Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World

by Roy Porter

  In many respects Godwin was a dogmatic rationalist, but he was certainly not oblivious to complexity. In his novel Things as They Are, or the Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), he continued to expose corruption in precisely the manner commended by the Enquiry: England has its Bastilles; the workings of the law betrayed its trumpeted impartiality; between the mighty and the weak justice did not apply; brutal squires suborned the law to tyrannize their inferiors; due legal process did not touch the noble murderer Falkland whereas it hounded innocents like Caleb. But Caleb Williams also explores problems arising from the principles of Political Justice, though not chewed over there. Apprised of Falkland's fatal secret – he has murdered the brutal Tyrrel – Caleb is beset by threats pressing him to conceal it. In the revised ending to the novel, where the hero's final revelation of the truth leaves Falkland a broken man, Godwin in effect questions the philosophy expounded in the Enquiry: that inexorable pursuit of truth and justice which makes no concessions to humanity. The Enquiry's conviction that ‘truth is omnipotent’ is revealed to be questionable when its quest traps Caleb in the destructive power nexus he has sought to escape. The catastrophe is framed by Falkland's question: ‘Will a reasonable man sacrifice to barren truth, when benevolence, humanity and every consideration that is dear to the human heart require that it should be superseded?’74

  In assailing cant, in cutting the cackle, in envisaging a total transformation of conduct on the basis of private reason, Godwin drove enlightened logic further than any, even Bentham. His very extremism – especially his chillingly Houyhnhnm-like model of a rational, passion-free man – was a gift to the satirists. Godwin clones prate their way through the comic novels of the day – Mr Subtile in Isaac D'Israeli's Vaurien (1797), Dr Myope in Elizabeth Hamilton's thematic Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800).75 ‘His folly in thus eternally making himself a mark for abuse is inconceivable,’ guffawed Southey: ‘Come kick me – is his eternal language.’76 Nevertheless, among reforming circles Godwin proved vastly influential, honoured as the man who drove enlightened thinking to its logical conclusions.

  Godwin was not alone in advocating the abolition of power in the name of justice. The 1790s produced a crop of utopians, including William Hodgson, whose The Commonwealth of Reason (1795) pitted reason against corruption, and came out with ringing vindications of liberty (‘the power of doing every thing… which does not trench upon the rights of another’).77 Particularly impressive, however, was Thomas Spence.

  One of nineteen children of a Newcastle artisan, Spence was brought up as a member of the Sandemanians, a religious sect believing in community of goods among church members: as with Godwin and so many others, his later thinking was a rationalization of early religious views. Following an attempt in the 1770s by the Newcastle Corporation to enclose and appropriate the Town Moor, Spence harangued the local Philosophical Society on the parochial ownership of land. To propagate his radical ideas, in 1792 he moved to London, set up shop ‘At the Hive of Liberty’ off High Holborn and reissued his land reform proposals as ‘The Real Rights of Man’ in his The Meridian Sun of Liberty (1796).78 He also issued a penny weekly called Pig's Meat, or Lessons for the Swinish Multitude – an ‘up yours’ to Burke, which contained selections from Harrington, Locke, Voltaire and others from the Enlightenment pantheon.79

  Land nationalization was Spence's cure-all. Land in ‘Spenceonia’ would be vested in corporate ownership, and held on parochial leases. A parish council would govern the community, running schools, trades and the militia. Communal ownership was a birth-right: ‘That property in land and liberty among men in a state of nature ought to be equal, few, one would be fain to hope, would be foolish to deny.’80

  Spence's politics thus stood Harrington on his head. In Oceana, land had secured independence; for Spence, by contrast, landownership was the tool of aristocratic oppression. His The Restorer of Society to its Natural State (1807) argued that, far from being divinely ordained by the great Landowner in the Sky, property originated in naked aggression. Land, the people's birthright, had become a field of blood, for anybody with money could cheat the people of their due.81

  As with land, with language too, Spence was a leveller. His Grand Repository of the English Language (1775) proposed a revised alphabet based on the impeccably egalitarian principle of one letter, one sound. Spelling had deviated from the spoken word so drastically that written language had been turned into the ‘property of the few’, to remedy which Spence created new signs. His book formed part of the enlightened drive to demystify language by exposure of its roots and by simplification.82

