Chapter I: Introduction

I. Sociality the basis of religion—Its definition.

II. The connection between religion, æsthetics, and morals.

III. The inevitable decomposition of all systems of dogmatic
religion; the state of “non-religion” toward which the human mind
seems to tend—The exact sense in which one must understand the
non-religion as distinguished from the “religion of the future.”

IV. The value and utility, for the time being, of religion; its
ultimate insufficiency, 1

Part First.

THE GENESIS OF RELIGIONS IN PRIMITIVE SOCIETIES.

_CHAPTER I._

RELIGIOUS PHYSICS.

IMPORTANCE OF THE PROBLEM OF THE ORIGIN OF RELIGION—UNIVERSALITY
OF RELIGIOUS BELIEFS OR SUPERSTITIONS—VARIABILITY OF RELIGIONS AND
RELIGIOUS EVOLUTION.

I. Idealist theory which attributes the origin of religion to
a notion of the infinite—Henotheism of Max Müller and Von
Hartmann—M. Renan’s Instinct for Divinity.

II. Theory of a worship of the dead and of spirits—Herbert
Spencer—Spencer’s objections to the theory of the attribution of a
soul to natural forces.

III. Answer to objections—Religious physics sociological in
form, and the substitution of relations between malevolent
or beneficent conscious beings for relations between natural
forces—Sociomorphism of primitive Peoples, 21

_CHAPTER II._

RELIGIOUS METAPHYSICS.

I. Animism or polydemonism—Formation of the dualist conception of
spirit—Social relations with spirits.

II. Providence and miracles—The evolution of the dualist
conception of a special providence—The conception of
miracles—The supernatural and the natural—Scientific explanation
and miracles—Social and moral modifications in the character
of man, owing to supposed social relations with a special
providence—Increasing sentiment of irresponsibility and passivity
and “absolute dependence.”

III. The creation—Genesis of the notion of creation—The dualistic
elements in this idea—Monism—Classification of systems of
religious metaphysics—Criticism of the classification proposed by
Von Hartmann—Criticism of the classification proposed by Auguste
Comte, 80

_CHAPTER III._

RELIGIOUS MORALS.

I. The laws which regulate the social relations between gods and
men—Morality and immorality in primitive religions—Extension of
friendly and hostile relations to the sphere of the gods—Primitive
inability in matters of conscience, as in matters of art, to
distinguish the great from the monstrous.

II. The moral sanction in the society which includes gods and
men—Patronage—That divine intervention tends always to be
conceived after the model of human intervention and to sanction it.

III. Worship and religious rites—Principles of reciprocity and
proportionality in the exchange of services—Sacrifice—Principle
of coercion and incantation—Principle of habit and its relation
to rites—Sorcery—Sacerdotalism—Prophecy—The externals of
worship—Dramatization and religious æsthetics.

IV. Subjective worship—Adoration and love; their psychological
origin, 113

Part Second.

THE DISSOLUTION OF RELIGIONS IN EXISTING SOCIETIES.

_CHAPTER I._

DOGMATIC FAITH.

I. Narrow dogmatic faith—The credulity of primitive man: First,
spontaneous faith in the senses and imagination; Second, faith in
the testimony of superior men; Third, faith in the divine word, in
revelation, and in the sacred texts—The literalness of dogmatic
faith—Inevitable intolerance of narrow dogmatic faith—Belief
in dogma, revelation, salvation, and damnation all result in
intolerance—Modern tolerance.

II. Broad dogmatic faith—Orthodox Protestantism—Dogmas
of orthodox Protestantism—Rational consequences of these
dogmas—Logical failure of orthodox Protestantism.

III. The dissolution of dogmatic faith in modern society—Reasons
that render this dissolution inevitable—Comparative influence of
the various sciences; influence of public instruction, of means
of communication, of industry even and of commerce, etc.—The
disappearance of belief in oracles and prophecies—Gradual
disappearance of the belief in miracles, in devils, etc., 136

_CHAPTER II._

SYMBOLIC AND MORAL FAITH.

I. Substitution of metaphysical symbolism for dogma—Liberal
Protestantism—Comparison with Brahmanism—Substitution
of moral symbolism for metaphysical symbolism—Moral
faith—Kant—Mill—Matthew Arnold—A literary explanation of the
Bible substituted for a literal explanation.

