The Sun of Truth Fears No Light and Needs No Lies

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Quan Judge · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 37 pages

Thirty-seven pages with a full abstract and train of thoughts. *Like the file on cosmopolitanism earlier in this section, much of the argument is carried in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's own words* — which gives it a weight and a fairness that a straightforward complaint about critics would not have.

The premise is stated at the front: the truth from the lips did not atone for the lie in the heart. From it follows a defence of open argument put in commercial terms — every man's reasoned opinion has a right to pass into the common auditory, for arguments are the currency of the intellect. The image is then extended into the sharpest passage in the file, on anonymous reviewing. In the great theatre of literature there are no authorised door-keepers, since anonymous critics are self-elected; and they have lost all credit with wise men by unfair dealing — by refusing to receive an honest man's money because they anticipate and dislike his opinion, so that his intellectual coin is refused under pretence of being light or counterfeit, without any proof given either by the money scales or by sounding the coin in dispute against one of known goodness. Two diagnoses of intolerance follow, and they are more generous than the usual sort. Either the intolerant person is not master of the grounds on which his own faith is built — which therefore neither is nor can be his own faith — and he is angry not at opposition to truth but at the interruption of his own indolence and intellectual slumber. Or he has no love of truth for its own sake and no reverence for the command to seek earnestly after it, a command which, even if it had never been given by revelation, is involved in the gift of reason itself and in the dependence of all our virtues on its development. The closing principle is practical: there can be no end without means, and God furnishes no means that exempt us from the task of joining our own best endeavours.

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