an to fluctuate between the two attitudes, to alternate between
them--possible, though inconsistent. The child, or even that larger
child, the man, may beg and scold, almost in the same breath. The
savage, as is well known, will treat his fetish in the same
inconsequential way. That it is inconsequential is a fact; but it is a
fact which, if learned, is but very slowly learned. The process by
which it is learned is part of the evolution of religion; and it is a
process in the course of which the idea of God tends to disengage
itself from the confusion of thought and the confusion of feeling, in
which it is at first enshrouded.

We, indeed, at the present day, may see, or at any rate feel, the
difference between magic and religion, between spell and prayer. And
we may imagine that the difference, because real, has always been seen
or felt, as we see and feel it. But, if we so imagine, we are
mistaken. The difference was not felt so strongly, or seen so
definitely, as to make it impossible to ascribe magic to Moses, or
rain-making to Elijah. In still earlier ages, the difference was still
more blurred. The two things were not discriminated as we now
discriminate them: they were not felt then, as they are felt now to be
inconsistent and incompatible. It was the likeness between the two
that filled the field of mental vision, originally. Whether a man
makes a petition or a command, the fact is that he wants something;
and, with his attention centred on that fact, he may be but little
aware, as the child is little, if at all, aware, that he passes, or is
guilty of unreasonable inconsistency in passing, from the one mood to
the other, and back again. It is in the course of time and as a
consequence of mental growth that he becomes aware of the difference
between the two moods.

If we insist on maintaining that, because spell and prayer are
essentially different, men have at all times been fully conscious of
the difference, we make it fundamentally impossible to explain the
growth of religion, or to admit that it can have any growth. Just as,
on the argument advanced in our first chapter, gods and fetishes have
gradually been differentiated from some conception, prior to them, and
indeterminate; just as magician and priest, eventually distinguished,
were originally undistinguished, for a man of power was potentially
both and might become either; so spell and prayer have come to be
differentiated, to be recognised as differen