FOOTNOTES

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Jean-Marie Guyau

[1] See an account given of the ProlÉgomÈnes of M. Albert RÉville, by M. Darmesteter, Revue philosophique, seventh year, vol. i. p. 76.

[2] The importance which Auguste Comte attributed to sociology is well known, but in his horror of metaphysics the founder of positivism excluded from his science everything really universal and cosmic that it contained, in order to reduce it to limits exclusively human. Messrs. Spencer and Lilienfeld, Schaeffle and Espinas, improving on the sociology of Comte, have extended social laws and have shown that every living organism is an embryonic society, and, vice versa, that every society is an organism. A contemporary philosopher goes still further and attributes to sociology a certain metaphysical significance. M. Alfred FouillÉe says: “Since biology and sociology are so closely related, may not the laws that are common to them be expected to suggest still more universal laws of nature and thought? Is the entire universe anything more than a vast society in process of formation, a vast system of conscious and consciously striving atoms which is working itself out, and little by little falling into shape? The laws which govern the grouping of individual atoms in the body are, no doubt, at bottom the same as those that govern the grouping of individuals in society; and the very atoms themselves, which are supposed to be indivisible, are, it may be, diminutive societies. If so, social science, the crown of human sciences, may some day give us, in its ultimate formula, the secret of universal life.... It is conceivable that the universal type of existence of the world may be found in sociology—that the universe may come to be conceived as a society in process of formation; miscarrying here and succeeding there, in its effort to transmute the reign of mechanics into a reign of justice, and to substitute fraternity for antagonism. If so, the essential and immanent power at the heart of beings, always ready to manifest itself as soon as circumstances give it access to the light of consciousness, might be expressed by the single word, sociability.” (Alfred FouillÉe, La Science sociale contemporaine, 2d edition, introduction and conclusion.) M. FouillÉe has not applied this theory to religion; he has noted its suggestiveness in the domain of metaphysics and of ethics simply; we believe, and we shall endeavour to show, that it is not less suggestive in the domain of religion.

This book was finished, and in part printed, when there appeared in the Revue philosophique M. Lesbazeilles’ interesting article on Les bases psychologiques de la religion.

Although the author’s point of view, as the title indicates, is throughout strictly psychological, he has given his attention also to social relations and “conditions of collective adaptation,” which he regards as prefigured, anticipated, and sanctified by religious rites and myths. This, we think, implies some confusion between religion and morality. Morality deals with collective human life, but religion deals with collective life generally, and undertakes at the same time to provide a physical and a metaphysical explanation of things. We shall see that in the beginning religion was a superstitious physics, in which the forces of nature were regarded simply as the expression of some unknown person or person’s volitions, and that it thus naturally assumed a sociological form.

[3] See pt. 3, chap. ii.

[4] See pt. 3, chap. i.

[5] See pt. 3, chaps. i. and ii.

[6] See pt. 2, chap. iv.

[7] “You are occupied with religion,” a cultivated unbeliever writes me. “There is then some such thing! So much the better for those who cannot do without it.” This witticism precisely sums up the state of mind of a great many enlightened Frenchmen: they are profoundly astonished that religion should still be on its legs, and out of their astonishment they draw the conviction that it is necessary. Their surprise thereupon becomes a respect, almost a reverence. Assuredly positive religions still exist and long will exist; and as long as they exist they will no doubt do so for reasons; but these reasons diminish day by day and the number of believers diminishes along with them. Instead of bowing down before the fact as before something sacred, one must rather say to one’s self that by modifying the fact one will modify and suppress the raisons d’Être of that fact; by driving religions before it, the modern mind demonstrates that they have less and less the right to live. That certain people have not as yet learned to do without them is true, and as long as they do not learn to do without them religions will for them exist; we have not the least anxiety on that score; and just in so far as they find their certitude in regard to them shaken, they will have proved that their intelligence is so far enfranchised as to have no further need of an arbitrary rule. Similarly for peoples: nothing is more naÏve than to urge the very necessity of transitions as a bar to progress: it is as if one should call attention to the shortness of human steps, and conclude therefrom that movement is impossible; that man stands still like a shell-fish attached to a stone or a fossil buried in a rock.

[8] Herr Roskoff, Das Religionswesen der rohesten Naturvoelker (Leipzig, 1880); M. Girard de Rialle, Mythologie comparÉe (Paris, 1878); M. RÉville, Les religions des peuples non civilisÉs (Paris, 1880).

[9] See M. G. De Mortillet, Le prÉhistorique. AntiquitÉ de l’homme (Paris, 1883).

[10] We find it adopted or almost so even by spiritualists, like M. Vacherot, La religion, Paris, 1869.

[11] See Origin and Development of Religion, by F. Max MÜller, M.A.

[12] Origin and Development of Religion, p. 210.

[13] Origin of Religion, p. 25.

[14] This word has met with success in Germany. Hartmann also adopts a theory of henotheism.

[15] Max MÜller, as is well known, goes the length of believing that the authors of the first myths were perfectly conscious that they were speaking in parables; and that subsequent generations misunderstood them, because they personified the figures and the names by which the Divine was referred to; so that mythology becomes literally the science of a disease of language.

[16] Among the most ingenious and least contestable of Max MÜller’s suggestions, we cite the paragraph devoted to the Vedic deity Aditi, one of the names of the dawn: “You will be as surprised as I certainly was surprised when the fact first presented itself to me, that there really is a deity in the Veda who is simply called the boundless or the infinite, in Sanscrit A-diti. Aditi is derived from diti, and the negative particle a. Diti, again, is regularly derived from a root DÂ (dyati), to bind, from which dita, the participle, meaning bound, and diti, a substantive, meaning binding and bound. Aditi, therefore, must originally have meant without bounds, not chained nor inclosed, boundless, infinite, infinitude.”

This etymology, on the contrary, seems to us rather to be calculated to show precisely that the conception of infinity is not primitive, and that the first time the Hindus invoked the dawn under the name of Aditi, they were far from possessing any distinction between finite and infinite. The night was for them a prison-house, the return of day was their deliverance. It is well known that they represented day as a luminous cow, which moved slowly out of the stable at night and stepped across the fields of heaven and of earth. Sometimes these cows are represented as stolen and confined in sombre caverns. Aurora herself is retained in the depths of Rita; night threatens to reign without end, but the gods set out in search of her, Indra discovers and delivers her, and with her aid, the cows bellowing for liberty are discovered in their cavern. It seems to us that for one who enters into the spirit of these primitive legends, it is easy to determine the primitive sense of Aditi. Aditi is the dawn who, confined one knows not where, succeeds at last in breaking bonds and appears radiantly in the open heaven, delivering and delivered, breaking the jail in which the hours of darkness have confined the world. Aditi is the dawn, freed and giving freedom. And, by an extension of meaning, it comes to signify the immortal and imperishable light which no power can veil or hide for more than a day. Whereas, Diti signifies what is mortal and perishable and prisoned in the bounds of matter. This construction is simple, and what is more, is confirmed by the legends to which we have just alluded; after having advocated it in the Revue philosophique (December, 1879), we find it adopted by M. RÉville, ProlÉgomÈnes À l’histoire des religions, 1881.

[17] Alfred FouillÉe, La libertÉ et le dÉterminisme, 2e partie.

[18] See the authors Morale anglaise contemporaine, 2e partie.

[19] See our Morale anglaise contemporaine, p. 579.

[20] Fetichism, M. RÉville also says, is logically a later belief. “A fetich is a vulgar object, possessing no value in itself, but which a negro preserves, venerates, adores, because he believes that it is the dwelling place of a spirit. And the choice of the said object is not absolutely arbitrary. A fetich possesses this very special distinction, that it is the property of the person who adores it. It is in this element of individual ownership—ownership by the tribe or the family—that the difference clearly appears between the object of a naturist religion, and the fetich, properly so called. However humble it may be—tree, rock, or rivulet—the first is independent, is accessible to all, to strangers as to indigenes, on the sole condition that they conform to the exigencies of the ritual or the cult. The sun shines for everybody, the mountain is accessible to all who scale its sides, the spring refreshes the passer-by, whatever be his tribe; the very tree which rises in the midst of the desert asks of the traveller some mark of deference, and does not trouble itself about his origin. One cannot appropriate a natural object. It is otherwise with a fetich. Once adopted by a family, it is in some sort in the service of that family and has nothing to do with others.” This definition of fetichism is quite special, and in no wise concerns primitive fetichism, conceived as an ascription of something analogous to the human will in all inanimate things.

[21] Spencer, Principles of Sociology.

[22] See, among others, M. Vacherot, La religion.

[23] Spencer, Principles of Sociology.

[24] Mr. Spencer’s Principles of Sociology.

[25] According to Mr. Spencer, the movement of a train does not appear spontaneous to animals because it is continuous; and therein lies the ground of their exemption from fright. On this reasoning, animals who live in the neighbourhood of stations should display fright at the arrival and departure of trains. Nothing of the kind is observable. They are equally incurious in regard to horses harnessed to wagons on a high-road. Speculative disinterestedness is altogether lacking in animals and savages; they live locked in the arms of sensation and desire; they spontaneously draw a circle about their ego, and whatsoever lies beyond lies beyond their intelligence.

