a more or less personal sentiment and spontaneous outburst of emotion for a faith in authority, have always played the rôle in history of unconscious heretics. Sentimental epochs are epochs of inaction, of concentration upon one’s self, of comparative independence of thought. On the contrary, there presided nothing sentimental or meditative at the origin of religion, there was a stampede simply of a multitude of souls in mortal terror or hope, and no such thing as independence of thought; it is less of sentiment properly so-called, than of sensation and of action, that religions have been born. Primitive religion was not a means of escape out of this world, a port-hole into the blue; the earliest gods were not in the least ethereal, they were possessed of solid muscles, of arms capable of dealing blows. To explain the origin of primitive beliefs by a nascent idealism, is to explain them by their precise opposite. One becomes an idealist when one is on the point of ceasing to believe; after having rejected a multitude of alleged realities one consoles one’s self by adoring, for a time, the figments of one’s own imagination; the spirit of early times is much more positive, as the Comtists say. A preoccupation with the infinite, a divine vertigo, a sentiment of the abysses of life, are wanting to man in early times. The modern mind with its intenser vision now and again perceives in nature an endless perspective down which we look with agony; we feel ourselves carried forward to the verge of a chasm; we are like navigators who, in the Antilles, under the intense light of the sun, can see the bottom and the depth of the sea and measure the gulf above which they hang suspended. But for less enlightened intelligences nature is opaque, vision is limited to the surface of things, and one floats upon the rhythm and pulse of the sea without asking what lies beneath. [Sidenote: A late phenomenon.]