40* COSMIC PIIILOSOPH Y. [FT. in. 



organic world, an earnest and reverent thinker, like Agassiz, 

 beholds the work of omnipresent thought, he is but &quot;unawares 

 contemplating his own personality reflected before him, and mis 

 taking, Narcissus-like, a mirrored image for a substantial object 

 of adoration. Thus is explained, even while it is refuted, the 

 famous argument of the watch, with all its numerous kin 

 dred. In the anthropomorphic hypothesis, the bearings of 

 the inner and the outer worlds are exactly reversed. It is 

 not the intelligence which has made the environment, but it 

 is the environment which has moulded the intelligence. In 

 the mint of nature, the coin Mind has been stamped ; and 

 theology, perceiving the likeness of the die to its impression, 

 has unwittingly inverted the causal relation of the two, 

 making Mind, archetypal and self-existent, to be the die. 



Therefore, to cite the language employed with slightly 

 different but kindred intent by Mr. Barratt, &quot; we protest 

 against the reversal of the true order. . . . We must not fall 

 down and worship as the source of our life and virtue the 

 image which our own minds have set up. Why is such 

 idolatry any better than that of the old wood and stone ? If 

 we worship the creations of our minds, why not also those 

 of our hands? The one is indeed a more refined self-adora 

 tion than the other ; but the radical error remains the same 

 in both. The old idolaters were wrong, not because they 

 worshipped themselves, but because they worshipped their 

 creation as if it were their creator ; and how can any [anthro 

 pomorphic theory] escape the same condemnation ? &quot; * 



The origin of the teleological hypothesis is thus pointed 

 out, and its plausibility accounted for. On the one hand, 

 the primitive tendency in man to interpret nature anthropo- 

 morphically, and his proneness to lend to his own ideas 

 objective embodiment, are facts admitting no dispute. All 

 history teems with evidences of their wide-spread and deep- 

 rooted influence. Has not fetishism been at one time the 

 universal theology, and realism at another time the dominant 



1 Physical Ethics, p. 225. 



