A History of Freedom of Thought | Page 5

be believed? Some minds would be
prepared to accept it, if it were reiterated often enough, through the
potent force of suggestion. This force, exercised largely by emphatic
repetition (the theoretical basis, as has been observed, of the modern
practice of advertising), has played a great part in establishing
authoritative opinions and propagating religious creeds. Reason
fortunately is able to avail herself of the same help.
The following sketch is confined to Western
[21] civilization. It begins with Greece and attempts to indicate the
chief phases. It is the merest introduction to a vast and intricate subject,
which, treated adequately, would involve not only the history of
religion, of the Churches, of heresies, of persecution, but also the
history of philosophy, of the natural sciences and of political theories.
From the sixteenth century to the French Revolution nearly all
important historical events bore in some way on the struggle for
freedom of thought. It would require a lifetime to calculate, and many
books to describe, all the directions and interactions of the intellectual
and social forces which, since the fall of ancient civilization, have
hindered and helped the emancipation of reason. All one can do, all one
could do even in a much bigger volume than this, is to indicate the
general course of the struggle and dwell on some particular aspects
which the writer may happen to have specially studied.

[21] CHAPTER II
REASON FREE
(GREECE AND ROME)

WHEN we are asked to specify the debt which civilization owes to the
Greeks, their
[22] achievements in literature and art naturally occur to us first of all.
But a truer answer may be that our deepest gratitude is due to them as
the originators of liberty of thought and discussion. For this freedom of
spirit was not only the condition of their speculations in philosophy,
their progress in science, their experiments in political institutions; it
was also a condition of their literary and artistic excellence. Their
literature, for instance, could not have been what it is if they had been
debarred from free criticism of life. But apart from what they actually
accomplished, even if they had not achieved the wonderful things they
did in most of the realms of human activity, their assertion of the
principle of liberty would place them in the highest rank among the
benefactors of the race; for it was one of the greatest steps in human
progress.
We do not know enough about the earliest history of the Greeks to
explain how it was that they attained their free outlook upon the world
and came to possess the will and courage to set no bounds to the range
of their criticism and curiosity. We have to take this character as a fact.
But it must be remembered that the Greeks consisted of a large number
of separate peoples, who varied largely in temper, customs and
traditions,
[23] though they had important features common to all. Some were
conservative, or backward, or unintellectual compared with others. In
this chapter “the Greeks” does not mean all the Greeks, but only those
who count most in the history of civilization, especially the Ionians and
Athenians.
Ionia in Asia Minor was the cradle of free speculation. The history of
European science and European philosophy begins in Ionia. Here (in
the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.) the early philosophers by using their
reason sought to penetrate into the origin and structure of the world.
They could not of course free their minds entirely from received
notions, but they began the work of destroying orthodox views and
religious faiths. Xenophanes may specially be named among these

pioneers of thought (though he was not the most important or the
ablest), because the toleration of his teaching illustrates the freedom of
the atmosphere in which these men lived. He went about from city to
city, calling in question on moral grounds the popular beliefs about the
gods and goddesses, and ridiculing the anthropomorphic conceptions
which the Greeks had formed of their divinities. “If oxen had hands and
the capacities of men, they would make gods in the shape of oxen.”
This attack on received
[24] theology was an attack on the veracity of the old poets, especially
Homer, who was considered the highest authority on mythology.
Xenophanes criticized him severely for ascribing to the gods acts which,
committed by men, would be considered highly disgraceful. We do not
hear that any attempt was made to restrain him from thus assailing
traditional beliefs and branding Homer as immoral. We must remember
that the Homeric poems were never supposed to be the word of God. It
has been said that Homer was the Bible of the Greeks. The remark
exactly misses the truth. The Greeks fortunately had no Bible, and this
fact was both an