II.


It seems, then, that all is ended; it seems that, with the
cessation of the worship and mystification of humanity by itself,
the theological problem is for ever put aside. The gods have
gone: there is nothing left for man but to grow weary and die in
his egoism. What frightful solitude extends around me, and
forces its way to the bottom of my soul! My exaltation resembles
annihilation; and, since I made myself a God, I seem but a
shadow. It is possible that I am still a ME, but it is very
difficult to regard myself as the absolute; and, if I am not the
absolute, I am only half of an idea.

Some ironical thinker, I know not who, has said: "A little
philosophy leads away from religion, and much philosophy leads
back to it." This proposition is humiliatingly true.

Every science develops in three successive periods, which may be
called--comparing them with the grand periods of
civilization--the religious period, the sophistical period, the
scientific period.[3] Thus, alchemy represents the religious
period of the science afterwards called chemistry, whose
definitive plan is not yet discovered; likewise astrology was the
religious period of another science, since
established,--astronomy.