Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World

by Roy Porter

  115 Quoted in O'Higgins, Anthony Collins: The Man and His Works, p. 10.

  116 Swift produced a magnificent parody in Mr Collins' Discourse of Free-thinking (1713), p. 7. ‘The priests tell me,’ he ironized, ‘I am to believe the Bible, but Free-thinking tells me otherwise in many Particulars. The Bible says the Jews were a nation favoured by God; but I who am a Free-thinker say, that cannot be, because the Jews lived in a corner of the earth, and Free-thinking makes it clear that those who live in Corners cannot be Favourites of God.’ ‘Free-thinker’ was a term used by Locke in 1697 to describe Toland. In 1711 there appeared a periodical named the Freethinker.

  117 Quoted in O'Higgins, Anthony Collins: The Man and His Works, pp. 78, 89f.

  118 Collins, A Discourse of the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion; Bury, A History of Freedom of Thought, p. 140; Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, pp. 70f.

  119 Hobbes professed to be a Christian but emptied Christianity of all its traditional meanings, portraying God simply as the source of irresistible power. Belief in the natural immortality of the soul was a relic of ‘Greek demonology’: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1968 [1651]), p. 405.

  120 Charles Blount, Anima Mundi (1679); Harrison, ‘Religion’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment, p. 73; Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, p. 142.

  121 Charles Leslie, A Short and Easy Method with the Deists (1698); Searby, A History of the University of Cambridge, vol. iii, p. 277.

  122 The following depends heavily on Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods, pp. 66f, and Harrison, ‘Religion’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment, pp. 16f.

  123 S. I. Tucker, Enthusiasm (1972). The fourth edition of Locke 's Essay concerning Human Understanding contains an additional chapter entitled ‘Of Enthusiasm’, in which Locke attacks Protestant extremists claiming to have private illuminations from God. These he refuses to dignify with the name of ‘revelation’, calling them ‘the ungrounded fancies of a man's own brain’: Cranston, John Locke: A Biography, p. 277.

  124 John Trenchard, The Natural History of Superstition (1709); Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods, p. 74. Trenchard then went on to collaborate with John Gordon on the Independent Whig (1720), whose essays on politics and religion proved amazingly successful, seeing many re-editions, making its way across the Atlantic and being translated into French by the atheist d'Holbach.

  125 Mandeville too took up this Lucretian idea that religion had originated in fear:

  Primitive man saw an invisible enemy behind every Mischief and every Disaster that happens to him, of which the Cause is not very plain and obvious; excessive Heat and Cold; Wet and Drought, that are offensive; Thunder and Lightning, even when they do no visible Hurt; Noises in the dark, Obscurity itself, and every thing that is frightful and unknown… finding all his Enquiries upon earth in vain, he would lift up his Eyes to the Sky.

  Bernard de Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees (1924 [1714]), vol. ii, pp. 208–12. See Redwood, Reason, Ridicule and Religion, p. 34.

  126 Trenchard, The Natural History of Superstition, pp. 10–11; Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods, p. 75.

  127 Trenchard, The Natural History of Superstition, pp. 12–13.

  128 Trenchard, The Natural History of Superstition, p. 15. See also John Beaumont, An Historical, Physiological and Theological Treatise of Spirits, Apparitions, Witchcrafts and Other Magical Practices (1705).

  129 Trenchard, The Natural History of Superstition, pp. 14–15; Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods, p. 77.

  130 Trenchard, The Natural History of Superstition, p. 19; Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods, p. 78. For the psychopathologization of enthusiasm, see Michael Heyd, ‘Be Sober and Reasonable’ (1995); Hillel Schwartz, Knaves, Fools, Madmen, and ‘That Subtile Effluvium’ (1978), and The French Prophets (1980).

  131 Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1999 [1711]), vol. i, p. 86. Thus, ‘above all other enslaving Vices, and Restrainers of Reason and just Thought, the most evidently ruinous and fatal to the Understanding is that of Superstition, Bigotry, and vulgar Enthusiasm’ (vol. i, p. 153).

