Astrology had become a kind of false science with its fixed rules, its axioms, and even its truths, from which its errors were false deductions. Deceptive, mad, and pernicious, it was nevertheless very ingenious (which people do not believe today).

The island of the Phaeacians is Corfu. The memory of England and Cook has remained in Otahiti and will perpetuate itself there. Why should that of the Greeks and their heroes not have remained on the coasts of Iberia, Italy, the Celtic lands, and all this part of Hesperia or the west?

The siege of Troy and the expedition of the Argonauts are the two great epochs of uncertain times.

...Once this form of explanation is admitted, the author would need only choose to prove that we can say, do, and think nothing that does not trace some astronomical emblem. Everything in the universe will fit his system, just as all sorts of words are fitted to all sorts of thoughts by making bouts-rimés of them. — I want to go to Paris. — Where are you setting out from? — From the north. — Then you will represent the sun passing from the upper signs to the lower, Osiris going to his death, the passage from light to darkness, etc. And I shall find as many applications to the heavenly bodies as I please in every place, in every tavern we find along the way.

The sky is vast. One puts anything one wishes in it.

This Mr. Dupuis is an imperious author, even when he plays the modest one.

There are fables that absorb the whole attention of the human mind and make it incapable (when it believes them) of attending to anything else. There are others that combine with everything, that leave the mind an easy freedom, that burden it with no weight, no constraint, that melt and mingle readily with all the moral or physical opinions that sound knowledge can give. Those are the best; the others are the worst.

To represent the power of the sun by a Hercules whose club, emblem of the force of its rays, batters down the brilliance of various constellations given the shapes of animals, etc.—that is only a monstrous invention in which everything is displeasing and out of measure. The human race did well when it made a man of this emblematic sun, and a story and earthly adventures of his allegorical labors. It thus reduced these enormous, shapeless inventions to their proper proportions. It changed what was only an extravagant fable into an agreeable (and useful) romance. Not everything that changes in traditions is thereby corrupted. On the contrary. [...]

December 4.

It is the materialist who is perpetually obliged to employ abstract words and make use of abstract beings, such as Nature, Existence, Causes, effects, mechanism, etc., where others say God, creation, the author, the work, the will, the laws of God, etc.

Thus the morality and logic of the A[theist] are founded, more than those of the spiritualist, on abstract terms that express nothing whose existence even the person using them can believe in and imagine.

Thus, turning the author’s own terms against him, one can tell him that if the spiritualist feeds on hollow ideas, the materialist reasoner feeds his mind on specters without features, without color, without beauty.

Was it originally the priest who gave the people’s religion, or the people who adopted the priest’s religion? It is a great question.

Where the inner sense stops, there reason must stop, or else it loses itself in reasonings whose regularity deceives it and whose conclusion it can never be sure is or is not truth. Thus, for example, the inner sense being unable to teach us anything about the question of whether the stars have a soul or do not...

These opinions that make the world an animal or a great being, animate like man and intelligent like us, these opinions, I say, are not good, for they destroy in man the gratitude inspired in him by the other opinion, which teaches that the world is a place created for him.