Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/576

 554 FRANCE. entangled in this prejudice. A long intellectual develop*, ment was required to reach the truth, that our knowledge does not extend beyond the cognition of the succession and coexistence of facts ; that the same procedure must be extended to abstract speculation which the common mind itself makes use of in its single actions. On the other hand, the positive philosophy, notwithstanding its rejection of metaphysics, is far from giving its sanction to empiricism. Every isolated, empirical observation is use- less and uncertain ; it obtains value and usefulness only when it is defined and explained by a theory, and combined with other observations into a law — this makes the dif- ference between the observations of the scholar and the layman. The positive stage of a science, which begins when we learn to explain phenomena by their laws, is preceded by two others : a theological stage, which ascribes phenomena to supposed personal powers, and a metaphysical stage, which ascribes them to abstract natural forces. These three periods denote the childhood, the youth, and the manhood of science. The earliest view of the world is the theological view, which derives the events of the world from the voluntary acts of supernatural intelligent beings. The crude view of nature sees in each individual thing a being animated like man ; later man accustoms himself to think of a whole class of objects as governed by one invisible being, by a divinity ; finally the multitude of divinities gives place to a single God, who creates, maintains, and rules the universe, and by extraordinary acts, by miracles, interferes in the course of events. Thus fetichism (in its highest form, astrolatry), polytheism, and monotheism are the stages in the develop- ment of the theological mode of thought. In the second, the metaphysical, period, the acts of divine volition are replaced by entities, by abstract concepts, which are re« garded as realities, as the true reality back of phenomena. A force, a power, an occult property or essence is made to dwell in things; the mysterious being which directs events is no longer called God, but " Nature," and invested with certain inclinations, with a horror of a vacuum, an aversion