almost disappeared, and from faith in God the Creator,--are the great
systems which share the human mind between them? There are two: deism
and pantheism.

What is deism? It is a doctrine which acknowledges that there is one
God, the cause of the universe; but a God who is in a manner withdrawn
from His own work, and who leaves it to go on alone. God has regulated
things in the mass, but not in detail, or, to employ an expression of
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (who came at a later period to entertain better
opinions), "God is like a king who governs his kingdom, but who does not
trouble himself to ascertain whether all the taverns in it are good
ones." The idea of a general government of God which does not descend to
details--such is the essence of deism.

What is pantheism, in the ordinary meaning of the word? We have already
said: it is a doctrine which absorbs God in the universe, which
confounds Him with nature, and makes of Him only the inert substance,
the unconscious principle of the universe. These are the two great
conceptions which wrestle, in the history of human thought, against the
idea of the Creator. These two systems triumph easily one over the
other, because each of them contains a portion of truth which is wanting
to its antagonist. They cannot support themselves because each of them
has in it a portion of error. This is what we must well understand.

Deism contains a portion of truth; for it maintains a Creator
essentially distinct from the Creation, or, according to an expression
which I translate from an ancient Indian poem: "One single act of His
created the Universe, and He remained Himself whole and entire." This
thought is true. What is the error of deism? It is that it makes a God
like to a man who works upon matter existing previously to his action,
and who puts in operation forces independent of himself, and which he
does nothing but employ. In this way a watchmaker makes a watch which
goes afterwards without him, because the watchmaker only sets to work
forces which have an independent existence, and which continue to act
when he has ceased his labor. We work upon matter foreign to us. The
workman did not make matter, but only disposes of it, and he can never
do more than modify the action of forces which do not proceed from his
will, and have not been regulated by his understanding. But the Being
who is the cause of all cannot dispose of foreign forces which act
afterwards by themselves, since