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  THE NON-RELIGION
  OF THE FUTURE

  _A SOCIOLOGICAL STUDY_


  TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH
  OF
  M. GUYAU

  [Illustration]

  NEW YORK
  HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
  1897




  COPYRIGHT, 1897,
  BY
  HENRY HOLT & CO.


  THE MERSHON COMPANY PRESS,
  RAHWAY, N. J.




TABLE OF CONTENTS.


  INTRODUCTION.

  I. Sociality the basis of religion—Its definition.

  II. The connection between religion, æsthetics, and morals.

  III. The inevitable decomposition of all systems of dogmatic
  religion; the state of “non-religion” toward which the human mind
  seems to tend—The exact sense in which one must understand the
  non-religion as distinguished from the “religion of the future.”

  IV. The value and utility, for the time being, of religion; its
  ultimate insufficiency,                                             1


  Part First.

  THE GENESIS OF RELIGIONS IN PRIMITIVE SOCIETIES.


  _CHAPTER I._

  RELIGIOUS PHYSICS.

  IMPORTANCE OF THE PROBLEM OF THE ORIGIN OF RELIGION—UNIVERSALITY
    OF RELIGIOUS BELIEFS OR SUPERSTITIONS—VARIABILITY OF RELIGIONS AND
    RELIGIOUS EVOLUTION.

  I. Idealist theory which attributes the origin of religion to
  a notion of the infinite—Henotheism of Max Müller and Von
  Hartmann—M. Renan’s Instinct for Divinity.

  II. Theory of a worship of the dead and of spirits—Herbert
  Spencer—Spencer’s objections to the theory of the attribution of a
  soul to natural forces.

  III. Answer to objections—Religious physics sociological in
  form, and the substitution of relations between malevolent
  or beneficent conscious beings for relations between natural
  forces—Sociomorphism of primitive Peoples,                        21


  _CHAPTER II._

  RELIGIOUS METAPHYSICS.

  I. Animism or polydemonism—Formation of the dualist conception of
  spirit—Social relations with spirits.

  II. Providence and miracles—The evolution of the dualist
  conception of a special providence—The conception of
  miracles—The supernatural and the natural—Scientific explanation
  and miracles—Social and moral modifications in the character
  of man, owing to supposed social relations with a special
  providence—Increasing sentiment of irresponsibility and passivity
  and “absolute dependence.”

  III. The creation—Genesis of the notion of creation—The dualistic
  elements in this idea—Monism—Classification of systems of
  religious metaphysics—Criticism of the classification proposed by
  Von Hartmann—Criticism of the classification proposed by Auguste
  Comte,                                                             80


  _CHAPTER III._

  RELIGIOUS MORALS.

  I. The laws which regulate the social relations between gods and
  men—Morality and immorality in primitive religions—Extension of
  friendly and hostile relations to the sphere of the gods—Primitive
  inability in matters of conscience, as in matters of art, to
  distinguish the great from the monstrous.

  II. The moral sanction in the society which includes gods and
  men—Patronage—That divine intervention tends always to be
  conceived after the model of human intervention and to sanction it.

  III. Worship and religious rites—Principles of reciprocity and
  proportionality in the exchange of services—Sacrifice—Principle
  of coercion and incantation—Principle of habit and its relation
  to rites—Sorcery—Sacerdotalism—Prophecy—The externals of
  worship—Dramatization and religious æsthetics.

  IV. Subjective worship—Adoration and love; their psychological
  origin,                                                           113


  Part Second.

  THE DISSOLUTION OF RELIGIONS IN EXISTING SOCIETIES.


  _CHAPTER I._

  DOGMATIC FAITH.

  I. Narrow dogmatic faith—The credulity of primitive man: First,
  spontaneous faith in the senses and imagination; Second, faith in
  the testimony of superior men; Third, faith in the divine word, in
  revelation, and in the sacred texts—The literalness of dogmatic
  faith—Inevitable intolerance of narrow dogmatic faith—Belief
  in dogma, revelation, salvation, and damnation all result in
  intolerance—Modern tolerance.

  II. Broad dogmatic faith—Orthodox Protestantism—Dogmas
  of orthodox Protestantism—Rational consequences of these
  dogmas—Logical failure of orthodox Protestantism.

  III. The dissolution of dogmatic faith in modern society—Reasons
  that render this dissolution inevitable—Comparative influence of
  the various sciences; influence of public instruction, of means
  of communication, of industry even and of commerce, etc.—The
  disappearance of belief in oracles and prophecies—Gradual
  disappearance of the belief in miracles, in devils, etc.,         136


  _CHAPTER II._

  SYMBOLIC AND MORAL FAITH.

  I. Substitution of metaphysical symbolism for dogma—Liberal
  Protestantism—Comparison with Brahmanism—Substitution
  of moral symbolism for metaphysical symbolism—Moral
  faith—Kant—Mill—Matthew Arnold—A literary explanation of the
  Bible substituted for a literal explanation.

  II. Criticism of symbolic faith—Inconsequence of liberal
  Protestantism—Is Jesus of a more divine type than other great
  geniuses?—Does the Bible possess a greater authority in matters of
  morals than any other masterpiece of poetry?—Criticism of Matthew
  Arnold’s system—Final absorption of religions by morality,       167


  _CHAPTER III._

  DISSOLUTION OF RELIGIOUS MORALITY.

  I. The first durable element of religious morality:
  Respect—Alteration of respect by the addition of the notion of the
  fear of God and divine vengeance.

  II. Second durable element of religious morality:
  Love—Alteration of this element by the addition of ideas of
  grace, predestination, damnation—Caducous elements of religious
  morality—Mysticism—Antagonism of divine love and human
  love—Asceticism—Excesses of asceticism—Especially in the
  religions of the East—Conception of sin in the modern mind.

  III. Subjective worship and prayer—The notion of prayer from
  the point of view of modern science and philosophy—Ecstasy—The
  survival of prayer,                                               195


  _CHAPTER IV._

  RELIGION AND NON-RELIGION AMONG THE PEOPLE.

  I. Is religious sentiment an innate and imperishable possession of
  humanity—Frequent confusion of a sentiment for religion with a
  sentiment for philosophy and morals—Renan—Max Müller—Difference
  between the evolution of belief in the individual and the evolution
  of belief in the race—Will the disappearance of faith leave a void
  behind?

  II. Will the dissolution of religion result in a dissolution
  of morality among the people?—Is religion the sole safeguard
  of social authority and public morality?—Christianity and
  socialism—Relation between non-religion and immorality, according
  to statistics.

  III. Is Protestantism a necessary transition stage between religion
  and free-thought?—Projects for Protestantizing France—Michelet,
  Quinet, De Laveleye, Renouvier, and Pillon—Intellectual,
  moral, and political superiority of Protestantism—Utopian
  character of the project—Uselessness, for purposes of morals,
  of substituting one religion for another—Is the possession of
  religion a condition _sine qua non_ of superiority in the struggle
  for existence?—Objections urged against France and the French
  Revolution by Matthew Arnold; Greece and Judea compared, France
  and Protestant nations compared—Critical examination of Matthew
  Arnold’s theory—Cannot free-thought, science, and art evolve their
  respective ideals from within?                                    226


  _CHAPTER V._

  RELIGION AND NON-RELIGION AND THE CHILD.

  I. Decline of religious education—Defects of this education,
  in especial in Catholic countries—Means of lightening these
  defects—The priest—The possibility of state-action on the priest.

  II. Education provided by the state—Primary instruction—The
  schoolmaster—Secondary and higher instruction—Should the history
  of religion be introduced into the curriculum?

  III. Education at home—Should the father take no part in the
  religious education of his children—Evils of a preliminary
  religious education to be followed by disillusionment—The special
  question of the immortality of the soul: what should be said to
  children about death,                                             272


  _CHAPTER VI._

  RELIGION AND NON-RELIGION AMONG WOMEN.

  Are women inherently predisposed toward religion and even toward
  superstition?—The nature of feminine intelligence—Predominance
  of the imagination—Credulity—Conservatism—Feminine
  sensibility—Predominance of sentiment—Tendency to mysticism—Is
  the moral sentiment among women based upon religion—Influence
  of religion and of non-religion upon modesty and love—Origin of
  modesty—Love and perpetual virginity—M. Renan’s paradoxes on
  the subject of monastic vows—How woman’s natural proclivities
  may be turned to account by free-thought—Influence exercised by
  the wife’s faith over the husband—Instance of a conversion to
  free-thought,                                                     295


  _CHAPTER VII._

  THE EFFECT OF RELIGION AND NON-RELIGION ON POPULATION AND THE
    FUTURE OF THE RACE.

  I. Importance of the problem of population—Antagonism between
  numerical strength and wealth—Necessity of numbers for the
  maintenance and progress of the race—Necessity of giving the
  advantage of numbers to the superior races—Problem of population
  in France—Its relation to the religious problem—Are the reasons
  for the restriction of the number of births physiological, moral,
  or economic?—Malthusianism in France—The true national peril.

  II. Remedies—Is a return to religion possible?—Religious
  powerlessness and growing tolerance in the matter—The
  influence that the law might exercise upon the causes of small
  families—Enumeration of these causes—Reform of the law in
  regard to filial duty—(Support of parents)—Reform of the law
  of inheritance—Reform of the military law for the purpose of
  favouring large families and of permitting emigration to the French
  colonies.

  III. Influence of public education: its necessity as a substitute
  for religious sentiment,                                          315


  Part Third.

  NON-RELIGION OF THE FUTURE.


  _CHAPTER I._

  RELIGIOUS INDIVIDUALISM.

  I. Is a renovation of religion possible? 1. Is a unification of the
  great religions to-day existing possible? 2. Is the appearance of a
  new religion to be expected?—Future miracles impossible—Religious
  poetry not to be expected—Men of genius capable of sincerely
  and naïvely labouring in the creating of a new religion not to
  be expected—Impossibility of adding to the original stock of
  religious ideas—No new cult possible—Last attempts at a new cult
  in America and in France—The Positivist cult—Ethical culture—Can
  socialism renew religion?—Advantages and defects of socialistic
  experiments.

  II. Religious anomy and the substitution of doubt for faith—1.
  Will the absence of religion result in scepticism? Will the number
  of sceptics increase with the disappearance of religion? 2.
  Substitution of doubt for faith—Genuinely religious character of
  doubt.

  III. Substitution of metaphysical hypothesis for
  dogma—Difference between religious sentiment and instinct for
  metaphysics—Imperishable character of the latter—Sentiment
  at once of the limits of science and of the infinity of our
  ideal—Spencer’s attempted reconciliation of science and
  religion—Confusion of religion with metaphysics,                 350


  _CHAPTER II._

  ASSOCIATION. THE PERMANENT ELEMENT OF RELIGIONS IN SOCIAL LIFE.

  SOCIAL ASPECT OF RELIGIONS—RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES AND
    CHURCHES—IDEAL TYPE OF VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATION—ITS DIVERSE FORMS.

  I. Associations for intellectual purposes—How such associations
  might preserve the most precious elements of religions—Societies
  for the advancement of science, philosophy, religion—Dangers to
  avoid—Popularization of scientific ideas; propagandism in the
  interests of science.

  II. Associations for moral purposes—Tendency of religion in the
  best minds to become one with charity—Pity and charity will
  survive dogma—Rôle of enthusiasm in moral propagandism—Necessity
  of hope to sustain enthusiasm—Possibility of propagating moral
  ideas: 1. Apart from myths and religious dogmas; 2. Apart from
  any notion of a religious sanction—Baudelaire’s conception of a
  criminal and happy hero—Criticism of that conception—Worship of
  the memory of the dead.

  III. Associations for æsthetic purposes—Worship of art and
  nature—Art and poetry will sever their connection with religion
  and will survive it—Necessity of developing the æsthetic sentiment
  and the worship of art, as the religious sentiment becomes more
  feeble—Poetry, eloquence, music; their rôle in the future—Final
  substitution of art for rites—Worship of nature—Feeling
  for nature originally an essential element of the religious
  sentiment—Superiority of a worship of nature over worship of human
  art—Nature is the true temple of the future,                     391


  _CHAPTER III._

  THEISM.

  REVIEW OF THE PRINCIPAL METAPHYSICAL HYPOTHESES WHICH WILL REPLACE
    DOGMA.

  I. Introduction—Progress of metaphysical hypotheses—Metaphysical
  hypotheses destined to increasing diversity in details, and
  increasing agreement on essential points—Importance of the
  moral element in metaphysical hypotheses—The part played by
  conscience in human morality will not diminish, as Mr. Spencer
  says—Sympathetic groups under which divers systems of metaphysics
  will be ranged.

  II. Theism—1. Probable fate of the creation hypothesis—The author
  of the world conceived as a prime mover—Eternity of movement—The
  author of the world conceived as a creator properly so
  called—Illusion involved in the conception of nothing—Criticism
  of the creation hypothesis from the point of view of morals: the
  problem of evil and of the responsibility of the creator—Attempts
  to save optimism—Hypothesis of a God creating free agents,
  “workmen” and not “work”—Reciprocal determinism and the illusion
  of spontaneity—Immorality of the temptation—Hypothesis of the
  fall, its impossibility—God the tempter—Lucifer and God—2.
  Probable fate of the notion of Providence—Hypotheses to explain
  a special Providence and miracles thus insufficient—Hypothesis
  of a non-omnipotent God proposed by John Stuart Mill—The God of
  Comtism—Religion should be not solely human but cosmic—The fate
  of the philosophical idea of God—Rational religion proposed by the
  neo-Kantians—Ultimate transformation of the notion of divinity and
  of Providence—Human Providence and progressive divinity in the
  world,                                                            424


  _CHAPTER IV._

  PANTHEISM.

  REVIEW OF THE PRINCIPAL METAPHYSICAL HYPOTHESES WHICH WILL REPLACE
    DOGMA.—_Continued._

  I. Optimistic pantheism—Transformation of transcendent Deism
  into immanent theism and pantheism—Disanthropomorphized
  God, according to Messrs. Fiske and Spencer—Diverse forms
  of pantheism—Optimistic and intellectualistic pantheism of
  Spinoza—Objections, Spinoza’s fatalism—The moral significance
  that might be lent to pantheism by the introduction of some notion
  of a final cause—Qualities and defects of pantheism—Conception
  of unity upon which it is founded—This conception criticised—Its
  possible subjectivity.

  II. Pessimistic pantheism—Pessimistic interpretation of religions
  in Germany—1. Causes of the progress of pessimism in the present
  epoch—Progress of pantheistic metaphysics and of positive
  science—Penalties incident to thought and reflection—Mental
  depression and sense of powerlessness, etc.—2. Is pessimism
  curable?—Possible remedies—The labour problem and the future
  of society—Illusions involved in pessimism—Inexactitude of its
  estimate of pleasures and pains—Quotation from Leopardi—Criticism
  of the practical results of pessimism—Nirvâna—An experiment in
  Nirvâna—Will pessimistic pantheism be the religion of the
  future?                                                           452


  _CHAPTER V._

  IDEALISM, MATERIALISM, MONISM.

  REVIEW OF THE PRINCIPAL METAPHYSICAL HYPOTHESES WHICH WILL REPLACE
    DOGMA.—_Concluded._

  I. Idealism—Different forms of idealism: subjective idealism,
  objective idealism: The whole of existence resolved into a mode
  of mental existence—Value of idealism considered from point of
  view of the religious sentiment—Most specious of contemporary
  idealisms: Possibility of universal progress in the hypothesis
  of radical spontaneity and of “freedom”—Reconciliation between
  determinism and the conception of freedom—Moral idealism as a
  possible substitute for religious sentiment: Dependence of the
  universe on the principle of goodness.

  II. Materialism—Difficulty in defining absolute materialism:
  Matter—The atom—Nebular hypothesis—Hydrogen—Necessity of
  supplementing materialism by some theory of the origin of
  life—The latest conception of materialism: Conception of infinite
  divisibility and infinite extensibility.

  III. Monism and the fate of worlds—Current of contemporary systems
  toward monism—Scientific interpretation of monism—The world
  conceived monistically as a becoming and as a life—Scientific
  formulæ for life—Progress consists in the gradual confusion
  of these two formulæ—That the rise of morality and religion
  can be accounted for without the presupposition of any final
  cause—Metaphysical and moral expectations in regard to the
  destiny of the world and of humanity, it may be, founded on
  scientific monism—Facts which appear to be inconsistent with
  these expectations—Pessimistic conception of dissolution that is
  complementary to the conception of evolution—Is the immanence of
  dissolution demonstrable?—Natural devices for the perpetuation of
  the “fittest”—Rôle of intelligence, of numbers, etc.—Calculation
  of probabilities—Is eternity _a parte post_ a ground of
  discouragement or of hope—Probable existence of thinking beings in
  other worlds: the planets, possibility of the existence of beings
  superior to man—Survival of the conception of gods—Hypothesis of
  intercosmic consciousness and of a universal society.

  IV. Destiny of the human race—The hypothesis of immortality
  from the point of view of monism—Two possible conceptions of
  immortality—Eternal or untemporal existence and continuation of
  life in some superior forms—I. Hypothesis of eternal life—its
  function in antique religions, in Platonism, and in the systems of
  Spinoza, Kant, and Schopenhauer—Eternal life and the subsistence
  of the individual—Distinction made by Schopenhauer and various
  other philosophers between individuality and personality—Eternal
  life problematical and transcendent—Aristocratic tendency
  of the theory of eternal life—Hypothesis of conditional
  immortality—Criticism of the hypothesis of conditional
  immortality; incompatibility of this notion with that of divine
  goodness—II. Hypothesis of a continuation of the present
  life and its evolution into some superior form—What sort
  of immortality the theory of evolution permits us to hope
  for—Immortality of one’s labours and conduct—True conception of
  such immortality—Its relation to the laws of heredity, atavism,
  natural selection—Immortality of the individual—Objections
  drawn from science—Protestations of affection against the
  annihilation of the person—Resulting antinomy—III. Modern
  opposition between the conception of _function_ and the conception
  of simple substance, in which ancient philosophy endeavours to
  find a proof of immortality—Peripatetic theory of Wundt and
  modern philosophers on the nature of the soul—Immortality as
  a continuation of function, proved not by the simplicity, but
  by the complexity of consciousness—Relation between complexity
  and instability—Three stages of social evolution—Analogy of
  conscience with a society, collective character of individual
  consciousness—Conception of progressive immortality—Last product
  of evolution and natural selection: (1) No necessary relation
  between the compositeness and complexity of consciousness and its
  dissolubility: indissoluble compounds in the physical universe—(2)
  Relation between consciousnesses, their possible fusion in a
  superior consciousness—Contemporary psychology and the religious
  notion of the interpenetration of souls—Possible evolution of
  memory and identification of it with reality—Palingenesis by
  force of love—Problematic character of those conceptions and of
  every conception relative to existence, of consciousness and the
  relation between existence and consciousness—IV. Conception of
  death appropriate to those who, in the present state of evolution,
  do not believe in the immortality of the individual—Antique and
  modern stoicism—Acceptance of death: element of melancholy and
  of greatness in it—Expansion of self by means of philosophical
  thought, and scientific disinterestedness, to the point of to some
  extent approving one’s own annihilation,                          477




INTRODUCTION.

    I. Sociality the basis of religion—Its definition.

    II. The connection between religion, æsthetics, and morals.

    III. The inevitable decomposition of all systems of dogmatic
      religion; the state of “non-religion” toward which the
      human mind seems to tend—The exact sense in which one
      must understand the non-religion as distinguished from the
      “religion of the future.”

    IV. The value and utility, for the time being, of religion;
      its ultimate insufficiency.


I. We shall meet, in the course of this work, many different
definitions that have at one time or another been given to religion.
Some were assigned from the point of view of physics, others from that
of metaphysics, others from that of morals, almost none from that of
sociology. And yet, upon closer scrutiny, the notion of a _social bond_
between man and the powers superior to him, but resembling him, is
precisely the point in which all religious conceptions are at one. Man
becomes truly religious, in our judgment, only when above the human
society in which he lives he superimposes in his scheme of the world
another society, more powerful and more cultured, a universal and, so
to speak, a cosmic society. The sphere of sociality, which is one of
the characteristics of humanity, must be enlarged till it reaches to
the stars. Sociality is the firm foundation of the religious sentiment,
and a religious being might be defined as a being disposed to be
sociable, not only with all living creatures with whom experience makes
him acquainted, but also with the creatures of thought with whom he
peoples the world.

That _religion_ consists essentially in the establishment of a bond—at
first mythical, and subsequently mystic, in the first instance
between man and the forces of the universe, then between man and the
universe itself, and ultimately between man and the elements of the
universe—is distinctly the outcome of every study of religion; but
what we wish especially here to consider is the precise way in which
this bond has been conceived. Well (it may appear more clearly at the
close of this inquiry), the religious bond has been conceived _ex
analogia societatis humanæ_: the relations, amicable and inimical, of
men to each other were employed first for the explanation of physical
phenomena and natural forces, then for the metaphysical explanation
of the world, of its creation, conservation, and government; in
short, sociological laws were universalized, and the state of war
or peace which existed among men, families, tribes, and nations was
conceived as existing also among the volitions which were fancied
to exist beneath or beyond the forces of nature. A mythic or mystic
sociology, conceived as containing the secret of all things, lies at
the basis of all religions. Religion is not simply the expression of an
anthropomorphism—animals and fantastic beings of various sorts have
played no inconsiderable rôle in different cults; it is an imaginative
extension, a universalization of all the good or evil relations which
exist among conscious beings, of war and peace, friendship and enmity,
obedience and rebellion, protection and authority, submission, fear,
respect, devotion, love: religion is a universal _sociomorphism_.
Social relations with animals, with the dead, intellectual and social
relations with good and evil genii, with the forces of nature, are
nothing more nor less than various forms of this universal sociology
in which religion has sought to find the reason of things—of physical
phenomena such as thunder, storm, sickness, death, as well as of
metaphysical relations—the origin and destiny of things, and of moral
relations—virtue, vice, law, and sanction.

If, therefore, we were forced to condense the theory of this book into
a single definition, we should say that religion is the outcome of an
effort to explain all things—physical, metaphysical, and moral—by
analogies drawn from human society, imaginatively and symbolically
considered. In short it is a universal sociological hypothesis,
mythical in form.

To justify this conception we shall review the various definitions
that have been put forth of the religious sentiment; we shall see that
each of them needs completion by the rest, and that, too, from the
sociological point of view.

The definition which has perhaps been most widely adopted of late
years, with divers modifications by Strauss, by Pfleiderer, by Lotze,
and by M. Réville, is that of Schleiermacher. According to him, the
essence of religion consists in the feeling that we all have of our own
absolute dependence. The powers in respect to which this dependence is
felt we call divinities. On the other hand, according to Feuerbach, the
origin, nay the essence even of religion is desire: if man possessed
no needs, no desires, he would possess no gods. If grief and evil did
not exist, says Hartmann later on, there would be no religion; the
gods, even the gods of history, are no more than the powers to whom
man looks for what he does not possess, and wants, to whom he looks
for relief, for salvation, for happiness. The respective definitions
of Schleiermacher and Feuerbach, taken separately, are incomplete; it
is at least necessary, as Strauss suggests, to superpose them. The
religious sentiment is primarily, no doubt, a feeling of dependence;
but this feeling of dependence, really to give birth to religion, must
provoke in one a reaction—a desire of deliverance. To feel one’s own
weakness; to be conscious of limitations of all sorts which bound
one’s life, and then to desire to augment one’s power over one’s self
and over the material universe; to enlarge one’s sphere of action;
to attain once more to a comparative independence in face of the
necessities of every kind which hem one in—such is the course of the
human mind in the presence of the universe.

But here an objection occurs: precisely the same course seems to be
followed by the mind in the establishment of science. In a scientific
period man feels himself as profoundly _dependent_ as in a religious
period, and this feeling of dependence is accompanied by a no less
vivid reaction in the one case than in the other. The man of science
and the believer alike aim at enfranchisement, but by different means.
Must one be content, then, with an external and negative definition,
and say with M. Darmesteter: “Religion embraces all knowledge and all
power not scientific”?[1] A knowledge not scientific possesses all
the attributes of a contradiction in terms, and, as for a power not
scientific, it is indispensable to distinguish it in some positive way
from the power which is afforded us by science. Well, to keep close
to the facts, the power of religion is that which we frankly do not
possess, while the power of science is that which we do possess and
know that we possess. One might indeed fall back on the distinction
between belief and certainty; but the man of science also has his
beliefs, his preferences for such and such a cosmological hypothesis,
which, however, is not a religious belief, properly so called.
Religious and moral “faith,” as opposed to scientific “hypothesis,” is
an ultimate and very complete manifestation of the religious sentiment,
which we shall examine later, though it carries with it no suggestion
of its primitive origin.

      [1] See an account given of the _Prolégomènes_ of M. Albert
      Réville, by M. Darmesteter, _Revue philosophique_, seventh
      year, vol. i. p. 76.

From the sociological point of view the distinction is plain. The
religious sentiment begins at the point where mechanical determinism
seems to offer an opportunity in the world for a sort of _moral_ and
_social_ reciprocity—a possible _exchange_ of _sentiments_ and even
of desires, between man and the powers of the universe, whatever they
may be. That point once reached, man no longer conceives it possible to
measure the consequences of an act—of using an axe, for example, on a
sacred tree—in the exact terms of mere mechanical reaction; for over
and above the simple brute fact of what he has done, the sentiment or
intention that it indicates must be taken into account and the probable
effect of that for good or evil upon the gods. Religious sentiment
is a feeling of dependence, on the part of primitive man, in respect
to the intelligences, the _volitions_, with which he has peopled the
universe and which he believes capable of _being affected agreeably
or disagreeably_ by his conduct. Religious sentiment is not a feeling
of mere physical dependence upon the universal frame of things; it
is more than all a physical dependence, a moral, and in especial, a
social dependence. This relation of dependence consists really of two
reciprocal terms: if man is bound by it in some sort to the powers of
nature, they in turn are bound by it to man; man has more or less of
a hold on them, he can offend them morally, just as he might offend
a fellow-man. If man is in the hand of the gods, he can in a measure
force the hand to open or shut. The divinities are in a sense dependent
also on man; they experience, as the result of his conduct, a measure
of pleasure or of pain. It is only later that this idea of reciprocal
dependence becomes metaphysical; it reaches its ultimate development
in the concept of the “absolute,” and in the sentiment of adoration or
simple “respect.”

Besides the consciousness of dependence and the correlative need
of a liberation of some sort from it, we find in the religious
sentiment the expression of another _social_ need not less important;
the need of affection, of tenderness, of love. Our sensibility,
developed by hereditary instincts of sociality and by the force even
of our imagination stretching out beyond the limits of this world,
instinctively seeks for a person, a commanding figure to lean on, to
confide in. When we are happy we need to bless some one; when we are
wretched, we need some one to complain to, to groan to, even to curse.
It is hard to resign ourselves to the belief that no one hears us,
that no one a long way off sympathizes with us, that this swarming
universe spins in the void. God is the friend with us at the first
hour and at the last, with us always and in all places, even where no
other friend can follow, even in death. To whom can we speak of those
we have loved and lost? Of the people about us, some hardly remember
them, others did not even know them; but in this divine and omnipresent
Being we find the society, which is constantly broken by death, once
more reunited: _In eo vivimus_, in Him we cannot die. From this point
of view, God, the object of the religious sentiment, no longer seems
a guardian and master simply. He is better than a friend; He is a
father; in the beginning a severe father and all-powerful, as very
young children imagine their fathers to be. Children readily believe
that their father can do anything, even work miracles: a word from him
and the world moves; _fiat lux_, and the day is born; the distinction
between evil and good lies in his will; disobedience to him naturally
involves punishment. They judge his power by their weakness; and so the
primitive race of man felt toward God. But later a superior conception
arose; as man developed he developed his God, endowed him with a more
generous list of moral attributes; and this God is ours. We feel the
need of a smile from Him after a sacrifice, the thought of Him sustains
us. Woman especially, who is more immature in this respect than man,
experiences a greater need of a “Father in heaven.” When one wishes
to deprive us of a god, to deliver us from celestial tutelage, we
suddenly find ourselves orphans. One might recognize a profound truth
in the great symbol of Christ, the God, dying for the enfranchisement
of human thought. This modern version of the “passion” is enacted, it
is true, only in the heart, but it is none the less agonizing; it stirs
one’s indignation none the less, it dwells in one like the image of a
father who is dead. One cares less for the promised freedom than for
the protection and affection that are gone. Carlyle—whimsical, unhappy
genius—could eat no bread that his wife’s own hands, nay his wife’s
own heart, had not prepared; and we are all like that; we all have need
of daily bread kneaded with love and tenderness; and they that have no
loving hand from which to look for it, ask it of their god, of their
ideal, of their dream; they create for themselves a family in the realm
of imagination, they fill out the bosom of infinity by the addition of
a heart.

The social need for protection and love was evidently not so dominant
in primitive times. The tutelary functions attributed to divinities
were at first confined to the more or less vulgar accidents of this
life. Later they were more especially directed toward one’s moral
emancipation and extended even beyond the tomb. Need of protection and
affection leads ultimately to considerations on the destiny of man and
the world; and thus it is that religion, nearly physical in origin,
issues in systems of metaphysics.

       *       *       *       *       *

II. This book is intimately related to two others that we have
published on æsthetics and on morals. We believe that the æsthetic
sentiment is identical with self-conscious life, with life that is
conscious of its own subjective intensity and harmony; beauty we
have said may be defined as a perception or an act that stimulates
life simultaneously on its three sides—sensibility, intelligence,
will—and that produces pleasure by the immediate consciousness of this
general stimulation. Moral sentiment, on the other hand, is identical,
we believe, with a consciousness of the powers and possibilities in
the sphere of practice of a life ideal in intensity and breadth of
interest. The bulk of these possibilities relates to one’s power,
in some form or other, of serving other people. Finally, religious
sentiment appears when this consciousness of the social aspect of life
is extended to the totality of conscious beings, and not only of real
and living, but also of possible and ideal beings. It is, therefore,
in the very notion of life, and of its various individual or social
manifestations, that the essential unity of æsthetics with morals and
religion is to be found.

In the first part of this work we shall trace the origin and evolution
of sociological mythology. In the succeeding portions we shall consider
whether, if we once set aside the mythical or imaginative element which
is essential to religion and which distinguishes it from philosophy,
the _sociological_ theory does not offer the most probable, and most
comprehensive, metaphysical explanation of the universe.[2]

      [2] The importance which Auguste Comte attributed to sociology
      is well known, but in his horror of metaphysics the founder
      of positivism excluded from his science everything really
      universal and cosmic that it contained, in order to reduce it
      to limits exclusively human. Messrs. Spencer and Lilienfeld,
      Schaeffle and Espinas, improving on the sociology of Comte,
      have extended social laws and have shown that every living
      organism is an embryonic society, and, _vice versa_, that every
      society is an organism. A contemporary philosopher goes still
      further and attributes to sociology a certain metaphysical
      significance. M. Alfred Fouillée says: “Since biology and
      sociology are so closely related, may not the laws that are
      common to them be expected to suggest still more universal laws
      of nature and thought? Is the entire universe anything more
      than a vast society in process of formation, a vast system
      of conscious and consciously striving atoms which is working
      itself out, and little by little falling into shape? The laws
      which govern the grouping of individual atoms in the body are,
      no doubt, at bottom the same as those that govern the grouping
      of individuals in society; and the very atoms themselves, which
      are supposed to be indivisible, are, it may be, diminutive
      societies. If so, social science, the crown of human sciences,
      may some day give us, in its ultimate formula, the secret of
      universal life.... It is conceivable that the universal type
      of existence of the world may be found in sociology—that the
      universe may come to be conceived as a society in process
      of formation; miscarrying here and succeeding there, in its
      effort to transmute the reign of mechanics into a reign of
      justice, and to substitute fraternity for antagonism. If so,
      the essential and immanent power at the heart of beings,
      always ready to manifest itself as soon as circumstances give
      it access to the light of consciousness, might be expressed
      by the single word, sociability.” (Alfred Fouillée, _La
      Science sociale contemporaine_, 2d edition, introduction
      and conclusion.) M. Fouillée has not applied this theory to
      religion; he has noted its suggestiveness in the domain of
      metaphysics and of ethics simply; we believe, and we shall
      endeavour to show, that it is not less suggestive in the domain
      of religion.

      This book was finished, and in part printed, when there
      appeared in the _Revue philosophique_ M. Lesbazeilles’
      interesting article on _Les bases psychologiques de la
      religion_.

      Although the author’s point of view, as the title indicates, is
      throughout strictly psychological, he has given his attention
      also to social relations and “conditions of collective
      adaptation,” which he regards as prefigured, anticipated,
      and sanctified by religious rites and myths. This, we think,
      implies some confusion between religion and morality. Morality
      deals with collective human life, but religion deals with
      collective life generally, and undertakes at the same time to
      provide a physical and a metaphysical explanation of things. We
      shall see that in the beginning religion was a superstitious
      physics, in which the forces of nature were regarded simply as
      the expression of some unknown person or person’s volitions,
      and that it thus naturally assumed a sociological form.

       *       *       *       *       *

III. It is important that there should be no misunderstanding in regard
to this _non-religion_ of the future, as contradistinguished from
the multitude of _religions of the future_ that have been recently
expounded. It has seemed to us that these various expositions are based
on a number of equivocations. In the first place religion, properly
so-called, has sometimes been confused with metaphysics, sometimes with
morals, sometimes with both; and it is owing to this confusion that
religion has been conceived to be indestructible. Is it not by an abuse
of language that Mr. Spencer, for example, gives the name of religion
to speculations concerning the unknowable and thence readily deduces
the conclusion that religion, by which he means metaphysics, possesses
an impregnable stronghold in the human mind? In the same way many other
contemporary philosophers, like Herr von Hartmann, the theologian
of the unconscious, have not resisted the temptation of describing
for us a religion of the future, which resolves itself simply into
their own system, whatever it may be, of philosophy. Others again,
especially among liberal Protestants, preserve the name of religion
for purely rationalistic systems of thought. There is, of course, a
sense in which one may admit that metaphysics and morals constitute a
religion, or form at least the vanishing point toward which religion
tends. But, in many books, the “religion of the future” is no more
than a somewhat hypocritical compromise with some form of positive
religion. Under cover of the symbolism dear to the Germans, they save
in appearance what they in reality destroy. It is in opposition to
this species of subterfuge that we have adopted the less misleading
term of the “Non-religion of the Future.” Thus we separate ourselves
from Von Hartmann and the other prophets who reveal to us, point by
point, the religion of the fiftieth century. When one approaches an
object of such ardent controversy it is better to employ words with
exactness. Everything, first and last, has been included within the
limits of philosophy; even the sciences, on the pretext that all
scientific researches were in the beginning undertaken by philosophy;
and philosophy, in turn, has been included in religion, on the pretext
that originally religion embraced within its limits the whole of
philosophy and of science. Given a religion of some kind, even that of
the Fuegians, there is nothing to prevent one from reading into its
myths the last dictum of modern metaphysics; by this means a religion
may apparently continue in existence until there is no more left of it
than a mere envelope of religious phraseology covering and discovering
a wholly metaphysical and purely philosophical system. Better still,
on this method, since Christianity is the highest form of religion,
all philosophers must ultimately become Christians; and finally, since
universality and catholicity are the ideal of Christianity, we shall
all be Catholics before we are aware of it.

For the investigator who, without denying such analogies as may
ultimately be found to exist, proposes to take as his point of
departure the specific differences of religion (which is the true
method), every positive and historical religion presents three
distinctive and essential elements: (1) An attempt at a mythical
and non-scientific explanation of natural phenomena (divine
intervention, miracles, efficacious prayers, etc.), or of historical
facts (incarnation of Jesus Christ or of Buddha, revelations, and
so forth); (2) A system of dogmas, that is to say, of symbolic
ideas, of imaginative beliefs, forcibly imposed upon one’s faith as
absolute verities, even though they are susceptible of no scientific
demonstration or philosophical justification; (3) A cult and a system
of rites, that is to say, of more or less immutable practices regarded
as possessing a marvellous efficacy upon the course of things, a
propitiatory virtue. A religion without myth, without dogma, without
cult, without rite is no more than that somewhat bastard product,
“natural religion,” which is resolvable into a system of metaphysical
hypotheses. By these three different, and really organic elements,
religion is clearly marked off from philosophy. Also, instead of
being nowadays what it was at a former period, a popular philosophy
and popular science, mythical and dogmatic religion tends to become a
system of antiscientific and antiphilosophical ideas. If this character
is not always apparent, it is owing to the sort of symbolism of which
we have spoken, which preserves the name and abandons the ideas or
adapts them to the progress of the modern mind.

The elements which distinguish religion from metaphysics or from
ethics, and which constitutes a positive religion properly so-called,
are, in our judgment, essentially caducous and transitory, and, if so,
we reject the religion of the future, as we should reject an alchemy
of the future, or astrology of the future. But it does not follow that
non-religion or a-religion—which is simply the negation of all dogma,
of all traditional and supernatural authority, of all revelation,
of all miracle, of all myth, of all rite erected into a duty—is
synonymous with impiety, with a contempt for the moral and metaphysical
elements of ancient faiths. Not in the least; to be non-religious or
a-religious is not to be anti-religious. More than that, as we shall
see, the non-religion of the future may well preserve all that is
pure in the religious sentiment: an admiration for the cosmos and
for the infinite powers which are there displayed; a search for an
ideal not only individual, but social, and even cosmic, which shall
overpass the limits of actual reality. As it may be maintained that
modern chemistry is a veritable alchemy—but an alchemy shorn of the
presuppositions which caused its miscarriage—as modern contemporary
chemists may pronounce a sincere eulogium upon the ancient alchemists
and their marvellous intuitions; just so it may be affirmed that the
true religion, if the word must be preserved, consists in no longer
maintaining a narrow and superstitious religion. The absence of
positive and dogmatic religion is, moreover, the very form toward which
all particular religions tend. In effect they strip themselves, little
by little (except Catholicism and Turkish Mohammedanism), of their
sacred character, of their antiscientific affirmations; they renounce
the oppressive control that they have traditionally exercised over
the individual conscience. The developments of religion and those of
civilization have always proceeded hand in hand; the developments of
religion have always proceeded in the line of a greater independence
of spirit, of a less literal and less narrow dogmatism, of a freer
speculation. Non-religion, as we here understand it, may be considered
as a higher degree simply of religion and of civilization.

The absence of religion thus conceived is one with a reasoned
but hypothetical metaphysics, treating of men and the universe.
One may designate it as religious independence, or _anomy_, or
individualism.[3] It has, moreover, been preached in some degree by
all religious reformers from Sakia-Mouni and Jesus to Luther and
Calvin, for they have all of them maintained liberty of conscience
and respected so much only of tradition as, in the then state of
contemporary religious criticism, they could not help admitting.
Catholicism, for example, was founded in part by Jesus, but also in
part in spite of Jesus; intolerant Anglicanism was founded in part by
Luther, but also in part in spite of Luther. The non-religious man, the
man simply without a religion, may therefore admire and sympathize with
the great founders of religion, not only in that they were thinkers,
metaphysicians, moralists, and philanthropists, but in that they
were reformers of established belief, more or less avowed enemies of
religious authority, of every affirmation which should be that of a
sacred body and not of an individual. Every positive religion possesses
as one of its essential characters that of transmitting itself from
one generation to another, by virtue of the authority which attaches
to domestic or national traditions; its mode of transmission is thus
totally different from that of science and of art. New religions
themselves are obliged more often than not to present themselves in
the guise of simple reforms, in the guise of simple returns to the
rigour of former teaching and precept, to avoid giving too great a
shock to the principle of authority, but in spite of these disguises
every new religion has shaken it; the return to an alleged primitive
authority has always been a real outleap in the direction of ultimate
liberty. There exists, then, in the bosom of every great religion a
dissolving force; namely, the very force which served in the beginning
to constitute it and to enable it to triumph over its predecessor:
the right of private judgment. It is upon this force, this right,
that one may count for the ultimate establishment, after the gradual
decomposition of every system of dogmatic belief, of a final absence of
religion.[4]

      [3] See pt. 3, chap. ii.

      [4] See pt. 3, chap. i.

Over and above the confusion between the perpetuity of metaphysics
and morals and that of positive religion, there is another tendency
among our contemporaries against which we have wished to protest.
It is the belief, which many profess, in the final unification of
existing religions into a religion of the future, either a perfected
Judaism, or a perfected Christianity, or a perfected Buddhism. To
this predicted religious unity we oppose rather a future plurality of
beliefs, a religious individualism. A pretension to universality is,
no doubt, characteristic of every great religion; but the dogmatic
and mythological element which constitutes a religion positive is
precisely irreconcilable, even under the elastic form of symbolism,
with the very universality to which they aspire. Such a universality
cannot be realized even in metaphysics and morals, for the element
of insolubility and unknowability, which cannot be eliminated, will
always attract different minds in different directions. The notion of
a dogma actually catholic, that is universal, or even a belief actually
catholic, seems to us a belief contrary to the indefinite progress
for which each of us ought to work according to his strength and his
opportunities. A thought is not really personal, does not, properly
speaking, even exist or possess the right to exist, unless it be
something more than a mere repetition of the thoughts of somebody else.
Every eye must have its own point of view, every voice its own accent.
The very progress of intelligence and of conscience must, like all
progress, proceed from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, nor seek
for an ideal unity except in an increasing variety. Would one recognize
the absolute power of the savage chief or the Oriental monarch in the
federative republican government, which, after a certain number of
centuries, will probably be that of all civilized nations? No; and
yet humanity will have passed from the one to the other by a series
of gradations sometimes scarcely visible. We believe that humanity
will progress in the same way generally, from dogmatic religion with
pretensions to universality, catholicity, and monarchy—of which
the most curious type has precisely been achieved in our days with
the dogma of infallibility—toward that state of individualism and
religions, which we consider as the human ideal, and which, moreover,
does not in the least exclude the possibility of diverse religious
associations or federations, nor of free and continuous progress toward
ultimate unity of belief on the most general subjects of human inquiry.

       *       *       *       *       *

The day when positive religions shall have disappeared, the spirit
of curiosity in matters of cosmology and metaphysics, which has been
more or less paralyzed by an effort to dwell within the unyielding
limits of indomitable formula, will be more vivacious than ever before.
There will be less of faith, but more of free speculation; less of
contemplation, but more of reasoning, of hardy induction, of an active
outleap of thought; the religious dogma will be extinct, but the best
elements of religious life will be propagated, will be augmented in
intensity and extent. For he alone is religious, in the philosophical
sense of the word, who searches for, who thinks about, who loves the
truth. Christ might have said: I came not to bring peace into human
thought, but an incessant battle of ideas; not repose, but movement and
progress of spirit; not universal dogma, but liberty of belief, which
is the first condition of growth.[5]

      [5] See pt. 3, chaps. i. and ii.

       *       *       *       *       *

IV. To-day, when the very value of religion is increasingly called in
doubt, it has been defended by sceptics, who support it, sometimes in
the name of the poetry and beauty of religious legend, sometimes in
the name of its practical utility. There is sometimes a reaction in
the modern mind toward fiction and away from the reality. The human
mind becomes weary of regarding itself as a too passively clear mirror
in which the world throws its image; and takes pleasure in breathing
on the glass and obscuring it; and thence it comes that certain
refined philosophers raise the question whether truth and clearness
are advantageous in art, in science, in morals, in religion; and they
go the length even of preferring religious or philosophical error on
æsthetic grounds. For our part, we are far from antagonizing poetry,
and believe it to be excessively beneficial for humanity, but on
condition that it be not the dupe of its own symbols and do not erect
its intentions into dogmas. At this price, we believe that poetry may
very often be truer, and better, than certain too narrowly scientific,
or too narrowly practical truths. We shall not take ourselves to task
for having frequently, in this book, mingled poetry and metaphysics.
In so doing we preserve, in so far as it is legitimate, one of the
aspects of every religion, its poetic symbolism. Poetry is often more
philosophic, not only than history, but than abstract philosophy, but
on condition of being sincere and of making no pretensions to being
what it is not.

But the partisans of “beneficent error” will object: Why endeavour
to dissipate poetic illusion and to call things by their names? Are
there not for peoples, for men, for children, certain useful errors
and permissible illusions?[6] Surely a great number of errors may
be considered as having been necessary in the history of humanity;
but has not progress precisely consisted in restricting the number of
these useful errors? There have been also organs in the body which
have become superfluous, and have disappeared or been fundamentally
transformed; such, for example, are the muscles which, no doubt, served
our ancestors to move their ears. There exist evidently also, in the
human mind, instincts, sentiments, and beliefs which have already
atrophied and are destined to disappear or to be transformed. To show
the deep roots that religion has sent down into the depths of the human
mind is not to demonstrate the perpetuity of religion, for the human
mind itself is incessantly changing. “Our fathers,” said Fontenelle,
“made the mistake of hoarding up their errors for our benefit”; and
in effect, before arriving at the truth, a certain number of false
hypotheses must be tried; to discover the true is in some sense to have
exhausted the possibilities of the false. Religions have rendered the
human mind this immense service, they have exhausted a whole class of
side-issues in science, metaphysics, and ethics; one must cross the
marvellous to attain the natural, one must cross direct revelation and
mystical intention to attain to rational induction and deduction. All
the fantastic and apocalyptical ideas with which religion has peopled
the human mind once possessed their utility, just as the incomplete
and often grotesque sketches with which the studio of the artist is
filled once possessed theirs. This straying of the human mind was
a sort of reconnoitering, this play of imagination was a veritable
labour, a preliminary labour; but the products of it must not be
presented as final. The false and even the absurd have always played
so great a rôle in human affairs that it would assuredly be dangerous
to attempt abruptly to proceed without them; transitions are useful,
even in passing from darkness into light, and one needs to become
accustomed even to the truth. It is for that reason that society has
always rested in a great measure upon error. To-day this portion of its
foundation is being withdrawn, and conservatives are sadly frightened
lest the whole social equilibrium be destroyed; but we repeat, this
diminution of the number of errors is precisely what constitutes
progress, and in some sort defines it. Progress in effect is not simply
a sensible amelioration of life, it is also the achievement of a better
intellectual formulation of life, it is a triumph of logic; to progress
is to attain to a more complete consciousness of one’s self and of
the world, and by that very fact to a more complete inner consistency
of one’s theory of the world. In the beginning, not only moral and
religious life, but civil and political life, rested upon the grossest
errors, on absolute monarchy, divine right, caste, and slavery; all
this barbarity possessed a certain utility, but its utility precisely
consisted in its leading to its own extinction; it served as a means
of handing us on to something better. What distinguishes the living
mechanism from other mechanisms is that the outer springs precisely
labour to cause themselves to be superseded; that the movement once
produced is perpetual. If we possessed means of projection powerful
enough to rival those of nature, we might convert a cannon ball into
an eternal satellite of the earth, without its being necessary to
impart movement to it a second time. A result accomplished in nature
is accomplished once for all. A step forward if it is real and not
illusory, and in especial if it is completely conscious, renders
impossible a step backward.

      [6] See pt. 2, chap. iv.

In the eighteenth century the attack on religion was directed by
philosophical partisans of _a priori_ principles, who were persuaded
that the instant a faith was proved to be absurd that was the end
of it. In our days the attack is led by historians who possess an
absolute respect for fact, which they are inclined to erect into a
law, historians who pass a learned existence in the midst of absurdity
in all its forms, and for whom the irrational, instead of condemning
a belief in which it appears, is often a condition of its duration.
Therein lies the difference between the attitude of the eighteenth
century and that of the nineteenth toward religion. The eighteenth
century hated religion and wished to destroy it. The nineteenth century
endeavours to understand religion and cannot reconcile itself to seeing
so charming an object of study disappear. The historian’s device is,
“What has been, will be”; he is naturally inclined to model his
conception of the future on his knowledge of the past. A witness of the
futility of revolutions, he sometimes forgets that complete evolution
is possible: an evolution which transforms things to their very roots
and metamorphoses human beings and their beliefs to an extent that
renders them unrecognizable.[7]

      [7] “You are occupied with religion,” a cultivated unbeliever
      writes me. “There is then some such thing! So much the
      better for those who cannot do without it.” This witticism
      precisely sums up the state of mind of a great many enlightened
      Frenchmen: they are profoundly astonished that religion should
      still be on its legs, and out of their astonishment they draw
      the conviction that it is necessary. Their surprise thereupon
      becomes a respect, almost a reverence. Assuredly positive
      religions still exist and long will exist; and as long as they
      exist they will no doubt do so for reasons; but these reasons
      diminish day by day and the number of believers diminishes
      along with them. Instead of bowing down before the fact as
      before something sacred, one must rather say to one’s self
      that by modifying the fact one will modify and suppress the
      _raisons d’être_ of that fact; by driving religions before it,
      the modern mind demonstrates that they have less and less the
      right to live. That certain people have not as yet learned
      to do without them is true, and as long as they do not learn
      to do without them religions will for them exist; we have
      not the least anxiety on that score; and just in so far as
      they find their certitude in regard to them shaken, they will
      have proved that their intelligence is so far enfranchised as
      to have no further need of an arbitrary rule. Similarly for
      peoples: nothing is more naïve than to urge the very necessity
      of transitions as a bar to progress: it is as if one should
      call attention to the shortness of human steps, and conclude
      therefrom that movement is impossible; that man stands still
      like a shell-fish attached to a stone or a fossil buried in a
      rock.

One of the masters of religious criticism, M. Renan, wrote to
Sainte-Beuve: “No, assuredly I did not wish to detach from the old
trunk a soul which was not ripe.” We, also, are not of those who
believe in shaking the tree and gathering a green and bruised crop;
but if one ought not to make the green fruit fall, one may at least
take means to hasten its ripening upon the branch. The human brain is
a transmutation of solar heat; one must dissipate this heat, to become
once more a ray of the sun. Such an ambition is very gentle, is not at
all exorbitant, when one remembers how small a thing a ray of the sun
is and how lost in infinite space; a relatively small portion of these
wandering rays, however, has sufficed to fashion the earth and all
mankind.

I often meet, near my home, a missionary with a black beard, a hard,
sharp eye, lit sometimes by a mystic gleam. He seems to maintain a
correspondence with the four corners of the world; assuredly he works
and works precisely at building up what I am endeavouring to pull down.
And must our opposite strivings therefore be regarded as hostile? Why
so? Are we not both brothers and humble collaborators in the work
of humanity? To convert primitive peoples to Christian dogma and to
deliver those who have arrived at a higher stage of civilization from
a positive and dogmatic faith, are two tasks which, far from excluding
each other, complete each other. Missionaries and freethinkers
cultivate different plants, in different places, but at bottom both are
labouring to make the field of humanity more fertile. It is said that
John Huss, when tied to the stake at Constance, wore a smile of supreme
joy when he perceived a peasant in the crowd, bringing straw from the
roof of his hut to light the fire: _Sancta simplicitas!_ The martyr
recognized in this man a brother in sincerity; he was glad to find
himself in the presence of a disinterested conviction. We are no longer
in the times of John Huss, of Bruno, of Servetius, of St. Justin, or
of Socrates; it constitutes a reason the more for showing ourselves
tolerant, and sympathetic even, toward those whom we regard as being in
error, provided that the error be sincere.

There is an anti-religious fanaticism which is almost as dangerous
as religious fanaticism. Erasmus compares humanity to a drunken man
seated on a horse and lurching first to the right and then to the
left. The enemies of religion have often committed the mistake of
despising their adversaries; it is the worst of faults. There is a
power of elasticity in human beliefs which causes their resistance to
increase in proportion to the compression which is exerted upon them.
Formerly, when a city was attacked by some scourge, the first care of
the notable inhabitants, of the chiefs of the city, was to order public
prayers; to-day the practical means of battling with epidemics and
other scourges are better known, but nevertheless, in 1885, when there
was cholera in Marseilles the municipal council devoted its attention
almost singly to removing the religious mottoes from the walls of the
public schools; it is a remarkable example of what one may call a
counter-superstition. Thus the two species of fanaticism, religious
and anti-religious, may equally distract the timid from the employment
of scientific means against natural evils; an employment which is
after all, _par excellence_, the business of man; these two kinds of
fanaticism are paralyso-motors in the great body of humanity.

Among cultivated people there has now and then taken place a violent
reaction against religious prejudice, and this reaction frequently
persists till death; but in a certain number of cases this reaction is
followed in the course of time by a counter-reaction; it is only, as
Spencer has remarked, when this counter-reaction has been sufficient,
that one may formulate, with anything like completeness, judgments
somewhat less narrow and more comprehensive upon the question of
religion. Time makes us generous, enlarges our minds each year, as it
does the concentric circles in the trunk of a tree. Life also pacifies
us as death does; reconciles us with those who do not think and feel
as we do. When you become indignant at some antique, absurd prejudice,
remember that it has been a travelling companion of humanity for
perhaps ten thousand years, that it has lent men aid when the ways
were bad and has been the occasion of many joys, and has lived, so to
speak, the life of humanity; one might well find a certain element of
fraternity in every human thought.

We do not believe that the readers of this sincere book will be able
to accuse us of partiality or of injustice, for we have not sought to
disguise either the good or the evil aspects of religion, and have
even taken a certain pleasure in setting the former in relief. On the
other hand, we shall hardly be taxed with ignorance of the religious
problem which we have patiently studied on its every side. We shall
perhaps be reproached with belonging something too manifestly to the
country of our birth, with introducing into the solutions here offered
something of the French excess of logic, of an indisposition to yield
to half measures, of the determination to have all or nothing, of the
spirit which was unable to stop midway with Protestantism and which
for the past two centuries has been the home of the most ardent free
thought in the world. We reply that if the French mind has a defect,
this defect is not logic but a certain nimble trenchancy, a certain
narrowness of view which is the reverse of the spirit of logic and
analysis; logic, after all, has always the last word here below.
Concessions to absurdity, or at least to relativity, may sometimes be
necessary in human affairs—and the French Revolutionists were wrong
not to recognize it—but such concessions are always transitory. Error
is not the end and aim of the human mind; if one cannot make up one’s
account with it, if it is useless to disparage it bitterly, it is also
unnecessary to venerate it. Minds at once logical and capacious are
always sure to be followed, provided one gives humanity time enough;
and the truth can wait; it always remains young and is certain some
day to be recognized. Sometimes during long night marches soldiers
fall asleep without ceasing on that account to go forward; they march
on in their dreams and do not awaken till they have reached their
destination on the battlefield. It is thus that ideas advance in the
human mind; they are so drowsy that they seem unable to stand upright,
one discovers their strength and their vitality only by the distance
they traverse, and finally day breaks and they appear on the field and
are victorious.




THE NON-RELIGION OF THE FUTURE.




Part First.

THE GENESIS OF RELIGIONS IN PRIMITIVE SOCIETIES.




CHAPTER I.

RELIGIOUS PHYSICS.

  IMPORTANCE OF THE PROBLEM OF THE ORIGIN OF RELIGION—UNIVERSALITY OF
    RELIGIOUS BELIEFS OR SUPERSTITIONS—VARIABILITY OF RELIGIONS AND
    RELIGIOUS EVOLUTION.

    I. Idealist Theory which Attributes the Origin of Religion to
      a Notion of the Infinite—Henotheism of Max Müller and Von
      Hartmann—M. Renan’s Instinct for Divinity.

    II. Theory of a Worship of the Dead and of Spirits—Herbert
      Spencer—Spencer’s Objections to the Theory of the
      Attribution of a Soul to Natural Forces.

    III. Answer to Objections—Religious Physics Sociological in
      Form, and the Substitution of Relations between Malevolent
      or Beneficent Conscious Beings for Relations between
      Natural Forces—Socio-morphism of Primitive Peoples.


[Sidenote: Importance of inquiry into genesis of religion.]

The question of the genesis of religion is more important than any
other historical inquiry. It involves not only the truth or falsity
of past events, but the value or the reverse of our ideas and present
beliefs. Each of us has something at stake in this investigation. The
causes which formerly gave rise to a belief are still, in the majority
of cases, those which maintain it in existence in our days, and to
take stock of these causes is, whether one intends it to be so or not,
to pass judgment on the belief itself. History, if it should ever be
complete, would possess here the power of effacing in the future what
it had failed to justify in the past. Perfectly to ascertain the
origin of religions would be at the same time either to condemn them or
to fortify and preserve them.

[Sidenote: Established fact that every known race of people is
religious.]

One point may legitimately be regarded as attained by contemporary
criticism. After the labours of Herr Roskoff, M. Réville, and M. Girard
de Rialle, it is impossible to maintain that there exist nowadays on
the surface of the earth whole peoples absolutely without religion
or superstition, which among non-civilized people amount to the same
thing.[8] The reason why man is a superstitious or religious being is
simply that he possesses a high degree of intelligence. Megalithic
monuments (menhirs, cromlechs, dolmens), sepulchres, amulets, are
trustworthy evidence of the existence of religion in prehistoric times;
and those fragments of bone detached from the skull and pierced with
holes to pass a string through—“cranial rounds”—belong, no doubt,
to the same category.[9] Manifestations of the religious spirit date
back thus to the age of polished stone. And to pass from facts to
hypotheses it is conceivable that at the beginning of the quaternary
period, perhaps two hundred and fifty thousand years ago, man was
already feeding upon vague and elementary superstitions, though he does
not appear to have felt sufficient respect for his dead to have dug
sepulchres, and although no fetiches belonging to that period have been
discovered.

      [8] Herr Roskoff, _Das Religionswesen der rohesten
      Naturvoelker_ (Leipzig, 1880); M. Girard de Rialle, _Mythologie
      comparée_ (Paris, 1878); M. Réville, _Les religions des peuples
      non civilisés_ (Paris, 1880).

      [9] See M. G. De Mortillet, _Le préhistorique. Antiquité de
      l’homme_ (Paris, 1883).

[Sidenote: Established fact that religion is of natural origin.]

A second point which may be regarded as equally established, and which
results in important consequences in the matter of method of research,
is that religion, being of natural origin, must have developed slowly
and in accordance with universal and regular laws; it must have
originated in simple and vague notions of some sort, accessible to
the most primitive intelligence. And from that starting point it must
have risen by gradual evolution to the complex and precise conceptions
which characterize it to-day. It is in vain for religions to believe
themselves immutable; they have all of them been borne forward
unwittingly by the movement of universal evolution. The great Egyptian
Sphinx, who has not changed her position in the desert these four
thousand years, might believe herself to be stationary, but she has
never ceased for an instant to whirl through space, borne along by the
earth’s motion around the sun.

[Sidenote: Two contrasted theories of its origin.]

It remains to determine what these primary notions that lay at the
bottom of all religions were. And here begins the disagreement among
the principal authorities on the science of religion. Some of them
explain the birth of religion by a sort of mysterious intuition of
supra-sensible verity, by a divination of God; others regard it as an
intellectual error, a false hypothesis, which was natural, however,
and perhaps inevitable to primitive intelligence. The first look upon
religion as an immense leap on the part of the human mind over and
beyond the limits of the physical world in which we are confined,
the second believe it to be born in the beginning of an inexact
interpretation of the commonest phenomena of the world, of objects
of our senses or of our consciousness; for the first, religion is
more than science; for the second, religion is pseudo-science. All
idealists—Strauss, Renan, Matthew Arnold—discover in every religion
the germ of their own especial form of refined idealism, and bow down
before it with a respect that might well appear ironical if they did
not affirm themselves to be quite sincere; they see in religions
generally the noblest and most lasting product of the human mind. Their
extreme adversaries, on the contrary, see no more in the origin of
religions than, as Auguste Comte would have said, the expression of a
gross fetichism.

[Sidenote: Is religion a species of illusion?]

It is evident that the problem of the origin of religion, in the new
form in which it presents itself to-day, is quite as grave as ever it
was; formerly the question was whether religion is revealed or natural;
to-day the question is whether religion is or is not true—whether
it is or is not the product of an intellectual error, of a sort of
inevitable optical illusion which it is the business of science to
explain and to correct; whether, in effect, the god of mythical and
symbolical religion is not simply a magnified idol.

[Sidenote: The positivist theory no longer in possession of the field.]

The positivist theory of religion seemed some years ago close upon its
ultimate triumph.[10] Many had accepted it, but without having fully
perceived all of its consequences. At the present moment it is, on the
contrary, strongly contested. New elements have been introduced into
the problem and the whole question must be gone over again. Max Müller
in especial has made what might be almost called a desperate effort
to make out a case for the objectivity and essential rationality of
religion, which had both been compromised by positivism.[11] From a
different point of view Herbert Spencer also, in his “Sociology,” has
criticised theories which regard fetichism or naturism as the principle
of religion.

      [10] We find it adopted or almost so even by spiritualists,
      like M. Vacherot, _La religion_, Paris, 1869.

      [11] See _Origin and Development of Religion_, by F. Max
      Müller, M. A.

[Sidenote: Max Müller’s theory.]

According to Max Müller some notion of divinity, in especial in the
form of a notion of the infinite, must have preceded the conception of
God. Gods are simply subsequent personifications of this great innate
idea; our ancestors kneeled in worship long before they possessed a
name for Him before whom they were kneeling. Even at the present day
we recognize in the last resort the vanity of all the titles of the
unknown God whom we must adore really in silence. Religion, which is
responsible for the origin of the gods of history, may therefore well
survive them. We say religion; for in effect, according to Max Müller,
all religions amount in the end to one, since they may all be traced
back through the long course of their development to a single original
conception, that namely of the infinite, which from the very beginning
was present in the mind of man. This universal conception, however,
Max Müller does not regard as in any sense mystical or innate, in the
old acceptation of that word. He willingly adopts the axiom: _Nihil
in fide quod non antea fuerit in sensu._[12] But in his opinion some
perception of the infinite is logically involved in a perception of
the finite, and this conception of infinity, with its basis at once in
sense and reason, is the true foundation of religion. Given the five
senses of a savage, Max Müller undertakes to make him sensible of or at
least experience some presentiment of the infinite, make him desire it,
feel some aspiration toward it. Take the sense of sight for example:
“Man sees, he sees to a certain point; and then his eyesight breaks
down. But exactly where his eyesight breaks down there presses upon
him, whether he likes it or not, the perception of the unlimited or
the infinite.” “It may be said,” he adds, “that this is not perception
in the ordinary sense of the word. No more it is, but still less is it
mere reasoning.” “If it seems too bold to say that man actually sees
the invisible, let us say that he _suffers_ from the invisible, and
the invisible is only a special name for the infinite.” Man not only
necessarily divines the infinite as existing beyond the limits of the
finite, and as it were enveloping it; he perceives it within the limits
of the finite, and as it were penetrating it; the infinite divisibility
of matter is manifest to the senses, the fact that science seems to
demand the existence of an irreducible atom as a necessary postulate
to the contrary notwithstanding. And what is true of space is equally
true of time, applies equally to quality and quantity. “Beyond, behind,
beneath, and within the finite, the infinite is always present to our
senses. It presses upon us, it grows upon us from every side. What we
call finite in space and time, in form and word, is nothing but a veil
or net which we ourselves have thrown over the infinite.” And let it
not be objected that primitive languages supply no means of expressing
the idea of infinity, of the beyond, which is given in every finite
sensation. Do the languages of antiquity supply a means of designating
the infinite shades and variety of colour? Democritus was acquainted
with but four colours: black, white, red, and yellow. Shall we say,
therefore, that the ancients did not perceive the blue of heaven?
The sky was as blue for them as it is for us, but they had not yet
established a conventional designation for the sensation it afforded
them. And similarly in the case of the infinite for the primitive man;
it existed for him although he had not as yet invented a name for it.
Well, what is this infinite, in the last resort, but the object to
which every religion addresses itself? A religious being is essentially
one who is not satisfied with such and such a finite sensation; who
looks everywhere for the beyond—looks for it in life, in death, in
nature, in himself. To be divinely aware of a vague somewhat that
one cannot quite understand, to feel a veneration for it and then to
endeavour to fit it with a name, to call to it stammeringly, these
are the beginnings of every system of religious worship. The religion
of the infinite comprehends and precedes all others, and since the
infinite itself is given in sensation, it follows that “Religion is
simply another development of sensuous perception, quite as much as
reason is.”[13]

      [12] _Origin and Development of Religion_, p. 210.

      [13] _Origin of Religion_, p. 25.

[Sidenote: Equally opposed to positivists and orthodox monotheists.]

Max Müller is equally critical in his attitude toward positivists, who
regard fetichism as the primitive religion, and toward the orthodox,
who find in monotheism the natural uncorrupted type of religion. In
his opinion, to name a god or gods implies antecedently the possession
of a notion of the divine, of the infinite; gods are simply the
different forms, more or less imperfect indeed, in which divers peoples
have bodied forth one and the same idea; religion is, so to speak,
a language into which men have endeavoured to translate one and the
same internal aspiration—that of comprehending the great unknown; if
man’s tongue and intelligence have gone astray, if the diversity and
inequality of religions are comparable to the diversity and inequality
of languages, that does not necessarily mean that at bottom the
veritable principle and object of all these different religions, as of
all these different languages, are not very nearly the same. According
to Max Müller a fetich, in the proper sense of the word (_factitius_),
is no more than a symbol which presupposes an idea symbolized; the
idea of God cannot come out of a fetich unless it has already been put
there. Casual objects, such as stones, shells, the tail of a lion,
a tangle of hair, or any such rubbish, do not possess in themselves
a theogonic or god-producing character. The phenomena of fetichism,
therefore, are always historically and psychologically secondary.
Religions do not begin in fetichisms, it is truer to say that they end
in it; not one of them has shown itself capable of maintaining its
original purity in connection with fetichism. Portuguese Catholics who
reproach negroes with the _feitiços_ were the first (were they not?) to
have their rosaries, their crosses, their sacred images, blessed by the
priests, before their departure from their native land.

[Sidenote: Henotheism.]

If fetichism, understood as Max Müller understands it, is not the
primitive form of religion, if self-conscious monotheism is equally
incapable of maintaining its claim to be so, it is more exact to say
that the earliest religion, at least in India, consisted in the worship
of different objects, accepted one after the other as representing _a_
god (εἷς) and not the unique and sole God (μόνος). It is this that
Max Müller calls by a word invented by him: henotheism (εἷς, ἑνός,
in opposition to μόνος), or better, kathenotheism.[14] In ordinary
polytheism the gods are arranged in hierarchies, belong to different
ranks; order reigns in heaven; but in the beginning no such system of
subordination could have existed. Each god must have seemed in turn
the most powerful to whoever invoked him; Indra, Varuna, Agni, Mitra,
Somah were accustomed to hear the same epithets addressed to them;
religious anarchy preceded religious monarchy. “Among you, O Gods,”
says Rishi Manu Vaivasvata, “there is none that is large, there is none
that is small, there is none that is old nor young: you are all great
indeed.” They are all but different symbols of the same idea, of an
adoration for that which overpasses the limits of the human mind, for
the mysterious infinite whose existence our senses prove by their very
incapacity of taking cognizance of it.

      [14] This word has met with success in Germany. Hartmann also
      adopts a theory of henotheism.

[Sidenote: The evolution of the Hindu faith typical.]

Max Müller endeavours to trace the evolution of Hindu thought from
a period long previous to the birth of Buddhism, which was the
Protestantism of India. The learned philologist sees in the development
of religion in India one of the essential types of the development of
human religions generally. It may be even, he thinks, that the Hindus,
who started from as low a plane as we, have in some respects reached a
more considerable height. Let us follow him in this inquiry, which has
nowhere been conducted more anxiously and indefatigably than in the
great country which may almost be called the home of meditation. Let us
take with him a “bird’s-eye view” of what may be regarded as an epitome
of human history.

[Sidenote: Progress from the semi-tangible to the intangible.]

Πάντες δὲ θεῶν χατέους’ ἄνθρωποι, said Homer. It was not within
the domain of the wholly tangible that India sought for its gods;
understanding by _tangible_ whatever one can touch on all sides,
stones, shells, bones, etc.; and Max Müller sees in this fact (which,
by the way, may be contested) a fresh argument against the fetich
theory. On the contrary, in the presence of his great, snow-capped
mountains, of which our comparatively level Europe can scarcely afford
us even an idea, in the presence of his immense beneficent rivers with
their rumbling cataracts, their eddies, their unknown sources, in the
presence of the ocean, stretching away beyond the line of vision, the
Hindu found himself surrounded by things, of which he could touch
and understand but some inconsiderable portion—of which the origin
and destiny baffled him. It was in the domain of the _semi-tangible_
that India found its _semi-deities_. One step beyond, Hindu thought
domesticated itself in the region of the intangible, that is to say,
in the region of things which, though visible, lie entirely beyond our
reach—the visible heaven, the stars, the sun, the moon, the dawn,
which were regarded in India, as also elsewhere, as true divinities.
Add to these thunder, which for the Hindus also descends from heaven
with a “howl,” the wind sometimes so terrible, which, however, in
the hot days of summer “pours honey” upon man, and the rain, sent
by the beneficent rain god, Indra. Having thus created their deities
and peopled heaven somewhat at haphazard, the Hindus were not slow
to distribute them into classes and families—to invent for them a
necessary background of genealogy. There is a record of certain efforts
to establish in the Hindu heaven, as in the Olympus of the Greeks, a
system of government, a supreme authority; in a number of hymns the
notion of the one God, Creator and Master of the world, is clearly
expressed: He is “the Father that begat us, the Ruler who knows the
laws and the worlds, in Him alone all creatures repose.”

[Sidenote: And from the intangible to the unreal.]

But the Hindu mind was destined to rise at a bound above Greek
polytheism and Hebrew monotheism. It is well to see God in nature.
There lies still a step beyond: to ignore nature. A firm belief in
the reality of this world, in the value of this life, enters as an
essential element into the belief in a personal God, superior to
the world and distinct from it, like the Javeh of the Hebrews. The
distinguishing characteristic of the Hindu mind is precisely a certain
scepticism in regard to the world, a persuasion of the vanity of
nature; so that the Hindu god possesses and can possess nothing in
common with Jupiter or Javeh. He who sees no more in material force
than a play of the senses, will see no more in the power which is
supposed to direct that force than a play of the imagination; faith
in a Creator shares the fate of faith in a creation. It is in vain
for Hindu poets to vindicate _sraddhâ_ faith, for the gods. Indra in
especial, the most popular of the divinities, to whom the supreme
epithet of Visvakarman, the maker of all things, is given, is of all
others most subject to be doubted. “There is no Indra. Who has seen
him? Whom shall we praise?” (Rig. vii. 89, 3.) It is true that the
poet after these bitter words represents Indra as appearing in person,
as in the book of Job. “Here I am, O worshipper! behold me here. In
might I overcome all creatures.” But the faith of the poet and of
the thinker takes fire but for a moment; we enter into a period of
doubt which Max Müller designates by the name of adevism and which he
carefully distinguishes from atheism properly so called. And in effect
Hindus did not reject the very notion of a god, the Greek θεός;
they sought God simply back of and beyond the personal and capricious
deities that up to that time they had adored; such deities became for
them names simply, but names of some thing, of some being, unknown.
“There is only one being, although the poets call him by a thousand
names.” Buddhism itself, which came later and did no more than develop
tendencies already existing in Brahmanism, was not, in Max Müller’s
judgment, originally atheistic. Adevism was no more for India, with
some slight exceptions, than a period of transition; the Hindu mind
passed it as a step toward a higher level. And yet what anxiety, what
incertitude, is expressed in certain hymns which belong, no doubt,
to this unhappy epoch. The Vedic poets no longer glorify the sky nor
the dawn, they do not celebrate the powers of Indra, nor the wisdom
of Visvakarman and Pragâpati. They move about, as they themselves
say, “as if enveloped in mist and idle speech.” Another says: “My
ears vanish, my eyes vanish, and the light also which dwells in my
heart; my mind with its far off longing leaves me; what shall I say,
and what shall I think?... Who knows from whence this great creation
sprang? and whether it is the work of a Creator or not? The most High
Seer, that is in the highest heaven, he knows it, or perchance even
he knows not.” (Rig. x. 129.) There is profoundness in these last
words, and how the problem of the creation has been probed by the human
intellect since that epoch! The evolution of the ideas indicated in
the passages of the hymns reaches its climax in what are called the
Upanishads, the last literary compositions which still belong to the
Vedic period, where all the philosophy of the time is found condensed,
and where one catches glimpses of the modern doctrine of Schopenhauer
and of Von Hartmann. After having meditated a long time the Hindu
believed himself to have succeeded. Max Müller cites the surprising
dialogue between Pragâpati and Indra, in which the latter acquires,
after a long effort, an acquaintance with the “self hidden within the
heart,” the Atman, what Kant would call “the transcendental ego.” In
the beginning Indra supposed this ego to be the visible reflection of
his body, covered with its splendid raiment, in the water. But no;
for when the body suffers or perishes, Atman would perish. “I see no
good in this doctrine.” Indra then entertained the hypothesis that the
Atman reveals itself in dreams, when the mind is given over to the
control of one knows not what invisible power, and forgets the pains
of life. But no, for in dreams one still weeps, still suffers. Or may
not the Atman, the supreme ego, be simply the man in dreamless sleep,
in perfect repose? The ideal of repose, forgetfulness, of profound and
sweet sleep, has always possessed great charm for the Orient. But no,
“for he who sleeps does not know himself (his self), that he is I, nor
does he know anything that exists. He is gone to utter annihilation.
I see no good in this doctrine.” It is only after passing through all
these successive stages, that the Hindu mind comes at last to formulate
what seems to it altogether the most profound truth and the supreme
ideal. Atman is the self, leaving the body and freeing itself from
pleasure and pain, taking cognizance of its own eternity (Upan. viii.
7-12); recognizing the Old, who is difficult to be seen, who has
entered into darkness.... It is smaller than small, greater than great;
hidden in the heart of the creature. (ii. 12, 20.) Atman the “highest
person,” whom the sage finally discovers in himself, lies also at the
bottom of all other beings than himself. Atman, the subjective ego, is
identical with Brahma, the objective ego. Brahma is in us, and we are
in all things, the distinction between individuals vanishes, nature
and its gods are absorbed in Brahma, and Brahma is “the very ether of
our hearts.” “Thou art it, _tat tvam_, is the word of life and of the
whole world.” To find one’s self in everything, to feel the eternity
of everything, is the supreme religion; it is the religion of Spinoza.
“There is one eternal thinker, thinking the non-eternal thoughts; he,
though one, fulfils the desires of many.... Brahma cannot be reached
by speech, by mind, or by eye. He cannot be apprehended, except by him
who says: He is.” This Brahma in whom everything vanishes as a dream,
“is a great terror, like a drawn sword”; but he is also the highest
joy to him who has once found him; he is the appeaser of desire and
intelligence. “Those who know him become immortal.”

[Sidenote: Hindu tolerance.]

We have at last reached with Max Müller “the end of the long journey
which we undertook to trace.” We have seen the Hindu religion, which
is typical of human religions, develop gradually, endeavour to cope
with the infinite in its various forms, until it attains the height
of conceiving it as Brahma, the eternal thinker, of whom the world
is no more than a transitory thought. The gods are dead; sacrifices,
rites, observances of all sorts are useless; the sole rite which
is appropriate as an offering to the infinite is meditation and
detachment. Do the débris therefore of the earlier stages of the faith
disappear and the temples fall in dust, and Agni, Indra, and all these
splendid titles pass into oblivion? Not at all, and here, following Max
Müller, we may find in the history of the religions of India a lesson
for ourselves in tolerance and generosity. The Brahmans understood
that, as man grows from infancy to old age, the idea of the divine must
grow in him from the cradle to the grave; a religion which does not
live and grow is a dead religion. The Hindus accordingly have divided
the life of the individual into distinct periods—Âsramas, as they say;
in the earlier Âsramas the believer invokes gods, offers sacrifices,
puts up prayers; it is only later, when he has accomplished these
naïve duties and tempered his soul by long contact with the juvenile
aspects of the faith, that in his mature reason he rises above the
gods, and regards all sacrifices and ceremonies as vain forms, and
thenceforth finds his cult in the highest science which is to him the
highest religion, the Vedanta. Thus in the life of the individual the
various stages of religion exist in an harmonious hierarchy. Even in
our days in a Brahman family one may see the grandfather at the summit
of the intellectual ladder looking down without disdain upon his son,
who fulfils each day his sacred duties, and at his grandson learning
by heart the ancient hymns. All generations live in peace, side by
side. The different castes, each of which follows a system of belief
adapted to its degree, do the same. All adore, at bottom, the same
god, but this god takes care to make himself accessible to everyone,
to stoop for those whose station does not lift them above the earth.
“It is thus,” says Max Müller, “that every religion, if it is a bond
of union between the wise and the foolish, the old and the young, must
be pliant, must be high, and deep, and broad; bearing all things,
believing all things, enduring all things.” Let us be as tolerant as
our fathers in India, let us not be indignant against the superstitions
above which we ourselves have risen and which served us in their day as
stepping stones. Let us learn how to discover the element of goodness
and truth in all the creeds of humanity. It may be that all human
religions, if they could once be freed from the legends which drape
them, would unite to furnish for the cultivated portion of mankind a
religion really complete. “Who knows but that their very foundation may
serve once more, like the catacombs, or like the crypts beneath our old
cathedrals, for those who, to whatever creed they may belong, long for
something better, purer, older, and truer than what they can find in
the statutable sacrifices, services, and sermons of the days in which
their lot on earth has been cast.”

       *       *       *       *       *

[Sidenote: Criticism of Max Müller’s theory.]

Is this elevated theory exact? In the first place it seeks erroneously
to find in Hindu civilization the type of primitive religion; more
than that it inverts the order of evolution by presupposing at the
beginning the existence of complex notions and profound symbols which
have been misconceived, it holds, by later generations only through
an inability correctly to interpret the language in which they lay
embalmed.[15] The capital defect in the theory, however, is that it
discovers the origin of religion in the vaguest and most modern of
metaphysical ideas, that namely of the infinite. Max Müller holds that
this idea is furnished even by the senses; his system presents itself
to us as an effort at a reconciliation between the sensualists and
the idealists. But the doctrine rests upon a confusion. A perception
of relativity is one thing, a perception of infinity is another; some
objects are great, some are small, and any object is great or small
according to the standard of comparison—that is what the senses, or
rather the memory, informs us of; and unless the metaphysical subtlety
of a modern scholar whispers something in their ear, that is all they
tell us. Max Müller seems to believe that the perception of space
supplies us directly with a perception of infinity; but over and above
any question of the psychological inexactitude of this account, it
is irreconcilable with the historical facts. The infinity of space
is an idea which metaphysicians alone, and that too in comparatively
late times, have succeeded in realizing. The horizon is, on the face
of it, a physical limit. The child fancies that he can go close up to
the horizon and touch the beginnings of the celestial dome with his
finger; the ancients conceived the heavens as an inverted bowl of hard
crystal, sown with luminous points.[16] For us who have been told since
we were children that the stars are greater than the earth, and are
separated from us by a distance unimaginably great, the spectacle of
the heavens by a necessary association gives rise to a feeling of the
incommensurable and the infinite. There is no reason to suppose that
anything analogous took place in the mind of primitive man when he
lifted his eyes on high. Primitive man has not the least idea that the
power of vision is limited, that the vault of heaven is the vault of
his incapacity and that infinite space stretches beyond; habitually,
primitive man locates the end of the world at the extremity of his line
of vision, which forms on all sides of him a visible and motionless
sphere. It is difficult for him to understand that heavenly space
is greater than the visible world. He finds it equally difficult to
conceive the infinitely little; the infinite divisibility of matter
of which, according to Max Müller, the senses take cognizance, is a
conception which results only from the most abstract reasoning. Man’s
natural belief is that the divisibility of matter stops at the same
point that his power of taking cognizance of it does—at the visible
atom.

      [15] Max Müller, as is well known, goes the length of believing
      that the authors of the first myths were perfectly conscious
      that they were speaking in parables; and that subsequent
      generations misunderstood them, because they personified the
      figures and the names by which the Divine was referred to; so
      that mythology becomes literally the science of a disease of
      language.

      [16] Among the most ingenious and least contestable of Max
      Müller’s suggestions, we cite the paragraph devoted to the
      Vedic deity Aditi, one of the names of the dawn: “You will be
      as surprised as I certainly was surprised when the fact first
      presented itself to me, that there really is a deity in the
      Veda who is simply called the boundless or the infinite, in
      Sanscrit A-_diti_. _Aditi_ is derived from _diti_, and the
      negative particle _a_. _Diti_, again, is regularly derived from
      a root DÂ (dyati), to bind, from which _dita_, the participle,
      meaning bound, and _diti_, a substantive, meaning binding
      and bound. _Aditi_, therefore, must originally have meant
      without bounds, not chained nor inclosed, boundless, infinite,
      infinitude.”

      This etymology, on the contrary, seems to us rather to be
      calculated to show precisely that the conception of infinity is
      not primitive, and that the first time the Hindus invoked the
      dawn under the name of Aditi, they were far from possessing any
      distinction between finite and infinite. The night was for them
      a prison-house, the return of day was their deliverance. It is
      well known that they represented day as a luminous cow, which
      moved slowly out of the stable at night and stepped across
      the fields of heaven and of earth. Sometimes these cows are
      represented as stolen and confined in sombre caverns. Aurora
      herself is retained in the depths of _Rita_; night threatens
      to reign without end, but the gods set out in search of her,
      Indra discovers and delivers her, and with her aid, the cows
      bellowing for liberty are discovered in their cavern. It
      seems to us that for one who enters into the spirit of these
      primitive legends, it is easy to determine the primitive sense
      of Aditi. Aditi is the dawn who, confined one knows not where,
      succeeds at last in breaking bonds and appears radiantly in
      the open heaven, delivering and delivered, breaking the jail
      in which the hours of darkness have confined the world. Aditi
      is the dawn, freed and giving freedom. And, by an extension
      of meaning, it comes to signify the immortal and imperishable
      light which no power can veil or hide for more than a day.
      Whereas, Diti signifies what is mortal and perishable and
      prisoned in the bounds of matter. This construction is simple,
      and what is more, is confirmed by the legends to which we
      have just alluded; after having advocated it in the _Revue
      philosophique_ (December, 1879), we find it adopted by M.
      Réville, _Prolégomènes à l’histoire des religions_, 1881.

[Sidenote: “Suffering from the invisible,” a modern malady.]

As to this “suffering from the invisible” of which Max Müller speaks,
it is an altogether modern disease, which, instead of giving rise
to the idea of the infinite, is, on the contrary, a late product of
this notion which was itself acquired by force of knowledge and of
reasoning; far from marking the point from which religions spring,
the “suffering from the unknown” stamps their insufficiency, is the
beginning of their end. Primitive man troubles himself little about
the infinity of nature and the eternal silence of infinite space; he
constructs a world after the model of his own houses and shuts himself
safely up in it. It is only the visible world that troubles him; he
finds in it an object more than sufficient for his utmost physical
and intellectual activity; he does not go far afield in search of
his gods; he finds them, so to speak, under his hand, touches them
with his finger, lives in their company. The essence of their power
over him lies in the fact that they are neighbours of his. To his
gross intelligence the greatness of the gods is not commensurate with
their intrinsic infinity, but with their power over him; if heaven
neither lighted him nor warmed him with its sun, it would not be the
universal father, the Dyaush-pitâ, the Ζεύς, the Jupiter. We do
not mean to say with Feuerbach that religion strikes root in gross
self-interest and brutal egoism simply; in his relations with the gods,
as in his relations with his fellows, man is partly selfish, partly
unselfish: what we maintain is that primitive man is not an advanced
rationalist of the type of Max Müller, that the conception of infinity
was attained independently of religious faith, and, more than that,
is in conflict with religious faith and will ultimately destroy it.
When in the progress of human thought the universe is once conceived
as infinite, it overpasses the gods and unseats them. This happened
in Greece at the time of Democritus and Epicurus. Positive religion
demands a finite world: primitive people did not rear temples to the
Infinite in the hopes of domesticating Him. Max Müller pronounces
a eulogy upon the Hindus for their adevism; was it really to their
conception of the infinite that they owed their wisdom, and might not
the idea of infinity alone have quite as well led them to atheism?
When one learns to contemplate the world as an eternally lengthening
chain of phenomena, one no longer hopes, by a futile prayer, to stop
or to modify the march of such inflexible determinism; one contents
one’s self with investigating it by science or entering into it in some
field of action. Religion disappears in science or morality. There
remains, it is true, a final hypothesis that one may maintain: one may
apotheosize the infinite, make over to it, after the manner of the
Brahmans, of the ancient and modern Buddhists, of the Schopenhauers
and the Hartmanns, a donation of some mysterious unity of essence;
but if so, prayer expires in meditation, in ecstasy, in a monotonous
rocking of the cradle of thought to the rhythm of the phenomenal
world, and religion becomes a religion of monism. But this religion
does not spring in any proper sense from the notion of infinity, it,
so to speak, hooks on to it rather; it is another example of man’s
need, if not to personify, at least to individualize and to unify the
infinite—so great is man’s need to project his individuality by main
force, if need be, into the world! One is bent on endowing this great
material body that one calls nature with some sort of a soul, one is
bent on conceiving it in some fashion or other on the model of the
human organism; and is not that, too, a species of anthropomorphism?

[Sidenote: The conception of infinity a scientific discovery.]

It is only later that human thought, carried away upon an endless
voyage of discovery analogous to the migration of a primitive people,
after having traversed the length of visible space and leaped the
bound of its own intellectual horizon, attains the presence of the
unfathomable ocean of the infinite. The infinite is for the human mind
such a discovery as the ocean was for peoples who had wandered to its
shores from the mountains and the plains. Just as for the newborn child
the different planes of vision are indistinct and equally near; just
as it is by the sense of touch that one learns little by little to
recognize the depth of space and to acquire the conception of distance;
just as, so to speak, it is with one’s own hand that one opens the
horizon before one; in the same way to the uncultivated intelligence
everything seems finite and limited; and it is only by moving forward
that it perceives the breadth and depth of its domain. It is only to
a mind upon the march that the great perspective of the infinite is
thrown open. At bottom this conception of infinity is less due to any
direct experience of mere things than to a sense of one’s own personal
activity, to a belief in the perpetual progress open to human thought;
action, as somebody has said,[17] is the real infinite or at least what
appears as such. In this sense it may be admitted that there is in
every human thought some vague presentiment of infinity, for there is
a consciousness of a fund of activity which will not be exhausted in
any given act nor in any given thought; to be conscious that one lives
is thus in some sort to be conscious that one is infinite: illusion
or reality, this notion forms a part of all our thoughts, turns up in
every proposition of science; but it does not produce science, it is,
on the contrary, born of it; it does not produce religion, which is
the science of primitive ages, but descends from it. The conception
of infinity in many respects resembles the ignorance of Socrates, the
refined ignorance which was really in disguise the last development of
intelligence. One of the antiscientific traits of existing religions is
precisely that they display no sufficient sentiment of our ignorance
in the presence of the unknowable, that the window they have open
upon the infinite is decidedly too contracted. If, as we have seen,
religious physics tends little by little to transform itself into a
metaphysics; if the gods have retreated from phenomenon to phenomenon,
to the region of the supersensible; if heaven has separated itself
from earth, positive religion nevertheless still lives in fear of
throwing open to human thought a perspective really infinite. Its eyes
are always fixed upon a more or less, determinate being, a creator,
a unity in which the spirit may find repose and safety from the
infinite. Religious metaphysics, like religious physics, has remained
more or less anthropomorphic, and rests more or less on a foundation
of miracle; a foundation, that is to say, which limits and suspends
the exercise of intelligence. And as the object of adoration, in the
majority of religions, is anything rather than the infinite, in the
same way religious faith itself leads to a disposition to arrest the
march of thought and impose upon it an immutable barrier; it leads
to the negation of infinity and of the indefinite progress of human
research. Stricken by an arrest of development the majority of positive
religions settled once for all on the first formulæ that occurred to
them; they erected them into the practical object of a cult and left
the intangible infinite unmolested in outer vagueness.

      [17] Alfred Fouillée, _La liberté et le déterminisme, 2e partie_.

[Sidenote: Conception of an all-embracing unity, also modern.]

Over and above the conception of the infinite there is another and
a similar notion that it is equally impossible to discover at the
roots of religious thought; it is that of unity in plurality, of
totality. This pantheistic, monistic concept Von Hartmann believes
to be the starting-point of all religions. As a partial disciple of
Hegel and of Schopenhauer, Von Hartmann inevitably attributes to
humanity and applies to the interpretation of history the formulæ of
his dialectic. “Henotheism,” he says, “is founded on a recognition
of the positive identity at bottom of all the divinities of nature;
an identity which permits one to adore in the person of every god
individually, and principally in the person of each of the leading
gods, absolute divinity, the divine god. It becomes therefore a matter
of indifference, in some measure, under which of its particular aspects
one worships Divinity; when Indra is represented imaginatively in the
form of a buffalo, the right to represent him immediately afterward in
the form of an eagle, or a falcon, is not for an instant abrogated;
when henotheism offers its homage to the supreme deity under the name
of Indra, god of the tempest, it does not incapacitate itself from
adoring him a moment afterward under the name of Surya, god of the
sun; or of Rudra-Varuna, god of the heavens. Henotheism does not owe
its origin, therefore, to a failure in the association of ideas, and
to a chance forgetfulness, an incredible lapse of memory on the part
of polytheists, when they were addressing their homage to Surya as the
supreme god, that there were still other gods in existence who were
adored by other people, and even sometimes by themselves.” Imagine
primitive humanity “up” in the latest developments of the philosophy
of monism, with its symbolism and its notion of conceiving diverse
powers as metaphorical manifestations of the fundamental unity of
things! Even for India, the home of pantheistic metaphysics, such a
philosophy is the reluctant product of a civilization already refined.
People never take the first steps in thought by means of abstractions.
To conceive divinity in general, and subsequently represent it by
Indra, Surya, or Rudra-Varuna, as by aspects, no one of which
exhaust the totality of it—by a sort of litany in which the unity of
things appears successively under diverse names and forms—implies a
subtlety of intelligence and a mastery of the henotheistic conception
of the universe that is one of the latest products of metaphysical
speculation. In the beginning the form and figure of the god was not
distinguished from the god himself. The distinction between body
and mind was one that humanity attained with great difficulty; and,
_a fortiori_, any notion of a unity of the supreme and world soul,
existing under a multiplicity of forms, must of necessity have made its
appearance much later.

       *       *       *       *       *

[Sidenote: M. Renan’s religious instinct.]

Another and later form of this vague idealism, that Max Müller and Von
Hartmann, and also Strauss, have advocated, is presented in the theory
of M. Renan concerning the “religious instinct,” or the “revelation
of the ideal.” By religious instinct M. Renan understands something
mysterious and mystical, a heavenly voice in one’s bosom, a sudden
and almost sacred revelation. “The construction of a religion,” he
cries, “is for humanity what the construction of a nest is for a bird.
A mysterious instinct awakens in the heart of a being, who heretofore
has lived totally unaware of the existence in himself of any such
possibilities. The bird which has never itself laid an egg nor seen
an egg laid, possesses a secret foreknowledge of the natural function
which it is going to perform. It lends itself with a species of pious
and devoted joy to an end which it does not understand. The birth of
the religious idea in man is something quite analogous. Mankind is
moving forward unsuspectingly in its allotted course, and suddenly
a little period of silence comes upon it, a lapse of sensation, and
it cries to itself: ‘O God, how strange is the destiny of man! Is
it indeed true that I exist? What is the world? Am I the sun, and
does its heat and light feed upon my heart?... O Father, I see thee
beyond the clouds,’ and the noise of the outer world begins again,
and the window, open out upon the infinite, closes once more, but,
from that moment, a being to all appearance egoistic will perform
inexplicable deeds and will experience a need to bow the knee and
to adore.” This charming passage, set off by the unction and the
ecstasy of Gerson and Fénelon, is a capital instance of the mental
attitude of a number of people nowadays who are endeavouring to
transmute a reverence for some tottering religion into a reverence
for the religious sentiment. Unhappily, M. Renan’s account is purely
mythological; primitive man never experienced anything of the kind.
M. Renan completely confounds the ideas and sentiments which he, the
historian of religion, the refined thinker, might have experienced
himself, with those which primitive man was really subject to. This
species of supreme doubt on the matter of our own existence and that
of the world, this sentiment of the strangeness of our destiny, this
communion of the soul with the totality of nature, this outbreak of
refined sensibility, excited and tormented by modern life, possesses
nothing in common with the sentiment of primitive religion, with its
robust and crude faith reposing upon palpable fact and visible miracle.
Mysticism, far from explaining the origin of religion, marks rather
its period, its decomposition. A mystic is a person, who, feeling
vaguely the insufficiency, the void, of a positive and finite religion,
endeavours to compensate himself for the narrowness and poverty of
established dogma by superabundance of sentiment. Mystics, substituting
a more or less personal sentiment and spontaneous outburst of emotion
for a faith in authority, have always played the rôle in history of
unconscious heretics. Sentimental epochs are epochs of inaction, of
concentration upon one’s self, of comparative independence of thought.
On the contrary, there presided nothing sentimental or meditative at
the origin of religion, there was a stampede simply of a multitude of
souls in mortal terror or hope, and no such thing as independence of
thought; it is less of sentiment properly so-called, than of sensation
and of action, that religions have been born. Primitive religion was
not a means of escape out of this world, a port-hole into the blue;
the earliest gods were not in the least ethereal, they were possessed
of solid muscles, of arms capable of dealing blows. To explain the
origin of primitive beliefs by a nascent idealism, is to explain them
by their precise opposite. One becomes an idealist when one is on
the point of ceasing to believe; after having rejected a multitude of
alleged realities one consoles one’s self by adoring, for a time, the
figments of one’s own imagination; the spirit of early times is much
more positive, as the Comtists say. A preoccupation with the infinite,
a divine vertigo, a sentiment of the abysses of life, are wanting to
man in early times. The modern mind with its intenser vision now and
again perceives in nature an endless perspective down which we look
with agony; we feel ourselves carried forward to the verge of a chasm;
we are like navigators who, in the Antilles, under the intense light
of the sun, can see the bottom and the depth of the sea and measure
the gulf above which they hang suspended. But for less enlightened
intelligences nature is opaque, vision is limited to the surface of
things, and one floats upon the rhythm and pulse of the sea without
asking what lies beneath.

[Sidenote: A late phenomenon.]

Before the need for mystical belief can occur to one, one must have
been reared in an atmosphere of faith, or else in an atmosphere of
doubt; and both these states of mind are equally unknown to the
earlier and simpler races of humanity. Or, more accurately, they are
perfectly acquainted with faith, but it is the naïve faith of eye and
ear; they possess the perfect confidence that every sentient being
has in his five senses, and in all that there is nothing religious
properly so-called. I remember the astonishment I felt in my infancy
when I first saw the words doubt and faith; it was in some verses, and
the poet was singing, with much eloquence, all the horrors of doubt.
I perfectly understood what it was to doubt a fact, or to believe in
it, but I bothered my head in vain to discover what one meant by doubt
simply: What was there so terrible about being in doubt on matters with
which one was insufficiently acquainted? The word faith was equally
unintelligible to me, for I had as yet no conception of believing in
anything except what was certain. The case of primitive man is exactly
the same. He no more experiences a mystical need to believe than he
experiences a mystical need to get drunk before having tasted wine.
Religious sentiment does not make its appearance in him suddenly,
does not simply step out on the stage. There are no lacunæ in the
human soul, it is a prey to invincible continuity. Such a sentiment
must come gradually by a slow adaptation of the spirit to the inexact
ideas supplied to one by the senses. Man, imagining himself to live in
the bosom of a society of gods, inevitably accommodates himself to so
novel a habitat. Every society, human or divine, creates the individual
member in its own image; draft the labourer for a soldier, let the
villager become a citizen, they acquire of necessity new gestures and
sentiments which, upon their return to their former habitat, they
once more in a measure lose. The case is inevitably the same for
mankind and religion. As the most sociable of beings, man is also the
most readily subject to the influence of those with whom he lives or
believes himself to live. The gods, whom we create more or less in our
own image, thereupon, by an inevitable reaction, return the compliment.
A religious instinct, such as M. Renan describes, is in a large part
the work of this sort of reaction and of education; if it possesses
profound roots in our being, the reason is that it was planted in us
in our infancy, that it speaks to us with the voice of our childhood,
and takes us back to our earliest years; often a word, a thought with
which we have been struck at some former time, without, however,
having understood it, unexpectedly reawakens in us, reverberates in
our memory; it is but an echo, and it appeals to us as if it were a
voice. The rôle played by heredity in the formation of one’s character
has been noticeably exaggerated; the influence of education is at the
present day not estimated at its full value.[18] Even among animals,
instinct amounts to little without education. A bird, no doubt, does
not actually need to see an egg laid to acquit itself with “devotion”
of that new function; but when it is a question of building the nest,
the case is not so simple: birds reared in a cage, who have never seen
a nest, are often at a loss what to do; instinct whispers indeed to
them still, but its voice is no longer clear, no definite image of
the ideal nest presents itself to their eyes. Nature’s “devotion” is
at fault. Add that these instincts, so “mysterious” in M. Renan’s
opinion, act on the individual by means of a somewhat gross mechanism,
and that it suffices to tamper with the mechanism, to excite the
instinct or to suspend it. To transform, for example, a capon into a
setting hen, it suffices simply to pluck the feathers off the belly;
it then squats upon eggs—or upon pebbles—with pleasure. Really there
is mystery enough in nature without going out of one’s way to add to
it; it is not philosophic to trace everything back to instinct, and
then presently to regard these instincts as unconscious intentions, and
in these intentions to see the proof of a plan, and in this plan the
proof of a god. With a logic so accommodating as that, M. Renan might
well find in the religious instinct a peremptory demonstration of the
existence of God.

      [18] See the authors _Morale anglaise contemporaine, 2e partie_.

[Sidenote: The only instincts involved the instincts of
self-preservation and sociability.]

In our judgment there was, in the beginning, no other instinct involved
than the instinct of self-preservation, and the instinct of sociality,
which is closely allied to the former. More than that, the intellectual
procedure upon which primitive men relied was no other than a simple
association by contiguity and similarity, together with such reasoning
by induction or analogy as is inseparably bound up with association.
This species of intellectual procedure is precisely that which, in its
highest stages, gives birth to the scientific explanation of things.
Religion, as we shall show presently, originates as science does, in
a certain astonishment that an intelligent being experiences in the
face of certain phenomena and in the fears and desires which result
therefrom, and in the consequent voluntary reaction.

       *       *       *       *       *

[Sidenote: Müller and Spencer agree in rejecting the fetich hypothesis.]

II. Herbert Spencer, who is almost at the antipodes from Max Müller,
by a conscious return to euhemerism regards the gods simply as heroes
transfigured in the memories of their descendants, reduces religion to
an ancestor worship, and thus implicitly denies that a presentiment
of the divine or of the infinite has played any part in its origin.
Nevertheless, Max Müller and Herbert Spencer, in spite of such
divergences, agree in rejecting the theory which attributes the birth
of religion to the mingled astonishment and fear of an intelligent
being in the face of certain natural phenomena, and to the need of
explanation and protection that he experiences before what is puissant
and powerful.

[Sidenote: Necessity of relying upon a number of principles.]

We willingly concede to Mr. Spencer that ancestor worship has played
its part in the genesis of human beliefs; heroes have been deified not
only after their death, but even in their lifetime. But why rely upon
this single principle for the explanation of so complex a phenomenon
as religion? Why wish to see in every detail a realization of it, even
when no positive fact seems to authorize one’s doing so? Spencer’s
system, which resolves the whole body of our beliefs into one, reminds
one a little of Genesis, and of the theory that all mankind are
descended from the first couple, Adam and Eve, after Eve had herself
been fashioned out of one of Adam’s ribs. If it is an excellent
characteristic of Mr. Spencer’s to look for the origin of heterogeneous
and later beliefs in some vague and homogeneous conception, this
primitive conception must at least be sufficiently ample to be able
fairly to accommodate within its own limits the whole body of its
successors, and Mr. Spencer is somewhat too much inclined to confound
the homogeneity of a notion with its amplitude; it is only by a prodigy
of artifice that he succeeds in extracting from his principle a
completely furnished religious theory of the universe.

[Sidenote: Spencer’s theory wantonly clever.]

Mr. Spencer endeavours, first, to prove, by _three_ examples, that a
cult for the dead exists among three tribes of savages very low in the
scale of civilization and not possessed, so far as has been observed,
of any other form of religion; he thereupon infers that a cult for
the dead is the earliest form of worship. These examples are open to
discussion, but even if they were not, it in nowise follows that all
other forms of religion spring from a cult for the dead. Death is,
no doubt, so frequent and brutal a fact that it early engages the
attention of primitive peoples; some germ of the notion of burial may
be discovered among animals. Ants have frequently been observed, after
their battles, carrying off the corpses of their soldiers; but from the
fact that human intelligence must necessarily have been engaged in one
direction, does it follow that it can have been engaged in no other?
For the manufacture of a god Mr. Spencer requires first a corpse,
second the conception of a spiritual double of the corpse, third a
belief that this spirit is capable of inhabiting, not only the body,
that it has just quitted, but another body, an inanimate effigy, a bee,
a stone, etc. What a complication! One knows Mr. Spencer’s ingenious
device for explaining tree-worship; sometimes he would have us conceive
trees as the resting-places of departed souls, who for some reason or
other have taken a notion to inhabit them; sometimes he would have
us rely on a theory of misinterpreted legend: a tribe that in former
years inhabited the forest, a tribe _come from the forest_, ultimately
believes itself to be descended from trees, ultimately believes that
its ancestors were trees. Really, all that strikes us as particularly
artificial. A tall tree is venerable in and of itself. A certain
“sacred horror” is an essential attribute of a dense forest. Night
and obscurity play a notable part in the genesis of religion; well, a
forest is the very incarnation of eternal night with its element of
the unforeseen, its terrors, the sigh of the wind in the branches like
a voice, the cry of the wild beast which seems sometimes to come from
the trees themselves. And what intense and silent life in and about a
tree, if one but studies it closely! An animal does not observe with
sufficient attention to see plants grow and the sap rise; but how
astonished man must have been when first he remarked that the roots of
trees make their way even into rock, that their trunks break all bonds:
that they rise year by year, and are at the very beginnings of their
maturity at an age when man is old! Forest vegetation is alive, but
with a life so different from ours that it must naturally have filled
our ancestors with surprise and reverence. Remember, too, that the
sap of certain trees, when it flows from a wound, is of the colour of
blood, or of the colour and almost of the taste of milk.

[Sidenote: Superfluity of effort to explain zoolatry by ancestor
worship.]

Similarly, why resort to an ancestor worship to explain zoolatry? What
is more natural, for example, than the universal veneration for the
snake? This mysterious creature which glides away among the shadows,
appears, and disappears, and carries with it power of life and death?
Or instead of a serpent, consider the lion, or any other ferocious
animal. He makes his appearance in a country and creates havoc among
the flocks; one pursues him, but for some reason or other no shot
reaches him; he is invulnerable. He becomes increasingly audacious and
terrible; he disappears for weeks together, nobody knows where; he
reappears suddenly, nobody knows why; he defies the hunters with the
majesty that wild beasts sometimes show, in perfect consciousness of
their power. Behold! a veritable god.

It is well known that the aborigines worshipped the horses which the
Spaniards imported into America; according to Prescott, they preferred
to attribute the invention of firearms to the horses rather than to
the Spaniards. The fact is simply that the Spaniards were men like
themselves, and that the aborigines took their measure accordingly;
but an unknown animal came to them armed with an indefinite power.
Men adore nothing but what they are comparatively ignorant of, and
it is for that reason, whatever Mr. Spencer may say, that nature,
so long imperfectly known, afforded to religion a more generous and
inexhaustible aliment than humanity.

[Sidenote: Narrowness and insufficiency of Spencer’s formula.]

At bottom what Mr. Spencer regards as the true confirmation of his
doctrine is the relation it bears to the rest of his system; it
is for him an example simply of a universal law, a consequence of
evolution. According to this doctrine, everything seems to spring from
a primordial unity, from a single homogeneous belief—the belief in
a power more or less vague, exercised by the souls of the dead; this
belief, once given, undergoes a complete series of integrations and
differentiations, and ultimately becomes a belief in the regular action
of an unknown and universal power. Mr. Spencer seems to us to be right
in pitching upon the one homogeneous belief from which all others arise
by a process of evolution; but the formula of this belief that he
presents us with seems to us altogether too narrow and insufficient.
If one wishes to discover the idea which dominates both the cult for
the dead and the cult for the gods, one will find in it a natural
persuasion that nothing is absolutely and definitively inanimate, that
everything lives and possesses, therefore, intentions and volitions.
Man has deified the phenomena of nature, as he has immortalized his
ancestors, for the sole and only reason that, as a living being
possessed of a will, the most difficult thing in the beginning for him
to understand is the invincible determinism and absolute inertia of the
phenomena of the external world.[19]

      [19] See our _Morale anglaise contemporaine_, p. 579.

[Sidenote: Criticism of fetichism commonly a play on words.]

The adoration of natural forces, conceived as more or less analogous
to powerful living beings possessed of volition, has been denominated
sometimes fetichism, sometimes naturism. Messrs. Müller and Spencer
are agreed that fetichism is one of the later forms of religion, and
decline to treat it as primitive. On both sides of this interesting
discussion one desideratum seems to us to be beautifully conspicuous
by its absence, namely, precision of formula and agreement as to the
exact sense of terms. The words _fetich_, _animate being_, _inanimate
being_, and so forth, seem to us to have given rise to a number of
misunderstandings, on the part both of those who are defending the
fetich theory and of those who are attacking it. Let us cite some
examples: Max Müller has undertaken to define the word fetichism;
as was natural for a philologist he went in search of an etymology,
and he found, relying on Tylor, that fetichism (from the Portuguese
_feitiço_, derived from the Latin _factitius_, _artificial_) could not
designate anything but a superstitious reverence felt or shown for
certain knick-knacks that possessed no apparent title to any such
honourable distinction. The definition of Tylor and of Max Müller may
be philologically exact; unhappily, none of the philosophers who have
regarded fetichism as the basis of religion have ever employed that
word in the narrow and rigorous sense which Max Müller puts upon it;
they understood by it, as de Brosses and A. Comte did, the primitive
tendency to conceive external objects as animated by a life analogous
to that of man. They comprehended also, under the title of fetichism,
what Max Müller distinguishes from it so carefully under the names of
_physiolatry_, or the worship rendered to natural objects other than
gimcracks, and of _zoolatry_, or the worship of animals. The result is
that Max Müller’s refutations really do not concern the doctrine which
they are designed to combat, and over against which he sets up his own
doctrine. Similarly in regard to the definitions of M. Réville.[20]
To demonstrate that a cult for knick-knacks is not the primitive and
unique original of all human religions does not help us forward; the
problem remains where it was. Let us consider, therefore, not the
words, but the theory itself of the animation of nature, and let us
examine the objections that have been urged against it.

      [20] Fetichism, M. Réville also says, is logically a later
      belief. “A fetich is a vulgar object, possessing no value in
      itself, but which a negro preserves, venerates, adores, because
      _he believes that it is the dwelling place of a spirit_. And
      the choice of the said object is not absolutely arbitrary.
      A fetich possesses this very special distinction, that it
      is the property of the person who adores it. It is in this
      element of individual ownership—ownership by the tribe or
      the family—that the difference clearly appears between the
      object of a naturist religion, and the fetich, properly so
      called. However humble it may be—tree, rock, or rivulet—the
      first is independent, is accessible to all, to strangers as
      to indigenes, on the sole condition that they conform to the
      exigencies of the ritual or the cult. The sun shines for
      everybody, the mountain is accessible to all who scale its
      sides, the spring refreshes the passer-by, whatever be his
      tribe; the very tree which rises in the midst of the desert
      asks of the traveller some mark of deference, and does not
      trouble itself about his origin. One cannot appropriate a
      natural object. It is otherwise with a fetich. Once adopted by
      a family, it is in some sort in the service of that family and
      has nothing to do with others.” This definition of fetichism is
      quite special, and in no wise concerns _primitive fetichism_,
      conceived as an ascription of something analogous to the human
      will in all inanimate things.

[Sidenote: Children and even animals distinguish between animate and
inanimate.]

According to Messrs. Spencer and Müller the savage may legitimately
be compared to a child who mistakes a well-dressed doll for a living
being, or who punishes a door against which he has stumbled; the savage
is not so naïve. The very child is far from possessing all the naïveté
that is ascribed to him, in general he perfectly distinguishes between
the animate and the inanimate; and when he talks to his play-things,
and conducts himself before them as if they were alive he is not a dupe
of his own words, he is composing a diminutive drama simply, in which
he is an actor; he is making poetry and not mythology. “If his doll
should step up to him and bite him, he would be the first person to be
astonished.”[21] In the same way, a dog plays with a stick—the comedy
of the chase—he bites it, he tears it into pieces, he warms to his
game, which is still for him, when all is said, no more than a game.
Even the famous example of a child’s rage at inanimate objects against
which it has stumbled, an example which has done service in the pages
of all those who have written on religion,[22] is seriously damaged by
Mr. Spencer; according to him, mothers and nurses suggest to the child
absurd ideas which, but for them, it would not have; it is they, who,
if it has hurt itself against an inanimate object, affect to be angry;
and, to distract its attention from the pain, endeavour to excite its
anger also. The little comedy of the inanimate object is one in which
the child displays no initiative. In any event the example deals with
an ill-observed psychological phenomenon, which, for the present, can
be employed to support no theory whatever.

      [21] Spencer, _Principles of Sociology_.

      [22] See, among others, M. Vacherot, _La religion_.

[Sidenote: Savages mistaking a watch, etc., for animate lends no
support to fetichism.]

Similarly, according to Mr. Spencer, no employment can be made of the
mistakes committed by a savage in the presence of certain complex
products of the arts and of civilization; he believes these objects
to be alive, but how should he do otherwise? If he is deceived, it is
rather due to the degree of perfection attained by our art than to any
defect in his own intelligence. When the indigenes of New Zealand saw
Cook’s ship, they took it for a sailing whale. Anderson relates that
the Bushmen supposed that a carriage was an animate being and must be
provided with fodder; the complexity of its structure, the symmetry of
its parts, its moving wheels, naturally suggested no fragment of their
own experience of inanimate things. Just so the Esquimaux believed
that a music-box and a hand-organ were living beings. All these errors
are in a measure rational, but they are errors of a kind that really
primitive man would have no opportunity to commit. To suppose that he
was dominated by a natural tendency to assign life to things which were
not alive, to imagine that he went out of his way to confound things
which animals of a lesser degree of intelligence perfectly distinguish,
is to invert the whole course of evolution.

[Sidenote: Primitive man incurious.]

There are, in Mr. Spencer’s opinion, still other prejudices relative
to primitive man from which we should free ourselves. We believe him
to be voluntarily and incessantly occupied, as the modern infant
is, with the _why_ of things; we fancy him perpetually endeavouring
to satisfy a restless curiosity. Unhappily, if we are to trust our
experience of the lower races of man, it appears that the sentiment
of curiosity decreases directly as one approaches the savage state.
To awaken curiosity demands surprise; Plato was correct in regarding
astonishment as the beginning of philosophy. Well, what produces
astonishment is an unexpected breach in the chain of causation; but
for a primitive intelligence which has not yet achieved scientific
maturity, there is no such thing as natural causation and no such
thing as rational surprise.[23] The Fuegians, the Australians, show
the most complete indifference in the presence of matters for them
absolutely new and essentially surprising. According to Dampier, the
Australians whom he took on board paid no attention to anything in the
vessel except what was given them to eat. The very mirrors did not
succeed in astonishing savages of inferior race; they were amused with
them, but evinced neither surprise nor curiosity. When Park inquired
of the negroes, “What becomes of the sun at night? Is it the same sun
that rises the next day or another?”—they made him no reply and found
the question puerile. Spix and Martius report, that the minute one
begins to question a Brazil Indian about his language he shows signs
of impatience, complains of headache, and proves himself incapable
of mental labour. Similarly the Abipones, when they find themselves
unable to understand anything at a glance, soon become fatigued and
cry, “What, after all, does it amount to?” “It seems,” Sir John Lubbock
says, “as if the mind of the savage lives in a perpetual come and
go of pure feebleness, incapable of fixing itself upon anything. He
accepts what he sees as an animal does; he adapts himself to the world
about him spontaneously; astonishment, admiration, the very conditions
of worship are above him. Accustomed to the regularity of nature he
patiently awaits the succession of such phenomena as he has observed,
mechanical habit overbears all intelligence in him.”

      [23] Spencer, _Principles of Sociology_.

[Sidenote: Inexactitude of facts on which the fetich theory is founded.]

In effect, according to Mr. Spencer, all of the observed facts upon
which the old fetichistic theory was founded are chargeable with
inexactitude; they were taken from the narratives of the earlier
travellers, who rarely came into contact with any but races already
debauched and half civilized. Little by little, he says, the idea
that fetichism is primordial took possession of men’s minds and, as
prepossession constitutes nine-tenths of belief, it has rested master
of the field almost without a contest; I myself accepted it, although,
as I remember, with a vague feeling of discontent. This discontent
became positive doubt when I was better informed with regard to the
ideas of the savage. From doubt I passed to negation when I had once
tabulated the whole body of the facts relating to the most degraded
races.

[Sidenote: A priori demonstration of the priority of animism.]

Mr. Spencer undertakes even to demonstrate _a priori_ the falsity
of the fetich theory. What, he asks, is a fetich? An inanimate
object supposed to contain a being, of which the senses do not take
cognizance; such a conception is extremely complex, and above the
reach of primitive minds. The savage is so incapable of abstraction
that he can neither conceive nor express a colour as distinct from
some coloured object, a light as distinct from some light object—star
or fire, an animal which shall be neither a dog nor a cow nor a
horse; and he is asked to imagine an animate being in the heart of an
inanimate thing, an invisible power in the heart of a visible object,
in effect, a soul! Nothing less than the conception of a soul, in Mr.
Spencer’s judgment, will serve the fetich hypothesis; and primitive man
certainly could not attain the notion of a soul by mere observation of
nature. Before projecting this complex idea into the heart of things,
he must previously have constructed it, and as preparation for that,
Mr. Spencer says, he must have supplied himself with a theory of
death, and conceived the mind as surviving the body, and therefore as
separable from the body and as the motive principle of the body. It
is to his notions on death that man must look for any conception of
life in inanimate nature. Every fetich is a spirit, no spirit can be
for a primitive intelligence anything else than the spirit of someone
who is dead. Necessarily, therefore, a cult for the dead, spiritism,
must precede fetichism; the latter is no more than an extension, a
by-product, of the former.[24]

      [24] Mr. Spencer’s _Principles of Sociology_.

       *       *       *       *       *

[Sidenote: Spencer’s attack not against a vital spot.]

III. Such is the theory of Mr. Spencer. And he would be right if the
partisans of primitive fetichism understood by fetich, as he does, a
material object at the heart of which the adorer imagines the existence
of a mysterious agent _distinct from this object itself_. But is this
notion of distinctness a necessary part, at least in the beginning, of
fetichism, or, as one says to-day, of naturism? Imagine a rock which
should detach itself unexpectedly from the mountain side, and roll
down to the hut of a savage; it stops suddenly just as it is on the
point of crushing his dwelling, it remains there pendent, menacing, to
all appearance ready at an instant’s notice to begin rolling again;
the savage fairly trembles at the sight of it. Do you believe that he
needs really to suppose the presence of some foreign agent, of a soul,
of an ancestral spirit in that stone to regard it as an object of fear
and of respect? Not at all. It is the rock itself which constitutes
his fetich, it is to the rock that he bows; he venerates it precisely
because he is far from supposing it, as you do, essentially and
eternally inert and passive; he ascribes to it possible intentions,
a maleficent or beneficent will. He says to himself: “It is asleep
to-day, but it was awake yesterday; yesterday it could have killed
me, and it did not want to.” Let the lightning strike a savage’s hut
three times in succession within a month, and he will easily recognize
that the thunder is ill-disposed toward him and, quite without any
preliminary need of personification in the way of endowing it with a
departed soul, he will set about adoring the thunder and conjuring it
not to do him harm. Mr. Spencer does not perceive that, at the very
beginning of his exposition, he ascribes to primitive man a conception
of nature analogous to the abstract mechanism of Descartes. Such a
conception once pre-supposed, it is plain that to regard an object or
a natural phenomenon as the centre of a cult, some new conception must
be added to it, and this new conception may well be that of a spirit.
Mr. Spencer, as he himself admits, looks upon fetichism as quite
analogous to modern spiritualism, which sees in turning tables and
oscillating chairs the work of disembodied souls; but nothing could be
more arbitrary than this analogy. It is quite impossible that primitive
man should stand in the same position that we do in the face of any
natural phenomenon; as he does not possess the modern metaphysical
idea of inert matter, he experiences no need to invent an indwelling
spirit before he can ascribe volition to it. If a savage should see a
table turn, he would say simply that the table was turning, no doubt,
because it wanted to turn, and that, for him, would be the end of it;
and if by chance it should be a matter of interest to him whether the
table turned or not, it would immediately become a fetich to him. The
conception of a fetich does not in the least presuppose, as Mr. Spencer
maintains, the conception of a soul; there is no such metaphysical
element in fetichism, and it is precisely on that account that this
form of religion must have preceded spiritism, which is always founded
on a more or less rudimentary metaphysics.

[Sidenote: For savages and children nature a society.]

For animals and savages, as for very young children, nature is
absolutely the opposite of what it appears to be nowadays to the
scholar and the philosopher: for them it is not a cold and neuter
habitat, in which man alone possesses aims and bends everything to
the fulfilment of his wishes; it is not a physical laboratory full
of inert instruments for the service of man. On the contrary, nature
is a society; primitive people see intention in everything. Friends
or enemies surround them on all sides; the struggle for existence is
one long pitched battle with imaginary allies against adversaries not
infrequently only too real. How should they understand that there is
a profound unity in nature which rigidly excludes from the chain of
things anything like individuality or independence? The only cause of
movement with which they are acquainted is desire; they reckon desire
or intention as the cause of every movement in nature, as of every
movement in their fellow-men and in animals; and they conceive that the
intentions of all of the diverse beings by which they find themselves
surrounded may be equally modified by prayer and offerings. Their
conception of nature is at once anthropomorphic and sociomorphic, as
is subsequently their conception of God. Nothing is more natural and
inevitable than this fashion of modeling the external world on the
internal, and the relations of things on the relations of men.

[Sidenote: Panthelism.]

If the word fetichism is too vague to designate this primitive state
of mind and gives rise to confusion, take another word; if the word
_panthelism_ were not a little barbarous it would better express this
stage of human intelligence in which one is inclined to ascribe to all
the phenomena of nature not indeed souls, as distinct from bodies, but
simply intentions, desires, volitions, as naturally inhering in the
objects themselves.

[Sidenote: English classification of things.]

But here we shall perhaps be reminded that, as Mr. Spencer says, the
distinction between things animate and inanimate is quite clear even
to the brute, and, _a fortiori_, to primitive man; so that primitive
man will not attribute desire or volition to a thing which he knows
to be inanimate—_animate_, _inanimate_; how we do come back to the
vague! Under each of these terms the modern man ranges a group of ideas
absolutely inaccessible to primitive man and to the lower animals.
Personally we deny that the distinction between animate and inanimate
was present in the earliest stages of intellectual evolution. Certainly
both the animal and the savage recognized a division of the phenomena
of nature into two classes; one is composed of the things which are
disposed to do them good or evil, the other is composed of those
which ignore them simply; that is the primitive distinction. As to an
acquaintance with animate and inanimate they are innocent of anything
of the kind; on this point, as on all others, they confine themselves
to the grossest sense-experience. Their senses inform them that certain
objects are beings who are altogether inoffensive, who eat nobody and
are not themselves good to eat; one gives them no further attention;
practically they do not exist. I one day asked a peasant woman the
name of a small plant. She looked at me with frank astonishment and
replied, with a shake of the head, “_Ce n’est rien_—it is nothing;
it is not good to eat!” That woman was on a level with primitive man.
In the eyes of the latter, as in the eye of an animal, one-half the
phenomena of nature are _nothing_—they do not count; one scarcely
sees them. The fruits on a tree, on the contrary, are _good to eat_.
The savage, however, perceives immediately that the fruit makes no
active resistance, does not cry out when he bites into it; and he
considers it, therefore, as on all accounts absolutely indifferent,
except that it is good to eat. But given a fruit that poisons him, he
promptly fears it and venerates it. Similarly with animals: stones
and vegetation hold equally aloof from the carnivora, are practically
as distant as the moon and the stars. The herbivora, on the contrary,
pay no attention to anything but vegetation. Natural objects being
thus parcelled off into two classes, the class of the indifferent and
inoffensive, and the class of the useful and hurtful, the animal soon
learns to recognize that in the second class the most important objects
are those which possess spontaneity of movement. But in his eyes—and
this is a fact of capital importance—spontaneity of movement is not
the exclusive sign of _life_, of interior activity; it is a sign simply
of utility, or of heightened danger for him. He is wholly preoccupied
with personal and practical consequences; he indulges in no superfluity
of inference in regard to the object itself; he does not speculate.
Moreover, a moving object which in nowise affects his sensibility
rapidly becomes quite as indifferent to him as a motionless object.
Animals soon become accustomed to the passage of railway trains: cows
browse tranquilly, partridges on the brow of a hill scarcely lift their
heads; and why? Because they have recognized in the locomotive an
inanimate mechanism?[25] Not in the least; they observe simply that the
locomotive never goes out of its way to damage them.

      [25] According to Mr. Spencer, the movement of a train does not
      appear spontaneous to animals because it is continuous; and
      therein lies the ground of their exemption from fright. On this
      reasoning, animals who live in the neighbourhood of stations
      should display fright at the arrival and departure of trains.
      Nothing of the kind is observable. They are equally incurious
      in regard to horses harnessed to wagons on a high-road.
      Speculative disinterestedness is altogether lacking in animals
      and savages; they live locked in the arms of sensation and
      desire; they spontaneously draw a circle about their ego, and
      whatsoever lies beyond lies beyond their intelligence.

[Sidenote: Belief that all things are animate natural to animals.]

This being the primitive conception of the world, we believe that the
more incapable an uncivilized being is of observing and reasoning
the more natural it should be for him to acquire the conviction that
objects which at first struck him as indifferent are not genuinely
inanimate, but are sometimes malevolent in their intentions toward him,
sometimes benevolent; that they possess in effect over him a quite
respectable degree of power. In other words the more intelligent an
animal or a savage becomes, the more superstitious he will be, and thus
by the very progress of mental evolution the primitive distinction
of objects into two classes will become dim—the distinction of
objects into those which are altogether indifferent and outside of the
society in which one lives, and those which are more or less worthy
of attention, more or less closely in practical relations with us.
Mental evolution has proceeded, believe us, in precisely the opposite
direction to that imagined by Mr. Spencer.

[Sidenote: Motion a material sign of life in them.]

Let us speak first of the more intelligent animals, before passing
to man. The more intelligent animals are often obliged to give their
attention to a class of objects in appearance indifferent to them
and to modify the imperfect ideas which they had at first conceived
in regard to them. Generally speaking, objects of this sort are
motionless; if immobility be not their essential distinguishing
characteristic, it is at least one of their principal distinguishing
characteristics. The instinct of self-preservation in a being
inevitably bestirs itself in the presence of every movement that looks
like a menace. Well, an animal is soon obliged to recognize that
indifferent objects possess in certain circumstances the attribute
of spontaneous movement, an attribute which is for him so vitally
interesting. I remember the surprise a kitten once showed when it
perceived the dead leaves rise in the wind and circulate about it;
at first it ran away, and then came back and pursued the leaves, and
smelt them, and touched them with its paw. Darwin relates that a dog
was one day lying near an open parasol on the lawn; the parasol moved
in the breeze, the dog began to bay, to growl furiously, and, every
time that the parasol moved again, began to growl afresh. Evidently it
was a new thing to Darwin’s dog that such an object as a parasol might
change its place without the visible intervention of some person; all
the dog’s classifications were thrown into disorder, he was no longer
certain whether he must class the parasol with things indifferent or
with things harmful. He would have experienced an analogous impression
if he had seen a paralytic patient, always theretofore motionless in
his armchair, suddenly rise and walk. An animal’s surprise is still
more strong when an object regarded as till then indifferent approaches
him and manifests its activity by an infliction of sudden pain. I
witnessed the astonishment of a cat which, having seen a red-hot coal
roll out of the stove door, leaped forward to play with it; he caught
it simultaneously with snout and paw, gave a cry of pain, and fled in
such fear that it was two days before he returned to the house. Mr.
Spencer himself cites another example which he has observed. The beast
was a formidable creature, half mastiff, half hound, who was playing
with a cane; he was leaping and gambolling, and holding it by the
ferule end. Suddenly the handle of the cane touched the ground and the
ferule was pushed forcibly back toward the dog’s palate. The animal
groaned, let the cane fall, and fled some distance away; and there
he manifested, it appears, a degree of alarm truly comic in a beast
apparently so ferocious. It was only after many cautious approaches
and much hesitation that he yielded to the temptation of taking hold
of the cane. Mr. Spencer, who supplies us with this fact, with great
impartiality concludes from it, as we also do, that it was the unusual
conduct of the cane which suggested to the dog the notion that it was
animate; but he hastens to add that before the vague idea of animation
thus given rise to in an animal could become definite in a man,
the intervention of some spiritualistic theory would be absolutely
necessary. One may well ask one’s self what spiritualism has to do with
the case.[26]

      [26] _Principles of Sociology._

[Sidenote: Instruments supposed to be animate by animals.]

