Sur cent premiers peuples celebres, J'ai plonge cent peuples fameux, Dans un abime de tenebres Ou vous disparaitrez comme eux. J'ai couvert d'une ombre eternelle Des astres eteints dans leur cours. --Ah! par pitie, lui dit ma belle, Vieillard, epargnez nos amours! [129] _Esprit des Lois_, Bk. I. chap. 1. [130] _Lecons sur l'homme_, by Carl Vogt (lectures delivered during the winter of 1862-1863, at Neuchatel and at Chaux-de-Fonds), 1 vol. 8vo. Paris, 1865.--_L'Homme et le Singe_, by Frederic de Rougemont, pamphlet, 12mo. Neuchatel, 1863. LECTURE V. _HUMANITY._ (At Geneva, 1st. Dec., 1863.) GENTLEMEN, Man has need of God. If he be not fallen into the most abject degradation, he does not succeed in extinguishing the instinct which leads him to inquire after his Creator. A false wisdom labors to still the cravings which the truth alone can satisfy; but false wisdom remains powerless, and betrays itself continually by some outrageous contradiction. Here is a curious example of this: In a book which was famous in the last century, and which was called the gospel of atheism,[131] the Baron d'Holbach explains as follows the existence of the universe: "The universe, that vast assemblage of all that exists, everywhere presents to our view only matter and motion.--Nature is the grand whole which results from the assemblage of different material substances, from their different combinations, and from the different motions which we see in the universe."[132] Here is a clear doctrine: all that exists, the soul included, is nothing but matter in motion. I pass from the beginning to the end of the work, and I arrive at this conclusion: "O nature! sovereign of all beings! and ye, her adorable daughters, virtue, reason, truth! be ye for ever our sole divinities; to you it is that the incense and the homage of the earth are due."[133] If we try to translate this sort of hymn in accordance with the express definitions of the author, we shall obtain the following result: "O matter in motion! sovereign of all material substances in motion! and ye, virtue, reason, truth, who are various names of matter which moves, be ye the only divinities of that moving matter which is ourselves." Yet this author was no blockhead. What then passed in his mind? He laid down the thesis of materialism: bodies in motion are the only reality. But he is all the while a man. The need for adoration is not destroyed in his soul, and he deceives himself. He defines nature as consisting wholly of matter, and when he sets himself to worship it, he entirely forgets his definition. This is not on his part a piece of philosophical jugglery, but the manifestation of the real condition of our nature, which is always giving the lie, in one direction or another, to erroneous systems. The power of wholly maintaining himself in error has not been granted to man. He who denies