Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World
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A campaign was mounted for the abolition of subscription and the modification of the Articles, headed by Socinian-leaning Anglicans like Theophilus Lindsey, the vicar of Catterick. A meeting at the Feathers Tavern in London led to the presentation of a petition to the House of Commons in 1772, embodying Blackburne's proposal to replace subscription with a profession of belief in the Scripturess. On its rejection, Lindsey left the Church, followed by his son-in-law, John Disney. Shortly afterwards, with the support of the Earl of Shelburne, the Duke of Grafton and other grandees, Lindsey opened England's first designated Unitarian church, in Essex Street off the Strand. Blessed with such superior patrons, Unitarianism became a force in the land; by 1800 nearly 200 chapels had sprung up.47
Amongst Lindsey's allies had been John Jebb, another protégé of Law at Peterhouse, where he lectured in mathematics and the Greek Testament. Jebb campaigned for the reform of the Cambridge tripos, proposing annual examinations. Developing Unitarian leanings, he too participated in the Feathers Tavern Petition, subsequently resigning his living and taking up medicine.48 ‘It is now well known’, he asserted,
that a majority of the thinking clergy are disposed to embrace the hypothesis of Arius or Socinus, with regard to the person of Jesus. And that the opinion of Athanasius, though sanctified by the acts of uniformity, is now exploded by almost every reader of the Bible.49
Wishful thinking, doubtless, but none the less a sign of the times.
Paralleling these liberal tendencies within Anglicanism, but altogether weightier in its consequences, was the radicalization of Nonconformity. Under William and Mary, Dissent had achieved freedom of worship but not civil equality. Subsequent decades brought for many Nonconformists a shift from theological soul-searching to a more rational and political stance; and they flexed their muscles with a growing sense of historical destiny. ‘Your very existence depends on your changing the reason of your dissent which used to be an opinion of superior orthodoxy and superior purity of faith and worship,’ David Williams apprised fellow Nonconformists in 1777,
for another which is the only rational and justifiable reason of dissent – the inalienable and universal right of private judgement, and the necessity of an unrestrained enquiry and freedom of debate and discussion on all subjects of knowledge, morality, and religion. This may be called Intellectual Liberty. This should be the general reason of dissent.50
Exercising ‘Intellectual Liberty’ in those ‘shaking times’, Rational Dissent gravitated towards Unitarianism, the enlightened mode of Protestantism par excellence whose high priest was Joseph Priestley.51
A polymath born with a perpetual-motion pen – his works fill twenty-six volumes, and he died, almost inevitably, correcting proofs52 – Priestley championed freedom of inquiry more than any other as the rationale of a rational Christian life of endless progress. ‘Train our youth to the new light which is now almost everywhere bursting out in favour of the civil rights of men,’ he called upon the Hackney Academy in 1791, and
let every young mind expand itself, catch the rising gale, and partake of the glorious enthusiasm, the great objects of which are the flourishing state of science, arts, manufactures, and commerce, the extinction of wars, with the calamities incident to mankind for them, the abolishing of all useless distinctions, which were an offspring of a barbarous age.53
Largely ignored by most historians of the Enlightenment, Priestley is central to the distinctive arc of British developments.
