Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World

by Roy Porter

  ‘Ideas’ arose from an external material thing (e.g. snow) provoking first a sensation and then a reflection which involved an ‘idea’: thus the sensation of snow would lead to the idea of ‘white’,70 an ‘idea’ thus being the ‘object of the understanding’. Locke's usage was original: ‘ideas’ are in our minds, not only when we think but also when we see or respond to any sense inputs. The objects of perception were thus not things but ideas, which stemmed from objects in the external world but which also depended upon the mind for their existence.

  Deriving thus from sensations, ideas were at first ‘simple’, but later, thanks to ‘reflection’, they could be combined so as to become ‘complex’. For instance, from the repetition of similar sensations, the ideas of time and space were in due course built up, while from movement there arose the idea of agency and power. To be authentic, an idea had to originate from something external and, in ascertaining the knowability of the outside world, it was vital to discriminate between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ qualities, that is, those truly inherent in the actual world as distinct from those which merely clocked up some response in the observer. A statement about volume (a ‘primary’ quality) was very different from one about smell: the latter (a ‘secondary’ quality) said nothing essential about the substance in question, only about the nose of the sniffer. That was a distinction strategic to Locke, partly because it enabled him, while denying innate ideas, to stave off charges of scepticism; in the event, however, it proved unsustainable.71

  Plotting epistemological pathways, Locke proceeded from sensation and reflection to perception, that is, thinking itself. This involved contemplation, the retention of past experiences and the ability to recall them. Memory was thus integral to the understanding, as were wit and judgement.72 Wit implied the facile juxtaposition of ideas, if perhaps fancifully and without fixed order; judgement demonstrated a precise discrimination between them. Largely taken from Hobbes, Locke's distinction was to prove highly influential in aesthetics and literary criticism.73

  Through exercise of judgement and habitual association of ideas, complex ideas could be built up, such as those of order, beauty or liberty.74 The idea of freedom thus arose from the fact that a person felt able to act or desist from acting when he chose. Here lay one of Locke's many rebuttals of Hobbes. For the latter, liberty was a matter of power: a person was free to do whatever he had the power to do. The political liberal in Locke rejected this, for an act could be voluntary, in the sense of being an act of will, but none the less not truly ‘free’, if it were the product of external coercion (e.g. a gun to the head). But though Locke rebutted Hobbes's authoritarian politics, they shared much common ground in their approaches to genuine knowledge and the workings of the mind. Hobbes had reduced thought to the mechanics of motion; Locke too embarked upon a comparable simplification:

  our original ideas… all might be reduced to these very few primary and original ones, viz. extension, solidity, mobility, or the power of being moved; which by our senses we receive from body; perceptivity or the power of perception, or thinking; motivity, or the power of moving; which by reflection we receive from our minds.75

  Far more than Hobbes, Locke was impressed by the Baconian philosophy of the Royal Society (of which he was elected a fellow in 1668); its commitment to observation and experiment provided the grounding for his philosophy of science. He was enthralled, for instance, by the microscope, which hinted at yet further unseen worlds, awaiting investigation: ‘that which is now the yellow colour of gold would then disappear and instead of it we should see an admirable texture of parts, of a certain size and figure. This microscopes plainly discover to us.’76 Patient observation and experiment would certainly prove fruitful; but, Locke warned, conclusions must not outrun the evidence. Forever limited to the perceivable and measurable, science could say nothing about inner reality.77 In his corrective to scholastic and Cartesian arrogance, Locke thus proposed promoting knowledge by respecting its boundaries. Though ‘demonstrable’ knowledge, the harvest of experience, could never be more than probable, it was nevertheless useful and progressive.78

  Alongside his defences of toleration and political liberty, Locke thus set the enlightened agenda with his endorsement of the mind's progressive capacities. In dismissing Platonic and Cartesian a priorism, in asserting that knowledge was the art of the probable and in holding that the way forward lay in empirical inquiry, he replaced rationalism with reasonableness in a manner which became programmatic for the Enlightenment in Britain.

