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Title: The future of an illusion
Author: Sigmund Freud
Editor: Ernest Jones
Translator: W. D. Robson-Scott
Release date: August 31, 2025 [eBook #76774]
Language: English
Original publication: Edinburgh: Horace Liverwright and the institute of psycho-analysis, 1928
Credits: Richard Tonsing and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FUTURE OF AN ILLUSION ***
THE FUTURE OF AN ILLUSION
THE INTERNATIONAL PSYCHO-ANALYTICAL LIBRARY
EDITED BY ERNEST JONES
No. 15
THE FUTURE OF AN ILLUSION
SIGMUND FREUD, M.D., LL.D.
TRANSLATED
BY
W. D. ROBSON-SCOTT
PUBLISHED BY HORACE LIVERIGHT
AND THE INSTITUTE OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS
MCMXXVIII
_Printed in Great Britain by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
I wish to express my thanks to the Editor and to Mr. James Strachey for
reading through this translation and making many helpful suggestions.
W. D. R.-S.
CHAPTER I
When one has lived for long within a particular culture[1] and has often
striven to discover its origins and the path of its development, one
feels for once the temptation to turn one’s attention in the other
direction and to ask what further fate awaits this culture and what
transformations it is destined to undergo. But one soon finds that the
value of such an enquiry is diminished from the outset by several
considerations. Above all, by the fact that there are only a few people
who can survey human activity in all its ramifications. Most people have
been compelled to restrict themselves to a single, or to a few, spheres
of interest; but the less a man knows of the past and the present the
more unreliable must his judgement of the future prove. And further it
is precisely in the matter of this judgement that the subjective
expectations of the individual play a part that is difficult to assess;
for these prove to be dependent on purely personal factors in his own
experience, on his more or less hopeful attitude to life, according as
temperament, success or failure has prescribed for him. And finally one
must take into account the remarkable fact that in general men
experience the present naïvely, so to speak, without being able to
estimate its content; they must first place it at a distance, _i.e._ the
present must have become the past before one can win from it points of
vantage from which to gauge the future.
Footnote 1:
The German word _Kultur_ has been translated sometimes as ‘culture’
and sometimes as ‘civilization’, denoting as it does a concept
intermediate between these and at times inclusive of both.—ED.
And so he who yields to the temptation to deliver an opinion on the
probable future of our culture will do well to remind himself of the
difficulties just indicated, and likewise of the uncertainty that
attaches quite universally to every prophecy. It follows from this that
in hasty flight from so great a task I shall seek out the small tract of
territory to which my attention has hitherto been directed, as soon as I
have defined its position in general.
Human culture—I mean by that all those respects in which human life has
raised itself above animal conditions and in which it differs from the
life of the beasts, and I disdain to separate culture and
civilization—presents, as is well known, two aspects to the observer. It
includes on the one hand all the knowledge and power that men have
acquired in order to master the forces of nature and win resources from
her for the satisfaction of human needs; and on the other hand it
includes all the necessary arrangements whereby men’s relations to each
other, and in particular the distribution of the attainable riches, may
be regulated. The two tendencies of culture are not independent of each
other, first, because the mutual relations of men are profoundly
influenced by the measure of instinctual satisfaction that the existing
resources make possible; secondly, because the individual can himself
take on the quality of a piece of property in his relation to another,
in so far as this other makes use of his capacity for work or chooses
him as sexual object; and thirdly, because every individual is virtually
an enemy of culture, which is nevertheless ostensibly an object of
universal human concern. It is remarkable that little as men are able to
exist in isolation they should yet feel as a heavy burden the sacrifices
that culture expects of them in order that a communal existence may be
possible. Thus culture must be defended against the individual, and its
organization, its institutions and its laws, are all directed to this
end; they aim not only at establishing a certain distribution of
property, but also at maintaining it; in fact, they must protect against
the hostile impulses of mankind everything that contributes to the
conquest of nature and the production of wealth. Human creations are
easy to destroy, and science and technical skill, which have built them
up, can also be turned to their destruction.
So one gets the impression that culture is something which was imposed
on a resisting majority by a minority that understood how to possess
itself of the means of power and coercion. Of course it stands to reason
that these difficulties are not inherent in the nature of culture
itself, but are conditioned by the imperfections of the cultural forms
that have so far been developed. Indeed it is not difficult to point out
these defects. While mankind has made solid advances in the conquest of
nature and may expect to make still greater ones, no certain claim can
be established for a corresponding advance in the regulation of human
affairs, and probably at every period, as again now, many men have asked
themselves whether this fragment that has been acquired by culture is
indeed worth defending at all. One might suppose that a reorganization
of human relations should be possible, which, by abandoning coercion and
the suppression of the instincts, would remove the sources of
dissatisfaction with culture, so that undisturbed by inner conflict men
might devote themselves to the acquisition of natural resources and to
the enjoyment of the same. That would be the golden age, but it is
questionable if such a state of affairs can ever be realized. It seems
more probable that every culture must be built up on coercion and
instinctual renunciation; it does not even appear certain that without
coercion the majority of human individuals would be ready to submit to
the labour necessary for acquiring new means of supporting life. One
has, I think, to reckon with the fact that there are present in all men
destructive, and therefore anti-social and anti-cultural, tendencies,
and that with a great number of people these are strong enough to
determine their behaviour in human society.
This psychological fact acquires a decisive significance when one is
forming an estimate of human culture. One thought at first that the
essence of culture lay in the conquest of nature for the means of
supporting life, and in eliminating the dangers that threaten culture by
the suitable distribution of these among mankind, but now the emphasis
seems to have shifted away from the material plane on to the psychical.
The critical question is whether and to what extent one can succeed,
first, in diminishing the burden of the instinctual sacrifices imposed
on men; secondly, in reconciling them to those that must necessarily
remain; and thirdly, in compensating them for these. It is just as
impossible to do without government of the masses by a minority as it is
to dispense with coercion in the work of civilization, for the masses
are lazy and unintelligent, they have no love for instinctual
renunciation, they are not to be convinced of its inevitability by
argument, and the individuals support each other in giving full play to
their unruliness. It is only by the influence of individuals who can set
an example, whom the masses recognize as their leaders, that they can be
induced to submit to the labours and renunciations on which the
existence of culture depends. All is well if these leaders are people of
superior insight into what constitute the necessities of life, people
who have attained the height of mastering their own instinctual wishes.
But the danger exists that in order not to lose their influence they
will yield to the masses more than these will yield to them, and
therefore it seems necessary that they should be independent of the
masses by having at their disposal means of enforcing their authority.
To put it briefly, there are two widely diffused human characteristics
which are responsible for the fact that the organization of culture can
be maintained only by a certain measure of coercion: that is to say, men
are not naturally fond of work, and arguments are of no avail against
their passions.
I know what objections will be brought against these arguments. It will
be said that the character of the masses, here delineated, which is
supposed to prove that one cannot dispense with coercion in the work of
civilization, is itself only the result of defective cultural
organization, through which men have become embittered, revengeful and
unapproachable. New generations, brought up kindly and taught to have a
respect for reason, who have experienced the benefits of culture early
in life, will have a different attitude towards it; they will feel it to
be their very own possession, and they will be ready on its account to
make the sacrifice in labour and in instinctual renunciation that is
necessary for its preservation. They will be able to do without coercion
and will differ little from their leaders. If no culture has so far
produced human masses of such a quality, it is due to the fact that no
culture has yet discovered the plan that will influence men in such a
way, and that from childhood on.
It may be doubted whether it is possible at all, or at any rate just
now, in the present stage of our conquest of nature, to establish a
cultural organization of this kind; it may be asked where the throng of
superior, dependable and disinterested leaders, who are to act as
educators of the future generations, are to come from; and one may be
appalled at the stupendous amount of force that will be unavoidable if
these intentions are to be carried out. But one cannot deny the grandeur
of this project and its significance for the future of human culture. It
is securely based on a piece of psychological insight, on the fact that
man is equipped with the most varied instinctual predispositions, the
ultimate course of which is determined by the experiences of early
childhood. But the limitations of man’s capacity for education set
bounds to the efficacy of such a cultural transformation. One may
question whether and in what degree it would be possible for another
cultural milieu to efface the two characteristics of human masses that
make the guidance of men’s affairs so very difficult. The experiment has
not yet been made. Probably a certain percentage of mankind—owing to
morbid predisposition or too great instinctual vigour—will always remain
asocial, but if only one can succeed in reducing to a minority the
majority that is to-day hostile to culture, one will have accomplished a
great deal, perhaps indeed everything that can be accomplished.
I should not like to give the impression that I have wandered far away
from the chosen path of my enquiry. I will therefore expressly assert
that it is far from my intention to estimate the value of the great
cultural experiment that is at present in progress in the vast country
that stretches between Europe and Asia. I have neither the special
knowledge nor the capacity to decide on its practicability, to test the
expediency of the methods employed, or to measure the width of the
inevitable gulf between intention and execution. What is there in course
of preparation eludes investigation, for which it is not ready; for this
our long consolidated culture presents the material.
CHAPTER II
We have glided unawares out of the economic plane over into the
psychological. At first we were tempted to seek the essence of culture
in the existing material resources and in the arrangements for their
distribution. But with the discovery that every culture is based on
compulsory labour and instinctual renunciation, and that it therefore
inevitably evokes opposition from those affected by these demands, it
became clear that the resources themselves, the means of acquiring them,
and the arrangements for their distribution could not be its essential
or unique characteristic; for they are threatened by the rebelliousness
and destructive passions of the members of the culture. Thus in addition
to the resources there are the means of defending culture: the coercive
measures, and others that are intended to reconcile men to it and to
recompense them for their sacrifices. And these last may be described as
the psychical sphere of culture.
For the sake of a uniform terminology we will describe the fact that an
instinct cannot be satisfied as ‘frustration’, the means by which this
frustration is secured as ‘prohibition’, and the condition produced by
the prohibition as ‘privation’. Then the next step is to distinguish
between privations that do affect everybody and those that do not, those
that merely affect groups, classes, or even individuals. The former are
the oldest; with the prohibitions that cause them culture began, who
knows how many thousands of years ago, to detach itself from the
primordial animal condition of mankind. To our surprise we have found
that they are still operative, that they still form the kernel of the
hostility to culture. The instinctual wishes that suffer under them are
born anew with every child; there is a class of men, the neurotics, who
react already to this first group of frustrations by an asocial
attitude. Such instinctual wishes are those of incest, of cannibalism,
and of murder. It seems strange to classify these, in repudiating which
all men seem to be at one, with those others, about whose permissibility
or impermissibility in our culture there is so vigorous a dispute; but
psychologically one is justified in doing this. Nor is the attitude of
culture to these oldest instinctual wishes the same in each case;
cannibalism alone seems to be proscribed by everyone, and—to other than
analytic observation—completely overcome; the strength of the incest
wishes can still be perceived behind the prohibition; and under certain
conditions murder is still practised, indeed enjoined, by our culture.
