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of these monsters in history. It only remains, then, to find how and
wherefore they have been formed in the imagination. Now, if we examine
with care the subjects of these intellectual creations, analyze the
ideas which they combine and associate, and carefully weigh all the
circumstances which they allege, we shall find that this first obscure
and incredible state of things is explained by the laws of nature.
We find that these stories of a fabulous kind have a figurative sense
different from the apparent one; that these events, pretended to be
marvellous, are simple and physical facts, which, being misconceived or
misrepresented, have been disfigured by accidental causes dependent
on the human mind, by the confusion of signs employed to represent
the ideas, the want of precision in words, permanence in language,
and perfection in writing; we find that these gods, for instance, who
display such singular characters in every system, are only the physical
agents of nature, the elements, the winds, the stars, and the meteors,
which have been personified by the necessary mechanism of language
and of the human understanding; that their lives, their manners, their
actions, are only their mechanical operations and connections; and that
all their pretended history is only the description of these phenomena,
formed by the first naturalists who observed them, and misconceived by
the vulgar who did not understand them, or by succeeding generations who
forgot them. In a word, all the theological dogmas on the origin of the
world, the nature of God, the revelation of his laws, the manifestation
of his person, are known to be only the recital of astronomical facts,
only figurative and emblematical accounts of the motion of the heavenly
bodies. We are convinced that the very idea of a God, that idea at
present so obscure, is, in its first origin, nothing but that of the
physical powers of the universe, considered sometimes as a plurality by
reason of their agencies and phenomena, sometimes as one simple and only
being by reason of the universality of the machine and the connection of
its parts; so that the being called God has been sometimes the wind,
the fire, the water, all the elements; sometimes the sun, the stars, the
planets, and their influence; sometimes the matter of the visible
world, the totality of the universe; sometimes abstract and metaphysical
qualities, such as space, duration, motion, intelligence; and we
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