In June 1643, amidst the furnace heat of civil war, Parliament issued a prohibition of unlicensed publications. This Ordinance for the Regulating of Printing rescinded freedoms that had existed since the abolition of the Star Chamber, a judicial court notorious for its abuses of power, in 1641. For two years, the unlicensed presses had churned opinion, controversy and fringe views, uninhibited by government censorship. ‘Licence’ is a complex word that points to the difficult relationship between individual and collective freedoms. It derives from the Latin licentia, which in turn is related to licet, ‘it is permitted’, but also licens, meaning ‘bold’ and ‘unrestrained’. When we drive with a licence, we are permitted a freedom by law. But if we drive licentiously, or without due restraint, we may find our freedoms legitimately encroached upon. Some liberties are granted for obedience, others are assumed by the individual regardless of established legal or social norms. In 1643, individual liberty of expression was curbed as State concern about licence in the public sphere led to the return of licensing. Those who printed without permission, or without giving an author’s name, risked having their books burnt and being sent to prison. Admittedly, this was preferable to being burnt as well as your books, which could happen under the Inquisition, and did, in some Catholic countries, through to the nineteenth century.

John Milton, now best known as the poet of Paradise Lost – itself a profound meditation on obedience and its limits – objected to the return of licensing. Why, he asked, fight to overthrow the tyranny of unrestrained monarchy and drain the cesspit of the Star Chamber, if only to usher back its spirit of control? This is the question that motivates his great prose work Areopagitica; A speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing, to the Parlament [sic] of England, which was published towards the end of 1644, when he was 36 and already a well-known writer. True to his principles, and characteristically defiant, Milton gave his name, but published without a licence. He spoke with his actions as well as his words. Laws, he believed, could be defied where they conflicted with a strictly examined conscience. In Milton’s double revolutionary context, the importance of this cannot be overstated. The Protestant Reformation hinged on the belief that God’s light shone from within; it was not received via the external authority of Popes and bishops. Milton was also at war, in words at least, with a monarchy that, in his view, aped popish ceremony and dictatorial presumption. Absolute authority, Milton believed, exists only in heaven. Disobedience may have been disastrous for Satan and his fallen angels, and it did not work out well for Adam and Eve, but it was very much on the table for the freethinker in seventeenth-century England.

Milton had also published, the previous year, anonymously and without a licence, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce: Restor’d to the Good of Both Sexes, From the Bondage of Canon Law, a radical (for the time) argument that divorce, then allowed only in very limited circumstances, should be possible simply on the basis of incompatibility between man and wife. This outraged the clergy, who saw it as promoting sexual licence. Milton’s tract was first published on 1st August 1643; the Ordinance for the Regulation of Printing had come into force in June. His tract was mentioned with disgust in Parliament by those arguing for censorship. Herbert Palmer, a Puritan clergyman, read a sermon to Parliament in 1644, stating that Milton deserved to be burnt for this tract.

If Milton broke actual laws by publishing Areopagitica, there is also something unruly about the form and manner of his work. He calls it a ‘speech’, addressed ‘to the Parlament of England’. But Areopagitica is not a speech – it is too long and rhetorically demanding for such purposes – and it was not given in Parliament, a forum where Milton had no licence to speak. Areopagitica first appeared in the more lowly form of a pamphlet – a transitory, rough and ready articulation, another bundle of pages in a Babel of public print.

Milton was provoking questions about the right to be heard but also, crucially, about authority. At this point, he had little licensed authority himself and was viewed in some quarters as a crackpot. His authority is thus assumed, with a verve that borders on arrogance; it is grounded in his deep learning, in the evident power of his intellect, and in the brilliance of his literary skills. He also possessed a deep conviction that truth was on his side and that truth, in the end, would shine through.

Any revolutionary power base, the thing Parliament was becoming, begins as a challenge to existing authority, in this case, to the ‘divine right’ assumed by Charles I. The very logic of such a power base, that of dissent, entails the prospect of its own undoing at the hands of the next stage of the revolution. This is the toothpaste that Edmund Burke tried to put back in the tube after 1688, arguing for a monarchical reset based on limited powers and a flavour of mystique. Arguing from the French revolutionaries’ descent to government by guillotine, he proposed a pragmatic status quo based on an aesthetically pleasing but disempowered hereditary monarch. Authority is necessary, but it cannot operate without a foundation or generally accepted centre. Burke believed that the jewels, golden coaches, and ceremony of monarchy provided exactly this.

