Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World
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I hope to present you with a catalogue of diseases in which I have effected a cure… Many circumstances indeed seem to indicate that a great revolution in this art is at hand… And if you do not, as I am almost sure you do not, think it absurd to suppose the organization of man equally susceptible of improvement from culture with that of various animals and vegetables, you will agree with me in entertaining hopes not only of a beneficial change in the practice of medicine, but in the constitution of human nature itself.93
Beddoes's Promethean expectations of how science would revolutionize life were undergirded by his enlightened vision of Homo sapiens as a creature of infinite possibility: the mind was not cursed by original sin or trammelled by innate ideas. Beddoes the empiricist set no bounds to improvement: Nature's truths lay open to the senses, and education itself was, in the widest sense, experimental.94
Science seemed the master key to progress. ‘Not to insist on the great advancements in arts and science which have originated from natural philosophy,’ maintained the Dissenting doctor John Aikin, ‘what man of enlarged ideas will deny, that the philosophy of the human mind, of law, of commerce, of government, of morals, and I will add, of religion, have greatly contributed to any superiority this age may claim over former periods?’95 In short, what could shackle the mind? Joseph Priestley pictured intelligence endlessly triumphing under divine guidance: ‘knowledge… will… be increased; nature including both its materials and its laws, will be more at our command’.96 Science thereby figured as the basis of a brighter future in all realms. ‘The English hierarchy (if there be anything unsound in its constitution),’ he maintained, ‘has reason to tremble even at an air pump or an electrical machine.’97
The reason of science did not, however, seem so reasonable to everyone, all the time. It was, after all, Priestley who spent his last days, Newton-like, poring over the prophecies of the Book of Daniel, while the astronomer William Herschel was confident about finding inhabitants on the moon. Was science's title as the guardian of reason assured? Was it not susceptible to some enlightened criteria of humility?98
7
ANATOMIZING HUMAN NATURE
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of Mankind is Man.
ALEXANDER POPE1
Upon the whole, I desire to take my Catalogue of Virtues from Cicero's Offices, not from the Whole Duty of Man.
DAVID HUME2
And who are you? said he.
– Don't puzzle me; said I.
LAURENCE STERNE, Tristram Shandy3
With the displacement of scripturalism that was brought about by rational religion, the need to resolve the human condition moved centre stage in Enlightenment thinking. ‘’Tis evident, that all the sciences have a relation, greater or less, to human nature, declared David Hume in his thematically titled A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40): not only were epistemology, ethics, aesthetics and politics all anchored in human nature, but even mathematics and the natural sciences were ‘in some measure dependent on the science of Man’.4 Evidently Pope had got it right: the proper study of mankind indeed was man.
The recoil from Protestant bibliolatry demanded a wholesale refiguring of man's character and destiny. Reformation theology had preached woeful truths: man was fallen, his passions were base, sinners could not achieve salvation by their own efforts, while Calvinists held that implacable Divine Will had predestined all but the saints to eternal perdition. Through the Fall, Paradise had been lost, and such progress as there might be towards redemption would have to be a pilgrim's. For Bunyan, the via dolorosa to the Celestial City wound through Vanity Fair, where Christian and his companion Faithful were pelted by the mob, set in irons and hurled into a cage as a public spectacle. Faithful was sentenced to be burnt at the stake while for Christian, although he escaped and ‘came to a delicate plain, called Ease’, this was more the beginning of his trials than the end: ‘at the farthest side of that plain was a little hill called Lucre’, beyond which lay Doubting Castle.5
This saga of fallen man expelled into a vale of tears is captured by an event in the childhood of the Dissenter Isaac Watts. One day, the pious story runs, his mother came across some of the young lad's verses. Doubting his authorship on account of their merit, she quizzed him about them. To prove that they were his the boy composed for her an acrostic:
I am a vile polluted lump of earth,
So I've continued ever since my birth,
Although Jehovah grace does daily give me,
As sure this monster Satan will deceive me,
Come therefore, Lord, from Satan's claws relieve me.
