The day when positive religions shall have disappeared, the spirit of curiosity in matters of cosmology and metaphysics, which has been more or less paralyzed by an effort to dwell within the unyielding limits of indomitable formula, will be more vivacious than ever before. There will be less of faith, but more of free speculation; less of contemplation, but more of reasoning, of hardy induction, of an active outleap of thought; the religious dogma will be extinct, but the best elements of religious life will be propagated, will be augmented in intensity and extent. For he alone is religious, in the philosophical sense of the word, who searches for, who thinks about, who loves the truth. Christ might have said: I came not to bring peace into human thought, but an incessant battle of ideas; not repose, but movement and progress of spirit; not universal dogma, but liberty of belief, which is the first condition of growth.[5]
IV. To-day, when the very value of religion is increasingly called in doubt, it has been defended by sceptics, who support it, sometimes in the name of the poetry and beauty of religious legend, sometimes in the name of its practical utility. There is sometimes a reaction in the modern mind toward fiction and away from the reality. The human mind becomes weary of regarding itself as a too passively clear mirror in which the world throws its image; and takes pleasure in breathing on the glass and obscuring it; and thence it comes that certain refined philosophers raise the question whether truth and clearness are advantageous in art, in science, in morals, in religion; and they go the length even of preferring religious or philosophical error on æsthetic grounds. For our part, we are far from antagonizing poetry, and believe it to be excessively beneficial for humanity, but on condition that it be not the dupe of its own symbols and do not erect its intentions into dogmas. At this price, we believe that poetry may very often be truer, and better, than certain too narrowly scientific, or too narrowly practical truths. We shall not take ourselves to task for having frequently, in this book, mingled poetry and metaphysics. In so doing we preserve, in so far as it is legitimate, one of the aspects of every religion, its poetic symbolism. Poetry is often more philosophic, not only than history, but than abstract philosophy, but on condition of being sincere and of making no pretensions to being what it is not.
But the partisans of “beneficent error” will object: Why endeavour to dissipate poetic illusion and to call things by their names? Are there not for peoples, for men, for children, certain useful errors and permissible illusions?[6] Surely a great number of errors may be considered as having been necessary in the history of humanity; but has not progress precisely consisted in restricting the number of these useful errors? There have been also organs in the body which have become superfluous, and have disappeared or been fundamentally transformed; such, for example, are the muscles which, no doubt, served our ancestors to move their ears. There exist evidently also, in the human mind, instincts, sentiments, and beliefs which have already atrophied and are destined to disappear or to be transformed. To show the deep roots that religion has sent down into the depths of the human mind is not to demonstrate the perpetuity of religion, for the human mind itself is incessantly changing. “Our fathers,” said Fontenelle, “made the mistake of hoarding up their errors for our benefit”; and in effect, before arriving at the truth, a certain number of false hypotheses must be tried; to discover the true is in some sense to have exhausted the possibilities of the false. Religions have rendered the human mind this immense service, they have exhausted a whole class of side-issues in science, metaphysics, and ethics; one must cross the marvellous to attain the natural, one must cross direct revelation and mystical intention to attain to rational induction and deduction. All the fantastic and apocalyptical ideas with which religion has peopled the human mind once possessed their utility, just as the incomplete and often grotesque sketches with which the studio of the artist is filled once possessed theirs. This straying of the human mind was a sort of reconnoitering, this play of imagination was a veritable labour, a preliminary labour; but the products of it must not be presented as final. The false and even the absurd have always played so great a rôle in human affairs that it would assuredly be dangerous to attempt abruptly to proceed without them; transitions are useful, even in passing from darkness into light, and one needs to become accustomed even to the truth. It is for that reason that society has always rested in a great measure upon error. To-day this portion of its foundation is being withdrawn, and conservatives are sadly frightened lest the whole social equilibrium be destroyed; but we repeat, this diminution of the number of errors is precisely what constitutes progress, and in some sort defines it. Progress in effect is not simply a sensible amelioration of life, it is also the achievement of a better intellectual formulation of life, it is a triumph of logic; to progress is to attain to a more complete consciousness of one’s self and of the world, and by that very fact to a more complete inner consistency of one’s theory of the world. In the beginning, not only moral and religious life, but civil and political life, rested upon the grossest errors, on absolute monarchy, divine right, caste, and slavery; all this barbarity possessed a certain utility, but its utility precisely consisted in its leading to its own extinction; it served as a means of handing us on to something better. What distinguishes the living mechanism from other mechanisms is that the outer springs precisely labour to cause themselves to be superseded; that the movement once produced is perpetual. If we possessed means of projection powerful enough to rival those of nature, we might convert a cannon ball into an eternal satellite of the earth, without its being necessary to impart movement to it a second time. A result accomplished in nature is accomplished once for all. A step forward if it is real and not illusory, and in especial if it is completely conscious, renders impossible a step backward.
