‘That does sound splendid. A race of men that has renounced all
illusions and has thus become capable of making its existence on the
earth a tolerable one! But I cannot share your expectations. And this,
not because I am the pig-headed reactionary you perhaps take me for. No;
it is because I am a sensible person. It seems to me that we have now
exchanged rôles; you prove to be the enthusiast, who allows himself to
be carried away by illusions, and I represent the claims of reason, the
right to be sceptical. What you have just stated seems to me to be
founded on errors, which after your precedent I may call illusions
because they betray clearly enough the influence of your wishes. You
indulge in the hope that generations which have not experienced the
influence of religious teaching in early childhood will easily attain
the wished-for primacy of the intelligence over the life of the
instincts. That is surely an illusion; in this decisive point human
nature is hardly likely to alter. If I am not mistaken—one knows so
little of other civilizations—there are even to-day peoples who do not
grow up under the pressure of a religious system, and they come no
nearer your ideal than the others. If you wish to expel religion from
our European civilization you can only do it through another system of
doctrines, and from the outset this would take over all the
psychological characteristics of religion, the same sanctity, rigidity
and intolerance, the same prohibition of thought in self-defence.
Something of this sort you must have in justice to the requirements of
education. For you cannot do without education. The way from sucking
child to civilized man is a long one; too many young people would go
astray and fail to arrive at their life tasks in due time if they were
left without guidance to their own development. The doctrines made use
of in their education will always confine the thought of their riper
years, exactly as you reproach religion with doing to-day. Do you not
observe that it is the ineradicable natural defect of our, of every,
culture that it imposes on the child, governed by his instincts and
intellectually weak, the making of decisions to which only the matured
intelligence of the grown-up can do justice? But owing to the fact that
mankind’s development through the ages is concentrated into a few years
of childhood culture cannot do otherwise, and it is only by affective
influence that the child can be induced to accomplish the task assigned
to it. And so this is the outlook for your “primacy of the intellect”.
‘And now you should not be surprised if I intervene on behalf of
retaining the religious system of teaching as the basis of education and
of man’s communal life. It is a practical problem, not a question of
reality value. Since we cannot, for the sake of the preservation of our
culture, postpone influencing the individual until he has become ready
for culture—many would never be so anyhow—and since we are obliged to
press some system of teaching on the growing child which shall have the
effect on him of a postulate that does not admit of criticism, it seems
to me that the religious system is by far the most suitable for the
purpose; of course just on account of that quality—its power for
wish-fulfilment and consolation—by which you claim to have recognized it
as an “illusion”. In face of the difficulty of discovering anything
about reality, indeed the doubt whether this is possible for us at all,
we must not overlook the fact that human needs are also a part, and
indeed an important part, of reality, and one that concerns us
particularly closely.
‘I find another advantage of religious doctrine in one of its
peculiarities, to which you seem to take particular exception. It admits
of an ideational refinement and sublimation, by which it can be divested
of most of those traces of a primitive and infantile way of thinking
which it bears. What is then left is a body of ideas which science no
longer contradicts and which it cannot disprove. These modifications of
religious doctrine, which you have condemned as half-measures and
compromises, make it possible to bridge the gap between the uneducated
masses and the philosophical thinker, and to preserve that common bond
between them which is so important for the protection of culture. With
it you would have no need to fear that the poor man would discover that
the upper strata of society “no longer believe in God”. I think I have
shown by now that your endeavour reduces itself to the attempt to
replace a proved and affectively valuable illusion by one that is
improved and without affective value.’
You shall not find me impervious to your criticism. I know how difficult
it is to avoid illusions; perhaps even the hopes I have confessed to are
of an illusory nature. But I hold fast to one distinction. My
illusions—apart from the fact that no penalty is imposed for not sharing
them—are not, like the religious ones, incapable of correction, they
have no delusional character. If experience should show—not to me, but
to others after me who think as I do—that we are mistaken, then we shall
give up our expectations. Take my endeavour for what it is. A
psychologist, who does not deceive himself about the difficulty of
finding his bearings in this world, strives to review the development of
mankind in accord with what insight he has won from studying the mental
processes of the individual during his development from childhood to
manhood. In this connection the idea forces itself upon him that
religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis, and he is optimistic
enough to assume that mankind will overcome this neurotic phase, just as
so many children grow out of their similar neuroses. These pieces of
knowledge from individual psychology may be inadequate, their
application to the human race unjustified, the optimism without
foundation; I grant you the uncertainty of all these things. But often
we cannot refrain from saying what we think, excusing ourselves on the
ground that it is given for no more than it is worth.
And there are two points that I must dwell on a little longer. First,
the weakness of my position does not betoken any strengthening of yours.
