PRE-THALESIAN PHILOSOPHY 205 



prevented reflection. It is true that on the poetical and religious side 

 there were many tales about the sun and other great facts of nature, but 

 where these were really from the earliest beliefs, they seem to have had 

 no connection with our present subject. On the other hand, it was 

 precisely in the irregular and exceptional occurrences that the germ 

 of scientific wonder is to be sought. The unaccustomed, the disturbing, 

 the fearful, had the power of piercing the primitive mind with curiosity 

 and of stirring the great interrogation. Sickness, especially if sudden 

 and dreadful, and death suggested demonic origins, and thoughts which 

 led to belief in charms and spells and magic, and incantations filled the 

 primitive imagination. Here then in the very beliefs that modern 

 science endeavors to eliminate must we look for the acorn out of which 

 that mighty oak has grown, for it is exactly in primitive magic that the 

 belief in cause and effect had its birth. The first men could conceive 

 of cause only through analogy with their own wills, and all those natural 

 forces which affected their welfare through the immediate environment 

 (the weather, the cattle, the crops, the chase) were conceived of as 

 endowed with wills or spirits, which could be appeased or frightened 

 like themselves. Now some of the forces which seem at first to belong 

 to the neighborhood, such as heat and moisture, have the power of 

 carrying the mind to remoter objects such as the sun and the clouds, and 

 so a philosophy of magical causation gradually grew until it covered the 

 world as it was then known. There sprang up in connection with this 

 fanciful knowledge a parallel, fanciful control, for even among savages 

 knowledge seemed to mean power. The savages of the spirits were 

 met by magical rites and by sacrifices, and out of this struggle emerged 

 a larger view of cause which began to take in the regular as well as the 

 irregular experiences. All these beliefs were closely associated with 

 religious beliefs, but they may be seen also as a dim philosophy or 

 science of the natural forces. When we reach the great theogonies and 

 cosmogonies with which the early world terminates its effort to bear the 

 burden of human thought, there is already established a strong concep- 

 tion of the uniformity of nature and even of the need of wisdom and 

 investigation. 



It has long been recognized that the roots of moral philosophy are to 



