 6. The power of education is almost boundless. There is not one natural inclination which it is not strong enough to coerce and if needful to destroy it by disuse. 7. In the greatest recorded victory which education has ever achieved over a whole host of natural inclinations and in an entire people, the maintenance through centuries of the institutions of Lycurgus, it was very little, if even at all, indebted to religion. For the gods of the Spartans were the same as those of every other Greek state. And though, no doubt, every state of Greece believed that its particular polity had at its first establishment some sort of divine sanction, mostly that of the Delphian Oracle. There was seldom any difficulty in obtaining the same or an equally powerful sanction for a change. It was not religion which formed the strength of the Spartan institutions. The root of the system was devotion to Sparta, to the ideal of the country or state, which transformed into ideal devotion to a greater country. The world would be equal to that and far nobler achievements. Among the Greeks generally, social morality was extremely independent of religion. The inverse relation was rather that which existed between them. The worship of the gods was inculcated chiefly as a social duty, in as much as if they were neglected or insulted. It was believed that their displeasure would fall not more upon the affinity individual than upon the state or community which bred and tolerated him. Such moral teaching as existed in Greece had very little to do with religion. The gods were not supposed to concern themselves much with men's conduct to one another, except when men had contrived to make the gods themselves an interested party by placing an assertion or an engagement under the sanction of a solemn appeal to them by oath or vow. I grant that the Sophists and philosophers and even popular orators did their best to press religion into the service of their special objects, and to make it be thought that the sentiments of whatever kind, which they were engaged in and inculcating, were particularly acceptable to the gods. But this never seems the primary consideration in any case save those of direct offense to the dignity of the gods themselves. For the enforcement of human morality's secular inducements were almost exclusively relied on. The case of Greece is, I believe, the only one in which any teaching, other than religious, has had the unspeakable advantage of forming the basis of education. And though much may be said against the quality of some part of the teaching, very little can be said against its effectiveness. The most memorable example of the power of education over conduct is afforded, as I have just remarked, by this exceptional case, constituting a strong presumption that in other cases early religious teaching has owed its power over mankind rather to its being earlier than its being religious. We have now considered two powers, that of authority and that of early education, which operate through men's involuntary beliefs, feelings, and desires, and which religion has hitherto held as its almost exclusive appendage. Let us now consider a third power, which operates directly on their actions, whether their involuntary sentiments are carried with it or not. This is the power of public opinion, of the praise and blame, the favor and disfavor, of their fellow creatures, and is a source of strength inherent in any system of moral belief which is generally adopted, whether connected with the religion or not. Men are so much accustomed to give to the motives that decide their actions more flattering names than justly belong to them, that they are generally quite unconscious how much those parts of their conduct which they most pride themselves on, as well as some which they are ashamed of, are determined by the motive of public opinion. Of course public opinion for the most part enjoins the same things which are enjoined by the received social morality, that morality being, in truth, the summary of the conduct which each one of the multitude, whether he himself observes it with any strictness or not, desires that others should observe towards him. People are therefore easily able to flatter themselves that they are acting from the motive of conscience when they are doing in obedience to the inferior motive, things which their conscience approves. We continually see how great is the power of opinion in opposition to conscience, how men follow a multitude to do evil, how often opinion induces them to do what their conscience disapproves, and so often there prevents them from doing what it commands. But when the motive of public opinion acts in the same direction with conscience, which, since it has usually itself made the conscience in the first instance, if for the most part naturally does, it is then of all motives which operate on the bulk of mankind, the most overpowering. The names of all the strongest passions, except the merely animal ones, manifested by human nature, are each of them a name for some part only of the motive derived from what I here call public opinion. The love of glory, the love of praise, the love of admiration, the love of respect and deference, even the love of sympathy, are portions of its attractive power. Vanity is of a too prudent name for its attractive influence generally, when considered excessive in degree. The fear of shame, the dread of ill repute or of being disliked or hated are the direct and simple forms of its deterring power. But the deterring force of the unfavorable sentiments of mankind does not consist solely in the painfulness of knowing oneself to be the object of those sentiments. It includes all the penalties which they can inflict, exclusion from social intercourse and from the innumerable good offices which human beings require from one another. The forfeiture of all that is called success in life, often the great diminution or total loss of means of subsistence, positive ill offices of various kinds, sufficient to render life miserable and reaching in some states of society as far as actual persecution to death. And again, the attractive or impelling influence of public opinion includes the whole range of what is commonly meant by ambition. For in accepted times of lawless military violence, the objects of social ambition can only be attained by means of the good opinion and favorable disposition of our fellow creatures, nor in nine cases out of ten, with those objects be even desired, where it not for the power they confer over the sentiments of mankind. Even the pleasure of self-approbation, in the great majority, is mainly dependent on the opinion of others, such as the involuntary influence of authority on ordinary minds, that persons must be of a better than ordinary mold to be capable of the full assurance that they are in the right, when the world, that is, when their world thinks them wrong, nor is there to most men any proof so demonstrative of their own virtue or talent as that people in general seem to believe in it. Through all departments of human affairs, regard for the sentiments of our fellow creatures is in one shape or other, in nearly all characters, the pervading motive. And we ought to note this motive is naturally strongest in the most sensitive natures, which are the most promising material for the formation of great virtues. How far its power reaches is known by too familiar experience to require either proof or illustration here. When once the means of living have been obtained, the far greater part of the remaining labor and effort, which takes place on the earth, has for its object to acquire the respect or the favorable regard of mankind, to be looked up to, or at all events, not to be looked down upon by them. The industrial and commercial activity which advanced civilization, the frivolity, prodigality, and selfish thirst of aggrandizement, which retarded, flowed equally from that source. While as an instance of the power exercised by the terrors derived from public opinion, we know how many murders have been committed merely to remove a witness who knew and was likely to disclose some secret that would bring disgrace upon his murderer. Anyone who fairly and impartially considers the subject will see reason to believe that those great effects on human conduct, which are commonly ascribed in motives derived directly from religion, have mostly for their approximate cause the influence of human opinion. Religion has been powerful not by its intrinsic force, but because it has wielded that additional and more mighty power. The effect of religion has been immense in giving a direction to public opinion, which has, in many most important respects, been wholly determined by it. But without the sanctions super-added by public opinion, its own proper sanctions have never saved exceptional characters or in peculiar modes of mind exercised a very potent influence after the times had gone by in which divine agency was supposed to bitchily employ temporal rewards and punishments. When a man firmly believed that if he violated the sacredness of a particular sanctuary he would be struck dead in the spot or spent in suddenly with a mortal disease, he doubtless took care not to incur the penalty. But when anyone had had the courage to defy the danger and escape with impunity, the spell was broken. If ever any people were taught that they were under a divine government and that unfaithfulness to the religion and law would be visited from above with temporal chastisements, the Jews were so. Yet their history was a mere succession of lapses into paganism. Their prophets and historians who held fast to the ancient beliefs, though they gave them so liberal an interpretation as to think it a sufficient manifestation of God's displeasure towards a king if any evil happened to his great-grandson, never ceased to complain that their countrymen turned a deaf ear to their veticians and nations. And hence, with the faith they held in a divine government operating by temporal penalties, they could not fail to anticipate, as Mirabeau's father, without such prompting, was able to do on the eve of the French Revolution, la côte de genre, an expectation which, luckily for the credit of their prophetic powers, was fulfilled. Unlike that of the Apostle John, who in the only intelligible prophecy in the revelations foretold to the city of the seven hills, a fate like that of Nunavut and Babylon, which prediction remains to this hour unaccomplished. Unquestionably, the conviction which experienced in time forced on all but the very ignorant that divine punishments were not to be confidently expected in a temporal form contributed much to the downfall of the old religions, and the general adoption of one which, without absolutely excluding providential interferences in this life for the punishment of guilt or the reward of merit, removed the principal scene of divine retribution to the world after death, but rewards and punishments postponed to that distance of time and never seen by the eye are not calculated, even when infinite and eternal, to have on ordinary minds a very powerful effect in the opposition to strong temptation. Their remoteness alone is a prodigious deduction from their efficacy on such minds as those which most require the restraint of punishment. A still greater abatement is their uncertainty, which belongs to them from the very nature of the case. For rewards and punishments administered after death must be awarded not definitely to particular actions, but on a general survey of the person's whole life, and he easily persuades himself that whatever may have been his picadillos, there will be a balance in his favor at the last. All positive religions