relations without serious danger; and it must become moderate in proportion as the organisms rise to an increasing resemblance to our own. When the positive philosophy shall regulate these relations, it will be by constituting a special department of external nature, in regard to which a familiar knowledge of our interest in the zoological scale will have trained us in our duty to all living beings. Such were, as nearly as we can estimate, the socia influences of fetichism. We must now observe how it passed into polytheism.

Transition to

There can be no doubt of the direct deri

Polytheism. vation of polytheism from fetichism, at all times and in all places. The analysis of individual development, and the investigation of the corresponding degrees of the social scale, alike disclose this constant succession. The study of the highest antiquity, when illustrated by sound sociological theories, verifies the same fact. In most theogonies the prior existence of fetichism is necessary to the formation of the gods of polytheism. The Greek gods that issued from the Ocean and the Earth, issued from the two principal fetiches; and we have seen how, in its maturity, polytheism incorporates strong remains of fetichism. Speculatively regarded, this transformation of the religious spirit is perhaps the most radical that it has ever undergone, though we are unable, through its remoteness, to appreciate with any steadiness its extent and difficulty. From the comparative nearness and social importance of the transition to monotheism, we naturally exaggerate its relative importance; but in truth the interval to be passed was much narrower in the later case than in the earlier. If we reflect that fetichism supposed matter to be, in all forms, actually alive, while polytheism declared it to be nearly inert, and passively subject to the arbitrary will of a divine agent, it seems hardly imaginable how such a transition of views could be gradually made. Both are equally remote from the positive view, that of the operation of natural laws; but they are no less opposed to each other, except in the one point of some express will being the cause of every incident: and thus it is a matter of the highest philosophical interest to ascertain the spontaneous mode of this memorable transition.

TRANSITION TO POLYTHEISM.

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The intervention of the scientific spirit has only recently been direct and explicit; but not the less has it been concerned in all the successive modifications of the religious spirit. If Man had been no more capable than monkeys and carnivorous animals of comparing, abstracting, and generalizing, he would have remained for ever in the rude fetichism which their imperfect organization forbids their surmounting. Man however can perceive likeness between phenomena, and observe their succession: and when these characteristic faculties had once found aliment and guidance under the first theological instigation, they gathered strength perpetually, and by their exercise reduced, more and more rapidly, the influence of the religious philosophy by which they had been cherished. The first general result of the rise of this spirit of observation and induction seems to me to have been the passage from fetichism to polytheism, beginning, as all such changes do, with the highest order of minds, and reaching the multitude at last. To understand this, we must bear in mind that, as all fetich faith relates to some single and determinate object, the belief is of an individual and concrete nature. This quality suits well with the particular and unconnected character of the rudely material observations proper to an infant state of the human mind: so that the exact accordance between the conception and the investigation that is found wherever our understandings are at work, is evident in the present case. The expansion of the spirit of observation caused by the first theory, imperfect as it was, must destroy the balance which, at length, cannot be maintained at all but by some modification of the original philosophy. Thus the great revolution which carried men on from fetichism to polytheism is due to the same mental causes, though they may not be so conspicuous, that now produce all scientific revolutions, which always arise out of a discordance between facts and principles. Thus did the growing generalization of human observations necessitate the same process in regard to the corresponding theological conceptions, and occasion the transformation of fetichism into simple polytheism; for the difference between the divinities of the two systems is the essential one that the gods, properly so called, have, from

their indeterminate residence, a more general and abstract character. Each undertakes a special order of phenomena, but in a great number of bodies at the same time; so that each rules a department of some extent; whereas the fetich is inseparable from the one object in which it resides. When certain phenomena appeared alike in various substances, the corresponding fetiches must have formed a group, and at length coalesced into one principal one, which thus became a god; that is, an ideal and usually invisible agent, whose residence is no longer rigorously fixed. Thus, when the oaks of a forest, in their likeness to each other, suggested certain general phenomena, the abstract being in whom so many fetiches coalesced was no fetich, but the god of the forest. Thus, the intellectual transition from fetichism to polytheism is neither more nor less than the ascendancy of specific over individual ideas, in the second stage of human childhood, social as well as personal. As every essential disposition is, on our principles, inherent in humanity from the beginning, this process must have already taken place, in certain cases; and the transition was thus, no doubt, much facilitated; as it was only necessary to extend and imitate what had already been done. Polytheism itself may have been primitive in certain cases, where the individual had a strong natural tendency to abstraction, while his contemporaries, being more impressible than reasonable, were more struck by differences than resemblances. As this exceptional condition does not indicate any general superiority, and the cases must have been few and restricted, my theory is not affected by them. They are interesting to us only as showing how the human mind was subjected to its first great philosophical transition, and carried through it.

