His action is blindly impulsive, while the form of Magic in question involves generalisations and other mental processes not expressed by the laws of association.[25] If magical actions cannot be deduced from the principle of association, they can at least be classified according to the kind of association they illustrate. For, although the various ideas brought together in Magic, in a relation of cause and effect, are frequently said to have come together by 'chance,' some of the conditions under which they have in fact become connected are expressed in the universal laws of association, namely, association by similarity or contrast, by contiguity or spatial opposition, and by emotional congruity or disparity. Whenever magical acts have been classified, it has been according to the principle of association.[26] But every kind of activity involving mental operations falls in some of its relations under the laws of association, hence the relative unfruitfulness of these classifications, hence also our attempt at grouping magical practices according to a factor of greater significance, namely, the nature of the power they involve. =2. The Independence of Religion from Magic.=--The following psychological arguments appear to me to go a long way towards proving that _magical behaviour has had an origin independent of the animistic[27] belief_, and that some of its forms, at least, antedated it, and therefore also Religion:-- (_a_) The absorbing interest found by young children in the _use_ of things, and their complete indifference at first to the _modus operandi_, point, it would seem, to a stage in human development at which the explanation of things is not yet desired. It is well known that long before a child asks 'how?' he wearies his guardians with the question, 'what for?'[28] He wants to know what things are good for, and, in particular, what _he_ can do with them before he cares for an understanding of their origin, and of their mechanism. This keen interest in the production of results, this curiosity about the practical meaning of things, is apparently quite independent of any abstract idea of power. Since the child passes through a pre-interpretative stage, may we not admit a corresponding period in racial development during which no explanatory soul-theory, no animistic philosophy, is entertained? A mental attitude such as this would make Religion impossible, while it would provide the essential condition for a Magic of our first class.