excerpts from THE AREOPAGITICA by John Milton (1608-1674)
appeared on November 24, 1644.
a plea for the right to print and publish without censorship; response
to the Parliament's ordinance requiring government permission for publications.
1640-1660 pamphlet wars
1667 Paradise Lost
Foolish tongues! When God gave him reason, he gave him freedom to choose,
for reason is but choosing; he had been else a mere artificial Adam, such
an Adam as he is in the motions. We ourselves esteem not of that obedience,
or love, or gift, which is of force: God therefore left him free, set before
him a provoking object ever almost in his eyes; herein consisted his merit,
herein the right of his reward, the praise of his abstinence. Wherefore
did he create passions within us, pleasures round about us, but that these
rightly tempered are the very ingredients of virtue? They are not skilful
considerers of human things, who imagine to remove sin by removing the
matter of sin; for, besides that it is a huge heap increasing under the
very act of diminishing, though some part of it may for a time be withdrawn
from some persons, it cannot from all, in such a universal thing as books
are; and when this is done, yet the sin remain entire. Though ye take from
a covetous man all his treasure, he has yet one jewel left: ye cannot bereave
him of his covetousness. Banish all objects of lust, shut up all youth
into the severest discipline that can be exercised in any hermitage, ye
cannot make them chaste that came not thither so: such great care and wisdom
is required to the right managing of this point.
...
Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much
arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge
in the making.
Under these fantastic terrors of sect and schism, we wrong the earnest
and zealous thirst after knowledge and understanding which God hath stirred
up in this city.
What some lament of, we rather should rejoice at, should rather praise
this pious forwardness among men, to reassume the illdeputed care of their
religion into their own hands again. A little generous prudence, a little
forbearance of one another, and some grain of charity might win all these
diligences to join and unite in one general and brotherly search after
truth, could we but forego this prelatical tradition of crowding free consciences
and Christian liberties into canons and precepts of men.
...
Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost
inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with
the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be
discerned, that those confused seeds which were imposed upon Psyche as
an incessant labour to cull out and sort asunder, were not more intermixed.
It was from out the rind of one apple tasted that the knowledge of good
and evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world.
And perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and
evil, that is to say of knowing good by evil.
...
And how can a man teach with authority, which is the life of teaching,
how can he be a doctor in his book as he ought to be, or else had better
be silent, whenas all he teaches, all he delivers, is but under the tuition,
under the correction of his patriarchal licenser, to blot or alter what
precisely accords not with the hidebound humour which he calls his judgment?
-- when every acute reader, upon the first sight of a pedantic license,
will be ready with these like words to ding the book a quoit's distance
from him: "I hate a pupil teacher; I endure not an instructor that comes
to me under the wardship of an overseeing fist. I know nothing of the licenser,
but that I have his own hand here for his arrogance; who shall warrant
me his judgment?" "The State, sir," replies the stationer, but has a quick
return: "The State shall be my governors, but not my critics; they may
be mistaken in the choice of a licenser, as easily as this licenser may
be mistaken in an author; this is some common stuff." And he might add
from Sir Francis Bacon, that "Such authorized books are but the language
of the times." For though a licenser should happen to be judicious more
than ordinary, which will be a great jeopardy of the next succession, yet
his very office and his commission enjoins him to let pass nothing but
what is vulgarly received already.
...
For if they fell upon one kind of strictness, unless their care were
equal to regulate all other things of like aptness to corrupt the mind,
that single endeavour they knew
would be but a fond labour: to shut and fortify one gate against corruption,
and be necessitated to leave others round about wide open. If we think
to regulate printing, thereby to rectify manners, we must regulate all
recreations and pastimes, all that is delightful to man. No music must
be heard, no song be set or sung, but what is grave and Doric. There must
be licensing of dancers, that no gesture, motion, or deportment be taught
our youth, but what by their allowance shall be thought honest; for such
Plato was provided of. It will ask more than the work of twenty licensers
to examine all the lutes, the violins, and the guitars in every house;
they must not be suffered to prattle as they do, but must be licensed what
they may say. And who shall silence all the airs and madrigals that whisper
softness in chambers? The windows also, and the balconies, must be thought
on; there are shrewd books, with dangerous frontispieces, set to sale:
who shall prohibit them, shall twenty licensers? The villages also must
have their visitors to inquire what lectures the bagpipe and the rebec
reads, even to the balladry and the gamut of every municipal fiddler, for
these are the countryman's Arcadias and his Monte Mayors.
...
Truth is compared in Scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters
flow not in a perpetual progression, they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity
and tradition. A man may be a heretic in the truth; and if he believe things
only because his pastor says so, or the Assembly so determines, without
knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he
holds, becomes his heresy. There is not any burden that some would gladder
post off to another, than the charge and care of their religion. There
be, who knows not that there be of Protestants and professors who live
and die in as errant and implicit faith, as any lay Papist or Loretto.
A wealthy man addicted to his pleasure and to his profits, find religion
to be a traffic so entangled, and of so many piddling accounts, that of
all mysteries he can not skill to keep a stock going upon that trade. What
should he do? fain he woud have the name to be religious, fain he would
bear up with his neighbors in that. What does he therefore, but resolves
to give over toiling, and to find himself out some factor, to whose care
and credit he may commit the whole managing of his religious affairs...