Letters of a Lunatic

The day before my arrest, I was solicited by a number of students to commence my course, which I consented to do by the beginning of the following week, and as this year I had already the proof-sheets of several disquisitions on German literature in my hands, I could have begun publicly and under the most favorable auspices. But it would seem that these gentlemen were determined that I should not begin, and that they adopted this most admirable and effectual method of anticipating my perfectly regular and legitimate movements. Indeed, by the enquiry, "What are you going to do?" I have already been desired to infer, that an entire abandonment of my profession was expected of me. Its exercise had already been rendered as difficult as possible, several members of the Council having for several years past virtually superseded me by encouraging two other men on the same spot, which I in all honor was entitled to occupy myself, and which contained hardly room enough for one. What would Humboldt, Grimm, Ampère, Burnouf, and some of our other friends on the other side of the water say to such proceedings? I am reduced to penury, when from my public position I might be expected to be independent, I am deprived of the liberty of academic instruction by the terrorism of a narrow-minded clique, while successfully and diligently engaged in adding fresh honor to my post, I am bereft of freedom altogether by men, who owe their power to the fortuitous concurrence of local and sectarian influences, who are utter strangers to the large humanity of liberal culture, and who are too ignorant to decide upon the merits of a man of letters, being themselves destitute of both name and place among those who represent the literary and scientific enlightenment of our age and country. But I have wearied your patience already too long. I should like to have my case properly understood at Washington, and you will pardon my having burdened you with so much of the detail. In regard to my future movements I am uncertain. Supposing even my liberation to be near at hand, it will be difficult to commence in the midst of winter in the city, where all educational arrangements are made in the autumn. This fact was well known to those who have tied my hands. Several educational works I am anxious to complete, one particularly, at which I was interrupted a year ago this month.

I am, with great consideration,most respectfully and trulyYours,G. J. Adler.

LETTER V

Bloomingdale Asylum, Nov. 17th, 1853.

My dear sir,

In reply to yours of the 12th inst., I can say what I might have said on the first day of my confinement; that neither the chancellor nor any one else at the University can have or ever could have any apprehension whatever of being molested by me in any place or in any manner whatever, provided they mind their own business and cease to give me any further provocation. The Chancellor's conduct was pre-eminently odious, and beneath the dignity of his office. His letter, which I still hold in my hands, is as ludicrous as it is false. He is certainly very much mistaken in supposing that by his tiny authority he can so easily crush a scholar and a professor of my reputation and "standing." "Proud of my connection with the University and anxious to secure my co-operation," when but a month before he solicited the "fraternal aid" of a distant brother divine in his attempt to ship me out of the city as a sick man, of a distempered mind, concerning whom he was most deeply and devoutly concerned, and (what is still more strange,) of a man whom he pronounces "unfitted for the business of instruction?" This is his own language and this is the whole discovery, the dénouement of the dirty transactions by which I was harassed last winter. I admit that my conduct may be regarded as too hasty. I might have defended myself in a calmer, more dignified and more effectual manner. As it is, however, I shall make no apology and I still think, that a month's imprisonment in the Tombs or a severe castigation of a tangible description last winter would have conferred a lasting moral benefit on certain persons in that institution. In making this remark, I by no means intend to throw out any menace, nor would I myself like the office of Knout-master-general either to his imperial majesty at St. Petersburgh, or to his excellency the Governor, or to the President of the United States; but I refer simply to the moral good that would undoubtedly have accrued to the souls of certain students and professors at the University during the last winter from a dose or two of the "good old English discipline." As to the infamous and unearthly noises that worried and distracted me for at least six months, the ruin of my health and the entire suspension of my studies were too grave a result to be easily overlooked or forgotten, and the ignoble and bigoted clique at the bottom of that brutal terrorism have certainly not failed to leave a lasting impression of their power on my mind. No denial or assurance to the contrary will ever invalidate the evidence of my senses. What I saw with my own eyes, and heard with my own ears at the time I complained, is as true as are the phenomena of my present experience. The guillotine alone was wanting to cap the climax of those high-handed proceedings. It was a repetition of the same narrow vandalism which in 1848 exiled me out of the city, and in 1849 made me leave America in disgust. While I therefore disclaim cherishing or ever having cherished the remotest desire to molest the peace or safety of any member of the faculty – the fear of corporal punishment betrays a bad conscience on the part of my adversaries and is a virtual admission of their guilt, or else it is a fiction invented to patch up a hopeless case; – I would at the same time assure all those concerned in this business, that I am not an advocate of nonresistance or of tame submission to such a gross injustice, and that in case of need I can wield a pen to defend my rights before an intelligent public, the opinion of which in matters of this kind, in America particularly, is after all the last and highest instance of appeal.

