fact that such a man as Balzac fell back upon it when attempting to explain the newly-invented daguerreotype, that most marvellous of all image-phenomena.[502] To the primitive mind it is only natural to apply this reasoning even to artificial images. Whether the likeness of a thing is fashioned by nature in water or air, or whether it be made by man, it is in both cases thought of as depriving the thing itself of some part of its substance. Such a notion, which cannot surprise us when met with among the lower savages, seems to have been at the bottom of even the Mohammedan prohibition of the formative arts.[503] It is evident that, wherever images are explained in this crude manner, magic by similarity in reality becomes merely a case of magic by contiguity. The materialistic thought which lies behind the belief in a solidarity between similar things appears nowhere so clearly as within the department of pictorial magic. But we believe that its influence can also be traced in all the other superstitions regarding sympathetic causation. In spite of that feeling of superiority so common in nations which have no leaning towards formative arts, poetical and musical magic in its lower forms is founded on quite as crude a conception as any idolatry or pictorial sorcery. It would indeed be unnatural if the theory of corporeal emanations had not been applied to acoustic as well as to optical phenomena. To the unscientific mind sounds and reverberations are something quite synonymous with sights and reflections. The sounds connected with the impression of a being, thing, or phenomenon will therefore be conceived as being a part of the being, thing, or phenomenon itself. To these easily-explained notions there are to be added the peculiar superstitions entertained with regard to a class of sounds which are only associated with things, viz. their names. To the primitive man a name literally constitutes a part of the object it denotes. The magician may therefore get the mastery over the spirits he invokes and the men he bewitches by merely mentioning their names.[504] In many cases a most potent spell consists of unintelligible words, which to the conjurer himself has no meaning at all. In other cases, although the words really have a sense, we can easily observe that they are not used for the purpose of creating an illusion of reality. The typical incantation may indeed in a manner be called descriptive. The singer is anxious not to pass by any detail, the omitting of which may be injurious to the potency of his magic. But the result is only a sort of inventory, which seldom suggests a full and vivid mental picture. Many of the Shaman prayers and songs show us by their whole character that in their case at least poetical illusion has had nothing to do with the belief in the power of words over things.[505]