Note 620 — Chapter VII

The speculative view of this tendency has been recently illustrated in the most comprehensive manner by M. Auguste Comte, in his Philosophie Positive; and his conclusions in regard to the earliest stage of the human mind are confirmed by everything we know of barbarous nations; and they are also confirmed, as he has decisively proved, by the history of physical science. In addition to the facts he has adduced, I may mention, that the history of geology supplies evidence analogous to that which he has collected from other departments.

A popular notion of the working of this belief in supernatural causation may be seen in a circumstance related by Combe. He says, that in the middle of the eighteenth century the country west of Edinburgh was so unhealthy, ‘that every spring the farmers and their servants were seized with fever and ague.’ As long as the cause of this was unknown, ‘these visitations were believed to be sent by Providence;’ but after a time the land was drained, the ague disappeared, and the inhabitants perceived that what they had believed to be supernatural was perfectly natural, and that the cause was the state of the land, not the intervention of the Deity. Combe's Constitution of Man, Edinb. 1847, p. 156.