It is possible that cultural developments lie before us, in which yet
other wish-gratifications, which are to-day entirely permissible, will
appear just as disagreeable as those of cannibalism do now.
Already in these earliest instinctual renunciations a psychological
factor is involved, which remains of great importance for everything
that follows. It is not true to say that the human mind has undergone no
development since the earliest times and that in contrast to the
advances of science and technical skill it is still the same to-day as
at the beginning of history. We can point out one of these advances
here. It is in accordance with the course of our development that
external compulsion is gradually internalized, in that a special mental
function, man’s super-ego, takes it under its jurisdiction. Every child
presents to us the model of this transformation; it is only by that
means that it becomes a moral and social being. This strengthening of
the super-ego is a highly valuable psychological possession for culture.
Those people in whom it has taken place, from being the foes of culture,
become its supporters. The greater their number in a cultural community,
the more secure it is and the more easily can it dispense with external
coercion. Now the degree of this internalization differs widely in the
case of each instinctual prohibition. As far as the earliest demands of
culture, already mentioned, are concerned, the process of
internalization seems to have been to a great extent accomplished, if we
leave out of account the unwelcome exception of the neurotics. But the
case is altered when we turn to the other instinctual claims. One notes
with surprise and concern that a majority of men obey the cultural
prohibitions in question only under the pressure of external force, in
fact only where the latter can assert itself and for as long as it is an
object of fear. This also holds good for those so-called moral cultural
demands, which in the same way apply to everyone. The greater part of
what one experiences of man’s moral untrustworthiness is to be explained
in this connection. There are innumerable civilized people who would
shrink from murder or incest, and who yet do not hesitate to gratify
their avarice, their aggressiveness and their sexual lusts, and who have
no compunction in hurting others by lying, fraud and calumny, so long as
they remain unpunished for it; and no doubt this has been so for many
cultural epochs.
If we turn to those restrictions that only apply to certain classes of
society, we encounter a state of things which is glaringly obvious and
has always been recognized. It is to be expected that the neglected
classes will grudge the favoured ones their privileges and that they
will do everything in their power to rid themselves of their own surplus
of privation. Where this is not possible a lasting measure of discontent
will obtain within this culture, and this may lead to dangerous
outbreaks. But if a culture has not got beyond the stage in which the
satisfaction of one group of its members necessarily involves the
suppression of another, perhaps the majority—and this is the case in all
modern cultures,—it is intelligible that these suppressed classes should
develop an intense hostility to the culture; a culture, whose existence
they make possible by their labour, but in whose resources they have too
small a share. In such conditions one must not expect to find an
internalization of the cultural prohibitions among the suppressed
classes; indeed they are not even prepared to acknowledge these
prohibitions, intent, as they are, on the destruction of the culture
itself and perhaps even of the assumptions on which it rests. These
classes are so manifestly hostile to culture that on that account the
more latent hostility of the better provided social strata has been
overlooked. It need not be said that a culture which leaves unsatisfied
and drives to rebelliousness so large a number of its members neither
has a prospect of continued existence, nor deserves it.
The extent to which cultural rules have been internalized—to express it
popularly and unpsychologically: the moral level of the members—is not
the only psychical asset to be considered if one is estimating the value
of a culture. In addition there is its heritage of ideals and artistic
creations, that is to say, of the satisfactions they both yield.
One will be only too readily inclined to include among the psychical
possessions of a culture its ideals, that is, its judgements of what are
its loftiest and its most ambitious accomplishments. It seems at first
as if these ideals would determine the achievements of the cultural
group; but the actual process would seem to be that the ideals are
modelled on the first achievements that the co-operation of internal
ability and external circumstances made possible, and that now these
first achievements are merely held fast by the ideal as examples to be
followed. The satisfaction the ideal gives to the members of the culture
is thus of a narcissistic nature, it is based on pride in what has
already been successfully achieved. To make this satisfaction complete
the culture compares itself with others which have applied themselves to
other tasks and have developed other ideals. On the strength of these
differences every culture claims the right to despise the rest. In this
way cultural ideals become a source of discord and enmity between
different cultural groups, as can be most clearly seen among nations.
The narcissistic satisfaction provided by the cultural ideal is also one
of the forces that effectively counteract the hostility to culture
within the cultural group. It can be shared not only by the favoured
classes, which enjoy the benefits of this culture, but also by the
suppressed, since the right to despise those that are outside it
compensates them for the wrongs they suffer in their own group. True,
one is a miserable plebeian, tormented by obligations and military
service, but withal one is a Roman citizen, one has one’s share in the
task of ruling other nations and dictating their laws. This
identification of the suppressed with the class that governs and
exploits them is, however, only a part of a larger whole. Thus the
former can be attached affectively to the latter; in spite of their
animosity they can find their ideals in their masters. Unless such
relations, fundamentally of a satisfying kind, were in existence, it
would be impossible to understand how so many cultures have contrived to
exist for so long in spite of the justified hostility of great masses of
men.
Different in kind is the satisfaction that art yields to the members of
a cultural group. As a rule it remains inaccessible to the masses, who
are engaged in exhausting labour and who have not enjoyed the benefits
of individual education. As we have long known, art offers substitutive
gratifications for the oldest cultural renunciations, still always most
deeply felt, and for that reason serves like nothing else to reconcile
men to the sacrifices they have made on culture’s behalf. On the other
hand, works of art promote the feelings of identification, of which
every cultural group has so much need, in the occasion they provide for
the sharing of highly valued emotional experiences. And when they
represent the achievements of a particular culture, thus in an
impressive way recalling it to its ideals, they also subserve a
narcissistic gratification.
No mention has yet been made of what is perhaps the most important part
of the psychical inventory of a culture: that is to say, its—in the
broadest sense—religious ideas; in other words, the use of which will be
justified later, its illusions.
CHAPTER III
Wherein lies the peculiar value of religious ideas?
We have spoken of the hostility to culture, produced by the pressure it
exercises and the instinctual renunciations that it demands. If one
imagined its prohibitions removed, then one could choose any woman who
took one’s fancy as one’s sexual object, one could kill without
hesitation one’s rival or whoever interfered with one in any other way,
and one could seize what one wanted of another man’s goods without
asking his leave: how splendid, what a succession of delights, life
would be! True, one soon finds the first difficulty: everyone else has
exactly the same wishes, and will treat one with no more consideration
than one will treat him. And so in reality there is only one single
person who can be made unrestrictedly happy by abolishing thus the
restrictions imposed by culture, and that is a tyrant or dictator who
has monopolized all the means of power; and even he has every reason to
want the others to keep at least one cultural commandment: thou shalt
not kill.
But how ungrateful, how short-sighted after all, to strive for the
abolition of culture! What would then remain would be the state of
nature, and that is far harder to endure. It is true that nature does
not ask us to restrain our instincts, she lets us do as we like; but she
has her peculiarly effective mode of restricting us: she destroys us,
coldly, cruelly, callously, as it seems to us, and possibly just through
what has caused our satisfaction. It was because of these very dangers
with which nature threatens us that we united together and created
culture, which, amongst other things, is supposed to make our communal
existence possible. Indeed, it is the principal task of culture, its
real _raison d’être_, to defend us against nature.
One must confess that in many ways it already does this tolerably well,
and clearly as time goes on it will be much more successful. But no one
is under the illusion that nature has so far been vanquished; few dare
to hope that she will ever be completely under man’s subjection. There
are the elements, which seem to mock at all human control: the earth,
which quakes, is rent asunder, and buries man and all his works; the
water, which in tumult floods and submerges all things; the storm, which
drives all before it; there are the diseases, which we have only lately
recognized as the attacks of other living creatures; and finally there
is the painful riddle of death, for which no remedy at all has yet been
found, nor probably ever will be. With these forces nature rises up
before us, sublime, pitiless, inexorable; thus she brings again to mind
our weakness and helplessness, of which we thought the work of
civilization had rid us. It is one of the few noble and gratifying
spectacles that men can offer, when in the face of an elemental
catastrophe they awake from their muddle and confusion, forget all their
internal difficulties and animosities, and remember the great common
task, the preservation of mankind against the supremacy of nature.
For the individual, as for mankind in general, life is hard to endure.
The culture in which he shares imposes on him some measure of privation,
and other men occasion him a certain degree of suffering, either in
spite of the laws of this culture or because of its imperfections. Add
to this the evils that unvanquished nature—he calls it Fate—inflicts on
him. One would expect a permanent condition of anxious suspense and a
severe injury to his innate narcissism to be the result of this state of
affairs. We know already how the individual reacts to the injuries that
culture and other men inflict on him: he develops a corresponding degree
of resistance against the institutions of this culture, of hostility
towards it. But how does he defend himself against the supremacy of
nature, of fate, which threatens him, as it threatens all?
Culture relieves him of this task: it performs it in the same way for
everyone. (It is also noteworthy that pretty well all cultures are the
same in this respect.) It does not cry a halt, as it were, in its task
of defending man against nature; it merely pursues it by other methods.
This is a complex business; man’s seriously menaced self-esteem craves
for consolation, life and the universe must be rid of their terrors, and
incidentally man’s curiosity, reinforced, it is true, by the strongest
practical motives, demands an answer.
With the first step, which is the humanization of nature, much is
already won. Nothing can be made of impersonal forces and fates; they
remain eternally remote. But if the elements have passions that rage
like those in our own souls, if death itself is not something
spontaneous, but the violent act of an evil Will, if everywhere in
nature we have about us beings who resemble those of our own
environment, then indeed we can breathe freely, we can feel at home in
face of the supernatural, and we can deal psychically with our frantic
anxiety. We are perhaps still defenceless, but no longer helplessly
paralysed; we can at least react; perhaps indeed we are not even
defenceless, we can have recourse to the same methods against these
violent supermen of the beyond that we make use of in our own community;
we can try to exorcise them, to appease them, to bribe them, and so rob
them of part of their power by thus influencing them. Such a
substitution of psychology for natural science provides not merely
immediate relief, it also points the way to a further mastery of the
situation.
