These three kinds of evidence in favour of the wizard’s power—natural causes set in motion by himself, natural causes introduced by his clients, and sheer favourable coincidences—have so much the air of perceptual proof, or of an appeal to common sense, that the savage positivist who is able to resist them must have a more solid judgment than most of our educated civilised people. Judgment is an innate individual character, on which education has little effect, except in the special department of a man’s training. A scientific expert, for example, may be an excellent judge of evidence in his own pursuit, and elsewhere quite helpless; for where he is strong it is not a set of rules but the mass of his special experience that guides him. That out of the mass of general experience, so disorderly and fragmentary as it is, some minds should have the power of extracting common sense, in spite of the misrepresentations of Magic and Animism, is very remarkable, and very fortunate for the rest of us.
That the three kinds of evidence which serve so well to confirm belief in wizardry are all of them—as to the connexion between a wizard’s rites or spells and the event—entirely coincidental, gives some support to the hypothesis that coincidences are the foundation of the belief in Magic.
Bearing in mind, then, that a wizard’s practices sometimes include real causes, and that his shallow knowledge disables him for discriminating between causation and hocus-pocus; that Magic or Sorcery is generally believed in by those about him, who seek his aid, or the aid of others of his class; that both they and he earnestly desire that his pretensions should be well founded; that he produces striking subjective effects; that in such cases his artifices are a condition of his success, and that a good many coincidences, complete or partial, seem to prove that his art has further extraordinary influence upon men and nature—it is no wonder that some wizards are deluded along with their dupes, especially neurotic enthusiasts or men of an imaginative and histrionic temperament.
To explain the possibility of some men being sincere in witchcraft is not to palliate the profession, much less the anti-social practices of witchcraft. For the most part those practices are deceitful. They are not the invention of savage society; society invents nothing; only the individual invents. They are the invention and tradition of wizards, who keep the secret so far as it is to their advantage: of wizards growing more and more professional, and trading upon the fears and hopes, the anxiety and credulity of their fellows. The spirit of superstition is common to the tribe, but its professional exploitation is the work of those who profit by it.