to the jealousy and resentment which regular practitioners of any art, e.g., medicine, have ever displayed and do still display towards irregular, unprofessional practitioners.  This reply, however, is now generally admitted to be one which it is impossible to accept in the case of religion for the simple reason that it does not account for the facts.  The plain fact which wrecks this attempted explanation is that magic is punished and witches are burnt not because witch-finders or priests are jealous of them, but because the community dreads them and feels their very existence to be a danger.  It is the community which feels the world of difference there is between magic and religion.

The attraction of the view that religion is but magic under another name, that prayers are to the end but spells, that ‘priest’ is but ‘magician’ written differently, is that it is a simplicist theory.  It simplifies things.  It exhibits religion as evolved out of magic and as containing at the end nothing more or other than was present at the beginning in magic.  It is but a variant of the pre-formation theory of the evolution of religion.  In fine, the notion that in magic we have religion pre-formed is the counterpart of the idea that we can find religion pre-formed in totemism.  In both cases we secure continuity in the process of evolution apparently, but the continuity secured is appearance merely and is gained only at the price of ignoring the facts.

It is not surprising, therefore, that in the later, enlarged editions of The Golden Bough, Sir James Frazer has given up the view that religion evolved out of magic, being moved thereto by the fact, as he says, that there is ’a fundamental distinction and even opposition of principle between magic and religion’.  There is, in Frazer’s present view, no continuity between the magic which came first and the religion which came ages later:  between them is an absolute breach of continuity, a fundamental distinction, an opposition of principle.  ’The principles of thought on which magic is based,’ Frazer says, ’resolve themselves into two:  first, that like produces like; and, second, that things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other.’  These beliefs are due to the association of ideas:  if two things are more or less like one another, or if two things have gone together in our experience of the past, the sight of the one will make us think of the other and expect to find it.  So strong is the expectation which is thus created that in the savage it amounts to absolute belief; and magic consists in acting on that belief, in setting like to produce like, with the firm conviction that thus (by magic) man can obtain all that he desires.  For long ages, according to Frazer, man acted on that belief, and only eventually did he discover that magic did not always act.  This discovery set him thinking and led him to the inference that at work in the world there must be supernatural powers or beings, that the course of nature and of human life is controlled by personal beings superior to man.  And that inference, according to Sir James Frazer’s definition, constitutes religion.