Lectures and Essays

by Goldwin Smith

Lareveillere Lepaux, a member of the French Directory, invented a new religion of Theo-philanthropy which seems in fact to have been an organized Rousseauism. He wished to impose it on France but finding that in spite of his passionate endeavours he made but little progress he sought the advice of Talleyrand. "I am not surprised" said Talleyrand "at the difficulty you experience. It is no easy matter to introduce a new religion. But I will tell you what I recommend you to do. I recommend you to be crucified and to rise again on the third day." We cannot say whether Lareveillere made any proselytes but if he did their number cannot have been much smaller than the reputed number of the religious disciples of Comte. As a philosophy, Comtism has found its place and exercised its share of influence among the philosophies of the time but as a religious system it appears to make little way. It is the invention of a man not the spontaneous expression of the beliefs and feelings of mankind. Any one with a tolerably lively imagination might produce a rival system with as little practical effect. Roman Catholicism was at all events a growth not an invention.

Cosmic Emotion, though it does not affect to be an organized system, is the somewhat sudden creation of individual minds set at work apparently by the exigencies of a particular situation and on that account suggestive prima facie of misgivings similar to those suggested by the invention of Comte.

Now is the worship of Humanity or Cosmic Emotion really a substitute for religion? That is the only question which we wish in these few pages to ask. We do not pretend here to inquire what is or what is not true in itself.

Religion teaches that we have our being in a Power whose character and purposes are indicated to us by our moral nature, in whom we are united and by the union made sacred to each other, whose voice conscience however generated, is whose eye is always upon us, sees all our acts, and sees them as they are morally, without reference to worldly success or to the opinion of the world, to whom at death we return, and our relations to whom, together with his own nature, are an assurance that according as we promote or fail to promote his design by self improvement and the improvement of our kind, it will be well or ill for us in the sum of things. This is a hypothesis evidently separable from belief in a revelation, and from any special theory respecting the next world, as well as from all dogma and ritual. It may be true or false in itself, capable of demonstration or incapable. We are concerned here solely with its practical efficiency, compared with that of the proposed substitutes. It is only necessary to remark, that there is nothing about the religious hypothesis as here stated, miraculous, supernatural, or mysterious, except so far as those epithets may be applied to anything beyond the range of bodily sense, say the influence of opinion or affection. A universe self-made, and without a God, is at least as great a mystery as a universe with a God; in fact the very attempt to conceive it in the mind produces a moral vertigo which is a bad omen for the practical success of Cosmic Emotion.

For this religion are the service and worship of Humanity likely to be a real equivalent in any respect, as motive power, as restraint, or as comfort? Will the idea of life in God be adequately replaced by that of an interest in the condition and progress of Humanity, as they may affect us and be influenced by our conduct, together with the hope of human gratitude and fear of human reprobation after death, which the Comtists endeavor to organize into a sort of counterpart of the Day of Judgment?

It will probably be at once conceded that the answer must be in the negative as regards the immediate future and the mass of mankind. The simple truths of religion are intelligible to all, and strike all minds with equal force, though they may not have the same influence with all moral natures. A child learns them perfectly at its mother's knee. Honest ignorance in the mine, on the sea, at the forge, striving to do its coarse and perilous duty, performing the lowliest functions of humanity, contributing in the humblest way to human progress, itself scarcely sunned by a ray of what more cultivated natures would deem happiness, takes in as fully as the sublimest philosopher the idea of a God who sees and cares for all, who keeps account of the work well done or the kind act, marks the secret fault, and will hereafter make up to duty for the hardness of its present lot. But a vivid interest—such an interest as will act both as a restraint and as a comfort—in the condition and future of humanity can surely exist only in those who have a knowledge of history sufficient to enable them to embrace the unity of the past, and an imagination sufficiently cultivated to glow with anticipation of the future. For the bulk of mankind the humanity worshippers point of view seems unattainable at least within any calculable time.

As to posthumous reputation good or evil it is and always must be the appendage of a few marked men. The plan of giving it substance by instituting separate burial places for the virtuous and the wicked is perhaps not very seriously proposed. Any such plan involves the fallacy of a sharp division where there is no clear moral line besides postulating not only an unattainable knowledge of men's actions but a knowledge still more manifestly unattainable of their hearts. Yet we cannot help thinking that on the men of intellect to whose teaching the world is listening this hope of posthumous reputation, or to put it more plainly, of living in the gratitude and affection of their kind by means of their scientific discoveries and literary works exercises an influence of which they are hardly conscious, it prevents them from fully feeling the void which the annihilation of the hope of future existence leaves in the hearts of ordinary men.

Besides so far as we are aware no attempt has yet been made to show us distinctly what humanity is and wherein its holiness consists. If the theological hypothesis is true and all men are united in God, humanity is a substantial reality, but otherwise we fail to see that it is any thing more than a metaphysical abstraction converted into an actual entity by philosophers who are not generally kind to metaphysics. Even the unity of the species is far from settled, science still debates whether there is one race of men or whether there are more than a hundred. Man acts on man no doubt, but he also acts on other animals, and other animals on him. Wherein does the special unity or the special bond consist? Above all what constitutes the holiness? Individual men are not holy, a large proportion of them are very much the reverse. Why is the aggregate holy? Let the unit be a complex phenomenon, an organism or whatever name science may give it, what multiple of it will be a rational object of worship?

For our own part we cannot conceive worship being offered by a sane worshipper to any but a conscious being, in other words to a person. The fetish worshipper himself probably invests his fetish with a vague personality such as would render it capable of propitiation. But how can we invest with a collective personality the fleeting generations of mankind? Even the sum of mankind is never complete, much less are the units blended into a personal whole, or as it has been called a colossal man.

There is a gulf here, as it seems to us, which cannot be bridged, and can barely be hidden from view by the retention of religious phraseology. In truth, the anxious use of that phraseology betrays weakness, since it shows that you cannot do without the theological associations which cling inseparably to religious terms.