1 8 COMTE TO BENJAMIN KIDD PART i 



causes, ghosts of gods, ghosts of the real living body 

 under the style and title of souls, and so forth and so 

 forth. Drugs produce sleep because they have a soporific 

 virtue. Life is due to some mysterious intangible vital 

 energy. Chief of all the abstractions is Nature. Substi- 

 tute Nature for the monotheistic God and the feat is 

 accomplished ; the transition is made ; the first stage of 

 thought has given place to the second. With the con- 

 ception of nature grows up a crop of wild beliefs in 

 natural laws he means the jurist's natural law, not the 

 physicist's and in natural rights. These beliefs are 

 powerful to destroy, powerless to create. But that is 

 their use, to clear away the rubbish and debris of an 

 obsolete intellectual and social order. Hence the reign 

 of metaphysics must be incomparably shorter than the 

 prevalence of the theological spirit. Already the new, 

 the true, the final stage of thought was unfolding itself 

 in a few rarely gifted minds. The one solid result of 

 metaphysical inquiries consisted in the fragments of 

 science accidentally discovered, either in antiquity or 

 in the Middle Ages, by minds too finely touched for the 

 metaphysical dreams which chiefly occupied them. In 

 a sense, therefore, science antedated metaphysics. But 

 more still, there must have been a leaven of positivism 

 i.e. of science even in the earliest fetishist days, if 

 human life was to be maintained on earth. Ajid so we 

 do not wonder to find that society was being built up, 

 piece by piece, long before sociology was possible. In 

 the days of fetishism the family was developed, the 

 most essential of all social formations. Polytheism, 

 which ushered in the epoch of militarism, witnessed the 

 construction of the State. At first, however, spiritual 

 power and secular power were closely combined. Either 

 the State was a Theocracy, in which the priests ruled ; 



