- He would have described this
decent, the gradual diffusion, the growing power of the new Idea, the
active ferment which it contains after the manner of a dogma,
beneficent or pernicious according to the minds in which it lodges,
capable of arming men and of driving them on to pure destruction when
not fully comprehended, and capable of reorganizing them if they can
grasp its veritable meaning.
Its first effects are simply destructive, for, through Darwinism,
through experimental psychology, through the physiology of the brain,
through biblical exegesis, through the comparative study of savage
communities and their moral systems, the new concepts at first shocks
the religious idea which it tends to replace; even, with the half-
cultivated and in the minds of novices, it tends to pure negation, to
hostility against existing religions. To every social gathering around
the religious idea that explains and sustains it, what a disturbance
in the secular system formed by the co-ordination and mutual
adaptation of laws, customs, morality, and institutions! What a
rupture of the inward equilibrium which maintains man passive and
tranquil! The consequent mental agitation will lead to agitation,
impulsion, ambitions, lassitude, despondency, and disorder in all the
sentiments which had thus far maintained every species of society, the
family, the commune, the Church, free association and the State! -
Now, along with the immediate effects of science on the intellectual
habits of men consider the effects of its application to their
material condition; at first, their increased well-being, their power
increased, then the rupture of the ties that bind them to their
birthplace, the concentration of masses of workmen in the towns to
which they are attracted by great and rapid industrial development,
the influx of new ideas, of every species of information, the gradual
decline of the old hereditary prejudices of caste and parish which act
automatically as instincts, and are useful as instincts to the small
groups in which the individual is born and in which he lives.
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