Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World

by Roy Porter

  It is with much regret that for some years past we have remarked considerable injury to have been suffered by the woods and young timber around this city in consequence of wearing oaken sprigs in the hat, and the decorating of shop-windows and apartments of houses with oaken branches, on the 29 of May. If the practice alluded to be meant as an expression of Loyalty, we would just suggest that this is a very improper display of it: since it would never sanction that injury to individuals and loss to the publick, which are produced by these annual depredations on private property.8

  As hinted, Nature symbolized as public patrimony or even patriotism could easily be at odds with Nature as private property.

  Nowadays it is accepted that ‘Nature’ is a social category. ‘Although we are accustomed,’ explains Simon Schama, ‘to separate nature and human perception into two realms, they are, in fact, indivisible… landscape is the work of the mind.’9 What passes these days in England for Nature – the chequerboard fields, hawthorn hedgerows and coppices which conservationists defend against developers – is largely the product of Enlightenment agri-business, landscape gardening and peasant-cleansing. In declaring ‘All Nature is but Art unknown to Thee’, Alexander Pope intended to be pious, but he was unwittingly providing the codebreaker to Georgian environmental history.10

  What framed the mental landscape of the English Enlightenment? Vistas were widening: the Ptolemaic closed world had yielded to the infinite Newtonian universe, while circumnavigators like Captain Cook encouraged poets and philosophers alike to portray the terraqueous globe as an integrated whole, a backdrop to enlightened cosmopolitanism, man as a citizen of the whole world. 11

  Yet horizons on Creation were also shrinking spectacularly. When conceptualizing the universe, a late-eighteenth-century man of science – unlike, say, a founding fellow of the Royal Society – had probably excluded from his range of vision Heaven, Hell and all the Satanic squadrons of demons, spirits and witches omnipresent in Milton.12 ‘The truth,’ lamented Carlyle in 1829, ‘is men have lost their belief in the Invisible, and believe and hope and work only in the Visible… Only the material, the immediate practical, not the divine and spiritual, is important to us.’13

  But though we catch here anticipations of what Max Weber termed the ‘disenchantment of the world’, the planet had not yet been reduced to the meaningless mass of congealing magma which paralysed Tennyson and other Victorian honest doubters; with Pope as their guide, the Georgians read Nature as a masterwork of divine artistry – one looked ‘thro’ Nature, up to Nature's God’. Filing out of church of a Sunday, the devout were meant to gaze up in awe. In the words of Psalm 111, as rhymed and regularized by Joseph Addison:

  The Spacious Firmament on high

  With all the blue Etherial sky

  And spangled Heav'ns, a Shining Frame

  Their great Original proclaim.14

  In such a confident Latitudinarian world view, there could be no such thing as mere Nature; there was Creation, and that remained a sacred auditorium with designated roles, costumes and scripts for all creatures great and small, from herbs and herbivores, up through the Chain of Being to the Psalmist's, or Addison's, great Original:

  See, thro' this air, this ocean, and this earth,

  All matter quick, and bursting into birth.

  Above, how high, progressive life may go!

  Around, how wide! how deep extend below!15

  Perceptions of the terrestrial economy as a drama or, equally, as an estate, matched the daily material realities of the interdependency of man with the natural world.16 Most people, after all, still lived on the land – in 1700 only one in eight of England's population resided in towns of over 5,000 – and sheep outnumbered people. There was an overwhelming proximity – physical, mental and emotional – between humans, flocks and fields. The sense that everything had its rank and station in Creation squared with popular mentalities whose folk tales mixed up children, wolves, giants and monsters; an élite culture exemplified by Gilbert White's Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1788/9), where swallows and hedgehogs were humanized into honorary parishioners;17 and, not least, a creed that was breathtakingly anthropocentric. Unlike certain world religions, Christian theology affirmed that all had been divinely adapted for mankind, because humans alone had immortal souls and so could be saved. Genesis had granted man ‘dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth’. And even after the Fall and the Flood, had not the Lord reissued His mandate: ‘Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it’?18

