command issued.  And yet the bodily aspect of the man seems hardly more altered than when he slept, and, sleeping, seemed to himself to leave his body and wander through dreamland.  What then if that something, which is the essence of the man, has really been made to wander by the violence done to it, and is unable, or has forgotten, to come back to its shell?  Will it not retain somewhat of the powers it possessed during life?  May it not help us if it be pleased, or (as seems to be by far the more general impression) hurt us if it be angered?  Will it not be well to do towards it those things which would have soothed the man and put him in good humour during his life?  It is impossible to study trustworthy accounts of savage thought without seeing, that some such train of ideas as this, lies at the bottom of their speculative beliefs.

There are savages without God, in any proper sense of the word, but none without ghosts.  And the Fetishism, Ancestor-worship, Hero-worship, and Demonology of primitive savages, are all, I believe, different manners of expression of their belief in ghosts, and of the anthropomorphic interpretation of out-of-the-way events, which is its concomitant.  Witchcraft and sorcery are the practical expressions of these beliefs; and they stand in the same relation to religious worship as the simple anthropomorphism of children, or savages, does to theology.

In the progress of the species from savagery to advanced civilization, anthropomorphism grows into theology, while physicism (if I may so call it) develops into science; but the development of the two is contemporaneous, not successive.  For each, there long exists an assured province which is not invaded by the other; while, between the two, lies a debateable land, ruled by a sort of bastards, who owe their complexion to physicism and their substance to anthropomorphism, and are M. Comte’s particular aversions—­metaphysical entities.

But, as the ages lengthen, the borders of Physicism increase.  The territories of the bastards are all annexed to science; and even Theology, in her purer forms, has ceased to be anthropomorphic, however she may talk.  Anthropomorphism has taken stand in its last fortress—­man himself.  But science closely invests the walls; and Philosophers gird themselves for battle upon the last and greatest of all speculative problems—­Does human nature possess any free, volitional, or truly anthropomorphic element, or is it only the cunningest of all Nature’s clocks?  Some, among whom I count myself, think that the battle will for ever remain a drawn one, and that, for all practical purposes, this result is as good as anthropomorphism winning the day.

The classification of the sciences, which, in the eyes of M. Comte’s adherents, constitutes his second great claim to the dignity of a scientific philosopher, appears to me to be open to just the same objections as the law of the three states.  It is inconsistent in itself, and it is inconsistent with fact.  Let us consider the main points of this classification successively:—­