1
10
3
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/9213a938063be06f4f448dc6219b8748.pdf?Expires=1712793600&Signature=srMFiKo5Aoml5%7E3S1t0buq2NLFSy0zQ5HIuK5%7EykVUWKaxyY-%7EkGwi4zUyK%7Evsmn9279wJZk%7EgOdZk6i%7Ejdc2wJN-exPd%7EVsSYpkCRhNJ5CUrFx2as9vcbGOSe%7ECIH46-RvQNH81XE9gkb396GVZXAaFxeeqnwoljvTfPUiXe58nAcgaEu6BjBJrjd2zfISOd367faOqiuBGJe-RsoBQCU%7E4ys5jFNHThFD75n0aupEWK0m95zfq06gAHIXzDzo2tzC7Sgg5HgQvCDluwYyv-ftbB5NA%7EMcxNXdiuqCir7STP-EAYv%7E%7E-aDHGbsACLAEmB%7EoNXB5iBumUX2armG1ZA__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
0aad24a5ee169c3bddf9e5441c3aec27
PDF Text
Text
^morality
AND
OODERN W
Toleration
~s<
.<
■■
ZA(,’S
BY
.
.’3 ’k''
•M.«-
E. S. P. HAYNES
Author of “Religious Persecution,” ete.
London :
WATTS & CO.,
17 JOHNSON’S COURT, FLEET STREET, E.C„
Price Threepence
�Works by
Joseph McCabe
Life and Letters of George Jacob HoiyOake. With two Photogravure Portraits and eight
other Illustrations. Cloth, 2 vols., medium 8vo,
xviii + 716 pp.; 4s. 6d. net, inland carriage gd.
“ Mr. McCabe has done his work carefully, sym
pathetically, and well....... It is a valuable record of
one of the most useful lives of the Victorian era.
Mr. Holyoake came into contact with many of the
most noteworthy persons of his time ; but there
were few, even among the best, who could be com
pared to him for nobility of character, unselfishness
of aim, courage of conviction, or who rendered more
useful services in their day and generation.”—
Review of Reviews.
The Evolution of Mind.
Cloth, 5s. net, by
post 5s. 4d.
The Decay of the Church of Rome.
Cloth, 7s. 6d. net, by post 7s. nd.
The Bible in Europe : An Inquiry into the Con
tribution of the Christian Religion to Civilisation.
Cloth, 224 pp., 2S. 6d. net, by post 2s. iod.
Modern Rationalism : Being a Sketch of the
Progress of the Rationalistic Spirit in the Nineteenth
Century. Cloth, 200 pp., 2s. 6d. net, by post 2s. iod.;
paper cover, is. net, by post is. 3d.
The Religion
Study.
of
Woman;
An Historical
207 pp., 2s. 6d. net, by post 2s. iod.
From Rome to Rationalism ; or, Why I Left
the Church.
32 pp.; 3d., by post 3^d.
One Hundred Years of Education Con
troversy. 16 pp. and cover, 3d., by post 3%d.;
cheaper edition, id., by post ij^d.
WATTS & CO.,
17 JOHNSON’S COURT, FLEET STREET, LONDON, E.C.
’
||
�Ml e\
NATIONAL SECULAR SOCIETY
MODERN MORALITY AND
MODERN TOLERATION
BY
E. S. P. HAYNES
Author of "Religious Persecution,” etc.
[issued
for the rationalist press association, limited]
London :
WATTS & CO.,
17 JOHNSON’S COURT, FLEET STREET, E.C.
�HJeOicateò
WITH AFFECTIONATE REGARD
TO
Mrs. THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY
�INTRODUCTION
The two essays here published are, so to speak, pendants to
my book on Religious Persecution, which was published when
I was only twenty-seven years of age. The subject might
well occupy a lifetime, and it is scarcely surprising that I
should continue to meditate upon it in such moments of
leisure as I enjoy. The first essay was read to ten male
undergraduates at Oxford, and to about fifty male and
female undergraduates at Cambridge.
Both audiences
belonged to the flourishing society of “ Heretics.”
It is,
perhaps, not odd that Oxford should still continue her tradi
tion of discouraging heretics until they are senile or dead,
but one very trenchant Oxford critic helped me to define and
distinguish points which I had not sufficiently elaborated.
At Cambridge I was told that the example of Jesus Christ’s
life was a potent force in contemporary morality ; and I
could only reply that the example of men and women whom
we have actually known and admired in youth, and even in
later life, ought to be equally potent. Personally, I should
consider it more potent ; but it is impossible to see quite
inside the minds of others.
As each year passes it seems to me more and more
impossible to take any abstract system of thought seriously
unless it intimately affects the practical problems of every
day life ; and I have known many excellent Freethinkers in
the older generation who made a point of attending church
because they thought that the decline of churchgoing would
entail a moral cataclysm. If such admirable people as these
can be induced to think otherwise, our Association will
prosper even more than it has done hitherto.
3
�INTROD UCTION
4
I have to thank my friend Mr. Belloc for kindiv allowing’
me to reprint my second essay from the columns of the
Eye- Witness. It is at least consoling' to reflect that we shall
never relapse into complete “quietism” while Mr. Belta©
lives ; and the cordial admission of a Rationalist to th®
columns of his brilliant review shows that militant Catholicism
is by no means incompatible with certain qualities of intel
lectual curiosity and comprehensive vision which Rationalists
would always desire to see associated with their own cause.
I have used the personal pronoun without regard to the
snobbish and vulgar prejudice against it. The fear of this
prejudice often forces some writers into ponderous peri
phrases which no less often suggest that the writer’s personal
opinions are those of an influential majority. It is at once
humbler and more courageous to avoid pretending that
individual opinions have more than an individual value ;
and, in the matter of style, Cardinal Newman’s example is
good enough for me.
E. S. P. H.
SA John's Wood.
January, igis.
�I.
THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION AND
MODERN MORALITY
Among Agnostics of the nineteenth century, and to
some extent to-day, it was, and is, largely held that the
disappearance of Christian, or even theistic, belief
involves not only no relaxation, but also no change, of
ethical sanctions or conduct. The latter view is, to my
mind, a perilous fallacy. Clearly, the Agnostic sanc
tions must be different; and if this be true, it follows
that conduct will also be different. Unless our society
is prepared to face this fact, and also to impart to the
rising generation some solid principles of ethical
training, it must, as Goldwin Smith long ago pre
dicted, be prepared to face a “ very bad quarter of an
hour.”
In a book which I wrote some years ago on Religious
Persecution I distinguished what I call “ civic morality ”
from what I call “ individual morality.” I defined “ civic
morality as that part of conduct which relates to other
citizens, and is regulated by the appointment of State
penalties for the enforcement of it. I defined “ individual
morality ” as conduct which is only regulated by social,
not legal, agencies, and is therefore more spontaneous.
Broadly speaking, civic morality depends less on senti
ment than on utilitarian common sense, though, of
course, legislation is adapted to changing views of
individual morality. Civic morality is, therefore, so
much the less likely to be moulded by religious
emotions or sanctions, except where the State is theo
cratic, as in the case of medieval Europe or modern.
Islam.
5
�6
THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION
Let us now analyse the Christian or theistic concep*
tion of morality. Christian morality is essentially a
matter' of duty towards God and a Creator. God is.
assumed by the Catholic Church and many other
Christian bodies to forbid, among other things, suicide,
divorce, limitation of the family, or the sacrifice of the
infant’s life to the mother’s life in childbirth without any
saving clause whatsoever. The use of anaesthetics and
cremation is still viewed with suspicion even where
allowed. God is understood to have made certain
definite arrangements for the life of each human being
and the propagation of the species, which must on no
account be interfered with. Imbued with some such
belief, the early Christians declined to shave their
beards, as they would not blasphemously attempt to
improve upon the handiwork of their Creator.
Moreover, the Church declares that Socialism is
sinful. To quote an excellent pamphlet of Ernest R.
Hull, S.J.: “The right of private property is a divine
ordinance....... the state of probation does not suppose
equality in the present lot of men....... There is to come
a final reckoning day in which all inequalities will be
levelled up and compensated for.”1 Men, therefore,
must not try to improve upon the social structure set
up by their Creator as exemplified in the Christian
world.
A different set of considerations emerges in regard to
the nature of the ethical sanction. Morality, according
to the theologian, is primarily concerned with God, who
rewards and punishes men exclusively in relation to
their obedience or disobedience to his commands. An
old man, alone in the world, without ties or obligations,
may prefer euthanasia to a slow and painful death by
cancer. This man is (theologically) quite as inexcusable
in the eyes of God as the man who by his suicide leaves
a wife and family to starve. God has ordered all men to
1 Why Should I be Moral? y. 95.
(Sands & Co.)
�AND MODERN MORALITY
I
live until the unavoidable moment of death. God has
also commanded all men and women to increase and
multiply, subject to the conditions laid down by the
Church. The Catholic Church has always told the wife
to comply with the husband’s demands for conjugal
rights in case he should be tempted to offend God by
committing adultery. Consequently, many a man has
forced his wife to have children every year till she died.
He has then married another wife and continued the
same course of conduct till the second wife died, and so
forth. This is a perfectly true picture, not only of
medieval Christendom, but also of Victorian England.
“ Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die ”
sums up the situation. “ Reasoning why ” may fre
quently lead to eternal damnation.
Starting with these ideas of duty to God, religious
thinkers quite logically proceed to indicate certain
changes in modern morality as the direct result of
religious unbelief, such as, for example, a greater
tolerance of suicide, divorce, and limitation of the
family, as well as a tendency to try and improve human
society from a purely terrestrial point of view. I
cordially agree with them, and am sorry to see so many
Agnostics attempting to deny the fact. I cannot see
the use of attacking the Christian religion except with
a view to substituting a rational morality for Christian
or theistic morality.
Theologians can no longer
interfere with modern science, but they can and do still
block the progress of modern morality.
The theologians defend their position by suggesting
that even on utilitarian grounds modern morality is
dangerous. “ Once admit euthanasia,” they argue,
“and suicide will become epidemic.
Once admit
divorce, and society will become promiscuous.” Again
I cordially agree with them. All moral changes are, in
the last degree, perilous, unless men know clearly what
they want and define clearly the sanctions on which they
rely. It is, therefore, all the more important not to
�THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION
continue pretending1 that Christian morality is inde
pendent of the Christian religion.
It would be idle to deny that Christian morality
connotes a great deal of morality that is common to all
human societies, and it is of course largely based on
the Stoic and humanitarian ideas which filled the
atmosphere in which Christianity was born. That is
why it is so necessary to determine exactly how much
of our morality to-day is traceable to distinctly Christian
influences. I have tried up to now to define the
Christian basis of morality ; but it is equally incumbent
on me to try and indicate what I consider to be the
basis of modern, as distinct from Christian, morality.
A friend of mine once remarked that society was only
respectable because we did not all want to commit the
seven deadly sins at one and the same moment. The
reason why we do not want to commit them is because
we are for the most part the slaves of moral habits
inculcated in early youth. Our moral habits and
faculties have been hammered into us by a long process
of evolution. I cannot do better than quote again a
passage from Father Hull’s dialogue, in which he is
putting certain arguments for the Agnostic view into
the mouth of one of the many speakers whom he
subsequently refutes :—
We have no evidence to show how ethical ideas first came
into the human mind—whether they formed part of it from
the very first origin of the race, or were gradually evolved as
time went on. It is notorious that the “ moral sense ’’ flourishes
best in a moral environment—that is to say, in a circle where
both public and private opinion stand on the side of morality,
and the supremacy of the moral code is accepted by all without
question, and taught to and enforced on the young from their
very birth. Among the savage races and the criminal classes
it hardly appears at all ;T and experiments seem to show that
children separated from all moral influence irom birth grow up
apparently quite destitute of the ethical sense, and show little
or no capacity for imbibing it later on. May it not therefoie
x This is clearly untrue of savage races.
works passim.
See Dr. Westermarck’»
�AND MODERN MORALITY
9
be that evolution is right in explaining that the whole cluster
of moral ideas is the outcome of a gradual process of develop
ment, which, starting from practical experience and the clash
of interests, gradually gave rise to social conventions and tribal
laws, thus creating a habit of thinking in a groove which in
course of time became a sort of a second nature, indistinguish
able from nature itself? My contention in this case would be
that the ideas of right and wrong and the categorical form of
the dictate of conscience are indeed facts of consciousness ;
not, however, pertaining to our nature as such, but artificially
induced by the habit of generations—by perpetually drumming
into the minds of the young, as absolute truths, the ideals
which are already stereotyped in the minds of the old. A
similar example occurs in the department of manners. The
European and the Hindu are both so imbued with their
ancestral customs of eating and the rest, that so long as they
remain apart each takes for granted that his is the only feasible
way of going on. And even when they come together this
conviction remains so immovably fixed in the mind that they
detest each other’s ways heartily, and simply cannot tolerate
them. May it not be the same with the ethical ideas of the
■ intuitional theory—that they are so ingrained by tradition in
the mind as to become inseparable from it, and are thus taken
as part of the intrinsic constitution of human nature ; whereas
in fact they are merely an adventitious accretion, the inherit
ance of countless ages !
To this Father Hull adds, on his own side :—
So long as this view seems possible, so long does an air of
uncertainty pervade the whole sphere of ethics ; and so long
does it remain possible to doubt the absolute validity of its
principles and its dictates.1
Father Hull, of course, lays down the Christian
principle that all morality, being a divine command, is
comprehensive in every detail, and does not vary from
age to age. He deduces a great deal from the operation
of “Conscience,” and seems to forget Montaigne’s
apophthegm “Conscience is custom.” This view is
clearly repugnant to the modern Agnostic. Perhaps
the best statement of what ought to be an Agnostic’s
point of view is set forth in Sir Leslie Stephen’s Science
of Ethics. Stephen reconciles the utilitarian and evolu1 Op. cit.,
p. 77.
�IO
THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION
tionary theories, and points out that the aim and object
of every society is to achieve a certain kind of social
hygiene which will probably produce a social, though
not necessarily an individual, happiness. He points
out, for example, how a man who is too morally
sensitive for his generation, is liable to suffer just
because of this very fact.1 Shortly, however, the
ordinary modern test of our morality is its social value.
This view has been violently contested by writers like
the late Mr. Lecky. Mr. Lecky satirically commented
on the social position of the prostitute, in spite of her
seemingly obvious claim to honour on the utilitarian
ground of her existence being essential to the chastity of
other women.1 I do not see how Lecky’s contention can
2
be denied so long as we are content to admit that the
supposed chastity of all other women justifies the social
evil of prostitution ; nor must we forget that both in
ancient Greece and modern Japan (as opposed to Chris
tian countries) the prostitute enjoyed, and still enjoys,
the social esteem and recognition accorded to the ordinary
self-supporting citizen. The whole tendency, however,
of modern England is to rely less on prostitution as an
instrument of social welfare, and to attach a less super
stitious value to female chastity. Advanced thinkers—
like Mr. Wells and Mr. Bernard Shaw—attach more
importance to the economic independence than to the
chastity of women ; and in many cases, of course, female
chastity needs the security of economic independence.
I have chosen this particular example because Mr.
Lecky made his most effective point by means of it.
But in every region of morality we are to-day measuring
acts exclusively by their social consequences. Had a
strike, for example, occurred in the Middle Ages, the
population would at once have asked each other whether
1 A perfect example of this would be Sir Samuel Romilly, the sensitive
humanitarian, whose contemporaries thwarted almost every effort h©
made to remedy the barbarous cruelty of his age.
2 In his Introduction to the History of European Morals.
�AND MODERN MORALITY
11
the strike pleased or displeased God, and would have
supported or opposed the strike according to what they
imagined to be God’s will. Had the strike coincided
with a pestilence breaking out among the strikers, this
would have meant that God did not intend the strike
to continue, and the State would have taken measures
accordingly. The modern man discusses such a pheno
menon simply from the social point of view. He asks
himself whether the strike is or is not likely to promote
the ultimate welfare of society. For that reason a great
deal of modern morality is made up of compromises
between conflicting claims. In short, social harmony is
preferred to the development of particular virtues as ends
in themselves. Many thinkers vastly prefer the doctrine
of civic order and efficiency to the workings of Christian
charity. Again we subordinate so-called moral principles
to social convenience. It is to-day frankly acknowledged
that society would be instantly dissolved by any serious
adoption in practice of the Sermon on the Mount. It,
therefore, seems odd that medieval morality was in some
respects more inconsistent with Christian morality than
our own. Crimes of lust and hatred were far more
common in the Middle Ages than they are to-day. The
uncertainty of marriage was a perfect scandal, in spite
of the unquestioned dogma that the marriage was indis
soluble except by death. Private warfare was rampant
throughout medieval Europe, though it was quite unsafe
to challenge the inspired word of the Prince of Peace.
It must, however, be remembered that moral trans
gressions could be easily remedied by indulgences and
death-bed repentance. The more mundane process of
terrestrial cause and effect was obscured from view by
the supernatural machinery.
The improved and more stable morality of our civilisa
tion is of itself an argument in favour of what I call
modern morality. If theological conceptions produce
no better results than they did in the Middle Ages,
when they were far more literally accepted than they are
�12
THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION
now, they clearly cannot command as much confidence
as the appeal to reason. Moreover, the historian would
probably admit that the humanitarian movement of
to-day is rooted in the new doctrines of society that
came to birth at the end of the eighteenth century, and
in these doctrines religion is undoubtedly postponed to
human welfare.
It may be specially remarked that
Christian morality, as such, exercises very little influence
on the modern world. Such influence as it has can only
be observed in certain departments of human life where
old traditions have survived and escaped analysis.
