CHAPTER II.

ASSOCIATION. THE PERMANENT ELEMENT OF RELIGIONS IN SOCIAL LIFE.

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

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

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

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

[Sidenote: Association and religion.]

The most durable practical idea in possession of the religious spirit, as of the spirit of reform, is that of association. In the beginning, as we have seen, religion was essentially sociological, by its conception of a society of gods and men. The element of various religions that will survive in the non-religion of the future is precisely this conception, that the ideal of humanity and even of nature consists in the establishment of closer and closer social relations between all kinds of beings. Religions, therefore, have justly chosen to call themselves associations and _églises_, that is to say, assemblies. It is by force of assemblies, secret or open, that the great Jewish and Christian religions have conquered the world. Christianity has even resulted in the notion of an universal church, first militant, then triumphant, and united in love; although, by a strange aberration, instead of regarding universality as an ideal, as the inaccessible limit of an indefinite evolution, Catholicity has been presented as already realized in a system of dogmas which there was nothing to do but to disseminate, and that, if need be, by force. This mistake has been the ruin of dogmatic religions, and it still subsists, even in religions which have transmuted their dogmas into symbols; for an universal symbol is less conceivable than an universal dogma. The only universal thing is and should be precisely the liberty accorded to individuals of conceiving the eternal enigma in any manner whatever that appeals to them, and of associating themselves with those who share the same hypothesis.

[Sidenote: Ideal type of association.]

The right of association, which has hitherto been checked by law, by ignorance, by prejudice, by difficulties of communication, etc., had scarcely begun to manifest its full importance till in the present century. Associations of every kind will some day cover the globe, or rather everything, so to speak, will be accomplished by associate enterprise; and within the limits of the great body of society innumerable groups of the most diverse kinds will form and dissolve with an equal facility, without impeding the general movement. The ideal type of every form of association is a compound of the ideal of socialism and of the ideal of individualism—such a form of association, that is to say, as will afford the individual at once the maximum of present and future security, and the maximum of personal liberty. Every insurance company is an association of this kind; the individual member is protected by the immense power of the association; his contribution to the associate funds is of the slightest, he is free to join the association or to withdraw from it, and to lead his life absolutely as he chooses.

[Sidenote: Its various forms.]

The mistake of religions, and of systems of socialism also, as we have already remarked, is that they presuppose a society of individuals morally and intellectually of the same type. But human beings are, neither within nor without, copies of each other; the comparative psychology and physiology of races and nations, sciences which are still embryonic, will one day demonstrate the diversity which exists between different divisions of the human species and, owing to atavisms of various kinds, even between individuals of the most strictly homogeneous divisions and groups. Religious, metaphysical, and moral sentiment will one day appear in very various forms, and give rise to associations of every kind—some individualistic, some socialistic—so that men of the same stamp may mutually aid and encourage each other, under condition, however, of preserving their complete independence, their perfect right to change their beliefs when they will. Union and independence should go hand in hand; everything should be shared, but nobody should be compelled to give or to receive; minds may be made transparent without losing their freedom of movement. The future, in a word, belongs to association, providing it be voluntary association, for the augmentation, and not for the sacrifice of personal liberty.

If we pass from these general principles to their particular applications we find three essential kinds of voluntary association that seem destined to survive religions: associations for intellectual purposes, for moral purposes, for emotional purposes.

_I. Associations for intellectual purposes._

[Sidenote: Associations for the advancement of research.]

It will always be possible for men of science to associate for the purpose of verifying and collecting evidence in regard to doctrines and beliefs which they themselves recognize as provisional only. There are divisions and subdivisions in the world of thought, which resemble the geographical division of the earth; these divisions practically result from the division of labour; each person has a distinct task to fulfil, a distinct object to which he must apply his intelligence. The whole body of labourers united in one and the same effort of thought, and turned toward the same point in the intellectual horizon, tend naturally to gravitate toward each other; every form of co-operation tends to become an association. We all of us belong to some intellectual province, we have all of us a mental native land, in which we find our fellow-citizens, our brothers toward whom we are impelled by a natural sympathy. This sympathy is explicable as a vague consciousness of the solidarity existing between the whole body of intelligent human beings who inevitably take an interest in each other, who love to share truth or error, as they love to share pleasure or pain: it is good to see men draw together and agree, providing they do not thereby lose flexibility; providing their solidarity becomes a condition of progress and not of immobility. Men will always delight in contributing their store of ideas to the common stock, as the disciples of Socrates brought their dinners and shared them in the little house in Athens; knowledge, supposition, or prejudice, in common, draws people together like a common love. Our hearts should go out first to those who are nearest to us, to those who are our neighbours in the field of intelligence. Labour not only fashions the object it is expended on, it fashions the labourer; similarity of occupation pursued with the same ardour ends by producing similarity of heart. Companionship in labour, of whatsoever kind it may be, constitutes one of the strongest ties among men. In our days associations are formed among men of science or investigators, as among journeymen following the same trade. There are societies for the pursuit of scientific, medical, biological studies, etc.; and societies for the pursuit of literary and philological studies, of philosophical, psychological, and moral studies; of economic and social studies, and finally of religious studies. These societies are genuine _églises_, churches, but churches for community of labour and not for associate repose in a conventional faith; and they will increase in number with the subdivision and specialization of each of these several branches of study. Such associations are typical of future associations generally, religious associations included. Community of inquiry, which no less than community of faith gives rise to a feeling of fraternity, is often superior to community of faith and more fertile than it. The highest religious associations will, no doubt, some day be associations for the pursuit of religious and metaphysical studies. Thus the best elements of individualism and socialism will be reconciled. The infinite extensibility of science, the opportunity that it offers inquirers of appropriating the results of each other’s labours, make association for the acquisition of knowledge the type of a perfect association, of an association that exists for the benefit both of the individuals and of the society.

[Sidenote: Scientific fanaticism.]

There is one thing, however to be avoided. Opinions, and in especial opinions on morals, social matters, or metaphysical subjects, acquire, like the sticks in the fable, a prodigious power, when a number of people holding them in common once associate, which is out of all relation to the intrinsic value of the opinions themselves. Novalis said: “My faith gained an infinite value in my eyes the moment I saw it shared by someone else.” The psychology of that remark is just; it calls attention to a dangerous illusion against which precaution should be taken; for in a certain state of the emotions it is easier for two people, and even for a thousand, to make mistakes than for any one of them separately. Science has its enthusiasts, and also its fanatics, and might have at need its advocates of intolerance and violence. Happily it carries the remedy for all this with it; increase science, and it becomes the very principle of tolerance, for the greatest science is best aware of its own limits.

