I. The third notion which is destined to survive historic religions,

and which has been as yet imperfectly realized, is that of voluntary

association for the purpose of enjoying in common some æsthetic

pleasure of a high and morally refining kind; therein lies what

will survive of the ceremonial of diverse religions. The artistic

elements pent up in various religions will disengage themselves, will

become independent of tradition, of symbolism taken seriously, and of

superstition. Science, metaphysics, and morals all have their poetical

side, and in so far are analogous to religion.

[Sidenote: Destined prevalence of admiration.]

The pure abstraction by which the thinker escapes beyond the limits

of sentiment is an unstable and unlasting state of mind; abstraction

contains something fictitious, for nothing abstract exists in nature;

abstraction is of value only as an instrument; its aim is to grapple

with some one side of the reality, to enable one subsequently more

easily to embrace the reality as a whole. Every general result

that abstraction can achieve may sooner or later become the object

of a sentiment. The progress of science, as Mr. Spencer says, has

always been accompanied side by side by a corresponding progress

in the faculty of admiration; this faculty must inevitably develop,

in the future, when man will have attained a less fragmentary and

more genuinely synthetic conception of the universe. Admiration is

one of the surviving elements of the religious sentiment. Man will

always be subject to astonishment, and will always contemplate the

universe in a spirit of wonder, although, no doubt, the time must

come when he will cease to kneel. Artistic genius, even when inspired

by great philosophical and cosmological ideas, remains essentially

different from religious genius properly so called, the distinctive

character of which is to be dogmatic. The Greeks were of all peoples

the most poetical and the least religious. Poetry, like metaphysics,

consists in constructions in the realm of imagination and thought,

which are capable of infinite variety and tend to overrun the whole

compass of the human mind. Dogmatic religion, on the contrary,

tends continually to limit the fertility of the imagination and of

philosophic thought; it implies a certain poverty of mind to cling

always to the same conception, to feel no desire to pass beyond it,

to create. Metaphysical hypothesis, unshackled by dogma, gifted with

variety and liberty, must inevitably be fertile even in the domain of

art; it cannot dwell forever among abstractions, it must produce a

corresponding sentiment, a poetic sentiment which will not be the naïve

assurance of faith but the proper emotional reaction in the presence

of a transformation of the real world under the influence of thought

conceiving the ideal. For the philosopher, as for the poet, every

surface that science touches, every form and figure in the world that

the finger of knowledge taps, gives forth a sound, not of the void,

but, so to speak, of the “essential inwardness of life.” They resemble

the marbles in Italy which give forth, beneath a blow, a sound as

harmonious as their forms. There is an inner harmony that may well go

along with harmony of surface; science shows us the laws of surfaces,

philosophy and poetry put us into sympathy with what lies below the

surface. If it is impossible to deny, as pure idealists attempt to

deny, the objective character of the world in which we live, one can,

at least, not say where objectivity begins and subjectivity ends.

Between Naghiri and Yarkand there exists an almost unknown tribe called

Hunza, whose language presents a peculiarity which it is impossible to

separate from one’s notion of humanity; one cannot, in their speech,

express the idea of a horse simply, but must say my horse or thy horse

or his horse. Our language is more perfect than that of the Hunza, but

we are absolutely incapable of conceiving things in abstraction from

all notion of human personality; in especial, when we are dealing, not

with individual, external objects, but with the cosmos as a whole.

There is no such thing as a world existing in isolation; there is only

your world, my world, the human world. Man is so inseparably associated

with his conception of the universe that it is impossible to know

what our universe would be apart from us, or what we should be apart

from it. The metaphysician and the poet are at one in celebrating the

projection of humanity into all things. At their highest points poetry

and philosophy coincide. Metaphysics is the poetry of pure reason,

poetry is the metaphysics of the senses and of the heart. The two

supply us with our conception of the world, and, after all, since we

are the product of the world, it must be in some sense akin to all

that we contain. The fundamental secret of things lies at the bottom

of human thought. Poetry is a light and winged creature, Plato says,

but he was speaking of the poetry of the poet, of his sonorous and

harmonious words; but the poetry of the metaphysician, the poetry of

profound ideas and hidden causes, is also a winged thing, but winged

not to be enabled to skim the surfaces of things as a land bird skims

the surface of land and sea, but to be enabled to dive as “divers” do

when they plunge into the limpid waves, and, at the risk of asphyxia,

walk upon the opaque bottom of the sea and tear it up with their beaks

in search of food and come up shaking their feathers from none knows

where. Sometimes their search has been in vain, sometimes they bring up

buried treasure; and they alone of all beings employ their wings not

to skim and to touch the surface of things, but to penetrate to the

depths of them. The last word of poetry, as of thought, will be to

dive beneath the moving flood and sweep of things, and seize the secret

of the material universe which is also the secret of the spiritual

universe.

[Sidenote: Art in a measure to take the place of religion.]

II. The more feeble dogmatic religions become, the greater the

necessity for a stronger and higher art. Humanity needs a certain

amount of distraction, and even, as Pascal said, of “diversion.” A

human beast, such as an English or German labouring man, knows but one

distraction in the world: eating and drinking, especially drinking.

Many English labourers never go to the theatre or to church, never

read, know nothing of the pleasures of home; the gin-palace and gin

take the place of art, religion, and the family. Opium plays the same

role in China. They who do not know how to amuse themselves brutalize

themselves; self-brutalization is, at least, a change, an element of

variety in the monotony of life, a break in the continuity of the

chain of misery. Oblivion from time to time is imperative. One of

the ancients said that he would rather be a master in the science of

oblivion than in that of memory. The only porches of forgetfulness

that are open to the more debased portions of mankind are sleep and

intoxication; people at a higher stage of civilization may approach art

and adoration; and these two forms of distraction are the highest and

sweetest.[125]

[125] Slaves, exiles, and unfortunates generally drink. The

Irish and Poles are, according to statistics, the most drunken

peoples in Europe.

[Sidenote: Art as a diversion.]

The amount of activity devoted by men to religion and æsthetics

may appear at first sight useless and even harmful; but it must be

recognized that humanity is always possessed of a surplus which must be

expended in some way or other. Prayer and religious exercises, regarded

as occupations simply, are of the least harmful of pastimes, are of the

least vain of the various forms of distraction. Prayer and the church

have hitherto been the art and theatre of the poor. No doubt art and

prayer cannot be made to constitute alone the whole of life; mystics

have believed that it is practical life that is the diversion, and that

the serious element in things is religious contemplation. Precisely

the opposite is true: preoccupation with art and metaphysics should

dominate human life, but not absorb it. Religion in especial, with its

myths, is too generously compounded of illusion and downright fiction

to be made the centre of life; religion is a radiant coloured cloud

that wreaths the summit of the mountain. If we climb up into it we

perceive that it is empty and sombre within, that it is a cloud, damp

and cold like other clouds and radiant only from below.

[Sidenote: Æsthetic element in religion.]

The poetry of religion may survive the dogmatism of religion; as

articles of faith, religious ideas are to-day anachronisms; as

practical and philosophical conceptions they are like all works of art,

in a measure imperishable. Who, asks Lange, could wish to refute a Mass

of Palestrina or accuse the Madonna of Raphael of error? Religions have

inspired literary and artistic labours—products which will survive

them at least in part, and will constitute ultimately their best

justification. What remains of the Crusades to-day? Among the best

things that they gave us must be counted certain flowers that they

brought back with them and propagated among us, for example, Damascus

roses, and certain colours and perfumes which have survived the great

rising of Europe against Asia in support of certain ideas and passions

which are to-day forever extinct.

[Sidenote: Defects of æsthetic side of religion.]

Looked at from a certain point of view, priests are the artists of

the people, but the genuine artist ought to move with the times,

understand new motives and not repeat indefinitely, from generation

to generation, the same musical or poetical theme. The feeble side of

religious aæsthetics is that its repertoire of incident and mystery is

severely limited, that it has repeated itself for centuries. It must

enlarge the number of its pieces, must abandon those it has. Nothing

could be better than to assemble for the purpose of experiencing in

common an emotion at once aæsthetic and serious, seeing and hearing

something beautiful; but it is impossible that this emotion should be

indefinitely prolonged by a repetition of the same stimulus. Rites are

irreconcilable with the double aim of art: variety and progress in the

expression of the emotions themselves. Sooner or later the rudimentary

art of ritual must give place to genuine and progressive art, just as

the instinctive and eternally monotonous architecture practised by bird

and insect has become the infinitely varied architecture which has

produced and will produce masterpieces of the most varied kind, from

Notre Dame de Paris to the Alhambra.

[Sidenote: Transformation of the sermon.]

In general, men gather together to listen. Conferences, sermons, songs

are the most permanent features in religious cult. They will probably

exist in some form or other in future associations as in those of the

past. One point will become increasingly important in every spoken word

addressed to the people, and that is the instructive aspect of what is

said; if one is to address the people, one must teach them something.

Well, there are three kinds of instruction, scientific, literary

and moral, or metaphysical. The first will have to be more and more

generously given, not only in school but wherever adults congregate.

The two other sorts may be given simultaneously by lectures. The most

interesting elements in many sermons and conferences are the texts and

citations brought to the hearers’ attention by the speaker. The choice

of these texts, the manner in which they are expounded and introduced

to the comprehension of the multitude, constitute the value of the

sermon. In other words, the best sermon consists simply in the reading

and exposition of some choice page from a good book. In Germany, in

England, in the Indies preachers of certain liberal sects choose their

texts indifferently from among the whole number of the sacred books of

humanity. A still more liberal epoch may be conceived, when texts will

be selected not only from among the writings of the poets of ancient

times but also from among the writings of men of genius of all times;

every great work will be read and commented on as a sacred book. The

most complete expression of the so-called religious sentiment, apart

from the vast Hindu or Jewish epochs, is, after all, to be found in

certain profane masterpieces, from the works of Plato and Marcus

Aurelius to Kant’s “Hymn to Duty”; from the dramas of Æschylus to

the “Hamlet” of Shakespeare, to the “Polyeucte” of Corneille, and the

“Contemplations” of Victor Hugo.

[Sidenote: Transformation of the prophet.]

Religious prophets, like priests, will be replaced by great poets,

great metaphysicians, great men of science. Each of us will be able to

choose our prophet, to prefer the genius which is best adapted to our

personal intelligence and best serves as an intermediary between us and

the eternal truth, and each of us will be in the last resort our own

priest.[126]

[126] “Prophecy is not dead, it flourishes under another name.

Religious reforms, emancipation from oppressive authority, war

against corrupt institutions, religious poetry, philosophy of

history—are all represented under various titles in the modern

world. The old trunk has branched again simply.” (M. Albert

Réville, p. 229, _Prolégomènes de l’Histoire des religions_.)

[Sidenote: Music.]