I may perhaps take as an example the law of marriage
■and divorce in England. Whatever the merits of dis
cussion may be on social grounds, it is perfectly
ludicrous that the matter should be discussed with refer
ence to the textual condition of an old manuscript, or
that any intellectual body of persons in our generation
should concern themselves with a controversy conducted
on those lines; yet in 1910 we had the astonishing
spectacle of bishops appearing before the Royal Com
mission on Divorce, and solemnly arguing this grave
and weighty matter as if the solution of the problem
depended upon the doctrine of verbal inspiration.
It may be argued that modern Churchmen are more in
line with other humanitarian movements of to-day, and
the social , reforms of the nineteenth century are often
attributed to religious influences such as the influence of
the Wesleyan and Evangelical movements. Men like
Lord Shaftesbury are frequently cited in this connection.
It is difficult to prove anything strictly in discussing so
large a question ; but the study of history disposes many
people to believe that religion follows morality rather
than morality religion, and that both are deeply influ
enced by economic changes. It seems odd that Chris
tianity should have continued for 1,800 years without
producing the enormous humanitarian and ethical
changes which occurred in the first fifty years of th©
nineteenth century, and that these changes should then
�AND MODERN MORALITY
E3
be ascribed to a “revival ” of Christianity.1 Undoubtedly,
• writers like Voltaire and Rousseau and Fielding had
produced an enormous effect, and the new wealth of the
industrial revolution became widely diffused. The rail
way, the novel, the newspaper, and scientific discoveries
enormously enlarged the sympathies of the average man.
Nor did the “ revival ” of Christianity continue. The
whole forward movement here referred to became asso
ciated with the most formidable spread of sceptical ideas
known to European history. A curious sidelight on the
connection of religion with moral progress is thrown by
Mr. Joseph Clayton’s book on the Bishops as Legislators.
Why should the bishops have so sturdily and consis
tently declined to abolish a barbarously varied system of
capital punishment for small thefts if the Church was
really achieving the moral improvement of England
during this period, or if the bishops themselves had an
atom of real confidence in the moral influences of the
religion which they professed ?
The fact remains that men are not moral without some
sort of reason for being so, or without growing up in
moral habits ; but the time is long past when the young
could safely associate moral truths with the truths of
orthodox Christianity. Yet the advocates of secular
education for the most part tend to forget the need for
f As a specimen of Christian morality in eighteenth-century England
the following extract from Lecky’s History of England in the Eighteenth
Century deserves quotation (Vol. III., p. 537, Library Edition). It relates
to a case mentioned in Parliament in 1777 of a sailor taken by the press
gang from a wife not yet nineteen years of age, with two infant children.
“The breadwinner being gone, his goods were seized for an old debt,
and his wife was driven into the streets to beg. At last, in despair, she
stole a piece of coarse linen from a linen-draper’s shop. Her defence,
which was fully corroborated, was : ‘ She had lived in credit and wanted
for nothing till a press-gang came and stole her husband from her ; but
since then she had no bed to lie on and nothing to give her children to
eat, and they were almost naked. She might have done something
wrong, for she hardly knew what she did.’ The lawyers declared that,
shoplifting being a common offence, she must be executed ; and she was
driven to Tyburn with a child still suckling at her breast.” What were the
Christians doing at this date? Little, it is to be feared, but enjoying
rather gross pleasures and discussing how to make the best of both
worlds.
�14
THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION
some kind of moral training, and that if we are to give
the young moral training we must clearly give them
cogent reasons for moral conduct. It is worse than
useless to attach importance to religious sanctions of
morality unless we are prepared to justify the truth of
those sanctions up to the hilt. Are we to tell our
children that they must not lie or steal because God will
send them to Hell if they do, or because lying and
stealing are injurious to society and incidentally to
themselves? That is the question which modern society
shirks answering.
Modern society tries to meet the difficulty by a com
promise, which consists in hiring teachers who frequently
do not believe in the Christian religion to pretend that
they do. Indirectly, of course, these teachers employ
other inducements to morality besides the sanctions of
the Christian religion ; but the whole system is so
chaotic that it frequently ends in producing moral
chaos.
For these reasons it seems to me that the modern
Agnostic must not be content with the mere avowal of
disbelief in the Christian religion. If he does not
believe in the Christian religion, he cannot possibly
believe in the Christian sanctions of morality. If he
does not believe in the Christian sanctions, he must
find other sanctions, as I have indicated. If these
sanctions hold good for him, he must admit that they
will hold good for other people who have lost faith in
the Christian religion, and he must be prepared to make
an open profession of these principles, in spite of the
fact that the moral reformer encounters worse prejudice
than the religious reformer.
Rightly or wrongly, Agnostics believe that the
Christian religion is declining, and will progressively
continue to decline. If this be true, it means that an
increasingly larger number of persons will reject the
sanctions of Christian morality, and must either find
other sanctions for themselves or else be taught on an
�AND MODERN MORALITY
i5
entirely new system in early youth. This seems to me
far the most important concern of the modern Agnostic,
more especially because it has been neglected by the
old-fashioned type of Agnostic who wished to vindicate
himself and his friends from the suggestions of immorality
that were at one time made by the less scrupulous kind
of Christian. We cannot, and must not, therefore, shirk
the obvious conclusion that the old morality based on
Christian sanctions must be largely modified in accord
ance with social sanctions. Society must not, for
example, enforce celibacy on a particular class of men
because they are devoted to the service of God, though
society may well be justified in enforcing celibacy or
sterilised marriage on those who are unfit to become
parents. The real danger to-day is our inclination to
put the wine of this new social morality into the old
bottles of the Christian religion.
It may be asked how anything so fluctuating as the
social sanction can serve as a standard. When, for
instance, Antigone buried her brother in defiance of the
State, was she obeying or disobeying a social sanction ?
Assuming that she disobeyed, are we to deny her the
right of appeal to the social sanction of a future genera
tion ? Are not all heretics constantly trying to modify
or even destroy the social sanctions of their own age?
Indeed, is any social sanction of any ethical value
unless it is the spontaneous agreement of individuals,
and not a compulsory code enforced by a bureaucratic
or social tyranny? No one can be more alive to these
difficulties than a strong Individualist like myself; but
I maintain that in any society most people are fairly
well agreed on a number of questions concerning the
moral hygiene of that society, such as the reprobation
of murder or theft. Society can at least agree that the
starting-point of all discussion must be the welfare of
society, and not the textual criticism of antiquated folk
lore.
I should compare the social sanction with a debenture
�16
THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION
—that is to say, a floating charge on the present and
future assets of a company.
The property affected
by it varies from year to year ; in ten years it may be
entirely different from what it was. The terms of the
debenture bond or stock may be changed from time to
time ; but no variation of the terms of the loan or of the
assets makes the debenture less real or legally enforce
able. The debenture perishes only on redemption ; and
the social sanction will perish only with the abolition of
the criminal law. When every individual ungrudgingly
and spontaneously fulfils his social obligations, the
social sanction will become superfluous ; at present it
represents the claim of society to enforce such actions
on the individual as are determined for the moment to
be his duties to society.
In this connection it may be useful to illustrate my
meaning by applying the principles I have formulated
to modern Socialism. I should say at once that I am
no Socialist. Most of the Socialist writers I have read
seem to me to ignore either economic truths or the
truths of human psychology. They seem to me to
assume a state of society in which no one has an axe to
grind, and to draw too large cheques on public spirit
and altruism ; but their power and influence are largely
due to the omission of those who are not Socialists to
preach and to practise a social code of morals. Even
bishops hesitate nowadays to console a starving man by
telling him that he will be better off in the next world
than the rich man. They do not usually exhort him to
take no thought for the morrow, and to live like the
lilies of the field.1 Society must be prepared to justify
itself on a rational basis ; to convince the labourer that
he is receiving his proper hire, and to give him a
reasonable opportunity of earning what is due to him.
Society must also tackle the whole sex problem on rational
1 Except, perhaps, in regard to the irresponsible propagation of large
families.
�AND MODERN MORALITY
i7
lines. Marriage must be rational ; men must share
equitably with women the responsibilities for children
born out of wedlock; female labour must not be sweated;
and the whole question of venereal disease must be
scientifically handled.
The word “sin” must be
eliminated from the discussion of social or medical
remedies, for it has invariably been used as an excuse
for shirking social or medical remedies—as, for example,
when we are told that a certain venereal disease is the
“ finger of God.”1
The Socialists are bound to win all along the line
unless their opponents are prepared to face the question
of sanctions fairly and squarely, because in the meantime
Socialists are allowed by others to arrogate to them
selves the profession of public service and of working
exclusively for the public good. Christianity, however
one may twist its doctrines, is concerned with the end of
an old world. The business of the Agnostic is to share
in the beginnings of a new world.
1 An edifying remark frequently made by a deceased English officer
who was once Governor of Gibraltar.
c
�II.
THE EXPERIMENT OF MODERN
TOLERATION
The word “ toleration ” has been used so constantly in
a theological sense, while theology has become so much
less prominent in our thoughts than it used to be, that
the word sounds almost obsolete, except perhaps in con
nection with the position of religious orders in countries
like France and Portugal. About ten years ago I wrote
a book to demonstrate that nearly all that we understand
by the name of Toleration was necessarily associated in
its religious sense with an undercurrent of scepticism,
either implicit or explicit, in regard to ultimate pro
blems, and that no really free discussion is allowed by
any human society concerning matters which they think
all-important. On the other hand, I was forced to
admit that our generation had more cosmopolitan
interests, more intellectual curiosity, and far more
novels and newspapers to read, all of which promoted
and necessitated a larger freedom of discussion.
During the last ten years I have constantly been
wondering how much toleration exists in regard to free
discussion of subjects outside religion, and especially of
what John Stuart Mill called “experiments in life.” On
the whole, I think that any contemporary observer is
bound to admit that the issues raised by the contro
versies of to-day are amazingly wide and deep as com
pared with those of the nineteenth century.
The two main obstacles to free discussion have at all
times been the conviction (i) that the principle “salus
populi, sziprema lex''1 must express the permanent
attitude of the State to public criticism ; and (2) that
18
�THE EXPERIMENT OF MODERN TOLERA TION 19
those fundamental principles of morality on which
human society is deemed to repose must never be
subjected to the test of reason or argument. Thus, for
instance, there could be no free discussion of religious
problems so long as (¿z) it was feared that such dis
cussion might bring down the wrath of the gods on the
State or community which permitted the discussion ; or
(¿) the identification, or close association, of morality
with religion compelled men to believe that reli
gious creeds and moral principles must stand or fall
together.
On either assumption the free discussion of religious
problems necessarily provokes a breach of the peace
and becomes a matter of police supervision, as we see
in modern Spain, where Rationalism becomes confused
with anarchy. The State may sometimes bridge over
difficulties by tolerating a sort of passive heresy in
religion or morality, as, for example, the Romans did
in the case of local or particular cults, or as our Indian
Penal Code of to-day tolerates obscene works of art
connected with purely religious representations ; but
such partial toleration as this is not extended to any
kind of missionary effort or proselytism.
Yet to-day we behold the astonishing spectacle of
entirely free discussion in regard to the most crucial
problems of State and society. I need only refer to
disarmament, socialism, anarchism, the endowment of
motherhood, and the treatment of crime as disease.
Nor is all this discussion without practical results.
Arbitration is now a real force in European politics, the
Socialists have found their ideas embodied in a so-called
Liberal Budget, discontented artisans and suffragettes
increasingly disregard the King’s Peace, unmarried
mothers are less harshly treated by society, and prisons
are seemingly more attractive than workhouses. All
these changes evoke deep disgust in a large number of
citizens ; but they take place in a piecemeal and tranquil
fashion which never gives an opportunity for real
�2o
THE EXPERIMENT OF MODERN TOLERATION
fighting-. Even modern revolutions come to pass with
out appreciable bloodshed.
So far from this result being anticipated, it may be
remembered that Mill dreaded the uniformity and
mediocrity of democracies as an engine of obscurantism.
But the democratic uniformity of to-day is principally
manifested in the cosmopolitan habits of modern Europe,
which make less for repression of the individual than
for international peace. We seem to be achieving a
sort of Chinese “harmony,” a spirit of pacific com
promise, in all departments of life. The only coercive
force appears in that bureaucratic tyranny which so
often distinguishes the more pacific types of society.
All these characteristics point either to an almost
universal confidence in the common sense of mankind,
and in the capacity of human nature to revolt effectively,
in the last resort, against intolerable abuses, or to a
prevalent conviction that nothing is much worth fighting
about. Some will be heard saying : “Magna est Veritas
et prcevalebit”; others that no principle on earth is
worth going to the stake for. The first attitude of mind
seems curiously associated with the second. Belief in
the ultimate victory of truth seems easily to breed indif
ference as regards the immediate prospects of truth.
All persecution, however, necessarily implies an attitude
of distrust towards those who would allow the collective
intelligence of mankind free play. The persecutor will
not accept the consolations that Newman found in
repeating the words “Securus judicat orbis terrarum.”
False theology must be suppressed as speedily as false
economics ; for men will either not distinguish the true
from the false, or else will resent the toil and incon
venience of always making the effort to do so. I choose
the analogy of economics because false economics are
likely to alarm the modern world more than false
theology, and we live in an atmosphere of Socialist and
anti-Socialist leagues, and of Free Trade and Tariff
Reform leagues. Indeed, all disputation about burning
�THE EXPERIMENT OF MODERN TOLERATION
21
questions, such as property, seems bound to entail a dis
turbance of civil order, even if men really care little about
distinctions between true and false theories, and rely on
the financial common sense of the community. Thus,
however strongly I may be convinced that socialistic
experimentswill never destroy the proprietary instincts of
humanity, yet I may violently resent the inconvenience
of temporarily losing my property while such experi
ments are going on. Nevertheless, in modern society
such questions rarely tend to reach a violent, or even
decisive, issue. Some sort of compromise is nearly
always practicable. Ina given year I may have to pay
to the State one-eighth of my income, instead of onetenth ; but, in the first place, there is always the hope
that the electorate may stand this no longer, and, in the
second place, it is clearly more enjoyable to spend seven
eighths of my income in freedom than to be imprisoned
for resisting even a tyrannical and unjust surveyor of
taxes. The instinct of the highly civilised man leads
him to avoid the employment of force even where he would
not be opposing the State. If an armed burglar comes
to my house, and I am insured against burglary, it may
save a great deal of trouble, not to mention my life, if I
request him merely not to abstract articles of sentimental
value, but otherwise to make a free choice. An increas
ing disrespect for the ideal of chastity may lead to men’s
marital or paternal rights over their wives and daughters
being less strictly regarded; but it is quite old-fashioned
for an injured father or husband to aggravatethe scandal
by assaulting the offender.
The spirit of compromise seems, in fact, to increase
with all civilisation, and it is especially characteristic of
the oldest civilisation we know—namely, the Chinese.
In the Independent Review for April, 1904, an acute
observer recorded the tendency in Chinese civilisation
to encourage only an “ irreducible minimum " of the
virtues.1 “ Man,” he wrote, in describing the Chinese
1 Mr. A. M. Latter.
�22
THE EXPERIMENT OF MODERN TOLERA TION
philosophy of life, “ is a difficult animal ; and human
intelligence must devise the best means of inducing hi®
to live in peace with his neighbours, to make the earth
yield to him its utmost, and to develop the most useful
part of him—-his intelligence. To this end certain moral
ideas are doubtless useful ; but the foundation of all such
ideals is harmony in society, and, in so far as any other
ideal appears to conflict with this, it must be checked.
Inasmuch as harmony is the end of all civilised beings,
with regard to other ideals the best thing to do in practice
is to use the irreducible minimum of them ; and it is in
the discovery of the irreducible minimum that the Mon
golian intellect has developed most completely its civilisa
tion.” As a concrete instance, the writer, who is and
was a practising barrister, cites “ the attainment of justice,
without either the discovery of truth or the employment
of dishonesty. The harmony of the people forbids the
decree of a gross injustice ; the harmony of the magis
trate and the yamen forbids the abstention from bribes ;
the actual circumstances of the case are impossible to
discover; while the fact that the litigants have, by mere
litigation, disturbed the general harmony” leads to a
decision whereby “ both sides are punished slightly, and
the side that recommends itself to the tribunal is also
rewarded.” This attitude is forcibly contrasted with the
old European ideal of seeking the highest development
of particular virtues as ends in themselves without
making social and political harmony the paramount
aim. Side by side with all this one remarks the pacific
character of Chinese civilisation, based not so much on
humanitarian feeling as on motives of general con
venience.
I have quoted all these observations on China because
they seem curiously applicable to the tendencies I have
before noted in modern Europe.
Such progressive
toleration as we see to-day seems to indicate a growing
subjection of the emotions to reason. Mr. Shaw has
been preaching this doctrine for years in regard to the
�THE EXPERIMENT OF MODERN TOLERA TION
23
military virtue of courage. Mr. Wells and other
Socialists prefer the doctrine of civil order and efficiency
to the spirit of Christian charity. Modern men and
women set a higher value in society, politics, and
business on tact than on veracity. Advanced thinkers
attach more importance to the economic independence
than to the chastity of women. We all demand an irre
ducible minimum of armaments. The criminal is no
longer to be a pariah ; he is to be adapted to the uses of
a society which he must be taught to love. We deplore
nothing so much as physical pain or violence. Fight
ing, whether on the hustings or the battlefield, is begin
ning to appear nothing but a futile waste of time.
