In a book which was famous in the last century, and which was called the gospel of atheism,[131] the Baron d’Holbach explains as follows the existence of the universe:  “The universe, that vast assemblage of all that exists, everywhere presents to our view only matter and motion.—­Nature is the grand whole which results from the assemblage of different material substances, from their different combinations, and from the different motions which we see in the universe."[132] Here is a clear doctrine:  all that exists, the soul included, is nothing but matter in motion.  I pass from the beginning to the end of the work, and I arrive at this conclusion:  “O nature! sovereign of all beings! and ye, her adorable daughters, virtue, reason, truth! be ye for ever our sole divinities; to you it is that the incense and the homage of the earth are due."[133] If we try to translate this sort of hymn in accordance with the express definitions of the author, we shall obtain the following result:  “O matter in motion! sovereign of all material substances in motion! and ye, virtue, reason, truth, who are various names of matter which moves, be ye the only divinities of that moving matter which is ourselves.”  Yet this author was no blockhead.  What then passed in his mind?  He laid down the thesis of materialism:  bodies in motion are the only reality.  But he is all the while a man.  The need for adoration is not destroyed in his soul, and he deceives himself.  He defines nature as consisting wholly of matter, and when he sets himself to worship it, he entirely forgets his definition.  This is not on his part a piece of philosophical jugglery, but the manifestation of the real condition of our nature, which is always giving the lie, in one direction or another, to erroneous systems.  The power of wholly maintaining himself in error has not been granted to man.  He who denies God is always deifying something; and all worship which is not that of the Eternal and Infinite Mind is stultified by glaring contradictions.  Here is a recent example of this:  We were not a little surprised a short time since to see M. Ernest Renan deny clearly enough the immortality of our persons, and, in the opening of the very book in which this negation appears, to find him invoking the soul of his sister at rest with God.[134] Elsewhere, the same writer says that the Infinite Being does not exist, that absolute reason and absolute justice exist only in humanity, and he concludes his exposition of these views by an invocation of the Heavenly Father.[135] The Baron d’Holbach had put eight hundred and thirty-nine pages between his materialistic definition of the universe and his invocation of nature.  Now-a-days everything goes faster; and M. Renan places but a few pages of the Revue des Deux Mondes between his denial of God and his prayer to the Heavenly Father.  With this difference, which is to the advantage of the writer of the eighteenth century, the process is absolutely