ii£?V THE NON-RELIGION OF THE FUTURE A SOCIOLOGICAL STUDY TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH OF M. GUYAU \^ OF THF '^ UNIVERSITY . ' ', ■ >' ' '• NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY i8q7 •£J if ^6/ Copyright, 1897, BY HENRY HOLT & CO. THE MERSHON COMPANY PRESS, RAHWAY, N. J. ?<■ OF THK r UNIVERSITY TABLE OF CONTENTS. INTRODUCTION. I. Sociality the basis of religion— Its definition. II. The connection between religion, aesthetics, 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 dis- tinguished from the "religion of the future." IV. The value and utility, for the time being, of religion ; its ultimate insufficiency, ^ ©act ifirst. 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 - he infinite— Hehotheism of Max Miiller 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 iii IV TABLE OF CONTENTS. a special providence — The conception of miracles — The supernatural and the natural — Scientific explanation and miracles — Social a.nd moral modi- fications 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 ele- ments in this idea — Monism — Classification of systems of religious meta- physics — Criticism of the classification proposed by Von Hartmann — Criticism of the classification proposed by Auguste Comte, . . 80 CHAPTER III. RELIGIOUS MORALS. ,J L 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 propor- tionality in the exchange of services — Sacrifice — Principle of coercion and incantation — Principle of habit and its relation to rites — Sorcery — Sacer- dotalism — Prophecy — The externals of worship — Dramatization and re- ligious aesthetics. IV. Subjective worship — Adoration and love ; their psychological origin, . 113 Ipart Secon^. THE DISSOLUTION OF RELIGIONS IN EXISTING SOCIETIES. CHAPTER I. DOGMATIC FAITH. \. 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, salva- tion, 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. TABLE OF CONTENTS. V 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 ora- cles 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 Protes- tantism — Comparison with Brahmanism — Substitution of moral symbolism for metaphysical symbolism — Moral faith — Kant — Mill — Matthew Ar- nold — A literary explanation of the Bible substituted for a literal explanation. II. Criticism of symbolic faith — Inconsequence of liberal Protestant- ism — 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, predestmation, damnation — Caducous elements of religious morality — Mysticism — Antagonism of divine love and human love — Asceticism — Excesses of asceticism — Espe- cially 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 hu- manity? — Frequent confusion of a sentiment for religion with a sentiment for philosophy and morals — Renan — Max Miiller — 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 ? / TABLE OF CONTEA'TS. 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-re- ligion and immorality, according to statistics. III. Is Protestantism a necessary tfansition stage between religion and free-thought? — Projects for Protestantizing France — Michelet, Quinet, De Lavejfiye, Renouvier, and Pillon — Intellectual, moral, and political sui^eri- opty of Protestantism — Utopian character of the project — Uselessness, for urposes of morals, of substituting one religion for another — Is the pos- session of religion a condition sine qua non of superiority in the struggle for existence ? — Objections urged against France and the French Revolu- tion 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 school- master — Secondary and higher instruction — Should the history of re- ligion 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 — Predomi- nance of sentiment — Tendency to mysticism — Is the moral sentiment among women based upon religion — Influence of religion and of non-reli- gion 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 b\^ free-thought — Influence exercised by the wife's faith over the husband — Instance of a conversion to free-thought 295 TABLE OF CONIENTS. vii CHAPTER 111. THE EFFECT OF RELIGION AND NON-RELIGION ON POPULA- TION AND THE FUTURE OF THE RACE. I. Importance of the problem of population — Antagonism between nu- merical strength and wealtli — 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 militar}'- law for the purpose of favouring large families and of permitting emigration to the French colonies. III. Influence of public education : its necessit}' as a substitute for re- i' ligious sentiment 315 Ipart mythical in form. ~To justify this conception we shall review the various defini- INTRODUCTION. 3 tions 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. Reville, is that of Schleier- macher. 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 salva- tion, for happiness. The respective definitions of Schleier- macher 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 depend- ence 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 knowl- . 4 introduction: edge and all power not scientific " ? ' 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. 