The Common Sense of Toleration

The real safeguard against this is the dogma of Toleration. I need not
here repeat the compact treatise on it which I prepared for the Joint
Committee on the Censorship of Stage Plays, and prefixed to The Shewing
Up of Blanco Posnet. It must suffice 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