II. Criticism of symbolic faith—Inconsequence of liberal
Protestantism—Is Jesus of a more divine type than other great
geniuses?—Does the Bible possess a greater authority in matters of
morals than any other masterpiece of poetry?—Criticism of Matthew
Arnold’s system—Final absorption of religions by morality, 167

_CHAPTER III._

DISSOLUTION OF RELIGIOUS MORALITY.

I. The first durable element of religious morality:
Respect—Alteration of respect by the addition of the notion of the
fear of God and divine vengeance.

II. Second durable element of religious morality:
Love—Alteration of this element by the addition of ideas of
grace, predestination, damnation—Caducous elements of religious
morality—Mysticism—Antagonism of divine love and human
love—Asceticism—Excesses of asceticism—Especially in the
religions of the East—Conception of sin in the modern mind.

III. Subjective worship and prayer—The notion of prayer from
the point of view of modern science and philosophy—Ecstasy—The
survival of prayer, 195

_CHAPTER IV._

RELIGION AND NON-RELIGION AMONG THE PEOPLE.

I. Is religious sentiment an innate and imperishable possession of
humanity—Frequent confusion of a sentiment for religion with a
sentiment for philosophy and morals—Renan—Max Müller—Difference
between the evolution of belief in the individual and the evolution
of belief in the race—Will the disappearance of faith leave a void
behind?

II. Will the dissolution of religion result in a dissolution
of morality among the people?—Is religion the sole safeguard
of social authority and public morality?—Christianity and
socialism—Relation between non-religion and immorality, according
to statistics.

III. Is Protestantism a necessary transition stage between religion
and free-thought?—Projects for Protestantizing France—Michelet,
Quinet, De Laveleye, Renouvier, and Pillon—Intellectual,
moral, and political superiority of Protestantism—Utopian
character of the project—Uselessness, for purposes of morals,
of substituting one religion for another—Is the possession of
religion a condition _sine qua non_ of superiority in the struggle
for existence?—Objections urged against France and the French
Revolution by Matthew Arnold; Greece and Judea compared, France
and Protestant nations compared—Critical examination of Matthew
Arnold’s theory—Cannot free-thought, science, and art evolve their
respective ideals from within? 226

_CHAPTER V._

RELIGION AND NON-RELIGION AND THE CHILD.

I. Decline of religious education—Defects of this education,
in especial in Catholic countries—Means of lightening these
defects—The priest—The possibility of state-action on the priest.

II. Education provided by the state—Primary instruction—The
schoolmaster—Secondary and higher instruction—Should the history
of religion be introduced into the curriculum?

III. Education at home—Should the father take no part in the
religious education of his children—Evils of a preliminary
religious education to be followed by disillusionment—The special
question of the immortality of the soul: what should be said to
children about death, 272

_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, 295

_CHAPTER VII._

THE EFFECT OF RELIGION AND NON-RELIGION ON POPULATION AND THE
FUTURE OF THE RACE.

I. Importance of the problem of population—Antagonism between
numerical strength and wealth—Necessity of numbers for the
maintenance and progress of the race—Necessity of giving the
advantage of numbers to the superior races—Problem of population
in France—Its relation to the religious problem—Are the reasons
for the restriction of the number of births physiological, moral,
or economic?—Malthusianism in France—The true national peril.

II. Remedies—Is a return to religion possible?—Religious
powerlessness and growing tolerance in the matter—The
influence that the law might exercise upon the causes of small
families—Enumeration of these causes—Reform of the law in
regard to filial duty—(Support of parents)—Reform of the law
of inheritance—Reform of the military law for the purpose of
favouring large families and of permitting emigration to the French
colonies.

III. Influence of public education: its necessity as a substitute
for religious sentiment, 315

Part Third.

NON-RELIGION OF THE FUTURE.

_CHAPTER I._

RELIGIOUS INDIVIDUALISM.

I. Is a renovation of religion possible? 1. Is a unification of the
great religions to-day existing possible? 2. Is the appearance of a
new religion to be expected?—Future miracles impossible—Religious
poetry not to be expected—Men of genius capable of sincerely
and naïvely labouring in the creating of a new religion not to
be expected—Impossibility of adding to the original stock of
religious ideas—No new cult possible—Last attempts at a new cult
in America and in France—The Positivist cult—Ethical culture—Can
socialism renew religion?—Advantages and defects of socialistic
experiments.

II. Religious anomy and the substitution of doubt for faith—1.
Will the absence of religion result in scepticism? Will the number
of sceptics increase with the disappearance of religion? 2.
Substitution of doubt for faith—Genuinely religious character of
doubt.

