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Title: God and the State
Author: Michail Bakunin
Date: 1882
Language: en
Topics: atheist, classical, religion, the State
Source: Retrieved on February 14th, 2009 from http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/godstate/index.htm][Marxists.org]] and [[http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/bakunin/godandstate/godandstate_ch1.html#pref.
Notes: Written: February-March, 1871. Published by Mother Earth Publishing Association, New York, 1916. First Published: 1882 (Discovered posthumously by Carlo Cafiero and Elisée Reclus). Translated by Benjamin R. Tucker

Michail Bakunin

God and the State

Preface to the First French Edition

One of us is soon to tell in all its details the story of the life of

Michael Bakunin, but its general features are already sufficiently

familiar. Friends and enemies know that this man was great in thought,

will, persistent energy; they know also with what lofty contempt he

looked down upon wealth, rank, glory, all the wretched ambitions which

most human beings are base enough to entertain. A Russian gentleman

related by marriage to the highest nobility of the empire, he was one of

the first to enter that intrepid society of rebels who were able to

release themselves from traditions, prejudices, race and class

interests, and set their own comfort at naught. With them he fought the

stern battle of life, aggravated by imprisonment, exile, all the dangers

and all the sorrows that men of self-sacrifice have to undergo during

their tormented existence.

A simple stone and a name mark the spot in the cemetery of Berne where

was laid the body of Bakunin. Even that is perhaps too much to honor the

memory of a worker who held vanities of that sort in such slight esteem.

His friends surely will raise to him no ostentatious tombstone or

statue. They know with what a huge laugh he would have received them,

had they spoken to him of a commemorative structure erected to his

glory; they knew, too, that the true way to honor their dead is to

continue their work — with the same ardor and perseverance that they

themselves brought to it. In this case, indeed, a difficult task

demanding all our efforts, for among the revolutionists of the present

generation not one has labored more fervently in the common cause of the

Revolution.

In Russia among the students, in Germany among the insurgents of

Dresden, in Siberia among his brothers in exile, in America, in England,

in France, in Switzerland, in Italy, among all earnest men, his direct

influence has been considerable. The originality of his ideas, the

imagery and vehemence of his eloquence, his untiring zeal in

propogandism, helped too by the natural majesty of his person and by a

powerful vitality, gave Bakunin access to all the revolutionary groups,

and his efforts left deep traces everywhere, even upon those who, after

having welcomed him, thrust him out because of a difference of object or

method. His correspondence was most extensive; he passed entire nights

in preparing long letters to his friends in the revolutionary world, and

some of these letters, written to strengthen the timid, arouse the

sluggish, and outline plans of propagandism or revolt, took on the

proportions of veritable volumes. These letters more than anything else

explain the prodigious work of Bakunin in the revolutionary movement of

the century. The pamphlets published by him, in Russian, French, and

Italian, however important they may be, and however useful they may have

been in spreading the new ideas, are the smallest part of Bakunin’s

work.

The present memoir, “God and the State,” is really a fragment of a

letter or report. Composed in the same manner as most of Bakunin’s other

writings, it has the same literary fault, lack of proportion; moreover

it breaks off abruptly: we have searched in vain to discover the end of

the manuscript. Bakunin never had the time necessary to finish all the

tasks he undertook. One work was not completed when others were already

under way. “My life itself is a fragment,” he said to those who

criticized his writings. Nevertheless, the readers of “God and the

State” certainly will not regret that Bakunin’s memoir, incomplete

though it be, has been published. The questions discussed in it are

treated decisively and with a singular vigor of logic. Rightly

addressing himself only to his honest opponents, Bakunin demonstrates to

them the emptiness of their belief in that divine authority on which all

temporal authorities are founded; he proves to them the purely human

genesis of all governments; finally, without stopping to discuss those

bases of the State already condemned by public morality, such as

physical superiority, violence, nobility, wealth, he does justice to the

theory which would entrust science with the government of societies.

Supposing even that it were possible to recognize, amid the conflict of

rival ambitions and intrigues, who are the pretenders and who are the

real savants, and that a method of election could be found which would

not fail to lodge the power in the hands of those whose knowledge is

authentic, what guarantee could they offer us of the wisdom and honesty

of their government? On the contrary, can we not foresee in these new

masters the same follies and the same crimes found in those of former

days and of the present time? In the first place, science is not: it is

becoming. The learned man of to-day is but the know-nothing of tomorrow.

Let him once imagine that he has reached the end, and for that very

reason he sinks beneath even the babe just born. But, could he recognize

truth in its essence, he can only corrupt himself by privilege and

corrupt others by power. To establish his government, he must try, like

all chiefs of State, to arrest the life of the masses moving below him,

keep them in ignorance in order to preserve quiet, and gradually debase

them that he may rule them from a loftier throne.

For the rest, since the doctrinaires made their appearance, the true or

pretended “genius” has been trying his hand at wielding the scepter of

the world, and we know what it has cost us. We have seen them at work,

all these savants: the more hardened the more they have studied; the

narrower in their views the more time they have spent in examining some

isolated fact in all its aspects; without any experience of life,

because they have long known no other horizon than the walls of their

cheese; childish in their passions and vanities, because they have been

unable to participate in serious struggles and have never learned the

true proportion of things. Have we not recently witnessed the foundation

of a white school of “thinkers” — wretched courtiers, too, and people of

unclean lives — who have constructed a whole cosmogony for their sole

use? According to them, worlds have been created, societies have

developed, revolutions have overturned nations, empires have gone down

in blood, poverty, disease, and death have been the queens of humanity,

only to raise up an élite of academicians, the full-blown flower, of

which all other men are but the manure. That these editors of the Temps

and the Debats may have leisure to “think,” nations live and die in

ignorance; all other human beings are destined for death in order that

these gentlemen may become immortal!

But we may reassure ourselves: all these academicians will not have the

audacity of Alexander in cutting with his sword the Gordian knot; they

will not lift the blade of Charlemagne. Government by science is

becoming as impossible as that of divine right, wealth, or brute force.

All powers are henceforth to be submitted to pitiless criticism. Men in

whom the sentiment of equality is born suffer themselves no longer to be

governed; they learn to govern themselves. In precipitating from the

heights of the heavens him from whom all power is reputed to descend,

societies unseat also all those who reigned in his name. Such is the

revolution now in progress. States are breaking up to give place to a

new order, in which, as Bakunin was fond of saying, “human justice will

be substituted for divine justice.” If it is allowable to cite any one

name from those of the revolutionists who have taken part in this

immense work of renovation, there is not one that may be singled out

with more justice than that of Michael Bakunin.

Carlo Cafiero.

Elisée Reclus.

I

Who are right, the idealists or the materialists? The question once

stated in this way, hesitation becomes impossible. Undoubtedly the

idealists are wrong and the materialists right. Yes, facts are before

ideas; yes, the ideal, as Proudhon said, is but a flower, whose root

lies in the material conditions of existence. Yes, the whole history of

humanity, intellectual and moral, political and social, is but a

reflection of its economic history.

All branches of modern science, of true and disinterested science,

concur in proclaiming this grand truth, fundamental and decisive: The

social world, properly speaking, the human world — in short, humanity —

is nothing other than the last and supreme development — at least on our

planet and as far as we know — the highest manifestation of animality.

But as every development necessarily implies a negation, that of its

base or point of departure, humanity is at the same time and essentially

the deliberate and gradual negation of the animal element in man; and it

is precisely this negation, as rational as it is natural, and rational

only because natural — at once historical and logical, as inevitable as

the development and realization of all the natural laws in the world —

that constitutes and creates the ideal, the world of intellectual and

moral convictions, ideas.

Yes, our first ancestors, our Adams and our Eves, were, if not gorillas,

very near relatives of gorillas, omnivorous, intelligent and ferocious

beasts, endowed in a higher degree than the animals of any other species

with two precious faculties — the power to think and the desire to

rebel.

These faculties, combining their progressive action in history,

represent the essential factor, the negative power in the positive

development of human animality, and create consequently all that

constitutes humanity in man.

The Bible, which is a very interesting and here and there very profound

book when considered as one of the oldest surviving manifestations of

human wisdom and fancy, expresses this truth very naively in its myth of

original sin. Jehovah, who of all the good gods adored by men was

certainly the most jealous, the most vain, the most ferocious, the most

unjust, the most bloodthirsty, the most despotic, and the most hostile

to human dignity and liberty — Jehovah had just created Adam and Eve, to

satisfy we know not what caprice; no doubt to while away his time, which

must weigh heavy on his hands in his eternal egoistic solitude, or that

he might have some new slaves. He generously placed at their disposal

the whole earth, with all its fruits and animals, and set but a single

limit to this complete enjoyment. He expressly forbade them from

touching the fruit of the tree of knowledge. He wished, therefore, that

man, destitute of all understanding of himself, should remain an eternal

beast, ever on all-fours before the eternal God, his creator and his

master. But here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first

freethinker and the emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his

bestial ignorance and obedience; he emancipates him, stamps upon his

brow the seal of liberty and humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat

of the fruit of knowledge.

We know what followed. The good God, whose foresight, which is one of

the divine faculties, should have warned him of what would happen, flew

into a terrible and ridiculous rage; he cursed Satan, man, and the world

created by himself, striking himself so to speak in his own creation, as

children do when they get angry; and, not content with smiting our

ancestors themselves, he cursed them in all the generations to come,

innocent of the crime committed by their forefathers. Our Catholic and

Protestant theologians look upon that as very profound and very just,

precisely because it is monstrously iniquitous and absurd. Then,

remembering that he was not only a God of vengeance and wrath, but also

a God of love, after having tormented the existence of a few milliards

of poor human beings and condemned them to an eternal hell, he took pity

on the rest, and, to save them and reconcile his eternal and divine love

with his eternal and divine anger, always greedy for victims and blood,

he sent into the world, as an expiatory victim, his only son, that he

might be killed by men. That is called the mystery of the Redemption,

the basis of all the Christian religions. Still, if the divine Savior

had saved the human world! But no; in the paradise promised by Christ,

as we know, such being the formal announcement, the elect will number

very few. The rest, the immense majority of the generations present and

to come, will burn eternally in hell. In the meantime, to console us,

God, ever just, ever good, hands over the earth to the government of the

Napoleon Thirds, of the William Firsts, of the Ferdinands of Austria,

and of the Alexanders of all the Russias.

Such are the absurd tales that are told and the monstrous doctrines that

are taught, in the full light of the nineteenth century, in all the

public schools of Europe, at the express command of the government. They

call this civilizing the people! Is it not plain that all these

governments are systematic poisoners, interested stupefiers of the

masses?

I have wandered from my subject, because anger gets hold of me whenever

I think of the base and criminal means which they employ to keep the

nations in perpetual slavery, undoubtedly that they may be the better

able to fleece them. Of what consequence are the crimes of all the

Tropmanns in the world compared with this crime of treason against

humanity committed daily, in broad day, over the whole surface of the

civilized world, by those who dare to call themselves the guardians and

the fathers of the people? I return to the myth of original sin.

God admitted that Satan was right; he recognized that the devil did not

deceive Adam and Eve in promising them knowledge and liberty as a reward

for the act of disobedience which he had induced them to commit; for,

immediately they had eaten of the forbidden fruit, God himself said (see

Bible): “Behold, man is become as of the Gods, knowing both good and

evil; prevent him, therefore, from eating of the fruit of eternal life,

lest he become immortal like Ourselves.”

Let us disregard now the fabulous portion of this myth and consider its

true meaning, which is very clear. Man has emancipated himself; he has

separated himself from animality and constituted himself a man; he has

begun his distinctively human history and development by an act of

disobedience and science — that is, by rebellion and by thought.

Three elements or, if you like, three fundamental principles constitute

the essential conditions of all human development, collective or

individual, in history:

human animality;

thought; and

rebellion.

To the first properly corresponds social and private economy; to the

second, science; to the third, liberty.

Idealists of all schools, aristocrats and bourgeois, theologians and

metaphysicians, politicians and moralists, religionists, philosophers,

or poets, not forgetting the liberal economists — unbounded worshippers

of the ideal, as we know — are much offended when told that man, with

his magnificent intelligence, his sublime ideas, and his boundless

aspirations, is, like all else existing in the world, nothing but

matter, only a product of vile matter.

We may answer that the matter of which materialists speak, matter

spontaneously and eternally mobile, active, productive, matter

chemically or organically determined and manifested by the properties or

forces, mechanical, physical, animal, and intelligent, which necessarily

belong to it — that this matter has nothing in common with the vile

matter of the idealists. The latter, a product of their false

abstraction, is indeed a stupid, inanimate, immobile thing, incapable of

giving birth to the smallest product, a caput mortuum, an ugly fancy in

contrast to the beautiful fancy which they call God; as the opposite of

this supreme being, matter, their matter, stripped by that constitutes

its real nature, necessarily represents supreme nothingness. They have

taken away intelligence, life, all its determining qualities, active

relations or forces, motion itself, without which matter would not even

have weight, leaving it nothing but impenetrability and absolute

immobility in space; they have attributed all these natural forces,

properties, and manifestations to the imaginary being created by their

abstract fancy; then, interchanging rôles, they have called this product

of their imagination, this phantom, this God who is nothing, “supreme

Being” and, as a necessary consequence, have declared that the real

being, matter, the world, is nothing. After which they gravely tell us

that this matter is incapable of producing anything, not even of setting

itself in motion, and consequently must have been created by their God.

At the end of this book I exposed the fallacies and truly revolting

absurdities to which one is inevitably led by this imagination of a God,

let him be considered as a personal being, the creator and organizer of

worlds; or even as impersonal, a kind of divine soul spread over the

whole universe and constituting thus its eternal principle; or let him

be an idea, infinite and divine, always present and active in the world,

and always manifested by the totality of material and definite beings.

Here I shall deal with one point only.

The gradual development of the material world, as well as of organic

animal life and of the historically progressive intelligence of man,

individually or socially, is perfectly conceivable. It is a wholly

natural movement from the simple to the complex, from the lower to the

higher, from the inferior to the superior; a movement in conformity with

all our daily experiences, and consequently in conformity also with our

natural logic, with the distinctive laws of our mind, which being formed

and developed only by the aid of these same experiences; is, so to

speak, but the mental, cerebral reproduction or reflected summary

thereof.

The system of the idealists is quite the contrary of this. It is the

reversal of all human experiences and of that universal and common good

sense which is the essential condition of all human understanding, and

which, in rising from the simple and unanimously recognized truth that

twice two are four to the sublimest and most complex scientific

considerations — admitting, moreover, nothing that has not stood the

severest tests of experience or observation of things and facts —

becomes the only serious basis of human knowledge.

Very far from pursuing the natural order from the lower to the higher,

from the inferior to the superior, and from the relatively simple to the

more complex; instead of wisely and rationally accompanying the

progressive and real movement from the world called inorganic to the

world organic, vegetables, animal, and then distinctively human — from

chemical matter or chemical being to living matter or living being, and

from living being to thinking being — the idealists, obsessed, blinded,

and pushed on by the divine phantom which they have inherited from

theology, take precisely the opposite course. They go from the higher to

the lower, from the superior to the inferior, from the complex to the

simple. They begin with God, either as a person or as divine substance

or idea, and the first step that they take is a terrible fall from the

sublime heights of the eternal ideal into the mire of the material

world; from absolute perfection into absolute imperfection; from thought

to being, or rather, from supreme being to nothing. When, how, and why

the divine being, eternal, infinite, absolutely perfect, probably weary

of himself, decided upon this desperate salto mortale is something which

no idealist, no theologian, no metaphysician, no poet, has ever been

able to understand himself or explain to the profane. All religions,

past and present, and all the systems of transcendental philosophy hinge

on this unique and iniquitous mystery.[1]

Holy men, inspired lawgivers, prophets, messiahs, have searched it for

life, and found only torment and death. Like the ancient sphinx, it has

devoured them, because they could not explain it. Great philosophers

from Heraclitus and Plato down to Descartes, Spinoza: Leibnitz, Kant,

Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, not to mention the Indian philosophers,

have written heaps of volumes and built systems as ingenious as sublime,

in which they have said by the way many beautiful and grand things and

discovered immortal truths, but they have left this mystery, the

principal object of their transcendental investigations, as unfathomable

as before. The gigantic efforts of the most Wonderful geniuses that the

world has known, and who, one after another, for at least thirty

centuries, have undertaken anew this labor of Sisyphus, have resulted

only in rendering this mystery still more incomprehensible. Is it to be

hoped that it will be unveiled to us by the routine speculations of some

pedantic disciple of an artificially warmed-over metaphysics at a time

when all living and serious spirits have abandoned that ambiguous

science born of a compromise — historically explicable no doubt —

between the unreason of faith and sound scientific reason?

