Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World

by Roy Porter

  36 F. M. Voltaire, Letters concerning the English Nation (1926 [1733]), pp. 84f.; see also A. Rupert Hall, ‘Newton in France’ (1975).

  37 See Lisa Jardine, Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse (1974); Charles Webster, The Great Instauration (1975); Barbara J. Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-century England (1983).

  38 See Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (1996); Samuel I. Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan (1962).

  39 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1968 [1651]), pt 1, ch. 4, p. 105.

  40 Hobbes, Leviathan, pt 1, ch. 4, p. 106.

  41 How we came to translate Spirits, by the word Ghosts, which signifieth nothing, neither in heaven, nor earth, but the Imaginary inhabitants of man's brain, I examine not: but this I say, the word Spirit in the text signifieth no such thing; but either properly a real substance, or Metaphorically, some extraordinary ability or affection of the Mind, or of the Body. Hobbes, Leviathan, pt 3, ch. 34, p. 43. See Jeffrey Barnouw, ‘Hobbes's Psychology of Thought’ (1990).

  42 Hobbes, Leviathan (1968 [1651]), pt 1, ch. 11 p. 160; Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan, p. 30.

  43 Hobbes, Leviathan, pt 1, ch. 11, p. 161.

  44 Hobbes, Leviathan, pt 1, ch. 11, p. 161. For secularized Calvinism, see Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (1972), p. 313.

  45 Warren Chernaik, Sexual Freedom in Restoration Literature (1995), p. 27; Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan, p. 23: ‘In Hobbes's hands,’ Mintz observes, ‘nominalism and materialism became the instruments of a powerful scepticism about the real or objective existence of absolutes, and in particular about such absolutes as divine providence, good and evil, and an immortal soul.’

  46 Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 46.

  47 Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan, pp. 50, 61.

  48 David Hume, Essays Moral, Political and Literary (1898 [1741–2]), vol. ii, p. 135. As needs no saying, Enlightenment rhetoric can sound, albeit playfully, as bigoted and intolerant as any.

  49 For the ‘Under-Labourer’, see John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding (1975 [1690]), ‘Epistle to the Reader’, p. 10. Although knowledge was far from absolute, Locke believed, ‘it yet secures their great Concernments, that they have Light enough to lead them to the Knowledge of their Maker, and the sight of their own Duties.’ Locke was deeply interested in the new science and had a large collection of scientific books. See also John C. Biddle, ‘Locke's Critique of Innate Principles and Toland's Deism’ (1990), p. 141. For the limits of reason, see Robert Voitle, ‘The Reason of the English Enlightenment’ (1963).

  50 Generally see Maurice Cranston, John Locke: A Biography (1957); John W. Yolton, John Locke and the Way of Ideas (1956), and Locke: An Introduction (1985); Dunn, Locke; Peter Schouls, Reasoned Freedom (1992) is a good philosophical exposition. On the Essay, Katharine M. Morsberger, John Locke's An Essay concerning Human Understanding’ (1996) is helpful.

  51 Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, bk IV, ch. 3, p. 21; bk I, ch. 3, p. 27.

  52 Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, bk I, ch. 3, para. 12, p. 73. See discussion in Mark Goldie (ed.), Locke: Political Essays (1997), p. xix.

  53 Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, bk III, ch. 10, para. 34, p. 508. He continued that ‘all the Art of Rhetorick’ is ‘for nothing else but to insinuate wrong Ideas, move the Passions, and thereby mislead the Judgement’. Peter Walmsley, ‘Prince Maurice's Rational Parrot’ (1995) brings out Locke's distrust of language, as does Markley, Fallen Languages. The whole of Locke's book III is relevant.

  54 Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, bk II, ch. 10, para. 34, p. 508.

  55 Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, bk III, ch. 10, para. 34, p. 508; see Cranston, John Locke: A Biography, pp. 272f. Sterne's hero remarks: ‘Well might Locke write a chapter upon the imperfections of words’: Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1967 [1759–67]), pp. 354–5.