aid this self-delusion. Bad religions teach that divine vengeance may be bought off by offerings or personal abasement. The better religions, not to drive sinners to despair, dwell so much on the divine mercy that hardly anyone is compelled to think himself irrevocably condemned. The sole quality in these punishments which might seem calculated to make them efficacious, their overpowering magnitude, is itself a reason why nobody, except the hypochondriac here and there, ever really believes that he is in any very serious danger of incurring them. Even the worst malefactor is hardly able to think that any crime he has had in his power to commit, any evil he can have inflicted in this short space of existence, can have to serve torture extending through an eternity. Accordingly, religious writers and preachers are never tired of complaining how little effect religious motives have on men's lives and conduct, notwithstanding the tremendous penalties denounced. Mr. Bentham, whom I have already mentioned as one of the few authors who have written anything to the purpose on the efficacy of the religious sanction, adduces several cases to prove that religious obligation, when not enforced by public opinion, produces scarcely any effect on conduct. His first example is that of oaths. The oaths taken in Courts of Justice and any others which from the manifest importance to society of their being kept, public opinion rigidly enforces are felt as real and binding obligations. But university oaths and custom house oaths, though in a religious point of view equally obligatory, are in practice early disregarded even by men and other respects honorable. The university oaths to obey the statues has been for centuries with universal acquiescence, said it not, and early false statements are, or used to be, daily and unblushingly sworn to at the custom house, by persons as attentive as other people to all the ordinary obligations of life. The explanation being that veracity in these cases was not enforced by public opinion. The second case which Bentham cites is dueling, I practice now, in this country, obsolete, but in full vigor in several other Christian countries, deemed and admitted to be a sin by almost all who, nevertheless in obedience to opinion, and to escape from personal humiliation, are guilty of it. The third case is that of illicit sexual intercourse, which in both sexes stands in the very highest rank of religious sins, yet not being severely censored by opinion in the male sex, they have in general very little scruple in committing it, while in the case of women, though the religious obligation is not stronger, yet being backed in real earnest by public opinion is commonly effectual. Some objection may doubtless be taken to Bentham's instances, considered as crucial experiments on the power of the religious sanction, for, it may be said, people do not really believe that in these cases they shall be punished by God any more than by man. And this is certainly true in the case of those university and other oaths, which are habitually taken without any intention of keeping them. The oath, in these cases, is regarded as a mere formality, destitute of any serious meaning in the side of the deity, and the most groupless person, even if he does reproach himself for having taken an oath which no body deems fit to be kept, does not in his conscience tax himself with the guilt of perjury, but only with the profanation of a ceremony. This, therefore, is not a good example of the weakness of the religious motive when divorced from that of human opinion. The point which it illustrates is rather the tendency of the one motive to come and go with the other, so that where the penalties of a public opinion cease, the religious motive ceases also. The same criticism, however, is not equally applicable to Benson's other examples, dueling and sexual irregularities. Those who do these acts, the first by the command of public opinion, the latter with its indulgence, really do, in most cases, believe that they are offending God. Doubtless they do not think that they are offending him in such a degree as very seriously to endanger their salvation. Their reliance on his mercy prevails over the dread of his resentment, affording in the exemplification of the remark already made that the unavoidable uncertainty of religious penalties makes them feeble as a deterring motive. There so, even in the case of acts which human opinion condemns, much more with those to which it is indulgent. What mankind think venial, it is hardly ever supposed that God looks upon in the serious light, at least by those who feel in themselves any inclination to practice it. I do not for a moment think of denying that there are states of mind in which the idea of religious punishment acts with the most overwhelming force. In hypercontrarycal disease, and in those with whom from great disappointments or other moral causes, the thoughts and imagination have assumed an habitually melancholy complexion. That topic, falling in with the pre-existing tendency of the mind, supplies images well fitted to drive the unfortunate sufferer even to madness. Often during a temporary state of depression, these ideas take such a hold of the mind as to give a permanent turn to the character being the most common case of what in sectarian phraseology is called conversion. But if the depressed state seizes us after the conversion, as it commonly does, and the convert does not relapse, but perseveres in his new course of life, the principal difference between it and the old is usually found to be that the man now guides his life by the public opinion of his religious associates, as he before guided it by that of the profane world. At all events there is one clear proof how little the generality of mankind, either religious or worldly, really dread eternal punishments. When we see how, even at the approach of death, when the remoteness which took so much from their effect has been exchanged for the closest proximity, almost all persons who have not been guilty of some enormous crime, and many who have, are quite free from uneasiness as to their prospects in another world, and never for a moment seem to think themselves in any real danger of eternal punishment. With regard to the cruel deaths and bodily tortures which confessors and martyrs have so often undergone for the sake of religion, I would not depreciate them by attributing any part of this admirable courage and constancy to the influence of human opinion. Human opinion indeed has shown itself quite equal to the production of similar firmness in persons not otherwise distinguished by moral excellence, such as the North American Indian at the stake. But if it was not the thought of glory in the eyes of their fellow religionists, which help help these heroic sufferers in their agony, as little do I believe that it was, generally speaking, that of the pleasures of heaven or the pains of hell. Their impulse was a divine enthusiasm, a self-forgetting devotion to an idea, a state of exalted feeling by no means peculiar to religion, but which it is the privilege of every great cause to inspire, a phenomenon belonging to the critical moments of existence, not to the ordinary play of human motives, and from which nothing can be inferred as to the efficacy of the ideas which it sprung from, whether religious or any other, in overcoming ordinary temptations and regulating the course of daily life. End of the Utility of Religion, Part 2. Section 7 of Three Essays on Religion. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Ted Garvin. Three Essays on Religion by John Stuart Mill. The Utility of Religion, Part 3. We may now have done with this branch of the subject, which is, after all, the vulgarest part of it. The value of religion as a supplement to human laws, a more cunning sort of police, an auxiliary to the thief catcher and the hangman, is not that part of its claims which the more high-minded of its votaries are fondness of insisting on. And they would probably be as ready as anyone to admit that if the nobler offices of religion and the soul could be dispensed with, a substitute might be found for so coarse and selfish a social instrument as the fear of hell. In their view of the matter, the best of mankind absolutely require religion for the perfection of their own character, even though the coercion of the worst might possibly be accomplished without its aid. Even in the social point of view, however, under its most elevated aspect, these nobler spirits generally assert the necessity of religion as a teacher, if not as an enforcer of social morality. They say that religion alone can teach us what morality is, that all the high morality ever recognized by mankind was learned from a religion, that the greatest uninspired philosophers in their sublimest flights stop far short of the Christian morality, and whatever inferior morality they may have attained to by the assistants, as many think, of dim traditions derived from the Hebrew books or from a primeval revelation. They never could induce the common mass of their fellow citizens to accept it from them. That only when a morality is understood to come from the gods, do men in general adopt it, rally around it, and lend their human sanctions for its enforcement. That granting, the sufficiency of human motives to make the rule obeyed, were it not for the religious idea we should not have had the rule itself. There is truth in much of this, considered as a matter of history. Ancient peoples have generally, if not always, received their morals, their laws, their intellectual beliefs, and even their practical arts of life, all in short, which tended either to guide or to discipline them, as revelations from the superior powers, and in any other way could not easily have been induced to accept them. This was partly the effect of their hopes and fears from those powers, which were of much greater and more universal potency in early times, when the agency of the gods was seen in the daily events of life, experience not having yet disclosed the fixed laws according to which physical phenomena succeed one another. Independently to personal hopes and fears, the involuntary deference felt by these rude minds for power superior to their own, and the tendency to suppose that beings of superhuman power must also be of superhuman knowledge and wisdom, made them disinterestedly desired to conform their conduct to the presumed preferences of these powerful beings, and to adopt no new practice without their authorization, either spontaneously given or solicited and obtained. But because, when men were still savages, they would not have received either moral or scientific truth unless they had supposed them to be supernaturally imparted. Does it follow that they would now give up moral truths any more than scientific, because they believe them to have no higher origin than wise and noble human hearts, are not moral truths strong enough in their own evidence, at all events to retain the belief of mankind when once they have acquired it. I grant the sum of the precepts of Christ as exhibited in the Gospels, rising far above the Paulism, which is the foundation of ordinary Christianity, carry some kinds of moral goodness to a greater height than had ever been attained before, though much even of what is supposed to be peculiar to them is equal in the meditations of it Marcus Antoninas, which we have no ground for believing to have been in any way indebted to Christianity. But this benefit, whatever it amounts to, has been gained. Mankind have entered into the possession of it. It has become the property of humanity and cannot now be lost by anything short of a return to primeval