VHL] THE SCIENTIFIC ASPECTS OF POSITIVISM. 141 



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 &quot; meta 

 physical &quot; state &quot; metaphysical,&quot; 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 &quot;positive&quot; 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 anthropomorphic ; and, as compared with 



a child, his anthropomorphism 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 when he slept, and, sleeping, seemed to 



himself to leave his body and wander through dreamland. 



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 somewhat of the powers it possessed during life ? 



May it not help us if it be pleased, or (as seems to be by far the 



more general impression) hurt us if it be angered ? Will it not 



be well to do towards it those things which would have soothed 



the man and put him in good humour during his life ? It 



is impossible to study trustworthy accounts of savage thought 



without seeing that some such train of ideas as this lies at the 



bottom of their speculative beliefs. 



There are savages without God, in any proper sense of the 



