he worship of the earth
(Tellus or Pales) and of the various heavenly bodies, was prolonged into
the heart of Polytheism. Every scholar knows, though _litterateurs_ and
men of the world do not, that in the full vigour of the Greek religion,
the Sun and Moon, not a god and goddess thereof, were sacrificed to as
deities--older deities than Zeus and his descendants, belonging to the
earlier dynasty of the Titans (which was the mythical version of the
fact that their worship was older), and these deities had a distinct set
of fables or legends connected with them. The father of Phaethon and the
lover of Endymion were not Apollo and Diana, whose identification with
the Sungod and the Moongoddess was a late invention. Astrolatry, which,
as M. Comte observes, is the last form of Fetichism, survived the other
forms, partly because its objects, being inaccessible, were not so soon
discovered to be in themselves inanimate, and partly because of the
persistent spontaneousness of their apparent motions.

As far as Fetichism reached, and as long as it lasted, there was no
abstraction, or classification of objects, and no room consequently for
the metaphysical mode of thought. But as soon as the voluntary agent,
whose will governed the phaenomenon, ceased to be the physical object
itself, and was removed to an invisible position, from which he or she
superintended an entire class of natural agencies, it began to seem
impossible that this being should exert his powerful activity from a
distance, unless through the medium of something present on the spot.
Through the same Natural Prejudice which made Newton unable to conceive
the possibility of his own law of gravitation without a subtle ether
filling up the intervening space, and through which the attraction could
be communicated--from this same natural infirmity of the human mind, it
seemed indispensable that the god, at a distance from the object, must
act through something residing in it, which was the immediate agent, the
god having imparted to the intermediate something the power whereby it
influenced and directed the object. When mankind felt a need for naming
these imaginary entities, they called them the _nature_ of the object,
or its _essence_, or _virtues_ residing in it, or by many other
different names. These metaphysical conceptions were regarded as
intensely real, and at first as mere instruments in the hands of the
appropriate deities. But the habit being acquired of asc