by means of
which she claimed to solve the enigmas of the universe, her religion lost
its vitality and dried up because it lacked the strengthening nourishment
of reflection. It became a thing devoid of sense, whose _raison d'etre_ was
no longer understood; it embodied dead ideas and an obsolete conception of
the world. In Greece as well as at Rome it was reduced to a collection of
unintelligible rites, scrupulously and mechanically reproduced without
addition or omission because they had been practised by the ancestors of
long ago, and formulas hallowed by the _mos maiorum_, that were no longer
understood or sincerely cherished. Never did a people of advanced culture
have a more infantile religion.

The Oriental civilizations on the contrary were sacerdotal in character. As
in medieval Europe, the scholars of Asia and Egypt were priests. In the
temples the nature of the gods and of man were not the only subjects of
discussion; mathematics, astronomy, medicine, philology and history were
also studied. The successors of Berosus, a priest from Babylonia, and {32}
Manetho, a priest from Heliopolis, were considered deeply versed in all
intellectual disciplines as late as the time of Strabo.[13]

This state of affairs proved detrimental to the progress of science.
Researches were conducted according to preconceived ideas and were
perverted through strange prejudices. Astrology and magic were the
monstrous fruit of a hybrid union. But all this certainly gave religion a
power it had never possessed either in Greece or Rome.

All results of observation, all conquests of thought, were used by an
erudite clergy to attain the principal object of their activities, the
solution of the problem of the destiny of man and matter, and of the
relations of heaven and earth. An ever enlarging conception of the universe
kept transforming the modes of belief. Faith presumed to enslave both
physics and metaphysics. The credit of every discovery was given to the
gods. Thoth in Egypt and Bel in Chaldea were the revealers not only of
theology and the ritual, but of all human knowledge.[14] The names of the
Oriental Hipparchi and Euclids who solved the first problems of astronomy
and geometry were unknown; but a confused and grotesque literature made use
of the name and authority of Hermes Trismegistus. The doctrines of the
planetary spheres and the opposition of the four elements were made to
support systems of anthropology and of morality; the