Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/310

 278 The resemblance between magic and religion consists simply in the fact that both are subjects of which value is predicated. The difference is absolute and fundamental: it consists in the fact that the values predicated of the two are different and opposed. Magic, where it is believed in, is illicit and evil; religion is licit and approved by the community. The difference is not that religion makes and that magic avoids the assumption that there are powers superior to man, for magic often makes the assumption, whereas religion in its earliest stage probably had not yet come to make it or not to make it consciously. It may be that the behef in personal gods followed not only after but from the earlier stages of religious evolution, as European geometry not only followed but was evolved from the art of the Egyptian "cord-fasteners," or the steam plough from the primitive digging-stick, or as the oak grows from the acorn. But as we shall not expect by any process of analysis or dissection to find an oak in the acorn, neither shall we expect to find personal gods, or beings superior to man, in the earliest stages of religion. Nor should we for that reason deny that the earlier stages are religious, any more than we should deny that the oak and the acorn are both stages in the growth of the tree. Magic and religion differ not merely as two species of the same genus may differ, but at the outset with all the difference that lies between good and bad, and at the present day further with all the difference between what has been proved irrational and what has not.