Jean-Marie Guyau

“ Morality of doubt.
The most original, and one of the most profoundly moral products of the present century, of the century of science, is precisely this sincere sense of doubt, of the seriousness of every act of faith, of its not being a matter to be undertaken lightly, of its being a graver engagement than many others that one hesitates to assume; to give in one’s faith to an opinion has come to be like attesting one’s allegiance to it by the mediæval signature, which was written in one’s blood and bound one for all eternity. ”

“ Becoming and life are alike formless. Form, individuality, species, mark a transitory stoppage in the channel of life; we can neither seize nor hold nature, except when it is laid asleep, and what we call death—my death or yours—is itself a latent pulse of universal life, like one of the secret vibrations that pass through the germ during the months of apparent inertia during which it is making ready for the later stages of its development. The law of nature is eternal germination. A man of science was one day holding a handful of wheat, that had been found in the tomb of an Egyptian mummy. ”

“ At that time there lay beyond the limits of religion nothing but the grossest and most material occupations; there was no known middle ground between heaven and earth. To-day this middle ground has been discovered—the ground of thought. Science and art are born; and open before us an infinite perspective, where each of us may find an opportunity to employ the best of our gifts. Science offers a field for disinterestedness and research, but does not tolerate vagaries of the imagination. It encourages enthusiasm, but not delirium, and possesses a beauty of its own, the beauty of truth. ”

“ Time makes us generous, enlarges our minds each year, as it does the concentric circles in the trunk of a tree. Life also pacifies us as death does; reconciles us with those who do not think and feel as we do. When you become indignant at some antique, absurd prejudice, remember that it has been a travelling companion of humanity for perhaps ten thousand years, that it has lent men aid when the ways were bad and has been the occasion of many joys, and has lived, so to speak, the life of humanity; one might well find a certain element of fraternity in every human thought. ”

“ One cares less for the promised freedom than for the protection and affection that are gone. Carlyle—whimsical, unhappy genius—could eat no bread that his wife’s own hands, nay his wife’s own heart, had not prepared; and we are all like that; we all have need of daily bread kneaded with love and tenderness; and they that have no loving hand from which to look for it, ask it of their god, of their ideal, of their dream; they create for themselves a family in the realm of imagination, they fill out the bosom of infinity by the addition of a heart. ”

“ To-day the sound of the church-bells is as melancholy as a cry in the void; they tell of the deserted house of God, of the absence of the lord of the soil, they sound the knell of the believers. And is there nothing that can be done to domesticate religion once more in the heart of man? There is but one means: to see in God no more than a symbol of what exists always at the bottom of the human heart—morality. ”

“ But the explanation of positive religion seemed destined to be absolutely the opposite of its justification: to write the history of religions is to write a damaging criticism of them. When one endeavours to come to close quarters with their foundation in reality, one finds it retire before one little by little and ultimately disappear like the place where the rainbow rests upon the earth: one believes that one has discovered in religion a bond between heaven and earth, a pledge of alliance and hope; it is an optical illusion which science at once corrects and explains. ”

“ Incessant discoveries may be made in it and the peril of certain points of view counteracted by the novelty and attractiveness of certain others, and the known universe lost sight of in the abyss of the unknown. Thought bears its own antidote—a science sufficiently great is more trustworthy than innocence; a boundless curiosity is the cure for all petty curiosities. An eye which reaches the stars will not aim long at a low mark; it is protected by its command of space and light, for light is purifying. By making temptation infinite one makes it salutary and in the best sense divine. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As one climbs a height to survey a mountain range, the snow-capped peaks rise silently and take their places side by side along the horizon; it seems as if the enormous masses rise in obedience to an immense effort which uplifts them; it seems as if their immobility is only apparent, and one feels borne aloft with them toward the zenith. The heroes in the Indian legend, when they were weary of life and of the earth, rallied their strength for a final effort, and hand in hand scaled the Himalayas, and the mountains bore them away into the clouds. ”

“ The infinity of the unknowable, even, is no more than hypothetical. We perhaps flatter ourselves in the belief that we possess anything that is infinite—even ignorance. Perhaps the sphere of our knowledge is like the terrestrial globe, enveloped by but a thin atmosphere of the unknowable and unknown; perhaps there is no basis and foundation of the universe, just as there is no basis and foundation of the earth; perhaps the ultimate secret of things is the gravitation of phenomena. ”

“ To hide the cross beneath an armful of flowers is precisely the marvel realized by religion. And when religions are regarded from this point of view, all ground vanishes for looking with disdain upon the legends which constitute the material of popular faith. They become comprehensible, they become lovable, one feels one’s self enveloped in an “infinite tenderness” for this spontaneous product of naïve thought in quest of goodness, in pursuit of the ideal, for these fairy-tales of human morality, profounder and sweeter than all other fairy-tales. ”