For there is nothing new in this situation. It has an infantile
prototype, and is really only the continuation of this. For once before
one has been in such a state of helplessness: as a little child in one’s
relationship to one’s parents. For one had reason to fear them,
especially the father, though at the same time one was sure of his
protection against the dangers then known to one. And so it was natural
to assimilate and combine the two situations. Here, too, as in
dream-life, the wish came into its own. The sleeper is seized by a
presentiment of death, which seeks to carry him to the grave. But the
dream-work knows how to select a condition that will turn even this
dreaded event into a wish-fulfilment: the dreamer sees himself in an
ancient Etruscan grave, into which he has descended, happy in the
satisfaction it has given to his archæological interests. Similarly man
makes the forces of nature not simply in the image of men with whom he
can associate as his equals—that would not do justice to the
overpowering impression they make on him—but he gives them the
characteristics of the father, makes them into gods, thereby following
not only an infantile, but also, as I have tried to show, a phylogenetic
prototype.
In the course of time the first observations of law and order in natural
phenomena are made, and therewith the forces of nature lose their human
traits. But men’s helplessness remains, and with it their father-longing
and the gods. The gods retain their threefold task: they must exorcise
the terrors of nature, they must reconcile one to the cruelty of fate,
particularly as shown in death, and they must make amends for the
sufferings and privations that the communal life of culture has imposed
on man.
But within these there is a gradual shifting of the accent. It is
observed that natural phenomena develop of themselves from inward
necessity; without doubt the gods are the lords of nature: they have
arranged it thus and now they can leave it to itself. Only occasionally,
in the so-called miracles, do they intervene in its course, as if to
protest that they have surrendered nothing of their original sphere of
power. As far as the vicissitudes of fate are concerned, an unpleasant
suspicion persists that the perplexity and helplessness of the human
race cannot be remedied. This is where the gods are most apt to fail us;
if they themselves make fate, then their ways must be deemed
inscrutable. The most gifted people of the ancient world dimly surmised
that above the gods stands Destiny and that the gods themselves have
their destinies. And the more autonomous nature becomes and the more the
gods withdraw from her, the more earnestly are all expectations
concentrated on the third task assigned to them and the more does
morality become their real domain. It now becomes the business of the
gods to adjust the defects and evils of culture, to attend to the
sufferings that men inflict on each other in their communal life, and to
see that the laws of culture, which men obey so ill, are carried out.
The laws of culture themselves are claimed to be of divine origin, they
are elevated to a position above human society, and they are extended
over nature and the universe.
And so a rich store of ideas is formed, born of the need to make
tolerable the helplessness of man, and built out of the material offered
by memories of the helplessness of his own childhood and the childhood
of the human race. It is easy to see that these ideas protect man in two
directions; against the dangers of nature and fate, and against the
evils of human society itself. What it amounts to is this: life in this
world serves a higher purpose; true, it is not easy to guess the nature
of this purpose, but certainly a perfecting of human existence is
implied. Probably the spiritual part of man, the soul, which in the
course of time has so slowly and unwillingly detached itself from the
body, is to be regarded as the object of this elevation and exaltation.
Everything that takes place in this world expresses the intentions of an
Intelligence, superior to us, which in the end, though its devious ways
may be difficult to follow, orders everything for good, that is, to our
advantage. Over each one of us watches a benevolent, and only apparently
severe, Providence, which will not suffer us to become the plaything of
the stark and pitiless forces of nature; death itself is not
annihilation, not a return to inorganic lifelessness, but the beginning
of a new kind of existence, which lies on the road of development to
something higher. And to turn to the other side of the question, the
moral laws that have formed our culture govern also the whole universe,
only they are upheld with incomparably more force and consistency by a
supreme judicial court. In the end all good is rewarded, all evil
punished, if not actually in this life, then in the further existences
that begin after death. And thus all the terrors, the sufferings, and
the hardships of life are destined to be obliterated; the life after
death, which continues our earthly existence as the invisible part of
the spectrum adjoins the visible, brings all the perfection that perhaps
we have missed here. And the superior wisdom that directs this issue,
the supreme goodness that expresses itself thus, the justice that thus
achieves its aim—these are the qualities of the divine beings who have
fashioned us and the world in general; or rather of the one divine being
into which in our culture all the gods of antiquity have been condensed.
The race that first succeeded in thus concentrating the divine qualities
was not a little proud of this advance. It had revealed the father
nucleus which had always lain hidden behind every divine figure;
fundamentally it was a return to the historical beginnings of the idea
of God. Now that God was a single person, man’s relations to him could
recover the intimacy and intensity of the child’s relation to the
father. If one had done so much for the father, then surely one would be
rewarded—at least the only beloved child, the chosen people, would be.
More recently, pious America has laid claim to be ‘God’s own country’,
and for one of the forms under which men worship the deity the claim
certainly holds good.
The religious ideas that have just been summarized have of course gone
through a long process of development, and have been held in various
phases by various cultures. I have singled out one such phase of
development, which more or less corresponds to the final form of our
contemporary Christian culture in the west. It is easy to see that not
all the parts of this whole tally equally well with each other, that not
all the questions that press for an answer receive one, and that the
contradiction of daily experience can only with difficulty be dismissed.
But such as they are, these ideas—religious, in the broadest sense of
the word—are prized as the most precious possession of culture, as the
most valuable thing it has to offer its members; far more highly prized
than all our devices for winning the treasures of the earth, for
providing men with sustenance, or for preventing their diseases, and so
forth; men suppose that life would be intolerable if they did not accord
these ideas the value that is claimed for them. And now the question
arises: what are these ideas in the light of psychology; whence do they
derive the esteem in which they are held; and further, in all
diffidence, what is their real worth?
CHAPTER IV
An enquiry that proceeds uninterruptedly, like a monologue, is not
altogether without its dangers. One is too easily tempted to push aside
thoughts that would interrupt it, and in exchange one is left with a
feeling of uncertainty which one will drown in the end by
over-decisiveness. I shall therefore imagine an opponent who follows my
arguments with mistrust, and I shall let him interject remarks here and
there.
I hear him saying: ‘You have repeatedly used the expressions “culture
creates these religious ideas”, “culture places them at the disposal of
its members”, which sounds strange to me somehow. I could not say why
myself, but it does not sound so natural as to say that culture has made
regulations about distributing the products of labour or about the
rights over women and children.’
I think, nevertheless, that one is justified in expressing oneself thus.
I have tried to show that religious ideas have sprung from the same need
as all the other achievements of culture: from the necessity for
defending itself against the crushing supremacy of nature. And there was
a second motive: the eager desire to correct the so painfully felt
imperfections of culture. Moreover, there is something particularly
apposite in saying that culture gives the individual these ideas, for he
finds them at hand, they are presented to him ready-made; he would not
be in a position to find them by himself. It is the heritage of many
generations which he enters into and which he takes over as he does the
multiplication table, geometry, etc. There is certainly a distinction in
this, but it lies elsewhere, and I cannot examine it at this point. The
feeling of strangeness that you mention may be partly accounted for by
the fact that this stock of religious ideas is generally offered as a
divine revelation. But that is in itself a part of the religious system,
and entirely leaves out of account the known historical development of
these ideas and their variations in different ages and cultures.
‘Another point which seems to me more important. You would derive the
humanization of nature from the desire to put an end to human perplexity
and helplessness in the face of nature’s dreaded forces, and from the
necessity for establishing relations with, and finally influencing,
these forces. But this explanation seems to be superfluous. For
primitive man has no choice, he has no other way of thinking. It is
natural to him, as if innate, to project his existence outwards into the
world, and to regard all events that come under his observation as the
manifestations of beings who fundamentally resemble himself. It is his
only method of comprehension. And it is by no means self-evident, on the
contrary it is a remarkable coincidence, that he should succeed in
satisfying one of his great wants by thus indulging his natural
disposition.’
I do not find that so striking. For do you suppose that men’s
thought-processes have no practical motives, that they are simply the
expression of a disinterested curiosity? That is surely very improbable.
I believe, rather, that when he personifies the forces of nature man is
once again following an infantile prototype. He has learnt from the
persons of his earliest environment that the way to influence them is to
establish a relationship with them, and so, later on, with the same end
in view, he deals with everything that happens to him as he dealt with
those persons. Thus I do not contradict your descriptive observation; it
is, in point of fact, natural to man to personify everything that he
wishes to comprehend, in order that later he may control it—the
psychical subjugation as preparation for the physical—but I provide in
addition a motive and genesis for this peculiarity of human thought.
‘And now yet a third point. You have dealt with the origin of religion
once before, in your book _Totem und Tabu_. But there it appears in a
different light. Everything is the son-father relationship; God is the
exalted father, and the longing for the father is the root of the need
for religion. Since then, it seems, you have discovered the factor of
human weakness and helplessness, to which indeed the chief part in the
formation of religion is commonly assigned, and you now transfer to
helplessness everything that was formerly father complex. May I ask you
to enlighten me on this transformation?’
With pleasure. I was only waiting for this invitation. But is it really
a transformation? In _Totem und Tabu_ it was not my purpose to explain
the origin of religions, but only of totemism. Can you from any
standpoint known to you explain the fact that the first form in which
the protecting deity revealed itself to men was that of an animal, that
a prohibition existed against killing or eating this animal, and that
yet it was the solemn custom to kill it and eat it communally once a
year? It is just this that takes place in totemism. And it is hardly to
the purpose to argue whether totemism should be called a religion. It
has intimate connections with the later god-religions; the totem animals
become the sacred animals of the gods; and the earliest, and the most
profound, moral restrictions—the murder prohibition and the incest
prohibition—originate in totemism. Whether or not you accept the
conclusions of _Totem und Tabu_, I hope you will admit that in that book
a number of very remarkable isolated facts are brought together into a
consistent whole.
Why in the long run the animal god did not suffice and why it was
replaced by the human—that was hardly discussed in _Totem und Tabu_, and
other problems of the formation of religion find no mention there at
all. But do you regard such a limitation as identical with a denial? My
work is a good example of the strict isolation of the share that
psycho-analytic observation can contribute to the problem of religion.
