It is significant, not only as an evidence of their close affiliation
with the priestly craft, but also as indicating that their activity to
a good extent falls under that category of conspicuous leisure known
as manners and breeding, that the learned class in all primitive
communities are great sticklers for form, precedent, gradations of rank,
ritual, ceremonial vestments, and learned paraphernalia generally.
This is of course to be expected, and it goes to say that the higher
learning, in its incipient phase, is a leisure-class occupation--more
specifically an occupation of the vicarious leisure class employed in
the service of the supernatural leisure class. But this predilection for
the paraphernalia of learning goes also to indicate a further point of
contact or of continuity between the priestly office and the office of
the savant. In point of derivation, learning, as well as the priestly
office, is largely an outgrowth of sympathetic magic; and this magical
apparatus of form and ritual therefore finds its place with the learned
class of the primitive community as a matter of course. The ritual and
paraphernalia have an occult efficacy for the magical purpose; so
that their presence as an integral factor in the earlier phases of the
development of magic and science is a matter of expediency, quite as
much as of affectionate regard for symbolism simply.
This sense of the efficacy of symbolic ritual, and of sympathetic effect
to be wrought through dexterous rehearsal of the traditional accessories
of the act or end to be compassed, is of course present more obviously
and in larger measure in magical practice than in the discipline of the
sciences, even of the occult sciences. But there are, I apprehend,
few persons with a cultivated sense of scholastic merit to whom the
ritualistic accessories of science are altogether an idle matter. The
very great tenacity with which these ritualistic paraphernalia persist
through the later course of the development is evident to any one
who will reflect on what has been the history of learning in our
civilization. Even today there are such things in the usage of the
learned community as the cap and gown, matriculation, initiation,
and graduation ceremonies, and the conferring of scholastic degrees,
dignities, and prerogatives in a way which suggests some sort of a
scholarly apostolic succession. The usage of the priestly orders is
no doubt the proximate source of all these features of learned ritual,
vestments, sacramental initiation, the transmission of peculiar
dignities and virtues by the imposition of hands, and the like; but
their derivation is traceable back of this point, to the source from
which the specialized priestly class proper came to be distinguished
from the sorcerer on the one hand and from the menial servant of
a temporal master on the other hand. So far as regards both their
derivation and their psychological content, these usages and the
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