Then I understood that all the stars which have ever been observed in the sky, the millions of luminous points which constitute the Milky Way, the innumerable celestial bodies, suns of every magnitude and of every degree of brightness, solar systems, planets, and satellites, which by millions and hundreds of millions succeed each other in the void around us, that whatever human tongues have designated by the name of universe, do not in the infinite represent more than an archipelago of celestial islands and not more than a city in the grand total of population, a town of greater or lesser importance. In this city of the limitless empire, in this town of a land without frontiers, our Sun and its system represent a single point, a single house among millions of other habitations. Is our solar system a palace or a hovel in this great city? Probably a hovel. And the Earth? The Earth is a room in the solar mansion--a small dwelling, miserably small. Thus in the general economy of nature our planet has no more importance than a poor little room in a considerable house. That house in turn is lost in the middle of an immense town. And that immense town, which to us represents the entire universe, is in fact nothing but a universe beyond which in every direction there exist other universes. How far is this reality from human pretensions, both ancient and modern, which imagine that our world represents the infinite, that God stops the Sun to illuminate one of Joshua’s battles--a miracle renewed, says history, for Charlemagne and Charles V--and that the great Sower of stars took upon himself a human shape to dwell among us! What simplicity among sincere theologians! What imposture among the chiefs of states who still dare to invest themselves with titles of divine mandatories to enslave the people! Are not the real atheists those either ignorant or insincere people who make the sublimest idea the accomplice of all their mediocrities, and are not the real Deists the independent searchers whose sole ambition is laboriously to look for the causes and gradually to work up to truth? With what strange religious systems has humanity up to now enveloped its barren imagination! The Israelite who believes he is agreeable to God in practising circumcision or in buying a new knife to be sure that it has not touched pig’s fat; the Christian who imagines he can make God descend upon a table and who is told by his preachers that prayers and fasts have an influence upon the weather and agriculture; the Mahommedan who sees the gate of Mahomet’s paradise opening before him as he stabs a missionary; the fanatic who casts himself under the wheels of the Juggernaut; the Buddhist who remains fascinated in the beatific contemplation of his navel, or works a prayer-mill for the remission of sins--these surely form the most ridiculous and infantile ideas of the unknown and unknowable Being.