by Roy Porter
Addressing the law, Kames boldly held that legal rationality itself was not timeless but had to be historicized: ‘The law of a country is in perfection when it corresponds to the manners of the people, their circumstances, their government. And as these are seldom stationary, the law ought to accompany them in their changes.’120 Analysing man's ‘remarkable propensity for appropriation’, the law lord deemed that ‘without private property there would be no industry, and without industry, men would remain savages forever’. At ‘the dawn of society’, he explained, individuals defended their belongings and sought personal revenge. In due course, third parties were called in to adjudicate when property disputes arose. Such judges steadily acquired powers of intervention in disputes, and civil jurisdiction made headway. Criminal jurisdiction progressed more slowly, however, for ‘revenge, the darling privilege of undisciplined nature, is never tamely given up’.121 All the same, vendettas proved so disruptive that governments eventually assumed the mantle of proceeding against blood feuds.122
From the history of law, Kames was led to adumbrate a wider philosophy of social change: ‘Hunting and fishing, in order for sustenance, were the original occupations of man. The shepherd life succeeded; and the next stage was that of agriculture.’123 Such ‘progressive changes’ could be found ‘universally’, but it was only at the agrarian stage that there emerged ‘the true spirit of society, which consists in mutual benefits, and in making the industry of individuals profitable to others as well as to themselves’.124
Others mapped out similar patterns in establishing, in Sir John Dalrymple's words, ‘how men arrived from the most rude to the most polished state of society’. In his History of Edinburgh, from the Earliest Accounts to the Present Time (1787) Alexander Kincaid paints ‘a general picture of the manners of the time throughout all Scotland’ which paid special attention to ‘barbarity’ conceived as a cultural rather than a strictly economic phase.125 Such ideas, however, found their fullest expression in the four-stage theory spelt out by Adam Smith and later by his follower John Millar in their attempts to historicize Montesquieu's map of manners into a natural history of mankind.126 ‘The four stages of society are hunting, pasturage, farming, and commerce,’ explained Smith, in a thought experiment which sounds more like Crusoe than Rousseau:
If a number of persons were shipwrecked on a desert island their first sustenance would be from the fruits which the soil naturally produced, and the wild beasts which they could kill. As these could not at all times be sufficient, they came at last to tame some of the wild beasts that they might always have them at hand. In process of time even these would not be sufficient; and as they saw the earth naturally produce considerable quantities of vegetables of its own accords, they would think of cultivating it so that it might produce more of them. Hence agriculture, which requires a good deal of refinement before it could become the prevailing employment of a country… The age of commerce naturally succeeds that of agriculture.127
The dynamic tensions arising in each successive stage would spark the transition to the next. Herds thus led to the ‘inequality of fortune’ which ‘first gave rise to regular government. Till there be property there can be no government’, since its very point was to ‘defend the rich from the poor’.128
It was John Millar who elaborated these views. Like all progressive Scots, this professor of law at Glasgow praised the colossal benefits accruing from the Glorious Revolution and the Act of Union: ‘From this happy period, therefore, commerce and manufacturers assumed a new aspect, and continuing to advance with rapidity, produced innumerable changes in the state of society, and in the character and manners of the people.’129 His quasi-materialist version stressed the economic logic of the four stages. The first object of mankind was, it went without saying, ‘to procure subsistence, to obtain the necessaries, comforts and conveniences of life’. Thereafter, their aim was ‘to defend their persons and their acquisitions against the attacks of one another’. At first, because property itself was simple, political arrangements were as well, but greater wealth required that ‘its government ought to be the more complicated’. For that reason, by ‘tracing the progress of wealth we may thus expect to discover the progress of government’.130
Millar itemized the four successive states. First there were savages, ‘people who live by hunting and fishing and by gathering the spontaneous fruits of the earth’; then came the age of the shepherds; then husbandmen; and lastly commercial peoples.131 Overall, he told a tale of progress comprehensive and unalloyed:
