us ways.

The truth is, that these theological speculations carry us nowhere.
Myth and dialectical acuteness, however skillfully blended, cannot add
to our genuine knowledge of the world. Instead, they create new
problems of their own which cannot be settled, because there is no way
of testing and verifying the various solutions. In short, the premises
are at fault and must be outgrown and left behind. Our experience no
longer suggests to us the idea of a supernatural agency at work, nor
are we so prone to think of an act of creation some few thousands of
years in the past. We have largely outgrown the mythological setting
out of which theology arose, and it is tradition and the lack of a more
positive view which enable it to retain for us any semblance of
plausibility. There is nothing inherently irrational in the idea of
creation; it simply bears witness to a looser, more personal world in
which annihilation and {43} origination were familiar events, because
man saw only the surface of things and was not able to follow the
continuities which bind things together underneath. The principle of
conservation, which is one of the grand achievements of science, is
like a two-edged sword: it destroys not only the belief in an absolute
annihilation but, likewise, the belief in an absolute beginning.
Slowly, but surely, this new view of nature will have its effect and
undermine the more naive hypothesis of a creation. The emotional
reverberation of the accustomed forms of speech, reenforced by the
mental habits encouraged by religion, will die out only gradually. Man
is instinctively romantic and tends to dramatize the world. His
favorite categories are personal, and he has a profound distaste for
the impersonalism of science. Only the slow pressure of actual
knowledge will lift him to a truer view of the world in which he finds
himself.

{44}

CHAPTER IV

MAGIC AND RITUAL

Early man had not the conception of natural law that we now possess.
In order even partially to understand his attitude toward things, the
man of to-day must abstract from the idea of law and regularity which
he has shot through nature, and ignore the knowledge about the
antecedents of events which close observation and careful experiment
have furnished him with. In the case of magic, just as in the case of
mythology, he who wishes to see eye to eye with those who lived long
ago must rid himself for the time being both of the knowledg