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value to their unanimity on these particular points.
And such was the relationship of religious or philosophical doctrines (however little sanctioned)
in Europe and even France until recently; and such it is still among peoples who have retained a
relative integrity of character. To tell the truth, it is always a matter of different offshoots of the same
Christian trunk, or of some schematic skeleton of Christianity called spiritualism, be it the vague
spiritualism of Cousin or the original Spiritualism of Kant or his followers. So much so that when
these people feel the need to take away the “confessional nature” from the official teaching of ethics,
the intent is not to make it irreligious and certainly not antireligious. Everywhere that there is more
than one distinct credo, the schools at all levels, primary, secondary, higher, try to base themselves
either on one or on another, or on a combination of the others, or when they are varieties of the same
species—Protestantism and Catholicism or various Protestant sects—on what they have in common.
In certain provinces of Canada such as Manitoba and in England, the children are taught a minimum
or rather an extractum carnis of Christian doctrine: the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer.
Thus they obtain what is believed to be a “natural religion,” which is superimposed on the positive
religions in the same way that legal philosophers think they have discovered a “natural law” over and
above all legislation. But as those credos multiply, it becomes necessary—and the necessity makes
itself felt first for higher education, then for secondary education, finally for primary education—to
reduce more and more the extract that supposedly expresses their common ground. Thus emerges this
vague spiritualism that I spoke of, which occurred in France during more than the first half of this
century, a spiritualism that is really a schema of a simplified and rationalized Christianity. The
misfortune is that even this has become too substantial since the appearance and unparalleled success
of more radical philosophies: positivism and transformism. It is not that I consider positivist or even
transformist morality in themselves irreconcilable with Christian morality except for what touches its
sexual side. The first, in the form received from Comte, excellently bases the inner beauty achieved
by the saints, and maximized by the best doctors, on social utility. But the second is still seeking its
true form and has not found it. In the meantime it presents itself in deplorable counterfeit form as a
type of social Darwinism that Darwin himself would have rejected, which, since the catastrophe of
the Terrible Year, *2 is the only aspect of moral evolutionism to have invaded hearts and minds and
even the domain of facts.
This is the truly new, truly perilous side of present times; for the first time a great and popular
philosophy, differing thereby from all those which have held sway until now and from all churches,
logically and inevitably leads to maxims that are in absolute contradiction with age-old precepts.
From improperly understood concepts of competition for life, which were wrongly deemed sufficient
and necessary to explain living harmony, was deduced the necessity for the greatest universal good of
battle and war. What kind of ethics can you construct on this basis if not one that is antireligious and
not just irreligious? Goodness, modesty, respect, devotion: by what reason can we praise these
virtues of the past if they are reputed to be a cause of the degeneracy of peoples and races? If you
believe that all, even and especially the most violent, forms of battle are the sacred and bloody road
to progress, then it is the hardness of heart called character, it is pride, ambition, scorn for others,
and cruel combativeness that should be vaunted and cultivated in our children. Or rather, it is quite
useless to tell them so since they will tell it to themselves often enough; they have already said it to
themselves too often. And I ask you, when a civilized society has reached the point of convincing
itself that social life is essentially a battle, a natural aggravation of overexcited egoisms, that it is
good to be thus, that all good comes from this situation, and that it is proper to push to extremes these
contradictory drives, to generalize this confusion and make it gigantic in order to attain a future Eden