hable from the conditions which
constitute it.

To attempt to define magic is a risky thing; and, instead of doing so
at once, I will try to mark off proceedings which are not magical; and
I would venture to say that things which it is believed any one can do,
and felt that any one may do, are not magical in the eyes of those who
have that belief and that feeling. You may abstain from eating {78}
squirrel or wearing fine feathers because of the consequences; and
every one will think you are showing your common sense. You may hang
up the bones of animals you have killed, in order to attract more
animals of the like kind; and you are simply practising a dodge which
you think will be useful. Wives whose husbands are absent on hunting
or fighting expeditions may do or abstain from doing things which, on
the principle that like produces like, will affect their husbands'
success; and this application of the principle may be as
irrational--and as perfectly natural--as the behaviour of the beginner
at billiards whose body writhes, when he has made his stroke, in excess
of sympathy with the ball which just won't make the cannon. In both
cases the principle acted on,--deliberately in the one case, less
voluntarily in the other,--the instinctive feeling is that like
produces like, not as a matter of magic but as a matter of fact. If
the behaviour of the billiard player is due to an impulse which is in
itself natural and in his case is not magical, we may fairly take the
same view of the hunter's wife who abstains from spinning for fear the
game should turn and wind like the spindle and the hunter be unable to
hit it (Frazer, {79} p. 55). The principle in both cases is that like
produces like. Some applications of that principle are correct; some
are not. The incorrectness of the latter is not at once discovered:
the belief in their case is erroneous, but is not known to be
erroneous. And unless we are prepared to take up the position that
magic is the only form of erroneous belief which is to be found amongst
primitive men, we must endeavour to draw a line between those erroneous
beliefs which are magical and those erroneous beliefs which are not.
The line will not be a hard and fast line, because a belief which
originally had nothing magical about it may come to be regarded as
magical. Indeed, on the assumption that belief in magic is an error,
we have to enquire how men come to fall into the error. If there is no
suc