Humanitarian atheism is, therefore, the last step in the moral
and intellectual enfranchisement of man, consequently the last
phase of philosophy, serving as a pathway to the scientific
reconstruction and verification of all the demolished dogmas.
I need the hypothesis of God, not only, as I have just said, to
give a meaning to history, but also to legitimate the reforms to
be effected, in the name of science, in the State.
Whether we consider Divinity as outside of society, whose
movements it governs from on high (a wholly gratuitous and
probably illusory opinion); or whether we deem it immanent in
society and identical with that impersonal and unconscious reason
which, acting instinctively, makes civilization advance (although
impersonality and ignorance of self are contrary to the idea of
intelligence); or whether, finally, all that is accomplished in
society results from the relation of its elements (a system whose
whole merit consists in changing an active into a passive, in
making intelligence necessity, or, which amounts to the same
thing, in taking law for cause),--it always follows that the
manifestations of social activity, necessarily appearing to us
either as indications of the will of the Supreme Being, or as a
sort of language typical of general and impersonal reason, or,
finally, as landmarks of necessity, are absolute authority for
us.
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