[Sidenote: Association for purposes of propagandism.]

While distinguished minds will thus associate and carry on their labours and speculations in common, men who are occupied rather with manual labour will associate for the communication of their more or less vague, more or less irreflective beliefs, which, however, will be increasingly free from all element of the supernatural as instruction spreads among the people. These beliefs, which among certain peoples will be metaphysical, among certain others, such as the Latin nations, will be social and moral. Such associations will be of every possible kind, according to the opinions which preside over their formation; they will, however, possess this trait in common, that they will more and more rigorously exclude anything in the nature of dogma and of revelation. They will aim also at becoming like the associations of thinkers and men of science of which we have just spoken. It will be the duty of people of education, in such societies, to hand on the results of the scientific and metaphysical inquiries conducted by associations higher in the intellectual scale. Every temple will thus be built in stages, nave on nave, as in certain ancient churches, and the highest of these temples from which the inspired word will descend will be open to the sky and inhabited not by believers but by unbelievers in every limitation of research—by minds restlessly active, in quest of a more extended and demonstrable knowledge: _ad lucem per lucem_.

[Sidenote: Association for the dissemination of useful knowledge.]

One of the principal effects of association for intellectual purposes, thus conducted, would be the diffusion of scientific ideas among the people. If religions may be considered as so many expressions of the earliest scientific theories, the surest means of combating the errors and of preserving the good sides of religion would be the dissemination of the established principles of modern science. To disseminate is in a sense “to convert,” but to convert the believer to a faith in indubitable virtues; the task is one which is most tempting to a philosopher; one is sure that truth can do no harm, when it is handed on in all its purity. A really capital bit of statement, a really capital book, is often better than a good action; it carries farther, and if an imprudent act of heroism sometimes has a melancholy ending, words that speak to the heart never have. There are already in existence books for children, and for the people, that are masterpieces; they supply the public, for which they are intended, with ideas on morality and on certain sciences and supply those ideas undisfigured; and such books constitute more or less scientific catechisms, which are altogether superior to religious catechisms. At some future day such books will be written in regard to the great cosmological and metaphysical theories, epitomizing in simple language, made simpler by telling illustrations, the body of acquired facts or of probable hypotheses on the prime subjects of human interest. The dissemination of knowledge, standing thus on the middle plane between original inquiry and research and popular ignorance, will take the place held by religions, which are themselves founded on a collection of exoteric notions—a gross and symbolic epitome of what once was profound, and to-day is naïve, in the realm of knowledge. Modern science, if it is to progress, must be popularized; like a great river, if it is to grow larger, its bed must be deepened and widened.

[Sidenote: Scientific research open to everybody.]

One of the great advantages of science is that it can employ half talent and modest capacity—a manifest advantage for it as compared with art. A mediocre poet is a zero in the universe—at least sometimes; but a very ordinary mind may be capable of rendering a genuine service by some almost insignificant improvement in the method of covering the wires in an electric coil or in the gear of a steam-engine; it will have done its work in this world, will have paid its tribute, have won its place in the sun. Art cannot endure mediocrity, science may rely upon it—and find collaborators everywhere. Owing to that fact, science is capable of a degree of democratization that art does not always possess—and that religion alone has equalled. Art is capable of being and remaining aristocratic; science disdains nothing, gathers together all kinds of observations, makes use of all kinds and grades of intellectual power. Like the great Buddhistic and Christian religions, science favours equality, needs the support of the multitude, needs to be named legion. No doubt a small number of commanding men of genius are always necessary to conduct the work, to synthesize the materials in their totality, to make the more fundamental inductions. But if these men of genius were isolated, they would be powerless. Every man must contribute a stone, somewhat at haphazard, and the construction settles firmly on its foundation beneath the added weight of all of them, and becomes really indestructible. Dikes made of irregular stones are the solidest of all. When one walks along such a dike, one feels the sea rumble and break not only near one but under one’s very feet; the water plays vainly against the uncemented, undressed blocks of stone without being able to detach them, bathes them all and destroys none; such, in the history of the human mind, is science, which is formed of a multitude of little facts, gathered in very much at haphazard, which generations of mankind have piled up in disorder, and which ultimately become so solidly united that no effort of the imagination can disjoin them. The human mind, in the midst of its eternal ebb and flow, feels something solid and indestructible in its possession that its waves beat against in vain.

_II. Associations for moral purposes and moral propagandism._

[Sidenote: Association for uplifting the masses.]

There is another element of religion that will survive. Men not only associate for intellectual purposes, they will continue to do so for the purpose of ministering to human suffering, of correcting errors, of disseminating moral ideas. Such associations, like those for intellectual purposes, are based on a consciousness of the solidarity and fraternity of mankind, although, of course, so far as the future is concerned, there will be no question of a fraternity conceived superstitiously, or anti-philosophically, as arising out of a community of origin, from the same terrestrial or celestial father, but only of a rational and moral fraternity, arising out of an identity of nature and interest. The true philosopher should say not only, “Nothing that is human is strange to me;” but also, “Nothing that lives, suffers, and thinks is strange to me.” The heart feels at home wherever it finds another heart, though it even be in a lower order of being, and _a fortiori_, if it be in an equal or higher order of being. A Hindu poet, says the legend, saw a wounded bird fall struggling at his feet; the heart of the poet, sobbing with pity, struggled with the struggles of the dying bird: it is this fluttering of the heart, this measured and modulated rhythm of pain, which was the origin of verse. Like poetry, religion also originated in the highest and most beautiful manifestation of pity. Human love for human beings does not demand, as a condition precedent, perfect spiritual accord; it is love itself that produces such accord as is necessary. Love one another, and you will understand one another; light springs from the true union of hearts.

[Sidenote: Love of mankind in the future.]

Universal sympathy is a sentiment which is destined increasingly to develop in future societies. Even to-day, as the result of an inevitable evolution, religion has come to be confounded in the best minds with charity. Hard and sterile among primitive peoples, little more than a collection of formulæ of propitiation, religions have come, through their alliance with morality, to be one of the essential sources of human tenderness. Buddhism and Christianity have headed, first and last, the principal charitable organizations established among mankind. Fatally condemned as they are, at the end of a longer or shorter period, to intellectual sterility, these two religions are endowed with the genius of the heart. Men like Vincent de Paul have little by little come to replace men like St. Augustine or St. Athanasius, not without profit to humanity. This evolutionary process will, no doubt, continue; to-day, for example, few really talented theological works are produced by the priesthood,[121] but a great many practical charities are excellently conceived and executed by them. The day, no doubt, will come when the experience of personal suffering will always result in a desire to relieve the suffering of others. Physical pain usually produces a need of physical movement; æsthetic instinct introduces rhythm into the movement, transforms disorderly gestures into a beautiful regularity, and discordant cries into songs of pain;[122] moral instinct turns this need of movement toward the service of other people, and every misfortune thus becomes a source of pity for the misfortunes of others, and grief is transmuted into charity.