It is evident that this terrible mystery is inexplicable — that is,

absurd, because only the absurd admits of no explanation. It is evident

that whoever finds it essential to his happiness and life must renounce

his reason, and return, if he can, to naive, blind, stupid faith, to

repeat with Tertullianus and all sincere believers these words, which

sum up the very quintessence of theology: Credo quia absurdum. Then all

discussion ceases, and nothing remains but the triumphant stupidity of

faith. But immediately there arises another question: How comes an

intelligent and well-informed man ever to feel the need of believing in

this mystery?

Nothing is more natural than that the belief in God, the creator,

regulator, judge, master, curser, savior, and benefactor of the world,

should still prevail among the people, especially in the rural

districts, where it is more widespread than among the proletariat of the

cities. The people, unfortunately, are still very ignorant, and are kept

in ignorance by the systematic efforts of all the governments, who

consider this ignorance, not without good reason, as one of the

essential conditions of their own power. Weighted down by their daily

labor, deprived of leisure, of intellectual intercourse, of reading, in

short of all the means and a good portion of the stimulants that develop

thought in men, the people generally accept religious traditions without

criticism and in a lump. These traditions surround them from infancy in

all the situations of life, and artificially sustained in their minds by

a multitude of official poisoners of all sorts, priests and laymen, are

transformed therein into a sort of mental and moral babit, too often

more powerful even than their natural good sense.

There is another reason which explains and in some sort justifies the

absurd beliefs of the people — namely, the wretched situation to which

they find themselves fatally condemned by the economic organization of

society in the most civilized countries of Europe. Reduced,

intellectually and morally as well as materially, to the minimum of

human existence, confined in their life like a prisoner in his prison,

without horizon, without outlet, without even a future if we believe the

economists, the people would have the singularly narrow souls and

blunted instincts of the bourgeois if they did not feel a desire to

escape; but of escape there are but three methods — two chimerical and a

third real. The first two are the dram-shop and the church, debauchery

of the body or debauchery of the mind; the third is social revolution.

Hence I conclude this last will be much more potent than all the

theological propagandism of the freethinkers to destroy to their last

vestige the religious beliefs and dissolute habits of the people,

beliefs and habits much more intimately connected than is generally

supposed. In substituting for the at once illusory and brutal enjoyments

of bodily and spiritual licentiousness the enjoyments, as refined as

they are real, of humanity developed in each and all, the social

revolution alone will have the power to close at the same time all the

dram-shops and all the churches.

Till then the people. Taken as a whole, will believe; and, if they have

no reason to believe, they will have at least a right.

There is a class of people who, if they do not believe, must at least

make a semblance of believing. This class comprising all the tormentors,

all the oppressors, and all the exploiters of humanity; priests,

monarchs, statesmen, soldiers, public and private financiers, officials

of all sorts, policemen, gendarmes, jailers and executioners,

monopolists, capitalists, tax-leeches, contractors and landlords,

lawyers, economists, politicians of all shades, down to the smallest

vendor of sweetmeats, all will repeat in unison those words of Voltaire:

“If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.” For, you

understand, “the people must have a religion.” That is the safety-valve.

There exists, finally, a somewhat numerous class of honest but timid

souls who, too intelligent to take the Christian dogmas seriously,

reject them in detail, but have neither the courage nor the strength nor

the necessary resolution to summarily renounce them altogether. They

abandon to your criticism all the special absurdities of religion, they

turn up their noses at all the miracles, but they cling desperately to

the principal absurdity; the source of all the others, to the miracle

that explains and justifies all the other miracles, the existence of

God. Their God is not the vigorous and powerful being, the brutally

positive God of theology. It is a nebulous, diaphanous, illusory being

that vanishes into nothing at the first attempt to grasp it; it is a

mirage, an ignis fatuus; that neither warms nor illuminates. And yet

they hold fast to it, and believe that, were it to disappear, all would

disappear with it. They are uncertain, sickly souls, who have lost their

reckoning in the present civilisation, belonging to neither the present

nor the future, pale phantoms eternally suspended between heaven and

earth, and occupying exactly the same position between the politics of

the bourgeois and the Socialism of the proletariat. They have neither

the power nor the wish nor the determination to follow out their

thought, and they waste their time and pains in constantly endeavouring

to reconcile the irreconcilable. In public life these are known as

bourgeois Socialists.

With them, or against them, discussion is out of the question. They are

too puny.

But there are a few illustrious men of whom no one will dare to speak

without respect, and whose vigorous health, strength of mind, and good

intention no one will dream of calling in question. I need only cite the

names of Mazzini, Michelet, Quinet, John Stuart Mill. [2] Generous and

strong souls, great hearts, great minds, great writers, and the first

the heroic and revolutionary regenerator of a great nation, they are all

apostles of idealism and bitter despisers and adversaries of

materialism, and consequently of Socialism also, in philosophy as well

as in politics.

Against them, then, we must discuss this question.

First, let it be remarked that not one of the illustrious men I have

just named nor any other idealistic thinker of any consequence in our

day has given any attention to the logical side of this question

properly speaking. Not one has tried to settle philosophically the

possibility of the divine salto mortale; from the pure and eternal

regions of spirit into the mire of the material world. Have they feared

to approach this irreconcilable contradiction and despaired of solving

it after the failures of the greatest geniuses of history, or have they

looked upon it as already sufficiently well settled? That is their

secret. The fact is that they have neglected the theoretical

demonstration of the existence of a God, and have developed only its

practical motives and consequences. They have treated it as a fact

universally accepted, and, as such, no longer susceptible of any doubt

whatever, for sole proof thereof limiting themselves to the

establishment of the antiquity and this very universality of the belief

in God.

This imposing unanimity, in the eyes of many illustrious men and writers

to quote only the most famous of them who eloquently expressed it,

Joseph de Maistre and the great Italian patriot, Giuseppe Mazzini — is

of more value than all the demonstrations of science; and if the

reasoning of a small number of logical and even very powerful, but

isolated, thinkers is against it, so much the worse, they say, for these

thinkers and their logic, for universal consent, the general and

primitive adoption of an idea, has always been considered the most

triumphant testimony to its truth. The I sentiment of the whole world, a

conviction that is found and maintained always and everywhere, cannot be

mistaken; it must have its root in a necessity absolutely inherent in

the very nature of man. And since it has been established that all

peoples, past and present, have believed and still believe in the

existence of God, it is clear that those who have the misfortune to

doubt it, whatever the logic that led them to this doubt, are abnormal

exceptions, monsters.

Thus, then, the antiquity; and universality; of a belief should be

regarded, contrary to all science and all logic, as sufficient and

unimpeachable proof of its truth. Why?

Until the days of Copernicus and Galileo everybody believed that the sun

revolved about the earth. Was not everybody mistaken? What is more

ancient and more universal than slavery? Cannibalism perhaps. From the

origin of historic society down to the present day there has been always

and everywhere exploitation of the compulsory labour of the masses —

slaves, serfs, or wage workers — by some dominant minority; oppression

of the people by the Church and by the State. Must it be concluded that

this exploitation and this oppression are necessities absolutely

inherent in the very existence of human society? These are examples

which show that the argument of the champions of God proves nothing.

Nothing, in fact, is as universal or as ancient as the iniquitous and

absurd; truth and justice, on the contrary, are the least universal, the

youngest features in the development of human society. In this fact,

too, lies the explanation of a constant historical phenomenon — namely,

the persecution of which those who first proclaim the truth have been

and continue to be the objects at the hands of the official, privileged,

and interested representatives of “universal” and “ancient” beliefs, and

often also at the hands of the same masses who, after having tortured

them, always end by adopting their ideas and rendering them victorious.

To us materialists and Revolutionary Socialists, there is nothing

astonishing or terrifying in this historical phenomenon. Strong in our

conscience, in our love of truth at all hazards, in that passion for

logic which of itself alone constitutes a great power and outside of

which there is no thought; strong in our passion for justice and in our

unshakeable faith in the triumph of humanity over all theoretical and

practical bestialities; strong, finally, in the mutual confidence and

support given each other by the few who share our convictions — we

resign ourselves to all the consequences of this historical phenomenon,

in which we see the manifestation of a social law as natural, as

necessary, and as invariable as all the other laws which govern the

world.

This law is a logical, inevitable consequence of the animal origin; of

human society; for in face of all the scientific, physiological,

psychological, and historical proofs accumulated at the present day, as

well as in face of the exploits of the Germans conquering France, which

now furnish so striking a demonstration thereof, it is no longer

possible to really doubt this origin. But from the moment that this

animal origin of man is accepted, all is explained. History then appears

to us as the revolutionary negation, now slow, apathetic, sluggish, now

passionate and powerful, of the past. It consists precisely in the

progressive negation of the primitive animality of man by the

development of his humanity. Man, a wild beast, cousin of the gorilla,

has emerged from the profound darkness of animal instinct into the light

of the mind, which explains in a wholly natural way all his past

mistakes and partially consoles us for his present errors. He has gone

out from animal slavery, and passing through divine slavery, a temporary

condition between his animality and his humanity, he is now marching on

to the conquest and realisation of human liberty. Whence it results that

the antiquity of a belief, of an idea, far from proving anything in its

favour, ought, on the contrary, to lead us to suspect it. For behind us

is our animality and before us our humanity; human light, the only thing

that can warm and enlighten us, the only thing that can emancipate us,

give us dignity, freedom, and happiness, and realise fraternity among

us, is never at the beginning, but, relatively to the epoch in which we

live, always at the end of history. Let us, then, never look back, let

us look ever forward; for forward is our sunlight, forward our

salvation. If it is justifiable, and even useful and necessary, to turn

back to study our past, it is only in order to establish what we have

been and what we must no longer be, what we have believed and thought

and what we must no longer believe or think, what we have done and what

we must do nevermore.

So much for antiquity. As for the universality; of an error, it proves

but one thing — the similarity, if not the perfect identity, of human

nature in all ages and under all skies. And, since it is established

that all peoples, at all periods of their life, have believed and still

believe in God, we must simply conclude that the divine idea, an outcome

of ourselves, is an error historically necessary in the development of

humanity, and ask why and how it was produced in history and why an

immense majority of the human race still accept it as a truth.

Until we shall account to ourselves for the manner in which the idea of

a supernatural or divine world was developed and had to be developed in

the historical evolution of the human conscience, all our scientific

conviction of its absurdity will be in vain; until then we shall never

succeed in destroying it in the opinion of the majority, because we

shall never be able to attack it in the very depths of the human being

where it had birth. Condemned to a fruitless struggle, without issue and

without end, we should for ever have to content ourselves with fighting

it solely on the surface, in its innumerable manifestations, whose

absurdity will be scarcely beaten down by the blows of common sense

before it will reappear in a new form no less nonsensical. While the

root of all the absurdities that torment the world, belief in God,

remains intact, it will never fail to bring forth new offspring. Thus,

at the present time, in certain sections of the highest society,

Spiritualism tends to establish itself upon the ruins of Christianity.

It is not only in the interest of the masses, it is in that of the

health of our own minds, that we should strive to understand the

historic genesis, the succession of causes which developed and produced

the idea of God in the consciousness of men. In vain shall we call and

believe ourselves Atheists, until we comprehend these causes, for, until

then, we shall always suffer ourselves to be more or less governed by

the clamours of this universal conscience whose secret we have not

discovered; and, considering the natural weakness of even the strongest

individual against the all-powerful influence of the social surroundings

that trammel him, we are always in danger of relapsing sooner or later,

in one way or another, into the abyss of religious absurdity. Examples

of these shameful conversions are frequent in society today.

II

I have stated the chief practical reason of the power still exercised

today over the masses by religious beliefs. These mystical tendencies do

not signify in man so much an aberration of mind as a deep discontent at

Heart. They are the instinctive and passionate protest of the human

being against the narrowness, the platitudes, the sorrows, and the shame

of a wretched existence. For this malady, I have already said, there is

but one remedy — Social Revolution.

In the meantime I have endeavored to show the causes responsible for the

birth and historical development of religious hallucinations in the

human conscience. Here it is my purpose to treat this question of the

existence of a God, or of the divine origin of the world and of man,

solely from the standpoint of its moral and social utility, and I shall

say only a few words, to better explain my thought, regarding the

theoretical grounds of this belief.

All religions, with their gods, their demigods, and their prophets,

their messiahs and their saints, were created by the credulous fancy of

men who had not attained the full development and full possession of

their faculties. Consequently, the religious heaven is nothing but a

mirage in which man, exalted by ignorance and faith, discovers his own

image, but enlarged and reversed — that is, divinized. The history of

religion, of the birth, grandeur, and decline of the gods who have

succeeded one another in human belief, is nothing, therefore, but the

development of the collective intelligence and conscience of mankind. As

fast as they discovered, in the course of their historically progressive

advance, either in themselves or in external nature, a power, a quality,

or even any great defect whatever, they attributed them to their gods,

after having exaggerated and enlarged them beyond measure, after the

manner of children, by an act of their religious fancy. Thanks to this

modesty and pious generosity of believing and credulous men, heaven has

grown rich with the spoils of the earth, and, by a necessary

consequence, the richer heaven became, the more wretched became humanity

and the earth. God once installed, he was naturally proclaimed the

cause, reason, arbiter and absolute disposer of all things: the world

thenceforth was nothing, God was all; and man, his real creator, after

having unknowingly extracted him from the void, bowed down before him,

worshipped him, and avowed himself his creature and his slave.

Christianity is precisely the religion par excellence, because it

exhibits and manifests, to the fullest extent, the very nature and

essence of every religious system, which is the impoverishment,

enslavement, and annihilation of humanity for the benefit of divinity.

God being everything, the real world and man are nothing. God being

truth, justice, goodness, beauty, power, and life, man is falsehood,

iniquity, evil, ugliness, impotence, and death. God being master, man is

the slave. Incapable of finding justice, truth, and eternal life by his

own effort, he can attain them only through a divine revelation. But

whoever says revelation says revealers, messiahs, prophets, priests, and

legislators inspired by God himself; and these, once recognized as the

representatives of divinity on earth, as the holy instructors of

humanity, chosen by God himself to direct it in the path of salvation,

necessarily exercise absolute power. All men owe them passive and

unlimited obedience; for against the divine reason there is no human

reason, and against the justice of God no terrestrial justice holds.

Slaves of God, men must also be slaves of Church and State, in so far as

the State is consecrated by the Church. This truth Christianity, better

than all other religions that exist or have existed, understood, not

excepting even the old Oriental religions, which included only distinct

and privileged nations, while Christianity aspires to embrace entire

humanity; and this truth Roman Catholicism, alone among all the

Christian sects, has proclaimed and realized with rigorous logic. That

is why Christianity is the absolute religion, the final religion; why

the Apostolic and Roman Church is the only consistent, legitimate, and

divine church.

With all due respect, then, to the metaphysicians and religious

idealists, philosophers, politicians, or poets: The idea of God implies

the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive

negation of human liberty, and necessarily ends in the enslavement of

mankind, both in theory and practice.

Unless, then, we desire the enslavement and degradation of mankind, as

the Jesuits desire it, as the mômiers, pietists, or Protestant

Methodists desire it, we may not, must not make the slightest concession

either to the God of theology or to the God of metaphysics. He who, in

this mystical alphabet, begins with A will inevitably end with Z; he who

desires to worship God must harbor no childish illusions about the

matter, but bravely renounce his liberty and humanity.

If God is, man is a slave; now, man can and must be free; then, God does

not exist.

I defy anyone whomsoever to avoid this circle; now, therefore, let all

choose.

Is it necessary to point out to what extent and in what manner religions

debase and corrupt the people? They destroy their reason, the principal

instrument of human emancipation, and reduce them to imbecility, the

essential condition of their slavery. They dishonor human labor, and

make it a sign and source of servitude. They kill the idea and sentiment

of human justice, ever tipping the balance to the side of triumphant

knaves, privileged objects of divine indulgence. They kill human pride

and dignity, protecting only the cringing and humble. They stifle in the

heart of nations every feeling of human fraternity, filling it with

divine cruelty instead.

All religions are cruel, all founded on blood; for all rest principally

on the idea of sacrifice — that is, on the perpetual immolation of

humanity to the insatiable vengeance of divinity. In this bloody mystery

man is always the victim, and the priest — a man also, but a man

privileged by grace — is the divine executioner. That explains why the

priests of all religions, the best, the most humane, the gentlest,

almost always have at the bottom of their hearts — and, if not in their

hearts, in their imaginations, in their minds (and we know the fearful

influence of either on the hearts of men) — something cruel and

sanguinary.

None know all this better than our illustrious contemporary idealists.

They are learned men, who know history by heart; and, as they are at the

same time living men, great souls penetrated with a sincere and profound

love for the welfare of humanity, they have cursed and branded all these

misdeeds, all these crimes of religion with an eloquence unparalleled.

