of Comte. This in all its parts--its high priesthood, its hierarchy, its
sacraments, its calendar, its hagiology, its literary canon, its
ritualism, and we may add, in its fundamentally intolerant and
inquisitorial character--is an obvious reproduction of the Church of
Rome, with humanity in place of God, great men in place of the saints,
the Founder of Comtism in place of the Founder of Christianity, and even
a sort of substitute for the Virgin in the shape of womanhood typified
by Clotilde de Vaux. There is only just the amount of difference which
would be necessary in order to escape servile imitation. We have
ourselves witnessed a case of alternation between the two systems which
testified to the closeness of their affinity. The Catholic Church has
acted on the imagination of Comte at least as powerfully as Sparta acted
on that of Plato. Nor is Comtism, any more than Plato's _Republic_
and other Utopias, exempt from the infirmity of claiming finality for a
flight of the individual imagination. It would shut up mankind for ever
in a stereotyped organization which is the vision of a particular
thinker. In this respect it seems to us to be at a disadvantage compared
with Christianity, which, as presented, in the Gospels, does not pretend
to organize mankind ecclesiastically or politically, but simply supplies
a new type of character, and a new motive power, leaving government,
ritual and organization of every kind to determine themselves from age
to age. Comte's prohibition of inquiry into the composition of the
stars, which his priesthood, had it been installed in power, would
perhaps have converted into a compulsory article of faith, is only a
specimen of his general tendency (the common tendency, as we have said,
of all Utopias) to impose on human progress the limits of his own mind.
Let his hierarchy become masters of the world, and the effect would
probably be like that produced by the ascendency of a hierarchy
(enlightened no doubt for its time) in Egypt, a brief start forward
followed by consecrated immobility for ever.
Lareveillere Lepaux, a member of the French Directory, invented a new
religion of Theo-philanthropy which seems in fact to have been an
organized Rousseauism. He wished to impose it on France but finding that
in spite of his passionate endeavours he made but little progress he
sought the advice of Talleyrand. "I am not surprised" said Talleyrand
"at the difficulty you experience. It is no easy matter to introduce a
new religion. But I will tell you what I recommend you to do. I
recommend you to be crucified and to rise again on the third day." We
cannot say whether Lareveillere made any proselytes but if he did their
number cannot have been much smaller than the reputed number of the
religious disciples of Comte. As a philosophy, Comtism has found its
place and exercised its share of influence among the philosophies of the
time but as a religious system it appears to make little way. It is the
invention of a man not the spontaneous expression of the beliefs and
feelings of mankind. Any one with a tolerably lively imagination might
produce a rival system with as little practical effect. Roman
Catholicism was at all events a growth not an invention.
Cosmic Emotion, though it does not affect to be an organized system, is
the somewhat sudden creation of individual minds set at work apparently
by the exigencies of a particular situation and on that account
suggestive _prima facie_ of misgivings similar to those suggested
by the invention of Comte.
Now is the worship of Humanity or Cosmic Emotion really a substitute for
religion? That is the only question which we wish in these few pages to
ask. We do not pretend here to inquire what is or what is not true in
itself.
Religion teaches that we have our being in a Power whose character and
purposes are indicated to us by our moral nature, in whom we are united
and by the union made sacred to each other, whose voice conscience
however generated, is whose eye is always upon us, sees all our acts,
and sees them as they are morally, without reference to worldly success
or to the opinion of the world, to whom at death we return, and our
relations to whom, together with his own nature, are an assurance that
according as we promote or fail to promote his design by self
improvement and the improvement of our kind, it will be well or ill for
us in the sum of things. This is a hypothesis evidently separable from
belief in a revelation, and from any special theory respecting the next
world, as well as from all dogma and ritual. It may be true or false in
itself, capable of demonstration or incapable. We are concerned here
solely with its practical efficiency, compared with that of the proposed
substitutes. It is only necessary to remark, that there is nothing about
the religious hypothesis as here stated, miraculous, supernatural, or
mysterious, except so far as those epithets may be applied to anything
beyond the range of bodily sense, say the influence of opinion or
affection. A universe self-made, and without a God, is at least as great
a mystery as a universe with a God; in fact the very attempt to conceive
it in the mind produces a moral vertigo which is a bad omen for the
practical success of Cosmic Emotion.
For this religion are the service and worship of Humanity likely to be a
real equivalent in any respect, as motive power, as restraint, or as
comfort? Will the idea of life in God be adequately replaced by that of
an interest in the condition and progress of Humanity, as they may
affect us and be influenced by our conduct, together with the hope of
human gratitude and fear of human reprobation after death, which the
Comtists endeavor to organize into a sort of counterpart of the Day of
Judgment?
