Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World

by Roy Porter

  Probing the functions of the mind, Darwin addressed the links between volition and habit. Frequent repetition of an action built up patterns of behaviour; once habits were established, subsequent performance demanded less conscious play of mind. The tyro at the piano thus had to give all his concentration, whereas the expert pianist could attend to other things as well. Habit did not supersede volition, it merely pitched it on to a higher plane, better adapted to the complex needs of beings simultaneously performing a multiplicity of actions.73

  The power of the will to advance from isolated acts to behaviour patterns supplied a comprehensive model for the understanding of change. Animals – humans included – were not born inherently endowed with a repertoire of dispositions, capacities, propensities and skills. Schooled in Locke, Darwin rubbished innate ideas and their Scottish Common Sense variant. Rather, he noted, on the repetition of particular actions, habits formed,74 which, undergoing modification over time, tailored behaviour to environmental pressures, opportunities and niches. The sanctions of the senses – pleasures and pains – enabled organisms to learn and, through learning, to progress. Sense responses translated, via habit, into the volition which gave all creatures the capacity to change and be progressive.75

  What enabled such adaptive behaviour to assume truly complex forms, especially in humans, was a further power of the organism: association.76 This associative capacity – Darwin had in mind the classic conception of the association of ideas as spelt out by Locke, Hartley and Hume – was like gravitational attraction,77 and it was the key to the exceptionally subtle interactivity of organic behaviour as a whole. For Darwin, the expression of emotion – anger, fear, laughter – comprised the learnt product of chains of responses, transmitted from parents to offspring, over the generations, by the power of imitation.

  Association was crucial to Darwin's concept of progress, and thus to his evolutionism. Through that mechanism, behaviour attained ever more complex expression, generating, for instance, the sense of beauty and feelings of sympathy which created mutual affection among mankind and other sociable animals. Through imagination the brain became the storehouse of experience.78 And the imagination in turn played a crucial role in reproduction.

  Controversy had long raged over the mechanics of generation and heredity. Darwin repudiated the ‘preformationist’ theory, popular among the early mechanical philosophers, that foetal growth amounted to little more than the mechanistic enlargement of microscopic parts ‘given’ from the beginning: offspring did not remain carbon copies down the generations, he retorted.79 Most importantly he was convinced that the mind had a part to play in hereditary transmission to the offspring. Views of that kind were not uncommon, for folklore and certain medical theorists alike credited to the mother's imagination the power to impress its contents upon the embryo at conception – ‘monstrous’ births had been explained in that way.80 That view was rejected by Darwin, but he did propose an analogous (and equally sexist) doctrine, the idea that it was the male imagination which impressed itself upon the conceptus.81 A mechanism was thus provided whereby ‘improvements’, the products of experience, could be passed on to offspring: as with his contemporary Lamarck, Erasmus Darwin's evolutionary theory built in the idea of the inheritance of acquired characteristics.

  Darwin held sexual reproduction optimal for the future of a species: simpler, pre-sexual forms of reproduction – for example, that of plant bulbs – led to deterioration over the generations.82 In any case, sexual coupling provided the opportunity for ‘joy’, and it carried a further advantage: by supplying the means whereby the ‘ideas’ of the mind or imagination could be conveyed to the next generation, sexual breeding could be evolutionarily progressive, the adaptations of one generation being passed down to the next.83

  Analysis of living beings showed that life contained the capacity for repeated, continued, gradual modifications ‘in part produced by their own exertions in consequence of their desires and aversions, of their pleasures and their pains, or of irritations, or of associations; and many of these acquired forms or propensities are transmitted to their posterity’.84 Hence the argument for evolution was predicated upon, and clinched by, the general animation of life, leading Darwin to hail the evolutionary process as a whole:

  would it be too bold to imagine that… all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament, which The Great First Cause endued with animality, with the power of acquiring new parts, attended with new propensities, directed by irritations, sensations, volitions, and associations; and thus possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down those improvements by generation to its posterity, world without end?85

