If we wish to escape from this conclusion, if we wish to maintain the validity of science and yet always to remember ’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’, we must consider whether Sir James Frazer’s account of magic, according to which the principles of magic are identical with those of science, is the only account that can be given of magic; and for that purpose we may contrast it with the view of Wilhelm Wundt.  But before doing so, since Sir James Frazer holds that there is ’a fundamental distinction and even opposition of principle between magic and religion’, it will be well to try to see not only what he means by magic, but also whether his description or definition of religion is acceptable.

Whereas Robertson Smith held that religion, reduced to its very lowest terms, must imply at least belief in a god and communion with him, Frazer considers religion to be the belief that the course of nature and of human life is controlled by personal beings superior to man.  By the one view stress is laid on the mystic side of religion, on the communion which is effected through sacrifice; by the other view stress is laid on the power which the gods may be induced by prayer and supplication to exercise for the benefit of man.  Our first reflection, therefore, is that any view of religion, to be comprehensive, cannot confine itself to either of these aspects singly, but must find room for both—­for both prayer and sacrifice.  They cannot be mutually exclusive, nor can they be simply juxtaposed, as though they were atoms unrelated to one another, accidental neighbours in the same district.  There must be a higher unity, not created by or subsequent to the coalescence of elements originally independent of each other, but a higher unity of which both prayer and sacrifice are manifestations.  This higher unity, I venture to suggest, is the first principle of religion; and, if it is not explicitly recognized as the first principle of religion either by Robertson Smith or by Frazer, that may well be because their attention is concentrated on the earlier stages in the evolution of religion, when as yet it is not conspicuous and is, therefore, though in fact operative, liable to be overlooked.  As Ferrier has said, ’first principles of every kind have their influence, and indeed operate largely and powerfully long before they come to the surface of human thought and are articulately expounded.’  What then is the first principle of religion which only after long ages of evolution rose to the surface of human thought, and which, though it had been operative largely and powerfully, came only in the slow course of human evolution to be articulately expounded?  The first principle of religion is love—­love of one’s neighbour and one’s God.