The Non-religion of the Future: A Sociological Study

by Jean-Marie Guyau

Idealism and the religious instinct.

It is evident that idealism is one of the systems which is capable of affording a certain satisfaction to the religious sentiment, because the religious sentiment is allied to the instinct for metaphysics, and the instinct for metaphysics finds itself at home among all things of the spirit, of thought, of the moral world. The foundation of theism, as we have said, is moralism; the belief, that is to say, that the true power in nature is mental and moral. God is simply a representation of this power, conceived as transcendent. Pantheism itself, after having divinized and materialized the universe and resolved all things, so to speak, into God, tends to become idealistic, to resolve God into the thought which has conceived Him, to deny Him all existence over and above that which He possesses in thought, and for thought, and by virtue of thought. According to the Hindu comparison, the human mind is like the spider that can build its mansion out of materials drawn from its own body, and then reabsorb them.

Subjective idealism criticised.

But how shall the mind itself, the central fund of thought that is the origin and end of all things, be conceived? Is it individual or impersonal? English subjective or egoistic idealism, as Mr. Huxley defines it in his “Life of Hume,” replies, that in spite of all demonstration to the contrary, the collection of perceptions which constitute our consciousness may be simply a phantasmagoria which, engendered and co-ordinated by the ego, unrolls its successive scenes upon a background of nonentity. Mr. Spencer retorts that, if the universe is thus simply a projection of our subjective sensations, evolution is a dream; but evolution may be formulated in idealistic quite as well as realistic terms: and a coherent dream is as good as reality. Subjective idealism is therefore difficult to refute logically; but in spite of that fact it will never have many followers. For this apparent simplification of the world is in reality a complication. For subjective idealism involves the ridiculous hypothesis of a chance agreement between the impressions of any given individual and of all other individuals: a difficulty much harder to explain away than the preliminary one of the simple reflection in us of an external world. Mental phenomena are always more complex than material phenomena.

The reduction of the external world to subjective terms, the explanation of the optical illusion of objectivity, demands a much greater display of vain ingenuity than any theory of simple perception. More than that, the least effort with the resistance that it encounters is a refutation of egoistic, or as the English again say, solipsistic idealism. In the fact of resistance, subjective sensation and the perception of an objective reality coincide. Even if the manner in which our sensations of resistance are combined in tridimensional space may be conceived as subjective, it is difficult to admit that the materials out of which the structure is made are, as it were, suspended in mid-air. To explain the fact of resistance requires us absolutely to pass beyond the limits of consciousness, for even in the cases in which the sensation of resistance seems to be due to hallucination, the cause of hallucination is always found to be some instance of actual resistance, of friction or stress inside the body. The mistake of a madman, who sees an unfamiliar form take shape and rise before his eyes, is not that of considering the power as existing outside of himself, but of locating it at the extremities of his nerves of touch; whereas it is really in his brain, at the point where the nerves intersect with the cerebral centres. He is right in his sense of the presence of an enemy, but wrong in the direction in which he looks for it.

Truth in subjective idealism.

We are obliged, therefore, to admit the hypothesis of a multitude of microcosms, of mine, of yours, of everybody’s, and of a single macrocosm the same for everybody. What is true is that between the great world and every little world there is an incessant communication, by means of which everything that passes in the one is echoed in the other. We live in the universe, and the universe lives in us. The statement is not metaphorical, but literal. If we could look into the consciousness of a school child, we should see a more or less faithful image of all the marvels of the world: skies, seas, mountains, cities, etc.; we should perceive the germ of every elevated sentiment, of every kind of complex knowledge that the human brain contains. If we could look into the consciousness of some great man—some thinker, some poet—the spectacle would be quite different. It would embrace the whole of the visible and invisible universe, with its facts and its laws; it would embrace what is best in the whole of humanity. If the traces left by experience on the nervous system could be read, like the writing in a book, the earth might disappear, and its image and history be handed down in certain chosen human brains.

Realism destined to prevail.

Active and practical humanity will always believe in realism to the extent of insisting that the world possesses an existence which is independent of any individual thought. We shall dwell no further on subjective idealism, which is more important as a metaphysical curiosity than for any comfort it gives to the religious sentiment.