It was the dissemination of this doctrine and the writings of Voltaire which led to the “Feast of Reason,” and the publication of the “Encyclopédie” that led to the world volcanic eruption of 1789, which had its repetition in 1914.
It seems that most of these ideas were to be found in the writings of Adam Weishaupt, an apostate Catholic, who founded the secret society known as the “Illiminati” in 1776. It is interesting to compare some of his statements with Duhamel's aspirations.
“When men united themselves into nations, national love took the place of universal love. With the division of the globe into countries benevolence restricted itself behind boundaries that it was never again to transgress. It became a virtue to spread out at the expense of those who did not happen to be under our dominion. In order to attain this goal it became permissible to despise foreigners and to deceive and offend them. This virtue was called patriotism. Patriotism gave birth to localism, to the family spirit, and finally to egoism. Thus the origin of states or governments of civil society was the seed of discord and patriotism found its punishment in itself. Do away with this love of country, and men will once more learn to know and love each other as men; there will be no more partiality; the ties between hearts will unroll and extend.”
Duhamel wants to develop this relationship between men, but he wants to do it in a very different way.
This moral revolution will be accomplished when men love one another, and when they reward good for evil. Even though this had not been shouted from the housetops and whispered through the lattice, in every tongue and in every clime for the past twenty centuries, we should still feel that M. Duhamel is in error, for these precepts are at variance with the teachings of biology, the science for which M. Duhamel has so much respect. You might just as well ask a man who is drowning not to struggle as to ask a man to return good for evil—that is unless he is doing it as a stunt, an artefact, or in redemption of the promise to be saved. It is against nature. First teach him to put a new valuation on life and to get new standards of what makes life worth living. Then M. Duhamel will have a foundation to build upon.
That M. Duhamel is no less earnest than sincere in his purpose is proved by his lectures through Europe during the last few years, as protagonist for the suppression of war; and also by the fact that he was one of the co-founders of “Clarté,” so named for the book by Barbusse, which is a group of men who preach anti-militarism, the intellectual solidarity of nations, and the social equality of all citizens.
“Possession du Monde” is by virtue of its title a frank avowal of its aim to set forth the author's idea of finding some satisfactory substitute for the world possession for which the war was fought. It is the effort of a wholesome, buoyant, sympathetic man, after having been brought into contact with the horrors of the war, to find a substitute for orthodox religion; the expression of an emotionally religious man without a creed. M. Duhamel, who was brought up a Catholic, lost all religion, he said, when he was fifteen years old.
The panacea which Duhamel offers in this book for human suffering and world ills is the conscious striving for happiness by means of a sort of “culture of the soul.” He puts a personal construction upon happiness and holds that it is and should be the object of all humanity and of the whole world of living things. He quotes Maeterlinck to the effect that “As man is created for health, so was man created for happiness.” This soul culture is rather an attitude of feeling toward things than an attitude of thought. There is no attempt to think out any of the problems which have puzzled men for ages. Neither is there any denying of them. He simply says substantially: I am a practical man. Of course I take things as they are—or as they seem to be—but I take the best that is in them. I take the sunshine, the flowers, the wisdom of the ages, the art that has come down to us, the science, human love, the fine qualities of friendship, work, play, my sorrows and adversities, even religion—but I take only what is good out of them all; and I take that temperately, sanely, according to the limitations which nature and circumstances have imposed. And I am happy. You can do likewise and you can be happy.
But can I take poverty and want, and particularly can I take them with equanimity while my neighbour or brother is swaggering with riches, some of which he has robbed me because he is stronger or cleverer than I? Duhamel's formula for achieving happiness, as well as his conception of what constitutes happiness, only fits the average man, and it has been proven countless thousands of times that there is no such person. It is sufficient, perhaps, for people who feel normally and do not think for themselves. So it may be sufficient for the present for a mass of people who want to be led—if they are pious and healthy.
But how about the people who are different, or who are not healthy, or who think they are safer custodians of wealth and power than their so-called brothers? It brings no help to the people who are tortured by an insistent need to think things out for themselves, or else to find something which will answer their questions as to the why. Nor does it tell those who are handicapped, physically, mentally, or even temperamentally, how they can overcome their handicaps so as to, as it were, extract the honey from the flowers. The world is full of people with all degrees of unusualness and abnormality. One may ignore them, but no scheme of things can deny them. Duhamel uses them by preference as a basis for his fiction.