Apart from poetry and eloquence, the most religious of the arts, the

most capable of inspiring the multitude with an elevated sympathy has

been, and will be music. Wagner was not absolutely wrong in his notion

that music will be the religion of the future, or, at least, the cult

of the future. We do not speak of instrumental music only, but also

and in especial of vocal music, of choruses such as are often met with

in Germany, in which many voices unite in producing the same chant, in

beating the same rhythm which has been regulated in advance by genius.

Thus conceived, music is truly religious and socially significant.[127]

[127] Music at the present day forms a part of the cult; but

either it is supplied by members of the faithful, in which

event it is sufficiently bad, for the majority of the faithful

are ignorant of music; or it is provided by mercenaries,

and it is then more commonly good, but is generally ill

chosen. Musical education will one day probably be much more

wide-spread than it is to-day; it would not be more difficult,

and would always be more useful, to teach children the elements

of music than to teach them the mystery of the Incarnation.

More than that, if religious music were chosen not only from

so-called sacred works but from the works of classical masters

generally, one might be certain of hearing good music, varied

in style and movement, and capable of pleasing all those in

whom the æsthetic sense is developed.

[Sidenote: Kinship of æsthetic and religious sentiment.]

For the rest, almost every art is reconcilable with the gravity of

religious sentiment, for every art at its best awakens, no less than

poetry and music, a contemplative and philosophical mood. One may

agree with Strauss that religion will gradually be transmuted into

art, and even at the present day profane art and sacred art are rather

different than opposed. These differences will always subsist; it is

evident that a _pas redoublé_, for example, can never be the symbol of

a really profound idea of nature or of humanity or of the infinite.

Religious æsthetics, even though it becomes continuously larger and

more tolerant, will exclude to the end certain inferior forms of art.

[Sidenote: Necessary reforms in lay art.]

If art is to take the place of religion, it must progress in certain

directions, not only in its forms but in its material methods of

appeal. Note how much better church services are presented, from the

point of view of hygiene, than art exhibitions are. Moderation is

practised in the matter of light; the rooms are large and well supplied

with fresh air, are of an almost constant temperature; and the æsthetic

services are restful rather than exhausting. Compare with all this the

entertainment given in concert halls and theatres, where multitudes

are packed together under unnecessarily brilliant lights, where the

spectators are wrought up and excited and exhausted in a hundred ways

and pass out, finally, fatigued, enfeebled, nervously keyed up, and

pursued by a host of sensual images. Church architects are infinitely

more conversant with hygiene than those who build our theatres; they

understand that if the heavens are to be shut out at all, space enough

must be shut in to give the heart and chest room to expand. Among the

Greeks, where art really did form a sort of religion, the theatres were

open to the sky so that the spectators might really repose in body

while they gave up their minds to be played upon by the poet.

[Sidenote: In religious art.]

Just as existing profane art must undergo certain transformations

before it can be expected fully to satisfy a sane and well-balanced

nature, so religious art, if it is to be true to its highest

tendencies, must transform itself, must rid itself of precisely the

elements which to-day seem distinctively to constitute it, namely its

marvellous subject-matter and conventional handling. The marvellous in

art was long necessary, as we have seen, to capture men’s attention;

contemporaneous art does not need to make this appeal. All art took its

rise from convention, from ceremonial, but has enfranchised itself by

degrees. It might even be established as a general law that the more

perfect, the more expressive, arts become—the more, that is to say

they seek precisely to body forth the sentiment of the artist; and the

more expressive they are the less conventional and less pompous they

must be. Amplification and exaggeration are suppressed. The artist

occupies toward his emotions the same relation that the translator of a

great work does to his text: his translation will be regarded nowadays

as perfect in proportion as it is close, as it follows the text, line

by line and word by word; formerly the tradition was otherwise, and

every translator felt himself obliged to amplify. Art possesses _great_

means of inspiring emotion, but not _gross_ means. Public speakers at

the present day make much less frequent use of gesture; the actor no

longer steps out on the stage in the cothurnus; the language of verse

is approaching the language of ordinary life; music is breaking away

from the conventions of counterpoint. What is true of the diverse arts

is true also of religious æsthetics, which will one day abandon the

fictitious ornaments and vain ceremonies of ritualism. If an æsthetic

expression of some profound sentiment is to be true and durable, it

must itself be profound, must be like what it expresses, must be

murmured rather than articulate. What renders certain verse eternal

is its simplicity: the more overcharged an art is the more caducous

it proves, like the architecture of the Jesuit style, which is to-day

so ridiculous, with its gilding and false ornaments. Ceremonies,

properly so called, will become more and more simple in religious or

moral associations; the day will come, no doubt, when they will not be

employed at all except to celebrate the three great events of human

life: birth, marriage, and death; nay, perhaps they will disappear

altogether as emotion becomes too profound to be translated by any

objective device, by any conventional ceremony whatever.

“Une larme en dit plus que vous n’en pourriez dire.”

In cemeteries the tombs of distinguished people may be recognized

by their simplicity, by their freedom from conventional ornament. A

marble slab under a wreath of flowers is enough to produce upon the

passer-by a more vivid impression than crosses, burning lamps, images

of the saints, infantine gewgaws, and ridiculous inscriptions. Eternal

enigmas need not be supplied with excess of language; they are quite

capable of making themselves heard without raising their voices. The

silence of the stars is more impressive than speech, and the highest

religious instruction could not do better than teach men to listen to

such science. Meditation, which, after all, is recommended by every

religion, implies the negation of rite.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Enjoyment of natural beauty.]

III. A feeling for nature was, in the beginning, an important element

in the composition of the religious sentiment. Hindu ascetics went up

into the valleys of the Himalayas, St. Antoine went into the desert

at Thebes, St. Bruno went to La Grande Chartreuse, in search of

something more than simple solitude; they all of them experienced an

ill-defined need to eke out monotony of contemplation by admiration

of the beautiful in nature; a need to fill the void of ecstasy with

harmonious and powerful sensations. They were unconscious poets,

painters without hands, astronomers without special knowledge, and

their sentiment for nature made part of their religious sentiment;

the profane mingled with the divine, and they ascribed to God alone

the intense emotion that forest and mountain summit had given rise to

in them. To-day, the æsthetic sentiment exists apart from religious

sentiment; although every æsthetic sentiment of an especially elevated

kind is both contemplative and philosophical, it contains no suggestion

of any particular religion: no tabernacle can roof in heaven; æsthetic

sentiment is foreign to the definite and anthropomorphic notion of a

personal God. When we contemplate nature we have no sense of communion

with the personality of God; the artist has definitively supplanted the

religious hermit. The power of theological sentiment has weakened; the

power of sympathy for nature has increased.

[Sidenote: Should be cherished.]

This sense of natural beauty, which is so strong in many men at the

present day, is destined to a much greater future. Like æsthetic

faculties generally, a sense for the beauty of nature must be

cultivated and developed by a well-directed education. No germ of it

apparently is to be found in certain cases among the peasantry, where

a mechanical habit of life has dulled the emotions, nor among dwellers

in cities, in whom antagonistic tastes have been developed. A genuine

Parisian cares little for the country; he can pass an hour or two in

the fields, as he might in the Bois de Boulogne. An open-air landscape

would not so readily appeal to him as a picture of it in a gold frame;

his eye is not educated for dealing with the dimensions of nature.

[Sidenote: The most wholesome form of enjoyment.]

Of all æsthetic sentiments, love of nature possesses the advantage of

being the one which, even though pushed to excess, does not disturb

the equilibrium of body and mind. Love of nature is the sole emotion

which is absolutely hygienic. One may die of an exaggerated love of

the theatre, of music and so forth; one simply becomes healthy from

an exaggerated love of nature. Air and light! The Greeks were right,

were they not? to philosophize in the open air, in gardens and groves.

A ray of sunlight sometimes helps one more to understand the world

than an eternity of meditation in some gray room in the midst of open

volumes.[128]

[128] Every library reading room ought to open on a garden

where one could read and write on fine days in the open air.

For all men whose labour is physical—for example, for a

factory hand—the proper recreation is repose in the open

air, and, if need be, intellectual labour in the open air.

For men who work with their minds, the proper recreation is

bodily exercise in the open air, in the sunlight. For children

every holiday ought to be spent in the country. Lighted

rooms, children’s entertainments in the house even on Sunday

afternoons, theatrical representations, are, hygienically

speaking, absurdities. All boarding-schools, moreover, ought to

be beyond the city limits and if possible on some commanding

height. If there existed in France, as in Germany for example,

great colleges in country districts hard by forests, or still

better, in the highlands of Dauphiny or the Pyrenees, such

places would ultimately be adopted by the better classes for

their children’s education, and thus might be combated the

degeneracy of the middle class, which is so much more rapid in

France than elsewhere, because the custom of restricting the

number of children interferes with natural selection.

[Sidenote: Superior to enjoyment of human art.]

Compare the appeal that nature makes to the æsthetic sense with that

made by human art, and you will at once perceive the superiority of

the former. Art, even great art, even that which seems closest to the

truth, can never be more than a very insufficient representation of the

real world, because it is forced to a selection; it is forced to ignore

nine-tenths of life in order to set in a clear light what is extreme,

what appeals to laughter or to tears. Average human life is neither

ridiculous nor tragic; life, as it appears in art, is generally one or

the other. The reason is that art subordinates truth to interest, while

life is truth. Thence results the movement toward pessimism in art,

and in especial in modern art; the more masterly the artist is, the

more he will be inclined to seek for the ridiculous or the melancholy

aspects of life; his aim is to move pity or mirth, and existence in his

pages must take the form of tragedy or comedy. To live too exclusively

in the world of art is to live in a factitious environment as if one

should pass one’s whole existence in a theatre. The most beautiful

poem, the most beautiful work of art, contains pitfalls which one must

avoid. The imagination usually plays with loaded dice. Whoever lives

too exclusively on human art becomes, therefore, a little unhealthy, a

little unbalanced. The great source of æsthetic appeal is and should be

nature, which is always sincere, always shows for what it is, without

deception and ornament. A higher æsthetic culture will increase one’s

sensibility to natural beauty, and it is in a contemplation of the

cosmos that æsthetic sentiment, and a purified religious sentiment,

will find it possible most completely to coincide. The emotion that

arises from the contemplation of a landscape, of a sunset, of a stretch

of blue sea, of a snow-capped mountain outlined against the sky, or

even the blue dome of the sky itself, is absolutely pure, sane, neither

too depressing, nor too immoderately gay. In the presence of nature

one’s æsthetic sensibilities become the means of refreshing and

resting one instead of fatiguing one—nature smiles but never grimaces;

and its smile penetrates the soul as the sunlight penetrates the eye;

and if nature has its moods of sadness, they contain a touch of the

infinite which enlarges the heart. The immensity of nature and of the

all-enveloping heavens becomes, for those who feel it, a constant

source of a certain stoical serenity.

