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"God being everything, the real world
and man are nothing. God being truth, justice,
goodness, beauty, power, and life, man is
falsehood, iniquity, evil, ugliness, impotence,
and death. God being master, man is the slave."
While Satan is "the eternal rebel, the
first freethinker and the emancipator of
worlds."
"The liberty of man consists solely
in this: that he obeys natural laws because
he has himself recognized them as such
"Science is the compass of life; but
it is not life itself.... What I preach then
is, to a certain extent, the revolt of life
against science, or rather against the government
of science, not to destroy science - that
would be high treason to humanity - but to
remand it to its place so that it can never
leave it again
Who is right, the idealists or the materialists?
The question, once stated in this way, hesitation
becomes impossible. Undoubtedly the idealists
are wrong and the materialists right. Yes,
facts are before ideas; yes, the ideal, as
Proudhon said, is but a flower, whose root
lies in the material conditions of existence.
Yes, the whole history of humanity, intellectual
and moral, political and social, is but a
reflection of its economic history.
All branches of modem science, of true and
disinterested science, concur in proclaiming
this grand truth, fundamental and decisive:
The social world, properly speaking, the
human world - in short, humanity - is nothing
other than the last and supreme development
- at least on our planet and as far as we
know - the highest manifestation of animality.
But as every development necessarily implies
a negation, that of its base or point of
departure, humanity is at the same time and
essentially the deliberate and gradual negation
of the animal element in man; and it is precisely
this negation, as rational as it is natural,
and rational only because natural - at once
historical and logical, as inevitable as
the development and realization of all the
natural laws in the world - that constitutes
and creates the ideal, the world of intellectual
and moral convictions, ideas.
Yes, our first ancestors, our Adams and our
Eves, were, if not gorillas, very near relatives
of gorillas, omnivorous, intelligent and
ferocious beasts, endowed in a higher degree
than the animals of another species with
two precious faculties - the power to think
and the desire to rebel.
These faculties, combining their progressive
action in history, represent the essential
factor, the negative power in the positive
development of human animality, and create
consequently all that constitutes humanity
in man.
The Bible, which is a very interesting and
here and there very profound book when considered
as one of the oldest surviving manifestations
of human wisdom and fancy, expresses this
truth very naively in its myth of original
sin. Jehovah, who of all the good gods adored
by men was certainly the most jealous, the
most vain, the most ferocious, the most unjust,
the most bloodthirsty, the most despotic,
and the most hostile to human dignity and
liberty - Jehovah had just created Adam and
Eve, to satisfy we know not what caprice;
no doubt to while away his time, which must
weigh heavy on his hands in his eternal egoistic
solitude, or that he might have some new
slaves. He generously placed at their disposal
the whole earth, with all its fruits and
animals, and set but a single limit to this
complete enjoyment. He expressly forbade
them from touching the fruit of the tree
of knowledge. He wished, therefore, that
man, destitute of all understanding of himself,
should remain an eternal beast, ever on all-fours
before the eternal God, his creator and his
master. But here steps in Satan, the eternal
rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator
of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his bestial
ignorance and obedience; he emancipates him,
stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty
and humanity, in urging him to disobey and
eat of the fruit of knowledge.
We know what followed. The good God, whose
foresight, which is one of the divine faculties,
should have warned him of what would happen,
flew into a terrible and ridiculous rage;
he cursed Satan, man, and the world created
by himself, striking himself so to speak
in his own creation, as children do when
they get angry; and, not content with smiting
our ancestors themselves, he cursed them
in all the generations to come, innocent
of the crime committed by their forefathers.
Our Catholic and Protestant theologians look
upon that as very profound and very just,
precisely because it is monstrously iniquitous
and absurd. Then, remembering that he was
not only a God of vengeance and wrath, but
also a God of love, after having tormented
the existence of a few milliards of poor
human beings and condemned them to an eternal
hell, he took pity on the rest, and, to save
them and reconcile his eternal and divine
love with his eternal and divine anger, always
greedy for victims and blood, he sent into
the world, as an expiatory victim, his only
son, that he might be killed by men. That
is called the mystery of the Redemption,
the basis of all the Christian religions.
