by Roy Porter
Hume's critique of the claim that a knowledge of God and His attributes could be derived from the facts hinged on the critique of causality in his Treatise of Human Nature and Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (see chapter 7 below). The concept of causation was doubtless the basis of all knowledge, but causality was not itself a demonstrable fact. Experience showed the succession of events, but did not reveal any necessity in that succession – it was habit which created the expectation that one event would invariably follow on from another. Custom was not knowledge, however, and did not strictly justify projections from the past to the future, from the known to the unknown. Causality was thus not a principle definitively derived from the order of things but a mental postulate. Belief in a rational order of Nature was only a premise, albeit one that was useful, even essential.146
Pitting believers against rationalists, the Dialogues found the case for religion, be it Christian or Deist, unproven – and atheism likewise: doubt was the only honest and honourable option. However, that did not mean that religion had no use at all. Hume perhaps sympathized with his character Cleanthes when he stated: ‘The proper office of religion is to regulate the heart of men, humanize their conduct, infuse the spirit of temperance, order and obedience.’147 To that, enlightened Christians and Deists alike could happily say amen.
In his dying days, Hume informed James Boswell that he had ‘never entertained any belief in Religion since he began to read Locke and Clarke’.148 Some years previously he had called religiosity nothing but ‘sick men's dreams’.149 And as early as 1742, he had detected a ‘sudden and sensible change in the opinions of men within these last fifty years’, thanks to the progress of learning and liberty:
Most people, in this island, have divested themselves of all superstitious reverence to names and authority: The clergy have much lost their credit: Their pretensions and doctrines have been ridiculed; and even religion can scarcely support itself in the world. The mere name of king commands little respect; and to talk of a king as God's vice-regent on earth, or to give him any of those magnificent titles, which formerly dazzled mankind, would be to excite laughter in every one.150
Le bon David was, of course, trailing his coat with a majestic flourish, but he was surely right to link a decline in faith to the enlightened assault on authority at large, a process to which he contributed handsomely.
Whilst Hume remained a sceptic – on a visit to Paris he claimed never to have been in the company of atheists – others, however, were to come out as open atheists, including the one-time Dissenting minister William Godwin, followed by his future son-in-law, Percy Bysshe Shelley, author of The Necessity of Atheism (1811).151 Historically, this was a remarkable development. ‘Atheist’ had long been a term bandied about as an insult, but it was not until the eighteenth century that atheism was taken up as a principled rejection of religion as such, for being both incredible and immoral.
On the whole, however, English free-thinkers tended not to take their quarrel with orthodoxy to such extremes – perhaps because they were hardly made to suffer for their heterodoxy, or driven to court martyrdom. On failing to win a professorship, Hume could denounce ‘the cabals of the Principal, the bigotry of the clergy, and the credulity of the mob’,153 and Gibbon for his part might bridle at British benightedness,154 but infidelity did not stop the former from becoming librarian to the Edinburgh Faculty of Advocates or from holding diplomatic posts, just as the latter's impieties did not prevent him from becoming the age's most feted historian.155 Enlightened thinkers and a nation jealous to uphold freedoms and suspicious of clericalism generally rubbed along easily enough with each other in a climate in which religion was valued amongst the élite principally for teaching virtue and the rule of law.
