Civilization is but a filmy fringe on the history of man.  Go back as far as his records carry us and the story written on stone is of yesterday in comparison with the vast epochs of time which modern studies demand for his life on the earth.  For two millions (some hold even three millions) of years man lived and moved and had his being in a world very different from that upon which we look out.  There appear, indeed, to have been various types of man, some as different from us as we are from the anthropoid apes.  What upstarts of yesterday are the Pharaohs in comparison with the men who survived the tragedy of the glacial period!  The ancient history of man—­only now beginning to be studied—­dates from the Pliocene or Miocene period; the modern history, as we know it, embraces that brief space of time that has elapsed since the earliest Egyptian and Babylonian records were made.  This has to be borne in mind in connection with the present mental status of man, particularly in his outlook upon nature.  In his thoughts and in his attributes, mankind at large is controlled by inherited beliefs and impulses, which countless thousands of years have ingrained like instinct.  Over vast regions of the earth today, magic, amulets, charms, incantations are the chief weapons of defense against a malignant nature; and in disease, the practice of Asa(*) is comparatively novel and unusual; in days of illness many millions more still seek their gods rather than the physicians.  In an upward path man has had to work out for himself a relationship with his fellows and with nature.  He sought in the supernatural an explanation of the pressing phenomena of life, peopling the world with spiritual beings, deifying objects of nature, and assigning to them benign or malign influences, which might be invoked or propitiated.  Primitive priest, physician and philosopher were one, and struggled, on the one hand, for the recognition of certain practices forced on him by experience, and on the other, for the recognition of mystical agencies which control the dark, “uncharted region” about him—­to use Prof.  Gilbert Murray’s phrase—­and were responsible for everything he could not understand, and particularly for the mysteries of disease.  Pliny remarks that physic “was early fathered upon the gods”; and to the ordinary non-medical mind, there is still something mysterious about sickness, something outside the ordinary standard.

     (*) II Chronicles xvi, 12.

Modern anthropologists claim that both religion and medicine took origin in magic, “that spiritual protoplasm,” as Miss Jane Harrison calls it.  To primitive man, magic was the setting in motion of a spiritual power to help or to hurt the individual, and early forms may still be studied in the native races.  This power, or “mana,” as it is called, while possessed in a certain degree by all, may be increased by practice.  Certain individuals come to possess it very strongly:  among native Australians today it is still deliberately cultivated.  Magic in healing seeks to control the demons, or forces; causing disease; and in a way it may be thus regarded as a “lineal ancestor of modern science” (Whetham), which, too, seeks to control certain forces, no longer, however, regarded as supernatural.