It will probably be at once conceded that the answer must be in the
negative as regards the immediate future and the mass of mankind. The
simple truths of religion are intelligible to all, and strike all minds
with equal force, though they may not have the same influence with all
moral natures. A child learns them perfectly at its mother's knee.
Honest ignorance in the mine, on the sea, at the forge, striving to do
its coarse and perilous duty, performing the lowliest functions of
humanity, contributing in the humblest way to human progress, itself
scarcely sunned by a ray of what more cultivated natures would deem
happiness, takes in as fully as the sublimest philosopher the idea of a
God who sees and cares for all, who keeps account of the work well done
or the kind act, marks the secret fault, and will hereafter make up to
duty for the hardness of its present lot. But a vivid interest--such an
interest as will act both as a restraint and as a comfort--in the
condition and future of humanity can surely exist only in those who have
a knowledge of history sufficient to enable them to embrace the unity of
the past, and an imagination sufficiently cultivated to glow with
anticipation of the future. For the bulk of mankind the humanity
worshippers point of view seems unattainable at least within any
calculable time.
As to posthumous reputation good or evil it is and always must be the
appendage of a few marked men. The plan of giving it substance by
instituting separate burial places for the virtuous and the wicked is
perhaps not very seriously proposed. Any such plan involves the fallacy
of a sharp division where there is no clear moral line besides
postulating not only an unattainable knowledge of men's actions but a
knowledge still more manifestly unattainable of their hearts. Yet we
cannot help thinking that on the men of intellect to whose teaching the
world is listening this hope of posthumous reputation, or to put it more
plainly, of living in the gratitude and affection of their kind by means
of their scientific discoveries and literary works exercises an
influence of which they are hardly conscious, it prevents them from
fully feeling the void which the annihilation of the hope of future
existence leaves in the hearts of ordinary men.
Besides so far as we are aware no attempt has yet been made to show us
distinctly what humanity is and wherein its holiness consists. If the
theological hypothesis is true and all men are united in God, humanity
is a substantial reality, but otherwise we fail to see that it is any
thing more than a metaphysical abstraction converted into an actual
entity by philosophers who are not generally kind to metaphysics. Even
the unity of the species is far from settled, science still debates
whether there is one race of men or whether there are more than a
hundred. Man acts on man no doubt, but he also acts on other animals,
and other animals on him. Wherein does the special unity or the special
bond consist? Above all what constitutes the holiness? Individual men
are not holy, a large proportion of them are very much the reverse. Why
is the aggregate holy? Let the unit be a complex phenomenon, an organism
or whatever name science may give it, what multiple of it will be a
rational object of worship?
For our own part we cannot conceive worship being offered by a sane
worshipper to any but a conscious being, in other words to a person. The
fetish worshipper himself probably invests his fetish with a vague
personality such as would render it capable of propitiation. But how
can we invest with a collective personality the fleeting generations of
mankind? Even the sum of mankind is never complete, much less are the
units blended into a personal whole, or as it has been called a colossal
man.
There is a gulf here, as it seems to us, which cannot be bridged, and
can barely be hidden from view by the retention of religious
phraseology. In truth, the anxious use of that phraseology betrays
weakness, since it shows that you cannot do without the theological
associations which cling inseparably to religious terms.
You look forward to a closer union, a more complete brotherhood of man,
an increased sacredness of the human relation. Some things point that
way; some things point the other way. Brotherhood has hardly a definite
meaning without a father; sacredness can hardly be predicated without
anything which consecrates. We can point to an eminent writer who tells
you that he detests the idea of brotherly love altogether; that there
are many of his kind whom, so far from loving, he hates, and that he
would like to write his hatred with a lash upon their backs. Look again
at the severe Prussianism which betrays itself in the New Creed of
Strauss. Look at the oligarchy of enlightenment and enjoyment which
Renan, in his _Moral Reform of France_, proposes to institute for
the benefit of a select circle, with sublime indifference to the lot of
the vulgar, who, he says, "must subsist on the glory and happiness of
others." This does not look much like a nearer approach to a brotherhood
of man than is made by the Gospel. We are speaking, of course, merely of
the comparative moral efficiency of religion and the proposed
substitutes for it, apart from the influence exercised over individual
conduct by the material needs and other non-theological forces of
society.
For the immortality of the individual soul, with the influences of that
belief, we are asked to substitute the immortality of the race. But
here, in addition to the difficulty of proving the union and
intercommunion of all the members, we are met by the objection that
unless we live in God, the race, in all probability, is not immortal.
That our planet and all it contains will come to an end appears to be
the decided opinion of science. This "holy" being, our relation to which
is to take the place of our relation to an Eternal Father, by the
adoration of which we are to be sustained and controlled, if it exist at
all, is as ephemeral compared with eternity as a fly. We shall be told
that we ought to be content with an immortality extending through tens
of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of years. To the
_argumentum ad verecundiam_ there is no reply. But will this banish
the thought of ultimate annihilation? Will it prevent a man, when he is
called upon to make some great sacrifice for the race, from saying to
himself, that, whether he makes the sacrifice or not, one day all will
end in nothing?
