ief lower than which or back of which science
does not profess to go. But it is only in an advanced stage of its
evolution that the belief in magic becomes involved with the belief in
spirits. Originally, eating tiger to make you bold, or eating saffron
to cure jaundice, was just as matter of fact a proceeding as drinking
water to moisten your throat or sitting by a fire to get warm; like
produces like, and beyond that obvious fact it was not necessary to
go--there was no more need to imagine that the action of the saffron
was due to a spirit than to imagine {90} that it was a water spirit
which slakes your thirst. The fact seems to be that animism is a
savage philosophy which is competent to explain everything when called
upon, but that the savage does not spend every moment of his waking
life in invoking it: until there is some need to fall back upon it, he
goes on treating inanimate things as things which he can utilise for
his own purposes without reference to spirits. That is the attitude
also of the man who in virtue of his lore or his personal power can
produce effects which the ordinary man cannot or will not: he performs
his ceremony and the effect follows--or will follow--because he knows
how to do it or has mysterious personal power to produce the effect.
But he consults no spirits--at any rate in the first instance.
Eventually he may do so; and then magic enters on a further stage in
its evolution. (See Appendix.)

If the man who has the lore or the personal power, and who uses it for
nefarious purposes, proposes to employ it on obtaining the same control
over spirits as he has over things, his magic reaches a stage of
evolution in which it is difficult and practically unnecessary to
distinguish it from the stage of fetichism in which the owner of a
fetich {91} applies coercion to make the fetich spirit do what he
wishes. With fetichism I deal in another lecture. If, on the other
hand, the man who has the lore or the personal power and uses it for
social or "communal" purposes (Haddon, p. 41) comes to believe that,
for the effects which he has hitherto sought to produce by means of his
superior knowledge or superior power, it is necessary to invoke the aid
of spirits, he will naturally address himself to the spirit or god who
is worshipped by the community because he has at heart the general
interests of the community; or it may be that the spirit who produces
such a benefit for the community at large