§ 5. Scientific Explanation consists in discovering, deducing, and assimilating the laws of phenomena; it is the analysis of that Heracleitan 'flux' which so many philosophers have regarded as intractable to human inquiry. In the ordinary use of the word, 'explanation' means the satisfying a man's understanding; and what may serve this purpose depends partly upon the natural soundness of his understanding, and partly on his education; but it is always at last an appeal to the primary functions of cognition, discrimination and assimilation. Generally, what we are accustomed to seems to need no explanation, unless our curiosity is particularly directed to it. That boys climb trees and throw stones, and that men go fox-hunting, may easily pass for matters of course. If any one is so exacting as to ask the reason, there is a ready answer in the 'need of exercise.' But this will not explain the peculiar zest of those exercises, which is something quite different from our feelings whilst swinging dumb-bells or tramping the highway. Others, more sophisticated, tell us that the civilised individual retains in his nature the instincts of his remote ancestors, and that these assert themselves at stages of his growth corresponding with ancestral periods of culture or savagery: so that if we delight to climb trees, throw stones, and hunt, it is because our forefathers once lived in trees, had no missiles but stones, and depended for a livelihood upon killing something. To some of us, again, this seems an explanation; to others it merely gives annoyance, as a superfluous hypothesis, the fruit of a wanton imagination and too much leisure.