Evidently these are points which must be made quite clear before you
can, with any prospect of success, call upon men either to regard
Humanity with the same feelings with which they have regarded God, or to
give up their own interest or enjoyment for the future benefit of the
race. The assurance derived from the fondness felt by parents for their
offspring, and the self-denying efforts made for the good of children,
will hardly carry us very far, even supposing it certain that parental
love would remain unaffected by the general change. It is evidently a
thing apart from the general love of Humanity. Nobody was ever more
extravagantly fond of his children, or made greater efforts for them,
than Alexander Borgia.
It has been attempted, however, with all the fervour of conviction, and
with all the force of a powerful style, to make us see not only that we
have this corporal immortality as members of the "colossal man," but
that we may look forward to an actual though impersonal existence in the
shape of the prolongation through all future time of the consequences of
our lives. It might with equal truth be said that we have enjoyed an
actual though impersonal existence through all time past in our
antecedents. But neither in its consequences nor in its antecedents can
anything be said to live except by a figure. The characters and actions
of men surely will never be influenced by such a fanciful use of
language as this! Our being is consciousness; with consciousness our
being ends, though our physical forces may be conserved, and traces of
our conduct--traces utterly indistinguishable--may remain. That with
which we are not concerned cannot affect us either presently or by
anticipation; and with that of which we shall never be conscious, we
shall never feel that we are concerned. Perhaps if the authors of this
new immortality would tell us what they understand by non-existence, we
might be led to value more highly by contrast the existence which they
propose for a soul when it has ceased to think or feel, and for an
organism when it has been scattered to the winds.
They would persuade us that their impersonal and unconscious immortality
is a brighter hope than an eternity of personal and conscious existence,
the very thought of which they say is torture. This assumes, what there
seems to be no ground for assuming, that eternity is an endless
extension of time; and, in the same way, that infinity is a boundless
space. It is more natural to conceive of them as emancipation
respectively from time and space, and from the conditions which time and
space involve; and among the conditions of time may apparently be
reckoned the palling of pleasure or of existence by mere temporal
protraction. Even as we are, sensual pleasure palls; so does the merely
intellectual: but can the same be said of the happiness of virtue and
affection? It is urged, too, that by exchanging the theological
immortality for one of physical and social consequences, we get rid of
the burden of self, which otherwise we should drag for ever. But surely
in this there is a confusion of self with selfishness. Selfishness is
another name for vice. Self is merely consciousness. Without a self, how
can there be self-sacrifice? How can the most unselfish motive exist if
there is nothing to be moved? "He that findeth his life, shall lose it;
and he that loseth his life, shall find it," is not a doctrine of
selfishness, but it implies a self. We have been rebuked in the words of
Frederick to his grenadiers--"Do you want to live for ever?" The
grenadiers might have answered, "Yes; and therefore we are ready to
die."
It is not when we think of the loss of anything to which a taint of
selfishness can adhere--it is not even when we think of intellectual
effort cut short for ever by death just as the intellect has ripened and
equipped itself with the necessary knowledge--that the nothingness of
this immortality of conservated forces is most keenly felt: it is when
we think of the miserable end of affection. How much comfort would it
afford anyone bending over the deathbed of his wife to know that forces
set free by her dissolution will continue to mingle impersonally and
indistinguishably with forces set free by the general mortality?
Affection, at all events, requires personality. One cannot love a group
of consequences, even supposing that the filiation could be distinctly
presented to the mind. Pressed by the hand of sorrow craving for
comfort, this Dead Sea fruit crumbles into ashes, paint it with
eloquence as you will.
Humanity, it seems to us, is a fundamentally Christian idea, connected
with the Christian view of the relations of men to their common Father
and of their spiritual union in the Church. In the same way the idea of
the progress of Humanity seems to us to have been derived from the
Christian belief in the coming of the Kingdom of God through the
extension of the Church, and to that final triumph of good over evil
foretold in the imagery of the Apocalypse. At least the founders of the
Religion of Humanity will admit that the Christian Church is the matrix
of theirs so much their very nomenclature proves and we would fain ask
them to review the process of disengagement and see whether the essence
has not been left behind.
No doubt there are influences at work in modern civilisation which tend
to the strengthening of the sentiment of humanity by making men more
distinctly conscious of their position as members of a race. On the
other hand the unreflecting devotion of the tribesman which held
together primitive societies dies. Man learns to reason and calculate
and when he is called upon to immolate himself to the common interest of
the race he will consider what the common interest of the race when he
is dead and gone will be to him and whether he will ever be repaid for
his sacrifice.