One may learn from the preceding example something like what animals
conceive the inert instruments to be which they see us handling and
with which we sometimes strike them. The notion of an instrument, as
such, is relatively modern and was altogether unknown in the early
stages of evolution. An instrument, in the eyes of an animal as in
the eyes of primitive man, is almost a companion and an accomplice;
neither the one nor the other possesses any other notion in especial
of causation than that of a co-operation, mute agreement between two
associated beings. A lion, which Livingstone shot at and did not hit,
ran first to bite the stone which the bullet had struck; it was only
subsequently that he threw himself upon the hunter; the ball, the
gun, the hunter, were so many distinct and separate enemies that he
was bent on punishing in succession. Similarly, in an ancient list of
pains and penalties, one finds that the warrior is to lose his hand,
the blasphemer his tongue, the spy his ears. At this moment my dog
is at my side; the whip with which I corrected him this morning lies
upon a chair; the dog walks about that chair sniffing the air with
defiance and respect, and I do not believe he would have the courage
to touch it. He is aware, however, that when the whip hurt him, the
circumstances were quite different, that I was holding that dangerous
object in my hand, and that I was, in a sense, the first cause of his
chastisement. Still he is not perfectly reassured, as he would be in
the presence of an inert object. The impression he seems to have got
strikes me as comparable to that which a child receives from a serpent
behind a pane of glass; the child knows perfectly that under the actual
circumstances he is safe, but he cannot help saying to himself, “If the
circumstances were otherwise!”[27] Recollect that the Australian savage
treats the white man’s gun as a living and powerful being which he
adores and crowns with flowers and supplicates not to kill him. Legend
attributes a magic power to the swords of great captains, to Joyeuse
or to Durandal. In our own days, even, one sees combatants spend their
force not only against their enemies but against everything which
pertains to them; it is as if something were supposed to have passed
from the man into everything he possesses. Nothing is more difficult to
recognize than the profound indifference of nature.

      [27] Add that when an animal or primitive man has recognized
      that a certain object possesses a particular attribute, he
      often finds it difficult to recognize that simply analogous
      objects possess the same attribute. I was one day making a
      kitten run after a wooden ball as a dog would do; the ball
      struck it and hurt it; it cried out and I petted it and then
      wanted to begin playing once more; it would run willingly even
      after large stones when I threw them, but obstinately refused
      to run after the ball. So that it evidently conceived that
      the ball alone possessed the attribute of power to injure it;
      the kitten looked upon the ball, no doubt, with an evil eye,
      regarded it perhaps as an evil being who was unwilling to play;
      by a fault of generalization the kitten created for itself a
      sort of fetich which it did not adore indeed, but which it
      feared, and fear is a step toward adoration.

      Mr. Spencer himself admits in savages a certain inaptitude
      for generalization. This opinion, paradoxical as it may seem,
      is perhaps an important truth. If primitive intelligences,
      as M. Taine among others remarked, are especially prompt at
      noticing the superficial resemblances of things, that fact is
      not always a mark of genuine perspicacity, for the resemblance
      perceived between two sensations may be explicable less as
      an intelligent generalization than as a sort of confusion of
      the sensations themselves; if sensations are analogous or
      indistinct, they may naturally be mistaken for each other
      without any exercise whatsoever of intelligence. Thence the
      comparative insignificance of many examples taken from the case
      of language. True generalization seems to consist, more than
      anything else, in the reduction of facts to law; that is to
      say, in a conscious abstraction of differences, in a conscious
      recognition of the fundamental determinism which binds things
      up together and which precisely eludes both savages and animals.

      Note finally that the majority of animals and of savages, when
      they have once been deceived, are slow to recover from their
      error, are for a long time distrustful toward the object which
      has deceived them. A dog, coming home one evening, perceived
      an empty cask in an unusual place. He was extremely frightened
      and barked for a long time; it was only by day that he dared
      approach near the object of his alarm, and he examined and
      moved about it, and finally, like the frog in La Fontaine’s
      fable, recognized that the thing was inoffensive. If the cask
      in question had disappeared during the night, the dog would
      evidently have remembered it as a redoubtable being seen the
      evening before in the yard. A monkey, which I left in the room
      with a cardboard sheep one entire day, proved unable to the
      end entirely to satisfy itself that the sheep was inanimate. I
      believe, however, that this persuasion was ultimately achieved,
      for the monkey began finally to pluck the sheep’s wool and to
      treat it something too familiarly. But nature seldom permits us
      equally extended _tête-à-tête_ with objects that alarm us.

      Messrs. Spencer and Müller will call our attention to the fact,
      it is true, that cardboard sheep, no more than hand-organs
      or watches, exist _in rerum natura_. We reply that nature
      supplies primitive man with things much more astonishing: with
      rocks, and forests which can talk (the echo), with springs of
      hot water, with intermittent fountains. Mr. Fergusson (_Tree
      and Serpent Worship_) relates that in India he saw with his
      own eyes a tree which saluted the rising and setting sun, by
      lifting or lowering its boughs. Temples had formerly been
      reared in its neighbourhood. People came from all sides to
      see the marvellous tree. This tree was an old date-palm, half
      decayed, which hung above the road; in order to pass below it,
      it had been held back by a rope; but during this operation the
      fibres which composed the trunk were twisted like the threads
      in a rope. These fibres contracted toward midday in the heat of
      the sun; the tree untwisted and rose. It relaxed under the dew
      at evening and once more bowed down. (See M. Girard de Rialle,
      _Mythologie comparée_, t. i.)

[Sidenote: Conduct generates beliefs that justify it.]

Mr. Spencer, who denies that the child spontaneously strikes the table
which has wounded him, is not, however, unaware that a savage—the
Indian Tupis, for example—if he has bruised his foot against a stone,
leaps against it in fury and bites it like a dog. Mr. Spencer sees in
such facts a phenomenon wholly physical, the need for spending one’s
rage in violent muscular action; but this very need can but favour
the birth of a psychological illusion, of which the tenacity will be
proportionate to the intensity of the sentiment. The physical and the
moral are too closely bound up together for a physical expression of
anger not to be accompanied by a moral belief corresponding to the
action; if a powerful instinct induces us to treat a stone as an enemy,
we shall very really see an enemy in this stone.

[Sidenote: Romanes’ experiments.]

Mr. Romanes made some observations, of the same kind as those of Mr.
Spencer, upon a very intelligent Skye terrier. This terrier, like many
other dogs, was accustomed to play with dried bones, throwing them
into the air and endowing them with an appearance of life, for the
pleasure of chasing them afterward. Mr. Romanes attached a long slender
thread to a dried bone which he gave the dog to play with. After he had
played for some time Mr. Romanes chose an opportune moment, when the
bone had fallen to the ground some distance away, and the terrier was
approaching it; he drew the bone gently away, by means of the thread
attached to it. The attitude of the terrier changed entirely. The
bone, which he had been pretending to regard as living, appeared to
him to be really so, and his surprise knew no bounds. He approached it
nervously and cautiously, as Mr. Spencer describes in the observation
which he made; but the slow motion of the bone continued, and the dog
became more and more certain that the movement could not be explained
as resulting from the impulsion which he had communicated; his surprise
became terror, and he ran away and hid himself under the table, to
study from a distance the disconcerting spectacle of dried bones coming
to life again!

[Sidenote: Soap-bubble experiment.]

Another of Mr. Romanes’ experiments on the same dog shows that the
sentiment of the mysterious was, in this animal, quite powerful
enough to serve as an explanation of his conduct. Having taken the
terrier into a carpeted room, Mr. Romanes rolled some soap-bubbles
which an unsteady draft of air blew about the carpet. The dog took a
great interest in the matter, and seemed unable to decide whether the
bubbles were alive or not. At first he was very prudent, and followed
the bubbles at a distance, but as he was encouraged to examine them
more closely, he approached them with his ears up and his tail down,
in evident apprehension; the instant the bubble moved he drew back.
After a time, however, during which there was at least one bubble on
the floor, he took courage, and, the scientific spirit gaining the
upper hand over the sentiment of mystery, he became brave enough to
draw slowly near one of them and to put his paw upon it, not without
anxiety. Naturally the bubble burst, and his astonishment was vivid in
the extreme. Mr. Romanes made other bubbles, but could not persuade
the dog to approach them for a long time. After a while, however, he
started again in pursuit of one, and endeavoured with much caution
to put his paw upon it. The result was the same as before. After the
second attempt it was impossible to induce him to make a third, and
he ultimately ran out of the room and could not be coaxed back. The
same experiment, tried by Professor Delbœuf on his dog Mouston, gave
a still more striking result. At the blowing of the fourth bubble,
his wrath knew no bounds, but he no longer sought to seize it, he
contented himself with barking at it, in all the accents of rage, until
it burst. Professor Delbœuf wished to continue the experiment, and
attempted to do so, but, to his great regret, was obliged to break off
because of the frenzy into which the dog had worked himself. The moment
that Professor Delbœuf laid his hand upon the vessel containing the
soap-suds, the dog was no longer under his control. His condition was
evidently due, Professor Delbœuf says, to a contradiction between the
fact and his experience, that everything which is coloured is tangible.
He was in the presence of the unknown, with all its mysteries and
menaces; the unknown, which is the source of fear and of superstition.

[Sidenote: Fear of thunder in animals due to sense of mystery.]

According to Mr. Romanes the fear that many animals have of thunder
is due, in some sort, to a sentiment of mystery. He once possessed a
setter, which, he says, had not heard thunder until it had reached the
age of eighteen months, when it almost died of fear. He has observed
the same phenomenon in other animals, in diverse circumstances. The
fright of the setter in question was so strong that, subsequently,
when he heard some artillery practice and mistook it for thunder, his
aspect was positively pitiable, and in the midst of the chase he
endeavoured to hide himself, or to gain the house. After two or three
experiences of thunder his horror of cannon became greater than ever,
so much so that, in spite of his love for the chase, it was impossible
to coax him out of his kennel, so great was his fear that the artillery
practice might recommence and he be distant from the house. But the
keeper, who had had a wide experience of dogs, assured Mr. Romanes
that, if the dog were once taken to the battery and shown the veritable
cause for a noise analogous to that of thunder, he would become once
more fit for the hunt. Mr. Romanes does not doubt that such would have
been the case, for once, when sacks of apples were being emptied, it
made a noise in the house like distant thunder; the setter was very
restless, but when Mr. Romanes took him where the sacks were being
opened and showed him the real cause of the noise, his terror left
him, and on his return to the house he listened to the low rumbling in
perfect quietude.

[Sidenote: All natural phenomena tend to seem artificial to primitive
man.]

When one looks close one is surprised to see how many causes would
naturally lead one to attribute life, and life of an extraordinary and
mysterious character, to such and such really passive objects. Such
causes act evidently with greatly additional power upon the savage, the
primitive man, the man of the quaternary epoch, or upon the anthropoid,
as yet undiscovered, whose instruments have been found in the tertiary
period. Common animals, in effect, are almost lacking in attention;
from which it results that to produce any durable mental effect on
them, a prolonged repetition of the same sensation is necessary; they
must be accustomed to it. Moreover their crude intelligence takes
no impression from evanescent facts, they are unacquainted with the
external world except by averages. Exceptional facts strike them for
an instant, but presently glance off into oblivion. In this imperfect
machine, wear and tear is very rapid and the traces of phenomena
inevitably blur and become confounded. If animals possess a memory
for sensations, they lack an intellectual memory altogether; they are
capable of surprise, but not of remembering a surprise. To produce
in them a tenacious memory demands a setting of pain or pleasure, and
even then, if they recollect the sensation they experienced, they
readily forget the grounds of it. They feel passively, instead of
observing. From the moment where, with man, the spirit of observation
enters upon the scene everything is different; an exceptional fact,
for the same reason that it becomes rapidly effaced in an animal
intelligence, penetrates the more deeply into the memory of a man.
Moreover, man’s sphere of action is much wider than that of any animal,
and consequently the field of his experience is much more vast; the
more he modifies, voluntarily, the face of nature, the more capable he
becomes of recognizing and observing the variations which it presents,
independently of his interventions. Man possesses a notion unknown to
animals, the notion of _artificial_ things, of results deliberately
attained by self-conscious volition. One remembers that _fetich_ comes
from _factitius_, artificial. Man, being acquainted with the use of
fire, will regard, for example, a forest set ablaze by lightning from
entirely a different point of view from what any animal could: the
animal will flee without any other sentiment than that of alarm; the
man will naturally suppose the existence of some person who set it on
fire—who was acting, who was doing on a grand scale what he himself
sometimes does. Similarly with a boiling spring; this phenomenon lies
too far beyond the limits of animal intelligence to be especially
striking; but a man, on the other hand, who habitually goes to some
trouble to provide himself with boiling water, infers the existence of
some subterranean person who is heating water for purposes of his own.
All natural phenomena tend thus to appear artificial to the eyes of a
being who has once familiarized himself with the notion of artifice.
I was present recently among some members of the lower classes at the
flowing of an intermittent spring; not one of them was inclined to
believe the phenomenon a natural one, they regarded it as an effect
of some mechanism, of some artifice. The same belief is evidently
common among primitive people, with this difference, that artificial,
instead of suggesting mechanics, implies the notion of a superhuman and
marvelous power.

[Sidenote: Fetichism a logical theory to primitive man.]

Just as the animal finds the rationale of all things in a notion of
life and of activity, man tends to find a rationale of all things in a
conception of art and of scheming intelligence. For the one, surprising
phenomena are simply inexplicable conduct; for the other, they are the
complex effects of deliberative intelligence, they are master-pieces.
But the notion of activity, far from becoming effaced in the progress
of evolution, becomes simply more definite and more precise. Given
his incomplete experience, primitive man is perfectly logical in
attributing intelligence and consciousness to nature, he could not
rationally do otherwise; his mind is imprisoned in a blind alley, and
superstition is the sole outlet. At a given moment in human evolution,
superstition was perfectly rational.

[Sidenote: Seeming immanence of conscious life in nature.]

Even in our days, men of science are greatly embarrassed by their
inability to point out the precise line of demarcation between the
animate and the inanimate; and how should primitive man have grappled
with this problem? How distinguish, for example, between sleep and
death during one entire portion of life; during sleep, living bodies
lie inert, and why should not inert bodies sometimes prove to be alive?
At night especially, the whole becomes transformed, everything becomes
animate, a breath of wind suffices to make everything palpitate; it
seems as if all nature awakened after its day’s sleep; it is the hour
when wild beasts go in search of prey, and mysterious noises fill the
forest. The calmest imagination, under such circumstances, yields to
a temptation to see fantastic objects that are not. One night I was
walking on the sea-shore, and saw distinctly a gigantic beast moving
some distance away; it proved to be a perfectly motionless rock, in
the midst of others like it, but the waves, which alternately covered
and discovered it in part, lent it, to my eyes, some portion of
their own mobility. How many things in nature borrow thus from some
circumstance—from the wind, from a more or less uncertain light—an
appearance of life![28] Even when the eyes themselves would be
incapable of self-deception, the influence of the foolish terrors so
frequent among children and beings habituated to savage life would
count enormously. Emotional susceptibility is the more highly developed
among savages, in that it forms for them frequently a means of safety.
And primitive man is much more subject than we are to hallucinations
of the sort that are due to terror, and are not wholly fantastic, but
result from a fantastic interpretation of some genuine sense stimulus.
The traveller Park met two negroes on horseback; they fled from him at
a gallop in extreme terror, and meeting his followers in the course of
their flight reported that they had seen him dressed in the floating
robes of some redoubtable spirit. One of them affirmed that at sight
of Park he had felt himself enveloped in a breath of cold air from
heaven, which was like a jet of cold water. Suppress the word spirit in
this passage, which implies a pre-existing belief in the soul, and you
will perceive how hallucinations due to terror may well give birth to
beliefs all the more tenacious for the element of truth they contain.

      [28] Mr. H. Russell, the explorer of the Pyrenees, remarks the
      fantastic effects produced by the moonlight in the mountains.
      As the moonlight replaced the previous shadow on the faces
      and the angles of the rocks, he says, in an account of the
      ascension of the peak of Eriste, they seemed so plainly to
      move that once he mistook one of them for a bear and cocked
      the revolver at his side. The same explorer remarks also the
      surprising transformations which natural objects undergo at
      nightfall and at daybreak. At dawn, he says, there is a sort of
      universal shiver which seems to animate everything; the sound
      of the neighbouring cascade changed frequently; at break of
      day, after having groaned and thundered alternately, it begins
      to scold. For in the morning in the mountains, he says, sounds
      gain magnitude, they swell, and torrents in especial lift their
      voices as if angry; with the arrival of the day the air becomes
      sonorous and sound carries farther. He has experienced this, he
      says, frequently, but does not understand the cause.—_Alpine
      Club_, 1887.

[Sidenote: Dreams.]

Dreams also have played a considerable rôle in the genesis of
superstitions, as Epicurus and Lucretius remarked, and the labours of
Messrs. Tylor and Spencer have proved. Primitive language supplies
no means of saying, “I dreamt that I saw”; one must say simply, “I
saw.” Well, in the dreams which the savage himself can scarcely
distinguish from reality, he sees nothing but a perpetual series of
metamorphoses, of the transformation of men into ferocious beasts,
and of ferocious beasts into men; he dreams that he picks up a stone,
and that it comes to life in his hand; he looks out upon a motionless
lake, and it becomes suddenly a crawling mass of crocodiles and of
serpents.[29] How can Mr. Spencer maintain, after that, that primitive
man can distinguish with some degree of certainty the animate from the
inanimate? Not only during dreams, but during wakefulness, everything
suggests to primitive man the notion of changes of substance and magic
metamorphoses. Eggs, which are inanimate, change into birds or insects;
dead flesh becomes living worms; an effigy, under the influence of
memory, seems to live again and to respire.[30]

      [29] Spencer’s _Sociology_.

      [30] Savages imagine that they see the eyes of portraits move.
      I myself saw a child of two years old, accustomed to play
      with engravings, one day in a great fright snatch away its
      grandmother’s finger, which was resting on the picture of a
      ferocious beast. “Big beast bite grandmamma!” These ideas,
      which totally ignore the profound and definitive difference
      between animate and inanimate, are fixed in the human mind.
      A man of distinguished education once maintained to me quite
      seriously that certain petrifactive springs in the Pyrenees
      possessed the power of changing sticks into serpents. For one
      capable of imagining that a bit of wood might thus become a
      serpent, what difficulty would there be in believing that
      the bit of wood is alive (even a bit of dead wood), that the
      spring is alive (in especial a spring with such marvellous
      properties), and finally that the mountain itself is alive;
      everything is animate to eyes like that, and possessed of magic
      power.

[Sidenote: Primitive man humanizes nature.]

An animal is not sufficiently master of its sensations to follow their
course throughout their successive modifications; it is not in any
proper sense a witness, as man is, of the progress, of the perpetual
movement and transformation of all things; nature is, for it, a
series of detached pictures of which it does not seize the contrasts.
When man, on the contrary, follows attentively the more or less slow
evolution of things, he perceives the effacement of every fundamental
difference between the animate and the inanimate, he observes a
process of blind mechanical labour, which produces life in objects in
appearance quite inert. Is there not something rationally profound
and justifiable in the very naïveté with which he interprets nature?
Poetry is often philosophy in its most penetrating form. Who has not
asked himself sometimes if a puissant and hidden spring of life does
not circulate unknown to us in the high mountains, in the still trees,
and in the restless ocean, and if mute nature does not live in one long
course of meditation upon themes unknown to us? And since even nowadays
we ourselves are full of such vague doubts as that, do we imagine that
it would be easy to convince one of these primitive men of his error,
when he fancies that he feels the beating of what the Germans call the
“heart of nature”? After all is the primitive man wrong? Everything
about us does live, nothing is inanimate except in appearance, inertia
is a word simply; all nature is one universal aspiration, modern
science alone can measure with some approach to accuracy the activity
with which all things are saturated, and show it to us, here existent
in a state of diffusion, there in a state of concentration, and
self-conscious, and make us acquainted with the difference between
the higher organisms and the lower organisms, and between the latter
and mechanisms and rudimentary groupings of bits of matter. For
primitive man, to whom all these distinctions, all the gradations are
impossible, there is but one thing evident, and that is that the whole
of nature lives; and he naturally conceives this life on the model of
his own, as accompanied by self-consciousness, by an intelligence the
more astonishing in that it is mysterious. Moreover he is a man, and
_humanizes_ nature; he lives in society with other men, and conceives
all things in terms of social relations of friendship or of enmity.

[Sidenote: And divinizes it.]

From the humanization to the divinization there is but one step; let us
endeavour to make it. Whoever says _god_, means a living and powerful
being worthy, in some especial degree, of fear, of respect, or of
gratitude. Primitive man possesses already, let us suppose, some notion
of life; he needs now to be supplied with some notion of power, which
alone is capable of inspiring him with reverence, and this notion it
does not seem difficult for a being to obtain, who sees in all nature
an expression of a manifold conscious life, and who must recognize in
certain great phenomena the manifestation of a will much more powerful
than that of any man, and consequently more redoubtable and worthy of
respect. Here also, however, we encounter serious objections from Mr.
Spencer and from anthropologists like M. Le Bon; the question becomes
more complex.

[Sidenote: Natural phenomena quite striking enough to be adored on
their own account.]

According to Mr. Spencer, as we have seen, the most important phenomena
of nature, and among others the rising and the setting of the sun,
are precisely those which must be least striking to primitive man;
they cannot appear to him to be _extraordinary_ because they happen
every day; so that he experiences before them neither surprise nor
admiration. This argument is very ingenious, but is it not also a
little sophistical? If it were pushed to the end it would amount simply
to the fact that there is nothing surprising or unusual in nature,
nothing which breaks with the preconceived association of ideas,
nothing which seems to manifest the sudden intervention of strong
or violent powers. The fact, however, is quite the contrary; nature
is full of surprises and of terrors. The day may be fine; suddenly
the clouds gather and the thunder rolls—the fear of thunder felt by
animals has already been spoken of; in the mountains especially the
rumbling, re-echoing, fills them with unspeakable terror. Droves of
cattle lose all control of themselves and throw themselves headlong
down precipices. It is with great difficulty that the herdsman by
his presence and exhortations keeps his herd in order; probably the
beasts see in the herdsman a powerful friend, capable of protecting
them against this terrible being whom the Hindus call the “howler.” If
animals tremble thus before the thunder, it is unlikely that primitive
man should see nothing in it abnormal and extraordinary. Similarly
with the hurricane, which seems like an enormous respiration, as of
a universe out of breath. Similarly with the tempest: one knows the
Basque proverb: “If you want to learn to pray, go to sea.” Everyone
who finds himself in the hands of a victorious enemy is naturally
inclined to beg for mercy. Let there supervene a sudden calm; at the
moment when the tempest was about to break, let the sun reappear like
a great smiling face, chasing away the cloud with his arrow of gold,
and will it not seem a benevolent auxiliary; will it not be received
with cries of joy and enthusiasm? Nature is incessantly showing us thus
some unexpected change of scene, producing some theatrical effect which
inevitably suggests some anthropomorphic drama, in which the elements
and the stars are the actors. How many strange things happen in the sky
when once the attention is directed thither! Eclipses of the moon and
of the sun, and the very phases of the moon, are abundantly calculated
to astonish the very savages whom Messrs. Spencer and Müller declare to
be incapable of astonishment. Note, too, that the simple view of the
stars at night provokes a lively admiration in anyone who is accustomed
to sleep under a roof. I remember still my surprise, when, as a child,
I was awake for the first time in the night and lifted my eyes by
chance on high and perceived the heaven glittering with stars; it was
one of the most striking impressions of my life.[31]

      [31] Let us remember in this connection that, according to
      Wuttke, J. G. Müller, and Schultze, a cult for the moon and
      nocturnal stars must have preceded that of the sun, contrary
      to the weight of opinion heretofore. The moon’s phases were
      calculated to take the attention of primitive people, and must
      early have done so. One must, however, in this connection be on
      one’s guard against generalizing too quickly and believing that
      the evolution of human thought has in all places followed the
      same route. Habitats differ too widely for there not to have
      been in the beginning an infinite diversity in the religious
      conceptions entertained by different peoples. In Africa, for
      example, it is evident _a priori_ that the sun does not possess
      all the characteristics of a divinity. It is never desired or
      regretted, as in a northern country; it is, to all appearance
      at least, rather maleficent than beneficent; and the Africans
      adore by preference the moon and stars, the gentle radiance of
      which affords them light without oppressive heat, refreshes
      and reposes them from the fatigues of the day. The moon is
      considered by them as a male and all-powerful being, of which
      the sun is the female. It is when the new moon arises, after
      its period of absence from the heavens, and begins once more
      the round of its visible phases, that it is received and
      saluted with an especial demonstration of cries and dances.
      The Congo blacks go the length of seeing in the moon a symbol
      of immortality (M. Girard de Rialle, _Mythologie comparée_,
      p. 148). America, on the contrary, has been the centre of the
      worship of the sun. In general it seems that agriculture must
      of necessity result in the triumph of sun worship over moon
      worship, for the labourer is more dependent upon the sun than
      the hunter or the warrior. According to J. G. Müller, savage
      and warlike races have displayed a preference for the moon.

In effect, earth and sky incessantly furnish mankind with new
impressions capable of stimulating the most torpid imagination, and
of appealing to the whole round of human and social sensibilities:
fear, respect, gratitude. With these three elements it is easy to
account for the genesis of the religious sentiment.[32] If, then, our
ancestors adored the dawn, we do not believe, with Max Müller, that it
was because it seemed to open the gates of heaven and reveal to them a
vision of the infinite; we do not admit, with Mr. Spencer, that a cult
for the stars is reducible in the last resort to a simple confusion of
names, and was originally but an off-shoot from ancestor worship due
originally to the soul of some ancestor, who was metaphorically called
in his lifetime by the name of the sun or of some star. It seems to us
that one might quite well worship the sun and the stars on their own
account, or rather on account of the relation they bear to us.

      [32] As has been remarked, the adoration of natural forces has
      been observed under two forms. It has been addressed sometimes
      to regular and calm phenomena (Chaldeans, Egyptians), sometimes
      to changing and portentous phenomena (Jews, Indo-Europeans). It
      almost always results in the personification of these forces.

       *       *       *       *       *

[Sidenote: Summary.]

To sum up, the simplest, the most primitive conception that man can
form of nature is to regard it, not as a manifold of interdependent
phenomena, but as a multitude of conscious and voluntary beings, more
or less independent and endowed with extreme power, capable of acting
upon each other and upon mankind. Scientific determinism cannot but be
a much later conception, incapable of suggesting itself in the early
stages of human thought. The world once conceived thus as a collection
of physically powerful, voluntary beings, man comes, in the course
of time, to endow these beings, morally and socially, with qualities
according to the manner in which they conduct themselves toward him.
“The moon is naughty this evening,” a child said to me; “it will not
show itself.” Primitive man said also that the hurricane was naughty,
the thunder was naughty, and so forth, whereas the sun, the moon, the
fire, when they gave him pleasure, were good and beneficent. Well,
given a world of voluntary beings sometimes good, sometimes evil, armed
with irresistible power, easy to irritate, prompt to take vengeance as
man is himself, are they not gods? And if primitive man thus possesses
gods, does he not also possess a religion as the ceremonial which
regulates his social relations with the gods? To create a religion we
need, in effect, to add but one idea to those already dealt with—the
idea that it is possible by such and such conduct, by offerings, by
supplications, to influence the superior beings with which nature
is peopled; but this idea, which seems to us quite simple, did not,
however, appear before a relatively advanced stage of intellectual
evolution. A savage animal is scarcely acquainted with any other means
of influencing other beings than biting, growling, and menacing;
if these means fail, he counts on flight. A mouse has no hope of
influencing a cat in any manner whatsoever; once between the cat’s
paws, it knows there is but one resource, to run away; still the animal
ultimately, and in especial at the period of courtship, learns to
recognize the power of caresses and attentions; it does not, however,
occur to him to employ these means toward any but individuals of the
same species. Moreover, the animals must be social before the language
of manners can attain even a very humble degree of development; the
animal confines itself generally to caresses with the tongue, with the
head, with the tail. Evidently, also, such means would be inappropriate
in regard to beings which did not possess a hide and coat of hair; an
animal would not lick a tree or a stone, even if it attributed to them
an unwonted degree of power. So that even if the brute, as Auguste
Comte supposed, really possessed fetichistic conceptions more or
less vague, it would experience a complete inability to manifest its
goodwill in any manner whatsoever toward its rudimentary fetiches.

Superstitious fear is one of the elements of religion which, after
all, is well within the capacity of an animal, but this fear cannot
in an animal produce even the first steps of an embryo cult. An
animal is ignorant of the means of touching, of captivating, of the
infinitely complex language of affection and reverence. Comparatively
inaccessible to pity himself, he has no notion how to act to excite
pity in another; the conception of a gift, of an offering, so essential
to the relations of men to each other and to their gods is, save in
rare instances, to it unknown. The most primitive cult is always
essentially a counterfeit of an advanced social state; an imitation,
in an imaginary commerce with the gods, of a commerce already existing
among men united by complex ties. Religion implies a nascent art of
sociability, an elementary acquaintance with the springs which regulate
the conduct of beings in society; there is a certain rhetoric in
prayer, in genuflections and prostrations. Everything of that kind
is far beyond the range of the lower animals. One may discover among
them, however, some traces of the process of evolution which man
must have followed. It is, in especial, under domestication that an
animal’s manners reach their highest development. Their association
with a superior being resembles, more closely than anything else in
nature, the state in which primitive man believed himself to live with
his gods. The dog seems at times to put up a veritable prayer to the
master who is beating it, when it crawls at his feet and whimpers.
This attitude, however, provoked by the fear of a blow, is perhaps in
a large measure instinctive and not reflectively designed to excite
pity. The true prayer of the dog consists in licking the hand which
wounds him; the story is well known of the dog that licked the fingers
of his master while the latter was pitilessly practising upon him an
experiment in vivisection. I myself observed an analogous fact in an
enormous dog from the Pyrenees whose eye I had to cauterize; he might
have crushed my hand, and he simply licked it feverishly. It is almost
an example of religious submission; the sentiment which is observable
in embryo in the dog is the same as that which in its complete
development appears in the Psalms and the book of Job. The lower
animals display such a sentiment toward no other being but man. As to
man himself, he displays it only toward his gods, toward an absolute
chief or a father. Profound, however, as this sentiment is in some
animals, their expression of it is quite imperfect; though I remember a
case in which the action of licking, so habitual with dogs, was almost
like a human kiss. I was embracing my mother, at the door of the house,
before leaving for a journey, when my Pyrenees dog ran up to us, and,
placing his paws upon our shoulders literally kissed both of us. From
that time on (we have tried the experiment) he never sees us embrace
each other without coming to demand his kiss.

[Sidenote: Notion of Compensation.]

Another well-known fact, and worthy of remark, is the following: when a
dog or even a cat has committed some reprehensible act, has eaten the
roast or done something clumsy, it comes toward one with a thousand
little attentions; in so much that I have found myself able to divine
when my dog had committed a peccadillo simply by observing his unwonted
demonstrations of friendship. The animal hopes therefore, by force of
his social graces and attentions, to prevent his master from holding a
grudge against him, to deprecate the wrath that his culpable conduct
ought legitimately to arouse, and to awaken in its stead some degree
of benevolence by his demonstrations of submission and affection.
This notion of compensation becomes later an important element in the
religious cult. The Neapolitan brigand who dedicates a wax candle to
the altar of the Virgin; the mediæval lord, who, after having killed
his next of kin, rears a chapel to some saint, the hermit who lacerates
his chest with his hair shirt in order to avoid the more redoubtable
pangs of hell, reason precisely after the same fashion as my dog, they
are endeavouring, like him, to conciliate their judge, and, to be quite
frank, to corrupt him; for superstition rests in a great measure upon
the belief that it is possible to corrupt God.

[Sidenote: Notion of conscious gift.]

The most difficult notion to discover among animals is that of the
voluntary and conscious gift; the solidarity observed among certain
insects, for example the ant, which causes them to hold all their
goods in common, is something too instinctive and irreflective; a
veritable gift must address itself to some determinate person, and not
to an entire society; it must possess a degree of spontaneity that
excludes any hypothesis of pure instinct; and finally, it must be as
far as possible a sign of affection, a symbol. And the more symbolic
its character, the more religious, properly speaking, it will be;
religious offerings are more than anything else a symbolic testimony of
respect; piety scarcely plays a part in them, one does not in general
believe that they answer to any real need on the part of the gods,
one believes that they will be rather accepted by them than seized
upon with avidity. The notion of a gift, therefore, presupposes a
certain delicacy and refinement. Some germ of this sentiment, however,
we discover precisely in a dog observed by Mr. Spencer. This dog, a
very intelligent and very valuable spaniel, met one morning, after an
absence of some hours, a person of whom he was very fond. He amplified
his ordinary greeting by an addition which was not habitual; he drew
back his lips in a sort of smile, and, once out of doors, offered other
demonstrations of fidelity. As a hunter he had been trained to bring
game to his master. He no doubt regretted that there was no game at the
moment for him to bring as a means of expressing his affection; however
he rummaged about, and seizing presently a dead leaf, carried it to
his master with a multitude of caressing gestures.[33] Evidently the
leaf possessed for the dog no more than a symbolic value; he knew that
it was his duty to retrieve game, and that the action of retrieving
gave pleasure to his master, and he wished to accomplish this action
under his eyes, as to the object itself it made little difference; it
was his goodwill that he wished to show. The dead leaf was a veritable
offering, it possessed a sort of moral value.

      [33] H. Spencer, _Appendix to the Principles of Sociology_.

[Sidenote: Elements of which religion is compounded within the reach of
the lower animals.]

Thus animals may acquire, by contact with man, a certain number of
sentiments which enter later into human religion. The monkey in
this respect, as in all others, seems much in advance of the other
animals. Even in the savage state a number of simiæ display gestures of
supplication to deprecate the firing of a gun at them:[34] They possess
the sentiment of pity, since they ascribe it to others. Who knows but
that there may be in this mute prayer more of real religious sentiment
than exists sometimes in the psittacism of certain believers? Animals
in general employ in their relations with man the maximum of the means
of expression at their disposal, and it is not their fault if the means
are limited; they seem to consider man as a really royal being, a thing
apart in nature.[35] Must one conclude, as is sometimes done, that man
is a god in the eyes of the rest of the animal kingdom? Not altogether;
the lower animals see man too close; even in an embryonic religion one
must not be able to touch God with one’s finger; in religion as in art,
there is an advantage in perspective. My dog and I are companions;
sometimes he is jealous, sometimes he pouts. I am unhappily in no
respect, in his eyes, on a pedestal. There are, however, evidently
exceptions, cases in which the master seems to preserve his prestige.
I believe that under certain circumstances man has appeared to some
members of the lower animals as endowed with a power so extraordinary
that he must have awakened some vague religious sentiments; if man
is sometimes a god to his fellow-men, he may well be so to the lower
animals. I am aware that in the judgment of certain philosophers, and
even of certain men of science, religion is the exclusive appanage
of the human race, but up to this point we have found in primitive
religion no more than a certain number of simple ideas, not one of
which, taken separately, is above the reach of the lower animals. Just
as industry, art, language, and reason, so religion also has its roots
in the nebulous and confused consciousness of the animal. The animal,
however, rises to such ideas only at moments. He is unable to maintain
himself at their level, to synthesize them, to reduce them to a system.
His attention is too mobile for him to regulate his conduct by them.
Even if an animal were quite as capable of conceiving a god as is the
lowest of savages, he would remain forever incapable of a religious
cult.

      [34] Brehm, _Revue scientifique_, p. 974, 1874.

      [35] Espinas, _Sociétiés animales_, p. 181.

       *       *       *       *       *

[Sidenote: Primitive religion a paraphysics.]

We have seen that the birth of religion is not a species of theatrical
effect in nature, that preparation is being made for it among the
higher animals, and that man himself achieves it gradually, and
without shock. In this rapid effort to trace the genesis of primitive
religions, we have found no need to rely upon the conceptions of
the soul, of spirit, of the infinite, of a first cause, nor upon
any metaphysical sentiment. These ideas are of later date; they are
the product of religion, rather than the roots of it. The basis of
religion was in the beginning quite positive and natural; religion is
simply a mythical and sociomorphic theory of the physical universe,
and it is only at its summit, at an advanced degree of evolution,
that it comes into contact with metaphysics. Religion lies beyond
and at the side of science. Superstition, in the strict sense of
the word, and primitive religion were one, and it is not without
reason that Lucretius compares the two: _relligio_, _superstitio_.
To be present at the birth of religion is to perceive an erroneous
scientific conception, gathering other errors or incomplete verities
to itself, entering into one body of belief with them, and ultimately,
little by little, subordinating them. The earliest religions were
systematized and organized superstitions. Be it added that in our
judgment superstition consists simply in an ill-conducted scientific
induction, in a mistaken effort of human reason; and we do not wish to
be understood as intending by that the mere play of the imagination;
we do not wish to be understood as holding that religion is founded
in the last resort on a species of recreation of the mind. How often
the birth of religion has been attributed to an alleged appetite for
the marvellous, for the extraordinary, which is supposed to seize upon
young peoples as upon infants! A singularly artificial explanation for
a very natural and profound tendency. To say the truth, what primitive
peoples were in search of when they built up their different religions
was an explanation, and the least surprising explanation possible,
the explanation most in harmony with their rude intelligence, the
most rational explanation. It was infinitely less marvellous for an
ancient to suppose that the thunder came from the hand of Indra or
of Jupiter, than to believe it to be the product of a certain force
called electricity; the myth was for him a much more satisfying
explanation; it was the most plausible one that he could hit upon,
given his intellectual habitat. So that if science consists in relating
things, Jupiter and Jehovah may be regarded as rudimentary scientific
conceptions. If they are no longer such, the reason is simply that we
have discovered the natural and regular laws which supersede them.
When a task, so to speak, begins to perform itself, one dismisses the
employee who had previously been charged with it; but one should be
careful not to say that he was previously good for nothing, that he
had been stationed there by caprice or by favour. If our gods seem
nowadays to be purely honorary, the fact was otherwise at a previous
period. Religions are not the work of caprice; they correspond to an
invincible tendency in man, and sometimes in the lower animals, to try
to understand what passes before his eyes. Religion is nascent science,
and it was with purely physical problems that it at first essayed to
grapple. It was a physics _à côté_, a paraphysics, before becoming a
science _au delà_, a metaphysics.




CHAPTER II.

RELIGIOUS METAPHYSICS.

    I. Animism or polydemonism—Formation of the dualist
      conception of spirit—Social relations with spirits.

    II. Providence and miracles—The evolution of the dualist
      conception of a special providence—The conception of
      miracles—The supernatural and the natural—Scientific
      explanation and miracles—Social and moral modifications
      in the character of man owing to supposed social relations
      with a special providence—Increasing sentiment of
      irresponsibility and passivity and “absolute dependence.”

    III. The creation—Genesis of the notion of creation—The
      dualistic elements in this idea—Monism—Classification
      of systems of religious metaphysics—Criticism of the
      classification proposed by Von Hartmann—Criticism of the
      classification proposed by Auguste Comte.


_I. Animism._

[Sidenote: Legitimate and illegitimate metaphysics.]

The upshot of the preceding chapter is that every religion in its
beginning consisted of a mistaken system of physics; and between a
mistaken system of physics and certain forms of metaphysics there
is often no difference but one of degree simply. Magnify some
scientific error, reduce it to a system, explain heaven and earth
by it, and it will be a metaphysics—in the bad sense. Whatever one
universalizes—error or truth—acquires metaphysical significance, and
possibly it is more easy to universalize in this way the false than
the true; truth possesses always a greater concreteness than error,
and therefore offers greater resistance to arbitrary fashioning. Let a
modern man of science develop his knowledge as he will, and enlarge the
circle of known phenomena; so long as he holds vigorously by scientific
methods he will never be able to pass at a bound from the sphere of
phenomena to the sphere of things in themselves. The conscientious
man of science is prisoned within the limits of knowledge, his
thought has no outlet. But let him once break the chain of logic which
confines him, and behold him free. His false hypothesis grows without
obstacle or check from reality; he lands at a bound up to his neck in
metaphysics. The fact is, one may arrive at a system of metaphysics
in two ways—incontinently, by a logical solecism and an exaggeration
of some false premise _ad infinitum_, or by following the chain of
known truth to the point at which it disappears in eternal night, and
by endeavouring to peer into the darkness by the light of hypothesis:
in the first case metaphysics is simply a logically developed mistake
which gains in magnitude what it loses in reality, an illegitimate
negation of science; in the second case it is a hypothetical extension
of truth, in some sort a legitimate supplement to science.

We are approaching the moment when religious physics became transformed
into metaphysics; the period when the gods retreated from phenomenon
to phenomenon, and took refuge ultimately in the supersensible; the
period when heaven and earth first became distinct and separate;
although, to be quite accurate, the distinguishing characteristic of
religion even at the present day is an incoherent mixture of physics
and metaphysics, of anthropomorphic or sociomorphic theories in regard
to nature and to the supernatural. The foundation of every primitive
religion is reasoning by analogy, that is to say, the vaguest and least
sound of logical methods. At a later date the mass of naïve analogies
constituting any one religion is criticised and systematized and
completed by tentative induction or regular deduction.

       *       *       *       *       *

[Sidenote: Primitive metaphysics a fetichistic monism.]

Man, as we have seen, begins by creating a natural society, including
animals, plants, and even minerals, which he endows with a life similar
to his own: he believes himself to be in communication with them in
matters of volition and intention, just as he is in communication with
other men and animals. But in thus projecting something analogous to
his own life, to his power of volition and of his social relations and
responsibilities, into the existence of external things, he does not,
at first, dream of any distinction between the animating principle and
the body which it animates; he conceives as yet no such distinction in
his own case. The earliest stage of religious metaphysics, therefore,
is not a sort of vague monism relative to the divine principle, the
indwelling divinity of things, τὸ θεῖον, as Messrs. Müller and Von
Hartmann affirm, but a vague monism in regard to the soul and body,
which at first are conceived as one. The whole world is a society of
living _bodies_.

[Sidenote: Becomes a dualistic animism. Separate existence of the soul.]

The conception which is most analogous to the preceding is that of
distinct and separate souls animating each its body, of spirits capable
of quitting each its dwelling-place. It is this that historians of
religion mean by animism. What is remarkable in this conception is its
dualistic character. It contains the germ of the opposition between
soul and body. The dualistic conception arises slowly from a number of
naïve analogies. The first are borrowed from the fact of respiration.
Does not one fairly hear the departure of the breath animating a living
body, in what one calls the last gasp? Other analogies are borrowed
from the physical fact of the shadow cast by the sun; one seems to see
the spirit marching side by side with the body, and even changing its
place when the body is motionless. Shadow has played a large rôle in
the paraphysics of primitive peoples; shadows people the other world.
In the third place, during sleep it is incontestable, on the premises
that primitive man has at his disposal, that the spirit sometimes makes
long journeys, for the sleeper often recollects wandering, hunting,
or making war in distant countries, at a time when his companions are
perfectly aware that his body has lain motionless. Fainting also seems
to be a case in which something dwelling in us suddenly leaves and
presently comes back again. Lethargy is a more striking example of the
same thing. Visions in delirium, hallucinations in madness, or even
in dreams, deal with beings who are invisible to others; fantastic
beings who appear to savages as real as any others. Also it is well
known that fools and innocents were regarded, until modern times, as
inspired and sacred. Other nervous maladies—hysteria, “possession,”
somnambulism—add their quota of precision to the conception of a
spirit animating the body, dwelling in it, quitting it more or less at
will, tormenting it, etc.

Thus, by degrees, there arises the conception of a subtle mode of being
eluding touch, and commonly vision even, capable of a life independent
of the body it inhabits, and more powerful than the body. Man comes to
believe himself to be living in a society with beings other than those
who appeal directly and grossly to his senses; he believes himself to
be living in a society of spirits.

[Sidenote: Ghosts.]

That is not all. The problem of death early engaged the attention of
primitive people. They considered it altogether as a physical affair;
they explained it, as Messrs. Tylor and Spencer (following Lucretius)
have shown, by a number of inductions drawn from observations on sleep,
lethargy, and dream. A sleeping body awakes, it seems to follow that a
dead body will awake; that is the line of reasoning. Moreover, the dead
come back in dreams, or in the demi-hallucinations of the night and of
fear. The modern conception of pure spirit is an indirect and later
consequence of a belief in immortality, it is not itself the principle
of it. A cult for the dead, for the manes, as the Romans said, is
partly explicable on moral or psychological grounds, as, for example,
by a prolongation of filial respect and fear, and partly on grounds
altogether material and gross. A cult for the dead rests on a naïve
theory based on sentiment; it is semi-physical and semi-psychological.
The nature of a departed soul has been conceived in very different
ways. Among the Dakota Indians of North America, one’s double goes up
into the air, one’s _third_ rejoins the spirits, one’s fourth and last
soul stays by the body; an instance of a very complicated theory formed
out of elements altogether primitive. In general, the belief is that
the souls of the dead go to join ancestral souls in another world,
which is commonly a distant land from which the tribe has migrated
in former times—affording an example of a social tie which survives
death. The Greeks and Romans believed that, if the body was deprived
of sepulture, its shadow could not penetrate into its proper place of
abode; it remained on earth and haunted the living—a remnant of former
beliefs in the necessity of sepulture and the maintenance of friendly
relations with the society of the dead.[36]

      [36] See the author’s _Morale d’Épicure_ (_Des idées antiques
      sur la mort_) 3d edition, p. 105.

[Sidenote: Analogies between ghosts and living people.]

The dead were to be conciliated by the same means as the living, by
supplications and gifts. The gifts were the same as those which are
acceptable to the living—food, arms, costumes, horses, servants. In
Dahomey, when a king dies, a hundred of his soldiers are immolated on
his tomb as a body guard. Much the same thing was done among the Incas
of Peru. At Bali all the women of the harem are immolated upon the
grave of the defunct sultan. In Homer, Achilles slaughtered his Trojan
prisoners on the funeral pyre of Patroclus, together with the horses
and the dogs of his dead friend. The Fiji islanders used to immolate a
man at the foot of each pillar in the home of a chief, as a guard for
the edifice. In our days, spirits are still so numerous, in the eyes
of certain people, that an Arab, for example, when he throws a stone,
breathes an apology to such spirits as he may strike.[37] The universe
is populated by anthropomorphic societies.

      [37] See Le Bon, _L’Homme et les Sociétés_, t. ii.

[Sidenote: Care of vengeance committed to ghosts.]

It was to spirits that the care of one’s vengeances was confided.
According to Tylor, two Brahmans, believing that a man had robbed them
of fifty rupees, took their own mother and, with her consent, cut off
her head in order that her shadow might torment and pursue the robber
till death. Among the Alfourous of Moluccas children are buried alive
up to the neck, and left there under the scorching sun with their
mouths full of pepper and salt, so that, dying in an agony of thirst,
their souls may go in a state of fury in search of the enemy against
whom they have been sent. It is always some social exigency, some
hatred, some vengeance, some punishment, that leads one to enter into
commerce with spirits.

[Sidenote: Summary.]

In effect, all historical treatises unite to show that animism or
polydemonism has at one time or other been universal. It immediately
succeeded fetichism or concrete naturism, the primitive belief, in
which animating soul and animated body were not distinguished.

A belief in separately existing spirits, or spiritism, as Mr. Spencer
calls it, which contains the germ of the belief in revisitants from
the other world, constitutes the primitive origin of the more refined
metaphysical system called spiritualism. This last system, founded also
upon the notion of the fundamental duality of man, and of every living
being, leads to the notion of a society of spirits.

Let us now consider the inherent necessity under which animism lies of
developing into theism.


_II. Providence and Miracles._

[Sidenote: From ghosts to divinity a single step.]

From the notion of a spirit to that of a divinity is but one step.
It suffices to conceive the spirit as sufficiently powerful and
redoubtable to reduce us in some considerable measure to a state of
dependence. Spirits, manes, gods, subsist in the beginning on an
indistinct sentiment of terror. The instant that spirits can separate
themselves from the body and perform mysterious actions of which we are
incapable, they begin to be divine; it is for this reason that death
may change a man into a species of god.

[Sidenote: Development of notion of special providence.]

Spirits are not only powerful, however; they are also clairvoyant,
prevoyant—they are acquainted with things that lie beyond our
knowledge. More than that, they are benevolent or hostile; they
are related to us in various social or antisocial ways. Here we
have the elements of the notion of divine providence. The second
semi-metaphysical idea, which lies in germ at the bottom of every
religion, is, therefore, this of perspicacious spirits, of favouring
or unfavouring deities, of providences. “This being is well or ill
disposed toward me; he may work me good or harm.” Such is the first
naïve formulation of the theory of divine providence. One must
not expect to find, in the beginning, the notion of a general,
directing intelligence, but simply that of a social tie between
particular voluntary, well-disposed or ill-disposed beings. The notion
of providence, like all other religious notions, was at first a
superstition. A savage, on his way to some undertaking, meets a serpent
and succeeds in his enterprise; it was the serpent that brought him
luck: behold a providential accident! Gamblers at the present time
are quite as superstitious. The fetich theory of providence still
subsists, in the belief in medals, scapularies, and so forth.[38]
Observation inevitably results in the perception of causal relations
among phenomena; the trouble is, simply, that to the primitive mind
every coincidence appears to be a cause; _post hoc, ergo propter hoc_.
Any object that is a party to any such coincidence is a lucky object,
good to have in one’s power, a portable providence, so to speak. Thus
there arises the notion of a destiny, a bias in phenomena toward good
or evil, which imposes itself upon the previously existing conception
of nature as animated or peopled by spirits. The _post hoc, ergo
propter hoc_—that is to say, the belief in the influence of phenomena
immediately preceding or concomitant to the main event, and in the
influence of a present action upon some future event—is the germ of
superstitions both in regard to providence and to destiny. And out of
the idea of destiny, of fortune, of necessity, grows in process of time
the scientific notion of determinism and universal reciprocity.

      [38] A belief in relics, pushed so far by the earlier
      Christians and by so many Catholics to-day, is, too, a sort
      of faith in fetiches or amulets. From the earliest period of
      Christianity the faithful were accustomed to go to the Holy
      Land to obtain water from the Jordan, and gather dust from the
      soil that the feet of Christ had trod, and to break pieces from
      the true cross, which St. Paulin of Nole says, “possesses in
      all its parts a vital force in so much that although its wood
      be every day clipped off by innumerable pilgrims, it remains
      intact.” Relics are supposed not only to cure the body, but
      the soul of those who touch them: Gregory sent to a barbarous
      king the chains that had served to manacle the apostle Paul;
      assuring him that the same chains which had manacled the body
      of the saint could deliver the heart from sin.

      This superstition for relics, common in the Middle Ages, was
      held in all its naïveté by Bishop Gregory of Tours. He relates
      that one day when he was suffering from a pain in the temples,
      a touch from the hangings about the tomb of St. Martin cured
      him. He repeated the experiment three times with equal success.
      Once, he tells, he was attacked by a mortal dysentery; he
      drank a glass of water in which he had dissolved a pinch of
      dust scraped up on the tomb of the saint, and his health was
      restored. One day a bone stuck in his throat, he began praying
      and groaning, and kneeled before the tomb; he stretched out
      his hand and touched the hangings and the bone disappeared.
      “I do not know,” he says, “what became of it, for I neither
      threw it up nor felt it pass downward into my stomach.” At
      another time his tongue became swollen and tumefied; he licked
      the railing of the tomb of St. Martin and his tongue became
      of its natural size. St. Martin’s relics go the length even
      of curing toothache. “Oh, ineffable theriac!” cries Gregory
      of Tours, “ineffable pigment! admirable antidote! celestial
      purge! superior to all the drugs of the faculty! sweeter than
      aromatics, stronger than all unguents together! Thou cleanest
      the stomach like scammony, the lungs like hyssop; thou purgest
      the head like pyrethrig.”

[Sidenote: Systematic subordination among the gods.]

Little by little, by the growth of experience, man achieves the
conception of an orderly subordination among the different voluntary
beings with whom he peoples the earth, a sort of unification of
special providences, a more or less regular organization of the world.
Responsibility for current events retreats from cause to cause into the
distance, from powerful being to still more powerful being; primitive
man still insists on believing that every event is still the sign,
the expression of a volition. Once more his faith is dualistic: he
conceives the world as dependent upon the will of some one or more
superior beings who direct it, or suspend at need the ordinary course
of things.

[Sidenote: Development of belief in miracle.]

It is at this stage in the evolution of religion that the conception
of miracles appears. The notion of miracles is at first very vague in
primitive religions; the period at which this notion begins to become
definite marks the initiation of a further step in the development
of religion. If, in effect, the marvellous has in all times formed
a necessary element in the constitution, it did not possess in the
beginning the same character as nowadays; it was not so definitely
distinguished from the natural order of things. Human intelligence
had not yet distinguished scientific determinism and supernaturalism.
A natural phenomenon! The bare idea is almost modern; that is to
say, the idea of a phenomenon subject to immutable laws, bound up
together with the whole body of other phenomena and forming with them
a single unit. What a complex conception, and how far above the reach
of primitive intelligence! What we call a miracle _is_ a natural
phenomenon to a savage, he sees miracles every hour; properly speaking,
he sees nothing else but miracles, that is to say, surprising events.
Primitive man, in effect, takes no notice of what does not surprise
him (surprise, it has been said, is the father of science), and one of
the immediate characteristics, in his opinion, of what surprises him,
is that it is intentional.[39] That it should be so no more shocks
him, than a paradox shocks a philosopher. The savage is not acquainted
with the laws of nature, he has no notion of their being universal
to prevent his admitting exceptions to them. A miracle is simply to
him a sign of a power like his own, acting by methods unknown to him
and producing effects above the limits of his own capacity. Are such
effects _infinitely_ above his capacity? No such notion enters into the
question; it suffices that they be above it at all to make him bow down
and adore.

      [39] Etymologically, miracle signifies simply surprising. The
      Hindus do not even possess a special word for a supernatural
      event; miracle and spectacle in their language are one. The
      supernatural, that is to say, is for them simply an object
      of contemplation and admiration, an event which stands out
      prominently from the general monotony which attracts the eye.

[Sidenote: Marks a degree of intellectual progress.]

The belief in miracles, so anti-scientific nowadays, marks a
considerable progress in the intellectual evolution. It amounts, in
effect, to a limitation of divine intervention to a small number of
extraordinary phenomena. A conception of universal determinism is, in
fact, beginning to make its appearance. The belief in dualism, in the
separation between spirit and body, becoming constantly more marked,
ends in the belief in distinct and separate powers.

[Sidenote: Conception of God as Providence more essential than that of
Him as First Cause.]

Belief in a power miraculously distributing good and evil, in a
Providence, is the most vital element in religion. The most important
act in every religion, indeed, is propitiation and entreaty; well,
this act is not simply directed toward God as such, but toward God as
a presiding divinity, a power capable of favouring or disfavouring
us. And the great Oriental religions have reached their present state
of perfection without any special effort to make the notion of God
precise, without specially insisting upon any of his distinguishing
attributes except such as are subsidiary to this notion of a Providence
awarding good and evil; and popular fancy hastens to ascribe the
accomplishment of this distribution to genii, to good and evil spirits;
it need go no further, it need not penetrate to the Great Being, to
the infinite, so to speak, to the noumenon, and to the abyss which,
in effect, is to it a comparative matter of indifference. Even in
religions of Christian origin—in especial, in Catholicism, and the
Greek Church—God is not always addressed directly; saints, angels,
the Virgin, the Son, the Holy Spirit, are much more frequently invoked
as mediators. There is something vague, and obscure, and terrible,
in God the Father; He is the creator of heaven and hell, the great
and somewhat ambiguous principle of goodness, and, in some dim way,
of evil. One may see in Him the germ of an indirect personification
of nature, which is so indifferent to man, so hard, so inflexible.
Christ, on the contrary, is the personification of the best elements
of humanity. The responsibility for ferocious laws, maledictions,
eternal punishments, is laid upon the shoulders of the Old Testament
Deity hidden behind His cloud, revealed only in the lightning and
the thunder, reigning by terror, and demanding the life even of His
Son as an expiatory sacrifice. At bottom, the real God adored by the
Christians is Jesus, that is to say, a mediating Providence whose
function is to soften down the asperities of natural law, a Providence
who distributes nothing but good and happiness, whereas nature
distributes good and evil with equal indifference. It is Jesus we
invoke, and it is to the personification of Providence rather than to
that of the first cause of the world that humanity has kneeled these
two thousand years.

[Sidenote: Increasing opposition between notion of Providence and
science.]

A belief in miracles and in a Providence comes, in the course of its
development, into sharper and sharper conflict with a belief in the
order of nature. Man gives himself up to an exclusive preoccupation
with what he supposes to be the means of ameliorating his destiny and
that of his fellows: providential interference with the course of
nature, sacrifice, and prayer are his great means of action on the
world. He lives in the supernatural. There exists always, in the early
stages of every religion, a certain sentiment of evil, of suffering,
of terror; and to correct it the believer takes refuge in miracles.
Providence is thus the primitive means of progress, and man’s first
hope lay in the superhuman.

[Sidenote: Practical evil of belief in Providence.]

Fear of evil, and belief that it can be cured by divine intervention,
were the origin of prayer. A positive religion, even in our days, can
scarcely rest content with the conception of a God who simply sits at
a distance and watches the march of a world which he regulated, once
for all, at the beginning of time. He must absolutely show himself
from time to time in our midst, we must feel the proximity of his hand
ready to sustain us, he must be able to suspend the course of nature to
our profit. Piety requires the stimulus of a belief in the immediate
and present possibility of miracles, in their past existence, in their
present existence even, and in one’s power of invoking them by prayer.
Thus the believer opposes to the conception of ordinary determinism,
as the regulating principle of the external world, a faith in a being
capable at any moment of tampering with it; and he counts upon this
power being exercised, he counts upon invoking it, he puts his hope in
supernatural means not less than in natural means, and sometimes even
to the neglect of the latter.

       *       *       *       *       *

[Sidenote: Miracles not frauds.]

As Littré remarked, the mind may behave in three ways in regard to
miracles: adore them, reject them as a mystification, or explain them
by natural means. Primitive times, Antiquity, and the Middle Ages
adored miracles; the eighteenth century rejected them as impostures
and made game of them. It was then that the theory, that the founders
of religion were impostors simply, was generally prevalent. One of
the most necessary and most serious incidents in the human drama was
simply mistaken for a bit of comedy. It was forgotten that men do not
devote a whole lifetime to falsehood; the theory of imposture was a
psychological as well as historical error. A man—even an actor or a
politician—is always sincere on some side or other; at some period or
other a man inevitably says what he thinks, even if only by mistake.
Even certain palinodes, provoked by self-interest, are explicable by an
unconscious deviation, under the influence of some passion, rather than
by an altogether conscious and brazen determination to deceive; and
even when one lies with all one’s heart, one inevitably believes, or
soon comes to believe, some part of one’s own falsehood. The reproach
of hypocrisy, of comedy and falsehood, has been uttered a hundred
times in the course of history, and it has usually been a mistake.
In the eighteenth century the same men who prepared and achieved the
French Revolution were fond of accusing the prophets and Apostles,
the revolutionists of an early date, of insincerity and fraud. To-day
such an accusation can no longer be sustained against the sacred
books, and the men of the eighteenth century are themselves accused
of hypocrisy. For M. Taine, for example, almost all the leaders of
the French Revolution lie under the reproach of insincerity, and the
very people who sustained them were not, in his judgment, moved by
the ideas which they proclaimed, but by the grossest self-interest.
The fact is, there are always two points of view from which historic
events may be regarded: that of personal interests, which come to the
surface as seldom as possible, and that of the general and generous
ideas which, on the contrary, are complacently given prominence in
public speeches and writings. If it is useful for the historian to
divine the interested motives which contributed to the production of
a historical event, it is irrational to refuse to lend some measure
of credence to the higher motives which justified it and which may
well have lent their influence to that of self-interest. The human
heart is not a one-stringed instrument. The revolutionists had faith
in the Revolution, in the rights which they were vindicating, in
equality and fraternity; they even believed, sometimes, in their own
disinterestedness, as the Protestants believed in the Reformation, as
Christ and the prophets believed in their own inspiration; as even in
our days, by a belated superstition, the Pope believes in his own
infallibility. There is in every faith some element of the naïveté
which a child shows in its little semi-conscious hypocrisies, in its
caresses which mask a demand and its smiles which are the efflorescence
of satisfied desire. But without a certain element of genuineness,
a certain element of real naïveté in the faith of the believers, no
religion could exist, no revolution would be achieved, no important
change would be produced in the life of humanity. Intellectual
affirmation and action are always proportionate: to act is to believe
and to believe is to act.

[Sidenote: But illusions.]

In our days, miracles are beginning to be scientifically explained.
They are phenomena simply; frequently they were witnessed and described
in good faith, but with insufficient knowledge. Everyone is acquainted,
for example, with the biblical miracle according to which Isaiah
“brought again the shadows of the degrees, which was gone down in the
sun dial of Ahaz, ten degrees backward”; indeed the miracle has been
reproduced. Mr. Guillemin[40] demonstrates by geometrical reasonings
that, by inclining the dial slightly toward the horizon, the shadow
may be made gradually to creep a certain distance backward. In the
same way, the successive appearances of Jesus after his burial have
been paralleled by a recent event in the United States: a criminal,
at whose execution all his fellow-prisoners were present, appeared to
all of them successively the next day, or the day after. The latter is
a remarkable instance of collective hallucination, which shows that
a group of individuals living in, so to speak, the same emotional
habitat may well be struck at the same time by the same vision, without
there being, on their part, either conscious or unconscious fraud or
collusion. A third miracle, of an altogether different kind, has also
been scientifically explained: I mean the colouring of the fleece of
the flocks of Laban and of Jacob; the effect was obtained by a process
well-known to the Egyptians, and mentioned by Pliny. Matthew Arnold
believes that the miraculous cures also are not pure legend simply,
that they bear witness to the great influence of mind over matter.
Jesus really did exorcise devils, that is to say, the mad passions
which howled about him. And thus may be understood in their true sense
the words: “What does it matter whether I say, _Thy_ sins are forgiven
thee! or whether I say Arise and walk?” and again: “Thou art made
whole; sin no more, lest a worse thing befall thee.” Jesus himself
must have known, as Socrates and Empedocles did, though even in a more
extraordinary degree, that he possessed a moral and physical power, a
virtue, which he himself did not understand and which seemed to him a
divine gift. He knew himself to be morally and symbolically the healer
of the deaf, the blind, the paralytic, a physician of souls; and the
cures that he wrought in cases of hysteria, more or less temporary but
real, forced him to attribute to himself a superhuman power over the
body also.

      [40] _Actes de la Société helvét. des sc. nat._, August, 1877.

[Sidenote: Usually explicable by the science of nervous phenomena.]

The science of the nervous system, which dates almost entirely from our
days, may be taken as a perpetual running commentary on the history
of miracles. Perhaps a full quarter of the marvellous facts observed
and revered by humanity fall into place within the limits of this
new science. A physician, or observer, in the midst of his subjects
is like a prophet; those who surround him are incessantly obliged to
recognize in him an occult power, which he himself does not understand;
physician and patient, observer and observed, live equally in the realm
of the extraordinary. The facts of partial insensibility, of catalepsy
followed by a reawakening like a rising from the dead, of mental
suggestion taking place even at a distance, all these facts, which are
well known, and are each day becoming more and more explicable, are
even for us at the present moment on the confines of the miraculous;
they are detaching themselves, under our very eyes, from the sphere of
religion, and falling within the compass of science. The observer who
notices for the first time that he can transmit an almost compulsive
command by a look, by a pressure of the hand, and even, it appears
nowadays, by a simple tension of his will, must experience a species of
surprise, even of fright, of almost religious disquietude at finding
himself armed with such a power. He must begin to understand that
the mythical and mystical interpretation of such facts is an affair
of delicate discrimination, that lay beyond the stretch of primitive
intelligence.

[Sidenote: Often by less recondite knowledge.]

Even the miracles which do not belong simply to the less explicable
phenomena of the nervous system tend increasingly to appear to the
historian as having been possessed of some foundation in fact. All
that was subjective in them is the element of the marvellous and the
providential. The miracles really were produced, but in the human
heart; and instead, in any proper sense, of engendering faith they
proceeded from it and are explicable by it. An English missionary[41]
who made a journey in Siberia relates that at the moment of his
arrival at Irkutsk a fire was consuming three-fourths of the town; a
chapel, however, had been spared and the Russian clergy saw in this
fact a miracle; the English missionary explained it very simply by the
observation that the rest of the town had been built up of wood, and
that the chapel was of brick. But the missionary, who denies anything
like providential intervention in the above mentioned case, admits
providential intervention the same day in regard to another point; for
he relates that but for one of his horses having run away he would have
arrived too soon at Irkutsk, and would have had his baggage burned in
the fire, and offers thanks to God because his horse had been inspired
to break the traces. The same natural causes which suffice, according
to this excellent gentleman, to explain why the Russian church was
spared, suffice no longer when the luggage of an Anglican missionary,
the special _protégé_, is involved. Every believer is inclined thus to
interpret miraculously the mercies that have been shown to him. From
the height of a stall or the pulpit of a church one sees the events of
this world at a particular angle; from the stall or pulpit of another
church one sees them at another angle, and for purposes of scientific
verity the events must be looked down upon from the stalls and pulpits
of every church—unless one rejects churches altogether.

      [41] _Through Siberia_, by Henry Lansdell, with illustrations
      and maps; London, 1882.

[Sidenote: Miracles essential to religion.]

Religions create miracles by the very need that they themselves feel
for them, they create them as evidence in their own support; miracles
enter as a necessary element into the process of mental evolution which
engenders religion. The distinguishing mark of the word of God is that
it alters the order of natural phenomena. Mohammedanism alone made its
way in the world without the assistance of visible and gross evidence
in its favour, appealing not to the eyes but to the spirit, as Pascal
would say; and in this respect it may perhaps claim an intellectual
elevation that Judaism and Christianity cannot. But if Mohammed refused
the gift of miracles, with a good faith that Moses seems not to have
possessed, his disciples hastened to force it upon him, and have
supplied his life and death with an appropriate setting of marvellous
legend. Ground of belief must be had; the messenger of God must present
some visible sign by which he may be recognized.

[Sidenote: Prevalence of belief in special providence.]

It is evident that divine providence or protection must have been
conceived in the beginning as quite _special_, and not as acting by
general laws. The course of the world was one continual series of
divine interventions in the natural order of things, and in the affairs
of men; divinities lived in the midst of mankind, in the midst of
the family, in the midst of the tribe. This result may be explained
as due to the very character of primitive humanity. Primitive man,
who is the most credulous, is evidently also the least responsible
of mankind; incapable of governing himself, he is always willing
to abandon himself to the management of somebody else; in every
circumstance of life he needs to share some part of his burden. If a
misfortune happens to him, he relies on anybody or anything rather
than on himself. This characteristic, which has been remarked in a
number of races of mankind, is especially visible in infants and in
infant peoples. They lack patience to follow without skipping a link
in the chain of cause and effect; they do not understand how any
human action can produce any great effect, and are, in general, much
astonished at the disproportion which exists between effects and their
causes—a disproportion which is only explicable in their eyes by the
intervention of some foreign cause. Hence the need, so remarkable in
feeble minds, to discover some other than the real explanation for
a phenomenon; the real explanation is never, in their eyes, truly
sufficient. For a vanquished soldier, the defeat is never sufficiently
explained by scientific grounds; for example, by his own cowardice, by
the ill-management of the men on the field, by the ignorance of the
leaders; before the explanation is complete the notion of treason must
always be added. Just so, if one of the lower classes has an attack
of indigestion, he will not admit that he has eaten too much; he will
complain of the quality of the food, and perhaps even suggest that
somebody has tried to poison him. In the Middle Ages, when there was
pestilence, it was the fault of the Jews; at Naples the people beat the
images of the saints when the harvest is not good. All these facts are
explicable in the same way; an uncultivated mind cannot bring itself
to accept a result which is disagreeable to it, cannot resign itself
to having been unexpectedly disconcerted by the mere brute course of
things, to say with Turenne, when he was asked how he lost a battle:
“By my own fault.” The notion of a special providence allies itself
with his natural disposition; it permits man to wash his hands of all
responsibility, no matter what happens. A result which it would be
too much trouble to foresee, and to obtain by mere natural means, can
always be demanded at the hand of Providence; one waits for it instead
of working for it; and if one is deceived in one’s expectations one
lays the blame on the Deity. In the Bible, kings are never guilty
except toward God, their incapacity is simply impiety; but it is always
easier to be pious than to be capable.

[Sidenote: Belief in Providence tames people for absolute monarchy.]

At the same time that the naïve irresponsibility of primitive people
thus accommodates itself to the providential government of the world,
it accommodates itself no less to the despotic government of a monarch
or of an aristocracy. The principle of despotism is at bottom identical
with that of a supernatural, external providence; the latter also
demands a certain renunciation or abdication in the direction of
events. One lets one’s self go, one confides one’s self to someone
else, and by this means one winks at the cruellest of frauds, the
defraudment of one’s own volition; another wills and determines in
one’s stead. One limits one’s self to desiring and hoping, and prayers
and supplications take the place of action and of work. One floats with
the stream in a state of relaxation; if things turn ill there is always
someone for one to blame, to curse, or to wheedle; if, on the contrary,
things turn out well, one’s heart overflows with benedictions, not to
mention that one secretly attributes some part (man is so made) of
the result obtained to one’s self. Instead of saying, “I determined
that it should be so,” one says, “I asked, I prayed for it.” It is so
easy to believe that one is helping to manage the state, or govern
the earth, when one has murmured two words into the ear of a king
or a god—when, like the fly in the fable, one has simply buzzed an
instant about the great rolling wheel of the world. Propitiatory prayer
possesses a power which is great in proportion to its vagueness; it
seems to be able to do everything precisely because it cannot ever do
anything in especial. It exalts man in his own eyes because it enables
him to obtain the maximum of effect with the minimum of effort. What a
penchant the people have always felt for destiny and men of destiny!
How every appeal to the people, in behalf of men of destiny, has in all
times succeeded in taking the suffrage of the masses! A sentiment of
submission to the decrees of Providence, who is destiny personified,
has been the excuse of every form of indolence, of every cowardly
adherence to custom. And if one carries it to its logical conclusion,
to what else does the indolent sophism of the Orientals amount? It is
true that the precept, “Heaven will aid thee,” is habitually corrected
by the precept, “Aid thyself.” But efficiency to aid one’s self demands
initiative, and audacity, and a spirit of revolt against an unwelcome
course of things; efficiently to aid one’s self one must not say,
“God’s will be done,” but “My will be done”; one must be a rebel in
the midst of the passive multitude, a sort of Prometheus or Satan. It
is difficult to say to one, “Whatever happens, whatever exists, is what
it is, by the irresistible and special will of God,” and nevertheless
to add, “Do not submit to the accomplished facts.” In the Middle Ages
men consoled themselves in the midst of tyranny and poverty by thinking
that it was God himself who was oppressing them, and dared not rise
against their masters for fear they might be rising really against God.
To preserve social injustice it had to be apotheosized. What was really
no more than a human right had to be made divine.

[Sidenote: Personal initiative a defiance of the gods.]

The sentiment of personal initiative, like that of personal
responsibility, is quite modern and incapable of being developed in
the atmosphere of bigotry and narrowness in which man has long lived
with his gods. To say to one’s self, “I can undertake something new;
I shall have the audacity to introduce a change into the world; to
make an advance; in the combat against brute nature I shall shoot the
first arrow, without waiting, like the soldier of antiquity, till the
auspices have been consulted”—would have looked like an enormity to
men of former times; to men who did not take a step without consulting
their gods and carrying their images before them to show the way.
Personal initiative was, on the face of it, a direct offence against
Providence, an encroachment on His rights; to strike the rock as Moses
did, before having received the order to do so from God, would have
been to expose one’s self to His wrath. The world was the private
property of the Most High. It was not permitted to a man to employ
the forces of nature without special leave; man was in the position
of a child, who is not allowed to play with the fire; except that the
reason for prohibiting the child is not the same—we do not prohibit
children from playing with the fire because we are “jealous” of them.
The jealousy of the gods is a conception which has survived till the
present day, although it is incessantly retreating before the progress
made by human initiative. Machinery, the product of modern times, is
the most powerful enemy that the notion of a Providence has ever had to
wrestle with. One knows how the innocent winnowing machine was cursed
by the priests, and looked upon with an eye of hatred by the peasants,
because it imprisoned and employed in the service of man an essentially
providential force—that of the wind. But malediction was useless,
the wind could not refuse to winnow the wheat; the machine vanquished
the gods. There, as everywhere, human initiative carried the day.
Science found itself in direct opposition to the special intervention
of Providence, and appropriated and subdued the forces of nature to
an end, in appearance, not divine but natural. A man of science is a
disturbing element in nature, and science an anti-providence.

[Sidenote: Man practically a domestic animal in the house of the gods:
resulting enfeeblement of character.]

Before the earliest developments of science, primitive man found
himself, as a result of his imagination, in a state of domesticity
in the world, analogous to that to which he had himself reduced
certain animals; and this state exerted a profound influence upon
the character of such animals, deprived them of certain capacities
and endowed them, in turn, with others. Some of them—certain birds,
for example—become under domestication almost incapable of finding
and providing themselves with their necessary food. More intelligent
animals like the dog, who might in a case of absolute necessity rely
upon himself for indispensables, contract nevertheless a habit of
subjection to man which creates a corresponding need: my dog is not
at ease except when he knows that I am near; if anything causes me
to go away, he is restless and nervous; in the presence of danger he
runs between my legs, instead of taking refuge in flight, which would
be the primitive instinct. Thus every animal which knows itself to be
watched and protected in the details of its life by a superior being,
necessarily loses its primitive independence, and if its primitive
independence should be once more restored, it would be unhappy, would
experience an ill-defined fear, a vague sentiment of enfeeblement.
Just so in the case of primitive and uncultivated man: once he is
habituated to the protection of the gods, this protection becomes
for him a veritable need; if he is deprived of it, he falls into
a state of inexpressible discomfiture and inquietude. Add that, in
this case, he will soon provide himself with a substitute; to escape
from the intolerable solitude which doubt creates within him, he
will take refuge in his gods or his fetiches, under the influence of
a sentiment identical with that which sends the dog to take refuge
between the legs of his master. To attain some idea of the force of
such a sentiment among primitive human beings, one must remember that
the surveillance of the gods is much more extended and more scrupulous
even than that of man over domestic animals, or of a master over his
slaves. Primitive man feels his god or his genii at his side at every
step, in all the circumstances of life; he is accustomed to being
never alone, to the presence of someone by him keeping step with him;
he believes that every word that he says and every act that he does
is witnessed and judged. No domestic animal is accustomed to so high
a degree of subjection; he knows perfectly that our protection is not
always efficacious and that we are sometimes mistaken about him, that
we caress him when he ought to be punished, etc. Cats, for instance,
know that man cannot see in the dark: one evening a white cat made
ready to commit an abominable misdemeanour within two steps of me,
not suspecting that its colour would betray it to an attentive eye,
even in the obscurity. Primitive men sometimes practised an analogous
cunning in regard to their gods; they did not yet believe in the
complete sovereignty, in the absolute ubiquity, of Providence. But by
a process of logical development, Providence is ultimately believed
to extend to everything, to envelop one’s whole life; the fear of God
becomes to man a perpetual prohibition against his passions, a hope in
God’s aid his perpetual recourse. Religion and science possess this
much in common, that they result in enveloping us equally in a network
of necessities; but what distinguishes science is that it makes us
acquainted with the real order and causes of phenomena, and by that
fact permits us to modify that order at will; by showing us the fact
and nature of our dependence, science supplies us with the means of
conquering a comparative independence. In religion, on the contrary,
the mythical and miraculous element introduces an unforeseen factor,
the divine will, a special providence, into the midst of events, and
by that fact deceives one as to the true means of modifying the real
course of things. The instant one believes one’s self to be dependent
upon Jupiter or Allah, one ascribes a greater efficacy to propitiation
than to action; and it follows that the greater one perceives one’s
dependence to be the more completely one believes one’s self to be
without defence against it; the more complete the submission is to God,
the more complete one’s resulting submission becomes to the established
fact. The feeling of an imaginary dependence upon supernatural beings
thus increases the general dependence of man in relation to nature.
Thus understood, the notion of a special providence, of a divine
tutelage, has resulted in the protracted maintenance of the human
soul in a state of genuine minority; and this state of minority,
in its turn, has rendered the existence and surveillance of divine
protectors a necessity. When, therefore, the believer refuses an offer
of emancipation from the dependence which he has voluntarily accepted,
the reason is that he feels a vague sentiment of his own insufficiency,
of his irremediably belated coming of age; he is a child, who does not
dare stray far from the paternal roof; he does not possess the courage
to walk alone. The child who should show a precocious independence,
and should early learn to go its own road, would not improbably become
simply dissipated; his precocity might well be depravity in disguise.
Similarly in history, the irreligious, the sceptics, the atheists,
have been frequently spoiled children, precocious in the bad sense;
their freedom of spirit was only a high form of mischief. The human
race, like the individual, long needed surveillance and tutelage; so
long as it experienced this need it leaned inevitably upon a belief
in a providence external to itself and to the universe, capable of
interfering in the course of things, and of modifying the general laws
of nature by particular acts of volition. Subsequently, by the progress
of science, Providence has been deprived day by day of some of its
special and miraculous powers, of its supernatural prerogatives. By
the evolution of human thought piety has been transformed; it tends
to-day to regard as an object of filial affection what was formerly an
object of terror, of deprecation, of propitiation. Science, enveloping
Providence in a network of inflexible laws, is day by day reducing it
to a state of immobility and, so to speak, paralyzing it. Providence
is becoming like an old man whom age has rendered incapable of
movement—who but for our aid could not raise a hand or foot, who lives
with our assistance, and who, nevertheless, is only the more beloved,
as if his existence became to us more precious in proportion to its
uselessness.


_III. Creation._

[Sidenote: Conception of creation dualistic.]

After the notion of Providence one must deal, in running through the
metaphysical principles of religion, with the notion of a creator,
which has acquired in our days an importance that it did not possess
formerly. This conception, like that of the soul and of a special
providence, presented itself originally under the form of dualism. Man
conceived in the beginning a god as fashioning a world more or less
independent of himself, out of some pre-existing material. It was only
later that this crude dualism was refined into the notion of creation
_ex nihilo_, which represented the traditional duality as produced by
a primitive unity—God, who had at first existed alone, created out of
nothing a world distinct and separate from himself.

[Sidenote: Conception of creation natural.]

The following conversation, of which I can guarantee the authenticity,
affords an example of naïve metaphysic. The two interlocutors were
a little peasant girl, four years old, who had always lived in the
country, and a young girl from town, the daughter of the owner
of the farm. They had gone out into the garden where a number of
flowers had opened that morning; the little peasant girl admired
them enthusiastically, and addressing her companion, for whom she
had long entertained a species of cult: “It is you, mistress, is it
not,” she cried, “who makes these flowers?” This interrogation did
not embody an incipient speculation in a sphere of physics; the child
simply attributed an unknown power to a visible and palpable being.
Her mistress replied laughingly, “No, not I. I haven’t the power.”
“Who does it then?” the child asked. One perceives the persistence,
in primitive intelligences, of the impulse to explain things by the
direct action of somebody’s volition, the impulse to place somebody
behind every event. “It is God,” replied the elder girl. “And where
is God? Have you ever seen Him?” No doubt the little peasant, who
regarded the city as a very surprising place, supposed one might meet
God there, face to face, and God did not, as yet, represent to her
anything supra-physical. But how admirably disposed she was for the
reception of a more or less illegitimate metaphysic! “I have never
seen God,” replied her mistress, “and nobody has ever seen Him. He
lives in heaven, and at the same time lives among us; He sees us and
hears us; it is He who made the flowers, who made you and me, and
everything that exists.” I shall not report the child’s replies, for
I believe that she was too much astonished really to say anything.
She was in a situation such as a savage finds himself in when a
missionary comes and talks with him about God, the supreme being,
creator of all things, a spirit existing without a body. Savages
sometimes refuse to understand, and point to their heads and declare
that they suffer; sometimes they believe that one is making fun of
them, and even among our children there is a good deal of persistent
and mute astonishment, which wears off slowly with the lapse of
time. What is striking in the little conversation reported above,
is the way in which the metaphysical myth necessarily rises out of
the scientific error. An inexact induction first gives rise to the
notion of a human being acting by means to us unknown and mysterious;
this notion, once obtained, fastens upon the body of such and such
an individual, the object antecedently of especial veneration; from
this individual it retreats in course of time to another more distant,
from country to town, from earth to heaven, from visible heaven to the
invisible essence of things, the omnipresent substratum of the world.
Simultaneously with this retrograde movement, the being endowed with
marvellous powers becomes increasingly vague and abstract. The human
intelligence, in developing its conception of the supernatural being,
employs what theologians call _the negative method_, which consists
in abstracting one known attribute after another. If men and races of
men have always followed this procedure, it is less because of any
refinement of thought on their part than in obedience to the pressure
of an external necessity. Directly as man becomes acquainted with
nature, he sees all traces of his god fly before him; he is like a
miner who, thinking that he recognizes the presence of gold in the soil
beneath his feet, begins to dig, and finding nothing, cannot make up
his mind to believe that the earth contains no treasure; he sinks his
shafts deeper and deeper in an eternal hopefulness. Just so, instead
of breaking with his gods, man exiles them to a greater and greater
distance as he advances in knowledge. What nature excludes tends to
take on a metaphysical character; every error which persists in spite
of the progress of experience takes refuge in heaven, in some sphere
more and more completely inaccessible. Thus the somewhat gross origins
of religions are not irreconcilable with the refined speculations
incident to their period of development. Human intelligence, once
launched into infinite space, inevitably describes a wider and wider
orbit about reality. A mythical religion is not a completely rational
and _a priori_ construction; it always rests upon alleged experience,
upon observations and analogies, which are tainted with error; it is,
therefore, false _a posteriori_, and therein lies the explanation of
the invincible and increasing divergence between myth and verity.

[Sidenote: God conceived as orderer rather than as creator.]

In the beginning men conceived God rather as an orderer of the
universe, as a workman fashioning a pre-existing matter, than as a
creator; we find this notion still predominant among the Greeks.
Its genesis was probably something as follows: Whoever supposes the
existence of God regards the world as an instrument in His hands; God
employs the thunder, the wind, the stars for purposes of his own, as
man employs his arrows and his hatchet. Does it not naturally result
from that conception that God fashions these marvellous instruments
just as man fashions his arrows and hatchet? If the little peasant
girl, of whom we spoke above, had not seen her father repair or make
his tools, make a fire, make bread, till the soil, she would never
have asked who made the flowers in the garden. The child’s first
_why_ involves the following reasoning: Somebody has acted on this
thing as I myself have acted on such and such another thing; who,
then, in the present case is it? The abstract notion of causality is
a consequence of the practical development of our own causality; the
greater the number of things that one can make one’s self, the greater
one’s astonishment at seeing things done by other people with greater
rapidity or on a larger scale. The more bound down one is one’s self,
to the employment of tedious artifice, the more one admires what is
produced suddenly by a power which is apparently extraordinary. So that
the notion of a miracle thus more naturally arose from one’s experience
of the practical arts, than, so to speak, from brute experience, and
for the rest contained no element which was contradictory to the naïve
science of the earliest observers. Every question presupposes a certain
kind and amount of action on the part of the questioner; one does
not demand the cause of an event until one has one’s self been the
conscious cause of such and such another event. If man possessed no
influence in the world, he would not ask himself who made the world.
The mason’s trowel and carpenter’s saw have played a considerable part
in the development of religious metaphysics.

[Sidenote: Notion of creation ex nihilo of empirical origin.]

Remark, also, how easy it is, even at the present day, to confound the
word make with the word create, which indeed did not exist in primitive
times. How should one distinguish precisely what one fashions from what
one creates? There is a certain element of creation in fashioning;
and this element sometimes positively assumes a magical character,
seems to rise _ex nihilo_. What a marvel, for example, is a spark of
fire obtained from stone or wood! The Hindus see in it the symbol of
generation. In fire the earliest races of men laid their fingers on
the miraculous. In appearance the pebble one strikes or the dried wood
one rubs to produce a spark is not itself consumed; it gives without
loss, it creates. The first man who discovered the secret of producing
fire seemed to have introduced something genuinely new into the world,
to have ravished the power of creation from the gods. In general, what
distinguishes the artist, properly so called, from the simple workman
is the feeling that he possesses a power which he does not understand,
that he produces in some sense more than he aims at, that he is lifted
above himself; genius is not fully conscious, as simple talent is, of
its resources; it contains an element of the unforeseen, a force which
is not calculable in advance, a creative power; and therein lies the
secret of the true artist’s personal pride. Even in a matter of purely
physical power a superexcitation of the nervous system may place at
one’s disposal an amount of muscular energy one did not suppose one
possessed: the athlete, no more than the thinker, at such times knows
the limits of his own strength and the marvels of which he is capable.
Each of us possesses thus, during certain hours of his existence,
the consciousness of a more or less creative power, of the direct
production of something out of nothing. One feels that one has produced
by force of will a result that one’s intelligence cannot wholly account
for, that one cannot rationally explain. Therein lies the foundation
and in a measure the justification of a belief in miracles, in the
extraordinary power of certain men, and, in the last analysis, in a
power of creating. This indefinite power that man sometimes feels well
up within him, he naturally ascribes to his gods. Since he conceives
them as acting upon the world in a manner analogous to himself, he
conceives them as capable of giving rise to new elements in the world;
and this notion of creative power once introduced continuously develops
till the day when it leads one, from induction to induction, to the
belief that the entire world is the work of a divinity, that the
earth and the stars have been fashioned and created by a supernatural
volition. If man can strike fire out of a stone, why might not God
strike a sun out of the firmament? The conception of a creator, which
seems at first a remote consequence from a chain of abstract reasoning,
is thus one of the innumerable manifestations of anthropomorphism;
one of the ideas which, at least originally, seems to have been rather
paraphysical than metaphysical. It rests at bottom upon an ignorance
of the possible transformation and actual equivalents of forces, owing
to which every apparent creation is resolvable into a substantial
equivalence and every apparent miracle into an exemplification of
immutable order.

[Sidenote: Summary.]

To sum up, the creative power once ascribed to God is in our opinion
an extension of the notion of special Providence, which itself is of
empirical origin. When theologians nowadays begin by establishing the
creation, in order therefrom to deduce a special Providence, they
are precisely inverting the order of things as they appeared in the
beginning. It is only through the continually increasing preoccupation
of abstract thought and metaphysical speculation with the question
of the first cause, that the idea of a creative deity has acquired
thus a sort of preponderance, and constitutes in our day an essential
element in religion. Dualism, as we have seen, is of the essence of
this notion; dualism is the principal form under which the union of
souls and bodies, the relation of a special providence to natural laws,
the relation of creator to created has been conceived. The notion,
however, of a supreme unity running through all things has been caught
more or less vague glimpses of, from remote times down to the present
day. And it is on this notion that pantheistic and monistic religions,
principally those of India, are based. Brahmanism and Buddhism tend to
what has been called “absolute illusionism” for the benefit of a unity
in which the supreme being takes for us the form of non-existence.

[Sidenote: Dangers of effort to classify systems of religious
metaphysics.]

The temptation is natural systematically to class diverse systems of
religious metaphysics and to represent them as evolving, one after the
other in a regular order, conformable to a more or less determinate
scheme; but one must be on one’s guard here against two things: first,
the seduction of a system, with the metaphysical abstractions to which
it leads; second, the pretense of finding everywhere a regular progress
constantly headed toward religious unity. Religious philosophers have
erred in both these respects; Hegel, for example, yielded to the
temptation of imposing upon the history of religion his monotonous
trilogy, of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. In Von Hartmann the
Hegelian spirit, influenced by Schopenhauer, still survives. We have
seen Von Hartmann borrowing from Max Müller the abstract conception
of a divinity at once unified and multiple, a species of primitive
synthesis out of which historical religions were to arise by a process
of differentiation: out of henotheism, as out of matter still void
and without form, was to arise polytheism, and then by a process of
degenerescence was to arise polydemonism or animism, and finally
fetichism.[42] This order of development, as we have seen, is contrary
to matter of fact.

      [42] “Henotheism,” says Von Hartmann, “rests upon a
      contradiction. Man goes forth in search of divinity, and finds
      gods. He addresses each of these divinities in succession in
      the hope that he may be the divinity sought for, and confers
      upon him a multitude of predicates which call in question the
      divinity of the other gods. Obliged, however, as he is to
      look to different gods for the fulfilment of his respective
      demands he is unable to remain faithful to any one of them;
      he changes his object of adoration repeatedly and each time
      acts toward the god he is addressing as if he were god _par
      excellence_, without indeed himself observing at the time that
      he is denying the supreme divinity of any god by attributing it
      in turn to each of them. What renders the origin of religion
      possible is that this contradiction is not at first remarked;
      a persistent failure to recognize such a contradiction would
      not be possible in the midst of the progress of civilization,
      except in the case of an extreme intensity of religious
      sentiment, which shields all religious subjects from rational
      criticism. Such intensity of religious sentiment neither exists
      in all places nor at all times, and a spirit of intellectual
      criticism, operating intermittently, suffices in the long run
      to render the point of view of henotheism untenable. Two ways
      of avoiding the contradiction in question offer themselves.
      One may maintain the unity of God at the expense of the
      plurality, or, on the contrary, plurality of God at the expense
      of the unity. The first way leads to abstract monism, the
      second to polytheism; and out of polytheism, by a process of
      degeneration, arise polydemonism or animism and then fetichism.”

Fetichism, understood simply as the ascription of life to natural
objects, is primitive. Animism, or the conception of indwelling spirit,
arises subsequently. Polytheism, or the worship of a certain number
of analogous objects, such as the trees of a forest, implies some
distinction between the deity and the forest, whereas fetichism limits
itself strictly to the animation of each particular tree, and finally
henotheism, or the vague conception of an indwelling divinity in all
things, is ulterior and derivative. Monistic pantheism or monism lies
but one step beyond.

[Sidenote: Logically posterior often historically prior.]

Remark also that Von Hartmann, who endeavours to prove that a vague
monism is the primitive form of religion, regards the Vedas as a fair
example of the earliest form of natural religion, traces of which
remain more or less distinctly manifest in all mythologies. But this
is positively to forget that for an anthropologist the Vedas are
quite modern compositions, and that Hindu literature belongs to a
period of high refinement and civilization. Monistic metaphysics may
be the ultimate goal toward which all religions tend, but it is at
least not the point of departure. Finally, Von Hartmann endeavours to
establish the fact of a certain logical order in religious development,
a _progress_. This progress does not exist in history nor anywhere
outside of the abstract system constructed by Von Hartmann; it is
dialectic, not historic. The divers religious points of view have often
coincided in history; and sometimes a logically superior point of view
has even preceded an inferior.

[Sidenote: Comte’s classification logical, not psychological.]

Another classification, not less open to suspicion than that of Von
Hartmann, is the celebrated Comtist progression from fetichism to
polytheism and from polytheism to monism. In this classification the
framework no longer consists of metaphysical abstractions, but of
numbers. But numbers also possess their artificial and superficial
side; they do not express the most fundamental aspects of religion.
In the first place, it is a matter of extreme difficulty to perceive
any radical difference between naturistic fetichism and polytheism.
Multiplicity of divinities is a characteristic common to both. The
sole difference that Comte was able to establish is that in polytheism
a whole class of objects, for example all the trees of a forest, or a
whole class of phenomena, as lightning and storm, is represented by
one divinity. But this species of abstraction and generalization is
much less important, much more exterior and purely logical, than the
psychological and metaphysical progression from a grossly unitarian
and concrete naturism to a dualistic animism. This latter line of
development is in the direction of naturalistic and spiritualistic
metaphysics, which possess a deeper significance than a system of
mathematical enumeration and logical generalization. The passage from
polytheism to monotheism is also conceived by Comte somewhat too
mathematically. Polytheism early resulted in a certain hierarchy and
subordination of the whole body of individual deities to some one
powerful god: Jupiter, Fate, etc. On the other hand, monotheism has
always provided some place for secondary divinities—angels, devils,
spirits of every kind, to say nothing of the trinitarian conception of
the Godhead itself. Mathematical terms, in this connection, obscure
profound problems which belong really to metaphysics and to morals.

[Sidenote: The real classification.]

From the point of view of metaphysics the great question is that of the
relation which exists between the divinity and the world and mankind;
a relation of immanence or of transcendence, of duality or of unity.
We have seen that, from this point of view, religions have passed from
an extremely vague primitive immanence to a relation of transcendence
and of separation, ultimately to return, sometimes with comparative
rapidity (as in India), sometimes very slowly (as among Christian
nations), to the notion of an immanent God in whom we live and move and
have our being.

[Sidenote: Progressive encroachment of deterministic conception.]

Along with this difference of conception there necessarily goes
a corresponding difference in the parts ascribed respectively to
determinism and natural law, and to the arbitrary will of the deity or
deities. That is to say, the conflict between religion and science,
or what will one day become such, exists implicitly in the earliest
conceptions of the world. In the beginning, to be sure, there being
no such thing as science properly so called, no conflict is apparent;
one explains whatever one chooses as the product of an arbitrary will,
then little by little the regularity, the determinism, the orderliness
of certain phenomena are remarked. Divinities cease to be absolute
princes, and become more or less constitutional sovereigns. Therein
lies the law of religious evolution, which is much more significant
than the law promulgated by Comte; humanity tends progressively to
restrict the number of the phenomena with the natural course of which
the gods are supposed to interfere; the sphere of natural law tends
progressively to become more and more nearly all-comprehensive. The
Catholic nowadays no longer believes that a goddess brings his crops to
maturity or that a particular god launches a thunder-bolt, though he
is still profoundly inclined to imagine that God blesses his fields or
punishes him by destroying his house by a flash of lightning; arbitrary
power tends to be concentrated in a single being placed on a height
above nature. At a still further stage in the course of evolution, the
will of this being is conceived as expressed in the laws of nature
themselves without allowing for the existence of miraculous exceptions;
Providence, the Divinity, becomes _immanent_ in the scientific ordering
and determinism of the world. In this respect the Hindus and the Stoics
are far in advance of the Catholics.

[Sidenote: Unification of creeds incidental to that encroachment.]

The absorption of the respective worships of a number of deities into
the worship of one deity has been an incidental consequence of the
progress of science. Humanity began by offering up a multitude of
special services to a multitude of special gods. If one were to believe
certain linguists, it is true, natural objects—the sun, fire, the
moon—were at first adored as impersonal entities; their subsequent
personification being due to a too literal interpretation of figurative
impressions habitually employed to designate them, such as Ζεύς,
the brilliant. Certain myths, no doubt, did spring from this source:
_nomina, numina_; but humanity does not usually progress from the
general to the particular. Primitive religion, on the contrary, was
at first subdivided or rather simply divided into cults of all sorts;
it was only later that simplifications and generalizations arose. The
passage from fetichism to polytheism and to monotheism was simply the
consequence of a progressively scientific conception of the world; of
the progressive absorption of the several transcendent powers into a
single power immanent in the laws of the universe.

[Sidenote: Development of sociological and moral sides of religion.]

More important still than this metaphysical and scientific evolution
of religion is the sociological and moral evolution. What is really
important in a religious theory is less the conceived relation of the
primary substance to its manifestations in the universe, than the
attributes ascribed to this substance and to the inhabitants of the
universe. In other words, what sort of a society does the universe
constitute? What sort of social relation more or less moral between
the various members are derivable from the fundamental tie which binds
them to the principle which is immanent in all of them? That is the
great problem for which the others simply constitute a preparation. The
problem is to interpret the true foundation of beings and of being,
independently of numerical, logical, and even metaphysical relations.
Well, such an interpretation cannot be other than psychological and
moral. Psychologically, power was the first and essential attribute of
divinity, and this power was conceived as redoubtable. Intelligence,
knowledge, foreknowledge, were only at a later period ascribed to
the gods. And finally, divine morality, under the twofold aspects of
justice and goodness, is a very late conception indeed. We shall see it
develop side by side with the development of the systems of practical
morals that are incident to religion.




CHAPTER III.

RELIGIOUS MORALS.

    I. The laws which regulate the social relations between
      gods and men—Morality and immorality in primitive
      religions—Extension of friendly and hostile relations to
      the sphere of the gods—Primitive inability in matters of
      conscience, as in matters of art, to distinguish the great
      from the monstrous.

    II. The moral sanction in the society which includes gods and
      men—Patronage—That divine intervention tends always to
      be conceived after the model of human intervention and to
      sanction it.

    III. Worship and religious rites—Principles of
      reciprocity and proportionality in the exchange
      of services—Sacrifice—Principle of coercion and
      incantation—Principle of habit and its relation to
      rites—Sorcery—Sacerdotalism—Prophecy—The externals of
      worship—Dramatization and religious æsthetics.

    IV. Subjective worship—Adoration and love; their
      psychological origin.


_I. The laws which regulate the social relations between gods and men._

[Sidenote: Religion and morals not originally related.]

We are to-day inclined to see everywhere a very intimate relation
between religion and morals, since Kant recognized in ethics the aim
and sole foundation of the conception of God. In the beginning nothing
of the sort existed. It is plain from the preceding chapters that
religion was at first a physical explanation of events, and above all
of events in their relation to the interests of mankind, by a theory
of causes acting for ends of their own after the manner of the human
will; an explanation, that is to say, by causes at once efficient and
final; and theology is the development of a primitive teleology. Man
imagined himself to be living in society with beneficent or maleficent
beings, at first visible and tangible, then progressively invisible and
separate from the objects they inhabited. Therein, as we have said,
lay the first step of religion. Religion was in the beginning nothing
more than an imaginative extension of human society; the explanation of
things by a theory of volitions analogous to the volitions by means of
which man himself acts on the world, but of another order, of a higher
degree of power. Well, these volitions are sometimes good, sometimes
evil, sometimes friendly, sometimes hostile: friendship and hatred are
the two categories under which man inevitably classified the superior
powers with whom he believed himself to be in relations. Morality was
in no sense one of the distinguishing characteristics of these powers;
man was quite as naturally inclined to attribute to them wickedness as
goodness, or rather he felt vaguely that the rules of conduct by which
he was himself bound were not necessarily those by which these beings,
at once analogous to men and so different from them, were themselves
bound. Also in his relations with the gods, with the powers of nature,
man in nowise believed that the rules of mere human society, of the
family, of the tribe, of the nation, were always and in every respect
applicable. Thence it came that to render the gods propitious, man had
recourse to practices which he would have blamed in mere human morals:
human sacrifices, anthropophagy, sacrifices of virginity, etc.[43]

      [43] It has been remarked that peoples who for centuries
      have renounced anthropophagy have long persisted in human
      sacrifices: that thousands of women in certain sanctuaries
      have offered the painful sacrifices of their chastity to gods
      of a furious sensuality. The gods of paganism are dissolute,
      arbitrary, vindictive, pitiless, and still their adorers
      rise little by little to a conception of moral purity, of
      clemency, and of justice. Javeh is vindictive and ferocious,
      and yet it is in the midst of his people that the religion
      _par excellence_ of benignity and forgiveness took its rise.
      Also the real morality of men was never proportionate to the
      frequently fanatic intensity of their religious sentiments. See
      M. Réville (_Prolégomènes_, p. 281).

[Sidenote: Religion much less moral than society.]

If one stops to recollect that moral laws are in a great measure
the expression of the very necessities of human life, and that the
generality of certain rules is due to the uniformity of the conditions
of life on the surface of the globe, one will understand why it was
that one’s relations to the gods, that is to say to creatures of
the imagination, were not dominated so directly as one’s relations
to one’s fellow-men by the exigencies of practical life, but were
regulated by much more variable and fantastic laws containing often
a visible germ of immorality. The divine society was an imaginary
extension of human society, not an imaginative perfection of it. It was
physical fear, _timor_, and not moral reverence, which gave being to
the first gods. The human imagination, labouring thus under the empire
of fear, naturally gave birth to a prodigy more often than to an ideal.
For the primitive conscience, as for primitive art, the distinction
between the great and the monstrous was by no means sufficiently
marked. The germ of immorality, therefore, not less than of morality
lies at the root of every religion. Once more, it would be an error to
believe that religions are immoral in that they are anthropomorphic, or
sociomorphic; rather the contrary is true, they are not moral except
in so far as they are sociomorphic. Mutilation, for example, cruelty,
obscenity are foreign to the conceptions which dominate human conduct.
One may verify in every religion what is observed in Christianity,
that the truly moral God is precisely the man-God, Jesus, whereas God
the Father, who pitilessly sacrifices his own son, is anti-human and
immoral, precisely in that he is superhuman.

[Sidenote: Summary.]

In effect we find our fundamental proposition confirmed afresh:
religion is a sociology conceived as a physical, metaphysical, and
moral explanation of all things; it is the reduction of all natural,
and even supernatural forces to a human type, and the reduction of
their relations to social relations. Also the progress of religion
has been exactly parallel to the progress in social evolution, which
has itself been dominated by the progress of subjective morals and
conscience. The gods were at first divided into two classes: the
beneficent and the maleficent, who ultimately came to be recognized
as respectively virtuous and wicked. Then these two classes were
absorbed into their respective chiefs, into Ormuzd and Ahriman, into
God and Satan, into a principle of good and a principle of evil. Thus
by a fresh dualism spirits themselves were separated and ranged into
classes, as the spirit itself had previously been separated from the
body. Finally the principle of goodness subsisted victoriously under
the name of God. He became the personification of the moral law and
the moral sanction, the sovereign legislator and judge, in a word, the
living law of universal society, as a king is the living law in a human
society. To-day God tends to be identified with the human conscience
purified _ad infinitum_, and adequate with the universe. For these
last and most subtle representations of the religious sentiment, God
is no more than a symbol of the moral and the ideal. One may see in
this evolution of religious ideas the gradual triumph of sociomorphism,
since it is characterized by an extension to the universe at large of
social relations which are incessantly progressing toward perfection
among men.


_II. The moral sanction in the society which includes gods and men._

[Sidenote: The gods inevitably become protectors of social justice.]

To the personification of the law, religious morals inevitably
joined that of the sanction which plays so capital a rôle in every
human society. The celestial government has always been a projection
of the human government, with a penalty at first terrible and
subsequently softened. To say the truth, the theory of a sanction
is the systematization of that of a providence. The distinguishing
characteristic of a providence is that it awards or recompenses,
insomuch that one may bring down upon one’s self or avoid its anger,
by such and such conduct. Well, the instant a man admits that a divine
power is governing him, this power will inevitably appear to him to be
exercising a control over his conduct, and, as it were, sanctioning
it. This control will at first be exercised only in regard to the
personal relations of the individual, with his god and his gods. But
the individual will soon recognize that if the gods take an interest
in him they may well take an interest also in the other members of the
tribe, provided that these last know how to render them propitious;
and to injure the other worshippers of a god would be indirectly to
injure the god himself, and provoke his anger. All the members of a
tribe therefore find themselves protected against each other by their
association with the gods, religion lends support to social justice,
and whoever violates social justice expects the gods to punish him.
This expectation also must have been confirmed by the facts, for if
antisocial and unjust conduct had habitually prevailed among men,
social life would have been impossible. Injustice must then always on
an average have carried its sanction with it, and this sanction must
have appeared to be the direct work of the gods, passing judgment from
on high on the social conduct of their clients, as Roman patrons did,
seated beneath the columns of the atrium.

[Sidenote: And of human justice.]

As religions intermingled and grew in extent, the clientage of a god,
at first extended to the members of a single tribe, passed beyond its
bounds. Men, of no matter what origin, might become citizens of the
celestial city, of the superhuman association which took charge of each
of its members, so that the divine sanction tended increasingly to
become confounded with the moral sanction, and one understood that God
protected justice not only within the bosom of a tribe, but everywhere
within the limits of humanity.

[Sidenote: Natural desire to have the scales loaded on the side of
rectitude.]

While in the matter of the sanction the sociomorphic conception of the
world tended thus to become a moral conception, morality itself must
have tended, in order to eke out its own insufficiency, to ally itself
with religion. Human society, powerless to make itself always respected
by every one of its members, inevitably invoked the aid of the
society of superior beings which enveloped it on all sides. Man being
essentially a social animal, ζῶον πολιτικόν, could not be resigned
in the presence of the success of antisocial conduct, and whenever
it seemed that such conduct had succeeded humanly, the very nature
of mankind tended to make it turn toward the superhuman to demand a
reparation and a compensation. If the bees should suddenly see their
hives destroyed before their eyes without there being any hope of ever
reconstructing them, their whole being would be shaken, and they would
instinctively await for an intervention of some kind, which should
re-establish an order as immutable and sacred for them as that of the
stars is for us. Man, by virtue of the moral nature with which heredity
has furnished him, is thus inclined to believe that wickedness ought
not to have the last word in the universe; the triumph of evil and of
injustice always stirs his indignation. This species of indignation
is observable in infants almost before they can talk, and numerous
traces of it may be found even among animals. The logical result of
this instinctive protest against evil is a refusal to believe in its
definitive triumph.[44]

      [44] See the author’s _Esquisse d’une morale_ (I., iii.);
      _Besoin psychologique d’une sanction_.

[Sidenote: Results in victory being given in heaven to principle of
light.]

Man, in whose eyes the society in which the gods live corresponds so
closely to human society, must almost inevitably imagine the existence
among them of antisocial beings, of Ahrimans and Satans, protectors of
evil in heaven and on earth, but it is natural that he should give the
victory in the end to the “principle of good” over the “principle of
evil.” Of all things it is the most repugnant to him to believe that
the universe is fundamentally indifferent to the distinction between
good and evil; a divinity may be irascible, capricious, and even
intermittently wicked, but man cannot understand an impassible and cold
nature.

[Sidenote: Gods legitimated by alliance with the moral forces of
society.]

The most powerful of the gods had thus served to reconcile force and
justice, a barbarous justice appropriate to the spirit of primitive man.

Through the idea of sanction grafted thus upon that of providence,
religion assumes a really systematic character, and becomes attached
to the very fibres of the human heart. As instruments of goodness
in the universe, the gods, or at least the sovereign gods, serve to
confirm human morality; they become in some sort the life of morality.
Their existence is no longer simply a physical fact; it is a physical
fact, morally justified by a social instinct which relies upon it as
its main safeguard. Henceforth the power of the gods is legitimate. A
divine king, like a human king, requires a certain mystic consecration;
it is religion which consecrates human kings, it is morality which
consecrates the king of the gods.

[Sidenote: Importance of conception of immortality in the moral
evolution of religion.]

The notion of a divine intervention to trim the balance of the social
order, to punish and to recompense, was at first altogether foreign to
the belief in a continuation of life after death; it became allied to
this belief much later. Even among a people so advanced as the Hebrews
in matters of religious evolution, reward and punishment beyond this
life played no rôle, and yet there has scarcely ever been a people
who believed more heartily in the will of God as directing the life
of mankind; but in their eyes God achieved his victory in this life;
they possessed no need for an immortality as a means of redressing the
moral balance of the world.[45] It was only later, when the critical
sense had attained a higher development, that it was recognized that
the sanction did not always come in this life; the chastisement of
the culpable, the hoped-for recompense of the virtuous, gradually
retreated from the present world into a distant future. Hell and heaven
were thrown open to correct the manifest imperfections of this life.
The notion of immortality thus assumed an extraordinary importance,
insomuch that it seemed as if modern life would be destroyed if it were
deprived of this belief, which former times had, however, succeeded in
doing without. At bottom a clear and reflective conception of a life
after death, in which one is rewarded or punished for one’s life here,
is a very complex and remote deduction from the notion of sanction.

      [45] The question whether the Hebrews believed in the
      immortality of the soul has long been discussed, and M. Renan
      has been reproached with his negative attitude in the matter;
      but M. Renan never denied the existence, among the Hebrews, of
      a belief in a sojourn for the shadows or manes of the dead; the
      whole question was whether the Hebrews believed in a system
      of reward and punishment after death, and M. Renan was right
      in maintaining that any such notion is foreign to primitive
      Judaism. It is equally foreign to primitive Hellenism. Though
      the living endeavoured to conciliate the dead, they did not
      envy their fate which, even in the case of the just, was worse
      than the fate of the living. “Seek not to console me for death,
      noble Ulysses,” Achilles says, when he arrives in Tartarus. “I
      would rather be a hired labourer and till a poor man’s field
      than reign over all the regions of the dead.” (See _Morale
      d’Épicure_, 3d ed.; _Des idées antiques sur la mort_.)

[Sidenote: Religious sanction at first conceived as a vengeance.]

The religious sanction, being fundamentally an extension of human
social relations to the life of the gods, successively assumed the
three forms of human penalty. At first it was only vengeance, as in
the case of the lower animals and of savage man. It is evil rendered
in return for evil. The sentiment of vengeance has subsisted, and
still subsists, in the bosom of every religion which admits a divine
sanction; vengeance is confided to God, and becomes only the more
terrible. “Do not avenge yourselves,” St. Paul says, “but rather give
place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay,
saith the Lord. Therefore, if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he
thirst, give him to drink: for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of
fire on his head.” “Our patience,” St. Cyprian wrote, “comes from our
certainty that we shall be avenged; it heaps coals of fire upon the
heads of our enemies. The day on which the Most High shall number the
faithful shall see the culpable in Gehenna, and our persecutors shall
be consumed in eternal fire! What a spectacle for my transports, my
admiration, and my laughter!” And by way of a refinement, one of the
martyrs at Carthage told the pagans to look him well in the face so
that they might recognize him on the day of judgment at the right
hand of the Father, while they were being precipitated into eternal
flame.[46]

      [46] The most orthodox theologians, of course, mean by fire a
      veritable flame.

[Sidenote: Then as an expiation.]

The notion of vengeance, as it becomes more subtle and passes, so
to speak, from the domain of passion into that of intelligence is
transformed into the notion of expiation, which is exclusively
religious, although spiritualistic philosophers believe that it
contains moral and rational elements. Expiation is a sort of naïve
compensation by which one fancies one may counterbalance moral evil by
accepting physical evil along with it. Expiation is a penalty which
possesses no utility in the way of benefiting the culprit or those who
might follow his example; it is neither corrective nor preventive;
it is an alleged satisfaction of the law, the re-establishment of
an apparent symmetry for the delight of pure intelligence, a public
prosecution pure and simple. In a singular passage in the _Pensées
chrétiennes_, Father Bouhours has clearly and innocently set in relief
the inutility of religious expiation: “Penitence of the damned, thou
art rigorous, and how useless; could the anger of God go further than
to punish pleasure so brief by torments which shall never end? When
a damned soul shall have shed tears enough to fill all the rivers of
the world, even if he should only have shed one a century, he will be
no farther ahead after so many millions of years; he will only have
begun to suffer, and even when he shall have recommenced as often as
there are grains of sand upon the shores of the sea, he shall even
then have done nothing.” The highest degree of the notion of expiation
is in effect this of eternal damnation. In this theory of the penalty
of damnation, and the pains of fire without end, one recognizes the
barbarism of former time and the torments inflicted on the vanquished
by the vanquisher, on the rebel by the chief of the tribe. A sort
of atavism attaches even to the religion of love in this perpetual
inheritance of hatred, of the customs of a savage period erected into
an eternal and divine institution.


_III. Worship and religious rites._

[Sidenote: The cult an expression of supposed reciprocity between gods
and men.]

The cult, which, so to speak, is no more than the religion become
visible and tangible, is, like the religion itself, simply the
apotheosis of a certain social relation: the exchange of services
between men living in society. Man, who believes himself to receive
benefits from the gods, feels himself obliged to give something in
exchange. He conceives a sort of reciprocity of action as appropriate
between God and man, a possible return in good or evil conduct; man
possesses a certain hold on his God, he is capable of procuring Him a
certain satisfaction or causing Him a certain pain, and God will reply
a hundred fold in kind—pain for pain, pleasure for pleasure.

[Sidenote: Is so, even to-day.]

One knows how gross the external forms of worship in the beginning
were. They simply consisted in a practical application of the social
economy: the gods were given to eat and drink; an altar was a
butcher’s stall or the stall of a wine merchant, and the cult was a
veritable commerce between heaven and earth—a sort of a market, in
which man offered lambs or sheep and received in exchange riches and
health. In our days, the cult is refined; the exchange has become
more and more symbolic, the gift is simply an expression of moral
homage, for which the worshipper expects no immediate return; still the
principle of the cult is always the same, one believes that an act on
man’s part possesses a direct influence on the will of God, and this
act consists in offerings or prayers fixed on beforehand.

[Sidenote: Governed by the law of the market.]

Another principle of primitive cult is proportionality. One can expect
no more from another than a proportionate return; bow three times
before him, and he will be better disposed toward you than if you bow
but once; offer him a beef, and he will be more grateful than if you
offer an egg. Accordingly, to an uncultivated and superstitious mind,
it follows that quantity and number should regulate our relations with
the gods as they regulate our relations with our fellow-men; multiply
your prayers, and you will multiply your chances of favours; three
Paternosters go farther than one, a dozen candles will produce a much
greater effect than a single candle. A prayer that you go to a temple
to say in public, a cantique chanted in a sonorous voice, will attract
more attention than a silent demand formulated at the bottom of one’s
heart. Similarly, if one wishes to obtain rain or sun for the crops,
it is into the fields that one must go to offer up one’s prayer, in a
motley file of chanting worshippers; it is always serviceable to point
one’s finger at what one wants, and to make the demand in person.
The better to stimulate the memory of one’s idol primitive man was
accustomed to drive a nail into him, and the custom still survives in
Brittany in the form of thrusting pins into the bodies of the saints.
Out of sight, out of mind, holds good both of gods and saints. To
simple minds it would be contrary to the law of proportionate exchange
for a simple thought, a silent prayer, to receive such favour in the
eyes of the gods as an overt act.

[Sidenote: Embodied in fixed forms.]

Every religion insists upon some quite determinate exterior form of
worship, a precise manifestation, a creed; it endeavours to incorporate
itself into a certain number of rites and customs, which are numerous
and inviolable in proportion as the religion is primitive. The
universality of an external form of worship in the different religions
of the world is the consequence and the most striking proof of their
sociomorphic origin. Man has always believed that he might be useful
and agreeable to his gods so long as he has conceived them as analogous
to himself and to his neighbours.

       *       *       *       *       *

[Sidenote: Which soon came to be conceived as coercive.]

Add that to the notion of seducing the gods that of constraining is
soon joined. To the conception of an exchange of services is soon
joined that of a species of coercion exercised in some vague manner by
the intermediation of some friendly god or even by some simple magic
formula which has once succeeded, once procured the object demanded!
Formulæ consecrated by custom appear to be equally binding on gods
and men. Accordingly the cult, at first more or less loose, more or
less arbitrary, ultimately becomes minutely regulated; ultimately
becomes what one knows as a rite. A rite, at its lowest, is simply
the result of a tendency to repeat indefinitely an act which, at some
time or other, has seemed to render a god or a fetich propitious.
After propitiation comes mechanical custom. Religion, as Pascal well
said, is to a large extent habit. Rites are born of the need to
perform again and again the same act, under the same circumstances;
a need which is the foundation of custom, and without which all life
would be impossible. Moreover, there is something sacred in every
habit whatsoever, and every act, whatever it may be, tends to become
a habit and by that fact to become respectable, to be in some sort
self-consecrated. Rites, therefore, strike root in the very foundations
of our being; the need for rites manifests itself very early in
the life of the child. Children not only imitate other people and
themselves, repeat other people and themselves, but exact a scrupulous
precision in these repetitions; in general they do not distinguish the
end from the means by which, and the circumstances under which, it is
pursued; they do not yet possess a sufficiently exercised intelligence
to understand that the same line of action may lead to the same result
in different ways and under different circumstances. I once observed
a child of from eighteen months to two years old: if I got up from my
armchair and paraded about the room for its amusement, and stopped, it
was necessary before beginning once more that I should return to my
seat; the child’s pleasure was much diminished if the repetition was
not exact. The child was accustomed to be fed by a number of people
indifferently; still if I had given it some one thing—milk to drink,
for example—a number of times, it was no longer satisfied to receive
milk from anybody else, and insisted that the same person should always
give it the same thing. If, on leaving the house, I took another cane
than my own, the child would take it away from me to put it back where
it belonged. It was unwilling that one should wear one’s hat in the
house or go bare-headed out of doors. And finally, I saw it achieve a
veritable bit of ceremonial on its own account. It had been accustomed
to be told to call a domestic at the top of the servants’ stairway;
one day the domestic was in the room when the child was told to call
her; the child looked at her, turned about, went to the top of the
stairway where it usually called her, and there only shouted out her
name. All the conduct of life, in effect the most important as the most
insignificant, is classified in a child’s head, rigorously defined,
and modelled on the type of the first act of that kind that has caught
its attention, without the child’s ever being able to distinguish the
object of an act from its form. This confusion between purpose and
form exists in a no less striking degree among savages and primitive
peoples, and it is upon this very confusion that the sacred character
of religious rites is founded.

[Sidenote: Primitive man possesses a repugnance not to novelty but to a
breach of custom.]

The trouble that is apparent in a child or an uncultivated man in the
presence of whatever deranges his established association of ideas,
has been explained by a pure and simple horror of novelty. Lombroso
has even coined a word to designate this psychological state; he has
called it _misoneism_. But let us not confound two quite distinct
things, a horror of a breach of custom and a horror of novelty; there
are new perceptions, and habits that may be added to the whole body
of already existing perceptions and habits without deranging them
much or at all; and against these neither the savage nor the child
rebels. Though the child never wearies of listening to the same
tale and becomes irritated the moment one alters its least detail,
it will listen no less passionately to a new tale; and new toys and
new walks delight it. The same taste for novelty is observable among
savages, just in so far as it can be gratified without disturbing
their preconceived ideas. Primitive man is like the miser who will
not part with any of his acquired treasure, but asks nothing better
than to increase it. He is naturally curious, but he has no desire to
push his curiosity to the point of contradicting what he knows already
or believes he knows. And in a measure he is right, he is simply
obeying the powerful instinct of intellectual self-preservation; his
intelligence is not sufficiently supple constantly to knit and unknit
the associations of ideas which experience has established in him. A
black, out of an attachment for Livingstone, wished to accompany him to
Europe; a few days on the steamer drove him insane. It is, therefore,
in obedience to a certain branch of the instinct of self-preservation
that primitive peoples are so conservative in their customs and rites;
but they show themselves no less willing to appropriate the customs and
rites of other people whenever they can do so without abandoning their
own. The Romans ultimately came to accept the cult of all the peoples
in the world without, however, any abandonment of their national cult;
and fêtes, which are properly survivals of paganism, subsist even at
the present day; one acquires superstition, and customs, much more
easily than one loses them.

[Sidenote: Worship in public confirms cult.]

The power of example contributes also to lend an additional stability
to the public cult; an individual becomes hardened in a practice which
he finds universal in the society in which he lives. Thence comes the
importance of public worship; the practice of public worship makes
those who abstain from it conspicuous. Public worship is a _viva voce_
poll. Everyone sits in judgment upon you, all of your acquaintances
become your accusers, and all men who worship God are your enemies.
Not to think as everybody else does is comprehensible—but not to act
as everybody else does! To wish to break away from the servitude of
action which, once established, tends to perpetuate itself! In the
end the machine bends; one becomes brutalized. Even among people of
superior minds the force of habit is incredible. In the hours of doubt,
in his youth, M. Renan wrote to his adviser: “I recite the Psalms; I
could pass hours and hours, if I but followed my own inclination, in
the churches.... I experience lively returns of devotion.... At times
I am simultaneously both Catholic and rationalist! When one cuts loose
from such beliefs, beliefs which have become a second nature to one,
it seems as if one has severed one’s self from one’s whole past. One
has in some sense lived them, and one is attached to them as to one’s
own life; to abandon them is to resolve to die to one’s self. It seems
as if one’s entire strength had come from them and that one will be as
feeble as a child when one has lost them; they are to one what Samson’s
hair was to him. Happily they will grow again.”

[Sidenote: Priesthood a consequence of established rites.]

Priesthood is a consequence of the establishment of rites. The priest
is the man supposed to be most capable of influencing the divinity
by a minute and learned observation of the sacred rites. Rites, in
effect, the moment they become complicated by an accumulation of
diverse customs lie beyond the knowledge and power of the ordinary man;
it requires a special education to talk to the gods in the complex
language which alone they understand, in the formulæ which coerce their
wills. Whoever possesses this imagination is a species of magician or
sorcerer; and the priesthood arose out of sorcery, of which it was
simply the regular organization.[47]

      [47] “Sorcery, in the beginning purely individual and
      fantastic,” says M. Réville, “gradually develops into
      sacerdotalism and by that change, having become a permanent
      public institution, sacerdotal sorcery becomes systematic,
      develops a ritual which becomes traditional, imposes upon
      those who aspire to the honour of conducting the conditions
      of initiation, proof of efficiency, a novitiate, receives
      privileges, defends them if they are attacked, endeavours
      to augment them. This is the history of all sacerdotal
      institutions, which are certainly descended from a capricious,
      fantastic, disorderly, practice of sorcery in previous ages.”

[Sidenote: Tendency of priest to become a sacred person.]

The externals of worship remain to-day, in special in the Catholic and
Greek religions, a collection of traditional, inflexible formulæ, which
could not be trusted to produce their effect if a word or a gesture in
them were changed; certain ceremonies are really veritable traditional
forms of incantation. Rites resemble the invisible bonds in which Faust
held the Devil; but it is God himself in this case that is enchanted,
charmed, and overpowered. At bottom the belief which makes the Chinese
priest turn his praying machine, the belief which makes the devotee
tell her beads, the belief which makes the priest thumb his breviary
or say salaried masses for unknown peoples, which in the Midi makes
rich people pay beggars to mumble prayers before their doors, all rest
upon one and the same principle: they all rest on a faith in a power of
the rite, of the traditional formula in and of itself, no matter who
pronounces it. The efficacity of the interested prayers does not seem
to depend solely on the legitimacy of what one demands but on the form
employed in demanding them; and this form has been determined at bottom
by experience; the majority of devotees perform minute experiments
on the comparative virtue of individual prayers, masses, offerings,
pilgrimages, miraculous waters, etc.; they amass the result of their
observations and transmit them to their children. The invocation of
certain privileged Madonnas, such as the Madonna at Lourdes, is even
to-day a vestige of primitive sorcery. The priest inherits all these
naïve experiments as to the conditions appropriate to induce a miracle,
and he systematizes them. Priests being men picked for their capability
in the function which was regarded as the most useful of all others for
the preservation of society, necessarily came to constitute a really
superior caste and to be personally in some sense the object of the
cult which they administered. The perfect type of sacerdotal privilege
is hereditary priesthood as it existed in ancient Judaism, as it still
exists in India; every Brahman is born a priest and needs no special
education. The thirty-seven great priests of Vishnu in Gujerat are
honoured even to-day as the visible incarnation of Vishnu.[48]

      [48] It is an honour for which one pays dear to be permitted
      to consecrate to them one’s soul, one’s body, or the soul and
      body of one’s wife. One pays five rupees for the privilege of
      contemplating them, twenty for the privilege of touching them,
      thirteen for the privilege of being whipped by them, seventeen
      for the privilege of eating betel that they have chewed,
      nineteen for the privilege of drinking the water in which they
      have bathed, thirty-five for the privilege of washing their
      great toes, forty-two for the privilege of rubbing them with
      perfumed oil, and from one hundred to two hundred for tasting
      in their company the essence of delight.

[Sidenote: Antagonism between priest and prophet.]

Historically the priest has always found a rival, sometimes an
adversary, in the prophet, from Buddha to Isaiah and Jesus. The prophet
is not a priest bound to a sanctuary and slave to a tradition, but
an individual. “Prophecy,” says M. Albert Réville, “is to religion
what lyrism is to poetry.” The prophet and the lyric poet, in effect,
both speak in the name of their own inspiration. The prophet is often
a revolutionist, the priest is essentially a conservative; the one
represents innovation, the other custom.

[Sidenote: Dramatic element in cult.]

