China arrived very early at a sort of mediocre good sense, which prevented great extravagances.

She neither knew the advantages nor the abuses of the religious spirit.

At all events, she had not in this way any influence in directing the great current of humanity.

The religions of Babylonia and Syria were never freed from a substratum of strange sensuality; these religions remained, until their extinction in the fourth and fifth centuries of our era, schools of immorality, in which at intervals glimpses of the divine world were obtained by a sort of poetic intuition.

Egypt, notwithstanding an apparent kind of Fetichism, had very early metaphysical dogmas and a lofty symbolism.