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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Ghosts, and Other Lectures," Robert Green Ingersoll presents a compelling collection of essays that challenge conventional beliefs and invite readers to interrogate the nature of existence, religion, and morality. Ingersoll's literary style is marked by his eloquent rhetoric, sharp wit, and incisive logic, characteristic of the oratory prevalent in the late 19th century. The work serves as a remarkable tapestry of skepticism and reason, juxtaposing scientific inquiry with metaphysical questions, making it a vital contribution to the American freethought movement during a period marked by rising anti-religious sentiment and intellectual discourse. As one of the most prominent agnostic thinkers of his time, Ingersoll was profoundly influenced by the Enlightenment ideals of rationality and empirical evidence. His upbringing in a strict religious environment, combined with an extensive education in law, positioned him to critically assess religion's societal roles and the implications of superstition on human progress. His fervent advocacy for humanism and civil liberties is rendered throughout his lectures, reflecting his commitment to social change and intellectual enlightenment. I highly recommend "The Ghosts, and Other Lectures" to readers seeking a thought-provoking examination of spirituality and existential questions through the lens of reason. Ingersoll's passionate arguments and articulate delivery not only illuminate philosophical inquiries but also resonate with contemporary discussions about belief, ethics, and the human condition, making it an essential read for anyone engaged in critical thought. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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The Ghosts, and Other Lectures
Table of Contents
Introduction
This single-author collection presents a representative panorama of the public voice of Robert Green Ingersoll (1833–1899), the American orator, lawyer, and advocate of freethought. Its scope is not that of a complete works, but of a carefully gathered suite of major lectures and occasional addresses drawn from civic, political, and commemorative life. The purpose is twofold: to preserve the energy and clarity of a speaker who shaped debates in the late nineteenth century, and to show how his arguments about liberty, reason, and citizenship were developed across different forums, audiences, and occasions. Together, these works offer a durable map of his civic imagination.
The volume assembles varied text types characteristic of nineteenth‑century public discourse. It includes a prefatory statement and a concluding reflection, extended lectures delivered from the platform, essays of social and political argument, and formal speeches given at conventions and public banquets. There are campaign and nomination addresses, a commemorative oration rooted in national memory, and tributes that function as eulogies. The range also extends to a practical piece on agriculture in Illinois, evidence of the author’s engagement with everyday economic and regional concerns. Each form showcases a distinct rhetorical register while remaining anchored in the same commitment to public reasoning.
The unifying theme across these works is liberty understood in broad, human terms: freedom of conscience, freedom of expression, and the equitable dignity of women and children. That commitment is linked to a secular vision of the state, a critique of superstition’s influence on law and custom, and a robust confidence in education as a democratic instrument. Another thread is historical conscience—returning to foundational American texts and events to measure contemporary practice against declared principles. Whether defending personal autonomy or celebrating civic achievement, the works pursue the same end: enlarging the sphere in which reason, empathy, and rights can flourish.
Stylistically, the collection displays a hallmarked blend of clarity, cadence, and controlled fervor. Ingersoll’s arguments proceed by lucid structure and example, sharpened by irony and enlivened by anecdote. He often balances analytic critique with moral appeal, pairing logical demonstration with vivid imagery that remains accessible to general audiences. His tone can be combative when confronting dogma, yet generous when honoring friendship, service, or public virtue. Across genres, the prose favors direct definition, rhythmic parallelism, and memorable turns that illuminate rather than obscure. The result is rhetoric engineered for the lectern but crafted to retain force on the page.
These pieces emerge from the civic theater of the post–Civil War United States. Political addresses reflect the party conventions and contests of the era, including a nominating speech delivered at the national convention in Cincinnati in 1876. Banquet and commemorative speeches register the culture of public celebration and remembrance, as with an address honoring Ulysses S. Grant in Chicago on November 18, 1879. Tributes memorialize public and personal loss, including a minister of repute and the author’s brother, Ebon C. Ingersoll. An essay on farming grounds the volume in the material realities of Midwestern life during national transition.
