Freud - Complete Works (723 page)

   Thus I must contradict you when
you go on to argue that men are completely unable to do without the
consolation of the religious illusion, that without it they could
not bear the troubles of life and the cruelties of reality. That is
true, certainly, of the men into whom you have instilled the sweet
- or bitter-sweet - poison from childhood onwards. But what of the
other men, who have been sensibly brought up? Perhaps those who do
not suffer from the neurosis will need no intoxicant to deaden it.
They will, it is true, find themselves in a difficult situation.
They will have to admit to themselves the full extent of their
helplessness and their insignificance in the machinery of the
universe; they can no longer be the centre of creation, no longer
the object of tender care on the part of a beneficent Providence.
They will be in the same position as a child who has left the
parental house where he was so warm and comfortable. But surely
infantilism is destined to be surmounted. Men cannot remain
children for ever; they must in the end go out into ‘hostile
life’. We may call this ‘
education to
reality
’. Need I confess to you that the sole purpose of
my book is to point out the necessity for this forward step?

The Future Of An Illusion

4457

   You are afraid, probably, that
they will not stand up to the hard test? Well, let us at least hope
they will. It is something, at any rate, to know that one is thrown
upon one’s own resources. One learns then to make a proper
use of them. And men are not entirely without assistance. Their
scientific knowledge has taught them much since the days of the
Deluge, and it will increase their power still further. And, as for
the great necessities of Fate, against which there is no help, they
will learn to endure them with resignation. Of what use to them is
the mirage of wide acres in the moon, whose harvest no one has ever
yet seen? As honest smallholders on this earth they will know how
to cultivate their plot in such a way that it supports them. By
withdrawing their expectations from the other world and
concentrating all their liberated energies into their life on
earth, they will probably succeed in achieving a state of things in
which life will become tolerable for everyone and civilization no
longer oppressive to anyone. Then, with one of our
fellow-unbelievers, they will be able to say without regret:

                                               
Den Himmel überlassen
wir

                                                               
Den Engeln und den Spatzen.

The Future Of An Illusion

4458

X

That sounds splendid! A race of men who have
renounced all illusions and have thus become capable of making
their existence on earth tolerable! I, however, cannot share your
expectations. And that is not because I am the obstinate
reactionary you perhaps take me for. No, it is because I am
sensible. We seem now to have exchanged roles: you emerge as an
enthusiast who allows himself to be carried away by illusions, and
I stand for the claims of reason, the rights of scepticism. What
you have been expounding seems to me to be built upon errors which,
following your example, I may call illusions, because they betray
clearly enough the influence of your wishes. You pin your hope on
the possibility that generations which have not experienced the
influence of religious doctrines in early childhood will easily
attain the desired primacy of the intelligence over the life of the
instincts. This is surely an illusion: in this decisive respect
human nature is hardly likely to change. If I am not mistaken - one
knows so little about other civilizations - there are even to-day
peoples which do not grow up under the pressure of a religious
system, and yet they approach no nearer to your ideal than the
rest. If you want to expel religion from our European civilization,
you can only do it by means of another system of doctrines; and
such a system would from the outset take over all the psychological
characteristics of religion - the same sanctity, rigidity and
intolerance, the same prohibition of thought - for its own defence.
You have to have something of the kind in order to meet the
requirements of education. And you cannot do without education. The
path from the infant at the breast to the civilized man is a long
one; too many human young would go astray on it and fail to reach
their life-tasks at the proper time if they were left without
guidance to their own development. The doctrines which had been
applied in their upbringing would always set limits to the thinking
of their riper years - which is exactly what you reproach religion
with doing to-day. Do you not observe that it is an ineradicable
and innate defect of our and every other civilization, that it
imposes on children, who are driven by instinct and weak in
intellect, the making of decisions which only the mature
intelligence of adults can vindicate? But civilization cannot do
otherwise, because of the fact that mankind’s age-long
development is compressed into a few years of childhood; and it is
only by emotional forces that the child can be induced to master
the task set before it. Such, then, are the prospects for your
"primacy of the intellect".