Still, if the divine Savior had saved the
human world! But no; in the paradise promised
by Christ, as we know, such being the formal
announcement, the elect will number very
few. The rest, the immense majority of the
generations present and to come, will burn
eternally in hell. In the meantime, to console
us, God, ever just, ever good, hands over
the earth to the government of the Napoleon
Thirds, of the William Firsts, of the Ferdinands
of Austria, and of the Alexanders of all
the Russias.
Such are the absurd tales that are told and
the monstrous doctrines that are taught,
in the full light of the nineteenth century,
in all the public schools of Europe, at the
express command of the government. They call
this civilizing the people! Is it not plain
that all these governments are systematic
poisoners, interested stupefies of the masses?
I have wandered from my subject, because
anger gets hold of me whenever I think of
the base and criminal means which they employ
to keep the nations in perpetual slavery,
undoubtedly that they may be the better able
to fleece them. Of what consequence are the
crimes of all the Tropmanns in the world
compared with this crime of treason against
humanity committed daily, in broad day, over
the whole surface of the civilized world,
by those who dare to call themselves the
guardians and the fathers of the people?
I return to the myth of original sin.
God admitted that Satan was right; he recognized
that the devil did not deceive Adam and Eve
in promising them knowledge and liberty as
a reward for the act of disobedience which
he bad induced them to commit; for, immediately
they had eaten of the forbidden fruit, God
himself said (see Bible): "Behold, man
is become as of the Gods, knowing both good
and evil; prevent him, therefore, from eating
of the fruit of eternal life, lest he become
immortal like Ourselves.
Let us disregard now the fabulous portion
of this myth and consider its true meaning,
which is very clear. Man has emancipated
himself; he has separated himself from animality
and constituted himself a man; he has begun
his distinctively human history and development
by an act of disobedience and science - that
is, by rebellion and by thought.
Three elements or, if you like, three fundamental
principles constitute the essential conditions
of all human development, collective or individual,
in history:
(1) human animality;;
(2) thought; and
(3) rebellion.;
To the first properly corresponds social
and private economy; to the second, science;
to the third, liberty.
Idealists of all schools, aristocrats and
bourgeois, theologians and physicians, politicians
and moralists, religionists, philosophers,
or poets, not forgetting the liberal economists
- unbounded worshippers of the ideal, as
we know - are much offended when told that
man, with his magnificent intelligence, his
sublime ideas, and his boundless aspirations,
is, like all else existing in the world,
nothing but matter, only a product of vile
matter.
We may answer that the matter of which materialists
speak, matter spontaneously and eternally
mobile, active, productive, matter chemically
or organically determined and manifested
by the properties or forces, mechanical,
physical, animal, and intelligent, which
necessarily belong to it - that this matter
has nothing in common with the vile matter
of the idealists. The latter, a product of
their false abstraction, is indeed a stupid,
inanimate, immobile thing, incapable of giving
birth to the smallest product, a caput mortuum,
an ugly fancy in contrast to the beautiful
fancy which they call God; as the opposite
of this supreme being, matter, their matter,
stripped by that constitutes its real nature,
necessarily represents supreme nothingness.
They have taken away intelligence, life,
all its determining qualities, active relations
or forces, motion itself, without which matter
would not even have weight, leaving it nothing
but impenetrability and absolute immobility
in space; they have attributed all these
natural forces, properties, and manifestations
to the imaginary being created by their abstract
fancy; then, interchanging rÙles, they have
called this product of their imagination,
this phantom, this God who is nothing, "supreme
Being" and, as a necessary consequence,
have declared that the real being, matter,
the world, is nothing. After which they gravely
tell us that this matter is incapable of
producing anything, not even of setting itself
in motion, and consequently must have been
created by their God.
At the end of this book I exposed the fallacies
and truly revolting absurdities to which
one is inevitably led by this imagination
of a God, let him be considered as a personal
being, the creator and organizer of worlds;
or even as impersonal, a kind of divine soul
spread over the whole universe and constituting
thus its eternal principle; or let him be
an idea, infinite and divine, always present
and active in the world, and always manifested
by the totality of material and definite
beings. Here I shall deal with one point
only.