Amid suspicions that Locke himself had been a closet Arian, Unitarianism in time proved a Trojan horse and the spur to radical politics and religion (see chapter 18).156 Above all, the ‘potent magic of religion’ came under scrutiny157 as mainstream observance became divested of supernatural and spiritual elements – hence the violent antipathy among rational Christians and Deists alike to John Wesley, who upheld the reality of witchcraft and Satan's power in the world: Methodism was ‘wild and pernicious Enthusiasm’, according to the bishop of Exeter.158 Enlightened thought approved religion so long as its basis was rational rather than numinal. ‘I hope no reader imagines me so weak to stand up in the defence of real Christianity, such as used, in primitive times (if we may believe the writers of those ages) to have an influence upon men's belief and actions,’ ironized Swift on the obsolescence of old-time religion:
to offer at the restoring of that, would indeed be a wild project; it would be to dig up foundations: to destroy at one blow all the wit, and half the learning of the kingdom: to break the entire frame and constitution of things: to ruin trade, extinguish arts and sciences, with the professors of them; in short, to turn our courts, exchanges, and shops, into deserts.159
At century's end, William Blake indignantly concurred: ‘Spirits are Lawful, but not Ghosts; especially Royal Gin is Lawful Spirit.’160 The Enlightenment had little quarrel with true religion (designed to make men good) but feared the magic of the sacred in the hands of the priests.
6
THE CULTURE OF SCIENCE
And new philosophy calls all in doubt
JOHN DONNE1
Deep into the seventeenth century, the new science remained highly enigmatic. Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and all the other investigators now enshrined in the ‘scientific revolution’ pantheon met incomprehension and resistance, and not just from the Vatican;2 their theories were found fanciful, false or frightening. Late in life, the learned Milton had still by no means given wholehearted assent even to heliocentric astronomy – or perhaps he could not see why planetary orbits mattered much by contrast to the sacred tragedy of the Fall:
Think onely what concernes thee and thy being:
Dream not of other Worlds.3
For moralists and wits, the new science spelt confusion rather than clarification and closure. Theorists were accused of the vanity of dogmatizing or of sowing scepticism, and the proliferation of systems – Aristotelianism, Paracelsianism, Helmontianism, Epicureanism, Cartesianism, Gassendism, Democritism and a host of other ‘-isms’ besides – seemed as scandalous in natural philosophy as in faith. Hypotheses mushroomed, as in the cosmogonical war following the publication of Thomas Burnet's Sacred Theory of the Earth (1681): a dozen or so geological speculators made, unmade and remade the globe, and stalemate ensued. System rancorously contradicted system, riding roughshod over received readings of the Bible, to the extent that it could be said that Burnet, himself an Anglican divine, held that
All the books of Moses
Were nothing but supposes…
That as for Father Adam
And Mrs Eve his Madam,
And what the devil spoke, Sir,
'Twas nothing but a joke, Sir,
And well invented flam.4
For their part, curiosity-mongers were mocked for petty-mindedness: why ever collect all those fleas and fossils?
O! would the Sons of Men once think their Eyes
And Reason giv'n them but to study Flies!5
Thomas Shadwell's The Virtuoso (1676) paraded Sir Nicholas Gimcrack as a hobby-horsical blockhead, blithely indifferent to matters of genuine utility – he loved only the ‘speculative’ side of swimming – while in Gulliver's Travels (1726), Swift satirized the learned of Lagado, bent on extracting sunbeams from cucumbers and reducing life to geometry. The foibles of savants were manna to satirists.6
Though the Royal Society, chartered in 1662, potentially possessed intellectual prestige, it too laid itself open to derision.7 Meanwhile, hardliners warned that the new science compromised Scripture and pre-empted Providence. Cartesian matter in motion mechanism debarred God from the clockwork universe and deemed Creation lifeless, soulless and without conscious purpose, while other brands of the new philosophy for their part
reeked of Aristotelian eternalism, Democritan chance or Lucretian determinism; the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth's vast True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678) excoriated all such stepping stones to atheism.8
Despite such conflicts and confusions, the new science, or ‘natural philosophy’ as it was known,9 was after all recruited remarkably swiftly and successfully into enlightened discourse, and thereafter the two constituted a formidable alliance. This was partly a result of the good fortune for patriots in already having the Baconian programme to draw upon, trumpeting in The New Atlantis (1627) the ‘effecting of all things possible’. ‘The Human Understanding is unquiet,’ Bacon had stressed; ‘it cannot stop or rest, and still presses onward.’10 His ringing aphorisms – Antiquitas saeculi juventus mundi (‘Antiquity was the youth of the world’), ‘Knowledge is power’, and so forth – were morale-boosters to the Moderns in the battle of the books.11 Systematized in the Novum Organum (1620), Baconianism became a key enlightenment resource. With dogmatic scholasticism and magicians’ fantasies both being replaced by inductive method and experimental investigation, natural philosophy would match and extend the achievements of those ‘useful arts’ which the Lord Chancellor so extolled. In his The History of the Royal Society of London (1667), Bishop Sprat hitched Bacon to the Royal Society, stressing both the role of practical men in furthering science and its part in material progress.12
The post-Restoration assimilation of the new science into progressive ideologies was speeded up by another extraordinary stroke of luck, a constellation of phenomenal ‘natural philosophers’, who not only won international glory for their discoveries but were also anxious to allay fears and promote what we would now call the public understanding of science. Courting public approval – their denunciations of Descartes, Spinoza and Hobbes helped in this – they wove the new science into a progressive philosophy.
