When he
discovers his mistake, when he recognises sadly that both the order
of nature which he had assumed and the control which he had believed
himself to exercise over it were purely imaginary, he ceases to rely
on his own intelligence and his own unaided efforts, and throws
himself humbly on the mercy of certain great invisible beings behind
the veil of nature, to whom he now ascribes all those far-reaching
powers which he once arrogated to himself. Thus in the acuter minds
magic is gradually superseded by religion, which explains the
succession of natural phenomena as regulated by the will, the
passion, or the caprice of spiritual beings like man in kind, though
vastly superior to him in power.
But as time goes on this explanation in its turn proves to be
unsatisfactory. For it assumes that the succession of natural events
is not determined by immutable laws, but is to some extent variable
and irregular, and this assumption is not borne out by closer
observation. On the contrary, the more we scrutinise that succession
the more we are struck by the rigid uniformity, the punctual
precision with which, wherever we can follow them, the operations of
nature are carried on.
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