  While Locke was radical, he demolished to rebuild, and anatomized to root out pathological terms and tenets. To some he seemed alarmingly sceptical, because he judged received truths and innate ideas false or misleading. Yet, playing down the Fall, he resolutely insisted on the capabilities of the human understanding: the existence of God could be known, as could Nature and Nature's laws. He sought not to deny truth but to set it on a sound basis. His philosophy proved a great watershed, and he became the presiding spirit of the English Enlightenment.

  Locke's legacy proved controversial.79 Many of his views – his insistence upon reason as the judge of revelation, his denial of innate ideas and moral absolutes, his hints as to thinking matter, his radical suggestions on identity and consciousness and his audible silence on the Trinity (see chapters 5 and 7) – laid him open to attack; even Isaac Newton, normally an ally, once accused him of being a ‘Hobbist’.80 He was, as noted, denounced in his alma mater, while Bishop Stillingfleet sniffed atheism in his religion.81 His conviction that all knowledge derived from experience was unsettling, and his ‘way of ideas’ got up noses. Against Matthew Tindal's Lockean view that the ‘idea’ of government must be analysed, Jonathan Swift thus railed:

  Now, it is to be understood, that this refined Way of Speaking was introduced by Mr Locke… All the former Philosophers in the World, from the Age of Socrates to ours, would have ignorantly put the Question, Quid est Imperium? But now it seemeth we must vary our Phrase; and since our modern Improvement of Human Understanding, instead of desiring a Philosopher to describe or define a Mouse-trap, or tell me what it is; I must gravely ask, what is contained in the Idea of a Mouse-trap?82

  Nevertheless, Locke's empiricism took root. John Harris's influential encyclopaedia Lexicon Technicum (1704) followed him in defining ideas as ‘whatsoever the Mind perceives in itself’, and the second edition (1710) declared innatism conclusively refuted. ‘It is much to be suspected,’ opined William Wollaston in 1722, ‘there are no such innate maxims as they pretend’, while Chambers' Cyclopaedia (1728) averred that ‘our great Mr Locke seems to have put this Matter out of dispute’.83

  Lockean empiricism pointed the way to advances in scientific investigation. The Irish gentleman William Molyneux broached the exciting, if unsettling, implications that followed from the denial of innate ideas. For instance, would someone born blind, but subsequently given sight by surgery, be immediately able to distinguish a cube from a sphere? – was there, in other words, an innate idea of shape? Molyneux thought not: no one given sight for the first time could possibly judge. Locke agreed, acknowledging the point in the second edition of his Essay – a further blow to innatism.84 The rationalist Leibniz, for his part, demurred: a blind man, newly given sight, should be able to identify shapes and their differences. Berkeley, by contrast, supported Locke-Molyneux. Drawing on a case history published by the surgeon William Cheselden in the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions, he maintained in his Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision (1709) that a newly sighted blind boy could not immediately ‘see’ a thing – that is, could not match visual appearances with distances as perceived by touch.85 Cheselden had been well aware that Lockean experientialism had made such an individual a key test case, and his account was in turn cited by, among others, Voltaire, Diderot, Condillac, Buffon and Kant.86 Relating the eye to the I, Locke's epistemology thus stimulated studies in what would later be called experimental psychology.

  ‘Locke is univers
al’, declared William Warburton.87 By 1760, the Essay had raced through nine English editions, as well as four in his collected works, and Latin versions came out in London and on the Continent. Sales in France were predictably sluggish. Though a French translation was issued in 1700, twenty-five years later copies were still lying around unsold. From the 1730s, however, owing to Voltaire's Lettres anglaises (1733), French interest quickened. Meanwhile, in Britain, attacks were parried by supporters such as Catharine Cockburn, whose Defence of Mr Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding was published anonymously in 1702, while a host of writers publicized his views. Bolingbroke, for instance, proclaimed the potential, yet also the limits, of human knowledge – notions versified in Pope's Essay on Man.88

