Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World

by Roy Porter

  Nature, and Nature's Laws lay hid in Night:

  God said, Let Newton be! and All was Light.105

  It is, of course, no accident that, after Newton, the chief light-struck natural philosopher was that enlightened polymath Joseph Priestley, author of The History and Present State of Discoveries Relating to Vision, Light, and Colours (1772).106

  Light and enlightenment pervaded public consciousness. The ‘Light of Knowledge’, claimed William Young in 1722, was ‘now universally breaking on the world’;107 sixty years on, Gilbert Stuart spoke of ‘this enlightened age of philosophy and reflexion’;108 Abraham Tucker popularized Locke in his The Light of Nature Pursued (1768); Gibbon celebrated his ‘free and enlightened country’; the Lunar Society, that gathering of Midlands intellectual aristocracy, met monthly at full moon (to make their journey home easier); Thomas Spence praised the ‘Sun of Liberty’; and Mary Wollstonecraft was jubilant over – while Burke jeered at – ‘this enlightened age’.109 As Tom Paine so succinctly put it, ‘What we have to do is as clear as light.’110

  As a marker of how light's secular, practical connotations had come to the fore, Samuel Johnson defined ‘to enlighten’ as ‘to illuminate, to supply with light, to instruct, to furnish with increase of knowledge, to cheer, to exhilarate, to gladden, to supply with sight, to quicken in the faculty of vision’.111 Assuredly, light was thus integral to the natural order; but it could also be a manmade searchlight, piercing the gloom, dispelling darkness. Light's spell is evident in the intense interest taken in the science of sight. ‘Were there no example in the world, of contrivance except that of the eye,’ declared the Cambridge divine William Paley, ‘it would be alone sufficient to support the conclusion which we draw from it, as to the necessity of an intelligent Creator.’112 Above all, light was crucial to the newly dominant epistemology, as empiricism turned the problem of knowing into a matter of seeing: to know was henceforth to see. John Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690) was paradigmatic for a host of later texts which explained cognition through visual metaphors, the mind as a camera obscura.113 No accident, perhaps, that Lemuel Gulliver was English literature's first bespectacled hero.114

  With light so supercharged, enlightenment became a rallying cry. ‘Why are the nations of the world so patient under despotism?’ demanded the Revd Richard Price. ‘Is it not because they are kept in darkness, and want knowledge? Enlighten them and you will elevate them.’115 Almost inevitably, Tom Paine – not just a political radical but a designer of smokeless candles – also milked that image in his The Rights of Man (1792), claiming the transparency of truth: ‘the sun needs no inscription to distinguish him from darkness’.116 Light, he held, was God's gift, a natural asset – no wonder William Pitt's notorious window tax was so bitterly resented, a radical squib branding the Prime Minister ‘Mr Billy Taxlight’.117

  All this resplendence made light intoxicating, and there arose an excited sense of involvement in change among a people for whom sapere aude came to mean facere aude – not just to know but to act as well. Grumble though he might that all was ‘running mad after innovation’, Samuel Johnson could compliment ‘his own age’ for ‘its superiority’ over the Ancients – ‘in every respect’, that was, ‘except in its reverence for government’.118 Indeed, Boswell records that great cant hater protesting that ‘I am always angry when I hear ancient times praised at the expence of modern times.’119 ‘The age we live in is a busy age in which knowledge is rapidly advancing towards perfection,’ enthused the young Jeremy Bentham, launching a 60-year career dedicated to reforming the house of the Hanoverians according to the yardstick of utility. ‘In the natural world, in particular, every thing teems with discovery and with improvement.’120

  There were many Englands, but one was the stage of thrusting achievers, sold on science, dedicated to the diffusion of rational knowledge and eager for innovation – be it practical, artistic or intellectual. They were men devoted to the promotion of a new material well-being and leisure; aspiring provincials, Dissenters, sceptics and political realists resentful at the traditional authority imbued in Church and State. Such Moderns it was who were the fomenters of the Enlightenment.121

  3

  CLEARING AWAY THE RUBBISH

  Reason is the glory of human nature.