Wash me in Thy blood, O Christ,
And grace divine impart,
Then search and try the corners of my heart,
That I in all things may be fit to do
Service to thee, and sing thy praises too.6
Young Watts was in a bind: to prove his talents – something verging on the sin of pride – required him to attest his depravity. Enlightened thinking was to discount such doctrines as demeaning to God and man alike: ‘there is nothing which I contemplate with greater Pleasure’, avowed Richard Steele, ‘than the Dignity of Human Nature’.7
This is not to say, however, that Augustinian gloom was immediately and universally replaced by enlightened glee. Throughout the century, many moralists, variously disposed towards the enlightened agenda, continued to propound sober moral precepts couched in that Christian humanist idiom in which Hamlet had imagined man ‘crawling between heaven and earth’.8 Widespread in appeal was a dignified Stoicism derived from Cicero and Seneca, which warned against the vanity of human wishes and the snares of the senses – there was more in life to be endured than enjoyed, ruled Samuel Johnson. Christian Stoicism highlighted the polar forces of good and evil battling in the human breast – angel against animal, spirit against flesh, reason against appetite.9 In this model of man, the human condition was defined by its antinomies, and by the unavoidability of taxing choices. Set on a stage in which fantasy and falsehood had to be combated, ‘man's chief merit’, deemed Johnson, ‘consists in resisting the impulses of his nature’.10
No more in this Ciceronian than in the Calvinist scenario was there a sunny hedonism, a primrose path to pleasure. ‘Something is always wanting to happiness,’ explained Johnson's Rambler, for, as he remarked elsewhere, ‘in all sublunary things there is something to be wished which we must wish in vain’ – man, in short, ‘is not born for happiness’.11 What was crucial for such grave philosophies was not diversion but dignity and integrity: the disavowal of false gods and fatuous expectations. Six years before the storming of the Bastille, Johnson warned that ‘the age is running mad after innovation’.12 Debunking the inane and conceited cult of the new was, of course, also central to Burke's Reflections (1790).13
Such traditionalists poured scorn on naive optimism about the human condition. The Augustan satirists particularly ridiculed the facile follies of puffed-up sciolists. In his A Tale of a Tub (1704) and elsewhere, Swift conjured up a motley crew of modern philosophers, poets, professors and pedagogues, all suffering from obsessive solipsism. ‘I am now trying an Experiment very frequent among Modern Authors,’ the Tale's asinine narrator blurts out, ‘which is, to write upon Nothing.’14 Such blether epitomized the modern infatuation with singularity, one blithely eager, in the name of the new science, to reduce human beings to machines or puppets. Humanists like Johnson and Burke abhorred any apparent relinquishing of the lofty, if daunting, human obligation to exercise free will and moral choice. Swift's notorious ‘modest proposers’ and all the other panacea pedlars pilloried in Augustan satire were traitors to man's higher duties. Pope for his part presented rogues’ galleries of his own, notably with his portrayal of the hacks in The Dunciad (1728), bloated with their own genius. Time and again, conservative moralists levelled their wrath or wit against modern man, that wretch who, duped by a frivolous faith in progress, had abandoned his humanity and given himself over to facile
optimism and glib apologetics.15 Moral probity required recognition that, in Pope's words, man was ‘born but to die, and reasoning but to err’. Indeed, the most eloquent warning against all such self-exculpatory hubris came from Pope:
Plac'd on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise, and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest,
In doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast;
In doubt his Mind or Body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Whether he thinks too little, or too much;
Chaos of Thought and Passion, all confus'd;
Still by himself abus'd, or disabus'd;
Created half to rise, and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of Truth, in endless Error hurl'd
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!16
In his exposure of human pretensions, Pope held a fine line. While humbling pride, he was nevertheless more sanguine than Milton or Bunyan in urging man's capacity to know, and thus perhaps redeem, himself – indeed, in some moods he seems to be striking up enlightened melodies. After all, though a Catholic, Pope had drunk in Bolingbroke's natural religion and Shaftesbury's benevolism, and his confidence in the passions prefigured Hume:
The surest Virtues thus from Passions shoot,
Wild Nature's vigor working at the root.17
While sympathetic towards such classical values, modern thinkers for their part did not dwell on the tragic or on puncturing pretensions: theirs was an ardent desire to promote positive views of human potential.18 Every age, of course, has its admixture of optimists and pessimists, and such categories are themselves deeply problematic; yet it would be odd to deny that enlightened minds felt hopeful about the human condition.