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 ^11 a physical dependence, a moral, and in especial, a social dependence. This relation of dependence consists really ' See an account given of the ProUgomhies of M. Albert Reville, by M. Dar- mesteter, Revue philosophique, seventh year, vol. i. p. 76. INTRODUCTION. S 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 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 divanities 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 per- son, 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 : /;/ eo vtviinns, 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 distinc- O IXTRODUCTJON. tion 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 godA 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 them- selves 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 ]v 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 aesthetics and on morals. We believe that OF THK ^' y INTRODUCriO^f. IL UNIVERSITY the ae sthetic sentiment is identical with "self-conscious life , with life that is conscious of its own subjective intensity and harmony ; beauty we have saidmay be^defiued as a perception or an act that stimulates hfe simultaneously on its three sides — se^nsibilTty, intcllifjence, will — and that produces pleasure by the immediate ^con^dousn ess of t his_^eneral stinmlation. Moral sentimejitj^on_jhe other hand^Js. identical, we bcheve, 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 js extended t o the totality_of_conscious beings, and not only of r eal and livi ng, 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 aesthetics 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 por- tions 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 compre- hensive, metaphysical explanation of the universe." ' The importance which Auguste Comte attributed to sociology is well known, but in his horror of metaphysics the founder of positivism exchided 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.t'zV^ versa, that every society is an organism. A contemporary philosopher goes still further and attributes to sociology a certain metaphysical significance. M. Alfred Fouillee 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 group- ing 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 them- 8 IN rjiOD UC TION. III. It is important that there should be no misunderstand- ing in regard to this iion-religion of the future, as contradistin- guished 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 equivoca- tions. In the first place religion, properly so-called, has some- times 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 unknow- able 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 selves, 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 ulti- mate 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 Fouillee, La Science sociale conteiiiporaine, 2d edition, introduction and conclusion.) M. Fouillee 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 philospphique 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. INTRODUCTION. 9 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 con- stitute 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 com- promise with some form of positive religion. Under cover of the symbolism dear to the Germans, they save in appear- ance 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 Voii Hartmann and th e oth ejr_ prophets who reveal to us, point by point, the re ligion of the fiftieth century. Wh^n one approaches an ob ject 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 sciei]ce. 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 univer- sality 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 I O IN TROD UC TION. true mctho^d), every positive and historical religion presents three distinctive and e ssential elements: (i) An atte mpt at a mythical and no n-scientihc 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 justi- fication ; (3) A cult a nd 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 Igastard prod- uct, " 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 dog- 'matic 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, \ve reject the religion of the future', as we should reject an alchemy of the future, or astrology of the future. But it does n ot fo l low that non-religion ora-religion — which is simply the negation of all dogma, ofal l traditional and" supernatural authority, of all revelati on, of all miracle, of U' all myth, of all rite erected into a duty — is synonymous with impiety, with a contempt for the moral and metaphysical ele- ments of ancient faiths. Not in the least ; to be non-religious or ai-religious is not to be anti-religi ous. M ore than that, as we shall see, the non-religion of the future may well preserve all that is pure in the religious sentiment: an admirat^bnjor the IN TROD UCriON. 1 1 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~ rhay 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 afifirmed 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 con- trol that they have traditionally exercised over the individual conscience. The developments of religion and those of civili- zation have always proceeded hand in hand ; the develop- ments 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 consid ered as a higheFdegree" simply of 1 ' religion and of civihzation. The absence of religion thus conceived is one with a reasoned but hypotlietical metaphyslcs7 treating of rnen and the universe. One may designate it as religious independence, or anomy, or individualism.' 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 ard sympathize with the great founders of religion, not only in that they were thinkers, metaphysicians, moralists, and ' See pt. 3, chap. ii. 1 2 n\f TROD UC TION. philanthropists, but in that they were reformers of established belief, more or less avowed enemies of religious authority, of every afifirmation 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 trans- mission 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 gre at religion a dissolving f orce ; namely, the veryjorce whicliserved in the beginning to constitute it aiid 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 tlie ultimate establishment, after the gradual decomposition of every system of dogmatic belief, of a final absence of religion.' 