by Will Durant
At one end we see intelligent Power arranging planetary systems;… at the other,… providing an appropriate mechanism for the clasping and unclasping of the filaments of the feather of a humming bird…. Every organized natural body, in the provisions which it contains for its sustentation and propagation, testifies a care, on the part of the Creator, expressly directed to these purposes.9
Half of literate England began to discuss Paley’s books and watch; Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Hazlitt talked about them in a lively debate at Keswick. The Natural Theology had a long life; the great Darwin himself studied it carefully10 before formulating his rival theory that the adjustment of organs to desirable ends had come about through natural selection. A century after Paley, Henri Bergson eloquently rephrased the “argument from design” in L’Évolution créatrice (1906). The debate goes on.
II. GODWIN ON JUSTICE
Quite forgotten today, William Godwin (1756–1836) was the most influential English philosopher of his generation. “No work in our time,” wrote Hazlitt toward 1823, “gave such a blow to the philosophical mind of this country as the celebrated Enquiry Concerning Political Justice”11 “Throw away your books of chemistry,” Wordsworth told a young student, “and read Godwin on Necessity”;12 and in Godwin’s old age, when he had come to doubt himself, he saw his ideas broadcast on the wings of song by his son-in-law Shelley. He would probably have been put in jail except for the high price he charged for his book.
His parents were devout Calvinists, dedicated to the predestinarianism that in Godwin became determinism. His father was a Nonconformist minister; he himself was educated for the pulpit, and served as clergyman in divers towns. While so functioning at Stowmarket he was introduced by a young republican to the French philosophers, who soon upset his faith. He took atheism from d’Holbach, though in later years he graciously made a place for God in his congested volume. He took from Helvétius the belief in education and reason as the progenitors of utopia. He followed Rousseau in accepting the native goodness of men, but he preferred philosophical anarchism to Rousseau’s omnipotent state. He abandoned the Christian ministry, and set out to butter his bread with pen and ink. He joined Lord Stanhope and Thomas Holcroft in a club of “revolutionists,” but for the most part he gave himself to arduous study and difficult writing; and in 1793, aged thirty-seven, he issued the most radical major work of his time.
He called it Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness. Apparently a book on government, it covered nearly all the problems of philosophy, from perception to statesmanship, stopping just short of God. He scorned the fables of heaven and hell as transparent devices to promote obedience and facilitate government.13 He condemned clergymen who swore acceptance of the Thirty-nine Articles of the official faith while privately discarding them.14 He rejected free will, and the will itself if understood as a distinct faculty; it was for him merely an abstract term for conscious responses to stimuli, situations, or desires.15 Since actions are determined by heredity, individual experience, and present circumstances, we should meet the wrongdoings of others without anger or recrimination, and we should reform our penal system to rehabilitate rather than punish; however, it may be necessary to use praise, blame, and punishment as providing corrective memories in future temptations.16
What should we praise, and what condemn? The morally good, and morally bad? And what is good? Following Helvétius (1758) and Bentham (1789), Godwin defined the good as that which promotes individual or group happiness, and he defined happiness as consistent pleasure of body, mind, or feeling. This ethical philosophy is not hedonistic or sensual, for it ranks intellectual pleasures above those of the senses. It is not egoistic or selfish, for it recognizes that the individual is part of a group; that the good of the group is prerequisite to the security of its constituent individuals; and that among the highest of all pleasures are those that an individual may derive from contributing to the happiness of his fellow men. Our social instincts generate altruistic actions, and these actions can give us a pleasure keener and more lasting than any delight of sense or intellect.17 To be kind is to be happy; to be unkind is to be miserable. “Morality, the science of human happiness,” is “the principle which binds the individual to the species, and the inducements which are calculated to persuade us to model our conduct on the way most conducive to the advantage of all.”18
Justice, then, is the regulation of conduct, in the individual and the group, for the greatest happiness of the greatest number. “The immediate object of government is security for the group or the individual.” Since the individual desires as much freedom as comports with his security, “the most desirable state of mankind is that which maintains general security with the smallest encroachment upon individual independence.”19 Hence there is no need for governmental or religious sanctions for marriage; the mutual agreement of two adults to live together should suffice; and the union should be dissoluble at the desire of either party.20 (This line especially pleased Shelley.)
Godwin did not like governments. Whatever their form or theory, they were, in practice, the domination of a majority by a minority. He repudiated the conservative contention that the masses were congenitally inferior and always potentially murderous, and therefore had to be ruled by fable, terror, or force. Like Owen, he thought that most inferiorities were due to inadequate education, narrow opportunities, or environmental blight.21 He laughed at equality before the law, when every day saw a moneyed wrongdoer freed, by legal trickery or judicial favor, from the penalty of his crime.22 He was not a socialist; he accepted the institution—and the inheritance—of property,23 and opposed governmental control of production or distribution;24 but he insisted that private property should be considered a public trust,25 and warned that the concentration of wealth was inviting revolution.26
However, he had no taste for revolution. “Till the character of the human species is essentially altered,” any forcible overthrow of the existing system, any violent attempt to redistribute wealth, would cause a social disruption “more injurious to the common welfare than the inequality it attempted to remove.”27 “A revolution of opinion is the only means of attaining a better distribution of wealth,”28 and this will require a long and patient process of education through schools and literature.