barbarism. The new commandment to love one another, not however a new commandment, injustice to the great Hebrew lawgiver, it should always be remembered that the precept to love thy neighbor as thyself already existed in the Pentateuch, and very surprising it is to find it there. The recognition that the greatest are those who serve, not who are served by others, the reverence for the weak and humble, which is the foundation of chivalry, they, and not the strong, being pointed out as having the first place in God's regard, and the first claim on their fellow men, the lesson of the parable of the good Samaritan, that of he that is without sin letting him throw the first stone, the precept of doing as we would be done by, and such other noble moralities as are to be found, mixed with some poetical exaggerations and some maxims of which it is difficult to ascertain the precise object in the authentic sayings of Jesus of Nazareth. These are surely insufficient harmony with the intellect and feelings of every good man or woman, to be in no danger of being let go after having been once acknowledged as the creed of the best and foremost portion of our species. There will be, as there have been, shortcomings enough for a long time to come in acting on them, but that they should be forgotten or cease to be operative on the human conscience while human beings remain cultivated or civilized, may be pronounced once for all, impossible. On the other hand, there is a very real evil consequent on ascribing a supernatural origin to the received maxims of morality. That origin concentrates the whole of them and protects them from being discussed or criticized, so that if among the moral doctrines received as a part of religion, there will be any which are imperfect, which were either erroneous from the first or not properly limited and guarded in the expression or which, unexceptionable once, are no longer suited to the changes that have taken place in human relations and is my firm belief that in so-called Christian morality, instances of all these kinds are to be found, these doctrines are considered equally binding on the conscience with the noblest, most permanent and most universal precepts of Christ. Wherever morality is supposed to be of supernatural origin, morality is stereotyped, as law is, for the same reason among believers in the Koran. Belief then, and the supernatural, great as are the services which it rendered in the early stages of human development cannot be considered to be any longer required, either for enabling us to know what is right and wrong in social morality, or for supplying us with motives to do right and to abstain from wrong. Such belief, therefore, is not necessary for social purposes, at least in the course way in which these could be considered a part from the character of the individual human being. That more elevated branch of the subject now remains to be considered. If supernatural beliefs are indeed necessary to the perfection of the individual character, they are necessary also to the highest excellence in social conduct, necessary in a far higher sense than that vulgar one, which constitutes it the great support of morality and common eyes. Let us then consider what it is in human nature which causes it to require religion, what wants of the human mind, religion supplies, and what qualities it develops. When we have understood this, we shall be better able to judge how far these wants can be otherwise applied and those qualities, or qualities equivalent to them, unfolded and brought to perfection by other means. The old saying, premeless in orbit, deos, fiscit, tibor, I hold to be untrue, or to contain, at most, only a small amount of truth. Belief in God's had, I conceive, even in the rudest minds, a more honorable origin. Its universality has been very rationally explained from the spontaneous tendency of the mind to attribute life and volition similar to what it feels in itself to all natural objects and phenomenon which appear to be self-moving. This was a plausible fancy and no better theory could be formed at first. It was naturally persisted in so long as the motions and operations of these objects seemed to be arbitrary and incapable of being accounted for but by the free choice of the power itself. At first, no doubt, the objects themselves were supposed to be alive and this belief still subsists among African fetish worshipers. But as it must soon have appeared absurd that things which could do so much more than man could not or would not do what man does. As, for example, to speak, the transition was made to supposing that the object present to the senses was inanimate but was the creature and instrument of an invisible being with a form and organs similar to the human. These beings, having first been believed in, fear of them necessarily followed since they were thought able to inflict a pleasure on human beings, great evils, which the sufferers neither knew how to avert nor to foresee but were left dependent for their chances of doing either upon solicitations addressed to the deities themselves. It is true, therefore, that fear had much to do with religion, but belief in the gods evidently preceded and did not arise from fear. Though the fear when established was a strong support to the belief, nothing being conceived to be so great in the sense to the divinities as any doubt of their existence. It is unnecessary to prosecute further the natural history of religion as we have not here to account for its origin and rude minds before its persistency in the cultivated. A sufficient explanation of this will, I conceive, be found in the small limits of man's certain knowledge and the boundlessness of his desire to know. Human existence is girt round with mystery. The narrow region of our experience is a small island in the midst of a boundless sea which at once awes our feelings and stimulates our imagination by its vastness and its obscurity. To add to the mystery, the domain of our earthly existence is not only an island in infinite space but also an infinite time. The past and the future are alike shrouded from us. We neither know the origin of anything which is nor its final destination. If we feel deeply interested in knowing that there are myriads of worlds at an immeasurable and to our faculties inconceivable distance from us in space, if we are eager to discover what little we can about these worlds and when we cannot know what they are can never satiate ourselves with speculating what they may be. Is it not a matter of far deeper interest to us to learn or even to conjecture from whence came this near world which we inhabit? What cause or agency made it what it is? And on what powers depend its future fate? Who would not desire this more ardently than any other conceivable knowledge so long as there appeared the slightest hope of attaining it? What would not one give for any credible tidings from that mysterious region? Any glimpse into it which might enable us to see the smallest light through its darkness, especially any theory of it which we could believe and which represented it as tended by a benign and not a hostile influence? But since we are able to penetrate into that region with the imagination only, assisted by species but inconclusive analogies derived from human agency and design, imagination is free to fill up the vacancy with the imagery most congenial to itself, sublime and elevating if it be a lofty imagination, low and mean if it be a groveling one. Religion and poetry address themselves, at least in one of their aspects, to the same part of the human constitution. They both supply the same want that of ideal conceptions grander and more beautiful than we see realized in the prose of human life. Religion, as distinguished from poetry, is the product of the craving to know whether these imaginative conceptions have realities answering to them in some other world than ours. The mind, in this state, eagerly catches at any rumors respecting other worlds, especially when delivered by persons whom it deems wiser than itself. To the poetry of the supernatural comes to be thus added a positive belief and expectation which unpolitical minds can share with the political. Belief in a god or gods and in a life after death becomes the canvas whichever mind, according to its capacity, covers with such ideal pictures as it can either invent or copy. In that other life each hopes to find the good which he has failed to find on earth or the better which is suggested to him by the good which on earth he has partially seen and known. More especially, this belief supplies the finer minds with materials for conceptions of beings more awful than they can have known on earth and more excellent than they probably have known. So long as human life is insufficient to satisfy human aspirations, so long there will be a craving for higher things which finds its most obvious satisfaction in religion. So long as earth of your life is full of sufferings, so long there will be need of consolations which the hope of heaven affords to the selfish, the love of God to the tender and grateful. The value therefore of religion to the individual both in the past and present as a source of personal satisfaction and of elevated feelings is not to be disputed. But it has still to be considered whether in order to obtain this good it is necessary to travel beyond the boundaries of the world which we inhabit or whether the idealation of our earthly life, the cultivation of a high conception of what it may be made is not capable of supplying a poetry and in the best sense of the word a religion equally fitted to exalt the feelings and with the same aid from education still better calculated to ennoble the conduct than any belief respecting the unseen powers. At the bare suggestion of such a possibility many will exclaim that the short duration the smallness and insignificance of life if there is no prolongation of it beyond what we see makes it impossible that great and elevated feelings can connect themselves with anything laid out on so small a scale that such a conception of life can match with nothing higher than Epicurean feelings and the Epicurean doctrine let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die. Unquestionably within certain limits the maximum of the Epicureans is sound and applicable to much higher things than eating and drinking to make the most of the present for all good purposes those of enjoyment among the rest to keep under control those mental dispositions which lead to undue sacrifice of present good for a future which may never arrive to cultivate the habit of deriving pleasure from things within our reach rather than from the too eager pursuit of objects at a distance to think all time wasted which is not spent either in personal pleasure or in doing things useful to oneself or others these are wise maxims and the Carpidium doctrine carried thus far is a rational and legitimate corollary from the shortness of life but that because life is short we should care for nothing beyond it is not a legitimate conclusion and the supposition that human beings in general are not capable of feeling deep and even the deepest interest in things which they will never live to see is a view of human nature as false as it is abject let it be remembered that if individual life is short the life of the human species is not short its indefinite duration is practically equivalent to endlessness and being combined with indefinite capability of improvement it offers to the imagination and sympathies a large enough object to satisfy any reasonable demand for grandeur of aspiration if such an object appears small to a mind accustomed to dream of infinite and