The Non-religion of the Future: A Sociological Study

by Jean-Marie Guyau

We believe that love may be sufficiently defended on intellectual as well as on moral grounds. If it in certain respects involves an expense of force, it in others so heightens the entire vital energy, that the expense must be regarded as one of those fruitful investments which are inseparable from the very continuance of life. To live, after all, in the physical as well as in the moral sense of the word, is not only to receive but to give, but above all to give one’s self to love; it is difficult to pervert one of the most primitive elements of the human character, without also perverting the heart and the intelligence. Love is above all things a stimulant to the entire being and to the brain itself; it takes possession of the whole man; it plays upon man as upon a harp and sounds the whole compass of his being. It cannot be replaced by coffee or hasheesh. Women not only complete men, and form by union with them a more complete, more rounded existence, more justly epitomizing the possibilities of life; they are capable also, by their mere presence, by their mere smile, of doubling our individual powers and carrying them to the highest point of energy of which they are capable. Our manhood leans upon their grace. All other motives which inspire man—love of reputation, of glory, even of God—are slight as compared with the love of a woman who understands her rôle. Even the most abstract passion, the passion for science, often fails to acquire its entire strength until it has called to its aid the love of a woman, which wrings a smile out of the grave alembics and fills the crucibles with the gaiety of hope. Nothing is simple in our being; all things amalgamate and unite together. They who invented the monk aimed at simplifying human life; they succeeded only in unnaturally complicating it or mutilating it.

Love makes for sanity.

But love does not only play, in the life of the man of science and of the thinker, the rôle of stimulant; over and above its function in inciting such men to work, it contributes indirectly to rectify the product of their labours. Love lives in reality, and to live in reality helps one to think justly. Rightly to understand the world in which we live, we must not dwell beyond its bounds, must not make a world of our own, an unnatural and frigid world, rounded by the walls of a monastery. “To aim at being an angel is to be a beast,” says Pascal; and not only to be a beast, but in a measure to brutalize one’s self, to dim the precision and vivacity of one’s intelligence. A complete acquaintance with the details of the lives of great minds would reveal surprising traces of love in the audacity and sweep of great metaphysical and cosmological hypotheses, in profound generalizations, in passionate exactitude of demonstration. Love reaches everywhere; and as the philosopher who is also a lover pushes audaciously forward in the domain of thought, he moves more easily, more lightly, more confidently, with a heightened faith in himself, in others, and in this mysterious and mute universe. Love inspires one with that gentleness of heart which inclines one to an interest in the smallest things and in their place in the universe. There is great kindliness in the heart of the true philosopher.

Love the essence of art.

Then, too, what is science without art? The most intimate relations exist between the intellectual and artistic faculties.[94] Could art exist without love? Love becomes, in matters of art, of the very tissue of thought. To compose verses or music, to paint or model, is simply to transmute love by diverse methods and into diverse forms. Whatever the more or less sincere defenders of the monastic spirit and religious mysticism may say, love, which is as old as the world, is not upon the point of quitting it; and it is in the hearts and minds of the greatest of mankind that it dwells most securely. “Human frailty!” someone will murmur. “No,” we reply: “source of strength and strength itself.” If love is the science of the ignorant it constitutes some part also of the science of the sage. Eros is of all the gods the one on whom Prometheus is most dependent, for it is from Eros that he steals the sacred flame. Eros will survive in every heart, and in especial in every woman’s heart, when all religions shall have decayed.

Importance of early education in woman.

We may conclude, therefore, that the characteristic tendencies of woman may be employed in the services of truth, science, free-thought, and social fraternity. Everything depends on the education that is given her, and on the influence of the man whom she marries. Woman must be begun with in childhood. The life of a woman is more orderly and continuous than that of a man; for that reason the habits of childhood exercise a more permanent influence over her. There is but one great revolution in a woman’s life: marriage. And there are women for whom this revolution does not exist; and there are others for whom it exists in its most attenuated form, as when, for example, the husband’s manner of life and his beliefs are practically the same as those of the wife’s mother and family. In a tranquil environment, such as the majority of women exist in, the influence of early education may persist to the end; the small number of religious or philosophical ideas that were planted in a woman’s brain in her childhood may be found there years afterward, practically unchanged. The home is a protection, a sort of hot-house in which plants flourish that could not live in the open air; the film of glass or of veiling behind which women habitually stand to look out into the street does not protect them against sun and rain alone. A woman’s soul, like her complexion, preserves something of its native whiteness.

Husband responsible for wife’s education.

In France, in the majority of instances, women are children up to the time of their marriage; and children inclined to regard the man to whom their parents wish them to give their hand with a certain mixture of fear and of respect. Such a woman’s intelligence is almost as virgin as her body, and in the first months of marriage the husband may acquire, if he chooses, a decisive influence over his wife, model her as yet imperfectly developed brain almost to his will. If he waits, if he temporizes, he will find his task difficult—the more so as his wife will some day gain over him some such influence as he might at first have gained over her. The instant a woman becomes fully aware of her power, she almost always becomes the controlling influence in the household; if her husband has not formed her, if he has left her with all the prejudices and ignorances of a child, and often of a spoiled child, she will, in the course of time, form or rather deform him—will oblige him at first to tolerate, and ultimately to accept, her childish beliefs and errors, and perhaps in the end, profiting by the decline of his intelligence, with the coming on of old age, she will convert him, and by that fact retard the intellectual progress of the household by an entire generation. The priesthood positively count on the growing influence of the wife in every household; but they are helpless in the first months, or perhaps years, of marriage against the influence that the husband may exercise. And once fashioned by him the wife may continue to exist to the end of her life in his image, and to give him back his own ideas and instil them into his children.

Free-thinker’s difficulty.