Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World

by Roy Porter

  Shaftesbury's aesthetic creed – that beauty followed universal standards, but only the great-souled man, who had nurtured his taste, would recognize and cherish it – agreed with his teachings on morality. Creation was inherently good, he said, hence virtue did not consist in slavish Calvinist or Hobbesian obedience to external decrees. And man's end lay in a disinterested pursuit of virtue which would lead to self-perfection. Virtue stemmed from a benign disposition, which was of a piece with good breeding. Exercise of taste and virtue were thus comparable activities.37

  Shaftesbury's view that beauty, though not lying in the eye of the beholder, at least required a generous spirit to perceive it, was extended by his follower and systematizer Francis Hutcheson,38 whose Inquiry concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, Design (1725) drew on Locke's ‘way of ideas’: ‘the word beauty is taken for the idea raised in us, and a sense of beauty for our power of receiving this idea’.39 Hutcheson held that pulchritude did not simply dwell in and radiate from the object but was inseparable from acts of perception. His psychologizing style of thinking was predictably taken further along the relativistic road by David Hume: ‘Beauty,’ Hume concluded in 1757, ‘is no quality in things themselves: it exists merely in the mind… Each mind perceives a different beauty.’40 It was central also to the young Burke, whose Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful, of the same year, presented a reading of sublimity which was essentially sensationalist: aesthetic categories were primarily defined by imaginative experiences, involving emotions like terror (see chapters 9 and 13). ‘When any object, either of sublimity or beauty is presented to the mind,’ explained the Scot Archibald Alison later, in 1790, in his development of similar themes, ‘I believe every man is conscious of a train of thought being immediately awakened in his imagination, analogous to the character or expression of the original object.’41 Lockean associationism – Alison's ‘constant connection between the sign and the thing signified’ – thus came to govern enlightened analyses of aesthetic experience. Subjectivity did not, however, preclude science in such matters, for aesthetic associations were regarded by Hume and others as being no less definite – and hence no less determinable – than gravity itself.42 Beauty had been assimilated into the mechanisms of the mind.

  As issues like beauty, traditionally regarded as decreed by the order of Nature and mandated by the canons of classical criticism, were reconfigured as psychological, elucidation of the workings of that psyche obviously became more pressing. What precisely was the ‘self’ within? Was it, as taught by Christian dualism, the immortal and immaterial soul – or some annexe or inflexion of it? Or was it something altogether more mundane, to do simply with the senses, and with powers like judgement and memory? How was this je ne sais quoi to be known? By introspection – or by an anatomy of the brain or nerves? These were the big issues confronting enlightened moralists.

  In this context, the pressing question became that of self-identity: what did it mean to be an ‘I’? ‘The word Person,’ Hobbes had commented,

  is Latin [and] signifies the disguise, or outward appearance of a man, counterfeited on the State; and sometimes more particularly that part of it, which disguiseth the face, as a Mask or visard… So that a Person is the same that an Actor is, both on the Stage and in common Conversations; and to Personate, is to Act, or Represent himself, or an other.43

  Hobbes, as ever, points in two directions; on the one hand his was a subversive materialism which reduced the psyche to cerebral matter in motion; on the other, his quest for a philosophy of cast-iron order led him to focus on the outward manifestations of a man.

  The connection of personhood to inner consciousness was broached in the second edition of the Essay concerning Human Understanding (1694), where Locke declared that ‘self is not determined by Identity or Diversity of Substance, which it cannot be sure of, but only by identity of consciousness’:

  Person, as I take it, is the name for this self. Where-ever a Man finds, what he calls himself, there I think another may say is the same Person… This personality extends it self beyond present Existence to what is past, only by consciousness.44

