Chapter I: Religious Individualism (1)

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.

_I. Is a renovation of religion possible?_

[Sidenote: Is contemporary scepticism final?]

We have seen that the influence of dogma and of religious morality is on the wane in actually existing societies; but will not this period of decline be followed by a reaction in the opposite direction?

[Sidenote: Consolidation of existing religions not possible.]

Such a reaction could take place in two ways only: 1. By the unification of religions; 2. By the appearance of a new religion. The unification of existing religions is not to-day to be thought of; each of them has shown itself to be incapable of assimilating the others. The different Christian confessions hold each other in mutual respect, but they do the same with the great religions of the East. Islamism alone has made notable progress among tribes still imbued with primitive animism, and for them it represents a manifest progress. As for Christian missionaries they have never been able to make many proselytes among the Mussulmans, the Buddhists, or the Hindus. The Hindu who has been instructed in European science necessarily comes to doubt the revealed foundation of his national religion, but he is not on that account any the more inclined to believe in the Christian revelation. He ceases simply to be religious and becomes a free-thinker. All peoples alike are in that position; the principal great religions possess an approximate value as symbols of the unknowable, and worshippers perceive no advance in passing from one of them to the other: mankind in general does not welcome change for change’s sake. Missionaries themselves to-day lack faith in their religion; they possess either enthusiasm minus talent or talent minus enthusiasm, and the time is at hand when the spirit of propagandism, which has hitherto constituted the power of religion, will abandon it. Few people can cry to-day in the words of the unbelieving Jesuit missionary: “Ah, you have no conception of the pleasure of convincing men of what you do not believe yourself!” Where absolute faith is lacking, and absolute faith in the very details of the dogmas is lacking, sincerity, which constitutes the essential power of all propagandism, is lacking too. Bishop Colenso was one day asked, by his neophytes in Natal, some questions on the Old Testament. After having followed him up from question to question they asked him, on his word of honour, if all that was true. Seized by a scruple, the Bishop fell into a profound train of reflection, studied the question, read Strauss and the German commentators, and finally published a book in which he treats Biblical history as a series of myths. To this celebrated example of Colenso among the Kaffirs, must be joined that of Mr. Francis Newman in Syria, and of the Rev. Adams in India, and of others less well known. Efficiently to combat religions as well organized as those of India, for example, our missionaries would be obliged to become seriously proficient in the history of religion. But the day they sincerely study comparative religion in the hopes of converting somebody else, they will themselves undergo conversion, or at least will rapidly learn to reject a belief in a special revelation.[114] The great religions, and principally the “universal” religions, which to-day have attained their full development, hold each other in check. These vast bodies show almost no signs of life except within, by the formation of new centres of activity which detach themselves from the primitive nucleus, as we see daily happening in the bosom of Protestantism, which is constantly being subdivided into new sects; as also within the bosom of Hinduism, insomuch that the only sign of life that these religions give is that they are beginning to disintegrate.

[114] See M. Goblet d’Alviella, _L’évolution religieuse_.
Anglo-Saxon religious proselytism has achieved the distinction
of contradicting and paralyzing itself. The Theosophist
Society of the United States, in 1879, sent to India certain
missionaries, or rather counter-missionaries, who were
commissioned “to preach the majesty and glory of all ancient
religions and to fortify the Hindu, the Cingalese, the Parsee,
against all efforts to induce him to accept a new faith instead
of the Vedas, of the Tri-Pitâka and of the Zend Avestâ.” In
India and in the island of Ceylon these counter-missionaries
have succeeded in bringing back to the primitive faith some
thousands of converts to Christianity.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Analogy between nineteenth century and times of the Antonines superficial.]

The increasing multiplicity of sects, for example of the Protestant sects; the courageous efforts of certain disciples of Comte and of Spencer, the birth of Mormonism in America and of Brahmaism in India, have been regarded as symptoms of a religious fermentation analogous to that which disturbed the world at the time of the Antonines and very possibly destined, like that, to result in a renovation. “All things in nature spring from humble beginnings, and no one can to-day say whether the unconscious mission of the fisherman and publicans, gathered eighteen centuries ago on the borders of Lake Tiberias about a gentle and mystical idealist, will not to-morrow be handed on to such and such an association of spiritualists prophesying in a gorge of the Rocky Mountains; to such and such an illuminated gathering of socialists in some back shop in London; to such and such a band of ascetics, meditating, like the Essenes of old on the miseries of the world, in some jungle of Hindustan. Perhaps all they need is to discover on the road to Damascus another Paul, to give them a passport to future ages.”[115] These analogies between our century and that of the Antonines are very superficial; between the century which, as a whole, is of an unexampled incredulity and the century which was of an unexampled credulity—which accepted all religion from that of Isis and Mithra to that of Christ; from that of the talking serpent to that of Christ incarnate in the body of a virgin. During the past eighteen hundred years a new thing has been born into the world—science; and science is not compatible with supernatural revelations, which are the foundation of religions.

[115] _L’évolution religieuse contemporaine_, by M. Goblet
d’Alviella, p. 411.