If I am now trying to add to it the other, less deeply hidden, part, you
should not accuse me of inconsistency, just as before I was accused of
being one-sided. It is of course my business to point out the connecting
links between what I said before and what I now put forward, between the
deeper and the manifest motivation, between the father complex and man’s
helplessness and need for protection.
These connections are not difficult to find. They consist in the
relation of the child’s helplessness to the adult’s continuation of it,
so that, as was to be expected, the psycho-analytic motivation of the
forming of religion turns out to be the infantile contribution to its
manifest motivation. Let us imagine to ourselves the mental life of the
small child. You remember the object-choice after the anaclitic type,
which psycho-analysis talks about? The libido follows the paths of
narcissistic needs, and attaches itself to the objects that ensure their
satisfaction. So the mother, who satisfies hunger, becomes the first
love-object, and certainly also the first protection against all the
undefined and threatening dangers of the outer world; becomes, if we may
so express it, the first protection against anxiety.
In this function the mother is soon replaced by the stronger father, and
this situation persists from now on over the whole of childhood. But the
relation to the father is affected by a peculiar ambivalence. He was
himself a danger, perhaps just because of that earlier relation to the
mother; so he is feared no less than he is longed for and admired. The
indications of this ambivalence are deeply imprinted in all religions,
as is brought out in _Totem und Tabu_. Now when the child grows up and
finds that he is destined to remain a child for ever, and that he can
never do without protection against unknown and mighty powers, he
invests these with the traits of the father-figure; he creates for
himself the gods, of whom he is afraid, whom he seeks to propitiate, and
to whom he nevertheless entrusts the task of protecting him. Thus the
longing-for-the-father explanation is identical with the other, the need
for protection against the consequences of human weakness; the child’s
defensive reaction to his helplessness gives the characteristic features
to the adult’s reaction to his own sense of helplessness, _i.e_. the
formation of religion. But it is not our intention to pursue further the
development of the idea of God; we are concerned here with the matured
stock of religious ideas as culture transmits them to the individual.
CHAPTER V
Now to take up again the threads of our enquiry: what is the
psychological significance of religious ideas and how can we classify
them? The question is at first not at all easy to answer. Having
rejected various formulas, I shall take my stand by this one: religion
consists of certain dogmas, assertions about facts and conditions of
external (or internal) reality, which tell one something that one has
not oneself discovered and which claim that one should give them
credence. As they give information about what are to us the most
interesting and important things in life, they are particularly highly
valued. He who knows nothing of them is ignorant indeed, and he who has
assimilated them may consider himself enriched.
There are of course many such dogmas about the most diverse things of
this world. Every school hour is full of them. Let us choose geography.
We hear there: Konstanz is on the Bodensee. A student song adds: If you
don’t believe it go and see. I happen to have been there, and can
confirm the fact that this beautiful town lies on the shore of a broad
stretch of water, which all those dwelling around call the Bodensee. I
am now completely convinced of the accuracy of this geographical
statement. And in this connection I am reminded of another and very
remarkable experience. I was already a man of mature years when I stood
for the first time on the hill of the Athenian Acropolis, between the
temple ruins, looking out on to the blue sea. A feeling of astonishment
mingled with my pleasure, which prompted me to say: then it really is
true, what we used to be taught at school! How shallow and weak at that
age must have been my belief in the real truth of what I heard if I can
be so astonished to-day! But I will not emphasize the significance of
this experience too much; yet another explanation of my astonishment is
possible, which did not strike me at the time, and which is of a wholly
subjective nature and connected with the peculiar character of the
place.
All such dogmas as these, then, exact belief in their contents, but not
without substantiating their title to this. They claim to be the
condensed result of a long process of thought, which is founded on
observation and also, certainly, on reasoning; they show how, if one so
intends, one can go through this process oneself, instead of accepting
the result of it; and the source of the knowledge imparted by the dogma
is always added, where it is not, as with geographical statements,
self-evident. For instance: the earth is shaped like a globe; the proofs
adduced for this are Foucault’s pendulum experiment, the phenomena of
the horizon and the possibility of circumnavigating the earth. Since it
is impracticable, as all concerned realize, to send every school child
on a voyage round the world, one is content that the school teaching
shall be taken on trust, but one knows that the way to personal
conviction is still open.
Let us try to apply the same tests to the dogmas of religion. If we ask
on what their claim to be believed is based, we receive three answers,
which accord remarkably ill with one another. They deserve to be
believed: firstly, because our primal ancestors already believed them;
secondly, because we possess proofs, which have been handed down to us
from this very period of antiquity; and thirdly, because it is forbidden
to raise the question of their authenticity at all. Formerly this
presumptuous act was visited with the very severest penalties, and even
to-day society is unwilling to see anyone renew it.
This third point cannot but rouse our strongest suspicions. Such a
prohibition can surely have only one motive: that society knows very
well the uncertain basis of the claim it makes for its religious
doctrines. If it were otherwise, the relevant material would certainly
be placed most readily at the disposal of anyone who wished to gain
conviction for himself. And so we proceed to test the other two
arguments with a feeling of mistrust not easily allayed. We ought to
believe because our forefathers believed. But these ancestors of ours
were far more ignorant than we; they believed in things we could not
possibly accept to-day; so the possibility occurs that religious
doctrines may also be in this category. The proofs they have bequeathed
to us are deposited in writings that themselves bear every trace of
being untrustworthy. They are full of contradictions, revisions, and
interpolations; where they speak of actual authentic proofs they are
themselves of doubtful authenticity. It does not help much if divine
revelation is asserted to be the origin of their text or only of their
content, for this assertion is itself already a part of those doctrines
whose authenticity is to be examined, and no statement can bear its own
proof.
Thus we arrive at the singular conclusion that just what might be of the
greatest significance for us in our cultural system, the information
which should solve for us the riddles of the universe and reconcile us
to the troubles of life, that just this has the weakest possible claim
to authenticity. We should not be able to bring ourselves to accept
anything of as little concern to us as the fact that whales bear young
instead of laying eggs, if it were not capable of better proof than
this.
This state of things is in itself a very remarkable psychological
problem. Let no one think that the foregoing remarks on the
impossibility of proving religious doctrines contain anything new. It
has been felt at all times, assuredly even by the ancestors who
bequeathed this legacy. Probably many of them nursed the same doubts as
we, but the pressure imposed on them was too strong for them to have
dared to utter them. And since then countless people have been tortured
by the same doubts, which they would fain have suppressed because they
held themselves in duty bound to believe, and since then many brilliant
intellects have been wrecked upon this conflict and many characters have
come to grief through the compromises by which they sought a way out.
If all the arguments that are put forward for the authenticity of
religious doctrines originate in the past, it is natural to look round
and see whether the present, better able to judge in these matters,
cannot also furnish such evidence. The whole of the religious system
would become infinitely more credible if one could succeed in this way
in removing the element of doubt from a single part of it. It is at this
point that the activity of the spiritualists comes in; they are
convinced of the immortality of the individual soul, and they would
demonstrate to us that this one article of religious teaching is free
from doubt. Unfortunately they have not succeeded in disproving the fact
that the appearances and utterances of their spirits are merely the
productions of their own mental activity. They have called up the
spirits of the greatest of men, of the most eminent thinkers, but all
their utterances and all the information they have received from them
have been so foolish and so desperately insignificant that one could
find nothing else to believe in but the capacity of the spirits for
adapting themselves to the circle of people that had evoked them.
One must now mention two attempts to evade the problem, which both
convey the impression of frantic effort. One of them, high-handed in its
nature, is old; the other is subtle and modern. The first is the _Credo
quia absurdum_ of the early Father. It would imply that religious
doctrines are outside reason’s jurisdiction; they stand above reason.
Their truth must be inwardly felt: one does not need to comprehend them.
But this _Credo_ is only of interest as a voluntary confession; as a
decree it has no binding force. Am I to be obliged to believe every
absurdity? And if not, why just this one? There is no appeal beyond
reason. And if the truth of religious doctrines is dependent on an inner
experience which bears witness to that truth, what is one to make of the
many people who do not have that rare experience? One may expect all men
to use the gift of reason that they possess, but one cannot set up an
obligation that shall apply to all on a basis that only exists for quite
a few. Of what significance is it for other people that you have won
from a state of ecstasy, which has deeply moved you, an imperturbable
conviction of the real truth of the doctrines of religion?
The second attempt is that of the philosophy of ‘As If’. It explains
that in our mental activity we assume all manner of things, the
groundlessness, indeed the absurdity, of which we fully realize. They
are called ‘fictions’, but from a variety of practical motives we are
led to behave ‘as if’ we believed in these fictions. This, it is argued,
is the case with religious doctrines on account of their unequalled
importance for the maintenance of human society.[2] This argument is not
far removed from the _Credo quia absurdum_. But I think that the claim
of the philosophy of ‘As If’ is such as only a philosopher could make.
The man whose thinking is not influenced by the wiles of philosophy will
never be able to accept it; with the confession of absurdity, of
illogicality, there is no more to be said as far as he is concerned. He
cannot be expected to forgo the guarantees he demands for all his usual
activities just in the matter of his most important interests. I am
reminded of one of my children who was distinguished at an early age by
a peculiarly marked sense of reality. When the children were told a
fairy tale, to which they listened with rapt attention, he would come
forward and ask: Is that a true story? Having been told that it was not,
he would turn away with an air of disdain. It is to be expected that men
will soon behave in like manner towards the religious fairy tales,
despite the advocacy of the philosophy of ‘As If’.
Footnote 2:
I hope I am not doing an injustice if I make the author of the
philosophy of ‘As If’ represent a point of view that is familiar to
other thinkers also. Cp. H. Vaihinger, _Die Philosophie des Als ob_,
Siebente und achte Auflage, 1922, S. 68: ‘We include as fictions not
merely indifferent theoretical operations but ideational constructions
emanating from the noblest minds, to which the noblest part of mankind
cling and of which they will not allow themselves to be deprived. Nor
is it our object so to deprive them—for as _practical fictions_ we
leave them all intact; they perish only as _theoretical truths_’ (C.
K. Ogden’s translation).
But at present they still behave quite differently, and in past ages, in
spite of their incontrovertible lack of authenticity, religious ideas
have exercised the very strongest influence on mankind. This is a fresh
psychological problem. We must ask where the inherent strength of these
doctrines lies and to what circumstance they owe their efficacy,
independent, as it is, of the acknowledgement of the reason.
