Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/51

Rh effort of mind required to abolish the old and receive the new, is unable to comprehend. To the savage, time space and causality are as real and material as the things themselves, which surround him, and of which he can take cognizance by his coarsest sense, that of touch. He imagines time to be a monster that devours his own children; space seems to him to be a wall built around the horizon, or else the union of the visible earth with the heavens, which he looks upon as a vast roof or dome, and causality appears to him so necessary and inseparable from appearances, that he gives it the simplest and to him most reasonable form: tracing effects to their causes by ascribing them to the direct action of some being like himself. If a tree falls in the forest, some organic being must have thrown it down; if the earth trembles, somebody below must be shaking it, and as this vague generality of "somebody" is not easily grasped by his undeveloped mind, he gives it the convenient form of a human being. This identical process of thought is called forth by all the phenomena which take place around him. Unresisting slave to his conceptions of causality, he tries to discover the cause of every effect he notices, and, as he recognizes his own will as the source of his own actions, he applies this experience, the result of his individual observation, to nature in general and sees in every one of its phenomena the operations of the arbitrary will of some being like unto him-self. But now arises for the first time a cause for perplexity and astonishment. When his wife starts the fire by rubbing two dry sticks together, when his companion kills an animal with his stone hatchet, his senses apprehend the causes of the blaze and of the animal's death. But when the storm blows over his hut, or he is bruised by the hail, he can not see the Being that is maltreating him in this fashion. He can not doubt that this