In such a climate of opinion toleration is bound to
thrive; but this very climate of opinion impliesan almost
revolutionary transformation of European ideals and a
radical overthrow of our older traditions. Its existence
can scarcely be denied. It is what the journalist really
means when he writes about “ materialism ” or “lack of
public spirit.” This spirit of “peace at any price” or
“anything for a quiet life ” may or may not have set in
permanently. But the late Mr. Charles Pearson, who
called it “the decay of character,” thought that it had
set in permanently, and resigned himself to the prospect
with stoical calm. Indeed, a future generation may con
ceivably take the view that we have initiated a social
harmony which is the only real and substantial fruit of
human reason and progress.
Whatever the ultimate result may be, the fact remains
that our modern toleration is conditioned by, and points
to, either an absence of really strong convictions in the
mass of men, or a collective conviction that the peace of
invariable compromise must in all circumstances and at
all costs be maintained. This has visibly come to pass
in the sphere of theological controversy, and it is also
coming to pass in the sphere of all other controversy.
The duellist can only resort to the law courts, the fanatic
to the pulpit, the moralist to the newspapers, and the
�24
THE EXPERIMENT OF MODERN TOLERATION
politician to the hustings. We have abolished the pistol,
the rack, the pillory, and almost the gallows. We are
trying with some success to abolish war. It will be
interesting to see if we have set up a stable or unstable
equilibrium. The achievement of free debate concerning
all subjects, reposing on a foundation of internal and
external peace, has been the »goal of human effort for
centuries, and especially of liberal thinkers in the nine
teenth century. But the success of the achievement
would possibly be damping to men like John Bright or
John Stuart Mill, whose enthusiasms were not precisely
those of the quietist.
For the most salient object of human endeavour is a
“quiet life.” We seek for the community the same sort
of existence, free from accidents and disturbance, that
Metchnikoff prescribes for the individual man with aspira
tions to longevity. Our ideals have lost a certain belli
gerency, except in so far as they imply class-warfare; they
have become more terrestrial than celestial. The late
Mr. Charles Pearson so admirably sketched out the future
on these lines nearly twenty years ago that I need not
elaborate the theme. The accuracy of the prophecy
depends very much on the course of international politics.
The most civilised societies are constantly broken up by
more primitive foes, and the future historian may find
some analogy to the phagocytes of the human body in the
bureaucrats of the community. The bureaucrats begin
to wear out the community just as the phagocytes begin
to wear out the body, as each becomes old. Complete
freedom of discussion may be only a symptom of national
decline and individual degeneracy, due to an exaggerated
development of intelligence at the expense of more
primitive qualities. The next fifty years will at least be
of keen interest to all those who feel that our society is
passing through a phase of experiment.
PRINTED BY WATTS AND CO., I? JOHNSON’S COURT, FLEET STREET, E.C.
�Works by
J. M. Robertson
Pagan Christs.
edition.
New, revised and expanded,
Cloth, xxvi +456 pp., 5s. net, by post 5s. 3d.
Christianity and Mythology.
Companion
volume to Pagan Christs. New, revised and ex
panded, edition.
Cloth, 496 pp., 5s. net (inland
postage 5d.).
A Short History of Freethought, Ancient
and Modern. Cloth, 2 vols., xxvi+ 935 pp.;
21s. net (inland postage 7d.).
A Short History of Christianity.
Cloth,
400 pp.; 6s. net, by post 6s. 4d.
Letters on Reasoning.
enlarged, edition.
by post 3s. iod.
Second, revised and
Cloth, xxix + 260 pp.; 3s. 6d. net,
"'z
Pioneer Humanists.
Cloth, 339 pp.; 6s. net,
by post 6s. 4d.
Courses Of Study.
larged, edition.
post 6s. 3d.
New, revised and en
Cloth, viii + 340 pp.; 6s. net, by
Did Shakespeare Write “ Titus AndroniCUS”? Cloth, is. 6d. net, by post is. iod. (Origi
nally published at 5s. net.)
New Essays Towards a Critical Method.
Cloth, cr. 8vo, xii + 380 pp., 2s. 6d. net, by post 2s. iod.
What to Read : Suggestions for the Better Utili
sation of Public Libraries.
pp.; 2d., by post 2^d.
New edition.
16 large
WATTS & CO.,
17 JOHNSON’S COURT, FLEET STREET, LONDON, E.C.
--¿i
�R.P.A. SIXPENNY REPRINTS.
(Five or more post free at published price to any inland address.)
1. Huxley’s Lectures and
Essays. (A Selection.)
2. The Pioneers of Evolu
tion. By Edward Clodd.
3. Modern Science &. Modern
Thought. By Samuel Laing.
4. «Literature and Dogma.
By Matthew Arnold.
5. The Riddle of the Uni
verse, By Ernst Haeckel.
6. «Education s Intellectual,
Moral, and Physical. By
Herbert Spencer.
7. The Evolution of the Idea
Of God. By Grant Allen.
8. Human Origins. By S. Laing.
9. The Service of Man. By J.
Cotter Morrison.
10. Tyndall’s Lectures and
Essays. (A Selection.)
11. The Origin of Species.
By C. Darwin.
12. Emerson’s Addresses &
Essays.
13. On Liberty. By J. S. Mill.
/4, «The Story of Creation.
By Edward Clodd.
15. «An Agnostic’s Apology.
By Sir Leslie Stephen.
16. The Life of
Ernest Renan.
17. A
Modern
Jesus.
By
Zoroastrian.
By S. Laing.
18. An Introduction to the
Philosophy of Herbert
Spencer. By Professor W. H.
Hudson.
19. Three Essays on Religion.
By John Stuart Mill.
20. Creed of
Christendom.
By XV. R. Greg.
21. The Apostles.
By Ernest
Renan.
22. Problems of the Future.
By S. Laing.
23. Wonders of Life. By Ernst
Haeckel.
25. «God and the Bible.
Matthew Arnold.
By
26 and 27. ¡The Evolution of
Man. By Ernst Haeckel.
28. Hume’s Essays: I.—An In
quiry Concerning Human Under
standing. II.— An Inquiry Con
cerning the Principles of Morals.
29. Herbert Spencer’s Es
says. (A Selection.)
30. An Easy Outline of Evo
lution. By Dennis Hird, M.A.
31. Phases of Faith. By F. W.
Newman.
32. Asiatic
Studies.
By Sir
A. C. Lyall.
33. Man’s Place in Nature.
By T. H. Huxley.
34. The Origins Of Religion,
and Other Essays.
Lang.
By Andrew
35. Twelve
Lectures
and
Essays, By T. H. Huxley.
36. Haeckels His Life and
Work. By Wilhelm Bölsche.
37. 38, and 39. «Life of
Thomas Paine. By Moncurl
D. Conway.
40. The Hand of God, an
Other Posthumous Es
says. By Grant Allen.
41. The Nature and Origin c
Living Matter. By Dr. 1
Charlton Bastian.
42. Last Words on Evolution.
By Ernst Haeckel.
43. Paganism and Christi
anity. By J. A. Farrer.
44 & 45. «History of Ration
alism. By W. E. H. Lecky.
46. Aphorisms and Reflec
tions. By T. H. Huxley.
47 & 48. «History of Euro
pean Morals. By W. E. H
Lecky.
49. Selected Works of Vo.
taire. Translated, with Intro
By
duction, by Joseph McCabe.
Edward Clodd.
♦ * The whole of the above list, with the exception of th°s.e m^rkef w‘th an
asterisk, are supplied in cloth at xs. net.
t Published at 6d. net.
24. Jesus of Nazareth.
Complete Catalogue and copy of“The Literary Guide ” (16 large pages)
free oh receipt ofpost-card»
WATTS & CO.,
17 JOHNSON’S COURT, FLEET STREET, LONDON, E.C.
f
j
♦
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Modern morality and modern toleration
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Haynes, E.S.P. (Edmund Sidney Pollock) [1877-1949]
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 24 p. ; 22 cm.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references. The Christian religion and modern morality (p.5-17)--The experiment of modern toleration (p.18-24). Publisher's list (Works by Joseph MacCabe and J.M. Robertson) inside front and back covers respectively. R.P.A. Sixpenny reprints listed on back cover. Issued for the Rationalist Press Association. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Watts & Co.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1912
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
N301
Subject
The topic of the resource
Ethics
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Modern morality and modern toleration), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Language
A language of the resource
English
Morality
NSS
Toleration
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/766c992c7367fd258c2886385c4817f5.pdf?Expires=1712793600&Signature=FDuAXQHZR%7ELnehEoR4OtBCJrqn6XkLAUn72%7EcteL%7EWEa9myiywMKvkjpKXSHi7KBJzsosug9-G3x6xZoxeejt4zeq4N2WYWI9KhQz1r1LACD8GNJUlTwRHdqH8IVk3Tj028tBjT6IvvWYumaY9tIfq4Wjv5OSMXpnGIQKIhvLc9puih7DuHyOgmcwpiuTm6i6XwwZqMsTY4lqoiM04OJ1pbBh2fo2%7EwNmer7UgubGFx1dsso4HwmgcXr1Tica%7E9HsESSnw03gdWAoc8mvhmVLQlU%7EY8LseCfZ-Sn-hi1fsYCijcU8uNYRFegAp5cdNwk-AKVqPmDQD0Y2Pd5%7EmBTGQ__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
06f0914b1689e1b8c66e3756aadfd6a9
PDF Text
Text
nauonalsecularsoc^
BETWEEN
COLONEL
G.
R.
INGERSOLL
THE
HONORABLE F. D. COUDERT
AND
GOVERNOR S.
L. WOODFORD
AT THE
Nineteenth Century Club, New York.
VERBATIM REPORT.
\
</
PRICE TWOPENCE.
^Tnnlron:
PROGRESSIVE PUBLISHING COMPANY,
28 Stonecutter Street, E.C.
�LONDON :
PAINTED AND PUBLISHED BY G. W. EOOTB
AT 28 STONECUTTER STREET, E.C.
�£>1/710
Nj37°
THE LIMITS OF TOLERATION;
The points for discussion, as submitted in advance were
the following propositions:
First. Thought is a necessary natural product—the
result of what is called impressions made through the
medium of the senses upon the brain, not forgetting the
fact of heredity.
Second. No human being is accountable to any being
< —human or divine—for his thoughts.
Third. Human beings have a certain interest in the
thoughts of each other, and one who undertakes to tell
his thoughts should be honest.
Fourth. All have an equal right to express their
thoughts upon all subjects.
Fifth. For one man to say to another, “ I tolerate
you,” is an assumption of authority—not a disclaimer, but
a waiver, of the right to persecute.
Sixth. Each man has the same right to express to the
whole world his ideas that the rest of the world have to
express their thoughts to him.
THE PROCEEDINGS.
Courtlandt Palmer, Esq., President of the Club, in
introducing Mr. Ingersoll, among other things said :
The inspiration of the orator of the evening seems to
be that of the great Victor Hugo, who uttered the august
saying, “ There shall be no slavery of the mind.”
�4
Limits of Toleration.
When I was in Paris, about a year ago, I visited the
tomb of Victor Hugo. It was placed in a recess in the
crypt of the Pantheon. Opposite it was the tomb of
Jean Jacques Rousseau. Near by, in another re.cess, was
the memorial statue of Voltaire; and I felt, as I looked
at these three monuments, that had Colonel Ingersoll been
born in France, and had he passed in his long life account,,
the acclaim of the liberal culture of France would have
enlarged that trio into a quartette.
Colonel Ingersoll has appeared in several important
debates in print, notably with Judge Jeremiah S. Black,
formerly Attorney-General of the United States; lately
in the pages of the North American Review with the Rev.
Dr. Henry M. Field ; and last but not least the Right
Hon. William E. Gladstone, England’s Greatest citizen,
has taken up the cudgel against him in behalf of his
view of Orthodoxy. To-night, I believe for the first
time, the colonel has consented to appear in a colloquial
discussion. I have now the honor to introduce this dis
tinguished orator.
COLONEL INGERSOLL’S OPENING.
Ladies, Mr. President, and Gentlemen,—I am here, to
night for the purpose of defending your right to differ
with me. I want to convince you that you are under no
compulsion to accept my creed ; that you are, so far as I
am concerned, absolutely free t< follow the torch of your
reason according to your consc ence ; and I believe that
you are civilised io that degree that you will extend to
me the right that you claim for yourselves.
I admit, at the very threshold, that every human being
thinks as he must; and the first proposition really is,
whether man has the right to think. It will bear but
little discussion, for the reason that no man can control
his thought. If you think you can, what are you going
to think to-morrow ? What are you going to think
next year 1 If you can absolutely control your thought,
can you stop thinking ?
The question is, Has the will any power over the
thought I What is thought ? It is the result of nature
�Limits of Toleration.
5
—of the outer world—first upon the senses—those im
pressions left upon the brain as pictures of things in the
outward world, and these pictures are transformed into,
or produce, thought; and as long as the doors of the
senses are open, thoughts will be produced. Whoever
looks at anything in nature, thinks. Whoever hears any
sound—or any symphony—no matter what—thinks.
Whoever looks upon the sea, or on a star, or on a flower,
or on the face of a fellow-man, thinks, and the result of
that look is an absolute necessity. The thought producer
will depend upon your brain, upon your experience, upei
the history of your life.
One who looks upon the sea, knowing that the one hr
loved the best had been devoured by its hungry waves
will have certain thoughts ; and he who sees it for the
first time, will have different thoughts. In other words,
^io two brains are alike ; no two lives have been or are or
ever will be the same. Consequently, nature cannot pro
duce the same effect upon any two brains, or upon any
two hearts.
The only reason why we wish to exchange thoughts is
that we are different. If we were all the same, we should
die dumb. No thought would be expressed after we
found that our thoughts were precisely alike. We differ
—our thoughts are different. Therefore the commerce
that we call conversation.
Back of language is thought. Back of language is
the desire to express our thought to another. This desire
not only gave us language—this desire has given us the
libraries of the world. And not only the libraries : this
desire to express thought, to show to others the splendid
children of the brain, has written every book, formed
every language, painted every picture, and chiseled every
statue—this desire to express our thought to others, to
reap the harvest of the brain.
If, then, thought is a necessity, “ it follows as the night
the day ” that there is, there can be, no responsibility for
thought to any being, human or divine.
A camera contains a sensitive plate. The light flashes
upon it, and the sensitive plate receives a picture. Is
�6
Limits of Toleration.
it in fault ? Is it responsible for the picture ? So
with the brain. An image is left on it, a picture is im
printed there. The plate may not be perfectly level—it
may be too concave, or too convex, and the picture may
be a deformity; so with the brain. But the man does
not make his own brain, and the consequefice is, if the
picture is distorted it is not the fault of the brain.
We take then these two steps: first, thought is a
necessity; and second, the thought depends upon the
brain.
Each brain is a kind of field where nature sows with
careless hands the seeds of thought. Some brains are
poor and barren fields, producing weeds and thorns, and
some are like the tropic world where grow the palm and
pine—children of the sun and soil.
You read Shakespeare. What do you get out of •
Shakespeare 1 All that your brain is able to hold. It
depends upon your brain. If you are great—if you have
been cultivated—if the wings of youi’ imagination have
been spread—if you have had great, free, and splendid
thoughts—if you have stood upon the edge of things—if you
have had the courage to meet all that can come—you get an
immensity from Shakespeare. If you have lived nobly—
if you have loved with every drop of your blood and every
fibre of your being—if you have suffered—if you have
enjoyed—then you get an immensity from Shakespeare.
But if you have lived a poor, little, mean, wasted, barren,
weedy life—you get very little from that immortal man.
So it is from every source in nature—what you get
depends upon what you are.
Take then the second step. If thought is a necessity,
there can be no responsibility for thought. And why has
man ever believed that his fellow-man was responsible for
his thought ?
Everything that is, everything that has been, has been
naturally produced. Man has acted as under the same
circumstances we would have acted; because when you
say “ under the circumstances,” it is the same as to say
that you would do exactly as they have done.
�Limits of Toleration.
7
There has always been in men the instinct of self
preservation. There wras a time when men believed, and
honestly believed, that there was above them a God.
Sometimes they believed in many, but it will be sufficient
for my illustration to say, one. Mau believed that there
was in the sky above him a God who attended to the
affairs of men. He believed that that God, sitting
upon his throne, rewarded virtue and punished vice. He
believed also that that God held the community respon
sible for the sins of individuals. He honestly believed»it.
When the flood came, or when the earthquake devoured,
he really believed that some God w’as filled with anger—
with holy indignation—at his children. He believed it,
and so he looked about among his neighbors to see who
was in fault, and if there was any man who had failed to
bring his sacrifice to the altar, had failed to kneel, it may
be to the priest, failed to be present in the temple, or had
given it as his opinion that the God of that tribe or of that
nation was of no use, then, in order to placate the God
they seized the neighbor and sacrificed him on the altar
of theii’ ignorance and of their fear.
They believed when the lightning leaped from the
cloud and left its blackened mark upon the man that he
had done something—that he had excited the wrath of the
gods. And while man so believed—while he believed
that it was necessary, in order to defend himself, to kill
his neighbor—he acted simply according to the dictates of
his nature.
What I claim is that we have now advanced far enough
not only to think, but to know, that the conduct of man
has nothing to do with the phenomena of nature. We
are nOw advanced far enough to absolutely know that no
man can be bad enough and no nation infamous enough
to cause an earthquake. I think we have got to that
point that we absolutely know that no man can be wicked
enough to entice one of the bolts from heaven—that no
man can be cruel enough to cause a drouth—and that you
could not have infidels enough on the earth to cause
another flood. I think we have advanced far enough
not only to say that, but to absolutely know it—I mean
�8
Limits of Toleration.
people who have thought, and in whose minds there is
something like reasoning.
We know, if we know anything, that the lightning is
just as apt to hit a good man as a bad man. We know
it. We know that the earthquake is just as liable to
swallow virtue as to swallow vice. And you know just as
well as I do that a ship loaded with pirates is just as apt
to outride the storm as one crowded with missionaries.
