ble: it makes religion and magic alike but
means whereby man has--vainly--sought to satisfy desire. And the
implication is that the day of both alike is over. But if Frazer's
account of religion is unacceptable, his account of magic also is open
to criticism. He wavers between two opinions about magic: at one time he
regards it as all falsehood and deception, at another as the source from
which science springs, just as at one time he considered magic
fundamentally the same as religion and then again as fundamentally
different from religion. When Frazer is bent upon identifying magic and
science, he attributes to primitive man a theory of causation (that like
produces like): magic is based, he says, upon 'the views of natural
causation embraced by the savage magician'. On the other hand, according
to Wilhelm Wundt in his _Voelkerpsychologie_, primitive man has no notion
whatever of natural causation: primitive man, Wundt says, has only one
way of accounting for events--if something happens, somebody did it. If
any one mysteriously falls ill and dies, the question at once presents
itself to the savage mind, who did it? How any one could contrive to
make the man fall ill and die is, to the man's relations, thoroughly and
disquietingly mysterious. The one thing clear to them is that somebody
possesses and has exercised this mysterious and horrible power. The
person who, in the opinion not only of the relatives but also of all or
most of the community, naturally would do this sort of thing differs in
some way--in his appearance or habits--from the average member of the
community, and accordingly is credited, or discredited, with this
mysterious and dreadful power. Such a person, according to Wundt, is a
magician. Such an event is a marvel: so long as it is supposed to be
brought about by a man, it is a piece of magic; when it is ascribed (as,
according to Wundt, it comes in later, though not in primitive times, to
be ascribed) to a god, it is a miracle.

If science then does not work magic, there must be a fundamental
distinction between science and magic, an absolute opposition of
principles. The principles of thought on which magic is based cannot be,
as Frazer maintains, the same as those which give to science its
validity. In fine, the belief in magic seems to be based not on any
principle of thought, but upon the assumption that, if something
happens, somebody must have done it, and therefore must have had the
power to