THE gradual passage of the race of man from the condition of "beasts that reason not" to that of "persons of understanding and reason" has been an immensely long and a very painful one. It is not yet complete—is far, indeed, from being so—even amongst the most favoured classes of the most highly civilized peoples of to-day. Just as our bodily evolution and adaptation to present conditions is incomplete and exhibits what Metchnikoff has called "disharmonies"—that is, retentions of ancestral structures now not only useless, but even positively injurious—so does the mental condition attained by civilized man (if we do not limit our observation to exceptional instances) exhibit a retention—by means of records and accepted teaching—of beliefs and tendencies which were among the first products of the blundering efforts of human reason, and have caused atrocious suffering to millions of human beings in the long process of mental development. At one time the whole race lived in a world of delusions and fantastic beliefs—the outcome of false or defective observation rather than of false logic. These false conclusions as to many subjects were inevitable as soon as man began to reason at all. It was the necessary and injurious accompaniment of the growing habit of "reasoning" by which the more fortunate races have eventually been brought, step by step, to correct conclusions and a dominant position at the present day. The progress from the almost universal prevalence of an enormous system of preposterous false beliefs or conclusions onward to the triumph of sound knowledge has not only taken an immense period of time, but left whole races of men and large sections of the population—even in those races which have produced individuals remarkable for their power of discovering the truth—still subject to the early erroneous conceptions of natural processes and of man's relation to them.

The conclusion certainly seems to be justified that the most advanced animal progenitors of mankind, who lived and died unreasoning, the mere puppets of natural forces which they neither could, nor tried to, understand and control, were "happier" than the "rebel" man when he first conceived the notion that he could detect cause and effect, not only as between a blow and the production of a serviceable flint implement, but in the beneficent or injurious relations of the things around him to one another and to himself. Primitive men seem at a very remote period to have elaborated in regard to such vital matters a series of conclusions—differing in various races according to place and circumstance—to which they were led by erroneous observation and imperfect reasoning—reasoning which was arrested and distorted by fear, desire, haste, and imagination. The word "magic" is now used to indicate those beliefs and conclusions in all their variety, because the "magi" or priests of Zoroaster (Zarathustra), the founder of the religion of the ancient Persians, taught them in an elaborated form, and practised a system of supposed control of natural forces and of spirits, good and evil, in connexion with such beliefs. Magic is, therefore, defined as the general term for the practice and power of wonder-working as dependent on the employment of supposed supernatural or "occult" agencies. It forms a vast field of study and one of the greatest interest in the attempt to follow out the history of the workings of the human mind, its extraordinary envelopment in error and delusion, and its gradual emancipation therefrom.

In origin "magic" and "religion" are one. The priest and the magician were originally one. Man tried to control Nature by the use of spells and fantastic procedures, based on imagined powers and correspondences in natural objects. He excogitated (as a modern child sometimes does) a sort of fancifully assumed system of fixed laws of natural relations and interactions, of causes and effects which were suggested by superficial likenesses and wild guesses at connexion and sequence, accepted without criticism. Thus, we have the widespread doctrines of "sympathetic magic" and of "contagious magic." An example of the first is the belief that a certain tree or animal is the sympathetic representative of a certain man, and that as the one flourishes or suffers and dies so will the other. This is extended into a belief that a drawing or image, or even an unshaped stone, may sympathetically represent a man or an animal. The American medicine-man draws the picture of a deer on a piece of bark, and expects that shooting at it will cause him to kill a real deer the next day. He mistakes a connexion which exists only in the mind of the sorcerer for a real bond independent of the human mind. Thus, too, waxen or clay images of an enemy are made and melted before fire or wasted in water, or pierced with pins (even at this day in Scotland, as witness a clay figure in the museum at Oxford), in the belief that the enemy himself will be similarly injured. The belief in "contagious magic" leads to the procuring of a drop of the blood, or of a piece of the hair, the toenails, the clothing, or even a part of the unconsumed food of another individual, in order that a sorcerer may, by acting upon it or repeating "incantations" over it, influence the actions and life of that individual for good or for ill.