[26] Principles of Sociology.

[27] Add that when an animal or primitive man has recognized that a certain object possesses a particular attribute, he often finds it difficult to recognize that simply analogous objects possess the same attribute. I was one day making a kitten run after a wooden ball as a dog would do; the ball struck it and hurt it; it cried out and I petted it and then wanted to begin playing once more; it would run willingly even after large stones when I threw them, but obstinately refused to run after the ball. So that it evidently conceived that the ball alone possessed the attribute of power to injure it; the kitten looked upon the ball, no doubt, with an evil eye, regarded it perhaps as an evil being who was unwilling to play; by a fault of generalization the kitten created for itself a sort of fetich which it did not adore indeed, but which it feared, and fear is a step toward adoration.

Mr. Spencer himself admits in savages a certain inaptitude for generalization. This opinion, paradoxical as it may seem, is perhaps an important truth. If primitive intelligences, as M. Taine among others remarked, are especially prompt at noticing the superficial resemblances of things, that fact is not always a mark of genuine perspicacity, for the resemblance perceived between two sensations may be explicable less as an intelligent generalization than as a sort of confusion of the sensations themselves; if sensations are analogous or indistinct, they may naturally be mistaken for each other without any exercise whatsoever of intelligence. Thence the comparative insignificance of many examples taken from the case of language. True generalization seems to consist, more than anything else, in the reduction of facts to law; that is to say, in a conscious abstraction of differences, in a conscious recognition of the fundamental determinism which binds things up together and which precisely eludes both savages and animals.

Note finally that the majority of animals and of savages, when they have once been deceived, are slow to recover from their error, are for a long time distrustful toward the object which has deceived them. A dog, coming home one evening, perceived an empty cask in an unusual place. He was extremely frightened and barked for a long time; it was only by day that he dared approach near the object of his alarm, and he examined and moved about it, and finally, like the frog in La Fontaine’s fable, recognized that the thing was inoffensive. If the cask in question had disappeared during the night, the dog would evidently have remembered it as a redoubtable being seen the evening before in the yard. A monkey, which I left in the room with a cardboard sheep one entire day, proved unable to the end entirely to satisfy itself that the sheep was inanimate. I believe, however, that this persuasion was ultimately achieved, for the monkey began finally to pluck the sheep’s wool and to treat it something too familiarly. But nature seldom permits us equally extended tÊte-À-tÊte with objects that alarm us.

Messrs. Spencer and MÜller will call our attention to the fact, it is true, that cardboard sheep, no more than hand-organs or watches, exist in rerum natura. We reply that nature supplies primitive man with things much more astonishing: with rocks, and forests which can talk (the echo), with springs of hot water, with intermittent fountains. Mr. Fergusson (Tree and Serpent Worship) relates that in India he saw with his own eyes a tree which saluted the rising and setting sun, by lifting or lowering its boughs. Temples had formerly been reared in its neighbourhood. People came from all sides to see the marvellous tree. This tree was an old date-palm, half decayed, which hung above the road; in order to pass below it, it had been held back by a rope; but during this operation the fibres which composed the trunk were twisted like the threads in a rope. These fibres contracted toward midday in the heat of the sun; the tree untwisted and rose. It relaxed under the dew at evening and once more bowed down. (See M. Girard de Rialle, Mythologie comparÉe, t. i.)

[28] Mr. H. Russell, the explorer of the Pyrenees, remarks the fantastic effects produced by the moonlight in the mountains. As the moonlight replaced the previous shadow on the faces and the angles of the rocks, he says, in an account of the ascension of the peak of Eriste, they seemed so plainly to move that once he mistook one of them for a bear and cocked the revolver at his side. The same explorer remarks also the surprising transformations which natural objects undergo at nightfall and at daybreak. At dawn, he says, there is a sort of universal shiver which seems to animate everything; the sound of the neighbouring cascade changed frequently; at break of day, after having groaned and thundered alternately, it begins to scold. For in the morning in the mountains, he says, sounds gain magnitude, they swell, and torrents in especial lift their voices as if angry; with the arrival of the day the air becomes sonorous and sound carries farther. He has experienced this, he says, frequently, but does not understand the cause.—Alpine Club, 1887.

[29] Spencer’s Sociology.

[30] Savages imagine that they see the eyes of portraits move. I myself saw a child of two years old, accustomed to play with engravings, one day in a great fright snatch away its grandmother’s finger, which was resting on the picture of a ferocious beast. “Big beast bite grandmamma!” These ideas, which totally ignore the profound and definitive difference between animate and inanimate, are fixed in the human mind. A man of distinguished education once maintained to me quite seriously that certain petrifactive springs in the Pyrenees possessed the power of changing sticks into serpents. For one capable of imagining that a bit of wood might thus become a serpent, what difficulty would there be in believing that the bit of wood is alive (even a bit of dead wood), that the spring is alive (in especial a spring with such marvellous properties), and finally that the mountain itself is alive; everything is animate to eyes like that, and possessed of magic power.

[31] Let us remember in this connection that, according to Wuttke, J.G. MÜller, and Schultze, a cult for the moon and nocturnal stars must have preceded that of the sun, contrary to the weight of opinion heretofore. The moon’s phases were calculated to take the attention of primitive people, and must early have done so. One must, however, in this connection be on one’s guard against generalizing too quickly and believing that the evolution of human thought has in all places followed the same route. Habitats differ too widely for there not to have been in the beginning an infinite diversity in the religious conceptions entertained by different peoples. In Africa, for example, it is evident a priori that the sun does not possess all the characteristics of a divinity. It is never desired or regretted, as in a northern country; it is, to all appearance at least, rather maleficent than beneficent; and the Africans adore by preference the moon and stars, the gentle radiance of which affords them light without oppressive heat, refreshes and reposes them from the fatigues of the day. The moon is considered by them as a male and all-powerful being, of which the sun is the female. It is when the new moon arises, after its period of absence from the heavens, and begins once more the round of its visible phases, that it is received and saluted with an especial demonstration of cries and dances. The Congo blacks go the length of seeing in the moon a symbol of immortality (M. Girard de Rialle, Mythologie comparÉe, p. 148). America, on the contrary, has been the centre of the worship of the sun. In general it seems that agriculture must of necessity result in the triumph of sun worship over moon worship, for the labourer is more dependent upon the sun than the hunter or the warrior. According to J.G. MÜller, savage and warlike races have displayed a preference for the moon.

[32] As has been remarked, the adoration of natural forces has been observed under two forms. It has been addressed sometimes to regular and calm phenomena (Chaldeans, Egyptians), sometimes to changing and portentous phenomena (Jews, Indo-Europeans). It almost always results in the personification of these forces.

[33] H. Spencer, Appendix to the Principles of Sociology.

[34] Brehm, Revue scientifique, p. 974, 1874.

[35] Espinas, SociÉtiÉs animales, p. 181.

[36] See the author’s Morale d’Épicure (Des idÉes antiques sur la mort) 3d edition, p. 105.

[37] See Le Bon, L’Homme et les SociÉtÉs, t. ii.

[38] A belief in relics, pushed so far by the earlier Christians and by so many Catholics to-day, is, too, a sort of faith in fetiches or amulets. From the earliest period of Christianity the faithful were accustomed to go to the Holy Land to obtain water from the Jordan, and gather dust from the soil that the feet of Christ had trod, and to break pieces from the true cross, which St. Paulin of Nole says, “possesses in all its parts a vital force in so much that although its wood be every day clipped off by innumerable pilgrims, it remains intact.” Relics are supposed not only to cure the body, but the soul of those who touch them: Gregory sent to a barbarous king the chains that had served to manacle the apostle Paul; assuring him that the same chains which had manacled the body of the saint could deliver the heart from sin.

This superstition for relics, common in the Middle Ages, was held in all its naÏvetÉ by Bishop Gregory of Tours. He relates that one day when he was suffering from a pain in the temples, a touch from the hangings about the tomb of St. Martin cured him. He repeated the experiment three times with equal success. Once, he tells, he was attacked by a mortal dysentery; he drank a glass of water in which he had dissolved a pinch of dust scraped up on the tomb of the saint, and his health was restored. One day a bone stuck in his throat, he began praying and groaning, and kneeled before the tomb; he stretched out his hand and touched the hangings and the bone disappeared. “I do not know,” he says, “what became of it, for I neither threw it up nor felt it pass downward into my stomach.” At another time his tongue became swollen and tumefied; he licked the railing of the tomb of St. Martin and his tongue became of its natural size. St. Martin’s relics go the length even of curing toothache. “Oh, ineffable theriac!” cries Gregory of Tours, “ineffable pigment! admirable antidote! celestial purge! superior to all the drugs of the faculty! sweeter than aromatics, stronger than all unguents together! Thou cleanest the stomach like scammony, the lungs like hyssop; thou purgest the head like pyrethrig.”

[39] Etymologically, miracle signifies simply surprising. The Hindus do not even possess a special word for a supernatural event; miracle and spectacle in their language are one. The supernatural, that is to say, is for them simply an object of contemplation and admiration, an event which stands out prominently from the general monotony which attracts the eye.