Exterior forms of worship and rites allying themselves with refined
and elevated sentiments have in all religions taken on a symbolic
and expressive character that they did not possess in the practice
of primitive sorcery; they have become æsthetic and by that fact
rendered durable. For whoever looks upon the most ancient religious
ceremonies with the eye of an artist, they consist in the reproduction,
nowadays too mechanically and unconsciously, of a work of art which
once was not without its significance and its beauty. They are
nowadays like a hand-organ playing admirable compositions by some
old master. Pfleiderer, in his “Philosophy of Religion,” has shown
that the dominant element in the externals of worship is dramatic,
the dramatization of some mythological or legendary scenes. It is
especially among the Aryans that this element predominates; the Aryans
are especially susceptible to the charm of great epics and dramas.
The Semites are lyric rather, and thence arises the importance of
prophecy among them; although the lyric element was also represented
among the Greek poets and Pythonesses. The dramatic element, on the
contrary, is visible in certain symbolic ceremonies of Christianity
and Judaism. The Mass was formerly a veritable drama of the Passion in
which the spectators also took part; the half pagan, half Christian
processions that still subsist to-day possess for the crowd something
of the attractiveness of the opera. The Communion is a dramatization
of the Lord’s Supper. Catholicism especially is distinguished by
the possession of dramatic and æsthetic (too often gross) elements,
which explain, not less than historical reasons, its victory over
Protestantism among the nations of southern Europe, which are more
artistic than those of the north, and more sensually artistic. The
æsthetic superiority of a religion is not to be disdained by the
thinker. It is the æsthetic element in every rite which, as we shall
see, is its most respectable characteristic. Moreover, religious
sentiment and æsthetic sentiment have always gone hand in hand;
and this union has been one of the most important factors in the
development of the æsthetic sentiment; it is thus that dramas and
epics dealt in the beginning with gods and demi-gods rather than with
men; the earliest romances were religious legends; the first odes were
sacred chants and songs. Music and religion have always been allied.
But in the end, the æsthetic element becomes feeble and is replaced,
as religion loses its vitality, by a species of mechanical routine. In
the East, even more than among us, this phenomenon is manifest, the
whole tendency there is toward monotonous and interminable ceremonials.
The Parsees, the representatives of the oldest existing religion,
pass six hours a day in prayer. And according to the _Indian Mirror_
the following is a description of the festival of the Lord, a part
of the cult of Brahmaism, the altogether modern and wholly deistical
religion founded by Ram Mohun Roy and Keshub: “At precisely six o’clock
a hymn was intoned in chorus in the upper gallery of the _mandir_ to
announce the day’s solemnity. Others followed to the accompaniment of
the harmonium, and thus, after a succession of hymns, the sacred office
was reached, which, counting in the sermon, lasted from seven to ten
o’clock. A part of the congregation then retired to take some rest,
but those who remained intoned the _vedi_ to demand of the minister
explanations in regard to several points of his sermon. At noon, the
assembly having convened, four _pundits_ came out successively and
recited Sanskrit texts. At one o’clock the minister gave a conference.”
Then came the exposition of a number of philosophical and religious
theses, delivered by their respective authors. Hymns, meditations, and
prayers in common lasted till nearly seven o’clock, when the initiation
of seven new Brahmaists was celebrated. This ceremony, including a
sermon, lasted not less than two hours, and the assembly, which, if one
may believe the reporter, did not show any sign of fatigue after these
fifteen hours of continuous devotion, separated with a hymn to the
effect that it had not yet had enough: “The heart wishes not to return
home.”


_IV. Subjective worship—Adoration and love._

[Sidenote: Subjective worship a refinement on public and external
worship.]

Subjective worship has grown out of, and been a refinement upon, the
external cult, which in the beginning was in the eyes of mankind much
the more important of the two. To the incantation, to the material
offering, to the sacrifices of the victims succeeded subjective prayer
and the subjective offering of love, and the subjective sacrifice
of egoistic passion. To external homage, to evidences of fear and
respect by which one was supposed to recognize the superior power of
the gods, as one bows down in recognition of the superior power of
kings, succeeded a mental adoration, in which a god is recognized as
all-powerful but also as all-beneficent. The mental bowing down of the
entire soul before God is the last refinement of ritual; and ritual
itself in the higher religions comes to be the simple sign and symbol
of this adoration.[49] Thus the primitive sociomorphic character of
the cult becomes progressively more subtle: the semi-material society,
consisting of gods and men, becomes a wholly moral society, composed
of men and the principle of goodness, which still continues to be
represented as a person, as a master, as a father, as a king.

      [49] Among the Hindus, _Tapas_, that is to say fire, the ardour
      of devotion, and of voluntary renouncement, signified in the
      beginning simply the incantation intended to constrain the
      Devas to obedience, and to deprive them of a part of their
      power. Out of a crude conception has grown an extremely refined
      one. See _Manuel de l’Histoire des religions_, par C. P. Tiele,
      p. 19 (translated by Maurice Vernes).

[Sidenote: The love of God an outlet for the surplus of human love.]

The highest form of subjective worship is love of God, in which all the
duties of religious morality may be regarded as summed up. Adoration
contains in it a vitiating element of respect for power; love is a more
intimate union. The love of God is a partial manifestation of the need
to love which exists in every human being. This need is so great that
it cannot always find satisfaction in real life; it tends therefore to
stretch beyond, and not finding upon earth an object which completely
suffices for it, it seeks one in heaven. The love of God appears thus
to be an expression of the superabundance of the love of man. Our heart
sometimes feels too big for the world and seeks to overpass its limits.
Let us not forget, for the rest, that the world has been strangely
contracted by religious ignorance, intolerance, and prejudice; the
sphere left open to the need of loving was formerly a very narrow one:
it is not astonishing that the latter should have stretched out its
arms toward a celestial and supernatural being.

[Sidenote: Nourished by isolation, feebleness, and misfortune.]

The same thing happens when human affections are shipwrecked in us,
lose their object, no longer find anything to which they can attach
themselves. In France, as in England and America, the habitual devotion
of spinsters has long since been observed, though it often coincides
with a certain pining away of the heart. In our times a virtuous
unmarried woman is, so to speak, predestined to devotion; divine love
is for her (on an average, of course) a necessary compensation. Remark
also that old men are generally more inclined to devotion than young.
There are, no doubt, a number of reasons for it: the approach of death,
the enfeeblement of the body and of the intelligence, the increasing
need for a support, etc.; but there exists also a more profound reason.
The old man, always more isolated than the young, and deprived of the
excitations of the sexual instinct, possesses a smaller outlet for his
instinct for affection and for love. Thus there accumulates in him an
amount of treasure which he is free to apply as to him seems best;
well, the service of God is that which demands least effort, which
is most appropriate to the natural indolence of the old, to their
preoccupation with themselves; they become therefore devotees, partly
out of egoism, partly out of a need for some disinterested occupation.
A grain of incense burns in every heart, and when the perfume of it
can no longer be given to the earth we let it mount to heaven. Note
also that the loss of beloved beings, misfortunes of every sort, and
irreparable infirmities all provoke an expansion of the heart toward
God. In the Middle Ages unhappiness was frequently one of the most
important factors of piety; when a great and unmerited misfortune
happened to a man, the chances were that he would enter the Church or
else become an atheist; it depended often on his strength of mind, his
habits, and his education. When one strikes an animal it is equally
possible that it may bite one or crouch at one’s feet. Every time the
heart is violently bruised there comes an inevitable reaction; we
must reply from within to the blows from without, and this reply is
sometimes revolt and sometimes adoration. The feeble, the disinherited,
the suffering, all those to whom misfortune has not left strength
enough for rebellion, have but one resource: the sweet and consoling
humility of divine love. Whoever does not love, or is not loved
completely and sufficiently, on earth will always turn toward heaven:
the proposition is as regular as the parallelogram of forces.

[Sidenote: Power of mysticism a perversion of love.]

Just as we have seen in an error of the senses one of the objective
principles of religious physics, so perhaps may we find in a perversion
of love one of the most essential subjective principles of mysticism.
It is by love that this unction, this penetrating sweetness which makes
the mystic tremble to the marrow of his bones, is to be explained.
Profound love, even the most terrestrial, tends to envelop the object
with respect and veneration; an effect which is due to a number of
causes, and among others to the psychological law according to which
desire magnifies the desired object. To love is always a little to
adore. If it is a human being that is the object of the love, the
divinization incidental to it will be confined within certain limits,
but if the love stretch up from the earth into heaven, it may command
the full powers of the imagination; the soul, seeking at a distance
for some vague object to which to attach itself, will go out in mystic
outbursts of emotion and ecstasy. The soul will personify its ideal,
will supply it with figure and speech: its ideal will be Jesus with
Mary Magdalene at his feet, or the Virgin weeping at the foot of the
cross, or Moses in the midst of the clouds, or the child Buddha before
whom the statues of the gods rose and made obeisance. Thus mystical
religions are formed of great images and passionate sentiments and the
heart of man, the very life blood of which they turn to their profit.
What appears often to be the most intellectual of tastes is only love
in disguise. The most earthly love is often a religion in its earliest
stages. Henri Beyle, visiting the salt-mines at Salzburg, found in a
shaft a branch covered with incomparable diamonds scintillating in
the light. It was a dead timber on which the salt had crystallized;
in the timber thus transformed Beyle saw the symbol of what happens
in every loving heart; every object one finds there has taken on an
extraordinary brilliancy, a marvellous beauty. He calls this phenomenon
crystallization; we should prefer to call it divinization. Love always
divinizes its object; partially and provisionally when this object
is placed upon earth and close to one’s eyes, but definitively when
this object is lost in the distance of heaven. Our gods are like those
mysterious beings who spring, in legend, from a drop of generous blood
or a loving tear let fall upon the earth; it is with our own substance
that we nourish them; their beauty, their goodness come out of our
love, and if we love them as we do, the reason is that we must love
something; must lift up to the four corners of the horizon, even if
they be deaf, a supreme appeal. This outcome of love and religious
sentiment is most visible in exalted minds, both in the Middle Ages
and in our own days. The true element of originality in Christian
literature is that one there finds, for the first time, a sincere
and warm accent of love, scarcely divined, here and there, by the
great spirits of antiquity, by Sappho and Lucretius. In a page of St.
Augustine one finds the expression of a franker and more profound
ardour than in all the elegant affectations of Horace or the languors
of Tibullus. Nothing in pagan antiquity is comparable to the chapter
in the “Imitation” on love. The passion, confined and held in check,
mounts to heights till then unknown, like a dammed river; but it is
no less genuinely itself. What shall we say of the visionary mystics
of the people like St. Theresa, and Chantal, and Guyon? Among them
piety, in its most exaggerated form, verges upon the madness of love.
St. Theresa might have been a courtesan of genius equally as well as
a saint. Physiologists and physicians have often observed, in our
days, analogous pathological cases, in which the religious effusion is
simply, so to speak, a case of mistake in identity.[50]

      [50] Ribot, _de l’Hérédité_, 364; Moreau de Tours, _Psych.
      morbide_, 259.

[Sidenote: Worship of Christ to a considerable extent a perversion of
love.]

In Christianity the conception of Jesus, the beautiful, gentle young
man, the Holy Spirit incarnate in the purest and most ideal form,
favours more directly than any corresponding conception in any rival
religion this particular perversion of love. Christianity is the most
anthropomorphic belief in existence, for it is the one of all others
which, after having conceived the most elevated idea of God, abases
it, without degrading it, to the most human of human conditions. By
a much more refined, much more profound paganism than the paganism
of antiquity, the Christian religion has succeeded in making God the
object of an ardent love, without ceasing to make Him an object of
respect. By a myth much more seductive and poetic even than that of
Psyche, we see God, the true God, descended upon earth in the form of
a blond and smiling young man; we hear him speak low in the ear of
Mary Magdalene at the fall of evening; and then this vision suddenly
disappears and we see in the gathering shadow two mutilated arms
extended toward us, and a heart which bleeds for humanity. In this
legend all the powers of the imagination are called in play, all the
fibres of the heart are moved; it is an accomplished work of art. What
is there astonishing in the fact that Christ has been and is still the
great seducer of souls? In the ears of a young girl his name appeals
at once to all her instincts, even to the maternal instinct, for Jesus
is often represented as a child with the dimpled, rosy cheeks which
the Greeks ascribed to Eros. The heart of the woman is thus besieged
on all sides at once: her wavering and timid imagination wanders from
the cherub to the youth, and from the youth to the pale figure, with
the bowed head, upon the cross. It is possible that from the birth of
Christianity down to the present day there has not been one single
woman of an exalted piety whose heart has not first beat for her God,
for Jesus, for the most lovable and loving type that the human mind has
ever conceived.

[Sidenote: Moral element in the law of God.]

Side by side with its somewhat sentimental element the love of God
contains a moral element, which is progressively detaching itself
with the march of ideas. God being the very principle of goodness,
the personification of the moral ideal, the love of God ultimately
becomes a moral love properly so called, the love of virtue, of
sanctity at its height. The subjective act of charity thus becomes
the religious act _par excellence_, in which morality and subjective
worship are identified; good works and the externals of worship are
simply a translation into the outer world of the moral consciousness.
At the same time, in the highest speculations of philosophic theology,
charity has been conceived as embracing simultaneously all beings in
the divine love, and by consequence as beginning to realize the sort of
perfect society in which “all exist in all and all in every part.” The
social and moral character of religion thus attains its highest degree
of perfection and God appears as a sort of mystic realization of the
universal society, _sub specie æterni_.




Part Second.

THE DISSOLUTION OF RELIGIONS IN EXISTING SOCIETIES.




CHAPTER I.

DOGMATIC FAITH.

    I. Narrow dogmatic faith—The credulity of primitive man:
      First, spontaneous faith in the senses and imagination;
      Second, faith in the testimony of superior men; Third,
      faith in the divine word, in revelation, and in the sacred
      texts—The literalness of dogmatic faith—Inevitable
      intolerance of narrow dogmatic faith—Belief in dogma,
      revelation, salvation, and damnation all result in
      intolerance—Modern tolerance.

    II. Broad dogmatic faith—Orthodox Protestantism—Dogmas of
      orthodox Protestantism—Rational consequences of these
      dogmas—Logical failure of orthodox Protestantism.

    III. The dissolution of dogmatic faith in modern
      society—Reasons that render this dissolution
      inevitable—Comparative influence of the various sciences:
      influence of public instruction, of means of communication,
      of industry even and of commerce, etc.—The disappearance
      of belief in oracles and prophecies—Gradual disappearance
      of the belief in miracles, in devils, etc.


_I. Narrow dogmatic faith._

If faith has not varied especially in and of itself as a mode of
feeling, the objects with which it is concerned have differed from
generation to generation. Hence the various forms of doctrine which we
shall pass in review as showing the evolution and dissolution of faith.

       *       *       *       *       *

[Sidenote: Primitive faith more properly a credulity.]

In primitive religions, faith was altogether experimental and physical;
it was not opposed to scientific belief, which, to say the truth, did
not exist. It was a credulity rather than a faith; and religious faith,
in our day, is still a credulity, an obligatory credulity, primarily in
the authority of superior men, secondarily in that of God himself.

[Sidenote: Subordination of the marvellous in primitive faith.]

The origin of religious faith has been attributed solely to an appetite
for the marvellous and the extraordinary; but we have already shown
that religions do everything in their power to regulate the imagination
even in the very act of stimulating it, and to bring the unknown to the
touchstone of the known. The marvellous must aid in making something at
least apparently comprehensible; with marvel for marvel’s sake religion
holds no commerce. So much so, that primitive people have sought in
religion, less to multiply the marvellous, in the modern sense of
the word, than partially to suppress it; they have been in search of
an explanation of some sort. An explanation by superior powers, by
spirits, by occult virtues, seemed clearer to them than an explanation
by scientific law.

[Sidenote: Rationale of primitive man’s faith in the marvellous.]

For the rest, any explanation once given, primitive man never dreamed
of disputing it, he was essentially a “man of faith.” The delicate
shades of thought we designate as verisimilitude, probability,
possibility, were as little known to primitive man as to children.
The voluntary suspension of judgment that we call doubt indicates
an extremely advanced state of mind. With children and savages, to
conceive and to believe are one; they know nothing about reserving
their approbation, or mistrusting their own intelligence or that of
others. A certain humility, which young minds do not possess, is
necessary before one can say: That may be true but also it may not,
or in other words, I don’t know. And also one must have patience to
verify with care what one believes, and patience is courage of the most
difficult kind. Finally, man always feels the need to declare that what
is attractive, what satisfies his mind, is real: when one tells an
interesting story to a child, he says, “It is true, is it not?” If, on
the contrary, it is a sad story he will cry out: “That is not true!” A
man of the people to whom one should demonstrate, with the evidence in
one’s hand, that a thing he thought true was false, would reply with a
shake of the head, “If it is not true, it ought to be.” All primitive
people were like that. In a memorandum on The Development of Language
and Intelligence among Children, E. Egger characterized this state of
mind as “rebellion against the notion of doubt and even that of simple
probability.” Felix, a child of five and one-half years, took a lively
interest in sacred history, but he could not understand why all the
lacunæ had not been filled in, or why doubtful points should be marked
as such. “The actual state of his mind,” adds E. Egger, “corresponds in
a manner to that of the Greek mind during the period when the effort
was made painfully to set in order the chaos of ancient legend.” Two
years later the same child received a present of a collection of
stories. He found in the preface that the author gave the stories out
as true; he asked nothing further, and was promptly astonished to find
anybody else in doubt. “His trustfulness displayed no disposition to go
behind the letter of his text, in especial as the stories sounded to
him sufficiently probable.” In my own experience with children, I have
noticed that nothing irritates them like uncertainty; a thing must be
true or false, and generally they prefer that it should be true. For
the rest, a child does not know the limits of his own power, and still
less that of others; and too, he has no clear sense of the marvellous
and the improbable. A child saw a horse galloping by one day, and said
to me seriously, “I could run as fast as that.” Thus again the little
peasant girl, of whom we spoke above, asked her mistress why she might
not have made the flowers in the garden. A sense of the possible is
lacking in primitive intelligences: because you seem to a child or
a savage to be able to do more things than he, he readily comes to
believe that you can do everything; so that what we call miracles seem
to primitive people simply the visible and necessary sign of superior
power; so much so, indeed, that to them a man of mark ought to be
able to perform miracles; they expect them from him as their due, and
become indignant if they are not forthcoming, as a child is indignant
when one does not help him carry a burden that is too heavy for his
strength. The Hebrews precisely expected Moses to perform miracles and,
so to speak, obliged him to do them. The people believe in their great
men, and the belief in miracles is but a corollary from their general
confidence.

[Sidenote: Absoluteness of primitive faith.]

Moreover, faith reaches a height among primitive nations that it never
does among cultivated intelligences: they believe immeasurably things
that it is out of all measure to believe at all; the happy _inter
utrumque_ is as lacking in the belief itself as in the thing believed.
Mr. Spencer, in his “Sociology,” cites the example of a young woman who
attributed to a certain amulet the magical virtue of preserving her
against injuries. She thought herself as invulnerable as Achilles. The
chief of the tribe, astonished that so precious an amulet should exist,
and wishing no doubt to acquire it, asked to have its virtues verified
before his eyes. The woman was brought to him, a warrior prepared his
hatchet, and in perfect confidence she put out her arm. The blow fell
and the woman uttered a cry of astonishment not less than of pain as
her hand fell to the ground. Who in our day has such absolute faith?
Very few among us would risk his life, or even his hand, to maintain
such and such a dogma. This woman belonged to the race of martyrs; her
intense credulity bordered on heroism.

[Sidenote: Confusion of sincerity with verity by primitive man.]

Man’s natural confidence in his fellow-men, especially when there is no
very evident reason why the latter should mislead him, is the origin
of the credence we give to the testimony and authority of those who
claim to be inspired; which all seemed very human and natural in the
beginning, and only later came to be regarded as supernatural. This
spontaneous disposition to believe is an elementary instinct which
plays a large rôle in religious sociomorphism. Suspicious as primitive
man is when his material interests are at stake, in all other matters
he is apt to be credulous to a fault. Moreover, he scarcely knows what
one means by _error_, and does not distinguish it from deception; he
puts trust in his own judgment and in that of other people. When you
tell him something extraordinary, his first thought is that you are
making sport of him; he is less inclined to believe that you have
deceived yourself, that you have reasoned falsely; sincerity and verity
are confused in his mind. It has taken all the experience of modern
life to make clear to us the difference between these two things; to
induce us to verify the affirmations even of those whose characters we
esteem most highly; to contradict, without offending, those who are
dearest to us. Primitive man never distinguished his belief in the
“law” from his faith in the “prophets.” Those whom he esteemed and
admired seemed to him of necessity to know the facts. Add that man is
always inclined to make much of anything that is a material fact, of
anything that appeals to his eyes and to his ears. The sacred word, and
the sacred writings that embody it, are to him not merely indications,
but _proofs_ of what they affirm. I overheard it given in a church one
day as an incontestable proof that Moses conversed with the Lord that
Mt. Sinai is still in existence; that is the sort of argument that is
successful with the people. Livingstone says that the negroes listened
and believed from the moment he showed them the Bible and told them
that the celestial Father had written His will on the pages of that
book; they touched the pages and believed at once.

[Sidenote: Inference from reality of the sign to reality of the thing
signified the essence of faith in revelation.]

In effect, blind confidence in a word, in a sign—precipitate induction
from which one infers from the reality of the sign to the reality of
the thing signified: a second induction to the effect that any doctrine
relatively elevated, from the social and moral point of view, and put
forth by men one respects, is probably true, even if it be in many
points irrational—these are the principal elements of the primitive
faith in revelation. And this faith, in all its crudity, exists at the
present day. It wins its way through the eyes and ears; therein lies
its power. It is much less mystical than we are inclined to fancy; it
is incarnate in its monuments, its temples, its books; it walks about
and breathes in the person of its priests, its saints, its gods; we
cannot look about us without realizing its existence in one form or
another. It has been of great service to human thought, in spite of its
pitfalls, thus to have been able to express itself, to fashion objects
in its own image, to penetrate marble and stone, to provide that it
shall itself be borne back in upon us from without. How can one doubt
what is visible and tangible?

[Sidenote: Results in “credo quia ineptum.”]

Faith in testimony and authority leads to faith in sacred texts and in
the very letter of these texts. This is what one means by _literal_
faith. It exists still in our day, among many civilized people. It
constitutes the basis of the Catholicism of the masses. “In order
to silence restless spirits,” said the council of Trent, “it is
decreed that no one may, in the interpretation of the Scriptures, ...
deviate from the construction sanctioned by the Church, to seek for a
supposedly more exact rendering.” Faith lies thus in a renunciation
of thought, an abdication of liberty; imposes upon itself a rule not
of logic but of morals, and subjects itself to dogmas as to immutable
principles. It restricts intelligence beforehand to precise limits,
and imposes a general direction on it, with instructions not to swerve
from it. It is at this point that faith comes really to be opposed
to scientific belief for which in the beginning it was a substitute.
According to the council of the Vatican, those who have faith do not
believe “because of the intrinsic truth of the things revealed,” but
“because of the divine _authority_ that revealed them.” If you reason
with a person of that stamp, he will listen, understand, and follow
you—but only to a certain point; there he stops, and nothing in the
world can make him go beyond. Or rather from that point he will declare
himself inexpugnable, and will assure you that you have absolutely
no hold on him; and in effect, no scientific or philosophical reason
could turn him from his belief, since he places the object of his
faith in a sphere superior to reason, and makes his faith an affair of
“conscience.” Nothing can force a man to think rightly when he does not
propose rectitude of thought to himself as a supreme aim, and nothing
can oblige him to follow the dictates of reason to the bitter end,
if he believes that the instant he calls certain dogmas and certain
authorities in question he is committing a sin. Thus, faith gives a
certain sacred and inviolable character to what it sanctions,—converts
it into a sacred ark that one may not touch without sacrilege or
danger, neither may one look at it too closely nor touch it with one’s
fingers, even to lend it support now and then when it seems ready
to fall. Free-thought and science never consider a thing as true
except provisionally, and so long as it is not seriously doubted by
someone. Dogmatic faith, on the contrary, affirms as true not only the
things that are uncontested, but those which, according to it, are
conclusively presumed, and therefore above discussion. It follows that,
if reasons for belief diminish, faith must be none the less strong. It
was this that Pascal endeavoured to demonstrate. In effect, the less
a belief seems rational to our finite minds, the more merit there is
in lending credence to “divine authority.” It would be too simple to
believe no more than what one sees or what sounds probable to one; to
affirm the improbable, to believe in what seems incredible, is much
more meritorious. Our courage rises in proportion as our intelligence
becomes humble; the more absurd one is the greater one is—_credo quia
ineptum_; the more difficult the task, the greater the merit. The
strength of our faith is estimated, in the mysticism of Pascal, by
the weakness of its “reasons.” The ideal, on this theory, would be to
possess no more than the metaphysical minimum of reason for belief,
the weakest conceivable of motives, a mere nothing; that is to say,
one should be attached to the supreme object of one’s faith by the
slenderest of bonds. The Albigensian priests, the _parfaits_, wear a
simple white cord around their waists as an emblem of their vow; all
mankind wears this cord, and it is in reality more solid and often
heavier than any chain.

[Sidenote: Complete intellectual rest incident to faith.]

Scepticism tends toward a complete intellectual indifference with
regard to all things; dogmatic faith produces a partial indifference,
an indifference limited to certain points, determined once for all;
it is no longer anxious on these heads, but rests and delights in
established dogma. The sceptic and the man of faith abandon themselves
thus to a more or less extensive abstinence from thought. Religious
faith is a determination to suspend the flight of the imagination,
to limit the sphere of thought. We all know the Oriental legend that
the world is held up by an elephant, which stands on a tortoise,
which floats on a sea of milk. The believer must always refrain from
asking what supports the sea of milk? He must never notice a point of
which there is no explanation; he must constantly repeat to himself
the abortive incomplete idea that has been given him without daring
to recognize that it is incomplete. In a street through which I pass
every day, a blackbird whistles the same melodic phrase; the phrase
is incomplete, ends abruptly, and for years I have heard him lift his
voice, deliver himself of his truncated song, and stop with a satisfied
air, with no need to complete his musical fragment, which I never hear
without a feeling of impatience. It is thus with the true believer;
accustomed as he is in the most important questions to dwell within
the limits of the customary, without any curiosity about the beyond,
he sings his monotonous little note without dreaming that it lacks
anything—that his phrase is as clipped as his wings are, and that the
narrow world of his belief is not the universe.

[Sidenote: Wilful blindness of faith.]

The people who still hold to this kind of faith represent the antique
world endeavouring to perpetuate itself without a compromise in the
bosom of the new world, the world of modern society. The barbarian
does not wish to yield to the progress of ideas and of manners; if
such people formed the majority of the nation they would constitute
the greatest danger to human reason, to science, and to truth. Literal
faith, in effect, makes naked truth a subject of pudicity; one does
not dare to look it in the face or lift the sacred veil that hides its
beauty; you find yourself in the midst of a conspiracy, mysterious
beings surround you, putting their hands before your eyes and a finger
on your lips. Dogma holds you, possesses you, masters you in spite of
yourself; it is fixed in your heart and petrified in your intelligence:
it is not without reason that faith has been compared to an anchor
that has caught on the bottom and checked the vessel in its course,
while the open and free ocean stretches beyond as far as the eye can
reach. And who shall break the anchor from his heart? When you shake
it loose in one place, faith settles to its hold somewhere else; you
have a thousand weak points at which it attacks you. You can completely
abandon a philosophical doctrine; but you cannot break away absolutely
from a collection of beliefs in which blind and literal faith has
borne sway; there is always something left; you will carry the scars
and marks from it as slaves who are freed still carry on their flesh
the signs of their servitude. You are branded in the heart, you shall
feel the effects of it always; you shall have moments of dread and
shuddering, of mystic enthusiasm, of distrust of reason, of need to
represent things as being other than they really are, to see what is
not, and not to see what is. The fiction that was early forced upon
your soul shall often seem to you sweeter than the sound and rugged
truth, you need to know; you shall hate yourself for the sin of
knowledge.

       *       *       *       *       *

[Sidenote: Intolerance incident to faith.]

There is a story of a Brahman who was talking with a European of his
religion, and among other dogmas mentioned the scrupulous respect due
to animals. “The law,” said he “not only forbids one’s doing evil,
voluntarily, to the smallest creature even for the purpose of supplying
one’s self with food, it even bids one walk with extraordinary
circumspection with one’s eyes down, that one may avoid stepping on the
humblest ant.” Without trying to refute this naïve faith the European
handed the speaker a microscope. The Brahman looked through the
instrument and saw on everything about him, on the fruits that he was
about to eat, in the beverage that he was about to drink, everywhere
that he might put his hand or foot, the movement of a multitude of
little animals of whose existence he had never dreamed: creatures that
he had totally left out of account. He was stupefied and handed the
microscope back to the European. “I give it to you,” the latter said.
The Brahman with a movement of joy took it and threw it on the ground,
and broke it, and departed satisfied; as if by that stroke he had
destroyed the truth and saved his faith. Happily, in our day, one may
without great loss destroy an optical or physical instrument, it can
be replaced; but what is to become of an intelligence in the hands of
the fanatical believer? Would he not crush it, in case of need, as the
instrument of glass was crushed, and sacrifice it the more gaily that
a more limpid gleam of truth might well filter through it? In India
we have an example of the philosophical doctrine, very inoffensive in
appearance and upheld, with various modifications, by great thinkers,
of the transmigration of souls, becoming a religious dogma, producing
as a direct result intolerance, contempt of science, and all the
usual effects of blind dogmatism. Dogmatic and absolute faith in its
every form tends to check thought; thence springs its intolerance—a
consequence that may well be insisted on.

[Sidenote: And even logically resulting from it.]

Intolerance is only an outward realization of the tyranny exercised
within by dogmatic faith. Belief in a _revelation_, which all religion
rests upon, is the very opposite of progressive _discovery_; the
instant one affirms that the first exists, the latter becomes useless,
dangerous, and ends in being condemned. Intolerance, first theoretic,
then practical, is the legitimate offspring of absolute faith of every
kind. In all revealed religion doctrine first appears in the form of
_dogma_, then of dogmatic and categorical commandment. There have
always been things that must be believed, and practices that must be
observed, under pain of perdition. The sphere of dogmas and sacred
rites may be widened or narrowed, the discipline may be loose or so
strict that it extends to the very items of one’s diet; but there is
always at least a minimum of dogma that is absolute and of practice
that is rigidly obligatory, without which no truly religious church
could exist. And this is not all. Theological sanction is by its
very nature always in extremes; it presents one with no mean between
absolute good and absolute evil, both conceived as eternal. And this
being granted, how should believers, who are dominated by an exclusive
preoccupation with an ardent and profound faith, hesitate to employ
constraint in case of need when the matter at stake is so great—is of
absolute and eternal good or of absolute and eternal evil? For them the
only value of free-will lies in its use—in its use toward its proper
object, which is the fulfilment of the divine will. In the presence of
an eternity of penalties to be avoided, everything seems permissible;
any means seems good provided it be successful. Possessed of that
implicit certitude which is inseparable from an absolute and explicit
faith, what really enthusiastic soul would hold back before the
employment of force? Accordingly, as a matter of fact, every religion
which is at once new and powerful is intolerant. The appearance of
tolerance marks a decline of faith; a religion which allows for the
existence of another is a religion in decay. One cannot believe
anything “with all one’s heart” without a sentiment of pity and even of
horror for those who believe differently. If I were absolutely certain
of possessing the supreme and ultimate verity, should I hesitate to
turn the world upside-down to make it prevail? One puts blinkers on a
horse to keep him from seeing to the right or left; he looks straight
ahead and runs forward under the whip with the hardiness and vigour of
ignorance; it is in the same fashion that the partisans of an absolute
dogma move through life. “Every positive religion, every immutable
form,” says Benjamin Constant, “leads directly to intolerance,
providing one reasons logically.”

[Sidenote: Use of force as justifiable in a priest as in a physician.]

The reply to Benjamin Constant is that it is one thing to believe that
one knows the way to salvation and another thing to force others to
walk in that way. The priest looks upon himself as the physician of the
soul; to wish to minister by violence to an ailing soul, “is quite as
if,” it has been said, “the physician of the body for greater certainty
should take the precaution of having his patient condemned to death
or to hard labor in case of disobedience to his prescriptions.”[51]
Assuredly it would involve a contradiction in terms for the physician
of the body to wish to bring it to death; but it in nowise involves a
contradiction for the physician of the soul to wish to put constraint
upon the body. The objection falls of its own weight. For the rest,
let us not deceive ourselves; if the physicians of the body leave
their patients free, it is sometimes that they cannot help so doing,
simply; in certain grave cases they insist on having the patient under
their control in a hospital, which is, after all, a sort of prison.
If a European physician had to prescribe for one of those American
Indians, whose habit it is in an attack of smallpox, when the fever
reaches forty degrees, to plunge into the water to refresh themselves,
the first thing he would do would be to strap his patient to his cot.
And every physician would like really to be able to proceed after the
same fashion, even in Europe, even at the present day, with people
like Gambetta, Mirabeau, and many others less illustrious, who kill
themselves by negligence.

      [51] M. Franck, _Des rapports de la religion et de l’État_.

[Sidenote: Intolerance a perverted charity.]

Besides, one must not reason as if the believer could isolate himself
and act only for himself. For example, to a Catholic what is the
meaning of absolute liberty of choice in education? It means the right
of parents to damn their children. Is this right thus permissible in
their eyes? There are books calculated to destroy faith; books by
Voltaire, or Strauss, or Renan; books which, if circulated, result
in our losing our souls, “a thing far more grave than the death of
the body,” as Théodore de Bèze said, after St. Augustine. Can a
nation truly penetrated by a Christian charity allow such books to
be circulated on the pretext of liberty of conscience? No; one must
before all else deliver the very will from the bonds of heresy and
error; it is on this condition only that it can be free. Moreover, one
must prevent the corrupt conscience from corrupting others. We see
plainly that charitable intolerance is justified from an exclusively
theological point of view. It rests on logical reasonings of which the
point of departure alone is vicious.[52]

      [52] It is easy to understand the high ecclesiastical
      authorities in the Catholic Church, who maintain as an article
      of faith the right to repress error. Recollect the well-known
      pages in which St. Augustine speaks of what good effects he
      had observed to result from the employment of constraint in
      religious matters. “A great many of those who have been brought
      back into the Church by force confess themselves to be greatly
      rejoiced at having been delivered from their former errors,
      who, however, by I know not what force of custom, would never
      have thought of changing for the better if the fear of the
      law had not put them in mind of the truth. Good precepts and
      wholesome fear must go together so that not only the light of
      truth may drive away the gloom of error, but that charity may
      break the bonds of bad custom, so that we may rejoice over the
      salvation of the many.... It is written: ‘Bid them to enter
      in.’ ... God Himself did not spare his son, but delivered
      Him for our sake to the executioners.” Schiller makes the
      great inquisitor in _Don Carlos_ say the same thing. See St.
      Augustine, _Epist._ cxiii. 17, 5—St. Paul, _Ephes._, vi. 5,
      6, 9. Lastly, recollect also the reasoned decision of the
      doctors and councils. “Human government,” said St. Thomas,
      “is derived from _divine government_ and should _imitate_
      it. Now although God is all-powerful and infinitely good, He
      nevertheless permits in the universe that He has made the
      existence of evils which He could prevent; He permits them for
      fear that in suppressing them more than equivalent goods might
      be suppressed incidentally along with them and greater evils
      provoked in their stead. The same is true in human government;
      _rulers naturally tolerate certain evils for fear of putting
      an obstacle in the way of certain goods, or of causing greater
      evils_, as St. Augustine said in the treatise on _Order_. It
      is thus that _infidels_, though they sin in their rites, may
      be _tolerated, either because of some good coming from them,
      or to avoid some evil_. The Jews observe their rites, in which
      formerly the truth of the faith that we hold was prefigured;
      the result is advantageous in this, that we have the testimony
      of our enemies in favour of our faith, and that the object
      of our faith is, so to speak, shown in a reflected image. As
      for the worship of the other unbelievers, which is opposed in
      every way to truth and is entirely useless, _it would merit
      no tolerance_ if it were not to avoid some evil, such as the
      scandal or _the trouble which might result from the suppression
      of this worship_; or again as an impediment to the salvation
      of those who, under cover of this species of tolerance, come
      little by little into the faith. It is for that reason that
      the Church has occasionally tolerated even the worship of
      heretics, and heathens, when the number of infidels was great.”
      (_Summa theol._, 2 a; q. x, a. II.) One readily perceives the
      nature of _tolerance_ in that sense. It does not in the least
      recognize the right of those who are the object of it: if it
      does not maltreat them, it is simply to _avoid a greater evil_,
      or rather because its power is too small, and the number of
      infidels is too large.

      A professor of theology at the Sorbonne has recently contested
      the charge of Catholic intolerance. (M. Alfred Fouillée had
      just spoken of it in his _Social Science_.) He did so for
      reasons that may be cited as further proof. “Neither to-day,
      nor _ever, in any epoch of its history_, has the Catholic
      Church intended to _impose acceptance of the truth by
      violence_. All great theologians have taught that the act of
      faith is a voluntary act, which presupposes an illumination
      of the mind; _but they have also taught that constraint may
      favour this illumination, and in especial may preserve others
      from_ a bad example, from a contagious darkness. The Christian
      Church has had no need of the sword to evangelize the nations;
      if it has shed blood in its triumph, it has been _its own_.”
      Has it, then, not shed the blood of others? If one counts all
      the murders committed by intolerance in the name of absolute
      dogma, in every country in the world; if one could measure
      all the bloodshed; if one could gather together all the dead
      bodies—would the pile not mount higher than the spires of
      the cathedrals and the domes of the temples, where man still
      goes, with unalterable fervour, to invoke and bless the “God
      of Love”? Faith in a God who talks and acts, who has a history
      of His own, His Bible, His prophet and His priest, will always
      end by being intolerant. By adoring a jealous and vengeful God,
      one becomes in the end His accomplice. One tacitly approves all
      the crimes committed in His name and often (if one believes the
      Holy Scriptures) commanded by Him. One endeavours to forget
      these things when they are too stained with blood and filth.
      The monuments of such bloody scenes have been razed, and the
      places to which the strongest memories are attached have been
      purified and transformed: the partisans of certain dogmas need
      to wash their hearts also in lustral water.

[Sidenote: And a half-caste public spirit.]

In order to understand how legitimate religious intolerance appears
from its own point of view, we must remember with what perfect calm
we forbid and punish acts that are directly contrary to the actual
conditions of our social life (for example, the public outrage of
good morals, etc.). Now we know that all religion superposes another
society upon the actual one; it conceives men’s life as enveloped and
bounded by the life of the gods; it must therefore seek to maintain
the conditions of this supernatural society with not less energy than
we employ to maintain our human society, and the conditions of this
superior society lead to the multiplication of all the prohibitive
rules that we have previously imposed on our existence with our
fellows; imaginary walls cannot avoid being added to the walls and
ditches already impeding circulation on the earth’s surface; if we
live with the gods, we must expect to be jostled by them, and curbed
in their name. This state of things cannot disappear entirely until we
cease to believe we are co-members of a society with the gods, until we
see them transmuted into simple ideals. Ideals never necessitate the
exclusiveness and intolerance that realities do.

[Sidenote: Tolerance highly intellectual.]

On the whole, one must distinguish two kinds of virtue on which
religion has influence. The first are the virtues that may be called
positive and active, of the heart and of instinct, like charity and
generosity; at all times and in all countries they have existed among
men; religion exalts them, and to Christianity the honour is due of
having developed them to their highest degree. The second category
includes the purely intellectual virtues, whose operation consists
rather in checking and confining than in extending the sphere of
one’s activity—the virtues of self-possession, of abstinence, and of
tolerance, which are quite modern really and the result of science,
which has brought about a clearer knowledge of its own limitations
even. Tolerance is a very complex virtue, much more intellectual than
charity; it is a virtue of the head rather than of the heart; the
proof of it is that charity and intolerance are often found together,
forming an alliance rather than opposing each other. When tolerance
is not philosophical and wholly reasoned, it takes on the aspect of
a simple good-humour that greatly resembles moral weakness. Really to
demonstrate the greatness of tolerance, one must put to the front the
objective reasons drawn from the relativity of human knowledge and
not the subjective reasons drawn from our own hearts.[53] Up to the
present time tolerance has been founded on _respect_ for the person
and the will of another: “It is necessary,” it is said, “for man to
be free—free to deceive himself and to do evil, if need be;” and
nothing is truer, but there is another source of tolerance which is
more substantial and tends to gain ground more and more rapidly as
dogmatic faith disappears. This source is distrust of human thought and
conscience, which are not free not to deceive themselves, and to which
every article of absolute _faith_ must necessarily be also an article
of error. So that, at the present day, tolerance is no longer a virtue,
but simply an affair of the intelligence; the further one goes, the
more one sees that one does not in the least understand; the more one
sees that the beliefs of one’s neighbour are a complement to one’s own,
that no one of us can be right alone, to the exclusion of all others.
By the mere development of the intelligence which makes us aware of the
infinite variety of the world and the impossibility of any one solution
of eternal problems, each individual opinion comes to have a value in
our eyes: it is nothing more nor less than a bit of evidence bearing
on the theory of the universe, and it goes without the saying that no
one item of evidence can be made the basis of a definitive judgment, a
dogmatic conclusion, without appeal.

      [53] See A. Fouillée, _Systèmes de morale contemporains_.


_II. Broad dogmatic faith._

[Sidenote: Conflict between intelligence and dogmatism.]

“The aim of most men,” as an English writer says, “is to pass through
life with as little expenditure of thought as possible:” but what is
to become of those who think, and of intellectual men in general? Even
without suspecting it, one will ultimately allow an interpretation more
or less broad of the texts to which one has seemed to cling in a narrow
and _literal_ faith. There is almost no such thing as a perfectly
orthodox believer. Heresy enters by one door or another, and strange
to say it is that precise fact that keeps traditional faith alive in
face of the progress of science. An absolute and immutably literal
faith would be too offensive to last long. Orthodoxy either kills the
nations in which it entirely stifles freedom of thought or it kills
faith in itself. Intelligence can never stand still; it is a light that
moves, like that cast by the sun on the dripping oars as the boat is
being lustily rowed along.

[Sidenote: Dogmatism doubly irrational.]

The partisans of literal interpretation and authority seem sooner
or later to accept two irrational hypotheses instead of one; it is
not enough for them that there have been certain revelations from on
high, they insist that the very terms in which the divine thought is
incorporated shall be divine, sacred, and immutable, and of an absolute
exactitude. They divinize human language. They never think of the
difficulties that someone might feel who was not a god but simply a
Descartes, a Newton, or a Leibnitz, to express his great thoughts in
an unformed and half-savage tongue. Genius is always superior to the
language that it makes use of, and the words themselves are responsible
for many of the errors in its thoughts; and a “divine inspiration,”
brought down to the level of our language, would be perhaps more
embarrassed than an even purely human inspiration. Nothing therefore
can be stranger, to those who examine the matter calmly, than to see
civilized nations seeking for a complete expression of the divine
thought in the literatures of ancient peoples and semi-barbarous
nations, whose language and intelligence were infinitely inferior
to ours; their god, talking and dictating, would nowadays hardly
be given a certificate of competency in a primary examination. It
is the grossest anthropomorphism to conceive a divinity not in the
type of an ideal man but in the type of a barbarous man. Also, it is
not simply that a literal faith (the primitive form of all revealed
faith) ultimately appears to be entirely irrational; it is that this
characteristic becomes constantly more marked, for the reason that
faith stands still, or tries to stand still, while humanity marches on.

[Sidenote: Dogmatism is intellectual indifference or death.]

But for a certain number of heresies born and circulated among them,
but for a constant stream of fresh thought, people holding by a
literal religion would be a _caput mortuum_ in history, a little
“like the faithful Tibetians of Dalaï-lama,” as Von Hartmann says.
Literal religions cannot last and perpetuate themselves except by a
series of compromises. There are always in the minds of the sincere
and intelligent believer periods of advancement and of reaction, steps
forward followed by a recoil. Confessors know these sudden changes
well, and are prepared to deal with them and keep them within certain
limits. They themselves are subject to such changes; how many of them
have thought they believed and been suspected of heresy! If we could
see into the bottom of their minds what reconciliations should we not
perceive, what secret accommodations and compliances! There is in every
one of us something that _protests_ against literal faith, and if this
protestation is not explicit, it is often none the less real. No one
can hope to read more exactly than he who reads between the lines. When
one venerates and admires everything, it is generally what one simply
does not understand. Very many minds positively like vagueness and
accommodate themselves to it, they believe in gross and arrange the
details to suit themselves; sometimes even, after accepting a thing as
a whole, they eliminate one by one all its parts. Generally speaking,
those who aspire to literal faith nowadays are divisible into three
classes: the indifferent, the blind, and unconscious Protestants.

[Sidenote: Protestantism and liberty of conscience.]

The Protestantism of Luther and Calvin was a compromise replacing
a despotism; it was a broad faith, although it is at the same time
intolerant and orthodox; for there are certain things even in
Protestantism which do not admit of compromise; it contains _dogmas_
that it is impious to reject, and which, to the free-thinker, seem
scarcely less contrary to calm reason than the dogmas of Catholicism;
it contains a system of metaphysical or historical theses regarded
not as merely human, but as divine. The most desirable thing in a
religion that is to be progressive is that the sacred texts should be
ambiguous; and the text of the Bible is not ambiguous enough. How are
we to doubt, for example, the divinity of Christ’s mission? How doubt
the miracles? A belief in the divinity of Christ, and the genuineness
of the miracles, are the very foundation of the Christian religion;
Luther was obliged to accept them, and in our day even they bear
down with their full weight on orthodox Protestantism. So that what
seemed at first a generous concession to liberty of thought amounts
in the end to little. The circle one moves about in is so contracted!
Protestants, too, are fettered; the chain is simply longer and more
flexible. Protestantism has rendered services of great importance to
law and to liberty of conscience; but alongside of the concessions to
liberty that it enforced, it contains dogmas from which the use of
“charitable constraint” may logically be deduced. These dogmas which
are essential to true Protestantism are: original sin, conceived as
even more radical than it appears in Catholicism, and as destructive
of freedom of the will; the redemption, which recognizes the death of
God the Son as necessary to redeem man from the vindictiveness of God
the Father; predestination in all its rigour; grace and election in
their most fatalistic and mystical form; and last and most important,
an eternity of suffering without purgatory! If all these dogmas are
simply philosophical myths, Christian is a purely verbal title, and one
might as well call one’s self a heathen, for all the myths of Jupiter,
Saturn, Ceres, Proserpine, and the “divinities of Samothrace,” are also
susceptible of becoming symbols of higher metaphysics; we refer the
reader to Jamblicus and Schelling. We must thus assume that orthodox
Protestants believe in hell, redemption, and grace; and if so, the
consequences that we have deduced from these dogmas become inevitable.
Also Luther, Calvin, Théodore de Bèze, have preached and practised
intolerance for the same reasons as did the Catholics. They claimed the
right of private judgment for themselves alone, and only in so far as
they felt need of it; they never raised it to the level of an orthodox
doctrine. Calvin burned Servetius, and the Puritans in America in 1692
punished witchcraft with death.

[Sidenote: Every heresy serves liberty of conscience.]

If Protestantism has in the long run served the cause of liberty of
conscience, the reason is simply that every heresy is an instance of
liberty and of that enfranchisement which brings in its train a series
of additional heresies. In other words, heresy is the victory of
doubt over faith. By doubt Protestantism serves the cause of liberty;
by faith it would cease to serve it and would menace it—if it were
logical. But the characteristic of certain minds is precisely to come
to a halt halfway between freedom and liberty, between faith and
reason, between the past and the future.

[Sidenote: Protestantism a mark of logical feebleness in those who hold
it.]

Over and above the dogmas admitted in common, the true Protestant
demands further some fixed objective expression of his belief: he
attempts—he also—to incorporate it in a certain number of customs
and rites which create the need they satisfy and incessantly give
fresh life to a faith incessantly on the point of a decline; he
demands temples, priests, a ceremonial. In the item of ceremonial as
well as in the item of dogmas, orthodox Protestants nowadays feel
themselves to be much superior to Catholics; and they have really
rejected a considerable number of naïve beliefs and of useless rites
not infrequently borrowed from paganism. You should hear an excited
Protestant, in a discussion with a Catholic, speak of the Mass, that
degrading superstition in which “the most material and barbarous
interpretation possible” is put upon the words of Christ—_He that
eateth me shall live by me_. But does not this same Protestant admit
with the Catholic the miracle of the redemption, of Christ sacrificing
himself to save mankind? If you admit one miracle, what reason is there
to stop with that or any succeeding miracle? “Once more in this order
of ideas,” says Mr. Matthew Arnold, “and what can be more natural and
beautiful than to imagine this miracle every day repeated, Christ
offered in thousands of places, everywhere the believer enabled to
enact the work of redemption and unite himself with the Body whose
sacrifice saves him.” A beautiful conception, you acknowledge, for a
legend, but you refuse to put faith in it on the ground that it shocks
your reason; very good, but you reject in the same breath all the
rest of the irrationalities that are part and parcel of Christianity.
If Christ sacrificed himself for the human race, why should not he
sacrifice himself for me? if he came to a world that did not call
him, why should he not come to me who call upon him and pray to him?
if God once took on a form of flesh and blood, if He once inhabited a
human body, why find it strange that He should be present in my flesh
and blood? You want miracles, on condition that you are not to see
them; what is the meaning of such false modesty? When one believes a
thing, one must live in the heart of this belief, one must see it and
feel it everywhere; when one possesses a god, it is in order that he
may walk and breathe on earth. He whom we adore must not be relegated
to a corner of the heavens, or forbidden to appear in our midst; and
they must not be made sport of, who see him, and feel him, and touch
him. Free-thinkers may laugh, if they have the courage, at the priest
who believes that God is present in the Host that he holds in his
hands, and present in the temple when he officiates. They may laugh
at the peasant children who believe that Saints or the Virgin present
themselves before them to listen to their wants, but a true believer
cannot do otherwise than take all this seriously. Protestants take
baptism very seriously, and think it absolutely necessary to salvation.
Luther certainly believed in the devil; he saw him everywhere, in
storms, in fires, in the tumult that his passage along the streets
often excited, in the interruptions that occurred in his sermons; he
challenged, and threatened all devils, “were they as numberless as the
tiles of the roofs.” One day he even exorcised the Evil One, who had
been vociferating in the person of the audience, so efficiently that
the sermon, which opened in the midst of the greatest disturbance,
was finished in peace; the devil had been frightened. Why, then, do
orthodox Protestants, especially in our day, so genuinely wish to
stop arbitrarily short in their faith? Why believe that God or the
devil appeared to men two thousand years ago, and at no time since?
Why believe in the Gospel cures and not in the naïve legends that
are related of the Communion, or in the miracles at Lourdes? All
things hold together in a faith, and if you propose outraging human
reason, why not do it thoroughly? As Mr. Matthew Arnold observes, the
orthodox Protestant doctrine, in admitting that the Son of God could
substitute himself as an expiatory victim for man, condemned for the
fault of Adam,—in other words that he could suffer for a crime that
he had not committed for men who had not committed it either,—is only
to accept the following passage literally and rudely: “The son of man
is come to give his life as a ransom unto many.” From the moment that
one holds literally to a single text, why not do the same in regard to
others? In introducing a certain share of liberty into their faith,
the Protestants have also introduced a spirit of inconsequence; this
is its characteristic and its defect. Someone said to me once: “If I
should try to believe everything, I should end by believing nothing.”
This was Luther’s reasoning; he wished to make some allowances for
enlightenment; he hoped to preserve the faith by minimizing it. But
the limits are artificial. Only listen to Pascal, who possesses the
French talent for logic, and is at the same time a mathematician,
making light of Protestantism. “How I detest such nonsense!” he cries:
that is, not to believe in the Eucharist, etc. “If the Gospel is true,
if Jesus Christ is God, what difficulty is there in all that?” Nobody
saw more clearly than Pascal the things that, as he says, are “unjust”
in certain Christian dogmas, that are “shocking,” are “far-fetched,”
the “absurdities”; he saw it all and accepted it all. He accepted
everything or nothing. When one makes a bargain with faith, one does
not pick and choose; one takes all and gives all. It was Pascal who
said that atheism was a sign of strength of mind, but a strength
displayed in one direction only. One might turn that round and say
that Catholicism implies strength of mind, at least on one point.
Protestantism, though of a higher order in the evolution of belief,
remains to-day a mark of a certain weakness of mind in those who,
having made the first step toward freedom of thought, rest there; it
is a halt midway. At bottom, however, the two rival orthodoxies, over
which nowadays civilized nations dispute, are equally astonishing to
those who have passed beyond them.


_III. The dissolution of dogmatic faith in modern society._

[Sidenote: Dogmatic faith distanced by science.]

Can a dogmatic faith, whether narrow or broad, indefinitely coexist
with modern science? We think not. Science consists of two portions:
the constructive and the destructive. The constructive portion is
already far enough advanced, in modern society, to provide for certain
desiderata which dogma undertook formerly to supply. We have to-day,
for example, more extended and detailed information about the genesis
of the world than is found in the Bible. We are attaining by degrees a
certain number of facts relating to the affiliation of species. And all
the celestial or terrestrial phenomena which strike the eye are already
completely explained. The definitive _why_ has not been given, no
doubt; we even ask ourselves if there is one. But the _how_ has already
been in a great part dealt with. Let us not forget that religions
in the beginning took the place of physics; that physical theories
constituted for a long time an essential and preponderant part of them.
Nowadays physics and religion have been distinguished, and religion has
lost by the separation a large part of its power, which has passed over
to science.

[Sidenote: And undermined.]

The dissolvent and destructive aspect of science is not less important.
The first to present it in high relief were the physical sciences and
astronomy. All the ancient superstitions about the trembling of the
earth, eclipses, etc., which were a constant occasion of religious
exaltation, are destroyed, or nearly so, even among the populace.
Geology has overturned with a single stroke the traditions of most
religions. Physics has done away with miracles. The same almost may
be said of meteorology, which is so recent and has such a brilliant
future. God is still to a man of the people too often the sender of
rain and good weather, the Indra of the Hindus. A priest told me the
other day, in the best faith in the world, that the prayers of his
parishioners had brought the country three days of sunshine. In a
religious town if rain falls the day of a religious procession, and
stops shortly before the time of setting out, the people unhesitatingly
believe that a miracle has been performed. Sailors, who depend
so entirely on atmospheric perturbations, are more inclined to
superstition. The minute the weather can be more or less accurately
foretold and guarded against, all these superstitions are doomed. It
is thus that fear of thunder is rapidly subsiding at the present day;
this fear formed an important factor in the formation of the ancient
religions. By inventing the lightning-rod, Franklin did more to destroy
superstition than the most active propaganda could have done.

[Sidenote: Experiment in miracles.]

As M. Renan has remarked, we might even in our day demonstrate
scientifically the non-existence of miraculous interference in the
affairs of this world and the inefficiency of requests to God to
modify the natural course of things; one might, for example, minister
to patients according to the same methods, in two adjoining rooms of
a hospital; for the one set of patients a priest might pray, and one
might see whether the prayer would appreciably modify the means of
recovery. The result of this sort of experiment on the existence of a
special providence is moreover easy to foretell, and it is doubtful
whether any educated priest would lend himself to it.

[Sidenote: Religion and physiology and psychology.]

The sciences of physiology and psychology have explained to us in
a natural way a multitude of phenomena of the nervous system which
we were forced until recently to attribute to the marvelous, or to
trickery, or to divine influence, or to the devil.

[Sidenote: Religion and history.]

Finally, history is attacking not only the object of religion,
but religions themselves, by displaying all the sinuosities and
uncertainties of the thought that constructed them; the primitive
contradictions, corrected for better or for worse at some later period,
the genesis of the precisest dogmas by the gradual juxtaposition of
vague and heterogeneous ideas. Religious criticism, the elements of
which will sooner or later find their way into elementary instruction,
is the most terrible weapon that could be used against religious
dogmatism; it has produced and will produce its effect in Protestant
countries, where theology passionately engages the multitude. Religious
faith tends to give place to curiosity about religion; we understand
more readily the things we do not so absolutely believe, and we can be
more disinterestedly interested in the things that no longer fill us
with a sacred horror. But the explanation of positive religion seemed
destined to be absolutely the opposite of its justification: to write
the history of religions is to write a damaging criticism of them.
When one endeavours to come to close quarters with their foundation in
reality, one finds it retire before one little by little and ultimately
disappear like the place where the rainbow rests upon the earth: one
believes that one has discovered in religion a bond between heaven and
earth, a pledge of alliance and hope; it is an optical illusion which
science at once corrects and explains.

[Sidenote: Religion undermined by primary instruction.]

Primary instruction, which is sometimes made, nowadays, a subject of
ridicule, is also an altogether recent institution of which in former
times there scarcely existed a trace, and which profoundly modifies
all of the terms of every social and religious problem. The modicum
of elementary instruction that the modern schoolboy possesses, in
especial if one adds some few notions of religious history, would
alone suffice to put him on his guard against a great many forms of
superstition. Formerly it was the custom for a Roman soldier to embrace
the religion of any, and of every country, in which he was stationed
for a considerable space of time; on his return home he would set up an
altar to the distant gods that he had made his own: Sabazius, Adonis,
the goddess of Syria, or Asiatic Bellona, the Jupiter of Baalbec, or
the Jupiter of Doliche. To-day our soldiers and mariners bring back
from their travels little more than an incredulous tolerance, a gently
disrespectful smile in relation to gods in general.

[Sidenote: And by the perfection of the means of communication.]

The perfection of means of communication is also one of the great
obstacles to the maintenance of a dogmatic faith; nothing shelters
a belief like the abyss of a deep valley or the meanderings of an
unnavigable river. The last surviving believers in the religions of
antiquity were the peasants—_pagani_; whence the word pagan. But
to-day the country is being thrown open, mountains are being pierced,
the perpetually increasing activity in the movement of things and
of people results in the circulation of ideas, in a lowering of the
pretensions of the faith, and this levelling down must inevitably
continue step by step with the progress of science. In all times it
has been observed that the effect of travelling alters one’s beliefs.
To-day one travels standing still: the intellectual horizon changes
for one, whether one will or not. Men like Papins, Watts, Stephenson,
have done as much for the propagation of free-thought as the boldest of
philosophers. Even in our days the piercing of the Isthmus of Suez will
probably have done more for the enlightenment of the Hindus than the
conscientious efforts of Râm Mohun Roy or of Keshub.

[Sidenote: And by the development of commerce and industry.]

Among the causes which will tend in the future to eliminate the dogma
of a special providence, let us note the development of the arts—even
the art of commerce and of industry, which is still in its very
beginnings. Merchants and workmen, equally, have learned already to
rely upon no one but their own individual selves, to rely each upon
his own initiative, his personal ingenuity; he knows that to work
is to pray, not in the sense that his labour possesses some sort of
mystical value but because its value is real and within his reach;
and he acquires by that very fact a vivid and increasing sense of
responsibility. Compare, for instance, the life of a pointsman (that
of a working-man) with the life of a soldier, and you will see that
the conduct of the first is of necessity reflective, and develops
in him a sense of responsibility, whereas the second—accustomed to
march he knows not where, to obey, he knows not why, to vanquish
or be vanquished he knows not how—lives among circumstances which
naturally inspire in him a conception of irresponsibility, of divine
chance, or of hazard. Moreover, whenever industry does not treat the
workman like a machine but forces him to act consciously and with
reflection, its natural effect is to enfranchise the mind. And the
same thing is true of commerce; although in commerce a more important
rôle is played, by mere lying in wait—mere passivity; the merchant
waits for a purchaser, and his coming or not coming depends upon
something else. The superstitions of commerce, however, will grow
feebler as the functions of personal initiative and activity become
more extensive. Thirty years ago in a very religious town there existed
a number of small merchants who looked upon it as a matter of duty
not to examine their account book till the end of the year: it would
be, they said, a distrust of God to ascertain too often whether they
were losing or gaining; it would bring bad luck; the less attention
you pay to your income the greater it grows. Add that, thanks to this
sort of reasoning, which for the rest was not altogether without a
certain naïve logic, the merchants spoken of did not do an especially
brilliant business. In modern commerce the “positive” spirit—restless
intelligence and calculation outstripping chance—tends to become the
true and sole element of success; as to the risks which, in spite of
every precaution, still remain, they are covered by insurance.

[Sidenote: And by the practice of insurance.]

Insurance, then, is a conception altogether modern, whose operation is
to substitute the direct action of man for the intervention of God in
private affairs, and which looks to the recompense for a misfortune
before it has happened. It is probable that insurance, which dates only
some few years back and is spreading rapidly, will be applied some
day to almost every form of accident to which man is liable, will be
adapted to every circumstance of life, will accompany us everywhere,
will envelop us in a protecting net; and agriculture and navigation,
and those pursuits generally in which human initiative plays the
smallest part, in which one must dance attendance upon the special
benediction of heaven and ultimate success is always contingent, will
become increasingly independent and free. It is possible that the
notion of a special providence will some day be completely eliminated
from the sphere of economics; everything that in any manner whatsoever
is capable of being estimated in terms of money will be covered by an
insurance, shielded from accident, made independent of divine favour.

[Sidenote: And the progress of medical knowledge.]

There remains the purely personal sphere, the physical and moral
accidents which may befall us, the maladies that may come upon
ourselves and those who belong to us. That is the sphere in which
the majority of men feel their will most feeble, their perspicacity
most at fault. Listen to a member of the lower classes on the subject
of physiology or medicine, and you will understand how deep is the
abasement of their intelligence in this matter; and often, indeed, even
men of a more extended education are possessed of no more knowledge
than they on such points. Speaking generally, our ignorance of hygiene
and the most elementary notions of medicine is such that we are
helpless in the presence of physical evil; and it is because of this
helplessness, at the very spot precisely where we most need help, that
we seek for an outlet for an embarrassed volition and a restless hope
and find it in a petition addressed to God. Many people never think of
praying except when ill, or when they see persons dear to them ill. As
always, so here, a sense of an absolute dependence provokes a return
of religious sentiment. Just in proportion as instruction spreads,
just in proportion as the natural sciences become of service, we feel
ourselves armed with a certain power, even in the face of physical
accident. In more than usually pious families, the physician scarcely
assumed formerly any other character than that of an instrument of
special providence; one had confidence in him, less on the score of
his talent than of his sanctity; that confidence was absolute; one
washed one’s hands of all responsibility, as primitive people do in the
presence of the sorcerers and “priest physicians.” Nowadays, however,
the physician is beginning to be looked upon as a man like another, who
must rely upon himself, who receives no inspiration from on high, and
who must, in consequence, be chosen with care, and aided and sustained
in his task. It is understood that the remedies employed by him are
innocent of mystery, that their operation is uniform, that the matter
is altogether one of intelligence in their use; and instead of putting
one’s self, like so much brute matter, into the physician’s hands, one
does one’s best to co-operate with him. When we hear someone calling
for help and are free to run to him, does it ever occur to us nowadays
to fall upon our knees? No; we should even consider a passive prayer
as an indirect form of homicide. The epoch is past when Ambroise Paré
could say modestly: “I poulticed him, God cured him.” The fact is, God
does not cure those whom the physician does not poultice properly. The
progress of natural science will result really in a sort of preventive
insurance, no longer confined wholly to the sphere of economics; and
we shall be able some day to insure ourselves, not simply against the
economical consequences of such and such an accident, but against
the accident itself; we shall foresee it and avoid it, as we not
infrequently nowadays foresee and avoid poverty. And finally, in
respect even to unavoidable evils, it will occur to no one to rely upon
anything but human science and human effort.

[Sidenote: Progress in matters of belief since heathen antiquity and
the Middle Ages.]

Owing to the causes above enumerated, how far we have travelled since
the time of the ancients and the Middle Ages! In the first place we no
longer lend credence to oracles or to predictions. The law at least no
longer goes the length of lending credence to them, and even punishes
those who endeavour to speculate upon a naïveté of their more innocent
neighbours. Soothsayers at the present day are no longer lodged in
Temples. And in no case are philosophers and higher personages among
their clients. We are far from the time when Socrates and his disciples
made a pilgrimage to consult the oracle, when the gods spoke, and
gave advice, and regulated the conduct of men, and took the place of
attorneys, of physicians, of judges, and decided upon peace and war.
If it had been affirmed to a pagan that the day would come when man
would find the oracle at Delphi a superfluity, he would have been as
frankly surprised as a Christian is to-day when he hears it affirmed
that cathedrals, priests, and religious ceremonies will some day become
a superfluity.

[Sidenote: Tendency toward simplicity and uniformity.]

The rôle which prophecies played in the religion of the Hebrews is
well known. In the Middle Ages certain prophecies, such as that of the
millennium, were publicly and miserably put to the proof. Since that
time dogmatic religion, in the fear of compromising itself, has stood
aloof from oracles and prophecies, preferring increase of security to
extent of influence. Thus by degrees authoritative religion has come
to renounce its sway over one of the most important portions of human
life, which it pretended formerly to possess a knowledge of, and to
regulate—the future. It contents itself to-day with the present. Its
predictions, ever vaguer and more vague, nowadays bear only on the
period beyond the grave; it contents itself with promising heaven to
the faithful—which the Catholic religion indeed goes the length of in
some measure securing for them by absolution. And one may recognize
in the confessional a certain substitute for the divination of former
times. The hand of the priest opens or shuts the door of heaven for
the believer kneeling in the shadow of the confessional; he wields a
power in some respects greater than that of the Pythoness who might
determine with a word the fate of battles. Confession itself, however,
has disappeared in the stronger and younger offshoots of Christianity.
In orthodox Protestantism one is one’s self the judge of one’s own
future, and possesses no other clew to one’s destiny than the dictum
of one’s own conscience, with all its uncertainty upon its head. Owing
to this transformation dogmatic faith in the word of a priest or a
prophet tends to become a simple reliance on the voice of conscience,
which becomes ever less and less authoritative, ever more and more
feeble in the face of doubt. Faith in oracles and in the visible
finger of Providence in this world has become to-day simply a somewhat
hesitating reliance upon an inner oracle and an together transcendental
Providence. This is one of the items in respect to which religious
evolution may be considered as already something like complete, and
religious individualism as on the point of replacing obedience to the
priest, and the negation of the marvellous as substituted for antique
superstition.

[Sidenote: Belief in God falls with belief in devils.]

The strength of the belief in a personal God has been in all times
proportionate to the strength of the belief in a devil—we have just
seen an illustration of it in the case of Luther. In effect these
two beliefs are correlatives; they are the opposite faces of one and
the same anthropomorphism. Well, in our days, belief in the devil
is incontestably becoming feebler; and this enfeeblement is even
especially characteristic of the present epoch; there has at no other
time been anything to equal it. There is not an educated person to be
found in whom the notion of a devil does not excite a smile. That,
believe me, is a sign of the times, a manifest proof of the decline
of dogmatic religion. Wherever the power of dogmatic religion by an
exception to the general course of things has retained its vitality,
and retained it, as in America, even to the point of giving birth
to new dogmas, the fear of the devil has subsisted in its entirety;
wherever, as in more enlightened regions than America, this fear no
longer exists except as a symbol or a myth, the intensity and the
fecundity of the religious sentiment decline inevitably in the same
degree. The fate of Javeh is bound up with that of Lucifer; angels
and devils go hand in hand, as in some fantastic mediæval dance. The
day when Satan and his followers shall be definitively vanquished and
annihilated in the minds of the people, the celestial powers will not
have long to live.

       *       *       *       *       *

[Sidenote: Results.]

To sum up, in all these relations, dogmatic faith—and in especial,
such as is narrow, authoritative, intolerant, and at enmity with a
spirit of science—seems on every account destined to disappear, or to
survive, if at all, among a small number of believers. Every doctrine,
no matter how moral or how elevating, seems to us nowadays to lose
these attributes and to become degraded from the moment it proposes
to impose itself upon the human mind as a dogma. Dogma happily—that
crystallization of faith—is an unstable compound; like certain complex
crystals, it is apt to explode, under a concentrated ray of light, into
dust. Modern criticism supplies the ray. If Catholicism, in pursuit of
religious unity, logically results in the doctrine of infallibility,
modern criticism in the course of its establishment of the relativity
of human knowledge and of the essential fallibility of intelligence
in general, tends toward religious individualism and toward the
dissolution of every universal or “Catholic” dogma. And on that score
orthodox Protestantism is itself menaced with ruin, for it also has
preserved in its dogmas an element of Catholicity, and by that very
fact of intolerance, if not practical and civil, at least theoretical
and religious.




CHAPTER II.

SYMBOLIC AND MORAL FAITH.

    I. Substitution of metaphysical symbolism for dogma—Liberal
      Protestantism—Comparison with Brahmanism—Substitution
      of moral symbolism for metaphysical symbolism—Moral
      faith—Kant—Mill—Matthew Arnold—A literary explanation
      of the Bible substituted for a literal explanation.

    II. Criticism of symbolic faith—Inconsequence of liberal
      Protestantism—Is Jesus of a more divine type than
      other great geniuses—Does the Bible possess a greater
      authority in matters of morals than any other masterpiece
      of poetry—Criticism of Matthew Arnold’s system—Final
      absorption of religions by morality.


[Sidenote: Inevitable tendency of religion toward non-religion.]

Every illogical position being in its nature unstable, the very
inconsequence of a religion obliges it to a perpetual evolution
in the direction of an ultimate non-religion, which it approaches
incessantly by almost insensible steps. The Protestant knows nothing
of the ordeal of a Catholic obliged to accept everything or to reject
everything; he knows nothing of prodigious revolutions and subjective
_coups d’état_; he possesses instinctively the art of transition, his
_credo_ is elastic. There are so many different creeds, each a little
more thorough-going than the last, that he may pass through, that he
has time to habituate his spirit to the truth before being obliged to
profess it in its simplicity. Protestantism is the only religion, in
the Occident at least, in which it is possible for one to become an
atheist unawares and without having done one’s self the shadow of a
violence in the process: the subjective theism of Mr. Moncure Conway,
for example, or any such ultra-liberal Unitarian is so near a neighbour
to ideal atheism that really the two cannot be told apart, and yet the
Unitarians, who as a matter of fact are often simply free-thinkers,
hold, so to speak, that they still believe. The truth is that an
affectionate faith long retains its charm, even after one is persuaded
that it is an error and dead in one; one caresses the lifeless
illusions and cannot bring one’s self altogether to abandon them, as
in the land of the Slavs it is the custom to kiss the pale face of the
dead in the open coffin before throwing upon it the handful of earth
which severs definitely the last visible bonds of love.

[Sidenote: Exemplified in the case of Brahmanism and Buddhism.]

Long before Christianity, other great religions, Brahmanism and
Buddhism, which are much more comprehensive and less arrested in their
development, followed the course of evolution by which a literal
faith comes to be transformed into a symbolic faith. They have been
reconciled successively with one metaphysical system after another—a
process which has been inevitably carried forward with a fresh impulse
under the English rule. To-day Sumangala, the Buddhist high-priest of
Colombo, interprets in a symbolic sense the at once profound and naïve
doctrine of the transmigration; he pretends to reject miracles. Other
enlightened Buddhists freely accept modern doctrines, from those of
Darwin to those of Spencer. On the other hand, in the bosom of Hinduism
there has grown up a really new and wholly theistical religion,
that of the Brahmaists.[54] Râm Mohum Roy founded, at the beginning
of the century, a very deeply symbolical and wide-spread faith;
his successors have gone the length, with Debendra Nâth Tâgore, of
denying the authenticity even of the very texts which they were in the
beginning most concerned to interpret mystically. This last step was
taken suddenly, under circumstances which it is worth while to detail,
because they sum up in a few characteristic strokes the universal
history of religious thought. It happened about 1847. The disciples of
Râm Mohum Roy, the Brahmaists, had been for a long time engaged in a
discussion about the Vedas, and, quite as in the case of our liberal
Protestants, had been giving especial prominence to texts in which
they imagined they found an unmistakable affirmation of the unity of
the Godhead; and they rid themselves of all concern with the passages
that seemingly contradicted this notion by denying their authenticity.
Ultimately, somewhat alarmed at their own progress, they sent four
Pundits to Benares to collate the sacred texts: it was in Benares that,
according to the tradition, the only so-called complete and authentic
manuscript was preserved. During the two years that the labour of the
Pundits covered, the Hindus waited for the truth in the same spirit
that the Hebrews had done at the foot of Sinai. Finally the authentic
version, or what purported to be such, was brought to them; and they
possessed the definitive formula of revelation. Their disappointment
was great, and they took the matter into their own hands, realizing
at one blow the revolution which the liberal Protestants are pursuing
gradually in the bosom of Christianity: they rejected definitively the
Vedas and the antique religion of the Brahmans, and proclaimed in its
stead a theistical religion, which rests in no sense whatsoever upon
revelation. The new faith must in time develop, not without heresy
and schism, but its adherents constitute to-day in India an important
element in progress.

      [54] M. Goblet d’Alviella, _Evolution religieuse contemporaine_.

[Sidenote: Preservation of the letter while tampering with the spirit
of the Bible.]

In our days very estimable persons have essayed to push Christianity
also into a new path. In according the right of interpretation to
private individuals, Luther gave them the right of clothing their own
individual thoughts in the language of the antique dogmas and the
texts of the sacred books. Insomuch that by a singular revolution,
the “Word,” which was considered in the beginning as the faithful
expression of the divine thought, has tended to become for each of us
the expression of our own personal thought. The sense of the words
depending really upon ourselves, the most barbarous language can be
made at a pinch to serve us for the conveyance of the noblest ideas.
By this ingenious expedient texts become flexible, dogmas become
acclimated more or less to the intellectual atmosphere in which they
are placed, and the barbarism of the sacred books becomes disguised. By
virtue of living with the people of God we civilize them, we lend them
our ideas, inoculate them with our aspirations, everyone interprets
the Bible to suit himself, and the result is that the commentary
ultimately overgrows and half obscures the text itself; we no longer
read with undimmed vision—we look through a medium which disguises
everything that is hideous, and lends a fresh beauty to everything
that is beautiful. At bottom the veritable sacred Word is no longer
the one which God pronounced and sent forth reverberating, eternally
the same, down the centuries; it is the one which we pronounce or
rather whisper—for is it not the sense which one puts upon it
that constitutes the real value of an utterance? and it is we who
determine the sense. The Divine Spirit has passed into the believer
and, at certain times at least, the true God would seem to be one’s
own thought. This attempt at a reconciliation between religion and
free-thought is a masterpiece of tact. Religion seems always to lag
a little behind, but free-thought by exercise of a little ingenuity
always find means, in the end, of helping it forward. The progress of
the two consists of a series of arrangements, compromises, something
like what takes place between a conservative Senate and a progressive
Chamber of Deputies, honestly in search of a _modus vivendi_.

[Sidenote: Extension of symbolic interpretation to essential dogmas.]

By a procedure which Luther would never have dared to emulate
Protestants have taken the liberty of employing on essential dogmas
this power of symbolical interpretation which Luther reserved for texts
of a secondary importance. The most essential of dogmas, that upon
which all others depend, is the dogma of revelation. If, since Luther’s
time, an orthodox Protestant feels himself at liberty to discuss at
his ease whether the sense of the sacred Word is really this, that, or
the other, he never for an instant questions whether the Word itself
is really sacred in effect, or whether it really possesses any meaning
that can properly be called divine. When he holds the Bible he has no
doubt but that he has his hand upon the truth; he has only to discover
it beneath the words in which it is contained, has only to dig for it
in the sacred Book as a labourer might dig in a field in search of a
buried treasure. But is it then quite certain that the treasure is
really there, that the truth lies ready-made somewhere between the
covers of the Book? That is the question which the liberal Protestant
is asking himself, and he has already taken possession of Germany, of
England, of the United States, and possesses even in France a large
number of representatives. Previous to his advent all Christians were
at one in the belief that the sacred Word really exists somewhere; at
the present day this belief itself tends to become symbolic. No doubt
there was in Jesus a certain element of divinity, but is there not in
all of us, in one sense or another, a certain element of divinity? “Why
should we be surprised,” writes a liberal clergyman, “at finding Jesus
a mystery, when we are all of us ourselves a mystery?” According to
the new Protestants there is no longer any reason for taking anything
at its face value, not even what has hitherto been considered as the
spirit of Christianity. For the most logical of them, the Bible is
scarcely more than a book like another; custom has consecrated it;
one may find God in it if one seeks Him there, because one may find
God anywhere and put Him there, if by chance He be really not there
already. The divine halo has dropped from Christ’s head, or rather
he shares it with all the angels and all the saints. He has lost his
celestial purity or rather we share it with him, all of us; for is not
original sin also a symbol, and are we not all of us born innocent sons
of God? The miracles are but fresh symbols which represent, grossly
and visibly, the subjective power of faith. We are no longer to look
for orders directly from God; God no longer talks to us by a single
voice, but by all the voices of the universe, and it is in the midst
of the great concert of nature that we must seize and distinguish the
veritable Word. All is symbolic except God, who is the eternal truth.

[Sidenote: And even to the conception of God.]

Well, and why stop at God? Liberty of thought, which has been
incessantly turning and adapting dogma to its progress, has it in its
power to make a step beyond. Immutable faith is hemmed in by a circle
which is daily shrinking. For the liberal Protestant this contraction
has reached its extreme, and centre and circumference are one and the
process is continuing. Why should not God Himself be a symbol? What is
this mysterious Being, after all, but a popular personification of the
_divine_ or even of ideal humanity; in a word, of morality?

[Sidenote: The result practically a religion of morals. Perceived to be
so in Germany.]

Thus a purely moral symbolism comes in process of time to be
substituted for a metaphysical symbolism. We are close upon the Kantian
conception of a religion of duty, resting upon a simple postulate or
even a simple generalization of human conduct, to the effect that
morality and happiness are in the last resort in harmony. A faith in
morals, thus understood, has been adopted by many Germans as the basis
of religious faith. Hegelians have converted religion into a moral
symbolism. Strauss defines morality as the “harmonization” of man with
his species, and defines religion as the harmonization of man with the
universe; and these definitions, which seem at first sight to imply
a difference in extent and a certain opposition between morality and
religion, aim in reality at showing their ultimate unity; the ideal of
the species and the purpose of the universe are one, and if by chance
they should be distinct, it would be the more universal ideal that
morality itself would command us to follow. Von Hartmann, also, in
spite of his mystical tendencies, concludes that there is no religion
possible except one which will consecrate the moral autonomy of the
individual, his salvation by his own effort and not by that of somebody
else (autosoterism as distinguished from heterosoterism). From which
it follows that, in Von Hartmann’s opinion, the essence of religious
adoration and gratitude should be one’s respect for the essential and
impersonal element in one’s self; in other words, piety is, properly
speaking, no more than a form of morality and of absolute renouncement.

[Sidenote: Also in France.]

In France, as is well known, M. Renouvier follows Kant and bases
religion upon morality. M. Renan also makes of religion a little more
than an ideal morality: “Abnegation, devotion, sacrifice of the real
to the ideal, such,” he says, “is the very essence of religion.” And
elsewhere: “What is the state but egoism organized? what is religion
but devotion organized?” M. Renan forgets, however, that a purely
egoistic state, that is to say a purely immoral state, could not
continue to exist. It would be more accurate to say that the state is
justice organized; and since justice and devotion are in principle the
same, it follows that the state as well as religion rests ultimately
upon morality: morality is the very foundation of social life.

[Sidenote: Also in England.]

In England, also, the same process of the transformation of a
religious faith into a purely moral faith may be observed. Kant
through the intermediation of Coleridge and of Hamilton has exercised
a great influence upon English thought and upon the course of this
transformation. Coleridge brought down the Kingdom of God from Heaven
and domesticated it upon earth; the reign of God for him, as for Kant,
became that of morality. For John Stuart Mill, whose point of approach
was widely different from that of Coleridge, the outcome of the study
of religions was the same—that their essential value has always
consisted in the moral precepts they inculcate; the good that they have
done should be attributed rather to the stimulus they have given to the
moral sentiment than to the religious sentiment properly so called.
And it is to be added, Mill says, that the moral principles furnished
by religions labour under this double disability, that (1) they are
tainted with selfishness, and operate upon the individual by promises
or menaces relating to the life to come without entirely detaching him
from a preoccupation with his own interest, and, (2) they produce a
certain intellectual apathy, and even an aberration of the moral sense,
in that they attribute to an absolutely perfect being the creation of
a world so imperfect as our own, and thus in a certain measure cloak
evil itself in divinity. Nobody could adore such a god willingly
without having undergone a preliminary process of degeneration. The
true religion of the future, according to John Stuart Mill, will be
an elevated moral doctrine, going beyond an egoistic utilitarianism
and encouraging us to pursue the good of humanity in general; nay,
even of sentient beings in general. This conception of a religion of
humanity, which is not without analogy to the Positivist conception,
might be reconciled, John Stuart Mill adds, with the belief in a divine
power—a principle of goodness present in the universe. A faith in God
is immoral only when it supposes God to be omnipotent, since it, in
that case, charges him with responsibility for existing evil. A good
god can exist only on condition that he is less than omnipotent, that
he encounters in nature, nay in human nature, obstacles which hinder
him from effecting the good that he desires. Once conceive God thus,
and the formula of duty reads simply: Help God; work with Him for the
production of what is good, lend Him the concurrence that He really
needs since He is not omnipotent. Labour also with all great men—all
men like Socrates, Moses, Marcus Aurelius, Washington—do as they do,
all that you can and ought to do. This disinterested collaboration on
the part of all men with each other and with the principle of goodness,
in whatsoever manner that principle may be conceived or personified,
will be, in John Stuart Mill’s judgment, the ultimate religion. And
it is evidently no more than a magnified system of morality, erected
into a universal law for the world. What is it that we call the divine,
except this that is the best in ourselves? “God is good,” cried
Feuerbach, “signifies: goodness is divine; God is just signifies:
justice is divine.” Instead of saying: there have been divine agonies,
divine deaths, one has said, God has suffered, God has died. “God is
the apotheosis of the heart of man.”[55]

      [55] Mr. Seeley, in his work entitled _Natural Religion_
      (1882), takes pains to establish that of the three elements
      which compose the religious idea—the love of truth or
      science, the sentiment of beauty or art, the notion of duty or
      morals—it is the last only that can to-day be reconciled with
      Christianity.

[Sidenote: Matthew Arnold’s “Literature and Dogma.”]

An analogous thesis is maintained with great cleverness in a book which
caused considerable stir in England: Mr. Matthew Arnold’s “Literature
and Dogma.” The author, in common with religious critics generally,
remarks the growing tension that nowadays exists between science
and dogma. “An inevitable revolution, of which we all recognize the
beginnings and signs, but which has already spread, perhaps, farther
than most of us think, is befalling the religion in which we have been
brought up.” Mr. Arnold is right. At no former period have unbelievers
appeared to have so strong a hold in right reason; the old arguments
against providence, miracles, and final causes, that the Epicureans
brought into prominence, seem as nothing beside the arguments furnished
in our days by the Laplaces and the Lamarcks, and quite recently by
Darwin, the “evictor of miracles,” in Strauss’ phrase. One of the
sacred prophets whom Mr. Arnold is fond of quoting once said: “Behold,
the days come, that I will send a famine in the land, not a famine
of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the
Lord: and they shall wander from sea to sea, and from the north even
to the east, they shall run to and fro to seek the word of the Lord,
and shall not find it.” The time predicted by the prophet Mr. Arnold
might well recognize as our own; might it not with truth be said of
the present that it lacks the word of the Eternal, or soon will lack
it? A new spirit animates our generation; not only are we in doubt
whether the Eternal ever did speak or ever does speak to man, but
many of us believe in the existence of no other eternity than that of
a universe of mute and unfeeling matter which keeps its own secret
except as against those who have the wit to find it out. There are of
course, even to-day, some few faithful servants in the houses of the
Lord; but the Master seems to have departed for the far countries of
the past, to which memory alone has access. In Russia in the older
seigniorial estates, a disc of iron is fastened to the wall of the
mansion of the lord of the soil; and when he returns from a journey,
the first night he passes in his dominion, some follower runs to the
disc of iron and in the silence of the night beats upon the metal to
announce his vigilance and the presence of the master. Who will awaken
nowadays the voice of the bells in the church-steeples to announce
the return to His temple of the living God, and the vigilance of the
faithful? To-day the sound of the church-bells is as melancholy as
a cry in the void; they tell of the deserted house of God, of the
absence of the lord of the soil, they sound the knell of the believers.
And is there nothing that can be done to domesticate religion once
more in the heart of man? There is but one means: to see in God no
more than a symbol of what exists always at the bottom of the human
heart—morality. And it is to this expedient that Matthew Arnold also
turns his attention. But he is not content with a purely philosophic
system of morals, he aims at the preservation of religion, and in
especial of the Christian religion; and to that end he brings forward
a new method of interpretation, the literary and æsthetic method, the
purpose of which is to glean from the sacred texts whatever they may
contain of moral beauty, in the hope that it may incidentally prove
to contain also what is true. It aims at reconstructing the primitive
notions of Christianity, in whatsoever they possessed of vagueness,
of indecision, and at the same time of profundity, and to set them
in opposition over against the gross precision of popular views. In
matters of metaphysic or religion there is nothing more absurd than an
excessive precision; the truth in such matters is not to be rounded in
an epigram. Epigram can at best serve, not as a definition, but as a
suggestion of the infinities that it really does not circumscribe. And
just as the verity in such matters overpasses the measure of language,
so it overpasses the personalities and the figures which humanity has
chosen as representative of it. When an idea is powerfully conceived,
it tends to become definite, to take unto itself a visage, a voice;
our ears seem to hear and our eyes to see what our hearts feel. “Man
never knows,” said Goethe, “how anthropomorphic he is.” What is there
so surprising in the fact that humanity has personified that which in
all climes claimed its allegiance—the idea of goodness and of justice?
The Eternal, the eternally Just, the Omnipotent who squares reality
with justice, He who parcels out evil and good, the Being who weighs
all actions, who does all things by weight and measure, or rather who
is Himself weight and measure—_that_ is the God of the Jewish people,
the Javeh of adult Judaism, as He ultimately appears in the mist of
the unknown. In our days He has become transmuted into a simple moral
conception, which, having forcibly taken possession of the human mind,
has at last clothed itself in a mystical form—has become personified
by alliance with a crowd of superstitions that the “false science of
theologians” regards as inseparable from it and from which a more
delicately discriminating interpretation—an interpretation more
_literary_ and less _literal_—should set it free. God having become
one with the moral law, a further step may be taken; one may regard
Christ who immolated Himself to save the world as a moral symbol of
self-sacrifice, as the sublime type in which we find united all the
suffering of human life and all the ideal grandeur of morality. In His
figure the human and the divine are reconciled. He was a man, for He
suffered, but His devotion was so great that He was a god. And what
then is that Heaven which is reserved for those who follow Christ and
walk in the path of self-sacrifice? It is moral perfection. Hell is the
symbol of that depth of corruption to which, by hypothesis, they will
fall who, by a persistent choice of evil, ultimately lose all notion
even of goodness. The terrestrial paradise is a charming symbol for
the primitive innocence of the child: he has done as yet no evil, he
has done as yet no good; his earliest disobedience is his first sin;
when desire is awakened in him for the first time, his will has been
conquered, he has fallen, but this fall is precisely the condition of
his being set upon his feet again, of his redemption by the moral law;
behold him condemned to labour, to the hard labour of man upon himself,
to the struggle of self-mastery; without that contest to strengthen
him he would never see the god descend in him, Christ the Saviour, the
moral ideal. Thus it is in the evolution of the human conscience that a
key to human symbolism must be found.[56] Of them must be said what the
philosopher Sallust said of religious legends generally in his treatise
“On the Gods and the World”: Such things have never happened, but they
are eternally true. Religion is the morality of the people; it shows to
them, realized and divinized, the higher types of conduct which they
should force themselves to imitate here below; the dreams with which
it peoples the skies are dreams of justice, of equality of goods, of
fraternity: Heaven pays for earth. Let us then no longer employ the
names of God, of Christ, of the Resurrection except as symbols, vague
as hope itself. Then, according to Mr. Matthew Arnold, and those who
maintain the same thesis, we shall begin to love these symbols, our
faith will find a resting place in the religion which before seemed
to be but a tissue of gross absurdities. Beneath dogma, which is but
the surface, we shall find the moral law, which is the substance. This
law, it is true, has in religion become concrete; it has, so to speak,
taken on colour and form. That, however, is simply owing to the fact
that people are poets; they think in images or not at all. You can
only attract their attention by pointing your finger at something.
After all, what harm is there in the fact that the apostles, opening
the blue ether, showed the gaping nations of the earth the thrones of
gold and seraphim and white wings, and the kneeling multitude of the
elect? This spectacle fascinated the Middle Age, and at times, when
we shut our eyes, we seem to see it still. This poetry, spread upon
the surface of the moral law, lends it an attractiveness that it did
not possess in its bare austerity. Sacrifice becomes less difficult
when it presents itself crowned with a halo. The early Christians
were not fond of representing Christ as bleeding under the crown of
thorns, but as transfigured and triumphant; they preferred to keep
his agony in the background. Such pictures as ornament our Churches
would have filled them with horror; their young faith would have been
shaken by the image of the “agony upon the cross,” which caused Goethe
also a sort of a repugnance. When they represented the cross it was
no longer burdened with the God, and they took care even to cover
it with flowers and ornaments of every kind. You may see it in the
rude figures, the designs and sculptures found in the catacombs. To
hide the cross beneath an armful of flowers is precisely the marvel
realized by religion. And when religions are regarded from this
point of view, all ground vanishes for looking with disdain upon the
legends which constitute the material of popular faith. They become
comprehensible, they become lovable, one feels one’s self enveloped in
an “infinite tenderness” for this spontaneous product of naïve thought
in quest of goodness, in pursuit of the ideal, for these fairy-tales
of human morality, profounder and sweeter than all other fairy-tales.
It was necessary that religious poetry should prepare the earth long
beforehand for the coming of the mysterious ideal; should embellish
the place where it was to descend, as the mother of the Sleeping
Beauty, seeing the eyes of her daughter grow heavy with the sleep of
a hundred years, placed with confidence at the side of the bed the
embroidered cushion, on which the enamoured prince would one day kneel
to reawaken her with a kiss.

      [56] Besides Mr. Matthew Arnold, consult M. L. Ménard, _Sources
      du dogme Chrétien_ (_Critique religieuse, janvier, 1879._)

[Sidenote: Historical religions to be regarded historically.]

We have come a long way in all this from the servile interpretation of
the blind leaders who fasten upon particular texts and lose sight of
their subject as a whole. If one approaches a picture too near, the
perspective disappears and all the colours lose their proper value;
one must stand back a certain distance and see it in a favourable
light: and then alone the richness of the colours and the unity of
the work appear. Religions must be looked upon in the same way. If
the spectator stands sufficiently above them and aloof from them, he
loses all prejudice, all hostility, in respect to them; their sacred
books come even in time to merit in his eyes the name of sacred, and
he finds in them, Mr. Arnold says, a providential “secret,” which is
the “secret of Jesus.” Why not recognize, adds Mr. Arnold, that the
Bible is an inspired book, dictated by the Holy Spirit? After all,
everything that is spontaneous is more or less divine, providential;
whatever springs from the very sources of human thought is infinitely
venerable. The Bible is a unique book, corresponding to a peculiar
state of mind, and it can no more be made over or corrected than a
work of Phidias or Praxiteles. In spite of its moral lapses and its
frequent disaccord with the conscience of our epoch, it is a necessary
complement of Christianity; it manifests the spirit of Christian
society, it represents the tradition of it, and attaches the beliefs
of the present to those of the past.[57] The Bible and the dogmas of
the Church, having been formerly the point of departure for religious
belief, have come nowadays, no doubt, in the face of modern faith, to
be in need of justification; and this justification they will obtain;
to be understood is itself to be forgiven.

      [57] See M. L. Ménard, _ibid._ (_Crit. relig., 1879._)

[Sidenote: The moral doctrine of the New Testament the main strength of
Christianity.]

If the New Testament contains at all a more or less reflective moral
theory, it is assuredly that of love. Charity, or rather affectionate
justice (charity is always justice, absolutely considered), such is
the “secret” of Jesus. The New Testament may then be considered,
according to the opinion of Mr. Matthew Arnold, as before all else a
treatise on symbolical morality. The actual superiority of the New
Testament, as compared with Paganism and with pagan philosophy, is a
moral superiority; therein lay the secret of its success. There is no
theology in the New Testament unless it be the Jewish theology, and
the Jewish theology had proved itself incapable of the conquest of
the world. The power of the New Testament lay in its morality, and it
is its morality which even in our times survives still, more or less
transformed by modern progress. And it is upon the morality of the New
Testament that modern Christian societies must of necessity lean, it
is in the morality of the New Testament that they will find their true
strength; the morality of the New Testament is the principal argument
that they can invoke in proof of the legitimacy of religion itself and,
so to speak, of God.

[Sidenote: Logical outcome of Matthew Arnold’s position.]

Mr. Matthew Arnold and the group of liberal critics, who, like him,
are inspired by the spirit of the age (_Zeitgeist_), seem thus to have
guided faith to the ultimate point beyond which nothing remains but to
break definitively with the past and its texts and dogmas.

Religious thought in these pages is bound by the slenderest threads to
religious symbolism. At bottom, if one looks close, liberal Christians
suppress religion, properly so called, and substitute a religious
morality in its stead. The believer of other times affirmed the
existence of God first, and then made His will the rule of conduct; the
liberal believer of our day affirms the existence, first of all, of
the moral law, and cloaks it in divinity afterward. He, like Matthew
Arnold, treats with Javeh on equal terms, and speaks to Him almost as
follows: “Art Thou a person? I do not know. Hast Thou had prophets, a
Messiah? I no longer believe so. Hast Thou created me? I doubt it. Dost
Thou watch over me—me in especial—dost Thou perform miracles? I deny
it. But there is one thing, and one alone, in which I do believe, and
that is in my own conception of morality; and if Thou art willing to
become a surety for that and to bend the reality into harmony with my
ideal, we will make a treaty of alliance; and by the affirmation of my
existence as a moral being, I will affirm Thine into the bargain.” We
are far away from the antique Javeh, the Power, with whom no bargain
could be made; the jealous God, who wished man’s every thought to point
toward Him alone, and who would make no treaty with His people unless
He could precisely dictate the terms.

[Sidenote: Practical attenuation of Christian faith.]

The more distinguished German, English, and American clergymen thrust
theology so far into the background for the purpose of forwarding
practical morality that one may apply to all of them the words
of an American periodical, the _North American Review_: that a
pagan, desirous of making himself acquainted with the doctrines of
Christianity, might frequent our most fashionable churches for an
entire year and not hear one word about the torments of hell or the
wrath of an incensed God. As to the fall of man and the expiatory
agony of Christ, just so much would be said as to fall short of giving
umbrage to the most fanatical believer of the theory of evolution.
Listening and observing for himself, he would reach the conclusion
that the way to salvation lies in confessing one’s belief in certain
abstract doctrines, beaten out as thin as possible by the clergyman
and by the believer, in frequenting assiduously the church and
extra-religious meetings, in dropping an obolus every Sunday into the
contribution box, and in imitating the attitudes of his neighbours.
All the terms of theology are so loosely employed that all those are
considered Christians whose character has been formed by Christian
civilization, all those who have not remained total strangers to the
current of ideas set up in the Occident by Jesus and Paul. It was an
American clergyman who had abandoned the narrow dogmas of Calvin[58]
that, after having employed a long life in becoming more and more
liberal, discovered, in his seventieth year, this large formula for his
faith: “Nobody ought to be regarded as an infidel who sees in justice
the great creed of human life, and who aims at an increasingly complete
subjection of his will to his moral sense.”

      [58] Mr. Henry Ward Beecher.

II. What is the possible value and the possible duration of this moral
and metaphysical symbolism to which it is being attempted to reduce
religion?

[Sidenote: Logical hollowness of the position of the liberal
Protestants.]

Let us speak first of the liberal Protestants. Liberal Protestantism,
which resolves the very dogmas of its creed into mere symbols, stands
no doubt in the scale of progress in about the same relation to
orthodox Protestantism as the latter does in relation to Catholicism.
But far as it seems in advance of them from the point of view of morals
and society, it is inferior to them in logic. Catholicism has been
irreverently called a perfectly embalmed corpse, a Christian mummy,
in an admirable state of preservation beneath the cold embroidered
chasubles and surplices which envelop it; Luther’s Protestantism tears
the body to shreds, liberal Protestantism reduces it to dust. To
preserve Christianity while suppressing Christ the son, or at least
the messenger of God, is an undertaking of which they alone will be
capable who are little disposed to make much of what is known as logic.
Whoever does not believe in Revelation ought frankly to confess himself
a philosopher, and to hold the Bible and the New Testament as little
authoritative as the dialogues of Plato, or the treatises of Aristotle,
or the Vedas, or the Talmud. Liberal Protestants, as Herr von Hartmann,
one of their bitterest adversaries, remarks, seize upon the whole body
of modern ideas and label them Christianity. The process is not very
consistent. If you are absolutely determined to rally round a flag,
let it at least be your own. But the liberal Protestants wish, and
honestly, to be and to remain Protestants; in Germany, they obstinately
remain in the United Evangelical Church of Prussia, where they about
as truly belong as a sparrow does in the nest of a swallow. Herr von
Hartmann, whose zeal against them is unflagging, compares them to a
man whose house is riven in many places and going to ruin, and who
perceives and does all that in him lies still further to shatter it,
and continues, nevertheless, tranquilly to sleep in it and even to
call in passers-by and offer them board and lodging. Or again—always
according to Herr von Hartmann—they are like a man who should seat
himself in perfect confidence upon a chair after having first sawed
through all four legs of it. Strauss had already said: “The instant
that Jesus is regarded as no more than a man, one has no longer any
right to pray to him, to retain him as the centre of a cult, to preach
the whole year through on him, on his actions, on his adventures
and maxims; in especial, if the more important of his adventures
and actions have been recognized as fabulous, and if his maxims are
demonstrably incompatible with our present views on human life and
the world.” To understand what is peculiar in the majority of liberal
communions which always stop halfway, it is necessary to observe that
they are generally the work of ecclesiastics who have broken with the
dominant church, and that they preserve to the end some suggestion of
their former belief; they can no more think, except in the terms of the
formulæ of some dogma, than we can speak in the words of a language
with which we are unacquainted; and even when they endeavour to acquire
a new language they speak it always with an accent which betrays their
nationality. For the rest they feel instinctively that the name of
Christ lends them a certain authority, and they find it impossible to
abandon their profession and its emoluments. In Germany, and even in
France, over and above the liberal Protestants, who in the latter place
are few in number, former Catholics have sought to abandon orthodox
Catholicism, but they have not dared to abandon Christianity. The case
of Father Hyacinthe[59] is sufficiently well known. It is in vain for
those who are born Christians to try their hand at logic, and to make
an effort to rid themselves of their faith. They make one think, in
spite of one’s self, of a fly caught in a spider-web, who has freed
one wing and one leg, and only one.

      [59] Dr. Junqua, whose name almost became celebrated a few
      years ago, also tried to found a church, the Church of Liberty;
      those who entered were at liberty to believe almost anything
      they liked, not even the atheist, properly so called, being
      excluded. The church in question was to have been purely
      symbolic: baptism it was to recognize as the symbol of
      initiation into Christian civilization; confirmation as the
      symbol of an enrolment among the soldiers of Liberty; and
      the eucharist, that is to say a religious love feast, as the
      symbol of the brotherhood of man. It is to be added that these
      sacraments were not obligatory and that the members might
      abstain from them entirely if they chose. Still, they would be
      members of a communion. Their faith would be designated by a
      common name, they would be in relations with a priest who would
      comment in their presence on texts of the New Testament, and
      would talk of Christ if he and they believed in Him. The church
      of Dr. Junqua might easily have succeeded in England with Mr.
      Moncure Conway and the secularists.

[Sidenote: Neo-Christianity.]

Let us endeavour, however, to enter more intimately into the thoughts
of those who may be called the Neo-Christians, and let us seek for the
element of truth, if such there be, that their much-criticised doctrine
contains. If Jesus is only a man, they say, he is at least the most
extraordinary of men; at one bound, by an intuition at once natural
and divine, he discovered the supreme truth necessary to the life of
humanity; he is in advance of all times, he spoke not only for his own
people, nor for his own century, nor even for a score of centuries;
his voice rolled beyond the restricted circle of his auditors, and the
twelve apostles, beyond the people of Judea prostrate before him, to us
in whose ears it sounds the eternal truth; and it finds us even still
attentive, listening, trying to understand it, incapable of finding a
substitute for it. “In Jesus,” writes Pastor Bost in his work on “Le
Protestantisme libéral,” “the mingling of the human and the divine
was accomplished in proportions not seen elsewhere. His relation to
God is the normal and typical relation of humanity to the Creator....
Jesus stands forever as the model.” Professor Herman Schultz in a
conference in Göttingen, some years ago, also expressed the same idea,
that Jesus is really the Messiah, properly so called, in the sense
that the Jews attached to that word. He did found the kingdom of God,
not it is true by marvellous exploits like those of Moses or of Elias,
but by an exploit surpassing theirs, by the sacrifice of love, by the
voluntary gift of himself. The apostles and Christians in general
did not believe in Jesus because of the miracles he performed: they
accepted his miracles owing to their previous faith in him, a faith
the true foundation of which lay in Christ’s moral superiority, and
that subsists still even if one deny the miracles. Professor Schultz
concludes, against Strauss and M. Renan, that “a belief in Christ is
wholly independent of the results of a historical criticism of his
life.” Every one of the actions attributed to Jesus may be mythical,
but there remain to us his words and his thoughts, which find in us
an eternal echo. There are things which one discovers once for all,
and whosoever has found love has made a discovery that is not illusory
nor of brief duration. Is it not just that men should group themselves
about him, range themselves under his name? He himself loves to call
himself the Son of Man; it is under this title that humanity should
revere him. It is not destruction but reconstruction that is the
outcome of contemporary biblical exegesis, one of the representatives
of English Unitarianism, the Rev. A. Armstrong, said in 1883. It adds
to our love of Jesus to recognize in him a brother and to see in the
marvellous legends associated with him no more than the symbol of a
love more naïve than ours, that namely of his disciples. Proof by
miracle is but the ultimate form of a temptation from which humanity
should escape. In the symbolic story of the temptation in the desert,
Satan says: “Command that these stones be made bread;” he urged Christ
to be guilty of a miracle, of the prestidigitation which the ancient
prophets had employed so frequently to strike the imagination of the
people. But Jesus refused. And on another occasion he said to the
people indignantly: If you did not see prodigies and miracles you do
not believe, and to the Pharisees: “Ye hypocrites, ye can discern the
face of the sky and of the earth, ... and why even of yourselves judge
ye not what is right?” It is by the testimony of our own souls, say
the Neo-Christians; it is by our own individual conscience, our own
individual reason, that we shall find justice in the word of Christ,
and that we shall revere it; and this word is not true because it is
divine, it is divine because it is true.

[Sidenote: Modern German historical criticism and liberal
Protestantism.]

Thus understood, liberal Protestantism is a doctrine that merits
discussion; only it is sadly in lack of any distinguishing
characteristic especially to mark it off from the numerous
philosophical sects which, in the course of history, have gathered
about the opinions of some man and endeavoured to identify his
teachings with the truth and to lend to them an authority more than
human. Pythagoras was for his disciples what Jesus is to the liberal
Protestant. The traditional respect also of the Epicureans for their
master is well known, the sort of worship they rendered him, the
authority that they lent to his words.[60] Pythagoras brought to light
a great idea, that of the harmony which governs the physical and moral
universe; Epicurus, another, that of the happiness which is the true
aim of rational conduct, the measure of goodness, and even of truth;
and by their disciples these two great ideas came to be looked upon not
as parts of the truth but as truth itself in its entirety; they saw
no ground for further search. In the same way, in our own times, the
Positivists see in Auguste Comte not a profound thinker simply, but one
who has laid his finger, so to speak, on the definitive verity, one who
has traversed at a dash the whole domain of intelligence and traced out
once for all its limits. It is rigorously exact to say that Auguste
Comte is a sort of Christ for bigoted Positivists—a Christ a trifle
too recent, who did not have the happiness of dying on the cross. Each
of these sects reposes on the following belief: Before Pythagoras,
Epicurus, or Comte, nobody had seen the truth; after them nobody will
ever see it more clearly. Such a creed implicitly denies: 1. Historical
continuity, the inevitable result of which is that the man of genius is
always more or less the expression of his century and that the honour
of his discoveries is not due wholly to himself; 2. Human evolution,
the inevitable result of which is that the man of genius cannot be the
expression of all the centuries to come—that his point of view must
necessarily be some day passed by—that the truth discovered by him is
not the whole truth but simply a stage in the infinite progress of the
human mind. A _deus dixit_ is comprehensible, or if not comprehensible
at least conceivable; but to resuscitate in favour of some mere human
being, were it Jesus himself, the _magister dixit_ of the Middle Ages,
is a bit of an anachronism. Geometers have always held Euclid in the
highest respect, but each of them has done his best to contribute some
new theorem to the body of doctrine that he left behind; and is the
rule for moral truth not the same as that for mathematical truth? Is
it within the compass of one man’s powers to know and to utter all
that there is to be known? Is an autocracy the only form of government
in the sphere of mind? Liberal Protestants speak to us of the “secret
of Jesus”; but there are many secrets in this world, and each of us
carries his own; and who shall utter the secret of secrets, the last
word, the supreme verity? Nobody in particular, probably; truth is the
product of a prodigious co-operation, at which all peoples and all
generations must work. The horizon of truth can neither be taken in at
a single glance nor contracted; to perceive the whole of it one must
move forward incessantly, and at every step a new perspective is laid
bare. For humanity, to live is to learn; and before any individual
human being can tell us the great secret, he must have lived the life
of humanity, the lives of all existing beings and even of all existing
things, which seem scarcely to deserve the name of beings; he must have
concentrated in himself the universe. There can therefore properly be
no religion centred about a man. A man, be he Jesus himself, cannot
attach the human spirit to himself as to a fixed point. Liberal
Protestants think that they have seen the last of the Strausses and
Renans and their destructive criticism, because they have admitted
once for all that Jesus was not a god, but criticism will object to
them that the non-supernatural Messiah that they cherish is himself
a pure figment of the imagination. According to the rationalistic
exegesis, the doctrine of Christ, like his life, belongs more or less
to the domain of legend. Jesus never so much as conceived an idea of
the redemption—the very conception that is which lies at the root of
Christianity; he never so much as conceived an idea of the Trinity. If
one may rely upon works which stand perhaps shoulder to shoulder with
that of Strauss—the works of F. A. Müller, of Professor Weiss, of M.
Havet—Jesus was a Jew with the spiritual limitations of a Jew. His
dominant idea was that the end of the world was at hand and that on a
new-created earth would soon be realized the national kingdom looked
for by the Jews in the form of an altogether terrestrial theocracy.
The end of the world being near, it was naturally not worth while
to set up an establishment on earth for the short time that it was
still to exist; one’s entire business was properly with penitence and
the amendment of one’s conduct, in order not to be devoured by fire
at the day of judgment and excluded from the kingdom to be founded
on the new-created earth. Moreover, Jesus preached neglect of the
state, of the administration of justice, of the family, of labour
and of property; in effect, of all the essential elements of social
life. Evangelical morality itself presents to the critics of this
school little more than a disorderly mixture of the precepts of Moses
on disinterested love with the doctrine of Hillel more or less well
founded on enlightened self-interest. The original element in the New
Testament consisted less in the logical coherence of its teachings
than in a certain unction in the language employed, in a persuasive
eloquence which often took the place of reasoning. All that Christ said
others had said before him, but not with the same accent. In effect,
German historical criticism at once professes the greatest admiration
for the numerous founders of Christianity and leads its followers a
long way from the ideal man conceived by the Neo-Christians as being
the man-God whom primitive Christians adored. There exists accordingly
no more reason to attribute an element of revelation or of sacred
authority to the New Testament than to the Vedas or to any other
religious book. If Christianity is a symbolic faith, the myths of India
may quite as well be adopted as a basis of symbolism as the myths of
the Bible. And contemporary Brahmaists with their eclecticism, confused
and mystic as it often is, must be regarded as even nearer to the truth
than the liberal Protestants who still look for shelter and salvation
nowhere but under the diminishing shadow of the cross.

      [60] See the author’s work on _la Morale d’Épicure et ses
      rapports avec les doctrines contemporaines_, p. 186.

       *       *       *       *       *

Abandoning, then, all effort to attribute a sacred authority to the
sacred books and to the Christian tradition, may one ascribe to them
at least a superior moral authority? Do they lend themselves in any
especial degree to such a purely æsthetic and moral symbolism as that
suggested by Mr. Arnold?

[Sidenote: Futility of Mr. Arnold’s method considered as an instrument
of historical criticism.]

A purely moral symbolism may be regarded from either of two points of
view: the concrete, which is that of history; or the abstract, which
is that of philosophy. Historically nothing could be more inexact than
Mr. Arnold’s method, which essentially consists in making a present
of the most refined conceptions of our epoch to primitive peoples. It
gives us to understand, for example, that the Javeh of the Hebrews
was not regarded as a perfectly definite person, a transcendent power
altogether distinct and separate from the world and manifesting
himself by acts of capricious volition, a king of the skies, a lord
of battles, bestowing on his people victory or defeat, abundance or
famine, sickness or health. It suffices to read one page of the Bible
or the New Testament to convince one’s self that a doubt as to the
personal existence of Javeh never for an instant crossed the Hebrew
mind. So be it, Mr. Arnold will say, but Javeh was in their eyes no
more, after all, than the personification of justice, because they
believed powerfully in justice. It would be more exact to say that
the Hebrews had not as yet a very philosophic notion of justice; that
they conceived it as an order received from without, a command which
it would be dangerous to disobey, a hostile will forcibly imposed
upon one’s own. Nothing could be more natural in the sequel than
to personify such a will. But is that precisely what we understand
nowadays by justice; and does it not really seem to Mr. Arnold himself
that he is playing on words, when he endeavours to make us believe
all that? Fear of the Lord is not justice. There are matters that one
cannot express in the form of legend when one has once really conceived
them—matters the true poetry of which consists in their very purity,
in their simplicity. To personify justice, to represent it as external
to ourselves under the form of a menacing power, is not to possess a
“high idea” of it; is not in the least, as Mr. Arnold phrases it, to
be aglow with it, illuminated by it; it is, on the contrary, not yet
really to have formed a conception of justice. What Mr. Arnold regards
as the sublimest expression of an altogether modern moral sentiment
is, on the contrary, a partial negation of it. Mr. Arnold’s aim, as
he says, is a “literary” criticism; but the literary method consists
in resetting the great works of human genius in the circumstances
among which they were conceived; in discovering in them the spirit of
the age in which they were written, and not of the present age. If we
endeavour to interpret history by the light of modern ideas we shall
never understand a jot of it. Mr. Arnold is pleasantly satirical at
the expense of those who find in the Bible allusions to contemporary
events, to such and such a modern custom, to such and such a dogma
unknown to primitive times. A commentator, he says, finds a prediction
of the flight to Egypt in the prophecy of Isaiah: “The Lord rideth
upon a swift cloud and shall come into Egypt”; this light cloud being
the body of Jesus born of a virgin. Another, more fantastic, perceives
in the words: “Woe unto them that draw up iniquity with cords of
vanity”—a malediction of God against church bells. That assuredly
is a singular method of interpreting the sacred texts, but at bottom
it is no more logical to look in the sacred texts for modern ideas,
good or evil, than to search them for the announcement of such and
such a distant event or for a commentary on such and such a trait of
contemporary manners. Really to practise the literary method—and the
scientific method at the same time—one must a little forget one’s
self, one’s nation, one’s century; one must live the life of past
times—must become a Greek when one reads Homer, a Hebrew when one
reads the Bible, and not desire that Racine should be a Shakespeare,
nor Boccaccio a St. Benedict, nor Jesus a free-thinker, nor Isaiah an
Epictetus or a Kant. All things and all ideas are appropriate in their
own times and circumstances. Gothic cathedrals are magnificent, our
small houses to-day are very comfortable; there is no reason why we
should not admire the one and inhabit the other; the only thing that is
really inexcusable is to be absolutely unwilling that cathedrals should
be what alone they are.

[Sidenote: Philosophical insufficiency of Mr. Arnold’s position.]

Considered not from the point of view of history but purely from
that of philosophy, Mr. Arnold’s doctrine is much more attractive,
for its aim is precisely to enable us to discover our own ideas in
the ancient books as in a mirror. Nothing could be better, but are
we really in want of this mirror? Do we really need to rediscover
our modern conceptions embodied in the form of myth and more or less
distorted in the process? Do we really need voluntarily to go back to
the state of mind of primitive peoples? Do we really need to dwell
upon the somewhat narrow conception that they possessed of justice and
of morality before we shall be capable of conceiving a justice more
generous in its proportions and a morality more worthy of its name?
Would it not be much the same sort of thing as for one who was teaching
children physics to begin by seriously inculcating the classic theory
of nature’s abhorrence of a vacuum, of immobility of the earth, etc.?
The authors of the Talmud in their naïve faith said that Javeh, filled
with veneration for the book which he had himself dictated, would
devote the first three hours of every day to a study of the sacred law.
The most orthodox Jews do not to-day oblige their God to this recurrent
period of meditation; might not one without danger permit mankind a
somewhat similar economy of time? Mr. Arnold, whose mind moves so
easily, although with so plentiful a lack of directness and of logic,
criticises somewhere or other those who feel a need of a foundation
of fable for their faith, a foundation of supernatural intervention
and marvellous legend, and he says that many religious men resemble
readers of romances or smokers of opium; the reality becomes insipid
to them, although it is really more grand than the fantastic world of
opium and romance. Mr. Arnold does not perceive that, if the reality
is, as he says, the greatest and most beautiful of things, we have no
further need of the legend of Christianity, not even interpreted as
he interprets it: the real world, and by the real world I understand
the moral not less than the physical universe, should prove abundantly
sufficient for us. Ithuriel, Mr. Arnold says, has punctured miracles
with his spear; and did he not at the same stroke puncture symbolism?
We prefer to see truth naked rather than tricked out in parti-coloured
vestments; to clothe truth is to degrade it. Mr. Arnold compares a too
absolute faith to intoxication; one might willingly compare Mr. Arnold
to Socrates, who could drain off more than any other guest at the table
without becoming intoxicated. Not to become intoxicated was, for the
Greeks, one of the prerogatives of the sage. With this reservation they
permitted him to drink, but in our days the sages make small use of the
permission; they admire Socrates without imitating him, and find that
sobriety is still the best means of keeping one’s head. One might say
as much to Matthew Arnold. The Bible with its scenes of massacre, of
rape, and of divine vengeance is in his judgment bread for the soul;
the soul can no more do without it than we can ourselves do without
eating. The reply is that he has himself proved it to be a dangerous
form of nourishment, and that it is sometimes better to fast than to
eat poison.

[Sidenote: Buddhism more deeply symbolic than Christianity.]

For the rest, if one persists in seeking in the sacred books of by-gone
ages for the expression of primitive morality, it is not in the
Bible, but rather in the Hindu books that a literary or philosophical
interpretation will find the most extraordinary example of moral
symbolism. The entire world appears to the Buddhist as the realization
of the moral law, since in his opinion beings take rank in the universe
according to their virtues or vices, mount or descend on the ladder of
life according to their moral elevation or abasement. Buddhism is in
certain respects an effort to find in morals a theory of the universe.

       *       *       *       *       *

[Sidenote: Dependence of religion upon morality.]

In spite of the partial lapses from logical consistency that have
been here pointed out in the theory of moral symbolism, there is one
conclusion that is logically insisted on in the books just examined,
and in especial Mr. Arnold’s book, namely: that the solidest support
of every religion is a more or less imperfect system of morals; that
the power of Christianity, as of Buddhism, has lain in its moral
injunctions, and that if one suppressed this moral injunction there
would nothing remain of the two great “universal” religions brought
forth by human intelligence. Religion serves, so to speak, as an
envelope for morality; it protects morality against the period of its
ultimate development and efflorescence, but when once moral beliefs
have gained strength enough they tend to protrude from this envelope,
like a flower bursting out of the bud. Some years ago what was at that
time called Independent Morality was much discussed; the defenders of
religion maintained that the fate of morality is intimately bound up
with it—that if morality were separated from religion it must decline.
They were perhaps right in pointing out the intimate connection between
morality and religion, but they were mistaken in maintaining that it
is the former that is dependent; it would be truer to say the precise
opposite, that it is religion that depends upon morality, that the
latter is the principal and the former the subordinate. The Ecclesiast
says somewhere, “He hath set the world in their heart.” It is for that
reason that man should first look into his own heart, and should first
of all believe in himself. Religious faith might more or less logically
issue out of moral faith, but could not produce the moral faith, and if
it should go counter to the moral faith it would condemn itself. The
religious spirit cannot therefore accommodate itself to the new order
of things except by abandoning, in the first place, all the dogmas
of a liberal faith, and then all the symbols of a more enlightened
faith and holding fast by the fundamental principle which constitutes
the life of religion and dominates its historical evolution; that
is to say, the moral sentiment of Protestantism in spite of all its
contradictions has really introduced into the world a new principle; it
is this, that conscience is its own judge, that individual initiative
should be substituted for objective authority.[61] Such a principle
includes as a logical consequence not only the suppression of real
dogmas and of mysteries, but also that of precise and determinate
symbols; of everything, in a word, which proposes to impose itself
upon the conscience as a ready-made truth. Protestantism unwittingly
contained in its own bosom the germ of the negation of every positive
religion that does not address itself exclusively and directly to
private judgment, to the moral sense of the individual. In our days
no one is willing to believe simply what he is told to believe; he
must accept it independently: he believes that the danger of private
judgment is only apparent, and that in the intellectual world, as in
the world of civil liberty, it is out of liberty that all authority
worthy of respect takes its rise. The revolution which tends thus
to replace a religious faith, founded on the authority of texts and
symbols, by a moral faith founded upon the right of private judgment
recalls the revolution accomplished three centuries ago by Descartes,
who substituted evidence and reasoning for authority. Humanity is
increasingly anxious to reason out its own beliefs, to see with its
own eyes. The truth is no longer exclusively locked up in temples;
it addresses itself to everybody, communicates with everybody, gives
everybody the right to act. In the cult of scientific truth everyone,
as in the early days of Christianity, is capable of officiating in
his turn; there are no seats reserved in the sanctuary, there is no
jealous God, or rather the temples of truth are those which each of
us rears in his own heart—temples which are no more truly Christian
than Hebrew or Buddhist. The absorption of religion into morality is
one with the dissolution of all positive and determinate religion, of
all traditional symbolism and of all dogmatism. Faith, said Heraclitus
profoundly, is a sacred malady, ἱερὰ νόσος. For us moderns it is no
longer a sacred malady, and it is one from which all of us wish to be
delivered and cured.

      [61] Toward the end of his life Luther felt an increasing
      discouragement and disquietude on the subject of the reform
      inaugurated by him: “It is by severe laws and by superstition,”
      he wrote with bitterness, “that the world desires to be guided.
      If I could reconcile it with my conscience I would labour
      that the Pope with all his abominations might become once
      more our master.” Responsibility to one’s own conscience was
      indeed Luther’s fundamental idea—the idea which justifies the
      Reformation in the eyes of history, as formerly in the eyes of
      its own author.




CHAPTER III.

DISSOLUTION OF RELIGIOUS MORALITY.

    I. The first durable element of religious morality:
      Respect—Alteration of respect by the addition of the
      notion of the fear of God and divine vengeance.

    II. Second durable element of religious morality:
      Love—Alteration of this element by the addition of
      ideas of grace, predestination, damnation—Caducous
      elements of religious morality—Mysticism—Antagonism
      of divine love and human love—Asceticism—Excesses
      of asceticism—Especially in the religions of the
      East—Conception of sin in the modern mind.

    III. Subjective worship and prayer—The notion of
      prayer from the point of view of modern science and
      philosophy—Ecstasy—The survival of prayer.


Having traced the dissolution of dogma and religious symbolism it is
appropriate to consider the fate of that system of religious morality
which rests upon dogma and upon faith. There are in religious morality
some durable elements and some caducous ones which stand out in sharper
and sharper opposition in the course of the progress of human society.
The two stable elements of religious morality which will occupy us
first are respect and love; these are the elements indeed of every
system of morality, those which are in nowise related to mysticism or
symbolism, and which tend progressively to part company with them.

       *       *       *       *       *

[Sidenote: Superiority of element of love over that of respect.]

I. Kant regarded respect or reverence as the moral sentiment _par
excellence_; the moral law, in his opinion, was a law of reverence
and not of love, and therein lay its pretensions to universality: for
if it had been a law of love, there would have been a difficulty in
imposing it upon all reasonable beings. I can insist on your respecting
me but not on your loving me. In the sphere of society Kant is right;
the law cannot provide that men shall love each other, but only that
they shall respect each other’s rights. But is the same thing true
in the sphere of pure morality—have not the two great “universal”
religions, Buddhism and Christianity, been right in regarding love
as the controlling principle in ethics? Respect is no more than the
beginnings of ideal morality; in the attitude of respect the soul
feels itself restricted, held in check, embarrassed. And what in
effect essentially is respect, but the ability to violate a right on
the one hand and on the other a right to go inviolable? Well, there
is another sentiment which does away with the very possibility of
violence and which therefore is even purer than respect, that is to
say love, and Christianity has so understood it. Be it remarked also
that respect is necessarily implied in a properly understood moral
love; love is superior to respect not because it suppresses it but
because it completes it. Genuine love inevitably presents itself under
the form of respect, but this conception of respect, abstractly taken,
is an empty form without content; and can be filled with love alone.
What one respects in the dignity of another person is—is it not?—a
personal power held in check, a sort of moral autonomy. It is possible
to conceive a cold hard respect that is not absolutely free from some
suggestion of mechanical necessity. What one loves, on the contrary,
in the dignity of another person is the element in his character which
beckons and welcomes one. Is it possible to conceive a cold love?
Respect is a species of check, love is an outleap of emotion; respect
is the act by which will meets will; in love there is no sense of
opposition, of calculation, of hesitation; one gives one’s self simply
and entirely.

[Sidenote: The mistake of Christianity.]

Let it not therefore be made a reproach to Christianity that it sees in
love the very principle of relationship between reasonable beings, the
very principle of the moral law and of justice. Paul says with reason
that he who loves others fulfils the law. In effect, the commandments:
thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not
covet, and the rest, were summed up in: thou shalt love thy neighbor
as thyself. The defect of Christianity—a defect from which Buddhism
is free—is that the love of men is there conceived as disappearing,
in the last analysis, in the love of God. Man is not beloved except in
God and for God, and human society as a whole possesses no foundation
nor rule of life except in the relationship of men to God. Well, if
the love of man for man, properly understood, actually implies respect
for rectitude, the same thing cannot be said with the same degree
of emphasis for the love of man for God, and in God’s sight. The
conception of a society founded on the love of God contains the seeds
of theocratic government with all its abuses.

Moreover, if in Christian morality love of man resolves itself, in the
last resort, into love of God, love of God is always adulterated with
fear; the Old Testament insists upon it with positive complacency. The
fear of the Lord plays an important rôle in the celestial sanction,
and justice also, which is essential to Christianity, and which more
or less definitely antagonizes and sometimes even paralyzes it. It is
thus that, after having traced the sentiment of respect itself and of
justice to a foundation in love, Christianity suddenly reinstates the
former, re-endows it with precedence and that under its most primitive
and savage form—the form of fear in man and vengeance in God.

[Sidenote: Respect for the welfare of sentient beings in general the
essence of morality.]

This sanction, we have seen, is a special form of the notion of a
Providence. Those who believe in a special Providence distributing good
and evil admit, in the last resort, that this distribution takes place
in conformity with the conduct of the receivers and the sentiments of
approval or disapproval that that conduct inspires in the divinity. The
idea of a Providence, in the natural course of its development, becomes
therefore one with the notion of distributive justice, and this latter,
on the other hand, becomes one with the idea of divine sanction. The
idea of divine sanction has been conceived up to this point as one of
the essential elements of morality, and it seems, at first glance,
that religion and morality here coincide, that their respective needs
here unite, or rather that morality reaches completeness only by
the aid of religion. The notion of distributive justice naturally
involves the notion of a celestial distributor, but we have seen in
a preceding work that the notion of a sanction properly so called,
and the notion of a divine penal code, have in reality no essential
connection with morality; that on the contrary they possess a character
of immorality and irrationality; and that thus the religion of the
vulgar in no respect coincides with the highest morality, but that, on
the contrary, the very fundamental idea of the religion of the vulgar
is opposed to morality.[62] The founders of religion believe that the
most sacred law is the law of the strongest; but the idea of force
logically resolves itself into the relation between power on the one
hand and resistance on the other, and physical force is always, in
the sphere of morals, a confession of weakness. The _summum bonum_
therefore can contain no suggestion of force of this especial kind.
If human law, if civil law be condemned to rely upon a backing of
physical force, it is therein precisely that it lies under the reproach
of being merely civil and human. The case stands otherwise with the
moral law, which is immutable, eternal, and in some sort inviolable;
and in the presence of an inviolable law one can in no sense assume an
attitude even of suppressed violence. Force is powerless against the
moral law, and the moral law has therefore no need on its own side of
a show of force. The sole sanction of which the moral law stands in
need, the author has said elsewhere, as against the man who supposes
himself to have abrogated it, is and ought to be the mere fact of its
continued existence face to face with him, rising up before him ever
anew, as the giant Hercules believed himself to have vanquished rose
ever stronger to his embrace. To possess the attribute of eternity in
the face of violence is the only revenge that goodness personified or
not, under the figure of a god, can permit itself as against those who
violate it.[63] In human societies one of the distinguishing traits
of high civilization is slowness to take offence; with the progress of
knowledge one finds less and less ground for indignation in the conduct
of one’s fellow-men. When the being involved is by definition the very
personification of love the idea of offence becomes ridiculous; it is
impossible for any philosophic mind to admit the bare conception of
offending God, or of drawing down upon one, in the Biblical phrase,
his anger or his vengeance. Fear of an external sanction, or of any
sanction other than that of conscience, is therefore an element that
the progress of the modern mind tends to exclude from morality. It is
in vain for the Bible to say that fear of the Lord is the beginning
of wisdom; morality does not truly begin until fear ceases to exist,
fear being, as Kant said, pathological, not moral. Fear of hell may
have possessed in former times a certain social utility, but it is
essentially a stranger in modern society, and, _a fortiori_, will be
in the society of the future. Moreover, respect for the happiness
of people in general is becoming less and less adulterated by any
admixture of fear. This respect, mingled with love and even engendered
by love, is coming to be an altogether moral, and an altogether
philosophic sentiment, purified of anything in the nature of mysticism,
and in the best sense religious.