their prospects are gradually enlarged, their appetites and desires are more and more awakened and called forth in pursuit of the several conveniences of life; and the various branches of manufacture, together with commerce, its inseparable attendant, and with science and literature, the natural offspring of ease and affluence, are introduced, and brought to maturity.132
The environment played a certain part in such developments, explaining why some societies progressed more than others, but, like Smith, Millar essentially ascribed progress to man's nature itself, ‘a disposition and capacity for improving his condition’, which ‘has every where produced a remarkable uniformity in the several steps of his progression’.133
In the philosophies of Hume, Smith and Millar, improvement was virtually guaranteed and the path of progress everywhere became legible. Assessing Smith's contributions, Dugald Stewart thus praised his Dissertation on the Origin of Language (1761) as ‘a specimen of a particular sort of enquiry’ typical of the times, the attempt to explain the ‘marked difference between the institutions, ideas, manners and arts of the past and those of the present’. In examining ‘by what gradual steps the transition has been made from the first simple efforts of uncultivated nature, to a state of things so wonderfully artificial and complicated’, hard facts were, admittedly, few and far between, and so the answers had to be sought in another source, conjecture: ‘our conclusions a priori, may tend to confirm the credibility of facts, which, on a superficial view, appeared to be doubtful or incredible’. Such speculative accounts, Stewart insisted, did not merely serve to gratify curiosity: they had their scientific value, showing how change ‘may have been produced by natural causes’. The procedure was worthy of a name: ‘I shall take the liberty of giving the title of Theoretical or Conjectural History.’134 Progress had thus become so important a theoretical weapon in the enlightened armoury that when data were lacking to support it, conjecture would serve in their place.
With the querying of the sufficiency of the Bible to explain the human condition, attempts to make sense of the great canvas of history took on a new urgency, while rapid material and social change inspired attempts to position the present in terms of ongoing processes. Theories of transition from rudeness to refinement took hold, particularly in Scotland, in view of the nation's rapid development – from the savage to the Scotsman, from Eden to Edinburgh. Modernization did not only bring prosperity, it was a comprehensive force spreading civility to all departments of life: ‘the improvements in the state of society, which are the effects of opulence and refinement’, trumpeted Millar, will ‘dispose the father to behave with greater mildness and moderation in the exercise of his authority. As he lives in greater affluence and security, he is more at leisure to exert the social affections, and to cultivate those arts which tend to soften and humanize the temper.’135 Progress was humanizing.
The Scots felt mighty pleased to be enlightened – and affluent – at last.136 And, proud of their sturdy academic and philosophical traditions, they rationalized that confidence through elevated theories of the human mind and its ameliorating powers. No mere theorist of social change, Adam Ferguson also produced, for example, his Institutes of Moral Philosophy (1796). After chapters on ‘The History of the Species’, which sketched in the anthropological background, Ferguson then went on to tackle ‘The History of the Individual’, which looked at consciousness, sense and perception, observation, memory, imagination, abstraction, reasoning,
foresight, propensity, sentiment, desire and volition. Man's intellectual potential itself knew no bounds.137
As a historian of mental progress Ferguson was followed by Dugald Stewart, another typically polymathic professor from a typically Scottish academic dynasty. In 1772 Stewart junior took over the mathematical classes at Edinburgh of his failing father. Six years later he also undertook to lecture for Ferguson and, on the latter's resignation in 1785, he transferred to the chair of moral philosophy, proving a huge success. All his key books – the Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (1792), the Philosophical Essays (1810) and The Philosophy of the Active and Moral Powers of Man (1828) – disclose a common programme: a Baconian philosophy of mental development.
Natural philosophy had acquired the status of science, Stewart held, when inquiry, freed from metaphysical speculation, was directed towards discovering, by observation and experiment, the laws governing the connection of physical phenomena. Natural science had progressed by bringing these uniformities under laws of greater generality capable of comprehending disparate phenomena: the philosophy of mind must advance by similar means.
