Note (return) — COMTE.

This apparatus of transition is ingenious enough, but surely it is utterly uncalled for. The same uncultured imagination that could animate a tree, could people the air with gods. Whenever the cause of any natural event is invisible, the imagination cannot rest in Fetishism; it must create some being to produce it. If thunder is to be theologically explained—and there is no event in nature more likely to suggest such explanation—the imagination cannot animate the thunder; it must create some being that thunders. No one, the discipline of whose mind had not been solely and purely scientific, would have created for itself this difficulty, or solved it in such a manner.51