CHAPTER III.

THEISM.

REVIEW OF THE PRINCIPAL METAPHYSICAL HYPOTHESES WHICH WILL REPLACE

DOGMA.

I. Introduction—Progress of metaphysical

hypothesis—Metaphysical hypotheses destined to increasing

diversity in details, and increasing agreement on essential

points—Importance of the moral element in metaphysical

hypotheses—The part played by conscience in human morality

will not diminish, as Mr. Spencer says—Sympathetic groups

under which divers systems of metaphysics will be ranged.

II. Theism—1. Probable fate of the creation hypothesis—The

author of the world conceived as a prime mover—Eternity

of movement—The author of the world conceived as a

creator properly so called—Illusion involved in the

conception of nothing—Criticism of the creation hypothesis

from the point of view of morals: the problem of evil

and of the responsibility of the creator—Attempts

to save optimism—Hypothesis of a God creating free

agents, “workmen” and not “work”—Reciprocal determinism

and the illusion of spontaneity—Immorality of the

temptation—Hypothesis of the fall, its impossibility—God

the tempter—Lucifer and God—2. Probable fate of the

notion of Providence—Hypotheses to explain a special

Providence and miracles thus insufficient—Hypothesis of

a non-omnipotent God proposed by John Stuart Mill—The

God of Comtism—Religion should be not solely human but

cosmic—The fate of the philosophical idea of God—Rational

religion proposed by the neo-Kantians—Ultimate

transformation of the notion of Divinity and of

Providence—Human Providence and progressive Divinity in

the world.

_I. Introduction—Progress of metaphysical hypothesis._

[Sidenote: Trend visible in metaphysical speculation.]

To say that humanity, in its search for a plausible explanation

of the world, finds itself in the presence of a great number of

hypotheses among which it must choose does not mean that these

hypotheses should be regarded with a benevolent neutrality, that they

are equivalent in the eyes of reason. Far from it: we believe that

metaphysical hypotheses already are following a certain general

direction and will continue to do so in the future. Our conception

of the unknown will become precise as our knowledge of the knowable

becomes complete. Even morals, which vary so markedly from country to

country, tend to approach a single type and to become identical among

all civilized peoples. The same may be said of the practical part of

all religions. Rites become every day simpler, and dogmas do the same,

and metaphysical hypotheses will do the same. By the progress of human

thought, the avenues that lead to truth will be better known. We regard

it as certain, for example, that all effort will be abandoned, if it

has not been abandoned already, to conceive mankind’s ideal as embodied

in the jealous and evil God of the Bible.

[Sidenote: Number of metaphysical hypotheses not destined to decrease.]

The angle at which different human beings look out upon the ideal

will continually diminish; and as the angle diminishes, the power of

vision will increase, and this unexpected result will follow: that

metaphysical hypotheses concerning the world, and its destiny will

never be less numerous nor less varied, in spite of the increasing

convergence. Human thought may even become more personal, more

original, fuller of delicate distinctions, and at the same time less

inconsistent as one passes from mind to mind. As mankind approximates

the truth its details will become more various, and the beauty of

the whole more marked. An approach to certitude augments the dignity

and probability of the possible hypotheses without diminishing their

number. Astronomy, for example, has increased the sum of the known

truths about celestial bodies and at the same time multiplied the

number of possible hypotheses concerning them; the most definite

knowledge may thus be the most fertile in views of every sort, even

of obscure ones. As the human mind progresses it will see the aspects

of nature diversify and the laws of nature unify. This evening from

Sermione, the peninsula dear to Catullus, I saw on the surface of Lago

di Garda the reflection of as many stars as I could have seen had

I lifted my eyes to heaven. Each star reflected in the lake was in

reality nothing but a brilliant drop of water, close to my hand; each

of the stars in heaven is a world separate from me by an infinite

reach of space; the stars of heaven and of the lake were, however, to

me the same. The real distance of things and the depth of the universe

escape the human eye. But science corrects the eye, measures distances

at their just worth, probes ever deeper into the vault of heaven,

distinguishing objects from their reflections. Science takes account

at once of the place of the ray in the water and of its origin in the

sky. It will perhaps one day discover, in an infinitely magnified

expanse of thought, the primitive and central spring of light which as

yet communicates with us only by reflection and broken rays and flying

scintillations from some unstable mirror.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Moralism.]

Since the Stoics and Kant, metaphysical hypotheses have come to be

regarded from a new point of view. What to-day has come to be the

great charm of such hypotheses is that they endeavour to lend a moral

significance to the world, to impress upon the course of universal

evolution a direction conformable to that of our conscience as

affectionate and sociable beings. The future history of religion may

be summed up in this law: that religious dogmas, transformed at first

into simple metaphysical conjectures, reduced later to a certain number

of definite hypotheses, among which the individual made his choice on

increasingly rational grounds, ultimately came to bear principally on

the problem of morals. Religious metaphysics, in effect, will result in

a transcendental theory of universality, an ideal sociology embracing

in its sweep all the beings that constitute the universe; and this

sociology will be founded, not upon physical inductions, like that

of the earliest religions, nor upon ontological inductions like that

of the first system of metaphysics, but upon the moral conscience of

mankind. Animism, theism, pantheism, are destined to fall under the

domination of what may be called moralism.

[Sidenote: Increasing interest in moralism.]

Such diverse solutions as may be given of the moral problem thus

understood will always interest mankind, but they will occupy a

smaller and smaller place in its practical life; they will lose the

extraordinary influence that religions have often possessed over

the conduct of men. As society progresses the moral agent will find

less and less need to appeal for support in the conduct of life to

metaphysical hypotheses and systematic uncertainty. Positive morality

will more and more completely suffice for the ordinary exigencies of

life. Generosity of heart will be less dependent on the intelligence

for its adventurous impulses; it will produce them unassisted.

Metaphysical speculations will tend to become, like the highest

æsthetic products, a luxury; they will be sought for their own sakes,

and for the general elevation of mind that they bestow, rather than for

guidance in particular matters of conduct. The destiny of the world

will interest us quite apart from any question of our own destiny, and

our voyages into the unknown will be prompted not by selfishness but by

disinterested curiosity.

[Sidenote: And in reflective rectitude.]

We do not believe, however, with Mr. Spencer that the part to be

played by the reflective conscience in human life is destined to

diminish, nor that man will come to do what is right in obedience to

a blind instinct—to rush into the fire or throw himself into the

water to save the life of a fellow-creature almost as irreflectively

as he would lift his hat to a friend in the street. On the contrary,

man will become more and more reflective and philosophical in all

things, and among others, in regard to the directing principles of

his conduct. And there is no room in all this for the belief that the

dissolving influence exercised by reflection upon primitive instincts

will seriously hinder the growth of the social instinct. Intelligence

paralyzes instincts only when it is obliged to oppose them, when it

does not justify them, when it aims really at displacing them.[129]

But speculative thought will always justify social instinct, even

considered purely from the scientific and positive point of view. As

we have shown, the most extraordinary manifestation of the social

instinct, devotion, belongs to the general law of life, and does not

in the least possess the abnormal character that has sometimes been

attributed to it; to run a risk for someone else is not to be purely

unselfish, for one is attracted by the sublimity of danger and of risk,

and a capacity for this attraction has been developed and rendered

powerful by natural selection in the higher species of the animal

kingdom; the desire to expose one’s self is almost normal in a morally

well-constituted individual. In morals as in æsthetics sublimity is

allied to beauty.[130] The speculative instinct will, therefore,

not counteract the social instinct; it will rather fortify it, and

human disinterestedness generally, for speculation itself is the most

disinterested act of the mental life. Generally speaking, reflective

conscience is always more disinterested than irreflective action, which

is typified in reflex action; it is less directly useful to life on

its simplest terms. Parallel to the development of conscience and of

speculative intelligence there goes always a development of our moral

activity. The more truly intelligent a human being is the more active

he is; and the more active he is, the less self-sufficing he becomes,

the greater his need to live for someone else. Antisocial beings are

almost always mentally and physically dawdlers, who are incapable of

continuous mental or physical labour. Activity of mind must inevitably,

therefore, indirectly fortify the moral instincts. Sociality is

developed by thought.

[129] See upon this point the author’s _Problèmes

d’esthétique_, p. 139 (_De l’antagonisme entre l’esprit

scientifique et l’instinct_.)

[130] _Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation_, p. 215.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Possible to classify the diverse systems of future.]

Although by the progress of analysis the complication of the great

mental and moral hypotheses must increase, it is possible, even at

the present day, to foresee the main synthetic groups under which the

several systems will be classifiable.

[Sidenote: Present interest in such systems.]

This book is not a treatise on metaphysics: an exposition and criticism

of these systems will not, therefore, here be expected; but their

characteristic spirit, which has also been the spirit of the great

religions, is of interest to us here, and, for us, constitutes their

value. It is this spirit which is at once speculative and religious,

in the true sense of the word, that it is important, accordingly, to

elicit, and that wholly without dogmatical or polemical aim of any

kind. Absolute sincerity, impersonal and passionate sincerity, is

the first duty of the philosopher. To arrange the world according to

one’s personal preferences, to be on the lookout, not for the most

probable, but for the most consoling hypotheses, is to resemble a

merchant who should count his credits only when he is making up his

books and should indulge in none but consoling additions. The strictest

probity is demanded of him who balances the great book of life; the

philosopher should hide nothing either from others or from himself. We

shall endeavour, therefore, to set forth, what are in our judgment the

diverse aspects under which the knowable as a whole, and therefore also

the unknowable, or if you prefer, the great unknown, present themselves

to-day. We shall endeavour to interpret the great metaphysical systems

sympathetically, without, however, any illusions in regard to their

incompleteness and their errors. In a certain church in Verona sacred

texts are inscribed on the marble slabs of which the floor is composed;

they interpret and complete each other, and, however obscure at first,

gradually become plain as one advances under the high arched roof; thus

it is in life: the religious and philosophical beliefs in the midst

of which we live seem to us at first enigmatical and mysterious, we

trample them under foot without understanding them; but, as we advance,

we discover their hidden meaning, their naïveté, and their profoundity.

At every step in life a new perspective into the heart of humanity is

thrown open to us; to live is to understand, and to understand is not

only to tolerate but to love. Such love, however, is not incompatible

with clearness of vision, nor with an effort to transform and

ameliorate the beloved object; on the contrary, a really active love

ought to be, more than all else, a desire for transformation and for

progress. To love a being or a belief is to seek to make it better.

_II. Theism._

[Sidenote: Theism and religion distinct.]

