stition. Whatever is strange, or powerful, or vast, impresses his
imagination with dread. Such objects are only the outward manifestations
of an indwelling spirit, and therefore worthy of his veneration.

After Reason, aided by Experience, has led him forth from these
delusions as respects surrounding things, he still clings to his
original ideas as respects objects far removed. In the distance and
irresistible motions of the stars he finds arguments for the
supernatural, and gives to each of those shining bodies an abiding and
controlling genius. The mental phase through which he is passing permits
him to believe in the exercise of planetary influences on himself.

[Sidenote: Fetichism displaced by star-worship.]

But as reason led him forth from fetichism, so in due time it again
leads him forth from star-worship. Perhaps not without regret does he
abandon the mythological forms he has created; for, long after he has
ascertained that the planets are nothing more than shining points,
without any perceptible influence on him, he still venerates the genii
once supposed to vivify them, perhaps even he exalts them into immortal
gods.

[Sidenote: The idea of government by law.]

Philosophically speaking, he is exchanging by ascending degrees his
primitive doctrine of arbitrary volition for the doctrine of law. As the
fall of a stone, the flowing of a river, the movement of a shadow, the
rustling of a leaf, have been traced to physical causes, to like causes
at last are traced the revolutions of the stars. In events and scenes
continually increasing in greatness and grandeur, he is detecting the
dominion of law. The goblins, and genii, and gods who successively
extorted his fear and veneration, who determined events by their fitful
passions or whims, are at last displaced by the noble conception of one
Almighty Being, who rules the universe according to reason, and
therefore according to law.

[Sidenote: Its application to the solar system.]

In this manner the doctrine of government by law is extended, until at
last it embraces all natural events. It was thus that, hardly two
centuries ago, that doctrine gathered immense force from the discovery
of Newton that Kepler's laws, under which the movements of the planetary
bodies are executed, issue as a mathematical necessity from a very
simple material condition, and that the complicated motions of the solar
system cannot be other than they are. Few of those who read in