L62 LAY SERMONS, ADDRESSES, AND REVIEWS. [vm. 



vvliicli is the tendency of science ; or adopts a middle 

 course, and taking from the anthropomorphic view its 

 tendency to personify, and from the physical view its 

 tendency to exclude volition and affection, ends in what 

 M. Comte calls the "metaphysical" state — "metaphy- 

 sical," in M. Comte's writings, being a general term of 

 abuse for anything he does not like. 



What is true of the individual is, mutatis mutandis, 

 true of the intellectual development of the species. It 

 is absurd to say of men in a state of primitive savagery, 

 that all their conceptions are in a theological state.. 

 Nine-tenths of them are eminently realistic, and as 

 "positive" as ignorance and narrowness can make them. 

 It no more occurs to a savage than it does to a child, 

 to ask the why of the daily and ordinary occurrences 

 which form the greater part of his mental life. But 

 in regard to the more striking, or out-of-the-way, events, 

 which force him to speculate, he is highly anthropo- 

 morphic ; and, as compared with a child, his anthropo- 

 morphism is complicated by the intense impression 

 which the death of his own kind makes upon him, 

 as indeed it well may. The warrior, full of ferocious 

 energy, perhaps the despotic chief of his tribe, is 

 suddenly struck down. A child may insult the man 

 a moment before so awful ; a fly rests, undisturbed, on 

 the lips from which undisputed command issued. And 

 yet the bodily aspect of the man seems hardly more 

 altered than wdien he slept, and, sleeping, seemed to 

 himself to leave his body and wander through dream- 

 land. What then if that something, which is the essence 

 of the man, has really been made to wander by the 

 violence done to it, and is unable, or has forgotten, 

 to come back to its shell? Will it not retain some- 

 what of the powers it possessed during life ? May 

 it not help us if it be pleased, or (as seems to be 