[Sidenote: Attempt to found a religion to-day on miracles desperate.]

Will it be objected that miracles still happen? Possibly one or two notable ones in a century! The surprising thing is not that miracles still happen, but that, with millions of believers, including in their ranks thousands of excited women and children, they do not happen frequently. Every day ought to bring forth its duly authenticated miracle, but unhappily daily miracles no longer happen—except in mad-houses and hospitals for the hysterical, where they are observed and reported nowadays by incredulous men of science. When they happen elsewhere, true believers themselves are almost afraid of them and do not care to talk about them. Of old a king forbade God to perform miracles; the Pope has done almost as much to-day; they are regarded as objects of doubt and suspicion, rather than of edification. Among orthodox Protestant nations, miracles do not happen; enlightened theologians among them no longer insist on the marvellous elements in the early Christian tradition; they regard them as more likely to enfeeble than to confirm the authority of the Scriptures. Add that as a means of founding a new religion, or of reviving old religions, a miracle or two would do no good; they would rather result in the total destruction of the faith they were intended to establish. A whole series of miracles would be necessary, a sort of marvellous atmosphere in which the whole face of nature should be transformed, a mystic halo not only visibly resting on the head of the prophet, but reflected on the believers who surround him. In other words, the Messiah must be in his lifetime quite as wonderful as he is always reported to be afterward, and that without deception or finesse, either on his part or on the part of those who surround him and are supported by his divinity. Unhappily, in our days great men are immediately taken account of by history, which verifies everything, describes everything, sets down in plain print the contemporary fact, otherwise so likely to settle, with time, into some fantastic shape. Even the legend of Napoleon, which he himself laboured with all the resources of despotic power and brutal force to establish, did not last thirty years in Europe; in the East it exists still, transfigured. Personalities shrink beneath the touch of history. If Jesus had lived to-day his letters would have been published, and it is impossible to believe in the divinity of anybody after one has read his correspondence. The slightest facts of an interesting man’s life are ascertainable: state records enable us to ascertain important dates, what he did from year to year and even sometimes from day to day; sometimes a mere appearance in court, such as happened in the life of Shakspeare’s father, may serve to fix a date; and in the life of a prophet there would be no lack of appearances in court since unlicensed assemblies are interdicted. Life to-day is so hemmed in by reality, so disciplined, that it is difficult for the marvellous to find entrance, or to make good its lodgment even if it should get in. We live in little numbered and windowed boxes, in which the least disturbance attracts attention; we are watched like soldiers living in barracks; we have every evening to be present at the roll-call, with no possibility of dropping out of the society of men, of returning into ourselves, of avoiding the big eye of society. We are like bees living under a glass; the observer can watch them at work, watch them constructing their hive, watch them making their honey; and the sweetest of honey, even the honey with which the ancients nourished the baby Jupiter, ceases to be marvellous when one has been present at its tardy and painstaking elaboration.

We are far from the time when Pascal could say “Miracles are as a flash of lightning that reveals.” The lightning no longer flashes. Science stands ready to explain the first miracle that arises in support of a new religion.

[Sidenote: Genius has deserted the service of religion.]

Metaphysical and poetic genius also, upon which religions were so dependent in their earliest stages in the past, have also withdrawn from their service. Read the descriptions of the latest miracles, those at Lourdes, for example: the little girl taking off her stockings to step into the rivulet, the words of the Virgin, the vision repeated as a spectacle before witnesses who saw nothing—all of it is trivial and insignificant; how far we have travelled from the Lives of the Saints, the Gospel, the great Hindu legends! The poor in spirit may see God or the Virgin, but they cannot make others see them; the poor in spirit cannot found or revive religion; it requires genius, and genius, which bloweth where it listeth, bloweth to-day elsewhere. If the Bible and the Gospels had not been sublime poems they would not have made the conquest of the world. Æsthetically considered, they are epics greater than the Iliad. What Odyssey equals that of Jesus? Refined Greeks and Romans did not at first appreciate the simple, impassioned poetry of the Gospels; it was long before they admired the style of the Scriptures. St. Jerome, transported in a dream to the feet of the Sovereign Judge, heard a menacing voice cry: “Thou art naught but a Ciceronian!” After this dream St. Jerome applied himself to the study of the beauties of the Bible and the New Testament, and came ultimately to prefer them to the balanced periods of the great Latin orator: the Sermon on the Mount, in spite of some inconsistencies (in part the work of the disciples), is more eloquent than the most eloquent of Cicero’s orations, and the invectives against the Pharisees, authentic or not, are better literature than the denunciations against Catiline. M. Havet, in our judgment, entirely misses the point, when he asks how “so great a revolution could have taken its rise from such commonplace literature as the New Testament.” The literary excellence of the New Testament is of a new kind, unparalleled among the Greeks or the writers of the Old Testament; it possesses the grace of tenderness and of unction, which is well worth the lyrical fire of the prophets; it is a profound and naïve manual of popular morality, and every word makes one’s heart vibrate. The literary success of the New Testament was fully merited. The Hebrew people, who had not produced one man of science, had evidently produced a succession of sombre, tender, puissant poets unparalleled among any other people; a fact which in a great part explains the victorious progress of Hebrew religion. Poetry, like hope, is the sister of faith, and is more necessary than hope to faith, for one may forego the distant grace of hope when one is under the present charm of an illusion.