  Locke was also boiled down for students, notably in Isaac Watts's Logic (1724), which reached a twentieth edition by 1779.89 A devoted follower, that diligent Nonconformist expressed his admiration in a poem and an ode upon Locke's death: the Essay, he claimed, ‘has diffused fairer Light through the World in numerous Affairs of Science and of Human Life’, and he went on to declare that many chapters were ‘worthy of Letters of Gold’.90 Locke's hold over British philosophy increased as Watts's and later textbooks became standard; and, if somewhat unevenly, his thinking permeated higher education. Even Oxford showed a flicker of interest. A move had been made there in 1703 to suppress the Essay, but in 1744 the student reading lists mentioned Locke's ‘Metaphysics’, that is his Essay. Eleven years later, however, his alma mater repented of its rashness and Locke again disappeared.91

  By contrast with this predictable fate in Tory Oxford, Locke's philosophy rapidly entered the arts curriculum in Whig Cambridge. In 1739, the Advice to a Young Student, written for undergraduate use by Daniel Waterland, master of Magdalene College, praised the Essay for actually explaining the reasoning process, rather than, as with earlier logics, merely defining terms of art. Waterland's book shows that scholasticism was fast vanishing from enlightened Cambridge, having been supplanted by Hobbes, Descartes, Leibniz, Butler, Berkeley, but especially by Locke.92 He was also taken up in the Scottish universities, initially in the classes of John Stevenson, professor of logic at Edinburgh from 1730, although there it was Bacon who became the prince of the Moderns.93

  Meanwhile, the implications of Locke's empiricism were teased out, sketched in, challenged and contested, and it became the first base for the sensationalism of Hume (with his ‘impressions’) and for Hartley's elaboration of the association of ideas. Abraham Tucker's Light of Nature Pursued (1768) reads as a fulsome if prolix gloss on the thinker who had succeeded in ‘clearing away that incumbrance of innate ideas, real essences and such like rubbish’.94 Bent upon exploding fictions and the lies of language, Jeremy Bentham also paid heartfelt tribute: ‘Without Locke I could have known nothing.’95

  It was the Spectator, however, which introduced Locke to the reading public at large. The finest publicity agent any philosopher ever had, Joseph Addison popularized his ideas on wit, judgement, personal identity, the labyrinths of language and, above all, aesthetics in an astonishing sequence of essays on the ‘Pleasures of the Imagination’.96 Not least, addressing the problem of understanding Nature, he dramatized Lockean views on primary and secondary qualities with his habitual light touch:

  our Souls are at present delightfully lost and bewildered in a pleasing Delusion, and we walk about like the Enchanted Hero of a Romance, who sees beautiful Castles, Woods, and Meadows… but upon the finishing of some secret Spell, the fantastick Scene breaks up, and the disconsolate Knight finds himself on a barren Heath, or in a solitary Desart.97

  The comic possibilities of that rather disorienting distinction were seized upon in the Guardian's account of Jack Lizard's return home from college, where his student mind had clearly been turned: ‘for the first Week he dealt wholly in Paradoxes…When the Girls were sorting a Set of Knots, he would demonstrate to them that all the Ribbands were of the same Colour; or rather, says Jack, of no Colour at all.’98

  Maintaining that Locke's Essay was the book which, the Bible aside, dominated the Georgian century, Kenneth MacLean has documented its uptake from the intellectually serious – key quotations in Samuel Johnson's Dictionary – right across the spectrum to jokey allusions and knowing name-dropping.99 An advertisement in the Covent Garden Journal for 14 April 1752 thus puffed a caution against crime written by Henry Fielding as particularly suitable for the young, since ‘those Ideas which they then join together, as Mr Locke judiciously observes, they are never after capable of separating’.100 Evidently, Locke's name sold books.

  Laurence Sterne likewise took it for granted that readers of Tristram Shandy would know, or would wish to be thought to know, ‘the sagacious Locke’. Near the beginning, our hero observes that his father's custom of winding up the clock on the first Sunday night of every month

  was attended with but one misfortune, which, in a great measure, fell upon myself, and the effects of which I fear I shall carry with me to my grave; namely, that from an unhappy association of ideas, which have no connection in nature, it so fell out at length, that my poor mother could never hear the said clock wound up, – but the thought of some other things unavoidably popped into her head – and vice versa: – Which strange combination of ideas, the sagacious Locke, who certainly understood the nature of these things better than most men, affirms to have produced more wry actions than all other sources of prejudice whatsoever.101

  The tabula rasa also formed a talking point elsewhere in that novel and in many other books besides. In Mary Hays's Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796) we are told quite explicitly that the mind begins as a blank sheet of paper.102 Samuel Richardson's heroine Pamela acquired her grasp of the infant mind from Locke's Some Thoughts concerning Education (1693), obligingly presented to her by her husband-to-be;103 and some years later Lord Chesterfield sent his son a copy of the same book, with the key passages marked, to teach him what ‘a very wise, philosophical, and retired man, thinks’.104 Those who wanted to be in the know evidently had to be up with Locke.

