Читать книгу The Non-religion of the Future: A Sociological Study - Guyau Jean-Marie - Страница 4

Table of Contents

I. Sociality the basis of religion—Its definition.

II. The connection between religion, æsthetics, and morals.

III. The inevitable decomposition of all systems of dogmatic religion; the state of “non-religion” toward which the human mind seems to tend—The exact sense in which one must understand the non-religion as distinguished from the “religion of the future.”

IV. The value and utility, for the time being, of religion; its ultimate insufficiency.

I. We shall meet, in the course of this work, many different definitions that have at one time or another been given to religion. Some were assigned from the point of view of physics, others from that of metaphysics, others from that of morals, almost none from that of sociology. And yet, upon closer scrutiny, the notion of a social bond between man and the powers superior to him, but resembling him, is precisely the point in which all religious conceptions are at one. Man becomes truly religious, in our judgment, only when above the human society in which he lives he superimposes in his scheme of the world another society, more powerful and more cultured, a universal and, so to speak, a cosmic society. The sphere of sociality, which is one of the characteristics of humanity, must be enlarged till it reaches to the stars. Sociality is the firm foundation of the religious sentiment, and a religious being might be defined as a being disposed to be sociable, not only with all living creatures with whom experience makes him acquainted, but also with the creatures of thought with whom he peoples the world.

That religion consists essentially in the establishment of a bond—at first mythical, and subsequently mystic, in the first instance between man and the forces of the universe, then between man and the universe itself, and ultimately between man and the elements of the universe—is distinctly the outcome of every study of religion; but what we wish especially here to consider is the precise way in which this bond has been conceived. Well (it may appear more clearly at the close of this inquiry), the religious bond has been conceived ex analogia societatis humanæ: the relations, amicable and inimical, of men to each other were employed first for the explanation of physical phenomena and natural forces, then for the metaphysical explanation of the world, of its creation, conservation, and government; in short, sociological laws were universalized, and the state of war or peace which existed among men, families, tribes, and nations was conceived as existing also among the volitions which were fancied to exist beneath or beyond the forces of nature. A mythic or mystic sociology, conceived as containing the secret of all things, lies at the basis of all religions. Religion is not simply the expression of an anthropomorphism—animals and fantastic beings of various sorts have played no inconsiderable rôle in different cults; it is an imaginative extension, a universalization of all the good or evil relations which exist among conscious beings, of war and peace, friendship and enmity, obedience and rebellion, protection and authority, submission, fear, respect, devotion, love: religion is a universal sociomorphism. Social relations with animals, with the dead, intellectual and social relations with good and evil genii, with the forces of nature, are nothing more nor less than various forms of this universal sociology in which religion has sought to find the reason of things—of physical phenomena such as thunder, storm, sickness, death, as well as of metaphysical relations—the origin and destiny of things, and of moral relations—virtue, vice, law, and sanction.

If, therefore, we were forced to condense the theory of this book into a single definition, we should say that religion is the outcome of an effort to explain all things—physical, metaphysical, and moral—by analogies drawn from human society, imaginatively and symbolically considered. In short it is a universal sociological hypothesis, mythical in form.

To justify this conception we shall review the various definitions that have been put forth of the religious sentiment; we shall see that each of them needs completion by the rest, and that, too, from the sociological point of view.

The definition which has perhaps been most widely adopted of late years, with divers modifications by Strauss, by Pfleiderer, by Lotze, and by M. Réville, is that of Schleiermacher. According to him, the essence of religion consists in the feeling that we all have of our own absolute dependence. The powers in respect to which this dependence is felt we call divinities. On the other hand, according to Feuerbach, the origin, nay the essence even of religion is desire: if man possessed no needs, no desires, he would possess no gods. If grief and evil did not exist, says Hartmann later on, there would be no religion; the gods, even the gods of history, are no more than the powers to whom man looks for what he does not possess, and wants, to whom he looks for relief, for salvation, for happiness. The respective definitions of Schleiermacher and Feuerbach, taken separately, are incomplete; it is at least necessary, as Strauss suggests, to superpose them. The religious sentiment is primarily, no doubt, a feeling of dependence; but this feeling of dependence, really to give birth to religion, must provoke in one a reaction—a desire of deliverance. To feel one’s own weakness; to be conscious of limitations of all sorts which bound one’s life, and then to desire to augment one’s power over one’s self and over the material universe; to enlarge one’s sphere of action; to attain once more to a comparative independence in face of the necessities of every kind which hem one in—such is the course of the human mind in the presence of the universe.

But here an objection occurs: precisely the same course seems to be followed by the mind in the establishment of science. In a scientific period man feels himself as profoundly dependent as in a religious period, and this feeling of dependence is accompanied by a no less vivid reaction in the one case than in the other. The man of science and the believer alike aim at enfranchisement, but by different means. Must one be content, then, with an external and negative definition, and say with M. Darmesteter: “Religion embraces all knowledge and all power not scientific”?[1] A knowledge not scientific possesses all the attributes of a contradiction in terms, and, as for a power not scientific, it is indispensable to distinguish it in some positive way from the power which is afforded us by science. Well, to keep close to the facts, the power of religion is that which we frankly do not possess, while the power of science is that which we do possess and know that we possess. One might indeed fall back on the distinction between belief and certainty; but the man of science also has his beliefs, his preferences for such and such a cosmological hypothesis, which, however, is not a religious belief, properly so called. Religious and moral “faith,” as opposed to scientific “hypothesis,” is an ultimate and very complete manifestation of the religious sentiment, which we shall examine later, though it carries with it no suggestion of its primitive origin.

From the sociological point of view the distinction is plain. The religious sentiment begins at the point where mechanical determinism seems to offer an opportunity in the world for a sort of moral and social reciprocity—a possible exchange of sentiments and even of desires, between man and the powers of the universe, whatever they may be. That point once reached, man no longer conceives it possible to measure the consequences of an act—of using an axe, for example, on a sacred tree—in the exact terms of mere mechanical reaction; for over and above the simple brute fact of what he has done, the sentiment or intention that it indicates must be taken into account and the probable effect of that for good or evil upon the gods. Religious sentiment is a feeling of dependence, on the part of primitive man, in respect to the intelligences, the volitions, with which he has peopled the universe and which he believes capable of being affected agreeably or disagreeably by his conduct. Religious sentiment is not a feeling of mere physical dependence upon the universal frame of things; it is more than all a physical dependence, a moral, and in especial, a social dependence. This relation of dependence consists really of two reciprocal terms: if man is bound by it in some sort to the powers of nature, they in turn are bound by it to man; man has more or less of a hold on them, he can offend them morally, just as he might offend a fellow-man. If man is in the hand of the gods, he can in a measure force the hand to open or shut. The divinities are in a sense dependent also on man; they experience, as the result of his conduct, a measure of pleasure or of pain. It is only later that this idea of reciprocal dependence becomes metaphysical; it reaches its ultimate development in the concept of the “absolute,” and in the sentiment of adoration or simple “respect.”

Besides the consciousness of dependence and the correlative need of a liberation of some sort from it, we find in the religious sentiment the expression of another social need not less important; the need of affection, of tenderness, of love. Our sensibility, developed by hereditary instincts of sociality and by the force even of our imagination stretching out beyond the limits of this world, instinctively seeks for a person, a commanding figure to lean on, to confide in. When we are happy we need to bless some one; when we are wretched, we need some one to complain to, to groan to, even to curse. It is hard to resign ourselves to the belief that no one hears us, that no one a long way off sympathizes with us, that this swarming universe spins in the void. God is the friend with us at the first hour and at the last, with us always and in all places, even where no other friend can follow, even in death. To whom can we speak of those we have loved and lost? Of the people about us, some hardly remember them, others did not even know them; but in this divine and omnipresent Being we find the society, which is constantly broken by death, once more reunited: In eo vivimus, in Him we cannot die. From this point of view, God, the object of the religious sentiment, no longer seems a guardian and master simply. He is better than a friend; He is a father; in the beginning a severe father and all-powerful, as very young children imagine their fathers to be. Children readily believe that their father can do anything, even work miracles: a word from him and the world moves; fiat lux, and the day is born; the distinction between evil and good lies in his will; disobedience to him naturally involves punishment. They judge his power by their weakness; and so the primitive race of man felt toward God. But later a superior conception arose; as man developed he developed his God, endowed him with a more generous list of moral attributes; and this God is ours. We feel the need of a smile from Him after a sacrifice, the thought of Him sustains us. Woman especially, who is more immature in this respect than man, experiences a greater need of a “Father in heaven.” When one wishes to deprive us of a god, to deliver us from celestial tutelage, we suddenly find ourselves orphans. One might recognize a profound truth in the great symbol of Christ, the God, dying for the enfranchisement of human thought. This modern version of the “passion” is enacted, it is true, only in the heart, but it is none the less agonizing; it stirs one’s indignation none the less, it dwells in one like the image of a father who is dead. One cares less for the promised freedom than for the protection and affection that are gone. Carlyle—whimsical, unhappy genius—could eat no bread that his wife’s own hands, nay his wife’s own heart, had not prepared; and we are all like that; we all have need of daily bread kneaded with love and tenderness; and they that have no loving hand from which to look for it, ask it of their god, of their ideal, of their dream; they create for themselves a family in the realm of imagination, they fill out the bosom of infinity by the addition of a heart.

The social need for protection and love was evidently not so dominant in primitive times. The tutelary functions attributed to divinities were at first confined to the more or less vulgar accidents of this life. Later they were more especially directed toward one’s moral emancipation and extended even beyond the tomb. Need of protection and affection leads ultimately to considerations on the destiny of man and the world; and thus it is that religion, nearly physical in origin, issues in systems of metaphysics.

II. This book is intimately related to two others that we have published on æsthetics and on morals. We believe that the æsthetic sentiment is identical with self-conscious life, with life that is conscious of its own subjective intensity and harmony; beauty we have said may be defined as a perception or an act that stimulates life simultaneously on its three sides—sensibility, intelligence, will—and that produces pleasure by the immediate consciousness of this general stimulation. Moral sentiment, on the other hand, is identical, we believe, with a consciousness of the powers and possibilities in the sphere of practice of a life ideal in intensity and breadth of interest. The bulk of these possibilities relates to one’s power, in some form or other, of serving other people. Finally, religious sentiment appears when this consciousness of the social aspect of life is extended to the totality of conscious beings, and not only of real and living, but also of possible and ideal beings. It is, therefore, in the very notion of life, and of its various individual or social manifestations, that the essential unity of æsthetics with morals and religion is to be found.

In the first part of this work we shall trace the origin and evolution of sociological mythology. In the succeeding portions we shall consider whether, if we once set aside the mythical or imaginative element which is essential to religion and which distinguishes it from philosophy, the sociological theory does not offer the most probable, and most comprehensive, metaphysical explanation of the universe.[2]

III. It is important that there should be no misunderstanding in regard to this non-religion of the future, as contradistinguished from the multitude of religions of the future that have been recently expounded. It has seemed to us that these various expositions are based on a number of equivocations. In the first place religion, properly so-called, has sometimes been confused with metaphysics, sometimes with morals, sometimes with both; and it is owing to this confusion that religion has been conceived to be indestructible. Is it not by an abuse of language that Mr. Spencer, for example, gives the name of religion to speculations concerning the unknowable and thence readily deduces the conclusion that religion, by which he means metaphysics, possesses an impregnable stronghold in the human mind? In the same way many other contemporary philosophers, like Herr von Hartmann, the theologian of the unconscious, have not resisted the temptation of describing for us a religion of the future, which resolves itself simply into their own system, whatever it may be, of philosophy. Others again, especially among liberal Protestants, preserve the name of religion for purely rationalistic systems of thought. There is, of course, a sense in which one may admit that metaphysics and morals constitute a religion, or form at least the vanishing point toward which religion tends. But, in many books, the “religion of the future” is no more than a somewhat hypocritical compromise with some form of positive religion. Under cover of the symbolism dear to the Germans, they save in appearance what they in reality destroy. It is in opposition to this species of subterfuge that we have adopted the less misleading term of the “Non-religion of the Future.” Thus we separate ourselves from Von Hartmann and the other prophets who reveal to us, point by point, the religion of the fiftieth century. When one approaches an object of such ardent controversy it is better to employ words with exactness. Everything, first and last, has been included within the limits of philosophy; even the sciences, on the pretext that all scientific researches were in the beginning undertaken by philosophy; and philosophy, in turn, has been included in religion, on the pretext that originally religion embraced within its limits the whole of philosophy and of science. Given a religion of some kind, even that of the Fuegians, there is nothing to prevent one from reading into its myths the last dictum of modern metaphysics; by this means a religion may apparently continue in existence until there is no more left of it than a mere envelope of religious phraseology covering and discovering a wholly metaphysical and purely philosophical system. Better still, on this method, since Christianity is the highest form of religion, all philosophers must ultimately become Christians; and finally, since universality and catholicity are the ideal of Christianity, we shall all be Catholics before we are aware of it.

For the investigator who, without denying such analogies as may ultimately be found to exist, proposes to take as his point of departure the specific differences of religion (which is the true method), every positive and historical religion presents three distinctive and essential elements: (1) An attempt at a mythical and non-scientific explanation of natural phenomena (divine intervention, miracles, efficacious prayers, etc.), or of historical facts (incarnation of Jesus Christ or of Buddha, revelations, and so forth); (2) A system of dogmas, that is to say, of symbolic ideas, of imaginative beliefs, forcibly imposed upon one’s faith as absolute verities, even though they are susceptible of no scientific demonstration or philosophical justification; (3) A cult and a system of rites, that is to say, of more or less immutable practices regarded as possessing a marvellous efficacy upon the course of things, a propitiatory virtue. A religion without myth, without dogma, without cult, without rite is no more than that somewhat bastard product, “natural religion,” which is resolvable into a system of metaphysical hypotheses. By these three different, and really organic elements, religion is clearly marked off from philosophy. Also, instead of being nowadays what it was at a former period, a popular philosophy and popular science, mythical and dogmatic religion tends to become a system of antiscientific and antiphilosophical ideas. If this character is not always apparent, it is owing to the sort of symbolism of which we have spoken, which preserves the name and abandons the ideas or adapts them to the progress of the modern mind.

The elements which distinguish religion from metaphysics or from ethics, and which constitutes a positive religion properly so-called, are, in our judgment, essentially caducous and transitory, and, if so, we reject the religion of the future, as we should reject an alchemy of the future, or astrology of the future. But it does not follow that non-religion or a-religion—which is simply the negation of all dogma, of all traditional and supernatural authority, of all revelation, of all miracle, of all myth, of all rite erected into a duty—is synonymous with impiety, with a contempt for the moral and metaphysical elements of ancient faiths. Not in the least; to be non-religious or a-religious is not to be anti-religious. More than that, as we shall see, the non-religion of the future may well preserve all that is pure in the religious sentiment: an admiration for the cosmos and for the infinite powers which are there displayed; a search for an ideal not only individual, but social, and even cosmic, which shall overpass the limits of actual reality. As it may be maintained that modern chemistry is a veritable alchemy—but an alchemy shorn of the presuppositions which caused its miscarriage—as modern contemporary chemists may pronounce a sincere eulogium upon the ancient alchemists and their marvellous intuitions; just so it may be affirmed that the true religion, if the word must be preserved, consists in no longer maintaining a narrow and superstitious religion. The absence of positive and dogmatic religion is, moreover, the very form toward which all particular religions tend. In effect they strip themselves, little by little (except Catholicism and Turkish Mohammedanism), of their sacred character, of their antiscientific affirmations; they renounce the oppressive control that they have traditionally exercised over the individual conscience. The developments of religion and those of civilization have always proceeded hand in hand; the developments of religion have always proceeded in the line of a greater independence of spirit, of a less literal and less narrow dogmatism, of a freer speculation. Non-religion, as we here understand it, may be considered as a higher degree simply of religion and of civilization.

The absence of religion thus conceived is one with a reasoned but hypothetical metaphysics, treating of men and the universe. One may designate it as religious independence, or anomy, or individualism.[3] It has, moreover, been preached in some degree by all religious reformers from Sakia-Mouni and Jesus to Luther and Calvin, for they have all of them maintained liberty of conscience and respected so much only of tradition as, in the then state of contemporary religious criticism, they could not help admitting. Catholicism, for example, was founded in part by Jesus, but also in part in spite of Jesus; intolerant Anglicanism was founded in part by Luther, but also in part in spite of Luther. The non-religious man, the man simply without a religion, may therefore admire and sympathize with the great founders of religion, not only in that they were thinkers, metaphysicians, moralists, and philanthropists, but in that they were reformers of established belief, more or less avowed enemies of religious authority, of every affirmation which should be that of a sacred body and not of an individual. Every positive religion possesses as one of its essential characters that of transmitting itself from one generation to another, by virtue of the authority which attaches to domestic or national traditions; its mode of transmission is thus totally different from that of science and of art. New religions themselves are obliged more often than not to present themselves in the guise of simple reforms, in the guise of simple returns to the rigour of former teaching and precept, to avoid giving too great a shock to the principle of authority, but in spite of these disguises every new religion has shaken it; the return to an alleged primitive authority has always been a real outleap in the direction of ultimate liberty. There exists, then, in the bosom of every great religion a dissolving force; namely, the very force which served in the beginning to constitute it and to enable it to triumph over its predecessor: the right of private judgment. It is upon this force, this right, that one may count for the ultimate establishment, after the gradual decomposition of every system of dogmatic belief, of a final absence of religion.[4]

