ere see this conclusion, that the idea of God has not been a
miraculous revelation of invisible beings, but a natural offspring of
the human intellect--an operation of the mind, whose progress it has
followed and whose revolutions it has undergone, in all the progress
that has been made in the knowledge of the physical world and its
agents.

"It is then in vain that nations attribute their religion to heavenly
inspirations; it is in vain that their dogmas pretend to a primeval
state of supernatural events: the original barbarity of the human race,
attested by their own monuments,* belies these assertions at once.
But there is one constant and indubitable fact which refutes beyond
contradiction all these doubtful accounts of past ages. From this
position, that man acquires and receives no ideas but through the medium
of his senses,** it follows with certainty that every notion which
claims to itself any other origin than that of sensation and experience,
is the erroneous supposition of a posterior reasoning: now, it is
sufficient to cast an eye upon the sacred systems of the origin of the
world, and of the actions of the gods, to discover in every idea, in
every word, the anticipation of an order of things which could not exist
till a long time after. Reason, strengthened by these contradictions,
rejecting everything that is not in the order of nature, and admitting
no historical facts but those founded on probabilities, lays open its
own system, and pronounces itself with assurance.

* It is the unanimous testimony of history, and even of
legends, that the first human beings were every where
savages, and that it was to civilize them, and teach them to
make bread, that the Gods manifested themselves.

** The rock on which all the ancients have split, and which
has occasioned all their errors, has been their supposing
the idea of God to be innate and co-eternal with the soul;
and hence all the reveries developed in Plato and Jamblicus.
See the Timoeus, the Phedon, and De Mysteriis Egyptiorum,
sect. I, c. 3.

"Before one nation had received from another nation dogmas already
invented; before one generation had inherited ideas acquired by a
preceding generation, none of these complicated systems could have
existed in the world. The first men, being children of nature, anterior
to all events, ignorant of all science, were born without any idea of
the dogmas arising from