A Treatise on Parents and Children

The real safeguard against this is the dogma of Toleration. I need not / here repeat the compact treatise on it which I prepared for the Joint / Committee on the Censorship of Stage Plays, and prefixed to The Shewing / Up of Blanco Posnet. It must suffice now to say that the present must / not attempt to schoolmaster the future by pretending to know good from / evil in tendency, or protect citizens against shocks to their opinions / and convictions, moral, political or religious: in other words it must / not persecute doctrines of any kind, or what is called bad taste, / and must insist on all persons facing such shocks as they face frosty / weather or any of the other disagreeable, dangerous, or bracing / incidents of freedom. The expediency of Toleration has been forced on us / by the fact that progressive enlightenment depends on a fair hearing for / doctrines which at first appear seditious, blasphemous, and immoral, and / which deeply shock people who never think originally, thought being with / them merely a habit and an echo. The deeper ground for Toleration is / the nature of creation, which, as we now know, proceeds by evolution. / Evolution finds its way by experiment; and this finding of the way / varies according to the stage of development reached, from the blindest / groping along the line of least resistance to intellectual speculation, / with its practical sequel of hypothesis and experimental verification; / or to observation, induction, and deduction; or even into so rapid and / intuitive an integration of all these processes in a single brain / that we get the inspired guess of the man of genius and the desperate / resolution of the teacher of new truths who is first slain as a / blasphemous apostate and then worshipped as a prophet.

Here the law for the child is the same as for the adult. The high priest / must not rend his garments and cry "Crucify him" when he is shocked: / the atheist must not clamor for the suppression of Law's Serious Call / because it has for two centuries destroyed the natural happiness of / innumerable unfortunate children by persuading their parents that it is / their religious duty to be miserable. It, and the Sermon on the Mount, / and Machiavelli's Prince, and La Rochefoucauld's maxims, and Hymns / Ancient and Modern, and De Glanville's apologue, and Dr. Watts's rhymes, / and Nietzsche's Gay Science, and Ingersoll's Mistakes of Moses, and the / speeches and pamphlets of the people who want us to make war on / Germany, and the Noodle's Orations and articles of our politicians and / journalists, must all be tolerated not only because any of them may for / all we know be on the right track but because it is in the conflict of / opinion that we win knowledge and wisdom. However terrible the wounds / suffered in that conflict, they are better than the barren peace of / death that follows when all the combatants are slaughtered or bound hand / and foot.