  ISAAC WATTS1

  More like a communing of clubbable men than a clique or a conspiracy, the Enlightenment derived its coherence in Britain largely from a shared currency of images and idioms – it was as much a language as a programme. Powerful among these, as we have seen, was light: ‘this enlightened age’. Another keyword was emancipation: Moderns dramatized deliverance and studied escapology.2 Some societies crave the transcendence of the otherworldly; others revere custom, or, as with Renaissance Italy, hanker after a previous golden age.3 The enlightened, by contrast, aimed to break the chains and forge a new future.

  Emancipation might be portrayed in terms of a natural maturing or coming of age, a growing out of swaddling bands. What was generally envisaged, however, was something more violent and traumatic: snatching off a blindfold or bursting free from a straitjacket. Bogged down in semantic quicksands, fettered in ‘mind-forg'd manacles’,4 or hoodwinked by sinister foes, enlightened spirits craved escape from the murk of time or the mental maze. Narratives of emancipation were not, of course, without precedent – folklore abounds in tales of captors and captives, romances are travelogues of the search, and the Christian master narrative is itself a ‘doomed and redeemed’ tale of Paradise lost and regained.5 But what distinguishes the Enlightenment is the secularity of its model of mankind questing freedom through the Socratic ‘know yourself’ and its modern corollary, ‘do it yourself’.

  Escape scenarios gained their immediacy from two experiences, one negative, the other positive. Firstly there was the threat of malignant forces which had wreaked destruction in the past and were still darkening the present. In Britain, as elsewhere, Protestantism had never felt secure against a Catholicism cast not merely as erroneous and corrupt, but as evil incarnate, the Whore of Babylon, the Beast of the Apocalypse. Partly thanks to the Council of Trent (1545–63), Rome had had at its disposal the Index of Prohibited Books, the Inquisition, the Society of Jesus and other battalions of the Church Militant, which had then gone about their work with fire and faggot, leaving a gory toll of carnage and martyrs. The Protestant alliance had been mauled in the Thirty Years War; now Louis XIV was renewing the assault. What gave Britons such fitful sense of common cause and shared identity as they did possess was anti-Catholicism, a visceral loathing of ‘the insupportable Yoke of the most Pompous and Tyrannical Policy that ever enslav'd Mankind under the name or shew of Religion’.6 Such fears were readily fanned so long as Jacobitism was waiting in the wings.

  As chapter 5 will detail, enlightened minds inherited Protestant anti-Catholicism and then rationalized it. Rome was demonized as the inveterate foe. The perverse apotheosis of self-abasement and slavish submission to tyranny, Popery sanctified theological dogmatism, ritualized idolatry, drilled windows into men's souls and denied the post-Gutenberg duty of all believers to read God's Book by the candle of Reason.7

  Enlightened anti-Catholicism furthermore presumed guilt by association. Basing their creed on the Bible alone, Protestants denounced the dependency of Romish dogma upon Eastern gnosticism, Hellenistic Platonism, neo-Aristotelianism and other non-Christian sources: key tenets of Catholicism such as transubstantiation and purgatory had been shown to possess no scriptural basis whatever, being fabricated entirely on scholastic metaphysics, Church tradition and Vatican decrees. As the ‘new science’ assailed Platonism and Thomism with Cartesian systematic doubt or Baconian empiricism, it was inevitable that the citadel of scholastic theology would also be sapped, so dubious were its metaphysical foundations. Welding Protestantism to enlightened thinking, Locke was to assert in his The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) that all that was required of a Christian was to profess that the Bible was the word o
f God and Jesus the Messiah. Such professions aside, theology (that is, the knowledge of God) was essentially beyond man's needs, powers and business.8

  The academic heritage was trashed over and again by enlightened propagandists as a tragicomedy of errors – gazing up at the heavens, pedants had stumbled into a ditch. Thus Plato, proceeding – according to Viscount Bolingbroke – ‘like a bombast poet and a mad theologian’, had ‘diverted men from the pursuit of truth’.9 Gibbon likewise lamented misguided learning. ‘Several of these masters,’ he jeered at the neo-Platonists of late Antiquity, ‘were men of profound thought and intense application; but, by mistaking the true object of philosophy, their labours contributed much less to improve than to corrupt the human understanding.’ In the medieval period, furthermore, so prone to ‘credulity and submission’, monkish casuists had contracted ‘the vices of a slave’, and for fifteen hundred years metaphysics had perpetuated a sterile obscurantism.10

