 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer visit LibriVox.org This reading by Karl Manchester 2007 God and the State By Mikhail Bakunin Written between February and March 1871 First published posthumously in 1882 this translation by Benjamin R. Tucker first published 1916 introduction Bakunin's most famous work Published in various lengths at times ending mid-second section with the line This is the sense in which we are really anarchists. This version is the most complete form of the work published here the two originally titled Dear Elita Bakunin intended it to be part of the second portion to a larger work Named the Nauto Germanic Empire and the social revolution Nauto Germanic Empire is in reference to a treaty betwixt Russia and Germany at the time But the work was never completed What follows is a small collection of passages representative of the primary themes of the book God being everything the real world and man are nothing God being truth justice goodness beauty power and life Man is falsehood iniquity evil ugliness impotence and death God being master man is the slave While Satan is the eternal rebel the first free thinker and the emancipator of worlds The liberty of man consists solely in this That he obeys natural laws because he has himself recognized them as such Science is the compass of life But it is not life itself What I preach then is to a certain extent the revolt of life against science Or rather against the government of science Not to destroy science that would be high treason to humanity But to remand it to its place So that it can never leave it again End of introduction This is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer visit LibriVox.org This reading by Karl Manchester 2007 God and the state by Mikhail Bakunin Chapter one Who is right the idealists or the materialists? The question once stated in this way hesitation becomes impossible Undoubtedly the idealists are wrong and the materialists Right Yes, facts are before ideas Yes, the ideal as Proudhon said is but a flower whose root lies in the material conditions of existence Yes, the whole history of humanity Intellectual and moral political and social is but a reflection of its economic history All branches of modern science of true and disinterested science Concur in proclaiming this grand truth fundamental and decisive The social world properly speaking the human world in short humanity Is nothing other than the last and supreme development At least on our planet and as far as we know the highest manifestation of animality But as every development necessarily implies a negation That of its base or point of departure Humanity is at the same time and essentially the deliberate and gradual negation of the animal element in man And it is precisely this negation as rational as it is natural And rational only because natural At once historical and logical As inevitable as the development and realization of all the natural laws in the world That constitutes and creates the ideal the world of intellectual and moral convictions ideas Yes, our first ancestors our adams and our eaves were if not gorillas very near relatives of gorillas Omnivorous intelligent and ferocious beasts Endowed in a higher degree than the animals of other species with two precious faculties The power to think and the desire to rebel These faculties combining their progressive action in history represent the essential factor The negative power in the positive development of human animality and create consequently all that constitutes humanity in man The bible which is a very interesting and here and there very profound book When considered as one of the oldest surviving manifestations of human wisdom and fancy Expresses this truth very naively in its myth of original sin Jehovah who have all the good gods adored by men was certainly the most jealous the most vain the most ferocious The most unjust the most bloodthirsty the most despotic and the most hostile to human dignity and liberty Jehovah had just created adam and eve to satisfy. We know not what caprice No doubt to while away his time which must weigh heavy on his hands in his eternal egoistic solitude Or that he might have some new slaves He generously placed at their disposal the whole earth With all its fruits and animals and set but a single limit to this complete enjoyment He expressly forbade them from touching the fruit of the tree of knowledge He wished therefore that man destitute of all understanding of himself should remain an eternal beast Ever on all fours before the eternal god his creator and his master But here steps in Satan the eternal rebel the first free thinker and the emancipator of worlds He makes man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience He emancipates him stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty and humanity In urging him to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge We know what followed The good god whose foresight which is one of the divine faculties Should have warned him of what would happen flew into a terrible and ridiculous rage He cursed Satan man and the world created by himself Striking himself so to speak in his own creation as children do when they get angry And not content with smiting our ancestors themselves He cursed them in all the generations to come innocent of the crime committed by their forefathers Our catholic and Protestant theologians look upon that as very profound and very just Precisely because it is monstrously iniquitous and absurd Then remembering that he was not only a god of vengeance and wrath But also a god of love after having tormented the existence of a few milliards of poor human beings And condemned them to an eternal hell He took pity on the rest and to save them and reconcile his eternal and divine love with his eternal and divine anger Always greedy for victims and blood He sent into the world as an expiatory victim his only son that he might be killed by men That is called the mystery of the redemption the basis of all the christian religions Still if the divine saviour had saved the human world But no In the paradise promised by christ as we know such being the formal announcement the elect will number very few The rest the immense majority of the generations present in to come will burn eternally in hell In the meantime to console us god ever just ever good Hands over the earth to the government of the napoleon the third's of the william the first's Of the ferdinands of austria and of the alexanders of all the russias Such are the absurd tales that are told and the monstrous doctrines that are taught in the full light of the 19th century In all the public schools of europe at the express command of the government They call this civilizing the people Is it not plain that all these governments are systematic poisoners interested stupefiers of the masses? I have wondered from my subject Because anger gets hold of me whenever i think of the base and criminal means which they employ to keep the nations in perpetual slavery Undoubtedly that they may be the better able to fleece them Of what consequence are the crimes of all the troppans in the world? Compared with this crime of treason against humanity committed daily in broad day Over the whole surface of the civilized world by those who dare call themselves the guardians and fathers of the people I return to the myth of original sin God admitted that satan was right He recognized that the devil did not deceive adam and eve in promising them knowledge and liberty as a reward for the Act of disobedience which he had induced them to commit For immediately they had eaten of the forbidden fruit god himself said see bible Behold man is become as of the gods knowing both good and evil Prevent him therefore from eating of the fruit of eternal life lest he become immortal like ourselves Let us disregard now the fabulous portion of this myth and consider it's true meaning which is very clear Man has emancipated himself. He has separated himself from animality and constituted himself a man He has begun his distinctively human history and development by an act of disobedience and science That is by rebellion and by thought Three elements or if you like three fundamental principles constitute the essential condition of all human development collective or individual in history one human animality two thought and three rebellion To the first properly corresponds social and private economy To the second science to the third liberty Idealists of all schools aristocrats and bourgeois Theologians and metaphysicians politicians and moralists Religionists philosophers or poets not forgetting the liberal economists unbounded worshipers of the ideal as we know Are much offended when told that man with his magnificent intelligence his sublime ideas and his boundless aspirations Is like all else existing in the world nothing but matter only a product of vile matter We may answer that the matter of which materialists speak Matter spontaneously and eternally mobile active productive matter chemically or organically determined and manifested by the properties of forces mechanical physical animal and intelligence which necessarily belong to it That this matter has nothing in common with the vile matter of the idealists The latter a product of their false abstraction is indeed a stupid inanimate immobile thing incapable of giving birth to the smallest product A capitol mortuum an ugly fancy in contrast to the beautiful fancy which they call God As the opposite of this supreme being matter their matter Stripped by that which constitutes its real nature necessarily represents supreme nothingness They have taken away intelligence life all its determining qualities active relations or forces motion itself without which matter would not even have weight Leaving it nothing but impenetrability and absolute immobility in space They have attributed all these natural forces properties and manifestations to the imaginary being created by their abstract fancy Then into changing roles they have called this product of their imagination this phantom this god who is nothing supreme being And as a necessary consequence have declared that the real being matter the world is nothing After which they gravely tell us that this matter is incapable of producing anything Not even of setting itself in motion and consequently must have been created by their god At the end of this book I exposed the fallacies and truly revolting absurdities to which one is inevitably led By this imagination of a god Let him be considered as a personal being the creator and organizer of worlds Or even as impersonal a kind of divine soul spread over the whole universe and constituting thus its eternal principle Or let him be an idea infinite and divine always present and active in the world and always manifested by the totality of material and definite beings Here I shall deal with one point only The gradual development of the material world as well as of organic animal life and of the historically progressive intelligence of man Individually or socially is perfectly conceivable It is a wholly natural movement from the simple to the complex From the lower to the higher from the inferior to the superior A movement in conformity with all our daily experiences and consequently in conformity also with our natural logic With the distinctive laws of our mind which being formed and developed only by the aid of these same experiences Is so to speak but the mental cerebral reproduction or reflected summary thereof The system of the idealists is quite the contrary of this It is the reversal of all human experiences and of that universal and common good sense Which is the essential condition of all human understanding And which in rising from the simple and unanimously recognized truth that twice two or four To the sublimest and most complex scientific considerations Admitting moreover nothing that has not stood the severest tests of experience or observation of things and facts Becomes the only serious basis of human knowledge Very far from pursuing the natural order from the lower to the higher From the inferior to the superior and from the relatively simple to the more complex Instead of wisely and rationally accompanying the progressive and real movement from the world called inorganic to the world organic vegetable animal And then distinctively human From chemical matter or chemical being to living matter or living being and from living being to