The impossibility of finding anything new in the domain of mythical

religion might almost be demonstrated _a priori_; nothing more

attractive will ever be discovered in the way of a metaphysical myth

than the sovereign happiness obtained in this life in the Buddhists

Nirvâna, or obtained in the life after death in Christian immortality.

In these two conceptions, the metaphysical imagination of humanity

has once for all achieved its masterpiece, as the plastic imagination

once for all achieved its masterpiece in Greek statuary. Something

may be demanded in another order of ideas, one may exact less naïve

hypotheses, hypotheses more neighbour to the truth; but these

hypotheses will never seduce humanity nor pass over the world like a

wave of light, nor become transfigured in the form of a revelation.

The multitude never listens to a revelation that does not announce

some glad tidings, some salvation in this world, or the next; to be

a prophet, and to be listened to, imperatively requires one to be a

prophet of good augury. Religious metaphysics, after its two immense

efforts in Buddhism and Christianity (Mohammedanism is simply a

vulgarization of these two), is condemned in the future to sterility

or repetition, so long as severe and truly philosophical hypotheses,

based on scientific generalization, engage the attention of mankind.

Infantine hypotheses, which resolve the problems of the destiny of

mankind and of the world in a manner altogether consoling to human

vanity, are condemned to uniformity and banality. To discover anything

new in the realm of metaphysics, the religious spirit will have to

abandon the conditions which have hitherto existed; will have to deal

with ideas that lie beyond the primitive intellectual range of a

Hottentot, and even abandon all notion of universality, of Catholicity,

in the sphere of speculation.

[Sidenote: Impossibility of improving existing religious morality as

such.]

The same is true in the sphere of morals. So far as an exalted and

attractive system of morality is concerned, can one go farther than

Christianity and Buddhism, both of which preach exclusive altruism,

absolute self-abnegation? All that one can do is really to take a few

steps backward to moderate certain exaggerated outbursts of devotion in

the void, to fit Christian and Buddhistic morality to the real world,

to supply this beautiful mysticism with a material body; but for such

a task a new Messiah would be powerless, simple good sense does not

charm humanity; the cold, humble, commonplace duties of everyday life

cannot be made the basis of a great popular movement. Common-sense

is not contagious after the fashion of religious exaltation, which

passes from man to man like wildfire. Moral sentiment may well, in the

course of time, filter into us, pass slowly from man to man, rise like

a rising tide, but so gradually as scarcely to be perceptible. The

most lasting approaches to perfection are often the most unconscious.

It is a difficult matter by a simple impulse of faith to climb sheer

up on the ladder of civilization. True moral perfection is often the

precise opposite of heroic paroxysm. As the passion for goodness

becomes triumphant, it ceases to be a passion: it becomes, and must

become, a portion of our normal life, of the flesh that the mystics

curse; the man must become good from the roots of his hair to the

soles of his feet. Thus Buddhism and Christianity, in many respects,

have miscarried. If the first apostles, who preached these religions,

should return among men, how unchanged and untransmuted they would

find humanity, after so many thousands of years! There has been, no

doubt, an intellectual progress which has confirmed a certain number

of moral ideas, but this very complex intellectual progress has not

entirely been effected by religions. There was as yet no sign of it in

the small number of simple-hearted people gathered about the “new word”

in which the apostles saw their moral and religious ideal realized. As

the primitive virtues of this small knot of wholly religious and not

at all scientific people overspread humanity, they necessarily became

corrupt: and a morality of exalted self-abnegation could not succeed

beyond a small group, a family, a convent, artificially sequestered

from the rest of the world it necessarily failed when it undertook to

appeal to all mankind. The great world is too inhospitable and shifting

a soil; one does not sow seed in the sea. A revival or a repetition of

the religious epics of Christianity or of Buddhism would to-day meet

with an immediate check; for it is the very essence of their influence

to develop the heart disproportionately to the brain, and, such an

effect being a sort of disturbance of equilibrium, a sort of natural

monstrosity, can be produced in individuals indeed, but not in races.

The investigator to-day, who adds the least item of truth to the mass

of scientific and philosophic knowledge already acquired, performs a

much less brilliant but probably more definitive work than the purely

religious work of a Messiah. He is of those who construct not in three

days, but during successive ages, the sacred edifice which will not

fall.

[Sidenote: Growing antagonism to externals of worship.]

The most essential incident of every dogmatic religion, the cult, is

not less foreign to the spirit of modern society than dogma itself

is. The foundation of outer forms of worship, as we have seen, is a

crystallization of custom and tradition into the form of rites. Well,

as has been said, one of the characteristic marks of the innovating

spirit, and of intellectual superiority, is the power of breaking up

associations of ideas, of liberating one’s self in a measure from

established collocations of ideas, of being slow to contract invincible

habits of thought, of precisely not possessing a ritualistic mind. If

such be one of the great signs of superiority in an individual, it is

none the less so in a people. Progress in humanity may be estimated by

the degree of perfection that the faculty of psychic disassociation

has achieved. The instinct for novelty is then no longer held in

check by the instinct for ritualism; curiosity may be pushed to its

extreme without any sense of innovating impiety such as primitive

peoples regard it with. The importance of ritualism in the material

and religious life of a people indicates the predominance among them

of obscure and unconscious associations of ideas, their brain is

caught and enveloped in a closely woven network of tradition, in a

tissue impenetrable to the light of conscience. On the contrary, the

progress of reflection and of conscience which is manifested among

modern people is accompanied by an enfeeblement of established custom,

of unconscious habit, of the discipline and power of the past. There

is often a certain danger, on the practical side, in this change,

because reflection becomes strong enough to dissolve habits before it

is capable of making head against the passions of the moment. The power

of disassociation is intellectual, and is not in itself adequate to

the moral domination and direction of the individual, and whatever may

be the objections, from the point of view of morals, to the progress

of reflection, it is certain that it sooner or later strips rites,

religious ceremonies, and the whole machinery of worship, of their

sacred character. Etiquette in the presence of kings and gods alike

is destined to disappear. Whatever is an observance ceases to be a

duty, and the rôle of the priest by that fact is seriously changed.

The distant ideal toward which we are marching includes among other

things the disappearance of the priesthood, which is rite personified;

the god of the priesthood, who in certain respects is no more than an

apotheosis of custom, has to-day grown old and maintains his power only

by the prestige of the accomplished fact. It is in vain for men like

German, English, or American clergymen, or Hindu deists, who still

possess a religion, to endeavour to throw over revelation and dogma,

and reduce their faith to a system of personal and progressive beliefs,

to be accompanied by a ritual. The ritual is an excrescence simply,

an almost superstitious habit, mechanically practised and destined to

disappear.

[Sidenote: The liberal movement in religion a movement of

disintegration.]

The movement which, in certain countries, inclines religion to be shy

of dogmas and rites, is in reality a movement of disintegration, not

of reconstruction. Human beliefs, when they shall have taken their

final form in the future, will bear no mark of dogmatic and ritualistic

religion, they will be simply philosophical. Among certain people,

it is true, every philosophical system tends to assume the practical

and sentimental form of a system of beliefs and aspirations. The

ideas of Kant and Schelling, when they passed into America, gave

birth to Emerson’s and Parker’s transcendentalism; Spencer’s theory

of evolution became, in America, a religion of Cosmism, represented

by Messrs. Fiske, Potter, and Savage. But all such alleged religions

are simply the moving shadow, in the domain of sentiment and action,

of the substance of intellectual speculation. It is not enough to be

of the same opinion on some sociological or metaphysical theory and

then to congregate to the number of ten or a hundred in some theatre

or temple, to found a new religion and a new cult. The majority of

these pretended religions, which are simply philosophies and sometimes

very bad philosophies, are open to Mark Pattison’s observation on the

congregation of Comtists in their chapel in London: “Three persons and

no God.”

[Sidenote: Secularism.]

The defects of these modern cults appear in their most exaggerated form

in secularism, which had its hour of success in England. Secularism is

a purely atheistic and utilitarian religion, which has borrowed all it

could from the ritual of the English Church. This contradiction between

the outer form and the inner void resulted in a positive parody.[116]

[116] See the secularist version of the _Ite missa est_.

[Sidenote: Comtists.]

In France the Comtists have made the same attempt to preserve the

rites, without the background, of belief. The Comtist doctrine of

fetichism contains a certain amount of truth as characterizing

primitive religion, but it is insufficient in its application to

actual, existing religions. The religions of the present day have

developed, gradually, from a primitive system of physics to a complete

system of metaphysics: the fetiches have been transmuted into symbols

of the First Cause, or of the Final Cause. Positivism can offer us

no symbol of this kind; its “Great Fetich” is genuinely a fetich,

and appropriate for primitive peoples only. “Humanity” does not

afford complete satisfaction to one’s conception of causality, nor

to one’s conception of finality. In regard to the first, humanity is

a simple link in the infinite chain of phenomena; in regard to the

second, humanity constitutes an end which is practically inexact and

theoretically insufficient: practically inexact because almost the

whole of one’s activity relates to such and such a restricted group

of human beings and not to humanity as a whole; and theoretically

insufficient, because humanity looks small in the presence of the great

universe. Its life is a point in space, a point in time; it constitutes

a contracted ideal, and to say the truth, it is as vain for a race to

regard itself as its own end as for an individual. One cannot eternally

contemplate one’s own image and cannot, in especial, eternally adore

it. Love of humanity is the greatest of virtues and the most ridiculous

of fetichisms. The marriage of positive science and blind sentiment

cannot produce religion; the attempt to return to fetichism is an

attempt to foist the religion of a savage upon the most civilized of

mankind. Moreover, what we believe destined to subsist in the future in

a multitude of forms, and to replace religions, is not pure and simple

sentiment, but sentiment roused by metaphysical symbols, by speculation

and thought. Religious metaphysics may consist in involuntary illusion,

in error, in dream; but unmetaphysical fetichism consists in voluntary

illusion, in cherished error, in day-dream. Auguste Comte seemed to

believe that we should always need as the centre of our system of

worship, an imaginary personification of humanity, a great Being, a

great Fetich; such a fetichism would be a species of new category, in

the Kantian sense. Fetichism has never imposed itself upon humanity

after that fashion; intellectually considered, it was based on reasons

which can be shown to be false; emotionally considered, it was based on

feelings which can be shown to be perverted, and can be rectified. If

love sometimes stretches out toward personification, toward fetiches,

it is only in default of real persons and living individuals; such in

our opinion is, in its simplest form, the law which will gradually

result in the disappearance of every fetichistic cult. We must find

gods of flesh and bone, living and breathing among us—not poetical

creations like those of Homer, but visible realities. We must discover

the kingdom of heaven in the human soul, a future providence in

science, absolute goodness in the foundation of life. We must not

project our ideas and subjective images of things into the outer world,

and beyond the limits of the outer world, and love them with a sterile

love; but must love the beings of this world with an active affection

in so far as they are capable of conceiving and realizing the same

ideas as we. Just as patriotism, in so far as it is an abstract love,

tends to disappear, and to resolve itself into a general sympathy for

all our fellow-citizens, just so far the love of God tends to overflow

the surface of the earth and to include all living beings. To know

living beings is to love them; and thus science, in so far as it is

science of the observation of life, is one with the sentiment which

constitutes what is best in religion, is one with love.