[121] None in France.

[122] See the author’s _Problèmes d’esthétique_, i. 3.

[Sidenote: Must find expression in action.]

As in the case of artistic sentiment, religious sentiment at its best must be productive, must stimulate one’s activity. Religion, according to St. Paul, means charity, love; but there is no charity that is not charity for someone, and a really rich love cannot be confined within the limits of contemplation and mystic ecstasy, which, scientifically considered, are simply perversions and, as it were, spiritual miscarriages. True love must act.

The ancient opposition between faith and works is thus effaced. There is no powerful faith without works, any more than there is any such thing as a sterile genius or an unproductive talent for art. If Jesus preferred Mary, who was motionless at his feet, to Martha, who was moving about the house, it was, no doubt, because he perceived in the former a treasure of moral energy in reserve for the service of some great devotion; in reserve and therefore only waiting; silent, with a silence of sincere love which speaks more fervently than words.

[Sidenote: Charity.]

Charity will always constitute the point of meeting between the most audacious theoretic speculation and the least audacious practical activity. To identify one’s self, thought and heart, with someone else is to _speculate_ in the most charming sense of the word, is to stake one’s all. And the risk of staking his all is one that man will always wish to run. He is pushed to it by the most vivacious impulses in his nature. Goethe said that a man is not really worthy of the name till he has “begotten a child, built a house, and planted a tree.” The details chosen are somewhat trivial, but the aphorism embodies the need for productivity which is inherent in every being, the need to give or to develop life, to found something; the being who does not obey this impulse is _déclassé_, is degraded below the rank of man; he will suffer from it some day or other, and die of it body and soul. Happily absolute egoism is less frequent than is believed; to live solely for one’s self is a sort of utopia that may be summed up in the naïve formula: Everybody for me and I for nobody. The humblest of us, the instant we undertake a work of charity, come into possession of a completer self; we belong at once wholly to the enterprise, to the idea involved in it, to an idea more or less impersonal; we are drawn forward in spite of ourselves, like a swimmer by the current of the stream.

[Sidenote: Enthusiasm.]

The promotion of every enterprise great and small and of almost every human work depends on enthusiasm, which has played so important a rôle in religion. Enthusiasm presupposes a belief in the possible reality of an ideal, an active belief to be manifested in effort. There is generally but one way of demonstrating what is merely possible, and that is by realizing it, by converting it from possibility into actuality. Excessively matter-of-fact minds—minds immersed in matter—are condemned to short-sightedness in the realm of the possible; analysts distinguish too exactly between what is, and what is not, to be able to be of the best service in the labour of increasingly transforming the one into the other. There is, no doubt, a point of junction between the present and the future, but pure intelligence finds it difficult to lay its finger on it: it is everywhere and nowhere, or rather it is not an inert point but a flying point, a _direction_, a volition in pursuit of an end. The world belongs to the enthusiast, who deliberately deals with the “not yet” as the “already,” and treats the future as if it were the present; the world belongs to the synthetic mind, which confounds the real and the ideal in its embrace; the world belongs to men of the voluntary type, who do violence to reality, and break up its rigid outlines, and force it to yield up from within what might beforehand, in pure reason, have with equal justice been pronounced the possible and the impossible. The world belongs to the prophets and messiahs of science; enthusiasm is necessary to mankind, it is the genius of the masses and the productive element in the genius of individuals.

[Sidenote: Courage.]

The essence of enthusiasm is hope, and the basis of hope is manliness, is courage. Courage of despair is not so intense a phrase as courage of hope. Hope and true and active charity are one. If Hope alone remained in the bottom of Pandora’s box it was not because she had lost her wings and was unable to desert the society of men for the open spaces of the sky; it was that pity, charity, devotion, are very elements of her nature; to hope is to love, and to love is to wish to minister to those who suffer. Upon the half-open box of Pandora, from which Hope in her devotion to mankind refused to make her escape, should be inscribed, as upon the leaden coffer in the “Merchant of Venice,” “Who chooseth me, must give and hazard all he hath.”

[Sidenote: Proselytism.]

The object of enthusiasm varies from age to age: it was once religion, it may be scientific doctrine and discovery, it may above all be moral and social beliefs. It results therefrom that the spirit of proselytism, that seems so peculiar to religion, is destined to survive religion: it will be transformed simply. Every sincere and enthusiastic man with a surplus of moral energy is at heart a missionary, a propagandist of ideas and beliefs. Next to the joy of possessing a truth or a system which seems to be true, is that of disseminating this truth, of feeling it speak and act in us, of exhaling it with our breath. There have been more than twelve apostles in the history of humanity; every heart that is young, and strong, and loving is the heart of an apostle. There is not an idea in our brain that does not possess some element of sociality, of fraternity; that does not struggle for expression. Propagandism will be as ardently pursued, in the society of the future, as discovery. Moral proselytism will aim at communicating enthusiasm for the good and the true, at uplifting the moral level of mankind as a whole and mainly of the masses of the people.

[Sidenote: Morality apart from religion difficult to teach.]

But here we shall be met by an objection; we shall be told that independently of religion it will be difficult to disseminate a system of practical morality, conformable to the scientific ideas of our times. A professor of the Sorbonne was one day maintaining, in my hearing, that in the present crisis anything like systematic moral instruction is gravely in danger. Abstract theories cannot be taught, for they end in scepticism; absolute precepts cannot be taught, for they are false; nothing can be taught but facts, but history: one may be certain about facts. That is to say, morality cannot be taught at all.

[Sidenote: But not impossible.]

