The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll Volume IV Part 9

CONCLUSION.

LET us be honest. Let us preserve the veracity of our souls. Let education commence in the cradle--in the lap of the loving mother.

This is the first school. The teacher, the mother, should be absolutely honest.

The nursery should not be an asylum for lies.

Parents should be modest enough to be truthful--honest enough to admit their ignorance. Nothing should be taught as true that cannot be demonstrated.

Every child should be taught to doubt, to inquire, to demand reasons.

Every soul should defend itself--should be on its guard against falsehood, deceit, and mistake, and should beware of all kinds of confidence men, including those in the pulpit.

Children should be taught to express their doubts--to demand reasons.

The object of education should be to develop the brain, to quicken the senses. Every school should be a mental gymnasium. The child should be equipped for the battle of life. Credulity, implicit obedience, are the virtues of slaves and the enslavers of the free. All should be taught that there is nothing too sacred to be investigated--too holy to be understood.

Each mind has the right to lift all curtains, withdraw all veils, scale all walls, explore all recesses, all heights, all depths for itself, in spite of church or priest, or creed or book.

The great volume of Nature should be open to all. None but the intelligent and honest can really read this book. Prejudice clouds and darkens every page. Hypocrisy reads and misquotes, and credulity accepts the quotation. Superst.i.tion cannot read a line or spell the shortest word. And yet this volume holds all knowledge, all truth, and is the only source of thought. Mental liberty means the right of all to read this book. Here the Pope and Peasant are equal. Each must read for himself--and each ought honestly and fearlessly to give to his fellow-men what he learns.

There is no authority in churches or priests--no authority in numbers or majorities. The only authority is Nature--the facts we know. Facts are the masters, the enemies of the ignorant, the servants and friends of the intelligent.

Ignorance is the mother of mystery and misery, of superst.i.tion and sorrow, of waste and want.

Intelligence is the only light. It enables us to keep the highway, to avoid the obstructions, and to take advantage of the forces of nature.

It is the only lever capable of raising mankind. To develop the brain is to civilize the world. Intelligence reaves the heavens of winged and frightful monsters--drives ghosts and leering fiends from the darkness, and floods with light the dungeons of fear.

All should be taught that there is no evidence of the existence of the supernatural--that the man who bows before an idol of wood or stone is just as foolish as the one who prays to an imagined G.o.d,--that all worship has for its foundation the same mistake--the same ignorance, the same fear--that it is just as foolish to believe in a personal G.o.d as in a personal devil--just as foolish to believe in great ghosts as little ones.

So, all should be taught that the forces, the facts in Nature, cannot be controlled or changed by prayer or praise, by supplication, ceremony, or sacrifice; that there is no magic, no miracle; that force can be overcome only by force, and that the whole world is natural.

All should be taught that man must protect himself--that there is no power superior to Nature that cares for man--that Nature has neither pity nor hatred--that her forces act without the slightest regard for man--that she produces without intention and destroys without regret.

All should be taught that usefulness is the bud and flower and fruit of real religion. The popes and cardinals, the bishops, priests and parsons are all useless. They produce nothing. They live on the labor of others.

They are parasites that feed on the frightened. They are vampires that suck the blood of honest toil. Every church is an organized beggar.

Every one lives on alms--on alms collected by force and fear. Every orthodox church promises heaven and threatens h.e.l.l, and these promises and threats are made for the sake of alms, for revenue. Every church cries: "Believe and give."

A new era is dawning on the world. We are beginning to believe in the religion of usefulness.

The men who felled the forests, cultivated the earth, spanned the rivers with bridges of steel, built the railways and ca.n.a.ls, the great ships, invented the locomotives and engines, supplying the countless wants of man; the men who invented the telegraphs and cables, and freighted the electric spark with thought and love; the men who invented the looms and spindles that clothe the world, the inventors of printing and the great presses that fill the earth with poetry, fiction and fact, that save and keep all knowledge for the children yet to be; the inventors of all the wonderful machines that deftly mould from wood and steel the things we use; the men who have explored the heavens and traced the orbits of the stars--who have read the story of the world in mountain range and billowed sea; the men who have lengthened life and conquered pain; the great philosophers and naturalists who have filled the world with light; the great poets whose thoughts have charmed the souls, the great painters and sculptors who have made the canvas speak, the marble live; the great orators who have swayed the world, the composers who have given their souls to sound, the captains of industry, the producers, the soldiers who have battled for the right, the vast host of useful men--these are our Christs, our apostles and our saints. The triumphs of science are our miracles. The books filled with the facts of Nature are our sacred scriptures, and the force that is in every atom and in every star--in everything that lives and grows and thinks, that hopes and suffers, is the only possible G.o.d.

The absolute we cannot know--beyond the horizon of the Natural we cannot go. All our duties are within our reach--all our obligations must be discharged here, in this world. Let us love and labor. Let us wait and work. Let us cultivate courage and cheerfulness--open our hearts to the good--our minds to the true. Let us live free lives. Let us hope that the future will bring peace and joy to all the children of men, and above all, let us preserve the veracity of our souls.

HOW TO REFORM MANKIND.

* This address was delivered before the Militant Church at the Columbia Theatre, Chicago, Ills., April 12, 1896.

I.

"THERE is no darkness but ignorance." Every human being is a necessary product of conditions, and every one is born with defects for which he cannot be held responsible. Nature seems to care nothing for the individual, nothing for the species.

