he contrary, the curiosity of
the ape, or of the child who pulls out the legs and wings of a fly
to see what it will do without them, or who, on being told that a cat
dropped out of the window will always fall on its legs, immediately
tries the experiment on the nearest cat from the highest window in
the house (I protest I did it myself from the first floor only), is as
nothing compared to the thirst for knowledge of the philosopher, the
poet, the biologist, and the naturalist. I have always despised Adam
because he had to be tempted by the woman, as she was by the serpent,
before he could be induced to pluck the apple from the tree of
knowledge. I should have swallowed every apple on the tree the moment
the owner's back was turned. When Gray said "Where ignorance is bliss,
'tis folly to be wise," he forgot that it is godlike to be wise; and
since nobody wants bliss particularly, or could stand more than a very
brief taste of it if it were attainable, and since everybody, by the
deepest law of the Life Force, desires to be godlike, it is stupid, and
indeed blasphemous and despairing, to hope that the thirst for knowledge
will either diminish or consent to be subordinated to any other end
whatsoever. We shall see later on that the claim that has arisen in this
way for the unconditioned pursuit of knowledge is as idle as all dreams
of unconditioned activity; but none the less the right to knowledge must
be regarded as a fundamental human right. The fact that men of science
have had to fight so hard to secure its recognition, and are still so
vigorously persecuted when they discover anything that is not quite
palatable to vulgar people, makes them sorely jealous for that right;
and when they hear a popular outcry for the suppression of a method of
research which has an air of being scientific, their first instinct is
to rally to the defence of that method without further consideration,
with the result that they sometimes, as in the case of vivisection,
presently find themselves fighting on a false issue.

THE FLAW IN THE ARGUMENT

I may as well pause here to explain their error. The right to know
is like the right to live. It is fundamental and unconditional in its
assumption that knowledge, like life, is a desirable thing, though any
fool can prove that ignorance is bliss, and that "a little knowledge is
a dangerous thing" (a little being the most that any of us can attain),
as easily as that the pains of life are