We believe, on the contrary, that, even at the present day, the various theories in regard to the principles of morals possess a certain fund of ideas in common, which might well be made the subject of popular instruction. Even the most sceptical and egoistic moral theories admit that the individual cannot live by himself and for himself solely; that egoism involves a narrowing of the sphere of human activity that results in the impoverishment of life. To live fully and completely one must live for others. Our actions are like a shadow which we project upon the universe; the shadow can only be contracted by a diminution of our height; and the best way to enlarge it is to become generous—the principle of egoism is interior littleness. The idea and the sentiment which lie at the bottom of all human morality are the idea and sentiment of generosity; even the systems of Epicurus and of Bentham become generous and philanthropic when they are looked at from a certain height. It is this spirit of generosity which is inherent in every system of morals that a moralist ought always to endeavour to elicit and to communicate to his auditors. What, after all, constitutes the outcome of the years of instruction to which we devote our youth? Abstract forms? More or less scholastic ideas inculcated with so much difficulty? No, that sort of thing fades rapidly away; what subsist are certain sentiments. From history one acquires a certain cult for the past and for our natural tradition, which is useful but may become dangerous if it is carried to extremes; from the study of philosophy we acquire a certain openness of mind, a disinterested preoccupation with the causes of things, a love of hypothesis, a tolerance for difference of opinion; and from a study of ethics we acquire—what? A generosity of heart that causes us, if not to forget ourselves, at least not to forget other people. Other studies enlarge the mind, this one enlarges the heart. It is unreasonable, therefore, to be appalled by diversity of moral systems, for they are all of them obliged in one way or other to beat up to the physiological and psychological verity of love, which is the principle of all altruism and presents mankind with this alternative: to desiccate or to expand. Exclusively egoistic conduct is a rotten fruit. Egoism is eternal illusion and avarice, afraid to open its hands, ignoring the necessity of mutual credit, and the productivity of wealth in circulation. In morals as in political economy, circulation is necessary; the individual must share in the life of the society. Moralists have been wrong, perhaps, in overestimating self-sacrifice. It may be denied that virtue is at bottom, in any rigorous sense of the word, a sacrifice, but it cannot be denied that it is at bottom an enlargement of one’s self, a form of generosity. And this sentiment of generosity, by means of which one embraces all humanity and the universe, is what constitutes the solid base of all great religions, as of all systems of morality; and therein lies the reason why one may, without danger, study the infinite diversity of human beliefs in regard to the moral ideal—the _summum bonum_. There is a unity in the variety, a unity that centres in the idea of love. To be generous in thought and deed is to be at the centre of all great speculation on morals and religion.

[Sidenote: Necessity of disinterestedness.]

For the rest, is there any need of calling in the aid of mythical and mystical ideas in our effort to understand human society and its necessities, and among them the necessity of disinterestedness? The profounder one’s intelligence becomes, the more adequately one perceives the necessity, the inherent rationality of the function one accomplishes in human society; the more absolutely one understands one’s self and one’s self as a social being. A functionary above reproach is always ready to risk his life for the accomplishment of the duty with which he is charged, even though it be a relatively humble one—that of a policeman or a customs officer, of a signal man, of a railway employee or telegraph operator. Whoever does not feel himself ready to die at a given moment is inferior to these. One may sit in judgment on one’s self and on one’s ideal, by asking one’s self this question: for what idea, for what person would I risk my life? Whoever has not a reply ready has an empty or vulgar heart, he is incapable either of sympathizing with or of achieving anything that is great in life, for he is hidebound to the limits of his own individuality; he is feeble and sterile, and lives in his egoism like the tortoise in his shell. On the contrary, he who is conscious of a willingness to face death for his ideal is willing and anxious to maintain his ideal to the height of this possible sacrifice, and finds in the fact of the risk a supreme and constant tension, an indefatigable energy and power of will. The sole means of being great in life is to be conscious of indifference to death. And this courage in the presence of death is not the privilege of religions; its germ exists in every intelligent and loving volition, in the very sense for the universal which gives us science and philosophy; it shows itself in the spontaneous impulses of the heart, in the moral inspirations (which are as truly inspirations as those of the poet) that art and morality seek to give rise to in us. Independently of any religious conception, morality is privileged to belong to the poetry of the world and to the reality of the world. This poetry, instead of being purely contemplative, exists in action and in movement, but the sentiment of the beautiful is none the less one of the essential elements of it. A virtuous life, as the Greeks said, is at once both beautiful and good. Virtue is the profoundest of the arts, is that in which the artist and the work of art are one. In the old oak choir stalls in our churches, lovingly sculptured in the ages of faith, the same slab of wood sometimes represents on one side the life of a saint and on the other a pattern of roses and flowers, so arranged that each event in the saint’s life corresponds to a petal or the corolla of a flower; his self-sacrifice or his martyrdom lies on a background of lilies or roses. To live and to flower side by side, at once to suffer and to blossom, to unite in one’s self the reality of goodness and the beauty of the ideal, is the double aim of life; and we also, like the saints in the choir stalls, should present both sides.

[Sidenote: Religious sanction a superfluity.]

It will be objected that if the dissemination of moral ideas should be attempted in independence of religion, it will lack an element of sovereign power: the idea of a sanction after death, or at least the certitude of that sanction. It may be replied that the moral sentiment in its purity implies precisely doing good for its own sake. And if it be rejoined that any such notion is chimerical, we reply that the power of the moral ideal in future societies will be proportionate to its height.[123] It is commonly believed that the highest ideals are those which it is least easy to disseminate among the masses; the future will, we believe, demonstrate the opposite. Everything depends on the talent of the propagandist. Jesus and the evangelists did more to diffuse morality by embodying moral ideas in a form at once simple and sublime than by menacing men with divine vengeance and the flames of Gehenna. “Love ye one another; by this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.” In this admirable and eternal precept there is more of inexhaustible, practical power than in: ye shall be cast into the fire; there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth. Even in the past, it is by favour of great sentiments that great religious revolutions have been achieved; and these great sentiments will persist in the future, shorn of the superstitions with which they have long been associated. Thousands of martyrs have gone gaily to death for religion; and martyrdom to simple honesty and goodness of heart is, no doubt, more difficult though not less realizable than martyrdom to death. Morality will lose none of its practical power by revealing itself more and more as it is; that is, as the supreme end that a man can propose to himself. The true ideal of morality is charity, and charity is absolute disinterestedness, which looks for a recompense neither from man nor God. Recompense ought never to enter into one’s calculations in life nor into the hopes with which one regards the future; besides, the calculation would probably be bad. Recompense should be taken, when it comes, as a gift; as something distinctly over and above what one has earned. It is even good and reasonable never to do right with any other expectation than that of ingratitude, and to resign one’s self to receiving after death no reward of merit. The most practical religious instruction is an appeal to generous sentiments.

[123] See the author’s _Esquisse d’une morale_, pp. 236, 237.

[Sidenote: Baudelaire’s triumphant criminal.]