Of Cosmic Emotion it will perhaps be fair to say that it is proposed as
a substitute for religious emotion rather than as a substitute for
religion since nothing has been said about embodying it in a cult. It
comes to us commended by glowing quotations from Mr. Swinburne and Walt
Whitman and we cannot help admitting that for common hearts it stands in
need of the commendation. The transfer of affection from an all loving
Father to an adamantine universe is a process for which we may well seek
all the aid that the witchery of poetry can supply. Unluckily we are
haunted by the consciousness that the poetry itself is blindly ground
out by the same illimitable mill of evolution which grinds out Virtue
and affection. We are by no means sure that we understand what Cosmic
Emotion is even after leading an exposition of its nature by no ungifted
hand. Its symbola so to speak are the feelings produced by the two
objects of Kant's peculiar reverence--the stars of heaven and the moral
faculty of man. But after all these are only like anything else
aggregations of molecules in a certain stage of evolution. To the
unscientific eye they may be awful because they are mysterious, but let
science analyse them and then awfulness disappears. If the interaction
of all parts of the material universe is complete we fail to see why one
object or one feeling is more cosmic than another. However we will not
dwell on that which as we have already confessed we do not feel sure
that we rightly apprehend. What we do clearly see is that to have cosmic
emotion or cosmic anything you must have a cosmos. You must be assured
that the universe is a cosmos and not a chaos. And what assurance of
this can materialism or any non theological system give? Law is a
theological term, it implies a lawgiver or a governing intelligence of
some kind. Science can tell us nothing but facts, single or accumulated
as experience, which would not make a law though they had been observed
through myriads of years. Law is a theological term, and cosmos is
equally so, if it may not rather be said to be a Greek name for the
aggregate of laws. For order implies intelligent selection and
arrangement. Our idea of order would not be satisfied by a number of
objects falling by mere chance into a particular figure, however
intricate and regular. All the arguments which have been used against
design seem to tell with equal force against order. We have no other
universe wherewith we can compare this, so as to assure ourselves that
this universe is not a chaos, but a cosmos. Both on the earth and in the
heavens we see much that is not order, but disorder; not cosmos, but
acosmia. If we divine, nevertheless, that order reigns, and that there
is design beneath the seemingly undesigned, and good beneath the
appearance of evil, it is by virtue of something not dreamed of in the
philosophy of materialism.
Have we really come to this, that the world has no longer any good
reason for believing in a God or a life beyond the grave? If so, it is
difficult to deny that with regard to the great mass of mankind up to
this time Schopenhauer and the Pessimists are right, and existence has
been a cruel misadventure. The number of those who have suffered
lifelong oppression, disease, or want, who have died deaths of torture
or perished miserably by war, is limited though enormous; but probably
there have been few lives in which the earthly good has not been
outweighed by the evil. The future may bring increased means of
happiness, though those who are gone will not be the better for them;
but it will bring also increase of sensibility, and the consciousness of
hopeless imperfection and miserable futility will probably become a
distinct and growing cause of pain. It is doubtful even whether, after
such a raising of Mokanna's veil, faith in everything would not expire
and human effort cease. Still we must face the situation: there can be
no use in self-delusion. In vain we shall seek to cheat our souls and to
fill a void which cannot be filled by the manufacture of artificial
religions and the affectation of a spiritual language to which, however
persistently and fervently it may be used, no realities correspond. If
one of these cults could get itself established, in less than a
generation it would become hollower than the hollowest of
ecclesiasticisms. Probably not a few of the highest natures would
withdraw themselves from the dreary round of self mockery by suicide,
and if a scientific priesthood attempted to close that door by
sociological dogma or posthumous denunciation the result would show the
difference between the practical efficacy of a religion with a God and
that of a cult of "Humanity" or "Space."
Shadows and figments, as they appear to us to be in themselves these
attempts to provide a substitute for religion are of the highest
importance, as showing that men of great powers of mind, who have
thoroughly broken loose not only from Christianity but from natural
religion and in some cases placed themselves in violent antagonism to
both, are still unable to divest themselves of the religious sentiment
or to appease its craving for satisfaction. There being no God, they
find it necessary, as Voltaire predicted it would be, to invent one, not
for the purposes of police (they are far above such sordid Jesuitism),
but as the solution of the otherwise hopeless enigma of our spiritual
nature. Science takes cognizance of all phenomena, and this apparently
ineradicable tendency of the human mind is a phenomenon like the rest.
The thoroughgoing Materialist, of course, escapes all these
philosophical exigencies, but he does it by denying Humanity as well as
God and reducing the difference between the organism of the human animal
and that of any other animal to a mere question of complexity. Still,
even in this quarter, there has appeared of late a disposition to make
concessions on the subject of human volition hardly consistent with
Materialism. Nothing can be more likely than that the impetus of great
discoveries has carried the discoverers too far.