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 Chris- tianity, or a perfected Buddhism. To this predicted religious unity we oppose rather a future pluraTity" of beliefs, a religious i n dividualTsm. " A pretension to universahty is, no doubt, cHaracteristic oF"every great religion ; but the dogmatic and mythological element which constitutes a religion positive is . pl^cisely irreconcilable, even under the elastic form of syn- bolism, with the very universality to which they aspire. Such a universality cannot be realized even in metaphysics ai d morals, for the element of insolubility and unknowabilily, which cannot be eliminated, will always attract different minis ' See pt. 3, chap. i. IN TR ODUC TIO.V. I J 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, pro- ceed 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 preten- sions 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 indi- vidualism and religions, which we consider as the human ideal, and which, moreover, does not in the least exclude the I possibility of diverse religious associations or federations, nor jt of free and continuous progress toward ultimate unity of f 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, b ut more of free speculatio n ; less of contemplation, but more of reasoning,^ of ha rdy indu c tion, of an active outlcap of thought ; the religious dogma will be extinct, but the bes t ele- ments of religious life will be propagated, will be augmejited in intensity and extent.^ For he alone is religiou s , in thg 14 INTRODUCTION. 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 ; I not universal dogma, but liberty of belief, which is the first Vcondition of growth.' 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 aesthetic 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 inten- tions into dogmas. At this price, we believe that poetry may very often be truer, and better, than certain too narrow^ly 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? ' Surely a great •See pt. 3, chaps, i. and ii. 'See pt. 2, chap. iv. IN TROD UCriON. 1 5 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 disap- pear 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 Fon- tenelle, " 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 seiise to have exhausted the possibilities of the false. Religions have rendered the human mind this im- mense 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 revela- tion 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 role in human affairs that it would assuredly be dangerous to attempt abruptly to proceed with- out them ; transitions are useful, even in passing from dark- ness 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 ; 1 6 IN TROD UCriON. but we repeat, this diminution of the number of errors is pre- cisely what constitutes progress, and in some ^ort 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 mechan- isms is that the outer springs precisely labour to cause them- selves 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 neces- sary 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. In the eighteenth century the attack on religion was directed by philosophical" partisans "'df~7r7'?/^rz principles, who were persuaded that the instant a faith was proved to Taeabsurd that was the end of it. In our days the attack isTed 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 jtojdestroy 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. INTRODUCTION. 1 7 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.' 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 transmuta- tion 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 sufificed 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 ' " You are occupied with religion," a cultivated unbelie ver writes me. " There is then'sonie sucfTtTiing ! So mifc h the better for those who cannot do without it J' This witticism precisely sums up the state of mind of a gr eat man^enljghtengd[_ Frenchmen : they are profoundly astonished that religion should still be on its legs, and out of their astonishment they draw the con viction that it is necessary. T heir surprise thereupon become s 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 raisoits d'etre 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 intelli- gence is so far enfranchised as to have no further need of an arbitrary rule. Similarly for peoples : nothing is more naive than to urge the very necessity of transitions as a bar to progress : it is as if one should call attention to the short- ness 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. 1 8 INTROD UCTION. 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, com- ' plete 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 sunplicitas ! 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 f anaticism which is almost as danger'oaT; — ar' reTiglous fanaticism ^ E rasmus compares humanity to a druhl . . is of natural slowly and in accordance with universal and origin. regular laws ; it must have originated in simple and vague notions of some sort, accessible to the most primi- tive intelligence. And from that starting point it must have risen by gradual evolution to the complex and precise concep- tions which characterize it to-day. It is in vain for religions ' Herr Roskoff, Das Religionswesen der rohesten Naturvoelker (Leipzig, 1880) ; M. Girard de Rialle, yl/vMc/c^/V fcw/rtr/