The Future Of An Illusion

4459

   ‘And now you must not be
surprised if I plead on behalf of retaining the religious doctrinal
system as the basis of education and of man’s communal life.
This is a practical problem, not a question of reality-value.
Since, for the sake of preserving our civilization, we cannot
postpone influencing the individual until he has become ripe for
civilization (and many would never become so in any case), since we
are obliged to impose on the growing child some doctrinal system
which shall operate in him as an axiom that admits of no criticism,
it seems to me that the religious system is by far the most
suitable for the purpose. And it is so, of course, precisely on
account of its wish-fulfilling and consolatory power, by which you
claim to recognize it as an "illusion". In view of the
difficulty of discovering anything about reality - indeed, of the
doubt whether it is possible for us to do so at all - we must not
overlook the fact that human needs, too, are a piece of reality,
and, in fact, an important piece and one that concerns us
especially closely.

   ‘Another advantage of
religious doctrine resides, to my mind, in one of its
characteristics to which you seem to take particular exception. For
it allows of a refinement and sublimation of ideas, which make it
possible for it to be divested of most of the traces which it bears
of primitive and infantile thinking. What then remains is a body of
ideas which science no longer contradicts and is unable to
disprove. These modifications of religious doctrine, which you have
condemned as half-measures and compromises, make it possible to
avoid the cleft between the uneducated masses and the philosophic
thinker, and to preserve the common bond between them which is so
important for the safeguarding of civilization. With this, there
would be no need to fear that the men of the people would discover
that the upper strata of society "no longer believe in
God". I think I have now shown that your endeavours come down
to an attempt to replace a proved and emotionally valuable illusion
by another one, which is unproved and without emotional
value.’

   You will not find me inaccessible
to your criticism. I know how difficult it is to avoid illusions;
perhaps the hopes I have confessed to are of an illusory nature,
too. But I hold fast to one distinction. Apart from the fact that
no penalty is imposed for not sharing them, my illusions are not,
like religious ones, incapable of correction. They have not the
character of a delusion. If experience should show - not to me, but
to others after me, who think as I do - that we have been mistaken,
we will give up our expectations. Take my attempt for what it is. A
psychologist who does not deceive himself about the difficulty of
finding one’s bearings in this world, makes an endeavour to
assess the development of man, in the light of the small portion of
knowledge he has gained through a study of the mental processes of
individuals during their development from child to adult. In so
doing, the idea forces itself upon him that religion is comparable
to a childhood neurosis, and he is optimistic enough to suppose
that mankind will surmount this neurotic phase, just as so many
children grow out of their similar neurosis. These discoveries
derived from individual psychology may be insufficient, their
application to the human race unjustified, and his optimism
unfounded. I grant you all these uncertainties. But often one
cannot refrain from saying what one thinks, and one excuses oneself
on the ground that one is not giving it out for more than it is
worth.

The Future Of An Illusion

4460

   And there are two points that I
must dwell on a little longer. Firstly, the weakness of my position
does not imply any strengthening of yours. I think you are
defending a lost cause. We may insist as often as we like that
man’s intellect is powerless in comparison with his
instinctual life, and we may be right in this. Nevertheless, there
is something peculiar about this weakness. The voice of the
intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest till it has gained a
hearing. Finally, after a countless succession of rebuffs, it
succeeds. This is one of the few points on which one may be
optimistic about the future of mankind, but it is in itself a point
of no small importance. And from it one can derive yet other hopes.
The primacy of the intellect lies, it is true, in a distant,
distant future, but probably not in an
infinitely
distant
one. It will presumably set itself the same aims as those whose
realization you expect from your God (of course within human limits
- so far as external reality,
A
n
a
g
c
h
, allows it), namely the
love of man and the decrease of suffering. This being so, we may
tell ourselves that our antagonism is only a temporary one and not
irreconcilable. We desire the same things, but you are more
impatient, more exacting, and - why should I not say it? - more
self-seeking than I and those on my side. You would have the state
of bliss begin directly after death; you expect the impossible from
it and you will not surrender the claims of the individual. Our
God,
L
s
g
o
x
,¹ will fulfil
whichever of these wishes nature outside us allows, but he will do
it very gradually, only in the unforeseeable future, and for a new
generation of men. He promises no compensation for us, who suffer
grievously from life. On the way to this distant goal your
religious doctrines will have to be discarded, no matter whether
the first attempts fail, or whether the first substitutes prove to
be untenable. You know why: in the long run nothing can withstand
reason and experience, and the contradiction which religion offers
to both is all too palpable. Even purified religious ideas cannot
escape this fate, so long as they try to preserve anything of the
consolation of religion. No doubt if they confine themselves to a
belief in a higher spiritual being, whose qualities are indefinable
and whose purposes cannot be discerned, they will be proof against
the challenge of science; but then they will also lose their hold
on human interest.

