For want of intelligence the devotees of causes have been the mischief makers in all times. We cannot always know who does the most good in the world, but the evil that men do lives after them and it is sometimes possible to estimate the amount of harm done. Who has done the most harm in human history, the sceptics or the believers, the devotees of causes or the devotees of culture and urbanity? St. Bernard with his crusade, or Abelard with his doubts? The men who conducted the Inquisition, or the men who doubted the doctrine of the Trinity? Calvin and the obscurantists on both sides of the Reformation, or Erasmus and the Humanists? Cromwell and his Puritans or Voltaire and the Deists? Robespierre or Goethe? The devotees to causes have kept human life in turmoil. If the immorality they would cure has slain its thousands, their “morality” has slain its tens of thousands. In most cases the strife has been useless and for causes that might have been won in other ways, really won. The devotee of a cause requires little provocation to practice persecution, and only the opportunity to play the tyrant. Doubt not only has educational value: it preserves social sanity. I would suggest as part of everyone’s education the reading of such authors as Lucian, Epicurus, Abelard, Hobbes, Montaigne, Rabelais, Erasmus, Lessing, Voltaire, Hume and Anatole France. There is no blood on these men’s hands. They have quietly smiled in the face of bigotry and superstition. In their words there is laughter and there is light. Perhaps no one of them ever intended to be a liberator of mankind. They merely thought and spoke as free spirits, and their very presence puts sham and cant and unction and coercion and mistaken zeal to shame. They have done more for freedom and truth than all the armies of crusading devotees. CHAPTER VI A MAN IS KNOWN BY THE DILEMMAS HE KEEPS