internal beatitudes it will expand into far other dimensions when those baseless fancies shall have receded into the past nor let it be thought that only the more imminent of our species in mind and heart are capable of identifying their feelings with the entire life of the human race this noble capability implies indeed a certain cultivation but not superior to that which might be and certainly will be if human improvement continues a lot of all objects far smaller than this and equally confined within the limits of the earth though not within those of a single human life have been found sufficient to inspire large masses and long successions of mankind with an enthusiasm capable of ruling the conduct and coloring the whole life Rome was to the entire Roman people for many generations as much of religion as Jehovah was to the Jews nay, much more for they never fell off from their worship as the Jews did from theirs and the Romans otherwise a selfish people with no very remarkable faculties of any kind except the purely practical derived nevertheless from this one idea a certain greatness of soul which manifests itself in all their history where that idea is concerned and nowhere else and has earned for them the largest share of admiration in other respects not at all deserved which was felt for them by most noble-minded persons from that time to this when we consider how ardent a sentiment in favorable circumstances of education the love of country has become we cannot judge it impossible that the love of that larger country the world may be nursed into similar strength both as a source of elevated emotion and as a principle of deity he who needs any other lesson on this subject than the whole course of ancient history fords let him read Cicero de officius it cannot be said that the standard of morals laid down and that celebrated treatise is a high standard to our notions it is on many points unduly lacks and admits capitulations of conscience but on the subject of duty to our country there is no compromise that any man with the smallest pretentions to virtue could hesitate to sacrifice life reputation family everything valuable to him to the love of country is a supposition which this imminent interpreter of greek and roman morality cannot entertain for a moment if then persons could be trained as we see they were not only to believe in theory that the good of their country was an object to which all others ought to yield but to feel this practically as the grand duty of life so also may they be made to feel the same absolute obligation towards the universal good a morality grounded in large and wise views of the good of the whole neither sacrificing the individual to the aggregate nor the aggregate to the individual but giving to duty on the one hand and to freedom and spontaneity on the other their proper province would derive its power in the superior natures from sympathy and benevolence and the passion for ideal excellence in the inferior from the same feelings cultivated up to the measure of their capacity with the super added force of shame this exalted morality would not depend for its ascendancy on any hope of reward but the reward which might be looked for and the thought of which would be a consolation of suffering and a support in moments of weakness would not be a problematical future existence but the appropriation in this of those whom we respect and ideally of all those dead or living whom we admire or venerate for the thought that our dead parents or friends would have approved our conduct is a scarcely less powerful motive than the knowledge that our living ones do approve it and the idea that Socrates or Howard or Washington or Antoninas or Christ would have sympathized with us or that we are attempting to do our part in the spirit in which they did theirs has operated on the very best minds as a strong incentive to act up to their highest feelings and convictions to call these sentiments by the name morality exclusively of any other title is claiming too little for them they are a real religion of which as of other religions outward good works that most meaning usually suggested by the word morality are only a part and are indeed rather the fruits of the religion than the religion itself the essence of religion is the strong earnest direction of the emotions and desires towards an ideal object recognized as of the highest excellence and is rightfully paramount overall selfish objects of desire this condition is fulfilled by the religion of humanity and its imminent degree and in as high a sense as by the supernatural religions even in their best manifestations and far more so than in any of their others end of the utility of religion part three section eight of three essays on religion this is a LibriVox recording all the box recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit the box to work recording by Ted Garvin three essays on religion by John Stuart Mill the utility of religion part four much more might be added on this topic but enough has been said to convince anyone who can distinguish between the intrinsic capacities of human nature and the forms of which those capacities happen to have been historically developed that the sense of unity with mankind and a deep feeling for the general good may be cultivated into a sentiment and a principle capable of fulfilling every important function of religion and itself justly entitled to the name I will now further maintain that it is not only capable of fulfilling these functions but would fulfill them better than any form whatever of supernaturalism it is not only entitled to be called a religion it is a better religion than any of those which are ordinarily called by that title four in the first place is disinterested it carries the thoughts and feelings out of self and fixes them on an unselfish object loved and pursued as an end for its own sake the religions which deal in promises and threats regarding a future life do exactly the contrary they fasten down the thoughts to the person's own posthumous interest they tempt him to regard the performance of his duties to others mainly as a means to be his own personal salvation and are one of the most serious obstacles to the great purpose of moral culture the strengthening of the unselfish and weakening of the selfish element in our nature since they hold out to the imagination selfish good and evil of such tremendous magnitude that it is difficult for anyone who fully believes in their reality to have feeling or interest to spare for any other distant and ideal object it is true many of the most unselfish of mankind have been believers in supernaturalism because their minds have not dwelt on the threats and promises of their religion but chiefly on the idea of a being to whom they looked up with a confiding love and in whose hands they willingly left all but related especially to themselves but in its effect on common minds what now goes by the name of religion operates mainly through the feelings of self-interest even the cries to the gospels holds out the direct promise of reward from heaven as a primary inducement to the noble and beautiful benes coefficients towards our fellow creatures which he so impressively conculcates this is a radical inferiority of the best supernatural religions compared with the religion of humanity since the greatest thing which moral influences can do for the amelioration of human nature is to cultivate the unselfish feelings in the only mode in which any active principle in human nature can be effectively cultivated namely by habitual exercise but the habit of expecting to be rewarded in another life for our conduct in this makes even virtue itself no longer an exercise of the unselfish feelings secondly it is an immense abatement from the worth of the old religions as means of elevating and improving human character that it is nearly if not quite impossible for them to produce their best moral effects unless we suppose a certain torpedoity if not positive twists in the intellectual faculties for it is impossible that anyone who habitually thinks and who is unable to blunt his inquiring intellect by sophistry should be able without misgiving to go on ascribing absolute perfection to the author and ruler of so clumsily made and capriciously governed a creation as this planet and the life of its inhabitants the adoration of such a being cannot be with the whole heart unless the heart is first considerably sophisticated the worship must either be greatly over clouded by doubt and occasionally quite darkened by it where the moral sentiments must sink to the low level of the ordinances of nature the worshipper must learn to think blind partiality atrocious cruelty and in reckless injustice not blemishes in an object of worship since all of these are bound to access in the commonest phenomenon of nature it is true the God whose worship does not generally speaking the God of nature only but also the God of some revelation and the character of the revelation will greatly modify and it may be improve the moral influences of the religion this is emphatically true of Christianity since the author of the sermons on the mount is assuredly a far more bignignant being than the author of nature but unfortunately the believer in the Christian revelation is obliged to believe that the same being is the author of both this unless he resolutely avert his mind from the subject or practices the act of quieting his conscience by self-esteem involves him in moral preproxies without end since the ways of his deity in nature are on many occasions totally at variance with the precepts as he believes of the same deity in the gospel he who comes out with least moral damage from this embarrassment is probably the one who never attempts to reconcile the two standards with one another but confesses to himself that the purposes of providence are mysterious and that it's ways are not our ways that it's justice and goodness are not the justice and goodness which we can conceive and which it befits us to practice when however this is the feeling of the believer the worship of the deity ceases to be an adoration of abstract moral perfection it becomes the bowing down to a gigantic image of something not fit for us to imitate is the worship of power only I say nothing of the moral difficulties and perversions involved in revelation itself though even in the Christianity of the gospels at least in its ordinary interpretation there are some of so flagrant a character is almost too outweigh all the beauty and benignity and moral greatness which so eminently distinguish the saints and character of Christ the recognition for example of the object of highest worship in a being who could make a hell and who could create countless generations of human beings with a certain foreknowledge that he was creating them for this fate is there any moral enormity which might not be justified by imitation of such a deity and is it possible to adore such a one without a frightful distortion of the standard of right and wrong any other of the outrageous to the most ordinary justice and humanity involved in the common Christian conception of the moral character of God sinks into insignificance besides this dreadful idealization of wickedness most of them too are not so unequivably deducible from the very words of Christ as to be indisputably a part of Christian doctrine it may be doubted for instance whether Christianity is really responsible for atonement and redemption original sin and vicarious punishment and the same may be said respecting the doctrine which makes belief in the divine mission of Christ a necessary condition of salvation it is nowhere represented that Christ himself