The Non-religion of the Future: A Sociological Study

by Jean-Marie Guyau

And now let us consider consciousnesses in their relations to each other. Contemporary psychology tends to the doctrine that different consciousnesses, or if you prefer, different aggregates of states of consciousness, may combine, and even interpenetrate, somewhat analogously to what theologians mean by communion of souls. And if so, it is permissible to ask whether, if consciousnesses can interpenetrate, they may not some day come to possess a continuity of existence; may not be able to hand on their existence to each other, and to communicate to each other a new sort of durability instead of remaining, as Leibnitz says, more or less momentary; supposing always that such durability would be advantageous to the species.

Possible frequency of the phenomenon.

Mystical intuitions sometimes contain a certain presentiment of the truth. St. Paul tells us that the heavens and the earth shall pass away, that prophecies and languages shall pass away, but that one thing shall not pass, and that is charity, or love. If this doctrine is to be interpreted philosophically, the bond of continual love, which is of all bonds the least primitive and the most complex, must be conceived as capable of ultimately becoming the most durable of bonds, and as tending progressively to embrace a larger and larger proportion of the whole number of the inhabitants of the celestial city. It is by what is best, what is most disinterested, most impersonal, and most loving in one, that one achieves communion with the consciousness of another, and such disinterestedness must coincide ultimately with disinterestedness in others, with others’ love for one’s self; and there will arise thus a possible fusion of souls, a communion so intense that as one suffers in the bosom of another, so, too, one may come to live in the heart of another. To be sure, we have passed here into the limits of dreamland, but it is to be remarked that such dreams are extra-scientific, and not anti-scientific.

Vision of the ideal society.

Let us conceive ourselves as existing in this problematical, though not impossible, epoch when individual consciousnesses shall have achieved a higher degree of complexity and of subjective unity, and along with them a power of more intimate communion than they possess to-day, without the fact of that communion altogether breaking down the bounds of personality. They will communicate thus with each other, as the living cells in the same body sympathize with each other, and contribute each to form the collective consciousness; they will be all in all, and all in every part. And indeed one may readily conceive means of communication and of sympathy, much more subtle and direct than those which exist to-day among different individuals. The science of the nervous system is in its earliest stages; we are acquainted as yet with exaltation as a state of disease only, and with suggestion at a distance as an incident merely of hypnotism; but we already begin to be dimly aware of a whole world of phenomena that go to show the possibility of a direct communication between different, and even under certain circumstances of a sort of reciprocal absorption of two personalities. Some such complete fusion of two consciousnesses, that however still preserve their individuality, is to-day the dream of love which, as one of the greatest of social forces, ought not to labour in vain. Supposing the power of communion with other consciousnesses gradually to develop, the death of the individual will manifestly encounter a greater and greater resistance on the part of the several minds with which such an individual is in communication. And, in any event, the minds with which an individual is in communication will tend to retain an increasingly vivid, and, so to speak, living memory of him. Memory at the present day is simply an absolutely distinct representation of a certain being—an image, as it were, vibrating in the ether after the original has disappeared. The reason is that there does not as yet exist an intimate solidarity and continuous communication between one individual and another. But it is possible to conceive an image which would be scarcely distinguishable from the object represented; would be the sum of what such and such an object means to me; would be, as it were, the prolongation of the effect of another consciousness on my consciousness. Such an image might be regarded as a point of contact between the two consciousnesses involved. Just as in generation the two factors combine in a certain third, which represents them both, so such an animated and beloved image, instead of being passive, would constitute a component part of the collective energy and purpose of one’s being; would count for one in the complex whole that one calls a mind or a consciousness.

Personal immortality.

According to this hypothesis, the problem would be, to be at once loving enough and beloved enough to live and survive in the minds of others. The individual, in so far as his external accidents are concerned, would disappear; but what is best in him would survive in the souls of those he loves who love him. A ray of sunlight may for a time record upon a bit of dead paper the lines of a face that no longer exists among the living; nay, human art may go farther, and impart to canvas or to stone the minutest resemblances to human life; but art has not yet succeeded in imparting a soul to Galatea. Love must be added to art to achieve that miracle—men must love each other so completely that they become identified in the universal consciousness. When that consummation has been reached, each of us will live completely, and without loss, in the love of our fellows. The power of love is not limited, like that of light, to giving permanence to the outward appearances of life; it is capable of lending stability to life itself.

Elimination of death.

Separation on such an hypothesis would be as impossible as in the case of those atomic vortices of which we spoke above, which consisted each in a single individual, in the sense that no force could break them up into their elements; their unity lay not in their simplicity, but in their inseparability. Just so in the sphere of consciousness, a manifold of conscious states may conceivably form a luminous ring that can neither be broken nor extinguished. The atom, it has been said, is inviolable, and consciousness may come to be inviolable de facto.