CHAPTER VI
I think we have sufficiently paved the way for the answer to both these
questions. It will be found if we fix our attention on the psychical
origin of religious ideas. These, which profess to be dogmas, are not
the residue of experience or the final result of reflection; they are
illusions, fulfilments of the oldest, strongest and most insistent
wishes of mankind; the secret of their strength is the strength of these
wishes. We know already that the terrifying effect of infantile
helplessness aroused the need for protection—protection through
love—which the father relieved, and that the discovery that this
helplessness would continue through the whole of life made it necessary
to cling to the existence of a father—but this time a more powerful one.
Thus the benevolent rule of divine providence allays our anxiety in face
of life’s dangers, the establishment of a moral world order ensures the
fulfilment of the demands of justice, which within human culture have so
often remained unfulfilled, and the prolongation of earthly existence by
a future life provides in addition the local and temporal setting for
these wish-fulfilments. Answers to the questions that tempt human
curiosity, such as the origin of the universe and the relation between
the body and the soul, are developed in accordance with the underlying
assumptions of this system; it betokens a tremendous relief for the
individual psyche if it is released from the conflicts of childhood
arising out of the father complex, which are never wholly overcome, and
if these conflicts are afforded a universally accepted solution.
When I say that they are illusions, I must define the meaning of the
word. An illusion is not the same as an error, it is indeed not
necessarily an error. Aristotle’s belief that vermin are evolved out of
dung, to which ignorant people still cling, was an error; so was the
belief of a former generation of doctors that _tabes dorsalis_ was the
result of sexual excess. It would be improper to call these errors
illusions. On the other hand, it was an illusion on the part of Columbus
that he had discovered a new sea-route to India. The part played by his
wish in this error is very clear. One may describe as an illusion the
statement of certain nationalists that the Indo-Germanic race is the
only one capable of culture, or the belief, which only psycho-analysis
destroyed, that the child is a being without sexuality. It is
characteristic of the illusion that it is derived from men’s wishes; in
this respect it approaches the psychiatric delusion, but it is to be
distinguished from this, quite apart from the more complicated structure
of the latter. In the delusion we emphasize as essential the conflict
with reality; the illusion need not be necessarily false, that is to
say, unrealizable or incompatible with reality. For instance, a poor
girl may have an illusion that a prince will come and fetch her home. It
is possible; some such cases have occurred. That the Messiah will come
and found a golden age is much less probable; according to one’s
personal attitude one will classify this belief as an illusion or as
analogous to a delusion. Examples of illusions that have come true are
not easy to discover, but the illusion of the alchemists that all metals
can be turned into gold may prove to be one. The desire to have lots of
gold, as much gold as possible, has been considerably damped by our
modern insight into the nature of wealth, yet chemistry no longer
considers a transmutation of metals into gold as impossible. Thus we
call a belief an illusion when wish-fulfilment is a prominent factor in
its motivation, while disregarding its relations to reality, just as the
illusion itself does.
If after this survey we turn again to religious doctrines, we may
reiterate that they are all illusions, they do not admit of proof, and
no one can be compelled to consider them as true or to believe in them.
Some of them are so improbable, so very incompatible with everything we
have laboriously discovered about the reality of the world, that we may
compare them—taking adequately into account the psychological
differences—to delusions. Of the reality value of most of them we cannot
judge; just as they cannot be proved, neither can they be refuted. We
still know too little to approach them critically. The riddles of the
universe only reveal themselves slowly to our enquiry, to many questions
science can as yet give no answer; but scientific work is our only way
to the knowledge of external reality. Again, it is merely illusion to
expect anything from intuition or trance; they can give us nothing but
particulars, which are difficult to interpret, about our own mental
life, never information about the questions that are so lightly answered
by the doctrines of religion. It would be wanton to let one’s own
arbitrary action fill the gap, and according to one’s personal estimate
declare this or that part of the religious system to be more or less
acceptable. These questions are too momentous for that; too sacred, one
might say.
At this point it may be objected: well, then, if even the crabbed
sceptics admit that the statements of religion cannot be confuted by
reason, why should not I believe in them, since they have so much on
their side—tradition, the concurrence of mankind, and all the
consolation they yield? Yes, why not? Just as no one can be forced into
belief, so no one can be forced into unbelief. But do not deceive
yourself into thinking that with such arguments you are following the
path of correct reasoning. If ever there was a case of facile argument,
this is one. Ignorance is ignorance; no right to believe anything is
derived from it. No reasonable man will behave so frivolously in other
matters or rest content with such feeble grounds for his opinions or for
the attitude he adopts; it is only in the highest and holiest things
that he allows this. In reality these are only attempts to delude
oneself or other people into the belief that one still holds fast to
religion, when one has long cut oneself loose from it. Where questions
of religion are concerned people are guilty of every possible kind of
insincerity and intellectual misdemeanour. Philosophers stretch the
meaning of words until they retain scarcely anything of their original
sense; by calling ‘God’ some vague abstraction which they have created
for themselves, they pose as deists, as believers, before the world;
they may even pride themselves on having attained a higher and purer
idea of God, although their God is nothing but an insubstantial shadow
and no longer the mighty personality of religious doctrine. Critics
persist in calling ‘deeply religious’ a person who confesses to a sense
of man’s insignificance and impotence in face of the universe, although
it is not this feeling that constitutes the essence of religious
emotion, but rather the next step, the reaction to it, which seeks a
remedy against this feeling. He who goes no further, he who humbly
acquiesces in the insignificant part man plays in the universe, is, on
the contrary, irreligious in the truest sense of the word.
It does not lie within the scope of this enquiry to estimate the value
of religious doctrines as truth. It suffices that we have recognized
them, psychologically considered, as illusions. But we need not conceal
the fact that this discovery strongly influences our attitude to what
must appear to many the most important of questions. We know
approximately at what periods and by what sort of men religious
doctrines were formed. If we now learn from what motives this happened,
our attitude to the problem of religion will suffer an appreciable
change. We say to ourselves: it would indeed be very nice if there were
a God, who was both creator of the world and a benevolent providence, if
there were a moral world order and a future life, but at the same time
it is very odd that this is all just as we should wish it ourselves. And
it would be still odder if our poor, ignorant, enslaved ancestors had
succeeded in solving all these difficult riddles of the universe.
CHAPTER VII
Having recognized religious doctrines to be illusions, we are at once
confronted with the further question: may not other cultural
possessions, which we esteem highly and by which we let our life be
ruled, be of a similar nature? Should not the assumptions that regulate
our political institutions likewise be called illusions, and is it not
the case that in our culture the relations between the sexes are
disturbed by an erotic illusion, or by a series of erotic illusions?
Once our suspicions have been roused, we shall not shrink from asking
whether there is any better foundation for our conviction that it is
possible to discover something about external reality through the
applying of observation and reasoning in scientific work. Nothing need
keep us from applying observation to our own natures or submitting the
process of reasoning to its own criticism. Here a series of enquiries
present themselves, which in their result should be of decisive
importance for constructing a ‘Weltanschauung’. We surmise, too, that
such an endeavour would not be wasted, and that it would at least
partially justify our suspicions. But the author of these pages has not
the means to undertake so comprehensive a task; forced by necessity, he
confines his work to the pursuit of a single one of these illusions,
that is, the religious.
But now the loud voice of our opponent bids us to stop. We are called to
account for our transgressions.
‘Archæological interests are no doubt most praiseworthy, but one does
not set about an excavation if one is thereby going to undermine
occupied dwelling-places so that they collapse and bury the inhabitants
under their ruins. The doctrines of religion are not a subject that one
can be clever about, as one can about any other. Our culture is built up
on them; the preservation of human society rests on the assumption that
the majority of mankind believe in the truth of these doctrines. If they
are taught that there is no almighty and all just God, no divine world
order, and no future life, then they will feel exempt from all
obligation to follow the rules of culture. Uninhibited and free from
fear, everybody will follow his asocial, egoistic instincts, and will
seek to prove his power. Chaos, which we have banished through thousands
of years of the work of civilization, will begin again. Even if one
knew, and could prove, that religion was not in possession of the truth,
one should conceal the fact and behave as the philosophy of “As If”
demands—and this in the interests of the preservation of everybody. And
apart from the danger of the undertaking, it is also a purposeless
cruelty. Countless people find their one consolation in the doctrines of
religion, and only with their help can they endure life. You would rob
them of what supports them, and yet you have nothing better to give them
in exchange. It has been admitted that so far science has not achieved
much, but even if it had advanced far further, it would not suffice for
men. Man has yet other imperative needs, which can never be satisfied by
cold science, and it is very strange—to be frank, it is the acme of
inconsistency—that a psychologist who has always emphasized how much in
men’s lives the intelligence retreats before the life of the instincts
should now strive to rob men of a precious wish-satisfaction, and should
want to give them in exchange a compensation of an intellectual nature.’
What a number of accusations all at once! However, I am prepared to deny
them all; and what is more, I am prepared to defend the statement that
culture incurs a greater danger by maintaining its present attitude to
religion than by relinquishing it. But I hardly know where to begin my
reply.
Perhaps with the assurance that I myself consider my undertaking to be
completely harmless and free from danger. This time the overestimation
of the intellect is not on my side. If men are such as my opponents
describe them—and I have no wish to contradict it—then there is no
danger of a devout believer, overwhelmed by my arguments, being deprived
of his faith. Besides, I have said nothing that other and better men
have not said before me in a much more complete, forcible and impressive
way. The names of these men are well known. I shall not quote them. I
should not like to give the impression that I would count myself of
their number. I have merely—this is the only thing that is new in my
statement—added a certain psychological foundation to the critique of my
great predecessors. It is hardly to be expected that just this addition
will produce the effect that was denied to the earlier attempts.
Certainly I might be asked at this point why I write such things if I am
convinced of their ineffectiveness. But we shall come back to that
later.
The one person this publication may harm is myself. I shall have to
listen to the most unpleasant reproaches on the score of shallowness,
narrow-mindedness, and lack of idealism and of understanding for the
highest interests of mankind. But on the one hand these remonstrances
are not new to me; and on the other hand, if a man has even in his early
years learnt to face the displeasure of his contemporaries, what effect
then can it have on him in his old age, when he is certain to be soon
beyond the reach of all favour or disfavour? In former times it was
different. Then utterances such as these brought with them a sure
foreshortening of one’s earthly existence and a speedy approach of the
opportunity to gain personal experience of the next life. But, I repeat,
those times are over, and to-day such things can be written without
endangering even the author; the most that can happen will be that in
this or that country the translation and the circulation of his book
will be forbidden—and naturally this will happen just in that country
which feels certain of the high standard of its culture. But one must be
able to put up with this also, if one makes any plea for
wish-renunciation or for acquiescence in fate.
