Note 2 — VI. THE LAW OF INTELLECTUAL FREEDOM.

I emphasize this important clause for the particular benefit of those who in my personal history have had the absurd expectation that I should continue to entertain a respectful deference to a certain phase of religionism, which upon a careful and rational examination I found to be worthless and which is repugnant to my taste and better judgment, and of others who with equal absurdity are in the habit of exacting ecclesiastical tests (I will not say religious, for such men show by their very conduct that their enlightenment in matters of the religion of the heart is very imperfect) for academic appointments;—as if the science and the culture of the nineteenth century were still to be the handmaid of the church, as they were in the Middle Age; as if Philosophy and the Liberal Arts could ever thrive and flourish in the suffocating atmosphere of the idols of the cave, the idols of the tribe, and the idols of the market-place!