In Egypt I was a Moslem; here I shall be a Catholic, for the good of the people.

I do not believe in religions.

The idea of a God!" (And then, pointing upward:) "Who made all that ?" Imagination has already decorated this great name with its legends.

Let us content ourselves with those already existing; "the restlessness of man" is such that he cannot do without them; in default of those already made he would fashion others, haphazard, and still more strange.

The positive religions keep man from going astray; it is these which render the supernatural definite and precise;[5110] "he had better catch it there than pick it up at Mademoiselle Lenormand's, or with some fortune-teller or a passing charlatan." An established religion "is a kind of vaccination which, in satisfying our love of the marvelous, protects us against quacks and sorcerers;[5111] the priests are far better than the Cagliostros, Kants, and the rest of the German mystics." In sum illuminism and metaphysics,[5112] speculative inventions of the brain or of a contagious overexcitement of the nervous system, all these illusions of gullible men, are basically unhealthy, and, in general, anti-social.