KNOWLEDGE.
A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
In the arena of life animal instinct triumphs over the elemental forces
of Nature, as human intelligence triumphs over instinct, and the secret
of that superiority is knowledge. Skill is well-directed force.
Prudence is well-applied reason. The efficiency of that directing
faculty depends on experience, as we call the accumulation of
recollected facts. Knowledge is stored light, as helpful in the
narrowest as in the widest sphere of conscious activity, and the
instinctive appreciation of that advantage manifests itself in the
lowest species of vertebrate animals, nay, perhaps even in the winged
insects that swarm in from near and far to explore the mystery of a
flickering torch. Curiosity, rather than the supposed love of rhythm,
tempts the serpent to leave its den at the sound of the conjurer’s
flute. Dolphins are thus attracted by the din of a kettledrum,
river-fish by the glare of a moving light. Where deer abound, a
pitchwood fire, kindled in a moonless night, is sure to allure them
from all parts of the forest. Antelope hunters can entice their game
within rifle-shot by fastening a red kerchief to a bush and letting it
flutter in the breeze. When the first telegraph lines crossed the
plateau of the Rocky Mountains, herds of bighorn sheep were often seen
trotting along the singing wires as if anxious to ascertain the meaning
of the curious innovation. Every abnormal change in the features of a
primitive landscape—the erection of a lookout-tower, a clearing in the
midst of a primeval forest—attracts swarms of inquisitive birds, even
crows and shy hawks, who seem to recognize the advantage of
reconnoitering the topography of their hunting-grounds. In some of the
higher animals inquisitiveness becomes too marked to mistake its
motive, as when a troop of colts gathers about a new dog, or a pet
monkey pokes his head into a cellar-hole, and wears out his
finger-nails to ascertain the contents of a brass rattle.
For the intelligence of children, too, inquisitiveness is a pretty sure
test. Infants of ten months may be seen turning their eyes toward a new
piece of furniture in their nursery. Kindergarten pets of three years
have been known to pick up a gilded pebble from the gravel road and
call their teacher’s attention to the color of the abnormal specimen.
With a little encouragement that faculty of observation may develop
surprising results. The wife of a Mexican missionary of my
acquaintance, who had taken charge of an Indian orphan boy, and made a
point of answering every pertinent question of the bright-eyed
youngster, was one day surprised to hear him usher in a stranger and
invite him to a seat in the parlor. “How could you know it was not a
tramp?” she asked her little chamberlain after the visitor had left.
“Oh, I could tell by his clean finger-nails,” said Master Five-years,
“and also by his straight shoes. Tramps always get their heels
crooked!”
The shrewd remarks of boy naturalists and girl satirists often almost
confirm the opinion of Goethe that every child has the innate gifts of
genius, and that subsequent differences are only the result of more or
less propitious educational influences. And in spite of most
discouraging circumstances, the love of knowledge sometimes revives in
after years with the energy almost of a passionate instinct. On the
veranda of a new hotel in a railroad town of southern Texas, I once
noticed the expression of rapt interest on the face of a young hunter,
a lad of eighteen or nineteen, who here for the first time came in
contact with the representatives of a higher civilization and with
breathless attention drank in the conversation of two far-traveled
strangers. “If they would hire me for a dog-robber (a low menial), I
would do it for a dime a day,” he muttered, “just for the chance to
hear them talk.”
“But if they should take you to some smoky, crowded, big city?”
“I don’t care,” said he, with an oath, “I would let them lock me up in
a jail, if I could get an education like theirs.”
It would, indeed, be a mistake to suppose that the thirst for mental
development is the exclusive product of advanced culture. In the thinly
settled highlands of our western territories, miners and herders have
been known to travel ten miles a day over rough mountain roads to get
the rudiments of a school education. Missionaries who have mastered the
language of a barbarous tribe have more than once been followed by
converts whom the charm of general knowledge (far more than any special
theological motive) impelled to forsake the home of their fathers and
follow the white stranger to the land of his omniscient countrymen.
B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
Knowledge is power, even in the contests of brutes. Superior
topographical knowledge enables the chasing wolf to intercept the
flight of his game; a well-chosen ambush makes the tiger the master of
his would-be slayer. Familiarity with the habits of enemies and rivals
decides success in the struggle for existence.
