Exerpt from
AREOPAGITICA
A SPEECH FOR THE LIBERTY OF UNLICENSED PRINTING
TO THE PARLIAMENT OF ENGLAND
by
John Milton
"...If ye be thus resolved, as it were injury to think ye were
not, I know not what should withhold me from presenting ye with a
fit instance wherein to show both that love of truth which ye
eminently profess, and that uprightness of your judgment which is
not wont to be partial to yourselves; by judging over again that
Order which ye have ordained to regulate printing:--that no book,
pamphlet, or paper shall be henceforth printed, unless the same be
first approved and licensed by such, or at least one of such, as
shall be thereto appointed. For that part which preserves justly
every man's copy to himself, or provides for the poor, I touch not,
only wish they be not made pretences to abuse and persecute honest
and painful men, who offend not in either of these particulars.
But that other clause of licensing books, which we thought had died
with his brother quadragesimal and matrimonial when the prelates
expired, I shall now attend with such a homily, as shall lay before
ye,
- first the inventors of it to be those whom ye will be loath to
own;
- next what is to be thought in general of reading, whatever
sort the books be;
- and that this Order avails nothing to the
suppressing of scandalous, seditious, and libellous books, which
were mainly intended to be suppressed.
- Last, that it will be
primely to the discouragement of all learning, and the stop of
truth, not only by disexercising and blunting our abilities in what
we know already, but by hindering and cropping the discovery that
might be yet further made both in religious and civil wisdom.
I deny not, but that it is of greatest concernment in the Church
and Commonwealth, to have a vigilant eye how books demean
themselves as well as men; and thereafter to confine, imprison, and
do sharpest justice on them as malefactors.
For books are not
absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to
be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do
preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that
living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as
vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragon's teeth; and being
sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men.
And yet, on
the other hand, unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man
as kill a good book. Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature,
God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself,
kills the image of God, as it were in the eye.
Many a man lives a
burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of
a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life
beyond life. 'Tis true, no age can restore a life, whereof perhaps
there is no great loss; and revolutions of ages do not oft recover
the loss of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole nations
fare the worse.
We should be wary therefore what persecution we raise against
the living labours of public men, how we spill that seasoned life
of man, preserved and stored up in books; since we see a kind of
homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdom, and if it
extend to the whole impression, a kind of massacre; whereof the
execution ends not in the slaying of an elemental life, but strikes
at that ethereal and fifth essence, the breath of reason itself,
slays an immortality rather than a life.
But lest I should be
condemned of introducing license, while I oppose licensing, I
refuse not the pains to be so much historical, as will serve to
show what hath been done by ancient and famous commonwealths
against this disorder, till the very time that this project of
licensing crept out of the Inquisition, was catched up by our
prelates, and hath caught some of our presbyters. ..."
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