  Once hitched to the papal propaganda machine, otherwise innocuous sophistries had turned positively dangerous. Rome commanded a fiendish indoctrination department in which iniquity trapped innocence, be it through devious dogma or gaudy images. The Antichrist's evil empire was endlessly portrayed as a lethal threat to the freeborn Englishman's enjoyment of his God-given faculties.11

  It was not just from Popery that post-Restoration élites were seeking deliverance, however: collective memories had also been scarred by the Civil War. The Calvinist dogma of predestination had bred ‘enthusiasm’, that awesome, irresistible and unfalsifiable conviction of personal infallibility (see chapter 5). Presbyterians, antinomian ‘mechanic preachers’ spewing up prophecies as the spirit moved them, and other self-elected saints had loosed torrents of chiliastic bloodshed. Those experiences came back as nightmares: still in the 1780s the unflappable Edward Gibbon could descry in the Gordon rioters rampaging through the capital the ghosts of Roundhead fanatics – bogeymen soon recycled in Burke's Reflections (1790).12 If Popery was the epitome of despotism, imposed from above, Puritanism was anarchy incarnate, breaking out from below. Who could say which was the more pernicious?13

  Luckily, light was dawning, hinting that this long reign of delusion, devastation and death might nearly be over. Holy war was going out of fashion: Europe-wide, princes and even prelates were becoming more wary about heretic-and witch-burning, while the mental tide was turning, as is evident from the popularity of burlesques of the bigots:

  Such as do build their faith upon

  The holy text of pike and gun

  Decide all controversies by

  Infallible artillery…

  As if religion were intended

  For nothing else but to be mended.14

  In particular – this is the positive development – natural science was making headway as a solid platform for knowledge. Telescopes and microscopes were revealing new worlds, infinitely distant, infinitely large or small; anatomy was laying bodily structures bare, and England's own William Harvey had discovered the circulation of the blood. Observation and experiment were revealing Nature's laws, while inventions like the airpump and, a bit later, Newcome's steam engine were contributing to that ‘effecting of all things possible’ trumpeted by Bacon; and meantime, brave new worlds were being discovered by circumnavigators. So if the Civil War left an acrid stench, there were also harbingers of hope.

  This intellectual watershed was signposted in the ‘battle of the books’.15 The Renaissance had venerated classical achievements in philosophy, science, letters and the arts; Hippocrates and Galen remained the medical bibles; and humanists continued to uphold the geocentric (earth-centred) and homocentric (man-centred) cosmos espoused by Greek science, with man at the hub and as the measure of the divinely created system. Xenophon, Cicero, Livy, Virgil and other classical poets, philosophers, moralists, historians and statesmen chaired the school of virtue in which students of culture should enrol. Renaissance ‘anticomania’ was consoling: wisdom was already set in stone, the custodian of civilization.

  To enlightened eyes, however, the humanist tenet that what had come first was best had been overtaken by time: after all, as Bacon and Hobbes pointed out, it was the Modern Age which was truly old. Historical scholarship produced a new optic on the past, challenging the Renaissance identification with the Ancients and accentuating the radical differences between the old world of Antiquity and the new one marked by guns and printing. Authentic new worlds had been discovered, above all America, disclosing scenes of exotic life unknown to Aristotle or Ptolemy. The seventeenth century moreover proved intellectually revolutionary. The dazzling ‘new sciences’ of astronomy, cosmology and physics pioneered by Kepler and Galileo challenged the cosy commonplaces of both Greek philosophy and the Bible. Heliocentric astronomy decentred the earth, reducing it to a tiny, minor planet nowhere in particular in that dauntingly infinite universe newly glimpsed through the telescope, whose immense spaces frightened not only Pascal. And this ‘new astronomy’ was complemented by a new ‘mechanical philosophy’, which stripped Nature of its purposive vitality, reducing it to a machine made up of material particles governed by universal laws, whose motions could be given mathematical expression. If daunting and dangerous, science was also full of promise.

