Understanding man has the secret in the hands, whether this be, as of old, some potent charm or, as nowadays, a mathematical formula. A feeling of triumph, even to-day, accompanies every experimental step in the realm of Nature which determines something — about the purposes and powers of the god of heaven or the storm-spirits of the ground-dæmons; or about the numina of natural science (atom-nuclei, the velocity of light, gravitation); or even about the abstract numina that thought conceives in contemplating its own image (concept, category, reason) — and, in determining, fixes it in the prison of an unalterable system of causal relations. Experience in this inorganic, killing, preserving sense, which is something quite different from life-experience and knowledge of men, takes place in two modes — theory and technique,[1] or, in religious language, myth and cult — according as the believer's intention is to open up or to confine the secrets of the world-around. Both demand a high development of human understanding. Both may be born of either fear or love. There is a mythology of fear, like the Mosaic and the primitive generally, and a mythology of love, like that of early Christianity and Gothic mysticism. Similarly there is a technique of defensive, and another technique of postulant, magic, and this, no doubt the most fundamental, distinction between sacrifice and prayer[2] distinguishes also primitive and mature mankind. Religiousness is a trait of soul, but religion is a talent. "Theory" demands the gift of vision that few possess to the extent of luminous insight and many possess not at all. It is world-view, "Weltanschauung" in the most primary sense, whether what one sees in that world is the hand and the loom of powers, or (in a colder urban spirit, not fearing or loving, but inquisitive) the theatre of law-conform forces. The secrets of Taboo and Totem are beheld in god-faiths and soul-faiths, and calculated in theoretical physics and biology. "Technique" presupposes the intellectual gift of binding and conjuring. The theorist is the critical seer, the technician is the priest, the discoverer is the prophet.
The means, however, in which the whole force of intellect concentrates itself is the form of the actual, which is abstracted from vision by speech, and of which not every waking-consciousness can discern the quintessence — the conceptual circumscription, the communicable law, name, number. Hence every conjuration of the deity is based on the knowledge of its real name and the use of rites and sacraments, known and available only to the initiated, of which the form must be exact and the words correct. This applies not merely to primitive magic, but just as much to our physical (and particularly our medical) technique. It is for this reason that mathematics have a character of sanctity and are regularly the product of a religious milieu (Pythagoras, Descartes, Pascal); that there is a mysticism of sacred numbers (3, 7, 12) in
- ↑ See p. 25.
- ↑ The distinction between the two is one of inner form. A sacrifice made by Socrates is at bottom a prayer; and generally the Classical sacrifice is to be looked upon as a prayer in bodily form. The ejaculated prayer of the criminal, on the contrary, is a sacrifice to which fear drives him.