  132 Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ‘Letter concerning Enthusiasm’, vol. i, p. i; Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods, p. 79; see also Robert Voitle, The Third Earl of Shaftesbury: 1671–1713 (1984). Shaftesbury stated: ‘Ridicule is the proper antidote to every development of enthusiasm. Instead of breaking the bones of the French charlatans, we had the good sense to make them the subject of a puppet-show at Bartle'my fair’: ‘Letter concerning Enthusiasm’, in Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, vol. i, p. 19. Shaftesbury's teacher, Locke, had added a chapter against enthusiasm in the fourth edition of his Essay.

  Enthusiasm was satirized in Swift's A Tale of a Tub (1975 [1704]).

  133 Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, vol. i, p. 8; Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods, p. 79.

  134 Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1999), vol. i, p. 13.

  135 Robert Kreiser, Miracles, Convulsions and Ecclesiastical Politics in Early Eighteenth-century Paris (1978); Daniel Roche, France in the Enlightenment (1998), p. 373; Stanley Tweyman (ed. and intro.), Hume on Miracles (1996), p. 31.

  136 Conyers Middleton, Free Enquiry into the Miraculous Powers which are Supposed to Have Subsisted in the Christian Church from the Earliest Ages (1749). That is why it was upon reading Middleton that the adolescent Gibbon converted to Catholicism.

  137 Hume had published his Enquiry concerning Human Understanding in 1748 and had high hopes for it, but ‘on my return from Italy, I had the Mortification to find all England in a Ferment on account of Dr Middletons Free Enquiry; while my Performance was entirely overlooked and neglected’; discussed in John Valdimir Price, ‘The Reading of Philosophical Literature’ (1982), p. 171. See Ernest Campbell Mossner, ‘The Religion of David Hume’ (1990).

  138 See David Hume, ‘Of Miracles’, first published in Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understanding (1748), contained in Enquiries concerning the Human Understanding and concerning the Principles of Morals (1966), section X, ‘Of Miracles’, part I, p. 86:

  A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined… It is no miracle that a man, seemingly in good health, should die on a sudden: because such a kind of death, though more unusual than any other, has yet been frequently observed to happen. But it is a miracle, that a dead man should come to life; because that has never been observed in any age or country. There must, therefore, be a uniform experience against every miraculous event, otherwise the event would not merit that appellation. And as a uniform experience amounts to a proof, there is here a direct and full proof, from the nature of the fact, against the existence of any miracle; nor can such a proof be destroyed, or the miracle rendered credible, but by an opposite proof, which is superior.

  See Tweyman (ed. and intro.), Hume on Miracles; James E. Force, ‘Hume and Johnson on Prophecy and Miracles’ (1990); Donald T. Siebert, Johnson and Hume on Miracles’ (1990).

  139 See Hume, ‘Of Miracles’ (1741–2), in Enquiries concerning the Human Understanding and concerning the Principles of Morals, pt 1, p. 86.

  140 Hume, Enquiries concerning the Human Understanding and concerning the Principles of Morals, p. 130.

  141 David Hume, Essays Moral, Political and Literary (1898 [1741–2]).

  142 David Hume, ‘Of Superstition and Enthusiasm’ (1741–2), in Selected Essays (1993), p. 39.

  143 J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History (1985), p. 153; see also John B. Stewart, Opinion and Reform in Hume's Political Philosophy (1992), p. 277.

&
nbsp; 144 David Hume, ‘Natural History of Religion’ (1741–2), in Essays Moral, Political and Literary, vol. ii, p. 363.

  145 David Hume, Hume's Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1947).

  146 Gladys Bryson, Man and Society (1968), p. 230.

  147 See the account of their last meeting in Boswell's journal, 3 March 1777, in Charles M. Weis and Frederick A. Pottle (eds), Boswell in Extremes, 1776–1778 (1971), pp. 11–15, especially p.11: ‘He then said flatly that the Morality of every Religion was bad, and I really thought, was not jocular when he said that when he heard a man was religious, he concluded he was a rascal, though he had known some instances of very good men being religious’; see A. N. Wilson, God's Funeral (1999), p. 22.

  148 Hume to Boswell, 7 July 1776. Charles M. Weis and Frederick A. Pottle (eds.), Boswell in Extremes, 1776–1778 (1971), p. 11.

