Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World

by Roy Porter

  74 Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, p. 255.

  75 Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, p. 210.

  76 Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, p. 152.

  77 Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, p. 155.

  78 Smith used the phrase three times, in the Wealth of Nations, the Moral Sentiments, and the History of Astronomy (1795): Berry, Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment, p. 44. See also Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, vol. i, bk IV, ch. 2, p. 456.

  79 Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, vol. i, bk 4, ch. 2, p. 456. For discussion of the ‘invisible hand’, see Ronald Hamowy, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Theory of Spontaneous Order (1987), pp. 13–22 (for Smith); pp. 22–5 (for Ferguson).

  80 Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, vol. ii, bk IV, ch. 8, p. 654.

  81 See the discussion in Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, vol. ii, bk V, ch. 1, pp. 707–23.

  82 This dissonance is obviously reminiscent of ‘Mandeville's paradox’.

  83 Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, pp. 183–5.

  84 Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 51.

  85 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1968 [1651]), vol. ii, p. 16.

  86 Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 183.

  87 Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 229.

  88 Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 50. Barbon had earlier written of such ‘wants of the mind’. See the discussion in chapter 15.

  89 Smith, Lectures On Jurisprudence, p. 488.

  90 Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 223. This is of course also Mandeville's sentiment.

  91 This is one of the main themes of Elie Halévy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism (1972).

  92 Edmund Burke, The Works and Correspondence of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (1852), vol. ii, p. 398, letter from Burke to Arthur Young (23 May 1797).

  93 Catherine Macdonald Maclean, Born Under Saturn (1943), p. 549.

  18 REFORM

  1 Jeremy Bentham, A Fragment on Government (1988 [1776]), p. 3.

  2 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1979), p. 222.

  3 Joseph Priestley, An Essay on the First Principles of Government (1768), pp. 7–9.

  4 For this Anglo-Latin educational and cultural tradition, see J. C. D. Clark, Samuel Johnson: Literature, Religion and English Cultural Politics from the Restoration to Romanticism (1994), p. 2.

  5 On that ‘two cultures’ divide, the Norwich Gazette once announced that ‘a Latin Epigram… was some Time since published in this Paper; but, as the greater Part of our Readers are unacquainted with that Language, the Author has been prevailed upon to put the same Sentiments into English’: Geoffrey Alan Cranfield, The Development of the Provincial Newspaper 1700–1760 (1962), p. 105. A new audience had come into being: Peter Burke, ‘Heu Domine, Adsunt Turcae’ (1991).

  6 Margaret C. Jacob, The Cultural Meaning of the Scientific Revolution (1988), p. 139.

  7 John Aikin, An Address to the Dissenters of England on Their Late Defeat (1790), p. 18; see Isaac Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism (1990), p. 60; Penelope Corfield, Power and the Professions in Britain 1700–1850 (1995).

  8 Anna Barbauld, Address to Opposers of the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts (1790), pp. 18, 25.

  9 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in A Vindication of the Rights of Men with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1995), p. 132. ‘Thank heaven I am not a Lady of Quality,’ Wollstonecraft once remarked: Claire Tomalin, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (1974), p. 59.

  10 Joseph Priestley, A View of the Principles and Conduct of the Protestant Dissenters with Respect to the Civil and Ecclesiastical Constitution of England (1769), p. 5, and Familiar Letters Addressed to the Inhabitants of the Town of Birmingham in Refutation of Several Charges Advanced Against the Dissenters and Unitarians, by the Revd Mr Madan(1790–92), letter 4, p. 6; Richard Price, The Evidence for a Future Period of Improvement in the State of Mankind, with the Means and Duty of Promoting It (1787), pp. 41–4.

  11 Thomas Holcroft, The Adventures of Hugh Trevor (1973 [1794]), pp. 9, 158.

  12 Crane Brinton, The Political Ideas of the English Romanticists (1926), p. 39. In Mary Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1996 [1796]), p. 49, a character exclaims the anti-Pope philosophy of ‘whatever is, is wrong’: ‘we may trace most of the faults, and the miseries of mankind, to the vices and errors of political institutions’.