made the statement except in the huddled up account of the resurrection contained in the concluding verses of Saint Mark which some critics I believe the best consider to be an interpolation again the proposition that the powers that be are ordained of God and the whole series of corollaries deduced from it in the epistles belong to Saint Paul and must stand or fall with Paulism not with Christianity but there is one moral contradiction inseparable from every form of Christianity which no ingenuity can resolve and no sophistry explain a way it is that so precious a gift bestowed on a few should have been withheld from the many that countless millions of human beings should have been allowed to live and die to sin and suffer without the one thing needful the divine remedy for sin and suffering which it would have cost the divine giver as little to vouchsafe to all as to have bestowed by special grace upon a favored minority add to this that the divine message assuming it to be such has been authenticated by credentials so insufficient that they failed to convince a large proportion of the strongest and most cultivated minds and the tendency to disbelieve them appears to grow with the growth of scientific knowledge and critical to discrimination he who can believe these to be the intentional shortcomings of a perfectly good being must impose silence on every prompting of the sense of goodness and justice as received among men it is no doubt possible and there are many instances of it to worship with the intense devotion either deity that of nature or of the gospel without any perversion of the moral sentiments but this must be by fixing the attention exclusively on what is beautiful and beneficent in the precepts and spirit of the gospel and in the dispensations of nature and putting all that is the reverse as entirely aside as if it did not exist accordingly the simple and innocent faith can only as I have said coexist with a torporate and inactive state of speculative faculties for a person of exercise and elect there is no way of attaining anything equivalent to it say by sophistication and perversion either of the understanding or of the conscience it may almost always be said both of sex and of individuals who derive their morality from religion that the better logicians they are the worst moralist one only form of belief in the supernatural one only theory respecting the origin and government of the universe stands wholly clear both of intellectual contradiction and of moral obliquity is that which resigning irrevocably the idea of an omnipotent creator regards nature and life not as the expression throughout of the moral character and purpose of the deity but as the product of a struggle between contriving goodness and an intractable material as was believed by Plato or a principle of evil as was the doctrine of the Manicheans a creed like this which I have known to be devoutly held by at least one cultivated and conscientious person of our own day allows it to be believed that all the massive evil which exists was undesigned by and exists not by the appointment of but in spite of the being whom we are called upon to worship a virtuous human being assumes in this theory the exalted character of a fellow laborer with the highest a fellow combatant in the great strife contributing his low which by the aggregation of many like himself becomes much towards that progressive ascendancy and ultimately complete triumph of good over evil which history points to in which this doctrine teaches us in regard as planned by the being to whom we are all the benevolent contrives we behold in nature against the moral tendency of this creed no possible objection can lie it can produce on whoever can succeed in believing it no other than an open effect the evidence for it indeed if evidence it can be called is too shadowy and substantial and the promises it holds out too distant and uncertain to admit of it being a permanent substitute for the religion of humanity but the two may be held in conjunction even he to whom ideal good and the progress of the world towards it are already a religion even though that other creed may seem to him a belief not grounded on evidence is it liberty to indulge the pleasing and encouraging thought that its truth is possible apart from all dogmatic belief there is for those who need it an ample domain in the region of the imagination which may be planted with possibilities with hypotheses which cannot be known to be false and when there is anything in the appearances of nature to favor them as in this case there is for whatever force we attach to the analogies of nature with the effects of human contrivance there is no disputing the remark of Paley that which is good in nature exhibits those analogies much oftener than what is evil the contemplation of these possibilities is of legitimate indulgence capable of burying its part with other influences in feeding and animating the tendency of the feelings and impulses towards good one advantage says it is the supernatural religions must always possess over the religion of humanity the prospect they hold out to the individual of a life after death for though the skepticism of the understanding does not necessarily exclude the theism of the imagination and feelings and this again gives opportunity for a hope that the power which has done so much for us may be able and willing to do this also such vague possibility must ever stop far short of a conviction it remains then to estimate the value of this element the prospect of a world to come as a constituent of earthly happiness I cannot but think that as the condition of mankind becomes improved as they grow happier in their lives and more capable of deriving happiness from unselfish sources they will care less and less for this flattering expectation it is not naturally or generally the happy who are the most anxious either for a prolongation of the present life or for a life hereafter it is those who never have been happy they who have had their happiness can bear the part with existence but it is hard to die without ever having lived when mankind sees to need a future existence as a consolation for the sufferings of the present it will have lost its chief value to them for themselves I am now speaking of the unselfish those who are so wrapped up in self that they are unable to identify their feelings with anything which will survive them or to feel their life prolonged in their younger contemporaries and in all who helped to carry on the progressive movement of human affairs require the notion of another selfish life beyond the grave to enable them to keep up any interest in existence since the present life as this termination approaches dwindles into something too insignificant to be worth caring about but if the religion of humanity were as seriously cultivated as the supernatural religions are and there is no difficulty in conceiving that it might be much more so all who had received the customary amount of moral cultivation would up to the hour of death live ideally in the life of those who were to follow them and though doubtless they would often willingly survive as individuals for a much longer period than the present duration of life it appears to be probable that after a length of time different and different persons they would have had enough of existence and would gladly lie down and take their eternal rest meanwhile and without looking so far forward we may remark that those who believe the immortality of the soul generally quit life with fully as much if not more, reluctance as those who have had no such expectation the mere cessation of the existence is no evil to anyone the idea is only formidable through the illusion of imagination which makes one conceive oneself as if one were alive and feeling oneself dead what is odious in death is not death itself but the act of dying and it's the gooberious accompaniments all of which must be equally undergone by the believer in immortality nor can I perceive that the skeptic loses by his skepticism any real and valuable consolation except one the hope of reunion with those dear to him who have ended their earthly life before him that loss indeed is neither to be denied nor extenuated in many cases it is beyond the reach of comparison or estimate and will always suffice to keep alive in the more sensitive natures the imaginative hope of futurity which if there is nothing to prove there is as little in our knowledge and experience to contradict history so far as we know it bears out the opinion that mankind can perfectly well do without the belief in a heaven the Greeks had anything but a tempting idea of a future state their Elysian fields held up very little attraction to their feelings and imagination Achilles in the Odyssey express a very natural and no doubt a very common sentiment when he said that he would rather be on earth the surf of a needy master than rain over the whole kingdom of the dead and the pins of character so striking in the address of the dying imperhaedron to his soul gives evidence that the popular conception had not undergone much variation during that long interval yet we neither find that the Greeks enjoyed lifeless nor fear death more than other people the Buddhist religion counts probably at this day a greater number of votaries than either the Christian or the Mohammedan the Buddhist Creed recognizes many modes of punishment in the future life or rather lives by the transmigration of the soul into new bodies of men or animals but the blessing from heaven which it proposes as a reward to be earned by perseverance in the highest order of virtuous life is annihilation the cessation at least of all conscious or separate existence it is impossible to mistake in this religion the work of legislators and moralists endeavoring to supply supernatural motives for the conduct which they were anxious to encourage and they could find nothing more transcendent to hold out as the capital prize to be won by the mightiest efforts of labor and self-delial than what we are so often told is a terrible idea of annihilation surely this is a proof that the idea is not really or naturally terrible that not philosophers only the common order of mankind can easily reconcile themselves to it and even consider it as a good and that it is no unnatural part of the idea of a happy life that life itself be laid down after the best that it can give has been fully enjoyed through a long lapse of time when all its pleasures even those of benevolence are familiar and nothing untasted and unknown is left to stimulate curiosity and keep up the desire of prolonged existence it seems to me not only possible but probable that in a higher and above all a happier condition of human life not annihilation but immortality may be the burdensome idea and that human nature so please with the present and by no means impatient to quit it would find comfort and not sadness in the thought that it is not chained through eternity to a conscious existence which it cannot be assured that it will always wish to preserve end of the utility of religion part four section number nine of three essays on religion this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org three essays on religion by John Stuart Mill Theism part one introduction the contest which subsists from of old between believers and unbelievers in natural and revealed religion has like other permanent contests varied materially in its character from age to age and the present generation at least in the higher regions of controversy shows as compared with the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century a marked alteration in the aspect of the dispute one feature of