The case is therefore perfectly plain. I deny having ever given any just cause of apprehension to any man in the institution. The very supposition is an absurdity. They are the iniquitous aggressors throughout. They have to endeavored to crush my intellectual independence by carrying the principle of conformity to a ridiculous extent, and by enforcing a submission to which no man of honor without the loss of all his intellectual powers could submit. – I told the chancellor on the spur and in the excitement of the moment what I thought of the falsehoods contained in his epistle and of his previous conduct which, if he is a gentleman, he is bound to justify. He gravely ignored the letter of complaint I had addressed to him a month before, or rather answered it by spectral demonstrations the night after its reception. Such mummery and such terrorism, practiced on an officer of a literary institution by a fellow-officer is surely out of place and Dr. Ferris has not yet learnt (it seems) the meaning of an A. M. and of certain other rights of Academic men, (to say nothing of the courtesy customary among men of letters of every age and in all civilized countries), to introduce or suffer such singular proceedings in a respectable institution. As for myself I do not intend to be intimidated in the least, and if my life and health last, I shall find the means of defending both my honor and my position as a gentleman and a scholar. It is all idle to attempt to crush or gag a man by terror. The humbug of the spirit-rappers is no greater than the jugglery of door-and-desk-slamming, of vociferations and mystifications so successfully employed at the University during the whole of last winter. As it regards therefore my alleged insanity on these points, I must confess, that if a denial of the reality of this terrorism by which the University (and certain societies) have carried on their nefarious business of subjugation, be required of me, then I can never become rational again without adding falsehood to cowardice. It smacks too much of the outrage of '48, when I was compelled to admit the most damnable affronts as delusive impressions of my senses and when other men's infernal-pit-iniquity was alleged to be the offspring of my own tobacco-fume! This is subjectivism with a vengeance! It is too big a pill to swallow. It produces rather too great an excess of abdominal convulsions, as the Doctors would say.

If by my conduct I have incurred any censure or violated any law, or menaced the safety or the life or property of any man in or out of the institution, why in the name of reason and of common sense do not these gentlemen proceed in the regular way, to secure exemption from the fear of danger? Could they not have legally coerced me to keep the peace? or could they not (a still more rational course) have requested a committee of the council to meet for the purpose of examining and adjusting a matter of such grave importance? Could I not and can I not now expose the hollow misery of the sham, the real nature of which is as plain as the noon-day sun? The course they have adopted is surely derogatory to the moral integrity of the parties concerned, and my stay among lunatics and maniacs is an unpardonable abuse of an excellent institution. The day before my arrest, eight young gentleman volunteered to commence the study of the language which I more especially profess and I had engaged to begin with a public lecture in the Monday following. These proceedings rob me now, for this winter at least, of the only advantage, which my connection with the institution affords me, and it is manifest enough that the difficulty was "got up" for the express purpose of anticipating and of frustrating my preparations for the present semestre.

It still seems to me, that these gentlemen incriminate themselves in two ways: – 1st, By desiring me to remove out of the building, they incur the suspicion of being themselves the authors or abettors of the nuisance I complain of. I would propose to have some one stay with me and to retain and pay for my study as usual. In that event I should have a witness and the detection and punishment of the offenders would exonerate all those who in case of my removal would have part of the criminal credit of molesting the private residence of a professor and a scholar. 2d, The fear of personal injury from the hands of one, who for many years past has been known to be a man of peaceable and unexceptionable behavior and who never attacked or struck any man in his life, appears to have its origin in a consciousness of guilt and to be a virtual admission of it. Do they perhaps think their conduct so outrageous, that the meekness of Moses could no longer endure it without resentment? I grant that a passionate man would be likely to take a more substantial revenge. I myself however have no inclination to degrade myself in any such way. – My confinement is on a false pretense, and if any made affidavit to my insanity, they most assuredly must have perjured themselves. Whatever I did, I have been provoked to do by what I deem a stupidity and a flagrant invasion of the rights and privileges of an academic instructor, which no language can castigate with adequate severity.

I am most respectfully and trulyyour obedient servant.D. A. & Co., New-York. G. J. A.

VI. THE LAW OF INTELLECTUAL FREEDOM

"All property or rather all substantial determinations, which relate to my personal individuality and which enter into the general constitution of my self-consciousness, as for example, my personality proper, my freedom of volition in general, my morality, my religion are inalienable and the right to them is imprescriptible."

"That that which the mind is per se and by its very definition should also become an actual existence and pro se, that consequently it should be a person, capable of holding property, possessed of morality and religion – all this is involved in the idea of the mind itself, which as the causa sui, in other words, as a free cause, is a substance, cujus natura non potest concipi nisi existens. (Spinoza, Eth. S. 1. def. 1.)."

