[23] Kirkup, History of Socialism, 1892, p. 64. [↑]
[24] “From an early age he had lost all belief in the prevailing forms of religion” (Kirkup, p. 59). [↑]
[25] Reformers of almost all schools, indeed, from the first regarded Owen with more or less genial incredulity, some criticizing him acutely without any ill-will. See Podmore’s Robert Owen, 1906, i, 238–42. Southey was one of the first to detect his lack of religious belief. Id. p. 222, n. [↑]
[27] Kirkup, as cited, p. 64. [↑]
[29] “Extraordinary self-complacency,” “autocratic action,” “arrogance,” are among the expressions used of him by his ablest biographer. (Podmore, ii, 641.) Of him might be said, as of Emerson by himself, “the children of the Gods do not argue”—the faculty being absent. [↑]
[30] Pamphlet sold at 1½d., and “to be had of all the Booksellers.” [↑]
[31] Of George Combe’s Constitution of Man (1828), a deistic work, over 50,000 copies were sold in Britain within twelve years, and 10,000 in America. Advt. to 4th ed. 1839. Combe avows that his impulse came from the phrenologist Spurzheim. [↑]
[32] See the details in his Last Trial by Jury for Atheism in England. [↑]