Sect. VIII.: Eighth system: The world a machine: worship of the Demi-ourgos, or supreme artificer.

“Hitherto the theologians, in exercising their faculties on the detached and subtile substances of ether and the igneous principle, had not however ceased to treat of existences palpable and perceptible to the senses, and their theology had continued to be the theory of physical powers, placed sometimes exclusively in the stars, and sometimes disseminated through the universe. But at the period at which we are arrived, some superficial minds, losing the chain of ideas which had directed these profound enquiries, or ignorant of the facts which served as their basis, rendered abortive all the results that had been obtained from them, by the introduction of a strange and novel chimera. They pretended that the universe, the heavens, the stars, the sun, differed in no respect from an ordinary machine; and applying to this hypothesis a comparison drawn from the works of art, they erected an edifice of the most whimsical sophisms. “A machine,” said they, “cannot form itself, there must be a workman to construct it; its very existence implies this. The world is a machine: it has therefore an artificer.”

“Hence the Demi-ourgos, or supreme artificer, the autocrator and sovereign of the universe. It was in vain that the ancient philosophy objected to the hypothesis, that this artificer did not stand in less need of parents and an author, and that a scheme, which added only one link to the chain by taking the attribute of eternity from the world and giving it to the creator, was of little value. These innovators, not contented with a first paradox, added a second, and applying to their artificer the theory of human understanding, pretended that the Demi-ourgos fashioned his machine upon an archetype or idea extant in his mind. In a word, just as their masters, the natural philosophers, had placed the primum mobile in the sphere of the fixed stars, under the appellation of intelligence and reason, so their apes, the spiritualists, adopting the same principle, made it an attribute of the Demi-ourgos, representing this being as a distinct substance, necessarily existing, to which they applied the terms of Mens or Logos, in other words, understanding and speech. Separately from this being, they held the existence of a solar principle, or soul of the world, which, taken with the preceding, made three gradations of divine personages; first, the Demi-ourgos, or supreme artificer; secondly, the Logos, understanding or speech: and thirdly, the spirit or soul of the world. And this, O Christians, is the fiction on which you have founded your doctrine of the Trinity; this is the system, which, born a Heretic in the Egyptian temples, transmitted a Heathen to the schools of Greece and Italy, is now Catholic or Orthodox by the conversion of its partisans, the disciples of Pythagoras and Plato, to Christianity.

“Thus the Deity, after having been originally considered as the sensible and various action of meteors and the elements; then as the combined power of the stars, considered in their relation to terrestrial objects; then as those terrestrial objects themselves, in consequence of confounding symbols with the things they represented; then as the complex power of Nature, in her two principal operations of production and destruction; then as the animated world without distinction of agent and patient, cause and effect; then as the solar principle or element of fire acknowledged as the sole cause of motion—the Deity, I say, considered under all these different views, became at last a chimerical and abstract being; a scholastic subtlety of substance without form, of body without figure; a true delirium of the mind beyond the power of reason at all to comprehend. But in this its last transformation, it seeks in vain to conceal itself from the senses: the seal of its origin is indelibly stamped upon it. All its attributes, borrowed from the physical attributes of the universe, as immensity, eternity, indivisibility, incomprehensibleness; or from the moral qualities of man, as goodness, justice, majesty; and its very names, derived from the physical beings which were its types, particularly the sun, the planets, and the world, present to us continually, in spite of those who would corrupt and disguise it, infallible marks of its genuine nature.

“Such is the chain of ideas through which the human mind had already run at a period anterior to the positive recitals of history; and since their systematic form proves them to have been the result of one scene of study and investigation, every thing inclines us to place the theatre of investigation, where its primitive elements were generated, in Egypt. There their progress was rapid, because the idle curiosity of the theological philosophers had, in the retirement of the temples, no other food than the enigma of the universe, which was ever present to their minds; and because, in the political diffentions which long disunited that country, each state had its college of priests, who, being in turns auxiliaries or rivals, hastened by their disputes the progress of science and discovery.

“On the borders of the Nile there happened at that distant period, what has since been repeated all over the globe. In proportion as each system was formed, it excited by its novelty quarrels and schisms: then, gaining credit even by persecution, it either destroyed anterior ideas, or incorporated itself with and modified them. But political institutions taking place, all opinions, by the aggregation of states and mixture of different people, were at length confounded; and the chain of ideas being lost, theology, plunged in a chaos, became a mere logogryph of old traditions no longer understood. Religion, losing its object, was now nothing more than a political expedient by which to rule the credulous vulgar; and was embraced either by men credulous themselves and the dupes of their own visions, or by bold and energetic spirits, who formed vast projects of ambition.”