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CHAPTER XII

CONCLUSIONS

I

E have already, in the course of this inquiry, become familiar with most of the conclusions to be drawn therefrom, and it will therefore suffice to recall the most important in a brief recapitulation.

At the very beginning of the old religions, and especially at the beginning of that which seems to be the most ancient of all and the source of all the rest, there is no secret doctrine and no revelation; there is only the prehistoric tradition of a metaphysics which we should today call purely rationalistic. The confession of absolute ignorance as regards the nature, attributes, character, purposes, and existence even of the First Cause or the God of Gods. is public and explicit. It is a vast negation; we know nothing, we can know nothing, we never shall know anything, for it may be that God Himself does not know everything.

This unknown First Cause is of necessity infinite, for the infinite alone is unknowable, and

the God of Gods would no longer be the God of Gods, and could not understand Himself, unless He were all things. His infinity inevitably gives rise to pantheism; for if the First Cause is everything, everything partakes in the First Cause, and it is not possible to imagine anything that can set bounds to it and is not the Cause itself, or part of the Cause, or does not proceed from the Cause. From this pantheism proceeds in its turn the belief in immortality and the ultimate optimism, for, the Cause being infinite in space and time, nothing that is of it or in it can be destroyed without destroying a part of the Cause itself; which is impossible, since it would still be the nothingness that sought to circumscribe it, just as nothing could be eternally unhappy without condemning part of itself to eternal unhappiness.

Absolute agnosticism, with its consequences; the infinity of the divine, pantheism, universal immortality, and ultimate optimism—here is the point of departure of the great primitive teachers, pure intellects, and implacable logicians, such as were the mysterious Atlanteans, if we may believe the traditions of the occultists; and would not the very same point of departure impose itself to-day upon those who should seek to found a new religion which would not be repugnant to the ever-increasing exactions of human reason?

2

But if all is God and necessarily immortal, it is none the less certain that men and things and worlds disappear. From this moment we bid good-by to the logical consequences of the great confession of ignorance to enter the labyrinth of theories which are no longer unassailable, and which, for that matter, are not at the outset put before us as revelations but as mere metaphysical hypotheses, as speculations of great antiquity, born of the necessity of reconciling the facts with the too abstract and too rigid deductions of human reason.

As a matter of fact, according to these hypotheses man, the world and the universe do not perish; they disappear and reappear alternately throughout eternity, in virtue of Maya, the illusion of ignorance. When they no longer exist for us or for any one, they still exist virtually, where no one sees them; and those who have ceased to see them do not cease to exist as though they saw them. Similarly, when God sets bounds to Himself, in order to manifest Himself and to become conscious of a portion of Himself, He does not cease to be infinite and unknowable to Himself. He seems for a moment to place Himself at the point of view or within the comprehension of those whom He has quickened in His bosom.

This last hypothesis must in the beginning have been, as it is at present and always will be, a mere makeshift; but there was a time when it became a sort of dogma which, eagerly welcomed by the imagination, soon completely replaced the great primitive negation. From that moment, despairing of knowing the unknowable, man duplicated and subdivided and multiplied it, relegating the inconceivable First Cause to the inaccessible Infinite, and henceforth concerned himself only with those secondary causes by which it manifests itself and

acts.

He does not ask himself, or rather he does not dare to ask, how, the First Cause being essentially unknowable, its manifestations could be considered as known, although it had not ceased to be unknowable; and we enter the vast vicious circle in which mankind must resign itself to live under penalty of condemning itself to an eternal negation, an eternal immobility and ignorance and silence.

Unable to know God in Himself, man contents himself with seeking and questioning Him in His creatures, and above all in mankind. He thought to find Him there, and the religions were born, with their gods, their cults, their sacrifices, their beliefs, their moralities, their hells and heavens. The relationship which binds them all to the unknown Cause is

more and more forgotten, reappearing only at certain moments, as it reappeared, for example, long afterwards, in Buddhism, in the metaphysicians, in the ancient mysteries and occult traditions. But despite this oblivion, and thanks to the idea of this First Cause, necessarily one, invisible, intangible, and inconceivable, which we are consequently compelled to regard as purely spiritual; two of the great principles of the primitive religion, which subsequently permeated those religions which sprang from it, have survived, deep-rooted and tenacious of life, secretly repeating, beneath all outward appearances, that the essence of all things is one and that the spirit is the source of all, the only certitude, the sole eternal reality.

3

From these two principles, which at bottom are only one, proceeds all that primitive ethic which became the great ethic of humanity: unity being the ideal and sovereign good, evil means separation, division, and multiplicity, and matter is finally but one result of separation or multiplicity. To return to unity, therefore, we must strip ourselves, must escape from matter, which is but an inferior form or degradation of the spirit.

It was thus that man found, or believed that