Auguste Comte and Positivism | Page 7

with Polytheism, and it is
probable that the two coexisted from the earliest period at which the
human mind was capable of forming objects into classes. Fetichism
proper gradually becomes limited to objects possessing a marked
individuality. A particular mountain or river is worshipped bodily (as it
is even now by the Hindoos and the South Sea Islanders) as a divinity
in itself, not the mere residence of one, long after invisible gods have
been imagined as rulers of all the great classes of phaenomena, even
intellectual and moral, as war, love, wisdom, beauty, &c. The worship
of the earth (Tellus or Pales) and of the various heavenly bodies, was
prolonged into the heart of Polytheism. Every scholar knows, though
_littérateurs_ and men of the world do not, that in the full vigour of the
Greek religion, the Sun and Moon, not a god and goddess thereof, were
sacrificed to as deities--older deities than Zeus and his descendants,
belonging to the earlier dynasty of the Titans (which was the mythical
version of the fact that their worship was older), and these deities had a
distinct set of fables or legends connected with them. The father of
Phaëthon and the lover of Endymion were not Apollo and Diana,
whose identification with the Sungod and the Moongoddess was a late
invention. Astrolatry, which, as M. Comte observes, is the last form of
Fetichism, survived the other forms, partly because its objects, being
inaccessible, were not so soon discovered to be in themselves
inanimate, and partly because of the persistent spontaneousness of their
apparent motions.
As far as Fetichism reached, and as long as it lasted, there was no
abstraction, or classification of objects, and no room consequently for
the metaphysical mode of thought. But as soon as the voluntary agent,
whose will governed the phaenomenon, ceased to be the physical object
itself, and was removed to an invisible position, from which he or she
superintended an entire class of natural agencies, it began to seem
impossible that this being should exert his powerful activity from a
distance, unless through the medium of something present on the spot.
Through the same Natural Prejudice which made Newton unable to

conceive the possibility of his own law of gravitation without a subtle
ether filling up the intervening space, and through which the attraction
could be communicated--from this same natural infirmity of the human
mind, it seemed indispensable that the god, at a distance from the
object, must act through something residing in it, which was the
immediate agent, the god having imparted to the intermediate
something the power whereby it influenced and directed the object.
When mankind felt a need for naming these imaginary entities, they
called them the nature of the object, or its essence, or virtues residing
in it, or by many other different names. These metaphysical
conceptions were regarded as intensely real, and at first as mere
instruments in the hands of the appropriate deities. But the habit being
acquired of ascribing not only substantive existence, but real and
efficacious agency, to the abstract entities, the consequence was that
when belief in the deities declined and faded away, the entities were
left standing, and a semblance of explanation of phaenomena, equal to
what existed before, was furnished by the entities alone, without
referring them to any volitions. When things had reached this point, the
metaphysical mode of thought, had completely substituted itself for the
theological.
Thus did the different successive states of the human intellect, even at
an early stage of its progress, overlap one another, the Fetichistic, the
Polytheistic, and the Metaphysical modes of thought coexisting even in
the same minds, while the belief in invariable laws, which constitutes
the Positive mode of thought, was slowly winning its way beneath them
all, as observation and experience disclosed in one class of phaenomena
after another the laws to which they are really subject. It was this
growth of positive knowledge which principally determined the next
transition in the theological conception of the universe, from
Polytheism to Monotheism.
It cannot be doubted that this transition took place very tardily. The
conception of a unity in Nature, which would admit of attributing it to a
single will, is far from being natural to man, and only finds admittance
after a long period of discipline and preparation, the obvious
appearances all pointing to the idea of a government by many

conflicting principles. We know how high a degree both of material
civilization and of moral and intellectual development preceded the
conversion of the leading populations of the world to the belief in one
God. The superficial observations by which Christian travellers have
persuaded themselves that they found their own Monotheistic belief in
some tribes of savages, have always been contradicted by more
accurate knowledge: those who have