"We may say that the most characteristic current philosophies have not only a touch of mania, but a touch suicidal mania. The mere questioner has knocked his head against the limits of human thought; and cracked it. This is what makes to futile the the warnings of the orthodox and the boasts of the advanced about the dangerous boyhood of free thought.
What we are looking at is not the boyhood of three thought; it is the old age and ultimate dislocation of free thought. It is vain for bishops and pious bigwigs to discuss what dreadful things will happen if wild skepticism runs it course. It has run its course. It is vain for eloquent atheists to talk of the truths that will be revealed if once we see free thought begin. We have seen it end. It has no more questions to ask; it has questioned itself."
He goes on to talk about Aristotle and the other philosophers who doubted their world and their very existence.
(this notion of free thought)"might have reached its bankruptcy more quickly and cleanly if it had not been hampered by the indefensible laws of blasphemy or by the absurd notion that modern England (or America) is Christian. But it would have reached its bankruptcy none the less. Militant atheists are still unjustly persecuted; but rather because they are the old minority then because they are the new one. Free thought has exhausted its own freedom. It is weary of its own success. If any eager freethinker now hails philosophic freedom as the dawn, he is only like the man in Mark Twain who came out wrapped in blankets to see the sun rise and was just in time to see it set.
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