Note 43 — Chapter I · INTRODUCTORY

It was not till 1713, however, that Anthony Collins’s Discourse of Freethinking, occasioned by the Rise and Growth of a Sect called Freethinkers, gave the word a universal notoriety, and brought it into established currency in controversy, with the normal significance of “deist,” Collins having entirely repudiated atheism. Even after this date, and indeed in full conformity with the definition in Collins’s opening sentence, Ambrose Philips took The Freethinker as the title of a weekly journal (begun in 1718) on the lines of the Spectator, with no heterodox leaning,43 the contributors including Boulter, afterwards Archbishop of Dublin, and the son of Bishop Burnet. But despite this attempt to keep the word “freethinking” as a name for simple freedom from prejudice in secular affairs, the tendency to specialize it as aforesaid was irresistible. As names go, it was on the whole a good one; and the bitterness with which it was generally handled on the orthodox side showed that its implicit claim was felt to be disturbing, though some antagonists of course claimed from the first that they were as “free” under the law of right reason as any skeptic.44 At this time of day the word may be allowed prescriptive standing, as having no more drawbacks than most other names for schools of thought or attitudes of mind, and as having been admitted into most European languages. The question-begging element is not greater in this than in many other terms of similar intention, such as “rationalism”; and it incurs no such charge of absurdity as lies against the invidious religious term, “infidelity.” The term “infidel” invites “fidel.”