Considered as a whole, the collection remains significant because it fuses enduring questions of rights and governance with the craft of public persuasion. Its arguments for secular government, for the civic and intellectual emancipation of women and children, and for the primacy of reason in law and policy continue to inform contemporary debates. Beyond doctrine, these writings model how to speak across difference without surrendering principle—how to translate conviction into arguments that invite scrutiny. They also preserve a historical record of how ideas circulated before mass electronic media, when a lecture hall or convention floor could shape national conversation.
Reading these works together invites attention to occasion and audience. A nomination speech must ignite a convention; a lecture can patiently unfold a case; a tribute requires tenderness; a banquet toast blends wit with homage. Yet the same mind and moral horizon unify them. The transitions from polemic to praise, from national ideals to local concerns, show an orator navigating the full circuit of public life. Approached in sequence, the collection reveals development by reiteration: central commitments revisited under varying pressures. Approached selectively, each piece stands as an accessible entry point to the author’s durable vision of free citizenship.
Historical Context
Robert Green Ingersoll (1833–1899), lawyer, Civil War colonel, and the era’s most famous platform orator, forged his career amid the transformations of the American Gilded Age. Born in Dresden, New York, and long based in Peoria, Illinois, he served as Illinois Attorney General (1867–1869) before moving his practice to Washington, D.C., and later New York. Railroads, the telegraph, and a national press amplified his lectures into mass events, while the lyceum and urban theaters supplied stages from Boston to Chicago. His blend of Enlightenment rationalism, patriotic reverence for 1776, and postwar nationalism shaped the addresses collected here—combining political exhortation, anticlerical critique, after-dinner eloquence, and memorial tributes.
The Civil War framed Ingersoll’s public identity and the moral vocabulary of his speeches. As colonel of the 11th Illinois Cavalry, he was captured at Lexington, Tennessee (December 18, 1862), paroled, and resigned in 1863. The rise of Decoration Day, proclaimed nationally by John A. Logan of the Grand Army of the Republic in 1868, created a ritual of remembrance that Ingersoll enriched with orations evoking battle, sacrifice, and reunified purpose; the line “The past rises before me like a dream” belongs to this commemorative culture. His tributes—whether to soldiers or to private figures—translated wartime memory into democratic ideals that animate multiple pieces in this collection.
Ingersoll’s freethought campaign unfolded alongside scientific and scholarly upheavals. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and the spread of German higher criticism (later distilled by Julius Wellhausen in 1878) unsettled traditional biblical authority. Ingersoll, dubbed “The Great Agnostic,” popularized skepticism on the American platform, celebrating Thomas Paine and the Enlightenment as intellectual forebears. His lectures on “ghosts,” superstition, and secular ethics traveled the same press networks and lecture circuits that carried evangelical revivals, often provoking clergy and delighting vast urban audiences. These cultural currents supported the broad claims for liberty of conscience and the rights of the individual that recur across the essays and addresses gathered here.
The partisan arena gave Ingersoll some of his most enduring stages. A lifelong Republican shaped by antislavery politics, he argued for the promises of the Thirteenth (1865), Fourteenth (1868), and Fifteenth (1870) Amendments during Reconstruction and its contested aftermath. His famed nominating speech for James G. Blaine at the Republican National Convention in Cincinnati (June 15, 1876) exemplified the fusion of moral drama and political spectacle that typified the age. The same year, the centennial mood turned orators toward Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence. Later, in Chicago, he saluted Ulysses S. Grant at the Palmer House banquet (November 18, 1879), linking wartime leadership to the national mission of liberty.
Women’s rights and the status of children were central to postbellum reform and to Ingersoll’s broader theory of liberty. The suffrage agitation of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (with the National Woman Suffrage Association founded in 1869) intersected with debates on married women’s property, education, and employment. Simultaneously, the common-school movement and early child-labor reforms reframed children as rights-bearing citizens in formation rather than mere dependents. Ingersoll’s arguments for secular schooling, against coercive dogma, and for domestic equality drew on this reform climate. By situating family life within constitutional and Enlightenment principles, he extended the language of 1776 into the intimate institutions of the home and school.
