Social and Philosophical Studies (1906)
Translated by Charles H. Kerr.
Published by Charles H. Kerr & Company, Chicago 1918.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
CAUSES OF BELIEF IN GOD
The Religious Bourgeoisie and the Irreligious Proletariat
Bourgeois free-thought under the auspices of two illustrious scientists, Berthelot and Haeckel, has set up its platform at Rome, opposite the Vatican to hurl its oratorical thunder-bolts against Catholicism, which with its hierarchical clergy and its alleged immutable dogmas stands in the bourgeois mind for Religion.
Do the free thinkers, because they are put ting Catholicism on trial, think they are emancipated from belief in God, the foundation of all religion? Do they think that the Bourgeoisie, the class to which they belong, can dispense with Christianity, of which Catholicism is a manifestation?
Christianity, though it has succeeded in adapting itself to other social forms, is first and foremost the religion of societies founded on individual property and the exploitation of wage labor, and that is why it has been, is, and shall be, whatever is said, and whatever is done, the religion of the Bourgeoisie. For more than ten centuries all its movements, whether for organizing itself, emancipating itself, or spreading into new territory, have been accompanied and complicated by religious crises; it has always put the material interests whose triumph it sought under the cover of Christianity, which it claimed that it wished to re form and bring back to the pure doctrine of the Divine Master.
The bourgeois revolutionists of 1789, imagining that France could be de-christianized, persecuted the clergy with unequaled vigor; the more logical of them, thinking that nothing would be accomplished as long as the be lief in God existed, abolished God by decree, like a functionary of the old regime, and re placed him by the Goddess of Reason. But when the revolutionary fever had run its course, Robespierre re-established by a decree the supreme being, the name of God being still out of fashion, and a few months later the cu rates emerged from their cells and opened their churches, where the faithful held love feasts, and Bonaparte to satisfy the bourgeois mob signed the Concordat: then appeared a Christianity of a romantic, sentimental, picturesque and macaronic character, adapted by Chateaubriand to the tastes of the triumphant Bourgeoisie.
The powerful intellects of free thought have affirmed and still affirm, in spite of evidence, that science would disencumber the human brain of the idea of God by making it useless for a comprehension of the mechanism of the universe. Nevertheless the men of science with but few exceptions are still under the charm of that belief; if in his own field a scientist, to use Laplace s phrase, has no need of the hypothesis of God to explain the phenomena that he studies, he does not venture to declare that it is useless in accounting for those which are not summed up in the list of his researches; and all scientists recognize that God is more or less necessary for the proper working of the social gearings and for the morals of the masses. [1] Not only is the idea of God not completely banished from the brains of the scientists, but the grossest superstition flourishes, not in the backwoods and among the ignorant, but in the capitals of civilization and among the educated bourgeois; some enter into sessions with spirits to get news from beyond the tomb, others prostrate themselves before St. Anthony of Padua to find something lost, to guess the lucky number at the lottery, to pass an examination at the Polytechnic; they consult palmists, clairvoyants, card-readers, in order to learn the future, interpret dreams, etc. The scientific knowledge that they possess does not protect them against the most stupid credulity.
But while in all the groups of the Bourgeoisie the religious sentiment retains its vitality and shows itself in a thousand fashions, the industrial proletariat is characterized by a religious indifference that is unreasoning, but unshakable.
Mr. Charles Booth, the well-known sociologist, at the close of his vast inquiry into the religious state of London, which his army of assistants “have visited district by district, street by street, and often house by house,” states that
“the mass of the people make no profession of faith and take no interest in religious observances … The great section of the population which passes by the name of the working classes, lying socially between the lower middle class and the poor, remains, as a whole, outside of all the religious bodies … The churches have come to be regarded as the resorts of the well-to-do, and of those who are willing to accept the charity and patronage of the people better off than themselves … The average working man of to-day thinks more of his rights or of his wrongs than of his duties and his failure to perform them. Humility and the consciousness of sin, and the attitude of worship, are perhaps not natural to him.” [2]
These undeniable proofs of the instinctive irreligion of the London workingmen, usually thought so religious, can be matched by the most superficial observation of the industrialized cities of France: If laborers are found there who assume religious sentiments, or who really have them (these latter are rare) it is because religion strikes them as a form of charitable relief; if others are fanatical free thinkers, it is because they have suffered from the meddling of the priest in their families or in their relations with their employer.
Indifference in religious matters, the most serious symptom of irreligion, to quote Lamennais, is inborn in the modern working class. While the political movements of the Bourgeoisie may have taken on a religious or anti-religious form, no inclination can be seen in the Proletariat of the great industries in Europe and America toward elaborating a new religion to replace Christianity, nor any desire to reform it. The economic and political organizations of the working class in both hemispheres are uninterested in any doctrinal discussion on religious dogmas and spiritual ideas; this however does not prevent their making war on priests of all cults, regarding them as the domestics of the capitalist class.
How comes it that the bourgeois, who receive a scientific education of greater or less extent, are still trammeled by religious ideas, from which the workers, without the education, have freed themselves?
II. Natural Origins of the Idea of God in the Savage
To declaim against Catholicism as the free thinkers do, or to ignore God as the positivists do does not take account of the persistence of the belief in God in spite of the progress and the popularization of scientific knowledge, nor does it take account of the persistence of Christianity in spite of the railleries of Voltaire, the persecutions of the revolutionists, and the results of exegetic criticism. It is easy to declaim and ignore and it is hard to explain for to do that one must begin by inquiring how and why belief in God and spiritualistic ideas slipped into the human brain, took root there and developed; and answers to these questions are found only by going back to the ideology of the savages, where are clearly outlined the spiritualistic ideas which encumber the brains of civilized people.
The idea of the soul and of its survival is an invention of the savages, who allowed them selves an immaterial and immortal spirit to explain the phenomena of dreams.
The savage who has no doubt of the reality of his dreams imagines that if during his sleep he hunts, fights, or takes vengeance, and if on awakening he finds himself in the place where he lay down it is because another self, a double, as he says, impalpable, invisible and light as air has left his sleeping body to go far away to hunt or fight, and if it comes about that he sees in his dreams his ancestors and his dead companions he concludes that he has been visited by their spirits, which survive the destruction of their corpses.
The savage – “that child of the human species,” as Vico calls him – has, like the child, puerile notions about nature. He thinks that he can give orders to the elements as to his limbs, that he can with words and magic rites command the rain to fall, the wind to blow, etc.; if for example he fears that the night may overtake him on his march he knots up in a certain fashion certain herbs to stop the sun, as the Joshua of the Bible did with a prayer. The spirits of the dead having this power over the elements to a higher degree than the living, he calls on them to produce the phenomenon when he fails in bringing it about. Since a brave warrior and a skillful sorcerer have more effect upon nature than simple mortals, their spirits when they are dead must consequently have a greater power over it than the doubles of ordinary men; the savage chooses them out of the crowd of spirits to honor them with offerings and sacrifices and to beg them to make it rain, when drought compromises his harvests, to give him victory when he takes the field, to cure him when he is sick. Primitive man starting out with a mistaken explanation of dreams elaborated the elements which later served for the creation of one sole God, who is when defined nothing more than a spirit, more powerful than the other spirits.
The idea of God is neither an innate idea, nor an a priori idea, but an a posteriori idea, just as all ideas are, since man can not think until he has come in contact with the phenomena of the real world which he explains as he can. It is impossible to set forth in an article the logically deductive manner in which the idea of God proceeded from the idea of the soul, invented by the savages.
Grant Allen, bringing together and summing up the observations and researches of explorers, folklorists, and anthropologists and interpreting them and illuminating them by his ingenious and fertile criticism has followed out in its principal steps the process of formation of the idea of God in his remarkable work entitled, The Evolution of the Idea of God; an Enquiry into the Origin of Religions, London 1903. He also demonstrated with ample proofs that primitive Christianity with its Man-God, dead and raised again, its Virgin-Mother, its Holy-Spirit, its legends, its mysteries, its dogmas, its ethics, its miracles, and its ceremonies, merely assembled and organized into a religion, certain ideas and myths, which for centuries were cur rent in the ancient world.
III. Economic Origins of the Belief of God in the Bourgeois
It might reasonably have been hoped that the extraordinary development and popularization of scientific knowledge and the demonstration of the necessary linking of natural phenomena might have established the idea that the universe ruled by the law of necessity was re moved from the caprices of any human or superhuman will and that consequently God be came useless since he was stripped of the multiple functions which the ignorance of the sav ages had laid upon him; nevertheless it can not but be recognized that the belief in a God, who can at his will overthrow the necessary order of things, still persists in men of science, and that such a God is still in demand by the educated bourgeois, who asks him as the sav ages do for rain, victory, cures, etc.
Even if the scientists had succeeded in creating in bourgeois circles the conviction that the phenomena of the natural world obey the law of necessity in such sort that, determined by those which precede them, they determine those which follow them, it would still have to be proved that the phenomena of the social world are also subject to the law of necessity. But the economists, the philosophers, the moralists, the historians, the sociologists, and the politicians who study human societies, and who even assume to direct them, have not succeeded, and could not succeed in creating the conviction that social phenomena depend upon the law of necessity like natural phenomena; and it is because they have not been able to establish this conviction that the belief m God is a necessity for bourgeois brains, even the most cultivated ones. If philosophical determinism reigns in the natural sciences it is only because the Bourgeoisie has permitted its scientists to study freely the play of natural forces, which it has every motive to under stand, since it utilizes them in the production of its wealth; but by reason of the situation that it occupies in society it could not grant the same liberty to its economists, philosophers, moralists, historians, sociologists and politicians, and that is why they have not been able to introduce philosophical determinism into the sciences of the social world. The Catholic Church for a like reason formerly forbade the free study of nature, and its social dominance had to be overthrown in order to create the natural sciences.
The problem of the belief in God on the part the Bourgeoisie can not be approached without an exact notion of the role played by this class in society. The social role of the modern bourgeoisie is not to produce wealth, but it is to have it produced by wage workers, to seize upon it and distribute it among its members after having left to its manual and intellectual producers just enough for their nourishment and reproduction.
The wealth taken away from the laborers forms the booty of the bourgeois class. The barbarian warriors after the taking and sacking of a city put the products of the pillage into a common fund, divided them into parts as equal as possible and distributed them by lot among those who had risked their lives to conquer them.
The organization of society permits the bourgeoisie to seize upon wealth without any one of its members being forced to risk his life. The taking possession of this colossal booty without incurring dangers is one of the greatest marks of progress in our civilization. The wealth despoiled from the producers is not divided into equal parts to be distributed by lot; it is distributed under form of rents, incomes, dividends, interests, and industrial and commercial profits, proportionately to the value of the real or personal property; that is to say, to the extent of the capital possessed by each bourgeois.
The possession of a property, a capital, and not that of physical, intellectual or moral qualities is the indispensable condition for receiving a part in the distribution of the wealth. A child in swaddling clothes, as well as an adult, may have a right to its share of the wealth. A dead man possesses it so long as a living man has not yet perfected his title to his property. The distribution is not made among men, but among properties. Man is a zero; property alone counts.
A false analogy has been drawn between the Darwinian struggle which the animals wage among themselves for the means of subsistence and reproduction and that which is let loose among the bourgeois for the distribution of wealth. The qualities of strength, courage, agility, patience, ingenuity, etc., which assure victory to the animal, constitute integral parts of his organism, while the property which gives the bourgeois part of the wealth which he has not produced is not incorporated in his individuality. This property may increase or decrease and thus procure for him a larger or smaller share with out its increase or diminution being occasioned by the exercise of his physical or intellectual qualities. At the very most it might be said that trickery, intrigue, charlatanism, in a word, the lowest mental qualities permit the bourgeois to take a part larger than that which the value of his capital authorizes him to take; in that case he pilfers from his bourgeois brothers. If then the struggle for life can in a number of cases be a cause for progress among animals, the struggle for wealth is a cause of degeneracy for the bourgeois.
The social mission of grasping the wealth produced by the wage-workers makes of the bourgeoisie a parasitic class; its members do not contribute to the creation of wealth, with the exception of a few whose number is constantly diminishing, and the labor which they furnish does not correspond to the portion of wealth which falls to them.
If Christianity, after having been in the first centuries the religion of the mendicant crowds whom the state and the wealthy supported by daily distributions of food, has become that of the bourgeoisie the parasitic class par excellence, it is because parasitism is the essence of Christianity.
Jesus in his sermon on the mount explained its character in a masterly fashion; it is there that he formulates the Our Father, the prayer which every believer must address to God to ask him for his “daily bread” instead of asking him for work; and in order that no Christian worthy of the name may be tempted to resort to work for obtaining the necessaries of life, the Christ adds,
“Consider the birds of the air, they sow not neither do they reap, and your Heavenly Father feedeth them * * * take no thought therefore and do not say, to-morrow what shall we eat, or what shall we drink, or wherewithal shall we be clothed. * * * Your Heavenly Father knoweth that you have need of all these things.”
The Heavenly Father of the bourgeoisie is the class of manual and intellectual wage workers; this is the God who provides for all its needs.
But the bourgeoisie can not recognize its parasitic character without at the same time signing its death warrant; so while it leaves the bridle on the neck of its men of science, that without being troubled with any dogma nor stopped by any consideration they may give themselves up to the freest and most profound study of the forces of nature, which it applies to the production of its wealth, it forbids to its economists, philosophers, moralists, historians, sociologists, and politicians the impartial study of the social world, and condemns them to the search of reasons that may serve as excuses for its phenomenal fortune. [3] Concerned only with the returns received or to be received, they are trying to find out, if by some lucky chance social wealth might not have other sources than the labor of the wage- worker, and they have discovered that the labor the economy, the method, the honesty, the knowledge, the intelligence, and many other virtues of the bourgeois manufacturers, merchants, landed proprietors, financiers, shareholders, and income- drawers, contributed to its production in a manner far more efficacious than the labor of the manual and intellectual wage-workers, and there fore they have the right to take the lion s share and to leave the others only the share of the beast of burden.
The bourgeois hears them with a smile, be cause they sing his praises, he even repeats these impudent assertions, and calls them eternal truths; but, however slender his intelligence, he can not admit these things in his inmost soul, for he has only to look around him to perceive that those who work their life through, if they do not possess capital, are poorer than Job, and that those who possess nothing but knowledge, intelligence, economy, honesty, and who exercise these qualities, must limit their ambition to their daily pittance, and rarely hope for anything beyond Then he says to himself: “If the economists, the philosophers, and the politicians with all their wit and literary training have not been able, in spite of their conscientious search, to find more valid reasons for explaining the wealth of the bourgeoisie, it is because there is something crooked in the business, some unknown cause whose mysteries are beyond us.” An Unknowable of the social order plants itself before the capitalist’s eyes.
The capitalist, for the sake of social peace, is interested that the wage-workers should believe his riches to be the fruit of his innumerable virtues, but in reality he cares as little to know that they are the rewards of his good qualities as to know that truffles, which he eats as voraciously as the pig, are vegetables capable of cultivation; only one thing matters to him, namely, to possess them, and what troubles him is to think that he may lose them without any fault of his own. He can not help having this unpleasant perspective, since even in the narrow circle of his acquaintance, he has seen certain persons lose their possessions, while others became rich after having been in distress. The causes of these reverses and strokes of fortune are beyond him as well as beyond the people who experienced them. In a word, he observes a continual going and coming of wealth, the causes of which are for him within the realm of the Unknowable, and he is reduced to setting down these changes of fortune to chance, to luck. [4]
It is too much to hope that the bourgeois should ever arrive at a positive notion of the phenomena of the distribution of wealth, since in proportion as mechanical production develops, property is depersonalized and takes on the collective and impersonal form of corporations with their stocks and bonds, the titles to which are finally dragged into the whirlpool of the stock exchange. There they pass from hand to hand without the buyers and sellers having seen the property which they represent, or even knowing exactly the geographical place where it is situated. They are exchanged, lost by some and won by others, in a manner which comes so near gambling that the distinction is difficult to draw. All modern economic development tends more and more to transform capitalist society into one vast international gambling house where the bourgeois win and lose capital, thanks to unknown events which escape all foresight, all calculation, and which seem to them to depend on nothing but chance. The Unknowable is enthroned in bourgeois society as in a gambling house.
Gambling, which on the stock exchange is seen without disguise, has always been one of the conditions of commerce and industry; their risks are so numerous and so unforeseen, that often the enterprises which are conceived, calculated and carried out most skillfully fail, while others undertaken lightly, in a happy-go-lucky fashion, succeed. These successes and failures, due to unexpected causes generally unknown and apparently arising only from chance, predispose the bourgeois to the mental attitude of the gamester; the game of the stock exchange fortifies and vivifies this mental cast. The capitalist whose fortune is invested in stocks sold on the exchange, who is ignorant of the reason for the variations of their prices and dividends, is a professional gamester. Now the gamester, who can account for his gains or losses only as a good run or a bad run, is an eminently superstitious individual; the frequenters of gambling houses all have magical charms to compel good fortune; one mumbles a prayer to St. Anthony of Padua, or no matter what spirit from Heaven, another plays only when a certain color has won, another holds a rabbit’s foot in his left hand, etc.