  13 Philip Harling, The Waning of ‘Old Corruption’ (1996), p. 1.

  14 Quoted in Jeremy Black, An Illustrated History of Eighteenth-century Britain, 1688–1793 (1996), p. 51.

  15 See the discerning discussion in Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries (1981).

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

  17 Ernest Mossner, The Life of David Hume (1970 [1954]), pp. 10, 365; Charles Camic, Experience and Enlightenment (1983), p. 56. For other relevant remarks from Hume's correspondence, see J. Y. T. Greig (ed.), The Letters of David Hume (1932), vol. i, pp. 86, 161, 170, 193, 355, 392, 451, 504; John B. Stewart, The Moral and Political Philosophy of David Hume (1963), p. 187.

  18 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1976 [1759]), pp. 245, 254.

  19 William C. Lehmann, John Millar of Glasgow, 1735–1801: His Life and Thought and His Contributions to Sociological Analysis (1960), P. 35.

  20 Edward Copeland, Women Writing about Money (1995), p. 167.

  21 William Paley, Reasons for Contentment Addressed to the Labouring Part of the British Public (1793), p. 12. Hazlitt dubbed Paley a ‘shuffling Divine’: Catherine Macdonald Maclean, Born Under Saturn (1943), p. 194. For his earlier radicalism, see later in this chapter.

  22 Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney, p. 140. She says: ‘The small pittance bequeathed to me was insufficient to preserve me from dependence. – Dependence! – I repeated to myself, and I felt my heart die within me’ (p. 31).

  23 ‘Sincerity,’ wrote William Godwin, ‘once introduced into the manners of mankind, would necessarily bring every other virtue in its train’: William Godwin, Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1985 [1793]), p. 26.

  24 Wordsworth was soon to call true poetry the ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’: Alan Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment (1989), pp. 30f.

  25 Mrs Inchbald, Nature And Art (1796).

  26 William Hazlitt, Life of Thomas Holcroft (1816), in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt (1932), vol. iii, p. 140; Holcroft, The Adventures of Hugh Trevor, Gary Kelly, The English Jacobin Novel, 1780–1805 (1986), p. 114. Holcroft was a passionate supporter of the French Revolution: ‘Hey for the new Jerusalem! The millennium! And peace and eternal beatitude be with the soul of Thomas Paine’: quoted in Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (1975), p. 49. Sincerity must replace secrecy, benevolence self-love, and truth ignorance.

  27 Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, p. 42. In Robert Bage's Man as He is (1792), the impoverished Quaker heroine refuses to marry the rich baronet until he proves himself a valuable member of society.

  28 Robert Bage, Hermsprong, or Man as He is Not (1951 [1796]), ch. 76, p. 233.

  29 John Cannon, Parliamentary Reform 1640–1832 (1972), p. 66; Peter D. G. Thomas, John Wilkes: A Friend to Liberty (1996); James T. Boulton, The Language of Politics in the Age of Wilkes and Burke (1963); George Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty (1962).

  30 On post-1760 politics, see H. T. Dickinson, The Politics of the People in Eighteenth-century Britain (1995), pp. 236f; J. G. A. Pocock (ed.), The Varieties of British Political Thought, 1500–1800 (1993); John Brewer, ‘English Radicalism in the Age of George III’ (1980), pp. 323–67; Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism.

  31 Carl B. Cone, The English Jacobins (1968), p
. 50.

  32 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1988 [1690]), p. 301; discussed in John Dunn, Locke (1984), p. 39.

  33 George Berkeley, ‘On the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America’ (1752), in Roger Lonsdale (ed.), The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-century Verse (1984), p. 175; W. H. G. Armytage, Yesterday's Tomorrows (1968), p. 26.

  34 J. Hector St John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth-century America (1997 [1782]), p. 64.

  35 Richard Price, Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution (1784), pp. 1–2, 5; D. O. Thomas, The Honest Mind (1977), p. 264.

  36 Mary P. Mack, Jeremy Bentham, An Odyssey of Ideas, 1748–1792 (1962), p. 410.

  37 William Blake, America: A Prophecy (1793), pt 4, 1. 12, in G. Keynes (ed.), Blake: Complete Writings (1969), p. 197; David V. Erdman, Blake, Prophet against Empire 3rd edn (1954). Bentham admired America: though deploring the natural rights metaphysics of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, he hailed ‘that newly created nation, one of the most enlightened, if not the most enlightened, at this day on the globe’: Mack, Jeremy Bentham, An Odyssey of Ideas, 1748–1792, p. 410.

  38 Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism, pp 183f.; Dickinson, The Politics of the People in Eighteenth-century Britain, pp. 237f.; Peter Searby, A History of the University of Cambridge (1997), vol. iii, p. 297.

  39 Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism, pp. 175ff; Carla Hay, James Burgh, Spokesman for Reform in Hanoverian England (1979); Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism (1987), p. 197.

  40 James Burgh, Political Disquisitions (1775), discussed in Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism, p. 197.

  41 J. C. D. Clark, The Language of Liberty 1660–1832 (1994), p. 33.

  42 Burgh, Political Disquisitions, vol. iii, pp. 458–60.

  43 [David Williams], Incidents in My Own Life Which Have Been Thought of Some Importance (1980 [1802?]). In a newly inaugurated chapel in Margaret Street, London, ‘where all matters of faith should be omitted and pure morality taught’, Williams was the first person in Europe to conduct a form of public worship based on simple deism. He was passionately in favour of freedom of expression. ‘I do not see why thieves should not be allowed to preach the principles of theft; seducers of seduction; adulterers of adultery, and traitors of treason’: quoted by Martin Fitzpatrick, ‘Toleration and the Enlightenment Movement’ (2000), p. 44. See also J. Dybikowski, On Burning Ground (1993).

  44 Joseph Priestley, Lectures on History and General Policy, 4th edn (1826 [1788], lecture 18, p. 337; James Burgh, Crito (1767), vol. ii, p. 68; David Williams, Lectures On Education (1789), pp. 4, 64; Godwin, An Enquiry concerning Political Justice, pp. 42, 472; Isaac Kramnick, ‘Eighteenth-century Science and Radical Social Theory’ (1986).

  45 Michael R. Watts, The Dissenters (1978), p. 380.

  46 Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1962 [1876]), vol. i, p. 358.

  47 Martin Fitzpatrick, ‘Heretical Religion and Radical Political Ideas in Late Eighteenth-century England’ (1990), pp. 350–52; Searby, A History of the University of Cambridge, vol. iii, pp. 407f.; A. M. C. Waterman, ‘A Cambridge “Via Media” in Late Georgian Anglicanism’ (1991).

  48 Searby, A History of the University of Cambridge, vol. iii, p. 405; Anthony Page, ‘Enlightenment and a “Second Reformation” ’ (1998), which stresses Jebb's praise of Locke and Newton. William Cole, the antiquarian and diehard Tory, denounced Lindsey as one of ‘a restless generation who will never be contented till they have overturned the Constitution in Church and State’.

  49 Anthony Hadley Lincoln, Some Political and Social Ideas of English Dissent, 1763–1800 (1938), p. 320.

  50 Quoted in Dickinson, The Politics of the People in Eighteenth-century Britain, p. 168.

  51 Joseph Barber, tutor at the Evangelical Independent Academy at Hoxton from 1778 to 1791: see Alan P. F. Sell, John Locke and the Eighteenth-century Divines (1997), p. 14. Unitarianism was defined in 1792 by the Monthly Review as denying the Trinity, the pre-existence and atonement of Christ, and the existence of a spiritual principle in man distinct from the body; and maintaining the absolute unity of God, the proper humanity of Christ, the necessity and efficacy of good works, and the sufficiency of repentance without a vicarious sacrifice, to obtain pardon from a placable Deity: see G. M. Ditchfield, ‘Anti-trinitarianism and Toleration in Late Eighteenth-century British Politics’ (1991), p. 48. For Socinianism, see Roland N. Stromberg, Religious Liberalism in Eighteenth-century England (1954); Knud Haakonssen (ed.), Enlightenment and Religion (1997); Lincoln, Some Political and Social Ideas of English Dissent, 1763–1800; Fitzpatrick, ‘Heretical Religion and Radical Political Ideas in Late Eighteenth-century England’; Ursula Henriques, Religious Toleration in England 1783–1833 (1961); H. McLachlan, The Unitarian Movement in the Religious Life of England (1931).

  52 It will be remembered that Hume, on his deathbed, imagined pleading with Charon for more time so that he could finish correcting a work for the press. Of the dead Priestley, it was written:

  Here lies at rest,

  In oaken chest,

  Together packed most nicely,

  The bones and brains,

  Flesh, blood, and veins,

  And soul of Dr Priestley.

  Quoted in Horton Davies, Worship and Theology in England from Watts and Wesley to Martineau, 1690–1900 (1996), p. 91. For biographies of Priestley, see Ann Holt, A Life of Joseph Priestley (1931); Robert E. Schofield, The Enlightenment of Joseph Priestley (1997).

  53 Joseph Priestley, Proper Objects of Education in the Present State of the World (1791), pp. 22, 39. On the liberal atmosphere of the Academy, see Maclean, Born Under Saturn, p. 65.

  54 Joseph Priestley, Memoirs of Dr Joseph Priestley, Written on Himself (1904 [1795]), p. 4, para. 10. For what follows see J. A. Passmore, Priestley's Writings on Philosophy, Science and Politics (1965); Schofield, The Enlightenment of Joseph Priestley.

  55 Priestley, Memoirs of Dr Joseph Priestley, Written on Himself, p. 5, para. 13.

  56 Priestley, Memoirs of Dr Joseph Priestley, Written on Himself, p. 6, para. 14.

  57 Revulsion grew among Nonconformists against strict Calvinism. Late in life Lucy Aikin recollected how, around 1750, Dissenters had broken free from ‘the chains and darkness of Calvinism, and their manners softened with their system’: Cone, The English Jacobins, p. 13.

  58 Joseph Priestley, Letter to the Right Honourable William Pitt (1787), in John Towill Rutt (ed.), The Theological and Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Priestley (1817–32), vol. xix, p. 128; for the liberalism of Nonconformist academies, see Watts, The Dissenters, pp. 370, 466. When Joseph Priestley joined the staff at Warrington in 1761 he found that all three of its tutors were Arians.

  59 Rutt, The Theological and Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Priestley, vol. i, p. 50n.

  60 See especially Joseph Priestley, An Examination of Dr Reid's Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Commonsense… (1774), p. xxxvii; Joseph Priestley, Disquisitions Relation to Matter and Spirit (1777), p. 120. Priestley was more ‘indebted’ to Hartley's Observations than to any other book except the Bible: An Examination of Dr Reid's Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Commonsense…, p. 2.

  61 Joseph Priestley, Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever, letter IV, ‘An Examination of Mr Hume's Dialogues on Natural Religion’, vol. iv, p. 368.

  62 Joseph Priestley, Additional Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever, in Answer to Mr William Hammon [i.e. Matthew Turner] (1782).

  63 Joseph Priestley, Hartley's Theory of the Human Mind on the Principle of the Association of Ideas (1775), and his introduction to Anthony Collins, A Philosophical Inquiry concerning Human Liberty (1790).

  64 Joseph Priestley, The Rudiments of English Grammar (1969 [1761]), A Chart of Biography (1765), and New Chart of History (1769).

  65 Joseph Priestley, Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criti
cism (1777), and Remarks on Some Paragraphs in the Fourth Volume of Dr Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England, Relating to the Dissenters (1769).

  66 Carl B. Cone, Torchbearer of Freedom (1952); Jack Fruchtman, Jr, The Apocalyptic Politics of Richard Price and Joseph Priestley (1983); William D. Hudson, Reason and Right (1970).

  67 Joseph Priestley, The History and Present State of Electricity, with Original Experiments (1767).

  68 Priestley, The History and Present State of Electricity, with Original Experiments, p. 711.

  69 Priestley, The History and Present State of Electricity, with Original Experiments, p. 420.

  70 Joseph Priestley, The Scripture Doctrine of Remission (1761).