Note 65 — Chapter VII · MAGIC, MENTALITY, AND CITY LIFE

Thomas and Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (Boston, 1918), I, 3: “The oldest but most persistent form of social technique is that of ‘ordering-and-forbidding’—that is, meeting a crisis by an arbitrary act of will decreeing the disappearance of the undesirable or the appearance of the desirable phenomena, and the using arbitrary physical action to enforce the decree. This method corresponds exactly to the magical phase of natural technique. In both, the essential means of bringing a determined effect is more or less consciously thought to reside in the act of will itself by which the effect is decreed as desirable, and of which the action is merely an indispensable vehicle or instrument; in both, the process by which the cause (act of will and physical action) is supposed to bring its effect to realization remains out of reach of investigation.”