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 _régime_."--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 subject, though for the purpose only of controversy, than they would be edified by a repetition of those reasonings which have long since brought conviction to their minds. We will content ourselves, therefore, with this protest, and with adding--as a fact of experience, which, in estimating a law of development, may with peculiar propriety be insisted on--that hitherto no such incompatibility has made itself evident. Hitherto science, or the method of thinking, which its cultivation requires and induces, has not shown itself hostile to the first great article of religion--that on which revelation proceeds to erect all the remaining articles of our faith. If it is a fact that, in rude times, men began their speculative career by assigning individual phenomena to the immediate causation of supernatural powers, it is equally a fact that they have hitherto, in the most enlightened times, terminated their inductive labours by assigning that _unity_ and _correlation_ which science points out in the universe of things to an ordaining intelligence. We repeat, as a matter of experience, it is as rare in this age to find a reflective man who does not read _thought_ in this unity and correlation of material phenomena, as it would have been, in some rube superstitious period, to discover an individual who refused to see, in any one of the specialities around him, the direct interference of a spirit or demon. In our own country, men of science are rather to blame for a too detailed, a puerile and injudicious, manner of treating this great argument, than for any disposition to desert it.