[40] Actes de la SociÉtÉ helvÉt. des sc. nat., August, 1877.

[41] Through Siberia, by Henry Lansdell, with illustrations and maps; London, 1882.

[42] “Henotheism,” says Von Hartmann, “rests upon a contradiction. Man goes forth in search of divinity, and finds gods. He addresses each of these divinities in succession in the hope that he may be the divinity sought for, and confers upon him a multitude of predicates which call in question the divinity of the other gods. Obliged, however, as he is to look to different gods for the fulfilment of his respective demands he is unable to remain faithful to any one of them; he changes his object of adoration repeatedly and each time acts toward the god he is addressing as if he were god par excellence, without indeed himself observing at the time that he is denying the supreme divinity of any god by attributing it in turn to each of them. What renders the origin of religion possible is that this contradiction is not at first remarked; a persistent failure to recognize such a contradiction would not be possible in the midst of the progress of civilization, except in the case of an extreme intensity of religious sentiment, which shields all religious subjects from rational criticism. Such intensity of religious sentiment neither exists in all places nor at all times, and a spirit of intellectual criticism, operating intermittently, suffices in the long run to render the point of view of henotheism untenable. Two ways of avoiding the contradiction in question offer themselves. One may maintain the unity of God at the expense of the plurality, or, on the contrary, plurality of God at the expense of the unity. The first way leads to abstract monism, the second to polytheism; and out of polytheism, by a process of degeneration, arise polydemonism or animism and then fetichism.”

[43] It has been remarked that peoples who for centuries have renounced anthropophagy have long persisted in human sacrifices: that thousands of women in certain sanctuaries have offered the painful sacrifices of their chastity to gods of a furious sensuality. The gods of paganism are dissolute, arbitrary, vindictive, pitiless, and still their adorers rise little by little to a conception of moral purity, of clemency, and of justice. Javeh is vindictive and ferocious, and yet it is in the midst of his people that the religion par excellence of benignity and forgiveness took its rise. Also the real morality of men was never proportionate to the frequently fanatic intensity of their religious sentiments. See M. RÉville (ProlÉgomÈnes, p. 281).

[44] See the author’s Esquisse d’une morale (I., iii.); Besoin psychologique d’une sanction.

[45] The question whether the Hebrews believed in the immortality of the soul has long been discussed, and M. Renan has been reproached with his negative attitude in the matter; but M. Renan never denied the existence, among the Hebrews, of a belief in a sojourn for the shadows or manes of the dead; the whole question was whether the Hebrews believed in a system of reward and punishment after death, and M. Renan was right in maintaining that any such notion is foreign to primitive Judaism. It is equally foreign to primitive Hellenism. Though the living endeavoured to conciliate the dead, they did not envy their fate which, even in the case of the just, was worse than the fate of the living. “Seek not to console me for death, noble Ulysses,” Achilles says, when he arrives in Tartarus. “I would rather be a hired labourer and till a poor man’s field than reign over all the regions of the dead.” (See Morale d’Épicure, 3d ed.; Des idÉes antiques sur la mort.)

[46] The most orthodox theologians, of course, mean by fire a veritable flame.

[47] “Sorcery, in the beginning purely individual and fantastic,” says M. RÉville, “gradually develops into sacerdotalism and by that change, having become a permanent public institution, sacerdotal sorcery becomes systematic, develops a ritual which becomes traditional, imposes upon those who aspire to the honour of conducting the conditions of initiation, proof of efficiency, a novitiate, receives privileges, defends them if they are attacked, endeavours to augment them. This is the history of all sacerdotal institutions, which are certainly descended from a capricious, fantastic, disorderly, practice of sorcery in previous ages.”

[48] It is an honour for which one pays dear to be permitted to consecrate to them one’s soul, one’s body, or the soul and body of one’s wife. One pays five rupees for the privilege of contemplating them, twenty for the privilege of touching them, thirteen for the privilege of being whipped by them, seventeen for the privilege of eating betel that they have chewed, nineteen for the privilege of drinking the water in which they have bathed, thirty-five for the privilege of washing their great toes, forty-two for the privilege of rubbing them with perfumed oil, and from one hundred to two hundred for tasting in their company the essence of delight.

[49] Among the Hindus, Tapas, that is to say fire, the ardour of devotion, and of voluntary renouncement, signified in the beginning simply the incantation intended to constrain the Devas to obedience, and to deprive them of a part of their power. Out of a crude conception has grown an extremely refined one. See Manuel de l’Histoire des religions, par C.P. Tiele, p. 19 (translated by Maurice Vernes).

[50] Ribot, de l’HÉrÉditÉ, 364; Moreau de Tours, Psych. morbide, 259.

[51] M. Franck, Des rapports de la religion et de l’État.

[52] It is easy to understand the high ecclesiastical authorities in the Catholic Church, who maintain as an article of faith the right to repress error. Recollect the well-known pages in which St. Augustine speaks of what good effects he had observed to result from the employment of constraint in religious matters. “A great many of those who have been brought back into the Church by force confess themselves to be greatly rejoiced at having been delivered from their former errors, who, however, by I know not what force of custom, would never have thought of changing for the better if the fear of the law had not put them in mind of the truth. Good precepts and wholesome fear must go together so that not only the light of truth may drive away the gloom of error, but that charity may break the bonds of bad custom, so that we may rejoice over the salvation of the many.... It is written: ‘Bid them to enter in.’ ... God Himself did not spare his son, but delivered Him for our sake to the executioners.” Schiller makes the great inquisitor in Don Carlos say the same thing. See St. Augustine, Epist. cxiii. 17, 5—St. Paul, Ephes., vi. 5, 6, 9. Lastly, recollect also the reasoned decision of the doctors and councils. “Human government,” said St. Thomas, “is derived from divine government and should imitate it. Now although God is all-powerful and infinitely good, He nevertheless permits in the universe that He has made the existence of evils which He could prevent; He permits them for fear that in suppressing them more than equivalent goods might be suppressed incidentally along with them and greater evils provoked in their stead. The same is true in human government; rulers naturally tolerate certain evils for fear of putting an obstacle in the way of certain goods, or of causing greater evils, as St. Augustine said in the treatise on Order. It is thus that infidels, though they sin in their rites, may be tolerated, either because of some good coming from them, or to avoid some evil. The Jews observe their rites, in which formerly the truth of the faith that we hold was prefigured; the result is advantageous in this, that we have the testimony of our enemies in favour of our faith, and that the object of our faith is, so to speak, shown in a reflected image. As for the worship of the other unbelievers, which is opposed in every way to truth and is entirely useless, it would merit no tolerance if it were not to avoid some evil, such as the scandal or the trouble which might result from the suppression of this worship; or again as an impediment to the salvation of those who, under cover of this species of tolerance, come little by little into the faith. It is for that reason that the Church has occasionally tolerated even the worship of heretics, and heathens, when the number of infidels was great.” (Summa theol., 2 a; q. x, a. II.) One readily perceives the nature of tolerance in that sense. It does not in the least recognize the right of those who are the object of it: if it does not maltreat them, it is simply to avoid a greater evil, or rather because its power is too small, and the number of infidels is too large.

A professor of theology at the Sorbonne has recently contested the charge of Catholic intolerance. (M. Alfred FouillÉe had just spoken of it in his Social Science.) He did so for reasons that may be cited as further proof. “Neither to-day, nor ever, in any epoch of its history, has the Catholic Church intended to impose acceptance of the truth by violence. All great theologians have taught that the act of faith is a voluntary act, which presupposes an illumination of the mind; but they have also taught that constraint may favour this illumination, and in especial may preserve others from a bad example, from a contagious darkness. The Christian Church has had no need of the sword to evangelize the nations; if it has shed blood in its triumph, it has been its own.” Has it, then, not shed the blood of others? If one counts all the murders committed by intolerance in the name of absolute dogma, in every country in the world; if one could measure all the bloodshed; if one could gather together all the dead bodies—would the pile not mount higher than the spires of the cathedrals and the domes of the temples, where man still goes, with unalterable fervour, to invoke and bless the “God of Love”? Faith in a God who talks and acts, who has a history of His own, His Bible, His prophet and His priest, will always end by being intolerant. By adoring a jealous and vengeful God, one becomes in the end His accomplice. One tacitly approves all the crimes committed in His name and often (if one believes the Holy Scriptures) commanded by Him. One endeavours to forget these things when they are too stained with blood and filth. The monuments of such bloody scenes have been razed, and the places to which the strongest memories are attached have been purified and transformed: the partisans of certain dogmas need to wash their hearts also in lustral water.

[53] See A. FouillÉe, SystÈmes de morale contemporains.

[54] M. Goblet d’Alviella, Evolution religieuse contemporaine.

[55] Mr. Seeley, in his work entitled Natural Religion (1882), takes pains to establish that of the three elements which compose the religious idea—the love of truth or science, the sentiment of beauty or art, the notion of duty or morals—it is the last only that can to-day be reconciled with Christianity.

[56] Besides Mr. Matthew Arnold, consult M. L. MÉnard, Sources du dogme ChrÉtien (Critique religieuse, janvier, 1879.)

