Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World

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by Roy Porter


  For Newtonian methodology, rhetoric and the language of science, see J. V. Golinski, ‘Language, Discourse and Science’ (1990); for the rejection of ‘metaphysics’, see Gary Hatfield, ‘Metaphysics and the New Science’ (1990); G. A. J. Rogers, ‘The Empiricism of Locke and Newton (1979), and Locke's Essay and Newton's Principia’ (1990).

  32 Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 863.

  33 ‘I make great doubt,’ insisted Boyle, ‘whether there be not some phenomena in nature which the atomists cannot satisfactorily explain by any figuration, motion or connection of material particles whatsoever’: Robert Boyle, Some Considerations Touching the Usefulnesse of Experimental Natural Philosophy (1663), in Thomas Birch (ed.), The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle (1744), vol. ii, pp. 47f. On Boyle, see Michael Hunter (ed.), Robert Boyle Reconsidered (1994).

  34 Norman Sykes, Church and State in England in the Eighteenth Century (1934), p. 153; John Gascoigne, ‘From Bentley to the Victorians’ (1988); Margaret C. Jacob, ‘Reflections on the Ideological Meaning of Western Science from Boyle and Newton to the Postmodernists’ (1995), and The Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1689–1720 (1976), p. 18, which ‘stresses what previous commentators have ignored – [Newtonianism's] usefulness to the intellectual leaders of the Anglican church as an underpinning for their vision of what they liked to call the “world politick” ’. Coleridge quipped that for rationalists God was the Sunday name for gravitation: R. W. Harris, Romanticism and the Social Order (1969), p. 234.

  35 J. T. Desaguliers, The Newtonian System of the World (1728), ll. 17–18, quoted in Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment, p. 124. There were other ways of putting science to use for the wider purposes of state, notably political arithmetic: see Julian Hoppit, ‘Political Arithmetic in Eighteenth-century England’ (1996); Andrea Rusnock, ‘Biopolitics’ (1999); Peter Buck, ‘People Who Counted’ (1982).

  36 Desaguliers, The Newtonian System of the World, p. 8.

  37 Desaguliers, The Newtonian System of the World, p. 8.

  38 For the fate of one of Newton's disciples, see Force, William Whiston: Honest Newtonian.

  39 Dennis R. Dean, James Hutton and the History of Geology (1992); Roy Porter, ‘Philosophy and Politics of a Geologist’ (1978); Toland's pantheistic view of active matter challenged orthodox Newtonianism: Stephen H. Daniel, John Toland: His Methods, Manners, and Mind (1984), pp. 12f.

  40 William Paley, Natural Theology (1802), ch. 1, ‘State of Argument’. The watch illustration was commonplace – in Bolingbroke, etc. – long before Paley made it his own. He probably adapted it from Abraham Tucker's The Light of Nature Pursued (1768), vol. i, p. 523; vol. ii, p. 83.

  41 Paley, Natural Theology, ch. 1. For the Pope quotation, see An Essay on Man (1733–4), 1. 332, in Butt, The Poems of Alexander Pope, p. 546.

  42 Yes, according to Richard Dawkins's The Blind Watchmaker (1986).

  43 The following discussion examines changing ideas of the very micro stuff of nature (ontology). Chapter 13 explores new theories of the meaning of natural order in the terraqueous globe.

  44 For matter theory, the order of nature and the will of God, see Robert E. Schofield, Mechanism and Materialism (1970); Arnold Thackray, Atoms and Powers (1977); Simon Schaffer, ‘Natural Philosophy’ (1980); P. M. Heimann and J. E. McGuire, ‘Newtonian Forces and Lockean Powers’ (1971); P. M. Heimann, ‘Newtonian Natural Philosophy and the Scientific Revolution’ (1973), ‘ “Nature is a Perpetual Worker” ’ (1973), and ‘Voluntarism and Immanence’ (1978); Peter Harman, Metaphysics and Natural Philosophy (1982).

  45 For materialism on the Continent, see Aram Vartanian, Diderot and Descartes (1953); Thomas L. Hankins, Science and the Enlightenment (1985); for Erasmus Darwin, see chapter 19 below. See also Theodore Brown, ‘From Mechanism to Vitalism in Eighteenth-century English Physiology’ (1974).