The Unknowable of the social order envelops the bourgeois as the Unknowable of the natural order surrounded the savage; all or nearly all the acts of civilized life tend to develop in him the superstitious and mystical habit of assigning everything to chance, like the professional gamester. Credit, for example, without which commerce and industry are impossible, is an act of faith in chance, in the unknown, performed by him who gives the credit, since he has no positive guarantee that the one who receives the credit will be able to meet his obligations at maturity his solvency depending upon a thousand and one accidents that can not be foreseen nor understood. Other economic phenomena instill every day into the bourgeois mind the belief in a mystical force without material support; detached from everything material. The bank note, to cite a single example, holds within itself a social force so far beyond its small material consequence that it prepares the bourgeois mind for the idea of a force, which should exist independently of matter. This miserable rag of paper, which no one would stoop to pick up, were it not for its magical power, gives its possessor all material things most to be desired in the civilized world; bread, meats, wine, house, lands, horses, women, health, consideration, honors, etc., the pleasures of the senses and the delights of the soul; God could do no more. Bourgeois life is woven out of mysticism. [5]
Commercial and industrial crises confront the terrified bourgeois, – uncontrollable, unchecked forces of a power so irresistible that they scatter disasters as terrible as the wrath of the Christian God. When they are unchained in the civilized world they ruin capitalists by thousands and destroy products and means of production by hundreds of millions. For a century the economists have recorded their periodical returns without being able to advance any plausible hypothesis of their origin. The impossibility of finding their causes on earth has suggested to certain English economists the idea of looking for them in the sun; its spots, they say, destroying by droughts the harvests of India, might diminish its capacity for purchasing European merchandise and might determine the crises. These grave sages carry us back scientifically to the judicial astrology of the middle ages, which subjected the events of human societies to the conjunction of the stars, and to the belief of savages in the action of shooting stars, comets, and eclipses of the moon upon their destinies.
The economic world swarms with fathomless mysteries for the bourgeois, mysteries which the economists resign themselves to leaving unexplored. The capitalist, who, thanks to his scientists, has succeeded in domesticating natural forces, is so amazed by the incomprehensible effects of economic forces that he declares them uncontrollable, like God, and he thinks that the wisest course is to endure patiently the ills which they inflict and accept gratefully the favors which they grant. He says with Job: “The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord.” Economic forces appear to him in a fantasm as friendly and hostile spirits. [6]
The terrible and inexplicable phenomena of the social order which surround the capitalist and strike him without his knowing why or how in his industry, his commerce, his fortune, his well-being, his life, are as disquieting for him as were for the savage the terrible and inexplicable phenomena of nature which excited and overheated his exuberant imagination. Anthropologists account for the primitive man’s belief in witchcraft, in the soul, in spirits and in God, on the ground of his ignorance of the natural world the same explanation holds for the civilized man his spiritualist ideas and his belief in God should be attributed to his ignorance of the social world, the uncertain duration of his prosperity, and the inknowable causes of his fortunes and misfortunes, predispose the bourgeois to admit, like the savage, the existence of superior beings, which act on social phenomena as their fancies lead them whether favorably or unfavorably, as described by Theognis and the writers of the Old Testament. To propitiate them he practices the grossest superstition, communicates with spirits from the other world, burns candles before sacred images and prays to the trinitarian God of the Christians or the one God of the philosophers.
The savage, in daily contact with nature, is especially impressed by the unknown things of the natural order, which on the contrary worry the bourgeois but slightly; the only nature he knows about has been agreeably decorated, trimmed, graveled, raked off and generally domesticated. The numerous services that science has already rendered for his enrichment, and those he still expects from her, have engendered in his mind a blind faith in her power. He does not doubt but that some day she will solve the unknown problems of nature and even prolong indefinitely his own life, as promised by Metchnikoff, the microbe-maniac. But it is not so with the unknown things of the social world, the only ones that trouble him; these seem to him impossible of comprehension. It is the unknowable of the social world, not of the natural world, which insinuates into his unimaginative head the idea of God, an idea which he did not have the trouble of inventing, but found ready to be appropriated. The incomprehensible and insoluble social problems make God so necessary that he would have invented Him, had need been.
The bourgeois, vexed by the bewildering go and come of fortunes and misfortunes, and by the puzzling play of economic forces, is further more confused by the brutal contradiction of his own conduct and that of his fellows with the current notions of justice, morality, honesty; he repeats these sententiously, but refrains from regulating his acts by them, although he insists that they be observed strictly by the people who come into contact with him. For example, if the merchant hands his customer goods that are damaged or adulterated, he still wishes to be paid in sterling money; if a manufacturer cheats the laborer on the measurement of his work, he will not submit to losing a minute of the day for which he pays him; if the bourgeois patriot (all bourgeois are patriots) seizes the fatherland of a weaker nation his commercial dogma is still the integrity of his country, which according to Cecil Rhodes is a vast commercial establishment. Justice, morality and other principles more or less eternal, are valuable for the bourgeois, but only if they serve his interests; they have a double face, an indulgent and smiling one turned toward himself, and a frowning and commanding face turned toward others.
The constant and general contradiction between people’s acts and their notions of justice and morality, which might be thought of a nature to disturb the idea of a just God in the bourgeois mind, rather confirms it, and prepares the ground for that of the immortality of the soul, which had disappeared among nations that had reached the patriarchal period. This idea is preserved, strengthened and constantly revivified in the bourgeois by his habit of expecting a reward for everything he does or does not do. [7] He employs laborers, manufactures goods, buys, sells, lends money, renders any service, whatever it be, only in the hope of being rewarded, of reaping a benefit. The constant expectation of profit results in his performing no act for the pleasure in it, but to pocket a recompense; if he is generous, charitable, honorable, or even if he limits himself to not being dishonest, the satisfaction of his conscience is not enough for him; a reward is essential if he is to be satisfied and not feel that he has been duped by his good and candid feelings; if he does not receive his reward on earth, which is generally the case, he counts on getting it in heaven. Not only does he expect a reward for his good acts, and his abstention from bad acts, but he hopes to receive compensation for his misfortunes, his failures, his vexations and even his annoyances. His ego is so aggressive that to satisfy it he annexes heaven to earth. The wrongs in civilization are so numerous and so crying, and those of which he is the victim assume in his eyes such boundless proportions, that his sense of eternal justice can not conceive but that some day they shall be redressed; and it is only in another world that this day can shine; only in heaven is he assured of receiving the reward for his misfortunes. Life after death becomes for him a certainty, for his good God, just and adorned with all bourgeois virtues, can not but grant him rewards for what he has done and has not done, and amends for what he has suffered; in the business tribunal of heaven, the accounts not adjusted on earth will be audited.
The bourgeois does not give the name of injustice to his monopolizing of the wealth created by wage-workers; for him this robbery is justice itself, and he can not conceive how any imaginable God could have a different opinion on the subject. Nevertheless, he regards it as no violation of eternal justice to allow the laborers to cherish the desire to improve their conditions of life and of labor; but as he is keenly aware that these improvements would have to be made at his expense, he thinks it good policy to promise them a future life, where they shall feast like bourgeois. The promise of posthumous happiness is for him the most economical way to satisfy the laborers demands. Life beyond the grave, at first a pleasure of hope for the satisfaction of his ego, becomes an instrument of exploitation.
Once it is settled that in heaven the accounts of earth are to be definitely settled, God necessarily becomes a judge having at his disposal an Eldorado for some and a prison for others, as is laid down by Christianity, following Plato. [8] The celestial judge renders his decrees according to the judicial code of civilization, enriched by a few moral laws which can not figure in it, owing to the impossibility of establishing the offense and finding the proof.
The modern bourgeois occupies himself mainly with the rewards and compensations beyond the tomb; he takes but a moderate interest in the punishment of the wicked, that is to say, the people who have injured him personally. The Christian hell disturbs him little; first, because he is convinced that he has done nothing and can do nothing to deserve it, and second, because his resentment against his fellows who have sinned against him is but short-lived. He is always disposed to renew his relations of business or pleasure with them if he sees any advantage in it; he even has a certain esteem for those who have duped him, since after all they have done to him only what he has done or would have liked to do to them. Every day in bourgeois society we see persons whose pilferings had made a scandal, and who might have been thought forever lost, return to the surface and achieve an honorable position; nothing but money was demanded of them as a condition for resuming business and making honorable profits. [9]
Hell could only have been invented by men and for men tortured by the hate and the passion of vengeance. The God of the first Christians is a pitiless executioner, who takes a savory pleasure in feasting his eyes on the tortures inflicted for all eternity on the infidels, his enemies.
“The Lord Jesus,” says St. Paul, “shall ascend into heaven with the angels of his power, with burning flames of fire, working vengeance against those who know not God and who obey not the Gospel; they shall be punished with an everlasting punishment before the face of God and before the glory of his power.” – II. Thess. I, 6–9.
The Christian of those days expected with an equally fervent faith for the reward of his piety and the punishment of his enemies, who became the enemies of God. The bourgeois, no longer cherishing these fierce hates (hate brings no profits), no longer needs a hell to assuage his vengeance, nor an executioner-God to chastise his associates who have clashed with him.
The belief of the bourgeoisie in God and in the immortality of the soul is one of the ideological phenomena of its social environment; it will never lose it till it is dispossessed of its wealth stolen from wage-workers, and transformed from a parasitic class into a productive class.
The bourgeoisie of the eighteenth century, which struggled in France to grasp the social dictatorship, attacked furiously the Catholic clergy and Christianity, because they were props of the aristocracy; if in the ardor of battle some of its chiefs, Diderot, La Mettrie, Helvetius, d’Holbach, pushed their irreligion to the point of atheism, others, quite as representative of its spirit, if not more so, Voltaire, Rousseau, Turgot, never arrived at the negation of God. The materialist and sensualist philosophers, Cabanis, Maine de Biran, de Gerando, who survived the Revolution, publicly retracted their infidel doctrines. We must not waste our time in accusing these remarkable men of having betrayed the philosophical opinions which, at the opening of their career, had assured them fame and livelihood; the bourgeoisie alone is guilty. Victorious, it lost its irreligious combativeness, and like the dog in the Bible, it returned to its vomit. These philosophers underwent the influence of the social environment; being bourgeois, they evolved with their class.
This social environment, from the workings of which not even the most learned nor the most emancipated of the bourgeois can free themselves, is responsible for the deism of men of genius, like Cuvier, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Faraday, Darwin, and for the agnosticism and positivism of contemporary scientists, who, not daring to deny God, abstain from concerning themselves with him. But this very act is an implicit recognition of the existence of God, whom they need in order to understand the social world, which seems to them the plaything of chance, rather than ruled by the law of necessity, like the natural world.
M. Brunetiere, thinking to dart an epigram at the free-thought of his class, quotes the phrase of the German Jesuit Gruber, that “the Unknowable is an idea of God appropriate to Free Masonry.” The Unknowable can not be any one s idea of God; but it is its generating cause, in savages and barbarians as well as in Christian bourgeois or Free Masons. If the unknown elements of the natural environment made necessary for the savage and barbarian the idea of a God, creator and ruler of the world, the unknown elements of the social environment make necessary for the bourgeois the idea of a God who shall distribute the wealth stolen from the manual and intellectual wage-workers, dispense blessings and curses, reward good deeds, avenge injuries and repair wrongs. The savage and the bourgeois are drawn unsuspectingly into the belief in God, just as they are carried along by the rotation of the earth.
IV. Evolution of the Idea of God
The idea of God, planted and germinated in the human brain by the unknown elements of the natural environment and the social environment, is not something invariable; it varies on the contrary according to time and place; it evolves in proportion as the mode of production develops, transforming the social environment.
God, for the Greeks, the Romans and other ancient peoples, had his dwelling in a given spot, and existed only to be useful to his adorers and hurtful to their enemies; each family had its private gods, the spirits of deified ancestors, and each city had its municipal or state god. The municipal god or goddess dwelt in the temple consecrated to him or her and was incorporated into the image which often was a block of wood or a stone; he or she was interested in the fate of the inhabitants of the city of these alone. The ancestral gods concerned themselves only with family affairs. The Jehovah of the Bible was a god of this kind; he lodged in a wooden box, called Ark of the Covenant, which was carried along when the tribes changed their location; they put it at the head of the army, that Jehovah might fight for his people; if he chastised them cruelly for their infractions of his law, he also rendered them many services, as the Old Testament reports. When the municipal god was not in the best of circumstances, they associated another divinity with him; the Romans, during the second Punic war, brought over from Pessinonte the statue of Cybele, that the goddess from Asia Minor might aid them in their defense against Hannibal. The Christians had no other idea of divinity when they demolished the temples and broke the statues of the gods in order to oust them and keep them from protecting the pagans.
The savages thought that the soul was the replica of the body, so their deified spirits, though incorporated into stones, blocks of wood or beasts preserved the human form. Similarly for St. Paul and the apostles, God was anthropomorphic, they made of him a Man-God, like to them selves both in body and mind; while the modern capitalist conceives him as without head or arms, and present in all the nooks and corners of the earth, instead of being quartered in one certain locality.
The Greeks and Romans, like the Jews and the first Christians had no thought of their god being the only god of creation; the Jews believed in Moloch, Baal and other gods of the nations with which they warred as firmly as in Jehovah, and the Christians of the first centuries and of the middle ages, while they called Jupiter and Allah false gods, still took them for gods, who could work wonders quite as well as Jesus and his Eternal Father. [10] This belief in a multiplicity of gods made it possible for each city to have a god attached to its service, shut up in a temple and incorporated into a statue or some such object; Jehovah was in a stone. The modern capitalist who thinks that his God is present in all places of the earth cannot but arrive at the notion of one sole God; and the ubiquity which he attributes to his God prevents his representing him with face and buttocks, arms and legs, like Homer’s Zeus and St. Paul’s Jesus.
The municipal divinities, which belonged to the warlike cities of antiquity, always at strife with neighboring peoples, could not answer to the religious needs which mercantile production created in the bourgeois democracies of the commercial and industrial cities, obliged on the contrary to maintain pacific relations with surrounding nations. The necessities of commerce and industry forced the new-born Bourgeoisie to demunicipalize the city divinities and create cosmopolitan gods. Six or seven centuries before the Christian era we observe in the maritime cities of Ionia, Magna Grecia and Greece attempts to organize religions whose gods should not be exclusively monopolized by one city, but should be recognized and worshiped by different nations, even hostile ones. These new divinities, Isis, Demeter, Dionysos, Mithra, Jesus, etc., several of whom belonged to the matriarchal epoch, still took on the human form, though the need was beginning to be felt of a Supreme Being which should not be anthropomorphic; but it is not until the capitalist epoch that the idea of an amorphous god has imposed itself, as a consequence of the impersonal form taken on by the property of corporations.
Impersonal property, which introduced a mode of possession absolutely new and diametrically opposed to that which had previously existed, was necessarily destined to modify the habits and customs of the bourgeois and consequently transform his mentality. Until its appearance, the possibilities of ownership were limited to a vineyard in the Bordelais, a weaving establishment at Rouen, a forge at Marseilles or a grocery in Paris. Each of these properties, distinct in the character of the industry and in its geographical situation, was possessed by one single individual, or by two or three at the most; it was a rare thing for one individual to possess several of them. It is otherwise with impersonal property: a railroad, a mine, a bank, etc., are possessed by hundreds and thousands of capitalists, while one and the same capitalist may have side by side in his portfolio bonds of France, Prussia, Turkey and Japan, with stocks of goldmines in the Transvaal, electric railways in China, a line of trans-Atlantic steamers, a coffee plantation in Brazil, a coal mine in France, etc. No such ties of affection can link the capitalist to the impersonal property he possesses as bind the bourgeois to the property that he administers, or that is operated under his control; his interest in it is proportioned only to the price paid for the stock and the rate of dividend it bears. It is a matter of absolute indifference to him whether the dividend be declared by a scavenger enterprise, a sugar refinery or a cotton-spinning mill, and whether the production be carried on at Paris or at Pekin. Once the dividend becomes all-important, the distinguishing characteristics of the properties producing it disappear, and these properties in different industries, differently situated, are for the capitalist one sole dividend-bearing property, whose certificates, circulating on the stock exchange, continue to keep various names of trades and of countries.
Impersonal property, embracing all trades and extending all over the globe, unrolls its tentacles armed with suckers greedy for dividends, in a Christian nation just as it does in realms of Mohammedanism, Buddhism or fetichism. The accumulation of wealth is the absorbing and mastering passion of the capitalist, and so this identification of properties of different sorts and countries in one sole and cosmopolitan property was bound to reflect itself in his intelligence and to influence his conception of God. [11] Impersonal property without any doubt leads him to amalgamate the gods of the earth into one sole and cosmopolitan God, who according to the various countries bears the name of Jesus, Allah or Buddha, and is worshiped according to different rites.
It is a matter of historical fact that the idea of one sole and universal God, which Anaxagoras was one of the first to conceive, and which through the centuries lived only in the brains of a few thinkers, did not become a current idea until capitalist civilization appeared. But as by the side of this impersonal, sole and cosmopolitan property there still exist countless personal and local properties, so certain local and anthropomorphic gods touch elbows in the capitalist’s brain with the one and cosmopolitan God. The division into nations, which are commercial and industrial rivals, compels the Bourgeoisie to parcel out its one God into as many gods as there are nations; thus every nation of Christendom thinks that the Christian God, who is all the while the God of all the Christians, is its national god, like Jehovah of the Jews and Pallas-Athene of the Athenians. When two Christian nations declare war, each prays its national and Christian God to fight on its side, and if it is victorious, it sings Te Deums to thank him for having beaten the rival nation and its national and Christian God. The pagans made different gods fight among themselves the Christians make their one God fight with himself. The one and cosmopolitan God could not completely dethrone the national gods in the bourgeois brain unless all the bourgeois nations were centralized into one single nation.
