ceeding a little further as we trace the development of natural or
objective religion, we come to the belief in _magic_, which in
primitive peoples is closely associated with their first attempts at
experimental science. What gives magic its peculiar character is that
it is based on fanciful, and not on real correspondences. The
uneducated mind cannot distinguish between associations of ideas which
are purely arbitrary and subjective, and those which have a more
universal validity. Not, of course, that all the affinities seized
upon by primitive man proved illusory; but those which were not so
ceased to be magical, and became scientific. The savage draws no
distinction between the process by which he makes fire and that by
which his priest calls down rain, except that the latter is a
professional secret; drugs and spells are used indifferently to cure
the sick; astronomy and astrology are parts of the same science. There
is, however, a difference between the magic which is purely
naturalistic and that which makes mystical claims. The magician
sometimes claims that the spirits are subject to him, not because he
has learned how to wield the forces which they must obey, but because
he has so purged his higher faculties that the occult sympathies of
nature have become apparent to him. His theosophy claims to be a
spiritual illumination, not a scientific discovery. The error here is
the application of spiritual clairvoyance to physical relations. The
insight into reality, which is unquestionably the reward of the pure
heart and the single eye, does not reveal to us in detail how nature
should be subdued to our needs. No spirits from the vasty deep will
obey our call, to show us where lies the road to fortune or to ruin.
Physical science is an abstract inquiry, which, while it keeps to its
proper subject--the investigation of the relations which prevail in
the phenomenal world--is self-sufficient, and can receive nothing on
external authority. Still less can the adept usurp Divine powers, and
bend the eternal laws of the universe to his puny will.

The turbid streams of theurgy and magic flowed into the broad river
of Christian thought by two channels--the later Neoplatonism, and
Jewish Cabbalism. Of the former something has been said already. The
root-idea of the system was that all life may be arranged in a
descending scale of potencies, forming a kind of chain from heaven to
earth. Man, as a microcosm, is in contact with e