The Autobiography of an Idea by Louis H. Sullivan

If with open mind one reads and observes industriously and long; if in so doing one covers a wide field and so covering reflects in terms of realism, he is likely, soon or late, to be brought to a sudden consciousness that Man is an unknown quantity and his existence unsuspected.

One will be equally amazed to note that the philosophers, the theologians, of all times turned their backs upon Man; that, from the depths of introspection, fixing their gaze in all directions save the real one, they have uniformly evolved a phantasm, or a series of phantoms, and have declared such to be man in his reality -- and such reality to be depraved. A small feature, however, was overlooked by them in the neglect to observe that their man, in his depravity, had created the gods. Their insistent view of man -- a further product of their fantasy -- lay in the dogma, protean in form, that man is creature.