Nevertheless, to require a general education through a national system of schools would be a mistake, for these would be tools of national chauvinism leading to war, and of governmental propaganda aimed to instill a blind obedience.29 Education should be left to private enterprise, should always tell the truth, and should habituate the student to reason. “Reason is not an independent principle” or faculty, “and has no tendency to incite us to action; in a practical view it is merely a comparison and balancing of different feelings. Reason… is calculated to regulate our conduct according to the comparative worth it ascribes to different excitements” or impulses. “Morality is nothing but a calculation of consequences,”30 including the consequences to the group. “It is therefore to the improvement of reason that we are to look for the improvement of our social condition.”31
The road to utopia through education is long and arduous, but man has made some progress on that road, and there is no visible limit to his further advance. The goal is a humanity sufficiently instructed and foresightful to act reasonably and freely. Anarchism is the distant ideal, but for many generations to come it will remain an ideal, and the nature of man will necessitate some form of government. We must continue to hope that, in our distant and cleansed descendants, intelligence will graduate into orderly freedom.
There must have been a rich fount of intellectual energy in Godwin, for in 1794, only a year after publishing his ponderous Enquiry, he issued what many judged to be the outstanding novel of the time, Caleb Williams, which showed “the spirit and character of the government intruding itself in every rank of society.” To this story the author added his own living romance: he married Mary Wollstonecraft (179
7), adopted her free-love daughter Fanny Imlay, and lived with Mary for a year in stimulating companionship. “I honored her intellectual powers,” he said, “and the noble generosity of her propensities; mere tenderness would not have been adequate to produce the happiness which we experienced.”32 She died, as we have seen, shortly after giving birth to Mary Godwin Shelley.
In 1801 he married Mrs. Mary Jane Clairmont, whose daughter (by her first husband) was to be one of Byron’s mistresses. Godwin and his wife supported their complex brood by publishing books, among them the Tales from Shakespeare (1807) of Charles and Mary Lamb. In the reaction which drew Wordsworth and Coleridge from his friendship Godwin fell upon hard times, and he too shared in the natural conservatism of old age. Shelley, himself in straits, helped him; and in 1833, by the irony of history, the government, which he had tolerated as a necessary evil, made him a “yeoman usher of the Exchequer,” with a modest pension that fed him till he died (1836).
III. MALTHUS ON POPULATION
Godwin’s Enquiry provoked into print a book far more famous than his own. The process was aided by the unusual reaction of a son against his father’s liberal philosophy.
Daniel Malthus (died 1800) was an amiable eccentric, a personal friend of David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He shared the skepticism of the Scot and the pessimism of the Swiss about civilization. He attended personally to his son’s pre-college education, and trusted that Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) would be a law-abiding radical like himself and Godwin. Thomas went through Cambridge, and entered the Anglican ministry in 1797. When Godwin’s book appeared (1793), father and son had many fond debates over its contents. Thomas did not share his father’s enthusiasm about it. This utopian fancy of triumphant reason, he felt, would be repeatedly stultified by the simple fact, so pithily declared in the Book of Ecclesiastes, that when the supply of food rises its beneficence is soon annulled by an increase in population. As the fertility of the earth is limited, and there is no bound to the sexual mania of men, the multiplication of mouths—through earlier marriage, reckless reproduction, lowered infantile and senile mortality—must soon consume the augmented food. The father did not accept this conclusion, but he admired the force with which it had been argued, and he asked his son to write out his views. Thomas did, and the result was published in 1798 as An Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society.
It began with a disarming apology to the two writers whose optimism it challenged:
I cannot doubt the talents of such men as Godwin and Condorcet…. I have read some of their speculations, on the perfectibility of men and society, with great pleasure. I have been warmed and delighted with the enchanting picture which they hold forth. I ardently wish for such happy improvements. But I see great and, to my understanding, unconquerable difficulties in the way to them. These difficulties it is my present purpose to state; declaring, at the same time that so far from exulting in them as a cause of triumph over the friends of innovation, nothing would give me greater pleasure than to see them completely removed.33
Malthus tried to put his argument in mathematical form. Allowing that the food supply may increase arithmetically every twenty-five years (from 1 to 2 to 3 to 4 to 5 to 6, etc.), the population, if unchecked—and allowing four surviving children to every couple—would increase geometrically every twenty-five years (from 1 to 2 to 4 to 8 to 16 to 32 …). At this rate “in two centuries the population would be to the means of subsistence as 25 to 9; in three centuries it would be 4,096 to 13; and in 2,000 years the difference would be incalculable.”34 The reason why population has not risen so rapidly is that it was limited both by negative and by positive checks on reproduction. The negative checks were preventive: the deferment of marriage by poverty or other causes; “vice” (by which Malthus meant extramarital sex), “unnatural passions” (homosexuality, sodomy, etc.), and the various means of contraception in or outside of marriage. When these negative factors failed to keep population in balance with the food supply, nature and history provided positive checks operating upon individuals already existing: infanticide, disease, famine, and war, painfully balancing births with deaths.
