On the Origin, Idea, Scope, and History of Ancient and Modern Magic

The inclination toward superstition is conditioned by the innermost nature of man. Man would have to be a being of entirely different mental faculties and emotional qualities than he is if it were otherwise, and if one found it differently in the history of peoples and mankind.

It was certainly a philosophy very unworthy of the highest mental faculties of man when, in older and more recent times, some founded the entire edifice of what they called religion and virtue merely on the sensory feelings of fear and hope in man.

Nevertheless, what is more peculiar to man, and what mixes more into all his intellectual views, determinations of the will, and emotional inclinations than the feelings of fear and hope? Frederick II, who shared that view with the Encyclopédistes 18th-century French philosophers who edited the Encyclopédie, calls them the two wheels by which the human machine is set in motion. As long as there are humans, it will remain true what Jeremiah said almost two and a half thousand years ago: "The human heart is a defiant and desperate thing; who can fathom it?" Truly a saying of deep meaning, and one upon which, for the explanation of countless phenomena in the realm of superstition, a voluminous commentary could be written!

Furthermore, what is more firmly rooted in the most general inner faculties of human nature than the affects of affection and aversion, love and hate—that law of elective affinities a reference to the chemical and emotional concept popularized by Goethe reigning through the entire universe in countless wonderful phenomena of sympathy and antipathy,