[Sidenote: Ethical Culture Society.]

Another religion of humanity, or rather a religion of ethics, has

recently been founded in New York by Mr. Felix Adler, the son of an

American rabbi; but Mr. Adler, who is more consistent than Comte, has

determined to do away with religious ceremonial, not less than with

religious dogma. He has abandoned almost everything in the way of

ceremony; he has abandoned the catechism, and professes allegiance to

no sacred book. As a metaphysician he is a follower of Kant, rather

than of Comte, but makes no positive affirmation on the subject of

God and immortality; he admits only the existence of an unknowable

noumenon, of an ultimate reality which lies behind all appearances,

and is responsible for the harmony of the world. So long as divergence

in matters of belief continues to become increasingly great, Mr.

Adler regards it as necessary to concentrate attention on the moral

law itself, apart from any theory of its origin or justification. Men

have so long disputed, he thinks, about the basis of the law, that the

law itself has not received its due share of notice. His movement is

essentially a practical movement and appeals to the conscience, a cry

for more justice, an exhortation for the performance of duty.

[Sidenote: Its object.]

The primary aim of the society should be, according to Mr. Adler,

to reform the lives of its own members. He has founded: 1. A

Sunday-school, where instruction is given in practical morality, in

the history of the most important religions, and in the elements of

the philosophy of religion; 2. A public kindergarten organized on the

Froebel method; 3. A school, for working people’s children between the

ages of three and nine.[117]

[117] Indigent pupils are clothed and fed; the instruction is

gratuitous; the school contains at present one hundred pupils,

having begun with eight. An industrial museum is attached to

it. The society also sends out district nurses to attend the

sick in the poorer quarters of New York.

[Sidenote: Is of a type destined to survive.]

Mr. Adler’s following at first consisted of Jews; subsequently a number

of people, without distinction of race, gathered about him. They are

left entirely free in the matter of their personal beliefs, and are

united only in an ardent desire for the regeneration of mankind.

Every Sunday the faithful congregate, to listen to a discourse and

then disperse; none but members of the society are permitted to join

in the management of the institutions founded and maintained by the

society. This religion, which is, _à l’américaine_, wholly practical,

is acceptable to the philosopher; at bottom it is simply a great mutual

aid temperance society. The only objection that can be urged against it

is that it is somewhat prosaic, but it is certainly one of the forms of

social activity which are destined to succeed ritualistic religions.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Antiquity of faith in socialism as a panacea.]

Certain partisans of religious revival regard socialism as their last

hope. Socialistic ideas ought, in their judgment, to give religion

a fresh start and supply it with an impetus hitherto unknown. This

conception wears an air of originality, but, as a matter of fact, it is

quite the reverse of original. The great catholic religions, Buddhism

and Christianity, were in the beginning socialistic, they preached

universal partition of goods, and poverty; it was by means of so doing

that they were in part enabled to spread with such rapidity. In reality

the instant that the period of propagandism succeeded the period of

struggle for permission to exist, these religions did everything

within their power to become individualistic even at the expense of

inconsistency; they ceased to promise equality on earth and relegated

it to heaven or to Nirvâna.

[Sidenote: Socialism unrealizable except by a select few.]

Do we therefore believe that socialistic ideas will play no part in

the future, and is it not conceivable that a certain mysticism might

form an alliance with socialism, and both lend and borrow force by so

doing? A mystical socialism is by no means unrealizable under certain

conditions, and, far from constituting an obstacle to religious

free-thought, it might become one of its most important manifestations.

But what has hitherto rendered socialism impracticable and utopian is

that it has aimed at subjugating the whole of mankind, rather than

some small social group. What has been aimed at is state socialism;

the case has been the same in the matter of religion. But systems of

socialism and of religious doctrine must, in the future at least, be

addressed to small groups and not to confused masses; must be made the

basis of manifold and various associations in the bosom of society. As

its most earnest partisans recognize, socialism presupposes for its

success a certain average of virtue, that may well obtain among some

hundreds of men but not among some millions. It endeavours to establish

a sort of special providence, which would be quite incompetent to

manage the affairs of the world but may well watch over the interests

of a neighbourhood. Socialism aims more or less at playing the part of

fate, at predetermining the destiny of the individual, at supplying

each individual with a certain average amount of happiness which he can

neither increase nor diminish. Socialism is the apotheosis of state

interference, and the world in general is not disposed to worship it;

its ideal is a life which is completely foreseen, insured, with the

element of fortune and of hope left out, with the heights and the

depths of human life levelled away—an existence somewhat utilitarian

and uniform, regularly plotted off like the squares on a checker board,

incapable of satisfying the ambitious desires of the mass of mankind.

Socialism is to-day advocated by the rebels in society. Its success,

however, would depend on the most peaceable, the most conservative, the

most bourgeois people in the world; it supplies no sufficient outlet

for the love of risk, of staking one’s everything, of playing for the

height of fortune against the depth of misery, which is one of the

essential factors of human progress.

[Sidenote: Experiments in socialism.]

Practical experiments in socialism are being made every day; there

is in France the phalansterian association of M. Godin; in America

there are the associations by the followers of Cabet, not to speak

of others of a more purely religious character, such as those of the

Quakers, Shakers, etc.; and finally, there are co-operative societies

of various kinds. These avowedly or unavowedly socialistic experiments

have never succeeded except when their promoters were willing very

rigorously to limit their numbers; certain intellectual and moral

defects in the members must inevitably in every case have proved fatal

to them. Socialism is possible only in a small society of the elect.

Even the theorists who once regarded profit-sharing as the universal

panacea recognize to-day that profit-sharing constitutes a remedy in

some cases only; that the labouring classes are not, as a whole, either

patient, or painstaking enough to fulfil the very simple conditions

that profit-sharing demands. They are unfit for corporate life, they

are hard repellent individuals, they are elements of disintegration;

when a small socialistic society finds them on its list of members,

it excludes them; if mankind as a whole formed one great socialistic

society, it also would be obliged to exclude them. To universalize

socialism is to destroy it.

[Sidenote: Future of socialism.]

Every scientific discovery passes through three distinct stages:

the stage of pure theory, of application on a small scale in the

laboratory, of application on a grand scale in the world of business.

It frequently happens that the development of an idea is arrested

in the sphere of theory, that it does not enter into the sphere of

practice at all, or that, completely successful in the laboratory,

it miscarries when the attempt is made to apply it to business. If

this holds true of scientific ideas, of devices that depend for their

success upon the plasticity of inert matter only, which we may bend

to our will, _a fortiori_ it must be true of sociological ideas, of

experiments, of devices that depend for their success on the plasticity

of so variable, so heterogeneous a substance as human nature. Socialism

is still, for the most part, at the theoretical stage; and even as

a theory socialism is very vague and not very consistent and, when

the effort is made to put it into practice, the difference between

experiments in the laboratory, among conditions that the experimenter

can in a measure determine and control, and in the great world in which

everything is determined and controlled for him, must be remembered.

The state which yields to the seduction of some charming socialistic

theory, and endeavours, as it will endeavour, to realize it, will

inevitably be ruined. Social experiments cannot be attempted by the

state—not even if they are experiments in religion, or rather in

especial not if they are experiments in religion. Some experiments may

at most be observed by the state and followed with interest by it; nay,

the state may even in certain cases encourage the most interesting of

them and subsidize them as it does certain industrial enterprises.

We are persuaded that socialism in the future, like religion in the

past, will appear in many different forms. There will arise a number

of conceptions of an ideal society, each of which is realizable in

special circumstances, and by people of some special disposition. Human

society which to-day, beyond the limits of convents and monasteries

(which consist in artificial groupings of individuals of the same sex),

presents a certain uniformity of type, may well at some later date,

owing to complete liberty of association, and to the spread of personal

initiative, present a great variety of types. Socialism will not result

in the founding of a religion, but it may well result in the founding

of a number of associations dominated respectively by some metaphysical

or moral idea. Socialism will thus contribute to that multiplicity and

diversity of beliefs which does not exclude but rather encourages their

practical application.

[Sidenote: Necessity of allowing for a multiplicity of conflicting

ideals.]

The future, therefore, will leave the human mind, as time goes on, more

and more at liberty; will permit the individual to do increasingly as

he likes so long as he does not violate the rights of anybody else.

What is the highest social ideal? Does it lie purely and simply in the

practice of the necessary virtues or of a half conscious morality, an

unreflecting benignity, compounded of ignorance and custom? This social

ideal is realized in certain countries in the Orient, where Buddhism

is dominant, and the people are so gentle that years pass without a

homicide; and yet life in these countries in nowise appeals to us

as ideal. To this sort of morality must be added some satisfaction

of the principal desire of mankind, of the desire for economic ease

and for practical happiness, and even that would not be enough; for

that much is realized in corners of Switzerland, of Portugal, in

primitive countries like Costa Rica, where poverty is unknown. Artists

dream of a life devoted entirely to art, to the beautiful, of a life

which is hostile to prosaic and practical virtue, and this ideal was

realized in the Renaissance: the Renaissance was distinguished by an

extraordinary efflorescence of æsthetic instinct and moral depravity,

and we in nowise desire to return to it. And if science, which is

the modern ideal, should become absolute, we should see a society of

_blasés_ Fausts which would not be more enviable perhaps than other

societies. No; a complete social ideal must neither consist in bare

morality nor in simple economic well-being, nor in art alone, nor in

science alone—it must consist in all of these together; its ideal must

be the greatest and most universal conceivable. This ideal is that

of progress, and progress cannot take place in one direction only at

a time; whoever advances in one direction only will soon retreat. A

point of light shines in all directions simultaneously. The excellence

of religion cannot be demonstrated by showing that it favours some

one species of human activity; morality, for example, or art. It is

not enough to make man moral as Christianity and Buddhism did, nor to

excite his æsthetic imagination as Paganism did. Not one but all of his

faculties must be stimulated, and there is but one religion that can

do it; and that religion each must create for himself. Whoever feels

attracted by a life similar to that of a priest will do well to become

a Christian and even a Quaker, and the artist will do well to become a

pagan. What is certain is that no one of the deities which mankind has

created and worshipped is all-sufficing; mankind needs all of them and

something more, for human thought has outgrown its gods.

[Sidenote: Liberty the condition of knowledge.]

Under the sounding domes of old cathedrals, the echoes are so numerous

that an immense screen has sometimes to be stretched across the nave to

break the reverberations and enable the priest’s voice alone to reach

the faithful. This screen which is invisible from below, which isolates

the sacred word and deadens all other sound, is stretched not only

across the cathedral nave but across the heart of every true believer.

It must be torn away; every voice and word must be free to attain

the ear of man; the sacred word rises from no one throat, but is the

symphony of all the voices that sound beneath the dome of heaven.

[Sidenote: Decline of the power of religion.]

I was talking one day with M. Renan upon the gradual decrease in the

power of religion, on the silence that has fallen on the divine word,

which formerly drowned all other sounds. To-day, it is the word of

nature and humanity, of free-thought and free sentiment, which is

taking the place of oracles and of supernatural revelation, of dogmatic

religion. M. Renan, with the openness of mind which is habitual with

him, and which partakes indeed largely of scepticism, took up at

once my point of view. “Yes,” he said, “we are all marching toward

non-religion. After all, why should not humanity do without religious

dogmas? Speculation will take the place of religion. Even at the

present day, among advanced peoples, dogmas are disintegrating, the

incrustations of human thought are breaking up. Most people in France

are already non-religious; men of the people hardly believe more than

professed men of science; they possess their little fund of ideas, more

or less profound, on which they live, without help from the priest.

