The Non-religion of the Future: A Sociological Study

by Jean-Marie Guyau

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

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• INTRODUCTION.
• I. Sociality the basis of religion—Its definition.
• II. The connection between religion, æsthetics, and morals.
• III. The inevitable decomposition of all systems of dogmatic religion; the state of “non-religion” toward which the human mind seems to tend—The exact sense in which one must understand the non-religion as distinguished from the “religion of the future.”
• IV. The value and utility, for the time being, of religion; its ultimate insufficiency, [1]
• Part First.
• THE GENESIS OF RELIGIONS IN PRIMITIVE SOCIETIES.
• CHAPTER I.
• RELIGIOUS PHYSICS.
• Importance of the Problem of the Origin of Religion—Universality of Religious Beliefs or Superstitions—Variability of Religions and Religious Evolution.
• I. Idealist theory which attributes the origin of religion to a notion of the infinite—Henotheism of Max Müller and Von Hartmann—M. Renan’s Instinct for Divinity.
• II. Theory of a worship of the dead and of spirits—Herbert Spencer—Spencer’s objections to the theory of the attribution of a soul to natural forces.
• III. Answer to objections—Religious physics sociological in form, and the substitution of relations between malevolent or beneficent conscious beings for relations between natural forces—Sociomorphism of primitive Peoples, [21]
• CHAPTER II.
• RELIGIOUS METAPHYSICS.
• I. Animism or polydemonism—Formation of the dualist conception of spirit—Social relations with spirits.
• II. Providence and miracles—The evolution of the dualist conception of a special providence—The conception of miracles—The supernatural and the natural—Scientific explanation and miracles—Social and moral modifications in the character of man, owing to supposed social relations with a special providence—Increasing sentiment of irresponsibility and passivity and “absolute dependence.”
• III. The creation—Genesis of the notion of creation—The dualistic elements in this idea—Monism—Classification of systems of religious metaphysics—Criticism of the classification proposed by Von Hartmann—Criticism of the classification proposed by Auguste Comte, [80]
• CHAPTER III.
• RELIGIOUS MORALS.
• I. The laws which regulate the social relations between gods and men—Morality and immorality in primitive religions—Extension of friendly and hostile relations to the sphere of the gods—Primitive inability in matters of conscience, as in matters of art, to distinguish the great from the monstrous.
• II. The moral sanction in the society which includes gods and men—Patronage—That divine intervention tends always to be conceived after the model of human intervention and to sanction it.
• III. Worship and religious rites—Principles of reciprocity and proportionality in the exchange of services—Sacrifice—Principle of coercion and incantation—Principle of habit and its relation to rites—Sorcery—Sacerdotalism—Prophecy—The externals of worship—Dramatization and religious æsthetics.
• IV. Subjective worship—Adoration and love; their psychological origin, [113]
• Part Second.
• THE DISSOLUTION OF RELIGIONS IN EXISTING SOCIETIES.
• CHAPTER I.
• DOGMATIC FAITH.
• I. Narrow dogmatic faith—The credulity of primitive man: First, spontaneous faith in the senses and imagination; Second, faith in the testimony of superior men; Third, faith in the divine word, in revelation, and in the sacred texts—The literalness of dogmatic faith—Inevitable intolerance of narrow dogmatic faith—Belief in dogma, revelation, salvation, and damnation all result in intolerance—Modern tolerance.
• II. Broad dogmatic faith—Orthodox Protestantism—Dogmas of orthodox Protestantism—Rational consequences of these dogmas—Logical failure of orthodox Protestantism.
• III. The dissolution of dogmatic faith in modern society—Reasons that render this dissolution inevitable—Comparative influence of the various sciences; influence of public instruction, of means of communication, of industry even and of commerce, etc.—The disappearance of belief in oracles and prophecies—Gradual disappearance of the belief in miracles, in devils, etc., [136]
• CHAPTER II.
• SYMBOLIC AND MORAL FAITH.
• I. Substitution of metaphysical symbolism for dogma—Liberal Protestantism—Comparison with Brahmanism—Substitution of moral symbolism for metaphysical symbolism—Moral faith—Kant—Mill—Matthew Arnold—A literary explanation of the Bible substituted for a literal explanation.
• II. Criticism of symbolic faith—Inconsequence of liberal Protestantism—Is Jesus of a more divine type than other great geniuses?—Does the Bible possess a greater authority in matters of morals than any other masterpiece of poetry?—Criticism of Matthew Arnold’s system—Final absorption of religions by morality, [167]
• CHAPTER III.
• DISSOLUTION OF RELIGIOUS MORALITY.
• I. The first durable element of religious morality: Respect—Alteration of respect by the addition of the notion of the fear of God and divine vengeance.