"This very notion, that it should be what it is through itself alone and as the self-concentration or endless self-retrosusception out of its mere natural and immediate existence contains also the possibility of the opposition between what it is only per se (i. e. substantially) and not pro se (i. e. subjectively, in reality) and vice versa between what is only pro se and not also per se (which in the Will is the bad, the vicious); – and hence too the possibility of the alienation of one's personality and of one's substantial existence, whether this alienation be effected implicitly and unconsciously or explicitly and expressly. Examples of the alienation of personality are slavery, vassalage, disability to hold property, the unfree possession of the same, &c., &c."

"Instances of the abalienation of intelligent rationality, of individual and social morality and of religion occur in the beliefs and practices of superstition, in ceding to another the power and the authority of making rules and prescriptions for my actions (as when one allows himself to be made a tool for criminal purposes), or of determining what I am to regard as the law and duty of conscience, religious truth, &c."

"The right to such inalienable possessions is imprescriptible, and the act by which I become seized of my personality and of my substantial being, by which I make myself an accountable, a moral and a religious agent, removes these determinations from the control of all merely external circumstances and relations, which alone could give them the capacity of becoming the property of another. With this abnegation of the external, all questions of time and all claims based upon previous consent or acquiescence fall to the ground. This act of rational self-recovery, whereby I constitute myself an existing idea, a person of legal and moral responsibility, subverts the previous relation and puts an end to the injustice which I myself and the other party have done to my comprehension and to my reason, by treating and suffering to be treated the endless existence of self-consciousness as an external and an alienable object." 2

"This return to myself discloses also the contradiction (the absurdity) of my having ceded to another my legal responsibility, my morality and my religion at a time when I could not yet be said to possess them rationally, and which as soon as I become seized and possessed of them, can essentially be mine alone and can not be said to have any outward existence."

"It follows from the very nature of the case, that the slave has an absolute right to make himself free; that if any one has hired himself for any crime, such as robbery, murder, &c. this contract is of itself null and void and that every one is at full liberty to break it."

"The same may be said of all religious submission to a priest, who sets up for my father confessor (step-father, &c.); for a matter of such purely internal interest must be settled by every man himself and alone. A religiosity, a part of which is deposited in the hands of another is tantamount to none at all; for the Spirit is one, and it is he that is required to dwell in the heart of man; the union of the per and pro se must belong to every individual apart."

1

The details of this scandalous act of vandalism, which though it nearly cost me my life, I did not even mention in the preface to my large German and English Lexicon, finished in the course of the same year, are too diffuse and complicated, to be noticed here. As the leading personages of this drama, however, were the representatives of powerful and influential ecclesiastical organizations, and as shortly before, repeated and desperate proselyting efforts had been made by some of these men, and by their miserable underlings, I cannot possibly be wrong in designating the vile commotion, by which I was swept from my post, as the venomous explosion of ignoble and of bigoted elements, which have in fact been the prolific source of all the confusion I complain of now. I distinctly remember the treacherous and inquisitorial anxiousness of a certain (now) president of a prominent University, (with whom I was reading Logic,) to become acquainted with German metaphysics, the mysterious meetings of a certain ecclesiastical committee, the efforts of a certain temperance coterie at a certain hotel, and a dozen other despicable conclaves and combinations, whose machinations were too palpable to be mistaken or forgotten. I also know, that a certain philosophy to which I was known to be particularly partial, is looked upon with jealous suspicion by certain superficial and insignificant pretenders to that science, whose ignorance and malice forges weapons of destruction out of the noblest and sublimest conceptions that have ever emanated from the intellect of man. To all these ambitious and noisy enemies of intellectual freedom, whose littleness asperses, calumniates and levels whatever is gigantic and sublime, I would here say, once for all, that if they could but rationally comprehend this Goethe, this Jean Paul, this Fichte, Kant and Hegel, whom they regard with so much horror, their moral regeneration would almost be beyond a doubt, and if they could think and write like them, their title to enduring fame would never need an advocate or petty trickster to defend it.

2

I emphasize this important clause for the particular benefit of those who in my personal history have had the absurd expectation that I should continue to entertain a respectful deference to a certain phase of religionism, which upon a careful and rational examination I found to be worthless and which is repugnant to my taste and better judgment, and of others who with equal absurdity are in the habit of exacting ecclesiastical tests (I will not say religious, for such men show by their very conduct that their enlightenment in matters of the religion of the heart is very imperfect) for academic appointments; – as if the science and the culture of the nineteenth century were still to be the handmaid of the church, as they were in the Middle Age; as if Philosophy and the Liberal Arts could ever thrive and flourish in the suffocating atmosphere of the idols of the cave, the idols of the tribe, and the idols of the market-place!