In Germany the work of decomposition is far advanced. In England it

is only in its beginnings, but it is moving rapidly. Christianity is

everywhere giving place to free-thought. Buddhism and Hinduism are

doing the same; in India the mass of intelligent men are free-thinkers,

in China there is no state religion. It will take a long while, but

religion will in the end disappear, and one may already imagine for

Europe a time when it will be a thing of the past.... Islam is the one

black spot on the horizon. The Turks are narrow, rebellious against

reasoning, hostile to everything that lies beyond literal faith ...

but if they will not follow us we shall simply leave them behind, and

I think we shall be obliged to do so.” We should add that, if some

Christians and Buddhists show themselves as backward as the Turks, we

shall leave them behind also. Those members of mankind who think, see,

and move forward, are always obliged to drag a long train of those who

neither see, nor think, nor wish to move forward. They do move forward,

however, in the long run. Professed advocates of the different positive

and dogmatic religions count every day for less and less among the

truly active members of the human species; and we ask nothing better.

Whoever does not count for progress practically does not exist, and

ultimately will not exist. Activity of thought is becoming more and

more a condition of existence; the preponderant rôle that religions

played in the past is to be explained by the fact that religion offered

almost the sole field of intellectual and moral activity—the sole

issue for the most elevated tendencies of our being. At that time there

lay beyond the limits of religion nothing but the grossest and most

material occupations; there was no known middle ground between heaven

and earth. To-day this middle ground has been discovered—the ground

of thought. Science and art are born; and open before us an infinite

perspective, where each of us may find an opportunity to employ the

best of our gifts. Science offers a field for disinterestedness and

research, but does not tolerate vagaries of the imagination. It

encourages enthusiasm, but not delirium, and possesses a beauty of its

own, the beauty of truth.

_II. Religious anomy and the substitution of doubt for faith._

[Sidenote: Religious anomy.]

I. We have proposed as the moral ideal what we have called moral

anomy—the absence of any fixed moral rule.[118] We believe still

more firmly that the ideal toward which every religion ought to tend

is religious anomy, the complete enfranchisement of the individual in

all religious matters, the redemption of his thought, which is more

precious than his life, the suppression of dogmatic faith in every

form. Instead of accepting ready-made dogmas, we should each of us be

the makers of our own creed. Whatever Montaigne may say, faith is a

softer pillow for idleness than doubt. Faith is a species of nest in

which idleness lies in shelter, and hides its head under the warmth

and darkness of a protecting wing; nay, it is a nest prepared in

advance, like those that are sold in the markets and made by men, for

birds that are kept in cages. We believe that in the future man will

be increasingly unwilling to live in cages and that, if he needs a

nest, he will construct it himself twig by twig in the open air, and

abandon it when he is weary of it, and remake it, if necessary, every

springtime, at each new stage of his thought.

[118] See our _Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation ni

sanction_.

[Sidenote: Religious anomy and scepticism.]

Is religious anomy, or the absence of religion, synonymous with

scepticism? Since the disappearance of Pyrrhonism and Ænesideinism,

scepticism is simply a word which serves as a label for the most

dissimilar doctrines. Greek sceptics were fond of calling themselves

seekers, Ζητητικοί; a name which is appropriate to every philosopher

as distinguished from believer. But how the term scepticism in its

modern negative acceptation is abused! If you do not belong to some

definite system of thought, you are at once set down as a sceptic.

But nothing is further removed from a superficial scepticism than

the sympathetic mind which, precisely because it embraces so large a

horizon, refuses to confine itself to some one narrow point of view, as

in a glade a hundred feet square or in a diminutive valley between two

mountains. “You are not dogmatic enough,” the philosopher is sometimes

told. “To what system do you belong?” “In what class of thinking

insects do you belong?” “To what card in our collection must you be

pinned?” A reader always wants to ask an author a certain number of

conventional questions. What do you think of such and such a problem?

Of such and such another? You are not a spiritualist; are you then a

materialist? You are not an optimist; are you then a pessimist? One

must reply, yes or no, without explanatory amplification. But what I

think is of small importance, even for myself; my point of view is

not the centre of the universe. What I am seeking to learn, what

you are seeking to learn, is the contents of human thought in all

its variety and complexity. If I study myself it is not because I am

myself, but because I am a man like other men. If I watch my own little

soap bubble, it is because it contains a ray of the sun; my object is

precisely to pass beyond the limits of my own horizon and not to remain

within them. More than that, people whose ideas are fixed, clear-cut,

absolute, are exactly those who have no ideas of their own. Revelation,

intuition, religion, categorical and exclusive affirmation, are notions

hostile to modern thought, which is in its very essence progressive.

There are two sorts of men: those who remain on the surface of things

and those who sound the depths of things. There are superficial minds

and serious minds. In France almost all those whom we designate as

sceptics or as blasés are superficial minds, with an affectation of

profundity. They are also often practical Epicureans. There will always

be people ready to say, with a certain hero of Balzac’s: “A good fire,

a good table; behold the ideal of human life!” Waiting for dinner is

the sole occupation of the day. But there will always be other people

for whom life consists in an indefatigable activity.

[Sidenote: Feebleness of scepticism.]

The number of sceptics will not necessarily be increased by the final

decay and disappearance of religious scepticism, which is a compound of

lightness and ignorance, resting on the same foundation as religious

prejudice, on the absence of a solid philosophical education. Really

serious minds are either positive or speculative; a too positive,

common-sense spirit might, if it became general in society, menace

it with a certain intellectual debasement; but religion would not

hinder its development: witness America. The true means of checking

the positive spirit is to cultivate the sense of beauty and the love

of art. To speculative minds, on the other hand, belongs the future

of humanity; but far from being dependent upon dogma, speculation

can flourish only in its absence. It is the life of speculation

to ask questions about the deepest concerns of human life; dogma

provides ready-made answers, and speculation cannot accept them.

The disappearance of positive religions will give scientific and

metaphysical speculation a fresh impulse. The speculative spirit is

the extreme opposite both of the spirit of faith and of the spirit

of absolute negation. An inquirer may suspect his own resources, may

recognize his own powerlessness, but he will never give up the search.

Strong minds will never be discouraged or disgusted, will never be

followers of Mérimée or Beyle. In active mental labour there is

something which is worth more than faith and doubt together, as there

is in genius something which is worth more at once than the somewhat

silly admiration of the multitude and the disdainful criticism of

pretended connoisseurs; excess of criticism and excess of credulity

are alike powerless. It is good to be aware of one’s own weakness, but

from time to time only; one must turn one’s eyes toward the limits of

human intelligence, but not rest them there, on pain of paralysis.

“Man,” says Goethe, “should believe firmly that the incomprehensible

will become comprehensible; but for that he would cease to scrutinize

and to try.” In spite of the number of ideas which make their entrance

into and exit from the human mind, which rise and set on the human

horizon, which flame up and burn out, there is, in every human mind,

an element of eternity. On certain autumn nights one may observe a

veritable shower of aerolites; hundreds of stars detach themselves

from the zenith like luminous flakes of snow; the dome of heaven

itself seems to have given way, the worlds hung above the earth seem

to have broken loose, and all the stars at once to be descending and

about to leave the great firmament of night unvariegated, opaque; but

the falling stars go out one by one, and the serene brilliancy of the

fixed stars still remains; the storm has passed beneath them and has

not troubled the tranquil splendour of their rays, nor the incessant

appeal of their fixity and glory. The appeal is one that man will

always respond to; under the open sky and the pressure of the problem

brought home to him by the great stars, man does not feel himself

feeble unless he pusillanimously shuts his eyes. Humanity will lose

none of its intellectual power by the disappearance of religious faith;

its horizon will grow wider simply, and the luminous points in the

immensity of space will grow more numerous. True genius is speculative,

and in whatever environment true genius is placed it will speculate; it

has speculated hitherto despite of all that orthodox faith could do, it

will speculate still more actively in spite of all that scepticism can

do.

[Sidenote: Speculation and practice.]

And the practical side of human life has nothing to fear from the

growth of the speculative spirit. Given minds sufficiently large, and

the fact that they look down upon the earth from a height, does not

prevent them from seeing human life as it is and as it should be.

Decidedly one must be a man, a patriot, a “tellurian,” as Amiel said,

with some contempt; to be so may appear to be a small function in the

totality of things, but an upright spirit will not fulfil it with

less exactitude because he perceives its limits and its restricted

importance. Nothing is in vain, and _a fortiori_ no being is in vain;

small functions are as necessary as great. If a man of intelligence

happens to be a porter or a scavenger, he should apply himself to that

profession with as much devotion as to any other. To do well what one

has to do, however humble it may be, is the first of duties. An ant of

genius ought not to bring to the ant-hill a grain the less, even though

he were capable of taking cognizance of the eternities of time and

space.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Doubt as distinguished from scepticism.]

II. Although the suppression of religious dogma does not lead to

scepticism, it decidedly does lead to doubt, and we believe that the

modern sense of doubt represents a higher stage of civilization than

the faith in dogma that distinguished former times. Religious faith is

distinguished from philosophic belief by a subjective difference. If

the man of faith is not altogether blind, at least he perceives but one

point in the intellectual horizon; he has focussed his intelligence

upon some one plot of ground, and the rest of the world does not

exist for him; he returns day after day to his chosen corner, to the

little nest he has made for his thoughts to dwell in, as we said

above—returns as a dove returns to the dovecote and sees but it in

the immensity of space. Fanaticism marks a still further degree of

contraction in one’s intellectual vision. On the contrary, the greater

the progress of reflection in the history of the human race, the more

completely religious faith becomes merged in, and subordinated to,

philosophic conviction; the two cease to be distinguishable except by

a difference in the degree of doubt that they involve, a doubt which

itself rests upon a clearness in one’s vision of things. As reflection

becomes more profound, it manifests here as everywhere its destructive

influence upon instinct; everything that is instinctive, primitive,

and naïve in faith disappears, and, along with it, disappears

everything that constituted its strength, that made it so powerful in

the human heart. True strength lies in the human reason, in complete

self-consciousness, in a consciousness of the problems of life, of

their complexity, of their difficulties.

[Sidenote: Ideal gradation of faith.]

Faith, as we have seen, consists in affirming things not capable of

objective verification, with the same subjective satisfaction as if

they could be verified: in attributing to the uncertain as great a

value as to the certain—nay, perhaps a greater value. The ideal of the

philosopher, on the contrary, would be a perfect correspondence between

conclusiveness of evidence and degree of belief. The intellectual

satisfaction that we take in our beliefs, the degree of tenacity with

which we hold them, should vary precisely with the completeness and

certainty of our knowledge. A primitive intelligence cannot be content

to remain in suspense, it must decide one way or the other; it is the

mark of a more perfect intelligence to remain in doubt in reference to

what is doubtful. Credulity is intellectual original sin.

[Sidenote: Uncertainty of metaphysics.]

