II. This book is intimately related to two others that we have published on æsthetics and on morals. We believe that the æsthetic sentiment is identical with self-conscious life, with life that is conscious of its own subjective intensity and harmony; beauty we have said may be defined as a perception or an act that stimulates life simultaneously on its three sides—sensibility, intelligence, will—and that produces pleasure by the immediate consciousness of this general stimulation. Moral sentiment, on the other hand, is identical, we believe, with a consciousness of the powers and possibilities in the sphere of practice of a life ideal in intensity and breadth of interest. The bulk of these possibilities relates to one’s power, in some form or other, of serving other people. Finally, religious sentiment appears when this consciousness of the social aspect of life is extended to the totality of conscious beings, and not only of real and living, but also of possible and ideal beings. It is, therefore, in the very notion of life, and of its various individual or social manifestations, that the essential unity of æsthetics with morals and religion is to be found.
In the first part of this work we shall trace the origin and evolution of sociological mythology. In the succeeding portions we shall consider whether, if we once set aside the mythical or imaginative element which is essential to religion and which distinguishes it from philosophy, the sociological theory does not offer the most probable, and most comprehensive, metaphysical explanation of the universe.[2]
III. It is important that there should be no misunderstanding in regard to this non-religion of the future, as contradistinguished from the multitude of religions of the future that have been recently expounded. It has seemed to us that these various expositions are based on a number of equivocations. In the first place religion, properly so-called, has sometimes been confused with metaphysics, sometimes with morals, sometimes with both; and it is owing to this confusion that religion has been conceived to be indestructible. Is it not by an abuse of language that Mr. Spencer, for example, gives the name of religion to speculations concerning the unknowable and thence readily deduces the conclusion that religion, by which he means metaphysics, possesses an impregnable stronghold in the human mind? In the same way many other contemporary philosophers, like Herr von Hartmann, the theologian of the unconscious, have not resisted the temptation of describing for us a religion of the future, which resolves itself simply into their own system, whatever it may be, of philosophy. Others again, especially among liberal Protestants, preserve the name of religion for purely rationalistic systems of thought. There is, of course, a sense in which one may admit that metaphysics and morals constitute a religion, or form at least the vanishing point toward which religion tends. But, in many books, the “religion of the future” is no more than a somewhat hypocritical compromise with some form of positive religion. Under cover of the symbolism dear to the Germans, they save in appearance what they in reality destroy. It is in opposition to this species of subterfuge that we have adopted the less misleading term of the “Non-religion of the Future.” Thus we separate ourselves from Von Hartmann and the other prophets who reveal to us, point by point, the religion of the fiftieth century. When one approaches an object of such ardent controversy it is better to employ words with exactness. Everything, first and last, has been included within the limits of philosophy; even the sciences, on the pretext that all scientific researches were in the beginning undertaken by philosophy; and philosophy, in turn, has been included in religion, on the pretext that originally religion embraced within its limits the whole of philosophy and of science. Given a religion of some kind, even that of the Fuegians, there is nothing to prevent one from reading into its myths the last dictum of modern metaphysics; by this means a religion may apparently continue in existence until there is no more left of it than a mere envelope of religious phraseology covering and discovering a wholly metaphysical and purely philosophical system. Better still, on this method, since Christianity is the highest form of religion, all philosophers must ultimately become Christians; and finally, since universality and catholicity are the ideal of Christianity, we shall all be Catholics before we are aware of it.
For the investigator who, without denying such analogies as may ultimately be found to exist, proposes to take as his point of departure the specific differences of religion (which is the true method), every positive and historical religion presents three distinctive and essential elements: (1) An attempt at a mythical and non-scientific explanation of natural phenomena (divine intervention, miracles, efficacious prayers, etc.), or of historical facts (incarnation of Jesus Christ or of Buddha, revelations, and so forth); (2) A system of dogmas, that is to say, of symbolic ideas, of imaginative beliefs, forcibly imposed upon one’s faith as absolute verities, even though they are susceptible of no scientific demonstration or philosophical justification; (3) A cult and a system of rites, that is to say, of more or less immutable practices regarded as possessing a marvellous efficacy upon the course of things, a propitiatory virtue. A religion without myth, without dogma, without cult, without rite is no more than that somewhat bastard product, “natural religion,” which is resolvable into a system of metaphysical hypotheses. By these three different, and really organic elements, religion is clearly marked off from philosophy. Also, instead of being nowadays what it was at a former period, a popular philosophy and popular science, mythical and dogmatic religion tends to become a system of antiscientific and antiphilosophical ideas. If this character is not always apparent, it is owing to the sort of symbolism of which we have spoken, which preserves the name and abandons the ideas or adapts them to the progress of the modern mind.
