Sections 1 Who are right, the idealists or the materialists? 2 We know what followed. 3 God admitted that Satan was right; he recognized that the devil did not deceive Adam and Eve… 4 At the end of this book I exposed the fallacies and truly revolting absurdities to which one… 5 Very far from pursuing the natural order from the lower to the higher, from the inferior to… 6 Nothing is more natural than that the belief in God, the creator, regulator, judge, master,… 7 "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." 8 This imposing unanimity, in the eyes of many illustrious men and writers to quote only the… 9 This law is a logical, inevitable consequence of the animal origin of human society; for in… 10 Until we shall account to ourselves for the manner in which the idea of a supernatural or… 11 All religions, with their gods, their demigods, and their prophets, their messiahs and their… 12 With all due respect, then, to the metaphysicians and religious idealists, philosophers,… 13 The God whom they adore, or whom they think they adore, is distinguished from the real gods… 14 A jealous lover of human liberty, and deeming it the absolute condition of all that we… 15 The great misfortune is that a large number of natural laws, already established as such by… 16 But there is still a third reason which would render such a government impossible—namely… 17 Does it follow that I reject all authority? 18 This same reason forbids me, then, to recognize a fixed, constant, and universal authority,… 19 But, while rejecting the absolute, universal, and infallible authority of men of science, we… 20 Such, in few words, is their whole philosophy: a philosophy of sentiments, not of real… 21 But here we are again fallen back under the yoke of Church and State. 22 Compare the last two civilizations of the ancient world—the Greek and the Roman. 23 Italy has already rendered immense services to the cause of human emancipation. 24 To show how theoretical idealism incessantly and inevitably changes into practical… 25 We have a new proof of this in what we see to-day. 26 And if the truth were just the opposite! 27 The fall is so terrible that divinity, the divine person or idea, is flattened out, loses… 28 Here then we have Divinity torn up and lodged, in infinitely small particles, in an immense… 29 Then we have reached at last the manifestation of God upon earth. 30 Of all despotisms that of the doctrinaires or inspired religionists is the worst. 31 Upon this nature are based the indisputable rights and grand mission of science, but also… 32 In their existing organization, monopolizing science and remaining thus outside of social… 33 Science knows all these things, but it does not and cannot go beyond them. 34 What I preach then is, to a certain extent, the revolt of life against science, or rather… 35 The immense advantage of positive science over theology, metaphysics, politics, and judicial… 36 Shall we blame the science of history? 37 But until the masses shall have reached this degree of instruction, will it be necessary to… 38 It is at the same time the triumph of the ugliest and most brutal materialism. 39 The explanation of this belief, moreover, is rational enough. 40 In every development, just or false, real or imaginary, collective or individual, it is… 41 We have seen how much this transition cost the Jewish people, constituting, so to speak, its… 42 As for the second condition, the spiritualization of Jehovah, that was realized by the… 43 "Metaphysics are reduced to psychology." 44 Before the altar of a unique and supreme God was raised on the ruins of the numerous altars… 45 We know almost nothing of this great and saintly personage, all that the gospels tell us… 46 That abstraction, that caput mortuum, absolutely void of all contents, the true nothing,… 47 It was very fortunate for Christianity that it met a world of slaves. 48 The first is the perfect type of narrowness and suspicious meanness, of exaltation without… 49 From the Renaissance and the Reformation down to the Revolution, the bourgeoisie, if not in… 50 The revolution of July resulted in lifting its tastes. 51 The only way, on the contrary, harmful only to the people, precious in its salvation of… 52 There was still one way left—to return to the humanitarian and revolutionary religion of the…
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