The gradual development of the material world,
as well as of organic animal life and of
the historically progressive intelligence
of man, individually or socially, is perfectly
conceivable. It is a wholly natural movement
from the simple to the complex, from the
lower to the higher, from the inferior to
the superior; a movement in conformity with
all our daily experiences, and consequently
in conformity also with our natural logic,
with the distinctive laws of our mind, which
being formed and developed only by the aid
of these same experiences; is, so to speak,
but the mental, cerebral reproduction or
reflected summary thereof.
The system of the idealists is quite the
contrary of this. It is the reversal of all
human experiences and of that universal and
common good sense which is the essential
condition of all human understanding, and
which, in rising from the simple and unanimously
recognized truth that twice two are four
to the sublimest and most complex scientific
considerations - admitting, moreover, nothing
that has not stood the severe tests of experience
or observation of things and facts - becomes
the only serious basis of human knowledge.
Very far from pursuing the natural order
from the lower to the higher, from the inferior
to the superior, and from the relatively
simple to the more complex; instead of wisely
and rationally accompanying the progressive
and real movement from the world called inorganic
to the world organic, vegetables, animal,
and then distinctively human - from chemical
matter or chemical being to living matter
or living being, and from living being to
thinking being - the idealists, obsessed,
blinded, and pushed on by the divine phantom
which they have inherited from theology,
take precisely the opposite course. They
go from the higher to the lower, from the
superior to the inferior, from the complex
to the simple. They begin with God, either
as a person or as divine substance or idea,
and the first step that they take is a terrible
fall from the sublime heights of the eternal
ideal into the mire of the material world;
from absolute perfection into absolute imperfection;
from thought to being, or rather, from supreme
being to nothing. When, how, and why the
divine being, eternal, infinite, absolutely
perfect, probably weary of himself, decided
upon this desperate salto mortale is something
which no idealist, no theologian, no physician,
no poet, has ever been able to understand
himself or explain to the profane. All religions,
past and present, and all the systems of
transcendental philosophy hinge on this unique
and iniquitous mystery.
[1] Holy men, inspired lawgivers, prophets,
messiahs, have searched it for life, and
found only torment and death. Like the ancient
sphinx, it has devoured them, because they
could not explain it. Great philosophers
from Heraclitus and Plato down to Descartes,
Spinoza: Leibnitz, Kant, Fichte, Schelling,
and Hegel, not to mention the Indian philosophers,
have written heaps of volumes and built systems
as ingenious as sublime, in which they have
said by the way many beautiful and grand
things and discovered immortal truths, but
they have left this mystery, the principal
object of their transcendental investigations,
as unfathomable as before. The gigantic efforts
of the most Wonderful geniuses that the world
has known, and who, one after another, for
at least thirty centuries, have undertaken
anew this labor of Sisyphus, have resulted
only in rendering this mystery still more
incomprehensible. Is it to be hoped that
it will be unveiled to us by the routine
speculations of some pedantic disciple of
an artificially warmed-over physics at a
time when all living and serious spirits
have abandoned that ambiguous science born
of a compromise - historically explicable
no doubt - between the unreason of faith
and sound scientific reason?
It is evident that this terrible mystery
is inexplicable - that is, absurd, because
only the absurd admits of no explanation.
It is evident that whoever finds it essential
to his happiness and life must renounce his
reason, and return, if he can, to naive,
blind, stupid faith, to repeat with Tertullianus
and all sincere believers these words, which
sum up the very quintessence of theology:
Credo quia absurdum. Then all discussion
ceases, and nothing remains but the triumphant
stupidity of faith. But immediately there
arises another question: How comes an intelligent
and well-informed man ever to feel the need
of believing in this mystery?
