“It is thus that God, after having been, First, The visible and various action of the meteors and the elements;

“Secondly, The combined powers of the stars, considered in their relations to terrestrial beings;

Thirdly, These terrestrial beings themselves, by confounding the symbols with their archetypes;

Fourthly, The double power of nature in its two principal operations of producing and destroying;

“Fifthly, The animated world, with distinction of agent and patient, of effect and cause;

“Sixthly, The solar principle, or the element of fire considered as the only mover;

“Has thus become, finally, in the last resort, a chimerical and abstract being, a scholastic subtilty, of substance without form, a body without a figure, a very delirium of the mind, beyond the power of reason to comprehend.  But vainly does it seek in this last transformation to elude the senses; the seal of its origin is imprinted upon it too deep to be effaced; and its attributes, all borrowed from the physical attributes of the universe, such as immensity, eternity, indivisibility, incomprehensibility; or on the moral affections of man, such as goodness, justice, majesty; its names* even, all derived from the physical beings which were its types, and especially from the sun, from the planets, and from the world, constantly bring to mind, in spite of its corrupters, indelible marks of its real nature.

* In our last analysis we found all the names of the Deity to be derived from some material object in which it was supposed to reside.  We have given a considerable number of instances; let us add one more relative to our word God.  This is known to be the Deus of the Latins, and the Theos of the Greeks.  Now by the confession of Plato (in Cratylo), of Macrobius (Saturn, lib. 1, c. 24,) and of Plutarch (Isis and Osiris) its root is thein, which signifies to wander, like planein, that is to say, it is synonymous with planets; because, add our authors, both the ancient Greeks and Barbarians particularly worshipped the planets.  I know that such enquiries into etymologies have been much decried:  but if, as is the case, words are the representative signs of ideas, the genealogy of the one becomes that of the other, and a good etymological dictionary would be the most perfect history of the human understanding.  It would only be necessary in this enquiry to observe certain precautions, which have hitherto been neglected, and particularly to make an exact comparison of the value of the letters of the different alphabets.  But, to continue our subject, we shall add, that in the Phoenician language, the word thah (with ain) signifies also to wander, and appears to be the derivation of thein.  If we suppose Deus to be derived from the Greek Zeus, a proper name of You-piter, having zaw, I live, for its root, its sense will be precisely that of you, and will mean soul of the world, igneous principle. (See note p. 143).