In primitive religions, faith was altogether experimental and physical; it was not opposed to scientific belief, which, to say the truth, did not exist. It was a credulity rather than a faith; and religious faith, in our day, is still a credulity, an obligatory credulity, primarily in the authority of superior men, secondarily in that of God himself. [Sidenote: Subordination of the marvellous in primitive faith.] The origin of religious faith has been attributed solely to an appetite for the marvellous and the extraordinary; but we have already shown that religions do everything in their power to regulate the imagination even in the very act of stimulating it, and to bring the unknown to the touchstone of the known. The marvellous must aid in making something at least apparently comprehensible; with marvel for marvel’s sake religion holds no commerce. So much so, that primitive people have sought in religion, less to multiply the marvellous, in the modern sense of the word, than partially to suppress it; they have been in search of an explanation of some sort. An explanation by superior powers, by spirits, by occult virtues, seemed clearer to them than an explanation by scientific law. [Sidenote: Rationale of primitive man’s faith in the marvellous.] For the rest, any explanation once given, primitive man never dreamed of disputing it, he was essentially a “man of faith.” The delicate shades of thought we designate as verisimilitude, probability, possibility, were as little known to primitive man as to children. The voluntary suspension of judgment that we call doubt indicates an extremely advanced state of mind. With children and savages, to conceive and to believe are one; they know nothing about reserving their approbation, or mistrusting their own intelligence or that of others. A certain humility, which young minds do not possess, is necessary before one can say: That may be true but also it may not, or in other words, I don’t know. And also one must have patience to verify with care what one believes, and patience is courage of the most difficult kind. Finally, man always feels the need to declare that what is attractive, what satisfies his mind, is real: when one tells an interesting story to a child, he says, “It is true, is it not?” If, on the contrary, it is a sad story he will cry out: “That is not true!” A man of the people to whom one should demonstrate, with the evidence in one’s hand, that a thing he thought true was false, would reply with a shake of the head, “If it is not true, it ought to be.” All primitive people were like that. In a memorandum on The Development of Language and Intelligence among Children, E. Egger characterized this state of mind as “rebellion against the notion of doubt and even that of simple probability.” Felix, a child of five and one-half years, took a lively interest in sacred history, but he could not understand why all the lacunæ had not been filled in, or why doubtful points should be marked