IN LITERATURE
sense of magic—in other words, that he looked for delightful shortcuts and escapes from the facts of life, whereas we look for the law which explains and controls the facts. But the truth probably is that primitive man had no sense of magic whatever; when he busied himself with his incantations and his hocus-pocus, he probably had a quite modern sense of cause and effect. To us he seems a magician, because his method of getting at the cause or at the effect was not ours; but he had no measure by which to judge himself. He consulted the medicine-man as we consult the doctor, and his faith was no more shaken than ours is by a failure to cure. It is the conception of magic, not the conception of cause and effect, which has grown with time and enlightenment. Now, and only now, can we realize how much of primitive science was really magic; but in the
[127]