The advantage of superior knowledge is not limited to the prestige of
superlative scholarship, but asserts itself in the chances of every
competitive pursuit, so infallibly, indeed, as to justify Diderot’s
paradox that there is no need of any such thing as love of science for
its own sake, since all knowledge repays its acquisition by collateral
benefits. A farmer’s boy studying statute law, a lawyer collecting
market reports, will sooner or later find a chance to profit by their
study. The infinite interaction of human affairs connects the interests
of all branches of human knowledge, and makes the humblest handicraft
amenable to scientific improvement. Knowledge has never hindered the
successful pursuit of any manual vocation. Fifty years ago several
states of the American Union made it a penal offense to teach a slave
reading and writing; and if the planter valued his laborers in
proportion to their canine submissiveness, he was perhaps right that
“education spoils a nigger.” It qualified his servility, and by making
him a better man, made him perhaps a less available dog. But with that
single exception, ignorance is a disadvantage, and knowledge an
advantage, both to its possessor and his employers. In the solitudes of
the Australian bush-land, Frederick Gerstäcker found a herdsman reading
Aristophanes in the original. Neither the sheep nor their owners were
any the worse for that incidental accomplishment of the poor shepherd,
who found his study a sufficient source of pastime, while his comrades
were apt to drown their ennui in bad rum. James Cook, the greatest of
modern maritime discoverers, served his apprenticeship on board of a
coal-barge and employed his leisure in studying works on geography and
general history. The knowledge thus acquired might seem of no direct
advantage, but three years after, on board of the Eagle frigate, the
erudition of the brawny young sailor soon attracted the attention of
two intelligent officers whose recommendations proved the
stepping-stones of his successful career. Mohammed Baber Khan, the
emperor of the Mogul empire, owed his triumphs to his topographical
studies of a region which afterward became the battleground of his
great campaigns. Mohammed the Prophet gained the confidence of his
first employer by his familiarity with the commercial customs of
neighboring nations. Superior knowledge compels even an unwilling
recognition of its prestige. In the Middle Ages, when Moslems and
Trinitarians were at daggers drawn, Christian kings sent respectful
embassies to solicit the professional advice of Ibn Rushd (“Averroes”),
the Moorish physician. During the progress of the life-and-death
struggle of France and Great Britain, the discoveries of Sir Humphrey
Davy impelled the Academie Française to send their chief prize to
England. The benefits of great inventions are too international to
leave room for that envy that pursues the glory of military heroes, and
the triumphs of science have often united nations whom a unity of
religion had failed to reconcile.
C.—PERVERSION.
There is a tradition that a year before the conversion of Constantine
the son of the prophetess Sospitra was praying in the temple of
Serapis, when the spirit of his mother came over him and the veil of
the future was withdrawn. “Woe to our children!” he exclaimed, when he
awakened from his trance, “I see a cloud approaching, a great darkness
is going to spread over the face of the world.” That darkness proved a
thirteen hundred years’ eclipse of common sense and reason. There is a
doubt if the total destruction of all cities of the civilized world
could have struck a more cruel blow to Science than the dogma of
salvation by faith and abstinence from the pursuit of free inquiry. The
ethics of the world-renouncing fanatic condemned the love of secular
knowledge as they condemned the love of health and the pursuit of
physical prosperity, and the children of the next fifty generations
were systematically trained to despise the highest attribute of the
human spirit. Spiritual poverty became a test of moral worth;
philosophers and free inquirers were banished, while mental castrates
were fattened at the expense of toiling rustics and mechanics; science
was dreaded as an ally of skepticism, if not of the arch-fiend in
person; the suspicion of sorcery attached to the cultivation of almost
any intellectual pursuit, and the Emperor Justinian actually passed a
law for the “suppression of mathematicians.”
When the tyranny of the church reached the zenith of its power, natural
science became almost a tradition of the past. The pedants of the
convent schools divided their time between the forgery of miracle
legends and the elaboration of insane dogmas. The most extravagant
absurdities were propagated under the name of historical records;
medleys of nursery-tales and ghost-stories which the poorest village
school-teacher of pagan Rome would have rejected with disgust were
gravely discussed by so-called scholars. Buckle, in his “History of
Civilization,” quotes samples of such chronicles which might be
mistaken for products of satire, if abundant evidence of contemporary
writers did not prove them to have been the current staple of medieval
science.
When the gloom of the dreadful night was broken by the first gleam of
modern science, every torch-bearer was persecuted as an incendiary.
Astronomers were forced to recant their heresies on their bended knees.