Born in 1733 the son of a poor Yorkshire cloth-dresser, on his mother's early death Priestley was adopted by a well-to-do aunt, a Presbyterian but no bigot, who kept open house for the local Dissenting ministers, even ones ‘obnoxious on account of their heresy… if she thought them honest and good men’.54
As a lad, Priestley felt the full Calvinist horrors: ‘Believing that a new birth, produced by the immediate agency of the Spirit of God, was necessary to salvation,’ he was to recall, ‘and not being able to satisfy myself that I had experienced anything of the kind, I felt occasionally such distress of mind as it is not in my power to describe.’55 These brushes with Calvinist ‘darkness’ drove him to ‘a peculiar sense of the value of rational principles of religion’56 – for, after all, the heretics taking tea at his aunt's showed that ‘honest and good men’ could legitimately think for themselves.57
Destined for the Presbyterian ministry, Priestley was educated at grammar school until he was sixteen, later reading his way into Chaldean, Syriac and Arabic, as well as modern languages, mathematics, physics and philosophy. At nineteen he entered the Daventry Academy, a liberal institution he always cherished. ‘While your Universities resemble pools of stagnant water,’ he told William Pitt in a public letter in 1787, ‘ours [i.e., the Nonconformist academies] are like rivers, which, taking their natural course, fertilize a whole country.’58 Unlike hidebound Oxbridge, their very methods fostered inquiry, claimed Priestley, who rejoiced in free interchange and became a fierce controversialist. ‘I do not recollect,’ stated one of his pupils, ‘that he ever showed the least displeasure at the strongest objections that were made to what he delivered.’59
At Daventry, Priestley hit on David Hartley's Observations on Man (1749), which account of the workings of the mind by ‘the laws of association’ quite won him over. The transparent simplicity of Hartley's philosophy gratified Priestley's no-nonsense Lockean bent: no mystifying ‘faculties’ or ‘innate instincts’, only ideas and their causes and effects. Moreover, Hartley implied that education was everything, and the prospects of progress boundless. By pointing to perfectibility through learning, associationism justified faith in both education and progress.60 Not least, the pious Hartley's rejection of free will and mind–body dualism convinced Priestley he could be a determinist, a materialist and a Christian all at once: ‘compared with Dr Hartley, I consider Mr Hume as not even a child’.61 Hume's conservative politics, in any case, were as distasteful to Priestley as his flippant unbelief.62 Hartley's earnest morality and faith, by contrast, were after his own heart. Anthony Collins's Philosophical Inquiry concerning Human Liberty and Necessity (1714) had already sapped his belief in free will, and Hartley now provided him with an alternative. He proved a lifelong disciple: in 1775 he abridged the Observations as Hartley's Theory of the Human Mind on the Principle of the Association of Ideas (1775), fifteen years later producing a new edition of Collins's Philosophical Inquiry.63
In 1755, aged twenty-two, Priestley gained his first congregation, at Needham Market, Suffolk. He was not a success – he stammered, and his Arian theological unorthodoxies galled his flock. Moving to Nantwich in Cheshire, he set up a school, buying scientific instruments, including an ‘electrical machine’ and an airump, before becoming in 1761 ‘Tutor of the languages’ to the Nonconformist academy at Warrington, soon to become the most illustrious of the Dissenters' universities. There he gave the world his reflections on criticism, grammar, history and law, his Chart of Biography (1765) and New Chart of History (1769) proving popular teaching texts.64 The polymath was never daunted: he was the self-taught lawyer whose A Few Remarks on Blackstone's Commentaries (1769) bearded England's most erudite jurist, and the stutterer who published a Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism (1777).65 Specialization was arcane and suspect.
