Note 23 — Chapter I · INTRODUCTORY

In England, as in the rest of Europe, however, the phenomenon of freethought had existed, in specific form, long before it could express itself in propagandist writings, or find any generic name save those of atheism and infidelity; and the process of naming was as fortuitous as it generally is in matters of intellectual evolution. Phrases approximating to “free thought” occur soon after the Restoration. Thus Glanvill repeatedly writes sympathetically of “free philosophers”23 and “free philosophy.”24 In 1667 we find Sprat, the historian of the Royal Society, describing the activity of that body as having arisen or taken its special direction through the conviction that in science, as in warfare, better results had been obtained by a “free way” than by methods not so describable.25 As Sprat is careful to insist, the members of the Royal Society, though looked at askance by most of the clergy26 and other pietists, were not as such to be classed as unbelievers, the leading members being strictly orthodox; but a certain number seem to have shown scant concern for religion;27 and while it was one of the Society’s first rules not to debate any theological question whatever,28 the intellectual atmosphere of the time was such that some among those who followed the “free way” in matters of natural science would be extremely likely to apply it to more familiar problems.29 At the same period we find Spinoza devoting his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670) to the advocacy of libertas philosophandi; and such a work was bound to have a general European influence. It was probably, then, a result of such express assertion of the need and value of freedom in the mental life that the name “freethinker” came into English use in the last quarter of the century.