  For enlightened sensibilities, Nature was, in other words, no wilderness occupied by Satan; nor was it intrinsically alive or holy – the Church had always fought pantheistic paganism. Rather Nature was a resource, ‘principally designed’, asserted the Cambridge divine and Newtonian popularizer Richard Bentley, ‘for the being and service and contemplation of man’.19 ‘We can, if need be, ransack the whole globe,’ maintained his fellow physico-theologian the Revd William Derham, ‘ppenetrate into the bowels of the earth, descend to the bottom of the deep, travel to the farthest regions of this world, to acquire wealth, to increase our knowledge, or even only to please our eye and fancy.’ And so benevolent was Providence that, no matter how acquisitive man might be, ‘still the Creation would not be exhausted, still nothing would be wanting for food, nothing for physic, nothing for building and habitation, nothing for cleanliness and refreshment, yea even for recreation and pleasure’.20 As late as the dawn of the nineteenth century, the Quaker geologist William Phillips could reassure readers that ‘everything is intended for the advantage of Man’, who is the ‘Lord of Creation’, a sentiment mirrored in William Paley's Natural Theology (1802) and, in the 1830s, in the multi-authored Bridgewater Treatises.21

  Rational religion sustained a sense of a milieu adapted to the daily needs of the rich man in his castle and the poor man at his gate.22 There were books in brooks, sermons in stones and the writing was on the trees. The trunk was a staff of life, carrying echoes of Calvary; but timber had social morals to point too.

  Hail, old Patrician Trees, so great and good!

  Hail, ye Plebeian underwood!

  sang Abraham Cowley at the Restoration, anticipating Burke's paean to the ‘great oaks which shade a country’.23 As in the body politic, so in Nature everything had its place and purpose, its meanings and morals. Where diseases were endemic, had not God planted natural remedies? The Revd Edmund Stone's discovery in the 1760s of the therapeutic properties of the bark of another tree, the willow – what was to prove the first stage on the road to aspirin – arose in part because he was piously confident that wetlands, as well as causing rheumatism, would yield cures for it – a vindication of an ‘all is for the best’ optimism of which Dr Pangloss might have been proud.24 All the environment was thus a stage – in his popular natural history, An History of the Earth and Animated Nature (1774), Oliver Goldsmith extolled the ‘great theatre of His glory’ – and, if God was also the Celestial Artist, Nature was properly to be appreciated through painterly eyes, as a backdrop designed to elicit seemly responses.25

  This representation of Nature as an ideal habitat arose in part because Addison's generation, basking in the Glorious Revolution, had inherited a profound environmental crisis which it zealously combatted. ‘The opinion of the World's Decay is so generally received,’ George Hakewill had observed in 1630, ‘not onely among the Vulgar, but of the Learned, both Divines and others.’26 Reformation commentators had affirmed the old classical tropes and biblical prophecies: this vale of tears was a wreck, old and decrepit; the end of the world was nigh.27 Everywhere, or so chiliastic champions of mundus senescens had declared, the climate was deteriorating, the soil growing exhausted and pestilences multiplying. At the Creation, insisted the theologian Thomas Burnet in his Sacred Theory of the Earth (1684), the face of the globe had been eggshell smooth; but the v
ery existence of mountains and, furthermore, their perpetual denudation showed that all was cracking up, becoming reduced to ‘Ruines and Rubbish’; what modern man inhabited was, by consequence of the Fall, a ‘little dirty Planet’, a superannuated sphere and punishment for Original Sin.28

  If Burnet on mutability smacked of Baroque rhetoric, others could point to environmental decay of a directly tangible kind: collapsing cliffs, landslips, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, silting estuaries and the like. At home John Evelyn deplored smoke pollution and deforestation, while abroad observers on Barbados and other new colonies were alarmed at how rapidly slash-and-burn clearances and plantation monocultures like sugar cane brought on droughts, flash floods and devastating soil erosion, turning once fertile terrain arid.29 Original Sin and modern greed together explained what many diagnosed as the symptoms of a planet terminally sick.