Nothing is more natural than that the belief
in God, the creator, regulator, judge, master,
curser, savior, and benefactor of the world,
should still prevail among the people, especially
in the rural districts, where it is more
widespread than among the proletariat of
the cities. The people, unfortunately, are
still very ignorant, and are kept in ignorance
by the systematic efforts of all the governments,
who consider this ignorance, not without
good reason, as one of the essential conditions
of their own power. Weighted down by their
daily labor, deprived of leisure, of intellectual
intercourse, of reading, in short of all
the means and a good portion of the stimulants
that develop thought in men, the people generally
accept religious traditions without criticism
and in a lump. These traditions surround
them from infancy in all the situations of
life, and artificially sustained in their
minds by a multitude of official poisoners
of all sorts, priests and laymen, are transformed
therein into a sort of mental and moral habit,
too often more powerful even than their natural
good sense.
There is another reason which explains and
in some sort justifies the absurd beliefs
of the people - namely, the wretched situation
to which they find themselves fatally condemned
by the economic organization of society in
the most civilized countries of Europe. Reduced,
intellectually and morally as well as materially,
to the minimum of human existence, confined
in their life like a prisoner in his prison,
without horizon, without outlet, without
even a future if we believe the economists,
the people would have the singularly narrow
souls and blunted instincts of the bourgeois
if they did not feel a desire to escape;
but of escape there are but three methods
- two chimerical and a third real. The first
two are the dram-shop and the church, debauchery
of the body or debauchery of the mind; the
third is social revolution. Hence I conclude
this last will be much more potent than all
the theological propagandism of the freethinkers
to destroy to their last vestige the religious
beliefs and dissolute habits of the people,
beliefs and habits much more intimately connected
than is generally supposed. In substituting
for the at once illusory and brutal enjoyments
of bodily and spiritual licentiousness the
enjoyments, as refined as they are real,
of humanity developed in each and all, the
social revolution alone will have the power
to close at the same time all the dram-shops
and all the churches.
Till then the people. Taken as a whole, will
believe; and, if they have no reason to believe,
they will have at least a right.
There is a class of people who, if they do
not believe, must at least make a semblance
of believing. This class comprising all the
tormentors, all the oppressors, and all the
exploiters of humanity; priests, monarchs,
statesmen, soldiers, public and private financiers,
officials of all sorts, policemen, gendarmes,
jailers and executioners, monopolists, capitalists,
tax-leeches, contractors and landlords, lawyers,
economists, politicians of all shades, down
to the smallest vendor of sweetmeats, all
will repeat in unison those words of Voltaire:
"If God did not exist, it would be necessary
to invent him." For, you understand,
"the people must have a religion."
That is the safety-valve.
There exists, finally, a somewhat numerous
class of honest but timid souls who, too
intelligent to take the Christian dogmas
seriously, reject them in detail, but have
neither the courage nor the strength nor
the necessary resolution to summarily renounce
them altogether. They abandon to your criticism
all the special absurdities of religion,
they turn up their noses at all the miracles,
but they cling desperately to the principal
absurdity; the source of all the others,
to the miracle that explains and justifies
all the other miracles, the existence of
God. Their God is not the vigorous and powerful
being, the brutally positive God of theology.
It is a nebulous, diaphanous, illusory being
that vanishes into nothing at the first attempt
to grasp it; it is a mirage, an ignis fatugs;
that neither warms nor illuminates. And yet
they hold fast to it, and believe that, were
it to disappear, all would disappear with
it. They are uncertain, sickly souls, who
have lost their reckoning in the present
civilisation, belonging to neither the present
nor the future, pale phantoms eternally suspended
between heaven and earth, and occupying exactly
the same position between the politics of
the bourgeois and the Socialism of the proletariat.
They have neither the power nor the wish
nor the determination to follow out their
thought, and they waste their time and pains
in constantly endeavouring to reconcile the
irreconcilable. In public life these are
known as bourgeois Socialists.
With them, or against them, discussion is
out of the question. They are too puny.
But there are a few illustrious men of whom
no one will dare to speak without respect,
and whose vigorous health, strength of mind,
and good intention no one will dream of calling
in question. I need only cite the names of
Mazzini, Michelet, Quinet, John Stuart Mill.
Generous and strong souls, great hearts,
great minds, great writers, and the first
the heroic and revolutionary regenerator
of a great nation, they are all apostles
of idealism and bitter despisers and adversaries
of materialism, and consequently of Socialism
also, in philosophy as well as in politics.
Against them, then, we must discuss this
question.
