"Thus the ideas of God and religion sprung, like all others, from physical objects, and were in the understanding of man, the products of his sensations, his wants, the circumstances of his life, and the progressive state of his knowledge. "As these ideas had natural beings for their first models, it resulted from hence that the divinity was originally as various and manifold as the forms under which he seemed to act: each being was a power, a genius, and the first men found the universe crowded with innumerable Gods. "In like manner the ideas of the divinity having had for motors the affections of the human heart, they underwent an order of division calculated from the sensations of pain: and pleasure, of love and hatred: the powers of nature, the Gods, the genii, were classed into benign and maleficent, into good and evil ones: and this constitutes the universality of these two ideas in every system of religion. "These ideas, analogous to the condition of their inventors, were for a long time confused and cross. Wandering in woods, beset with wants, destitute of resources, men in their savage state had no leisure to make comparisons and draw conclusions. Suffering more ills than they tasted enjoyments, their most habitual sentiment was fear, their theology terror, their worship was confined to certain modes of salutation, of offerings which they presented to beings whom they supposed to be ferocious and greedy like themselves. In their state of equality and independence, no one took upon him the office of mediator with Gods as insubordinate and poor as himself. No one having any superfluity to dispose of, there existed no parasite under the name of priest, nor tribute under the name of victim, nor empire under the name of altar; their dogmas and morality, jumbled together, were only self-preservation; and their religion, an arbitrary idea without influence on the mutual relations existing between men, was but a vain homage paid to the visible powers of nature. "Such was the first and necessary origin of every idea of the divinity...." "In reality, when the vulgar heard others talk of a new heaven and another world, they gave a body to these fictions; they erected on it a solid stage and real scenes; and their notions of geography and astronomy served to strengthen, if they did not give rise to the delusion.