Impersonal property possesses other qualities which it has transmitted to its one and cosmopolitan God. The proprietor of a wheat field, a carpenter’s shop or a haberdashery can see, touch, measure, and appraise his property, the clear and precise form of which strikes his senses. But the owner of government bonds and of shares in a railroad, a coal mine, an insurance company or a bank cannot see, touch, measure, appraise the parcel of property represented by his bonds and stocks, in whatever forest or government building, in whatever wagon, ton of coal, insurance policy or bank safe he might suppose it to be. His fragment of property is lost, buried in a vast whole that he cannot even picture to himself; for if he has seen locomotives and stations, as well as subterranean galleries, he has never seen a railroad nor a mine in its entirety; and a national debt, a bank and an insurance company are not capable of being represented by any image whatever. The impersonal property of which he is one of the co-proprietors can not assume in his imagination other than a vague, uncertain, indeterminate form; it is for him rather a rational being, which reveals its existence by dividends, than a tangible reality. Nevertheless this impersonal property, though indefinite as a metaphysical conception, provides for all his needs, like the Heavenly Father of the Christians, without requiring from him any more labor of body and brain than to take in his dividends: he receives them in blessed laziness of body and soul as a Grace of Capital, of which the Grace of God, “the truest of Christian doctrines,” as Renan says, is the religious reflection. He troubles his brain as little to study the nature of the impersonal property which gives him interest and dividends as he does to know whether his one and cosmopolitan God is man, woman or beast, intelligent or idiotic, and whether he possesses the qualities of strength, ferocity, justice, kindness, etc., with which the anthropomorphic gods had been endowed. He wastes no time on prayers, because he is sure that no supplication will modify the rate of interest or dividend on the impersonal property of which his one and cosmopolitan God is the intellectual reflection.
At the very time when impersonal property was transforming the anthropomorphic God of the Christians into an amorphous God and a rational being, – into a metaphysical conception, it was taking away from the religious feeling of the Bourgeoisie the virulence which had produced the fanatical fever of martyrs, crusaders and inquisitors; it was transforming religion into a matter of personal taste, like cookery, which each suits to his fancy, with butter or with oil, with garlic or without. But if the capitalist Bourgeoisie needs a religion, and finds liberal Christianity to its taste, it cannot accept without serious amendments the Catholic Church, whose inquisitorial despotism descends to the details of private life, and whose organization of bishops, curates, monks and Jesuits, disciplined and obedient to wink and nod, is a menace to its public order. The Catholic Church was endurable for the feudal society, all of whose members, from serf to king, were graded in a hierarchy and bound to each other by reciprocal rights and duties; but it can not be tolerated by the bourgeois democracy, whose members, equal before the law, but divided by their interests, wage perpetual industrial and commercial war among themselves, and always claim the right to criticize the constituted authorities, and hold them responsible for their economic mischances.
The capitalist, who does not want any obstacle to his getting rich, found it equally impossible to tolerate the guild organization of master-workmen, which supervise the manner of producing and the quality of the product. He crushed it. Freed from all control, he now has but his own interest to consult in making his fortune, each according to the means at his disposal: on his elastic conscience alone depends the quality of the goods that he makes and sells; it is for the customer to see that he is not deceived with regard to the quality, weight and price of what he buys. Every one for himself, and God, in other words money, for all. The freedom of industry and commerce could not but reflect itself in his way of conceiving religion, which each one under stands as he likes. Each makes his own arrangements with God, as with his conscience in a business matter; each according to his interests and his light interprets the teachings of the church and the words of the Bible, which is put into the hands of the Protestants, as the Code is put into the hands of all the capitalists.
The capitalist can be neither martyr nor inquisitor, because he has lost the furor of proselytism which inflamed the first Christians. They had a vital interest in increasing the number of believers, in order to swell the army of malcontents, giving battle to pagan society. Yet he has a sort of religious proselytism, without breath and without conviction, which is conditioned by his exploitation of woman and of the wage- worker.
Woman must be pliable to his wishes. He wishes her faithful and unfaithful according to his desires. If she is the wife of a brother capitalist, and if he is courting her, he demands her infidelity as a duty toward his Ego, and he unfurls his rhetoric to relieve her of her religious scruples; if she is his lawful wife, she becomes his property, and must be inviolate; he requires from her a fidelity equal to every test, and employs religion to force conjugal duty toward him into her head.
The wage-worker ought to be resigned to his lot. The social function of exploiter of labor requires the capitalist to propagate the Christian religion, preaching humility and submission to God, who chooses the masters and sets off the servants, and to complete the teachings of Christianity by the eternal principles of democracy. It is quite to his interest that the wage-workers exhaust their brain power in controversies on the truths of religion and in discussions on Justice, Liberty, Ethics, Patriotism and other such booby-traps, in order that they may not have a minute left to reflect on their wretched condition and the means for improving it. The famous radical and free-trader, John Bright, appreciated this stultifying method so thoroughly, that he devoted his Sundays to reading and commenting on the Bible for his laborers. But the profession of Biblical brain-destroyer, which English [12] capitalists of both sexes may undertake to kill time or as a whim, is of necessity irregular, like any amateur work. The capitalist class needs to have at its disposal professionals in brain destroying to fulfill this task. He finds them in the clergy of all cults. But every medal has its reverse side. The reading of the Bible by wage-workers presents dangers that one day some pious Rockefeller will recognize; and to meet this situation he will organize a company for the publication of popular Bibles expurgated of the plaints against the iniquities of the rich and of the cries of envious wrath against their scandalous good fortune. The Catholic Church, foreseeing these dangers, had provided against them, by forbidding the faithful to read the Bible, and by burning Wycliffe, the first to translate it into a vulgar tongue. The Catholic clergy, with its neuvaines, its pilgrimages, and its other mummeries, is of all clergies that which practices most wisely the art of brain- destruction; it is also the best equipped for furnishing ignorant brothers and sisters to teach in primary schools, and nuns to stand guard over women in factories. The great industrial capitalists, on account of its manifold services, sustain it politically and financially, in spite of their antipathy for its hierarchy, its rapacity, and its intrusion into family affairs.
V. Causes of the Irreligion of the Proletariat
The numerous attempts made in Europe and America to christianize the industrial proletariat have completely miscarried; they have not succeeded in moving it from its religious indifference, which becomes general in proportion as machine production enlists new recruits from the peasants, artisans and petty tradesmen into the army of wage-workers.
Machine production, which makes the capitalist religious, tends on the contrary to make the proletariat irreligious.
If it is logical for the capitalist to believe in a Providence attentive to his needs, and in a God who elects him among thousand of thousands, to load with riches his laziness and social inutility, it is still more logical for the proletarian to ignore the existence of a divine Providence, since he knows that no Heavenly Father would give him daily bread if he prayed from morning to evening, and that the wage which produces for him the bare necessities of life is earned by his own labor: and he knows only too well that if he did not work he would starve, in spite of all the Good Gods of heaven and all the philanthropists of earth. The wage-worker is his own providence. His conditions of life make any other providence inconceivable for him; he has not in his life, as the capitalist in his, those strokes of fortune which might by magic lift him out of his sad situation. Wage-worker he is born, wage-worker he lives, wage-worker he dies. His ambition can not go beyond a raise in wages and a job that shall last all the days of the year and all the years of his life. The unforeseen hazards and chances of fortune which predispose the capitalist to superstitious ideas do not exist for the proletarian, and the idea of God cannot appear in the human brain unless its coming is prepared for by certain superstitious ideas, no matter what their source.
If the wage- worker were to let himself be drawn into a belief in that God, whom he hears talked of without paying attention, he would begin by questioning his justice, which allotted to him nothing but work and poverty; he would make the God an object of horror and of hate, and would picture him under the form and aspect of a capitalist exploiter, like the black slaves of the colonies, who said that God was white, like their masters.
Of course the wage-worker has no more idea of the course of economic phenomena than the capitalist and his economists, nor does he understand why, as regularly as night succeeds day, the periods of industrial prosperity and work at high pressure are followed by crises and lockouts. This failure to understand, which predisposes the mind of the capitalist to belief in God, has not the same effect on that of the wage-worker, because they occupy different positions in modern production. The possession of the means of production gives the capitalist the direction absolute and arbitrary of the production and distribution of products, and obliges him, consequently, to concern himself with the causes which govern them: the wage-worker, on the contrary, has no right to trouble himself with them. He has no part in the direction of the productive process, nor in the choice and the procuring of the raw materials, nor in the manner of producing, nor in the sale of the product; he has but to furnish labor like a beast of burden. The passive obedience of the Jesuits, which arouses the wordy indignation of the freethinkers, is the law in the army and the workshop. The capitalist plants the wage-worker in front of the moving machine, loaded with raw materials, and orders him to work; he becomes a cog of the machine. He has in production but one aim, the wage, the sole interest which capitalism has been forced to leave him; when he has drawn this, he has nothing more to claim. The wage being the sole interest that it has permitted him to keep in production, he therefore has to concern himself simply with having work so as to receive wages; and as the employer or his representatives are the givers of work, it is they, men of flesh and blood like himself, that he blames, if he has or has not work, and not economic phenomena, which he may be entirely ignorant of; it is against these men that he is irritated on account of the reductions of wage and slackness of work, and not against the general perturbations of production. He holds them responsible for all that comes to him, good or evil. The wage-worker personalizes the accidents of production which affect him, while the possession of the means of production is depersonalized in proportion as they take the form of machinery.
The life led by the laborer in the great industries has removed him even more than the capitalist from the influences of the environment of nature which in the peasant keep up the belief in ghosts, in sorceries, in witchcraft and other superstitious ideas. He sees the sun only through the factory windows; he knows nature only from the country surrounding the city where he works, and that he sees only on rare occasions; he could not distinguish a field of wheat from a field of oats nor a potato plant from hemp; he knows the products of the earth only in the form under which he consumes them. He is completely ignorant of the work of the fields and the causes affecting the yield of the harvests; drought, excessive rains, hail, cyclones, etc., never make him think of their action on nature and her harvests. His urban life shelters him from the anxieties and the troublesome cares which assail the mind of the farmer. Nature has no hold upon his imagination.
The labor of the mechanical factory puts the wage-worker in touch with terrible natural forces unknown to the peasant, but instead of being mastered by them, he controls them. The gigantic mechanism of iron and steel which fills the factory, which makes him move like an automaton, which sometimes clutches him, mutilates him, bruises him, does not engender in him a superstitious terror as the thunder does in the peasant, but leaves him unmoved, for he knows that the limbs of the mechanical monster were fashioned and mounted by his comrades, and that he has but to push a lever to set it in motion or stop it. The machine, in spite of its miraculous power and productiveness, has no mystery for him. The laborer in the electric works, who has but to turn a crank on a dial to send miles of motive power to tramways or light to the lamps of a city, has but to say, like the God of Genesis, “Let there be light,” and there is light. Never sorcery more fantastic was imagined, yet for him this sorcery is a simple and natural thing. He would be greatly surprised if one were to come and tell him that a certain God might if he chose stop the machines and extinguish the lights when the electricity had been turned on; he would reply that this anarchistic God would be simply a misplaced gearing or a broken wire, and that it would be easy for him to seek and to find this disturbing God. The practice of the modern workshop teaches the wage-worker scientific determinism, without his needing to pass through the theoretical study of the sciences.
Since the capitalist and the proletarian no longer live in the fields, natural phenomena can no longer produce in them the superstitious ideas, which were utilized by the savage in elaborating his idea of God; but if the former, since he be longs to the ruling and parasitic class, under goes the action of the social phenomena which generate superstitious ideas, the other, since he belongs to the exploited and productive class, is removed from their superstition-breeding action. The capitalist class can never be de-christianized and delivered from belief in God until it shall be expropriated from its class dictatorship and from the wealth that it plunders daily from the wage-working laborers.
The free and impartial study of nature has engendered and firmly established in certain scientific circles the conviction that all phenomena are subject to the law of necessity, and that their determining causes must be sought within nature and not without. This study has, moreover, made possible the subjection of natural forces to the use of man.
But the industrial use of natural forces has transformed the means of production into economic organisms so gigantic that they escape the control of the capitalists who monopolize them, as is proved by the periodic crises of industry and commerce. These organisms of production, though of human creation, disturb the social environment, when crises break out, as blindly as the natural forces trouble nature when once unchained. The modern means of production can no longer be controlled except by society, and for that control to be established, they must first become social property; then only will they cease to engender social inequalities, to give wealth to the parasites and inflict miseries on the wage-working producers, and create world-wide perturbations which the capitalist and his economists can attribute only to chance and to unknown causes. When they shall be possessed and controlled by society, there will no longer be an Unknowable in the social order; then and only then, will belief in God be definitely eliminated from the human mind.
The indifference in religious matters of our modern laborers, the determining causes of which I have been tracing, is a new phenomenon, now produced for the first time in history: the popular masses have, till now, always elaborated the spiritual ideas, which the philosophers have merely had to refine and to obscure, as well as the legends and the religious ideas, which the priests and the ruling classes have merely organized into official religions and instruments of intellectual oppression.
THE ORIGIN OF ABSTRACT IDEAS
The Origin of Abstract Ideas
Inquiries Into the Origin of the Idea of Justice and the Idea of Goodness
I. Contradictory Opinions Regarding the Origin of Abstract Ideas
It often happens in the history of thought that hypotheses and theories, after having been the object of study and discussion, disappear from the field of intellectual activity to reappear only after a season of oblivion more or less prolonged. Then they are examined anew in the light of the know ledge accumulated during the interval, and some times they end by being included in the baggage of acquired truths.
The theory of the continuity of species – unconsciously admitted by the savage, who takes for his ancestors plants and animals endowed with human qualities, scientifically foreseen by the thinkers of antiquity and the Renaissance, brilliantly defined by the naturalists at the close of the eighteenth century – had sunk into so deep an oblivion after the memorable debate between Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire and Cuvier that its conception was attributed to Darwin when he revived it in 1859 in his Origin of Species. The proofs, which in 1831 had been lacking for Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire to bring victory for his thesis, Unity of Plan, had been accumulated in such abundance that Darwin and his disciples had been able to complete the theory and impose it on the scientific world.
The materialistic theory of the origin of abstract ideas had a similar experience: put forth and discussed by the thinkers of Greece, taken up in England by the philosophers of the seventeenth century, and in France by those of the eighteenth century – it has since the triumph of the Bourgeoisie been eliminated from philosophical preoccupations.
Alongside of the ideas which correspond to things and persons, there exist others which have no tangible counterpart in the objective world, such as the ideas of the Just, the True, the Good, the Evil; of Number, Cause and Infinity. If we are ignorant of the cerebral phenomenon which transforms the. sensation into an idea – just as we do not know how a dynamo transforms motion into electricity – we have no trouble in taking account of the origin of the ideas which are the conceptions of objects apprehended by the senses; while the origin of the abstract ideas which do not correspond to any objective reality, has been the object of studies which have not yet given definite results.
The Greek philosophers, whom we meet at the entrance of all the avenues of thought, have stated and tried to solve the problem of abstract ideas. Zeno (the founder of the Stoic School) looked upon the senses as the source of knowledge, but the sensation became a conception only after having undergone a series of intellectual transformations.
The savages and barbarians, who were the creators of the Latin and Greek languages, anticipating the philosophers, seemed to have believed that thoughts proceeded from sensations, since in Greek eidos, the physical appearance of the object, that which strikes the view, signifies “idea”; and in Latin sapientia, the taste of an object, that which strikes the palate, becomes “reason.” [1]
Plato, on the contrary, thought that the ideas of the Good, the True, the Beautiful, were innate, unchangeable, universal. “The soul in its journey in the track of God, disdaining what we improperly call beings, and raising its glances toward the one true Being had contemplated It and remembered what it had seen.” (Phaedrus). Socrates had also placed apart from humanity a Natural Right whose laws, nowhere written, are nevertheless respected by all the world, although men may have never assembled together to enact them by a common agreement. [2]
Aristotle does not seem to have so robust a faith in Natural Right, which he jests at pleasantly when he assures us that it was inviolable only for the gods, however, the immortals of Olympus were quite at their ease with this Natural Right, and their doings and practices were so grossly shocking to the morals current among mortals, that Pythagoras condemned to the torments of hell the souls of Homer and Hesiod for having ventured to relate them.
Right, Aristotle said, was not universal. According to him it could only exist between equal persons. The father of a family, for example, could not commit an injustice toward his wife, his children or his slaves, nor toward any person in dependence on him. He could strike them, sell them and kill them without thereby departing from the right. Aristotle, as is usually done, adapted his Right to the manners of his epoch; as he did not conceive of the transformation of the patriarchal family, he found himself obliged to erect its customs into principles of right. But instead of according to Right a universal and immutable character, he conceded to it only a relative value and limited its action to persons placed on an equal footing.
But, how is it that his teacher Plato, whose mind was so subtle, who had under his eyes the same customs and who had no idea of their abolition, since in his ideal republic he introduced slavery – had not the same opinions regarding the relativity of Justice? A word dropped by Aristotle gives room for the theory that Plato, like the priests of the Sacred Mysteries and a majority of the sophists, had not explained in his writings the whole of his philosophy, but had revealed it only to a small number of trusted disciples. He might have been intimidated by the condemnation of Socrates and the dangers incurred at Athens by Anaxogaras, who had imported thither from Ionia the Philosophy of Nature, and who escaped death only in flight.