  149 David Hume, The Philosophical Works of David Hume (1874–5; repr. 1987), vol. 3, p. 83.

  150 Hume, Essays Moral, Political and Literary, vol. i, p. 54, essay vii.

  151 For Hume, see Berman, A History of Atheism in Britain from Hobbes to Russell, p. 101; Don Locke, A Fantasy of Reason (1980), p. 340; ‘In my forty-fourth year I ceased to regard the name of Atheist with the same complacency I had done for several preceding years.’ In 1818 he began an autobiographical essay ‘Of Religion’, opening with the round declaration ‘I am an unbeliever’. See also Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Necessity of Atheism (1811), and Wilson, God's Funeral. Godwin declared: ‘For my part I had rather be damned with Plato and Lord Bacon, than go to Heaven with Paley and Malthus’: Harold Orel, English Romantic Poets and the Enlightenment (1973), p. 181.

  152 Wilson, God's Funeral.

  153 David Hume, Letters (1932), vol. i, p. 62. See the discussion in Stewart, Opinion and Reform in Hume's Political Philosophy, p. 106.

  154 Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History, pp. 153f. Gibbon drew on Hume's discussion of superstition and enthusiasm.

  155 For Gibbon's mock surprise at the flap his impieties caused, see Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life, p. 159.

  156 Sell, John Locke and the Eighteenth-century Divines, p. 165. The transition from a religious to a political framework of thought in the Enlightenment is well discussed in Michel de Certeau, ‘The Formality of Practices’, in The Writing of History (1988), pp. 149–51; B. W. Young, Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-century England (1998). See also Hans W. Frei: ‘If historical periods may be said to have a single chronological and geographical starting point, modern theology began in England at the turn from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century’: The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, p. 51. Rational Dissenters looked back with gratitude to Locke, above all for his stand on toleration. See Sell, John Locke and the Eighteenth-century Divines, p. 165.

  157 Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life, p. 80.

  158 Richard Polwhele, preface to George Lavington, Enthusiasm (1833), p. cxiv: ‘The mania of Methodism has seized the West of England, and is now spreading at this instant through its remotest parts.’

  159 Jonathan Swift, An Argument to Prove That the Abolishing of Christianity in England… (1717), p.9.

  160 William Blake, ‘Annotations to Dr Thornton's “New Translation of the Lord's Prayer” ’ (1827) in G. Keynes (ed.), Blake: Complete Writings (1969), p. 787.

  6 THE CULTURE OF SCIENCE

  1 And new Philosophy calls all in doubt,

  The Element of fire is quite put out,

  The Sun is lost, and th'earth, and no mans wit

  Can well direct him where to looke for it.

  John Donne, The First Anniversarie (1611), quoted in Victor I. Harris, All Coherence Gone (1966), pp. 20–21.

  2 The concept of a ‘scientific revolution’ remains contested, though whether what happened amounted to a ‘revolution’ does not affect the argument in this chapter: see I. Bernard Cohen, Revolution in Science (1985); H. Floris Cohen, The Scientific Revolution (1994); John Henry, The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science (1997); Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich (eds), The Scientific Revolution in National Context (1992); John A. Schuster, ‘The Scientific Revolution’ (1990). Michael Fores's ‘Science and the “Neolithic Paradox” ’ (1983) attacks the ‘myth’ of the Scientific Revolution; Steven Shapin's The Scientific Revolution (1996) opens provocatively: ‘there was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it’ (p. 1).

  3 The Archangel Raphael's warning to man: John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667), bk VIII, ll. 167–8. See Marjorie Hope Nicolson, The Breaking of the Circle (1960), p. 167, and Science Demands the Muse (1966).

  4 ‘The Battle Royal’ (1694) by William Pittis, reprinted in The Original Works of William King(1776), vol. i, pp. 221–2. The fact that Burnet's cause was taken up by the Deist Charles Blount did not help; Roy Porter, ‘Creation and Credence’ (1979).

  5 Alexander Pope, The Dunciad (1728), bk IV, ll. 453–4, in John Butt (ed.), The Poems of Alexander Pope (1965), pp. 788–9.