  As a radical alternative to Genesis, evolution was first established in largely biomedical terms in Darwin's Zoonomia. Its human and social implications were further spelt out in his didactic poem The Temple of Nature, posthumously published in 1803. A sublime panorama of change was there unfolded, from the coagulation of nebulae up to modern society, from mushrooms to monarchs. Irritation was the initial trigger of the life forces, unlocking the potentialities of animated powers, leading to the awakening of feelings:

  Next the long nerves unite their silver train,

  And young SENSATION permeates the brain;

  Through each new sense the keen emotions dart,

  Flush the young cheek, and swell the throbbing heart.86

  Sensation in turn quickened the perceptions of pleasure and pain and triggered volition:

  From pain and pleasure quick VOLITIONS rise,

  Lift the strong arm, or point the inquiring eyes.87

  These then produced association and the awakening of mind:

  Last in thick swarms ASSOCIATIONS spring,

  Thoughts join to thoughts, to motions motions cling;

  Whence in long trains of catenation flow

  Imagined joy, and voluntary woe.88

  And with the association of ideas came habit, imitation, imagination and the higher mental powers, which in their turn generated language, the arts and sciences, the love of beauty and the moral and social powers engendered by sympathy. Through such evolutionary processes man had become the lord of creation – his preeminence did not stem from a divine mission or from any innate Cartesian endowments, but because of basic physical facts: highly sensitive hands, for instance, had permitted the development of superior powers of volition and understanding.89

  ‘All nature exists in a state of perpetual improvement’, and so life possessed the potential for unlimited improvement.90 The endless mutual competition of burgeoning organic forms within the terraqueous globe also resulted in death, destruction and even extinction:

  From Hunger's arm the shafts of Death are hurl'd,

  And one great Slaughter-house the warring world!91

  Nevertheless, rather as for Adam Smith, in Darwin's view the law of competition brought about net improvement, and the aggregate rise of population spelt not Malthusian misery but an augmentation of happiness on a cosmic felicific calculus:

  Shout round the globe, how Reproduction strives

  With vanquish'd Death – and Happiness survives;

  How Life increasing peoples every clime,

  And young renascent Nature conquers Time.92

  Darwin's evolutionism provided the British Enlightenment's most sublime theory of boundless improvement.93

  Contrast the epic of human progress, implicit or explicit in most late Enlightenment opinion and given tangible form by Darwin, to such earlier visions as Paradise Lost and the Essay on Man. For Milton, what was fundamental was the relationship between God and man – Adam's offence lay in his violation of God's command – and man's destiny was couched in a transcendental revelation. Pope for his part presented a view of the human condition as fixed on a divinely ordained scale:

  Plac'd on this isthmus of a middle state,

  A being darkly wise, and rudely great…94

  With a static ‘Chain of B
eing’ in mind,95 Pope viewed beings as suspended between the divine and the animal, a predicament at once laughable and lamentable,

  Created half to rise, and half to fall;

  Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all.96

  Darwin, by contrast, painted a wholly optimistic, naturalistic and this-worldly picture, grounded on evolution. Human capacities were the products of biological and physiological development which extended to ‘the progress of the Mind’.97 Not only was there no Miltonic Lucifer and Fall, neither was there any Popean conflict countenanced between mind and body, man and Nature. Viewing humanity from Nature's perspective, not God's, Darwin granted a far more elevated position to mankind: man alone had consciousness of the natural order. Whereas Pope scorned pride as hubristic, for Darwin, as for Hume before him, pride and its triumphs had their legitimate basis in Nature. The mankind Pope satirized, Darwin celebrated.