this change is so apparent as to be generally acknowledged the more softened temper in which the debate is conducted on the part of unbelievers the reactionary violence provoked by the intolerance of the other side has in a great measure exhausted itself experience has abated the ardent hopes once entertained of the regeneration of the human race by merely negative doctrine by the destruction of superstition the philosophical study of history one of the most important creations of recent times has rendered possible an impartial estimate of the doctrines and institutions of the past from a relative instead of an absolute point of view as incidents of human development at which it is useless to grumble and which may deserve admiration and gratitude for their effects in the past even though they may be thought incapable of rendering similar services to the future and the position assigned to Christianity or theism by the more instructed of those who reject the supernatural is that of things once of great value but which can now be done without rather than as formerly of things misleading and noxious obinicio along with this change in the moral attitude of thoughtful unbelievers towards the religious ideas of mankind a corresponding difference has manifested itself in their intellectual attitude the war against religious beliefs in the last century was carried on principally on the ground of common sense or of logic in the present age on the ground of science the progress of the physical sciences is considered to have established by conclusive evidence matters of fact with which the religious traditions of mankind are not reconcilable while the science of human nature and history is considered to show that the creeds of the past are natural growths of the human mind in particular stages of its career destined to disappear and give place to other convictions in a more advanced stage in the progress of discussion this last class of considerations seems even to be superseding those which address themselves directly to the question of truth religions tend to be discussed at least by those who reject them less as intrinsically true or false then as products thrown up by certain stages of civilization and which, like the animal and vegetable productions of a geological period perish in those which succeeded from the secession of the conditions necessary to their continued existence this tendency of recent speculation to look upon human opinions preeminently from an historical point of view as facts obeying laws of their own and requiring, like other observed facts and historical or a scientific explanation a tendency not confined to religious subjects is by no means to be blamed but to be applauded not solely as drawing attention to an important and previously neglected aspect of human opinions but because it has a real though indirect bearing upon the question of their truth for whatever opinion a person may adopt on any subject that admits of controversy his assurance, if he be a cautious thinker cannot be complete unless he is able to account for the existence of the opposite opinion to ascribe it to the weakness of the human understanding is an explanation which cannot be sufficient for such a thinker for he will be slow to assume that he has himself a less share of that infirmity than the rest of mankind and that error is more likely to be on the other side than on his own in his examination of evidence the persuasion of others perhaps of mankind in general is one of the data of the case one of the phenomena to be accounted for as the human intellect though weak is not essentially perverted there is a certain presumption of the truth of any opinion held by many human minds requiring to be rebutted by assigning some other real or possible cause for its prevalence and this consideration has a special relevancy to the inquiry concerning the foundations of theism in as much as no argument for the truth of theism is more commonly invoked or more confidently relied on than the general assent of mankind but while giving its full value to this historical treatment of the religious question we ought not therefore to let it supersede the dogmatic the most important quality of an opinion on any momentous subject is its truth or falsity which to us resolves itself into the sufficiency of the evidence on which it rests it is indispensable that the subject of religion should from time to time be reviewed as a strictly scientific question and that its evidences should be tested by the same scientific methods and on the same principles as those of any of the speculative conclusions drawn by physical science it being granted then that the legitimate conclusions of science are entitled to prevail over all opinions however widely held which conflict with them and that the cannons of scientific evidence which the successes and failures of two thousand years have established are applicable to all subjects on which knowledge is attainable let us proceed to consider what place there is for religious beliefs on the platform of science what evidences they can appeal to such as science can recognize and what foundation there is for the doctrines of religion considered as scientific theorems in this inquiry we of course begin with natural religion the doctrine of the existence and attributes of god theism though i have defined the problem of natural theology to be that of the existence of god or of a god rather than of gods there is the amplest historical evidence that the belief in gods is immeasurably more natural to the human mind than the belief in one author and ruler of nature and that this more elevated belief is compared with the former an artificial product requiring except when impressed by early education a considerable amount of intellectual culture before it can be reached for a long time the supposition appeared forced and unnatural that the diversity we see in the operations of nature can all be the work of a single will to the untaught mind and to all minds in the pre-scientific times the phenomena of nature seemed to be the result of forces altogether heterogeneous each taking its course quite independently of the others and though to attribute them to conscious wills is imminently natural the natural tendency is to suppose as many such independent wills as there are distinguishable forces of sufficient importance and interest to have been remarked and named there is no tendency in polytheism as such to transform itself spontaneously into monotheism it is true that in polytheistic systems generally the deity whose special attributes inspire the greatest degree of awe is usually supposed to have a power of controlling the other deities and even in the most degraded perhaps of all such systems the Hindu adulation heaps upon the divinity who is the immediate object of adoration epithets like those habitual to believers in a single god but there is no real acknowledgement of one governor every god normally rules his particular department though there may be a still stronger god whose power when he chooses to exert it can frustrate the purposes of the inferior divinity there could be no real belief in one creator and governor until mankind had begun to see in the apparently confused phenomena which surrounded him a system capable of being viewed as the possible working out of a single plan this conception of the world was perhaps anticipated though less frequently than is supposed by individuals of exceptional genius but it could only become common after a rather long cultivation of scientific thought the special mode in which scientific study operates to instill monotheism in place of the more natural polytheism is in no way mysterious the specific effect of science is to show by accumulating evidence that every event in nature is connected by laws with some fact or facts which preceded it or in other words depends for its existence on some antecedent but yet not so strictly on one as not to be liable to frustration or modification from others and these distinct chains of causation are so entangled with one another the action of each cause is so interfered with by the other causes though each acts according to its own fixed law that every effect is truly the result rather of the aggregate of all causes in existence than of any one only and nothing takes place in the world of our experience without spreading a perceptible influence of some sort through a greater or less portion of nature and making perhaps every portion of it slightly different from what it would have been if that event had not taken place now when once the double conviction has found entry into the mind that every event depends on antecedents and at the same time that to bring it about many antecedents must concur perhaps all the antecedents in nature in so much that a slight difference in any one of them might have prevented the phenomenon or materially altered its character the conviction follows that no one event certainly no one kind of events can be absolutely preordained or governed by any being but one who holds in his hand the reigns of all nature and not of some department only at least if a plurality be supposed it is necessary to assume so complete a concert of action and unity of will among them that the difference is for most purposes immaterial between such a theory and that of the absolute unity of the Godhead the reason then why monotheism may be accepted as the representative of theism in the abstract is not so much because it is the theism of all the more improved portions of the human race as because it is the only theism which can claim for itself any footing on scientific ground every other theory of the government of the universe by supernatural beings is inconsistent either with the carrying on of that government through a continual series of natural antecedents according to fixed laws or with the interdependence of each of these series upon all the rest which are the two most general results of science setting out therefore from the scientific view of nature as one connected system or united whole united not like a web composed of separate threads in passive juxtaposition with one another but rather like the human or animal frame and apparatus kept going by perpetual action and reaction among all its parts it must be acknowledged that the question to which theism is an answer is at least a very natural one and issues from an obvious want of the human mind accustomed as we are to find in proportion to our means of observation a definite beginning to each individual fact and since wherever there is a beginning we find that there was an antecedent fact called by us a cause a fact but for which the phenomenon which thus commences would not have been it was impossible that the human mind should not ask itself whether the whole of which these particular phenomena are a part had not also a beginning and if so whether that beginning was not an origin whether there was not something antecedent to the whole series of causes and effects that return nature but for which nature itself would not have been from the first recorded speculation this question has never remained without and hypothetical answer the only answer which has long continued to afford satisfaction is theism looking at the problem as it is our business to do merely as a scientific inquiry it resolves itself into two questions first is the theory which refers the origin of all the phenomena of nature to the will of a creator consistent or not with the ascertained results of science secondly assuming it to be consistent will its proofs bear to be tested by the principles of evidence and canons of belief by which our long experience of scientific inquiry has proved