nity. Anti-social desires cannot
be expressed by the community or sanctioned by religion. Prayer is the
essential {150} expression of true socialism; and the spirit which
prompts it is and has always been the moving spirit of social progress.

Professor Tylor, noticing the "extreme development of mechanical
religion, the prayer-mill of the Tibetan Buddhists," suggests that it
"may perhaps lead us to form an opinion of large application in the
study of religion and superstition; namely, that the theory of prayers
may explain the origin of charms. Charm-formulae," he says, "are in
very many cases actual prayers, and as such are intelligible. Where
they are mere verbal forms, producing their effect on nature and man by
some unexplained process, may not they or the types they have been
modelled on have been originally prayers, since dwindled into mystic
sentences?" (_P. C._ II, 372-373). Now, if this suggestion of
Professor Tylor's be correct, it will follow that as charms and spells
are degraded survivals of prayer, so magic generally--of which charms
and spells are but one department--is a degradation of religion. That
in many cases charms and spells are survivals of prayer--formulae from
which all spirit of religion has entirely evaporated--all students of
the science of religion would now admit. That prayers may {151}
stiffen into traditional formulae, and then become vain repetitions
which may actually be unintelligible to those who utter them, and so be
conceived to have a force which is purely magical and a "nature
practically assimilated more or less to that of charms" (_l.c._), is a
fact which cannot be denied. But when once the truth has been admitted
that prayers may pass into spells, the possibility is suggested that it
is out of spells that prayer has originated. Mercury raised to a high
temperature becomes red precipitate; and red precipitate exposed to a
still greater heat becomes mercury again. Spells may be the origin of
prayers, if prayers show a tendency to relapse into spells. That
possibility fits in either with the theory that magic preceded religion
or still more exactly with the theory that religion simply is magic
raised, so to speak, to a higher moral temperature. We have therefore
to consider the possibility that the process of evolution has been from
spell to prayer (R. R. Marett, _Folk-Lore_ XV, 2, pp. 132-166); and let
us begin the consideration by observing that the reverse passage-