[Sidenote: And the conditions in which alone genius could succeed are wanting.]

To found a great religion has demanded and will always demand the services of men of genius such as Jesus was, or, to be quite historic, as St. Paul was. But if genius is to found religion it can do so only under two essential conditions. It must in the first place be absolutely sincere; we no longer live in a period when religion can be benefited by imposture; it must, in the second place, distinctly impose upon itself; it must be the dupe of its own inspiration, of its own interior illuminations, disposed to see in them something superhuman, to feel itself in direct communication with God, or at least especially designated by God. This second condition was easy to realize in ancient times when, in their ignorance of psychological and physiological phenomena, not only men like Jesus but philosophers like Socrates and Plotinus believed that they felt within them something supernatural, took their visions and their ecstasies seriously; and, unable to explain their own very genuine genius, regarded it as a proof of some mysterious or miraculous communication with God. Purely and simply to rank these great men among lunatics would be absurd; they were simply seeking to explain phenomena which overtaxed their knowledge and gave what, after all, was the most plausible explanation for the times in which they lived. With the scientific knowledge that we possess nowadays, and which every man who attains a certain intellectual level inevitably will possess, men like Moses and Jesus, men who are inspired, will be obliged, so to speak, to choose between two alternatives; to see in their inspiration simply the natural impulse of genius, to speak in their own name, to make no pretences to revelation or prophecy, to be, in effect, philosophers, or actively to allow themselves to be deceived by their own exaltation, to objectify it, to personify it, to become madmen in downright earnest. At the present day those who are not capable of naming the force that is acting in them and declaring it to be natural and human, and of preserving their self-mastery, are definitively regarded as of unsound mind; prophets who believe in their own prophecies are sent to Charenton. We are familiar with distinctions that were unknown in ancient times, even to the promoters of religious ideas; the great men who founded religions were carried away by the movement they had themselves called into being; were divinized by the God that they themselves had brought to men. Genius is as capable of going to school as stupidity; and, like stupidity, it has been to school in the nineteenth century and is familiar with nineteenth-century science. A time will come—nay, probably has come for Europe—when prophets, apostles, and Messiahs will be extinct among men. It is a species which is dying out. “Who of us, who of us will become a god?” None of us will become a god, and more than that none of us wants to. Science has killed the supernatural in us even in the very centre of our being, in our deepest ecstasies; visions no longer put on the shape of apparition but of simple hallucination, and the day they become so strong that we believe in them we lose all power to make anybody else believe in them, and become, not uncommonly, amenable to the law. The middle term between the man of genius and the fool, the man of inspiration, of revelation, the Messiah, the God, has disappeared.

[Sidenote: Dissemination of knowledge has weakened the religious sentiment.]

Add that inspiration nowadays, and forever more, lacks and will lack its appropriate environment. Intensity of religious emotion in a people, an intensity which sometimes rises to the height of fanaticism, depends, in a great measure, upon ignorance and upon the level of intelligence achieved by average human life. When problems of the origin and destiny, and reason of things, are suddenly presented to an ignorant people, it experiences profound terrors, ecstasies, a general heightening of the sensibility which is due to the fact that a state of metaphysical and philosophical curiosity is utterly unfamiliar to it, constitutes a positive revolution in its ordinary habits of mind. When the average level of intellectual activity is once raised, metaphysical emotion loses its revolutionary character precisely because the whole extent of human existence has become imbued with it. A calm, high, continuous enjoyment takes the place of a brief, stormy ecstasy; people who pass their lives on the shore of the ocean cease to fear it, or at least do not experience so violent an emotion in its presence as they did at the sight of their first tempest. If we had never looked upon the starry heavens, the first time we lifted our eyes to them we should be filled with fear; the spectacle of them to-day calms us, gently inspires us. To appease the violence of religious sentiment, it must, when it has been purified, be permitted to permeate the whole of human existence, be always present with us, and domesticate us in the infinite.

[Sidenote: A new religion must be both novel and significant.]

