1 8 FROM COMTE TO BENJAMIN KIDD PARTI 



regards a belief in the soul as belonging to a much 

 ore sophisticated state of mind than that of the 

 'amiable fetish worshippers, the first fathers of the 

 human race. Not until the baleful shadow of meta- 

 physics begins to fall upon human thought do we 

 hear of souls in men, or of spirits in nature. To 

 Comte, psychology is a kind of physiology ; psychical 

 life is a property of the human body ; and, to the 

 fetishist, psychical life was a property of the objects 

 of nature. Again Comte differs from ordinary usage 

 in extending the term fetish to cover any object in 

 nature which might be worshipped a river, a moun- 

 tain, a star, the moon, the sun. By other writers, 

 that highly ambiguous and arbitrary word is usually 

 applied only to things which are or which may become 

 private property. Fetishism, as understood by Comte, 

 was regarded by him as the first form of religion. 

 This, again, was part of the legacy to Comte of the 

 Encyclopedists and their fellows. Out of Fetishism, 

 according to Comte, grew Polytheism. The change 

 is mainly attributed to the action of human reason. 

 It came to be discovered that things which had been 

 regarded as animated were really inanimate. But 

 the theological delusion was not yet shaken off ; the 

 human mind was not yet strong enough to go right 

 on to the scientific or positivist consciousness. Instead 

 of doing that, mankind invented a set of imaginary 

 beings, called gods, lurking behind the phenomena of 

 nature. To the gods were now attributed those activi- 

 ties which observation would no longer suffer men 

 to ascribe to stones or plants or unconscious natural 

 forces. Next, out of Polytheism grew Monotheism. 

 Here again reason had been at work; as the unity 