They reject with indignation all solidarity with the God of positive

religions and with his representatives, past, present, and on earth.

The God whom they adore, or whom they think they adore, is distinguished

from the real gods of history precisely in this — that he is not at all

a positive god, defined in any way whatever, theologically or even

metaphysically. He is neither the supreme being of Robespierre and J. J.

Rousseau, nor the pantheistic god of Spinoza, nor even the at once

immanent, transcendental, and very equivocal god of Hegel. They take

good care not to give him any positive definition whatever, feeling very

strongly that any definition would subject him to the dissolving power

of criticism. They will not say whether he is a personal or impersonal

god, whether he created or did not create the world; they will not even

speak of his divine providence. All that might compromise him. They

content themselves with saying “God” and nothing more. But, then, what

is their God? Not even an idea; it is an aspiration.

It is the generic name of all that seems grand, good, beautiful, noble,

human to them. But why, then, do they not say, “Man.” Ah! because King

William of Prussia and Napoleon III, and all their compeers are likewise

men: which bothers them very much. Real humanity presents a mixture of

all that is most sublime and beautiful with all that is vilest and most

monstrous in the world. How do they get over this? Why, they call one

divine and the other bestial, representing divinity and animality as two

poles, between which they place humanity. They either will not or cannot

understand that these three terms are really but one, and that to

separate them is to destroy them.

They are not strong on logic, and one might say that they despise it.

That is what distinguishes them from the pantheistical and deistical

metaphysicians, and gives their ideas the character of a practical

idealism, drawing its inspiration much less from the severe development

of a thought than from the experiences, I might almost say the emotions,

historical and collective as well as individual, of life. This gives

their propaganda an appearance of wealth and vital power, but an

appearance only; for life itself becomes sterile when paralyzed by a

logical contradiction.

This contradiction lies here: they wish God, and they wish humanity.

They persist in connecting two terms which, once separated, can come

together again only to destroy each other. They say in a single breath:

“God and the liberty of man,” “God and the dignity, justice, equality,

fraternity, prosperity of men” — regardless of the fatal logic by virtue

of which, if God exists, all these things are condemned to

non-existence. For, if God is, he is necessarily the eternal, supreme,

absolute master, and, if such a master exists, man is a slave; now, if

he is a slave, neither justice, nor equality, nor fraternity, nor

prosperity are possible for him. In vain, flying in the face of good

sense and all the teachings of history, do they represent their God as

animated by the tenderest love of human liberty: a master, whoever he

may be and however liberal he may desire to show himself, remains none

the less always a master. His existence necessarily implies the slavery

of all that is beneath him. Therefore, if God existed, only in one way

could he serve human liberty — by ceasing to exist.

A jealous lover of human liberty, and deeming it the absolute condition

of all that we admire and respect in humanity, I reverse the phrase of

Voltaire, and say that, if God really existed, it would be necessary to

abolish him.

The severe logic that dictates these words is far too evident to require

a development of this argument. And it seems to me impossible that the

illustrious men, whose names so celebrated and so justly respected I

have cited, should not have been struck by it themselves, and should not

have perceived the contradiction in which they involve themselves in

speaking of God and human liberty at once. To have disregarded it, they

must have considered this inconsistency or logical license practically

necessary to humanity’s well-being.

Perhaps, too, while speaking of liberty as something very respectable

and very dear in their eyes, they give the term a meaning quite

different from the conception entertained by us, materialists and

Revolutionary Socialists. Indeed, they never speak of it without

immediately adding another word, authority — a word and a thing which we

detest with all our heart.

What is authority? Is it the inevitable power of the natural laws which

manifest themselves in the necessary concatenation and succession of

phenomena in the physical and social worlds? Indeed, against these laws

revolt is not only forbidden — it is even impossible. We may

misunderstand them or not know them at all, but we cannot disobey them;

because they constitute the basis and fundamental conditions of our

existence; they envelop us, penetrate us, regulate all our movements,

thoughts, and acts; even when we believe that we disobey them, we only

show their omnipotence.

Yes, we are absolutely the slaves of these laws. But in such slavery

there is no humiliation, or, rather, it is not slavery at all. For

slavery supposes an external master, a legislator outside of him whom he

commands, while these laws are not outside of us; they are inherent in

us; they constitute our being, our whole being, physically,

intellectually, and morally: we live, we breathe, we act, we think, we

wish only through these laws. Without them we are nothing, we are not.

Whence, then, could we derive the power and the wish to rebel against

them?

In his relation to natural laws but one liberty is possible to man —

that of recognizing and applying them on an ever-extending scale in

conformity with the object of collective and individual emancipation or

humanization which he pursues. These laws, once recognized, exercise an

authority which is never disputed by the mass of men. One must, for

instance, be at bottom either a fool or a theologian or at least a

metaphysician, jurist, or bourgeois economist to rebel against the law

by which twice two make four. One must have faith to imagine that fire

will not burn nor water drown, except, indeed, recourse be had to some

subterfuge founded in its turn on some other natural law. But these

revolts, or, rather, these attempts at or foolish fancies of an

impossible revolt, are decidedly, the exception; for, in general, it may

be said that the mass of men, in their daily lives, acknowledge the

government of common sense — that is, of the sum of the natural laws

generally recognized — in an almost absolute fashion.

The great misfortune is that a large number of natural laws, already

established as such by science, remain unknown to the masses, thanks to

the watchfulness of these tutelary governments that exist, as we know,

only for the good of the people. There is another difficulty — namely,

that the major portion of the natural laws connected with the

development of human society, which are quite as necessary, invariable,

fatal, as the laws that govern the physical world, have not been duly

established and recognized by science itself.

Once they shall have been recognized by science, and then from science,

by means of an extensive system of popular education and instruction,

shall have passed into the consciousness of all, the question of liberty

will be entirely solved. The most stubborn authorities must admit that

then there will be no need either of political organization or direction

or legislation, three things which, whether they emanate from the will

of the sovereign or from the vote of a parliament elected by universal

suffrage, and even should they conform to the system of natural laws —

which has never been the case and never will be the case — are always

equally fatal and hostile to the liberty of the masses from the very

fact that they impose upon them a system of external and therefore

despotic laws.

The liberty of man consists solely in this: that he obeys natural laws

because he has himself recognized them as such, and not because they

have been externally imposed upon him by any extrinsic will whatever,

divine or human, collective or individual.

Suppose a learned academy, composed of the most illustrious

representatives of science; suppose this academy charged with

legislation for and the organization of society, and that, inspired only

by the purest love of truth, it frames none but laws in absolute harmony

with the latest discoveries of science. Well, I maintain, for my part,

that such legislation and such organization would be a monstrosity, and

that for two reasons: first, that human science is always and

necessarily imperfect, and that, comparing what it has discovered with

what remains to be discovered, we may say that it is still in its

cradle. So that were we to try to force the practical life of men,

collective as well as individual, into strict and exclusive conformity

with the latest data of science, we should condemn society as well as

individuals to suffer martyrdom on a bed of Procrustes, which would soon

end by dislocating and stifling them, life ever remaining an infinitely

greater thing than science.

The second reason is this: a society which should obey legislation

emanating from a scientific academy, not because it understood itself

the rational character of this legislation (in which case the existence

of the academy would become useless), but because this legislation,

emanating from the academy, was imposed in the name of a science which

it venerated without comprehending — such a society would be a society,

not of men, but of brutes. It would be a second edition of those

missions in Paraguay which submitted so long to the government of the

Jesuits. It would surely and rapidly descend to the lowest stage of

idiocy.

But there is still a third reason which would render such a government

impossible — namely that a scientific academy invested with a

sovereignty, so to speak, absolute, even if it were composed of the most

illustrious men, would infallibly and soon end in its own moral and

intellectual corruption. Even today, with the few privileges allowed

them, such is the history of all academies. The greatest scientific

genius, from the moment that he becomes an academician, an officially

licensed savant, inevitably lapses into sluggishness. He loses his

spontaneity, his revolutionary hardihood, and that troublesome and

savage energy characteristic of the grandest geniuses, ever called to

destroy old tottering worlds and lay the foundations of new. He

undoubtedly gains in politeness, in utilitarian and practical wisdom,

what he loses in power of thought. In a word, he becomes corrupted.

It is the characteristic of privilege and of every privileged position

to kill the mind and heart of men. The privileged man, whether

politically or economically, is a man depraved in mind and heart. That

is a social law which admits of no exception, and is as applicable to

entire nations as to classes, corporations, and individuals. It is the

law of equality, the supreme condition of liberty and humanity. The

principal object of this treatise is precisely to demonstrate this truth

in all the manifestations of human life.

A scientific body to which had been confided the government of society

would soon end by devoting itself no longer to science at all, but to

quite another affair; and that affair, as in the case of all established

powers, would be its own eternal perpetuation by rendering the society

confided to its care ever more stupid and consequently more in need of

its government and direction.

But that which is true of scientific academies is also true of all

constituent and legislative assemblies, even those chosen by universal

suffrage. In the latter case they may renew their composition, it is

true, but this does not prevent the formation in a few years’ time of a

body of politicians, privileged in fact though not in law, who, devoting

themselves exclusively to the direction of the public affairs of a

country, finally form a sort of political aristocracy or oligarchy.

Witness the United States of America and Switzerland.

Consequently, no external legislation and no authority — one, for that

matter, being inseparable from the other, and both tending to the

servitude of society and the degradation of the legislators themselves.

Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought.

In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker;

concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect

or engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such

a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor the

savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with

all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their

knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and

censure. I do not content myself with consulting a single authority in

any special branch; I consult several; I compare their opinions, and

choose that which seems to me the soundest. But I recognize no

infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever

respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such or such an

individual, I have no absolute faith in any person. Such a faith would

be fatal to my reason, to my liberty, and even to the success of my

undertakings; it would immediately transform me into a stupid slave, an

instrument of the will and interests of others.

If I bow before the authority of the specialists and avow my readiness

to follow, to a certain extent and as long as may seem to me necessary,

their indications and even their directions, it is because their

authority is imposed upon me by no one, neither by men nor by God.

Otherwise I would repel them with horror, and bid the devil take their

counsels, their directions, and their services, certain that they would

make me pay, by the loss of my liberty and self-respect, for such scraps

of truth, wrapped in a multitude of lies, as they might give me.

I bow before the authority of special men because it is imposed upon me

by my own reason. I am conscious of my inability to grasp, in all its

details and positive developments, any very large portion of human

knowledge. The greatest intelligence would not be equal to a

comprehension of the whole. Thence results, for science as well as for

industry, the necessity of the division and association of labor. I

receive and I give — such is human life. Each directs and is directed in

his turn. Therefore there is no fixed and constant authority, but a

continual exchange of mutual, temporary, and, above all, voluntary

authority and subordination.

This same reason forbids me, then, to recognize a fixed, constant, and

universal authority, because there is no universal man, no man capable

of grasping in that wealth of detail, without which the application of

science to life is impossible, all the sciences, all the branches of

social life. And if such universality could ever be realized in a single

man, and if he wished to take advantage thereof to impose his authority

upon us, it would be necessary to drive this man out of society, because

his authority would inevitably reduce all the others to slavery and

imbecility. I do not think that society ought to maltreat men of genius

as it has done hitherto; but neither do I think it should indulge them

too far, still less accord them any privileges or exclusive rights

whatsoever; and that for three reasons: first, because it would often

mistake a charlatan for a man of genius; second, because, through such a

system of privileges, it might transform into a charlatan even a real

man of genius, demoralize him, and degrade him; and, finally, because it

would establish a master over itself.

To sum up. We recognize, then, the absolute authority of science,

because the sole object of science is the mental reproduction, as

well-considered and systematic as possible, of the natural laws inherent

in the material, intellectual, and moral life of both the physical and

the social worlds, these two worlds constituting, in fact, but one and

the same natural world. Outside of this only legitimate authority,

legitimate because rational and in harmony with human liberty, we

declare all other authorities false, arbitrary and fatal.

We recognize the absolute authority of science, but we reject the

infallibility and universality of the savant. In our church — if I may

be permitted to use for a moment an expression which I so detest: Church

and State are my two bêtes noires — in our church, as in the Protestant

church, we have a chief, an invisible Christ, science; and, like the

Protestants, more logical even than the Protestants, we will suffer

neither pope, nor council, nor conclaves of infallible cardinals, nor

bishops, nor even priests. Our Christ differs from the Protestant and

Christian Christ in this — that the latter is a personal being, ours

impersonal; the Christian Christ, already completed in an eternal past,

presents himself as a perfect being, while the completion and perfection

of our Christ, science, are ever in the future: which is equivalent to

saying that they will never be realized. Therefore, in recognizing

absolute science as the only absolute authority, we in no way compromise

our liberty.

I mean by the words “absolute science,” which would reproduce ideally,

to its fullest extent and in all its infinite detail, the universe, the

system or coordination of all the natural laws manifested by the

incessant development of the world. It is evident that such a science,

the sublime object of all the efforts of the human mind, will never be

fully and absolutely realized. Our Christ, then, will remain eternally

unfinished, which must considerably take down the pride of his licensed

representatives among us. Against that God the Son in whose name they

assume to impose upon us their insolent and pedantic authority, we

appeal to God the Father, who is the real world, real life, of which he

(the Son) is only a too imperfect expression, whilst we real beings,

living, working, struggling, loving, aspiring, enjoying, and suffering,

are its immediate representatives.

But, while rejecting the absolute, universal, and infallible authority

of men of science, we willingly bow before the respectable, although

relative, quite temporary, and very restricted authority of the

representatives of special sciences, asking nothing better than to

consult them by turns, and very grateful for such precious information

as they may extend to us, on condition of their willingness to receive

from us on occasions when, and concerning matters about which, we are

more learned than they. In general, we ask nothing better than to see

men endowed with great knowledge, great experience, great minds, and,

above all, great hearts, exercise over us a natural and legitimate

influence, freely accepted, and never imposed in the name of any

official authority whatsoever, celestial or terrestrial. We accept all

natural authorities and all influences of fact, but none of right; for

every authority or every influence of right, officially imposed as such,

becoming directly an oppression and a falsehood, would inevitably impose

upon us, as I believe I have sufficiently shown, slavery and absurdity.

In a word, we reject all legislation, all authority, and all privileged,

licensed, official, and legal influence, even though arising from

universal suffrage, convinced that it can turn only to the advantage of

a dominant minority of exploiters against the interests of the immense

majority in subjection to them.

This is the sense in which we are really Anarchists.

The modern idealists understand authority in quite a different way.

Although free from the traditional superstitions of all the existing

positive religions, they nevertheless attach to this idea of authority a

divine, an absolute meaning. This authority is not that of a truth

miraculously revealed, nor that of a truth rigorously and scientifically

demonstrated. They base it to a slight extent upon quasi-philosophical

reasoning, and to a large extent also on sentiment, ideally, abstractly

poetical. Their religion is, as it were, a last attempt to divinise all

that constitutes humanity in men.

This is just the opposite of the work that we are doing. On behalf of

human liberty, dignity and prosperity, we believe it our duty to recover

from heaven the goods which it has stolen and return them to earth.

They, on the contrary, endeavouring to commit a final religiously heroic

larceny, would restore to heaven, that divine robber, finally unmasked,

the grandest, finest and noblest of humanity’s possessions. It is now

the freethinker’s turn to pillage heaven by their audacious piety and

scientific analysis.

The idealists undoubtedly believe that human ideas and deeds, in order

to exercise greater authority among men, must be invested with a divine

sanction. How is this sanction manifested? Not by a miracle, as in the

positive religions, but by the very grandeur or sanctity of the ideas

and deeds: whatever is grand, whatever is beautiful, whatever is noble,

whatever is just, is considered divine. In this new religious cult every

man inspired by these ideas, by these deeds, becomes a priest, directly

consecrated by God himself. And the proof? He needs none beyond the very

grandeur of the ideas which he expresses and the deeds which he

performs. These are so holy that they can have been inspired only by

God.

Such, in so few words, is their whole philosophy: a philosophy of

sentiments, not of real thoughts, a sort of metaphysical pietism. This

seems harmless, but it is not so at all, and the very precise, very

narrow and very barren doctrine hidden under the intangible vagueness of

these poetic forms leads to the same disastrous results that all the

positive religions lead to — namely, the most complete negation of human

liberty and dignity.

To proclaim as divine all that is grand, just, noble, and beautiful in

humanity is to tacitly admit that humanity of itself would have been

unable to produce it — that is, that, abandoned to itself, its own

nature is miserable, iniquitous, base, and ugly. Thus we come back to

the essence of all religion — in other words, to the disparagement of

humanity for the greater glory of divinity. And from the moment that the

natural inferiority of man and his fundamental incapacity to rise by his

own effort, unaided by any divine inspiration, to the comprehension of

just and true ideas, are admitted, it becomes necessary to admit also

all the theological, political, and social consequences of the positive

religions. From the moment that God, the perfect and supreme being, is

posited face to face with humanity, divine mediators, the elect, the

inspired of God spring from the earth to enlighten, direct, and govern

in his name the human race.