  Crucial to the repertoire of the British Enlightenment was the Lockean model of the mind maturing through experience from ignorance to knowledge, and the paradigm it suggested for the progress of mankind at large. The individual could gain practical knowledge through the senses, could reason through words, and could find out his duties to God and his fellows. Being error-prone, man was imperfect; being educable, he was improvable. Mistakes could be expunged and advance would come by trial and error.105 What made Locke the great teacher of the Enlightenment, it has been said, was his offering ‘a plausible account of the new science as valid knowledge, intertwined with a theory of rational control of the self’, while bringing the two together under the ideal of rational self-responsibility.106

  4

  PRINT CULTURE

  Books and the Man I sing.

  ALEXANDER POPE1

  The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.

  SAMUEL JOHNSON2

  The present age, if we consider chiefly the state of our own country, may be stiled with great propriety The Age of Authors.

  SAMUEL JOHNSON3

  Society is held together by communication and information.

  SAMUEL JOHNSON4

  Crucial to the Enlightenment were the battles of the pen – against sword, censor, and rival pen. In paper wars, wit, erudition and criticism targeted darkness, dullness and despotism. Most dramatically in France, philosophes wielded the quill against Church and State, which retaliated by overseeing and harassing writers and publishers via the Index of Prohibited Books and the censor's office, police cells, the courts and even the Bastille. Both Voltaire and Diderot were locked up, and they and other philosophes spent time in exile. On the eve of the Revolution more than 160 censors were on Louis XVI's thought-police's payroll; to evade their attentions, elaborate networks had been devised to smuggle contraband publications across the borders from the Netherlands and Switzerland.5

&
nbsp; They did these things differently in England. Censorship had been reinstated at the Restoration after the publishing free-for-all of the Civil War and Interregnum, but the Glorious Revolution of 1688 put paid to that.6 In 1695 the Licensing Act was allowed to lapse – partly out of resentment at the Stationers' Company's monopoly – and the old system of pre-publication censorship never returned. Hitherto restricted to London, York and Oxbridge, printing became a free market, and nothing stood in the way of any bold writer or bookseller willing to run the risk of post-publication prosecution, and perhaps prison or the pillory – and that, as Daniel Defoe found after conviction for his Short Way with Dissenters (1702), could prove a passport to popularity. Among the vaunted post-1688 shibboleths was freedom of the press, that liberty which ‘protects all the rest’, as the London Evening Post self-servingly proclaimed in 1754.7

  Printed materials mushroomed. About 6,000 titles had appeared in England during the 1620s; that number climbed to almost 21,000 during the 1710s, and to over 56,000 by the 1790s.8 Some individual sales were impressive. Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) went through five editions in twelve months, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Tobias Smollett's Roderick Random (1748) had print runs of 5,000 in their first year, while Henry Fielding's Amelia (1751) sold as many in just a week.9

  Pamphlets went like hot cakes. Defoe's True-Born Englishman (1701), a political verse satire, enjoyed nine regular editions in four years and suffered a dozen pirated editions, totalling some 80,000 copies.10 A few years later three tracts associated with the Sacheverell controversy sold over 50,000 apiece; and in 1776 Richard Price's Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty did as well.11 Between 1660 and 1800 over 300,000 separate book and pamphlet titles were published in England, amounting perhaps to 200 million copies all told.12 As will be clear even from these crude numbers, unlike many of their Continental cousins, English men of letters hardly constituted a ‘literary underground’, forced to wage guerrilla wars against the powers that be. Rather they formed part of an emergent culture industry, staking out self-identities as critics, knowledge-mongers and opinion-makers, addressing a growing public, and used as well as abused by the authorities.