Milton would have hated any such idea as a very real hell on earth, as a sagging and cynical crypto-papist State. He believed that authority must rest on the consent of individual reason as it works towards the discovery of truth. And golden coaches were of no use for this journey. To him, all people were part of God’s creation, endued with a conscience and a reasoning capacity to distinguish right from wrong. They were able to make their own decisions about how they should be ruled. They were not sheep to be tricked into the fold, distracted by glittering gewgaws. To the Christian fundamentalist, the answer was simple: to hold up the Bible as the answer to all questions. But Milton was too well-educated to think of Scripture as a set of rules. He knew it for what it is, a linguistic and textual smorgasbord, full of symbols, allegories, parables and poetry. It required educated and judicious interpretation, and it is this process, rather than static diktat, on which true authority must be based. A ruler justifies his authority, writes Milton, when his ‘prudent spirit acknowledges and obeys the voice of reason from what quarter soever it be heard speaking’. The key phrase here is ‘what quarter soever’; we must be ready to hear all rational voices, to plunge into the ocean of opinion in order to become expert swimmers. Those who write with evil intent, to promote popery and undermine the commonwealth, must be identified and stopped; complete freedom of speech has never been entertained by the wise. But those who are simply misguided, or plain wrong, must be allowed their say, even where – especially where – it conflicts with current official views. This is not some TalkRadio idea of ‘free speech’: ignorant people should not be taken seriously on subjects where their authority is based on nothing more than easily swayed emotion. It is to recognise that, in our fallen world, it requires great skill to extract truth from the vast deserts of error and evil that surround us. Licensing, Milton argues, will blunt our capacity for critical thought, leaving us vulnerable to seductive but dangerous words. Censorship, he writes,

‘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.’

Given that some parliamentarians had been mutilated for expressing their beliefs (William Prynne, for example, had his ears ‘cropped’), Milton’s language could not be more immediate. For him, a lack of ears symbolised an urgent duty to listen. Authority should not be hereditary; it must be earned through hard work, and that work is the work of the mind, of knowing the world, and of knowing the minds of others through their words. Not the abstractions of the ivory tower, but working things through while embattled on all sides by contending voices:  

‘I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather: that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary.’

The price of free thought for Milton was a moral obligation to go to war amidst words, to be a soldier in the cause of truth and collective prosperity. Those who silence voices will never keep the world pure. Their licence to remove the liberty of others will simply cheapen virtue by attaching it to the dubious privilege of an unexamined and unenquiring life.

For a bibliography of our articles on free speech and free thought, see: Free Speech in the Freethinker.

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It seems fair to call Shelley an atheist. He did not believe in God. In 1811, while a student at University College, Oxford, he published a pamphlet titled The Necessity of Atheism*, signing it ‘An Atheist’. When the university authorities became aware of the publication, they burned any copies they could find, and expelled the wayward student. Later, during the dark summer of 1816, Shelley was travelling with his wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (author of Frankenstein), and Lord Byron. Shelley developed a habit of signing hotel registers in deliberately provocative style. On the 23^rd of July, at the Hôtel de Londres in Chamonix, the poet declared himself, in Greek, a ‘lover of humanity’, ‘democrat’, and ‘atheist’. These inscriptions were mostly removed, some crossed out by Byron himself.

But if Shelley called himself an ‘atheist’, what did he mean by the word? The Oxford English Dictionary gives the primary sense as ‘One who denies or disbelieves the existence of a God’. This definition is non-denominational – ‘the existence of a God’ could refer to any deity, active or passive, benign or malevolent. In Shelley’s context, ‘atheist’ would apply specifically to the Christian God. It would also have a strong pejorative implication – the atheist is a godless person and thus not bound by God’s commandments. He or she is not someone to trust in any given ‘thou shalt not’ situation. The OED definition also includes a choice – atheism can be denial or disbelief. The two words are not easily disentangled, but this is not a casual tautology. ‘Disbelief’ is defined as ‘The action or an act of disbelieving; mental rejection of a statement or assertion; positive unbelief’. To positively disbelieve something we must simultaneously believe something else (positively) that contradicts the initial proposition. I do not believe in (an immaterial) God because I believe that the universe consists purely of material and physical matter. This makes you an atheist, but also a dogmatist (a materialist); you may thus be required to account for your (materialist) beliefs, which in the early nineteenth century involved a very different discourse to that of twenty-first-century science. As a young man, Shelley was influenced in this regard by the French Enlightenment atheist and materialist Baron d’Holbach.  

