Magic Science and Religion 3 5 



those mental schemes and physical contrivances which could be 

 described as diagrams or formulas. Methods of indicating the 

 main points of the compass, arrangements of stars into constel- 

 lations, co-ordination of these with the seasons, naming of moons 

 in the year, of quarters in the moon — ^all these accomplishments 

 are known to the simplest savages. Also they are all able to draw 

 diagrammatic maps in the sand or dust, indicate arrangements by 

 placing small stones, shells, or sticks on the ground, plan expeditions 

 or raids on such rudimentary charts. By co-ordinating space and 

 time they are able to arrange big tribal gatherings and to combine 

 vast tribal movements over extensive areas. ^ The use of leaves, 

 notched sticks, and similar aids to memory is well known and seems 

 to be almost universal. All such " diagrams " are means of 

 reducing a complex and unwieldy bit of reality to a simple and 

 handy form. They give man a relatively easy mental control 

 over it. As such are they not — in a very rudimentary form no 

 doubt — fundamentally akin to developed scientific formulas and 

 " models," which are also simple and handy paraphrases of a 

 complex or abstract reality, giving the civilised physicist mental 

 control over it ? 



This brings us to the second question : Can we regard primitive 

 knowledge, which, as we found, is both empirical and rational, 

 as a rudimentary stage of science, or is it not at all related to it ? 

 If by science be understood a body of rules and conceptions, based 

 on experience and derived from it by logical inference, embodied 

 in material achievements and in a fixed form of tradition and carried 

 on by some sort of social organisation — then there is no doubt that 

 even the lowest savage communities have the beginnings of science, 

 however rudimentary. 



Most epistemologists would not, however, be satisfied with 

 such a " minimum definition " of science, for it might apply to 

 the rules of an art or craft as well. They would maintain that 

 the rules of science must be laid down explicitly, open to control 

 by experiment and critique by reason. They must not only be 

 rules of practical behaviour, but theoretical laws of knowledge. 

 Even accepting this stricture, however, there is hardly any doubt 

 that many of the principles of savage knowledge are scientific in 

 this sense. The native shipwright knows not only practically of 

 buoyancy, leverage, equilibrium, he has to obey these laws not 

 ^ Cf. the writer's Argonauts of the Western Pacific, chap. xvi. 



