Dictionary of Heresies, Errors, and Schisms

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" ...been the primary natures of all things, then nothing will be said that is not worthy of the Divinity. It appears that since the sciences have been lost several times, these sentiments have been preserved until now as the remnants of the doctrine of the first men; it is only in this way that we can distinguish the opinions of our fathers from the opinions of those who were first on the earth (1)."

The most incontestable testimonies thus attest that Theism Theism: The belief in the existence of one supreme creator God. is the primitive religion of mankind, and that Polytheism Polytheism: The worship of or belief in multiple deities. is its corruption.

Indeed, if Theism is not the primitive religion of men, they must have risen from Polytheism to the belief in an infinite spirit who drew the world out of chaos The author uses the archaic spelling "cahos.". Let us see if it is possible that the peoples among whom we found the dogma of a supreme intelligence who drew the world out of chaos could have risen to it by starting from a state of gross ignorance and passing through all the degrees of Polytheism, as Mr. Hume David Hume (1711–1776), the Scottish philosopher. In his 1757 work The Natural History of Religion, Hume argued that humans were originally polytheists and only gradually developed monotheistic ideas through reason and fear. claims; for this purpose, let us suppose them placed on the earth with only the faculties that man brings at birth.

Need and curiosity are the driving forces of the human spirit; it seeks the causes and nature of the phenomena that interest it, either by the spectacle they offer or by their relationship to its preservation and happiness.

Man, emerging from the hands of nature and delivered, so to speak, to only those faculties she grants him, has no guide in this search but his senses, imagination, his experience, and analogy.

His experience and his senses make him see all phenomena as isolated objects, or produced by different causes, and each of these phenomena as a collection of different parts of matter that a motive force unites or separates.

Man's experience and senses would further have taught him that he produces movement, that he moves his arm when he wishes and as he wishes, that he can give to the different bodies surrounding him all the movements and all the forms he desires, to reunite them, separate them, and mix them at his will. Analogy would therefore have led him to suppose in nature an infinity of spirits who produced—

(1) Arist. métaph. l. 12. c. 8. original: "Arist. métaph. l. 12. c. 8." This refers to Aristotle's Metaphysics, Book 12, Chapter 8, where he discusses the ancient traditions of the gods.