  56 Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, bk III, ch. 10, para. 31; bk III, ch. 10, para. 9, p. 495. Locke feared a new Babel: bk III, ch. 6, para. 29, p. 456.

  57 Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure, p. 27. The linguistic cleansing here urged was parodied by Swift in a reductio ad absurdum, in which he broached the scheme of the Academy of Lagado ‘for entirely abolishing all Words whatsoever; And this was urged as a great Advantage in Point of Health as well as Brevity… since Words are only Names for Things, it would be more convenient for all Men to carry about them, such Things as were necessary to express the particular Business they are to discourse on’: Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels (1954 [1726]), bk III, pp. 51–85. (Penguin edn, p. 230.) Swift both shared and satirized enlightened critiques of intellectual nonsense: see J. R. R. Christie, ‘Laputa Revisited’ (1989); Deborah Baker Wyrick, Jonathan Swift and the Vested Word (1988); Christopher Fox, Locke and the Scriblerians (1988).

  58 Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, bk IV, ch. 16, para. 14.

  59 Quoted in Alan P. F. Sell, John Locke and the Eighteenth-century Divines (1997), p. 9.

  60 Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, bk IV, ch. 13; bk IV, ch. 18, para. 2.

  61 Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, bk IV, ch. 18, para. 5: ‘Nothing that is contrary to, and inconsistent with the clear and self-evident Dictates of Reason, has a Right to be urged, or assented to, as a matter of Faith, wherein Reason hath nothing to do.’ Failure to acknowledge this had resulted in religions being filled with superstition.

  62 Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, bk IV, ch. 18, para. 2. In the fourth edition, Locke added an attack on enthusiasm: see chapter 5.

  63 Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, bk IV, ch. 17, para. 2.

  64 Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, bk IV, ch. 27, para. 6.

  65 Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, bk IV, ch. 17, para. 15.

  66 Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, bk I, ch. 1, para. 6, p. 46. For Locke and the new science, see G. A.J. Rogers, ‘The Empiricism of Locke and Newton’ (1979), ‘Locke, Anthropology and Models of the Mind’ (1993), ‘Boyle, Locke and Reason’ (1990), and ‘Locke, Newton and the Cambridge Platonists on Innate Ideas’ (1990). For the idea of a tongue scientifically unambiguous and shorn of misleading rhetoric, see W. K. Wimsatt, Philosophic Words (1948).

  67 Biddle, ‘Locke's Critique of Innate Principles and Toland's Deism’; Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (1989), p. 164.

  68 Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, bk II, ch. 1, para. 2, p. 104.

  69 Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, bk II, ch. 11, para. 17, pp. 162–3; Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 167. Early in book I of the Essay concerning Human Understanding, Locke asks: ‘Whence comes it [the mind] by that vast store [of ideas], which the busy and boundless Fancy of Man has painted on it, with an almost endless variety?’ (which was the same as asking, ‘Whence has it all the materials of Reason and Knowledge?’), and replies: ‘To this I answer, in one word, From Experience’ (bk I, ch. 2, para. 1).

  70 Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, bk II, ch. 1, para. 5: Locke's statement – ‘whatsoever the mind perceives in itself, or is the immediate object of perception, thought, or understanding, that I call idea’ – was quoted by Samuel Johnson in his Dictionary sub ‘idea’.

  71 As Berkeley among others argued, in a further attack upon the false thought worlds created by the philosophers. See Barrett, Death of the Soul, p. 35.

  72 Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, bk II, ch. 11, para. 2; bk II, ch. 11, para. 1.

  73 Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, bk II, ch. 11, para. 2; Martin Kallich, The Association of Ideas and Critical Theory in Eighteenth-century England (1970); Ernest Lee Tuveson, The Imagination as a Means of Grace (1960).

  74 Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, bk II, ch. 33.

  75 Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, bk II, ch. 21,
para. 73.

  76 Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, bk II, ch. 23, para. 13.

  77 Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, bk III, ch. 6, para. 9.

  78 Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, bk IV, ch. 3, para. 6.

  79 ‘There is a real justice in seeing the European Enlightenment as Locke's legacy’: Dunn, Locke, p. 21.