This opinion is confirmed by an attentive and comparative reading of the dialogues of Plato, who, as Goethe remarks, often makes game of his readers. In any event, the teacher of Socrates and several of the disciples of the latter had but a slender idea of the immutability of Justice. Archelaus, who merited the surname of “Naturalist” (Phusikos), and who was the teacher of Socrates, denied Natural Right and maintained that civil laws were the only foundation for the notions of the Just and the Unjust. Aristippus, who, like Plato, was the disciple of Socrates, declared his profound contempt for Natural and Social Right, and professed that the wise man ought to put himself above civil laws and permit himself to do all they forbid when he could do so in safety: the action which they forbid being bad only in the vulgar opinion, invented to keep fools in check. [3] Plato, without having the boldness to put forth such doctrines, showed by his acknowledged respect for pederasty, the little importance he attached to the laws of Natural Right. This love against nature, forbidden to slaves, was the privilege of free citizens and virtuous men; in the Republic (Book 5) Socrates makes of this one of the rewards for warlike courage.
The quarrel over the origin of ideas was rekindled in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England and France when the Bourgeoisie was setting itself in motion and preparing to grasp the dictatorship of society. There are no innate ideas, declared Diderot and the Encyclopedists. Man comes into the world as a blank tablet on which the objects of nature engrave their impressions as time passes. The Sensationalist school of Condillac formulated its famous axiom, “Nothing exists in the understanding which has not originally been in the senses.” Buffon advised the gathering of facts in order to procure ideas, which are nothing but compared sensations, or more accurately, associations of sensations.
Descartes, reviving the method of introspection, and the “Know Thyself” of Socrates, and bringing again into use the Chinese puzzle of the Alexandrian School, “Given the Self, to find God,” isolated himself in his ego in order to know the universe, and dated from his ego the beginning of philosophy, for which he is reproached by Vico. As in his ego purified from beliefs that have been taught, or, so to speak, from the prejudices conceived from infancy by the senses, as well as from all truths taught by the sciences, Descartes found the ideas of Substance, of Cause, etc.; he supposed them to be inherent in the intelligence and not acquired by experience. They were, according to Kant s expression, universal and necessary ideas, rational concepts whose objects can not be furnished by experience, but existing incontestably in our mind; whether we know it or not, we hold at every moment certain necessary and universal judgments; in the simplest propositions are contained the principles of Substance, Cause and Being.
Leibnitz replied to those who with Locke affirmed that ideas were introduced by way of the senses, that in fact nothing existed in the understanding which had not originally been in the senses, except the understanding itself. Man according to him, brought with him at birth certain ideas and conceptions concealed in his understanding which the encountering of exterior objects brought to light. The intelligence is pre-formed before individual experience begins. He compared the ideas and conceptions anterior to experience to the different colored veins which streak a block of marble, and which the skillful sculptor uses to adorn the statues he chisels from it.
Hobbes, who, before Locke, had said in his treatise on Human Nature, that there were no .ideas which had not previously existed in sensation, and that the sensations are the origins of ideas – reproducing the thesis of Archelaus, maintained in his De Cive, that we must turn to the civil laws to know what was just and what was unjust. They indicate to us what must be called theft, murder, adultery or injury to a citizen; for it is not a theft simply to take away from someone that which he possesses, but that which belongs to him; now it is for the law to determine what is ours and what is another’s. Likewise, not every homicide is murder but rather when one kills one whom the civil law forbids putting to death; nor is it adultery to lie with a woman, but only to have to do with a woman whom the law forbids approaching. [4]
The patricians of Rome and Athens committed no adultery in having connection with the wives of artisans, in quas stuprum non committitur – “against whom a crime is not committed,” said the brutal legal formula. They were consecrated to the aristocratic debauch. In our days the husband who in England should kill his wife, taken in the act of adultery, would be summarily hanged as a vulgar assassin; while in France, far from being punished he becomes a hero, who has avenged his honor. The course of a river suffices to transform a crime into a virtuous act, so said, before Pascal, the skeptic Montaigne. (Book 2, Chapter 13.)
Locke maintained that ideas came from two sources, sensation and reflection. Condillac apparently deprived the English philosopher’s doctrine of one of its sources, reflection, leaving only sensation – which was transformed into attention, comparison, judgment, reason, and finally into desire and will.
His ex-disciple, Maine de Biran, casting sensation to the winds and restoring to honor the method of Descartes, who drew everything from his ego as from a well, found in the understanding the point of departure of his ideas. [5] The concepts of “Cause and Substance,” he said, “are antecedent in our mind to the two principles which contain them. We first think these ideas within ourselves, in our knowledge of the Cause and the Substance that we are; once these ideas acquired, induction carries them outside of us and makes us conceive of causes and substances wherever there are phenomena and qualities.” The principle of Cause and of Substance reduces itself to nothing but a phenomenon or rather a fiction of our understanding, to use Hume’s phrase. The introspective method of Descartes and Socrates, which the Bourgeois spiritualists abused so liberally, leads on one side to skepticism and on the other to impotence, for, “to pretend to illuminate the depths of psychological activity by means of the individual consciousness is like wishing to light the universe with a match,” says Maudsley.
The final victory of the Bourgeoisie in England and in France impressed a complete revolution upon philosophic thought. The theories of Hobbes, Locke and Condillac, after having occupied the center of the stage, were dethroned. People no longer deigned to discuss them and they were never mentioned unless truncated and falsified, to serve as examples of the wanderings into which the human spirit falls when it abandons the ways of God. The reaction went so far that under Charles X even the philosophy of the sophists of spiritualism fell under suspicion. An attempt was made to forbid their teaching in colleges. [6]
The triumphant Bourgeoisie re-established on the altar of its Reason the eternal truths and the most vulgar spiritualism. Justice, which the philosophers of Greece, England and France had reduced to reasonable proportions, which suited it to the conditions of the social environment in which it was manifested, became a necessary, immutable and universal principle. “Justice,” cried one of the most academic sophists of the Bourgeois philosophy, “is invariable and always present,” although it arrives only by degrees in human thought and in social facts. The limits of its field of action are ever extended and never narrowed; no human power can make it leave ground once acquired.
The Encyclopedists threw themselves with revolutionary enthusiasm into the quest of the origin of ideas, which they hoped to find by questioning the intelligence of children and savages. [7] The new philosophy scornfully rejected these inquiries which were of a nature to lead to dangerous results. “Let us set aside in the first place the question of origin,” exclaimed Victor Cousin, the master sophist, in his argument on the True, the Good and the Beautiful.
“The philosophy of the last century was too complaisant to questions of this sort. To what purpose shall we call on the region of darkness for light, or on a mere hypothesis for the explanation of reality; why go back to a pretended primitive stage in order to account for a present stage which can be studied in itself; why inquire into the germ of that which can be perceived and which needs to be known in its finished and perfect form? We deny absolutely that human nature should be studied in the famous savage of Aveyron or in his peers of the Islands of Oceanica or the American Continent. The true man is man perfect in his type; the true human nature is human nature arrived at its full development, as the true society is also the perfected society. Let us turn away our eyes from the child and the savage to fix them upon the actual man, the real and finished man.” (15th and 16th Lessons)
The ego of Socrates and Descartes could not but inevitably lead to the adoration of the bourgeois, the man perfect in his kind, real, finished, – the type of human nature arrived at its complete development and to the consecration of bourgeois society, the finished social order, founded upon the eternal and immutable principles of Goodness and Justice.
It is time to inquire into the value of this Justice and these eternal truths of Bourgeois spiritualism and to reopen the debate on the origin of ideas.
II. Formation of the Instinct and of Abstract Ideas
We may apply to the instinct of animals what the spiritualist philosophers call innate ideas. Beasts are born with an organic pre-disposition an intellectual pre-formation, according to Leibnitz’s phrase, which permits them to accomplish spontaneously, without going through the school of any experience, the most complicated acts necessary to their individual preservation and the propagation of their species. This pre-formation is nowhere more remarkable than in the insects which go through metamorphoses, as the butterfly and may-bug. According to their transformations, they adopt different kinds of life rigorously correlated with each of the new forms which they take on. Sebastien Mercier was altogether right when he declared that “instinct was an innate idea.” [8]
The spiritualists, not having the idea that instinct might be the result of the slow adaptation of a species of animals to the conditions of its natural environment, conclude stoutly that instinct is a gift of God. Man has never hesitated to put out of his reach the causes of the phenomena which escape him. But instinct is not like the Justice of the sophists of spiritualism, an immutable faculty, susceptible of no deviation, no modi fication. Domestic animals have more or less modified the instincts which God in his inexhaustible goodness bestowed on their savage ancestors. The chickens and ducks of our back yards have almost lost their instinct of flight, which became useless in the artificial environment in which man has placed them for centuries. The aquatic instincts has been obliterated in the ducks of Ceylon to such a degree that they have to be pushed to make them go into the water. Different varieties of chickens, Houdans, LaFleche, Campine, etc., have been robbed of the imperative instinct of maternity; although excellent layers they never think of sitting on their eggs. The calves in certain parts of Germany for generations have been taken from their mothers at birth, and among the cows a notable weakening of the maternal instinct has been observed. Giard thinks that one of the prime causes of that instinct in the mammals might be the organic need of relief from the milk, which makes the breasts swollen and painful. [9]
Another naturalist shows that the nest-building instinct of the stickleback must be attributed not to the Deity, but to a temporary inflammation of the kidneys during the mating season.
No very long time is necessary to reverse the best rooted instinct. Romanes cites the case of a hen which had been made to sit three times on duck’s eggs and who conscientiously pushed into the water the true chickens which she had been permitted to hatch. Man has overturned the instincts of the canine race; according to his needs he has given it new instincts and afterwards has suppressed them. The dog in the savage state does not bark. The dogs of the savages are silent; civilized man has given the dog the instinct of barking and has afterwards suppressed it in dogs of certain breeds. When the hound encounters the game, he leaps upon it barking loudly, while the sight of game makes the setter mute and nails him to the spot. If the setter is of a good breed, he needs no individual education to manifest this instinct, which is relatively a new acquisition. The young dogs hunting for the first time stop mute and motionless in their path at the sight of stones, sheep, etc. The tendency is implanted in the brain, but it is blind and requires a special training. Since to modify or suppress the instincts of an animal and to develop new ones in in him, it is only necessary to place him in new conditions of existence, the instinct of the wild animals is then only the result of their adaptation to the conditions of the natural environment in which they live. It is not created all at once; it is developed gradually in the animal species under the action and reaction of external and internal phenomena, which may be unknown but which necessarily have existed.
Man can study in himself the formation of instinct. He can learn nothing mentally or physically without a certain cerebral tension which relaxes in proportion as the object of study becomes more familiar. When, for example, one begins to play the piano, one must watch attentively the movement of the hands and fingers in order to strike exactly the note desired, but with habit one reaches the point of touching it mechanically without looking at the keyboard, and while thinking of other things. Just so when one studies a foreign language one must constantly keep his attention on the choice of words, articles, prepositions, terminations, adjectives, verbs, etc., which come to mind instinctively when one becomes familiar with the new language. The brain and the body of man and the animal have the property of transforming into automatic actions what originally were voluntary and conscious, and the result of a sustained attention. Without this property of automatizing himself, man would be incapable of education, physically or intellectually; if he were obliged to watch over his movements in order to speak, walk, eat, etc., he would remain in everlasting childhood. Education teaches man to dispense with his intelligence. It tends to transform him into a machine more and more complicated. The conclusion is paradoxical.
The brain of an adult is more or less automatized according to the degree of his own education and that of his race. The abstract elementary notions of Cause, Substance, Being, Number, Justice, etc., are as familiar and instinctive to him as eating and drinking, and he has lost all remembrance of the manner in which he acquired them, for civilized man, like the setter, inherits at birth the traditional habit of acquiring them at the first occasion. But this tendency to acquire them is the result of a progressive ancestral experience prolonged through thousands of years. It would be as ridiculous to think that abstract ideas germinated spontaneously in the human head as to think that the bicycle or any other machine of the most improved type had been constructed at the first attempt. Abstract ideas, like the instinct of animals, were gradually formed in the individual and in the race. To seek their origin it is not enough to analyze the manner of thinking of the civilized adult, as Descartes does, but also, as the Encyclopedists would have had it to question the intelligence of the child and to re trace the course of the ages to study that of the barbarian and the savage, as we are obliged to do when we wish to find the origins of our political and social institutions, of our arts and our sciences. [10]
The sensationalists of the eighteenth century in making of the brain a tabula rasa, which was a radical way of renewing the “purification” of Descartes, neglected this fact of capital importance; namely, that the brain of the civilized man is a field worked for centuries and sown with concepts and ideas by thousands of generations and that, according to the exact expression of Leibnitz, it is pre-formed before individual experience begins. We must admit that it possesses the molecular arrangement destined to give birth to a considerable number of ideas and concepts. Some such admission is required to explain that extraordinary men, like Pascal, have been able to find out for themselves more than one series of abstract ideas, such as the theorems of the first book of Euclid, which have only been elaborated by a long procession of thinkers. In any case the brain possesses such an aptitude for acquiring certain concepts and elementary ideas that it does not perceive the fact of their acquisition. The brain is not merely limited to receiving impressions which come from outside, by way of the senses; it, of itself, does a molecular work, which the English physiologists call unconscious cerebration, which enables it to complete its acquisitions and even to make new ones without passing through experience. Students utilize this precious faculty when they learn their lesson imperfectly and go to bed leaving to their slumber the duty of fixing them in memory.
Indeed, the brain is full of mysteries. It is a terra incognita which the physiologists have scarcely begun to explore. It certainly possesses faculties which often find no outlet in the environment in which the individual and his race are evolving. These dormant faculties cannot therefore result from the direct action of the exterior environment upon the brain, but rather from its action upon other organs, which in their turn react upon the nervous centers. Goethe and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire called this phenomenon the balancing of organs. Here are two historical examples.
Savages and barbarians are capable of a far greater number of intellectual operations than they accomplish in their daily life. During hundreds of years the Europeans have transported from the coast of Africa into the colonies thousands of savage and barbarian negroes, removed from civilized men by centuries of culture. Nevertheless at the end of a very short time they assimilated the crafts of civilization. The Guaranys of Paraguay, when the Jesuits undertook their education, were wandering naked in the forests, armed only with a wooden bow and club with no knowledge, except how to cultivate maize. Their intelligence was so rudimentary that they could not count beyond twenty, using their fingers and toes. Nevertheless the Jesuits made these savages skillful operatives, capable of difficult works – such as complicated organs, geographical spheres, paintings and decorated sculptures. These trades and arts with the ideas corresponding to them did not exist in the inborn state in the hands and brain of the Guaranys. They had been, so to speak, poured into them by the Jesuits as new airs are added to a street organ. The brain of the Guaranys, if it was incapable of discovering them by its own initiative was at least marvelously “predisposed” or “pre-formed,” according to Leibnitz’s phrase, for acquiring them.
It is equally certain that the savage is as foreign to the abstract concepts of civilized men as to their arts and crafts, which is proved by the absence in their language of terms for general ideas. How then did the abstract ideas and concepts which are so familiar to the civilized man slip into the human brain? To solve this problem which has to so great an extent preoccupied philosophic thought, we must, like the Encyclopedists, start on the path opened up by Vico, and question language, the most important if not the first mode of manifestation of sentiments and ideas. [11] It plays so considerable a role that the Christians of the first centuries, reproducing the idea of primitive men, said, “The Word is God;” and that the Greeks designated by the same term, logos, the word and thought; and that from the verb phrazo (to speak), they derived phrazomai, to speak to one’s self, to think. Indeed the most abstract head cannot think without employing words – without speaking to himself mentally, if he does not do so really, like children and many adults who murmur what they think. Language holds too great a place in the development of the intellect for the etymological formation of words and their successive meanings to fail of reflecting the conditions of life and the mental state of the men who created and used them.
One fact strikes us at the outset; often one and the same word is used to designate an abstract idea and a concrete object. The words which in European languages signify material goods, and the straight line, have also the meaning of the moral Good and Right, Justice;
- Ta agatha (Greek) goods, wealth; to agathon, the good.
- Bona (Latin), goods; bonum (Latin) the good.
- Les biens (French) goods; le Bien, the good.
- Orthos (Greek), rectum (Latin), derecho (Spanish), droit, (French), etc. have the double meaning of being in a straight line and that of Right, Justice.
Here again are other examples chosen in the Greek language: Kalon, arrow, javelin, beauty, virtue; phren, heart, entrails, reason, will; kakos, man of plebeian origin, base, wicked, ugly; kakon, vice, crime. The word kakos contributes to the formation of a series of terms, employed for what is vile and evil; kakke, excrement; kakkia, vice, baseness; kakotheos, impious; kakophonia, unpleasant sound, etc.
The fact is worth attention, although little noticed. This is the way with daily phenomena; because they fill the eyes they are not seen. Nevertheless, it is worth considering how the vulgar tongue and the philosophic and legal tongue have joined under the same term the material and the ideal, the concrete and the abstract. Two questions are raised at the very outset: first, have the abstract and the ideal been degraded into the concrete and into the material, or have the material and concrete transformed themselves into the ideal and abstract? – and how has this transubstantiation been accomplished?
