On the other hand, there is a disposition of the obeah man to become a sort of confessor and privy counselor in all the intimate and personal affairs of the common people. The black people—and not only black, but occasionally Portuguese, who are the traders in the smaller islands—go to him with affairs of business and of the heart. They write him long personal letters, and he sends them a magical prayer or incantation to cure them of bodily ailments, to protect them from dangers of travel, and to insure general good fortune. In an affair of the heart, the witch doctor frequently prescribed a magic powder, sweetly scented, to accompany and lend a delicate and stimulating fragrance to a love letter. In principle, this aspect of the obeah man’s practice is like Mr. Coué’s—“Every day, in every way, I am better and better”—only that the uses of obeah are more specific. In any case, there is here a very evident tendency of the practice to assume a form in which the ritual of obeah is merely a device, like the prayers of primitive folk, for magically re-enforcing the expression of a wish. So closely are the magical practices of the obeah man connected—in the mind of the ordinary black man—with religion that in one case, at any rate, he pretended to cure a boy of insanity by making believe that he was operating as the agent or proxy of the priest. This, then, represents a second tendency to change in the practices of magic by the black man. If obeah in some instances seems to be taking the form of popular medicine, in others it tends to assume the form of a pagan religious ceremony, adapting itself to the forms and the ritual of the local church. VI. THE PROBLEM STATED In a recent volume, _Studies in Human Nature_, Mr. J. B. Baillie has suggested that the disposition and the ability to think abstractly, disinterestedly, and scientifically is not only a relatively recent acquisition of the human race, but at the same time is a local phenomenon.