Page:The place of magic in the intellectual history of Europe.djvu/42

34 the full significance of the presence of such notions in the minds of mediæval thinkers and scientists.

It was stated above that the outcome of magic is præternatural, marvelous; but this statement, while in one sense perfectly true, requires some qualification. Perhaps to inexperienced primitive man the results which he wished to accomplish or the crude theories on which he based his operations seemed nothing remarkable. Perhaps incantation seemed to him the natural way to bring rain, and sorcery the sole cause of disease. But as time went on and observation taught men, it must have been impressed upon their minds that either the events they sought to produce, or the methods by which they sought to produce them, were a little out of the ordinary, although of the possibility of the events and of the validity of the methods they still remained convinced. If we wish to sum up the whole history of magic in a sentence, we may say that men first regarded magic as natural, then as marvelous, then as impossible and absurd. Evidently then magic is subjective, as anything false must be. To-day in the thought of educated and sensible people it is limited in actual significance to stage illusions; once it was a universal attitude towards the universe. As one false hypothesis after another was superseded by true notions, the content of magic narrowed in men's minds until at last it became an acknowledged deception. Meanwhile its mistaken premises and strange proceedings first mingled with and then vanished into science and scientific methods.

This, then, is the significance of the beliefs of which we were speaking in the first chapter. They are phenomena in that union—or struggle—of magic and science which marked the decay of the former and the development of the latter. As such, they warn us not to picture a magician to ourselves as armed with a wand, clad in solemn robes,