May we not suppose that all men are equally inspired by God? Then,

surely, there is no further use for mediators. But this supposition is

impossible, because it is too clearly contradicted by the facts. It

would compel us to attribute to divine inspiration all the absurdities

and errors which appear, and all the horrors, follies, base deeds, and

cowardly actions which are committed, in the world. But perhaps, then,

only a few men are divinely inspired, the great men of history, the

virtuous geniuses, as the illustrious Italian citizen and prophet,

Giuseppe Mazzini, called them. Immediately inspired by God himself and

supported upon universal consent expressed by popular suffrage — Dio e

Popolo — such as these should be called to the government of human

societies.[3]

But here we are again fallen back under the yoke of Church and State. It

is true that in this new organization, indebted for its existence, like

all the old political organisations, to the grace of God, but supported

this time — at least so far as form is concerned, as a necessary

concession to the spirit of modern times, and just as in the preambles

of the imperial decrees of Napoleon III. — on the (pretended) will of

the people, the Church will no longer call itself Church; it will call

itself School. What matters it? On the benches of this School will be

seated not children only; there will be found the eternal minor, the

pupil confessedly forever incompetent to pass his examinations, rise to

the knowledge of his teachers, and dispense with their discipline — the

people.[4]

The State will no longer call itself Monarchy; it will call itself

Republic: but it will be none the less the State — that is, a tutelage

officially and regularly established by a minority of competent men, men

of virtuous genius or talent, who will watch and guide the conduct of

this great, incorrigible, and terrible child, the people. The professors

of the School and the functionaries of the State will call themselves

republicans; but they will be none the less tutors, shepherds, and the

people will remain what they have been hitherto from all eternity, a

flock. Beware of shearers, for where there is a flock there necessarily

must be shepherds also to shear and devour it.

The people, in this system, will be the perpetual scholar and pupil. In

spite of its sovereignty, wholly fictitious, it will continue to serve

as the instrument of thoughts, wills, and consequently interests not its

own. Between this situation and what we call liberty, the only real

liberty, there is an abyss. It will be the old oppression and old

slavery under new forms; and where there is slavery there is misery,

brutishness, real social materialism, among the privileged classes as

well as among the masses.

In defying human things the idealists always end in the triumph of a

brutal materialism. And this for a very simple reason: the divine

evaporates and rises to its own country, heaven, while the brutal alone

remains actually on earth.

Yes, the necessary consequence of theoretical idealism is practically

the most brutal materialism; not, undoubtedly, among those who sincerely

preach it — the usual result as far as they are concerned being that

they are constrained to see all their efforts struck with sterility —

but among those who try to realise their precepts in life, and in all

society so far as it allows itself to be dominated by idealistic

doctrines.

To demonstrate this general fact, which may appear strange at first, but

which explains itself naturally enough upon further reflection,

historical proofs are not lacking.

Compare the last two civilisations of the ancient world — the Greek and

the Roman. Which is the most materialistic, the most natural, in its

point of departure, and the most humanly ideal in its results?

Undoubtedly the Greek civilisation. Which on the contrary, is the most

abstractly ideal in its point of departure — sacrificing the material

liberty of the man to the ideal liberty of the citizen, represented by

the abstraction of judicial law, and the natural development of human

society to the abstraction of the State — and which became nevertheless

the most brutal in its consequences? The Roman civilisation, certainly.

It is true that the Greek civilisation, like all the ancient

civilisations, including that of Rome, was exclusively national and

based on slavery. But, in spite of these two immense defects, the former

none the less conceived and realised the idea of humanity; it ennobled

and really idealised the life of men; it transformed human herds into

free associations of free men; it created through liberty the sciences,

the arts, a poetry, an immortal philosophy, and the primary concepts of

human respect. With political and social liberty, it created free

thought. At the close of the Middle Ages, during the period of the

Renaissance, the fact that some Greek emigrants brought a few of those

immortal books into Italy sufficed to resuscitate life, liberty,

thought, humanity, buried in the dark dungeon of Catholicism. Human

emancipation, that is the name of the Greek civilisation. And the name

of the Roman civilisation? Conquest, with all its brutal consequences.

And its last word? The omnipotence of the Caesars. Which means the

degradation and enslavement of nations and of men.

Today even, what is it that kills, what is it that crushes brutally,

materially, in all European countries, liberty and humanity? It is the

triumph of the Caesarian or Roman principle.

Compare now two modern civilisations — the Italian and the German. The

first undoubtedly represents, in its general character, materialism; the

second, on the contrary, represents idealism in its most abstract, most

pure, and most transcendental form. Let us see what are the practical

fruits of the one and the other.

Italy has already rendered immense services to the cause of human

emancipation. She was the first to resuscitate and widely apply the

principle of liberty in Europe, and to restore to humanity its titles to

nobility: industry, commerce, poetry, the arts, the positive sciences,

and free thought. Crushed since by three centuries of imperial and papal

despotism, and dragged in the mud by her governing bourgeoisie, she

reappears today, it is true, in a very degraded condition in comparison

with what she once was. And yet how much she differs from Germany! In

Italy, in spite of this decline — temporary let us hope — one may live

and breathe humanly, surrounded by a people which seems to be born for

liberty. Italy, even bourgeois Italy, can point with pride to men like

Mazzini and Garibaldi..In Germany one breathes the atmosphere of an

immense political and social slavery, philosophically explained and

accepted by a great people with deliberate resignation and free will.

Her heroes — I speak always of present Germany, not of the Germany of

the future; of aristocratic, bureaucratic, political and bourgeoisie

Germany, not of the Germany of the prolétaires — her heroes are quite

the opposite of Mazzini and Garibaldi: they are William I., that

ferocious and ingenuous representative of the Protestant God, Messrs,

Bismarck and Moltke, Generals Manteuffel and Werder. In all her

international relations Germany, from the beginning of her existence,

has been slowly, systematically invading, conquering, ever ready to

extend her own voluntary enslavement into the territory of her

neighbours; and, since her definitive establishment as a unitary power,

she has become a menace, a danger to the liberty of entire Europe. Today

Germany is servility brutal and triumphant.

To show how theoretical idealism incessantly and inevitably changes into

practical materialism, one needs only to cite the example of all the

Christian Churches, and, naturally, first of all, that of the Apostolic

and Roman Church. What is there more sublime, in the ideal sense, more

disinterested, more separate from all the interests of this earth, than

the doctrine of Christ preached by that Church? And what is there more

brutally materialistic than the constant practice of that same Church

since the eighth century, from which dates her definitive establishment

as a power? What has been and still is the principal object of all her

contests with the sovereigns of Europe? Her temporal goods, her revenues

first, and then her temporal power, her political privileges. We must do

her the justice to acknowledge that she was the first to discover, in

modern history, this incontestable but scarcely Christian truth that

wealth and power, the economic exploitation and the political oppression

of the masses, are the two inseparable terms of the reign of divine

ideality on earth: wealth consolidating and augmenting power, power ever

discovering and creating new sources of wealth, and both assuring,

better than the martyrdom and faith of the apostles, better than divine

grace, the success of the Christian propagandism. This is a historical

truth, and the Protestant Churches do not fail to recognise it either. I

speak, of course, of the independent churches of England, America, and

Switzerland, not of the subjected churches of Germany. The latter have

no initiative of their own; they do what their masters, their temporal

sovereigns, who are at the same time their spiritual chieftains, order

them to do, It is well known that the Protestant propagandism,

especially in England and America, is very intimately connected with the

propagandism of the material, commercial interests of those two great

nations; and it is known also that the objects of the latter

propagandism is not at all the enrichment and material prosperity of the

countries into which it penetrates in company with the Word of God, but

rather the exploitation of those countries with a view to the enrichment

and material prosperity of certain classes, which in their own country

are very covetous and very pious at the same time.

In a word, it is not at all difficult to prove, history in hand, that

the Church, that all the Churches, Christian and non-Christian, by the

side of their spiritualistic propagandism, and probably to accelerate

and consolidate the success thereof, have never neglected to organise

themselves into great corporations for the economic exploitation of the

masses under the protection and with the direct and special blessing of

some divinity or other; that all the States, which originally, as we

know, with all their political and judicial institutions and their

dominant and privileged classes, have been only temporal branches of

these various Churches, have likewise had principally in view this same

exploitation for the benefit of lay minorities indirectly sanctioned by

the Church; finally and in general, that the action of the good God and

of all the divine idealities on earth has ended at last, always and

everywhere, in founding the prosperous materialism of the few over the

fanatical and constantly famishing idealism of the masses.

We have a new proof of this in what we see today. With the exception of

the great hearts and great minds whom I have before referred to as

misled, who are today the most obstinate defenders of idealism? In the

first place, all the sovereign courts. In France, until lately, Napoleon

III. and his wife, Madame Eugénie; all their former ministers,

courtiers, and ex-marshals, from Rouher and Bazaine to Fleury and

Piétri; the men and women of this imperial world, who have so completely

idealised and saved France; their journalists and their savants — the

Cssagnacs, the Girardins, the Duvernois, the Veuillots, the Leverriers,

the Dumas; the black phalanx of Jesuits and Jesuitesses in every garb;

the whole upper and middle bourgeoisie of France; the doctrinaire

liberals, and the liberals without doctrine — the Guizots, the Thiers,

the Jules Favres, the Pelletans, and the Jules Simons, all obstinate

defenders of the bourgeoisie exploitation. In Prussia, in Germany,

William I., the present royal demonstrator of the good God on earth; all

his generals, all his officers, Pomeranian and other; all his army,

which, strong in its religious faith, has just conquered France in that

ideal way we know so well. In Russia, the Czar and his court; the

Mouravieffs and the Bergs, all the butchers and pious proselyters of

Poland. Everywhere, in short, religious or philosophical idealism, the

one being but the more or less free translation of the other, serves

today as the flag of material, bloody, and brutal force, of shameless

material exploitation; while, on the contrary, the flag of theoretical

materialism, the red flag of economic equality and social justice, is

raised by the practical idealism of the oppressed and famishing masses,

tending to realise the greatest liberty and the human right of each in

the fraternity of all men on the earth.

Who are the real idealists — the idealists not of abstraction, but of

life, not of heaven, but of earth — and who are the materialists?

It is evident that the essential condition of theoretical or divine

idealism is the sacrifice of logic, of human reason, the renunciation of

science. We see, further, that in defending the doctrines of idealism

one finds himself enlisted perforce in the ranks of the oppressors and

exploiters of the masses. These are two great reasons which, it would

seem, should be sufficient to drive every great mind, every great heart,

from idealism. How does it happen that our illustrious contemporary

idealists, who certainly lack neither mind, nor heart, nor good will,

and who have devoted their entire existence to the service of humanity —

how does it happen that they persist in remaining among the

representatives of a doctrine henceforth condemned and dishonoured?

They must be influenced by a very powerful motive. It cannot be logic or

science, since logic and science have pronounced their verdict against

the idealistic doctrine. No more can it be personal interests, since

these men are infinitely above everything of that sort. It must, then,

be a powerful moral motive. Which? There can be but one. These

illustrious men think, no doubt, that idealistic theories or beliefs are

essentially necessary to the moral dignity and grandeur of man, and that

materialistic theories, on the contrary, reduce him to the level of the

beasts.

And if the truth were just the opposite!

Every development, I have said, implies the negation of its point of

departure. The basis or point of departure, according to the

materialistic school, being material, the negation must be necessarily

ideal. Starting from the totality of the real world, or from what is

abstractly called matter, it logically arrives at the real idealisation

— that is, at the humanisation, at the full and complete emancipation of

society. Per contra; and for the same reason, the basis and point of

departure of the idealistic school being ideal, it arrives necessarily

at the materialisation of society, at the organization of a brutal

despotism and an iniquitous and ignoble exploitation, under the form of

Church and State. The historical development of man according to the

materialistic school, is a progressive ascension; in the idealistic

system it can be nothing but a continuous fall.

Whatever human question we may desire to consider, we always find this

same essential contradiction between the two schools. Thus, as I have

already observed, materialism starts from animality to establish

humanity; idealism starts from divinity to establish slavery and condemn

the masses to an endless animality. Materialism denies free will and

ends in the establishment of liberty; idealism, in the name of human

dignity, proclaims free will, and on the ruins of every liberty founds

authority. Materialism rejects the principle of authority, because it

rightly considers it as the corollary of animality, and because, on the

contrary, the triumph of humanity, the object and chief significance of

history, can be realised only through liberty. In a word, you will

always find the idealists in the very act of practical materialism,

while you will see the materialists pursuing and realising the most

grandly ideal aspirations and thoughts.

History, in the system of the idealists, as I have said, can be nothing

but a continuous fall. They begin by a terrible fall, from which they

never recover — by the salto mortale; from the sublime regions of pure

and absolute idea into matter. And into what kind of matter ! Not into

the matter which is eternally active and mobile, full of properties and

forces, of life and intelligence, as we see it in the real world; but

into abstract matter, impoverished and reduced to absolute misery by the

regular looting of these Prussians of thought, the theologians and

metaphysicians, who have stripped it of everything to give everything to

their emperor, to their God; into the matter which, deprived of all

action and movement of its own, represents, in opposition to the divine

idea, nothing but absolute stupidity, impenetrability, inertia and

immobility.

The fall is so terrible that divinity, the divine person or idea, is

flattened out, loses consciousness of itself, and never more recovers

it. And in this desperate situation it is still forced to work miracles!

For from the moment that matter becomes inert, every movement that takes

place in the world, even the most material, is a miracle, can result

only from a providential intervention, from the action of God upon

matter. And there this poor Divinity, degraded and half annihilated by

its fall, lies some thousands of centuries in this swoon, then awakens

slowly, in vain endeavouring to grasp some vague memory of itself, and

every move that it makes in this direction upon matter becomes a

creation, a new formation, a new miracle. In this way it passes through

all degrees of materiality and bestiality — first, gas, simple or

compound chemical substance, mineral, it then spreads over the earth as

vegetable and animal organization till it concentrates itself in man.

Here it would seem as if it must become itself again, for it lights in

every human being an angelic spark, a particle of its own divine being,

the immortal soul.

How did it manage to lodge a thing absolutely immaterial in a thing

absolutely material; how can the body contain, enclose, limit, paralyse

pure spirit? This, again, is one of those questions which faith alone,

that passionate and stupid affirmation of the absurd, can solve. It is

the greatest of miracles. Here, however, we have only to establish the

effects, the practical consequences of this miracle.

After thousands of centuries of vain efforts to come back to itself,

Divinity, lost and scattered in the matter which it animates and sets in

motion, finds a point of support, a sort of focus for

self-concentration. This focus is man his immortal soul singularly

imprisoned in a mortal body. But each man considered individually is

infinitely too limited, too small, to enclose the divine immensity; it

can contain only a very small particle, immortal like the whole, but

infinitely smaller than the whole. It follows that the divine being, the

absolutely immaterial being, mind, is divisible like matter. Another

mystery whose solution must be left to faith.

If God entire could find lodgment in each man, then each man would be

God. We should have an immense quantity of Gods, each limited by all the

others and yet none the less infinite — a contradiction which would

imply a mutual destruction of men, an impossibility of the existence of

more than one. As for the particles, that is another matter; nothing

more rational, indeed, than that one particle should be limited by

another and be smaller than the whole. Only, here another contradiction

confronts us. To be limited, to be greater and smaller are attributes of

matter, not of mind. According to the materialists, it is true, mind is

only the working of the wholly material organism of man, and the

greatness or smallness of mind depends absolutely on the greater or less

material perfection of the human organism. But these same attributes of

relative limitation and grandeur cannot be attributed to mind as the

idealists conceive it, absolutely immaterial mind, mind existing

independent of matter. There can be neither greater nor smaller nor any

limit among minds, for there is only one mind — God. To add that the

infinitely small and limited particles which constitute human souls are

at the same time immortal is to carry the contradiction to a climax. But

this is a question of faith. Let us pass on.

Here then we have Divinity torn up and lodged, in infinitely small

particles, in an immense number of beings of all sexes, ages, races, and

colours. This is an excessively inconvenient and unhappy situation, for

the divine particles are so little acquainted with each other at the

outset of their human existence that they begin by devouring each other.

Moreover, in the midst of this state of barbarism and wholly animal

brutality, these divine particles, human souls, retain as it were a

vague remembrance of their primitive divinity, and are irresistibly

drawn towards their whole; they seek each other, they seek their whole.

