Thus the human race has continued so long in a state of infancy, because
man has been inattentive to Nature; has neglected her ways, because he
has disdained experience--because he has thrown by his reason--because
he has been enraptured with the marvellous and the supernatural,--
because he has unnecessarily TREMBLED. These are the reasons there is so
much trouble in conducting him from this state of childhood to that of
manhood. He has had nothing but the most trifling hypotheses, of which
he has never dared to examine either the principles or the proofs,
because he has been accustomed to hold them sacred, to consider them as
the most perfect truths, and which he is not permitted to doubt, even
for an instant. His ignorance made him credulous; his curiosity made him
swallow the wonderful: time confirmed him in his opinions, and he passed
his conjectures from race to race for realities; a tyrannical power
maintained him in his notions, because by those alone could society be
enslaved. It was in vain that some faint glimmerings of Nature
occasionally attempted the recall of his reason--that slight
corruscations of experience sometimes threw his darkness into light, the
interest of the few was founded on his enthusiasm; their pre-eminence
depended on his love of the marvellous; their very existence rested on
the firmness of his ignorance; they consequently suffered no opportunity
to escape, of smothering even the transient flame of intelligence. The
many were thus first deceived into credulity, then forced into
submission. At length the whole science of man became a confused mass of
darkness, falsehood, and contradictions, with here and there a feeble
ray of truth, furnished by that Nature, of which he can never entirely
divest himself; because, without his perception, his necessities are
continually bringing him back to her resources.

Let us then, if possible, raise ourselves above these clouds of