I
The idea of glory is not one of the most difficult to resolve. It can
be identified with the general idea of immortality, of which it is
but one of the secondary and naïver forms, differing from it only in
the substitution of vanity for pride. In the one we have the idea of
duration fortified by the pride of a being who believes himself of
immortal importance, but who consents to enjoy without fuss an absolute
perennity. In the other, vanity, replacing pride, puts aside the idea
of the absolute, or, declaring itself incapable of attaining it,
clings to a desire of eternity, no doubt, but an objective eternity,
perceptible to others--a ceremonial eternity which wastes in world-wide
repute that which absolute immortality gains in depth and in proud
humility.
Abstract words define inadequately an abstract idea. It is better to
fall back upon the common opinion. Everybody knows what glory is. Every
writer pictures to himself literary glory. Nothing is clearer than this
sort of illusion. Nothing is clearer than love and desire. Definitions,
which are indispensable for dictionaries only, contain of reality
precisely what a net, raised at the wrong moment from the sea where
it awaited its prey, contains of obscure, squirming life. Sea-weed
writhes in its meshes. Lanky creatures stir their translucent claws,
and here are all sorts of helices or of valvules which a mechanical
sensibility keeps tight-shut. But reality, which was a big fish, with
a sudden swish of its tail, flopped overboard. Generally speaking,
clear, neat sentences have no meaning. They are affirmative gestures,
suggesting obedience, and that is all. The human mind is so complex,
and things are so tangled up in each other that, in order to explain a
blade of grass, the entire universe would have to be taken to pieces;
and in no language is there a single authentic word upon which a lucid
intelligence could not construct a psychological treatise, a history
of the world, a novel, a poem, a drama, according to the day and the
temperature. The definition is a sack of compressed flour contained in
a thimble. What can we do with it, unless we are antarctic explorers?
It is more to the point to place a pinch of flour under the microscope
and seek patiently, amid the bran, the living starch. In what is left
after analyzing the idea of immortality, the idea of glory will be
found a shining speck of gold.
Man still believes himself the last achievement of the creative
power. Darwin, corroborating the Bible, ushered the human couple out
of the shades on the sixth day only; and the leading scientists take
the same stand--a fact which favours those dubious books in which
the questionable concordance of Science and Faith is celebrated. But
Darwinism is on the eve of disappearing before preciser notions.
To-morrow we shall no longer be obliged to believe that the creator of
the universe, having organized the lower species without moral ideas,
invented man for the purpose of depositing in his brain a principle
which it had got along very well without itself, in the course of its
preparatory labours. If man is no longer the latest arrival,--if he
is a very old animal in the history of life,--if the flower of the
life-tree is not Adam but the Dove,--then the whole metaphysic of
morals will collapse. What! after the masterpiece, Man, He (or She,
according to which meaningless word may be professed) humbles Himself
to make the Bird! What! the stork after Abraham's ancestor! Yet so it
is. M. Quinton's labours[1] will no longer permit us to doubt it. It
becomes certain that the human intelligence, far from being the goal of
creation, is only an accident, and that moral ideas are but parasitic
vegetations arising from an excess of nutrition. The phenomena of
intelligence, moral consciousness, and all the titles of nobility
engrossed on the parchment, might perfectly well, no doubt, have
appeared in any other species whatsoever. The birds, whose evolution
is as yet incomplete, will not, perhaps, be exempted from them. Their
arterial system is superior to man's--simpler and stronger. They can
eat without interrupting their breathing. They steal, they speak, they
can recite the Rights of Man or the Nicene Creed--supreme achievements
of large numbers of men. The bird, chronological king of creation, has
remained, till now, and in spite of its improvements, an animal. The
bird series does not seem, in point of intelligence, superior to that
of the mammals, among which Man figures as an inexplicable exception.
Intelligence could then be regarded as an end, only if each of the
animal species were rigorously determined and stationary. This is M.
