in connection with the present mental status of man, particularly in his
outlook upon nature. In his thoughts and in his attributes, mankind at
large is controlled by inherited beliefs and impulses, which countless
thousands of years have ingrained like instinct. Over vast regions of
the earth today, magic, amulets, charms, incantations are the chief
weapons of defense against a malignant nature; and in disease, the
practice of Asa(*) is comparatively novel and unusual; in days of
illness many millions more still seek their gods rather than the
physicians. In an upward path man has had to work out for himself
a relationship with his fellows and with nature. He sought in the
supernatural an explanation of the pressing phenomena of life, peopling
the world with spiritual beings, deifying objects of nature, and
assigning to them benign or malign influences, which might be invoked or
propitiated. Primitive priest, physician and philosopher were one, and
struggled, on the one hand, for the recognition of certain practices
forced on him by experience, and on the other, for the recognition
of mystical agencies which control the dark, "uncharted region" about
him--to use Prof. Gilbert Murray's phrase--and were responsible for
everything he could not understand, and particularly for the mysteries
of disease. Pliny remarks that physic "was early fathered upon the
gods"; and to the ordinary non-medical mind, there is still something
mysterious about sickness, something outside the ordinary standard.

(*) II Chronicles xvi, 12.

Modern anthropologists claim that both religion and medicine took origin
in magic, "that spiritual protoplasm," as Miss Jane Harrison calls it.
To primitive man, magic was the setting in motion of a spiritual power
to help or to hurt the individual, and early forms may still be studied
in the native races. This power, or "mana," as it is called, while