“While the connection between physical effects was yet unknown, nothing was more natural than to suppose that they were produced by intelligent beings, invisible and resembling ourselves; for what else could they have resembled? Everything that happened without the intervention of man, had its god, whose worship was soon established by fear or hope, and this worship was conceived in accordance with the deference accorded powerful men; for the gods were only more powerful men and more or less perfect according as they were the product of an age more or less enlightened as to the true perfections of humanity. When philosophers had recognised the absurdity of these fables, without however having obtained true light upon natural history, they imagined an explanation of the causes of phenomena by abstract expressions, such as essences and faculties: expressions that nevertheless explained nothing and that were reasoned about as if they had been beings, new divinities substituted for the old ones. These analogies were followed out, and faculties were multiplied to account for each effect. It was only very late, in observing the mechanical action that bodies have upon one another, that other hypotheses were drawn from this mechanics, (_de cette mécanique_) which mathematics could develop and experience verify.” Littré calls attention to “the great sureness of judgment” that led Turgot to cite only physical phenomena when he spoke of those that had ceased to be interpreted either theologically or metaphysically. “When he wrote this passage, positivity (I use this word, a necessary creation of M. Comte’s) was only beginning to reach chemical phenomena and had not yet attained those of biology and sociology.” But, says Littré, “after reserving the rights of priority for this eminent thinker, there is nothing to prevent M. Comte from keeping all the part that he had made himself and that belongs to him. Three principal points mark Comte’s independence of Turgot. The latter saw in the conception nothing more than an idea to meditate upon; Comte saw in it a sociological law; Turgot did not attach to it a sketch of human development; Comte developed with the aid of this law the whole historical series; Turgot did not perceive that he held one of the necessary elements of a philosophy; Comte, in the same flight of thought, went from history become science to philosophy become positive. The sociological law, isolated in Turgot, makes part, in Comte, of a vast whole: there were therefore two independent creations. Either M. Comte had not read Turgot, or, more probably, he had read him at a time when this passage, which to-day awakens attention, had no particular significance.”