The Philosophy of Misery | Page 5

them; and, as to the idea of God, it
is easily seen why isolation and statu quo are alike fatal to it. On the
one hand, absence of communication keeps the mind absorbed in
animal self-contemplation; on the other, absence of motion, gradually
changing social life into mechanical routine, finally eliminates the idea
of will and providence. Strange fact! religion, which perishes through
progress, perishes also through quiescence.
[2] The Chinese have preserved in their traditions the remembrance of a
religion which had ceased to exist among them five or six centuries
before our era.
(See Pauthier, "China," Paris, Didot.) More surprising still is it that this
singular people, in losing its primitive faith, seems to have understood

that divinity is simply the collective me of humanity: so that, more than
two thousand years ago, China had reached, in its commonly-accepted
belief, the latest results of the philosophy of the Occident. "What
Heaven sees and understands," it is written in the Shu-king, "is only
that which the people see and understand. What the people deem
worthy of reward and punishment is that which Heaven wishes to
punish and reward. There is an intimate communication between
Heaven and the people: let those who govern the people, therefore, be
watchful and cautious." Confucius expressed the same idea in another
manner: "Gain the affection of the people, and you gain empire. Lose
the affection of the people, and you lose empire." There, then, general
reason was regarded as queen of the world, a distinction which
elsewhere has been bestowed upon revelations. The Tao-te-king is still
more explicit. In this work, which is but an outline criticism of pure
reason, the philosopher Lao-tse continually identifies, under the name
of TAO, universal reason and the infinite being; and all the obscurity of
the book of Lao tse consists, in my opinion, of this constant
identification of principles which our religious and metaphysical habits
have so widely separated.

Notice further that, in attributing to the vague and (so to speak)
objectified consciousness of a universal reason the first revelation of
Divinity, we assume absolutely nothing concerning even the reality or
non-reality of God. In fact, admitting that God is nothing more than
collective instinct or universal reason, we have still to learn what this
universal reason is in itself. For, as we shall show directly, universal
reason is not given in individual reason, in other words, the knowledge
of social laws, or the theory of collective ideas, though deduced from
the fundamental concepts of pure reason, is nevertheless wholly
empirical, and never would have been discovered a priori by means of
deduction, induction, or synthesis. Whence it follows that universal
reason, which we regard as the origin of these laws; universal reason,
which exists, reasons, labors, in a separate sphere and as a reality
distinct from pure reason, just as the planetary system, though created
according to the laws of mathematics, is a reality distinct from
mathematics, whose existence could not have been deduced from
mathematics alone: it follows, I say, that universal reason is, in modern

languages, exactly what the ancients called God. The name is changed:
what do we know of the thing?
Let us now trace the evolution of the Divine idea.
The Supreme Being once posited by a primary mystical judgment, man
immediately generalizes the subject by another mysticism,--analogy.
God, so to speak, is as yet but a point: directly he shall fill the world.
As, in sensing his social me, man saluted his AUTHOR, so, in finding
evidence of design and intention in animals, plants, springs, meteors,
and the whole universe, he attributes to each special object, and then to
the whole, a soul, spirit, or genius presiding over it; pursuing this
inductive process of apotheosis from the highest summit of Nature,
which is society, down to the humblest forms of life, to inanimate and
inorganic matter. From his collective me, taken as the superior pole of
creation, to the last atom of matter, man EXTENDS, then, the idea of
God,--that is, the idea of personality and intelligence,--just as God
himself EXTENDED HEAVEN, as the book of Genesis tells us; that is,
created space and time, the conditions of all things.
Thus, without a God or master-builder, the universe and man would not
exist: such is the social profession of faith. But also without man God
would not be thought, or--to clear the interval--God would be nothing.
If humanity needs an author, God and the gods equally need a revealer;
theogony, the history of heaven, hell, and their inhabitants,--those
dreams of the human mind,--is the counterpart of the universe, which
certain philosophers have called in return the dream of God. And how
magnificent this theological creation, the work of society! The creation
of the demiourgos was obliterated; what we call the Omnipotent