Incomparably important to the marriage of science and enlightenment were the career, achievements and image of Sir Isaac Newton.13 A childhood genius born in 1642, Newton went up to Cambridge University in 1661, becoming a fellow of Trinity College in 1667 and just two years later Lucasian professor of mathematics. By then he had already made giant strides in two branches of that subject, differentiation and integration. As early as October 1666 he wrote a dazzling tract setting out the basics of the calculus – the fact that he did not publish it at the time was to precipitate, forty years later, a violent dispute with the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz over who got there first. Newton also undertook early experimental investigations into light, showing that sunlight was heterogeneous, and that colours arose from the separation of white light into its component rays.
Around 1670 he became engrossed in two other fields of inquiry, alchemy and theology. He read widely in alchemy, experimenting in his personal laboratory and composing treatises. Though he never published any of these – the art was losing respectability – they probably influenced his scientific thinking at large.14 Theologically, Newton convinced himself earlier than Locke, and far more radically, that the doctrine of the Trinity was false; he became a closet Arian. He also devoted himself to Scripture, reading the Apocalypse and the Book of Daniel as prognosticating the rise of the Trinitarian heresy. His theological searches foreshadowed many prominent enlightened positions, although, as with his alchemy, he confined his Arian views to a trusted circle.15
In 1684, a visit from fellow physicist Edmond Halley recalled Newton to his earlier interests. Two and a half years of intense application led to his masterpiece, the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, published in 1687.16 The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy laid out a new science of dynamics which linked Kepler's laws of the heavenly orbits to Galileo's kinematics of terrestrial motion. Not only did Newton offer a comprehensive account of the forces holding the solar system together, but he also deduced an astonishing generalization, that of universal gravitation: every particle of matter in the universe is attracted to every other with a force varying directly as the product of their masses and inversely as the square of their distance. The clarity and power of that law, the coping stone of the new conception of Nature, ensured that the Principia dominated enlightened thinking about Nature.