thinking being The idealists obsessed blinded and pushed on by the divine phantom, which they have inherited from theology Take precisely the opposite course They go from the higher to the lower From the superior to the inferior from the complex to the simple They begin with god either as a person or as a divine substance or idea And the first step that they take is a terrible fall from the sublime heights of the eternal ideal Into the mire of the material world From absolute perfection into absolute imperfection From thought to being or rather from supreme being to nothing When how and why the divine being eternal infinite absolutely perfect Probably weary of himself decided upon this desperate Salto mortale Is something which no idealist no theologian no metaphysician no poet has ever been able to understand himself or explain to the profane All religions past and present and all the systems of transcendental philosophy hinge on this unique Iniquitous mystery footnote I call it iniquitous because as I believe I have proved in the appendix alluded to This mystery has been and still continues to be the consecration of all the horrors which have been and are being committed in the world I call it unique because all other theological and metaphysical absurdities which debase the human mind are but its necessary consequences end footnote Holy men inspired law givers prophets messiahs have searched it for life and found only torment and death Like the ancient Sphinx it has devoured them because they could not explain it Great philosophers from Heraclitus and Plato down to Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Thicht, Schelling and Hegel Not to mention the Indian philosophers have written heaps of volumes and built systems as ingenious as sublime In which they have said by the way many beautiful and grand things and discovered immortal truths But they have left this mystery the principal object of their transcendental investigations as unfathomable as before The gigantic efforts of the most wonderful geniuses that the world has known and who one after another for at least 30 centuries Have undertaken anew this labor of Sisyphus have resulted only in rendering this mystery still more incomprehensible Is it to be hoped that it will be unveiled to us by the routine speculations of some pedantic disciple of an artificially Warmed over metaphysics at a time when all living and serious spirits have abandoned that ambiguous science born of a compromise Historically explicable no doubt between the unreason of faith and sound scientific reason It is evident that this terrible mystery is inexplicable That is absurd because only the absurd admits of no explanation It is evident that whoever finds it essential to his happiness and life must renounce his reason and return if he can To naive blind stupid faith to repeat with tertiary anus and all sincere believers these words which sum up the very quintessence of theology Credo queer absurdum I believe because it is absurd Then all discussion ceases And nothing remains but the triumphant stupidity of faith But immediately there arises another question How comes an intelligent and well-informed man ever to feel the need of believing in this mystery? Nothing is more natural than that the belief in god the creator regulator judge master cursor saviour and benefactor of the world Should still prevail among the people Especially in the rural districts where it is more widespread than amongst the proletariat of the cities The people unfortunately are still very ignorant and are kept in ignorance by the systematic efforts of all the governments Who consider this ignorance not without good reason as one of the essential conditions of their own power Weighted down by their daily labor deprived of leisure of intellectual intercourse of reading In short of all the means and a good portion of the stimulants that develop thought in men The people generally accept religious traditions without criticism and in a lump These traditions surround them from infancy in all the situations of life And artificially sustained in their minds by a multitude of official poisoners of all sorts priests and laymen Are transformed therein into a sort of mental and moral babbit Too often more powerful even than their natural good sense There is another reason which explains and in some sort justifies the absurd beliefs of the people Namely the wretched situation in which they find themselves fatally condemned by the economic organization of society in the most civilized countries of europe Reduced intellectually and morally as well as materially to the minimum of human existence Can find in their life like a prisoner in his prison without horizon without outlet without even a future if we believe the economists The people would have the singularly narrow souls and blunted instincts of the bourgeois if they did not feel a desire to escape But if escaped there are but three methods Two shimerical and a third real The first two are the dram shop and the church Debortury of the body or debauchery of the mind The third is social revolution Hence i conclude that this last will be much more potent than all the theological Propagandism of the free thinkers to destroy to the last vestige the religious beliefs and disillute habits of the people Beliefs and habits much more intimately connected than is generally supposed In substituting for the at once illusory and brutal Enjoyments of bodily and spiritual licentiousness the enjoyments as refined as they are real of humanity developed in each and all The social revolution alone will have the power to close at the same time all the dram shops and all the churches Till then the people taken as a whole will believe And if they have no reason to believe they will have at least a right There is a class of people who if they do not believe must at least make a semblance of believing This class comprising all the tormentors all the oppressors and all the exploiters of humanity priests Monarchs statesmen Soldiers public and private financiers Officials of all sorts policemen jondahms jailers and executioners monopolists capitalists tax leeches contractors and landlords Lawyers economists politicians of all shades down to the smallest vendor of sweetmeats All will repeat in unison those words of voltair If god did not exist it would be necessary to invent him For you understand the people must have a religion That is the safety valve There exists finally a somewhat numerous class of honest but timid souls who Too intelligent to take the christian dogmas seriously reject them in detail But have neither the courage nor the strength nor the necessary resolution to summarily renounce them altogether They abandon to your criticism all the special absurdities of religion They turn up their noses at all the miracles, but they cling desperately to the principal absurdity The source of all the others To the miracle that explains and justifies all the other miracles the existence of god Their god is not the vigorous and powerful being the brutally positive god of theology It is a nebulous Diaphanous illusory being that vanishes into nothing at the first attempt to grasp it It is a mirage an igneous fatugues That neither warms nor illuminates And yet they hold fast to it and believe that were it to disappear or would disappear with it They are uncertain sickly souls who have lost their reckoning in the present civilization Belonging to neither the present nor the future Pale phantoms eternally suspended between heaven and earth and occupying exactly the same position between the politics of the bourgeois and the socialism of the proletariat They have neither the power nor the wish nor the determination to follow out their thought And they waste their time and pains in constantly endeavoring to reconcile the irreconcilable In public life. These are known as bourgeois socialists With them or against them discussion is out of the question. They are too puny But there are a few illustrious men of whom no one will dare to speak without respect And whose vigorous health strength of mind and good intention. No one will dream of calling in question I need only cite the names of matzini, michelay, quiney, john stewart mill footnote Mr. Stuart mill is perhaps the only one whose serious idealism may be fairly doubted and that for two reasons First that if not absolutely the disciple He is a passionate admirer an adherent of the positive philosophy of august compt A philosophy which in spite of its numerous reservations is really atheistic Second that mr. Stuart mill is english and in england to proclaim oneself an atheist is to ostracize oneself Even at this late day end footnote generous and strong souls great hearts great minds great writers And the first the heroic and revolutionary regenerator of a great nation They are all apostles of idealism and bitter despisers and adversaries of materialism And consequently of socialism also in philosophy as well as in politics Against them then we must discuss this question First let it be remarked that not one of the illustrious men I have just named Nor any other idealistic thinker of any consequence in our day has given any attention to the logical side of this question Properly speaking not one has tried to settle philosophically the possibility of the divine salto mortale From the pure and eternal regions of the spirit into the mire of the material world Have they feared to approach this irreconcilable contradiction and despair of solving it after the failures of the greatest geniuses of history Or have they looked upon it as already sufficiently well settled That is their secret The fact is that they have neglected the theoretical demonstration of the existence of a god And have developed only its practical motives and consequences They have treated it as a fact universally accepted and as such no longer susceptible of any doubt whatever For soul proof thereof limiting themselves to the establishment of the antiquity and this very universality of the belief in god This imposing unanimity in the eyes of many illustrious men and writers to quote only the most famous of them who eloquently expressed it Joseph de Maestra and the great italian patriot Giuseppe Mazzini Is of more value than all the demonstrations of science And if the reasoning of a small number of logical and even very powerful but isolated thinkers is against it So much the worse they say for these thinkers and their logic For their universal consent the general and primitive adoption of an idea has always been considered the most triumphant testimony to its truth The sentiment of the whole world a conviction that is found and maintained always and everywhere cannot be mistaken It must have its root in a necessity absolutely inherent in the very nature of man And since it has been established that all peoples past and present have believed and still believe in the existence of god It is clear that those who have the misfortune to doubt it whatever the logic that led them to this doubt are abnormal exceptions monsters Thus then the antiquity and universality of a belief should be regarded Contrary to all science and all logic as sufficient and unimpeachable proof of its truth Why Until the days of Copernicus and Galileo everybody believed that the sun revolved about the earth Was not everybody mistaken? What is more ancient and more universal than slavery? cannibalism perhaps From the origin of historic society down to the present day there has been always and everywhere exploitation of the compulsory labor of the masses slaves serfs or wage workers by some dominant minority oppression of the people by the church and by the state Must it be concluded that this exploitation and this oppression are necessities absolutely inherent in the very existence of human society? These are examples which show that the argument of the champions of god proves nothing Nothing in fact is as universal or as ancient as the iniquitous and absurd Truth and justice on the contrary are the least universal the youngest features in the development of human society In this fact too lies the explanation of a constant historical phenomenon Namely the persecution of which those who first proclaim the truth have been and continue to be the objects at the hands of the official privileged and interested representatives of universal and ancient beliefs And often also at the hands of the same masses who after having tortured them always end by adopting their ideas