The alternative is ‘negative unbelief’, plain or flat denial. I do not believe in God and that is the end of the matter. This has become a common version of atheism, although for Shelley such a position would hold little interest. It is giving up halfway through, disbelieving something without formulating an alternative. The intellectually respectable variation of negative unbelief is philosophical scepticism, a tradition of thought that can be traced back to classical Greece, and that played an important role in Shelley’s development as a thinker and poet. The sceptic does not deny the existence of God and is thus not an atheist in a strict sense. She simply refuses to believe because she is not persuaded by the evidence. ‘I deny nothing, but doubt everything’, as Byron wrote in Don Juan.

This is broadly the position taken in Shelley’s Necessity of Atheism, which, far from being a firebrand rant, is a perfectly reasonable and balanced statement that draws from well-established philosophical arguments (notably Locke and Hume). The most provocative thing about the work is its title, which, Shelley knew, would be taken as an attack on the established Church. After discussing the nature of belief, the author of the pamphlet analyses the different kinds of evidence that can be used to argue for the existence of a God. He gives three types, the most compelling being the evidence derived from the senses, actual experience of the deity: ‘Those to whom the Deity has […] appeared have the strongest possible conviction of his existence’. Most of us, of course, cannot draw on evidence of this nature. The second kind of evidence is that provided by reason. But God, it is widely held, exists beyond the limit of human reason, and the numerous (and conflicting) attempts to rationalise belief do not command assent. The third, and weakest, form of evidence is testimony – accounts of others’ religious experiences. Here Shelley repeats Hume’s famous argument against miracles, that it is more likely for people to lie or be deceived than to have a genuine supernatural experience. From this analysis Shelley concludes that ‘it is evident that having no proofs from any of the three sources of conviction, the mind cannot believe the existence of a God’. He might have inserted ‘rationally’ or ‘reasonably’ before ‘believe’. Shelley does not deny the existence of a God, he simply withholds belief on the basis that the available evidence is not compelling. Inevitably, such a position was not acceptable – Oxford was still a training institute for clerics – but it remains a plausible and sensible response to the problems of belief. ‘Atheism’, in Shelley’s notorious pamphlet, means nothing more, and nothing less, than this.

For all its biographical infamy, the Necessity of Atheism could not be called a trailblazing work of philosophy. The sceptical arguments on which it is based were well established and had a long counter-radical history. Ancient sceptics used them to disengage the mind from controversy, to achieve tranquillity (ataraxia) in the face of contending metaphysical systems. During the Reformation, the same arguments were adapted by Catholic intellectuals, including Erasmus and Montaigne, to oppose Protestant innovation. If certainty in matters of religion is impossible, they argued, then we might as well stick with what we have (Catholicism).  Scepticism of this tenor, while a strong influence on Shelley, could never satisfy his questing, radically innovative temperament. Shelley wanted answers, and scepticism does not provide them. It is an attitude rather than a position.

Although Shelley remained an atheist in the broadest sense, the label does little justice to the originality of his mature thought. Tracing the complex web of influences out of which this thought developed has occupied scholars over thousands of pages and is beyond my current remit. But I will try to give a sense of Shelley’s answers with reference to one particularly important influence, George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne (1685-1753). Berkeley was a brilliant writer and intellectual who attempted to reconcile contemporary philosophy – the empiricism that led Hume to scepticism – with a necessary belief in the Christian God. Shelley was Berkeley’s ideal reader, a young philosopher who (as Berkeley put it in the Preface to his A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710)) has become ‘tainted with Scepticism, or want[s] a demonstration of the existence and immateriality of God, or the natural immortality of the soul’.

