When we say to our children, "A little bird told me," both we and our children may be quite ignorant of Dr. Dasent's introduction to the Norse Tales. We may be quite unconscious that we are using an expression traceable to a time when people believed in such language of birds and beasts as gifted persons could understand. It may be that we repeat the words simply because we remember that our parents once successfully deceived us in our childhood by using them, and that our parents did but follow the example of theirs. But evidently we should not explain the trivial saying simply by following it back endlessly into antiquity unless we concluded that it had always been characteristic of parents to deceive children in this manner. In that case we should have discovered a metaphysical truth about the nature of parents, and no further explanation would be required. If, however, we are not willing to admit that parents are such by nature that they will cite birds as sources of information when it is expedient to keep the real source hidden, but insist that this habit be otherwise explained, we ask for an explanation which the continuity of history alone can not afford. An explanation in contemporaneous terms is required. We do not use the phrase because our ancestors used it, although we may have derived it from them; we use it because of its known efficacy. We may, however, discover that our ancestors--or Norse parents--used it for a different reason, namely, because they believed in a language of beasts and birds. But if we ask why they so believed, it will not profit us to pursue antiquity again, unless by so doing we come upon the contemporaneous, experimental origin of that belief. For it is evident that if the belief had an origin, there was a time anterior when it did not exist, and its origin can not, therefore, be explained solely in terms of that anterior time. Its origin points, not to continuity, but to action. It indicates not that the originators of the belief had ancestors, but that, in view of their contemporaneous circumstances, they acted in a certain way. To explain the origin of anything, therefore, we can not trust to the continuity of history alone. That continuity may carry us back to the beginnings of beliefs and institutions which have persisted and been transmitted from age to age; it may reveal to us experimental factors which have shaped beliefs and institutions, but which have long since been forgotten; but it can never, of itself, reveal the experimental origin of any belief or institution whatever. That is, in principle, the limitation by which the explanatory value of historical continuity is restricted. To understand origins we must appeal to the contemporaneous experience of their own age, or to experimental science.[8]