Those who are ignorant of physical causes have a natural fear [27], proceeding from a restlessness in their minds, as to whether there exists a Being or an Agency invisible to them, who has the power to injure them or to do them good. Hence the tendency which they have to feign unseen causes, which are only the phantoms of their imagination--whom they deprecate in adversity and thank in prosperity. They make Gods of them for this purpose; and this chimerical fear of invisible Powers is the source of those Religions which every one forms after his own fashion. Those whose interest it is that the people should rest contentedly fettered by such reveries, have fostered their spread--have founded laws upon them--and finally reduced the people by the terrors of futurity to a blind obedience. § 2. The origin of the Gods being discovered, men next imagined that they resembled themselves, and that they invariably acted with a certain end in view. Thus they unanimously said and believed, that God only works for man's behoof; and reciprocally, that man is only created for God. This prejudice is general even in the present day, and when we reflect on the influence which it must necessarily have on the manners and opinions of men we may clearly perceive that from it have arisen those false ideas which men have formed to themselves, of good and evil, of merit and demerit, of praise and blame, of order and confusion, of beauty and deformity, and a thousand other similar matters. § 3.