dare stray far from the paternal roof; he does not possess the courage to walk alone. The child who should show a precocious independence, and should early learn to go its own road, would not improbably become simply dissipated; his precocity might well be depravity in disguise. Similarly in history, the irreligious, the sceptics, the atheists, have been frequently spoiled children, precocious in the bad sense; their freedom of spirit was only a high form of mischief. The human race, like the individual, long needed surveillance and tutelage; so long as it experienced this need it leaned inevitably upon a belief in a providence external to itself and to the universe, capable of interfering in the course of things, and of modifying the general laws of nature by particular acts of volition. Subsequently, by the progress of science, Providence has been deprived day by day of some of its special and miraculous powers, of its supernatural prerogatives. By the evolution of human thought piety has been transformed; it tends to-day to regard as an object of filial affection what was formerly an object of terror, of deprecation, of propitiation. Science, enveloping Providence in a network of inflexible laws, is day by day reducing it to a state of immobility and, so to speak, paralyzing it. Providence is becoming like an old man whom age has rendered incapable of movement—who but for our aid could not raise a hand or foot, who lives with our assistance, and who, nevertheless, is only the more beloved, as if his existence became to us more precious in proportion to its uselessness. _III. Creation._ [Sidenote: Conception of creation dualistic.] After the notion of Providence one must deal, in running through the metaphysical principles of religion, with the notion of a creator, which has acquired in our days an importance that it did not possess formerly. This conception, like that of the soul and of a special providence, presented itself originally under the form of dualism. Man conceived in the beginning a god as fashioning a world more or less independent of himself, out of some pre-existing material. It was only later that this crude dualism was refined into the notion of creation _ex nihilo_, which represented the traditional duality as produced by a primitive unity—God, who had at first existed alone, created out of nothing a world distinct and separate from himself. [Sidenote: Conception of creation natural.]