Men In Search Of Belief:the Religious Of Intellectuals In May Fourth Period

Since the late Qing Dynasty, traditional political rule and Confucianism were questioned and to its peak in May Fourth period. In the background, it was urgent to reestablish belief. In the process, sanctification became important, which demanded belief to be a religion. In the stimulation of belief, intellectuals showed their romantical and painful soul of religion and wanted to be martyr. The paper will explore the difficulty of belief and its inner logic through the concept of the religious, and disclose the structure of thought, spiritual power and inner soul of revolution in modern China.Though the context of of traditional Chinese thought, cosmology, morality and history were the versions to unfold the situation. Chu Qianzhi tried to rebuild cosmological belief under his strong religious desire. Restudying traditional cosmology, he found transcendental origin was the basic way to get cosmology-life-politics through. Under his variable cosmology, he wanted to destroy and save the word like a god.Yun Daiying began the journey of belief in the starting-point of morality. He found morality was not self-sufficient. In the beginning, he chose conscience and then "-ism" as the base of morality. The failure of practice, he reflected "-ism " must be sanctified. In the process, he used asceticism to build the revolutional morality. His road vividly explained the proposition "morality definitely leads to religion".Chen Duxiu began his opposition career in the belief of history. He mixed Chinese traditional immortality and western Progressive historical view, which made personal meaning based on historical meaning and sacrificed themselves for the aim. His romantic sacrifice imagination and Christian martyr passion made him revolt against tradition and authority. He desire to establish a new religion to evoke people’s lofty and zealous religion emotion and to put it into practice.In the three cases, cosmological belief failed, and moral and historical beliefs eventually united with "-ism". It seemed to show the difficulties of reestablishing classic transcendental belief, and we have to find the religious objects in this word. It is the origin of unrest of modern society. The question is not only in the China, but also in the whole world.