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wrote: 'That was the greatest day in my life: I carried out my duty.'
An impenitent sinner was this Owen! And he was paid out for it!
'Owen,' says the Westminster Review, 'was not torn in pieces for this: the time of physical vengeance in matters of religion had gone by. But no one, even nowadays, can offend our cherished prejudices with impunity!'
English priests do not, in fact, use surgical methods any more, although they are not squeamish about other, more spiritual means. 'From that moment,' says the author of the article, 'Owen brought down upon himself the fearful hatred of the clergy, and after that meeting begins the long list of failures which makes ridiculous the last forty years of his life. He was not a martyr, but he was an outlaw.'
Enough, I think. I may put the Westminster Review aside. I am very grateful to it for such a vivid reminder not only of the saintly old man but also of the environment in which he lived.
Let us turn to business, that is, to Owen himself and his teaching.
One thing I shall add as I bid farewell to the unwashed critic and to Owen's other biographer,16 also unwashed, less severe but no less earnest-that, while I am not an entirely envious man, I envy them from the bottom of my heart. I \'\'auld give much for their imperturbable consciousness of their own excellence, for their calm satisfaction with themselves and with their comprehension, for their sometimes pliant, always just and now and then slightly ironical condescension. What tranquillity must be conferred by this complete confidence in their knowledgeability, and in the fact that they are wiser and more practical than Owen was; that, if they had his energy and his money they would not behave so stupidly, but would be rich, like Rothschild, and ministers, like Palmerston!
I I
RoBERT OwEN called one of the articles in which he set out his system, 'An attempt to change this lunatic asylum into a Rational World,'17
16 Herzen is probably referring to William L. Sargant and his book, Robert Owen and his Social Philosophy ( London, 1 860) . ( A .S.) 17 In English in the originaL (R.) Owen's article 'The \Vorld a great lunatic asylum' was published in the first issue of Robert Owen's Journal
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One of Owen's biographers, prompted by this, tells how a madman who was confined in a hospital said: 'The whole world thinks me insane, and I think the whole world is so; the pity is that the majority is on the side of the whole world.'
This expands Owen's title and throws a clear light on the whole business. I am sure that the biographer did not consider how accurate his comparison was nor how far it carried. He only wanted to hint that Owen \Vas mad, and I shall not dispute that . . . but what his reason is for supposing that that whole world of his is sane, this I do not understand.
If Owen was mad it was by no means because the world thought him so and he paid it back in its own coin, but because, knowing well that he lived in a madhouse and was surrounded by the sick, he talked to them for sixty years as though they were well.
Here the number of the sick means nothing: sanity has its justification not in the majority of votes but in its own logical arbitrariness. If the whole of England is convinced that a certain medium can summon up the spirits of the dead, and one Faraday says that this is rubbish, then truth and sanity will be on his side and not on the side of the whole population of England.
More: if even Faraday does not say this, then the truth about this subject will not exist at all as something recognised ; but none the less the absurdity accepted unanimously by the whole people will still be an absurdity.
The majority of vvhich the sick man complained was not frightening because it was wise or foolish, right or wrong, false or true, but because it was powerful and because it held the keys of Bedlam.
Power does not admit consciousness within its understanding as a necessary condition ; on the contrary, it is the more irresistible the madder it is, the more to be feared the more it lacks consciousness. From an insane man it is possible to save oneself, from a pack of furious wolves it is harder, and before the irrational elements a man can only fold his arms and perish.
The act of Owen's that in 1 8 1 7 struck England with horror would not in 1 6 1 7 have astonished the country of Vanini and Giordano Bruno, would not have scandalised France or Germany in 1 7 1 7 ; but England, after half a century, cannot remember him without exasperation. Perhaps somewhere in Spain the ( London. 2nd l\'o,·emher, 1 850), and ends almost liternllv as in HPrzen's quotation : 'To change this lunatic asylu m into a ra tion�! world, will be the work to be accomplished by this journal.' ( A .S. )
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monks might have incited the savage rabble against him, the alguazils of the Inquisition might have put him in prison or burnt him on a bonfire, but the humane part of society would have been on his side . . . .
Could Goethe and Fichte, Kant and Schiller, or Humboldt in our time and Lessing a hundred years ago, have concealed their way of thinking or have had the unscrupulousness to preach their philosophy, in books and in the academies, for six days a week, and on the seventh to listen pharisaically to the pastor, and bamboozle the mob, [a plebe, with their devout Christianity?
The same thing in France: Not Voltaire nor Rousseau nor Diderot, not all the Encyclopaedists, nor the school of Bichat and Cabanis, nor Laplace nor Comte, pretended to be ultramontanists or bowed in veneration before 'cherished prejudices,'
and this did not lower or diminish their importance by one iota.
The Continent, politically enslaved, is morally freer than England ; the mass of ideas and doubts in circulation is much more extensive. They have become habitual and society does not shake with either fear or indignation before a free man-Wenn er die Kette bricht.1�
On the Continent people are powerless before authority: they endure their chains, but do not respect them. The Englishman's liberty is more in his institutions than in himself or in his conscience. His freedom is in the 'common law,' in habeas corpus, not in his morals or his way of thinking. Before the prejudices of society the proud Brit inclines without a murmur, with an appearance of respect. It stands to reason, then, that wherever there are people there are lies and pretence, but openness is not considered a vice, the boldly uttered conviction of a thinker is not confused with the indecency of a lewd woman who boasts of her own fall ; but hypocrisy is not exalted to the degree of a social and therewith obligatory virtue.19
IS From Schiller's poem 'Die Worte des Glaubens.' (A .S. ) The couplet runs: 'Vor dem Sklaven, wenn er die Kette bricht, Vor dem freien Menschen er::.ittert nicht.' (R.)