Professor Frazer has approached the problem from another side. In the first edition of _The Golden Bough_ he attempted no definition of Religion; and the relation of Magic to Religion, therefore, was hardly clear. Critics did not fail to call his attention to this. In the second edition (1900) he accordingly proceeded to define {x} his position. There, with Sir Alfred Lyall and Professor Jevons, he recognizes “a fundamental distinction and even opposition of principle between magic and religion”; and in _The Magic Art_, he has more recently somewhat expanded his exposition of their relations. Magic, it appears, is a false science based on the assumption “that in nature one event follows another necessarily and invariably without the intervention of any spiritual or personal agency.” Religion is “a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct and control the course of nature and of human life.” Man began with magic. He knew of no beings superior to himself, and he believed that by certain ceremonies he could cause the results he desired. “Yet his power, great as he believes it to be, is by no means arbitrary and unlimited. He can wield it only so long as he strictly conforms to the rules of his art, or to what may be called the laws of nature as conceived by him. To neglect these rules, to break these laws in the smallest particular is to incur failure, and may even expose the unskilful practitioner himself to the utmost peril. If he claims a sovereignty over nature, it is a constitutional sovereignty, rigorously limited in its scope, and exercised in exact conformity with ancient usage.” After a while man found out his blunder. “The shrewder intelligences must in time have come to perceive that magical ceremonies and incantations did not really effect the results they were designed to produce, and which the majority of their simpler fellows still believed that they did actually produce.… The discovery amounted to this, that men for the first time recognized their inability to manipulate at pleasure certain natural forces which hitherto they had believed to be completely within their control. It was a confession of human {xi} ignorance and weakness. Man saw that he had taken for causes what were no causes, and that all his efforts to work by means of these imaginary causes had been vain.… Not that the effects which he had striven so hard to produce did not continue to manifest themselves. They were still produced, but not by him.” In this emergency he turned to “a new system of faith and practice, which seemed to offer a solution of his harassing doubts and a substitute, however precarious, for that sovereignty over nature which he had abdicated. If the great world went on its way without the help of him or his fellows, it must surely be because there were other beings, like himself, but far stronger, who, unseen themselves, directed its course and brought