  The prime language reformer in this mould was, however, Horne Tooke, indicted in 1794 for ‘compassing and imagining the king's death’. Elaborating in his The Diversions of Purley (1786) an etymological theory all his own, the bold political radical revealed how language had become suborned in the power politics of ‘metaphysical Imposture’.83 His ‘philosophy of signs’ traced individual words back to their Anglo-Saxon roots, presenting a narrative of the English tongue which buttressed the ‘Norman Yoke’ theory of state power. Defying the orthodoxies of the grammarians, Tooke served up a drastically simplified account of the parts of speech and the meaning of individual words, combating philological élitism (‘imposture’) of all kinds, be it that of the Tory dictionary-maker Samuel Johnson, the idealist metaphysician Lord Monboddo, or the courtly James Harris, whose Hermes, or a Philosophical Inquiry concerning Universal Grammar (1751) had treated hierarchical language structures as the reflections of natural and social hierarchies. Like the Burkean myth of history, Harris's theory was, in Tooke's eyes, an ideological ruse, designed to confer legitimacy upon the present order. Philology must untangle the mystification of power woven by words.84

  The radical doctor Thomas Beddoes equally pointed to ‘the long delusions which words have supported, the deadly animosities, public and private, to which they have given rise’.85 Likewise Charles Pigott, whose Political Dictionary, Explaining the True Meaning of Words (1795) also unmasked official signs as tools of oppression. What, for instance, were bank notes but ‘small slips of thin, silky paper, on which are engraved strong and forcible arguments in favour of arbitrary power’? Another likeminded demystifier, William Frend, also exposed paper money as a medium of idolatry, fearing that ‘money-craft’ would ‘become as dangerous as priest-craft’.86 Locke's radical suspicion of words was alive and well.

  Land reform also found expression in the communitarian schemes of the young Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey for setting up a ‘pantisocracy’ in America, that land of radical dreams:87

  Where dawns, with hope serene, a brighter day

  Than e'er saw Albion in her happiest times.88

  Fired by Revolutionary fervour and hounded by creditors, Coleridge had quit Cambridge University in 1793, gravitating to the company of young radicals in Bristol, notably Southey, and throwing himself into poetry, preaching and pamphleteering. The friends projected a utopian community on the banks of the Susquehanna river, Pennsylvania, untainted by the Old World.89 Twelve men and twelve women, ‘familiar with each other's dispositions’, were to set sail for America. Two or three hours’ labour a day would suffice, and the ample leisure would be spent in study, discussion and childrearing. ‘Could they realize their plan,’ wrote Thomas Poole, a friend with his feet upon the ground, ‘they would, indeed, realize the age of reason; but however perfectible human nature may be, I fear it is not yet perfect enough to exist long under the regulations of such a system.’90

  Though their plans, predictably, fell through, young Coleridge, on angelic wings, remained a beacon of enlightenment: his Watchman (1796), with its Baconian masthead ‘Knowledge is Power’, declared, ‘A People are Free in Proportion as They Form Their Own Opinions’.91 Having made ‘a diligent, I may say, an intense study of Locke, Hartley and others’,92 he had espoused a creed of Unitarianism, determinism, materialism and progress,93 enthusing to Southey about the ‘corporeality of thou
ght’.94 Radical intellectuals like Godwin, Darwin and Priestley had paved the way;95 moral improvement would be gradual but inevitable; and society, guided by a ‘small but glorious band… of thinking and disinterested Patriots’, was to reparadise the world.96 Coleridge's Religious Musings (1794) presented ‘a Vision’ of human destiny, moving to a ‘blest future’, viz: ‘The present State of Society. The French Revolution, Millennium. Universal Redemption. Conclusion’ – there it was, all history in a nutshell.97 If English Romanticism was, in large measure, to be the creation of Coleridge's circle, it was thus a child of the Enlightenment, albeit one that repudiated its paternity.

