Every great advance in knowledge has extended
the sphere of order and correspondingly restricted the sphere of
apparent disorder in the world, till now we are ready to anticipate
that even in regions where chance and confusion appear still to
reign, a fuller knowledge would everywhere reduce the seeming chaos
to cosmos. Thus the keener minds, still pressing forward to a deeper
solution of the mysteries of the universe, come to reject the
religious theory of nature as inadequate, and to revert in a measure
to the older standpoint of magic by postulating explicitly, what in
magic had only been implicitly assumed, to wit, an inflexible
regularity in the order of natural events, which, if carefully
observed, enables us to foresee their course with certainty and to
act accordingly. In short, religion, regarded as an explanation of
nature, is displaced by science.
But while science has this much in common with magic that both rest
on a faith in order as the underlying principle of all things,
readers of this work will hardly need to be reminded that the order
presupposed by magic differs widely from that which forms the basis
of science.
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