III. Substitution of metaphysical hypothesis for
dogma—Difference between religious sentiment and instinct for
metaphysics—Imperishable character of the latter—Sentiment
at once of the limits of science and of the infinity of our
ideal—Spencer’s attempted reconciliation of science and
religion—Confusion of religion with metaphysics, 350

_CHAPTER II._

ASSOCIATION. THE PERMANENT ELEMENT OF RELIGIONS IN SOCIAL LIFE.

SOCIAL ASPECT OF RELIGIONS—RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES AND
CHURCHES—IDEAL TYPE OF VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATION—ITS DIVERSE FORMS.

I. Associations for intellectual purposes—How such associations
might preserve the most precious elements of religions—Societies
for the advancement of science, philosophy, religion—Dangers to
avoid—Popularization of scientific ideas; propagandism in the
interests of science.

II. Associations for moral purposes—Tendency of religion in the
best minds to become one with charity—Pity and charity will
survive dogma—Rôle of enthusiasm in moral propagandism—Necessity
of hope to sustain enthusiasm—Possibility of propagating moral
ideas: 1. Apart from myths and religious dogmas; 2. Apart from
any notion of a religious sanction—Baudelaire’s conception of a
criminal and happy hero—Criticism of that conception—Worship of
the memory of the dead.

III. Associations for æsthetic purposes—Worship of art and
nature—Art and poetry will sever their connection with religion
and will survive it—Necessity of developing the æsthetic sentiment
and the worship of art, as the religious sentiment becomes more
feeble—Poetry, eloquence, music; their rôle in the future—Final
substitution of art for rites—Worship of nature—Feeling
for nature originally an essential element of the religious
sentiment—Superiority of a worship of nature over worship of human
art—Nature is the true temple of the future, 391

_CHAPTER III._

THEISM.

REVIEW OF THE PRINCIPAL METAPHYSICAL HYPOTHESES WHICH WILL REPLACE
DOGMA.

I. Introduction—Progress of metaphysical hypotheses—Metaphysical
hypotheses destined to increasing diversity in details, and
increasing agreement on essential points—Importance of the
moral element in metaphysical hypotheses—The part played by
conscience in human morality will not diminish, as Mr. Spencer
says—Sympathetic groups under which divers systems of metaphysics
will be ranged.

II. Theism—1. Probable fate of the creation hypothesis—The author
of the world conceived as a prime mover—Eternity of movement—The
author of the world conceived as a creator properly so
called—Illusion involved in the conception of nothing—Criticism
of the creation hypothesis from the point of view of morals: the
problem of evil and of the responsibility of the creator—Attempts
to save optimism—Hypothesis of a God creating free agents,
“workmen” and not “work”—Reciprocal determinism and the illusion
of spontaneity—Immorality of the temptation—Hypothesis of the
fall, its impossibility—God the tempter—Lucifer and God—2.
Probable fate of the notion of Providence—Hypotheses to explain
a special Providence and miracles thus insufficient—Hypothesis
of a non-omnipotent God proposed by John Stuart Mill—The God of
Comtism—Religion should be not solely human but cosmic—The fate
of the philosophical idea of God—Rational religion proposed by the
neo-Kantians—Ultimate transformation of the notion of divinity and
of Providence—Human Providence and progressive divinity in the
world, 424

_CHAPTER IV._

PANTHEISM.

REVIEW OF THE PRINCIPAL METAPHYSICAL HYPOTHESES WHICH WILL REPLACE
DOGMA.—_Continued._

I. Optimistic pantheism—Transformation of transcendent Deism
into immanent theism and pantheism—Disanthropomorphized
God, according to Messrs. Fiske and Spencer—Diverse forms
of pantheism—Optimistic and intellectualistic pantheism of
Spinoza—Objections, Spinoza’s fatalism—The moral significance
that might be lent to pantheism by the introduction of some notion
of a final cause—Qualities and defects of pantheism—Conception
of unity upon which it is founded—This conception criticised—Its
possible subjectivity.

II. Pessimistic pantheism—Pessimistic interpretation of religions
in Germany—1. Causes of the progress of pessimism in the present
epoch—Progress of pantheistic metaphysics and of positive
science—Penalties incident to thought and reflection—Mental
depression and sense of powerlessness, etc.—2. Is pessimism
curable?—Possible remedies—The labour problem and the future
of society—Illusions involved in pessimism—Inexactitude of its
estimate of pleasures and pains—Quotation from Leopardi—Criticism
of the practical results of pessimism—Nirvâna—An experiment in
Nirvâna—Will pessimistic pantheism be the religion of the
future? 452

_CHAPTER V._

IDEALISM, MATERIALISM, MONISM.

