Man's Right to Knowledge and Its Free Use

Abstract

THE right to knowledge and its use, which, in a practical sense, I take to be a self-evident postulate, arises from that ceaseless demand of man's nature for the elaboration by his mind of the world of sense and of his inner universe, a demand coeval with the beginnings of his differentiation of perceptions and the birth of language, coeval with the emergence of free and conscious mind. The right describes the original attribute and mode of expression through which man has evolved to his individual and social primacy, the freedom by which he moves in his quest of Truth and which, in the present phase of ethical intelligence, is more than ever the condition for the preservation of the advances already made. To relate that right to what we in the West call democratic government requires that, within the limits possible to any assumption, we make clear the primary assumption of democracy, which is that the individual must remain free and that government must ultimately conform to the preponderant judgment of free men. This must be taken to be an absolute in the sense that it is inseparable from our form of organization; changes must lie within that fundamental postulate; its surrender or destruction would be the end of such a government. Within two generations that basis has been challenged by both the fascist and communist doctrines, and it is the persistence of the war of ideas engaged between these schools and that of the community of free men that has aroused us to an examination of democracy's defensive as well as offensive powers and of the elaboration of its subsidiary corollaries in experience. We in Canada share the inheritance of the West in virtually the same amplitude as you in this country do: and my task is to indicate briefly the