Such is not my view of the meaning of the religious fables.
Humanity, in recognizing God as its author, its master, its alter
ego, has simply determined its own essence by an antithesis,--an
eclectic essence, full of contrasts, emanated from the infinite
and contradictory of the infinite, developed in time and aspiring
to eternity, and for all these reasons fallible, although guided
by the sentiment of beauty and order. Humanity is the daughter
of God, as every opposition is the daughter of a previous
position: that is why humanity has formed God like itself, has
lent him its own attributes, but always by giving them a specific
character,--that is, by defining God in contradiction of itself.
Humanity is a spectre to God, just as God is a spectre to
humanity; each of the two is the other's cause, reason, and end
of existence.
It was not enough, then, to have demonstrated, by criticism
of religious ideas, that the conception of the divine me leads
back to the perception of the human me; it was also necessary to
verify this deduction by a criticism of humanity itself, and to
see whether this humanity satisfies the conditions that its
apparent divinity supposes.
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