Auguste Comte and Positivism | Page 9

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 nature by miraculous interpositions; and this