Origine de tous les cultes ou religion universelle

are necessary when one wishes to understand one another, especially when it concerns abstract ideas, such as that of cause. All of Nature, and Nature alone, presented itself all at once to fulfill this great idea of a universal cause or of God. Men famous for their power, and respected for their benefits toward humanity, immediately disappeared before this august name; and effects could not usurp the sacred titles of the cause; even more so, animals and statues had to be removed from the number of the Gods. Since nothing that does not bear the character of being unproduced and indestructible, and of being an eternal, sovereign agent, could ever have been taken by any nation or any man for the Divinity, in the sense that I believed I should give to this word, and which is the only one it can have, there remained then only the Universe itself that could sustain the immense idea that the name of God must present. The Universe as God or cause, and regarded as such, that is my first chapter. This conclusion, which resulted necessarily for me from the definition set as a principle in this chapter, received full confirmation in the following chapters of the same Book. I have proved there, by the historical testimonies of all the peoples of the world, by the inspection of their religious and political monuments, by the divisions and distributions of the sacred and social order, and finally by the authority of the ancient Philosophers, that it is to the Universe and its parts that men originally and most generally attributed the idea of Divinity. Thus, what ought to have been is found to have effectively been. This truth, which has already been perceived by others, led me to a second one, which seems to have escaped them, although it was nevertheless a necessary consequence of the first; which is that the primary means of explanation, and the one that can be most generally employed, must be to relate the ancient fictions about the Divinity to the play of natural causes. The Gods being Nature itself, the history of the Gods must be that of Nature; and as she has no other adventures than her phenomena, the adventures of the Gods will therefore be the phenomena of Nature set into allegories. This conclusion, which seems incontestable to me, led me naturally to the principles of the true system of explanations, which, despite its difficulties, is nevertheless the only one permitted to be admitted, according to the very nature of the ancient

Religion of the world, and which is still the modern one. For almost nothing has changed. This assertion will still cause astonishment, but I shall demonstrate its truth in the following pages. To this first part of my Work, where I have tried to establish the necessity of a system of explanations that rests upon Physics and Astronomy, succeeds a second part, which contains the principles of the system and traces the path that must be followed.

It is from Nature herself that I have drawn the fundamental ideas of my new method. I have placed man in her presence in the first chapter of this second Part, and I have made the different pictures pass before his eyes that the Universe offers in its most marked divisions and in the play of its principal agents. The first spectacle that I presented to him is that of Light and Darkness, which are in an eternal contrast; that of the succession of days and nights, the periodic order of the Seasons, and the march of the brilliant Star The Sun that regulates their course; that of the Moon, its sister and rival, who takes in hand the scepter of Olympus the home of the gods, here meaning the sky when the former has abandoned it to carry light and life into the lower hemisphere which night was covering, while the Sun dispenses the day to us. The night and the innumerable fires it lights upon the azure of the Heavens; the revolution of the Stars, longer or shorter upon our horizon, and the constancy of this duration in the fixed stars; its variety in the Wandering Stars, or the Planets; their direct or retrograde march, their momentary stations, the phases of the Moon—waxing, full, waning, and stripped of all light; the progressive movement of the Sun from bottom to top and from top to bottom, from which results the variation of heat, the duration of days, and the different temperatures of the air; the successive order of the risings and settings of the fixed stars, which mark the different points of the Sun's course, while the varied faces that the Earth takes mark down here the same epochs of the annual movement of the Sun; the correspondence of the latter in its forms with the celestial forms to which the Sun unites; the variations that this same correspondence undergoes during a long sequence of centuries; the passive dependence in which the sublunary part of the world finds itself toward the part superior to the Moon;