It subsists, I say, this hypothesis, more tenacious, more
pitiless than ever. We have reached one of those prophetic
epochs when society, scornful of the past and doubtful of the
future, now distractedly clings to the present, leaving a few
solitary thinkers to establish the new faith; now cries to God
from the depths of its enjoyments and asks for a sign of
salvation, or seeks in the spectacle of its revolutions, as in
the entrails of a victim, the secret of its destiny.

Why need I insist further? The hypothesis of God is allowable,
for it forces itself upon every man in spite of himself: no one,
then, can take exception to it. He who believes can do no less
than grant me the supposition that God exists; he who denies is
forced to grant it to me also, since he entertained it before
me, every negation implying a previous affirmation; as for him
who is in doubt, he needs but to reflect a moment to understand
that his doubt necessarily supposes an unknown something, which,
sooner or later, he will call God.

But if I possess, through the fact of my thought, the right to
SUPPOSE God, I must abandon the right to AFFIRM him. In other
words, if my hypothesis is irresistible, that, for the present,
is all that I can pretend. For to affirm is to determine; now,
every determination, to be true, must be reached empirically. In
fact, whoever says determination, says relation, conditionality,
experience. Since, then, the determination of the idea of God
must result from an empirical demonstration, we must abstain from
everything which, in the search for this great unknown, not being
established by experience, goes beyond the hypothesis, under
penalty of relapsing into the contradictions of theology, and