On visits to London, Priestley made friends with scientists and philosophers, notably Benjamin Franklin and Richard Price, the Nonconformist divine, actuary and statistician.66 Contacts with the former led to The History and Present State of Electricity, with Original Experiments (1767), the work which put the understanding of electricity on a scientific footing.67 His electrical inquiries, he proudly reported, were the first to show experimentally that ‘the attraction of electricity is subject to the same laws as that of gravitation, and is therefore as the square of the distances’.68 That work also contained his thoughts on scientific method. While at heart a Baconian fact-collector, the free-thinking controversialist did not dismiss theory, only dogmatism. ‘A philosopher wh
o has been long attached to a favourite hypothesis… will not, sometimes, be convinced of its falsity by the plainest evidence of fact.’69
In 1767 Priestley accepted an invitation to address the people of Mill Hill, Leeds, a congregation which found his religious stance congenial. He had long abandoned both orthodox Trinitarianism and the Atonement.70 Now the enlightened champion of the plain and simple moved from Arianism to Socinianism, denying not only that Christ was ‘of the same substance’ as God the Father but that he was divine at all. The Messiah was just ‘a man like ourselves’, ‘a man approved by God’, neither unerring nor unblemished – ‘as much a creature of God as a loaf of bread’. His bold Socinianism rejected Christ worship as ‘idolatrous’ – theological levelling indeed! – while Trinitarianism, he railed, was just as bad as transubstantiation.71 Priesdey's Theological Repository, set up in 1769, was the first magazine avowedly dedicated to free religious inquiry.72
Priestley's later theological writings, notably An History of the Corruptions of Christianity (1782) and his History of Early Opinions Concerning Jesus Christ (1786), were devoted to proving that Socinianism squared with the Gospels.73 Yet he was doomed, he lamented, to pleasing none: ‘The greater part of my philosophical acquaintance ridicule my attachment to Christianity, and yet the generality of Christians will not allow me to belong to them at all.’74 Indeed: the unbeliever Gibbon told him to stick to ‘those sciences in which real and useful improvements can be made’,75 while, for their part, Christians were ill disposed to embrace a materialist and a determinist who rejected Original Sin, the Trinity and the Atonement. He was ‘one of the most dangerous enemies of Christianity’, judged John Wesley; detesting ‘enthusiasm’, Priestley retaliated in an anonymous Appeal to the Professors of Christianity (1770),76 while the Methodists paraded their Christian love in a hymn:
Stretch out thy hands, thou Triune God:
The Unitarian fiend expel
And chase his doctrine back to Hell.77
Attacks left Priestley quite undaunted, however, as he saw the hand of Providence at work everywhere. ‘Even the persecutors,’ explained The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated (1777), ‘are only giving the precedence to the persecuted, and advancing them to a much higher degree of perfection.’78 The ways of God were thus progressive. On his younger son's early death in 1795, he expressed the belief that he ‘had the foundation of something in his character, on which a good superstructure may be raised hereafter’.79 Even the dead were destined to improve.
Priestley's Leeds years were not wholly given over to the demystification of theology, however. In 1772 he published a history of optics,80 before plunging into chemistry – with a characteristic utilitarian bent, his first chemical publication taught how to substitute artificial soda water for imported spa waters. Addressing the problem of ‘different kinds of air’, or the composition of the atmosphere, his Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air (1774) augmented knowledge of what he called ‘dephlogisticated air’ – today's oxygen, although he never approved the name or the Lavoisierian theory behind it.81 Science won Priestley national fame, and in 1771 Joseph Banks proposed him as ‘scientific observer’ on Cook's second Pacific expedition. But his theological heterodoxy had grown notorious, and the design was scuppered. The next year, however, the Earl of Shelburne made him ‘librarian and literary companion’, a post he held until 1780, when he moved to Birmingham.
Priestley's first philosophical publication appeared in 1774: An Examination of Dr Reid's Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Commonsense, Dr Beattie's Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth, and Dr Oswald's Appeal to Common Sense on Behalf of Religion. Piously aimed as it was at Hume, the thinking of Reid and his fellow Scottish Common Sense philosophers might have won Priestley's imprimatur.82 But he was a loyal disciple of Hartley and, via Hartley, of Locke's ‘way of ideas’, over which the Scots had qualms, spying therein the root of all Humean evil. Reid's Inquiry was but ‘an ingenious piece of sophistry’, Priestley judged, and, turning to the Presbyterian minister and philosopher James Oswald, he found it ‘unaccountable… that such a performance should ever have excited any other sentiments than those of contempt, in any person who had been initiated into the elements of this kind of knowledge by Mr Locke’.83 In replacing Locke's and Hartley's scientific theories of mind with ‘such a number of independent, arbitrary, instinctive principles, that the very enumeration of them is really tiresome’, Common Sense philosophy was, he deemed, obscurantist.84 ‘Common sense’ was in truth but a euphemism for mystification, a roadblock to further inquiry. All their so-called ‘instinctive' truths – belief, for example, in an ‘external world’ – could be derived from experience by means of a single crystal-clear principle: association.
