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 ascribing 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