Volume V of The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Discussions, gathers the 1900 Dresden Edition's most outspoken essays and addresses from the great skeptic and champion of free thought. These pages capture Ingersoll at his most combative and brilliant: sparring with Talmage, defending Thomas Paine, and attacking the dogmas, hypocrisies, and authorities that he believed stifled human liberty. His arguments move from sharp public controversy to wider reflections on reason, science, and the stubborn refusal to accept natural truth. With vivid imagery and relentless logic, he challenges superstition, questions the reliability of sacred history, and exposes what he sees as the distortions of fanaticism, forgery, and inherited belief. Provocative, witty, and uncompromising, this volume showcases Ingersoll's lifelong defense of intellectual courage and the freedom to think without fear. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.

À propos de l'auteur

Ingersoll, Robert Green

Robert Green Ingersoll was a forceful American orator, lawyer, Civil War veteran, and leading public freethinker of the nineteenth century, born in New York in 1833 and rising from a minister’s son to one of the most celebrated public speakers of his age. After studying law and serving with distinction in the Union Army, he built a successful legal career while becoming famous for lectures that drew enormous crowds and challenged the religious orthodoxies of his time. Ingersoll’s writing and speeches championed reason, science, individual conscience, women’s rights, civil liberties, and a more humane social order, and he became known for defending free inquiry with wit, eloquence, and courage. His work often confronts questions of faith, morality, death, and justice, but always with a conviction that human dignity should not depend on dogma. That makes him strikingly relevant today, in an era still marked by debates over belief, secularism, rights, and the limits of authority. Ingersoll’s legacy lies not only in his influence on American freethought but also in the enduring power of his language: sharp, generous, and unafraid to speak plainly. Readers who enjoy passionate argument, intellectual history, and eloquent advocacy for liberty and skepticism will find him especially rewarding.