To modern philosophers these fictions
are merely the abstract names of the classes of phaenomena which
correspond to them; and it is one of the puzzles of philosophy, how
mankind, after inventing a set of mere names to keep together certain
combinations of ideas or images, could have so far forgotten their own
act as to invest these creations of their will with objective reality,
and mistake the name of a phaenomenon for its efficient cause. What was
a mystery from the purely dogmatic point of view, is cleared up by the
historical. These abstract words are indeed now mere names of
phaenomena, but were not so in their origin. To us they denote only the
phaenomena, because we have ceased to believe in what else they once
designated; and the employment of them in explanation is to us
evidently, as M. Comte says, the naif reproduction of the phaenomenon
as the reason for itself: but it was not so in the beginning. The
metaphysical point of view was not a perversion of the positive, but a
transformation of the theological. The human mind, in framing a class of
objects, did not set out from the notion of a name, but from that of a
divinity.
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