grand and omnipotent authority, at once natural and rational, the only
one which we may respect, will be that of the collective and public
spirit of a society founded on equality and solidarity and the mutual
human respect of all its members. Yes, this is an authority which is not
at all divine, wholly human, but before which we shall bow willingly,
certain that, far from enslaving them, it will emancipate men. It will
be a thousand times more powerful, be sure of it, than all your divine,
theological, metaphysical, political, and judicial authorities,
established by the Church and by the State; more powerful than your
criminal codes, your jailers, and your executioners.
The power of collective sentiment or public spirit is even now a very
serious matter. The men most ready to commit crimes rarely dare to defy
it, to openly affront it. They will seek to deceive it, but will take
care not to be rude with it unless they feel the support of a minority
larger or smaller. No man, however powerful he believes himself, will
ever have the strength to bear the unanimous contempt of society; no one
can live without feeling himself sustained by the approval and esteem of
at least some portion of society. A man must be urged on by an immense
and very sincere conviction in order to find courage to speak and act
against the opinion of all, and never will a selfish, depraved, and
cowardly man have such courage.
Nothing proves more clearly than this fact the natural and inevitable
solidarity--this law of sociability--which binds all men together, as
each of us can verify daily, both on himself and on all the men whom
he knows. But, if this social power exists, why has it not sufficed
hitherto to moralize, to humanize men? Simply because hitherto this
power has not been humanized itself; it has not been humanized because
the social life of which it is ever the faithful expression is based,
as we know, on the worship of divinity, not on respect for humanity;
on authority, not on liberty; on privilege, not on equality; on the
exploitation, not on the brotherhood of men; on iniquity and falsehood,
not on justice and truth. Consequently its real action, always in
contradiction of the humanitarian theories which it professes, has
constantly exercised a disastrous and depraving influence. It does not
repress vices and crimes; it creates them. Its authority is consequently
a divine, anti-human authority; its influence is mischievous and
baleful. Do you wish to render its authority and influence beneficent
and human? Achieve the social revolution. Make all needs really
solidary, and cause the material and social interests of each to conform
to the human duties of each. And to this end there is but one means:
Destroy all the institutions of Inequality; establish the economic and
social equality of all, and on this basis will arise the liberty, the
morality, the solidary humanity of all.
I shall return to this, the most important question of Socialism.
[5] Here three pages of Bakunin's manuscript are missing.
[6] The lost part of this sentence perhaps said: "If men of science, in
their researches and experiments are not treating men actually as they
treat animals, the reason is that" they are not exclusively men of
science, but are also more or less men of life.
[7] Science, in becoming the patrimony of everybody, will wed itself in
a certain sense to the immediate and real life of each. It will gain in
utility and grace what it loses in pride, ambition, and _doctrinaire_
pedantry. This, however, will not prevent men of genius, better
organized for scientific speculation than the majority of their fellows,
from devoting themselves exclusively to the cultivation of the sciences,
and rendering great services to humanity. Only, they will be ambitious
for no other social influence than the natural influence exercised upon
its surroundings by every superior intelligence, and for no other
reward than the high delight which a noble mind always finds in the
satisfaction of a noble passion.
[8] Universal _experience_, on which all science rests, must be clearly
distinguished from universal _faith_, on which the idealists wish to
support their beliefs: the first is a real authentication of facts; the
second is only a supposition of facts which nobody has seen, and which
consequently are at variance with the experience of everybody.
[9] The idealists, all those who believe in the immateriality and
immortality of the human soul, must be excessively embarrassed by
the difference in intelligence existing between races, peoples, and
individuals. Unless we suppose that the various divine particles have
been irregularly distributed, how is this difference to be explained?
Unfortunately there is a considerable number of men wholly stupid,
foolish even to idiocy. Could they have received in the distribution a
particle at once divine and stupid? To escape this embarrassment the
idealists must necessarily suppose that all human souls are equal, but
that the prisons in which they find themselves necessarily confined,
human bodies, are unequal, some more capable than others of serving as
an organ for the pure intellectuality of soul. According to this, such
a one might have very fine organs at his disposition, such another
very gross organs. But these are distinctions which idealism has not
the power to use without falling into inconsistency and the grossest
materialism; for in the presence of absolute immateriality of soul
all bodily differences disappear, all that is corporeal, material,
necessarily appearing indifferent, equally and absolutely gross. The
abyss which separates soul from body, absolute immateriality from
absolute materiality, is infinite. Consequently all differences, by the
way inexplicable and logically impossible, which may exist on the other
side of the abyss, in matter, should be to the soul null and void, and
neither can nor should exercise any influence over it. In a word, the
absolutely immaterial cannot be constrained, imprisoned, and much less
expressed in any degree whatsoever by the absolutely material. Of all
the gross and materialistic (using the word in the sense attached to it
by the idealists) imaginations which were engendered by the primitive
ignorance and stupidity of men, that of an immaterial soul imprisoned in
a material body is certainly the grossest, the most stupid, and nothing
better proves the omnipotence exercised by ancient prejudices even over
the best minds than the deplorable sight of men endowed with lofty
intelligence still talking of it in our days.
[10] I am well aware that in the theological and metaphysical systems of
the Orient, and especially in those of India, including Buddhism, we
find the principle of the annihilation of the real world in favor of the
ideal and of absolute abstraction. But it has not the added character of
voluntary and deliberate negation which distinguishes Christianity; when
those systems were conceived, the world of human thought, of will and of
liberty, had not reached that stage of development which was afterwards
seen in the Greek and Roman civilization.
[11] It seems to me useful to recall at this point an anecdote--one, by
the way, well known and thoroughly authentic--which sheds a very clear
light on the personal value of this warmer-over of the Catholic beliefs
and on the religious sincerity of that period. Chateaubriand submitted
to a publisher a work attacking faith. The publisher called his
attention to the fact that atheism had gone out of fashion, that the
reading public cared no more for it, and that the demand, on the
contrary, was for religious works. Chateaubriand withdrew, but a few
months later came back with his _Genius of Christianity_.
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Transcriber's note:
The following corrections were made to the text:
Page | original word | correction
-----------+---------------+-------------
7 | viwes | views
31 | infalliby | infallibly
57 | judcial | judicial
59 | up to-day | up to to-day
83 | burgeoisie | bourgeoisie
83 | singuarly | singularly
Footnote 2 | onself | oneself