[57] See M. L. MÉnard, ibid. (Crit. relig., 1879.)

[58] Mr. Henry Ward Beecher.

[59] Dr. Junqua, whose name almost became celebrated a few years ago, also tried to found a church, the Church of Liberty; those who entered were at liberty to believe almost anything they liked, not even the atheist, properly so called, being excluded. The church in question was to have been purely symbolic: baptism it was to recognize as the symbol of initiation into Christian civilization; confirmation as the symbol of an enrolment among the soldiers of Liberty; and the eucharist, that is to say a religious love feast, as the symbol of the brotherhood of man. It is to be added that these sacraments were not obligatory and that the members might abstain from them entirely if they chose. Still, they would be members of a communion. Their faith would be designated by a common name, they would be in relations with a priest who would comment in their presence on texts of the New Testament, and would talk of Christ if he and they believed in Him. The church of Dr. Junqua might easily have succeeded in England with Mr. Moncure Conway and the secularists.

[60] See the author’s work on la Morale d’Épicure et ses rapports avec les doctrines contemporaines, p. 186.

[61] Toward the end of his life Luther felt an increasing discouragement and disquietude on the subject of the reform inaugurated by him: “It is by severe laws and by superstition,” he wrote with bitterness, “that the world desires to be guided. If I could reconcile it with my conscience I would labour that the Pope with all his abominations might become once more our master.” Responsibility to one’s own conscience was indeed Luther’s fundamental idea—the idea which justifies the Reformation in the eyes of history, as formerly in the eyes of its own author.

[62] See the author’s Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation ni sanction, p. 188, etc.

[63] “If God had consciously created the human will of such essential perversity as to find its natural expression in thwarting Him, He would be impotent in the face of it; could only show Himself compassionate; could only regret His own act in creating it. His duty would not be to punish mankind but to the utmost possible degree to lighten their sufferings, to show Himself gentle and good directly in proportion to this evil; and the damned, if they were truly incurable, would be in greater need of the joys of heaven than the elect themselves. Either the sinner can be reclaimed; and in that event hell would be nothing more than an immense school, an immense house of correction for preparing the culpable with the utmost possible rapidity for heaven; or the sinner is incorrigible, is analogous to an incurable maniac (which is absurd), and then he is eternally to be pitied and a supreme Goodness would endeavour to compensate him for his misery by every imaginable means by showering upon him every bliss that he was capable of enjoying. Turn it as one will, the dogma of hell stands thus in direct opposition to the truth.

“For the rest, by the very act of damning a soul, that is to say shutting it out forever from His presence, or, in terms less mystical, excluding it forever from a knowledge of the truth, would not God in turn be shutting Himself out from the soul, limiting His own power, and so to speak in some measure damning Himself also? The penalty of the damnation would fall in part on Him who inflicted it. As to the physical torment of which theologians speak, interpreted metaphorically, it becomes even more inadmissible. Instead of damning mankind God ought eternally to gather about Him those who have strayed from Him; it is for the culpable above all others that, as Michel Angelo said, God opened wide his arms upon the cross. We represent Him as looking down upon the sinning multitude from too great a height for them ever to be anything to Him but the incarnation of misfortune. Well, just in so far as they are unfortunate must they not logically be the especial favourites of divine goodness?”—Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation ni sanction, p. 189.

[64] The fact has been verified by the English authorities and has been commented on by the physiologist W. Preyer (Über die Erforschung des Lebens, Jena, and Sammlung physiologischer Abhandlungen). Yoghis who have attained the highest degree of perfection, and are insensible to cold and to heat and have contracted, by a series of experiments, the habit of breathing almost not at all, have been buried alive and resuscitated at the end of some weeks. When they were reawakened a heightening of the temperature was noticed as in the case of the reawaking of hibernating mammals, and it is indeed to the phenomena of hibernation that this strange voluntary suspension of animation most closely approaches—this mystical return to a life merely vegetative, this absorption in the bosom of the unconscious, where the Yoghis hopes to find God. As a preliminary discipline the Yoghis diminishes little by little the quantity of air and light necessary to his life; he lives in a cell which is lit and ventilated by no more than a single chink; he minimizes all movement in order to minimize the necessity of respiration; he does not speak except to repeat to himself twelve thousand times a day the mystic name of Om; he remains for hours together motionless as a statue. He practises breathing over again and again the same body of air, and the longer the period between inspiration and expiration, the greater his sanctity! Finally he carefully seals all the openings of his body with wax and cotton and closes the opening of the throat with the tongue, which certain incisions permit him to fold over backward, and finally falls into a lethargy in which the movements of respiration may be suspended without the thread of life positively being severed.

[65] See below chapter iv.

[66] This, however, is exceptional; in church, during the services, the majority of the faces remain inexpressive, for the reason that prayer with the majority of the faithful is almost always mechanical.

[67] See on this point our Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation, p. 27.

[68] “Oh, God” said Diderot, at the end of his InterprÉtation de la nature, “I do not know if Thou existest, but I shall bear myself as if Thou sawest into my soul; I shall act as if I felt myself in Thy presence.... I ask nothing of Thee in this world, for the course of things is necessary in and of its own nature, if Thou dost not exist, and necessary if Thou dost, by Thy decree.”

[69] Report of MM. Bourru and Burot au CongrÈs scientifique de Grenoble, August 18, 1885.

[70] A defender of the use of hasheesh scientifically employed, M. Giraud, who conceives that it is possible to induce ecstasy at will, and to regulate it by medical doses, writes us with enthusiasm: “A bit of hasheesh dispenses with painful mystical expedients to induce ecstasy. There is no further need of asceticism; the result is an intoxication, but a sacred intoxication, which is nothing else than an excess of activity in the higher centres.” We believe that every sort of drunkenness, far from possessing a sacred character, will constitute for ever and always, in the eyes of science, a morbid state, in no sense enviable from any rational point of view, by an individual in normal health; the constant employment of stimulants will exhaust the nervous system and throw it out of order, as the daily employment of nux vomica will, in the long run, destroy the power of a healthy stomach.

[71] See above what we have already said in regard to the Yoghis and asceticism.

[72] M. Sully-Prudhomme.

[73] Moreover when one has passed one’s life, or even many years, in any study whatsoever, one is inclined extremely to exaggerate the importance of this study. Greek professors believe that Greek is necessary to the best interests of humanity. When any question arises of drawing up a curriculum, if the professors of the several studies are interrogated, each wishes to see his own especial branch of science in the first rank. I remember that after I myself had been making Latin verses for some years I would have ranged myself voluntarily among the defenders of Latin verse. Whenever anyone makes an especial study of some work of genius, that of an individual, or a fortiori that of a people—Plato, Aristotle or Kant, the Vedas or the Bible, this work tends to become in his eyes the very centre of human thought; the book of which one makes a special study tends to become the book. A priest looks upon the whole of human life as an affair of faith simply; knowledge to a priest means simply a knowledge of the Fathers of the Church. It is not astonishing that even members of the laity, who have made religion the principal object of their studies, should be inclined to magnify its importance for humanity, or that the historian of religious thought should regard it as including the whole of human life, and as acquiring, even independently of any notion of revelation, a sort of inviolable character.

[74] Acts ii. 44, 45; iv. 32, sqq.

[75] Tertull. Apolog. c. 39, Justin., Apolog. I, 14.

[76] It must not be believed that even prostitutes, who as a class are so closely allied to criminals, are wholly non-religious. A case is cited of a number of prostitutes who subscribed the money to have one of their companions, who was on the point of death, removed from a house of ill-fame to some place where the priest might visit her; others subscribed money for a great number of masses to be said for the soul of a companion who was dead. At all events prostitutes are quite superstitious, and their religion swarms with strange and ridiculous beliefs.

In Italy criminals are usually religious. Quite recently the Tozzi family of butchers, after having killed and dismembered a young man, sold his blood, mixed with sheep’s blood, in their shop, and went none the less to perform their devotions to the Madonna, and to kiss the statue of the Virgin. The Caruso band, Lombroso says, habitually placed sacred images in the caves and woods in which they lived, and burned candles before them. Verzeni, who strangled three women, was an assiduous frequenter of the church and the confessional, and he came of a family which was not only religious but bigoted. The companions of La Gala, who were imprisoned at Pisa, obstinately refused to take food on Friday during Lent, and when the keeper tried to persuade them to do so, they replied, “Do you think we have been excommunicated?” Masini, with his band, met three countrymen and among them a priest; he slowly sawed open the throat of one of them with an ill-sharpened knife, and then, with his hands still bloody, obliged the priest to give him the consecrated Host. Giovani Mio and Fontana went to confession before going out to commit a murder. A young Neapolitan parricide, covered with amulets, confessed to Lombroso that he had invoked the aid of the Madonna de la ChaÎne in the accomplishment of his horrible crime. “And that she really helped me I conclude from this, that at the first blow of the stick my father fell dead, although I am myself personally weak.” Another murderer, a woman, before killing her husband, fell on her knees and prayed to the blessed Virgin to give her the strength to accomplish her crime. Still another announced his acceptance of a line of action devised by his companion in these words, “I will come, and I will do that with which God has inspired thee.”

