e the conception
of religion.

Closely associated with his Law of the three States is another which he
calls the _Law of the Wills and Causes_. In fact, there is practically
no difference between that law and the first or theological stage
through which human knowledge goes. It may be enunciated thus:
Whenever the human mind is in ignorance of the proximate causes of a
given phenomenon, it tends to ascribe it to the agency of superior and
invisible powers. Hence, ignorance of nature, which modern science has
largely remedied, led men to ascribe to "the act of God" innumerable
events, even the appearance of Halley's comet, which we now
unhesitatingly refer to subordinate agencies. Why, then, urged Comte,
should we continue to believe in even one supreme Cause, when we may
hope, with the advance of science, to give an explanation of every
natural occurrence or fact? Convinced on social grounds that belief in
the Deity had been of no service to mankind, he sought for
philosophical reasons to justify his surrendering the tenet, and thus
formulated the famous law which has just been enunciated. If that law
is valid and universal in its application, we should have to surrender
all hope of Comte's co-operation with what we hold to be rational
religion. But it is because I am so convinced that it is that very
law, so finely framed and stated by Comte, which makes it impossible to
dispense with belief in a supra-mundane Power, that I adhere to the
ideal which I sketched in the beginning, that Kant and Comte will be
found to be, after Christ, the master builders of the second temple
which is to be the religious home of the ages to come.

For what does his famous law amount to? To nothing beyond this, that
we are warranted in believing that no single fact, no individual
phenomenon, of nature exists, but will be one day explained by the
all-conquering advance of physical science. But surely his most
enthusiastic adherent will admit that when every phenomenon has been
singly explained, only half the work, and that by far the less
significant part, has been done. If the human mind is eager, and
legitimately eager, to explore the scene of nature's manifestations,
much more will it be necessary to attempt some solution of the vaster
fact of their concatenation, of their miraculous combination into that
whole which we call the universe. It is not so much the isolated
phenomena which strike the mind with such overpowering be