      [62] See the author’s _Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation ni
      sanction_, p. 188, etc.

      [63] “If God had consciously created the human will of such
      essential perversity as to find its natural expression in
      thwarting Him, He would be impotent in the face of it; could
      only show Himself compassionate; could only regret His own act
      in creating it. His duty would not be to punish mankind but
      to the utmost possible degree to lighten their sufferings, to
      show Himself gentle and good directly in proportion to this
      evil; and the damned, if they were truly incurable, would be in
      greater need of the joys of heaven than the elect themselves.
      Either the sinner can be reclaimed; and in that event hell
      would be nothing more than an immense school, an immense house
      of correction for preparing the culpable with the utmost
      possible rapidity for heaven; or the sinner is incorrigible,
      is analogous to an incurable maniac (which is absurd), and
      then he is eternally to be pitied and a supreme Goodness would
      endeavour to compensate him for his misery by every imaginable
      means by showering upon him every bliss that he was capable of
      enjoying. Turn it as one will, the dogma of hell stands thus in
      direct opposition to the truth.

      “For the rest, by the very act of damning a soul, that is to
      say shutting it out forever from His presence, or, in terms
      less mystical, excluding it forever from a knowledge of the
      truth, would not God in turn be shutting Himself out from the
      soul, limiting His own power, and so to speak in some measure
      damning Himself also? The penalty of the damnation would fall
      in part on Him who inflicted it. As to the physical torment
      of which theologians speak, interpreted metaphorically, it
      becomes even more inadmissible. Instead of damning mankind God
      ought eternally to gather about Him those who have strayed
      from Him; it is for the culpable above all others that, as
      Michel Angelo said, God opened wide his arms upon the cross. We
      represent Him as looking down upon the sinning multitude from
      too great a height for them ever to be anything to Him but the
      incarnation of misfortune. Well, just in so far as they are
      unfortunate must they not logically be the especial favourites
      of divine goodness?”—_Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation ni
      sanction_, p. 189.

[Sidenote: Unstable equilibrium of the Christian notion of absolute
love.]

II. Having seen how readily the notion of respect became corrupt in
Christianity, let us consider the fate of the notion of love. If the
importance which it gave to this principle constitutes the chief
honour of Christianity is not the God of the Christians, nevertheless,
conceived in a manner inconsistent with the very essence of His
being? The God of Christianity, or at least of orthodox Christianity,
is a conception of absolute love which involves a contradiction and
the destruction of all true fraternity. For the love affirmed to be
absolute is in fact limited, since it has to do with a world that
is marred by evil, metaphysical, sensible, moral. The love is not
even universal, since it is conceived as an especial grace more or
less arbitrarily bestowed or withheld, according to the dogma of
predestination. The doctrine of grace, round which theology has played
with such excess of subtlety, completes the highest principle of
morality, the principle of love by the addition of the grossest notion
of anthropomorphism: that of favour. God is always conceived on the
model of absolute kings who accord favour and disfavour capriciously;
one of the most vulgar of sociomorphic relations being chosen, as one
perceives, as the true analogue of God’s relation to His creatures. The
two elements of the notion of grace are antagonistic to each other.
Absolute love is in its nature universal, favouritism is in its nature
particular. There are, according to theology, a certain number of
beings who are excluded from universal love; the sentence of damnation
is in its very essence such an exclusion. Thus understood, divine
charity is incompatible with true fraternity, with true charity; for
true charity God does not possess—sets us no example of it. If we
believe that God hates and damns, it will be in vain for Him to forbid
personal vengeance. We shall inevitably espouse His hatreds, and the
very principle of vengeance will find its support and its highest
realization in Him. When St. Paul said: “Let thyself not conquer by
the instrumentality of evil, but overcome evil by goodness,” the
precept was admirable. Unhappily God was the first to violate it, to
decline to overcome evil by good. Do as I bid thee and not as I myself
do is the very spirit of Christian teachings. Is it not in the midst
of a sort of hymn to charity and forgiveness that the characteristic
phrase of St. Paul occurs: “If thine enemy have hunger give him to eat
and thou shalt heap coals of fire upon his head.” Thus the apparent
forgiveness becomes transmuted into a refined form of vengeance, which
the divine sanction serves only to make more terrible, and which, under
the cloak of benefits, nay even of caresses, pours upon the head of
one’s enemy an avenging flame; one’s very charity sets the torch to the
fires of hell. This indelible stain of barbarism on the page of love,
this atavistic animal instinct of vengeance ascribed to God, shows the
dangerous side of the theological element introduced into the morality
of love.

[Sidenote: Conflict between divine and human love.]

Another danger to which a religion founded upon a divine love is
subject is mysticism; a sentiment destined to an increasing antagonism
with the modern mind and condemned, therefore, ultimately to disappear.
The heart of man, in spite of its fertility in giving birth to passions
of all sorts, has nevertheless always concentrated itself upon a small
number of objects which find their own level. God and the world are
two antagonists between which our sensibility is portioned out. One
or the other of them inevitably receives the greater share. In all
times religious sects have felt a possible opposition between absolute
love of God and love of man. In a number of religions God has shown
himself jealous of the affection devoted to others, and thus in a
sense stolen from Him. He was not content with the superfluity of the
human heart, He was bent on appropriating the soul in its entirety.
Among the Hindus, as we know, the very essence of supreme piety lies
in detachment from the world, in a life of solitude in the midst
of great forests, in the rejection of all earthly affection, in a
mystical indifference in regard to all mortal things. In the western
world, when Christianity had made its way, this thirst of solitude,
this home-sickness for the desert seized once more upon the soul, and
thousands of men fled the faces of their fellows, quitting their
families and their homes, renouncing all other love but that of God,
feeling themselves more intimately in His presence when they were
distant from all beings else but Him. The whole of the Middle Ages
were tormented by this antagonism between divine and human love. In
the end, with the immense majority of men, human love carried the day.
It could not be otherwise; the very Church could not preach complete
detachment for everybody under pain of having nobody to preach to. But
among scrupulous and strenuous souls the opposition between divine and
human love manifested itself in all the circumstances of life. One
remembers Mme. Périer’s account of Pascal. She was surprised at times
that her brother repulsed her, became suddenly cold to her, turned away
from her when she approached to soothe him in his pain; she began to
think he did not love her, she complained of it to her sister, but it
was in vain to try to undeceive her. Finally the enigma was explained
on the very day of Pascal’s death by Domat, one of his friends. Mme.
Périer learned that in Pascal’s opinion the most innocent and fraternal
friendship is a fault for which one habitually fails to take one’s self
sufficiently to task, because one underestimates its magnitude. “By
fomenting and suffering these attachments to grow up, one is giving
to someone else some portion of what belongs to God alone; one is in
a manner robbing Him of what is to Him the most precious thing in all
the world.” It would be impossible better to express the mystical
antagonism between divine and human love. This principle occupied so
prominent a place in the foreground of Pascal’s mind that, the more
readily to keep it always before him, he wrote with his own hand upon
a piece of paper: “It is unjust in me to permit anyone to form an
attachment for me, however voluntarily, and with whatever pleasure
they may do it. In the long run I should deceive them, for I belong
to nobody but to God, and have not the wherewithal to satisfy a human
affection.... I should therefore be culpable, if I should allow anyone
to love me, if I should attract people toward me.... They should pass
their lives and employ their effort in pleasing and searching for God.”
The instant God is conceived as a person and not as a simple ideal,
there inevitably arises in souls tinged with mysticism, a rivalry
between His claims and those of other persons. How can the Absolute
admit any human being to a share of what essentially is His? He must
dwell in as absolute a solitude at the bottom of man’s heart as on the
height of heaven.

[Sidenote: Exists at the present day.]

The rivalry between divine and human love perceived by the Jansenists,
as by many of the early Christians and by mystics generally, exists
even to-day for a large number of men. In certain religious houses
any excessively affectionate demonstration toward their parents is
forbidden to children, and a fraternal or filial kiss is made the basis
of a case of conscience. If Protestant education and custom are not at
one on this point with Catholic education and custom, the reason is
that Protestantism, as has already been observed, has no talent for
ultimate logical consequences. Catholicism, on the contrary, holds
logic in scrupulous respect. To cite but one example: is not the
interdiction of marriage in the case of the clergy a logical deduction
from the conception of a religion which is founded on the theory of the
fall of man, and whose purpose in the world is essentially anti-carnal?
Love for a woman is too absorbing, too exclusive, to coexist in the
heart of a priest, side by side with an undiminished love for God.
Of all the sentiments of the soul, love is the one which fills it
most nearly to the limit of its capacity. It is, in this respect, in
diametric opposition to the theological sentiment which consists in the
recognition of a sort of subjective void and personal insufficiency.
Two lovers are of all the world the beings who are most sufficient unto
themselves, they are of all the world those who experience least the
need of God. Well, for mystics, love that is not given to God is love
wasted. The lightest veil is enough to screen them once and forever
from the “intelligible sun.” It is of the very essence of such a God to
be relegated to some region above the world, exiled in a manner from
the soul of man; there are regions of love in which He does not exist
and never will exist. He calls me, and if I do not turn my face in His
direction precisely, I lose Him.

[Sidenote: Conflict between mysticism and egoism.]

The absolute detachment of the mystic leads to another consequence
which is equally in opposition to modern tendencies; it treats, that
is to say, as an absolute zero a being who has at least the value of
unity, to wit: the ego. If I aim at the welfare of all sentient beings
indiscriminatingly, I aim also in some measure at my own, who am one
of them; and moreover, it is for my own that I can labour to best
advantage. This ego counts for something in this world, it is a unit
in the sum. The pure love inculcated by mysticism, on the contrary,
lets the ego go for nothing, after the manner of the muleteer, who,
in reckoning his mules, always forgot to count the one he was sitting
on; the missing mule never turned up except when he dismounted, so
that he ultimately resolved to go forward on foot. The transcendent
and chimerical morality of mysticism might be compared to a purely
humanitarian theory of politics; it is indeed even more abstract.
Patriotism, no doubt, leans upon a delusion when it regards one’s
native country as the centre of the world, but does not humanitarianism
lean not upon one but upon a whole series of illusions? In the item
of illusions here below one must put up with the least false and most
useful. Well, it is probably not wholly without utility that each
nation in the universe should act for itself; if each should attempt
to act exclusively for the universe as a whole and for the love of the
whole, either it would not act at all or it would conceive the future
of the universe practically on the model of its own future and would
commit an uninterrupted succession of mistakes. Very frequently in this
world unconscious and indirect collaboration is more efficacious than
that which is conscious and direct. Men often do more for the best aims
of humanity by directing their attention in a spirit of rivalry toward
needs comparatively immediate but which for that very reason stimulate
their efforts and their hopes, than by uniting for the attainment of
an object so distant that it discourages them. In morals and politics
one has not only to hit upon the best means of combining the forces
of humanity, but also upon what is the best means of exciting human
effort; and on that score there is something to be said even for the
love of the parish in which one is born. One’s parish is at least a
definite object: one knows where it is, one cannot lose one’s way, one
may entertain a hope, nay even a certitude, of reaching it, and hope
and certitude are great allies. And the same is true of self-love and
love for those with whom one identifies one’s self. It is precisely
this that mysticism ignores and by that means puts itself in opposition
to the scientific spirit. For mysticism there is no compromise possible
between the fact and its ideal which denies the fact. Logically
mysticism ought to address its efforts toward total annihilation, much
after the manner of the followers of Schopenhauer and of Hartmann.
It would be better for the world to go off in smoke, so to speak; to
become sublimated like the corpses which the worshippers of the sun
used to expose to its rays, to be converted, as far as possible, into
vapour.

[Sidenote: Love of God on the decline.]

Excess destroys itself. If pleasure ends in disgust, mysticism
possesses also its seamy side in a certain disenchantment with God
himself, in a certain home-sickness for unknown joys, in that sadness
peculiar to the cloister for which Christians were obliged to invent a
new name, in the Latin language, to designate—_acedia_. When in the
Middle Ages all one’s preoccupations and affections were turned toward
heaven, human tenderness was impoverished to precisely that extent. The
intellectual and moral evolution of our days has moved in a contrary
direction; love of God is on the decline. Love of mankind, on the
contrary, and love of living beings in general, is on the increase. A
sort of substitution of the one for the other is taking place. Does
it not seem as if earth’s turn had come, and that much of the force
previously spent in futile adoration, devoted toward the clouds, is
being more and more practically employed in the service of humanity?

[Sidenote: Love of man to take its place.]

Formerly, ideas of human fraternity and loving equality were promoted
in especial by the Christians. The explanation is simple: God was
conceived by them as an actual father, a _genitor_; men seemed to
the early Christians all of one family, having a common ancestor. So
that divine love and human love were regarded by them as inseparably
bound up with each other. It is to be added that Christianity, which
made its way into the world through the lower classes of society,
had everything to gain by giving prominence to notions of fraternity
and equality; it was by this means among others that it conciliated
the masses, who were for a long time its main support. But from
the moment it found itself able to rely upon the higher classes of
society, how quickly it changed its language is well known, and at
the present moment the position of Christianity is precisely opposite
to that which it occupied in the ancient world. Ardent advocates of
the ideas of fraternity are often adversaries of religion, are often
free-thinkers, sometimes decided atheists. The system of thought which
founded the love of men for each other upon a community of origin is
almost universally rejected. Social doctrines, which in former times
were so often based upon the element of socialism in the New Testament,
are nowadays being formed and inculcated in complete independence of
religious faith and often in positive antagonism to any religious
faith whatever. Religion sometimes presents itself as an additional
obstacle, simply, to the brotherhood of man, in that it creates more
stubborn divisions among them than differences of class or even of
language. By an inevitable evolution religion has to-day come to
represent among certain nations the spirit of caste and intolerance,
and consequently of jealousy and enmity, whereas non-religion has come
to be the recognized champion of social equality, of tolerance, and of
fraternity. Behind God, rightly or wrongly, as behind their natural
defender, the partisans of the old order of things, of privilege and
hereditary enmities, have ranged themselves; in the breast of the
faithful a mystical love for God corresponds to-day as in other days
to an anathema and malediction on mankind. It was long ago remarked
that those whose blessing is most fluent can also show themselves at
need the most fluent to curse; the most mystical are the most violent.
Nothing can equal the violence of the gentle Jesus himself when he
is speaking of the Pharisees, whose doctrines possessed so close an
analogy to his own. Whoever believes himself to have felt the breath
of God upon his forehead becomes bitter and obstinate in his relations
with mere men; he is no longer one of them. So that the notion of the
divine, of the superhuman tends toward that of the antinatural and
antihuman.

[Sidenote: And also love of family.]

The aim of progress in modern societies is to domesticate peace
within their limits as well as without, to suppress mysticism, and to
concentrate upon the real universe, present or to come, the whole body
of our affections; to bind our hearts together in so intimate a union
that they shall be sufficient unto themselves and unto each other, and
that the human world, magnified by the eyes of love, may gather to
itself the totality of things. In the first place the love of family,
which scarcely existed at all in ancient times, and which in the Middle
Ages was almost entirely absorbed by the conception of authority and of
subordination, can scarcely be said to have acquired before our days
a considerable hold on human life. It is only since the eighteenth
century and the spread of the theory of equality that the father of a
family, in especial in France, has ceased to consider himself as a sort
of irresponsible sovereign, and begun to treat his wife in some sort as
his equal and to exercise over his children no more than the minimum of
possible authority. Whenever women shall receive an education almost
equivalent to that given to men, the moral equality between them and
men will have been consecrated, and as love is always more complete and
more durable between beings who consider each other as morally equal,
it follows that the love of family will increase, will draw to itself
a greater proportion of the desires and aspirations of the individual.
In positive opposition to religion, which has undertaken to combat the
love of woman by restraining it within narrow limits, the love of woman
has attained little by little an intensity that it never possessed in
ancient times: it suffices to read our poets to become convinced of
it, and it will continue to increase with the intellectual development
of women, which will make a closer and more complete union between men
and women possible than exists at present. The association of man and
woman being capable thus of becoming in a manner a sort of intellectual
association and fellowship, it will result in a fertility of a new
species: love will no longer act upon the intelligence solely as the
most powerful of stimulants, it will contribute positive elements
hitherto unknown. It is impossible to predict the sort of work that
the combined labour of man and woman will produce when they possess
a preparation for it that will be practically upon both sides equal.
Some hint of what one means may be gathered from examples actually
under one’s eyes. In the present century men and women of talent are
tending to come into closer relations with each other; and I might
cite the names of Michelet and Mme. Michelet, of John Stuart Mill
and his wife, of Lewes and George Eliot, and other names besides.
But not to give an undue prominence to great names like these, which
are after all exceptions in the human race, it is not too much to
assert that from the very top of the social ladder to the bottom the
family tends increasingly to become a unity, a more and more perfect
organism in which man will one day find scope for all of his powers
and capabilities. The importance of the family increases, as that of
the city and of the despotic tutelage of the state decreases. This
importance, which is almost non-existent in purely military societies
(of which Lacedæmon may serve as the accomplished exemplar), becomes
greater and greater in free and industrial societies such as those of
the future, and thus there opens a new field for human activity and
sensibility. The love of men and women for each other and of both for
their children, heightened by the growing sentiment of equality, is
destined in the author’s judgment to create a new and non-mystical
sort of religion, the worship of the family. If a cult for the gods
of the hearth was one of the earliest religions, perhaps it will also
be actually the last: the family hearth possesses in and of itself an
element of sacredness, of religion, since it binds together as about a
common centre beings so diverse in origin and sex. And thus the modern
family, founded on the law of equality, seems by its very spirit,
and by the sentiments which it excites, to be in growing opposition
to religious mysticism. The true type of the priest, whatever
Protestantism may say, is the solitary man, the missionary here below,
devoted body and soul to God; whereas the type of the practical
philosopher and the modern sage is a loving, thinking, labouring man,
devoted to those who are dear to him.

[Sidenote: And love of country.]

A similar antagonism may be seen between the sentiment of mysticism
and of allegiance to the state. The citizen who knows that the fate of
his country lies in his arms, who loves his country with an active and
sincere love, is a worshipper in a social religion. Great politicians
have almost always been large and liberal minds. The ancient republics
were comparatively non-religious for their time; the disappearance
of monarchy coincides in general, in the history of mankind, with
enfeeblement of faith. When everybody shall feel himself as equally and
truly a citizen as anybody else, and shall be able to devote himself
with an equal love to the good of the state, there will no longer be
so great a store of unemployed activity, of surplus sensibility lying
ready to the hand of mysticism. For the rest, let us magnify a little
the sphere of human activity; not only the family and the state are
nowadays demanding an increasingly large share of one’s attention and
affection, but the human race itself is coming to be each day more and
more intimately present to the mind of each of us. We find it more
and more difficult even in thought to isolate ourselves, to become
absorbed either in ourselves, or in God. The human world has become
infinitely more human than formerly; all the bounds which separated
men from each other (religion, language, nationality, race) are
regarded already by superior men as artificial. The human race itself
is coming to be recognized as a part only of the animal kingdom, the
entire world claims the attention of science, offers itself to our love
and opens for the devotees of mysticism the perspective of a species
of universal fraternity. Just in so far as the universe thus grows
larger, it becomes less and less insufficient in our eyes; and this
surplus of love, which formerly mounted toward heaven in search of some
transcendent resting place, finds ample room upon the surface of the
earth and of heavenly bodies not unknown to astronomy. If the mystical
tendency of the human mind be not destined completely to disappear, if
it possesses any element of permanency, it will at least change its
direction, and indeed, little by little is changing it. Christians were
in no sense wrong in finding society in ancient times too narrow and
the ancient world too cabined and confined under its dome of crystal;
the very reason for the existence of Christianity lay in this vicious
conception of society and of nature. To-day the one thing needful is
to magnify the world till it shall satisfy the needs of man; until
an equilibrium be established between the universe and the human
heart. The aim of science is not to extinguish the need to love which
constitutes so considerable an element of the religious sentiment, but
to supply that need with an actually existing object; its function is
not to put a check upon the outleap of human affection but to justify
it.

[Sidenote: But the love of a personal God must be distinguished in all
this from love of the ideal God.]

And remark, also, that if the love of a personal God mystically
conceived tends to become dim in modern societies, the same is not
true of the love of an ideal God conceived as the practical type of
conduct. The ideal God, in effect, in no sense exists in opposition
to the world, He surpasses it simply; He is at bottom identical with
the progress of human thought which, with its point of departure in
brute fact, outstrips the actual and foresees and prepares the way
for perpetual progress. In human life the real and the ideal are
harmonized, for life as a whole both is and becomes. Whoever says life,
says evolution; and evolution is the Jacob’s ladder resting both on
heaven and on earth; at the base of it we are brutes, at the summit
of it we are gods, so that religious sentiment cannot be said so much
to be in opposition to science and philosophy as to complete them;
or rather, it is at bottom identical with the spirit that animates
them. We have spoken of religion as science,—in its beginnings as
unconscious science; in the same way science may be called religion
headed back toward reality; headed, that is to say in the normal
direction. Religion says to the human race: Bind yourselves together
into a single whole; science shows the human race that all mankind are
inevitably parts of a single whole already, and the teaching of the two
is practically one.

[Sidenote: Summary.]

In effect there is taking place a certain substitution in our
affections; we are coming to love God in man, the future in the
present, the ideal in the real. The man of evolution is precisely the
man-God of Christianity. And this love of the ideal harmonized with the
love of humanity, instead of finding its vent in vain contemplation and
ecstasy, will fill the limbs with energy. We shall love God all the
more that He will be, so to speak, the work of our own hands. And if
there be really at the bottom of the human heart some indestructible
element of mysticism, it will be employed as an important factor in the
service of evolution; our heart will go out to our ideas, and we shall
adore them in proportion as we shall realize them. Religion having
become the purest of all things—pure love of the ideal—will at the
same time have become the realest and in appearance the humblest of all
things—labour.

       *       *       *       *       *

[Sidenote: Mysticism and asceticism.]

The natural and practical complement of mysticism is asceticism; and
asceticism is another of the elements of religious morality that are
becoming daily feebler in the presence of the modern spirit.

[Sidenote: Asceticism in the good and the bad sense.]

Austerity is of two kinds, the one quite mystical in origin, despising
art, beauty, science; the other founded on a certain moral stoicism,
a certain respect for one’s self. The latter is in no sense ascetic,
it is composed for the most part of the very love for science and art,
but it is the highest art only that it loves, and science for science’s
sake that it pursues. The excess of austerity, to which religions have
so often led, bears the same relation to virtue that avarice does to
economy. Austerity alone does not constitute a merit or an element of
superiority. Life may be much more gentle, more social, better on many
accounts among a people of loose manners like the ancient Greeks, than
among a people who regard existence as hard and dry, and who make it so
by the brutality of their faith and ignore the lightening of the burden
of life that lies in smiles and tears. One would rather live with
prodigals than with misers. Avarice, however, which may be regarded
in the life of a people or of a family as a state of transition, is
economically and morally superior to prodigality. The same may be said
of excessive rigour. Excessive rigour and avarice are defects which
are rendered tolerable by their consequences, which impoverish life
in order subsequently, with a freer hand, to enrich it. It is better
for the race if not always so for the individual to be economical to
excess than to dissipate its resources intemperately. An impulse held
in check gathers force. Austerity, like avarice, is a means of defence
and of protection, a weapon. Conquerors have often in the course of
history been the sons of misers who have amassed treasure and blood for
their benefit. From time to time it is good to regard one’s self as an
enemy, and to live and sleep in a coat of mail. For the rest, there
are temperaments that can be held in check by nothing lighter than
bars of iron, that find no mean between pure water and pure alcohol;
between a bed of roses and a crown of thorns; between moral law and
military discipline; between a moralist and a corporal. Still, one
must not represent such a state of mind at least as ideal. The ascetic
hates himself; but one must hate nobody, not even one’s self; one must
understand all things and regulate them. Hatred of self springs from
feebleness of will; whoever is gifted with self-control need not hate
himself. Instead of giving one’s self a bad name one’s duty is to make
one’s self worthy of a better. There may well be a certain legitimate
element of rigour, of inner discipline, in every system of morality;
but this discipline should be reasonable, rationally directed toward
an end which explains and justifies it: one’s business is not to break
the body but to fashion it, to bend it. The savant, for example,
should aim to develop his brain, to refine his nervous system, to
reduce his circulatory and nutritive system to their lowest terms. You
may call that asceticism if you like, but it is a fertile, a useful
asceticism; it is at bottom a moral hygiene simply—which ought to be
made a part of physical hygiene. A surgeon knows that he must lead a
severe and continent life, or his hand will lose its cunning. The very
condition of his being able to aid other people is that he in a measure
suffer privation himself; he must choose. And to make this choice
he experiences no need of a religious injunction, he requires only
the voice of conscience. It suffices for him to know enough of moral
hygiene to foresee the distant results of his conduct and to possess
a sufficient measure of firmness to be self-consistent. It is after
this fashion that, in plotting out one’s life according to scientific
laws, one may regulate it, may render it almost as hard as that of
the most self-denying monk. Every profession that is freely chosen is
in the nature of a self-imposed discipline. As to the choice of no
profession, as to voluntary idleness—that is in and of itself immoral
and necessarily leads to immorality, whatever may be the religion that
one holds.

[Sidenote: Asceticism results in a preoccupation with sin.]

The ultimate consequence of excessive rigourism is morbid preoccupation
with sin: an obsession which, with the fear of the millennium, is one
of the greatest of the futile tortures that have afflicted humanity.
It is as dangerous for man to magnify his vices as his virtues; to
believe one’s self a monster possesses no greater exemption from evil
consequences than to believe one’s self perfect. Sin in itself, and
philosophically considered, is a conception difficult to reconcile
with the modern idea of scientific determinism, which, when it has
explained everything, goes far, if not toward justifying everything, at
least toward pardoning everything. Neither the pangs nor the vanity of
sin are permissible to us nowadays when we are hardly certain really
that our own sins belong to us. Temptation comes to us in the guise of
the reawaking of an hereditary appetite, handed down to us not only
from the first man, but from the ancestors of the first man, or more
accurately from life itself, from the universe, from the God who is
immanent in the world or who transcends it, and has created it; it is
not the devil that tempts us, it is God. Like Jacob, of whom we were
speaking a moment ago, we must vanquish God, must subject life to
thought, must give the victory to the higher forms of life, as against
the lower. If we are wounded in this struggle, if we are branded with
the mark of sin, if we mount haltingly up the steps of goodness, we
ought not to be immeasurably terrified: the essential thing is to go
upward. Temptation is not in and of itself a blot, it may be even
an emblem of nobility so long as one does not yield to it. Our first
fathers were not subject to temptation, properly so called, because
they yielded to all their desires, because they made no struggle
against them. Sin or moral evil is explicable: first by the antagonism
between instinct and reflection; second, by the antagonism between
egoistic instincts and altruistic instincts. This double antagonism
between instinct and conscious purpose, between egoism and altruism,
is a necessary incident of self-knowledge and a condition of progress:
to know one’s self is to be aware more or less uneasily of a manifold,
and succession of inconsistent desires of which the moving equilibrium
constitutes life itself; self-knowledge, and knowledge in general, is
the equivalent of temptation. Life is in some sort always sin, for one
cannot eat, one cannot even breathe without some measure of affirmation
of low and egoistic instincts. Moreover asceticism logically leads
nowhere, to negation of life; the most thorough-going ascetics are the
Yoghis of India, who attain the point of living without air or food and
of going down alive into the tomb.[64] And in believing himself thus to
have realized absolute renunciation, what the ascetic actually realized
is complete and perfect egoism, for the last drops of vegetative life
which flow in his veins circulate for him alone and not a shiver of his
heart is directed beyond himself; by impoverishing and annihilating his
life, he has suppressed the generosity that fulness of life produced;
in his endeavour to kill sin he has slaughtered charity. The real moral
and religious ideal does not consist in denying one’s self everything
in order to deny one’s self what is sinful. There is nothing absolutely
evil in us, except excess; when we apply the knife to our hearts, we
should have but one aim, the one which the gardener has in view in
pruning trees, to increase our real power. Our manifold desires should
all be satisfied at one time or another; we should take example from
the mother who forces herself to eat that she may watch to the end at
the bedside of her dying child. Whoever purposes to live for others
besides himself, will find no time to sulk; for whoever possesses a
heart sufficiently great no function in life is impure. Every moral
rule should be a reconciliation between egoism and altruism, original
sin and ideal sanctity; and to accomplish this reconciliation it
suffices to show that each of our manifold and mutually exclusive
desires, if carried to the extreme, contradicts itself; that our
desires need each other, that when nature endeavours to rise above
herself she inevitably falls headlong. To govern one’s self means to
reconcile all parties. Ormuzd and Ahriman, spirit and nature, are
not so hostile to each other as seems to be believed, and either of
them indeed is powerless without the other. They are two gods whose
origin is the same, they are immortal, and for immortals some means of
accommodation must be found. Complete and unremunerated sacrifice never
can be adopted as a rule of life; never can be more than a sublime
conception, a spark in some individual existence, consuming the fuel it
feeds upon and then disappearing and leaving behind, face to face, the
two great principles, a conscious reconciliation of which constitutes
the moral mean.

      [64] The fact has been verified by the English authorities and
      has been commented on by the physiologist W. Preyer (_Über die
      Erforschung des Lebens_, Jena, and _Sammlung physiologischer
      Abhandlungen_). Yoghis who have attained the highest degree of
      perfection, and are insensible to cold and to heat and have
      contracted, by a series of experiments, the habit of breathing
      almost not at all, have been buried alive and resuscitated at
      the end of some weeks. When they were reawakened a heightening
      of the temperature was noticed as in the case of the reawaking
      of hibernating mammals, and it is indeed to the phenomena of
      hibernation that this strange voluntary suspension of animation
      most closely approaches—this mystical return to a life merely
      vegetative, this absorption in the bosom of the unconscious,
      where the Yoghis hopes to find God. As a preliminary discipline
      the Yoghis diminishes little by little the quantity of air and
      light necessary to his life; he lives in a cell which is lit
      and ventilated by no more than a single chink; he minimizes all
      movement in order to minimize the necessity of respiration;
      he does not speak except to repeat to himself twelve thousand
      times a day the mystic name of Om; he remains for hours
      together motionless as a statue. He practises breathing over
      again and again the same body of air, and the longer the
      period between inspiration and expiration, the greater his
      sanctity! Finally he carefully seals all the openings of his
      body with wax and cotton and closes the opening of the throat
      with the tongue, which certain incisions permit him to fold
      over backward, and finally falls into a lethargy in which the
      movements of respiration may be suspended without the thread of
      life positively being severed.

[Sidenote: Results a priori from the nature of ideas.]

The very nature of the conceptions confirms what we have just said
respecting temptation and sin. Directly or indirectly, every idea
is a suggestion, an incitement to action; it tends even to take
exclusive possession of us, to become a fixed idea, to employ us as
a means to its own end, to realize itself often in spite of us; but
as our thought embraces all things in the universe, high and low, we
are incessantly solicited to act in opposite directions; temptation,
from this point of view, is simply the law of thought, and the law of
sensibility. And ascetics and priests have endeavoured as a means of
struggling against temptation to confine human thought, to prevent it
from playing freely about the things of this world. But the things
of this world are precisely those which are always present, which
solicit us most strongly and constantly. And the greater our effort
to exclude them from the mind, the greater their power over us. There
is nothing one sees more clearly than what one resolves not to look
at; there is nothing that makes the heart beat so quickly as what one
resolves not to love. The cure for temptation, so persistently demanded
by essentially religious people, is not restriction of thought but
enlargement of thought. The visible world cannot be hidden, it is
folly to attempt it, but it can be magnified indefinitely. Incessant
discoveries may be made in it and the peril of certain points of view
counteracted by the novelty and attractiveness of certain others,
and the known universe lost sight of in the abyss of the unknown.
Thought bears its own antidote—a science sufficiently great is more
trustworthy than innocence; a boundless curiosity is the cure for all
petty curiosities. An eye which reaches the stars will not aim long
at a low mark; it is protected by its command of space and light, for
light is purifying. By making temptation infinite one makes it salutary
and in the best sense divine. Asceticism, and the artificial maturity
that comes of a dissolute life, often amount to the same thing. One
must keep one’s youth and memory green, and one’s heart open. “I
was not a man before years of manhood,” said Marcus Aurelius. Both
asceticism and debauchery make men precociously old, wean them from
love and enthusiasm for the things of this world. The island of Cythere
and the desert of Thebes are alike deserts. To remain young long, to
remain a child even in the spontaneity and affectionateness of one’s
heart, to preserve not in externals, but in “internals,” something of
lightness and gaiety is the best means of dominating life; for what
is more powerful than youth? One must neither stiffen one’s self, nor
bristle up against life, nor cowardly abandon one’s self to it; one
must take it as it is, that is to say, according to the popular maxim,
“as it comes,” and welcome it with an infant’s smile without any other
care than to maintain one’s possession of one’s self, in order that one
may possess all things.

       *       *       *       *       *

[Sidenote: Prayer.]

III. Morality and religion are inseparable in all historical faiths,
and the essential act of subjective worship, the fundamental rite
commanded by religious morality, is prayer.

[Sidenote: Kinds of prayer distinguished.]

To analyze prayer into all its component elements would be very
difficult and far from simple. Prayer may be an almost mechanical
accomplishment of the rite, the babbling of vain words, and as such
it is despicable even from the point of view of religion. It may be
an egoistic demand, and as such it is mean, simply. It may be an act
of naïve faith in beliefs more or less popular and irrational, and on
this score its value is so slight that it may be neglected. But it may
be also the disinterested outpouring of a soul which believes itself
to be in some fashion or other serving someone else, acting upon the
world by the ardour of its faith, conferring a gift, an offering,
devoting something of itself to someone else. Therein lies the grandeur
of prayer: it is then no more than one of the forms of charity and
the love of mankind. But suppose it should be demonstrated that this
especial form of charity is illusory, does one imagine that the very
principle of charity itself will by that fact receive a check?

[Sidenote: Superficiality of most pleas in its behalf.]

Many arguments have been urged in favour of prayer, but the majority
of them are quite external and superficial. Prayer, it has been said,
as being a demand on a special Providence, is sovereignly consoling;
it is one of the sweetest of the satisfactions incident to religious
faith. One who had been converted to free-thought said to me recently,
“There is but one thing in my former faith that I regret, and that is
that I can no longer pray for you and imagine that I am serving you.”
Assuredly it is sad to lose a faith which consoled one; but suppose
that someone believed himself to possess the fairy-wand and to be able
to save the world. Some fine morning he finds himself undeceived, he
finds himself alone in the world with no power at his disposal more
mysterious than that of his ten fingers and his brain. He cannot but
regret his imaginary power, but he will labour nevertheless to acquire
a real power and the loss of his illusions will but serve as a stimulus
to his will. It is always dangerous to believe that one possesses a
power that one has not, for it hinders one in some degree from knowing
and exercising those that one has. The men of former times, the times
of absolute monarchy, who had access to the ear of princes, possessed a
power analogous to that which the believers on their knees in temples
still believe themselves to possess; this power, in the case of
kings, their confidential ministers have lost as the result of purely
terrestrial revolutions; and have they thereby been diminished in their
dignity as moral beings? No, a man is morally greater as a citizen than
as a courtier; one is greater as the result of what one does one’s self
only, or attempts to do, and not as the result of what one endeavours
to obtain from a master.

[Sidenote: Arguments for its utility equally good for auricular
confession.]

Will the individual never be able to do without prayers conceived as a
constant communication with God, as a daily confession, a faith in Him
and before Him? He will probably not renounce it until he is capable
of existing without it. Arguments to prove the practical utility of
prayer, conceived as a direct communication with one’s living ideal,
would all hold equally good in favour of Catholic confession before
the priest as a realization of the moral ideal. Nevertheless, when
Protestants suppressed the confession they gave a fresh development
to moral austerity: the morality of Protestant peoples, which is
defended only by the voice of conscience, is not inferior to that of
Catholic peoples.[65] Is it any more necessary for the purpose of
ascertaining one’s faults and curing them to kneel before a personified
and anthropomorphic God than before a priest beneath the roof of
a church? Experience alone can decide, and a number of men seem
already successfully to have tried the experiment. The scrutiny of a
philosophical conscience has been proved to be sufficient.

      [65] See below chapter iv.

[Sidenote: Prayer as a subjective relief.]

Finally it has been said that prayer, even conceived as destitute of
objective effect, nevertheless justifies itself by the comfort it
affords; one has attempted to argue in its favour on purely subjective
grounds, but prayer runs the risk precisely of losing its power as a
consoler the instant one ceases to believe in its objective efficiency.
If nobody hears us, who will continue to offer up petitions simply to
ease the burden of his own heart? If the orator is uplifted by the
sympathy of the assembly which listens to him, does it follow that he
will experience the same effect if he deliver his oration in the void
with the knowledge that his thought, his word, his emotion, are lost,
and spend themselves in space?

[Sidenote: Subjective charity the durable element in prayer.]

If prayer is really to be its own reward, it must not consist of a
demand addressed to some Being exterior to one’s self, it must be a
subjective act of love, what Christianity calls an act of charity.
Charity is the eternal element in prayer. To ask for something for
one’s self is a thing difficult to justify; to ask for something for
someone else is at least a beginning of disinterested conduct. “How
much longer thy prayers grow, grandmama, day by day!” “The number
of those for whom I pray increases day by day.” Over and above this
element of charity, prayer contains a certain beauty—a beauty which
will not disappear with the disappearance of the superstitions which
have clustered about it. The moral beauty of prayer is intimately bound
up with certain profound human sentiments: one prays for somebody whom
one loves; one prays out of pity or of affection; one prays in despair,
in hope, in gratitude; so that the most elevated of human sentiments
sometimes ally themselves with prayer and colour it. This tension of
one’s whole being at such times finds its way out upon the visage,
and transfigures it with the intense expression that certain painters
have loved to catch and to perpetuate.[66] What is most beautiful and
probably also what is best in prayer is, more than all else, the human
and moral element in it. If there is thus an essential charity in
genuine prayer, charity of the lips is not enough, that of the heart
and hands must be added to it, and that is to say in the last resort
action must be substituted for it.

      [66] This, however, is exceptional; in church, during the
      services, the majority of the faces remain inexpressive, for
      the reason that prayer with the majority of the faithful is
      almost always mechanical.

[Sidenote: Increasing tendency for such prayer to express itself in
action.]

Prayer for love and charity tends increasingly to find vent in action:
a verification of this fact may be found in history. Formerly, in a
moment of distress, a pagan woman would have thought only of appeasing
the anger of the Gods by some blood sacrifice, by the murder of some
innocent member of the larger mammals; in the Middle Ages she would
have made a vow or founded a chapel—things still vain and powerless
to alleviate the misery of this world; in our days she would think
rather, if she were a person of some elevation of spirit, of giving
money in charity, of founding an establishment for the instruction of
the poor or the care of the infirm. One sees in that fact the march
of progress in religious ideas; the time will come when such actions
will no longer be accomplished for a directly interested end but as a
sort of exchange with the divinity, a traffic of kindness; they will
constitute a recognized part of public worship, the essence of worship
will be charity. Pascal asks, somewhere, why God has bestowed prayer
upon man, why God has commanded man to pray; and he replies profoundly
enough: “To give him the dignity of seeing himself as a cause”; but
if he who demands benefits by prayer possessed formerly the dignity
of being, in his own right, a cause, how much greater is the dignity
of him who by the exercise of his own moral will procures the object
of his desire? And if to be the cause of one’s own well-being be thus
the essence of prayer, of that which brings man nearest to God, of
that which lifts man nearest to His level—may one not say that the
most disinterested, the most sacred, the most human, the most divine
of prayers is moral conduct? In Pascal’s opinion, it is true, moral
conduct presupposes two terms, duty and power, and man cannot always
do what he should; but one must break with the antique opposition
established by Christianity, between the sentiment of duty and the
practical powerlessness of a man shorn of all adventitious aid—shorn
of grace. In reality the sentiment of duty is, in and of itself, the
first vague consciousness of a power existent in us, of a force which
tends to achieve its own realization.[67] Consciousness of his power
for good and of the power of the ideal unite in man, for this ideal is
no more than the projection, the objectification, of the highest power
within, the form that that power takes in reflective intelligence.
Every volition is at bottom no more than a capability of some sort in
labour, an action in the stage of germination: the will to do good, if
it is conscious of its own power, has no need to await the prompting
of external grace; it is itself its own grace; by the very fact of
its birth it becomes efficacious; by the very fact of wishing, nature
creates. Pascal conceived the moral end, which duty places before us,
too much after the manner of a physical and external object, that one
might be able to look upon but not to attain. “One directs one’s looks
on high,” says he, in his “Pensées,” “but one rests upon the sand and
the earth will slip from under one, and one shall fall with one’s eyes
on heaven.” But might not one respond that the heaven of which Pascal
is here speaking, the heaven we carry in our own bosoms, is something
quite different from the heaven which we perceive spread out above our
heads? Must it not here be said that to see is to touch and to possess;
that a sight of the moral end renders possible a progress toward it;
that the resting point one finds in the moral will, the most invincible
of all the forms of volition, will not give way beneath one, and that
one cannot fall, in one’s progress toward goodness and that in this
sense to lift one’s eyes toward heaven is already to have set one’s
feet on the way thither.

      [67] See on this point our _Esquisse d’une morale sans
      obligation_, p. 27.

[Sidenote: Ultimate claim for prayer.]

There remains one more aspect under which prayer may be considered. It
may be regarded as a species of spiritual elevation, a communication
with the universe or with God.[68] Prayer has in all times been
glorified as a means of uplifting the whole being to a plane that it
otherwise would have been unable to attain. The best of us, as Amiel
said not long since, find complete development and self-knowledge in
prayer alone.

      [68] “Oh, God” said Diderot, at the end of his _Interprétation
      de la nature_, “I do not know if Thou existest, but I shall
      bear myself as if Thou sawest into my soul; I shall act as if I
      felt myself in Thy presence.... I ask nothing of Thee in this
      world, for the course of things is necessary in and of its own
      nature, if Thou dost not exist, and necessary if Thou dost, by
      Thy decree.”

[Sidenote: Distinction between religious ecstasy and philosophical
meditation.]

One must be on one’s guard against a multitude of illusions in this
connection, and must carefully distinguish between two very different
things: religious ecstasy and philosophical meditation. One of the
consequences of our profounder knowledge of the nervous system is an
increasing contempt for ecstasy and for all of those states of nervous
intoxication or even of intellectual intoxication which were formerly
regarded by the multitude, and sometimes even by philosophers, as
superhuman, and truly divine. Religious ecstasy, so called, may be
a phenomenon so purely physical that it suffices to apply a bit of
volatile oil of cherry laurel to induce it in certain subjects, and
to fill them with ecstatic beatitude, and make them pray and weep
and kneel. Such was the fact in the case of a hysteric patient, a
hardened courtesan of Jewish origin; it sufficed even to induce in
her definite visions, even such as that of the girl with golden hair
in the blue robe starred with gold.[69] The intoxication indulged in
by the followers of Dionysius in Greece, like that indulged in by
hasheesh-eaters, was no more than a violent means of inducing ecstasy
and of entering into communication with the supernatural world.[70]
In India,[71] and among the Christians, fasting is practised to attain
the same end, namely a nervous excitation of the nervous systems. The
macerations of the anchorite were, says Wundt, a solitary orgie, in the
course of which monks and nuns ardently pressed in their arms fantastic
images of the Virgin and the Saviour. According to a legend of
Krishnaïsm, the Queen Udayapura, Mira Bai, being pressed to abjure her
God, threw herself at the feet of the statue of Krishna and made this
prayer: “I have quitted for thee my love, my possessions, my crown; I
come to thee, oh, my refuge! Take me.” The statue listened motionless;
suddenly it opened and Mira disappeared inside of it. To vanish thus
into the bosom of one’s God is—is it not?—the perfect ideal of the
highest human religions. All of them have proposed it to man, as a
prime object of desire, to die in God; all of them have seen the
higher life as a form of ecstasy; whereas the fact is that, in a state
of ecstasy, one descends on the contrary to a lower and a vegetative
plane of existence, and that this apparent fusion with God is no more
than a return to a primitive inertia, to a mineral impassibility, to a
statuesque petrifaction. One may believe one’s self uplifted in a state
of ecstasy, and mistake for an exaltation of thought what is in reality
no more than a sterile nervous excitement. The trouble is that there
is no means of measuring the real force and extent of thought. Under
normal circumstances the only means that exist are action; one who does
not act is inevitably inclined to exaggerate the value of his thought.
Amiel himself did not escape from this danger. Fancied superiority
disappears the moment a thought seeks expression of whatsoever kind.
The dream that is told becomes absurd; the ecstasy in which one retains
complete control of one’s mind, in which one endeavours to take stock
of the confused emotions one experiences, vanishes before us and leaves
behind no more than a fatigue, a certain subjective obscurity, like a
winter twilight, which precipitates a frost upon the window-panes that
intercepts the last rays of the sun. My most beautiful verses will
never be written, the poet says: “Of my work, the better part lies
buried in myself.”[72] That is an illusion by which dream seems always
superior to reality; an illusion of the same sort as that which makes
us attach so much value to certain hours of religious exaltation. The
truth is that the poet’s best verses are those which he has written
with his own hand, his best thought is that which has possessed
vitality enough to find its formula and its music; the whole of him
lies in his poetry. And we also, we are in our actions, in our words,
in the glance of an eye or the accent of a word, in a gesture, in the
palm of a hand open in charity. To exist is to act, and a thought which
is incapable of expression is an abortion which has never really been
alive and has never merited to live. In the same way the true God is
also the one who can be domesticated in one’s own heart, who does not
fly the face of reflective consciousness, who does not show himself
in dreams alone, whom one does not invoke as a phantom or a demon.
Our ideal ought not to be some passing and fantastic apparition, but
a positive creation of our spirit; we must be able to contemplate it
without destroying it, to feed our eyes upon it as upon a reality.
For the rest this ideal of goodness and of perfection, persisting as
it does in the face of inner scrutiny, has no need of an objective
existence in some sort material, to produce its proper effect upon
the spirit. The profoundest love subsists for those who have been, as
well as for those who are, and reaches out into the future as well as
into the present. Nay, it even in a manner outstretches the measure
of existence and develops a power of divining and loving the ideal
that shall some day be. Maternal love is a model now as always for all
moral beings, in that it does not await the birth of its object before
making the first steps in its service. Long before the child is born
the mother forms an image of it in her fancy, and loves it and gives
herself to it in advance.

      [69] _Report of MM. Bourru and Burot au Congrès scientifique de
      Grenoble_, August 18, 1885.

      [70] A defender of the use of hasheesh scientifically employed,
      M. Giraud, who conceives that it is possible to induce ecstasy
      at will, and to regulate it by medical doses, writes us
      with enthusiasm: “A bit of hasheesh dispenses with painful
      mystical expedients to induce ecstasy. There is no further
      need of asceticism; the result is an intoxication, but a
      sacred intoxication, which is nothing else than an excess of
      activity in the higher centres.” We believe that every sort
      of drunkenness, far from possessing a sacred character, will
      constitute for ever and always, in the eyes of science, a
      morbid state, in no sense enviable from any rational point
      of view, by an individual in normal health; the constant
      employment of stimulants will exhaust the nervous system and
      throw it out of order, as the daily employment of nux vomica
      will, in the long run, destroy the power of a healthy stomach.

      [71] See above what we have already said in regard to the
      Yoghis and asceticism.

      [72] M. Sully-Prudhomme.

[Sidenote: The highest form of prayer.]

For a truly elevated spirit the hours consecrated to the formation
of its ideal will always be precious hours of patient attention and
meditation, not only upon what one knows or does not know, but upon
what one hopes and will attempt; upon the ideal seeking for birth
through one’s instrumentality, and leaning upon one’s heart. The
highest form of prayer is thought. Every form of philosophic meditation
possesses, like prayer, an element of consolation, not directly, for it
may well deal with the saddest of realities, but indirectly because it
enlarges the heart. Every aperture broken open upon the infinite braces
us like a current in the open air. Our personal sorrows are lost in the
immensity of the infinite, as the waters of the earth are lost in the
immensity of the sea.

As for those who are not capable of thinking for themselves, of
standing spiritually on their own feet; it will always be good for them
to retrace the thoughts which appear to them to be the highest and
the noblest product of the human mind. On this account the Protestant
custom of reading and of meditating on the Bible is, in principle,
excellent; the book however is ill-chosen. But it is good that man
should habituate himself to read or to re-read a certain number of
times a day, or a week, something else than a newspaper or a novel;
that he should turn now and then to some serious subject of meditation
and dwell on it. Perhaps the day will come when every one independently
will compose a Bible of his own; will select from among the works of
the greatest human thinkers the passages which especially appeal to
him, and will read them and re-read and assimilate them. To read a
serious and high-minded book is to deal at first hand with the greatest
of human thoughts; to admire is to pray, and it is a form of prayer
that is within the power of all of us.




CHAPTER IV.

RELIGION AND NON-RELIGION AMONG THE PEOPLE.

    I. Is religious sentiment an innate and imperishable
      possession of humanity?—Frequent confusion of a sentiment
      for religion with a sentiment for philosophy and
      morals—Renan—Max Müller—Difference between the evolution
      of belief in the individual and the evolution of belief
      in the race—Will the disappearance of faith leave a void
      behind?

    II. Will the dissolution of religion result in a
      dissolution of morality among the people?—Is religion
      the sole safeguard of social authority and public
      morality?—Christianity and socialism—Relation between
      non-religion and immorality, according to statistics.

    III. Is Protestantism a necessary transition stage
      between religion and free-thought?—Projects for
      Protestantizing France—Michelet, Quinet, De Laveleye,
      Renouvier, and Pillon—Intellectual, moral, and political
      superiority of Protestantism—Utopian character of
      the project—Uselessness, for purposes of morals, of
      substituting one religion for another—Is the possession
      of religion a condition _sine qua non_ of superiority in
      the struggle for existence?—Objections urged against
      France and the French Revolution by Matthew Arnold;
      Greece and Judea compared, France and Protestant nations
      compared—Critical examination of Matthew Arnold’s
      theory—Cannot free-thought, science, and art evolve their
      respective ideals from within?


We have seen the dissolution which menaces religious dogmatism, and
even religious morality, in modern societies. And from the very fact
of such dissolution certain more or less disturbing social problems
arise. Is it really a perilous thing, this gradual enfeeblement of
what has so long served as the basis of social and domestic virtue?
Certain people delight in subjecting nine-tenths of the human race to
a sort of ostracism. They declare in advance that the people, and all
women and children, are incapable of rising to a conception which it
is recognized that a large number of men have attained. The mass of
the people, it is said, and women and children, must be appealed to on
the side of the imagination; only, one must take care to choose the
least dangerous form of appeal possible, for fear of injuring those
whom one means to serve. Let us consider to what extent this incapacity
of the people, of women and children, for philosophy is capable of
demonstration. It is the more necessary in this book, in that it
is the sociological aspect of religion that is here the subject of
investigation.


_I. Is religious sentiment an innate and imperishable possession of
humanity?_

[Sidenote: Tendency to regard religious beliefs as necessary in
proportion to their absurdity.]

In our days, be it remarked, religious sentiment has found defenders
among those who, like Renan, Taine, and so many others, are most
firmly convinced of the absurdities of the dogmas themselves. So
long as such men occupy a purely intellectual point of view—that
is to say, their real point of view—the whole of the contents of
religion, all the dogmas, all the rites appear to them to be so many
astounding errors, a vast system of unconscious, mutual deception;
but the instant, on the contrary, they regard religion from the point
of view of sensibility—that is to say, from the point of view of
the masses—everything becomes justifiable in their eyes; everything
that they would attack without scruple as a bit of reasoning becomes
sacred to them as a bit of sentiment, and by a strange optical illusion
the absurdity of religious beliefs becomes an additional proof of
their necessity; the greater the abyss which separates them from the
intelligence of the masses, the greater their fear of having this
abyss filled up. They do not for themselves feel the need of religious
beliefs, but on this very account they regard them as indispensable for
other people. They say, “How many irrational beliefs the people do have
that we get along very well without!” And they conclude, therefore,
“These beliefs must be extremely necessary to the existence of social
life and must correspond to a real need, in order thus firmly to have
implanted themselves in the life of the masses.”[73]

      [73] Moreover when one has passed one’s life, or even many
      years, in any study whatsoever, one is inclined extremely to
      exaggerate the importance of this study. Greek professors
      believe that Greek is necessary to the best interests of
      humanity. When any question arises of drawing up a curriculum,
      if the professors of the several studies are interrogated, each
      wishes to see his own especial branch of science in the first
      rank. I remember that after I myself had been making Latin
      verses for some years I would have ranged myself voluntarily
      among the defenders of Latin verse. Whenever anyone makes an
      especial study of some work of genius, that of an individual,
      or _a fortiori_ that of a people—Plato, Aristotle or Kant, the
      Vedas or the Bible, this work tends to become in his eyes the
      very centre of human thought; the book of which one makes a
      special study tends to become _the_ book. A priest looks upon
      the whole of human life as an affair of faith simply; knowledge
      to a priest means simply a knowledge of the Fathers of the
      Church. It is not astonishing that even members of the laity,
      who have made religion the principal object of their studies,
      should be inclined to magnify its importance for humanity,
      or that the historian of religious thought should regard it
      as including the whole of human life, and as acquiring, even
      independently of any notion of revelation, a sort of inviolable
      character.

[Sidenote: Free-thought for an intellectual aristocracy.]

Frequently, along with this belief in the omnipotence of the religious
sentiment, there goes a certain contempt for those who are the victims
of it; they are the serfs of thought, they must remain attached to
the soil, bound within the limits of their own narrow horizon. The
aristocracy of science is the most jealous of aristocracies, and
a certain number of our contemporary men of science are bent on
carrying their coat of mail in their brain. They profess toward the
mass of the people a somewhat contemptuous charity, and propose to
leave it undisturbed in its beliefs, immersed in prejudice as being
the sole habitat in which it is capable of existing. For the rest,
they sometimes envy the people its eternal ignorance, platonically
of course. The bird no doubt possesses vague regrets, vague desires,
when he perceives from on high a worm trailing tranquilly through
the dew, oblivious of heaven; but the bird, as a matter of fact, is
always careful to retain his wings, and our superior men of science
do the same. In their judgment, certain superior minds are capable of
enfranchising themselves from religion, without evil results following;
the mass of the people cannot. It is necessary to reserve freedom of
conscience and free-thought for a certain select few; the intellectual
aristocracy should defend itself by a fortified camp. Just as the
ancient Roman people demanded bread and spectacles, so modern people
demand temples, and to give them temples is sometimes the sole means
of making them forget that they have not enough bread. The mass of
humanity must, as a mere necessity of existence, adore a god, and not
simply god in general, but a certain God whose commandments are to be
found in a pocket Bible. A sacred book, _that_ is what is necessary.
We are reminded of Mr. Spencer’s saying, that the superstition of
the present day is the superstition of the printed page; we believe
that some mystical virtue inheres in the four and twenty letters of
the alphabet. When a child asks questions concerning the birth of his
younger brother, he is told that one found him under a bush in the
garden; and the child is content. The mass of the people is a big child
simply, and must be dealt with after the same fashion. When the mass
of the people asks questions about the origin of the world, hand it
the Bible—it will there see that the world was made by a determinate
Being, who carefully adjusted its parts to each other; it will learn
the precise amount of time that was consumed in the work; seven days,
neither more nor less; and it needs learn nothing further. Its mind is
walled in by a good solid barrier which it is forbidden to overleap
even by a look—the wall of faith. Its brain is carefully sealed, the
sutures become firm with age, and there is nothing to do but to begin
the same thing over again with the next generation.

Is it then true that religion is thus, for the mass of mankind, either
a necessary good or a necessary evil, rooted in the human heart?

       *       *       *       *       *

[Sidenote: Confusion of religious sentiment with need for philosophy
and morality.]

The belief that the religious sentiment is innate and perpetual rests
upon a confusion of the religious sentiment with the need that exists
in mankind for philosophy and morality; and however closely bound up
together philosophy and morality and religion may be, they are in
themselves distinct and separate, and tend progressively to become more
and more manifestly so.

[Sidenote: Religious sentiment not innate.]

In the first place, how universal soever the religious sentiment may
appear to be, it must be admitted that it is not innate. Persons who
have passed their childhood without any communication with other
human beings, owing to some corporal defect, display no signs of the
possession of religious ideas. Dr. Kitto, in his book on the loss of
the senses, cites the case of an American woman who was congenitally
deaf and dumb, and who later, after she was capable of communicating
with the people about her, was found not to possess the slightest
notion of a divinity. The Rev. Samuel Smith, after twenty-three
years intercourse with deaf mutes, says that, education apart, they
possess no notion of a divinity. Lubbock and Baker cite a great number
of examples of savages who are in the same case. According to the
conclusions set forth above, in the beginning religions did not spring
ready-made out of the human heart: they were imposed on man from
without, they reached him through his eyes and through his ears; they
contained no element of mysticism—in their first steps. Those who
derive mysticism from an innate religious sentiment reason a little
after the manner of those who in politics should derive royalty from
some supposed innate respect for a royal race. Such a respect is the
work of time, of custom, of the sympathetic tendencies of a body of men
long trained in some one direction; there is contained in it no single
primitive element, and yet the power of the sentiment of loyalty to
a royal race is considerable. The Revolution showed as much, in the
wars of the Vendée. But this power wears out some day or other, the
cult for royalty disappears with the disappearance of royalty itself;
other habits are formed, creating other sentiments, and the spectator
is surprised to see that a people which was royalist under monarchy
becomes republican under republicanism. The reign of sensibility over
intelligence is not perpetual; sooner or later, the position of the two
must be reversed; there is an intellectual habitat to which we must as
inevitably adapt ourselves as to our physical habitat. The perpetuity
of the religious sentiment depends upon its legitimacy. Born, as it is,
of certain beliefs and certain customs, its fate is one with theirs.
So long as a belief is not completely compromised and dissolved, the
sentiment attaching to it may no doubt possess the power of preserving
it, for sentiment always plays the rôle of protector and preserver.
The human soul in this respect is analogous to society. Religious or
political sentiments resemble iron braces buried in some wall menaced
with ruin; they bind together the disjointed stones, and may well
sustain the edifice for some time longer than, but for them, it would
have stood; but let the wall once be undermined, so that it begins
to give way, and they will fall with it. No better method could be
employed for securing the complete and absolute extinction of a dogma
or an institution than to maintain it till the last possible instant;
its fall under such circumstances becomes a veritable annihilation.
There are periods in history when to preserve is not to save but
definitely to ruin.

[Sidenote: Post hoc ergo propter hoc.]

The perpetuity of religion has therefore in nowise been demonstrated.
From the fact that religions always have existed it cannot be concluded
that they always will exist; by ratiocination like that one might
indeed achieve singular consequences. Humanity has always, in all
times and places, associated certain events with others which chanced
to accompany them; _post hoc ergo propter hoc_ is a universal sophism
and the principle of all superstition. It is the basis of the belief
that thirteen must not sit down at table, that one must be careful
not to spill the salt, etc. Certain beliefs of this kind, such as
that Friday is an unlucky day, are so widespread that they suffice
sensibly to affect the average of travellers arriving in Paris on
that day of the week by train and omnibus; a number of Parisians are
averse to beginning a journey on Friday, or to attending to business
that can be postponed; and it must be remembered that the intelligence
of Parisians, at least of the men, stands high in the scale. What can
one conclude from that if not that superstition is tenacious of life
in the bosom of humanity and will long be so? Let us reason, then, in
regard to superstition as in regard to mythological religion. Must we
not admit that the need of superstition is innate in man, that it is
part of his nature, that his life would really be incomplete if he
ceased to believe that the breaking of a mirror is a sign that someone
will die? Let us therefore set about finding some _modus vivendi_
with superstition; let us combat superstitions which are harmful not
by exposing their irrationality but by substituting in their stead
superstitions which are contrary to them and inoffensive. Let us
declare that there are political superstitions and instruct women and
children in them; let us inoculate, for example, feeble minds with
that ingenious Mohammedan aphorism, that the duration of one’s life is
determined in advance and that the coward gains absolutely nothing by
fleeing from the field of battle; if he was fated to die, he will die
on his own doorstep. Does not that strike one as a useful belief for an
army to hold and more inoffensive than a great many religious beliefs?
Perhaps it even contains an element of truth.

[Sidenote: That religious beliefs have been useful no reason for
retaining them.]

One might go far along that path and discover a number of necessary
or at least useful illusions, a number of “indestructible” beliefs.
“It is,” says M. Renan, “more difficult to hinder mankind’s believing
than to induce it to believe.” Certainly it is. In other words, it is
more difficult to instruct than to deceive. If it were not so, what
merit would there be in the communication of knowledge? Knowledge is
always more complex than prejudice. A knowledge sufficiently complete
to put one on one’s guard against lapses of judgment demands years
of patience. Happily, humanity has long centuries before it, long
centuries and treasures of perseverance; for there is no creature more
persevering than man and no man more obstinate than the savant. But
it may be said that religious myths, being better adapted than pure
knowledge to popular intelligence, possess after all the advantage of
symbolizing a portion of the truth; and that on this score one may
permit them to the vulgar. It is as if one should say that the “vulgar”
should be permitted to believe that the sun moves round the earth
because the common man is incapable of conceiving, with accuracy, the
infinite complexity of the motion of the stars. But every theory, every
attempted explanation, however crude it may be, is in some degree a
symbol of the truth. It is symbolic of the truth to say that nature
experiences a horror of a vacuum, that the blood lies motionless in
the arteries, that the line of vision runs from the eye to the object,
instead of from the object to the eye. All these primitive theories are
incomplete formulations of the reality, more or less popular efforts to
“render” it; they rest upon visible facts not yet correctly interpreted
by a completer scientific knowledge; and does that constitute a reason
for respecting all these symbols, and for condemning the popular
intelligence to fatten upon them? Primitive and mythical explanations
served in the past to build up the truth; they ought not nowadays to
be employed to obscure it. When a scaffolding has served its purpose
in aiding one to erect an edifice, one tears it down. If certain
tales are good to amuse children with, one at least should be careful
that they are not taken too seriously. Let us not take outworn dogmas
too seriously, let us not regard them with excessive complacency and
tenderness; if they are still legitimately objects of admiration to us
when we reset them among the circumstances to which they owed their
birth, they cease to be so the instant one endeavours to perpetuate
them among the circumstances of modern life where they are quite out of
place.

[Sidenote: Preliminary acquisition of falsehood not necessary to
recognition of truth.]

Like M. Renan, Mr. Max Müller almost sees an example to be followed
in the castes established by the Hindus among the minds, as among the
classes of the people, in the regular periods or asrâmas through which
they oblige the intelligence successively to pass, in the hierarchy of
religions with which they burden the spirit of the faithful. For them
traditional error is sacred and venerable; it serves as a preparation
for the truth; one must place a bandage on the eyes of the neophyte in
order to be able to take it off again afterward. The tendencies of the
modern mind are precisely the opposite; it likes to supply the present
generation at once, and without superfluous preliminary, with the whole
body of truth acquired by the generations which have passed away,
without false respect or false courtesy for the errors it replaces;
it is not enough that the light should filter into the mind through
some secret rift, the doors and windows must be thrown wide open.
The modern mind fails to see in what respect a deliberate effort to
inculcate absurdity in a portion of the community can serve to secure
rectitude of judgment in the remaining portions; or in what respect it
is necessary to build a house of truth upon a foundation of falsehood;
or to run down the part of the hill that we have already climbed, as a
preparation for climbing higher.

[Sidenote: Transformation of faith inevitable.]

If the religious sentiment should disappear, it may be objected, it
would leave a void which it would be impossible to fill, and humanity’s
horror of a vacuum is even greater than nature’s. Humanity, therefore,
would satisfy somehow or other, even with absurdities, that eternal
need of believing of which we have spoken above. The instant one
religion is destroyed another takes its place; it will be always so
from age to age, because the religious sentiment will always exist as
a continuing need for some object of worship which it will create and
re-create in spite of all the ratiocination in the world. No victory
over nature can be lasting; no permanent need in the human breast
can be long silenced. There are periods in human life when faith is
as imperious as love; one experiences a hunger to embrace something,
to give one’s self—even to a figment of the imagination; one is a
victim to a fever of faith. Sometimes this mood lasts throughout
one’s whole life, sometimes it lasts some days only or some hours;
there are cases in which it does not present itself till late, and
even very late, in life. And the priest has taken note of all these
vicissitudes; he is always there, patient, waiting tranquilly for the
moment when the symptoms shall appear, and the sleeping sentiment
shall awaken and become masterful; he has the Host ready, he has
great temples reverberating with sacred prayers, where man may come
to kneel, and breathe in the spirit of God, and arise strengthened.
The reply is that it is a mistake to regard all humanity as typified
in the person of the recently disabused believer. It has often been
made a subject of reproach to free-thinkers that they endeavour to
destroy without replacing, but one cannot destroy a religion in the
breasts of a people. At some certain moment in its history it falls of
its own weight, with the disappearance of the pretended evidences on
which it was resting; it does not, properly speaking, die; it ceases
simply—becomes extinct. It will cease definitely when it shall have
become useless, and there is no obligation to replace what is no longer
necessary. Among the masses, intelligence is never far in advance
of tradition; one never adopts a new idea until one has by degrees
become accustomed to it. It all takes place without violence, or at
least without lasting violence; the crisis passes, the wound closes
quickly, and leaves no trace behind; the forehead of the masses bears
no scar. Progress lies in wait for the moment of least resistance, of
least pain. Even revolutions do not succeed except in so far as they
are purely beneficial, as they constitute a universally advantageous
evolution. For the rest, there is no such thing as a revolution, or a
cataclysm, properly so called, in human belief. Each generation adds a
doubt to those which existed before in the minds of their parents, and
thus faith falls away bit by bit, like the banks of a river worn by the
stream; the sentiments which were bound up with the belief go with it,
but they are incessantly replaced by others, a new wave sweeps forward
to fill the void, and the human soul profits by its losses and grows
larger, like the bed of a river. The adaptation of a people to its
environment is a beneficent law. It has often been said, and justly,
that there is food for the soul as well as food for the body; and the
analogy may be pursued by remarking that it is difficult to induce
a people to change its national diet. For centuries the inhabitants
of Brittany have lived upon imperfectly cooked buckwheat cakes, as
they live by their simple faith and infantine superstitions. It may,
however, be affirmed, _a priori_, that the day will come when the reign
of the buckwheat cake in Brittany will be at an end, or at least will
be shared by other, and better prepared, and more nourishing foods; it
is equally rational to affirm that the faith of Brittany will some day
come to an end, that the somewhat feeble minds of the inhabitants will
sooner or later seek nourishment in solider ideas and beliefs, and that
the whole of their intellectual life will, by degrees, be transformed
and renewed.

[Sidenote: The disenchantment that accompanies it temporary.]

It is only those who have been reared in a faith, and then disabused
of it, that preserve, along with their primitive sentiments, a certain
home-sickness for a belief to correspond to these sentiments. The
reason is that they have been violently hastened in their passage from
belief to incredulity. The story of the passing disenchantment with
life, which the recent disbeliever experiences, has often been told.
“I felt horribly exiled,” M. Renan once said, in speaking of the moral
crisis through which he himself had passed. “The fish in Lake Baikal
have taken thousands of years, it is said, to transform themselves from
salt-water to fresh-water fish. I had to achieve my own transformation
in the course of some weeks. Catholicism surrounds the whole of life
like an enchanted circle with so much magic that, when one is deprived
of it, everything seems insipid and melancholy; the universe looked to
me like a desert. If Christianity was not true, everything else seemed
to me to be indifferent, frivolous, scarce worthy of attention; the
world looked mediocre, morally impoverished to me. The world seemed
to me to be in its dotage and decadence; I felt lost in a nation of
pigmies.” This pain incident to metamorphosis, this sort of despair at
renouncing everything that one has believed and loved up to that time,
is not peculiar to the Christian who has fallen away from Christianity;
it exists in diverse degrees, as M. Renan well knew, whenever a love of
any sort comes to an end in us. For him who, for example, has placed
his whole life in the love of a woman and feels himself betrayed by
her, life seems not less disenchanted than for the believer who sees
himself abandoned by his God. Even simple intellectual errors may
produce an analogous sentiment. Archimedes no doubt would have felt
his life crumble away beneath him, if he had discovered irremediable
lacunæ in his chain of theorems. The more intimately a god has been
personified and humanized, the more intimately he comes to be beloved,
and the greater must be the wound he leaves behind when he deserts the
heart. But even though this wound be in certain instances incurable,
that fact constitutes no argument in support of the religion of the
masses, for an illegitimate and unjustifiable love may cause as
much suffering when one is deprived of it as a legitimate love. The
bitterness of truth lies less in truth itself than in the resistance
offered to it by intrenched and established error. It is not the world
which is desert when deprived of the god of our dreams, it is our own
heart; and we have ourselves to blame if we have filled our hearts with
nothing better than dreams. For the rest, in the majority of cases, the
void, the sense of loss which a religion leaves behind, is not lasting;
one adapts one’s self to one’s new moral environment, one becomes
happy again; no doubt not in the same manner—one is never happy twice
in the same manner—but in a manner less primitive, less infantine,
more stable. M. Renan is an example of it. His transmutation into a
fresh-water fish was achieved in reality tranquilly enough; it is
doubtful whether he ever dreams now of the salt-water stretches of the
Bible, and nobody has ever declared so forcibly that he is happy. One
might almost make it a matter of reproach to him, and suggest that the
profoundest happiness is sometimes not so precisely aware of itself. If
every absolute faith is a little naïve, one is not absolutely without
naïveté when one is too confident of one’s own happiness.

[Sidenote: The essential cheapness of religious speculation.]

To the surprise and to the disenchantment which a former Christian
experiences in the presence of scientific truth may be opposed the
even more profound astonishment which those who have been exclusively
nourished on science experience in the presence of religious dogma.
The man of science can understand religious dogmas, for he can follow
the course of their birth and development century by century; but he
experiences, in his effort to adapt himself to this narrow environment,
something of the difficulty that he might feel in an effort to enter
a Liliputian fairy palace. The world of religion—with the ridiculous
importance which it ascribes to the earth as the centre of the
universe, with the palpable moral errors that the Bible contains, with
its whole body of legend, which is affecting only to those who believe
in them, with its superannuated rites—all seems so poor, so powerless
to symbolize the infinite, that the man of science is inclined to see
in these infantine dreams the repugnant and despicable side rather
than the elevated and attractive side. Livingstone says that one day,
after having preached the Gospel to a new tribe, he was taking a walk
in the neighbouring fields when he heard near him, behind a bush, a
strange noise like a convulsive cough; he there found a young negro who
had been taken by an irresistible desire to laugh by the account of
the Biblical legends, and had hidden himself there out of respect for
Livingstone, and in the shadow of the bush was writhing with laughter
and unable to reply to the questions of the worthy pastor. Certainly
the surprising legends of religion can give rise to no such outburst
of gaiety as this in one who has spent his life among the facts of
science and the reasoned theories of philosophy. He feels rather a
certain bitterness, such as one feels generally in the presence of
human feebleness, for man feels something of the same solidarity in the
presence of human error as in the presence of human suffering. If the
eighteenth century ridiculed superstition, if the human mind was then
“dancing,” as Voltaire said, “in chains,” it is the distinction of our
epoch more accurately to have estimated the weight of those chains; and
in truth, when one examines coolly the poverty of the popular attempts
that have been made to represent the world and the ideal of mankind,
one feels less inclination to laugh than to weep.

[Sidenote: Inevitable extinction of fanaticism.]

But, however that may be, the evolution of human belief must not be
judged by the painful revolutions of individual belief; in humanity
such transformations are subject to regular laws. The very explosions
of the religious sentiment, explosions even of fanaticism, which
still occur and have so often occurred in the course of religious
degeneration, enter as an integral part into the formula of the very
process of degeneration itself. After having been so long one of the
most ardent interests of humanity, religious faith must, of necessity,
be slow in cooling. Every human interest resembles those stars which
are gradually declining at once in light and heat, and which from
time to time present a solid exterior and then, as the result of some
inner disturbance, burst through their outer rind and become once
more brilliant to a degree that they had not rivalled for hundreds
of centuries; but this very brilliancy is itself an expenditure of
light and heat, a phase simply of the process of cooling. The star
hardens once more on its surface, and, after every fresh cataclysm and
illumination, it becomes less brilliant and dies in its efforts to
revive. A spectator who should be watching it from a sufficient height
might even find a certain comfort in the triumphs of the very spirit
of fanaticism and reaction which result in a prolonged subsequent
enfeeblement and a more rapid approach toward final extinction. Just
as haste is sometimes more deliberate than deliberation, so a violent
effort to reanimate the past sometimes results in hastening its death.
You cannot heat a cold star from the outside.


_II. Will the dissolution of religion result in a dissolution of
morality among the people?_

The general enfeeblement of the religious instinct will set free, for
employment in social progress, an immense amount of force hitherto
set aside for the service of mysticism; but it may well be asked also
whether there are not a number of forces hurtful to society, and
hitherto held in check or annulled by the religious instinct, which
upon its disappearance will be given free play.

[Sidenote: One must respect what is respectable only.]

“Christianity,” Guizot said, “is a necessity for mankind; it is
a school of reverence.” No doubt; but less so perhaps than Hindu
religions, which go the length of proposing the absolute division of
mankind into castes as an object for reverence; however contrary it may
be to the natural sentiments of mankind and the operation of social
laws. Assuredly no society can subsist if its members neither respect
nor reverence what is respectable and venerable; respect is decidedly
an indispensable element in national life; the fact is one which we too
easily forget in France; but society is barred from progress if one
respects what is not respectable, and progress is a condition of life
for a society. Tell me what you respect, and I will tell you what you
are. The progress of human reverence for objects ever higher and more
high is symbolic of all other kinds of progress achieved by the human
mind.

[Sidenote: Christianity quite the opposite of a defence against
communism.]

But for religion, say the Guizot school, the property-question would
sweep away the masses of the people; it is the Church which holds
them in check. If there is a property-question, let us not seek to
ignore it; let us labour sincerely and actively at its solution. _Qui
trompe-t-on ici?_ Is God simply a means of saving the capitalist? More
than that, the property-question is not one which is more intimately
bound up to-day with religion than with free-thought. Christianity,
which implicitly contains within it the principles of communism,
is itself responsible for spreading ideas among the people which
have inevitably germinated in the course of the great intellectual
germination which distinguishes the present epoch. M. de Laveleye,
one of the defenders of liberal Christianity, confesses as much.
It was well known that among the first Christians all property was
held in common, and that communism was the immediate consequence
of baptism.[74] “We hold everything in common except our women,”
Tertullian and St. Justin say; “we share everything.”[75] It is well
known with what vehemence the Fathers of the Church have attacked the
right of private property. “The earth,” says St. Ambrose, “was given
to the rich and poor in common. Why, oh, ye rich! should ye arrogate
to yourselves alone the ownership of it?” “Nature created rights in
common, usurpation has created private rights.” “Wealth is always the
product of robbery,” says St. Jerome. “The rich man is a robber,”
says St. Basil. “Iniquity is the basis of private property,” says St.
Clement. “The rich man is a brigand,” says St. Chrysostom. Bossuet
himself cries, in a sermon on the distribution of the necessities
of life: “The murmurs of the poor are just: why this inequality of
condition?” And, in the sermon on the eminent dignity of the poor:
“The politics of Jesus are directly opposed to those of this century.”
And finally Pascal, summing up in an illustration all the socialistic
ideas which compose the bulk of Christian doctrine: “‘That dog is
mine,’ say these poor children; ‘that place there is my place in the
sun.’ Behold the beginning and the type of the usurpation of the
earth.” When “these poor children” are men, they do not always view
the usurpation of the earth with resignation; from the Middle Ages
down they have, from time to time, risen in revolt and there have
been resulting massacres. Men like Pastoureaux and Jacques in France
and Wat Tyler in England, the anabaptists and John of Leyden in
Germany, are examples of what we mean. But, these great explosions of
popular clamour once at an end, the Christian priest had always at his
disposal, to subdue the crowd, a robust doctrine of compensation in
heaven for one’s sufferings on earth; all the beatitudes are summed up
in “Blessed are the poor, for they shall see God.” In our days, owing
to the progress of the natural sciences, anything like certitude on the
subject of compensation in heaven has disappeared; even the Christian,
less sure of Paradise, aspires to see the justice and compensations of
heaven realized in this world. The most durable element in Christianity
is, therefore, less the check that it imposes upon the masses than
the contempt for the established order with which it inspires them.
Religion is nowadays obliged to call in social science to aid it in
its struggle against socialism. The true principle of private property
as of social authority cannot be religious; it lies essentially in
the sentiment of the rights of other people and in an increasingly
scientific acquaintance with the conditions of social and political
life.

      [74] _Acts_ ii. 44, 45; iv. 32, sqq.

      [75] Tertull. _Apolog._ c. 39, Justin., _Apolog._ I, 14.

[Sidenote: Religion not necessary to morality.]

But is not religion a safeguard of popular morality? It is true
that immorality and crime are habitually conceived as associated
with non-religion, and as products of it. Criminologists, however,
have demonstrated that no proposition could be less tenable. If one
considers the mass of the delinquents in any country, one will find
that irreligion among them is an exception, and a rare exception. In
unusually religious countries like England delinquents are not less
numerous, and the average of belief among them is higher; the greater
number, Mayhew says, profess to believe in the Bible. In France,
where non-religion is so common, it is natural that it should also
be common among the criminal classes, but it is far from being the
rule; it is most frequent among the leaders, the organizers of crime,
those, in effect, who rise above the mass of their fellows, like
Mandrin in the last century, La Pommerais, Lacenaire. If sociologists
find themselves obliged to attribute a positive antisocial bias to
certain criminals, it is not surprising that they should recognize
in a number of them an amount of instruction and a degree of talent
amply sufficient to disembarrass them of the superstitious beliefs of
the multitude, which are shared by their companions in crime. Neither
their talents nor their culture have sufficed absolutely to check
their evil disposition, but certainly they have not been responsible
for it. Criminologists cite a number of facts which go to prove that
the most minute and sincere practice of religion may go along with the
greatest crimes. Despine relates that Bourse had scarcely finished a
robbery and a homicide, before he went to kneel and take part in a
church service. G., a courtesan, as she set fire to her lover’s house,
cried: “God and the ever blessed Virgin do the rest!” The wife of
Parency, while her husband was killing an old man as a preliminary to
robbery, was praying God for her husband’s success. It is well known
how religious the Marquise of Brinvilliers was; her very condemnation
was facilitated by the fact of her having written with her own hands
a secret confession of her sins in which she made mention, along with
parricides, fratricides, arsons, and poisonings without number, of the
list of the number of times that she had been remiss or negligent in
confession.[76] Religion is no more responsible for all these crimes
than non-religion is; the higher elements of both are equally debarred
of entrance into the brain of a criminal. Although the moral sense
and religious sentiment are in origin distinct, they act and react
incessantly upon each other. It may be announced, as a law, that no one
whose moral sense is obliterated can be capable of experiencing genuine
religious sentiment in all its purity, though such a person may well
be more than usually apt to attach a value to the superstitious forms
of a cult. The religious sentiment, at its height, always rests upon a
refined moral sense, although, when religious sentiment goes further
and becomes fanaticism, it may react on and debase the moral sense. On
a person who is deficient in moral sense, religion produces no effects
but such as are evil—fanaticism, formalism, and hypocrisy—because it
is of necessity ill-comprehended and misconstrued.

      [76] It must not be believed that even prostitutes, who
      as a class are so closely allied to criminals, are wholly
      non-religious. A case is cited of a number of prostitutes who
      subscribed the money to have one of their companions, who was
      on the point of death, removed from a house of ill-fame to
      some place where the priest might visit her; others subscribed
      money for a great number of masses to be said for the soul of
      a companion who was dead. At all events prostitutes are quite
      superstitious, and their religion swarms with strange and
      ridiculous beliefs.

      In Italy criminals are usually religious. Quite recently the
      Tozzi family of butchers, after having killed and dismembered a
      young man, sold his blood, mixed with sheep’s blood, in their
      shop, and went none the less to perform their devotions to the
      Madonna, and to kiss the statue of the Virgin. The Caruso band,
      Lombroso says, habitually placed sacred images in the caves
      and woods in which they lived, and burned candles before them.
      Verzeni, who strangled three women, was an assiduous frequenter
      of the church and the confessional, and he came of a family
      which was not only religious but bigoted. The companions of
      La Gala, who were imprisoned at Pisa, obstinately refused to
      take food on Friday during Lent, and when the keeper tried
      to persuade them to do so, they replied, “Do you think we
      have been excommunicated?” Masini, with his band, met three
      countrymen and among them a priest; he slowly sawed open the
      throat of one of them with an ill-sharpened knife, and then,
      with his hands still bloody, obliged the priest to give him the
      consecrated Host. Giovani Mio and Fontana went to confession
      before going out to commit a murder. A young Neapolitan
      parricide, covered with amulets, confessed to Lombroso that
      he had invoked the aid of the Madonna de la Chaîne in the
      accomplishment of his horrible crime. “And that she really
      helped me I conclude from this, that at the first blow of the
      stick my father fell dead, although I am myself personally
      weak.” Another murderer, a woman, before killing her husband,
      fell on her knees and prayed to the blessed Virgin to give her
      the strength to accomplish her crime. Still another announced
      his acceptance of a line of action devised by his companion in
      these words, “I will come, and I will do that with which God
      has inspired thee.”

[Sidenote: Ignorance, not Catholicism, responsible for immorality.]

Catholic countries often supply an unusually high percentage of
criminals, because Catholic countries are more ignorant than Protestant
countries. In Italy, for example, as many as sixteen out of every
hundred deaths in the Papal States and Southern Italy, have at times
been deaths by violence, whereas in Liguria and Piedmont only two
or three out of every hundred are deaths by violence. The population
of Paris is not, on the whole, more immoral than that of any other
great European city, although it is distinctly less religious; what
a difference, for example, between London and Paris! The churches,
temples, and synagogues in Paris would not hold one-tenth of the
population, and, as they are half empty in time of services, a
statistician may with some show of reason conclude that only about a
twentieth of the population fulfil their religious duties. Whereas
Paris contains only 169 places of worship, London, in 1882, possessed
1231—without counting the religious assemblies which regularly gather
in the parks, the public squares, and even under the railway viaducts.

[Sidenote: Non-religion not responsible for French Revolution and the
Commune.]

But should not the crimes of the Commune and those of the French
Revolution be set down to non-religion? One might, with more show of
truth, render religion responsible for the massacres of St. Bartholomew
and of the Dragonnades, for, in the wars of the Huguenots, of the
Vaudois, of the Albigenses, the issue was a religious issue, whereas in
the case of the Commune the issue was wholly a social one; religion was
only very indirectly involved in it. The analogy for the Commune is to
be found in the wars concerning the agrarian laws of ancient Rome, or
in contemporary strikes which are so often accompanied by bloodshed, or
in any of the brutal uprisings of the labourer or the peasant against
the capitalist or the owner of the soil. Be it remarked, moreover,
that in all these and the like contests the stronger party—the
representative of society and, it is alleged, of religion—commits,
in the name of repression, violences comparable to and sometimes less
excusable than those with which they charge the party of disorder.

[Sidenote: Labour for labour’s sake.]

What demoralizes races and peoples is not so much the downfall of
religion as the luxury and idleness of the few and the discontented
poverty of the many. In society demoralization begins at the two
extremes, top and bottom. The law of labour is open to two species
of revolt; the revolt of the discontented working man who curses the
law of labour even while he obeys it, and the revolt of the idle
noble, or man of fortune, who ignores it simply. The richest classes
in society are often those whose lives show a minimum of devotion, of
disinterestedness, of true moral elevation. For a fashionable woman,
for example, the duties of life too frequently consist in an unbroken
round of trifles; she is utterly ignorant of what it means to take
pains. To bear a child or two (to exceed the number of three, one of
them has said, is the height of immorality), to have a nurse to take
care of them, to be faithful to one’s husband, at least within the
limits of coquetry—behold the whole duty of woman! Too frequently,
in the upper classes, duty comes to be conceived simply as a matter
of abstinence, of not being as nasty or as wicked as one might.
Temptations to do evil increase in number as one mounts in the social
scale, whereas what one may call temptations to do good decrease in
number. Fortune enables one to hire a substitute, so to speak, in
all the duties of life—in caring for the sick, in nursing children,
in rearing them, and so forth; the rich are not obliged to pay, as
the saying is, with their person—_payer de la personne_! Wealth too
often produces a species of personal avarice, of miserliness of one’s
self, a restriction of moral and physical activity, an impoverishment
of the individual and of the race. The shopkeeping class constitute
the least immoral section of the rich, and that because they preserve
their habits of work; but they are constantly affected by the example
of the higher classes, who take a pride in being useless. The remnant
of morality, which exists among the middle class, is partly due to
the love of money; money does, in effect, possess one advantage, that
it must in general be worked for. Nobles and business men love money
but in different ways. Young men of good family love it as a means of
expense and of prodigality, people in a small way of business love it
for its own sake, and out of avarice. Avarice is a powerful safeguard
for the remnants of morality in a people. It coincides, in almost all
its results, with a disinterested love of labour; it exercises no evil
influence except in the matter of marriage, where the question of the
girl’s portion becomes paramount, and in the matter of children,
of which it tends to restrict the number. All things considered, as
between prodigality and avarice, the moralist is obliged to cast
his vote for the latter on the ground that it is not favourable to
debauchery, and does not therefore tend to dissolve society; both are
maladies which benumb and may destroy one, but the former is contagious
and is transmitted by contact. We may add that love of expense rarely
serves to encourage regular labour: it produces, rather, an appetite
for gambling and even for robbery; clever strokes on the stock-exchange
amount, in certain cases, to robbery pure and simple. Thence arises a
secondary demoralizing influence. Prodigals are necessarily attracted
to the more or less shaky forms of financial speculation, by which,
absolutely without labour properly so called, more money can be amassed
than by labour; the miser, on the contrary, will hesitate, will prefer
effort to risk, and his effort will be more beneficial to society. In
effect, the only thing that can maintain society in a healthy state
is that love of labour for its own sake which is so rarely met with,
and which one must endeavour to develop; but this love of intellectual
and physical labour is in nowise bound up with religion; it is bound
up with a certain broad culture of the mind and heart which render
idleness insupportable.

[Sidenote: Religion the creature of circumstance.]

Similarly with the other moral and social virtues which are alleged
to be inseparable from religion. In all times humanity has found a
certain average of vice, as of virtue, necessary. Religions themselves
have always been obliged to give way before certain prevalent habits
and passions. If we had been living at the time of the Reformation,
we should have heard Catholic priests maintaining, with all the
seriousness in the world, that, but for Catholic dogmas and the
authority of the Pope, society would dissolve and perish. Happily
experience has proved that these dogmas and that authority are not
indispensable to social life; the conscience of mankind has attained
its majority and no longer needs the services of a guardian. The day
will come, no doubt, when Frenchmen will no more feel an inclination to
enter into a house of stone and invoke God to the sound of a hymn than
an Englishman or a German experiences to-day an inclination to kneel
before a priest and confess to him.


_III. Is Protestantism a necessary transition stage between religion
and free-thought?_

[Sidenote: Dependence of Catholicism on power.]

Over and above free-thinkers, properly so called, there exists in every
country a class of men who understand perfectly the defects in the
religions in force about them, but have not the power of mind necessary
to lift them above revealed dogma generally, and every form of external
cult and rite. They begin accordingly to dabble in the religions
of neighbouring peoples. A religion which is not in force in one’s
immediate neighbourhood always possesses the advantage of being seen
from a distance. At a distance its faults are scarcely distinguishable,
and the imagination freely endows it with all excellent qualities.
How many things and persons gain thus by aloofness! When one has seen
one’s ideal, it is sometimes good not to approach it too near if one is
to preserve one’s reverence for it. A number of Englishmen, indignant
at the aridity of the hard and blind fanaticism of the extreme
Protestants, cast envious glances across the Channel, where a religion
seems to reign that is more friendly to art,—at once more æsthetic
and more mystical, capable of affording a completer satisfaction to
certain human needs. Among those who are thus favourable to a properly
understood Catholicism may be cited Matthew Arnold and Cardinal Newman;
and one might even add the Queen of England herself. In France, as
might be expected, quite the opposite disposition obtains. Wearied of
the Catholic Church and of its intolerance, we should gladly escape
its dominion: compared with the objections against Catholicism which
assail our eyes, the objections against Protestantism appear to us as
trifling. And the same notion has occurred simultaneously to a number
of distinguished Frenchmen: why should France remain Catholic, at least
in name? Why should not France adopt the religion of the more robust
people who have recently vanquished her; the religion of Germany, of
England, of the United States, of all the young, strong, and active
nations? Why not begin again the labour interrupted by the massacre
of St. Bartholomew and the Edict of Nantes? Even if one should not
succeed in converting the masses, it would suffice, according to the
partisans of Protestantism, to propagate the new religion among the
élite of the population very sensibly to modify the general course
of our government, of our national spirit, even of our laws. The
laws regulating the relations of Church and State would promptly be
corrected; they would be reconstructed so as to offer protection to
the development of the Protestant religion, as they at this moment do
in a thousand ways to the outworn religion of Catholicism. Ultimately
Protestantism would be declared to be the national religion of France;
the religion, in other words, toward which she ought to endeavour
to move, and which constitutes her real ideal, her sole hope of the
future, the sole means open to Latin nations to escape death, and
to outlive, in some sense, themselves. Add that, in the judgment of
the authors of this hypothesis, the Protestant religion, once fairly
entered in the lists against Catholicism, must inevitably and speedily
win the day; the iron pot would make short work of the earthen pot.
The partisans of Protestantism invoke history in support of their
conclusions; Protestantism was vanquished among us by force, and
not by persuasion; its defeat is therefore not definitive. Wherever
Catholicism has not employed violence, persecution, and crime to
maintain itself, it has always succumbed; its only tenable argument
has been to put its opponents to death; to-day this comfortable method
of backing the syllogism by the sword is out of date, and Catholicism
is condemned the instant it is attacked. It contains, moreover,
an essential and irremediable vice, auricular confession. By the
confessional it excites the open or secret hostility of every husband
and every father, who sees the priest interposing between him and his
wife, between him and his children. The confessor is a supernumerary in
every family; a member who has neither the same interests nor the same
ideas, and who, nevertheless, is perfectly informed of everything the
other members do, and can, in a thousand ways, oppose their projects,
and, at the moment when they least expect it, bar their path. When one
takes into consideration the mute state of war which so often exists
between the married man and the Catholic priest; when one analyzes the
other causes of dissolution which are working in Catholicism; when
one considers, for example, that the dogma of infallibility is simply
inacceptable to anyone whose conscience is not absolutely distorted,
one must admit that the project of Protestantizing France, how strange
soever it may seem at first glance, is worthy of serious attention.

[Sidenote: Proposal to Protestantize France.]

It is not astonishing that it should have won to its side a number
of partisans, and should have provoked a certain intellectual
fermentation. Michelet and Quinet were desirous that France should
become Protestant, at least transitorily! In 1843, during a journey
to Geneva, Michelet discussed with some clergymen the means of
accelerating the progress of Protestantism in France and of creating
a really national church. Two men, whose names are known to all those
who have laboured in philosophy or in social science, MM. Renouvier
and De Laveleye, are among the promoters of this movement. Convinced
free-thinkers, like M. Louis Ménard, acquiesce in it, making use of
the names of Turgot and Quinet; and M. Pillon also has sustained the
project. Many Protestant ministers have turned the whole of their
activity in this channel, have founded journals and written for the
reviews; pamphlets, works often remarkable in their kind, have been
composed and circulated. Protestants are more disposed than Catholics
to propagandism, because their faith is more personal. They feel
that in a number of provinces they form an important nucleus which
may grow in time like a snowball. A number of villages, of Yonne, la
Marne, l’Aude, etc., have already been converted; in spite of all the
obstacles raised by the civil and religious authorities, in spite of
vexations and annoyances of every sort, the neophytes have finally
succeeded in establishing a Protestant pastor among them. Materially
considered, these results are small; their consequences, however, may
some day be of great importance. One never suspects how many people
there are ready to listen and to believe; how many people there are
ready to preach and to convert. It need not be a matter of surprise,
some day or other, to see Protestant clergymen fairly rise out of
the soil and overrun our country districts. The Catholic clergy, who
present an almost unbroken front of incapacity, will scarcely be able
to hold their own against a new and ardent adversary.

[Sidenote: Contrary to the tendency of French history.]

The most serious opposition to Protestantism in France is not to be
looked for from the Catholics, but from the free-thinkers. It is in the
name of free-thought that we shall consider the following question:
Ought France really to accept as its ideal any religion whatsoever,
even though it be superior to the one professedly in possession at
the present day? Is not the acceptance of any religion as an ideal
precisely contrary to the whole movement of the French mind since the
Revolution?

[Sidenote: French Revolution still being accomplished.]

It has been said that, if the French Revolution was put down before it
had produced all of the results which were expected of it, the reason
was that it was undertaken, not in the name of a liberal religion,
but in antagonism to all religion. The nation rose as a body against
Catholicism, but it had nothing to offer in its stead; it was an
effort in the void and resulted necessarily in a fall. To address
such a reproach to the Revolution, is precisely to fail to recognize
its distinguishing peculiarity. Theretofore religion had usually been
involved in the political discussions of men; the English Revolution,
for example, was in part religious. And when an uprising was, as it
happened, wholly religious, its purpose was to pull down one cult and
set up another; the aid of a new God had to be called in to expel the
old; but for Jesus or some other unknown divinity, Jupiter would still
have been enthroned on Olympus. Also the result of these religious
revolutions was easy to predict; at the end of a certain number of
years some new cult was bound to carry the day, to intrench itself, and
to become quite as intolerant as its predecessor; and the revolution
was achieved—that is to say, everything was practically in the same
state that it was before. A determinate end, close at hand, had been
pursued and attained; a little chapter in the history of the universe
had been written, and one was ready to close it with a period and to
say that was all. What drives the historian to despair in the case
of the French Revolution, is precisely the impossibility of writing
a peroration, of reaching a final stop, of saying, “That is all.”
The great fermentation persists, and passes on from generation to
generation. “The French Revolution has come to nothing,” it is said;
but the reason is perhaps simply that it has not miscarried. The French
Revolution is still in its earliest stages; if we are still unable to
say where it is leading us, we may at least affirm with confidence
that it is leading us somewhere. It is precisely the incertitude and
the remoteness of their aim that constitute the nobility of certain
enterprises; if one wants something very big, one must be resigned to
want something a little vague. One must be resigned also to a settled
discontent with everything that is offered one as a substitute for the
fleeing ideal that constitutes one’s aim. Never to be satisfied—behold
a comparatively unknown state of mind in many parts of the world! Some
thousands of years ago there were a number of revolutions in China,
which brought forth results so precise and so incontestable that they
have come down in a state of absolute preservation to the present day.
Is China the ideal of those who wish a people to achieve once for
all a state of satisfaction, of stable equilibrium, of established
environment, of unalterable outline and form? Certainly the bent of
the French mind is precisely the opposite of that of the Chinese.
Horror of routine, of tradition, of the established fact in the face
of reason, is an attribute that we possess to a fault. To carry reason
into politics, into law, into religion was precisely the aim of the
French Revolution. It is no easy thing, it is even futile, to attempt
to introduce simultaneously logic and light into everything; one makes
mistakes, one reasons ill, one has one’s days of weakness, one succumbs
to concordats and empires. In spite, however, of so many temporary
divergences from the straight path, it is already easy to recognize the
direction toward which the Revolution tends, and to affirm that this
direction is not religious. The French Revolution affords an example,
for the first time in the world, of a liberal movement disassociated
from religion. To wish, with Quinet, that the Revolution should become
Protestant is simply not to understand it. Republican in the sphere
of politics, the Revolution tends to enfranchise man, in the sphere
of thought also, from every species of religious domination, and of
uniform and irrational dogmatic belief. The Revolution did not achieve
this end at the first attempt; it was guilty even of imitating the
intolerance of the Catholics; therein lay its prime fault, its great
crime; we suffer from it still. But the remedy does not consist in
adopting a new religion, which would simply be a disguised return to
the past.

[Sidenote: Advantages of Protestantism.]

Let us examine, however, the substantial apology for Protestantism,
presented by M. de Laveleye. He maintains the superiority of
Protestantism principally in regard to three points: 1. It is
favourable to education; 2. It is favourable to political and religious
liberty; 3. It does not possess a celibate clergy living outside of the
family, and even outside of the country. Let us pass these different
points in review. In Protestantism the need of instruction, and
therefore of a knowledge of how to read, is inevitable, for the reason
that, as has been often remarked, the reformed religion is founded on
the interpretation of a book, the Bible. The Catholic religion, on the
contrary, rests upon the sacraments and certain practices, such as the
confession, and the Mass, which presuppose no knowledge of reading.
Luther’s first and last word was, “God commands you to educate your
children.” In the eyes of the Catholic priest an ability to read is
not, so far as religion is concerned, an unqualified advantage, it
exposes the possessor to certain dangers, it is a path that may lead
to heresy. The organization of popular instruction dates from the
Reformation. The consequence is that Protestant countries are far in
advance of Catholic countries in the matter of popular instruction.[77]
Wherever popular instruction attains its height, labour will be
directed with more intelligence, and the economic situation will
be better; Protestantism therefore gives rise to a superiority not
only in instruction, but in commerce and industry, in order and in
cleanliness.[78]

      [77] In Saxony, Denmark, Sweden, Prussia, Scotland (not
      England), illiteracy is at a minimum. Even in the most favoured
      Catholic countries, such as France and Belgium, at least a
      third of the population are illiterate. In this comparison race
      goes for nothing; Switzerland proves as much; purely Latin but
      also Protestant cantons Neuchâtel, Vaux, and Geneva are on a
      level with the Germanic cantons of Zürich and Bern, and are
      superior to such as Tessin, Valais, and Lucerne.

      [78] In Switzerland the cantons of Neuchâtel, Vaux, and Geneva
      are strikingly in advance of Lucerne, Valais, and the forest
      cantons; they are not only superior in matters of education,
      but in matters of industry, of commerce, and of wealth; and
      their artistic and literary activity is greater. “In the United
      States,” says De Tocqueville, “the majority of the Catholics
      are poor.” In Canada the larger order of business interests,
      manufacturing, commerce, the principal shops in the cities, are
      in the hands of Protestants. M. Audiganne, in his studies on
      the labouring population in France, remarks on the superiority
      of the Protestants in respect to industry, and his testimony
      is the less suspicious because he does not attribute that
      superiority to Protestantism. “The majority of the labourers
      in Nîmes, notably the silk-weavers, are Catholics, while the
      captains of industry and of commerce, the capitalists in a
      word, belong to the Reformed religion.” “When a family has
      split into two branches, one of which has clung to the faith
      of its fathers, while the other has become Protestant, one
      almost always remarks in the former a progressive financial
      embarrassment, and in the other an increasing wealth.” “At
      Mazamet, the Elbœuf of the south of France, all the captains of
      industry with one exception are Protestants, while the great
      majority of the labourers are Catholics. And Catholic working
      men are, as a class, much less well educated than Protestant
      working men.” Before the revocation of the Edict of Nantes
      members of the Reformed church had taken the lead in all
      branches of labour, and the Catholics, who found themselves
      unable to maintain a competition with them, had the practice of
      a number of different industries in which the latter excelled
      forbidden them by a series of edicts beginning with the year
      1662. After their expulsion from France the Huguenots carried
      into England, into Prussia, into Holland, their spirit of
      enterprise and of economy; and enriched the districts in which
      they settled. The Germans owe some portion of their progress
      to Huguenot exiles. Refugees from the Revocation introduced
      different industries into England, among others the silk
      industry; and it was certain disciples of Calvin who civilized
      Scotland. (See M. de Laveleye _De l’avenir des peuples
      catholiques_.)

[Sidenote: Protestantism favours self-government.]

Similarly in civil and political matters, Protestants have always been
partisans of self-government, of liberty, of local autonomy, and of
decentralization. Side by side with the advance of the Reformation
in Switzerland, in Holland, in England and America there went a
dissemination of the principles of liberty which later became the
articles of faith of the French Revolution. Calvinists, notably, have
always been inclined to an ideal of liberty and equality which has
rightfully rendered them objects of suspicion to the French monarchy;
they realized this ideal only beyond the seas in the American
Constitution, which may be regarded, in some sort, as the product
of Calvinistic ideas. As early as the year 1633 an American, Roger
Williams, proclaimed universal liberty, and liberty of conscience
in particular; he proclaimed the complete equality of all modes of
religious worship before the law, and on these principles founded
the democracy of Rhode Island and the town of Providence. The United
States, with the local autonomy and decentralization which characterize
its government, still forms the type of the Protestant state. In such
a state the widest liberty exists only, to say the truth, within the
limit of Christianity: the founders of the American Constitution
scarcely foresaw the day when a wider tolerance would be necessary.
And it would be to form an extremely false idea of the United States
to imagine that the civil power and religion are wholly disassociated.
The separation between Church and state is far from being as absolute
in America as is often supposed, and M. Goblet d’Alviella very justly
corrects the too enthusiastic assertions, on this point, of M. Guizot
and M. de Laveleye.[79]

      [79] “Public institutions are still deeply impregnated with
      Christianity. Congress, the State legislatures, the navy, the
      army, the prisons, are all supplied with chaplains; the Bible
      is still read in a large number of schools. The invocation of
      God is generally obligatory in an oath in a court of law, and
      even in an oath of office. In Pennsylvania the Constitution
      requires that every public employee shall believe in God, and
      in a future state of reward and punishments. The Constitution
      of Maryland awards liberty of conscience to deists only. The
      laws against blasphemy have never been formally abrogated.
      In certain States, more or less stringent Sunday laws are
      enforced. In 1880 a court declined to recognize, even as a
      moral obligation, a debt contracted on Sunday, and a traveller,
      injured in a railway accident, was refused damages on the
      ground that he was travelling on the Lord’s Day. And, finally,
      church property and funds are in a considerable degree exempt
      from taxation.” (M. Goblet d’Alviella, _Évolution religieuse_,
      p. 233.)

      Similarly, in Switzerland, in the month of February, 1886, the
      criminal court of Glaris, the chief place in a canton of 7000
      inhabitants, at 130 kilometers from Bern, rendered a singular
      judgment. A mason named Jacques Schiesser, who was obliged to
      work in water of an excessively low temperature, shivering
      with cold, his hands blue, made a movement of impatience
      at the cold, and uttered irreverential words toward God. A
      _procès-verbal_ was made out against him. He appeared before
      the judges, who condemned him for blasphemy to two days’
      imprisonment. It is surprising to see Switzerland carried,
      actually by Protestantism, back to the Middle Ages.

[Sidenote: Intellectual and moral superiority of Protestant clergy.]

Finally, to the political superiority of Protestantism must be added
the intellectual and moral superiority of its clergy. The obligation
to read and interpret the Bible has given rise, in the universities of
Protestant theology, to a work of exegesis which has resulted in a new
science, the Science of Religion. The Protestant clergymen are better
educated than our priests, and have moreover families and children,
and lead a life like that of any other citizen; they are national,
because their church is a national church; they do not receive orders
from abroad, and, more than all, they do not possess the terrible power
which the Catholic priest owes to the confessional; a power which
cost France the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and so many other
deplorable measures.[80]

      [80] “By means of the confessional,” says M. de Laveleye,
      the “priest holds the sovereign, the magistrates, and the
      electors, and through the electors the legislative chamber, in
      his power; so long as the priest presides over the sacraments,
      the separation of Church and State is only a dangerous
      illusion. The absolute submission of the entire ecclesiastical
      hierarchy to a single will, the celibacy of the clergy, and
      the multiplication of monastic orders, constitute a danger in
      Catholic countries of which Protestant countries know nothing.”

[Sidenote: But Protestantism is not a necessary step toward
free-thought.]

The several advantages which Protestantism enjoys by comparison
with Catholicism are so incontestable that, if one must absolutely
choose between the two religions, one could not hesitate. But such
a choice is not necessary; one can avoid both horns of the dilemma.
Free-thought is even more intimately dependent upon, and more disposed
to favour, science than Protestantism is, for free-thought absolutely
depends upon science. Free-thought is more intimately dependent upon
practical and civil liberty than Protestantism is, by the very fact
that free-thought is the complete realization of liberty in the sphere
of theory. Finally free-thought renders the clergy superfluous, or
rather to reinstate a mediæval term it tends to replace the priest by
the _clerk_, that is to say by the _savant_, the professor, the man
of letters, the man of culture, to whatever state of society he may
belong. The best thing that has been said about Protestantism in France
is M. de Narbonne’s remark to Napoleon. “There is not enough religion
in France to make two.” Instead of a national religion we possess in
France a national non-religion; that very fact constitutes our claim
to originality among the nations. In France two-thirds at least of the
male population live outside the limits of religious tradition. In the
country, as in the town, there is scarcely one man for every ten women
to be found in church, sometimes not more than one for a hundred, and
sometimes none at all. In the majority of the departments, scarcely
one man can be found fulfilling his religious duties. In the great
cities, the labourer is the avowed enemy of religion, in the country
the peasant is simply indifferent. The peasantry displays a certain
respect for the exterior forms of worship; but the reason is that the
peasantry comes in contact with the priest, its intercourse with him
is constant, it generally fears or esteems him enough not to laugh
at him, except behind his back. The results of the French Revolution
cannot be arrested in this country; sooner or later they will suffice
to give birth to a complete religious, political, and civil liberty:
even to-day in politics it is not in the direction of a lack of liberty
that our failure lies, it is quite the reverse. For the French, it is
useless to talk of adopting Protestantism under the pretext that it is
favourable to civil and political liberty, to diffusion of modern ideas
and science.

[Sidenote: No sufficient evidence that Protestant countries are more
moral than Catholic.]

There remains the consideration of public morality in France. But it
is impossible to demonstrate that the morality of Protestant people
is superior to that of Catholics; nay, in respect to a certain number
of items, statistics tend rather to prove the contrary, if anything
can be proved of morality by statistics. Drunkenness, for example,
is a much less terrible scourge among Catholic peoples who inhabit
climates in which alcohol constitutes a much smaller temptation.
Illegitimate births are much more frequent in Germany than in France;
no doubt because of the laws that regulate marriage. The average of
crimes and offences is not very variable from country to country,
and such variations as there are, are attributable to difference of
climate, of race, of greater or less density of population, and not
to differences of religion. To-day, on account of the increasing
perfection of means of communication, vice tends to find its level.
Vices spread like contagious diseases: everyone whose system is in a
state which is favourable to poison becomes contaminated, to whatsoever
race or whatsoever religion he may belong. The effect of any given
religion upon the morality of any given people is certainly not to
be overlooked, but it is altogether relative to the character of the
people in question, and proves nothing as to the absolute moral quality
of the religion itself. Mohammedanism is of great service to barbarous
tribes, because it prohibits drunkenness, and travellers generally
agree as to the moral superiority of Mohammedan tribes as compared with
tribes converted to Christianity; the first are composed of shepherds
and relatively honest merchants, the second are composed of drunkards,
whom alcohol has transformed into beasts and pillagers. Does it follow
that we must all become converted to Mohammedanism, or even that the
prohibitions of the Koran, all-powerful as they are over the savage
mind, would act with the same force upon a drunkard of Paris or of
London? Alas, no! and in the absence of any such possibility one may
take refuge in this means: sobriety is even more important for the
masses of the people than continence, its absence borders more nearly
on bestiality; moreover the labouring man and especially the peasant
possesses less opportunity to run to excesses of incontinence than of
drink, for the simple reason that women cost more than drink. Even
among the followers of Mohammed, the poor are obliged to restrict
themselves to one wife.

[Sidenote: And religion is not the sole factor that determines
morality.]

And finally religion does not constitute the sole cause of morality;
still less is it capable of re-establishing a morality which is on a
decline; the utmost it can do is to maintain morality somewhat longer
in existence than it otherwise would be, to confirm custom and habit by
a backing of faith. The power of custom and of the accomplished fact
is so considerable that even religion can scarcely make head against
it. When a new religion takes possession of a people it never destroys
the mass of the beliefs which have taken root in their hearts; it
fortifies them rather by adapting itself to them. To conquer paganism,
Christianity was obliged to transform itself: it became Latin in Latin
countries, German in German countries. Mohammedanism in Persia, in
Hindustan, in the island of Java serves simply as a vestment and a veil
for the old Zoroastrian, or Brahman, or Buddhistic beliefs. Manners,
national characters, and superstitions are more durable than dogmas.
The character of northern peoples is always hard and all of a piece, to
an extent that produces a certain external regularity in their lives, a
certain submission to discipline, sometimes also a certain savageness
and brutality. The men of southern Europe, on the contrary, are mobile,
malleable, open to temptation. The explanation is to be looked for
in their climate, not in their religion. The rigid fir-tree grows in
the north; flexible, tall reeds in the south. The discipline of the
Prussian army and administration does not result from the religion
of Prussia, but from the worship of discipline. Throughout the whole
life of the north there runs a certain stiffness which shows itself
in the smallest details, in the manner of walking, of speaking, of
directing the eyes; and the northern conscience is brusque and rough,
it commands, and one must obey or disobey; in the south of Europe it
argues. If Italy were Protestant, there would probably be few Quakers.
We believe therefore that the effect is often taken for the cause,
where a preponderant influence is attributed to the Protestant or
Catholic religion on public or private morality, and, that is to say,
on the vital power of a people. This influence formerly was enormous,
it is diminishing day by day, and it is science to-day which tends to
become the principal arbiter of the destinies of a nation.

       *       *       *       *       *

[Sidenote: Is the possession of a religion indispensable for the best
interests of humanity.]

If it be so, what must one think of the doubts, as to the future
of France, which seem to be entertained in certain quarters? Those
who regard religion as the condition _sine qua non_ of life and of
superiority in the struggle for existence among nations, must naturally
consider France as in danger of disappearing. But is this criterion of
national vitality admissible?

[Sidenote: Matthew Arnold’s theory.]

We find ourselves here once more in the presence of Mr. Matthew
Arnold. In his judgment, the modern world has been made what it is by
the influence of two peoples, the Greeks and the Jews, representing
respectively two distinct and almost opposed ideas, which are
contending with each other for the possession of the modern mind. For
Greece—the brilliant, but in spite of its subtlety of spirit, somewhat
superficial Greece—art and science fill the measure of life. For the
Hebrews life might be summed up in one word, justice. And by justice
must not be understood a rigid respect for the rights of others, but
a willingness to renounce one’s own interest, one’s own pleasure,
a self-effacement in the presence of the eternal law of sacrifice
personified in Javeh. Greece and Judea are dead; Greece faithful to the
last moment to its belief in the all-sufficiency of art and science,
Judea faithless at the last moment to its belief in the all-sufficiency
of justice, and falling by reason of that very infidelity. Mr. Matthew
Arnold finds the two nations symbolized in an Old Testament story. It
was before the birth of Isaac, the veritable inheritor of the divine
promise, who was humble but elect. Abraham looked upon his first son
Ishmael, who was young, vigorous, brilliant, and daring, and implored
God: “Oh, that Ishmael might live before Thee!” But it could not be.
Greece, the Ishmael among nations, has perished. Later the Renaissance
appeared as its successor; the Renaissance was full of vitality, of
future; the dream, the sombre nightmare had passed away, there was
to be no more religious asceticism, we were to return to nature. The
Renaissance held in horror the tonsured and hooded Dark Ages, whose
spirit was renouncement and mortification. For the Renaissance itself
the ideal was fulness of life, growth of the individual, the free and
joyous satisfaction of all our instincts, of art and science; Rabelais
was the personification of it. Alas! the Renaissance fell, as Greece
fell, and the natural successor of the Renaissance, in Mr. Matthew
Arnold’s judgment, is George Fox, the first Quaker, the open contemner
of arts and sciences. Finally, in our days, a people in Europe has
taken up the succession; the modern Greece, dear to the enlightenment
of all nations, the friend of art and science, is France. How often,
and with what ardour, has this prayer in its favour been raised to God
in heaven: “Oh, that Ishmael might live before Thee!” France is the
average sensual man, and Paris is his city, and who of us does not feel
himself attracted? The French possess this element of superiority over
the Renaissance, that they are more balanced than other peoples, and
though France has aimed to liberate mankind and to enfranchise them
from the austere rule of sacrifice, she has not conceived man as a
monster, nor liberty as a species of madness. Her ideas are formulated
in a system of education which lies in the regular, complete, and
harmonious development of all the faculties. Accordingly the French
ideal does not shock other nations, it seduces them; France is for
them the land of tact, of measure, of good sense, of logic. We aim in
perfect confidence at developing the whole human being without violence
to any part of it. It is in this ideal that we have found our famous
gospel of the rights of man. The rights of man consist simply in a
systematization of Greek and French ideas, in a consecration of the
supremacy of self, as against abnegation and religious sacrifice. In
France, Mr. Matthew Arnold says, the desires of the flesh, and current
ideas, are mistaken for the rights of man. While we are pursuing one
ideal, other peoples, more tightly chained to Hebraism, continue to
cultivate that justice which is founded on renouncement. From time
to time they look with envy out of their own austere and dull life,
and with admiration upon the French ideal which is so positive, so
clear, so satisfying; they are half inclined at times to make a trial
of it. France has exerted a charm on the entire world. Everyone at
some period or other of his life has thirsted for the French ideal,
has desired to make a trial of it. The French wear the guise of the
people to whom has been intrusted the beautiful, the charming ideal
of the future, and other nations cry: “Oh, that Ishmael might live
before Thee!” And Ishmael seems to grow more and more brilliant each
day, seems certain of success, is on the point of making the conquest
of the world. But at this moment a disaster occurs, the Crisis, the
Biblical judgment arrives at the moment of triumph; behold the judgment
of the world! The world, in Mr. Matthew Arnold’s opinion, was judged
in 1870: the Prussians were Javeh’s substitute. And once more Ishmael,
the spirit of Greece, the spirit of the Renaissance, the spirit of
France, free-thought, and free conduct were conquered by Israel, by
the spirit of the Bible, by the spirit of the Middle Ages. A brilliant
but superficial civilization was crushed beneath the weight of the
barbarous and unyielding asceticism of a more or less naïve faith.
Javeh is even in the present century the god of battles, and woe to the
individuals who do not believe, with the ancient Jew, that abnegation
constitutes three-fourths of life, and that art and science together
barely fill the other fourth.

[Sidenote: Victorious superiority of Hellenism.]

Rightly to estimate this philosophy of history let us occupy Matthew
Arnold’s point of view, which is not without some shade of truth.
Assuredly Greece and Judea, although their ideas dissolved into and
became a part of Christianity, are, so to speak, two antithetical
nations representing respectively two opposed conceptions of life and
of the world. These two nations have unceasingly struggled against each
other in intellectual battle, and one may accept as most honourable
for France the rôle that Mr. Arnold has assigned to her, that of being
the modern Greece, of representing the struggle of art and science
against mystical and ascetic faith. Greece and France were conquered,
it is true, but it does not follow from that fact that the spirit of
Greece and France, of art and science, has been conquered by faith.
The battle is on the definitive issue still uncertain. If one must
trust to a calculation of probabilities, all the probabilities are in
favour of science; if the French were conquered in 1870, it was not by
German religion but by German science. In general it is very difficult
to say that a doctrine is inferior because the people who maintained
it have been vanquished in history. History is a succession of events
whose causes are so complex that we never can affirm that we know
absolutely all of the reasons which produced any given historical fact.
There are, moreover, in the life of any people a number of currents
of thought running side by side, and sometimes in opposite directions.
The land of Rabelais is also that of Calvin. More than that, in other
nations we see a species of official doctrine professed by a series
of remarkable thinkers, which seems more or less in opposition to the
more unconscious doctrine of the people, in which the conduct and
thoughts of the great multitude may be regarded as summarized. What,
for example, is to be considered as the true doctrine of the Jewish
people? Is it the passionate faith of Moses, of Elijah, or of Isaiah;
is it the scepticism of the Ecclesiast, already foreshadowed in the
book of Job; is it the explosion of sensuality in the Song of Songs? It
is difficult to decide; it may be affirmed with some show of truth that
the temperament of the Jewish people as a whole is rather more sensual
than mystic. The official doctrine handed down to us in the Bible
may be regarded as a reaction against popular tendencies; a reaction
whose violence is the measure of the strength and stubbornness of the
tendencies against which it was directed. The great days of the Hebrew
people were rather those when, under the reign of Solomon, the arts
of ease and life were flourishing than those when the prophets were
bewailing the disappearance of so much splendour. Or what was really
the spirit of the people in the Middle Ages? Is it to be found in the
mystical books of the monks of the times? And are the Middle Ages,
apart from the Renaissance, to be regarded as constituting a great
and completed epoch? Even if we supposed, with Mr. Matthew Arnold,
that every brilliant age, such as the Renaissance, every age of art
and science, harbours in its own bosom the germs of death, does that
fact constitute a reason for lowering one’s estimate of such epochs of
intense life, and is it not better for a people to have lived, even
though but for a few years, than to have slept through centuries?

[Sidenote: Analogy between life of nation and that of individual.]

Nothing is eternal. When a nation has enjoyed a brilliant life
during a certain number of years or centuries, when it has produced
great artists or great scholars, there necessarily comes a period of
comparative exhaustion. Religions also are subject to the law of birth,
maturity, and decay. Where does the responsibility lie? On the very
laws of life, which do not permit plants to blossom eternally, and
which in general provide, in all the kingdoms of the natural world,
that there shall be nothing so fragile as a flower. But if all human
things are transitory, to labour for the efflorescence of intelligence,
to regard art and science as the supreme aim of life, is precisely
to pursue that which is least perishable. Art, science, the last
achievements of the human mind do not decay; man alone, the individual
disappears, and the ancient adage is eternally true: “Art is long, and
life is short.” As to true justice, it also is surely eternal; but if
by true justice be understood the hard law of Jehovah, the worship of
this law has always fallen upon the insignificant epochs of history,
and precisely upon the epochs of injustice and barbarism. Therein lies
the explanation of the fact that that cult has flourished at periods
when nations were the most robust and difficult to subdue. The manners
of such nations are ferocious, their life at bottom is quite contrary
to the ideal of justice, and their religious faith resembles their
manners, and is violent and savage, and inclines them to intolerance,
to fanaticism, to massacre; but all these elements of injustice none
the less constitute, in the people that unites them all, so many
additional chances of victory over other people. Later, when manners
become more civilized, when faith diminishes and art and science are
born, a nation often becomes weaker, directly as it becomes nobler; the
finer an organism is, the more delicate it becomes, the easier it is to
break. Renouncement of self, submission of the weak to the strong, and
of the strongest to an all-powerful priest, the species of hierarchy
that obtained in Judea, in India, and Europe during the Middle Ages,
formerly gave a people a superiority in the struggle for existence,
like that of a rock over a vegetable, of an oak over a sensitive
plant, of a bull or an elephant over man; but is precisely that kind
of effectiveness the ideal of humanity, and the aim to be proposed
to human effort? To raise art and science to their highest possible
development exacts a considerable expense of force; art and science
fatigue and exhaust the people who give them birth. After epochs of
effervescence, follow epochs of repose and of recuperation, epochs, so
to speak, of intellectual lying fallow. These alternations of repose
and productivity, of sterility and fecundity will continue to recur
until some means be found of maintaining the human mind continuously
in its state of highest vitality, as one fertilizes the earth, and,
so to speak, thus secures a constant flow of sap and a perpetual
efflorescence. The day perhaps will come when the psychic analogue
of the rotation of crops may be discovered. However that may be, the
greatness of a people has in the past too often exhausted it. But it
does not follow, from that fact, that history must be read backward,
and that periods of mere preparation and barbarism and despotism must
be regarded as those which are the incarnation of the law of justice
and have saved the race of mankind.

[Sidenote: Hellenism contains the cure of its own evils.]

If greatness kills it is beautiful to die for greatness; but when it is
the death of a nation that is in question, mortality is never complete.
Which is the more completely alive to-day, whatever Mr. Matthew Arnold
may say, Greece or Judea? Which will be more alive to-morrow, France,
which to-day seems trampled underfoot, or the nations which seem to
be France’s superiors? If we were perfectly sure that France, better
than any other nation, represents art and science, we might affirm
with perfect certitude that she will possess the future, and say with
confidence that Ishmael will live. It is true that, in Mr. Matthew
Arnold’s opinion, Ishmael represents not only the man of intellect
but the man of the senses, of the desires of the flesh. Of a truth
it is strange to see anyone regarding the conquerors of France as
Quakers, and Paris can lay no better claim than London or Berlin to
being dubbed the modern Babylon. Mr. Matthew Arnold’s mystic terrors
in this connection are really deserving of raillery. What is just in
his position is that the French, even in the pursuit of pleasure,
display a certain moderation and measure, display a degree of art that
is unknown to other people; and by that very fact they achieve, if not
the substance, at least the form of morality, which is, as Aristotle
has said, a just mean between two vicious extremes. In Mr. Matthew
Arnold’s judgment, however, this specious morality serves simply as
a cloak for the lowest degree of immorality, that namely of seeking
one’s rule of life not in God but in human nature, with all its diverse
tendencies, high and low. This immorality constitutes in its turn a
sort of social danger, that of a softening or enfeeblement of the
national character of a people. This danger appears to us illusory,
or rather, if one may so speak, it is a question which belongs rather
to hygiene than to morals; what is really wanted is that science
itself should discover in the matter a rule of conduct. In reality,
genuine men of science actually are those who know best how to direct
themselves in life, and a whole people of men of science could leave
little to desire on the score of conduct; and that fact shows that
science itself contains an element of practical wisdom and morality.
Note also that there exists an antagonism between cerebral labour and
the violence of the physical appetites. The prohibitions which are
based upon a mystical law too often season desire simply, as it is
easy to prove by examples drawn from the clergy of the Middle Ages.
A much more certain method may be employed, namely, to extinguish
desire, to substitute a sort of intellectual disdain in place of
religious terror. The Mohammedan religion prohibits the use of wine;
but it is very easy to distinguish between wine and alcohol, which
Mohammed did not formerly forbid for the sufficient reason that he was
unacquainted with its existence. Moreover, religious faith is not only
subject to subtleties of interpretation, it is subject to periods of
weakness; but if, on the contrary, you issue no mystical prohibition
but cultivate a man to a certain degree of intellectual development,
he will simply not desire to drink; education will have transformed
him more perfectly than religion could have done. Far from diminishing
the value that individuals set upon pleasure, religions in reality
frequently augment it considerably, because, over and against such and
such a pleasure, and, as it were, holding the balance level against it,
they establish an eternity of pain. When a religious devotee yields
to temptation, he conceives the desired indulgence as, in some sort,
of an infinite value, as condensing into an instant such an eternity
of joy as may compensate an eternity of suffering. This conception,
which unconsciously dominates the entire conduct of the believer, is
fundamentally immoral. Fear of chastisement, as psychologists have
frequently remarked, lends a certain additional charm to the forbidden
pleasure; magnify the chastisement, you heighten the charm. Therein
lies the explanation of the fact that, if a devotee is immoral at all,
he is infinitely more so than a sceptic; he will indulge in monstrous
refinements in his pleasures, analogous to the monstrous refinements
in which his god indulges, in the item of punishments; and his virtue,
consisting largely in fear, is itself fundamentally immoral. In epochs
of scientific development this mystical and diabolical heightening of
pleasure will disappear. The man of science is acquainted with the
causes of pleasure, they fall into place in his scheme of things, in
the general network of causes and effects; a pleasure is a desirable
effect, but only in so far as it does not exclude such and such another
equally desirable effect. The pleasures of the senses take their
legitimate rank in the classified and subordinated list of human aims.
A man of large intelligence holds desire in check by means of its
natural and sole all-powerful antagonist—disdain.