To maintain the necessity of the idea of sanction in moral instruction and propagandism, the following argument has been employed. Baudelaire, it is said, in the last days of his intellectual life, sketched a great drama, destined to astonish the partisans of middle-class morality. The hero of the drama, stripping himself of vulgar prejudice, was to commit one after another, and with an equal success, the crimes which are supposed to be the most terrible—was to kill his father, to dishonour his brother, to violate his sister and his mother, to betray his country, and finally, his work in the world accomplished, in possession of fortune and reputation, was to retire to some charming site, under some soft sky, and to exclaim with all the tranquillity in the world: “Let us now enjoy in peace the fruits of our crime.” What reply could you make, it is asked, to such a man and to those who might be tempted to imitate him, if you had not at hand the menaces of religion and the prospect of future punishment? How could you disturb the criminal’s promised joy?

[Sidenote: His life punishes itself.]

Let us consider first in what the criminal’s promised joy can consist. Baudelaire’s hero is naturally incapable of appreciating the pleasures of the hearth; a man who has killed his father can find little delight in the birth of a son. He is equally incapable of appreciating a love of science for science’s sake, for the man who could love science for science’s sake would never be tempted to become a great criminal, and as for pure æsthetic pleasures, moral delicacy and æsthetic delicacy in general go hand in hand; it is not probable that a being incapable of remorse and insensitive to all the shades and varieties of the moral life would be apt to be sensible of all the shades and varieties of beauty and of æsthetic enjoyment. The capacity for a sincere admiration of the beautiful corresponds always to a possibility of strong repugnances to the ugly, and repugnance for the ugly is scarcely conceivable apart from a repugnance for what is ugly in immorality. It is true that Byron depicted certain satanic heroes accomplishing the blackest of crimes without any loss to their elegance, to their good manners, to their high spirit and courage, but his heroes, not to raise the question of their possibility in real life, are extremely unhappy; they, like Byron himself and his disciples, are the victims of a refined remorse, distaste of life, misanthropy; the only art that lies within their range is pessimistic art, which but aggravates their malady. Their æsthetic joys are veritable agonies. Or if, Byron and Byronism apart, one keeps close to the truth, one may well doubt whether true æsthetic pleasures are more within the reach of a genuine criminal than of an educated butcher’s boy. His pleasure would be confined to the monotonous round of wine, women, and play; and he could not take wine with a light heart, for men talk under the influence of wine; and he must play but little, for men ruin themselves at play; so that there remains nothing but women who constitute, as a matter of fact, the habitual consolation of criminals. In all times police have looked for criminals, and found them, the day after their offence in places of ill-repute. Very well, the defence of society apart, we see no reason for depriving the poor wretches of the restricted joys that remain to them. It would be doing too much honour to Baudelaire’s hero to give him an immortality in the next life, simply as a means of making him pay dearer than he has already done in this for the few kisses that he has purchased with his blood-stained gold. He suffers enough as it is, the only additional suffering that could be wished for him is that of remorse, but remorse is a sign of superiority. Real criminals, temperamental criminals, those who are the victims of what is known as moral insanity, are absolutely ignorant of remorse, because they are perfectly adapted to crime; they are made for the immoral environment in which they live, and live at ease, and experience no desire for a change. To perceive that a door is low, one’s stature must be great. If Lady Macbeth’s hand had been rude and her eye dull, she never would have desired to wash off the drop of blood. To suffer is to pass beyond the bounds of one’s environment; the criminal who experiences remorse has strayed less far from the human type than the one who does not feel remorse. The first may become a man once more, the second is incapable of crossing the line of demarcation which separates man and beast, for he is incapable of perceiving it; he is walled in with his crime, and is a brute or a madman.

[Sidenote: And will in the future be viewed with horror.]

But, it will be objected, if this brute or this madman sees no divine menace above his head, would not many people regard his situation as enviable, and labour as they are labouring, to destroy the moral and human instincts in themselves, to place themselves precisely in the position of Baudelaire’s hero? We do not believe that faith in a religious sanction could greatly change anybody’s attitude toward such an abnormal being. Crime offers man but one attraction, that of wealth; but wealth, whatever value it may have in the eyes of the people, is but one among the good things of the world. Offer a poor man a million dollars coupled with the gout, and if he had an atom of common-sense he would refuse. Propose to make him rich, on condition of his being bandy-legged or humpbacked, and he would probably refuse also; in especial, if he were young. All women would refuse. The difficulty experienced in finding people to fill certain situations which are in themselves well paid—that, for instance, of public executioner—demonstrates that, even in the eyes of the people, money is not everything. If it were, no menace of punishment after death could prevent men generally from becoming assassins.[124] I know women, and men also, who would refuse a fortune if they were obliged to acquire it by becoming butchers—so great are certain repugnances, even purely sentimental and æsthetic repugnances. The moral horror of crime, which is in the generality of cases stronger than any other repugnance, will always separate us from criminals, whatever the prevailing beliefs as to life after death.

[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.)

[Sidenote: And with pity.]

This horror will be still stronger when for the habitual hatred, anger, and desire for revenge, that the presence of a criminal now causes us, shall be substituted by degrees a feeling of pity—the pity which we feel for inferior or malformed beings, for the unconscious monstrosities of nature. One may sometimes envy the life of what one hates; but one can never envy the life of what one pities. Hatred signifies the presence of some element of attraction in the object hated; but pity is the highest and most definitive moral barrier that can exist between two beings.

[Sidenote: The durable element in this notion of sanction.]

The sole respectable and durable element in the idea of sanction is neither the notion of recompense nor of penalty, but that of the ideal of goodness as possessed of sufficient force to impose itself upon nature, and to envelop the world; it seems to us good that the just and gentle man should have the last word in the universe, but this kingdom of goodness of which humanity dreams does not need for its establishment the procedure of a human kingdom. The moral sentiment may be considered the great power in the universe. The inherent tendency of morality gradually to subdue nature to its purposes by the instrumentality of mankind is the most striking fact in the realm of philosophy, and the one which is, of all others, the most appropriate to excite the spirit of proselytism. No myth is necessary to arouse an ardour for goodness and a sense of universal fraternity. What is great and beautiful is self-sufficing.

[Sidenote: Cult for the dead.]

Whatever may be the beliefs that men will one day hold on a life after death, and the conditions which render possible the final triumph of goodness, the notion of such a triumph is an ultimate moral and social idea, which will always lend itself readily to propagandism, because it is the foundation of all religions without being in any wise essentially bound up with religious dogma; it is in essence a cult for memory, for veneration and love of ancestry, for respect for death and for the dead. Far from necessarily declining with the decline of religion, a reverence for the dead may rapidly increase because the metaphysical sentiment of the unknown in death will increase. The spirit of democracy itself inclines the masses to an uneasy admiration in the presence of death, the great democrat, the great leveller who wanders incessantly about humanity, and planes down equally all excesses of misery and happiness; casts us, without distinction of persons, into the great abyss from the depths of which the attentive ear has caught no sound of an arrested fall.