the necessity of being guided first then there is one conception of theism which is consistent another which is radically inconsistent with the most general truths that have been made known to us by scientific investigation the one which is inconsistent is the conception of god governing the world by acts of variable will the one which is consistent is the conception of a god governing the world by invariable laws the primitive and even in our own day the vulgar conception of the divine rule is that the one god like the many gods of antiquity carries on the government of the world by special decrees made pro hoc vichy although supposed to be omniscient as well as omnipotent he is thought not to make up his mind until the moment of action or at least not so conclusively but that his intentions may be altered up to the very last moment by appropriate solicitation without entering into the difficulties of reconciling this view of the divine government with the prescience and the perfect wisdom ascribed to the deity we may content ourselves with the fact that it contradicts what experience has taught us of the manner in which things actually take place the phenomena of nature do take place according to general laws they do originate from definite natural antecedents therefore if their ultimate origin is derived from a will that will must have established the general laws and willed the antecedents if there be a creator his intentions must have been that events should depend upon antecedents and be produced according to fixed laws but this being conceded there is nothing in scientific experience inconsistent with the belief that those laws and sequences are themselves due to a divine will neither are we obliged to suppose that the divine will exerted itself once for all and after putting a power into the system which enabled it to go on of itself has ever since let it alone science contains nothing repugnant to the supposition that every event which takes place results from a specific volition of the presiding power provided that this power adheres in its particular volitions to general laws laid down by itself the common opinion of this hypothesis tends more to the glory of the deity than the supposition that the universe was made so that it could go on of itself there have been thinkers however of no ordinary eminence of whom Leibniz was one who thought the last the only supposition worthy of the deity and protested against likening God to a clockmaker whose clock will not go unless he puts his hand to the machinery and keeps it going with such considerations we have no concern in this place we are looking at the subject not from the point of view of reverence but from that of science and with science both these suppositions as to the mode of the divine action are equally consistent we must now however pass to the next question there is nothing to disprove the creation and government of nature by a sovereign will but is there anything to prove it of what nature are its evidences and weighed in the scientific balance what is their value and of section nine section ten of three essays on religion this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org three essays on religion by John Stuart Mill the evidences of theism the evidences of a creator are not only of several distinct kinds but of such diverse characters that they are adapted to minds of very different descriptions and it is hardly possible for any mind to be equally impressed by them all the familiar classification of them into proofs a priori and a posteriori marks that when looked at in a purely scientific view they belong to different schools of thought accordingly though the unthoughtful believer whose creed really rests on authority gives an equal welcome to all plausible arguments in support of the belief in which he has been brought up philosophers who have had to make a choice between the a priori and the a posteriori methods in general science seldom fail while insisting on one of these modes of support for religion to speak with more or less of disparagement of the other it is our duty in the present inquiry to maintain complete impartiality and to give a fair examination to both at the same time I entertain a strong conviction that one of the two modes of argument is in its nature scientific the other not only unscientific but condemned by science the scientific argument is that which reasons from the facts and analogies of human experience as a geologist does when he infers the past states of our terrestrial globe or an astronomical observer when he draws conclusions respecting the physical composition of the heavenly bodies this is the a posteriori method the principal application of which to theism is the argument as it is called of design the mode of reasoning which I call unscientific though in the opinion of some thinkers it is also a legitimate mode of scientific procedure is that which infers external objective facts from ideas or convictions of our minds I say this independently of any opinion of my own respecting the origin of our ideas or convictions for even if we are unable to point out any manner in which the idea of God for example can have grown up from the impressions of experience still the idea can only prove the idea and not the objective fact unless indeed the fact is supposed agreeably to the book of genesis to have been handed down by tradition from a time when there was direct personal intercourse with the divine being in which case the argument is no longer a priori the supposition that an idea or a wish or a need even if native to the mind proves the reality of a corresponding object derives all its plausibility from the belief already in our minds that we were made by a benign being who would not have implanted in us a groundless belief or a want which he did not afford us the means of satisfying and is therefore a palpable Petitio Principi if adduced as an argument to support the very belief which it presupposes at the same time it must be admitted that all a priori systems whether in philosophy or religion do in some sense profess to be founded on experience since though they affirm the possibility of arriving at truths which transcend experience they yet make the facts of experience their starting point as what other starting point is possible they are entitled to consideration in so far as it can be shown that experience gives any countenance either to them or to their method of inquiry professedly a priori arguments are not unfrequently of a mixed nature partaking in some degree of the a posteriori character and may often be said to be a posteriori arguments in disguise a priori considerations acting chiefly in the way of making some particular a posteriori argument tell for more than it is worth this is emphatically true of the argument for theism which i shall first examine the necessity of a first cause for this has in truth a wide basis of experience in the universality of the relation of cause and effect among the phenomena of nature while at the same time theological philosophers have not been content to let it rest upon this basis but have affirmed causation as a truth of reason apprehended intuitively by its own light argument for a first cause the argument for a first cause admits of being and is presented as a conclusion from the whole of human experience everything that we know it is argued had a cause and owed its existence to that cause how then can it be but that the world which is but a name for the aggregate of all that we know has a cause to which it is indebted for its existence the fact of experience however when correctly expressed turns out to be not that everything which we know derives its existence from a cause but only every event or change there is in nature a permanent element and also a changeable the changes are always the effects of previous changes the permanent existences so far as we know are not effects at all it is true we are accustomed to say not only of events but of objects that they are produced by causes as water by the union of hydrogen and oxygen but by this we only mean that when they begin to exist their beginning is the effect of a cause but their beginning to exist is not an object it is an event if it be objected that the cause of a things beginning to exist may be said with propriety to be the cause of the thing itself I shall not quarrel with the expression but that which in an object begins to exist is that in it which belongs to the changeable element in nature the outward form and the properties depending on mechanical or chemical combinations of its component parts there is in every object another and a permanent element these the specific elementary substance or substances of which it consists and their inherent properties these are not known to us as beginning to exist within the range of human knowledge they had no beginning consequently no cause though they themselves are causes or con causes of everything that takes place experience therefore affords no evidences not even analogies to justify our extending to the apparently immutable a generalization grounded only on our observation of the changeable as a fact of experience then causation cannot legitimately be extended to the material universe itself but only to its changeable phenomena of these indeed causes may be affirmed without any exception but what causes the cause of every change is a prior change and such it cannot but be for if there were no new antecedent there would not be a new consequent if the state of facts which brings the phenomenon into existence had existed always or for an indefinite duration the effect also would have existed always or been produced an indefinite time ago it is thus a necessary part of the fact of causation within the sphere of our experience that the causes as well as the effects had a beginning in time and were themselves caused it would seem therefore that our experience instead of furnishing an argument for a first cause is repugnant to it and that the very essence of causation as it exists within the limits of our knowledge is incompatible with a first cause but it is necessary to look more particularly into the matter and analyze more closely the nature of the causes of which mankind have experience for if it should turn out that though all causes have a beginning there is in all of them a permanent element which had no beginning this permanent element may with some justice be termed a first or universal cause in as much as though not sufficient of itself to cause anything it enters as a con cause into all causation now it happens that the last result of physical inquiry derived from the converging evidences of all branches of physical science does, if it holds good land us so far as the material world is concerned in a result of this sort whenever a physical phenomenon is traced to its cause the cause when analyzed is found to be a certain quantum of force combined with certain co-locations and the last great generalization of science the conservation of force teaches us that the variety in the effects depends partly upon the amount of the force and partly upon the diversity of the co-locations the force itself is essentially one and the same and there exists of it in nature a fixed quantity which if the theory be true is never increased nor diminished here then we find even in the changes of material nature a permanent element to all appearance the very one of which we were inquest this it is apparently to which if to anything we must assign the character of first cause the cause of the material universe for all effects may be traced up to it while it cannot be traced up by our experience to anything beyond its transformations