Old Radicals will remember that Richard Carlile published a work entitled "Every Woman's Book," which deals with the same subject and advocates the same object as Dr. Knowlton's pamphlet R. D. Owen objected to the "style and tone" of Carlile's "Every Woman's Book," as not being in "good taste," and he wrote his "Moral Physiology" to do in America what Carlile's work was intended to do in England. This work of Carlile's was stigmatized as "indecent" and "immoral," because it advocated, as does Dr. Knowlton's, the use of preventive checks to population. In striving to carry on Carlile's work, we cannot expect to escape Carlile's reproach; but, whether applauded or condemned, we mean to carry it on, socially as well as politically and theologically.
We believe, with the Rev. Mr. Malthus, that population has a tendency to increase faster than the means of existence, and that some checks must therefore exercise control over population. The checks now exercised are semi-starvation and preventable disease; the enormous mortality among the infants of the poor is one of the checks which now keep down the population. The checks that ought to control population are scientific, and it is these which we advocate. We think it more moral to prevent the conception of children than, after they are born, to murder them by want of food, air and clothing. We advocate scientific checks to population, because, so long as poor men have large families, pauperism is a necessity, and from pauperism grow crime and disease. The wages which would support the parents and two or three children in comfort and decency, is utterly insufficient to maintain a family of twelve or fourteen, and we consider it a crime to bring into the world human beings doomed to misery or to premature death. It is not only the hard-working classes which are concerned in this question. The poor preacher, the struggling man of business, the young professional man, are often made wretched for life by their inordinately large families, and their years are passed in one long battle to live; meanwhile, the woman's health is sacrificed and her life embittered from the same cause. To all of these we point the way of relief and happiness; for the sake of these we publish what others fear to issue; and we do it confident that if we fail the first time, we shall succeed at last, and that the English public will not permit the authorities to stifle a discussion of the most important social question which can influence a nation's welfare.
Charles Bradlaugh.
Annie Besant.
PHILOSOPHICAL PROEM
Consciousness is not a "principle" or substance of any kind, nor is it, strictly speaking, a property of any substance or being. It is a peculiar action of the nervous system, and the system is said to be sensible, or to possess the property of sensibility, because those sentient actions which constitute our different consciousnesses may be excited in it. The nervous system includes not only the brain and spinal marrow, but numerous soft white cords, called nerves, which extend from the brain and spinal marrow to every part of the body in which a sensation can be excited.
A sensation is a sentient action of a nerve and the brain; a thought or idea (both the same thing) is a sentient action of the brain alone. A sensation or a thought is consciousness, and there is no consciousness but that which consists either in a sensation or a thought.
Agreeable consciousness constitutes what we call happiness, and disagreeable consciousness constitutes misery. As sensations are a higher degree of consciousness than mere thought, it follows that agreeable sensations constitute a more exquisite happiness than agreeable thoughts. That portion of happiness which consists in agreeable sensations is commonly called pleasure. No thoughts are agreeable except those which were originally excited by or have been associated with agreeable sensations. Hence, if a person never had experienced any agreeable sensations, he could have no agreeable thoughts, and would, of course, be an entire stranger to happiness.
There are five species of sensations—seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and feeling. There are many varieties of feeling—as the feelings of hunger, thirst, cold, hardness, etc. Many of these feelings are excited by agents that act upon the exterior of the body, such as solid substances of every kind, heat, and various chemical irritants. These latter feelings are called passions.