The future of an illusion

‘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.

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.