Origine de tous les cultes ou religion universelle

This Work will therefore have no other goal than to go back to the source of our religious opinions, to fix their origin, to follow their progress and varied forms; to make visible the common chain that unites them all, and to propose a general method for decomposing their formless and monstrous mass. I shall not speak of revealed Religions, because none exist, and none can exist. All are daughters of curiosity, ignorance, interest, and imposture. The Gods, in my view, are children of men; and I think, like Hesiod an ancient Greek poet, that the earth produced the Heaven (1). Thus the Work has all the imperfection of its Author. Most of those who have written on religious antiquity have given us only notions that are either false or incomplete. They had, before writing, an established opinion, and they labored only to gather proofs suited to give it some likelihood. Then their studies and efforts served only to lead them astray, by showing them only what they wished to see. They already had a system, and they studied antiquity in order to find something with which to establish it. For me, on the contrary, in studying antiquity, I have tried to grasp its most universal spirit, and to make my system emerge from the result of my research, and from the collection of a mass of scattered materials that I have brought together, compared, and linked. It is antiquity itself, when well studied and deeply explored, that formed and fixed my opinion of it. It is she who led me, as if by the hand, to the conclusion that I then set down as a principle; and I had the satisfaction of seeing that the path she had traced for me was absolutely that of nature. In my work, the first and most universal Religion is found to be that which is first in the order of our ideas, and the most natural to man. The empire of the senses precedes the works of reflection; and one sees there that notions drawn from the physical order existed for many more centuries and among a much greater number of men than the metaphysical abstractions imagined later. Man, in my view, begins where others make him end, and ends where he is vulgarly made to begin (2). He is not a

(1) Theogony The Origin of the Gods line 116. original: "Theogon. v. 116."
(2) Christians suppose that man originally received from the Divinity itself the true notions of the supreme intellectual Being, and that he only sought the

Being originally imbued with notions of the incorporeal being, and a worshiper of an invisible God, who then lowers himself to the worship of the corporeal and visible being through forgetfulness of the first. On the contrary, here man worships his God where he sees his powerful action exercised, and he places in the visible cause the supreme and primitive origin of all the effects he sees it produce. It was only long afterward that he imagined the need for a superior cause, and he sought it everywhere where he saw nothing, and where he could see nothing. For if he had seen it, it would have ceased to be that cause, and it would have re-entered the order of the visible world. This path, which I suppose the spirit takes, is entirely consistent with the great axiom that all our ideas come to us from the senses; but it is the inverse of the one that men are commonly made to take in the opinion of the Jews and Christians. It simply results from this that they are wrong, and that they are in contradiction with me only because they are in contradiction with common sense and with nature itself. The consequences that may follow from our principles do not enter into our plan. The principle alone must be well established; the rest follows necessarily, and the greater or lesser number of overturned opinions and ideas cannot be taken into account in the eyes of reason. Indeed, would I ever have written if I had, at every step, looked at the consequences? Let us set down the principles; the reader will draw the consequences. It is for them to change and destroy false opinions, and not for the latter to stop them in their march. It is hard, I know, to retrace one's steps; but it is even more humiliating never to dare to abjure long-held errors. We are all born to feel the impression of truth; and education, which degrades us, delivers us all to imposture. Let us dare to think for ourselves, and we shall be the true children of Nature.

I first fixed the idea that one must have attached to this word God, and that it must awaken in us; persuaded as I am that precise definitions

Divinity in material objects when he had forgotten the invisible God, to whom his Worship was originally addressed in the infancy of the world. This is a gross error, which common sense rejects and which our Work destroys.