Walter Bagehot

The 'liberation of humanity,' as Goethe used to call it--the deliverance of men from the yoke of inherited usage, and of rigid, unquestionable law--was begun in Greece, and had many of its greatest effects, good and evil, on Greece.

The age of debate is beginning, and even Herodotus, the least of a wrangler of any man, and the most of a sweet and simple narrator, felt the effect.

When we come to Thucydides, the results of discussion are as full as they have ever been; his light is pure, 'dry light,' free from the 'humours' of habit, and purged from consecrated usage.

Every page of Aristotle and Plato bears ample and indelible trace of the age of discussion in which they lived; and thought cannot possibly be freer.

The deliverance of the speculative intellect from traditional and customary authority was altogether complete.

Two great classes of the people, the slaves and women, were almost excluded from such qualities; even the free population doubtless contained a far greater proportion of very ignorant and very superstitious persons than we are in the habit…

We fix our attention on the best specimens of Athenian culture--on the books which have descended to us, and we forget that the corporate action of the Athenian people at various critical junctures exhibited the most gross superstition.

Still, as far as the intellectual and cultivated part of society is concerned, the triumph of reason was complete; the minds of the highest philosophers were then as ready to obey evidence and reason as they have ever been since; probably…

The rule of custom over them at least had been wholly broken, and the primary conditions of intellectual progress were in that respect satisfied.

In Religion there was progress, but without it there was not any.

All over antiquity, all over the East, and over other parts of the world which preserve more or less nearly their ancient condition, there are two classes of religious teachers--one, the priests, the inheritors of past accredited…

Accordingly it is their office and calling to assert themselves as organs of the divine will; they are justified in opposing their authority to every power of the world.

All that is new comes from the prophets; all which is old is retained by the priests.

But the peculiarity of Judaea--a peculiarity which I do not for a moment pretend that I can explain--is that the prophetic revelations are, taken as a whole, indisputably improvements; that they contain, as time goes on, at each succeeding…

My point is that there is no such spreading impetus in progress thus caused as there is in progress caused by discussion.

To receive a particular conclusion upon the ipse dixit, upon the accepted authority of an admired instructor, is obviously not so vivifying to the argumentative and questioning intellect as to argue out conclusions for yourself.

The characteristic of the Middle Ages may be approximately--though only approximately--described as a return to the period of authoritative usage and as an abandonment of the classical habit of independent and self-choosing thought.

The principal agent in breaking up the persistent medieval customs, which were so fixed that they seemed likely to last for ever, or till some historical catastrophe overwhelmed them, was the popular element in the ancient polity which was…

The history of the English Constitution, as far as the world cares for it, is, in fact, the complex history of the popular element in this ancient polity, which was sometimes weaker and sometimes stronger, but which has never died out, has…

The history of this growth is the history of the English people; and the discussions about this constitution and the discussions within it, the controversies as to its structure and the controversies as to its true effects, have mainly…

Since Luther's time there has been a conviction more or less rooted, that a man may by an intellectual process think out a religion for himself, and that, as the highest of all duties, he ought to do so.

The influence of the political discussion, and the influence of the religious discussion, have been so long and so firmly combined, and have so effectually enforced one another, that the old notions of loyalty, and fealty, and authority…

Trade, for example, is obviously a force which has done much to bring men of different customs and different beliefs into close contiguity, and has thus aided to change the customs and the beliefs of them all.

In modern Europe, the existence of a cosmopolite Church, claiming to be above nations, and really extending through nations, and the scattered remains of Roman law and Roman civilisation co-operated with the liberating influence of…

But perhaps in no case have these subsidiary causes alone been able to generate intellectual freedom; certainly in all the most remarkable cases the influence of discussion has presided at the creation of that freedom, and has been active…