and rendering them victorious To us materialists and revolutionary socialists. There is nothing astonishing or terrifying in this historical phenomenon Strong in our conscience in our love of truth at all hazards In that passion for logic which of itself alone constitutes a great power and outside of which there is no thought Strong in our passion for justice and in our unshakable faith in the triumph of humanity over all theoretical and practical bestialities Strong finally in the mutual confidence and support given each other by the few who share our convictions We resign ourselves to all the consequences of this historical phenomenon in which we see the manifestation of a social law as natural As necessary and as invariable as all the other laws which govern the world This law is a logical inevitable consequences of the animal origin of human society For in face of all the scientific, physiological, psychological and historical proofs accumulated at the present day As well as in the face of the exploits of the Germans conquering France which now furnish so striking a demonstration thereof It is no longer possible to really doubt this origin But from the moment that this animal origin of man is accepted all is explained History then appears to us as the revolutionary negation now slow apathetic sluggish now passionate and powerful of the past It consists precisely in the progressive negation of the primitive animality of man by the development of his humanity Man a wild beast cousin of the gorilla has emerged from the profound darkness of animal instinct into the light of the mind Which explains in a wholly natural way all his past mistakes and partially consoles us for his present errors He has gone out from animal slavery and passing through divine slavery a temporary condition between his animality and his humanity He is now marching on to the conquest and realization of human liberty Whence it results that the antiquity of a belief of an idea far from proving anything in its favor Ought on the contrary to lead us to suspect it For behind us is our animality and before us are humanity Human light the only thing that can warm and enlighten us The only thing that can emancipate us give us dignity freedom and happiness and realize fraternity among us Is never at the beginning, but relatively to the epoch in which we live Always at the end of history Let us then never look back. Let us look ever forward for forward is our sunlight forward our salvation If it is justifiable and even useful and necessary to turn back to study our past It is only in order to establish what we have been and what we must no longer be What we have believed and thought and what we must no longer believe or think What we have done and what we must do never more So much for antiquity As for the universality of an era It proves but one thing The similarity if not the perfect identity of human nature in all ages and under all skies And since it establishes that all peoples at all periods of their life have believed and still believe in God We must simply conclude that the divine idea An outcome of ourselves is an error historically necessary in the development of humanity And ask why and how it was produced in history and why an immense majority of the human race still accept it as a truth Until we shall account to ourselves for the manner in which the idea of a supernatural or divine world Was developed and had to be developed in the historical evolution of the human conscience All our scientific conviction of its absurdity will be in vain Until then we shall never succeed in destroying it in the opinion of the majority Because we shall never be able to attack it in the very depths of the hut man being where it had birth Condemned to a fruitless struggle without issue and without end We should forever have to content ourselves with fighting it solely on the surface In its innumerable manifestations whose absurdity will be scarcely beaten down by the blows of common sense Before it will reappear in a new form no less nonsensical While the root of all the absurdities that torment the world belief in God remains intact It will never fail to bring forth new offspring Thus at the present time in certain sections of the higher society Spiritualism tends to establish itself upon the ruins of Christianity It is not only in the interest of the masses It is in that of the health of our own minds that we should strive to understand the historic genesis The succession of causes which developed and produced the idea of God in the consciousness of men In vain shall we call and believe ourselves atheists until we comprehend these courses for until then We shall always suffer ourselves to be more or less governed by the clamours of this universal conscience whose secret we have not discovered And considering the natural weakness of even the strongest individual against the all-powerful influence of the social surroundings that trample him We are always in danger of relapsing sooner or later in one way or another into the abyss of religious absurdity Examples of these shameful conversions are frequent in society today End of chapter one This is a LibriVox recording for more information or to volunteer visit LibriVox This is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer Visit LibriVox.org this reading by Karl Manchester 2007 God and the state by Mikhail Bakunin Chapter two part one I have stated at the chief practical reason of the power still exercised today over the masses by religious beliefs These mystical tendencies do not signify in man so much in aberration of mind As a deep discontent at heart They are the instinctive and passionate protest of the human being against the narrowness the platitudes The sorrows and the shame of a wretched existence For this malady. I have already said there is but one remedy social revolution In the meantime, I have endeavoured to show the cause is responsible for the birth and historical development of religious hallucinations in the human conscience Here it is my purpose to treat this question of the existence of a god or of the divine origin of the world and of man solely from the standpoint of its moral and social utility And I shall say only a few words to better explain my thought regarding the theoretical grounds of this belief All religions with their gods their demigods and their prophets their messiahs and their saints Were created by the credulous fancy of men who had not attained the full development and full possession of their faculties consequently The religious heaven is nothing but a mirage in which man exalted by ignorance and faith discovers his own image But enlarged and reversed that is divinized The history of religion of the birth grandeur and decline of the gods who have succeeded one another in human belief Is nothing therefore, but the development of the collective intelligence and conscience of mankind As fast as they discovered in the course of their historically progressive advance Either in themselves or in external nature a power equality or even any great defect whatever They attributed them to their gods After having exaggerated and enlarged them beyond measure after the manner of children by an act of their religious fancy Thanks to this modesty and pious generosity of believing and credulous men Heaven has grown rich with the spoils of the earth And by a necessary consequence the richer heaven became the more wretched became humanity and the earth God once installed he was naturally proclaimed the cause reason arbiter an absolute disposer of all things The world dense forth was nothing God was all and man his real creator After having unknowingly extracted him from the void bowed down before him worshiped him and avowed himself his creature and his slave Christianity is precisely the religion par excellence Because it exhibits and manifests to the fullest extent the very nature and essence of every religious system Which is the impoverishment enslavement and annihilation of humanity for the benefit of divinity God being everything the real world and man are nothing God being truth justice goodness beauty power and life Man is falsehood iniquity evil ugliness impotence and death God being master man is the slave Incapable of finding justice truth and eternal life by his own effort He can attain them only through a divine revelation But whoever says revelation says revealers messiahs prophets priests and legislators Inspired by God himself And these once recognized as the representatives of divinity on earth as the holy instructors of humanity Chosen by God himself to direct it in the path of salvation Necessarily exercise absolute power All men owe them passive and unlimited obedience For against the divine reason there is no human reason and against the justice of God no terrestrial justice holds Slaves of God men must also be slaves of church and state Insofar as the state is consecrated by the church This truth Christianity better than all other religions that exist or have existed Understood not accepting even the old oriental religions Which included only distinct and privileged nations while Christianity aspires to embrace entire humanity And this truth Roman Catholicism alone amongst all the christian sects has proclaimed and realized with rigorous logic That is why Christianity is the absolute religion the final religion Why the apostolic and roman church is the only consistent legitimate and divine church With all due respect then to the metaphysicians and religious idealists philosophers politicians or poets The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice It is the most decisive negation of human liberty And necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind both in theory and practice Unless then we desire the enslavement and degradation of mankind as the Jesuits desire it as the momias Piotists or Protestant Methodists desire it We may not must not make the slightest concession either to the god of theology or to the god of metaphysics He who in this mystical alphabet begins with a will inevitably end with z He who desires to worship god must harbor no childish illusions about the matter But bravely renounce his liberty and humanity if god is Man is a slave Now man can and must be free Then god does not exist I defy anyone whom so ever to avoid this circle Now therefore let all choose Is it necessary to point out to what extent and in what manner religions debase and corrupt the people They destroy their reason the principal instrument of human emancipation And reduce them to imbecility the essential condition of their slavery They dishonor human labor and make it a sign and source of servitude They kill the idea and sentiment of human justice Ever tipping the balance to the side of triumphant naves Privileged objects of divine indulgence They kill human pride and dignity Protecting only the cringing and humble They stifle in the heart of nations every feeling of human fraternity Filling it with divine cruelty instead All religions are cruel all founded on blood For all rest principally on the idea of sacrifice That is on the perpetual immolation of humanity to the insatiable vengeance of divinity In this bloody mystery man is always the victim and the priest a man also but a man privileged by grace Is the divine executioner That explains why the priests of all religions the best the most humane the gentlest Almost always have at the bottom of their hearts and if not in their hearts in their imaginations in their minds And we know the fearful influence of either on the hearts of men Something cruel and sanguinary None know all this better than our illustrious contemporary idealists They are learned men who know history by heart And as they are at the same time living men great souls penetrated with a sincere and profound love for the welfare of humanity They have cursed and branded all these misdeeds all these crimes of religion with an eloquence unparalleled They reject with indignation all solidarity with the god of positive religions And with his representatives past present and on earth The god whom they adore or whom they think they adore Is distinguished from the real gods of history precisely in this That he is not at all a positive god defined in any way whatever Theologically or even metaphysically He is neither the supreme being of robespierre and jj russo Nor the pantheistic god of spinosa Nor even the at once imminent transcendental and very equivocal god of hegel They take good