he is believed to be
concerned with the good of the community, then he will disapprove of
nefarious proceedings whether magical or not. But Dr. Frazer's
position I take to be that no such spirit or god can come to be
believed in, unless there has been previously a belief in magic. Now,
that argument either is or is not based on the assumption that magic
and religion are but two manifestations, two stages, in the evolution
of the same principle. If that is the basis, then what manifested
itself at first as magic subsequently manifests itself as religion; and
"the transition from magic to religion" implies the priority of magic
to religion. But, as we have seen, Dr. Frazer {98} formally
postulates, not an identity, but an "opposition of principle" between
the two. We must therefore reject the assumption of an identity of
principle; and accept the "opposition of principle." But if so, then
there must be two principles which are opposed to one another, religion
and magic; and we might urge that line of argument consistently enough
to show that there can be no magic save where there is religion to be
opposed to it.

Now, there is an opposition of principle between magic used for
nefarious purposes and religion; and the opposition is that the one
promotes social and the other anti-social purposes. Nefarious
purposes, whether worked by magic or by other means, are condemned by
religion and are nefarious especially because offensive to the god who
has the interests of the community at heart. That from the moment
society existed anti-social tendencies also manifested themselves will
not be doubted; and neither need we doubt that the principle that like
produces like was employed from the beginning for social as well as for
anti-social purposes. The question is whether, in the stage of
animism, the earliest and the lowest stage which science recognises in
the evolution of man, there is ever found a society {99} of human
beings which has not appropriated some one or more of the spirits by
which all things, on the animistic principle, are worked, to the
purposes of the community. No such society has yet been proved to
exist; still less has any _a priori_ proof been produced to show that
such a society must have existed. The presumption indeed is rather the
other way. Children go through a period of helpless infancy longer
than the young of any other creatures; and could not reach the age of
self-help, if the family did