Some Omens having been established by subjective prognostication or by coincidence, many more may be added by analogy, or by a sort of reasoning. An analogy with the contrast of right and left hand may be noticed in all opposites: the woodpecker in Borneo, for example, having two cries, and one of them a warning, must not the other be an encouragement? The belief in Omens having taken hold of the public mind, everybody is on the look-out for signs and wonders; and anything unusual seen, or heard, or rumoured, becomes a possible Omen of anything else, and men ask one another what it portends. The superstitious imagination is greedy of its accustomed food. Under such conditions, too, Omens are discovered by retrospection: a public calamity, such as the death of a king, the defeat of an army, or a pestilence (or in private life some private misfortune), makes us remember some foregoing event or events, which must have forewarned us, had we had the skill to interpret the significance of Time’s progression. § 4. DIFFERENTIATION OF OMENS FROM GENERAL MAGIC The savage mind, sensitive to the resemblance of relations, cannot overlook the analogy between signs and warning cries; many Omens are cries; and with the spread of animistic explanation, they came to be considered as the sendings of spirits or gods. But, at first, by mere magical thinking, under the stress of anxiety to know the future, and the helplessness of common sense to predict anything outside the everyday routine, Omens are gradually separated from ordinary probable signs (such as the tracks of game) as necessary infallible signs (or tendencies) if cunning can find them out, connected by some supernatural law with the unknown future that certainly awaits us, and as a kind of Magic. The magical habit of mind may be supposed to have resulted from the coalescence of beliefs concerning several imaginary operations—by charms, spells, rites—each class of beliefs having its own occasions, causes, or fallacious grounds. Those operations had in common the marks of being connexions of events due to imagined forces of a mysterious kind, and therefore grouped themselves together in men’s minds as the Magic apperception-mass. Omens had these marks and, therefore, were assimilated to Magic. An Omen is an event regarded as a magical sign of the good or ill success of some undertaking, or of the approach of good fortune, or of calamity. And on the principle that ideas are differentiated from a confused matrix, it is probable that Omens, having at first been confused with other magical antecedents of events, were only gradually again distinguished from them. But an important distinction existed and at last came to light: charms, rites and spells are causes of events; whereas Omens are signs only, not causes. The difference is that whereas charms, rites and spells directly exert their powers upon the course of things, Omens themselves