Talbot Mundy - "The Ivory Trail"

G.A. Henty - "The Lion of the North"

Charles M. Sheldon - "In His Steps"

Aristophanes - "Peace"

New Philadelphia Book Publisher Highlights Local Talent
Book and Publishing News from Publishers Newswire(tm)

Looking for Child to be on Cover of a New Book, 'The Model Child'
PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- The Philadelphia literary world will celebrate the launch of two new players today, April 10th: Kay Square Press, a new publishing company focused on Philadelphia-area artists, their stories, and their art; and Kay Square's first release, 'With the Rich and Mighty: Emlen Etting of Philadelphia' (ISBN: 978-0-9815129-0-7), a critical biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta.

FlatSigned Press Alleges Don Imus Remarks Damage Legacy of President Gerald R. Ford
NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Nathan Yungerberg, an accomplished model scout and professional child photographer is launching a nation-wide casting call to find the cover model for his highly anticipated book release, 'The Model Child: A Parents Guide to the Child Modeling Industry' (ISBN: 978-0-9817018-0-6).

Books: Lectures Of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Vol. I

C >> Col. Robert Green Ingersoll >> Lectures Of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Vol. I




According to the orthodox logic, God having furnished us with imperfect
minds has a right to demand a perfect result. Suppose Mr. Smith should
overhear a couple of small bugs holding a discussion as to the existence
of Mr. Smith, and suppose one should have the temerity to declare upon
the honor of a bug that he had examined the whole question to the best
of his ability, including the argument based upon design, and had come
to the conclusion that no man by the name of Smith had ever lived.
Think then of Mr. Smith flying into an ecstasy of rage, crushing the
atheist bug beneath his iron heel, while he exclaimed, "I will teach
you, blasphemous wretch, that Smith is a diabolical fact!" What then
can we think of God who would open the artillery of heaven upon one of
his own children for simply expressing his honest thought? And what
man, who really thinks, can help repeating the words of Aeneas, "If
there are gods they certainly pay no attention to the affairs of man."

In religious ideas and conceptions there has been for ages a slow and
steady development. At the bottom of the ladder (speaking of modern
times) is Catholicism, and at the top are atheism and science. The
intermediate rounds of this ladder are occupied by the various sects,
whose name is legion.

But whatever may be the truth on any subject has nothing to do with our
right to investigate that subject, and express any opinion we may form.
All that I ask is the right I freely accord to all others.

A few years ago a Methodist clergyman took it upon himself to give me a
piece of friendly advice. "Although you may disbelieve the bible," said
he, "you ought not to say so. That you should keep to yourself." "Do you
believe the bible?" said I. He replied, "Most assuredly." To which I
retorted, "Your answer conveys no information to me. You may be
following your own advice. You told me to suppress my opinions. Of
course a man who will advise others to dissimulate will not always be
particular about telling the truth himself."

It is the duty of each and every one to maintain his individuality.
"This above all, to thine own self be true, and it must follow as the
night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man." It is a
magnificent thing to be the sole proprietor of yourself. It is a
terrible thing to wake up at night and say: "There is nobody in this
bed!" It is humiliating to know that your ideas are all borrowed, and
that you are indebted to your memory for your principles, that your
religion is simply one of your habits, and that you would have
convictions if they were only contagious. It is mortifying to feel that
you belong to a mental mob and cry "crucify him" because the others do.
That you reap what the great and brave have sown, and that you can
benefit the world only by leaving it.

Surely every human being ought to attain to the dignity of the unit.
Surely it is worth something to be one and to feel that the census of
the universe would not be complete without counting you.

Surely there is grandeur in knowing that in the realm of thought, at
least, you are without a chain; that you have the right to explore all
heights and all depths; that there are no walls, fences, prohibited
places, nor sacred corners in all the vast expanse of thought; that
your intellect owes no allegiance to any being, human or divine; that
you hold all in fee and upon no condition and by no tenure whatever;
that in the world of mind you are relieved from all personal dictation,
and from the ignorant tyranny of majorities.

Surely it is worth something to feel that there are no priests, no
popes, no parties, no governments, no kings, no gods to whom your
intellect can be compelled to pay a reluctant homage.

Surely it is a joy to know that all the cruel ingenuity of bigotry can
devise no prison, no lock, no cell, in which for one instant to confine
a thought; that ideas cannot be dislocated by racks, nor crushed in
iron boots, nor burned with fire.

Surely it is sublime to think that the brain is a castle, and that
within its curious bastions and winding halls the soul, in spite of all
worlds and all beings, is the supreme sovereign of itself.





