Knowlton Biography Chapter 33
Thirty-three: A New Edition
The only seeming objection of much weight that can be brought against diffusing the knowledge of checks, is, that it will serve to increase illegal connexions. Now this is exactly the contrary effect of that which those who have diffused such knowledge most confidently believe will arise from it. To diminish such connexions, is indeed one of the grand objects of these publications—an object which laws and prisons cannot, or at least, do not accomplish. Why is there so much prostitution in the land?—The true answer is not, and never will be, because the people have become acquainted with certain facts in physiology.
Abner Kneeland was an unflinching supporter of Knowlton and Fruits of Philosophy from the start, so it’s no surprise that when Charles revised and expanded the book in 1834, Kneeland became his publisher. The new version of Fruits of Philosophy was marked “Third Edition, With Additions,” and the title page read, “By Charles Knowlton, M.D., Author of “Modern Materialism.” The book was professionally printed in Boston on high-quality paper, and bound in orange cloth. Like Knowlton’s earlier, self-published edition, the new Fruits of Philosophy was a palm-sized, “private companion” that its owners could carry and read discreetly.
The 1834 Fruits of Philosophy was also three times as long as the previous editions. It contained 182 pages of text, and an Appendix that reprinted an article about the book that had run in Kneeland’s Investigator. Charles once again included his original Philosophical Proem, his account of Malthus’s population question, and the details of male and female anatomy and his birth control method. He added new discussions of medical issues related to sexuality, including sterility, impotence, and onanism.
The moral argument of the new version of Fruits of Philosophy was unchanged. “When an individual gratifies any of his instincts in a temperate degree,” Charles said, “he adds an item to the sum total of human happiness,
and causes the amount of human happiness to exceed the amount of misery farther than if he had not enjoyed himself; therefore it is virtuous, or, to say the least, it is not vicious or sinful for him so to do. But it must ever be remembered that this temperate degree depends on circumstances—that one person’s health, pecuniary circumstances, or social relations may be such that it would cause more misery than happiness for him to do an act, which, being done by a person under different circumstances, would cause more happiness than misery. Therefore, it would be right for the latter to perform such an act, but not for the former.
Charles was expanding on the utilitarian moral argument he’d been making since medical school. Actions were good or bad depending on circumstances, he said. People could learn to live with this complexity and make their own choices, rather than taking refuge in absolutism and superstition. In the new edition, Charles gave a personal example of this argument, using a subject that hit very close to home, masturbation.
Most physicians and moralists had not changed their opinions on the depravity and danger of masturbation, in the decade since they’d convinced Charles he was dying from self-abuse. Tissot’s Treatise on the Diseases Produced By Onanism was still the best-selling authority on the subject—Charles had a copy of it in his medical library. But with the new edition of Fruits of Philosophy, Charles had the authority and the platform to offer his own opinion. Tissot’s book, he said, was “filled with a collection of desperate cases, and when a young man ignorant of medicine reads these cases and the multitude of symptoms which, among all the cases, he will meet with, he must be an uncommonly sound or healthy man, or he will believe that he has already done himself great if not irreparable injury.” Tissot blamed so many conditions on masturbation, and gave so many exaggerated examples, that his aim was clearly a combination of alarmism and titillation, Charles suggested. “A man marries a young wife, and in three weeks becomes blind, and in four months dies; another is attacked the day after marriage with acute fever, and two others a week after; another has an epileptic fit…and all these diseases are attributed to venery, as a matter of course. I do not believe that in any case more good than evil will arise from erroneous views or false coloring,” Charles warned.
In his experience, Charles said, the sensational way moralists like Tissot described the “disease” of masturbation and its effects was, itself, dangerous. “Let a young man once become possessed with the idea that his virility is impaired,” Charles said, “and that sexual intercourse would greatly injure him, if not ultimately destroy; and, my word for it, his mind will wear out his machine faster than any degree of intemperance that is at all prevalent.—Let him now have no advisor but Tissot’s treatise, and he will certainly die!” He was once “intimately acquainted with a young man” who had suffered from exactly this type of mental anguish, Charles continued. Physicians following the lead of moralists like Tissot had almost killed the boy, when “the best remedy, as I have before said, is marriage. It restored the young man whose case I have just mentioned to health and strength in a few months, and he is now the father of several pretty healthy children.”
