Dictionary of Heresies, Errors, and Schisms

PRELIMINARY

phenomena; imagination would have created them The author refers here to "génies" or spirits/deities. for everything, would have placed them everywhere, and explained everything by their means, as is seen among the savage peoples discovered since Christopher Columbus.

Imagination, which accommodates spirits so well, conversely rejects the idea of chaos, and the senses combat it. The human mind, in the state we are assuming Referring to the hypothetical state of "gross ignorance" mentioned on the previous page., could only have arrived at the knowledge of a chaos anterior to the formation of the world after having recognized the falsity of the spirits spirits: The original French uses "génies," referring to the localized deities or supernatural forces that early civilizations used to explain natural events. to which it would have first attributed the phenomena of nature.

To renounce the system of spirits, so pleasant and interesting to the imagination and to human weakness, it was necessary to have recognized that everything operates mechanically in phenomena; which necessarily supposes in the human race, as we have hypothesized it, a long series of connected and compared observations, a science of physics, and the arts In this context, "arts" refers to technology and the practical application of knowledge..

To arrive at the belief in chaos, after having recognized the falsity of the system of spirits, it was necessary to form the project of tracing back to the origin of the world, to have followed the productions of nature in all their states, to have seen them born from a common principle, return to it, and merge into it once again.

The observations that would have led one to judge that everything on the terrestrial globe had at first been confounded, could not have persuaded one that the sky had been originally nothing but a frightful chaos.

None of the phenomena observed on the earth suggest that the light of the celestial bodies was mixed with terrestrial parts. Storms, tempests, and volcanoes that overturn the atmosphere and shake the earth do not affect the sun or the stars; their arrangement is immutable, their revolutions are constant, their shape is unalterable—at least, that is how men, in the state we are assuming, would have seen the sky. Thus observation, far from persuading that the celestial bodies had been confused in the abyss from which the earth emerged, would on the contrary have led men to suppose that the sky and the stars had always been exactly as they saw them.

The human mind could not therefore have supposed that the sky had