But besides the many forms of these two kinds of magic, there is a later variety of magic which grew up with what is not a primitive belief, namely, the belief in the existence of spiritual beings inhabiting trees, rocks, waters, and animals. It developed further with the later belief in the existence of ghosts or spirits of the dead. Fear and the desire to control hostile unseen forces was the motive of all magic. The magician invented "spells," "rites," and "ceremonies" for controlling and bending these spirits to his will. But as a still later development, we find more and more definitely separated from the magician and his spells—the priest, who learnt humility in the face of might greater than his own, and, abandoning the attempt to coerce, adopted the attitude of propitiation and prayer, and prostrated himself before a higher power. Thus (as Dr. Marret writes) religion gradually became separated from magic, though often mixed with it, and often retaining magical elements. Religious cults became publicly recognized, established, and respectable, whilst "magic" became private, secret, disreputable, and at last openly condemned and suppressed by the priests of religion. The history of magic in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America presents an almost unlimited field of study. We find remarkable agreements in the fundamental notions on which magic is based in all parts of the world and also important differences in details and special developments.

Divination is that branch of magic which attempts to discover secrets or to foresee events, whilst magic in general is an attempt to influence the course of events. Divination is the process of attempting to obtain knowledge of secret or future things by means of oracles, omens, or astrology. One of its methods is "necromancy," the supposed communication with the spirits of the dead. This word is formed from the Greek words "nekros," a corpse, and "manteia," divination; but in Latin it was erroneously written "nigromantia," and so gave rise to the application of the name "the black art" to sorcery and witchcraft in general. By the ancient Greeks and Romans all omens, as well as oracles, were regarded as sent by the gods, and in ancient Rome a large and wealthy corporation of augurs who were constantly consulted by private individuals as well as by the State existed. They received regular "fees" for their services in interpreting and seeking for omens. The orthodox belief has always been either that the soothsayer is directly controlled by a god or a spirit, or, on the other hand, that the material objects inspected and regarded as signs of the future are controlled by the gods or by spirits, so as to afford information. Divination is, and has been, practised in all grades of civilization and culture, from the Australian "black fellow" to the American medium. Amongst its many varieties are (1) crystal gazing, a method similar to that of dreams, excepting that the vision is set up voluntarily by gazing into a crystal ball or a basin of water; (2) shell-hearing; (3) the divining-rod in its various forms; (4) sieve, ring, and Bible swinging; (5) automatic writing; (6) sand divination, widely practised in Africa; (7) trance-speaking; (8) the examination of the hand, or palmistry; (9) card-laying; (10) the interpretation of dreams; (11) the casting of lots, or sortilege; (12) the drawing of texts from the Bible or from Virgil (the 'sortes VirgilianÆ' of old times); (13) the inspection of the entrails of animals freshly killed (haruspication), and the study of footprints; (14) augury by omens, such as the behaviour and cry of birds, and the meeting with ominous animals; and lastly (15 and 16), the two highly elaborated and pretentious systems of astrology (divination by the stars) and geomancy (divination by the lie of hills and rivers). In the case of astrology the stars are believed not merely to prognosticate the future, but also to influence it, and the latter is the special feature of geomancy, practised in China, where no house or other building can be erected without a certificate as to its favourable position in regard to "magic" by the professional "geomancer," who has to be paid his fee, and thus takes the place of the local government surveyor and sanitary officer of Western Europe.

In the exercise of these arts of divination there is no doubt that, owing to the concentration of his attention on the thing to be inspected the operator is, in many kinds of divination, "self-hypnotized," or brought into that well-known mental condition in which the unconscious memory and other special mental processes are active, whilst an exaggerated acuteness of the senses is produced. In other cases the person who consults the "operator" may be so influenced. Hallucination of one kind and another is therefore likely to occur, and thus mystery and apparently marvellous results are not inconsistent with the good faith of the operator. But there is no reason to doubt that the modern sorcerers who make money by their pretended divinations are rogues and impostors of a particularly dangerous and injurious variety.