A final condition precedent to the success of a new religion would be that it should be really new, that it should contribute a new idea to the treasury of the human mind. Among the wretched attempts at starting a new faith which have been made from one end of the world to the other in our days, nothing original has made its appearance. In America a religion new in appearance, Mormonism, has had some success; it is, of all modern attempts, the only one which has relied upon miraculous prophecy and revelation, such as are indispensable to a genuine dogmatic religion: it has also its book, its Bible, and even includes in its legend some prosaic tale of marvellous pair of spectacles destined for the deciphering of the book. The God of Mormonism, who is rather better educated than the God of the Bible, possesses some notion of optics. But at bottom Mormonism is simply a modern edition of Jewish ideas and customs: the whole religion is a bit of plagiarism, a resuscitation of superanuated legends and beliefs, to which it has added nothing but what is trivial; it is a religious anachronism. It seems also to have reached the limit of its development, the number of its adherents is not increasing. Hindu Brahmaism is an eclectic and mystic spiritualism without one really new idea. Comtism, which consists of the rites of religion and nothing else, is an attempt to maintain life in the body after the departure of the soul. The spiritualists are charlatans, or empirics, who have been impressed with certain, as yet obscure, phenomena of the nervous system which they themselves are unable to explain scientifically. But charlatanism has never founded anything durable in the domain of religion. To compare American Mormonism or spiritualism to nascent Christianity is to make one’s self ridiculous. Humble as the beginnings of Christianity were one must not be the dupe of historical illusion, nor believe that Christianity owed its triumph to a simple concurrence of happy events; that the world, for example, according to M. Renan’s hypothesis, might quite easily have become Mithraic. The disciples of a certain Chrestus, mentioned for the first time by Suetonius, could present, as the basis of their as yet vague beliefs, two incomparable epic poems, the Old Testament and Gospels; they introduced into the world a new system of morality, which was admirable even in its errors, and original at least for the mass of mankind; and they contributed, finally, to the common stock of ideas a great metaphysical conception, that of the resurrection, which, combined with current philosophical conceptions, necessarily gave birth to the doctrine of personal immortality. Christianity conquered by its own weight, it was inevitable that it should find its St. Paul; the Old Testament and the Gospels were too eminent to be forgotten, or to remain without influence on human life. There is not a single example in the history of the world of a great masterpiece, at once literary or philosophical, which has gone its way unperceived, without exerting an influence upon the progress of humanity. Every work which is sufficiently endowed with beauty or virtue is sure of the future.

[Sidenote: No great religion could nowadays take its rise among the masses.]

It is among the masses that religious movements have hitherto begun. But a new religion could not come to us to-day from the ignorant masses of an Oriental people nor from the lower classes of any country of Europe. In heathen antiquity, all social classes were united in a belief in naïve superstitions. Marcus Aurelius himself was obliged to preside in great pomp over a ceremony in honour of the serpent of Alexander of Abonoteichos which numbered believers among his friends. To-day a bishop in Australia can refuse to order a prayer for rain, and declare that atmospheric phenomena are regulated by inflexible natural laws, and persuade the believers in his diocese, if they want a remedy against drought, to ameliorate their system of irrigation. These two facts indicate the thorough-going difference between the ancient and modern world. The contemptuous title of Barbarians, which the Greeks and Romans applied to all other peoples, was less than exact, for the Hebrews and the Hindus at least possessed a more profound religion than the Greeks and Romans and even in certain respects a superior literature. Greek and Roman civilization is a rare historical example, which proves that religion is not necessarily the measure of the intellectual development of a people. Greece excels principally by her art and science; but the superiority which she conceived herself to possess in other respects was a pure illusion founded on ignorance. The superiority that we attribute to ourselves is demonstrated by our knowledge; we are better acquainted to-day with the religion of most Oriental peoples than they are themselves; and we have earned a right to sit in judgment on them, and admire them, and criticise them, that the ancients did not possess. The distinction between those who know and those who do not is to-day the sole really serious line of demarcation between classes and nations. And the line is one that religion cannot pass, for every complete religion involves a general conception of the world, and no such naïve conception of the world as a man of the people is capable of can ever find acceptance by a cultivated mind. No great religion can germinate and achieve complete development in modern society.

[Sidenote: Impossibility of improving on existing religions in their kind.]

The impossibility of finding anything new in the domain of mythical religion might almost be demonstrated _a priori_; nothing more attractive will ever be discovered in the way of a metaphysical myth than the sovereign happiness obtained in this life in the Buddhists Nirvâna, or obtained in the life after death in Christian immortality. In these two conceptions, the metaphysical imagination of humanity has once for all achieved its masterpiece, as the plastic imagination once for all achieved its masterpiece in Greek statuary. Something may be demanded in another order of ideas, one may exact less naïve hypotheses, hypotheses more neighbour to the truth; but these hypotheses will never seduce humanity nor pass over the world like a wave of light, nor become transfigured in the form of a revelation. The multitude never listens to a revelation that does not announce some glad tidings, some salvation in this world, or the next; to be a prophet, and to be listened to, imperatively requires one to be a prophet of good augury. Religious metaphysics, after its two immense efforts in Buddhism and Christianity (Mohammedanism is simply a vulgarization of these two), is condemned in the future to sterility or repetition, so long as severe and truly philosophical hypotheses, based on scientific generalization, engage the attention of mankind. Infantine hypotheses, which resolve the problems of the destiny of mankind and of the world in a manner altogether consoling to human vanity, are condemned to uniformity and banality. To discover anything new in the realm of metaphysics, the religious spirit will have to abandon the conditions which have hitherto existed; will have to deal with ideas that lie beyond the primitive intellectual range of a Hottentot, and even abandon all notion of universality, of Catholicity, in the sphere of speculation.

