The father of Phaethon and the
lover of Endymion were not Apollo and Diana, whose identification with
the Sungod and the Moongoddess was a late invention. Astrolatry, which,
as M. Comte observes, is the last form of Fetichism, survived the other
forms, partly because its objects, being inaccessible, were not so soon
discovered to be in themselves inanimate, and partly because of the
persistent spontaneousness of their apparent motions.
As far as Fetichism reached, and as long as it lasted, there was no
abstraction, or classification of objects, and no room consequently for
the metaphysical mode of thought. But as soon as the voluntary agent,
whose will governed the phaenomenon, ceased to be the physical object
itself, and was removed to an invisible position, from which he or she
superintended an entire class of natural agencies, it began to seem
impossible that this being should exert his powerful activity from a
distance, unless through the medium of something present on the spot.
Through the same Natural Prejudice which made Newton unable to conceive
the possibility of his own law of gravitation without a subtle ether
filling up the intervening space, and through which the attraction could
be communicated--from this same natural infirmity of the human mind, it
seemed indispensable that the god, at a distance from the object, must
act through something residing in it, which was the immediate agent, the
god having imparted to the intermediate something the power whereby it
influenced and directed the object.
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