of Humboldt
outweighs them all." The men who stand in the front rank, the men who
know most of the secrets of nature, the men who know most are today the
advanced infidels of this world. I have lived long enough to see the
brand of intellectual inferiority on every orthodox brain.

INGERSOLL'S LECTURE ON TALMAGIAN THEOLOGY.

Ladies and Gentlemen: Nothing can be more certain than that no human
being can by any possibility control his thought. We are in this
world--we see, we hear, we feel, we taste; and everything in nature
makes an impression upon the brain, and that wonderful something,
enthroned there with these materials, weaves what we call thought, and
the brain can no more help thinking than the heart can help beating.
The blood pursues its old accustomed round without our will. The heart
beats without asking leave of us, and the brain thinks in spite of all
that we can do. This being true, no human being can justly be held
responsible for his thought any more than for the beating of his heart,
any more than for the course pursued by the blood, any more than for
breathing air. And yet for thousands of years thought has been thought
to be a crime, and thousands and millions have threatened us with
eternal fire if we give the product of that brain. Each brain, in my
judgment, is a field where nature sows the seeds of thought, and
thought is the crop that man reaps, and it certainly cannot be a crime
to gather; it certainly cannot be a crime to tell it, which simply
amounts to the right to sell your crop or to exchange your product for
the product of some other man's brain. That is all it is. Most
brains--at least some--are rather poor fields, and the orthodox worst
of all. That field produces mostly sorrel and mullin, while there are
fields which, like the tropic world, are filled with growth, and where
you find the vine and palm, royal children of the sun and brain. I
then stand simply for absolute freedom of thought--absolute; and I
don't believe, if there be a God, that it will be or can be pleasing to
Him to see one of His children afraid to express what he thinks. And,
if I were God, I never would cease making men until I succeeded in
making one grand enough to tell his honest opinion.

Now there has been a struggle, you know, a long time between the
believers in the natural and the supernatural--between gentlemen who
are going to reward us in another world and those who propose to make