Origine de tous les cultes ou religion universelle

"is at the same time the work of
Nature, and Nature herself. It is
a folly to wish to go outside of
it to seek something else."

Such is the summary of the great philosophical principles that Pliny Gaius Plinius Secundus, known as Pliny the Elder, a Roman author and naturalist puts at the head of his history of Nature. No one until now has thought to deny the world the prerogative of being the visible first and universal cause. The empire of Nature over everything that is born, grows, and perishes here below is too marked for anyone to be mistaken about it; but since then, people have imagined the existence of an invisible cause, of a nature different from that of the visible cause, placed outside of it, acting upon it; and those who believe in everything have admitted it, without worrying about proofs. Others have continued to place it where they saw it, without losing themselves in unknown regions. The reality of the one, supported by the testimony of all the senses, was contested by no one: that of the other was at least doubtful, and if one could distrust the illusions of the senses, one should be even more on guard against those of the imagination and metaphysics. These men whom we call pagans, coarse and blind, believed that there is only an effect for which one can ask what its cause is; but that the cause itself does not allow this question, unless it presents itself to us as an effect seen under another relationship; and then it is still an effect for which we seek the cause, and not a cause. Now, the Universe presented itself to their eyes only under the aspect of a very powerful and always active cause, and never as an effect. They had not seen it born, grow, alter, or age; it always appeared the same, and offered none of the characters of a produced and destructible being;

(1) for the Universe, says Ocellus Ocellus Lucanus, a Pythagorean philosopher, consi-
dered in its totality, announces to us
nothing that reveals an origin, or pre-
sages a destruction; it has not been

seen to be born, nor to grow, nor to improve,
nor to deteriorate, nor to decrease, it is
always the same, in the same man-
ner, always equal, and similar to
itself.

It does not appear that since Ocellus, our observations have taught us anything more. It was therefore natural for men to stop where effects seemed to end, and where the being takes on a character different from that of all those who are subordinate to it; this being was Nature. It was necessary to go back to the tree to seek the cause of the fruit, and to the earth to find that of the tree; both produced and reproduced, they were obviously effects; but the series of productions and reproductions seemed to end at the earth, which offered nothing of what characterizes the produced and fleeting being; there also ended man's research on the progression of causes; there was attached the summit of the chain of generations, of the vegetable kingdom, mineral kingdom, and even the animal kingdom; for, finally, one had to stop somewhere; and Nature seemed to have fixed this point in her own bosom. Infinite progression in causes is an absurdity; and since it must stop, why prolong it beyond the term where we see it end? Those who imagined the immaterial being, whom by their own admission one cannot see, were equally obliged to end these questions there: who produced him? and to answer, he exists without any cause other than his own nature. This is precisely what the ancients said of the universe (2); it is because it is; and it would not be if it had not always been. Whatever system one adopts, one must always be content with this answer; it is a necessary truth, with which our mind accommodates itself with difficulty, and which it is forced to receive. One feels that it would be to delay the difficulty, and not to solve it, to seek the cause of the cause, and

Footnotes at bottom of page 2
(1) Chapter 1, Section 6.
(2) Ocellus, Chapter 1, Section 2.

that eternity of existence could at least as much belong to what one always saw existing, as to an abstract being, imagined solely to explain this perpetuity as inexplicable in him as it was in Nature. Nature was therefore, and had to be, the limit of the research of the first men on divinity, or on the first universal cause, until the world of

The UNIVERSALITY of the worship rendered to Nature, to its parts and to the principal agents of the universal cause, is supported by the most authentic monuments of the history of all the peoples of the world.

One reads in the Pentateuch of the Jews, a work whose antiquity is praised, an exhortation by their legislator, by which he warns his people against the worship rendered to Nature among all other nations; this man, raised in the school of some spiritualist, wanting to propagate the doctrine of the metaphysicians, and to make it the basis of the religion of his little horde, reminds them of the conversations he had with the invisible, and the prestige of the whirlwinds of flame and smoke that he imagined, to invest himself in some way with divinity, and to speak in its name. (1) "Re-

spirits and intelligences, placed outside the limits of Nature, had been created by the metaphysicians. These subtleties of a few thinkers never made more than a slight exception to the general opinion on nature which remained in possession of its divinity, and held almost all mortals attached to its worship, just as it held them chained under its laws.

CHAPTER II.

WORSHIP OF NATURE PROVED BY HISTORY.

member, he says, that you
saw no figure, nor any
resemblance, on the day that the lord
spoke to you at Horeb in the midst of the fire,
for fear that being seduced, you might
make some image, some figure;
(2) or that raising your eyes to heaven, and
seeing there the sun, the moon, and all
the stars, you might fall into illu-
sion and into error, and that you
might render a cult of adoration to
creatures that the lord your
God made for the service of all
the nations that are under heaven.

Although this Pentateuch is for the most part only a collection of tales, of the genre of Arabian tales; however, one sees there that the author, whoever he may be, was a spiritualist, and that he only calls his people back to the worship of the invisible cause because all the peoples in the midst of whom he lived adored the world and its most brilliant and active parts. He had to defend them against the seduction of the imposing spectacle of the Universe, and against that of the example of the most civilized nations of the East, who had no other worship; without that, this defense would appear quite useless; and despite this precaution, the imperious force of example, and that of the action of all the senses, always brought the Jew back to the feet of the images and altars of Nature: So great is her empire over man, so much metaphysical abstractions will always have difficulty destroying the testimony of the senses. It is against this worship so natural to men that the spiritualists and the pretended inspired of the Judaic sect

Footnotes at bottom of page 3
(1) Deuteronomy, Chapter 4, verse 15, etc.
(2) Verse 19.