I think you are defending a lost cause. We may insist as much as we like
that the human intellect is weak in comparison with human instincts, and
be right in doing so. But nevertheless there is something peculiar about
this weakness. The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not
rest until it has gained a hearing. Ultimately, after endlessly repeated
rebuffs, it succeeds. This is one of the few points in which one may be
optimistic about the future of mankind, but in itself it signifies not a
little. And one can make it a starting-point for yet other hopes. The
primacy of the intellect certainly lies in the far, far, but still
probably not infinite, distance. And as it will presumably set itself
the same aims that you expect to be realized by your God—of course
within human limits, in so far as external reality, Ἀνάγκη, allows
it—the brotherhood of man and the reduction of suffering, we may say
that our antagonism is only a temporary and not an irreconcilable one.
We desire the same things, but you are more impatient, more exacting,
and—why should I not say it—more selfish than I and those like me. You
would have the state of bliss to begin immediately after death; you ask
of it the impossible, and you will not surrender the claim of the
individual. Of these wishes our god Αόγος[4] will realize those which
external nature permits, but he will do this very gradually, only in the
incalculable future and for other children of men. Compensation for us,
who suffer grievously from life, he does not promise. On the way to this
distant goal your religious doctrines will have to be discarded, no
matter whether the first attempts fail, or whether the first
substitute-formations prove to be unstable. You know why; in the long
run nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction
religion offers to both is only too palpable. Not even the purified
religious ideas can escape this fate, so long as they still try to
preserve anything of the consolation of religion. Certainly if you
confine yourself to the belief in a higher spiritual being, whose
qualities are indefinable and whose intentions cannot be discerned, then
you are proof against the interference of science, but then you will
also relinquish the interest of men.
Footnote 4:
The twin gods Αόγος-Ἀνάγκη of the Dutchman _Multatuli_.
And secondly: note the difference between your attitude to illusions and
mine. You have to defend the religious illusion with all your might; if
it were discredited—and to be sure it is sufficiently menaced—then your
world would collapse, there would be nothing left for you but to despair
of everything, of culture and of the future of mankind. From this
bondage I am, we are, free. Since we are prepared to renounce a good
part of our infantile wishes, we can bear it if some of our expectations
prove to be illusions.
Education freed from the burden of religious doctrines will not perhaps
effect much alteration in man’s psychological nature; our god Αόγος is
not perhaps a very powerful one; he may only fulfil a small part of what
his forerunners have promised. If we have to acknowledge this, we shall
do so with resignation. We shall not thereby lose our interest in the
world and in life, for we have in one respect a sure support which you
lack. We believe that it is possible for scientific work to discover
something about the reality of the world through which we can increase
our power and according to which we can regulate our life. If this
belief is an illusion, then we are in the same position as you, but
science has shown us by numerous and significant successes that it is no
illusion. Science has many open, and still more secret, enemies among
those who cannot forgive it for having weakened religious belief and for
threatening to overthrow it. People reproach it for the small amount it
has taught us and the incomparably greater amount it has left in the
dark. But then they forget how young it is, how difficult its
beginnings, and how infinitesimally small the space of time since the
human intellect has been strong enough for the tasks it sets it. Do we
not all do wrong in that the periods of time which we make the basis of
our judgements are of too short duration? We should take an example from
the geologist. People complain of the unreliability of science, that she
proclaims as a law to-day what the next generation will recognize to be
an error and which it will replace by a new law of equally short
currency. But that is unjust and in part untrue. The transformation of
scientific ideas is a process of development and progress, not of
revolution. A law that was at first held to be universally valid proves
to be a special case of a more comprehensive law, or else its scope is
limited by another law not discovered until later; a rough approximation
to the truth is replaced by one more carefully adjusted, which in its
turn awaits a further approach to perfection. In several spheres we have
not yet surmounted a phase of investigation in which we test hypotheses
that have soon to be rejected as inadequate; but in others we have
already an assured and almost immutable core of knowledge. Finally an
attempt has been made to discredit radically scientific endeavour on the
ground that, bound as it is to the conditions of our own organization,
it can yield nothing but subjective results, while the real nature of
things outside us remains inaccessible to it. But this is to disregard
several factors of decisive importance for the understanding of
scientific work. Firstly, our organization, _i.e._ our mental apparatus,
has been developed actually in the attempt to explore the outer world,
and therefore it must have realized in its structure a certain measure
of appropriateness; secondly, it itself is a constituent part of that
world which we are to investigate, and readily admits of such
investigation; thirdly, the task of science is fully circumscribed if we
confine it to showing how the world must appear to us in consequence of
the particular character of our organization; fourthly, the ultimate
findings of science, just because of the way in which they are attained,
are conditioned not only by our organization but also by that which has
affected this organization; and, finally, the problem of the nature of
the world irrespective of our perceptive mental apparatus is an empty
abstraction without practical interest.
No, science is no illusion. But it would be an illusion to suppose that
we could get anywhere else what it cannot give us.
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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
● Typos fixed; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.
● Used numbers for footnotes.
● Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.