The history of successive meanings of words solves the first difficulty; it shows the concrete meaning always preceding the abstract meaning.
- Aissa (Greek), used at first for the lot or portion which falls to anyone in a division, ends by meaning a decree of destiny;
- Moira, at first the portion of a guest at a banquet, the lot of a warrior in the distribution of booty; then one s portion in life and finally the goddess Destiny, to whom “gods and mortals are equally subject.”
- Nomos begins by being used for pasturage and ends by meaning law.
The link which attaches the abstract meaning to the concrete meaning is not always apparent. Thus it is difficult at first glance to perceive how the human mind could have linked pasturage to the abstract idea of law, the straight line to the idea of Justice, the share of a guest at a banquet to immutable destiny. I shall show the links which unite these different meanings in the article on the Origins of the Ideas, Justice and Goodness. It is only important at this moment to point out the fact.
The human mind ordinarily employs the same method of work in spite of the difference in the objects on which it operates: for example, the road which it has followed to transform sounds into vowels and consonants is the same as that which is traversed in rising from the concrete to the abstract. The origin of letters appeared so mysterious to the Bishop Mallinkrot, that in his De Arte Typographica, to put his mind at rest, he attributed their invention to God, who was already the author of instinct and abstract ideas. But the researches of philologists have torn away one by one the veils enveloping the alphabetical mystery. They have shown that letters did not fall ready-made from heaven, but man arrived only gradually at representing the sounds by consonants and vowels. I shall mention the first steps traversed, which are useful for my demonstration.
Man begins by picture-writing. He represents an object by its image, a dog by drawing of a dog. He passes then to symbolical writing, and pictures a part for the whole, the head of an animal for the entire animal. Then he rises to metaphorical writing: he portrays an object having some resemblance, real or supposed, with the idea to be expressed – the forepart of a lion to signify the idea of priority, a cubit for Justice and Truth, a vulture for maternity. The first attempt at phonetics was made by rebuses; the sound was represented by the image of an object having the same sound. The Egyptians, calling the pig’s tail deb, represented the sound deb by the picture of the curled tail of a pig. Finally a certain number of pictures are preserved more or less modified, no longer for the phonetic value of several syllables, but for that of the initial syllable, etc., etc. [12]
Writing had inevitably to pass through the metaphorical stage since primitive man thinks and speaks in metaphors. The Redskin of America to indicate a brave warrior said “he is like the bear;” the man with piercing glance is like the eagle; to affirm that he forgives an outrage he declares “he buries it in the earth,” etc. These metaphors are for us sometimes undecipherable; thus, it is difficult to understand how the Egyptians came to represent in their hieroglyphics Justice and Truth by the cubit, and maternity by the vulture. I shall disentangle the metaphor of the vulture. In the next article I will explain that of the cubit.
The matriarchal family had in Egypt an extraordinary longevity, as is shown in its religious myths by numerous traces of the antagonism of the two sexes; struggling, the one to preserve its high position in the family, the other to dispossess it. The Egyptian like Apollo in the Eumenides of Aeschylus, declares that it is man who fulfills the important function in the act of generation, and that woman, “like the pistil of a fruit, only receives and nourishes his germ.” The Egyptian woman returns the compliment and boasts that she conceives without the co-operation of man. The statue of Neith, the mother goddess, the “Sovereign Lady of the upper regions,” bore at Sais this arrogant inscription: “I am all that has been, all that is and all that shall be. No one has lifted my robe. The fruit I have borne is the Sun.” Her name, among other signs, has for its emblem the vulture and the first letter of the word mother (mou). [13]
Now the hieroglyphics of Horapollon teach us that the Egyptians believed that in the species of vultures there were no males and that the females were fertilized by the wind. They attributed to that bird, everywhere else regarded as ferocious, a motherly tenderness so extreme that it tore its breast to nourish its little ones. So, after having made of it, by reason of its strange generative property, the bird of Neith, the mother goddess, who herself also propagates without the co-operation of the male, they made of it the symbol of the mother, then of maternity.
This characteristic example gives an idea of the twists and turns through which the human mind passes to picture its abstract ideas through the images of concrete objects.
If in the metaphorical and emblematic writing the image of a material object becomes the symbol of an abstract idea, it is seen that a word created to denote an object or one of its attributes ends by serving to denote an abstract idea.
* * *
In the mind of the child and of the savage – “that child of the human race,” as Vico calls him – there exist only images of definite objects. When the little child says doll, he does not mean to speak of any doll no matter which but of one certain doll that he has held in his hands and that has already been shown him, and if another is offered him it results in his rejecting it with anger; so, every word is for him a proper name, the symbol of the object with which he has come in contact. His language, like that of the savage, possesses no generic terms embracing a class of objects of the same nature, but one series after another of proper names. Thus the savage languages have no terms for general ideas, such as “man,” “body,” etc., and for the abstract ideas, Time, Cause, etc. There are some which have not the verb “to be.” The Tasmanian had an abundance of words for every tree of the different species, but no term for saying tree in general. The Malay has no word for color, although he has words for every color. The Tbiponne has not words for man, body, time, etc. and he does not possess the verb to be. He does not say, “I am Abiponne,” but, “Me Abi-ponne.” [14] But by degrees the child and primitive man carry over the name and the idea of the first persons and things they have known to all the persons and things which present a real or fictitious resemblances with them. They elaborate after a fashion, by way of analogy and comparison, certain general and abstract ideas embracing groups of objects, more or less extended, and sometimes the proper name of one object becomes the symbolic term of the abstract idea representing the group of objects having analogies with the object for which the word had been coined. Plato maintains that the general ideas thus obtained, which classify objects without taking account of their individual differences, are “essences of divine origin.” Socrates in the Tenth Book of the Republic says that the idea of bed is an essence of divine creation, because it is immutable, always identical with itself, while the beds created by cabinet makers all differ among themselves.
The human mind has often brought together the most dissimilar objects having only a vague point of resemblance among themselves. Thus by a process of anthropomorphism man has taken his own members for terms of comparison, as is proved by the metaphors which persist in civilized languages although they date from the beginning of humanity, such as the “bowels of the earth,” the “veins of a mine,” the “heart of an oak,” “tooth of a saw,” the “gorge of a mountain,” the “arm of the sea,” etc. When the abstract idea of measure takes shape in his brain, he takes for a unit of measure his foot, his hand, his thumb, his arms (Orgyia a Greek measure equal to two arms extended). So every measure is a metaphor. When we speak of an object three feet, two inches in extent, we mean that it is as long as three feet two thumbs. [15] But with the development of civilization, people were forced to resort to other units of measure. Thus the Greeks took the stadion, the distance traversed in the footrace at the Olympic Games; and the Latins jugerum, the surface which could be plowed in one day by a jugum (a yoke of oxen).
An abstract word, as Max Muller remarks, is often only an adjective transformed into a substantive; – that is to say, the attribute of an object metamorphosed into a personage, into a metaphysical entity, into an imaginary being, and it is by way of metaphor that this metempsychosis is accomplished. The metaphor is one of the principal ways by which the abstract penetrates into the human brain. In the preceding metaphors, they speak of the mouth of a cavern, a tongue of land, because the mouth presents an opening and the tongue an elongated form. The same process has served to procure new terms of comparison in proportion as the need of them has made itself felt, and it is always the most salient property of the object, that which consequently impresses the senses most vividly which is made the term of comparison.
A great number of savage languages have no words for the abstract ideas of hardness, roundness, warmth, etc., and they are deprived of them because the savage has not yet succeeded m creating the imaginary beings or metaphysical entities which correspond to these terms. Thus, for hard he says “like stone,” for round “like the moon,” for hot, “like the sun;” because the qualities of hard, round and hot are in his brain inseparable from stone, moon and sun. It is only after a long process of brain work that these qualities are detached, abstracted from these concrete objects to be metamorphosed into imaginary beings. Then the qualifying term becomes a substantive and stands for the abstract idea formed in the brain.
No savage tribes have been found without the idea of number, the abstract idea par excellence, although the numeration of certain savages does not go beyond twenty. It is probable that even animals can count up to two. Here is an observation I have made, which is easy to repeat, and which would seem to prove it: the pigeon, although sitting on two eggs – with very rare exceptions – nevertheless has the property of laying eggs at will. If, after she has laid two eggs one is taken away, the female lays a third and even a fourth and fifth if the eggs are taken as fast as she lays them. She requires two eggs in the nest before she begins to sit. The domestic pigeon, overfed, may sometimes lay three eggs; when that happens she pushes one out of the nest, or else leaves it if she cannot push out the superfluous egg.
It would seem that the abstract idea of number, contrary to Vico’s opinion, is one of the first, if not the first, to be formed in the brain of animals and man; for if all objects have not the property of being round, hard or hot, etc., they have nevertheless one quality which is common to them, that of being distinct from one another, by their form and the relative position which they occupy, and this quality is the point of departure of numeration. [16] The brain substance must have the idea of number; that is to say, be able to distinguish the objects from each other, in order to carry on its function. This was recognized by the Pythagorian Philolaus, the first who, according to Diogenes of Laercia, affirmed that the motion of the earth described a circle, when he declared that number resides in all that is, and without it nothing can be known and nothing can be thought.
But the extension of numeration beyond the number two was one of the most painful of Herculean labors ever imposed upon the human brain, as is proved by the mystical character attributed to the first ten numbers [17]; and the mythological and legendary memories attached to certain figures: 10 (Siege of Troy and of Veii, which lasted exactly ten years); 12 (the 12 gods of Olympus, 12 labors of Hercules, 12 apostles, etc.); 50 (the 50 sons of Priam, the 50 Danaides; Endymion, according to Pausanius made Selene the mother of 50 daughters; Acteon hunted with 50 braces of hounds when Diana metamorphosed him; the boat constructed by Danaus according to the instructions of Minerva, had 50 oars, as had that of Hercules at the time of his expedition against Troy.) These numbers are so many stages at which the human mind halted after the efforts made to reach the points, and it has marked them with legends to preserve their memory.
The savage, when he arrives at the end of his numeration, says “many” to indicate the objects which remain over and which he cannot count for lack of numbers. Vico remarks that for the Romans 60, then 100, then 1,000 were innumerable quantities. The Hovas of Madagascar say for 1,000 “evening,” for 10,000 “night,” and the word tapitrisa, which they use to indicate a million, is literally translated by the end of counting. It was the same for us, but since the war of 1870-1871 it is a billion which marks the limit of our popular numeration.
Language shows us that man has taken his hand, his foot and his arms for units of length. He still uses his fingers and toes for counting. F. Nansen says the Esquimaux, with whom he lived more than a year, have no name for any figure beyond five. They count on the fingers of the right hand and then stop when all the fingers have been named and touched. For six they take the left hand and say the first finger of the other hand, for seven, the second finger, thus on to ten. Afterwards they count in the same fashion on the toes and stop at twenty, the limit of their numeration: but the great mathematicians go further and for twenty-one they say the first finger of the other man and begin again, passing over the hands and feet. Twenty is one man, one hundred is five men. The Roman figures which were used until the introduction of .the Arabic figures preserve the memory of this primitive mode of numeration; I is one finger, II is two fingers, V is a hand with the three middle fingers folded while the little finger and the thumb are straight; X is two Vs or two hands crossed. But when it was necessary to count beyond the hundred and the thousand, they were obliged to resort to other objects than the human members.
The Romans took pebbles, calculi, from which is derived the word calculus in modern languages. The Latin expressions calculum ponere (to place the pebble) and subducere calculum (to take away the pebble) indicate that it was by adding and taking away pebbles that they added and subtracted. At the Familistere of Guise I saw the first two arithmetical operations taught by a similar process to children of five and six years. Pebbles were the obvious things for this use; they had already served for drawing lots in the distribution of booty and land.
Savages cannot figure in their heads. They must have before their eyes the objects which they are counting. Thus, when they make exchanges they place on the ground the objects which they are giving opposite those they receive. This primitive equation, which in the last analysis is simply a tangible metaphor, is the only thing which can satisfy their minds. Numbers, in their heads, as in those of children, are concrete ideas. When they say two, three or five, they see two, three or five fingers, pebbles or any other objects. In many savage tongues the first five figures bear the names of the fingers; it is only by a process of intellectual distillation that the numbers come to strip themselves in the head of the civilized adult of any form corresponding to a certain object, and to keep only the form of conventional signs. [18] The most idealistic metaphysician cannot think without words nor calculate without signs, – that is to say without concrete objects. The Greek philosophers when they began their inquiries on the properties of numbers, gave them geometrical forms. They divided them into three groups: the group of linear numbers (mekos). the group of numbers of planes, squares (epipedon), the group of the numbers of three dimensions, cubes (triké auxé). The modern mathematicians have still preserved the expression linear number for a root number.
The savage for long, hard, round or hot, says “like the foot, stone, moon, sun;” but feet are of unequal length, stones are more or less hard, the moon is not always round, the sun is hotter in summer than in winter; so when the human mind felt the need of a higher degree of exactness, it recognized the insufficiency of the terms of comparison which it had till then used. It then imagined types of length, hardness, roundness and heat to be employed as terms of comparison. It is thus that in abstract mechanics, the mathematicians imagined a lever absolutely rigid and without thickness and a wedge absolutely incompressible in order to continue their theoretical investigations, arrested by the imperfections of the levers and wedges of reality. But the wedge and the lever of the mathematicians like the types of length, roundness, hardness although derived from real objects whose attributes had been submitted to intellectual distillation, no longer correspond to any real object but to ideas formed in the human head. Because the objects of reality differ among themselves and from the imaginary type, always one and identical with itself, Plato calls the real objects vain and deceptive images and the ideal type an essence of divine creation. In that case, as in a multitude of others, God, the creator, is man thinking.
Artists by an analogous process have given birth to chimeras, whose bodies, although com posed of detached organs abstracted from different animals, correspond to nothing real but to a fantasm of the imagination. The chimera is an abstract idea – as abstract as any idea you please of the Beautiful, the Good, the Just, Time or Cause – but Plato, himself, did not dare to class it in the number of his divine essences.
Man, probably when barbarous tribes began to differentiate into classes, separated himself from the animal kingdom and raised himself to the rank of a supernatural being, whose destinies are the constant preoccupation of the gods and the celestial bodies. Later on he isolated the brain from the other organs to make it the seat of the soul. Natural science reintegrates man in the animal series of which he is the sum and crown; the socialist philosophy will restore the brain to the series of organs. The brain has the property of thinking as the stomach has that of digesting. It cannot think but by the aid of ideas, which it fabricates with the materials furnished it by the natural environment and the social or artificial environment in which man evolves.
The Origin of the Idea of Justice
I. The Law of Retaliation – Retributive Justice
Justice as it exists in our civilized societies flows from two sources; one takes its origin in the very nature of the human being and the other in the social environment organized on the basis of private property. The passions and the concepts existing in man before the establishment of property, and the interests, passions and ideas which this engenders, acting and reacting one upon another, have ended by begetting developing and crystallizing in the brain of civilized man the ideas of the Just and Unjust.
The human sources of the idea of justice are the passion for vengeance and the sentiment of equality.
The passion of vengeance is one of the most ancient in the human mind. It has its root in the instinct of self-preservation – in the necessity which impels animal and man to resist when they receive a blow, and to respond to it mechanically if fear does not put them to flight. It is the blind and unreasoning necessity which leads the child and the savage to strike the inanimate object which has wounded them. Reduced to its simplest and last expression, vengeance is a reflex movement analogous to the involuntary motion which makes the eye wink when it is threatened.
Vengeance with the savage and the barbarian is of an intensity unknown to civilized men. “The Redskins,” says the American historian, Adairs, “feel their heart burn violently day and night until they have shed blood for blood. They transmit from father to son the memory of the murder of a relative, of a member of their clan, even though it be an old woman.” There are stories of Redskins who have committed suicide because they could not avenge themselves. The Fijian, who has received an insult, places within the range of his vision an object which he does not take away until he has assuaged his vengeance. The Slavonic women of Dalmatia show their child the bloody shirt of the slain father to incite it to vengeance.
“Vengeance one hundred years old, still has its milk teeth,” says the Afghan proverb. The Semitic god, “although slow to anger” visits the “iniquity of the fathers upon the children and the children’s children unto the third and fourth generation.” (Exodus, XXXIV, 7.) Four generations do not assuage his thirst for vengeance. He forbids entrance into the assembly up to the tenth generation to the Moabites and the Ammonites, “because they met you not with bread and with water in the way, when ye came forth out of Egypt.” (Deut. XXIII., 4.) The Hebrew might have said, like the Scandinavian, “The shell of the oyster may fall into dust by the process of years and a thousand other years may pass over this dust, but vengeance shall still be warm in my heart.” The Erinnyes of Greek mythology are the ancient goddesses “of vengeance” “of the inextinguishable thirst for blood.” The chorus of the sublime trilogy of Aeschylos, palpitating with the passions that torture the souls of the gods and mortals, cries out to Orestes, hesitating to avenge his father: “Let outrage be punished by outrage, let murder avenge murder.” “Evil for evil,” says the maxim of ancient times; “blood shed upon the earth demands other blood; the nourishing earth has drunk the blood of murder; it is dried, but its trace remains ineffaceable and cries for vengeance.” Achilles to avenge the death of Patroclus, his friend, forgets the insult of Agamemnon and stifles the wrath which made him watch unmoved the defeats of the Achaeans. The death of Hector does not assuage his passion; three times he drags his corpse around the walls of Troy.