The majority of people scarcely see any possible alternative to such

and such a determinate religion except atheism. The fact is, of course,

quite otherwise. Religious thought manifests itself in a hundred

forms; why should free-thought be restricted to a single conception of

the universe? I have known a multitude of free-thinkers who believed

more sincerely in the existence of God, in the immortality of the

soul, and, in general, in spiritual principles than a great many

professed worshippers. Were they right to do so? Was Voltaire, for

example, who based his affirmation of the existence of God upon the

splendour of a sunrise, somewhat naïve, and inclined to mistake an

emotion for a bit of proof? It makes little difference; what we wish

to set in relief is that faith in a priest is not necessarily part and

parcel of faith in a God, and that the disappearance of the former may

lend an increase of power and of refinement to the latter. No single

philosophic doctrine is to be regarded as standing alone in opposition

to the whole body of religions; religions and philosophies together

are all philosophic doctrines, all hypotheses, and none of them above

discussion. We say to the individual: “Weigh and choose.” And among

these hypotheses we include that of which modern religions constitute

the symbolic expression, theism. If the religious anomy which we regard

as the ideal implies the suppression of everything in the nature of an

external revelation, it does not on that account exclude a subjective

and personal intuition of divinity. Even mystics may find their account

in the religious individualism of the future. Intuition, however, in

metaphysics as in morals, is every day losing ground. The progress

of ideas will result in the gradual triumph of scientific induction

over alleged natural intuition, of probability over faith. Subjective

revelation will disappear as objective revelation is doing, and give

place by degrees to reasoning. Dogmatic theism, like all dogma, is

doomed; but what is purest in the theistic spirit may survive.

[Sidenote: God conceived as prime mover a superfluity according to

modern physics.]

I. Let us first consider the probable fate of the dogma of the Creator,

which belongs to the great Jewish, Christian, and Islamite religions.

Science follows the law of parsimony; nature economizes force, science

economizes ideas. The first economy to be undertaken might well relate

precisely to the idea of the creation. The author of the world may

be conceived as the universal motor. But the conception of cause as

a source of movement, or as a prime motor, is full of contradictions

and is becoming more and more foreign to modern philosophy. For the

conception of a first cause implies a pre-existing state of repose, and

repose is no more primitive and absolute than nothingness. Nothing is

in repose, nothing has ever been in repose. The most motionless atom

in the atmosphere describes in its vibration, according to Clausius,

four hundred and forty-seven metres a second in a space of ninety-five

millionths of a millimetre; it receives during this time four billion

seven hundred million shocks. The vibrating atom of hydrogen describes

one thousand eight hundred and eighty-four metres in a second. Repose

is an illusion of the human mind, and the conception of a divine first

mover is a second illusion based on the first. The eternal movement

that stirred the molecules of the primitive substance, later grouped

them into spheres, and the spheres began whirling of their own accord

in the ether without need of a preliminary push from the sacred beetle

(as the Egyptian legend has it) that rolls his sacred ball, which is

the image of the universe. Where, as Strauss remarked, Newton felt

called upon to assume a “divine first impulse,” and Buffon was obliged

to resort to the hypothesis of a comet colliding with the primitive

sphere and breaking it up into the fragments which now constitute the

earth and the planets, we need invoke nothing but the fixity of natural

laws. Since Kant, Descartes, and Laplace, we possess an approximate

explanation of the formation of the stars, which are alternately

produced and dissolved by the concentration and resolution of material

masses—are born to be “devoured,” as Kant said, in the abyss of

eternity. One and the same cause, resistance of the ether, explains the

agglomeration of nebulous matter into nucleï, and the slowing down of

the motion of the spheres thus formed, and the ultimate fall of these

spheres upon some neighbouring centre of attraction and the resulting

dispersion into nebulæ.

[Sidenote: And with physiology.]

More than that, by the progress of physiology and natural history,

the organic and the inorganic worlds have come to be conceived

as so closely related that a true explanation of the first would

probably include a true explanation of the second. The chasm that once

existed between life and what sustains life has been closed. If our

laboratories do not enable us to catch spontaneous generation in the

act, the reason is simply that their resources are not equal to those

of nature, that they have not the same means at their disposal, that

the so-called primitive beings that we endeavour to produce in the

laboratory are really not primitive. Men of science who have attempted

such experiments resemble the followers of Darwin who have tried to

transform an anthropoid ape into a human being. Nature permits of an

infinite convergence of forces upon a determinate point, that cannot

be realized in a laboratory. More than that, time, which we are always

inclined to neglect, is a necessary factor in the evolution of things;

what is natural is slow. To find the earliest stages of organic life,

as to find the early stages in the formation of a star, we must go far

back into the remote past.

[Sidenote: God conceived as a Creator worse than superfluous.]

If there is no necessity for the conception of God as a prime mover,

is there any necessity for the conception of God as the Creator of

the universe? A creative cause seems to the modern mind less and less

needed for the explanation of the world, for the fact of existence

stands in no need of explanation; what rather needs explanation is

non-existence. Death, repose, are all relative and derived. Death

implies life, and is itself only a provisional stage, an interval

between two metamorphoses. There exists no _punctum mortuum_, no

one really dead point in the universe. It is by a pure artifice of

thought that religions have conceived the universe as beginning in

annihilation, in death (which is a remote consequence of life), in

order to afford an opportunity for the intervention of a creative

power: creation is a resurrection following on a fictitious death.

[Sidenote: Nothingness an aspect of existence.]

The real state of the case is not that existence springs from

non-existence, but that non-existence is a simple aspect of existence,

or rather an illusion of thought. The notion of creation will be more

and more widely displaced by that of evolution and variation. Different

worlds are eternal variations on the same theme, the _tat tvam asi_ of

the Hindus tends to become a scientific variety. A substantial unity

of the world and the solidarity of all the beings in the world will,

undoubtedly, be more and more clearly demonstrated.

[Sidenote: God responsible for evil.]

The creation may be considered, since Kant’s time, as a demonstrably

indemonstrable and even inconceivable hypothesis; but Kant did not

stay to inquire whether the Biblical dogma of the creation will not

tend to appear to us increasingly immoral; a tendency which, according

to Kant’s principles, would suffice to cause it to be rejected in the

future. A doubt, which some thinkers of antiquity felt keenly, has come

to be widely diffused in our days; a Creator is a being in whom all

things find their reason and their cause, and who, consequently, is

ultimately responsible for everything. He is responsible for all the

evil in the universe. As the idea of infinite power, of supreme liberty

of action became inseparable from the conception of God, God was

deprived of every excuse, for the Absolute is dependent upon nothing.

Everything, on the contrary, depends on Him and finds its reason in

Him. In the last resort He alone is culpable; His work, in the manifold

series of its effects, presents itself to modern thought as one sole

action, and this action, like any other, is capable of being sat upon

in moral judgment; the author is to be judged by his work, the world

passes judgment on God. Well, as evil and immorality in the universe,

with the progress of the moral sense, become more shocking, it seems

that to admit the creation hypothesis is to centralize, to concentrate,

all the immorality of the world in one being, and to justify the

paradox: “God is evil.” To admit the doctrine of a Creator is, in a

word, to banish evil from the world to God, its primordial source; to

absolve men and the universe and accuse the author of both.

[Sidenote: Evil of denying the existence of evil to exculpate God.]

There is something still worse than referring the source of all evil

thus to a creative will, and that is, for the purpose of exculpating

the Creator, to deny the evil itself, and to declare that this world

is the best of all possible worlds. Such is the choice that Leibnitz

and the theologians made. Religions are obliged to apologize for

the universe, to profess an admiration for the divine plan; they

hold in reserve excuses for the existence of injustice, and labour

unconsciously to falsify the moral sense, in order to relieve God of

his responsibility.

[Sidenote: Doctrine that physical or intellectual evil are conditions

of well-being.]

Many hypotheses have been devised in the service of optimism to excuse

the Creator, without compromising the moral sense, and mankind’s

instinct for progress. Physical evil (suffering), intellectual evil

(error and doubt), have been declared to be a condition _sine qua

non_ of moral good; which would justify them. Moral evil would thus

remain the sole verifiable evil in the universe, and as moral evil

consists simply in evil intentions on the part of men, men alone, on

this hypothesis, would be responsible. The universe itself, that is

to say, would contain no evil except in the person of the man who is

purposely evil by his own free choice, and the possibility of moral

evil might be considered as a supreme condition of moral goodness,

the latter presupposing freedom of choice, a selection by the will,

and an alternative to be refused. The evil in the universe would thus

be compensated for by morality, suffering would be compensated for by

virtue, mistakes by good will. The world itself would be simply a means

of producing morality and, in its apparent imperfection, it would be

the best world possible, because its apparent imperfection would be

necessary to produce what is best in it.

[Sidenote: Doctrine that the dignity of the world lies in its

spontaneity.]

The world, it has been said, cannot be in every respect absolute,

for it would then be God; it must always be in the position of a

recipient; the less it receives—the more it acts in independence

of external aid, the more it develops from within, and the more it

approaches the Absolute, insomuch that the very poverty of the earth

constitutes its grandeur, since it is the condition of its real

wealth, a wealth not borrowed from another but acquired by its own

effort. Everything, therefore, becomes transfigured according to this

hypothesis, every suffering becomes a merit; God wished to create the

most spontaneous world possible, that is to say at bottom to create

as little as possible, to leave as large an initiative as possible to

his creatures. _Laissez faire_ is God’s device, as it is the device of

all good government. A small result, but obtained by spontaneity, is

superior to a greater result obtained by mechanical artifice. “Divine

art,” says a philosopher, in commenting on some doctrines of Plato,

“is infinitely superior to human art; it creates individuals who are

ends unto themselves and self-evolved. These individuals are not, as

Leibnitz believed, automata ... true perfection is autonomous. If God

is only a demiurge, he may be accused, and ought to be accused, of

being a bad workman. Is the world not full of unsuccessful attempts,

of unfortunate combinations, of ends either missed altogether or ill

achieved? The critics of Providence will always have enough to say, but

these unfinished sketches are the work not of God but of his creatures,

of the forces and individual souls that he has set in operation. In a

word God is not a workman who produces works, but a workman who creates

workmen.”[131] This formula sums up in a striking manner what may be

called transfigured optimism. The new hypothesis does not deny evil,

but, on the contrary, hastens to admit it; but by converting evil into

a consequence of spontaneity, it subordinates it to good itself, makes

it labour in the service of its opposite; the most fragmentary sketch

becomes respectable when it is a step, and a necessary step, toward a

masterpiece.

[131] A. Fouillée, _Philosophie de Platon_, t. ii. p. 639. See

also M. Secrétan, _Philosophie de la liberté_, and Vallier,

_L’Intention morale_.

[Sidenote: Criticised.]

