What is this pre-logical form of thought which characterizes the mentality of primitive people? Lévy-Bruhl describes it as “participation.” The primitive mind does not know things as we do, in a detached objective way. The uncivilized man enters, so to speak, into the world about him and interprets plants, animals, the changing seasons, and the weather in terms of his own impulses and conscious purposes. It is not that he is lacking in observation, but he has no mental patterns in which to think and describe the shifts and changes of the external world, except those offered by the mutations of his own inner life. His blunders of interpretation are due to what has been described as the “pathetic fallacy,” the mistake of attributing to other persons, in this case, to physical nature and to things alive and dead, the sentiments and the motives which they inspire in him. As his response to anything sudden and strange is more likely to be one of fear than of any other emotion, he interprets the strange and unfamiliar as menacing and malicious. To the civilized observer it seems as if the savage lived in a world peopled with devils.
One difference between the savage and the civilized man is that the savage is mainly concerned with incidents and accidents, the historical, rather than scientific, aspects of life. He is so actively engaged in warding off present evil and meeting his immediate needs that he has neither time nor inclination to observe routine. It is the discovery and explanation of this routine that enables natural science to predict future consequences of present action and so enable us to prepare today for the needs of tomorrow. It is the discovery and explanation, in terms of cause and effect, of this routine that constitutes, in the sense in which Lévy-Bruhl uses the term, rational thought.
What the author of primitive mentality means by “participation” is familiar enough, though the expression itself is unusual as description of a form of thought. Human beings may be said to know one another immediately and intuitively by “participation.” Knowledge of this kind is dependent, however, upon the ability of human beings to enter imaginatively into one another’s minds and to interpret overt acts in terms of intentions and purposes. What Lévy-Bruhl’s statement amounts to, then, is that savage people think, as poets have always done, in terms of wills rather than forces. The universe is a society of wilful personalities, not an irrefragable chain of cause and effect. For the savage, there are events, but neither hypotheses nor facts, since facts, in the strict sense of the word, are results of criticism and reflection and presuppose an amount of detachment that primitive man does not seem to possess. Because he thinks of his world as will rather than force, primitive man seeks to deal with it in terms of magic rather than of mechanism.
II. MAGIC AS A FORM OF THOUGHT
Thorndyke’s History of Magic is an account of the manner and circumstances under which, within the period it covers, not all at once, but gradually, first in one field of knowledge and practice, and then in another—haltingly, painfully, and step by step—the transition from magic to science was made.
Anthropologists have not always agreed as to the precise relation between magic and science. Is magic to be regarded as an earlier and more primitive form of science, or is it not? It is at least true that science, as means of control of the external world, has always found some form of magic in existence, and has always displaced it. But magic is probably never merely a tool or a technique which men use to control and fashion the world after their desire. It is primarily a form of emotional expression, a gesture, or dramatic performance. It has something, also, of the character of a prayer or solemn formulation of a wish, but always with the hope that in some—not quite intelligible—way the formulation of the wish will bring its own fulfilment. Magic ceases to interest us where the relation of the means to ends assumes the definiteness and certainty of a scientific demonstration.
Farmers in some parts of the country still pray for rain—at least they did so up to a few years ago. They will quit doing so, however, as soon as someone invents a sure-fire device for making it.[[64]]
We still believe in magic in medicine and in politics—partly, I suspect, because in those fields science has not been able to give us the positive knowledge it has in other regions of our experience, and partly because in the field of medicine and of politics our solemn formulations of our wishes so frequently bring the results desired. In many cases the method of social reformers in dealing with social evils is not unlike the technique of Christian Science in dealing with bodily and spiritual ailments; it consists mainly in solemnly and ceremonially asserting that a given evil no longer exists. Society formulates its wish, consecrates it—through the solemn referendum of a popular election, perhaps—and writes it on the statute books. As far as the public is concerned, the thing is then finished. Fortunately, this form of magic often works—but unfortunately, it does not work so often as it used to.[[65]]
What has been said indicates that magic may be regarded as a form of thought characteristic of, but not confined to, primitive—or what Professor Ellsworth Faris has called preliterate—man. It suggests, also, that primitive thought and primitive mentality are ordinarily associated with a definite organization of life and experience, perhaps even a definite economic organization of society. We all are disposed to think in magical terms in those regions of our experience that have not been rationalized, and where our control is uncertain and incomplete. The stock exchange and the golf course, where success is uncertain and fortuitous, all tend to breed their own superstition.
“Magic,” as Thorndyke says, “implies a mental state, and so may be viewed from the standpoint of the history of thought.” But magic, if it is a form of thought, is not science; neither is it art. The arts may be said to begin with the lower animals. But in the art with which the beaver constructs a dam and the bird builds a nest there is neither magic nor science.