Let us pass over the accessory consequences. The great advantage of the
spiritualistic interpretation is that it gives to our life a morality,
an aim and a meaning that are imaginary, but very much superior to those
which our cultivated instincts proffer to it. The more or less
unbelieving spiritualism of to-day still draws light from the reflection
of that advantage and preserves a deep, though somewhat shapeless faith
in the final supremacy and the indeterminate triumph of the mind.
The other interpretation, on the contrary, offers us no morality, no
ideal superior to our instinct, no aim situate outside ourselves and no
horizon other than space. Or else, if we could derive a morality from
the only synthetic theory that has sprung from the innumerable
experimental and fragmentary statements which form the imposing but dumb
mass of the conquests of science, I mean the theory of evolution, it
would be the horrible and monstrous morality of nature, that is to say,
the adaptation of the species to the environment, the triumph of the
strongest and all the crimes necessary to the struggle of life. Now this
morality, which does, in the meanwhile, appear to be another certainty,
the essential morality of all earthly life, since it inspires the
actions of agile and ephemeral man as well as the slow movements of the
undying crystals: this morality would soon become fatal to mankind if it
were practised to an extreme. All religions, all philosophies, the
counsels of gods and wise men have had no other object than to introduce
into this overheated environment, which, if it were pure, would
probably dissolve our species, elements that should reduce its
virulence. These were, more particularly, a belief in just and dread
gods, a hope of reward and a fear of eternal punishment. There were also
neutral matters and antidotes, for which, with a somewhat curious
foresight, nature had reserved a place in our own hearts: I mean
goodness, pity, a sense of justice.
Wherefore, this intolerant and exclusive environment, which was to be
our natural and normal environment, was never and probably never will be
pure. Be this as it may, the state in which it is to-day offers a
strange and noteworthy spectacle. It is fretting, bubbling and being
precipitated like a fluid into which chance has let fall a few drops of
some unknown reagent. The compensating principles which religion had
added to it are gradually evaporating and being eliminated at the top,
while at the bottom they are coagulating into a thick and inactive
mass. But, in proportion as these disappear, the purely human antidotes,
although oxydized through and through by the elimination of the
religious elements, gain greater vigour and seem to exert themselves to
maintain the standard of the mixture in which the human species is being
cultivated by an obscure destiny. Pending the arrival of as yet
mysterious auxiliaries, they occupy the place abandoned by the
evaporating forces.
V
Is it not surprising, at the outset, that, in spite of the decrease of
religious feeling and the influence which this decrease must needs have
upon human reason, which no longer sees any supernatural interest in
doing good, while the natural interest in doing good is fairly
disputable: is it not surprising that the sum of justice and goodness
and the quality of the general conscience, far from diminishing, have
incontestably, increased? I say incontestably, although doubtless the
fact will be contested. To establish it, we should have to review all
history, or, at the very least, that of the last few centuries, compare
the position of those who were unhappy formerly with that of those who
are unhappy now, place beside the sum total of the injustice of
yesterday the sum total of the injustice of to-day, contrast the state
of the serf, the semi-serf, the peasant, the labourer, under the old
systems of government, with the condition of our working-man, set the
indifference, the unconsciousness, the easy and harsh certainty of those
who possessed the land in former days against the sympathy, the
self-reproachful restlessness, the scruples of those who possess the
land to-day. All this would demand a detailed and very long study; but
I think that any fair mind will, without difficulty, allow that there
is, notwithstanding the existence of too much real and widespread
wretchedness, a little more justice, solidarity, sympathy and hope, not
only in the wishes of men--for thus much seems certain--but in very
deed....
To what religion, to what thoughts, to what new elements are we to
attribute this illogical improvement in our moral atmosphere? It is
difficult to state precisely; for, though it is certain that they are
beginning to act in a very perceptible manner, they are still too
recent, too shapeless, too unsettled for us to qualify them.