'every child soon comes to distinguish in
practice, are for primitive thought interwoven in wild confusion.' Two
categories, which in primitive thought are thus interwoven in wild
confusion, are, it may be suggested, religion and magic; and only in the
dispersive process of evolution do they tend to become discriminated. In
ancient Egypt, in Babylon, in Brahminism, religion fails to disentangle
itself from magic; and not even has Christianity always succeeded in
throwing it off. Different as we may conceive magic and religion to be,
the fact remains that at first they grow up intertwined together. In the
lower forms of religion magic is worked not only by magicians but by
priests as well; spells and prayers are hardly to be distinguished from
one another. The idea that 'priest' is but 'magician' writ differently,
that prayers are but spells under another name, is now obsolete. The
truth may be that religion neither follows on, nor is evolved from
magic, but that both radiate from a common centre, the heart of man; and
that at first both are attempts made by man to secure the fulfilment of
his desires, to do his will, though eventually he finds that the way to
control nature is to obey her, not to try to command her by working
magic; and that it is in endeavouring to do God's will, not his own,
that man finds peace at the last.

In the three forms of religion which thus far we have taken into
account, fetishism, polytheism, monotheism, religion is felt to be a
personal relation--a relation between the human personality and some
personality more than human; and the human heart is reaching out and
groping after some divine personality, if peradventure it may find Him.
But there is yet another form of religion proceeding from the human
heart in which this does not seem to be the case--and that is Buddhism.
The Buddha definitely renounced the search after God and would not allow
his disciples to engage in the pursuit. Practically the pursuit was
useless, according to the Buddha: escape from suffering is all that man
can want or strive or hope for. Escape from suffering is possible only
by cessation from existence; and that cessation from existence, here and
hereafter, can be attained by man himself, who can reach Nirvana without
the aid of gods, if gods there be. From the point of view of metaphysics
the idea that there is any relation between the human personality and
the divine falls to the ground, according to the Buddha,