In 1704 Newton published his second great book, the Opticks, which expounded his findings about light reached over thirty years earlier and concluded with sixteen ‘Queries’, speculations destined to shape experimental science. Finally, he returned to theology. His posthumously published Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended (1728) and Observations on the Prophecies (1733) set about rectifying biblical chronology – falsified by Popery and priestcraft – in the light of astronomical data.17
Newton had left Cambridge in 1696 to become warden (and later master) of the Royal Mint, and in 1703 the Royal Society elected him president, an office he held until his death in 1727. He was knighted in 1705, the first scion of science to be so recognized. Meanwhile he was gathering about him a circle of protégés. David Gregory, John Keill, Roger Cotes, William Whiston and Colin Maclaurin gained university chairs through Newton's patronage, while Francis Hauksbee and J. T. Desaguliers found Royal Society employment with his help. These acolytes pursued the priority dispute with Leibniz over the calculus, with Keill and John Freind acting as Newton's champions and the divine Samuel Clarke waging the campaign on a more philosophical plane.18 Through having such followers, Newton became Newtonianism.19
Newton's authority was, of course, founded upon his Principia, but, being mathematically incredibly demanding, it was more revered than read. Popularization was needed. Initially this was the work of disciples such as Henry Pemberton, author of A View of Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophy (1728), but in time a wider group became involved, including authors overseas, such as the Italian Francesco Algarotti, whose Newtonianismo per le dame (1737) was translated into English as Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophy Explain'd for the Use of the Ladies (1739).20 Newtonian mathematical cosmology was quickly assimilated into the educational curriculum at his alma mater. Among the enthusiasts was Richard Bentley, the brilliant classicist and master of Trinity, who delivered the first of the Boyle Lectures (see below). Bentley in turn patronized Roger Cotes, the first Plumian professor of astronomy and editor of the second edition of the Principia (1709), and William Whiston, Newton's protégé and successor as Lucasian professor.21
Newton's fame spread beyond Britain, especially in the Dutch republic through the experimenters Pieter van Musschenbroek and W. J. 'sGravesande, while Herman Boerhaave gave medicine a Newtonian slant. French acceptance was slower, on account of the entrenched Cartesian plenism. While Voltaire grappled manfully with the technicalities, his Lettres philosophiques (1734) mainly promoted Newton as an intellectual hero,22 and nor was it until the 1730s that such Newtonian sympathizers as Clairaut and Maupertuis became prominent in the Académie Royale des Sciences.23
Newton's work proved crucial in various ways.24 The Principia endorsed a mathematical approach, which was to be applied to rational mechanics. The Opticks, on the other hand, opened up experimental inquiries into heat, light, magnetism and electricity, partly through the new theory of matter offered in the concluding ‘Queries’, further amplified in the 1706 and 1717 editions, where the Newtonian notion of force was extended from planetary gravitation to the microscopic intercorpuscular interactions, with a view to resolving problems like chemical affinity. Newton also introduced in the 1717 ‘Queries’ the idea of the aether, a super-fine fluid composed of mutually repulsive particles. This proved a flexible theoretical resource, giving rise in later thinking to other hypothetical subtle fluids, designed to explain electricity, heat, etc.
Newton was the god who put English science on the map, an intellectual colossus, flanked by Bacon and Locke.
Let Newton, Pure Intelligence, whom God
To mortals lent to trace His boundless works
From laws sublimely simple, speak thy fame
In all philosophy.25
sang J
ames Thomson in his ‘Ode on the Death of Sir Isaac Newton’ (1727). Wordsworth was later more Romantic:
Newton with his prism and silent face,
... a mind for ever,
Voyaging through strange seas of thought alone.26
‘Newton’ the icon proved crucial to the British Enlightenment, universally praised except by a few obdurate outsiders, notably William Blake, who detested him and all his works.27
What was crucial about Newton – apart from the fact that, so far as his supporters were concerned, he was a Briton blessed with omniscience – was that he put forward a vision of Nature which, whilst revolutionary, reinforced latitudinarian Christianity. For all but a few diehards,28 Newtonianism was an invincible weapon against atheism, upholding no mere First Cause but an actively intervening personal Creator who continually sustained Nature and, once in a while, applied a rectifying touch.29 Like Locke, furthermore, the public Newton radiated intellectual humility. Repudiating the a priori speculations of Descartes and later rationalists, he preferred empiricism: he would ‘frame no hypotheses’ (hypotheses non fingo),30 and neither would he pry into God's secrets. Thus, while he had elucidated the law of gravity, he did not pretend to divine its causes. Not least, in best enlightened fashion, Newtonian science set plain facts above mystifying metaphysics. In Newtonianism, British scientific culture found its enduring rhetoric: humble, empirical, co-operative, pious, useful.31 ‘I don't know what I may seem to the world, but, as to myself,’ he recalled, in his supreme soundbite,
I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.32