The savage and the barbarian never forgive. They can wait year after year for the propitious moment of vengeance. Clytemnestra for ten long years watched patiently for the hour of her vengeance. When she had assassinated Agamemnon, the murderer of her daughter, drunk with joy and blood, she cried, “The dew of murder has fallen on me; as sweet to my heart as is to the fields the rain of Jupiter in the season when the grain of wheat comes forth from its sheath.”
Man sanctifies and deifies his passions, especially when they are useful for his preservation, private and social. “The inextinguishable thirst for blood,” vengeance, erected into a sacred duty, becomes the first of duties. The Erinnyes, in number like the curses which come from the mouth of an angered mother, hurl themselves from the shades of Erebus when once the imprecations give them life and motion. [1] They appear in the light of the sun only to breathe the passion of vengeance and untiringly to pursue the murderer over land and sea. No mortal could escape them. Their rage hunted down the culprit and his family and extended to him who gave him protection – to cities and whole countries. They stirred up civil wars and scattered pestilence and famine. The chorus of the Erinnyes of Aeschylos when Orestes is on the point of escaping them cries:
| And I, dishonoured, wretched, full of wrath, Upon this land (Attica), ha! Ha! Will venom, venom from my heart let fall, In vengeance for my grief, A dropping which shall smite the earth with barrenness! And thence shall come, (O Vengeance!) on the plain Down-swooping, blight of leaves and murrain dire That o’er the land flings taint of pestilence. (Plumptre’s Translation.) |
The Semitic god likewise avenged the shedding of blood upon plants, beasts and children. The poetic imagination of the Greeks personified in these terrible goddesses, whose name they feared to pronounce, the terrors inspired in primitive peoples by the unchaining of the passion of vengeance.
Vico, in his Scienza Nuova, formulates this axiom of social science:
“Legislation takes man as he is to make of him a being adapted for human society. From ferocity, avarice and ambition – these three vices which lead men astray, it derives the army, commerce and the court; that is to say, the strength, wealth and knowledge of republics; and these great vices, capable of destroying the human race, create social felicity.
“This axiom proves the existence of a divine providence – the divine legislative thought, which, from the passions of men absorbed completely in their private interests, that would make them live like ferocious beasts in solitude, derives the civil order which permits them to live in human societies.”
Inviolable law, to use Aristotle’s phrase, arose in fact from the passion of vengeance, furious and ever boiling. But it is not a divine legislative intelligence, which, as Vico thought, creates order out of the disorders of human passions; it is on the contrary these disorders which engender order. I shall try to prove this.
The implacable and furious passion for vengeance which is found in the souls of the savages and barbarians of the old and new world, as is proved by the previous quotations, is imposed upon them by the conditions of the natural and social environment in which they move.
The savage, at perpetual war with man and beast, and his spirit haunted by imaginary dangers, cannot live alone, and gathers himself into herds. He cannot understand existence outside of his clan; to drive him from it is to condemn him to death. [2] The members of a tribe consider themselves descended from a single ancestor. The same blood flows in their veins. To shed the blood of one member is to shed the blood of the whole tribe. The savage has no individuality; it is the tribe, the clan, and later the family, which possesses an individuality. Solidarity of the narrowest and solidest kind welds together the members of a tribe or clan to the point of making them one single being, like the Briareus of Greek mythology; in the most primitive nations that it has been possible to observe, the women are in common and the children belong to the clan. Individual property has not yet made its appearance. The most personal objects such as arms and ornaments pass from hand to hand with the most startling rapidity, according to Fison and Howitt, those conscientious and intelligent observers of Australian manners. The members of savage tribes and barbarous clans move and act in common like a single man; they change their location, hunt, fight and cultivate the land in common. When warlike tactics are improved, they range themselves in battle by tribes, clans and families.
They put offenses into the common fund, like everything else; an injury done to one savage is resented by the whole clan as if it were personal to every member; to shed the blood of one savage is to shed the blood of the clan. All its members consider it their duty to wreak vengeance. Vengeance is collective like marriage and property. The right of exercising vengeance was among the barbarous Germans the family bond, par excellence. When the Frankish tribes had established the wehrgeld; that is to say, a monetary compensation for the offense, all the members of the family shared the price of blood. But the Frank who had gone out of the family community had no right to the wehrgeld. If he was killed, it was the king who became his avenger and received the price of his blood.
But, because the clan resents the injury done to one of its members, the whole clan becomes responsible for the offense committed by one of its members. The offense is collective like the injury. [3] The offended clan takes vengeance by killing any individual whatever of the offending clan. “Among the Australian people a general consternation reigns,” writes Sir G. Grey, “when a murder is committed, especially when the guilty one has escaped, for his relatives consider themselves guilty, and it is only the persons who have no relation with the family who feel any safety.” A murder is the declaration of war between two families, between two clans – a war of ambuscades and extermination, which lasts for years, since a murder demands a death to avenge it, which in its turn demands vengeance. Some times two entire clans come to blows. It is only half a century ago that in Dalmatia “war extended from the families to the whole village, and sometimes civil war was let loose over all the district.” [4] Even women and children are objects of vengeance. The Scandinavians did not spare the new-born in the cradle, for, “A wolf lies in wait in the tender child” says the Eddas. Even in the nineteenth century the Greeks took vengeance upon male children of more than eight years old, and the women and young girls alone were spared. [5]
It is not only real murders which imperiously demand vengeance, but also the imaginary murders created by the superstitious intelligence of the savage. No death is natural for the Australian; every decease is caused by the mischief of an enemy belonging to a rival clan, and the duty of the relatives is to avenge the deceased by killing; not exactly the presumed author of the mischief, but any member whatever of his clan – several indeed if possible. [6] Moreover, the dead man avenged himself, his spirit came to torture the guilty. Fraser asserts that one of the causes of the suppression of the cannibal banquets is the fear of posthumous vengeance on the part of the unfortunate who has been eaten. It is not only to avenge himself that the savage kills the murderer, but also to appease the dead, whose spirit would be tormented until human blood be shed. To tranquilize the shade of Achilles, the Greeks sacrificed on his tomb Polyxena, the sister of Paris, his murderer.
The savage, who understands his existence only as an integral part of his clan, transforms the individual offense into a collective offense; and vengeance, which is an act of personal defense and self-preservation, becomes an act of collective defense and self-preservation. The clan protects itself by wreaking vengeance for the murder or wounds of one of its members. But this collective vengeance inevitably involves collective dangers which sometimes compromise the existence of the clan. The collective dangers of these vendettas obliged the savages to stifle their sentiment of solidarity and to sacrifice the member of the clan responsible for the injury and to deliver him up to the clan of his victim. Savages of Australia, arms in their hands, stop and calm themselves, reducing their vengeance to a personal damage exactly equal to that which had been committed, and which had become the cause of the quarrel. Life for life, wound for wound. The law of retaliation was born.
Retaliation, “life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe” (Exodus, XXI, 23, 25), this alone can give full satisfaction to the sentiment of equality of the primitive communist tribes, whose members are all equal.
The most complete equality follows necessarily from the conditions in which the savage of the communist tribes lives. Darwin in his Voyage of a Naturalist relates this characteristic story: He saw a Fuegian, to whom a wool coverlet had been given, tear it into rags equal in breadth, in order that each individual of the tribe might receive a piece, since the savage could not admit that one member of his clan should be better endowed than another in anything whatever. Caesar, when he came in contact with the German tribes, was struck by the equalitarian spirit which governed their division of goods. He attributed it to the desire to create equality among their members. Caesar reasons like a civilized man living in a social environment where unequal conditions of existence inevitably produce inequality among the citizens. The barbarians whom he had under his eyes were living on the contrary in a communist environment producing equality; they therefore did not have to seek for it in their divisions, but to satisfy their equalitarian spirit by distributing equal shares to all without in the least suspecting the social importance of their act. It is in this way that people digest without any knowledge of the chemistry of the stomach, and that the bees construct the cells in their hives according to the most exact geometric and mechanical rules of resistance and economy of space, without suspecting the existence of geometry and mechanics. Equality is not only implanted in the heart and brain of primitive men, but furthermore exists in their physical appearance. Volney relates that a chief of the Redskins expressed to him his astonishment at the great physical differences which existed between the whites whom he saw, while the greatest resemblance was the rule between the members of any one savage tribe.
Old age surrounded with respect is the first privilege which appears in human societies. It is the only one which exists in the savage tribe. Whatever may be the superior qualities of courage, intelligence, endurance of hunger, thirst and pain which distinguish a warrior, they do not give him the right to assert himself. He may be chosen to direct his companions on the hunt, and to command in war, but the expedition ended, he becomes again their equal. “The greatest chief of the Redskins,” says Volney, “cannot even in the field strike or punish a warrior, and in the village he is obeyed by no child except his own.” [7] The Greek chief of Homeric times possessed an authority scarcely more extended. Aristotle remarks that if the power of Agamemnon went as far as the right to kill the runaway when they were marching against the enemy, yet he patiently accepted insults at the time of council. The Greek generals in historic times, when their year of command expired returned to the ranks. Thus, according to Plutarch, Aristides and Philopœmen, who had been leaders of armies, and who had won victories, served as simple soldiers.
Retaliation is merely the application of equality in the matter of satisfaction to be awarded for in injury. It is the equalized expiation for the offense. Only a damage exactly equal to the offense committed – a life for a life, a burn for a burn – can satisfy the equalitarian soul of primitive men. The equalitarian instinct, which in the distribution of food and of goods imposed the equal share, created the law of retaliation. The necessity of preventing the disastrous consequences of vendettas introduced it into primitive societies. Justice plays no role, either in its creation or introduction. Thus we find the law of retaliation established among nations, who have so little idea of Justice that they possess no words for crime, fault, justice. The Homeric Greeks, although of a relatively higher civilization, had no word for law, and it is impossible to conceive of Justice without laws. [8]
Retaliation, invented and introduced to escape the dangers of vendettas and admitted by primitive men because it gave full satisfaction to their passion for vengeance, had to be regulated when once it became a matter of custom. The entire clan originally had a right to vengeance, which it exercised indifferently on any member of the clan which had committed the offense. A beginning was made by limiting the number of persons who could exercise vengeance, and that of the persons upon whom it was permitted to exercise it. The thar, the law of blood of the Bedouins and almost all the Arabs, authorizes every individual comprised in the first five degrees of relationship to kill any relative of the murderer comprised in the first five degrees. This custom must have been general, for among the Germans and the Scandinavians the wehrgeld was paid and received by the relatives of the first five circles or degrees.
This custom, although limiting the field of vengeance, nevertheless gave up to it too vast a choice of victims; thus among the Hebrews we recognize attempts to restrain it and to limit vengeance to the guilty one. Jehovah, who has no fear of contradicting himself, commands in Deuteronomy (XXIV, 16): “not to put to death the fathers for the children, nor the children for the fathers, but each to be put to death for his own sin.” It was so difficult to impose this limitation upon fiery vengeance that long afterwards the Eternal protests against the proverb, “The fathers have eaten sour grapes and the chil ren’s teeth are set on edge. As I live, ye shall not have occasion any more to use this proverb in Israel. Behold! all souls are Mine, as the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is mine, and the soul that sinneth shall die.” (Ezekiel, XVIII, 2, 3, 4)
But it was still more difficult to limit the number of persons considering themselves authorized to exercise vengeance – and finally to take it away from them. The passion of vengeance could not be assuaged unless the nearest relative of the victim punished the guilty one. Thus, it is Pyrrhus, the son of Achilles, who before the Achaean army had to sacrifice the sister of his father’s murderer. Caillaud relates that in certain tribes of the African desert, the guilty one is turned over to the full discretion of the near relatives of the victim – who torture him and kill him at their will. Fraser saw in Persia a woman, to whom they had given up the murderer of her son, pierce him with fifty slashes of a knife, and by a refinement of vengeance, pass the bloody blade over his lips. In the ninth century in Norway, the murderer, led to the edge of the sea by the members of the popular assembly, was put to death by the prosecutor, or on his authority, by the royal provost. As for Athens, the civil power was charged to strike the culprit, the nearest relative assisted at the execution as an avenger of blood. Even though he no longer played an active part, his presence was necessary, not only to assuage his vengeance but also to fulfill the primitive conditions of the law of retaliation.
This law, by regulating and limiting the vendetta, proves that the passion which tortures and blinds primitive man subsides by degrees and can finally be curbed under a yoke; man accustoms himself no longer to exercise vengeance blindly upon a whole clan or upon a whole family, but on the culprit alone, and this vengeance is limited to rendering strictly blow for blow, death for death. [9] This regulation could not be introduced and maintained but for the collective intervention of the clans and families of the victim and the culprit. The family, always remaining responsible for the actions of its members, is called upon to declare whether it wishes to take the responsibility of the offense, or to give up the offender; in this last case, to determine on an expiation proportionate to the injury, it must also constrain the culprit to submit passively in the event of there being resistance on his part. [10] Thus they came to establish arbitrating tribunals, whose duties it was to estimate the offense and to award satisfaction.
The members of the tribe assembled together as was the case with the Scandinavians, constituted this first tribunal of arbitration; but on account of the difficulties presented by the gathering of such assemblies, only cases of murder or serious wounds were submitted to them; as for of minor importance, like blows and wounds not involving death or the loss of a limb they had to be settled by the council of elders
Moses on the advice of his father-in-law, Jethro, chose men of truth and placed such over them to be rulers of thousands, rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifty and rulers of tens, to judge the people at all times,” but every grave matter they were to bring to him. (Exodus xviii) Moses probably reproduced in the desert what existed in Egypt. A council of Druids was in Gaul charged with looking into the offense and fixing the penalty. If one of the parties refused to submit to its decree, it barred him from sacrifices, which constituted the most terrible punishment, for the interdict was avoided by everyone. (Caesar’s Gallic War, vi, 13) At Athens the Areopagus regulated vengeance. Aeschylos puts in the mouth of the Erinnyes who had just lost their case, these words depicting the evils which had necessitated the institution of such a tribunal:
| “For this, too, I will pray, That Discord, never satiate with ill, May never ravine in this commonwealth Nor dust that drinks dark blood From veins of citizens, Through eager thirst for vengeance, from the State Snatch woes as penalty For deeds of murderous guilt.” – (Plumptre’s Translation.) |
These ancient goddesses, daughters of Night, who personified primitive vengeance, were pronouncing their funeral oration. After the establishment of the Areopagus, they subsided and lost their savage character along with their function. They then changed their names and were called Eumenides; that is to say, the Good Goddesses.
The Areopagus must have dated back to a remote antiquity. Another legend says it was established to pronounce on the murder committed by Ares. He had killed the son of Poseidon who had violated his daughter. He was acquitted by the twelve gods who formed the tribunal. By the way, the word Areopagus signifies Ares Hill. Another legend has it that the first murder brought before this tribunal was that of Procris, killed accidentally in the chase by her husband, Cephalus. This legend and that of the matricide of Orestes would make the institution of the Areopagus date back to the period of the matriarchate, which at the time of the Trojan war had just been replaced by the patriarchate; in fact, at the moment when woman ceases to be the head of the family, she enters as a slave into the house of her husband, who has the right of life and death over her. Even her son possesses that right. Consequently vengeance could no longer be demanded for her death if the murder was brought about by her husband or her son. [11] The Areopagus rendered its decrees in the dark, like the Egyptian tribunal corresponding to it. That is why Themis, the goddess emblematic of Justice, has her eyes bandaged. The Athenians no doubt wished this symbolism to recall the fact that the Areopagus had been established as a substitute for the Erinnyes, daughters of Night, who, according to Homer, lived in the shades of Erebus. The Areopagus and the Egyptian tribunal admitted no attorneys. The culprit, himself, was obliged to preserve silence. These two tribunals, replacing the families of the offended and the offender, did not judge; their role was limited to finding the culprit and delivering him to the family of the offended.
If in a commercial city like Athens, the necessity of maintaining order permitted the establishment of a permanent tribunal for regulating vendettas and punishing culprits, almost everywhere else it was necessary to leave to the families the function of satisfying their own vengeance. In England in the tenth century, under King Alfred, custom and law still authorized families to declare private war in case of murder. The civil power in France, not having been able to take vengeance away from the families, tried to attenuate its effects by imposing an interval between the offense and the vengeance. A royal ordinance of the thirteenth century, La quarantaine-le-roy (king’s forty days), attributed to Phillip Augustus or St. Louis, forbade undertaking private war for vengeance until forty days had elapsed since the commission of the offense. If, in this interval a murder was committed upon one of the offenders, the murderer was punished with the death penalty, for having transgressed the royal ordinance. It is only lately that the French Government has been able to suppress vendettas in Corsica.
The passion for vengeance, although subject to the law of retaliation and to arbitrating assemblies, still remained irrepressible. Its claws and its teeth could only be drawn by property. Nevertheless property, which is destined to banish the disorders of private vengeance, makes its appearance surrounded by a train of discords and crimes in the bosom of families. Before the right of primogeniture was recognized and accepted as an established custom, it engendered fratricidal struggles for the possession of the paternal goods, of which Greek mythology has preserved horrible memories in the story of the Atridae. [12] Since then property has not ceased to be the most efficacious and the most active cause of private dissensions and crimes, and of civil and international wars, which have overwhelmed human societies.