The elements which distinguish religion from metaphysics or from ethics, and which constitutes a positive religion properly so-called, are, in our judgment, essentially caducous and transitory, and, if so, we reject the religion of the future, as we should reject an alchemy of the future, or astrology of the future. But it does not follow that non-religion or a-religion—which is simply the negation of all dogma, of all traditional and supernatural authority, of all revelation, of all miracle, of all myth, of all rite erected into a duty—is synonymous with impiety, with a contempt for the moral and metaphysical elements of ancient faiths. Not in the least; to be non-religious or a-religious is not to be anti-religious. More than that, as we shall see, the non-religion of the future may well preserve all that is pure in the religious sentiment: an admiration for the cosmos and for the infinite powers which are there displayed; a search for an ideal not only individual, but social, and even cosmic, which shall overpass the limits of actual reality. As it may be maintained that modern chemistry is a veritable alchemy—but an alchemy shorn of the presuppositions which caused its miscarriage—as modern contemporary chemists may pronounce a sincere eulogium upon the ancient alchemists and their marvellous intuitions; just so it may be affirmed that the true religion, if the word must be preserved, consists in no longer maintaining a narrow and superstitious religion. The absence of positive and dogmatic religion is, moreover, the very form toward which all particular religions tend. In effect they strip themselves, little by little (except Catholicism and Turkish Mohammedanism), of their sacred character, of their antiscientific affirmations; they renounce the oppressive control that they have traditionally exercised over the individual conscience. The developments of religion and those of civilization have always proceeded hand in hand; the developments of religion have always proceeded in the line of a greater independence of spirit, of a less literal and less narrow dogmatism, of a freer speculation. Non-religion, as we here understand it, may be considered as a higher degree simply of religion and of civilization.
The absence of religion thus conceived is one with a reasoned but hypothetical metaphysics, treating of men and the universe. One may designate it as religious independence, or anomy, or individualism.[3] It has, moreover, been preached in some degree by all religious reformers from Sakia-Mouni and Jesus to Luther and Calvin, for they have all of them maintained liberty of conscience and respected so much only of tradition as, in the then state of contemporary religious criticism, they could not help admitting. Catholicism, for example, was founded in part by Jesus, but also in part in spite of Jesus; intolerant Anglicanism was founded in part by Luther, but also in part in spite of Luther. The non-religious man, the man simply without a religion, may therefore admire and sympathize with the great founders of religion, not only in that they were thinkers, metaphysicians, moralists, and philanthropists, but in that they were reformers of established belief, more or less avowed enemies of religious authority, of every affirmation which should be that of a sacred body and not of an individual. Every positive religion possesses as one of its essential characters that of transmitting itself from one generation to another, by virtue of the authority which attaches to domestic or national traditions; its mode of transmission is thus totally different from that of science and of art. New religions themselves are obliged more often than not to present themselves in the guise of simple reforms, in the guise of simple returns to the rigour of former teaching and precept, to avoid giving too great a shock to the principle of authority, but in spite of these disguises every new religion has shaken it; the return to an alleged primitive authority has always been a real outleap in the direction of ultimate liberty. There exists, then, in the bosom of every great religion a dissolving force; namely, the very force which served in the beginning to constitute it and to enable it to triumph over its predecessor: the right of private judgment. It is upon this force, this right, that one may count for the ultimate establishment, after the gradual decomposition of every system of dogmatic belief, of a final absence of religion.[4]
Over and above the confusion between the perpetuity of metaphysics and morals and that of positive religion, there is another tendency among our contemporaries against which we have wished to protest. It is the belief, which many profess, in the final unification of existing religions into a religion of the future, either a perfected Judaism, or a perfected Christianity, or a perfected Buddhism. To this predicted religious unity we oppose rather a future plurality of beliefs, a religious individualism. A pretension to universality is, no doubt, characteristic of every great religion; but the dogmatic and mythological element which constitutes a religion positive is precisely irreconcilable, even under the elastic form of symbolism, with the very universality to which they aspire. Such a universality cannot be realized even in metaphysics and morals, for the element of insolubility and unknowability, which cannot be eliminated, will always attract different minds in different directions. The notion of a dogma actually catholic, that is universal, or even a belief actually catholic, seems to us a belief contrary to the indefinite progress for which each of us ought to work according to his strength and his opportunities. A thought is not really personal, does not, properly speaking, even exist or possess the right to exist, unless it be something more than a mere repetition of the thoughts of somebody else. Every eye must have its own point of view, every voice its own accent. The very progress of intelligence and of conscience must, like all progress, proceed from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, nor seek for an ideal unity except in an increasing variety. Would one recognize the absolute power of the savage chief or the Oriental monarch in the federative republican government, which, after a certain number of centuries, will probably be that of all civilized nations? No; and yet humanity will have passed from the one to the other by a series of gradations sometimes scarcely visible. We believe that humanity will progress in the same way generally, from dogmatic religion with pretensions to universality, catholicity, and monarchy—of which the most curious type has precisely been achieved in our days with the dogma of infallibility—toward that state of individualism and religions, which we consider as the human ideal, and which, moreover, does not in the least exclude the possibility of diverse religious associations or federations, nor of free and continuous progress toward ultimate unity of belief on the most general subjects of human inquiry.