according to Wilhelm Wundt in his Voelkerpsychologie, primitive man has no notion whatever of natural causation:  primitive man, Wundt says, has only one way of accounting for events—­if something happens, somebody did it.  If any one mysteriously falls ill and dies, the question at once presents itself to the savage mind, who did it?  How any one could contrive to make the man fall ill and die is, to the man’s relations, thoroughly and disquietingly mysterious.  The one thing clear to them is that somebody possesses and has exercised this mysterious and horrible power.  The person who, in the opinion not only of the relatives but also of all or most of the community, naturally would do this sort of thing differs in some way—­in his appearance or habits—­from the average member of the community, and accordingly is credited, or discredited, with this mysterious and dreadful power.  Such a person, according to Wundt, is a magician.  Such an event is a marvel:  so long as it is supposed to be brought about by a man, it is a piece of magic; when it is ascribed (as, according to Wundt, it comes in later, though not in primitive times, to be ascribed) to a god, it is a miracle.

If science then does not work magic, there must be a fundamental distinction between science and magic, an absolute opposition of principles.  The principles of thought on which magic is based cannot be, as Frazer maintains, the same as those which give to science its validity.  In fine, the belief in magic seems to be based not on any principle of thought, but upon the assumption that, if something happens, somebody must have done it, and therefore must have had the power to do it.

Wundt, whilst differing from Frazer in his description of magic, is at one with him in believing that before religion existed there was an age of magic.  But Wundt’s view that marvels are magic when supposed to have been done by man, but miracles when supposed to have been done by a god or his priests, suggests the possibility that, as the belief in magic is found usually, if not always, to exist side by side with the belief in miracles, the two beliefs may from the beginning have co-existed, that the age of magic is not prior in the course of evolution to the age of religion.  This possibility, it will be admitted, derives some colour at least from the way in which the theory of evolution is employed to account for the origin of species:  different though reptiles are from birds, the serpent from the dove, both are descended from a common ancestor, the archaeopteryx.  If this instance be taken as typical of the process of evolution in general, then the course of evolution is not, so to speak, linear or rectilinear, but—­to use M. Bergson’s word—­’dispersive’.  To suppose that religion is descended from magic would then be as erroneous as to suppose that birds are descended from reptiles or man from the monkey.  The true view will be that the course of evolution is not linear, is not a line produced for ever in the same direction, not a succession of stages, but is ‘dispersive’, that from a common starting point many lines of evolution radiate in different directions.  The course of evolution is not unilinear but multilinear; it runs on many lines which diverge, but all the diverging lines start from the same point.