And since he could not count, the continuous recurrence of natural phenomena had no cumulative force with him, so that he might distinguish them from other events.

His argument was thus simply "the sun will rise again because it rose before; the moon will wax and wane again because she waxed and waned before"; grass and leaves and fruit would grow again because they did so before; the animals which gave him food would come again as before; and so on.

But these were the only events which his brain retained at all, and that only because his existence depended upon them and they continually recurred.

The ordinary incidents of life which presented some variation passed without record in his mind, as they still do very largely in those of primitive savages.

And since he made no distinction between the different classes of events, holding them all to be the acts of volitional beings, he applied this law of the recurrence of events to every incident of life, and thought that whenever anything happened, reason existed for supposing that the same thing or something like it would happen again.