Page:The place of magic in the intellectual history of Europe.djvu/37

29] dreamers whose minds such fancies had led astray. This is a superficial view. It does not explain how the ordinary man came to imagine the existence of magic. Magicians in the true sense were no mere imaginary order existent only in the minds of men, nor a profession of dreamers and imposters. Magic was not the outright invention of imagination; it was primitive man's philosophy, it was his attitude toward nature. It was originally not the exercise of supposed innate, marvelous powers by a favored few nor a group of secret doctrines or practices known to but a few; it was a body of ideas held by men universally and which, during their savage state at least, they were forever trying to put into practice. Everybody was a magician.

To understand magic, then, we should consider this attitude of primitive man—I use the word primitive in no narrow sense—and should try to picture to ourselves what his attitude would be. It is a safe assumption that he would interpret the world about him according to his own sensations, feelings and motives. Whether he looked upon nature at large or in detail, he would in all probability regard it not as an inexorable machine run in accordance with universal and immutable laws, but as a being or world of beings much like himself—fickle, changing, capable of being influenced by inducements or deterred by threats, beneficent or hostile according as satisfied or offended by treatment received. To make life go as he wished, he must be able to please and propitiate or to coerce these forces outside himself. In this endeavor his faculty of