The ultimate consequence of excessive rigourism is morbid preoccupation with sin: an obsession which, with the fear of the millennium, is one of the greatest of the futile tortures that have afflicted humanity. It is as dangerous for man to magnify his vices as his virtues; to believe one’s self a monster possesses no greater exemption from evil consequences than to believe one’s self perfect. Sin in itself, and philosophically considered, is a conception difficult to reconcile with the modern idea of scientific determinism, which, when it has explained everything, goes far, if not toward justifying everything, at least toward pardoning everything. Neither the pangs nor the vanity of sin are permissible to us nowadays when we are hardly certain really that our own sins belong to us. Temptation comes to us in the guise of the reawaking of an hereditary appetite, handed down to us not only from the first man, but from the ancestors of the first man, or more accurately from life itself, from the universe, from the God who is immanent in the world or who transcends it, and has created it; it is not the devil that tempts us, it is God. Like Jacob, of whom we were speaking a moment ago, we must vanquish God, must subject life to thought, must give the victory to the higher forms of life, as against the lower. If we are wounded in this struggle, if we are branded with the mark of sin, if we mount haltingly up the steps of goodness, we ought not to be immeasurably terrified: the essential thing is to go upward. Temptation is not in and of itself a blot, it may be even an emblem of nobility so long as one does not yield to it. Our first fathers were not subject to temptation, properly so called, because they yielded to all their desires, because they made no struggle against them. Sin or moral evil is explicable: first by the antagonism between instinct and reflection; second, by the antagonism between egoistic instincts and altruistic instincts. This double antagonism between instinct and conscious purpose, between egoism and altruism, is a necessary incident of self-knowledge and a condition of progress: to know one’s self is to be aware more or less uneasily of a manifold, and succession of inconsistent desires of which the moving equilibrium constitutes life itself; self-knowledge, and knowledge in general, is the equivalent of temptation. Life is in some sort always sin, for one cannot eat, one cannot even breathe without some measure of affirmation of low and egoistic instincts. Moreover asceticism logically leads nowhere, to negation of life; the most thorough-going ascetics are the Yoghis of India, who attain the point of living without air or food and of going down alive into the tomb.[64] And in believing himself thus to have realized absolute renunciation, what the ascetic actually realized is complete and perfect egoism, for the last drops of vegetative life which flow in his veins circulate for him alone and not a shiver of his heart is directed beyond himself; by impoverishing and annihilating his life, he has suppressed the generosity that fulness of life produced; in his endeavour to kill sin he has slaughtered charity. The real moral and religious ideal does not consist in denying one’s self everything in order to deny one’s self what is sinful. There is nothing absolutely evil in us, except excess; when we apply the knife to our hearts, we should have but one aim, the one which the gardener has in view in pruning trees, to increase our real power. Our manifold desires should all be satisfied at one time or another; we should take example from the mother who forces herself to eat that she may watch to the end at the bedside of her dying child. Whoever purposes to live for others besides himself, will find no time to sulk; for whoever possesses a heart sufficiently great no function in life is impure. Every moral rule should be a reconciliation between egoism and altruism, original sin and ideal sanctity; and to accomplish this reconciliation it suffices to show that each of our manifold and mutually exclusive desires, if carried to the extreme, contradicts itself; that our desires need each other, that when nature endeavours to rise above herself she inevitably falls headlong. To govern one’s self means to reconcile all parties. Ormuzd and Ahriman, spirit and nature, are not so hostile to each other as seems to be believed, and either of them indeed is powerless without the other. They are two gods whose origin is the same, they are immortal, and for immortals some means of accommodation must be found. Complete and unremunerated sacrifice never can be adopted as a rule of life; never can be more than a sublime conception, a spark in some individual existence, consuming the fuel it feeds upon and then disappearing and leaving behind, face to face, the two great principles, a conscious reconciliation of which constitutes the moral mean.
Results a priori from the nature of ideas.