For Stewart the great desideratum was a unitary human science, though one which would be two-pronged, embracing a science of society (including economics and politics) and a science of consciousness. The phenomenon of consciousness, he stressed, had to be addressed unbiased by speculation, and the laws of their relations validated inductively. The science of mind would seek a knowledge of the ‘general laws of our constitution’, paralleling Newtonian principles in physics, and, like them, promote the deductive explanation of a galaxy of facts.
Though the science of mind presupposed ‘the principles of common sense’, that favourite term of Thomas Reid was erroneous, for it made his appeal to ‘common sense’ against scepticism sound like an appeal to the vulgar against the educated. Stewart instead chose to speak of ‘the fundamental laws of human belief’.
Stewart derived from earlier Scottish thinkers an idea which became his leitmotiv, almost an idée fixe: the unity of the ‘philosophical sciences’ – logic, moral and political philosophy, political economy and aesthetics, all dependent on the philosophy of mind. For this, the study of human nature ‘considered as one great whole’ was required, grounded upon psychology in its widest sense. He was also concerned to integrate his natural philosophical views within rational religion. The soul was not something of which we were introspectively conscious; our knowledge of it, rather, was entirely ‘relative’, derived from the phenomenon of consciousness. The immateriality of the mind created expectations of life after death, and tendencies deep-seated in human nature needed a future life for their realization – for instance, the irreducible notions of right and wrong required and suggested divine government. Stewart represented the culmination of Scottish academic attempts to discover in history the progressive manifestation of mind.
Central to enlightened hopes was the goal of extending scientific thinking to man and society. Living in a rapidly changing society with a strong university tradition, it is little surprise that the Scots were so prominent in that movement, contributing particularly clear and coherent philosophies of progress.
11
HAPPINESS
The present is the Age of Pastime, the Golden Reign of Pleasure
SAMUEL FAWCONER1
Oh Happiness! our being's end and aim!
Good, Pleasure, Ease, Content! Whate'er thy name
ALEXANDER POPE2
What is the pulse of this so busy world?
The love of pleasure…
EDWARD YOUNG3
I will tell you in what consists the summum bonum of human life: it consists in reading Tristram Shandy, in blowing with a pair of bellows into your shoes in hot weather, and roasting potatoes under the grate in cold.
ARCHDEACON PALEY4
The Enlightenment's great historical watershed lay in the validation of pleasure. This chapter, rounding off the first half of this book, will explore the increasing embracement, however uneven and qualified, of the pursuit of temporal happiness as the summum bonum.
It would be absurd to imply that before the Enlightenment there were no profligates, no cakes and ale, or that the pleasures of the senses and imagination were utterly frowned upon. In Antiquity, Epicurus and his followers had advocated a hedonism which prioritized, if not the gratification of desire at least the avoidance of pain.5 Pagan bacchanalia were well known to the Renaissance,6 while pastoral painting and poetry blazoned bucolic golden age idylls in which bounteous Nature freely yielded up her fruits.7 The Christian calendar had its feasts no less than its fasts – the Twelve Days of Christmas, Plough Sunday and Monday, Shrove Tuesday, All Fools' Day and any number of saints' days – while trades had their particular festive days: for example, St Crispin's for shoemakers, St Paul's for tinners. Familiar themes – the revels of Bacchus and Venus, the cornucopia and the flowing bowl – show that, both in reality and in the artistic imagination, there had always been times and places of holiday, abandonment and enjoyment.
