erpret them and persuade to
their living. If you contend that mothers are greater than teachers, I
shall agree with you on condition that you will admit that a mother is
not really great unless she is a teacher.

(9) The desire and effort to learn facts, interpret and live them
constitute morality.

(10) Morality is the greatest thing in the world, because it is all
there is of real religion and politics.

(11) But, paradoxical as it may seem, there is one thing which is
greater than the greatest thing in the world--freedom.

(12) And the freedom which is greater than morality consists in the
liberty to learn, interpret, live and teach facts, without which liberty
a man may be a non-moral child, or an immoral hypocrite, but he cannot
be the possessor of the pearl of great price--morality, without which
human life is not worth the living or even possible.

II. My political faith is summed up in the following creed of twelve
articles:

(1) As the universe in general is self-existing, self-sustaining and
self-governing, so man in particular, who is but one among the
transitory, cosmic phenomena, has all of the potentialities of his own
life within himself, so that every man can say of himself what the
makers of Jesus had him say: I and my Father are one.

(2) Man has set a far-off and high-up goal of an ideal civilization for
himself, and is finding the way to it by his own discoveries, and is
walking therein by his own strength, so that he is not in the least
indebted to any of the gods of the supernaturalistic interpretations of
religion, either for the setting of the goal, or for what progress he
has made towards it.

(3) Nor is humanity indebted to its outstanding representatives for the
advance in the way of civilization, as is evident from the fact that,
but for the gods, it would have long since been far beyond the point
where the English-German war would have been within the range of
possibilities, and these gods are the gifts to a blind humanity by its
blind leaders.

(4) Humanity is not indebted to its physical scientists any more than to
its spiritual prophets for its advance in the way of civilization,
because the scientists have always worked, as the prophets have
preached, in the interests of the profiteers of the existing system of
economics. Economic systems have been the chief, if not indeed, the only
promoters of war, and the world war with its tremendous horrors would
not have been possible b