ct. This elementary,
gross, instinctive, involuntary belief in God, is not the living,
intelligent, active, and legislative faith of humanity. It is almost
animal. I am persuaded that if the brutes even,--if the dog, the
horse, the ox, the elephant, the bird, could speak, they would
confess, that, at the bottom of their nature, their instincts, their
sensations, their obtuse intelligence, assisted by organs less
perfect than ours, there is a clouded, secret sentiment of this
existence of a superior and primordial Being, from whom all emanates,
and to whom all returns,--a shadow of the divinity upon their being,
a distant approach to the conception of that idea, which fills the
worlds, and for which alone the worlds have been made,--the idea of
God!

* * * * *

This may be a bold, but it is not an impious supposition. For God,
having made all things for himself alone, must have placed, upon all
that he made, an impress of himself; more or less clear, more or less
luminous, more or less profound, a presentiment or a remembrance of a
Creator. But this faith, when it stops here, is not worthy of the
name. It is a species of _Pantheism_, that is to say, a confused
"visibility," a physical working together into indissoluble union of
something impersonal, something blind, something fatal, and something
divine, which, in the elements composing the universe, we may call
GOD. But this "visibility" can give to man no moral decision,--can
give to God no worship. The Pantheism of which I am accused as a
philosopher and poet, that Pantheism which I have always scorned as a
contradiction and as a blasphemy, resembles entirely the reasoning of
the man who should say, "I see an innumerable multitude of rays,
therefore there is no sun."

III.

Faith, or reasonable and effective belief in God, proceeds, undoubtedly,
from this first instinct; but in proportion as intelligence develops
itself, and human thought expands, it goes from knowledge to knowledge,
from conclusion to conclusion, from light to light, from sentiment to
sentiment, infinitely farther and higher, in the idea of God. It does
not see him with the eyes of the body, because the Infinite is not
visible by a narrow window of flesh, pierced in the frontal bone of an
insect called Man; but it sees Him, with a thousand times more
certainty, by the spirit, that immaterial eye of the soul, which nothing
blinds; and after having seen him