CHAP, ii COMTE'S LIFE AND TEACHING 19 



and harmony of nature was more and more dis- 

 covered, it became more and more difficult at 

 length it became impossible to interpret the world 

 as an effect produced by independent or rival agencies. 

 There must be one great first cause ; one great man- 

 like Being. Monotheism had begun; the last term 

 in the theological development. But the develop- 

 ment was to continue beyond Monotheism, and al- 

 ready, unnoticed, under the dominance of the theo- 

 logical stage, the germs of the metaphysical stage of 

 mind were developing. \ Metaphysics, according to 

 Comte, sees through the absurdity of belief in gods 

 or in God ; reason is still active, and is very strongly 

 impressed at this stage (says Comte) with the moral 

 difficulties of Theism ; but, according to metaphy- 

 sicians, all we have to do is to substitute abstractions 

 for the discredited deities. In the metaphysical stage 

 of thought we take these abstractions seriously, as if 

 they could give a real and satisfying explanation of 

 things; but they are only ghosts of causes, ghosts 

 of gods, ghosts of the real living body under the style 

 and title of souls, and so forth and so forth. Drugs 

 produce sleep because they have a soporific virtue. 

 Life is due to some mysterious intangible vital energy. 

 Chief of all the abstractions is Nature. Substitute / 

 Nature for the monotheistic God and the feat is ac- 

 complished ; the transition is made ; the first stage of 

 thought has given place to the second. With the 

 conception of nature grows up a crop of wild beliefs 

 in natural laws he means the jurist's natural law, 

 not the physicist's and in natural rights. These 

 beliefs are powerful to destroy, powerless to create. 

 But that is their use, to clear away the rubbish and 