[Sidenote: Among the Greeks.]

The Greeks, who of all ancient people are supposed to have been the least religious, were of all ancient people those who showed most reverence for the dead. The most irreligious city in modern times, Paris, is that in which the fête for the dead is most solemn, in which the entire people rise to celebrate it, and that also in which we see the most flippant street Arab take off his hat in the presence of a funeral and salute the visible image of the eternal enigma. A respect for the dead which binds the generations of mankind together, which is the essence of the most certain form of immortality, that of memory and example, will not disappear with the decay of religion. Corpus Christi may be forgotten, but All Souls’ Day will be observed till the end of human time.

_III. Associations for æsthetic purposes—Worship of art and nature._

[Sidenote: Association for enjoyment of products of æsthetic genius.]

I. The third notion which is destined to survive historic religions, and which has been as yet imperfectly realized, is that of voluntary association for the purpose of enjoying in common some æsthetic pleasure of a high and morally refining kind; therein lies what will survive of the ceremonial of diverse religions. The artistic elements pent up in various religions will disengage themselves, will become independent of tradition, of symbolism taken seriously, and of superstition. Science, metaphysics, and morals all have their poetical side, and in so far are analogous to religion.

[Sidenote: Destined prevalence of admiration.]

The pure abstraction by which the thinker escapes beyond the limits of sentiment is an unstable and unlasting state of mind; abstraction contains something fictitious, for nothing abstract exists in nature; abstraction is of value only as an instrument; its aim is to grapple with some one side of the reality, to enable one subsequently more easily to embrace the reality as a whole. Every general result that abstraction can achieve may sooner or later become the object of a sentiment. The progress of science, as Mr. Spencer says, has always been accompanied side by side by a corresponding progress in the faculty of admiration; this faculty must inevitably develop, in the future, when man will have attained a less fragmentary and more genuinely synthetic conception of the universe. Admiration is one of the surviving elements of the religious sentiment. Man will always be subject to astonishment, and will always contemplate the universe in a spirit of wonder, although, no doubt, the time must come when he will cease to kneel. Artistic genius, even when inspired by great philosophical and cosmological ideas, remains essentially different from religious genius properly so called, the distinctive character of which is to be dogmatic. The Greeks were of all peoples the most poetical and the least religious. Poetry, like metaphysics, consists in constructions in the realm of imagination and thought, which are capable of infinite variety and tend to overrun the whole compass of the human mind. Dogmatic religion, on the contrary, tends continually to limit the fertility of the imagination and of philosophic thought; it implies a certain poverty of mind to cling always to the same conception, to feel no desire to pass beyond it, to create. Metaphysical hypothesis, unshackled by dogma, gifted with variety and liberty, must inevitably be fertile even in the domain of art; it cannot dwell forever among abstractions, it must produce a corresponding sentiment, a poetic sentiment which will not be the naïve assurance of faith but the proper emotional reaction in the presence of a transformation of the real world under the influence of thought conceiving the ideal. For the philosopher, as for the poet, every surface that science touches, every form and figure in the world that the finger of knowledge taps, gives forth a sound, not of the void, but, so to speak, of the “essential inwardness of life.” They resemble the marbles in Italy which give forth, beneath a blow, a sound as harmonious as their forms. There is an inner harmony that may well go along with harmony of surface; science shows us the laws of surfaces, philosophy and poetry put us into sympathy with what lies below the surface. If it is impossible to deny, as pure idealists attempt to deny, the objective character of the world in which we live, one can, at least, not say where objectivity begins and subjectivity ends. Between Naghiri and Yarkand there exists an almost unknown tribe called Hunza, whose language presents a peculiarity which it is impossible to separate from one’s notion of humanity; one cannot, in their speech, express the idea of a horse simply, but must say my horse or thy horse or his horse. Our language is more perfect than that of the Hunza, but we are absolutely incapable of conceiving things in abstraction from all notion of human personality; in especial, when we are dealing, not with individual, external objects, but with the cosmos as a whole. There is no such thing as a world existing in isolation; there is only your world, my world, the human world. Man is so inseparably associated with his conception of the universe that it is impossible to know what our universe would be apart from us, or what we should be apart from it. The metaphysician and the poet are at one in celebrating the projection of humanity into all things. At their highest points poetry and philosophy coincide. Metaphysics is the poetry of pure reason, poetry is the metaphysics of the senses and of the heart. The two supply us with our conception of the world, and, after all, since we are the product of the world, it must be in some sense akin to all that we contain. The fundamental secret of things lies at the bottom of human thought. Poetry is a light and winged creature, Plato says, but he was speaking of the poetry of the poet, of his sonorous and harmonious words; but the poetry of the metaphysician, the poetry of profound ideas and hidden causes, is also a winged thing, but winged not to be enabled to skim the surfaces of things as a land bird skims the surface of land and sea, but to be enabled to dive as “divers” do when they plunge into the limpid waves, and, at the risk of asphyxia, walk upon the opaque bottom of the sea and tear it up with their beaks in search of food and come up shaking their feathers from none knows where. Sometimes their search has been in vain, sometimes they bring up buried treasure; and they alone of all beings employ their wings not to skim and to touch the surface of things, but to penetrate to the depths of them. The last word of poetry, as of thought, will be to dive beneath the moving flood and sweep of things, and seize the secret of the material universe which is also the secret of the spiritual universe.

[Sidenote: Art in a measure to take the place of religion.]

II. The more feeble dogmatic religions become, the greater the necessity for a stronger and higher art. Humanity needs a certain amount of distraction, and even, as Pascal said, of “diversion.” A human beast, such as an English or German labouring man, knows but one distraction in the world: eating and drinking, especially drinking. Many English labourers never go to the theatre or to church, never read, know nothing of the pleasures of home; the gin-palace and gin take the place of art, religion, and the family. Opium plays the same role in China. They who do not know how to amuse themselves brutalize themselves; self-brutalization is, at least, a change, an element of variety in the monotony of life, a break in the continuity of the chain of misery. Oblivion from time to time is imperative. One of the ancients said that he would rather be a master in the science of oblivion than in that of memory. The only porches of forgetfulness that are open to the more debased portions of mankind are sleep and intoxication; people at a higher stage of civilization may approach art and adoration; and these two forms of distraction are the highest and sweetest.[125]

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

[Sidenote: Art as a diversion.]

