Thus, then, we utterly confuse primitive thinking with our own scientific standpoint when we explain it by the need for the interpretation of phenomena. Causality, in our sense of the word, does not exist for primitive man. If we would speak of causality at all on his level of experience, we may say only that he is governed by the causality of magic. This, however, receives its stamp, not from the laws that regulate the connection of ideas, but from the forces of emotion. The mythological causality of emotional magic is no less spasmodic and irregular than the logical causality arising out of the orderly sequence of perceptions and ideas is constant. That the former preceded the latter is, nevertheless, of great importance. For the causality of natural law, as we know it, would hardly have been possible had not magical causality prepared the way for it. Yet the later arose from the earlier just at that moment in which the attention of men ceased to be held by the unusual, the startling, and the fearful, and occupied itself with the orderly, the regular, and commonplace. For this reason the very greatest advance in the investigation of natural laws was made by Galileo, when he took as the object of his research that which was the most commonplace, the falling of a body to the earth. Primitive man did not reflect about this phenomenon nor, until a long time afterwards, did civilized man. That a body should fall to the earth when thrown upwards 'is self-evident' because it is thus that bodies have always acted. An echo of this primitive view remains even in the older physics, which, following Aristotle, tells us that a body falls because the centre of the earth is its natural point of rest--that is, to put it otherwise, it must behave as it does because it has always done so.