alone can be so traced and of them the cause always includes the force itself the same quantity of force in some previous form it would seem then that in the only sense in which experience supports in any shape the doctrine of a first cause these as the primeval and universal element in all causes the first cause can be no other then force we are however by no means at the end of the question on the contrary the greatest stress of the argument is exactly at the point which we have now reached for it is maintained that mind is the only possible cause of force or rather perhaps that mind is a force and that all other force must be derived from it in as much as mind is the only thing which is capable of originating change this is said to be the lesson of human experience in the phenomena of inanimate nature the force which works is always a pre-existing force not originated but transferred one physical object moves another by getting out to it the force by which it has first been itself moved the wind communicates to the waves or to a windmill or a ship part of the motion which has been given to itself by some other agent in voluntary action alone we can see a commencement and origination of motion since all other causes appear incapable of this origination experience is in favor of the conclusion that all the motion in existence owed its beginning to this one cause voluntary agency if not that of man then of a more powerful being this argument is a very old one it is to be found in Plato not as might have been expected in the Phaidon where the arguments are not such as would now be deemed of any weight but in his latest production the legis and it is still one of the most telling arguments with the more metaphysical class of defenders of natural theology now in the first place if there be truth in the doctrine of the conservation of force in other words the constancy of the total amount of force in existence this doctrine does not change from true to false when it reaches the field of voluntary agency the will does not any more than other causes create force granting that it originates motion it has no means of doing so but by converting into that particular manifestation a portion of force which already existed in other forms it is known that the source from which this portion of force is derived is chiefly or entirely the force evolved in the processes of chemical composition and decomposition which constitutes the body of nutrition the force so liberated becomes a fund upon which every muscular and even every merely nervous action as of the brain in thought is a draft it is in this sense only that according to the best lights of science volition is an originating cause volition therefore does not answer to the idea of a first cause since force must in every instance be assumed as prior to it and there is not the slightest color derived from experience for supposing force itself to have been created by a volition as far as anything can be concluded from human experience force has all the attributes of a thing eternal and uncreated this however does not close the discussion for though whatever verdict experience can give in the case is against the possibility that will ever originates force yet if we can be assured that neither does force originate will will must be held to be an agency if not prior to force yet co-eternal with it and if it be true that will can originate not indeed force but the transformation of force from some other of its manifestations into that of mechanical motion and that there is within human experience no other agency capable of doing so the argument for a will as the originator though not of the universe yet of the cosmos or order of the universe remains unanswered but the case thus stated is not conformable to fact whatever volition can do in the way of creating motion out of other forms of force and generally of evolving force from a latent into a visible state can be done by many other causes chemical action for instance electricity heat the mere presence of a gravitating body all these are causes of mechanical motion on a far larger scale than any volitions which experience presents to us and in most of the effects thus produced the motion given by one body to another is not as in the ordinary cases of mechanical motion motion that has first been given to that other by some third body the phenomenon is not a mere passing on of mechanical motion but a creation of it out of a force previously latent or manifesting itself in some other form volition therefore regarded as an agent in the material universe has no exclusive privilege of origination all that it can originate is also originated by other transforming agents if it be said that those other agents must have had the force they give out put into them from elsewhere I answer that this is no less true of the force which volition disposes of we know that this force comes from an external source the chemical action of the food and air the force by which the phenomena of the material world are produced circulates through all physical agencies in a never-ending though sometimes intermitting stream I am of course speaking of volition only in its action on the material world we have nothing to do here with the freedom of the will itself as a mental phenomenon with the vixata questio whether volition is self-determining or determined by causes to the question now in hand it is only the effects of volition that are relevant not its origin the assertion is that physical nature must have been produced by a will because nothing but will is known to us as having the power of originating the production of phenomena we have seen that on the contrary all the power that will possesses over phenomena is shared as far as we have the means of judging by other and much more powerful agents and that in the only sense in which those agents do not originate neither does will originate no prerogative therefore can on the ground of experience be assigned to volition above other natural agents as a producing cause of phenomena all that can be affirmed by the strongest assertor of the freedom of the will is that volitions are themselves uncaused and are therefore alone fit to be the first or universal cause but even assuming volitions to be uncaused the properties of matter so far as experience discloses are uncaused also and have the advantage over any particular volition in being so far as experience can show eternal theism therefore in so far as it rests on the necessity of a first cause has no support from experience to those who in default of experience consider the necessity of a first cause as matter of intuition I would say that it is needless in this discussion to contest their premises since admitting that there is and must be a first cause it has now been shown that several other agencies then will can lay equal claim to that character one thing only may be said which requires notice here among the facts of the universe to be accounted for it may be said is mind and it is self-evident that nothing can have produced mind but mind the special indications that mind is deemed to give pointing to intelligent contrivance belong to a different portion of this inquiry but if the mere existence of mind is supposed to require as a necessary antecedent another mind greater and more powerful the difficulty is not removed by going one step back the creating mind stands as much in need of another mind to be the source of its existence as the created mind be it remembered that we have no direct knowledge at least apart from revelation of a mind which is even apparently eternal as force and matter are an eternal mind is as far as the present argument is concerned a simple hypothesis to account for the minds which we know to exist now it is essential to an hypothesis that if admitted it should at least remove the difficulty and account for the facts but it does not account for mind to refer one mind to a prior mind for its origin the problem remains unsolved the difficulty undiminished may rather increased to this it may be objected that the causation of every human mind is matter of fact since we know that it had a beginning in time we even know or have the strongest grounds for believing that the human species itself had a beginning in time for there is a vast amount of evidence that the state of our planet was once such to be incompatible with animal life and that human life is of very much more modern origin than animal life in any case therefore the fact must be faced that there must have been a cause which called the first human mind nay the very first germ of organic life into existence no such difficulty exists in the supposition of an eternal mind if we did not know that mind on our earth began to exist we might suppose it to be uncaused and we may still suppose this of the mind to which we ascribe its existence to take this ground is to return into the field of human experience and to become subject to its cannons and we are then entitled to ask where is the proof that nothing can have caused a mind except another mind from what except from experience can we know what can produce what what causes are adequate to what effects that nothing can consciously produce mind but mind is self-evident being involved in the meaning of the words but that there cannot be unconscious production must not be assumed for it is the very point to be proved apart from experience and arguing on what is called reason that is on supposed self-evidence the notion seems to be that no causes can give rise to products of a more precious or elevated kind than themselves but this is at variance with the known analogies of nature how vastly nobler and more precious for instance are the higher vegetables and animals than the soil and manure out of which and by the properties of which they are raised up the tendency of all recent speculation is towards the opinion that the development of inferior orders of existence into superior the substitution of greater elaboration and higher organization for lower is the general rule of nature whether it is so or not there are at least in nature a multitude of facts bearing that character and this is sufficient for the argument here then this part of the discussion may stop the result it leads to is that the first cause argument is in itself of no value for the establishment of theism because no cause is needed for the existence of that which has no beginning and both matter and force whatever metaphysical theory we may give of the one or the other have had so far as our experience can teach us no beginning which cannot be said of mind the phenomena or changes in the universe have indeed each of them a beginning and a cause but their cause is always a prior change nor do the analogies of experience give us any reason to expect from the mere occurrence of changes that if we could trace back the series far enough we should arrive at a primeval volition the world does not by its mere existence bear witness to a god if it gives indications of one these must be given by the special nature of the phenomena by what they present that resembles adaptation to an end of which hereafter if in default of evidence from experience the evidence of intuition is relied upon it may be answered that if mind as mind presents intuitive evidence of having been created the creative mind must do the same and we are no nearer to the first cause than before but if there be nothing in the nature of mind which in itself implies a creator the minds which have a beginning in time as all minds have which are known to our experience must indeed have been caused but it is not necessary that their cause should have been a prior intelligence end of section 10