[77] In Saxony, Denmark, Sweden, Prussia, Scotland (not England), illiteracy is at a minimum. Even in the most favoured Catholic countries, such as France and Belgium, at least a third of the population are illiterate. In this comparison race goes for nothing; Switzerland proves as much; purely Latin but also Protestant cantons NeuchÂtel, Vaux, and Geneva are on a level with the Germanic cantons of ZÜrich and Bern, and are superior to such as Tessin, Valais, and Lucerne.

[78] In Switzerland the cantons of NeuchÂtel, Vaux, and Geneva are strikingly in advance of Lucerne, Valais, and the forest cantons; they are not only superior in matters of education, but in matters of industry, of commerce, and of wealth; and their artistic and literary activity is greater. “In the United States,” says De Tocqueville, “the majority of the Catholics are poor.” In Canada the larger order of business interests, manufacturing, commerce, the principal shops in the cities, are in the hands of Protestants. M. Audiganne, in his studies on the labouring population in France, remarks on the superiority of the Protestants in respect to industry, and his testimony is the less suspicious because he does not attribute that superiority to Protestantism. “The majority of the labourers in NÎmes, notably the silk-weavers, are Catholics, while the captains of industry and of commerce, the capitalists in a word, belong to the Reformed religion.” “When a family has split into two branches, one of which has clung to the faith of its fathers, while the other has become Protestant, one almost always remarks in the former a progressive financial embarrassment, and in the other an increasing wealth.” “At Mazamet, the Elboeuf of the south of France, all the captains of industry with one exception are Protestants, while the great majority of the labourers are Catholics. And Catholic working men are, as a class, much less well educated than Protestant working men.” Before the revocation of the Edict of Nantes members of the Reformed church had taken the lead in all branches of labour, and the Catholics, who found themselves unable to maintain a competition with them, had the practice of a number of different industries in which the latter excelled forbidden them by a series of edicts beginning with the year 1662. After their expulsion from France the Huguenots carried into England, into Prussia, into Holland, their spirit of enterprise and of economy; and enriched the districts in which they settled. The Germans owe some portion of their progress to Huguenot exiles. Refugees from the Revocation introduced different industries into England, among others the silk industry; and it was certain disciples of Calvin who civilized Scotland. (See M. de Laveleye De l’avenir des peuples catholiques.)

[79] “Public institutions are still deeply impregnated with Christianity. Congress, the State legislatures, the navy, the army, the prisons, are all supplied with chaplains; the Bible is still read in a large number of schools. The invocation of God is generally obligatory in an oath in a court of law, and even in an oath of office. In Pennsylvania the Constitution requires that every public employee shall believe in God, and in a future state of reward and punishments. The Constitution of Maryland awards liberty of conscience to deists only. The laws against blasphemy have never been formally abrogated. In certain States, more or less stringent Sunday laws are enforced. In 1880 a court declined to recognize, even as a moral obligation, a debt contracted on Sunday, and a traveller, injured in a railway accident, was refused damages on the ground that he was travelling on the Lord’s Day. And, finally, church property and funds are in a considerable degree exempt from taxation.” (M. Goblet d’Alviella, Évolution religieuse, p. 233.)

Similarly, in Switzerland, in the month of February, 1886, the criminal court of Glaris, the chief place in a canton of 7000 inhabitants, at 130 kilometers from Bern, rendered a singular judgment. A mason named Jacques Schiesser, who was obliged to work in water of an excessively low temperature, shivering with cold, his hands blue, made a movement of impatience at the cold, and uttered irreverential words toward God. A procÈs-verbal was made out against him. He appeared before the judges, who condemned him for blasphemy to two days’ imprisonment. It is surprising to see Switzerland carried, actually by Protestantism, back to the Middle Ages.

[80] “By means of the confessional,” says M. de Laveleye, the “priest holds the sovereign, the magistrates, and the electors, and through the electors the legislative chamber, in his power; so long as the priest presides over the sacraments, the separation of Church and State is only a dangerous illusion. The absolute submission of the entire ecclesiastical hierarchy to a single will, the celibacy of the clergy, and the multiplication of monastic orders, constitute a danger in Catholic countries of which Protestant countries know nothing.”

[81] Would it not be possible at once to raise the income of all priests who are possessed of certain lay diplomas such as those of bachelor, licentiate, etc., and who, by that very fact, would be plainly competent to conduct a lay or religious education in a more modern and scientific spirit?

[82] M. Goblet d’Alviella.

[83] “Lay education,” said LittrÉ, “ought not to avoid dealing with anything which is essential; and what could be more essential in considering the moral government of society than the religions which have dominated or still dominate it?”

[84] By M. Maurice Vernes (approved by LittrÉ, and later by M. Paul Bert).

[85] Some years ago, as is well known, on the 1st of October, 1877, the faculty of theology in the three state universities of Leyden, Utrecht, and Groningen, and in the Communal University of Amsterdam, was declared to be a lay faculty and was freed from all association and connection with the Church, and was required to give purely scientific and philosophic instruction on the history of religion, without practical discipline. (See M. Steyn ParvÉ, Organisation de l’instruction primaire, secondaire et supÉrieure dans le royaume des Pays-Bas, Leyden, 1878, and M. Maurice Vernes, MÉlanges de critique religieuse, p. 305.)

The following is the programme of this faculty: 1. General theology; 2. History of doctrines concerning divinity; 3. History of religions in general; 4. History of the Israelite religion; 5. History of Christianity; 6. Literature of the Israelites, and the ancient Christians; 7. Old and New Testament exegesis; 8. History of the dogmas of the Christian church; 9. Philosophy of religion; 10. Ethics.

[86] As M. Vernes has remarked, the preparation for teaching the history of religions might well be the same as that for teaching philosophy, history, and letters. It should include the studies in the upper classes, of the philosophical section of the École normale, and a preparatory course in the divers other faculties: a real normal course. In this course the professor should point out the general principle of the history of religions and should confine himself to indicating them very summarily in the case of the religions of Greece and Rome, to which a general literary education will have given the pupil access; he should deal, without excessive attention to detail, with the other Indo-European religions (those of India, Persia, etc.), with the religions of Egypt, of Assyria, of Phoenicia, of Islam; and should spend his greatest efforts on the criticism of Judaism and the early stages of Christianity, on the history of the principal Christian dogmas and their development.

[87] Works in religious criticism would naturally find their place in the school and college libraries. They might be supplemented by a more or less extensive museum of religious curiosities, beginning with the fetiches of savage tribes and extending down to the present day.

To the mass of the French public the solid results already achieved by an independent criticism of the Bible constitute a terra incognita; they must be disseminated. M. Lenormant’s effort might serve as an example for other efforts of the same kind. In order to make it apparent at a glance how the Pentateuch has been formed, by the combination and fusion of the earlier sets of documents, M. Lenormant undertook to publish a translation from the Hebrew, in which he distinguishes the extracts from the respective sets of documents by different kinds of type. Thus one has before one the natural explanation of the way in which all the episodes in Genesis are presented in the two parallel versions, sometimes juxtaposed, sometimes mingled.

[88] “Memory is no doubt an affliction for the grown man much more than for the child, but it is also a consolation. Cultivation of one’s memories supplies powerful means of moral education for all ages, and for nations as well as for individuals. It was quite to be expected that we should find an ancestor worship in the early history of every people.” (Felix Henneguy, Critique philosophique, 8th year, vol. ii. p. 218.)

[89] Ibid.

[90] Among the greatest causes of difficulty with a child, let us note the following: the father is apt to be a free-thinker, the mother a Catholic. It hears every day at Church that those who do not practise their religious duties will go to hell: the child therefore reasons that if its father dies it will never see him again, unless it goes to hell with him, and then it will never see its mother again. A full and complete belief in annihilation would be less painful and less annoying than this belief in eternal damnation. Add that in this respect many Protestant clergymen, in especial in England and in the United States, are not less intolerant than Catholic priests.

[91] As a general rule, Darwin says, men go farther than women, whether the matter be one of profound meditation, of reason, or imagination, or simply of the use of the senses or even of the hands. According to certain statistical investigations it appears that the modern female brain has remained almost stationary, while the male brain has developed notably. The brain of a Parisian woman is no larger than that of a Chinese woman, and the Parisian woman labours under the additional disadvantage of possessing a larger foot.

Admitting these facts one may still refuse to infer from them the existence of a congenital incapacity, for the way in which women have always been treated by men and the education that they have received may well have left results which have become hereditary. The education of women has in all times been less strenuous than that of men; and their mind, perhaps naturally less scientific, has never been developed by direct contact with the external world. In the Orient and in Greece, among the nations from whom we derive our civilization, women (at least in families in easy circumstances) were always restricted to a subordinate rÔle, confined to woman’s quarters, or withdrawn from all direct contact with the real world. Thence arose a sort of tradition of ignorance and intellectual abasement which has been handed down to us. There is nothing like the brain of a young girl reared at home for gathering to itself completely, and without loss, the whole residue of middle-class silliness, of naÏve and self-satisfied prejudice, of strutting ignorance that does not see itself as others see it, of superstition transformed into a rule of conduct. But change the education and you will in a great measure change these results. Even according to Darwin’s own theory, education and heredity can in the long run undo anything that they have done. Even if there should remain a certain balance of intelligence in favor of the male, even if the female should prove to be in the end, as Darwin says, incapable of pushing invention as far in advance as man, it would not follow that her heart and intelligence should be filled with another order of ideas and sentiments than those which are beneficial to men. It is one thing to invent and to widen the domain of science, and another thing to assimilate the knowledge already acquired; it is one thing to widen the intellectual horizon, and another thing to adapt one’s eyes and heart to this more open habitat.

