All religious principles base their ideas on a ‘God’ which does not act upon any human senses. The idea is convenient because no man can comprehend such a being. All our ideas are but pictures of objects which strike us. What can the idea of God represent to us when it is an idea without an object? An effect without a cause is impossible. Is not such an idea as impossible as an effect without a cause? If one cannot test an idea, is it not a chimera?

Some theologians, however, assure us that the idea of God is innate, or that men have this idea from the time of their birth. Every principle is a judgment; all judgment is the effect of experience; experience is not acquired but by the exercise of the senses: from which it follows that religious principles are drawn from nothing, and are not innate.