Quinton's opinion, at least provisionally. The species, since they
are species--since the individuals which compose them are reproduced
in beings identical with themselves--the species, such as they are
defined, by these very syllables--spec-i-es--may disappear, but they
can no longer change. Man has quite certainly passed through various
states in which he was not a man; but the day man produced a man,
humanity began immutable. It is then possible that human intelligence,
instead of being an accident, a derogation, was determined, from the
beginning, like the human hand, the human feet, the human hair. It
would then have a normal, logical rôle in the universe, and its very
excess--genius--would be but exuberance of energy. But we should still
have to explain the bird's stupidity. Is it, perhaps, an evidence of
the intellectual degeneration of the creative forces? The most probable
opinion is that intelligence is an excrescence, like an oak-apple. To
what insect's bite do we owe it? We shall never know.
It matters little whether the intelligence be, as Taine believed, a
normal product of the brain, or a malady, especially as a blemish,
transmitted as such from generation to generation, ends by losing its
pathological characteristics. It becomes an integral and normal part
of the organism.[2] Its accidental origin is, however, corroborated
by this, that although an excellent instrument for a priori
combinations, the intelligence is, one would say, especially unfitted
for the perception of realities. It is to this infirmity that we owe
metaphysics, religions and ethical systems. As the external world can
reach the consciousness only by scrupulously conforming to all the
nooks and crannies of the pocket, it turns out that, believing to hold
an image of the world, we have only an image of ourselves. Certain
rectifications are possible. Analysis of the phenomena of vision has
made us admit that. By comparing our sensations and our ideas with what
we can comprehend of the sensations and ideas of others, we arrive at a
determination of probable averages; but, above all, negative averages.
It would be easier to draw up a list of non-truths than a list of
truths. To affirm that a given religion is false, no longer denotes
great boldness of intellect or even much intellect. The veracity of any
religion whatsoever is to-day a subject for controversy only for the
various European clergies who make their living out of it, or for those
belated rationalists who, like their master Kant, are ever awaiting the
propitious and lucrative hour for opportune conversions. But, to the
naïve question presented by those who, like nature, in the seventeenth
century, abhor a vacuum:--"What will you put in its place?"--no answer
can be made. It is enough, and it is no small thing at that, to have
transmuted a truth into a non-truth. The higher calling of criticism is
not even, as Pierre Bayle proclaimed, to sow doubts; it must destroy.
The intelligence is an excellent instrument of negation. It is time to
employ it, and so stop trying to rear palaces with picks and torches.
The history of the idea of immortality is a good example of our
congenital inability to perceive realities otherwise than reshaped and
worked over by the understanding. The idea of immortality is born of
belief in the double. In sleep, and while the body is inert, there is
a part of man that stirs, that travels, that fights, that eats, enjoys
or suffers, exhibits all the phenomena of life. This part of man, this
double of man, this astral body, survives the decomposition of the
material body, whose habits and needs it keeps. Such, doubtless, is the
origin of the belief in what, since Hellenism, we call the immortality
of the soul. In an earlier stage, the Egyptian religion was based upon
the theory of the double. It was for doubles, and not for souls, that
first real, and later symbolic, food was placed in the tombs. But the
Egyptian religion was already charged, in addition, with the idea of
justice, of equilibrium. The doubles were weighed in the scales of
good and evil. Ethical metaphysics had obscured the primitive idea of
immortality, which is nothing but the idea of indefinite duration.
