Auguste Comte and Positivism | Page 9

plausible; but must still have appeared
improbable until it had come to seem likely that invariability was the
common rule of all nature. The Greeks and Romans at the Christian era
had reached a point of advancement at which this supposition had
become probable. The admirable height to which geometry had already
been carried, had familiarized the educated mind with the conception of
laws absolutely invariable. The logical analysis of the intellectual
processes by Aristotle had shown a similar uniformity of law in the
realm of mind. In the concrete external world, the most imposing
phaenomena, those of the heavenly bodies, which by their power over
the imagination had done most to keep up the whole system of ideas
connected with supernatural agency, had been ascertained to take place
in so regular an order as to admit of being predicted with a precision
which to the notions of those days must have appeared perfect. And
though an equal degree of regularity had not been discerned in natural
phaenomena generally, even the most empirical observation had
ascertained so many cases of an uniformity almost complete, that
inquiring minds were eagerly on the look-out for further indications
pointing in the same direction; and vied with one another in the
formation of theories which, though hypothetical and essentially
premature, it was hoped would turn out to be correct representations of
invariable laws governing large classes of phaenomena. When this
hope and expectation became general, they were already a great
encroachment on the original domain of the theological principle.
Instead of the old conception, of events regulated from day to day by
the unforeseen and changeable volitions of a legion of deities, it
seemed more and more probable that all the phaenomena of the
universe took place according to rules which must have been planned
from the beginning; by which conception the function of the gods
seemed to be limited to forming the plans, and setting the machinery in
motion: their subsequent office appeared to be reduced to a sinecure, or
if they continued to reign, it was in the manner of constitutional kings,

bound by the laws to which they had previously given their assent.
Accordingly, the pretension of philosophers to explain physical
phaenomena by physical causes, or to predict their occurrence, was, up
to a very late period of Polytheism, regarded as a sacrilegious insult to
the gods. Anaxagoras was banished for it, Aristotle had to fly for his
life, and the mere unfounded suspicion of it contributed greatly to the
condemnation of Socrates. We are too well acquainted with this form
of the religious sentiment even now, to have any difficulty in
comprehending what must have been its violence then. It was
inevitable that philosophers should be anxious to get rid of at least
these gods, and so escape from the particular fables which stood
immediately in their way; accepting a notion of divine government
which harmonized better with the lessons they learnt from the study of
nature, and a God concerning whom no mythos, as far as they knew,
had yet been invented.
Again, when the idea became prevalent that the constitution of every
part of Nature had been planned from the beginning, and continued to
take place as it had been planned, this was itself a striking feature of
resemblance extending through all Nature, and affording a presumption
that the whole was the work, not of many, but of the same hand. It must
have appeared vastly more probable that there should be one
indefinitely foreseeing Intelligence and immovable Will, than hundreds
and thousands of such. The philosophers had not at that time the
arguments which might have been grounded on universal laws not yet
suspected, such as the law of gravitation and the laws of heat; but there
was a multitude, obvious even to them, of analogies and homologies in
natural phaenomena, which suggested unity of plan; and a still greater
number were raised up by their active fancy, aided by their premature
scientific theories, all of which aimed at interpreting some
phaenomenon by the analogy of others supposed to be better known;
assuming, indeed, a much greater similarity among the various
processes of Nature, than ampler experience has since shown to exist.
The theological mode of thought thus advanced from Polytheism to
Monotheism through the direct influence of the Positive mode of
thought, not yet aspiring to complete speculative ascendancy. But,
inasmuch as the belief in the invariability of natural laws was still

imperfect even in highly cultivated minds, and in the merest infancy in
the uncultivated, it gave rise to the belief in one God, but not in an
immovable one. For many centuries the God believed in was flexible
by entreaty, was incessantly ordering the affairs of mankind by direct
volitions, and continually reversing the course of