perhaps more important than it claims to be. Art, which certainly did not begin as art for art’s sake, originally served tendencies which to-day have for the greater part ceased to exist. Among these we may suspect various magic intentions.[1]
4
Animism, the first conception of the world which man succeeded in evolving, was therefore psychological. It did not yet require any science to establish it, for science sets in only after we have realized that we do not know the world and that we must therefore seek means of getting to know it. But animism was natural and self-evident to primitive man; he knew how the things of the world were constituted, and as man conceived himself to be. We are therefore prepared to find that primitive man transferred the struc-
- ↑ S. Reinach, “L’art et la Magie,” in the collection, “Cultes, Mythes et Religions,” Vol. I, p. 125-136. Reinach thinks that the primitive artists who have left us the scratched or painted animal pictures in the caves of France did not want to “arouse” pleasure, but to “conjure things.” He explains this by showing that these drawings are in the darkest and most inaccessible part of the caves and that representations of feared beasts of prey are absent. “Les modernes parlent souvent, par hyperbole, de la magie du pinceau ou du ciseau d’un grand artiste et, en général, de la magie de l’art. Entendu en sense propre, qui est celui d’une constrainte mystique exercée par la volonté de l’homme sur d’autres volontés ou sur les choses, cette expression n’est plus admissible; mais nous avons vu qu’elle était autrefois rigouresement vraie, du moins dans l’opinion des artistes” (p. 136).
