o right, only error and no
correctness of thought or speech, only spell and no prayer. And if
both have been always, as they are now, present, there must also
always have been a tendency in that which has prevailed to conquer. We
may say that, in the process of evolution, man becomes aware of
differences to which at first he gave but little attention; and, so
far as he becomes conscious of them, he sets aside what is illogical,
immoral, or irreligious, because he is satisfied it is illogical,
immoral, or irreligious, and for no other reason.

The theory that spell preceded prayer in the evolution of religion
proceeds upon a misconception of the process of evolution. At one time
it was assumed and accepted without question that the vegetable and
animal kingdoms, and all their various species, were successive stages
of one process of evolution; and that the process proceeded on one
line and one alone. On the analogy of the evolution of living beings,
as thus understood, all that remained, when the theory of evolution
came to be applied to the various forms of thought and feeling, was to
arrange them also in one line; and that, it was assumed, would be the
line which the evolution of religion had followed. On this assumption,
either magic must be prior to religion, or religion prior to magic;
and, on the principle that priority must be assigned to the less
worthy, it followed that magic must have preceded religion.

It will scarcely be disputed that it was on the analogy of what was
believed to be the course of evolution, in the case of vegetable and
animal life, that the first attempts to frame a theory of the
evolution of religion proceeded, with the result that gods were
assumed to have been evolved out of fetishes, religion out of magic,
and prayer out of spell. To disprove this, it is not necessary to
reject the theory of evolution, or to maintain that evolution in
religion proceeds on lines wholly different from those it follows
elsewhere. All that is necessary is to understand the theory of the
evolution of the forms of life, as that theory is held by naturalists
now; and to understand the lines which the evolution of life is now
held to have followed. The process of evolution is no longer held to
have followed one line alone, or to have described but one single
trajectory like that of a cannon-ball fired from a cannon. The process
of evolution is, and has been from the beginning, dispersive. To
borrow M. Bergson'