s
and Magellan. I thank Galileo, and Copernicus, and Kepler, and Des
Cartes, and Newton, and La Place. I thank Locke, and Hume, and Bacon,
and Shakespeare, and Kant, and Fichte, and Liebnitz, and Goethe. I thank
Fulton, and Watts, and Volta, and Galvani, and Franklin, and Morse, who
made lightning the messenger of man. I thank Humboldt, the Shakespeare
of science. I thank Crompton and Arkwright, from whose brains leaped the
looms and spindles that clothe the world. I thank Luther for protesting
against the abuses of the church, and I denounce him because he was
the enemy of liberty. I thank Calvin for writing a book in favor of
religious freedom, and I abhor him because he burned Servetus. I thank
Knox for resisting episcopal persecution, and I hate him because he
persecuted in his turn. I thank the Puritans for saying "Resistance to
tyrants is obedience to God," and yet I am compelled to say that they
were tyrants themselves. I thank Thomas Paine because he was a believer
in liberty, and because he did as much to make my country free as any
other human being. I thank Voltaire, that great man who, for half a
century, was the intellectual emperor of Europe, and who, from his
throne at the foot of the Alps, pointed the finger of scorn at every
hypocrite in Christendom. I thank Darwin, Haeckel and Buchner, Spencer,
Tyndall and Huxley, Draper, Leckey and Buckle. I thank the inventors,
the discoverers, the thinkers, the scientists, the explorers. I thank
the honest millions who have toiled.

I thank the brave men with brave thoughts. They are the Atlases upon
whose broad and mighty shoulders rests the grand fabric of civilization.
They are the men who have broken, and are still breaking, the chains of
Superstition. They are the Titans who carried Olympus by assault, and
who will soon stand victors upon Sinai's crags.

We are beginning to learn that to exchange a mistake for the truth--a
superstition for a fact--to ascertain the real--is to progress.

Happiness is the only possible good, and all that tends to the happiness
of man is right, and is of value. All that tends to develop the bodies
and minds of men; all that gives us better houses, better clothes,
better food, better pictures, grander music, better heads, better
hearts; all that renders us more intellectual and more loving, nearer
just; that makes us better husbands and wives, better children, better
citizens--all these things combined produce what I call Progres