advantage that they at length habituate us to the thought that everything may be different from what we imagine. This experience, too, in its turn, like that of seeking the why and wherefore, may be generalized until in the last resort we arrive at a philosophy that denies the necessity of the very principle of contradiction itself.
It is really a most extraordinary thing that people should have founded their belief in a God, of whom nothing is known or can be known, upon obscure ideas of causation. I say “of whom nothing is or can be known"; for, disguise it as you will, all attempts to infer a creator of the world amount to anthropomorphism.
Instead of saying that the world is mirrored in us, we ought perhaps to say that human reason is reflected in the world. We cannot help it, we are forced to recognize order and wise government in the universe: it follows from the constitution of our reasoning faculty that we should do so. But it does not follow that things really are so because we are under the necessity of thinking them so; for we have absolutely no idea of the true nature of the objective world. From this order and government, then, it is not possible to prove the existence of God.
For every imaginable thing we have a coup d’œil— every intelligent person, that is to say, who hears or sees anything, instinctively forms a judgment
