But after these scrappy notes about Jealousy and how people protect
their minds against ideas, and especially the idea which is God, and
against the mental intrusions of their fellow-creatures conveying
ideas, I understand better the purport of that uninvited society,
which he declared insisted upon coming to the Great Conference upon
the Mind of the Race, and which held such enthusiastic and crowded
meetings that at last it swamped all the rest of the enterprise. It
was, he declared, to the bitter offence of Dodd, a society with very
much the same attitude towards all impersonal mental activities that
the Rationalist Press Association has to Religion, and it was called
the Royal Society for the Discouragement of Literature.
"Why 'Royal'?" I asked.
"Oh--obviously," he said....
This Royal Society was essentially an organization of the conservative
instincts of man. Its aim was to stop all this thinking....
And yet in some extraordinary way that either I did not note at the
time or that he never explained, it became presently the whole
Conference! The various handbills, pamphlets in outline, notes for
lectures, and so forth, that accompanied his notes of the Proceedings
of the Royal Society may either be intended as part of the sectional
proceedings of the great conference or as the production of this
hostile organization. I will make a few extracts from the more legible
of these memoranda which render the point clearer.