106 SCIENCE IN GRECO-ROMAN ANTIQUITY 



would never have gained and kept its world-supremacy. 

 Doubtless, long before the Greeks, men possessed 

 scientific knowledge, instinctive and practical. Already, 

 in the Stone Age, they knew how to use the lever to 

 move heavy objects, and how to make spears and 

 arrows. At a later period the Chaldean and Egyptian 

 civilizations witness to a very remarkable technical 

 knowledge ; but as we have seen, they did not succeed 

 in creating rational science, that is, in giving a reasoned 

 explanation of natural phenomena and technical 

 processes. 



In the presence of Nature, two types of explanation 

 can be utilized : the one brings into play the rational 

 mentality, the other belongs to what M. Levy-Bruhl 

 calls the pre-logical mentality, and which it would be 

 preferable to call with M. Brunschvicg the pre-scientific 

 mentality. x 



The latter is common amongst primitive peoples ; it 

 conceives of the links of causality between natural 

 phenomena as a form of mystical participation, which 

 is in a sense extra-spatial and extra-temporal. 2 An 

 individual is devoured by a crocodile or a lion. If he 

 dies in this manner, it is not, in the mind of the savage, 

 because he has imprudently approached one of these 

 ferocious animals ; it is because a malevolent spirit has 



1 In fact, in the reasoning of the savage, the use of the 

 principle of contradiction is by no means abolished as M. 

 Levy-Bruhl seems to imagine. Only it is exercised on another 

 plane. To primitive man contradictions manifested them- 

 selves in the realm of the mystical, not in that of sensible 

 experience. See our article, " Le probleme de verite," in 

 the Revue de theologie et philosophie, Lausanne, Dec. 1923. 

 This is why we choose in preference to the appellation of M. 

 Levy-Bruhl that which M. Brunschvicg has adopted in his 

 masterly work, L' experience et la causalite physique, Alcan, 

 Paris, 1922, p. 113. 



2 Levy-Bruhl, Mentalite primitive, Alcan, Paris, 1922, pp. 

 55 and 516. 



