time they are pronounced, can successively complete and throw
light on each other, in proportion to the acquisition of ideas,
in such a way as to maintain continual harmony between universal
reason and individual speculation, and indefinitely extend the
sphere of certainty: which is always an affirmation of the
authority of human judgments.

Now, the first judgment of the reason, the preamble of every
political constitution seeking a sanction and a principle, is
necessarily this: THERE IS A GOD; which means that society is
governed with design, premeditation, intelligence. This
judgment, which excludes chance, is, then, the foundation of the
possibility of a social science; and every historical and
positive study of social facts, undertaken with a view to
amelioration and progress, must suppose, with the people, the
existence of God, reserving the right to account for this
judgment at a later period.

Thus the history of society is to us but a long determination of
the idea of God, a progressive revelation of the destiny of man.
And while ancient wisdom made all depend on the arbitrary and
fanciful notion of Divinity, oppressing reason and conscience,
and arresting progress through fear of an invisible master,
the new philosophy, reversing the method, trampling on the
authority of God as well as that of man, and accepting no other
yoke than that of fact and evidence, makes all converge toward
the theological hypothesis, as toward the last of its problems.

Humanitarian atheism is, therefore, the last step in the moral
and intellectual enfranchisement of man, consequently the last