as such. “The actual state of his mind,” adds E. Egger, “corresponds in a manner to that of the Greek mind during the period when the effort was made painfully to set in order the chaos of ancient legend.” Two years later the same child received a present of a collection of stories. He found in the preface that the author gave the stories out as true; he asked nothing further, and was promptly astonished to find anybody else in doubt. “His trustfulness displayed no disposition to go behind the letter of his text, in especial as the stories sounded to him sufficiently probable.” In my own experience with children, I have noticed that nothing irritates them like uncertainty; a thing must be true or false, and generally they prefer that it should be true. For the rest, a child does not know the limits of his own power, and still less that of others; and too, he has no clear sense of the marvellous and the improbable. A child saw a horse galloping by one day, and said to me seriously, “I could run as fast as that.” Thus again the little peasant girl, of whom we spoke above, asked her mistress why she might not have made the flowers in the garden. A sense of the possible is lacking in primitive intelligences: because you seem to a child or a savage to be able to do more things than he, he readily comes to believe that you can do everything; so that what we call miracles seem to primitive people simply the visible and necessary sign of superior power; so much so, indeed, that to them a man of mark ought to be able to perform miracles; they expect them from him as their due, and become indignant if they are not forthcoming, as a child is indignant when one does not help him carry a burden that is too heavy for his strength. The Hebrews precisely expected Moses to perform miracles and, so to speak, obliged him to do them. The people believe in their great men, and the belief in miracles is but a corollary from their general confidence. [Sidenote: Absoluteness of primitive faith.]