For theologians, for philosophers--if there still be any to profess
these honest doctrines--for the common run of men, the idea of
immortality, or of the future life, is intimately connected with the
idea of justice. Eternal happiness is a compensation accorded human
sorrows. There are also--but these are for theologians only--personal
torments to punish infractions of priestly orders, which tortures
are, moreover, an additional recompense for the good, and a guarantee
against promiscuity. We have here an aristocratic selection, but one
based upon the idea of good and bad, instead of upon that of strength
and weakness. These strange reversals of values enraged Nietzsche. They
should be accepted as at least transitory consequences of civilized
man's sensibility. Primitive man, whose nervous vibrations are few, and
whose intelligence is passive, feels suffering, though dully, but does
not feel injustice, which is moral suffering. To encounter a similar
state we must cross the middle regions, and question a Goethe, a Taine
or a Nietzsche--men in whom intelligence has finally conquered by
its very excess, repelling the pleadings of pity and the sentimental
pitfalls of justice. If the idea of immortality had been born in a
superior intelligence, it would have differed only by its greater logic
from the brutal conceptions of primitive humanity.
M. Marillier has collected and co-ordinated all that which, in the
beliefs of the uncivilized, relates to the survival of the soul.[3] The
ensemble of the facts shows that the idea of justice has had not the
slightest share in forming the conception of the idea of immortality.
There have been few discoveries more important for the history of human
beliefs. The idea of immortality was, at first, as M. Marillier has
the hardihood to assert, a purely scientific conception. It is the
magnification and prolongation of a fact--of a fact badly observed,
but still a fact. The future life is the continuation of the present
life, and involves the same customs, the same pleasures, the same
annoyances. This world also has a double: the other world. The bad and
the good, the strong and the weak, continue there as here. Sometimes
life, without change in the relations of its elements, is more clement
in the other world. Sometimes, in the same conditions, it is worse.
But, whether the future life be considered as better or worse, it is
the same for all. Better still, it implies perfect equality in those
commonplace pleasures which are the average ideal of the civilized man
as well as of the savage. The tribes of New Guinea, rendered anaemic by
hunger, dream of eating unlimited sago throughout eternity. As it would
be possible to discover, even in this egalitarian paradise, some vague
idea of compensation, hence of justice; we must go farther, to Java,
where paradise--doubtless because of an excessive toll--was accessible
only to the rich; to those resigned races, where alone the kings, the
priest and the nobles, were saved; to Borneo, where the hereafter,
divided into seven circles, corresponded to the seven circles of the
social hierarchy. In another corner of the great island, "every person
whom a man kills in this world becomes his slave in the next." There
we have a paradise clearly based upon the idea of force, and a belief
which laughs a little at the categorical imperative. Not only is the
weak not "recompensed," but his weakness and his suffering may, through
the caprice of the strong, be raised to the infinite. The slayer has
acquired an immortal profit. Societies in which there is poetry, art,
laughter, love, still exist with such a morality. The fact may sadden,
but it does not surprise us; for it is evident that we have here a
terrible element of resistance against foreigners. Such a system has
its drawbacks. From time to time, in Borneo, a band of young Dyaks who
have not yet killed, dash into a town and slay. Having thus gained
immortal life and a slave, they remain more tranquil thereafter. Among
the Shans, a man killed by an elephant forfeits paradise. Eaten by a
tiger, he becomes a tiger. Women who die in child-bed become ghouls
and haunt the tombs, their feet reversed, heels foremost. In the
Mariannas, there is a heaven and a hell. Violent death leads to hell,
natural death to paradise. These people were destined to be slaves from
all eternity. In another region of Oceania, the fate of the soul is
decided by the family of the deceased, who throw dice for it. Odd means
annihilation, even eternal happiness. In Tahiti, the blind souls, on
leaving the body, wander away to a plain where there are two stones.
One, touched first, confers immortal life, the other eternal death.
This is almost sublimely absurd. It is as grandiose and terrible as
predestination. Saint Augustine placed the one in the night, before
birth. The Tahitians situated the other in the shades, after death.
Protestantism, to which those poor people have since surrendered, has
not much changed their beliefs. Generally speaking, the greatest effort
of a religious or philosophical innovator is to put at the end what was
originally at the beginning, or vice versa.
By connecting itself with the idea of immortality, the idea of justice
has, then, singularly disturbed its original character. It has even
contaminated the idea of earthly immortality--the idea of glory.