the higher learning has since remained in some sense a by-product or
by-occupation of the priestly classes. As the body of systematized
knowledge increased, there presently arose a distinction, traceable
very far back in the history of education, between esoteric and exoteric
knowledge, the former--so far as there is a substantial difference
between the two--comprising such knowledge as is primarily of no
economic or industrial effect, and the latter comprising chiefly
knowledge of industrial processes and of natural phenomena which were
habitually turned to account for the material purposes of life.
This line of demarcation has in time become, at least in popular
apprehension, the normal line between the higher learning and the lower.

It is significant, not only as an evidence of their close affiliation
with the priestly craft, but also as indicating that their activity to
a good extent falls under that category of conspicuous leisure known
as manners and breeding, that the learned class in all primitive
communities are great sticklers for form, precedent, gradations of rank,
ritual, ceremonial vestments, and learned paraphernalia generally.
This is of course to be expected, and it goes to say that the higher
learning, in its incipient phase, is a leisure-class occupation--more
specifically an occupation of the vicarious leisure class employed in
the service of the supernatural leisure class. But this predilection for
the paraphernalia of learning goes also to indicate a further point of
contact or of continuity between the priestly office and the office of
the savant. In point of derivation, learning, as well as the priestly
office, is largely an outgrowth of sympathetic magic; and this magical
apparatus of form and ritual therefore finds its place with the learned
class of the primitive community as a matter of course. The ritual and
paraphernalia have an occult efficacy for the magical purpose; so
that their presence as an integral factor in the earlier phases of the
development of magic and science is a matter of expediency, quite as
much as of affectionate regard for symbolism simply.

This sense of the efficacy of symbolic ritual, and of sympathetic effect
to be wrought through dexterous rehearsal of the traditional accessories
of the act or end to be compassed, is of course present more obviously
and in larger measure in magical practice than in the discipline of the
sciences, even of the occult sciences. But