  Empirical discoveries fostered a new spirit, eager to question authorities, even the Bible, a sceptical turn robustly expressed in the Dictionnaire (1697) of that unbiddable Huguenot Pierre Bayle.16 Many of Europe's greatest minds of Bayle's generation concluded that, in the search for truth, neither implicit faith in the Bible nor automatic reliance on the Ancients would any longer suffice. If, as late as 1690, William Temple's Essay upon the Ancient and Modern Learning upheld the superiority of the Ancients, William Wotton's Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning (1694) countered that, in the sciences at least, they had been wholly eclipsed by the Moderns. It remained hotly disputed, however, whether Antiquity's achievements in poetry, drama and the fine arts had been, or could be, excelled: would the contemporary Homer please step forward? But Moderns like Alexander Pope had their own solution to that problem: the classics could be translated, simplified and modernized to meet the needs of modern audiences.17

  Such confusions, crises and controversies frame the key enlightenment escape strategy, the demand for a clear-out and clean-up of the lumber house of the mind, condemned as dark, dilapidated and dangerous, unfit for habitation: metaphysics was dismissed as moonshine and traditional teachings were ridiculed as fictions, frauds, fantasies, fables or fallacies.18 Bigotry, dogmatism and overweening system-building were damned by Moderns equally eager to deride ‘old wives’ tales' and other hand-me-down folk wisdom: obsolete orthodoxies in all shapes and sizes had to be swept away. Magic, mysticism, scholasticism and all other houses of cards or castles of error must be demolished, and knowledge rebuilt on firm foundations. Enlightened publicists thus set about cleansing, scouring, sifting, sieving, winnowing the mental grain from the chaff, echoing the injunctions of the Helmontian chemist and doctor George Thomson back in the 1660s: ‘Works, not Words; Things, not Thinking… Operation, not meerly Speculation.’19 Emancipation would not come easily: ‘the Bulk of Mankind in all Ages, and in all Countries, are violently attached to the Opinions, Customs, and even Habits, which they have been used to’, averred the free-thinker John Trenchard, adopting the patronizing air favoured by enlightened authors when putting down ‘folly'. ‘Sounds, Shews, Prejudices, vain and idle Terrors, Phantoms, Delusions… operate more upon them than true and strong Reasons.’20

  It became de rigueur to denounce the bad old ways of the bad old days. George Berkeley, philosopher, mathematician and later bishop, prompted himself: ‘Mem.: to be eternally banishing Metaphisics etc. and recalling Men to Common Sense.’21 Locke's pupil, the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, similarly condemned ‘all that Dinn & Noise of Metaphysicks, all that pretended studdy’.22 Where then lay true inquiry? ‘To philosophize, in a just Signification, is but To carry Good-Breeding a step higher’23 – thinking cou
ld be rescued from the academic eunuchs if undertaken by gentlemen in a liberal spirit.

  Crucial to these truth strategies – impatience with obscurity and a prizing of clarification and transparency – was distrust of what the Royal Society's apologist Thomas Sprat dubbed ‘the cheat of words’. Taking their cue from the ‘new science’, enlightened thinkers set res over verba; words must not be reified, reality must replace rhetoric. Sprat called for language to ‘return back to primitive purity, and shortness, when men deliver'd so many things, almost in an equal number of words’.24 He was not so ‘lost in lexicography’, mused Samuel Johnson, ‘as to forget that words are the daughters of the earth, and that things are the sons of heaven’.25 Since ‘words are so apt to impose on the understanding,’ despaired Berkeley, ‘I am resolved in my inquiries to make as little use of them as possibly I can.’26

  Setting reality above verbality, the coming English empiricism also looked favourably on quantification. Were not numbers, at least, unambiguous and trustworthy? ‘Instead of using only comparative and superlative Words and intellectual Arguments,’ explained Sir William Petty, a founder fellow of the Royal Society, ‘I have taken the course… to express myself in Terms of Number, Weight, or Measure.’27

  Eternal intellectual vigilance was essential, however, because inanity was endemic and error infectious. Their feared triumph in a cacophonous babel formed the nightmare vision of Alexander Pope's Dunciad (1728), the climax of which depicted the final eclipse of reason at the hands of the Queen of Dulness:

  Lo! thy dread Empire, CHAOS! is restor'd;

  Light dies before thy uncreating word:

  Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;

  And Universal Darkness buries All.28

  Pope's abhorrence of quack versification reflected the suspicion of fabling and fiction, as expressed in the notorious put-down of poetry itself attributed to the Cambridge professor Isaac Barrow: ‘a kind of ingenious nonsense’. Though hardly one of its front-men, Pope shared the Enlightenment's hatred of a priori scholiasts, logic-choppers, pedants, know-alls and other dunces: in its warnings to man to heed his limits, his Essay on Man reads like Locke in heroic couplets.29