God admitted that Satan was right; he recognized that the devil did not deceive Adam and Eve in promising them knowledge and liberty as a reward for the act of disobedience which he had induced them to commit; for, immediately they had eaten of the forbidden fruit, God himself said (see Bible): "Behold, the man is become as one of the gods, to know good and evil; prevent him, therefore, from eating of the fruit of eternal life, lest he become immortal like Ourselves." Let us disregard now the fabulous portion of this myth and consider its true meaning, which is very clear. Man has emancipated himself; he has separated himself from animality and constituted himself a man; he has begun his distinctively human history and development by an act of disobedience and science--that is, by _rebellion_ and by _thought_. * * * * * Three elements or, if you like, three fundamental principles constitute the essential conditions of all human development, collective or individual, in history: (1) _human animality_; (2) _thought_; and (3) _rebellion_. To the first properly corresponds _social and private economy_; to the second, _science_; to the third, _liberty_. * * * * * Idealists of all schools, aristocrats and _bourgeois_, theologians and metaphysicians, politicians and moralists, religionists, philosophers, or poets, not forgetting the liberal economists--unbounded worshippers of the ideal, as we know--are much offended when told that man, with his magnificent intelligence, his sublime ideas, and his boundless aspirations, is, like all else existing in the world, nothing but matter, only a product of _vile matter_.