(1) We have seen that, for primitive man, everything is alive, full of arbitrary caprices, desires, intentions, and especially mysteries, because everything is unforeseen: it is the reign of universal contingency. The formula, “everything is alive,” is, however, too absolute; it only suits those things which were seen to move and change—_i.e._, the majority, not the totality of things. It seems as if the absence of motion, stability, fixity, the want of reaction, had been a sort of revelation to a simple mind. Perhaps it was through the spectacle of the fixity of things that the notion of order or law made its very humble entry into the world. However that may be, it is certain that the depersonification of nature began early to mark the origin of science. In our present state of culture we find a difficulty in representing to ourselves a state of mind in which the idea of fixity in natural phenomena is almost _nil_; yet such a state of mind has existed, and there is no want of documents to prove it. The expression, “the new moon,” was not at first a metaphor: men wondered if the sun would always continue his course; the Mexicans anxiously awaited his new birth every fifty years; eclipses seemed to happen at random, and caused great terror, etc.[193] Gradually the spirit of observation and reflection arrived at constant relations, and introduced into the conception of Nature the ideas of order and regularity, diminishing in so far the domain of chance and contingency. This notion of a cosmic order has influenced religious conceptions; the government of the physical world was attributed to the gods; they are its regulators; each has his department where he is supreme. The co-existence of two opposite principles has been remarked in the religion of several nations in this period of their development: necessity being personified in an abstract, mysterious, inaccessible deity (Rita among the Aryans, Ma with the Egyptians, Tao with the Chinese, Moira or Nomos with the Greeks, etc.[194]); while contingency, or rather limited arbitrary power, was personified in more human gods having their legends, acting within their own special sphere, as, for instance, the gods of Greece. The latter are also sometimes divided into two categories, which is the first step towards simplification, one kind bestowing physical well-being—health, prosperity, riches; the other inflicting physical ills—disease, famine, tempest, shipwreck. ----- Footnote 193: For the facts see Goblet d’Alviella, _op. cit._, p. 178. Footnote 194: Goblet d’Alviella, _ib._, pp. 176-198. -----