personality worshipped: religion is the bond of union between them, and
it is also a bond which unites the worshippers to one another. It is by
its very nature a bond of union, a means of communion between persons,
human and divine. That is the mystic aspect of religion which finds
expression in the rite of sacrifice and in the sacramental meals which
are felt somehow to bind together, or rather to reunite and keep
together, the worshippers and their god. This communion however is not
merely mystic: it has its practical effects inasmuch as it affects the
conduct of the worshipper and enables him to do what without it he would
not have had strength to do.

If fetishism, polytheism, and monotheism radiate from a common centre,
the heart of man, then the heart of man must also be regarded as the
starting-point of magic. If they spring straight from the heart, though
in different directions, dispersively, then magic must also start from
the common centre; and, though its divergence from religion tends to
become total, at first, and indeed it may be for long, the discrepancy
between them is rather felt uneasily than recognized clearly.
Categories, such as those of cause and effect, identity and difference,
which are the common property of civilized thought, and which among us,
Mr. L.T. Hobhouse says, 'every child soon comes to distinguish in
practice, are for primitive thought interwoven in wild confusion.' Two
categories, which in primitive thought are thus interwoven in wild
confusion, are, it may be suggested, religion and magic; and only in the
dispersive process of evolution do they tend to become discriminated. In
ancient Egypt, in Babylon, in Brahminism, religion fails to disentangle
itself from magic; and not even has Christianity always succeeded in
throwing it off. Different as we may conceive magic and religion to be,
the fact remains that at first they grow up intertwined together. In the
lower forms of religion magic is worked not only by magicians but by