care not to give him any positive definition whatever Feeling very strongly that any definition would subject him to the dissolving power of criticism They will not say whether he is a personal or impersonal god Whether he created or did not create the world They will not even speak of his divine providence All that might compromise him They content themselves with saying god and nothing more But then what is their god? Not even an idea it is an aspiration It is the generic name of all that seems grand good beautiful noble human to them But why then do they not say man? Ah Because king william of prussia and napoleon the third and all their compiers are likewise men Which bothers them very much Real humanity presents a mixture of all that is most sublime and beautiful with all that is vilest and most monstrous in the world How do they get over this? Why? They call one divine and the other bestial Representing divinity and animality as two poles between which they place humanity They either will not or cannot understand that these three terms are really but one And that to separate them is to destroy them They are not strong on logic And one might say they despise it That is what distinguishes them from the pantheistical and deistical metaphysicians And gives their ideas the character of a practical idealism Drawing its inspiration much less from the severe development of a thought than from the experiences I might almost say the emotions historical and collective as well as individual of life This gives their propaganda an appearance of wealth and vital power, but an appearance only For life itself becomes sterile when paralyzed by a logical contradiction This contradiction lies here They wish god and they wish humanity They persist in connecting two terms which once separated can come together again only to destroy each other They say in a single breath God and the liberty of man God and the dignity justice equality fraternity prosperity of men Regardless of the fatal logic by virtue of which if god exists All these things are condemned to non-existence For if god is he is necessarily the eternal supreme absolute master And if such a master exists man is a slave Now if he is a slave needs a justice nor equality nor fraternity nor prosperity are possible for him In vain flying in the face of good sense and all the teachings of history Do they represent their god as animated by the tenderest love of human liberty A master whoever he may be and however liberal he may desire to show himself Remains nonetheless always a master his existence necessarily implies the slavery of all that is beneath him Therefore if god existed only in one way could he serve human liberty by ceasing to exist A jealous lover of human liberty and deeming it the absolute condition of all that we admire and respect in humanity I reverse the phrase of voltair and say that if god really existed it would be necessary to abolish him The severe logic that dictates these words is far too evident to require a development of this argument And it seems to me impossible that the illustrious men whose names so celebrated and justly respected I have cited should not have been struck by it themselves And should not have perceived the contradiction in which they involve themselves in speaking of god and human liberty at once To have disregarded it. They must have considered this inconsistency or logical license Practically necessary to humanity's well-being Perhaps too while speaking of liberty as something very respectable and very dear in their eyes They give the term a meaning quite different from the conception entertained by us materialists and revolutionary socialists Indeed they never speak of it without immediately adding another word authority A word and a thing which we detest with all our heart What is authority? Is it the inevitable power of the natural laws which manifest themselves in the necessary concatenation and succession of phenomena in the physical and social worlds? Indeed against these laws revolt is not only forbidden. It is even impossible We may misunderstand them or not know them at all But we cannot disobey them because they constitute the basis and fundamental conditions of our existence They envelop us penetrators Regulate all our movements thoughts and acts Even when we believe that we disobey them. We only show their omnipotence Yes, we are absolutely the slaves of these laws But in such slavery there is no humiliation or rather it is not slavery at all For slavery supposes an external master a legislator outside of him whom he commands While these laws are not outside us. They are inherently in us They constitute our being our whole being Physically intellectually and morally we live we breathe we act we think we wish Only through these laws Without them. We are nothing We are not Once then could we derive the power and the wish to rebel against them In his relation to natural laws, but one liberty is possible to man That of recognizing and applying them on an ever-extending scale in conformity with the object of collective and individual emancipation Or humanization which he pursues These laws once recognized exercise an authority which is never disputed by the mass of men One must for instance be at bottom either a fool or a theologian or at least a metaphysician jurist or bourgeois economist to rebel against the law by which twice to make four One must have faith to imagine that fire will not burn nor water drown Except indeed recourse be had to some subterfuge founded in its turn on some other natural law But these revolts or rather these attempts at or foolish fancies of an impossible revolt Are decidedly the exception for in general it may be said that the mass of men in their daily lives Acknowledge the government of common sense That is of the sum of the natural laws generally recognized in an almost absolute fashion The great misfortune is that a large number of natural laws Already established as such by science remain unknown to the masses Thanks to the watchfulness of these tutelary governments that exist As we know only for the good of the people There is another difficulty namely that the major portion of the natural laws connected with the development of human society Which are quite as necessary Invariable fatal as the laws that govern the physical world have not been duly established and recognized by science itself Once they shall have been recognized by science And then from science by means of an extensive system of popular education and instruction Shall have passed into the consciousness of all the question of liberty will be entirely solved The most stubborn authorities must admit that there will be no need either of political organization or direction or legislation Three things which whether they emanate from the will of the sovereign or from the vote of a parliament elected by universal suffrage And even should they conform to the system of natural laws Which has never been the case and never will be the case Are always equally fatal and hostile to the liberty of the masses From the very fact that they impose upon them a system of external and therefore despotic laws The liberty of man consists solely in this That he obeys natural laws because he has himself recognized them as such And not because they have been externally imposed upon him By any extrinsic will whatever divine or human collective or individual Suppose a learned academy composed of the most illustrious representatives of science Suppose this academy charged with legislation and the organization of society And that inspired only by the purest love of truth It frames none but laws in absolute harmony with the latest discoveries of science Well, I maintain for my part that such legislation and such organization would be a monstrosity And that for two reasons First That human science is always unnecessarily imperfect and that comparing what it has discovered with what remains to be discovered We may say that it is still in its cradle So that were we to try to force the practical life of men collective as well as individual Interstrict and exclusive conformity with the latest data of science We should condemn society as well as individuals to suffer martyrdom on a bed of procrustes Which would soon end by dislocating and stifling them life ever remaining an infinitely greater thing than science The second reason is this a society Which should obey legislation emanating from a scientific academy? Not because it understood itself the rational character of this legislation In which case the existence of the academy would become useless But because this legislation emanating from the academy was imposed in the name of a science which it venerated without Comprehending such a society would be a society not of men but of brutes It would be a second edition of those missions in paraguay Which submitted so long to the government of the Jesuits It would surely and rapidly descend to the lowest stage of idiocy But there is still a third reason which would render such a government impossible Namely that a scientific academy Invested with a sovereignty so to speak absolute Even if it were composed of the most illustrious men Would infallibly and soon end in its own moral and intellectual corruption Even today with the few privileges allowed them such is the history of all academies The greatest scientific genius from the moment that he becomes an academician an officially licensed savant Inevitably lapses into sluggishness He loses his spontaneity His revolutionary hardy hood and that troublesome and savage energy characteristic of the grandest geniuses Ever called to destroy old tottering worlds and lay the foundations of new He undoubtedly gains in politeness in utilitarian and practical wisdom what he loses in power of thought In a word he becomes corrupted It is the characteristic of privilege and of every privileged position to kill the mind and heart of men The privileged man whether politically or economically Is a man depraved in mind and heart That is a social law which admits of no exception And is applicable to entire nations as to classes corporations and individuals It is the law of equality the supreme condition of liberty and humanity The principal object of this treatise is precisely to demonstrate this truth in all the manifestations of human life A scientific body to which had been confided the government of society would soon end by devoting itself No longer to science at all but to quite another affair And that affair as in the case of all established powers would be its own eternal perpetuation By rendering the society confided to its care ever more stupid and consequently more in need of its government and direction But that which is true of scientific academies is also true of constituent and legislative assemblies Even those chosen by universal suffrage In the latter case they may renew their composition It is true But this does not prevent the formation in a few years time of a body of politicians Privileged in fact though not in law Who devoting themselves exclusively to the direction of the public affairs of a country Finally form a sort of political aristocracy or oligarchy Witness the united states of america and switzerland Consequently no external legislation and no authority One for that matter being inseparable from the other And both tending to the servitude of society and the degradation of the legislators themselves Does it follow that I reject all authority Far from me such a thought In the matter of boots I refer to the authority of the bootmaker Concerning houses canals or railroads I consult that of the architect or engineer For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor the savant to impose his authority upon me I listen to them freely and with the respect merited by their intelligence their character their knowledge Reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure I do not content myself with consulting authority in any special branch I consult several I compare their opinions and choose that which seems to me the soundest But I recognize no infallible authority Even in special questions Consequently whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such and such an individual I have no absolute faith in any person Such a faith would be fatal to my reason to my liberty and even to the success of my undertakings It would immediately transform me into a stupid slave an instrument of the will and interests of others If I bow before the