With these acts of self-control, with freedom, morality comes into existence: the fear of God has laid the foundations of human life. Altars arise all over the earth: the caves of her mountains, whither the man now bears the woman, ashamed as he is of gratifying his desires before the face of the sky, which is the face of God, preside at the first marriage-rites and shelter the first families: her bosom opens to receive the sacred trust of the bodies of the dead. The first and fundamental ethical institutions--worship, wedlock and burial--have arisen. This social and ethical power of the idea of God appears again in the course of subsequent history: since when nations have relapsed into savagery through warfare, and human laws have no more power over them, religion is the only means of subduing them. It reappears again in the individual development of human life: children indeed cannot learn piety except through the fear of some deity; and when all natural help fails him man requires a superior being to save him, and this being is God. All nations believe in a divine providence: tribes living in a society without any consciousness of God, for instance in some parts of Brazil, among the Kafirs, and in the Antilles, are travellers' tales, an attempt to increase the sale of their books by the narration of portents. If this is so,--and doubtless it is--then no doctrine can be more foolish than that which claims to conceive a morality and civilisation without religion. Just as no well-established physical science is possible without the guidance of abstract mathematical truth, so no knowledge of morality can arise except together with abstract metaphysical truths, without, that is, the idea of God. When the religious consciousness is extinguished or obscured the conception of society and the state is extinguished or obscured with it. Jews, Christians, Gentiles and Mahommedans possess this conception because all alike believe in some deity, whether as an infinite free spirit, or as several gods consisting of mind and body, or as one single God, an infinite free spirit in an infinite body. The Epicureans did not possess such a conception, attributing to God as they did body alone, and chance together with body: nor did the Stoics, who made him subject to fate. And Cicero made the admirable remark to the Epicurean Atticus, that he could not discuss laws with him unless he first granted the existence of the divine providence. Hobbes, who revived Epicureanism, and Spinoza, who revived Stoicism, as we have seen entirely failed to understand the nature of society and the state. One must consort with primitive man, stupid, hirsute, unclean and dishevelled, to refute those learned authors of "desiccated literature," with Peter Bayle at their head, who maintain that human society can and indeed does live without religion.