The Non-religion of the Future: A Sociological Study

by Jean-Marie Guyau

But, of course, pantheism is a very indefinite doctrine, susceptible of many interpretations according to the manner in which the universal energy, the omnipresent unity, and in especial, the fundamental ground of its activity, which some regard as determinism simply and others as the orderly achievement of a final cause, are conceived. Nay, more; both necessity and the orderly achievement of a final cause may be conceived optimistically or pessimistically.

I. Optimistic pantheism.

Spinozism.

The first kind of pantheism, then, that which conceives a single substance as developing in an infinity of modes with no final cause in view, may be typified by the purely intellectualistic pantheism of Spinoza. This doctrine shows us, as existing in the totality of things, the immanent logic which presides over its development. The essence of human nature is reason, since reason is the essence of man. The proper function of reason is understanding, and to understand is to perceive the necessity of things, and the necessity of things is nature, or, if you will, God. Reason serves no other purpose than to enable us to understand; and the soul, in so far as it employs reason, regards that alone as useful which leads to understanding. To conceive the absolute necessity of eternal nature is to conceive that which, being subject only to the law of its own being, is free; it is, therefore, to conceive eternal freedom. And by that very fact it is to participate in eternal freedom, to identify itself with it. A consciousness of necessity is thus one with the fact of freedom. Human thought thus identifies itself with divine thought and becomes a consciousness of eternity. This consciousness, which is supreme joy, is love of God. The mystic Hebrew and Christian idea thus proves one with the moral theories of antiquity in Spinoza’s vast synthesis. Intellectual intuition is self-conscious nature; the intellectual liberty, as the Stoics taught it, is consciousness of necessity, and nature possessing itself; and mystic ecstasy, by which the individual is absorbed in universal being, is nature returning to itself and rediscovering its eternal existence beneath its passing modes.[137]

An optimistic fatalism.

The objection that moral and religious philosophy urged, and always will urge, against Spinoza’s pantheism, considered as a possible substitute for religion, is that it is an optimistic fatalism, that regards everything as achieved by the mechanical and brutal operation of efficient causes, and excludes the possibility of any conception of final cause or of progress, properly so called. The evolution of the modes of substance, even when it results in pain, death, and vice, is divine; and the question arises, why this universe, which is alleged to be perfect and incapable of progress, should not be wholly motionless, and why this eternal, aimless agitation in the bosom of absolute substance should exist?

Fiske’s theory of a dramatic movement in the universe.

In Mr. Fiske’s judgment, Spinozism is the only pantheism, properly so called. The remark seems to us unduly to restrict the application of the term. Every system of theism that involves the notion of a final cause tends to become pantheistic when it denies the transcendence and admits the organic unity of the universe, which is the Deus vivens, the natura naturans, with a law of progress which is superior to the necessary laws of pure logic and mathematics and mechanics. The exclusion of any notion of the immanence of a final cause in things is not essential to pantheism. One might even conceive a sort of moral pantheism which should recognize a certain moral significance in the world, or at least what Mr. Fiske himself calls a dramatic tendency toward a moral dénouement. The instant men feel it to be a god that is labouring in the universe, they feel, rightly or wrongly, reassured as to the destiny of the moral ideal; they feel that they have an aim to march toward, and seem to hear, in the shadow of things, a multitude marching with them. They no longer have a sense of the vanity of life; all life, on the contrary, becomes divine, if not as it is, at least as it tends to be and ultimately will be.

Criticised.

This system, according to its partisans, may be regarded as an induction which is justified by the modern doctrine of evolution. Mr. Fiske even goes the length of saying that Darwinism has done as much to confirm theology as to weaken it. Unhappily, nothing is more problematic than such an interpretation of modern science. Science reveals no element of divinity in the universe, and the process of evolution, which results in the incessant construction and destruction of similar worlds in an endless round, moves toward no conscious or unconscious natural end, so far as we can discover. Scientifically, therefore, the notion of a final cause of the universe may be no more than a human conception, than a bit of abstract anthropomorphism. No scientific induction can justify one in ascribing to the universe as such a conscious purpose. And it is equally rash to conceive the universe as a whole possessing a psychical and moral unity, since the universe, as science reveals it to us, is an infinity in no sense grouped about a centre. Materially speaking, the universe may perhaps be regarded as the expression of a single power, but not as possessing any moral or psychic unity. Whatever is organized, living, feeling, thinking, is, so far as we know, finite, and the equivalence of forces in the universe possesses nothing in common with the centralization of these forces. It is, perhaps, precisely because the forces of the universe are not moving in the same direction that the struggle and contest which are the life of the world exist. Who knows but that for the universe to become a unity and a total would involve its becoming finite, involve the acquisition of a centre, and by that very fact, perhaps, of a circumference which would arrest the eternal expansion of matter and life in infinite space.