



Produced by Charlene Taylor, Bryan Ness, eagkw and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
(This file was produced from images generously made
available by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)







  THE NON-RELIGION
  OF THE FUTURE

  _A SOCIOLOGICAL STUDY_


  TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH
  OF
  M. GUYAU

  [Illustration]

  NEW YORK
  HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
  1897




  COPYRIGHT, 1897,
  BY
  HENRY HOLT & CO.


  THE MERSHON COMPANY PRESS,
  RAHWAY, N. J.




TABLE OF CONTENTS.


  INTRODUCTION.

  I. Sociality the basis of religion—Its definition.

  II. The connection between religion, æsthetics, and morals.

  III. The inevitable decomposition of all systems of dogmatic
  religion; the state of “non-religion” toward which the human mind
  seems to tend—The exact sense in which one must understand the
  non-religion as distinguished from the “religion of the future.”

  IV. The value and utility, for the time being, of religion; its
  ultimate insufficiency,                                             1


  Part First.

  THE GENESIS OF RELIGIONS IN PRIMITIVE SOCIETIES.


  _CHAPTER I._

  RELIGIOUS PHYSICS.

  IMPORTANCE OF THE PROBLEM OF THE ORIGIN OF RELIGION—UNIVERSALITY
    OF RELIGIOUS BELIEFS OR SUPERSTITIONS—VARIABILITY OF RELIGIONS AND
    RELIGIOUS EVOLUTION.

  I. Idealist theory which attributes the origin of religion to
  a notion of the infinite—Henotheism of Max Müller and Von
  Hartmann—M. Renan’s Instinct for Divinity.

  II. Theory of a worship of the dead and of spirits—Herbert
  Spencer—Spencer’s objections to the theory of the attribution of a
  soul to natural forces.

  III. Answer to objections—Religious physics sociological in
  form, and the substitution of relations between malevolent
  or beneficent conscious beings for relations between natural
  forces—Sociomorphism of primitive Peoples,                        21


  _CHAPTER II._

  RELIGIOUS METAPHYSICS.

  I. Animism or polydemonism—Formation of the dualist conception of
  spirit—Social relations with spirits.

  II. Providence and miracles—The evolution of the dualist
  conception of a special providence—The conception of
  miracles—The supernatural and the natural—Scientific explanation
  and miracles—Social and moral modifications in the character
  of man, owing to supposed social relations with a special
  providence—Increasing sentiment of irresponsibility and passivity
  and “absolute dependence.”

  III. The creation—Genesis of the notion of creation—The dualistic
  elements in this idea—Monism—Classification of systems of
  religious metaphysics—Criticism of the classification proposed by
  Von Hartmann—Criticism of the classification proposed by Auguste
  Comte,                                                             80


  _CHAPTER III._

  RELIGIOUS MORALS.

  I. The laws which regulate the social relations between gods and
  men—Morality and immorality in primitive religions—Extension of
  friendly and hostile relations to the sphere of the gods—Primitive
  inability in matters of conscience, as in matters of art, to
  distinguish the great from the monstrous.

  II. The moral sanction in the society which includes gods and
  men—Patronage—That divine intervention tends always to be
  conceived after the model of human intervention and to sanction it.

  III. Worship and religious rites—Principles of reciprocity and
  proportionality in the exchange of services—Sacrifice—Principle
  of coercion and incantation—Principle of habit and its relation
  to rites—Sorcery—Sacerdotalism—Prophecy—The externals of
  worship—Dramatization and religious æsthetics.

  IV. Subjective worship—Adoration and love; their psychological
  origin,                                                           113


  Part Second.

  THE DISSOLUTION OF RELIGIONS IN EXISTING SOCIETIES.


  _CHAPTER I._

  DOGMATIC FAITH.

  I. Narrow dogmatic faith—The credulity of primitive man: First,
  spontaneous faith in the senses and imagination; Second, faith in
  the testimony of superior men; Third, faith in the divine word, in
  revelation, and in the sacred texts—The literalness of dogmatic
  faith—Inevitable intolerance of narrow dogmatic faith—Belief
 