ribing not only
substantive existence, but real and efficacious agency, to the abstract
entities, the consequence was that when belief in the deities declined
and faded away, the entities were left standing, and a semblance of
explanation of phaenomena, equal to what existed before, was furnished
by the entities alone, without referring them to any volitions. When
things had reached this point, the metaphysical mode of thought, had
completely substituted itself for the theological.

Thus did the different successive states of the human intellect, even at
an early stage of its progress, overlap one another, the Fetichistic,
the Polytheistic, and the Metaphysical modes of thought coexisting even
in the same minds, while the belief in invariable laws, which
constitutes the Positive mode of thought, was slowly winning its way
beneath them all, as observation and experience disclosed in one class
of phaenomena after another the laws to which they are really subject.
It was this growth of positive knowledge which principally determined
the next transition in the theological conception of the universe, from
Polytheism to Monotheism.

It cannot be doubted that this transition took place very tardily. The
conception of a unity in Nature, which would admit of attributing it to
a single will, is far from being natural to man, and only finds
admittance after a long period of discipline and preparation, the
obvious appearances all pointing to the idea of a government by many
conflicting principles. We know how high a degree both of material
civilization and of moral and intellectual development preceded the
conversion of the leading populations of the world to the belief in one
God. The superficial observations by which Christian travellers have
persuaded themselves that they found their own Monotheistic belief in
some tribes of savages, have always been contradicted by more accurate
knowledge: those who have read, for instance, Mr Kohl's Kitchigami, know
what to think of the Great Spirit of the American Indians, who belongs
to a well-defined system of Polytheism, interspersed with large remains
of an original Fetichism. We have no wish to dispute the matter with
those who believe that Monotheism was the primitive religion,
transmitted to our race from its first parents in uninterrupted
tradition. By their own acknowledgment, the tradition was lost by all
the nations of the world except a small and peculiar people, in whom it
was