If fetishism, polytheism, and monotheism radiate from a common centre, the heart of man, then the heart of man must also be regarded as the starting-point of magic.  If they spring straight from the heart, though in different directions, dispersively, then magic must also start from the common centre; and, though its divergence from religion tends to become total, at first, and indeed it may be for long, the discrepancy between them is rather felt uneasily than recognized clearly.  Categories, such as those of cause and effect, identity and difference, which are the common property of civilized thought, and which among us, Mr. L.T.  Hobhouse says, ’every child soon comes to distinguish in practice, are for primitive thought interwoven in wild confusion.’  Two categories, which in primitive thought are thus interwoven in wild confusion, are, it may be suggested, religion and magic; and only in the dispersive process of evolution do they tend to become discriminated.  In ancient Egypt, in Babylon, in Brahminism, religion fails to disentangle itself from magic; and not even has Christianity always succeeded in throwing it off.  Different as we may conceive magic and religion to be, the fact remains that at first they grow up intertwined together.  In the lower forms of religion magic is worked not only by magicians but by priests as well; spells and prayers are hardly to be distinguished from one another.  The idea that ‘priest’ is but ‘magician’ writ differently, that prayers are but spells under another name, is now obsolete.  The truth may be that religion neither follows on, nor is evolved from magic, but that both radiate from a common centre, the heart of man; and that at first both are attempts made by man to secure the fulfilment of his desires, to do his will, though eventually he finds that the way to control nature is to obey her, not to try to command her by working magic; and that it is in endeavouring to do God’s will, not his own, that man finds peace at the last.

In the three forms of religion which thus far we have taken into account, fetishism, polytheism, monotheism, religion is felt to be a personal relation—­a relation between the human personality and some personality more than human; and the human heart is reaching out and groping after some divine personality, if peradventure it may find Him.  But there is yet another form of religion proceeding from the human heart in which this does not seem to be the case—­and that is Buddhism.  The Buddha definitely renounced the search after God and would not allow his disciples to engage in the pursuit.  Practically the pursuit was useless, according to the Buddha:  escape from suffering is all that man can want or strive or hope for.  Escape from suffering is possible only by cessation from existence; and that cessation from existence, here and hereafter, can be attained by man himself, who can reach Nirvana without the aid of gods, if gods there be.  From the point of view of metaphysics the idea that there is any