Life is defined by Herbert Spencer as "the coördination of actions, or their continuous adjustment;" by Lewes as "a series of definite and successive changes, both of structure and composition, which take place within an individual without destroying its identity;" by Schelling as "the tendency to individuation;" by Richeraud as "a collection of phenomena which succeed each other during a limited time in an organized body;" and by De Blainville as "the two-fold internal movement of composition and decomposition, at once general and continuous." According to Hume, Mind is but a bundle of ideas and impressions which are the sum of all knowledge, and consequently, "the only things known to exist." In the positive philosophy of Auguste Comte, intellectual development is divided into three phases; namely, the Supernatural, in which the mind seeks for supernatural causes; the Metaphysical, wherein abstract forces are set up in place of supernatural agencies; and the Positive, which inquires into the laws which engender phenomena. Martineau, commenting upon intuition and the mind's place in nature, charges the current doctrine of evolution with excluding the element of life from developing organisms. Until the origin of mind, and the relation of mind to its environment is determined, the origin of the supernatural must remain unaccounted for. Yet we may follow the principle of worship back to very near its source, if we are unable entirely to account for it.
We have seen how the inability of brutes to form in the mind long sequences of thought, prevents speech; so, in primitive societies, when successions of unrecorded events are forgotten before any conception of general laws can be formed therefrom, polytheism in its grossest form is sure to prevail. Not until the earlier stages of progress are passed, and, from a multitude of correlative and oft-repeated experiences, general deductions made, can there be any higher religious conceptions than that of an independent cause for every consequence.
By some it is alleged that the religious sentiment is a divine idea perfected by the Creator and implanted in man as part of his nature, before his divergence from a primitive centre. Singularly enough, the Fathers of the Church referred the origin of fable as well as the origin of fact to the Hebrew Scriptures. Supported by the soundest sophistry, they saw in every myth, Grecian or barbarian, a biblical character. Thus the Greek Hercules was none other than the Hebrew Sampson; Arion was Jonah, and Deucalion Noah. Other mythological characters were supposed by them to have been incarnated fiends, who disappeared after working for a time their evil upon men.