These two works of Kant’s, the _Critique of Pure Reason_ and the _Critique of Practical Reason_ appear to emanate from two different pens; in the first, whatever is asserted is proved. The second work is dictated by a personal experience; Kant affirms that thus it is and that it cannot be otherwise. But here again I perceive a lack, a want, if not from the believer’s point of view, yet from that of those people who ask what could be the religion of our primitive ancestors; personal experience is not expressed as Kant expresses it, unless it is the result of a long series of meditations and examinations of conscience; in a word, experiences which have been transmitted from generation to generation. This is a religion that has achieved much, it is not that form of it which would be found amongst the generality of men, and still less would it spring to life in the heart of primitive man. But here are two positivist philosophers who undertake to solve this great problem: they consider reason as ready with a reply to those who seek to know the meaning of God and of religion, two concepts which are inseparable, the one from the other; and even ready to explain how these two concepts have penetrated into the consciousness of all human beings. These philosophers speak no doubt from experience, for having questioned their reason it has replied to them: God and religion form one conception. The first explanation is--man is conscious of his condition; he is possessed with the desire of happiness, and is unable to realise it; but his imagination represents to him another state in which the desire of happiness will exist and in which there will be no obstacle to its realisation; the first of these states is real, the other visible to the mind’s eye; they are therefore not identical; to will and not to have the power is to be man; to will and to be omnipotent is to be God. Little by little man understands that these two states of conditions having been conceived by the same mind, have the same origin; the notion fixes itself firmly in his mind that the two states seem gradually to approach each other, and are not always distinguishable; the union of desire and power is the Divine essence; the growing consciousness of this union is religion, which dawns and increases in man. Man does not desire immortality because he believes in it, nor because it is demonstrable; but he believes in it and demonstrates its existence because he desires it. The sentence, “God sees all,” does not mean, so we are told, what it appears to mean; it expresses the feeling God knows all of which man is ignorant, but which he fain would know; and the sentence, “God is beneficence,” is the cry of man who desires happiness. All the predicates applied by man to the Deity in the course of history and humanity have never, in the opinion of philosophers, had any other origin than the representation of our wishes.