authority of the specialists and avail my readiness to follow To a certain extent and as long as it may seem to me necessary Their indications and even their directions It is because their authority is imposed upon me by no one neither by men nor by god Otherwise I would repel them with horror and bid the devil take their councils their directions and their services Certain that they would make me pay by the loss of my liberty and self-respect For such scraps of truth wrapped in a multitude of lies as they might give me I bow before the authority of special men because it is imposed upon me by my own reason I am conscious of my inability to grasp in all its details and positive developments any very large portion of human knowledge The greatest intelligence would not be equal to a comprehension of the whole Thence results for science as well as for industry the necessity of the division and association of labor I receive and I give such as human life Each directs and is directed in his turn Therefore there is no fixed and constant authority But a continual exchange of mutual temporary and above all voluntary authority and subordination This same reason forbids me then to recognize a fixed constant and universal authority Because there is no universal man No man capable of grasping in that wealth of detail without which the application of science to life is impossible All the sciences all the branches of social life And if such universality could ever be realized in a single man And if it be wished to take advantage thereof to impose his authority upon us It would be necessary to drive this man out of society Because his authority would inevitably reduce all others to slavery and imbecility I do not think that society ought to maltreat men of genius as it has done hitherto But neither do I think it should indulge them too far Still less accord than any privileges or exclusive rights whatsoever And that for three reasons First because it would often mistake a charlatan for a man of genius Second because through such a system of privileges It might transform into a charlatan even a real man of genius Demoralize him and degrade him And finally because it would establish a master over itself To sum up we recognize then the absolute authority of science Because the sole object of science is the mental reproduction As well considered and systematic as possible of the natural laws inherent in the material Intellectual and moral life of both the physical and the social worlds These two worlds constituting in fact, but one in the same natural world Outside of this only legitimate authority Legitimate because rational and in harmony with human liberty We declare all other authorities false arbitrary and fatal We recognize the absolute authority of science But we reject the infallibility and universality of the savant In our church as in the Protestant church We have a chief an invisible Christ science And like the Protestants more logical even than the Protestants We will suffer neither pope nor council nor conclaves of infallible cardinals Nor bishops nor even priests Our Christ differs from the Protestant and Christian Christ in this That the latter is a personal being ours impersonal The Christian Christ already completed in an eternal past Presents himself as a perfect being While the completion and perfection of our Christ science are ever in the future Which is equivalent to saying that they will never be realized Therefore in recognizing absolute science as the only absolute authority We in no way compromise our liberty I mean by the words absolute science Which would reproduce ideally to its fullest extent and in its infinite detail the universe The system or coordination of all the natural laws manifested by the incessant development of the world It is evident that such a science the sublime object of all the efforts of the human mind Will never be fully and absolutely realized Our Christ then will remain eternally unfinished Which must considerably take down the pride of his licensed representatives among us Against that God the Son in whose name they assume to impose upon as their Insolent and pedantic authority We appeal to God the Father who is the real world real life of which he the Son Is only a two imperfect expression Whilst we real beings living working struggling loving aspiring enjoying and suffering Are its immediate representatives But while rejecting the absolute universal and infallible authority of men of science We willingly bow before the respectable although relative quite temporary and very restricted Authority of the representatives of special sciences Asking nothing better than to consult them by turns and very grateful for such precious information As they may extend to us on condition of their willingness to receive from us on occasions when And concerning matters about which we are more learned than they In general we ask nothing better than to see men endowed with great knowledge Great experience great minds and above all great hearts Exercise over us a natural and legitimate influence Freely accepted and never imposed in the name of any official authority whatsoever Celestial or terrestrial We accept all natural authorities and all influences of fact But none of right For every authority or every influence of right Officially imposed as such becoming directly an oppression and a falsehood Would inevitably impose upon us as I believe I have sufficiently shown slavery and absurdity In a word we reject all legislation all authority And all privileged licensed official and legal influence Even though arising from universal suffrage Convinced that it can only turn to the advantage of a dominant minority of Exploitors against the interests of the immense majority in subjection to them This is the sense in which we are really anarchists The modern idealists understand authority in quite a different way Although free from the traditional superstitions of all the existing positive religions They nevertheless attach to this idea of authority a divine and absolute meaning This authority is not that of a truth miraculously revealed Nor that of a truth rigorously and scientifically demonstrated They base it to a slight extent upon quasi philosophical reasoning And to a large extent also on sentiment ideally abstractly poetical Their religion is as it were a last attempt to divinize all that constitutes humanity in men This is just the opposite of the work that we are doing On behalf of human liberty dignity and prosperity We believe it our duty to recover from heaven the goods which it has stolen and return them to earth They on the contrary endeavoring to commit a final religiously heroic larceny would restore to heaven That divine robber finally unmasked the grandest finest and noblest of humanity's possessions It is now the free thinkers turn to pillage heaven by their audacious piety and scientific analysis The idealists undoubtedly believe that human ideas and deeds In order to exercise greater authority amongst men must be invested with a divine sanction How is this sanction manifested? Not by a miracle as in the positive religions But by the very grandeur of sanctity of the ideas and deeds Whatever is grand, whatever is beautiful, whatever is noble, whatever is just is considered divine In this new religious cult every man inspired by these ideas by these deeds Becomes a priest directly consecrated by God himself And the proof? He needs none beyond the very grandeur of the ideas which he expresses and the deeds which he performs These are so holy that they can have been inspired only by God Such in so few words is their whole philosophy a philosophy of sentiments not of real thoughts A sort of metaphysical pietism This seems harmless But it is not so at all and the very precise very narrow and very barren doctrine Hidden under the intangible vagueness of these poetic forms leads to the same disastrous results That all the positive religions lead to Namely the most complete negation of human liberty and dignity To proclaim as divine all that is grand just noble and beautiful in humanity Is to tacitly admit that humanity of itself would have been unable to produce it That is abandoned to itself its own nature is miserable iniquitous base and ugly Thus we come back to the essence of all religion in other words to the disparagement of humanity for the greater glory of divinity And from the moment that the natural inferiority of man and his fundamental incapacity to rise by his own effort Unaided by any divine inspiration to the comprehension of just and true ideas are admitted It becomes necessary to admit also all the theological political and social consequences of the positive religions From the moment that God the perfect and supreme being is posited face to face with humanity Divine mediators the elect the inspired of God spring from the earth to enlighten direct and govern in his name the human race May we not suppose that all men are equally inspired by God Then surely there is no further use for mediators But this supposition is impossible Because it is too clearly contradicted by the facts It would compel us to attribute to divine inspiration or the absurdities and errors which appear And the horrors follies base deeds and cowardly actions which are committed in the world But perhaps then only a few men are divinely inspired the great men of history The virtuous geniuses as the illustrious Italian citizen and prophet Giuseppe Mazzini called them Immediately inspired by God himself and supported upon universal consent expressed by popular suffrage Dio Epopolo such as these should be called to the government of human societies footnote In London. I once heard monsieur Louis Blanc express almost the same idea The best form of government said he to me Would be that which would invariably call men of virtuous genius to the control of affairs end footnote But here we are again fallen back under the yoke of church and state It is true that in this new organization indebted for his existence like the old political organizations to the grace of God But supported this time at least so far as form is concerned as a necessary concession to the spirit of modern times And just as in the preamble of the imperial decrees of napoleon the third on the Pretended will of the people the church will no longer call itself church It will call itself school What matters it on the benches of this school will be seated not children only There will be found the eternal minor the pupil confessedly forever incompetent to pass his examinations Rise to the knowledge of his teachers and dispense with their discipline the people footnote One day I asked matzini what measures would be taken for the emancipation of the people Once his triumphant unitary republic had been definitely established The first measure he answered will be the foundation of schools for the people And what will the people be taught in these schools? The duties of man sacrifice and devotion But where will you find a sufficient number of professors to teach these things? Which no one has the right or power to teach unless he preaches by example Is not the number of men who find supreme enjoyment in sacrifice and devotion exceedingly limited Those who sacrifice themselves in the service of a great idea obey a lofty passion And satisfying this personal passion outside of which life itself loses all value in their eyes They generally think of something else than building their action into doctrine While those who teach doctrine usually forget to translate it into action For the simple reason that doctrine kills the life the living spontaneity of action Men like matzini in whom doctrine and action form an admirable unity are very rare exceptions In christianity also there have been great men holy men who have really practiced or who at least have passionately tried to practice All that they preached and whose hearts overflowing with love were full of contempt for the pleasures and goods of this world But the immense majority of catholic and protestant priests who by trade have preached and still preach the doctrines of chastity abstinence and renunciation Belied their teachings by their example It is not without reason but because of several centuries experience that among the people of all countries these phrases have become by words As licentious as a priest as gluttonous as a priest as ambitious as a priest As greedy selfish and grasping as a priest It is then established that the professors of the