[Sidenote: Hellenism more just than justice.]

To sum it all up, Ishmael is quite capable of regulating his own
conduct without Jehovah’s help. Justice is salvation, said the Hebrew
people; but science also is salvation, and justice too, and justice
not infrequently more just and more certain than any other kind. If
Ishmael sometimes strays into the desert, sometimes loses his way and
falls, he knows how to get up again; he has strength enough in his own
heart to help himself, and to make him independent of Jehovah, who
left him alone in infinite space without even sending to his aid the
angel mentioned in the Bible. If France has really, as Mr. Arnold says,
formulated the new gospel of Ishmael, this profoundly human gospel is
indubitably destined to outlive the other, for there is often nothing
more provisional, more unlasting, more fragile, than what men have
crowned with the adjective divine. The surest method of finding what
is really eternal is to look for the best and most universal elements
in the human character. But the gospel of the rights of man, Mr. Arnold
objects, is the ideal of the average, sensual man only. One wonders
what the meaning of the word “sensual” in this place can be, and what
sensuality can have to do with an unwillingness to disregard the rights
of other people or to have one’s own rights disregarded by other
people. As if the rights of man had anything to do with sensuality!
Mr. Arnold forgets that the word “right” always implies some measure
of sacrifice. But the sacrifice is precisely proportionate—it is not
the sacrifice of all for the benefit of one or of the few; it is not a
sterile sacrifice, it is not a vain expense of force, it is the partial
sacrifice of all for the benefit of all, it is the renunciation in
our own conduct of everything which might interfere with like conduct
on the part of other people; so that, instead of being a waste of
social power, it is in the best sense an organization and an increase
of social power. The people who first truly realize the gospel of
the rights of man will not only be the most brilliant, the most
enviable, the happiest of peoples, but also the justest of peoples,
with a justice which will be not only national and passing, but, so
to speak, universal and indestructible; not even the hand of Jehovah
will be able to shiver its power, for what is really divine in power
will dwell in its own heart. The French Revolution was not so purely
sensual and earthly as Mr. Matthew Arnold affirms. It was an uprising
not in the name of the senses but of the reason. The Declaration of
Rights is a series of formulæ _a priori_, constituting a sort of
metaphysics or religion of civil government, founded upon a revelation
by the human conscience. It is easily comprehensible that positive
and empirical thinkers, such as Bentham and John Stuart Mill and
Taine, should have a word of blame for this novel species of religious
Utopia; but a person like Mr. Matthew Arnold, who prides himself on
being religious, ought not to draw back from it, ought even to admire
it. Theodore Parker, a Christian not less liberal than Mr. Matthew
Arnold, did so. Writing on the subject of the French Revolution,
Theodore Parker said: that the French were more transcendental than
the Americans. To the intellectual conception of liberty and to the
moral conception of equality they joined the religious conception of
fraternity, and thus supplied politics as well as legislation with a
divine foundation as incontestable as the truths of mathematics. They
declare that rights and duties precede and dominate human law. America
says: “The Constitution of the United States is above the President;
the Supreme Court is above Congress.” France says: “The constitution of
the universe is above the Constitution of France!” That is what forty
millions of men declare. It is the greatest proclamation that a nation
has ever made in history.

[Sidenote: Good and evil sides of French gaiety.]

What we may reasonably be reproached with is not our love for art and
science, but our love for a facile art and a superficial science. We
may rightfully be reproached also with a somewhat Attic lightness,
a lack of perseverance and of seriousness. Naturally, one does not
mean that we should imitate the superstitious Slave who attributes
an involuntary burst of laughter to the devil, and who, after having
laughed, expectorates indignantly to exorcise the sweet spirit of
gaiety whom he regards as a spirit of evil. If French gaiety is one
of our weaknesses it is also one of the elements of our national
strength; but let us be quite clear about the sense to be put upon
the word. The gaiety which is genuine and charming consists simply in
high-heartedness and vivacity of mind. One’s courage is strong enough,
confident enough, to be able to afford not to look at things on their
painful side. Everything has two handles, says the Greek sage; and by
one handle it is light and easy to manage; it is by that handle that
the French are fond of taking destiny and fortune. Gaiety of that
kind is simply a form of hope; thoughts which come from the heart,
great thoughts are often the most smiling. What one calls _aptness_,
that swift fitness and appropriateness in which the French delight,
is itself an evidence of mental detachment, an affirmation to the
effect that things which appeared at first so enormous really possess
slight importance, a mark of high courage in the face of disaster; it
is simply a less theatrical rendering of the ancient _non dolet_. A
French officer, in a guerilla war (in New Caledonia, I think), felt
himself struck in the breast by a bullet; “Well aimed, for a savage,”
he said, as he fell. That is French heroism; not going the length of
ignoring the fact, but maintaining a just appreciation of it as it is.
But there is a gaiety that cannot be too much blamed or too steadily
repressed, a gaiety undistinguished by subtlety or high courage, and
one to which other peoples are quite as inclined as the French, the
gross laugh which follows horse-play like an echo, and inhabits taverns
and _cafés chantants_. That species of gaiety is the vicious gaiety
of peasants out for a holiday, of commercial travellers at dinner. It
is undeniable that the Gaul has a weakness for _gaudriole_. I know a
promising young physician who was obliged to leave Paris, where he had
won a name as a hospital surgeon, obliged to quit work and to go to a
distant country for his health; in a moment of expansion he confided
to me that what he regretted most were the jolly evenings at the
Palais-Royal. There are thousands of distinguished young men subjected
to this species of education, of discipline in “chaff,” and it is
inevitable that it should result in a loss, for them, of something
that is fine. The Palais-Royal, the vaudeville, _cafés-concerts_ are
places which corrupt the taste as the palate is corrupted by drinking
wood eau-de-vie. It is difficult to be a really remarkable man and
at the same time to possess a serious taste for the gross pleasantry
of second-class theatres. The two are irreconcilable. And it is a
melancholy thing to think that the pick of the young men of France
should be exposed to precisely that influence, should pass a number of
years in such an environment and lose their taste as surely as their
ear for music. Whatever is anti-æsthetic in laughter is degrading;
witticisms must be spiritual, must really expand the heart with healthy
mirth; laughter should positively embellish the face. _Nihil inepto
risu ineptius est_; the reason is that in such cases laughter is simply
an explosion of silliness. The wise man, says the Bible, laughs with an
inner laugh. Laughter should illuminate and not disfigure the visage,
because it reveals the soul, and the soul should be beautiful, should
resemble an outburst of frankness, of sincerity. The charm of laughter
lies, in a great measure, in the sincerity of the joy which renders
us, for the time being, transparent to those about us. Human thought
and the human heart, with the entire world that they contain, may be
embodied in a tear.

[Sidenote: Parisian wit an epitome of all that is evil in French
gaiety.]

Parisian wit, which in some quarters is regarded as the very type and
ideal of French wit, is in some respects no more than an epitome of
its defects; among the working classes it consists in chaff, what they
call _blague_; among the upper classes it consists in a superficial
varnish, an inability to fix the mind on a logical succession of ideas.
In the salon frivolity is a convention, it has positively attained
the height of being good manners. My attention was attracted a minute
ago by a fly buzzing about my window, its transparent wings described
curve after curve on the luminous surface that arrested its flight. Its
graceful and futile progress reminded me of the conversation of a lady
to whom I had just been listening in the salon, and who for an hour
had described a series of scarcely larger circles, upon the surfaces
of everything, and beneath the surface of nothing. The whole world of
Parisian frivolity was typefied by the shimmering flight of the fly on
the window-pane, ignorant of the open air, playing with stray rays of
the great sun toward which it was unable to mount.

[Sidenote: True inwardness.]

But must one be serious to the point of ennui? Certainly not, it
is not necessary. It does not belong to our temperament. Let us
recognize, however, that to be enduring of ennui is a great power;
it is the secret of slow, patient, painstaking labour, which spares
no detail, which guarantees solidity in the foundations and remote
and hidden elements of knowledge; it is the secret of the superiority
of men of northern race over men of southern. In the south, owing to
an impatience of what is tedious, there is manifested an inability
to stick to one thing, to follow one pursuit, to venture into the
darkness beyond where the light stops. Tasks pursued with obstinacy
in the certitude of an ultimate success, indefatigable labour at the
desk, reading understood as the absolute appropriation of every word
and thought between the covers of the book in hand, are unknown to
those superficial intelligences which are quick to take a birds-eye
view of a subject in its entirety, but are impatient of details and
of course among others of essential details. There are races of men
who are incapable of anything exacting more attention than “skimming”;
they skim their books, they skim the world, they turn the leaves of
life. Neither true art nor true science is within their reach. “Live
inwardly,” says the “Imitation.” It is an ideal which Frenchmen, who
are particularly inclined to lose themselves in external details,
might well pursue. But true inwardness does not necessarily consist
in sterile meditation on a dogma. “Live inwardly” should signify, be
serious, be yourself, be original, independent, and free; bestir your
own powers of thought, take a pleasure in developing them and yourself;
bloom inwardly like certain plants which lock up within themselves
their pollen, their perfume, their beauty; but give out your fruit. The
natural expansiveness which leads a Frenchman to be so communicative
is one of his good qualities; the bad side of it, where there is a bad
side, consists simply in not having anything serious to communicate.

[Sidenote: Remedy for French levity.]

Our defects are curable, and their remedy does not lie in a sort of
religious asceticism, but in a more profound and complete understanding
of the great objects of love that have always attracted the French
mind—science, art, law, liberty, universal fraternity. There is a
Japanese legend of a young girl who procured some flower seeds and was
surprised to find them nothing but little black prickly grains; she
offered them to her playmates, who would not accept them; then she
sowed them, in some anxiety as to the results, and by and by a superb
flower sprang from every grain and all her playmates begged for the
seeds that they had refused. Philosophic and scientific truths are just
such seeds; they are unattractive at first, but the day will come when
mankind will prize them at their just worth.




CHAPTER V.

RELIGION AND NON-RELIGION AND THE CHILD.

    I. Decline of religious education—Defects of this education,
      in especial in Catholic countries—Means of lightening
      these defects—The priest—The possibility of state-action
      on the priest.

    II. Education provided by the state—Primary instruction—The
      schoolmaster—Secondary and higher instruction—Should the
      history of religion be introduced into the curriculum.

    III. Education at home—Should the father take no part in the
      religious education of his children—Evils of a preliminary
      religious education to be followed by disillusionment—The
      special question of the immortality of the soul: what
      should be said to children about death.


_I. Decline of religious education._

[Sidenote: Unfitness of religious dogma as material for education.]

The religious education given to children by the priest possesses
defects and even dangers which it is important to set in a clear
light, and which explain the gradual decline in secular education.
An opinion regarded as divine is an opinion which is as unfit for
purposes of education as for purposes of science. The great opposition
which obtains between religion and philosophy—in spite of their
outward resemblances—is that the one is seeking and that the other
declares that it has found; the one is anxious to hear, the other
has already heard; the one weighs evidence, the other puts forth
assertions and condemnations; the one recognizes it as its duty to
raise objections and to reply to them; the other to shut its eyes
to objections and to difficulties. From these differences result
corresponding differences in methods of instruction. A philosopher,
a metaphysician, aims to convince, the priest inculcates; the former
instructs, the latter reveals; the former endeavours to stimulate and
to train the reasoning, the latter to suppress it or at least to turn
it aside from primitive and fundamental dogmas; the former awakens
the intelligence, the latter in some measure lays it asleep. It is
inevitable that revelations should be opposed to spontaneity and
liberty of mind. When God has spoken man should be silent, in especial
when the man is a child. And errors, which are often inoffensive if
taught by a philosopher, are grave and dangerous if taught by a priest
who speaks in the name and with the authority of God. In the first
instance the remedy lies always at hand: an insufficient reason may
always be made to give way before a sufficient reason; the child holds
the standards of weight and measure in his own hands. And indeed it
is not always easy to teach error at all by reason and reasoning: to
attempt to give reasons for a prejudice is an excellent means of making
its essential untruth prominent. It has always been some attempt on the
part of humanity to demonstrate its beliefs that has resulted in their
disproof. Whoever endeavours to examine a dogma is close upon the point
of contradicting it, and the priest, who regards contradiction as a
failure in faith, is always obliged, in the nature of things, to avoid
an examination of it, to interdict a certain number of questions, to
take refuge in mystery. When a priest has filled a brain with faith he
seals it. Doubt and investigation, which are the life of philosophy,
the priest regards as a mark of distrust and suspicion, as a sin,
as an impiety; he lifts his eyes to Heaven at the bare notion of
anybody’s thinking for himself. God is both judge and party in every
discussion; at the very time when you are endeavouring to find reasons
for believing in his existence, He commands you to affirm it. The
believer who hesitates at a dogma is a little in the position of the
sheep in the fable, who wished to reason with the wolf and to prove to
him that the water was not muddy; he proved it indeed, but he was eaten
up for his pains; he would have done just as well to hold his peace and
yield. Also there is nothing more difficult than to shake yourself free
from a faith that was fastened upon you in your childhood and that has
been confirmed by the priest, by custom, by example, by fear. Fear, in
especial, is a capital guardian to watch over the interests of positive
religion and a religious education, a guardian who is always on the
_qui vive_; but for it the body of belief which is known as dogma would
soon fall into decay and blow away in dust. One person would reject
this, another that; everybody would rise in open revolt, running hither
and thither gaily like a lot of schoolchildren out for a holiday.
Happily they are always accompanied by a tutor, who keeps them in order
and brings them home like a flock of lambs to the sheepcote. What power
can reasoning have over anybody who is afraid? How can you be expected
to see anything as in itself it really is, if you have been accustomed
from childhood to walk with your eyes closed? Truth becomes for you as
variable and unstable as your own sensibility. At an audacious moment
you deny everything, the next day you are prepared to affirm more than
you were before. It is very easy to understand; nobody is obliged to
be brave always, and, more than all, one’s conscience is involved.
Conscience, like government, is conservative; it is naturally inimical
to revolution and change. It is early taken in hand, and taught its
little lesson; it becomes uneasy the instant you call in question a
line on the map; you cannot take an independent step without some inner
voice crying out to you to take care. Accustomed as you are to hear
people anathematized who do not think as you do, you shudder at the
thought of incurring such anathemas yourself. The priest has corrupted
to his interest every sentiment in your soul—fear, respect, remorse;
he has fashioned your soul, your character, your morals to his hand.
Insomuch that if you call religion in question, you call everything in
question.

[Sidenote: Impropriety of suppressing the clergy.]

Subsidence of thought, benumbment of the spirit of liberty, love of
routine, of blind tradition, of passive obedience, of everything, in
a word, which is directly opposed to the spirit of modern science are
the results of a too exclusively clerical education. These dangers are
being more and more distinctly felt, especially in France—perhaps
too much so. We go the length of demanding that religious education
shall be suppressed and that immediately, as being hostile to liberty
and to progress. An irresistible movement has begun toward lay
education, a movement to which Catholics must some day or other adjust
themselves. But it should be done slowly, transition should not be
pushed too rapidly. To suppress at a blow the whole clergy who once
had complete control of the national education, and still have charge
of some portion of it, ought not to be the aim of free-thinkers; the
clergy will suppress themselves if they are but given time; they will
simply become extinct. At bottom it is not a bad thing that fifty-five
thousand people should be or appear to be occupied with something
else than their personal wants. No doubt one never lives completely
up to one’s ideal, and the ideal of disinterestedness that the priest
proposes to himself is rarely realized; still it is good that a certain
number of men here below should labour at a task which is above their
strength; so many others labour at tasks only which are beneath them.

[Sidenote: A religion at its best only in competition.]

It must be confessed, however, that no religion is at its best in a
country in which it reigns supreme; really to estimate it, one must see
it struggling for supremacy against some rival faith, Catholic against
Protestant, for example. Under such circumstances the priest and the
pastor in a sense run a race with each other, compete with each other
in activity and intelligence. One may see the results in the Dauphiné,
in Alsace, and in a number of foreign countries. The zeal of the priest
profits immensely by some such struggle for existence on the part of
the religion to which he belongs; whoever does the most good, gives the
best advice, the best education, to the children in his charge, wins a
victory for his faith. The result, which is easy to foresee, is that
a mixed population of Protestants and Catholics is better instructed,
more enlightened, is possessed of a higher morality than many other
countries wholly Catholic.

[Sidenote: Proposed reform in Catholic countries.]

One very desirable step in Catholic countries is that the priest
should be given complete civil liberty, should be allowed to leave
the Church if he choose, without becoming an outcast in society,
should be free to marry, and to enjoy absolutely all the rights of
citizenship. A second desirable step, and an essential one, is that the
priest, who is one of the schoolmasters of the nation, should himself
receive a higher education than he does to-day. The state, far from
endeavouring to diminish the income of the priesthood—a very slight
economy—might well, at need, augment it and exact diplomas analogous
to those demanded of other instructors, and sufficient evidences of
competence in extended historical and scientific inquiries and in
religious history.[81] Already a number of priests in country districts
are studying botany, mineralogy, and, in some instances, music. The
ranks of the clergy contain a great quantity of live force, which is
neutralized by a defective primary education, by lack of initiative,
by lack of habits of freedom. Instead of endeavouring to separate
church and state by a species of surgical operation, free-thinkers
might well take their stand on the concordat, and profit by the fact
that the state controls the income of the clergy, and endeavour to
reawaken the priesthood to the conditions of modern life. In sociology,
as in mechanics, it is sometimes easier to make use of the obstacles
to one’s advancement than to try to batter them down. Whatever is, is
in some measure useful; from the very fact that clerical education
still maintains its existence it may be argued that it still plays a
certain rôle in maintaining the social equilibrium, even if it be but
a passive rôle, the rôle of counterpoise. But whatever possesses some
degree of utility may well acquire a higher degree; whatever is may
be transformed. We must not endeavour to destroy the priesthood but
to transform it; to supply it with other practical and theoretical
pursuits than the mechanical handling of the breviary. Between the
literal religion which the majority of the French clergy teach, and
a national and human ideal, there exist innumerable degrees which
must be achieved successively and slowly, by a gradual intellectual
progress, by an almost insensible widening of the intellectual horizon.
Meanwhile, until the priest shall have passed through these successive
degrees and have become aware of his essential superfluousness, it is
good that he should make himself useful in the manner in which he
still believes himself capable of being of use: but one thing should
be exacted of him, that he should not make himself harmful by stepping
outside of the limits within which he is properly confined.

      [81] Would it not be possible at once to raise the income of
      all priests who are possessed of certain lay diplomas such as
      those of bachelor, licentiate, etc., and who, by that very
      fact, would be plainly competent to conduct a lay or religious
      education in a more modern and scientific spirit?


_II. Education provided by the state._

[Sidenote: State neutrality in religious matters.]

The task undertaken by a state that is endeavouring to substitute a
lay for a clerical education is one of increasing importance. The law
ought, no doubt, to recognize all religions as equal, but, as has been
remarked,[82] there are two ways in which this recognition may be
conducted: the one passive, the other active. The government may stand
neutral simply, and abstain from either refuting or from giving comfort
to the pretensions of any given system of theology; or it may be
actively neuter, that is to say, it may pursue its task of scientific
and philosophical achievement in complete indifference to any and every
system of theology.[83] It is a neutrality of the latter sort that
should be practised in primary and secondary instruction, and that
should govern the conduct of the instructor.

      [82] M. Goblet d’Alviella.

      [83] “Lay education,” said Littré, “ought not to avoid dealing
      with anything which is essential; and what could be more
      essential in considering the moral government of society than
      the religions which have dominated or still dominate it?”

[Sidenote: Importance of the schoolmaster.]

The schoolmaster has always been a mark for raillery, and sometimes
justly so; to-day he is slightly regarded by everyone with any
pretensions to high acquirements. Renan and Taine, and partisans
generally of an intellectual aristocracy, can scarcely suppress a
smile at the mention of this representative of democracy, of science
for small children. University professors show small tolerance for
the pedantry of their humble assistant, who is sometimes ignorant of
Greek. Men of culture, with any tincture of poetry or of art, regard
the man as something very prosaic and utilitarian whose main ambition
is to instruct some thousands of peasants in the alphabet, grammar, and
the names of the principal cities of Europe, and of the geographical
localities from which we obtain pepper and coffee. And yet this
despised schoolmaster, whose importance is daily increasing, is the
sole middle-man between the belated masses and the intellectual élite,
who are moving ever more and more rapidly forward. He has the advantage
of being necessary and the disadvantage of knowing it; buried in his
remote village, his accomplishments impress him almost as much as they
do the children and the peasantry about him; the optical illusion is
a natural one. But if an exaggerated estimate of his own importance
sometimes gives rise in him to an offensive pedantry, it supplies
him with the sort of devotion that enables a humble functionary to
rise to the height of the duties to which he has been called. And
who, after all, but society, is responsible for the fashioning and
instruction of the schoolmaster? And cannot society raise the level
of his intelligence in proportion as it increases the magnitude of
his task? A little knowledge makes a pedant, much knowledge makes
a scholar. There will always be schoolmasters who will be as well
educated as one could wish, provided only that their salaries are
raised side by side with the list of required studies. It is strange
that a society should not do its best to form those whose function it
is in turn to form it. The great question of popular education becomes
in certain aspects a question of shillings and pence. The practical
instruction of schoolmasters has already been carried to a certain
degree of perfection; he has been initiated into an apprenticeship, and
introduced, as it were, into the kitchen of certain sciences; he has
been supplied with notions on agriculture and chemistry which often
enable him to give excellent advice to the peasantry. It would be very
easy a little to perfect his theoretical knowledge, to give him a
broader knowledge of the sciences which he considers too exclusively
on their practical side, to give him some conception of things as
a whole, to raise him above an exclusive adoration of the isolated
facts of historical or grammatical minutiæ. A little philosophy would
make a better historian and a less tedious geographer. He might be
introduced to the great cosmological hypotheses, to some sufficient
notions of psychology, and in especial of child-psychology, and finally
a little history of religion would familiarize him with the principal
metaphysical speculations that the human mind has put forth in its
endeavour to pass beyond the bounds of science; he would become, as a
result of it, more tolerant in all matters of religious belief. This
more extended instruction would permit him to follow at a distance the
progress of science; his intelligence would not stand still, he would
not come to his complete maturity somewhere between the ABC-book and
the grammar. Moreover, intellectual elevation is always accompanied
by a moral elevation which manifests itself in all the conduct of
life, and sometimes a word from a schoolmaster may change all the
rest of a pupil’s existence. The greater one’s intellectual, and in
especial, one’s moral superiority, the greater one’s influence over
those about one. Even at the present time the very modest amount of
knowledge at the disposal of the ordinary teacher gives him a very
genuine influence; he is believed in, his words are listened to and
accepted. The peasant—that doubting Thomas—who nowadays shakes his
head over what the priest says, is becoming accustomed to consult
the schoolmaster; the schoolmaster has shown him how to make more
grain grow in the same amount of ground; the quivering of a blade of
grass in the wind is for a man of the people the most categorical
of affirmations; to accomplish something is to prove: action is
ratiocination enough. Moreover the schoolmaster demonstrates the
practical power of science by fashioning successive generations of
mankind, by converting them into men. It is at the schoolmaster’s hands
that everyone receives the provision of knowledge that must last him
and maintain his strength throughout his whole life; he prepares one
for life as the priest prepares one for death, and in the eyes of the
peasant, preparation for life is much more important than preparation
for death. Life has its mystery as well as death, and in the former
case the fact of one’s capability is certain; the schoolmaster often
determines the future of the pupil in a manner that is visible and
verifiable; and nothing like so much can be said for the priest. The
power of the latter also has diminished with the change that has taken
place in the popular notion of punishment after death. The priest’s
power lies in ceremonies, in propitiatory or expiatory sacrifices;
the virtue of sacrifices of both kinds equally is to-day looked on
sceptically. Knowledge is better than prayer, and the priest is
gradually losing his ascendency over the people. The schoolmaster is
often the butt of raillery, but the country priest, whom it was so much
the fashion to idealize at the beginning of the century, is to-day
a mark for open mirth. The reaction was natural and in some measure
legitimate; perfection is not of this world, and dwells neither in
the state nor the school, but the rôle of the schoolmaster and the
priest in humanity is important, for they are the sole dispensers of
science and metaphysics to the multitude. We have seen how much it is
to be hoped that the priest, who is so ignorant to-day in Catholic
countries, will soon receive a better education, will soon begin to
create a reason for his continued existence in modern society. If he
falls too far behind the intellectual movement of the times, he will
drop out simply, and the schoolmaster will inherit his power. After all
there are all kinds of apostles, in blouse and frock-coat as well as
in priestly robes; and the proselytism of some of them is based upon a
mystical disinterestedness, and of others on a certain practical aim;
there are some who travel about the world, and some who sit by the fire
and are none the less active for all that. What may be affirmed safely
is that in all times apostles have been even more disposed to address
little children than men, and it is notable that the modern Vincent de
Paul was a schoolmaster-Pestalozzi.

[Sidenote: Moral education the legitimate successor of religious
education.]

What is taking the place of religious education, in existing societies,
is moral education. The moral sentiment, as we know, is the least
suspicious element in the modern religious sentiment, and metaphysical
hypotheses, based in the last resort upon moral conceptions, are
the ultimate and highest outcome of religious hypotheses. To the
elements of philosophic morality it has been proposed to add, in
secondary and even in primary instruction, some notion of the history
of religions[84]. If this proposition is to be made acceptable it
must be reduced within just limits. Let us cherish no illusion; M.
Vernes is wrong if he believes that a professor, and in especial a
schoolmaster, ever could dwell with insistence upon the history of the
Jews without coming into conflict with the clergy. A truly scientific
criticism of the legends which are usually taught children under the
name of sacred history positively batters down the very foundations
of Christianity. Clergymen and priests would not endure it; they
would protest and with some show of reason against it, in the name of
religious neutrality: religion is not less certain in their eyes than
science, and the ignorant faith that distinguishes many of them has
not yet been tempered by a habit of free criticism; so that anything
like a genuine historical education which should openly controvert
portions of the traditional theology must be considered in advance as
impossible. There must be no question in the matter of openly refuting
anybody; the course of instruction must simply be such as to furnish
those who follow it with a criterion of truth, and to teach them to
make use of it. We believe therefore that if the history of religions
is ever made a part of the regular course of instruction, it will deal
principally with everything but the history of the Jews. It might
furnish elementary instruction on the moral system of Confucius, on
the moral metaphysical notions involved in Indo-European religions,
on the antique Egyptian religion, on the Greek myths, and finally on
the religious and moral atmosphere in which Christianity took its
rise, and on which it in some sort depended and throve. It would be
well even to make scholars in primary schools acquainted with the
names of some of the great sages in the history of the world, with
their actual or legendary biography, with the moral maxims which are
attributed to them. What harm could it do to instruct our children in
the aphorisms uttered by Confucius, Zoroaster, Buddha, Socrates, Plato,
and Aristotle, and to let them see something of what humanity really
believed before the time of Christ? One cannot destroy the old faith
openly and in a minute, but one may do much to undermine and justly to
undermine it by showing where and how it borrowed much of all that is
best in it—that it is not an exception in the history of human thought
nor even, in all respects, unsurpassed in its kind.

      [84] By M. Maurice Vernes (approved by Littré, and later by M.
      Paul Bert).

[Sidenote: Helplessness of religion in the face of argument.]

The Church possesses two means of educating children in its dogmas, and
only two; the first is that of patristic or ecclesiastical authority:
‘The fact is thus and such because I say so’; the second is the
testimony of miracles. These two, even at the present day, constitute
the whole effective contents of the priests’ armoury. The moment they
step outside this little circle of ideas they lose their power. And to
destroy these two arguments it suffices to show: 1st, that other men
have said something different from the teachings of Christianity; 2d,
that other gods than Jehovah have also performed miracles; or, in other
words, there are no miracles whatever that have been scientifically
ascertained. A number of French schools were founded in Kabail, and
were prospering, when by degrees they were abandoned. In one of
them, which was the last deserted, some exercises of the pupils were
discovered: they dealt with a story about Fredegunde. This anecdote
illustrates current notions on instruction in classical history:
History means facts, and facts often monstrous and immoral; not content
with teaching them to young Frenchmen we export them to Kabail; but we
do not export our ideas, nor even employ them at home. We should have
done better to teach the young Algerians what we know about Mohammed
and his religion and about Jesus and the other prophets, the divinity
of whose inspiration Mohammed himself admitted. The slightest traces
that a really rational education should leave in a half-savage mind
would be more useful than a heap of absurd facts perfectly remembered.
At bottom it is more important even that a French child should know
something of Mohammed or Buddha than of Fredegunde. Although Mohammed
and Buddha never lived on French soil, their influence on us is
infinitely more great and their relation to us infinitely closer than
that of Chilperic or Lothaire.

[Sidenote: Place of religion in state education.]

The place in which the history of religions really belongs, is in the
higher education. It is not enough to have introduced it with success
into the Collège de France, and quite recently to have secured its
recognition in a small part of the higher studies in the École. If
we should replace our faculties of theology by chairs of religious
criticism we should do no more than follow the example of Holland.[85]
Mr. Max Müller introduced the science of religions into the University
of Oxford with success. Similarly in Switzerland at the organization
of the University of Geneva, in 1873, there was created in the faculty
of letters a chair of the history of religions, although there already
existed in the university a faculty of theology. In Germany the history
of religions is taught independently, notably at the University of
Wurtzburg, under the name of Comparative Symbolism. Just as a complete
course of instruction in philosophy should include the principles of
the philosophy of law and the philosophy of history, it will some day
include also the principles of the philosophy of religion. After all,
even from the point of view of philosophy, Buddha and Jesus possess a
much greater importance than Anaximander or Thales.[86]

      [85] Some years ago, as is well known, on the 1st of October,
      1877, the faculty of theology in the three state universities
      of Leyden, Utrecht, and Groningen, and in the Communal
      University of Amsterdam, was declared to be a lay faculty and
      was freed from all association and connection with the Church,
      and was required to give purely scientific and philosophic
      instruction on the history of religion, without practical
      discipline. (See M. Steyn Parvé, _Organisation de l’instruction
      primaire, secondaire et supérieure dans le royaume des
      Pays-Bas_, Leyden, 1878, and M. Maurice Vernes, _Mélanges de
      critique religieuse_, p. 305.)

      The following is the programme of this faculty: 1. General
      theology; 2. History of doctrines concerning divinity; 3.
      History of religions in general; 4. History of the Israelite
      religion; 5. History of Christianity; 6. Literature of the
      Israelites, and the ancient Christians; 7. Old and New
      Testament exegesis; 8. History of the dogmas of the Christian
      church; 9. Philosophy of religion; 10. Ethics.

      [86] As M. Vernes has remarked, the preparation for teaching
      the history of religions might well be the same as that for
      teaching philosophy, history, and letters. It should include
      the studies in the upper classes, of the philosophical section
      of the _école normale_, and a preparatory course in the divers
      other faculties: a real _normal_ course. In this course the
      professor should point out the general principle of the history
      of religions and should confine himself to indicating them very
      summarily in the case of the religions of Greece and Rome, to
      which a general literary education will have given the pupil
      access; he should deal, without excessive attention to detail,
      with the other Indo-European religions (those of India, Persia,
      etc.), with the religions of Egypt, of Assyria, of Phœnicia, of
      Islam; and should spend his greatest efforts on the criticism
      of Judaism and the early stages of Christianity, on the history
      of the principal Christian dogmas and their development.

[Sidenote: Education of instructors.]

It has been said, after M. Laboulaye, that a professor of the history
of religion should be at once an archæologist, an epigraphist, a
numismatist, a linguist, an anthropologist, and versed in Hindu,
Phœnician, Slavonic, Germanic, Celtic, Etruscan, Greek, and Roman
antiquities; he should be nothing less than a Pico della Mirandola. At
that rate one might show also that neither schools nor colleges can be
expected to include a course on natural history or on the political
history of some seven or eight nations—nay, even that it is impossible
to teach children to read: the art of reading is so difficult in its
perfection! Really is it necessary that the historian of religion
should be a master of all the historical sciences? He is under no
obligation to discover new materials, he has simply to make use of
those which philologists and epigraphists have put at his disposal;
such materials are now abundant enough and well enough ascertained
to require a course specially devoted to them. There is no need for
the instructor to master such and such a particular division of the
history of religion; he is simply required to furnish students in our
universities, in the course of one or two years, with a general view
of the development of religious ideas in history. The professor will
no doubt encounter certain difficulties in dealing with religious
questions because of the amount of feeling that such problems always
involve, but the same difficulty is met with in every course which
deals with contemporary questions, and almost every course does deal
with them. A professor of history has to deal with contemporary facts,
to describe the successive changes in the form of government in
France, etc. A professor of philosophy has to deal with questions of
theodicy and morals; and even in pure psychology, materialistic and
deterministic theories have to be passed upon; even a mere professor
of rhetoric is obliged, in treating of literature and of Voltaire and
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to touch on questions
which are burning. Similarly, a professor in the law school must find
a thousand occasions for praising, or blaming, or criticising the laws
of the State. And must one, because of dangers of this sort which are
met with at every step, cease teaching history, philosophy, and law?
No, and we do not believe that one should be debarred from teaching
religious history. The whole question is one of fact rather than of
principle; it should be the master’s business to avoid digressions
beyond the limits of pure science, and to be on his guard against
seeming to mean something more than he says, and masking a criticism of
the existing order of things under a course on abstract theory.[87]

      [87] Works in religious criticism would naturally find their
      place in the school and college libraries. They might be
      supplemented by a more or less extensive museum of religious
      curiosities, beginning with the fetiches of savage tribes and
      extending down to the present day.

      To the mass of the French public the solid results already
      achieved by an independent criticism of the Bible constitute a
      _terra incognita_; they must be disseminated. M. Lenormant’s
      effort might serve as an example for other efforts of the
      same kind. In order to make it apparent at a glance how the
      Pentateuch has been formed, by the combination and fusion
      of the earlier sets of documents, M. Lenormant undertook
      to publish a translation from the Hebrew, in which he
      distinguishes the extracts from the respective sets of
      documents by different kinds of type. Thus one has before one
      the natural explanation of the way in which all the episodes in
      Genesis are presented in the two parallel versions, sometimes
      juxtaposed, sometimes mingled.

[Sidenote: Legitimate object of religious instruction.]

The aim of this impartial course of instruction should be to supply
each religion with its proper historical setting, to show how it
was born, developed, opposed to others; it should be described, not
refuted. The bare introduction of historical continuity into the course
of religious thought is itself a considerable step in advance; whatever
is continuous ceases to be marvellous. Nobody is astonished at a brook
which gradually becomes bigger; our ancestors adored great rivers of
whose sources they were ignorant.


_III. Education at Home._

It has often been asked, as a question of practical conduct, whether
the head of a household ought not to have a religion, at least if not
for himself, for his wife and children, and if his wife is religious
ought he to abandon the education of his children to her?

[Sidenote: Father’s duty in regard to religious instruction.]

We believe it is the duty of the head of a household to rear his family
in the ideas in which he believes. Whatever solution of the religious
problem he may have attained, he ought to hide it from no one, and
in especial not from his family. Moreover, even if he should wish to
keep his opinions secret, he would be unable to do so, at least for
the whole of his life. His dissimulation would simply result in such
an association in the minds of his children between moral precepts
and religious dogmas that the chances would be that they would stand,
or rather fall, together. Of all people in the world the child is
precisely the one who is likely to suffer most from a belief that
religion and morality are inseparably bound up together. Of all human
beings children are least philosophical, least metaphysical, least
familiar with scientific ideas, and therefore of all others the most
easily biassed once for all by the inculcation of false or doubtful
notions presented as certain. In China, at the periodical conferences,
certain mandarins dilate upon the following theme in the presence of
the more notable among the inhabitants: “Do your duty as a citizen and
beware of religion.” That is precisely what a father ought to say again
and again to his children. It is a good principle of education to take
it for granted that the child is rational, and to treat it as such, in
order ultimately and gradually to develop the spirit of reason in it.
What a child lacks is much less intensity of attention than continuity.
Very often among country people, and almost always among inferior races
(as also among animals), the young are more wide-awake, more curious,
more quick-minded than the mature men; but their attention must be
seized in transit; teaching them resembles teaching a bird on the wing.
Their schoolmaster must have the gifts of a bird-fancier; and it is his
fault much oftener than the child’s if the latter does not understand,
does not ask questions, is inert and incurious. The scientific
education of the child should begin with its first question; truth is
a debt that one owes to it, and truth accessible to its intelligence.
The moment a child asks a question out of its own head, it is at least
in part prepared to understand the reply; the duty of the person
interrogated is to reply, as fully and as truly as he believes the
child capable of understanding, and if he leaves gaps he must at least
never fill them with lies. It is so easy to tell the child to wait
until it is bigger. There should be no fear of precociously developing
the child’s reason in its two essential forms, the instinct of inquiry,
of _why_ and _how_, and the instinct of perception, of logical cogency
in the reply to the “why” and “how.” One need not be afraid that the
child will fatigue its brain by abstract reasoning; Pascals are rare.
The danger does not lie in a premature development of the reason, which
it is always easy moreover to check, but in a premature development of
the sensibility. The child must not be encouraged to feel too strongly.
To subject it to vain fears such as those of hell and the devil, or to
beatific visions and mystic enthusiasms such as young girls experience
at the time of the first communion, is to do it much greater harm than
to teach it to reason justly and to develop in it a certain intelligent
virility. Races become effeminate by excess of sensibility, never by
excess of scientific and philosophic power.

[Sidenote: Impossible to leave the child in ignorance.]

It will perhaps be said, with Rousseau, that if the child is not
to be trammelled with religious prejudice it may at least wait for
reasoned instruction on religion until it has attained its intellectual
maturity. We reply that it is impossible to do so in the present state
of society. If the father does not teach his child it will absorb the
prejudices of those it associates with, and to disabuse it of them
afterward will demand a veritable crisis, which is always painful and
often the cause of permanent suffering. The great art of education
should consist precisely in avoiding crises of this sort in the orderly
growth of the intellect. The father who postpones the decisive moment
will be the first person to be surprised at the amount of pain he will
be obliged to subject his child to in order to root up the error which
he has placidly permitted to grow under his very eyes.

[Sidenote: One must begin early.]

M. Littré has given an account of a case of conscience of this kind;
after having voluntarily held aloof from the religious education of
his daughter till she had reached years of discretion, he found her
at last so sincerely convinced, so completely fashioned by religion
for religion, that he recoiled before so thorough-going a change; like
a surgeon whose hand should tremble at the thought of an operation
upon a body that love had rendered sacred to him; like an oculist who
should feel that light was not worth the pain that he would have to
inflict on eyes that were dear to him. The intellectual operator has
not at his command even the resource of chloroform; he must practise
his surgery upon a subject who is fully conscious and even excited
by attention and reflection. Prevention is better than expectant
treatment, which allows the disease to develop in the hopes of curing
it afterward. The competent educator, like the competent physician,
may be known by his ability in avoiding the necessity of operations.
It is a mistake to allow a child to grow up in complete belief in
religious legends, with the intention of undeceiving it afterward. It
will be undeceived not without regret nor without effort. And often
the effort put forth will itself be too great, will overshoot itself,
and from excess of faith the child will pass at a bound to sceptical
indifference and will suffer for it. Treasures in heaven are treasures
in fiat money; the disappointment which must some day come, when
one learns the truth, will be bitter. It would be better always to
have known that one was poor. A child may early be accustomed to the
conception of the infinite; it makes up its account with it as with
the notion of the antipodes, or of the absence of an absolute up and
down in the universe. The first sensation one experiences when one
learns that the earth is spherical is of terror, a fear of the void,
of tumbling off into the abyss of open space. The same naïve fear lies
at the bottom of the religious sentiment in certain minds, and is due
to factitious associations of ideas which are a matter of education
wholly. A fish born in an aquarium becomes accustomed to its habitat,
as the ancients were accustomed to the inverted crystal ball of the
heavens; it would be lost in the ocean. Birds reared in the cage often
die if they are abruptly given their liberty. A period of transition is
always necessary, one needs time to become accustomed to intellectual
expanses as well as to expanses of air and water. If mankind is to live
without religion it must receive a non-religious education, and this
education will spare it a great deal of the suffering that those who
have been educated in the faith and have subsequently broken away by
their own efforts have undergone. The wood-cutter’s child experiences
no sentiment of fear in the solitude and obscurity of the forest, in
the arched lanes and alleys, among the trees among which it was born. A
town-born child would feel lost in such a place and would begin to cry.
The world of science, with its shadowy labyrinths and limitless extent
and its numberless obstacles which must be removed one at a time, is
such a forest; the child who is born in it will not be frightened, will
live in it always happily.

       *       *       *       *       *

[Sidenote: What to say to the child about death. M. Louis Ménard’s
position.]

Of all the problems of education which lie on the borders of religious
metaphysics the most interesting is, unquestionably, what to say to
the child about death and human destiny. When these questions are
discussed before him, is a rational and truly philosophical method to
be employed? Is he to be informed dogmatically, or is it a matter of
indifference what is said to him? This problem has been discussed,
in the “Critique philosophique,” by M. Louis Ménard, who deals with
the hypothetical case of a child that has lost its mother and is
cross-questioning its father. That is ingenious, but it is a specious
way of raising the problem. When a young child loses its mother we
regard it as the first duty of the father to console and spare its
delicate organism the strain of all strong emotions. The question
is one of moral hygiene, in which philosophy and religion are not
concerned, in which the age and temperament of the child are the sole
things to consider. Truth is not equally valuable at all periods of
life; one does not tell a man abruptly that his wife has just died.
The most convinced materialist will hesitate to announce to a nervous
child that it will never see its mother again. But the materialist
in question would always do wrong to put forth a categorical
affirmation in a case in which there exists at best nothing more than
probabilities; the most dangerous method of deception is to present as
a recognized certainty what is really nothing of the kind. In any event
there is one form of immortality, that of memory, and that species of
immortality we may ourselves secure by implanting it in the mind of
the child.[88] The father ought repeatedly to talk to the orphan child
of the dead mother. He can create a recollection in the child as vivid
and as detailed as his own; whether the child behaves well or ill he
can always say, “If your mother were but here!” The child will thus
become accustomed to find a recompense or a punishment in its mother’s
approbation or disapprobation.[89]

      [88] “Memory is no doubt an affliction for the grown man
      much more than for the child, but it is also a consolation.
      Cultivation of one’s memories supplies powerful means of
      moral education for all ages, and for nations as well as for
      individuals. It was quite to be expected that we should find an
      ancestor worship in the early history of every people.” (Felix
      Henneguy, _Critique philosophique_, 8th year, vol. ii. p. 218.)

      [89] _Ibid._

[Sidenote: Should talk with child as with a grown person.]

To raise the problem more fairly, let us suppose the circumstances
somewhat less tragic than those which M. Ménard has chosen, and let us
ask how, in general, the child must be spoken to about death. When the
child is capable of following a more or less complex bit of exposition,
toward the age of ten or twelve for example, I confess that I see no
reason why its questions should not be answered exactly as if they
were those of a grown person. At that age it will no longer believe
in fairies, it will no longer need to believe in legends, not even
in those of Christianity. The scientific and philosophic spirit will
have begun to develop and must not be either checked or distorted. If
its intelligence leads it toward philosophical problems, so much the
better; one must meet its need as simply as if the problems in question
were historical. I have seen a child much tormented by a desire to know
whether such and such an historical personage died a natural death or
was poisoned. The child was told that the thing was doubtful, but that
the probability was so and so. The same method should be pursued in
reference to more important problems.

[Sidenote: No difficulty in making the child understand.]

But how, it may be asked, is one to form replies, that the child can
understand, to questions which relate to the life beyond the grave?
Is not the sole language that it understands that of Christianity,
which deals with men raised to heaven, with happy souls seated among
the angels and the seraphim, etc.? We reply that people in general
seem to have a strange conception of the child’s intelligence; they
expect it to understand the most refined subtleties of grammar, the
most unexpected turns and shifts of theology, and are afraid to say
a word to it of philosophy. A little girl of twelve years, of my
acquaintance, replied with much ingenuity to this unexpected question:
What is the difference between a perfect and an imperfect Christian?
It was evident that she would not have experienced greater difficulty
in replying to a metaphysical question. I recollect having myself
followed, at the age of eight, a discussion on the immortality of the
soul; nay, I even pronounced an interior judgment in favour of him
who was maintaining the cause of immortality. Our system of education
is full of contradictions, which consist at once in mechanically
burdening the child’s memory with things it cannot understand, and
in depriving its intelligence of subjects in which it might take an
interest. “But,” M. Ménard will object, “a child must not be put into
a position of being able to oppose its father’s belief to that of its
mother or of its grand-mother.” Why not? It happens, necessarily, every
day. There are, on all subjects, incessantly going on in the bosom of
the family a series of discussions, of small disagreements which in
nowise fundamentally disturb the harmony of the household; why should
it be otherwise when more important and uncertain questions simply
are involved? “But the child will lose respect for its parents.” It
is certainly better that it should lose respect for them than that
it should believe everything they say, even when they deceive it.
Happily, respect for one’s parents is not at all the same thing as
belief in their infallibility. Children early make use of liberty
of judgment, they may early be taught to sift out the truth from a
mass of more or less contradictory affirmations, their judgment may
be developed instead of being supplied, as is at present attempted,
ready and completely made. The essential thing is to avoid rousing
their passions and converting them into fanatics. The child needs an
atmosphere of calm for the harmonious development of its faculties;
it is a delicate plant that must not be too soon exposed to wind and
weather; but it does not follow that it should be kept in the obscurity
or half light of religious legend. The sole means of sparing the child
the trouble of passion and fanaticism is to place it outside of all
religious communion and to habituate it to examine things coolly,
philosophically; to take problems of religion for what they are; that
is to say, for problems simply, with ambiguous solutions.[90] Nothing
serves better to awake the intellectual spontaneity of the child than
to say to it: This is what I believe, and these are my reasons for
believing it; I may be wrong. Your mother, or such and such a person,
believes something else for certain other reasons, right or wrong. The
child acquires thus a rare quality, that of tolerance; its respect
for its parents attaches to the diverse doctrines that it sees them
professing; it learns, in its earliest years, that every sincere and
reasoned belief is in the highest degree respectable. I am intimately
acquainted with a child that has been reared in this way, and it has
never had any occasion for anything but satisfaction with the education
it has received. It has never been presented on the subject of human
destiny, or the destiny of the world, with any opinion in the nature of
an article of faith; instead of religious certitudes it has heard only
of metaphysical possibilities and probabilities. Toward the age of
thirteen and a half the problem of the destiny of mankind was abruptly
suggested to it; the death of a very dear aged relative caused it to
do more thinking than is customary at that age, but its philosophic
beliefs proved themselves sufficient. They still are sufficient,
although the child in question has been obliged several times to face
the possibility, and the immediate possibility, of its own death. I
cite the example as an experiment which bears on the question under
discussion.

      [90] Among the greatest causes of difficulty with a child, let
      us note the following: the father is apt to be a free-thinker,
      the mother a Catholic. It hears every day at Church that those
      who do not practise their religious duties will go to hell:
      the child therefore reasons that if its father dies it will
      never see him again, unless it goes to hell with him, and then
      it will never see its mother again. A full and complete belief
      in annihilation would be less painful and less annoying than
      this belief in eternal damnation. Add that in this respect many
      Protestant clergymen, in especial in England and in the United
      States, are not less intolerant than Catholic priests.

[Sidenote: Summary.]

How then should death be spoken of to a child? I reply confidently, as
one would speak of it to a grown person, allowing for the difference
between abstract and concrete language. I naturally suppose the child
to be semi-rational, more than ten years old, and capable of thinking
of something else than its top or its doll. I believe it should then
be talked with openly, and told what we ourselves think most probable
on these terrible questions. The free-thinker who leans toward
naturalistic doctrines will say to his son or his daughter that he
believes death to be a resolution of the person into its constituent
elements, a return to a blind material existence, a fresh beginning
in the perpetual round of evolution; that all that we leave behind is
the good that we have done and that we live in humanity by our good
actions and our good thoughts, and that immortality is productivity
for the best interests of humanity. The spiritualist will say that,
owing to the distinction between the soul and the body, death is simply
a deliverance. The pantheist or the monist will repeat the formula
consecrated by the use of three thousand years: _Tat tvam asi_—Thou
art that; and the modern child will recognize, as the young Brahman
does, that beneath the surface of things there lies a mysterious unity
into which the individual may fade. Finally the Kantian will endeavour
to make his child understand that the conception of duty involves
something anterior and superior to the present life; that to be aware
of the moral law is to be conscious of immortality. Everyone will say
what he believes, and take care not to pretend that his opinion is the
absolute truth. The child, thus treated like a human being, will early
learn to make up its own mind, to provide itself with a creed without
having received it from any traditional religion or any immutable
doctrine; it will learn that a really sacred belief is one which is
reflective and reasoned and seemingly personal; and if at times, as it
advances in age, it experiences a greater or less anxiety about the
unknown, so much the better; such an anxiety, when the senses are not
involved and thought alone is concerned, is in no sense dangerous. The
child who experiences it will be of the stuff out of which philosophers
and sages are made.




CHAPTER VI.

RELIGION AND NON-RELIGION AMONG WOMEN.

    Are women inherently predisposed toward religion
      and even toward superstition?—The nature of
      feminine intelligence—Predominance of the
      imagination—Credulity—Conservatism—Feminine
      sensibility—Predominance of sentiment—Tendency to
      mysticism—Is the moral sentiment among women based upon
      religion?—Influence of religion and of non-religion upon
      modesty and love—Origin of modesty—Love and perpetual
      virginity—M. Renan’s paradoxes on the subject of monastic
      vows—How woman’s natural proclivities may be turned
      to account by free-thought—Influence exercised by the
      wife’s faith over the husband—Instance of a conversion to
      free-thought.


Among free-thinkers themselves there are a certain number who
believe that women are by the very nature of their minds devoted to
superstition and to myth. Is the incapacity of the female mind for
philosophy more demonstrable than that of the child’s mind to which it
has so frequently been compared?

[Sidenote: Woman’s attention to details.]

We are not obliged to decide the question whether women’s mental powers
are or are not inferior to those of men.[91] We are obliged to consider
only whether the limits of female intelligence are so tightly drawn
that religion, and even superstition, are for it inevitable. Those
who maintain that women are in some sort condemned to error argue
from certain essential elements in her character; let us examine
accordingly the peculiarity of her intelligence and of her sensibility.
The female mind, it has been said, is less abstract than that of the
male; women are more impressionable on the side of the senses and of
the imagination, are more readily appealed to by what is beautiful and
striking and coloured: thence arises their need for myths, for symbols,
for a cult, for rites that speak to the eye. We reply that this need is
not absolute: are not Protestant women content with a cult which does
not appeal to the senses? And in any event, an imaginative spirit is
not necessarily superstitious. Superstition is a matter of education,
not of nature; there is a certain maturity of mind which lends no
encouragement to superstition. I have known a number of women who did
not possess one superstition among them and were incapable of acquiring
one; there was no distinction in this respect to be observed between
their intelligence and that of a man; the conception of the world as
an orderly succession of phenomena, once really accepted by the human
mind, maintains itself by its own power, without aid from without, as
the fact in the long run always does.

      [91] As a general rule, Darwin says, men go farther than women,
      whether the matter be one of profound meditation, of reason,
      or imagination, or simply of the use of the senses or even of
      the hands. According to certain statistical investigations
      it appears that the modern female brain has remained almost
      stationary, while the male brain has developed notably. The
      brain of a Parisian woman is no larger than that of a Chinese
      woman, and the Parisian woman labours under the additional
      disadvantage of possessing a larger foot.

      Admitting these facts one may still refuse to infer from them
      the existence of a congenital incapacity, for the way in which
      women have always been treated by men and the education that
      they have received may well have left results which have become
      hereditary. The education of women has in all times been less
      strenuous than that of men; and their mind, perhaps naturally
      less scientific, has never been developed by direct contact
      with the external world. In the Orient and in Greece, among the
      nations from whom we derive our civilization, women (at least
      in families in easy circumstances) were always restricted to a
      subordinate rôle, confined to woman’s quarters, or withdrawn
      from all direct contact with the real world. Thence arose a
      sort of tradition of ignorance and intellectual abasement which
      has been handed down to us. There is nothing like the brain of
      a young girl reared at home for gathering to itself completely,
      and without loss, the whole residue of middle-class silliness,
      of naïve and self-satisfied prejudice, of strutting ignorance
      that does not see itself as others see it, of superstition
      transformed into a rule of conduct. But change the education
      and you will in a great measure change these results. Even
      according to Darwin’s own theory, education and heredity can in
      the long run undo anything that they have done. Even if there
      should remain a certain balance of intelligence in favor of
      the male, even if the female should prove to be in the end, as
      Darwin says, incapable of pushing invention as far in advance
      as man, it would not follow that her heart and intelligence
      should be filled with another order of ideas and sentiments
      than those which are beneficial to men. It is one thing to
      invent and to widen the domain of science, and another thing
      to assimilate the knowledge already acquired; it is one thing
      to widen the intellectual horizon, and another thing to adapt
      one’s eyes and heart to this more open habitat.

[Sidenote: Female credulity.]

A second trait of female intelligence, which has also been made use
of, is its credulity—by which religion has so largely profited. Women
are more credulous than men, in this sense: they possess a certain
confidence in men, whom they recognize as stronger and more widely
experienced than themselves; they willingly believe whatever grave men,
whom they are accustomed to venerate, men like priests, assert. Their
credulity is thus in a great part a mere form of their natural need to
lean on some member of the opposite sex. Conceive a religion originated
and administered solely by women; it would be looked upon with great
distrust by women, in general. The day men cease to believe, female
credulity—in especial that of the average woman, who is accustomed
to judge with the eyes and intelligence of someone else—will be
profoundly affected. I once asked a maid who had remained thirty years
in the same house what were her beliefs. “Those of my master,” she
replied; her master was an atheist. The same question was put to the
wife of a member of the Institute. She replied: “I was a Catholic
until I was married. After I was married I began to appreciate the
superiority of my husband’s mind, I saw that he did not believe in
religion, and I ceased to believe in it entirely myself.”

[Sidenote: Female conservatism.]

A third trait of the feminine character is its conservativeness, its
friendliness to tradition, its indisposition to initiative. Respect for
power and authority, Spencer says, predominates in women, influences
their ideas and sentiments in regard to all institutions, and tends
to strengthen political and ecclesiastical governments. For the same
reason women are particularly inclined to put faith in whatever is
imposing; doubt, criticism, a disposition to question whatever is
established is rare among them, Mr. Spencer thinks. Women certainly do
possess a more conservative disposition than men in religion and in
politics; it has been so found in England where women vote on municipal
questions, and in our judgment the rôle that woman should play in this
world is precisely that of conservatism; as a young girl, she must
guard her person as a treasure, must be always suspicious of she knows
not precisely what; then as a wife she must watch over her child, her
house, her husband; must preserve, retain, defend, embrace somebody
or something. Is it a thing to be complained of? Is it not to this
instinct that we owe our life, and if difference in sex, or sexual
functions, involves grave differences in character, must we conclude
from this fact that women possess an irremediable civil and religious
incapacity? No; conservatism may be of service in the ranks of truth
as in the ranks of error; all depends on what is given to conserve.
If women are more philosophically and scientifically educated, their
conservatism may do good service.

[Sidenote: Female timidity.]

A final trait of the feminine mind, very like the preceding, is that
women are more given to an absorption in detail, are less courageous,
are more capable of dealing with particular details than with general
ideas and things as a whole, and are more inclined to narrow and
literal interpretations than men. If a woman, for example, is intrusted
with any administrative office she will execute every rule to the
letter with an exaggerated conscientiousness and a naïve anxiety. The
conclusion is that women will always lend comfort to literal religions
and to superstitious practices. In our opinion this penchant for
minutiæ and for scrupulousness which is so frequently observed among
women may become, on the contrary, an important factor of incredulity
when women are sufficiently instructed to perceive at first hand the
innumerable contradictions and ambiguities of the texts they are
dealing with. An enlightened scruple is a keener instrument of doubt
than of faith.

We confess we do not yet see that the differences, native or acquired,
between the male and the female brain suffice to constitute women a
sort of inferior caste, devoted by their birth to religion and the
service of myth, while men are reserved for science and philosophy.

[Sidenote: Is sentiment a badge of servitude to error?]

Let me now examine the more profound reasons based on the nature of
women’s sentimental proclivities. In general, it is said that women are
dominated not by reason but by sentiment. They respond quickly to a
call made in the name of pity or of charity, and not so quickly to one
made in the name of equity. But is sentiment the exclusive possession
of religions? And are there not also men of sentiment as well as men of
thought? And are the first on that account condemned to a life of error
while the second live in the presence of the truth?

[Sidenote: Women and mysticism.]

But it is insisted that in women sentiment naturally tends toward
mysticism. Among the Greeks, Spencer says, the women were more
accessible than the men to religious excitation.[92] It may be replied
that the greatest mystics have not been women. St. Theresas have been
much less numerous than men like Plotinus (it was Plotinus who first
gave the word ἔκστασις its current sense), Porphyry, Iamblicus,
Dionysius the Areopagite, St. Bonaventure, Gerson, Richard de Saint
Victor, Eckhart, Tauler, Swedenborg. Mysticism develops in proportion
to the restriction of the individual’s activity. Women’s life, which is
less active than that of men, allows more space for the development of
mystic impulses and exercises of piety. But activity cures the diseases
of contemplation, in especial of vain and empty contemplation in which
only average and ignorant minds can take delight. Woman’s religious
activity will diminish in proportion as a wider field of activity is
opened up to her, and in proportion as an intellectual and æsthetic
education is supplied to her and she becomes interested in all the
human questions and realities of this world. It has been desired even
to render political life accessible to woman, to restore to her the
rights which have hitherto been denied her. M. Secrétan has recently
advocated this measure, which was formerly advocated by John Stuart
Mill. To do so at the present moment would be to hand over politics
directly to the priesthood, who at present control women. But when
by gradual degrees women’s religious emancipation shall have been
completed, it is possible that a certain political emancipation may
be the natural consequence of it. Her civil emancipation in any event
is only a matter of time. The equality of women before the law is a
necessary consequence of democratic ideas. When they shall be forced
thus to occupy themselves more actively in the affairs of this world
the new employment of their energy will protect them more and more from
mystical tendencies.

      [92] Sir Rutherford Alcock says also, that in Japan it is
      very rare to see any other worshippers in the temples than
      women and children; the men are always extremely few in number
      and belong to the lower classes. At least five-sixths and
      often nine-tenths of the pilgrims who come to the temple of
      Juggernaut are women. Among the Sikhs the women are said to
      believe in more gods than the men. These examples, borrowed
      as they are from different races, and at different epochs,
      show sufficiently, in Spencer’s opinion, that, when we find an
      analogous state of things in Catholic countries, and even in
      some measure in England, we are not to attribute it solely to
      the education of women; the cause, he thinks, is deeper, lies
      in their nature. (See Spencer’s _Study of Sociology_.)

If an opportunity be given them to influence society they will no
doubt exercise it philanthropically. Well, pity is one of the most
powerful derivatives of mysticism. Even among religious orders it has
been remarked how much less exalted the devotion of the members of
the philanthropic orders is than of those who restrict themselves to
sterile meditation in the cloister.

[Sidenote: Female moral sentiment.]

If mysticism is no more truly indispensable to women than to men, can
it be maintained that their moral sentiment is incapable of subsistence
apart from some religion? Is women’s moral power less than that of men,
and is it only in religion that they can find the additional increment
of strength of which they are in need? Resistance to physical or moral
pain supplies a sufficiently exact measure of power. Well, women show
in maternity, with all its consequences, in pregnancy, in childbirth,
in nursing, accompanied as it is by continual watchfulness and care,
a patience of physical pain which is perhaps greater than anything
that the average man is capable of. Just so in respect to patience of
moral pain: women may suffer much from poverty, and sadness follows the
flying needle, but love and pity are the great sources of restraint. As
the sphere of her intelligence widens, a large field will be supplied
for the exercise of women’s power of love which is so highly developed.
The genuine remedy for every kind of suffering is increased activity of
mind, which means increased instruction. Action is always an anodyne
of pain. Therein lies the explanation of the power of charity to calm
personal suffering, which is always in some degree egoistic. The best
way to console one’s self, for women and men alike, will always be to
minister to someone else; hope revives in a heart which gives hope to
others. Pains become gentle as they become fertile in beneficence, and
productivity is an appeasement.

[Sidenote: Best side of female levity.]

And finally, by way of compensation, there are other respects in which
women would suffer perhaps less than men from the disappearance of
religious beliefs. Women live more completely in the present than men
do, they are somewhat bird-like in their composition, and forget the
tempest the instant it is passed. Women laugh as easily as they cry,
and their laughter soon dries their tears: they are to be forgiven
for at least one aspect of this divine levity. Moreover they have
their household, all the tender and practical preoccupations of life,
which absorb them more completely, heart and soul, than men. A woman’s
happiness is probably complete the instant she believes herself to be
beautiful and feels that she is loved; a man’s happiness is a much
more complex product and contains a much larger number of intellectual
elements. Women live more wholly within the limits of their own
generation than men, and experience a sort of contemporary immortality
in the hearts of those they love.

[Sidenote: Modesty and love.]

Among the most developed sentiments of women there are two which
constitute the strength of their disposition to propriety: modesty,
the dignity of their sex, and love, which is exclusive when it is
true. But for these two powerful causes religious motives would always
have weighed lightly with her. If religion exercises a great control
over women, it is by taking possession of these two motives: the
surest means of making women listen, and almost the sole means, is to
awaken their love, or to appeal to their modesty: to give themselves
or to refuse themselves are the two great acts which dominate their
lives, and immorality among them generally increases directly with
the diminution of their modesty. Thence arises a new and delicate
problem, whether modesty, that compound of power and grace, is not
rather a religious than a moral virtue, and if religion has maintained
it, would it not disappear with the disappearance of religion, and
be enfeebled by a religion increasingly scientific and, in a sense,
positive? Note in the first place, that if the essence of all feminine
virtue is modesty, as of all male virtue it is courage, that very
fact constitutes an additional reason for doing everything in one’s
power to make modesty independent of religion, in order that it may
stand unaffected by the doubts which necessarily, in the modern world,
will overwhelm the latter. Certainly modesty is capable of serving
remarkably well as a safeguard for beliefs, and even for irrational
beliefs; it always prevents one from pushing reason, as from pushing
desire to the end, but there is a true and a false, a useful and a
harmful modesty. The first, as we shall see, is not bound up with
religion, either in its origin or in its destiny.

[Sidenote: Origin of modesty.]

In the first place is modesty of religious origin? Every young girl
feels vaguely that she has at her disposal a treasure which a number
of people desire. This sentiment, which is confused with some obscure
consciousness of sex, was necessary to enable the female to attain
complete physical development before giving herself. Precocious
immodesty must inevitably, in effect has, resulted in an arrested
development. It might easily have produced also a comparative
sterility. Modesty is thus a guarantee for the continuance of the
species, one of the sentiments that natural selection must inevitably
have tended to preserve and to increase. It is a condition, moreover,
of sexual selection; if the female had been disposed to give herself
indiscriminately, the species would have suffered. Happily desire is
checked by modesty, an obstacle which it can remove only on condition
of the woman’s being strongly attracted by the object desired; a
quality which will subsequently be transmissible to the species. From
the point of view of sexual selection there is in modesty a great deal
of coquetry—a coquetry which is unaware of its aim, which is half
unconscious, and often mistakes for a duty what is really but a bit of
management. The art of provisional refusal, and of attractive flight,
must inevitably have attained a high development among superior
beings, for it is a powerful medium of seduction and selection. Modesty
has developed side by side with it, and really constitutes but a
fugitive moment in the eternity of female coquetry. Coquetry originates
in the young girl who is yet too ignorant to be really modest, but too
much of a woman not to love to attract and to retreat; and at the other
extreme it constitutes the last remnant of modesty in women who really
possess none. Finally, modesty is also composed largely of an element
of fear, which has been very useful in the preservation of the race.
Among animals the female almost always runs some risk in the presence
of the male, which is generally stronger than she; love-making is
not only a crisis but a danger, and she must mollify the male before
surrendering herself to him, must seduce him before satisfying him.
Even in the human race, in primitive times, women were not always safe
from violence from men. Modesty secures a sort of expectant love which
was necessary in primitive times, a proof, a period of mutual scrutiny.
Lucretius has remarked that children, by their weakness and by their
fragility, have contributed to the softening of human manners; the same
remark applies to women and to this sense of their own comparative
weakness, which they experience so acutely in modesty, and which they
to some degree communicate to men. Women’s fears and scruples have made
man’s hand less hard; their modesty has given rise in him to a certain
form of respect, to a form of desire which is less brutal and more
gentle; they have civilized love. Modesty is analogous to the species
of fright that inclines a bird to flee one’s caresses, which bruise
it. One’s very look possesses some element of hardness for a bird;
and is it not a prolongation of touch? In addition to these various
elements there goes, to the composition of a young girl’s or a young
man’s modesty, a higher and more properly human element; the fear of
love itself, the fear of something new and unknown, of the profound
and powerful instinct which is awakening in one after having up to
that time lain asleep, which abruptly arises in one and struggles for
dominance with the other forces and impulses of one’s being. The young
man, unaccustomed as yet to submit to the domination of this instinct,
finds in it something stranger and more mysterious than in any other;
_c’est l’interrogation anxieuse de chérubin_.[93]

      [93] Shame is usually regarded as constituting the essence of
      modesty, but shame can have been but one of the elements in its
      formation; such shame as actually exists is readily explicable
      as a sense of the uncleanness attaching, in especial in the
      case of the woman (of whom the Hebrews required a periodic
      purification), to certain animal functions. But modesty must
      have been developed also by the use of clothing and the growth
      of the habit of covering, first the loins and then more and
      more of the entire person; and indeed the development of
      modesty and of the habit of wearing clothes must each have been
      aided by the other. The habit of going covered gives rise very
      soon to shame at being seen uncovered. The little negresses
      whom Livingstone supplied with shifts became, in a few days,
      so accustomed to having the upper half of their bodies hidden
      that, when they were surprised in their chambers in the
      morning, they hastily covered their breasts.

[Sidenote: Religious education and modesty.]

To sum up, the sentiment of modesty neither originates in religion nor
depends upon it; it is only very indirectly allied to it. Even from the
point of view of modesty a religious education is not above reproach.
Among Protestants, is the reading of the Bible always a good school? M.
Bruston has contended for the propriety of reading the Song of Songs
in an epoch like ours when marriages are often made out of interest
rather than of inclination; and indeed we agree with him that the
reading of the Song of Songs does tend to develop certain inclinations
in young girls, but hardly an inclination to a regular and complicated
church marriage. Among Catholics how many indiscreet questions the
confessor puts to the young girl! How many prohibitions, as dangerous
in their way as suggestions! And even in the item of modesty excess is
a defect; a little wholesome liberty in education and manners would
do no harm. Catholic education sometimes distorts the woman’s mind by
making it too different from that of the man, and by accustoming it to
a perpetual timidity and discomposure in the presence of the being with
whom she must pass her life, and by rendering her modesty somewhat too
indeterminate and savage, and converting it into a sort of religion.

[Sidenote: True modesty.]

There is also sometimes manifest a sort of perversion of modesty in the
mystical tendencies of woman, which are especially strong at the age
of puberty. These tendencies, exploited by the priesthood, give rise
to convents and cloisters. A Catholic education too often constitutes
for young girls a sort of moral mutilation; one endeavours to keep them
virgins, and one succeeds in converting them into imperfect women.
Religions are too inclined to consider the union of the sexes under I
know not what mystical aspect, and, from the point of view of morals,
as a stain. Certainly purity is a power; it is with a little diamond
point that mountains, and even continents, are nowadays pierced, but
Christianity has confounded chastity with purity. True purity is that
of love, true chastity is chastity of heart; chastity of heart survives
chastity of body, and stops at the point beyond which it would become
a restriction, an obstacle to the free development of the entire
being. An eunuch or a young man studying for the priesthood may well
be destitute of chastity; the smile of a young girl at the thought
of her fiancé may be infinitely more virginal than that of a nun.
Nothing moreover stains the mind like a too exclusive preoccupation
with the things of the body; incessant attention to them necessarily
evokes a chain of immodest imagery. St. Jerome in his desert,
believing, as he relates, that he saw the Roman courtesans dancing
naked in the moonlight, was less pure in heart and brain than Socrates
unceremoniously paying a visit to Theodora. A too self-conscious
modesty is immodest. The whole grace of virginity is ignorance; the
instant virginity becomes aware of itself it is tarnished; virginity,
like certain fruits, can only be preserved by a process of desiccation.
Love and sunshine transform the universe. Modesty is simply a coat of
mail which presupposes a state of war between the sexes, and aims at
preventing a blind promiscuity; the mutual self-abandonment of love
is more chaste than the modest inquietude and the immodest suspicion
which precede it; there grows up between two people who love each
other a sort of confidence that results in their neither wishing nor
being able to keep back anything from each other; self-constraint,
suspicion, consciousness of antagonism of interest, all disappear. This
is assuredly the characteristic of the most perfect form of reunion
that can exist in this world; Plato believed that the human body is
the prison of the spirit and cuts it off from immediate communication
with its fellow-spirits; paradoxical as it may seem, it is in love that
the body becomes less opaque, and effaces itself, and soul communicates
with soul. Nay, marriage itself preserves in women a sort of moral
virginity, as one may recognize on the scarred and discoloured hands of
old women the white line that has been protected for thirty years, by
the wedding ring, against the wear and tear of life.

[Sidenote: M. Renan on celibacy.]

Modesty is a sentiment which has survived, as we have seen, because
it was useful to the propagation of the species; mysticism perverts
and corrupts it and enlists it precisely against the propagation
of the species. Between a Carmelite nun and a courtesan like Ninon
de Lenclos the sociologist might well hesitate; socially they are
almost equally worthless, their lives are almost equally miserable
and vain; the excessive macerations of the one are as foolish as the
pleasures of the other; the moral desiccation of the one is often
not without some analogy to the corruption of the other. Vows or
habits of perpetual chastity, the monastic life itself, have found
in our days an unexpected defender in M. Renan. It is true he does
not regard such matters from the point of view of Christianity. If he
has a word to say in favour of perpetual chastity, it is strictly in
the name of physiological induction; he considers chastity simply as
a means of heightening the capacity of the brain and of increasing
one’s intellectual fertility. He does not absolutely blame impurity,
he delights in a sense, as he himself says, in the joys of the
debauchee and the courtesan; he possesses the boundless curiosity and
the accomplished impudicity of the man of science. But he believes
that there exists a sort of intellectual antinomy between complete
intellectual development and bodily love. The true man of science
should concentrate his entire vitality in his brain, should devote
his life to abstractions and chimeras; by this reservation of his
entire strength for the service of his head, his intelligence will
flower in double blossoms, the monstrous beauty of which, produced
by the transformation of stamens into petals, is the achievement of
sterility. Love is a heavy tax to pay for the vanities of the world,
and in the budget of the human race women count almost exclusively on
the side of expense. Science, economical of time and force, should
teach one to disembarrass one’s self of women and love, and to leave
such futilities to the drones. These paradoxes that M. Renan puts
forth rest on a well-known scientific fact: that the most intelligent
species are those in which reproduction is least active; fertility,
generally speaking, varies inversely to cerebral energy. But love must
not quite be confounded with sexual activity, unless one is to draw the
somewhat strange conclusion that among animals hares are those who are
best acquainted with love, and among men Frenchmen are those who know
least of it. From the fact that excessive commerce with the other sex
paralyses the intelligence, it does not in the least follow that the
sentiment of love produces the same effect and that one’s intellectual
power diminishes with the growth of one’s heart.

[Sidenote: Love a cerebral stimulant.]

We believe that love may be sufficiently defended on intellectual as
well as on moral grounds. If it in certain respects involves an expense
of force, it in others so heightens the entire vital energy, that the
expense must be regarded as one of those fruitful investments which are
inseparable from the very continuance of life. To live, after all, in
the physical as well as in the moral sense of the word, is not only to
receive but to give, but above all to give one’s self to love; it is
difficult to pervert one of the most primitive elements of the human
character, without also perverting the heart and the intelligence.
Love is above all things a stimulant to the entire being and to the
brain itself; it takes possession of the whole man; it plays upon man
as upon a harp and sounds the whole compass of his being. It cannot be
replaced by coffee or hasheesh. Women not only complete men, and form
by union with them a more complete, more rounded existence, more justly
epitomizing the possibilities of life; they are capable also, by their
mere presence, by their mere smile, of doubling our individual powers
and carrying them to the highest point of energy of which they are
capable. Our manhood leans upon their grace. All other motives which
inspire man—love of reputation, of glory, even of God—are slight as
compared with the love of a woman who understands her rôle. Even the
most abstract passion, the passion for science, often fails to acquire
its entire strength until it has called to its aid the love of a woman,
which wrings a smile out of the grave alembics and fills the crucibles
with the gaiety of hope. Nothing is simple in our being; all things
amalgamate and unite together. They who invented the monk aimed at
simplifying human life; they succeeded only in unnaturally complicating
it or mutilating it.

[Sidenote: Love makes for sanity.]

But love does not only play, in the life of the man of science and of
the thinker, the rôle of stimulant; over and above its function in
inciting such men to work, it contributes indirectly to rectify the
product of their labours. Love lives in reality, and to live in reality
helps one to think justly. Rightly to understand the world in which
we live, we must not dwell beyond its bounds, must not make a world
of our own, an unnatural and frigid world, rounded by the walls of a
monastery. “To aim at being an angel is to be a beast,” says Pascal;
and not only to be a beast, but in a measure to brutalize one’s self,
to dim the precision and vivacity of one’s intelligence. A complete
acquaintance with the details of the lives of great minds would
reveal surprising traces of love in the audacity and sweep of great
metaphysical and cosmological hypotheses, in profound generalizations,
in passionate exactitude of demonstration. Love reaches everywhere;
and as the philosopher who is also a lover pushes audaciously forward
in the domain of thought, he moves more easily, more lightly, more
confidently, with a heightened faith in himself, in others, and in this
mysterious and mute universe. Love inspires one with that gentleness of
heart which inclines one to an interest in the smallest things and in
their place in the universe. There is great kindliness in the heart of
the true philosopher.

[Sidenote: Love the essence of art.]

Then, too, what is science without art? The most intimate relations
exist between the intellectual and artistic faculties.[94] Could art
exist without love? Love becomes, in matters of art, of the very tissue
of thought. To compose verses or music, to paint or model, is simply
to transmute love by diverse methods and into diverse forms. Whatever
the more or less sincere defenders of the monastic spirit and religious
mysticism may say, love, which is as old as the world, is not upon the
point of quitting it; and it is in the hearts and minds of the greatest
of mankind that it dwells most securely. “Human frailty!” someone will
murmur. “No,” we reply: “source of strength and strength itself.” If
love is the science of the ignorant it constitutes some part also
of the science of the sage. Eros is of all the gods the one on whom
Prometheus is most dependent, for it is from Eros that he steals the
sacred flame. Eros will survive in every heart, and in especial in
every woman’s heart, when all religions shall have decayed.

      [94] See the author’s _Problèmes de l’esthétique
      contemporaine_, livre ii.

[Sidenote: Importance of early education in woman.]

We may conclude, therefore, that the characteristic tendencies of woman
may be employed in the services of truth, science, free-thought, and
social fraternity. Everything depends on the education that is given
her, and on the influence of the man whom she marries. Woman must
be begun with in childhood. The life of a woman is more orderly and
continuous than that of a man; for that reason the habits of childhood
exercise a more permanent influence over her. There is but one great
revolution in a woman’s life: marriage. And there are women for whom
this revolution does not exist; and there are others for whom it exists
in its most attenuated form, as when, for example, the husband’s manner
of life and his beliefs are practically the same as those of the wife’s
mother and family. In a tranquil environment, such as the majority of
women exist in, the influence of early education may persist to the
end; the small number of religious or philosophical ideas that were
planted in a woman’s brain in her childhood may be found there years
afterward, practically unchanged. The home is a protection, a sort of
hot-house in which plants flourish that could not live in the open air;
the film of glass or of veiling behind which women habitually stand to
look out into the street does not protect them against sun and rain
alone. A woman’s soul, like her complexion, preserves something of its
native whiteness.

[Sidenote: Husband responsible for wife’s education.]

In France, in the majority of instances, women are children up to the
time of their marriage; and children inclined to regard the man to whom
their parents wish them to give their hand with a certain mixture of
fear and of respect. Such a woman’s intelligence is almost as virgin
as her body, and in the first months of marriage the husband may
acquire, if he chooses, a decisive influence over his wife, model her
as yet imperfectly developed brain almost to his will. If he waits,
if he temporizes, he will find his task difficult—the more so as his
wife will some day gain over him some such influence as he might at
first have gained over her. The instant a woman becomes fully aware of
her power, she almost always becomes the controlling influence in the
household; if her husband has not formed her, if he has left her with
all the prejudices and ignorances of a child, and often of a spoiled
child, she will, in the course of time, form or rather deform him—will
oblige him at first to tolerate, and ultimately to accept, her childish
beliefs and errors, and perhaps in the end, profiting by the decline of
his intelligence, with the coming on of old age, she will convert him,
and by that fact retard the intellectual progress of the household by
an entire generation. The priesthood positively count on the growing
influence of the wife in every household; but they are helpless in
the first months, or perhaps years, of marriage against the influence
that the husband may exercise. And once fashioned by him the wife may
continue to exist to the end of her life in his image, and to give him
back his own ideas and instil them into his children.

[Sidenote: Free-thinker’s difficulty.]

The free-thinker, it is true, labours under a great disadvantage in
the work of conversion: a believer may always decline to reason;
whenever an intellectual duel seems to him to be disadvantageous he may
decline to fight; a high degree of indulgent tenacity and of prudence
is necessary in a discussion with anyone who is thus ready to take
refuge in flight at the slightest alarm. What can one do against a
gentle and obstinate determination to say nothing, to intrench one’s
self in ignorance, to allow argument to shatter itself against an outer
wall. “It seemed to me,” a Russian novelist cries, “as if all my words
bounded off her like peas shot at a marble statue.” One of Shakspere’s
heroines proposes to essay matrimony as an exercise of patience. If
patience is, in the management of the household, the great virtue of
the wife, the man’s virtue should be perseverance and active obstinacy
in an effort to fashion and create her to his desire and ideal. I
once questioned a woman who had married a free-thinker with a secret
intention of converting him. The upshot of the matter was the precise
opposite, and I quote below her own account, as she gave it to me,
of the successive phases of this moral crisis. It is of course only
an isolated example, but it may serve to illustrate the character of
women, and the more or less great facility with which they may be made
to accept scientific or philosophic ideas.

[Sidenote: Wife’s effort to convert her husband.]

“The double aim of every Christian woman is to save souls, in general,
and to save her own in particular. To aid Christ, by bringing back into
the fold the sheep who have strayed away, is her great dream, and to
preserve her own purity is her constant preoccupation. When the moment
came for me to try my powers, a lively solicitude took possession of
me: should I really succeed in winning over the man to whom I was to
unite my life, or would he succeed in winning me over? Great is the
power of evil, and whoever exposes himself to temptation will perish,
but if evil is powerful, God, I assured myself, is still more powerful,
and God never abandons those who confide in him, and I confided in God.
To convince the incredulous who had systematized their incredulity into
a reasoned whole was no slight task, and I did not hope to accomplish
it in four and twenty hours. My plan was this: to be faithful in the
midst of the unfaithful, immutable and confident in my religion which
was the religion of the humble, the simple, and the ignorant; to do the
utmost good possible, according to the first of Christ’s commandments;
to practise my religion in silence but openly; to domesticate it in my
household; to inaugurate a secret, slow, incessant combat which should
last, if necessary, till the end of my life. And then to rely upon the
infinite mercy of God.

“With this disposition of mind I had no difficulty in standing mute
whenever my husband attacked my beliefs. My first object was to prove
the uselessness of all discussion, the firmness of my faith. I knew
perfectly well that I really was unable to reply, that he knew so much
and I so little. But if I had only been a doctor of theology I would
have accepted the challenge, I would have heaped up proof on proof!
With the truth and God for me, how could I have been vanquished? But
I was not in the least like a doctor of theology, and the result
was that, fortified in my ignorance, I listened placidly to all his
arguments, and the livelier, the more cogent they were, the more
profoundly I was convinced of the truth of my religion, which stood
erect under so much battering and triumphed in its immunity.

“I was inexpugnable, and the siege might have lasted long if my husband
had not recognized the strength of my position and changed his tactics.
His object was to force me to discuss, to follow his objections, to
understand them in spite of myself, to turn them over in my own mind.
He told me that it would be a help to him in his work if I should
epitomize sometimes in writing, sometimes _viva voce_, a certain number
of works on religion. He put into my hands M. Renan’s ‘Vie de Jésus,’
M. Reville’s wise and conscientious little book on ‘L’Histoire du dogme
de la divinité de Jésus Christ,’ often full of abstract inquiries in
which the sincerity of the author was evident and contagious, even
when the reader was looking for sophisms.[95] I could not refuse to
read the books without abandoning my most cherished ambition, which
was to aid my husband in his work. My conscience was involved, and I
could not consult my confessor because we were then abroad; moreover
my faith, although profound, had always been, or pretended to be,
generous and enlightened. If I was ever to hand my religion on I must
not be intolerant; and I read! M. Renan did not especially scandalize
me, he was a follower of Jesus, writing of Jesus; his book, which has
charmed many women as much as a romance, saddened me without repelling
me. I was obliged to make a written abstract of the entire book and had
to put myself into the author’s place, to see things with his eyes,
to think his thoughts; and, in spite of myself, I sometimes saw in my
own heart, side by side with the impeccable and perfect Christ God,
the figure of the imperfect, suffering, worn man, out of patience and
cursing. The other books, which were much more abstract, called for a
much greater effort on my part, but the very effort that I put forth
constrained me more completely to assimilate their contents. Every day
I lost ground, and my once passive faith became slowly transformed into
an anxious desire to know, into a hope that a more complete knowledge
would re-establish my broken defences.

      [95] “Among the polemical works on Christianity I shall cite
      one which is perhaps somewhat old, but precious, in that it
      sums up with great impartiality the whole mass of secular
      objections, including a large number of modern objections to
      Christianity, the book of M. Patrice Larroque, entitled _Examen
      critique des doctrines de la religion Chrétienne_.”

“One day, my husband said to me abruptly: ‘You will not refuse to
read the Bible, which is the source of your religion, from one end to
the other?’ I acceded with pleasure, I did not wait for permission—I
was beyond that; it seemed to me that to read the Bible must be the
beginning of that profound knowledge which I envied my ideal doctor of
theology. It was with trembling fingers that I opened the black-bound
book, with its closely printed pages dictated by God Himself, alive
still with the divine Word! I held in my hands the truth, the
justification of human life, the keys of the future; it seemed to me
that the tablets of Sinai had been committed to me as to the prostrate
multitude of the Hebrews at the foot of the mountain, and I also would
have kneeled humbly to receive it. But, as I made my way through the
book, the immorality of certain pages seemed to me so evident that
my whole heart rose in revolt against them. I had not been hardened
from my childhood, as Protestant girls are, to all these tales. The
Catholic education, which does what it can to keep the Sacred Books
out of sight, seems to me in this respect, and only in this respect,
much superior to the Protestant religion. In any event, it prepares one
who reads the Bible for the first time in mature years to feel much
more acutely the profound immorality of sacred history. Catholicism
often perverts the intelligence; Protestantism might naturally go the
length of perverting the heart. Unbelievers have often made the moral
monstrosities in the Bible a subject of raillery; I felt nothing but
indignation when I came across them, and I closed with disgust the book
which I had so long regarded with respect.

“What should I think of it; what should I believe? The words of
infinite love and charity which the New Testament contains came back
to me. If God was anywhere He must be there, and once more I opened
the sacred book—the book which has so often tempted humanity. After
all, it was Christ that I had adored rather than the Lord of Hosts.
My acquaintance had been almost wholly limited to the Gospel of St.
John, which I had learned was of disputable authenticity. I read the
Gospels from end to end. Even in St. John I could not find the model
man above reproach, the incarnate God, the divine Word; in the very
midst of the beauties and sublimities of the text, I myself began to
perceive innumerable contradictions, naïvetés, superstitions, and moral
failings. My beliefs no longer existed, I had been betrayed by my God,
my whole previous intellectual life looked to me more and more like a
dream. This dream had its beautiful aspects; even to-day I sometimes
regret the consolation that it once afforded me and can never afford
me again. Nevertheless, in all sincerity, if I had the chance to sleep
once more the intellectual sleep of my girlhood, to forget all that
I have learned, to return to my errors—I would not for the world
consent to take it, I would not take a step backward. The memory of the
illusions that I have lost has never disturbed the line of reasoning by
means of which I lost them. When once I had come face to face with the
reality, it maintained itself from that moment on, sometimes painfully,
but steadily in my imagination. The last thing that a human being can
willingly consent to is to be deceived.”




CHAPTER VII.

THE EFFECT OF RELIGION AND NON-RELIGION ON POPULATION AND THE FUTURE OF
THE RACE.

    I. Importance of the problem of population—Antagonism
      between numerical strength and wealth—Necessity of numbers
      for the maintenance and progress of the race—Necessity
      of giving the advantage of numbers to the superior
      races—Problem of population in France—Its relation to
      the religious problem—Are the reasons for the restriction
      of the number of births physiological, moral, or
      economic?—Malthusianism in France—The true national peril.

    II. Remedies—Is a return to religion possible?—Religious
      powerlessness and growing tolerance in the matter—The
      influence that the law might exercise upon the causes of
      small families—Enumeration of these causes—Reform of the
      law in regard to filial duty—(Support of parents)—Reform
      of the law of inheritance—Reform of the military law for
      the purpose of favouring large families and of permitting
      emigration to the French colonies.

    III. Influence of public education: its necessity as a
      substitute for religious sentiment.


One of the most important of the problems to which the gradual
enfeeblement of the religious sentiment has given rise is that of
race fertility and the question of population. Almost all religions
have attached a considerable importance to the rapid increase of
population. With the diminution of the influence of religions among the
superior races of mankind, shall we not lose an important aid in their
maintenance and multiplication?

       *       *       *       *       *

[Sidenote: Antagonism between wealth and population.]

I. In the beginning, for the earliest aggregations of mankind, number
was a condition of power and consequently of security. The power of
wealth, which can be concentrated in the possession of a single man,
did not, so to speak, exist. In our days wealth has become a power
which is sufficient unto itself, and which division and distribution
often inevitably dissipate. Therein lies the source of the reasoning
which appeals nowadays to the heads of families: “To render a family
powerful one must transmit one’s capital in as undivided a state as
possible; that is to say, one must restrict the numbers of one’s
descendants to the utmost feasible limits.” Capital and capitalistic
egoism is therefore the enemy of population, because multiplication of
men always implies a more or less minute subdivision of wealth.

[Sidenote: Importance of rapid increase of population.]

Religion has always held the power of capital, in this respect, in
check. The Christian, the Hindu, the Mohammedan religion all correspond
to a state of things very different from that of the modern world; to
a state of society in which number constitutes a great power, in which
large families possess an immediate and visible utility. The greater
number of the great religions are at one in the precept: “Increase
and multiply.” According to the laws of Manou, one of the conditions
of salvation is the large number of male descendants. The religious
and national tradition of the Jews on the point is well known. Every
religion of Jewish origin being thus favourable to increase in the
size of the family, and expressly prohibiting means of prevention,
it follows that, other things equal, a sincerely Christian or Jewish
people will multiply more rapidly than a free-thinking people. The
infertility of the higher races, over and above the influence of the
opposition between religion and the modern spirit, is induced also by
a sort of antinomy between civilization and race propagation: rapid
civilization is always accompanied by a certain race corruption. This
antinomy must be remedied under penalty of extinction. Life is intense
in proportion to the number of young, ambitious people who engage
in it; the struggle for existence is fertile just so far as it is
carried on by young men rather than by men who are fatigued and who no
longer possess an enthusiasm for work; a young and rapidly increasing
nation constitutes a richer and more powerful organism, a steam-engine
working at a high pressure. One-half, perhaps three-fourths of the
distinguished men have come of numerous families; some have been the
tenth, some the twelfth child; to restrict the number of children is
to restrict the production of talent and genius, and that, too, out
of all proportion to the restriction of the family. An only son, far
from having, on the average, a greater number of chances of being a
remarkable man, really possesses fewer; in especial if he belongs to
the upper classes. “Both the mother and father, it has been said, watch
over this first child and enfeeble it by superfluous care, and spare
it, by yielding to its wishes, all moral gymnastic.” Every child who
expects to be the sole inheritor of a small fortune will put forth
less energy, in the struggle for existence, than he otherwise would.
And finally, it is a physiological fact that the first children are
often less vigorous and less intelligent; maternity is a function which
becomes perfect, as other functions do, by repetition; a mother’s first
effort is as rarely a masterpiece as a poet’s. To limit the number of
children is, therefore, in a certain measure to dwarf their physical
and intellectual powers.

[Sidenote: Fallacy of Malthusianism.]

As an increase of population heightens the intensity of the physical
and mental life of a nation, so also it heightens the intensity of the
economic life of a nation, stimulates the circulation of wealth, and
ultimately increases the public treasure instead of diminishing it. It
is happening under our very eyes in Germany and England, where public
wealth has increased side by side with the population. In Germany, in
a period of nine years (1872-1881), the average annual revenue of each
individual increased six per cent., while the population rolled up by
millions. The economical doctrine which regards overpopulation as the
principal cause of poverty is a very superficial one. As long as there
is an available plot of ground unoccupied, and perhaps even after the
entire earth shall be cultivated (for science may be able to create
new sources of wealth and even of food) a man will always constitute a
bit of living capital, of a higher value than a horse or a cow, and to
increase the numbers of citizens of a nation will be to increase the
sum of its wealth.[96]

      [96] What economists have really established, and what MM.
      Maurice Block, Courcelles-Seneuil, Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, Othenin
      d’Haussonville are right in maintaining, is that it is harmful
      to society to add to the non-working classes, to the number
      of feeble beings who are incapable of labour, to the number
      of beggars, and of non-combatants generally, whoever they may
      be. Well, poverty favours the birth of those who are dependent
      upon society, and the birth of those who are dependent upon
      society tends still further to increase poverty; that is the
      circle from which so many economists have believed that the
      precepts of Malthus offered them an issue. Unhappily, if there
      is one universal attribute of poverty, it is its fertility;
      for in all nations the poorest classes are those that have the
      greatest number of children. Malthus has never been listened to
      by the poorer classes, but precisely by those only who, from
      the point of view of a sagacious political economy, ought to be
      encouraged to leave as many children behind them as possible,
      because they alone would educate them well: that is to say, the
      economical peasantry and the prosperous middle class. Insomuch
      that a fertility of the poor is absolutely without remedy
      (except by way of charity or emigration); but it constitutes in
      the end a much less considerable evil than the infertility of a
      nation as a whole, and is an ultimate evil only because, in the
      last analysis, it results in a genuine unproductivity. Poverty,
      especially in the cities, rapidly kills out the most prolific
      races.

[Sidenote: Menace to modern civilization.]

Formerly the struggle for existence between two races or nations ended
in a single violent crisis: the vanquished were massacred or reduced
to slavery, and slavery usually resulted in the gradual extinction
of the inferior race; it was a slow massacre. Famine, produced by
methodical devastation, achieved what war had begun—whole races
disappeared abruptly from the face of the globe and left not a trace
behind: the most recent and most striking example is that of the
great American empires of Mexico and Peru. Thus the strongest and
most intelligent races alone survived, and had only to confirm their
victory with all its consequences by clearing the earth before them.
Existence was a monopoly in the hands of the strong. It is no longer
so. To-day the vanquished are no longer massacred; on the contrary,
when an uncivilized country is conquered, it is supplied with good
laws, with police and hygiene. Inferior races increase and multiply
under the rule of superior races. The Cape negroes, the Chinese, the
negroes in the United States, and even the last surviving red-skins,
who seem disposed to-day to take heart, are examples of what I mean.
Well, the Orient contains, in the Chinese Empire, a veritable reservoir
of men, which some day or other will overflow the entire earth. In the
face of this compact multitude, which is increasing rapidly, and with
advancing civilization will increase more rapidly, the four or five
great nations of Europe, and the United States and Australia, seem
a small matter. The future of humanity depends mathematically upon
the proportions in which the more intelligent races are represented
in the complex composition of the man of the future. And every son of
one of the more highly endowed races of the globe, such as the French,
German, or English, commits a positive fault in not labouring for the
multiplication of his race; he contributes to lower the future level
of human intelligence. Men of science have already established it as
a law that the power of reproduction decreases with the increase of
cerebral activity, and that intelligent races reproduce themselves
with increasing difficulty; to augment this natural difficulty by a
voluntary restriction is daily to labour for the brutalization of the
human race.

[Sidenote: Duty of civilized races to multiply.]

The followers of Malthus, supposing that there at present exists an
equilibrium between population and the means of subsistence, look
with anxiety upon every new arrival in the world; but even admitting
that the struggle for existence has already reached that acute stage,
it might still be hoped that only the more intelligent would leave
children behind them. Malthus’ law should possess no force for the
educated men of Europe, who alone are acquainted with it, but only for
the negroes or the Chinese, who are absolutely ignorant of it. Malthus’
law is not meant for us; in reality it is not meant for anyone. By the
very fact that one is acquainted with it, and possesses foresight and
self-control enough to put it into practice, one proves that one stands
beyond the circle of its applicability. Malthusians, who endeavour to
apply to the reproduction of mankind the principles of animal-breeders,
forget that the dominant principle in all breeding is to favour the
multiplication of the superior species. One Durham bull is worth
ten common bulls. What is true of bulls and sheep is true of men: a
Frenchman, with the scientific and æsthetic aptitude of his race,
represents on the average a social capital a hundred times greater
than that represented by a negro, an Arab, a Turk, a Cossack, or a
Chinaman. To leave few French descendants, in order that Cossacks and
Turks may increase and multiply, is to commit an absurdity, even on
the principles of a Malthusian. Be it remembered that it was among the
Aryans, and in especial among the Greeks, that science and art worthy
of the name took their rise; from them they passed to the other Aryans,
and then to the other human races.

[Sidenote: Bad outlook for the future.]

Michelet compares the treasure of science and truth, amassed by the
human mind, to the egg that a slave carried into the Roman circus,
at the end of the entertainment, into the midst of the great lions,
who were gorged and asleep. If one of the wild beasts opened his eyes
and was seized once more by desire at sight of the man with the egg,
which is the symbol of human genius, the slave was lost. In our times
genius is infinitely less persecuted than heretofore, and is no longer
in danger of the arena or of the headsman, and it seems as if the
sacred egg out of which the future is to arise has nothing further to
fear; but this is a mistake. Precisely because the human mind is year
by year growing richer, its treasure is becoming so considerable, so
delicate, and difficult to preserve in its entirety, that it may well
be asked whether a succession of people sufficiently well endowed
will arise to retain and to augment the acquisitions of science. Up
to the present day those truths alone have survived the wear and tear
of time which were simple; at the present epoch the rapidity of the
progress of science may well make us anxious as to its permanence. The
extreme complexity of science may well make us fear that the peoples
of the future may not possess mental elevation enough to embrace it
in its entirety, and to add to it by a constant increase. Suppose,
for example, that the world should be reduced abruptly to Africa,
Asia, and South America, where the Spanish race has not yet produced
a single scientific genius; must not the scientific labours of our
century inevitably miscarry? Happily their safety is bound up with that
of certain great nations. The Anglo-Saxon and Germanic peoples to-day
cover the earth with their children and their colonies. But it is sad
to think that one of the three or four great European peoples, which
alone count for much in the progress of humanity, should be dancing
gaily toward annihilation.

[Sidenote: Danger from Asia.]

A fusion of races will sooner or later take place in humanity; it is
already taking place in the United States, and the perfection of means
of communication is hastening its consummation throughout the entire
world. Europe is pouring out its surplus upon America, Africa, and
Australia; Asia will some day overflow Europe and America; what is
taking place to-day, fifty years after the invention of railways, can
scarcely give us an idea of the mixture and amalgamation of races which
will some day be realized on the earth. Such a mixture, even though
it raise the level, in some small degree, of races intellectually
ill-endowed, may well abase the level of races intellectually
well-endowed, if the latter are greatly outnumbered by the former.

[Sidenote: Money the modern patent of nobility.]

It may be objected, it is true, that the superior races of mankind
may remain isolated in the midst of the multiplication of the other
branches of humanity in a sort of jealous aristocracy, served and
respected by those whom they dominate by their intelligence. This is
one of the dreams of M. Renan, who sees in the Chinese the future slave
of the Europeans—gentle, docile slaves, with just enough intelligence
to be marvellous industrial machines. Unhappily we have learned, to our
expense, that the Chinese are also excellent instruments of war. In the
industrial society in which we live, money constitutes, in the long
run, the basis of aristocracy. To-day money is the true force and title
of nobility. To lay up treasures demands a very average intelligence,
of which a great number of inferior people are no doubt capable: once
rich and they will be our equals; richer, they will be our superiors
and our masters. If they have money enough they can purchase every
privilege, even that of mixing their blood with ours, even that of
marrying our daughters and of confounding our race and theirs. The
only means by which intelligence can preserve its power is by means of
numbers. Genius itself must leave a posterity behind it, and in spite
of prejudice to the contrary, if we are to be eternal it must be by
means of our children rather than by our works.

[Sidenote: Religion of the family.]

Positivists propose to substitute a religion of humanity for existing
and rapidly disappearing religions; there is a still more accessible
religion, and more practical, and more useful, which was one of the
first religions of humanity: the religion of the family, the worship of
the little group of beings bound together by ties of blood and memory
and name and honour, which form an epitome of a nation; to permit one’s
family to die out or to diminish in number is to labour, to the extent
that in one lies, to diminish the power of one’s native country and
of humanity itself. Patriotism has been made a subject of ridicule,
but patriotism is a beautiful thing, and befitting in the head of a
household. Paternity in its completest sense, that is to say, the
responsibility for the education of a new generation from birth to the
age of manhood, is, after all, the surest element of patriotism, and is
within the reach of everyone.

[Sidenote: Gradual impoverishment of France.]

In France especially, as we have seen, the population question is an
important one, and should be insisted on. It has been said with reason
that France to-day is not threatened by a multitude of dangers, but
by one only, which actually constitutes a national peril: that of
extinction from lack of children.[97] A nation may increase its capital
in two ways; 1. By productive expenditure and productive labour; 2. By
the utmost possible diminution of both, of labour and of expenditure.
France has been employing the second means since the beginning of the
present century; she has been economizing in children and diminishing
the rapidity of the circulation of national life. She has, by this
process, amassed a great treasure, but the results of her economy
have been in part consecrated to the payment of an indemnity of five
billions, and in part to loans, as in Mexico, Turkey, and Egypt, and to
speculation of every kind, and the result of these blind economies has
been a gradual impoverishment.

      [97] M. Richet.

[Sidenote: Classes in France that maintain the population.]

Over and above those who are unreflective, or who simply trust to
luck, there exists no considerable class of people in France, except
Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, who can be counted on to maintain
the race. There exists no doubt a certain number of _bons vivants_
who are determined to take their pleasure at all hazards, and who find
in the restriction of the family a limitation of their pleasure; but
they are rare. The disciples of Malthus are nowadays much more numerous
than those of Rabelais. People who have children, not out of pleasure
nor by chance, but out of patriotism and philosophy, are so rare that
they need not at present be taken into account. The more the property
in France is subdivided, the greater the number of small proprietors,
the fewer children there are. Since 1866 the agricultural inquiry
has demonstrated the invasion of Malthusianism and the progress of
voluntary infertility in almost every department _side by side with
the subdivision of the soil_. From that time on the movement has gone
forward unchecked. “In certain communes the words brother and sister
have almost fallen out of use. Primogeniture, which was abolished
in 1789, has been replaced by unigeniture.”[98] Labourers only are
anti-malthusians, and that out of carelessness for the future. A
Malthusian was one day remonstrating with a poor labourer, who was
the father of twelve children and ambitious to become the father of
a thirteenth. “What will you have?” said the latter, “it is the only
pleasure in the world that I get for nothing; I would not diminish it
on any account.”

      [98] Toubeau, _La Répartition des impôts_, t. ii.

[Sidenote: Power of religion to stimulate population.]

It has been maintained that a greater or less restriction of the number
of births is essentially due, not to a diminution in the religious
devotion of the people, but simply to an increase of prudence. Whoever
does not live simply in the present moment, but takes account of the
future, will restrict the number of his children according to the
figure of his income. And yet where faith is sincere and rigid, it does
not permit one to hesitate on mere grounds of economics. In Brittany
prudence neither checks religion nor fertility. Engaged couples,
knowing that they will have children after marriage, postpone their
union till they shall have laid by a certain amount of money, purchased
a house and a plot of ground. In the department of Ille-et-Vilaine,
men do not generally become engaged before their twenty-fourth year,
nor women before their nineteenth year. Marriage does not last as
long therefore in Brittany as in Normandy; it lasts on the average
twenty-seven years and a half in Normandy and twenty-one in Brittany,
and yet the fertility of the women of Brittany, as compared with that
of the women of Normandy, is almost as that of a hundred to sixty.
In Brittany the result of religion and prudence, before marriage,
combined, is a constant increase of population; in Normandy the effect
of incredulity and prudence, after marriage, combined, is a constant
diminution of the population; although, of the two peoples, the Normans
are more vigorous, and owing to the greater frequency of twins,
naturally more fertile.[99]

      [99] See M. Baudrillart, _Les Populations rurales de la
      Bretagne_.

[Sidenote: Condition of population in France not due to aversion to
marriage.]

The weakness of the French as a nation does not lie in the smallness of
the number of marriages. Practically the average number of marriages
in France is the same as in Germany, something like eight a year for
every thousand inhabitants, so that marriages are about as frequent in
France as elsewhere. There is no question of immorality involved, but
simply one of the prudence of married people. Illegitimate births are
less numerous in France than in Italy or in Germany and in especial in
Catholic Germany. In Paris scarcely more than twenty-five per cent. of
the children are illegitimate, at Osmultz in Moravia fully seventy per
cent. are illegitimate. M. Bertillon has established the fact that,
since the beginning of the century, the percentage of marriage has
been maintained, and even has increased rather than diminished up to
1865; but that the percentage of births has diminished continuously,
and regularly. According to statistics every marriage averages five
children in Germany, five in England, or almost five, and three only in
France.

[Sidenote: Nor to degree of civilization in France.]

Certain thinkers have been inclined to believe that the comparative
slowness in the increase of the French people was due to a relatively
high development of the brain. We have already remarked the antagonism
which exists between reproduction and the development of the nervous or
cerebral system, but it is somewhat precipitate to apply to a special
group of men what is true of the species as a whole; and there is a
touch of fatuity in the notion that the French people have achieved so
high a point of development that there exists in certain provinces not
only a decrease in the rate of reproduction, but an absolute decrease
of population. A statistical investigation has shown, it is true, that
members of the Institute do not average more than one or two children
apiece, but this statistical inquiry proves simply that members of
the Institute have not desired to have large families, and that their
conduct, which is generally not influenced by religion, has been
comformable to their desire. An ordinarily healthy man could become the
father of a hundred children every year; and to imagine that his sexual
needs diminish under the influence of intellectual labour to the extent
of his having but one child in forty years would be more apropos in a
comic opera than in a serious book. Remark, however, that the fertility
is less great among peasants, whose cerebral activity is at a minimum,
than in our cities, in which it is relatively great; but in cities
fertility is balanced unhappily by mortality. The antagonism between
fertility and development of the brain should be at its greatest in
women; but Frenchwomen, whose education has long been neglected, do not
appear to possess on the average any intellectual superiority over the
women of other countries. And in our provinces population advances most
slowly in Normandy, where the women are so vigorous that the percentage
of twins is higher than elsewhere.

[Sidenote: Malthusianism the cause.]

Malthusianism therefore is the cause of the evil, and malthusianism
is a worse scourge than pauperism; it is in a sense the pauperism of
the middle classes. Just as an excessive impoverishment may kill out a
whole social class, malthusianism is the death of the middle classes.
It is rare to find a middle-class family with more than two or three
children; two children, at least, are necessary to replace the father
and the mother, and to maintain the population; a certain number of
celibates and of married people who are sterile must be allowed for.
The middle classes therefore are approaching extinction: the result of
restricting their number is suicide.

To sum up, the population question in France is purely and simply a
moral question; but more than any other question of the like nature
it is closely bound up with religion because, up to the present time,
religion has been the sole power which has dared to check popular
inclination in this regard. It is in respect to population that lay
morality has been most negligent.

       *       *       *       *       *

[Sidenote: Futility of effort to bring about a return of religion.]

II. If the question is really one of a return to some traditional
religion or a gradual extinction of the race, free-thinkers may well
hesitate between a number of lines of conduct. They may, in the first
place, take refuge in resignation: “After me the Deluge.” Many of the
middle classes and a great number even of economists, who regard the
future of their race and of their country as much too distant to be
taken into account and consider present comfort as the sole rational
aim of man, accept this position. A more radical alternative is to
join the Church: both the Catholic and the Protestant churches, in
spite of the eccentricity of their legends, are useful as an aid in
making a nation numerous and strong and prolific; and the French
of all nations needs religion, so that, instead of endeavouring to
destroy the Christian faith, it is our duty to endeavour to propagate
it. There is an element of hypocrisy and even of cowardice in this
effort to revive a bygone error in the name of present utility. And
it involves the affirmation that error is at the bottom more useful
than truth, and that truth is fundamentally irreconcilable with the
continued existence of the human race—an affirmation which is somewhat
precipitate. Above all, the effort to arrest scepticism is simply
futile—futile for humanity, for a people, for a family. When it is
time to regret that certain things have been learned it is too late to
set about ignoring them. The French people, in especial, possess a fund
of incredulity which is based upon the practical and logical character
of their temperament: they rose in 1789 against the clergy, in the name
of liberty; nowadays they will struggle with the same stubbornness in
the name of comfort against the prescriptions of religion, against the
very instincts of human nature, and will make themselves sterile in
order to become rich without immoderate labour. The re-establishment
of religion is simply out of the question; sincerely religious men
themselves, if they happen also to be intelligent, recognize it. This
rational sterility, produced by a triumph of the intellect over natural
instinct and religious dogma, is a charming theme for declamation;
but declamation is also sterile, and does not date from yesterday; it
was tried before the Revolution and succeeded neither in augmenting
religious sensibility nor in diminishing French infertility. In a
pamphlet on the Erreurs de Voltaire, the Abbé Nonotte wrote in 1766:
“Present notions and practices on the subject of population are as
melancholy for morality as for statesmanship. People are content
nowadays with a single heir. Pleasure and libertinism carry the day.
The fortunes of a great number of the first families in Paris rest
on the shoulders of a single child. It was better in former times;
for families were not afraid of a number of children, and were not
so extravagant but that they could provide them with a means of
subsistence.”

[Sidenote: Inability of priest to cope with question of population.]

Neither the priest nor the confessor can be counted on. Has the priest
ever power enough, even in countries like Brittany where devotion is at
its height, to suppress the grossest vice; drunkenness, for example,
and that, too, among women? How can a priest be expected to maintain
an influence over men who confess hardly more than once a year—at
Easter? How can the priest, under such circumstances, be expected to be
really a governor of the conscience, and in especial a physician of the
soul? He receives a general confession from each of his parishioners,
he is in a hurry, he is obliged to restrict his attention to the
most enormous of the sins confessed to him, and the whole ends in
absolution, followed by communion. Some days afterward the men get
drunk again, and do just as they did before, till the year comes round.
Prejudices and habits are stronger than anything else.

[Sidenote: Pliancy of religion.]

They who, with the Abbé Nonotte, regard religion as the cure of all
evils, forget that religion itself is very compliant, that it can be
made to stand for a multitude of things. If the mass of the French
people should allow themselves to be persuaded by the Abbé Nonotte
and his disciples to return to the traditional faith, the traditional
faith itself would soon cease to be so austere. Confessors would
become more discreet. Are they not to-day obliged to tolerate polkas
and waltzes, and young people whirling about the room in each other’s
arms, which was formerly so severely prohibited? The letter of religion
remains in vain the same, the spirit of the worshippers changes. At the
present day Jesuits willingly close their eyes to the sterility of the
family; they have even been accused of whispering to advice for the
preservation of certain inheritances. Do you imagine that confessors
in the Faubourg Saint-Germain ask especially embarrassing questions?
Heaven can be compromised with.

[Sidenote: Even of Protestantism.]

This sort of tolerance, like all tolerance, will grow with time. Even
in Protestant families in which a more extreme rigidity reigns, the
spirit of the times is dominant. Orthodoxy is everywhere becoming less
ferocious, sterility is everywhere on the increase. Even clergymen do
not have as large families as formerly. Statistics on this head would
be very instructive; one might find in the very bosom of Protestantism
sterility increasing directly with liberalism of belief. If Darwin and
Spencer have partisans in the English clergy, and among the American
Protestants, why should not Malthus also? In especial, since Malthus
was a grave and religious man.

[Sidenote: Decrease of population encouraged by the Catholic Church.]

The Catholic religion has itself been guilty by its advocacy of
religious celibacy. In France one hundred and thirty thousand persons
of both sexes are devoted to celibacy.[100] It is to be regretted that
Catholicism, which during a number of centuries (in the time when
St. Sidonius Apollinaris, the son-in-law of the Emperor Avitus, was
Bishop of Clermont-Ferrand) did not impose celibacy upon ecclesiastics,
should have felt obliged later to exact it, and should have come to
consider absolute continence superior to marriage, contrary to all
physiological and psychological laws. “Continence as a profession,”
says M. Montesquieu, “has destroyed more men than pestilence and war
together. Every religious house constitutes a family which never gives
birth to a child, and which continues in existence only by adopting
children from without. Such houses are open like so many abysses, to
swallow up the future of the race.” Religious celibacy results in
another evil consequence: although priests do not to-day constitute
the élite of society, they are still among the most intelligent, the
best educated, the least ill-disposed members of society. And they
gaily consent to be annihilated, to disappear, and to leave, like the
heretics they used to burn, no trace behind. They form as constant a
drain on the body-politic as the victims of the Inquisition formed
during so many years in Spain. If we should count the sons only of
clergymen who have become distinguished or even great men, from Linnæus
to Wurtz and Emerson, we might see how much we lose by the celibacy of
our priesthood.

      [100] Dr. Lagneau, _Remarques démographiques sur le célibat en
      France_.

But religion apart, sterility may be combated by law, by morals, and by
education.

[Sidenote: Legal remedy.]

Religion is the law of primitive peoples; when it becomes feeble, its
precepts split into two parts: one of which, regarded as useless,
is neglected and loses its entire value, while the other, which is
regarded as the guarantee of social life, becomes formulated into moral
or civilized laws obligatory in character. This is the history of a
number of hygienic measures prescribed by Oriental religion which have
become simple police regulations in the laws of modern Europe. In the
present question it is evident that the law should take the place that
religion once held; the legislator should assume the function of the
priest. Such a substitution is not unexampled; it took place among the
Greeks; the citizen was obliged, by law, to have children. Socrates in
Athens was obliged by law to take a second wife. In Sparta the young
husband lived at the public table until he had supplied the state with
three sons. He was subject to military service until he had supplied
the state with four.[101] Nowadays of course such radical laws are
not to be thought of, and indeed no simple and direct law could reach
the evil; an entire system of mutually completing laws is necessary.
The whole series of reasons which prevent the head of a household from
having a large family must first be known; then they must be met in
detail by a series of laws devised to suppress them or counterbalance
them; so that whenever one interest makes for sterility, another and
equivalent interest shall make for fertility. It is accordingly in the
very bosom of the family that the law, and that progressive reform of
morals to which the law is so capable of contributing, must operate.

      [101] Aristotle, _Politica_, ii. 6, 13.

[Sidenote: Worship of comfort a reason for small families.]

The head of a family to-day abandons the notion of having many children
for a number of reasons, sometimes mutually contradictory, which it
is necessary we should make ourselves fully acquainted with before
endeavouring to devise means of counteracting them. There exist in
the first place, though not very frequently, physical reasons: the
ill-health of the mother, the fear of her dying through frequent
pregnancies. When this fear is justified in the judgment of a physician
it is respectable; it is defensible even from the point of view of
society, for children born under such conditions would be delicate
and useless as members of society. But in almost the whole number of
cases, the grounds of sterility are economical and egoistic. French
sterility is an economical, much more than a physiological phenomenon.
The head of a family calculates the cost of rearing a numerous family,
calculates that instead of being able to lay by money while he is in
the vigour of his life, he will have to spend it on his children, and
to pass his old age in poverty; having a large family he regards simply
as a bit of prodigality. Our budget of 4,200,000,000 represents an
average of 113 francs a head; with such taxes, decidedly, if one is to
bring up a numerous family, one must have a considerable fortune or
must deftly manipulate one’s poverty.

[Sidenote: Worship of land another.]

Also the small proprietor regards the earth somewhat as a savage does
his fetich: his field, his house, are sacred entities which he wishes
to confide to sure hands. If he has a number of children, it will be
necessary to share these treasures and perhaps to sell them in case
they cannot otherwise be divided equally. The peasant no more regards
such a division of property as possible than a gentleman under the old
régime would have admitted the possibility of selling his ancestral
chateau. Both of them would regard a mutilation of their family as a
less evil than the mutilation of their domain. But to rear a child is
to create a bit of capital, and fertility is a form of social economy.
Both economists and French peasants admit willingly that to rear a calf
or a sheep is to add to one’s wealth, and _a fortiori_ they should
admit that to rear a child is. But there is a difference: the calf,
once reared, labours solely for the person who reared it, whereas the
child ultimately comes to labour for itself. From the selfish point of
view of the father, it is better to raise cattle and sheep. From the
point of view of society, it is incontestably better to rear men. In
all new countries the French race is prolific, because a large number
of children under such circumstances is not a charge but a profitable
investment. In Canada sixty thousand Frenchmen have grown into a people
of two millions and a half. In Algeria the birth-rate is from 30 to 35
per 1000; in Normandy it is not 20 per thousand. Finally, a striking
example of the influence of emigration has been discovered in France
itself, in the Department of the Basses-Pyrénées, where the birth-rate
varies with the rate of emigration, to fill the places of those who
have gone to America.

[Sidenote: Women of fashion imitate the demi-monde.]

Let us consider, on the other hand, the causes which influence women.
It is natural that, in a certain stage of society, women should be
unwilling to be mothers. Motherhood represents the sole task which it
is left to them to perform, and this task they find the harder because
fortune has relieved them of every other. They are not even obliged
to nourish their children: the maternal breast can find a substitute;
they are not obliged either to rear their children or to teach them:
governesses can be hired; but nobody can give birth to their children,
and in their life of frivolity childbirth is the one serious function
that remains. They protest against it and they are right. The ambition
of women of the _grandmonde_ being too often, as has been said, to
mimic women of the _demi-monde_, it is well that they should imitate
them in this respect as in all others, and that they should endeavour
to establish between marriage and prostitution this final bond of
similarity—sterility.

[Sidenote: Women of the lower classes fear labour.]

Even among the women of the people gestation and childbirth, being, as
they are, painful, are also objects of the liveliest repugnance and of
protestations of every kind. I have never seen a woman of the people
who did not complain at being pregnant and who would not have preferred
any other malady. _Ah! Nous ne faisons pas, nous recevons_—“We women
have no voice in the matter,” said one of them to me—“if but we
had!” She epitomized in a word the physiological and psychological
position of the poor woman. Those who have not had children, far from
complaining of it, congratulate themselves, and in any event they
rarely desire more than one.

[Sidenote: Large families among the poor traceable to ignorance.]

In Picardy and in Normandy, as M. Baudrillart remarks, a woman who has
many children is made the butt of raillery. And if other provinces
are less sterile, it is owing to religion or to ignorance. The women
have not yet become acquainted with Malthus. They know of but one
remedy against an evil that they fear—to keep out of the way of
their husbands. The wife of such and such a labouring man prefers a
beating to the risk of having another child: but as she is the weaker
she often succeeds in bringing upon herself both the beating and the
child. Fear of pregnancy is more often than is commonly believed the
cause of dissension in poor households, and for that matter in rich
households also. The instant a woman reasons, instead of submitting to
the law, she inevitably feels the disproportion that exists, for her,
between the pleasures of love and the pains of maternity. She must be
supplied with a new conception of duty, and that not simply in the way
of a religious obligation which the husband can ridicule but of a moral
obligation.

[Sidenote: Girls should be educated for maternity.]

Catholic education, as we have already remarked, does great harm in
rearing young girls in a false modesty, in never speaking to them of
the duties of marriage for fear of awakening their imagination in the
direction of their future husband. The actual result is precisely the
opposite of the calculated result. Young girls see nothing in marriage
but the future husband and unknown pleasures. They never think of any
matter of painful duty which they must accept in advance; they do
not consider children as a question of duty but of necessity simply,
they are actuated by but one ambition, that of diverting themselves.
Girls should be educated and prepared for motherhood; our present
education is adapted to the formation of nuns or old maids, sometimes
of courtesans, for we neglect early to inspire woman with a feeling of
duty for her proper function, which constitutes also a large portion of
all that is moral in her life—the duty of maternity. Happily, married
women cannot remain sterile simply by wishing it, their husbands must
become their accomplices; it is their husbands, who, in the last
resort, are responsible. If the husband, out of complaisance to his
wife or to his wife’s relatives, undertakes to be a Malthusian _malgré
lui_, he plays almost as ridiculous a rôle as that of Georges Dandin:
the man who permits himself to be dictated to in the matter of not
having children is almost as complaisant as the man who acknowledges
the children of other people.

[Sidenote: Paternal love tends to restrict the number of children.]

Another cause which explains the low birth-rate in France is that
paternal and maternal love is more tender and more exclusive there
than in other countries. The French family, whatever may be said
to the contrary, is much more closely united than the English or
German family: in it a sort of fraternity obtains between parents and
children. Members of a family separate with regret, and the ideal of
the father is to have so few children that he may always keep them by
him. We are too refined, too far advanced from a state of nature, to
submit without suffering to the rupture which puberty naturally brings
about in the animal family, to the flight of the young bird whose wings
are grown; we have not the courage to accept the dismemberment of the
household, far less to wish it as a necessity and, on the whole, a good
thing. This affection has of course its egoistic side, and it is on
that side that it results in sterility. Parents rear children less for
the children’s sake than for their own.

[Sidenote: Two legal remedies.]

Having thus passed in review the principal causes which restrict the
number of children in French families let us consider what influence
law and morals might exert in counteracting them. Legal reforms should
be directed especially toward the two following points: 1. Reform of
the law relating to filial duties (maintenance of parents); 2. Reform
of the law of inheritance; 3. Reform of the military law, so as to
favour numerous families and permit emigration to the French colonies.

[Sidenote: Present state of the law does not sufficiently protect
parents against ingratitude.]

Rearing children being a considerable trouble and expense it is
necessary that it should be made profitable, that it should be
converted into a species of loan for a long term of years. The law can
bring this about in various ways. French legislation has protected
children by a provision that their fathers cannot completely disinherit
them; it should also have protected fathers against children’s
ingratitude. It often happens, in the country especially, that after
an aged couple have reared a numerous generation they find themselves
dependent upon their sons or upon their sons-in-law and are ill-fed
and greeted with abuse. The law provides that children must maintain
their parents, no doubt, but maintenance may be supplied in a manner
which renders it little better than assassination. The law which has
endeavoured to establish the moral independence of the son as against
the father might well endeavour to establish on a firm basis the moral
independence of the parents themselves. If a father to-day cannot
disinherit his son, is it not shocking that a son should be able, in a
sense, to disinherit his father—to accept life, nourishment, education
from him and to give derision, abusive language, and sometimes blows
in return? Observers who have lived among the people, in especial in
country districts, uniformly bear witness to the deplorable situation
of certain old men who are obliged to beg on the highroad, or of
their neighbours, for means of support which are refused them in
their own houses. The present French law is helpless in the presence
of filial ingratitude which takes the form, not of overt act, but of
abusive language and disrespectful conduct. It annuls a donation made
to an ungrateful child, but it cannot annul the donation of life, and
ungrateful children benefit by the inability. A father should be able
to count at least on a certain minimum of revenue from his children,
whoever they may be.[102]

      [102] We are not obliged here to enter into details of
      administration. Perhaps it would be no more than just to give
      parents their choice between living with their children,
      which is often so painful, and an annual sum, proportional
      to the salary and resources of the children. This sum might
      be taxed by the state or the commune, and paid by it to the
      father. Every head of a family would at once reflect that if
      he some day becomes poor and has but one child he will have
      but one source of income, whereas, if he has ten children,
      he will have ten sources of income, and ten chances that one
      of them may be considerable; as it would be if any of one’s
      children should have become wealthy. A numerous family would
      thus constitute a guarantee of independence for the father; on
      the other hand, the more he expended in educating them, the
      greater chance he would have of later obtaining an equivalent
      return for it. In labouring for the augmentation of the social
      capital he would thus be securing an insurance for his old
      age. Even supposing that the execution of a law of this kind
      should be difficult, the right of parents to some really active
      gratitude on the part of their children should be recognized
      and consecrated formally by the letter of the law, which should
      prescribe a line of conduct for children and even fix a certain
      appropriate ratio between their income and the amount of their
      remittances to their parents. The law should even do what in
      it lies to efface from the language, in especial in their
      applicability to those who have generously fulfilled their
      duties of paternity, the shameful words: _être à la charge de
      ses enfants_—dependent on his children for support; the public
      should be made accustomed to consider this sort of dependence
      not as an accident to the children, and as a misfortune, and
      almost a disgrace, to the parents, but as a natural consequence
      of the relation of parent and child.

[Sidenote: The state owes parents a debt.]

If, as is probable, the principle of social insurance is ultimately
to prevail, and if a certain amount of the regular income of every
labourer is to be retained and laid by to form a provision for his
old age, which his employer or the state will increase in certain
proportions, we believe that it would be equitable to increase the
provision laid by for the father of a family in a larger ratio than
the provision laid by for a celibate. The father of a family having
done more for the state than the celibate—having contributed to the
state his time and trouble and expense in rearing certain members of
the new generation—it would be legitimate for the state to make a
restitution to him of some small portion of the money he has laid out
in a disinterested manner; in a manner which did not benefit him and
has benefited the state.

[Sidenote: Tax on celibacy.]

Meanwhile this consummation is somewhat distant, and there is a reform
immediately practicable: a tax on celibacy. Whenever this tax has been
mentioned it has been made the subject of universal ridicule; it has
been represented, as M. Ch. Richet remarked, as a sort of penalty,
a fine for not being willing or not being able to marry. This is a
very unfair statement of the case; the measure would be simply strict
justice. With anything like an equality in the matter of fortune
a celibate pays smaller taxes (indirect taxes, taxes on doors and
windows, etc.); and the tax of rearing a family, by which the married
man serves the state in a number of ways at once, the celibate avoids
altogether. The celibate therefore is an altogether privileged person,
he avoids almost everything in the way of social duties. In regard to
all taxes, direct and indirect, he enjoys dispensations which are not
without analogy to those formerly admitted to priests and nobles. The
same thing holds good of married people who do not have children; they
are, so to speak, encouraged by the law: it is a state of things which
should not and cannot last.

[Sidenote: In principle identical with certain provisions at time of
Revolution.]

By a tax on celibacy one would simply be reverting to the ideas of
the French Revolution. The Revolution took care, by a number of laws,
to favour the married man at the expense of the unmarried. Thus every
celibate was ranked, for purposes of taxation, in a higher class than
that to which, according to his income, he would have been placed had
he been married. If he demanded assistance for some of the causes for
which assistance was granted, he would be given but half the amount
that a married man in his situation would have received; if he was more
than thirty years old the laws obliged him to pay twenty-five per
cent. additional to all ground tax; the taxable value of his property
was estimated at fifty per cent. higher than it would otherwise have
been. A manufacturer was obliged to declare whether he was celibate or
married. The law considered every man a celibate who was thirty years
old and was not married, or a widower.[103]

      [103] See the _Études sur le célibat en France_, by Dr. G.
      Lagneau (Académie des sciences morales et politiques, p. 835,
      1885.)

[Sidenote: Parents should be taxed inversely to number of children.]

