tate of things he surveys is such as it is and no
other, is no product of high civilisation, but a characteristic of his
race down to its lowest stages. Among rude savages it is already an
intellectual appetite, whose satisfaction claims many of the moments not
engrossed by war or sport, food or sleep. Even in the Botocudo or
the Australian, scientific speculation has its germ in actual
experience."(3) It will be shown later that the food of the savage
intellectual appetite is offered and consumed in the shape of
explanatory myths.

(1) See Amazonian Tortoise-Myth., pp. 5, 37, 40; and compare Mr.
Harris's Preface to Nights with Uncle Remus.

(2) Steller, p. 267. Cf. Farrer's Primitive Manners, p. 274.

(3) Primitive Culture, i. 369.

But we must now observe that the "actual experience," properly so
called, of the savage is so limited and so coloured by misconception and
superstition, that his knowledge of the world varies very much from the
conceptions of civilised races. He seeks an explanation, a theory of
things, based on his experience. But his knowledge of physical causes
and of natural laws is exceedingly scanty, and he is driven to fall back
upon what we may call metaphysical, or, in many cases "supernatural"
explanations. The narrower the range of man's knowledge of physical
causes, the wider is the field which he has to fill up with
hypothetical causes of a metaphysical or "supernatural" character. These
"supernatural" causes themselves the savage believes to be matters of
experience. It is to his mind a matter of experience that all nature
is personal and animated; that men may change shapes with beasts; that
incantations and supernatural beings can cause sunshine and storm.

A good example of this is given in Charlevoix's work on French
Canada.(1) Charlevoix was a Jesuit father and missionary among the
Hurons and other tribes of North America. He thus describes the
philosophy of the Red Men: "The Hurons attribute the most ordinary
effects to supernatural causes".(2) In the same page the good father
himself attributes the welcome arrival of rainy weather and the cure
of certain savage patients to the prayers of Pere Brebeuf and to the
exhibition of the sacraments. Charlevoix had considerably extended
the field in which natural effects are known to be produced by natural
causes. He was much more scientifically minded than his savage flock,
and was quite aware that an ordinary clock with a pendulum cann