  The person was thus fundamentally not fixed in the flesh but in the understanding, held Locke, using ‘consciousness’ in the sense of the ‘totality of the impressions, thoughts, and feelings, which make up a person's conscious being’.45 By thus making the self-presence of the soul hinge on such fleeting occurrences as impressions and sensations, he seemed to his critics to come perilously close to dissolving it completely. This gave him no cause for unease, however: as he saw it, his reading, far from opening the floodgates to scepticism and unbelief, afforded a nobler vision of the mind, detached thereby from the dross of corporeality. He certainly entertained no doubts as to the real presence of the self. ‘For if I know I feel pain,’ he wrote,

  it is evident I have as certain perception of my own existence, as of the existence of the pain I feel: or if I know I doubt, I have as certain perception of the existence of the thing doubting, as of that thought which I call doubt. Experience then convinces us, that we have an intuitive knowledge of our own existence.46

  Such teachings nevertheless potentially destabilized beliefs about the permanent integrity of the self. Locke's pupil Shaftesbury relished such ruminations, his turn of thinking taking an introspective, not to say narcissistic, direction. For the earl, the theoretical question ‘What is a person?’ bled into the personal ‘Who am I?’ While staunchly upholding a patrician endorsement of rank and status, he grew absorbed in the enigmas of selfhood, reflecting on the riddle of identity that ‘I [may] indeed be said to be lost, or have lost My Self’ – a conclusion with infinitely regressive Shandyesque possibilities.47

  The subversive repercussions of such speculations as to the unity, permanency and identity of the self were explored in controversies over duty, accountability and determinism. Many arose out of the necessitarian teachings of Joseph Priestley and William Godwin,48 but such conflicts had first crystallized in exchanges between Samuel Clarke and Anthony Collins. For the Christian rationalist, continuity was of the essence of the conscious mind; its omnipresence confirmed the immortal soul, which was in turn a validation of the Supreme Intellect. Challenging these orthodoxies, Collins teased out the implications of Locke's suggestion that consciousness, while assuredly the seat of the understanding, was nevertheless intermittent and fragmented: thinking, Collins stressed, did not go on all the time – for instance, during sleep – while trances, forgetfulness and delirium proved that perception was discontinuous and divisible.49 Such instances provided golden opportunities for this free-thinking lawyer. ‘Let us consider to what Ideas we apply the Term Self,’ he proposed, giving such unsettling speculations a provocative spin:

  If a Man charges me with a Murder done by some body last Night, of which I am not conscious; I deny that I did the Action, and cannot possibly attribute it to my Self, because I am not conscious that I did it. Again, suppose me to be seized with a short Frenzy of an Hour, and during that time to kill a Man, and then to return to my Self without the least Consciousness of what I have done; I can no more attribute that Action to my Self than I could the former, which I supposed done by another. The mad Man and the sober Man are really two as distinct Persons as any two Other Men in the World.50

  Collins's tantalizing forensic speculations not only problematized notions of personal responsibility in the moral and legal spheres but also challenged doctrines of sacred responsibility and punishment. Such debates over identity were destined to run and run, especially once rekindled by Hume (see below).

  Perhaps in order to obviate the risk entailed in post-Lockean speculations that the cogito, that backbone of public man, would disintegrate if theological or Stoic absolutes were discarded, certain moral philosophers set about making an inventory of the divine anatomy of the mind. Notable here was the school of ‘faculty psychology’, which shone especially in the Scottish universities, as a ‘middle way’ seeking to forge a mor
al philosophy which was credibly modern yet would reassure both the Kirk and civic patrons that moral philosophy was basically about teaching man his God-given duties.

  Along these lines, Francis Hutcheson at Glasgow – ‘I am called New Light here,’ he quipped – developed an elaborate classification, derived from introspection, of the mental faculties with which man had been endowed, designed to demonstrate the reality of the ‘moral sense’ (regarded as an inner power rather like gravity) and so rebut scepticism and Bernard de Mandeville's cynical egoism.51 Daringly, in the light of Presbyterian politics, Hutcheson's blueprint for the internal chambers of the mind was framed within a naturalistic ethic – ‘the action is best,’ he declared, sidestepping discussion of sin, ‘which procures the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers’.52 His pioneering utilitarianism – the test of morality lay not in conscience but in consequences – was given respectability by his insistence that it was God Himself who had implanted in the machinery of the mind the disposition to virtue, a moral sense naturally tending to goodness.53 Such sentiments bring out Hutcheson's multiple commitments: his espousal of the natural (that is, God-given) goodness of mankind; of adaptation and final causes; and of happiness as a criterion and moral goal. Equally evident is his determination to replace the a priori with the empirical, since it was to ‘our structure and frame’ – rather than the Commandments or Clarkean eternal fitnesses – that he looked for ‘clear evidences showing the proper business of mankind’.54

