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Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World

Page 81

by Roy Porter


  71 Watts, The Dissenters, p. 477.

  72 H. McLachlan, English Education under the Test Acts (1931), p. 168; Fitzpatrick, ‘Heretical Religion and Radical Political Ideas in Late Eighteenth-century England’, p. 352.

  73 Joseph Priestley, An History of the Corruptions of Christianity (1871 [1782]), An History of Early Opinions concerning Jesus Christ (1786), and Priestley wrote of ‘dreadful corruptions’ (p. x), and attacked the ‘atonement’ and ‘original sin’ as being unbiblical (pp. 93, 107). He praised the clergy in England for being ‘enlightened’; condemned ‘idolatry’ (p. 108) and the deification of Jesus (p. 108) – all such was Platonizing (p. 113), and ‘oriental philosophy’ (p. 132); for Priestley the ‘Universal Parent of mankind commissioned Jesus Christ to invite men to the practice of virtue, by the assurance of his mercy to the penitent’ (p. 301).

  74 Joseph Priestley, preface to Letters to the Revd Edward Burn, in Rutt, The Theological and Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Priestley, vol. xix, p. 310.

  75 Letter from Gibbon (28 January 1783), in J. E. Norton (ed.), The Letters of Edward Gibbon (1956), vol. ii, p. 321.

  76 [Joseph Priestley], An Appeal to the Serious and Candid Professors of Christianity… by a Lover of the Gospel (1775).

  77 Passmore, Priestley's Writings on Philosophy, Science and Politics, p. 17.

  78 Joseph Priestley, The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated (1777), in Rutt, The Theological and Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Priestley, vol. iv, p. 450. Priestley called himself a ‘Necessarian’.

  79 Passmore, Priestley's Writings on Philosophy, Science and Politics, p. 18.

  80 Joseph Priestley, The History of the Present State of the Discoveries Relating to Vision, Light, and Colours (1772).

  81 Joseph Priestley, Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air (1774–7); R. G. W. Anderson and Christopher Lawrence (eds.), Science, Medicine and Dissent (1987); William H. Brock, The Fontana History of Chemistry (1992), pp. 99–101.

  82 Priestley, An Examination of Dr Reid's Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Commonsense; Michael Barfoot, ‘Priestley, Reid's Circle and the Third Organon of Human Reasoning’ (1987). Reid resisted Locke's way of ideas, Berkeley's idealism and Hume's scepticism: all undermined the belief in a divinely created reality which common sense provided. In his An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (1764), he questioned the notion that reality consisted simply of ‘ideas’, arguing that belief in an external reality was intuitive, and not mediated by sensory perceptions. Keith Lehrer, Thomas Reid (1989), P. 5.

  83 Priestley, ‘An Examination of Dr Reid's Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense', in Rutt, The Theological and Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Priestley, vol. iii, pp. 4–5.

  84 Priestley, introduction to ‘Remarks on Dr Reid's Inquiry into the Principles of the Human Mind’, in Rutt, The Theological and Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Priestley, vol. iii, p. 27.

  85 Priestley, Hartley's Theory of the Human Mind on the Principle of the Association of Ideas (1775), in Rutt, The Theological and Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Priestley, vol. iii, p. 182.

  86 Priestley, Memoirs of Dr Joseph Priestley, Written on Himself, p. 52, para. 124.

  87 Priestley, Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit. See also the contextualized discussion in chapter 6.

  88 Priestley, The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated.

  89 Joseph Priestley and Richard Price, A Free Discussion of the Doctrines of Materialism and Philosophical Necessity (1778) in Rutt, The Theological and Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Priestley, vol. iv, p. 72. These ideas obviously prefigure Godwin's: see chapter 20.

  90 Priestley and Price, A Free Discussion of the Doctrines of Materialism and Philosophical Necessity, in Rutt, The Theological and Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Priestley, vol. iv, p. 74.

  91 Priestley, An Essay on the First Principles of Government (1768): see Elie Halévy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism (1972), p. 22; Joseph Priestley, Political Writings (1993).

  92 Priestley, An Essay on the First Principles of Government, in Rutt, The Theological and Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Priestley, vol. xxii, p. 11.

  If I be asked what I mean by liberty, I should chose, for the sake of greater clearness, to divide it into two kinds, political and civil; and the importance of having clear ideas on this subject will be my apology for the innovation. POLITICAL LIBERTY, I would say, consists in the power, which the members of the state reserve to themselves, of arriving at the public offices, or, at least, of having votes in the nomination of those who fill them: and I would choose to call CIVIL LIBERTY that power over their own actions, which the members of the state reserve to themselves, and which their officers must not infringe.

  Priestley, Political Writings, p. 12.

  93 Priestley, An Essay on the First Principles on Government, in Rutt, The Theological and Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Priestley, vol. xxii, p. 13; Mack, Jeremy Bentham, An Odyssey of Ideas, 1748–1792, p. 103.

  94 [Joseph Priestley], A Free Address to Those Who Have Petitioned for the Repeal of the Late Act of Parliament in Favour of the Roman Catholics (1780); see Halévy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism, pp. 133f.

  95 Priestley, An Essay on the First Principles of Government, in Rutt (ed.), The Theological and Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Priestly, vol. xxii, p. 57, and A Free Address to Those Who Have Petitioned for the Repeal of the Late Act of Parliament in Favour of the Roman Catholics; Halévy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism, p. 22.

