manitou. For thirty centuries the poets, legislators, and sages
of civilization, handing down from age to age the philosophic
lamp, have written nothing more sublime than this profession of
faith. And here, at the end of this long conspiracy against God,
which has called itself philosophy, emancipated reason concludes
with savage reason, The universe is a NOT-ME, objectified by a
ME.

Humanity, then, inevitably supposes the existence of God: and if,
during the long period which closes with our time, it has
believed in the reality of its hypothesis; if it has worshipped
the inconceivable object; if, after being apprehended in this act
of faith, it persists knowingly, but no longer voluntarily, in
this opinion of a sovereign being which it knows to be only a
personification of its own thought; if it is on the point of
again beginning its magic invocations,--we must believe that so
astonishing an hallucination conceals some mystery, which
deserves to be fathomed.

I say hallucination and mystery, but without intending to deny
thereby the superhuman content of the God-idea, and without
admitting the necessity of a new symbolism,--I mean a new
religion. For if it is indisputable that humanity, in affirming
God,--or all that is included in the word me or spirit,--only
affirms itself, it is equally undeniable that it affirms itself
as something other than its own conception of itself, as all
mythologies and theologies show. And since, moreover, this
affirmation is incontestable, it depends, without doubt, upon
hidden relations, which ought, if possible, to be determined
scientifically.