INGERSOLL'S LECTURE ON HUMBOLDT



Ladies and Gentlemen: Great minds seem to be a part of the infinite.
Those possessing them seem to be brothers of the mountains and the seas.

Humboldt was one of these. He was one of the few great enough to rise
above the superstition and prejudice of his time, and to know that
experience, observation and reason are the only basis of knowledge.

He became one of the greatest of men in spite of having been born rich
and noble--in spite of position. I say in spite of these things,
because wealth and position are generally the enemies of genius, and the
destroyers of talent.

It is often said of this or that man that he is a self-made man--that he
was born of the poorest and humblest parents, and that with every
obstacle to overcome he became great. This is a mistake. Poverty is
generally an advantage. Most of the intellectual giants of the world
have been nursed at the sad but loving breast of poverty. Most of those
who have climbed highest on the shining ladder of fame commenced at the
lowest round. They were reared in the straw-thatched cottages of
Europe, in the log-houses of America, in the factories of the great
cities, in the midst of toil, in the smoke and din of labor, and on the
verge of want. They were rocked by the feet of mothers whose hands, at
the same time, were busy with the needle or the wheel.

It is hard for the rich to resist the thousand allurements of pleasure,
and so I say that Humboldt, in spite of having been born to wealth and
high social position, became truly and grandly great.

In the antiquated and romantic castle of Tegel, by the side of the pine
forest, on the shore of the charming lake, near the beautiful city of
Berlin, the great Humboldt, one hundred years ago to-day, was born, and
there he was educated after the method suggested by Rousseau--Campe, the
philologist and critic, and the intellectual Kunth being his tutors.
There he received the impressions that determined his career; there the
great idea that the universe is governed by law took possession of his
mind, and there he dedicated his life to the demonstration of this
sublime truth.

He came to the conclusion that the source of man's unhappiness is his
ignorance of nature.

He longed to give a physical description of the universe--a grand
picture of nature; to account for all phenomena; to discover the laws
governing the world; to do away with that splendid delusion called
special-providence, and to establish the fact that the universe is
governed by law.

To establish this truth was, and is, of infinite importance to mankind.
That fact is the death-knell of superstition; it gives liberty to every
soul, annihilates fear, and ushers in the Age of Reason.

The object of this illustrious man was to comprehend the phenomena of
physical objects in their general connection, and to represent nature as
one great whole, moved and animated by internal forces.

For this purpose he turned his attention to descriptive botany,
traversing distant lands and mountain ranges to ascertain with certainty
the geographical distribution of plants. He investigated the laws
regulating the differences of temperature and climate, and the changes
of the atmosphere. He studied the formation of the earth's crust,
explored the deepest mines, ascended the highest mountains, and wandered
through the craters of extinct volcanoes.

He became thoroughly acquainted with chemistry, with astronomy, with
terrestrial magnetism; and as the investigation of one subject leads to
all others, for the reason that there is a mutual dependence and a
necessary connection between all facts, so Humboldt became acquainted
with all the known sciences.

His fame does not depend so much upon his discoveries (although he
discovered enough to make hundreds of reputations) as upon his vast and
splendid generalizations.

He was to science what Shakespeare was to the drama.

He found, so to speak, the world full of unconnected facts, all portions
of a vast system--parts of a great machine; he discovered the
connection that each bears to all, put them together, and demonstrated
beyond all contradiction that the earth is governed by law.

He knew that to discover the connection of phenomena is the primary aim
of all natural investigation. He was infinitely practical.

Origin and destiny were questions with which he had nothing to do.

His surroundings made him what he was.

In accordance with a law not fully comprehended, he was a production of
his time.

Great men do not live alone; they are surrounded by the great; they are
the instruments used to accomplish the tendencies of their generation;
they fulfill the prophecies of their age.

Nearly all of the scientific men of the eighteenth century had the same
idea entertained by Humboldt, but most of them in a dim and confused
way. There was, however, a general belief among the intelligent that
the world is governed by law, and that there really exists a connection
between all facts, or that all facts are simply the different aspects of
a general fact, and that the task of science is to discover this
connection; to comprehend this general fact or to announce the laws of
things.

Germany was full of thought, and her universities swarmed with
philosophers and grand thinkers in every department of knowledge.

Humboldt was the friend and companion of the greatest poets, historians,
philologists, artists, statesmen, critics and logicians of his time.

