llow-man
remains offensive both to morality and religion. With the means
adopted for realising the will and carrying out the intention, morality
and religion have no concern. If the same or similar means can be used
for purposes consistent with the common weal, they do not, so far as
they are used for such purposes, come under the ban of either morality
or religion. Therein we have, I suggest, the reason of a certain
confusion of thought {82} in the minds of students of the science of
religion. We of the present day look at the means employed. We see
the same means employed for ends that are, and for ends that are not,
antisocial; and, inasmuch as the means are the same and are alike
irrational, we group them all together under the head of magic. The
grouping is perfectly correct, inasmuch as the proceedings grouped
together have the common attribute of being proceedings which cannot
possibly produce the effects which those who employ them believe that
they will and do produce. But this grouping becomes perfectly
misleading, if we go on to infer, as is sometimes inferred, that
primitive man adopted it. First, it is based on the fact that the
proceedings are uniformly irrational--a fact of which man is at first
wholly unaware; and which, when it begins to dawn upon him, presents
itself in the form of the further error that while some of these
proceedings are absurd, others are not. In neither case does he adopt
the modern, scientific position that all are irrational, impossible,
absurd. Next, the modern position deals only with the proceedings as
means,--declaring them all absurd,--and overlooks entirely what is to
primitive man the point of fundamental importance, viz. the object {83}
and purpose with which they are used. Yet it is the object and purpose
which determine the social value of these proceedings. For him, or in
his eyes, to class together the things which he approves of and the
things of which he disapproves would be monstrous: the means employed
in the two cases may be the same, but that is of no importance in face
of the fact that the ends aimed at in the two cases are not merely
different but contradictory. In the one case the object promotes the
common weal, or is supposed by him to promote it. In the other it is
destructive of the common weal.

If, therefore, we wish to avoid confusion of thought, we must in
discussing magic constantly bear in mind that we group together--and
therefore ar