Chapter VI: 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.