In his edition of Hartley, Priestley proposed that ‘the whole man is made up of some uniform composition, and that the property of perception is the result… of such an organical structure as that of the brain’.85 Such materialism predictably created a furore: ‘In all the newspapers,’ protested Priestley, ‘I was represented as an unbeliever in revelation, and no better than an Atheist.’86 He was resolved, however, to show that that charge was unwarranted, both religiously and philosophically.
Theologically, conceded his Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit (1777), materialism had been deemed at odds with immortality. Man was not, however, ‘naturally’ immortal at all but only so because God had chosen to resurrect him. That was primarily a resurrection of the body – and of the mind only as a result of its being incorporated. Philosophical anti-materialism was based upon discredited conceptions of matter as inert, impenetrable and solid.87 Hence there was no incompatibility between matter and mental powers, but there were sound reasons for rejecting the traditional doctrine of two opposed substances, mind and matter, for dualism (which he identified with Popery) could never explain how the twain could possibly interact.
In 1777 again, in his Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated, Priestley drew heavily on Collins and Hartley to clinch his case against free will.88 It was theologically erroneous, because it precluded Providence; it was metaphysical moonshine, because it made action unintelligible; and it was ethically objectionable, because it left moral choice arbitrary. In such doctrinal tussles, his old comrade Richard Price proved a worthy antagonist, their correspondence (published as A Free Discussion of the Doctrines of Materialism and Philosophical Necessity (1778)) being held up as a model of candour. Price argued that Christianity preached the free will which alone would ground moral responsibility; Priestley rejected it as arbitrary, irrational and counter-Providential: ‘we have no more reason… to conclude that a man can move himself, that is, that he can will without motives, than that a stone can move itself’: God alone had that power.89 For Priestley, terms like base or blameworthy should be scrapped: rather it should be said that individuals had acted from motives good or ill and that social happiness would be increased or diminished by this or that action. Adroit social manipulation of ‘rewards and punishments’ would promote morality and law-abidingness.90
Such ethical utilitarianism also watermarked Priestley's political thinking. He cared little for high politics, disdaining the ‘language of any party’; what concerned him was freedom. But here his experiences as a Dissenter radicalized him, as he became less inclined to accept that liberty could thrive in the prevailing socio-political soil.
Priestley's early Essay on the First Principles of Government (1768) distinguished between two sorts of liberty, civil and political.91 The former consisted in civil liberty, ‘that power over their own actions, which the members of the state reserve to themselves, and which their officers must not infringe’; the latter was ‘the right to magistracy’ – that is, voting and office-holding.92 Of the two, it was civil liberty which was fundamental (the two great freedoms upon which he insisted being religion and education). Questions of political leadership, by contrast, were pragmatic – who was least cor
ruptible by power? ‘The good and happiness of the members, that is, the majority of the members of any state,’ wrote, ‘is the great standard by which everything related to that state must finally be determined’ (on reading this, Bentham ‘cried out, as it were in an inward ecstasy Eureka’).93 Government should no longer intervene in many matters customarily taken for its province, and resistance was sanctioned, if the existing order were destructive of the greatest happiness or of civil liberties. On toleration, Priestley far out-Locked Locke, favouring ‘unbounded liberty in matters of religion’ – ‘full toleration’ for Roman Catholics and atheists no less than Dissenters.94
Up to the 1760s, while defending minorities, however, Priestley was still fairly content with the constitution; and, if disdaining the established Church as an alliance of ‘worldly minded men, for their temporal emolument’, he had not urged its disestablishment. Over the years, however, his pamphlets in defence of Dissenters grew more strident.95 In 1785, in his Reflections on the Present State of Free Inquiry in this Country, he spoke of Dissenters as ‘laying gunpowder, grain by grain, under the old building of error and superstition, which a single spark may hereafter inflame so as to produce an instantaneous explosion’ – hence the nickname ‘Gunpowder Joe’.96