 Individualism, a reader, edited by George H. Smith and Marilyn Moore, narrated by James Foster. 22. From Free Thought Its Conditions, Agreements, and Secular Results, George Jacob Holioke, The Reasoner, April 1872 George Jacob Holioke, 1817 to 1906, was an English Chartist, Owenite, and Freethinker. He promoted voluntary socialism, educational opportunities for all social classes, and secularism, a term he coined. He served six months in prison on charges of blasphemy. Holioke crusaded for the right of every individual to freedom of thought, inquiry, and speech. The following excerpt from Free Thought, Its Conditions, Agreements, and Secular Results, was published in The Reasoner, a weekly journal of Free Thought that Holioke founded in 1846 and edited for fifteen years. Free Thought signifies the unrestricted application of the powers of the intellect to any subject. It means the absence of any threat or penalty or impediment to the exercise of thought. The application of thought to any subject may be unsatisfactory, no result may be arrived at, a disagreeable discovery may be made, the end of the investigation may be worthless or painful or offensive, and it may be desirable to beat a retreat from it as soon as it is reached, but the right to reach it and gain that experience must be undisputed before Free Thought can be said to exist. To be a free thinker in any proper sense of the term, there must be no fetter on the mind, no fear in the use of thought, and no dread of any result. There must be no intention or desire or anxiety to make a result arrived at, agree with the Bible, for instance, or to agree with or corroborate any foregone conclusion. There must be no dread of God's displeasure at the honest result. There must be no effective social penalty or censure or disapprobation at the exercise of thought, or it cannot be free. Free Thought is an instrument, as it were, of investigation. It will not ensure to all the same ultimate results, but it affords them the best chance of attaining the truth. All men have not equal strength of mind in using Free Thought. All do not employ it upon the same facts or materials or premises of argument. Free Thought may land some in heresy, some in mere theism, some in atheism. Yet there are certain primary and secular things into which all are led who employ intelligently the principle of free thought. Free Thought is a primary principle from which several things flow, which all who intelligently stand on the side of free thought perceive, accept, and act upon. On the very threshold of the term Free Thought, we find three ideas included in it. Namely, the necessity of Free Thought, the rightfulness of it, the adequacy of it. One, its necessity. All men love freedom naturally. It is an instinct of their nature. It is the condition of growth and development. There can be no progress without it. All art, all science, all improvement is owing to the use of it. Every new religion has been created by it. Christ and his apostles employed it to a great extent. Men would have dwelt in ignorance and superstition without it. Freedom of thought is a necessity of progressive life. Every man would be at the mercy of falsehood, of navery, of speech, of fanaticism, of wanton speculation and fatal error unless he fell back on his own judgment and defended himself. Free Thought is self-defense as well as necessity. If we are responsible to society or to God, Free Thought is a moral obligation, a duty as well as a right. Two, its rightfulness. That which is a necessity of intellectual existence and a moral obligation can be no crime. If God has made us, He has put His stamp of approval on Free Thought, for He has made it the deepest instinct of intelligence and the means of all excellence. Yet it would be impossible if men believed it to be a guilty thing, for no sane men would then venture upon it. If ignorance were felt to be innocence, no well-disposed person would attempt to get knowledge. But experience tells us that ignorance is a misfortune or an offense. Therefore Free Thought, which dispels ignorance and is the prime creator of knowledge, must be a virtue. Three, its adequacy. Every free thinker commences by assuming the comparative sufficiency of reason as an instrument of investigation. Free Thought is simply the free employment of reason in the conduct of life. Every free thinker necessarily believes in the practical adequacy of this instrument. Free Thought is the following of reason, which it sets up as the test of the Bible of Christianity of authority. Free Thought does not begin in the rebellion, but in the action or the understanding with a view to self-protection and to truth. Reason, the faculty of following the path of facts, does not despise intuition or instinct or the voice of nature or authority. It uses but revises them. It does not pretend to be infallible or all-sufficient in an absolute sense, but reason is the supreme arbiter and the most reliable arbiter we have for the conduct of life. It is not perfect, but yet supreme. It is the high court of the understanding beyond which there is no appeal. Compared with all other means of judgment, all free thinkers agree in giving it the first place of efficiency, sufficiency, and adequacy. If free thought be therefore a needful, rightful, and adequate instrument of progress, it implies whatever is necessary for its existence and operation. It implies further the free publication of well-intentioned thought, the fair criticism of it, the equal action of conviction. 