You know it.
I am now speaking of the phenomena of nature. I
believe, as much as I believe that I live, that the reason a
thing is right is because it tends to the happiness of man
kind. I believe, as much as I believe that I live, that on
the average the good man is not only the happier man,
but that no man is happy who is not good.
If, then, we have gotten over that frightful, that awful
superstition—we are ready to enjoy hearing the thoughts
of each other.
I do not say, neither do I intend to be understood as
saying, that there is no God. All I intend to say is, that
so far as we can see, no man is punished, no nation is
punished by lightning, or famine, or storm. Everything
happens to the one as to the other.
Now let us admit that there is an infinite God. That
has nothing to do with the sinlessness of thought—nothing
to do with the fact that no man is accountable to any
being, human or divine, for what he thinks. And let me
tell you why.
If there be an infinite God, leave him to deal with men
who sin against him. You can trust him, if you believe
in him. He has the power. He has a heaven full of
bolts. Trust him. And now that you are satisfied that
the earthquake will not swallow you, nor the lightning
strike you, simply because you tell your thoughts, if one
of your neighbors differs with you, and acts improperly or
thinks or speaks improperly of your God, leave him with
your God—he can attend to him a thousand times better
than you can. He has the time. He lives from eternity
to eternity. More than that, he has the means. So
�Limits of Toleration.
9
that, whether there be this Being or not, you have no
right to interfere with your neighbor.
The next proposition is, that I have the same right to
express my thought to the whole world, that the whole
world has to express its thought to me.
I believe that this realm of thought is not a democracy,
where the majority rule : it is not a republic. It is a
country with one inhabitant. The brain is the world in
which my mind lives, and my mind is the sovereign of
that realm. We are all kings, and one man balances the
rest of the world as one drop of water balances the sea.
Each soul is crowned. Each soul wears the purple dud
the tiara; and only those are good citizens of the intellentual world who give to every other human being every
right that they claim for themselves, and only those are
traitors in the great realm of thought who abandon reason
and appeal to force.
If now I have got out of your minds the idea that you
have to abuse your neighbors to keep on good terms with
God, then the question of religion is exactly like every
question—I mean of thought, of mind—I have nothing to
say now about action.
Is there authority in the world of art ? Can a legis
lature pass a law that a certain picture is beautiful, and
can it pass a law putting in the penitentiary any impudent
artistic wretch who says that to him it is not beautiful ?
Precisely the same with music. Our ears are not all the
same ; we are not touched by the same sounds—the same
beautiful memories do not arise.
Suppose, you have
an authority in music ? You may make men, it may be,
bv offering them office or by threatening them with
punishment, swear that they all like that tune—but you
never will know till tbe day of your death whether they
do or not! The moment you introduce a despotism in
the world of thought, you succeed in making hypocrites
—and you get in such a position that you never know
what your neighbor thinks.
So in the great realm of religion, there can be no force.
No one can be compelled to pray. No matter how you
tie him down, or crush him down on his face or on his
�10
Limits of Toleration.
knees, it. is above the power of the human race to put in
that man, by force, the spirit of prayer. You cannot do
t. Neither can you compel anybody to worship a God.
Worship rises from the heart like perfume from a flower.
It cannot obey; it cannot do that which some one else
commands. It must be absolutely true to the law of its
own nature. And do you think any God would be satisfied
with compulsory worship ? Would he like to see long
rows of poor, ignorant slaves on their terrified knees
repeating words without a soul—giving him what you
might call the shucks of sound ? Will any God be
satisfied with that? And so I say we must be as free in
one department of thought as another.
Now I take the next step, and that is, that the rights
of all are absolutely equal.
I have the same right to give you my opinion that you
have to give me yours. I have no right to compel you to
hear, if you do not want to. I have no right to compel
you to speak if you don’t want to. If you do not wish to
know my thought, I have no right to force it upon you.
The next thing is, that this liberty of thought, this
liberty of expression, is of more, value than any other
thing beneath the stars. Of more value than any religion,
of more value than any government, of more value than
all the constitutions that man has written and all the laws
that he has passed, is this liberty—the absolute liberty of
the human mind. Take away that word from language,
and all other words become meaningless sounds, and there
is then no reason for a man being and living upon the
earth.
So then, I am simply in favor of intellectual hospitality
—that is all. You come to me with a new idea. I invite
you into the house. Let us see what you have. Let us
talk it over. If I do not like your thought, I will bid it
a polite “ good day.” If I do like it, I will say : “ Sit
down; stay with me, and become a part of the intellectual
wealth of my world.” That is all.
And how any human being ever has had the impudence
to speak against the right to speak is beyond the power
of my imagination. Here is a man who speaks—who
�Limits of Toleration.
11
exercises a right that he, by his speech, denies. Can
liberty go further than that? Is there any toleration
possible beyond the liberty to speak against liberty—-the
real believer in free speech allowing others to speak against
the right to speak ? Is there any limitation beyond that ?
So, whoever has spoken against the right to speak has
admitted that he violated his own doctrine. No man can
open his mouth against the freedom of speech without
denying every argument he may put forward. Why ?
He is exercising the right that he denies. How did he
get it ? Suppose there is one man on an island. You
will all admit now that he would have the right to do his
own thinking. You will all admit that he has the right
to express his thought. Now will somebody tell me how
many men would have to immigrate to that island before
the original settler would lose his right to think and his
right to express himself ?
If there be an infinite Being—and it is a question that
I know nothing about—you would be perfectly astonished
to know how little I do know on that subject, and yet I
know as much as the aggregated world knows, and as little
as the smallest insect that ever fanned with happy wings
the summer air—if there be such a Being, I have the
same right to think that he has, simply because it is a
necessity of my nature—because I cannot help it. And
the Infinite would be just as responsible to the sjnallest
intelligence living in the infinite spaces—he would be just
as responsible to that intelligence as that intelligence can
be to him, provided that intelligence thinks as a necessity
of his nature.
There is another phrase to which I object—“ tolera
tion.” “ The limits of toleration.” Why say “ toleration T
I will tell you why. When the thinkers were in the
minority—when the philosophers were vagabonds—when
the men with brains furnished fuel for bonfires—when
the majority were ignorantly orthodox—when they hated
the heretic as a last year’s leaf hates a this year’s bud—in
that delightful time these poor people in the minority had
to say to ignorant power, to conscientious rascality, to
cruelty born of universal love : “ Don^t kill us : don’t be
�12
Limits of Toleration.
so arrogantly meek as to burn us ; tolerate us.” At that
time the minority was too small to talk about rights, and
the great big ignorant majority when tired of shedding
blood, said : “ Well, we will tolerate you ; we can afford
to wait; you will not live long, and when the Being of
infinite compassion gets h*old of you we will glut our re
venge through an eternity of joy; we will ask you every
now and then, ‘What is your opinion now?’ ”
Both feeling absolutely sure that infinite goodness
would have his revenge, they “ tolerated ” these thinkers,
and that word finally took the place almost of liberty.
But 1 do not like it. When you say “ I tolerate,” you
do not say you have no right to punish, no right to perse
cute. It is only a disclaimer for a few moments and for
a few years, but you retain the right. I deny it.
And let me say here to-night—it is your experience, it
is mine—that the bigger a man is the more charitable he
is; you know it. The more brain he has, the more
excuses he finds for all the world; you know it. And if
there be in heaven an infinite Being, he must be grander .
than any man; he must have a thousand times more
charity than the human heart can hold, and is it possible
that he is going to hold his ignorant children responsible
for the impressions made by nature upon their brain?
Let us have some sense.
ThSre is another side to this question, and that is with
regard to the freedom of thought and expression in mat
ters pertaining to this world.
No man has a right to hurt the character of a neighbor.
He has no right to utter slander. He has no right to
bear false witness. He has no right to be actuated by
any motive except for the general good—but the things
he does here to his neighbor—these are easily defined and
easily punished. All that I object to is setting up a stan
dard of authority in the world of art, the world of beauty,
the world of poetry, the world of worship, the world of
religion, and the world of metaphysics. That is what I object
to ; and if the old doctrines had been carried out, every
human being that has benefited this world would have
been destroyed. If the people who believe that a certain
�Limits of Toleration.
13
belief is necessary to insure salvation had had control of
this world, we would have been as ignorant to-night as
wild beasts. Every step in advance has been made in
spite of them. There has not been a book of any value
printed since the invention of that art—and when I say
“ of value,” I mean that contained new and splendid
truths—that was not anathematised by the gentlemen
who believed that man is responsible for his thought.
Every step has been taken in spite of that doctrine.
Consequently I simply believe in absolute liberty of
mind. And I have no fear about any other world—not
the slightest. When I get there, I will give my honest
opinion of that country; I will give my honest thought
there; and if for that I lose my soul, I will keep at least
my self-respect.
A man tells me a story. I believe it, or disbelieve it.
I cannot help it. I read a story—no matter whether in
the original Hewbrew, or whether it has been translated.
I believe it or I disbelieve it. No matter whether it is
written in a very solemn or a very flippant manner—I
have my idea about its truth. And I insist that each
man has the right to judge that for himself, and for that
reason, as I have already said, I am defending your right
to differ with me—that is all. And if you do differ with
me, all that proves is that I do not agree with you. There
is no man that lives to-night beneath the stars—there is
no being—that can force my soul upon its knees, unless
the reason is given. I will be no slave. I do not care how
big my master is, I am just as small, if a slave, as though
the mastei’ were small. It is not the greatness of the
master that can honor the slave. In other words, I am
going to act according to my right, as I understand it,
without any other human being.
And now, if you think—any of you, that you can
control your thought, I want you try it. There is not
one here who can by any possibil ty think, only as he
must
You remember the story of the Methodist minister
who insisted that he could control his thoughts. A. man
said to him, “ Nobody can control his own mind.” “ Oh,
�14
Limits of Toleration.
yes, he can,” the preacher replied. “ My dear sir,” said
the man, “ you cannot even say the Lord’s Prayer with
out thinking of something else.” “ Oh, yes, I can.”
“ Well, if you will do it, I will give you that horse, the
best riding horse in this county.”
“Well who is to
judge ? ” said the preacher. “ I will take your own word
for it, and if you say the Lord’s Prayer through without
thinking of anything else, I will give you that horse.”
So the minister shut his eyes and began : “ Our father
who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom
come, thy will be done------ ” “ I suppose you will throw
in the saddle and bridle ? ”
I say to you to-night, ladies and gentlemen, that I feel
more interest in the freedom of thought and speech than
in all other questions, knowing, as I do, that it is the con
dition of great and splendid progress for the race ; remem
bering, as I do, that the opposite idea has covered the
cheek of the world with tears ; remembering, and knowing
as I do, that the enemies of free thought and free
speech have covered this world with blood. These men
have filled the heavens with an infinite monster; they
have filled the future with fire and flame, and they have
made the present, when they have had the power, a per
dition. These men, these doctrines, have carried faggots
to the feet of philosophy. These men, these doctrines,
have hated to see the dawn of an intellectual day. These
men, these doctrines, have denied every science, and de
nounced and killed every philosopher they could lay their
bloody, cruel, ignorant hands upon.
And for that reason, I am for absolute liberty of thought,
everywhere, in every department, domain, and realm of the
human mind.
PRESIDENT PALMER.
In the very amusing sketch of “Father Tom and the
Pope,” Father Tom is represented as saying that “ every
sensible man is a man who judges by his senses; but we all
know that these seven senses are seven deluders, and that if
we want to know anything about mysteries, we call in the
�Limits of Toleration.
15
eighth sense—the only sense to be depended upon—which
is the sense of the Church/’
Mr. Kernan was to have attended to-night, to give us
“ the sense of the Church —the Roman Catholic—but he,
unfortunately, has been forced to go to Chicago. Mr.
Coudert, however, is one of the few men who I know who
could take his place in such an emergency, has kindly
consented to appear.
REMARKS OF MR. COUDERT.
Ladies and Gentlemen and Mr. President,—It is not
only “the sense of the Church” that I am lacking
now, I am afraid it is any sense at all; and I am only won
dering how a reasonably intelligent human being—meaning
myself—could in view of the misfortune that befell Mr.
Kernan, have undertaken to speak to-night.
This is a new experience. I have never sang in any of
Verdi’s operas—I have never listened to one through—but
I think I would prefer to try all three of these perform
ances rather than go on with this duty which in a vain
moment of deluded vanity I’ heedlessly undertook.
I am in a new field here. I feel very much like the
master of a ship who thinks that he can safely guide his
bark. . (I am not alluding to the traditional bark of St.
Peter, in which I hope that I am and will always be, but the
ordinary bark that requires a compass and a rudder and a
guide.) And I find that all these ordinary things, which
we generally take for granted, and which are as necessary
to our safety as the air which we breathe, or the sunshine
that we enjoy, have been quietly, pleasantly, and smilingly
thrown overboard by the gentleman who has just preceded
me.
Carlyle once said—and the thought came to me as the
gentleman was speaking—A Comic History of England !
—for some wretch had just written such a book—talk of
free thought and free speech when men do such things 1
—A Comic History of England ! The next thing we shali
hear of will be “ A Comic History of the Bible II think
�16
Limits of Toleration.
we have heard the first chapter of that comic history to
night; and the only comfort that I have—and possibly
some other antiquated and superannuated persons of either
sex, if such there be within my hearing—is that such
things as have seemed to me charmingly to partake of the
order of blasphemy, have been uttered with such charming
bonhomie, and received with such enthusiastic admiration,
that I have wondered whether we are in a Christian audi
ence of the nineteenth century, or in a possible Ingersollian audience of the Twenty-third.
And let me first, before I enter upon the very few and
desultory remarks which are the only ones that I can make
now and with which I may claim- your polite attention—
let me say a word about the comparison with which your
worthy President opened these proceedings.
There are two or three things upon which I am a little
sensitive : One, aspersions upon the land of my birth—the
city of New York; the next, the land of my fathers; and
the next, the bark that I was just speaking of.
Now your worthy President, in his well-meant efforts to
exhibit in the best possible style the new actor upon his
stage, said that he had seen Victor Hugo’s remains, and
Voltaire’s and Jean Jacques Rousseau’s, and that he
thought the niche might well be filled by Colonel Ingersoll.
If that had been merely the expression of a natural desire
to see him speedily annihilated, I might perhaps in the
interests of the Christian community have thought, but
not said, “ Amen! ” (Here you will at once observe
the distinction I make between free thought and free
speech!)
I do not think, and I beg that none of you, and par
ticularly the eloquent rhetorician who preceded me, will
think, that in anything I may say I intend any personal
discourtesy, for I do believe to some extent in freedom of
speech upon a platform like this. Such a debate as tins
rises entirely above and beyond the plane of personali
ties.
I suppose that your President intended to compare
Colonel Ingersoll to Voltaire, to Hugo and to Rousseau.
I have no retainer from either of those gentlemen, but for
�Limits of Toleration.
17
the reason that I just gave you, I wish to defend their
memory from what I consider a great wrong. And so I
do not think—with all respect to the eloquent and learned
gentleman—that he is entitled to a place in that niche.
Voltaire did many wrong things. He did them for many
reasons, and chiefly because he was human. But Voltaire
did a great deal to build up. Leaving aside his noble
tragedies, which charmed and delighted his audiences, and
dignified the stage, throughout his work was some effort
to ameliorate the condition of the human race. He fought
against torture ; he fought against persecution ; he fought
against bigotry ; he clamored and wrote against littleness
and fanaticism in every way, and he was not ashamed
when he entered Upon his domains at Femay, to erect a
church to the Gr^d of whom the most oui friend can say
is, “ I do not knoxy whether he exists or not.”
Rousseau did many noble things, but he was a madman,
and in our day would probably have been locked, up in an
asylum and treated by intelligent doctors. His works,
however, bear the impress of a religious education, and if
there be in his works tor sayings anything to parallel what
we have heard to-night—whether a parody on divine
revelation, or a parody upon the prayer of prayers—I have
not seen it.
Victor Hugo has enriched the literature of his day with
prose- and poetry that have made him the Shakespeare of
the nineteenth century—poems as deeply imbued with a
devout sense of responsibility to the Almighty as the
writings of an archbishop or a cardinal. He has left
the traces of his beneficent action all over the literature
of his day, of his country, and of his race.
All these men, then, have built up something. Will
anyone, the most ardent admirer of Colonel Ingersoll, tell
me what he has built up ?
To go now to the argument. The learned gentleman
says that freedom of thought is a grand thing. Unfor
tunately, freedom of thought exists. What one of us
would not put manacles and fetters upon his thoughts,
if he only could? What persecution have any of us
suffered to compare with the involuntary recurrence of
�18
Limits of Toleration.
these demons that enter our brain—that bring back past
events that we would wipe out with our tears, or even
with our blood—and make us slaves of a power unseen but
uncontrollable and uncontrolled ? Is it not unworthy of
so eloquent and intelligent a man to preach before you
here to-night that thought must always be free ?
When in the history of the world has thought ever
been fettered ? If there be a page in history upon which
such an absurdity is written, I have failed to find it.
Thought is beyond the domain of man. The most
cruel and arbitrary ruler can no more penetrate into your
bosom and mine and extract the inner workings of our
brain, than he can scale the stars or pull down the sun
from its seat. Thought must be free. Thought is un
seen, unhandled and untouched, and no despot has yet
been able to reach it, except when the thoughts burst
into words. And therefore, may we not consider now,
and say that liberty of word is what he wants, and not
liberty of thought, which no one has ever gainsaid or
disputed?
