Note 31 — Chapter XXI · FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Thus all forms of opinion were shown to proceed either from intellectual or moral defect, save the opinions of Owen. Such propositions, tranquilly elaborated, were probably as effective in producing irritation as any frontal attack upon any dogmas, narratives, or polities. But, though not even consistent (inasmuch as the fundamental thesis that “character is formed by circumstances” is undermined by the datum of four varieties of organization), they were potent to influence serious men otherwise broadly instructed as to the nature of religious history and the irrationality of dogma; and Owen for a generation, despite the inevitable failure and frustration of his social schemes, exercised by his movement a very wide influence on popular life. To a considerable extent it was furthered by the popular deistic philosophy of George and Andrew Combe—a kind of deistic positivism—which then had a great vogue;31 and by the implications of phrenology, then also in its most scientific and progressive stage. When, for various reasons, Owen’s movement dissolved, the freethinking element seems to have been absorbed in the secular party, while the others appear to have gone in large part to build up the movement of Co-operation. On the whole, the movement of popular freethought in England could be described as poor, struggling, and persecuted, only the most hardy and zealous venturing to associate themselves with it. The imprisonment of Holyoake (1842) for six months, on a trifling charge of blasphemy, is an illustration of the brutal spirit of public orthodoxy at the time.32 Where bigotry could thus only injure and oppress without suppressing heresy, it stimulated resistance; and the result of the stimulus was a revival of popular propaganda which led to the founding of a Secular Society in 1852.