Yet sensualism had been decisively rejected. Plato had pictured the appetites as a mutinous crew – only Captain Reason would prevent shipwreck – while the Stoics for their part dismissed hedonism as a bubble: the wise must disdain fleeting pleasures and find truth in the immaterial and eternal. Stoicism thus somewhat anticipated the Christian rejection of carnality, true blessedness coming only through abstinence and asceticism.8 Concupiscence was die consequence of Original Sin; through omnipresent images of the Expulsion, the danse macabre and the memento mori, Christians had been taught that this was a vale of tears in which labour was a cursed reminder of the Fall, egoism was evil and pride had to be cast out of the heart: according to Sir Thomas Browne, ‘there is no happiness within the circle of flesh’. Signalling the Church's anxieties about the seductive pleasures of objects, the deadly sins singled out for censure were envy and avarice, lust and even, somewhat bathetically, gluttony. In this valley of the shadow of death, the mortification of the flesh was the release of the spirit.9
Many such God-fearing Christians remained – Gibbon smirked at how such killjoys divested the God they adored of ‘every amiable attribute’.10 Samuel Johnson, whose Rasselas (1759) showed that the Happy Valley was not happy at all, offered what might be called an infelicific calculus: ‘Infelicity is involved in corporeal nature, and interwoven with our being; all attempts therefore to decline it wholly are useless and vain.’11
*
While there were some sunny intervals, hedonism in itself was wholly deprecated within traditional Christianity. The Enlightenment's novelty lay in the legitimacy it accorded to pleasure, not as occasional binges, mystical transports or blue-blooded privilege, but as the routine entitlement of people at large to pursue the senses (not just purify the soul) and to seek fulfilment in this world (and not only in the next).
This transformation, as seen, came about partly within Christianity, for Latitudinarianism presented a benevolent God as author of a harmonious universe in which earthly joys presaged heavenly rewards. ‘To do good is the most pleasant enjoyment in the world,’ explained Archbishop Tillotson, ‘it is natural, and whatever is so, is delightful.’12 ‘There should not always be Storms or Thunder,’ ruled the Marquis of Halifax; ‘a clear Sky would sometimes make the Church look more like Heaven.’13
More importantly, hedonism also emerged beyond the Church, thanks to the reinstatement of classical ideas and to enlightened philosophies of human nature. The new science promoted mechanical models of man essentially as a machine motivated to pursue pleasure and avoid pain. In Leviathan (1651), Hobbes advanced a negative hedonism, oriented primarily towards avoiding pain and death, while for his part Mandeville touted a cynical egoism: all actually pursue selfish pleasure, if hypocritically denying it.14 For their challenges to traditional precepts, humanistic and Christian, Hobbes and Mandeville were pilloried, but their essential message won gradual if guarded acceptance: self-fulfilment rather than
denial should be embraced, because it is inherent in human nature and beneficial to society. Later thinkers glossed these otherwise shocking conclusions. Taking distinct guises in different fields of discourse, they are worth reviewing briefly.
One, as mentioned, lay within divinity itself. By 1700, natural theology was achieving high prominence, picturing God as the benign Architect of a perfect universe. Following in Sir Isaac's footsteps, the Boyle lecturers presented the Earth as a law-governed habitat meant for mankind's use.15 Man could garner the fruits of the soil, tame the animals and quarry the crust.16 Cosmic optimism of course begged endless questions, being satirized by Voltaire's Candide and Samuel Johnson's Rasselas – that meeting of ideological opposites, both published in 1759 after the Lisbon earthquake killed 30,000 people.17 The natural theology of design remained extremely influential, however, culminating in the Christian utilitarianism of the Revd William Paley, who cooed: ‘it is a happy world after all’.18
The union of earthly and divine happiness was expressed in similarly blunt utilitarian terms by Abraham Tucker, who compared Heaven to a ‘universal bank, where accounts are regularly kept and every man debited or credited for the least farthing he takes out or brings in’. The divine depository had many advantages over the Bank of England; not only was the security perfect, but the rate of interest was enormous; whenever the Christian was in need, said Tucker, ‘the runner angel’ would ‘privately slip the proper sum into my hand at a time when I least expect it’. He calculated that our entire suffering might be equivalent to a minute of pain once in every twenty-two years.19