The hypothesis in question is certainly one which, within the realm of

theism, may well continue to be long the most plausible. It gives rise,

however, to a great many difficulties. In the first place it assumes

the superiority of what is spontaneous to what is not; of what, so to

speak, does itself, as compared with what is done. Be it so, but in

what respect can beings in this world be said to lead a spontaneous

existence; in what respect can I be said to lead a spontaneous

existence? Am I not the result of a multitude of causes? I was born

and am maintained by the consilience of a multitude of little cellular

or atomic volitions. Should I be less than I am if I were the result of

a single volition, and that a divine volition? Over and above myself

there always exist my antecedents, the causes of me; my true cause does

not lie within the limits of myself: what difference does it make to

me, therefore, whether those causes lie within the universe or beyond?

Whether the world is the more or less harmonious work of a multitude of

blind spontaneities or the work of a single intelligent will, neither

diminishes nor increases the value of any given individual that is the

product of the world. My ancestors are indifferent to me the instant I

become dependent upon ancestors at all. Should the statue of Pygmalion

reproach the sculptor with having made it beautiful, and having made it

with his own hands, and definitively fashioned it for life? Providing

it lives and is happy, it matters little whence its life comes.

Obscurity lies behind, light and life lie before, and it is forward

that one’s face is set.

[Sidenote: Results in determinism.]

In the new Platonic hypothesis, transfigured as above, the organization

of the individual always becomes, in the last resort, the work of a

reciprocal determinism. According to the ordinary hypothesis, it is

the work of a single, absolute, determining will; but the absolute or

relative character of the determining principle in nowise affects the

nature of what is determined. The actual world is no more passive,

if it is produced directly by the operation of the first cause, than

if it is produced indirectly by the intermediation of a multitude

of derivative causes, even if these causes present individually the

character of spontaneity. After all, since the individual must always

be solidary, solidarity between it and divine perfection is preferable

to solidarity with derivative imperfection.

[Sidenote: And contradicts itself.]

There is, however, in the Platonic and Aristotelian notion of

spontaneity an element of profundity and of verisimilitude, but it

leads precisely to the refutation of the doctrine of creation: once

carry the hypothesis of the spontaneity of existence to its ultimate

conclusion, and the original fund of existence must be impoverished

until nothing but nude unqualifiable substance be left; but that is to

say, one must go back to Aristotle’s pure force, to Hegel’s pure being,

which is identical with not being; the masterpiece of spontaneity

would be self-creation. The instant such a spontaneity is possible God

is a superfluity; it is easier to say that becoming arose out of the

identity of being and not being, or rather that becoming is eternal on

its own account. Becoming thus becomes God and theism becomes atheism

or pantheism.

[Sidenote: Summary.]

To sum up, the Creator unable to create bare, virtual substance, must

have created beings endowed with some real quality; but, if so, they

are once for all his works and not simply independent workmen. More

than that, such a substance with such qualities once created, such and

such effects necessarily follow; qualities are determinations which

determine subsequent determinations in their turn. Behold therefore the

present, big with the future. The world becomes a determined succession

of “works” which develop fatally from their earliest stage.

[Sidenote: Doctrine that God has created beings free to choose

criticized.]

M. Secrétan will tell us that God simply created free wills but not

substances; but it must be confessed that these free wills have been

immersed in a deterministic universe which leaves them little liberty

of action. Why, therefore, did He not create us freer and still

freer and as free as Himself? But we should have been gods, it is

objected:—so much the better, might be replied; there could not be

too many gods; we do not see why God should have reduced himself to

a unity, “as if the laws of number constituted a limitation of His

power.”[132] It does not appear why the Creator should be unable to

create a double of Himself; why He should be obliged to hand on the

divine life, that He wishes to share, on lower terms only; we do not

see why God’s productivity should involve a certain degeneration.

[132] M. Fouillée has effectively stated this in his _Systèmes

de morale contemporains_, where he in some measure attacks the

hypothesis that he had incidentally proposed in his commentary

on Plato.

[Sidenote: A maximum of liberty.]

In any event, in default of other attributes, we ought to be given the

maximum of possible liberty; admitting that we could not be created

free and equal to God, our liberty should differ from His by a minimum.

This minimum, being susceptible of infinite diminution, might become

less than any conceivable difference; it might become, that is to say,

infinitely little, practically zero; but we are far from any such

exalted station, and if God gave us liberty He was very miserly about

it.

[Sidenote: An abuse of language to call us free.]

To say the truth, it is only by an abuse of language that any such

ideal liberty is ascribed to us as is attributed to God, and regarded

as of infinite value. The freedom that religion ascribes to us is

freedom of the will, power to do evil or good, a power the very

consequence of which is irreconcilable with the notion of God. Without

entering upon a consideration of what such a power would be and of its

moral worth, why does our free-will exist in the midst of conditions so

unfavourable to it, so calculated to render it ineffective? The sole

response is the classic theory of the temptation. The temptation, as

an explanation of the world, practically involves the hypothesis of a

father exposing his children, as a means of testing their virtue, to

temptations of vice and crime, and knowing beforehand that they will

succumb. Morally, the conception is simply inadmissible; is worthy of

the distant times when hearts were harder than they are to-day. More

than that, the only beings that could in any proper sense be put to

the proof are truly conscientious beings, for they alone are capable

of entertaining a moral alternative. A reflective conscience is so

rare in the world! By virtue of what temptation resisted are minerals

and vegetables permitted to exist in unconsciousness and sleep, while

animals are torn by the miseries of life and death without being able

to convert their sufferings into a confirmation of the moral will or

amelioration of their lot?

[Sidenote: Doctrine of the fall.]

The supreme resource of Christianity and of religions generally is

the doctrine of the fall, but this explanation of evil as the result

of a primitive imperfection is an explanation of evil by evil. The

fall must have been preceded by some defect in the will itself, or

the will would not have failed. Original sin is not an ultimate; one

does not stumble if there is no obstacle in the way, and one’s legs

are well made, and one is walking in the eye of the Lord. Sin involves

temptation, and the doctrine of the temptation necessarily implies

that God was the first tempter; morally, it was God himself who fell

in the fall of His creatures by Him planned. To explain original

sin, which is the root of all sin, the sin of Lucifer, theologians

have resorted not to a temptation within the realm of sense, but to

a temptation within the realm of intelligence. It was by pride that

the angels fell. Their sin rose thus out of the very centre of their

minds. But pride is incidental only to short-sightedness. Complete

science is aware of its own limitations. Pride, therefore, results from

insufficiency of knowledge. The pride of the angels was due to God. One

may have reasons for wishing to do and for doing evil, but reasons do

not hold in the face of reason itself. If, according to the partisans

of free-will, human intelligence is capable by virtue of pride and

inner perversity of creating out of nothing motives for evil-doing, it

is at least incapable of so doing except in so far as its knowledge

is limited, ambiguous and uncertain. Practically, nobody hesitates

except in the absence of absolute knowledge. There is no such thing

as rationally and consciously flying in the face of reason. Lucifer

was, therefore, by his very nature impeccable. The will to do evil is

borne of the opposition which an imperfect intelligence fancies it

perceives, in a world hypothetically perfect, between its own advantage

and the advantage of everybody else. But if God and his works are

really perfect, such an antinomy between the good of the individual

and the universal good, which even to the best human intelligences

appears provisional only, would _a fortiori_ appear so to one of the

archangels of the intelligence, to the Light-bearer of thought. To

know is to participate in the supreme truth, in the divine conscience;

to possess all knowledge would be to possess, among other things, the

moral insight of God; and how out the midst of all that divinity should

anything Satanic arise?

[Sidenote: God always responsible in the last resort.]

To-day, when a sin is committed among men and it cannot be traced

to any fault of education, or of environment, or of overwhelming

temptation, men of science look for the explanation among the ancestors

of the guilty person, in the conviction that they must be in the

presence of a case of atavism. No such explanation could exist in the

case of God’s firstborn. When the world was young and beautiful and

good, original sin was as wonderful as the first appearance of the

world itself; it was a veritable creation of something out of nothing.

Satan’s creation was superior to God’s. His moral _fiat nox_ was

greater in genius and creative power than God’s _fiat lux_. In effect,

every religious explanation of evil ultimately leads to the ascription

of it to God himself or to a being more powerful than God, and in

both cases equally the Creator is debased. That fact constitutes the

principal reason that compromises the creation hypothesis, properly so

called, for every philosophical mind.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Special Providence and miracles.]

II. The second notion of theism is that of Providence, which may

be either general or special. Along with the notion of a special

Providence governing the world from without, we have seen that the

notion of miracle must be included. The sole means by which these two

decrepit conceptions can be defended are the following: Conceive,

with Pascal, two worlds, a physical world and above it the moral

world enveloping it, and in places penetrating it. The points of

intersection, so to speak, between the moral and physical world are

miracles. They are not so much breaches in the laws of nature as

affirmations of superior laws. Such is the argument; but we reply

that the so-called superior laws are inevitably, in certain respects,

contradictory to those of nature, in the very respects in reference to

which the miracle has happened. One cannot, for example, suppose that

a saint, precipitated from the height of a rock, resists the law of

gravitation and floats up to heaven, without a manifest contradiction,

so far as natural laws are concerned; without a destruction, indeed, of

those laws. More than that, a moral law is such precisely in so far as

it differs in the lines of its applicability from natural law; just in

so far as a conflict between it and natural laws is inconceivable. Only

a natural law can suspend (and that apparently only) the operation of a

natural law.

[Sidenote: Attempt to limit its activity to the subjective side.]

It has been fancied that the difficulty about miracles may be done

away with by conceiving that Providence acts, not upon the material

universe, but upon human thought, by means of suggestion, inspirations

from on high, providential ideas; but contemporary science has

established so intimate a connection between motion and thought that

it is impossible to distinguish between an influence exerted in the

spiritual and an influence exerted in the material world. It is

hopeless to attempt to immaterialize Providence in order to save it.

The special intervention of Providence must be material or not at all.

[Sidenote: Universal Providence.]

The old conception of miracles and of the supernatural and special

Providence was therefore, in a certain sense, logical. Religions had

not been mistaken; they had perceived that the day Providence became

too exclusively universal religion would be absorbed in metaphysics,

and this result, in effect, will be produced in the future. Religions

have never supported the theory of a general Providence, and it is

certain that if a general Providence sufficed for the abstract reason

of a Malebranche, with his sense of order, symmetry, and law, it would

not suffice for the human heart, with its sense of justice and its

desire, if it is to sacrifice itself for God, to find in the God at

least a defender and a benefactor. A benefit loses its value as such

by being too indirect; humanity has little understanding of justice in

general which treats the individual as a means of securing the good of

the whole and sacrifices him at need—at least, for a time. Charity,

like justice, it seems to him, should be individual and special. A

universal Providence is so universal that no traces of it exist in

the details of life, and in especial in the particular evils and

sufferings which form so large a part of life. The God of Malebranche,

who is incapable of showing His effective benevolence to any of us

individually, is paralyzed, as Louis XIV. was, by His very greatness.

