[7] “You are occupied with religion,” a cultivated unbeliever writes me. “There is then some such thing! So much the better for those who cannot do without it.” This witticism precisely sums up the state of mind of a great many enlightened Frenchmen: they are profoundly astonished that religion should still be on its legs, and out of their astonishment they draw the conviction that it is necessary. Their surprise thereupon becomes a respect, almost a reverence. Assuredly positive religions still exist and long will exist; and as long as they exist they will no doubt do so for reasons; but these reasons diminish day by day and the number of believers diminishes along with them. Instead of bowing down before the fact as before something sacred, one must rather say to one’s self that by modifying the fact one will modify and suppress the _raisons d’être_ of that fact; by driving religions before it, the modern mind demonstrates that they have less and less the right to live. That certain people have not as yet learned to do without them is true, and as long as they do not learn to do without them religions will for them exist; we have not the least anxiety on that score; and just in so far as they find their certitude in regard to them shaken, they will have proved that their intelligence is so far enfranchised as to have no further need of an arbitrary rule. Similarly for peoples: nothing is more naïve than to urge the very necessity of transitions as a bar to progress: it is as if one should call attention to the shortness of human steps, and conclude therefrom that movement is impossible; that man stands still like a shell-fish attached to a stone or a fossil buried in a rock. One of the masters of religious criticism, M. Renan, wrote to Sainte-Beuve: “No, assuredly I did not wish to detach from the old trunk a soul which was not ripe.” We, also, are not of those who believe in shaking the tree and gathering a green and bruised crop; but if one ought not to make the green fruit fall, one may at least take means to hasten its ripening upon the branch. The human brain is a transmutation of solar heat; one must dissipate this heat, to become once more a ray of the sun. Such an ambition is very gentle, is not at all exorbitant, when one remembers how small a thing a ray of the sun is and how lost in infinite space; a relatively small portion of these wandering rays, however, has sufficed to fashion the earth and all mankind.