The Non-religion of the Future: A Sociological Study

by Jean-Marie Guyau

And genuine novelty.

But Leopardi might reply, What is the charm of novelty but an illusion? For everything on earth is really old: the future is but a repetition of the past and ought logically to be as repugnant as the past. Abstract formulæ, and precipitate inductions like that, offer no resistance either to reason or to experience. Whatever pessimistic poets may say to the contrary, nothing is a repetition of anything else, either in human life or in the universe. There is always something new under the sun, if it be no more than the budding leaves on a tree or the changing colour on a cloud. No two sunsets are the same. Fairy-stories tell of a marvellous picture book, the pages of which one may turn forever without weariness, for the instant the picture has been looked upon and the page turned, its place is taken by a new picture. The universe is such a book; when one wishes to turn back to a familiar page it is no longer the same nor are we ourselves the same, and if we consider the matter narrowly, the world should always possess for us its first freshness.

Perception of difference the mark of high intelligence.

The distinctive sign of a really superior, really human intellect is to be interested in everything in the universe, and in the difference between things. When we look straight before us without, properly speaking, seeing anything, we perceive resemblances only; when we look with attention, with affectionate love of detail, we perceive an infinity of differences; an intellectual activity, always awake, finds everywhere objects of interest. To love anything is to find in it, incessantly, elements of novelty.

The world inexhaustibly interesting.

When pessimists maintain that the charm of the future is an illusion, it may be retorted that the illusion is theirs, that they do not look at the world closely enough to see it as it is, and do not love it because they do not know it. If one could view the Alps from the surface of a passing aërolite, the Rigi, the Faulhorn, Mont Blanc, Monte Rosa would all look alike, would all appear to be indifferent points on the earth’s rind; but what shall be said of the naïve traveller who confounds them, and professes to have seen the whole of the Alps when he has climbed the Rigi? Life, also, is a perpetual ascent, of which it is difficult to say one has seen the whole because one has climbed the first peak. From childhood to old age, the horizon grows larger and changes and is always new. Nature seems to repeat itself only to a superficial gaze. Each of its works is original, like those of genius. Æsthetically or intellectually considered, discouragement is voluntary or involuntary blindness. If poets have wished to forget past experiences which were too painful, even in memory, no true scholar or man of science has ever expressed the desire to forget what he knew, to make a blank space in his intelligence, to reject the knowledge so slowly acquired—unless, indeed, it were for the refined pleasure of learning it all over again and of owing nothing to the labour of previous generations. Beneath every human desire, we repeat, there exists this thirst for truth, which is one of the essential elements of the religious sentiment, and all other desires may be satiated or fatigued, but this one still subsists; one may be weary of life without being weary of knowledge; even those who have been most bitterly wounded by the conditions of life may still accept them for the light that the intelligence brings them at the price of pain, as a soldier, whose eyes have been injured by some chance splinter, nevertheless strains them beneath his eyelids to follow the course of the fight about him.

Summary.

In effect, the analysis that pessimism is based upon is, in many respects, superficial. Even the word pessimism is inexact, for the doctrine ascribes no progress from bad to worse, from pejus to pessimum; it maintains simply that the world is bad and must be recognized as such, and that this recognition is the consequence and the condition of progress, of intellectual power and of knowledge.

Suicide as a resource.

The practical rules for the conduct of life that pessimism prescribes from its principles are still more open to discussion. Granted the wretchedness of life, the remedy that pessimists propose is the new religious salvation that modern Buddhists are to make fashionable. This novelty, which is older than Sâkya-Muni itself, is one of the most ancient of Oriental ideas; it to-day proves attractive to a number of Occidental peoples, as it has several times proved attractive to them in former days, for traces of it may be found among the Neo-Platonists and the Christian mystics. The conception is that of Nirvâna. To sever all the ties which attach you to the external world; to prune away all the young offshoots of desire, and recognize that to be rid of them is a deliverance; to practice a sort of complete psychical circumcision; to recoil upon yourself and to believe that by so doing you enter into the society of the great totality of things (the mystics would say of God); to create an inner vacuum, and feel dizzy in the void and, nevertheless, to believe that the void is plentitude supreme—Πλὴρωμα—these have always constituted temptations to mankind; mankind has been tempted to meddle with them, as it has been tempted to creep up to the verge of dizzy precipices and look over. The pantheistic or monistic notion of Nirvâna eludes criticism precisely because it is void of all precise content. Physiologically speaking, Nirvâna corresponds to the period of repose and quietude which always follows a period of tension and of effort. One cannot stop and take breath in the eternal forward march that constitutes the phenomenal life of humanity; it is good sometimes to feel lassitude, it is good a little to understand the comparative cheapness and vanity of everything one has hitherto attained, but good only on condition that such an understanding of our past constitutes a spur to fresh effort in the future. To rest content with lassitude—to believe that the deepest existence is the meanest, the coldest, the most inert—is equivalent to a confession of defeat in the struggle for existence. Nirvâna leads, in fact, to the annihilation of the individual and of the race, and to the logical absurdity that the vanquished in the struggle for existence are the victors over the trials and miseries of life.