Note 48 — Chapter VII · FALLACIES IN POPULAR ARGUMENTS

“Wherever sympathetic magic occurs,” says Dr. Frazer, “in its pure unadulterated form, it assumes that in nature one event follows another necessarily and invariably without the intervention of any spiritual or personal agency”48 (the italics are mine). “The magician supplicates no higher power; he sues the favour of no fickle and wayward being; he abases himself before no awful deity.”49 “I have,” says Dr. Frazer,50 “come to agree with Sir A. C. Lyall and Mr. F. B. Jevons in recognising a fundamental distinction, and even opposition, of principle between magic and religion.” This opinion must be shared by every unbiassed mind, and it is curious, and not without importance, to observe, with Dr. Frazer, that the “fundamental conception” of sympathetic magic “is identical with that of modern science.”51 “Underlying the whole system is a faith—implicit, but real and firm—in the order and uniformity of nature.”52