  Analysis of the make-up of human nature, proposed Hutcheson in his A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy (1747), must take into account both body and soul. Of these, the soul was the ‘nobler’ part, endowed with two classes of powers, the understanding and the will. The former ‘contains all the powers which aim at knowledge’, while the latter has ‘all our desires pursuing happiness and eschewing misery’.55

  What Hutcheson meant by the understanding was the sum of all the powers designed to yield knowledge. These included the senses – those powers of the soul by which (Lockean) ideas were raised when encountering certain objects. Some senses (like sight) were external, depending on bodily organs stimulating feelings or notions in the soul when an impression was made on the body; others were internal – otherwise known as consciousness or reflection. There were also reflex or subsequent senses, among which he listed aesthetic appreciation (already discussed); the enjoyment derived from the discovery of truth; sympathy or fellow feeling; the desire for action; and conscience or the ‘moral sense’

  by which we discern what is graceful, becoming, beautiful and honourable in the affections of the soul, in our conduct of life, our words and actions… What is approved by this sense, we count right and beautiful, and call it virtue; what is condemned, we count base and deformed and vicious.56

  This sense of good and evil was universal, being divinely implanted at all times and places. There was also the sense of honour and shame, founded upon the moral sense yet distinct from it and operating in the light of consciousness of the approval of our fellows; and lastly the Shaftesburian sense of ridicule, vital for correcting human frailties.

  Complementing the understanding was the will, which orchestrated the pursuit of happiness. Such wishes came in two sorts, selfish and disinterested. Among the former were stable passions – the desire for good for one's self, an aversion to evil, joy when good was attained or sorrow when evil ensued – and also turbulent, blind and impetuous impulses, including the itch for power, renown or gold. The disinterested passions included calm desires (such as benevolence or good will), aversion, joy (which might take such forms as pride, arrogance and ostentation) and sorrow (including shame, remorse and dejection). Then there were passionate desires – ‘nor have we names settled to distinguish always the calm from the passionate’, added Hutcheson, apparently defeated at last by the daunting taxonomic task he had taken on.

  In the organization of the psyche there were finally also ‘dispositions relating equally to understanding and will’. These were four. First was the (Lockean) disposition to associate ideas or affections, ‘however disparate or unlike, which at once have made strong impressions on our mind’ – in Hutcheson's view, it was to this leaning that we owed ‘our power of memory, or recalling of past events, and even the faculty of speech’. Second, there were habits, for ‘such is the nature both of the soul and body, that all our powers are increased and perfected by exercise’. Then there was the desire to obtain whatever appeared a means to a desirable end, such as wealth and power. Last, there were the powers of eloquence.57

  Hutcheson thus internalized morality – virtuous behaviour stemmed from inner impulses – while skirting scepticism by stressing how these feelings were divinely implanted as part of a structured consciousness. Rather as with Linnaeus's contemporaneous botany, inventories of the mind such as Hutcheson's might be self-confessedly artificial, being drawn up largely for heuristic and pedagogic purposes, but they were also meant, in a rather literal way, as natural-historical taxonomies of the powers with which the Divine Artificer had endowed man, that animal rationalis brought into this world to practise virtue and achieve happiness. Such schemes became the bedrock of academic moral philosophy in the Common Sense philosophy which shored up the syllabuses of Scottish (and North American) universities, partly in order to serve as a sandbag against the floodtides of Mandevillian cynicism and Humean scepticism.58