REVIEW OF THE PRINCIPAL METAPHYSICAL HYPOTHESES WHICH WILL REPLACE
DOGMA.—_Concluded._

I. Idealism—Different forms of idealism: subjective idealism,
objective idealism: The whole of existence resolved into a mode
of mental existence—Value of idealism considered from point of
view of the religious sentiment—Most specious of contemporary
idealisms: Possibility of universal progress in the hypothesis
of radical spontaneity and of “freedom”—Reconciliation between
determinism and the conception of freedom—Moral idealism as a
possible substitute for religious sentiment: Dependence of the
universe on the principle of goodness.

II. Materialism—Difficulty in defining absolute materialism:
Matter—The atom—Nebular hypothesis—Hydrogen—Necessity of
supplementing materialism by some theory of the origin of
life—The latest conception of materialism: Conception of infinite
divisibility and infinite extensibility.

III. Monism and the fate of worlds—Current of contemporary systems
toward monism—Scientific interpretation of monism—The world
conceived monistically as a becoming and as a life—Scientific
formulæ for life—Progress consists in the gradual confusion
of these two formulæ—That the rise of morality and religion
can be accounted for without the presupposition of any final
cause—Metaphysical and moral expectations in regard to the
destiny of the world and of humanity, it may be, founded on
scientific monism—Facts which appear to be inconsistent with
these expectations—Pessimistic conception of dissolution that is
complementary to the conception of evolution—Is the immanence of
dissolution demonstrable?—Natural devices for the perpetuation of
the “fittest”—Rôle of intelligence, of numbers, etc.—Calculation
of probabilities—Is eternity _a parte post_ a ground of
discouragement or of hope—Probable existence of thinking beings in
other worlds: the planets, possibility of the existence of beings
superior to man—Survival of the conception of gods—Hypothesis of
intercosmic consciousness and of a universal society.

IV. Destiny of the human race—The hypothesis of immortality
from the point of view of monism—Two possible conceptions of
immortality—Eternal or untemporal existence and continuation of
life in some superior forms—I. Hypothesis of eternal life—its
function in antique religions, in Platonism, and in the systems of
Spinoza, Kant, and Schopenhauer—Eternal life and the subsistence
of the individual—Distinction made by Schopenhauer and various
other philosophers between individuality and personality—Eternal
life problematical and transcendent—Aristocratic tendency
of the theory of eternal life—Hypothesis of conditional
immortality—Criticism of the hypothesis of conditional
immortality; incompatibility of this notion with that of divine
goodness—II. Hypothesis of a continuation of the present
life and its evolution into some superior form—What sort
of immortality the theory of evolution permits us to hope
for—Immortality of one’s labours and conduct—True conception of
such immortality—Its relation to the laws of heredity, atavism,
natural selection—Immortality of the individual—Objections
drawn from science—Protestations of affection against the
annihilation of the person—Resulting antinomy—III. Modern
opposition between the conception of _function_ and the conception
of simple substance, in which ancient philosophy endeavours to
find a proof of immortality—Peripatetic theory of Wundt and
modern philosophers on the nature of the soul—Immortality as
a continuation of function, proved not by the simplicity, but
by the complexity of consciousness—Relation between complexity
and instability—Three stages of social evolution—Analogy of
conscience with a society, collective character of individual
consciousness—Conception of progressive immortality—Last product
of evolution and natural selection: (1) No necessary relation
between the compositeness and complexity of consciousness and its
dissolubility: indissoluble compounds in the physical universe—(2)
Relation between consciousnesses, their possible fusion in a
superior consciousness—Contemporary psychology and the religious
notion of the interpenetration of souls—Possible evolution of
memory and identification of it with reality—Palingenesis by
force of love—Problematic character of those conceptions and of
every conception relative to existence, of consciousness and the
relation between existence and consciousness—IV. Conception of
death appropriate to those who, in the present state of evolution,
do not believe in the immortality of the individual—Antique and
modern stoicism—Acceptance of death: element of melancholy and
of greatness in it—Expansion of self by means of philosophical
thought, and scientific disinterestedness, to the point of to some
extent approving one’s own annihilation, 477