  6 Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels (1954 [1726]), p. 165; J. R. R. Christie, ‘Laputa Revisited’ (1989); Douglas Patey, ‘Swift's Satire on “Science” and the Structure of Gulliver's Travels’ (1991); Roslynn D. Haynes, From Faust to Strangelove (1994), p. 44. From the viewpoint of this book it is significant that it was sunbeams that Swift's virtuosi hoped to produce: Gulliver's Travels, ‘A Voyage to Laputa’, pt III, section 5.

  7 Michael Hunter, Science and Society in Restoration England (1981), and Establishing the New Science (1989). The June 1999 issue of the British Journal for the History of Science is devoted to the eighteenth-century Royal Society.

  8 Richard S. Westfall, Science and Religion in Seventeenth-century England (1970); John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion (1991).

  9 ‘Natural philosophy’ was the contemporary term for what would later be modified into ‘science’. The salience of the distinction is stressed in Andrew Cunningham, ‘Getting the Game Right’ (1988).

  10 J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis and D. D. Heath (eds), The Works of Francis Bacon (1857–74), vol. iv, p. 57.

  11 For Bacon's image and influence, see Charles Webster, The Great Instauration (1975); R. F. Jones, Ancients and Moderns (1936).

  12 P. B. Wood, ‘Methodology and Apologetics’ (1980); Peter Dear, ‘Totius in Verba’ (1985).

  13 For biography, see R. S. Westfall, Never at Rest (1980); Frank E. Manuel, A Portrait of Isaac Newton (1968).

  14 Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, The Janus Face of Genius (1991).

  15 Frank F. Manuel, Isaac Newton, Historian (1963), and The Religion of Isaac Newton (1974).

  16 Isaac Newton, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1962 [1687]).

  17 Norman Hampson, The Enlightenment (1968), p. 34; Manuel, Isaac Newton, Historian.

  18 A. Rupert Hall, Philosophers at War (1980).

  19 Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs and Margaret C. Jacob, Newton and the Culture of Newtonianism (1995); Simon Schaffer, ‘Newtonianism’ (1990); Marie Boas Hall, Promoting Experimental Learning (1991). For their Cambridge roots, see Peter Searby, A History of the University of Cambridge (1977), vol. iii, pp. 150f. For Desaguliers, see Margaret C. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment (1981), p. 124.

  20 Steven Shapin, ‘The Social Uses of Science’ (1980); Gerald Dennis Meyer, The Scientific Lady in England, 1650–1760 (1955).

  21 Searby, A History of the University of Cambridge, vol. iii, p. 150; James A. Force, William Whiston: Honest Newtonian (1985).

  22 Newton surpassed conquerors like Alexander the Great: F. M. Voltaire, Letters concerning the English Nation (1926 [1733]), p. 65.

  23 Henry Guerlac, Newton on the Continent (1981); A. Ruper Hall, ‘Newton in France’ (1975).

  24 Henry Guerlac, ‘Where the Statue Stood (1977).

  25 James Thomson, ‘Summer’, ll. 1545–8, in James Thomson, Works (1744), vol. i, p. 141; Richard Yeo, ‘Genius, Method and Mortality’ (1988); Gerd Buchdahl, The Image of Newton and Locke in the Age of Reason (1961); Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Newton D
emands the Muse (1946).

  26 William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1970 (text of 1805)), p. 35. In his early years Coleridge too was an ardent Newtonian:

  There, Priest of Nature! dost thou shine,

  NEWTON! a King among the Kings divine.

  Quoted in Ian Wylie, Young Coleridge and the Philosophers of Nature (1989), pp. 32–3.

  27 Even Blake could be ambiguous: Donald D. Ault, Visionary Physics (1974).

  28 C. B. Wilde, ‘Hutchinsonians, Natural Philosophy and Religious Controversy in Eighteenth-century Britain’ (1980).

  29 Schaffer, ‘Newtonianism’.

  30 Newton, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, ‘General Scholium’, vol. ii, p. 547.

  31 Such images were for public consumption – in person, Newton was an imperious egoist: see Manuel, A Portrait of Isaac Newton. Science presented itself as harmonious, but in truth there were endless priority and property disputes: see R. Iliffe, ‘ “In the Warehouse” ’ (1992).