philosophers is in fact only a
transparent veil to atheistical doctrines. Faith in God the Creator is
in their eyes a superstition; this is their only settled dogma. In other
respects they indulge in theses the most contradictory. Most generally
they deify man, declaring that there is no other God than the idea of
humanity, no other infinite than the indefinite character of the
aspirations of our own soul. At other times they proclaim an undisguised
materialism, and look for the explanation of all things in atoms and in
the law which governs them. They make to themselves a two-faced idol,
one of these faces being called nature, and the other humanity. What
strangely increases the confusion is that all the terms of language
change meaning as employed by their pen. They speak of God, of duty, of
religion, of immortality; their pages seem sometimes to be extracted
from mystical writings; but these sacred words have for them a totally
different meaning than for the ordinary run of their readers. Their God
is not a Being, their religion is not a worship, their duty is not a
law, their immortality is not the hope of a world to come. Amidst these
equivocations and contradictions thought is blunted, and the sinews of
the intellect are unstrung. The public, bewitched by talent and
captivated by success, is deluged with writings which have the same
effect as the talk of a frivolous man, or the showy tattle of a woman of
the world. They give an agreeable exercise to the mind, without ever
allowing it to form either a precise idea or a settled judgment.

Many are the clouds then on the intellectual horizon of France. Glance
over the recent productions of French philosophy, and you will have no
difficulty in recognizing the gravity of the situation. Works are
multiplying with the object of defending the existence of God,
Providence, the immortality of the soul: dams are being raised against
the rising flood of atheism.[53] And here is a fact still more
significant, namely, that the historians of ideas, whether they are
recurring to the most remote antiquity, or are passing in review the
worst errors of modern days, cannot meet with the negation of God,
without having their eyes thus turned to Paris, and their attention
directed to contemporary productions.[54]

I hence infer, that atheism is raising its head in France, and there
presenting itself under two forms. Materialism is appearing principally
as an heritage from the last ce