who read these studies, and who are struggling with the same difficulties as those which have so long engaged the author's thoughts, may find both interest and profit in seeing how he has succeeded in satisfying himself. Those even who have never reflected on these questions, or have lightly turned from them because they deemed them insoluble, will not perhaps object to be directed to them by one who wishes, not to check their freedom of thought, but to stimulate them to exercise it. Who, at the close of his secret meditations, on the confines of his knowledge, at the end of his affections, of the joys he has tasted, of the trials he has endured, has not seen rising before him the religious question—I mean the mysterious problem of his destiny? Of all questions it is the most vital. Men may be turned from it for a time by manifold distractions and by a sense of powerlessness to solve the question, but it is impossible that they should not return to it. Has life a meaning? Is it worth living? Our efforts, have they an end? Our works and our thoughts, have they any permanent value to the universe? This problem, which one generation may evade, returns with the next. Each new recruit to the human race brings the problem along with him, because he wishes to live, and to live is to act, and all action requires a faith. It is of the young that I have thought while preparing these pages, and it is to them that I dedicate them.

To a generation that believed it could repose in Positivism in philosophy, utilitarianism in morals, and naturalism in art and poetry, has succeeded a generation that torments itself more than ever with the mystery of things, that is attracted by the ideal, that dreams of social fraternity, of self-renunciation, of devotion to the little, to the miserable, to the oppressed—devotion like the heroism of Christian love. Hence what has been called the renaissance of Idealism, the return, i.e., to general ideas, to faith in the invisible, to the taste for symbols, and to those longings, as confused as they are ardent, to discover a religion or to return to the religion their fathers have disdained. Our young people, it seems to me, are pushing bravely forward, marching between two high walls: on the one side modern science with its rigorous methods which it is no longer possible to ignore or to avoid; on the other, the dogmas and the customs of the religious institutions in which they were reared, and to which they would, but cannot, sincerely return. The sages who have led them hitherto point to the impasse they have reached, and bid them take a part,—either for science against religion, or for religion against science. They hesitate, with reason, in face of this alarming alternative. Must we then choose between pious ignorance and bare knowledge? Must we either continue to live a moral life belied by science, or set up a theory of things which our consciences condemn? Is there no issue to the dark and narrow valley which our anxious youth traverse? I think there is. I think I have caught glimpses of a steep and narrow path that leads to wide and shining table-lands above. Indeed I have ascended in the footsteps of some others, and I signal in my turn to younger, braver pioneers who, in course of time, will make a broader, safer road, along which all the caravan may pass.

BOOK FIRST

RELIGION

CHAPTER I

ON THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ORIGIN, AND ON THE NATURE OF RELIGION

1. First Critical Reflections

Why am I religious? Because I cannot help it: it is a moral necessity of my being. They tell me it is a matter of heredity, of education, of temperament. I have often said so to myself. But that explanation simply puts the problem further back; it does not solve it

The necessity which I experience in my individual life I find to be still more invincible in the collective life of humanity. Humanity is not less incurably religious than I am. The cults it has espoused and abandoned have deceived it in vain; in vain has the criticism of savants and philosophers shattered its dogmas and mythologies; in vain has religion left such tracks of blood and fire throughout the annals of humanity; it has survived all change, all revolution, all stages of culture and progress. Cut down a thousand times, the ancient stem has always sent new branches forth. Whence comes this indestructible vitality? What is the cause of the universality and perpetuity of religion?

Before entering upon this question it will be necessary to remove a fruitful cause of error with respect to the essence and origin of the religious sense, especially among the peoples of Latin extraction. This cause lies in the very word religion. It very badly designates the psychological phenomenon to be studied; it envelops it in accessory and even in alien ideas, which blind and mislead half-educated men. The word comes to us from the least religious of the peoples of the world. It has no synonym or equivalent in the language of the ancient Hebrews, or in that of the Greeks, the Germans, the Celts, or the Hindus, the human families which, in the religious order, have been the most original and the most creative. It was Rome that imposed the word upon us along with her language, her genius, and her institutions.

The first Christians were not acquainted with it. It is absent from the New Testament. When, in the third century, it enters into Christian speech, it no doubt undergoes a sort of baptism, and seems to cover a meaning more in conformity with the spirit of the Gospel. Lactantius defines religion as "the link which unites man to God." But in the ancient Roman writers the word never had this profound and mystical meaning. Instead of marking the inward and subjective side of religion, and signalising it as a phenomenon of the life of the soul, it defined religion by the outside, as a tradition of rites, and as a social institution bequeathed by ancestors. The Christian baptism through which the word passed did not efface this ancient Roman stamp. To the majority, even now, religion is hardly anything more than a series of traditional rites, supernatural beliefs, political institutions; it is a Church in possession of divine sacraments, constituted by a sacerdotal hierarchy, for the discipline and government of souls. Such is the form under which the genius of Rome conceived and realised Christianity in the Western world; and the fascination that this political and social conception of religion still exercises is so great that minds the most enlightened know no better than to agree with M. Brunetière, who, when wishing to set forth the superiority of Catholicism to Protestantism, confines himself, like Bossuet, to praising it as a perfect model of government.

By a sort of logical necessity, whenever and wherever this political conception of religion has predominated, an analogous explanation of its origin has always arisen. It is natural that men should have applied to it the ancient juridical adage: is fecit cui prodest. Religion admirably serves to govern the peoples; therefore it was originally invented for that purpose. It was the work of priests and chiefs who wished by means of it to strengthen and to ratify their authority. So reason the Romans in the days of Cicero and the philosophers of the eighteenth century. And there is some foundation for their arguments. Religion has often been utilised by politics: pious frauds are to be found in all the cults. But what then? What do the facts prove? It is not the pious fraud that produces the religion; it is the religion that gives occasion and opportunity to pious frauds. Without religion there would have been no pious frauds. When I hear it said, "Priests made religion," I simply ask, "And who, pray, made the priests?" In order to create a priesthood, and in order that that invention should find general acceptance with the people