rreconcilable, if we take account of the differences
in races. Taking it generally, it is hard to believe that he is not
curious--he holds his life at that price. He is in the presence of the
universe just as we are when confronted with an unknown animal or fruit.
Is it useful or hurtful? He has all the more need for a conception of
the world since he feels himself dependent on everything. While our
subordination as regards nature is limited by the knowledge of her laws,
he is on account of his animism in a position similar to ours before an
assembly of persons whom we have to approach or avoid, conciliate or
yield to. It is necessary that he be _practically_ curious--that is
indispensable for his preservation. There has been alleged the
indifference of primitive man to the complicated engines of civilization
(a steamboat, a watch, etc.). This shows, not lack of curiosity, but
absence of intelligence or interest for what he does not consider
immediately useful for his needs.

His conception of the world is a product of the imagination, because no
other is possible for him. The problem is imperatively set, he solves it
as best he can; the myth is a response to a host of theoretical and
practical needs. For him, the imaginative explanation takes the place of
the rational explanation which is yet unborn, and which for great
reasons can not arise--first, because the poverty of his experience,
limited to a small circle, engenders a multitude of erroneous
associations, which remain unbroken in the absence of other experiences
to contradict and shatter them; secondly, because of the extreme
weakness of his logic and especially of his conception of causality,
which most often reduces itself to a _post hoc, ergo propter hoc_.
Whence we have the thorough subjectivity of his interpretation of the
world.[62] In short, primitive man makes without exception or reserve,
and in terms of images, what science makes provisionally, with reserves,
and by means of concepts--namely, hypotheses.

Thus, the explicative myths are as we see, an epitome of a practical
philosophy, proportioned to the requirements of the man of the earliest,
or slightly-cultured ages. Then comes the period of critical
transformation: a slow, progressive substitution of a rational
conception of the world for the imaginative conception. It results from
a work of _depersonification_ of the myth, which little by little loses
its subjective, anthropomorphic character in