This phenomenon of
the collective reason,--a sort of mirage in which humanity,
contemplating itself, takes itself for an external and
transcendent being who considers its destinies and presides over
them,--this illusion of the conscience, we say, has been analyzed
and explained; and henceforth to reproduce the theological
hypothesis is to take a step backward in science. We must
confine ourselves strictly to society, to man. GOD in religion,
the STATE in politics, PROPERTY in economy, such is the triple
form under which humanity, become foreign to itself, has not
ceased to rend itself with its own hands, and which today it must
reject.
I admit that every affirmation or hypothesis of Divinity proceeds
from anthropomorphism, and that God in the first place is only
the ideal, or rather, the spectre of man. I admit further that
the idea of God is the type and foundation of the principle of
authority and absolutism, which it is our task to destroy or at
least to subordinate wherever it manifests itself, in science,
industry, public affairs.
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