•'
Liberty of speeeh ;—and the gentleman generously tells
us, “ Why I only ask for myself what I would cheerfully
extend to you. I wish you to be free ; and you can even
entertain those old delusions which your mothers taught,
and look with envious admiratioA upon me while I scale
the giddy heights of Olympus, gather the honey and
approach the stars and tell y^u how pure the air is in
those upper regions which you are unable to reach/’’
Thanks for his kindness ! But I think that it is one
thing for us to extend to him that liberty that he asks for
—the liberty to destroy—and another thing for him to
give us the liberty which we claim, the liberty to con
serve.
Oh! destruction is so ea^y, destruction is so pleasant!
It marks the footsteps all through our life. The baby
begins by destroying his bib ; the older child by destroying
his . horse, and when the man is grown up he joins the
legiment with the latent instinct that when he gets a
chance he will destroy human life.
This building cost many thousand days* work. It was
�Limits of Toleration.
19
planned by more or less skilful architects ignorant of
ventilation, but well-meaning.
Men lavished their
thought, and men lavished their sweat for a pittance, upon
this building. It took months and possibly years to
build it and to adorn it and to beautify it. And yet, as it
stands complete to-night with all of you here in the vigor
of your life and in the enjoyment of such entertainment
as you may get here this evening, I will find a dozen men
who, with a few pounds of dynamite will reduce it and all
of us to instant destruction.
The dynamite man may say to me, “I give you all
liberty to build and occupy and insure, if you will give
me liberty to blow up.” Is that a fair bargain ! Am I
bound in conscience and in good sense to accept it.
Liberty of speech I Tell me where liberty of speech has
ever existed. There have been free societies. England
was a free country. France has struggled through crisis
after crisis to obtain liberty of speech. We think we have
liberty of speech, as we understand it, and yet who would
undertake to say that our society could live with liberty
of speech ? We have gone through many crises in our
short history, and we know that thought is nothing before
the law, but the word is an act—as guilty at.times as the
act of killing, or burglary, or any of the violent crimes
that disgrace humanity and require the police.
A word is an act—an act of the tongue ; and why
should my tongue go unpunished, and I who wield it
mercilessly toward those who are weaker than I, escape,
if my arm is to be punished when I use it tyrannously .
Whom would you punish for the murder of Desdemona—
is it Iago or Othello ? Who was the villain, who was the
criminal, who deserved the scaffold—who but free speech ..
Iago exercised free speech. He poisoned the ear of
Othello and nerved his arm and Othello was the murderer
—but Iago went scot free. That was a word.
“Oh!” says the counsel, “ but that does not apply to
individuals; be tender and charitable to individuals.
Tender and charitable to men if they endeavor to destroy
all that you love and venerate and respect!
Are you tender and charitable to me if you enter my
�20
Limits of Toleration.
house, my castle, and debauch my children from the faith
that, they have been taught? Are you tender and
charitable to them and to me when you teach them that
I have instructed them in falsehood, that their mother
has rocked them in blasphemy; and that they are now
among the fools and the witlings of the world because
they believe in my precepts ? Is that the charity that
you speak of? Heaven forbid that liberty of speech such
as that should ever invade my home or yours!
We all understand, and the learned gentleman will
admit, that his discourse is but an eloquent apology for
blasphemy. And when I say this, I beg you to believe
me incapable of resorting to the cheap artifice of strong
words to give points to a pointless argument, or to offend
a courteous adversary. I think if I put it to him he
would, with characteristic candor, say, “ Yes, that is what
I claim the liberty to blaspheme; the world has out
grown these things ; and I claim to-day, as I claimed a
few months ago in the neighboring gallant little State of
New Jersey, that while you cannot slander man, your
tongue is free to revile and insult man’s maker.” New
Jersey was behind in the race for progress, and did not
accept his argument. His unfortunate client was con
victed and had to pay the fine which the press—which is
seldom mistaken—says came from the pocket of his
generous counsel.
The argument was a strong one; the argument was
brilliant, and was able ; and I say now, with all my pre
dilections for the church of my fathers, and for your
church (because it is not a question of oui’ differences, but
it is a question whether the tree shall be torn up by the
roots, not what branches may bear richer fruit or deserve
to be lopped off) —I say, why has every Christian State
passed these statutes against blasphemy? Turning into
ridicule sacred things—-firing off the Lord’s Prayer as you
would a joke from Joe Miller or a comic poem—that is
what I mean by blasphemy. If there be any other or
better definition, give it me, and I will use it.
Now understand. All these States of ours care not one
fig what our religion is. Behave ourselves properly, obey
�Limits of Toleration.
21
the laws, do not require the intervention of the police,
and the majesty of your conscience will be as exalted as
the sun. But the wisest men and the best men-—possibly
not so eloquent as the orator, but I may say it without
offence to him—other names that shine brightly in the
galaxy of our best men, have insisted and maintained
that the Christian faith was the ligament that kept our
modern society together, and our laws have said, and the
laws of most of our States say, to this day, “ Think what
- you like, but do not, like Sainson, pull the pillars down
upon us all.”
. .
If I had anything to say, ladies and gentlemen, it is
time that I should say it now. My exordium has been
very long, but it was no longer than the dignity of the
subject, perhaps, demanded.
Free speech we all have. Absolute liberty of speech
we never had. Did we have it before the war ? Many of
us here remember that if you crossed an imaginary line
and went among some of thd noblest and best men that
ever adorned this continent, one word against slavery
meant death. And if you say that that was the influence
of slavery, I will carry you to Boston, that city which
numbers within its walls as many intelligent people to the
acre as any city on the globe—-was it different there ?
Why, the fugitive, beaten, blood-stained slave, when he
got there, was seized and turned back; and when a few
good and brave men, in defence of free speech, undertook
to defend the slave and to try and give him liberty, they
were mobbed and pelted and driven through the city.
You may say, “ That proves there was no liberty of
speech.” No ; it proves this : that wherever, and where
soever, and whenever, liberty of speech is incompatible
with the safety of the State, liberty of speech must fall
back and give way, in order that the State may be pre
served.
First, above everything, above all things, the safety
of the people is the supreme law. And if rhetoricians,
anxious to tear down, anxious to pluck the faith from
the young ones who are unable to defend it, come for
ward with nickel-plated platitudes and commonplaces
�22
Limits of Toleration.
clothed in second-hand purple and tinsel, and try to tear
down the temple, then it is time, I shall not say for good
men—for I know so few they make a small battalion—
but for good women, to come to the rescue.
PRESIDENT PALMER.
In what I said, ladies and gentlemen, I tried to sink
my personality. I did not say, in introducing Colonel
Ingersoll, that in case he had been bom in France, and
in case he had passed away, I thought that a fourth niche
should be prepared for him with the three worthies I
mentioned; but that I thought the acclaim of the liberal
culture of France—the same free thought that had
erected these monuments, would have erected a fourth for
Colonel Ingersoll had he lived among them. But perhaps
even in saying that I was led away from the impartiality
I desired to show, in my admiration and love for the man.
I now have the honor to introduce to you that accom
plished gentleman and scholar, my friend, our neighbor
from the goodly city of Brooklyn, General Stewart L.
Woodford.
GENERAL WOODFORD’S SPEECH.
Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen,—At this late
hour I could not attempt—even if I would—the elo
quence of my friend Colonel Ingersoll; nor the wit and
rapier-like sarcasm of my other valued friend Mr, Coudert.
But there are some things so serious about this subject
that we discuss to-night, that I crave your pardon if,
without preface, and without rhetoric, I get at once to
what from my Protestant standpoint seems the fatal logical
error of Mr. Ingersoll’s position.
Mr. Ingersoll starts with the statement—and that I
may not, for I could not, do him injustice, nor myself in
justice, in the quotation, I will give it as he stated it—he
starts with this statement: that thought is a necessary
natural product, the result of what we call impressions
made through the medium of the senses upon the brain.
�Limits of Toleration.
23
Do you think that is thought ? Now stop—turn right
into your own minds—is that thought? Does not will
power take hold? Does not reason take hold? Doesnot
memory take hold, and is not thought the action of the
brain based upon the impression and assisted or directed
by manifold and varying influences ?
Secondly, our friend Mr. Ingersoll says that no human
being is accountable to any being, human or divine, for
his thought.
.
He starts with the assumption that thought is the
inevitable impression burnt upon the mind at once, . and
then jumps to the conclusion that there is no responsibility.
Now is not that a fair logical analysis of what he has
said?
.
,
.
My senses leave upon my mind an impression, and then
my mind, out of that impression, works good or evil. The
glass of brandy, being presented to my physical sense,
inspires thirst—inspires the thought of thirst inspires
the instinct of debauchery. Am I not accountable for
the result of the mind given me, whether I yield to the
debauch, or rise to the dignity of self-control ?
Every thing, of sense, leaves its impression upon the
mind. If there be no responsibility anywhere, then is
this world blind chance. If there be no responsibility
anywhere, then my friend deserves no credit if he
be guiding you in the path of truth, and I deserve
no censure if I be carrying you back into the path
of superstition. Why, admit for a moment that a
man has no control over his thought, and you destroy
absolutely the power of regenerating the. world, the power
of improving the world. The world swings one way, or
it swings the other. If it be true that in all these ages
we have come nearer and nearer to a perfect liberty, that
is true simply and alone because the mind of man, through
reason, through memory, through a thousand inspirations
and desires and hopes, has ever tended toward better
results and higher achievements.
.
No accountability? I speak not for my friend, but I
recognise that I am accountable to myself; I recognise
that whether I rise or fall, that whether my life goes
�24
Limits of Toleration.
upward or downward, I am responsible to myself. And
so, in spite of all sophistry, so in spite of all dream, so in
spite of all eloquence, each woman, each man within this
audience is responsible—first of all to herself and himself
—whether when bad thoughts, when passion, when
murder, when evil come into the heart or brain he harbors
them there or he casts them out.
I am responsible further—I am responsible to my
neighbor. I know that I am my neighbor’s keeper. I
know that as I touch your life, as you touch mine, I am
responsible every moment, every hour, every day, for my
influence upon you. I am either helping you up, or I am
dragging you down ; you are either helping me up or you
are dragging me down—and you know it. Sophistry
cannot get away from this; eloquence cannot seduce us
from it. You know that if you look back through the
record of your life, there are lives that you have helped
and lives that you have hurt. You know that there are
lives on the downward plane that went down because in
an evil hour you pushed them; you know, perhaps with
blessing, lives that have gone up because you have reached
out to them a helping hand. That responsibility for your
neighbor is a responsibility and an accountability that you
and I cannot avoid or evade.
I believe one thing further : that because there is a
creation there is a Creator. I believe that because there
is force, there is a Projector of force ; because there is
matter, there is spirit. I reverently believe these things.
I am not angry with my neighbor because he does not;
it may be that he is right, that I am wrong ; but if there
be a Power that sent me into this world, so far as that
Power has given me wrong direction, or permitted wrong
direction, that Power will judge me justly. So far as 1
disregard the light that I have, whatever it may be—
whether it be light of reason, light of conscience, light of
history—so far as I do that which my judgment tells me
is wrong, I am responsible and I am accountable.
Now the Protestant theory, as I understand it, is simply
this : It would vary from the theory as taught by the
mother Church—it certainly swings far away from the
�Limits of Toleration.
25
theory as suggested by my friend—I understand the
Protestant theory to be this : That every man is respon
sible to himself, to his neighbor, and to his God, for his
thought. Not for the first impression—but for that im
pression, for that direction and result which he intel
ligently gives to the first impression or deduces from it.
I understand that the Protestant idea is this : That man
may think—we know he will think—for himself ; but that
he is responsible for it. That a man may speak his
thought, so long as he does not hurt his neighbor. He
must use his own liberty so that he shall not injure the
well-being of any other one—so that when using this
liberty, when exercising this freedom, he is accountable
at the last to his God. And so Protestantism sends me
into the world with this terrible and solemn responsibility.
It leaves Mr. Ingersoll free to speak his thought at the
bar of his conscience, before the bar of his fellow-man,
but it holds him in the inevitable grip of absolute re
sponsibility for every light word idly spoken. God grant
that he may use that power so that he can face that re
sponsibility at the last!
It leaves to every churchman liberty to believe and
stand by his church according to his own conviction. It
stands for this : the absolute liberty to each individual
man to think, to write, to speak, to act, according to the
best light within him ; limited as to his fellows, by the
condition that he shall not use that liberty so as to injure
them ; limited in the other direction, by those tremendous
laws which are laws in spite of all rhetoric, and in spite of
all logic.
If I put my finger into the. fire, that fire burns. If I
do a wrong, that wrong remains. If I hurt my neighbor,
the wrong reacts upon myself. If I would try to escape
what you call judgment, what you, call penalty, I cannot
escape the working of the inevitable law that follows a
cause by an effect; I cannot escape that inevitable law—
not the creation of some dark monster flashing through
the skies—but, asL I believe, the beneficent creation which
puts into the spiritual life, the same control of law that
guides the material life, which wisely makes me re-
�26
Limits of Toleration.
sponsible, that in the solemnity of that responsibility I
am bound to lift my brother up and never to drag my
brother down.
REPLY OF COLONEL INGERSOLL.
The first gentleman who replied to me took the ground
boldly that expression is not free—that no man has the
right to express his real thoughts—and I suppose that
he acted in accordance with that idea. How are you
to know whether he thought a solitary thing that he
said or not ? How is it possible for us to ascertain
whether he is simply the mouthpiece of some other ?
Whether he is a free man, or whether he says that which
he does not believe, it is impossible for us to ascertain.
He tells you that I am about to take away the religion
of your mothers. I have heard that said a great many
times. No doubt Mr. Coudert has the religion of his
mother, and judging from the argument he made, his
mother knew at least as much about these questiohs as
her son. I believe that every good father and good
mother wants to see the son and the daughter climb higher
upon the great and splendid mount of thought than they
reached. You never can honor your father by going
around swearing to his mistakes. You never can honor
your mother by saying that ignorance is blessed because
she did not know everything. I want to honor my parents
by finding out more than they did.
' There is another thing that I was a little astonished at
—that Mr. Coudert, knowing that he would be in eter
nal felicity with his harp in his hand seeing me in the
world of the damned, could yet grow envious here to-night
at my imaginary monument.
And he tells you—this Catholic—that Voltaire was an
exceedingly good Christian compared with me. Do you
know I am glad that I have compelled a Catholic—one
who does not believe he has the right to express his honest
thoughts—to pay a compliment to Voltaire simply because
he thought it was at my expense ?
1 have an almost infinite admiration for Voltaire; and
�Limits of Toleration.
27
when 1 hear that name pronounced, I think of a plume
floating over a mailed knight—I think of a man that rode
to the beleaguecl City of Catholicism and demanded a
surrender—I think of a great man who thrust the dagger
eof assassination into your Mother Church, and from that
wound she never will recover.
One word more. This gentleman says that children
are destructive—that the first thing they do is to destroy
their bibs. The gentleman, I should think from his talk,
has preserved his !
They talk about blasphemy.
What is blasphemy?
Let us be honest with each other. Whoever lives upon
the unpaid labor of others is a blasphemer.. Whoever
slanders, maligns, and betrays is a blasphemer. . Whoever
denies to others the rights that he claims for himself is a
blasphemer.
Who is a worshipper ? One who makes a happy home
—one who fills the lives of wives and children with sun
light—one who has a heart where the flowers of kindness
burst into blossom and fill the air with perfume—the man
who sits beside his wife, prematurely old and wasted, and
holds her thin hands in his and kisses them as passionately
and loves her as truly and as rapturously as when she was
a bride—he is a worshipper—that is worship.
And the gentleman brought forward as a reason why
we should not have free speech, that only a few years ago
some of the best men in the world, if you said a word in
favor of liberty, would shoot you down. What an argu
ment was that 1 They were not good men. They were
the whippers of women and the stealers of babes—robbers
of the trundle-bed—assassins of human liberty. They
knew no better, but I do not propose to follow the
example of a barbarian because he was honestly a bar
barian.
So much for debauching his family by telling them
that his precepts are false. If he has taught them as he
has taught us to-night, he has debauched their minds. . I
would be honest at the cradle. I would not tell a child
ariything as a certainty that I did not know. I would be
absolutely honest.
�28
Limits of Toleration.
But he says that thought is absolutely free—nobody
can control thought. Let me tell him: Superstition is
the jailer of the mind. You can so stuff a child with
superstition that its poor little brain is a bastile and its
poor little soul a convict. Fear is the jailer of the mind,
and superstition is the assassin of liberty.
So when anybody goes into his family and tells these
great and shining truths, instead of debauching his children
they will kill the snakes that crawl in their cradles. Let
us be honest and free.
And now, coming to the second gentleman. He is a
Protestant. The Catholic Church says : “ Don’t think ;
pay your fare ! this is a through ticket, and we will look
out for your baggage.” The Protestant Church says :
“ Read that Bible for yourselves; think for yourselves ;
but if you do not come to a right conclusion you will be
eternally damned.” Any sensible man will say, “ Then
I won’t read it—I’ll believe it without reading it.” And
that is the only way you can be sure you will believe it:
don’t read it.
Governor Woodford says that we are responsible for our
thoughts. Why ? Could you help thinking as you did
on this subject? No. Could you help believing the
Bible ? I suppose not. Could you help believing that
story of Jonah ? Certainly not—it looks reasonable in
Brooklyn.
I stated that thought was the result of the impressions
of nature upon the mind through the medium of the
senses. He says you cannot have thought without
memory. How did you get the first one ?
Of course I intended to be understood—and the language
is clear—that there could be no thought except through
the impressions made upon the brain by nature through
the avenue called the senses. Take away the senses, how
would vou think then ? If you thought at all, I think
you would agree with Mr. Coudert.
