Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/308

 276 religion is but a sort of magic, and also to reject the idea that religion and magic, good and evil, are but different manifestations of fundamentally the same thing. The notion that religion is but a sort of magic is like the idea that justice is a sort of thievishness: the latter idea, as Plato showed, is the consequence that follows from a false notion of what justice is, and the other idea is based on a mistaken notion of what religion is. To appreciate the view that religion and magic were originally, or are fundamentally the same, it is necessary to take account of mana or "power."

Dr Söderblom's view is that the conception of mana or "power" differentiates itself, in the course of its evolution, into good mana and bad mana (p. 218), and that with this differentiation the opposition between magic and religion becomes marked (p. 219). Mana in the earliest stage of its evolution was, according to Dr. Söderblom, neither good nor bad; from this original mana, by the process of differentiation and evolution, sprang two species of mana, the good and the bad, and then the difference, or a difference, between magic and religion became clear. There are however difficulties about Dr. Söderblom's views. Power to do good is good power, good mana; power to do evil is evil mana, evil power. Wherever mana is believed in, the two kinds of mana are found. No case of the mana belief can be produced in which the two kinds of mana are absent. And the reason is clear: the only grounds on which the existence or nature of a power can be inferred are its effects; and it is because the effects are good, or because the effects are bad, that the supposed power is pronounced to be good in the one case, or bad in the other. If the effects were neither good nor bad, then indeed the mana would be neither good nor bad. But to effects which are neither good nor bad primitive man pays no attention, and consequently he only infers good mana and bad mana. They may be resident in the