Employing the word certitude strictly for what is certain, and meaning

by belief what is plausible or probable only, when one is investigating

some mere matter of fact, one may in the end be able to say positively

such and such is certain, is what the future will affirm on this point;

but, when the degree of certitude involved amounts to no more than to

probability or even possibility, and to metaphysical possibility at

that, it is ridiculous to say: “I believe such and such a thing; such

and such is therefore the dogma that everybody ought to adopt.” Such

positive basis for metaphysical inductions as exists is too uneven

not to result in a divergence in the lines of the hypotheses which

rise from it into the obscure heights of the unknown; no two of our

glances toward the infinite are parallel; our attempts at solving

metaphysical problems are little more than rockets shot capriciously

into the sky. The philosopher can do little more than take cognizance

of the divergence of rival hypotheses, and of their equality and equal

insufficiency in the eye of reason.

[Sidenote: Postulates for purposes of practice.]

But the problem of action presents itself to the philosopher no less

than to the rest of mankind. For purposes of conduct some one among

the diverging lines of human speculation must be chosen; philosophic

thought must be left to describe its curves and circles above our

heads while we walk, if not sure-footedly at least in some definite

direction, upon the earth. One is sometimes for practical purposes

obliged to rely on doubtful premises as if they were certain. Such

a choice, however, is simply an inferior and exceptional means of

choosing among hypotheses which one has neither the time nor the power

exactly to test. One cuts loose from one’s doubts, but the expedient

is a purely practical one; cutting the Gordian knots of life cannot be

adopted as one’s habitual intellectual procedure. Faith which leans

with an equal sense of security upon the certain and the uncertain,

the evident and the doubtful, should be but a provisional state of

mind forced upon one by some practical necessity. One ought never,

so to speak, to believe once for all, to subscribe one’s allegiance

forever. Faith should never be regarded as more than a second best,

and a provisional second best. The instant that action is no longer

necessary, one must revert to one’s doubt, to one’s scruples, to all

the precautions of science. Kant did violence to the natural order

of things when he ascribed to faith and morals a predominance over

reasoning; when he gave to the practical reason, whose commandments may

be the expression simply of acquired habits, control over the critical

and scientific reason. His moral philosophy consists in erecting a

foregone conclusion into a rule, whereas, as a matter of fact, one

ought not to make up one’s mind definitely until all the evidence is

in, until every alternative choice has been considered and rejected, if

at all, on good grounds; our beliefs should be relied upon in practice

exactly in proportion to their probability in the actual state of

our knowledge. Alternatives do not exist in the outer world, they do

not exist in a state of complete knowledge. The moral ideal is not

to multiply them, nor to make a leap in the dark the habitual method

of intellectual procedure. There is no such thing as a categorical

imperative or a religious _credo_ for the traveller under unknown

skies; he is not to be saved by faith but by active and constant

self-control, by the spirit of doubt and criticism.

[Sidenote: Doubt and the religious sentiment.]

Doubt is not, at bottom, as profoundly opposed as might be believed to

what is best in the religious sentiment, it is even a product of the

religious sentiment. For doubt is simply a consciousness that one’s

thought is not absolute—cannot seize the absolute either directly or

indirectly; and so, consequently, doubt is the most religious attitude

of the human mind. Even atheism is often less irreligious than a

positive belief in the imperfect and inconsistent God of religion. To

be in doubt about God is a form of the sense of the divine. Moreover,

the constant inquiry that doubt provokes does not necessarily exclude

the erection of an altar to the unknown God, but it excludes everything

in the nature of a determinate religion, the erection of an altar that

bears a name, the establishment of a cult that consists in rites. In

the cemeteries in Tyrol, a little marble basin rests on each tomb;

it gathers water from the rain and the swallows from the eaves of

the neighbouring church come and drink from it; this clear water,

that comes from on high, is a thousand times more sacred, more deeply

blessed than that which sleeps in the holy-water vessel in the church,

and over which the priest has stretched his hands. Why should religion,

so to speak, sequestrate, retire from public circulation, everything

it touches? That alone is truly sacred which is consecrated to the

use of mankind as a whole, which passes from hand to hand, which is

worn out in process of time in the service of humanity. There has been

enough and to spare of closed houses, closed temples, closed souls—of

cloistered and walled-in lives, of smothered or extinguished hearts;

what is wanted is an open heart and life under the open sky, under the

incessant benediction of the sun and clouds.

[Sidenote: Modesty of doubt.]

Philosophy is often accused of pride because it rejects faith, but it

was the father of philosophy, Socrates, who first said: “I know but one

thing, that I know nothing.” It is precisely because the philosopher

knows how much he does not know that he is not certain in regard to

all things, but is reduced to remain in doubt, to wait anxiously and

reverentially for the germination of the seed of truth in the distant

future. To regard as certain what one does not positively know is to

violate one’s intellectual conscience. From the point of view of the

individual, as from the point of view of society, doubt is in certain

cases a duty—doubt, or if you prefer, methodical ignorance, humility,

self-abnegation in matters intellectual. Where philosophy is ignorant

it is morally obliged to say to others and to itself: “I do not know; I

doubt, I hope, nothing more.”

[Sidenote: Morality of doubt.]

The most original, and one of the most profoundly moral products of

the present century, of the century of science, is precisely this

sincere sense of doubt, of the seriousness of every act of faith,

of its not being a matter to be undertaken lightly, of its being a

graver engagement than many others that one hesitates to assume; to

give in one’s faith to an opinion has come to be like attesting one’s

allegiance to it by the mediæval signature, which was written in one’s

blood and bound one for all eternity. At the point of death especially,

which is the very period when religion says to a man, “Abandon thyself

for an instant, yield to the force of example, of custom, to the

natural disposition to affirm as certain what thou dost not know, to

fear of damnation, and thou shalt be saved”—at the point of death when

a blind act of faith is a last weakness and a last cowardice, doubt is

assuredly the highest and most courageous position the human thought

can assume: it is a fight to the finish without surrender; it is death

with all one’s wounds before, in the presence of the problem still

unsolved, but faced to the end.

_III. Substitution of metaphysical hypotheses for dogma._

[Sidenote: Scope of metaphysics.]

Beyond the limits of science there lies still a field for hypothesis,

and for that other science called metaphysics, the aim of which is to

estimate the comparative value of hypotheses; to know, to suppose, to

reason, to inquire, are of the essence of the modern mind; we no longer

need dogma. Religion, which in the beginning was a naïve science, has

ultimately become the enemy of science; in the future it must give

way before science or must become merged in some really scientific

hypothesis; an hypothesis, that is to say, which acknowledges itself

to be such, which declares itself to be provisional, which measures

its utility by the amount it explains; and aspires to nothing better

than to give place to an hypothesis that shall be more inclusive.

Science and research outweigh stationary adoration. The eternal

element in religion is the tendency which produced there the need of

an explanation, of a theory that shall bind mankind and the world

together; the indefatigable activity of mind which declines to stop

at the brute fact which produced in former times the tangle of

contradictory myths and legends now transmuted into the co-ordinate

and harmonious body of science. What is respectable in religion

is precisely the germ of the spirit of metaphysics and scientific

investigation, which is to-day proving fatal to religions.

[Sidenote: Distinction between metaphysical and religious sentiment.]

Religious sentiment properly so called must not be confounded with

the instinct for metaphysics, the two are utterly distinct. The first

is destined to decline with the extension of knowledge; the other,

under some form or other, will always continue. The instinct for free

speculation corresponds in the first place to an indestructible sense

of the limits of positive knowledge: it is an echo in us of the undying

mystery of things. It corresponds to an invincible tendency in the

human mind to the need for an ideal; to the need, not only of the

intelligence but of the heart, to pass beyond the limits of the visible

and tangible world. The wings of the soul are too long to fly close to

the earth, the soul is formed to move in long swoops and circles in

the open sky. All it needs is to be lifted above the earth; often it

is unable to do this of itself, and its long wings beat and trail in

the dust. And to what power is it to look for its preliminary start?

To its very desire for unknown spaces, to its desire for an infinite

and insecure ideal. Nature, as positive science reveals it to us, is,

no doubt, the sole incontestable divinity, the _deus certus_, as the

Emperor Aurelius called the Sun; but its very certitude constitutes an

element of inferiority. Sun-light is not the most brilliant light; the

reality can have no lasting pretensions to be regarded as divine. The

ideal God is necessarily the _deus incertus_, a problematical, perhaps

even fictitious God.

[Sidenote: Persistence of metaphysical problems.]

This sense at once of the limits of science and of the infinity of

human aspirations makes it forever inadmissible for man to abandon

all effort to solve the great problem of the origin and destiny

of the universe. The child, Spencer says, may hide his head under

the bed-clothes, and for an instant escape consciousness of the

darkness outside; but in the long run the consciousness subsists, the

imagination continues to dwell upon what lies beyond the limits of

human conception. The progress of human thought has consisted less

in discovering answers to ultimate problems than in discovering more

precise methods of formulating the problems themselves; the enigmas

are no longer stated in primitive terms. This change in statement is a

proof of the progress and growth in the human mind; but the problems

unhappily are as difficult as ever to solve. Up to the present moment

no sufficient answer has been suggested, the mystery has simply been

transposed from one place to another; so much so that Spencer says

the scientific interpretation of the universe is as full of mysteries

as theology; and he compares human knowledge to a luminous globe in

the midst of infinite darkness. The larger the globe becomes the

greater the depth and extent of darkness that it reveals, insomuch that

increase of science but enlarges the abyss of our ignorance.

[Sidenote: Possible finiteness of the unknown.]

One must, however, be on one’s guard against exaggeration. The universe

is infinite, no doubt, and consequently the material of human science

is infinite, but the universe is dominated by a certain number of

simple laws with which we may become continuously better and better

acquainted. Many generations of men would be necessary to master in

all their complexity the vedic epics, but we are able even to-day to

formulate the principles which dominate them, and it is not impossible

that we may some day be able to do the same for the epic of the

universe. We may be able even to go the length of achieving precision

in our ignorance, of marking in the infinite chain of phenomena the

links which must forever be hidden from us. It is not accurate,

therefore, to say that our ignorance increases with our knowledge,

although it may be considered as probable that our knowledge will

always be aware of something that escapes it, and may come in time to

be able more and more distinctly to define, however negatively, the

nature of this residuum. The infinity of the unknowable, even, is no

more than hypothetical. We perhaps flatter ourselves in the belief

that we possess anything that is infinite—even ignorance. Perhaps

the sphere of our knowledge is like the terrestrial globe, enveloped

by but a thin atmosphere of the unknowable and unknown; perhaps there

is no basis and foundation of the universe, just as there is no basis

and foundation of the earth; perhaps the ultimate secret of things is

the gravitation of phenomena. The unknown is the air we breathe, but

it is perhaps no more infinite than the earth’s atmosphere, and one’s

consciousness of an unknowable infinity can no more be regarded as the

basis of knowledge than the atmosphere of the earth can be regarded as

the foundation upon which the earth rests.[119]

[119] The notion of the unknowable has been the subject of a

lively discussion in England and in France. See on this point

the work of M. Paulhan in the _Revue philosophique_, t. vi. p.

279.

[Sidenote: Distinction between religion and metaphysics.]

