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The average man lives mentally from hand to mouth, and troubles as little about ultimate explanations as he does about the exhaustion of the coal supply. It is a point of some significance that the perception of design in nature, as with the belief in deity, is, if one may use the expression, pre-scientific in point of origin.
Be prepared for the inevitable differences between it and the testimony of your own day. The witness of the time is not true, nor, in the strict sense, false. It is merely incompetent, half-trained, pre-scientific, but all through perfectly natural. The wonder would have been to have had a life of Christ without miracles. The air teems with them. The East is full of Messiahs.
History only shows how terribly he blundered in the pre-scientific period. The blunders may give us a hint here and there. Man was essentially the same in the first and the eighteenth century, and the differences are due to the clumsy devices which he made by rule of thumb. We do not want to refer to them now, except as illustrations of errors.
In a pre-scientific age they, like other peoples, were at a loss to understand what produced thunder and lightning, rain, the fertility or failure of crops, the changes of the seasons, the flow or cessation of springs and streams, the intoxication or exhilaration proceeding from wine, and a multitude of other phenomena.
We can become acquainted with the materials with which the poet-priest of the pre-scientific past worked to build himself a marvelous and soul-satisfying tale; and we are able, as history unrolls, to watch myth gradually pass into theology. The desire to explain how nature came to be and how man arose was well-nigh universal.
I had just begun to fancy that I felt the constriction round my temples again when Mrs. Challenger called out from the sofa that she was fainting. Her husband turned on more gas. "In pre-scientific days," said he, "they used to keep a white mouse in every submarine, as its more delicate organization gave signs of a vicious atmosphere before it was perceived by the sailors.
He learned some Anglo-Saxon and Gothic to test his theory and, of course, confirmed it. The book shows ingenuity, shrewdness, and industry, and Tooke deserves credit for seeing the necessity of applying a really historical method to his problem, though his results were necessarily crude in the pre-scientific stage of philology.
In pre-scientific times, diseases were regarded as the effect of spirits or demons. Death, itself, is considered the work of a malignant agent. It is unnatural and magical. Savages often address diseases respectfully as Grandfather Smallpox. Jesus heals a woman and speaks of her as "a daughter of Abraham whom Satan has bound these eighteen years past."
Its origin must be sought in a pre-scientific age and its persistence in a number of extraneous circumstances which have perpetuated a belief that would otherwise have inevitably disappeared. And it would indeed be a matter for surprise if this belief said by theists to be of all beliefs the most profound should be the one speculation on which savage thought has justified itself.
We lived in a pre-scientific age, and did not go curiously into the origin of things, being content to take the Creation as it stood, and to use the gifts of the gods in their finished form.
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