Now I admit—so we need never have a contradiction
about it—I admit that every human being is responsible
' to the person he injures; if he injures any man, woman or
child, or any dog, or the lowest animal that crawls, he is
�Limits of Toleration.
29
responsible to that animal, to that being—in other words,
he is responsible to any being that he has injured.
But you cannot injure an infinite Being, if there be one.
I will tell you why. You cannot help him, and you can
not hurt him.. If there be an infinite Being he is condition
less—he does not want anything, he has it. You cannot
help anybody that does not want something—you cannot
help him. You cannot hurt anybody unless he is a con
ditioned being and you change’ his condition so as to
inflict a harm. But'if God be conditionless, you cannot
hurt him, and you cannot help him. So do not trouble
yourselves about the Infinite. All our duties lie within
reach—all our duties are right here ; and my religion is
simply this :
First—Give to every other human being every right
that you claim for yourself.
Second—If vou tell your thought at all, tell youi
honest thought. Do not be a parrot—do not be an in
strumentality for an organisation. Tell your own thought,
honor bright, what you think.
My next idea is, that the only possible good in the
universe is happiness. The time to be happy is now.
The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is
to try and make somebody else so.
My o-ood friend General Woodford—and he is a good
man telling the best he knows—says that I will be
accountable at the bar up yonder. I am ready to settle
that account now, and expect to be, every moment of my
life—and when that settlement comes, if it does come, I
do not believe that a solitary being can rise and say that
I ever injured him or her.
But no matter what they say. Let me tell you a story,
how we will settle if we do get there.
You remember the story told about the Mexican who
believed that his country was the only one in the world,
and said so. The priest told him that there was another
country where a man lived who was eleven 01 twelve feet
high that made the whole world, and if he denied it, when
that man got hold of him he would not leave a whole bone
in his body. But he denied it. He was one of those
�30
Limits of Toleration.
men who would not believe further than his vision
extended.
. So one day in his boat he was rocking away when the
wind suddenly arose and he was blown out of sight of his
home. After several days he was blown so far that he
saw the shore of another country. Then he said, “ My
Lord, I am gone! I have been swearing all my life that
there was no other country, and here it is I ” So he did
his best—paddled with what little strength he had left,
reached the shore and got out of his boat. Sure enough,
there came down a man to meet him about twelve feet
high. The poor little wretch was frightened almost to
death, so he said to the tall man as he saw him coming
down, “Mister, whoever you are, I denied your existence,
I did not believe you lived ; I swore there was no such
country as this; but I see I was mistaken, and I am
gone. You are going to kill me, and the quicker you do
it the better and get me out of my misery. Do it
now I ”
The great man just looked at the little fellow and said
nothing, till he asked “ What are you going to do with
me, because over in that other country I denied your
existence ? ” “ What am I going to do with you ? ” said
the supposed god. “ Now that you have got here, if you
behave yourself I am going to treat you well.”
�Colonel Ingersoll’s Works.
-------- 0------- -
s. d.
MISTAKES OF MOSES. Price
-10
In cloth
_
-1,6
The only complete edition published in England.
136 pp.
DEFENCE OF FREETHOUGHT
0 6
Five Hours’ Speech at Trial of C. B. Reynolds
for Blasphemy.
REPLY TO GLADSTONE
With a biography.
ROME OR REASON? 0 4
A Reply to Cardinal Manning
FAITH AND FACT. A Reply to Rev. Dr. Field 0 2
GOD AND MAN.
Second Reply to Dr. Field
0
-
2
2
THE HOUSEHOLD OF FAITH
-
-
THE DYING CREED -
-
-02
-
0
THE CLERGY AND COMMON SENSE
-
0.2
ART AND MORALITY
-
-
-
0
2
THE GREAT MISTAKE
-
-
-
0
1
LIVE TOPICS -
-
-
’
-
-
-01
REAL BLASPHEMY -
-
-
-01
SOCIAL SALVATION -
-
-
-01
u MYTH AND MIRACLE
-
Progressive Publishing Co., 28 Stonecutter Street, E.C.
01
�CRIMES
of
CHRISTIANITY.
By G. W. FOOTE and J. M. WHEELER.
VOL. I. Chapters
(1) Christ to Constantine; (2) Constantine
to Hypatia; (3) Monkery ; (4) Pious Forgeries ; (5) Pious
Frauds; (6) Rise of the Papacy; (7) Crimes of the Popes;
(8) Persecution of the Jews ; (9) The Crusades.
Hundreds of refeiences are.given to standard authorities. No pains
have been spared to make the work a complete, trustworthy, final, unanswerable Indictment of Christianity. The Tree is judged by its Fruit.
224 pp., cloth boards, gilt lettered, 2s. 6d.
“ The book is very carefully compiled, the references are given with
exactitude, and the work is calculated to be of the greatest use to the oppo
nents of Christianity.”—National Reformer.
“ The book is worth reading. It is fair, and on the whole correct.”—
Weekly Times.
“The book has a purpose, and is entitled to a fair hearing.”—Hudders
field Examiner.
“The work should be scattered like autumn leaves.”—Ironclad Aye, U. S. A.
Two keen writers.”—Truthseeker (London).
“ Animated throughout by the bitterest hatred of Christianity.”—Literary
World.
“ Presented in a concise and impressive manner. . . so far as we have
been able to verify the quotations they are given accurately.”—Open Court
(Chicago).
“Elaborate, and we dare say accurate.”—Weekly Dispatch.
“ Able, instructive. . . courteous and fair. . . . well got up, low priced,
and highly suggestive.”—Oldham Chronicle.
“ A work at once valuable and interesting.”—Truthseeker (New York).
“ Shows a wide research and a consummate knowledge of authorities.”—
Western Figaro,
Vol. II. is in Preparation.
THE “FREETHINKER,”
EDITED BY
G. W. FOOTE.
------- o-------
PUBLISHED
EVERY
THURSDAY
PRICE ONE PENNY.
Progressive Publishing Company, 28 Stonecutter Street, London, E.O.
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
The limits of toleration : a discussion between Colonel R.G. Ingersoll and Honorable F.D. Coudert and Governor S.L. Woodford, at the Nineteenth Century Club, New York: verbatim report
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Ingersoll, Robert Green [1833-1899]
Coudert, F. D.
Woodford, Stewart L. (Stewart Lyndon) [1835-1913]
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 30 p. ; 19 cm.
Notes: Publisher's advertisements inside and on back cover. No. 48d in Stein checklist. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Progressive Publishing Company
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1889
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
N370
Subject
The topic of the resource
Religious toleration
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (The limits of toleration : a discussion between Colonel R.G. Ingersoll and Honorable F.D. Coudert and Governor S.L. Woodford, at the Nineteenth Century Club, New York: verbatim report), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Language
A language of the resource
English
NSS
Religious Tolerance
Toleration
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/dd89fe04cfcbf89ed32eeb566efb54b6.pdf?Expires=1712793600&Signature=vtZPdjjU0A-aHiRiFBe-fKU8BEn7Zx3FySlXMVqMEeL%7EuQy5pj3wpABDMjaCVK1Qwao22feuifHZHqnjN4bRMpOuWsrHcvX6SUURyAPMh4ONEqFVWfRH6VkcsvbUGjwpMcO%7EiU2APz9JSwCBBUEUpRrbuusdihMSZCJ1ZiwiTX3q2aBHbj3cW0%7EI%7ERDAMLhQeDuanM1QTQ3PubeSOJat%7EQmTzoSYl7tPceVClwd1QbjgrLYYpEWe-wmQAmecxVfZMxPuRQYL0V6jrJK6AgTYoDIWIF5%7Ego9aD5XgyG7CINyrrW9K7vpmiPMOV4PVRO7OW9Y5XNK%7ESspLP4InU3XPTg__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
ece9564a6e64663273ccda830e233635
PDF Text
Text
WITH SOME REMARKS ON
PROFESSOR TYNDALL’S ADDRESS AT BELFAST.
BY
CHARLES BRAY,
Author of ‘ The Philosophy of Necessity' ‘A Manual of Anthropology or
Science of Man,' ‘ The Education of the Feelings,' Ac.
“ Things are to each man according as they seem to him.”—Anaxagoras.
“ The eye sees only what it brings the power to see.”— T. Carlyle.
PUBLISHED BY THOMAS SOOTT,
NO. II THE TERRACE, FARQUHAR ROAD, UPPER NORWOOD,
LONDON, S.E.
1875.
Price Ninepence.
�- LONDON:
PRINTED DY C. W., RBYNELL, LITTLE PULTENEY STREET,
HAYMARKET, IV.
�'*.-*«*
*
TOLERATION.-*'
“"[JI VERY man,” says t>r. Johnson, “has a right
P J to his own opinion, and^fevery Ong else »has a
right to knock him down for it.” * <1 do nofc know %
whether this is the meaning he gives »to Toleration in
his dictionary, but it pretty correctly expresses both
its theory and practice in his day. Witness the brute
who knocked down Shelley. The^toet one day in Italy
was asking for his letters at the post-office, and gave in ,
his name—“ What! ” said an Englishman present,11 are ,
you that d—d Atheist Shelley ? ” an$. knocked him down, .
endangering his life ; no doubt understanding toleration in the above Johnsonian sense. I need not say that
such an outrage would not be permitted in the present
day, neither could it take place if it would, not so much
from any alteration of theory or opinion on the subject .
as from an entire alteration of, feeling; and it is- our
feelings, not the intellect, that rule us. The instincts
of the multitude are often in advance of the reason,t
and it is the imperceptible growth of the moral sense
and not the intellect that determines conduct. ‘It would,
be impossible in the present day to re-light the fires of
Smithfield or to burn a Witch; and yet there can be no
doubt that, from an intellectual point of view, both the
Inquisition and the Witch burners were only acting
consistently in accordance with their creed. It is the
moral judgment of the world that has condemned the
creed; logically it is as sound as ever.
It is true the age does not notv admit of persecution;
or, if it does, only in a very restrained and modified
sense. People are avoided or sent to Coventry for
certain opinions, that are supposed to militate against
�6
Toleration: ‘with Some Remarks on
what is now considered “ good society; ” but i( the
naughty man, who does not believe in anything,” is
well received. In this, however, there is no thought of
toleration; few know even the meaning of the word.
Let us then inquire what is toleration, and if it be
really a virtue or not ?
Religiozcs Toleration.
Toleration in a dictionary sense is bearing, enduring,
allowance of what is not approved, liberty to teach
religious opinions different to the Established Church.
It is in the latter sense—in a religious sense—that
toleration is best known to the Dissenters, because they
have suffered legally from the want of it. But is
religious toleration a virtue—i.e., is it right or wrong ?
From the Boman Catholic point of view it must be
wrong ; from the Protestant it is right. The Roman
Catholic, as we are told by Archbishop Manning in the
June number of the Contemporary Review, not only
believes in the moral and divine certainty of his reve
lation—i.e., the Christian revelation—but he also
believes that a necessary provision has been made for
the safe custody, the proper interpretation, and full
understanding of this revelation in his own church,
“ divinely founded, divinely preserved from error, and
divinely assisted in the declaration of the truth.” He
believes that the voice of the living Church at this hour
is no other than the voice of the Holy Spirit. That
the decrees of the nineteen General Councils, by which
the present Canon and other fundamental dogmas have
been established, are also undoubtedly the voice of the
Holy Spirit. The Roman Catholic Church, whether
dispersed or gathered in one CEcumenical Council, is
pronounced to be infallible ; and every one who shall
deny such a Council to be (Ecumenical is excommuni
cated—i.e., damned to all eternity, Now, how any one
who believes that God has not only given us a revela-
�Professor Tyndall's Address at Belfast.
7
tion, but his Spirit also to guard and interpret it, can
consistently tolerate any other doctrine, I cannot con
ceive. But the authority of the Roman Catholic Church
and of its (Ecumenical Councils have been profanely
denied by the Protestants, who say that, inasmuch as
the members of these Councils differed in opinion, they
could not all have the Holy Ghost, and to say that it
dwelt with the majority is a pure assumption. (See
Article 21 of the Church of England.)
But it is not the Catholics only who have persecuted
and who have burnt people to death in order to inspire
them with a proper faith. Protestants also have done
so ; “ and if he that believeth shall be saved, and he that
believeth not shall be damned,” and if belief is in our
own power, I cannot see how we can be justified in not
taking every step, even the most extreme, to promote
that faith which alone leads to salvation. For what is
the suffering of an hour or two here at the stake com
pared to an eternity of such burning in hell with the
devil and his angels ? Intolerance, therefore, is a virtue
in a Roman Catholic and in all who believe that they
have infallible truth, and that all men can believe that
truth if they are so disposed. But it has been dis
covered that slow burning at the stake, even with green
wood, which gives more time for faith and repentance,
does not tend to clear the judgment and enable people
to see what they could not see before. The error, how
ever, both of Catholic and Protestant, was not in the
want of toleration, but in the dogma that belief is in
our own power, and that we can believe what we like,
whereas we cannot believe that to be black which
appears to us to be white, or in any of the various steps
between, although we should be burned for it both here
and hereafter. Persecution may make hypocrites, but
it cannot make us believe that which appears to us to
be incredible. It has been the gradual perception and
recognition of this truth by the wise that has given the
tone to society, and made the foolish—i.e.-, the multi
�8
Toleration: with Some Remarks on
tude—more tolerant. Protestantism proclaimed the right
of private judgment; and when people really took the
liberty to think for themselves, and did not leave it to
their church or chapel, the consequences were exactly
what might have been expected—viz., that no two people
ever do think alike. This was more manifest among
the Scotch—reasoning and theological people—than
among the English. A small band of Presbyterians had
seceded from a small body that had itself seceded from
the National Church. The suffering remnant, we are
told, dwindled away until it was composed but of two
persons, an old man and an old woman. “ I suppose,
Janet,” said a scoffer to the dame, “that you believe
yourself and John to be now the only true members of
Christ’s Kirk.” “Weel mon,” she replied, “I’m nae
so sure of John.” It is this tendency to divide—the
right of private judgment having been conceded—that
makes toleration almost a necessity in religion.
The altered tone of Society as illustrated in Professor
Tyndall’s late Address at Belfast.
The last meeting of the British Association for the
Advancement of Science furnishes a complete illustra
tion of this. Galileo was imprisoned and Giordano
Bruno burnt for much less heresy than that displayed
by the President of the Association in the Annual
Address. The Spectator is a clever journal, but it
admits no science that cannot be strained through its
rather old and narrow theological sieve, and it says :—■
“ Professor Tyndall will be much less persecuted for
denying the existence of God than he would be for
denying the value of Monarchy, and may defend Atheists
with much less abuse than communists or oligarchs.
English ‘ society ’ nowadays holds two things to be
divine, Property and the Usual.”
But is Professor Tyndall’s Address Atheism or a
defence of Atheists ? In the Spectator's view it may
�Professor Tyndall's Address at Belfast.
9
be, with others it may be only a step towards a more
complete understanding of the character of God. The
anthropomorphic view must give place to one in which
God must be “All in All,” and not a part only of
nature or the universe ; “ for,” as St. Paul says, “ there
are diversities of operation, but the same God worketh
all in all.” “ God,” as Victor Cousin says, “must be
everything or nothing.” A priori, we must feel that
the Infinite must contain everything; and science, a pos
teriori, is now only beginning to recognise this view.
Professor Tyndall says, “Is there not a temptation to
close to some extent with Lucretius, when he affirms
that ‘ Nature is seen to do all things spontaneously of
herself, without the meddling of the Gods ? ’ or with
Bruno, when he declares that Matter is not ‘ that mere
empty capacity which philosophers have pictured her to
be, but the universal mother who brings forth all things
as the fruit of her own womb ? ’ ” “ Abandoning,” he
says, “ all disguise, the confession I feel bound to make
before you is that I prolong the vision backward across
the boundary of the experimental evidence, and discern
in that Matter, which we in our ignorance, notwith
standing our professed reverence for its Creator, have
hitherto covered with opprobrium, the promise and
potency of every form and quality of life.” “The
teaching of the whole lecture is,” says the Spectator,
“ that, so far as science can ascertain, Matter—expanding
that word to include Force as one of its attributes—is
the Final Causeand it says “ that the result of such
a philosophy, if universally accepted, would be evil, or
rather, to avoid theological terminology, would be
injurious to human progress, we have no doubt.” Then
why tolerate it ? “ Because,” says the Spectator, “ that,
if it be true, the injury is no argument against its
diffusion ; for the injury, whatever its amount, is less
than that which must proceed from the deliberate lying
of the wise, or from the existence of that double creed,
an exoteric and esoteric one, which is the invariable
�io
Toleration : with Some Remarks on
result of their silence or their limitation of speech to a
circle of the initiated.” But the question is, -if true,
can it possibly be evil, or injurious to human progress ?
I think not; and the result of this philosophy appears
to me to lead, not only to the destruction of much that
now stands in the way of real religion, and that tends
to Atheism, but it would also lead to the most important
of all truths. Thus what is “Lucretius denying God
and deifying nature ” but saying with Pope that—
All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body Nature is, and God the soul.
and that this body and soul, as far as we can see, are
inseparable. It is the recognition of the fact, not of a
God in Nature, but that God is Nature and Nature is
God, and that the government of the Universe by a
separate Being is altogether untenable. The Spectator
says that it is Professor Tyndall’s opinion “ that the
Unknown and the Unknowable is discovered, and is
‘ Matter,’ ” and that this Matter “ is the ultimate source
of all things, and its own first cause.” In this I think
the Spectator does not truly represent the Professor.