And then it occurred to me to ask whether the publication of this work
might not do some harm after all—not indeed to a person, but to a cause:
the cause of psycho-analysis. For it cannot be denied that this is my
creation, and that an abundance of distrust and ill-will has been shown
to it. If I now come forward with such displeasing statements, people
will be only too ready to displace their feelings from my person on to
psycho-analysis. Now one can see, it will be said, where psycho-analysis
leads to. The mask is fallen; it leads to the denial of God and of an
ethical ideal, as indeed we have always supposed. To keep us from the
discovery, we have been made to believe that psycho-analysis neither
has, nor can have, a philosophical standpoint.
This pother will be really disagreeable to me on account of my many
fellow-workers, several of whom do not at all share my attitude to
religious problems. However, psycho-analysis has already braved many
storms, and it must face this new one also. In reality psycho-analysis
is a method of investigation, an impartial instrument like, say, the
infinitesimal calculus. Even if a physicist should discover with the
help of the latter that after a certain period the earth will be
destroyed, one would still hesitate to impute destructive tendencies to
the calculus itself, and to proscribe it on that account. Nothing that I
have said here against the truth-value of religion needed the support of
psycho-analysis; it had been said by others long before psycho-analysis
came into existence. If one can find a new argument against the truth of
religion by applying the psycho-analytic method, so much the worse for
religion, but the defenders of religion will with equal right avail
themselves of psycho-analysis in order to appreciate to the full the
affective significance of religious doctrines.
And now to proceed with the defence: clearly religion has performed
great services for human culture. It has contributed much toward
restraining the asocial instincts, but still not enough. For many
thousands of years it has ruled human society; it has had time to show
what it can achieve. If it had succeeded in making happy the greater
part of mankind, in consoling them, in reconciling them to life, and in
making them into supporters of civilization, then no one would dream of
striving to alter existing conditions. But instead of this what do we
see? We see that an appallingly large number of men are discontented
with civilization and unhappy in it, and feel it as a yoke that must be
shaken off; that these men either do everything in their power to alter
this civilization, or else go so far in their hostility to it that they
will have nothing whatever to do either with civilization or with
restraining their instincts. At this point it will be objected that this
state of affairs is due to the very fact that religion has forfeited a
part of its influence on the masses, just because of the deplorable
effect of the advances in science. We shall note this admission and the
reasons given for it, and shall make use of it later for our own
purposes; but the objection itself has no force.
It is doubtful whether men were in general happier at a time when
religious doctrines held unlimited sway than they are now; more moral
they certainly were not. They have always understood how to externalize
religious precepts, thereby frustrating their intentions. And the
priests, who had to enforce religious obedience, met them half-way.
God’s kindness must lay a restraining hand upon his justice. One sinned,
and then one made oblation or did penance, and then one was free to sin
anew. Russian mysticism has come to the sublime conclusion that sin is
indispensable for the full enjoyment of the blessings of divine grace,
and therefore, fundamentally, it is pleasing to God. It is well known
that the priests could only keep the masses submissive to religion by
making these great concessions to human instincts. And so it was
settled: God alone is strong and good, man is weak and sinful.
Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in
religion. If the achievements of religion in promoting men’s happiness,
in adapting them to civilization, and in controlling them morally, are
no better, then the question arises whether we are right in considering
it necessary for mankind, and whether we do wisely in basing the demands
of our culture upon it.
Let us consider the unmistakable character of the present situation. We
have heard the admission that religion no longer has the same influence
on men that it used to have (we are concerned here with European
Christian culture). And this, not because its promises have become
smaller, but because they appear less credible to people. Let us admit
that the reason—perhaps not the only one—for this change is the increase
of the scientific spirit in the higher strata of human society.
Criticism has nibbled at the authenticity of religious documents,
natural science has shown up the errors contained in them, and the
comparative method of research has revealed the fatal resemblance
between religious ideas revered by us and the mental productions of
primitive ages and peoples.
The scientific spirit engenders a particular attitude to the problems of
this world; before the problems of religion it halts for a while, then
wavers, and finally here too steps over the threshold. In this process
there is no stopping. The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible
to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief, at first
only of the obsolete and objectionable expressions of the same, then of
its fundamental assumptions, also. The Americans who instituted the
monkey trial in Dayton have alone proved consistent. Elsewhere the
inevitable transition is accomplished by way of half-measures and
insincerities.
Culture has little to fear from the educated or from the brain workers.
In their case religious motives for civilized behaviour would be
unobtrusively replaced by other and secular ones; besides, for the most
part they are themselves supporters of culture. But it is another matter
with the great mass of the uneducated and suppressed, who have every
reason to be enemies of culture. So long as they do not discover that
people no longer believe in God, all is well. But they discover it,
infallibly, and would do so even if this work of mine were not
published. They are ready to accept the results of scientific thought,
without having effected in themselves the process of change which
scientific thought induces in men. Is there not a danger that these
masses, in their hostility to culture, will attack the weak point which
they have discovered in their taskmaster? If you must not kill your
neighbour, solely because God has forbidden it and will sorely avenge it
in this or the other life, and you then discover that there is no God so
that one need not fear his punishment, then you will certainly kill
without hesitation, and you could only be prevented from this by mundane
force. And so follows the necessity for either the most rigorous
suppression of these dangerous masses and the most careful exclusion of
all opportunities for mental awakening or a fundamental revision of the
relation between culture and religion.
CHAPTER VIII
One would suppose that this last proposal could be carried out without
any special difficulty. It is true that it would involve some measure of
renunciation, but one would gain, perhaps, more than one lost, and a
great danger would be avoided. But people have a horror of it, as if
civilization would thereby be exposed to an even greater danger. When
Saint Boniface felled the tree which was venerated as sacred by the
Saxons, those who stood round expected some fearful event to follow the
outrage. It did not happen, and the Saxons were baptized.
It is manifestly in the interest of man’s communal existence, which
would not otherwise be practicable, that civilization has laid down the
commandment that one shall not kill the neighbour whom one hates, who is
in one’s way, or whose property one covets. For the murderer would draw
on to himself the vengeance of the murdered man’s kinsmen and the secret
envy of the others who feel as much inward inclination as he did to such
an act of violence. Thus he would not enjoy his revenge or his spoil for
long, but would have every prospect of being killed soon himself. Even
if he could defend himself against single foes by his extraordinary
strength and caution, he would be bound to succumb to a combination of
these weaker foes. If a combination of this sort did not take place,
then murder would continue ceaselessly, and the end of it would be that
men would exterminate one another. It would be the same state of affairs
among individuals that still prevails in Corsica among families, but
otherwise survives only among nations. Insecurity of life, an equal
danger for all, now unites men into one society, which forbids the
individual to kill and reserves to itself the right to kill in the name
of society the man who violates this prohibition. This, then, is justice
and punishment.
We do not, however, tell others of this rational basis for the murder
prohibition; we declare, on the contrary, that God is its author. Thus,
making bold to divine his intentions, we find that he has no wish,
either, for men to exterminate each other. By acting thus we invest the
cultural prohibition with a quite peculiar solemnity, but at the same
time we risk making its observance dependent on belief in God. If we
retract this step, no longer saddling God with our own wishes, and
content ourselves with the social justification for the cultural
prohibition, then we renounce, it is true, its hallowed nature, but we
also avoid endangering its existence. And we gain something else as
well. Through some kind of diffusion or infection the character of
sanctity and inviolability, of other-worldliness, one might say, has
been extended from some few important prohibitions to all other cultural
institutions and laws and ordinances. And often the halo becomes these
none too well; not only do they invalidate each other by making
conflicting decisions according to the time and place of their origin;
even apart from this they betray every sign of human inadequacy. One can
easily recognize among them things which can only be the product of
shortsightedness and apprehensiveness, the expression of narrow
interests, or the result of inadequate hypotheses. The criticism to
which one must subject them also diminishes to an unwelcome extent
people’s respect for other and more justified cultural demands. As it is
a delicate task to decide what God has himself ordained and what derives
rather from the authority of an allpowerful parliament or a supreme
judicial decision, it would be an indubitable advantage to leave God out
of the question altogether, and to admit honestly the purely human
origin of all cultural laws and institutions. Along with their
pretensions to sanctity the rigid and immutable nature of these laws and
regulations would also cease. Men would realize that these have been
made, not so much to rule them, as, on the contrary, to serve their
interests; they would acquire a more friendly attitude to them, and
instead of aiming at their abolition they would aim only at improving
them. This would be an important advance on the road which leads to
reconciliation with the burden of culture.
But here our plea for a purely rational basis for cultural laws, that is
to say, for deriving them from social necessity, is interrupted by a
sudden doubt. We have chosen as our example the origin of the murder
prohibition. But does our account of it correspond to historical truth?
We fear not; it appears to be merely a rationalistic construction. With
the help of psycho-analysis we have studied this very point in the
history of human culture, and supported by this study we are bound to
say that in reality it did not happen like this. Even in men to-day
purely reasonable motives are of little avail against passionate
impulses. How much weaker, then, must they have been in the primordial
animal man! Perhaps even now his descendants would still kill one
another without inhibition, if there had not been among those acts of
murder one—the slaughter of the primal father—which evoked an
irresistible emotional reaction, momentous in its consequences. From it
arose the commandment: thou shalt not kill, which in totemism was
confined to the father-substitute, and was later extended to others, but
which even to-day is not universally observed.
But according to arguments which I need not repeat here, that primal
father has been the prototype of God, the model after which later
generations have formed their figure of God. Hence the religious
explanation is right. God was actually concerned in the origin of that
prohibition; his influence, not insight into what was necessary for
society, brought it into being. And the process of attributing man’s
will to God is fully justified; for men, knowing that they had brutally
set aside the father, determined, in the reaction to their outrage, to
respect his will in future. And so the religious doctrine does give us
the historical truth, though of course in a somewhat remodelled and
disguised form; our rational explanation belies it.
