Since then, religion is identical with myth, and since myth is not distinguishable from philosophy by any positive character, but only as false philosophy from true philosophy and as error from the truth which rectifies and contains it, we must affirm that religion, in so far as it is truth, is identical with philosophy, or as can also be said, _that philosophy_ is the _true religion._ All ancient and modern thought about religions, which have always been dissolved in philosophies, leads to this result. And since philosophy coincides with history, and religion and the history of religion are the same, and myth and religion are strictly speaking indistinguishable, we can see very well the vanity of the attempt that is being made beneath our eyes to preserve a religion or mythological truth side by side with a history of religions, which on the contrary is supposed to be practised with complete mental freedom and with an entirely critical method. This, which is one of the tendencies of so-called _modernism,_ is condemned as contradictory and illogical, by philosophy not less than by the Catholic Church.[1] The history of religions is an integral part of the history of philosophy, and as inseparable from it as error from the history of truth. [Sidenote: _Conversion of errors into one another. Conversion of mythologism into philosophism (theology) and of philosophism into mythologism (mythology of nature, historical apocalypses, etc.)._] When religion does not dissolve into philosophy and wishes to persist together with it, or to substitute itself for philosophy, it reveals itself as effective error; that is to say, as an arbitrary attempt against truth, due to habit, feelings and individual passions. But the destiny of every form of error is to be unable to persist before the light of truth. Hence the constant change of tactics and the passage of every error into the error from which it had at first wished to disassociate itself, or into which it did not mean to fall. Thus æstheticism, dislodged from its positions, takes refuge in those of empiricism; and empiricism either descends again into pure sensationalism and æstheticism, or becomes volatilized in mysticism. Thus (to stop at the case we have before us) mythologism, which intends to be the opposite of philosophism and to work with blind fancy instead of with empty concepts, is obliged in order to save itself from the attacks of criticism to have recourse to philosophism; and religion is then called _theology._ Theology is philosophism, because it works with concepts which are empty of all historical and empirical content. Myth becomes _dogma_; the myth of the expulsion from Paradise becomes the dogma of original sin; the myth of the son of God becomes the dogma of the incarnation and of the Trinity. Nor must it be thought that for its part philosophism does not accomplish the opposite transition. Every philosophy of nature ends by appearing as a _mythology of nature,_