“It is evident that the notion of spirits, imagined by savages and adopted by the ignorant, is calculated to retard the progress of knowledge, since it precludes our researches into the true cause of the effects which we see, by keeping the human mind in apathy and sloth. This state of ignorance may be very useful to crafty theologians, but very injurious to society. This is the reason, however, why in all ages priests have persecuted those who have been the first to give natural explanations of the phenomena of nature— as witness: Anaxagoras, Aristotle, Galileo, Descartes—and, more recently, Richard Carlile, William Lawrence, Robert Taylor, and Abnet Kneeland; to which we may add the name of the learned and venerable Thomas Cooper, lately president of Columbia College, South Carolina.”

— H.D. Robinson (1835), notes to Baron d’Holbach’s The System of Nature [1]