The Non-religion of the Future: A Sociological Study

by Jean-Marie Guyau

Before the earliest developments of science, primitive man found himself, as a result of his imagination, in a state of domesticity in the world, analogous to that to which he had himself reduced certain animals; and this state exerted a profound influence upon the character of such animals, deprived them of certain capacities and endowed them, in turn, with others. Some of them—certain birds, for example—become under domestication almost incapable of finding and providing themselves with their necessary food. More intelligent animals like the dog, who might in a case of absolute necessity rely upon himself for indispensables, contract nevertheless a habit of subjection to man which creates a corresponding need: my dog is not at ease except when he knows that I am near; if anything causes me to go away, he is restless and nervous; in the presence of danger he runs between my legs, instead of taking refuge in flight, which would be the primitive instinct. Thus every animal which knows itself to be watched and protected in the details of its life by a superior being, necessarily loses its primitive independence, and if its primitive independence should be once more restored, it would be unhappy, would experience an ill-defined fear, a vague sentiment of enfeeblement. Just so in the case of primitive and uncultivated man: once he is habituated to the protection of the gods, this protection becomes for him a veritable need; if he is deprived of it, he falls into a state of inexpressible discomfiture and inquietude. Add that, in this case, he will soon provide himself with a substitute; to escape from the intolerable solitude which doubt creates within him, he will take refuge in his gods or his fetiches, under the influence of a sentiment identical with that which sends the dog to take refuge between the legs of his master. To attain some idea of the force of such a sentiment among primitive human beings, one must remember that the surveillance of the gods is much more extended and more scrupulous even than that of man over domestic animals, or of a master over his slaves. Primitive man feels his god or his genii at his side at every step, in all the circumstances of life; he is accustomed to being never alone, to the presence of someone by him keeping step with him; he believes that every word that he says and every act that he does is witnessed and judged. No domestic animal is accustomed to so high a degree of subjection; he knows perfectly that our protection is not always efficacious and that we are sometimes mistaken about him, that we caress him when he ought to be punished, etc. Cats, for instance, know that man cannot see in the dark: one evening a white cat made ready to commit an abominable misdemeanour within two steps of me, not suspecting that its colour would betray it to an attentive eye, even in the obscurity. Primitive men sometimes practised an analogous cunning in regard to their gods; they did not yet believe in the complete sovereignty, in the absolute ubiquity, of Providence. But by a process of logical development, Providence is ultimately believed to extend to everything, to envelop one’s whole life; the fear of God becomes to man a perpetual prohibition against his passions, a hope in God’s aid his perpetual recourse. Religion and science possess this much in common, that they result in enveloping us equally in a network of necessities; but what distinguishes science is that it makes us acquainted with the real order and causes of phenomena, and by that fact permits us to modify that order at will; by showing us the fact and nature of our dependence, science supplies us with the means of conquering a comparative independence. In religion, on the contrary, the mythical and miraculous element introduces an unforeseen factor, the divine will, a special providence, into the midst of events, and by that fact deceives one as to the true means of modifying the real course of things. The instant one believes one’s self to be dependent upon Jupiter or Allah, one ascribes a greater efficacy to propitiation than to action; and it follows that the greater one perceives one’s dependence to be the more completely one believes one’s self to be without defence against it; the more complete the submission is to God, the more complete one’s resulting submission becomes to the established fact. The feeling of an imaginary dependence upon supernatural beings thus increases the general dependence of man in relation to nature. Thus understood, the notion of a special providence, of a divine tutelage, has resulted in the protracted maintenance of the human soul in a state of genuine minority; and this state of minority, in its turn, has rendered the existence and surveillance of divine protectors a necessity. When, therefore, the believer refuses an offer of emancipation from the dependence which he has voluntarily accepted, the reason is that he feels a vague sentiment of his own insufficiency, of his irremediably belated coming of age; he is a child, who does not dare stray far from the paternal roof; he does not possess the courage to walk alone. The child who should show a precocious independence, and should early learn to go its own road, would not improbably become simply dissipated; his precocity might well be depravity in disguise. Similarly in history, the irreligious, the sceptics, the atheists, have been frequently spoiled children, precocious in the bad sense; their freedom of spirit was only a high form of mischief. The human race, like the individual, long needed surveillance and tutelage; so long as it experienced this need it leaned inevitably upon a belief in a providence external to itself and to the universe, capable of interfering in the course of things, and of modifying the general laws of nature by particular acts of volition. Subsequently, by the progress of science, Providence has been deprived day by day of some of its special and miraculous powers, of its supernatural prerogatives. By the evolution of human thought piety has been transformed; it tends to-day to regard as an object of filial affection what was formerly an object of terror, of deprecation, of propitiation. Science, enveloping Providence in a network of inflexible laws, is day by day reducing it to a state of immobility and, so to speak, paralyzing it. Providence is becoming like an old man whom age has rendered incapable of movement—who but for our aid could not raise a hand or foot, who lives with our assistance, and who, nevertheless, is only the more beloved, as if his existence became to us more precious in proportion to its uselessness.