He was the companion of Schiller, who believed that man would be
regenerated through the influence of the beautiful; of Goethe, the
grand patriarch of German literature; of Wieland, who has been called
the Voltaire of Germany; of Herder, who wrote the outlines of a
philosophical history of man; of Kotzebue, who lived in the world of
romance; of Schleiermacher, the pantheist; of Schlegel, who gave to his
country the enchanted realm of Shakespeare--of the sublime Kant, author
of the first work published in Germany on Pure Reason; of Fichte, the
infinite idealist; of Schopenhauer, the European Buddhist who followed
the great Gautama to the painless and dreamless Nirvana, and of hundreds
of others whose names are familiar to and honored by the scientific
world.

The German mind had been grandly roused from the long lethargy of the
dark ages of ignorance, fear and faith. Guided by the holy light of
reason, every department of knowledge was investigated, enriched and
illustrated.

Humboldt breathed the atmosphere of investigation; old ideas were
abandoned; old creeds, hallowed by centuries, were thrown aside;
thought became courageous; the athlete, Reason, challenged to mortal
combat the monsters of superstition.

No wonder that under these influences Humboldt formed the great purpose
of presenting to the world a picture of nature, in order that men might,
for the first time, behold the face of their Mother.

Europe becoming too small for his genius, he visited the tropics in the
new world, where, in the most circumscribed limits, he could find the
greatest number of plants, of animals, and the greatest diversity of
climate, that he might ascertain the laws governing the production and
distribution of plants, animals and men, and the effects of climate upon
them all. He sailed along the gigantic Amazon--the mysterious Orinoco--
traversed the Pampas--climbed the Andes until he stood upon the crags of
Chimborazo, more than eighteen thousand feet above the level of the sea,
and climbed on until blood flowed from his eyes and lips. For nearly
five years he pursued his investigations in the new world, accompanied
by the intrepid Bonpland. Nothing escaped his attention. He was the
best intellectual organ of these new revelations of science. He was
calm, reflective and eloquent; filled with a sense of the beautiful,
and the love of truth. His collections were immense, and valuable
beyond calculation to every science. He endured innumerable hardships,
braved countless dangers in unknown and savage lands, and exhausted his
fortune for the advancement of true learning.

Upon his return to Europe he was hailed as the second Columbus; as the
scientific discoverer of America; as the revealer of a new world; as
the great demonstrator of the sublime truth that universe is governed by
law.

I have seen a picture of the old man, sitting upon a mountain side--
above him the eternal snow; below, smiling valley of the tropics,
filled with vine and palm. His chin upon his breast, his eyes deep,
thoughtful and calm, his forehead majestic--grander than the mountain
upon which he sat. "Crowned with the snow of his whitened hair," he
looked the intellectual autocrat of this world.

Not satisfied with his discoveries in America, he crossed the steppes of
Asia, the wastes of Siberia, the great Ural range, adding to the
knowledge of mankind at every step. His energy acknowledged no
obstacle, his life knew no leisure; every day was filled with labor and
with thought. He was one of the apostles of science, and he served his
divine master with a self-sacrificing zeal that knew no abatement--with
an ardor that constantly increased, and with a devotion unwavering and
constant as the polar star.

In order that the people at large might have the benefit of his numerous
discoveries, and his vast knowledge, he delivered at Berlin a course of
lectures, consisting of sixty-one free addresses, upon the following
subjects:

Five upon the nature and limits of physical geography.

Three were devoted to a history of science.

Two to inducements to a study of natural science.

Sixteen on the heavens.

Five on the form, density, latent heat, and magnetic power of the earth,
and to the polar light.

Four were on the nature of the crust of the earth, on hot springs,
earthquakes and volcanoes.

Two on mountains, and the type of their formation.

Two on the form of the earth's surface, on the connection of continents,
and the elevation of soil over ravines.

Three on the sea as a globular fluid surrounding the earth.

Ten on the atmosphere--as an elastic fluid surrounding the earth, and on
the distribution of heat.

One on the geographic distribution of organized matter in general,

Three on the geography of plants.

Three on the geography of animals; and

Two on the races of men.

These lectures are what is known as the Cosmos, and present a scientific
picture of the world--of infinite diversity in unity; of ceaseless
motion in the eternal grasp of law.

These lectures contain the result of his investigation, observation and
experience; they furnish the connection between phenomena; they
disclose some of the changes through which the earth has passed in the
countless ages; the history of vegetation, animals and men; the effects
of climate upon individuals and nations; the relation we sustain to
other worlds, and demonstrate that all phenomena, whether insignificant
or grand, exist in accordance with inexorable law.

