conscience; it intimidates them, perhaps; it does not soften them. So recompense is only an additional attraction, added to all the others. As, properly speaking, there is no merit, recompense is simply an advantage that one desires, that is striven for and obtained without attaching to it any moral idea. Thus is degraded and effaced the great institution, natural and divine, of the recompense of virtue by happiness, and of reparation for a fault by proportionate suffering.[197] We may then draw the conclusion, without fear of its being contradicted either by analysis or dialectics, that the doctrine of interest is incompatible with the most certain facts, with the strongest convictions of humanity. Let us add, that this doctrine is not less incompatible with the hope of another world, where the principle of justice will be better realized than in this. I will not seek whether the sensualistic metaphysics can arrive at an infinite being, author of the universe and man. I am well persuaded that it cannot. For every proof of the existence of God supposes in the human mind principles of which sensation renders no account,--for example, the universal and necessary principle of causality, without which I should have no need of seeking, no power of finding the cause of whatever exists.[198] All that I wish to establish here is, that in the system of interest, man, not possessing any truly moral attribute, has no right to put in God that of which he finds no trace either in the world or in himself. The God of the ethics of interest must be analogous to the man of these same ethics. How could they attribute to him the justice and the love--I mean disinterested love--of which they cannot have the least idea? The God that they can admit loves himself, and loves only himself. And reciprocally, not considering him as the supreme principle of charity and justice, we can neither love nor honor him, and the only worship that we can render him, is that of the fear with which his omnipotence inspires us.