Libertinism

“ That at death the identity of the man absolutely ceases, and we totally lose our existence.318 Yet, from these excellent comforters, our 259 modern scepticks have revived their senseless tenet of annihilation to serve the cause of libertinism. The grand desideratum, in libertinism, is, to be able to give an unbounded loose to the sensual passions, to their very utmost extent, without any impertinent hints from a certain disagreeable monitor, called conscience, and the dread of an after-reckoning. ”

“ This license, with the corruption of morals, of which it is both the sign and the cause, leads directly to feelings the most inconsistent with manly and virtuous patriotism. Voluptuousness, and{28} its consequences, render the libertine incapable of relish for what is simply and abstractedly beautiful or sublime, whether in literature or in the arts, and destroy the taste, while they degrade and blunt the understanding. But, above all, such libertinism leads to the exclusive pursuit of selfish gratification, for egotism is its foundation and its essence. ”

“ It cannot be imagined that ever men would at first have entertained opinions of contempt of ordinances and libertinism, and therefore we may observe they usually come in the rear of other opinions, which by a long tract of art prepare their way. ”

“ I endeavored to imagine a state of society where, instead of permitting and approving libertinism in young men before marriage, instead of regarding the separation of husband and wife as natural and desirable, instead of giving to women the legal right to practise the trade of prostitution, instead of countenancing and sanctioning divorce—if, instead of this, we taught by words and actions that the state of celibacy, the solitary existence of a man properly endowed for, and who has not renounced the sexual relation, is a monstrous and opprobrious wrong ”

“ There are many newspapers and they are printed with the greatest freedom, but as a rule the social and moral conditions are worse than they were under the despotism. What they call liberty we call license, because they do not know any better. They construe the word liberty to mean the privilege of doing whatever they please, and many who have suffered horribly from oppression are now retaliating because in a way there is no means of preventing it. There is more drunkenness, more disorder, more crime, more stealing, more begging than ever before. ”

“ For then, in virtue of my right of liberty, I should regard myself as obligated to repress the aberrations of your will, in order to protect my own and that of others. Society guaranties the liberty of each one, and if one citizen attacks that of another, he is arrested in the name of liberty. For example, religious liberty is sacred; you may, in the secret of consciousness, invent for yourself the most extravagant superstition; but if you wish publicly to inculcate an immoral worship, you threaten the liberty and reason of your citizens: such preaching is interdicted. ”

“ Between those who are free already and those who as yet are not there is no equality possible. The part of reason is to rule and of instinct to obey. On the other hand, if you impose on the blind the office of leading the blind, both will end [Pg 46] in the abyss. We should never forget that liberty does not consist in the licence of passion emancipated from law, which licence would prove the most hideous of tyrannies; liberation consists in willing obedience to law; it is the right to do ones duty, and only just men can be called free. ”

“ When he entered a societal group, controls were necessarily imposed. But our society--unlike most in the world--presupposes that freedom and liberty are in a frame of reference that makes the individual, not government, the keeper of his tastes, beliefs, and ideas. ”

“ All the liberty therefore that we yet lack will gradually spring up — there, where our bondage is — in our minds. To be free we have but to see our chains. Are we disappointed — are we sometimes angry, because the crowd or any part of the crowd around us bows submissively to mischievous usages or unjust laws? ”

“ To take away the free, soaring sense of liberty.
“There is no such thing as liberty,” she heard the quiet, deep, dangerous voice of Don Ramón repeating. “There is no such thing as liberty. The greatest liberators are usually slaves of an idea. The freest people are slaves to convention and public opinion, and more still, slaves to the industrial machine. There is no such thing as liberty. You only change one sort of domination for another. All we can do is to choose our master.” ”

“ In these times of license, which are sometime mistaken for times of unusual liberty, it is not for anyone to define what is altogether bad, nor to confine good, nor good taste, within too narrow limits; neither is it generous to prescribe anything that shall be universally eaten or worn; and, above all liberties, the liberty to wear a smile or a frown should prevail; but it is within the province of organized society to put its stamp of approval or disapproval on the time and place for appropriate use of them. ”

“ For my own part, I have no hope, that the stream of general liberty will flow for ever, unpolluted, through the foul mire of partial bondage, or that they, who have been habituated to lord it over others, will not be base enough, in time, to let others lord it over them. If they resist, it will be the struggle of pride and selfishness, not of principle. ”

“ If the moralist distinguishes between actions that are evil because they are forbidden, and those that are forbidden because they are evil, the libertine has a counter-distinction between those that are forbidden because they are pleasant, and those that are pleasant because they are forbidden. ”

“ And if we adopt that principle of judging by the worst, then the worst effects of the press are far wider than the worst effects of the public-house. What exactly is the principle by which they distinguish between lawful and unlawful liberty, or mixed and unmixed licence?{85} I have a rough-and-ready test, which may be right or wrong, but which I can at least state; but where has their test been stated? I say that the simplest form of freedom is that which distinguishes the free man from the slave—the ownership of his own body and his own bodily activities. ”

“ But liberty is in many other dangers from itself, besides those which arise from formed designs of destroying it, under hypocritical pretences, or romantic schemes of restoring it upon a more perfect plan. It is particularly liable to become excessive, and to degenerate insensibly into licentiousness; in the same manner as liberality, for example, is apt to degenerate into extravagance. And as men cloak their extravagance to themselves under the notion of liberality, and to the world under the name of it, so licentiousness passes under the name and notion of liberty. ”