To this end, Berkeley gave a twist to Locke’s key proposition that all knowledge is based on experience derived from the senses. We have no direct experience, Berkeley pointed out, of what we habitually think of as an external world. When we talk about a chair, we are referring not to a thing that exists outside our minds, but to a set of sense impressions – the chair’s colour, shape, texture, and so on. We can infer that something is causing these impressions, but we can have no certain knowledge of what that something is. The assumption that the impressions are caused by a material realm of entities that exist independently of their being perceived was, for Berkeley, a metaphysical fantasy. We can only conceive of things, he pointed out, in terms of their sensible qualities – try imagining a chair as anything other than a composite of sense impressions – so on what basis can I credibly claim that the chair has any existence independent of my perceptions of it? This impasse, which Locke attempted to get past with his awkward distinction between primary and secondary qualities, led Berkeley to his brilliant central contention, that to exist is to be perceived (esse est percipi). This is a form of idealism, and had a profound effect on Shelley.

Berkeley’s theory comes with some notorious problems. His brand of idealism appears especially vulnerable to the spectre of solipsism, the problem of how we prove, in philosophically valid ways, that other minds exist. If existence means being perceived, then are other people not just bundles of ideas perceived by my mind? There is also the  problem of continuous existence. If a chair exists only as the perceptions of a given perceiver, does it cease to exist when its only perceiver leaves the room? Berkeley believed that there were other perceivers and that things do have continuous existence (they are continuously perceived) outside any given human mind because there is a universal, continuous perceiver – and that is God.  

Shelley accepted all of this except the last bit, the positing of a necessary and active (Christian) deity. He proposed, instead, what we might roughly call a godless idealism. In his essay ‘On Life’ (1819), he writes that

‘The view of life presented by the most refined deductions of the intellectual philosophy [idealism], is that of unity. Nothing exists but as it is perceived. The difference is merely nominal between those two classes of thought, which are vulgarly distinguished by the names of ideas and of external objects. Pursuing the same thread of reasoning, the existence of distinct individual minds, similar to that which is employed in now questioning its own nature, is likewise found to be a delusion. The words I, YOU, THEY, are not signs of any actual difference subsisting between the assemblage of thoughts thus indicated, but are merely marks employed to denote the different modifications of the one mind.’

The first three sentences recapitulate Berkeley, but in Shelley’s provocative and probing style. It may be commonsensical to believe that external objects cause our sense impressions, but such an explanation is philosophically inadequate. The existence of things cannot be severed from the fact of their being perceived. This foundation, which Shelley takes to be solid, is pursued – as we might expect from a poet – in the direction of linguistic enquiry and critique. Our words and habits of expression, it is suggested, are storehouses of error. More specifically, language is prejudiced against idealism; it assumes – it uncritically talks about – discrete, material bodies and, unless used with great care and precision, will raise philosophical fantasies that fail to grasp the truth. Pronouns – always contentious – are a notable instance: the words ‘I’ and ‘you’ do not signify any ‘actual difference’ in the world as it really exists, Shelley proposes. Existence is simply ‘an assemblage of thoughts’ – or, as Shelley also terms it, ‘the one mind’. He strips out God from Berkeley and this is the closest he gets to filling the void.  

What Shelley means by ‘the one mind’ is another question. It is left enigmatic, although some have argued that the phrase is intended to signify a quasi-mystical entity. The ‘one mind’ is an alternative to God and exists in the way that God is taken to exist. What seems more likely, however, is that Shelley is varying his description of the extraordinary conception of existence to which his thinking has led him. His words come close to positing something that is not really there. Such moments are inevitable, as Shelley recognised, while we are bound to use a language that comes freighted with error and which seems determined to substantiate non-entities.

Philosophy, for Shelley, was an extraordinary pursuit because it allowed the mind to conceive the wondrous reality of existence. But poetry, he came to believe, is more extraordinary still. Language, in its habitual uses, is obfuscatory: its mendacious repetitions damp down our perceptions of the truth. It forms a veil (a favourite Shelleyan figure) between the mind and life. But Shelley also knew that language is not bound to the drudgery of establishment use. It has huge creative potential. Through the words of the poet, the veil can be painted with lovely colours, or perhaps even ripped aside entirely. Shelley thought Christ a poet in the fullest sense, but he hated the Christian God because His fabrication has been turned by men to the purposes of oppression. But Shelley’s disbelief – inextricable from his disapproval – in God does not imply a dreary void. As conveyed through his poems, for him, existence is an obscured wonder, a ground-zero rapture that is both beyond, and within, words.

*Link is to the edition published by G.W. Foote & Co (publishers of the Freethinker), available on Amazon. The company earns a small referral fee if you purchase via this link.

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