and then to escape from them and so make them cold.
Primitive man multiplied such ways of explaining each and every
process going on in the world around him and in himself. Mere words or
names lost their first simple signification and acquired permanent
association with imaginary spirits, demons, and haunting intangible
ghosts, by reference to which our ancestors in their earliest
"reasoning" explained to their own satisfaction the strange and sudden
events fraught to them with the daily experience of pain or pleasure.
The whole world was held by them to be "bewitched," and it was only by
slow and painful steps that some knowledge of the persistent order of
Nature was obtained, whilst the phantastic imagery which had served in
its place, bit by bit disappeared. "Caloric" was a late lingerer, and
was only got rid of when what had been so called was shown to be a
vibration of particles--a mode or kind of motion--a "state," and not a
mysterious fluid existing as a thing in itself.

Just as "caloric" no longer serves and is no longer possible as the
supposed "explanation" of the behaviour of bodies in the hot or the
cold state, so we no longer require the supposition of "spirits" of
one kind or another as "explanations" of the living state of those
products of our mother earth which are called plants, animals and men.
In neither case do such "spirits" really "explain" the state in
question; they are only names for the activity which it was imagined
that they served to explain. These states or affections of matter
remain as wonderful and important to us as they were before. But by
giving up the prehistoric notions about them which have been handed on
until the present day we can think of them in a more satisfactory
way--a way which avoids the multiplication of unnecessary imaginary
agencies and the conception of an intermittent and hesitating Creative
Power, and substitutes for it the operation of continuous orderly and
preordained forces.

It is true that we can neither ascertain nor imagine either the
beginning or the end of the orderly process which we discover in
operation to-day. We can trace it back by well-established inference
into a remote past, but a beginning of it is not within the
possibilities of human thought. We can, with reasonable probability of
being correct, foretell the changes and developments which time will
bring in many combinations and dispositions which are the
manifestations of that process at