The Non-religion of the Future: A Sociological Study

by Jean-Marie Guyau

I was talking one day with M. Renan upon the gradual decrease in the power of religion, on the silence that has fallen on the divine word, which formerly drowned all other sounds. To-day, it is the word of nature and humanity, of free-thought and free sentiment, which is taking the place of oracles and of supernatural revelation, of dogmatic religion. M. Renan, with the openness of mind which is habitual with him, and which partakes indeed largely of scepticism, took up at once my point of view. “Yes,” he said, “we are all marching toward non-religion. After all, why should not humanity do without religious dogmas? Speculation will take the place of religion. Even at the present day, among advanced peoples, dogmas are disintegrating, the incrustations of human thought are breaking up. Most people in France are already non-religious; men of the people hardly believe more than professed men of science; they possess their little fund of ideas, more or less profound, on which they live, without help from the priest. In Germany the work of decomposition is far advanced. In England it is only in its beginnings, but it is moving rapidly. Christianity is everywhere giving place to free-thought. Buddhism and Hinduism are doing the same; in India the mass of intelligent men are free-thinkers, in China there is no state religion. It will take a long while, but religion will in the end disappear, and one may already imagine for Europe a time when it will be a thing of the past.... Islam is the one black spot on the horizon. The Turks are narrow, rebellious against reasoning, hostile to everything that lies beyond literal faith ... but if they will not follow us we shall simply leave them behind, and I think we shall be obliged to do so.” We should add that, if some Christians and Buddhists show themselves as backward as the Turks, we shall leave them behind also. Those members of mankind who think, see, and move forward, are always obliged to drag a long train of those who neither see, nor think, nor wish to move forward. They do move forward, however, in the long run. Professed advocates of the different positive and dogmatic religions count every day for less and less among the truly active members of the human species; and we ask nothing better. Whoever does not count for progress practically does not exist, and ultimately will not exist. Activity of thought is becoming more and more a condition of existence; the preponderant rôle that religions played in the past is to be explained by the fact that religion offered almost the sole field of intellectual and moral activity—the sole issue for the most elevated tendencies of our being. At that time there lay beyond the limits of religion nothing but the grossest and most material occupations; there was no known middle ground between heaven and earth. To-day this middle ground has been discovered—the ground of thought. Science and art are born; and open before us an infinite perspective, where each of us may find an opportunity to employ the best of our gifts. Science offers a field for disinterestedness and research, but does not tolerate vagaries of the imagination. It encourages enthusiasm, but not delirium, and possesses a beauty of its own, the beauty of truth.

II. Religious anomy and the substitution of doubt for faith.

Religious anomy.

I. We have proposed as the moral ideal what we have called moral anomy—the absence of any fixed moral rule.[118] We believe still more firmly that the ideal toward which every religion ought to tend is religious anomy, the complete enfranchisement of the individual in all religious matters, the redemption of his thought, which is more precious than his life, the suppression of dogmatic faith in every form. Instead of accepting ready-made dogmas, we should each of us be the makers of our own creed. Whatever Montaigne may say, faith is a softer pillow for idleness than doubt. Faith is a species of nest in which idleness lies in shelter, and hides its head under the warmth and darkness of a protecting wing; nay, it is a nest prepared in advance, like those that are sold in the markets and made by men, for birds that are kept in cages. We believe that in the future man will be increasingly unwilling to live in cages and that, if he needs a nest, he will construct it himself twig by twig in the open air, and abandon it when he is weary of it, and remake it, if necessary, every springtime, at each new stage of his thought.

Religious anomy and scepticism.

Is religious anomy, or the absence of religion, synonymous with scepticism? Since the disappearance of Pyrrhonism and Ænesideinism, scepticism is simply a word which serves as a label for the most dissimilar doctrines. Greek sceptics were fond of calling themselves seekers, Ζητητικοί; a name which is appropriate to every philosopher as distinguished from believer. But how the term scepticism in its modern negative acceptation is abused! If you do not belong to some definite system of thought, you are at once set down as a sceptic. But nothing is further removed from a superficial scepticism than the sympathetic mind which, precisely because it embraces so large a horizon, refuses to confine itself to some one narrow point of view, as in a glade a hundred feet square or in a diminutive valley between two mountains. “You are not dogmatic enough,” the philosopher is sometimes told. “To what system do you belong?” “In what class of thinking insects do you belong?” “To what card in our collection must you be pinned?” A reader always wants to ask an author a certain number of conventional questions. What do you think of such and such a problem? Of such and such another? You are not a spiritualist; are you then a materialist? You are not an optimist; are you then a pessimist? One must reply, yes or no, without explanatory amplification. But what I think is of small importance, even for myself; my point of view is not the centre of the universe. What I am seeking to learn, what you are seeking to learn, is the contents of human thought in all its variety and complexity. If I study myself it is not because I am myself, but because I am a man like other men. If I watch my own little soap bubble, it is because it contains a ray of the sun; my object is precisely to pass beyond the limits of my own horizon and not to remain within them. More than that, people whose ideas are fixed, clear-cut, absolute, are exactly those who have no ideas of their own. Revelation, intuition, religion, categorical and exclusive affirmation, are notions hostile to modern thought, which is in its very essence progressive. There are two sorts of men: those who remain on the surface of things and those who sound the depths of things. There are superficial minds and serious minds. In France almost all those whom we designate as sceptics or as blasés are superficial minds, with an affectation of profundity. They are also often practical Epicureans. There will always be people ready to say, with a certain hero of Balzac’s: “A good fire, a good table; behold the ideal of human life!” Waiting for dinner is the sole occupation of the day. But there will always be other people for whom life consists in an indefatigable activity.

