As to this “suffering from the invisible” of which Max Müller speaks, it is an altogether modern disease, which, instead of giving rise to the idea of the infinite, is, on the contrary, a late product of this notion which was itself acquired by force of knowledge and of reasoning; far from marking the point from which religions spring, the “suffering from the unknown” stamps their insufficiency, is the beginning of their end. Primitive man troubles himself little about the infinity of nature and the eternal silence of infinite space; he constructs a world after the model of his own houses and shuts himself safely up in it. It is only the visible world that troubles him; he finds in it an object more than sufficient for his utmost physical and intellectual activity; he does not go far afield in search of his gods; he finds them, so to speak, under his hand, touches them with his finger, lives in their company. The essence of their power over him lies in the fact that they are neighbours of his. To his gross intelligence the greatness of the gods is not commensurate with their intrinsic infinity, but with their power over him; if heaven neither lighted him nor warmed him with its sun, it would not be the universal father, the Dyaush-pitâ, the Ζεύς, the Jupiter. We do not mean to say with Feuerbach that religion strikes root in gross self-interest and brutal egoism simply; in his relations with the gods, as in his relations with his fellows, man is partly selfish, partly unselfish: what we maintain is that primitive man is not an advanced rationalist of the type of Max Müller, that the conception of infinity was attained independently of religious faith, and, more than that, is in conflict with religious faith and will ultimately destroy it. When in the progress of human thought the universe is once conceived as infinite, it overpasses the gods and unseats them. This happened in Greece at the time of Democritus and Epicurus. Positive religion demands a finite world: primitive people did not rear temples to the Infinite in the hopes of domesticating Him. Max Müller pronounces a eulogy upon the Hindus for their adevism; was it really to their conception of the infinite that they owed their wisdom, and might not the idea of infinity alone have quite as well led them to atheism? When one learns to contemplate the world as an eternally lengthening chain of phenomena, one no longer hopes, by a futile prayer, to stop or to modify the march of such inflexible determinism; one contents one’s self with investigating it by science or entering into it in some field of action. Religion disappears in science or morality. There remains, it is true, a final hypothesis that one may maintain: one may apotheosize the infinite, make over to it, after the manner of the Brahmans, of the ancient and modern Buddhists, of the Schopenhauers and the Hartmanns, a donation of some mysterious unity of essence;