[92] Sir Rutherford Alcock says also, that in Japan it is very rare to see any other worshippers in the temples than women and children; the men are always extremely few in number and belong to the lower classes. At least five-sixths and often nine-tenths of the pilgrims who come to the temple of Juggernaut are women. Among the Sikhs the women are said to believe in more gods than the men. These examples, borrowed as they are from different races, and at different epochs, show sufficiently, in Spencer’s opinion, that, when we find an analogous state of things in Catholic countries, and even in some measure in England, we are not to attribute it solely to the education of women; the cause, he thinks, is deeper, lies in their nature. (See Spencer’s Study of Sociology.)

[93] Shame is usually regarded as constituting the essence of modesty, but shame can have been but one of the elements in its formation; such shame as actually exists is readily explicable as a sense of the uncleanness attaching, in especial in the case of the woman (of whom the Hebrews required a periodic purification), to certain animal functions. But modesty must have been developed also by the use of clothing and the growth of the habit of covering, first the loins and then more and more of the entire person; and indeed the development of modesty and of the habit of wearing clothes must each have been aided by the other. The habit of going covered gives rise very soon to shame at being seen uncovered. The little negresses whom Livingstone supplied with shifts became, in a few days, so accustomed to having the upper half of their bodies hidden that, when they were surprised in their chambers in the morning, they hastily covered their breasts.

[94] See the author’s ProblÈmes de l’esthÉtique contemporaine, livre ii.

[95] “Among the polemical works on Christianity I shall cite one which is perhaps somewhat old, but precious, in that it sums up with great impartiality the whole mass of secular objections, including a large number of modern objections to Christianity, the book of M. Patrice Larroque, entitled Examen critique des doctrines de la religion ChrÉtienne.”

[96] What economists have really established, and what MM. Maurice Block, Courcelles-Seneuil, Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, Othenin d’Haussonville are right in maintaining, is that it is harmful to society to add to the non-working classes, to the number of feeble beings who are incapable of labour, to the number of beggars, and of non-combatants generally, whoever they may be. Well, poverty favours the birth of those who are dependent upon society, and the birth of those who are dependent upon society tends still further to increase poverty; that is the circle from which so many economists have believed that the precepts of Malthus offered them an issue. Unhappily, if there is one universal attribute of poverty, it is its fertility; for in all nations the poorest classes are those that have the greatest number of children. Malthus has never been listened to by the poorer classes, but precisely by those only who, from the point of view of a sagacious political economy, ought to be encouraged to leave as many children behind them as possible, because they alone would educate them well: that is to say, the economical peasantry and the prosperous middle class. Insomuch that a fertility of the poor is absolutely without remedy (except by way of charity or emigration); but it constitutes in the end a much less considerable evil than the infertility of a nation as a whole, and is an ultimate evil only because, in the last analysis, it results in a genuine unproductivity. Poverty, especially in the cities, rapidly kills out the most prolific races.

[97] M. Richet.

[98] Toubeau, La RÉpartition des impÔts, t. ii.

[99] See M. Baudrillart, Les Populations rurales de la Bretagne.

[100] Dr. Lagneau, Remarques dÉmographiques sur le cÉlibat en France.

[101] Aristotle, Politica, ii. 6, 13.

[102] We are not obliged here to enter into details of administration. Perhaps it would be no more than just to give parents their choice between living with their children, which is often so painful, and an annual sum, proportional to the salary and resources of the children. This sum might be taxed by the state or the commune, and paid by it to the father. Every head of a family would at once reflect that if he some day becomes poor and has but one child he will have but one source of income, whereas, if he has ten children, he will have ten sources of income, and ten chances that one of them may be considerable; as it would be if any of one’s children should have become wealthy. A numerous family would thus constitute a guarantee of independence for the father; on the other hand, the more he expended in educating them, the greater chance he would have of later obtaining an equivalent return for it. In labouring for the augmentation of the social capital he would thus be securing an insurance for his old age. Even supposing that the execution of a law of this kind should be difficult, the right of parents to some really active gratitude on the part of their children should be recognized and consecrated formally by the letter of the law, which should prescribe a line of conduct for children and even fix a certain appropriate ratio between their income and the amount of their remittances to their parents. The law should even do what in it lies to efface from the language, in especial in their applicability to those who have generously fulfilled their duties of paternity, the shameful words: Être À la charge de ses enfants—dependent on his children for support; the public should be made accustomed to consider this sort of dependence not as an accident to the children, and as a misfortune, and almost a disgrace, to the parents, but as a natural consequence of the relation of parent and child.

[103] See the Études sur le cÉlibat en France, by Dr. G. Lagneau (AcadÉmie des sciences morales et politiques, p. 835, 1885.)

[104] “Direct taxes,” says M. Javal, “are in a great measure a tax on children: compulsory road labour is forced on young men before they are adult. The tax on doors and windows is a tax on air and light, the inconvenience of which increases directly with the increase in the size of the family and the consequent necessity of occupying a larger apartment. The license itself, which applies to the amount of the rent of one’s habitation, is in a great measure proportional to the necessary expenses and not to the resources of the person taxed.” (Revue scientifique, No. 18, November 1, 1884, p. 567.) “It is well known,” says M. Bertillon, “that the city of Paris pays to the state the tax on apartments that rent for less than four hundred francs. In principle nothing could be better, but in practice: suppose two neighbours, one of them an unmarried man, possesses a comfortable lodging of two rooms with the accessories; one of these two rooms can scarcely be called a necessity for him and is distinctly a simple addition to his comfort, and the city pays his tax. His neighbour has a family and four children, and lives in three rooms which constitute a very narrow, and hardly a sufficient lodging, but the rent of it is five hundred francs and the unhappy man must pay: (1) Six times greater taxes on what he consumes than his neighbour; (2) A furniture tax; (3) Some portion of the tax that the city pays on the apartment of the celibate neighbour. Evidently the result is precisely the opposite of what it should be.” (Bertillon, La statistique humaine de la France.)

[105] If a purse should be given by the state to one of every seven children in the same family (according to a law at the time of the Revolution which has recently been revived and corrected) it would be no more than justice, nay, it would be almost an act of simple reparation; although it must not be supposed that the practical results would be considerable. The benefit that it would do to the father of the family is too uncertain, and the prospect of such an advantage could influence only a man who had six children and was hesitating about the seventh; but he who has had six children is not a follower of Malthus and is not likely to be.

[106] Suppose, to take almost the first figures that occur to one, that the law taxed an only son’s inheritance twenty per cent.; it might tax an inheritance to be handed down to two children only fifteen per cent., an inheritance to be handed down to three children ten per cent., to four children eight per cent., to five children six per cent., to six children four per cent., to seven children two per cent., and to any greater number of children nothing. Remark that this gradation actually exists to-day but inversely, because just in so far as an inheritance has to be divided up among a large number of children, the expenses of the sale and partition tend to increase and the value of the property, which is thus split up into bits, tends to decrease. A number of cases may be cited in which inheritances that had to be divided among seven or eight children have lost, by partition, not only twenty but even twenty-five or fifty per cent. of their value. On the contrary, an inheritance transmitted to a single inheritor is burdened with the direct tax only, and that amounts at most to ten per cent. Here, as elsewhere, the law protects small families and encourages sterility.

[107] M. Javal in 1885 proposed, in the Chamber, to substitute for Article 19 of the commission another article, according to the terms of which when two or three sons of the same family were enrolled they should be held to only three years of service all told, and that when there were more than three brothers enrolled they should each be required to give but one year’s service. The amendment was due to the fact that population in France is not increasing.

[108] Young soldiers also, as M. Richet says, might be permitted to marry under certain conditions. They are precisely at the age when fertility is at its greatest.

[109] Rightly to appreciate the ability of France to maintain colonies, this figure must not be compared with the rate of emigration from other countries, but with the average excess of births over deaths in France. Thus considered, the number of forty thousand emigrants (adopted by M. Paul Leroy-Beaulieu) becomes relatively large, since the annual excess of our births is not one hundred thousand.

[110] The legal minimum of required residence should not be taken as representing the real duration of actual residence: people do not come back from distant countries merely for the wishing; but the legislature should take advantage of the psychological effect of a definite figure; an emigrant rarely leaves France without a determination to be gone only so long. The majority of the Basques who emigrate in such large numbers to America expect to return soon; three-fourths of them become good citizens of the Argentine Republic.

