Volume I.

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PRELIMINARY DISCOURSE.

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CHAPTER ONE.

On the Primitive Religion of Mankind.

If we except a few savages, there are no men without religion. The most ancient peoples—the Chaldeans, the Egyptians, the Celts, the Germans, the Gauls—were still barbarians In this 18th-century context, "barbarian" refers to ancient civilizations before the arrival of Roman or Christian influence, rather than a lack of culture., and each had a religion as different from the others as were their customs and the climates they inhabited. Despite these differences, they preserved common dogmas: all believed that a spiritual principle had drawn the world out of chaos original: "cahos" and that it animated all of nature; all believed that the celestial God had united with the earth, and it was for this reason that they honored the earth as the mother of the Gods. *

Aristotle traces this belief back to the first inhabitants of the earth and regards all mythology as the corruption of these dogmas. "Deepest antiquity," he says, "has left to future centuries, under the shroud of fables, the belief that there are Gods, and that Divinity embraces all of nature; there was added later the rest of what fable teaches us to persuade the people, in order to make them more obedient to the laws and for the good of the State. It is thus that it is said that the Gods resemble men, or certain animals, and other similar things; if one separates from these the only things that were said at the beginning—namely, that the Gods have... The text cuts off here at the end of the page; the author is likely quoting Aristotle's Metaphysics, Book XII, regarding the preservation of the idea of the divine through oral tradition.

• See Homer, Hesiod, Ovid, Herodotus, Strabo, Caesar, Tacitus, etc.