that all their pretended science was limited to saying, in what manner
nature acted, by a thousand subterfuges which they themselves found it
impossible to comprehend. Man always deceives himself for want of
studying nature; he leads himself astray, every time he is disposed to
go out of it; he is always quickly necessitated to return; he is even in
error when he substitutes words which he does not himself understand,
for things which he would much better comprehend if he was willing to
look at them without prejudice.

Can a theologian ingenuously believe himself more enlightened, for
having substituted the vague words spirit, incorporeal substance, &c. to
the more intelligible terms nature, matter, mobility, necessity? However
this may be, these obscure words once imagined, it was necessary to
attach ideas to them; in doing this, he has not been able to draw them
from any other source than the beings of this despised nature, which are
ever the only beings of which he is enabled to have any knowledge. Man,
consequently, drew them up in himself; his own soul served for the model
of the universal soul, of which indeed according to some it only formed
a portion; his own mind was the standard of the mind that regulated
nature; his own passions, his own desires, were the prototypes of those
by which he actuated this being; his own intelligence was that from
which he formed that of the mover of nature; that which was suitable to
himself, he called the order of nature; this pretended order was the
scale by which he measured the wisdom of this being; in short, those
qualities which he calls perfections in himself, were the archetypes in
miniature, of the perfections of the being, he thus gratuitously
supposed to be the agent, who operated the phenomena of nature. It was
thus, that in despite of all their efforts, the theologians were,
perhaps always will be, true Anthropomorphites. A sect of this
denomination appeared in 359, in Egypt, they held the doctrine that