Feebleness of scepticism.

The number of sceptics will not necessarily be increased by the final decay and disappearance of religious scepticism, which is a compound of lightness and ignorance, resting on the same foundation as religious prejudice, on the absence of a solid philosophical education. Really serious minds are either positive or speculative; a too positive, common-sense spirit might, if it became general in society, menace it with a certain intellectual debasement; but religion would not hinder its development: witness America. The true means of checking the positive spirit is to cultivate the sense of beauty and the love of art. To speculative minds, on the other hand, belongs the future of humanity; but far from being dependent upon dogma, speculation can flourish only in its absence. It is the life of speculation to ask questions about the deepest concerns of human life; dogma provides ready-made answers, and speculation cannot accept them. The disappearance of positive religions will give scientific and metaphysical speculation a fresh impulse. The speculative spirit is the extreme opposite both of the spirit of faith and of the spirit of absolute negation. An inquirer may suspect his own resources, may recognize his own powerlessness, but he will never give up the search. Strong minds will never be discouraged or disgusted, will never be followers of Mérimée or Beyle. In active mental labour there is something which is worth more than faith and doubt together, as there is in genius something which is worth more at once than the somewhat silly admiration of the multitude and the disdainful criticism of pretended connoisseurs; excess of criticism and excess of credulity are alike powerless. It is good to be aware of one’s own weakness, but from time to time only; one must turn one’s eyes toward the limits of human intelligence, but not rest them there, on pain of paralysis. “Man,” says Goethe, “should believe firmly that the incomprehensible will become comprehensible; but for that he would cease to scrutinize and to try.” In spite of the number of ideas which make their entrance into and exit from the human mind, which rise and set on the human horizon, which flame up and burn out, there is, in every human mind, an element of eternity. On certain autumn nights one may observe a veritable shower of aerolites; hundreds of stars detach themselves from the zenith like luminous flakes of snow; the dome of heaven itself seems to have given way, the worlds hung above the earth seem to have broken loose, and all the stars at once to be descending and about to leave the great firmament of night unvariegated, opaque; but the falling stars go out one by one, and the serene brilliancy of the fixed stars still remains; the storm has passed beneath them and has not troubled the tranquil splendour of their rays, nor the incessant appeal of their fixity and glory. The appeal is one that man will always respond to; under the open sky and the pressure of the problem brought home to him by the great stars, man does not feel himself feeble unless he pusillanimously shuts his eyes. Humanity will lose none of its intellectual power by the disappearance of religious faith; its horizon will grow wider simply, and the luminous points in the immensity of space will grow more numerous. True genius is speculative, and in whatever environment true genius is placed it will speculate; it has speculated hitherto despite of all that orthodox faith could do, it will speculate still more actively in spite of all that scepticism can do.

Speculation and practice.

And the practical side of human life has nothing to fear from the growth of the speculative spirit. Given minds sufficiently large, and the fact that they look down upon the earth from a height, does not prevent them from seeing human life as it is and as it should be. Decidedly one must be a man, a patriot, a “tellurian,” as Amiel said, with some contempt; to be so may appear to be a small function in the totality of things, but an upright spirit will not fulfil it with less exactitude because he perceives its limits and its restricted importance. Nothing is in vain, and a fortiori no being is in vain; small functions are as necessary as great. If a man of intelligence happens to be a porter or a scavenger, he should apply himself to that profession with as much devotion as to any other. To do well what one has to do, however humble it may be, is the first of duties. An ant of genius ought not to bring to the ant-hill a grain the less, even though he were capable of taking cognizance of the eternities of time and space.