  But such theological eco-pessimism was challenged in enlightened thinking. The Glorious Revolution enthroned a new regime which championed freedom, order, prosperity and progress; and its apologists, notably the Boyle lecturers, provided environmental visions vindicating the new governmental order by naturalizing it. Complementing the political settlement of 1688, and all the more so the Hanoverian succession of 1714, Nature was newly commended for its stability: the ‘grand design of Providence’, concluded the Newtonian geologist and physician John Woodward in his An Essay towards a Natural History of the Earth (1695), was thus the ‘Conservation of the Globe’ in a ‘just aequilibrium’.30

  In that work, Woodward frankly admitted that events like the Noachian Deluge – which he happily accepted as a literal historical event, confirmed both by the Bible and by physical evidence – prima facie suggested ‘nothing but tumult and disorder’:

  yet if we draw somewhat nearer, and take a closer prospect of it… we may there trace out a steady hand producing… the most consummate order and beauty out of confusion and deformity… and directing all the several steps and periods to an end, and that a most noble and excellent one, no less than the happiness of the whole race of mankind.31

  As with the English monarchy, and also with miracles, the Earth's turbulent revolutionary career was over; all was now equilibrium, the body terrestrial was healthily balanced; and the final global revolution – the Deluge – had been constructive not punitive, a ‘Reformation’ introducing a new ‘constitution’ into the ‘Government of the Natural World’. Through that revolution the Lord had transformed mankind ‘from the most deplorable Misery and Slavery, to a Capacity of being Happy’, by rendering the post-diluvial Earth niggardly, forcing man to labour by the sweat of his brow, and thus compelling sober industry.32

  Enlightened theorists further insisted that the laws of Nature governing the globe were ‘immutable’ and ‘progressive’, and familiar phenomena were reinterpreted in the light of presiding divine design.33 Decomposing mountains had once been taken as dysfunctional, symptoms of a catastrophe (usually Noah's Flood); but now their positive functions were stressed – ‘the plains become richer’, explained Goldsmith, ‘in proportion as the mountains decay’.34

  No mountains, no rainfall, no fertility – argued a new generation of physical geographers, dismissing the ecological doomsters. In his Theory of the Earth (1795), the Scottish physician and geologist James Hutton maintained that the decomposition of mountains produced the detritus which, flowing down rivers to form the seabed, would, millions of years hence, become the basis of new strata, whose ultimate decay would once again form rich soil, and so on, in endless cycles. Likewise with volcanoes and earthquakes, a sore topic after the calamitous Lisbon earthquake of 1755: all such apparently destructive processes were actually integral, it was now claimed, to Nature's benign operations:

  When we trace the parts of which this terrestrial system is composed, and when we view the general connection of those several parts, the whole presents a machine of a peculiar construction by which it is adapted to a certain end. We perceive a fabric, erected in wisdom, to obtain a purpose worthy of the power that is apparent in the production of it.35

  The globe was self-sustaining and self-repairing, Hutton insisted, so as to form an enduring habitat, perfect for man.36 A reviewer noted the switch from eco-gloom to eco-glory: ‘the dreary and dismal view of waste and universal ruin is removed, and the mind is presented with the pleasing prospect of a wise and lasting provision for the economy of nature’.37

  The Enlightenment's new environmental vision married Newton and Locke. Along with this law-governed Earth machine went a possessive individualism which rationalized God's giving dominion to mankind through a labour theory of property and value: man had the right to appropriate the Earth and its fruits.38 The biblical mandate to master the Earth and multiply was thereby rationalized. The age of Donne had seen mutability – ‘’tis all in pieces, all cohaerence gone' – and the Puritans had anticipated apocalyptic fire and floods; but from the 1690s the environment was philosophically stabilized.39 Both pious Christians like the Boyle lecturers and later Deists like Hutton portrayed a steady-state terrestrial economy,40 rather as Adam Smith would deem the free market economy self-adjusting and optimal. Illustrating these views, Oliver Goldsmith depicted the Earth as a God-sent ‘habitation’, a mansion for the Lord's tenant to enjoy – on condition he toiled to improve his estate, for:

  while many of his wants are thus kindly furnished, on the one hand, there are numberless inconveniences to excite his industry on the other. This habitation, though provided with all the conveniences of air, pasturage, and water, is but a desert place, without human cultivation.