  Darwin's vision of evolution had potent ideological implications. His writings amount to an early and full vindication of industrial society, rationalized through a social biology.98 In his naturalistic theodicy, struggle, sexual selection and competition were presented as part of the natural order. Yet no less prominent in his vision were love, sympathy and co-operation – his poems and letters give abundant testimony to his enduring hatred of violence, cruelty, war and empire.99 Nor was his a merely mechanical view of man; indeed, he was concerned to rescue man from the aspersion of being nothing other than a machine. He stressed man's inner energies and drives, both the capacity and the need to learn, the inventiveness and adaptiveness of homo faber, the man who makes himself. Darwin offered a vision of man for the machine age, but not of man the machine.

  Progress proved the ultimate Enlightenment gospel. It kindled optimism and pointed to a programme: the promise of a better future would expose and highlight whatever remained wrong in the present. It was a vision of hope, a doctrine of change. If Paradise Lost told mankind's tale in terms of disobedience, sin and punishment – and perhaps redemption – so as to justify the ways of God to man; and if the Essay on Man offered an enigmatic view of man as a riddle, even if in principle at least capable of improvement through self-knowledge, Darwin and his peers presented a man-centred view of man making himself – a Promethean vision of infinite possibilities. God had become a distant cause of causes; what counted was man acting in Nature. The theodicy, the master narrative, had become secularized.100

  20

  THE REVOLUTIONARY ERA:

  ‘MODERN PHILOSOPHY’

  The Voluntary Actions of Men Originate in their Opinions.

  WILLIAM GODWIN1

  [S]uch is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing. The sun needs no inscription to distinguish him from darkness.

  THOMAS PAINE2

  The English national memory gloried in the Glorious Revolution. Recording centennial junketings in Norwich, the Norfolk Chronicle reported on 1 November 1788:

  The Revolution is undoubtedly the most illustrious and happy aera in the British annals… Hence Britain has been… the grand bulwark of the liberties of Europe and of the Protestant religion. Hence agriculture, manufactures and commerce have risen to a height which has surprisingly increased the wealth of the community. Hence science, polite literature and the arts of social life have been improved in a manner that… cannot be equalled in any part of universal history.3

  Over a hundred gentlemen had supped at the city centre tavern the Maid's Head with a Dissenter in the chair. ‘The immortal memory of King William’ produced three cheers; ‘The Bishop of the Diocese’ was feted, as were ‘the Lord Lieutenant’ and ‘the City Members’. There were more radical toasts too: ‘the Majesty of the People’ and ‘freedom to slaves’. Nearer home, the diners had a whipround for the miserable debtors languishing in the city's gaols.4 The event captures the true flavour of the English Enlightenment, progressive but not incendiary, broad church and confident enough to include toasts to prelates and people alike, to embrace Anglicans and Dissenters, and to extend sympathy to unfortunates. Such relaxed, tolerant optimism did not long survive the outbreak of the French Revolution.

  Initially, John Bull applauded the storming of the Bastille. ‘How much the greatest event that has ever happened in the world,’ proclaimed the Whig leader Charles James Fox; it was ‘the dawn of universal liberty’, cheered Erasmus Darwin, while his crony Josiah Wedgwood ‘rejoiced’ in the ‘glorious revolution’ – a telling phrase.5 For a while the atmosphere was festive, with much gadding around wearing bonnets rouges and salutations as ‘citoyen’ (comparable with the reaction in Europe to the destruction of the Berlin Wall two centuries later). Wordsworth's

  I see, I see! glad Liberty succeed

  With every patriot virtue in her train!6

  caught the mood. To share in the exhilaration, young William crossed the Channel in 1790, landing just before the anniversary of ‘that great federal day’, 14 July. Writing later in the Prelude (although by then the salad days radical had changed his tune) he recalled:

