Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/183

impersonal God; while here are denied, as equally absurd, both the impersonality of God and pantheism.

Further on in this chapter, he adds: "The true remedy against fanaticism is not, it appears to me, in identifying humanity with the Divinity, which is nothing else than affirming communism in political economy, and mysticism and the statu quo in philosophy. The true remedy is to prove to humanity that God, if he exists, is its enemy." We here see that, after having denied pantheism and an impersonal God, Mr. Proudhon also denies humanism, as contained in his definition. On the other hand, his theory of a rivalry between God and man, which we have already noticed in a former chapter of this book, begins here to assume a concrete form.

He asserts this theory, and also the condemnation of humanitarianism, still more clearly in the ninth chapter of the same book, where he says: "For my part, and I regret to confess it, for I feel that such a declaration separates me from the most intelligent among the socialists, the more I reflect upon it the more I find it impossible to believe in this deification of our species, which, attentively considered, is nothing else, among the atheists of our day, than the expiring echo of religious terrors, which, re-establishing and consecrating mysticism under the name of humanism, replaces the sciences under the sway of prejudice, subjects the moral world to the authority of custom, and the social economy to the rule of communism, or, what is the same thing, atony and misery; and finally, it even subjects logic to the domination of the absurd and the absolute; and, as I find myself compelled to repudiate ... this new religion, together with those which have preceded it, I