“ Who desires that America, the idol of those who seek freedom from the tyranny of the Old World, shall trample on the right of personal liberty? And yet those hundreds of singing-societies which have joined in this outburst of moral indignation have forgotten that every law is a limitation of personal liberty. The demand of the nation must limit the demands of the individual, even if it is not the neighbor, but the actor himself who is directly hurt. ”

“ There is a modern abuse which is exactly parallel to this, and which consists in using the law to impose pet social aims on society, which use up the time and energy of the citizens in other aims than those chosen by themselves for their own happiness. Thus the most difficult problem in respect to liberty under law is now what it has always been, to prevent the law from overgrowing and smothering liberty. ”

“ They represented the pure, abstract form of every principle as near as it is possible for it to be represented by human frailty. Free speech, free inquiry and freedom of conscience found perfect expression in their meetings, and the Liberator was the one paper in which any honest, well-meaning person might print any conscientious opinion, however contrary to those generally received in society. ”

“ It was a case, he sometimes told himself, of a man, who had resisted temptation all his life, being punished for one instant's folly more harshly than if he were a practised libertine. No libertine, indeed, could have got himself into such a scrape, for none would have surrendered so completely to a single manifestation of the primal force. ”

“ And the gentleman brought forward as a reason why we should not have free speech, that only a few years ago some of the best men in the world, if you said a word in favor of liberty, would shoot you down. What an argument was that! They were not good men. They were the whippers of women and the stealers of babes—robbers of the trundlebed—assassins of human liberty. ”

“ If there be, in the long catalogue of guile, one character more hatefully despicable than another, it is the libertine. Time corrects the tongue of slander, and the generosity of friends makes atonement for the depredations of the midnight robber. Sufferings and calamities may be assuaged or mitigated by the sympathies of kindred hearts, and the tear of affection is sufficient to wash out the remembrance of many of the sorrows to which flesh is heir. But for the venom of the libertine, there is no remedy,—of its fatal consequences, there is no mitigation. ”

“ That those who scouted belief in the principle of Liberty made no greater mistake than to suppose that Liberty was dangerous because it made a man a libertine. To those with any decency, the creed of Freedom was—of all—the most enchaining. ”

“ Thus the theoretic libertine is usually a person of blameless family life, whilst the practical libertine is mercilessly severe on all other libertines, and excessively conventional in professions of social principle.
What is more, these professions are not hypocritical: they are for the most part quite sincere. The common libertine, like the drunkard, succumbs to a temptation which he does not defend, and against which he warns others with an earnestness proportionate to the intensity of his own remorse. ”

“ We can afford no liberties with liberty itself. ”

“ But if this is even approximately true, it seriously restricts that liberty of the individual for which Mill pleads. The individual has no chance, because he has no rights, against the social organism. Society can punish him for acts or even opinions which are anti-social in character. ”

“ This right belongs so thoroughly to the essence of liberty that to deny it is to mutilate man in his body, in his soul, and in the exercise of his faculties, and society, which progresses only by the free initiative of individuals, soon lacking explorers, finds itself arrested in its onward march. ”

“ A black coming in at this moment with a jug of spring-water, I could not repress a smile, which the General at once interpreted. 'This may seem a contradiction,' he continued, 'but I think you must perceive that it is neither a crime nor an absurdity. When we profess, as our fundamental principle, that liberty is the inalienable right of every man, we do not include madmen or idiots; liberty in their hands would become a scourge. ”

“ But let us abandon the discussion of a principle now too trite, for humankind, at least in Europe, is satisfied that unlimited liberty is nowhere consistent with a properly-regulated state of society. ”

“ But we cannot see how the innocent bystander profits, when the free citizen is forbidden to go fishing on Sunday, to smoke in public, to see certain plays, to get Anthony Comstock reports and the Kreutzer Sonata through the mails; to say in public just what he wants to say—to exercise freedom of speech; to kiss his girl in the parks, or a woman to wear abbreviated skirts,—ad libitum!
These prohibitions burden the individual without conferring any appreciable advantage upon the mass, or even upon other individuals. ”

“ Liberty had received many a blow from the hands of these men, who had fled from home and country to secure it, but it could not die while their own principles were remembered, and constantly at one point or another, irrepressible men and women rose up, bent upon free thought and free speech, and shaming even the most determined and intolerant spirit. ”

“ Having a false and absurd notion as to what liberty is, either they pervert the very idea of freedom, or they extend it at their pleasure to many things in respect of which man cannot rightly be regarded as free. ”

“ They have excited feelings; they think they must do something for the cause of liberty; and, in their sphere of action, they do not see what else they can do than to contribute to an abolition press, or an abolition society, or to pay an abolition lecturer. ”

“ So monstrous a principle is far more dangerous than any single interference with liberty; there is no violation of liberty which it would not justify; it acknowledges no right to any freedom whatever, except perhaps to that of holding opinions in secret, without ever disclosing them: for, the moment an opinion which I consider noxious passes any one's lips, it invades all the 'social rights' attributed to me by the Alliance. ”

“ The perpetrators and abettors of such deeds of darkness mistake liberty for license; every man or woman has a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—yet only so far as he does not interfere with the exercise of the same rights by others. ”

“ That it is a denial of personal liberty is undisputed; and the point with which we are at this moment concerned is that to entrench a denial of liberty behind the mighty ramparts of our Constitution is to do precisely the opposite of what our Constitution--or any Constitution like ours--is designed to do. ”