[111] Among the secondary causes which tend to lower the French birth-rate, and which the law might counteract, let us notice that of abortion, which is practised in France not less commonly than in Germany, but bears much worse results here than there, because of the small number of children that are born in France. Paris positively enjoys a reputation for the art of miscarriage, and ladies come there from various parts of the world to be relieved of their children. “One of the professors of our schools said this year, in one of his courses, that a midwife had confessed to him that she produced on an average one hundred miscarriages a year.” (Dr. Verrier, Revue scientifique, June 21, 1884.) Pajot affirms that there are more miscarriages than births. Might not this state of things be remedied: 1. By the re-establishment of the revolving boxes (tours); 2. By a more constant inspection of the books and offices of midwives and accoucheurs, such as furnished lodgings in Paris are subject to.

Among the principal reasons which prevent marriage let us mention the preliminary formalities, which are too numerous even when both parties are French, and are simply numberless when one party is a foreigner. The law of marriages when both parties are French ought to be simplified to the utmost possible extent, so that an impatience of the preliminaries could in nowise influence engaged couples. More than that every effort should be made to facilitate marriages between French subjects and foreigners, unions the results of which are generally good for the race and which are hindered by all sorts of legal obstacles in certain countries; this last question is a subject to be dealt with by diplomacy. Still other causes that the law might modify operate in France, if not to diminish the birth-rate, at least—what amounts to the same thing—to increase the mortality among children. In the first place is to be reckoned the employment of wet-nurses, who should be subject to a much more rigorous surveillance than they are at present, under the Roussel law. In the second place, there is the deplorable condition of illegitimate children, the mortality among whom is greater in France than in any other country: some of them are reported as stillborn, who medical statistics would go to show are the victims of murder; others die of hunger in the second week of their birth owing to negligence or cruelty on the part of the mother. The re-establishment of the revolving boxes (tours) would here also be of prime service. In the third place, let us mention the exceptional mortality in France of adults from twenty to twenty-five years of age, which must result from bad administration in the army. Legislators and administrators should direct their attention simultaneously to all these points, if they are to check the current of depopulation in France.

[112] We conceive, for example, that a father who proposes to enrich his son might often do well to take as the measure of his generosity the sum that his son can lay by, and does really lay by, during a year of labour. The father might double or even sextuple that sum, but he ought at least to make it the basis of his calculations instead of taking counsel with some vague and often deceptive notion of equality, or with his affection for his child, which is often an extreme instance of inequality. We know a young man who at his twenty-eighth year had already amassed by ten years of labour forty thousand francs; his parents tripled the amount.

[113] See Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation ni sanction, p. 53, and Morale anglaise contemporaine, 2e partie.

[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.

[115] L’Évolution religieuse contemporaine, by M. Goblet d’Alviella, p. 411.

[116] See the secularist version of the Ite missa est.

[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.

[118] See our Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation ni sanction.

[119] The notion of the unknowable has been the subject of a lively discussion in England and in France. See on this point the work of M. Paulhan in the Revue philosophique, t. vi. p. 279.

[120] See our ProblÈmes de l’esthÉtique contemporaine, 1st part.

[121] None in France.

[122] See the author’s ProblÈmes d’esthÉtique, i. 3.

[123] See the author’s Esquisse d’une morale, pp. 236, 237.

[124] M. de Molinari has calculated the chances of death to which the profession of assassin is exposed, as compared with certain dangerous occupations, as that of miner. He reaches the following result: that an assassin runs less risk of death than a miner; an insurance company might demand a smaller premium of assassins than it would be obliged to demand of miners. (See Esquisse d’une morale, the chapter on Le risque et la lutte, i. 4.)

[125] Slaves, exiles, and unfortunates generally drink. The Irish and Poles are, according to statistics, the most drunken peoples in Europe.

[126] “Prophecy is not dead, it flourishes under another name. Religious reforms, emancipation from oppressive authority, war against corrupt institutions, religious poetry, philosophy of history—are all represented under various titles in the modern world. The old trunk has branched again simply.” (M. Albert RÉville, p. 229, ProlÉgomÈnes de l’Histoire des religions.)

[127] Music at the present day forms a part of the cult; but either it is supplied by members of the faithful, in which event it is sufficiently bad, for the majority of the faithful are ignorant of music; or it is provided by mercenaries, and it is then more commonly good, but is generally ill chosen. Musical education will one day probably be much more wide-spread than it is to-day; it would not be more difficult, and would always be more useful, to teach children the elements of music than to teach them the mystery of the Incarnation. More than that, if religious music were chosen not only from so-called sacred works but from the works of classical masters generally, one might be certain of hearing good music, varied in style and movement, and capable of pleasing all those in whom the Æsthetic sense is developed.

[128] Every library reading room ought to open on a garden where one could read and write on fine days in the open air. For all men whose labour is physical—for example, for a factory hand—the proper recreation is repose in the open air, and, if need be, intellectual labour in the open air. For men who work with their minds, the proper recreation is bodily exercise in the open air, in the sunlight. For children every holiday ought to be spent in the country. Lighted rooms, children’s entertainments in the house even on Sunday afternoons, theatrical representations, are, hygienically speaking, absurdities. All boarding-schools, moreover, ought to be beyond the city limits and if possible on some commanding height. If there existed in France, as in Germany for example, great colleges in country districts hard by forests, or still better, in the highlands of Dauphiny or the Pyrenees, such places would ultimately be adopted by the better classes for their children’s education, and thus might be combated the degeneracy of the middle class, which is so much more rapid in France than elsewhere, because the custom of restricting the number of children interferes with natural selection.

[129] See upon this point the author’s ProblÈmes d’esthÉtique, p. 139 (De l’antagonisme entre l’esprit scientifique et l’instinct.)

[130] Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation, p. 215.

[131] A. FouillÉe, Philosophie de Platon, t. ii. p. 639. See also M. SecrÉtan, Philosophie de la libertÉ, and Vallier, L’Intention morale.

[132] M. FouillÉe has effectively stated this in his SystÈmes de morale contemporains, where he in some measure attacks the hypothesis that he had incidentally proposed in his commentary on Plato.

[133] Kant’s Kritik der Urtheils-Kraft.

[134] See M. A. FouillÉe, Les systÈmes de morale contemporains.

[135] See Aristotle, Metaphysica, and Hegel’s Logik.

[136] See the criticism of Kantianism in the SystÈmes de morale contemporains, by M. Alfred FouillÉe.

[137] See the chapter on Spinoza in the author’s Morale d’Épicure, p. 230.

[138] See in the Revue philosophique, June, 1885, an article by M. ArrÉat on Mainlaender.

[139] M. Ch. FÉrÉ, Revue philosophique, July, 1886.

[140] A woman somnambulist was induced to believe that she could not lift her worsted neckerchief off the back of a chair; her shoulders were cold and she wanted it; she put out her hand, and finding herself unable to overcome the subjective obstacle, she translated it into the outer world and declared that the neckerchief was unclean, or of an offensive colour, etc., and ultimately became violently terrified. Another subject, also a woman, was persuaded that she could not pull open a drawer; she touched the button and then let go of it shivering, and exclaiming that it was cold. “No wonder,” she added, as a rational justification of her repulsion, “it is of iron!” She was given an iron compass; she endeavoured to handle it, but soon dropped it. “You see,” she said, “it is as cold as the handle, I cannot hold it.” Thus the objective explanation of a subjective fact, once entertained, tends by force of logic to become general, to include a whole class of similar phenomena, to become a system, and, if need be, a cosmological and metaphysical system.

[141] Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation ni sanction, p. 89.

[142] Dialogue cited by M. Caro in Pessimisme.

[143] M. Ribot holds the same doctrine.

[144] See Schelling, Schopenhauer, Lotze, Wundt, SecrÉtan, MM. Ravaison, A. FouillÉe, Lachelier, and, to a certain extent, M. Renouvier.

[145] See Schopenhauer, Horwicz, and M. FouillÉe.

[146] See Wundt’s Psychologie physiologique.

[147] Alfred FouillÉe, La LibertÉ et le DÉterminisme, 2d edition, pp. 353, 354, 356.

[148] Alfred FouillÉe, La LibertÉ et le DÉterminisme, 2d edition, pp. 353, 354, 356.

[149] A. FouillÉe, op. cit.

[150] “The category of Real Existence does not seem reconcilable with the notion of liberty; the latter in its perfection must be conceived under the category of the Ideal, and in its imperfection under that of Becoming.”—A. FouillÉe, La LibertÉ et le DÉterminisme, conclusion.

[151] M. Franck, Essais de critique philosophique.

[152] M. Franck, op. cit.

[153] The author argued the point at length, in 1873, in his book on Epicurus. See also his Morale anglaise, 2 partie, pp. 385-386, 2d edition.

[154] A. FouillÉe, La LibertÉ et le DÉterminisme, 2d edition.

[155] This form of idealism is equally compatible with the prevailing monistic doctrines, and is in some cases, as notably in that of M. FouillÉe, confounded with them. See below.

[156] Mr. Spencer himself has a little forgotten this fact in a number of his own somewhat too mechanical constructions.

[157] See Renouvier’s arguments and Lotze’s and FouillÉe’s replies to them in the Revue philosophique.

[158] See the preceding chapter.

[159] See the author’s study on L’idÉe de temps (Revue philosophique, April, 1885).

[160] See the author’s Esquisse d’une morale, p. 447, et seq.

