What is this pre-logical form of thought which characterizes the mentality of primitive people? Lévy-Bruhl describes it as “participation.” The primitive mind does not know things as we do, in a detached objective way. The uncivilized man enters, so to speak, into the world about him and interprets plants, animals, the changing seasons, and the weather in terms of his own impulses and conscious purposes. It is not that he is lacking in observation, but he has no mental patterns in which to think and describe the shifts and changes of the external world, except those offered by the mutations of his own inner life. His blunders of interpretation are due to what has been described as the “pathetic fallacy,” the mistake of attributing to other persons, in this case, to physical nature and to things alive and dead, the sentiments and the motives which they inspire in him. As his response to anything sudden and strange is more likely to be one of fear than of any other emotion, he interprets the strange and unfamiliar as menacing and malicious. To the civilized observer it seems as if the savage lived in a world peopled with devils. One difference between the savage and the civilized man is that the savage is mainly concerned with incidents and accidents, the historical, rather than scientific, aspects of life. He is so actively engaged in warding off present evil and meeting his immediate needs that he has neither time nor inclination to observe routine. It is the discovery and explanation of this routine that enables natural science to predict future consequences of present action and so enable us to prepare today for the needs of tomorrow. It is the discovery and explanation, in terms of cause and effect, of this routine that constitutes, in the sense in which Lévy-Bruhl uses the term, rational thought. What the author of primitive mentality means by “participation” is familiar enough, though the expression itself is unusual as description of a form of thought. Human beings may be said to know one another immediately and intuitively by “participation.” Knowledge of this kind is dependent, however, upon the ability of human beings to enter imaginatively into one another’s minds and to interpret overt acts in terms of intentions and purposes. What Lévy-Bruhl’s statement amounts to, then, is that savage people think, as poets have always done, in terms of wills rather than forces. The universe is a society of wilful personalities, not an irrefragable chain of cause and effect. For the savage, there are events, but neither hypotheses nor facts, since facts, in the strict sense of the word, are results of criticism and reflection and presuppose an amount of detachment that primitive man does not seem to possess. Because he thinks of his world as will rather than force, primitive man seeks to deal with it in terms of magic rather than of mechanism. II. MAGIC AS A FORM OF THOUGHT