christian virtues Consecrated by the church the priests in the immense majority of cases have practiced quite the contrary of what they have preached This very majority the universality of this fact show that the fault is not to be attributed to them as individuals But to the social position Impossible and contradictory in itself in which these individuals are placed The position of the christian priest involves a double contradiction In the first place that between the doctrine of abstinence and renunciation and the positive tendencies and needs of human nature Tendencies and needs which in some individual cases always very rare may indeed be continually held back Suppressed and even entirely annihilated by the constant influence of some potent intellectual and moral passion Which at certain moments of collective exaltation may be forgotten and neglected for some time by a large mass of men at once But which are so fundamentally inherent in our nature that sooner or later they always resume their rights So that when they are not satisfied in a regular and normal way They are always replaced at last by unwholesome and monstrous satisfaction This is a natural and consequently fatal and irresistible law under the disastrous action of which Inevitably fall all christian priests and especially those of the roman catholic church It cannot apply to the professors that is to the priests of the modern church Unless they are also obliged to preach christian abstinence and renunciation But there is another contradiction common to the priests of both sects This contradiction grows out of the very title and position of the master A master who commands oppresses and exploits is a wholly logical and quite natural personage But a master who sacrifices himself to those who are subordinated to him by his divine or human privilege Is a contradictory and quite impossible being This is the very constitution of hypocrisy so well personified by the pope who while calling himself The lowest servant of the servants of god In tokenware of following the example of christ. He even washes once a year the feet of twelve roman beggars Proclaims himself at the same time vicar of god absolute and infallible master of the world Do I need to recall that the priests of all churches far from sacrificing themselves to the flocks confided to their care Have always sacrificed them exploited them and kept them in the condition of a flock Partly to satisfy their own personal passions and partly to serve the omnipotence of the church Like conditions like causes always produce like effects It will then be the same with the professors of the modern school Divinely inspired and licensed by the state. They will necessarily become Some without knowing it others with full knowledge of the cause Teachers of the doctrine of popular sacrifice to the power of the state and to the profit of the privileged classes Must we then eliminate from society all instruction and abolish all schools Far from it instruction must be spread among the masses without stint Transforming all the churches all those temples dedicated to the glory of god and to the slavery of men Into so many schools of human emancipation But in the first place let us understand each other Schools properly speaking in a normal society founded on equality and on respect for human liberty Will exist only for children and not for adults And in order that they may become schools of emancipation and not of enslavement It will be necessary to eliminate first of all this fiction of god the eternal and absolute enslaver The whole education of children and their instruction must be founded on the scientific development of reason Not on that of faith On the development of personal dignity and independence not on that of piety and obedience On the worship of truth and justice at any cost And above all on the respect for humanity which must replace always and everywhere the worship of divinity The principle of authority in the education of children Constitutes the natural point of departure It is legitimate Necessary when applied to children of a tender age whose intelligence has not yet openly developed itself But as the development of everything and consequently of education implies the gradual negation of the point of departure This principle must diminish as fast as education and instruction advance giving place to increasing liberty All rational education is at bottom nothing but this progressive Emoliation of authority for the benefit of liberty the final object of education Necessarily being the formation of free men full of respect and love for the liberty of others Therefore the first day of the pupil's life if the school takes infants scarcely able as yet to stammer a few words Should be that of the greatest authority at an almost entire absence of liberty But its last day should be that of the greatest liberty and the absolute abolition of every vestige of the animal or divine principle of authority The principle of authority applied to men who have surpassed or attained their majority becomes a monstrosity A flagrant denial of humanity a source of slavery and intellectual and moral depravity Unfortunately paternal governments have left the masses to wallow in an ignorance so profound That it will be necessary to establish schools not only for the people's children, but for the people themselves From these schools will be absolutely eliminated smallest applications or manifestations of the principle of authority They will be schools no longer They will be popular academies in which neither pupils nor masters will be known Where the people will come freely to get if they need it free instruction and in which rich in their own experience They will teach in their turn many things to the professors who shall bring them knowledge which they lack This then will be a mutual instruction an act of intellectual fraternity between the educated youth and the people The real school for the people and for all grown men is life The only grand and omnipotent authority at once natural and rational the only one which we may respect Will be that of the collective and public spirit of a society founded on equality and solidarity And the mutual human respect of all its members Yes, this is an authority which is not at all divine Holy human but before which we shall bow willingly Certain that far from enslaving them it will emancipate men It will be a thousand times more powerful be sure of it than all your divine Theological metaphysical political and judicial authorities established by the church and by the state More powerful than your criminal codes your jailers and your executioners The power of collective sentiment or public spirit is even now a very serious matter The men most ready to commit crimes rarely dare to defy it to openly affront it They will seek to deceive it but will take care not to be rude with it unless they feel the support of a minority Larger or smaller No man however powerful he believes himself will ever have the strength to bear the unanimous contempt of society No one can live without feeling himself sustained by the approval and esteem of at least some portion of society A man must be urged on by an immense and very sincere conviction In order to find courage to speak and act against the opinion of all And never will a selfish depraved and cowardly man have such courage Nothing proves more clearly than this fact the natural and inevitable solidarity This law of sociability Which binds all men together as each of us can verify daily Both on himself and on the men whom he knows But if this social power exists why has it not sufficed hitherto to moralize to humanize men? Simply because hitherto this power has not been humanized itself It has not been humanized because the social life of which it is ever the faithful expression Is based as we know on the worship of divinity Not on respect for humanity On authority not on liberty on privilege Not on equality on the exploitation not on the brotherhood of men On iniquity and falsehood not on justice and truth Consequently it's real action always in contradiction of the humanitarian theories which it professes Has constantly exercised a disastrous and depraving influence It does not repress vices and crimes it creates them its authority is consequently a divine anti-human authority Its influence is mischievous and baleful Do you wish to render its authority and influence beneficent and human? Achieve the social revolution Make all needs really Solidary and cause the material and social interests of each to conform to the human duties of each And to this end there is but one means Destroy all the institutions of inequality Establish the economic and social equality of all And on this basis will arise the liberty the morality the solitary humanity of all I shall return to this the most important question of socialism End footnote End of part one of chapter two This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer visit LibriVox.org This recording by Karl Manchester 2007 God and the state by Mikhail Bakunin Chapter two part two The state will no longer call itself monarchy. It will call itself republic But it will be nonetheless the state That is a tutelage officially and regularly established by a minority of competent men Men of virtuous genius or talent who will watch and guide the conduct of this great Encourageable and terrible child the people The professors of the school and the functionaries of the state will call themselves republicans But they will be nonetheless tutors shepherds and the people will remain what they have been hitherto from all eternity A flock Beware of shearers for where there is a flock There necessarily must be shepherds also to shear and devour it The people in this system will be the perpetual scholar and pupil In spite of its sovereignty wholly fictitious It will continue to serve as the instruments of thoughts wills and consequently interests not its own Between this situation and what we call liberty the only real liberty there is an abyss It will be the old oppression and old slavery under new forms And where there is slavery there is misery brutishness real social materialism Among the privileged classes as well as among the masses In defying human things the idealists always end in the triumph of a brutal materialism And this for a very simple reason The divine evaporates and rises to its own country heaven while the brutal alone remains actually on earth Yes, the necessary consequence of theoretical idealism is practically the most brutal materialism Not undoubtedly among those who sincerely preach it The usual result as far as they are concerned being that they are constrained to see all their efforts struck with sterility But among those who try to realize their precepts in life and in all society so far as it allows itself to be dominated by idealistic doctrines To demonstrate this general fact which may appear strange at first But which explains itself naturally enough upon further reflection Historical proofs are not lacking Compare the last two civilizations of the ancient world the greek and the roman Which is the most materialistic the most natural in its point of departure and the most humanly ideal in its results And doubtedly the greek civilization Which on the country is the most abstractly ideal in its point of departure Sacrificing the material liberty of the man to the ideal liberty of the citizen represented by the abstraction of judicial law and the natural development of human society to the abstraction of the state And which became nevertheless the most brutal in its consequences The roman civilization certainly It is true that the greek civilization like all the ancient civilizations including that of rome Was exclusively national and based on slavery But in spite of these two immense defects the former nonetheless conceived and realized the idea of humanity It ennobled and really idealized the life of men It transformed human herds into free associations of free men It created through liberty the sciences the arts a poetry an immortal philosophy And the primary concepts of human respect With political and social liberty it created free thought At the close of the middle ages during the period of the renaissance The fact that some greek emigrants brought a few of those immortal books into italy Suffice to resuscitate life liberty thought humanity buried in the dark dungeon of catholicism Human emancipation that is the name of the greek civilization