FROM MYTH TO SCIENCE 311 



placed a stick to point towards his hut and sang over it to fill it with magic 

 power. Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, who describe the incident, say that 

 when the victim knew of the magical pointing-stick he went to bed in terror. 

 They tried every means of reassuring him : they laughed at him, they rea- 

 soned, they scolded, they coaxed, they even beat him. But everything 

 failed and in twenty- four hours the man was dead.^ His camp-mates thought 

 he was killed by magical power directed by the stick — ^this was their inter- 

 pretation of his death ; we say unhesitatingly that he died of fright — ^this 

 is our interpretation. 



When a woman who is suckling a child dies in Paraguayan Chaco, her 

 child is buried alive with her. The Chaco Indians fear she will return to 

 claim her infant if it is not laid in her grave. Mr. W. Burbrooke Grubb, a 

 missionary in Chaco, persuaded his people, on one occasion, to save a child 

 who had been thus doomed. During the night after the funeral a wild uproar 

 filled the camp : a woman had seen her dead friend enter her tent. The 

 dead woman had come for her child — this was the interpretation in Chaco ; 

 a woman who feared the breach of a funeral custom had dreamed of her dead 

 friend's return — this was the missionary's interpretation. 2 



A savage who happened to make good hunting when he was cairying 

 a ham-bone took one with him on aU. his future hunts. He mistook, in our 

 opinion, a mere coincidence for a magical connection.' 



These differing estimates of the same incidents depend upon the role 

 of interpretation in all judgments. A little reflection shows that this inter- 

 pretation is very extensive and very pervasive. When we see water we know 

 it can wet us : this is an interpretation, for wetness can be felt but not seen. 

 We interpret one another's thoughts by words or gestures ; we interpret 

 one another's actions by constructing a context for them — assuming, for 

 example, that a lady entering a confectioner's will buy a cake ; we inter- 

 pret the events of nature in a precisely analogous way — concluding, for 

 example, that clouds have been charged with electricity when lightning 

 flashes. We are never content vnth what we actually see or hear or touch, 

 or experience generally, but always construct, sometimes spontaneously, 

 sometimes deliberately, a context, a larger whole, in which to set our experi- 

 ences. Thus, behind the world of actual sense, behind its colours, shapes, 

 sounds, smells, and " feels," science supposes a world of minute particles — 

 molecules, atoms, or electrons. Scientific theories are simply wide, palpable 

 extensions of the interpretive habit which dominates our minds. Our 

 simplest experiences contain some interpretation, though careful reflection 

 may be needed to discover it. When we try to piece together the clues 

 in a murder trial we are obviously constructing a context, placing the death 

 which we know in a wider whole. In scientific theories or hypotheses ample 

 contexts are provided for experiences : a system of moving particles and ether 

 waves is constructed around the colours we perceive. 



In our interpretations one thing is compared with another thing which 

 serves as a model. A girl of thirteen asked her uncle, who lectured in a 

 university, whether staff and students assembled each morning for prayers. 

 Universities might be no worse for regular morning prayers, but their arrange- 

 ments forbid. The girl knew that boys and girls study in schools and older 

 people in universities ; but when she argued from morning prayers at her 

 own school to morning prayers at a university, she assumed a school to be a 

 more perfect model of a university than it is. Her error revealed her method 

 of interpreting through models, and her elders use the same method though 

 experience makes them more circumspect in appl}dng it. When we assume 



^ The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, ch. xiv. 



2 An Unknown People in an Unknown Land. 



' Carveth Read, The Origin of Man and of His Superstitions, p. 116. 



