“The theologic system has reached the highest state of perfection of which it is susceptible, when it has substituted the providential action of one only being for the capricious agency of the numerous independent divinities who had previously been imagined.  In like manner, the last term of the metaphysic system consists in conceiving, instead of the different special entities, one great general entity, nature, considered as the only source of all phenomena.  The perfection of the positive system, towards which it unceasingly tends, though it is not probable it can ever attain to it, would be the ability to represent all observable phenomena as particular cases of some one general fact; such, for instance, as that of gravitation.”—­Vol.  I. p. 5.

After some very just, and indeed admirable, observations on the necessity, or extreme utility, of a theologic hypothesis at an early period of mental development, in order to promote any systematic thought whatever, he proceeds thus:—­

“It is easily conceivable that our understanding, compelled to proceed by degrees almost imperceptible, could not pass abruptly, and without an intermediate stage, from the theologic to the positive philosophy.  Theology and physics are so profoundly incompatible, their conceptions have a character so radically opposed, that before renouncing the one to employ exclusively the other, the mind must make use of intermediate conceptions of a bastard character, fit, for that very reason, gradually to operate the transition.  Such is the natural destination of metaphysical conceptions; they have no other real utility.  By substituting, in the study of phenomena, for supernatural directive agency an inseparable entity residing in things, (although this be conceived at first merely as an emanation from the former,) man habituates himself, by degrees, to consider only the facts themselves, the notion of these metaphysical agents being gradually subtilized, till they are no longer in the eyes of men of intelligence any thing but the names of abstractions.  It is impossible to conceive by what other process our understanding could pass from considerations purely supernatural, to considerations purely natural, from the theologic to the positive regime.”—­P. 13.

We need hardly say that we enter our protest against the supposition that theology is not the last, as well as the first, of our forms of thought—­against the assertion that is here, and throughout the work, made or implied, that the scientific method, rigidly applied in its appropriate field of enquiry, would be found incompatible with the great argument of an intelligent Cause, and would throw the whole subject of theology out of the range of human knowledge.  It would be superfluous for us to re-state that argument; and our readers would probably be more displeased to have presented before them a hostile view of this