Of all the topics which present themselves to the student of the science of religion for investigation and explanation there is none which has caused more diversity of opinion, none which has produced more confusion of thought, than magic. The fact is that the belief in magic is condemned alike by science and religion,--by the one as essentially irrational, and by the other as essentially irreligious. But though it is thus condemned, it flourishes, where it does flourish, as being science, though of a more secret kind than that usually recognised, or as being a more potent application of the rites and ceremonies of religion. It is indeed neither science nor religion; it lives by mimicking one or other or both. In the natural history of belief it owes its survival, so long as it does survive, to its "protective colouring" and its power of mimicry. It is, always and everywhere, an error,--whether tried by the canons of science or religion; {71} but it lives, as error can only live, by posing and passing itself off as truth. If now the only persons deceived by it were the persons who believed in it, students of the science of religion would have been saved from much fruitless controversy. But so subtly protective is its colouring that some scientific enquirers have confidently and unhesitatingly identified it with religion, and have declared that magic is religion, and religion is magic. The tyranny of that error, however, is now well-nigh overpast. It is erroneous, and we may suppose is seen to be erroneous, in exactly the same way as it would be to say that science is magic, and magic science. The truth is that magic in one aspect is a colourable imitation of science: "in short," as Dr. Frazer says (_Early History of the Kingship_, p. 38), "magic is a spurious system of natural law." That is, we must note, it is a system which is spurious in our eyes, but which, to those who believed in it, was "a statement of the rules which determine the sequence of events throughout the world--a set of precepts which human beings observe in order to compare their ends" (_ib._, p. 39). The point, then, from which I wish to start is that {72} magic, as it is now viewed by students of the science of religion, on the one hand is a spurious system of natural law or science, and on the other a spurious system of religion. Our next point is that magic could not be spurious for those who believed in it: they held that they knew some things and could do things which ordinary people did not know and could not do; and, whether their knowledge was of the secrets of nature or of the spirit world, it was not in their eyes spurious.