MAGIC AND WONDER
essential desire to have a science—that is, to control and ameliorate our destiny by calculated means, it is not clear that we differ from our ultimate ancestors.
In one respect, however, we ought to differ from them. If time has provided us with a criticism of magic, of illegitimate and ineffective attempts at power, it should have taught us also to admire what is lawful, effective, and true. If primitive literature, recording an incomprehensible world, yearned after magic, our records, of a world understood, should be full of wonder—that is, full of idealizing joy in the truth and in the beauty before our eyes. Time should have distinguished us so from earlier man, because the ability to wonder comes late. To be sure, the Rousseau sentimentalists imagined the savage as contemplating the heavens and the earth beneath with astonishment and awe, and
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