The Non-religion of the Future: A Sociological Study

by Jean-Marie Guyau

And will in the future be viewed with horror.

But, it will be objected, if this brute or this madman sees no divine menace above his head, would not many people regard his situation as enviable, and labour as they are labouring, to destroy the moral and human instincts in themselves, to place themselves precisely in the position of Baudelaire’s hero? We do not believe that faith in a religious sanction could greatly change anybody’s attitude toward such an abnormal being. Crime offers man but one attraction, that of wealth; but wealth, whatever value it may have in the eyes of the people, is but one among the good things of the world. Offer a poor man a million dollars coupled with the gout, and if he had an atom of common-sense he would refuse. Propose to make him rich, on condition of his being bandy-legged or humpbacked, and he would probably refuse also; in especial, if he were young. All women would refuse. The difficulty experienced in finding people to fill certain situations which are in themselves well paid—that, for instance, of public executioner—demonstrates that, even in the eyes of the people, money is not everything. If it were, no menace of punishment after death could prevent men generally from becoming assassins.[124] I know women, and men also, who would refuse a fortune if they were obliged to acquire it by becoming butchers—so great are certain repugnances, even purely sentimental and æsthetic repugnances. The moral horror of crime, which is in the generality of cases stronger than any other repugnance, will always separate us from criminals, whatever the prevailing beliefs as to life after death.

And with pity.

This horror will be still stronger when for the habitual hatred, anger, and desire for revenge, that the presence of a criminal now causes us, shall be substituted by degrees a feeling of pity—the pity which we feel for inferior or malformed beings, for the unconscious monstrosities of nature. One may sometimes envy the life of what one hates; but one can never envy the life of what one pities. Hatred signifies the presence of some element of attraction in the object hated; but pity is the highest and most definitive moral barrier that can exist between two beings.

The durable element in this notion of sanction.

The sole respectable and durable element in the idea of sanction is neither the notion of recompense nor of penalty, but that of the ideal of goodness as possessed of sufficient force to impose itself upon nature, and to envelop the world; it seems to us good that the just and gentle man should have the last word in the universe, but this kingdom of goodness of which humanity dreams does not need for its establishment the procedure of a human kingdom. The moral sentiment may be considered the great power in the universe. The inherent tendency of morality gradually to subdue nature to its purposes by the instrumentality of mankind is the most striking fact in the realm of philosophy, and the one which is, of all others, the most appropriate to excite the spirit of proselytism. No myth is necessary to arouse an ardour for goodness and a sense of universal fraternity. What is great and beautiful is self-sufficing.

Cult for the dead.

Whatever may be the beliefs that men will one day hold on a life after death, and the conditions which render possible the final triumph of goodness, the notion of such a triumph is an ultimate moral and social idea, which will always lend itself readily to propagandism, because it is the foundation of all religions without being in any wise essentially bound up with religious dogma; it is in essence a cult for memory, for veneration and love of ancestry, for respect for death and for the dead. Far from necessarily declining with the decline of religion, a reverence for the dead may rapidly increase because the metaphysical sentiment of the unknown in death will increase. The spirit of democracy itself inclines the masses to an uneasy admiration in the presence of death, the great democrat, the great leveller who wanders incessantly about humanity, and planes down equally all excesses of misery and happiness; casts us, without distinction of persons, into the great abyss from the depths of which the attentive ear has caught no sound of an arrested fall.

Among the Greeks.