It is Divinity itself, scattered and lost in the natural world, which

looks for itself in men, and it is so demolished by this multitude of

human prisons in which it finds itself strewn, that, in looking for

itself, it commits folly after folly.

Beginning with fetishism, it searches for and adores itself, now in a

stone, now in a piece of wood, now in a rag. It is quite likely that it

would never have succeeded in getting out of the rag, if the other;

divinity which was not allowed to fall into matter and which is kept in

a state of pure spirit in the sublime heights of the absolute ideal, or

in the celestial regions, had not had pity on it.

Here is a new mystery — that of Divinity dividing itself into two

halves, both equally infinite, of which one — God the Father — stays in

the purely immaterial regions, and the other — God the Son — falls into

matter. We shall see directly, between these two Divinities separated

from each other, continuous relations established, from above to below

and from below to above; and these relations, considered as a single

eternal and constant act, will constitute the Holy Ghost. Such, in its

veritable theological and metaphysical meaning, is the great, the

terrible mystery of the Christian Trinity.

But let us lose no time in abandoning these heights to see what is going

on upon earth.

God the Father, seeing from the height of his eternal splendour that the

poor God the Son, flattened out and astounded by his fall, is so plunged

and lost in matter that even having reached human state he has not yet

recovered himself, decides to come to his aid. From this immense number

of particles at once immortal, divine, and infinitely small, in which

God the Son has disseminated himself so thoroughly that he does not know

himself, God the Father chooses those most pleasing to him, picks his

inspired persons, his prophets, his “men of virtuous genius,” the great

benefactors and legislators of humanity: Zoroaster, Buddha, Moses,

Confucius, Lycurgus, Solon, Socrates, the divine Plato, and above all

Jesus Christ, the complete realisation of God the Son, at last collected

and concentrated in a single human person; all the apostles, Saint

Peter, Saint Paul, Saint John before all, Constantine the Great,

Mahomet, then Charlemagne, Gregory VII Dante, and, according to some,

Luther also, Voltaire and Rousseau, Robespierre and Danton, and many

other great and holy historical personages, all of whose names it is

impossible to recapitulate, but among whom I, as a Russian, beg that

Saint Nicholas may not be forgotten.

Then we have reached at last the manifestation of God upon earth. But

immediately God appears, man is reduced to nothing. It will be said that

he is not reduced to nothing, since he is himself a particle of God.

Pardon me! I admit that a particle of a definite, limited whole, however

small it be, is a quantity, a positive greatness. But a particle of the

infinitely great, compared with it, is necessarily infinitely small,

Multiply milliards of milliards by milliards of milliards — their

product compared to the infinitely great, will be infinitely small, and

the infinitely small is equal to zero. God is everything; therefore man

and all the real world with him, the universe, are nothing. You will not

escape this conclusion.

God appears, man is reduced to nothing; and the greater Divinity

becomes, the more miserable becomes humanity. That is the history of all

religions; that is the effect of all the divine inspirations and

legislations. In history the name of God is the terrible club with which

all divinely inspired men, the great “virtuous geniuses,” have beaten

down the liberty, dignity, reason, and prosperity of man.

We had first the fall of God. Now we have a fall which interests us more

— that of man, caused solely by the apparition of God manifested on

earth.

See in how profound an error our dear and illustrious idealists find

themselves. In talking to us of God they purpose, they desire, to

elevate us, emancipate us, ennoble us, and, on the contrary, they crush

and degrade us. With the name of God they imagine that they can

establish fraternity among men, and, on the contrary, they create pride,

contempt; they sow discord, hatred, war; they establish slavery. For

with God come the different degrees of divine inspiration; humanity is

divided into men highly inspired, less inspired, uninspired. All are

equally insignificant before God, it is true; but, compared with each

other, some are greater than others; not only in fact — which would be

of no consequence, because inequality in fact is lost in the

collectivity when it cannot cling to some legal fiction or institution —

but by the divine right of inspiration, which immediately establishes a

fixed, constant, petrifying inequality. The highly inspired must be

listened to and obeyed by the less inspired, and the less inspired by

the uninspired. Thus we have the principle of authority well

established, and with it the two fundamental institutions of slavery:

Church and State.

Of all despotisms that of the doctrinaires; or inspired religionists is

the worst. They are so jealous of the glory of their God and of the

triumph of their idea that they have no heart left for the liberty or

the dignity or even the sufferings of living men, of real men. Divine

zeal, preoccupation with the idea, finally dry up the tenderest souls,

the most compassionate hearts, the sources of human love. Considering

all that is, all that happens in the world from the point of view of

eternity or of the abstract idea, they treat passing matters with

disdain; but the whole life of real men, of men of flesh and bone, is

composed only of passing matters; they themselves are only passing

beings, who, once passed, are replaced by others likewise passing, but

never to return in person. Alone permanent or relatively eternal in men

is humanity, which steadily developing, grows richer in passing from one

generation to another. I say relatively; eternal, because, our planet

once destroyed — it cannot fail to perish sooner or later, since

everything which has begun must necessarily end — our planet once

decomposed, to serve undoubtedly as an element of some new formation in

the system of the universe, which alone is really eternal, who knows

what will become of our whole human development? Nevertheless, the

moment of this dissolution being an enormous distance in the future, we

may properly consider humanity, relatively to the short duration of

human life, as eternal. But this very fact of progressive humanity is

real and living only through its manifestations at definite times, in

definite places, in really living men, and not through its general idea.

The general idea is always an abstraction and, for that very reason, in

some sort a negation of real life. I have stated in the Appendix that

human thought and, in consequence of this, science can grasp and name

only the general significance of real facts, their relations, their laws

— in short, that which is permanent in their continual transformations —

but never their material, individual side, palpitating, so to speak,

with reality and life, and therefore fugitive and intangible. Science

comprehends the thought of the reality, not reality itself; the thought

of life, not life. That is its limit, its only really insuperable limit,

because it is founded on the very nature of thought, which is the only

organ of science.

Upon this nature are based the indisputable rights and grand mission of

science, but also its vital impotence and even its mischievous action

whenever, through its official licensed representatives, it arrogantly

claims the right to govern life. The mission of science is, by

observation of the general relations of passing and real facts, to

establish the general laws inherent in the development of the phenomena

of the physical and social world; it fixes, so to speak, the

unchangeable landmarks of humanity’s progressive march by indicating the

general conditions which it is necessary to rigorously observe and

always fatal to ignore or forget. In a word, science is the compass of

life; but it is not life itself. Science is unchangeable, impersonal,

general, abstract, insensible, like the laws of which it is but the

ideal reproduction, reflected or mental — that is cerebral (using this

word to remind us that science itself is but a material product of a

material organ, the brain). Life is wholly fugitive and temporary, but

also wholly palpitating with reality and individuality, sensibility,

sufferings, joys, aspirations, needs, and passions. It alone

spontaneously creates real things and; beings. Science creates nothing;

it establishes and recognises only the creations of life. And every time

that scientific men, emerging from their abstract world, mingle with

living creation in the real world, all that they propose or create is

poor, ridiculously abstract, bloodless and lifeless, still-born, like

the homunculus created by Wagner, the pedantic disciple of the immortal

Doctor Faust. It follows that the only mission of science is to

enlighten life, not to govern it.

The government of science and of men of science, even be they

positivists, disciples of Auguste Comte, or, again, disciples of the

doctrinaire; school of German Communism, cannot fail to be impotent,

ridiculous, inhuman, cruel, oppressive, exploiting, maleficent. We may

say of men of science, as such, what I have said of theologians and

metaphysicians: they have neither sense nor heart for individual and

living beings. We cannot even blame them for this, for it is the natural

consequence of their profession. In so far as they are men of science,

they have to deal with and can take interest in nothing except

generalities; that do the laws [...]

[Three pages of the manuscript are missing]

... they are not exclusively men of science, but are also more or less

men of life. [The lost part of this sentence perhaps said: “If men of

science in their researches and experiments are not treating men

actually as they treat animals, the reason is that” they are not

exclusively men of science, but are also more or less men of life.]

III

Nevertheless, we must not rely too much on this. Though we may be well

nigh certain that a savant; would not dare to treat a man today as he

treats a rabbit, it remains always to be feared that the savants; as a

body, if not interfered with, may submit living men to scientific

experiments, undoubtedly less cruel but none the less disagreeable to

their victims. If they cannot perform experiments upon the bodies of

individuals, they will ask nothing better than to perform them on the

social body, and that what must be absolutely prevented.

In their existing organisation, monopolising science and remaining thus

outside of social life, the savants; form a separate caste, in many

respects analogous to the priesthood. Scientific abstractions is their

God, living and real individuals are their victims, and they are the

consecrated and licensed sacrificers.

Science cannot go outside of the sphere of abstractions. In this respect

it is infinitely inferior to art, which, in its turn, is peculiarly

concerned also with general types and general situations, but which

incarnates them by an artifice of its own in forms which, if they are

not living in the sense of real life none the less excite in our

imagination the memory and sentiment of life; art in a certain sense

individualizes the types and situations which it conceives; by means of

the individualities without flesh and bone, and consequently permanent

and immortal, which it has the power to create, it recalls to our minds

the living, real individualities which appear and disappear under our

eyes. Art, then, is as it were the return of abstraction to life;

science, on the contrary, is the perpetual immolation of life, fugitive,

temporary, but real, on the altar of eternal abstractions.

Science is as incapable of grasping the individuality of a man as that

of a rabbit, being equally indifferent to both. Not that it is ignorant

of the principle of individuality: it conceives it perfectly as a

principle, but not as a fact. It knows very well that all the animal

species, including the human species, have no real existence outside of

an indefinite number of individuals, born and dying to make room for new

individuals equally fugitive. It knows that in rising from the animal

species to the superior species the principle of individuality becomes

more pronounced; the individuals appear freer and more complete. It

knows that man, the last and most perfect animal of earth, presents the

most complete and most remarkable individuality, because of his power to

conceive, concrete, personify, as it were, in his social and private

existence, the universal law. It knows, finally, when it is not vitiated

by theological or metaphysical, political or judicial doctrinairisme, or

even by a narrow scientific pride, when it is not deaf to the instincts

and spontaneous aspirations of life — it knows (and this is its last

word) that respect for man is the supreme law of Humanity, and that the

great, the real object of history, its only legitimate object is the

humanization and emancipation, the real liberty, the prosperity and

happiness of each individual living in society. For, if we would not

fall back into the liberticidal fiction of the public welfare

represented by the State, a fiction always founded on the systematic

sacrifice of the people, we must clearly recognize that collective

liberty and prosperity exist only so far as they represent the sum of

individual liberties and prosperities.

Science knows all these things, but it does not and cannot go beyond

them. Abstraction being its very nature, it can well enough conceive the

principle of real and living individuality, but it can have no dealings

with real and living individuals; it concerns itself with individuals in

general, but not with Peter or James, not with such or such a one, who,

so far as it is concerned, do not, cannot, have any existence. Its

individuals, I repeat, are only abstractions.

Now, history is made, not by abstract individuals, but by acting, living

and passing individuals. Abstractions advance only when borne forward by

real men. For these beings made, not in idea only, but in reality of

flesh and blood, science has no heart: it considers them at most as

material for intellectual and social development. What does it care for

the particular conditions and chance fate of Peter or James? It would

make itself ridiculous, it would abdicate, it would annihilate itself,

if it wished to concern itself with them otherwise than as examples in

support of its eternal theories. And it would be ridiculous to wish it

to do so, for its mission lies not there. It cannot grasp the concrete;

it can move only in abstractions. Its mission is to busy itself with the

situation and the general conditions of the existence and development,

either of the human species in general, or of such a race, such a

people, such a class or category of individuals; the general causes of

their prosperity, their decline, and the best general methods of

securing, their progress in all ways. Provided it accomplishes this task

broadly and rationally, it will do its whole duty, and it would be

really unjust to expect more of it.

But it would be equally ridiculous, it would be disastrous to entrust it

with a mission which it is incapable of fulfilling. Since its own nature

forces it to ignore the existence of Peter and James, it must never be

permitted, nor must anybody be permitted in its name, to govern Peter

and James. For it were capable of treating them almost as it treats

rabbits. Or rather, it would continue to ignore them; but its licensed

representatives, men not at all abstract, but on the contrary in very

active life and having very substantial interests, yielding to the

pernicious influence which privilege inevitably exercises upon men,

would finally fleece other men in the name of science, just as they have

been fleeced hitherto by priests, politicians of all shades, and

lawyers, in the name of God, of the State, of judicial Right.

What I preach then is, to a certain extent, the revolt of life against

science, or rather against the government of science, not to destroy

science — that would be high treason to humanity — but to remand it to

its place so that it can never leave it again. Until now all human

history has been only a perpetual and bloody immolation of millions of

poor human beings in honor of some pitiless abstraction — God, country,

power of State, national honor, historical rights, judicial rights,

political liberty, public welfare. Such has been up to today the

natural, spontaneous, and inevitable movement of human societies. We

cannot undo it; we must submit to it so far as the past is concerned, as

we submit to all natural fatalities. We must believe that that was the

only possible way, to educate the human race. For we must not deceive

ourselves: even in attributing the larger part to the Machiavellian

wiles of the governing classes, we have to recognize that no minority

would have been powerful enough to impose all these horrible sacrifices

upon the masses if there had not been in the masses themselves a dizzy

spontaneous movement which pushed them on to continual self-sacrifice,

now to one, now to another of these devouring abstractions the vampires

of history ever nourished upon human blood.

We readily understand that this is very gratifying, to the theologians,

politicians, and jurists. Priests of these abstractions, they live only

by the continual immolation of the people. Nor is it more surprising

that metaphysics too, should give its consent. Its only mission is to

justify and rationalize as far as possible the iniquitous and absurd.

But that positive science itself should have shown the same tendencies

is a fact which we must deplore while we establish it. That it has done

so is due to two reasons: in the first place, because, constituted

outside of life, it is represented by a privileged body; and in the

second place, because thus far it has posited itself as an absolute and

final object of all human development. By a judicious criticism, which

it can and finally will be forced to pass upon itself, it would

understand, on the contrary, that it is only a means for the realization

of a much higher object — that of the complete humanization of the real

situation of all the real individuals who are born, who live, and who

die, on earth.

The immense advantage of positive science over theology, metaphysics,

politics, and judicial right consists in this — that, in place of the

false and fatal abstractions set up by these doctrines, it posits true

abstractions which express the general nature and logic of things, their

general relations, and the general laws of their development. This

separates it profoundly from all preceding doctrines, and will assure it

for ever a great position in society: it will constitute in a certain

sense society’s collective consciousness. But there is one aspect in

which it resembles all these doctrines: its only possible object being

abstractions, it is forced by its very nature to ignore real men,

outside of whom the truest abstractions have no existence. To remedy

this radical defect positive science will have to proceed by a different

method from that followed by the doctrines of the past. The latter have

taken advantage of the ignorance of the masses to sacrifice them with

delight to their abstractions, which by the way, are always very

lucrative to those who represent them in flesh and bone. Positive

science, recognizing its absolute inability to conceive real individuals

and interest itself in their lot, must definitely and absolutely

renounce all claim to the government of societies; for if it should

meddle therein, it would only sacrifice continually the living men whom

it ignores to the abstractions which constitute the sole object of its

legitimate preoccupations.

The true science of history, for instance, does not yet exist; scarcely

do we begin today to catch a glimpse of its extremely complicated

conditions. But suppose it were definitely developed, what could it give

us? It would exhibit a faithful and rational picture of the natural

development of the general conditions — material and ideal, economical,

political and social, religious, philosophical, aesthetic, and

scientific — of the societies which have a history. But this universal

picture of human civilization, however detailed it might be, would never

show anything beyond general and consequently abstract estimates. The

milliards of individuals who have furnished the living and suffering

materials of this history at once triumphant and dismal — triumphant by

its general results, dismal by the immense hecatomb of human victims

“crushed under its car” — those milliards of obscure individuals without

whom none of the great abstract results of history would have been

obtained — and who, bear in mind, have never benefited by any of these

results — will find no place, not even the slightest in our annals. They

have lived and been sacrificed, crushed for the good of abstract

humanity, that is all.

Shall we blame the science of history. That would be unjust and

ridiculous. Individuals cannot be grasped by thought, by reflection, or

even by human speech, which is capable of expressing abstractions only;

they cannot be grasped in the present day any more than in the past.

Therefore social science itself, the science of the future, will

necessarily continue to ignore them. All that, we have a right to demand

of it is that it shall point us with faithful and sure hand to the

general causes of individual suffering — among these causes it will not

forget the immolation and subordination (still too frequent, alas!) of

living individuals to abstract generalities — at the same time showing

us the general conditions necessary to the real emancipation of the

individuals living in society. That is its mission; those are its

limits, beyond which the action of social science can be only impotent

and fatal. Beyond those limits being the doctrinaire and governmental

pretentious of its licensed representatives, its priests. It is time to

have done with all popes and priests; we want them no longer, even if

they call themselves Social Democrats.