From this somber analysis Malthus drew surprising conclusions. First, there is no use raising the wages of workingmen, for if wages are increased the workers will marry earlier and will have more children; the population will grow; the mouths will increase faster than the food, and poverty will be restored. Likewise it is useless to raise the “poor rates” (taxes for the care of the unemployed); this will be an incentive to idleness and larger families; mouths will again multiply faster than goods; the competition among buyers will allow sellers to raise the prices of their diminishing stocks; and soon the poor will be as poor as before.35
To complete his demolition of Godwin, Malthus went on to consider the “dream” of philosophical anarchism. If government were to disappear, “every man would be obliged to guard with force his little store,” as we bar our doors and windows when law and order fail. “Selfishness would be triumphant…, contention perpetual.”36 With all restraints removed from mating and coitus, reproduction would advance faster than production, overpopulation would reduce each individual’s allotment of goods, and utopia would collapse in desperate competition, price and wage spirals, inevitable chaos, spreading misery.37 Government would have to be restored; private property would have to be protected to encourage production and investment; private violence would have to be suppressed by public force. History would return to its traditional formula: the products of nature divided by the nature of man.
In a revised and much extended form of the Essay, Malthus laid down, more clearly and harshly than before, the preventive remedies that might render unnecessary the catastrophic cures used by nature and history. He proposed a halt to poor relief, and a check on interference with free enterprise; the law of supply and demand should be left to operate in the relations of producers and consumers, employers and employees. Early marriage must be discouraged to keep the birth rate down. “Our obligation” is “not to marry till we have a fair prospect of being able to support our children.”38 Above all, men must learn moral restraint before and after marriage. “The interval between the age of puberty and… marriage must… be passed in strict chastity.”39 Within marriage there must be no contraception in any way or form. If these or equivalent regulations are not observed we must resign ourselves to periodical reductions of overpopulation by famine, pestilence, or war.
The Essay on Population was received as a divine revelation by the conservative elements of the British people. Parliament and the employers felt warranted in resistance to the demands of liberals like Robert Owen for legal mitigations of the “laws” of supply and demand. William Pitt withdrew the bill he had introduced for extending poor relief.40 The measures already taken by the government against British radicals seemed justified by Malthus’ contention that these peddlers of utopia were seducing simple souls to tragic delusions. British manufacturers were strengthened in their belief that low wages made for disciplined labor and obedience. Ricardo made the Malthusian theory the foundation of his “dismal science.” (It was after reading Malthus that Carlyle gave that name to economics.) Now nearly all the evil incident to the Industrial Revolution could be ascribed to the reckless fertility of the poor.
The liberals were at first thrown into dismay and disarray by Malthus’ Essay. Godwin took twenty years to draw up his answer, and then his book Of Population, an Answer to Malthus (1820) was mostly a reiteration of his hopes, and a complaint that Malthus had converted the friends of progress into reactionaries by the hundred.41 William Hazlitt was an exception: in an essay on Malthus in The Spirit of the Age (1824), he attacked the merciless divine with all the sharp edge of his intellect. The fertility of plants, he thought, could be relied upon to outrun the fertility of women. “A grain of corn will multiply and propagate itself much faster even than the human species. A bushel of wheat will sow a field; that field will furni
sh seed for 20 others.”42 There will be “green revolutions.”
Later writers brought up an array of facts to calm Malthusian fears. In Europe, in China, in India, population has more than doubled after Malthus; yet their people are better fed than before. In the United States the population has doubled several times since 1800; nevertheless, despite an ever lower percentage of the people required for it, agriculture produces more adequately than ever before, and has an immense surplus for export. Contrary to Malthus, the rise in wages has brought not an increase but a lowering of the birth rate. The problem is no longer a deficiency of seeds or fields but a shortage in the supply of nonhuman energy to operate the mechanisms of agriculture and industry, of villages and towns.
Of course the real answer to Malthus has been contraception—its moral acceptance, its wider dissemination, its greater efficacy, its lower cost. The general secularization of thought broke down the theological barriers to birth control. The Industrial Revolution transformed children from the economic assets they had been on the farm to the economic handicaps they became in cities as child labor slowly diminished, as education became expensive, as urban crowding rose. Intelligence spread: men and women realized that changed conditions no longer required large families. Even war now demanded technical inventiveness for competition in material destruction rather than masses of young men deployed in competitive homicide.
So the answer to Malthus came not from Godwin’s theories but from the “Neo-Malthusians” and their propaganda for birth control. In 1822 Francis Place published Illustrations and Proofs of the Principle of Population. He accepted Malthus’ principle that population tends to increase faster than the food supply. Restraint, he agreed, is necessary, but not by postponing marriage; better would be the acceptance of contraception as a legitimate and relatively moral substitute for nature’s blind fertility and war’s wholesale destruction. (He himself had fifteen children, of whom five died in childhood.) He scattered through London handbills printed at his own expense, advocating birth control; and he continued his campaign till his death at the age of eighty-three (1854).