4. Free Publicity The free publication of presumably useful opinion by tongue and pen is essential to free thought. Logicians prove that reasoning itself is impossible without the use of words as the instrument of it. Without publicity of ideas, society could never be benefited by the labors of successful thinkers. No man can preserve his own sanity who has denied conversation with his fellows. Without the comparison of ideas with those of other men, no man can either be sure of the truth or escape lunacy. All great thinkers who are isolated or who are much before their age and have no equals with whom they can test the truth of their views are partially insane or are believed to be so or are treated as such. The right of publication of well-considered opinion is one of the high conditions of intellectual progress and sanity to all men. The greatest absurdity of speech arises from persons not being taught that mere talk is wind and worthlessness. Unless there is purpose and relevance in speech, it is of no consequence in advocacy. Truth itself requires discrimination in its use. People constantly overlook that what is true is not always useful. A man may know a thousand things that are true but still trivial or mischievous or defamatory. The most liberal laws distinguish between well-intentioned and malicious truth. Chafers, who assailed Lady Twiss, was assumed to have some truth to tell, but he was deemed not less infamous on that account. We contend for the right of publicity that truth which is relevant and presumptively useful to society. 5. Fair Criticism Without fair criticism thought could never be tested or improved. Thought is often foolish, often mischievous and sometimes wicked, but he alone who submits it to free criticism gives guarantees to society that he means well, though he may be an error, since criticism must bring down upon him exposure and punishment if he be in fault or foolish. He who perverts free thinking into loose thinking, he who degrades free speech to a scream of passion or makes it an echo of folly, is a traitor to both, and criticism is the court where the treason is tried and punished. Criticism is the corrector of erroneous thought or abuse of freedom. The liberty of criticism is a limitation of free speech imposing upon it reflection and care, and criticism itself has conditions, namely those of seeking less to assail error than to discover and establish truth, less to intensify the differences which divide men than to discover the agreements which may further unite them. Fair criticism respects the aims of the thinker criticized. 6. Equal Action of Conviction Without the reasonable action of opinion, thought is practically fruitless. We must be able to embody ideas as institutions. There must be fair play for thoughts as well as free play. The free thinker must have equal civil rights and be free to live a life in accordance with his convictions provided he respects the equal rights of others in doing so. There must be an end of civil disqualifications for honest opinion. The new law of secular affirmations provides that the heretic shall have equal right of protection in law with the Christian. There can be no free action of opinion without equal civil rights. Free thought without limits is license and publication, debate and action may prove offensive and barren of moral results. The savage is the type of brute liberty which includes plunder and murder amongst his pastimes. This sentiment is that oft-quoted one from the conquest of Grenada which Dryden puts into the mouth of Almanyore. I am as free as nature first made man ere the base laws of servitude began when wild in woods the noble savage ran. When a limit is first put to this by civilization many men gradually lose the instinct of freedom. Obedience to authority becomes implicit. Society degenerates into slavery of person and mind and men arise who preach that freedom of thought itself is a crime and all conduct which does not conform to the second rate notions of a man's commonplace neighbors is treated as a social offence. Temperate individuality becomes nearly impossible. Two classes of men then in due course disturb or disgrace the state. One who asserts freedom in the form of outrage, another who suffer obedience to subside into submission. These are they who as politicians invent systems of officious centralization and treat government as so much machinery for rendering liberty impossible. The free thinker guided by his own leading principle seeks that limit to free action which shall preserve individuality in the midst of society and reconcile order and independence. This has been individualism a reader edited by George H. Smith and Marilyn Moore narrated by James Foster. Copyright 2015 by the Cato Institute Production copyright 2015 by the Cato Institute