The Arizona sentinel., 1889-06-15
FREEDOM OF THOUGHT.
Ahe Province of Thinking Is to Discove
 Truth and to Reject Error.

Ahe Province of Thinking Is to Discover
 Truth and to Reject Error.
 Though tyranny finds many ways to enslave man, it can have no direct power over his thoughts. His actions may be restrained, his speech may be fettered, his body may be chained, his life itself may be taken away, but his thoughts no one can interfere with. They remain his own, and, except with his will, no one can even guess what they are. But does this absence of direct power insure true freedom of thought? It may at first sight seem to do so, but deeper insight into the nature of thought will show that it is itself subject to many in- fueuces and conditions. Associa- tions, circumstances, education, climate, race, occupation, hopes, fears, emotions-all exert an indirect but powerful pressure upon thought; so powerful that if in one sense it is always free, in another sense it is always controlled. If no one else can claim authority over our thought, neither may we exercise an absolute and immediate dominion over it. Is freedom of thought, then, a mere name "a sound without meaningP Not so. Real freedom of any kind involves not only the absence of artificial restraint, but the presence of influences favora- bIe to growth and development The infant left without care is not free; it has no choice but to perish. The body can be enslaved by gout or paralysis as surely as by prisons and chains; both prevent the healthful ex- ercise which is its life. Even indolence and self-indulgence may prove equal tyrants, It is only where wholesome and active life secures for the body that varied motion and other salutary conditions needful to its best development that we can say the freedom of the body is secured. So the freedom which thought needs is not merely the absence of any personal compulsory force, but the presence of favorable influences, which shall enable it to grow in strength and to perform its functions in the most perfect manner. Our thought should be the guides of our whole lives; their province is to discover truth and to reject error, to sift the just from the unjust, the pure from the impure, the better from the worse. and so to apply them as to improve character and life. How important, then, it becomes that we should foster those conditions and influences that will enable thought to perform without intolerance, so essen tial a work! One very strong pressure that bears upon thought to prevent its freedom and restrain its growth is that of fancied personal interest. We say fancied; because the real interest oi the individual is bound up in the healthful advancement of his thought. But it is not uncommon for people to imagine that their happiness lies in an opposite direction. They fear the cen sure of their party, or the frown of fashionable circle, or the loss of favor or patronage, if they follow out some train of thought to its logical conclusions. Or they see that if they accept its issues it will require of them certain sacrifices, which they are not prepared to make. Thus they stife or abandon thoughts that seem dangerous, and remain on what they supposed to be safe ground, forgetting that there is no mental safety where freedom of thought is banished. Then there are also preju- dices and antiquities and even sympa- thies, to guard against. Itiis impossi- ble fully to estimate how much our thinking is governed by our feeling. We love one person and refuse to see any defect in him. We dislike an. other, and his defects are so patent to us that we see no virtues. So with the parties we espouse and those we oppose. Our tendency is to es- teem the ideas and doings of the one as all right and those of the other as all wrong. In general it may be SdlO GudG Gl1O uOS1TO OO SSbdDl1Su dS true some particular conclusion, or some special set of ideas, is a stronger element in the investigation than the desire to find out what really is true. How the desires and the emotions are valuable parts of our nature, and de- serve full recognition, but when they tyrannize over the thoughts and pre- vent their free action they exceed their domain and by all possible means ought to be controlled -Phila, r