“And the idea came to him of a future religion with simple and terrible ceremonies. The science of ancient days had initially dressed the sacred forms. People adored Zeus, like Athene, before knowing what thunder was, and before knowing what lightning was. Science followed religion. Why not suppose, on the contrary, a religion born of science? Did not the theory of universal attraction, the most admirable of modern times, have sufficient beauty to be divinized, while awaiting a new progress of human thought to overturn that theory and find another formula of the universe? Could it not, in the meantime, also count its martyrs and its fanatics?”

Gabriel de Lautrec, 1903