Once more, the sole mission of science is to light the road. Only Life,

delivered from all its governmental and doctrinaire barriers, and given

full liberty of action, can create.

How solve this antinomy?

On the one hand, science is indispensable to the rational organization

of society; on the other, being incapable of interesting itself in that

which is real and living, it must not interfere with the real or

practical organization of society.

This contradiction can be solved only in one way: by the liquidation of

science as a moral being existing outside the life of all, and

represented by a body of breveted savants; it must spread among the

masses. Science, being called upon to henceforth represent society’s

collective consciousness, must really become the property of everybody.

Thereby, without losing anything of its universal character, of which it

can never divest itself without ceasing to be science, and while

continuing to concern itself exclusively with general causes, the

conditions and fixed relations of individuals and things, it will become

one in fact with the immediate and real life of all individuals. That

will be a movement analogous to that which said to the Protestants at

the beginning of the Reformation that there was no further need of

priests for man, who would henceforth be his own priest, every man,

thanks to the invisible intervention of the Lord Jesus Christ alone,

having at last succeeded in swallowing his good God. But here the

question is not of Jesus Christ, nor good God, nor of political liberty,

nor of judicial right — things all theologically or metaphysically

revealed, and all alike indigestible. The world of scientific

abstractions is not revealed; it is inherent in the real world, of which

it is only the general or abstract expression and representation. As

long as it forms a separate region, specially represented by the savants

as a body, this ideal world threatens to take the place of a good God to

the real world, reserving for its licensed representatives the office of

priests. That is the reason why it is necessary to dissolve the special

social organization of the savants by general instruction, equal for all

in all things, in order that the masses, ceasing to be flocks led and

shorn by privileged priests, may take into their own hands the direction

of their destinies. [5]

But until the masses shall have reached this degree of instruction, will

it be necessary to leave them to the government of scientific men?

Certainly not. It would be better for them to dispense with science than

allow themselves to be governed by savants. The first consequence of the

government of these men would be to render science inaccessible to the

people, and such a government would necessarily be aristocratic because

the existing scientific institutions are essentially aristocratic. An

aristocracy of learning! from the practical point of view the most

implacable, and from the social point of view the most haughty and

insulting — such would be the power established in the name of science.

This régime would be capable of paralyzing the life and movement of

society. The savants always presumptuous, ever self-sufficient and ever

impotent, would desire to meddle with everything, and the sources of

life would dry up under the breath of their abstractions.

Once more, Life, not science, creates life; the spontaneous action of

the people themselves alone can create liberty. Undoubtedly it would be

a very fortunate thing if science could, from this day forth, illuminate

the spontaneous march of the people towards their emancipation. But

better an absence of light than a false and feeble light, kindled only

to mislead those who follow it. After all, the people will not lack

light. Not in vain have they traversed a long historic career, and paid

for their errors by centuries of misery. The practical summary of their

painful experiences constitutes a sort of traditional science, which in

certain respects is worth as much as theoretical science. Last of all, a

portion of the youth — those of the bourgeois students who feel hatred

enough for the falsehood, hypocrisy, injustice, and cowardice of the

bourgeoisie to find courage to turn their backs upon it, and passion

enough to unreservedly embrace the just and human cause of the

proletariat — those will be, as I have already said, fraternal

instructors of the people; thanks to them, there will be no occasion for

the government of the savants.

If the people should beware of the government of the savants, all the

more should they provide against that of the inspired idealists. The

more sincere these believers and poets of heaven, the more dangerous

they become. The scientific abstraction, I have said, is a rational

abstraction, true in its essence, necessary to life, of which it is the

theoretical representation, or, if one prefers, the conscience. It may,

it must be, absorbed and digested by life. The idealistic abstraction,

God, is a corrosive poison, which destroys and decomposes life,

falsifies and kills it. The pride of the idealists, not being personal

but divine, is invincible and inexorable: it may, it must, die, but it

will never yield, and while it has a breath left it will try to subject

men to its God, just as the lieutenants of Prussia, these practical

idealists of Germany, would like to see the people crushed under the

spurred boot of their emperor. The faith is the same, the end but little

different, and the result, as that of faith, is slavery.

It is at the same time the triumph of the ugliest and most brutal

materialism. There is no need to demonstrate this in the case of

Germany; one would have to be blind to avoid seeing it at the present

hour. But I think it is still necessary to demonstrate it in the case of

divine idealism.

Man, like all the rest of nature, is an entirely material being. The

mind, the facility of thinking, of receiving and reflecting upon

different external and internal sensations, of remembering them when

they have passed and reproducing them by the imagination, of comparing

and distinguishing them, of abstracting determinations common to them

and thus creating general concepts, and finally of forming ideas by

grouping and combining concepts according to different methods —

intelligence, in a word, sole creator of our whole, ideal world, is a

property of the animal body and especially of the quite material

organism of the brain.

We know this certainly, by the experience of all, which no fact has ever

contradicted and which any man can verify at any moment of his life. In

all animals, without excepting the wholly inferior species, we find a

certain degree of intelligence, and we see that, in the series of

species, animal intelligence develops in proportion as the organization

of a species approaches that of man, but that in man alone it attains to

that power of abstraction which properly constitutes thought.

Universal experience,[6] which is the sole origin, the source of all our

knowledge, shows us, therefore, that all intelligence is always attached

to some animal body, and that the intensity, the power, of this animal

function depends on the relative perfection of the organism. The latter

of these results of universal experience is not applicable only to the

different animal species; we establish it likewise in men, whose

intellectual and moral power depends so clearly upon the greater or less

perfection of their organism as a race, as a nation, as a class, and as

individuals, that it is not necessary to insist upon this point.[7]

On the other hand, it is certain that no man has ever seen or can see

pure mind, detached from all material form existing separately from any

animal body whatsoever. But if no person has seen it, how is it that men

have come to believe in its existence? The fact of this belief is

certain and if not universal, as all the idealists pretend, at least

very general, and as such it is entirely worthy of our closest

attention, for a general belief, however foolish it may be, exercises

too potent a sway over the destiny of men to warrant us in ignoring it

or putting it aside.

The explanation of this belief, moreover, is rational enough. The

example afforded us by children and young people, and even by many men

long past the age of majority, shows us that man may use his mental

faculties for a long time before accounting to himself for the way in

which he uses them, before becoming clearly conscious of it. During this

working of the mind unconscious of itself, during this action of

innocent or believing intelligence, man, obsessed by the external world,

pushed on by that internal goad called life and its manifold

necessities, creates a quantity of imaginations, concepts, and ideas

necessarily very imperfect at first and conforming but slightly to the

reality of the things and facts which they endeavour to express Not

having yet the consciousness of his own intelligent action, not knowing

yet that he himself has produced and continues to produce these

imaginations, these concepts, these ideas, ignoring their wholly

subjective - that is, human-origin, he must naturally consider them as

objective; beings, as real beings, wholly independent of him, existing

by themselves and in themselves.

It was thus that primitive peoples, emerging slowly from their animal

innocence, created their gods. Having created them, not suspecting that

they themselves were the real creators, they worshipped them;

considering them as real beings infinitely superior to themselves, they

attributed omnipotence to them, and recognised themselves as their

creatures, their slaves. As fast as human ideas develop, the gods, who,

as I have already stated, were never anything more than a fantastic,

ideal, poetical reverberation of an inverted image, become idealised

also. At first gross fetishes, they gradually become pure spirits,

existing outside of the visible world, and at last, in the course of a

long historic evolution, are confounded in a single Divine Being, pure,

eternal, absolute Spirit, creator and master of the worlds.

In every development, just or false, real or imaginary collective or

individual, it is always the first step, the first act that is the most

difficult. That step once taken, the rest follows naturally as a

necessary consequence. The difficult step in the historical development

of this terrible religious insanity which continues to obsess and crush

us was to posit a divine world as such, outside the world. This first

act of madness, so natural from the physiological point of view and

consequently necessary in the history of humanity, was not accomplished

at a single stroke. I know not how many centuries were needed to develop

this belief and make it a governing influence upon the mental customs of

men. But, once established, it became omnipotent, as each insane notion

necessarily becomes when it takes possession of man’s brain. Take a

madman, whatever the object of his madness — you will find that obscure

and fixed idea which obsesses him seems to him the most natural thing in

the world, and that, on the contrary, the real things which contradict

this idea seem to him ridiculous and odious follies. Well religion is a

collective insanity, the more powerful because it is traditional folly,

and because its origin is lost in the most remote antiquity. As

collective insanity it has penetrated to the very depths of the public

and private existence of the peoples; it is incarnate in society; it has

become, so to speak, the collective soul and thought. Every man is

enveloped in it from his birth; he sucks it in with his mother’s milk,

absorbs it with all that he touches, all that he sees. He is so

exclusive]y fed upon it, so poisoned and penetrated by it in all his

being that later, however powerful his natural mind, he has to make

unheard-of efforts to deliver himself from it, and then never completely

succeeds. We have one proof of this in our modern idealists, and another

in our doctrinaire; materialists — the German Communists. They have

found no way to shake off the religion of the State.

The supernatural world, the divine world, once well established in the

imagination of the peoples, the development of the various religious

systems has followed its natural and logical course, conforming,

moreover, in all things to the contemporary development of economical

and political relations of which it has been in all ages, in the world

of religious fancy, the faithful reproduction and divine consecration.

Thus has the collective and historical insanity which calls itself

religion been developed since fetishism, passing through all the stages

from polytheism to Christian monotheism.

The second step in the development of religious beliefs, undoubtedly the

most difficult next to the establishment of a separate divine world, was

precisely this transition from polytheism to monotheism, from the

religious materialism of the pagans to the spiritualistic faith of the

Christians. She pagan gods — and this was their principal characteristic

— were first of all exclusively national gods. Very numerous, they

necessarily retained a more or less material character, or, rather, they

were so numerous because they were material, diversity being one of the

principal attributes of the real world. The pagan gods were not yet

strictly the negation of real things; they were only a fantastic

exaggeration of them.

We have seen how much this transition cost the Jewish people,

constituting, so to speak, its entire history. In vain did Moses and the

prophets preach the one god; the people always relapsed into their

primitive idolatry, into the ancient and comparatively much more natural

and convenient faith in many good gods, more material, more human, and

more palpable. Jehovah himself, their sole God, the God of Moses and the

prophets, was still an extremely national God, who, to reward and punish

his faithful followers, his chosen people, used material arguments,

often stupid, always gross and cruel. It does not even appear that faith

in his existence implied a negation of the existence of earlier gods.

The Jewish God did not deny the existence of these rivals; he simply did

not want his people to worship them side by side with him, because

before all Jehovah was a very Jealous God. His first commandment was

this:

“I am the Lord thy God, and thou shalt have no other gods before me.”

Jehovah, then, was only a first draft, very material and very rough, of

the supreme deity of modern idealism. Moreover, he was only a national

God, like the Russian God worshipped by the German generals, subjects of

the Czar and patriots of the empire of all the Russias; like the German

God, whom the pietists and the German generals, subjects of William I.

at Berlin, will no doubt soon proclaim. The supreme being cannot be a

national God; he must be the God of entire Humanity. Nor can the supreme

being be a material being; he must be the negation of all matter — pure

spirit. Two things have proved necessary to the realisation of the

worship of the supreme being:

a realisation, such as it is, of Humanity by the negation of

nationalities and national forms of worship;

a development, already far advanced, of metaphysical ideas in order to

spiritualise the gross Jehovah of the Jews.

The first condition was fulfilled by the Romans, though in a very

negative way no doubt, by the conquest of most of the countries known to

the ancients and by the destruction of their national institutions. The

gods of all the conquered nations, gathered in the Pantheon, mutually

cancelled each other. This was the first draft of humanity, very gross

and quite negative.

As for the second condition, the spiritualisation of Jehovah, that was

realised by the Greeks long before the conquest of their country by the

Romans. They were the creators of metaphysics. Greece, in the cradle of

her history, had already found from the Orient a divine world which had

been definitely established in the traditional faith of her peoples;

this world had been left and handed over to her by the Orient. In her

instinctive period, prior to her political history, she had developed

and prodigiously humanised this divine world through her poets; and when

she actually began her history, she already had a religion readymade,

the most sympathetic and noble of all the religions which have existed,

so far at least as a religion — that is, a lie — can be noble and

sympathetic. Her great thinkers — and no nation has had greater than

Greece — found the divine world established, not only outside of

themselves in the people, but also in themselves as a habit of feeling

and thought, and naturally they took it as a point of departure. That

they made no theology — that is, that they did not wait in vain to

reconcile dawning reason with the absurdities of such a god, as did the

scholastics of the Middle Ages — was already much in their favour. They

left the gods out of their speculations and attached themselves directly

to the divine idea, one, invisible, omnipotent, eternal, and absolutely

spiritualistic but impersonal. As concerns Spiritualism, then, the Greek

metaphysicians, much more than the Jews, were the creators of the

Christian god. The Jews only added to it the brutal personality of their

Jehovah.

That a sublime genius like the divine Plato could have been absolutely

convinced of the reality of the divine idea shows us how contagious, how

omnipotent, is the tradition of the religious mania even on the greatest

minds. Besides, we should not be surprised at it, since, even in our

day, the greatest philosophical genius which has existed since Aristotle

and Plato, Hegel — in spite even of Kant’s criticism, imperfect and too

metaphysical though it be, which had demolished the objectivity or

reality of the divine ideas — tried to replace these divine ideas upon

their transcendental or celestial throne. It is true that Hegel went

about his work of restoration in so impolite a manner that he killed the

good God for ever. He took away from these ideas their divine halo, by

showing to whoever will read him that they were never anything more than

a creation of the human mind running through history in search of

itself. To put an end to all religious insanities and the divine mirage,

he left nothing lacking but the utterance of those grand words which

were said after him, almost at the same time, by two great minds who had

never heard of each other — Ludwig Feuerbach, the disciple and

demolisher of Hegel, in Germany, and Auguste Comte, the founder of

positive philosophy, in France. These words were as follows:

“Metaphysics are reduced to psychology.” All the metaphysical systems

have been nothing else than human psychology developing itself in

history.

To-day it is no longer difficult to understand how the divine ideas were

born, how they were created in succession by the abstractive faculty of

man. Man made the gods. But in the time of Plato this knowledge was

impossible. The collective mind, and consequently the individual mind as

well, even that of the greatest genius, was not ripe for that. Scarcely

had it said with Socrates: “Know thyself!” This self-knowledge existed

only in a state of intuition; in fact, it amounted to nothing. Hence it

was impossible for the human mind to suspect that it was itself the sole

creator of the divine world. It found the divine world before it; it

found it as history, as tradition, as a sentiment, as a habit of

thought; and it necessarily made it the object of its loftiest

speculations. Thus was born metaphysics, and thus were developed and

perfected the divine ideas, the basis of Spiritualism.

It is true that after Plato there was a sort of inverse movement in the

development of the mind. Aristotle, the true father of science and

positive philosophy, did not deny the divine world, but concerned

himself with it as little as possible. He was the first to study, like

the analyst and experimenter that he was, logic, the laws of human

thought, and at the same time the physical world, not in its ideal,

illusory essence, but in its real aspect. After him the Greeks of

Alexandria established the first school of the positive scientists. They

were atheists. But their atheism left no mark on their contemporaries.

Science tended more and more to separate itself from life. After Plato,

divine ideas were rejected in metaphysics themselves; this was done by

the Epicureans and Sceptics, two sects who contributed much to the

degradation of human aristocracy, but they had no effect upon the

masses.

Another school, infinitely more influential, was formed at Alexandria.

This was the school of neo-Platonists. These, confounding in an impure

mixture the monstrous imaginations of the Orient with the ideas of

Plato, were the true originators, and later the elaborators, of the

Christian dogmas.

Thus the personal and gross egoism of Jehovah, the not less brutal and

gross Roman conquest, and the metaphysical ideal speculation of the

Greeks, materialised by contact with the Orient, were the three

historical elements which made up the spiritualistic religion of the

Christians.

Before the altar of a unique and supreme God was raised on the ruins of

the numerous altars of the pagan gods, the autonomy of the various

nations composing the pagan or ancient world had to be destroyed first.

