PRINCIPLES AND METHODS 107 



incited the crocodile or lion to devour him. These 

 animals have not acted by themselves in obedience to 

 their instincts, they are only an instrument used by the 

 malevolent spirit. The latter could have chosen some 

 other instrument, disease, for example, and in this case 

 the individual destined to perish from its attack could 

 have approached the lion or crocodile without danger. 

 Here is another fact : Some one swallows poison and 

 dies. To modern science, the poison, through the 

 stomach, penetrates the blood, and corrupts it, or acts 

 on the nervous system by causing an arrest of essential 

 vital functions. There is here a whole chain of causes 

 and effects produced from the moment when the poison 

 is swallowed until that in which death supervenes. 

 This succession of links is more or less rapid according 

 to the case, and by the use of an antidote it may be 

 checked. To the pre-scientific mind, things happen 

 differently. It is an evil spirit, and he alone, who gives 

 to the poison its hurtfulness ; by itself it has no power 

 and without the spirit incarnate in it, would be harm- 

 less. Hence the custom of ordeals or judgments by 

 poison, so common amongst savage tribes. Every 

 accused person could vindicate himself by submitting 

 to the test of poison ; if he vomited it, it was because 

 he was innocent ; if he died, it was because he was 

 guilty. Thus, whilst the scientific mentality always 

 seeks the cause of a sensible phenomenon in a com- 

 bination of conditioning phenomena, also sensible, the 

 pre-scientific mentality appeals to mystical and occult 

 forces invisible and imperceptible to the ordinary 

 means of perception. These forces are the real causes 

 of sensible phenomena ; they float around man, who 

 cannot always locate them in time and space, or even 

 distinguish them, for they are in a sense extra-spatial 

 and extra-temporal. They seem to imply to the 

 primitive mentality a supplementary dimension ignored 

 by us, not a spatial dimension like a fourth dimension, 



