What depraved tastes! some people will exclaim.  Are you not ashamed to confess such inclinations without blushing!  Dear critics, you make me laugh heartily.  Thanks to my coarse tastes, I believe myself happier than other men, because I am convinced that they enhance my enjoyment.  Happy are those who know how to obtain pleasures without injury to anyone; insane are those who fancy that the Almighty can enjoy the sufferings, the pains, the fasts and abstinences which they offer to Him as a sacrifice, and that His love is granted only to those who tax themselves so foolishly.  God can only demand from His creatures the practice of virtues the seed of which He has sown in their soul, and all He has given unto us has been intended for our happiness; self-love, thirst for praise, emulation, strength, courage, and a power of which nothing can deprive us—­the power of self-destruction, if, after due calculation, whether false or just, we unfortunately reckon death to be advantageous.  This is the strongest proof of our moral freedom so much attacked by sophists.  Yet this power of self-destruction is repugnant to nature, and has been rightly opposed by every religion.

A so-called free-thinker told me at one time that I could not consider myself a philosopher if I placed any faith in revelation.  But when we accept it readily in physics, why should we reject it in religious matters?  The form alone is the point in question.  The spirit speaks to the spirit, and not to the ears.  The principles of everything we are acquainted with must necessarily have been revealed to those from whom we have received them by the great, supreme principle, which contains them all.  The bee erecting its hive, the swallow building its nest, the ant constructing its cave, and the spider warping its web, would never have done anything but for a previous and everlasting revelation.  We must either believe that it is so, or admit that matter is endowed with thought.  But as we dare not pay such a compliment to matter, let us stand by revelation.

The great philosopher, who having deeply studied nature, thought he had found the truth because he acknowledged nature as God, died too soon.  Had he lived a little while longer, he would have gone much farther, and yet his journey would have been but a short one, for finding himself in his Author, he could not have denied Him:  In Him we move and have our being.  He would have found Him inscrutable, and thus would have ended his journey.

God, great principle of all minor principles, God, who is Himself without a principle, could not conceive Himself, if, in order to do it, He required to know His own principle.

Oh, blissful ignorance!  Spinosa, the virtuous Spinosa, died before he could possess it.  He would have died a learned man and with a right to the reward his virtue deserved, if he had only supposed his soul to be immortal!

It is not true that a wish for reward is unworthy of real virtue, and throws a blemish upon its purity.  Such a pretension, on the contrary, helps to sustain virtue, man being himself too weak to consent to be virtuous only for his own ’gratification.  I hold as a myth that Amphiaraus who preferred to be good than to seem good.  In fact, I do not believe there is an honest man alive without some pretension, and here is mine.