The Non-religion of the Future: A Sociological Study

by Jean-Marie Guyau

Doubt is not, at bottom, as profoundly opposed as might be believed to what is best in the religious sentiment, it is even a product of the religious sentiment. For doubt is simply a consciousness that one’s thought is not absolute—cannot seize the absolute either directly or indirectly; and so, consequently, doubt is the most religious attitude of the human mind. Even atheism is often less irreligious than a positive belief in the imperfect and inconsistent God of religion. To be in doubt about God is a form of the sense of the divine. Moreover, the constant inquiry that doubt provokes does not necessarily exclude the erection of an altar to the unknown God, but it excludes everything in the nature of a determinate religion, the erection of an altar that bears a name, the establishment of a cult that consists in rites. In the cemeteries in Tyrol, a little marble basin rests on each tomb; it gathers water from the rain and the swallows from the eaves of the neighbouring church come and drink from it; this clear water, that comes from on high, is a thousand times more sacred, more deeply blessed than that which sleeps in the holy-water vessel in the church, and over which the priest has stretched his hands. Why should religion, so to speak, sequestrate, retire from public circulation, everything it touches? That alone is truly sacred which is consecrated to the use of mankind as a whole, which passes from hand to hand, which is worn out in process of time in the service of humanity. There has been enough and to spare of closed houses, closed temples, closed souls—of cloistered and walled-in lives, of smothered or extinguished hearts; what is wanted is an open heart and life under the open sky, under the incessant benediction of the sun and clouds.

Modesty of doubt.

Philosophy is often accused of pride because it rejects faith, but it was the father of philosophy, Socrates, who first said: “I know but one thing, that I know nothing.” It is precisely because the philosopher knows how much he does not know that he is not certain in regard to all things, but is reduced to remain in doubt, to wait anxiously and reverentially for the germination of the seed of truth in the distant future. To regard as certain what one does not positively know is to violate one’s intellectual conscience. From the point of view of the individual, as from the point of view of society, doubt is in certain cases a duty—doubt, or if you prefer, methodical ignorance, humility, self-abnegation in matters intellectual. Where philosophy is ignorant it is morally obliged to say to others and to itself: “I do not know; I doubt, I hope, nothing more.”

Morality of doubt.

The most original, and one of the most profoundly moral products of the present century, of the century of science, is precisely this sincere sense of doubt, of the seriousness of every act of faith, of its not being a matter to be undertaken lightly, of its being a graver engagement than many others that one hesitates to assume; to give in one’s faith to an opinion has come to be like attesting one’s allegiance to it by the mediæval signature, which was written in one’s blood and bound one for all eternity. At the point of death especially, which is the very period when religion says to a man, “Abandon thyself for an instant, yield to the force of example, of custom, to the natural disposition to affirm as certain what thou dost not know, to fear of damnation, and thou shalt be saved”—at the point of death when a blind act of faith is a last weakness and a last cowardice, doubt is assuredly the highest and most courageous position the human thought can assume: it is a fight to the finish without surrender; it is death with all one’s wounds before, in the presence of the problem still unsolved, but faced to the end.

III. Substitution of metaphysical hypotheses for dogma.

Scope of metaphysics.

Beyond the limits of science there lies still a field for hypothesis, and for that other science called metaphysics, the aim of which is to estimate the comparative value of hypotheses; to know, to suppose, to reason, to inquire, are of the essence of the modern mind; we no longer need dogma. Religion, which in the beginning was a naïve science, has ultimately become the enemy of science; in the future it must give way before science or must become merged in some really scientific hypothesis; an hypothesis, that is to say, which acknowledges itself to be such, which declares itself to be provisional, which measures its utility by the amount it explains; and aspires to nothing better than to give place to an hypothesis that shall be more inclusive. Science and research outweigh stationary adoration. The eternal element in religion is the tendency which produced there the need of an explanation, of a theory that shall bind mankind and the world together; the indefatigable activity of mind which declines to stop at the brute fact which produced in former times the tangle of contradictory myths and legends now transmuted into the co-ordinate and harmonious body of science. What is respectable in religion is precisely the germ of the spirit of metaphysics and scientific investigation, which is to-day proving fatal to religions.

Distinction between metaphysical and religious sentiment.

Religious sentiment properly so called must not be confounded with the instinct for metaphysics, the two are utterly distinct. The first is destined to decline with the extension of knowledge; the other, under some form or other, will always continue. The instinct for free speculation corresponds in the first place to an indestructible sense of the limits of positive knowledge: it is an echo in us of the undying mystery of things. It corresponds to an invincible tendency in the human mind to the need for an ideal; to the need, not only of the intelligence but of the heart, to pass beyond the limits of the visible and tangible world. The wings of the soul are too long to fly close to the earth, the soul is formed to move in long swoops and circles in the open sky. All it needs is to be lifted above the earth; often it is unable to do this of itself, and its long wings beat and trail in the dust. And to what power is it to look for its preliminary start? To its very desire for unknown spaces, to its desire for an infinite and insecure ideal. Nature, as positive science reveals it to us, is, no doubt, the sole incontestable divinity, the deus certus, as the Emperor Aurelius called the Sun; but its very certitude constitutes an element of inferiority. Sun-light is not the most brilliant light; the reality can have no lasting pretensions to be regarded as divine. The ideal God is necessarily the deus incertus, a problematical, perhaps even fictitious God.