The ejective existence thus ascribed to society serves as a stepping-stone to the yet more vague and general ascription of such existence to the Cosmos. At first, indeed, or during the earliest stages of culture, the ascription of ejective existence to the external world is neither vague nor general: on the contrary, it is most distinct and specific. Beginning in the rudest forms of animism, where every natural process admits of being immediately attributed to the volitional agency of an unseen spirit, anthropomorphism sets out upon its long course of development, which proceeds _pari passu_ with the development of abstract thought. Man, as it has been truly said, universally makes God in his own image; and it is difficult to see how the case could be otherwise. Universally the eject must assume the pattern of the subject, and it is only in the proportion that this pattern presents the features of abstract thinking that the image which it throws becomes less and less man-like. Hence, as Mr. Fiske has shown in detail, so soon as anthropomorphism has assumed its highest state of development, it begins to be replaced by a continuous growth of 'deanthropomorphism,' which, passing through polytheism into monotheism, eventually ends in a progressive 'purification' of theism--by which is meant a progressive metamorphosis of the theistic conception, tending to remove from Deity the attributes of Humanity. The last of these attributes to disappear is that of personality, and when this final ecdysis has been performed, the eject which remains is so unlike its original subject, that, as we shall immediately find, it is extremely difficult to trace any points of resemblance between them. Now it is with this perfect, or imago condition of the world-eject, that we have to do. Mr. Herbert Spencer, in what I consider the profoundest reaches of his philosophic thought, has well shown, on the one hand, how impossible it is to attribute to Deity any of the specific attributes of mind as known to ourselves subjectively; and, on the other hand, how it is possible to conceive 'symbolically' that the universe may be instinct with a 'quasi-psychical' principle, as greatly transcending personality as personality transcends mechanical motion[10]. Accepting, then, the world-eject in this its highest conceivable stage of evolution, I desire to contemplate it under the light of the monistic theory.