The amount of activity devoted by men to religion and æsthetics may appear at first sight useless and even harmful; but it must be recognized that humanity is always possessed of a surplus which must be expended in some way or other. Prayer and religious exercises, regarded as occupations simply, are of the least harmful of pastimes, are of the least vain of the various forms of distraction. Prayer and the church have hitherto been the art and theatre of the poor. No doubt art and prayer cannot be made to constitute alone the whole of life; mystics have believed that it is practical life that is the diversion, and that the serious element in things is religious contemplation. Precisely the opposite is true: preoccupation with art and metaphysics should dominate human life, but not absorb it. Religion in especial, with its myths, is too generously compounded of illusion and downright fiction to be made the centre of life; religion is a radiant coloured cloud that wreaths the summit of the mountain. If we climb up into it we perceive that it is empty and sombre within, that it is a cloud, damp and cold like other clouds and radiant only from below.

[Sidenote: Æsthetic element in religion.]

The poetry of religion may survive the dogmatism of religion; as articles of faith, religious ideas are to-day anachronisms; as practical and philosophical conceptions they are like all works of art, in a measure imperishable. Who, asks Lange, could wish to refute a Mass of Palestrina or accuse the Madonna of Raphael of error? Religions have inspired literary and artistic labours—products which will survive them at least in part, and will constitute ultimately their best justification. What remains of the Crusades to-day? Among the best things that they gave us must be counted certain flowers that they brought back with them and propagated among us, for example, Damascus roses, and certain colours and perfumes which have survived the great rising of Europe against Asia in support of certain ideas and passions which are to-day forever extinct.

[Sidenote: Defects of æsthetic side of religion.]

Looked at from a certain point of view, priests are the artists of the people, but the genuine artist ought to move with the times, understand new motives and not repeat indefinitely, from generation to generation, the same musical or poetical theme. The feeble side of religious aæsthetics is that its repertoire of incident and mystery is severely limited, that it has repeated itself for centuries. It must enlarge the number of its pieces, must abandon those it has. Nothing could be better than to assemble for the purpose of experiencing in common an emotion at once aæsthetic and serious, seeing and hearing something beautiful; but it is impossible that this emotion should be indefinitely prolonged by a repetition of the same stimulus. Rites are irreconcilable with the double aim of art: variety and progress in the expression of the emotions themselves. Sooner or later the rudimentary art of ritual must give place to genuine and progressive art, just as the instinctive and eternally monotonous architecture practised by bird and insect has become the infinitely varied architecture which has produced and will produce masterpieces of the most varied kind, from Notre Dame de Paris to the Alhambra.

[Sidenote: Transformation of the sermon.]

In general, men gather together to listen. Conferences, sermons, songs are the most permanent features in religious cult. They will probably exist in some form or other in future associations as in those of the past. One point will become increasingly important in every spoken word addressed to the people, and that is the instructive aspect of what is said; if one is to address the people, one must teach them something. Well, there are three kinds of instruction, scientific, literary and moral, or metaphysical. The first will have to be more and more generously given, not only in school but wherever adults congregate. The two other sorts may be given simultaneously by lectures. The most interesting elements in many sermons and conferences are the texts and citations brought to the hearers’ attention by the speaker. The choice of these texts, the manner in which they are expounded and introduced to the comprehension of the multitude, constitute the value of the sermon. In other words, the best sermon consists simply in the reading and exposition of some choice page from a good book. In Germany, in England, in the Indies preachers of certain liberal sects choose their texts indifferently from among the whole number of the sacred books of humanity. A still more liberal epoch may be conceived, when texts will be selected not only from among the writings of the poets of ancient times but also from among the writings of men of genius of all times; every great work will be read and commented on as a sacred book. The most complete expression of the so-called religious sentiment, apart from the vast Hindu or Jewish epochs, is, after all, to be found in certain profane masterpieces, from the works of Plato and Marcus Aurelius to Kant’s “Hymn to Duty”; from the dramas of Æschylus to the “Hamlet” of Shakespeare, to the “Polyeucte” of Corneille, and the “Contemplations” of Victor Hugo.

[Sidenote: Transformation of the prophet.]

Religious prophets, like priests, will be replaced by great poets, great metaphysicians, great men of science. Each of us will be able to choose our prophet, to prefer the genius which is best adapted to our personal intelligence and best serves as an intermediary between us and the eternal truth, and each of us will be in the last resort our own priest.[126]

[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_.)

[Sidenote: Music.]

Apart from poetry and eloquence, the most religious of the arts, the most capable of inspiring the multitude with an elevated sympathy has been, and will be music. Wagner was not absolutely wrong in his notion that music will be the religion of the future, or, at least, the cult of the future. We do not speak of instrumental music only, but also and in especial of vocal music, of choruses such as are often met with in Germany, in which many voices unite in producing the same chant, in beating the same rhythm which has been regulated in advance by genius. Thus conceived, music is truly religious and socially significant.[127]

[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.

[Sidenote: Kinship of æsthetic and religious sentiment.]

For the rest, almost every art is reconcilable with the gravity of religious sentiment, for every art at its best awakens, no less than poetry and music, a contemplative and philosophical mood. One may agree with Strauss that religion will gradually be transmuted into art, and even at the present day profane art and sacred art are rather different than opposed. These differences will always subsist; it is evident that a _pas redoublé_, for example, can never be the symbol of a really profound idea of nature or of humanity or of the infinite. Religious æsthetics, even though it becomes continuously larger and more tolerant, will exclude to the end certain inferior forms of art.

[Sidenote: Necessary reforms in lay art.]

If art is to take the place of religion, it must progress in certain directions, not only in its forms but in its material methods of appeal. Note how much better church services are presented, from the point of view of hygiene, than art exhibitions are. Moderation is practised in the matter of light; the rooms are large and well supplied with fresh air, are of an almost constant temperature; and the æsthetic services are restful rather than exhausting. Compare with all this the entertainment given in concert halls and theatres, where multitudes are packed together under unnecessarily brilliant lights, where the spectators are wrought up and excited and exhausted in a hundred ways and pass out, finally, fatigued, enfeebled, nervously keyed up, and pursued by a host of sensual images. Church architects are infinitely more conversant with hygiene than those who build our theatres; they understand that if the heavens are to be shut out at all, space enough must be shut in to give the heart and chest room to expand. Among the Greeks, where art really did form a sort of religion, the theatres were open to the sky so that the spectators might really repose in body while they gave up their minds to be played upon by the poet.

[Sidenote: In religious art.]

