The Non-religion of the Future: A Sociological Study

by Jean-Marie Guyau

Ideal liberty the aim of the universe.

If the shock of wills in the world is unusually brutal, the reason is that they are as yet but half conscious of their powers; as consciousness develops, contest will give way to concurrence. To avoid violent concussion with obstacles in the way, the free agent has less need of acquaintance with them than of acquaintance with itself. As there is nothing in the universe that is foreign to volition, there is nothing in the universe that is foreign to the ideal that every volition aims at. It is probable that life is always and everywhere accompanied by consciousness in some slight degree; and wherever consciousness exists, desire may exist. Nature’s device, as a contemporaneous poet has said, is “I aspire.” The human ideal is, perhaps, no more than the conscious formulation of this aspiration which is common to the whole universe. If so, it follows that ideal freedom is the limit of evolution, and that volition, which aims at ideal freedom, is the principle of it.[150]

Objections answered.

It has been objected to this idealist theory of evolution that progress implies an aim and the observance of certain principles in its attainment, while evolution does not.[151] But the precise object of the doctrine in question is to supply evolution with a name and appropriate principles, and to extend the notion of progress to the universe as a whole. It has also been objected to this somewhat panthelistic hypothesis (θέλος), that if everything is free, nothing is free.[152] This objection is not exact, for it would imply, in economics, for instance, that to increase everybody’s well-being would increase the well-being of nobody, or that if everybody equally should be impoverished, everybody would equally be enriched. To universalize a conception is one thing, to suppress it is another. The world cannot at the present day be conceived as distinct from the human race: the two are vitally and intimately related. Endow mankind with an unbiassed freedom of will, and Epicurus would be right in holding that indeterminism is the basis of all things.[153] Similarly, suppose mankind endowed with “a radical goodness of will, which is very distinct from freedom of the will, but nevertheless constitutes a sort of moral freedom in process of formation,”[154] and the germ of such goodness of will should be found in a more or less unconscious form throughout the entire universe. Before the human mind can really produce anything whatever, the whole universe must be like it in labour. Partisans of the theory of goodness of will as the basis of human morality are therefore logical in regarding it as more or less present in some degraded form throughout the whole of nature, even in beings in which intelligence has not yet made its appearance; and goodness of will in such cases is to be considered as accompanied by the obscure beginnings of responsibility, of implicit merit or demerit—one must return in effect to a sort of re-reading of the Hindu theory, according to which the several degrees that exist in nature represent so many stages in morality.

Moral idealism and the religious sentiment.

Hypotheses fingo is the mother of metaphysics. Moral idealism of the kind we have just epitomized from the pages of a contemporary author is decidedly no more than a hypothesis, and a hypothesis open to discussion; but it is assuredly the form of idealism that is least incompatible with the theory of evolution, and with the facts of natural history and of human history.[155] Moreover, it affords unusual scope for the religious sentiment, freed from its mysticism and transcendence. If the unknown activity which lies at the basis of the natural world has produced in the human race a consciousness of goodness, and a deliberate desire for it, there is reason to hope and to believe that the last word of ethics and metaphysics is not a negative.

Religion interpreted in the light of this hypothesis.

We have a number of times cited Schleiermacher’s definition of religion: the sense of our absolute dependence in regard to the universe and its principle. When the religious sentiment becomes transformed into a moral idealism its correct formula tends to be the inverse of the preceding: a sense of the dependence of the universe upon the determination that goodness shall prevail, of which we are conscious in ourselves and which we conceive to be or to be capable of becoming the directing principle of universal evolution. The notion of the moral and social ideal of freedom is, therefore, according to this doctrine, not a mere superficial accident in the universe, but a revelation and growing consciousness of the most fundamental laws of the universe, of the true essence of things, which is the same in all beings in different degrees and in diverse combinations. Nature represents an eternal ascent toward a more and more clearly conceived ideal, which dominates its progress from beginning to end. As one climbs a height to survey a mountain range, the snow-capped peaks rise silently and take their places side by side along the horizon; it seems as if the enormous masses rise in obedience to an immense effort which uplifts them; it seems as if their immobility is only apparent, and one feels borne aloft with them toward the zenith. The heroes in the Indian legend, when they were weary of life and of the earth, rallied their strength for a final effort, and hand in hand scaled the Himalayas, and the mountains bore them away into the clouds. Ancient peoples generally regarded the mountains as a transition between earth and sky; it was from the mountains that the soul, profiting by the impulse lent it by the last touch of earth, took its freest flight: the mountains constituted a pathway toward the open heavens. And that may be an element of profundity in these naïve ideas which ascribe to nature aspirations which are more properly human. Do there not exist in nature great unfinished sketches, hints and lines leading upward? Nature has done all that unconsciously, has blindly piled block on block of stone slowly toward the stars. It is man’s privilege to read a meaning into her work, to make use of her efforts, to employ past centuries as the materials out of which to build the future; by scaling the heights of nature man will reach the sky.

II. Materialism.

Properly to estimate idealism it must be contrasted with its opposite, materialism.