XENOPHANES Of COLOPHON (six centuries B.C.),
Supernatural Religion, vol. 1. p. 76.
.
-----
.
[Footnote: Delivered before the British Association on Wednesday evening, August 19, 1874.]
.
§ 1
AN impulse inherent in primeval man turned his thoughts and questionings betimes towards the sources of natural phenomena. The same impulse, inherited and intensified, is the spur of scientific action to-day. Determined by it, by a process of abstraction from experience we form physical theories which lie beyond the pale of experience, but which satisfy the desire of the mind to see every natural occurrence resting upon a cause. In forming their notions of the origin of things, our earliest historic (and doubtless, we might add, our prehistoric) ancestors pursued, as far as their intelligence permitted, the same course. They also fell back upon experience; but with this difference — that the particular experiences which furnished the warp and woof of their theories were drawn, not from the study of nature, but from what lay much closer to them — the observation of men. Their theories accordingly took an anthropomorphic form. To super-sensual beings, which, 'however potent and invisible, were nothing but a species of human creatures, perhaps raised from among mankind, and retaining all human passions and appetites,' [Footnote: Hume, 'Natural History of Religion.] were handed over the rule and governance of natural phenomena.