In the eighteenth century the attack on religion was directed by philosophical partisans of a priori principles, who were persuaded that the instant a faith was proved to be absurd that was the end of it. In our days the attack is led by historians who possess an absolute respect for fact, which they are inclined to erect into a law, historians who pass a learned existence in the midst of absurdity in all its forms, and for whom the irrational, instead of condemning a belief in which it appears, is often a condition of its duration. Therein lies the difference between the attitude of the eighteenth century and that of the nineteenth toward religion. The eighteenth century hated religion and wished to destroy it. The nineteenth century endeavours to understand religion and cannot reconcile itself to seeing so charming an object of study disappear. The historian’s device is, “What has been, will be”; he is naturally inclined to model his conception of the future on his knowledge of the past. A witness of the futility of revolutions, he sometimes forgets that complete evolution is possible: an evolution which transforms things to their very roots and metamorphoses human beings and their beliefs to an extent that renders them unrecognizable.[7]
One of the masters of religious criticism, M. Renan, wrote to Sainte-Beuve: “No, assuredly I did not wish to detach from the old trunk a soul which was not ripe.” We, also, are not of those who believe in shaking the tree and gathering a green and bruised crop; but if one ought not to make the green fruit fall, one may at least take means to hasten its ripening upon the branch. The human brain is a transmutation of solar heat; one must dissipate this heat, to become once more a ray of the sun. Such an ambition is very gentle, is not at all exorbitant, when one remembers how small a thing a ray of the sun is and how lost in infinite space; a relatively small portion of these wandering rays, however, has sufficed to fashion the earth and all mankind.
I often meet, near my home, a missionary with a black beard, a hard, sharp eye, lit sometimes by a mystic gleam. He seems to maintain a correspondence with the four corners of the world; assuredly he works and works precisely at building up what I am endeavouring to pull down. And must our opposite strivings therefore be regarded as hostile? Why so? Are we not both brothers and humble collaborators in the work of humanity? To convert primitive peoples to Christian dogma and to deliver those who have arrived at a higher stage of civilization from a positive and dogmatic faith, are two tasks which, far from excluding each other, complete each other. Missionaries and freethinkers cultivate different plants, in different places, but at bottom both are labouring to make the field of humanity more fertile. It is said that John Huss, when tied to the stake at Constance, wore a smile of supreme joy when he perceived a peasant in the crowd, bringing straw from the roof of his hut to light the fire: Sancta simplicitas! The martyr recognized in this man a brother in sincerity; he was glad to find himself in the presence of a disinterested conviction. We are no longer in the times of John Huss, of Bruno, of Servetius, of St. Justin, or of Socrates; it constitutes a reason the more for showing ourselves tolerant, and sympathetic even, toward those whom we regard as being in error, provided that the error be sincere.
There is an anti-religious fanaticism which is almost as dangerous as religious fanaticism. Erasmus compares humanity to a drunken man seated on a horse and lurching first to the right and then to the left. The enemies of religion have often committed the mistake of despising their adversaries; it is the worst of faults. There is a power of elasticity in human beliefs which causes their resistance to increase in proportion to the compression which is exerted upon them. Formerly, when a city was attacked by some scourge, the first care of the notable inhabitants, of the chiefs of the city, was to order public prayers; to-day the practical means of battling with epidemics and other scourges are better known, but nevertheless, in 1885, when there was cholera in Marseilles the municipal council devoted its attention almost singly to removing the religious mottoes from the walls of the public schools; it is a remarkable example of what one may call a counter-superstition. Thus the two species of fanaticism, religious and anti-religious, may equally distract the timid from the employment of scientific means against natural evils; an employment which is after all, par excellence, the business of man; these two kinds of fanaticism are paralyso-motors in the great body of humanity.
Among cultivated people there has now and then taken place a violent reaction against religious prejudice, and this reaction frequently persists till death; but in a certain number of cases this reaction is followed in the course of time by a counter-reaction; it is only, as Spencer has remarked, when this counter-reaction has been sufficient, that one may formulate, with anything like completeness, judgments somewhat less narrow and more comprehensive upon the question of religion. Time makes us generous, enlarges our minds each year, as it does the concentric circles in the trunk of a tree. Life also pacifies us as death does; reconciles us with those who do not think and feel as we do. When you become indignant at some antique, absurd prejudice, remember that it has been a travelling companion of humanity for perhaps ten thousand years, that it has lent men aid when the ways were bad and has been the occasion of many joys, and has lived, so to speak, the life of humanity; one might well find a certain element of fraternity in every human thought.
We do not believe that the readers of this sincere book will be able to accuse us of partiality or of injustice, for we have not sought to disguise either the good or the evil aspects of religion, and have even taken a certain pleasure in setting the former in relief. On the other hand, we shall hardly be taxed with ignorance of the religious problem which we have patiently studied on its every side. We shall perhaps be reproached with belonging something too manifestly to the country of our birth, with introducing into the solutions here offered something of the French excess of logic, of an indisposition to yield to half measures, of the determination to have all or nothing, of the spirit which was unable to stop midway with Protestantism and which for the past two centuries has been the home of the most ardent free thought in the world. We reply that if the French mind has a defect, this defect is not logic but a certain nimble trenchancy, a certain narrowness of view which is the reverse of the spirit of logic and analysis; logic, after all, has always the last word here below. Concessions to absurdity, or at least to relativity, may sometimes be necessary in human affairs—and the French Revolutionists were wrong not to recognize it—but such concessions are always transitory. Error is not the end and aim of the human mind; if one cannot make up one’s account with it, if it is useless to disparage it bitterly, it is also unnecessary to venerate it. Minds at once logical and capacious are always sure to be followed, provided one gives humanity time enough; and the truth can wait; it always remains young and is certain some day to be recognized. Sometimes during long night marches soldiers fall asleep without ceasing on that account to go forward; they march on in their dreams and do not awaken till they have reached their destination on the battlefield. It is thus that ideas advance in the human mind; they are so drowsy that they seem unable to stand upright, one discovers their strength and their vitality only by the distance they traverse, and finally day breaks and they appear on the field and are victorious.