Science Is Magic

[DISRAELI]

@DISRAELI I was actually referring to the phenomena of nature going haywire when magic is afoot. Animals behaving weirdly, air pressure being effected (wind) stuff like that and then there is the effects on people.  Think crop circles, fairy rings etc also.  There is a visceral effect on nature/reality.

If we are not talking about that and those entities, are we talking about latent psychic powers in humans or what is the mechanism that effects change?

Personally I think looking for science in magic is worthwhile, who knows where all the myths and legends comes from.  Maybe some lost knowledge can be resurfaced.

Sir James is talking about the belief systems of primitive peoples. Except when they are trying to injure an enemy, their magical practices are normally about constructive things like getting crops to grow, bringing game animals to a place where you can kill them, and curing people's illnesses.

As for the mechanisms, I've already mentioned how he analyses their practices as involving pseudo-scientific assumptions about the way nature works and trying to make use of the assumed mechanisms which he calls contagion and imitation. That is, you can make things happen at a distance by what you do locally (pouring water onto the ground to emcourage the rain) or by what you do to something which has belonged to a distant person.

This resembles science in that they are exploiting what they understand to be natural mechanisms, and the transition to science started happening when people began to realise that these assumptions were based entirely on the imagination, and this was the real reason why the magic failed so frequently. That prompted them to be more observant and start looking for the real mechanisms.