d to the unobserved,
from the known to the unknown; and the wider the range of our
observation and knowledge, the greater the probability that our
reasoning will be correct.

[Sidenote: The savage draws his ideas of natural causation from
observation of himself. Hence he explains the phenomena of nature by
supposing that they are produced by beings like himself. These beings
may be called spirits or gods of nature to distinguish them from living
human gods.]

All this is as true of the savage as of the civilised man. He too
argues, and indeed can only argue on the basis of experience from the
known to the unknown, from the observed to the hypothetical. But the
range of his experience is comparatively narrow, and accordingly his
inferences from it often appear to civilised men, with their wider
knowledge, to be palpably false and absurd. This holds good most
obviously in regard to his observation of external nature. While he
often knows a good deal about the natural objects, whether animals,
plants, or inanimate things, on which he is immediately dependent for
his subsistence, the extent of country with which he is acquainted is
commonly but small, and he has little or no opportunity of correcting
the conclusions which he bases on his observation of it by a comparison
with other parts of the world. But if he knows little of the outer
world, he is necessarily somewhat better acquainted with his own inner
life, with his sensations and ideas, his emotions, appetites, and
desires. Accordingly it is natural enough that when he seeks to discover
the causes of events in the external world, he should, arguing from
experience, imagine that they are produced by the actions of invisible
beings like himself, who behind the veil of nature pull the strings that
set the vast machinery in motion. For example, he knows by experience
that he can make sparks fly by knocking two flints against each other;
what more natural, therefore, than that he should imagine the great
sparks which we call lightning to be made in the same way by somebody up
aloft, and that when he finds chipped flints on the ground he should
take them for thunder-stones dropped by the maker of thunder and
lightning from the clouds?[3] Thus arguing from his limited experience
primitive man creates a multitude of spirits or gods in his own likeness
to explain the succession of phenomena in nature of whose true causes he
is ignorant; in short he personifies the phenomena