an understanding. But this prodigious state of things gives birth to
a ray of reasoning, that resolves the difficulty; for if the miracles
held out in systems of religion have actually existed; if, for instance,
metamorphoses, apparitions and the conversations of one or more Gods,
recorded in the sacred books of the Hindoos, the Hebrews, and the
Parses, are indeed events in real history, it follows that nature in
those times was perfectly unlike the nature that we are acquainted with
now; that men of the present age are totally different from the men that
formerly existed; but, consequently, that we ought not to trouble our
heads about them.

"On the contrary, if those miraculous facts have had no real existence
in the physical order of things, they must be regarded solely as
productions of the human intellect: and the nature of man, at this
day, capable of making the most fantastic combinations, explains the
phenomenon of those monsters in history. The only difficulty is to
ascertain how and for what purpose the imagination invented them. If we
examine with attention the subjects that are exhibited by them, if
we analyze the ideas which they combine and associate, and weigh with
accuracy all their concomitant circumstances, we shall find a solution
perfectly conformable to the laws of nature. Those fabulous stories have
a figurative sense different from their apparent one; they are founded
on simple and physical facts; but these facts being ill-conceived and
erroneously represented, have been disfigured and changed from their
original nature by accidental causes dependent on the human mind, by the
confusion of signs made use of in the representation of objects, by the
equivocation of words, the defect of language, and the imperfection of
writing. These Gods, for example, who act such singular parts in every
system, are no other than the physical powers of nature, the elements,
the winds, the meteors, the stars, all which have been personified by
the necessary mechanism of language, and the manner in which objects
are conceived by the understanding. Their life, their manners, their
actions, are only the operation of the same powers, and the whole of
their pretended history no more than a description of their various
phenomena, traced by the first naturalist that observed them, but taken
in a contrary sense by the vulgar, who did not understand it, or by
succeeding generations, who forgot it. In a word, all the theologica