• II. Second durable element of religious morality: Love—Alteration of this element by the addition of ideas of grace, predestination, damnation—Caducous elements of religious morality—Mysticism—Antagonism of divine love and human love—Asceticism—Excesses of asceticism—Especially in the religions of the East—Conception of sin in the modern mind.
• III. Subjective worship and prayer—The notion of prayer from the point of view of modern science and philosophy—Ecstasy—The survival of prayer, [195]
• CHAPTER IV.
• RELIGION AND NON-RELIGION AMONG THE PEOPLE.
• I. Is religious sentiment an innate and imperishable possession of humanity—Frequent confusion of a sentiment for religion with a sentiment for philosophy and morals—Renan—Max Müller—Difference between the evolution of belief in the individual and the evolution of belief in the race—Will the disappearance of faith leave a void behind?
• II. Will the dissolution of religion result in a dissolution of morality among the people?—Is religion the sole safeguard of social authority and public morality?—Christianity and socialism—Relation between non-religion and immorality, according to statistics.
• III. Is Protestantism a necessary transition stage between religion and free-thought?—Projects for Protestantizing France—Michelet, Quinet, De Laveleye, Renouvier, and Pillon—Intellectual, moral, and political superiority of Protestantism—Utopian character of the project—Uselessness, for purposes of morals, of substituting one religion for another—Is the possession of religion a condition sine qua non of superiority in the struggle for existence?—Objections urged against France and the French Revolution by Matthew Arnold; Greece and Judea compared, France and Protestant nations compared—Critical examination of Matthew Arnold’s theory—Cannot free-thought, science, and art evolve their respective ideals from within? [226]
• CHAPTER V.
• RELIGION AND NON-RELIGION AND THE CHILD.
• I. Decline of religious education—Defects of this education, in especial in Catholic countries—Means of lightening these defects—The priest—The possibility of state-action on the priest.
• II. Education provided by the state—Primary instruction—The schoolmaster—Secondary and higher instruction—Should the history of religion be introduced into the curriculum?
• III. Education at home—Should the father take no part in the religious education of his children—Evils of a preliminary religious education to be followed by disillusionment—The special question of the immortality of the soul: what should be said to children about death, [272]
• CHAPTER VI.
• RELIGION AND NON-RELIGION AMONG WOMEN.
• Are women inherently predisposed toward religion and even toward superstition?—The nature of feminine intelligence—Predominance of the imagination—Credulity—Conservatism—Feminine sensibility—Predominance of sentiment—Tendency to mysticism—Is the moral sentiment among women based upon religion—Influence of religion and of non-religion upon modesty and love—Origin of modesty—Love and perpetual virginity—M. Renan’s paradoxes on the subject of monastic vows—How woman’s natural proclivities may be turned to account by free-thought—Influence exercised by the wife’s faith over the husband—Instance of a conversion to free-thought, [295]
• CHAPTER VII.
• THE EFFECT OF RELIGION AND NON-RELIGION ON POPULATION AND THE FUTURE OF THE RACE.
• I. Importance of the problem of population—Antagonism between numerical strength and wealth—Necessity of numbers for the maintenance and progress of the race—Necessity of giving the advantage of numbers to the superior races—Problem of population in France—Its relation to the religious problem—Are the reasons for the restriction of the number of births physiological, moral, or economic?—Malthusianism in France—The true national peril.
• II. Remedies—Is a return to religion possible?—Religious powerlessness and growing tolerance in the matter—The influence that the law might exercise upon the causes of small families—Enumeration of these causes—Reform of the law in regard to filial duty—(Support of parents)—Reform of the law of inheritance—Reform of the military law for the purpose of favouring large families and of permitting emigration to the French colonies.
• III. Influence of public education: its necessity as a substitute for religious sentiment, [315]
• Part Third.
• NON-RELIGION OF THE FUTURE.
• CHAPTER I.
• RELIGIOUS INDIVIDUALISM.
• I. Is a renovation of religion possible? 1. Is a unification of the great religions to-day existing possible? 2. Is the appearance of a new religion to be expected?—Future miracles impossible—Religious poetry not to be expected—Men of genius capable of sincerely and naïvely labouring in the creating of a new religion not to be expected—Impossibility of adding to the original stock of religious ideas—No new cult possible—Last attempts at a new cult in America and in France—The Positivist cult—Ethical culture—Can socialism renew religion?—Advantages and defects of socialistic experiments.
