Progressive reason resulting from the projection of eternal ideas
upon the movable and inclined plane of time, man can understand
the language of God, because he comes from God and his reason at
the start is like that of God; but God cannot understand us or
come to us, because he is infinite and cannot re-clothe himself
in finite attributes without ceasing to be God, without
destroying himself. The dogma of providence in God is shown to
be false, both in fact and in right.
It is easy now to see how the same reasoning turns against the
system of the deification of man.
Man necessarily positing God as absolute and infinite in his
attributes, whereas he himself develops in a direction the
inverse of this ideal, there is discord between the progress of
man and what man conceives as God. On the one hand, it appears
that man, by the syncretism of his constitution and the
perfectibility of his nature, is not God and cannot become God;
on the other, it is plain that God, the supreme Being, is the
antipode of humanity, the ontological summit from which it
indefinitely separates itself.
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