Over and above the special tax on celibacy, a more equitable
distribution of the tax on families might be realized. As M. Richet
remarks, if the father of a family cannot be assisted by indirect
taxes, the direct tax on him should at least be inversely proportional
to the number of his children.[104] Not only so, but compulsory road
labour—this unpopular tax, which constitutes the last vestige of the
_corvée_—might well be suppressed entirely for the fathers of more
than four or even of more than three children.[105]

      [104] “Direct taxes,” says M. Javal, “are in a great measure a
      tax on children: compulsory road labour is forced on young men
      before they are adult. The tax on doors and windows is a tax on
      air and light, the inconvenience of which increases directly
      with the increase in the size of the family and the consequent
      necessity of occupying a larger apartment. The license itself,
      which applies to the amount of the rent of one’s habitation,
      is in a great measure proportional to the necessary expenses
      and not to the resources of the person taxed.” (_Revue
      scientifique_, No. 18, November 1, 1884, p. 567.) “It is well
      known,” says M. Bertillon, “that the city of Paris pays to
      the state the tax on apartments that rent for less than four
      hundred francs. In principle nothing could be better, but in
      practice: suppose two neighbours, one of them an unmarried
      man, possesses a comfortable lodging of two rooms with the
      accessories; one of these two rooms can scarcely be called a
      necessity for him and is distinctly a simple addition to his
      comfort, and the city pays his tax. His neighbour has a family
      and four children, and lives in three rooms which constitute
      a very narrow, and hardly a sufficient lodging, but the rent
      of it is five hundred francs and the unhappy man must pay: (1)
      Six times greater taxes on what he consumes than his neighbour;
      (2) A furniture tax; (3) Some portion of the tax that the city
      pays on the apartment of the celibate neighbour. Evidently
      the result is precisely the opposite of what it should be.”
      (Bertillon, _La statistique humaine de la France_.)

      [105] If a purse should be given by the state to one of every
      seven children in the same family (according to a law at the
      time of the Revolution which has recently been revived and
      corrected) it would be no more than justice, nay, it would be
      almost an act of simple reparation; although it must not be
      supposed that the practical results would be considerable.
      The benefit that it would do to the father of the family is
      too uncertain, and the prospect of such an advantage could
      influence only a man who had six children and was hesitating
      about the seventh; but he who has had six children is not a
      follower of Malthus and is not likely to be.

[Sidenote: Injustice of present law of inheritance.]

Everybody is agreed nowadays as to the defects in the law regulating
the taxation of inheritances. We believe that it is more than anything
else by a modification of this law that the practice of malthusianism
can be checked. The tax on every inheritance which is to be divided
up among a great number of children ought as far as possible to be
reduced, whereas the tax on inheritances which are to go undivided to a
single inheritor ought to be increased. The small proprietor who limits
himself to one child, in order to avoid dividing his field, would
soon learn that he is making a bad calculation if by that very act he
subjects his estate to a heavy tax. On the contrary, whoever lays out
his fortune in rearing a number of children would at least have the
satisfaction of thinking that almost the whole of his fortune could be
handed down to them, that the public treasury would take little of it,
and that if his property had to be divided after his death it would at
least not be seriously diminished; almost nothing would “go out of the
family.”[106]

      [106] Suppose, to take almost the first figures that occur to
      one, that the law taxed an only son’s inheritance twenty per
      cent.; it might tax an inheritance to be handed down to two
      children only fifteen per cent., an inheritance to be handed
      down to three children ten per cent., to four children eight
      per cent., to five children six per cent., to six children
      four per cent., to seven children two per cent., and to any
      greater number of children nothing. Remark that this gradation
      actually exists to-day but inversely, because just in so far
      as an inheritance has to be divided up among a large number
      of children, the expenses of the sale and partition tend to
      increase and the value of the property, which is thus split up
      into bits, tends to decrease. A number of cases may be cited in
      which inheritances that had to be divided among seven or eight
      children have lost, by partition, not only twenty but even
      twenty-five or fifty per cent. of their value. On the contrary,
      an inheritance transmitted to a single inheritor is burdened
      with the direct tax only, and that amounts at most to ten per
      cent. Here, as elsewhere, the law protects small families and
      encourages sterility.

[Sidenote: Tax on inheritances falling to celibates.]

Every reform of the law of inheritance must make up its account with
the two motives which alone inspire a man to amass a fortune: a
personal interest, and an interest in his wife and children. So that,
whenever a man is a widower without children, his property might be
made subject at his death to a considerable tax, without his industry,
which society is interested in stimulating, being thereby especially
discouraged. A considerable tax therefore on the property left by
celibates, and married couples without children, would be evidently
equitable, and, no more than in the case of a tax on celibacy, to be
regarded as a penalty. The simple fact is that a man who has not
reared children has expended much less of his income for the benefit
of society, and that society has the right during his lifetime or at
his death to trim the scales against him. Indeed proportionate taxation
ought positively to be a matter of conscience with society.

[Sidenote: French law of inheritance tends toward minute subdivision of
estates.]

Given the importance of large fortunes in modern society, religion and
the patriarchal spirit together devised in former times a compromise
between the necessity of having a large family and of keeping the
family possessions undivided; I refer to primogeniture. To attempt to
re-establish the law of primogeniture in nations which have rejected
it would be impracticable and unjust, even though one should recognize
that the traditional superstition and prejudices on this point were
not without some justification. But, to reassure those who dislike the
thought of the inevitable partition of their territorial possessions,
the present laws in regard to inheritances might be made less
stringent. Every land-owner, every owner of a factory or a commercial
house, might be left free to designate which of his children he
considered most competent to succeed him in the possession of such real
property, and the law of partition might be considered as applicable
to the rest of his property only. It would be a sort of liberty of
bequest, within the limits of the family. The authors of our civil
code broke the line of succession as it had existed in the families
of the nobility; and they did well, in that they dispersed masses of
unproductive capital, and by that very fact rendered them productive;
but they did less well, in that they rendered it difficult to bequeath
large farming or manufacturing establishments from father to son. They
have necessitated the subdivision of capitals which were much more
productive in their entirety; and as a result families of farmers and
manufacturers who remain, from father to son, for generations in the
same pursuit and are thereby enabled to carry it to its highest degree
of perfection, have almost disappeared in France. Such commercial
or land-owning dynasties constitute the greatness of England and of
Germany. A great commercial house or a great farming enterprise is
not to be created in a day, and if after one’s death one’s labour is
to be destroyed by partition, so much the worse for the country. Le
Play has depicted in lively colours the despair of the farmer who
has laboured all his life to perfect a system of cultivation, of the
manufacturer who has created a prosperous house, who see their work
menaced with destruction if they have a number of children. Such men
have but one resource; to withdraw enough money from their business
to satisfy the requirements of the law in regard to the children
who are not to succeed them, and thus to prevent the sale of their
establishment. The result of this manœuvre often is that the child who
inherits this establishment is left too poor to carry on the business
and finds ruin where his father found wealth. The law, in its endeavour
to divide the produce of the father’s labour among his children, too
often annihilates the most valuable part of the father’s labour; in the
effort to obtain an apparent equity in the partition of the revenues,
it destroys the source of them. The law cuts down the tree to gather
the fruit.

[Sidenote: Large families should be partly exempted from military
service.]

Military service, which is perhaps the heaviest burden that the state
lays on the individual, also constitutes the state’s principal means of
influencing him. The most Malthusian native of Normandy would become
amenable at once if a question of five years’ military service, more
or less, were involved. To-day the father of four living children is
exempt from the twenty-eight days’ military service (the law does not
seem to be well known, but ought to be); he ought to be exempt from all
reserve service, even in time of war. Similarly, as has already been
demanded, a family which has furnished two soldiers to the army ought
to be exempt from further military duty. The younger sons should be
definitively excused from military service by the fact of their two
elder brothers having marched under the flag. As a matter of fact,
families in which there are more than two sons are so rare that such
a measure would hardly diminish the annual recruits.[107] More than
that the Budget is unequal to the needs of the whole number of possible
recruits even as the case stands; it is therefore irrational to make
one’s selection from among them by an appeal to chance. Such a device
is an appeal to inequality and that under the disguise of equality
and law; the future of every society depends upon the decreasing part
played in it by the injustices of chance. The military service required
of each family should therefore be regulated with some rational
reference to the number of children in it.[108]

      [107] M. Javal in 1885 proposed, in the Chamber, to substitute
      for Article 19 of the commission another article, according
      to the terms of which when two or three sons of the same
      family were enrolled they should be held to only three years
      of service all told, and that when there were more than three
      brothers enrolled they should each be required to give but
      one year’s service. The amendment was due to the fact that
      population in France is not increasing.

      [108] Young soldiers also, as M. Richet says, might be
      permitted to marry under certain conditions. They are precisely
      at the age when fertility is at its greatest.

[Sidenote: Emigration to be encouraged.]

Emigration tends to augment fertility; emigration must therefore
be favoured by law. It is soberly estimated at present that from
thirty to forty thousand Frenchmen emigrate each year; the figure is
relatively small, but that number of emigrants a year is enough to
settle important colonies.[109] It is unscientific to maintain at this
late day that the French are incapable of colonizing when they have
so powerfully aided in forming the great English colonies in Canada,
India, and Egypt and are actually colonizing Algeria and Tunis. What
we lack is not the ability to establish colonies, but the habit of
emigration. Emigration, in spite of its importance for us, obtains
mainly in certain poor districts in France; it is not general enough
to have any considerable influence, as yet, in raising the birth-rate;
the law should here be looked to, to correct the habits of the people.
In England out of every family of four sons it is almost to be expected
that one of them will go to India, another to Australia, a third to
America; there is nothing surprising in it, it is the custom. A sense
of distance is almost unknown on the opposite side of the Channel. In
France, if a single child leaves the country, even as the secretary
of an embassy, he is as solemnly bid good-bye as if he were going
never to return, as if he were dying even. There is a great deal of
prejudice and ignorance in paternal anguish of this kind. Such and such
a sedentary profession, for example that of a physician, is subject
to perils that are perfectly well known to statisticians and which
we nevertheless do not hesitate to choose for our children precisely
because it permits them to live next door to us, rather than at the
other end of the world. Such national prejudices will give way before
education, the increasing habit of travelling, and the progressively
rapid circulation of society; laws might favour it. The spirit of
enterprise and colonization, which seems at first sight so foreign to
love of family, is capable of being allied with it; nay, becomes, under
certain circumstances, the very condition of it. To rear a numerous
family is always in a certain sense to colonize, even though all the
children live within the limits of their native country. To rear a
large family is to launch one’s children upon unknown ways, and demands
the activity of mind and fertility of resource which are of the essence
of colonization. The creation of a numerous family is positively a
social enterprise, as the creation of a great commercial house or a
great farming industry is an economical enterprise; success in both
cases demands constant effort and brings a various profit in return.
Suppose a couple have reared ten children to labour and honesty; the
children form a protecting phalanx about the parents and give them,
in return for the rearing, if not gross and direct benefits, at least
happiness and honour. We do not wish to disguise the fact, however,
that to rear a family involves a certain amount of risk; but every
enterprise involves a risk. And indeed the prime need in this whole
matter is to develop the spirit of enterprise and audacity which was
formerly so powerful in the French nation. A great many people to-day
remain celibate for the same reason that they are content to live
within a small income without endeavouring to increase their fortune
by investing it in commerce or manufacture; they are afraid of the
risks of the family, just as they are afraid of commercial risks. They
consume instead of producing, because producing is inseparable from a
certain preliminary investment of money and activity. Similarly a great
many people, once they are married, endeavour, so to speak, to reduce
marriage to a minimum; they do not dare to have children; they are
afraid of the preliminary outlay, they are afraid of emerging from the
shell of their short-sighted egoism.

      [109] Rightly to appreciate the ability of France to maintain
      colonies, this figure must not be compared with the rate of
      emigration from other countries, but with the average excess of
      births over deaths in France. Thus considered, the number of
      forty thousand emigrants (adopted by M. Paul Leroy-Beaulieu)
      becomes relatively large, since the annual excess of our births
      is not one hundred thousand.

[Sidenote: To French colonies.]

It is, of course, emigration to French colonies that the law ought
especially to favour, and for that purpose there is one respect in
which the military law should be reformed. As a matter of fact, in
spite of the law of July 27, 1872, the government is obliged to grant
pardon to the numerous Basques and Savoyards who emigrate to escape
military service. More than that, the sole important current that
exists in France flows toward foreign colonies, and often creates on
their shores industries which rival our own, while they rarely open
advantageous markets for our commerce. Is it not a matter of urgent
necessity to make our colonies as attractive to the French emigrants
as the colonies of any foreign nationality? If the young man of
twenty who has made up his mind to pass some years of his life in
Brazil finds himself _de facto_ exempt from military service, ought
he not to be _de jure_ exempt if he wishes to emigrate to Algiers,
to Tunis, to Tonquin, to Madagascar? Emigration is itself a sort of
military service. Colonists defend and enlarge the frontiers of the
countries; a really rational law should recognize them as a portion
of the military power of the country. Fifty-four chambers of commerce
in our principal cities, “considering that it is of the greatest
importance to encourage, by every means possible, intelligent and
well-educated young people, intending to emigrate, to establish
themselves in our colonies,” demanded justly “that, in times of peace,
young men residing in the colonies should be granted a delay of five
years in the call to military service, a delay which should become a
definitive exemption after a further residence of five consecutive
years.” We believe that this period of ten years might be shortened,
and that a residence of seven years in the colonies, or even of five
in certain distant colonies, like Tonquin, might be infinitely more
profitable to the mother country than a three-years’ military service
at home.[110] We are much less in need of soldiers to guard our
colonies than of colonists; indeed our colonies are too often “colonies
without colonists.” More than that, we travel too little, we are not
as well acquainted as we should be with our own possessions; whoever
had spent five of the most active years of his life in the colonies
would be tempted to return there or to send his friends and relatives
there. An amendment, looking to this exemption from military service,
was discussed in the Chamber of Deputies in May and June, 1884. If it
should ever be passed, it might have a considerable influence upon the
destinies of the French people.[111]

      [110] The legal minimum of required residence should not be
      taken as representing the real duration of actual residence:
      people do not come back from distant countries merely for the
      wishing; but the legislature should take advantage of the
      psychological effect of a definite figure; an emigrant rarely
      leaves France without a determination to be gone only so long.
      The majority of the Basques who emigrate in such large numbers
      to America expect to return soon; three-fourths of them become
      good citizens of the Argentine Republic.

      [111] Among the secondary causes which tend to lower the
      French birth-rate, and which the law might counteract, let
      us notice that of abortion, which is practised in France not
      less commonly than in Germany, but bears much worse results
      here than there, because of the small number of children that
      are born in France. Paris positively enjoys a reputation for
      the art of miscarriage, and ladies come there from various
      parts of the world to be relieved of their children. “One of
      the professors of our schools said this year, in one of his
      courses, that a midwife had confessed to him that she produced
      on an average one hundred miscarriages a year.” (Dr. Verrier,
      _Revue scientifique_, June 21, 1884.) Pajot affirms that there
      are more miscarriages than births. Might not this state of
      things be remedied: 1. By the re-establishment of the revolving
      boxes (_tours_); 2. By a more constant inspection of the books
      and offices of midwives and accoucheurs, such as furnished
      lodgings in Paris are subject to.

      Among the principal reasons which prevent marriage let us
      mention the preliminary formalities, which are too numerous
      even when both parties are French, and are simply numberless
      when one party is a foreigner. The law of marriages when
      both parties are French ought to be simplified to the utmost
      possible extent, so that an impatience of the preliminaries
      could in nowise influence engaged couples. More than that
      every effort should be made to facilitate marriages between
      French subjects and foreigners, unions the results of which are
      generally good for the race and which are hindered by all sorts
      of legal obstacles in certain countries; this last question is
      a subject to be dealt with by diplomacy. Still other causes
      that the law might modify operate in France, if not to diminish
      the birth-rate, at least—what amounts to the same thing—to
      increase the mortality among children. In the first place is to
      be reckoned the employment of wet-nurses, who should be subject
      to a much more rigorous surveillance than they are at present,
      under the Roussel law. In the second place, there is the
      deplorable condition of illegitimate children, the mortality
      among whom is greater in France than in any other country:
      some of them are reported as stillborn, who medical statistics
      would go to show are the victims of murder; others die of
      hunger in the second week of their birth owing to negligence or
      cruelty on the part of the mother. The re-establishment of the
      revolving boxes (_tours_) would here also be of prime service.
      In the third place, let us mention the exceptional mortality in
      France of adults from twenty to twenty-five years of age, which
      must result from bad administration in the army. Legislators
      and administrators should direct their attention simultaneously
      to all these points, if they are to check the current of
      depopulation in France.

[Sidenote: Dangers of depopulation should be taught.]

III. Apart from the laws, the great means of influencing races is
public education: it is by that means that the ideas and feelings may
be moulded. The French people must be enlightened, therefore, on the
disastrous consequences of depopulation; sentiments of patriotism,
of honour, of duty, must in every possible way be appealed to. The
schoolmaster, the physician, and the mayor may all be of help. There
are a whole multitude of such means of instruction that are being
neglected.

[Sidenote: In the army by conferences.]

In the first place there are military conferences. Conferences of a
half hour each, with striking facts and examples and a few significant
figures, might exercise a considerable influence on the army, which
is to-day the nation. Military conferences will some day certainly be
one of the great means for the dissemination of knowledge; they have
recently been employed with success in Belgium during the strikes, to
inculcate notions of political economy in the army and to fortify the
military against certain communistic arguments.

[Sidenote: In the country by proclamations.]

Then, in the second place, posters might be used. Certain speeches
delivered in the Chamber or the Senate have a much feebler title
to be placarded on the walls of remote villages than such and such
economical, statistical, and geographical information. In the country
placarding might be supplemented by _viva voce_ reading by some
important functionary of the village, or even by the public crier. The
_Bulletin des Communes_, if it were composed more carefully than it is
and filled with examples, might be read every Sunday in front of the
town hall. If the schoolmaster were intrusted with this function the
reading would be the germ of a weekly conference, which considering
the emptiness and monotony of country life might well succeed in
attracting a certain number of the public. Statistical and economical
information on the depopulation of certain provinces; on the dangers
of such depopulation; on the enormous growth of the English, German,
and Italian peoples; on the social consequences of the enfeeblement
of a race—might thus be placarded, read aloud, and commented on in
order to call to the attention of everyone the economical and political
ruin which is menacing us. The influence of religious instruction
is diminishing; it is essential to supply its place by a moral and
patriotic education which shall combat prejudice, egoism, imprudence,
and false prudence.

[Sidenote: Tastes of parents and of children not the same.]

One of the commonest psychological illusions that a better education
might dispel is the belief that one’s children are going to depend for
their happiness on precisely the same circumstances that constitute
one’s own happiness. A miser, whose happiness consists in adding to
his wealth, does not perceive that his posterity will not lay the same
emphasis that he does on the possession of an immense and undivided
capital. The peasant, who has passed his life in rounding out his plot
of ground, by obtaining here a bit and there a bit of real estate at
the expense of infinite stratagem, conceives his son as finding his
highest happiness in a continuation of the same process. His vision
does not stretch beyond the hedge that bounds his own meadow, or rather
the hedge that bounds the neighbouring meadow which he is ambitious
to acquire. A village butcher will have but one child, so that he may
make him a butcher like himself, and his successor; if he had two, the
second might be forced to become a baker or a carpenter or a locksmith.
What a misfortune!—how could one consent to live if one were not a
butcher! The idle man of leisure, who passes the first forty years of
his life between women and horses, dreams of nothing better for his
heir than idleness. Those, on the contrary, who feel such and such a
thorn in their present mode of life imagine that they are securing
perfect happiness for their son if they secure him an immunity from
that particular source of suffering. The hard-working day labourer,
the small shopkeeper, the functionary who has laboured all his life
ten or twelve hours out of every twenty-four, and has never had but
one desire in his life—that of taking his fill of rest—imagines
that his son will naturally be much happier than himself if he does
not have to work so much. Ninety-five per cent. of the human race are
bound to hard labour and imagine that the pinnacle of happiness would
be to do nothing. The majority are absolutely ignorant of the fact
that, other things equal, happiness is never exactly proportionate to
wealth, and that, according to one of Laplace’s theorems, if fortune
should increase by geometrical progression, happiness would increase by
arithmetical progression; the millionaire controls but a fraction more
happiness than a workman who makes enough to live on. And too, wealth
is never known at its best except by the man who has made it, who knows
what it is worth, who looks upon it with the satisfaction of an artist
contemplating his work, of a house-owner examining his house, of a
peasant measuring his field. A fortune is always more precious to the
man who has got it together than to his son, who will perhaps dissipate
it. If there is one axiom that fathers ought to take the trouble to
master, it is this: A robust, intelligent young man with the advantage
of a good education, which to-day is indispensable, runs a greater
chance of being happy in life if he is busy, and he will not be busy
if a fortune is handed to him when he comes of age. If a young man is
to be made happy, the surest means is not to give him a fortune but
to supply him with an opportunity of acquiring one, if fortune be his
aim.[112]

      [112] We conceive, for example, that a father who proposes
      to enrich his son might often do well to take as the measure
      of his generosity the sum that his son can lay by, and does
      really lay by, during a year of labour. The father might double
      or even sextuple that sum, but he ought at least to make it
      the basis of his calculations instead of taking counsel with
      some vague and often deceptive notion of equality, or with his
      affection for his child, which is often an extreme instance
      of inequality. We know a young man who at his twenty-eighth
      year had already amassed by ten years of labour forty thousand
      francs; his parents tripled the amount.

[Sidenote: Relation between ample means of subsistence and population.]

The peasantry and the middle classes of France, when they become more
enlightened, will begin to understand that the universe stretches
beyond their village or their street; that their children, when once
they have been sufficiently educated, will have a multitude of careers
open to them, and notably that of emigration to the colonies. Whenever
a limitless field of action is thrown open to a race, its birth-rate
increases. People who live near unoccupied land, or who see numerous
careers open to their children, are like people who live on the coast
in the presence of the wealth of the ocean. What is the explanation of
the well-known fertility of the fishing population, even in France?
It has been attributed to differences of food; it is more probably
due, as has been remarked, to the fact that the produce of fishing is
proportionate to the number of fishermen and that the sea is large
enough and deep enough for all.

       *       *       *       *       *

[Sidenote: Summary.]

To sum up, the relation of religious beliefs to the maintenance of
the race is the foundation of one of the gravest problems that the
decline of Christianity gives rise to. If we have insisted at length
upon this problem, the reason is that it is almost the only one in
regard to which neither morals nor politics have as yet seriously
attempted to supply the place of religion. In regard to such questions
morals have hitherto been afraid to insist, and politics have been
unpardonably negligent. Religion alone is afraid of nothing and has
neglected nothing. This state of things must be changed; some solution
must be found for so vital a problem—a problem which becomes every
year more and more vital as instinct declines in power and reflective
intelligence becomes stronger.[113] Shall we be obliged some day to
adopt the most radical imaginable solution; shall those who have
no children be obliged to pay for the rearing and education of the
children of those who have many? No; before reaching so extreme a
point as that a number of palliatives will have been tried, and we
have endeavoured to suggest some of them. What is essential is that
politics, morals, education, and hygiene should all do their duty in
this matter, in especial since religion is nowadays beginning to be
powerless in it. Science must do in the future what religion has done
in the past; must secure the fertility of the race and its physical,
moral, and economical education.

      [113] See _Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation ni sanction_,
      p. 53, and _Morale anglaise contemporaine_, 2e partie.




Part Third.

NON-RELIGION OF THE FUTURE.




CHAPTER I.

RELIGIOUS INDIVIDUALISM.

    I. Is a renovation of religion possible? 1. Is a unification
      of the great religions to-day existing possible? 2. Is
      the appearance of a new religion to be expected?—Future
      miracles impossible—Religious poetry not to be
      expected—Men of genius capable of sincerely and naïvely
      labouring in the creating of a new religion not to
      be expected—Impossibility of adding to the original
      stock of religious ideas—No new cult possible—Last
      attempts at a new cult in America and in France—The
      Positivist cult—Ethical culture—Can socialism renew
      religion?—Advantages and defects of socialistic
      experiments.

    II. Religious anomy and the substitution of doubt for
      faith—1. Will the absence of religion result in
      scepticism? Will the number of sceptics increase with the
      disappearance of religion? 2. Substitution of doubt for
      faith—Genuinely religious character of doubt.

    III. Substitution of metaphysical hypothesis for
      dogma—Difference between religious sentiment and
      instinct for metaphysics—Imperishable character of
      the latter—Sentiment at once of the limits of science
      and of the infinity of our ideal—Spencer’s attempted
      reconciliation of science and religion—Confusion of
      religion with metaphysics.


_I. Is a renovation of religion possible?_

[Sidenote: Is contemporary scepticism final?]

We have seen that the influence of dogma and of religious morality is
on the wane in actually existing societies; but will not this period of
decline be followed by a reaction in the opposite direction?

[Sidenote: Consolidation of existing religions not possible.]

Such a reaction could take place in two ways only: 1. By the
unification of religions; 2. By the appearance of a new religion.
The unification of existing religions is not to-day to be thought
of; each of them has shown itself to be incapable of assimilating
the others. The different Christian confessions hold each other in
mutual respect, but they do the same with the great religions of the
East. Islamism alone has made notable progress among tribes still
imbued with primitive animism, and for them it represents a manifest
progress. As for Christian missionaries they have never been able
to make many proselytes among the Mussulmans, the Buddhists, or
the Hindus. The Hindu who has been instructed in European science
necessarily comes to doubt the revealed foundation of his national
religion, but he is not on that account any the more inclined to
believe in the Christian revelation. He ceases simply to be religious
and becomes a free-thinker. All peoples alike are in that position;
the principal great religions possess an approximate value as symbols
of the unknowable, and worshippers perceive no advance in passing from
one of them to the other: mankind in general does not welcome change
for change’s sake. Missionaries themselves to-day lack faith in their
religion; they possess either enthusiasm minus talent or talent minus
enthusiasm, and the time is at hand when the spirit of propagandism,
which has hitherto constituted the power of religion, will abandon
it. Few people can cry to-day in the words of the unbelieving Jesuit
missionary: “Ah, you have no conception of the pleasure of convincing
men of what you do not believe yourself!” Where absolute faith is
lacking, and absolute faith in the very details of the dogmas is
lacking, sincerity, which constitutes the essential power of all
propagandism, is lacking too. Bishop Colenso was one day asked, by his
neophytes in Natal, some questions on the Old Testament. After having
followed him up from question to question they asked him, on his word
of honour, if all that was true. Seized by a scruple, the Bishop fell
into a profound train of reflection, studied the question, read Strauss
and the German commentators, and finally published a book in which
he treats Biblical history as a series of myths. To this celebrated
example of Colenso among the Kaffirs, must be joined that of Mr.
Francis Newman in Syria, and of the Rev. Adams in India, and of others
less well known. Efficiently to combat religions as well organized
as those of India, for example, our missionaries would be obliged to
become seriously proficient in the history of religion. But the day
they sincerely study comparative religion in the hopes of converting
somebody else, they will themselves undergo conversion, or at least
will rapidly learn to reject a belief in a special revelation.[114]
The great religions, and principally the “universal” religions, which
to-day have attained their full development, hold each other in
check. These vast bodies show almost no signs of life except within,
by the formation of new centres of activity which detach themselves
from the primitive nucleus, as we see daily happening in the bosom of
Protestantism, which is constantly being subdivided into new sects; as
also within the bosom of Hinduism, insomuch that the only sign of life
that these religions give is that they are beginning to disintegrate.

      [114] See M. Goblet d’Alviella, _L’évolution religieuse_.
      Anglo-Saxon religious proselytism has achieved the distinction
      of contradicting and paralyzing itself. The Theosophist
      Society of the United States, in 1879, sent to India certain
      missionaries, or rather counter-missionaries, who were
      commissioned “to preach the majesty and glory of all ancient
      religions and to fortify the Hindu, the Cingalese, the Parsee,
      against all efforts to induce him to accept a new faith instead
      of the Vedas, of the Tri-Pitâka and of the Zend Avestâ.” In
      India and in the island of Ceylon these counter-missionaries
      have succeeded in bringing back to the primitive faith some
      thousands of converts to Christianity.

       *       *       *       *       *

[Sidenote: Analogy between nineteenth century and times of the
Antonines superficial.]

The increasing multiplicity of sects, for example of the Protestant
sects; the courageous efforts of certain disciples of Comte and of
Spencer, the birth of Mormonism in America and of Brahmaism in India,
have been regarded as symptoms of a religious fermentation analogous
to that which disturbed the world at the time of the Antonines and
very possibly destined, like that, to result in a renovation. “All
things in nature spring from humble beginnings, and no one can to-day
say whether the unconscious mission of the fisherman and publicans,
gathered eighteen centuries ago on the borders of Lake Tiberias about
a gentle and mystical idealist, will not to-morrow be handed on to
such and such an association of spiritualists prophesying in a gorge
of the Rocky Mountains; to such and such an illuminated gathering
of socialists in some back shop in London; to such and such a band
of ascetics, meditating, like the Essenes of old on the miseries of
the world, in some jungle of Hindustan. Perhaps all they need is to
discover on the road to Damascus another Paul, to give them a passport
to future ages.”[115] These analogies between our century and that of
the Antonines are very superficial; between the century which, as a
whole, is of an unexampled incredulity and the century which was of an
unexampled credulity—which accepted all religion from that of Isis
and Mithra to that of Christ; from that of the talking serpent to that
of Christ incarnate in the body of a virgin. During the past eighteen
hundred years a new thing has been born into the world—science; and
science is not compatible with supernatural revelations, which are the
foundation of religions.

      [115] _L’évolution religieuse contemporaine_, by M. Goblet
      d’Alviella, p. 411.

[Sidenote: Attempt to found a religion to-day on miracles desperate.]

Will it be objected that miracles still happen? Possibly one or two
notable ones in a century! The surprising thing is not that miracles
still happen, but that, with millions of believers, including in their
ranks thousands of excited women and children, they do not happen
frequently. Every day ought to bring forth its duly authenticated
miracle, but unhappily daily miracles no longer happen—except in
mad-houses and hospitals for the hysterical, where they are observed
and reported nowadays by incredulous men of science. When they happen
elsewhere, true believers themselves are almost afraid of them and
do not care to talk about them. Of old a king forbade God to perform
miracles; the Pope has done almost as much to-day; they are regarded
as objects of doubt and suspicion, rather than of edification. Among
orthodox Protestant nations, miracles do not happen; enlightened
theologians among them no longer insist on the marvellous elements
in the early Christian tradition; they regard them as more likely to
enfeeble than to confirm the authority of the Scriptures. Add that as
a means of founding a new religion, or of reviving old religions, a
miracle or two would do no good; they would rather result in the total
destruction of the faith they were intended to establish. A whole
series of miracles would be necessary, a sort of marvellous atmosphere
in which the whole face of nature should be transformed, a mystic halo
not only visibly resting on the head of the prophet, but reflected
on the believers who surround him. In other words, the Messiah must
be in his lifetime quite as wonderful as he is always reported to
be afterward, and that without deception or finesse, either on his
part or on the part of those who surround him and are supported by
his divinity. Unhappily, in our days great men are immediately taken
account of by history, which verifies everything, describes everything,
sets down in plain print the contemporary fact, otherwise so likely
to settle, with time, into some fantastic shape. Even the legend of
Napoleon, which he himself laboured with all the resources of despotic
power and brutal force to establish, did not last thirty years in
Europe; in the East it exists still, transfigured. Personalities
shrink beneath the touch of history. If Jesus had lived to-day his
letters would have been published, and it is impossible to believe in
the divinity of anybody after one has read his correspondence. The
slightest facts of an interesting man’s life are ascertainable: state
records enable us to ascertain important dates, what he did from year
to year and even sometimes from day to day; sometimes a mere appearance
in court, such as happened in the life of Shakspeare’s father, may
serve to fix a date; and in the life of a prophet there would be
no lack of appearances in court since unlicensed assemblies are
interdicted. Life to-day is so hemmed in by reality, so disciplined,
that it is difficult for the marvellous to find entrance, or to make
good its lodgment even if it should get in. We live in little numbered
and windowed boxes, in which the least disturbance attracts attention;
we are watched like soldiers living in barracks; we have every evening
to be present at the roll-call, with no possibility of dropping out of
the society of men, of returning into ourselves, of avoiding the big
eye of society. We are like bees living under a glass; the observer can
watch them at work, watch them constructing their hive, watch them
making their honey; and the sweetest of honey, even the honey with
which the ancients nourished the baby Jupiter, ceases to be marvellous
when one has been present at its tardy and painstaking elaboration.

We are far from the time when Pascal could say “Miracles are as a flash
of lightning that reveals.” The lightning no longer flashes. Science
stands ready to explain the first miracle that arises in support of a
new religion.

[Sidenote: Genius has deserted the service of religion.]

Metaphysical and poetic genius also, upon which religions were so
dependent in their earliest stages in the past, have also withdrawn
from their service. Read the descriptions of the latest miracles, those
at Lourdes, for example: the little girl taking off her stockings to
step into the rivulet, the words of the Virgin, the vision repeated
as a spectacle before witnesses who saw nothing—all of it is trivial
and insignificant; how far we have travelled from the Lives of the
Saints, the Gospel, the great Hindu legends! The poor in spirit may see
God or the Virgin, but they cannot make others see them; the poor in
spirit cannot found or revive religion; it requires genius, and genius,
which bloweth where it listeth, bloweth to-day elsewhere. If the Bible
and the Gospels had not been sublime poems they would not have made
the conquest of the world. Æsthetically considered, they are epics
greater than the Iliad. What Odyssey equals that of Jesus? Refined
Greeks and Romans did not at first appreciate the simple, impassioned
poetry of the Gospels; it was long before they admired the style of
the Scriptures. St. Jerome, transported in a dream to the feet of the
Sovereign Judge, heard a menacing voice cry: “Thou art naught but a
Ciceronian!” After this dream St. Jerome applied himself to the study
of the beauties of the Bible and the New Testament, and came ultimately
to prefer them to the balanced periods of the great Latin orator: the
Sermon on the Mount, in spite of some inconsistencies (in part the work
of the disciples), is more eloquent than the most eloquent of Cicero’s
orations, and the invectives against the Pharisees, authentic or not,
are better literature than the denunciations against Catiline. M.
Havet, in our judgment, entirely misses the point, when he asks how
“so great a revolution could have taken its rise from such commonplace
literature as the New Testament.” The literary excellence of the New
Testament is of a new kind, unparalleled among the Greeks or the
writers of the Old Testament; it possesses the grace of tenderness
and of unction, which is well worth the lyrical fire of the prophets;
it is a profound and naïve manual of popular morality, and every word
makes one’s heart vibrate. The literary success of the New Testament
was fully merited. The Hebrew people, who had not produced one man
of science, had evidently produced a succession of sombre, tender,
puissant poets unparalleled among any other people; a fact which in a
great part explains the victorious progress of Hebrew religion. Poetry,
like hope, is the sister of faith, and is more necessary than hope to
faith, for one may forego the distant grace of hope when one is under
the present charm of an illusion.

[Sidenote: And the conditions in which alone genius could succeed are
wanting.]

To found a great religion has demanded and will always demand the
services of men of genius such as Jesus was, or, to be quite historic,
as St. Paul was. But if genius is to found religion it can do so
only under two essential conditions. It must in the first place be
absolutely sincere; we no longer live in a period when religion can be
benefited by imposture; it must, in the second place, distinctly impose
upon itself; it must be the dupe of its own inspiration, of its own
interior illuminations, disposed to see in them something superhuman,
to feel itself in direct communication with God, or at least especially
designated by God. This second condition was easy to realize in ancient
times when, in their ignorance of psychological and physiological
phenomena, not only men like Jesus but philosophers like Socrates and
Plotinus believed that they felt within them something supernatural,
took their visions and their ecstasies seriously; and, unable to
explain their own very genuine genius, regarded it as a proof of some
mysterious or miraculous communication with God. Purely and simply to
rank these great men among lunatics would be absurd; they were simply
seeking to explain phenomena which overtaxed their knowledge and gave
what, after all, was the most plausible explanation for the times
in which they lived. With the scientific knowledge that we possess
nowadays, and which every man who attains a certain intellectual
level inevitably will possess, men like Moses and Jesus, men who
are inspired, will be obliged, so to speak, to choose between two
alternatives; to see in their inspiration simply the natural impulse of
genius, to speak in their own name, to make no pretences to revelation
or prophecy, to be, in effect, philosophers, or actively to allow
themselves to be deceived by their own exaltation, to objectify it, to
personify it, to become madmen in downright earnest. At the present
day those who are not capable of naming the force that is acting in
them and declaring it to be natural and human, and of preserving their
self-mastery, are definitively regarded as of unsound mind; prophets
who believe in their own prophecies are sent to Charenton. We are
familiar with distinctions that were unknown in ancient times, even to
the promoters of religious ideas; the great men who founded religions
were carried away by the movement they had themselves called into
being; were divinized by the God that they themselves had brought
to men. Genius is as capable of going to school as stupidity; and,
like stupidity, it has been to school in the nineteenth century and
is familiar with nineteenth-century science. A time will come—nay,
probably has come for Europe—when prophets, apostles, and Messiahs
will be extinct among men. It is a species which is dying out. “Who
of us, who of us will become a god?” None of us will become a god,
and more than that none of us wants to. Science has killed the
supernatural in us even in the very centre of our being, in our deepest
ecstasies; visions no longer put on the shape of apparition but of
simple hallucination, and the day they become so strong that we believe
in them we lose all power to make anybody else believe in them, and
become, not uncommonly, amenable to the law. The middle term between
the man of genius and the fool, the man of inspiration, of revelation,
the Messiah, the God, has disappeared.

[Sidenote: Dissemination of knowledge has weakened the religious
sentiment.]

Add that inspiration nowadays, and forever more, lacks and will lack
its appropriate environment. Intensity of religious emotion in a
people, an intensity which sometimes rises to the height of fanaticism,
depends, in a great measure, upon ignorance and upon the level of
intelligence achieved by average human life. When problems of the
origin and destiny, and reason of things, are suddenly presented to an
ignorant people, it experiences profound terrors, ecstasies, a general
heightening of the sensibility which is due to the fact that a state of
metaphysical and philosophical curiosity is utterly unfamiliar to it,
constitutes a positive revolution in its ordinary habits of mind. When
the average level of intellectual activity is once raised, metaphysical
emotion loses its revolutionary character precisely because the whole
extent of human existence has become imbued with it. A calm, high,
continuous enjoyment takes the place of a brief, stormy ecstasy; people
who pass their lives on the shore of the ocean cease to fear it, or
at least do not experience so violent an emotion in its presence as
they did at the sight of their first tempest. If we had never looked
upon the starry heavens, the first time we lifted our eyes to them we
should be filled with fear; the spectacle of them to-day calms us,
gently inspires us. To appease the violence of religious sentiment, it
must, when it has been purified, be permitted to permeate the whole of
human existence, be always present with us, and domesticate us in the
infinite.

[Sidenote: A new religion must be both novel and significant.]

A final condition precedent to the success of a new religion would be
that it should be really new, that it should contribute a new idea to
the treasury of the human mind. Among the wretched attempts at starting
a new faith which have been made from one end of the world to the other
in our days, nothing original has made its appearance. In America a
religion new in appearance, Mormonism, has had some success; it is,
of all modern attempts, the only one which has relied upon miraculous
prophecy and revelation, such as are indispensable to a genuine
dogmatic religion: it has also its book, its Bible, and even includes
in its legend some prosaic tale of marvellous pair of spectacles
destined for the deciphering of the book. The God of Mormonism, who
is rather better educated than the God of the Bible, possesses some
notion of optics. But at bottom Mormonism is simply a modern edition of
Jewish ideas and customs: the whole religion is a bit of plagiarism,
a resuscitation of superanuated legends and beliefs, to which it has
added nothing but what is trivial; it is a religious anachronism. It
seems also to have reached the limit of its development, the number
of its adherents is not increasing. Hindu Brahmaism is an eclectic
and mystic spiritualism without one really new idea. Comtism, which
consists of the rites of religion and nothing else, is an attempt
to maintain life in the body after the departure of the soul. The
spiritualists are charlatans, or empirics, who have been impressed with
certain, as yet obscure, phenomena of the nervous system which they
themselves are unable to explain scientifically. But charlatanism has
never founded anything durable in the domain of religion. To compare
American Mormonism or spiritualism to nascent Christianity is to make
one’s self ridiculous. Humble as the beginnings of Christianity were
one must not be the dupe of historical illusion, nor believe that
Christianity owed its triumph to a simple concurrence of happy events;
that the world, for example, according to M. Renan’s hypothesis, might
quite easily have become Mithraic. The disciples of a certain Chrestus,
mentioned for the first time by Suetonius, could present, as the basis
of their as yet vague beliefs, two incomparable epic poems, the Old
Testament and Gospels; they introduced into the world a new system
of morality, which was admirable even in its errors, and original at
least for the mass of mankind; and they contributed, finally, to the
common stock of ideas a great metaphysical conception, that of the
resurrection, which, combined with current philosophical conceptions,
necessarily gave birth to the doctrine of personal immortality.
Christianity conquered by its own weight, it was inevitable that it
should find its St. Paul; the Old Testament and the Gospels were too
eminent to be forgotten, or to remain without influence on human life.
There is not a single example in the history of the world of a great
masterpiece, at once literary or philosophical, which has gone its
way unperceived, without exerting an influence upon the progress of
humanity. Every work which is sufficiently endowed with beauty or
virtue is sure of the future.

[Sidenote: No great religion could nowadays take its rise among the
masses.]

It is among the masses that religious movements have hitherto begun.
But a new religion could not come to us to-day from the ignorant
masses of an Oriental people nor from the lower classes of any country
of Europe. In heathen antiquity, all social classes were united in a
belief in naïve superstitions. Marcus Aurelius himself was obliged
to preside in great pomp over a ceremony in honour of the serpent of
Alexander of Abonoteichos which numbered believers among his friends.
To-day a bishop in Australia can refuse to order a prayer for rain, and
declare that atmospheric phenomena are regulated by inflexible natural
laws, and persuade the believers in his diocese, if they want a remedy
against drought, to ameliorate their system of irrigation. These two
facts indicate the thorough-going difference between the ancient and
modern world. The contemptuous title of Barbarians, which the Greeks
and Romans applied to all other peoples, was less than exact, for the
Hebrews and the Hindus at least possessed a more profound religion
than the Greeks and Romans and even in certain respects a superior
literature. Greek and Roman civilization is a rare historical example,
which proves that religion is not necessarily the measure of the
intellectual development of a people. Greece excels principally by her
art and science; but the superiority which she conceived herself to
possess in other respects was a pure illusion founded on ignorance.
The superiority that we attribute to ourselves is demonstrated by
our knowledge; we are better acquainted to-day with the religion of
most Oriental peoples than they are themselves; and we have earned
a right to sit in judgment on them, and admire them, and criticise
them, that the ancients did not possess. The distinction between those
who know and those who do not is to-day the sole really serious line
of demarcation between classes and nations. And the line is one that
religion cannot pass, for every complete religion involves a general
conception of the world, and no such naïve conception of the world
as a man of the people is capable of can ever find acceptance by a
cultivated mind. No great religion can germinate and achieve complete
development in modern society.

[Sidenote: Impossibility of improving on existing religions in their
kind.]

The impossibility of finding anything new in the domain of mythical
religion might almost be demonstrated _a priori_; nothing more
attractive will ever be discovered in the way of a metaphysical myth
than the sovereign happiness obtained in this life in the Buddhists
Nirvâna, or obtained in the life after death in Christian immortality.
In these two conceptions, the metaphysical imagination of humanity
has once for all achieved its masterpiece, as the plastic imagination
once for all achieved its masterpiece in Greek statuary. Something
may be demanded in another order of ideas, one may exact less naïve
hypotheses, hypotheses more neighbour to the truth; but these
hypotheses will never seduce humanity nor pass over the world like a
wave of light, nor become transfigured in the form of a revelation.
The multitude never listens to a revelation that does not announce
some glad tidings, some salvation in this world, or the next; to be
a prophet, and to be listened to, imperatively requires one to be a
prophet of good augury. Religious metaphysics, after its two immense
efforts in Buddhism and Christianity (Mohammedanism is simply a
vulgarization of these two), is condemned in the future to sterility
or repetition, so long as severe and truly philosophical hypotheses,
based on scientific generalization, engage the attention of mankind.
Infantine hypotheses, which resolve the problems of the destiny of
mankind and of the world in a manner altogether consoling to human
vanity, are condemned to uniformity and banality. To discover anything
new in the realm of metaphysics, the religious spirit will have to
abandon the conditions which have hitherto existed; will have to deal
with ideas that lie beyond the primitive intellectual range of a
Hottentot, and even abandon all notion of universality, of Catholicity,
in the sphere of speculation.

[Sidenote: Impossibility of improving existing religious morality as
such.]

The same is true in the sphere of morals. So far as an exalted and
attractive system of morality is concerned, can one go farther than
Christianity and Buddhism, both of which preach exclusive altruism,
absolute self-abnegation? All that one can do is really to take a few
steps backward to moderate certain exaggerated outbursts of devotion in
the void, to fit Christian and Buddhistic morality to the real world,
to supply this beautiful mysticism with a material body; but for such
a task a new Messiah would be powerless, simple good sense does not
charm humanity; the cold, humble, commonplace duties of everyday life
cannot be made the basis of a great popular movement. Common-sense
is not contagious after the fashion of religious exaltation, which
passes from man to man like wildfire. Moral sentiment may well, in the
course of time, filter into us, pass slowly from man to man, rise like
a rising tide, but so gradually as scarcely to be perceptible. The
most lasting approaches to perfection are often the most unconscious.
It is a difficult matter by a simple impulse of faith to climb sheer
up on the ladder of civilization. True moral perfection is often the
precise opposite of heroic paroxysm. As the passion for goodness
becomes triumphant, it ceases to be a passion: it becomes, and must
become, a portion of our normal life, of the flesh that the mystics
curse; the man must become good from the roots of his hair to the
soles of his feet. Thus Buddhism and Christianity, in many respects,
have miscarried. If the first apostles, who preached these religions,
should return among men, how unchanged and untransmuted they would
find humanity, after so many thousands of years! There has been, no
doubt, an intellectual progress which has confirmed a certain number
of moral ideas, but this very complex intellectual progress has not
entirely been effected by religions. There was as yet no sign of it in
the small number of simple-hearted people gathered about the “new word”
in which the apostles saw their moral and religious ideal realized. As
the primitive virtues of this small knot of wholly religious and not
at all scientific people overspread humanity, they necessarily became
corrupt: and a morality of exalted self-abnegation could not succeed
beyond a small group, a family, a convent, artificially sequestered
from the rest of the world it necessarily failed when it undertook to
appeal to all mankind. The great world is too inhospitable and shifting
a soil; one does not sow seed in the sea. A revival or a repetition of
the religious epics of Christianity or of Buddhism would to-day meet
with an immediate check; for it is the very essence of their influence
to develop the heart disproportionately to the brain, and, such an
effect being a sort of disturbance of equilibrium, a sort of natural
monstrosity, can be produced in individuals indeed, but not in races.
The investigator to-day, who adds the least item of truth to the mass
of scientific and philosophic knowledge already acquired, performs a
much less brilliant but probably more definitive work than the purely
religious work of a Messiah. He is of those who construct not in three
days, but during successive ages, the sacred edifice which will not
fall.

[Sidenote: Growing antagonism to externals of worship.]

The most essential incident of every dogmatic religion, the cult, is
not less foreign to the spirit of modern society than dogma itself
is. The foundation of outer forms of worship, as we have seen, is a
crystallization of custom and tradition into the form of rites. Well,
as has been said, one of the characteristic marks of the innovating
spirit, and of intellectual superiority, is the power of breaking up
associations of ideas, of liberating one’s self in a measure from
established collocations of ideas, of being slow to contract invincible
habits of thought, of precisely not possessing a ritualistic mind. If
such be one of the great signs of superiority in an individual, it is
none the less so in a people. Progress in humanity may be estimated by
the degree of perfection that the faculty of psychic disassociation
has achieved. The instinct for novelty is then no longer held in
check by the instinct for ritualism; curiosity may be pushed to its
extreme without any sense of innovating impiety such as primitive
peoples regard it with. The importance of ritualism in the material
and religious life of a people indicates the predominance among them
of obscure and unconscious associations of ideas, their brain is
caught and enveloped in a closely woven network of tradition, in a
tissue impenetrable to the light of conscience. On the contrary, the
progress of reflection and of conscience which is manifested among
modern people is accompanied by an enfeeblement of established custom,
of unconscious habit, of the discipline and power of the past. There
is often a certain danger, on the practical side, in this change,
because reflection becomes strong enough to dissolve habits before it
is capable of making head against the passions of the moment. The power
of disassociation is intellectual, and is not in itself adequate to
the moral domination and direction of the individual, and whatever may
be the objections, from the point of view of morals, to the progress
of reflection, it is certain that it sooner or later strips rites,
religious ceremonies, and the whole machinery of worship, of their
sacred character. Etiquette in the presence of kings and gods alike
is destined to disappear. Whatever is an observance ceases to be a
duty, and the rôle of the priest by that fact is seriously changed.
The distant ideal toward which we are marching includes among other
things the disappearance of the priesthood, which is rite personified;
the god of the priesthood, who in certain respects is no more than an
apotheosis of custom, has to-day grown old and maintains his power only
by the prestige of the accomplished fact. It is in vain for men like
German, English, or American clergymen, or Hindu deists, who still
possess a religion, to endeavour to throw over revelation and dogma,
and reduce their faith to a system of personal and progressive beliefs,
to be accompanied by a ritual. The ritual is an excrescence simply,
an almost superstitious habit, mechanically practised and destined to
disappear.

[Sidenote: The liberal movement in religion a movement of
disintegration.]

The movement which, in certain countries, inclines religion to be shy
of dogmas and rites, is in reality a movement of disintegration, not
of reconstruction. Human beliefs, when they shall have taken their
final form in the future, will bear no mark of dogmatic and ritualistic
religion, they will be simply philosophical. Among certain people,
it is true, every philosophical system tends to assume the practical
and sentimental form of a system of beliefs and aspirations. The
ideas of Kant and Schelling, when they passed into America, gave
birth to Emerson’s and Parker’s transcendentalism; Spencer’s theory
of evolution became, in America, a religion of Cosmism, represented
by Messrs. Fiske, Potter, and Savage. But all such alleged religions
are simply the moving shadow, in the domain of sentiment and action,
of the substance of intellectual speculation. It is not enough to be
of the same opinion on some sociological or metaphysical theory and
then to congregate to the number of ten or a hundred in some theatre
or temple, to found a new religion and a new cult. The majority of
these pretended religions, which are simply philosophies and sometimes
very bad philosophies, are open to Mark Pattison’s observation on the
congregation of Comtists in their chapel in London: “Three persons and
no God.”

[Sidenote: Secularism.]

The defects of these modern cults appear in their most exaggerated form
in secularism, which had its hour of success in England. Secularism is
a purely atheistic and utilitarian religion, which has borrowed all it
could from the ritual of the English Church. This contradiction between
the outer form and the inner void resulted in a positive parody.[116]

      [116] See the secularist version of the _Ite missa est_.

[Sidenote: Comtists.]

In France the Comtists have made the same attempt to preserve the
rites, without the background, of belief. The Comtist doctrine of
fetichism contains a certain amount of truth as characterizing
primitive religion, but it is insufficient in its application to
actual, existing religions. The religions of the present day have
developed, gradually, from a primitive system of physics to a complete
system of metaphysics: the fetiches have been transmuted into symbols
of the First Cause, or of the Final Cause. Positivism can offer us
no symbol of this kind; its “Great Fetich” is genuinely a fetich,
and appropriate for primitive peoples only. “Humanity” does not
afford complete satisfaction to one’s conception of causality, nor
to one’s conception of finality. In regard to the first, humanity is
a simple link in the infinite chain of phenomena; in regard to the
second, humanity constitutes an end which is practically inexact and
theoretically insufficient: practically inexact because almost the
whole of one’s activity relates to such and such a restricted group
of human beings and not to humanity as a whole; and theoretically
insufficient, because humanity looks small in the presence of the great
universe. Its life is a point in space, a point in time; it constitutes
a contracted ideal, and to say the truth, it is as vain for a race to
regard itself as its own end as for an individual. One cannot eternally
contemplate one’s own image and cannot, in especial, eternally adore
it. Love of humanity is the greatest of virtues and the most ridiculous
of fetichisms. The marriage of positive science and blind sentiment
cannot produce religion; the attempt to return to fetichism is an
attempt to foist the religion of a savage upon the most civilized of
mankind. Moreover, what we believe destined to subsist in the future in
a multitude of forms, and to replace religions, is not pure and simple
sentiment, but sentiment roused by metaphysical symbols, by speculation
and thought. Religious metaphysics may consist in involuntary illusion,
in error, in dream; but unmetaphysical fetichism consists in voluntary
illusion, in cherished error, in day-dream. Auguste Comte seemed to
believe that we should always need as the centre of our system of
worship, an imaginary personification of humanity, a great Being, a
great Fetich; such a fetichism would be a species of new category, in
the Kantian sense. Fetichism has never imposed itself upon humanity
after that fashion; intellectually considered, it was based on reasons
which can be shown to be false; emotionally considered, it was based on
feelings which can be shown to be perverted, and can be rectified. If
love sometimes stretches out toward personification, toward fetiches,
it is only in default of real persons and living individuals; such in
our opinion is, in its simplest form, the law which will gradually
result in the disappearance of every fetichistic cult. We must find
gods of flesh and bone, living and breathing among us—not poetical
creations like those of Homer, but visible realities. We must discover
the kingdom of heaven in the human soul, a future providence in
science, absolute goodness in the foundation of life. We must not
project our ideas and subjective images of things into the outer world,
and beyond the limits of the outer world, and love them with a sterile
love; but must love the beings of this world with an active affection
in so far as they are capable of conceiving and realizing the same
ideas as we. Just as patriotism, in so far as it is an abstract love,
tends to disappear, and to resolve itself into a general sympathy for
all our fellow-citizens, just so far the love of God tends to overflow
the surface of the earth and to include all living beings. To know
living beings is to love them; and thus science, in so far as it is
science of the observation of life, is one with the sentiment which
constitutes what is best in religion, is one with love.

[Sidenote: Ethical Culture Society.]

Another religion of humanity, or rather a religion of ethics, has
recently been founded in New York by Mr. Felix Adler, the son of an
American rabbi; but Mr. Adler, who is more consistent than Comte, has
determined to do away with religious ceremonial, not less than with
religious dogma. He has abandoned almost everything in the way of
ceremony; he has abandoned the catechism, and professes allegiance to
no sacred book. As a metaphysician he is a follower of Kant, rather
than of Comte, but makes no positive affirmation on the subject of
God and immortality; he admits only the existence of an unknowable
noumenon, of an ultimate reality which lies behind all appearances,
and is responsible for the harmony of the world. So long as divergence
in matters of belief continues to become increasingly great, Mr.
Adler regards it as necessary to concentrate attention on the moral
law itself, apart from any theory of its origin or justification. Men
have so long disputed, he thinks, about the basis of the law, that the
law itself has not received its due share of notice. His movement is
essentially a practical movement and appeals to the conscience, a cry
for more justice, an exhortation for the performance of duty.

[Sidenote: Its object.]

The primary aim of the society should be, according to Mr. Adler,
to reform the lives of its own members. He has founded: 1. A
Sunday-school, where instruction is given in practical morality, in
the history of the most important religions, and in the elements of
the philosophy of religion; 2. A public kindergarten organized on the
Froebel method; 3. A school, for working people’s children between the
ages of three and nine.[117]

      [117] Indigent pupils are clothed and fed; the instruction is
      gratuitous; the school contains at present one hundred pupils,
      having begun with eight. An industrial museum is attached to
      it. The society also sends out district nurses to attend the
      sick in the poorer quarters of New York.

[Sidenote: Is of a type destined to survive.]

Mr. Adler’s following at first consisted of Jews; subsequently a number
of people, without distinction of race, gathered about him. They are
left entirely free in the matter of their personal beliefs, and are
united only in an ardent desire for the regeneration of mankind.
Every Sunday the faithful congregate, to listen to a discourse and
then disperse; none but members of the society are permitted to join
in the management of the institutions founded and maintained by the
society. This religion, which is, _à l’américaine_, wholly practical,
is acceptable to the philosopher; at bottom it is simply a great mutual
aid temperance society. The only objection that can be urged against it
is that it is somewhat prosaic, but it is certainly one of the forms of
social activity which are destined to succeed ritualistic religions.

       *       *       *       *       *

[Sidenote: Antiquity of faith in socialism as a panacea.]

Certain partisans of religious revival regard socialism as their last
hope. Socialistic ideas ought, in their judgment, to give religion
a fresh start and supply it with an impetus hitherto unknown. This
conception wears an air of originality, but, as a matter of fact, it is
quite the reverse of original. The great catholic religions, Buddhism
and Christianity, were in the beginning socialistic, they preached
universal partition of goods, and poverty; it was by means of so doing
that they were in part enabled to spread with such rapidity. In reality
the instant that the period of propagandism succeeded the period of
struggle for permission to exist, these religions did everything
within their power to become individualistic even at the expense of
inconsistency; they ceased to promise equality on earth and relegated
it to heaven or to Nirvâna.

[Sidenote: Socialism unrealizable except by a select few.]

Do we therefore believe that socialistic ideas will play no part in
the future, and is it not conceivable that a certain mysticism might
form an alliance with socialism, and both lend and borrow force by so
doing? A mystical socialism is by no means unrealizable under certain
conditions, and, far from constituting an obstacle to religious
free-thought, it might become one of its most important manifestations.
But what has hitherto rendered socialism impracticable and utopian is
that it has aimed at subjugating the whole of mankind, rather than
some small social group. What has been aimed at is state socialism;
the case has been the same in the matter of religion. But systems of
socialism and of religious doctrine must, in the future at least, be
addressed to small groups and not to confused masses; must be made the
basis of manifold and various associations in the bosom of society. As
its most earnest partisans recognize, socialism presupposes for its
success a certain average of virtue, that may well obtain among some
hundreds of men but not among some millions. It endeavours to establish
a sort of special providence, which would be quite incompetent to
manage the affairs of the world but may well watch over the interests
of a neighbourhood. Socialism aims more or less at playing the part of
fate, at predetermining the destiny of the individual, at supplying
each individual with a certain average amount of happiness which he can
neither increase nor diminish. Socialism is the apotheosis of state
interference, and the world in general is not disposed to worship it;
its ideal is a life which is completely foreseen, insured, with the
element of fortune and of hope left out, with the heights and the
depths of human life levelled away—an existence somewhat utilitarian
and uniform, regularly plotted off like the squares on a checker board,
incapable of satisfying the ambitious desires of the mass of mankind.
Socialism is to-day advocated by the rebels in society. Its success,
however, would depend on the most peaceable, the most conservative, the
most bourgeois people in the world; it supplies no sufficient outlet
for the love of risk, of staking one’s everything, of playing for the
height of fortune against the depth of misery, which is one of the
essential factors of human progress.

[Sidenote: Experiments in socialism.]

Practical experiments in socialism are being made every day; there
is in France the phalansterian association of M. Godin; in America
there are the associations by the followers of Cabet, not to speak
of others of a more purely religious character, such as those of the
Quakers, Shakers, etc.; and finally, there are co-operative societies
of various kinds. These avowedly or unavowedly socialistic experiments
have never succeeded except when their promoters were willing very
rigorously to limit their numbers; certain intellectual and moral
defects in the members must inevitably in every case have proved fatal
to them. Socialism is possible only in a small society of the elect.
Even the theorists who once regarded profit-sharing as the universal
panacea recognize to-day that profit-sharing constitutes a remedy in
some cases only; that the labouring classes are not, as a whole, either
patient, or painstaking enough to fulfil the very simple conditions
that profit-sharing demands. They are unfit for corporate life, they
are hard repellent individuals, they are elements of disintegration;
when a small socialistic society finds them on its list of members,
it excludes them; if mankind as a whole formed one great socialistic
society, it also would be obliged to exclude them. To universalize
socialism is to destroy it.

[Sidenote: Future of socialism.]

Every scientific discovery passes through three distinct stages:
the stage of pure theory, of application on a small scale in the
laboratory, of application on a grand scale in the world of business.
It frequently happens that the development of an idea is arrested
in the sphere of theory, that it does not enter into the sphere of
practice at all, or that, completely successful in the laboratory,
it miscarries when the attempt is made to apply it to business. If
this holds true of scientific ideas, of devices that depend for their
success upon the plasticity of inert matter only, which we may bend
to our will, _a fortiori_ it must be true of sociological ideas, of
experiments, of devices that depend for their success on the plasticity
of so variable, so heterogeneous a substance as human nature. Socialism
is still, for the most part, at the theoretical stage; and even as
a theory socialism is very vague and not very consistent and, when
the effort is made to put it into practice, the difference between
experiments in the laboratory, among conditions that the experimenter
can in a measure determine and control, and in the great world in which
everything is determined and controlled for him, must be remembered.
The state which yields to the seduction of some charming socialistic
theory, and endeavours, as it will endeavour, to realize it, will
inevitably be ruined. Social experiments cannot be attempted by the
state—not even if they are experiments in religion, or rather in
especial not if they are experiments in religion. Some experiments may
at most be observed by the state and followed with interest by it; nay,
the state may even in certain cases encourage the most interesting of
them and subsidize them as it does certain industrial enterprises.
We are persuaded that socialism in the future, like religion in the
past, will appear in many different forms. There will arise a number
of conceptions of an ideal society, each of which is realizable in
special circumstances, and by people of some special disposition. Human
society which to-day, beyond the limits of convents and monasteries
(which consist in artificial groupings of individuals of the same sex),
presents a certain uniformity of type, may well at some later date,
owing to complete liberty of association, and to the spread of personal
initiative, present a great variety of types. Socialism will not result
in the founding of a religion, but it may well result in the founding
of a number of associations dominated respectively by some metaphysical
or moral idea. Socialism will thus contribute to that multiplicity and
diversity of beliefs which does not exclude but rather encourages their
practical application.

[Sidenote: Necessity of allowing for a multiplicity of conflicting
ideals.]

The future, therefore, will leave the human mind, as time goes on, more
and more at liberty; will permit the individual to do increasingly as
he likes so long as he does not violate the rights of anybody else.
What is the highest social ideal? Does it lie purely and simply in the
practice of the necessary virtues or of a half conscious morality, an
unreflecting benignity, compounded of ignorance and custom? This social
ideal is realized in certain countries in the Orient, where Buddhism
is dominant, and the people are so gentle that years pass without a
homicide; and yet life in these countries in nowise appeals to us
as ideal. To this sort of morality must be added some satisfaction
of the principal desire of mankind, of the desire for economic ease
and for practical happiness, and even that would not be enough; for
that much is realized in corners of Switzerland, of Portugal, in
primitive countries like Costa Rica, where poverty is unknown. Artists
dream of a life devoted entirely to art, to the beautiful, of a life
which is hostile to prosaic and practical virtue, and this ideal was
realized in the Renaissance: the Renaissance was distinguished by an
extraordinary efflorescence of æsthetic instinct and moral depravity,
and we in nowise desire to return to it. And if science, which is
the modern ideal, should become absolute, we should see a society of
_blasés_ Fausts which would not be more enviable perhaps than other
societies. No; a complete social ideal must neither consist in bare
morality nor in simple economic well-being, nor in art alone, nor in
science alone—it must consist in all of these together; its ideal must
be the greatest and most universal conceivable. This ideal is that
of progress, and progress cannot take place in one direction only at
a time; whoever advances in one direction only will soon retreat. A
point of light shines in all directions simultaneously. The excellence
of religion cannot be demonstrated by showing that it favours some
one species of human activity; morality, for example, or art. It is
not enough to make man moral as Christianity and Buddhism did, nor to
excite his æsthetic imagination as Paganism did. Not one but all of his
faculties must be stimulated, and there is but one religion that can
do it; and that religion each must create for himself. Whoever feels
attracted by a life similar to that of a priest will do well to become
a Christian and even a Quaker, and the artist will do well to become a
pagan. What is certain is that no one of the deities which mankind has
created and worshipped is all-sufficing; mankind needs all of them and
something more, for human thought has outgrown its gods.

[Sidenote: Liberty the condition of knowledge.]

Under the sounding domes of old cathedrals, the echoes are so numerous
that an immense screen has sometimes to be stretched across the nave to
break the reverberations and enable the priest’s voice alone to reach
the faithful. This screen which is invisible from below, which isolates
the sacred word and deadens all other sound, is stretched not only
across the cathedral nave but across the heart of every true believer.
It must be torn away; every voice and word must be free to attain
the ear of man; the sacred word rises from no one throat, but is the
symphony of all the voices that sound beneath the dome of heaven.

[Sidenote: Decline of the power of religion.]

I was talking one day with M. Renan upon the gradual decrease in the
power of religion, on the silence that has fallen on the divine word,
which formerly drowned all other sounds. To-day, it is the word of
nature and humanity, of free-thought and free sentiment, which is
taking the place of oracles and of supernatural revelation, of dogmatic
religion. M. Renan, with the openness of mind which is habitual with
him, and which partakes indeed largely of scepticism, took up at
once my point of view. “Yes,” he said, “we are all marching toward
non-religion. After all, why should not humanity do without religious
dogmas? Speculation will take the place of religion. Even at the
present day, among advanced peoples, dogmas are disintegrating, the
incrustations of human thought are breaking up. Most people in France
are already non-religious; men of the people hardly believe more than
professed men of science; they possess their little fund of ideas, more
or less profound, on which they live, without help from the priest.
In Germany the work of decomposition is far advanced. In England it
is only in its beginnings, but it is moving rapidly. Christianity is
everywhere giving place to free-thought. Buddhism and Hinduism are
doing the same; in India the mass of intelligent men are free-thinkers,
in China there is no state religion. It will take a long while, but
religion will in the end disappear, and one may already imagine for
Europe a time when it will be a thing of the past.... Islam is the one
black spot on the horizon. The Turks are narrow, rebellious against
reasoning, hostile to everything that lies beyond literal faith ...
but if they will not follow us we shall simply leave them behind, and
I think we shall be obliged to do so.” We should add that, if some
Christians and Buddhists show themselves as backward as the Turks, we
shall leave them behind also. Those members of mankind who think, see,
and move forward, are always obliged to drag a long train of those who
neither see, nor think, nor wish to move forward. They do move forward,
however, in the long run. Professed advocates of the different positive
and dogmatic religions count every day for less and less among the
truly active members of the human species; and we ask nothing better.
Whoever does not count for progress practically does not exist, and
ultimately will not exist. Activity of thought is becoming more and
more a condition of existence; the preponderant rôle that religions
played in the past is to be explained by the fact that religion offered
almost the sole field of intellectual and moral activity—the sole
issue for the most elevated tendencies of our being. At that time there
lay beyond the limits of religion nothing but the grossest and most
material occupations; there was no known middle ground between heaven
and earth. To-day this middle ground has been discovered—the ground
of thought. Science and art are born; and open before us an infinite
perspective, where each of us may find an opportunity to employ the
best of our gifts. Science offers a field for disinterestedness and
research, but does not tolerate vagaries of the imagination. It
encourages enthusiasm, but not delirium, and possesses a beauty of its
own, the beauty of truth.


_II. Religious anomy and the substitution of doubt for faith._

[Sidenote: Religious anomy.]

I. We have proposed as the moral ideal what we have called moral
anomy—the absence of any fixed moral rule.[118] We believe still
more firmly that the ideal toward which every religion ought to tend
is religious anomy, the complete enfranchisement of the individual in
all religious matters, the redemption of his thought, which is more
precious than his life, the suppression of dogmatic faith in every
form. Instead of accepting ready-made dogmas, we should each of us be
the makers of our own creed. Whatever Montaigne may say, faith is a
softer pillow for idleness than doubt. Faith is a species of nest in
which idleness lies in shelter, and hides its head under the warmth
and darkness of a protecting wing; nay, it is a nest prepared in
advance, like those that are sold in the markets and made by men, for
birds that are kept in cages. We believe that in the future man will
be increasingly unwilling to live in cages and that, if he needs a
nest, he will construct it himself twig by twig in the open air, and
abandon it when he is weary of it, and remake it, if necessary, every
springtime, at each new stage of his thought.

      [118] See our _Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation ni
      sanction_.

[Sidenote: Religious anomy and scepticism.]

Is religious anomy, or the absence of religion, synonymous with
scepticism? Since the disappearance of Pyrrhonism and Ænesideinism,
scepticism is simply a word which serves as a label for the most
dissimilar doctrines. Greek sceptics were fond of calling themselves
seekers, Ζητητικοί; a name which is appropriate to every philosopher
as distinguished from believer. But how the term scepticism in its
modern negative acceptation is abused! If you do not belong to some
definite system of thought, you are at once set down as a sceptic.
But nothing is further removed from a superficial scepticism than
the sympathetic mind which, precisely because it embraces so large a
horizon, refuses to confine itself to some one narrow point of view, as
in a glade a hundred feet square or in a diminutive valley between two
mountains. “You are not dogmatic enough,” the philosopher is sometimes
told. “To what system do you belong?” “In what class of thinking
insects do you belong?” “To what card in our collection must you be
pinned?” A reader always wants to ask an author a certain number of
conventional questions. What do you think of such and such a problem?
Of such and such another? You are not a spiritualist; are you then a
materialist? You are not an optimist; are you then a pessimist? One
must reply, yes or no, without explanatory amplification. But what I
think is of small importance, even for myself; my point of view is
not the centre of the universe. What I am seeking to learn, what
you are seeking to learn, is the contents of human thought in all
its variety and complexity. If I study myself it is not because I am
myself, but because I am a man like other men. If I watch my own little
soap bubble, it is because it contains a ray of the sun; my object is
precisely to pass beyond the limits of my own horizon and not to remain
within them. More than that, people whose ideas are fixed, clear-cut,
absolute, are exactly those who have no ideas of their own. Revelation,
intuition, religion, categorical and exclusive affirmation, are notions
hostile to modern thought, which is in its very essence progressive.
There are two sorts of men: those who remain on the surface of things
and those who sound the depths of things. There are superficial minds
and serious minds. In France almost all those whom we designate as
sceptics or as blasés are superficial minds, with an affectation of
profundity. They are also often practical Epicureans. There will always
be people ready to say, with a certain hero of Balzac’s: “A good fire,
a good table; behold the ideal of human life!” Waiting for dinner is
the sole occupation of the day. But there will always be other people
for whom life consists in an indefatigable activity.

[Sidenote: Feebleness of scepticism.]

The number of sceptics will not necessarily be increased by the final
decay and disappearance of religious scepticism, which is a compound of
lightness and ignorance, resting on the same foundation as religious
prejudice, on the absence of a solid philosophical education. Really
serious minds are either positive or speculative; a too positive,
common-sense spirit might, if it became general in society, menace
it with a certain intellectual debasement; but religion would not
hinder its development: witness America. The true means of checking
the positive spirit is to cultivate the sense of beauty and the love
of art. To speculative minds, on the other hand, belongs the future
of humanity; but far from being dependent upon dogma, speculation
can flourish only in its absence. It is the life of speculation
to ask questions about the deepest concerns of human life; dogma
provides ready-made answers, and speculation cannot accept them.
The disappearance of positive religions will give scientific and
metaphysical speculation a fresh impulse. The speculative spirit is
the extreme opposite both of the spirit of faith and of the spirit
of absolute negation. An inquirer may suspect his own resources, may
recognize his own powerlessness, but he will never give up the search.
Strong minds will never be discouraged or disgusted, will never be
followers of Mérimée or Beyle. In active mental labour there is
something which is worth more than faith and doubt together, as there
is in genius something which is worth more at once than the somewhat
silly admiration of the multitude and the disdainful criticism of
pretended connoisseurs; excess of criticism and excess of credulity
are alike powerless. It is good to be aware of one’s own weakness, but
from time to time only; one must turn one’s eyes toward the limits of
human intelligence, but not rest them there, on pain of paralysis.
“Man,” says Goethe, “should believe firmly that the incomprehensible
will become comprehensible; but for that he would cease to scrutinize
and to try.” In spite of the number of ideas which make their entrance
into and exit from the human mind, which rise and set on the human
horizon, which flame up and burn out, there is, in every human mind,
an element of eternity. On certain autumn nights one may observe a
veritable shower of aerolites; hundreds of stars detach themselves
from the zenith like luminous flakes of snow; the dome of heaven
itself seems to have given way, the worlds hung above the earth seem
to have broken loose, and all the stars at once to be descending and
about to leave the great firmament of night unvariegated, opaque; but
the falling stars go out one by one, and the serene brilliancy of the
fixed stars still remains; the storm has passed beneath them and has
not troubled the tranquil splendour of their rays, nor the incessant
appeal of their fixity and glory. The appeal is one that man will
always respond to; under the open sky and the pressure of the problem
brought home to him by the great stars, man does not feel himself
feeble unless he pusillanimously shuts his eyes. Humanity will lose
none of its intellectual power by the disappearance of religious faith;
its horizon will grow wider simply, and the luminous points in the
immensity of space will grow more numerous. True genius is speculative,
and in whatever environment true genius is placed it will speculate; it
has speculated hitherto despite of all that orthodox faith could do, it
will speculate still more actively in spite of all that scepticism can
do.

[Sidenote: Speculation and practice.]

And the practical side of human life has nothing to fear from the
growth of the speculative spirit. Given minds sufficiently large, and
the fact that they look down upon the earth from a height, does not
prevent them from seeing human life as it is and as it should be.
Decidedly one must be a man, a patriot, a “tellurian,” as Amiel said,
with some contempt; to be so may appear to be a small function in the
totality of things, but an upright spirit will not fulfil it with
less exactitude because he perceives its limits and its restricted
importance. Nothing is in vain, and _a fortiori_ no being is in vain;
small functions are as necessary as great. If a man of intelligence
happens to be a porter or a scavenger, he should apply himself to that
profession with as much devotion as to any other. To do well what one
has to do, however humble it may be, is the first of duties. An ant of
genius ought not to bring to the ant-hill a grain the less, even though
he were capable of taking cognizance of the eternities of time and
space.

       *       *       *       *       *

[Sidenote: Doubt as distinguished from scepticism.]

II. Although the suppression of religious dogma does not lead to
scepticism, it decidedly does lead to doubt, and we believe that the
modern sense of doubt represents a higher stage of civilization than
the faith in dogma that distinguished former times. Religious faith is
distinguished from philosophic belief by a subjective difference. If
the man of faith is not altogether blind, at least he perceives but one
point in the intellectual horizon; he has focussed his intelligence
upon some one plot of ground, and the rest of the world does not
exist for him; he returns day after day to his chosen corner, to the
little nest he has made for his thoughts to dwell in, as we said
above—returns as a dove returns to the dovecote and sees but it in
the immensity of space. Fanaticism marks a still further degree of
contraction in one’s intellectual vision. On the contrary, the greater
the progress of reflection in the history of the human race, the more
completely religious faith becomes merged in, and subordinated to,
philosophic conviction; the two cease to be distinguishable except by
a difference in the degree of doubt that they involve, a doubt which
itself rests upon a clearness in one’s vision of things. As reflection
becomes more profound, it manifests here as everywhere its destructive
influence upon instinct; everything that is instinctive, primitive,
and naïve in faith disappears, and, along with it, disappears
everything that constituted its strength, that made it so powerful in
the human heart. True strength lies in the human reason, in complete
self-consciousness, in a consciousness of the problems of life, of
their complexity, of their difficulties.

[Sidenote: Ideal gradation of faith.]

Faith, as we have seen, consists in affirming things not capable of
objective verification, with the same subjective satisfaction as if
they could be verified: in attributing to the uncertain as great a
value as to the certain—nay, perhaps a greater value. The ideal of the
philosopher, on the contrary, would be a perfect correspondence between
conclusiveness of evidence and degree of belief. The intellectual
satisfaction that we take in our beliefs, the degree of tenacity with
which we hold them, should vary precisely with the completeness and
certainty of our knowledge. A primitive intelligence cannot be content
to remain in suspense, it must decide one way or the other; it is the
mark of a more perfect intelligence to remain in doubt in reference to
what is doubtful. Credulity is intellectual original sin.

[Sidenote: Uncertainty of metaphysics.]

Employing the word certitude strictly for what is certain, and meaning
by belief what is plausible or probable only, when one is investigating
some mere matter of fact, one may in the end be able to say positively
such and such is certain, is what the future will affirm on this point;
but, when the degree of certitude involved amounts to no more than to
probability or even possibility, and to metaphysical possibility at
that, it is ridiculous to say: “I believe such and such a thing; such
and such is therefore the dogma that everybody ought to adopt.” Such
positive basis for metaphysical inductions as exists is too uneven
not to result in a divergence in the lines of the hypotheses which
rise from it into the obscure heights of the unknown; no two of our
glances toward the infinite are parallel; our attempts at solving
metaphysical problems are little more than rockets shot capriciously
into the sky. The philosopher can do little more than take cognizance
of the divergence of rival hypotheses, and of their equality and equal
insufficiency in the eye of reason.

[Sidenote: Postulates for purposes of practice.]

But the problem of action presents itself to the philosopher no less
than to the rest of mankind. For purposes of conduct some one among
the diverging lines of human speculation must be chosen; philosophic
thought must be left to describe its curves and circles above our
heads while we walk, if not sure-footedly at least in some definite
direction, upon the earth. One is sometimes for practical purposes
obliged to rely on doubtful premises as if they were certain. Such
a choice, however, is simply an inferior and exceptional means of
choosing among hypotheses which one has neither the time nor the power
exactly to test. One cuts loose from one’s doubts, but the expedient
is a purely practical one; cutting the Gordian knots of life cannot be
adopted as one’s habitual intellectual procedure. Faith which leans
with an equal sense of security upon the certain and the uncertain,
the evident and the doubtful, should be but a provisional state of
mind forced upon one by some practical necessity. One ought never,
so to speak, to believe once for all, to subscribe one’s allegiance
forever. Faith should never be regarded as more than a second best,
and a provisional second best. The instant that action is no longer
necessary, one must revert to one’s doubt, to one’s scruples, to all
the precautions of science. Kant did violence to the natural order
of things when he ascribed to faith and morals a predominance over
reasoning; when he gave to the practical reason, whose commandments may
be the expression simply of acquired habits, control over the critical
and scientific reason. His moral philosophy consists in erecting a
foregone conclusion into a rule, whereas, as a matter of fact, one
ought not to make up one’s mind definitely until all the evidence is
in, until every alternative choice has been considered and rejected, if
at all, on good grounds; our beliefs should be relied upon in practice
exactly in proportion to their probability in the actual state of
our knowledge. Alternatives do not exist in the outer world, they do
not exist in a state of complete knowledge. The moral ideal is not
to multiply them, nor to make a leap in the dark the habitual method
of intellectual procedure. There is no such thing as a categorical
imperative or a religious _credo_ for the traveller under unknown
skies; he is not to be saved by faith but by active and constant
self-control, by the spirit of doubt and criticism.

[Sidenote: Doubt and the religious sentiment.]

Doubt is not, at bottom, as profoundly opposed as might be believed to
what is best in the religious sentiment, it is even a product of the
religious sentiment. For doubt is simply a consciousness that one’s
thought is not absolute—cannot seize the absolute either directly or
indirectly; and so, consequently, doubt is the most religious attitude
of the human mind. Even atheism is often less irreligious than a
positive belief in the imperfect and inconsistent God of religion. To
be in doubt about God is a form of the sense of the divine. Moreover,
the constant inquiry that doubt provokes does not necessarily exclude
the erection of an altar to the unknown God, but it excludes everything
in the nature of a determinate religion, the erection of an altar that
bears a name, the establishment of a cult that consists in rites. In
the cemeteries in Tyrol, a little marble basin rests on each tomb;
it gathers water from the rain and the swallows from the eaves of
the neighbouring church come and drink from it; this clear water,
that comes from on high, is a thousand times more sacred, more deeply
blessed than that which sleeps in the holy-water vessel in the church,
and over which the priest has stretched his hands. Why should religion,
so to speak, sequestrate, retire from public circulation, everything
it touches? That alone is truly sacred which is consecrated to the
use of mankind as a whole, which passes from hand to hand, which is
worn out in process of time in the service of humanity. There has been
enough and to spare of closed houses, closed temples, closed souls—of
cloistered and walled-in lives, of smothered or extinguished hearts;
what is wanted is an open heart and life under the open sky, under the
incessant benediction of the sun and clouds.

[Sidenote: Modesty of doubt.]

Philosophy is often accused of pride because it rejects faith, but it
was the father of philosophy, Socrates, who first said: “I know but one
thing, that I know nothing.” It is precisely because the philosopher
knows how much he does not know that he is not certain in regard to
all things, but is reduced to remain in doubt, to wait anxiously and
reverentially for the germination of the seed of truth in the distant
future. To regard as certain what one does not positively know is to
violate one’s intellectual conscience. From the point of view of the
individual, as from the point of view of society, doubt is in certain
cases a duty—doubt, or if you prefer, methodical ignorance, humility,
self-abnegation in matters intellectual. Where philosophy is ignorant
it is morally obliged to say to others and to itself: “I do not know; I
doubt, I hope, nothing more.”

[Sidenote: Morality of doubt.]

The most original, and one of the most profoundly moral products of
the present century, of the century of science, is precisely this
sincere sense of doubt, of the seriousness of every act of faith,
of its not being a matter to be undertaken lightly, of its being a
graver engagement than many others that one hesitates to assume; to
give in one’s faith to an opinion has come to be like attesting one’s
allegiance to it by the mediæval signature, which was written in one’s
blood and bound one for all eternity. At the point of death especially,
which is the very period when religion says to a man, “Abandon thyself
for an instant, yield to the force of example, of custom, to the
natural disposition to affirm as certain what thou dost not know, to
fear of damnation, and thou shalt be saved”—at the point of death when
a blind act of faith is a last weakness and a last cowardice, doubt is
assuredly the highest and most courageous position the human thought
can assume: it is a fight to the finish without surrender; it is death
with all one’s wounds before, in the presence of the problem still
unsolved, but faced to the end.


_III. Substitution of metaphysical hypotheses for dogma._

[Sidenote: Scope of metaphysics.]

Beyond the limits of science there lies still a field for hypothesis,
and for that other science called metaphysics, the aim of which is to
estimate the comparative value of hypotheses; to know, to suppose, to
reason, to inquire, are of the essence of the modern mind; we no longer
need dogma. Religion, which in the beginning was a naïve science, has
ultimately become the enemy of science; in the future it must give
way before science or must become merged in some really scientific
hypothesis; an hypothesis, that is to say, which acknowledges itself
to be such, which declares itself to be provisional, which measures
its utility by the amount it explains; and aspires to nothing better
than to give place to an hypothesis that shall be more inclusive.
Science and research outweigh stationary adoration. The eternal
element in religion is the tendency which produced there the need of
an explanation, of a theory that shall bind mankind and the world
together; the indefatigable activity of mind which declines to stop
at the brute fact which produced in former times the tangle of
contradictory myths and legends now transmuted into the co-ordinate
and harmonious body of science. What is respectable in religion
is precisely the germ of the spirit of metaphysics and scientific
investigation, which is to-day proving fatal to religions.

[Sidenote: Distinction between metaphysical and religious sentiment.]

Religious sentiment properly so called must not be confounded with
the instinct for metaphysics, the two are utterly distinct. The first
is destined to decline with the extension of knowledge; the other,
under some form or other, will always continue. The instinct for free
speculation corresponds in the first place to an indestructible sense
of the limits of positive knowledge: it is an echo in us of the undying
mystery of things. It corresponds to an invincible tendency in the
human mind to the need for an ideal; to the need, not only of the
intelligence but of the heart, to pass beyond the limits of the visible
and tangible world. The wings of the soul are too long to fly close to
the earth, the soul is formed to move in long swoops and circles in
the open sky. All it needs is to be lifted above the earth; often it
is unable to do this of itself, and its long wings beat and trail in
the dust. And to what power is it to look for its preliminary start?
To its very desire for unknown spaces, to its desire for an infinite
and insecure ideal. Nature, as positive science reveals it to us, is,
no doubt, the sole incontestable divinity, the _deus certus_, as the
Emperor Aurelius called the Sun; but its very certitude constitutes an
element of inferiority. Sun-light is not the most brilliant light; the
reality can have no lasting pretensions to be regarded as divine. The
ideal God is necessarily the _deus incertus_, a problematical, perhaps
even fictitious God.

[Sidenote: Persistence of metaphysical problems.]

This sense at once of the limits of science and of the infinity of
human aspirations makes it forever inadmissible for man to abandon
all effort to solve the great problem of the origin and destiny
of the universe. The child, Spencer says, may hide his head under
the bed-clothes, and for an instant escape consciousness of the
darkness outside; but in the long run the consciousness subsists, the
imagination continues to dwell upon what lies beyond the limits of
human conception. The progress of human thought has consisted less
in discovering answers to ultimate problems than in discovering more
precise methods of formulating the problems themselves; the enigmas
are no longer stated in primitive terms. This change in statement is a
proof of the progress and growth in the human mind; but the problems
unhappily are as difficult as ever to solve. Up to the present moment
no sufficient answer has been suggested, the mystery has simply been
transposed from one place to another; so much so that Spencer says
the scientific interpretation of the universe is as full of mysteries
as theology; and he compares human knowledge to a luminous globe in
the midst of infinite darkness. The larger the globe becomes the
greater the depth and extent of darkness that it reveals, insomuch that
increase of science but enlarges the abyss of our ignorance.

[Sidenote: Possible finiteness of the unknown.]

One must, however, be on one’s guard against exaggeration. The universe
is infinite, no doubt, and consequently the material of human science
is infinite, but the universe is dominated by a certain number of
simple laws with which we may become continuously better and better
acquainted. Many generations of men would be necessary to master in
all their complexity the vedic epics, but we are able even to-day to
formulate the principles which dominate them, and it is not impossible
that we may some day be able to do the same for the epic of the
universe. We may be able even to go the length of achieving precision
in our ignorance, of marking in the infinite chain of phenomena the
links which must forever be hidden from us. It is not accurate,
therefore, to say that our ignorance increases with our knowledge,
although it may be considered as probable that our knowledge will
always be aware of something that escapes it, and may come in time to
be able more and more distinctly to define, however negatively, the
nature of this residuum. The infinity of the unknowable, even, is no
more than hypothetical. We perhaps flatter ourselves in the belief
that we possess anything that is infinite—even ignorance. Perhaps
the sphere of our knowledge is like the terrestrial globe, enveloped
by but a thin atmosphere of the unknowable and unknown; perhaps there
is no basis and foundation of the universe, just as there is no basis
and foundation of the earth; perhaps the ultimate secret of things is
the gravitation of phenomena. The unknown is the air we breathe, but
it is perhaps no more infinite than the earth’s atmosphere, and one’s
consciousness of an unknowable infinity can no more be regarded as the
basis of knowledge than the atmosphere of the earth can be regarded as
the foundation upon which the earth rests.[119]

      [119] The notion of the unknowable has been the subject of a
      lively discussion in England and in France. See on this point
      the work of M. Paulhan in the _Revue philosophique_, t. vi. p.
      279.

[Sidenote: Distinction between religion and metaphysics.]

Unknowable or not, infinite or finite, the unknown will always be the
object of metaphysical hypotheses. But is to admit the perpetuity of
metaphysical hypotheses to admit the eternity of religion? The question
involves an ambiguity of words. Spencer defines religious thought as
that which deals with all that lies beyond the sphere of the senses,
but that is precisely the field of philosophic thought; philosophy
in its entirety, therefore, and not religion only, is included in
Spencer’s definition. Nay more, science itself is in part included in
Spencer’s definition, for science, which takes cognizance of everything
within the reach of perception and reasoning, by that very fact
undertakes to fix the limit of their power, and thus indirectly touches
upon the field of the unknowable—if not to enter it, at least to
outline it, and that itself constitutes a sort of negative acquaintance
with it. Knowledge is essentially critical and self-critical. The
eternity of philosophy and of science must, no doubt, be admitted; but
the eternity of religion, as that word is usually understood, in nowise
follows from that admission.

[Sidenote: Spencer’s unknowable.]

According to Spencer, the unknowable itself is not absolutely
unknowable. Among the mysteries, which become more mysterious as they
are more deeply reflected upon, there will remain, Spencer thinks,
for man one absolute certitude—that he is in the presence of an
infinite and eternal energy which is the source of all things. The
formula of human certitude is open to discussion. The man of science
is more inclined to believe in an infinite number of energies than in
an infinite energy, in a sort of mechanical atomism, a subdivision of
force _ad infinitum_ rather than in monism. Moreover, no religion can
stop with the bare affirmation of the existence of an eternal energy or
infinity of energies. It must maintain the existence of some relation
between these energies and human morality, between the direction of
these energies and that of the moral impulse in mankind. But a relation
of this sort is the last thing in the world that can be deduced from
the doctrine of evolution. Hypotheses in regard to the matter may of
course be devised, but, far from possessing a character of certitude,
such hypotheses would rather, from the point of view of pure science,
display a positive improbability. Human morality, if it be considered
scientifically, is a question that concerns the struggle for existence
and not a question that concerns the universe. What distinguishes the
natural forces, with which science deals, from gods, is precisely
that the former are indifferent to the morality or immorality of our
lives. In spite of our increasing admiration for the complexity of the
phenomena of the world, for the solidarity that obtains among them,
for the latent or active life which animates all things, we have not
yet demonstrably discovered in the world a single element of divinity.
Science does not reveal to us a universe spontaneously labouring for
the realization of what we call goodness: goodness is to be realized,
if at all, only by our bending the world to our purposes, by enslaving
the gods that we once adored, by replacing the reign of God by the
reign of man.

[Sidenote: Spencer’s followers in France.]

The alleged reconciliation of science and religion in Spencer’s pages
is not made out except by virtue of an ambiguity in terms. Partisans of
religion have, however, hastened to welcome these apparent concessions
in their favour and have based on them an argument for the perpetuity
of dogmas. Jouffroy has told us how dogmas become extinct; recently
one of his successors at the Sorbonne endeavoured to show “how dogmas
come into being again,” and he took his stand with Spencer on an
ambiguity in terms. By dogmas M. Caro meant the principal points of the
original doctrine of the soul—as if one could apply the name dogma
to philosophical hypotheses, even though they be eternal hypotheses!
The important thing, however, is to understand each other; if problems
which constantly recur, and constantly receive hypothetical solutions,
are to be called dogmas, then dogmas do come to life again, and may
be expected always to do so; _multa renascentur quæ jam cecidere,
cadentque_.... But if terms be employed as a philosopher should employ
them, with precision, how can metaphysical conclusions be regarded as
dogmas? Examine the writings of Heraclitus, the evolutionist; Plato,
the contemplator of ideas; Aristotle, the formulater of the laws of
thought; Descartes, the inquirer who sought in an abyss of doubt for
the absolute criterion of truth; Leibnitz, who regarded himself as
the mirror of the universe; Spinoza, lost in the heart of infinite
substance; Kant, resolving the universe into thought and thought
into the moral law; where are the dogmas in these great metaphysical
poems? They are not systems of dogma, they are systems marked by the
individuality of genius, although containing something of the eternal
philosophy, the _perennis philosophia_ of Leibnitz. Every system, as
such, is precisely the means of demonstrating the insufficiency of
the central idea which dominates it, and the necessity for the human
mind of passing beyond it. To systematize is to develop a group of
ideas to their logical conclusion, and, by that very fact, to show how
much they do not include, how far they fall short of exhausting human
thought as a whole; to construct is to demonstrate the weight of the
material one is building with, and the impossibility of piling it up
to heaven. Every system requires a certain number of years to bring it
to completion, and then, when the edifice is achieved, one may one’s
self mark the points where it will begin to crack, what columns will
yield first, where its ultimate decay will begin. To recognize that
the subsidence and decay of a thing is rational, is to be resigned
to it and in some measure consoled for it; but whatever is useful is
necessarily transitory, for it is useful for an end; and it is thus
that the utility of a system implies that it will some day make way for
something else. “Ἀνάγκη στῆναι,” says dogma; “ἀνάγκη μὴ στῆναι,”
the philosopher says. Systems die and dogmas die; sentiments and ideas
survive. Whatever has been set in order falls into disorder, boundaries
become obliterated, structures fall into dust; what is eternal is the
dust itself, the dust of doctrine, which is always ready to take on a
new form, to fill a new mould, and which, far from receiving its life
from the fugitive forms it fills, lends them theirs. Human thoughts
live, not by their contours but from within. To understand them they
must be taken, not as they appear in any one system, but as they appear
in a succession of different and often diverse systems.

[Sidenote: Instability of metaphysics.]

As speculation and hypothesis are eternal, so also is the instinct for
philosophy and metaphysics which corresponds to them eternal, though
it is perpetually changing. It appears at the present day as something
widely different from the intimate certitude of dogma, of confident and
placid faith. If independence of mind and freedom of speculation are
not without their sweetness, their attractiveness, their intoxication,
they are not without their bitterness and disquietude. We must make up
our minds to-day to accept a certain modicum of intellectual suffering
as inseparable from our treasure of intellectual joy; for the life of
the spirit, like that of the body, follows a just mean between pleasure
and pain. Intense metaphysical emotion, like intense æsthetic emotion,
possesses always an element of sadness.[120] The day will come when
the graver moods of the human heart will sometimes demand satisfaction
as they demanded and found satisfaction in Heraclitus and Jeremiah.
It is inevitable that there should be an element of melancholy in the
emotional setting of metaphysical speculation—as there inevitably
is in the perception of the sublimity we feel ourselves incapable of
attaining, in the experience of doubt, of intellectual evil, of moral
evil, of sensible evil which are mingled with all our joys, and of
which doubt itself is but a reverberation in consciousness. There is
an element of suffering in all profound philosophy as in all profound
religion.

      [120] See our _Problèmes de l’esthétique contemporaine_, 1st
      part.

[Sidenote: Communion with the universe.]

One day when I was seated at my desk my wife came up to me and
exclaimed: “How melancholy you look! What is the matter with you?
Tears, _mon Dieu_! Is it anything that I have done?” “Of course it is
not; it is never anything that you have done. I was weeping over a bit
of abstract thought, of speculation on the world and the destiny of
things. Is there not enough misery in the world to justify an aimless
tear? and of joy to justify an aimless smile?” The great totality of
things in which man lives may well demand a smile or a tear from him,
and it is his conscious solidarity with the universe, the impersonal
joy and pain that he is capable of experiencing, the faculty, so to
speak, of impersonalizing himself, that is the most durable element
in religion and philosophy. To sympathize with the whole universe, to
inquire the secret of it, to wish to contribute to its amelioration, to
overpass the limits of our egoism and live the life of the universe, is
the distinguishing pursuit of humanity.

[Sidenote: Summary.]

Religion, therefore, may pass away without in the least affecting the
metaphysical instinct, or the emotion which accompanies its exercise.
When the Hebrews were marching toward the promised land they felt that
God was with them, God had spoken and had told them what lay beyond,
and at night a pillar of fire lighted them on their way. The pillar
of fire has burned out, and we are no longer sure that God is with
us; we possess no other fire to light us on our way through infinite
night but that of our intelligence. If we could but be sure that there
is a promised land—that others may attain it as well as we—that the
desert really has an end! But we are not certain even of that; we are
seeking for a new world and are not positive that it exists; nobody
has journeyed thither, nobody has returned thence, and our sole hope
of repose lies in discovering it. And we shall go forward forever, the
puppets of an indefatigable hope.




CHAPTER II.

ASSOCIATION. THE PERMANENT ELEMENT OF RELIGIONS IN SOCIAL LIFE.

SOCIAL ASPECT OF RELIGIONS—RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES AND CHURCHES—IDEAL
TYPE OF VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATION—ITS DIVERSE FORMS.

    I. Associations for intellectual purposes—How such
      associations might preserve the most precious elements
      of religions—Societies for the advancement of science,
      philosophy, religion—Dangers to avoid—Popularization of
      scientific ideas; propagandism in the interests of science.

    II. Associations for moral purposes—Tendency of religion
      in the best minds to become one with charity—Pity
      and charity will survive dogma—Rôle of enthusiasm
      in moral propagandism—Necessity of hope to sustain
      enthusiasm—Possibility of propagating moral ideas:
      1. Apart from myths and religious dogmas; 2. Apart
      from any notion of a religious sanction—Baudelaire’s
      conception of a criminal and happy hero—Criticism of that
      conception—Worship of the memory of the dead.

    III. Associations for æsthetic purposes—Worship of art and
      nature—Art and poetry will sever their connection with
      religion and will survive it—Necessity of developing the
      æsthetic sentiment and the worship of art, as the religious
      sentiment becomes more feeble—Poetry, eloquence, music;
      their rôle in the future—Final substitution of art for
      rites—Worship of nature—Feeling for nature originally an
      essential element of the religious sentiment—Superiority
      of a worship of nature over worship of human art—Nature is
      the true temple of the future.


[Sidenote: Association and religion.]

The most durable practical idea in possession of the religious
spirit, as of the spirit of reform, is that of association. In the
beginning, as we have seen, religion was essentially sociological, by
its conception of a society of gods and men. The element of various
religions that will survive in the non-religion of the future is
precisely this conception, that the ideal of humanity and even of
nature consists in the establishment of closer and closer social
relations between all kinds of beings. Religions, therefore, have
justly chosen to call themselves associations and _églises_, that is
to say, assemblies. It is by force of assemblies, secret or open, that
the great Jewish and Christian religions have conquered the world.
Christianity has even resulted in the notion of an universal church,
first militant, then triumphant, and united in love; although, by a
strange aberration, instead of regarding universality as an ideal, as
the inaccessible limit of an indefinite evolution, Catholicity has been
presented as already realized in a system of dogmas which there was
nothing to do but to disseminate, and that, if need be, by force. This
mistake has been the ruin of dogmatic religions, and it still subsists,
even in religions which have transmuted their dogmas into symbols; for
an universal symbol is less conceivable than an universal dogma. The
only universal thing is and should be precisely the liberty accorded
to individuals of conceiving the eternal enigma in any manner whatever
that appeals to them, and of associating themselves with those who
share the same hypothesis.

[Sidenote: Ideal type of association.]

The right of association, which has hitherto been checked by law, by
ignorance, by prejudice, by difficulties of communication, etc., had
scarcely begun to manifest its full importance till in the present
century. Associations of every kind will some day cover the globe,
or rather everything, so to speak, will be accomplished by associate
enterprise; and within the limits of the great body of society
innumerable groups of the most diverse kinds will form and dissolve
with an equal facility, without impeding the general movement. The
ideal type of every form of association is a compound of the ideal
of socialism and of the ideal of individualism—such a form of
association, that is to say, as will afford the individual at once the
maximum of present and future security, and the maximum of personal
liberty. Every insurance company is an association of this kind; the
individual member is protected by the immense power of the association;
his contribution to the associate funds is of the slightest, he is free
to join the association or to withdraw from it, and to lead his life
absolutely as he chooses.

[Sidenote: Its various forms.]

The mistake of religions, and of systems of socialism also, as we have
already remarked, is that they presuppose a society of individuals
morally and intellectually of the same type. But human beings are,
neither within nor without, copies of each other; the comparative
psychology and physiology of races and nations, sciences which are
still embryonic, will one day demonstrate the diversity which exists
between different divisions of the human species and, owing to atavisms
of various kinds, even between individuals of the most strictly
homogeneous divisions and groups. Religious, metaphysical, and moral
sentiment will one day appear in very various forms, and give rise to
associations of every kind—some individualistic, some socialistic—so
that men of the same stamp may mutually aid and encourage each other,
under condition, however, of preserving their complete independence,
their perfect right to change their beliefs when they will. Union and
independence should go hand in hand; everything should be shared, but
nobody should be compelled to give or to receive; minds may be made
transparent without losing their freedom of movement. The future, in a
word, belongs to association, providing it be voluntary association,
for the augmentation, and not for the sacrifice of personal liberty.

If we pass from these general principles to their particular
applications we find three essential kinds of voluntary association
that seem destined to survive religions: associations for intellectual
purposes, for moral purposes, for emotional purposes.


_I. Associations for intellectual purposes._

[Sidenote: Associations for the advancement of research.]

It will always be possible for men of science to associate for the
purpose of verifying and collecting evidence in regard to doctrines
and beliefs which they themselves recognize as provisional only.
There are divisions and subdivisions in the world of thought, which
resemble the geographical division of the earth; these divisions
practically result from the division of labour; each person has a
distinct task to fulfil, a distinct object to which he must apply his
intelligence. The whole body of labourers united in one and the same
effort of thought, and turned toward the same point in the intellectual
horizon, tend naturally to gravitate toward each other; every form of
co-operation tends to become an association. We all of us belong to
some intellectual province, we have all of us a mental native land,
in which we find our fellow-citizens, our brothers toward whom we are
impelled by a natural sympathy. This sympathy is explicable as a vague
consciousness of the solidarity existing between the whole body of
intelligent human beings who inevitably take an interest in each other,
who love to share truth or error, as they love to share pleasure or
pain: it is good to see men draw together and agree, providing they
do not thereby lose flexibility; providing their solidarity becomes a
condition of progress and not of immobility. Men will always delight in
contributing their store of ideas to the common stock, as the disciples
of Socrates brought their dinners and shared them in the little house
in Athens; knowledge, supposition, or prejudice, in common, draws
people together like a common love. Our hearts should go out first
to those who are nearest to us, to those who are our neighbours in
the field of intelligence. Labour not only fashions the object it
is expended on, it fashions the labourer; similarity of occupation
pursued with the same ardour ends by producing similarity of heart.
Companionship in labour, of whatsoever kind it may be, constitutes one
of the strongest ties among men. In our days associations are formed
among men of science or investigators, as among journeymen following
the same trade. There are societies for the pursuit of scientific,
medical, biological studies, etc.; and societies for the pursuit of
literary and philological studies, of philosophical, psychological,
and moral studies; of economic and social studies, and finally of
religious studies. These societies are genuine _églises_, churches,
but churches for community of labour and not for associate repose
in a conventional faith; and they will increase in number with the
subdivision and specialization of each of these several branches of
study. Such associations are typical of future associations generally,
religious associations included. Community of inquiry, which no less
than community of faith gives rise to a feeling of fraternity, is often
superior to community of faith and more fertile than it. The highest
religious associations will, no doubt, some day be associations for the
pursuit of religious and metaphysical studies. Thus the best elements
of individualism and socialism will be reconciled. The infinite
extensibility of science, the opportunity that it offers inquirers of
appropriating the results of each other’s labours, make association for
the acquisition of knowledge the type of a perfect association, of an
association that exists for the benefit both of the individuals and of
the society.

[Sidenote: Scientific fanaticism.]

There is one thing, however to be avoided. Opinions, and in especial
opinions on morals, social matters, or metaphysical subjects, acquire,
like the sticks in the fable, a prodigious power, when a number of
people holding them in common once associate, which is out of all
relation to the intrinsic value of the opinions themselves. Novalis
said: “My faith gained an infinite value in my eyes the moment I saw
it shared by someone else.” The psychology of that remark is just; it
calls attention to a dangerous illusion against which precaution should
be taken; for in a certain state of the emotions it is easier for two
people, and even for a thousand, to make mistakes than for any one of
them separately. Science has its enthusiasts, and also its fanatics,
and might have at need its advocates of intolerance and violence.
Happily it carries the remedy for all this with it; increase science,
and it becomes the very principle of tolerance, for the greatest
science is best aware of its own limits.

[Sidenote: Association for purposes of propagandism.]

While distinguished minds will thus associate and carry on their
labours and speculations in common, men who are occupied rather with
manual labour will associate for the communication of their more or
less vague, more or less irreflective beliefs, which, however, will be
increasingly free from all element of the supernatural as instruction
spreads among the people. These beliefs, which among certain peoples
will be metaphysical, among certain others, such as the Latin nations,
will be social and moral. Such associations will be of every possible
kind, according to the opinions which preside over their formation;
they will, however, possess this trait in common, that they will more
and more rigorously exclude anything in the nature of dogma and of
revelation. They will aim also at becoming like the associations of
thinkers and men of science of which we have just spoken. It will be
the duty of people of education, in such societies, to hand on the
results of the scientific and metaphysical inquiries conducted by
associations higher in the intellectual scale. Every temple will thus
be built in stages, nave on nave, as in certain ancient churches,
and the highest of these temples from which the inspired word will
descend will be open to the sky and inhabited not by believers but
by unbelievers in every limitation of research—by minds restlessly
active, in quest of a more extended and demonstrable knowledge: _ad
lucem per lucem_.

[Sidenote: Association for the dissemination of useful knowledge.]

One of the principal effects of association for intellectual purposes,
thus conducted, would be the diffusion of scientific ideas among
the people. If religions may be considered as so many expressions
of the earliest scientific theories, the surest means of combating
the errors and of preserving the good sides of religion would be the
dissemination of the established principles of modern science. To
disseminate is in a sense “to convert,” but to convert the believer
to a faith in indubitable virtues; the task is one which is most
tempting to a philosopher; one is sure that truth can do no harm,
when it is handed on in all its purity. A really capital bit of
statement, a really capital book, is often better than a good action;
it carries farther, and if an imprudent act of heroism sometimes has
a melancholy ending, words that speak to the heart never have. There
are already in existence books for children, and for the people,
that are masterpieces; they supply the public, for which they are
intended, with ideas on morality and on certain sciences and supply
those ideas undisfigured; and such books constitute more or less
scientific catechisms, which are altogether superior to religious
catechisms. At some future day such books will be written in regard
to the great cosmological and metaphysical theories, epitomizing in
simple language, made simpler by telling illustrations, the body of
acquired facts or of probable hypotheses on the prime subjects of human
interest. The dissemination of knowledge, standing thus on the middle
plane between original inquiry and research and popular ignorance, will
take the place held by religions, which are themselves founded on a
collection of exoteric notions—a gross and symbolic epitome of what
once was profound, and to-day is naïve, in the realm of knowledge.
Modern science, if it is to progress, must be popularized; like a great
river, if it is to grow larger, its bed must be deepened and widened.

[Sidenote: Scientific research open to everybody.]

One of the great advantages of science is that it can employ half
talent and modest capacity—a manifest advantage for it as compared
with art. A mediocre poet is a zero in the universe—at least
sometimes; but a very ordinary mind may be capable of rendering a
genuine service by some almost insignificant improvement in the
method of covering the wires in an electric coil or in the gear
of a steam-engine; it will have done its work in this world, will
have paid its tribute, have won its place in the sun. Art cannot
endure mediocrity, science may rely upon it—and find collaborators
everywhere. Owing to that fact, science is capable of a degree of
democratization that art does not always possess—and that religion
alone has equalled. Art is capable of being and remaining aristocratic;
science disdains nothing, gathers together all kinds of observations,
makes use of all kinds and grades of intellectual power. Like the
great Buddhistic and Christian religions, science favours equality,
needs the support of the multitude, needs to be named legion. No
doubt a small number of commanding men of genius are always necessary
to conduct the work, to synthesize the materials in their totality,
to make the more fundamental inductions. But if these men of genius
were isolated, they would be powerless. Every man must contribute a
stone, somewhat at haphazard, and the construction settles firmly on
its foundation beneath the added weight of all of them, and becomes
really indestructible. Dikes made of irregular stones are the solidest
of all. When one walks along such a dike, one feels the sea rumble
and break not only near one but under one’s very feet; the water plays
vainly against the uncemented, undressed blocks of stone without being
able to detach them, bathes them all and destroys none; such, in the
history of the human mind, is science, which is formed of a multitude
of little facts, gathered in very much at haphazard, which generations
of mankind have piled up in disorder, and which ultimately become so
solidly united that no effort of the imagination can disjoin them. The
human mind, in the midst of its eternal ebb and flow, feels something
solid and indestructible in its possession that its waves beat against
in vain.


_II. Associations for moral purposes and moral propagandism._

[Sidenote: Association for uplifting the masses.]

There is another element of religion that will survive. Men not only
associate for intellectual purposes, they will continue to do so for
the purpose of ministering to human suffering, of correcting errors,
of disseminating moral ideas. Such associations, like those for
intellectual purposes, are based on a consciousness of the solidarity
and fraternity of mankind, although, of course, so far as the future
is concerned, there will be no question of a fraternity conceived
superstitiously, or anti-philosophically, as arising out of a community
of origin, from the same terrestrial or celestial father, but only of
a rational and moral fraternity, arising out of an identity of nature
and interest. The true philosopher should say not only, “Nothing that
is human is strange to me;” but also, “Nothing that lives, suffers,
and thinks is strange to me.” The heart feels at home wherever it
finds another heart, though it even be in a lower order of being, and
_a fortiori_, if it be in an equal or higher order of being. A Hindu
poet, says the legend, saw a wounded bird fall struggling at his feet;
the heart of the poet, sobbing with pity, struggled with the struggles
of the dying bird: it is this fluttering of the heart, this measured
and modulated rhythm of pain, which was the origin of verse. Like
poetry, religion also originated in the highest and most beautiful
manifestation of pity. Human love for human beings does not demand, as
a condition precedent, perfect spiritual accord; it is love itself
that produces such accord as is necessary. Love one another, and you
will understand one another; light springs from the true union of
hearts.

[Sidenote: Love of mankind in the future.]

Universal sympathy is a sentiment which is destined increasingly
to develop in future societies. Even to-day, as the result of an
inevitable evolution, religion has come to be confounded in the best
minds with charity. Hard and sterile among primitive peoples, little
more than a collection of formulæ of propitiation, religions have
come, through their alliance with morality, to be one of the essential
sources of human tenderness. Buddhism and Christianity have headed,
first and last, the principal charitable organizations established
among mankind. Fatally condemned as they are, at the end of a longer
or shorter period, to intellectual sterility, these two religions
are endowed with the genius of the heart. Men like Vincent de Paul
have little by little come to replace men like St. Augustine or St.
Athanasius, not without profit to humanity. This evolutionary process
will, no doubt, continue; to-day, for example, few really talented
theological works are produced by the priesthood,[121] but a great many
practical charities are excellently conceived and executed by them.
The day, no doubt, will come when the experience of personal suffering
will always result in a desire to relieve the suffering of others.
Physical pain usually produces a need of physical movement; æsthetic
instinct introduces rhythm into the movement, transforms disorderly
gestures into a beautiful regularity, and discordant cries into songs
of pain;[122] moral instinct turns this need of movement toward the
service of other people, and every misfortune thus becomes a source
of pity for the misfortunes of others, and grief is transmuted into
charity.

      [121] None in France.

      [122] See the author’s _Problèmes d’esthétique_, i. 3.

[Sidenote: Must find expression in action.]

As in the case of artistic sentiment, religious sentiment at its best
must be productive, must stimulate one’s activity. Religion, according
to St. Paul, means charity, love; but there is no charity that is not
charity for someone, and a really rich love cannot be confined within
the limits of contemplation and mystic ecstasy, which, scientifically
considered, are simply perversions and, as it were, spiritual
miscarriages. True love must act.

The ancient opposition between faith and works is thus effaced. There
is no powerful faith without works, any more than there is any such
thing as a sterile genius or an unproductive talent for art. If Jesus
preferred Mary, who was motionless at his feet, to Martha, who was
moving about the house, it was, no doubt, because he perceived in the
former a treasure of moral energy in reserve for the service of some
great devotion; in reserve and therefore only waiting; silent, with a
silence of sincere love which speaks more fervently than words.

[Sidenote: Charity.]

Charity will always constitute the point of meeting between the most
audacious theoretic speculation and the least audacious practical
activity. To identify one’s self, thought and heart, with someone else
is to _speculate_ in the most charming sense of the word, is to stake
one’s all. And the risk of staking his all is one that man will always
wish to run. He is pushed to it by the most vivacious impulses in his
nature. Goethe said that a man is not really worthy of the name till
he has “begotten a child, built a house, and planted a tree.” The
details chosen are somewhat trivial, but the aphorism embodies the
need for productivity which is inherent in every being, the need to
give or to develop life, to found something; the being who does not
obey this impulse is _déclassé_, is degraded below the rank of man; he
will suffer from it some day or other, and die of it body and soul.
Happily absolute egoism is less frequent than is believed; to live
solely for one’s self is a sort of utopia that may be summed up in the
naïve formula: Everybody for me and I for nobody. The humblest of us,
the instant we undertake a work of charity, come into possession of
a completer self; we belong at once wholly to the enterprise, to the
idea involved in it, to an idea more or less impersonal; we are drawn
forward in spite of ourselves, like a swimmer by the current of the
stream.

[Sidenote: Enthusiasm.]

The promotion of every enterprise great and small and of almost every
human work depends on enthusiasm, which has played so important a
rôle in religion. Enthusiasm presupposes a belief in the possible
reality of an ideal, an active belief to be manifested in effort. There
is generally but one way of demonstrating what is merely possible,
and that is by realizing it, by converting it from possibility
into actuality. Excessively matter-of-fact minds—minds immersed
in matter—are condemned to short-sightedness in the realm of the
possible; analysts distinguish too exactly between what is, and what is
not, to be able to be of the best service in the labour of increasingly
transforming the one into the other. There is, no doubt, a point of
junction between the present and the future, but pure intelligence
finds it difficult to lay its finger on it: it is everywhere and
nowhere, or rather it is not an inert point but a flying point, a
_direction_, a volition in pursuit of an end. The world belongs to
the enthusiast, who deliberately deals with the “not yet” as the
“already,” and treats the future as if it were the present; the world
belongs to the synthetic mind, which confounds the real and the ideal
in its embrace; the world belongs to men of the voluntary type, who do
violence to reality, and break up its rigid outlines, and force it to
yield up from within what might beforehand, in pure reason, have with
equal justice been pronounced the possible and the impossible. The
world belongs to the prophets and messiahs of science; enthusiasm is
necessary to mankind, it is the genius of the masses and the productive
element in the genius of individuals.

[Sidenote: Courage.]

The essence of enthusiasm is hope, and the basis of hope is manliness,
is courage. Courage of despair is not so intense a phrase as courage of
hope. Hope and true and active charity are one. If Hope alone remained
in the bottom of Pandora’s box it was not because she had lost her
wings and was unable to desert the society of men for the open spaces
of the sky; it was that pity, charity, devotion, are very elements of
her nature; to hope is to love, and to love is to wish to minister
to those who suffer. Upon the half-open box of Pandora, from which
Hope in her devotion to mankind refused to make her escape, should be
inscribed, as upon the leaden coffer in the “Merchant of Venice,” “Who
chooseth me, must give and hazard all he hath.”

[Sidenote: Proselytism.]

The object of enthusiasm varies from age to age: it was once religion,
it may be scientific doctrine and discovery, it may above all be
moral and social beliefs. It results therefrom that the spirit of
proselytism, that seems so peculiar to religion, is destined to survive
religion: it will be transformed simply. Every sincere and enthusiastic
man with a surplus of moral energy is at heart a missionary, a
propagandist of ideas and beliefs. Next to the joy of possessing a
truth or a system which seems to be true, is that of disseminating
this truth, of feeling it speak and act in us, of exhaling it with
our breath. There have been more than twelve apostles in the history
of humanity; every heart that is young, and strong, and loving is
the heart of an apostle. There is not an idea in our brain that does
not possess some element of sociality, of fraternity; that does not
struggle for expression. Propagandism will be as ardently pursued, in
the society of the future, as discovery. Moral proselytism will aim
at communicating enthusiasm for the good and the true, at uplifting
the moral level of mankind as a whole and mainly of the masses of the
people.

[Sidenote: Morality apart from religion difficult to teach.]

But here we shall be met by an objection; we shall be told that
independently of religion it will be difficult to disseminate a system
of practical morality, conformable to the scientific ideas of our
times. A professor of the Sorbonne was one day maintaining, in my
hearing, that in the present crisis anything like systematic moral
instruction is gravely in danger. Abstract theories cannot be taught,
for they end in scepticism; absolute precepts cannot be taught, for
they are false; nothing can be taught but facts, but history: one may
be certain about facts. That is to say, morality cannot be taught at
all.

[Sidenote: But not impossible.]

We believe, on the contrary, that, even at the present day, the various
theories in regard to the principles of morals possess a certain fund
of ideas in common, which might well be made the subject of popular
instruction. Even the most sceptical and egoistic moral theories admit
that the individual cannot live by himself and for himself solely;
that egoism involves a narrowing of the sphere of human activity that
results in the impoverishment of life. To live fully and completely
one must live for others. Our actions are like a shadow which we
project upon the universe; the shadow can only be contracted by a
diminution of our height; and the best way to enlarge it is to become
generous—the principle of egoism is interior littleness. The idea and
the sentiment which lie at the bottom of all human morality are the
idea and sentiment of generosity; even the systems of Epicurus and of
Bentham become generous and philanthropic when they are looked at from
a certain height. It is this spirit of generosity which is inherent in
every system of morals that a moralist ought always to endeavour to
elicit and to communicate to his auditors. What, after all, constitutes
the outcome of the years of instruction to which we devote our youth?
Abstract forms? More or less scholastic ideas inculcated with so much
difficulty? No, that sort of thing fades rapidly away; what subsist
are certain sentiments. From history one acquires a certain cult for
the past and for our natural tradition, which is useful but may become
dangerous if it is carried to extremes; from the study of philosophy
we acquire a certain openness of mind, a disinterested preoccupation
with the causes of things, a love of hypothesis, a tolerance for
difference of opinion; and from a study of ethics we acquire—what?
A generosity of heart that causes us, if not to forget ourselves, at
least not to forget other people. Other studies enlarge the mind, this
one enlarges the heart. It is unreasonable, therefore, to be appalled
by diversity of moral systems, for they are all of them obliged in
one way or other to beat up to the physiological and psychological
verity of love, which is the principle of all altruism and presents
mankind with this alternative: to desiccate or to expand. Exclusively
egoistic conduct is a rotten fruit. Egoism is eternal illusion and
avarice, afraid to open its hands, ignoring the necessity of mutual
credit, and the productivity of wealth in circulation. In morals as
in political economy, circulation is necessary; the individual must
share in the life of the society. Moralists have been wrong, perhaps,
in overestimating self-sacrifice. It may be denied that virtue is at
bottom, in any rigorous sense of the word, a sacrifice, but it cannot
be denied that it is at bottom an enlargement of one’s self, a form
of generosity. And this sentiment of generosity, by means of which
one embraces all humanity and the universe, is what constitutes the
solid base of all great religions, as of all systems of morality; and
therein lies the reason why one may, without danger, study the infinite
diversity of human beliefs in regard to the moral ideal—the _summum
bonum_. There is a unity in the variety, a unity that centres in the
idea of love. To be generous in thought and deed is to be at the centre
of all great speculation on morals and religion.

[Sidenote: Necessity of disinterestedness.]

For the rest, is there any need of calling in the aid of mythical
and mystical ideas in our effort to understand human society and
its necessities, and among them the necessity of disinterestedness?
The profounder one’s intelligence becomes, the more adequately one
perceives the necessity, the inherent rationality of the function one
accomplishes in human society; the more absolutely one understands
one’s self and one’s self as a social being. A functionary above
reproach is always ready to risk his life for the accomplishment of the
duty with which he is charged, even though it be a relatively humble
one—that of a policeman or a customs officer, of a signal man, of a
railway employee or telegraph operator. Whoever does not feel himself
ready to die at a given moment is inferior to these. One may sit in
judgment on one’s self and on one’s ideal, by asking one’s self this
question: for what idea, for what person would I risk my life? Whoever
has not a reply ready has an empty or vulgar heart, he is incapable
either of sympathizing with or of achieving anything that is great in
life, for he is hidebound to the limits of his own individuality; he is
feeble and sterile, and lives in his egoism like the tortoise in his
shell. On the contrary, he who is conscious of a willingness to face
death for his ideal is willing and anxious to maintain his ideal to
the height of this possible sacrifice, and finds in the fact of the
risk a supreme and constant tension, an indefatigable energy and power
of will. The sole means of being great in life is to be conscious of
indifference to death. And this courage in the presence of death is not
the privilege of religions; its germ exists in every intelligent and
loving volition, in the very sense for the universal which gives us
science and philosophy; it shows itself in the spontaneous impulses of
the heart, in the moral inspirations (which are as truly inspirations
as those of the poet) that art and morality seek to give rise to in us.
Independently of any religious conception, morality is privileged to
belong to the poetry of the world and to the reality of the world. This
poetry, instead of being purely contemplative, exists in action and in
movement, but the sentiment of the beautiful is none the less one of
the essential elements of it. A virtuous life, as the Greeks said, is
at once both beautiful and good. Virtue is the profoundest of the arts,
is that in which the artist and the work of art are one. In the old oak
choir stalls in our churches, lovingly sculptured in the ages of faith,
the same slab of wood sometimes represents on one side the life of a
saint and on the other a pattern of roses and flowers, so arranged that
each event in the saint’s life corresponds to a petal or the corolla of
a flower; his self-sacrifice or his martyrdom lies on a background of
lilies or roses. To live and to flower side by side, at once to suffer
and to blossom, to unite in one’s self the reality of goodness and the
beauty of the ideal, is the double aim of life; and we also, like the
saints in the choir stalls, should present both sides.

[Sidenote: Religious sanction a superfluity.]

It will be objected that if the dissemination of moral ideas should
be attempted in independence of religion, it will lack an element of
sovereign power: the idea of a sanction after death, or at least the
certitude of that sanction. It may be replied that the moral sentiment
in its purity implies precisely doing good for its own sake. And if
it be rejoined that any such notion is chimerical, we reply that the
power of the moral ideal in future societies will be proportionate
to its height.[123] It is commonly believed that the highest ideals
are those which it is least easy to disseminate among the masses;
the future will, we believe, demonstrate the opposite. Everything
depends on the talent of the propagandist. Jesus and the evangelists
did more to diffuse morality by embodying moral ideas in a form at
once simple and sublime than by menacing men with divine vengeance
and the flames of Gehenna. “Love ye one another; by this shall all
men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.”
In this admirable and eternal precept there is more of inexhaustible,
practical power than in: ye shall be cast into the fire; there shall
be wailing and gnashing of teeth. Even in the past, it is by favour of
great sentiments that great religious revolutions have been achieved;
and these great sentiments will persist in the future, shorn of the
superstitions with which they have long been associated. Thousands of
martyrs have gone gaily to death for religion; and martyrdom to simple
honesty and goodness of heart is, no doubt, more difficult though not
less realizable than martyrdom to death. Morality will lose none of its
practical power by revealing itself more and more as it is; that is, as
the supreme end that a man can propose to himself. The true ideal of
morality is charity, and charity is absolute disinterestedness, which
looks for a recompense neither from man nor God. Recompense ought never
to enter into one’s calculations in life nor into the hopes with which
one regards the future; besides, the calculation would probably be bad.
Recompense should be taken, when it comes, as a gift; as something
distinctly over and above what one has earned. It is even good and
reasonable never to do right with any other expectation than that of
ingratitude, and to resign one’s self to receiving after death no
reward of merit. The most practical religious instruction is an appeal
to generous sentiments.

      [123] See the author’s _Esquisse d’une morale_, pp. 236, 237.

[Sidenote: Baudelaire’s triumphant criminal.]

To maintain the necessity of the idea of sanction in moral instruction
and propagandism, the following argument has been employed. Baudelaire,
it is said, in the last days of his intellectual life, sketched a great
drama, destined to astonish the partisans of middle-class morality. The
hero of the drama, stripping himself of vulgar prejudice, was to commit
one after another, and with an equal success, the crimes which are
supposed to be the most terrible—was to kill his father, to dishonour
his brother, to violate his sister and his mother, to betray his
country, and finally, his work in the world accomplished, in possession
of fortune and reputation, was to retire to some charming site, under
some soft sky, and to exclaim with all the tranquillity in the world:
“Let us now enjoy in peace the fruits of our crime.” What reply could
you make, it is asked, to such a man and to those who might be tempted
to imitate him, if you had not at hand the menaces of religion and the
prospect of future punishment? How could you disturb the criminal’s
promised joy?

[Sidenote: His life punishes itself.]

