COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



gress from Anthropomorphism, not to Positiv- 

 ism, but to Cosmism, as a necessary corollary. 

 For what does that progress depend upon ? 

 What is the underlying process of which it is 

 the necessary symptom and result ? Why is it 

 that men begin by investing the unknown causes 

 of phenomena with quasi-human attributes and 

 end by recognizing a single Cause which is in- 

 scrutable ? In treating of deanthropomorphiza- 

 tion (Part I., chapter vii.) we examined this point. 

 We perceived the primitive anthropomorphism 

 to be a corollary from the relativity of all know- 

 ledge. We saw that, to interpret phenomena at 

 all, men must interpret them in terms of their 

 own consciousness. We saw that before the 

 dawn of science, when events seemed isolated 

 and capricious, the phenomenon itself was by a 

 natural inference — which only the progress of 

 science has taught us to correct — endowed with 

 a quasi-human personality. We traced the man- 

 ner in which, as phenomena become generalized 

 in wider and wider groups, the causes of phe- 

 nomena become conceived as more and more 

 abstract, and become stripped by slow degrees of 

 their anthropomorphic vestments. Until finally, 

 when generalization has proceeded to such an 

 extent as to give us a single grand science of 

 Cosmology, dealing with the Universe as an 

 integral whole, there comes to be recognized a 

 single Cause of phenomena, which, as being in- 

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