Charles included an article from the Investigator as an Appendix to the new edition. It answered two objections that had been raised to Fruits of Philosophy: that birth control would lead to licentiousness and prostitution, and that birth control was “against nature.” In the first case, Charles said, the opinions of everybody who’d studied the subject were against the idea that birth control would lead to looser sexual behavior. People delayed marriage because they feared the burden a large family would put on them, and this led to more sex outside marriage and especially to prostitution. Everyone since Malthus, on both sides of the Atlantic, Charles said, agreed on the connection between late marriage and vice. For example, Charles continued:
I might quote pages to the point from ‘Every Woman’s Book;’ but I fear my communication would be too lengthy. I content myself with a few lines. ‘But when it has become the custom here as elsewhere to limit the number of children, so that none need have more than they wish, no man will fear to take a wife, all will marry while young; debauchery will diminish.’
The whole point of books like Richard Carlile’s, Robert Dale Owen’s, and his own, Charles said, was to allow people to marry early and satisfy their needs without fearing the consequences.
And as far as birth control being “against nature” was concerned, Charles responded that it all depended how you defined nature. “It has been said, it is best to let nature take her course,” Charles said. “Now in the broadest sense of the word nature I say so too. In this sense there is nothing unnatural in the universe. But if we limit the sense of the word nature so as not to include what we mean by art, then is civilized life one continued warfare against nature.” Like every technology since fire, Charles explained, medicine was mankind’s attempt to improve on “natural” life. If they wanted to be consistent, people who objected to birth control because it was unnatural should also avoid houses, carriages, cooked food, and certainly books! “This of course, is my opinion,” Charles concluded. “But since I have probably reflected more upon the subject than all the persons concerned in my imprisonment put together, until it can be shown that I have not as clear a head and as pure a heart as any of them, I think it entitled to some weight.”
Abner Kneeland not only published the 1834 edition of Fruits of Philosophy, he sold it in his bookstore and in the pages of the Investigator. Single copies were available for fifty cents, and approved booksellers could order Fruits of Philosophy at wholesale prices of thirty-seven and a half cents per copy for a hundred books, and twenty-five cents each, for five hundred. Charles kept several hundred copies on-hand in Ashfield, but after 1834 more copies of Fruits of Philosophy were delivered through the mail than were bought directly from the author. Copies of the new edition even found their way onto ships crossing the Atlantic. Before the end of 1834, freethought publisher James Watson was selling his own version of Knowlton’s book in London.
Unfortunately for Abner Kneeland, publishing the Investigator and a new edition of Fruits of Philosophy, running a Society for Free Enquirers in Boston, and supporting radical social reforms had its costs. The January 10, 1834 issue of the Investigator carried a front-page headline announcing, “The Editor is indicted for BLASPHEMY.” Kneeland had been arrested for publishing three articles in the December 20, 1833 issue. The first two were reprints out of Frances Wright and Robert Dale Owen’s New York Free Enquirer: a passage from Voltaire and an article questioning the effectiveness of prayer. The third was an editorial comparing Kneeland’s beliefs with those of the Universalists who had cast him out of their organization a few years earlier.
The indictment claimed Kneeland’s explanation of his personal beliefs violated Part IV, Title I, Chapter 272, Section 36 of Massachusetts General Law:
Whoever willfully blasphemes the holy name of God by denying, cursing or contumeliously reproaching God, his creation, government or final judging of the world, or by cursing or contumeliously reproaching Jesus Christ or the Holy Ghost, or by cursing or contumeliously reproaching or exposing to contempt and ridicule, the holy word of God contained in the holy scriptures shall be punished by imprisonment in jail for not more than one year or by a fine of not more than three hundred dollars, and may also be bound to good behavior.
This section, incidentally, is still part of Massachusetts General Law. Kneeland had stated his beliefs in a published letter to Thomas Whittemore, president of the Cambridge Bank, congressman, and publisher of the Universalist paper, The Trumpet. Whittemore, who had chaired the congressional committee that disestablished the Congregational Church in 1833, apparently believed people should be free to choose their religion, but not free to choose no religion. Kneeland had written, “I still hold to universal philanthropy, universal benevolence, and universal charity, in these respects, I am still a Universalist.” But then he had continued, “Universalists believe in a god, which I do not.”
Abner Kneeland’s blasphemy case dragged on in Massachusetts courts for five years, but he stayed focused on publishing the Investigator and distributing Fruits of Philosophy and other freethought titles. In 1838, Frances Wright became a co-editor of the Investigator, to give Kneeland time to focus on his appeals. Abner’s final appeal, to the state’s Supreme Court, failed in 1839. The sixty-four year old journalist was convicted and jailed for sixty days. When released, Kneeland left the state for Iowa, and never returned. There is no record of how many booksellers ordered Fruits of Philosophy in bulk, but in the five years they collaborated on the book, Kneeland and Knowlton sold nearly seven thousand copies of the new edition.