And the name of the roman civilization Conquest with all its brutal consequences And its last word the omnipotence of the caesars Which means the degradation and enslavement of nations and of men Today even what is it that kills what is it that crushes brutally materially in all european countries liberty and humanity It is the triumph of the caesarian or roman principle Compare now at two modern civilizations the italian and the german The first undoubtedly represents in its general character materialism The second on the contrary represents idealism in the most abstract most pure and most transcendental form Let us see what are the practical fruits of the one and the other Italy has already rendered immense services to the cause of human emancipation She was the first to resuscitate and widely apply the principle of liberty in europe and to restore to humanity its titles to nobility Industry commerce poetry the arts the positive sciences and free thought Crushed since by three centuries of imperial and papal despotism And dragged in the mud by her governing bourgeoisie She reappears today. It is true in a very degraded condition in comparison with what she once was And yet how much she differs from germany in italy in spite of this decline Temporary let us hope one may live and breathe humanly surrounded by a people which seems to be born for liberty Italy even bourgeois italy can point with pride to men like matzini and gary baldy In germany one breathes the atmosphere of an immense political and social slavery philosophically explained and accepted by a great people with deliberate resignation and free will Her heroes i speak always of present germany not of the germany of the future Of aristocratic bureaucratic political and bourgeoisie germany not of the germany of the proletaires Her heroes are quite the opposite of matzini and gary baldy They are william the first that ferocious and ingenious representative of the protestant god messes bismarck and malta generals mantafal and verda In all her international relations germany from the beginning of her existence has been slowly systematically invading conquering ever ready to extend her own voluntary enslavement into the territory of her neighbors And since her definitive establishment as a unitary power She has become a menace a danger to the liberty of entire europe Today germany is civility brutal and triumphant To show how theoretical idealism incessantly and inevitably changes into practical materialism One needs only to cite the example of all the christian churches and naturally first of all that of the apostolic and roman church What is there more sublime in the ideal sense more disinterested more separate from all the interests of this earth Than the doctrine of christ preached by that church And what is there more brutally materialistic than the constant practice of that same church since the eighth century From which dates her definitive establishment as a power What has been and still is the principal object of all her contests with the sovereigns of europe Her temporal goods her revenues first and then her temporal power Her political privileges We must do her the justice to acknowledge that she was the first to discover in modern history This incontestable but scarcely christian truth that wealth and power the economic exploitation and the political oppression of the masses Are the two inseparable terms of the reign of divine ideality on earth Wealth consolidating and augmenting power power ever discovering and creating new sources of wealth And both assuring better than the martyrdom and faith of the apostles Better than divine grace the success of the christian propagandism This is a historical truth And the protestant churches do not fail to recognize it either I speak of course of the independent churches of england america and switzerland Not of the subjected churches of germany the latter have no initiative of their own They do what their masters their temporal sovereigns who are at the same time their spiritual chieftains Order them to do It is well known that the protestant propagandism especially in england and america Is very intimately connected with the propagandism of the material commercial interests of those two great nations And it is also known that the objects of the latter propagandism Is not at all the enrichment and material prosperity of the countries into which it penetrates in company with the word of god But rather the exploitation of those countries with a view to the enrichment and material prosperity of certain classes Which in their own country are very covetous and very pious at the same time In a word it is not at all difficult to prove history in hand that the church That all the churches christian and non christian By the side of their spiritualistic Propagandism and probably to accelerate and consolidate the success thereof Have never neglected to organize themselves into great corporations for the economic exploitation of the masses Under the protection and with the direct and special blessing of some divinity or other That all the states Which originally as we know with all their political and judicial institutions and their dominant and privileged classes Have been only temporal branches of these various churches Of likewise had principally in view this same exploitation for the benefit of lay minorities Indirectly sanctioned by the church Finally and in general that the action of the good god and of all the divine idealities on earth has ended at last Always and everywhere in founding the prosperous materialism of the few over the fanatical and constantly famishing idealism of the masses We have a new proof of this in what we see today With the exception of the great hearts and great minds whom i have before referred to as misled Who are today the most obstinate defenders of idealism? In the first places all the sovereign courts in france until lately Napoleon III and his wife madame eugenie all their former ministers courtiers and ex-martials From rua and basane to fleury and pietrie the men and women of this imperial world Who have so completely idealized and saved france Their journalists and their savants the gerardin the du vernois the veillot the le verrier the duma the black phalanx of jesuits and jesuitesses in every garb the whole upper and middle bourgeoisie of france The doctrinaire liberals and the liberals without doctrine the guiseaux the tiere the joule fave the pelétin And the joule simon all obstinate defenders of the bourgeoisie Explotation in prussia in germany William the first the present royal demonstrator of the good god on earth all his generals all his officers Pomeranian and other all his army Which strong in its religious faith has just conquered france in that ideal way? We know so well in russia the tsar and his court the maravieffs and the bergs All the butchers and pious proselytizers of poland Everywhere in short religious or philosophical idealism the one being but the more or less free translation of the other Serves today as the flag of material bloody and brutal force A shameless material exploitation While on the contrary the flag of theoretical materialism the red flag of economic equality and social justice Is raised by the practical idealism of the oppressed and famishing masses Tending to realize the greatest liberty and the human right of each in the fraternity of all men on the earth Who are the real idealists? The idealists not of abstraction, but of life not of heaven, but of earth And who are the materialists? It is evident that the essential condition of theoretical or divine idealism Is the sacrifice of logic of human reason the renunciation of science We see further that in defending the doctrines of idealism One finds himself enlisted perforce in the ranks of the oppressors and exploiters of the masses These are two great reasons which it would seem should be sufficient to drive every great mind every great heart from idealism How does it happen that our illustrious contemporary idealists who certainly lack neither mind nor heart nor good will And who have devoted their entire existence to the service of humanity How does it happen that they persist in remaining among the representatives of a doctrine henceforth condemned and dishonored? They must be influenced by a very powerful motive It cannot be logic or science since logic and science have pronounced their verdict against the idealistic doctrine No more can it be personal interests since these men are infinitely above everything of that sort It must then be a powerful moral motive Which there can be but one These illustrious men think no doubt that idealistic theories or beliefs are essentially necessary to the moral dignity and grandeur of man And that materialistic theories on the contrary reduce him to the level of the beasts And if the truth were just the opposite Every development I have said implies the negation of its point of departure The basis or point of departure according to the materialistic school being material The negation must be necessarily ideal Starting from the totality of the real world or from what is abstractly called matter It logically arrives at the real idealization that is at the humanization At the full and complete emancipation of society Per contra and for the same reason the basis and point of departure of the idealistic school being ideal It arrives necessarily at the materialization of society At the organization of a brutal despotism and an iniquitous and ignoble exploitation under the form of church and state The historical development of man according to the materialistic school is a progressive ascension In the idealistic system, it can be nothing but a continuous fall Whatever human question we may desire to consider we always find this same essential contradiction between the two schools Thus, as I have already observed materialism starts from animality to establish humanity Idealism starts from divinity to establish slavery and condemn the masses to an endless animality Materialism denies free will and ends in the establishment of liberty Idealism in the name of human dignity proclaims free will and on the ruins of every liberty founds authority Materialism rejects the principle of authority Because it rightly considers it as the corollary of animality and because on the contrary the triumphs of humanity The object and chief significance of history can be realized only through liberty In a word you will always find the idealists in the very act of practical materialism Whilst you will see the materialists pursuing and realizing the most grandly ideal aspirations and thoughts History in the system of the idealists as I have said can be nothing but a continuous fall They begin by a terrible fall from which they never recover By the Salto Mortale from the sublime regions of pure and absolute idea into matter And into what kind of matter Not into the matter which is eternally active and mobile full of properties and forces of life and intelligence As we see it in the real world But into abstract matter impoverished and reduced to absolute misery by the regular looting of these prussians of thought The theologians and metaphysicians who have stripped it of everything to give everything to their emperor to their god Into the matter which deprived of all action and movement of its own represents in opposition to the divine idea Nothing but absolute stupidity in penetrability inertia and immobility The fall is so terrible that divinity the divine person or idea is flattened out Loses consciousness of itself and never more recovers it and in this desperate situation It is still forced to work miracles for from the moment that matter becomes inert Every movement that takes place in the world Even the most material is a miracle Can result only from a providential intervention from the action of god upon matter And there this poor divinity degraded and half annihilated by its fall Lies some thousands of centuries in this swoon Then awakened slowly in vain endeavouring to grasp some vague memory of itself And every move that it makes in this direction upon matter becomes a creation a new formation a new miracle In this way it passes through all degrees of materiality and bestiality First gas simple or compound chemical substance mineral it then spreads over the earth as vegetable and animal Until it concentrates itself in man Here it would seem as if it must become itself again For it lights in every human being an