Unknowable or not, infinite or finite, the unknown will always be the

object of metaphysical hypotheses. But is to admit the perpetuity of

metaphysical hypotheses to admit the eternity of religion? The question

involves an ambiguity of words. Spencer defines religious thought as

that which deals with all that lies beyond the sphere of the senses,

but that is precisely the field of philosophic thought; philosophy

in its entirety, therefore, and not religion only, is included in

Spencer’s definition. Nay more, science itself is in part included in

Spencer’s definition, for science, which takes cognizance of everything

within the reach of perception and reasoning, by that very fact

undertakes to fix the limit of their power, and thus indirectly touches

upon the field of the unknowable—if not to enter it, at least to

outline it, and that itself constitutes a sort of negative acquaintance

with it. Knowledge is essentially critical and self-critical. The

eternity of philosophy and of science must, no doubt, be admitted; but

the eternity of religion, as that word is usually understood, in nowise

follows from that admission.

[Sidenote: Spencer’s unknowable.]

According to Spencer, the unknowable itself is not absolutely

unknowable. Among the mysteries, which become more mysterious as they

are more deeply reflected upon, there will remain, Spencer thinks,

for man one absolute certitude—that he is in the presence of an

infinite and eternal energy which is the source of all things. The

formula of human certitude is open to discussion. The man of science

is more inclined to believe in an infinite number of energies than in

an infinite energy, in a sort of mechanical atomism, a subdivision of

force _ad infinitum_ rather than in monism. Moreover, no religion can

stop with the bare affirmation of the existence of an eternal energy or

infinity of energies. It must maintain the existence of some relation

between these energies and human morality, between the direction of

these energies and that of the moral impulse in mankind. But a relation

of this sort is the last thing in the world that can be deduced from

the doctrine of evolution. Hypotheses in regard to the matter may of

course be devised, but, far from possessing a character of certitude,

such hypotheses would rather, from the point of view of pure science,

display a positive improbability. Human morality, if it be considered

scientifically, is a question that concerns the struggle for existence

and not a question that concerns the universe. What distinguishes the

natural forces, with which science deals, from gods, is precisely

that the former are indifferent to the morality or immorality of our

lives. In spite of our increasing admiration for the complexity of the

phenomena of the world, for the solidarity that obtains among them,

for the latent or active life which animates all things, we have not

yet demonstrably discovered in the world a single element of divinity.

Science does not reveal to us a universe spontaneously labouring for

the realization of what we call goodness: goodness is to be realized,

if at all, only by our bending the world to our purposes, by enslaving

the gods that we once adored, by replacing the reign of God by the

reign of man.

[Sidenote: Spencer’s followers in France.]

The alleged reconciliation of science and religion in Spencer’s pages

is not made out except by virtue of an ambiguity in terms. Partisans of

religion have, however, hastened to welcome these apparent concessions

in their favour and have based on them an argument for the perpetuity

of dogmas. Jouffroy has told us how dogmas become extinct; recently

one of his successors at the Sorbonne endeavoured to show “how dogmas

come into being again,” and he took his stand with Spencer on an

ambiguity in terms. By dogmas M. Caro meant the principal points of the

original doctrine of the soul—as if one could apply the name dogma

to philosophical hypotheses, even though they be eternal hypotheses!

The important thing, however, is to understand each other; if problems

which constantly recur, and constantly receive hypothetical solutions,

are to be called dogmas, then dogmas do come to life again, and may

be expected always to do so; _multa renascentur quæ jam cecidere,

cadentque_.... But if terms be employed as a philosopher should employ

them, with precision, how can metaphysical conclusions be regarded as

dogmas? Examine the writings of Heraclitus, the evolutionist; Plato,

the contemplator of ideas; Aristotle, the formulater of the laws of

thought; Descartes, the inquirer who sought in an abyss of doubt for

the absolute criterion of truth; Leibnitz, who regarded himself as

the mirror of the universe; Spinoza, lost in the heart of infinite

substance; Kant, resolving the universe into thought and thought

into the moral law; where are the dogmas in these great metaphysical

poems? They are not systems of dogma, they are systems marked by the

individuality of genius, although containing something of the eternal

philosophy, the _perennis philosophia_ of Leibnitz. Every system, as

such, is precisely the means of demonstrating the insufficiency of

the central idea which dominates it, and the necessity for the human

mind of passing beyond it. To systematize is to develop a group of

ideas to their logical conclusion, and, by that very fact, to show how

much they do not include, how far they fall short of exhausting human

thought as a whole; to construct is to demonstrate the weight of the

material one is building with, and the impossibility of piling it up

to heaven. Every system requires a certain number of years to bring it

to completion, and then, when the edifice is achieved, one may one’s

self mark the points where it will begin to crack, what columns will

yield first, where its ultimate decay will begin. To recognize that

the subsidence and decay of a thing is rational, is to be resigned

to it and in some measure consoled for it; but whatever is useful is

necessarily transitory, for it is useful for an end; and it is thus

that the utility of a system implies that it will some day make way for

something else. “Ἀνάγκη στῆναι,” says dogma; “ἀνάγκη μὴ στῆναι,”

the philosopher says. Systems die and dogmas die; sentiments and ideas

survive. Whatever has been set in order falls into disorder, boundaries

become obliterated, structures fall into dust; what is eternal is the

dust itself, the dust of doctrine, which is always ready to take on a

new form, to fill a new mould, and which, far from receiving its life

from the fugitive forms it fills, lends them theirs. Human thoughts

live, not by their contours but from within. To understand them they

must be taken, not as they appear in any one system, but as they appear

in a succession of different and often diverse systems.

[Sidenote: Instability of metaphysics.]

As speculation and hypothesis are eternal, so also is the instinct for

philosophy and metaphysics which corresponds to them eternal, though

it is perpetually changing. It appears at the present day as something

widely different from the intimate certitude of dogma, of confident and

placid faith. If independence of mind and freedom of speculation are

not without their sweetness, their attractiveness, their intoxication,

they are not without their bitterness and disquietude. We must make up

our minds to-day to accept a certain modicum of intellectual suffering

as inseparable from our treasure of intellectual joy; for the life of

the spirit, like that of the body, follows a just mean between pleasure

and pain. Intense metaphysical emotion, like intense æsthetic emotion,

possesses always an element of sadness.[120] The day will come when

the graver moods of the human heart will sometimes demand satisfaction

as they demanded and found satisfaction in Heraclitus and Jeremiah.

It is inevitable that there should be an element of melancholy in the

emotional setting of metaphysical speculation—as there inevitably

is in the perception of the sublimity we feel ourselves incapable of

attaining, in the experience of doubt, of intellectual evil, of moral

evil, of sensible evil which are mingled with all our joys, and of

which doubt itself is but a reverberation in consciousness. There is

an element of suffering in all profound philosophy as in all profound

religion.

[120] See our _Problèmes de l’esthétique contemporaine_, 1st

part.

[Sidenote: Communion with the universe.]

One day when I was seated at my desk my wife came up to me and

exclaimed: “How melancholy you look! What is the matter with you?

Tears, _mon Dieu_! Is it anything that I have done?” “Of course it is

not; it is never anything that you have done. I was weeping over a bit

of abstract thought, of speculation on the world and the destiny of

things. Is there not enough misery in the world to justify an aimless

tear? and of joy to justify an aimless smile?” The great totality of

things in which man lives may well demand a smile or a tear from him,

and it is his conscious solidarity with the universe, the impersonal

joy and pain that he is capable of experiencing, the faculty, so to

speak, of impersonalizing himself, that is the most durable element

in religion and philosophy. To sympathize with the whole universe, to

inquire the secret of it, to wish to contribute to its amelioration, to

overpass the limits of our egoism and live the life of the universe, is

the distinguishing pursuit of humanity.

[Sidenote: Summary.]

Religion, therefore, may pass away without in the least affecting the

metaphysical instinct, or the emotion which accompanies its exercise.

When the Hebrews were marching toward the promised land they felt that

God was with them, God had spoken and had told them what lay beyond,

and at night a pillar of fire lighted them on their way. The pillar

of fire has burned out, and we are no longer sure that God is with

us; we possess no other fire to light us on our way through infinite

night but that of our intelligence. If we could but be sure that there

is a promised land—that others may attain it as well as we—that the

desert really has an end! But we are not certain even of that; we are

seeking for a new world and are not positive that it exists; nobody

has journeyed thither, nobody has returned thence, and our sole hope

of repose lies in discovering it. And we shall go forward forever, the

puppets of an indefatigable hope.

CHAPTER II.

ASSOCIATION. THE PERMANENT ELEMENT OF RELIGIONS IN SOCIAL LIFE.

SOCIAL ASPECT OF RELIGIONS—RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES AND CHURCHES—IDEAL

TYPE OF VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATION—ITS DIVERSE FORMS.

I. Associations for intellectual purposes—How such

associations might preserve the most precious elements

of religions—Societies for the advancement of science,

philosophy, religion—Dangers to avoid—Popularization of

scientific ideas; propagandism in the interests of science.

II. Associations for moral purposes—Tendency of religion

in the best minds to become one with charity—Pity

and charity will survive dogma—Rôle of enthusiasm

in moral propagandism—Necessity of hope to sustain

enthusiasm—Possibility of propagating moral ideas:

1. Apart from myths and religious dogmas; 2. Apart

from any notion of a religious sanction—Baudelaire’s

conception of a criminal and happy hero—Criticism of that

conception—Worship of the memory of the dead.

III. Associations for æsthetic purposes—Worship of art and

nature—Art and poetry will sever their connection with

religion and will survive it—Necessity of developing the

æsthetic sentiment and the worship of art, as the religious

sentiment becomes more feeble—Poetry, eloquence, music;

their rôle in the future—Final substitution of art for

rites—Worship of nature—Feeling for nature originally an

essential element of the religious sentiment—Superiority

of a worship of nature over worship of human art—Nature is

the true temple of the future.

[Sidenote: Association and religion.]

The most durable practical idea in possession of the religious

spirit, as of the spirit of reform, is that of association. In the

beginning, as we have seen, religion was essentially sociological, by

its conception of a society of gods and men. The element of various

religions that will survive in the non-religion of the future is

precisely this conception, that the ideal of humanity and even of

nature consists in the establishment of closer and closer social

relations between all kinds of beings. Religions, therefore, have

justly chosen to call themselves associations and _églises_, that is

to say, assemblies. It is by force of assemblies, secret or open, that

the great Jewish and Christian religions have conquered the world.

Christianity has even resulted in the notion of an universal church,

first militant, then triumphant, and united in love; although, by a

strange aberration, instead of regarding universality as an ideal, as

the inaccessible limit of an indefinite evolution, Catholicity has been

presented as already realized in a system of dogmas which there was

nothing to do but to disseminate, and that, if need be, by force. This

mistake has been the ruin of dogmatic religions, and it still subsists,

even in religions which have transmuted their dogmas into symbols; for

an universal symbol is less conceivable than an universal dogma. The

only universal thing is and should be precisely the liberty accorded

to individuals of conceiving the eternal enigma in any manner whatever

that appeals to them, and of associating themselves with those who

share the same hypothesis.

[Sidenote: Ideal type of association.]