Just as existing profane art must undergo certain transformations before it can be expected fully to satisfy a sane and well-balanced nature, so religious art, if it is to be true to its highest tendencies, must transform itself, must rid itself of precisely the elements which to-day seem distinctively to constitute it, namely its marvellous subject-matter and conventional handling. The marvellous in art was long necessary, as we have seen, to capture men’s attention; contemporaneous art does not need to make this appeal. All art took its rise from convention, from ceremonial, but has enfranchised itself by degrees. It might even be established as a general law that the more perfect, the more expressive, arts become—the more, that is to say they seek precisely to body forth the sentiment of the artist; and the more expressive they are the less conventional and less pompous they must be. Amplification and exaggeration are suppressed. The artist occupies toward his emotions the same relation that the translator of a great work does to his text: his translation will be regarded nowadays as perfect in proportion as it is close, as it follows the text, line by line and word by word; formerly the tradition was otherwise, and every translator felt himself obliged to amplify. Art possesses _great_ means of inspiring emotion, but not _gross_ means. Public speakers at the present day make much less frequent use of gesture; the actor no longer steps out on the stage in the cothurnus; the language of verse is approaching the language of ordinary life; music is breaking away from the conventions of counterpoint. What is true of the diverse arts is true also of religious æsthetics, which will one day abandon the fictitious ornaments and vain ceremonies of ritualism. If an æsthetic expression of some profound sentiment is to be true and durable, it must itself be profound, must be like what it expresses, must be murmured rather than articulate. What renders certain verse eternal is its simplicity: the more overcharged an art is the more caducous it proves, like the architecture of the Jesuit style, which is to-day so ridiculous, with its gilding and false ornaments. Ceremonies, properly so called, will become more and more simple in religious or moral associations; the day will come, no doubt, when they will not be employed at all except to celebrate the three great events of human life: birth, marriage, and death; nay, perhaps they will disappear altogether as emotion becomes too profound to be translated by any objective device, by any conventional ceremony whatever.

“Une larme en dit plus que vous n’en pourriez dire.”

In cemeteries the tombs of distinguished people may be recognized by their simplicity, by their freedom from conventional ornament. A marble slab under a wreath of flowers is enough to produce upon the passer-by a more vivid impression than crosses, burning lamps, images of the saints, infantine gewgaws, and ridiculous inscriptions. Eternal enigmas need not be supplied with excess of language; they are quite capable of making themselves heard without raising their voices. The silence of the stars is more impressive than speech, and the highest religious instruction could not do better than teach men to listen to such science. Meditation, which, after all, is recommended by every religion, implies the negation of rite.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Enjoyment of natural beauty.]

III. A feeling for nature was, in the beginning, an important element in the composition of the religious sentiment. Hindu ascetics went up into the valleys of the Himalayas, St. Antoine went into the desert at Thebes, St. Bruno went to La Grande Chartreuse, in search of something more than simple solitude; they all of them experienced an ill-defined need to eke out monotony of contemplation by admiration of the beautiful in nature; a need to fill the void of ecstasy with harmonious and powerful sensations. They were unconscious poets, painters without hands, astronomers without special knowledge, and their sentiment for nature made part of their religious sentiment; the profane mingled with the divine, and they ascribed to God alone the intense emotion that forest and mountain summit had given rise to in them. To-day, the æsthetic sentiment exists apart from religious sentiment; although every æsthetic sentiment of an especially elevated kind is both contemplative and philosophical, it contains no suggestion of any particular religion: no tabernacle can roof in heaven; æsthetic sentiment is foreign to the definite and anthropomorphic notion of a personal God. When we contemplate nature we have no sense of communion with the personality of God; the artist has definitively supplanted the religious hermit. The power of theological sentiment has weakened; the power of sympathy for nature has increased.

[Sidenote: Should be cherished.]

This sense of natural beauty, which is so strong in many men at the present day, is destined to a much greater future. Like æsthetic faculties generally, a sense for the beauty of nature must be cultivated and developed by a well-directed education. No germ of it apparently is to be found in certain cases among the peasantry, where a mechanical habit of life has dulled the emotions, nor among dwellers in cities, in whom antagonistic tastes have been developed. A genuine Parisian cares little for the country; he can pass an hour or two in the fields, as he might in the Bois de Boulogne. An open-air landscape would not so readily appeal to him as a picture of it in a gold frame; his eye is not educated for dealing with the dimensions of nature.

[Sidenote: The most wholesome form of enjoyment.]

Of all æsthetic sentiments, love of nature possesses the advantage of being the one which, even though pushed to excess, does not disturb the equilibrium of body and mind. Love of nature is the sole emotion which is absolutely hygienic. One may die of an exaggerated love of the theatre, of music and so forth; one simply becomes healthy from an exaggerated love of nature. Air and light! The Greeks were right, were they not? to philosophize in the open air, in gardens and groves. A ray of sunlight sometimes helps one more to understand the world than an eternity of meditation in some gray room in the midst of open volumes.[128]

[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.

[Sidenote: Superior to enjoyment of human art.]

Compare the appeal that nature makes to the æsthetic sense with that made by human art, and you will at once perceive the superiority of the former. Art, even great art, even that which seems closest to the truth, can never be more than a very insufficient representation of the real world, because it is forced to a selection; it is forced to ignore nine-tenths of life in order to set in a clear light what is extreme, what appeals to laughter or to tears. Average human life is neither ridiculous nor tragic; life, as it appears in art, is generally one or the other. The reason is that art subordinates truth to interest, while life is truth. Thence results the movement toward pessimism in art, and in especial in modern art; the more masterly the artist is, the more he will be inclined to seek for the ridiculous or the melancholy aspects of life; his aim is to move pity or mirth, and existence in his pages must take the form of tragedy or comedy. To live too exclusively in the world of art is to live in a factitious environment as if one should pass one’s whole existence in a theatre. The most beautiful poem, the most beautiful work of art, contains pitfalls which one must avoid. The imagination usually plays with loaded dice. Whoever lives too exclusively on human art becomes, therefore, a little unhealthy, a little unbalanced. The great source of æsthetic appeal is and should be nature, which is always sincere, always shows for what it is, without deception and ornament. A higher æsthetic culture will increase one’s sensibility to natural beauty, and it is in a contemplation of the cosmos that æsthetic sentiment, and a purified religious sentiment, will find it possible most completely to coincide. The emotion that arises from the contemplation of a landscape, of a sunset, of a stretch of blue sea, of a snow-capped mountain outlined against the sky, or even the blue dome of the sky itself, is absolutely pure, sane, neither too depressing, nor too immoderately gay. In the presence of nature one’s æsthetic sensibilities become the means of refreshing and resting one instead of fatiguing one—nature smiles but never grimaces; and its smile penetrates the soul as the sunlight penetrates the eye; and if nature has its moods of sadness, they contain a touch of the infinite which enlarges the heart. The immensity of nature and of the all-enveloping heavens becomes, for those who feel it, a constant source of a certain stoical serenity.