During the past year two very important books have been published, in English, dealing with the subject of magic. The first is a translation of Lévy-Bruhl’s La Mentalité Primitive, and the other is Lynn Thorndyke’s A History of Magic and Experimental Science during the First Thirteen Centuries of the Christian Era.
In venturing to include two volumes so different in content and point of view in the same general category, I have justified myself by adopting Thorndyke’s broad definition, which includes under “magic” “all occult arts and sciences, superstition and folklore.”
Lévy-Bruhl’s book is an attempt, from a wide survey of anthropological literature, to define a mode of thought characteristic of primitive peoples.
Thorndyke, on the other hand, is interested mainly, as the title of his volume indicates, in the beginnings of empirical science. The points of view are different, but the subject matter is the same, namely, magical beliefs and practices, particularly in so far as they reflect and embody a specific type of thought.
Lévy-Bruhl has collected, mainly from the writings of missionaries and travelers, an imposing number of widely scattered observations. These have been classified and interpreted in a way that is intended to demonstrate that the mental life and habits of thought of primitive peoples differ fundamentally from those of civilized man.
Thorndyke, on the other hand, has described the circumstances under which, during the first thirteen centuries of our era, the forerunners of modern science were gradually discarding magical practices in favor of scientific experiment.
There is, of course, no historical connection between the culture of Europe in the thirteenth century and that of present-day savages, although the magical beliefs and practices of both are surprisingly similar and in many cases identical, a fact which is intelligible enough when we reflect that magic is a very ancient, widespread, characteristically human phenomenon, and that science is a very recent, exceptional, and possibly fortuitous manifestation of social life.
Lévy-Bruhl described the intelligence and habits of thought characteristic of savage peoples as a type of mentality. The civilized man has another and a different mentality. “Mentality,” used in this way, is an expression the precise significance of which is not at once clear. We use the expression “psychology” in a similar but somewhat different way when we say, for example, that the rural and urban populations “have a different ‘psychology,’” or that such and such a one has the “psychology” of his class—meaning that a given individual or the group will interpret an event or respond to a situation in a characteristic manner. But “mentality,” as ordinarily used, seems to refer to the form, rather than to the content, of thought. We frequently speak of the type or grade of mentality of an individual, or of a group. We would not, however, qualify the word “psychology” in any such way. We would not, for example, speak of the grade or degree of the bourgeoisie, or the proletarian “psychology.” The things are incommensurable and “psychology,” in this sense, is a character but not a quantity.
The term “mentality,” however, as Lévy-Bruhl uses it, seems to include both meanings. On the whole, however, “primitive mentality” is used here to indicate the form in which primitive peoples are predisposed to frame their thoughts. The ground pattern of primitive thought is, as Lévy-Bruhl expresses it, “pre-logical.”
As distinguished from Europeans and from some other peoples somewhat less sophisticated than ourselves, the primitive mind “manifests,” he says, “a decided distaste for reasoning and for what logicians call the discursive operations of thought. This distaste for rational thought does not arise out of any radical incapacity or any inherent defect in their understanding,” but is simply a method—one might almost say a tradition—prevalent among savage and simple-minded people of interpreting as wilful acts the incidents, accidents, and unsuspected changes of the world about them.