The very nature of the conceptions confirms what we have just said respecting temptation and sin. Directly or indirectly, every idea is a suggestion, an incitement to action; it tends even to take exclusive possession of us, to become a fixed idea, to employ us as a means to its own end, to realize itself often in spite of us; but as our thought embraces all things in the universe, high and low, we are incessantly solicited to act in opposite directions; temptation, from this point of view, is simply the law of thought, and the law of sensibility. And ascetics and priests have endeavoured as a means of struggling against temptation to confine human thought, to prevent it from playing freely about the things of this world. But the things of this world are precisely those which are always present, which solicit us most strongly and constantly. And the greater our effort to exclude them from the mind, the greater their power over us. There is nothing one sees more clearly than what one resolves not to look at; there is nothing that makes the heart beat so quickly as what one resolves not to love. The cure for temptation, so persistently demanded by essentially religious people, is not restriction of thought but enlargement of thought. The visible world cannot be hidden, it is folly to attempt it, but it can be magnified indefinitely. Incessant discoveries may be made in it and the peril of certain points of view counteracted by the novelty and attractiveness of certain others, and the known universe lost sight of in the abyss of the unknown. Thought bears its own antidote—a science sufficiently great is more trustworthy than innocence; a boundless curiosity is the cure for all petty curiosities. An eye which reaches the stars will not aim long at a low mark; it is protected by its command of space and light, for light is purifying. By making temptation infinite one makes it salutary and in the best sense divine. Asceticism, and the artificial maturity that comes of a dissolute life, often amount to the same thing. One must keep one’s youth and memory green, and one’s heart open. “I was not a man before years of manhood,” said Marcus Aurelius. Both asceticism and debauchery make men precociously old, wean them from love and enthusiasm for the things of this world. The island of Cythere and the desert of Thebes are alike deserts. To remain young long, to remain a child even in the spontaneity and affectionateness of one’s heart, to preserve not in externals, but in “internals,” something of lightness and gaiety is the best means of dominating life; for what is more powerful than youth? One must neither stiffen one’s self, nor bristle up against life, nor cowardly abandon one’s self to it; one must take it as it is, that is to say, according to the popular maxim, “as it comes,” and welcome it with an infant’s smile without any other care than to maintain one’s possession of one’s self, in order that one may possess all things.
Prayer.
III. Morality and religion are inseparable in all historical faiths, and the essential act of subjective worship, the fundamental rite commanded by religious morality, is prayer.
Kinds of prayer distinguished.
To analyze prayer into all its component elements would be very difficult and far from simple. Prayer may be an almost mechanical accomplishment of the rite, the babbling of vain words, and as such it is despicable even from the point of view of religion. It may be an egoistic demand, and as such it is mean, simply. It may be an act of naïve faith in beliefs more or less popular and irrational, and on this score its value is so slight that it may be neglected. But it may be also the disinterested outpouring of a soul which believes itself to be in some fashion or other serving someone else, acting upon the world by the ardour of its faith, conferring a gift, an offering, devoting something of itself to someone else. Therein lies the grandeur of prayer: it is then no more than one of the forms of charity and the love of mankind. But suppose it should be demonstrated that this especial form of charity is illusory, does one imagine that the very principle of charity itself will by that fact receive a check?
Superficiality of most pleas in its behalf.
Many arguments have been urged in favour of prayer, but the majority of them are quite external and superficial. Prayer, it has been said, as being a demand on a special Providence, is sovereignly consoling; it is one of the sweetest of the satisfactions incident to religious faith. One who had been converted to free-thought said to me recently, “There is but one thing in my former faith that I regret, and that is that I can no longer pray for you and imagine that I am serving you.” Assuredly it is sad to lose a faith which consoled one; but suppose that someone believed himself to possess the fairy-wand and to be able to save the world. Some fine morning he finds himself undeceived, he finds himself alone in the world with no power at his disposal more mysterious than that of his ten fingers and his brain. He cannot but regret his imaginary power, but he will labour nevertheless to acquire a real power and the loss of his illusions will but serve as a stimulus to his will. It is always dangerous to believe that one possesses a power that one has not, for it hinders one in some degree from knowing and exercising those that one has. The men of former times, the times of absolute monarchy, who had access to the ear of princes, possessed a power analogous to that which the believers on their knees in temples still believe themselves to possess; this power, in the case of kings, their confidential ministers have lost as the result of purely terrestrial revolutions; and have they thereby been diminished in their dignity as moral beings? No, a man is morally greater as a citizen than as a courtier; one is greater as the result of what one does one’s self only, or attempts to do, and not as the result of what one endeavours to obtain from a master.