The right of association, which has hitherto been checked by law, by

ignorance, by prejudice, by difficulties of communication, etc., had

scarcely begun to manifest its full importance till in the present

century. Associations of every kind will some day cover the globe,

or rather everything, so to speak, will be accomplished by associate

enterprise; and within the limits of the great body of society

innumerable groups of the most diverse kinds will form and dissolve

with an equal facility, without impeding the general movement. The

ideal type of every form of association is a compound of the ideal

of socialism and of the ideal of individualism—such a form of

association, that is to say, as will afford the individual at once the

maximum of present and future security, and the maximum of personal

liberty. Every insurance company is an association of this kind; the

individual member is protected by the immense power of the association;

his contribution to the associate funds is of the slightest, he is free

to join the association or to withdraw from it, and to lead his life

absolutely as he chooses.

[Sidenote: Its various forms.]

The mistake of religions, and of systems of socialism also, as we have

already remarked, is that they presuppose a society of individuals

morally and intellectually of the same type. But human beings are,

neither within nor without, copies of each other; the comparative

psychology and physiology of races and nations, sciences which are

still embryonic, will one day demonstrate the diversity which exists

between different divisions of the human species and, owing to atavisms

of various kinds, even between individuals of the most strictly

homogeneous divisions and groups. Religious, metaphysical, and moral

sentiment will one day appear in very various forms, and give rise to

associations of every kind—some individualistic, some socialistic—so

that men of the same stamp may mutually aid and encourage each other,

under condition, however, of preserving their complete independence,

their perfect right to change their beliefs when they will. Union and

independence should go hand in hand; everything should be shared, but

nobody should be compelled to give or to receive; minds may be made

transparent without losing their freedom of movement. The future, in a

word, belongs to association, providing it be voluntary association,

for the augmentation, and not for the sacrifice of personal liberty.

If we pass from these general principles to their particular

applications we find three essential kinds of voluntary association

that seem destined to survive religions: associations for intellectual

purposes, for moral purposes, for emotional purposes.

_I. Associations for intellectual purposes._

[Sidenote: Associations for the advancement of research.]

It will always be possible for men of science to associate for the

purpose of verifying and collecting evidence in regard to doctrines

and beliefs which they themselves recognize as provisional only.

There are divisions and subdivisions in the world of thought, which

resemble the geographical division of the earth; these divisions

practically result from the division of labour; each person has a

distinct task to fulfil, a distinct object to which he must apply his

intelligence. The whole body of labourers united in one and the same

effort of thought, and turned toward the same point in the intellectual

horizon, tend naturally to gravitate toward each other; every form of

co-operation tends to become an association. We all of us belong to

some intellectual province, we have all of us a mental native land,

in which we find our fellow-citizens, our brothers toward whom we are

impelled by a natural sympathy. This sympathy is explicable as a vague

consciousness of the solidarity existing between the whole body of

intelligent human beings who inevitably take an interest in each other,

who love to share truth or error, as they love to share pleasure or

pain: it is good to see men draw together and agree, providing they

do not thereby lose flexibility; providing their solidarity becomes a

condition of progress and not of immobility. Men will always delight in

contributing their store of ideas to the common stock, as the disciples

of Socrates brought their dinners and shared them in the little house

in Athens; knowledge, supposition, or prejudice, in common, draws

people together like a common love. Our hearts should go out first

to those who are nearest to us, to those who are our neighbours in

the field of intelligence. Labour not only fashions the object it

is expended on, it fashions the labourer; similarity of occupation

pursued with the same ardour ends by producing similarity of heart.

Companionship in labour, of whatsoever kind it may be, constitutes one

of the strongest ties among men. In our days associations are formed

among men of science or investigators, as among journeymen following

the same trade. There are societies for the pursuit of scientific,

medical, biological studies, etc.; and societies for the pursuit of

literary and philological studies, of philosophical, psychological,

and moral studies; of economic and social studies, and finally of

religious studies. These societies are genuine _églises_, churches,

but churches for community of labour and not for associate repose

in a conventional faith; and they will increase in number with the

subdivision and specialization of each of these several branches of

study. Such associations are typical of future associations generally,

religious associations included. Community of inquiry, which no less

than community of faith gives rise to a feeling of fraternity, is often

superior to community of faith and more fertile than it. The highest

religious associations will, no doubt, some day be associations for the

pursuit of religious and metaphysical studies. Thus the best elements

of individualism and socialism will be reconciled. The infinite

extensibility of science, the opportunity that it offers inquirers of

appropriating the results of each other’s labours, make association for

the acquisition of knowledge the type of a perfect association, of an

association that exists for the benefit both of the individuals and of

the society.

[Sidenote: Scientific fanaticism.]

There is one thing, however to be avoided. Opinions, and in especial

opinions on morals, social matters, or metaphysical subjects, acquire,

like the sticks in the fable, a prodigious power, when a number of

people holding them in common once associate, which is out of all

relation to the intrinsic value of the opinions themselves. Novalis

said: “My faith gained an infinite value in my eyes the moment I saw

it shared by someone else.” The psychology of that remark is just; it

calls attention to a dangerous illusion against which precaution should

be taken; for in a certain state of the emotions it is easier for two

people, and even for a thousand, to make mistakes than for any one of

them separately. Science has its enthusiasts, and also its fanatics,

and might have at need its advocates of intolerance and violence.

Happily it carries the remedy for all this with it; increase science,

and it becomes the very principle of tolerance, for the greatest

science is best aware of its own limits.

[Sidenote: Association for purposes of propagandism.]

While distinguished minds will thus associate and carry on their

labours and speculations in common, men who are occupied rather with

manual labour will associate for the communication of their more or

less vague, more or less irreflective beliefs, which, however, will be

increasingly free from all element of the supernatural as instruction

spreads among the people. These beliefs, which among certain peoples

will be metaphysical, among certain others, such as the Latin nations,

will be social and moral. Such associations will be of every possible

kind, according to the opinions which preside over their formation;

they will, however, possess this trait in common, that they will more

and more rigorously exclude anything in the nature of dogma and of

revelation. They will aim also at becoming like the associations of

thinkers and men of science of which we have just spoken. It will be

the duty of people of education, in such societies, to hand on the

results of the scientific and metaphysical inquiries conducted by

associations higher in the intellectual scale. Every temple will thus

be built in stages, nave on nave, as in certain ancient churches,

and the highest of these temples from which the inspired word will

descend will be open to the sky and inhabited not by believers but

by unbelievers in every limitation of research—by minds restlessly

active, in quest of a more extended and demonstrable knowledge: _ad

lucem per lucem_.

[Sidenote: Association for the dissemination of useful knowledge.]

One of the principal effects of association for intellectual purposes,

thus conducted, would be the diffusion of scientific ideas among

the people. If religions may be considered as so many expressions

of the earliest scientific theories, the surest means of combating

the errors and of preserving the good sides of religion would be the

dissemination of the established principles of modern science. To

disseminate is in a sense “to convert,” but to convert the believer

to a faith in indubitable virtues; the task is one which is most

tempting to a philosopher; one is sure that truth can do no harm,

when it is handed on in all its purity. A really capital bit of

statement, a really capital book, is often better than a good action;

it carries farther, and if an imprudent act of heroism sometimes has

a melancholy ending, words that speak to the heart never have. There

are already in existence books for children, and for the people,

that are masterpieces; they supply the public, for which they are

intended, with ideas on morality and on certain sciences and supply

those ideas undisfigured; and such books constitute more or less

scientific catechisms, which are altogether superior to religious

catechisms. At some future day such books will be written in regard

to the great cosmological and metaphysical theories, epitomizing in

simple language, made simpler by telling illustrations, the body of

acquired facts or of probable hypotheses on the prime subjects of human

interest. The dissemination of knowledge, standing thus on the middle

plane between original inquiry and research and popular ignorance, will

take the place held by religions, which are themselves founded on a

collection of exoteric notions—a gross and symbolic epitome of what

once was profound, and to-day is naïve, in the realm of knowledge.

Modern science, if it is to progress, must be popularized; like a great

river, if it is to grow larger, its bed must be deepened and widened.

[Sidenote: Scientific research open to everybody.]

One of the great advantages of science is that it can employ half

talent and modest capacity—a manifest advantage for it as compared

with art. A mediocre poet is a zero in the universe—at least

sometimes; but a very ordinary mind may be capable of rendering a

genuine service by some almost insignificant improvement in the

method of covering the wires in an electric coil or in the gear

of a steam-engine; it will have done its work in this world, will

have paid its tribute, have won its place in the sun. Art cannot

endure mediocrity, science may rely upon it—and find collaborators

everywhere. Owing to that fact, science is capable of a degree of

democratization that art does not always possess—and that religion

alone has equalled. Art is capable of being and remaining aristocratic;

science disdains nothing, gathers together all kinds of observations,

makes use of all kinds and grades of intellectual power. Like the

great Buddhistic and Christian religions, science favours equality,

needs the support of the multitude, needs to be named legion. No

doubt a small number of commanding men of genius are always necessary

to conduct the work, to synthesize the materials in their totality,

to make the more fundamental inductions. But if these men of genius

were isolated, they would be powerless. Every man must contribute a

stone, somewhat at haphazard, and the construction settles firmly on

its foundation beneath the added weight of all of them, and becomes

really indestructible. Dikes made of irregular stones are the solidest

of all. When one walks along such a dike, one feels the sea rumble

and break not only near one but under one’s very feet; the water plays

vainly against the uncemented, undressed blocks of stone without being

able to detach them, bathes them all and destroys none; such, in the

history of the human mind, is science, which is formed of a multitude

of little facts, gathered in very much at haphazard, which generations

of mankind have piled up in disorder, and which ultimately become so

solidly united that no effort of the imagination can disjoin them. The

human mind, in the midst of its eternal ebb and flow, feels something

solid and indestructible in its possession that its waves beat against

in vain.

_II. Associations for moral purposes and moral propagandism._

[Sidenote: Association for uplifting the masses.]

There is another element of religion that will survive. Men not only

associate for intellectual purposes, they will continue to do so for

the purpose of ministering to human suffering, of correcting errors,

of disseminating moral ideas. Such associations, like those for

intellectual purposes, are based on a consciousness of the solidarity

and fraternity of mankind, although, of course, so far as the future

is concerned, there will be no question of a fraternity conceived

superstitiously, or anti-philosophically, as arising out of a community

of origin, from the same terrestrial or celestial father, but only of

a rational and moral fraternity, arising out of an identity of nature

and interest. The true philosopher should say not only, “Nothing that

is human is strange to me;” but also, “Nothing that lives, suffers,

and thinks is strange to me.” The heart feels at home wherever it

finds another heart, though it even be in a lower order of being, and

_a fortiori_, if it be in an equal or higher order of being. A Hindu

poet, says the legend, saw a wounded bird fall struggling at his feet;

the heart of the poet, sobbing with pity, struggled with the struggles

of the dying bird: it is this fluttering of the heart, this measured

and modulated rhythm of pain, which was the origin of verse. Like

poetry, religion also originated in the highest and most beautiful

manifestation of pity. Human love for human beings does not demand, as

a condition precedent, perfect spiritual accord; it is love itself

that produces such accord as is necessary. Love one another, and you

will understand one another; light springs from the true union of

hearts.

[Sidenote: Love of mankind in the future.]

