We are informed, that the savages, in order to flatten the heads of
their children, squeeze them between two boards, by that means
preventing them from taking the shape designed for them by Nature. It is
pretty nearly the same thing with the institutions of man; they commonly
conspire to counteract Nature, to constrain and divert, to extinguish
the impulse Nature has given him, to substitute others which are the
source of all his misfortunes. In almost all the countries of the earth,
man is bereft of truth, is fed with falsehoods, and amused with
marvellous chimeras: he is treated like those children whose members
are, by the imprudent care of their nurses, swathed with little fillets,
bound up with rollers, which deprive them of the free use of their
limbs, obstruct their growth, prevent their activity, and oppose
themselves to their health.

Most of the superstitious opinions of man have for their object only to
display to him his supreme felicity in those illusions for which they
kindle his passions: but as the phantoms which are presented to his
imagination are incapable of being considered in the same light by all
who contemplate them, he is perpetually in dispute concerning these
objects; he hates his fellow, he persecutes his neighbour, his neighbour
in turn persecutes him, and he believes that in doing this he is doing
well: that in committing the greatest crimes to sustain his opinions he
is acting right. It is thus superstition infatuates man from his
infancy, fills him with vanity, and enslaves him with fanaticism: if he
has a heated imagination, it drives him on to fury; if he has activity,
it makes him a madman, who is frequently as cruel himself, as he is
dangerous to his fellow-creatures, as he is incommodious to others: if,
on the contrary, he be phlegmatic, and of a slothful habit, he becomes
melancholy and useless to society.