[Sidenote: Impossibility of improving existing religious morality as such.]

The same is true in the sphere of morals. So far as an exalted and attractive system of morality is concerned, can one go farther than Christianity and Buddhism, both of which preach exclusive altruism, absolute self-abnegation? All that one can do is really to take a few steps backward to moderate certain exaggerated outbursts of devotion in the void, to fit Christian and Buddhistic morality to the real world, to supply this beautiful mysticism with a material body; but for such a task a new Messiah would be powerless, simple good sense does not charm humanity; the cold, humble, commonplace duties of everyday life cannot be made the basis of a great popular movement. Common-sense is not contagious after the fashion of religious exaltation, which passes from man to man like wildfire. Moral sentiment may well, in the course of time, filter into us, pass slowly from man to man, rise like a rising tide, but so gradually as scarcely to be perceptible. The most lasting approaches to perfection are often the most unconscious. It is a difficult matter by a simple impulse of faith to climb sheer up on the ladder of civilization. True moral perfection is often the precise opposite of heroic paroxysm. As the passion for goodness becomes triumphant, it ceases to be a passion: it becomes, and must become, a portion of our normal life, of the flesh that the mystics curse; the man must become good from the roots of his hair to the soles of his feet. Thus Buddhism and Christianity, in many respects, have miscarried. If the first apostles, who preached these religions, should return among men, how unchanged and untransmuted they would find humanity, after so many thousands of years! There has been, no doubt, an intellectual progress which has confirmed a certain number of moral ideas, but this very complex intellectual progress has not entirely been effected by religions. There was as yet no sign of it in the small number of simple-hearted people gathered about the “new word” in which the apostles saw their moral and religious ideal realized. As the primitive virtues of this small knot of wholly religious and not at all scientific people overspread humanity, they necessarily became corrupt: and a morality of exalted self-abnegation could not succeed beyond a small group, a family, a convent, artificially sequestered from the rest of the world it necessarily failed when it undertook to appeal to all mankind. The great world is too inhospitable and shifting a soil; one does not sow seed in the sea. A revival or a repetition of the religious epics of Christianity or of Buddhism would to-day meet with an immediate check; for it is the very essence of their influence to develop the heart disproportionately to the brain, and, such an effect being a sort of disturbance of equilibrium, a sort of natural monstrosity, can be produced in individuals indeed, but not in races. The investigator to-day, who adds the least item of truth to the mass of scientific and philosophic knowledge already acquired, performs a much less brilliant but probably more definitive work than the purely religious work of a Messiah. He is of those who construct not in three days, but during successive ages, the sacred edifice which will not fall.

[Sidenote: Growing antagonism to externals of worship.]

The most essential incident of every dogmatic religion, the cult, is not less foreign to the spirit of modern society than dogma itself is. The foundation of outer forms of worship, as we have seen, is a crystallization of custom and tradition into the form of rites. Well, as has been said, one of the characteristic marks of the innovating spirit, and of intellectual superiority, is the power of breaking up associations of ideas, of liberating one’s self in a measure from established collocations of ideas, of being slow to contract invincible habits of thought, of precisely not possessing a ritualistic mind. If such be one of the great signs of superiority in an individual, it is none the less so in a people. Progress in humanity may be estimated by the degree of perfection that the faculty of psychic disassociation has achieved. The instinct for novelty is then no longer held in check by the instinct for ritualism; curiosity may be pushed to its extreme without any sense of innovating impiety such as primitive peoples regard it with. The importance of ritualism in the material and religious life of a people indicates the predominance among them of obscure and unconscious associations of ideas, their brain is caught and enveloped in a closely woven network of tradition, in a tissue impenetrable to the light of conscience. On the contrary, the progress of reflection and of conscience which is manifested among modern people is accompanied by an enfeeblement of established custom, of unconscious habit, of the discipline and power of the past. There is often a certain danger, on the practical side, in this change, because reflection becomes strong enough to dissolve habits before it is capable of making head against the passions of the moment. The power of disassociation is intellectual, and is not in itself adequate to the moral domination and direction of the individual, and whatever may be the objections, from the point of view of morals, to the progress of reflection, it is certain that it sooner or later strips rites, religious ceremonies, and the whole machinery of worship, of their sacred character. Etiquette in the presence of kings and gods alike is destined to disappear. Whatever is an observance ceases to be a duty, and the rôle of the priest by that fact is seriously changed. The distant ideal toward which we are marching includes among other things the disappearance of the priesthood, which is rite personified; the god of the priesthood, who in certain respects is no more than an apotheosis of custom, has to-day grown old and maintains his power only by the prestige of the accomplished fact. It is in vain for men like German, English, or American clergymen, or Hindu deists, who still possess a religion, to endeavour to throw over revelation and dogma, and reduce their faith to a system of personal and progressive beliefs, to be accompanied by a ritual. The ritual is an excrescence simply, an almost superstitious habit, mechanically practised and destined to disappear.

