Mere inferences are often taken for facts, but, under normal conditions, the imaginative man is not the dupe of his own inventive faculty. It may be said that, however true this may be of more modern religious myth, the attitude of the "primitive man" towards the naive creations of his fancy is different. Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as a primitive man. However far we may go back, we shall find men with parents, and preceded by an infinite line of ancestors. Still there can be no harm in using this term to designate mankind at some ill-defined stage of progress above the highest lower animal and below the savage of our own days. Strange things are told us of the primitive man. He is said to be unable to distinguish between his imaginations and facts, and that he is in the habit of taking his dreams[49] for real occurrences. Fiske says: "Our primitive ancestors knew nothing about laws of nature, nothing about physical forces, nothing about the relations of cause and effect, nothing about the necessary regularity of things.... The only force they knew was the force of which they were directly conscious--the force of will. Accordingly, they imagined all the outward world to be endowed with volition and to be directed by it." Of course our primitive ancestors expressed themselves differently from ourselves. They did not talk about laws of nature and the necessary regularity of things. But can we conceive them ignorant of the law of the regular alternation of night and day, of summer and winter, of the phases of the moon? Did not the "primitive man" know just as well as Newton that when an apple is detached from a tree it falls to the ground? He knew that from a blow as cause we may expect pain, wounds, or even death as the effect. He had sufficient acquaintance with dynamics to be aware that he could not raise himself from the ground more than a few feet, and with chemistry to have learnt that the savour of food is improved or spoilt, according to circumstances, by the application of fire. Nor is it true that he ascribed all forces to volition. It is only by exception that the child, the savage, and the primitive man attribute life to inanimate things. This requires imagination, a faculty which is notoriously feebler with them than with the adult civilized man. The progress of humanity is from a sporadic towards a general recognition of will in or behind the material universe, from fitful and sportive fancies involving this idea to an earnest and steady conviction of its truth, and from the fragmentary personification of the part as animated to the conception of a living, universal whole. Agnosticism, which ignores volition in matter, belongs, therefore, to the lower end of the scale of progress. Where it appears in civilized man, it is a case of arrested development. The average savage is a materialist, who associates volition with the energies of nature in a much less thorough