CHAPTER II
THREE TYPES OF BEHAVIOUR DIFFERENTIATED
In his dealings with the different kinds of objects or forces with which he is, or thinks himself, in relation, man has developed three distinct types of behaviour. A concrete illustration will bring them before us more forcibly than an abstract characterisation. A stoker in the hold of a ship, throwing coal into the furnace, represents one of them. His purpose is to produce propelling energy. The amount of coal he shovels in, together with the air-draught, the condition of the boiler and other factors of the same sort, determine, as he understands the matter, the velocity of the ship. The same man, playing cards of an evening, and having lost uninterruptedly for a long time, might get up and walk round the table backwards in order to change his luck. He would then illustrate a second mode of behaviour. If a storm threatens to sink the ship, our stoker might be seen falling on his knees, lifting his hands to heaven, and addressing in passionate words an invisible being. These are the three differentiated kinds of responses he has learned to make, the three ways by which he endeavours to make use of the forces about him in his struggle for the preservation and the enrichment of life. We may designate them as—
1. The mechanical behaviour.
2. The coercitive behaviour, or Magic.
3. The anthropopathic behaviour, which includes Religion.
The mechanical behaviour differs from the anthropopathic by the absence of any reference to personal beings. In the sphere in which it obtains, threats and presents are equally ineffective. It implies instead the practical—not the theoretical—recognition of a fairly definite and constant quantitative relation between cause and effect. If science is to be provided with an ancestor, and only with one, it should be this first type of behaviour rather than Magic. For, the moment the existence of the fixed quantitative relations, implicitly acknowledged in the first type of behaviour, is explicitly recognised, science is born. Magic separates itself, on the one hand, from the mechanical behaviour by the absence of implied quantitative relations, and, on the other hand, from anthropopathic behaviour by the failure to use means of personal influence; punishment and reward are just as foreign to Magic as to mechanical behaviour. As to the anthropopathic type of activity, it includes the ordinary relations of men with men as well as those with gods. One’s frame of mind and behaviour when dealing with a human person, especially if exalted far above us, resembles Religion so closely that it is proper to place them in the same class.
Mechanical behaviour and Religion are, obviously, by far the most common and important modes of activity among civilised peoples, whereas in primitive culture the coercitive behaviour (Magic) is everywhere in evidence and Religion may be practically unknown. As one ascends from the lowest stages of culture, Magic gradually loses official recognition. Among us, though it leads only a surreptitious existence, it has by no means lost all influence. The list of magical superstitions that have retained a hold among us would be found tediously long. A numerous class of them includes the gambler’s methods of securing luck. So-called ‘religious’ practices may really be magical. The cross, the rosary, relics, and other accessories of Religion, acquire in the mind of many Christians a power of the coercitive type; that is, for instance, the case when the sign of the cross, of itself, without the mediation of God or Saint, is felt to have power; or when ‘saying one’s beads’ is held to possess a curative virtue of the kind ascribed to sacred relics by the superstitious. Even when the symbolism of the sign of the cross, and the meaning of the Ave Maria are realised, it happens not infrequently that signing oneself and saying one’s beads are regarded as acting upon the Virgin Mary, Jesus Christ, or God, in the manner of an incantation i.e. magically.