[Sidenote: The liberal movement in religion a movement of disintegration.]

The movement which, in certain countries, inclines religion to be shy of dogmas and rites, is in reality a movement of disintegration, not of reconstruction. Human beliefs, when they shall have taken their final form in the future, will bear no mark of dogmatic and ritualistic religion, they will be simply philosophical. Among certain people, it is true, every philosophical system tends to assume the practical and sentimental form of a system of beliefs and aspirations. The ideas of Kant and Schelling, when they passed into America, gave birth to Emerson’s and Parker’s transcendentalism; Spencer’s theory of evolution became, in America, a religion of Cosmism, represented by Messrs. Fiske, Potter, and Savage. But all such alleged religions are simply the moving shadow, in the domain of sentiment and action, of the substance of intellectual speculation. It is not enough to be of the same opinion on some sociological or metaphysical theory and then to congregate to the number of ten or a hundred in some theatre or temple, to found a new religion and a new cult. The majority of these pretended religions, which are simply philosophies and sometimes very bad philosophies, are open to Mark Pattison’s observation on the congregation of Comtists in their chapel in London: “Three persons and no God.”

[Sidenote: Secularism.]

The defects of these modern cults appear in their most exaggerated form in secularism, which had its hour of success in England. Secularism is a purely atheistic and utilitarian religion, which has borrowed all it could from the ritual of the English Church. This contradiction between the outer form and the inner void resulted in a positive parody.[116]

[116] See the secularist version of the _Ite missa est_.

[Sidenote: Comtists.]

In France the Comtists have made the same attempt to preserve the rites, without the background, of belief. The Comtist doctrine of fetichism contains a certain amount of truth as characterizing primitive religion, but it is insufficient in its application to actual, existing religions. The religions of the present day have developed, gradually, from a primitive system of physics to a complete system of metaphysics: the fetiches have been transmuted into symbols of the First Cause, or of the Final Cause. Positivism can offer us no symbol of this kind; its “Great Fetich” is genuinely a fetich, and appropriate for primitive peoples only. “Humanity” does not afford complete satisfaction to one’s conception of causality, nor to one’s conception of finality. In regard to the first, humanity is a simple link in the infinite chain of phenomena; in regard to the second, humanity constitutes an end which is practically inexact and theoretically insufficient: practically inexact because almost the whole of one’s activity relates to such and such a restricted group of human beings and not to humanity as a whole; and theoretically insufficient, because humanity looks small in the presence of the great universe. Its life is a point in space, a point in time; it constitutes a contracted ideal, and to say the truth, it is as vain for a race to regard itself as its own end as for an individual. One cannot eternally contemplate one’s own image and cannot, in especial, eternally adore it. Love of humanity is the greatest of virtues and the most ridiculous of fetichisms. The marriage of positive science and blind sentiment cannot produce religion; the attempt to return to fetichism is an attempt to foist the religion of a savage upon the most civilized of mankind. Moreover, what we believe destined to subsist in the future in a multitude of forms, and to replace religions, is not pure and simple sentiment, but sentiment roused by metaphysical symbols, by speculation and thought. Religious metaphysics may consist in involuntary illusion, in error, in dream; but unmetaphysical fetichism consists in voluntary illusion, in cherished error, in day-dream. Auguste Comte seemed to believe that we should always need as the centre of our system of worship, an imaginary personification of humanity, a great Being, a great Fetich; such a fetichism would be a species of new category, in the Kantian sense. Fetichism has never imposed itself upon humanity after that fashion; intellectually considered, it was based on reasons which can be shown to be false; emotionally considered, it was based on feelings which can be shown to be perverted, and can be rectified. If love sometimes stretches out toward personification, toward fetiches, it is only in default of real persons and living individuals; such in our opinion is, in its simplest form, the law which will gradually result in the disappearance of every fetichistic cult. We must find gods of flesh and bone, living and breathing among us—not poetical creations like those of Homer, but visible realities. We must discover the kingdom of heaven in the human soul, a future providence in science, absolute goodness in the foundation of life. We must not project our ideas and subjective images of things into the outer world, and beyond the limits of the outer world, and love them with a sterile love; but must love the beings of this world with an active affection in so far as they are capable of conceiving and realizing the same ideas as we. Just as patriotism, in so far as it is an abstract love, tends to disappear, and to resolve itself into a general sympathy for all our fellow-citizens, just so far the love of God tends to overflow the surface of the earth and to include all living beings. To know living beings is to love them; and thus science, in so far as it is science of the observation of life, is one with the sentiment which constitutes what is best in religion, is one with love.

[Sidenote: Ethical Culture Society.]

