dogma—Rôle of enthusiasm in moral propagandism—Necessity of hope to sustain enthusiasm—Possibility of propagating moral ideas: 1. Apart from myths and religious dogmas; 2. Apart from any notion of a religious sanction—Baudelaire’s conception of a criminal and happy hero—Criticism of that conception—Worship of the memory of the dead.
III. Associations for æsthetic purposes—Worship of art and nature—Art and poetry will sever their connection with religion and will survive it—Necessity of developing the æsthetic sentiment and the worship of art, as the religious sentiment becomes more feeble—Poetry, eloquence, music; their rôle in the future—Final substitution of art for rites—Worship of nature—Feeling for nature originally an essential element of the religious sentiment—Superiority of a worship of nature over worship of human art—Nature is the true temple of the future, 391
CHAPTER III.
THEISM.
Review of the Principal Metaphysical Hypotheses which will Replace Dogma.
I. Introduction—Progress of metaphysical hypotheses—Metaphysical hypotheses destined to increasing diversity in details, and increasing agreement on essential points—Importance of the moral element in metaphysical hypotheses—The part played by conscience in human morality will not diminish, as Mr. Spencer says—Sympathetic groups under which divers systems of metaphysics will be ranged.
II. Theism—1. Probable fate of the creation hypothesis—The author of the world conceived as a prime mover—Eternity of movement—The author of the world conceived as a creator properly so called—Illusion involved in the conception of nothing—Criticism of the creation hypothesis from the point of view of morals: the problem of evil and of the responsibility of the creator—Attempts to save optimism—Hypothesis of a God creating free agents, “workmen” and not “work”—Reciprocal determinism and the illusion of spontaneity—Immorality of the temptation—Hypothesis of the fall, its impossibility—God the tempter—Lucifer and God—2. Probable fate of the notion of Providence—Hypotheses to explain a special Providence and miracles thus insufficient—Hypothesis of a non-omnipotent God proposed by John Stuart Mill—The God of Comtism—Religion should be not solely human but cosmic—The fate of the philosophical idea of God—Rational religion proposed by the neo-Kantians—Ultimate transformation of the notion of divinity and of Providence—Human Providence and progressive divinity in the world, 424
CHAPTER IV.
PANTHEISM.
Review of the Principal Metaphysical Hypotheses which will Replace Dogma.—Continued.
I. Optimistic pantheism—Transformation of transcendent Deism into immanent theism and pantheism—Disanthropomorphized God, according to Messrs. Fiske and Spencer—Diverse forms of pantheism—Optimistic and intellectualistic pantheism of Spinoza—Objections, Spinoza’s fatalism—The moral significance that might be lent to pantheism by the introduction of some notion of a final cause—Qualities and defects of pantheism—Conception of unity upon which it is founded—This conception criticised—Its possible subjectivity.
II. Pessimistic pantheism—Pessimistic interpretation of religions in Germany—1. Causes of the progress of pessimism in the present epoch—Progress of pantheistic metaphysics and of positive
