nal and consistent
with fact than the first; but I cannot think it is a just or adequate
account of the growth of intelligence, either in the individual man, or
in the human species. Any one who will carefully watch the development
of the intellect of a child will perceive that, from the first, its mind
is mirroring nature in two different ways. On the one hand, it is merely
drinking in sensations and building up associations, while it forms
conceptions of things and their relations which are more thoroughly
"positive," or devoid of entanglement with hypotheses of any kind, than
they will ever be in after-life. No child has recourse to imaginary
personifications in order to account for the ordinary properties of
objects which are not alive, or do not represent living things. It does
not imagine that the taste of sugar is brought about by a god of
sweetness, or that a spirit of jumping causes a ball to bound. Such
phaenomena, which form the basis of a very large part of its ideas, are
taken as matters of course--as ultimate facts which suggest no
difficulty and need no explanation. So far as all these common, though
important, phaenomena are concerned, the child's mind is in what M. Comte
would call the "positive" state.

But, side by side with this mental condition, there rises another. The
child becomes aware of itself as a source of action and a subject of
passion and of thought. The acts which follow upon its own desires are
among the most interesting and prominent of surrounding occurrences; and
these acts, again, plainly arise either out of affections caused by
surrounding things, or of other changes in itself. Among these
surrounding things, the most interesting and important are mother and
father, brethren and nurses. The hypothesis that these wonderful
creatures are of like nature to itself is speedily forced upon the
child's mind; and this primitive piece of anthropomorphism turns out to
be a highly successful speculation, which finds its justification at
every turn. No wonder, then, that it is extended to other similarly
interesting objects which are not too unlike these--to the dog, the cat,
and the canary, the doll, the toy, and the picture-book--that these are
endowed with wills and affections, and with capacities for being "good"
and "naughty." But surely it would be a mere perversion of language to
call this a "theological" state of mind, either in the proper sense of
the word "theological," or as contras