The Non-religion of the Future: A Sociological Study

by Jean-Marie Guyau

This book is not a treatise on metaphysics: an exposition and criticism of these systems will not, therefore, here be expected; but their characteristic spirit, which has also been the spirit of the great religions, is of interest to us here, and, for us, constitutes their value. It is this spirit which is at once speculative and religious, in the true sense of the word, that it is important, accordingly, to elicit, and that wholly without dogmatical or polemical aim of any kind. Absolute sincerity, impersonal and passionate sincerity, is the first duty of the philosopher. To arrange the world according to one’s personal preferences, to be on the lookout, not for the most probable, but for the most consoling hypotheses, is to resemble a merchant who should count his credits only when he is making up his books and should indulge in none but consoling additions. The strictest probity is demanded of him who balances the great book of life; the philosopher should hide nothing either from others or from himself. We shall endeavour, therefore, to set forth, what are in our judgment the diverse aspects under which the knowable as a whole, and therefore also the unknowable, or if you prefer, the great unknown, present themselves to-day. We shall endeavour to interpret the great metaphysical systems sympathetically, without, however, any illusions in regard to their incompleteness and their errors. In a certain church in Verona sacred texts are inscribed on the marble slabs of which the floor is composed; they interpret and complete each other, and, however obscure at first, gradually become plain as one advances under the high arched roof; thus it is in life: the religious and philosophical beliefs in the midst of which we live seem to us at first enigmatical and mysterious, we trample them under foot without understanding them; but, as we advance, we discover their hidden meaning, their naïveté, and their profoundity. At every step in life a new perspective into the heart of humanity is thrown open to us; to live is to understand, and to understand is not only to tolerate but to love. Such love, however, is not incompatible with clearness of vision, nor with an effort to transform and ameliorate the beloved object; on the contrary, a really active love ought to be, more than all else, a desire for transformation and for progress. To love a being or a belief is to seek to make it better.

II. Theism.

Theism and religion distinct.

The majority of people scarcely see any possible alternative to such and such a determinate religion except atheism. The fact is, of course, quite otherwise. Religious thought manifests itself in a hundred forms; why should free-thought be restricted to a single conception of the universe? I have known a multitude of free-thinkers who believed more sincerely in the existence of God, in the immortality of the soul, and, in general, in spiritual principles than a great many professed worshippers. Were they right to do so? Was Voltaire, for example, who based his affirmation of the existence of God upon the splendour of a sunrise, somewhat naïve, and inclined to mistake an emotion for a bit of proof? It makes little difference; what we wish to set in relief is that faith in a priest is not necessarily part and parcel of faith in a God, and that the disappearance of the former may lend an increase of power and of refinement to the latter. No single philosophic doctrine is to be regarded as standing alone in opposition to the whole body of religions; religions and philosophies together are all philosophic doctrines, all hypotheses, and none of them above discussion. We say to the individual: “Weigh and choose.” And among these hypotheses we include that of which modern religions constitute the symbolic expression, theism. If the religious anomy which we regard as the ideal implies the suppression of everything in the nature of an external revelation, it does not on that account exclude a subjective and personal intuition of divinity. Even mystics may find their account in the religious individualism of the future. Intuition, however, in metaphysics as in morals, is every day losing ground. The progress of ideas will result in the gradual triumph of scientific induction over alleged natural intuition, of probability over faith. Subjective revelation will disappear as objective revelation is doing, and give place by degrees to reasoning. Dogmatic theism, like all dogma, is doomed; but what is purest in the theistic spirit may survive.

God conceived as prime mover a superfluity according to modern physics.

I. Let us first consider the probable fate of the dogma of the Creator, which belongs to the great Jewish, Christian, and Islamite religions. Science follows the law of parsimony; nature economizes force, science economizes ideas. The first economy to be undertaken might well relate precisely to the idea of the creation. The author of the world may be conceived as the universal motor. But the conception of cause as a source of movement, or as a prime motor, is full of contradictions and is becoming more and more foreign to modern philosophy. For the conception of a first cause implies a pre-existing state of repose, and repose is no more primitive and absolute than nothingness. Nothing is in repose, nothing has ever been in repose. The most motionless atom in the atmosphere describes in its vibration, according to Clausius, four hundred and forty-seven metres a second in a space of ninety-five millionths of a millimetre; it receives during this time four billion seven hundred million shocks. The vibrating atom of hydrogen describes one thousand eight hundred and eighty-four metres in a second. Repose is an illusion of the human mind, and the conception of a divine first mover is a second illusion based on the first. The eternal movement that stirred the molecules of the primitive substance, later grouped them into spheres, and the spheres began whirling of their own accord in the ether without need of a preliminary push from the sacred beetle (as the Egyptian legend has it) that rolls his sacred ball, which is the image of the universe. Where, as Strauss remarked, Newton felt called upon to assume a “divine first impulse,” and Buffon was obliged to resort to the hypothesis of a comet colliding with the primitive sphere and breaking it up into the fragments which now constitute the earth and the planets, we need invoke nothing but the fixity of natural laws. Since Kant, Descartes, and Laplace, we possess an approximate explanation of the formation of the stars, which are alternately produced and dissolved by the concentration and resolution of material masses—are born to be “devoured,” as Kant said, in the abyss of eternity. One and the same cause, resistance of the ether, explains the agglomeration of nebulous matter into nucleï, and the slowing down of the motion of the spheres thus formed, and the ultimate fall of these spheres upon some neighbouring centre of attraction and the resulting dispersion into nebulæ.

And with physiology.

More than that, by the progress of physiology and natural history, the organic and the inorganic worlds have come to be conceived as so closely related that a true explanation of the first would probably include a true explanation of the second. The chasm that once existed between life and what sustains life has been closed. If our laboratories do not enable us to catch spontaneous generation in the act, the reason is simply that their resources are not equal to those of nature, that they have not the same means at their disposal, that the so-called primitive beings that we endeavour to produce in the laboratory are really not primitive. Men of science who have attempted such experiments resemble the followers of Darwin who have tried to transform an anthropoid ape into a human being. Nature permits of an infinite convergence of forces upon a determinate point, that cannot be realized in a laboratory. More than that, time, which we are always inclined to neglect, is a necessary factor in the evolution of things; what is natural is slow. To find the earliest stages of organic life, as to find the early stages in the formation of a star, we must go far back into the remote past.

God conceived as a Creator worse than superfluous.

If there is no necessity for the conception of God as a prime mover, is there any necessity for the conception of God as the Creator of the universe? A creative cause seems to the modern mind less and less needed for the explanation of the world, for the fact of existence stands in no need of explanation; what rather needs explanation is non-existence. Death, repose, are all relative and derived. Death implies life, and is itself only a provisional stage, an interval between two metamorphoses. There exists no punctum mortuum, no one really dead point in the universe. It is by a pure artifice of thought that religions have conceived the universe as beginning in annihilation, in death (which is a remote consequence of life), in order to afford an opportunity for the intervention of a creative power: creation is a resurrection following on a fictitious death.