Coastal sailing as long as it is perfectly safe and easy commands no magic. Overseas expeditions are invariably bound up with ceremonies and ritual. Man resorts to magic only where chance and circumstances are not fully controlled by knowledge.
Interpretation
Exploration and adventure carry a sense of magic when they involve uncertainty and risk.
This quote reflects on the nature of human experiences, contrasting the mundane nature of safe activities with the profound significance of ventures that demand courage and ritual. It suggests that the 'magic' of adventure or exploration arises when one steps into the unknown, where knowledge alone does not guarantee control over outcomes, compelling humans to seek meaning through ceremonies and beliefs.
In practice
In a motivational speech about embracing uncertainty.
Magic enables man to carry out with confidence his important tasks, to maintain his poise and his mental integrity in fits of anger, in the throes of hate, of unrequited love, of despair and anxiety. The function of magic is to ritualize man's optimism, to enhance his faith in the victory of hope over fear. Magic expresses the greater value for man of confidence over doubt, of steadfastness over vacillation, of optimism over pessimism.
The anthropologist must relinquish his comfortable position in the long chair on the veranda of the missionary compound, Government station, or planter's bungalow, where, armed with pencil and notebook and at times with a whisky and soda, he has been accustomed to collect statements from informants.... He must go out into the villages, and see the natives at work in gardens, on the beach, in the jungle; he must sail with them to distant sandbanks and to foreign tribes.
The final goal ... is to grasp the native's point of view, _x000D_ his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world.
There are no peoples however primitive without religion and magic. Nor are there, it must be added at one, any savage races lacking in either the scientific attitude, or in science, though this lack has been frequently attributed to them.
I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.
Not much longer shall we have time for reading lessons of the past. An inexorable present calls us to the defense of a great future.
When did the future switch from being a promise to a threat?
I will not judge a person to be spiritually dead whom I have judged formerly to have had spiritual life, though I see him at present in a swoon (faint)as to all evidences of the spiritual life. And the reason why I will not judge him so is this -- because if you judge a person dead, you neglect him, you leave him; but if you judge him in a swoon,(faint) though never so dangerous, you use all means for the retrieving of his life.
The quantity and quality of consciousness, one may say, have always been growing throughout geological times. In this respect man, in whom nervous organisation and therefore psychological powers have attained an undisputed maximum, may be considered, scientifically, as a natural centre of evolution of the primates.
England in a way is lucky. It's an island, so the frontiers are given by the sea.
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