This is not a correct understanding, cry the humanists. To have
the right ideal of humanity, it must be considered, not in its
historic development, but in the totality of its manifestations,
as if all human generations, gathered into one moment, formed a
single man, an infinite and immortal man.
That is to say, they abandon the reality to seize a projection;
the true man is not the real man; to find the veritable man, the
human ideal, we must leave time and enter eternity,--what do I
say?--desert the finite for infinity, man for God! Humanity, in
the shape we know it, in the shape in which it is developed, in
the only shape in fact in which it can exist, is erect; they show
us its reversed image, as in a mirror, and then say to us: That
is man! And I answer: It is no longer man, it is God. Humanism
is the most perfect theism.
What, then, is this providence which the theists suppose in God?
An essentially human faculty, an anthropomorphic attribute, by
which God is thought to look into the future according to the
progress of events, in the same way that we men look into
the past, following the perspective of chronology and history.
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