Philosophers were caged like wild beasts. Religious skeptics were burnt
at the stake, as enemies of God and the human race. It was, indeed,
almost impossible to enunciate any scientific axiom that did not
conflict with the dogmas of the revelation-mongers who had for
centuries subordinated the evidence of their own senses to the rant of
epileptic monks and maniacs. And when the sun of Reason rose visibly
above the horizon of the intellectual world, its rays struggled
distorted through the dense mist of superstition which continued to
brood over the face of the earth, and was only partially dispersed even
by the storms of the Protestant revolt.
The light of modern science has brought its blessings only to the
habitants of the social highlands; the valley dwellers still grope
their way through the gloom of inveterate superstitions and prejudices,
and centuries may pass before the world has entirely emerged from the
shadow of the life-blighting cloud which the son of Sospitra recognized
in the rise of the Galilean delusion.
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
Of all the sins of Antinaturalism, the suppression of human reason has
brought down the curse of the direst retribution. It is the
unpardonable sin against the Holy Spirit. The actual extinction of
their local sunshine could hardly have entailed greater misery upon the
slaves of the Christian church. The victims of a permanent Egyptian
darkness might have taken refuge in the Goshen of their neighbors, in
the sunny garden-homes of the Parsees and Spanish Moriscos, but the
jealousy of the clerical tyrants closed every gate of escape, and for
thirteen centuries the nations of Christian Europe suffered all the
horrors of enforced ignorance and superstition. The history of that
dismal night is, indeed, the darkest page in the records of the human
race, and its horrors bind the duties of every sane survivor to a war
of extermination upon the dogmas of the insane fanatic whose priests
turned the paradise of southern Europe into a hell of misery and
barbarism.
The battle against the demon of darkness became a struggle for
existence, in which the powers of Nature at last prevailed, but for
millions of our fellow-men the day of deliverance has dawned too late;
spring-time and morning returned in vain for many a once fertile land
where the soil itself had lost its reproductive power, where the
outrages of Antinaturalism had turned gardens into deserts and freemen
into callous slaves. The storm that awakened the nations of northern
Europe from the dreams of their poison-fever could not break the spell
of a deeper slumber, and the moral desert of the Mediterranean
coast-lands remains to warn the nations of the future, as the bleaching
bones of a perished caravan remain to warn the traveler from the track
of the simoom.
The religion of Mohammed, with its health-laws and encouragements to
martial prowess, has produced no ruinous results of physical
degeneration, but the entire neglect of mental culture has not failed
to avenge itself in the loss of national prestige. For after the
northern nations of Christendom had broken the yoke of their spiritual
tyrants, the children of Islam remained faithful to the task-masters of
their less grievous bondage, but also to its total indifference to
secular science, and from that day the crescent of the prophet became a
waning moon.
E.—REFORM.
The experience of the Middle Ages has made the separation of church and
state the watchword of all true Liberals. But the divorce of church and
school is a duty of hardly less urgent importance. While many of our
best Freethinkers waste their time in hair-splitting metaphysics,
Catholic and Protestant Jesuits coöperate for a purpose which they have
shrewdly recognized as the main hope of obscurantism: The perversion of
primary education by its re-subjection to the control of the clergy.
The definite defeat of those intrigues should be considered the only
permanent guarantee against the revival of spiritual feudalism. A
perhaps less imminent, but hardly less serious, danger to the cause of
Science is the stealthy revival of mysticism. Under all sorts of
nomenclatural modifications, the specter-creed of the ancient Gnostics
is again rearing its head, and menacing reason by an appeal to the
hysterical and sensational proclivities of ignorance.
In the third place, there is no doubt that under the present
circumstances of educational limitations the adoption of female
suffrage would prove a death-blow to intellectual progress and re-doom
mankind to the tutelage of a clerical Inquisition; but rather than
perpetuate a twofold system of oppression, we should complete the work
of emancipation by admitting our sisters to all available social and
educational advantages, as well as to the privilege of the polls. From
the suffrage of educated women we have nothing to fear and much to
hope.
It has long been a mooted question if the progress of knowledge can be
promoted by arbitrary encouragement, such as prize offers and
sinecures, but the preponderance of logic seems on the side of those
who hold that science should be left to its normal rewards, and that
the proper sphere of legislation does not extend beyond the duty of
securing the full benefit of those rewards by the removal of absurd
disabilities and unfair discriminations in support of worm-eaten
dogmas. Reason may be safely left to fight its own battle, if the arms
of Un-reason cease to be strengthened by statutes which enable every
village ghost-monger to silence the exponents of science by an appeal
to medieval heretic-laws.