A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 1 of 2: Third edition, Revised and Expanded, in two volumesRobertson, J. M. (John Mackinnon)
Religion
A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 1 of 2: Third edition, Revised and Expanded, in two volumes
Robertson, J. M. (John Mackinnon)
Free thought -- History
One or two earlier writers, [15] indeed, use "infidel" in the modern
sense; and it was at times so used by early Elizabethans. [16]
But Foxe brackets together "Jews, Turks, or infidels"; [17] and
Hooper, writing in 1547, speaks, like Jewel, of the heathen as
"the infidels." [18] Hooker (1553-1600), in his Fifth Sermon, § 9,
[19] uses the word somewhat indefinitely, but in his margin makes
"Pagans and Infidels" equivalent to "Pagans and Turks." So also,
in the Ecclesiastical Polity, [20] "infidels" means men of another
religion. On the title-page of Reginald Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft
(1574), on the other hand, we have "the infidelitie of atheists";
but so late as 1600 we find "J. H." [John Healy], the translator of
Augustine's City of God, rendering infideles and homines infideles by
"unbelievers." [21] "Infidelity," in the modern sense, occurs in Sir
T. Browne. [22]
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 clergy [26] 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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