We now observe that the stock of religious ideas contains not only
wish-fulfilments, but also important historical memories. What
matchless, what abundant power this combination of past and present must
give to religion! But with the help of an analogy we may perhaps feel
our way towards another view of the problem. It is not a good thing to
transplant ideas far away from the soil in which they grew, but we
cannot resist pointing out the resemblance which forms this analogy. We
know that the human child cannot well complete its development towards
culture without passing through a more or less distinct phase of
neurosis. This is because the child is unable to suppress by rational
mental effort so many of those instinctual impulsions which cannot later
be turned to account, but has to check them by acts of repression,
behind which there stands as a rule an anxiety motive. Most of these
child neuroses are overcome spontaneously as one grows up, and
especially is this the fate of the obsessional neuroses of childhood.
The remainder can be cleared up still later by psycho-analytic
treatment. In just the same way one might assume that in its development
through the ages mankind as a whole experiences conditions that are
analogous to the neuroses, and this for the same reasons, because in the
ages of its ignorance and intellectual weakness it achieved by purely
affective means the instinctual renunciations, indispensable for man’s
communal existence. And the residue of these repression-like processes,
which took place in antiquity, has long clung on to civilization. Thus
religion would be the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity. It,
like the child’s, originated in the Oedipus complex, the relation to the
father. According to this conception one might prophesy that the
abandoning of religion must take place with the fateful inexorability of
a process of growth, and that we are just now in the middle of this
phase of development.
So we should form our behaviour after the model of a sensible teacher,
who does not oppose the new development confronting him, but seeks to
further it and to temper the force of its onset. To be sure this analogy
does not exhaust the essence of religion. If on the one hand religion
brings with it obsessional limitation, which can only be compared to an
individual obsessional neurosis, it comprises on the other hand a system
of wish-illusions, incompatible with reality, such as we find in an
isolated form only in Meynert’s amentia, a state of blissful
hallucinatory confusion. But these are only just comparisons, with whose
help we can endeavour to understand social phenomena; individual
psychology supplies us with no exact counterpart.
It has been shown repeatedly (by myself, and particularly by Theodor
Reik) into what details the analogy of religion and the obsessional
neurosis may be pursued, how much of the vicissitudes and peculiarities
of the formation of religion may be understood in this way. And it
accords well with this that the true believer is in a high degree
protected against the danger of certain neurotic afflictions; by
accepting the universal neurosis he is spared the task of forming a
personal neurosis.
Our knowledge of the historical value of certain religious doctrines
increases our respect for them, but it does not invalidate our proposal
to exclude them from the motivation of cultural laws. On the contrary!
This historical residue has given us the conception of religious dogmas
as, so to speak, neurotic survivals, and now we may say that the time
has probably come to replace the consequences of repression by the
results of rational mental effort, as in the analytic treatment of
neurotics. One may prophesy, but hardly regret, that this process of
remodelling will not stop at dispelling the solemn air of sanctity
surrounding the cultural laws, but that a general revision of these must
involve the abolition of many of them. And this will go far to solve our
appointed problem of reconciling men to civilization. We need not regret
the loss of historical truth involved in accepting the rational
motivation of cultural laws. The truths contained in religious doctrines
are after all so distorted and systematically disguised that the mass of
mankind cannot recognize them as truth. It is an instance of the same
thing when we tell the child that new-born babies are brought by the
stork. Here, too, we tell the truth in symbolic guise, for we know what
that large bird signifies. But the child does not know it; he hears only
the distortion, and feels that he has been deceived; and we know how
often his refractoriness and his distrust of the grown-ups gets bound up
with this impression. We have come to the conclusion that it is better
to avoid such symbolic disguisings of the truth, and to allow the child
knowledge of the real state of affairs in a way suitable for his stage
of intellectual development.
CHAPTER IX
‘You allow yourself contradictions which are hard to reconcile with one
another. First you declare that a work like yours is quite harmless; no
one will let himself be robbed of his religious faith through such
discussions. But since, as became evident later, it is your aim to
disturb this faith, one may ask: why in fact do you publish it? At
another point, however, you admit that it might be dangerous, indeed
very dangerous, for a man to discover that people no longer believe in
God. Docile though he had been hitherto, now he would throw off all
allegiance to the laws of culture. Your whole argument that the
religious motivation of the cultural commandments signifies a danger for
culture rests, in fact, on the assumption that the believer can be made
into an unbeliever. But that is a complete contradiction.
‘And here is another contradiction: you admit on the one hand that man
will not be guided by intelligence; he is ruled by his passions and by
the claims of his instincts; but on the other hand you propose to
replace the affective basis of his allegiance to culture by a rational
one. Let who can understand this. To me it seems a case of either the
one or the other.
‘Besides, have you learnt nothing from history? Once before such an
attempt to substitute reason for religion was made, officially and in
the grand manner. Surely you remember the French Revolution and
Robespierre, and also how short-lived and how deplorably ineffectual the
experiment? It is being repeated in Russia at present, and we need not
be curious about the result. Do you not think we may assume that man
cannot do without religion?
‘You have said yourself that religion is more than an obsessional
neurosis. But you have not dealt with this other aspect of it. You are
content to work out the analogy with the neurosis. Men must be freed
from a neurosis. What else is lost in the process does not trouble you.’
Probably these apparent contradictions have arisen because I have been
dealing too hastily with complicated matters, but we can make up for
this to some extent. I still maintain that in one respect my work is
quite harmless. No believer will let himself be led astray by these or
by similar arguments. A believer has certain ties of affection binding
him to the substance of religion. There are certainly a vast number of
other people who are not religious in the same sense. They obey the laws
of civilization because they are intimidated by the threats of religion,
and they fear religion so long as they consider it as a part of the
reality that restricts them. These are the people who break free as soon
as they dare to give up their belief in its reality value; but arguments
have no effect on them either. They cease to fear religion when they
find that others do not fear it, and of these I have asserted that they
would learn of the decline of religious influence even if I did not
publish my work.
But I suppose you yourself attach more value to the other contradiction
with which you tax me. Since men are so slightly amenable to reasonable
arguments, so completely are they ruled by their instinctual wishes, why
should one want to take away from them a means of satisfying their
instincts and replace it by reasonable arguments? Certainly men are like
this, but have you asked yourself whether they need be so, whether their
inmost nature necessitates it? Can an anthropologist give the cranial
index of a people whose custom it is to deform their children’s heads by
bandaging them from their earliest years? Think of the distressing
contrast between the radiant intelligence of a healthy child and the
feeble mentality of the average adult. Is it so utterly impossible that
it is just religious up-bringing which is largely to blame for this
relative degeneration? I think it would be a very long time before a
child who was not influenced began to trouble himself about God and the
things beyond this world. Perhaps his thoughts on these matters would
then take the same course as they did with his ancestors; but we do not
wait for this development; we introduce him to the doctrines of religion
at a time when he is neither interested in them nor capable of grasping
their import. Is it not true that the two main points in the modern
educational programme are the retardation of sexual development and the
early application of religious influence? So when the child’s mind
awakens, the doctrines of religion are already unassailable. But do you
suppose that it is particularly conducive to the strengthening of the
mental function that so important a sphere should be closed to it by the
menace of hell pains? We need not be greatly surprised at the feeble
mentality of the man who has once brought himself to accept without
criticism all the absurdities that religious doctrines repeat to him,
and even to overlook the contradictions between them. Now we have no
other means of controlling our instincts than our intelligence. And how
can we expect people who are dominated by thought-prohibitions to attain
the psychological ideal, the primacy of the intelligence? You know too
that women in general are said to suffer from so-called ‘physiological
weak-mindedness’, _i.e._ a poorer intelligence than the man’s. The fact
itself is disputable, its interpretation doubtful; but it has been
argued for the secondary nature of this intellectual degeneration that
women labour under the harshness of the early prohibition, which
prevented them from applying their mind to what would have interested
them most, that is to say, to the problems of sexual life. So long as a
man’s early years are influenced by the religious thought-inhibition and
by the loyal one derived from it, as well as by the sexual one, we
cannot really say what he is actually like.
But I will curb my ardour and admit the possibility that I too am
chasing after an illusion. Perhaps the effect of the religious
thought-prohibition is not as bad as I assume, perhaps it will turn out
that human nature remains the same even if education is not abused by
being subjected to religion. I do not know, and you cannot know either.
It is not only the great problems of this life that seem at present
insoluble; there are many smaller questions also that are hard to
decide. But you must admit that there is here the justification for a
hope for the future, that perhaps we may dig up a treasure which can
enrich culture, and that it is worth while to make the experiment of a
non-religious education. Should it prove unsatisfactory, I am ready to
give up the reform and to return to the earlier, purely descriptive
judgement: man is a creature of weak intelligence who is governed by his
instinctual wishes.
There is another point in which I wholeheartedly agree with you. It is,
to be sure, a senseless proceeding to try and do away with religion by
force and at one blow—more especially as it is a hopeless one. The
believer will not let his faith be taken from him, neither by arguments
nor by prohibitions. And even if it did succeed with some, it would be a
cruel thing to do. A man who has for decades taken a sleeping draught is
naturally unable to sleep if he is deprived of it. That the effect of
the consolations of religion may be compared to that of a narcotic is
prettily illustrated by what is happening in America. There they are now
trying—plainly under the influence of petticoat government—to deprive
men of all stimulants, intoxicants and luxuries,[3] and to satiate them
with piety by way of compensation. This is another experiment about the
result of which we need not be curious.
Footnote 3:
_I.e._ tea, alcohol, and tobacco.
And so I disagree with you when you go on to argue that man cannot in
general do without the consolation of the religious illusion, that
without it he would not endure the troubles of life, the cruelty of
reality. Certainly this is true of the man into whom you have instilled
the sweet—or bitter-sweet—poison from childhood on. But what of the
other, who has been brought up soberly? Perhaps he, not suffering from
neurosis, will need no intoxicant to deaden it. True, man will then find
himself in a difficult situation. He will have to confess his utter
helplessness and his insignificant part in the working of the universe;
he will have to confess that he is no longer the centre of creation, no
longer the object of the tender care of a benevolent providence. He will
be in the same position as the child who has left the home where he was
so warm and comfortable. But, after all, is it not the destiny of
childishness to be overcome? Man cannot remain a child for ever; he must
venture at last into the hostile world. This may be called ‘_education
to reality_’; need I tell you that it is the sole aim of my book to draw
attention to the necessity for this advance?
