s, 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 development
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 regarded 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 to breaks, a tendency toward the best, a _vis
medicatrix_, etc. Here belong, also, the vegetative soul of Aristotle, the
vital force and the plastic impulse of modern investigators. Finally the
positive stage is reached, when all such abstractions, which are even yet
conceived as half personal and acting voluntarily, are abandoned, and
the unalterable and universally valid laws of phenomena established by
observation and experiment alone. But to explain the laws of nature
themselves transcends, according to Comte, the fixed limits of human
knowledge. The beginning of the world lies outside the region of the
knowable, atheism is no better grounded than the theistic hypothesis, and
if Comte asserts that a blindly acting mechanism is less probable than a
world-plan, he is conscious that he is expressing a mere conjecture which
can never be raised to the rank of a scientific theory. The origin and the
end of things are insoluble problems, in answering which no progress has
yet been made in spite of man's long thought about them. Only that which
lies intermediate between the two inscrutable termini of the world is an
object of knowledge.

It is not only the human mind in general that exhibits this advance from
the theological, through the metaphysical, to the positive mode of thought,
but each separate science goes through the same three periods--only that
the various disciplines have developed with unequal rapidity. While some
have already culminated in the positive method of treatment, others yet
remain caught in the theological period of beginnings, and others still are
in the metaphysical transition stage. Up to the present all three phases
of development exist side by side, and even among the objects of the most
highly developed sciences there are some which w