and from the continual associations of
ill-assorted ideas, arose a mass of disorders in theology, in morals,
and in traditions; first, because the animals represented the stars,
the characters of the animals, their appetites, their sympathies,
their aversions, passed over to the gods, and were supposed to be their
actions; thus, the god Ichneumon made war against the god Crocodile;
the god Wolf liked to eat the god Sheep; the god Ibis devoured the
god Serpent; and the deity became a strange, capricious, and ferocious
being, whose idea deranged the judgment of man, and corrupted his morals
and his reason.

"Again, because in the spirit of their worship every family, every
nation, took for its special patron a star or a constellation, the
affections or antipathies of the symbolic animal were transferred to its
sectaries; and the partisans of the god Dog were enemies to those of the
god Wolf;* those who adored the god Ox had an abhorrence to those who
ate him; and religion became the source of hatred and hostility,--the
senseless cause of frenzy and superstition.

* These are properly the words of Plutarch, who relates that
those various worships were given by a king of Egypt to the
different towns to disunite and enslave them, and these
kings had been taken from the cast of priests. See Isis and
Osiris.

"Besides, the names of those animal-stars having, for this same reason
of patronage, been conferred on countries, nations, mountains, and
rivers, these objects were taken for gods, and hence followed a mixture
of geographical, historical, and mythological beings, which confounded
all traditions.

"Finally, by the analogy of actions which were ascribed to them, the
god-stars, having been taken for men, for heroes, for kings, kings
and heroes took in their turn the actions of gods for models, and by
imitation became warriors, conquerors, proud, lascivious, indolent,
sanguinary; and religion consecrated the crimes of despots, and
perverted the principles of government."

IV. Fourth system. Worship of two Principles, or Dualism.

"In the mean time, the astronomical priests, enjoying peace and
abundance in their temples, made every day new progress in the sciences,
and the system of the world unfolding gradually to their view, they
raised successively various hypotheses as to its agents and effects,
which became so many theological systems.

"The voyages of the maritime nations and the ca