“The concept of a divinity the priests wish to foist upon us is the concept, precisely, of a universal cause whereof every other cause is an effect. The imbeciles to whom these impostors have always addressed themselves believed that such a cause did exist—could possibly exist separately from the particular effects it produces, quite as if the modalities of a body could be separated from that body, as if whiteness being one of the qualities of snow, it were possible to peel that quality away from snow. Do modifications take leave of the bodies they modify? Well then, your God is only a modification of the matter that by its essence is perpetually in motion; this motion which you think you can separate from it, this energy native to matter, there’s’ your God; and now, you flea-brained worshiping mice, now inspect this august being who made you in his image, and decide for yourselves to what homage he is entitled!
“Those wits that hold the first cause capable of producing no more than the local movement of bodies, and who reserve to our human intelligence the power of self-determination, curiously limit that cause and, stealing away its universality, reduce it to the lowest thing in Nature, to, that is, the mean task of keeping matter on the move. But as all things in Nature are interrelated, let mental feelings produce movements in living bodies, let the movements of bodies excite sentiments in souls, all very well, but one cannot resort to this supposition to found or defend religious worship; as a consequence of the perception of the objects that are there before our consideration, we ask only that these perceptions occur when we are prepared to make the most of them, when they coincide with a stirring in our organs. Thus the cause of these stirrings is the cause of our will and desiring. If this cause knows nothing of the effect these stirrings produce in us, then what a puny God you’ve got there! and if he knows, then he is accomplice to it and consents thereto; if, knowing, he does not consent, he is thus forced to do what he does not want to do; there is thus something more powerful than he, hence he is constrained to obey laws. As our will always expresses itself in some movement, gesture, or impulse, God is consequently obliged to concur in what we will and sanction what at our will’s behest we do: God hence dwells in the parricide’s murdering arm, in the incendiary’s torch, in the whore’s cunt. God begins to sweat, to say no? Then there’s a skimpy, starveling little God, weaker than us, and he’s forced to obey us. And so, irrespective of what they say, it’s got to be stated that there is no universal cause; or if you simply cannot manage without one, we’ll have to let it consent to everything that happens to us, we’ll have to suppose it never wills anything else, you’ll have also to accept that this shoddy Omnipotence can neither hate nor love any of the particular beings which emanate from it, because all of them obey it equally, and that, this being so, words like punishments, rewards, commandments, prohibitions, order, and disorder are merely allegorical terms drawn from what transpires in the sphere of human events and intercourse.
“Notice now that as soon as one no longer feels strictly bound to regard God as an essentially good being, as a being who loves mankind, it is very possible to think that God intended to deceive man. Thus even were we to grant the authenticity of all the miracles upon which the whole scheme is made to repose by those who claim to knowledge of the laws he disclosed to a few individuals, as all these prodigious deeds confirm the injustice and inhumanity of God, we have no assurance that these wonders were not wrought with the express purpose of gulling us, and nothing authorizes the belief that by the most scrupulous observance of his commandments we can ever win his friendship. If he does not punish those who have observed his decreed law, its observance becomes useless; and as this obedience is painful, your God, in prescribing it, showed himself guilty of both uselessness and wickedness: whereupon I must again inquire whether this being is worthy of our pious attentions. His commandments, moreover, are in no wise respectworthy; they are absurd, contrary to right reason, they are offensive to our moral sense and are physically afflicting, they who proclaim the law violate it night and day, and if indeed there is in the world a scattering of personages who seem moved to express faith in this law, let us carefully scrutinize their mentalities, we will discover them to be simple-minded or lunatic. I turn an analytical eye upon the evidence offered in proof of this scandalous jumble of mysteries and decrees, the issue of our ridiculous God, and I find everything perched upon the pitiable foundations of confused, uncertain traditions which seem only to invite regular defeat at the hands of any adversary, however unskilled he may be.
“We may declare it truthfully and with confidence: of all the religions edified by mankind, there is not one which can make any legitimate claim to pre-eminence over the rest; not one which is not stuffed with fables, replete with lies, overflowing with perversities, not one which is not studded with the most imminent dangers lying cheek to jowl with the most glaring contradictions. The crazed seek to justify their reveries, and they call miracles to their rescue: whence the result that, with the same tedious circular process, it’s now the miracle which proves the religion whereas a moment ago ’twas the religion which proved the miracle. Nor is it that only one religion requires miracles; they all do, miracles are cited in every holy text, and on every page. Leda had a splendid swan; to compete with her, Mary had to be served by her dove.
“If nevertheless all these miracles were true, the obvious and necessary result would be that God had allowed miracles to occur in behalf of true and false religions alike, in which case his impartiality would manifest his unconcern for error and truth. The entertaining thing is that every sect is as firmly persuaded as any of its rivals of the overwhelming reality of the prodigies it recognizes. If they are all false, one must conclude that entire nations have been capable of believing fictions; thus, insofar as the truth of prodigies goes, the unconditional credulity of a whole people proves nothing whatsoever. But not one of these alleged facts can be proved in any way other than by the persuasion of those who believe them already, hence there is not one the truth whereof has been adequately established; and as these wonders constitute the sole means by which we might be compelled to believe in a religion, we must conclude that not one stands proven, and we must deem them all as the handiwork of fanaticism, deceit, fraud, and arrogance.”