He is the sole being who cannot move without breaking a natural law,

and who consequently is condemned to eternal immobility. The least of

His interventions being a miracle, He cannot employ the means that

other beings employ without derogating from His dignity and His power;

so that God is reduced, if He is to remain God, either to standing

inert or to contradicting our intelligence. By that very fact He ceases

to be lovable, unless one pretend to love Him precisely for what He

cannot do, for the benevolence that He cannot show, as for the prayers

He cannot grant. Pity is the sole sentiment that can be roused in us by

a being who is so good that He cannot wish evil, and so powerless that

He is obliged to see nothing but evil accomplished in the world. No

human misery could be comparable to a divine misery like that. The very

height of suffering must be experienced by a God who should at once

be conscious of His own infinity and should feel the distance which

separates Him from the world which He has created. Only the clear and

profound vision of such a God could penetrate the abyss of evil to the

bottom, and it is He of all beings in the world who would suffer from

an eternal vertigo.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: God’s omnipotence.]

What is most unacceptable in the traditional notion of Providence is

the attribute of omnipotence. In the first place, divine omnipotence

is inconsistent with the existence of evil; in the second place, it

leads logically to the possibility of supernatural intervention in this

world, which, if it is to be of any service, must be special and not

general. To avoid these implications of the conception of Providence,

John Stuart Mill has conceived a superior and divine being who should

not be all-powerful. This being would be the principle of good, acting

in the universe according to natural laws, but hindered and retarded in

his action by these laws themselves, which bring suffering and death.

The existence of such a being once established, religion would be saved

and morality confirmed. Virtue would consist in a sort of co-operation

with this great unknown being, who is struggling against evil. The good

man would feel that he was aiding God and that God was aiding him in

so far as He found it possible.

[Sidenote: Non-omnipotent God.]

This amended conception of Providence is more admissible and more

reconcilable with the real and imperfect world that we are familiar

with. But it must be confessed that the amendment amounts to an almost

complete cancellation. If Providence is to be reduced thus simply to

one of the forces at work in nature, to the force that makes more or

less partially and provisionally for goodness, there is nothing to

distinguish it from the power that makes for evolution, from natural

selection, or from any other beneficent natural law. To personify such

laws is futile scientifically; and, practically, is it so very useful?

Or conceive the being as existent side by side with these laws and

watching their operation, but unable to contravene it; but so to do

is to return to the conception of an ineffective, immobile God. The

prime condition of existence for a God is to be good for something; a

non-omnipotent God soon comes to be an impotent God. The actual world

marks the extreme limits of the power of such a God, and at some stage

in the course of evolution the unconscious forces of nature, leagued

together against the principle of goodness, may succeed in paralyzing

it entirely.

[Sidenote: Is such a God to be conceived as eternal?]

More than that, is a non-omnipotent God to be conceived as eternal?

If not, He is in no very striking respect superior to man. His power

is so slight that He has not even been able to make it very clearly

manifest to mankind that it exists at all. Or if He is eternal, and

eternally present in all things, then His lack of power is growing and

becoming radical. One may in any event congratulate one’s self that a

blind and indifferent universe has, among all possible combinations,

fallen by chance into the one which constitutes our present world; but

a God who has pursued goodness conscientiously through a whole eternity

demonstrates His complete incapacity, if He has succeeded in producing

nothing better than such a miscarriage of the ideal as this universe.

The judgment that may fairly be passed upon the world is altogether

dependent upon the question who made it and who created life; if the

world is self-evolved, it may well appear to us as possessing a certain

beauty, as giving an earnest of better things; but if it is the work

of an intelligent will, present in all things, and persisting in its

designs throughout the eternity of the past, it is inevitable that

one should feel that this volition has not been possessed of great

power, that the importance of the victory is not in proportion to the

duration of the struggle, that such a God does not constitute a very

solid support, and that His existence is a matter of indifference to

the future of the universe. Is such a God more powerful than humanity,

or even so powerful? His eternity is but a proof of voluntary or forced

inaction; far from dignifying Him it debases Him. On the surface of

the earth there are many species of insects which were probably in

existence before the race of man. In the transparent amber that belongs

to tertiary strata may be seen the little corselet of the melipones

caught and held there these past five hundred thousand years. Are these

distant predecessors of the human race on that account more venerable?

* * * * *

[Sidenote: The religion of humanity.]

John Stuart Mill, a disciple of Auguste Comte, put forth this theory of

a non-omnipotent Providence, conceived on the model of the human will,

with a certain mental reservation; his real meaning was that for many

cultivated men such a being, labouring for goodness, according to the

utmost of its limited power, would be confounded with humanity, taken

as a whole. Humanity is, in effect, according to Comte, a great being

of divine aspirations, to whom one might, with all one’s heart, render

homage; in especial, if one leaves out of account the individuals who

are, properly speaking, only parasites, and do not co-operate for the

production of the common result, whom progress consists precisely in

excluding from society. Religion, on this theory, is the state of

spiritual unity resulting from the convergence of all our thoughts and

all our actions toward the service of humanity. This, as Mill said,

is a genuine religion, quite capable of resisting sceptical attack

and of undertaking the labour of the older cults. According to this

doctrine, Providence is simply humanity, looking after the interest of

its individual members. Such a Providence, regarded as one with human

volition, might assuredly be accepted by any philosopher; it marks, as

we shall see later, the extreme limit of which the development of the

notion of a Special Providence is susceptible, the point at which this

notion and the conception of human morality become one. The precept

to love mankind in God becomes transformed into the precept to love

God in mankind. For a philosopher who identifies God with his ideal,

both precepts are equally true and beautiful. We have ourselves shown

how the religious sentiment in the course of its evolution tends to

become one with the respect and love of humanity, and how religious

faith tends to develop into a moral faith, and a simple and active

hopefulness in the triumph of moral goodness.

[Sidenote: Criticised.]

John Stuart Mill’s and Comte’s ideas are thus shielded against

criticism so long as they are taken in a general and almost

metaphorical sense; but if they are to be interpreted literally and

made the basis of a cult and a religion of humanity, they are puerile

simply. Precisely because Providence can be realized by humanity, the

cult for Providence, with all its ceremonies, invocations, adorations,

which are manifest and ridiculous paganism, must be suppressed. Every

organism exemplifies a certain sort of Providence—even the social

organism, which is the equilibrium of the laws of life. The totality of

an organism is truly admirable, and one may readily understand how any

individual member, if he is endowed with consciousness, might admire

the whole to which he belongs; but how could he make it the object of

a cult? The cellules which constitute me might well be interested in

the preservation of what I call myself and help each other, and by

that very fact help me to that end, but they could not adore me. Love

of humanity is one thing, and idolatry of humanity, or sociolatry,

according to Comte’s term, is another. A really sincere and enlightened

love of humanity is the very opposite of such idolatry; would be

by it compromised and corrupted. The cult for humanity reminds one

of the antique, naïve cult for the family, for the lares, for the

hearth, for the sacred fire kept alive beneath the ashes. To preserve

respect and love to-day does not require a resuscitation of all these

superstitions; respect and love pass from heart to heart without need

of ceremonial as a medium. The Positivist religion, far from being a

step in advance, is a step backward toward the superstitious beliefs

which have been banished because they were useless, and consequently

harmful.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Religion must be cosmic.]

Religion ought to be not only human but cosmic, and such it will be by

the very nature of the case as the result of reflection. Theism will be

obliged, if it is to subsist at all, to confine itself to the vaguest

possible affirmation of a principle analogous to the soul as the

mysterious origin of the world and of its development. The essential

character of this principle must be that it is not really separate

from the world nor opposed to its determinism. Beliefs in the creation

and in a special Providence will give place more and more to belief in

some spontaneous action, which is essential to beings generally, and

in especial to those who are endowed with consciousness. Religion has

gradually come to be a metaphysics of immanent finality, consisting in

the single general proposition: the world possesses a significance, and

is making toward an end and aim of its own;[133] the world is a society

of beings who may come to discover in themselves an identity of moral

impulse.[134] God is the term by which we designate what renders the

movement of the world toward a state of peace, concord, and harmony

_possible_. And since for human intelligence the possible and the

real[135] are confused, a belief in the possibility of a better world

becomes the belief in something divine which is immanent in this world.

[133] Kant’s _Kritik der Urtheils-Kraft_.

[134] See M. A. Fouillée, _Les systèmes de morale

contemporains_.

[135] See Aristotle, _Metaphysica_, and Hegel’s _Logik_.

[Sidenote: Theism and atheism insensibly pass into each other.]

Between idealistic theism and atheism the distance may be

diminished _ad infinitum_. Many atheists, language to the contrary

notwithstanding, are already at one with theists, intoxicated with God.

If the actual existence of God be called in question, at least His

progressive existence, the progressive realization of an ideal, the

gradual descent of Christ from heaven to earth, may be admitted. The

presentiment of progress thus becomes merged in a sense of the actual

presence of the divine. The ideal seems to live and palpitate in the

world about one; it is as if an artist’s vision of his work should be

so intense that it should seem to float out of his brain and take its

place upon the untouched canvass before him.

[Sidenote: Theism must be furnished with a new vocabulary.]

The power of words is limited; there are shades and subtleties of

thought that cannot be expressed in language. What possible verbal

reply can be given to questions like those that Marguerite asks of

Faust? “It is a long time since thou wert at mass ... dost thou believe

in God?” “My beloved,” replies Faust, “who would dare to say I believe

in God?” ... “So thou dost not believe in Him?... Who would dare to say

that he does not believe when he listens to the voice of his heart,

when a sense of tenderness and happiness fills his soul? Pronounce

the first words that occur to thee. What difference what thou callest

it: happiness, heart, love, God? The feeling is everything, the word

is vain.” The deist philosopher who holds words cheap seems to the

superficial multitude to be simply a hypocritical sceptic; whereas the

rigid atheist displays the narrowness of a sectary. What is certain is

that the name of God has sometimes been associated with the greatest

of human conceptions, sometimes with the most barbarous. The theistic

hypothesis cannot continue to subsist unless it be freed once for all

from puerile and gross associations.

[Sidenote: Rational religion.]

It is toward this consummation that theism, at its best, and in

particular what Kant calls religion, within the limits presented by

reason, is tending. It merits a special examination.

[Sidenote: Neo-Kantianism.]

The neo-Kantian religion ascribes the supreme place to moral goodness

as the directing principle of every reasonable will. From that

premise the neo-Kantians deduce “moral liberty” as the condition of

goodness. For goodness, in their judgment, is simply freedom conceived

as appearing to itself in its intellectual purity, and dominating

the phenomenal self. Freedom thus conceived occupies a place above

phenomena, which belong essentially to necessity and to determinism.