  46 Joseph Priestley, Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit (1777), pp. 1–7. Priestley saw himself as completing Newton's empiricism, that is, not feigning fictitious entities: Robert E. Schofield, The Enlightenment of Joseph Priestley (1997), and see below, chapter 18; John W. Yolton, Thinking Matter (1983), pp. 113f.

  47 Robert Greene, The Principles of the Philosophy of the Expansive and Contractive Forces (1727); John Rowning, A Compendious System of Natural Philosophy (1735–42). For non- and anti-Newtonian theories, see C. B. Wilde, ‘Hutchinsonianism, Natural Philosophy and Religious Controversy in Eighteenth-century Britain’ (1980), and ‘Matter and Spirit as Natural Symbols in Eighteenth-century British Natural Philosophy’ (1982).

  48 James Hutton, An Investigation of the Principles of Knowledge, and of the Progress of Reason, from Sense to Science and Philosophy (1794).

  49 James Hutton, Theory of the Earth (1795), vol. i, p. 200.

  50 Schofield, Mechanism and Materialism, p. 263, and see below, chapter 18.

  51 Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate (1987), p.8.

  52 For popularization, see Simon Schaffer, ‘Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle in the Eighteenth Century’ (1983); the essays contained in British Journal for the History of Science, vol. xxviii (March 1995); and Roger Cooter and Stephen Pumfrey, ‘Separate Spheres and Public Places’ (1994).

  53 Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-pump (1985), a book which raises and, via a concrete case study, attempts to resolve the crucial question of how the new science established its truth status, a problem to which Shapin has returned in A Social History of Truth (1994). In this period scientific truth became normative for and definitive of truth in general. See also Larry Stewart, ‘Public Lectures and Private Patronage in Newtonian England’ (1986), ‘The Selling of Newton’ (1986), and Other Centres of Calculation’ (1999).

  54 Margaret C. Jacob, The Cultural Meaning of the Scientific Revolution (1988), p. 142.

  55 Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London (1978), p. 81; Desmond King-Hele, Erasmus Darwin and the Romantic Poets (1986).

  56 Roy Porter, ‘Sex and the Singular Man’ (1984); for other medical showmen see Roy Porter, Health for Sale (1989).

  57 Geoffrey Alan Cranfield, The Development of the Provincial Newspaper 1700–1760 (1962), p. 216. For Jurin, see Andrea Rusnock, The Correspondence of James Jurin (1684–1750) Physician and Secretary of the Royal Society (1996). For itinerant lecturers, see A. E. Musson and Eric Robinson, Science and Technology in the Industrial Revolution (1969); Larry Stewart, The Rise of Public Science (1992), p. 94.

  58 John R. Millburn, Benjamin Martin: Author, Instrument-maker and Country-showman (1976).

  59 Millburn, Benjamin Martin: Author, Instrument-maker and Country-showman, p. 4.

  60 Gerard Turner, ‘Instruments’ (2000); Patricia Fara, Sympathetic Attractions (1996); Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men (1989). For science and women, see Alice N. Walters, ‘Conversation Pieces’ (1997).

  61 On science for children, see James A. Secord, ‘Newton in the Nursery’ (1985). Robert Collison, Encyclopaedias (1964); Frank A. Kafker (ed.), Notable Encyclopedias of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1981). Richard Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions (forthcoming), quotes Charles Lamb's droll confession that he was ‘a whole encyclopaedia behind the rest of the world’. See also above, chapter 4.

  62 Quoted in D. Spadafora, The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-century Britain (1990), p. 326.

  63 Jan Golinski, Science as Public Culture (1992); Stewart, The Rise of Public Science, p. 22. For such projectors, see Margaret R. Hunt, The Middling Sort (1996), pp. 175f.

  64 Benjamin Vaughan, New and Old Principles of Trade Compared (1788), quoted in Nicholas A. Hans, New Trends in Education in the Eighteenth Century (1966), p. 13.

  65 [Thomas Bentley], Letters on the Utility and Policy of Employing Machines to Shorten Labour (1780), quoted in Hans, New Trends in Education in the Eighteenth Century, p. 14.

  66 D. G. C. Allan, William Shipley: Founder of the Royal Society of Arts (1968), p. 112.

  67 Spadafora, The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-century Britain, pp
. 53, 211. In his ‘Navigation, or the Triumph of the Thames’ (1778), the personified nations, summoned by Mercury, god of commerce, discharge their products into the lap of Father Thames. Barry stressed the superiority of the Moderns: James Barry, An Account of a Series of Pictures in the Great Room of the Society of Arts…at the Adelphi (1783), in The Works of James Barry, Esq. (1809), vol. ii, p. 323.