• II. Religious anomy and the substitution of doubt for faith—1. Will the absence of religion result in scepticism? Will the number of sceptics increase with the disappearance of religion? 2. Substitution of doubt for faith—Genuinely religious character of doubt.
• III. Substitution of metaphysical hypothesis for dogma—Difference between religious sentiment and instinct for metaphysics—Imperishable character of the latter—Sentiment at once of the limits of science and of the infinity of our ideal—Spencer’s attempted reconciliation of science and religion—Confusion of religion with metaphysics, [350]
• CHAPTER II.
• ASSOCIATION. THE PERMANENT ELEMENT OF RELIGIONS IN SOCIAL LIFE.
• Social Aspect of Religions—Religious Communities and Churches—Ideal Type of Voluntary Association—Its Diverse Forms.
• I. Associations for intellectual purposes—How such associations might preserve the most precious elements of religions—Societies for the advancement of science, philosophy, religion—Dangers to avoid—Popularization of scientific ideas; propagandism in the interests of science.
• II. Associations for moral purposes—Tendency of religion in the best minds to become one with charity—Pity and charity will survive dogma—Rôle of enthusiasm in moral propagandism—Necessity of hope to sustain enthusiasm—Possibility of propagating moral ideas: 1. Apart from myths and religious dogmas; 2. Apart from any notion of a religious sanction—Baudelaire’s conception of a criminal and happy hero—Criticism of that conception—Worship of the memory of the dead.
• III. Associations for æsthetic purposes—Worship of art and nature—Art and poetry will sever their connection with religion and will survive it—Necessity of developing the æsthetic sentiment and the worship of art, as the religious sentiment becomes more feeble—Poetry, eloquence, music; their rôle in the future—Final substitution of art for rites—Worship of nature—Feeling for nature originally an essential element of the religious sentiment—Superiority of a worship of nature over worship of human art—Nature is the true temple of the future, [391]
• CHAPTER III.
• THEISM.
• Review of the Principal Metaphysical Hypotheses which will Replace Dogma.
• I. Introduction—Progress of metaphysical hypotheses—Metaphysical hypotheses destined to increasing diversity in details, and increasing agreement on essential points—Importance of the moral element in metaphysical hypotheses—The part played by conscience in human morality will not diminish, as Mr. Spencer says—Sympathetic groups under which divers systems of metaphysics will be ranged.
• II. Theism—1. Probable fate of the creation hypothesis—The author of the world conceived as a prime mover—Eternity of movement—The author of the world conceived as a creator properly so called—Illusion involved in the conception of nothing—Criticism of the creation hypothesis from the point of view of morals: the problem of evil and of the responsibility of the creator—Attempts to save optimism—Hypothesis of a God creating free agents, “workmen” and not “work”—Reciprocal determinism and the illusion of spontaneity—Immorality of the temptation—Hypothesis of the fall, its impossibility—God the tempter—Lucifer and God—2. Probable fate of the notion of Providence—Hypotheses to explain a special Providence and miracles thus insufficient—Hypothesis of a non-omnipotent God proposed by John Stuart Mill—The God of Comtism—Religion should be not solely human but cosmic—The fate of the philosophical idea of God—Rational religion proposed by the neo-Kantians—Ultimate transformation of the notion of divinity and of Providence—Human Providence and progressive divinity in the world, [424]
• CHAPTER IV.
• PANTHEISM.
• Review of the Principal Metaphysical Hypotheses which will Replace Dogma.—Continued.
• I. Optimistic pantheism—Transformation of transcendent Deism into immanent theism and pantheism—Disanthropomorphized God, according to Messrs. Fiske and Spencer—Diverse forms of pantheism—Optimistic and intellectualistic pantheism of Spinoza—Objections, Spinoza’s fatalism—The moral significance that might be lent to pantheism by the introduction of some notion of a final cause—Qualities and defects of pantheism—Conception of unity upon which it is founded—This conception criticised—Its possible subjectivity.
• II. Pessimistic pantheism—Pessimistic interpretation of religions in Germany—1. Causes of the progress of pessimism in the present epoch—Progress of pantheistic metaphysics and of positive science—Penalties incident to thought and reflection—Mental depression and sense of powerlessness, etc.—2. Is pessimism curable?—Possible remedies—The labour problem and the future of society—Illusions involved in pessimism—Inexactitude of its estimate of pleasures and pains—Quotation from Leopardi—Criticism of the practical results of pessimism—Nirvâna—An experiment in Nirvâna—Will pessimistic pantheism be the religion of the future? [452]
• CHAPTER V.
• IDEALISM, MATERIALISM, MONISM.
• Review of the Principal Metaphysical Hypotheses which will Replace Dogma.—Concluded.