[161] See on this subject the author’s Vers d’un philosophe, p. 198.

[162] To understand the enormous differences which, in spite of the analogies, may exist between the organization of the planetary or stellar beings and our own, it suffices to consider the immense variety which obtains among terrestrial species. Ants have already achieved an advanced state of society with their shepherd, labouring, and warrior castes. Suppose them to continue their intellectual development instead of halting at a mechanical life of instinct; they might arrive at a point of mental evolution analogous, mutatis mutandis, to that of such and such a human society; for example, that of the Chinese. Who knows, indeed, but that they might rule the earth by virtue of substituting number and intelligence for individual power? Their civilization would be in some sort Liliputian, and destined, no doubt, to exercise a smaller influence on the course of things than that of which physically stronger beings might prove capable; or, to pass from one extreme to the other, in the dreamland in which Fontenelle, Diderot, and Voltaire have laboured, conceive a race of human beings developed not from anthropoids, but from the next most intelligent members of the animal kingdom—from elephants. Scientifically, the supposition is not impossible, when it is considered that the elephant’s trunk is at once one of the strongest and most delicate organs of prehension known to us, and that to possess a well-developed brain and good organs of prehension are perhaps the prime requisites for success in the struggle for existence. A giant civilization, therefore, quite different from ours in externals, if not in essentials, might well have been achieved on the earth or on some neighbouring star. However repugnant to our instinctive anthropomorphism, we should familiarize ourselves with the thought that if evolution is subject to necessary laws, a simple series of accidents and favourable circumstances may give such and such a species the advantage over such and such another, and invert the comparative dignity of the two without the general onward movement of evolution being checked.

Moreover, the development of intelligence in a planet depends much less on the bodily form and number of the inhabitants than on the nature of their life; and as their life depends upon phenomena of heat, light, electricity, and the chemical modifications that they produce, it is these phenomena that in some sort decide the intellectual future of the planet. Kant threw out the suggestion that in an astronomic system, for example—in our solar system—the intellectual and moral perfection of the inhabitants increases with their aloofness from the central star, and thus follows a lowering of the temperature; but such a hypothesis is much too simple to account for so complex an effect, and one which is dependent upon many other things than temperature. What is probable, from the phenomena of life as we know them, is that thought could scarcely be developed either in a brazier or a glacier, and that a certain mean is a necessary condition of organic and intellectual development.

[163] See the Revue philosophique, 1886.

[164] At the very centre of one’s being, universality and personality increase side by side; that is to say, the greater the share of existence a being possesses, the greater the amount of existence that it is capable of sharing with other beings. Incommunicability or impenetrability represents the lowest degree of existence; natural existence, the existence of forces as yet blind and fatal, maintains by their mutual antagonism an equilibrium in a state of inertia and torpor ... The greater one’s self-appropriation by intelligence, the greater one’s power of taking possession of other beings by thought; the being that best knows itself best knows other beings ... the spirit, in so far as it is intelligent, should be open, penetrable, participable, and participant. Two minds, in so far as they are perfect, may interpenetrate each other by means of thought (A. FouillÉe, Philosophie de Platon).

“We must distinguish,” M. Janet also says, “between personality and individuality. Individuality consists in all the external circumstances which distinguish one man from another—circumstances of time, place, organization, etc.... The root of personality lies in individuality, but it tends incessantly to withdraw from it. The individual is centred in himself; personality aspires to rise above itself. The ideal of individuality is egoism, the focussing of the whole in self; the ideal of personality is devotion, the identification of self with the whole. Personality, properly so called, is consciousness of the impersonal” (Moral, 573).

[165] Fiske, The Destiny of Man, p. 113.

[166] “Whoever says that he cannot conceive an action without a substratum confesses by his very words that the alleged substratum which he conceives is a product of his imagination; it is his own thought that he is obliged to place as a support behind the reality of things. By a pure illusion of the imagination, after one has stripped off from an object the only qualities that it possesses, one affirms that something of it, one knows not what, still subsists.” (Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism.)

“To be,” said Berkeley, “is to be this or that. Simply to be, without explanatory addition, is to be nothing; it is a simple conception, if not a word void of sense.”

“Berkeley’s object was to overthrow the hypothesis of a substance lying beyond the range of spirit, as an imperceptible support of the qualities of which our senses take cognizance.” (FÉlix Revaisson, La Philosophie en France, 9.)

See also M. Lachelier, De l’Induction.

[167] This hypothesis is identical with that of monism.

[168] Wundt, Psychologie, vol. ii.

[169] See M. Ravaisson, La MÉtaphysique d’Aristote, vol. ii., and Rapport sur la Philosophie en France.

[170] Association or grouping is the general law of organic and inorganic existence. Society, properly so called, is only a particular case, is only the most complex instance, of this universal law.... A consciousness is rather a We than an I. It is capable of union with other consciousnesses and of forming, in conjunction with them, a more comprehensive and more durable consciousness, from which it receives and to which it communicates thought, as a star both borrows and communicates motion in the system to which it belongs. (Espinas, Des SociÉtÉs animales, 128. See also M. FouillÉe, La Science sociale contemporaine, l. iii.)

Transcriber’s note

The footnotes have been renumbered and gathered at the end of this book. Minor errors in spacing, capitalization etc. have been corrected without note. Missing accents in the sidenotes have been added to be consistent with the main text. Also the following changes have been made, on page
5 “as” added (just as he might offend a fellow-man)
18 “adverversaries” changed to “adversaries” (the mistake of despising their adversaries)
45 “puisant” changed to “puissant” (what is puissant and powerful)
48 footnote anchor added (the phenomena of the external world.[19])
64 “unaquainted” changed to “unacquainted” (they are unacquainted with the external world)
157 “terrestial” changed to “terrestrial” (the celestial or terrestrial phenomena which)
163 “neigbours” changed to “neighbours” (their more innocent neighbours)
167 “Protestanism” changed to “Protestantism” (Inconsequence of liberal Protestantism)
191 “abhorence” changed to “abhorrence” (theory of nature’s abhorrence)
207 “considerble” changed to “considerable” (a considerable hold on human life)
215 “mimimize” changed to “minimize” (in order to minimize the necessity)
241 “Watt” changed to “Wat” (Pastoureaux and Jacques in France and Wat Tyler in England)
298 “sentitiment” changed to “sentiment” (dominated not by reason but by sentiment)
304 “cherubin” changed to “chÉrubin” (l’interrogation anxieuse de chÉrubin)
304 “Songs” changed to “Song” (reading the Song of Songs)
335 “Étre” changed to “Être” (Être À la charge de ses enfants)
337 “corveÉ” changed to “corvÉe” (the last vestige of the corvÉe)
337 “celibat” changed to “cÉlibat” (sur le cÉlibat en France)
347 “anxiom” changed to “axiom” (If there is one axiom that fathers ought to)
389 “esthetique” changed to “esthÉtique” (ProblÈmes de l’esthÉtique contemporaine)
399 “Budhism” changed to “Buddhism” (Buddhism and Christianity have headed)
453 “asscribes” changed to “ascribes” (unity that it ascribes to the world)
477 “Hydrogene” changed to “Hydrogen” (hypothesis—Hydrogen—Necessity of), also in the table of contents
533 “Pyschologically” changed to “Psychologically” (Psychologically and metaphysically considered)
542 “Reconcilation” changed to “Reconciliation” (Reconciliation between determinism and indeterminism)
542 “Socialty” changed to “Sociality” (Sociality, and self- preservation)
462 “FrÉrÉ” changed to “FÉrÉ” (One may say, with M. FÉrÉ, that people in good)
539 “Comtes” changed to “Comte” (Comte, A., 109)
539 “Feurbach” changed to “Feuerbach” (by Schleiermacher and Feuerbach)
541 “Lavelaye” changed to “Laveleye” (Lavelaye, M. de, 249, 252, 284)
541 “ascetism” changed to “asceticism” (and asceticism, 211)
541 “Panthelism, 55-453” changed to “Pantheism, 452” and “Panthelism, 55”
541 “Parve” changed to “ParvÉ” (ParvÉ, M. Steyn, 283)
and in footnote number
36 “Epicure” changed to “Épicure” (See the author’s Morale d’Épicure)
40 “Societe” changed to “SociÉtÉ” (Actes de la SociÉtÉ helvÉt. des sc. nat.)
44 “a’une” changed to “d’une” (Esquisse d’une morale)
78 “embarassment” changed to “embarrassment” (remarks in the former a progressive financial embarrassment)
85 “sÉcondaire” changed to “secondaire” (l’instruction primaire, secondaire et supÉrieure)
87 “Lenornant” changed to “Lenormant” (M. Lenormant undertook to publish a translation)
139 “FrÉrÉ” changed to “FÉrÉ” (M. Ch. FÉrÉ, Revue philosophique, July, 1886.).

Otherwise the original was preserved, including inconsistencies in spelling, hyphenation and capitalisation, also possible errors in foreign languages. No italics were used in the sidenotes, this has not been changed. The index has not been checked for errors in alphabetization or pagenumbers. Additional: M. Janet, mentioned in footnote 164 is probably Paul Janet, “La Morale”.





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