The earliest view of the world is the theological view, which derives the events of the world from the voluntary acts of supernatural intelligent beings.  The crude view of nature sees in each individual thing a being animated like man; later man accustoms himself to think of a whole class of objects as governed by one invisible being, by a divinity; finally the multitude of divinities gives place to a single God, who creates, maintains, and rules the universe, and by extraordinary acts, by miracles, interferes in the course of events.  Thus fetichism (in its highest form, astrolatry), polytheism, and monotheism are the stages in the development of the theological mode of thought.  In the second, the metaphysical, period, the acts of divine volition are replaced by entities, by abstract concepts, which are regarded as realities, as the true reality back of phenomena.  A force, a power, an occult property or essence is made to dwell in things; the mysterious being which directs events is no longer called God, but “Nature,” and invested with certain inclinations, with a horror of a vacuum, an aversion to breaks, a tendency toward the best, a vis medicatrix, etc.  Here belong, also, the vegetative soul of Aristotle, the vital force and the plastic impulse of modern investigators.  Finally the positive stage is reached, when all such abstractions, which are even yet conceived as half personal and acting voluntarily, are abandoned, and the unalterable and universally valid laws of phenomena established by observation and experiment alone.  But to explain the laws of nature themselves transcends, according to Comte, the fixed limits of human knowledge.  The beginning of the world lies outside the region of the knowable, atheism is no better grounded than the theistic hypothesis, and if Comte asserts that a blindly acting mechanism is less probable than a world-plan, he is conscious that he is expressing a mere conjecture which can never be raised to the rank of a scientific theory.  The origin and the end of things are insoluble problems, in answering which no progress has yet been made in spite of man’s long thought about them.  Only that which lies intermediate between the two inscrutable termini of the world is an object of knowledge.

It is not only the human mind in general that exhibits this advance from the theological, through the metaphysical, to the positive mode of thought, but each separate science goes through the same three periods—­only that the various disciplines have developed with unequal rapidity.  While some have already culminated in the positive method of treatment, others yet remain caught in the theological period of beginnings, and others still are in the metaphysical transition stage.  Up to the present all three phases of development exist side by side, and even among the objects of the most highly developed sciences there are some which we continue to regard theologically; these are the ones which we do not yet understand how to calculate,