Property enters like a fury into the human heart, overwhelming the most deeply rooted sentiments, instincts and ideas and exciting new passions; nothing less than property would have served to restrain and weaken vengeance, the ancient and dominant passion of the barbaric soul.
Private property once established, blood no longer demands blood; it demands property; the law of retaliation is transformed.
The transformation of retaliation was probably facilitated by slavery and the slave trade, the first international commerce which was regularly established. The exchange of living men for oxen, arms and other objects accustomed the barbarian to giving for blood some other equivalent than blood. A new household phenomenon contributed even more energetically than the slave trade toward modifying the law of retaliation. Woman, so long as the matriarchal family exists, remains in her clan, where she is visited by her husband or husbands; in the patriarchal family the young girl leaves her family to go and live in that of her husband. The father is indemnified for the loss of his daughter, who by marrying ceases to belong to him. The young girl then be comes an object of traffic, a finder of oxen, alphesiboia according to the Homeric epithet. It was for oxen that the Greeks exchanged her. The father began by trafficking in his daughters and ended by selling his sons, as is shown by the Greek and Roman laws. The father by selling his own blood breaks the ancient solidarity which united the members of the family and bound them in life and death. The parents, exchanging for beasts and other property their children, their living blood, became for a still stronger reason disposed to accept beasts or other property for blood that had been shed, for a son who was slain. The children, following the example of their parents, came in their turn to satisfy themselves with an indemnity, whatever it might be, for the blood of their father or mother.
Then instead of life for life, tooth for tooth, beasts, iron or gold are demanded for life, tooth and other wounds. The Kaffirs require oxen, the Scandinavians, Germans and barbarians, who by contact with more civilized nations have learned the use of money, demand silver. [13]
This revolution, one of the most far-reaching ever accomplished in the human soul, was not brought about suddenly nor without painful struggles. Not only religion, the preserver of ancient customs, but also the barbarian sentiments of solidarity and dignity opposed themselves to the substitution of money for blood. Superstition attached a curse to blood money. The treasure, which in the Eddas is the cause of the death of Sigurd and the extermination of the family of the Volsungs and the Giukings, is precisely the price of blood which the Scandinavian gods Odin, Loki and Hœnir had to pay for the murder of Balder. Saxo Grammaticus has preserved the song of a Danish bard who is indignant against the customs of his day and against those who carry in their purse the blood of their fathers. The nobles of Turkestan, says Pallas, never consent to receive the price of blood. The Afghan murderer, even if he has committed an involuntary murder, according to Elphinstone, has to beg the family of his victim to accept his money for compensation and has to submit to a humiliating ceremony analogous to that which on a similar occasion was in use among the Slavs of Southern Europe.
“The judges and spectators form a large circle. In the middle, the culprit with a gun and a dagger attached to his neck, crawls on his knees to the feet of the offended party, who, after taking away his arms, raises him and embraces him, saying, God forgive you. The spectators with joyous plaudits congratulate the reconciled enemies. This ceremony, called the Circle of Blood, ends by a feast given at the expense of the murderer, in which all the spectators take part.” [14]
The Bedouin, although accepting blood-money, forces the murderer and his family to recognize their obligations to him.
Retribution for blood was at first left to the award of the offended party, who at his will determined the quantity and quality of the objects to be given to appease him. The Sagas show us the Icelander fixing by himself the price of blood and content with nothing less than all the property of the murderer and his family. To appease his passion for vengeance, complete spoliation was required, that the culprit and his family might be deprived of the joys of life. This excess of compensation made this sort of expiation practically impossible and gave room for endless debates. The barbarians, to obviate this difficulty, saw themselves forced to decide on the price which could be demanded. The barbarian codes fixed minutely the price to be paid in kind or money for the life of a freeman, according to his birth and his rank; for wounds on the hand, on the arm, on the leg, etc.; and for every insult to his honor, and every attempt upon his domestic peace. The king, as well as the peasant, was protected by a wehrgeld, payable to his relatives. The only difference between the wehrgeld of the king and that of other individuals in a nation was the scale on which the price of blood was figured. [15]
The family of the culprit was responsible for the payment of the price of blood, which the family of the victim shared among its members, proportionately to the degree of relationship. The Gragas of Iceland indicate the manner of division: the males of the family were divided into five circles or degrees of relationship; the first circle, composed of the father, mother and the eldest son, received or paid three marks; the second and third circles two marks; the fourth one mark and the fifth one ore or an eighth of a mark.
The wehrgeld involved the creation of an official body with the duty of superintending its application. Later, fines were added to it. The wehrgeld continued to be paid to the relatives of the victim, while the fines accrued to the royal or public funds. It is almost the same as in our own days in capitalist countries, where the wehrgeld has taken the name of damages and interests.
The simple and equalitarian spirit of the savage had led him to the law of retaliation, life for life, wound for wound, which was the only way for regulating vengeance that he could imagine; but when under the operation of property, the law of retaliation was transformed and the brutal equation of life for life was replaced by the economic equation, beasts and other goods for life, wound, insult, etc. – the spirit of the barbarian was submitted to a severe test: he had to solve a problem which obliged him to penetrate into the domain of abstraction. He had on one side to weigh the material and moral damage caused a family by the death of one of its members; and to an individual by the loss of one of his limbs or by an insult; and on the other hand to measure the advantage which they derived from the cession of certain material goods; – that is to say, he was obliged to apportion and equilibrate things having no direct material connection between them. The barbarian began brutally in demanding in the case of a murder, the social ruin of the culprit, his economic death, the cession of all his property; and ended after many intellectual efforts by tariffing life, the loss of an eye or a tooth and even insults. This tariffing obliged him to acquire new abstract concepts on the relations of men among themselves and with things, which in their turn engendered in his brain the idea of retributive justice, which has for its mission to proportion as exactly as possible compensation to damage.
II. Distributive Justice
The instinct of self-preservation, the first and the most imperious of instincts, impels the savage man, like the animal, his ancestor, to take possession of the objects he needs. All that he can seize he grasps to satisfy either his hunger or his fancy. He acts toward material goods in the same way the scientist and the man of letters act toward intellectual goods: he takes his good wherever he finds it, according to Moliere s phrase. [16] The European travelers who have been the victims of that instinct have given themselves up to fine moral indignation and have belabored the savage with the epithet of thief, as if it were possible that the idea of theft should enter into the human head before the establishment of property. [17]
To subdue this prehensile instinct [18], which is the transformation of one of the essential proper ties of organized matter, to subject it to the yoke and to compress it to the stifling point, has been one of the tasks of civilization. To subjugate the prehensile instinct humanity has passed through stages more numerous than those required for subduing and extinguishing the passion for vengeance. The subjection of this primordial instinct has contributed to the defining of the idea of justice, rough-hewn by the taming of vengeance.
The savage, while he wanders in little clans over the uninhabited earth, along the seas and the streams, stopping where he finds food in abundance, exercises his prehensile instinct without restrictions of any sort; but from the remotest prehistoric times, the necessity of procuring the means of existence obliges him to restrain that instinct within certain limits. When the population of a country acquires a certain density, the savage tribes inhabiting it divide the land into hunting grounds, or into pastures when they live by the breeding of cattle. In order to preserve their means of subsistence, which are the natural fruits, game, fish and sometimes herds of swine feeding freely in the forests, the savage and barbaric nations of the old and the new world fringe their territories with neutral zones. [19] Every individual who goes beyond the limit of the territory of his tribe is pursued, trailed and sometimes put to death by the neighboring tribe. He can within the limit of his territory take freely of what he needs, but beyond that limit he takes only at his risk and peril. The violations of territory, often encouraged to exercise the bravery and the skill of the young warriors, are among the most frequent causes of war between neighboring tribes. The savages, in order to avoid these wars and to live at peace with their neighbors, were obliged to repress their prehensile instinct and to leave it a free career only within the limit of their own territory, the common property of all the members of their tribe.
But even in the limits of this territory the necessity of preserving the means of existence obliges the savages to put a bridle on their prehensile instinct. The Australians forbid the consumption of chickens and pigs when there is a scarcity, and that of bananas and yams when the crop of the bread-fruit trees promises ill. They prohibit fishing in certain bays when fish are scarce. The Redskins of Canada for other reasons do not kill the female beavers. The savages, even when dying of hunger, do not touch the plants and animals which are the totems of their tribes, that is the ancestors from which they claim to be descended. These prohibitions, to be more effective, often take on a religious character. The forbidden object is tabooed, and the gods take it upon themselves to punish those who violate the prohibition.
These restrictions to the prehensile instinct are communistic; they are imposed only in the interest of all the members of the tribe and it is only for this reason that the savage and the barbarian submit to them voluntarily. But there exist even among savages other restrictions which have not this character of common interest.
The sexes in savage tribes are distinctly separated by their functions. The man fights and hunts, the woman feeds and watches over the child, which belongs to her and not to the father, who is generally unknown or uncertain. She takes charge of the preservation of the provisions, the preparation and the distribution of food, the making of clothes, household utensils, etc., and she attends to agriculture at its beginning. This separation – based upon organic differences, introduced to prevent promiscuous sexual relations and maintained by the functions de volving upon each sex – is reinforced by religious ceremonies and mysterious practices peculiar to each sex and forbidden on pain of death to the persons of the other sex and by the creation of a language which is understood only by the initiated of one sex. The separation of the sexes inevitably brought on their antagonism, which translated itself by prohibitions imposed upon the prehensile instinct, which no longer have a general character, but which take on a special sex character – we might say a class character; for, as Marx observes, the class struggle first shows itself under the form of a struggle between the sexes. Here are a few of these sex prohibitions: the savage tribes ordinarily forbid women to participate in their cannibal feasts; certain choice meats such as the flesh of the beaver and emu are in Australia especially reserved for the warriors; it is from a sentiment of the same kind that the Greeks and Romans of historic times forbade women the use of wine.
The restrictions imposed upon the prehensile instinct continued to become more numerous with the establishment of the collective family property. As long as the territory of the clan remains the undivided property of all its members, who cultivate it in common just as they hunt and fish in common, the provisions entrusted to the keeping of the married women, according to Morgan, remain common property. Also within the limit of the territory of his clan a savage takes freely the food he needs. “In a village of Redskins,” says Cattlin, “every individual, man, woman or child, has the right to enter into any cabin, no matter what, even into that of the military chief of the nation, and eat all he requires.” The Spartans, according to Aristotle, had preserved these communistic manners, but the division of the arable lands of the clan introduces other manners. The division of lands could only take place on condition of its giving full satisfaction to the sentiment of jealous equality which filled the soul of primitive man. This sentiment demands imperatively that all have the same things, according to the formula which Theseus the mythical law-giver of Athens, had given for the foundation of justice. Every distribution of food or of the booty of war among primitive men was made in the most equalitarian manner – they could not conceive that it should be otherwise. The equal partition is for them the inevitable, so in the Greek language, moira, which signifies at first the part coming to each guest at a banquet ends by indicating the supreme goddess of Destiny to whom men and gods are subject; and the word diké used at first for equal division, custom ends by being the name of the goddess Justice. [20] If the most perfect equality must rule in the distribution of food, so much more the equalitarian spirit will be awakened when it comes to distributing the lands which provide the support for the whole family, for the division of lands was made by families proportionately to the number of their male members.
It has been rightly said that the inundations of the Nile forced the Egyptians to invent the first elements of geometry that they might redistribute the fields when the stream, bursting its banks, had effaced their land-marks. The custom of holding plowed lands in common after the harvest, and their annual redistribution, imposed upon other nations the same necessity as the overflowing of the Nile. The primitive men were obliged in all countries to discover for themselves the elements of surveying without going through the Egyptian school. Measuring follows naturally from counting. Probably the flock fortified the idea of number and developed numeration, while the division of land engendered the idea of measurement, and the vessel that of capacity. Rectilinear geometry was naturally the first to be discovered. It required year after year to learn how to decompose a curve into an infinity of straight lines and the area of a circle into an infinity of isosceles triangles. The arable lands were then divided by straight lines into parallelograms, very long and very narrow. But before they knew how to measure the surface of parallelograms by multiplying the base by the altitude and consequently before they had the power of making them equal, the primitive men could not be satisfied until the pieces of ground falling to each family were enclosed in straight lines of equal length. They arrived at these lines by carrying over the ground the same stick the same number of times. The stick which was used for measuring the length of the lines was sacred. The Egyptian hieroglyphics take for the symbol of Justice and Truth, the cubit, that is to say, the unit of measure. What the cubit had measured was just and true. [21]
The portions comprised between the straight lines of equal length set at rest their equalitarian spirit and gave no room for contests. The straight line was thus the important part of the operation 1 he straight lines once traced, the fathers of families were content. They gave full satisfaction their equalitarian sentiments. For this reason the Greek word orthos, which at first means what is in a straight line, has the further meaning of that which is true, equitable and just. [22]
The straight line, because it acquired the power of subduing their savage passions, must of necessity have taken on in their eyes an august character. It is by a like phenomenon that the Pythagorians, dazzled by the properties of the numbers they were studying, attributed to the decade a fatalistic character, and that all nations have given mystical qualities to the first numbers. We may thus conceive that the straight line represented in the minds of the men of the first agrarian allotments all they could conceive of Justice.
The equalitarian spirit of primitive men was so fierce, that to prevent the division of lands divided into narrow strips of equal lengths from exciting quarrels, they were distributed by lot, with the aid of pebbles, before the invention of writing. Thus the Greek word kleros, which means pebble, takes on the added significance of portion assigned by lot; then that of patrimony, fortune, condition, country.
The idea of justice was originally so closely linked to the division of lands, that in Greek, the word nomos, which means usage, custom, law, has for its root nem, which gives birth to a numerous family of words containing the idea of pasturage and of sharing. [23]
Nomos, at first exclusively used for pasturage, took on in the course of time numerous different meanings (sojourn, habitation, usage, custom, laws), which are so many historical sediments deposited by human evolution. If we unroll the chronological series of these meanings, we pass in review the principal stages traversed by prehistoric peoples. Nomos, pasturage, recalls the pastoral and vagabond epoch; from the time the nomad (nomas) pauses, nomos is used for sojourn, habitation; but when once the pastoral peoples pause and choose their homes in a country, they must inevitably divide up the lands; then nomos takes on the meaning of division. When once the agrarian divisions have passed into popular customs, nomos takes on its last meaning, custom, law, law being originally the codification of custom. In the Greek of the Byzantine period and of the modern epoch, nomos no longer preserves any other meaning than law. From nomos are derived nomisma, that which is established by custom, religious practice; nomizo, to observe the custom, to think, to judge; nomisis, worship, religion; Nemesis, the goddess of distributive justice, etc. – which are so many witnesses of the effect of agrarian divisions upon human thought.
The division of the common lands of a clan reveals a new world to the imagination of prehistoric man. It revolutionizes the instincts, the passions, the ideas and the customs in a more energetic and more profound fashion than would be done in our days by the return of capitalist property to the community. The primitive men, to familiarize their brains with the strange idea that they must no longer touch the fruits and the harvests of the neighboring fields within reach of their hands, were obliged to resort to all the witchcraft that they were capable of imagining.
Every field assigned by lot to a family was surrounded by a neutral zone like the territory of the tribe. The Roman law of the Twelve Tables fixed it at five feet. Boundaries marked its limits. At first they were only heaps of stone or trunks of trees. It was not until later that they were given the form of pillars with human heads to which arms were sometimes added. These heaps of stone and pieces of wood were gods for the Greeks and Latins. Oaths were made not to displace them [24]; the plowman was not allowed to approach it, “for fear that the god, feeling him self struck by the ploughshare, should cry to him, Stop, this is my field, there is thine.” (Ovid, Fasti) “Cursed be he who removeth his neighbor’s landmark,” thunders Jehovah, “and all the people shall say Amen!” (Deuteronomy, xxvii, 17). The Etruscans called down all manner of curses on the head of the culprit. “He who shall have removed the boundary,” says one of their sacred anathemas, “shall be condemned by the gods, his house shall disappear, his race shall be extinguished, his land shall produce no more fruits; hail, blight and the fires of the dog-star shall destroy his harvests, his limbs shall be covered with ulcers, and shall fall into corruption.” If property brought justice to humanity, it drove away brotherhood.
Every year at the Terminalia, the neighboring proprietors of Latium decorated the landmarks with garlands, made offerings of honey, wheat and wine, and sacrificed a lamb on an altar built for the occasion, for it was a crime to stain with blood the sacred landmark.
