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Among nations least advanced in civilization, the imagination revels in
strange and fantastic creations, and, by its predilection for symbols, alike
influences ideas and language. Instead of examining, men are led to
conjecture, dogmatize, and interpret supposed facts that have never been
observed. The inner world of thought and of feeling does not reflect the
image of the external world in its primitive purity. That which in some
regions of the earth manifested itself as the rudiments of natural
philosophy, only to a small number of persons endowed with superior
intelligence, appears in other regions, and among entire races of men, to be
the result of mystic tendencies and instinctive intuitions. An intimate
communion with nature, and the vivid and deep emotions thus awakened, are
likewise the source from which have sprung the first impulses toward the
worship and deification of the destroying and preserving forces of the
universe. But by degrees, as man, after having passed through the different
gradations of intellectual development, arrives at the free enjoyment of the
regulating power of reflection, and learns by gradual progress, as it were,
to separate the world of ideas from that of sensations, he no longer rests
satisfied merely with a vague presentiment of the harmonious unity of
natural forces; thought begins to fulfill its noble mission; and
observation, aided by reason, endeavors to trace phenomena to the causes
from which they spring.
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