The Non-religion of the Future: A Sociological Study

by Jean-Marie Guyau

Charity.

Charity will always constitute the point of meeting between the most audacious theoretic speculation and the least audacious practical activity. To identify one’s self, thought and heart, with someone else is to speculate in the most charming sense of the word, is to stake one’s all. And the risk of staking his all is one that man will always wish to run. He is pushed to it by the most vivacious impulses in his nature. Goethe said that a man is not really worthy of the name till he has “begotten a child, built a house, and planted a tree.” The details chosen are somewhat trivial, but the aphorism embodies the need for productivity which is inherent in every being, the need to give or to develop life, to found something; the being who does not obey this impulse is déclassé, is degraded below the rank of man; he will suffer from it some day or other, and die of it body and soul. Happily absolute egoism is less frequent than is believed; to live solely for one’s self is a sort of utopia that may be summed up in the naïve formula: Everybody for me and I for nobody. The humblest of us, the instant we undertake a work of charity, come into possession of a completer self; we belong at once wholly to the enterprise, to the idea involved in it, to an idea more or less impersonal; we are drawn forward in spite of ourselves, like a swimmer by the current of the stream.

Enthusiasm.

The promotion of every enterprise great and small and of almost every human work depends on enthusiasm, which has played so important a rôle in religion. Enthusiasm presupposes a belief in the possible reality of an ideal, an active belief to be manifested in effort. There is generally but one way of demonstrating what is merely possible, and that is by realizing it, by converting it from possibility into actuality. Excessively matter-of-fact minds—minds immersed in matter—are condemned to short-sightedness in the realm of the possible; analysts distinguish too exactly between what is, and what is not, to be able to be of the best service in the labour of increasingly transforming the one into the other. There is, no doubt, a point of junction between the present and the future, but pure intelligence finds it difficult to lay its finger on it: it is everywhere and nowhere, or rather it is not an inert point but a flying point, a direction, a volition in pursuit of an end. The world belongs to the enthusiast, who deliberately deals with the “not yet” as the “already,” and treats the future as if it were the present; the world belongs to the synthetic mind, which confounds the real and the ideal in its embrace; the world belongs to men of the voluntary type, who do violence to reality, and break up its rigid outlines, and force it to yield up from within what might beforehand, in pure reason, have with equal justice been pronounced the possible and the impossible. The world belongs to the prophets and messiahs of science; enthusiasm is necessary to mankind, it is the genius of the masses and the productive element in the genius of individuals.

Courage.

The essence of enthusiasm is hope, and the basis of hope is manliness, is courage. Courage of despair is not so intense a phrase as courage of hope. Hope and true and active charity are one. If Hope alone remained in the bottom of Pandora’s box it was not because she had lost her wings and was unable to desert the society of men for the open spaces of the sky; it was that pity, charity, devotion, are very elements of her nature; to hope is to love, and to love is to wish to minister to those who suffer. Upon the half-open box of Pandora, from which Hope in her devotion to mankind refused to make her escape, should be inscribed, as upon the leaden coffer in the “Merchant of Venice,” “Who chooseth me, must give and hazard all he hath.”

Proselytism.

The object of enthusiasm varies from age to age: it was once religion, it may be scientific doctrine and discovery, it may above all be moral and social beliefs. It results therefrom that the spirit of proselytism, that seems so peculiar to religion, is destined to survive religion: it will be transformed simply. Every sincere and enthusiastic man with a surplus of moral energy is at heart a missionary, a propagandist of ideas and beliefs. Next to the joy of possessing a truth or a system which seems to be true, is that of disseminating this truth, of feeling it speak and act in us, of exhaling it with our breath. There have been more than twelve apostles in the history of humanity; every heart that is young, and strong, and loving is the heart of an apostle. There is not an idea in our brain that does not possess some element of sociality, of fraternity; that does not struggle for expression. Propagandism will be as ardently pursued, in the society of the future, as discovery. Moral proselytism will aim at communicating enthusiasm for the good and the true, at uplifting the moral level of mankind as a whole and mainly of the masses of the people.

Morality apart from religion difficult to teach.

But here we shall be met by an objection; we shall be told that independently of religion it will be difficult to disseminate a system of practical morality, conformable to the scientific ideas of our times. A professor of the Sorbonne was one day maintaining, in my hearing, that in the present crisis anything like systematic moral instruction is gravely in danger. Abstract theories cannot be taught, for they end in scepticism; absolute precepts cannot be taught, for they are false; nothing can be taught but facts, but history: one may be certain about facts. That is to say, morality cannot be taught at all.