III. Creation.

Conception of creation dualistic.

After the notion of Providence one must deal, in running through the metaphysical principles of religion, with the notion of a creator, which has acquired in our days an importance that it did not possess formerly. This conception, like that of the soul and of a special providence, presented itself originally under the form of dualism. Man conceived in the beginning a god as fashioning a world more or less independent of himself, out of some pre-existing material. It was only later that this crude dualism was refined into the notion of creation ex nihilo, which represented the traditional duality as produced by a primitive unity—God, who had at first existed alone, created out of nothing a world distinct and separate from himself.

Conception of creation natural.

The following conversation, of which I can guarantee the authenticity, affords an example of naïve metaphysic. The two interlocutors were a little peasant girl, four years old, who had always lived in the country, and a young girl from town, the daughter of the owner of the farm. They had gone out into the garden where a number of flowers had opened that morning; the little peasant girl admired them enthusiastically, and addressing her companion, for whom she had long entertained a species of cult: “It is you, mistress, is it not,” she cried, “who makes these flowers?” This interrogation did not embody an incipient speculation in a sphere of physics; the child simply attributed an unknown power to a visible and palpable being. Her mistress replied laughingly, “No, not I. I haven’t the power.” “Who does it then?” the child asked. One perceives the persistence, in primitive intelligences, of the impulse to explain things by the direct action of somebody’s volition, the impulse to place somebody behind every event. “It is God,” replied the elder girl. “And where is God? Have you ever seen Him?” No doubt the little peasant, who regarded the city as a very surprising place, supposed one might meet God there, face to face, and God did not, as yet, represent to her anything supra-physical. But how admirably disposed she was for the reception of a more or less illegitimate metaphysic! “I have never seen God,” replied her mistress, “and nobody has ever seen Him. He lives in heaven, and at the same time lives among us; He sees us and hears us; it is He who made the flowers, who made you and me, and everything that exists.” I shall not report the child’s replies, for I believe that she was too much astonished really to say anything. She was in a situation such as a savage finds himself in when a missionary comes and talks with him about God, the supreme being, creator of all things, a spirit existing without a body. Savages sometimes refuse to understand, and point to their heads and declare that they suffer; sometimes they believe that one is making fun of them, and even among our children there is a good deal of persistent and mute astonishment, which wears off slowly with the lapse of time. What is striking in the little conversation reported above, is the way in which the metaphysical myth necessarily rises out of the scientific error. An inexact induction first gives rise to the notion of a human being acting by means to us unknown and mysterious; this notion, once obtained, fastens upon the body of such and such an individual, the object antecedently of especial veneration; from this individual it retreats in course of time to another more distant, from country to town, from earth to heaven, from visible heaven to the invisible essence of things, the omnipresent substratum of the world. Simultaneously with this retrograde movement, the being endowed with marvellous powers becomes increasingly vague and abstract. The human intelligence, in developing its conception of the supernatural being, employs what theologians call the negative method, which consists in abstracting one known attribute after another. If men and races of men have always followed this procedure, it is less because of any refinement of thought on their part than in obedience to the pressure of an external necessity. Directly as man becomes acquainted with nature, he sees all traces of his god fly before him; he is like a miner who, thinking that he recognizes the presence of gold in the soil beneath his feet, begins to dig, and finding nothing, cannot make up his mind to believe that the earth contains no treasure; he sinks his shafts deeper and deeper in an eternal hopefulness. Just so, instead of breaking with his gods, man exiles them to a greater and greater distance as he advances in knowledge. What nature excludes tends to take on a metaphysical character; every error which persists in spite of the progress of experience takes refuge in heaven, in some sphere more and more completely inaccessible. Thus the somewhat gross origins of religions are not irreconcilable with the refined speculations incident to their period of development. Human intelligence, once launched into infinite space, inevitably describes a wider and wider orbit about reality. A mythical religion is not a completely rational and a priori construction; it always rests upon alleged experience, upon observations and analogies, which are tainted with error; it is, therefore, false a posteriori, and therein lies the explanation of the invincible and increasing divergence between myth and verity.

