I have come here to-night, partly because I want to hear Mr. Russell, and partly because of an old affection for South Place and its traditions. I myself have been for more than forty years a professional teacher; and it is as a teacher—who thirty-seven years ago was dismissed for refusing religious conformity—that I most easily approach the problem of free thought. Though systems of education professing to teach men and women how to think have been in use in Europe for, perhaps, three thousand

When we speak of anything as “free,” our meaning is not definite unless we can say what it is free from . Whatever or whoever is “free” is not subject to some external compulsion, and to be precise we ought to say what this kind of compulsion is. Thus thought is “free” when it is free from certain kinds of outward control which are often present. Some of these kinds of control which must be absent if thought is to be “free” are obvious, but others are more subtle and elusive. To begin with the m

(Mrs.) C. Fletcher Smith and Ernest Carr , Hon. Secretaries . (Mrs.) F. M. Cockburn , Hon. Treasurer , “Peradeniya,” Northampton Road, Croydon. PRINTED BY WATTS AND CO., JOHNSON’S COURT, FLEET STREET, E.C.4. I should add that they re-appointed me later, when war passions had begun to cool. See The New Republic , Feb. 1, 1922, p. 259 ff. See The Invention of a New Religion . By Professor Chamberlain, of Tokio. Published by the Rationalist Press Association. (Now out of print.)...