  80 E. S. De Beer (ed.), The Correspondence of John Locke (1976–89), letter 1659, vol. iv, p. 727. As late as 1768, Locke's Essay was placed on the Index of Prohibited Books in Portugal.

  81 Yolton, John Locke and the Way of Ideas, p. 88; Sell, John Locke and the Eighteenth-century Divines, p. 29.

  82 For Tindal, see his Rights of the Christian Church Asserted (sn, 1706); and for Swift, see his Bickerstaff Papers (1957 [1708–9]), p. 80, quoted in John Valdimir Price, ‘The Reading of Philosophical Literature’ (1982), p. 167. Locke's idea of personality also came in for satire: Kerby-Miller (ed.), Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works, and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus, 1950.

  83 For Chambers, see under entry for ‘Idea’; William Wollaston, The Religion of Nature Delineated (1724), p. 17, in Yolton, John Locke and the Way of Ideas, p. 69.

  84 William R. Paulson, Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Blind in France (1988), pp. 21–38; Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse (1946), pp. 82–4; see also Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, bk II, ch. 9, para. 8.

  85 William Cheselden, ‘An Account of Some Observations Made by a Young Gentleman’ (1727–8); Richard C. Allen, David Hartley on Human Nature (1999), p. 140. See also G. N. Cantor, ‘The History of “Georgian” Optics’ (1978); Luke Davidson, ‘ “Identities Ascertained” ’ (1996).

  86 Alan Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment (1989), p. 26; Jonathan Rée, I See a Voice (1999), pp. 334–7.

  87 William Warburton, Letters from a Late Eminent Prelate to One of His Friends (1808), p. 207: letter of 3 March 1759. The friend was Richard Hurd.

  88 Bolingbroke, On Human Knowledge, in The Works of Lord Bolingbroke (1969; repr. of 1841edn [1754–77]), vol. v, p. 166. Reason was to Bolingbroke, as to Locke, a candle to light the traveller on a dark night.

  89 Watts, Logick, see Arthur Paul Davis, Isaac Watts: His Life and Works (1948), p. 86.

  90 Isaac Watts, Philosophical Essays on Various Subjects (1733), preface. Locke's writings were ‘sun-beams’: Sell, John Locke and the Eighteenth-century Divines, pp. 36, 163.

  91 Sell, John Locke and the Eighteenth-century Divines, p. 5; J. Yolton, ‘Schoolmen, Logic and Philosophy’ (1986), p. 570.

  92 John Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of the Enlightenment (1989), pp. 7f.; Peter Searby, A History of the University of Cambridge (1997), vol. iii, p. 152.

  93 W. S. Howell, Eighteenth-century British Logic and Rhetoric (1971), pp. 273–4; Anand C. Chitnis, The Scottish Enlightenment (1976), p. 159.

  94 Abraham Tucker, The Light of Nature Pursued (1997 [1768]), vol. i, p. 44. Tucker thematically contrasted the ‘land of philosophy’, which was open country, with the ‘land of metaphysics’, overgrown with thickets (vol. ii, p. 76).

  95 Mary P. Mack, Bentham, An Odyssey of Ideas, 1748–1792, p. 120. Bentham, however, was not naive about language:

  To say that, in discourse, fictitious language ought never, on any occasion, to be employed, would be as much as to say that no discourse in the subject of which the operations, or affections, or other phenomena of the mind are included, ought ever to be held.

  Chrestomathia (1816), quoted in Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary, p. 138.

  96 Addison and Steele, The Spectator, 11 papers, vol. III, nos. 411–42, pp. 535–82. After categorizing the ‘primary’ sources of the imagination's pleasures, chiefly those objects or prospects distinguished by greatness, uncommonness or beauty, Addison then turned to the ‘secondary’ pleasures' of the imagination. See the discussion in Malcolm Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque (1989), pp. 39–40; Tuveson, The Imagination as a Means of Grace. For Locke on abuse of words, see Spectator, no. 373; on personal identity, no. 578. Addison succeeded Locke as Commissioner of Appeals in 1704.

