ind of religion, and who had never uttered
prayers or offered sacrifices of any kind. Next, the religious
element, according to Dr. Frazer, is also quite clear: it consists in
offering sacrifices to the dead with the prayer or the words, "Here are
your offerings, in order that the crop of yams may be good." Now, it
is not suggested, even by Dr. Frazer, that this religious element is a
form of magic or is in any way developed out of or evolved from magic.
On the contrary, if this element is religious--indeed, whether it be
really religious or not--it is obviously entirely distinct and
different from sympathetic or hom[oe]opathic magic. The mere fact that
the magical {94} rite of burying in the taro fields stones which
resemble taros has to be supplemented by rites which are, on Dr.
Frazer's own showing, non-magical, shows that the primitive belief in
this application of the principle that like produces like was already
dying out, and was in process of becoming a mere survival. Suppose
that it died out entirely and the rite of burying stones became an
unintelligible survival, or was dropped altogether, and suppose that
the prayers and sacrifices remained in possession of the field, which
would be the more correct way of stating the facts, to say that the
magic had died out and its place had been taken by something totally
different, viz. religion; or that what was magic had become religion,
that magic and religion are but two manifestations, two stages, in the
evolution of the same principle? The latter statement was formally
rejected by Dr. Frazer in the second edition of his _Golden Bough_,
when he declared that he had come to recognise "a fundamental
distinction and even opposition of principle between magic and
religion" (Preface, xvi). His words, therefore, justify us in assuming
that when he speaks, in his _Lectures on the Early History of the
Kingship_, of the "transition from magic to religion," he cannot {95}
mean that magic becomes religion, or that religion is evolved out of
magic, for the "distinction and even opposition of principle" between
the two is "fundamental." He can, therefore, only mean that magic is
followed and may be driven out by something which is fundamentally
opposed to it, viz. religion.

What then is the fundamental opposition between magic and religion? and
is it such as to require us to believe with Dr. Frazer that magic
preceded religion, and that of two opposite ideas the mind can