FROM MYTH TO SCIENCE 313 



Adequate explanation or interpretation depends upon adequate realisa- 

 tion of alternatives. On the top of Pen-maen-mawr there is a group of 

 three huge stones which are huddled as if they had been dropped from above. 

 During part of last century science could not suggest a reasonable inter- 

 pretation of this appearance. In Shrewsbury there is an " erratic " boulder 

 called the " Bell-stone " which is unlike any rocks nearer than Cumberland 

 or Scotland. It looks as if it were a bit of Cumberland dropped on Shrews- 

 bury. A Mr. Cotton told Charles Darwin, when the latter was a youth, that 

 the world would come to an end before the mystery of the " Bell-stone " 

 was revealed.^ Science now realises that boulders can be dropped from 

 floating ice. Alternatively, on Tinker Bell lines, they could be dropped by 

 giants, and this, as legend testifies, was the first alternative accepted. Now 

 this mythological interpretation was, in part, forced upon the primitive 

 mind by its restriction to one alternative. The stones looked as if they 

 had been dropped or carried, and such dropping or carrying not only looked 

 as if powerful beings had dropped or carried them, but the " as if " could 

 not be connected with any other alternative. The original mythological 

 conviction that giants had carried and dropped many huge boulders, because 

 the stones were placed as if they had been so carried and dropped, is char- 

 acteristic of a very close restriction of the primitive mind to one general 

 alternative for explanation. Human actions do strike decisively into 

 human lives, and these human actions are so constantly and impressively 

 part of experience that it was no doubt natural, perhaps inevitable, for the 

 first human thinkers to interpret all tilings as if personal beings had acted 

 or thought in certain ways — to discover explanations in stories. 



In the beginning of things, say the Kassena, the sky was close to the 

 ground. An old woman, who was cooking her dinner, became angry because 

 she had to stoop as if she were in a low-roofed room. In her anger she tore 

 a piece from the sky and made in into soup. The angered sky went upwards 

 to its present place and has remained there ever since. ^ This legend is more 

 naive than the Babylonian legend in which Marduk constructs the sky out 

 of the body of the dismembered Tiamat, but is typical of the primitive pre- 

 ference for explanation through story. A catalogue of primitive explanatory- 

 myths which explain by personal actions would " stretch out until the crack 

 of doom." 



The progress from mythological explanation to explanation which can 

 be called, quite intelUgibly though vaguely, " scientific " is marked by the 

 emergence of three features which are selected from many others. The first 

 is the substitution of prolonged processes for single decisive moments ; the 

 second is the recognition of causes which are not personal ; and the third is 

 ihe recognition of the as if which connects interpretation and interpreted. 

 In a wide survey of the course of thought, which neglects nicety of detail, 

 these three features force themselves into notice and mark conspicuous 

 changes in thinking. The third feature is to receive chief treatment here, 

 but the first and second, since they are connected with it, will receive some 

 notice. 



The insult offered to the sky by the old woman was a decisive moment 

 for the earth which settled its separation from the sky. This compression 

 of causation into single, rapid incidents is a natural accompaniment of the 

 story-telUng method of interpretation. Single human actions have often 

 decisive consequences and important consequences — a whole family might be 

 put to death at the nod of a chief, or a tribe be decimated because one of 

 its members slew a member of another. An extension of these decisive, 



1 Charles Darwin, ed. Francis Darwin, p. 14. 



* Cardinall, The Natives of the Northern Territories oj the Gold Coast, 

 P- 23. 