“ For the rest, there is no such thing as a revolution, or a cataclysm, properly so called, in human belief. Each generation adds a doubt to those which existed before in the minds of their parents, and thus faith falls away bit by bit, like the banks of a river worn by the stream; the sentiments which were bound up with the belief go with it, but they are incessantly replaced by others, a new wave sweeps forward to fill the void, and the human soul profits by its losses and grows larger, like the bed of a river. ”

“ What is there so surprising in the fact that humanity has personified that which in all climes claimed its allegiance—the idea of goodness and of justice? The Eternal, the eternally Just, the Omnipotent who squares reality with justice, He who parcels out evil and good, the Being who weighs all actions, who does all things by weight and measure, or rather who is Himself weight and measure—that is the God of the Jewish people, the Javeh of adult Judaism, as He ultimately appears in the mist of the unknown. ”

“ Humanity, therefore, would satisfy somehow or other, even with absurdities, that eternal need of believing of which we have spoken above. The instant one religion is destroyed another takes its place; it will be always so from age to age, because the religious sentiment will always exist as a continuing need for some object of worship which it will create and re-create in spite of all the ratiocination in the world. No victory over nature can be lasting; no permanent need in the human breast can be long silenced. There are periods in human life when faith is as imperious as love ”

“ Let us be as tolerant as our fathers in India, let us not be indignant against the superstitions above which we ourselves have risen and which served us in their day as stepping stones. Let us learn how to discover the element of goodness and truth in all the creeds of humanity. It may be that all human religions, if they could once be freed from the legends which drape them, would unite to furnish for the cultivated portion of mankind a religion really complete. ”

“ The horizon of truth can neither be taken in at a single glance nor contracted; to perceive the whole of it one must move forward incessantly, and at every step a new perspective is laid bare. For humanity, to live is to learn; and before any individual human being can tell us the great secret, he must have lived the life of humanity, the lives of all existing beings and even of all existing things, which seem scarcely to deserve the name of beings; he must have concentrated in himself the universe. ”

“ Love reaches everywhere; and as the philosopher who is also a lover pushes audaciously forward in the domain of thought, he moves more easily, more lightly, more confidently, with a heightened faith in himself, in others, and in this mysterious and mute universe. Love inspires one with that gentleness of heart which inclines one to an interest in the smallest things and in their place in the universe. There is great kindliness in the heart of the true philosopher.
Love the essence of art.
Then, too, what is science without art? ”

“ The French possess this element of superiority over the Renaissance, that they are more balanced than other peoples, and though France has aimed to liberate mankind and to enfranchise them from the austere rule of sacrifice, she has not conceived man as a monster, nor liberty as a species of madness. Her ideas are formulated in a system of education which lies in the regular, complete, and harmonious development of all the faculties. Accordingly the French ideal does not shock other nations, it seduces them; France is for them the land of tact, of measure, of good sense, of logic. ”

“ Arnold might well recognize as our own; might it not with truth be said of the present that it lacks the word of the Eternal, or soon will lack it? A new spirit animates our generation; not only are we in doubt whether the Eternal ever did speak or ever does speak to man, but many of us believe in the existence of no other eternity than that of a universe of mute and unfeeling matter which keeps its own secret except as against those who have the wit to find it out. ”

“ And shall human thought, and the higher life which stirs in us like the germ in the seed, and love that seems to sleep forever in the tomb, not have this reawakening in some unforeseen springtime, and not be brought face to face with eternity, which seems at present to be buried, once and for all, in darkness? What is death, after all, in the universe, but a lesser degree of vital heat, a more or less transitory lowness of temperature? ”

“ To love is always a little to adore. If it is a human being that is the object of the love, the divinization incidental to it will be confined within certain limits, but if the love stretch up from the earth into heaven, it may command the full powers of the imagination; the soul, seeking at a distance for some vague object to which to attach itself, will go out in mystic outbursts of emotion and ecstasy. ”

“ Well, what is this infinite, in the last resort, but the object to which every religion addresses itself? A religious being is essentially one who is not satisfied with such and such a finite sensation; who looks everywhere for the beyond—looks for it in life, in death, in nature, in himself. To be divinely aware of a vague somewhat that one cannot quite understand, to feel a veneration for it and then to endeavour to fit it with a name, to call to it stammeringly, these are the beginnings of every system of religious worship. ”

