314 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



widespread effects of single incidents provided the primitive mind with its 

 personal explanations of all phenomena. The " three unities " which have 

 been alternately extolled and derided, whether Aristotle intended to enforce 

 them or not, emphasise the dramatic effect which localisation of action in 

 narrow spaces and short times secures. We can still reaUse the aesthetic 

 quaUty of the dramatic compression, so congenial to the primitive mind, 

 of big consequences into single decisive events. We can realise it in the 

 sudden end to the Golden Age, made by the lid of Pandora's box. The 

 Pandora myth, like all the great mythological themes, has varied in the 

 telling. The seductive destructiveness of woman figures in all its blend of 

 ideas. Each Olympian, when Hephaestus had made Pandora of earth, gave 

 her a gift — Aphrodite, for example, gave her beauty, and Hermes boldness 

 and cunning. In the original legend the fortunes of men depended upon 

 a single act of acceptance. The beautiful thunderbolt could not be thrown, 

 and so was led by Hermes to Epimetheus. Now Prometheus had warned 

 him to accept no gift from Zeus. When Pandora stood before Epimetheus 

 the fortunes of men stood in the balance ; when she was taken to his arms 

 all the miseries descended on the human race. 



The extension of single decisive events into long complex processes 

 distinguishes scientific from mythological explanation and is accompanied 

 also by an extension of the role of impersonal causes. Carveth Read remarks 

 that the anthropoids live by common sense, and savages by common sense 

 troubled by magic and animism. ^ This common-sense core of primitive 

 belief includes recognitions of simple causal connections such as the de- 

 pendence of the penetrative power of a spear on its sharpness and the depend- 

 ence of its effectiveness on the vigour with which it is thrown. Primitive 

 man surrounds these rational recognitions with irrational magic and animistic 

 notions : he sharpens his spear and throws it hard, but believes also that 

 it kills by magic or is directed by a spirit. It required time to disengage 

 the core of impersonal causation from its magical and animistic nimbus, 

 and a greater time to extend the notion of impersonal causation to inanimate 

 nature. Modern science has pared down the possibilities of personal efforts 

 and extended the sphere of impersonal causes. Now the displacements 

 of decisive moments by prolonged processes and of personal agents by im- 

 personal forces, which are two aspects of the gradual substitution of science 

 for mythology, had one significant lesson for human thought : they enforced 

 the recognition of the interpretive element in all thinking. 



According to a Hottentot legend death entered the world because a stupid 

 hare mistook a message or wilfully perverted it. He was sent by the moon 

 to tell men that though they would die like the moon dies, they would rise 

 again as she rises. The hare blundered, wittingly or unwittingly, and 

 announced to men that they would die permanently. The angry moon 

 threw a stick at the hare and gave him his cleft lip. In one addition to the 

 story the hare, in return, scratched the moon's face.^ Since the moon's face 

 has marks, and scratches would produce them, the situation is as if the legend 

 were true. Since the as if fits primitive estimates of possibility more closely 

 than it fits ours, the story was believed because it successfully interpreted 

 facts. The human mind naturally includes interpretations that can be suc- 

 cessfully connected by an as if with facts in its belief in those facts. The 

 AS if is ignored, or unnoticed, and the whole story, because it hangs together, 

 is uncritically believed. In the mythological age of the human mind there 

 was no clear recognition of the element of theory or hypothesis which per- 

 vades all interpretation. Fact and hypothesis, once successfully combined 

 into a consistent and, to the primitive mind, intelligible tale, received equal 



^ The Origin of Man and of His Superstitions, p. 67. 



^ Sir James Frazer, Folk-lore in the Old Testament, vol. i, p. 2. 



