If Magic preceded Animism, we must insert a stage of thought at the beginning of Comte’s series, making four instead of three; and the suggestion may perhaps be made to appear plausible, that the Metaphysical stage, the reign of occult forces in explanation, is not a mere residue of Fetichism after the spirit has departed, but rather the re-emergence into daylight of magical ideas of force, that always persisted, but for ages were kept in comparative obscurity by the vogue of Animism. § 2. WHAT IS MAGIC? In his _Development of Moral Ideas_ (II. 47) Prof. Westermarck observes that savages distinguish two classes of phenomena; the natural or familiar, and the supernatural or mysterious. The latter again are divided into the mechanical (Magic) and the volitional (Animism). This seems to be true: it corrects the notion, still common, that the savage explains all natural activities by Animism; recognises that he takes some phenomena as a matter of course, as the animals do; and, as to events that are not a matter of course, rightly marks the distinction between his conceptions of them as either mechanical (due to some uniformly acting force) or volitional (that is, arbitrary or capricious). With the savage, then, there are ongoings of things around him that are _perceived_ to be regular and continuous; and there are others between which connections are _imagined_ to take place, and these either regularly or capriciously: for thus I venture to interpret the difference between the natural and the supernatural; it is the difference between perception-belief and imagination-belief. Common sense, Magic, Animism—these are the three great congeries of ideas that compete for the control of his thoughts and in his interpretation of the world. Magic may be defined as a connexion of events imagined to be constant and to depend upon the agency of some thing or activity possessing an efficacious quality or force (in fact unreal), and not to depend (as a connexion) upon the will of any particular person.