Should talk with child as with a grown person.
To raise the problem more fairly, let us suppose the circumstances somewhat less tragic than those which M. Ménard has chosen, and let us ask how, in general, the child must be spoken to about death. When the child is capable of following a more or less complex bit of exposition, toward the age of ten or twelve for example, I confess that I see no reason why its questions should not be answered exactly as if they were those of a grown person. At that age it will no longer believe in fairies, it will no longer need to believe in legends, not even in those of Christianity. The scientific and philosophic spirit will have begun to develop and must not be either checked or distorted. If its intelligence leads it toward philosophical problems, so much the better; one must meet its need as simply as if the problems in question were historical. I have seen a child much tormented by a desire to know whether such and such an historical personage died a natural death or was poisoned. The child was told that the thing was doubtful, but that the probability was so and so. The same method should be pursued in reference to more important problems.
No difficulty in making the child understand.
But how, it may be asked, is one to form replies, that the child can understand, to questions which relate to the life beyond the grave? Is not the sole language that it understands that of Christianity, which deals with men raised to heaven, with happy souls seated among the angels and the seraphim, etc.? We reply that people in general seem to have a strange conception of the child’s intelligence; they expect it to understand the most refined subtleties of grammar, the most unexpected turns and shifts of theology, and are afraid to say a word to it of philosophy. A little girl of twelve years, of my acquaintance, replied with much ingenuity to this unexpected question: What is the difference between a perfect and an imperfect Christian? It was evident that she would not have experienced greater difficulty in replying to a metaphysical question. I recollect having myself followed, at the age of eight, a discussion on the immortality of the soul; nay, I even pronounced an interior judgment in favour of him who was maintaining the cause of immortality. Our system of education is full of contradictions, which consist at once in mechanically burdening the child’s memory with things it cannot understand, and in depriving its intelligence of subjects in which it might take an interest. “But,” M. Ménard will object, “a child must not be put into a position of being able to oppose its father’s belief to that of its mother or of its grand-mother.” Why not? It happens, necessarily, every day. There are, on all subjects, incessantly going on in the bosom of the family a series of discussions, of small disagreements which in nowise fundamentally disturb the harmony of the household; why should it be otherwise when more important and uncertain questions simply are involved? “But the child will lose respect for its parents.” It is certainly better that it should lose respect for them than that it should believe everything they say, even when they deceive it. Happily, respect for one’s parents is not at all the same thing as belief in their infallibility. Children early make use of liberty of judgment, they may early be taught to sift out the truth from a mass of more or less contradictory affirmations, their judgment may be developed instead of being supplied, as is at present attempted, ready and completely made. The essential thing is to avoid rousing their passions and converting them into fanatics. The child needs an atmosphere of calm for the harmonious development of its faculties; it is a delicate plant that must not be too soon exposed to wind and weather; but it does not follow that it should be kept in the obscurity or half light of religious legend. The sole means of sparing the child the trouble of passion and fanaticism is to place it outside of all religious communion and to habituate it to examine things coolly, philosophically; to take problems of religion for what they are; that is to say, for problems simply, with ambiguous solutions.[90] Nothing serves better to awake the intellectual spontaneity of the child than to say to it: This is what I believe, and these are my reasons for believing it; I may be wrong. Your mother, or such and such a person, believes something else for certain other reasons, right or wrong. The child acquires thus a rare quality, that of tolerance; its respect for its parents attaches to the diverse doctrines that it sees them professing; it learns, in its earliest years, that every sincere and reasoned belief is in the highest degree respectable. I am intimately acquainted with a child that has been reared in this way, and it has never had any occasion for anything but satisfaction with the education it has received. It has never been presented on the subject of human destiny, or the destiny of the world, with any opinion in the nature of an article of faith; instead of religious certitudes it has heard only of metaphysical possibilities and probabilities. Toward the age of thirteen and a half the problem of the destiny of mankind was abruptly suggested to it; the death of a very dear aged relative caused it to do more thinking than is customary at that age, but its philosophic beliefs proved themselves sufficient. They still are sufficient, although the child in question has been obliged several times to face the possibility, and the immediate possibility, of its own death. I cite the example as an experiment which bears on the question under discussion.
Summary.
How then should death be spoken of to a child? I reply confidently, as one would speak of it to a grown person, allowing for the difference between abstract and concrete language. I naturally suppose the child to be semi-rational, more than ten years old, and capable of thinking of something else than its top or its doll. I believe it should then be talked with openly, and told what we ourselves think most probable on these terrible questions. The free-thinker who leans toward naturalistic doctrines will say to his son or his daughter that he believes death to be a resolution of the person into its constituent elements, a return to a blind material existence, a fresh beginning in the perpetual round of evolution; that all that we leave behind is the good that we have done and that we live in humanity by our good actions and our good thoughts, and that immortality is productivity for the best interests of humanity. The spiritualist will say that, owing to the distinction between the soul and the body, death is simply a deliverance. The pantheist or the monist will repeat the formula consecrated by the use of three thousand years: Tat tvam asi—Thou art that; and the modern child will recognize, as the young Brahman does, that beneath the surface of things there lies a mysterious unity into which the individual may fade. Finally the Kantian will endeavour to make his child understand that the conception of duty involves something anterior and superior to the present life; that to be aware of the moral law is to be conscious of immortality. Everyone will say what he believes, and take care not to pretend that his opinion is the absolute truth. The child, thus treated like a human being, will early learn to make up its own mind, to provide itself with a creed without having received it from any traditional religion or any immutable doctrine; it will learn that a really sacred belief is one which is reflective and reasoned and seemingly personal; and if at times, as it advances in age, it experiences a greater or less anxiety about the unknown, so much the better; such an anxiety, when the senses are not involved and thought alone is concerned, is in no sense dangerous. The child who experiences it will be of the stuff out of which philosophers and sages are made.
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.
Among free-thinkers themselves there are a certain number who believe that women are by the very nature of their minds devoted to superstition and to myth. Is the incapacity of the female mind for philosophy more demonstrable than that of the child’s mind to which it has so frequently been compared?