Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 29, 1918.djvu/117

 Magic and Religion 107

spells are illicit and malevolent ; but has anyone ever heard that the spell which cures a child of warts is repro- bated by the community ? Or does Dr. Jevons class it as a prayer ?

Take a slightly different case ! The Ibo physician, who has learned from one already initiated to concoct and use medicines, employs the following formula : " Once you were wood in the bush, now you are medicine." That is the essential part of the ritual, and without it his drugs are of no avail. Is this a spell or a prayer } In form and intention it can hardly be called anything but a spell ; will Dr. Jevons ask us to class it as a prayer } If it is a prayer, to whom is it addressed } If it is a spell, where is the malevolent intention ?

In each, therefore, of the three spheres on which Dr. Jevons relies — magic, maiia, and the spell — his argument is lacking in completeness, and there are relevant facts which show that his category of magic is at variance with the category actually recognised by more primitive peoples and by the lore of our own folk.

The neglect of the crucial case is one of the crying evils of anthropology, and papers like that of Dr. Jevons, entirely divorced from all contact with the facts, so far as can be seen, belong to an age of make-believe, in which, just as each German professor of philosophy constructs or reconstructs the universe according to the dictates of his inner consciousness, either no facts exist, or, at most, only those which fall in with the preconceived ideas of the author. By the side of an inability to look facts in the face, a defective terminology is a minor evil.

Dr. Jevons has devoted a part of his paper to showing that Sir James Frazer, Dr. Marrett and others, use ambi- guous terms, hold impossible views, or otherwise put themselves out of court. It is perhaps a little puzzling that he should be so ready to attribute human fallibility to men of his own intellectual status and environment,