Conspicuous among the new optimists was the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury.19 Tutored by Locke, though assuredly no clone, Shaftesbury derided Hobbes's grim teachings: in dwelling on the dismal master passions of fear and that lust for power which ended only in death, had not the author of Leviathan ‘forgot to mention Kindness, Friendship, Sociableness, Love of Company and Converse, Natural affection, or anything of this kind’?20 Hobbes, however, was not Shaftesbury's sole bugbear; hellfire preachers had equally traduced mankind with their deluded dogma that good nature and religion were at odds. Rejecting all such misanthropy, be it secular or Christian, and venerating the Cambridge Platonists, Shaftesbury exalted man as a naturally sociable being and commended a disinterested love of virtue: ‘If Eating and Drinking be natural, Herding is so too. If any Appetite or Sense be natural, the Sense of Fellowship is the same.’21
Shaftesbury also talked up man's capacities: reason and ridicule, criticism and conversation would dispel error and further the cause of truth. ‘Good humour’, he held, ‘is not only the best security against enthusiasm, but the best foundation of piety and true religion’, while a ‘Freedom of Raillery’ was ‘a Liberty in decent Language to question every thing, and an Allowance of unravelling or refuting any Argument, without offence’.22 His Characteristicks (1711) shared similar goals to those of the Spectator, which began in the same year: to cajole readers out of bad habits and to coax them into better ones. And exactly like that magazine, his writing – conversational and dialogic in form – proved highly popular, with Characteristicks going through at least ten editions by the 1790s; evidently it struck a chord with a reading public keen to be sweet-talked into feeling good about itself.23
The new hopefulness was often predicated upon claims to lay bare the springs of human nature, so as to gain at long last a true grasp of what would later be called individual psychology: once understood, the human animal or machine could be fine-tuned to play its optimal social role. Both post-Vesalian anatomy and the new mechanical philosophy sanctioned the project of probing beneath the skin or the skull: in order for the workings of the human motor to be mastered, first it had to be stripped down. The classic early expression of this view was Leviathan.24 But what Hobbes purported to find – homo lupus homini – was no less repugnant to the enlightened than to the divines, wounding human dignity as much as it supposedly implied atheism. Nevertheless, the Hobbesian invitation to take man to pieces retained its appeal.
