COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



implicated is it with all the habits of thought 

 which theology nurtures — that we sometimes 

 hear it explicitly maintained that when natural 

 law can be shown to be coextensive with the 

 whole of nature, then our belief in God will ipso 

 facto be extinguished. 



Such a position is no doubt as irreligious as it 

 is unscientific ; but it is not difficult to see how 

 it has come to be so commonly maintained. Not 

 only is it often apparently justified by the un- 

 philosophical language of scientific men — espe- 

 cially of those shallow writers known as " mate- 

 rialists " — who speak of " natural law " as if it 

 were something different from " Divine action," 

 but it is also the logical offspring of that primi- 

 tive fetishism from which all our theology is de- 

 scended. For as physical generalization began 

 to diminish the sphere of action of the innumer- 

 able quasi-human agencies by which fetishism 

 sought to account for natural phenomena, there 

 could hardly fail to arise a belief in some sort 

 of opposition between invariable law and quasi- 

 human agency. On the one hand you have a 

 set of facts that occur in fixed sequences, and so 

 are not the result of anthropomorphic volition ; 

 on the other hand you have a set of facts that 

 seem to occur according to no determinable or- 

 der, and so are the result of anthropomorphic 

 volition. The fetishistic thinker could not, of 

 course, formulate the case in this abstract and 

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