ABSTRACT
Diabolical Place was always obvious enough what the main axioms of the Enlightenment were. The Enlightenment secret was out at last. Secularism condemns marriage vows, along with all other vows, oaths, and promises, as being relics of superstition. The greatest happiness axiom condemns clerical celibacy. For these reasons, the Enlightenment had always promised an immense future increase in sexual gratification. Among the people whom Thomas Malthus convinced of his factual proposition, however, were the contemporary British leaders of the Enlightenment: the utilitarian philosophers Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, and their numerous and influential followers. Someone described Place's handbill as "diabolical," and this word caught on, and stuck to the handbills and to Place: no doubt because it accurately expressed what most decent people felt about such publications. Place's publications seem actually to have left the subject of contraception even more unmentionable than it had been before.