Palmistry or chiromancy is one of the oldest of the large family of systems for foretelling the future. It existed in China 4000 years ago, and is treated in the most ancient Greek writings as a well-known belief. The gipsies probably brought it with them from India. Those who practise palmistry pretend that by the inspection and proper interpretation of the various irregularities and flexion-folds of the skin of the hand the mental or moral dispositions and powers of an individual can be discovered, and not only that, but that the current of future events in the life of an individual are indicated by them. To this it is customary to add nowadays the pretence of a revelation by these same markings of events in the past life of their owner. It is only what we might have expected that primitive man, seeking for signs and occult mysteries, should have found in the varying folds of the hand—"the organ of organs"—something to excite his tendency to attribute magical importance to what he could not simply explain. The folds of the skin on the palmar surface of the hand are, as a matter of fact, so disposed that the thick loose skin shall be capable of bending in grasping, whilst it is held down to the skeleton of the hand by fibrous lines of attachment, so as to prevent its slipping and the consequent insecurity of grip. The swellings bounded by the lines of folding and fixture are called "monticuli" by the palmist, and are simply subcutaneous fat, which acts as a padding, or cushioning, and projects between the lines of fibrous attachment of the skin to the deeply placed bones. They differ slightly in different individuals, as do other structures.

These same lines and monticuli are present in the hands and feet of the chimpanzee and other man-like apes, and were specially exhibited under my direction in the upper gallery of the Natural History Museum. But no palmist ever read the ape's hand, although, according to the great and authoritative treatises on palmistry, it would be perfectly easy to do so, since every variation in the lines and the monticules has been mechanically dealt with, and its supposed indications precisely determined by a formal set of rules. There are similar lines on that part of the foot in human infants and in the adult apes which corresponds to the palmar surface. But no palmist has attempted to deal with them. The fact is that the attributions indicated by such names as the line of heart, the line of life, the line of the head, and the line of fortune are purely arbitrary, as are those of the monticules Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, the Sun, Mercury, Mars, and the Moon. In past times there have been great divergences in their interpretation by different schools, and the present uniformity is as devoid of any conceivable relation to fact as were the former divergences. It is impossible to discuss the asserted correlation of the lines and monticules of the hand with either character or life-history, since no facts are offered in support of the notion that there is such a correlation. We have bare assertion, and nothing more, as in most of the other doctrines of magic.

The shape of the hand and of the fingers, and the softness, hardness, dryness, and moisture of the skin are taken into account by most palmists. Few, if any, of those who pretend at the present day to "read" a hand are really acquainted with the elaborate rules laid down by the painstaking, if deluded, people who endeavoured to construct a sort of astrology of the hand by assigning the names of heavenly bodies to parts of it. The modern professional palmist forms a judgment and guess as to his or her client's character and probable past and future history by indications and information obtained from the client's face, manner, conversation, costume, and personal acquaintance. If a vague prophecy made by the "fortune-teller" should by hazard turn out to be near the truth, it is remembered and quoted by the client as a proof of the truth of palmistry; if it does not prove to be correct, it is forgotten.

The question of the possibility of judging of the character and disposition of a man or woman by the form and proportions of the hand or the foot is altogether distinct from that of the reality of "divination" of future events by applying a system of rules to the interpretation of the lines and swellings of the palmar surface. Persons of quick perception are in the habit of forming judgments as to character from a first impression of the face, expression, voice, and movements of another individual. Often such judgments are erroneous, and I do not know that they have ever been proved by a large series of experiments to be more frequently right than wrong. But it is possible that correct indications may sometimes be thus obtained. Many people think that they can form more or less correct judgments as to certain mental characteristics by observing the shape and play of the hand and fingers or of the foot. There may be such a correlation of the gesture and form of hands or feet with some mental qualities, but obviously this has nothing to do with palmistry. It has never been really proved that persons of what is called "good birth" have smaller hands and feet than persons of "low birth," although it is often assumed that they have. And it has never been shown why small hands and feet should go with "good birth," supposing that they do so, or why some people have large and some small extremities. The possible effect of certain manual occupations in enlarging the hands of an individual is, of course, excluded; the question raised is as to naturally or hereditarily small hands and feet.