nsistencies and absurdities in the received
religions. But this operation is quite independent of the Metaphysical
mode of thought, and was no otherwise connected with it than in being
very generally carried on by the same minds (Plato is a brilliant
example), since the most eminent efficiency in it does not necessarily
depend on the possession of positive scientific knowledge. But the
Metaphysical spirit, strictly so called, did contribute largely to the
advent of Monotheism. The conception of impersonal entities, interposed
between the governing deity and the phaenomena, and forming the
machinery through which these are immediately produced, is not
repugnant, as the theory of direct supernatural volitions is, to the
belief in invariable laws. The entities not being, like the gods, framed
after the exemplar of men--being neither, like them, invested with human
passions, nor supposed, like them, to have power beyond the phaenomena
which are the special department of each, there was no fear of offending
them by the attempt to foresee and define their action, or by the
supposition that it took place according to fixed laws. The popular
tribunal which condemned Anaxagoras had evidently not risen to the
metaphysical point of view. Hippocrates, who was concerned only with a
select and instructed class, could say with impunity, speaking of what
were called the god-inflicted diseases, that to his mind they were
neither more nor less god-inflicted than all others. The doctrine of
abstract entities was a kind of instinctive conciliation between the
observed uniformity of the facts of nature, and their dependence on
arbitrary volition; since it was easier to conceive a single volition as
setting a machinery to work, which afterwards went on of itself, than to
suppose an inflexible constancy in so capricious and changeable a thing
as volition must then have appeared. But though the regime of
abstractions was in strictness compatible with Polytheism, it demanded
Monotheism as the condition of its free development. The received
Polytheism being only the first remove from Fetichism, its gods were too
closely mixed up in the daily details of phaenomena, and the habit of
propitiating them and ascertaining their will before any important
action of life was too inveterate, to admit, without the strongest shock
to the received system, the notion that they did not habitually rule by
special interpositions, but left phaenomena in all ordinary