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Updated: June 13, 2025
Paul Natorp, the distinguished Plato-scholar in Germany, the short-lived pathetically eloquent M. Guyau in France, and, above all, Benedetto Croce, the large encyclopaedic mind in Italy, have influenced or led much of this movement, which, in questions of Religion, has assuredly not reached the deepest and most tenacious teachings of life.
His culture and learning were French even more than German. He was steeped in Montaigne, to whom he has paid a glowing tribute in “Schopenhauer as Educationalist.” He was a careful student of the great French classics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He read and annotated Guyau, with whom he had many points in common.
Bergson's thought, although in many respects it is strikingly original and novel, is, nevertheless, the continuation, if not the culmination, of a movement in French philosophy which we can trace back through Boutroux, Guyau, Lachelier and Ravaisson to Maine de Biran, who died in 1824.
Yet the evidence appears to satisfy M. Guyau, and is used by him to reinforce his argument. The anthropologist and psychologist, then, must either admit that their evidence is no better than ours, if as good, or must say that they only believe evidence as to 'possible' facts. They thus constitute themselves judges of what is possible, and practically regard themselves as omniscient.
"The whole grace of virginity," wrote another philosopher, Guyau, "is ignorance. Virginity, like certain fruits, can only be preserved by a process of desiccation." Mérimée pointed out the same desiccating influence of virginity. In a letter dated 1859 he wrote: "I think that nowadays people attach far too much importance to chastity.
Another curious example may be cited. M. Guyau, in his work 'The Non-Religion of the Future, argues that Religion is doomed. 'Poetic genius has withdrawn its services, witness Tennyson and Browning! 'Among orthodox Protestant nations miracles do not happen. But 'marvellous facts' do happen. These 'marvellous facts, accepted by M. Guyau, are what Hume called 'miracles, and advised the 'wise and learned' to laugh at, without examination. They were not facts, and could not be, he said. Now to M. Guyau's mind they are facts, and therefore are not miracles. He includes 'mental suggestion taking place even at a distance. A man 'can transmit an almost compulsive command, it appears nowadays, by a simple tension of his will. If this be so, if 'will' can affect matter from a distance, obviously the relations of will and matter are not what popular science tells us that they are. Again, if this truth is now established, and won from that region which Hume and popular science forbid us to investigate, who knows what other facts may be redeemed from that limbo, or how far they may affect our views of possibilities? The admission of mental action, operative
As for the agnostic writer on the Non-Religion of the Future, M. Guyau actually illustrates the Resurrection of our Lord by an American myth about a criminal, of whom a hallucinatory phantasm appeared to each of his gaol companions, separately and successively, on a day after his execution! For this prodigious fable no hint of reference to authority is given.
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