This was very brutally done by the Romans who, by conquering the

greatest part of the globe known to the ancients, laid the first

foundations, quite gross and negative ones no doubt, of humanity. A God

thus raised above the national differences, material and social, of all

countries, and in a certain sense the direct negation of them, must

necessarily be an immaterial and abstract being. But faith in the

existence of such a being, so difficult a matter, could not spring into

existence suddenly. Consequently, as I have demonstrated in the

Appendix, it went through a long course of preparation and development

at the hands of Greek metaphysics, which were the first to establish in

a philosophical manner the notion of the divine idea, a model eternally

creative and always reproduced by the visible world. But the divinity

conceived and created by Greek philosophy was an impersonal divinity. No

logical and serious metaphysics being able to rise, or, rather, to

descend, to the idea of a personal God, it became necessary, therefore,

to imagine a God who was one and very personal at once. He was found in

the very brutal, selfish, and cruel person of Jehovah, the national God

of the Jews. But the Jews, in spite of that exclusive national spirit

which distinguishes them even to-day, had become in fact, long before

the birth of Christ, the most international people of the world. Some of

them carried away as captives, but many more even urged on by that

mercantile passion which constitutes one of the principal traits of

their character, they had spread through all countries, carrying

everywhere the worship of their Jehovah, to whom they remained all the

more faithful the more he abandoned them.

In Alexandria this terrible god of the Jews made the personal

acquaintance of the metaphysical divinity of Plato, already much

corrupted by Oriental contact, and corrupted her still more by his own.

In spite of his national, jealous, and ferocious exclusivism, he could

not long resist the graces of this ideal and impersonal divinity of the

Greeks. He married her, and from this marriage was born the

spiritualistic — but not spirited — God of the Christians. The

neoplatonists of Alexandria are known to have been the principal

creators of the Christian theology.

Nevertheless theology alone does not make a religion, any more than

historical elements suffice to create history. By historical elements I

mean the general conditions of any real development whatsoever — for

example in this case the conquest of the world by the Romans and the

meeting of the God of the Jews with the ideal of divinity of the Greeks.

To impregnate the historical elements, to cause them to run through a

series of new historical transformations, a living, spontaneous fact was

needed, without which they might have remained many centuries longer in

the state of unproductive elements. This fact was not lacking in

Christianity: it was the propagandism, martyrdom, and death of Jesus

Christ.

We know almost nothing of this great and saintly personage, all that the

gospels tell us being contradictory, and so fabulous that we can

scarcely seize upon a few real and vital traits. But it is certain that

he was the preacher of the poor, the friend and consoler of the

wretched, of the ignorant, of the slaves, and of the women, and that by

these last he was much loved. He promised eternal life to all who are

oppressed, to all who suffer here below; and the number is immense. He

was hanged, as a matter of course, by the representatives of the

official morality and public order of that period. His disciples and the

disciples of his disciples succeeded in spreading, thanks to the

destruction of the national barriers by the Roman conquest, and

propagated the Gospel in all the countries known to the ancients.

Everywhere they were received with open arms by the slaves and the

women, the two most oppressed, most suffering, and naturally also the

most ignorant classes of the ancient world. For even such few proselytes

as they made in the privileged and learned world they were indebted in

great part to the influence of women. Their most extensive propagandism

was directed almost exclusively among the people, unfortunate and

degraded by slavery. This was the first awakening, the first

intellectual revolt of the proletariat.

The great honour of Christianity, its incontestable merit, and the whole

secret of its unprecedented and yet thoroughly legitimate triumph, lay

in the fact that it appealed to that suffering and immense public to

which the ancient world, a strict and cruel intellectual and political

aristocracy, denied even the simplest rights of humanity. Otherwise it

never could have spread. The doctrine taught by the apostles of Christ,

wholly consoling as it may have seemed to the unfortunate, was too

revolting, too absurd from the standpoint of human reason, ever to have

been accepted by enlightened men According with what joy the apostle

Paul speaks of the scandale de la foi; and of the triumph of that divine

folie; rejected by the powerful and wise of the century, but all the

more passionately accepted by the simple, the ignorant, and the

weak-minded!

Indeed there must have been a very deep-seated dissatisfaction with

life, a very intense thirst of heart, and an almost absolute poverty of

thought, to secure the acceptance of the Christian absurdity, the most

audacious and monstrous of all religious absurdities.

This was not only the negation of all the political, social, and

religious institutions of antiquity: it was the absolute overturn of

common sense, of all human reason. The living being, the real world,

were considered thereafter as nothing; whereas the product of man’s

abstractive faculty, the last and supreme abstraction in which this

faculty, far beyond existing things, even beyond the most general

determinations of the living being, the ideas of space and time. having

nothing left to advance beyond, rests in contemplation of his emptiness

and absolute immobility.

That abstraction, that caput mortuum, absolutely void of all contents

the true nothing, God, is proclaimed the only real, eternal,

all-powerful being. The real All is declared nothing and the absolute

nothing the All. The shadow becomes the substance and the substance

vanishes like a shadow.[8]

All this was audacity and absurdity unspeakable, the true scandale de la

foi, the triumph of credulous stupidity over the mind for the masses;

and — for a few — the triumphant irony of a mind wearied, corrupted,

disillusioned, and disgusted in honest and serious search for truth; it

was that necessity of shaking off thought and becoming brutally stupid

so frequently felt by surfeited minds:

IV Credo quod absurdum

I believe in the absurd; I believe in it, precisely and mainly, because

it is absurd. In the same way many distinguished and enlightened minds

in our day believe in animal magnetism, spiritualism, tipping tables,

and — why go so far? — believe still in Christianity, in idealism, in

God.

The belief of the ancient proletariat, like that of the modern, was more

robust and simple, less haut goût. The Christian propagandism appealed

to its heart, not to its mind; to its eternal aspirations, its

necessities, its sufferings, its slavery, not to its reason, which still

slept and therefore could know nothing about logical contradictions and

the evidence of the absurd. It was interested solely in knowing when the

hour of promised deliverance would strike, when the kingdom of God would

come. As for theological dogmas, it did not trouble itself about them

because it understood nothing about them The proletariat converted to

Christianity constituted its growing material but not its intellectual

strength.

As for the Christian dogmas, it is known that they were elaborated in a

series of theological and literary works and in the Councils,

principally by the converted neo-Platonists of the Orient. The Greek

mind had fallen so low that, in the fourth century of the Christian era,

the period of the first Council, the idea of a personal God, pure,

eternal, absolute mind, creator and supreme master, existing outside of

the world, was unanimously accepted by the Church Fathers; as a logical

consequence of this absolute absurdity, it then became natural and

necessary to believe in the immateriality and immortality of the human

soul, lodged and imprisoned in a body only partially mortal, there being

in this body itself a portion which, while material is immortal like the

soul, and must be resurrected with it. We see how difficult it was, even

for the Church Fathers; to conceive pure minds outside of any material

form. It should be added that, in general, it is the character of every

metaphysical and theological argument to seek to explain one absurdity

by another.

It was very fortunate for Christianity that it met a world of slaves. It

had another piece of good luck in the invasion of the Barbarians. The

latter were worthy people, full of natural force, and, above all, urged

on by a great necessity of life and a great capacity for it; brigands

who had stood every test, capable of devastating and gobbling up

anything, like their successors, the Germans of today; but they were

much less systematic and pedantic than these last, much less moralistic,

less learned, and on the other hand much more independent and proud,

capable of science and not incapable of liberty, as are the bourgeois of

modern Germany. But, in spite of all their great qualities, they were

nothing but barbarians — that is, as indifferent to all questions of

theology and metaphysics as the ancient slaves, a great number of whom,

moreover, belonged to their race. So that, their practical repugnance

once overcome, it was not difficult to convert them theoretically to

Christianity.

For ten centuries Christianity, armed with the omnipotence of Church and

State and opposed by no competition, was able to deprave, debase, and

falsify the mind of Europe It had no competitors, because outside of the

Church there were neither thinkers nor educated persons. It alone

though,, it alone spoke and wrote, it alone taught. Though heresies

arose in its bosom, they affected only the theological or practical

developments of the fundamental dogma never that dogma itself. The

belief in God, pure spirit and creator of the world, and the belief in

the immateriality of the soul remained untouched. This double belief

became the ideal basis of the whole Occidental and Oriental civilization

of Europe; it penetrated and became incarnate in all the institutions,

all the details of the public and private life of all classes, and the

masses as well.

After that, is it surprising that this belief has lived until the

present day, continuing to exercise its disastrous influence even upon

select minds, such as those of Mazzini, Michelet, Quinet, and so many

others? We have seen that the first attack upon it came from the

renaissance; of the free mind in the fifteenth century, which produced

heroes and martyrs like Vanini, Giordano Bruno, and Galileo. Although

drowned in the noise, tumult, and passions of the Reformation, it

noiselessly continued its invisible work, bequeathing to the noblest

minds of each generation its task of human emancipation by the

destruction of the absurd, until at last, in the latter half of the

eighteenth century, it again reappeared in broad day, boldly waving the

flag of atheism and materialism.

The human mind, then, one might have supposed, was at last about to

deliver itself from all the divine obsessions. Not at all. The divine

falsehood upon which humanity had been feeding for eighteen centuries

(speaking of Christianity only) was once more to show itself more

powerful than human truth. No longer able to make use of the black

tribe, of the ravens consecrated by the Church, of the Catholic or

Protestant priests, all confidence in whom had been lost, it made use of

lay priests, short-robed liars and sophists. among whom the principal

rôles devolved upon two fatal men, one the falsest mind, the other the

most doctrinally despotic will, of the last century — J. J. Rousseau and

Robespierre.

The first is the perfect type of narrowness and suspicious meanness, of

exaltation without other object than his own person, of cold enthusiasm

and hypocrisy at once sentimental and implacable, of the falsehood of

modern idealism. He may be considered as the real creator of modern

reaction. To all appearance the most democratic writer of the eighteenth

century, he bred within himself the pitiless despotism of the statesman.

He was the prophet of the doctrinaire State, as Robespierre, his worthy

and faithful disciple, tried to become its high priest. Having heard the

saying of Voltaire that, if God did not exist, it would be necessary to

invent him, J. J. Rousseau invented the Supreme Being, the abstract and

sterile God of the deists. And It was in the name of the Supreme Being,

and of the hypocritical virtue commanded by this Supreme Being, that

Robespierre guillotined first the Hébertists and then the very genius of

the Revolution, Danton, in whose person he assassinated the Republic,

thus preparing the way for the thenceforth necessary triumph of the

dictatorship of Bonaparte I. After this great triumph, the idealistic

reaction sought and found servants less fanatical, less terrible nearer

to the diminished stature of the actual bourgeoisie. In France,

Chateaubriand, Lamartine, and — shall I say it? Why not? All must be

said if it is truth — Victor Hugo himself, the democrat, the republican,

the quasi-socialist of today! and after them the whole melancholy and

sentimental company of poor and pallid minds who, under the leadership

of these masters, established the modern romantic school in Germany, the

Schlegels, the Tiecks, the Novalis, the Werners, the Schellings, and so

many others besides, whose names do not even deserve to be recalled.

The literature created by this school was the very reign of ghosts and

phantoms. It could not stand the sunlight; the twilight alone permitted

it to live. No more could it stand the brutal contact of the masses. It

was the literature of the tender, delicate, distinguished souls,

aspiring to heaven, and living on earth as if in spite of themselves. It

had a horror and contempt for the politics and questions of the day; but

when perchance it referred to them, it showed itself frankly

reactionary, took the side of the Church against the insolence of the

freethinkers, of the kings against the peoples, and of all the

aristocrats against the vile rabble of the streets. For the rest, as I

have just said, the dominant feature of the school of romanticism was a

quasi-complete indifference to politics. Amid the clouds in which it

lived could be distinguished two real points — the rapid development of

bourgeois materialism and the ungovernable outburst of individual

vanities.

To understand this romantic literature, the reason for its existence

must be sought in the transformation which had been effected in the

bosom of the bourgeois class since the revolution of 1793.

From the Renaissance and the Reformation down to the Revolution, the

bourgeoisie, if not in Germany, at least in Italy, in France, in

Switzerland, in England, in Holland, was the hero and representative of

the revolutionary genius of history. From its bosom sprang most of the

freethinkers of the fifteenth century, the religious reformers of the

two following centuries, and the apostles of human emancipation,

including this time those of Germany, of the past century. It alone,

naturally supported by the powerful arm of the people, who had faith in

it, made the revolution of 1789 and ’93. It proclaimed the downfall of

royalty and of the Church, the fraternity of the peoples, the rights of

man and of the citizen. Those are its titles to glory; they are

immortal!

Soon it split. A considerable portion of the purchasers of national

property having become rich, and supporting themselves no longer on the

proletariat of the cities, but on the major portion of the peasants of

France, these also having become landed proprietors, had no aspiration

left but for peace, the re-establishment of public order, and the

foundation of a strong and regular government. It therefore welcomed

with joy the dictatorship of the first Bonaparte, and, although always

Voltairean, did not view with displeasure the Concordat with the Pope

and the re-establishment of the official Church in France: “Religion is

so necessary to the people!” Which means that, satiated themselves, this

portion of the bourgeoisie then began to see that it was needful to the

maintenance of their situation and the preservation of their

newly-acquired estates to appease the unsatisfied hunger of the people

by promises of heavenly manna. Then it was that Chateaubriand began to

preach. [9]

Napoleon fell and the Restoration brought back into France the

legitimate monarchy, and with it the power of the Church and of the

nobles, who regained, if not the whole, at least a considerable portion

of their former influence. This reaction threw the bourgeoisie back into

the Revolution, and with the revolutionary spirit that of scepticism

also was re-awakened in it. It set Chateaubriand aside and began to read

Voltaire again; but it did not go so far as Diderot: its debilitated

nerves could not stand nourishment so strong. Voltaire, on the contrary,

at once a freethinker and a deist, suited it very well. Béranger and

P.L. Courier expressed this new tendency perfectly. “The God of the good

people” and the ideal of the bourgeois king, at once liberal and

democratic, sketched against the majestic and thenceforth inoffensive

background of the Empire’s gigantic victories such was at that period

the daily intellectual food of the bourgeoisie of France.

Lamartine, to be sure, excited by a vain and ridiculously envious desire

to rise to the poetic height of the great Byron, had begun his coldly

delirious hymns in honour of the God of the nobles and of the legitimate

monarchy. But his songs resounded only in aristocratic salons. The

bourgeoisie did not hear them. Béranger was its poet and Courier was its

political writer.

The revolution of July resulted in lifting its tastes. We know that

every bourgeois in France carries within him the imperishable type of

the bourgeois gentleman, a type which never fails to appear immediately

the parvenu acquires a little wealth and power. In 1830 the wealthy

bourgeoisie had definitely replaced the old nobility in the seats of

power. It naturally tended to establish a new aristocracy. An

aristocracy of capital first of all, but also an aristocracy of

intellect, of good manners and delicate sentiments. It began to feel

religious.

This was not on its part simply an aping of aristocratic customs. It was

also a necessity of its position. The proletariat had rendered it a

final service in once more aiding it to overthrow the nobility. The

bourgeoisie now had no further need of its co-operation, for it felt

itself firmly seated in the shadow of the throne of July, and the

alliance with the people, thenceforth useless, began to become

inconvenient. It was necessary to remand it to its place, which

naturally could not be done without provoking great indignation among

the masses. It became necessary to restrain this indignation. In the

name of what? In the name of the bourgeois interest bluntly confessed ?

That would have been much too cynical. The more unjust and inhuman an

interest is, the greater need it has of sanction. Now, where find it if

not in religion, that good protectress of al I the well-fed and the

useful consoler of the hungry? And more than ever the triumphant

bourgeoisie saw that religion was indispensable to the people.

After having won all its titles to glory in religious, philosophical,

and political opposition, in protest and in revolution, it at last

became the dominant class and thereby even the defender and preserver of

the State, thenceforth the regular institution of the exclusive power of

that class. The State is force, and for it, first of all, is the right

of force, the triumphant argument of the needle-gun, of the chassepot.

But man is so singularly constituted that this argument, wholly eloquent

as it may appear, is not sufficient in the long run. Some moral sanction

or other is absolutely necessary to enforce his respect. Further, this

sanction must be at once so simple and so plain that it may convince the

masses, who, after having been reduced by the power of the State. must

also be induced to morally recognise its right.

There are only two ways of convincing the masses of the goodness of any

social institution whatever. The first, the only real one, but also the

most difficult to adopt — because it implies the abolition of the State,

or, in other words, the abolition of the organised political

exploitation of the majority by any minority whatsoever — would be the

direct and complete satisfaction of the needs and aspirations of the

people, which would be equivalent to the complete liquidation of the

political and economical existence of the bourgeois class, or, again, to

the abolition of the State. Beneficial means for the masses, but

detrimental to bourgeois interests; hence it is useless to talk about

them.

The only way, on the contrary, harmful only to the people, precious in

its salvation of bourgeois privileges, is no other than religion. That

is the eternal mirage; which leads away the masses in a search for

divine treasures, while much more reserved, the governing class contents

itself with dividing among all its members — very unequally, moreover

and always giving most to him who possesses most — the miserable goods

of earth and the plunder taken from the people, including their

political and social liberty.