Let us consider first in what the criminal’s promised joy can consist.
Baudelaire’s hero is naturally incapable of appreciating the pleasures
of the hearth; a man who has killed his father can find little delight
in the birth of a son. He is equally incapable of appreciating a love
of science for science’s sake, for the man who could love science for
science’s sake would never be tempted to become a great criminal, and
as for pure æsthetic pleasures, moral delicacy and æsthetic delicacy
in general go hand in hand; it is not probable that a being incapable
of remorse and insensitive to all the shades and varieties of the
moral life would be apt to be sensible of all the shades and varieties
of beauty and of æsthetic enjoyment. The capacity for a sincere
admiration of the beautiful corresponds always to a possibility of
strong repugnances to the ugly, and repugnance for the ugly is scarcely
conceivable apart from a repugnance for what is ugly in immorality.
It is true that Byron depicted certain satanic heroes accomplishing
the blackest of crimes without any loss to their elegance, to their
good manners, to their high spirit and courage, but his heroes, not to
raise the question of their possibility in real life, are extremely
unhappy; they, like Byron himself and his disciples, are the victims
of a refined remorse, distaste of life, misanthropy; the only art
that lies within their range is pessimistic art, which but aggravates
their malady. Their æsthetic joys are veritable agonies. Or if, Byron
and Byronism apart, one keeps close to the truth, one may well doubt
whether true æsthetic pleasures are more within the reach of a genuine
criminal than of an educated butcher’s boy. His pleasure would be
confined to the monotonous round of wine, women, and play; and he could
not take wine with a light heart, for men talk under the influence of
wine; and he must play but little, for men ruin themselves at play;
so that there remains nothing but women who constitute, as a matter
of fact, the habitual consolation of criminals. In all times police
have looked for criminals, and found them, the day after their offence
in places of ill-repute. Very well, the defence of society apart, we
see no reason for depriving the poor wretches of the restricted joys
that remain to them. It would be doing too much honour to Baudelaire’s
hero to give him an immortality in the next life, simply as a means
of making him pay dearer than he has already done in this for the few
kisses that he has purchased with his blood-stained gold. He suffers
enough as it is, the only additional suffering that could be wished
for him is that of remorse, but remorse is a sign of superiority. Real
criminals, temperamental criminals, those who are the victims of what
is known as moral insanity, are absolutely ignorant of remorse, because
they are perfectly adapted to crime; they are made for the immoral
environment in which they live, and live at ease, and experience no
desire for a change. To perceive that a door is low, one’s stature
must be great. If Lady Macbeth’s hand had been rude and her eye dull,
she never would have desired to wash off the drop of blood. To suffer
is to pass beyond the bounds of one’s environment; the criminal who
experiences remorse has strayed less far from the human type than the
one who does not feel remorse. The first may become a man once more,
the second is incapable of crossing the line of demarcation which
separates man and beast, for he is incapable of perceiving it; he is
walled in with his crime, and is a brute or a madman.

[Sidenote: And will in the future be viewed with horror.]

But, it will be objected, if this brute or this madman sees no divine
menace above his head, would not many people regard his situation
as enviable, and labour as they are labouring, to destroy the moral
and human instincts in themselves, to place themselves precisely in
the position of Baudelaire’s hero? We do not believe that faith in
a religious sanction could greatly change anybody’s attitude toward
such an abnormal being. Crime offers man but one attraction, that of
wealth; but wealth, whatever value it may have in the eyes of the
people, is but one among the good things of the world. Offer a poor
man a million dollars coupled with the gout, and if he had an atom of
common-sense he would refuse. Propose to make him rich, on condition
of his being bandy-legged or humpbacked, and he would probably refuse
also; in especial, if he were young. All women would refuse. The
difficulty experienced in finding people to fill certain situations
which are in themselves well paid—that, for instance, of public
executioner—demonstrates that, even in the eyes of the people, money
is not everything. If it were, no menace of punishment after death
could prevent men generally from becoming assassins.[124] I know women,
and men also, who would refuse a fortune if they were obliged to
acquire it by becoming butchers—so great are certain repugnances, even
purely sentimental and æsthetic repugnances. The moral horror of crime,
which is in the generality of cases stronger than any other repugnance,
will always separate us from criminals, whatever the prevailing beliefs
as to life after death.

      [124] M. de Molinari has calculated the chances of death to
      which the profession of assassin is exposed, as compared with
      certain dangerous occupations, as that of miner. He reaches the
      following result: that an assassin runs less risk of death than
      a miner; an insurance company might demand a smaller premium
      of assassins than it would be obliged to demand of miners.
      (See _Esquisse d’une morale_, the chapter on _Le risque et la
      lutte_, i. 4.)

[Sidenote: And with pity.]

This horror will be still stronger when for the habitual hatred,
anger, and desire for revenge, that the presence of a criminal now
causes us, shall be substituted by degrees a feeling of pity—the pity
which we feel for inferior or malformed beings, for the unconscious
monstrosities of nature. One may sometimes envy the life of what one
hates; but one can never envy the life of what one pities. Hatred
signifies the presence of some element of attraction in the object
hated; but pity is the highest and most definitive moral barrier that
can exist between two beings.

[Sidenote: The durable element in this notion of sanction.]

The sole respectable and durable element in the idea of sanction is
neither the notion of recompense nor of penalty, but that of the ideal
of goodness as possessed of sufficient force to impose itself upon
nature, and to envelop the world; it seems to us good that the just
and gentle man should have the last word in the universe, but this
kingdom of goodness of which humanity dreams does not need for its
establishment the procedure of a human kingdom. The moral sentiment
may be considered the great power in the universe. The inherent
tendency of morality gradually to subdue nature to its purposes by the
instrumentality of mankind is the most striking fact in the realm of
philosophy, and the one which is, of all others, the most appropriate
to excite the spirit of proselytism. No myth is necessary to arouse an
ardour for goodness and a sense of universal fraternity. What is great
and beautiful is self-sufficing.

[Sidenote: Cult for the dead.]

Whatever may be the beliefs that men will one day hold on a life after
death, and the conditions which render possible the final triumph
of goodness, the notion of such a triumph is an ultimate moral and
social idea, which will always lend itself readily to propagandism,
because it is the foundation of all religions without being in any
wise essentially bound up with religious dogma; it is in essence a
cult for memory, for veneration and love of ancestry, for respect for
death and for the dead. Far from necessarily declining with the decline
of religion, a reverence for the dead may rapidly increase because
the metaphysical sentiment of the unknown in death will increase. The
spirit of democracy itself inclines the masses to an uneasy admiration
in the presence of death, the great democrat, the great leveller
who wanders incessantly about humanity, and planes down equally all
excesses of misery and happiness; casts us, without distinction of
persons, into the great abyss from the depths of which the attentive
ear has caught no sound of an arrested fall.

[Sidenote: Among the Greeks.]

The Greeks, who of all ancient people are supposed to have been the
least religious, were of all ancient people those who showed most
reverence for the dead. The most irreligious city in modern times,
Paris, is that in which the fête for the dead is most solemn, in which
the entire people rise to celebrate it, and that also in which we see
the most flippant street Arab take off his hat in the presence of a
funeral and salute the visible image of the eternal enigma. A respect
for the dead which binds the generations of mankind together, which is
the essence of the most certain form of immortality, that of memory and
example, will not disappear with the decay of religion. Corpus Christi
may be forgotten, but All Souls’ Day will be observed till the end of
human time.


_III. Associations for æsthetic purposes—Worship of art and nature._

[Sidenote: Association for enjoyment of products of æsthetic genius.]

I. The third notion which is destined to survive historic religions,
and which has been as yet imperfectly realized, is that of voluntary
association for the purpose of enjoying in common some æsthetic
pleasure of a high and morally refining kind; therein lies what
will survive of the ceremonial of diverse religions. The artistic
elements pent up in various religions will disengage themselves, will
become independent of tradition, of symbolism taken seriously, and of
superstition. Science, metaphysics, and morals all have their poetical
side, and in so far are analogous to religion.

[Sidenote: Destined prevalence of admiration.]

The pure abstraction by which the thinker escapes beyond the limits
of sentiment is an unstable and unlasting state of mind; abstraction
contains something fictitious, for nothing abstract exists in nature;
abstraction is of value only as an instrument; its aim is to grapple
with some one side of the reality, to enable one subsequently more
easily to embrace the reality as a whole. Every general result
that abstraction can achieve may sooner or later become the object
of a sentiment. The progress of science, as Mr. Spencer says, has
always been accompanied side by side by a corresponding progress
in the faculty of admiration; this faculty must inevitably develop,
in the future, when man will have attained a less fragmentary and
more genuinely synthetic conception of the universe. Admiration is
one of the surviving elements of the religious sentiment. Man will
always be subject to astonishment, and will always contemplate the
universe in a spirit of wonder, although, no doubt, the time must
come when he will cease to kneel. Artistic genius, even when inspired
by great philosophical and cosmological ideas, remains essentially
different from religious genius properly so called, the distinctive
character of which is to be dogmatic. The Greeks were of all peoples
the most poetical and the least religious. Poetry, like metaphysics,
consists in constructions in the realm of imagination and thought,
which are capable of infinite variety and tend to overrun the whole
compass of the human mind. Dogmatic religion, on the contrary,
tends continually to limit the fertility of the imagination and of
philosophic thought; it implies a certain poverty of mind to cling
always to the same conception, to feel no desire to pass beyond it,
to create. Metaphysical hypothesis, unshackled by dogma, gifted with
variety and liberty, must inevitably be fertile even in the domain of
art; it cannot dwell forever among abstractions, it must produce a
corresponding sentiment, a poetic sentiment which will not be the naïve
assurance of faith but the proper emotional reaction in the presence
of a transformation of the real world under the influence of thought
conceiving the ideal. For the philosopher, as for the poet, every
surface that science touches, every form and figure in the world that
the finger of knowledge taps, gives forth a sound, not of the void,
but, so to speak, of the “essential inwardness of life.” They resemble
the marbles in Italy which give forth, beneath a blow, a sound as
harmonious as their forms. There is an inner harmony that may well go
along with harmony of surface; science shows us the laws of surfaces,
philosophy and poetry put us into sympathy with what lies below the
surface. If it is impossible to deny, as pure idealists attempt to
deny, the objective character of the world in which we live, one can,
at least, not say where objectivity begins and subjectivity ends.
Between Naghiri and Yarkand there exists an almost unknown tribe called
Hunza, whose language presents a peculiarity which it is impossible to
separate from one’s notion of humanity; one cannot, in their speech,
express the idea of a horse simply, but must say my horse or thy horse
or his horse. Our language is more perfect than that of the Hunza, but
we are absolutely incapable of conceiving things in abstraction from
all notion of human personality; in especial, when we are dealing, not
with individual, external objects, but with the cosmos as a whole.
There is no such thing as a world existing in isolation; there is only
your world, my world, the human world. Man is so inseparably associated
with his conception of the universe that it is impossible to know
what our universe would be apart from us, or what we should be apart
from it. The metaphysician and the poet are at one in celebrating the
projection of humanity into all things. At their highest points poetry
and philosophy coincide. Metaphysics is the poetry of pure reason,
poetry is the metaphysics of the senses and of the heart. The two
supply us with our conception of the world, and, after all, since we
are the product of the world, it must be in some sense akin to all
that we contain. The fundamental secret of things lies at the bottom
of human thought. Poetry is a light and winged creature, Plato says,
but he was speaking of the poetry of the poet, of his sonorous and
harmonious words; but the poetry of the metaphysician, the poetry of
profound ideas and hidden causes, is also a winged thing, but winged
not to be enabled to skim the surfaces of things as a land bird skims
the surface of land and sea, but to be enabled to dive as “divers” do
when they plunge into the limpid waves, and, at the risk of asphyxia,
walk upon the opaque bottom of the sea and tear it up with their beaks
in search of food and come up shaking their feathers from none knows
where. Sometimes their search has been in vain, sometimes they bring up
buried treasure; and they alone of all beings employ their wings not
to skim and to touch the surface of things, but to penetrate to the
depths of them. The last word of poetry, as of thought, will be to
dive beneath the moving flood and sweep of things, and seize the secret
of the material universe which is also the secret of the spiritual
universe.

[Sidenote: Art in a measure to take the place of religion.]

II. The more feeble dogmatic religions become, the greater the
necessity for a stronger and higher art. Humanity needs a certain
amount of distraction, and even, as Pascal said, of “diversion.” A
human beast, such as an English or German labouring man, knows but one
distraction in the world: eating and drinking, especially drinking.
Many English labourers never go to the theatre or to church, never
read, know nothing of the pleasures of home; the gin-palace and gin
take the place of art, religion, and the family. Opium plays the same
role in China. They who do not know how to amuse themselves brutalize
themselves; self-brutalization is, at least, a change, an element of
variety in the monotony of life, a break in the continuity of the
chain of misery. Oblivion from time to time is imperative. One of
the ancients said that he would rather be a master in the science of
oblivion than in that of memory. The only porches of forgetfulness
that are open to the more debased portions of mankind are sleep and
intoxication; people at a higher stage of civilization may approach art
and adoration; and these two forms of distraction are the highest and
sweetest.[125]

      [125] Slaves, exiles, and unfortunates generally drink. The
      Irish and Poles are, according to statistics, the most drunken
      peoples in Europe.

[Sidenote: Art as a diversion.]

The amount of activity devoted by men to religion and æsthetics
may appear at first sight useless and even harmful; but it must be
recognized that humanity is always possessed of a surplus which must be
expended in some way or other. Prayer and religious exercises, regarded
as occupations simply, are of the least harmful of pastimes, are of the
least vain of the various forms of distraction. Prayer and the church
have hitherto been the art and theatre of the poor. No doubt art and
prayer cannot be made to constitute alone the whole of life; mystics
have believed that it is practical life that is the diversion, and that
the serious element in things is religious contemplation. Precisely
the opposite is true: preoccupation with art and metaphysics should
dominate human life, but not absorb it. Religion in especial, with its
myths, is too generously compounded of illusion and downright fiction
to be made the centre of life; religion is a radiant coloured cloud
that wreaths the summit of the mountain. If we climb up into it we
perceive that it is empty and sombre within, that it is a cloud, damp
and cold like other clouds and radiant only from below.

[Sidenote: Æsthetic element in religion.]

The poetry of religion may survive the dogmatism of religion; as
articles of faith, religious ideas are to-day anachronisms; as
practical and philosophical conceptions they are like all works of art,
in a measure imperishable. Who, asks Lange, could wish to refute a Mass
of Palestrina or accuse the Madonna of Raphael of error? Religions have
inspired literary and artistic labours—products which will survive
them at least in part, and will constitute ultimately their best
justification. What remains of the Crusades to-day? Among the best
things that they gave us must be counted certain flowers that they
brought back with them and propagated among us, for example, Damascus
roses, and certain colours and perfumes which have survived the great
rising of Europe against Asia in support of certain ideas and passions
which are to-day forever extinct.

[Sidenote: Defects of æsthetic side of religion.]

Looked at from a certain point of view, priests are the artists of
the people, but the genuine artist ought to move with the times,
understand new motives and not repeat indefinitely, from generation
to generation, the same musical or poetical theme. The feeble side of
religious aæsthetics is that its repertoire of incident and mystery is
severely limited, that it has repeated itself for centuries. It must
enlarge the number of its pieces, must abandon those it has. Nothing
could be better than to assemble for the purpose of experiencing in
common an emotion at once aæsthetic and serious, seeing and hearing
something beautiful; but it is impossible that this emotion should be
indefinitely prolonged by a repetition of the same stimulus. Rites are
irreconcilable with the double aim of art: variety and progress in the
expression of the emotions themselves. Sooner or later the rudimentary
art of ritual must give place to genuine and progressive art, just as
the instinctive and eternally monotonous architecture practised by bird
and insect has become the infinitely varied architecture which has
produced and will produce masterpieces of the most varied kind, from
Notre Dame de Paris to the Alhambra.

[Sidenote: Transformation of the sermon.]

In general, men gather together to listen. Conferences, sermons, songs
are the most permanent features in religious cult. They will probably
exist in some form or other in future associations as in those of the
past. One point will become increasingly important in every spoken word
addressed to the people, and that is the instructive aspect of what is
said; if one is to address the people, one must teach them something.
Well, there are three kinds of instruction, scientific, literary
and moral, or metaphysical. The first will have to be more and more
generously given, not only in school but wherever adults congregate.
The two other sorts may be given simultaneously by lectures. The most
interesting elements in many sermons and conferences are the texts and
citations brought to the hearers’ attention by the speaker. The choice
of these texts, the manner in which they are expounded and introduced
to the comprehension of the multitude, constitute the value of the
sermon. In other words, the best sermon consists simply in the reading
and exposition of some choice page from a good book. In Germany, in
England, in the Indies preachers of certain liberal sects choose their
texts indifferently from among the whole number of the sacred books of
humanity. A still more liberal epoch may be conceived, when texts will
be selected not only from among the writings of the poets of ancient
times but also from among the writings of men of genius of all times;
every great work will be read and commented on as a sacred book. The
most complete expression of the so-called religious sentiment, apart
from the vast Hindu or Jewish epochs, is, after all, to be found in
certain profane masterpieces, from the works of Plato and Marcus
Aurelius to Kant’s “Hymn to Duty”; from the dramas of Æschylus to
the “Hamlet” of Shakespeare, to the “Polyeucte” of Corneille, and the
“Contemplations” of Victor Hugo.

[Sidenote: Transformation of the prophet.]

Religious prophets, like priests, will be replaced by great poets,
great metaphysicians, great men of science. Each of us will be able to
choose our prophet, to prefer the genius which is best adapted to our
personal intelligence and best serves as an intermediary between us and
the eternal truth, and each of us will be in the last resort our own
priest.[126]

      [126] “Prophecy is not dead, it flourishes under another name.
      Religious reforms, emancipation from oppressive authority, war
      against corrupt institutions, religious poetry, philosophy of
      history—are all represented under various titles in the modern
      world. The old trunk has branched again simply.” (M. Albert
      Réville, p. 229, _Prolégomènes de l’Histoire des religions_.)

[Sidenote: Music.]

Apart from poetry and eloquence, the most religious of the arts, the
most capable of inspiring the multitude with an elevated sympathy has
been, and will be music. Wagner was not absolutely wrong in his notion
that music will be the religion of the future, or, at least, the cult
of the future. We do not speak of instrumental music only, but also
and in especial of vocal music, of choruses such as are often met with
in Germany, in which many voices unite in producing the same chant, in
beating the same rhythm which has been regulated in advance by genius.
Thus conceived, music is truly religious and socially significant.[127]

      [127] Music at the present day forms a part of the cult; but
      either it is supplied by members of the faithful, in which
      event it is sufficiently bad, for the majority of the faithful
      are ignorant of music; or it is provided by mercenaries,
      and it is then more commonly good, but is generally ill
      chosen. Musical education will one day probably be much more
      wide-spread than it is to-day; it would not be more difficult,
      and would always be more useful, to teach children the elements
      of music than to teach them the mystery of the Incarnation.
      More than that, if religious music were chosen not only from
      so-called sacred works but from the works of classical masters
      generally, one might be certain of hearing good music, varied
      in style and movement, and capable of pleasing all those in
      whom the æsthetic sense is developed.

[Sidenote: Kinship of æsthetic and religious sentiment.]

For the rest, almost every art is reconcilable with the gravity of
religious sentiment, for every art at its best awakens, no less than
poetry and music, a contemplative and philosophical mood. One may
agree with Strauss that religion will gradually be transmuted into
art, and even at the present day profane art and sacred art are rather
different than opposed. These differences will always subsist; it is
evident that a _pas redoublé_, for example, can never be the symbol of
a really profound idea of nature or of humanity or of the infinite.
Religious æsthetics, even though it becomes continuously larger and
more tolerant, will exclude to the end certain inferior forms of art.

[Sidenote: Necessary reforms in lay art.]

If art is to take the place of religion, it must progress in certain
directions, not only in its forms but in its material methods of
appeal. Note how much better church services are presented, from the
point of view of hygiene, than art exhibitions are. Moderation is
practised in the matter of light; the rooms are large and well supplied
with fresh air, are of an almost constant temperature; and the æsthetic
services are restful rather than exhausting. Compare with all this the
entertainment given in concert halls and theatres, where multitudes
are packed together under unnecessarily brilliant lights, where the
spectators are wrought up and excited and exhausted in a hundred ways
and pass out, finally, fatigued, enfeebled, nervously keyed up, and
pursued by a host of sensual images. Church architects are infinitely
more conversant with hygiene than those who build our theatres; they
understand that if the heavens are to be shut out at all, space enough
must be shut in to give the heart and chest room to expand. Among the
Greeks, where art really did form a sort of religion, the theatres were
open to the sky so that the spectators might really repose in body
while they gave up their minds to be played upon by the poet.

[Sidenote: In religious art.]

Just as existing profane art must undergo certain transformations
before it can be expected fully to satisfy a sane and well-balanced
nature, so religious art, if it is to be true to its highest
tendencies, must transform itself, must rid itself of precisely the
elements which to-day seem distinctively to constitute it, namely its
marvellous subject-matter and conventional handling. The marvellous in
art was long necessary, as we have seen, to capture men’s attention;
contemporaneous art does not need to make this appeal. All art took its
rise from convention, from ceremonial, but has enfranchised itself by
degrees. It might even be established as a general law that the more
perfect, the more expressive, arts become—the more, that is to say
they seek precisely to body forth the sentiment of the artist; and the
more expressive they are the less conventional and less pompous they
must be. Amplification and exaggeration are suppressed. The artist
occupies toward his emotions the same relation that the translator of a
great work does to his text: his translation will be regarded nowadays
as perfect in proportion as it is close, as it follows the text, line
by line and word by word; formerly the tradition was otherwise, and
every translator felt himself obliged to amplify. Art possesses _great_
means of inspiring emotion, but not _gross_ means. Public speakers at
the present day make much less frequent use of gesture; the actor no
longer steps out on the stage in the cothurnus; the language of verse
is approaching the language of ordinary life; music is breaking away
from the conventions of counterpoint. What is true of the diverse arts
is true also of religious æsthetics, which will one day abandon the
fictitious ornaments and vain ceremonies of ritualism. If an æsthetic
expression of some profound sentiment is to be true and durable, it
must itself be profound, must be like what it expresses, must be
murmured rather than articulate. What renders certain verse eternal
is its simplicity: the more overcharged an art is the more caducous
it proves, like the architecture of the Jesuit style, which is to-day
so ridiculous, with its gilding and false ornaments. Ceremonies,
properly so called, will become more and more simple in religious or
moral associations; the day will come, no doubt, when they will not be
employed at all except to celebrate the three great events of human
life: birth, marriage, and death; nay, perhaps they will disappear
altogether as emotion becomes too profound to be translated by any
objective device, by any conventional ceremony whatever.

    “Une larme en dit plus que vous n’en pourriez dire.”

In cemeteries the tombs of distinguished people may be recognized
by their simplicity, by their freedom from conventional ornament. A
marble slab under a wreath of flowers is enough to produce upon the
passer-by a more vivid impression than crosses, burning lamps, images
of the saints, infantine gewgaws, and ridiculous inscriptions. Eternal
enigmas need not be supplied with excess of language; they are quite
capable of making themselves heard without raising their voices. The
silence of the stars is more impressive than speech, and the highest
religious instruction could not do better than teach men to listen to
such science. Meditation, which, after all, is recommended by every
religion, implies the negation of rite.

       *       *       *       *       *

[Sidenote: Enjoyment of natural beauty.]

III. A feeling for nature was, in the beginning, an important element
in the composition of the religious sentiment. Hindu ascetics went up
into the valleys of the Himalayas, St. Antoine went into the desert
at Thebes, St. Bruno went to La Grande Chartreuse, in search of
something more than simple solitude; they all of them experienced an
ill-defined need to eke out monotony of contemplation by admiration
of the beautiful in nature; a need to fill the void of ecstasy with
harmonious and powerful sensations. They were unconscious poets,
painters without hands, astronomers without special knowledge, and
their sentiment for nature made part of their religious sentiment;
the profane mingled with the divine, and they ascribed to God alone
the intense emotion that forest and mountain summit had given rise to
in them. To-day, the æsthetic sentiment exists apart from religious
sentiment; although every æsthetic sentiment of an especially elevated
kind is both contemplative and philosophical, it contains no suggestion
of any particular religion: no tabernacle can roof in heaven; æsthetic
sentiment is foreign to the definite and anthropomorphic notion of a
personal God. When we contemplate nature we have no sense of communion
with the personality of God; the artist has definitively supplanted the
religious hermit. The power of theological sentiment has weakened; the
power of sympathy for nature has increased.

[Sidenote: Should be cherished.]

This sense of natural beauty, which is so strong in many men at the
present day, is destined to a much greater future. Like æsthetic
faculties generally, a sense for the beauty of nature must be
cultivated and developed by a well-directed education. No germ of it
apparently is to be found in certain cases among the peasantry, where
a mechanical habit of life has dulled the emotions, nor among dwellers
in cities, in whom antagonistic tastes have been developed. A genuine
Parisian cares little for the country; he can pass an hour or two in
the fields, as he might in the Bois de Boulogne. An open-air landscape
would not so readily appeal to him as a picture of it in a gold frame;
his eye is not educated for dealing with the dimensions of nature.

[Sidenote: The most wholesome form of enjoyment.]

Of all æsthetic sentiments, love of nature possesses the advantage of
being the one which, even though pushed to excess, does not disturb
the equilibrium of body and mind. Love of nature is the sole emotion
which is absolutely hygienic. One may die of an exaggerated love of
the theatre, of music and so forth; one simply becomes healthy from
an exaggerated love of nature. Air and light! The Greeks were right,
were they not? to philosophize in the open air, in gardens and groves.
A ray of sunlight sometimes helps one more to understand the world
than an eternity of meditation in some gray room in the midst of open
volumes.[128]

      [128] Every library reading room ought to open on a garden
      where one could read and write on fine days in the open air.
      For all men whose labour is physical—for example, for a
      factory hand—the proper recreation is repose in the open
      air, and, if need be, intellectual labour in the open air.
      For men who work with their minds, the proper recreation is
      bodily exercise in the open air, in the sunlight. For children
      every holiday ought to be spent in the country. Lighted
      rooms, children’s entertainments in the house even on Sunday
      afternoons, theatrical representations, are, hygienically
      speaking, absurdities. All boarding-schools, moreover, ought to
      be beyond the city limits and if possible on some commanding
      height. If there existed in France, as in Germany for example,
      great colleges in country districts hard by forests, or still
      better, in the highlands of Dauphiny or the Pyrenees, such
      places would ultimately be adopted by the better classes for
      their children’s education, and thus might be combated the
      degeneracy of the middle class, which is so much more rapid in
      France than elsewhere, because the custom of restricting the
      number of children interferes with natural selection.

[Sidenote: Superior to enjoyment of human art.]

Compare the appeal that nature makes to the æsthetic sense with that
made by human art, and you will at once perceive the superiority of
the former. Art, even great art, even that which seems closest to the
truth, can never be more than a very insufficient representation of the
real world, because it is forced to a selection; it is forced to ignore
nine-tenths of life in order to set in a clear light what is extreme,
what appeals to laughter or to tears. Average human life is neither
ridiculous nor tragic; life, as it appears in art, is generally one or
the other. The reason is that art subordinates truth to interest, while
life is truth. Thence results the movement toward pessimism in art,
and in especial in modern art; the more masterly the artist is, the
more he will be inclined to seek for the ridiculous or the melancholy
aspects of life; his aim is to move pity or mirth, and existence in his
pages must take the form of tragedy or comedy. To live too exclusively
in the world of art is to live in a factitious environment as if one
should pass one’s whole existence in a theatre. The most beautiful
poem, the most beautiful work of art, contains pitfalls which one must
avoid. The imagination usually plays with loaded dice. Whoever lives
too exclusively on human art becomes, therefore, a little unhealthy, a
little unbalanced. The great source of æsthetic appeal is and should be
nature, which is always sincere, always shows for what it is, without
deception and ornament. A higher æsthetic culture will increase one’s
sensibility to natural beauty, and it is in a contemplation of the
cosmos that æsthetic sentiment, and a purified religious sentiment,
will find it possible most completely to coincide. The emotion that
arises from the contemplation of a landscape, of a sunset, of a stretch
of blue sea, of a snow-capped mountain outlined against the sky, or
even the blue dome of the sky itself, is absolutely pure, sane, neither
too depressing, nor too immoderately gay. In the presence of nature
one’s æsthetic sensibilities become the means of refreshing and
resting one instead of fatiguing one—nature smiles but never grimaces;
and its smile penetrates the soul as the sunlight penetrates the eye;
and if nature has its moods of sadness, they contain a touch of the
infinite which enlarges the heart. The immensity of nature and of the
all-enveloping heavens becomes, for those who feel it, a constant
source of a certain stoical serenity.




CHAPTER III.

THEISM.

REVIEW OF THE PRINCIPAL METAPHYSICAL HYPOTHESES WHICH WILL REPLACE
DOGMA.

    I. Introduction—Progress of metaphysical
      hypothesis—Metaphysical hypotheses destined to increasing
      diversity in details, and increasing agreement on essential
      points—Importance of the moral element in metaphysical
      hypotheses—The part played by conscience in human morality
      will not diminish, as Mr. Spencer says—Sympathetic groups
      under which divers systems of metaphysics will be ranged.

    II. Theism—1. Probable fate of the creation hypothesis—The
      author of the world conceived as a prime mover—Eternity
      of movement—The author of the world conceived as a
      creator properly so called—Illusion involved in the
      conception of nothing—Criticism of the creation hypothesis
      from the point of view of morals: the problem of evil
      and of the responsibility of the creator—Attempts
      to save optimism—Hypothesis of a God creating free
      agents, “workmen” and not “work”—Reciprocal determinism
      and the illusion of spontaneity—Immorality of the
      temptation—Hypothesis of the fall, its impossibility—God
      the tempter—Lucifer and God—2. Probable fate of the
      notion of Providence—Hypotheses to explain a special
      Providence and miracles thus insufficient—Hypothesis of
      a non-omnipotent God proposed by John Stuart Mill—The
      God of Comtism—Religion should be not solely human but
      cosmic—The fate of the philosophical idea of God—Rational
      religion proposed by the neo-Kantians—Ultimate
      transformation of the notion of Divinity and of
      Providence—Human Providence and progressive Divinity in
      the world.


_I. Introduction—Progress of metaphysical hypothesis._

[Sidenote: Trend visible in metaphysical speculation.]

To say that humanity, in its search for a plausible explanation
of the world, finds itself in the presence of a great number of
hypotheses among which it must choose does not mean that these
hypotheses should be regarded with a benevolent neutrality, that they
are equivalent in the eyes of reason. Far from it: we believe that
metaphysical hypotheses already are following a certain general
direction and will continue to do so in the future. Our conception
of the unknown will become precise as our knowledge of the knowable
becomes complete. Even morals, which vary so markedly from country to
country, tend to approach a single type and to become identical among
all civilized peoples. The same may be said of the practical part of
all religions. Rites become every day simpler, and dogmas do the same,
and metaphysical hypotheses will do the same. By the progress of human
thought, the avenues that lead to truth will be better known. We regard
it as certain, for example, that all effort will be abandoned, if it
has not been abandoned already, to conceive mankind’s ideal as embodied
in the jealous and evil God of the Bible.

[Sidenote: Number of metaphysical hypotheses not destined to decrease.]

The angle at which different human beings look out upon the ideal
will continually diminish; and as the angle diminishes, the power of
vision will increase, and this unexpected result will follow: that
metaphysical hypotheses concerning the world, and its destiny will
never be less numerous nor less varied, in spite of the increasing
convergence. Human thought may even become more personal, more
original, fuller of delicate distinctions, and at the same time less
inconsistent as one passes from mind to mind. As mankind approximates
the truth its details will become more various, and the beauty of
the whole more marked. An approach to certitude augments the dignity
and probability of the possible hypotheses without diminishing their
number. Astronomy, for example, has increased the sum of the known
truths about celestial bodies and at the same time multiplied the
number of possible hypotheses concerning them; the most definite
knowledge may thus be the most fertile in views of every sort, even
of obscure ones. As the human mind progresses it will see the aspects
of nature diversify and the laws of nature unify. This evening from
Sermione, the peninsula dear to Catullus, I saw on the surface of Lago
di Garda the reflection of as many stars as I could have seen had
I lifted my eyes to heaven. Each star reflected in the lake was in
reality nothing but a brilliant drop of water, close to my hand; each
of the stars in heaven is a world separate from me by an infinite
reach of space; the stars of heaven and of the lake were, however, to
me the same. The real distance of things and the depth of the universe
escape the human eye. But science corrects the eye, measures distances
at their just worth, probes ever deeper into the vault of heaven,
distinguishing objects from their reflections. Science takes account
at once of the place of the ray in the water and of its origin in the
sky. It will perhaps one day discover, in an infinitely magnified
expanse of thought, the primitive and central spring of light which as
yet communicates with us only by reflection and broken rays and flying
scintillations from some unstable mirror.

       *       *       *       *       *

[Sidenote: Moralism.]

Since the Stoics and Kant, metaphysical hypotheses have come to be
regarded from a new point of view. What to-day has come to be the
great charm of such hypotheses is that they endeavour to lend a moral
significance to the world, to impress upon the course of universal
evolution a direction conformable to that of our conscience as
affectionate and sociable beings. The future history of religion may
be summed up in this law: that religious dogmas, transformed at first
into simple metaphysical conjectures, reduced later to a certain number
of definite hypotheses, among which the individual made his choice on
increasingly rational grounds, ultimately came to bear principally on
the problem of morals. Religious metaphysics, in effect, will result in
a transcendental theory of universality, an ideal sociology embracing
in its sweep all the beings that constitute the universe; and this
sociology will be founded, not upon physical inductions, like that
of the earliest religions, nor upon ontological inductions like that
of the first system of metaphysics, but upon the moral conscience of
mankind. Animism, theism, pantheism, are destined to fall under the
domination of what may be called moralism.

[Sidenote: Increasing interest in moralism.]

Such diverse solutions as may be given of the moral problem thus
understood will always interest mankind, but they will occupy a
smaller and smaller place in its practical life; they will lose the
extraordinary influence that religions have often possessed over
the conduct of men. As society progresses the moral agent will find
less and less need to appeal for support in the conduct of life to
metaphysical hypotheses and systematic uncertainty. Positive morality
will more and more completely suffice for the ordinary exigencies of
life. Generosity of heart will be less dependent on the intelligence
for its adventurous impulses; it will produce them unassisted.
Metaphysical speculations will tend to become, like the highest
æsthetic products, a luxury; they will be sought for their own sakes,
and for the general elevation of mind that they bestow, rather than for
guidance in particular matters of conduct. The destiny of the world
will interest us quite apart from any question of our own destiny, and
our voyages into the unknown will be prompted not by selfishness but by
disinterested curiosity.

[Sidenote: And in reflective rectitude.]

We do not believe, however, with Mr. Spencer that the part to be
played by the reflective conscience in human life is destined to
diminish, nor that man will come to do what is right in obedience to
a blind instinct—to rush into the fire or throw himself into the
water to save the life of a fellow-creature almost as irreflectively
as he would lift his hat to a friend in the street. On the contrary,
man will become more and more reflective and philosophical in all
things, and among others, in regard to the directing principles of
his conduct. And there is no room in all this for the belief that the
dissolving influence exercised by reflection upon primitive instincts
will seriously hinder the growth of the social instinct. Intelligence
paralyzes instincts only when it is obliged to oppose them, when it
does not justify them, when it aims really at displacing them.[129]
But speculative thought will always justify social instinct, even
considered purely from the scientific and positive point of view. As
we have shown, the most extraordinary manifestation of the social
instinct, devotion, belongs to the general law of life, and does not
in the least possess the abnormal character that has sometimes been
attributed to it; to run a risk for someone else is not to be purely
unselfish, for one is attracted by the sublimity of danger and of risk,
and a capacity for this attraction has been developed and rendered
powerful by natural selection in the higher species of the animal
kingdom; the desire to expose one’s self is almost normal in a morally
well-constituted individual. In morals as in æsthetics sublimity is
allied to beauty.[130] The speculative instinct will, therefore,
not counteract the social instinct; it will rather fortify it, and
human disinterestedness generally, for speculation itself is the most
disinterested act of the mental life. Generally speaking, reflective
conscience is always more disinterested than irreflective action, which
is typified in reflex action; it is less directly useful to life on
its simplest terms. Parallel to the development of conscience and of
speculative intelligence there goes always a development of our moral
activity. The more truly intelligent a human being is the more active
he is; and the more active he is, the less self-sufficing he becomes,
the greater his need to live for someone else. Antisocial beings are
almost always mentally and physically dawdlers, who are incapable of
continuous mental or physical labour. Activity of mind must inevitably,
therefore, indirectly fortify the moral instincts. Sociality is
developed by thought.

      [129] See upon this point the author’s _Problèmes
      d’esthétique_, p. 139 (_De l’antagonisme entre l’esprit
      scientifique et l’instinct_.)

      [130] _Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation_, p. 215.

       *       *       *       *       *

[Sidenote: Possible to classify the diverse systems of future.]

Although by the progress of analysis the complication of the great
mental and moral hypotheses must increase, it is possible, even at
the present day, to foresee the main synthetic groups under which the
several systems will be classifiable.

[Sidenote: Present interest in such systems.]

This book is not a treatise on metaphysics: an exposition and criticism
of these systems will not, therefore, here be expected; but their
characteristic spirit, which has also been the spirit of the great
religions, is of interest to us here, and, for us, constitutes their
value. It is this spirit which is at once speculative and religious,
in the true sense of the word, that it is important, accordingly, to
elicit, and that wholly without dogmatical or polemical aim of any
kind. Absolute sincerity, impersonal and passionate sincerity, is
the first duty of the philosopher. To arrange the world according to
one’s personal preferences, to be on the lookout, not for the most
probable, but for the most consoling hypotheses, is to resemble a
merchant who should count his credits only when he is making up his
books and should indulge in none but consoling additions. The strictest
probity is demanded of him who balances the great book of life; the
philosopher should hide nothing either from others or from himself. We
shall endeavour, therefore, to set forth, what are in our judgment the
diverse aspects under which the knowable as a whole, and therefore also
the unknowable, or if you prefer, the great unknown, present themselves
to-day. We shall endeavour to interpret the great metaphysical systems
sympathetically, without, however, any illusions in regard to their
incompleteness and their errors. In a certain church in Verona sacred
texts are inscribed on the marble slabs of which the floor is composed;
they interpret and complete each other, and, however obscure at first,
gradually become plain as one advances under the high arched roof; thus
it is in life: the religious and philosophical beliefs in the midst
of which we live seem to us at first enigmatical and mysterious, we
trample them under foot without understanding them; but, as we advance,
we discover their hidden meaning, their naïveté, and their profoundity.
At every step in life a new perspective into the heart of humanity is
thrown open to us; to live is to understand, and to understand is not
only to tolerate but to love. Such love, however, is not incompatible
with clearness of vision, nor with an effort to transform and
ameliorate the beloved object; on the contrary, a really active love
ought to be, more than all else, a desire for transformation and for
progress. To love a being or a belief is to seek to make it better.


_II. Theism._

[Sidenote: Theism and religion distinct.]

The majority of people scarcely see any possible alternative to such
and such a determinate religion except atheism. The fact is, of course,
quite otherwise. Religious thought manifests itself in a hundred
forms; why should free-thought be restricted to a single conception of
the universe? I have known a multitude of free-thinkers who believed
more sincerely in the existence of God, in the immortality of the
soul, and, in general, in spiritual principles than a great many
professed worshippers. Were they right to do so? Was Voltaire, for
example, who based his affirmation of the existence of God upon the
splendour of a sunrise, somewhat naïve, and inclined to mistake an
emotion for a bit of proof? It makes little difference; what we wish
to set in relief is that faith in a priest is not necessarily part and
parcel of faith in a God, and that the disappearance of the former may
lend an increase of power and of refinement to the latter. No single
philosophic doctrine is to be regarded as standing alone in opposition
to the whole body of religions; religions and philosophies together
are all philosophic doctrines, all hypotheses, and none of them above
discussion. We say to the individual: “Weigh and choose.” And among
these hypotheses we include that of which modern religions constitute
the symbolic expression, theism. If the religious anomy which we regard
as the ideal implies the suppression of everything in the nature of an
external revelation, it does not on that account exclude a subjective
and personal intuition of divinity. Even mystics may find their account
in the religious individualism of the future. Intuition, however, in
metaphysics as in morals, is every day losing ground. The progress
of ideas will result in the gradual triumph of scientific induction
over alleged natural intuition, of probability over faith. Subjective
revelation will disappear as objective revelation is doing, and give
place by degrees to reasoning. Dogmatic theism, like all dogma, is
doomed; but what is purest in the theistic spirit may survive.

[Sidenote: God conceived as prime mover a superfluity according to
modern physics.]

I. Let us first consider the probable fate of the dogma of the Creator,
which belongs to the great Jewish, Christian, and Islamite religions.
Science follows the law of parsimony; nature economizes force, science
economizes ideas. The first economy to be undertaken might well relate
precisely to the idea of the creation. The author of the world may
be conceived as the universal motor. But the conception of cause as
a source of movement, or as a prime motor, is full of contradictions
and is becoming more and more foreign to modern philosophy. For the
conception of a first cause implies a pre-existing state of repose, and
repose is no more primitive and absolute than nothingness. Nothing is
in repose, nothing has ever been in repose. The most motionless atom
in the atmosphere describes in its vibration, according to Clausius,
four hundred and forty-seven metres a second in a space of ninety-five
millionths of a millimetre; it receives during this time four billion
seven hundred million shocks. The vibrating atom of hydrogen describes
one thousand eight hundred and eighty-four metres in a second. Repose
is an illusion of the human mind, and the conception of a divine first
mover is a second illusion based on the first. The eternal movement
that stirred the molecules of the primitive substance, later grouped
them into spheres, and the spheres began whirling of their own accord
in the ether without need of a preliminary push from the sacred beetle
(as the Egyptian legend has it) that rolls his sacred ball, which is
the image of the universe. Where, as Strauss remarked, Newton felt
called upon to assume a “divine first impulse,” and Buffon was obliged
to resort to the hypothesis of a comet colliding with the primitive
sphere and breaking it up into the fragments which now constitute the
earth and the planets, we need invoke nothing but the fixity of natural
laws. Since Kant, Descartes, and Laplace, we possess an approximate
explanation of the formation of the stars, which are alternately
produced and dissolved by the concentration and resolution of material
masses—are born to be “devoured,” as Kant said, in the abyss of
eternity. One and the same cause, resistance of the ether, explains the
agglomeration of nebulous matter into nucleï, and the slowing down of
the motion of the spheres thus formed, and the ultimate fall of these
spheres upon some neighbouring centre of attraction and the resulting
dispersion into nebulæ.

[Sidenote: And with physiology.]

More than that, by the progress of physiology and natural history,
the organic and the inorganic worlds have come to be conceived
as so closely related that a true explanation of the first would
probably include a true explanation of the second. The chasm that once
existed between life and what sustains life has been closed. If our
laboratories do not enable us to catch spontaneous generation in the
act, the reason is simply that their resources are not equal to those
of nature, that they have not the same means at their disposal, that
the so-called primitive beings that we endeavour to produce in the
laboratory are really not primitive. Men of science who have attempted
such experiments resemble the followers of Darwin who have tried to
transform an anthropoid ape into a human being. Nature permits of an
infinite convergence of forces upon a determinate point, that cannot
be realized in a laboratory. More than that, time, which we are always
inclined to neglect, is a necessary factor in the evolution of things;
what is natural is slow. To find the earliest stages of organic life,
as to find the early stages in the formation of a star, we must go far
back into the remote past.

[Sidenote: God conceived as a Creator worse than superfluous.]

If there is no necessity for the conception of God as a prime mover,
is there any necessity for the conception of God as the Creator of
the universe? A creative cause seems to the modern mind less and less
needed for the explanation of the world, for the fact of existence
stands in no need of explanation; what rather needs explanation is
non-existence. Death, repose, are all relative and derived. Death
implies life, and is itself only a provisional stage, an interval
between two metamorphoses. There exists no _punctum mortuum_, no
one really dead point in the universe. It is by a pure artifice of
thought that religions have conceived the universe as beginning in
annihilation, in death (which is a remote consequence of life), in
order to afford an opportunity for the intervention of a creative
power: creation is a resurrection following on a fictitious death.

[Sidenote: Nothingness an aspect of existence.]

The real state of the case is not that existence springs from
non-existence, but that non-existence is a simple aspect of existence,
or rather an illusion of thought. The notion of creation will be more
and more widely displaced by that of evolution and variation. Different
worlds are eternal variations on the same theme, the _tat tvam asi_ of
the Hindus tends to become a scientific variety. A substantial unity
of the world and the solidarity of all the beings in the world will,
undoubtedly, be more and more clearly demonstrated.

[Sidenote: God responsible for evil.]

The creation may be considered, since Kant’s time, as a demonstrably
indemonstrable and even inconceivable hypothesis; but Kant did not
stay to inquire whether the Biblical dogma of the creation will not
tend to appear to us increasingly immoral; a tendency which, according
to Kant’s principles, would suffice to cause it to be rejected in the
future. A doubt, which some thinkers of antiquity felt keenly, has come
to be widely diffused in our days; a Creator is a being in whom all
things find their reason and their cause, and who, consequently, is
ultimately responsible for everything. He is responsible for all the
evil in the universe. As the idea of infinite power, of supreme liberty
of action became inseparable from the conception of God, God was
deprived of every excuse, for the Absolute is dependent upon nothing.
Everything, on the contrary, depends on Him and finds its reason in
Him. In the last resort He alone is culpable; His work, in the manifold
series of its effects, presents itself to modern thought as one sole
action, and this action, like any other, is capable of being sat upon
in moral judgment; the author is to be judged by his work, the world
passes judgment on God. Well, as evil and immorality in the universe,
with the progress of the moral sense, become more shocking, it seems
that to admit the creation hypothesis is to centralize, to concentrate,
all the immorality of the world in one being, and to justify the
paradox: “God is evil.” To admit the doctrine of a Creator is, in a
word, to banish evil from the world to God, its primordial source; to
absolve men and the universe and accuse the author of both.

[Sidenote: Evil of denying the existence of evil to exculpate God.]

There is something still worse than referring the source of all evil
thus to a creative will, and that is, for the purpose of exculpating
the Creator, to deny the evil itself, and to declare that this world
is the best of all possible worlds. Such is the choice that Leibnitz
and the theologians made. Religions are obliged to apologize for
the universe, to profess an admiration for the divine plan; they
hold in reserve excuses for the existence of injustice, and labour
unconsciously to falsify the moral sense, in order to relieve God of
his responsibility.

[Sidenote: Doctrine that physical or intellectual evil are conditions
of well-being.]

Many hypotheses have been devised in the service of optimism to excuse
the Creator, without compromising the moral sense, and mankind’s
instinct for progress. Physical evil (suffering), intellectual evil
(error and doubt), have been declared to be a condition _sine qua
non_ of moral good; which would justify them. Moral evil would thus
remain the sole verifiable evil in the universe, and as moral evil
consists simply in evil intentions on the part of men, men alone, on
this hypothesis, would be responsible. The universe itself, that is
to say, would contain no evil except in the person of the man who is
purposely evil by his own free choice, and the possibility of moral
evil might be considered as a supreme condition of moral goodness,
the latter presupposing freedom of choice, a selection by the will,
and an alternative to be refused. The evil in the universe would thus
be compensated for by morality, suffering would be compensated for by
virtue, mistakes by good will. The world itself would be simply a means
of producing morality and, in its apparent imperfection, it would be
the best world possible, because its apparent imperfection would be
necessary to produce what is best in it.

[Sidenote: Doctrine that the dignity of the world lies in its
spontaneity.]

The world, it has been said, cannot be in every respect absolute,
for it would then be God; it must always be in the position of a
recipient; the less it receives—the more it acts in independence
of external aid, the more it develops from within, and the more it
approaches the Absolute, insomuch that the very poverty of the earth
constitutes its grandeur, since it is the condition of its real
wealth, a wealth not borrowed from another but acquired by its own
effort. Everything, therefore, becomes transfigured according to this
hypothesis, every suffering becomes a merit; God wished to create the
most spontaneous world possible, that is to say at bottom to create
as little as possible, to leave as large an initiative as possible to
his creatures. _Laissez faire_ is God’s device, as it is the device of
all good government. A small result, but obtained by spontaneity, is
superior to a greater result obtained by mechanical artifice. “Divine
art,” says a philosopher, in commenting on some doctrines of Plato,
“is infinitely superior to human art; it creates individuals who are
ends unto themselves and self-evolved. These individuals are not, as
Leibnitz believed, automata ... true perfection is autonomous. If God
is only a demiurge, he may be accused, and ought to be accused, of
being a bad workman. Is the world not full of unsuccessful attempts,
of unfortunate combinations, of ends either missed altogether or ill
achieved? The critics of Providence will always have enough to say, but
these unfinished sketches are the work not of God but of his creatures,
of the forces and individual souls that he has set in operation. In a
word God is not a workman who produces works, but a workman who creates
workmen.”[131] This formula sums up in a striking manner what may be
called transfigured optimism. The new hypothesis does not deny evil,
but, on the contrary, hastens to admit it; but by converting evil into
a consequence of spontaneity, it subordinates it to good itself, makes
it labour in the service of its opposite; the most fragmentary sketch
becomes respectable when it is a step, and a necessary step, toward a
masterpiece.

      [131] A. Fouillée, _Philosophie de Platon_, t. ii. p. 639. See
      also M. Secrétan, _Philosophie de la liberté_, and Vallier,
      _L’Intention morale_.

[Sidenote: Criticised.]

The hypothesis in question is certainly one which, within the realm of
theism, may well continue to be long the most plausible. It gives rise,
however, to a great many difficulties. In the first place it assumes
the superiority of what is spontaneous to what is not; of what, so to
speak, does itself, as compared with what is done. Be it so, but in
what respect can beings in this world be said to lead a spontaneous
existence; in what respect can I be said to lead a spontaneous
existence? Am I not the result of a multitude of causes? I was born
and am maintained by the consilience of a multitude of little cellular
or atomic volitions. Should I be less than I am if I were the result of
a single volition, and that a divine volition? Over and above myself
there always exist my antecedents, the causes of me; my true cause does
not lie within the limits of myself: what difference does it make to
me, therefore, whether those causes lie within the universe or beyond?
Whether the world is the more or less harmonious work of a multitude of
blind spontaneities or the work of a single intelligent will, neither
diminishes nor increases the value of any given individual that is the
product of the world. My ancestors are indifferent to me the instant I
become dependent upon ancestors at all. Should the statue of Pygmalion
reproach the sculptor with having made it beautiful, and having made it
with his own hands, and definitively fashioned it for life? Providing
it lives and is happy, it matters little whence its life comes.
Obscurity lies behind, light and life lie before, and it is forward
that one’s face is set.

[Sidenote: Results in determinism.]

In the new Platonic hypothesis, transfigured as above, the organization
of the individual always becomes, in the last resort, the work of a
reciprocal determinism. According to the ordinary hypothesis, it is
the work of a single, absolute, determining will; but the absolute or
relative character of the determining principle in nowise affects the
nature of what is determined. The actual world is no more passive,
if it is produced directly by the operation of the first cause, than
if it is produced indirectly by the intermediation of a multitude
of derivative causes, even if these causes present individually the
character of spontaneity. After all, since the individual must always
be solidary, solidarity between it and divine perfection is preferable
to solidarity with derivative imperfection.

[Sidenote: And contradicts itself.]

There is, however, in the Platonic and Aristotelian notion of
spontaneity an element of profundity and of verisimilitude, but it
leads precisely to the refutation of the doctrine of creation: once
carry the hypothesis of the spontaneity of existence to its ultimate
conclusion, and the original fund of existence must be impoverished
until nothing but nude unqualifiable substance be left; but that is to
say, one must go back to Aristotle’s pure force, to Hegel’s pure being,
which is identical with not being; the masterpiece of spontaneity
would be self-creation. The instant such a spontaneity is possible God
is a superfluity; it is easier to say that becoming arose out of the
identity of being and not being, or rather that becoming is eternal on
its own account. Becoming thus becomes God and theism becomes atheism
or pantheism.

[Sidenote: Summary.]

To sum up, the Creator unable to create bare, virtual substance, must
have created beings endowed with some real quality; but, if so, they
are once for all his works and not simply independent workmen. More
than that, such a substance with such qualities once created, such and
such effects necessarily follow; qualities are determinations which
determine subsequent determinations in their turn. Behold therefore the
present, big with the future. The world becomes a determined succession
of “works” which develop fatally from their earliest stage.

[Sidenote: Doctrine that God has created beings free to choose
criticized.]

M. Secrétan will tell us that God simply created free wills but not
substances; but it must be confessed that these free wills have been
immersed in a deterministic universe which leaves them little liberty
of action. Why, therefore, did He not create us freer and still
freer and as free as Himself? But we should have been gods, it is
objected:—so much the better, might be replied; there could not be
too many gods; we do not see why God should have reduced himself to
a unity, “as if the laws of number constituted a limitation of His
power.”[132] It does not appear why the Creator should be unable to
create a double of Himself; why He should be obliged to hand on the
divine life, that He wishes to share, on lower terms only; we do not
see why God’s productivity should involve a certain degeneration.

      [132] M. Fouillée has effectively stated this in his _Systèmes
      de morale contemporains_, where he in some measure attacks the
      hypothesis that he had incidentally proposed in his commentary
      on Plato.

[Sidenote: A maximum of liberty.]

In any event, in default of other attributes, we ought to be given the
maximum of possible liberty; admitting that we could not be created
free and equal to God, our liberty should differ from His by a minimum.
This minimum, being susceptible of infinite diminution, might become
less than any conceivable difference; it might become, that is to say,
infinitely little, practically zero; but we are far from any such
exalted station, and if God gave us liberty He was very miserly about
it.

[Sidenote: An abuse of language to call us free.]

To say the truth, it is only by an abuse of language that any such
ideal liberty is ascribed to us as is attributed to God, and regarded
as of infinite value. The freedom that religion ascribes to us is
freedom of the will, power to do evil or good, a power the very
consequence of which is irreconcilable with the notion of God. Without
entering upon a consideration of what such a power would be and of its
moral worth, why does our free-will exist in the midst of conditions so
unfavourable to it, so calculated to render it ineffective? The sole
response is the classic theory of the temptation. The temptation, as
an explanation of the world, practically involves the hypothesis of a
father exposing his children, as a means of testing their virtue, to
temptations of vice and crime, and knowing beforehand that they will
succumb. Morally, the conception is simply inadmissible; is worthy of
the distant times when hearts were harder than they are to-day. More
than that, the only beings that could in any proper sense be put to
the proof are truly conscientious beings, for they alone are capable
of entertaining a moral alternative. A reflective conscience is so
rare in the world! By virtue of what temptation resisted are minerals
and vegetables permitted to exist in unconsciousness and sleep, while
animals are torn by the miseries of life and death without being able
to convert their sufferings into a confirmation of the moral will or
amelioration of their lot?

[Sidenote: Doctrine of the fall.]

The supreme resource of Christianity and of religions generally is
the doctrine of the fall, but this explanation of evil as the result
of a primitive imperfection is an explanation of evil by evil. The
fall must have been preceded by some defect in the will itself, or
the will would not have failed. Original sin is not an ultimate; one
does not stumble if there is no obstacle in the way, and one’s legs
are well made, and one is walking in the eye of the Lord. Sin involves
temptation, and the doctrine of the temptation necessarily implies
that God was the first tempter; morally, it was God himself who fell
in the fall of His creatures by Him planned. To explain original
sin, which is the root of all sin, the sin of Lucifer, theologians
have resorted not to a temptation within the realm of sense, but to
a temptation within the realm of intelligence. It was by pride that
the angels fell. Their sin rose thus out of the very centre of their
minds. But pride is incidental only to short-sightedness. Complete
science is aware of its own limitations. Pride, therefore, results from
insufficiency of knowledge. The pride of the angels was due to God. One
may have reasons for wishing to do and for doing evil, but reasons do
not hold in the face of reason itself. If, according to the partisans
of free-will, human intelligence is capable by virtue of pride and
inner perversity of creating out of nothing motives for evil-doing, it
is at least incapable of so doing except in so far as its knowledge
is limited, ambiguous and uncertain. Practically, nobody hesitates
except in the absence of absolute knowledge. There is no such thing
as rationally and consciously flying in the face of reason. Lucifer
was, therefore, by his very nature impeccable. The will to do evil is
borne of the opposition which an imperfect intelligence fancies it
perceives, in a world hypothetically perfect, between its own advantage
and the advantage of everybody else. But if God and his works are
really perfect, such an antinomy between the good of the individual
and the universal good, which even to the best human intelligences
appears provisional only, would _a fortiori_ appear so to one of the
archangels of the intelligence, to the Light-bearer of thought. To
know is to participate in the supreme truth, in the divine conscience;
to possess all knowledge would be to possess, among other things, the
moral insight of God; and how out the midst of all that divinity should
anything Satanic arise?

[Sidenote: God always responsible in the last resort.]

To-day, when a sin is committed among men and it cannot be traced
to any fault of education, or of environment, or of overwhelming
temptation, men of science look for the explanation among the ancestors
of the guilty person, in the conviction that they must be in the
presence of a case of atavism. No such explanation could exist in the
case of God’s firstborn. When the world was young and beautiful and
good, original sin was as wonderful as the first appearance of the
world itself; it was a veritable creation of something out of nothing.
Satan’s creation was superior to God’s. His moral _fiat nox_ was
greater in genius and creative power than God’s _fiat lux_. In effect,
every religious explanation of evil ultimately leads to the ascription
of it to God himself or to a being more powerful than God, and in
both cases equally the Creator is debased. That fact constitutes the
principal reason that compromises the creation hypothesis, properly so
called, for every philosophical mind.

       *       *       *       *       *

[Sidenote: Special Providence and miracles.]

II. The second notion of theism is that of Providence, which may
be either general or special. Along with the notion of a special
Providence governing the world from without, we have seen that the
notion of miracle must be included. The sole means by which these two
decrepit conceptions can be defended are the following: Conceive,
with Pascal, two worlds, a physical world and above it the moral
world enveloping it, and in places penetrating it. The points of
intersection, so to speak, between the moral and physical world are
miracles. They are not so much breaches in the laws of nature as
affirmations of superior laws. Such is the argument; but we reply
that the so-called superior laws are inevitably, in certain respects,
contradictory to those of nature, in the very respects in reference to
which the miracle has happened. One cannot, for example, suppose that
a saint, precipitated from the height of a rock, resists the law of
gravitation and floats up to heaven, without a manifest contradiction,
so far as natural laws are concerned; without a destruction, indeed, of
those laws. More than that, a moral law is such precisely in so far as
it differs in the lines of its applicability from natural law; just in
so far as a conflict between it and natural laws is inconceivable. Only
a natural law can suspend (and that apparently only) the operation of a
natural law.

[Sidenote: Attempt to limit its activity to the subjective side.]

It has been fancied that the difficulty about miracles may be done
away with by conceiving that Providence acts, not upon the material
universe, but upon human thought, by means of suggestion, inspirations
from on high, providential ideas; but contemporary science has
established so intimate a connection between motion and thought that
it is impossible to distinguish between an influence exerted in the
spiritual and an influence exerted in the material world. It is
hopeless to attempt to immaterialize Providence in order to save it.
The special intervention of Providence must be material or not at all.

[Sidenote: Universal Providence.]

The old conception of miracles and of the supernatural and special
Providence was therefore, in a certain sense, logical. Religions had
not been mistaken; they had perceived that the day Providence became
too exclusively universal religion would be absorbed in metaphysics,
and this result, in effect, will be produced in the future. Religions
have never supported the theory of a general Providence, and it is
certain that if a general Providence sufficed for the abstract reason
of a Malebranche, with his sense of order, symmetry, and law, it would
not suffice for the human heart, with its sense of justice and its
desire, if it is to sacrifice itself for God, to find in the God at
least a defender and a benefactor. A benefit loses its value as such
by being too indirect; humanity has little understanding of justice in
general which treats the individual as a means of securing the good of
the whole and sacrifices him at need—at least, for a time. Charity,
like justice, it seems to him, should be individual and special. A
universal Providence is so universal that no traces of it exist in
the details of life, and in especial in the particular evils and
sufferings which form so large a part of life. The God of Malebranche,
who is incapable of showing His effective benevolence to any of us
individually, is paralyzed, as Louis XIV. was, by His very greatness.
He is the sole being who cannot move without breaking a natural law,
and who consequently is condemned to eternal immobility. The least of
His interventions being a miracle, He cannot employ the means that
other beings employ without derogating from His dignity and His power;
so that God is reduced, if He is to remain God, either to standing
inert or to contradicting our intelligence. By that very fact He ceases
to be lovable, unless one pretend to love Him precisely for what He
cannot do, for the benevolence that He cannot show, as for the prayers
He cannot grant. Pity is the sole sentiment that can be roused in us by
a being who is so good that He cannot wish evil, and so powerless that
He is obliged to see nothing but evil accomplished in the world. No
human misery could be comparable to a divine misery like that. The very
height of suffering must be experienced by a God who should at once
be conscious of His own infinity and should feel the distance which
separates Him from the world which He has created. Only the clear and
profound vision of such a God could penetrate the abyss of evil to the
bottom, and it is He of all beings in the world who would suffer from
an eternal vertigo.

       *       *       *       *       *

[Sidenote: God’s omnipotence.]

What is most unacceptable in the traditional notion of Providence is
the attribute of omnipotence. In the first place, divine omnipotence
is inconsistent with the existence of evil; in the second place, it
leads logically to the possibility of supernatural intervention in this
world, which, if it is to be of any service, must be special and not
general. To avoid these implications of the conception of Providence,
John Stuart Mill has conceived a superior and divine being who should
not be all-powerful. This being would be the principle of good, acting
in the universe according to natural laws, but hindered and retarded in
his action by these laws themselves, which bring suffering and death.
The existence of such a being once established, religion would be saved
and morality confirmed. Virtue would consist in a sort of co-operation
with this great unknown being, who is struggling against evil. The good
man would feel that he was aiding God and that God was aiding him in
so far as He found it possible.

[Sidenote: Non-omnipotent God.]

This amended conception of Providence is more admissible and more
reconcilable with the real and imperfect world that we are familiar
with. But it must be confessed that the amendment amounts to an almost
complete cancellation. If Providence is to be reduced thus simply to
one of the forces at work in nature, to the force that makes more or
less partially and provisionally for goodness, there is nothing to
distinguish it from the power that makes for evolution, from natural
selection, or from any other beneficent natural law. To personify such
laws is futile scientifically; and, practically, is it so very useful?
Or conceive the being as existent side by side with these laws and
watching their operation, but unable to contravene it; but so to do
is to return to the conception of an ineffective, immobile God. The
prime condition of existence for a God is to be good for something; a
non-omnipotent God soon comes to be an impotent God. The actual world
marks the extreme limits of the power of such a God, and at some stage
in the course of evolution the unconscious forces of nature, leagued
together against the principle of goodness, may succeed in paralyzing
it entirely.

[Sidenote: Is such a God to be conceived as eternal?]

More than that, is a non-omnipotent God to be conceived as eternal?
If not, He is in no very striking respect superior to man. His power
is so slight that He has not even been able to make it very clearly
manifest to mankind that it exists at all. Or if He is eternal, and
eternally present in all things, then His lack of power is growing and
becoming radical. One may in any event congratulate one’s self that a
blind and indifferent universe has, among all possible combinations,
fallen by chance into the one which constitutes our present world; but
a God who has pursued goodness conscientiously through a whole eternity
demonstrates His complete incapacity, if He has succeeded in producing
nothing better than such a miscarriage of the ideal as this universe.
The judgment that may fairly be passed upon the world is altogether
dependent upon the question who made it and who created life; if the
world is self-evolved, it may well appear to us as possessing a certain
beauty, as giving an earnest of better things; but if it is the work
of an intelligent will, present in all things, and persisting in its
designs throughout the eternity of the past, it is inevitable that
one should feel that this volition has not been possessed of great
power, that the importance of the victory is not in proportion to the
duration of the struggle, that such a God does not constitute a very
solid support, and that His existence is a matter of indifference to
the future of the universe. Is such a God more powerful than humanity,
or even so powerful? His eternity is but a proof of voluntary or forced
inaction; far from dignifying Him it debases Him. On the surface of
the earth there are many species of insects which were probably in
existence before the race of man. In the transparent amber that belongs
to tertiary strata may be seen the little corselet of the melipones
caught and held there these past five hundred thousand years. Are these
distant predecessors of the human race on that account more venerable?

       *       *       *       *       *

[Sidenote: The religion of humanity.]

John Stuart Mill, a disciple of Auguste Comte, put forth this theory of
a non-omnipotent Providence, conceived on the model of the human will,
with a certain mental reservation; his real meaning was that for many
cultivated men such a being, labouring for goodness, according to the
utmost of its limited power, would be confounded with humanity, taken
as a whole. Humanity is, in effect, according to Comte, a great being
of divine aspirations, to whom one might, with all one’s heart, render
homage; in especial, if one leaves out of account the individuals who
are, properly speaking, only parasites, and do not co-operate for the
production of the common result, whom progress consists precisely in
excluding from society. Religion, on this theory, is the state of
spiritual unity resulting from the convergence of all our thoughts and
all our actions toward the service of humanity. This, as Mill said,
is a genuine religion, quite capable of resisting sceptical attack
and of undertaking the labour of the older cults. According to this
doctrine, Providence is simply humanity, looking after the interest of
its individual members. Such a Providence, regarded as one with human
volition, might assuredly be accepted by any philosopher; it marks, as
we shall see later, the extreme limit of which the development of the
notion of a Special Providence is susceptible, the point at which this
notion and the conception of human morality become one. The precept
to love mankind in God becomes transformed into the precept to love
God in mankind. For a philosopher who identifies God with his ideal,
both precepts are equally true and beautiful. We have ourselves shown
how the religious sentiment in the course of its evolution tends to
become one with the respect and love of humanity, and how religious
faith tends to develop into a moral faith, and a simple and active
hopefulness in the triumph of moral goodness.

[Sidenote: Criticised.]

John Stuart Mill’s and Comte’s ideas are thus shielded against
criticism so long as they are taken in a general and almost
metaphorical sense; but if they are to be interpreted literally and
made the basis of a cult and a religion of humanity, they are puerile
simply. Precisely because Providence can be realized by humanity, the
cult for Providence, with all its ceremonies, invocations, adorations,
which are manifest and ridiculous paganism, must be suppressed. Every
organism exemplifies a certain sort of Providence—even the social
organism, which is the equilibrium of the laws of life. The totality of
an organism is truly admirable, and one may readily understand how any
individual member, if he is endowed with consciousness, might admire
the whole to which he belongs; but how could he make it the object of
a cult? The cellules which constitute me might well be interested in
the preservation of what I call myself and help each other, and by
that very fact help me to that end, but they could not adore me. Love
of humanity is one thing, and idolatry of humanity, or sociolatry,
according to Comte’s term, is another. A really sincere and enlightened
love of humanity is the very opposite of such idolatry; would be
by it compromised and corrupted. The cult for humanity reminds one
of the antique, naïve cult for the family, for the lares, for the
hearth, for the sacred fire kept alive beneath the ashes. To preserve
respect and love to-day does not require a resuscitation of all these
superstitions; respect and love pass from heart to heart without need
of ceremonial as a medium. The Positivist religion, far from being a
step in advance, is a step backward toward the superstitious beliefs
which have been banished because they were useless, and consequently
harmful.

       *       *       *       *       *

[Sidenote: Religion must be cosmic.]

Religion ought to be not only human but cosmic, and such it will be by
the very nature of the case as the result of reflection. Theism will be
obliged, if it is to subsist at all, to confine itself to the vaguest
possible affirmation of a principle analogous to the soul as the
mysterious origin of the world and of its development. The essential
character of this principle must be that it is not really separate
from the world nor opposed to its determinism. Beliefs in the creation
and in a special Providence will give place more and more to belief in
some spontaneous action, which is essential to beings generally, and
in especial to those who are endowed with consciousness. Religion has
gradually come to be a metaphysics of immanent finality, consisting in
the single general proposition: the world possesses a significance, and
is making toward an end and aim of its own;[133] the world is a society
of beings who may come to discover in themselves an identity of moral
impulse.[134] God is the term by which we designate what renders the
movement of the world toward a state of peace, concord, and harmony
_possible_. And since for human intelligence the possible and the
real[135] are confused, a belief in the possibility of a better world
becomes the belief in something divine which is immanent in this world.

      [133] Kant’s _Kritik der Urtheils-Kraft_.

      [134] See M. A. Fouillée, _Les systèmes de morale
      contemporains_.

      [135] See Aristotle, _Metaphysica_, and Hegel’s _Logik_.

[Sidenote: Theism and atheism insensibly pass into each other.]

Between idealistic theism and atheism the distance may be
diminished _ad infinitum_. Many atheists, language to the contrary
notwithstanding, are already at one with theists, intoxicated with God.
If the actual existence of God be called in question, at least His
progressive existence, the progressive realization of an ideal, the
gradual descent of Christ from heaven to earth, may be admitted. The
presentiment of progress thus becomes merged in a sense of the actual
presence of the divine. The ideal seems to live and palpitate in the
world about one; it is as if an artist’s vision of his work should be
so intense that it should seem to float out of his brain and take its
place upon the untouched canvass before him.

[Sidenote: Theism must be furnished with a new vocabulary.]

The power of words is limited; there are shades and subtleties of
thought that cannot be expressed in language. What possible verbal
reply can be given to questions like those that Marguerite asks of
Faust? “It is a long time since thou wert at mass ... dost thou believe
in God?” “My beloved,” replies Faust, “who would dare to say I believe
in God?” ... “So thou dost not believe in Him?... Who would dare to say
that he does not believe when he listens to the voice of his heart,
when a sense of tenderness and happiness fills his soul? Pronounce
the first words that occur to thee. What difference what thou callest
it: happiness, heart, love, God? The feeling is everything, the word
is vain.” The deist philosopher who holds words cheap seems to the
superficial multitude to be simply a hypocritical sceptic; whereas the
rigid atheist displays the narrowness of a sectary. What is certain is
that the name of God has sometimes been associated with the greatest
of human conceptions, sometimes with the most barbarous. The theistic
hypothesis cannot continue to subsist unless it be freed once for all
from puerile and gross associations.

[Sidenote: Rational religion.]

It is toward this consummation that theism, at its best, and in
particular what Kant calls religion, within the limits presented by
reason, is tending. It merits a special examination.

[Sidenote: Neo-Kantianism.]

The neo-Kantian religion ascribes the supreme place to moral goodness
as the directing principle of every reasonable will. From that
premise the neo-Kantians deduce “moral liberty” as the condition of
goodness. For goodness, in their judgment, is simply freedom conceived
as appearing to itself in its intellectual purity, and dominating
the phenomenal self. Freedom thus conceived occupies a place above
phenomena, which belong essentially to necessity and to determinism.
Kantians found also implied in the notion of absolute liberty, subject
to the condition of time, the attribute of eternity. They say, with
Spinoza: “I feel, and I know that I am eternal; eternity is one with
divinity.” Is it not the eternal that all the nations of men have
adored? I feel God therefore present in myself. He reveals himself to
me in the moral ideal. But is this God that my conscience reveals to me
really myself? Is he each of us, and must one believe that the universe
in the last resort is, as has been said, a republic of free-wills—that
there are thus as many Gods as individuals, and that we are all Gods?
Or does this multiplicity of individuals and of personalities exist
only in appearance, and is the universe at bottom the expression of a
single will? Theism may choose between these two hypotheses—between
a sort of metaphysical and moral polytheism and a sort of monotheism,
and may subsequently arrange to its liking the relations which it may
suppose to exist between the absolute will and the world of phenomenon.
But a belief in a moral ideal does not in the least involve anything
more than a belief in something eternal and divine, as shaping the
universal course of things. One cannot bend it to the service of any
one determinate religion, rather than of any other. Within certain
limits, however, it may lend some support to the moral and religious
sentiments. The most acceptable form of theistic doctrine in the future
will, no doubt, be some moral philosophy analagous to that of Kant.
Kantianism itself, however, is too closely bound up with the notion of
duty, properly so called, and with the categorical imperative. It, like
Judaism, is a religion of law. Instead of the law, one will content
one’s self, in all probability, in the future, with an ideal conceived
as supreme above all things, and as exercising upon our thought and
will the highest attraction that can be exercised by what has been
called the power of an ideal.[136]

      [136] See the criticism of Kantianism in the _Systèmes de
      morale contemporains_, by M. Alfred Fouillée.

[Sidenote: Belief consists not in worship, but in action.]

A belief in the divine will then no longer consist in passive
adoration, but in action. A belief in Providence will no longer
consist in a justification of the existing world and of its evils in
the name of the divine intention, but in an effort to introduce by
human intervention a greater amount of justice and of goodness into
the world. We have seen that the notion of Providence was based among
ancient peoples on the conception of an exterior finality, forcibly
imposed upon things, of a secret and transcendent aim, which the
universe was warped to serve by force of some unknown will. With such
a theory of things, man was incessantly checked in his activity,
since he conceived it to be impossible to prevent the course of the
world from achieving its aim. The world seemed to him to be organized
definitively; he had no hope, except in prayer and miracle; everything
about him seemed to him to be sacred; the inviolability of nature
was both a principle and a consequence of the notion of Providence
thus understood. And, as we have seen, science was long regarded as
sacrilegious. It created both surprise and scandal to see science
intervene in the affairs of this world, disturbing everything, changing
the direction of natural forces, transforming the divine rulers of the
world into humble ministrants to human wants. In our days, however,
science is coming to be more and more held in honour. For the past
century nature has been, to the best of human ability, turned upside
down. Humanity’s long quietism has been succeeded by a feverish
activity. Everybody wishes to lend a hand in the universal mechanism,
and to contribute his part in the modification of the direction of the
whole; everybody wishes to bend things to his own views, and to become,
so far as in him lies, a minor Providence.

[Sidenote: Increasing power of mankind in the universe.]

Just as the individual is coming to feel himself more and more a
citizen of the state, so he is coming to feel himself more and more a
citizen of the universe, inseparably bound by relations of cause and
effect with the universal sum of phenomena. He recognizes that there
is nothing in the world that does not concern him, and that on every
side he can exert an influence, great or small, and leave his mark on
the great world. He perceives with astonishment the extent of the power
of his will and intelligence. Just in so far as his rational faculties
establish a connection between phenomena, they establish by that very
fact a connection between phenomena and himself, and he no longer
feels himself alone in the universe. Since, according to a celebrated
theory, the centre of the world is in each and every distinct being,
it follows that if this centre were exhaustively self-conscious it
would see all the rays in infinite space focussing in it, and all the
chains of phenomenal causation meeting in it, and the effects of its
volition stretching out into infinity, and its every action possessing
an influence upon the totality of things. It would perceive itself to
be a sort of universal Providence.

[Sidenote: A consequence of liberty of thought.]

If human beings are not so exhaustively self-conscious as all that,
the progress of science is carrying them forward in that direction.
A portion of the government of nature is in our hands, some part of
the responsibility for what takes place in the universe is on our
heads. At the beginning man conceived himself as living in a state of
dependence on the world, in a state which ancient religions symbolize;
at present he perceives that the world is equally dependent upon him.
The substitution of a human providence for the omnipresent influence of
a divine providence might be given as being, from this point of view,
the formula of progress; the increasing independence of mankind, in the
face of the natural universe, will thus result in an increasing inner
independence, in a growing independence of mind and thought.

[Sidenote: Mankind to be its own special providence.]

The vulgar conception of a special and exterior providence which, as
we have seen, is so closely bound up with the conception of man’s
place in the universe as one of subjection—nay, even the most refined
conception of providence as transcendent and distant and as assigning
to each being its determinate place in the totality of things—may
thus, without ground of regret, be displaced in the mind of humanity.
We shall some day perceive that we are stronger when we stand on our
feet, shoulder to shoulder, hand in hand, than when we kneel with bowed
heads and implore the unfeeling sky. Among the ancient Germans, when
one of the faithful was about to enter a sacred forest he had his hands
bound together as a symbol of his subjection to the gods; if he had
the misfortune to fall as he was making his way into the forest, he did
not dare to get up again; so to do would have been an affront to the
gods; he was reduced to squirming and rolling like a reptile out of the
immense temple. To this primitive conception of religious servitude,
the modern conception of mankind as free in the presence of its God,
of its beloved ideal, of its conceived work in the world, of its dream
of progress, is more and more opposed. Even at the present day a true
sense of the divine may be recognized by its giving man a consciousness
of his liberty and his dignity rather than his subjection; the true
gods are those who make us lift our heads higher in the struggle for
existence; adoration no longer consists in prostration but in standing
upright.

[Sidenote: Story of the anchorite.]

To borrow once more from the classic land of symbolism, from India,
whence our German or Gallic ancestors came, the great epic of Ramayana
tells us of a sainted and sage anchorite who exemplified in his own
person the whole sum of human virtue and piety. One day, confiding
in the justice of heaven, he was invoking Indra and the whole chorus
of the gods, and the gods were capricious and did not listen to him;
his prayer fell back from the heavens unheard. The man, perceiving
the indifference of the gods, was moved with indignation; and
gathering together the power that he had hoarded, by his sacrifices
and renunciation, and, feeling himself more powerful than his gods,
more powerful than Indra himself, began to issue forth commands to
the high heavens. And at his voice new stars rose and shone in the
crystal sphere; he said, “Let there be light!” and there was light;
he refashioned the world; his goodness became a creative providence.
Nor was this all: he conceived the notion of creating new and better
gods; and Indra himself was trembling toward his fall, for not even he
that commands the air and the skies shall prevail against sanctity.
Indra, the powerful, therefore hastened to yield and cried out to the
saint, “Thy will be done!” and he left a place in the heavens for the
new stars, and their light bears eternal witness to the omnipotence of
goodness, which is the supreme God and object of adoration among men.




CHAPTER IV.

PANTHEISM.

REVIEW OF THE PRINCIPAL METAPHYSICAL HYPOTHESES WHICH WILL REPLACE
DOGMA.—_Continued._

    I. Optimistic pantheism—Transformation of transcendent Deism
      into immanent theism and pantheism—Disanthropomorphized
      God, according to Messrs. Fiske and Spencer—Diverse
      forms of pantheism—Optimistic and intellectualistic
      pantheism of Spinoza—Objections, Spinoza’s fatalism—The
      moral significance that might be lent to pantheism by the
      introduction of some notion of a final cause—Qualities
      and defects of pantheism—Conception of unity upon which
      it is founded—This conception criticised—Its possible
      subjectivity.

    II. Pessimistic pantheism—Pessimistic interpretation
      of religions in Germany—1. Causes of the progress of
      pessimism in the present epoch—Progress of pantheistic
      metaphysics and of positive science—Penalties incident
      to thought and reflection—Mental depression and sense of
      powerlessness, etc.—2. Is pessimism curable?—Possible
      remedies—The labour problem and the future of
      society—Illusions involved in pessimism—Inexactitude
      of its estimate of pleasures and pains—Quotation
      from Leopardi—Criticism of the practical results of
      pessimism—Nirvâna—An experiment in Nirvâna—Will
      pessimistic pantheism be the religion of the future?


[Sidenote: Conception of God being disanthropomorphized.]

As theism becomes immanent, the personality of God comes to be more and
more vaguely conceived. It is the very existence of God’s personality
that pantheism either denies or confounds with that of the universe.
According to Mr. Spencer and Mr. Fiske, the movement which led
humanity to conceive its God anthropomorphically will be succeeded by
a movement in the opposite direction; God will be deprived of all of
His human attributes, will be disanthropomorphized. He will first be
shorn of His lower impulses, and then of everything which is analogous
to human sensibility; the highest human sentiments will be regarded
as too gross to be attributed to Him. Similarly with the attributes
of intelligence and will; every human faculty will in its turn be
abstracted and divinity, as it becomes relieved of its limitations,
will lose, one after the other, every item of its significance to the
intelligence; it will be conceived ultimately as a vague unity simply,
which eludes the forms of distinct thought. Pantheism lends itself to
this notion of an indeterminate and indeterminable disanthropomorphized
divinity. Nevertheless, the crudest and most naïve speculations,
anthropomorphism and fetichism, in Mr. Spencer’s judgment, contained
a part of the truth, namely, that the power that manifests itself in
consciousness is simply a different form of the mysterious power that
manifests itself beyond consciousness. The last result attained by
human science, Mr. Spencer thinks, is that the unknown force which
exists outside of consciousness is, if not similar to the known force
that exists in consciousness, at least a simple mode of the same force,
since the two are convertible into each other. So that the final result
of the line of speculation begun by primitive man is that the power
which manifests itself in the material universe is the same as that
which manifests itself in us under the form of consciousness.

[Sidenote: Pantheism.]

If pantheism goes the length of denying the personality and
individuality of God, it is by way of compensation inclined to
attribute a sort of individuality to the world. In effect, if God is
present in every atom of the universe, the universe is a veritable
living being possessing an organic unity, and developing, like an
embryo, according to a determinate law. What distinguishes pantheism
from this point of view is, therefore, the substantial unity that it
ascribes to the world.

[Sidenote: Different forms of pantheism.]

But, of course, pantheism is a very indefinite doctrine, susceptible
of many interpretations according to the manner in which the universal
energy, the omnipresent unity, and in especial, the fundamental ground
of its activity, which some regard as determinism simply and others as
the orderly achievement of a final cause, are conceived. Nay, more;
both necessity and the orderly achievement of a final cause may be
conceived optimistically or pessimistically.


_I. Optimistic pantheism._

[Sidenote: Spinozism.]

The first kind of pantheism, then, that which conceives a single
substance as developing in an infinity of modes with no final cause
in view, may be typified by the purely intellectualistic pantheism of
Spinoza. This doctrine shows us, as existing in the totality of things,
the immanent logic which presides over its development. The essence of
human nature is reason, since reason is the essence of man. The proper
function of reason is understanding, and to understand is to perceive
the necessity of things, and the necessity of things is nature, or,
if you will, God. Reason serves no other purpose than to enable us
to understand; and the soul, in so far as it employs reason, regards
that alone as useful which leads to understanding. To conceive the
absolute necessity of eternal nature is to conceive that which, being
subject only to the law of its own being, is free; it is, therefore, to
conceive eternal freedom. And by that very fact it is to participate
in eternal freedom, to identify itself with it. A consciousness of
necessity is thus one with the fact of freedom. Human thought thus
identifies itself with divine thought and becomes a consciousness
of eternity. This consciousness, which is supreme joy, is love of
God. The mystic Hebrew and Christian idea thus proves one with the
moral theories of antiquity in Spinoza’s vast synthesis. Intellectual
intuition is self-conscious nature; the intellectual liberty, as the
Stoics taught it, is consciousness of necessity, and nature possessing
itself; and mystic ecstasy, by which the individual is absorbed in
universal being, is nature returning to itself and rediscovering its
eternal existence beneath its passing modes.[137]

      [137] See the chapter on Spinoza in the author’s _Morale
      d’Épicure_, p. 230.

[Sidenote: An optimistic fatalism.]

The objection that moral and religious philosophy urged, and always
will urge, against Spinoza’s pantheism, considered as a possible
substitute for religion, is that it is an optimistic fatalism, that
regards everything as achieved by the mechanical and brutal operation
of efficient causes, and excludes the possibility of any conception of
final cause or of progress, properly so called. The evolution of the
modes of substance, even when it results in pain, death, and vice, is
divine; and the question arises, why this universe, which is alleged to
be perfect and incapable of progress, should not be wholly motionless,
and why this eternal, aimless agitation in the bosom of absolute
substance should exist?

[Sidenote: Fiske’s theory of a dramatic movement in the universe.]

In Mr. Fiske’s judgment, Spinozism is the only pantheism, properly so
called. The remark seems to us unduly to restrict the application of
the term. Every system of theism that involves the notion of a final
cause tends to become pantheistic when it denies the transcendence and
admits the organic unity of the universe, which is the _Deus vivens_,
the _natura naturans_, with a law of progress which is superior to
the necessary laws of pure logic and mathematics and mechanics. The
exclusion of any notion of the immanence of a final cause in things is
not essential to pantheism. One might even conceive a sort of moral
pantheism which should recognize a certain moral significance in the
world, or at least what Mr. Fiske himself calls a dramatic tendency
toward a moral dénouement. The instant men feel it to be a god that is
labouring in the universe, they feel, rightly or wrongly, reassured as
to the destiny of the moral ideal; they feel that they have an aim to
march toward, and seem to hear, in the shadow of things, a multitude
marching with them. They no longer have a sense of the vanity of life;
all life, on the contrary, becomes divine, if not as it is, at least as
it tends to be and ultimately will be.

[Sidenote: Criticised.]

This system, according to its partisans, may be regarded as an
induction which is justified by the modern doctrine of evolution.
Mr. Fiske even goes the length of saying that Darwinism has done as
much to confirm theology as to weaken it. Unhappily, nothing is more
problematic than such an interpretation of modern science. Science
reveals no element of divinity in the universe, and the process of
evolution, which results in the incessant construction and destruction
of similar worlds in an endless round, moves toward no conscious or
unconscious natural end, so far as we can discover. Scientifically,
therefore, the notion of a final cause of the universe may be no more
than a human conception, than a bit of abstract anthropomorphism. No
scientific induction can justify one in ascribing to the universe
as such a conscious purpose. And it is equally rash to conceive the
universe as a whole possessing a psychical and moral unity, since the
universe, as science reveals it to us, is an infinity in no sense
grouped about a centre. Materially speaking, the universe may perhaps
be regarded as the expression of a single power, but not as possessing
any moral or psychic unity. Whatever is organized, living, feeling,
thinking, is, so far as we know, finite, and the equivalence of forces
in the universe possesses nothing in common with the centralization
of these forces. It is, perhaps, precisely because the forces of the
universe are not moving in the same direction that the struggle and
contest which are the life of the world exist. Who knows but that for
the universe to become a unity and a total would involve its becoming
finite, involve the acquisition of a centre, and by that very fact,
perhaps, of a circumference which would arrest the eternal expansion of
matter and life in infinite space.

[Sidenote: No unity in the so-called universe.]

What constitutes the charm of pantheism, for a number of its followers,
is precisely this conception of unity in the world; but when one
endeavours to make the conception precise, it proves so evanescent
that it ultimately resolves itself into the absolute indetermination
of Hegelian Non-Being. The more one examines it, the more one asks
one’s self whether the unity that pantheism ascribes to the universe
is not as purely a bit of anthropomorphism as is the design that
pantheism attributes to the universe. The character of definiteness
and of totality that the universe seems to possess may be simply a
form that the human mind imposes upon the world of experience. Project
on a wall—the wall of Plato’s cavern—shadows of numberless confused
objects, of revolving atoms and formless clouds, and they will all
fall into some certain figure; will look like the fantastic shadow of
certain human constructions: will present the outline of towers and
cities, animals and what not. The unity and figure of the world are
perhaps simply of the same nature. Apart from our conception of it, the
world is perhaps infinite, and infinity can never mean anything else
to the human mind than formlessness, for we are, by the very nature of
the case, unable to describe its contours. The unity of the world is
perhaps realized only in our minds; it is, perhaps, only from our minds
that the mass of things obtain such unity as they seem to possess.
Neither the world nor humanity are totals except in so far as we think
of them as such, and act upon them, and group them about our thought
and action as a centre.

[Sidenote: Summary.]

To sum up, if the need of unity seems to justify pantheism, this
need receives, at least, but an illusory satisfaction in the two
principal forms of pantheism, and, in especial, in the deterministic
form. Either the primordial and finite unity of the world is abstract
and indeterminate and therefore purely subjective; or it becomes
determinate in attributes which are as human as those of the god of
atheism. The will which Schopenhauer makes the basis of his system
is either the human will or simply force (which itself is human or
animal), or the sense of effort, or, finally, pure abstraction.
The same is true of the eternal force which Mr. Spencer regards as
immanent in the universe. Such conceptions are more meagre in content
but not necessarily more objective than those of the God of love, the
World-Spirit, the World-Thought.


_II. Pessimistic pantheism._

[Sidenote: Pessimism.]

Pantheism has travelled from Spinoza’s optimism to Schopenhauer’s
pessimism; its most recent form, and in some respects one of its most
ancient forms. The pessimistic interpretation of religions with death
or Nirvâna regarded as the redemption, is making incessant progress
in Germany. Pascal long ago said: “Of all creatures that inhabit the
earth, the Christian alone avoids pleasure and willingly embraces
pain.” Germany, after having resuscitated Buddhism with Schopenhauer,
Von Hartmann, Bahnsen, is in a fair way to supply us with a sort of
pessimistic edition of Christianity which will far outdo Pascal. But
for evil and sin, religion would not have existed, Von Hartmann thinks,
and as evil is of the essence of existence annihilation is the sole
salvation possible. Bahnsen, in his philosophy of despair reaches an
analogous conclusion. The most interesting representative of the new
doctrine is Philipp Mainlaender, the author of the “Philosophy of the
Redemption” (Die Philosophie der Erclösing). He was the son of parents
of an exalted piety, and grandson of a mystic who died of nervous
fever in his thirty-third year, and brother of another mystic who, on
his arrival in India, was converted to Buddhism and died soon after,
exhausted by the intensity of his mental life. Mainlaender found his
Damascus in Italy; the heavens opened upon him in a bookshop in Naples
where he discovered the writings of Schopenhauer. After having composed
his system of pessimistic philosophy, he supervised the printing of the
first volume, and the day he received his first copy (March 31, 1876)
he hanged himself.[138] The sincerity of this pessimist’s conviction
cannot be denied, nor the power of abstract ideas implanted on a brain
prepared for them by heredity, and by the intellectual tendencies of
the times. Mainlaender regarded philosophy as some day destined to
replace religion, but the philosophy is to be pessimistic; Mainlaender
declared himself a Christian even while he was founding a scientific
system of atheism. Freedom to commit suicide is the modern substitute
for the beautiful illusion of immortality. Salvation by death will,
Mainlaender thought, take the place of salvation by eternal life. The
tree of science will thus become the legendary fig-tree of Timon the
misanthrope, the branches of which were weighted every morning afresh
by the bodies of the dead, who had come in search of oblivion from the
evil of life, and had found it in self-destruction.

      [138] See in the _Revue philosophique_, June, 1885, an article
      by M. Arréat on Mainlaender.

[Sidenote: Must find the causes of pessimism.]

I. To estimate the value and probable duration of the pessimistic
sentiment, which has in some cases at the present day been identified
with the religious sentiment, one must first consider its causes.

[Sidenote: The growth of pantheistic metaphysics.]

Different reasons have brought about this transformation of pantheism,
which after having divinized the world, now inspires the individual to
dream fondly on his annihilation and reabsorption into the unity of
things. The first cause is the progress of pantheistic metaphysics.
After having adored nature as the product of immanent reason,
pantheists have come to regard it as a work of immanent unreason,
as the degeneration of an indeterminate and unconscious unity in
the misery and conflict of phenomenal selves, of conscious beings
condemned to suffering. At the very least, nature is indifferent to
man. Eternal force, which is so much spoken of to-day, is no more
comforting and reassuring to us than eternal substance. Right or wrong,
the metaphysical instinct, which is identical at bottom with the moral
instinct, demands not only the presence of life in all things, but of
life in pursuit of an ideal of goodness and universal sociality.

[Sidenote: Persistence of anthropomorphism.]

I was lying one day in the mountains, stretched on the grass; a lizard
came out of a hole and mistook my motionless body for a rock, and
climbed up on my leg and stretched himself out to bask in the sun. The
confiding little creature lay on me enjoying the light, untroubled
by any suspicion of the relatively powerful stream of life which was
flowing noiselessly and amicably beneath him. And I, for my part, began
to look at the moss and the grass on which I was reposing, and the
brown earth and the great rocks; was I not myself, after all, a lizard
simply as compared with the great world, and was I not perhaps a victim
of the same mistake? Was there not a secret life throbbing everywhere
about me, palpitating beneath my feet, sweeping forward confusedly in
the great totality of things? Yes, but what difference did it make if
it was simply the blind egoistic life of a multitude of atoms, each
striving for ends of its own. Little lizard, why have I not, like thee,
a friendly eye in the universe to watch over me?

[Sidenote: The progress of science.]

The second cause of contemporary pessimism is the rapid progress of
positive science, and the revelations it is making in regard to the
natural world. The movement has been so precipitate, new ideas have
been produced with such rapidity, that the intelligence has found it
difficult to adapt itself to them; we are going too fast, we find it
as difficult to get our breath as the rider of a runaway horse, or an
aeronaut swept away at a dizzy speed by the wind. Knowledge causes
thus, at the present epoch, a sense of discomfort which is due to a
disturbance of the inner equilibrium; consciousness of the world,
so joyous in its beginnings at the time of the Renaissance, making
its first appearance in the midst of Rabelais’ uproarious fun, has
come to be almost melancholy. We have not yet become domesticated in
the infinities of the new world which has been revealed to us, and
we feel a little lost; therein lies the secret of the melancholy of
the present epoch, which was melodramatic and rapid in the pages of
Chateaubriand and the youngest children of the century; and has come to
be serious and reflective in the pages of Leopardi and of Schopenhauer
and of the pessimists of the present day. In India the Brahmans are
distinguished by a black point between their eyes; our men of science,
our philosophers and artists, carry this black point on their foreheads.

[Sidenote: Exaggerated development of thought.]

The third cause of pessimism, which results from the two preceding,
is the suffering caused by the exaggerated development of thought at
the present day, and the disproportionate place that it occupies at
present in human life. We are suffering from a sort of hypertrophy of
the intelligence. Those who work with their brains, who meditate upon
life and death, who philosophize, ultimately experience this suffering;
and the same is true of artists, who pass their life in endeavouring
to realize a more or less inaccessible ideal. One is drawn all ways
at once by the sciences and arts; one wishes to devote one’s self
simultaneously to all of them, and one is obliged to choose. One’s
whole vitality sets in toward one’s brain; one has to check it, to beat
it back, to resign one’s self to vegetating instead of to living! One
does not resign one’s self—one prefers to abandon one’s self to the
inner fire that consumes one. One’s thoughts gradually become feebler,
the nervous system becomes irritable, becomes feminine; but the will
remains virile, is always on the stretch, unsatisfied, and the result
is an eternal struggle, an endless dissatisfaction with one’s self;
one must choose, must have muscles or nerves; be a man or a woman;
and the thinker and artist are neither the one nor the other. If by a
simple immense effort we could but express the world of sentiment and
thought we carry within us, with what joy, what pleasure we should
do it; even if the brain should be torn asunder in the process! But
we must give it out by small fragments, squeeze it out drop by drop,
submit to all the interruptions of life, and little by little the
organism becomes exhausted in the struggle between mind and body, and
the intelligence flickers like a light in a rising wind, until the
spirit is vanquished and the light goes out.

[Sidenote: Dissolving effect of subjective analysis on the emotions.]

Modern thought is not only more clear-sighted in matters of the
external world, but also in matters of the internal world. John
Stuart Mill maintained that introspection and the progress of
psychological analysis possess a certain dissolving force that, along
with disillusionment, induces sadness. We come to be too well aware
of the source of our feelings and the details of our character; what
an antagonism between being gifted enough in matters of philosophy or
poetry to create a world to one’s own mind, to embellish and illuminate
the real world, and, nevertheless, being too analytic and introspective
to profit by the pleasing illusion! We build airy palaces of cards
and are the first to blow them down. We are without pity for our own
hearts, and sometimes wonder whether we should not have been better off
without them; we are too transparent to our own eyes, we see the hidden
springs of our own activity, we have no sincere faith in objective
reality, nor faith enough in the rationality of our own joys to enable
them to attain their maximum.

[Sidenote: Heightened sensibility.]

At the same time that the intelligence is becoming more penetrating and
reflective with the progress of knowledge, sensibility of every kind
is becoming more delicate; even sympathy, according to the pessimist,
is coming to be an instrument of torture by annexing the suffering of
others in addition to our own. The echo and reverberation in us of the
sufferings of other people, growing with the growing sociality, seem
to be greater than the echo and reverberation in us of human joys.
Social needs themselves, which have been so magnified at the present
day, are so far from being satisfied that pessimists are asking whether
they ever can be satisfied and whether humanity is not destined to
become simply more numerous in the struggle for existence, and more
wretched and more conscious of its wretchedness.

[Sidenote: Depression of vitality.]

And, finally, a last cause of pessimism is the enfeeblement of the
will, which accompanies an exaltation of the intelligence and the
sensibility. Pessimism is in some sort a metaphysical suggestion
engendered by physical and moral powerlessness. Consciousness of
lack of power produces a disesteem, not only for one’s self, but for
everything; a disesteem which, in certain speculative minds, must
inevitably crystallize into _a priori_ formulæ. It has been said that
suffering embitters one; and the same is true in an even greater degree
of a sense of powerlessness. Recent psychological observations confirm
this conclusion.[139] Among the insane, and among hypnotic subjects,
periods of satisfaction and optimism, which are periods of benevolence
and amenity, coincide with a heightened muscular power, whereas periods
of discontent and malevolence coincide with a state of depression of
the will which is accompanied by a lowering of the muscular powers,
sometimes by one-half. One may say, with M. Féré, that people in good
health, at the maximum of their muscular vitality, are incessantly
disposed to estimate the world in terms of their own vigour, whereas
the degenerate, the physically or mentally enfeebled, are incessantly
disposed to estimate the world and its possibilities in terms of their
own slackness and incompetency. Add that, being themselves unequal
to the struggle with the universe, it seems to them, by a natural
illusion, that the universe is unequal to their ideals and demands upon
it; they fancy that it is they that tip the scale, whereas the fact is
precisely the opposite.

      [139] M. Ch. Féré, _Revue philosophique_, July, 1886.

[Sidenote: Relation between powerlessness and pessimism.]

In all the experiments in hypnotism a sense of powerlessness engenders
dissatisfaction; the patient who finds himself unable to obtain
possession of a desired object endeavours to explain his inability by
seeking in the object itself some quality which renders it repulsive.
We are inevitably inclined to objectify the limitations of our own
power instead of recognizing them for what they are. Once started in
this path, hypnotic patients would certainly, if they were competent,
go the length of constructing a metaphysical system to justify their
state of mind.[140]

      [140] A woman somnambulist was induced to believe that she
      could not lift her worsted neckerchief off the back of a chair;
      her shoulders were cold and she wanted it; she put out her
      hand, and finding herself unable to overcome the subjective
      obstacle, she translated it into the outer world and declared
      that the neckerchief was unclean, or of an offensive colour,
      etc., and ultimately became violently terrified. Another
      subject, also a woman, was persuaded that she could not pull
      open a drawer; she touched the button and then let go of it
      shivering, and exclaiming that it was cold. “No wonder,” she
      added, as a rational justification of her repulsion, “it is of
      iron!” She was given an iron compass; she endeavoured to handle
      it, but soon dropped it. “You see,” she said, “it is as cold as
      the handle, I cannot hold it.” Thus the objective explanation
      of a subjective fact, once entertained, tends by force of
      logic to become general, to include a whole class of similar
      phenomena, to become a system, and, if need be, a cosmological
      and metaphysical system.

[Sidenote: Sense of powerlessness destined to increase.]

Pessimism thus probably originates, for the individual, in a sense of
lack of power. Sometimes this sense possesses indisputably a certain
element of universality; a consciousness of the limits of human power,
as of human intelligence, must as inevitably increase by the very
progress of our knowledge and capacity. Pessimism is not, therefore,
pure madness, nor pure vanity; or, if it is madness, the madness is
natural, and is induced sometimes by nature itself. At certain periods
nature seems to go insane, to revel in folly, although the power of
logic, which is identical in the last resort with the overruling
principle of things, always has the last word in the universe, as it
ought to have also in the human mind.

[Sidenote: Summary.]

To sum up: in this century of transition, of religious and moral and
social transformation, of reflection and dissolving analysis, causes
of suffering are abundant and ultimately assume the guise of motives
of despair. Every new step in intelligence and sensibility brings new
modes of suffering within our reach. The desire of knowledge, in
especial, which is the most dangerous of all human desires, because the
object of it is really infinite, becomes every day more insatiable and
enslaves not only isolated individuals, but entire nations; it is the
desire of knowledge that is the disease of the century, a disease which
is growing, and becoming for the philosopher the disease of humanity.
The seat of the disease is in the head; it is the brain of mankind that
is attacked. We are far from the naïveté of primitive people, who, when
they are asked for the seat of thought, point to the stomach or the
bosom! We are well aware that we think with our heads, for it is in our
heads that we suffer from a preoccupation with the unknown, with the
ideal, with an incessant endeavour to overtake the progress of a winged
and devouring thought. On the mountains of Tartary one sometimes sees
a strange animal pass through the morning mist at a breathless speed;
its eyes are those of a frightened antelope, and while it gallops with
a foot that trembles as it strikes the soil, two great wings stretch
out from the sides of its head and seem on the point of lifting it from
the ground each time that they pulsate. It sweeps down the valleys, and
its path is marked by traces of blood, and suddenly it falls, and the
two great wings rise from the body, and an eagle, which was feeding
leisurely upon its brain, takes its way off into the sky.

[Sidenote: Is pessimism the last word of philosophy?]

II. Is pessimism curable? A sense of evil constitutes a legitimate
element in the metaphysical or religious sentiment; but is that a
sufficient reason for recognizing it not simply as a part, but as the
whole of metaphysics and of religion? Such is the problem.

[Sidenote: Pessimism only part of the truth.]

Von Hartmann has endeavoured to discover in all religion a basis of
pessimism. To do so is to judge all humanity too narrowly, according to
one’s observation of it at the present day. To maintain that religion
is founded on a radical pessimism is like affirming that medicine is
based not on a theory of the curability, but of the incurability of
disease. Schopenhauer’s pessimism, like Spinoza’s optimism, contains,
no doubt, a certain indestructible element of truth, but immensely
overstated and magnified. If science cannot regard the world as
divine, neither can it regard the world as diabolical. There is no
more ground for cursing the objective universe than for adoring it.
And the subjective causes of unhappiness, which we have analyzed,
are provisional simply. Human knowledge, which at present is so
considerable in its dimensions that it actually embarrasses the brain,
may well come to be so organized (as, indeed, in some cases, it is even
now) that it will produce a sense of well-being and of largeness of
life only. There is need, however, for a wholly new science, that of
intellectual hygiene, of intellectual therapeutics, a science which,
once created, might prevent or cure the mental depression which seems
to result from exaggerated nervous excitation, such as pessimism seems
to be incidental to, and such as Greece was unacquainted with.

[Sidenote: Resignation.]

For the rest, the desire of knowledge, which is, as we have seen,
among the most profound of the desires of the century, may become the
source of, perhaps, the most trustworthy and most infallible cure for
a great number of human ills. Some of us, certainly, who are of the
physically and mentally disinherited, may cry: “I have suffered in all
my joys.” _Nescio quid amari_ was present for us in the first draught
of pleasure, in the first smile, in the first kiss, and yet the present
life is not without its sweetness when we do not rebel against it,
when it is rationally accepted. What makes up for the bitterness of
knowledge is the definiteness and clearness that it lends to the world.
As science becomes more perfect it may some day inspire the soul with
something of the serenity that is everywhere incidental to unfaltering
clear light. Therein lies the secret of Spinoza’s intellectual calm.
If his objective optimism is indefensible, his subjective optimism is
not without an aspect of truth in the consciousness of inner peace that
belongs to breadth of intelligence and harmony of thought.

[Sidenote: Analysis destroys irrational joys only.]

So far as introspection is concerned, and the dissolving force it
exercises upon our joys, introspection is destructive, really, of none
but irrational joys, and by way of compensation, it is destructive also
of irrational griefs. Truth resists analysis; it is our business to
seek in truth not only for the beautiful, but for the good. Take it
all in all, there is as much solid and enduring truth in enlightened
love of family, of country, of humanity, as in the most unquestionable
scientific fact, or in certain physical laws, like that of gravitation.
The great remedy for excessive analysis, such as Amiel, for example,
suffered from, is a little to forget one’s self, to widen one’s
horizon, and, above all, to do something. Action, by its very nature,
is a realized synthesis, a decision which necessitates the solution of
a certain number of problems, or the recognition that their solution is
not indispensable. Action is something too trenchant and provisional,
no doubt, but men must remember that they live in the provisional and
not the eternal, and that of their life, after all, what is least
provisional is action, motion, the vibration of an atom, the undulation
which traverses the great whole. Whoever lives immersed in the conduct
of life has no time for self-pity or self-dissection. Other forms of
oblivion are involuntary and sometimes lie beyond one’s power, but one
may always forget one’s self. The cure for all the sufferings of the
modern brain lies in an enlargement of the heart.

[Sidenote: The problem of distribution of wealth.]

It has been urged, it is true, that we suffer increasingly from a
growing sympathy and pity for each other. The problem of individual
happiness, owing to the increasing sense of the solidarity of mankind,
is more than ever dependent to-day upon the happiness of society at
large. Not only our immediate and personal griefs, but the griefs of
other people, of society, of humanity, present and to come, influence
us. So be it. To discuss the future would be endless. We have not
Macbeth’s privilege of being brought face to face with the file of
future generations, and cannot read in advance the destiny of our
descendants in their faces. The mirror of human life shows us nothing
but an image of ourselves, and in this image we are inclined, like the
poets, to emphasize the lines of pain. The labour problem, which at
present distresses us, is infinitely complex; but we believe that the
optimists have even more right to regard it with tranquillity than the
pessimists have to declare it insoluble; in especial when one considers
that it has assumed a threatening aspect only during something like
the last half century.

[Sidenote: How the economic half of the problem will be dealt with.]

The labour problem involves two distinct questions, one of them
relating to a conflict of interests, the other to a conflict of
intentions. We believe that the strictly economic problem will one
day be solved by a simultaneous increase in the difficulty of the
industrial situation and in the knowledge of how to deal with it, which
will lead the well-to-do classes to perceive that by endeavouring to
save everything they are running the risk of losing everything, and
will lead the lower classes to perceive that by endeavouring to obtain
too much they are running the risk of gaining nothing and of seeing
society’s coveted wealth melt away before their eyes, and that dividing
capital is like dividing a germ, and results in sterilization. The
remedy for socialism lies in science—even though the first effect of
a wider dissemination of knowledge would be to increase the strength
of socialism. Out of the very intensity of the crisis the solution
will come. The moment different interests are completely conscious of
their real points of antagonism, they are close upon a compromise. War
is never the result of anything but an incomplete knowledge of the
comparative powers and respective interests of the opposing parties;
people fight when they can no longer calculate, and the march of armies
and pitched battles may themselves be regarded as a sort of higher
arithmetic.

[Sidenote: The human half will settle itself.]

When it has once come to be understood that there is no fundamental
conflict of interest between the classes, the sense of antagonism
between them will gradually diminish. The most reassuring promise of a
complete solution of the industrial problem lies in human sociality.
All asperity of temper in the matter will be smoothed away by the
incontestable growth of sympathy and altruism.

[Sidenote: Love and admiration the panacea for pessimism.]

If sympathy, love, labour in common, recreation in common, sometimes
seem to augment the pains of life, they more than proportionately
augment the joys. Moreover, as is well known, to share trouble is to
lessen it; sympathy is itself a pleasure; poets know it, dramatic poets
in especial; even when pity is accompanied by a lively realization
of another’s pain it nevertheless induces love, and to that extent
still preserves a certain charm. That creature suffers, therefore
I love it; and there are infinite joys in love; it, multiplies the
value of life in one’s own eyes, by giving it a value in the eyes of
other people, a social value, which is in the best sense a religious
value. Man, Wordsworth says, lives in admiration, hope, and love,
but he who possesses admiration and love will always possess an
abundance of hope. He who loves and admires will possess the lightness
of heart that carries one through the day without fatigue. Love and
admiration are the great remedies of despair. Love, and you will wish
to live. Whatever may be the value of life from the point of view of
sensibility—knowledge and action, and principally action in behalf of
another, will always constitute reasons for living. And it is mainly
one’s reasons for living that justify one’s tenacity of life.

[Sidenote: Pessimism an optical illusion.]

Pessimism sees only the sensitive side of life; but life presents also
an active and an intellectual side; over and above the agreeable there
exist the great, the beautiful, and the generous. Even from the mere
point of view of pleasure and pain, pessimism is based on calculations
which are as open to discussion as Bentham’s hedonistic arithmetic. We
have seen elsewhere[141] that happiness and unhappiness are _ex post
facto_ mental constructions that are based upon a multitude of optical
illusions. Even the disillusionment of pessimism is itself a sort of an
illusion.

      [141] _Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation ni sanction_, p.
      89.

Leopardi hit upon an ingenious empirical argument in favour of
pessimism in his dialogue between an almanac seller and a passer-by:

_Almanac Seller._ Almanacs! New almanacs! New calendars! Who wants new
almanacs?

_Passer-by._ Almanacs for the new year?

_Almanac Seller._ Yes, sir.

_Passer-by._ Do you think this year will be a happy one?

_Almanac Seller._ Yes, to be sure, sir.

_Passer-by._ As happy as last year?

_Almanac Seller._ Much more so.

_Passer-by._ As the year before?

_Almanac Seller._ Still more so, sir.

_Passer-by._ Why, should you not like the new year to resemble one of
the past two years?

_Almanac Seller._ No, sir, I should not.

_Passer-by._ How many years have gone by since you began to sell
almanacs?

_Almanac Seller._ About twenty years, sir.

_Passer-by._ Which of the twenty should you wish the new year to be
like?

_Almanac Seller._ I do not know.

_Passer-by._ Do you not remember any particular year which you thought
a happy one?

_Almanac Seller._ Indeed, I do not, sir.

_Passer-by._ And yet life is a fine thing, is it not?

_Almanac Seller._ So they say.

_Passer-by._ Should you not like to live those twenty years, and even
all your past life from your birth, over again?

_Almanac Seller._ Ah, dear sir, would to God that I could!

_Passer-by._ But if you had to live over again the life you have
already lived, with all its pleasures and sufferings?

_Almanac Seller._ I should not like that.

_Passer-by._ Then what other life would you like to live? Mine, or that
of the prince, or whose? Do you not think that I, or the prince, or
anyone else would reply exactly as you have done, and that no one would
wish to repeat the same life over again?

_Almanac Seller._ Yes, I believe that....

_Passer-by._ And it is clear that each person is of opinion that the
evil he has experienced exceeds the good; ... but with the new year
fate will commence treating you, and me, and everyone well, and the
happy life will begin....

_Almanac Seller._ Almanacs! New almanacs! New calendars![142]

      [142] Dialogue cited by M. Caro in _Pessimisme_.

[Sidenote: Persistent novelty in the universe.]

Many of us no doubt would reply to the poet as the almanac seller
did—we should not wish to begin our life over again—but it is not
to be concluded from that that our past life, taken as a whole, has
been unhappy rather than happy. It is to be concluded simply that it
has lost its novelty, and with its novelty a great part of its charm.
Man, in effect, is not a purely sensitive being. His pleasures are,
so to speak, not blind. He not only enjoys, he knows that he enjoys,
and knows what he enjoys, and each of his sensations constitutes an
addition to his treasures of knowledge. Having once begun to amass
this treasure, he desires incessantly to augment it, though he cares
little enough futilely to handle and to contemplate the wealth already
acquired. Our past life, therefore, is to some extent tarnished and
deflowered. The number of hours that were so rich, so full that we
could not exhaust them at the time and desire to repeat them, is not
great; and, barring such hours, the principal charm of the rest of our
past existence lay in estimating its details, in comparing them with
each other, in exercising upon them our intelligence and our activity,
and in lightly passing them by; they were not worth lingering over;
they resembled the tracts of country that the traveller does not feel
tempted to turn and look back upon. If novelty possesses for mankind
a certain charm, if a repetition of identically similar circumstances
rarely affords as great pleasure the second time as the first, the
fact is owing in part to the very laws of desire, but in part to the
superiority of the human mind; the desired object should always offer
something new to the intelligence. Every desire contains an element of
philosophic and æsthetic curiosity that the past cannot satisfy; the
flower of novelty cannot be gathered twice from the same branch.

[Sidenote: And genuine novelty.]

But Leopardi might reply, What is the charm of novelty but an
illusion? For everything on earth is really old: the future is but
a repetition of the past and ought logically to be as repugnant as
the past. Abstract formulæ, and precipitate inductions like that,
offer no resistance either to reason or to experience. Whatever
pessimistic poets may say to the contrary, nothing is a repetition
of anything else, either in human life or in the universe. There is
always something new under the sun, if it be no more than the budding
leaves on a tree or the changing colour on a cloud. No two sunsets are
the same. Fairy-stories tell of a marvellous picture book, the pages
of which one may turn forever without weariness, for the instant the
picture has been looked upon and the page turned, its place is taken
by a new picture. The universe is such a book; when one wishes to turn
back to a familiar page it is no longer the same nor are we ourselves
the same, and if we consider the matter narrowly, the world should
always possess for us its first freshness.

[Sidenote: Perception of difference the mark of high intelligence.]

The distinctive sign of a really superior, really human intellect is
to be interested in everything in the universe, and in the difference
between things. When we look straight before us without, properly
speaking, seeing anything, we perceive resemblances only; when we
look with attention, with affectionate love of detail, we perceive an
infinity of differences; an intellectual activity, always awake, finds
everywhere objects of interest. To love anything is to find in it,
incessantly, elements of novelty.

[Sidenote: The world inexhaustibly interesting.]

When pessimists maintain that the charm of the future is an illusion,
it may be retorted that the illusion is theirs, that they do not
look at the world closely enough to see it as it is, and do not love
it because they do not know it. If one could view the Alps from the
surface of a passing aërolite, the Rigi, the Faulhorn, Mont Blanc,
Monte Rosa would all look alike, would all appear to be indifferent
points on the earth’s rind; but what shall be said of the naïve
traveller who confounds them, and professes to have seen the whole
of the Alps when he has climbed the Rigi? Life, also, is a perpetual
ascent, of which it is difficult to say one has seen the whole because
one has climbed the first peak. From childhood to old age, the horizon
grows larger and changes and is always new. Nature seems to repeat
itself only to a superficial gaze. Each of its works is original,
like those of genius. Æsthetically or intellectually considered,
discouragement is voluntary or involuntary blindness. If poets have
wished to forget past experiences which were too painful, even in
memory, no true scholar or man of science has ever expressed the desire
to forget what he knew, to make a blank space in his intelligence, to
reject the knowledge so slowly acquired—unless, indeed, it were for
the refined pleasure of learning it all over again and of owing nothing
to the labour of previous generations. Beneath every human desire,
we repeat, there exists this thirst for truth, which is one of the
essential elements of the religious sentiment, and all other desires
may be satiated or fatigued, but this one still subsists; one may be
weary of life without being weary of knowledge; even those who have
been most bitterly wounded by the conditions of life may still accept
them for the light that the intelligence brings them at the price
of pain, as a soldier, whose eyes have been injured by some chance
splinter, nevertheless strains them beneath his eyelids to follow the
course of the fight about him.

[Sidenote: Summary.]

In effect, the analysis that pessimism is based upon is, in many
respects, superficial. Even the word pessimism is inexact, for the
doctrine ascribes no progress from bad to worse, from pejus to
pessimum; it maintains simply that the world is bad and must be
recognized as such, and that this recognition is the consequence and
the condition of progress, of intellectual power and of knowledge.

[Sidenote: Suicide as a resource.]

The practical rules for the conduct of life that pessimism prescribes
from its principles are still more open to discussion. Granted the
wretchedness of life, the remedy that pessimists propose is the new
religious salvation that modern Buddhists are to make fashionable. This
novelty, which is older than Sâkya-Muni itself, is one of the most
ancient of Oriental ideas; it to-day proves attractive to a number of
Occidental peoples, as it has several times proved attractive to them
in former days, for traces of it may be found among the Neo-Platonists
and the Christian mystics. The conception is that of Nirvâna. To
sever all the ties which attach you to the external world; to prune
away all the young offshoots of desire, and recognize that to be rid
of them is a deliverance; to practice a sort of complete psychical
circumcision; to recoil upon yourself and to believe that by so doing
you enter into the society of the great totality of things (the
mystics would say of God); to create an inner vacuum, and feel dizzy
in the void and, nevertheless, to believe that the void is plentitude
supreme—Πλὴρωμα—these have always constituted temptations to
mankind; mankind has been tempted to meddle with them, as it has been
tempted to creep up to the verge of dizzy precipices and look over. The
pantheistic or monistic notion of Nirvâna eludes criticism precisely
because it is void of all precise content. Physiologically speaking,
Nirvâna corresponds to the period of repose and quietude which always
follows a period of tension and of effort. One cannot stop and take
breath in the eternal forward march that constitutes the phenomenal
life of humanity; it is good sometimes to feel lassitude, it is good a
little to understand the comparative cheapness and vanity of everything
one has hitherto attained, but good only on condition that such an
understanding of our past constitutes a spur to fresh effort in the
future. To rest content with lassitude—to believe that the deepest
existence is the meanest, the coldest, the most inert—is equivalent to
a confession of defeat in the struggle for existence. Nirvâna leads, in
fact, to the annihilation of the individual and of the race, and to the
logical absurdity that the vanquished in the struggle for existence are
the victors over the trials and miseries of life.

[Sidenote: Trial of Nirvâna.]

It would be interesting to perform a practical experiment in Nirvâna.
One of my acquaintances pushed the experiment as far as a European of
scientific tendencies could. He practised asceticism to the point of
rejecting all variety in his diet, he gave up meat (as Mr. Spencer
also did for some time), wine, every kind of ragout, every form of
condiment, and reduced to its lowest possible terms the desire that
is most fundamental in every living being—the desire of food, the
excitation of the famished animal in the presence of appetizing dishes,
the moment of heightened expectation before dinner which constitutes
for so many people the event of the day. For the protracted meals
that are customary, he substituted a certain number of cups of pure
milk. Having thus blunted his sense of taste and the grosser of his
appetites, having abandoned all physical activity, he sought to find
a recompense in the pleasures of abstract meditation, and of æsthetic
contemplation. He entered into a state which was not that of dreamland,
but neither was it that of real life, with its definite details. What
gives relief and outline to the life of each day, what makes each day
an epoch for us in our existence, is the succession of our desires
and our pleasures. One has no idea what a blank would be produced in
one’s existence by the simple omission of some hundreds of meals. By
a similar process of elimination, employed in regard to pleasures
and desires generally, he secured for his life a certain savourless,
colourless, ethereal charm. The whole universe recoiled by degrees
into the distance, for the universe was composed of things that he
no longer came into forcible contact with, that he no longer handled
vigorously, and that, therefore, came less violently into contact with
him, and left him, therefore, more indifferent to them. He entered the
cloud in which the gods sometimes envelop themselves, and no longer
felt the firm earth beneath his feet, but he soon found that, if he no
longer stood upon firm earth, he was not on that account the nearer
heaven; what struck him most was the enfeeblement of his thoughts
precisely at the time when, owing to his complete detachment from all
material cares, he was inclined to believe himself most intellectually
competent. The instant that thought ceased to rest upon a foundation
of solid reality it became incapable of abstraction; the life of
thought as of our whole being is contrast, and it gathers power by
dealing from time to time with objects which seem least readily to lend
themselves to its purposes. An endeavour to purify and to sublimate
thought robs it of its precision; meditation gives place to dream, and
dream gives place to the ecstasy in which mystics lose all sense of
the distinction between ἕν καὶ πᾶν, but in which a mind accustomed
to self-possession cannot long remain without a sense of vapidity.
Then a feeling of revolt supervenes, and one begins to understand
that abstract thought needs, if it is to achieve its highest point of
lucidity and concentration, to be spurred on by desire. Such at least
was the experience of the friend mentioned above, and I suggest his
experiment for imitation to those who speak of Nirvâna from hearsay
only, and have never practised absolute renunciation. The only danger
to fear is lest renunciation produce a certain brutalization, lest one
lose one’s self-control and be overcome by a sort of vertigo before
having measured the depth of the abyss, and having perceived that it is
bottomless. The safest paths in the mountains are those that have been
trodden out by asses and mules. “Follow the asses,” is the advice of
the guides. The advice is often good in real life; the good sense of
the multitude opens the way which must be followed, whether one will or
not, and philosophers may well at times “follow the asses.”

[Sidenote: Sanctity and egoism.]

Absorption in infinite substance, renunciation of the desire to live,
and inert sanctity will always constitute the ultimate form and
expression of human illusion. If all is vanity, nothing, after all, is
more vain than to be completely conscious that all is vanity; if action
is vain, repose is still more vain; life is vain, death is vainer.
Even sanctity is not the equal of charity, the equal, that is to say,
of what binds the individual to other individuals, and by that fact
renders him once more the slave of desire and of pleasure—if not of
his own desires and pleasures, at least of those of other people. One
must always serve someone, must always be in bonds to something, even
if only to the flesh. One must drag a chain, if one is to draw others
after one. Nobody forms a sufficient end and aim for his own activity;
nobody can emancipate himself by living ‘in and in,’ by forming
an ideal circle like the coiled serpent, by reflecting eternally,
according to the Hindu precept, on his navel; nothing is more like
servitude than liberty that is confined within the bounds of self. The
perfect sanctity of the mystics, Buddhists, and pessimists is a subtler
egoism simply; and the sole genuine virtue in the world is generosity,
which does not fear to set its foot in the dust, in the service of
another.

[Sidenote: Pessimism not destined to prevail.]

We do not therefore believe, with Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann,
that pessimism will be the religion of the future. Life will not be
persuaded to seek death, nor movement to prefer immobility. We have
said elsewhere that what renders existence possible renders it also
desirable; if the sum of the pains of human life were greater than the
sum of the pleasures, the species would become extinct by a gradual
decrease in the vitality of each succeeding generation. Occidental
nations, or rather the active people in the world, to whom the future
belongs, will never become converts to pessimism. Whoever acts, feels,
has power, and to be strong is to be happy. Even in the Orient, when
their pessimism, the great religions, is addressed to the multitude, it
is very superficial; commonplace maxims on the ills of existence, and
on the necessity for resignation, result as a matter of fact in a _far
niente_ which is appropriate to the manners of the Orient. And, when
it is addressed to thinkers, pessimism is only provisional—it points
to its own remedy in Nirvâna; but Nirvâna as a panacea and salvation
by negation, or by violent self-destruction, will not long captivate
modern common sense. It is ridiculous to attribute to man the power
to destroy the sacred germ from which life, with all its illusions,
has sprung, and will always spring, in spite of ascetics and partisans
of individual suicide, and even, if Von Hartmann will, of “cosmic
suicide.” It is perhaps less difficult to create than to annihilate, to
make God than to destroy Him.




CHAPTER V.

REVIEW OF THE PRINCIPAL METAPHYSICAL HYPOTHESES WHICH WILL REPLACE
DOGMA—_Concluded_.

IDEALISM, MATERIALISM, MONISM.

    I. Idealism—Different forms of idealism: subjective
      idealism, objective idealism: The whole of existence
      resolved into a mode of mental existence—Value of
      idealism considered from point of view of the religious
      sentiment—Most specious of contemporary idealisms:
      Possibility of universal progress on the hypothesis of
      radical spontaneity and of “freedom”—Reconciliation
      between determinism and the conception of freedom—Moral
      idealism as a possible substitute for religious sentiment:
      Dependence of the universe on the principle of goodness.

    II. Materialism—Difficulty in defining absolute materialism:
      Matter—The atom—Nebular hypothesis—Hydrogen—Necessity
      of supplementing materialism by some theory of the origin
      of life—The latest conception of materialism: Conception
      of infinite divisibility and infinite extensibility.

    III. Monism and the fate of worlds—Current of contemporary
      systems toward monism—Scientific interpretation of
      monism—The world conceived monistically as a becoming and
      as a life—Scientific formulæ for life—Progress consists
      in the gradual confusion of these two formulæ—That the
      rise of morality and religion can be accounted for without
      the presupposition of any final cause—Metaphysical
      and moral expectations in regard to the destiny of the
      world and of humanity it may be founded on scientific
      monism—Facts which appear to be inconsistent with these
      expectations—Pessimistic conception of dissolution that
      is complementary to the conception of evolution—Is the
      immanence of dissolution demonstrable?—Natural devices for
      the perpetuation of the “fittest”—Rôle of intelligence,
      of numbers, etc.—Calculation of probabilities—Is
      eternity _a parte post_ a ground of discouragement or
      of hope—Probable existence of thinking beings in other
      worlds: the planets, possibility of the existence of
      beings superior to man—Survival of the conception of
      gods—Hypothesis of intercosmic consciousness and of a
      universal society.

    IV. Destiny of the human race—The hypothesis of
      immortality from the point of view of monism—Two
      possible conceptions of immortality—Eternal or
      untemporal existence and continuation of life in some
      superior forms—I. Hypothesis of eternal life—its
      function in antique religions, in Platonism, and in the
      systems of Spinoza, Kant, and Schopenhauer—Eternal
      life and the subsistence of the individual—Distinction
      made by Schopenhauer and various other philosophers
      between individuality and personality—Eternal life
      problematical and transcendent—Aristocratic tendency of
      the theory of eternal life—Hypothesis of conditional
      immortality—Criticism of the hypothesis of conditional
      immortality; incompatibility of this notion with that
      of divine goodness—II. Hypothesis of a continuation of
      the present life and its evolution into some superior
      form—What sort of immortality the theory of evolution
      permits us to hope for—Immortality of one’s labours
      and conduct—True conception of such immortality—Its
      relation to the laws of heredity, atavism, natural
      selection—Immortality of the individual—Objections
      drawn from science—Protestations of affection against
      the annihilation of the person—Resulting antinomy—III.
      Modern opposition between the conception of _function_
      and the conception of simple substance, in which
      ancient philosophy endeavours to find a proof of
      immortality—Peripatetic theory of Wundt and modern
      philosophers on the nature of the soul—Immortality as a
      continuation of function, proved not by the simplicity,
      but by the complexity of consciousness—Relation between
      complexity and instability—Three stages of social
      evolution—Analogy of conscience with a society, collective
      character of individual consciousness—Conception of
      progressive immortality—Last product of evolution and
      natural selection: (1) No necessary relation between the
      compositeness and complexity of consciousness and its
      dissolubility: indissoluble compounds in the physical
      universe—(2) Relation between consciousnesses, their
      possible fusion in a superior consciousness—Contemporary
      psychology and the religious notion of the interpenetration
      of souls—Possible evolution of memory and identification
      of it with reality—Palingenesis by force of
      love—Problematic character of those conceptions and of
      every conception relative to existence, of consciousness,
      and the relation between existence and consciousness—IV.
      Conception of death appropriate to those who, in the
      present state of evolution, do not believe in the
      immortality of the individual—Antique and modern
      stoicism—Acceptance of death: element of melancholy
      and of greatness in it—Expansion of self by means of
      philosophical thought, and scientific disinterestedness,
      to the point of to some extent approving one’s own
      annihilation.


