In the infantile state of
reason and experience, individual objects are looked upon as animated.
The next step is the conception of invisible beings, each of whom
superintends and governs an entire class of objects or events. The last
merges this multitude of divinities in a single God, who made the whole
universe in the beginning, and guides and carries on its phaenomena by
his continued action, or, as others think, only modifies them from time
to time by special interferences.
The mode of thought which M. Comte terms Metaphysical, accounts for
phaenomena by ascribing them, not to volitions either sublunary or
celestial, but to realized abstractions. In this stage it is no longer
a god that causes and directs each of the various agencies of nature:
it is a power, or a force, or an occult quality, considered as real
existences, inherent in but distinct from the concrete bodies in which
they reside, and which they in a manner animate. Instead of Dryads
presiding over trees, producing and regulating their phaenomena, every
plant or animal has now a Vegetative Soul, the [Greek: Threptike phyge]
of Aristotle. At a later period the Vegetative Soul has become a Plastic
Force, and still later, a Vital Principle.
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