Over and above the confusion between the perpetuity of metaphysics and morals and that of positive religion, there is another tendency among our contemporaries against which we have wished to protest. It is the belief, which many profess, in the final unification of existing religions into a religion of the future, either a perfected Judaism, or a perfected Christianity, or a perfected Buddhism. To this predicted religious unity we oppose rather a future plurality of beliefs, a religious individualism. A pretension to universality is, no doubt, characteristic of every great religion; but the dogmatic and mythological element which constitutes a religion positive is precisely irreconcilable, even under the elastic form of symbolism, with the very universality to which they aspire. Such a universality cannot be realized even in metaphysics and morals, for the element of insolubility and unknowability, which cannot be eliminated, will always attract different minds in different directions. The notion of a dogma actually catholic, that is universal, or even a belief actually catholic, seems to us a belief contrary to the indefinite progress for which each of us ought to work according to his strength and his opportunities. A thought is not really personal, does not, properly speaking, even exist or possess the right to exist, unless it be something more than a mere repetition of the thoughts of somebody else. Every eye must have its own point of view, every voice its own accent. The very progress of intelligence and of conscience must, like all progress, proceed from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, nor seek for an ideal unity except in an increasing variety. Would one recognize the absolute power of the savage chief or the Oriental monarch in the federative republican government, which, after a certain number of centuries, will probably be that of all civilized nations? No; and yet humanity will have passed from the one to the other by a series of gradations sometimes scarcely visible. We believe that humanity will progress in the same way generally, from dogmatic religion with pretensions to universality, catholicity, and monarchy—of which the most curious type has precisely been achieved in our days with the dogma of infallibility—toward that state of individualism and religions, which we consider as the human ideal, and which, moreover, does not in the least exclude the possibility of diverse religious associations or federations, nor of free and continuous progress toward ultimate unity of belief on the most general subjects of human inquiry.

The day when positive religions shall have disappeared, the spirit of curiosity in matters of cosmology and metaphysics, which has been more or less paralyzed by an effort to dwell within the unyielding limits of indomitable formula, will be more vivacious than ever before. There will be less of faith, but more of free speculation; less of contemplation, but more of reasoning, of hardy induction, of an active outleap of thought; the religious dogma will be extinct, but the best elements of religious life will be propagated, will be augmented in intensity and extent. For he alone is religious, in the philosophical sense of the word, who searches for, who thinks about, who loves the truth. Christ might have said: I came not to bring peace into human thought, but an incessant battle of ideas; not repose, but movement and progress of spirit; not universal dogma, but liberty of belief, which is the first condition of growth.[5]

IV. To-day, when the very value of religion is increasingly called in doubt, it has been defended by sceptics, who support it, sometimes in the name of the poetry and beauty of religious legend, sometimes in the name of its practical utility. There is sometimes a reaction in the modern mind toward fiction and away from the reality. The human mind becomes weary of regarding itself as a too passively clear mirror in which the world throws its image; and takes pleasure in breathing on the glass and obscuring it; and thence it comes that certain refined philosophers raise the question whether truth and clearness are advantageous in art, in science, in morals, in religion; and they go the length even of preferring religious or philosophical error on æsthetic grounds. For our part, we are far from antagonizing poetry, and believe it to be excessively beneficial for humanity, but on condition that it be not the dupe of its own symbols and do not erect its intentions into dogmas. At this price, we believe that poetry may very often be truer, and better, than certain too narrowly scientific, or too narrowly practical truths. We shall not take ourselves to task for having frequently, in this book, mingled poetry and metaphysics. In so doing we preserve, in so far as it is legitimate, one of the aspects of every religion, its poetic symbolism. Poetry is often more philosophic, not only than history, but than abstract philosophy, but on condition of being sincere and of making no pretensions to being what it is not.

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]

One of the masters of religious criticism, M. Renan, wrote to Sainte-Beuve: “No, assuredly I did not wish to detach from the old trunk a soul which was not ripe.” We, also, are not of those who believe in shaking the tree and gathering a green and bruised crop; but if one ought not to make the green fruit fall, one may at least take means to hasten its ripening upon the branch. The human brain is a transmutation of solar heat; one must dissipate this heat, to become once more a ray of the sun. Such an ambition is very gentle, is not at all exorbitant, when one remembers how small a thing a ray of the sun is and how lost in infinite space; a relatively small portion of these wandering rays, however, has sufficed to fashion the earth and all mankind.