There are some truths, however, that we never should forget:
Superstition has always been the relentless enemy of science; faith has
been a hater of demonstration; hypocrisy has been sincere only in its
dread of truth, and all religions are inconsistent with mental freedom.

Since the murder of Hypatia in the fifth century, when the polished
blade of Greek philosophy was broken by the club of ignorant
Catholicism, until today, superstition has detested every effort of
reason.

It is almost impossible to conceive of the completeness of the victory
that the church achieved over philosophy. For ages science was utterly
ignored; thought was a poor slave; an ignorant priest was master of
the world; faith put out the eyes of the soul; the reason was a
trembling coward; the imagination was set on fire of hell; every human
feeling was sought to be suppressed; love was considered infinitely
sinful; pleasure was the road to eternal fire, and God was supposed to
be happy only when his children were miserable. The world was governed
by an Almighty's whim; prayers could change the order of things, halt
the grand procession of nature; could produce rain, avert pestilence,
famine, and death in all its forms. There was no idea of the certain;
all depended upon divine pleasure--or displeasure, rather; heaven was
full of inconsistent malevolence, and earth of ignorance. Everything
was done to appease the divine wrath; every public calamity was caused
by the sins of the people; by a failure to pay tithes, or for having,
even in secret, felt a disrespect for a priest. To the poor multitude
the earth was a kind of enchanted forest, full of demons ready to
devour, and theological serpents lurking, with infinite power, to
fascinate and torture the unhappy and impotent soul. Life to them was a
dim and mysterious labyrinth, in which they wandered weary, and lost,
guided by priests as bewildered as themselves, without knowing that at
every step the Ariadne of reason offered them the long lost clue.

The very heavens were full of death; the lightning was regarded as the
glittering vengeance of God, and the earth was thick with snares for the
unwary feet of man. The soul was supposed to be crowded with the wild
beasts of desire; the heart to be totally corrupt, prompting only to
crime; virtues were regarded as deadly sins in disguise; there was a
continual warfare being waged between the Deity and the devil for the
possession of every soul, the latter generally being considered
victorious. The flood, the tornado, the volcano, were all evidences of
the displeasure of heaven and the sinfulness of man. The blight that
withered, the frost that blackened, the earthquake that devoured, were
the messengers of the creator.

The world was governed by fear.

Against all the evils of nature there was known only the defense of
prayer, of fasting, of credulity, and devotion. Man, in his
helplessness, endeavored to soften the heart of God. The faces of the
multitude were blanched with fear, and wet with tears; they were the
prey of hypocrites, kings and priests.

My heart bleeds when I contemplate the sufferings endured by the
millions now dead; of those who lived when the world appeared to be
insane; when the heavens were filled with an infinite HORROR, who
snatched babes, with dimpled hands and rosy cheeks, from the white
breasts of mothers and dashed them into an abyss of eternal flame.

Slowly, beautifully, like the coming of the dawn, came the grand truth
that the universe is governed by law--that disease fastens itself upon
the good and upon the bad; that the tornado cannot be stopped by
counting beads; that the rushing lava pauses not for bended knees, the
lightning for clasped and uplifted hands, nor the cruel waves of the sea
for prayer; that paying tithes causes rather than prevents famine;
that pleasure is not sin; that happiness is the only good; that demons
and gods exist only in the imagination; that faith is a lullaby, sung
to put the soul to sleep; that devotion is a bribe that fear offers to
supposed power; that offering rewards in another world for obedience in
this, is simply buying a soul on credit; that knowledge consists in
ascertaining the laws of nature, and that wisdom is the science of
happiness. Slowly, grandly, beautifully, these truths are dawning upon
mankind.

From Copernicus we learned that this earth is only a grain of sand on
the infinite shore of the universe; that everywhere we are surrounded
by shining worlds vastly greater than our own, all moving and existing
in accordance with law. True, the earth began to grow small, but man
began to grow great.

The moment the fact was established that other worlds are governed by
law, it was only natural to conclude that our little world was also
under its dominion. The old theological method of accounting for
physical phenomena by the pleasure and displeasure of the Deity was, by
the intellectual, abandoned. They found: that disease, death, life,
thought, heat, cold, the seasons, the winds, the dreams of man, the
instinct of animals--in short, that all physical and mental phenomena
are governed by law, absolute, eternal and inexorable.