“But,” I interjected at this point, “if there be neither God nor religion, what is it runs the universe?”
“My dear,” Madame Delbène replied, “the universe runs itself, and the eternal laws inherent in Nature suffice, without any first cause or prime mover, to produce all that is and all that we know; the perpetual movement of matter explains everything: why need we supply a motor to that which is ever in motion? The universe is an assemblage of unlike entities which act and react mutually and successively with and against each other; I discern no start, no finish, no fixed boundaries, this universe I see only as an incessant passing from one state into another, and within it only particular beings which forever change shape and form, but I acknowledge no universal cause behind and distinct from the universe and which gives it existence and which procures the modifications in the particular beings composing it. I affirm indeed that, in my view, the absolute contrary holds, and I believe I have proven my point. We need not fret if we find nothing to substitute for chimeras, and above all let us never accept as cause for what we do not comprehend something else we comprehend even less.
“After having demonstrated the complete extravagance of the deific system,” that talented woman went on, “I’ll surely have little trouble uprooting the prejudices and superstitions that have been planted in you ever since the day when, at a tender age, you first heard theories expounded on the principle of life; is there really anything more extraordinary than this superiority to animals which humans arrogate to themselves? Ask them upon what basis their superiority rests. ‘We have a soul’—that’s their silly response. Then ask them to explain what they mean by this vocable, soul. And then you’ll see them stutter, flounder amidst contradictions: ‘It is an unknown substance,’ they begin; n
ext: it’s a secret incorporeal power; finally, a spirit whereof they have no definite idea. Ask them how this spirit, which, like their God, they imagine as totally without extension, has managed to wed itself to their material and extensive body, they’ll tell you that they frankly don’t know, that it’s passing strange, a mystery, that God’s omnipotent dexterity has brought this union about. Such are the admirably keen and incisive ideas that stupidity forms of the hidden or rather imaginary substance which stupidity turns into the mechanism responsible for all of stupidity’s acts.
“To that nonsense I have just this to reply: if the soul is a substance that differs essentially from the body and that can have no relation to it, their fusion is impossible. Furthermore, this soul, being in essence different from the body, ought necessarily to act in a different fashion from it; however, we observe that the impulses experienced by the body make themselves felt also upon this so-called soul, and that these two substances, dissimilar in essence, always act in concert. You’ll tell me that this harmony is another mystery, and in my turn I’ll tell you that I’m not aware of having any soul, that I’m acquainted with and feel nothing but my body; that it is the body which feels, which thinks, which judges, which suffers, which enjoys; and that all its faculties are the necessary effects of its mechanism, organization, and structure.
“Although man is utterly incapable of achieving the faintest idea of this soul of his, although everything proves to man that he feels, thinks, acquires thoughts and ideas, takes pleasure and suffers pain only by means of the senses or the organs of the body, notwithstanding he carries on with his folly and comes to the point of believing that this soul about which he knows nothing is exempt from death. But even supposing this soul to exist, tell me, if you please, how one can avoid recognizing its total dependence upon the body and the fact that it must share in all the vicissitudes of the body’s fate. And yet absurdity can bring a man so far as to believe that by its nature the soul has nothing in common with the body; one would have us think that it can act and feel without the body’s aid; in a word, one maintains that, deprived of this body and sundered from the senses, this sublime soul will be able to live in order to suffer, experience great comfort or severe torments. It is upon some such loose heap of conjectural absurdities one builds the wonderful opinion relative to the soul’s immortality.
“If I ask them their motives for supposing the soul deathless, they pipe up at once: ‘Because it is in man’s very nature to desire eternal life.’ ‘But,’ I reply, ‘does your desire become proof of its fulfillment? By what peculiar logic dare one decide that something cannot fail to happen because one wishes it to?’ ‘The impious,’ they give me back, ‘the impious, lacking the flattering hopes of an afterlife, desire definitive annihilation.’ ‘Well then, upon the basis of this desire, are they any less authorized to conclude that they will be annihilated than you claim yourselves authorized to conclude that you are going to go on existing always simply because that is your desire?’
“Oh, Juliette!” this rigorous logician pursued with all the energy of a passionate conviction, “oh, my beloved friend, doubt thereof there may be none: when we die, we die. Inside and out, through and through; and once the Fates have severed the thread, the human frame is no more than an inert mass, unable to produce those movements which, collectively, constituted its life. In the dead body neither circulation nor respiration nor digestion nor locution nor intellection are any longer there; upon death, so they say, the soul quits the body; but to say that this soul, of which nothing is known, is the principle of life is to say nothing at all unless it be that an unknown force is the hidden principle of imperceptible motions. What is more natural and simpler than to believe a dead man is dead, over and done with; and what more ludicrous than to believe that when a man is dead he’s still alive?
