A BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY OF ANCIENT, MEDIEVAL, AND MODERN FREETHINKERS 1 A BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY OF ANCIENT, MEDIEVAL, AND MODERN FREETHINKERS By Joseph McCabe Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com A BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY OF ANCIENT, MEDIEVAL, AND MODERN FREETHINKERS 2 Abbe, Professor Ernst (1840-1905) He was not only a distinguished German physicist and one of the most famous inventors on the staff at the Zeiss optical works at Jena but a notable social reformer, By a generous scheme of profit-sharing he virtually handed over the great Zeiss enterprise to the workers. Abbe was an intimate friend of Haeckel and shared his atheism (or Monism). Leonard Abbot says in his life of Ferrer that Abbe had "just the same ideas and aims as Ferrer." And-Er-Rahman III (891-961) The greatest of the Moslem Arab Caliphs, who raised Spain from a state of profound demoralization to one of unprecedented prosperity, culture and brilliance while Christian Europe lay in the darkest phase of the Dark Age. It was from the splendor of his empire that civilization was rekindled in France, then in Europe generally. See S.P. Scott's Moorish Empire in Europe (3 vols. 1904) Scott piously deplores his "infidelity" and sensuality and then describes his magnificent work in lyrical language. Stanley Lane Poole (The Moors in Spain, 1897) also says that he created a civilization "such as the wildest imagination can hardly conjure up." He defied the Koran all his life and was clearly an atheist. Abelard, Peter (1080-1142) The most learned and far away the most brilliant master in Christian Europe in the twelfth century. He was "the idol of Paris," and troubadour as well as a philosopher, until a canon of the cathedral had him castrated for an affair with his niece Heloise. This soured his disposition, so that it is andurd to call his letters to Heloise "love-letters," but his teaching was still so free that he was twice (1121 and 1141) solemnly condemned by the Church. His first principle was that "Reason precedes Faith." Compare the date with the preceding paragraph. The cultural splendor of Spain had just roused France from the Dark Age. Ackermann, Louise Victorine (1813-1890). A French woman writer of great distinction whose salon was one of the most brilliant intellectual centers of Paris. She is very resolutely Agnostic, without using that word in her Pensees d'une solitare (written later in life) and she wrote a poem for her tombstone which begins: "I do not know." In the strict sense she was an atheist. Adams, John (1735-1826) Second President of the United States. He signed the Treaty of Tripoli, which began (article 11), "The Government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion," he continued, "The doctrine of the divinity of Jesus has made a convenient cover for andurdity." The treaty was ratified by the Senate in 1797 without a single exception. His rejection of Christianity, which he professed to admire morally, runs all through his letters to Jefferson, of which there is a good selection edited by Welstach (1925), through it is better to read them in the original edition (1856). The correspondence of the two men, the most accomplished who ever rose to high political office in America- they freely quote Greek, Latin, Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com A BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY OF ANCIENT, MEDIEVAL, AND MODERN FREETHINKERS 3 Italian and French to each other- it is very free and most interesting. The attempts of his grandson and a few others to represent Adams as a Unitarian is not honest. He was not even a very firm Deist. One letter he wrote to Jefferson (May 12, 1820), who says that its "crowd of skepticism" kept him awake at night, has been suppressed by the pious Unitarian grandson, but in another (January 17, 1820) he defines God as "an essence that we know nothing of" and says that the attempts of philosophers to get beyond this are "games of push pin." He calls the Incarnation an "awful blasphemy," and says of the First Cause "whether we call it Fate or Chance or God." He believed in personal immortality but admitted that he knew no proof of it. He was, he says in a letter of May 15, 1817, often "tempted to think that this would be the best of all possible worlds if there were no religion in it." His family fell away to respectable Unitarianism but his grandson Charles Francis Adams (1835-1915) the distinguished historian, was an Agnostic of the Leslie Stephen school, as is shown in the Life and Letters. Adamson, Professor Robert (1852-1902) Described in the Cambridge History of Modern Literature (XIV,48) as "the most learned of contemporary philosophers." He