INDEX.

THE END.

FOOTNOTES

[1] See an account given of the Prolégomènes of M. Albert Réville, by M. Darmesteter, Revue philosophique, seventh year, vol. i. p. 76.

[2] The importance which Auguste Comte attributed to sociology is well known, but in his horror of metaphysics the founder of positivism excluded from his science everything really universal and cosmic that it contained, in order to reduce it to limits exclusively human. Messrs. Spencer and Lilienfeld, Schaeffle and Espinas, improving on the sociology of Comte, have extended social laws and have shown that every living organism is an embryonic society, and, vice versa, that every society is an organism. A contemporary philosopher goes still further and attributes to sociology a certain metaphysical significance. M. Alfred Fouillée says: “Since biology and sociology are so closely related, may not the laws that are common to them be expected to suggest still more universal laws of nature and thought? Is the entire universe anything more than a vast society in process of formation, a vast system of conscious and consciously striving atoms which is working itself out, and little by little falling into shape? The laws which govern the grouping of individual atoms in the body are, no doubt, at bottom the same as those that govern the grouping of individuals in society; and the very atoms themselves, which are supposed to be indivisible, are, it may be, diminutive societies. If so, social science, the crown of human sciences, may some day give us, in its ultimate formula, the secret of universal life.... It is conceivable that the universal type of existence of the world may be found in sociology—that the universe may come to be conceived as a society in process of formation; miscarrying here and succeeding there, in its effort to transmute the reign of mechanics into a reign of justice, and to substitute fraternity for antagonism. If so, the essential and immanent power at the heart of beings, always ready to manifest itself as soon as circumstances give it access to the light of consciousness, might be expressed by the single word, sociability.” (Alfred Fouillée, La Science sociale contemporaine, 2d edition, introduction and conclusion.) M. Fouillée has not applied this theory to religion; he has noted its suggestiveness in the domain of metaphysics and of ethics simply; we believe, and we shall endeavour to show, that it is not less suggestive in the domain of religion.

This book was finished, and in part printed, when there appeared in the Revue philosophique M. Lesbazeilles’ interesting article on Les bases psychologiques de la religion.

Although the author’s point of view, as the title indicates, is throughout strictly psychological, he has given his attention also to social relations and “conditions of collective adaptation,” which he regards as prefigured, anticipated, and sanctified by religious rites and myths. This, we think, implies some confusion between religion and morality. Morality deals with collective human life, but religion deals with collective life generally, and undertakes at the same time to provide a physical and a metaphysical explanation of things. We shall see that in the beginning religion was a superstitious physics, in which the forces of nature were regarded simply as the expression of some unknown person or person’s volitions, and that it thus naturally assumed a sociological form.

[3] See pt. [3, chap. ii.]