We have seen the dissolution which menaces religious dogmatism, and even religious morality, in modern societies. And from the very fact of such dissolution certain more or less disturbing social problems arise. Is it really a perilous thing, this gradual enfeeblement of what has so long served as the basis of social and domestic virtue? Certain people delight in subjecting nine-tenths of the human race to a sort of ostracism. They declare in advance that the people, and all women and children, are incapable of rising to a conception which it is recognized that a large number of men have attained. The mass of the people, it is said, and women and children, must be appealed to on the side of the imagination; only, one must take care to choose the least dangerous form of appeal possible, for fear of injuring those whom one means to serve. Let us consider to what extent this incapacity of the people, of women and children, for philosophy is capable of demonstration. It is the more necessary in this book, in that it is the sociological aspect of religion that is here the subject of investigation. _I. Is religious sentiment an innate and imperishable possession of humanity?_ [Sidenote: Tendency to regard religious beliefs as necessary in proportion to their absurdity.] In our days, be it remarked, religious sentiment has found defenders among those who, like Renan, Taine, and so many others, are most firmly convinced of the absurdities of the dogmas themselves. So long as such men occupy a purely intellectual point of view—that is to say, their real point of view—the whole of the contents of religion, all the dogmas, all the rites appear to them to be so many astounding errors, a vast system of unconscious, mutual deception; but the instant, on the contrary, they regard religion from the point of view of sensibility—that is to say, from the point of view of the masses—everything becomes justifiable in their eyes; everything that they would attack without scruple as a bit of reasoning becomes sacred to them as a bit of sentiment, and by a strange optical illusion the absurdity of religious beliefs becomes an additional proof of their necessity; the greater the abyss which separates them from the intelligence of the masses, the greater their fear of having this abyss filled up. They do not for themselves feel the need of religious beliefs, but on this very account they regard them as indispensable for other people. They say, “How many irrational beliefs the people do have that we get along very well without!” And they conclude, therefore, “These beliefs must be extremely necessary to the existence of social life and must correspond to a real need, in order thus firmly to have implanted themselves in the life of the masses.”[73]