Another religion of humanity, or rather a religion of ethics, has recently been founded in New York by Mr. Felix Adler, the son of an American rabbi; but Mr. Adler, who is more consistent than Comte, has determined to do away with religious ceremonial, not less than with religious dogma. He has abandoned almost everything in the way of ceremony; he has abandoned the catechism, and professes allegiance to no sacred book. As a metaphysician he is a follower of Kant, rather than of Comte, but makes no positive affirmation on the subject of God and immortality; he admits only the existence of an unknowable noumenon, of an ultimate reality which lies behind all appearances, and is responsible for the harmony of the world. So long as divergence in matters of belief continues to become increasingly great, Mr. Adler regards it as necessary to concentrate attention on the moral law itself, apart from any theory of its origin or justification. Men have so long disputed, he thinks, about the basis of the law, that the law itself has not received its due share of notice. His movement is essentially a practical movement and appeals to the conscience, a cry for more justice, an exhortation for the performance of duty.

[Sidenote: Its object.]

The primary aim of the society should be, according to Mr. Adler, to reform the lives of its own members. He has founded: 1. A Sunday-school, where instruction is given in practical morality, in the history of the most important religions, and in the elements of the philosophy of religion; 2. A public kindergarten organized on the Froebel method; 3. A school, for working people’s children between the ages of three and nine.[117]

[117] Indigent pupils are clothed and fed; the instruction is
gratuitous; the school contains at present one hundred pupils,
having begun with eight. An industrial museum is attached to
it. The society also sends out district nurses to attend the
sick in the poorer quarters of New York.

[Sidenote: Is of a type destined to survive.]

Mr. Adler’s following at first consisted of Jews; subsequently a number of people, without distinction of race, gathered about him. They are left entirely free in the matter of their personal beliefs, and are united only in an ardent desire for the regeneration of mankind. Every Sunday the faithful congregate, to listen to a discourse and then disperse; none but members of the society are permitted to join in the management of the institutions founded and maintained by the society. This religion, which is, _à l’américaine_, wholly practical, is acceptable to the philosopher; at bottom it is simply a great mutual aid temperance society. The only objection that can be urged against it is that it is somewhat prosaic, but it is certainly one of the forms of social activity which are destined to succeed ritualistic religions.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Antiquity of faith in socialism as a panacea.]

Certain partisans of religious revival regard socialism as their last hope. Socialistic ideas ought, in their judgment, to give religion a fresh start and supply it with an impetus hitherto unknown. This conception wears an air of originality, but, as a matter of fact, it is quite the reverse of original. The great catholic religions, Buddhism and Christianity, were in the beginning socialistic, they preached universal partition of goods, and poverty; it was by means of so doing that they were in part enabled to spread with such rapidity. In reality the instant that the period of propagandism succeeded the period of struggle for permission to exist, these religions did everything within their power to become individualistic even at the expense of inconsistency; they ceased to promise equality on earth and relegated it to heaven or to Nirvâna.

[Sidenote: Socialism unrealizable except by a select few.]

Do we therefore believe that socialistic ideas will play no part in the future, and is it not conceivable that a certain mysticism might form an alliance with socialism, and both lend and borrow force by so doing? A mystical socialism is by no means unrealizable under certain conditions, and, far from constituting an obstacle to religious free-thought, it might become one of its most important manifestations. But what has hitherto rendered socialism impracticable and utopian is that it has aimed at subjugating the whole of mankind, rather than some small social group. What has been aimed at is state socialism; the case has been the same in the matter of religion. But systems of socialism and of religious doctrine must, in the future at least, be addressed to small groups and not to confused masses; must be made the basis of manifold and various associations in the bosom of society. As its most earnest partisans recognize, socialism presupposes for its success a certain average of virtue, that may well obtain among some hundreds of men but not among some millions. It endeavours to establish a sort of special providence, which would be quite incompetent to manage the affairs of the world but may well watch over the interests of a neighbourhood. Socialism aims more or less at playing the part of fate, at predetermining the destiny of the individual, at supplying each individual with a certain average amount of happiness which he can neither increase nor diminish. Socialism is the apotheosis of state interference, and the world in general is not disposed to worship it; its ideal is a life which is completely foreseen, insured, with the element of fortune and of hope left out, with the heights and the depths of human life levelled away—an existence somewhat utilitarian and uniform, regularly plotted off like the squares on a checker board, incapable of satisfying the ambitious desires of the mass of mankind. Socialism is to-day advocated by the rebels in society. Its success, however, would depend on the most peaceable, the most conservative, the most bourgeois people in the world; it supplies no sufficient outlet for the love of risk, of staking one’s everything, of playing for the height of fortune against the depth of misery, which is one of the essential factors of human progress.

[Sidenote: Experiments in socialism.]

Practical experiments in socialism are being made every day; there is in France the phalansterian association of M. Godin; in America there are the associations by the followers of Cabet, not to speak of others of a more purely religious character, such as those of the Quakers, Shakers, etc.; and finally, there are co-operative societies of various kinds. These avowedly or unavowedly socialistic experiments have never succeeded except when their promoters were willing very rigorously to limit their numbers; certain intellectual and moral defects in the members must inevitably in every case have proved fatal to them. Socialism is possible only in a small society of the elect. Even the theorists who once regarded profit-sharing as the universal panacea recognize to-day that profit-sharing constitutes a remedy in some cases only; that the labouring classes are not, as a whole, either patient, or painstaking enough to fulfil the very simple conditions that profit-sharing demands. They are unfit for corporate life, they are hard repellent individuals, they are elements of disintegration; when a small socialistic society finds them on its list of members, it excludes them; if mankind as a whole formed one great socialistic society, it also would be obliged to exclude them. To universalize socialism is to destroy it.