First, let it be remarked that not one of
the illustrious men I have just named nor
any other idealistic thinker of any consequence
in our day has given any attention to the
logical side of this question properly speaking.
Not one has tried to settle philosophically
the possibility of the divine salto mortale;
from the pure and eternal regions of spirit
into the mire of the material world. Have
they feared to approach this irreconcilable
contradiction and despaired of solving it
after the failures of the greatest geniuses
of history, or have they looked upon it as
already sufficiently well settled? That is
their secret. The fact is that they have
neglected the theoretical demonstration of
the existence of a God, and have developed
only its practical motives and consequences.
They have treated it as a fact universally
accepted, and, as such, no longer susceptible
of any doubt whatever, for sole proof thereof
limiting themselves to the establishment
of the antiquity and this very universality
of the belief in God.
This imposing unanimity, in the eyes of many
illustrious men and writers to quote only
the most famous of them who eloquently expressed
it, Joseph de Maistre and the great Italian
patriot, Giuseppe Mazzini - is of more value
than all the demonstrations of science; and
if the reasoning of a small number of logical
and even very powerful, but isolated, thinkers
is against it, so much the worse, they say,
for these thinkers and their logic, for universal
consent, the general and primitive adoption
of an idea, has always been considered the
most triumphant testimony to its truth. The
I sentiment of the whole world, a conviction
that is found ' and maintained always and
everywhere, cannot be mistaken; it must have
its root in a necessity absolutely inherent
in the very nature of man. And since it has
been established that all peoples, past and
present, have believed and still believe
in the existence of God, it is clear that
those who have the misfortune to doubt it,
whatever the logic that led them to this
doubt, are abnormal exceptions, monsters.
Thus, then, the antiquity; and universality;
of a belief should be regarded, contrary
to all science and all logic, as sufficient
and unimpeachable proof of its truth. Why?
Until the days of Copernicus and Galileo
everybody believed that the sun revolved
about the earth. Was not everybody mistaken?
What is more ancient and more universal than
slavery? Cannibalism perhaps. From the origin
of historic society down to the present day
there has been always and everywhere exploitation
of the compulsory labour of the masses -
slaves, serfs, or wage workers - by some
dominant minority; oppression of the people
by the Church and by the State. Must it be
concluded that this exploitation and this
oppression are necessities absolutely inherent
in the very existence of human society? These
are examples which show that the argument
of the champions of God proves nothing.
Nothing, in fact, is as universal or as ancient
as the iniquitous and absurd; truth and justice,
on the contrary, are the least universal,
the youngest features in the development
of human society. In this fact, too, lies
the explanation of a constant historical
phenomenon - namely, the persecution of which
those who first proclaim the truth have been
and continue to be the objects at the hands
of the official, privileged, and interested
representatives of "universal"
and "ancient" beliefs, and often
also at the hands of the same masses who,
after having tortured them, always end by
adopting their ideas and rendering them victorious.
To us materialists and Revolutionary Socialists,
there is nothing astonishing or terrifying
in this historical phenomenon. Strong in
our conscience, in our love of truth at all
hazards, in that passion for logic which
of itself alone constitutes a great power
and outside of which there is no thought;
strong in our passion for justice and in
our unshakeable faith in the triumph of humanity
over all theoretical and practical bestialities;
strong, finally, in the mutual confidence
and support given each other by the few who
share our convictions - we resign ourselves
to all the consequences of this historical
phenomenon, in which we see the manifestation
of a social law as natural, as necessary,
and as invariable as all the other laws which
govern the world.
This law is a logical, inevitable consequence
of the animal origin; of human society; for
in face of all the scientific, physiological,
psychological, and historical proofs accumulated
at the present day, as well as in face of
the exploits of the Germans conquering France,
which now furnish so striking a demonstration
thereof, it is no longer possible to really
doubt this origin. But from the moment that
this animal origin of man is accepted, all
is explained. History then appears to us
as the revolutionary negation, now slow,
apathetic, sluggish, now passionate and powerful,
of the past. It consists precisely in the
progressive negation of the primitive animality
of man by the development of his humanity.