Let it be understood by the term Law is meant the same invariable
relations of succession and resemblance predicated of all facts
springing from like conditions. Law is a fact--not a cause. It is a
fact that like conditions produce like results; this fact is LAW. When
we say that the universe is governed by law, we mean that this fact,
called law, is incapable of change; that it is, has been, and forever
will be, the same inexorable, immutable FACT, inseparable from all
phenomena. Law, in this sense, was not enacted or made. It could not
have been otherwise than as it is. That which necessarily exists has no
creator.

Only a few years ago this earth was considered the real center of the
universe; all the stars were supposed to revolve around this
insignificant atom. The German mind, more than any other, has done away
with this piece of egotism. Purbach and Mullerus, in the fifteenth
century, contributed most to the advancement of astronomy in their day.
To the latter the world is indebted for the introduction of decimal
fractions, which completed our arithmetical notation, and formed the
second of the three steps by which, in modern times, the science of
numbers has been so greatly improved; and yet both of these men
believed in the most childish absurdities--at least in enough of them to
die without their orthodoxy having ever been questioned.

Next came the great Copernicus, and he stands at the head of the heroic
thinkers of his time, who had the courage and the mental strength to
break the chains of prejudice, custom and authority, and to establish
truth on the basis of experience, observation and reason. He removed
the earth, so to speak, from the center of the universe, and ascribed to
it a twofold motion, and demonstrated the true position which it
occupies in the solar system.

At his bidding the earth began to revolve. At the command of his genius
it commenced its grand flight amid the eternal constellations around the
sun. For fifty years his discoveries were disregarded. All at once, by
the exertions of Galileo, they were kindled into so grand a
conflagration as to consume the philosophy of Aristotle, to alarm the
hierarchy of Rome, and to threaten the existence of every opinion not
founded upon experience, observation and reason.

The earth was no longer considered a universe governed by the caprices
of some revengeful Deity, who had made the stars out of what he had left
after completing the world, and had stuck them in the sky simply to
adorn the night.

I have said this much concerning astronomy because it was the first
splendid step forward! The first sublime blow that shattered the lance
and shivered the shield of superstition; the first real help that man
received from heaven. Because it was the first great lever placed
beneath the altar of a false religion; the first revelation of the
infinite to man, the first authoritative declaration that the universe
is governed by law; the first science that gave the lie direct to the
cosmogony of barbarism; and because it is the sublimest victory that
reason has achieved.

In speaking of astronomy I have confined myself to the discoveries made
since the revival of learning. Long ago, on the banks of the Ganges,
ages before Copernicus lived, Aryabhatta taught that the earth is a
sphere and revolves on its own axis. This, however, does not detract
from the glory of the great German. The discovery of the Hindoo had
been lost in the midnight of Europe--in the age of faith--and Copernicus
was as much a discoverer as though Aryabhatta had never lived.

In this short address there is no time to speak of other sciences, and
to point out the particular evidence furnished by each to establish the
dominion of law, nor to more than mention the name of Descartes, the
first who undertook to give an explanation of the celestial motions, or
who formed the vast and philosophic conception of reducing all the
phenomena of the universe to the same law; of Montaigne, one of the
heroes of common sense; of Galvani, whose experiments gave the
telegraph to the world; of Voltaire, who contributed more than any
other of the sons of men to the destruction of religious intolerance;
of August Comte, whose genius erected to itself a monument that still
touches the stars; of Guttenberg, Watt, Stephenson, Arkwright, all
soldiers of science in the grand army of the dead kings.

The glory of science is that it is freeing the soul-breaking the mental
manacles--getting the brain out of bondage--giving courage to thought--
filling the world with mercy, justice and joy.

Science found agriculture plowing with a stick--reaping with a sickle--
commerce at the mercy of the treacherous waves and the inconstant winds
--a world without books--without schools--man denying the authority of
reason, employing his ingenuity in the manufacture of instruments of
torture--in building inquisitions and cathedrals. It found the land
filled with malicious monks--with persecuting Protestants, and the
burners of men. It found a world full of fear, ignorance upon its
knees; credulity the greatest virtue; women treated like beasts, of
burden; cruelty the only means of reformation. It found the world at
the mercy of disease and famine; men trying to read their fates in the
stars, and to tell their fortunes by signs and wonders; generals
thinking to conquer their enemies by making the sign of the cross, or by
telling a rosary. It found all history full of petty and ridiculous
falsehood, and the Almighty was supposed to spend most of his time
turning sticks into snakes, drowning boys for swimming on Sunday, and
killing little children for the purpose of converting their parents. It
found the earth filled with slaves and tyrants, the people in all
countries downtrodden, half naked, half starved, without hope, and
without reason in the world.