This is a stance that nearly all of us share, but it's important to understand the historical tradition it is grounded in. It isn't simply a case of admiring the complexity of God's works. It implies the attitudes of Newton, van Leeuwenhoek and earlier; indeed, right back to Dee. And, doubtless, to some Greek, or several. It involves the Renaissance belief that if we investigate the wonder, the marvel, the miracle, then we'll find even more wonders, marvels and miracles: gravity, say, or spermatozoa.

So what do we, and what did they, mean by 'magic? Dee spoke of the arcane arts, and Newton was committed to many explanations that were 'magickal', especially his commitment to action at a distance, 'gravity', which derived from the mystical attraction/repulsion basics of his Hermetic philosophy.

So 'magic' means three things, all apparently quite different. Meaning one is: 'something to be wondered at', and this ranges from card tricks to amoebas to the rings of Saturn. Meaning two is turning a verbal instruction, a spell, into material action, by occult or arcane means ... turning a person into a frog, or vice versa, or a djinn building a castle for his master. The third meaning is the one we use: the technical magic of turning a light switch on, and getting light, without even having to say 'fiat lux'.

Granny Weatherwax's recalcitrant broomstick is type two magic, but her 'headology' is largely a very, very good grasp of psychology (type three magic carefully disguised as type two). It brings to mind Arthur C. Clarke's phrase 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic', which we quoted and discussed in The Science of Discworld. Discworld exemplifies magic by spells, and indeed is maintained as an unlikely creation by being immersed in a strong magical field (type two). Adults of Earthly cultures, like Roundworld, pretend to have lost intellectual belief in magic of the Discworld kind, while their culture is turning more and more of their technology into magic (third kind). And the development of Hex throughout the books is turning Sir Arthur on his head: Discworld's sufficiently advanced magic is now practically indistinguishable from technology.

We can see, as (fairly) rational adults, where the first kind of magic comes from. We see something wonderful and feel tremendously happy that the universe is a place that can include ammonites, say, or kingfishers. But where did we get our belief in the second, irrational kind of magic? How does it come about that all cultures have children that begin their intellectual lives by believing in magic, instead of the real causality that surrounds them?

A plausible explanation is that human beings are initially programmed through fairy stories and nursery tales. All human cultures tell stories to their children; part of the development of our specific humanity is the interaction that we get with early language.

All cultures use animal icons for this nursery tuition, so we in the West have sly foxes, wise owls and frightened chickens. They seem to come out of a human dreamtime, where all animals seem to be types of human being in a different skin, and talk as a matter of course. We learn what the subtle adjectives mean from the actions -and words -of the creatures in the stories. Inuit children don't have a 'sly' fox icon; their fox is 'brave' and 'fast', while the Norwegian iconic fox is secretive and wise, full of good advice for respectful children. The causality in these stories is always verbal: 'So the fox said ... and they did it!' or 'I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house down.' The earliest communicated causality that the child meets is verbal instructions that cause material events. That is, spells.

Similarly, parents and carers are always transmuting the child's expressed desires into actions and objects, from food appearing on the table when the child is hungry to toys and other birthday and Christmas gifts. We surround these simple verbal requests with 'magical' ritual. We require the spell to begin with 'please', and its execution to be recognised by 'thank you'.22 It is indeed not surprising that our children come to believe that the way to acquire or access bits of the real world is simply to ask -indeed, simply asking or commanding is the classic spell. Remember

'open, sesame'?

To a child, the world does work like magic. Later in life, we wish that we could go on like that, with our 'wishes coming true'.23 So we design our shops, our webpages, our cars to fit this truly

'childish' view of the world.

Coming home in the car and clicking the garage open, clicking the infrared remote to open or lock the car, changing TV channels - even switching on the light by the wall switch - are just that kind of magic. Unlike our Victorian forebears, we like to hide the machinery and pretend it's not there. So Clarke's dictum is not at all surprising. What it means is that this ape keeps trying, with incredible ingenuity, to get back into the nursery, when everything was done for it. Maybe other intelligent/extelligent species will have a similar helpless early life, which they will attempt to compensate for or relive through their technology? If so, they will 'believe in magic', too, and we will be able to diagnose this by their possession of 'please' and 'thank you' rituals.

We can see this philosophy surviving into adulthood in different human cultures. In 'adult' stories like the Arabian Nights, an assortment of djinni and other marvels grant the heroes' wishes by magical means, just like those child-wishes coming true. Many 'romantic' adult stories have the same kind of setting, as do many fantasy tales. Fairness demands we add that, contrary to popular opinion, modern fantasy stories don't; it's hard to get much tension in a plot when anything is possible at the snap of a wand and so the practice of 'magic' therein tends to be difficult, dangerous and to be avoided wherever possible. Discworld is a magical world -we can hear the thoughts of a thunderstorm, for example, or the conversation of dogs -but magic in the pointy hat sense is very seldom used. The wizards and witches treat it rather like nuclear weaponry: it does no harm for people to know you've got it, but everyone will be in trouble if it gets used. This is magic for grown-ups; it has to be hard, because we know there's no such thing as a free goblin.

Unfortunately, adult beliefs about causality are usually contaminated by the less sophisticated wish-fulfilment philosophy that we carry with us from the tinkly magic of our infancies. For example, scientists will object to alternative theories on the grounds that 'if that was true, we wouldn't be able to do the sums'. Why do they think that nature cares whether humans can do the sums? Because their own desire to do the sums, which lets them write papers for learned journals, contaminates their otherwise rational view. There's a feeling of feet being stamped; the Almighty should change Her laws so that we can do the sums.

There are other ways to set up beliefs about causality, but they are difficult for creatures immersed in their own cultural assumptions: nearly everything that an adult human being is required to do is either made magical by technology, or it is to do with another human being, serving or being served.

These management, leadership and aristocracy issues have been handled very differently in different societies. Feudal societies have baronial class, who are in many respects allowed to remain in the nursery personas by being surrounded by servants and slaves and other parent- surrogates. Rich people in more complex societies, a high-status people in general (knights, kings, queens, princesses, Mafia bosses, operatic divas, pop idols, sports stars) seem to have set societies around them that pander to their needs in a very child-pampering way. As our society has become more technical, more and more of us, right down to the lowest status levels of society, have come to benefit from the accumulating magic of technology. Supermarkets have democratised and validated the provision of all we could want to each of our child-natures. The child-magic has been appropriated by more and more adults, through technology, and the legitimate kind, the 'wonder of nature' magic, has lost out.