I often meet, near my home, a missionary with a black beard, a hard, sharp eye, lit sometimes by a mystic gleam. He seems to maintain a correspondence with the four corners of the world; assuredly he works and works precisely at building up what I am endeavouring to pull down. And must our opposite strivings therefore be regarded as hostile? Why so? Are we not both brothers and humble collaborators in the work of humanity? To convert primitive peoples to Christian dogma and to deliver those who have arrived at a higher stage of civilization from a positive and dogmatic faith, are two tasks which, far from excluding each other, complete each other. Missionaries and freethinkers cultivate different plants, in different places, but at bottom both are labouring to make the field of humanity more fertile. It is said that John Huss, when tied to the stake at Constance, wore a smile of supreme joy when he perceived a peasant in the crowd, bringing straw from the roof of his hut to light the fire: Sancta simplicitas! The martyr recognized in this man a brother in sincerity; he was glad to find himself in the presence of a disinterested conviction. We are no longer in the times of John Huss, of Bruno, of Servetius, of St. Justin, or of Socrates; it constitutes a reason the more for showing ourselves tolerant, and sympathetic even, toward those whom we regard as being in error, provided that the error be sincere.

There is an anti-religious fanaticism which is almost as dangerous as religious fanaticism. Erasmus compares humanity to a drunken man seated on a horse and lurching first to the right and then to the left. The enemies of religion have often committed the mistake of despising their adversaries; it is the worst of faults. There is a power of elasticity in human beliefs which causes their resistance to increase in proportion to the compression which is exerted upon them. Formerly, when a city was attacked by some scourge, the first care of the notable inhabitants, of the chiefs of the city, was to order public prayers; to-day the practical means of battling with epidemics and other scourges are better known, but nevertheless, in 1885, when there was cholera in Marseilles the municipal council devoted its attention almost singly to removing the religious mottoes from the walls of the public schools; it is a remarkable example of what one may call a counter-superstition. Thus the two species of fanaticism, religious and anti-religious, may equally distract the timid from the employment of scientific means against natural evils; an employment which is after all, par excellence, the business of man; these two kinds of fanaticism are paralyso-motors in the great body of humanity.

Among cultivated people there has now and then taken place a violent reaction against religious prejudice, and this reaction frequently persists till death; but in a certain number of cases this reaction is followed in the course of time by a counter-reaction; it is only, as Spencer has remarked, when this counter-reaction has been sufficient, that one may formulate, with anything like completeness, judgments somewhat less narrow and more comprehensive upon the question of religion. Time makes us generous, enlarges our minds each year, as it does the concentric circles in the trunk of a tree. Life also pacifies us as death does; reconciles us with those who do not think and feel as we do. When you become indignant at some antique, absurd prejudice, remember that it has been a travelling companion of humanity for perhaps ten thousand years, that it has lent men aid when the ways were bad and has been the occasion of many joys, and has lived, so to speak, the life of humanity; one might well find a certain element of fraternity in every human thought.

We do not believe that the readers of this sincere book will be able to accuse us of partiality or of injustice, for we have not sought to disguise either the good or the evil aspects of religion, and have even taken a certain pleasure in setting the former in relief. On the other hand, we shall hardly be taxed with ignorance of the religious problem which we have patiently studied on its every side. We shall perhaps be reproached with belonging something too manifestly to the country of our birth, with introducing into the solutions here offered something of the French excess of logic, of an indisposition to yield to half measures, of the determination to have all or nothing, of the spirit which was unable to stop midway with Protestantism and which for the past two centuries has been the home of the most ardent free thought in the world. We reply that if the French mind has a defect, this defect is not logic but a certain nimble trenchancy, a certain narrowness of view which is the reverse of the spirit of logic and analysis; logic, after all, has always the last word here below. Concessions to absurdity, or at least to relativity, may sometimes be necessary in human affairs—and the French Revolutionists were wrong not to recognize it—but such concessions are always transitory. Error is not the end and aim of the human mind; if one cannot make up one’s account with it, if it is useless to disparage it bitterly, it is also unnecessary to venerate it. Minds at once logical and capacious are always sure to be followed, provided one gives humanity time enough; and the truth can wait; it always remains young and is certain some day to be recognized. Sometimes during long night marches soldiers fall asleep without ceasing on that account to go forward; they march on in their dreams and do not awaken till they have reached their destination on the battlefield. It is thus that ideas advance in the human mind; they are so drowsy that they seem unable to stand upright, one discovers their strength and their vitality only by the distance they traverse, and finally day breaks and they appear on the field and are victorious.