Like religion, the chief factor in magic--that by which it accomplishes its ends--is the mystic force that is released and set at work by the rite or the spell. Behind the sympathetic formula, behind the notions of property and of spirits, there is another notion still more mysterious, the notion of power, vague, impersonal, always operating, irresistible, or depending for its efficaciousness on conditions not altogether at command. The investigations of the last chapter have disclosed to us what this power is. By its very vagueness and impersonality it enshrines possibilities illimitable. It may be materialized, localized, personalized; but it ceases not to be spiritual, to act at a distance, and that by direct connection, if not by contact, to be mobile and to move without movement, to be impersonal though clothed in personal forms, to be divisible yet continuous. It is this notion that accounts in the last resort for the phenomena of magic. Without it, magic is incomprehensible; like a sentence without the copula, the action, the affirmation is wanting. All this is equally true of religion. The authors see therefore that magic is, like religion, a social phenomenon; it has parallel rites with those of religion; it has parallel postulates and beliefs. To distinguish it from religion they are driven to erect into a test the individualistic aims of its practitioners, or of those on whose behalf it is called in aid. Its true distinction is, according to this, that it tends to be isolated, to be furtive, to be put into motion on behalf of individuals and against the community; its methods become arbitrary; it ceases to be a common obligation. Individuals in magic have appropriated the ideas and the collective forces generated by {76} religion, and turned them to their own ends. Religion, in short, is social in its aims, magic is antisocial. That is the only difference between them. In this distinction Professor Durkheim agrees. Everywhere, he says, religious life has for its substratum a definite group; even what are called private cults are celebrated by the family or the corporation or society to which they are restricted. On the other hand, though magical beliefs are widely diffused and practised by large classes of a population, their effect is not to bind together those who adhere to them and unite them into a group having one common life: there is no magical Church. Between the magician and those who consult him there is no durable bond. He has clients, not a church. His relations with them are accidental, not permanent; and they may have no relations with one another; they may even be ignorant of one another’s existence.[76.1]