  68 See James Johnston Abraham, Lettsom, His Life, Times, Friends and Descendants (1933); Thomas Joseph Pettigrew, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Late John Coakley Lettsom (1817).

  69 Pettigrew, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Late John Coakley Lettsom, vol. ii, p. 3.

  70 Pettigrew, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Late John Coakley Lettsom, vol. i, p. 21.

  71 Pettigrew, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Late John Coakley Lettsom, vol. i, p. 118.

  72 Pettigrew, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Late John Coakley Lettsom, vol. ii, pp. 129–30.

  73 See John Gascoigne, Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment (1994); H. B. Carter, Joseph Banks 1743–1820 (1988).

  74 Robert Hooke, Micrographia (1665), p. 5.

  75 Hooke, Micrographia, preface, p. 7.

  76 L. Krüger, L. Daston and M. Heidelberger (eds.), The Probabilistic Revolution (1987), pp. 237–60; I. Hacking, The Emergence of Probability (1975), and The Taming of Chance (1990).

  77 Robert Brown, The Nature of Social Laws, Machiavelli to Mill (1984), pp. 58f. See also below, chapter 17.

  78 Adam Smith, Essays on Philosophical Subjects (1980 [1795]), bk II, sect. 12, p. 45. See also Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150–1750 (1998), pp. 326f.

  79 Smith, Essays on Philosophical Subjects, p. 51. ‘As ignorance begot superstition,’ he wrote, ‘science gave birth to the first theism that arose amongst those nations, who were not enlightened by divine Revelation.’ See discussion in D. D. Raphael, ‘Adam Smith: Philosophy, Science, and Social Science’ (1979).

  80 For marginalization, see Patrick Curry, Prophecy and Power (1989); Gloria Flaherty, ‘The Non-Normal Sciences’ (1995).

  81 Ann Geneva, Astrology and the Seventeenth-century Mind (1995).

  82 Curry, Prophecy and Power.

  83 Bernard S. Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press (1979), p. 239; Simon Schaffer, ‘Newton's Comets and the Transformation of Astrology’ (1987).

  84 Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press, pp. 243–5; Curry, Prophecy and Power, p. 90.

  85 Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press, pp. 167–81.

  86 Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch (1973).

  87 George Birkbeck Hill, Boswell's Life of Johnson (1934–50), vol. iii, p. 323.

  88 Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopaedia, 2nd edn (1738 [1728]), vol. ii, unpaginated, ‘Medicine’.

  89 Samuel Wood, Strictures on the Gout (1775), p. 6.

  90 Roy Porter, Doctor of Society (1991).

  91 Thomas Beddoes (ed.), Chemical Experiments and Opinions (1790), p. 60, and A Letter to Erasmus Darwin (1793), p. 29.

  92 Beddoes, A Letter to Erasmus Darwin, p. 58.

  93 Beddoes, A Letter to Erasmus Darwin, p. 62.

  94 Beddoes, A Letter to Erasmus Darwin, p. 62.

  95 John Aikin, Letters from a Father to His Son, 3rd edn (1796 [1792–3]), p. 47.

  96 Joseph Priestley, An Essay on the First Principles of Government (1768), p. 7.

  97 Joseph Priestley, Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air (1774–7), p. xiv; Maurice Crosland, ‘The Image of Science as a Threat’ (1987).

  98 See Kevin C. Knox, ‘Lunatick Visions’ (1999). For the enduring rhetoric of the mad scientist and the irrational rationalist, see Haynes, From Faust to Strangelove.

  7 ANATOMIZING HUMAN NATURE

  1 Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man (1733–4), epistle ii, 11. 1–2, in John Butt (ed.), The Poems of Alexander Pope (1965), p. 516.

  2 J. Y. T. Greig (ed.), The Letters of David Hume (1932), vol. i, p. 34.

  3 Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1967 [1759–67]), vol. vii, ch. 33, p. 500.

  4 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1978 [1739]), p. xv. The potential benefits were inestimable: ‘'Tis impossible to tell what changes and improvements we might make in these sciences were we thoroughly acquainted with the extent and force of human understanding.’

