the
whole residual cosmos as an everlasting presence, intimate or alien,
terrible or amusing, lovable or odious, which in some degree everyone
possesses. This sense of the world's presence, appealing as it does to
our peculiar individual temperament, makes us either strenuous or
careless, devout or blasphemous, gloomy or exultant, about life at
large; and our reaction, involuntary and inarticulate and often half
unconscious as it is, is the completest of all our answers to the
question, "What is the character of this universe in which we dwell?"
It expresses our individual sense of it in the most definite way. Why
then not call these reactions our religion, no matter what specific
character they may have? Non-religious as some of these reactions may
be, in one sense of the word "religious," they yet belong to THE
GENERAL SPHERE OF THE RELIGIOUS LIFE, and so should generically be
classed as religious reactions. "He believes in No-God, and he
worships him," said a colleague of mine of a student who was
manifesting a fine atheistic ardor; and the more fervent opponents of
Christian doctrine have often enough shown a temper which,
psychologically considered, is indistinguishable from religious zeal.

But so very broad a use of the word "religion" would be inconvenient,
however defensible it might remain on logical grounds. There are
trifling, sneering attitudes even toward the whole of life; and in some
men these attitudes are final and systematic. It would strain the
ordinary use of language too much to call such attitudes religious,
even though, from the point of view of an unbiased critical philosophy,
they might conceivably be perfectly reasonable ways of looking upon
life. Voltaire, for example, writes thus to a friend, at the age of
seventy-three: "As for myself," he says, "weak as I am, I carry on the
war to the last moment, I get a hundred pike-thrusts, I return two
hundred, and I laugh. I see near my door Geneva on fire with quarrels
over nothing, and I laugh again; and, thank God, I can look upon the
world as a farce even when it becomes as tragic as it sometimes does.
All comes out even at the end of the day, and all comes out still more
even when all the days are over."

Much as we may admire such a robust old gamecock spirit in a
valetudinarian, to call it a religious spirit would be odd. Yet it is
for the moment Voltaire's reaction on the whole of life. Je me'n fiche
is the vulgar French equivale