Auguste Comte and Positivism | Page 8

read, for instance, Mr Kohl's
Kitchigami, know what to think of the Great Spirit of the American
Indians, who belongs to a well-defined system of Polytheism,
interspersed with large remains of an original Fetichism. We have no
wish to dispute the matter with those who believe that Monotheism was
the primitive religion, transmitted to our race from its first parents in
uninterrupted tradition. By their own acknowledgment, the tradition
was lost by all the nations of the world except a small and peculiar
people, in whom it was miraculously kept alive, but who were
themselves continually lapsing from it, and in all the earlier parts of
their history did not hold it at all in its full meaning, but admitted the
real existence of other gods, though believing their own to be the most
powerful, and to be the Creator of the world. A greater proof of the
unnaturalness of Monotheism to the human mind before a certain
period in its development, could not well be required. The highest form
of Monotheism, Christianity, has persisted to the present time in giving
partial satisfaction to the mental dispositions that lead to Polytheism,
by admitting into its theology the thoroughly polytheistic conception of
a devil. When Monotheism, after many centuries, made its way to the
Greeks and Romans from the small corner of the world where it existed,
we know how the notion of daemons facilitated its reception, by
making it unnecessary for Christians to deny the existence of the gods
previously believed in, it being sufficient to place them under the
absolute power of the new God, as the gods of Olympus were already
under that of Zeus, and as the local deities of all the subjugated nations
had been subordinated by conquest to the divine patrons of the Roman
State.
In whatever mode, natural or supernatural, we choose to account for the
early Monotheism of the Hebrews, there can be no question that its
reception by the Gentiles was only rendered possible by the slow

preparation which the human mind had undergone from the
philosophers. In the age of the Caesars nearly the whole educated and
cultivated class had outgrown the polytheistic creed, and though
individually liable to returns of the superstition of their childhood, were
predisposed (such of them as did not reject all religion whatever) to the
acknowledgment of one Supreme Providence. It is vain to object that
Christianity did not find the majority of its early proselytes among the
educated class: since, except in Palestine, its teachers and propagators
were mainly of that class--many of them, like St Paul, well versed in
the mental culture of their time; and they had evidently found no
intellectual obstacle to the new doctrine in their own minds. We must
not be deceived by the recrudescence, at a much later date, of a
metaphysical Paganism in the Alexandrian and other philosophical
schools, provoked not by attachment to Polytheism, but by distaste for
the political and social ascendancy of the Christian teachers. The fact
was, that Monotheism had become congenial to the cultivated mind:
and a belief which has gained the cultivated minds of any society,
unless put down by force, is certain, sooner or later, to reach the
multitude. Indeed the multitude itself had been prepared for it, as
already hinted, by the more and more complete subordination of all
other deities to the supremacy of Zeus; from which the step to a single
Deity, surrounded by a host of angels, and keeping in recalcitrant
subjection an army of devils, was by no means difficult.
By what means, then, had the cultivated minds of the Roman Empire
been educated for Monotheism? By the growth of a practical feeling of
the invariability of natural laws. Monotheism had a natural adaptation
to this belief, while Polytheism naturally and necessarily conflicted
with it. As men could not easily, and in fact never did, suppose that
beings so powerful had their power absolutely restricted, each to its
special department, the will of any divinity might always be frustrated
by another: and unless all their wills were in complete harmony (which
would itself be the most difficult to credit of all cases of invariability,
and would require beyond anything else the ascendancy of a Supreme
Deity) it was impossible that the course of any of the phaenomena
under their government could be invariable. But if, on the contrary, all
the phaenomena of the universe were under the exclusive and

uncontrollable influence of a single will, it was an admissible
supposition that this will might be always consistent with itself, and
might choose to conduct each class of its operations in an invariable
manner. In proportion, therefore, as the invariable laws of phaenomena
revealed themselves to observers, the theory which ascribed them all to
one will began to grow