Thus it is that the purely theological nature of the primitive philosophy was preserved, in the conception that phenomena were governed by Will and not by laws; while, again, it was profoundly modified by the view of matter being no longer alive but inert, and obtaining all its activity from an imaginary external being. The intellectual and social consequences of the change will appear hereafter. The remark that occurs in this place is that the decline of the mental influence of the religious spirit, while

TRACES OF THE METAPHYSICAL STATE.

27

its political influence is rising, may be distinctly perceived at this stage. When each individual thing lost its character of essential life and divineness, it became accessible to the scientific spirit, which might be humble enough in its operation, but was no longer excluded by theological intervention. The change is evidenced by the corresponding steady diminution of the number of divinities, while their nature was becoming more abstract and their dominion more extended. Each god took the place of a troop of fetiches, which were thenceforth permitted, or reduced, to serve as his escort. We shall hereafter recognize the same process, in the succession of monotheism to polytheism.

The

The particular issue by which the transition was effected is easily found, when we consider that it must be through the phenomenon which appears the most general and abstract, and the most universal in its influence. stars answer to this description, when once their isolated and inaccessible position had fixed men's attention in preference to the nearer objects which had at first engrossed it.

The difference in conception between a fetich and a god must be smaller in the case of a star than of any other body; and it was this which made astrolatry, as I observed before, the natural intermediary state between the two first theological phases. Each sidereal fetich, powerful and remote, was scarcely distinguishable from a god; and especially in an age when men did not trouble themselves with nice distinctions. The only thing necessary to get rid of the individual and concrete character altogether, was to liberate the divinity from his imprisonment in one place and function, and to connect him by some real or apparent analogy with more general functions; thus making him a god, with a star for his preferred abode. This last transformation was so little necessary that, throughout nearly the whole polytheistic period, it was only the planets that, on account of their special variations, were subjected to it. The fixed stars remained true fetiches till they were included with everything in the universal monotheism.

In order to complete our estimate of this The Metaphypart of the human evolution, in which all the sical spirit principles of subsequent progress must be traceable. implicated, I must point out the manifestations of the

If

metaphysical spirit which here present themselves. the theological philosophy is modified by the scientific spirit, this is done only through the metaphysical spirit which rises with the decline of the theological, till the positive prevails over them both. The more recent

dominion of the metaphysical spirit may be the most engrossing to us; but perhaps its operation when it was a mere gradation of the theological philosophy might appear to be of higher importance, if we could estimate the change wrought by it, and were in possession of any precise evidence. When bodies ceased to be divinely alive by their own nature, they must have some abstract property which rendered them fit to receive the action of the supernatural agent;-an action which could not be immediate when the agent had a wider influence and an unfixed abode. Again, when a group of fetiches yield up their common attributes to a single god, and that god is regarded as living, in spite of his abstract origin, the conception is metaphysical in its whole character,―recognizing, as it does, personified abstractions. For the universal characteristic of the metaphysical state, as a transitional condition of the understanding, is a radical confusion between the abstract and the concrete point of view, alternately assumed to modify theological conceptions; now to render abstract what was before concrete, when each generalization is accomplished, and now to prepare for a new concentration the conception of more general existences, which were hitherto only abstract. Such is the operation of the metaphysical spirit on the theological philosophy, whose fictions had offered the only intelligible ground to human understanding while all that it could do was to transfer to everything out of itself its own sense of active existence. Distinct from every substance, though inseparable from it, the metaphysical entity is more subtile and less definite than the corresponding supernatural action from which it emanates; and hence its aptitude to effect transitions which are invariably a decline, in an intellectual sense, of the theological philosophy. The action is always critical, as it preserves theology while undermining its intellectual basis; and it can appear organic only when it is not too preponderant, and in as far as it contributes to the gradual