Universal sympathy is a sentiment which is destined increasingly

to develop in future societies. Even to-day, as the result of an

inevitable evolution, religion has come to be confounded in the best

minds with charity. Hard and sterile among primitive peoples, little

more than a collection of formulæ of propitiation, religions have

come, through their alliance with morality, to be one of the essential

sources of human tenderness. Buddhism and Christianity have headed,

first and last, the principal charitable organizations established

among mankind. Fatally condemned as they are, at the end of a longer

or shorter period, to intellectual sterility, these two religions

are endowed with the genius of the heart. Men like Vincent de Paul

have little by little come to replace men like St. Augustine or St.

Athanasius, not without profit to humanity. This evolutionary process

will, no doubt, continue; to-day, for example, few really talented

theological works are produced by the priesthood,[121] but a great many

practical charities are excellently conceived and executed by them.

The day, no doubt, will come when the experience of personal suffering

will always result in a desire to relieve the suffering of others.

Physical pain usually produces a need of physical movement; æsthetic

instinct introduces rhythm into the movement, transforms disorderly

gestures into a beautiful regularity, and discordant cries into songs

of pain;[122] moral instinct turns this need of movement toward the

service of other people, and every misfortune thus becomes a source

of pity for the misfortunes of others, and grief is transmuted into

charity.

[121] None in France.

[122] See the author’s _Problèmes d’esthétique_, i. 3.

[Sidenote: Must find expression in action.]

As in the case of artistic sentiment, religious sentiment at its best

must be productive, must stimulate one’s activity. Religion, according

to St. Paul, means charity, love; but there is no charity that is not

charity for someone, and a really rich love cannot be confined within

the limits of contemplation and mystic ecstasy, which, scientifically

considered, are simply perversions and, as it were, spiritual

miscarriages. True love must act.

The ancient opposition between faith and works is thus effaced. There

is no powerful faith without works, any more than there is any such

thing as a sterile genius or an unproductive talent for art. If Jesus

preferred Mary, who was motionless at his feet, to Martha, who was

moving about the house, it was, no doubt, because he perceived in the

former a treasure of moral energy in reserve for the service of some

great devotion; in reserve and therefore only waiting; silent, with a

silence of sincere love which speaks more fervently than words.

[Sidenote: Charity.]

Charity will always constitute the point of meeting between the most

audacious theoretic speculation and the least audacious practical

activity. To identify one’s self, thought and heart, with someone else

is to _speculate_ in the most charming sense of the word, is to stake

one’s all. And the risk of staking his all is one that man will always

wish to run. He is pushed to it by the most vivacious impulses in his

nature. Goethe said that a man is not really worthy of the name till

he has “begotten a child, built a house, and planted a tree.” The

details chosen are somewhat trivial, but the aphorism embodies the

need for productivity which is inherent in every being, the need to

give or to develop life, to found something; the being who does not

obey this impulse is _déclassé_, is degraded below the rank of man; he

will suffer from it some day or other, and die of it body and soul.

Happily absolute egoism is less frequent than is believed; to live

solely for one’s self is a sort of utopia that may be summed up in the

naïve formula: Everybody for me and I for nobody. The humblest of us,

the instant we undertake a work of charity, come into possession of

a completer self; we belong at once wholly to the enterprise, to the

idea involved in it, to an idea more or less impersonal; we are drawn

forward in spite of ourselves, like a swimmer by the current of the

stream.

[Sidenote: Enthusiasm.]

The promotion of every enterprise great and small and of almost every

human work depends on enthusiasm, which has played so important a

rôle in religion. Enthusiasm presupposes a belief in the possible

reality of an ideal, an active belief to be manifested in effort. There

is generally but one way of demonstrating what is merely possible,

and that is by realizing it, by converting it from possibility

into actuality. Excessively matter-of-fact minds—minds immersed

in matter—are condemned to short-sightedness in the realm of the

possible; analysts distinguish too exactly between what is, and what is

not, to be able to be of the best service in the labour of increasingly

transforming the one into the other. There is, no doubt, a point of

junction between the present and the future, but pure intelligence

finds it difficult to lay its finger on it: it is everywhere and

nowhere, or rather it is not an inert point but a flying point, a

_direction_, a volition in pursuit of an end. The world belongs to

the enthusiast, who deliberately deals with the “not yet” as the

“already,” and treats the future as if it were the present; the world

belongs to the synthetic mind, which confounds the real and the ideal

in its embrace; the world belongs to men of the voluntary type, who do

violence to reality, and break up its rigid outlines, and force it to

yield up from within what might beforehand, in pure reason, have with

equal justice been pronounced the possible and the impossible. The

world belongs to the prophets and messiahs of science; enthusiasm is

necessary to mankind, it is the genius of the masses and the productive

element in the genius of individuals.

[Sidenote: Courage.]

The essence of enthusiasm is hope, and the basis of hope is manliness,

is courage. Courage of despair is not so intense a phrase as courage of

hope. Hope and true and active charity are one. If Hope alone remained

in the bottom of Pandora’s box it was not because she had lost her

wings and was unable to desert the society of men for the open spaces

of the sky; it was that pity, charity, devotion, are very elements of

her nature; to hope is to love, and to love is to wish to minister

to those who suffer. Upon the half-open box of Pandora, from which

Hope in her devotion to mankind refused to make her escape, should be

inscribed, as upon the leaden coffer in the “Merchant of Venice,” “Who

chooseth me, must give and hazard all he hath.”

[Sidenote: Proselytism.]

The object of enthusiasm varies from age to age: it was once religion,

it may be scientific doctrine and discovery, it may above all be

moral and social beliefs. It results therefrom that the spirit of

proselytism, that seems so peculiar to religion, is destined to survive

religion: it will be transformed simply. Every sincere and enthusiastic

man with a surplus of moral energy is at heart a missionary, a

propagandist of ideas and beliefs. Next to the joy of possessing a

truth or a system which seems to be true, is that of disseminating

this truth, of feeling it speak and act in us, of exhaling it with

our breath. There have been more than twelve apostles in the history

of humanity; every heart that is young, and strong, and loving is

the heart of an apostle. There is not an idea in our brain that does

not possess some element of sociality, of fraternity; that does not

struggle for expression. Propagandism will be as ardently pursued, in

the society of the future, as discovery. Moral proselytism will aim

at communicating enthusiasm for the good and the true, at uplifting

the moral level of mankind as a whole and mainly of the masses of the

people.

[Sidenote: Morality apart from religion difficult to teach.]

But here we shall be met by an objection; we shall be told that

independently of religion it will be difficult to disseminate a system

of practical morality, conformable to the scientific ideas of our

times. A professor of the Sorbonne was one day maintaining, in my

hearing, that in the present crisis anything like systematic moral

instruction is gravely in danger. Abstract theories cannot be taught,

for they end in scepticism; absolute precepts cannot be taught, for

they are false; nothing can be taught but facts, but history: one may

be certain about facts. That is to say, morality cannot be taught at

all.

[Sidenote: But not impossible.]

We believe, on the contrary, that, even at the present day, the various

theories in regard to the principles of morals possess a certain fund

of ideas in common, which might well be made the subject of popular

instruction. Even the most sceptical and egoistic moral theories admit

that the individual cannot live by himself and for himself solely;

that egoism involves a narrowing of the sphere of human activity that

results in the impoverishment of life. To live fully and completely

one must live for others. Our actions are like a shadow which we

project upon the universe; the shadow can only be contracted by a

diminution of our height; and the best way to enlarge it is to become

generous—the principle of egoism is interior littleness. The idea and

the sentiment which lie at the bottom of all human morality are the

idea and sentiment of generosity; even the systems of Epicurus and of

Bentham become generous and philanthropic when they are looked at from

a certain height. It is this spirit of generosity which is inherent in

every system of morals that a moralist ought always to endeavour to

elicit and to communicate to his auditors. What, after all, constitutes

the outcome of the years of instruction to which we devote our youth?

Abstract forms? More or less scholastic ideas inculcated with so much

difficulty? No, that sort of thing fades rapidly away; what subsist

are certain sentiments. From history one acquires a certain cult for

the past and for our natural tradition, which is useful but may become

dangerous if it is carried to extremes; from the study of philosophy

we acquire a certain openness of mind, a disinterested preoccupation

with the causes of things, a love of hypothesis, a tolerance for

difference of opinion; and from a study of ethics we acquire—what?

A generosity of heart that causes us, if not to forget ourselves, at

least not to forget other people. Other studies enlarge the mind, this

one enlarges the heart. It is unreasonable, therefore, to be appalled

by diversity of moral systems, for they are all of them obliged in

one way or other to beat up to the physiological and psychological

verity of love, which is the principle of all altruism and presents

mankind with this alternative: to desiccate or to expand. Exclusively

egoistic conduct is a rotten fruit. Egoism is eternal illusion and

avarice, afraid to open its hands, ignoring the necessity of mutual

credit, and the productivity of wealth in circulation. In morals as

in political economy, circulation is necessary; the individual must

share in the life of the society. Moralists have been wrong, perhaps,

in overestimating self-sacrifice. It may be denied that virtue is at

bottom, in any rigorous sense of the word, a sacrifice, but it cannot

be denied that it is at bottom an enlargement of one’s self, a form

of generosity. And this sentiment of generosity, by means of which

one embraces all humanity and the universe, is what constitutes the

solid base of all great religions, as of all systems of morality; and

therein lies the reason why one may, without danger, study the infinite

diversity of human beliefs in regard to the moral ideal—the _summum

bonum_. There is a unity in the variety, a unity that centres in the

idea of love. To be generous in thought and deed is to be at the centre

of all great speculation on morals and religion.

[Sidenote: Necessity of disinterestedness.]

For the rest, is there any need of calling in the aid of mythical

and mystical ideas in our effort to understand human society and

its necessities, and among them the necessity of disinterestedness?

The profounder one’s intelligence becomes, the more adequately one

perceives the necessity, the inherent rationality of the function one

accomplishes in human society; the more absolutely one understands

one’s self and one’s self as a social being. A functionary above

reproach is always ready to risk his life for the accomplishment of the

duty with which he is charged, even though it be a relatively humble

one—that of a policeman or a customs officer, of a signal man, of a

railway employee or telegraph operator. Whoever does not feel himself

ready to die at a given moment is inferior to these. One may sit in

judgment on one’s self and on one’s ideal, by asking one’s self this

question: for what idea, for what person would I risk my life? Whoever

has not a reply ready has an empty or vulgar heart, he is incapable

either of sympathizing with or of achieving anything that is great in

life, for he is hidebound to the limits of his own individuality; he is

feeble and sterile, and lives in his egoism like the tortoise in his

shell. On the contrary, he who is conscious of a willingness to face

death for his ideal is willing and anxious to maintain his ideal to

the height of this possible sacrifice, and finds in the fact of the

risk a supreme and constant tension, an indefatigable energy and power

of will. The sole means of being great in life is to be conscious of

indifference to death. And this courage in the presence of death is not

the privilege of religions; its germ exists in every intelligent and

loving volition, in the very sense for the universal which gives us

science and philosophy; it shows itself in the spontaneous impulses of

the heart, in the moral inspirations (which are as truly inspirations

as those of the poet) that art and morality seek to give rise to in us.

