Excerpts
from Areopagitica: A Speech for the
by
John Milton
John Milton wrote Areopagitica to support freedom of the press and freedom of
speech. When he wrote it,
Excerpt 1 - “…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…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,…We should be wary therefore what persecution we raise against the
living labors 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.”
Excerpt 2 - “Good and evil we know in the field of
this world grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so
involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning
resemblances hardly to be discerned, that those confused seeds which were
imposed on Psyche as an incessant labor to cull out, and sort asunder,
were not more intermixed. It was from out of the rind of one apple tasted, that
the knowledge of good and evil as two twins cleaving together leaped forth into
the world. And perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing
good and evil, that is to say of knowing good by evil.
Excerpt 3 - “As therefore the state of man now is;
what wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear without the
knowledge of evil? He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits
and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer
that which is truly better, he is the true warfaring Christian. I can not
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. That virtue therefore
which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost
that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not
a pure; her whiteness is but an excremental whiteness;…”
*** “Since therefore the knowledge and survey of vice is in
this world so necessary to the constituting of human virtue, and the scanning
of error to the confirmation of truth, how can we more safely, and with less
danger scout into the regions of sin and falsity than by reading all manner of
tracts, and hearing all manner of reason? And this is the benefit which may be
had of books promiscuously read.
Excerpt 4 - “If every action which is good, or
evil in man at ripe years, were to be under pittance, and prescription, and
compulsion, what were virtue but a name,…when God gave him reason, he gave him
freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing; he had been else a mere
artificial Adam, such an Adam as he is in the motions. We ourselves esteem not of that obedience, or
love, or gift, which is of force; God therefore left him free, set before him a
provoking object, ever almost in his eyes herein consisted his merit, herein
the right of his reward, the praise of his abstinence. Wherefore did he create
passions within us, pleasures round about us, but that these rightly tempered
are the very ingredients of virtue?... They are not
skilful considerers of human things, who imagine to remove sin by removing the
matter of sin; for, besides that it is a huge heap increasing under the very
act of diminishing though some part of it may for a time be withdrawn from some
persons, it can not from all, in such a universal thing as books are; and when
this is done, yet the sin remains entire. Though ye take from a covetous man
all his treasure he has yet one jewel left, ye can not bereave him of his
covetousness. Banish all objects of lust, shut up all youth into the severest
discipline that can be exercised in any hermitage, ye can not make them chaste,
that came not thither so; such great care and wisdom is required to the right
managing of this point. Suppose we could expel sin by this means; look how much
we thus expel of sin, so much we expel of virtue: for the matter of them both
is the same; remove that, and ye remove them both alike.”
Excerpt 5 - “I found and visited the famous Galileo
grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition, for thinking in astronomy, otherwise
than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought. And though I knew that
England then was groaning loudest under the prelatical yoke, nevertheless I
took it as a pledge of future happiness, that other nations were so persuaded
of her liberty…Let her [Truth] and falsehood grapple; who ever knew truth put
to the worse, in a free and open encounter…Yet is it not impossible that she
[Truth] may have more shapes than one. What else is all that rank of things
indifferent, wherein truth may be on this side, or on the other, without being
unlike herself. What but a vain shadow else is the
abolition of those ordinances, that handwriting nailed to the cross,
what great purchase is this Christian liberty which Paul so often boasts
of. His doctrine is, that he who eats or eats not,
regards a day, or regards it not, may do either to the Lord. How many other
things might be tolerated in peace, and left to
conscience, had we but charity, and were it not the chief stronghold of our
hypocrisy to be ever judging one another. I fear yet this iron yoke of outward
conformity hath left a slavish print upon our necks; the ghost of a linen
decency yet haunts us…We do not see that while we still affect by all means a
rigid external formality, we may as soon fall again into a gross conforming
stupidity, Yet if all can not be of one mind, as who looks they should be? This
doubtless is more wholesome, more prudent, and more Christian, that many be
tolerated, rather than all compelled…”
Milton, John. Areopagitica.
Vol. III, Part 3. The Harvard Classics.
Collier & Son, 1909–14;
Bartleby.com, 2001. www.bartleby.com/3/3/. 7
February 2005.
Thought Exercises on excerpts from Areopagitica
Directions: