Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World

by Roy Porter

  29 On the state of nature, see Ronald L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (1975); Robert Wokler, ‘Anthropology and Conjectural History in the Enlightenment’ (1995)

  30 On Locke's anthropology, see G. A.J. Rogers, ‘Locke, Anthropology and Models of the Mind’ (1993).

  31 See William Knight, Lord Monboddo and Some of His Contemporaries (1900); discussion of an ‘original’ state amounted to a recasting of original sin.

  32 Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1995 [1767]), p. 14.

  33 Francis Hutcheson, A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy (1747), p. 2; cf. his A System of Moral Philosophy (1755), vol. i, pp. 1–2; Vincent Hope, Virtue by Consensus (1989); Gladys Bryson, Man and Society (1968), p. 19. The son of an Ulster Dissenting minister, Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) developed a theology which replaced Calvinism with rationalism. In 1729 he accepted the chair of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow, remaining there until his death in 1747. In metaphysics he largely followed Locke, but he was most important for his ethical writings.

  34 Bryson, Man and Society, p. 131. For a human anatomy that would ‘undress nature’, see also Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, vol. ii, pp. 3, 142. See Roger Smith, The Fontana History of the Human Sciences (1997), ch. 3, pp. 215–59.

  35 Johnson's sense of mental struggle is well conveyed in Gloria Sybil Gross, This Invisible Riot of the Mind (1992).

  36 And also, by extension, with independent gentlemen: ‘when the free spirit of a nation turns itself this way, judgments are formed: critics arise; the public eye and ear improve; a right taste prevails’: quoted in John Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt (1986), p. 34.

  37 G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility (1992), p. 205; Michael Prince, Philosophical Dialogue in the British Enlightenment (1996), p. 35.

  38 Hutcheson undertook to explain ‘the Principles of the late Earl of Shaftesbury’ and to show the errors of ‘the Author of the Fable of the Bees’: John B. Stewart, Opinion and Reform in Hume's Political Philosophy (1992), p. 76.

  39 Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, Design (1973 [1725]), p. 2; John Darling, The Moral Teaching of Francis Hutcheson’ (1989); J. Mordaunt Crook, ‘The Arcadian Vision’ (1988), pp. 48–9. ‘The Mind… is passive, and has not Power directly to prevent the perception of Ideas’: Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, Design, p. 2.

  40 David Hume, ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ (1741), in Selected Essays (1993), p. 136; David Marshall, ‘Arguing by Analogy’ (1995).

  41 Archibald Alison, Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1790), p. 55; Martin Kallich, The Association of Ideas and Critical Theory in Eighteenth-century England (1970).

  42 For associationism, see John P. Wright, ‘Association, Madness, and the Measures of Probability in Locke and Hume’ (1987); Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, bk I, pt I, sections 1–4, pp. 1–13.

  43 Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 6; see the discussion in Edward Hundert, ‘Performing the Passions in Commercial Society’ (1998), p. 150; Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (1989), pp. 172f.

  44 John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding (1975 [1690]), bk II, chs. 27–9; H. E. Allison, ‘Locke's Theory of Personal Identity’ (1977); R. C. Tennant, ‘The Anglican Response to Locke's Theory of Personal Identity’ (1982); D. P. Behan, ‘Locke on Persons and Personal Identity’ (1979); Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 172; Sylvana Tomaselli, ‘The First Person’ (1984); John Marshall, John Locke; Resistance, Religion and Responsibility (1994), p. 399.

  45 Locke's theory of the person proved unsettling: ‘What initially strikes a modern reader of his earliest critics… is their honest sense of befuddlement over what Locke is saying about the self’: Fox, Locke and the Scriblerians, pp. 50f. For satires on Locke, see Roger S. Lund, ‘Martinus Scriblerus and the Search for a Soul’ (1989).

  46 Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, bk IV, ch. 9, p. 618, quoted in Patricia Meyer Spacks, Imagining a Self (1976), p. 2.

  47 Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness (1994), pp. 73, 83–90. Shaftesbury obviously hints at Sterne on the self: see Max Byrd, Tristram Shandy (1985).

  48 See below, chapters 18 and 20, and the debates on topics such as insanity: chapter 9. The emergent novel obviously provided a forum for exploring the enigmas of the self.

  49 J. P. Ferguson, An Eighteenth-century Heretic (1976), contains a fine discussion; see also James O'Higgins, Anthony Collins: The Man and His Works (1970), p. 72f.; John W. Yolton, Thinking Matter (1983). For the meaning of dreams, see Jennifer Ford, Coleridge on Dreaming (1998); Fox, Locke and the Scriblerians, p. 51.

  50 Anthony Collins, An Answer to Mr Clarke's Third Defence to His Letter to Mr Dodwell (1708), p. 66; quoted in Fox, Locke and the Scriblerians, p. 53. Collins argued, like Locke, that personal identity did not reside in the flesh but ‘solely in Consciousness’, proceeding to carry Locke's theory to conclusions he never countenanced. Clarke had objected that if personal identity consisted in consciousness and if that were fleeting, the Resurrection of the same person would be impossible. ‘To which I answer,’ replied Collins, ‘if Personal Identity consists in Consciousness, as before explained… Consciousness can perish no more at the Dissolution of the Body, than it does every Moment we cease to think, or be conscious’: Anthony Collins, A Philosophical Inquiry concerning Human Liberty (1790 [1717]), p. 66. Given the impermanent nature of these distinct acts, Collins argued, ‘we are not conscious, that we continue a Moment the same individual numerical Being’ (p. 66).

  51 Gladys Bryson, Man and Society (1968), p. 8; Daniel Carey, ‘Reconsidering Rousseau’ (1998), p. 27.

  52 Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty, Order, Harmony, Design, sect. iii, fig. 8; Bryson, Man and Society, p. 8.

  53 Hutcheson, A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy in Three Books, pp. 2f., for the following.

  54 Bryson, Man and Society, p. 155.

  55 Hutcheson, A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy in Three Books, p. 4.

  56 Hutcheson, A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy in Three Books, p. 17.

  57 Hutcheson, A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy in Three Books, p. 2.

  58 For Common Sense philosophy, see Selwyn Alfred Grave, The Scottish Philosophy of Common Sense (1960); Keith Lehrer, Thomas Reid (1989).

  59 The word appears in Nathan Bailey's Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1721), which went through thirty editions: Gary Hatfield, ‘Remaking the Science of the Mind’ (1995); Christopher Fox, ‘Introduction: Defining Eighteenth-century Psychology’, in Psychology and Literature in the Eighteenth Century (1987), p. 3. Michel Foucault held that in the eighteenth century ‘psychology did not exist’: Madness and Civilization (1967), p. 197. As the above literature makes clear, this claim is wrong.

  60 Fernando Vidal, ‘Psychology in the Eighteenth Century’ (1993); John Christie, ‘The Human Sciences’ (1993).

  61 Fox, Psychology and Literature in the Eighteenth Century (1987), and ‘Crawford, Willis, and Anthropologie Abstracted’ (1988).

  62 David Hartley, Observations on Man (1791 [1749]), vol. i, p. 2.

  63 Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, vol. ii, p. 79.

  64 Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, vol. i, p. 72. Mandeville was reopening issues raised by Hobbes. For the following, see E. G. Hundert, The Enlightenment's Fable (1994); Dario Castiglione, ‘Excess, Frugality and the Spirit of Capitalism’ (1992); R. I. Cook, Bernard Mandeville (1974); M. M. Goldsmith, Private Vices, Public Benefits (1985); T. A. Horne, The Social Thought of Bernard Mandeville (1978).

  65 Bernard de Mandeville, The Virgin Unmask'd (1709), pp. 25, 87.

  66 Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees; Rudolf Dekker, ‘ “Private Vices, Public Virtues” Revisited’ (1992); J. Martin Stafford, Private, Vices, Publick Benefits? (1997).

  67 Mand
eville, The Fable of the Bees, vol. i, p. 20.

  68 Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, vol. i, p. 24.

  69 Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, vol. i, p. 26.

  70 Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, vol. i, pp. 323–69.

  71 Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, vol. i, p. 212.

  72 Mandeville, The Fables of the Bees, vol. i, p. 10.

  73 Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, vol. i, p. 76. For luxury, see John Sekora, Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought, Eden to Smollett (1977), p. 80; for pride, see Hundert, The Enlightenment's Fable, p. 73.

  74 Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, vol. i, p. 76.

  75 Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, vol. i, p. 407.

  76 Pope, An Essay on Man, epistle iii, ll. 317–8, in Butt, The Poems of Alexander Pope, p. 535.

  77 ‘The attentive Reader, who peruses the foregoing part of this Book, will soon perceive that two Systems cannot be more opposite than his Lordship's and mine’: Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, vol. ii, p. 324.

  78 Francis Hutcheson, Thoughts on Laughter, and Observations on the Fable of the Bees (1989 [1758]), discussed in Hundert, The Enlightenment's Fable, p. 37.

  79 Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, subtitle. It notoriously fell ‘deadborn from the press’. For Hume's life, see above, chapter 4. Generally on Hume, see Philippa Foot, ‘Locke, Hume, and Modern Moral Theory’ (1991); Peter Jones (ed.), The ‘Science’ of Man in the Scottish Enlightenment (1989); Nicholas Phillipson, Hume (1989); John B. Stewart, The Moral and Political Philosophy of David Hume (1963).

  80 Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, p. 269.

  81 Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, p. xvi.

  82 Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, p. xvii.

  83 Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, bk I, section iv.

  84 Hume, Enquiries concerning the Human Understanding and concerning the Principles of Morals, sect. viii, pt i, p. 83.

  85 Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, bk I, sect. i; bk I, sect. xii, ‘Of the Probability of Causes’.

  86 Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, bk I, sect. vi. Hume wrote (p. 259):

  We now proceed to explain the nature of personal identity, which has become so great a question in philosophy, especially of late years in England, where all the abstruser sciences are study'd with a peculiar ardour and application. And here ‘tis evident, the same method of reasoning must be continu'd, which has so successfully explain'd the identity of plants, and animals, and ships, and houses, and of all the compounded and changeable productions either of art or nature. The identity, which we ascribe to the mind of man, is only a fictitious one.

  87 For Hume on pride, see Stewart, Opinion and Reform in Hume's Political Philosophy, p. 123. Some moralists, argued Hume, try to quash all pride as ‘purely pagan and natural’, but this would render us incapable of achieving much: Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, bk III, sect. ii, p. 600.

  88 Stewart, Opinion and Reform in Hume's Political Philosophy, p. 127.

  89 Radical novels of the 1790s were often subtitled ‘Man as he is’, or some variant. Hume wanted to reconcile society to man as he is.

  90 See Mossner's interesting discussion in his introduction to David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1969 [1739]), p. 22.

  91 Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, bk II, sect. iii, p. 416.

  92 Hartley, for instance, dismissed eternal punishment: Richard C. Allen, David Hartley on Human Nature (1999), pp. xx, 38.

  93 Generally on Hartley, see Barbara Bowen Oberg, ‘David Hartley and the Association of Ideas’ (1976); C. U. M. Smith, ‘David Hartley's Newtonian Neuropsychology’ (1987); M. E. Webb, ‘A New History of Hartley's Observations on Man’ (1988), and ‘The Early Medical Studies and Practice of Dr David Hartley’ (1989); Margaret Leslie, ‘Mysticism Misunderstood’ (1972); Spadafora, The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-century Britain, p. 153; Allen, David Hartley on Human Nature.

  94 Locke stated, ‘I shall not at present meddle with the physical considerations of the mind’ – ‘These are speculations which, however curious and entertaining, I shall decline’: Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, bk I, ch. 1, p. 43.

  95 For Gay, see Halévy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism, pp. 7f.

  96 Quoted in R. V. Sampson, Progress in the Age of Reason (1956), p. 46; for Hartley's influence, see R. M. Young, ‘David Hartley’ (1970), and ‘Association of Ideas’ (1973); Yolton, Thinking Matter, p. 158.

  97 Hartley, Observations on Man, vol. i, p. 83.

  98 This argument, developed by the Revd John Gay, was taken over by Abraham Tucker in his The Light of Nature Pursued (1768). See the discussion in Allen, David Hartley on Human Nature, p. 267.

  99 Hartley, Observations on Man, vol. i, pp. 473–4.

  100 Smith, The Fontana History of the Human Sciences, pp. 216–17; Hatfield, ‘Remaking the Science of the Mind’.

  101 Dugald Stewart, ‘Dissertation: Exhibiting the Progress of Metaphysical, Ethical and Political Philosophy since the Revival of Letters in Europe’, in Sir William Hamilton (ed.), The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart (1854–60), vol. i, p. 479.

  8 THE SCIENCE OF POLITICS

  1 Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life (1966 [1796]), p. 51.

  2 David Hume, ‘That Politics may be Reduced to a Science’ (1741–2), in Selected Essays (1993), pp. 13–24; Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels (1985 [1726]), bk ii, p. 176: ‘Voyage to Brobdingnag’, Gulliver speaking: But I take this Defect among them to have risen from their Ignorance; but not having hitherto reduced Politicks into a Science, as the more acute Wits of Europe have done… He [the king] confined the Knowledge of governing within very narrow bounds; to common Sense and Reason, to Justice and Lenity, to the Speedy Determination of Civil and criminal Causes.

  3 J. T. Desaguliers, The Newtonian System of the World (1728), preface, p. 32, ll. 175–6: But boldly let thy perfect model be NEWTON's (the only true) Philosophy.

  4 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1965), p. 79.

  5 Robert Filmer, Patriarcha, and Other Political Works of Sir Robert Filmer (1949); Mark Kishlansky, A Monarchy Transformed (1996); Paul Kleber Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 1688–1788 (1989).

  6 For Locke's politics, see Peter Laslett, ‘The English Revolution and Locke's Two Treatises of Government’ (1956); John Marshall, John Locke; Resistance, Religion and Responsibility (1994); Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke's Two Treatises of Government (1986); John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke (1969). A useful anthology of political thinking is David Williams (ed.), The Enlightenment (1999).

  7 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1988 [1690]), bk i, ch. 1, sect. 1, p. 141. Locke added: ‘Slavery is so vile and miserable an Estate of Man, and so directly opposite to the generous Temper and Courage of our Nation; that 'tis hardly to be conceived, that an Englishman, much less a Gentleman, should plead for't': bk i, ch. 1, sect. 1, p. 141. The key to Filmer's philosophy, as Locke saw it, was that ‘no Man is Born free’: bk i, ch. 1, sect. 1, p. 142.

  8 Locke, Two Treatises of Government, bk i, ch. 1, sect. 1, p. 141.

  9 Locke, Two Treatises of Government, treatise 2, ch. 1, sect. 2, p. 268. For the politics of property, see H. T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property (1977); John Brewer and Susan Staves (eds), Early Modern Conceptions of Property (1995).

  10 Locke, Two Treatises of Government, treatise 2, ch. 2, sect. 6, p. 271. Locke explained that this was because men were ‘all the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise Maker, all the servants of one sovereign Master, sent into the world by His order, and about His business’. For the key idea of civil society, see Marvin B. Becker, The Emergence of Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (1994).

  11 Locke, Two Treatises of Government, treatise 2, ch. 9, sect. 124, pp. 350–51.

  12 Locke, Two Treatises of Government, treatise 2, ch. 9, sect. 135, pp. 357–8.

  13 Locke, Two Treatises of Government, treatise 2, ch. 13, sect. 149, p. 36
7.

  14 Locke, Two Treatises of Government, treatise 2, ch. 14, sect. 168, pp. 379–80: ‘people are not so easily got out of their old forms as some are apt to suggest’.

  15 Locke, Two Treatises of Government, treatise 2, ch. 19, sect. 225, p. 415.

  16 Locke, Two Treatises, treatise 2, ch. 5, sect. 25, p. 286. For discussion of property, see C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (1964).

  17 Locke, Two Treatises of Government, treatise 2, ch. 5, sect. 25, p. 286. Cf. Psalms 115, verse 16.

  18 Locke, Two Treatises of Government, treatise 2, ch. 5, sect. 32, pp. 290–91; Richard Ashcraft, ‘Lockean Ideas, Poverty, and the Development of Liberal Political Theory’ (1995).