[Sidenote: Future of socialism.]

Every scientific discovery passes through three distinct stages: the stage of pure theory, of application on a small scale in the laboratory, of application on a grand scale in the world of business. It frequently happens that the development of an idea is arrested in the sphere of theory, that it does not enter into the sphere of practice at all, or that, completely successful in the laboratory, it miscarries when the attempt is made to apply it to business. If this holds true of scientific ideas, of devices that depend for their success upon the plasticity of inert matter only, which we may bend to our will, _a fortiori_ it must be true of sociological ideas, of experiments, of devices that depend for their success on the plasticity of so variable, so heterogeneous a substance as human nature. Socialism is still, for the most part, at the theoretical stage; and even as a theory socialism is very vague and not very consistent and, when the effort is made to put it into practice, the difference between experiments in the laboratory, among conditions that the experimenter can in a measure determine and control, and in the great world in which everything is determined and controlled for him, must be remembered. The state which yields to the seduction of some charming socialistic theory, and endeavours, as it will endeavour, to realize it, will inevitably be ruined. Social experiments cannot be attempted by the state—not even if they are experiments in religion, or rather in especial not if they are experiments in religion. Some experiments may at most be observed by the state and followed with interest by it; nay, the state may even in certain cases encourage the most interesting of them and subsidize them as it does certain industrial enterprises. We are persuaded that socialism in the future, like religion in the past, will appear in many different forms. There will arise a number of conceptions of an ideal society, each of which is realizable in special circumstances, and by people of some special disposition. Human society which to-day, beyond the limits of convents and monasteries (which consist in artificial groupings of individuals of the same sex), presents a certain uniformity of type, may well at some later date, owing to complete liberty of association, and to the spread of personal initiative, present a great variety of types. Socialism will not result in the founding of a religion, but it may well result in the founding of a number of associations dominated respectively by some metaphysical or moral idea. Socialism will thus contribute to that multiplicity and diversity of beliefs which does not exclude but rather encourages their practical application.

[Sidenote: Necessity of allowing for a multiplicity of conflicting ideals.]

The future, therefore, will leave the human mind, as time goes on, more and more at liberty; will permit the individual to do increasingly as he likes so long as he does not violate the rights of anybody else. What is the highest social ideal? Does it lie purely and simply in the practice of the necessary virtues or of a half conscious morality, an unreflecting benignity, compounded of ignorance and custom? This social ideal is realized in certain countries in the Orient, where Buddhism is dominant, and the people are so gentle that years pass without a homicide; and yet life in these countries in nowise appeals to us as ideal. To this sort of morality must be added some satisfaction of the principal desire of mankind, of the desire for economic ease and for practical happiness, and even that would not be enough; for that much is realized in corners of Switzerland, of Portugal, in primitive countries like Costa Rica, where poverty is unknown. Artists dream of a life devoted entirely to art, to the beautiful, of a life which is hostile to prosaic and practical virtue, and this ideal was realized in the Renaissance: the Renaissance was distinguished by an extraordinary efflorescence of æsthetic instinct and moral depravity, and we in nowise desire to return to it. And if science, which is the modern ideal, should become absolute, we should see a society of _blasés_ Fausts which would not be more enviable perhaps than other societies. No; a complete social ideal must neither consist in bare morality nor in simple economic well-being, nor in art alone, nor in science alone—it must consist in all of these together; its ideal must be the greatest and most universal conceivable. This ideal is that of progress, and progress cannot take place in one direction only at a time; whoever advances in one direction only will soon retreat. A point of light shines in all directions simultaneously. The excellence of religion cannot be demonstrated by showing that it favours some one species of human activity; morality, for example, or art. It is not enough to make man moral as Christianity and Buddhism did, nor to excite his æsthetic imagination as Paganism did. Not one but all of his faculties must be stimulated, and there is but one religion that can do it; and that religion each must create for himself. Whoever feels attracted by a life similar to that of a priest will do well to become a Christian and even a Quaker, and the artist will do well to become a pagan. What is certain is that no one of the deities which mankind has created and worshipped is all-sufficing; mankind needs all of them and something more, for human thought has outgrown its gods.

[Sidenote: Liberty the condition of knowledge.]

Under the sounding domes of old cathedrals, the echoes are so numerous that an immense screen has sometimes to be stretched across the nave to break the reverberations and enable the priest’s voice alone to reach the faithful. This screen which is invisible from below, which isolates the sacred word and deadens all other sound, is stretched not only across the cathedral nave but across the heart of every true believer. It must be torn away; every voice and word must be free to attain the ear of man; the sacred word rises from no one throat, but is the symphony of all the voices that sound beneath the dome of heaven.

[Sidenote: Decline of the power of religion.]