Notice further that, in attributing to the vague and (so to
speak) objectified consciousness of a universal reason the first
revelation of Divinity, we assume absolutely nothing concerning
even the reality or non-reality of God. In fact, admitting that
God is nothing more than collective instinct or universal reason,
we have still to learn what this universal reason is in itself.
For, as we shall show directly, universal reason is not given in
individual reason, in other words, the knowledge of social
laws, or the theory of collective ideas, though deduced from the
fundamental concepts of pure reason, is nevertheless wholly
empirical, and never would have been discovered a priori by means
of deduction, induction, or synthesis. Whence it follows that
universal reason, which we regard as the origin of these laws;
universal reason, which exists, reasons, labors, in a separate
sphere and as a reality distinct from pure reason, just as the
planetary system, though created according to the laws of
mathematics, is a reality distinct from mathematics, whose
existence could not have been deduced from mathematics alone: it
follows, I say, that universal reason is, in modern languages,
exactly what the ancients called God. The name is changed: what
do we know of the thing?

Let us now trace the evolution of the Divine idea.

The Supreme Being once posited by a primary mystical judgment,
man immediately generalizes the subject by another
mysticism,--analogy. God, so to speak, is as yet but a point:
directly he shall fill the world.