The man whose whole activity is diverted to inner meditation becomes insensible to all his surroundings.

For a long time it has been known that the first systems of representations with which men have pictured to themselves the world and themselves were of religious origin. There is no religion that is not a cosmology at the same time that it is a speculation upon divine things. If philosophy and the sciences were born of religion, it is because religion began by taking the place of the sciences and philosophy.

It is not human nature which can assign the variable limits necessary to our needs. They are thus unlimited so far as they depend on the individual alone. Irrespective of any external regulatory force, our capacity for feeling is in itself an insatiable and bottomless abyss.

When man discovered the mirror, he began to lose his soul.

Men have been obliged to make for themselves a notion of what religion is, long before the science of religions started its methodical comparisons.

Maniacal suicide. —This is due to hallucinations or delirious conceptions. The patient kills himself to escape from an imaginary danger or disgrace, or to obey a mysterious order from on high, etc.

Reality seems valueless by comparison with the dreams of fevered imaginations; reality is therefore abandoned.