God conceived as orderer rather than as creator.

In the beginning men conceived God rather as an orderer of the universe, as a workman fashioning a pre-existing matter, than as a creator; we find this notion still predominant among the Greeks. Its genesis was probably something as follows: Whoever supposes the existence of God regards the world as an instrument in His hands; God employs the thunder, the wind, the stars for purposes of his own, as man employs his arrows and his hatchet. Does it not naturally result from that conception that God fashions these marvellous instruments just as man fashions his arrows and hatchet? If the little peasant girl, of whom we spoke above, had not seen her father repair or make his tools, make a fire, make bread, till the soil, she would never have asked who made the flowers in the garden. The child’s first why involves the following reasoning: Somebody has acted on this thing as I myself have acted on such and such another thing; who, then, in the present case is it? The abstract notion of causality is a consequence of the practical development of our own causality; the greater the number of things that one can make one’s self, the greater one’s astonishment at seeing things done by other people with greater rapidity or on a larger scale. The more bound down one is one’s self, to the employment of tedious artifice, the more one admires what is produced suddenly by a power which is apparently extraordinary. So that the notion of a miracle thus more naturally arose from one’s experience of the practical arts, than, so to speak, from brute experience, and for the rest contained no element which was contradictory to the naïve science of the earliest observers. Every question presupposes a certain kind and amount of action on the part of the questioner; one does not demand the cause of an event until one has one’s self been the conscious cause of such and such another event. If man possessed no influence in the world, he would not ask himself who made the world. The mason’s trowel and carpenter’s saw have played a considerable part in the development of religious metaphysics.

Notion of creation ex nihilo of empirical origin.

Remark, also, how easy it is, even at the present day, to confound the word make with the word create, which indeed did not exist in primitive times. How should one distinguish precisely what one fashions from what one creates? There is a certain element of creation in fashioning; and this element sometimes positively assumes a magical character, seems to rise ex nihilo. What a marvel, for example, is a spark of fire obtained from stone or wood! The Hindus see in it the symbol of generation. In fire the earliest races of men laid their fingers on the miraculous. In appearance the pebble one strikes or the dried wood one rubs to produce a spark is not itself consumed; it gives without loss, it creates. The first man who discovered the secret of producing fire seemed to have introduced something genuinely new into the world, to have ravished the power of creation from the gods. In general, what distinguishes the artist, properly so called, from the simple workman is the feeling that he possesses a power which he does not understand, that he produces in some sense more than he aims at, that he is lifted above himself; genius is not fully conscious, as simple talent is, of its resources; it contains an element of the unforeseen, a force which is not calculable in advance, a creative power; and therein lies the secret of the true artist’s personal pride. Even in a matter of purely physical power a superexcitation of the nervous system may place at one’s disposal an amount of muscular energy one did not suppose one possessed: the athlete, no more than the thinker, at such times knows the limits of his own strength and the marvels of which he is capable. Each of us possesses thus, during certain hours of his existence, the consciousness of a more or less creative power, of the direct production of something out of nothing. One feels that one has produced by force of will a result that one’s intelligence cannot wholly account for, that one cannot rationally explain. Therein lies the foundation and in a measure the justification of a belief in miracles, in the extraordinary power of certain men, and, in the last analysis, in a power of creating. This indefinite power that man sometimes feels well up within him, he naturally ascribes to his gods. Since he conceives them as acting upon the world in a manner analogous to himself, he conceives them as capable of giving rise to new elements in the world; and this notion of creative power once introduced continuously develops till the day when it leads one, from induction to induction, to the belief that the entire world is the work of a divinity, that the earth and the stars have been fashioned and created by a supernatural volition. If man can strike fire out of a stone, why might not God strike a sun out of the firmament? The conception of a creator, which seems at first a remote consequence from a chain of abstract reasoning, is thus one of the innumerable manifestations of anthropomorphism; one of the ideas which, at least originally, seems to have been rather paraphysical than metaphysical. It rests at bottom upon an ignorance of the possible transformation and actual equivalents of forces, owing to which every apparent creation is resolvable into a substantial equivalence and every apparent miracle into an exemplification of immutable order.