was an outspoken \Agnostic and a Utilitarian in ethics. In the symposium Ethical Democracy (1900) he says that even the most pretentious proofs of the existence of God are "intellectually unrepresentable" and that "the world conquered Christianity" instead of the other way about. Addams, Jane (1863-1935) Famous American reformer, founder of Hull House at Chicago, Nobel Prize Winner, and for 7 years President of the Womens' International League for Peace and Freedom. In view of her position Miss Adams, who was the aunt of the late Marcet Haldeman-Julius, had to be reticent about religion, but her biographer F.W. Linn says that she never departed from the Rationalism which her father had taught her and "just joined the Congregational Church as she might join a labor-union." Her German biographer, F. Rotten says the same. All Chicago respected her high character and followed her funeral, which by her direction was unsectarian. Addison: "Atheism is old fashioned word, I am a freethinker." (Webster's dictionary) Aikenhead, Thomas (1678-1697) A Scottish undergraduate of Edinburgh University who merits inclusion here as a martyr of freethought. Brooding over his Bible he came to the conclusion that it was "a rhapsody of ill contrived nonsense" and said so. After a travesty of a trial he was condemned and hanged. Airy, Sir George Biddell, K.C.B., D.C.L., LL.D., F.R.S. etc. (1801-1892) British Astronomer Royal, President of the Royal Society and loaded with European honors for his immense services to astronomy and other sciences. In the midst of his honors (1876) he published Notes of the Earlier Hebrew Scriptures in which he rejects revelation and miracles. He was a Theist but assured the public that he regarded "the ostensible familiarity of the biblical historian with the counsels of the Omnipotent as merely oriental allegories. Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com A BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY OF ANCIENT, MEDIEVAL, AND MODERN FREETHINKERS 4 Akbar, the Great (1542-1602) "greatest and wisest of the Mogui Emperors" (Enc. Brit.). He ruled the empire of India, which he conquered, with a wisdom and beneficence which few monarchs surpassed, and all historiand admit that he rejected the Moslem religion and cultivated and tried to establish a pure theism with tolerance of all sects. His Grand Vizier had the same views. Alembert, Jean Le Rond D' (1717-1783) the second greatest of the French Encyclopaedists, a foundling who became one of the most learned men of France, a member of the French and Berlin Academies and highly honored by Frederic the Great and Catherine the Great. He was the finest mathematician of his time and a man of simple ways and lofty character.. Alembert preferred to call himself a skeptic rather than an atheist, thinking that the latter implied an express denial of the existence of God. Aleieri, Count Francesco (1712-1761), Italian writer (science, history and philosophy) whose great learning won high favor with Frederic the Great, Augustus of Saxony, and even (at first) Pope, Clement XIV who pronounced him one of those rare men whom one would fain love even beyond the grave" Friend of Voltaire and a Deist. Frederic erected a monument to him. Alice, Princess. See Victoria Allbrutt, Sir Thomas Clifford, K.C.B., M.A., M.D., Sc. D. F.R.S. (1826-1925)., one of the most distinguished British physiciand of his time. His works on medicine and the Middle Ages are valuable. He was an agnostic, writing that "the issues of being...is not solved but proved insoluble." Allen, Colonel Ethan (1737-1789), leader of the Green Mountain Boys of Vermont in the War of Independence, later in the State Legislature. He published what seems to have been the first anti-Christian (Deistic) work in America, Reason the Only Oracle of Man (1781). There is a statue of him in Montpelier. Allenby, Viscount Field Marshal Edmund Henry Hynman (1861-1936) one of the leading British Commanders in the First European War. He was a member of the British Rationalist Press Association, and in the course of an eloquent appeal for peace (Allenby's Last Message) at his inauguration as Rector of Edinburgh University shortly before his death he ruled out religion as a help. Allingham, William (1824-1889) Irish poet and close friend of Froude, Tennyson, Rossetti and other famous writers whose conversations with him on religion are recorded in his Diary (1907). Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com A BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY OF ANCIENT, MEDIEVAL, AND MODERN FREETHINKERS 5 They were all skeptics, he shows. He professed to be an atheist but said that "we can not in the least comprehend or even think Deity." Alma-Tadema, Sir Laurence, Litt. D.D.C.L., R.A., F.S.A., O.M.