  Philosophies like Hutcheson's were tacitly part of what was beginning to be known as ‘psychology’.59 In traditional charts of knowledge, the study of the mind or soul had fallen under the heading of ‘pneumatology’, that is, the philosophy of ‘incorporeal’ substances (God, angels, etc.), a pursuit located in turn within the domain of divinity. Enlightened discourse, by contrast, began to map out a field of natural knowledge pertaining to the mind which was distinct from the theological study of the immortal soul. Thus Chambers' Cyclopaedia (1727) defined psychology as ‘a Discourse Concerning the Soul’ which constituted a part not of theology but rather of anthropology, that is, the natural study of man at large.60 The Cyclopaedia glossed soul and mind in Lockean terms. By associating the soul with physiology and logic, and by shifting the study of the mind from pneumatology to psychology, Chambers' text established the latter as part of the new philosophy.61 David Hartley, discussed below, similarly spoke in 1749 of ‘psychology, or theory of the human mind’, setting it within ‘natural philosophy’.62 With the soul thus becoming psychologized, as by Locke, and even materialized, as by Hartley and his editor, Priestley, enlightened thought withdrew the study of man from the theological. A new and essentially naturalistic or secular understanding of the psyche was thereby being framed.

  Embracing fresh approaches to the mind, enlightened thinking thus ensured that ethics, while continuing to draw upon Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, Cicero, the Bible, Renaissance humanists like Erasmus and Montaigne and many other revered authorities, should square with, indeed must be derived from, empirical and introspective investigation of the faculties and dispositions comprising man's natural endowment. Any such claim would previously have counted for less, in view of the doctrine of the Fall. But with a Pelagian theology resurgent, it was now deemed to be man's business not, as Johnson put it, to ‘resist the impulses of his nature’, but to train those affections. That in turn depended upon resolving the conundrum of human nature itself.

  So what was man's make-up? There was, needless to say, no single enlightened view, but rather difference, debate and dialogue. Battle lines were drawn, however, at the beginning of the century by Bernard de Mandeville, a Rotterdam-born physician who had settled in London. Cartesian by education and an admirer of the pungent moral satires of La Bruyère and La Rochefoucauld, Mandeville delighted in anatomizing man, or taking readers behind the scenes of this comedy of manners.63 According to him, the removal of the masks revealed Hobbesian egoism, an itch for power and a pride in reputation. ‘Disinterested’ behaviour turned out to be self-seeking, and ‘virtue’ concealed
selfishness and an insatiable hunger for gratification and aggrandizement.64

  Like Freud later, Mandeville was fascinated by the obsessive denial of the desires of the flesh dictated by moralists and divines, and was particularly intrigued by obsessional sexual ‘Thou shalt nots’. Males and females alike, explained his The Virgin Unmask'd (1709), were perennially on heat; both sexes craved the satisfaction of carnal hunger. Yet mores spelt out elaborate rules for deferring or rationing erotic gratification. Ladies in particular were expected to remain chaste, or at least cultivate a reputation for ‘virtue’.65 Mandeville did not positively object to such devices in the economy of erotic regulation – they negotiated discordant desires and made the system work – but he loved daring hypocrites to come clean.

  While Mandeville never strayed far from matters sexual, at the heart of his non-medical writings was another dialectic of desire and denial: the appetite for gain and fame. Time and again, he addressed what he identified as the central paradox of his age. Individuals were manifestly availing themselves of every opportunity to acquire wealth and esteem; money, possessions, display and conspicuous consumption – all conferred power and prestige. Yet acquisitiveness was conducted in the face of official fusillades against greed; what everyone actually did was denounced as luxury and vice. Why so? These were the issues addressed in his notorious The Grumbling Hive: or, Knaves Turn'd Honest (1705), a 433-line moral tale in doggerel hexameters, later festooned with lengthy prose commentaries and reissued as The Fable of the Bees: or Private Vices, Public Benefits (1714), a work which swelled with every infamous edition.66