...scattered over the entire surface of the Earth. The thread of Religious knowledge had been lost for many centuries; since it is found, let it serve us to bind together generations and peoples who seemed forgotten or even lost in the night of time, belonging only to the immense land of chimeras. I dedicate my work to the men of all countries and all centuries. I have cast the anchor of truth in the middle of the Ocean of time. If I have lived usefully for my fellow men, my destiny is fulfilled.

An allegorical engraving appears at the bottom of the preface. It depicts a bearded male figure with rays of light emanating from his head, seated before a pyramid. He represents Reason or a personification of Nature. To his left are symbols of the French Republic, including a fasces topped with a Phrygian cap and a shield inscribed with "The Law" and "French Republic." To his right lies a lion, and a banner reads "Liberty Equality."

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ORIGIN

OF ALL CULTS,

UNIVERSAL RELIGION.

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BOOK ONE.

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CHAPTER ONE.

THE UNIVERSE - GOD (1).

The name of God is a word void of meaning if it does not designate the universal cause and the active power that organizes all beings who have a beginning and an end; that is to say, the being who is the principle of everything, and who has no other principle than himself. Such is how Nature has always shown herself to men, who have judged what is by what they see and by what they feel. The nations we like to call savage have stayed there, and the greatest philosophers, fatigued by long and useless research, have been forced to return to it. After many centuries of philosophy, the Egyptians saw themselves constrained to engrave on one of the temples of Nature this famous inscription: (2) "I am everything that is, everything that has been, everything that will be, and no mortal has yet pierced the veil that covers me." (a) How many centuries it took for men to return to this; and how few are capable of receiving this sublime lesson! Ocellus of Lucania, a disciple of Pythagoras, who himself had been a disciple of the Egyptians, includes within Nature herself the

principle by which she exists and makes other beings she contains exist. From this he concludes that the Universe is unproduced and indestructible, which is one of the essential characters of the first cause. Nothing solid has yet been opposed to this conclusion; for we count for nothing the fictions of the Poets and the Platonists, and even less the testimony of a pretended revelation, given that one does not destroy a good argument with a fiction or an absurdity. The greatest naturalist of antiquity, Pliny, gives to the world all the characters of the first cause and of divinity. (3) "The world," says this scholar, "and what we call the sky, which in its vast contours embraces the other beings, must be regarded as a God, eternal, immense, unproduced, and indestructible. To seek other beings outside of him is a thing not only useless to man, but also above the forces of his mind; he is a sacred, immense, eternal being, who contains everything in himself..." original Latin: "Mundus, et hoc, quod nomine alio cœlum appellare libuit, cujus circumflexu degunt cætera, numen esse credi par est, æternum, immensum, neque genitum, neque interiturum unquam. Hujus extera indagare, nec interest hominum, nec capit humanæ conjectura mentis. Sacer est, æternus, immensus, totus in toto..."

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(1) The Author is here the Historian of the opinions of Antiquity.
(2) On Isis and Osiris, page 354. original: "De Iside, p. 354."
(3) Pliny, Natural History, book 2, chapter 1. original: "Pline, Hist. Nat., l. 2. c. 1."