The quest had many champions and took various forms. Newton predictably proved crucial, seemingly indicating the road ahead in the final pages of the Opticks: ‘And if natural Philosophy in all its Parts, by pursuing this Method, shall at length be perfected,’ stated its Query 31, ‘the Bounds of Moral Philosophy will be also enlarged.’25 Sir Isaac thus held out the prospect of a true science of human nature grounded upon natural science – one, as we shall see, which tempted David Hume.26
A popular approach to the subject lay in specifying man's place within the order of Nature. A long-established tradition, associated with jurists like Grotius and Pufendorf, had elucidated man's duties under natural law.27 Implicit, and often explicit, in such accounts lay suppositions about the uniformity of man. Echoing the classical quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus (‘always, everywhere and by everyone’), it was held that, in order to be scientific, accounts of rights and duties must transcend local and temporal variations so as to home in upon the quintessence. Only when shown to possess a universality comparable to the laws of motion would a rendition of human nature carry proven explanatory power and the ring of authenticity. If, as Hume held, mankind was presumed ‘much the same’ at all times and in all places, it was realistic to aspire ‘to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature’.28
Natural law theories were commonly hitched to a conjectural anthropology which sometimes questioned and sometimes confirmed the accepted order of the here and now by invoking a status quo ante.29 The thought experiment of positing man in an original state of Nature, divested of all but essential needs, wants and faculties, proved popular, influentially so in Locke's Two Treatises of Government (1690).30 How far existing society was ‘natural’ or ‘unnatural’ could be tested by reconstructing the transition from square one. Indeed, it was even possible to retrace the inquiry one stage further: at what (chrono) logical point had man transcended the merely animal and become distinctively human? – the issue behind Lord Monboddo's evolutionary speculations (see chapter 10).31
The tracing of such a passage from ‘Nature’ to ‘society’ was not, however, in the main meant to be taken literally and temporally, but more by way of a just-so story, and the Scottish professor Adam Ferguson insisted that inquiry into the human essence must not be confused with authentic historical narrations. Asked ‘where the state of nature is to be found’,
We may answer, It is here; and it matters not whether we are understood to speak in the island of Great Britain, at the Cape of Good Hope, or the Straits of Magellan… If the palace be unnatural, the cottage is so no less; and the highest refinements of political and moral apprehension, are not more artificial in their kind, than the first operations of sentiment and reason.32
If elucidation of human nature could thus entail anthropological reconstruction of mankind's station in space and time, be it grounded in the archives or the imagination, a journey into the interior could equally be conducted. We must ‘search accurately into the constitution of our nature’, observed Francis Hutcheson, professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow University, in 1747, ‘to see what sort of creatures we are’;33 ‘it must be by an anatomy of the mind’, pronounced Thomas Reid, a Scottish philosopher of the next generation, ‘that we can discover its powers and principles’.34 Central to the enlightened programme was analysis of the understanding. To such philosophers it no longer seemed profitable, in Milton's way, to inscribe the human actor in scenarios of sin and Satan, faith and the Fall; likewise the gladiatorial struggle within the breast between
good and evil, spirit and flesh, as conjured up by Johnsonian humanism, could now appear more sermon than science.35 Away with such rhetoric! What was needed was a dispassionate, objective study of human faculties, motives and behaviour.
For thinkers espousing Lockean empiricism, the key to the mechanisms of the mind and emotions lay in a sensationalist analysis of the production of consciousness and character via environmental stimuli. That carried a further implication: the understanding of selfhood in general and of the individual self in particular meant prioritizing interiority. What had once been taken as objective, external commands and eternal fitnesses needed to be recast as the products of trains of associations, as functions of inner powers, outgrowths of circumstances and experience: truths graven upon tablets of stone became psychologized. Heretofore profoundly suspect, subjectivity was now being tentatively validated.
One domain in which this new accent on subjectivity was explored and esteemed early on was the aesthetic. It was, after all, more plausible and less threatening to personalize taste than to do the same to morality itself – indeed, the notion that love of beauty required the exercise of superior individual aesthetic judgement had an evident appeal. As noted in chapter 3, the Spectator popularized Locke's empiricist aesthetics, but the internalization of the appreciation of beauty owed most to Shaftesbury, who sought at the same time to dignify ‘taste’ by associating it with the transcendent.36 Loveliness, he claimed, was objectively real, it was the splendour of the divine Nature about which he rhapsodized; but appreciation of such loveliness was not something which any Tom, Dick or Harry instinctively experienced or had the right to pronounce upon; while seeded in the human heart, it needed cultivation. Taste involved not only an exquisite, intuitive discrimination beyond mechanical calculation, but also a relish verging on enthusiasm: aesthetic transports implied a participation in the grander cosmic whole, transcending gross self-gratification.