Man, a wild beast, cousin of the gorilla,
has emerged from the profound darkness of
animal instinct into the light of the mind,
which explains in a wholly natural way all
his past mistakes and partially consoles
us for his present errors. He has gone out
from animal slavery, and passing through
divine slavery, a temporary condition between
his animality and his humanity, he is now
marching on to the conquest and realisation
of human liberty. Whence it results that
the antiquity of a belief, of an idea, far
from proving anything in its favour, ought,
on the contrary, to lead us to suspect it.
For behind us is our animality and before
us our humanity; human light, the only thing
that can warm and enlighten us, the only
thing that can emancipate us, give us dignity,
freedom, and happiness, and realise fraternity
among us, is never at the beginning, but,
relatively to the epoch in which we live,
always at the end of history. Let us, then,
never look back, let us look ever forward;
for forward is our sunlight, forward our
salvation. If it is justifiable, and even
useful and necessary, to turn back to study
our past, it is only in order to establish
what we have been and what we must no longer
be, what we have believed and thought and
what we must no longer believe or think,
what we have done and what we must do nevermore.
So much for antiquity. As for the universality;
of an error, it proves but one thing - the
similarity, if not the perfect identity,
of human nature in all ages and under all
skies. And, since it is established that
all peoples, at all periods of their life,
have believed and still believe in God, we
must simply conclude that the divine idea,
an outcome of ourselves, is an error historically
necessary in the development of humanity,
and ask why and how it was produced in history
and why an immense majority of the human
race still accept it as a truth.
Until we shall account to ourselves for the
manner in which the idea of a supernatural
or divine world was developed and had to
be developed in the historical evolution
of the human conscience, all our scientific
conviction of its absurdity will be in vain;
until then we shall never succeed in destroying
it in the opinion of the majority, because
we shall never be able to attack it in the
very depths of the hut man being where it
had birth. Condemned to a fruitless struggle,
without issue and without end, we should
for ever have to content ourselves with fighting
it solely on the surface, in its innumerable
manifestations, whose absurdity will be scarcely
beaten down by the blows of common sense
before it will reappear in a new form no
less nonsensical. While the root of all the
absurdities that torment the world, belief
in God, remains intact, it will never fail
to bring forth new offspring. Thus, at the
present time, in certain sections of the
highest society, Spiritualism tends to establish
itself upon the ruins of Christianity.
It is not only in the interest of the masses,
it is in that of the health of our own minds,
that we should strive to understand the historic
genesis, the succession of causes which developed
and produced the idea of God in the consciousness
of men. In vain shall we call and believe
ourselves Atheists, until we comprehend these
causes, for, until then, we shall always
suffer ourselves to be more or less governed
by the clamours of this universal conscience
whose secret we have not discovered; and,
considering the natural weakness of even
the strongest individual against the all-powerful
influence of the social surroundings that
trammel him, we are always in danger of relapsing
sooner or later, in one way or another, into
the abyss of religious absurdity. Examples
of these shameful conversions are frequent
in society today.
Footnotes
[1] I call it "iniquitous" because,
as I believe I have proved In the Appendix
alluded to, this mystery has been and still
continues to be the consecration of all the
horrors which have been and are being committed
in the world; I call it unique, because all
the other theological and physical absurdities
which debase the human mind are but its necessary
consequences.
[2] Mr. Stuart Mill is perhaps the only one
whose serious idealism may be fairly doubted,
and that for two reasons: first, that if
not absolutely the disciple, he is a passionate
admirer, an adherent of the positive philosophy
of Auguste Comte, a philosophy which, in
spite of its numerous reservations, is really
Atheistic; second, that Mr. Stuart Mill is
English, and in England to proclaim oneself
an Atheist is to ostracise oneself, even
at this late day.
Written: February - March, 1871 Source: God
and the State Publisher: Mother Earth Publishing
Association, New York © 1916 First Published:
1882 (Discovered posthumously by Carlo Cafiero
and Elisée Reclus) Translated: Benjamin R.
Tucker Online Version: Anarchist Archives
; Bakunin Reference Archive (marxists. org)
1999 Transcribed: Dana Ward
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Evans Experientialism 
