without a drive, unconscious to be sure at the time, toward independence and freedom, toward emancipation from my dependence on the womb. (…) At present I have father and mother in myself alone, no other being, not even a God, will help me unless I help myself; I stand and fall by my own resources.” [216F-LER: p. 99]
[217F-LER: p. 100]
“Nature has no beginning and no end. Everything in it acts upon everything else, everything in it is relative, everything is at once effect and cause, acting and reacting on all sides. Nature does not culminate in a monarchic summit; it is a republic.” [217F-LER: p. 100]
[218F-LER: p. 101]
“Why … should we not confine ourselves to the world, since in any case we cannot go above or outside it, since even the idea and hypothesis of God throws us back on the world … .” [218F-LER: p. 101]
[219F-LER: p. 102]
“What obliges me to stop at God? Nothing; I cannot help inquiring into His origin. And that is no secret: the cause of what for the theists, theologians, and so-called speculative philosophers is the first and universal cause of all things – is the human intellect. The intellect rises from the individual and particular to the universal, from the concrete to the abstract, from the determined to the undetermined. It also rises from real, definite, particular causes, and goes on rising until it comes to the concept of cause as such, the cause that produces no real, definite, particular effects.” [219F-LER: p. 102]
[220F-LER: p. 104-105]
[P. 104] “Power is the first predicate of the Godhead or rather, it is the first god. (…) [P. 105] The theists themselves expressly distinguish God’s power from His will and reason. But what is this power distinguished from will and reason if not the power of nature?” [220F-LER: p. 104-105]
[221F-LER: p. 109-110]
[P. 109] “The God whose sun shines on the just and the unjust, believers and unbelievers, Christians and pagans alike is indifferent to such religious distinctions, He knows nothing of them; this God, in truth, is nothing other than Nature. (…) [P. 110] … there is no way of explaining the thousands and thousands of contradictions, perplexities, difficulties, and inconsistencies in which religious belief involves us, unless we acknowledge that the original God was a being abstracted from nature and accordingly replace the mystical, ambiguous name and being of God with the name and being of nature.” [221F-LER: p. 109-110]