  5 John Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress (1678), discussed in Michael R. Watts, The Dissenters (1978), p. 263, and Christopher Hill, A Turbulent, Seditious and Factious People (1989).

  6 Arthur Paul Davis, Isaac Watts: His Life and Works (1948), p. 7.

  7 Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Tatler (1987), vol. ii, no. 87, p. 48 (Saturday, 29 October 1709).

  8 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, act III, scene i, 1. 130.

  9 For Johnson's convictions, see Paul K. Alkon, Samuel Johnson and Moral Discipline (1967); Maurice Quinlan, Samuel Johnson: A Layman's Religion (1964); C. F. Chapin, The Religious Thought of Samuel Johnson (1968); R. Voitle, Samuel Johnson the Moralist (1961); G. Irwin, Samuel Johnson: A Personality in Conflict (1971); more broadly, on humanist morality, see Herschel Baker, The Dignity of Man (1947); J. B. Bamborough, The Little World of Man (1952).

  10 Quoted in Paul Fussell, The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism (1965), p. 8; see also pp. 110f.

  11 W.J. Bate and A. B. Straus (eds), Samuel Johnson: The Rambler (1969), vol. iii, no. 196, pp. 257–61 (Saturday, 1 February 1752); Samuel Johnson, Life of Thomas Browne, in The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1939[1779–81]); George Birkbeck Hill, Boswell's Life of Johnson (1934–50), vol. i, p. 198; Fussell, The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism, p. 53.

  12 Hill, Boswell's Life of Johnson, vol. iv, p. 188.

  13 Fussell, The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism, p. 65.

  14 Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub, and Other Satires (1975 [1704]), p. 133. For Swift's misanthropy, see Jove's address, in the ‘Day of Judgment’:

  Offending race of human kind,

  By nature, learning, reason blind;

  Jonathan Swift, The Complete Poems (1983), p. 317.

  15 Discussed in Fussell, The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism, p. 303.

  16 Pope, An Essay on Man, epistle ii, 1. 10, in Butt, The Poems of Alexander Pope, p. 516.

  17 Pope, An Essay on Man, epistle ii, ll. 183–4, in Butt, The Poems of Alexander Pope, p. 522. See also Brean S. Hammond, Pope and Bolingbroke (1984).

  18 Lancelot (‘Capability’) Brown got his soubriquet because of his legendary ability to see the ‘capabilities’ in noblemen's grounds. Enlightened moralists felt the same about human nature.

  19 John Andrew Bernstein, ‘Shaftesbury's Optimism and Eighteenth-century Social Thought’ (1987); Robert Voitle, The Third Earl of Shaftesbury: 1671–1713 (1984).

  20 Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1999 [1711]), vol. ii, p. 67; Robert E. Norton, The Beautiful Soul (1995).

  21 Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ‘The Moralists’, vol. ii, pt II, sect. 4, p. 49, discussed in Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness (1994), p. 68; Basil Willey, The Eighteenth Century Background (1962), P. 73.

  22 Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ‘Sensus Communis’, vol. i, sect. 1, p. 38. See also Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness, p. 168.

  23 Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness, p.2.

  24 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1968 [1651]). Hobbes's epistemology and moral philosophy have been discussed above in chapter 3.

  25 Sir Isaac Newton, Opticks (1721), Query 31, p. 381; see discussion in Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, introduction.

  26 For the science of mind, see Elie Halévy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism (1792). The project also naturally attracted sceptics and satirists: see Christopher Fox, Locke and the Scriblerians (1988).

  27 For the European background, see Ulrich Im Hof, The Enlightenment (199
4), p. 182; Knud Haakonssen, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy (1996).

  28 David Hume, Enquiries concerning the Human Understanding and concerning the Principles of Morals (1966 [1748]), pt I, sect. viii, pp. 83–4. See D. Spadafora, The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-century Britain (1990), p. 269. Statements to this effect were legion. See, for instance, Viscount Bolingbroke's view that ‘men of all countries and languages, who cultivate their reason, judge alike’: Of the True Use of Retirement and Study, in The Works of Lord Bolingbroke (1969; repr. of 1841 edn), vol. iv, p. 163. For Mandeville's opinion that ‘human Nature is every where the same’, see The Fable of the Bees (1924 [1714]), vol. i, p. 275.

 

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