You fear, probably, that he will not stand the test? Well, anyhow, let
us be hopeful. It is at least something to know that one is thrown on
one’s own resources. One learns then to use them properly. And man is
not entirely without means of assistance; since the time of the deluge
science has taught him much, and it will still further increase his
power. And as for the great necessities of fate, against which there is
no remedy, these he will simply learn to endure with resignation. Of
what use to him is the illusion of a kingdom on the moon, whose revenues
have never yet been seen by anyone? As an honest crofter on this earth
he will know how to cultivate his plot in a way that will support him.
Thus by withdrawing his expectations from the other world and
concentrating all his liberated energies on this earthly life he will
probably attain to a state of things in which life will be tolerable for
all and no one will be oppressed by culture any more. Then with one of
our comrades in unbelief he will be able to say without regret:
Let us leave the heavens
To the angels and the sparrows.
CHAPTER X
‘That does sound splendid. A race of men that has renounced all
illusions and has thus become capable of making its existence on the
earth a tolerable one! But I cannot share your expectations. And this,
not because I am the pig-headed reactionary you perhaps take me for. No;
it is because I am a sensible person. It seems to me that we have now
exchanged rôles; you prove to be the enthusiast, who allows himself to
be carried away by illusions, and I represent the claims of reason, the
right to be sceptical. What you have just stated seems to me to be
founded on errors, which after your precedent I may call illusions
because they betray clearly enough the influence of your wishes. You
indulge in the hope that generations which have not experienced the
influence of religious teaching in early childhood will easily attain
the wished-for primacy of the intelligence over the life of the
instincts. That is surely an illusion; in this decisive point human
nature is hardly likely to alter. If I am not mistaken—one knows so
little of other civilizations—there are even to-day peoples who do not
grow up under the pressure of a religious system, and they come no
nearer your ideal than the others. If you wish to expel religion from
our European civilization you can only do it through another system of
doctrines, and from the outset this would take over all the
psychological characteristics of religion, the same sanctity, rigidity
and intolerance, the same prohibition of thought in self-defence.
Something of this sort you must have in justice to the requirements of
education. For you cannot do without education. The way from sucking
child to civilized man is a long one; too many young people would go
astray and fail to arrive at their life tasks in due time if they were
left without guidance to their own development. The doctrines made use
of in their education will always confine the thought of their riper
years, exactly as you reproach religion with doing to-day. Do you not
observe that it is the ineradicable natural defect of our, of every,
culture that it imposes on the child, governed by his instincts and
intellectually weak, the making of decisions to which only the matured
intelligence of the grown-up can do justice? But owing to the fact that
mankind’s development through the ages is concentrated into a few years
of childhood culture cannot do otherwise, and it is only by affective
influence that the child can be induced to accomplish the task assigned
to it. And so this is the outlook for your “primacy of the intellect”.
‘And now you should not be surprised if I intervene on behalf of
retaining the religious system of teaching as the basis of education and
of man’s communal life. It is a practical problem, not a question of
reality value. Since we cannot, for the sake of the preservation of our
culture, postpone influencing the individual until he has become ready
for culture—many would never be so anyhow—and since we are obliged to
press some system of teaching on the growing child which shall have the
effect on him of a postulate that does not admit of criticism, it seems
to me that the religious system is by far the most suitable for the
purpose; of course just on account of that quality—its power for
wish-fulfilment and consolation—by which you claim to have recognized it
as an “illusion”. In face of the difficulty of discovering anything
about reality, indeed the doubt whether this is possible for us at all,
we must not overlook the fact that human needs are also a part, and
indeed an important part, of reality, and one that concerns us
particularly closely.
‘I find another advantage of religious doctrine in one of its
peculiarities, to which you seem to take particular exception. It admits
of an ideational refinement and sublimation, by which it can be divested
of most of those traces of a primitive and infantile way of thinking
which it bears. What is then left is a body of ideas which science no
longer contradicts and which it cannot disprove. These modifications of
religious doctrine, which you have condemned as half-measures and
compromises, make it possible to bridge the gap between the uneducated
masses and the philosophical thinker, and to preserve that common bond
between them which is so important for the protection of culture. With
it you would have no need to fear that the poor man would discover that
the upper strata of society “no longer believe in God”. I think I have
shown by now that your endeavour reduces itself to the attempt to
replace a proved and affectively valuable illusion by one that is
improved and without affective value.’
You shall not find me impervious to your criticism. I know how difficult
it is to avoid illusions; perhaps even the hopes I have confessed to are
of an illusory nature. But I hold fast to one distinction. My
illusions—apart from the fact that no penalty is imposed for not sharing
them—are not, like the religious ones, incapable of correction, they
have no delusional character. If experience should show—not to me, but
to others after me who think as I do—that we are mistaken, then we shall
give up our expectations. Take my endeavour for what it is. A
psychologist, who does not deceive himself about the difficulty of
finding his bearings in this world, strives to review the development of
mankind in accord with what insight he has won from studying the mental
processes of the individual during his development from childhood to
manhood. In this connection the idea forces itself upon him that
religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis, and he is optimistic
enough to assume that mankind will overcome this neurotic phase, just as
so many children grow out of their similar neuroses. These pieces of
knowledge from individual psychology may be inadequate, their
application to the human race unjustified, the optimism without
foundation; I grant you the uncertainty of all these things. But often
we cannot refrain from saying what we think, excusing ourselves on the
ground that it is given for no more than it is worth.
And there are two points that I must dwell on a little longer. First,
the weakness of my position does not betoken any strengthening of yours.
I think you are defending a lost cause. We may insist as much as we like
that the human intellect is weak in comparison with human instincts, and
be right in doing so. But nevertheless there is something peculiar about
this weakness. The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not
rest until it has gained a hearing. Ultimately, after endlessly repeated
rebuffs, it succeeds. This is one of the few points in which one may be
optimistic about the future of mankind, but in itself it signifies not a
little. And one can make it a starting-point for yet other hopes. The
primacy of the intellect certainly lies in the far, far, but still
probably not infinite, distance. And as it will presumably set itself
the same aims that you expect to be realized by your God—of course
within human limits, in so far as external reality, Ἀνάγκη, allows
it—the brotherhood of man and the reduction of suffering, we may say
that our antagonism is only a temporary and not an irreconcilable one.
We desire the same things, but you are more impatient, more exacting,
and—why should I not say it—more selfish than I and those like me. You
would have the state of bliss to begin immediately after death; you ask
of it the impossible, and you will not surrender the claim of the
individual. Of these wishes our god Αόγος[4] will realize those which
external nature permits, but he will do this very gradually, only in the
incalculable future and for other children of men. Compensation for us,
who suffer grievously from life, he does not promise. On the way to this
distant goal your religious doctrines will have to be discarded, no
matter whether the first attempts fail, or whether the first
substitute-formations prove to be unstable. You know why; in the long
run nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction
religion offers to both is only too palpable. Not even the purified
religious ideas can escape this fate, so long as they still try to
preserve anything of the consolation of religion. Certainly if you
confine yourself to the belief in a higher spiritual being, whose
qualities are indefinable and whose intentions cannot be discerned, then
you are proof against the interference of science, but then you will
also relinquish the interest of men.
Footnote 4:
The twin gods Αόγος-Ἀνάγκη of the Dutchman _Multatuli_.
And secondly: note the difference between your attitude to illusions and
mine. You have to defend the religious illusion with all your might; if
it were discredited—and to be sure it is sufficiently menaced—then your
world would collapse, there would be nothing left for you but to despair
of everything, of culture and of the future of mankind. From this
bondage I am, we are, free. Since we are prepared to renounce a good
part of our infantile wishes, we can bear it if some of our expectations
prove to be illusions.
Education freed from the burden of religious doctrines will not perhaps
effect much alteration in man’s psychological nature; our god Αόγος is
not perhaps a very powerful one; he may only fulfil a small part of what
his forerunners have promised. If we have to acknowledge this, we shall
do so with resignation. We shall not thereby lose our interest in the
world and in life, for we have in one respect a sure support which you
lack. We believe that it is possible for scientific work to discover
something about the reality of the world through which we can increase
our power and according to which we can regulate our life. If this
belief is an illusion, then we are in the same position as you, but
science has shown us by numerous and significant successes that it is no
illusion. Science has many open, and still more secret, enemies among
those who cannot forgive it for having weakened religious belief and for
threatening to overthrow it. People reproach it for the small amount it
has taught us and the incomparably greater amount it has left in the
dark. But then they forget how young it is, how difficult its
beginnings, and how infinitesimally small the space of time since the
human intellect has been strong enough for the tasks it sets it. Do we
not all do wrong in that the periods of time which we make the basis of
our judgements are of too short duration? We should take an example from
the geologist. People complain of the unreliability of science, that she
proclaims as a law to-day what the next generation will recognize to be
an error and which it will replace by a new law of equally short
currency. But that is unjust and in part untrue. The transformation of
scientific ideas is a process of development and progress, not of
revolution. A law that was at first held to be universally valid proves
to be a special case of a more comprehensive law, or else its scope is
limited by another law not discovered until later; a rough approximation
to the truth is replaced by one more carefully adjusted, which in its
turn awaits a further approach to perfection. In several spheres we have
not yet surmounted a phase of investigation in which we test hypotheses
that have soon to be rejected as inadequate; but in others we have
already an assured and almost immutable core of knowledge. Finally an
attempt has been made to discredit radically scientific endeavour on the
ground that, bound as it is to the conditions of our own organization,
it can yield nothing but subjective results, while the real nature of
things outside us remains inaccessible to it. But this is to disregard
several factors of decisive importance for the understanding of
scientific work. Firstly, our organization, _i.e._ our mental apparatus,
has been developed actually in the attempt to explore the outer world,
and therefore it must have realized in its structure a certain measure
of appropriateness; secondly, it itself is a constituent part of that
world which we are to investigate, and readily admits of such
investigation; thirdly, the task of science is fully circumscribed if we
confine it to showing how the world must appear to us in consequence of
the particular character of our organization; fourthly, the ultimate
findings of science, just because of the way in which they are attained,
are conditioned not only by our organization but also by that which has
affected this organization; and, finally, the problem of the nature of
the world irrespective of our perceptive mental apparatus is an empty
abstraction without practical interest.
No, science is no illusion. But it would be an illusion to suppose that
we could get anywhere else what it cannot give us.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
● Typos fixed; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.
● Used numbers for footnotes.
● Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.
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