able hurt done to the bear's human heart--a hurt not
to be healed by any proffer of buns. He wanted to go, but he was a shy,
proud bear, and he would not say so.
The relation of magic to religion has been much disputed. According to
one school religion develops out of magic, according to another, though
they ultimately blend, they are at the outset diametrically opposed,
magic being a sort of rudimentary and mistaken science (This view held
by Dr Frazer is fully set forth in his "Golden Bough" (2nd edition),
pages 73-79, London, 1900. It is criticised by Mr R.R. Marett in "From
Spell to Prayer", "Folk-Lore" XI. 1900, page 132, also very fully by
MM. Hubert and Mauss, "Theorie generale de la Magie", in "L'Annee
Sociologique", VII. page 1, with Mr Marett's view and with that of MM.
Hubert and Mauss I am in substantial agreement.), religion having to do
from the outset with spirits.
But, setting controversy aside, at the present stage of our inquiry
their relation becomes, I think, fairly clear. Magic is, if my view
(This view as explained above is, I believe, my own most serious
contribution to the subject. In thinking it out I was much helped by
Prof. Gilbert Murray.) be correct, the active element which informs a
supersensuous world fashioned to meet other needs. This blend of
theory and practice it is convenient to call religion. In practice the
transition from magic to religion, from Spell to Prayer, has always been
found easy. So long as mana remains impersonal you order it about; when
it is personified and bulks to the shape of an overgrown man, you drop
the imperative and cringe before it. "My will be done" is magic,
"Thy Will be done" is the last word in religion. The moral discipline
involved in the second is momentous, the intellectual advance not
striking.
I have spoken of magical ritual as though it were the informing
life-spirit without which religion was left as an empty shell. Yet the
word ritual does not, as normally used, convey to our minds this notion
of intense vitalism. Rather we associate ritual with something cut
and dried, a matter of prescribed form and monotonous repetition. The
association is correct; ritual tends to become less and less informed by
the life-impulse, more and more externalised. Dr Beck ("Die Nachahmung
und ihre Bedeutung fur Psychologie und Volkerkunde", Leipzig, 1904.)
in his brilliant monograph on "Imitation" has laid stress on the almost
boundless influence of the imita
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