The next step is this: even the rudest men are curious, and ask "the reason why" of phenomena. "II y a eu de la philosophie meme dans ces siecles grossiers;" and this rude philosophy "greatly contributed to the origin of myths ". Men looked for causes of things. "'Whence comes this river?' asked the reflective man of those ages--a queer philosopher, yet one who might have been a Descartes did he live to-day. After long meditation, he concluded that some one had always to keep filling the source whence the stream springs. And whence came the water? Our philosopher did not consider so curiously. He had evolved the myth of a water-nymph or naiad, and there he stopped. The characteristic of these mythical explanations--as of all philosophies, past, present and to come--was that they were limited by human experience. Early man's experience showed him that effects were produced by conscious, sentient, personal causes like himself. He sprang to the conclusion that all hidden causes were also persons. These persons are the _dramatis personæ_ of myth. It was a person who caused thunder, with a hammer or a mace; or it was a bird whose wings produced the din. "From this rough philosophy which prevailed in the early ages were born the gods and goddesses"--deities made not only in the likeness of man, but of savage man as he, in his ignorance and superstition, conceived himself to be. Fontenelle might have added that those fancied personal causes who became gods were also fashioned in the likeness of the beasts, whom early man regarded as his equals or superiors. But he neglects this point. He correctly remarks that the gods of myth appear immoral to us because they were devised by men whose morality was all unlike ours--who prized justice less than power, especially (he might have added) magical power. As morality ripened into self-consciousness, the gods improved with the improvement of men; and "the gods known to Cicero are much better than those known to Homer, because better philosophers have had a hand at their making". Moreover, in the earliest speculations an imaginative and hair-brained philosophy explained all that seemed extraordinary in nature; while the sphere of philosophy was filled by fanciful narratives about facts. The constellations called the Bears were accounted for as metamorphosed men and women. Indeed, "all the metamorphoses are the physical philosophy of these early times," which accounted for every fact by what we now calletiological nature-myths. Even the peculiarities of birds and beasts were thus explained. The partridge flies low because Daedalus (who had seen his son Icarus perish through a lofty flight) was changed into a partridge. This habit of mind, which finds a story for the solution of every problem, survives, Fontenelle remarks, in what we now call folk-lore--popular tradition. Thus, the elder tree is said to have borne as good berries as the vine does till Judas Iscariot hanged himself from its branches.