There is not, there cannot be, a State without religion. Take the freest

States in the world — the United States of America or the Swiss

Confederation, for instance — and see what an important part is played

in all official discourses by divine Providence, that supreme sanction

of all States.

But whenever a chief of State speaks of God, be he William I., the

Knouto-Germanic emperor, or Grant, the president of the great republic,

be sure that he is getting ready to shear once more his people-flock.

The French liberal and Voltairean bourgeoisie, driven by temperament to

a positivism (not to say a materialism) singularly narrow and brutal,

having become the governing class of the State by its triumph of 1830,

had to give itself an official religion. It was not an easy thing. The

bourgeoisie could not abruptly go back under the yoke of Roman

Catholicism. Between it and the Church of Rome was an abyss of blood and

hatred, and, however practical and wise one becomes, it is never

possible to repress a passion developed by history. Moreover, the French

bourgeoisie would have covered itself with ridicule if it had gone back

to the Church to take part in the pious ceremonies of its worship, an

essential condition of a meritorious and sincere conversion. Several

attempted it, it is true, but their heroism was rewarded by no other

result than a fruitless scandal. Finally, a return to Catholicism was

impossible on account of the insolvable contradiction which separates

the invariable politics of Rome from the development of the economical

and political interests of the middle class.

In this respect Protestantism is much more advantageous. It is the

bourgeois religion par excellence. It accords just as much liberty as is

necessary to the bourgeois, and finds a way of reconciling celestial

aspirations with the respect which terrestrial conditions demand.

Consequently it is especially in Protestant countries that commerce and

industry have been developed. But it was impossible for the French

bourgeoisie to become Protestant. To pass from one religion to another —

unless it be done deliberately, as sometimes in the case of the Jews of

Russia and Poland, who get baptised three or four times in order to

receive each time the remuneration allowed them — to seriously change

one’s religion, a little faith is necessary. Now, in the exclusive

positive heart of the French bourgeois there is no room for faith. He

professes the most profound indifference for all questions which touch

neither his pocket first nor his social vanity afterwards. He is as

indifferent to Protestantism as to Catholicism. On the other hand, the

French bourgeois could not go over to Protestantism without putting

himself in conflict with the Catholic routine of the majority of the

French people, which would have been great imprudence on the part of a

class pretending to govern the nation.

There was still one way left — to return to the humanitarian and

revolutionary religion of the eighteenth century. But that would have

led too far. So the bourgeoisie was obliged, in order to sanction its

new State, to create a new religion which might be boldly proclaimed,

without too much ridicule and scandal, by the whole bourgeois class.

Thus was born doctrinaire Deism.

Others have told, much better than I could tell it, the story of the

birth and development of this school, which had so decisive and — we may

well add — so fatal an influence on the political, intellectual, and

moral education of the bourgeois youth of France. It dates from Benjamin

Constant and Madame de StaÎl; its real founder was Royer-Collard; its

apostles, Guizot, Cousin, Villemain, and many others. Its boldly avowed

object was the reconciliation of Revolution with Reaction, or, to use

the language of the school, of the principle of liberty with that of

authority, and naturally to the advantage of the latter.

This reconciliation signified: in politics, the taking away of popular

liberty for the benefit of bourgeois rule, represented by the

monarchical and constitutional State; in philosophy, the deliberate

submission of free reason to the eternal principles of faith. We have

only to deal here with the latter.

We know that this philosophy was specially elaborated by M. Cousin, the

father of French eclecticism. A superficial and pedantic talker,

incapable of any original conception, of any idea peculiar to himself,

but very strong on commonplace, which he confounded with common sense,

this illustrious philosopher learnedly prepared, for the use of the

studious youth of France, a metaphysical dish of his own making the use

of which, made compulsory in all schools of the State under the

University, condemned several generations one after the other to a

cerebral indigestion. Imagine a philosophical vinegar sauce of the most

opposed systems, a mixture of Fathers of the Church, scholastic

philosophers, Descartes and Pascal, Kant and Scotch psychologists all

this a superstructure on the divine and innate ideas of Plato, and

covered up with a layer of Hegelian immanence accompanied, of course, by

an ignorance, as contemptuous as it is complete, of natural science, and

proving just as two times two make five; the existence of a personal

God.....

[1] I call it “iniquitous” because, as I believe I have proved In the

Appendix alluded to, this mystery has been and still continues to be the

consecration of all the horrors which have been and are being committed

in the world; I call it unique, because all the other theological and

metaphysical absurdities which debase the human mind are but its

necessary consequences.

[2] Mr. Stuart Mill is perhaps the only one whose serious idealism may

be fairly doubted, and that for two reasons: first, that if not

absolutely the disciple, he is a passionate admirer, an adherent of the

positive philosophy of Auguste Comte, a philosophy which, in spite of

its numerous reservations, is really Atheistic; second, that Mr. Stuart

Mill is English, and in England to proclaim oneself an Atheist is to

ostracise oneself, even at this late day.

[3] In London I once heard M. Louis Blanc express almost the same idea.

“The best form of government,” said he to me, “would be that which would

invariably call men of virtuous genius to the control of affairs.”

[4] One day I asked Mazzini what measures would be taken for the

emancipation of the people, once his triumphant unitary republic had

been definitely established. “The first measure,” he answered “will be

the foundation of schools for the people.” “And what will the people be

taught in these schools?” “The duties of man — sacrifice and devotion.”

But where will you find a sufficient number of professors to teach these

things, which no one has the right or power to teach, unless he preaches

by example? Is not the number of men who find supreme enjoyment in

sacrifice and devotion exceedingly limited? Those who sacrifice

themselves in the service of a great idea obey a lofty passion, and,

satisfying this personal passion, outside of which life itself loses all

value in their eyes, they generally think of something else than

building their action into doctrine, while those who teach doctrine

usually forget to translate it into action, for the simple reason that

doctrine kills the life, the living spontaneity, of action. Men like

Mazzini, in whom doctrine and action form an admirable unity, are very

rare exceptions. In Christianity also there have been great men, holy

men, who have really practised, or who, at least, have passionately

tried to practice all that they preached, and whose hearts, overflowing

with love, were full of contempt for the pleasures and goods of this

world. But the immense majority of Catholic and Protestant priests who,

by trade, have preached and still preach the doctrines of chastity,

abstinence, and renunciation belie their teachings by their example. It

is not without reason, but because of several centuries’ experience,

that among the people of all countries these phrases have become

by-words: As licentious as a priest; as gluttonous as a priest; as

ambitious as a priest; as greedy, selfish, and grasping as a priest. It

is, then, established that the professors of the Christian virtues,

consecrated by the Church, the priests, in the immense majority of

cases, have practised quite the contrary of what they have preached.

This very majority, the universality of this fact, show that the fault

is not to be attributed to them as individuals, but to the social

position, impossible and contradictory in itself, in which these

individuals are placed. The position of the Christian priest involves a

double contradiction. In the first place, that between the doctrine of

abstinence and renunciation and the positive tendencies and needs of

human nature — tendencies and needs which, in some individual cases,

always very rare, may indeed be continually held back, suppressed, and

even entirely annihilated by the constant influence of some potent

intellectual and moral passion; which at certain moments of collective

exaltation, may be forgotten and neglected for some time by a large mass

of men at once; but which are so fundamentally inherent in our nature

that sooner or later they always resume their rights: so that, when they

are not satisfied in a regular and normal way, they are always replaced

at last by unwholesome and monstrous satisfaction. This is a natural and

consequently fatal and irresistible law, under the disastrous action of

which inevitably fall all Christian priests and especially those of the

Roman Catholic Church. It cannot apply to the professors, that is to the

priests of the modern Church, unless they are also obliged to preach

Christian abstinence and renunciation. But there is another

contradiction common to the priests of both sects. This contradiction

grows out of the very title and position of the master. A master who

commands, oppresses, and exploits is a wholly logical and quite natural

personage. But a master who sacrifices himself to those who are

subordinated to him by his divine or human privilege is a contradictory

and quite impossible being. This is the very constitution of hypocrisy,

so well personified by the Pope, who, while calling himself the lowest

servant of the servants of God — in token whereof, following the example

of Christ, he even washes once a year the feet of twelve Roman beggars —

proclaims himself at the same time vicar of God, absolute and infallible

master of the world. Do I need to recall that the priests of all

churches, far from sacrificing themselves to the flocks confided to

their care, have always sacrificed them, exploited them, and kept them

in the condition of a flock, partly to satisfy their own personal

passions and partly to serve the omnipotence of the Church? Like

conditions, like causes, always produce like effects. It will, then, be

the same with the professors of the modern School divinely inspired and

licensed by the State. They will necessarily become, some without

knowing it, others with full knowledge of the cause, teachers of the

doctrine of popular sacrifice to the power of the State and to the

profit of the privileged classes. Must we, then, eliminate from society

all instruction and abolish all schools? Far from it! Instruction must

be spread among the masses without stint, transforming all the churches,

all those temples dedicated to the glory of God and to the slavery of

men, into so many schools of human emancipation. But, in the first

place, let us understand each other; schools, properly speaking, in a

normal society founded on equality and on respect for human liberty,

will exist only for children and not for adults: and, in order that they

may become schools of emancipation and not of enslavement, it will be

necessary to eliminate, first of all, this fiction of God, the eternal

and absolute enslaver. The whole education of children and their

instruction must be founded on the scientific development of reason, not

on that of faith; on the development of personal dignity and

independence, not on that of piety and obedience; on the worship of

truth and justice at any cost, and above all on respect for humanity,

which must replace always and everywhere the worship of divinity. The

principle of authority, in the education of children, constitutes the

natural point of departure; it is legitimate, necessary, when applied to

children of a tender age, whose intelligence has not yet openly

developed itself. But as the development of everything, and consequently

of education, implies the gradual negation of the point of departure,

this principle must diminish as fast as education and instruction

advance, giving place to increasing liberty. All rational education is

at bottom nothing but this progressive immolation of authority for the

benefit of liberty, the final object of education necessarily being the

formation of free men full of respect and love for the liberty of

others. Therefore the first day of the pupils’ life, if the school takes

infants scarcely able as yet to stammer a few words, should be that of

the greatest authority and an almost entire absence of liberty; but its

last day should be that of the greatest liberty and the absolute

abolition of every vestige of the animal or divine principle of

authority. The principle of authority, applied to men who have surpassed

or attained their majority, becomes a monstrosity, a flagrant denial of

humanity, a source of slavery and intellectual and moral depravity.

Unfortunately, paternal governments have left the masses to wallow in an

ignorance so profound that it will be necessary to establish schools not

only for the people’s children, but for the people themselves. From

these schools will be absolutely eliminated the smallest applications or

manifestations of the principle of authority. They will be schools no

longer; they will be popular academies, in which neither pupils nor

masters will be known, where the people will come freely to get, if they

need it, free instruction, and in which, rich in their own experience,

they will teach in their turn many things to the professors who shall

bring them knowledge which they lack. This, then, will be a mutual

instruction, an act of intellectual fraternity between the educated

youth and the people. The real school for the people and for all grown

men is life. The only grand and omnipotent authority, at once natural

and rational, the only one which we may respect, will be that of the

collective and public spirit of a society founded on equality and

solidarity and the mutual human respect of all its members. Yes, this is

an authority which is not at all divine, wholly human, but before which

we shall bow willingly, certain that, far from enslaving them, it will

emancipate men. It will be a thousand times more powerful, be sure of

it, than all your divine, theological, metaphysical, political, and

judicial authorities, established by the Church and by the State, more

powerful than your criminal codes, your jailers, and your executioners.

The power of collective sentiment or public spirit is even now a very

serious matter. The men most ready to commit crimes rarely dare to defy

it, to openly affront it. They will seek to deceive it, but will take

care not to be rude with it unless they feel the support of a minority

larger or smaller. No man, however powerful he believes himself, will

ever have the strength to bear the unanimous contempt of society; no one

can live without feeling himself sustained by the approval and esteem of

at least some portion of society. A man must be urged on by an immense

and very sincere conviction in order to find courage to speak and act

against the opinion of all, and never will a selfish, depraved, and

cowardly man have such courage. Nothing proves more clearly than this

fact the natural and inevitable solidarity — this law of sociability —

which binds all men together, as each of us can verify daily, both on

himself and on all the men whom he knows. But, if this social power

exists, why has it not sufficed hitherto to moralise, to humanise men?

Simply because hitherto this power has not been humanised itself; it has

not been humanised because the social life of which it is ever the

faithful expression is based, as we know, on the worship of divinity,

not on respect for humanity; on authority, not on liberty; on privilege,

not on equality; on the exploitation, not on the brotherhood of men; on

iniquity and falsehood, not on justice and truth. Consequently its real

action, always in contradiction of the humanitarian theories which it

professes, has constantly exercised a disastrous and depraving

influence. It does not repress vices and crimes; it creates them. Its

authority is consequently a divine, anti-human authority; its influence

is mischievous and baleful. Do you wish to render its authority and

influence beneficent and human? Achieve the social revolution. Make all

needs really solidary, and cause the material and social interests of

each to conform to the human duties of each. And to this end there is

but one means: Destroy all the institutions of Inequality; establish the

economic and social equality of all, and on this basis will arise the

liberty, the morality, the solidary humanity of all. I shall return to

this, the most important question of Socialism.

[5] Science, in becoming the patrimony of everybody, will wed itself in

a certain sense to the immediate and real life of each. It will gain in

utility and grace what it loses in pride, ambition, and doctrinaire

pedantry. This, however, will not prevent men of genius, better

organized for scientific speculation than the majority of their fellows,

from devoting themselves exclusively to the cultivation of the sciences,

and rendering great services to humanity. Only, they will be ambitious

for no other social influence than the natural influence exercised upon

its surroundings by every superior intelligence, and for no other reward

than the high delight which a noble mind always finds in the

satisfaction of a noble passion.

[6] Universal experience, on which all science rests, must be clearly

distinguished from universal faith, on which the idealists wish to

support their beliefs: the first is a real authentication of facts; the

second is only a supposition of facts which nobody has seen, and which

consequently are at variance with the experience of everybody.

[7] The idealists, all those who believe in the immateriality and

immortality of the human soul, must be excessively embarrassed by the

difference in intelligence existing between races, peoples, and

individuals. Unless we suppose that the various divine particles have

been irregularly distributed, how is this difference to be explained?

Unfortunately there is a considerable number of men wholly stupid,

foolish even to idiocy. Could they have received in the distribution a

particle at once divine and stupid? To escape this embarrassment the

idealists must necessarily suppose that all human souls are equal. but

that the prisons in which they find themselves necessarily confined,

human bodies, are unequal, some more capable than others of serving as

an organ for the pure intellectuality of soul. According to this. such a

one might have very fine organs at his disposition. such another very

gross organs. But these are distinctions which idealism has not the

power to use without falling into inconsistency and the grossest

materialism, for in the presence of absolute immateriality of soul all

bodily differences disappear, all that is corporeal, material,

necessarily appearing indifferent, equally and absolutely gross. The

abyss which separates soul from body, absolute immateriality from

absolute materiality, is infinite. Consequently all differences, by the

way inexplicable and logically impossible, which may exist on the other

side of the abyss, in matter, should be to the soul null and void, and

neither can nor should exercise any influence over it. In a word, the

absolutely immaterial cannot be constrained, imprisoned, and much less

expressed in any degree whatsoever by the absolutely material. Of all

the gross and materialistic (using the word in the sense attached to it

by the idealists) imaginations which were engendered by the primitive

ignorance and stupidity of men, that of an immaterial soul imprisoned in

a material body is certainly the grossest, the most stupid. and nothing

better proves the omnipotence exercised by ancient prejudices even over

the best minds than the deplorable sight of men endowed with lofty

intelligence still talking of it in our days.

[8] I am well aware that in the theological and metaphysical systems of

the Orient, and especially in those of India, including Buddhism, we

find the principle of the annihilation of the real world in favour of

the ideal and of absolute abstraction. But it has not the added

character of voluntary and deliberate negation which distinguishes

Christianity; when those systems were conceived. The world of human

thought of will and of liberty, had not reached that stage of

development which was afterwards seen in the Greek and Roman

civilisation.

[9] It seems to me useful to recall at this point an anecdote — one, by

the way, well known and thoroughly authentic — which sheds a very clear

light on the personal value of this warmed-over of the Catholic beliefs

and on the religious sincerity of that period. Chateaubriand submitted

to a publisher a work attacking faith. The publisher called his

attention to the fact that atheism had gone out of fashion, that the

reading public cared no more for it, and that the demand, on the

contrary, was for religious works. Chateaubriand withdrew, but a few

months later came back with his Genius of Christianity.