Editorial note — Translated from Le Correspondant POSITIVISM. A. COMTE, LITTRÉ, H. TAINE.

[Footnote 118: Truth is older than error, and man began not in error, but in the truth, the sole principle of life and growth. Monotheism preceded, historically, both fetichism and polytheism, and the earliest and most authentic historical documents that we have prove that all the world began by believing in and worshipping one God. Polytheism bears evident traces of a prior religion which asserted the unity of God, of being not a development of fetichism, but a corruption of monotheism, as positivism bears unmistakable traces of its being a corruption of Christianity; a conclusive evidence that it never could have originated in a society that had never known and believed the Christian religion.—TRANSLATOR.]