444 FRAGMKNTS OF SCIENCE. 



the same course. They also fell back upon experience; 

 but with this difference that the particular experiences 

 which furnished the warp and woof of their theories were 

 drawn, not from the study of nature, but from what lay 

 much closer to them the observation of men. Their 

 theories accordingly took an anthropomorphic form. To 

 supersensual beings, which, " however potent and invisible, 

 were nothing but a species of human creatures, perhaps 

 raised from among mankind, and retaining all human 

 passions and appetites/'* were handed over the rule and 

 governance of natural phenomena. 



Tested by observation and reflection, these early notions 

 failed in the long run to satisfy the more penetrating 

 intellects of our race. Far in the depths of history we find 

 men of exceptional power differentiating themselves from 

 the crowd, rejecting these anthropomorphic notions, and 

 seeking to connect natural phenomena with their physical 

 principles. But, long prior to these purer efforts of the 

 understanding, the merchant had been abroad, and rendered 

 the philosopher possible; commerce had been developed, 

 wealth amassed, leisure for travel and speculation secured, 

 while races educated under different conditions, and there- 

 fore differently informed and endowed, had been stimulated 

 and sharpened by mutual contact. In those regions where 

 the commercial aristocracy of ancient Greece mingled with 

 their eastern neighbors, the sciences were born, being 

 nurtured and developed by free-thinking and courageous 

 men. The state of things to be displaced may be gathered 

 from a passage of Euripides quoted by Hume. " There is 

 nothing in the world; no glory, no prosperity. The gods 

 toss all into confusion; mix everything with its reverse, 

 that all of us, from our ignorance and uncertainty, may 

 pay them the more worship and reverence." Now as' 

 science demands the radical extirpation of caprice, and the 

 'absolute reliance upon law in nature, there grew with the 

 growth of scientific notions, a desire and determination to 

 sweep from the field of theory this mob of gods and demons, 

 and to place natural phenomena on a basis more congruent 

 with themselves. 



The problem which had been previously approached 

 from above, was now attacked from below; theoretic effort 



* Hume, " Natural History of Religion." 