  Europe at that time was thrilled with joy,

  France standing on the top of golden hours,

  And human nature seeming born again.7

  Dancing around the bonfire of the ancien régime was easy, but the Revolution also had to be understood within the great pageant of history. This was what was in his mind when, on 4 November 1789, Richard Price rose to deliver an address to commemorate the Glorious Revolution.8 That had gone down in British political wisdom as a conservative event: James II, insisted constitutionalists, had in reality ‘abdicated’ and the great chain of legality had never been snapped. Daringly, the reverend doctor, taking it upon himself to link it with current events in France, challenged such a reading of 1688. What Britain had begun, France was completing: now the tocsin had sounded for the rights of the people. Hence his peroration had a truly radical ring. ‘Tremble all ye oppressors of the world!’ thundered the frail old Dissenter:

  What an eventful period is this! I am thankful that I have lived to it; and I could almost say, Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation. I have lived to see a diffusion of knowledge, which has undermined superstition and error – I have lived to see the rights of men better understood than ever; and nations panting for liberty, which seemed to have lost the idea of it. – I have lived to see THIRTY MILLIONS of people, indignant and resolute, spurning at slavery, and demanding liberty with an irresistible voice… After sharing in the benefits of one Revolution, I have been spared to be a witness of two other Revolutions, both glorious.9

  Wagging his finger at the ‘oppressors’, Price warned:

  You cannot now hold the world in darkness. Struggle no longer against increasing light and liberality. Restore to mankind their rights; and consent to the correction of abuses, before they and you are destroyed together.10

  And he challenged his compatriots: if they supported the real principles of 1688 and were true believers in liberty, they must embrace the French Revolution.

  It was Edmund Burke who took up the gauntlet. His Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) never doubted its magnitude: ‘the most astonishing that has hitherto happened in the world’. But the veteran Whig, who had defended the American rebels back in the 1770s and many another liberal cause besides, damned the revolutionaries (‘the ablest architects of ruin’) as ‘cannibal philosophers’ set on destroying an edifice laboriously erected over the centuries: ‘The French have… completely pulled down to the ground their monarchy, their church, their nobility, their law, their revenue, their army, their navy, their commerce, their arts and their manufactures.’ Theirs was a wrecking rage: ‘The age of chivalry is gone,’ wrote Burke, ‘that of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded. The glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.’ Evidently politics should not be reduced to a science.11 Burke never scanted reform – ‘a state without the means of some change is without the means of
its conservation’12 – but, he insisted, change must come gradually and it must be consensual.

  Not even Burke's rhetoric could stem the tide. Political societies sprang up, comprising radical craftsmen and the petty bourgeoisie, headed by journalists, intellectuals and disaffected gentlemen. The clamour was renewed for constitutional reform. ‘Frenchmen, you are already free,’ declared the London Corresponding Society in 1792, ‘but the Britons are preparing to be so.’13 ‘For God's sake, send us the word of enlightenment,’ ran one letter the Society received the next year.14 Demanding parliamentary reform, the Society of Friends of the People, also founded in 1792, deemed Britain not a paradise of liberty but a prison of oligarchy: only one Englishman in eight possessed the franchise, and a numerical majority of MPs were elected by just over 11,000 voters.15

  Many returned Burke's fire – the Reflections drew at least thirty-eight replies, including Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), which reproved his ‘mortal antipathy to reason’.16 But it was above all Tom Paine who pleaded the people's cause against a corrupt Establishment and its hirelings. Attacking a regime first installed by a ‘banditti of ruffians’, the Rights of Man (1791–2) spoke directly to the cobblers, printers, weavers and carpenters who were the soul of urban radicalism and the torchbearers of plebeian enlightenment. Alarmed by Paine – ‘our peasantry,’ whinged T.J. Mathias, ‘now read the Rights of Man on mountains, and moors, and by the way side’17 - in May 1792 Pitt issued a proclamation against ‘seditious writings’. Paine prudently fled, but left his inspiration behind. The title of his The Age of Reason, which appeared the next year and carried the attack to the churches, became the radical catchphrase. Were they prepared to remain the ‘footballs and shuttlecocks of tyrants’? demanded the Nore mutineers of 1797: ‘No. The age of reason has at last revolved.’18