The Non-religion of the Future: A Sociological Study

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Guyau Jean-Marie. The Non-religion of the Future: A Sociological Study

The Non-religion of the Future: A Sociological Study

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

Part First. THE GENESIS OF RELIGIONS IN PRIMITIVE SOCIETIES

CHAPTER I. RELIGIOUS PHYSICS

CHAPTER II. RELIGIOUS METAPHYSICS

I. Animism

II. Providence and Miracles

III. Creation

CHAPTER III. RELIGIOUS MORALS

I. The laws which regulate the social relations between gods and men

II. The moral sanction in the society which includes gods and men

III. Worship and religious rites

IV. Subjective worship—Adoration and love

Part Second. THE DISSOLUTION OF RELIGIONS IN EXISTING SOCIETIES

CHAPTER I. DOGMATIC FAITH

I. Narrow dogmatic faith

II. Broad dogmatic faith

III. The dissolution of dogmatic faith in modern society

CHAPTER II. SYMBOLIC AND MORAL FAITH

CHAPTER III. DISSOLUTION OF RELIGIOUS MORALITY

CHAPTER IV. RELIGION AND NON-RELIGION AMONG THE PEOPLE

I. Is religious sentiment an innate and imperishable possession of humanity?

II. Will the dissolution of religion result in a dissolution of morality among the people?

III. Is Protestantism a necessary transition stage between religion and free-thought?

CHAPTER V. RELIGION AND NON-RELIGION AND THE CHILD

I. Decline of religious education

II. Education provided by the state

III. Education at Home

CHAPTER VI. RELIGION AND NON-RELIGION AMONG WOMEN

CHAPTER VII. THE EFFECT OF RELIGION AND NON-RELIGION ON POPULATION AND THE FUTURE OF THE RACE

Part Third. NON-RELIGION OF THE FUTURE

CHAPTER I. RELIGIOUS INDIVIDUALISM

I. Is a renovation of religion possible?

II. Religious anomy and the substitution of doubt for faith

III. Substitution of metaphysical hypotheses for dogma

CHAPTER II. ASSOCIATION. THE PERMANENT ELEMENT OF RELIGIONS IN SOCIAL LIFE

I. Associations for intellectual purposes

II. Associations for moral purposes and moral propagandism

III. Associations for æsthetic purposes—Worship of art and nature

CHAPTER III. THEISM

I. Introduction—Progress of metaphysical hypothesis

II. Theism

CHAPTER IV. PANTHEISM

I. Optimistic pantheism

II. Pessimistic pantheism

CHAPTER V. REVIEW OF THE PRINCIPAL METAPHYSICAL HYPOTHESES WHICH WILL REPLACE DOGMA—Concluded. Idealism, Materialism, Monism

I. Idealism

II. Materialism

III. Monism. The Fate of Worlds

IV. The destiny of the human race and the hypothesis of immortality from the point of view of monism

INDEX

FOOTNOTES

Отрывок из книги

Jean-Marie Guyau

Published by Good Press, 2019

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But the partisans of “beneficent error” will object: Why endeavour to dissipate poetic illusion and to call things by their names? Are there not for peoples, for men, for children, certain useful errors and permissible illusions?[6] Surely a great number of errors may be considered as having been necessary in the history of humanity; but has not progress precisely consisted in restricting the number of these useful errors? There have been also organs in the body which have become superfluous, and have disappeared or been fundamentally transformed; such, for example, are the muscles which, no doubt, served our ancestors to move their ears. There exist evidently also, in the human mind, instincts, sentiments, and beliefs which have already atrophied and are destined to disappear or to be transformed. To show the deep roots that religion has sent down into the depths of the human mind is not to demonstrate the perpetuity of religion, for the human mind itself is incessantly changing. “Our fathers,” said Fontenelle, “made the mistake of hoarding up their errors for our benefit”; and in effect, before arriving at the truth, a certain number of false hypotheses must be tried; to discover the true is in some sense to have exhausted the possibilities of the false. Religions have rendered the human mind this immense service, they have exhausted a whole class of side-issues in science, metaphysics, and ethics; one must cross the marvellous to attain the natural, one must cross direct revelation and mystical intention to attain to rational induction and deduction. All the fantastic and apocalyptical ideas with which religion has peopled the human mind once possessed their utility, just as the incomplete and often grotesque sketches with which the studio of the artist is filled once possessed theirs. This straying of the human mind was a sort of reconnoitering, this play of imagination was a veritable labour, a preliminary labour; but the products of it must not be presented as final. The false and even the absurd have always played so great a rôle in human affairs that it would assuredly be dangerous to attempt abruptly to proceed without them; transitions are useful, even in passing from darkness into light, and one needs to become accustomed even to the truth. It is for that reason that society has always rested in a great measure upon error. To-day this portion of its foundation is being withdrawn, and conservatives are sadly frightened lest the whole social equilibrium be destroyed; but we repeat, this diminution of the number of errors is precisely what constitutes progress, and in some sort defines it. Progress in effect is not simply a sensible amelioration of life, it is also the achievement of a better intellectual formulation of life, it is a triumph of logic; to progress is to attain to a more complete consciousness of one’s self and of the world, and by that very fact to a more complete inner consistency of one’s theory of the world. In the beginning, not only moral and religious life, but civil and political life, rested upon the grossest errors, on absolute monarchy, divine right, caste, and slavery; all this barbarity possessed a certain utility, but its utility precisely consisted in its leading to its own extinction; it served as a means of handing us on to something better. What distinguishes the living mechanism from other mechanisms is that the outer springs precisely labour to cause themselves to be superseded; that the movement once produced is perpetual. If we possessed means of projection powerful enough to rival those of nature, we might convert a cannon ball into an eternal satellite of the earth, without its being necessary to impart movement to it a second time. A result accomplished in nature is accomplished once for all. A step forward if it is real and not illusory, and in especial if it is completely conscious, renders impossible a step backward.

In the eighteenth century the attack on religion was directed by philosophical partisans of a priori principles, who were persuaded that the instant a faith was proved to be absurd that was the end of it. In our days the attack is led by historians who possess an absolute respect for fact, which they are inclined to erect into a law, historians who pass a learned existence in the midst of absurdity in all its forms, and for whom the irrational, instead of condemning a belief in which it appears, is often a condition of its duration. Therein lies the difference between the attitude of the eighteenth century and that of the nineteenth toward religion. The eighteenth century hated religion and wished to destroy it. The nineteenth century endeavours to understand religion and cannot reconcile itself to seeing so charming an object of study disappear. The historian’s device is, “What has been, will be”; he is naturally inclined to model his conception of the future on his knowledge of the past. A witness of the futility of revolutions, he sometimes forgets that complete evolution is possible: an evolution which transforms things to their very roots and metamorphoses human beings and their beliefs to an extent that renders them unrecognizable.[7]

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