now to say that the present must
not attempt to schoolmaster the future by pretending to know good from
evil in tendency, or protect citizens against shocks to their opinions
and convictions, moral, political or religious: in other words it must
not persecute doctrines of any kind, or what is called bad taste,
and must insist on all persons facing such shocks as they face frosty
weather or any of the other disagreeable, dangerous, or bracing
incidents of freedom. The expediency of Toleration has been forced on us
by the fact that progressive enlightenment depends on a fair hearing for
doctrines which at first appear seditious, blasphemous, and immoral, and
which deeply shock people who never think originally, thought being with
them merely a habit and an echo. The deeper ground for Toleration is
the nature of creation, which, as we now know, proceeds by evolution.
Evolution finds its way by experiment; and this finding of the way
varies according to the stage of development reached, from the blindest
groping along the line of least resistance to intellectual speculation,
with its practical sequel of hypothesis and experimental verification;
or to observation, induction, and deduction; or even into so rapid and
intuitive an integration of all these processes in a single brain
that we get the inspired guess of the man of genius and the desperate
resolution of the teacher of new truths who is first slain as a
blasphemous apostate and then worshipped as a prophet.

Here the law for the child is the same as for the adult. The high priest
must not rend his garments and cry "Crucify him" when he is shocked:
the atheist must not clamor for the suppression of Law's Serious Call
because it has for two centuries destroyed the natural happiness of
innumerable unfortunate children by persuading their parents that it is
their religious duty to be miserable. It, and the Sermon on the Mount,
and Machiavelli's Prince, and La Rochefoucauld's maxims, and Hymns
Ancient and Modern, and De Glanville's apologue, and Dr. Watts's rhymes,
and Nietzsche's Gay Science, and Ingersoll's Mistakes of Moses, and the
speeches and pamphlets of the people who want us to make war on
Germany, and the Noodle's Orations and articles of our politicians and
journalists, must all be tolerated not only because any of them may for
all we know be on the right track but because it is in the conflict of
opinion that we win knowledge and wisdom. However terrible the w