[Sidenote: The problem of the immanence of being.]

Naturalism consists in believing that nature, together with the beings
which compose it, make up the sum total of existence. But even from
this point of view there still remains the problem, what existence
essentially is, and what special mode of existence is most typical.
Is nature material, or mental, or both? The problem of the essence of
being is one that cannot be escaped.

[Sidenote: The double-aspect theory.]

The theory that seems to-day to be dominant is the “double-aspect”
theory—the theory of two inseparable correlatives subjective and
objective, of consciousness and of motion. We have, as M. Taine[143]
would say, two texts of the eternal book instead of one. The question
is, which of the two texts is original and sacred? Sometimes that which
is furnished by introspection alone, sometimes that which objective
science endeavours to decipher, are respectively held to be primitive.
Thence arise two opposed tendencies, not alone in psychological but
in metaphysical speculation; the one toward idealism, the other
toward materialism; the one toward what lies within, the other toward
what lies without. But these two aspects may and should be conceived
as possessing a certain unity; there is an inevitable tendency in
the human mind to follow out two converging lines to their point
of intersection. There are, therefore, three forms of naturalism:
idealism, materialism, monism. These three constitute the three genuine
systems of thought from which theism, atheism, and pantheism are
respectively derived.

      [143] M. Ribot holds the same doctrine.


_I. Idealism._

[Sidenote: Idealism defined.]

If the words thought and idea be interpreted as Descartes and Spinoza
understand them, as designating the entire life of the mind, the sum
total of the possible content of consciousness, idealism may be defined
as the system which resolves all reality into thought, into psychical
existence, insomuch that to be is to think or to be thought; to feel or
to be felt; to will or to be willed; to be the object or subject of a
conscious effort.

[Sidenote: Idealism and the religious instinct.]

It is evident that idealism is one of the systems which is capable of
affording a certain satisfaction to the religious sentiment, because
the religious sentiment is allied to the instinct for metaphysics, and
the instinct for metaphysics finds itself at home among all things
of the spirit, of thought, of the moral world. The foundation of
theism, as we have said, is _moralism_; the belief, that is to say,
that the true power in nature is mental and moral. God is simply a
representation of this power, conceived as transcendent. Pantheism
itself, after having divinized and materialized the universe and
resolved all things, so to speak, into God, tends to become idealistic,
to resolve God into the thought which has conceived Him, to deny Him
all existence over and above that which He possesses in thought,
and for thought, and by virtue of thought. According to the Hindu
comparison, the human mind is like the spider that can build its
mansion out of materials drawn from its own body, and then reabsorb
them.

[Sidenote: Subjective idealism criticised.]

But how shall the mind itself, the central fund of thought that is
the origin and end of all things, be conceived? Is it individual or
impersonal? English subjective or egoistic idealism, as Mr. Huxley
defines it in his “Life of Hume,” replies, that in spite of all
demonstration to the contrary, the collection of perceptions which
constitute our consciousness may be simply a phantasmagoria which,
engendered and co-ordinated by the ego, unrolls its successive
scenes upon a background of nonentity. Mr. Spencer retorts that,
if the universe is thus simply a projection of our subjective
sensations, evolution is a dream; but evolution may be formulated in
idealistic quite as well as realistic terms: and a coherent dream
is as good as reality. Subjective idealism is therefore difficult
to refute logically; but in spite of that fact it will never have
many followers. For this apparent simplification of the world is in
reality a complication. For subjective idealism involves the ridiculous
hypothesis of a chance agreement between the impressions of any given
individual and of all other individuals: a difficulty much harder to
explain away than the preliminary one of the simple reflection in us
of an external world. Mental phenomena are always more complex than
material phenomena.

The reduction of the external world to subjective terms, the
explanation of the optical illusion of objectivity, demands a much
greater display of vain ingenuity than any theory of simple perception.
More than that, the least effort with the resistance that it encounters
is a refutation of egoistic, or as the English again say, solipsistic
idealism. In the fact of resistance, subjective sensation and the
perception of an objective reality coincide. Even if the manner in
which our sensations of resistance are combined in tridimensional space
may be conceived as subjective, it is difficult to admit that the
materials out of which the structure is made are, as it were, suspended
in mid-air. To explain the fact of resistance requires us absolutely
to pass beyond the limits of consciousness, for even in the cases in
which the sensation of resistance seems to be due to hallucination,
the cause of hallucination is always found to be some instance of
actual resistance, of friction or stress inside the body. The mistake
of a madman, who sees an unfamiliar form take shape and rise before
his eyes, is not that of considering the power as existing outside
of himself, but of locating it at the extremities of his nerves of
touch; whereas it is really in his brain, at the point where the nerves
intersect with the cerebral centres. He is right in his sense of the
presence of an enemy, but wrong in the direction in which he looks for
it.

[Sidenote: Truth in subjective idealism.]

We are obliged, therefore, to admit the hypothesis of a multitude
of microcosms, of mine, of yours, of everybody’s, and of a single
macrocosm the same for everybody. What is true is that between the
great world and every little world there is an incessant communication,
by means of which everything that passes in the one is echoed in the
other. We live in the universe, and the universe lives in us. The
statement is not metaphorical, but literal. If we could look into the
consciousness of a school child, we should see a more or less faithful
image of all the marvels of the world: skies, seas, mountains, cities,
etc.; we should perceive the germ of every elevated sentiment, of
every kind of complex knowledge that the human brain contains. If we
could look into the consciousness of some great man—some thinker, some
poet—the spectacle would be quite different. It would embrace the
whole of the visible and invisible universe, with its facts and its
laws; it would embrace what is best in the whole of humanity. If the
traces left by experience on the nervous system could be read, like the
writing in a book, the earth might disappear, and its image and history
be handed down in certain chosen human brains.

[Sidenote: Realism destined to prevail.]

Active and practical humanity will always believe in realism to the
extent of insisting that the world possesses an existence which is
independent of any individual thought. We shall dwell no further
on subjective idealism, which is more important as a metaphysical
curiosity than for any comfort it gives to the religious sentiment.

[Sidenote: Objective idealism.]

Of objective idealism the same cannot be said. In objective idealism,
too, all material existence is regarded as a mode of mental existence;
being is identified either with the ideal law which presides over the
development of the universe, or with the genuine foundation of our
consciousness, our sensations, our desires. The world, as Emerson has
said, is a precipitate of the soul.

[Sidenote: Criticised.]

This hypothesis is certainly one of those that may best serve as a
substitute for theism, if theism should ever disappear. But idealism,
thus understood, is open to the following objection: Is it of any
special use to objectify the soul, if the existence of evil, which
Plato identified with matter, is thereby left unchanged? It is in
vain to translate evolution into psychic terms; no difficulty can be
avoided by so doing. The mysterious imperfections of the exterior world
are transported bodily into the mind; evil is spiritualized simply.
Identifying things with the intellectual law which presides over their
evolution in nowise excuses us from explaining why that law is in so
many respects bad, and why the intelligence that directs the universe
is so often self-contradictory and feeble.

[Sidenote: Objective idealism relatively capable of satisfying the
moral instincts.]

In spite of this objection, which will, perhaps, never receive a
sufficient reply, it is certain that, so far as our moral and social
instincts are concerned, idealism offers us greater ground for hope
than either of the remaining systems of thought. In spite of evil and
pain, the desire of progress and of salvation, which is the basis of
all religious speculation, may rely upon thought as its last resource.
But thought, if the doctrine of objective idealism is to be made
acceptable, must be understood as including not only intelligence,
but also sentiment, desire, and volition, and, in effect, the purely
intellectual idealism of a former time is at the present day being
succeeded by an idealism that regards the will as the fundamental
element in the universe.[144] Universal sensibility is an incident of
universal power of will, whereas intelligence, properly so called,
at least in so far as the function of intelligence is regarded as
representation, is more superficial than sensibility or volition.[145]
These three inseparable forms of psychic life[146] constitute the great
forces to which moral and religious sentiment must always turn for
support.

      [144] See Schelling, Schopenhauer, Lotze, Wundt, Secrétan, MM.
      Ravaison, A. Fouillée, Lachelier, and, to a certain extent, M.
      Renouvier.

      [145] See Schopenhauer, Horwicz, and M. Fouillée.

      [146] See Wundt’s _Psychologie physiologique_.

[Sidenote: Hypothesis of moral progress immanent in the world.]

Idealism, thus understood, constitutes one of the most tempting of the
solutions of the problem of evil. Optimism being, as we have seen,
indefensible, and pessimism being a caricature, the most plausible
religious and metaphysical hypothesis at the present day is the
conception of a “possible progress owing to the radical spontaneity
of all existing things.”[147] The will, according to this hypothesis,
with its tendency to indefinite self-expansion, is _par excellence_
the primitive power, the central element in man and in the universe.
Freedom of the will in man means the consciousness of this progressive
power, which is immanent in all things, and this consciousness may
be made the foundation of a moral being. This conception of freedom,
which is reconcilable with determinism, becomes an additional motive
among the other motives that govern man’s life, and tends to be
realized by the very fact that it is conceived and desired. Through
the intermediation of this conception, reality possesses a progressive
freedom, that is to say, a power of constant union with the whole, and
of moral enfranchisement. “In the beginning there obtains a universal
antagonism among the forces of the universe, a brutal fatality, an
infinite reign of shock and counter-shock, between blind and blindly
driven beings; then there arises a progressive organization that makes
the evolution of consciousness, and therefore of volition, possible;
there arises a gradual union and fraternity among the particulars that
constitute the universe. Ill-will, whether it originate in mechanical
necessity or in intellectual ignorance, is transitory; good-will is
permanent, radical, normal, and fundamental. To cultivate good-will
in one’s self is to enfranchise one’s self from the individual and
the transitory in favour of the universal and the permanent; it is to
become truly free, and by that very fact to become truly loving.”[148]

      [147] Alfred Fouillée, _La Liberté et le Déterminisme_, 2d
      edition, pp. 353, 354, 356.

      [148] Alfred Fouillée, _La Liberté et le Déterminisme_, 2d
      edition, pp. 353, 354, 356.

[Sidenote: Reconciliation between freedom and determinism.]

Between progressive freedom thus conceived, and the determinism in
the midst of which it progresses, there is no opposition; freedom and
determinism constitute two aspects of one and the same process of
evolution. Determinism essentially consists in a series of actions and
reactions existing between other beings and ourselves; but these very
actions and reactions constitute the manifestation of the development
of our, and their, inner activities. And the source of activity in the
universe is none other than an overflowing power, which is hostile to
limitation, to impediment of every kind; is, in a word, none other than
a self-realizing volition. Freedom, thus understood, may, therefore,
be considered in the last resort as the origin of determinism and as
one with it.[149] Necessity is, so to speak, the outer surface of
freedom—the point of contact between two or more free agents. Freedom
is inconceivable apart from a resulting determinism, for to be free is
to possess power, is to act and to react, is to determine and to be
determined. Determinism, on the other hand, that is to say, reciprocal
action, is inconceivable apart from freedom, from internal action, from
a spontaneous outbreak of power that tends to be free. So that one may
say, without contradiction, that determinism envelops the world, and
that free-will constitutes it.

      [149] A. Fouillée, _op. cit._

[Sidenote: Ideal liberty the aim of the universe.]

If the shock of wills in the world is unusually brutal, the reason
is that they are as yet but half conscious of their powers; as
consciousness develops, contest will give way to concurrence. To
avoid violent concussion with obstacles in the way, the free agent
has less need of acquaintance with them than of acquaintance with
itself. As there is nothing in the universe that is foreign to
volition, there is nothing in the universe that is foreign to the ideal
that every volition aims at. It is probable that life is always and
everywhere accompanied by consciousness in some slight degree; and
wherever consciousness exists, desire may exist. Nature’s device, as
a contemporaneous poet has said, is “I aspire.” The human ideal is,
perhaps, no more than the conscious formulation of this aspiration
which is common to the whole universe. If so, it follows that ideal
freedom is the limit of evolution, and that volition, which aims at
ideal freedom, is the principle of it.[150]

      [150] “The category of Real Existence does not seem
      reconcilable with the notion of liberty; the latter in its
      perfection must be conceived under the category of the Ideal,
      and in its imperfection under that of Becoming.”—A. Fouillée,
      _La Liberté et le Déterminisme_, conclusion.

[Sidenote: Objections answered.]

It has been objected to this idealist theory of evolution that
progress implies an aim and the observance of certain principles
in its attainment, while evolution does not.[151] But the precise
object of the doctrine in question is to supply evolution with a name
and appropriate principles, and to extend the notion of progress to
the universe as a whole. It has also been objected to this somewhat
panthelistic hypothesis (θέλος), that if everything is free, nothing
is free.[152] This objection is not exact, for it would imply, in
economics, for instance, that to increase everybody’s well-being would
increase the well-being of nobody, or that if everybody equally
should be impoverished, everybody would equally be enriched. To
universalize a conception is one thing, to suppress it is another.
The world cannot at the present day be conceived as distinct from the
human race: the two are vitally and intimately related. Endow mankind
with an unbiassed freedom of will, and Epicurus would be right in
holding that indeterminism is the basis of all things.[153] Similarly,
suppose mankind endowed with “a radical goodness of will, which is
very distinct from freedom of the will, but nevertheless constitutes a
sort of moral freedom in process of formation,”[154] and the germ of
such goodness of will should be found in a more or less unconscious
form throughout the entire universe. Before the human mind can really
produce anything whatever, the whole universe must be like it in
labour. Partisans of the theory of goodness of will as the basis of
human morality are therefore logical in regarding it as more or less
present in some degraded form throughout the whole of nature, even
in beings in which intelligence has not yet made its appearance; and
goodness of will in such cases is to be considered as accompanied
by the obscure beginnings of responsibility, of implicit merit or
demerit—one must return in effect to a sort of re-reading of the Hindu
theory, according to which the several degrees that exist in nature
represent so many stages in morality.

      [151] M. Franck, _Essais de critique philosophique_.

      [152] M. Franck, _op. cit._

      [153] The author argued the point at length, in 1873, in his
      book on Epicurus. See also his _Morale anglaise_, 2 partie, pp.
      385-386, 2d edition.

      [154] A. Fouillée, _La Liberté et le Déterminisme_, 2d edition.

[Sidenote: Moral idealism and the religious sentiment.]

_Hypotheses fingo_ is the mother of metaphysics. Moral idealism of
the kind we have just epitomized from the pages of a contemporary
author is decidedly no more than a hypothesis, and a hypothesis open
to discussion; but it is assuredly the form of idealism that is
least incompatible with the theory of evolution, and with the facts
of natural history and of human history.[155] Moreover, it affords
unusual scope for the religious sentiment, freed from its mysticism
and transcendence. If the unknown activity which lies at the basis
of the natural world has produced in the human race a consciousness
of goodness, and a deliberate desire for it, there is reason to hope
and to believe that the last word of ethics and metaphysics is not a
negative.

      [155] This form of idealism is equally compatible with the
      prevailing monistic doctrines, and is in some cases, as notably
      in that of M. Fouillée, confounded with them. See below.

[Sidenote: Religion interpreted in the light of this hypothesis.]

We have a number of times cited Schleiermacher’s definition of
religion: the sense of our absolute dependence in regard to the
universe and its principle. When the religious sentiment becomes
transformed into a moral idealism its correct formula tends to be the
inverse of the preceding: a sense of the dependence of the universe
upon the determination that goodness shall prevail, of which we are
conscious in ourselves and which we conceive to be or to be capable of
becoming the directing principle of universal evolution. The notion
of the moral and social ideal of freedom is, therefore, according to
this doctrine, not a mere superficial accident in the universe, but
a revelation and growing consciousness of the most fundamental laws
of the universe, of the true essence of things, which is the same in
all beings in different degrees and in diverse combinations. Nature
represents an eternal ascent toward a more and more clearly conceived
ideal, which dominates its progress from beginning to end. As one
climbs a height to survey a mountain range, the snow-capped peaks rise
silently and take their places side by side along the horizon; it seems
as if the enormous masses rise in obedience to an immense effort which
uplifts them; it seems as if their immobility is only apparent, and one
feels borne aloft with them toward the zenith. The heroes in the Indian
legend, when they were weary of life and of the earth, rallied their
strength for a final effort, and hand in hand scaled the Himalayas,
and the mountains bore them away into the clouds. Ancient peoples
generally regarded the mountains as a transition between earth and sky;
it was from the mountains that the soul, profiting by the impulse lent
it by the last touch of earth, took its freest flight: the mountains
constituted a pathway toward the open heavens. And that may be an
element of profundity in these naïve ideas which ascribe to nature
aspirations which are more properly human. Do there not exist in nature
great unfinished sketches, hints and lines leading upward? Nature has
done all that unconsciously, has blindly piled block on block of stone
slowly toward the stars. It is man’s privilege to read a meaning into
her work, to make use of her efforts, to employ past centuries as the
materials out of which to build the future; by scaling the heights of
nature man will reach the sky.


_II. Materialism._

Properly to estimate idealism it must be contrasted with its opposite,
materialism.

[Sidenote: Materialism difficult to define.]

We shall say but a few words on the subject of pure materialism,
because of all systems of thought materialism is the farthest removed
from those which give rise to religious and to metaphysical theories.
Absolute materialism is somewhat difficult to define, because matter
is one of the vaguest of words. To aim at representing the ultimate
elements of matter as wholly independent of thought, of consciousness,
of life, is evidently chimerical; such an effort leads straight to
the pure indeterminism of matter as conceived by Plato, Aristotle,
and Hegel; to an indefinite dyad, to a theory of virtuality and of
the identity of non-being. Also materialists are obliged to regard
as determinate and material the primitive force of which the world
constitutes simply a development. If, for example, according to the
most recent theories, all matter should prove to be reducible to
hydrogen, materialism would regard hydrogen as constituting a sort of
material or substantial unity in the world. Variety would exist only
in the forms displayed by the primitive element, hydrogen, or, if you
prefer, pre-hydrogen.

[Sidenote: Materialism criticised.]

It must be confessed that this conception is somewhat naïve and
nominalistic; the word material or chemical can never express more
than the outside, than the exterior properties of the primordial
element. The hydrogen atom itself is probably in a high degree
composite, is itself probably a world of little worlds, held in
place by gravitation. The very conception of an indivisible atom is
philosophically infantine. Thomson and Helmholtz have shown that our
atoms are little vortices of energy, and have succeeded in producing
experimentally analogous vortices formed of vapour; for instance, of
the vapour chlor-hydrate of ammonia. Each vortex is composed always of
the same particles; no one particle can be separated from the others;
each vortex possesses, therefore, a stable individuality. When the
attempt is made to cut the vortices, they fly the blade or bend about
it, and prove to be indivisible. They are capable of contraction, of
dilation, of partial interpenetration and distortion, but never of
dissolution. And certain men of science have thence inferred that we
possess thus a material proof of the existence of atoms. And so indeed
we do, providing an atom be understood to be something as complex, as
little primordial, and as relatively enormous as a nebula. Atoms are
indivisible as a nebula is indivisible by a knife blade, and the atom
of hydrogen is about as simple as the solar system. To explain the
universe by hydrogen is like explaining it by the sun and the planets.
The rise of the actual world out of hydrogen can be conceived only
on condition of ascribing to the alleged atoms of hydrogen something
more than physicists and chemists know them to possess. Materialism,
therefore, must enlarge its principle if it is to prove productive:
enlarge, as Diderot would say, your atheism and your materialism.

[Sidenote: Must be supplemented by some theory to account for life.]

But the instant materialism is “enlarged,” the universal element must
at once be regarded as alive and is not what is called brute matter.
Every generation of physicists, as Mr. Spencer says, discovers in so
called brute matter forces the existence of which the best informed
physicist would some years previous have disbelieved. When we perceive
solid bodies, sensitive in spite of their inertia to the action of
forces, the number of which is infinite; when the spectroscope proves
to us that terrestrial molecules move in harmony with molecules in the
stars; when we find ourselves obliged to infer that the innumerable
vibrations traverse space in all directions, the conception which is
forced upon us is not that of a universe of dead matter but rather
that of a universe everywhere alive; alive in the general sense of the
word, if not in the restricted.[156] The notion of life is perhaps
more human and more subjective, but after all more complete and
concrete than the notion of movement and of force; for we cannot hope
to discover the truth at any great distance from the subjective, since
subjectivity is the necessary form in which truth appears to us.

      [156] Mr. Spencer himself has a little forgotten this fact in a
      number of his own somewhat too mechanical constructions.

[Sidenote: Must be supplemented by some sort of mind-stuff theory.]

The second emendation to which materialism must submit, if it is to
satisfy the metaphysical instincts of mankind, is to include in the
primordial element not only life but some germ of mind. But primitive
matter conceived as a force capable of living and ultimately of
thinking is not what is scientifically and vulgarly regarded as matter,
far less as hydrogen. The pure materialist, thumping the rotundity of
the earth with his fist, and relying grossly on his sense of touch,
cries: “Matter is everything,” but matter is analyzable into force, and
force is simply a primitive form of life. Materialism therefore issues
into a sort of animism; in the presence of the circling world, the
materialist is obliged to say it is alive. Nor can he stop there; the
world is force, is action, is life—and something more; for in and by
me the world thinks. _E pur si pensa!_

[Sidenote: Passes readily into idealism.]

Behold us landed once more in idealism. And, indeed, as Lange and M.
Taine have well shown, materialism easily passes to idealism; pure
materialism results in an abstract mechanism, which is analyzable
into the laws of logic and of thought. And the basis of this
mechanism—atoms and motion—consists in enfeebled subtilized and
rarefied tactual and visual sensations, taken ultimately as the
expression of the final reality. The alleged foundation of objective
reality is simply a residuum of our most essential sensations.
Materialism is advocated in the name of positive science; but it, not
less than idealism, belongs really to the poetry of metaphysics; its
poetry is recorded simply in terms of atoms and motion, instead of in
terms of the elements of consciousness. Materialistic symbols are more
matter of fact, more neighbour to the visible reality, possess a wider
compass and generality, but they are none the less symbols simply.
Materialism is in some sort a tissue of metaphor in which scientific
terms lose their scientific signification, and gain a metaphysical
signification in its stead, transferred, as they are, to a domain that
lies beyond the range of experience. The man of science who speculates
thus upon the nature of things is, unknown to himself, a modern
Lucretius.

[Sidenote: Materialism and the notion of infinity.]

And finally, materialism, properly so called, has been invaded by
a notion which has been at all times peculiarly adapted to satisfy
the metaphysical and religious aspirations of mankind; the notion of
infinity, whether in the direction of greatness or the opposite. Men of
science go to the trouble of estimating the number of molecules in a
drop of water; they tell us that the thousandth part of a millimeter of
water contains 228,000,000 molecules; they say that a pinhead contains
the fourth power of 20,000,000 atoms, and that, if the atoms could be
counted a billion every second, it would take 253,678 years to complete
the task. But all such calculations are simply arithmetical _jeux
d’esprit_. These figures, which are so great in appearance, really
amount to nothing, and a grain of sand, no doubt, contains literally an
infinite number of particles.

[Sidenote: Final breakdown of materialism.]

The argument against the notion of infinity, based on the logical
impossibility of an infinite number, is not decisive;[157] it rests
upon a begging of the question, namely, that everything in the
universe is innumerable—that is to say, is capable of being precisely
included within the limits of an intelligence like our own. Logic, on
the contrary, insists that in homogeneous matter, like space, time,
and quantity, there is no limit to the possibility of division and
multiplication, and that, consequently, they may proceed beyond any
given number. If so called “purely scientific” materialism does not
admit that nature is coextensive with man’s conception of what is
possible—if it denies the parallelism between thought and nature—it
by that very fact denies also the rationality of nature, which is
precisely the principle upon which every philosophy that pretends to
be purely scientific ultimately relies. Whoever rejects the notion
of infinity is obliged, in the last resort, to suppose a species of
contradiction between the activity of the human mind, which is unable
to stop at any given point, and nature, which stops, for no reason in
particular, at a determinate point in time and space. The conception
of infinity may be said to be forced upon materialism, and that very
notion contains one of the antinomies against which intelligence, by
the very fact of its employment, is ultimately brought to a standstill;
it is precisely in the act of counting that intelligence achieves
the conception of the innumerable; it is by exhausting every given
quantity that it achieves the conception of the inexhaustible; it is
by reaching ever beyond the limits of the known that it comes in touch
with the unknowable; and all these conceptions mark the point where
we feel our intelligence becoming feeble and beyond which our sight
grows dim. Back of matter, which thought takes cognizance of, and back
of thought, which takes cognizance of itself, lies infinity, which
envelops both of them, and which seems the most fundamental aspect
of matter itself. It was not without reason that the ancients called
matter, abstractly considered, as independent of its diverse forms,
the infinite ἄπειρον. Materialism thus leaves us, as other systems
do, in the presence of that ultimate mystery which all religions have
symbolized in their myths, and which metaphysics will always be obliged
to recognize, and poetry to express, by the instrumentality of images.

      [157] See Renouvier’s arguments and Lotze’s and Fouillée’s
      replies to them in the _Revue philosophique_.

[Sidenote: Apologue.]

By the seaside stood a great, upright mountain that pierced the sky
like an arrow-head, and the waves beat upon its base. In the morning,
when the first light of the sun touched the ancient rocks, they
shivered, and a voice rose from the gray stones and mingled with the
sound made by the blue sea; and mountain and wave conversed together.
The sea said: “The heavens have been mirrored in my shifting waves
a million years, and in all that time have held as high aloof from
me and stood as motionless.” And the mountain said: “I have climbed
toward the heavens a million years, and they are still as high above
me as ever.” One day a ray of sun fell smiling upon the brow of the
mountain, and the mountain questioned it on the distant heavens from
which it came. The ray was about to reply, but was reflected suddenly
from the mountain to the sea, and from a scintillating wave back to
the heavens from which it came. And the ray is still _en route_ across
the infinite, toward the nebulæ of Maïa, in the Pleiades, which were
so long invisible, or toward some point farther still, and has not yet
replied.


_III. Monism. The Fate of Worlds._

[Sidenote: Monism.]

The word infinite, ἄπειρον, which the ancients applied to matter, the
moderns have applied to mind. The reason, no doubt, is that matter and
mind are two aspects of one and the same thing. The synthesis of these
two aspects is attempted by monism.

[Sidenote: Monism to-day prevalent.]

I. It is not our purpose here to pass judgment upon the theoretical
pretensions of monism as a system of metaphysics. We observe simply
that the trend of modern thought is toward this system. Materialism is
simply a mechanical monism, the fundamental law of which is conceived
as capable of being completely formulated in mathematical terms.
Idealism is simply a monism the essential law of which is conceived as
mental, as pertaining to the intelligence or to the will. This latter
form of monism numbers many adherents in Germany and in England. In
France it has been advocated by M. Taine, and we have just seen that
it is maintained at the present moment under a somewhat different form
by M. Fouillée, who regards it as a reconciliation of naturalism and
idealism, and no doubt also as a possible reconciliation between what
is essential in pantheism and in theism.[158] In our judgment the
balance must be more evenly trimmed than the philosophers above cited
have done, between the material and mental aspects of existence,
between objective science and subjective, conscious knowledge. Monism,
therefore, essentially consists simply in a hypothesis that combines
the least questionable facts dealt with by science, those which are
inseparable from the elementary facts of consciousness. The fundamental
unity imported by the term monism is not to be confounded with
Spinoza’s unity of substance, nor with the absolute unity advocated
by the Alexandrians, nor with Spencer’s unknowable force, nor with
anything in the nature of a final cause, such as is spoken of, for
example, by Aristotle. Neither do we affirm the existence of any
unity of figure and form in the universe. We are content to admit,
by a hypothesis at once scientific and metaphysical, the fundamental
homogeneity of all things, the fundamental identity of nature. Monism,
in our judgment, should be neither transcendent nor mystical, but
immanent and naturalistic. The world is one continuous Becoming; there
are not two kinds of existence nor two lines of development, the
history of which is the history of the universe.

      [158] See the preceding chapter.

[Sidenote: The fundamental conception of philosophy is that of life.]

Instead of endeavouring to resolve matter into mind or mind into
matter, we recognize them both as united in this synthesis, which
science itself (and science is a stranger to anything in the nature of
moral or religious prejudice) is obliged to recognize: the synthesis
known as _life_. Science tends every day still further to extend the
domain of life, and there exists no fixed point of demarcation between
the organic and the inorganic world. We do not know whether the
foundation of life is _will_, or _idea_, or _thought_, or _sensation_,
although in sensation we no doubt approach the central point; it seems
to us probable simply that consciousness, which constitutes for us
everything, should count for something in every mode of being, and
that there is, so to speak, no being in the universe which is entirely
abstracted from self. But, leaving these hypotheses to one side, what
we can affirm with certainty is that life, by the very fact of its
development, tends to engender consciousness; and that progress in life
ultimately comes to be one with progress in consciousness, in which
what is movement in one aspect is sensation in another. Considered
from within everything, even the intellectual forms of time and space,
is resolvable by the psychologist into sensation and desire;[159] and,
considered from without, everything is resolvable by the physicist into
emotion; to feel and to move seem to be the two formulæ that express
the entire inner and outer universe, the concave and convex aspects of
things; but to feel that one’s self moves is the formula that expresses
self-conscious life which is still so infrequent in the great totality
of things, but which is becoming increasingly more common. The very
meaning of progress in life consists in what is expressed by the
gradual fusion of these two. Life means, in fact, development toward
sensation and thought.

      [159] See the author’s study on _L’idée de temps_ (_Revue
      philosophique_, April, 1885).

[Sidenote: Life and activity.]

Side by side with the tendency which life thus displays to take
possession of itself by consciousness, it seeks to widen the sphere
of its operation by a more and more profound activity. Life is
productivity. At the lowest stage of consciousness life leads only
to the inner development of the solitary cell; at the highest stage
of consciousness, life manifests itself in intelligent and moral
productivity. Expansion, far from being opposed to the nature of
life, is in harmony with its nature, is the very condition of life,
properly so called, just as in generation the need to engender another
individual results in that individual’s existence being, as it were,
a condition of our own. The fact is that life does not consist in
nutrition only, it consists in production, and pure egoism involves not
an expansion of self but a diminution and mutilation of self. Also the
individual, by the mere fact of growth, tends to become both social and
moral.[160] It is this fact of the fundamental sociality of mankind
which is the basis of the moral instinct, and of what is most profound
and durable in the religious and metaphysical instinct. Metaphysical
speculation, like moral action, thus springs from the very source
of life. To live is to become a conscious, a moral, and ultimately
a philosophical being. Life is activity in one or other of its more
or less equivalent forms: moral activity, and what may be called
metaphysical activity, that is to say, activity of thought, binds up
the individual with the universe.

      [160] See the author’s _Esquisse d’une morale_, p. 447, _et
      seq._

[Sidenote: No final cause in nature.]

Up to this point we have made no mention of anything in the nature of
a final cause. Morality, in our judgment, is as independent as the
so-called religious instinct of anything in the nature of a primordial
end and aim. Morality in the beginning is simply a more or less blind,
unconscious, or, at best, subconscious power. As this power becomes
endowed with self-consciousness, it directs itself toward more and more
rational objects: _duty_ is self-conscious and organized morality.
Just as humanity moves blindly forward without in the first instance
possessing any notion of its destination, so also moves nature.

       *       *       *       *       *

[Sidenote: Monism and the problem of destiny.]

All this being true, what is the destiny of mankind in the world? Does
monism allow a place for the hopes on which the moral and metaphysical
sentiments have always relied in their effort to save thought and
good-will from the charge of vanity?

[Sidenote: Natural selection and the possible evolution of gods.]

If evolution may be conceived as possessing from the beginning a
certain aim and as being on the whole providential,—a metaphysical
hypothesis which unhappily is guiltless of the smallest trace of
scientific induction,—it may also be conceived as resulting in beings
capable of proposing to themselves a certain aim, and of dragging
nature after them toward it. Natural selection would thus finally be
converted into moral and, in some sort, divine selection. Such an
hypothesis is, no doubt, as yet a rash one, but is at least in the
direction of the trend of scientific thought, and it is not formally
in contradiction with present knowledge. Evolution, in effect, can and
will produce species and types superior to humanity as we know it; it
is not probable that we embody the highest achievement possible in
life, thought, and love. Who knows, indeed, but that evolution may
be able to bring forth, nay, has not already brought forth, what the
ancients called gods?

[Sidenote: Possibility of arresting process of dissolution.]

Such speculation offers a permanent support for what is best in the
religious sentiment for sociality, not only with all living and knowing
beings, but with the creatures of thought and superior power with which
we people the universe. Provided such beings are in no sense anti-real,
provided they might somewhere exist, if not in the present at least in
the future, the religious sentiment may attach itself to them without
check from the scientific sentiment. And in so doing it becomes one
with the metaphysical and poetic impulse. The believer is transmuted
into a philosopher or a poet, but into a poet whose poetry is his
life, and who dreams of a universal society of real or possible beings
who shall be animated to a goodness of will analogous to his own. The
statement that Feuerbach proposed, of what is essential in moral and
religious sentiment (the reaction of human desire on the universe),
may then be interpreted in a higher sense as referring to a desire and
a hope both that, first, the sociality with which we feel ourselves
personally to be animated may, as biology would lead us to believe,
be discovered in all beings that exist at the summit of universal
evolution; and second, that these beings thus placed at the front by
evolution, will one day succeed in securing what they have gained, in
preventing dissolution, and that they may thereby permanently establish
in the universe the love of social or rather universal well-being.

[Sidenote: The highest possible conception in the realms of morals.]

Thus understood, the religious sentiment may still be regarded as
ultra-scientific, but no longer as anti-scientific. It is, no doubt,
taking much for granted to suppose that beings who have arrived at a
high degree of evolution may determine from that point on the direction
that the evolutionary process is to take, but, after all, since we are
unable to affirm with certitude that such is not or may not become the
fact, the moral and social sentiment urges us to act in such manner
as to turn as far as in us lies the process of evolution in that
direction. If, as we have said, morality is a species of productivity,
every moral being must turn his eyes toward the future, must hope that
his work will not die, must watch over the safety of that portion of
himself that he has delivered to someone else—of his love—by which
not only he has devoted himself to others, but has made others in a
sense his own; has acquired rights over them, has conquered them, so to
speak, by subjecting himself to them. By labouring for humanity and for
the universe with which humanity is bound up, I acquire certain rights
over the universe. There arises between us a relation of reciprocal
dependence. The highest conception of morals and metaphysics is that
of a sort of sacred league between the higher beings of the earth, and
even of the universe, for the advancement of what is good.

       *       *       *       *       *

II. What scientific facts may be urged in bar of such hopes as to the
destiny of the universe and of humanity?

[Sidenote: Immanence of dissolution.]

The most discouraging aspect of the theory of evolution is that
of dissolution, which seems to be inevitably incident to it. From
Heracleitus to Mr. Spencer, philosophers have regarded these two ideas
as inseparable. But does evolution necessarily result in dissolution?
Our experience, both of the life of individuals and of worlds,
seems, so far as the past is concerned, to make for a reply in the
affirmative. Our whole acquaintance has been with worlds which have
gone or are going to shipwreck. When the corpse of a sailor is thrown
into the sea, his friends take notice of the exact point of latitude
and longitude at which his body disappeared in the ocean. Two figures
on a bit of paper are all that exists of what was a human life. An
analogous destiny may be supposed to be in reserve for the terrestrial
globe and for humanity as a whole. They may some day sink out of sight
in space and dissolve beneath the moving waves of ether; and at that
period, if some neighbouring and friendly star observe us, it may
take the latitude and longitude in infinite space of the point in the
celestial abyss where we disappeared—the angle made by the last rays
that left the earth; and the measure of this angle, made by two extinct
rays, may be the sole trace to remain of the whole sum of human effort
in the world of thought.

[Sidenote: Has been observed in the past only.]

Nevertheless, the duty of science being equally in its denials and
in its affirmations to keep within the limits of certainty, it is
important not to model our conception of the future too absolutely upon
our knowledge of the past.

[Sidenote: The future may differ from the past.]

Up to the present time there has been no individual, nor group of
individuals, nor world which has attained complete self-consciousness,
complete consciousness of its life and of the laws of its life. We are
unable, therefore, either to affirm or to demonstrate that dissolution
is essentially and eternally incident to evolution by the very law
of being: the law of laws is to us simply _x_. If thought is ever to
understand the law of laws, it will be by realizing the law in its
own person. And such a height of development is conceivable; if it
is impossible to prove its existence, it is still more impossible to
prove its non-existence. It may be that if complete self-consciousness,
if complete consciousness is ever achieved, it will produce a
corresponding power great enough to arrest the process of dissolution.
Beings who are capable, in their infinite complication of movements
in the world, of distinguishing those which make for evolution as
against those which make for dissolution, might be capable of defeating
the latter and of securing the unimpeded operation of the former. If
a bird is to cross the sea it needs a certain breadth of wing; its
destiny depends on some inches, more or less, of feathers. Seabirds
that desert the shore before their wings have attained the proper
strength are one after another engulfed in the waves, but when their
wings are full grown they can cross the ocean. A world also needs, so
to speak, a certain breadth of wing to secure its flight in infinite
space—its fate depends on some small increments, more or less, in the
development of consciousness; beings may one day be produced capable of
traversing eternity without danger of being engulfed, and evolution may
be established once for all in security against a recoil; for the first
time in the onward movement of the universe a definitive result may be
achieved. According to the profound symbolism of the Greek religion,
time is the father of worlds. The power of evolution which the moderns
regard as ruling over all things is the ancient Saturn who devours
his offspring. Which of his children shall deceive him and vanquish
him—what Jupiter shall some day prove strong enough to chain up the
divine and terrible power that engendered him? The problem for him when
he shall arise—for this god of light and intelligence—will be to
check the eternal and blind impulse of destruction without at the same
time arresting the impulse of productivity. Nothing, after all, can
justify one in affirming scientifically that such a problem is forever
insoluble.

[Sidenote: The inexhaustible resources of nature.]

The great resource of nature is number, the possible combinations of
which are infinite and constitute the secret of the eternal mechanism
of the universe. Fortuitous combination and selection, which have
produced so many marvels in the past, may give rise to still greater
marvels in the future. It is on that fact that Heracleitus, Empedocles,
Democritus, and later the men like Laplace, Lamarck, and Darwin based
their conception of the part played by chance in the universe, and of
the point of union between luck and destiny. There is in the history
of the world—as in the history of a people, a belief, or a science—a
certain number of partings of the way, where the least impulse toward
one side or toward the other suffices to destroy or to preserve the
accumulated effort of centuries. We must happily have passed an
infinity of such cross-roads to have attained our present point of
development. And at each new point of the kind we encounter once more
the same danger and run the same risk of losing everything that we have
gained. The number of times that a fortunate soldier has evaded death
will not make the next shot fired at him deviate a millimetre from its
appointed path, but if our successes in the past are no guarantee of
success in the future, our failures in the past do not constitute a
definitive proof of failure in the future.

[Sidenote: Even chances that the future may not resemble the past.]

The gravest objection that can be urged against hopefulness, an
objection which has hitherto not been sufficiently considered,
and which M. Renan has omitted to deal with in his something too
optimistic “Dialogues”—is that of the eternity _a parte post_, is the
semi-abortion, the partial miscarriage of a universe which, throughout
an infinite past, has proved itself incapable of a better world than
this.[161] Still, if that fact constitutes a reason for looking with
less confidence toward the future, it cannot be regarded as a ground
for despair. An infinite past has proved to be more or less sterile,
but an infinite future may prove to be otherwise. Even taking for
granted the total miscarriage hitherto of the labours of humanity and
of the infinity of extra-terrestrial beings who no doubt coöperate with
us, there remains, so far as the future is concerned, mathematically
one chance out of every two of success; and that is enough to debar
pessimism forever of an ultimate triumph. If the mere chances of the
dice, by which, according to Plato, the universe is governed, have as
yet produced nothing but crumbling worlds and caducous civilization, a
calculation of probabilities demonstrates that even after an infinite
number of throws the result of the present cast or of the next cast
cannot be foreseen. The future is not entirely determined by the past
_which is known to us_. Future and past are reciprocally related and
the one cannot be absolutely known without the other, and the one
cannot be absolutely divined from a knowledge of the other. Conceive a
flower in bloom at some point in infinite space—a sacred flower, the
flower of thought: hands have been groping for it in every direction
throughout an infinite past; some have touched it by chance and then
lost it again before they could seize it. Is the divine flower never
to be plucked? Why not? A negative answer would be simply the outcome
of discouragement, not the expression of probability. Or conceive,
once more, a ray of light following a straight line through space,
not reflected by any solid atom or molecule of air, and an infinity
of eyes in an eternal obscurity seeking for this ray, with no means
of discovering how near to them or how far from them it may, at any
moment, be. The ray pursues its way unimpeded, and innumerable open,
ardent eyes long for it and sometimes seem to feel the presence of
the luminous wave moving forward on its victorious course. Must
their search eternally be vain? If there is no definitive reason for
affirming it, there is still less any categorical reason for denying
it. It is a matter of chance, the man of science might say; it is a
matter, also, of perseverance and intelligence, would be added by the
philosopher.

      [161] See on this subject the author’s _Vers d’un philosophe_,
      p. 198.

[Sidenote: Positive evidence of ultimate success.]

The fact that we are to-day capable of stating such problems in regard
to the destiny of the universe seems to indicate something like an
advance in the direction of solving them; thought is unable to advance
upon reality beyond a certain point; the conception of an ideal
presupposes the existence of a more or less imperfect realization of
it. In the tertiary period no animal speculated about the universal
society. A true conception of the ideal, if the truth about the matter
could be known mathematically, would be found to possess, in all
probability, an enormous number of chances of being realized; properly
to state a problem is to have begun to solve it. A purely mathematical
calculation of the external probabilities of the case does not,
therefore, express the real value in the domain of intelligence and
morality, because in matters of intelligence and morality, possibility,
probability, and the powers upon which the realization of the fact
depends, lie in thought which is a concentration of inner and, so to
speak, living chances.

[Sidenote: In especial when the infinity of space is taken into
account.]

Over and above infinity of number and eternity of time, a field of
hopefulness lies in the immensity of space, which makes it irrational
for us to judge too absolutely of the future of the universe solely
from our experience of so small a portion of it as our solar, and even
as our stellar system. Are we the only thinking beings in the universe?
We have already seen that, without passing far beyond what science
holds to be certain, one may even now reply in the negative. There
very probably exists an infinity of cold or cooling stars, which have
arrived at about the same point in their evolution as our earth; each
of these stars is physically and chemically analogous to the earth,
and they must have passed through analogous stages of vapourization,
and condensation, and incandescence, and cooling. It is therefore
probable that they have given rise to forms of organic life more
or less analogous to those that we are acquainted with. In effect,
the homogeneity of the organic matter of which our stellar system
is composed (a fact which spectral analysis enables us to ascertain
in regard to even the most remote stars) allows us to infer, by an
induction which is not too improbable, a certain similitude in the most
fundamental types of organic life. Analogous types of mineralization
and crystallization must have given rise to analogous types of
organization, although the number and richness of the forms that are
possible increase as existence grows more complex. We do not see why
the primordial protoplasm should in such and such a satellite of Sirius
be especially different from that of our globe; nay, there may even
obtain a certain cycle of forms and “living numbers,” as Pythagoras
would say, that periodically recur. It is difficult in the actual state
of science to conceive life as appearing except in some form of matter
analogous to the cellule, and to conceive consciousness as otherwise
than centralized in and manifesting itself by vibrations such as those
to which our nervous systems are subject. Conscious life implies a
society of living beings, a sort of social consciousness which the
individual consciousness seems, in a sort, to presuppose. Organic and
conscious life, the conditions of which are so much more determinate
than those of inorganic life, must everywhere, in spite of differences
in the circumstances, have assumed in the course of evolution forms
that, in a number of respects, must have been analogous to animals and
human beings such as we are familiar with. Perhaps the most general
of the laws formulated by Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire on the correlation
of organs might be found to hold good of the animals existing on the
satellites of distant stars of the twentieth magnitude. In spite of the
infinite variety of the flora and fauna of our globe, and the seemingly
inexhaustible ingenuity that nature has displayed in varying their
forms, it may reasonably be surmised that the difference between the
types of life with which we are acquainted and those with which we are
not acquainted is subject to certain considerable limitations. In spite
of differences of temperature, of light, of attraction, of electricity,
sidereal species, how different soever they may be from terrestrial
species of living beings, must, by the necessities of the case, have
been developed in the direction of sensitiveness and of intelligence,
and have gone in that direction sometimes not as far as we, sometimes
farther. Note also that even on our globe the excessively odd and
monstrous types produced, like those of the tertiary period, as it were
in obedience to a sort of apocalyptic imagination, have proved unable
to maintain themselves. The most enduring species have generally been
the least eccentric, the closest to a uniform and æsthetic type. It is
not excessively improbable, therefore, that the universe contains an
infinite number of human species analogous to humanity as we know it,
in all essential faculties, although, perhaps, very different in the
form of their organs and in the degree of their intelligence. They are
our planetary brothers. Perhaps by comparison with us they are gods;
and in that fact lies, as we have said, the kernel of possible or
actual truth in the ancient beliefs in regard to the divine inhabitants
of the skies.[162]

      [162] To understand the enormous differences which, in spite
      of the analogies, may exist between the organization of the
      planetary or stellar beings and our own, it suffices to
      consider the immense variety which obtains among terrestrial
      species. Ants have already achieved an advanced state of
      society with their shepherd, labouring, and warrior castes.
      Suppose them to continue their intellectual development instead
      of halting at a mechanical life of instinct; they might arrive
      at a point of mental evolution analogous, _mutatis mutandis_,
      to that of such and such a human society; for example, that
      of the Chinese. Who knows, indeed, but that they might rule
      the earth by virtue of substituting number and intelligence
      for individual power? Their civilization would be in some sort
      Liliputian, and destined, no doubt, to exercise a smaller
      influence on the course of things than that of which physically
      stronger beings might prove capable; or, to pass from one
      extreme to the other, in the dreamland in which Fontenelle,
      Diderot, and Voltaire have laboured, conceive a race of human
      beings developed not from anthropoids, but from the next most
      intelligent members of the animal kingdom—from elephants.
      Scientifically, the supposition is not impossible, when it is
      considered that the elephant’s trunk is at once one of the
      strongest and most delicate organs of prehension known to us,
      and that to possess a well-developed brain and good organs of
      prehension are perhaps the prime requisites for success in the
      struggle for existence. A giant civilization, therefore, quite
      different from ours in externals, if not in essentials, might
      well have been achieved on the earth or on some neighbouring
      star. However repugnant to our instinctive anthropomorphism,
      we should familiarize ourselves with the thought that if
      evolution is subject to necessary laws, a simple series of
      accidents and favourable circumstances may give such and such
      a species the advantage over such and such another, and invert
      the comparative dignity of the two without the general onward
      movement of evolution being checked.

      Moreover, the development of intelligence in a planet depends
      much less on the bodily form and number of the inhabitants
      than on the nature of their life; and as their life depends
      upon phenomena of heat, light, electricity, and the chemical
      modifications that they produce, it is these phenomena that
      in some sort decide the intellectual future of the planet.
      Kant threw out the suggestion that in an astronomic system,
      for example—in our solar system—the intellectual and moral
      perfection of the inhabitants increases with their aloofness
      from the central star, and thus follows a lowering of the
      temperature; but such a hypothesis is much too simple to
      account for so complex an effect, and one which is dependent
      upon many other things than temperature. What is probable, from
      the phenomena of life as we know them, is that thought could
      scarcely be developed either in a brazier or a glacier, and
      that a certain mean is a necessary condition of organic and
      intellectual development.

[Sidenote: Objections answered.]

But, it has been said, if other globes than ours are inhabited by
intelligent and affectionate beings who live as we do upon the daily
bread of science, these beings cannot be notably superior to us, or
they would have given us before this time visible signs of their
existence. To argue thus is not sufficiently to take account of the
terrible power of space to imprison beings in infinite isolation.
It may well be doubted whether beings of a relatively infinite
intelligence, as compared with us, would not find their power unequal
to dealing with such spaces as separate the stars. Our testimony on a
question of the existence of such beings has no more value than that of
a flower in the polar regions, or a bit of moss on the Himalayas, or a
bit of weed in the depths of the Pacific Ocean, would have if it should
declare the earth to be void of really intelligent beings on the ground
that they had never been plucked by a human hand. If, therefore, the
universe somewhere contains beings really worthy of the name of gods,
they are probably so distant from us that they are as unaware of our
existence as we are of theirs. They perhaps have realized our ideals,
and the fact of that realization will perhaps remain unknown to us to
the end.

[Sidenote: Possibility of discovering inhabitants in other spheres.]

It is to-day admitted that every thought corresponds to a certain kind
of motion. Suppose that an analysis more delicate even than that of
the spectrum should enable us to record and to distinguish, not only
vibrations of light but the invisible vibrations of thought in distant
worlds. We should, perhaps, be surprised to see that in proportion as
the light and heat of the incandescent stars decrease, there by degrees
arises consciousness, and that the smallest and most obscure stars are
the first to produce it, whereas the most brilliant and enormous, like
Sirius and Aldebaran, are the last to feel these subtler vibrations,
but feel them ultimately with greater power, and develop a humanity
with faculties and powers proportionate to their enormity.

[Sidenote: Slowness of spread of civilization from star to star.]

The total amount of space which is known to us, from our earth to
the farthest nebulæ that the telescope renders visible, and to the
dark depths beyond, is no more than a mere point as compared with the
totality of the universe—supposing always that there is a totality.
Eternity may, therefore, be necessary for progress to traverse the
immensity of space, if one conceives progress (if such a thing exists
at all) as starting from some one point of departure, from a sort
of holy-land and elect people, and spreading from them out in all
directions into the infinite. Modern science, of course, scarcely
permits one to believe in so privileged a land. Illimitable nature
scarcely possesses, after the fashion of God, exclusive election.
If the ideal has been achieved in one place, it must also, in all
probability, have been achieved in a number of others, although the
wave of progress has not yet spread to us. Intellectual light travels
less rapidly than solar and stellar light, and yet how long it takes a
ray to come to us from Capricornus!

[Sidenote: Possibility of mind-acting on mind at a distance.]

In our inferior organisms, consciousness does not seem to pass from
one living molecule to another unless they are contiguous in space;
still, according to the most recent discoveries in regard to the
nervous system, and to the propagation of thought by mental suggestion
from a distance,[163] it is not contrary to the facts to conceive the
possibility of a sort of radiation of consciousness through space by
means of undulations of a degree of subtlety as yet unknown to us. It
is not utterly unpermissible to conceive a society of consciousnesses
not hemmed into some small corner of the universe, each in a narrow
organism which is a prison, but communicating freely with each other
throughout the whole expanse of space; it is not utterly unpermissible
to conceive the ultimate realization of the ideal of universal
sociality which constitutes the basis of the religious instinct. Just
as out of a more intimate communication with individual consciousnesses
there may arise upon our earth a sort of collective consciousness, so
it is not ridiculous to suppose that there may arise, in an infinity of
ages, a sort of intercosmic consciousness.

      [163] See the _Revue philosophique_, 1886.

[Sidenote: Patience.]

God is patient because he is eternal, theologians are fond of saying.
In an all-powerful being patience of evil would be a crime; patience,
which can scarcely be ascribed with any propriety to God, belongs
however most fitly to a being who is aware of his fundamental unity
with the totality of things, and is conscious of his eternity as a
member of the human species, as a member of the brotherhood of living
beings of which the human species is simply an accident, as a part of
the evolution of this globe in which conscious life itself at first
appears as no more than an accident, and of the evolution of the vast
astronomical systems in which our globe is no more than a point. Man
may be patient because, as an inseparable part of nature, he is eternal.


_IV. The destiny of the human race and the hypothesis of immortality
from the point of view of monism._

[Sidenote: Theory of evolution and death.]

Next to the fate of the universe, what interests us most vitally
is the question of our own destiny. Religion consists for the most
part in a meditation on death. If death were not an incident of life
mankind would nevertheless be superstitious, but superstition would
probably never have been systematized into religions. The mass of
society possesses so slight an interest in metaphysics! A problem must
bruise and wound them to attract their attention; and death prevents
such problems. Will the gates of the valley of Jehoshaphat, through
which the dead must pass, open on the heavens like a rainbow made of
light and hope, like a joyous triumphal arch, or will it be low as the
door of the tomb, and open upon infinite darkness? Such is the great
question to which all religions have endeavoured to furnish a response.
“The last enemy that shall be vanquished is death,” says St. Paul;
perhaps that also represents the last secret that shall be penetrated
by human thought. The ideas which tend to become dominant in modern
philosophy seem, however, to exclude the notion of the perpetuity
of the self. The conception of evolution principally is based on a
theory of mobility, and appears to result in the dissolution of the
individual, with even a greater certainty than in that of the species
or the world. The individual form, and the species form, are equally
unstable. On the walls of the catacombs may often be seen, roughly
designed, the dove, bringing back to the ark the green bough, the
symbol of the soul which has passed beyond the ocean and discovered the
eternal harbour; at the present day the harbour recoils _ad infinitum_,
before human thought; limitless open sea stretches away before it:
where in the abyss of bottomless and limitless nature shall be found
the branch of hope. Death is a wider void than life.

[Sidenote: The problem of life after death at the present day.]

When Plato approached the problem of destiny, he did not hesitate
to launch out into philosophical hypotheses, and even into poetical
myths. It is our present purpose to examine what are to-day the
suppositions, or, if you choose, the dreams that may still be
entertained as to the future by a sincere believer in the dominant
philosophy of the present day, the philosophy of evolution. Given the
present conception of nature, would Plato have found himself cut off
from those beautiful expectations to the charm of which he said we
ought to submit ourselves? In Germany, and in especial in England,
it is not uncommon to endeavour to discover how much of the antique
religious beliefs still subsists, and is, in however problematic and
uncertain a form, involved in the scientific and philosophic hypotheses
of the day. It is our purpose to undertake here an analogous inquiry
in regard to immortality, recognizing how conjectural any attempt to
solve the mystery of fate must be. Is it necessary to say that we
make no pretensions to “demonstrating” either the existence or even
the _scientific_ probability of a life after death? Our design is more
modest; it is enough to show that the impossibility of such a life is
not yet proven; even in the presence of modern science immortality is
still a problem; if this problem has not received a positive solution,
no more has it received a negative solution.

It is our intention further to consider what bold, and even adventurous
hypotheses may be necessary to enable one to translate into philosophic
language the sacred symbols of religion, or the destiny of the soul.

       *       *       *       *       *

[Sidenote: Death and idealism.]

I. There are two possible conceptions as to life after death; that
of eternal existence and that of immortality, properly so called, or
continuation and evolution of life under a superior form. The first
conception corresponds more particularly to the idealistic theories of
the world, which we have analyzed above, which, regarding the basis
of things as an eternal thought, a thought of thought, believe that
by identifying itself with it mankind might pass out of time into
eternity. Thought, which seems at first no more than a reverberation
and image of things, idealists believe, turns out in the last analysis
to be the very reality of which all the rest of the world is but a
reflection; but this conception of an eternal existence is not in the
least incompatible with the philosophy of evolution, for evolution
in time does not exclude a transcendent mode of existence out of
time. Such an existence, however, remains essentially problematic; it
corresponds to Kant’s Noumenon and Spencer’s Unknowable; according
to this hypothesis, corporal death is simply a stage in physical
evolution, and the final term to be attained by all beings is their
fixation in the consciousness of eternity. This point of fixation,
accessible to every thinking being, is to be attained only by the
highest, most disinterested, impersonal, and universal thought possible.

[Sidenote: An eternal element in man.]

Such is the hope which lies at the bottom of the great religions,
and the great idealistic systems of metaphysics. According to Plato
there is nothing durable in us but what relates to the eternal, and
to the universal, and is therefore of the same nature as they are.
All the rest is eliminated by Becoming, by perpetual Generation, that
is, by evolution. A flower is, in our eyes, a friend; it owes its
colour and charm, however simple, to a ray of the sun; but this ray,
to which our affection is due, is wholly impersonal; it creates the
beauty of the flower, and passes on its way; and it is the sun that
we should love, both for the ray and the flower. Too exclusive and
limited affection is always based on some mistake, and is on that
account perishable. It insists on our stopping at such and such a
link in the infinite chain of causes and effects. It is the principle
of the universe, it is the universal being that we must love, if our
heart is big enough, and it is that love alone, according to Plato,
which is eternal. Is not eternity the very form of existence in the
intelligible world, in which Goodness is the sun and the Ideas are the
stars? Christian neo-Platonists, over and above Time and its incessant
mobility, have dreamed of an intemporal and immutable somewhat, that
they call the life eternal: _Quæ enim videntur, temporalia sunt; quæ
autem non videntur, æterna_. Spinoza has dealt with the same conception
of an existence under the form of eternity, which does not exclude
the perpetual development of changing modes. Kant also, by his word
_Noumenon_, designated an intelligible, intemporal, transcendent
somewhat, that lay beyond the scope of physical evolution. “The eternal
evolution of the soul,” Schelling has said in his turn, “is not eternal
in the sense that it possesses neither a beginning nor an end, but in
that it bears no relation to Time.” And Schopenhauer, finally, believes
in an intemporal, eternal will, which is distinguished from the will
to live that belongs to time and to the evolution of temporal forms.
“We willingly recognize,” says Schopenhauer, “that what remains after
the complete abolition of the will is absolutely nothing to those who
are still full of the desire of life, but for those in whom desire is
annihilated what does our evil world, with its sun and its Milky Way,
amount to? Nothing.” It is with these words that Schopenhauer closes
his book. He brings us once more into the presence of _Nirvâna_,
conceived not only as a refuge from life, but also as a refuge from
death; as an existence that shall be placeless and timeless, and, so to
speak, _utopian_ (in its primary intention) and _achronistic_.

[Sidenote: Is such immortality personal or not?]

But is this eternal life, the fact of which is, as we have seen,
problematic, altogether impersonal or not? No certain reply can be
given since we are as ignorant of the essence of individual being as
of the essence of universal being, and consequently of the degree to
which it is possible for individuality to subsist in universality.
Schopenhauer, however, in his endeavour to ascribe to the individual
a greater amount of reality than Plato allowed, opposed the principle
of individuation to the natural individualities in which it manifests
itself, and it may, indeed, be asked, whether genuine consciousness,
genuine thought, and genuine volition do not at once pass beyond the
individual, and preserve what is most essential in the individual.
Individuality is always more or less physical, but it is possible that
what makes individuality limited is not of the essence of personality,
of consciousness; perhaps what is best in thought and will may become
universal, without ceasing in the best sense to be personal like the
Νοῦς of Anaxagoras.[164]

      [164] At the very centre of one’s being, universality and
      personality increase side by side; that is to say, the greater
      the share of existence a being possesses, the greater the
      amount of existence that it is capable of sharing with other
      beings. Incommunicability or impenetrability represents the
      lowest degree of existence; natural existence, the existence
      of forces as yet blind and fatal, maintains by their mutual
      antagonism an equilibrium in a state of inertia and torpor
      ... The greater one’s self-appropriation by intelligence, the
      greater one’s power of taking possession of other beings by
      thought; the being that best knows itself best knows other
      beings ... the spirit, in so far as it is intelligent, should
      be open, penetrable, participable, and participant. Two minds,
      in so far as they are perfect, may interpenetrate each other by
      means of thought (A. Fouillée, _Philosophie de Platon_).

      “We must distinguish,” M. Janet also says, “between
      personality and individuality. Individuality consists in all
      the external circumstances which distinguish one man from
      another—circumstances of time, place, organization, etc....
      The root of personality lies in individuality, but it tends
      incessantly to withdraw from it. The individual is centred in
      himself; personality aspires to rise above itself. The ideal
      of individuality is egoism, the focussing of the whole in
      self; the ideal of personality is devotion, the identification
      of self with the whole. Personality, properly so called, is
      consciousness of the impersonal” (_Moral_, 573).

[Sidenote: No positive knowledge to oppose to hypothesis of
immortality.]

Speculate as we may upon individual and universal being, we are all
but brought face to face in the end with the same transcendental _x_.
Such speculations, however, are not without a certain utility, that
of impressing us afresh with the limits of our knowledge. A belief
in a transcendent immortality, as Fiske says, can be defined only
negatively, as a refusal to believe that this world is everything.
The materialist maintains, Fiske says, that when we have described
the entire universe of phenomena, of which we are capable of taking
cognizance under the conditions of this life, the whole of the story
has been told. Fiske himself believes, on the contrary, that the whole
has not then been told.[165] We may at least say that it is _possible_
that the whole story has not then been told. But to pass from the
possible to the probable, no conclusion of the kind can be considered
satisfactory that is not based upon more positive reason, psychological
or moral; unsupported metaphysical speculations leave the mind simply
in the presence of a problem.

      [165] Fiske, _The Destiny of Man_, p. 113.

       *       *       *       *       *

[Sidenote: The hypothesis of a conditional eternity.]

Theories in regard to an eternal life such as we above mentioned have
always proved in history more or less aristocratic and inclined to
limit the number of the elect. In Buddhism the sage alone is capable
of achieving eternal existence, whereas all the rest of mankind are
condemned to life in time and illusion. Spinoza recognizes eternity
only in what he calls cognition of the third order, intellectual
intuition and love. Such cognition belongs properly to the true
philosopher only. The intelligence of the vulgar is passive and
perishable. “The instant the vulgar cease ... to suffer,” says Spinoza,
“they cease to exist.” And Goethe, too, was inclined to regard the
eternal life as reserved for an aristocracy.

[Sidenote: Criticised.]

This theory of inequality is maintainable only in so far as it is based
upon an actual ascertainment of the difference in progress displayed
by different minds, and of the small number of those who achieve the
heights of wisdom. The case is otherwise when such an observed fact
of natural or moral inequality is converted into a divine right, and
God is conceived as creating and desiring precisely such a state of
things. The latter, however, is the alternative that modern Christian
theologians have adopted in their effort to offer a re-reading of
the sacred texts. In their judgment the good alone are immortal, or,
rather, are immortalized by God; the others are damned, in the sense
that they are totally annihilated—an interpretation of the dogma of
eternal punishment that seems to them wholly to exculpate the Deity.
Any such notion is based upon a metaphysical illusion. The hypothesis
of traditional eternity is inconsistent with that of the existence of a
creator, since it is forever impossible on that hypothesis, to escape
the contradiction involved in the notion of a being’s creating only to
destroy—of a being’s choosing among his creatures a certain number
for condemnation to death. Annihilation is simply damnation palliated;
it is the substitution of a celestial guillotine for the long miseries
that have preceded. This theological hypothesis affords us no way out
of the difficulties involved in the doctrine of divine sanction that
lies at the heart of all religions; it is the sacrifice of Isaac, or of
Jesus, in another form simply. Will it be said that, on the hypothesis
of conditional immortality, the immoral being is alone responsible
for his own death? Yielding to passion, or even to vice, cannot be
assimilated to suicide, for in suicide one knows what one is doing and
is responsible for it; one kills one’s self because one wishes to die;
but one does not wish to die when one abandons one’s self to a passion;
and, if the result therefore of so doing is annihilation, death comes
upon one unforeseen and undesired, takes one by surprise, by a sort of
divine ruse, and the responsibility for such annihilation lies and must
lie with God. Moreover, how can there exist between two individuals
of the same nature a sufficiently great natural or moral difference
to justify the one’s being wholly annihilated, and the other’s being
permitted to live _in æternum_? It may be said, with Plato in the
“Republic,” that, if vice were a disease that is really mortal to the
soul, it would kill it in this life. Its destructive influence would
be felt long before the occurrence of death, which, so far as vice is
concerned, is an accidental circumstance simply.

[Sidenote: Is incompatible with human fellowship.]

As the notion of conditional immortality is incompatible with the
notion of an omnipotent, omniscient, sovereignly loving creator, so
also is it with that of a society of souls, of a spiritual kingdom,
from which a certain number of mankind would be excluded forever. An
absolutely wicked and hateful soul, unpossessed of any element of
humanity, not to say of divinity, and consequently unfit to live, is a
pure figment of hate and amounts to transporting the caste of pariah
into the celestial city. It is a contradiction in terms to enjoin us
to universal charity toward all men without exception, and at the same
time to wish us to consent to the absolute annihilation and damnation
of some of them. We are naturally and morally too intimately related
for certain of us to be condemned definitively to death without the
rest of us being impeded on our upward course; we are bound to each
other by our love of humanity like Alpine climbers by the cord that
passes from waist to waist, and one of us cannot slip but that the
rest of us feel it, nor fall without all of us falling. _Nihil humani
alienum_; one heart beats in the bosom of humanity, and if it stops
forever in a single human breast, it will stop forever in the breasts
of those also who are supposed to be immortal. The best of us, those
who would be fit to receive baptism into immortality, would do as the
barbarous and pagan chief, who, after having washed away his sins in
the holy water of the font, with salvation in his hand and Paradise
before his eyes, demanded suddenly what would be the fate of his former
companions who had died unconverted, and whether he should find them
in heaven. “No,” replied the priest, “they will be among the miserable
and the damned, and thou amongst the blessed.” “I will go, then, among
the damned, for I wish to go where I shall find my companions in arms.
Adieu!” And he turned his back upon the font.

[Sidenote: Summary.]

The hypothesis of conditional immortality can, therefore, be maintained
only by eliminating from it the doctrine of a creator of absolute
merit, of virtue, and of universal and infinite charity; thus
diminished, it becomes a belief in a sort of natural or metaphysical
necessity to which beings are subject according to their degree of
perfection simply. This hypothesis is essentially anti-providential,
and in harmony only with systems more or less analogous to that of
Spinoza.

In general the notion of eternal life is altogether transcendent and a
fit subject for mystical dreams only. Let us, therefore, abandon this
high ground and descend to nature and experience. Instead of talking
of eternity, let us speak of life after death and of an immortality
not conditional, but conditioned by the laws of matter and of mind and
attainable by everyone.

       *       *       *       *       *

[Sidenote: Does personality contain a permanent element?]

II. Let us take our stand in the beginning on positive experience, and
consider what sort of immortality the philosophy of evolution permits
us to hope for. There exists in the sphere of consciousness, so to
speak, a series of concentric circles which lie closer and closer about
an unfathomable centre, personality. Let us pass in review the diverse
manifestations of personality and see if they contain any imperishable
element.

[Sidenote: One’s works immortal.]

The most external, and, in some sort, the most observable aspect of
mankind, consists in their works and actions. Where material works
alone are concerned, such as a house that one has built, a picture that
one has painted, a statue that one has modelled, it may be felt that
the distance between the worker and the work is too great, and that
immortality in one’s work is too much like a sort of optical illusion.
But when intellectual and moral works are concerned, the effect and the
cause are more nearly one; therein lies the element of truth contained
in the highly impersonal and disinterested doctrine that one lives
in one’s works. Intellectual and moral labours are more than their
mere material effect. The good man’s highest wish is to live and live
again in his good actions; the thinker’s highest wish is to live and
live again in the thought that he has contributed to the inheritance
of humanity. This doctrine may be found in almost all great religions
and is capable of subsistence in the domain of pure science. According
to the modern Buddhists of India a man’s actions are his soul, and it
is this soul that survives his death, and transmigration of souls
is simply the constant transformation of good into better, and evil
into worse; the immortality of one’s soul is the immortality of one’s
actions, which continue to operate forever in the world according to
their original force and direction.

[Sidenote: Continuity of human effort.]

Generation after generation labours at the task, and passes the token
of hope from hand to hand. _Heri meum, tuum hodie_, yesterday was mine
and I spent it in doing good, but not enough good; to-day is thine:
employ the whole of it, do not lose an hour of it; if an hour dies
sterile, it is a chance lost of realizing the ideal. Thou art master of
to-day; do what in thee lies to make to-morrow what thou wouldst have
it, let to-morrow be always in advance of to-day, and the horizon that
men see each fresh morning be brighter and higher than the one they saw
before.

[Sidenote: Nothing lost.]

The action must be followed into its effects, or into the effect
of those effects, and so on infinitely. Our conduct stretches away
_ad infinitum_, beyond the reach of our knowledge. Even from the
purely physical and physiological point of view, neither intended
nor attempted goodness is ineffective, since both thought and desire
develop the mind. The very notion of what is to-day chimerical
corresponds to a real movement in our brains; it is a mental force
which contains its element of verity and influence. We inherit not only
what our fathers did, but what they could not do, what they attempted
and did not achieve. We are still alive with the devotion and sacrifice
of our ancestors, with the courage that perhaps they spent in vain, as
we feel in the spring the breath of distant antedeluvian springs and
the loves of the tertiary period.

[Sidenote: Failure in the past the guarantee of success in the future.]

The ability of the present generation has been made possible by the
stumbling and mistakes of generations in the past; and this embryonic
and successless past constitutes the guarantee of our future. In the
moral, as in the physiological world, there are instances of fertility
that are not yet explicable. Sometimes long after the death of the
man who first loved her the woman brings forth a child that resembles
him; and humanity may bring forth a civilization on the model of some
ideal cherished in the past, even when the past seems to be buried
forever, if the ideal contains some obscure element of truth and,
by consequence, of imperishable force. What has once really lived
shall live again, and what seems to be dead is only making ready to
revive. The scientific law of atavism is a guarantee of resurrection.
To conceive and desire the best is to attempt the ideal, is to
predetermine the path that all succeeding generations shall tread. Our
highest aspirations, which seem precisely the most vain, are, as it
were, waves which, having had the power to reach us, have the power to
pass beyond us, and may, by a process of summation with other waves,
ultimately shake the world. I am satisfied that what is best in me
will survive, perhaps not one of my dreams shall be lost; other men
will take them up, will dream them over again in their turn until they
are realized. It is by force of spent waves that the sea fashions the
immense bed in which it lies.

[Sidenote: Death not inevitable.]

In effect, in the philosophy of evolution life and death are recognized
as relative and correlative conceptions; life is in one sense death,
and death is the triumph of life over one of its particular forms.
Proteus in the fable could be prevented from changing his shape only
by being caught in sleep, which is the image of death; thus it is
in nature; fixed form is sleep, is death, is a pause in the eternal
fluctuation of life. Becoming and life are alike formless. Form,
individuality, species, mark a transitory stoppage in the channel of
life; we can neither seize nor hold nature, except when it is laid
asleep, and what we call death—my death or yours—is itself a latent
pulse of universal life, like one of the secret vibrations that pass
through the germ during the months of apparent inertia during which it
is making ready for the later stages of its development. The law of
nature is eternal germination. A man of science was one day holding
a handful of wheat, that had been found in the tomb of an Egyptian
mummy. “Five thousand years without sight of the sun! Unhappy grains
of wheat, as sterile as death, of which they have so long been the
companions, never shall their tall stalks bow beneath the wind on the
banks of the Nile. Never? What do I know of life, of death?” As an
experiment simply, without much hope of success, the man of science
sowed the grains of wheat that he had recovered from the tomb, and the
wheat of the Pharaohs received the caress of the sun, of the air, and
came up green through the soil of Egypt, and bowed beneath the wind on
the banks of the sacred and inexhaustible flood of the Nile. And shall
human thought, and the higher life which stirs in us like the germ in
the seed, and love that seems to sleep forever in the tomb, not have
this reawakening in some unforeseen springtime, and not be brought
face to face with eternity, which seems at present to be buried, once
and for all, in darkness? What is death, after all, in the universe,
but a lesser degree of vital heat, a more or less transitory lowness
of temperature? Death cannot be powerful enough to hold life and its
perpetual youth in check, and to prevent the infinite activity of
thought and of desire.

       *       *       *       *       *

[Sidenote: Is a more personal immortality possible?]

III. Yes, I and my works shall survive; but is immortality in this
sense sufficient to satisfy the religious sentiment? As an individual,
what do science and the philosophy of evolution promise me or permit me
to hope? A somewhat external and impersonal immortality is, as we have
seen, possible; is anything in the nature of an internal or personal
immortality likewise possible?

[Sidenote: Science answers in the negative.]

Assuredly, it is not of science that the individual can demand proofs
of his permanence. The fact of generation is, in the eyes of the man
of science, in and of itself a negative of individual immortality; the
social instinct which opens our hearts to thousands of other beings
emphasizes the negation, and the scientific and metaphysical instincts
themselves, which cause us to take an interest in the sensitive world,
in its laws and destinies, diminish, so to speak, our importance as
limited individuals. Thought breaks the limits of the self in which it
is confined, and our breast is too narrow to contain our heart. Oh,
how rapidly one learns in science and in art to make small account of
one’s self, and this diminution of self-esteem neither lessens one’s
enthusiasm nor one’s ardour, but adds to them only an element of manly
sadness such as a soldier might feel who says: “I count for but one in
the battle, nay, for less than that, for but a hundred millionth, and
if I should disappear the result of the contest would no doubt not be
changed, and yet I shall stay and fight.”

[Sidenote: Counsels resignation.]

Scientifically considered, individuality is a sort of provisional
native land, and one’s native land is a sort of magnified individual
with a consciousness composed of ideas and sentiments, and one’s love
for one’s country may be greater than one’s love for such and such an
individual. Such a love does not prevent us from understanding that
our country will not be immortal as a nation, that it will have its
periods of growth and of decay, that the obstacles which keep peoples
apart are caducous, and that nations incessantly disappear and lose
old elements and take on new. Why, merely from the fact that we love
our own individuality, should we not consent to the same reasoning in
regard to it; why should we wish to imprison it forever within the
limits of the same individuality? If a nation dies, why should not a
man? If it sometimes amounts to divination to cry out as one falls on
the battlefield, “_Finis patriæ!_” does it any the less surely amount
to divination to cry out in the presence of death, “_Finis individuæ_”?
Could Kosciusko feel that he himself had a right to live when Poland
and the ideas and beliefs to which he had devoted his life were no more?

[Sidenote: Dignity of resignation.]

A young girl, a relative of mine, on the point of death and unable
to articulate, signified her wish for a piece of paper. When it was
given to her, she began to write, “I do not want——” Death suddenly
intervened and interrupted her volition before it could find expression
in words; the thinking being and the expression of her thought seemed
to be annihilated by the same blow. The child’s protest, like her life,
was interrupted in the middle. Volition is powerless against death,
and it is useless to stiffen one’s will against the final blow. On
the contrary, man’s sole superiority in death consists in acceptance.
Pascal’s conscious reed might not only be constrained to bend like
any other reed, it might bend consentingly and respect the law that
requires its death. Next to consciousness of his own power, the highest
of man’s privileges is consciousness of the limits of his power, at
least as an individual. Out of the very disproportion between the
infinity that kills us, and the nothing that constitutes us, arises
the sense of a certain greatness in us; we prefer to be stricken
by a mountain rather than by a pebble; we should rather fall in a
struggle against a thousand than in a struggle against one; so that
intelligence, by measuring the greatness of our adversary, deprives us
of regret at our defeat.

[Sidenote: Desire to survive egoistic.]

To desire to make the individual, who is more or less physical even in
his moral nature, eternal, is, in the eyes of the man of science, a
remnant of egoism. In his judgment, the human mind should accept the
death of the individual by a species of intellectual devotion analogous
to that with which we accept the death of our native country. Modern
men of science may be defined as those who have no hope, ὁι μὴ
ἔχοντες ἐλπίδα, as St. Paul said; we are _individually_ of too small
account in the eyes of science to live always _individually_.

       *       *       *       *       *

[Sidenote: But only when it relates to one’s self.]

Ought we, therefore, to consent cheerfully to the sacrifice of self,
and to die willingly for the benefit of the universal life? So far
as one’s self is concerned, one can make the sacrifice lightly, but
the annihilation of those one loves cannot be accepted by a conscious
and affectionate being. It is in vain for scientific and philosophic
stoicism to urge with Epictetus that it is natural for a vase, which is
fragile, to break, and for a man, who is mortal, to die. The question
still remains, whether what is natural and scientific ought, as the
Stoics alleged, to satisfy my reason and my love. As a matter of fact,
when one really loves another person, what one endeavours to love is
not the element of fragility, the vase of clay, but the intelligence
and the heart, which Epictetus declines to consider separately from
their perishable accompaniments. One attaches one’s self to them as
to something permanent; one corrects and transfigures nature itself,
and passes in thought beyond the brutality of its laws, and therein
lies, perhaps, the very essence of the love of another. If the laws
of nature, after seeming for a moment to be suspended and vanquished
by the force of one’s disinterested love, subsequently break the bond
that holds them in check, is it surprising that one’s love should
still hold out against them? It is not only pain that I experience
at being baffled by the laws of nature; it is indignation, it is the
sense of injustice. The Stoics regarded pain as a passive affection of
the sensibility simply, but moral pain implies a struggle of the will
against nature, and an effort, as they themselves admit, to correct it.
It is on this ground that pain is not an evil; its rôle is incessantly
to impose our moral and social ideal on our physical nature, to force
it to perfect itself; pain is the principle of development in life,
and if there exists a means of vanquishing death, it is perhaps by
virtue of pain that we shall arrive at it. We are right, therefore, in
rebelling against nature’s powers of life and death, in so far as she
exercises them for the purpose of annihilating what is morally best in
us and in others.

[Sidenote: Love under the form of eternity.]

True love should never be expressed in the language of time. We say: “I
loved my father during his lifetime; I was deeply attached to my mother
or my sister.” Why locate it in the past? Why not say always: “I love
my father or my mother?” Does not, and should not, love lay claim to an
eternal present?

[Sidenote: Uniqueness of the individual.]

How could one say to a mother that there is nothing truly and
definitively alive, personal, unique, in the at once smiling and
meditative eyes of the child she holds upon her knees; that the little
being that she dreams of mature, and good, and great, is a simple
incident in the life of the species? No; her child is not like any
other that has ever lived or that ever will live; none other could
possess that look. Nowhere among the generations of men can there
exist a fac-simile of the beloved face before one. All nature does not
possess the equivalent of the individual, which it can destroy, but
not replace. It is not, therefore, without reason that love refuses
to consent to the substitution of one individual for another, which
constitutes the very movement of life; it cannot reconcile itself to
the eternal whirl in the dust of being; it is bent on fixing life, on
arresting the world in mid-progress. But the world does not stop at
its bidding. The future calls to generation after generation, and this
powerful force of attraction is also a force of dissolution. Nature
gives birth by means of death, and the joy of new loves is composed of
the fragments of the old.

[Sidenote: The protest of love against death not limited to humanity.]

This protest of love against death, against the dissolution of the
individual, attaches also to the lower animals. A dog, it seems, has
only a market value, and yet can I ever buy again one that shall be the
equivalent of this one that has died before my eyes? He loved me with
all the power of his unhappy being, and endeavoured to hold fast to me
while he was slipping away, and I endeavoured to hold him fast. Does
not every being that loves acquire a right to immortality? Yes; the
ideal of affection would be to immortalize all conscious beings; nay,
more, the poet who is delicately sensitive to the individuality of a
flower, or a ray of coloured light, of the drop of dew that refracts
it, would wish to immortalize all nature, would wish to view under the
form of eternity the rainbow that quivers in a soap bubble; for can
any two bubbles ever be the same? And yet, while the poet aims thus
at holding everything fast, at preserving everything, at fixing his
dreams, at enchaining the ocean of life, the man of science replies
that the eternal flood must be allowed to pulsate, to engulf our tears
and our blood, and that the world must be left free. For the man of
science, the flux and reflux and progress of life are more sacred than
the love of the individual.

       *       *       *       *       *

[Sidenote: Antagonism between love and science.]

Thus, in the question of individual immortality, two great forces drag
human thought in opposite directions. Science is inclined everywhere
to sacrifice the individual in the name of natural evolution; love
is inclined, in the name of a higher moral and social evolution, to
preserve the individual. The antinomy is one of the most disquieting
that the philosophic mind has to deal with.

[Sidenote: The best in one may survive.]

Should science be admitted to be wholly in the right, or must we
believe that an element of truth exists in the social instinct
which lies at the basis of affection, as there is a presentiment
and anticipation of the truth in all great natural instincts? The
social instinct possesses a greater value at the present day, because
philosophers are beginning to consider even the individual as a
society, and to recognize association as a universal law of nature.
Love, which is the power of cohesion at its highest degree, is
perhaps right in its desire for an element in the association between
individuals. Its sole error is that of exaggerating its pretensions
and of misplacing its hopes. After all, one must not be too exacting
nor ask too much of nature. A true philosopher, even for those that he
loves, should not shrink from proof by fire, and death is the flame
that purifies while it consumes. If anything survives the ordeal that
alone is much, and if what survives is precisely what is best in us,
what more can be asked? One may break the vase, of which Epictetus
speaks, but the perfume remains, and floats out into the air, and
becomes, no doubt, ultimately indistinguishable, but still subsists.

[Sidenote: Sociology and the problem of immortality.]

The science which seems to offer the strongest opposition to the
preservation of the individual is mathematics, which recognizes the
existence of nothing in the world but variable and equivalent figures
and abstractions. On the contrary, perhaps the most concrete of the
sciences, sociology, recognizes everywhere groups of realities;
sociology therefore cannot hold relations that arise out of
association, nor the terms between which they exist, so cheap. Let us
consider whether, from the point of view of a more complete and more
concrete science, consciousness, which is the principle of personality,
properly so called, necessarily and forever excludes the possibility of
indefinite duration that all great sciences attribute to the spirit.

       *       *       *       *       *

[Sidenote: The basis of existence not substance but activity.]

III. Antique metaphysics gave too much attention to questions of
substance, to considering whether the soul is simple or complex.
The question amounts to whether the soul is made of indivisible
or divisible material; it assumes as the basis of the phenomena of
mind, an imaginary and in some sort extended substance. It was upon
this doctrine of the simple substance that the demonstration of the
immortality of the soul was founded. Evolutionist philosophy tends
to fix our attention nowadays, not on the substance, but on the
way the substance behaves, that is to say, in physical terms, on
movements.[166] Consciousness is a certain action accompanied by a
certain collective unity of movements. If it exists in a substance
it is not the duration of this substance that interests us, but that
of its activity, since it is that activity which constitutes our
consciousness.

      [166] “Whoever says that he cannot conceive an action without
      a substratum confesses by his very words that the alleged
      substratum which he conceives is a product of his imagination;
      it is his own thought that he is obliged to place as a support
      behind the reality of things. By a pure illusion of the
      imagination, after one has stripped off from an object the only
      qualities that it possesses, one affirms that something of it,
      one knows not what, still subsists.” (Schelling, _System of
      Transcendental Idealism_.)

      “To be,” said Berkeley, “is to be this or that. Simply to be,
      without explanatory addition, is to be nothing; it is a simple
      conception, if not a word void of sense.”

      “Berkeley’s object was to overthrow the hypothesis of a
      substance lying beyond the range of spirit, as an imperceptible
      support of the qualities of which our senses take cognizance.”
      (Félix Revaisson, _La Philosophie en France_, 9.)

      See also M. Lachelier, _De l’Induction_.

[Sidenote: Continuity of existence means continuity of function.]

Wundt is one of the contemporary philosophers, who, after Aristotle,
Hume, Berkeley, and Kant, has best shown the illusiveness of
endeavouring to discover a simple substance underlying consciousness.
It is only internal experience, he says, only consciousness itself,
that comes to us guaranteed by immediate certainty. And this implies,
he adds, “that all these substances which spiritualism regards as the
basis of subjective or objective experience are of the highest degree
of uncertainty, for in no experience whatsoever are they given. They
are deliberate fictions, by the aid of which it has been attempted
to explain the unity of experience.” The true explanation of this
unity should be sought for elsewhere in continuity of function, and
not in simplicity of substance. “The consecutive effects of anterior
states combine with those which arise later; in this way there is
caused a subjective continuity of states which corresponds to the
objective continuity of movement, which is the condition of unity of
consciousness.” The binding together of successive mental states is
lacking in bodies, although they must possess the germ of action and
of sensation. For this reason Leibnitz was right in saying that bodies
are “momentary spirits,” which forget everything immediately, and know
only a present, uncomplicated by a past or a future. Conscious life,
on the contrary, by the very means of changing elements, realizes
a continuity of mental functions, a memory of the past, a certain
durability. This continuity is not a result of simplicity, but, on the
contrary, of the higher complexity that belongs to mental functions.
“On the physical side, as on the psychical side,” says Wundt, “the
living body is a unity; this unity is not founded in simplicity but
in compositeness of a high degree of complexity. Consciousness, with
its multitude of combined states, is a unity analogous to that of the
bodily organism. The absolute correlation between the physical and the
psychical suggests the following hypothesis:[167] that what we call the
soul is the internal aspect of what, in its external aspect, we call
the body that contains the soul. This way of conceiving the problem
of correlation inevitably leads us to the belief that the essence of
reality is intellectual, and that the fundamental attribute of being is
development or evolution. Human consciousness is the highest point of
such evolution; it constitutes the nodal point in the course of nature
where the world recollects itself. It is not as a simple being but as a
product evolved out of innumerable elements that the human soul is, as
Leibnitz says, ‘a mirror of the world.’”[168]

      [167] This hypothesis is identical with that of monism.

      [168] Wundt, _Psychologie_, vol. ii.

[Sidenote: The problem of immortality at the present day.]

From this modern point of view, which is a development of that of
Aristotle,[169] the question of immortality amounts to asking how
far the continuity of mental functions may be supposed to extend the
continuity of one’s intellectual being, which is the subjective unity
of a complex multiplicity aware of itself as such?

      [169] See M. Ravaisson, _La Métaphysique d’Aristote_, vol. ii.,
      and _Rapport sur la Philosophie en France_.

[Sidenote: Indissoluble material compounds.]

Note, first, that even in the external world we are not without
examples of indissoluble compounds; certain simple atoms are compounds
of this sort. The atom of hydrogen is a vortex of little worlds. Well,
is there nothing indissoluble in the universe except so-called atoms,
so-called physical “individuals,” and is it unpermissible to conceive,
on the subjective side, individuals more worthy of the name, whose
duration is guaranteed by the very fact of their complexity?

[Sidenote: Restatement of the problem.]

According to the reigning doctrines in physiology and experimental
psychology, individual consciousness is, as we have said, a compound of
the consciousnesses of all the cells that are united in the physical
organism.[170] The individual, consisting thus of a society, the
problem of death amounts to the question, whether there can exist an
association, at once solid enough to endure forever, and flexible
enough to adapt itself to the ever-shifting conditions of universal
evolution.

      [170] Association or grouping is the general law of organic
      and inorganic existence. Society, properly so called, is only
      a particular case, is only the most complex instance, of this
      universal law.... A consciousness is rather a _We_ than an
      _I_. It is capable of union with other consciousnesses and
      of forming, in conjunction with them, a more comprehensive
      and more durable consciousness, from which it receives and
      to which it communicates thought, as a star both borrows
      and communicates motion in the system to which it belongs.
      (Espinas, _Des Sociétés animales_, 128. See also M. Fouillée,
      _La Science sociale contemporaine_, l. iii.)

[Sidenote: The ideal type of association.]

This problem, be it observed in the first place, is precisely that
which human societies are endeavouring to solve. At the lowest stage
of social evolution solidity and flexibility are rarely united. Egypt,
for example, was solid but not very progressive. A stage higher in the
scale of evolution, in proportion as science advances and personal
liberty comes to be recognized, civilization becomes both more solid
and indefinitely flexible, and at some period in the future, when
scientific civilization shall have once mastered the globe, it will
possess a power that the most compact, and, in appearance, the solidest
masses cannot equal; it will be firmer than the very pyramids, and
will at the same time prove increasingly flexible, progressive,
capable of adaptation to every variation in the environment. The
synthesis of complexity and stability will then have been achieved.
The very character of thought is increasing adaptivity, and the
more intellectual a being is, the greater its power of displaying
the qualities which are most advantageous under any given set of
circumstances. The eye, which is more intellectual than the sense of
touch, furnishes a power of adaptation to a wider and more diversified
environment. Thought, which is more intellectual than sight, enables
one to adapt one’s self to the universe itself, to the immensity of
the stars, as well as to the infinite pettiness of the atoms in a drop
of water. If memory is a masterpiece of intellectual record-taking,
reasoning is a masterpiece of flexibility, of mobility, and of
progress. So that, whether individuals or nations are in question, the
most intellectual are those which possess at once the greatest amount
of stability and of adaptability. The problem of society is to unite
these two things, the problem of immortality is at bottom the same;
the individual consciousness being, as we have seen, itself a society.
From this point of view, it seems probable that the more perfect
one’s personal consciousness is, the more absolutely it possesses
both durability and a power of indefinite metamorphosis. So that,
even admitting what the Pythagoreans insist upon, that consciousness
is a number, a harmony, a musical chord, we may still ask whether
certain harmonies may not become sufficiently perfect to endure forever
without, on that account, ceasing to enter as elements into richer and
more complex harmonies. A lyre might vibrate _ad infinitum_ without
its several strings losing their respective tonalities amid the
multitude of their variations. There ought to exist an evolution in the
organization of consciousness as in the organization of molecules and
living cells, and the most vital and durable and flexible combinations
should possess the advantage in the struggle for existence.

[Sidenote: The last stage in the struggle for existence.]

Consciousness is a collection of associations of ideas, and,
consequently, of habits, grouped about a centre; and we know that
habits possess an indefinite duration; contemporary philosophy
regards the properties of elementary material substances as habits,
as instances of indissoluble association. A vegetable or animal
species is a habit, a type of grouping and organic form which subsists
century after century. It is not proved that mental habits may not in
the course of evolution achieve a fixity and a durability of which
we possess to-day no example. It is not proved that instability is
the definitive and eternal characteristic of the highest functions
of consciousness. A philosophic hopefulness in regard to immortality
is founded on the belief that, in the last stages of evolution,
the struggle for existence will become a struggle for immortality.
Nature will then come to realize, not by virtue of simplicity, but of
judicious complexity, a sort of progressive immortality, the final
product of natural selection; and, if so, religious symbols will have
been simply an anticipation of this final period. We shall have wings
to support us in our flight through life, Rückert says, wings to
support us in our flight past death; but the bird does not learn to
fly immediately nor at once; the hereditary habit of flight must have
been acquired and developed by the species because of the advantage it
brings with it in the struggle for existence. Survival, therefore, must
not be conceived as completed at a bound, but as slowly perfected by a
gradual and continuous lengthening of the average span of life. It must
be shown, however, that such a survival would constitute a superiority,
not only for the individual, but for the species.

[Sidenote: Psychology and the communion of souls.]

And now let us consider consciousnesses in their relations to each
other. Contemporary psychology tends to the doctrine that different
consciousnesses, or if you prefer, different aggregates of states
of consciousness, may combine, and even interpenetrate, somewhat
analogously to what theologians mean by communion of souls. And
if so, it is permissible to ask whether, if consciousnesses can
interpenetrate, they may not some day come to possess a continuity of
existence; may not be able to hand on their existence to each other,
and to communicate to each other a new sort of durability instead of
remaining, as Leibnitz says, more or less momentary; supposing always
that such durability would be advantageous to the species.

[Sidenote: Possible frequency of the phenomenon.]

Mystical intuitions sometimes contain a certain presentiment of the
truth. St. Paul tells us that the heavens and the earth shall pass
away, that prophecies and languages shall pass away, but that one thing
shall not pass, and that is charity, or love. If this doctrine is to be
interpreted philosophically, the bond of continual love, which is of
all bonds the least primitive and the most complex, must be conceived
as capable of ultimately becoming the most durable of bonds, and as
tending progressively to embrace a larger and larger proportion of the
whole number of the inhabitants of the celestial city. It is by what is
best, what is most disinterested, most impersonal, and most loving in
one, that one achieves communion with the consciousness of another, and
such disinterestedness must coincide ultimately with disinterestedness
in others, with others’ love for one’s self; and there will arise thus
a possible fusion of souls, a communion so intense that as one suffers
in the bosom of another, so, too, one may come to live in the heart of
another. To be sure, we have passed here into the limits of dreamland,
but it is to be remarked that such dreams are extra-scientific, and not
anti-scientific.

[Sidenote: Vision of the ideal society.]

Let us conceive ourselves as existing in this problematical, though
not impossible, epoch when individual consciousnesses shall have
achieved a higher degree of complexity and of subjective unity, and
along with them a power of more intimate communion than they possess
to-day, without the fact of that communion altogether breaking down
the bounds of personality. They will communicate thus with each other,
as the living cells in the same body sympathize with each other, and
contribute each to form the collective consciousness; they will be all
in all, and all in every part. And indeed one may readily conceive
means of communication and of sympathy, much more subtle and direct
than those which exist to-day among different individuals. The science
of the nervous system is in its earliest stages; we are acquainted as
yet with exaltation as a state of disease only, and with suggestion at
a distance as an incident merely of hypnotism; but we already begin
to be dimly aware of a whole world of phenomena that go to show the
possibility of a direct communication between different, and even
under certain circumstances of a sort of reciprocal absorption of two
personalities. Some such complete fusion of two consciousnesses, that
however still preserve their individuality, is to-day the dream of love
which, as one of the greatest of social forces, ought not to labour
in vain. Supposing the power of communion with other consciousnesses
gradually to develop, the death of the individual will manifestly
encounter a greater and greater resistance on the part of the several
minds with which such an individual is in communication. And, in any
event, the minds with which an individual is in communication will
tend to retain an increasingly vivid, and, so to speak, living memory
of him. Memory at the present day is simply an absolutely distinct
representation of a certain being—an image, as it were, vibrating
in the ether after the original has disappeared. The reason is that
there does not as yet exist an intimate solidarity and continuous
communication between one individual and another. But it is possible
to conceive an image which would be scarcely distinguishable from the
object represented; would be the sum of what such and such an object
means to me; would be, as it were, the prolongation of the effect
of another consciousness on my consciousness. Such an image might
be regarded as a point of contact between the two consciousnesses
involved. Just as in generation the two factors combine in a certain
third, which represents them both, so such an animated and beloved
image, instead of being passive, would constitute a component part of
the collective energy and purpose of one’s being; would count for one
in the complex whole that one calls a mind or a consciousness.

[Sidenote: Personal immortality.]

According to this hypothesis, the problem would be, to be at once
loving enough and beloved enough to live and survive in the minds
of others. The individual, in so far as his external accidents are
concerned, would disappear; but what is best in him would survive in
the souls of those he loves who love him. A ray of sunlight may for
a time record upon a bit of dead paper the lines of a face that no
longer exists among the living; nay, human art may go farther, and
impart to canvas or to stone the minutest resemblances to human life;
but art has not yet succeeded in imparting a soul to Galatea. Love must
be added to art to achieve that miracle—men must love each other so
completely that they become identified in the universal consciousness.
When that consummation has been reached, each of us will live
completely, and without loss, in the love of our fellows. The power of
love is not limited, like that of light, to giving permanence to the
outward appearances of life; it is capable of lending stability to life
itself.

[Sidenote: Elimination of death.]

Separation on such an hypothesis would be as impossible as in the case
of those atomic vortices of which we spoke above, which consisted each
in a single individual, in the sense that no force could break them
up into their elements; their unity lay not in their simplicity, but
in their inseparability. Just so in the sphere of consciousness, a
manifold of conscious states may conceivably form a luminous ring that
can neither be broken nor extinguished. The atom, it has been said, is
inviolable, and consciousness may come to be inviolable _de facto_.

[Sidenote: Triumph of love.]

Nay, one’s secondary and reflected life in the minds of other people
might even come to be more important than the original of which it is
a copy, insomuch that a gradual process of substitution might take
place, a substitution of which death would simply mark the definitive
and tranquil accomplishment. We might feel ourselves, even in this
life, entering into possession of an immortality in the hearts of
those who love us. Such an immortality would be a species of new
creation. Morality, and religion even, are in our judgment simply the
outcome of moral productivity; such an immortality would be simply an
ultimate manifestation of the same thing. And if it were once achieved,
the opposition that the man of science to-day perceives between the
continuation of the species and the immortality of the individual would
have disappeared in a final synthesis. Death closes one’s eyes, but
love stands by to open them again.

[Sidenote: Complete survival of the individual.]

The point of contact might thus be found between life and immortality.
At the beginning of evolution, death was the end of the individual and
the light of consciousness ended in obscurity. By virtue of moral and
social progress, one’s friends tend to remember one after death with
increasing intensity and for longer and longer periods; the image that
survives the original fades only by degrees, and more and more slowly,
as the course of evolution advances. And it may be that, at some time
in the future, the memory of beloved beings will so mingle with the
life and the blood of each new generation, and will be so passed on
from one to the other, that it will become a permanent element in
the current of conscious existence. Such a persistent memory of the
individual would be a gain in power for the species, for they who
remember love more dearly than they who forget, and to love dearly
is advantageous to the species. It is not, therefore, unpermissible
to conceive a gradual increase in the faculty of memory by natural
selection. The day may come when the individual will survive in as
detailed and complete a fac-simile of what he was in his lifetime as
can well be imagined, and death may become less significant than a
period of absence; love will endow the beloved object with the mystery
of eternal presence.

[Sidenote: Exemplified to-day in isolated cases.]

Even at the present day individuals here and there are sometimes so
deeply loved that it is doubtful whether or no what is best in them
does not survive their death, and their minds, unhappily subject to
the weaknesses of humanity and unable as yet to break through the
limitations of the physical organism, do not really succeed, by virtue
of the love that surrounds them, in achieving an almost complete
immortality even before their death. It is in the hearts of those
who love them that they really live, and in all the world the corner
that it really concerns them to be able to call their own lies in the
affections of two or three people.

[Sidenote: Destined to become common.]

This phenomenon of mental palingenesis, which is at present isolated,
may gradually come to be extended to the whole of the human species.
Immortality may be an ultimate possession acquired by the species,
as a whole, for the benefit of all of its members. Every individual
consciousness may come to survive as a constituent part in a more
comprehensive consciousness. Fraternity may, at some time in the
future, be universal, render soul transparent to soul, and the ideal of
morals and of religion be realized. Every soul will be reflected and
mirrored in every other; although it will not suffice for that purpose
simply to look into each other’s eyes unless one’s heart positively
shines through them. One must project one’s own image into the mirror
of the sea, if one is to find it there.

       *       *       *       *       *

[Sidenote: Possibility of a still more literal immortality.]

It must, of course, be admitted that, if such speculations do not
positively stretch away beyond the limits of possibility, they
certainly do stretch away beyond the limits of actual science and
experience, but precisely what renders all such hypotheses uncertain
renders them also forever possible: namely, our irremediable ignorance
of the basis of consciousness. Whatever discovery science may make in
regard to consciousness and its conditions, it will never ascertain its
essence, nor, consequently, the limits of its possible subsistence.
Psychologically and metaphysically considered, what are conscious
action and volition? Nay, what is unconscious activity, what is force,
what is efficient causality? We do not know, we are obliged to define
subjective activity and power in terms of objective motion, that is
to say, in terms of their effect, and it will always be permissible
for a philosopher to deny that motion, as a simple change of relations
in space, constitutes the whole of an action, and that there are no
uncaused movements, no relations between non-existent terms. And, if
so, how are we to know precisely to what extent activity is essentially
enduring as the emanation of a subjective power of which motion is, as
it were, the visible sign, and of which consciousness is the immediate
and intimate “apprehension.” Neither word nor act expresses all of us,
something always remains unsaid, and will, perhaps, remain unsaid to
the end of our lives—and beyond. It is possible that the foundation of
personal consciousness is a power as incapable of being exhausted by
any amount of activity as of being confined to any variety of forms.

[Sidenote: Can never be disproved.]

In any event the matter is, and always will be, a mystery, which arises
from the fact that consciousness is _sui generis_, is absolutely
inexplicable, and at bottom forever inaccessible to scientific formulæ
and a fit subject, therefore, of metaphysical hypotheses. Just as being
is the supreme genus, _genus generalissimum_, in the objective world,
so consciousness is the supreme genus in the subjective world; so that
no reply can ever be given to these two questions: What is being, and
what is consciousness? Nor, therefore, to this third question, which
depends upon the two preceding: Will consciousness continue to exist?

On an old dial, in a town in the south of France, may be read the
legend: _Sol non occidat!_ May the light not fail! Such is, indeed, the
proper epilogue to _fiat lux_. Of all things in this world light is the
one upon which we are most dependent; it, of all things, should have
been created once for all, εἰς ἀεί; should pour down from the heavens
through all eternity. And the light of the mind, which is more powerful
than the light of the sun, may ultimately succeed in eluding the law of
destruction which everywhere in the book of nature immediately follows
the law of creation, and then only will the command, _fiat lux_, have
been accomplished. _Lux non occidat in æternum!_

       *       *       *       *       *

[Sidenote: Stoicism the last resort.]

IV. But, it will be asked, what consolation and encouragement is
there in all this for those who do not feel the charm of these remote
hypotheses concerning the outer limits of existence, for those who see
death in all its brutality, and lean, as you yourself probably do, in
the present state of the theory of evolution, somewhat toward purely
negative conclusions? What can be said to them when they stand, as they
believe they do, on the brink of annihilation? Nothing better could
be said than the simple and somewhat unfeeling words of the ancient
Stoics, who, be it remarked also, were themselves disbelievers in
the immortality of the individual: “Be not a coward!” Deeply in the
wrong as Stoicism was in the presence of death, in its insensibility
to the pain of love which was the condition of its power and of its
progress among mankind, when it interdicted attachment and commanded
impassibility, it was right when it recommended insensibility to one’s
own death. A man needs no other consolation than to feel that he has
lived a complete life, that he has done his work, and that mankind
is not the worse, nay, is perhaps the better for his having existed;
and that whatever he has loved will survive, that the best of his
dreams will somewhere be realized, that the impersonal element in his
consciousness, the portion of the immortal patrimony of the human race,
which has been intrusted to him and constitutes what is best in him,
will endure and increase, and be passed on, without loss, to succeeding
generations; that his own death is of no more importance, no more
breaks the eternal continuity of things, than the shivering of a bit of
a hand-glass does. To gain a complete consciousness of the continuity
of life is to estimate death at its proper value, which is perhaps
that of the disappearance of a kind of living illusion. Once more, in
the name of reason, which is capable of understanding death, and of
accepting it as it accepts whatsoever else is intelligible—be not a
coward!

[Sidenote: Dignity of resignation.]

More than that, despair is grotesque because it is useless; cries and
groans, at least such as are not purely reflex, originally served their
purpose in the life of the species of arousing attention or pity, or
of summoning aid; it is to the fact that it was once useful that the
existence and propagation of the language of pain are due; but as there
is no help against the inexorable, and no pity to be asked for in a
matter that is in harmony with the interests of the totality of things
and conformable to the dictates of our own thought, resignation alone
is the proper attitude of mind, or rather a certain inner assent, or
still better, a smile of detachment and intelligence and comprehension,
and interest even in our own extinction. What is beautiful in the
natural order of things cannot definitively excite despair.

[Sidenote: Of considering one’s own case impersonally.]

If anyone who has experienced the pangs of death should make light of
the sort of consolation here referred to, we reply that we are not
ourselves speaking in absolute ignorance of the visage of the supreme
moment. We have ourselves had occasion more than once to look death in
the face, less often no doubt than a soldier in active service; but we
have had more time to consider it at our ease, and we have never found
reason to desire that it should be veiled by an irrational belief.
It is better to see and to know the truth; it is better not to tread
the brink of the precipice with bandaged eyes. To disguise death is
to pay it too great a compliment. We have had more than one example
of it under our eyes. We have seen our grandfather, who, by the way,
was himself not a believer, stricken down by successive attacks of
apoplexy, and he said to us, smiling in the intervals of his pain,
that he felt but one regret, and that was that so many superstitions
should be in existence, and that Catholicism in particular (it was at
that time when France was aiding the Papacy) should still be in power.
Note also that the progress of science—in especial, of physiological
and medical sciences—tends to increase the number of instances in
which death is foreseen and is waited for almost with serenity.
The least stoical of mankind sometimes feel the inclination toward
an act of heroism, which, though in a measure forced upon them, is
nevertheless not without its dignity. In the course of certain cases
of protracted disease, such as consumption or cancer, the patient, if
he possesses the necessary scientific qualifications, can calculate
the probabilities of his life and determine within a few days at what
time he will die. Bergot, whom I knew, was such a patient; Trousseau
was another, and there have been many more. Knowing one’s self to be
condemned, feeling one’s self to count for but one in the infinity of
the universe, one can consider one’s self and one’s progress toward the
unknown in a sense impersonally.

[Sidenote: Sudden death a blessing.]

If such a death is not without its bitterness, it is nevertheless the
one which, of all others perhaps, is likely to prove attractive to a
philosopher, to a mind with a passion for clearness, for foresight, for
comprehension. For the rest, in the majority of cases, death takes its
victims in the height of their vigour, in the midst of the struggle
for existence; it is a matter of a few hours, like birth; its very
suddenness renders it less redoubtable to the majority of mankind, who
find it comparatively easy to be brave in the presence of a danger that
is brief, and they hold out against the supreme enemy with the same
obstinate courage that they would display against any other. On the
contrary, when death approaches slowly, and deprives us of our strength
by degrees, and each day leaves us in possession of something less than
the day before, another source of consolation is open to us.

[Sidenote: Decline in interest in life with decline in vitality.]

It is a law of nature that diminution of vitality brings with it a
proportionate diminution of desire; a man cares less keenly for what
he feels himself less capable of attaining. Illness and old age always
make us set less value upon the joys of which they deprive us which
they first render bitter and then impossible; and the last joy of all,
that of bare existence, is as subject to the law as its predecessors.
Consciousness of one’s inability to live brings with it inability to
desire to live; it becomes a burden to draw one’s breath. One feels
one’s self dispersing, falling into dust, and no longer possessing
the strength to check the process of decay. Moreover, egoism declines
with declining strength; as we approach the grave we gain a power of
estimating ourselves more nearly at our just value, of understanding
that a faded flower has no right to live; that, as Marcus Aurelius
said, “a ripe olive _ought_ to fall from the tree.” One sentiment alone
survives, a sense of weariness, of extreme weariness. We long for rest,
long to relax the tension of life, to lie at ease, to have done with
it once for all. Oh! to be no longer on one’s feet. The dying well
know the supreme joy of looking forward to their last resting place!
They no longer envy the interminable file of the living whom they
perceive, as it were in a dream, vainly marching and countermarching
upon the surface of the earth where they sleep. They are resigned
to the solitude and abandonment of death. They are like travellers
in the desert—worn with fever, and fatigue, and unwilling to make
another step in advance; they are no longer borne up by the hope of
revisiting familiar skies; they are unable to surmount the remaining
difficulties of the way and request their companions to leave them, to
march on without them, and, stretched upon the sand, watch without a
tear, without a desire, the departing caravan creeping away toward the
horizon.

[Sidenote: Persistence of curiosity.]

Naturally, some of us will always shrink before death, and wring our
hands, and lose our self-possession. Some temperaments are subject to
vertigo, to a horror of abysses, and in especial to a horror of the
great abyss toward which all paths converge. Montaigne counsels such
people to throw themselves blindly over the verge; others counsel them
to fix their eyes till the end on some small mountain flower in the
crevice of the rock. The manliest of mankind will give their attention
to the depths of space and to the heavens, will fill their hearts with
the immensity of the universe, will magnify their souls to the limits
of the abyss, will subdue the rebellious individuality in themselves
before it is forcibly subdued for them, and will scarcely be aware of
the precipice till they have fairly passed beyond its brink. And for
the philosopher, who is essentially a worshipper of the unknown, death
possesses the attraction of novelty; birth only excepted, it is the
most mysterious incident in life. Death has its secret, its enigma, and
we are haunted by a vague hope that, as the final touch of irony, it
may be revealed to us at the last moment; that the dying, according to
the ancient belief, divine it and close their eyes only to shield them
from an intolerable brightness. Man’s last agony and his last pulse of
curiosity are one.




INDEX.


  A

  Absoluteness of primitive faith, 139
  Adler, Felix, 367
  All-embracing unity, modernity of concept of, 39
  Alviella, M. Goblet d’, 254, 277, 352
  Amiel, 378, 466
  Analysis, effect of, on emotions, 461;
    destroys irrational joys only, 466
  Ancestor worship, 47
  Animal’s prayer, 74;
    religion in lower, 76
  Animate and inanimate, obviousness of distinction between, 49
  Animism, priority of, 52;
    dualistic, 82
  Anomy, religious, 374
  Antagonism between wealth and population, 315
  Arnold, Matthew, 23, 92, 143, 156, 174, 189, 247, 259
  Art, and religion, 414;
    necessary reforms in, 418
  Asceticism, 211, 473
  Asia, danger from, 321
  Association, ideal type of, 392
  Augustine, Saint, 147
  Aurelius, Marcus, 360

  B

  Baudelaire’s criminal, 406
  Baudrillart, 324, 332
  Beneficent error, 14
  Bentham, 403
  Bertillon, M., 324, 337
  Bost, Pastor, 184
  Buddhism, 362
  Byron, 407

  C

  Caro, M., 387
  Catholicism, 203, 244, 247
  Cause, conception of God as first, 88
  Celibacy, 306;
    tax on, 336
  Charity, intolerance a perverted, 147, 400
  Christianity, 359, 362;
    main strength of, 180;
    the error of, 196;
    and communism, 240
  Civilization, menace to modern, 318
  Clergy, impropriety of suppressing the, 274
  Colenso, Bishop, 357
  Commune, The, 244
  Communism and Christianity, 240
  Compensation, notion of, 75
  Comte, A., 109
  Confessional, the, 248
  Conservatism, feminine, 7
  Constant, Benjamin, 146
  Conway, Moncure, 167
  Cosmism, 365
  Creation hypothesis, 102, 433
  Credulity, feminine, 29
  Crimes of French Revolution and Commune not due to non-religion, 244
  Criminal, Baudelaire’s, 406
  Criminology and religion, 241

  D

  Darwin, 295
  Dead, cult for the, 410
  Defect of French mind, 20
  Definition, by Schleiermacher and Feuerbach, of religion, 3
  Delirium, 82
  Dependence of religion upon morality, 192
  Determinism, concept of, 72;
    reconciliation between indeterminism and, 484
  Diderot, 222
  Dissolution, possibility of arresting, 497
  Divine and human love, conflict between, 201
  Divine Providence, notion of a, 85;
    futility of doctrine of, 440
  Divinization, 69
  Doctrine of Divine Providence, futility of, 440
  Dogma, unfitness as material for education of religions, 272
  Dogmatism and intelligence, 150
  Doubt, Morality of, 382
  Dreams, 67, 82
  Dualistic animism, 82
  Duty of civilized races to multiply, 319

  E

  Ecstasy, religious, 222
  Education, unfitness of religious dogma as material for, 272;
    by the priesthood, 273, 282;
    moral, 280;
    husband responsible for wife’s, 310
  Egoism and mysticism, conflict between, 204
  Eighteenth century view of miracles, 91
  Espinas, 526
  Essence of religion, 1, 10
  Ethical Culture Society, 367
  Evil of belief in a Divine Providence, 97
  Evil, problem of, 433
  Experiment in miracles, 158

  F

  Fainting, 82
  Faith, absoluteness of primitive, 139;
    complete intellectual rest, incident to, 142;
    willfully blind, 143;
    transformation of inevitable, 234
  Fall of man, doctrine of the, 439
  Family, religion of the, 322
  Fanaticism, possible scientific, 395
  Father’s duty in regard to religious instruction, 286
  Feminine credulity, 297;
    conservatism, 297;
    timidity, 298
  Féré, M. Ch., 462
  Fetichism, 44, 48, 65
  Fetichistic monism, primitive metaphysics a, 81
  Feuerbach’s definition of religion, 3
  First cause, concept of God as, 88
  Fiske, Mr. John, 452, 455, 512
  Force, use of justifiable, 146
  Fouillée, M. Alfred, 7, 37, 435, 484, 485, 493, 526
  France, proposal to Protestantize, 249;
    gradual improvement of, 322
  French, mind, its defect, 20;
    Revolution, 250;
    gaiety, 268

  G

  Gaiety, French, 268
  Ghosts, 83
  Gift, notion of, 75
  God, conceived as first cause, 88, 431;
    as ordered, 104;
    as creator, 432;
    responsible for evil, 433;
    His omnipotence, 442;
    hypothesis of, a non-omnipotent, 443;
    disanthropomorphization of concept of, 452;
    possible evolution of by natural selection, 496
  God, love of, 131;
    belief in, falls with belief in devil, 165;
    love of, on the wane, 205
  Goethe, 377, 400
  Grace, doctrine of, 200

  H

  Hartmann, Von, 39, 108, 109, 464
  Hasheesh, use of, defended, 223
  Havet, M., 355
  Hellenism, 261
  Henneguy, Felix, 290
  Henotheism, 27, 39, 108
  Hindu tolerance, 32
  History and religion, 158
  Human and divine love, conflict between, 261
  Humanity, religion of, 365
  Humanization, 68
  Husband responsible for wife’s education, 310
  Huxley, 480
  Hysteria, 83

  I

  Ideal type of association, 392
  Idealism, 479
  Incuriosity of primitive man, 51
  Indeterminism, reconciliation between determinism and, 484
  Individualism, religious, 12
  Infinite, concept of the, 34
  Inheritance, injustice of present law of, 338
  Initiative, sentiment of personal, 98
  Instinct, religious, 40, 229;
    of self-preservation and sociality, 44
  Instruction, father’s duty in regard to, 286
  Insurance and religion, 161
  Intolerance, incident to faith, 144;
    a perverted charity, 147
  Invisible, suffering from the, a modern malady, 35
  Immanence of conscious life in nature, 66
  Immortality, importance of concept of, 119

  J

  Javal, M., 337, 341
  Jerome, Saint, 355
  Jesus, 134, 187, 356
  Junqua, Dr., 183

  K

  Kant, 195, 380, 433, 447

  L

  Lange, 415, 490
  Laveleye, M. de, 249, 252, 284
  Lenormant, M., 285
  Leopardi, 468
  Lethargy, 82
  Liberal Protestantism, 182
  Littré, 277, 288
  Livingstone, 302
  Love, conflict between divine and human, 201;
    a cerebral stimulant, 307;
    makes for sanity, 308;
    of mankind, future of, 399
  Love of God, 131;
    on the wane, 205
  Lower animals, religion in, 76
  Luther, 193

  M

  Mainlaender, Phillipp, 458
  Malthusianism, 317;
    fallacy of, 317;
    in France, 325
  Marvellous, primitive man’s faith in the, 137
  Materialism, 488
  Maternity, girls should be trained for, 333
  Medical knowledge, progress of, and religion, 162
  Ménard, M. Louis, 249, 289
  Metaphysics, primitive, a fetichistic monism, 81;
    scope of, 383;
    instability of, 389;
    present direction of, 424
  Michelet, 249, 320
  Mill, John Stuart, 173, 442, 461
  Mind stuff, 490
  Misoneism, 125
  Miracles, conception of, 87;
    not frauds, 90;
    eighteenth century view of, 91;
    but illusions, 92;
    experiment in, 128;
    in modern times, 353
  Modesty, nature or, 301
  Mohammedanism, 257, 361
  Molinari, M. de, 409
  Monism, 493
  Montesquieu, 329
  Moral sentiment defined, 7
  Moralism, 426
  Morality and religion, 114, 241, 362;
    dependence of religion upon, 192;
    essence of, 197;
    apart from religion not hard to teach, 402
  Mormonism, 358
  Müller, Max, 24, 49, 233
  Mystery, fear of thunder due to sense of, 62
  Mysticism a perversion, 132;
    conflicts with egoism, 204;
    and asceticism, 211;
    and women, 299

  N

  Natural phenomena non-existent for primitive man, 64
  Natural selection, evolution of gods by, 496
  Nature a society, 55;
    seeming menace of conscious life in, 66;
    love of, 421;
    inexhaustible resources of, 500
  Neo-Christianity, 184
  Neutrality, propriety in religious affairs of state, 277
  Newman, Cardinal, 247
  Newman, Mr. Francis, 351
  Nirvâna, 473
  Nonotte, Abbé, 327
  Non-religion defined, 8;
    the goal of religion, 167;
    not responsible for the crimes of the French Revolution and the
      Commune, 244
  Novelty, persistent in the world, 470

  O

  Omnipotence, God’s, 442

  P

  Pantheism, 452
  Panthelism, 55
  Paraphysics, religion primarily a, 79
  Parents, not protected against ingratitude, 334;
    should be taxed inversely to number of children, 337
  Parvé, M. Steyn, 283
  Pascal, 202, 440
  Pattison, Mark, 365
  Paul, Saint, 356
  Paul, Vincent de, 399
  Personal initiative, sentiment of, 98
  Pessimism, 457;
    an optical illusion, 468
  Pillon, M., 249
  Polydemonism, 85
  Population, antagonism between wealth and, 315;
    importance of, 316;
    inability of priest to cope with question of, 327;
    decrease of, encouraged by the church, 328
  Positivism, 24, 109, 365
  Possession, 83
  Prayer, the animal’s, 74;
    kinds of, distinguished, 217;
    durable element in, 217;
    highest form of, 225
  Priest and prophet, antagonism between, 128
  Priesthood, origin of, 126;
    education by the, 273, 282
  Primary instruction and religion, 159
  Primitive man, incurious, 51;
    unaware of natural phenomena as such, 64;
    and novelty, 125;
    and the marvelous, 137
  Primitive metaphysics, a fetichistic monism, 81
  Problem of evil, 433
  Prophet and priest, antagonism between, 128
  Protestantism, 152, 167, 252;
    liberal, 182
  Providence, notion of a Divine, 85;
    evil of belief in, 97;
    futility of doctrine of, 440

  R

  Realism, 482
  Reconciliation between determinism and indeterminism, 484
  Relics, belief in, 86
  Religion, essence of, 1, 10;
    and science, difference between, 3;
    Feuerbach’s definition of, 3;
    Schleiermacher’s definition of, 3, 487;
    of natural origin, 22;
    and superstition, 78;
    primarily a paraphysics, 79;
    morally retrograde, 114;
    and physiology, psychology, and history, 158;
    and primary instruction, 159;
    and development of commerce, 160;
    and insurance, 161;
    and progress of medical knowledge, 162;
    tends toward non-religion, 167;
    dependent upon morality, 192;
    and crime, 241;
    not essential to morality, 241;
    deserted by genius, 355;
    of humanity, 365;
    and art, 414
  Religious individualism, 12;
    instinct, 40, 229;
    ecstasy, 222;
    instruction, father’s duty in regard to, 286
  Renan, 17, 23, 40, 119, 126, 158, 172, 227, 232, 236, 306, 321, 373
  Renouvier, 249
  Revelation, essence of faith in, 140
  Réville, M., 49, 114, 128, 417
  Revolution, French, 244, 250
  Richet, M., 337
  Romanes, George, 62

  S

  Sanction, superfluity of religious, 405
  Scepticism, feebleness of, 376
  Schelling, 524
  Schleiermacher’s definition of religion, 3, 487
  Schoolmaster, importance of the, 277
  Schultz, Professor Hermann, 184
  Science and religion, difference between, 3
  Secrétan, M., 437
  Secularism, 365
  Self-preservation, and sociality, instincts of, 44
  Sentiment, definition of moral, 7
  Sermon, transformation of the, 416
  Shadows, 82
  Sin, morbid preoccupation with, 213
  Socialism, 369
  Sociality, and self-preservation, instincts of, 44
  Society for Ethical Culture, 367
  Sociomorphism, religion a, 2
  Somnambulism, 83
  Special Providence, 440;
    mankind to be its own, 450
  Spencer, Herbert, 44, 384, 427, 451, 490
  Spinozism, 454
  Spirit, genesis of concept of, 82
  Stoicism, 520
  Strauss, 23, 417, 431
  Suffering from the invisible, a modern malady, 35
  Suicide, as a resource, 472
  Superstition and religion, 78
  Symbolism, 9

  T

  Taine, 227, 479, 490, 493
  Tax on celibacy, 306
  Theism, 429
  Theresa, Saint, 134
  Thunder, sense of mystery responsible for fear of, 63
  Timidity, feminine, 298
  Tolerance, 149;
    Hindu, 32
  Totality, concept of, 39
  Transformation of the sermon, 416
  Trent, Council of, 141

  U

  Unity, modernity of concept of an all-embracing, 39
  Universal Providence, 441

  V

  Vernes, M. Maurice, 281, 283
  Verrier, Dr., 344

  W

  Wealth, antagonism between population and, 315
  Wife, husband responsible for education of, 310
  Women and mysticism, 299;
    importance of early education of, 309
  Worship of ancestors, 47;
    public, 126;
    subjective, 130

  Z

  Zoölatry, 47


THE END.




Transcriber’s note


Words in italics have been surrounded with _underscores_ and small
capitals have been replaced with all capitals. The footnotes have been
renumbered and placed directly after the paragraph they belong to.

Minor errors in spacing, capitalization etc. have been corrected
without note. Missing accents in the sidenotes have been added to be
consistent with the main text. Also the following changes have been
made, on page

    5 “as” added (just as he might offend a fellow-man)
   18 “adverversaries” changed to “adversaries” (the mistake of
      despising their adversaries)
   45 “puisant” changed to “puissant” (what is puissant and powerful)
   48 footnote anchor added (the phenomena of the external world.[19])
   64 “unaquainted” changed to “unacquainted” (they are unacquainted
      with the external world)
  157 “terrestial” changed to “terrestrial” (the celestial or
      terrestrial phenomena which)
  163 “neigbours” changed to “neighbours” (their more innocent
      neighbours)
  167 “Protestanism” changed to “Protestantism” (Inconsequence of
      liberal Protestantism)
  191 “abhorence” changed to “abhorrence” (theory of nature’s
      abhorrence)
  207 “considerble” changed to “considerable” (a considerable hold on
      human life)
  215 “mimimize” changed to “minimize” (in order to minimize the
      necessity)
  241 “Watt” changed to “Wat” (Pastoureaux and Jacques in France and
      Wat Tyler in England)
  298 “sentitiment” changed to “sentiment” (dominated not by reason
      but by sentiment)
  304 “cherubin” changed to “chérubin” (l’interrogation anxieuse de
      chérubin)
  304 “Songs” changed to “Song” (reading the Song of Songs)
  335 “étre” changed to “être” (être à la charge de ses enfants)
  337 “corveé” changed to “corvée” (the last vestige of the _corvée_)
  337 “celibat” changed to “célibat” (sur le célibat en France)
  347 “anxiom” changed to “axiom” (If there is one axiom that fathers
      ought to)
  389 “esthetique” changed to “esthétique” (Problèmes de l’esthétique
      contemporaine)
  399 “Budhism” changed to “Buddhism” (Buddhism and Christianity have
      headed)
  453 “asscribes” changed to “ascribes” (unity that it ascribes to
      the world)
  477 “Hydrogene” changed to “Hydrogen” (hypothesis—Hydrogen—Necessity
      of), also in the table of contents
  533 “Pyschologically” changed to “Psychologically” (Psychologically
      and metaphysically considered)
  542 “Reconcilation” changed to “Reconciliation” (Reconciliation
      between determinism and indeterminism)
  542 “Socialty” changed to “Sociality” (Sociality, and
      self-preservation)
  462 “Fréré” changed to “Féré” (One may say, with M. Féré, that
      people in good)
  539 “Comtes” changed to “Comte” (Comte, A., 109)
  539 “Feurbach” changed to “Feuerbach” (by Schleiermacher and
      Feuerbach)
  541 “Lavelaye” changed to “Laveleye” (Lavelaye, M. de, 249, 252,
      284)
  541 “ascetism” changed to “asceticism” (and asceticism, 211)
  541 “Panthelism, 55-453” changed to “Pantheism, 452” and
      “Panthelism, 55”
  541 “Parve” changed to “Parvé” (Parvé, M. Steyn, 283)

and in footnote number

   36 “Epicure” changed to “Épicure” (See the author’s _Morale
      d’Épicure_)
   40 “Societe” changed to “Société” (Actes de la Société helvét. des
      sc. nat.)
   44 “a’une” changed to “d’une” (Esquisse d’une morale)
   78 “embarassment” changed to “embarrassment” (remarks in the former
      a progressive financial embarrassment)
   85 “sécondaire” changed to “secondaire” (l’instruction primaire,
      secondaire et supérieure)
   87 “Lenornant” changed to “Lenormant” (M. Lenormant undertook to
      publish a translation)
  139 “Fréré” changed to “Féré” (M. Ch. Féré, _Revue philosophique_,
      July, 1886.).

Otherwise the original was preserved, including inconsistencies
in spelling, hyphenation and capitalisation, also possible errors
in foreign languages. No italics were used in the sidenotes, this
has not been changed. The index has not been checked for errors in
alphabetization or pagenumbers. Additional: M. Janet, mentioned in
footnote 164 is probably Paul Janet, “La Morale”.