Both Matter and Spirit are mere phenomena, that is,
modes of manifestation of the Great Unknown and
Unknowable. As Professor Huxley says, “For, after
all, what do we know of this terrible ‘ Matter,’ except as
a name for the unknown and hypothetical cause of states
of our own consciousness ? And what do we know of
that ‘ Spirit ’ over whose threatened extinction by Matter
a great lamentation is arising like that which was heard
at the death of Pan, except that it is also a name for an
unknown and hypothetical cause, or condition, of states
of consciousness ? In other words, matter and spirit are
only names for the imaginary substrata of groups of
natural phenomena.” * There is no reason to suppose
that Tyndall disagrees on this subject with his brother
Professor. Elsewhere than in his Address he tells us
* ‘On the Physical Basis of Life. ’
�Professor Tyndall’s Address at Belfast. 11
that Matter is “ essentially mystical and transcendental.”
And this is true, for what do we really know about it
that enables us to say that it differs essentially from
Spirit ? We know only our own consciousness, that is,
to know and to be conscious are the same things, and
this consciousness tells us nothing of Matter but as the
cause of our varied consciousness ; as Mill tells us, these
groups of external natural phenomena, of which Matter
is the supposed substratum, are mere “ possibilities of
sensation.” Tyndall admits with Spencer that, “ Our
states of consciousness are mere symbols of an outside
entity which produces them and determines the order of
their succession, but the real nature of which we can
never know.” Both Matter and Mind are phenomenal,
and are the mere modes of action of the common “ sub
stance ”—the Great Unknown which underlies both.
When we talk of material and immaterial as indicating
a difference, per se, we are talking of what we know
nothing ; Matter is known to us only in its modes of
action, and Mind as consciousness.
The Spectator (in “The Stronghold of Materialism )
says that, “whatever Matter may be, it is at bottom the
fruit rather than the germ of mind.” But to set up the
rival claims of Spiritualism and Materialism under such
conditions of our knowledge is simply absurd—it is talk
ing of that of which we really know nothing certain. All
we know is that we never find Matter without Force, or
Life without Matter, or Mind without Matter. Tyndall
says, “ Man the object is separated by an impassable gulf
from man the subject.” Is it not rather the fact that
the active and passive principle—the body and soul of
Nature—are one and inseparable. God is the Universe,
and the Universe is God. In the Church of the Latter
Days, says St. Simon, man is to feel and realise the
divinity of his whole nature, material as well as spiritua .
And what is the important truth to which this
absorption of Nature into God, or the deification o
Nature points ? Why, that not only the moral laws,
�12
Toleration: with Some Remarks on
or man’s relation to his fellow man, are divine, but that
the physical laws are so also; for man’s relation to
Nature is his relation to God, and his well-being will be
assured in proportion as he studies these divine laws of
Nature, and acts in complete conformity and harmony
with their invariable sequence. Follow Nature, that is,
obey God. Professor Tyndall’s Address, when carried
out to its legitimate consequences, does not land us in
Atheism, but just the reverse; it leads through Nature
up to Nature’s God, or, rather, to the fact that God and
Nature are One; that God is All in All. If the per
petual changes in the combination of Molecules are
enough by themselves to produce all the varying forms
of inanimate and animate existence, God is the source
of all power and cause of all change. It is not Force
that is persistent, but His Will, consciously or auto
matically displayed. The argument, which I have used
elsewhere, put briefly is this. We know of Mind or
Consciousness only as a Force, and we know of that
which acts upon Mind, and of which it is the correlative,
only as Force, and as all these forces—of Heat, Light,
Magnetism, Electricity, Attraction, Repulsion, Chemical
Affinity, Life 'and Mind—so-called separate forces for
the sake of convenience in classification—all change
into each other, there is therefore but One, and as this
tends always to a given purpose, or acts with design, it
must be intelligent; and, if intelligent, conscious or
automatic, i.e., originally conscious ; and the conscious
action of Power or Force is Will. All Power is, there
fore, or was, Will Power, and 11 Causation the Will, Crea
tion the Act of God; ” that is, the Act of that which
underlies all Force, or of which it is the Force, variously
named Noumenon, Substance, Life, Being, the Very God.
The only knowledge we have of Force, or Power, or
Causation is that exercised by our own minds which we
call Will Power; and the connection between that
power and what it effects is one of purpose—a purely
mental one. In mind joined with structure—and we
�Professor TyndalPs Address at Belfast. 13
know of no other mind, for the mind of the universe is
inseparable from the structure of the universe, both
being equally an evolution or emanation from God : or
rather being God Himself—mental acts frequently re
peated pass from the conscious to the unconscious state ;
the original purpose is continued in the act, and the act
repeated without the sense or consciousness of it. Judg
ing by analogy, and of great things by small, this is
probably the source of General Causation. We find in
variable sequence only, and no reason why this sequence
should take place in the recognised order than in any
other. We can trace no necessary connection between
cause and effect; and the great probability is that it
was originally established and is maintained to effect a
given purpose, as in the action of our own wills, and
that this originally conscious action has passed in the
ages into the unconscious or automatic. Specific pur
poses have passed into general laws, and it is thus :
The Universal Cause
Acts not by partial but by general laws.*
What we call the Laws of Nature are nothing more
than unconscious or automatic Will Power.
In trying, then, to comprehend the mystery of what
is called “Evil”—i.e., pain, in all its different degrees,
both mental and bodily—we must take into considera
tion not only this automatic or unconscious action of
law, but also that it is not the partial but the general—
not man, but humanity—we have to consider. As the
innumerable cells of which the body is composed are to
man, so is man to the great body of humanity. As
each cell in the body gives up its life to another, and
the rapidity with which it does so increases the vitality
of the individual man, so it is in the great body of
humanity. But man is only the last and most perfect
form of enjoyment; we have to consider the whole of
* See “Note on Professors Huxley and Clifford,” at the
end.
�14
Toleration : with Some Remarks on
the animal creation spreading a fine network of nerve
over the whole world. The natural function of nerve is
pleasurable sensibility, and pain is the exception, not
the law : the pains not being as one in a hundred to the
pleasures. The aggregate of pleasurable sensations con
stitutes happiness. The difference between the optimist
and pessimist is one, therefore, of the simplest rule in
arithmetic. We cannot look upon this question from the
individual point of view. Individuals are only indi
viduals to our forms of thought. Underneath the whole
of sensitive existence lies one common force or “ sub
stance,” and life—all life—is only a form or mode of
this. The lilies that spread themselves over the surface
of the water, each in its separate existence so beautiful
a development, have under the water but one common
root.
The pains, of which individually so much is
made, are as much swallowed up in the happiness of
the whole as in the pain or “ sacrifice ” we are all called
upon to make of our lower nature to the highest pur
poses of existence. As increased fineness of nervous
texture seems necessary to the increase of sensibility, so
pain would seem to be the only guardian to so wonder
fully complicated a structure. Man quarrelling with
pain is like a child quarrelling with its nurse for keeping
it out of the fire, or a schoolboy with his schoolmaster,
for pain is a better teacher than pleasure.
There can be no exception to general laws, as both
instinct—which is organised experience—and reason
depend upon the uniformity and invariableness of such
laws, and all men’s actions depend upon his knowledge
of, and adaptation to, this uniformity. Exceptions,,
like eleemosynary charity, would sap the springs of
self-reliance and self-dependence, the foundation of all
manhood. •
There is another mystery also upon which the above;
views of the automatic action of mind throws some light.
The evolution of Mind from Matter, “ the passage,”
says Professor Tyndall, “ from the physics of the brain
�Professor Tyndall's Address at Belfast. 15
to the corresponding facts of consciousness, is unthink
able.” Physical Force is Automatic Mind, and when
under the molecular action of the brain, or other condi
tions, at present not well known to us, it resumes its
consciousness, no inexplicable gulf is passed of Mind
from Matter, but Mind has simply passed from the
automatic state to its originally conscious state. There
is no such thing as blind force or a Mindless Universe,
only a Soul of Nature and its body, like our own, acting
automatically in its physical functions. Mind, under
the action of the brain, not only resumes its conscious
ness, but takes a specific character which we call Intel
ligence and Feeling—forms of thought and impulses to
action which fit us as individuals to do our part in the
world in which we live. Intelligence, as known to us,
is thus a mere form which Universal Mind takes for
specific purposes, and we have no right whatever to
assume that what we call Intelligence exists in the
Universal Mind in the form in which it is known
to us.
This subject illustrates more forcibly than any other
the necessity for Toleration, and the folly of dogma
tising. The question has many sides, all leading to the
Unknown. The Materialist and the Positivist stop far
short of the deductions which I think I have drawn
legitimately, and the Theist makes a god after his own
image, with his own feelings, passions, and modes of
thought or intelligence : both, in my opinion, are
equally wrong, and we require the utmost limit of free
thought and full toleration on a subject on which we
all know so little; but it is well said that controversy
is to truth what the polish is to the diamond—it makes
it shine the brighter.
Not only this most difficult of all subjects, but most
questions appear simple to him only who knows little
about them. All are many-sided and appear clearest
to him who sees but one side, or, at least, but few; and
dogmatism and intolerance are, generally, in proportion
�16
Toleration: with Some Remarks on
to the extent, not of a person’s knowledge, but of his
ignorance.
The Eye sees only what it brings the power to see.
It used to be thought that the mind was a tabula
rasa, upon which anything could be written by educa
tion ; no allowance was made for difference in natural
faculty; but now it is pretty generally acknowledged
that, although things without us may be the same to all
people, they are seen and apprehended in proportion to
the greater or less perfection of our instrument of
thought. If a man is blind we do not expect him to
see, but if he is equally blind in some of his mental
faculties, we expect him to see with them just the same.
This blindness is recognised in those who cannot dis
tinguish colours, but notin any other of our perceptions.
Sir David Brewster found that one in eighty-nine were
colour blind, and this was thought to be an imperfection
in the organ of sight—the eye; but this is a mistake,
the defect is in the brain—in the absence or deficiency of
the part upon which the sense of colour depends. This
may be seen by any one who chooses to look. The same
absence of brain may cause equal blindness in all our
other mental powers, both perceptive and reflective.
The consequence is that all people necessarily see things
differently according to their natural powers of appre
hending. The worst of it is that we are seldom or ever
aware of our deficiencies; a specialist and physicist,
with great perceptive power, may see further into a mill
stone than most other people, but he may be utterly
deficient in the reasoning power • and a metaphysician
may have great reasoning power, but may reason in
correctly from want of power to collect and appreciate
correct data to reason upon. Experience has shown the
folly of believing that because a person is clever in one
department, his judgment may be equally trusted out of
his special department. Specialists, in physical science
especially, are but too often both narrow and intolerant.
�Professor Tyndall's Address at Belfast. 17
In all departments the focus of people’s mental eyes
differs : some can perceive only details, others only gene
rals, while others look only at the inner nature of all
they see. Consequently the evidence of such diverse
observers is as contradictory as their diverse mental
powers. I have known persons with a wonderful memory,
well stored in scientific facts, and in facts of Natural
History and History, with great power of language, and
great orators, but blind or almost blind in the reasoning
power, and therefore utterly without Judgment. The
world seldom recognises such deficiencies, if a man is a
clever talker, still seldomer does the man himself. “ It
would cost me,” says Lord Lytton, in his Speeches just
published, “ immense labour to acquire the ready, cool
trick of words with little knowledge and no heart in
them, which is necessary for a Parliamentary debater.”
And yet it is such clever Parliamentary debaters, such
heaven-born ministers I with “ little knowledge and no
heart in them,” to whom we entrust the power to
govern the world. “ The World embraces,” says Profes
sor Tyndall in his Address, “ not only a Newton, but a
Shakespeare—not only a Boyle, but a Raphael—not
only a Kant, but a Beethoven—not only a Darwin, but a
Carlyle.” It is these differences, dependent upon the
difference in the development of brain, recognised at
a glance by those who have made cerebral physiology
their study, that make us feel that Toleration is a
necessity, and that all that a wise man will be justified
in doing will be to try to make another see a thing in
the light he sees it, and if he fails he will bear it, that
is, tolerate it. It was almost a generation before the
savans on the Continent could see things as Sir I. New
ton saw them. If the wise man likes to console him
self with the reflection suggested to us by Carlyle, viz.,
“ that Great Britain consists of twenty-one millions of
inhabitants—mostly fools,” he can do so, but he had
better keep that opinion to himself, as to give expression
to it is a mode of intolerance not much more justifi
able than knocking a man down a la Dr. Johnson.
B
�18
Toleration : with Some Remarks on
It is difficult, however, to prevent this mode of con
solation suggesting itself when we consider how Gall’s
Great Discoveries are treated by the Physiologists of
the present day. They appear to be utterly ignored by
them, or quite forgotten, and yet they have given to
the world the only intelligible and practical system of
mental and moral philosophy it has yet known. At
the British Association Meeting at Belfast, in Section D
for Anatomy and Physiology, the leading Physiologists,
in opposition to Dr. Byrne, Dean of Clonfert, declared
that the cerebrum is a single organ, with no more
separation of function in its lobes than is the case with
the lobes of the liver; so that the long life of Gall, a
man superior in every way to any of them, was spent in
vain, and all that his followers have seen and discovered
since, for nearly one hundred years now, of the functions
of the brain, is all a delusion. Among the “Problems
of Life and Mind,” there is, perhaps, nothing more
wonderful than this. Either the leading men of science
in all departments, who filled Combe’s book of Testi
monials in 1836 in favour of Phrenology, were either
grossly ignorant, or the physiologists of the present day
must be so. To say that Phrenology is not a certain
science, that mind cannot be weighed and measured, or
as yet given in foot-pounds, is quite beside the mark,
for as much is known of the functions of the brain as of
any other organ. The brain of the civilised man ex
ceeds that of the savage by thirty cubic inches—thirty
cubic inches more of organised experience—of instinct
or feeling, of intuition or intelligence, and yet all this,
we are told, is contained in a single organ, with, of
course, a single function. There is no such case of
“ reversion,” or of a return to ignorance on record as this,
and there is no excuse for it, as every one who has eyes
may, if he pleases, compare the functions of the brain
with its development. There are few people who do
not know, or who may not discover upon inquiry, some
one who is colour blind, and they will always find in
�Professor Tyndall's Address at Belfast. 19
the centre of the eyebrow a deficiency of brain as
compared with others who can distinguish colours. The
connection between other faculties and organs are not
S3 easy to discriminate, but they may be found with
care and patience. Huxley, who ought to be our great
leader in this matter, speaks of an organ of consciousness
as if it were generally admitted, whereas the vividness
of consciousness is always in proportion to the size of
the organ with which each separate faculty and feeling
is found to be connected. There may be, and probably
is, an organ that gives us the intuition of the “I,” or
feeling of identity. What is called self-consciousness
or reflection on consciousness, depends upon the reason
ing faculties, which the brutes do not appear to
possess; they possess, however, most of the other in
tellectual faculties that man has, and some of them in
even a greater degree, and are as much capable of a
train of thought as he is, and of communicating it, as
it is very evident they have a language of their own.
Huxley, however, admits that as, “ in other cases,
function and organ are proportional, so we have a
right to conclude it in with the brain.” He does not,
however, appear yet to have compared function and
organ in the brain ; if he had, perhaps, he would be able
to tell the Phrenologists where they are wrong, and how
it is that the lives of several generations of clever men
have been quite thrown away. Dr. Carpenter, however,
is not so reticent; he has examined, and has come to
the conviction that if the intellect is in the brain at all,
i.e,. in the cerebrum, it is in the back of the head and
not in the front. He appears to think that Dr. Ferrier
has put us into the right road at last, and that, as by
taking off the skull, and other altogether abnormal con
ditions, a dog may be made to wag his tail and roll his
eyeballs, and show other such-like wonderful special
indications of intellect and feeling when parts, of the
brain are artificially stimulated, we are justified in
assuming, from this admirable mode of proceeding, that
�20
Toleration: with Some Remarks on
this intellect is in the back of the head, and not in the
front or forehead; and it was this original discovery of
his, he tells us, now twenty-five years ago, that com
pletely smashed phrenology and phrenologists !
It is not the Intellect that determines judgment so
much as Feeling, and it is not what we Imow but what
we feel that ordinarily determines conduct. A man
generally tells you what he feels rather than what he
thinks upon important subjects.
Indeed, very few
people think at all—they absorb their opinions from
the mental and moral atmosphere around them, and
speculative opinions are accepted, not from the argu
ments on which they rest, but from a predisposition to
receive them. We think according to the mode of this
age and country, and we dress our minds as we dress
our bodies in the fashion of the period. Tyndall’s
Address would not have been received twenty-five years
ago.
The extent to which feeling influences judgment is
well known and acknowledged in certain familiar cases,
but it is less recognised in others, where not quite
so potent.
The lover’s feeling for his mistress, for instance, and
the tendency he has to transfer all the best qualities
of his own mind to the object of his affections; the
perfection which the mother sees in her little fluffy,
squabby infant darling, and all its pretty ways, each one
believing there never was such a baby before; and
singular enough every woman sees every woman’s
folly but her own. We can all see, and laugh up our
sleeves at such follies, unless, indeed, we are too greatly
the victims, and then it is no laughing matter, par
ticularly if we are expected to qualify to nurse as well
as to admire.
All our feelings are liable to deceive us in the same
way in proportion to their strength ; our fears as well as
our hopes, our hates as well as our loves, all influence
�Professor Tyndall's Address at Belfast. 21
and warp the judgment, and tend to make us intolerant.
