It would be a great mistake to suppose that this error of a heathenish deification of nature is confined to the ancient world, or to those great and half-civilized primeval races of the remotest East, which, however, remained, and still continue, as it were, a living monument of an earlier epoch in the development of humanity. In the more intellectual ages of the world, physical science, or the philosophy of nature, may still be heathenish. It may be this, even while abstaining rigorously from all symbolical language, it comes forward in the highest elevation of the dynamical theory, and in pure scientific formularies. This may be the case even when outwardly it appears to be highly spiritual, or, at least, far removed from all the ordinary features of materialism. And it is invariably such whenever it recognizes nothing higher or superior to the infinite vital force and its dynamical play and law, and, consequently, does but deify nature. Heathenish it must ever remain so long as it does no more than this. This forms, as it were, a relapse of science into heathenism, and here, under a different form, fancy asserts her olden authority. For this purpose she does but assume a geometrical shape, and, decking herself out with all the riches of science, and moving with free dynamic action, speaks a thoroughly mathematical language. The point of indifference, and the positive and the negative pole of all existence, are now, so long as such a philosophy recognizes nothing beyond them, the new gods which, in those scientific fictions, whereof our own age has been profuse enough, may receive a shifting rank and honor, but still hold a similar position therein to that of Jupiter and Venus, or Mars and Apollo, in the ancient mythologies.