THE NON-RELIGION
OF THE FUTURE

A SOCIOLOGICAL STUDY

TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH
OF
M. GUYAU

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