   And secondly: observe the
difference between your attitude to illusions and mine. You have to
defend the religious illusion with all your might. If it becomes
discredited - and indeed the threat to it is great enough - then
your world collapses. There is nothing left for you but to despair
of everything, of civilization and the future of mankind. From that
bondage I am, we are, free. Since we are prepared to renounce a
good part of our infantile wishes, we can bear it if a few of our
expectations turn out to be illusions.

  
¹
The twin gods
L
s
g
o
x
and
A
n
a
g
c
h
of the Dutch writer Multatuli.

The Future Of An Illusion

4461

   Education freed from the burden
of religious doctrines will not, it may be, effect much change in
men’s psychological nature. Our god
L
s
g
o
x
is perhaps not a very
almighty one, and he may only be able to fulfil a small part of
what his predecessors have promised. If we have to acknowledge this
we shall accept it with resignation. We shall not on that account
lose our interest in the world and in life, for we have one sure
support which you lack. We believe that it is possible for
scientific work to gain some knowledge about the reality of the
world, by means of which we can increase our power and in
accordance with which we can arrange our life. If this belief is an
illusion, then we are in the same position as you. But science has
given us evidence by its numerous and important successes that it
is no illusion. Science has many open enemies, and many more secret
ones, among those who cannot forgive her for having weakened
religious faith and for threatening to overthrow it. She is
reproached for the smallness of the amount she has taught us and
for the incomparably greater field she has left in obscurity. But,
in this, people forget how young she is, how difficult her
beginnings were and how infinitesimally small is the period of time
since the human intellect has been strong enough for the tasks she
sets. Are we not all at fault, in basing our judgements on periods
of time that are too short? We should make the geologists our
pattern. People complain of the unreliability of science - how she
announces as a law to-day what the next generation recognizes as an
error and replaces by a new law whose accepted validity lasts no
longer. But this is unjust and in part untrue. The transformations
of scientific opinion are developments, advances, not revolutions.
A law which was held at first to be universally valid proves to be
a special case of a more comprehensive uniformity, or is limited by
another law, not discovered till later; a rough approximation to
the truth is replaced by a more carefully adapted one, which in
turn awaits further perfectioning. There are various fields where
we have not yet surmounted a phase of research in which we make
trial with hypotheses that soon have to be rejected as inadequate;
but in other fields we already possess an assured and almost
unalterable core of knowledge. Finally, an attempt has been made to
discredit scientific endeavour in a radical way, on the ground
that, being bound to the conditions of our own organization, it can
yield nothing else than subjective results, whilst the real nature
of things outside ourselves remains inaccessible. But this is to
disregard several factors which are of decisive importance for the
understanding of scientific work. In the first place, our
organization - that is, our mental apparatus - has been developed
precisely in the attempt to explore the external world, and it must
therefore have realized in its structure some degree of expediency;
in the second place, it is itself a constituent part of the world
which we set out to investigate, and it readily admits of such an
investigation; thirdly, the task of science is fully covered if we
limit it to showing how the world must appear to us in consequence
of the particular character of our organization; fourthly, the
ultimate findings of science, precisely because of the way in which
they are acquired, are determined not only by our organization but
by the things which have affected that organization; finally, the
problem of the nature of the world without regard to our percipient
mental apparatus is an empty abstraction, devoid of practical
interest.