“ To this primitive conception of religious servitude, the modern conception of mankind as free in the presence of its God, of its beloved ideal, of its conceived work in the world, of its dream of progress, is more and more opposed. Even at the present day a true sense of the divine may be recognized by its giving man a consciousness of his liberty and his dignity rather than his subjection; the true gods are those who make us lift our heads higher in the struggle for existence; adoration no longer consists in prostration but in standing upright. ”

“ Our gods are like those mysterious beings who spring, in legend, from a drop of generous blood or a loving tear let fall upon the earth; it is with our own substance that we nourish them; their beauty, their goodness come out of our love, and if we love them as we do, the reason is that we must love something; must lift up to the four corners of the [134] horizon, even if they be deaf, a supreme appeal. This outcome of love and religious sentiment is most visible in exalted minds, both in the Middle Ages and in our own days. ”

“ What power can reasoning have over anybody who is afraid? How can you be expected to see anything as in itself it really is, if you have been accustomed from childhood to walk with your eyes closed? Truth becomes for you as variable and unstable as your own sensibility. At an audacious moment you deny everything, the next day you are prepared to affirm more than you were before. It is very easy to understand; nobody is obliged to be brave always, and, more than all, one’s conscience is involved. Conscience, like government, is conservative; it is naturally inimical to revolution and change. ”

“ The truth is that an affectionate faith long retains its charm, even after one is persuaded that it is an error and dead in one; one caresses the lifeless illusions and cannot bring one’s self altogether to abandon them, as in the land of the Slavs it is the custom to kiss the pale face of the dead in the open coffin before throwing upon it the handful of earth which severs definitely the last visible bonds of love. ”

“ Over and above infinity of number and eternity of time, a field of hopefulness lies in the immensity of space, which makes it irrational for us to judge too absolutely of the future of the universe solely from our experience of so small a portion of it as our solar, and even as our stellar system. Are we the only thinking beings in the universe? We have already seen that, without passing far beyond what science holds to be certain, one may even now reply in the negative. ”

“ This species of supreme doubt on the matter of our own existence and that of the world, this sentiment of the strangeness of our destiny, this communion of the soul with the totality of nature, this outbreak of refined sensibility, excited and tormented by modern life, possesses nothing in common with the sentiment of primitive religion, with its robust and crude faith reposing upon palpable fact and visible miracle. ”

“ If we could look into the consciousness of a school child, we should see a more or less faithful image of all the marvels of the world: skies, seas, mountains, cities, etc.; we should perceive the germ of every elevated sentiment, of [482] every kind of complex knowledge that the human brain contains. If we could look into the consciousness of some great man—some thinker, some poet—the spectacle would be quite different. It would embrace the whole of the visible and invisible universe, with its facts and its laws; it would embrace what is best in the whole of humanity. ”

“ Max Müller pronounces a eulogy upon the Hindus for their adevism; was it really to their conception of the infinite that they owed their wisdom, and might not the idea of infinity alone have quite as well led them to atheism? When one learns to contemplate the world as an eternally lengthening chain of phenomena, one no longer hopes, by a futile prayer, to stop or to modify the march of such inflexible determinism; one contents one’s self with investigating it by science or entering into it in some field of action. Religion disappears in science or morality. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The religious sentiment is primarily, no doubt, a feeling of dependence; but this feeling of dependence, really to give birth to religion, must provoke in one a reaction—a desire of deliverance. To feel one’s own weakness; to be conscious of limitations of all sorts which bound one’s life, and then to desire to augment one’s power over one’s self and over the material universe; to enlarge one’s sphere of action; to attain once more to a comparative independence in face of the necessities of every kind which hem one in—such is the course of the human mind in the presence of the universe. ”

“ The most lasting approaches to perfection are often the most unconscious. It is a difficult matter by a simple impulse of faith to climb sheer up on the ladder of civilization. True moral perfection is often the precise opposite of heroic paroxysm. As the passion for goodness becomes triumphant, it ceases to be a passion: it becomes, and must become, a portion of our normal life, of the flesh that the mystics curse; the man must become good from the roots of his hair to the soles of his feet. Thus Buddhism and Christianity, in many respects, have miscarried. ”

“ Love, which is the power of cohesion at its highest degree, is perhaps right in its desire for an element in the association between individuals. Its sole error is that of exaggerating its pretensions and of misplacing its hopes. After all, one must not be too exacting nor ask too much of nature. A true philosopher, even for those that he loves, should not shrink from proof by fire, and death is the flame that purifies while it consumes. If anything survives the ordeal that alone is much, and if what survives is precisely what is best in us, what more can be asked? ”

“ When one walks along such a dike, one feels the sea [398] 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. ”