Independently of any religious conception, morality is privileged to

belong to the poetry of the world and to the reality of the world. This

poetry, instead of being purely contemplative, exists in action and in

movement, but the sentiment of the beautiful is none the less one of

the essential elements of it. A virtuous life, as the Greeks said, is

at once both beautiful and good. Virtue is the profoundest of the arts,

is that in which the artist and the work of art are one. In the old oak

choir stalls in our churches, lovingly sculptured in the ages of faith,

the same slab of wood sometimes represents on one side the life of a

saint and on the other a pattern of roses and flowers, so arranged that

each event in the saint’s life corresponds to a petal or the corolla of

a flower; his self-sacrifice or his martyrdom lies on a background of

lilies or roses. To live and to flower side by side, at once to suffer

and to blossom, to unite in one’s self the reality of goodness and the

beauty of the ideal, is the double aim of life; and we also, like the

saints in the choir stalls, should present both sides.

[Sidenote: Religious sanction a superfluity.]

It will be objected that if the dissemination of moral ideas should

be attempted in independence of religion, it will lack an element of

sovereign power: the idea of a sanction after death, or at least the

certitude of that sanction. It may be replied that the moral sentiment

in its purity implies precisely doing good for its own sake. And if

it be rejoined that any such notion is chimerical, we reply that the

power of the moral ideal in future societies will be proportionate

to its height.[123] It is commonly believed that the highest ideals

are those which it is least easy to disseminate among the masses;

the future will, we believe, demonstrate the opposite. Everything

depends on the talent of the propagandist. Jesus and the evangelists

did more to diffuse morality by embodying moral ideas in a form at

once simple and sublime than by menacing men with divine vengeance

and the flames of Gehenna. “Love ye one another; by this shall all

men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.”

In this admirable and eternal precept there is more of inexhaustible,

practical power than in: ye shall be cast into the fire; there shall

be wailing and gnashing of teeth. Even in the past, it is by favour of

great sentiments that great religious revolutions have been achieved;

and these great sentiments will persist in the future, shorn of the

superstitions with which they have long been associated. Thousands of

martyrs have gone gaily to death for religion; and martyrdom to simple

honesty and goodness of heart is, no doubt, more difficult though not

less realizable than martyrdom to death. Morality will lose none of its

practical power by revealing itself more and more as it is; that is, as

the supreme end that a man can propose to himself. The true ideal of

morality is charity, and charity is absolute disinterestedness, which

looks for a recompense neither from man nor God. Recompense ought never

to enter into one’s calculations in life nor into the hopes with which

one regards the future; besides, the calculation would probably be bad.

Recompense should be taken, when it comes, as a gift; as something

distinctly over and above what one has earned. It is even good and

reasonable never to do right with any other expectation than that of

ingratitude, and to resign one’s self to receiving after death no

reward of merit. The most practical religious instruction is an appeal

to generous sentiments.

[123] See the author’s _Esquisse d’une morale_, pp. 236, 237.

[Sidenote: Baudelaire’s triumphant criminal.]

To maintain the necessity of the idea of sanction in moral instruction

and propagandism, the following argument has been employed. Baudelaire,

it is said, in the last days of his intellectual life, sketched a great

drama, destined to astonish the partisans of middle-class morality. The

hero of the drama, stripping himself of vulgar prejudice, was to commit

one after another, and with an equal success, the crimes which are

supposed to be the most terrible—was to kill his father, to dishonour

his brother, to violate his sister and his mother, to betray his

country, and finally, his work in the world accomplished, in possession

of fortune and reputation, was to retire to some charming site, under

some soft sky, and to exclaim with all the tranquillity in the world:

“Let us now enjoy in peace the fruits of our crime.” What reply could

you make, it is asked, to such a man and to those who might be tempted

to imitate him, if you had not at hand the menaces of religion and the

prospect of future punishment? How could you disturb the criminal’s

promised joy?

[Sidenote: His life punishes itself.]

Let us consider first in what the criminal’s promised joy can consist.

Baudelaire’s hero is naturally incapable of appreciating the pleasures

of the hearth; a man who has killed his father can find little delight

in the birth of a son. He is equally incapable of appreciating a love

of science for science’s sake, for the man who could love science for

science’s sake would never be tempted to become a great criminal, and

as for pure æsthetic pleasures, moral delicacy and æsthetic delicacy

in general go hand in hand; it is not probable that a being incapable

of remorse and insensitive to all the shades and varieties of the

moral life would be apt to be sensible of all the shades and varieties

of beauty and of æsthetic enjoyment. The capacity for a sincere

admiration of the beautiful corresponds always to a possibility of

strong repugnances to the ugly, and repugnance for the ugly is scarcely

conceivable apart from a repugnance for what is ugly in immorality.

It is true that Byron depicted certain satanic heroes accomplishing

the blackest of crimes without any loss to their elegance, to their

good manners, to their high spirit and courage, but his heroes, not to

raise the question of their possibility in real life, are extremely

unhappy; they, like Byron himself and his disciples, are the victims

of a refined remorse, distaste of life, misanthropy; the only art

that lies within their range is pessimistic art, which but aggravates

their malady. Their æsthetic joys are veritable agonies. Or if, Byron

and Byronism apart, one keeps close to the truth, one may well doubt

whether true æsthetic pleasures are more within the reach of a genuine

criminal than of an educated butcher’s boy. His pleasure would be

confined to the monotonous round of wine, women, and play; and he could

not take wine with a light heart, for men talk under the influence of

wine; and he must play but little, for men ruin themselves at play;

so that there remains nothing but women who constitute, as a matter

of fact, the habitual consolation of criminals. In all times police

have looked for criminals, and found them, the day after their offence

in places of ill-repute. Very well, the defence of society apart, we

see no reason for depriving the poor wretches of the restricted joys

that remain to them. It would be doing too much honour to Baudelaire’s

hero to give him an immortality in the next life, simply as a means

of making him pay dearer than he has already done in this for the few

kisses that he has purchased with his blood-stained gold. He suffers

enough as it is, the only additional suffering that could be wished

for him is that of remorse, but remorse is a sign of superiority. Real

criminals, temperamental criminals, those who are the victims of what

is known as moral insanity, are absolutely ignorant of remorse, because

they are perfectly adapted to crime; they are made for the immoral

environment in which they live, and live at ease, and experience no

desire for a change. To perceive that a door is low, one’s stature

must be great. If Lady Macbeth’s hand had been rude and her eye dull,

she never would have desired to wash off the drop of blood. To suffer

is to pass beyond the bounds of one’s environment; the criminal who

experiences remorse has strayed less far from the human type than the

one who does not feel remorse. The first may become a man once more,

the second is incapable of crossing the line of demarcation which

separates man and beast, for he is incapable of perceiving it; he is

walled in with his crime, and is a brute or a madman.

[Sidenote: And will in the future be viewed with horror.]

But, it will be objected, if this brute or this madman sees no divine

menace above his head, would not many people regard his situation

as enviable, and labour as they are labouring, to destroy the moral

and human instincts in themselves, to place themselves precisely in

the position of Baudelaire’s hero? We do not believe that faith in

a religious sanction could greatly change anybody’s attitude toward

such an abnormal being. Crime offers man but one attraction, that of

wealth; but wealth, whatever value it may have in the eyes of the

people, is but one among the good things of the world. Offer a poor

man a million dollars coupled with the gout, and if he had an atom of

common-sense he would refuse. Propose to make him rich, on condition

of his being bandy-legged or humpbacked, and he would probably refuse

also; in especial, if he were young. All women would refuse. The

difficulty experienced in finding people to fill certain situations

which are in themselves well paid—that, for instance, of public

executioner—demonstrates that, even in the eyes of the people, money

is not everything. If it were, no menace of punishment after death

could prevent men generally from becoming assassins.[124] I know women,

and men also, who would refuse a fortune if they were obliged to

acquire it by becoming butchers—so great are certain repugnances, even

purely sentimental and æsthetic repugnances. The moral horror of crime,

which is in the generality of cases stronger than any other repugnance,

will always separate us from criminals, whatever the prevailing beliefs

as to life after death.

[124] M. de Molinari has calculated the chances of death to

which the profession of assassin is exposed, as compared with

certain dangerous occupations, as that of miner. He reaches the

following result: that an assassin runs less risk of death than

a miner; an insurance company might demand a smaller premium

of assassins than it would be obliged to demand of miners.

(See _Esquisse d’une morale_, the chapter on _Le risque et la

lutte_, i. 4.)

[Sidenote: And with pity.]

This horror will be still stronger when for the habitual hatred,

anger, and desire for revenge, that the presence of a criminal now

causes us, shall be substituted by degrees a feeling of pity—the pity

which we feel for inferior or malformed beings, for the unconscious

monstrosities of nature. One may sometimes envy the life of what one

hates; but one can never envy the life of what one pities. Hatred

signifies the presence of some element of attraction in the object

hated; but pity is the highest and most definitive moral barrier that

can exist between two beings.

[Sidenote: The durable element in this notion of sanction.]

The sole respectable and durable element in the idea of sanction is

neither the notion of recompense nor of penalty, but that of the ideal

of goodness as possessed of sufficient force to impose itself upon

nature, and to envelop the world; it seems to us good that the just

and gentle man should have the last word in the universe, but this

kingdom of goodness of which humanity dreams does not need for its

establishment the procedure of a human kingdom. The moral sentiment

may be considered the great power in the universe. The inherent

tendency of morality gradually to subdue nature to its purposes by the

instrumentality of mankind is the most striking fact in the realm of

philosophy, and the one which is, of all others, the most appropriate

to excite the spirit of proselytism. No myth is necessary to arouse an

ardour for goodness and a sense of universal fraternity. What is great

and beautiful is self-sufficing.

[Sidenote: Cult for the dead.]

Whatever may be the beliefs that men will one day hold on a life after

death, and the conditions which render possible the final triumph

of goodness, the notion of such a triumph is an ultimate moral and

social idea, which will always lend itself readily to propagandism,

because it is the foundation of all religions without being in any

wise essentially bound up with religious dogma; it is in essence a

cult for memory, for veneration and love of ancestry, for respect for

death and for the dead. Far from necessarily declining with the decline

of religion, a reverence for the dead may rapidly increase because

the metaphysical sentiment of the unknown in death will increase. The

spirit of democracy itself inclines the masses to an uneasy admiration

in the presence of death, the great democrat, the great leveller

who wanders incessantly about humanity, and planes down equally all

excesses of misery and happiness; casts us, without distinction of

persons, into the great abyss from the depths of which the attentive

ear has caught no sound of an arrested fall.

[Sidenote: Among the Greeks.]

The Greeks, who of all ancient people are supposed to have been the

least religious, were of all ancient people those who showed most

reverence for the dead. The most irreligious city in modern times,

Paris, is that in which the fête for the dead is most solemn, in which

the entire people rise to celebrate it, and that also in which we see

the most flippant street Arab take off his hat in the presence of a

funeral and salute the visible image of the eternal enigma. A respect

for the dead which binds the generations of mankind together, which is

the essence of the most certain form of immortality, that of memory and

example, will not disappear with the decay of religion. Corpus Christi

may be forgotten, but All Souls’ Day will be observed till the end of

human time.

_III. Associations for æsthetic purposes—Worship of art and nature._

[Sidenote: Association for enjoyment of products of æsthetic genius.]