Kantians found also implied in the notion of absolute liberty, subject

to the condition of time, the attribute of eternity. They say, with

Spinoza: “I feel, and I know that I am eternal; eternity is one with

divinity.” Is it not the eternal that all the nations of men have

adored? I feel God therefore present in myself. He reveals himself to

me in the moral ideal. But is this God that my conscience reveals to me

really myself? Is he each of us, and must one believe that the universe

in the last resort is, as has been said, a republic of free-wills—that

there are thus as many Gods as individuals, and that we are all Gods?

Or does this multiplicity of individuals and of personalities exist

only in appearance, and is the universe at bottom the expression of a

single will? Theism may choose between these two hypotheses—between

a sort of metaphysical and moral polytheism and a sort of monotheism,

and may subsequently arrange to its liking the relations which it may

suppose to exist between the absolute will and the world of phenomenon.

But a belief in a moral ideal does not in the least involve anything

more than a belief in something eternal and divine, as shaping the

universal course of things. One cannot bend it to the service of any

one determinate religion, rather than of any other. Within certain

limits, however, it may lend some support to the moral and religious

sentiments. The most acceptable form of theistic doctrine in the future

will, no doubt, be some moral philosophy analagous to that of Kant.

Kantianism itself, however, is too closely bound up with the notion of

duty, properly so called, and with the categorical imperative. It, like

Judaism, is a religion of law. Instead of the law, one will content

one’s self, in all probability, in the future, with an ideal conceived

as supreme above all things, and as exercising upon our thought and

will the highest attraction that can be exercised by what has been

called the power of an ideal.[136]

[136] See the criticism of Kantianism in the _Systèmes de

morale contemporains_, by M. Alfred Fouillée.

[Sidenote: Belief consists not in worship, but in action.]

A belief in the divine will then no longer consist in passive

adoration, but in action. A belief in Providence will no longer

consist in a justification of the existing world and of its evils in

the name of the divine intention, but in an effort to introduce by

human intervention a greater amount of justice and of goodness into

the world. We have seen that the notion of Providence was based among

ancient peoples on the conception of an exterior finality, forcibly

imposed upon things, of a secret and transcendent aim, which the

universe was warped to serve by force of some unknown will. With such

a theory of things, man was incessantly checked in his activity,

since he conceived it to be impossible to prevent the course of the

world from achieving its aim. The world seemed to him to be organized

definitively; he had no hope, except in prayer and miracle; everything

about him seemed to him to be sacred; the inviolability of nature

was both a principle and a consequence of the notion of Providence

thus understood. And, as we have seen, science was long regarded as

sacrilegious. It created both surprise and scandal to see science

intervene in the affairs of this world, disturbing everything, changing

the direction of natural forces, transforming the divine rulers of the

world into humble ministrants to human wants. In our days, however,

science is coming to be more and more held in honour. For the past

century nature has been, to the best of human ability, turned upside

down. Humanity’s long quietism has been succeeded by a feverish

activity. Everybody wishes to lend a hand in the universal mechanism,

and to contribute his part in the modification of the direction of the

whole; everybody wishes to bend things to his own views, and to become,

so far as in him lies, a minor Providence.

[Sidenote: Increasing power of mankind in the universe.]

Just as the individual is coming to feel himself more and more a

citizen of the state, so he is coming to feel himself more and more a

citizen of the universe, inseparably bound by relations of cause and

effect with the universal sum of phenomena. He recognizes that there

is nothing in the world that does not concern him, and that on every

side he can exert an influence, great or small, and leave his mark on

the great world. He perceives with astonishment the extent of the power

of his will and intelligence. Just in so far as his rational faculties

establish a connection between phenomena, they establish by that very

fact a connection between phenomena and himself, and he no longer

feels himself alone in the universe. Since, according to a celebrated

theory, the centre of the world is in each and every distinct being,

it follows that if this centre were exhaustively self-conscious it

would see all the rays in infinite space focussing in it, and all the

chains of phenomenal causation meeting in it, and the effects of its

volition stretching out into infinity, and its every action possessing

an influence upon the totality of things. It would perceive itself to

be a sort of universal Providence.

[Sidenote: A consequence of liberty of thought.]

If human beings are not so exhaustively self-conscious as all that,

the progress of science is carrying them forward in that direction.

A portion of the government of nature is in our hands, some part of

the responsibility for what takes place in the universe is on our

heads. At the beginning man conceived himself as living in a state of

dependence on the world, in a state which ancient religions symbolize;

at present he perceives that the world is equally dependent upon him.

The substitution of a human providence for the omnipresent influence of

a divine providence might be given as being, from this point of view,

the formula of progress; the increasing independence of mankind, in the

face of the natural universe, will thus result in an increasing inner

independence, in a growing independence of mind and thought.

[Sidenote: Mankind to be its own special providence.]

The vulgar conception of a special and exterior providence which, as

we have seen, is so closely bound up with the conception of man’s

place in the universe as one of subjection—nay, even the most refined

conception of providence as transcendent and distant and as assigning

to each being its determinate place in the totality of things—may

thus, without ground of regret, be displaced in the mind of humanity.

We shall some day perceive that we are stronger when we stand on our

feet, shoulder to shoulder, hand in hand, than when we kneel with bowed

heads and implore the unfeeling sky. Among the ancient Germans, when

one of the faithful was about to enter a sacred forest he had his hands

bound together as a symbol of his subjection to the gods; if he had

the misfortune to fall as he was making his way into the forest, he did

not dare to get up again; so to do would have been an affront to the

gods; he was reduced to squirming and rolling like a reptile out of the

immense temple. To this primitive conception of religious servitude,

the modern conception of mankind as free in the presence of its God,

of its beloved ideal, of its conceived work in the world, of its dream

of progress, is more and more opposed. Even at the present day a true

sense of the divine may be recognized by its giving man a consciousness

of his liberty and his dignity rather than his subjection; the true

gods are those who make us lift our heads higher in the struggle for

existence; adoration no longer consists in prostration but in standing

upright.

[Sidenote: Story of the anchorite.]

To borrow once more from the classic land of symbolism, from India,

whence our German or Gallic ancestors came, the great epic of Ramayana

tells us of a sainted and sage anchorite who exemplified in his own

person the whole sum of human virtue and piety. One day, confiding

in the justice of heaven, he was invoking Indra and the whole chorus

of the gods, and the gods were capricious and did not listen to him;

his prayer fell back from the heavens unheard. The man, perceiving

the indifference of the gods, was moved with indignation; and

gathering together the power that he had hoarded, by his sacrifices

and renunciation, and, feeling himself more powerful than his gods,

more powerful than Indra himself, began to issue forth commands to

the high heavens. And at his voice new stars rose and shone in the

crystal sphere; he said, “Let there be light!” and there was light;

he refashioned the world; his goodness became a creative providence.

Nor was this all: he conceived the notion of creating new and better

gods; and Indra himself was trembling toward his fall, for not even he

that commands the air and the skies shall prevail against sanctity.

Indra, the powerful, therefore hastened to yield and cried out to the

saint, “Thy will be done!” and he left a place in the heavens for the

new stars, and their light bears eternal witness to the omnipotence of

goodness, which is the supreme God and object of adoration among men.

CHAPTER IV.

PANTHEISM.

REVIEW OF THE PRINCIPAL METAPHYSICAL HYPOTHESES WHICH WILL REPLACE

DOGMA.—_Continued._

I. Optimistic pantheism—Transformation of transcendent Deism

into immanent theism and pantheism—Disanthropomorphized

God, according to Messrs. Fiske and Spencer—Diverse

forms of pantheism—Optimistic and intellectualistic

pantheism of Spinoza—Objections, Spinoza’s fatalism—The

moral significance that might be lent to pantheism by the

introduction of some notion of a final cause—Qualities

and defects of pantheism—Conception of unity upon which

it is founded—This conception criticised—Its possible

subjectivity.

II. Pessimistic pantheism—Pessimistic interpretation

of religions in Germany—1. Causes of the progress of

pessimism in the present epoch—Progress of pantheistic

metaphysics and of positive science—Penalties incident

to thought and reflection—Mental depression and sense of

powerlessness, etc.—2. Is pessimism curable?—Possible

remedies—The labour problem and the future of

society—Illusions involved in pessimism—Inexactitude

of its estimate of pleasures and pains—Quotation

from Leopardi—Criticism of the practical results of

pessimism—Nirvâna—An experiment in Nirvâna—Will

pessimistic pantheism be the religion of the future?

[Sidenote: Conception of God being disanthropomorphized.]

As theism becomes immanent, the personality of God comes to be more and

more vaguely conceived. It is the very existence of God’s personality

that pantheism either denies or confounds with that of the universe.

According to Mr. Spencer and Mr. Fiske, the movement which led

humanity to conceive its God anthropomorphically will be succeeded by

a movement in the opposite direction; God will be deprived of all of

His human attributes, will be disanthropomorphized. He will first be

shorn of His lower impulses, and then of everything which is analogous

to human sensibility; the highest human sentiments will be regarded

as too gross to be attributed to Him. Similarly with the attributes

of intelligence and will; every human faculty will in its turn be

abstracted and divinity, as it becomes relieved of its limitations,

will lose, one after the other, every item of its significance to the

intelligence; it will be conceived ultimately as a vague unity simply,

which eludes the forms of distinct thought. Pantheism lends itself to

this notion of an indeterminate and indeterminable disanthropomorphized

divinity. Nevertheless, the crudest and most naïve speculations,

anthropomorphism and fetichism, in Mr. Spencer’s judgment, contained

a part of the truth, namely, that the power that manifests itself in

consciousness is simply a different form of the mysterious power that

manifests itself beyond consciousness. The last result attained by

human science, Mr. Spencer thinks, is that the unknown force which

exists outside of consciousness is, if not similar to the known force

that exists in consciousness, at least a simple mode of the same force,

since the two are convertible into each other. So that the final result

of the line of speculation begun by primitive man is that the power

which manifests itself in the material universe is the same as that

which manifests itself in us under the form of consciousness.

[Sidenote: Pantheism.]

If pantheism goes the length of denying the personality and

individuality of God, it is by way of compensation inclined to

attribute a sort of individuality to the world. In effect, if God is

present in every atom of the universe, the universe is a veritable

living being possessing an organic unity, and developing, like an

embryo, according to a determinate law. What distinguishes pantheism

from this point of view is, therefore, the substantial unity that it

ascribes to the world.

[Sidenote: Different forms of pantheism.]

But, of course, pantheism is a very indefinite doctrine, susceptible

of many interpretations according to the manner in which the universal

energy, the omnipresent unity, and in especial, the fundamental ground

of its activity, which some regard as determinism simply and others as

the orderly achievement of a final cause, are conceived. Nay, more;

both necessity and the orderly achievement of a final cause may be

conceived optimistically or pessimistically.

_I. Optimistic pantheism._

[Sidenote: Spinozism.]

