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

Here, the highest, most real, and brightest ideas of reason are so closely connected with the darkest assumptions of superstition, and the one passes so imperceptibly into the other, that the separation is often very difficult without shifting the boundary markers of deception and truth, reason and unreason themselves, and designating as contradictory or hostilely opposed to one another that which, upon deeper insight, we must ultimately acknowledge as having sprung from one root.

I wish to explain myself further.

All belief and all superstition, all truth and all error in human representations of mystery, miracle-power, and supernatural influence, are ultimately founded as their common highest principle in the belief in beings higher, good, or evil, than man himself.

But we find this belief among all peoples in the old as well as the new world without any exception, provided that they are not still, like the Fuegians, or the Pascheräh an indigenous group referenced in contemporary travelogues, who in the development of language itself have not yet moved beyond this dull sound repeated by him forever, on the lowest stage of culture.

What lies at the basis of this is the darkly sensed, or more clearly recognized, general folk assumption: