1 6 COMTE TO BENJAMIN KIDD PART i 



partly due to the activity of the organism, partly to 

 the reaction of the environment; the two elements 

 mixing in a way that defies us to decompose them, and 

 that forbids us to regard man as capable of possessing 

 absolute truth. But usually Comte is content to let 

 history, as he understands history, tell its own tale. 

 Once, mankind aspired to penetrate to the knowledge of 

 causes. The race devoted itself to a theological inter- 

 pretation of the world. First came Fetishism ; every 

 object in nature, every part of the mighty whole, was 

 held to be alive, just as man himself is alive. Unlike 

 the writers of to-day, who generally identify Fetishism 

 with Animism in the most approved sense of that 

 slippery and misleading word Comte has no intention 

 of admitting that primitive mankind believed in spirits, 

 temporarily or permanently connected with the Fetish. 

 Not so ; Comte regards a belief in the soul as belonging 

 to a much more sophisticated state of mind than that 

 of the amiable fetish worshippers, the first fathers of 

 the human race. Not until the baleful shadow of 

 metaphysics begins to fall upon human thought do we 

 hear of souls in men, or of spirits in nature. To Comte, 

 psychology is a kind of physiology ; psychical life is a 

 property of the human body ; and, to the fetishist, 

 psychical life was a property of the objects of nature. 

 Again Comte differs from ordinary usage in extending 

 the term fetish to cover any object in nature which 

 might be worshipped a river, a mountain, a star, the 

 moon, the sun. By other writers, that highly am- 

 biguous and arbitrary word is usually applied only 

 to things which are or which may become private 

 property. Fetishism, as understood by Comte, was 

 regarded by him as the first form of religion. This, 

 again, was part of the legacy to Comte of the Ency- 



