The fundamental distinction, then, and even opposition of principle between magic and religion, is that in the one case man thinks that he can gain all that he desires by means of magic, and that in the other he turns with offerings and supplication to the personal beings superior to man whom he imagines to control the course of nature and of human life.

Whether the distinction which Sir James Frazer draws between magic and religion will hold depends partly on whether his definitions of magic and religion are acceptable.  In his account of magic there at least appears to be some confusion of thought.  On the one hand, he says, ’it must always be remembered that every single profession and claim put forward by the magician, as such, is false; not one of them can be maintained without deception, conscious or unconscious.’  This pronouncement makes it easy for us to understand that even the savage would eventually find magic an unsatisfactory method of gratifying his desires, a deception in fact.  On the other hand, Sir James apparently contradicts himself, that is to say, he denies that every single profession or claim put forward by the magician is false, and says, ’however justly we may reject the extravagant pretensions of magicians and condemn the deceptions which they have practised on mankind, the original institution of this class of man has, take it all in all, been productive of incalculable good to humanity.’  The ground for this second pronouncement, so contradictory of the first, is that magicians, Sir James tells us, ’were the direct predecessors, not merely of our physicians and surgeons but of our investigators and discoverers in every branch of natural science.’  Thus, though he no longer regards priests as transmogrified magicians, he does regard magicians as the earliest men of science, and does regard science, therefore, as a highly developed stage of magic.  This view logically follows from the premisses from which it starts; and if it is felt to be unacceptable, we shall naturally be inclined to scrutinize the premisses once more and more carefully.  When we do so scrutinize them, we see that the principles of thought on which Sir James Frazer assumes magic to be based are in effect the principles from which science started:  they are the beliefs that like produces like—­the basis of the law of causation—­and that things which our experience shows to have gone together in the past tend always to go together—­which is one way of stating our belief in the uniformity of nature.  If then these principles of thought are the principles on which magic as well as science is based, then science and magic are the same thing, and we have only to choose whether we will say that magic is not magic but undeveloped science, or that science is not science but merely magic transmogrified.  Thus, the pre-formation theory once more reasserts itself:  magic is the seed in which science is prefigured or pre-formed.