  A world thus furnished with advantages on the one side and inconveniences on the other, is the proper abode of reason, is the fittest to exercise the industry of a free and a thinking creature.41

  So, the Earth was not in crisis; it operated by a self-adjusting system governed by universal laws and made for man. Latitudinarian Anglicanism backed such thinking: God was benevolent, the Devil was de facto discredited (there might be a ghost, but there certainly were no gremlins, in the machine). And this philosophy of Nature was further fanfared by pious and edifying nature poetry. Works like Richard Blackmore's The Creation (1712) praised the glories of the universe and hymned its Creator.42 The cleric-poet Edward Young's The Complaint – generally referred to by its subtitle, ‘Night Thoughts’ – was completed by 1746, the same year as James Thomson's Seasons, and two years after Mark Akenside's The Pleasures of Imagination.43 Young extolled the natural world, expressive of the vastness of space and the power of God:

  Seas, rivers, mountains, forests, deserts, rocks,

  The promontory's height, the depth profound

  Of subterranean, excavated grots,

  Back-brow'd, and vaulted high, and yawning wide,

  From Nature's structure, or the scoop of Time.44

  Similar sentiments were expressed in Henry Brooke's Universal Beauty (1735):

  For deep, indeed, the Eternal Founder lies,

  And high above his work the Maker flies;

  Yet infinite that work, beyond our soar;

  Beyond what Clarkes can prove, or Newtons can explore!45

  Brooke was not opposed to the new science; he merely wished to make a moral point about pride.

  In The Pleasures of Imagination, Akenside for his part celebrated Nature, in true Baconian fashion, as God's book:

  some within a finer mould

  She wrought and temper'd with a purer flame.

  To these the fire omnipotent unfolds

  The worlds harmonious volume, there to read

  The transcript of himself.46

  Mid-century blank verse thus raised up hymns to Nature. Environmental philosophy and poetry propped up the enlightened order: God was the architect of natural order, rather as Walpole was the manager of political stability.

  And not just stability, improvement. As long ago maintained by Weber and Tawney, Protestant theology highlighted the individual's duty of self-realization: cultivating Nature
promised spiritual reward no less than daily bread. Enlightened authors had few qualms about man's right – his duty, even – to harness Nature, ‘bringing all the headlong tribes of nature into subjection to his will’, according to Goldsmith, ‘and producing… order and uniformity upon earth’.47 Through natural philosophy, maintained Joseph Glanvill, paraphrasing Bacon, ‘nature being known… may be mastered, managed, and used in the services of humane life’.48

  Such views, of course, underwrote what Europeans had been doing anyway for centuries to the environment: clearing forests, embanking, ploughing, planting, mining. Draining and deforestation were praised for freeing the land from dankness and disease, and turning wasteland into wealth.

  Radical and feminist historians have recently reproved the aggressive, macho element in post-Baconian thinking for replacing supposedly organic and harmonious notions of Mother Earth with a new vision of Nature exploited, even raped. ‘The veneration wherewith men are imbued for what they call nature,’ grumbled Robert Boyle in anti-superstitious vein, ‘has been a discouraging impediment to the empire of man over the inferior creatures of God: for many have… looked upon it, as… something impious to attempt.’ Fie on such scruples!49 This strain of environmental mastery should be noted, but it must also be kept in perspective. For the key Enlightenment paradigm of man's relation to the environment was not conflictual but cooperative, indeed positively Georgic. ‘I have placed thee in a spacious and well-furnished World,’ the botanist and Anglican clergyman John Ray imagined God informing mankind:

  I have provided thee with Materials whereon to exercise and employ thy Art and Strength… I have distinguished the Earth into Hills and Valleys, and Plains, and Meadows, and Woods; all these Parts, capable of Culture and Improvement by thy Industry, I have committed to thee for thy assistance in thy labors of Plowing, and Carrying, and Drawing, and Travel, the laborious Ox, the patient Ass, and the strong and serviceable Horse… 50