[67] See on this point our Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation, p. 27.
[68] “Oh, God” said Diderot, at the end of his Interprétation de la nature, “I do not know if Thou existest, but I shall bear myself as if Thou sawest into my soul; I shall act as if I felt myself in Thy presence.... I ask nothing of Thee in this world, for the course of things is necessary in and of its own nature, if Thou dost not exist, and necessary if Thou dost, by Thy decree.”
[69] Report of MM. Bourru and Burot au Congrès scientifique de Grenoble, August 18, 1885.
[70] A defender of the use of hasheesh scientifically employed, M. Giraud, who conceives that it is possible to induce ecstasy at will, and to regulate it by medical doses, writes us with enthusiasm: “A bit of hasheesh dispenses with painful mystical expedients to induce ecstasy. There is no further need of asceticism; the result is an intoxication, but a sacred intoxication, which is nothing else than an excess of activity in the higher centres.” We believe that every sort of drunkenness, far from possessing a sacred character, will constitute for ever and always, in the eyes of science, a morbid state, in no sense enviable from any rational point of view, by an individual in normal health; the constant employment of stimulants will exhaust the nervous system and throw it out of order, as the daily employment of nux vomica will, in the long run, destroy the power of a healthy stomach.
[71] See above what we have already said in regard to the Yoghis and asceticism.
[72] M. Sully-Prudhomme.
[73] Moreover when one has passed one’s life, or even many years, in any study whatsoever, one is inclined extremely to exaggerate the importance of this study. Greek professors believe that Greek is necessary to the best interests of humanity. When any question arises of drawing up a curriculum, if the professors of the several studies are interrogated, each wishes to see his own especial branch of science in the first rank. I remember that after I myself had been making Latin verses for some years I would have ranged myself voluntarily among the defenders of Latin verse. Whenever anyone makes an especial study of some work of genius, that of an individual, or a fortiori that of a people—Plato, Aristotle or Kant, the Vedas or the Bible, this work tends to become in his eyes the very centre of human thought; the book of which one makes a special study tends to become the book. A priest looks upon the whole of human life as an affair of faith simply; knowledge to a priest means simply a knowledge of the Fathers of the Church. It is not astonishing that even members of the laity, who have made religion the principal object of their studies, should be inclined to magnify its importance for humanity, or that the historian of religious thought should regard it as including the whole of human life, and as acquiring, even independently of any notion of revelation, a sort of inviolable character.
[74] Acts ii. 44, 45; iv. 32, sqq.
[75] Tertull. Apolog. c. 39, Justin., Apolog. I, 14.
[76] It must not be believed that even prostitutes, who as a class are so closely allied to criminals, are wholly non-religious. A case is cited of a number of prostitutes who subscribed the money to have one of their companions, who was on the point of death, removed from a house of ill-fame to some place where the priest might visit her; others subscribed money for a great number of masses to be said for the soul of a companion who was dead. At all events prostitutes are quite superstitious, and their religion swarms with strange and ridiculous beliefs.