Page:Tolstoy - Essays and Letters.djvu/305

 WHAT IS RELIGION? 289

outlived its day^ and is now not merely a useless, but even a harmful, social organ, like the vermiform appendix in the human body.

Religion is regarded by such men, not as something known to us by inward experience, but as an external phenomenon — a disease, as it were, which overtakes certain people, and which we can only investigate by its external symptoms.

Religion, in the opinion of some of these men, arose from attributing a spirit to various aspects of Nature (animism) ; in the opinion of others, it arose from the supposed possibility of communicating with deceased ancestors ; in the opinion of others, again, it arose from fear of the forces of Nature. But, say the learned men of our day, since science has now proved that trees and stones cannot be endowed with a spirit ; that dead ancestors do not know what is done by the living ; and that the aspects of Nature are explainable by natural causes— it follows that the need for religion has passed, as well as the need for all those restrictions with which, (in consequence of religious beliefs) people have hitherto hampered themselves. In the opinion of these learned men there was a period of ignorance : the religious period. That has long been outlived by humanity, though some occasional atavistic indications of it still remain. Then came the metaphysical period, which is now also outlived. But we, enlightened people, are living in a scientific period : a period of positive science which replaces religion and will bring humanity to a height of development it could never have reached while subject to the superstitious teachings of religion.

Early in 1901 the distinguished French savant Berthelot delivered a speech"^ in which he told his hearers that the day of religion has passed and religion must now be replaced by science. I refer to this speech because it is the first to my hand, and because it was delivered in the metropolis of the educated world by a universally recognised savant. But the same


 * See the Revue de Paris, January, 1901.— L. T.