The Non-religion of the Future: A Sociological Study

by Jean-Marie Guyau

For savages and children nature a society.

For animals and savages, as for very young children, nature is absolutely the opposite of what it appears to be nowadays to the scholar and the philosopher: for them it is not a cold and neuter habitat, in which man alone possesses aims and bends everything to the fulfilment of his wishes; it is not a physical laboratory full of inert instruments for the service of man. On the contrary, nature is a society; primitive people see intention in everything. Friends or enemies surround them on all sides; the struggle for existence is one long pitched battle with imaginary allies against adversaries not infrequently only too real. How should they understand that there is a profound unity in nature which rigidly excludes from the chain of things anything like individuality or independence? The only cause of movement with which they are acquainted is desire; they reckon desire or intention as the cause of every movement in nature, as of every movement in their fellow-men and in animals; and they conceive that the intentions of all of the diverse beings by which they find themselves surrounded may be equally modified by prayer and offerings. Their conception of nature is at once anthropomorphic and sociomorphic, as is subsequently their conception of God. Nothing is more natural and inevitable than this fashion of modeling the external world on the internal, and the relations of things on the relations of men.

Panthelism.

If the word fetichism is too vague to designate this primitive state of mind and gives rise to confusion, take another word; if the word panthelism were not a little barbarous it would better express this stage of human intelligence in which one is inclined to ascribe to all the phenomena of nature not indeed souls, as distinct from bodies, but simply intentions, desires, volitions, as naturally inhering in the objects themselves.

English classification of things.

But here we shall perhaps be reminded that, as Mr. Spencer says, the distinction between things animate and inanimate is quite clear even to the brute, and, a fortiori, to primitive man; so that primitive man will not attribute desire or volition to a thing which he knows to be inanimate—animate, inanimate; how we do come back to the vague! Under each of these terms the modern man ranges a group of ideas absolutely inaccessible to primitive man and to the lower animals. Personally we deny that the distinction between animate and inanimate was present in the earliest stages of intellectual evolution. Certainly both the animal and the savage recognized a division of the phenomena of nature into two classes; one is composed of the things which are disposed to do them good or evil, the other is composed of those which ignore them simply; that is the primitive distinction. As to an acquaintance with animate and inanimate they are innocent of anything of the kind; on this point, as on all others, they confine themselves to the grossest sense-experience. Their senses inform them that certain objects are beings who are altogether inoffensive, who eat nobody and are not themselves good to eat; one gives them no further attention; practically they do not exist. I one day asked a peasant woman the name of a small plant. She looked at me with frank astonishment and replied, with a shake of the head, “Ce n’est rien—it is nothing; it is not good to eat!” That woman was on a level with primitive man. In the eyes of the latter, as in the eye of an animal, one-half the phenomena of nature are nothing—they do not count; one scarcely sees them. The fruits on a tree, on the contrary, are good to eat. The savage, however, perceives immediately that the fruit makes no active resistance, does not cry out when he bites into it; and he considers it, therefore, as on all accounts absolutely indifferent, except that it is good to eat. But given a fruit that poisons him, he promptly fears it and venerates it. Similarly with animals: stones and vegetation hold equally aloof from the carnivora, are practically as distant as the moon and the stars. The herbivora, on the contrary, pay no attention to anything but vegetation. Natural objects being thus parcelled off into two classes, the class of the indifferent and inoffensive, and the class of the useful and hurtful, the animal soon learns to recognize that in the second class the most important objects are those which possess spontaneity of movement. But in his eyes—and this is a fact of capital importance—spontaneity of movement is not the exclusive sign of life, of interior activity; it is a sign simply of utility, or of heightened danger for him. He is wholly preoccupied with personal and practical consequences; he indulges in no superfluity of inference in regard to the object itself; he does not speculate. Moreover, a moving object which in nowise affects his sensibility rapidly becomes quite as indifferent to him as a motionless object. Animals soon become accustomed to the passage of railway trains: cows browse tranquilly, partridges on the brow of a hill scarcely lift their heads; and why? Because they have recognized in the locomotive an inanimate mechanism?[25] Not in the least; they observe simply that the locomotive never goes out of its way to damage them.

Belief that all things are animate natural to animals.

This being the primitive conception of the world, we believe that the more incapable an uncivilized being is of observing and reasoning the more natural it should be for him to acquire the conviction that objects which at first struck him as indifferent are not genuinely inanimate, but are sometimes malevolent in their intentions toward him, sometimes benevolent; that they possess in effect over him a quite respectable degree of power. In other words the more intelligent an animal or a savage becomes, the more superstitious he will be, and thus by the very progress of mental evolution the primitive distinction of objects into two classes will become dim—the distinction of objects into those which are altogether indifferent and outside of the society in which one lives, and those which are more or less worthy of attention, more or less closely in practical relations with us. Mental evolution has proceeded, believe us, in precisely the opposite direction to that imagined by Mr. Spencer.

Motion a material sign of life in them.

Let us speak first of the more intelligent animals, before passing to man. The more intelligent animals are often obliged to give their attention to a class of objects in appearance indifferent to them and to modify the imperfect ideas which they had at first conceived in regard to them. Generally speaking, objects of this sort are motionless; if immobility be not their essential distinguishing characteristic, it is at least one of their principal distinguishing characteristics. The instinct of self-preservation in a being inevitably bestirs itself in the presence of every movement that looks like a menace. Well, an animal is soon obliged to recognize that indifferent objects possess in certain circumstances the attribute of spontaneous movement, an attribute which is for him so vitally interesting. I remember the surprise a kitten once showed when it perceived the dead leaves rise in the wind and circulate about it; at first it ran away, and then came back and pursued the leaves, and smelt them, and touched them with its paw. Darwin relates that a dog was one day lying near an open parasol on the lawn; the parasol moved in the breeze, the dog began to bay, to growl furiously, and, every time that the parasol moved again, began to growl afresh. Evidently it was a new thing to Darwin’s dog that such an object as a parasol might change its place without the visible intervention of some person; all the dog’s classifications were thrown into disorder, he was no longer certain whether he must class the parasol with things indifferent or with things harmful. He would have experienced an analogous impression if he had seen a paralytic patient, always theretofore motionless in his armchair, suddenly rise and walk. An animal’s surprise is still more strong when an object regarded as till then indifferent approaches him and manifests its activity by an infliction of sudden pain. I witnessed the astonishment of a cat which, having seen a red-hot coal roll out of the stove door, leaped forward to play with it; he caught it simultaneously with snout and paw, gave a cry of pain, and fled in such fear that it was two days before he returned to the house. Mr. Spencer himself cites another example which he has observed. The beast was a formidable creature, half mastiff, half hound, who was playing with a cane; he was leaping and gambolling, and holding it by the ferule end. Suddenly the handle of the cane touched the ground and the ferule was pushed forcibly back toward the dog’s palate. The animal groaned, let the cane fall, and fled some distance away; and there he manifested, it appears, a degree of alarm truly comic in a beast apparently so ferocious. It was only after many cautious approaches and much hesitation that he yielded to the temptation of taking hold of the cane. Mr. Spencer, who supplies us with this fact, with great impartiality concludes from it, as we also do, that it was the unusual conduct of the cane which suggested to the dog the notion that it was animate; but he hastens to add that before the vague idea of animation thus given rise to in an animal could become definite in a man, the intervention of some spiritualistic theory would be absolutely necessary. One may well ask one’s self what spiritualism has to do with the case.[26]