precisely that they display no sufficient sentiment of our ignorance in the presence of the unknowable, that the window they have open upon the infinite is decidedly too contracted. If, as we have seen, religious physics tends little by little to transform itself into a metaphysics; if the gods have retreated from phenomenon to phenomenon, to the region of the supersensible; if heaven has separated itself from earth, positive religion nevertheless still lives in fear of throwing open to human thought a perspective really infinite. Its eyes are always fixed upon a more or less, determinate being, a creator, a unity in which the spirit may find repose and safety from the infinite. Religious metaphysics, like religious physics, has remained more or less anthropomorphic, and rests more or less on a foundation of miracle; a foundation, that is to say, which limits and suspends the exercise of intelligence. And as the object of adoration, in the majority of religions, is anything rather than the infinite, in the same way religious faith itself leads to a disposition to arrest the march of thought and impose upon it an immutable barrier; it leads to the negation of infinity and of the indefinite progress of human research. Stricken by an arrest of development the majority of positive religions settled once for all on the first formulæ that occurred to them; they erected them into the practical object of a cult and left the intangible infinite unmolested in outer vagueness. [17] Alfred Fouillée, _La liberté et le déterminisme, 2e partie_. [Sidenote: Conception of an all-embracing unity, also modern.]