ted upon. Often, also,
these imaginary relations were founded on reasons that escape us: like the
qualities attributed by astrology to the stars, they may have been derived
from old beliefs the memory of which is lost.

Like astrology, then, magic was a science in some respects. First, like the
predictions of its sister, it {184} was partly based on
observation--observation frequently rudimentary, superficial, hasty, and
erroneous, but nevertheless important. It was an experimental discipline.
Among the great number of facts noted by the curiosity of the magicians,
there were many that received scientific indorsement later on. The
attraction of the magnet for iron was utilized by the thaumaturgi before it
was interpreted by the natural philosophers. In the vast compilations that
circulated under the venerable names of Zoroaster or Hostanes, many fertile
remarks were scattered among puerile ideas and absurd teachings, just as in
the Greek treatises on alchemy that have come down to us. The idea that
knowledge of the power of certain agents enables one to stimulate the
hidden forces of the universe into action and to obtain extraordinary
results, inspires the researches of physics to-day, just as it inspired the
claims of magic. And if astrology was a perverted astronomy, magic was
physics gone astray.

Moreover, and again like astrology, magic was a science, because it started
from the fundamental conception that order and law exist in nature, and
that the same cause always produces the same effect. An occult ceremony,
performed with the same care as an experiment in the chemical laboratory,
will always have the expected result. To know the mysterious affinities
that connect all things is sufficient to set the mechanism of the universe
into motion. But the error of the magicians consisted in establishing a
connection between phenomena that do not depend on each other at all. The
act of exposing to the light for an instant a sensitive plate in a camera,
then immersing it, according to given recipes, in appropriate liquids, and
of making {185} the picture of a relative or friend appear thereon, is a
magical operation, but based on real actions and reactions, instead of on
arbitrarily assumed sympathies and antipathies. Magic, therefore, was a
science groping in the dark, and later became "a bastard sister of
science," as Frazer puts it.

But, like astrology, magic was religious in origin, and always remained a
bastard si