  For Coleridge's views changed. ‘I have snapped my squeaking baby-trumpet of Sedition,’ he announced in 1798, ‘& the fragments lie scattered in the lumber-room of Penitence.’98 Tellingly, having named his first son Hartley, Coleridge christened his second Berkeley, to signal his switch from materialism to idealism. He had ‘overthrown the doctrine of Association, as taught by Hartley’, he wrote to Poole in 1801, ‘and with it all the irreligious metaphysics of modern Infidels – especially, the doctrine of Necessity’.99

  Becoming increasingly, like Southey, a Church and King reactionary, Coleridge abandoned enlightened empiricism for German idealism and transcendentalism. Looking back to earlier religious traditions, and sideways to Kantian metaphysics, he trashed Locke in favour of a theory of mind which forefronted its innate activity; developed a doctrine of the organic ‘imagination’, over and against what he disparaged as the old passive and mechanical faculty of ‘fancy’; and contended that man was naturally religious. Regarding exploded empiricism as a sorry chapter in ‘the long and ominous eclipse of philosophy’,100 he would rescue and revive the (neo-) Platonism discarded by the Lockeans.

  Coleridge's animus grew ever more blazing. ‘Newton was a mere materialist,’ he wrote in 1801. ‘Mind, in his system, is always passive, – a lazy Looker-on on an external world.’101 Hence the bitterness of Coleridge's later years, when he surveyed the aftermath of enlightened philosophy:

  State of nature, or the Ourang Outang theology of the origin of the human race, substituted for the Book of Genesis, Ch. I–X. Rights of nature for the duties and privileges of citizens. Idea-less facts, misnamed proofs from history, grounds of experience, etc., substituted for principles and the insight derived from them… Government by journeymen clubs; by reviews, magazines, and above all by newspapers.102

  No wonder Peacock guyed this oracle: ‘there is too much commonplace light in our moral and political literature,’ pronounced Mr Flosky in Nightmare Abbey, paraphrasing Coleridge's Lay Sermons (1817), ‘and light is a great enemy to mystery.’103

  That the Romantic rejection of enlightenment did not automatically spell political conservatiatism,104 however, is clear from the career of William Blake. A prophet of liberty, the London artist-poet's roots lay in the seventeenth-century antinomian sects, doused in a later spiritualism.105 His early An Island in the Moon (c. 1784–5) lampooned Priestley as ‘Inflammable Gass’, whose challenge to the other philosophers – ‘Your reason – Your reason?’ – Blake turned into his name, Urizen, for the idol of abhorred materialism.106

  For Blake the Behmenist spiritualist, enlightenment's sin lay in its materialism, which denied alike the glory of God and the miracle of man. Materialism stemmed from the vile trinity of Bacon, Locke and Newton. ‘Bacon's Philosophy has Ruin'd England,’ he bewailed: ‘his first principle is Unbelief’;107 the ‘Loom of Locke’, with its denial of spiritual genius, was hardly less evil.108 The monochrome materialism of enlightened philosophy mirrored the sordid realities of capitalist oppression: industrialism, poverty, slavery, prostitution, war.109 And rationalism itself was, finally, a profanation of divine mystery:

  Mock on, Mock on Voltaire, Rousseau:

  Mock on, Mock on: 'tis all in vain!

  You throw the sand against the wind,

  And the wind blows it back again.110

  Enlighteners bent on demystification held that the sleep of reason bred monsters. Blake, however, regarded reason itself as the sick man's dream, begetting ‘mind forg'd manacles’. He, by contrast, was divinely inspired:111 ‘every honest man is a prophet,’ he declared, recuperating the discredited idea of divine madness112 and remaining ever a ‘son of Liberty’,113 all in a rage against an evil Establishment worshipping that diabolical trinity:

  ... May God us keep

  From Single vision & Newton's sleep!114

  Counter-enlightenment was as old as enlightenment itself: Swift's misanthropic impersonations of gung-ho buttonholing rationalizers, Johnson's sombre realism, those like William Law who held rational religion no religion at all, and perhaps that wing of Scottish Common Sense philosophy which hounded David Hume.115 The 1790s saw such thinking set upon a more coherent footing, with a reassertion of the frailty or depravity of human nature.