A man feels justly or kindly, not in proportion to his
familiarity with the truths of Christianity, but in pro
portion as his conscientious or benevolent feelings are
strong or weak; and his feeling towards his religion is
very much like a child’s for its doll: he makes an idol of
it, however wooden it is, and loves it all the better if it
has no brains, or has lost an eye or even its head, or all
its body has branned away. Religious people thus
clothe their god in all the gorgeous imagery of an
Eastern despotic monarch, sitting on a throne in some
spot in this Infinite Universe of suns and stars, which
they call Heaven, invested with passions like their own,
angry, jealous, partial, greedy of praise, creating all
things for his own glory, doing what is right and kind
towards his creatures only when he is bothered into it by
repeated importunity, and when you refuse to acknow
ledge and to bow down to this their god,—to this
image which they have set up, they call you an Atheist,
and you are committed to the fiery furnace of their
wrath. This is the worst and narrowest phase of dog
matism, fanaticism, and intolerance, and yet it is much
too common. It is this, our dependence upon feeling,
and often upon good feeling, rather than upon intellect,
that makes Toleration so difficult to practise—a man
may have nothing to give in support of his views but his
feeling on the subject, and as he knows that the feeling
is a good one, he looks upon any attack upon his
opinions as a personal attack upon himself. It was thus,
as Thackeray tells us in his “ Lectures on the Georges,
with good old stupid George the Third. This was how
he reasoned: “ I wish nothing but good, therefore every
man who does not agree with me is a traitor and a
scoundrel,” and as far as he was able he treated them as
such. It was for him to command, “ In this way you
shall trade, in this way you shall think ; these neigh
bours shall be your allies whom you shall help, these
others your enemies whom you shall slay at my orders ,
�'Ll
rl deration : with Some Remarks on
in this way you shall worship God.” Who can wonder
that under such guidance, aided by the Tories and a
“ heaven-born ” Minister with a head about the size of
a pin’s, we should have spent 1,200 millions in trying to
stay the march of Progress and in putting the Holy
Alliance in its place.
The conscientious bigot, James the Second, thought
that to differ from him in opinion was to doubt his word
and call him a liar, and, although unexpressed, this is
too frequently the tone of people generally—particu
larly of good and shallow people. They reason in this
way, as illustrated above: “You differ from me; I know
I mean well, you cannot therefore mean well as you
differ from me, and you must therefore be a scoundrel,”
—confounding feeling and intellect. If, therefore, you
differ from them on any point whatever, but especially
on Theological grounds, they regard the fact of your
differing from them as proof, not merely that you are
intellectually stupid, but that you are morally depraved.
This kind of intolerance is certainly less than it was
some twenty years since, when the slightest tendency to
free thought was represented as a wish to free yourself
from the restraints of Religion ; and the belief that an
Almighty and Infinitely Benevolent Creator of Hell was
a contradiction could only be held by those who were
afraid that they should go there.
The wise are always tolerant, and the ignorant are
intolerant, generally in proportion to their ignorance.
The whole history, not only of Religion but of Science,
shows the necessity for Toleration. In Religion, the
sphere of the occult and transcendental, we have good
and wise men on all sides; and in Science, prejudice
very much obscures the eyesight. The study of Human
Nature shows us that the power to form a correct
opinion depends 'upon natural capacity, and the degree
of cultivation such powers have received; upon how
people feel as well as think, and that people cannot be
made to think and feel alike. “ To submit our conclu-
�Professor Tyndall's Address at Belfast. 23
sions,” says Lewes, “to the rigorous test of evidence,
and to seek the truth, irrespective of our preconcep
tions, is the rarest and most difficult of intellectual
virtues.” (Problems of Life and Mind, p. 472). A
dogmatic manner is therefore felt to be not only
unwise but ungentlemanly, and the custom now of
good society is shortly to give an opinion, without
defending it, and we have little controversy.
The
Pall Mall Gazette, October 28, 1874, saysThe
modern peculiarity known as 'many-sidedness’ is
strictly in harmony with the characteristics of an age
in which much that has been hitherto regarded as
certain is proved to be questionable, while no certainty
of any kind is brought forward to supply the place of
that which is destroyed. Not long since, the ability to
see more than one side of a question, and the candour
which confesses to so doing, would have been branded
as half-heartedness. Now, these attributes are reckoned
as valuable as they are amiable.” Is there, however,
really nothing to fear from “ half-heartedness,” and
may not this suppression of all feeling lead to indiffer
ence towards truth itself ? The highest feeling we have,
and the most desirable to cultivate, is the love of truth
and light, and are we ever to be indifferent, or ever
appear to be indifferent, to it? “Fiat justitia, ruat
ccelum,” should be our motto.
And yet it is certain that at the present time, where
the general tendency is not towards indifference,. it is
towards intolerance and even persecution. This is the
natural feeling, only to be overcome by cultivation. It
is natural—1st. Because, in difference of opinion, if
others are right we are wrong, unless, which few sus
pect, another side’of the same question is seen. . 2n .
Because, we think we raise ourselves by depreciating or
depressing others, and certainly relatively we appear
taller. 3rd. As members of the human family we
cannot avoid being responsible for others’ errors, an as
the end of persecution is, in our opinion, to pu own
error, it has the appearance of standing up for ru .
�24
Toleration: with Some Remarks on
Full and complete Toleration is only to be found with,
the highest culture and the wisdom that that culture
ought to bring, but does not always. Knowledge inva
riably shows so many sides to every question that it
cannot but make people tolerant, and truth, when
divested of feeling and quietly expressed, has always the
best chance of acceptance. Truth has always a natural
advantage, but this is destroyed immediately force or
any element of persecution is introduced. We are
bound to listen quietly and respectfully to all earnest
opinion, feeling certain that if we differ from good and
clever men, that there is some side of the question we
have not yet seen. “ Whatever retards a spirit of inquiry
is favourable to error, and whatever promotes it is
favourable to truth,” says the Rev. Robert Hall.
Although, therefore, we are bound to stand up for what
we consider to be the truth, regardless of consequences,
yet the conviction is forced on us that the interests
of truth are best promoted by complete Toleration.
Full, and free, and open discussion must be allowed on
all subjects, and perfect toleration for all opinions, as
long as they remain opinions, but when opinions turn to
practice, then toleration ceases to be a duty, and the
■community has a right to step in and insist that such
action or practice shall be in accordance with its sup
posed interests ; and whether any action is so or not can
only be determined by the voice of the majority. Every
one, then, has the right to his opinion as long as it
remains opinion, but when a man proceeds to put his
opinion into practice he must accept what the majority,
not what he, thinks right, and Compromise thus becomes
the law of progress. There can, however, be no com
promise in opinion, which must be left perfectly free to
make the minority the majority by argument; to cut
off the heads of the minority, which is the prevailing
custom in a neighbouring country, can scarcely be said to
be giving it a fair chance of getting that acceptance
for the truth which is generally at first in a minority.
�Professor Tyndall's Address at Belfast. 2 5
In fact the government of a country by the majority is
only safe when the rights and interests of the minority
are protected by a Constitution.
The indictment under which Socrates was con
demned at Athens, as reported by Zenophon at the
commencement of the Memorabilia, ran thus:—“ Socrates
is guilty of crime, inasmuch as he does not believe in
those gods in which the city believes, but introduces other
novelties in regard to the gods; he is guilty also, inas
much as he corrupts the youth.” We have laid down
the axiom that Socrates had a perfect right to believe
in whatever gods he liked; with respect to the cor
ruption of the youth by the spread of his opinions, I
hold that truth must never be judged by its supposed
consequences, and that the inferred “Corruption ” could
only be dealt with when it showed itself in actions
opposed to the good of the community. Every one
must not only have full toleration for his opinions but
full liberty to spread whatever he believes to be true, or
otherwise full, free, and open discussion, by which truth
is tested, would be impossible. “Freedom of thought
and expression,” says Dr. J. W. Draper, “is to me the
first of all earthly things.” Error is best met in
open daylight and not when driven into dark corners.
We cannot give too wide scope to our conviction that
“ Magna est veritas et prevalebit.”
�NOTE ON
PROFESSORS HUXLEY AND CLIFFORD.
Professor Huxley, in his Lecture “ On the Hypothesis
that Animals are Automata,” published in the Fort
nightly Review for November, lays down these proposi
tions, that:—
I. “ The brain is the organ of sensation, thought,
and emotion, that is to say, some change in the condition
of the matter of this organ is the invariable antecedent
of the state of consciousness to which each of these terms
is applied.”
II. “The movements of animals are due to the
change of form of the muscles, which shorten and
become thicker; and this change of form in a muscle
arises from a motion of the substance contained within
the nerves which go to the muscle.”
III. “ The sensations of animals are due to the motion
of the substance of the nerves which connect the sensory
organs with the brain.”
IV. “ The motion of the matter of a sensory nerve
may be transmitted through the brain to motor nerves,
and thereby give rise to a contraction of the muscles
to which these motor nerves are distributed ; and this
reflection of motion from a sensory into a motor nerve
may take place without volition, or even contrary to it.”
Here everything is made to arise from, and to be
due to, motion, but motion is nothing in itself; it is the
mere transference of a body from one point of space to
another, and is inseparable from the thing moving.
How, then, can it be the cause of anything, or be trans
mitted ? How can you pass on nothing, or a condition,
inseparable from the thing of which it is the condition ?
You cannot transmit motion without transmitting the
thing moving with it. It is the cause of motion that is
transferred. That which causes motion in one body is
transmitted, and causes motion in another. This cause
�Note.
27
or active principle we call Force, and is the force of
some entity unknown, but is as measurable and as in
destructible as Matter itself. It is regarded as a
mere abstraction, but it is an abstraction only so
far as it is the force or power of some thing or entity
unknown. It is this loose mode of speaking by
nearly all physicists — of transmitting motion, &c.,
that leads to all sorts of confusion, both in physics and
metaphysics; it obscures the active principle (spirit),
and gives undue prominence and importance to the
passive (matter), whereas matter never originates any
thing, but merely conditions or determines the specific
mode of action of the active principle, Force. We have
an illustration of this kind of confusion in Professor
Clifford’s “ Body and Mind,” in the December Fort
nightly. He says, “ it is not a right thing to say that
the mind is force, because if the mind were a force we
should be able to perceive it.” Now no force is ever
perceived by us, it is known to us in physics only as
a mode of motion ; but when physical force is sub
jected to the molecular action of the brain and becomes
conscious force or mind, it is known to us then
directly as consciousness, and not secondarily as a
mode of motion; but it is not the less persistent
or known to us from what it does. Thus Professor
Clifford himself tells us:—“In voluntary action what
takes place is that a certain sensation is manipu
lated by the mind, and conclusions are drawn from it,
and then a message is sent out which causes certain
motions to take place. Now the character of the person
is evidently determined by the nature of this manipula
tion.” If the mind can manipulate, it must possess
power or force to do it. How he reconciles this with
the assertion afterwards “ that if anybody says that the
will influences matter, the statement is not untrue, but
it is nonsense. The will is not a material thing, it is
not a mode of material motion. Such an assertion
belongs to the crude materialism of the savage. Now
the only thing which influences matter is the position
�28
Note.
of surrounding matter or the motion of surrounding
matter.” He is evidently here in the usual muddle of
the physicists and materialists about motion being trans
mitted instead of the cause of motion. Huxley also
says, “ there is no proof that any state of consciousness
is the cause of change in the motion of the matter of
the organism.” Now the Will and Motives are states of
consciousness, and however high the authority, although
myself a Necessitarian, I am not prepared to admit that
the Will has no power over a man’s body, and that the
Will itself is not governed by motives. The mental
states are, with me, links in the chain of causation, and
I do not see that this is inconsistent with the fact that
consciousness is dependent upon molecular action.
Surely the volitional centres consciously put other parts
of the brain in motion. Whence is Memory but from
the conscious effort to put the brain in motion, and
thus recall other mental states ? If a man receives
an insult and, in a passion, knocks another down,
surely the consciousness of the insult and the passion
must have something to do with “the motion of the
matter of the organism.” Professor Huxley does not
mean to assert, I suppose, that exactly the same
motion could be made to take place automatically,
by the mere stimulation of the organs, without the aid
of consciousness ? The brain contains an enormous
amount of potential energy which is put in motion by
the Will, and becomes conscious by the Will setting the
brain in motion—th'e Will, of course, being subject to
the law of persistent force. In this sense we are auto
mata, being worked by the same force or spiritual
power, which everywhere else is working to purpose.
Should the Professor take to_ the study of Mesmerism,
in which, of late, he appears to have shown some slight
interest, he will ascertain with more correctness the
power that conscious Will can exercise, not only upon our
organisations but upon that of others, silently, at con
siderable distances, and without any apparent medium
of communication.
�Note.
29
When we say the Mind is Force we mean, not that it
is any of the recognised physical forces, but is composed
of that unknown something which is the active cause of
all things.
Herbert Spencer says :—“ That no idea or feeling arises,
save as the result of some physical force expended in
producing it, is fast becoming a commonplace of science.”
I think this will not be disputed, as we are all more or
less conscious of the extent to which mental effort, or
strong emotion, draws upon the physical forces of the
body. Each idea or feeling consumes or absorbs a cer
tain amount of physical force, which, as consciousness, is
no longer attended by a mode of motion, but it is not
the less persistent.
But Professor Clifford does not appear to be always
quite consistent. Thus in one place (p. 724, ’ ortnightly
F
Review) he tells us “ he is speaking of voluntary actions—
those actions in which the person is consulted, and
which are not done by his body without his leave,” and
yet in another he says, “ we are to regard the body as a
physical machine, which goes by itself according to a
physical law, that is to say, is automatic.” It can have
no voluntary action then. And he consequently tells
us “ that the mind is to be regarded as a stream of
feelings which runs parallel to, and simultaneous with,
a certain part of the action of the body, that is to say,
that particular part of the action of the brain in which
the cerebrum and the sensory tract are excited.” But we
are told that it is wrong to say the mind is a force;
of what then is the mind, regarded as a stream of
feeling, composed ? “ The actual reality,” the Professor
tells us, “ which underlies what we call matter is not the
same thing as the mind, is not the same thing as our
perception, but it is made of the same stuff. To use
the words of the old disputants, we may say that matter
is not of the same substance as mind, not homoousion,
but it is of like substance, it is made of similar stu
differently compacted together, Tiomoi-ousion.
But the question is, What becomes of “this stream of
�3°
Note.
feelings” which, runs parallel to, and simultaneous with,
the action of the brain ? Where does it come from, and
where does it go to ? As to the former, the Professor
says ‘‘the reality which we perceive as matter is that
same stuff which, being compounded together in a par
ticular way, produces mind.” The “ stream of feelings ”
then comes, we presume, from the body, compounded
by the molecular action of the brain. As thought or
feeling, then, is something—an entity, as much as mat
ter is—the question is, What becomes of it ? Upon
this most interesting question the Professor attempts to
throw no light. The mind is not force, he says, and it
is not therefore persistent as force; and he does not
seem to think any answer is required, although, if it
is the same stuff as matter, it must be equally inde
structible. A materialistic friend of mine, of some
note, from whom I have just heard on this subject, is
more consistent, if more wrong. He says, “Huxley is
quite right, thoughts are not things; matter thinks,
but does not think things, but of things : the conscious
ness in a will or effort is not a thing nor a power, but
the mere sense accompaniment of the physical action.”
This is a curious inversion of the real state of things,
as coming from a Philosopher. We know “ thoughts,”
but we know nothing of “ things ” until things become
thoughts. Thus, as Professor Huxley tells us, “ The
great fact insisted upon by Descartes, that no likeness
of external things is, or can be, transmitted to the mind
by the sensory organs, but that between the external
cause of a sensation and the sensation there is in
terposed a mode of motion of nervous matter, of
which the state of consciousness is no likeness, but a
mere symbol, is of the profoundest importance. It is
the physiological foundation of the doctrine of the
relativity of knowledge, and a more or less complete
idealism is a necessary consequence of it.” But what is
this “ sense accompaniment ” of the physical action to
which my friend alludes ? It must be something or
nothing. Professor Clifford seems to think it is some-
�Note.
31
thing as to -where it comes from, but nothing as to
where it goes to. When we come to consider where
thoughts and feelings go to, then we shall come to
occupy that ground of which the Spiritualists now make
such superstitious uses. Professor Clifford says, “We
are obliged to assume that along with every motion of
matter, whether organic or inorganic, there is some fact
which corresponds to the mental fact in ourselves. The
mental fact in ourselves is an exceedingly complex
thing: so also our brain is an exceedingly complex
thing. We may assume that the quasi-mental fact
which corresponds and which goes along with the motion
of every particle of matter is of such inconceivable sim
plicity, as compared with our own mental fact, with
our consciousness, as the motion of a molecule of mat
ter is of inconceivable simplicity when compared with
motion in our brain.”
“ This doctrine is not merely a speculation, but a
result to which all the greatest minds that have studied
this question in the right way have gradually been
approximating for a long time.”
This presence of Universal Mind, as an accompani
ment and cause of motion, I have endeavoured to
teach in my own way. I have endeavoured to show
that body—whatever that may be—and mind, from the
lowest form to the highest, are inseparable. The
Religious World has allied itself with the Spiritual only,
but the Physical must be taken equally into account.
We shall no more succeed in putting Spiritualism above
Materialism than Materialism above Spiritualism. They
must go together; some common ground must be found
on which both can meet. It is the opinion, Roden
Noel tells us, of both Schelling and Hegel that con
sciousness and matter are not absolutely divorced, but
radically identical, although superficially diverse.
PRINTED BY C. NT. REYNELL, LITTLE PULTENEY-STREET, HAYMARKET; 77.
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Toleration: with some remarks on Professor Tyndall's Address at Belfast
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Bray, Charles [1811-1884]
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 31 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references. From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Includes six pages of Notes on Professors Huxley and Clifford.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Thomas Scott
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1875
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
CT129
Subject
The topic of the resource
Religious toleration
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Toleration: with some remarks on Professor Tyndall's Address at Belfast), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Language
A language of the resource
English
Conway Tracts
John Tyndall
Toleration