Auguste Comte and Positivism | Page 8

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 plausible; but must still have
appeared improbable