Life pursuing life and in its turn pursued by death, presses to the snow line of the possible, and every form of life, of instinct, thought and action is fixed and determined by conditions, by countless antecedent and co-existing facts. The present is the child, and the necessary child, of all the past, and the mother of all the future.

Every human being longs to be happy, to satisfy the wants of the body with food, with roof and raiment, and to feed the hunger of the mind, according to his capacity, with love, wisdom, philosophy, art and song.

The wants of the savage are few; but with civilization the wants of the body increase, the intellectual horizon widens and the brain demands more and more.

The savage feels, but scarcely thinks. The pa.s.sion of the savage is uninfluenced by his thought, while the thought of the philosopher is uninfluenced by pa.s.sion. Children have wants and pa.s.sions before they are capable of reasoning. So, in the infancy of the race, wants and pa.s.sions dominate.

The savage was controlled by appearances, by impressions; he was mentally weak, mentally indolent, and his mind pursued the path of least resistance. Things were to him as they appeared to be. He was a natural believer in the supernatural, and, finding himself beset by dangers and evils, he sought in many ways the aid of unseen powers. His children followed his example, and for many ages, in many lands, millions and millions of human beings, many of them the kindest and the best, asked for supernatural help. Countless altars and temples have been built, and the supernatural has been worshiped with sacrifice and song, with self-denial, ceremony, thankfulness and prayer.

During all these ages, the brain of man was being slowly and painfully developed. Gradually mind came to the a.s.sistance of muscle, and thought became the friend of labor. Man has advanced just in the proportion that he has mingled thought with his work, just in the proportion that he has succeeded in getting his head and hands into partnership. All this was the result of experience.

Nature, generous and heartless, extravagant and miserly as she is, is our mother and our only teacher, and she is also the deceiver of men.

Above her we cannot rise, below her we cannot fall. In her we find the seed and soil of all that is good, of all that is evil. Nature originates, nourishes, preserves and destroys.

Good deeds bear fruit, and in the fruit are seeds that in their turn bear fruit and seeds. Great thoughts are never lost, and words of kindness do not perish from the earth.

Every brain is a field where nature sows the seeds of thought, and the crop depends upon the soil.

Every flower that gives its fragrance to the wandering air leaves its influence on the soul of man. The wheel and swoop of the winged creatures of the air suggest the flowing lines of subtle art. The roar and murmur of the restless sea, the cataract's solemn chant, the thunder's voice, the happy babble of the brook, the whispering leaves, the thrilling notes of mating birds, the sighing winds, taught man to pour his heart in song and gave a voice to grief and hope, to love and death.

In all that is, in mountain range and billowed plain, in winding stream and desert sand, in cloud and star, in snow and rain, in calm and storm, in night and day, in woods and vales, in all the colors of divided light, in all there is of growth and life, decay and death, in all that flies and floats and swims, in all that moves, in all the forms and qualities of things, man found the seeds and symbols of his thoughts; and all that man has wrought becomes a part of nature's self, forming the lives of those to be. The marbles of the Greeks, like strains of music, suggest the perfect, and teach the melody of life. The great poems, paintings, inventions, theories and philosophies, enlarge and mould the mind of man. All that is is natural. All is naturally produced. Beyond the horizon of the natural man cannot go.

Yet, for many ages, man in all directions has relied upon, and sincerely believed in, the existence of the supernatural. He did not believe in the uniformity of nature; he had no conception of cause and effect, of the indestructibility of force.

In medicine he believed in charms, magic, amulets, and incantations. It never occurred to the savage that diseases were natural.

In chemistry he sought for the elixir of life, for the philosopher's stone, and for some way of changing the baser metals into gold.

In mechanics he searched for perpetual motion, believing that he, by some curious combinations of levers, could produce, could create a force.

In government, he found the source of authority in the will of the supernatural.

For many centuries his only conception of morality was the idea of obedience, not to facts as they exist in nature, but to the supposed command of some being superior to nature. During all these years religion consisted in the praise and worship of the invisible and infinite, of some vast and incomprehensible power, that is to say, of the supernatural.

By experience, by experiment, possibly by accident, man found that some diseases could be cured by natural means; that he could be relieved in many instances of pain by certain kinds of leaves or bark.

This was the beginning. Gradually his confidence increased in the direction of the natural, and began to decrease in charms and amulets, The war was waged for many centuries, but the natural gained the victory. Now we know that all diseases are naturally produced, and that all remedies, all curatives, act in accordance with the facts in nature.

Now we know that charms, magic, amulets and incantations are just as useless in the practice of medicine as they would be in solving a problem in mathematics. We now know that there are no supernatural remedies.

In chemistry the war was long and bitter; but we now no longer seek for the elixir of life, and no one is trying to find the philosopher's stone. We are satisfied that there is nothing supernatural in all the realm of chemistry. We know that substances are always true to their natures; we know that just so many atoms of one substance will unite with just so many of another. The miraculous has departed from chemistry; in that science there is no magic, no caprice and no possible use for the supernatural. We are satisfied that there can be no change, that we can absolutely rely on the uniformity of nature; that the attraction of gravitation will always remain the same; and we feel that we know this as certainly as we know that the relation between the diameter and circ.u.mference of a circle can never change.

We now know that in mechanics the natural is supreme. We know that man can by no possibility create a force; that by no possibility can he destroy a force. No mechanic dreams of depending upon or asking for any supernatural aid. He knows that he works in accordance with certain facts that no power can change.