COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



or metaphysical into the scientific stage. Thus 

 mathematics, he tells us, has been a science, 

 in the strict sense of the word, from time im- 

 memorial ; but he omits to tell us that pure 

 mathematics, dealing solely with number and 

 form, and not involving conceptions of force, 

 could never have been in the theological stage. 

 It was only the phenomena of force which to 

 primitive men must have seemed to require an 

 anthropomorphic explanation. The action of 

 the human will, by the analogy of which ex- 

 ternal events were explained, may be a me- 

 chanical, but it is not a geometrical or algebraic 

 phenomenon. When we come to mechanics, 

 there is room to construct volitional explana- 

 tions. Nevertheless in mechanics there are so 

 few traces of such explanations, since the dawn 

 of history, that Comte thinks it may have al- 

 ways been a positive science ; and he quotes 

 approvingly Adam Smith's remark that no- 

 where do we ever hear of a god of Weight. 

 Such a god, however, had there ever been one, 

 would have been a generalized deity, belonging 

 to a comparatively advanced system of poly- 

 theism ; and though we are entitled to infer 

 from this that the earliest generalization of the 

 phenomena of weight was a scientific and not a 

 theological generalization, we are not entitled 

 to infer that in the primeval fetishistic period, 

 before the phenomena had been generalized at 



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