“We smile at the naïveté of those peoples who have the custom of burying provisions and victuals alongside corpses; is it more farfetched to believe men will eat after death than to fancy they’ll think, have pleasant or unpleasant ideas, amuse themselves, repent, feel hurt or joy, be glad or heavy of heart, when once the very organs required for transmitting and receiving sensations and ideas shall have rotted to bits and these bits crumbled to dust? To say that human souls will be happy or unhappy after death is tantamount to declaring that men can see without eyes, hear without ears, taste without palates, scent without noses, touch without fingers. And yet, think of it! they consider themselves exceedingly clever, most rational, those societies which uphold such notions.
“The dogma of the soul’s immortality assumes the soul to be a simple substance, in short, a spirit, but I haven’t given up wondering what a spirit is.”
“I was taught,” I volunteered, “that a spirit is a substance lacking extension, incorruptible, and having nothing in common with matter.”
“That being the case,” my tutor answered at once, “tell me how your soul arranges to be born, to grow, to strengthen itself, to agitate itself, and to age, and all this concurrently with the evolution of your body?
“Like a myriad of fools who have entertained the same notions, you’ll say that the whole affair is downright mysterious; but, imbeciles that they are, if all these problems are mysteries, they understand nothing about them, and since they understand nothing about them, how can they make an affirmative decision about the coexistence of what they are incapable of conceiving? In order to believe or affirm something, need you not at least know in what consists the thing you believe and declare to be? Belief in the soul’s immortality, that comes round to saying one is convinced of the existence of a thing whereof there is no possible means of forming any precise concept whatever; it’s belief in a batch of empty words without being able to associate any meaning to them; to maintain that a thing is such as it is said to be, that’s the last stage in madness and vanity.
“Ah, but what odd logicians these theologians are! Whenever they cannot divine the natural causes of things, they jump straight into improvising supernatural causes, they imagine spirits, gods, occult causes, unfathomable and uncanny agents, or rather words for all these, words a great deal more obscure than the phenomena they labor to account for. We’d best remain within the realm of Nature when we wish to appreciate the effects of Nature; let us never stray away from Nature when we wish to explain her phenomena, let us cease to worry over causes too subtle to be grasped by our organs, let us fully realize that it shall never be by turning our back upon Nature that we’ll find the solutions to the problems Nature poses us.
“Within the terms of theological hypothesis itself—that is to say, supposing that matter is moved by an omnipotent motor—by what right do the theologians deny their God the power to give this matter the faculty of thought? Were we to suppose a matter that could think we could at least gain a few insights into the subject of thought or into what does the thinking in us; whereas so long as we attribute thought to an immaterial being it is impossible for us even to begin to understand it.
“We encounter the objection that materialism reduces the human being to a mere machine, that materialism is hence a dishonor to our kind; but is it to honor this species to say that man acts at the behest of the secret impulses of a spirit or of a certain I don’t know quite what which serves to animate him nobody knows quite how?
“One readily perceives that the superiority they accord spirit over matter, or the soul over the body, is based simply on our ignorance of the nature of this soul, whereas everyone is more familiar with matter and flesh and fancies he understands them to the point of knowing precisely how they work. And yet, any contemplative mind must be aware that the simplest workings of our bodies are as difficult to apprehend as the enigmatic operations of thought.
“Why is it so many people have this inflated esteem for spiritual substance? I can offer only one explanation: their total inability to define it intelligibly. The slight case in which our theologians hold the flesh comes only from the fact that familiarity breeds contempt.
When they tell us that the soul is of greater excellence than the body, they tell us nothing unless it be that that with which they have no acquaintance must perforce be finer, nobler, than that whereupon they have a few vapid ideas.
“Tirelessly they fill our ears with the usefulness of this afterlife dogma; they declare that even if it were all a large fib, it would still have its advantages, for it would continue to alarm men and keep them browbeaten on the path of virtue. Well, I wonder whether it’s really so, that this dogma renders men better behaved and more virtuous. I dare say, to the contrary, that it is effective only in rendering them insane, hypocritical, wicked, despondent, irritable, and that you’ll always find more virtues and more civil conduct among those peoples who are not burdened with these ideas than among those with whom they are the foundation of religion. If they who are appointed to instruct and rule over men had wisdom and virtue themselves, realities, and not fantasies, would enable them to govern better; but scoundrels, quacksalvers, ambitious ruffians, or low sneaks, the lawgivers have ever found it easier to lull nations to sleep with bedtime tales than to teach truths to the public, than to develop intelligence in the population, than to encourage men to virtue by making it worthwhile for sound and palpable reasons, than, in short, to govern them in a logical manner.
“Let there be no doubt of it, priests have had their motives for contriving and fostering this ridiculous rumor of the soul’s immortality; lacking such devices, how would they have wrung pennies from the dying? Ah, if these loathsome dogmas of God and of a soul that outlives us are of no use to humankind, we must at least admit that they are indispensable to those who have taken upon themselves the chore of infecting public opinion.”2