Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/846

 of the decline of the theological and metaphysical conceptions of nature and the abstractions that grow out of them.

All the recent advances in ethnology teach us that man, as far back as we can trace his beliefs, explained the universe by the only power that he knew—that which he was himself conscious of possessing. To him every manifestation of power was the act of some god or demon who inhabited the sun, the moon, the forests, or the waters, and whose vengeance (for the primitive man's faith in diabolical agencies might well shame the believers in the more sublimated theories in regard to that cheerful dogma at the present day) it was necessary to placate by offerings, by sacrifices, by penances, and by supplications. No adequate test of reality then existed, and the spirit of a dream was as truly materialized as anything that could not be subjected to those most "realizing" of all senses—touch and muscular power.

The whole history of fetiches, idolatry, and polytheistic religions generally shows how strong was the belief in the immanence of powers beyond the human. An increase of culture served to remove the home of the gods to more distant fields, and, as man learned to philosophize, metaphysics gradually encroached on theology. The ideas of Plato, which to him were as real as the fetiches to the savages, were, as abstractions, the metaphysical substitutes for the demons that had preceded them.

The contest of nominalism with realism, which, during the middle ages, waxed so hard, paved the way for the scientific—or, in the Comtean terminology, the positive—conception of nature. Discerning in a great class of phenomena the evident progress of thought, Comte was led to suggest his famous law. As certainly as it has been disproved as a general law that thought passes from the theological, through the metaphysical, to the positive stage, so certainly has this theory a sort of broad suggestiveness, which often leads to otherwise undiscovered truths. The odium naturally and justly attaching to Comte's later social theories has had the tendency to obscure the value of his philosophical speculations. It is a fault (if it be a fault) of all founders of systems to over-estimate the application of their theories. Impressed by the discovery of a new truth, what wonder if they group all things under their rubric, and leave to their followers the task of clearly defining its application? Although in his constructive theories Comte erred most fatally, yet the fertility of his suggestions gave a great impetus to a more scientific philosophy, and extended its bounds over hitherto untrodden fields. Many owe to him much more than they willingly admit—more than they themselves are conscious of; and his uncompromising nominalism has had the tendency more precisely to define the meaning of abstract terms, and clear philosophy, and through it science, of much metaphysical verbiage.

While thus scientific nominalism is clearly in the ascendancy, there is a certain phase of realism which enters so completely into many