If it is true, according to the word of the Latin poet, that fear gave birth to the gods, it is still more true that the gods were invented to inspire terror. The Greeks created terrible goddesses to subdue the prehensile instinct and to horrify the violators of the property of others. Dike and Nemesis belonged to this class of divinities. Their birth was subsequent to the introduction of agrarian divisions, as their names indicate. They were charged with maintaining the new customs and punishing those who infringed them. Dike, terrible as the Erinnyes, with whom she is allied to terrify and punish, is appeased in proportion as men acquire the habit of respecting the new agrarian customs; she loses little by little her forbidding aspect. Nemesis presided over the divisions and took care that the distribution of the land was accomplished in an equitable manner. Nemesis on the bas-relief which represents the death of Meleager, is represented with a roll in her hand; doubtless the roll on which were inscribed the lots that fell to each family. Her foot rests on the wheel of fortune. To understand this symbolism it must be remembered that the portions of land were drawn by lot. [25]
The Greeks were so thoroughly convinced that the culture and sharing of lands had given birth to law and justice, that out of Demeter, the goddess of the shepherds of Arcadia, where she bore the name of Erinnys [26], and who plays no part in the two Homeric poems, they made the goddess of the fruitful earth, who initiated men into the mysteries of agriculture and established peace among them, giving them customs and laws. Demeter, on the monuments of the more ancient type, is represented with her head crowned with ears of wheat, holding in her hand implements of husbandry and poppies, which by reason of their innumerable grains are the symbol of fruitfulness; but in the more recent representations, which show her as law-giver, Thesmophora, Demeter replaces her ancient attributes by the stylet, which serves to engrave the customs and laws regulating the divisions of land; and by the roll on which are inscribed the titles of property. [27]
But the most formidable goddesses and the most horrible curses and anathemas, however deeply they disturbed the fantastical and artless imagination of the child-nations, failed utterly in curbing the prehensile instinct and the people’s inveterate habit of taking the things they needed. So there was nothing for it, but to resort to corporal punishment of a ferocity never before heard of and totally opposed to the sentiments and customs of savages and barbarians, who, if they do inflict blows to prepare themselves for their life of incessant struggles, never give to them the character of punishment. The savage does not strike his child. It is the proprietor fathers who invented the horrible precept, “He who loves well punishes well.” Attempts against property were punished more fiercely than crimes against persons. The abominable codes of iniquitous justice made their entrance into history in the train, and as the consequence, of private appropriation of land.
Property marks its appearance by teaching the barbarians to trample under foot their noble sentiments of equality and brotherhood. Laws inflicting the death penalty are enacted against those who menace property. “He, who at night shall secretly have cut or pastured his flocks on harvests produced by the plow,” commands the law of the Twelve Tables, “if he is of age, shall be sacrificed to Ceres and put to death; if he is under age, he shall be beaten by rods at the will of the magistrate and condemned to make amends for double the damage. The open robber, (that is to say, taken in flagrante delicto), if he is a freeman shall be beaten with rods and delivered up into slavery. The incendiary of a haystack shall be flogged and put to death by burning.” (Table VIII, 9, 10, 14) The law of Burgundy goes beyond the ferocious Roman law. It condemned to slavery the wife and the children of more than fourteen years who did not immediately denounce the husband and father guilty of theft or horses or oxen. (XLVII, 1, 2) Property introduced espionage into the bosom of the family.
Private property in real and personal goods, from its appearance, gives birth to instincts, sentiments, passions and ideas which under its action have been developing in proportion to its transformations, and which will persist as long as private property shall survive.
The law of retaliation introduced into the human brain the germ of the idea of justice, which the division of lands, laying the foundations of private property and real estate, was to fertilize and make fruitful. The law of retaliation taught man to subdue his passion for vengeance and subject it to regulation; property curbed, under the yoke of religion and law, his prehensile instinct. The role of property in the elaboration of justice was so preponderant that it obscured the earlier working of the law of retaliation to the point that a nation as subtle as the Greeks, and minds as keen as those of Hobbes and Locke, did not perceive it. In fact Greek poetry attributed the invention of laws only to the goddesses who preside over the partition and culture of lands. Hobbes thinks that before the establishment of property in a state of nature there is no injustice in whatever a man might do against another. Locke affirms that “where there is no property, there is no injustice, is a proposition as certain as any demonstration of Euclid: the idea of property being a right to a thing, and the idea to which the word injustice corresponds being the invasion or the violation of the right.” [28] The Greeks and these profound thinkers, hypnotized by property and forgetting the human being and his instincts and passions, suppressed the first and principal factor of history. The evolution of man and his societies cannot be understood and explained if we do not take account of the actions and reactions, one upon another, of human energies and economic and social forces.
The equalitarian spirit of primitive men, to overcome the passion of vengeance, had not and could not have found anything but the law of retaliation. On the occasions of the divisions of food, booty and lands, this same equalitarian spirit required imperatively equal parts for all, “that all might have the same things,” according to the formula of Theseus. Blow for blow, equal compensation for the wrong caused, and equal parts in the distribution of food and of lands were the only ideas of justice that primitive men could conceive. An idea of justice, which the Pythagorians expressed by the axiom “Not to overpass the equilibrium of the balance,” which as soon as it was invented became the attribute of justice.
But the idea of justice, which at its origin is but a manifestation of the equalitarian spirit, goes on, under the action of the property which it helps establish, to sanction the inequalities which property engenders among men.
Property, in fact, can only be consolidated by acquiring the right to set aside the prehensile instinct, and this right once acquired becomes an independent and automatic social force, which dominates man and turns against him.
The right of property conquers such a legitimacy, that: Aristotle identifies justice with respect for the laws which protect it, and injustice with the violation of these same laws; that the declaration of the rights of man and the citizen, of the bourgeois revolutionists of 1789 erects it into a “natural and inalienable right of man” (Article II); and that Pope Leo XIII in his famous encyclical on the condition of the laborers transforms it into a dogma of the Catholic Church. Matter leads the spirit.
The barbarian had substituted property for the shedding of blood. Property substituted itself for man, who in civilized societies possesses no rights but those conferred upon him by his property. Justice, like those insects which as soon as born devour their mother, destroys the equalitarian spirit which engendered it, and sanctions the enslavement of man.
The Communist Revolution, by suppressing private property and giving “to all the same things,” will emancipate man and will bring to life the equalitarian spirit. Then the ideas of justice, which have haunted human heads since the establishment of private property, will vanish – the most frightful nightmare which ever tortured sad civilized humanity.
Top of the page
<< Chapter 2 | Chapter 4 >>
Footnotes
1. Curses are not idle words for the barbarian; the word, the verb, is for him endowed with irresistible power. The gods themselves obeyed the imprecations of mortals. The Jews like the Chinese, condemned to death him who had cursed his father or mother. (Exodus XXI, 17.) Catholicism in giving the confessor the power of binding and loosing sins on earth and in heaven by the aid of a formula, reproduces the primitive idea of savages on the power of the word.
2. Cain, driven from his clan after the murder of Abel, laments: “My punishment is greater than I can bear. Behold, thou hast driven me from this land. I shall be a wanderer and fugitive over the earth and it shall come to pass that whosoever findeth me shall slay me.” (Genesis IV, 13, 14.) Exile is one of the most terrible punishments of ancient societies.
3. Collective responsibility still seems so natural in the Middle Ages that the ordinances of Edward I of England make the whole of the Trade Guild responsible for the crime of one of its members.
4. Sir Gardner Wilkinson, Dalmatia and Montenegro, 1848.
5. Lord Carnarvon. Reminiscences of Athens and Morea.
6. Jesus Christ, St. Paul and the Apostles, shared with the savages this opinion; diseases were according to them the work of the demon, the enemy of the human race. (Matthew IX, 33; Luke XI, 14; Acts XIX, 12.) This superstition for centuries kindled in Christian Europe the pyres of sorceresses.
7. Volney’s General Observations on the Indians of America, 1820.
8. This absence of the word “law” had struck the ancients: the historian Josephus observes with astonishment that in the Iliad the word nomos, which later was to signify law, is never employed in that sense.
9. The barbarian does not stop half way. He carries logic to its final consequences: once he had the idea of detaching the culprit from the collectivity of the family to make him carry the responsibility of his action, he pushed this idea to the point of detaching from the collectivity of the body, the organ which had committed the act, to be punished. Diodorus of Sicily reports that the Egyptians punished the violation of a free woman by mutilation. They amputated the nose of an adulterous woman in order to deprive her of the attractions which she had employed for seduction. They cut off the hands of counterfeiters and forgers of public seals, “in order to chastise the portion of the body with which the crime had been committed.” In almost all countries the hand of thieves have been cut off for petty larceny not involving capital punishment.
10. “When among the Itelmen of Kamchatka,” relates a traveler of the eighteenth century, G. Steller, “a murder is committed, the family of the victim applies to that of the murderer and demands that he be given up. If the latter consents and gives him up he is killed in the same fashion in which he killed his victim; if it refuses, that means that the family approves of the murder. Then war is declared between the two families. That which triumphs, massacres all the males of the vanquished family and carries into slavery the women and girls.” In Polynesia, when the culprit did not submit passively to the vengeance of the offended party, his own family constrained him by force. (Ellis, Polynesian Researches)
11. Demosthenes in one of his civil pleas cites an article of Draco’s laws which gave every Athenian the right of life and death over five women – his wife, his daughter, his mother, his sister and his concubine. The Gragas (gray geese), which are the ancient laws of Iceland, sanctioned this same right, adding to it adopted daughters. Later on in Solon’s epoch, customs being transformed, the laws of appeared too bloodthirsty, yet they were never abolished “but by the tacit consent of the Athenians,” says Aulus Gellius, they were, so to speak, obliterated.”
The first laws, precisely because they fix and sanction the customs of ancestors, were never abrogated they persisted although they were contradicted by new laws. Thus the code of Manu preserves, side by side, the law establishing the equal division of goods between brothers and that which established the right of primogeniture. The law of the twelve tables at Rome did not abolish the royal laws. The stone on which the latter were engraved was inviolable; at the very most the least scrupulous believed themselves authorized to turn it over.
12. If we recall the mythological legends of Greece, it seems that when the father’s authority replaced the mother’s in the family the order of succession was thrown into serious disorder. All the sons, who in the matriarchal family did not inherit, claimed to have equal rights to take possession of the goods of the deceased father and the management of the household. It was only after many internal struggles that the right of primogeniture succeeded in establishing itself and it could only maintain itself by calling religious superstition to its assistance. The father was accounted to live. He continued to administer his property and gave orders to his successor. Obedience was rendered not to the living heir but to the deceased father. Then by the side of the tribal religion were established the family cults which Fustel de Coulange supposes to have been primitive
13. At a time when historians believed that every nation and every race had its own special manners and customs, it was claimed that the wehrgeld was of German origin and that the Greeks and Latins had never descended to this barbarous means of compounding for blood by money. Nothing is further from the truth.
The Eighth Table of the Roman Law of the Twelve Tables says:
- Against him who breaks a limb and makes no amends, retaliation
- For the breaking of a freeman’s tooth a penalty of three hundred aces; of a slave’s one hundred and fifty
- For an insult a penalty of twenty-five aces.
Ajax having been sent with Ulysses and Phoenix on an embassy to Achilles to influence him to accept Agamemnon’s presents and appease his wrath, said to Ulysses: “Yet doth a man accept recompense of his brother’s murderer or for his dead son; and so the man-slayer for a great price abideth in his own land, and the kinsman s heart is appeased, and his proud soul, when he hath taken the recompense.” (Iliad, IX, 632-6)
14. Krasinski, Montenegro and the Slavonians of Turkey, 1853.
15. The establishment of the wehrgeld carries with it this curious consequence, which Mallet observes among the Scandinavians. Since the death of a freeman and wounds on his hand, his foot, etc., are subject to a price schedule, the body of a debtor may be held responsible for the debt contracted. It is this reasoning which in all countries has given the creditor the right to mutilate and enslave his debtor.
16. “Nature,” said Hobbes, “has given each of us an equal right over all things. In the state of nature each has the right to do and possess all that pleases him; whence comes the common saying that nature has given all things to all men, and from which it is gathered that in the state of nature utility is the rule of Right.” (De Cive, Book I, Chapter I) Hobbes and the philosophers who speak of natural right, natural religion, natural philosophy are lending to Dame Nature their notions of right, religion and philosophy, which are anything but natural. What should we say of the mathematician who should attribute to nature his concepts of the metric system and should philosophize on the natural meter and millimeter? Measures of length, laws, gods and philosophical ideas are of human manufacture; men have invented them, modified them and transformed them, according to their private and social needs.
17. Proudhon, who had taken to himself the proprietorship of Brissot’s phrase, committed the game error when he gave for a social axiom his “property is robbery,” for robbery is the consequence of property and not its determining cause. The historic origin of property, whether personal or real, proves that it never took, at its beginning a character of spoliation; this could not have been otherwise.
18. The word prehensile exists in zoological language. Webster defines it, adapted to seizing or grasping.
19. The rude savages of Terre del Fuego define the limits of their territories by broad vacant spaces. Caesar reports that the Suevi took pride in surrounding themselves with vast solitudes. The Germans gave the name of bordering forest and the Slavs the name of protecting forest to the neutral space between two or more tribes. Morgan says that in North America this space was narrower between tribes of the same language, ordinarily allied by marriage, and otherwise, and wider between tribes of different tongues.
20. A fragment of Heraclides of Pontus, a disciple of Plato, contains a description of the communistic feasts of the Dorians. Every person at the andreias (the common repast of the men) received an equal share, except the archon, the member of the council of the elders; he had the right to a quadruple portion – one in his quality as a citizen, a second in his quality as president of the table and two others for the support of the hall, these probably must have been reserved for his servants. Each table was under the special supervision of a matriarch, who distributed food to the guests. This function of distributor, reserved to woman, impressed so forcibly the prehistoric Greeks that they personified destiny and the Fates by the goddesses Moira, Aissa and Ceres, whose names signify the part which is received in the distribution of food or booty.
21. Haxthausen relates in his curious journey in Russia that he was in the State House of Jaroslaf certain rods which were revered as the sacred units of land measurement. The length of the rods was in inverse ratio to the quality of the land, the shortest served to measure the best lands and the longest for lands of inferior quality. “all the portions are in this way unequal in size and equal in value.”
22. The root or in the Greek language contributes to the formation of three groups of words, which seem contradictory, but which are complementary and connect themselves with the division of land:
- The Idea of going in a straight line:
or-thos, straight, erect, vertical, true, equitable, just;
or-me, movement upward, soaring, leaping, passion;
or-numi and or-ino, to set in motion, to excite;
or-ugma, ditch, subterranean gallery;
or-ux, pick-axe;
or-thoo, to make straight, to redress;
or-thosios, Zeus-Jupiter, who redresses wrongs. - The idea of bounding, of limiting:
or-os, boundary, frontier;
or-izo, to bound, to limit, to define, to enact;
or-ios, that which serves as a limit;
Zeus or-ios, Jupiter, protector of boundaries;
theos or-ios, the god of boundaries. - The idea of vigilance:
our-os, guard, guardian;
pul-or-os, guardian of gates;
tima-or-os, he who punishes, who avenges;
or-omoi, to watch over, to guard.
| 23. | Nemo, to share, to distribute, then to treat some one according to law; nome, pasturage, portion, lot; nomas, nomad, vagabond, who wanders feeding a herd; nomos, originally pasturage – then sojourn, dwelling, portion – and finally usage, custom, law; nomizo, to observe the custom, the law; to think, to believe, to judge; nomisma, a thing established by custom, by law, religious practice, money; nomisis, worship, religion, belief; nemesis, wrath of the gods against those who infringe on the rights of another, the goddess of distributive justice; epi-nomia, right to pasturage; pro-nomia, privilege. |
24. Plato In his Laws says: “Our first law should be this, that no one touch the boundary which separates a field from that of his neighbor, for it should remain unmoved, that no one should think of shaking the stone, which he has bound himself by an oath to leave in its place.”
25. Agriculture had a decisive influence over th development of the mentality of primitive men. Thus, for example, it was this which modified their opinions on the division of time. The hours, which in Greek mythology designated not the divisions of the day, but those of the year, were originally two in number; the hour of spring-time, Thallo, whose name signifies to be verdant, to bloom; and the hour of autumn, Karpus, which means fruit. Spring and autumn are the important seasons for the savage, who does not cultivate the land, but who lives on the fruits which it bears spontaneously. After the division of the lands, the number of hours is Increased to three, – Dike, Eunomia, whose name signifies good pasturage, equity, observation of custom, and Eirene, which means peace. Hesiod describes them in his Theogony as giving customs to men and establishing among them peace and Justice, like Demeter Thesmophora.
As long as men live by hunting, fishing and gathering wild fruits, it is a matter of indifference to them to be at war during one season rather than another, but when they have fields to sow and to reap, they are obliged to suspend during certain seasons of the year the wars of tribe against tribe, and to establish truces for the sowing times, the harvests and other agricultural labors. They then created the hour of peace, Eirene, and put these truces under her protection. The Catholics of the Middle Ages placed them under that of God and called them “Truces of God.” Eirene is derived from the word eiro, to speak. At Lacedaemon they gave the name eiren to the young man more than twenty years of age who had a right to speak in public assemblies. During the periods consecrated to the labors of the fields, the disputes between tribes and villages were settled no longer by arms, but by speech, – whence is derived Eirene, the goddess who speaks.
The cultivation of the land might have had an influence over writing, as would seem to be proved by the ancient manner of writing employed by the Greeks, Chinese, Scandinavians, etc., which consists in writing alternately from left to right and right to left, – returning on one’s steps like the oxen which plow.
26. Erinnys might have come from erion, wool, from which is derived eriole, wool stealer.
27. The mythological gallery of Millin (Paris, 1811) reproduces numerous medallions, vases, cameos, bas-reliefs, etc., on which Demeter is pictured with her various attributes.
28. Hobbes: De Cive, remark added to the French translation of Sorbières. Locke: Essay on the Human Understanding.
N OF THE IDEA OF JUSTICE
THE ORIGIN OF THE IDEA OF GOOD
- Formation of the Heroic Ideal
- Decomposition of the Heroic Ideal
- The Bourgeois Moral Ideal
