The Non-religion of the Future: A Sociological Study

by Jean-Marie Guyau

The growth of pantheistic metaphysics.

Different reasons have brought about this transformation of pantheism, which after having divinized the world, now inspires the individual to dream fondly on his annihilation and reabsorption into the unity of things. The first cause is the progress of pantheistic metaphysics. After having adored nature as the product of immanent reason, pantheists have come to regard it as a work of immanent unreason, as the degeneration of an indeterminate and unconscious unity in the misery and conflict of phenomenal selves, of conscious beings condemned to suffering. At the very least, nature is indifferent to man. Eternal force, which is so much spoken of to-day, is no more comforting and reassuring to us than eternal substance. Right or wrong, the metaphysical instinct, which is identical at bottom with the moral instinct, demands not only the presence of life in all things, but of life in pursuit of an ideal of goodness and universal sociality.

Persistence of anthropomorphism.

I was lying one day in the mountains, stretched on the grass; a lizard came out of a hole and mistook my motionless body for a rock, and climbed up on my leg and stretched himself out to bask in the sun. The confiding little creature lay on me enjoying the light, untroubled by any suspicion of the relatively powerful stream of life which was flowing noiselessly and amicably beneath him. And I, for my part, began to look at the moss and the grass on which I was reposing, and the brown earth and the great rocks; was I not myself, after all, a lizard simply as compared with the great world, and was I not perhaps a victim of the same mistake? Was there not a secret life throbbing everywhere about me, palpitating beneath my feet, sweeping forward confusedly in the great totality of things? Yes, but what difference did it make if it was simply the blind egoistic life of a multitude of atoms, each striving for ends of its own. Little lizard, why have I not, like thee, a friendly eye in the universe to watch over me?

The progress of science.

The second cause of contemporary pessimism is the rapid progress of positive science, and the revelations it is making in regard to the natural world. The movement has been so precipitate, new ideas have been produced with such rapidity, that the intelligence has found it difficult to adapt itself to them; we are going too fast, we find it as difficult to get our breath as the rider of a runaway horse, or an aeronaut swept away at a dizzy speed by the wind. Knowledge causes thus, at the present epoch, a sense of discomfort which is due to a disturbance of the inner equilibrium; consciousness of the world, so joyous in its beginnings at the time of the Renaissance, making its first appearance in the midst of Rabelais’ uproarious fun, has come to be almost melancholy. We have not yet become domesticated in the infinities of the new world which has been revealed to us, and we feel a little lost; therein lies the secret of the melancholy of the present epoch, which was melodramatic and rapid in the pages of Chateaubriand and the youngest children of the century; and has come to be serious and reflective in the pages of Leopardi and of Schopenhauer and of the pessimists of the present day. In India the Brahmans are distinguished by a black point between their eyes; our men of science, our philosophers and artists, carry this black point on their foreheads.

Exaggerated development of thought.

The third cause of pessimism, which results from the two preceding, is the suffering caused by the exaggerated development of thought at the present day, and the disproportionate place that it occupies at present in human life. We are suffering from a sort of hypertrophy of the intelligence. Those who work with their brains, who meditate upon life and death, who philosophize, ultimately experience this suffering; and the same is true of artists, who pass their life in endeavouring to realize a more or less inaccessible ideal. One is drawn all ways at once by the sciences and arts; one wishes to devote one’s self simultaneously to all of them, and one is obliged to choose. One’s whole vitality sets in toward one’s brain; one has to check it, to beat it back, to resign one’s self to vegetating instead of to living! One does not resign one’s self—one prefers to abandon one’s self to the inner fire that consumes one. One’s thoughts gradually become feebler, the nervous system becomes irritable, becomes feminine; but the will remains virile, is always on the stretch, unsatisfied, and the result is an eternal struggle, an endless dissatisfaction with one’s self; one must choose, must have muscles or nerves; be a man or a woman; and the thinker and artist are neither the one nor the other. If by a simple immense effort we could but express the world of sentiment and thought we carry within us, with what joy, what pleasure we should do it; even if the brain should be torn asunder in the process! But we must give it out by small fragments, squeeze it out drop by drop, submit to all the interruptions of life, and little by little the organism becomes exhausted in the struggle between mind and body, and the intelligence flickers like a light in a rising wind, until the spirit is vanquished and the light goes out.

Dissolving effect of subjective analysis on the emotions.

Modern thought is not only more clear-sighted in matters of the external world, but also in matters of the internal world. John Stuart Mill maintained that introspection and the progress of psychological analysis possess a certain dissolving force that, along with disillusionment, induces sadness. We come to be too well aware of the source of our feelings and the details of our character; what an antagonism between being gifted enough in matters of philosophy or poetry to create a world to one’s own mind, to embellish and illuminate the real world, and, nevertheless, being too analytic and introspective to profit by the pleasing illusion! We build airy palaces of cards and are the first to blow them down. We are without pity for our own hearts, and sometimes wonder whether we should not have been better off without them; we are too transparent to our own eyes, we see the hidden springs of our own activity, we have no sincere faith in objective reality, nor faith enough in the rationality of our own joys to enable them to attain their maximum.