angelic spark a particle of its own divine being the immortal soul How did it manage to lodge a thing absolutely immaterial in a thing absolutely material? How can the body contain in clothes limit paralyze pure spirit? This again is one of those questions which faith alone that passionate and stupid affirmation of the absurd can solve It is the greatest of miracles Here however we have only to establish the effects the practical consequences of this miracle After thousands of centuries of vain efforts to come back to itself Divinity lost and scattered in the matter which it animates and sets in motion Finds a point of support a sort of focus for self-concentration This focuses man his immortal soul singularly imprisoned in a mortal body But each man considered individually is infinitely too limited too small to enclose the divine immensity It can contain only a very small particle immortal like the whole but infinitely smaller than the whole It follows that the divine being the absolutely immaterial being mind is divisible like matter Another mystery whose solution must be left to faith If god entire could find lodgment in each man then each man would be god We should have an immense quantity of gods Each limited by all the others and yet nonetheless infinite a contradiction which would imply a mutual destruction of men An impossibility of the existence of more than one As for the particles that is another matter Nothing more rational indeed than that one particle should be limited by another and be smaller than the whole Only here another contradiction confronts us To be limited to be greater and smaller are attributes of matter not of mind According to the materialists. It is true Mind is only the working of the holy material organism of man And the greatness or smallness of mind depends absolutely on the greater or less material perfection of the human organism But these same attributes of relative limitation and grandeur cannot be attributed to mind as the idealists conceive it Absolutely immaterial mind mind existing independent of matter There can be neither greater nor smaller nor any limit amongst minds for there is only one mind god To add that the infinitely small and limited particles which constitute human souls are at the same time immortal is to carry the contradiction to a climax But this is a question of faith Let us pass on Here then we have divinity torn up and lodged in infinitely small particles in an immense number of beings of all sexes ages Races and colors. This is an excessively inconvenient and unhappy situation For the divine particles are so little acquainted with each other at the outset of their human existence that they begin by devouring each other Moreover in the midst of this state of barbarism and holy animal brutality These divine particles human souls retain as it were A vague remembrance of their primitive divinity and are irresistibly drawn towards their whole They seek each other. They seek their whole It is divinity itself scattered and lost in the natural world Which looks for itself in men and it is so demolished by this multitude of human prisons in which it finds itself strewn That in looking for itself it commits folly after folly Beginning with fetishism it searches for and adores itself now in a stone now in a piece of wood now in a rag It is quite likely that it would never have succeeded in getting out of the rag If the other divinity which was not allowed to fall into matter and which is kept in a state of pure spirit in the sublime heights Of the absolute ideal or in the celestial regions Had not had pity on it Here is a new mystery That of divinity dividing itself into two halves both equally infinite of which one God the father stays in the purely immaterial regions and the other god the son falls into matter We shall see directly between these two divinities separated from each other Continuous relations established from above to below and from below to above And these relations considered as a single eternal and constant act will constitute the holy ghost Such in its veritable theological and metaphysical meaning Is the great terrible mystery of the christian trinity But let us lose no time in abandoning these heights to see what is going on upon earth God the father Seeing from the height of his eternal splendor that the poor god the son flattened out and astounded by his fall Is so plunged and lost in matter that even having reached the human state he has not yet recovered himself Decides to come to his aid From this immense number of particles at once immortal divine and infinitely small In which god the son has disseminated himself so thoroughly that he does not know himself God the father chooses those most pleasing to him picks his inspired persons his prophets his men of virtuous genius The great benefactors and legislators of humanity Zoroasta buddha moses Confucius Lysurgis Solon Socrates The divine Plato and above all Jesus Christ the complete realization of god the son at last collected and concentrated in a single human person All the apostles st. Peter st. Paul st. John before all Constantine the great Mohammed then Charlemagne Gregory the seventh Dante and according to some luther also Voltaire and Russo robespierre and danton and many other great holy historical Personages all of whose names it is impossible to recapitulate But among whom I as a russian begged at st. Nicholas may not be forgotten Then we have reached at last the manifestation of god upon earth But immediately god appears man is reduced to nothing It will be said that he is not reduced to nothing since he is himself a particle of god pardon me I admit that a particle of a definite limited whole However small it be is a quantity a positive greatness But a particle of the infinitely great compared with it is necessarily infinitely small Multiply milliards of milliards by milliards of milliards Their product compared to the infinitely great will be infinitely small And the infinitely small is equal to zero God is everything therefore man and the real world with him the universe are nothing You will not escape this conclusion God appears man is reduced to nothing and the greater divinity becomes the more miserable becomes humanity That is the history of all religions. That is the effect of all the divine inspirations and legislations In history the name of god is the terrible club with which all divinely inspired men the great virtuous geniuses Have beaten down the liberty dignity reason and prosperity of man We had first the fall of god Now we have a fall which interests us more that of man Caused solely by the apparition of god manifested on earth See in how profound and error our dear and illustrious idealists find themselves In talking to us of god. They purpose. They desire to elevate us emancipate us And on the contrary they crush and degrade us With the name of god they imagined that they can establish fraternity among men And on the contrary they create pride contempt. They sow discord hatred war They establish slavery For with god come the different degrees of divine inspiration Humanity is divided into men highly inspired less inspired uninspired All are equally insignificant before god. It is true, but compared with each other some are greater than others Not only in fact Which would be of no consequence because inequality in fact is lost in the collectivity When it cannot cling to some legal fiction or institution But by the divine right of inspiration, which immediately establishes a fixed constant Petrifying inequality the highly inspired must be listened to and obeyed by the less inspired And the less inspired by the uninspired thus we have the principle of authority well established and with it the two fundamental of slavery church and state Of all despotisms that of the doctrinaires or inspired religionists is the worst They are so jealous of the glory of their god And of the triumph of their idea that they have no heart left for the liberty or the dignity or even the sufferings of living men of real men Divine zeal preoccupation with the idea finally dry up the tendrous souls the most compassionate hearts the sources of human love Considering all that is all that happens in the world from the point of view of eternity or of the abstract idea They treat passing matters with disdain But the whole life of real men of men of flesh and bone is composed only of passing matters They themselves are only passing beings who once passed are replaced by others likewise passing but never to return in person Alone permanent or relatively eternal in men is humanity which steadily developing Grows richer in passing from one generation to another I say relatively eternal because our planet once destroyed It cannot fail to perish sooner or later since everything which has begun must necessarily end Our planet once decomposed to serve undoubtedly as an element of some new formation in the system of the universe Which alone is really eternal Who knows what will become of our whole human development? Nevertheless the moment of this dissolution being an enormous distance in the future We may properly consider humanity relatively to the short duration of human life as eternal But this very fact of progressive humanity is real and living only through its manifestation at definite times in definite places In really living men and not through its general idea The general idea is always an abstraction and for that very reason in some sort a negation of real life I have stated in the appendix that human thought and in consequence of this science Can grasp and name only the general significance of real facts Their relations their laws In short that which is permanently in their continual transformations But never their material individual side Pulpitating so to speak with reality and life and therefore fugitive and intangible Science comprehends the thought of the reality not the reality itself The thought of life not life That is its limit. It's only really insupportable limit because it is founded on the very nature of thought Which is the only organ of science Upon this nature are based the indisputable rights and grand mission of science But also its vital impotence and even its mischievous action whenever Through its official licensed representatives. It arrogantly claims the right to govern life The mission of science is by observation of the general relations of passing and real facts To establish the general laws inherent in the development of the phenomena of the physical and social world It fixes so to speak the unchangeable landmarks of humanity's progressive march by indicating the general conditions Which it is necessary to rigorously observe and always fatal to ignore or forget In a word science is the compass of life But it is not life itself Science is unchangeable impersonal general abstract insensible like the laws of which it is but the ideal reproduction Reflected or mental that is cerebral using this word to remind us that science itself Is but a material product of a material organ the brain Life is wholly fugitive and temporary But also wholly palpitating with reality and individuality Sensibility sufferings joys aspirations needs and passions It alone spontaneously creates real things and beings Science creates nothing It establishes and recognizes only the creations of life and every time that scientific men emerging from their abstract world Mingle with living creation in the real world all they propose or create is poor ridiculously abstract bloodless and lifeless Stillborn like the homunculus created by Wagner the pedantic disciple of the immortal dr. Faust It follows that the only mission of science is to enlighten life not to govern it The government of science and of men of science Even be they positivists disciples vorgust kommt Or again disciples of the doctrine air school of german communism Cannot fail to be impotent ridiculous inhuman cruel oppressive exploiting maleficent We may say of men of science as such what I have said of theologians and metaphysicians They have neither sense nor heart for individual and living beings We cannot blame them for this for it is the natural consequence of their profession In so far as they are men of science they have to deal with and can take interest in nothing except generalities that do the laws Editorial note three pages of the manuscript are missing And note they are not exclusively men of science But are also more or less men of life End of part two of chapter two