The first kind of pantheism, then, that which conceives a single

substance as developing in an infinity of modes with no final cause

in view, may be typified by the purely intellectualistic pantheism of

Spinoza. This doctrine shows us, as existing in the totality of things,

the immanent logic which presides over its development. The essence of

human nature is reason, since reason is the essence of man. The proper

function of reason is understanding, and to understand is to perceive

the necessity of things, and the necessity of things is nature, or,

if you will, God. Reason serves no other purpose than to enable us

to understand; and the soul, in so far as it employs reason, regards

that alone as useful which leads to understanding. To conceive the

absolute necessity of eternal nature is to conceive that which, being

subject only to the law of its own being, is free; it is, therefore, to

conceive eternal freedom. And by that very fact it is to participate

in eternal freedom, to identify itself with it. A consciousness of

necessity is thus one with the fact of freedom. Human thought thus

identifies itself with divine thought and becomes a consciousness

of eternity. This consciousness, which is supreme joy, is love of

God. The mystic Hebrew and Christian idea thus proves one with the

moral theories of antiquity in Spinoza’s vast synthesis. Intellectual

intuition is self-conscious nature; the intellectual liberty, as the

Stoics taught it, is consciousness of necessity, and nature possessing

itself; and mystic ecstasy, by which the individual is absorbed in

universal being, is nature returning to itself and rediscovering its

eternal existence beneath its passing modes.[137]

[137] See the chapter on Spinoza in the author’s _Morale

d’Épicure_, p. 230.

[Sidenote: An optimistic fatalism.]

The objection that moral and religious philosophy urged, and always

will urge, against Spinoza’s pantheism, considered as a possible

substitute for religion, is that it is an optimistic fatalism, that

regards everything as achieved by the mechanical and brutal operation

of efficient causes, and excludes the possibility of any conception of

final cause or of progress, properly so called. The evolution of the

modes of substance, even when it results in pain, death, and vice, is

divine; and the question arises, why this universe, which is alleged to

be perfect and incapable of progress, should not be wholly motionless,

and why this eternal, aimless agitation in the bosom of absolute

substance should exist?

[Sidenote: Fiske’s theory of a dramatic movement in the universe.]

In Mr. Fiske’s judgment, Spinozism is the only pantheism, properly so

called. The remark seems to us unduly to restrict the application of

the term. Every system of theism that involves the notion of a final

cause tends to become pantheistic when it denies the transcendence and

admits the organic unity of the universe, which is the _Deus vivens_,

the _natura naturans_, with a law of progress which is superior to

the necessary laws of pure logic and mathematics and mechanics. The

exclusion of any notion of the immanence of a final cause in things is

not essential to pantheism. One might even conceive a sort of moral

pantheism which should recognize a certain moral significance in the

world, or at least what Mr. Fiske himself calls a dramatic tendency

toward a moral dénouement. The instant men feel it to be a god that is

labouring in the universe, they feel, rightly or wrongly, reassured as

to the destiny of the moral ideal; they feel that they have an aim to

march toward, and seem to hear, in the shadow of things, a multitude

marching with them. They no longer have a sense of the vanity of life;

all life, on the contrary, becomes divine, if not as it is, at least as

it tends to be and ultimately will be.

[Sidenote: Criticised.]

This system, according to its partisans, may be regarded as an

induction which is justified by the modern doctrine of evolution.

Mr. Fiske even goes the length of saying that Darwinism has done as

much to confirm theology as to weaken it. Unhappily, nothing is more

problematic than such an interpretation of modern science. Science

reveals no element of divinity in the universe, and the process of

evolution, which results in the incessant construction and destruction

of similar worlds in an endless round, moves toward no conscious or

unconscious natural end, so far as we can discover. Scientifically,

therefore, the notion of a final cause of the universe may be no more

than a human conception, than a bit of abstract anthropomorphism. No

scientific induction can justify one in ascribing to the universe

as such a conscious purpose. And it is equally rash to conceive the

universe as a whole possessing a psychical and moral unity, since the

universe, as science reveals it to us, is an infinity in no sense

grouped about a centre. Materially speaking, the universe may perhaps

be regarded as the expression of a single power, but not as possessing

any moral or psychic unity. Whatever is organized, living, feeling,

thinking, is, so far as we know, finite, and the equivalence of forces

in the universe possesses nothing in common with the centralization

of these forces. It is, perhaps, precisely because the forces of the

universe are not moving in the same direction that the struggle and

contest which are the life of the world exist. Who knows but that for

the universe to become a unity and a total would involve its becoming

finite, involve the acquisition of a centre, and by that very fact,

perhaps, of a circumference which would arrest the eternal expansion of

matter and life in infinite space.

[Sidenote: No unity in the so-called universe.]

What constitutes the charm of pantheism, for a number of its followers,

is precisely this conception of unity in the world; but when one

endeavours to make the conception precise, it proves so evanescent

that it ultimately resolves itself into the absolute indetermination

of Hegelian Non-Being. The more one examines it, the more one asks

one’s self whether the unity that pantheism ascribes to the universe

is not as purely a bit of anthropomorphism as is the design that

pantheism attributes to the universe. The character of definiteness

and of totality that the universe seems to possess may be simply a

form that the human mind imposes upon the world of experience. Project

on a wall—the wall of Plato’s cavern—shadows of numberless confused

objects, of revolving atoms and formless clouds, and they will all

fall into some certain figure; will look like the fantastic shadow of

certain human constructions: will present the outline of towers and

cities, animals and what not. The unity and figure of the world are

perhaps simply of the same nature. Apart from our conception of it, the

world is perhaps infinite, and infinity can never mean anything else

to the human mind than formlessness, for we are, by the very nature of

the case, unable to describe its contours. The unity of the world is

perhaps realized only in our minds; it is, perhaps, only from our minds

that the mass of things obtain such unity as they seem to possess.

Neither the world nor humanity are totals except in so far as we think

of them as such, and act upon them, and group them about our thought

and action as a centre.

[Sidenote: Summary.]

To sum up, if the need of unity seems to justify pantheism, this

need receives, at least, but an illusory satisfaction in the two

principal forms of pantheism, and, in especial, in the deterministic

form. Either the primordial and finite unity of the world is abstract

and indeterminate and therefore purely subjective; or it becomes

determinate in attributes which are as human as those of the god of

atheism. The will which Schopenhauer makes the basis of his system

is either the human will or simply force (which itself is human or

animal), or the sense of effort, or, finally, pure abstraction.

The same is true of the eternal force which Mr. Spencer regards as

immanent in the universe. Such conceptions are more meagre in content

but not necessarily more objective than those of the God of love, the

World-Spirit, the World-Thought.

_II. Pessimistic pantheism._

[Sidenote: Pessimism.]

Pantheism has travelled from Spinoza’s optimism to Schopenhauer’s

pessimism; its most recent form, and in some respects one of its most

ancient forms. The pessimistic interpretation of religions with death

or Nirvâna regarded as the redemption, is making incessant progress

in Germany. Pascal long ago said: “Of all creatures that inhabit the

earth, the Christian alone avoids pleasure and willingly embraces

pain.” Germany, after having resuscitated Buddhism with Schopenhauer,

Von Hartmann, Bahnsen, is in a fair way to supply us with a sort of

pessimistic edition of Christianity which will far outdo Pascal. But

for evil and sin, religion would not have existed, Von Hartmann thinks,

and as evil is of the essence of existence annihilation is the sole

salvation possible. Bahnsen, in his philosophy of despair reaches an

analogous conclusion. The most interesting representative of the new

doctrine is Philipp Mainlaender, the author of the “Philosophy of the

Redemption” (Die Philosophie der Erclösing). He was the son of parents

of an exalted piety, and grandson of a mystic who died of nervous

fever in his thirty-third year, and brother of another mystic who, on

his arrival in India, was converted to Buddhism and died soon after,

exhausted by the intensity of his mental life. Mainlaender found his

Damascus in Italy; the heavens opened upon him in a bookshop in Naples

where he discovered the writings of Schopenhauer. After having composed

his system of pessimistic philosophy, he supervised the printing of the

first volume, and the day he received his first copy (March 31, 1876)

he hanged himself.[138] The sincerity of this pessimist’s conviction

cannot be denied, nor the power of abstract ideas implanted on a brain

prepared for them by heredity, and by the intellectual tendencies of

the times. Mainlaender regarded philosophy as some day destined to

replace religion, but the philosophy is to be pessimistic; Mainlaender

declared himself a Christian even while he was founding a scientific

system of atheism. Freedom to commit suicide is the modern substitute

for the beautiful illusion of immortality. Salvation by death will,

Mainlaender thought, take the place of salvation by eternal life. The

tree of science will thus become the legendary fig-tree of Timon the

misanthrope, the branches of which were weighted every morning afresh

by the bodies of the dead, who had come in search of oblivion from the

evil of life, and had found it in self-destruction.

[138] See in the _Revue philosophique_, June, 1885, an article

by M. Arréat on Mainlaender.

[Sidenote: Must find the causes of pessimism.]

I. To estimate the value and probable duration of the pessimistic

sentiment, which has in some cases at the present day been identified

with the religious sentiment, one must first consider its causes.

[Sidenote: The growth of pantheistic metaphysics.]

Different reasons have brought about this transformation of pantheism,

which after having divinized the world, now inspires the individual to

dream fondly on his annihilation and reabsorption into the unity of

things. The first cause is the progress of pantheistic metaphysics.

After having adored nature as the product of immanent reason,

pantheists have come to regard it as a work of immanent unreason,

as the degeneration of an indeterminate and unconscious unity in

the misery and conflict of phenomenal selves, of conscious beings

condemned to suffering. At the very least, nature is indifferent to

man. Eternal force, which is so much spoken of to-day, is no more

comforting and reassuring to us than eternal substance. Right or wrong,

the metaphysical instinct, which is identical at bottom with the moral

instinct, demands not only the presence of life in all things, but of

life in pursuit of an ideal of goodness and universal sociality.

[Sidenote: Persistence of anthropomorphism.]

I was lying one day in the mountains, stretched on the grass; a lizard

came out of a hole and mistook my motionless body for a rock, and

climbed up on my leg and stretched himself out to bask in the sun. The

confiding little creature lay on me enjoying the light, untroubled

by any suspicion of the relatively powerful stream of life which was

flowing noiselessly and amicably beneath him. And I, for my part, began

to look at the moss and the grass on which I was reposing, and the

brown earth and the great rocks; was I not myself, after all, a lizard

simply as compared with the great world, and was I not perhaps a victim

of the same mistake? Was there not a secret life throbbing everywhere

about me, palpitating beneath my feet, sweeping forward confusedly in

the great totality of things? Yes, but what difference did it make if

it was simply the blind egoistic life of a multitude of atoms, each

striving for ends of its own. Little lizard, why have I not, like thee,

a friendly eye in the universe to watch over me?

[Sidenote: The progress of science.]