• I. Idealism—Different forms of idealism: subjective idealism, objective idealism: The whole of existence resolved into a mode of mental existence—Value of idealism considered from point of view of the religious sentiment—Most specious of contemporary idealisms: Possibility of universal progress in the hypothesis of radical spontaneity and of “freedom”—Reconciliation between determinism and the conception of freedom—Moral idealism as a possible substitute for religious sentiment: Dependence of the universe on the principle of goodness.
• II. Materialism—Difficulty in defining absolute materialism: Matter—The atom—Nebular hypothesis—Hydrogen—Necessity of supplementing materialism by some theory of the origin of life—The latest conception of materialism: Conception of infinite divisibility and infinite extensibility.
• III. Monism and the fate of worlds—Current of contemporary systems toward monism—Scientific interpretation of monism—The world conceived monistically as a becoming and as a life—Scientific formulæ for life—Progress consists in the gradual confusion of these two formulæ—That the rise of morality and religion can be accounted for without the presupposition of any final cause—Metaphysical and moral expectations in regard to the destiny of the world and of humanity, it may be, founded on scientific monism—Facts which appear to be inconsistent with these expectations—Pessimistic conception of dissolution that is complementary to the conception of evolution—Is the immanence of dissolution demonstrable?—Natural devices for the perpetuation of the “fittest”—Rôle of intelligence, of numbers, etc.—Calculation of probabilities—Is eternity a parte post a ground of discouragement or of hope—Probable existence of thinking beings in other worlds: the planets, possibility of the existence of beings superior to man—Survival of the conception of gods—Hypothesis of intercosmic consciousness and of a universal society.
• IV. Destiny of the human race—The hypothesis of immortality from the point of view of monism—Two possible conceptions of immortality—Eternal or untemporal existence and continuation of life in some superior forms—I. Hypothesis of eternal life—its function in antique religions, in Platonism, and in the systems of Spinoza, Kant, and Schopenhauer—Eternal life and the subsistence of the individual—Distinction made by Schopenhauer and various other philosophers between individuality and personality—Eternal life problematical and transcendent—Aristocratic tendency of the theory of eternal life—Hypothesis of conditional immortality—Criticism of the hypothesis of conditional immortality; incompatibility of this notion with that of divine goodness—II. Hypothesis of a continuation of the present life and its evolution into some superior form—What sort of immortality the theory of evolution permits us to hope for—Immortality of one’s labours and conduct—True conception of such immortality—Its relation to the laws of heredity, atavism, natural selection—Immortality of the individual—Objections drawn from science—Protestations of affection against the annihilation of the person—Resulting antinomy—III. Modern opposition between the conception of function and the conception of simple substance, in which ancient philosophy endeavours to find a proof of immortality—Peripatetic theory of Wundt and modern philosophers on the nature of the soul—Immortality as a continuation of function, proved not by the simplicity, but by the complexity of consciousness—Relation between complexity and instability—Three stages of social evolution—Analogy of conscience with a society, collective character of individual consciousness—Conception of progressive immortality—Last product of evolution and natural selection: (1) No necessary relation between the compositeness and complexity of consciousness and its dissolubility: indissoluble compounds in the physical universe—(2) Relation between consciousnesses, their possible fusion in a superior consciousness—Contemporary psychology and the religious notion of the interpenetration of souls—Possible evolution of memory and identification of it with reality—Palingenesis by force of love—Problematic character of those conceptions and of every conception relative to existence, of consciousness and the relation between existence and consciousness—IV. Conception of death appropriate to those who, in the present state of evolution, do not believe in the immortality of the individual—Antique and modern stoicism—Acceptance of death: element of melancholy and of greatness in it—Expansion of self by means of philosophical thought, and scientific disinterestedness, to the point of to some extent approving one’s own annihilation, [477]

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INTRODUCTION.

I. Sociality the basis of religion—Its definition.

II. The connection between religion, æsthetics, and morals.

III. The inevitable decomposition of all systems of dogmatic religion; the state of “non-religion” toward which the human mind seems to tend—The exact sense in which one must understand the non-religion as distinguished from the “religion of the future.”

IV. The value and utility, for the time being, of religion; its ultimate insufficiency.