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Updated: June 29, 2025
But it may be supplemented with indirect testimonies which prove that there was more of the thing than the direct tradition would lead us to conjecture, and that the denial of the existence of the gods must have penetrated very wide circles. The fullest expression of Attic free-thought at the end of the fifth century is to be found in the tragedies of Euripides.
The contradiction between the free-thought philosophy of Greece, which was fast outgrowing its polytheism and Olympian worship, and the deeply rooted sacerdotal system of the Pharaonian institutions, was too great and too flagrant. Thus there never was an Egypto-Hellenic phase of thought.
Yet, like Lollardry, four centuries earlier, free-thought merely took to running underground, safe, sooner or later, to return to the surface.
If in addition it teaches them a few catchwords of free-thought, a few smart blasphemies and syllogistic impertinences, this is of less consequence than at first sight appears, since these are attempted after-justifications, and no real causes of their unbelief.
He wouldn't have been himself if he could have dispensed with the cheap gibing free-thought which was in vogue in his day. Now, at any rate, he comforted himself with a gibe, but not for long. "Oh, if that day after to-morrow, that Sunday, might never come!" he exclaimed suddenly, this time in utter despair. "Why could not this one week be without a Sunday si le miracle exists?
In September, Nineteen Hundred Four, the World's Free-Thought Convention was held in Rome, and a committee was appointed to decorate the statue of Bruno and hold at its base a memorial meeting. The principal address was by Ernst Haeckel. In the course of his remarks Haeckel said: We meet in the Eternal City in the cause of liberty and the cause of truth.
But it is a practical joke at which even its author cannot brighten up enough to laugh. But it is when we consider the great artistic power of these two writers, with all their eccentricities, that we see even more clearly that free-thought was, as it were, a fight between finger-posts.
The Pope was "wriggling his venom into the heart of all possibilities of free-thought and action." Browning groaned "How long, O Lord, how long?" His home-thoughts of England in contrast with Italy were those of patriotism and pride. His wife was more detached, more critical towards her native land.
Having arrived thus far, the panegyrist breaks out into eulogy of "the grandest hero of free-thought," and claims for Bruno the proud distinction of materialist.
"But they stir up such a dust that all free-thought is choked, and because they value quantity above all things in the results they obtain, they neglect to sift what is great from what is small; and so Publius Scipio and others like him, who shrug their shoulders over the labors of the learned, find cause enough to laugh in their faces.
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