The way in which pictorial art is used for curative purposes affords us—if further proofs are wanted—a still more telling example of the difference between the magical and the aesthetic points of view. Nothing could be more crude and primitive than the notions held by the Navajo with regard to the salutary influences of their famous sand-paintings. The cure is effected, they believe, not by the patient’s looking at the represented figures, but by his rolling himself on them, or having the pigments of the mosaic applied to the corresponding parts of his own body. The more of the sacred sand he can thus attach to his body, the more complete is his recovery.[498] Among other tribes at the same stage of development as the Navajos the prevailing views are almost equally materialistic.[499] And even among the barbaric and semi-civilised peoples, although we do not meet with quite as gross superstitions, the fundamental idea of pictorial magic appears often to be the same. The power of a painting or a sculpture is thought of as something which is quite independent of its mental effects upon the spectator. That interpretation of sympathetic magic, therefore, which to us seemed most natural, cannot possibly be applied to its lower forms. As the concepts by which primitive man justifies to himself his beliefs and practices are naturally vague and hazy, it may seem futile to attempt to reconstruct his reasoning. Nothing final or definite can be asserted on so obscure a topic. But we may legitimately discuss the most consistent and most probable way in which to account for the various forms of sympathetic magic. And with regard to this question of probabilities we may rely to some extent upon the illustrative and suggestive analogies to primitive thought which can be found in scientific philosophies. For it is evident that a philosophical doctrine, if it fits in with the facts of primitive superstition, may be explanatory of those vague and latent notions which, without logical justification or systematical arrangement, lie in the mind of the magician and the idolater. Such a doctrine is presented to us in the familiar emanation-theories, according to which every image of a thing constitutes a concrete part of that thing itself. According to the clear and systematic statement of this doctrine given by the old Epicurean philosophers, shadows, reflections in a mirror, visions, and even mental representations of distant objects, are all caused by thin membranes, which continually detach themselves from the surface of all bodies and move onward in all directions through space.[500] If there are such things as necessary misconceptions, this is certainly one. Such general facts of sensuous experience as reflection, shadow, and mirage will naturally appear as the result of a purely material decortication—as in a transfer picture.[501] How near at hand this theory may lie even to the modern mind appears from the curious