Persecution as the Greatest Threat to Intellectual Freedom
RUSSELL, Bertrand. Religion and Science. London: Thornton Butterworth Ltd. 1935.
Small 8vo. Publisher’s blue-green cloth lettered in blue with printer’s device blocked in blue to upper board, in the original yellow dust-jacket printed in black; pp. 256, [4 (publisher’s catalogue)]; some spotting to rear cover of jacket, two old archival tape repairs to interior of jacket, spine ends lightly bumped with corresponding light fraying to jacket, spine of cloth and jacket slightly discoloured; a very good copy; old ownership inscription to front free endpaper.
First edition, scarce in the dust-jacket, of Russell’s history of the conflicts between science and traditional religion from the Renaissance to the twentieth century.
This was no. 178 in the Home University Library of Modern Knowledge, the remarkable series of popular non-fiction books written by prominent intellectuals. The series was edited by H.A.L. Fisher, Warden of New College, Oxford; Gilbert Murray, Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford; and Julian Huxley (brother of Aldous Huxley), then Honorary Professor of Zoology at King’s College, London. Other contributors to the series included Isaiah Berlin, Hilaire Belloc, Harold J. Laski, and John Masefield. Here, Russell argues that empiricism always overcomes dogma, but also sees that science cannot address individual, mystical experiences, identifying this as the central intellectual tension of the post-Enlightenment world and the reason why ideology will always continue to threaten progress.
In the final pages Russell expands his definition of dogma to include the secular movements of Fascism and Communism, a sobering mark of his prescience on the brink of the Second World War. He highlights in particular the growing persecution of intellectuals in Germany and Russia, calling it more severe than any actions taken by the Church since the seventeenth century: ‘new religions have arisen, with all the persecuting zeal of vigorous youth, and with as great a readiness to oppose science as characterized the Inquisition in the time of Galileo’ (p. 247).
SKU: 2125153