This is to “think black.” It is not everybody who can do it: it requires more sympathy and insight than are given to all men. Above all, it requires patience, long and close contact with the native, and the persistent and self-abandoning endeavour to penetrate his thoughts. Some missionaries have achieved it, some travellers, some traders, some colonists, some government officials. Too many of them, alas! have only skimmed the surface of the native mind. Even the latter, however, though they have failed to read the underlying meaning of what they saw, have sometimes taught us what to look for. To that extent the modern school of anthropology is founded on their observations. The training now given in anthropology at the universities and elsewhere utilizes and criticizes the reports of all observers, as well as the conclusions drawn from them by anthropologists at home. That training is of material assistance in fitting new labourers out for fresh fields of enquiry, or for working over again those fields which have been hitherto imperfectly reaped by ill-equipped enquirers. In some measure it supplies the place of longer preliminary intercourse with the man of lower culture; and it has the advantage that it teaches the student what kind of phenomenon to expect--an advantage perhaps not unaccompanied by dangers of its own. Be that as it may, the information of all kinds, good, bad, and indifferent, already at our service on the subject of the religions of the lower culture has been and is still being subjected to ruthless comparison and criticism. The result of this constant sifting is to put us in {25} possession of a considerable body of material for a sane judgement in regard to some of the beliefs of tribes in various parts of the world and to help us forward on the track of others. We no longer summarily deny the possession of religion to tribes whose practices we do not understand. We no longer attempt to docket beliefs imperfectly apprehended under headings applicable only to the highly developed and literary theology of Europe. We lie under a more insidious temptation--that of the too rapid generalization of the beliefs of the lower culture, for which the groundwork may not as yet exist. But we are learning the lesson that only by unwearied investigation, diligent observation, sympathetic enquiry without prepossession, can we attain to a real grasp of the protean ideas and half-formulated speculations of savage minds. THE RELATIONS OF RELIGION AND MAGIC {26} I. The Common Root Thus forewarned of the difficulties and dangers of our path, let us proceed to enquire whether there are any general ideas relating to religion disseminated among men in the lower stages of culture, that either are themselves primitive, or can have been derived from an earlier condition of thought discoverable by us.