  Reaction became philosophized on 1 November 1790, with Burke's Reflections. ‘We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason,’ he declared, ‘because we suspect that this stock in each man is small… Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency… Prejudice renders a man's duty his habit.’116 Mobilizing corporate traditionalism against atomistic individualism, Burke pulled the rug out from under enlightened faith in permanent progress. ‘We know that we have made no discoveries,’ he insisted, ‘and we think that no discoveries are to be made, in morality; nor many in the great principles of government, nor in the ideas of liberty, which were understood before we were born’.117

  Moreover, the seasoned Whig bared the dark secret of revolutionary fervour: new enlightenment was but old illumination writ large, the Revolution enthusiasm resurrected – but, this time, enthusiasm without religion. The radical cause was thereby tarred by Burke with the brush of such cranky cults as mesmerism. Prophets like Price who proclaimed the millennium, and rationalist metaphysicians who touted a do-it-yourself State – all provided sitting targets: there was nothing to choose, Burke implied, between sophisters and the mindless mob.118

  Another who linked British radicalism to the French Revolution, and the philosophes to rank illuminism, was the Edinburgh professor John Robison, author of Proofs of a Conspiracy against All the Religions and Governments of Europe (1798), who urged the Moderns to abandon the ‘bloodstained road’: ‘Illumination,’ he pronounced, ‘turns out to be worse than darkness.’119 Most reactionaries, however, were more homespun. The lawyer John Reeves issued in November 1792 the prospectus of an association ‘for protecting Liberty and Property against republicans and levellers’. Believing liberty's fate hung on the defence of property, Reeves dubbed the Radicals ‘levellers’.120 Others too harped on this potent fear, hitherto deployed by enlightened activists against religious enthusiasts. ‘The true Christian will never be a leveller,’ insisted Arthur Young, ‘will never listen to French politics, or to French philosophy.’121

  The lunacy seemingly pumping up enlightened ideas was meat and drink to the Anti-Jacobin Review, which rejoiced in Gillrayan caricatures of sans culotte crackpots:

  I am a hearty Jacobin,

  Who owns no God, and dreads no Sin,

  Ready to dash through thick and thin

  For Freedom…122

  and reduced the agenda of enlightenment to Dunciad-like twaddle:

  Reason, Philosophy, ‘fiddledum, diddledum’

  Peace and Fraternity, higgledy, piggledy

  Higgledy piggledy, ‘fiddledy, diddledum’.123

  A print in the magazine for August 1798 shows the apostles of reason turned devout, worshipping at the altar of ‘The New Morality’: Godwin, a jackass, braying aloud from Political Justice: Paine, a crocodile, in stays; Holcroft, an ‘acquitted felon’, in leg irons; while from a ‘Cornucopia of Ignorance’ pour the Wrongs of Woman and Godwin's Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft.124 Significantly, the Review pinpointed the root of all modern evils: ‘We have long considered the establishment of newspapers in this country as a misfortu
ne to be regretted.’125 Yet, by its mere existence, the Anti-Jacobin tacitly embraced the same philosophy – print power; indeed, it shared the masthead beloved of the radicals: Magna est Veritas et Praevalebit (‘Great is Truth and will Prevail’).126

  In ‘The Loves of the Triangles’, a skit on Erasmus Darwin's The Loves of the Plants (1789), the Anti-Jacobin parodied Godwinian perfectibilist pretensions:

  We contend, that if, as is demonstrable, we have risen from a level with the cabbages of the field to our present comparatively intelligent and dignified state of existence, by the mere exertion of our own energies; we should, if these energies were not repressed and subdued by the operation of prejudice, and folly, by KING-CRAFT and PRIEST-CRAFT… continue to exert and expand ourselves: [raising] Man from his present biped state, to a rank more worthy of his endowments and aspirations; to a rank in which he would be, as it were, all MIND… and never die, but by his own consent.127

  Other satires chortled at similar rationalist tripe. In her Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796), Elizabeth Hamilton presented philosophers with names like Mr Vapour and characterized by quirks like vegetarianism, solemnly training young sparrows to swarm bees.128 Her later Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800) burlesqued Mary Hays in the guise of Bridgetina Botherim, planning to settle in primal felicity among the Hottentots. Two progressive cults – the noble savage and perfectibilism – were killed with one stone when Mr Glib – Godwin again! – met the dumpy Bridgetina returning from a walk:

  ‘How d'ye do, citizen Miss?’ cried he, as soon as he observed her. ‘Exerting your energies, I see. That's it! energies do all. Make your legs grow long in a twinkling… No short legs in an enlightened society. All the Hottentots tall and straight as maypoles.129