Economic upheaval after the Panic of 1873 and the rise of corporate railroads stirred agrarian protest in the Midwest, particularly in Illinois. The Granger movement pressed for regulation of grain storage and freight rates, culminating in the Supreme Court’s Munn v. Illinois decision (1877) upholding state power over businesses “clothed with a public interest.” Ingersoll, grounded in prairie politics and Peoria legal practice, addressed rural life, markets, and practical reform with humor and urgency. Chicago’s explosive growth after the Great Fire (1871) and its rebuilt hotels and halls—such as the Palmer House—symbolized an urban modernity that both attracted and unsettled farmers, a tension his commentary often made vivid and accessible.
The legal culture of the late nineteenth century provided Ingersoll with a forum for defending speech, conscience, and due process. He opposed the censorship ethos of the Comstock Act (1873), criticized Sunday laws, and later argued high-profile cases in Washington, including the Star Route trials (1882–1883). His eventual defense of a freethought pamphleteer in a New Jersey blasphemy case (C. B. Reynolds, 1887) reflected the same principles that animated his platform lectures. Earlier service as Illinois Attorney General anchored his authority when denouncing legal privileges for sectarianism. Across courtroom and rostrum, he insisted that the Republic’s legitimacy rested on protecting the heretic and the minority voice.
Print capitalism and the national lecture system made Ingersoll’s oratory a shared civic experience. Railroad timetables turned Cincinnati, Chicago, and New York into nodes of a continental stage, while newspapers like the Chicago Tribune and the Cincinnati Commercial reprinted speeches verbatim for readers far beyond the hall. The culture of public tribute—eulogies for statesmen, clergy, and family—blended private grief with public pedagogy. His memorial for his brother, Congressman Ebon C. Ingersoll (1831–1879), and his tribute to Rev. Alexander Clark, a Pittsburgh Methodist editor, exemplify that civic rhetoric. Set against the centennial worship of 1776, these texts advance a humanistic nationalism grounded in reason, rights, and remembrance.
Synopsis (Selection)
PREFACE.
Ingersoll introduces the collection’s aims—championing reason, secularism, and individual liberty—and sets the tone for his critiques of superstition and tyranny.
THE GHOSTS.
A sweeping denunciation of inherited superstition and ecclesiastical authority, urging the replacement of fear and dogma with science, skepticism, and humane ethics.
THE LIBERTY LECTURES (including: THE LIBERTY OF MAN, WOMAN AND CHILD; LIBERTY OF WOMAN; THE LIBERTY OF CHILDREN; CONCLUSION).
A multipart argument for the complete emancipation of individuals—men, women, and children—through civil equality, education, and freedom from religious and political domination; it presses for women’s legal and social rights and for children’s right to happiness, learning, and protection. The conclusion calls for secular government, universal justice, and the primacy of human welfare over creed.
1776. THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE.
An oration exalting the Declaration as a charter of natural rights and popular sovereignty, contrasting it with monarchy and priestcraft, and urging its principles’ application to contemporary civic life.
ABOUT FARMING IN ILLINOIS.
A humorous, plainspoken discourse on agriculture that challenges common complaints, emphasizes practical knowledge and innovation, and reflects on economic and political forces shaping farm life.
SPEECH AT CINCINNATI
A campaign address outlining Republican ideals of union, liberty, and national progress in the postwar era, paired with a pointed critique of the opposing party’s record.
NOMINATING JAMES G. BLAINE FOR THE PRESIDENCY,
A convention nominating speech that praises Blaine’s leadership and frames the Republican legacy in terms of patriotism, reform, and party unity.
"THE PAST RISES BEFORE ME LIKE A DREAM."
A Decoration Day address evoking vivid scenes of the Civil War to honor fallen soldiers, celebrate emancipation, and counsel reconciliation grounded in liberty.
THE GRANT BANQUET AT THE PALMER HOUSE, CHICAGO, THURSDAY, NOV. 18th, 1879.
A toast lauding Ulysses S. Grant’s steadfast character and achievements in war and peace, presenting him as a symbol of national unity and republican virtue.
A TRIBUTE TO THE Rev. ALEXANDER CLARK.
A eulogy commemorating Clark’s humane spirit and ministry, emphasizing kindness, tolerance, and shared moral aims beyond sectarian divisions.
A TRIBUTE TO EBON C. INGERSOLL, BY HIS BROTHER ROBERT.
A deeply personal graveside oration for the author’s brother that offers secular consolation by affirming love, memory, and human goodness over theological dogma.