  97 Addison and Steele, The Spectator, vol. III, no. 413, pp. 546–7 (Tuesday, 24 June 1712).

  98 Sir Richard Steele, Joseph Addison and others, the Guardian, vol. I, no. 24, p. 95 (24 June 1712).

  99 Kenneth MacLean, John Locke and English Literature of the Eighteenth Century (1936), p. 1; see also Gerd Buchdahl, The Image of Newton and Locke in the Age of Reason (1961). For Locke as an educationalist, see chapter 15, and for his influence abroad, see John W. Yolton, Locke and French Materialism (1991), and Ross Hutchison, Locke in France (1688–1734) (1991). Robert DeMaria Jr calls Locke Johnson's ‘principal philosopher’: Johnson's Dictionary and the Language of Learning, p. 50.

  100 Covent-Garden Journal no. 30, quoted in MacLean, John Locke and English Literature of the Eighteenth Century, p. 2.

  101 Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1967 [1759–67]), vol. I, ch. 4, p. 39; Judith Hawley, ‘The Anatomy of Tristram Shandy’ (1993); Sterne perhaps had in mind this passage of Locke's Some Thoughts concerning Education: ‘Let not any fearful apprehensions be talked into them, nor terrible objects surprise them. This often so shatters and discomposes the spirits, that they never recover it [sic] again.’ J. L. Axtell, The Educational Writings of John Locke (1968), section 115, p. 221. At a later stage, Tristram felt obliged to come back and explain Locke's Essay:

  I will tell you in three words what the book is. – It is a history. – A history! of who? what? where? when? Don't hurry yourself – It is a history-book, Sir, (which may possibly recommend it to the world) of what passes in a man's own mind.

  Sterne, Tristram Shandy, vol. ii, ch. 2, p. 107.

  102 Mary Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1996 [1796]), p. 23.

  103 Samuel Richardson, Pamela (1883–4 [1740]), vol. iii, p. 330, letter 90. Parents, she recommended, should be careful not to ‘indulge their children in bad habits, and give them their head, at a time when, like wax, their tender minds may be moulded into what shape they please’.

  104 Charles Strachey (ed.), The Letters of the Earl of Chesterfield to His Son (1932), vol. i, p. 292, letter 168.

  105 John Passmore, The Perfectibility of Man (1970), pp. 171–212.

  106 Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 174.

  4 PRINT CULTURE

  1 Alexander Pope, The Dunciad (1728), 1. 1, in John Butt (ed.), The Poems of Alexander Pope (1965), P. 349.

  2 Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), preface.

  3 W.J. Bate, J. M. Bullitt, and L. F. Powell (eds.), Samuel Johnson: The Idler and Adventurer (1963), no. 115, p. 457 (11 December 1753)

  4 George Birkbeck Hill, Boswell's Life of Johnson (1934), vol. iii, p. 293 (16 April 1778).

  5 For censorship on the Continent, see Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (1996), and The Business of Enlightenment (1979). For a metahistory of the impact of the book, see Ernest Gellner, Plough, Sword and Book (1991).

  6 See discussion in Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book (1998), pp. 187f.

  7 This was then repeated in the Salisbury Journal (18 March 1754): C. Y. Ferdinand, Benjamin Collins and the Provincial Newspaper Trade in the Eighteenth Century (1997), p. 155. A degree of theatrical censorship was introduced by the Licensing Act (1737).

  8 James Raven, Naomi Tadmore and Helen Small (eds), The Practice and Representation of Reading in Britain 1500–1900 (1996), pp. 4ff; John Feather, ‘The Power of Print’ (1997), and A History of British Publishing (1988); Marjorie Plant, The English Book Trade (1965).

  9 Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader (1957), p. 49.

  10 James Sutherland, Defoe (1937), p. 68.

  11A. Beljame, Men of Letters and the English Public in the Eighteenth Century, 1660–1744 (1948), p. 309; A. S. Collins, Authorship in the Days of Johnson (1927), p. 21.