  96 Joseph Priestley, Reflections on the Present State of Free Inquiry in This Country (1785), in Rutt, The Theological and Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Priestley, vol. xvii, p. 544; Maurice Crosland, ‘The Image of Science as a Threat’ (1987). This explains Dr Johnson's response: ‘Ah Priestley, an evil man, Sir. His work unsettles everything’: quoted in Boswell Taylor, Joseph Priestley: The Man of Science (1954), p. 11.

  97 Joseph Priestley, ‘Some Considerations on the State of the Poor in General’ (1787), in Rutt, The Theological and Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Priestley, vol. xxv, p. 314; Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism, p. 54.

  98 Joseph Priestley, Letters to Edmund Burke Occasioned by His Reflections on the Revolution in France, &c. (1791), and his anonymous A Political Dialogue on the General Principles of Government (1791).

  99 Priestley, Letters to the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, in Rutt, The Theological and Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Priestley, vol. xxii, p. 203.

  100 Priestley, The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated (1777), in Rutt, The Theological and Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Priestley, vol. xxii, p. 168.

  101 Priestley, A Political Dialogue on the General Principles of Government, in Rutt, The Theological and Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Priestly, vol. xxv, p. 92.

  102 Priestley, A Political Dialogue on the General Principles of Government, in Rutt, The Theological and Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Priestley, vol. xxv, p. 96.

  103 Priestley, A Political Dialogue on the General Principles of Government, in Rutt, The Theological and Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Priestley, vol. xxv, p. 107.

  104 Joseph Priestley, Letter to the Right Hon. William Pitt (1787), in Rutt, The Theological and Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Priestley, vol. xix, p. 118.

  105 Joseph Priestley, Discourses Relating to the Evidence of Revealed Religion (1794–9); Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism, p. 75; Watts, The Dissenters, p. 486.

  106 Joseph Priestley, Letters to the Inhabitants of Northumberland (1801), in Rutt, The Theological and Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Priestley, vol. xxv, p. 18.

  107 Joseph Priestley, in Rutt, The Theological and Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Priestley, vol. ii, p. 404; Ian Wylie, Young Coleridge and the Philosophers of Nature (1989), p. 63. Nelson's victories were to fulfil the predictions contained in Isaiah 19, and Napoleon was the deliverer promised to Egypt.

  108 Priestley, Disqui
sitions Relating to Matter and Spirit, Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism, p. 97; John W. Yolton, Thinking Matter (1983), p. 113.

  109 Joseph Priestley, The Importance and Extent of Free Inquiry in Matters of Religion (1785), in Rutt, The Theological and Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Priestley, vol. xv, p. 78; Priestley, Political Writings, p. xxiv. Compare Godwin's teachings about truth and ‘free inquiry’.

  110 See Joseph Priestley, Letter to the Right Honourable William Pitt (1787).

  111 Priestley, Letter to the Right Honourable William Pitt in Rutt, The Theological and Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Priestly, vol. xix, p. 125.

  112 Generally on Bentham, see Mack, Jeremy Bentham, An Odyssey of Ideas, 1748–1792; J. Dinwiddy, Bentham (1989); Ross Harrison, Bentham (1983); Bentham, A Fragment on Government, p. 29.

  113 Bentham, A Fragment on Government. Bentham thought it ‘the very first publication by which men at large were invited to break loose from the trammels of authority and ancestor-worship on the field of law’ (p. vi). On the law and law reform see David Lieberman, The Province of Legislation Determined (1989). It can hardly be an accident that both Bentham and Gibbon came from Jacobite Tory families.

  114 Bentham, A Fragment on Government, p. 3.

  115 For the following exposition, see Harrison, Bentham.

  116 James E. Crimmins, Secular Utilitarianism (1990), p. 88.

  117 D.J. Manning, The Mind of Jeremy Bentham (1968), pp. 37, 59, citing Bentham's Plan of Parliamentary Reform (1817), p. cxcviii.

  118 For expositions, see Dinwiddy, Bentham; Harrison, Bentham; Mack, Jeremy Bentham, An Odyssey of Ideas, 1748–1792. ‘I am sorry,’ he wrote to Brissot, ‘that you have undertaken to publish a Declaration of Rights. It is a metaphysical work – the ne plus ultra of metaphysics. It may have been a necessary evil, – but it is nevertheless an evil’: Halévy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism, p. 174.

  119 Bentham, A Fragment of Government and An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Charles F. Bahmueller, The National Charity Company (1981), p. 203.

  120 Bentham, A Fragment on Government and An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Halévy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism, p. 30.

  121 Mack, Jeremy Bentham, An Odyssey of Ideas, 1748–1792, p. 129.

  122 Mack, Jeremy Bentham, An Odyssey of Ideas, 1748–1792, pp. 120, 129. Bentham substituted the method of ‘paraphrasis’: to define a word was to resolve the idea it represents into simpler ones based on sense impressions, that is, on pleasures and pains: Mack, Jeremy Bentham, An Odyssey of Ideas, 1748–792, p. 155.

  123 William Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age (1971 [1825]), p. 25.

  124 Pushpin was a tavern game. Bentham's views on sex have been discussed above in chapter 11.

  125 Simon Schaffer, ‘States of Mind’ (1990), p. 288; Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Destitute (1987); Tim Marshall, Murdering to Dissect (1995).

  126 For Bentham's will (24 August 1769) see A. Taylor Milne (ed.), The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham (1981), vol. i, p. 136. Bentham's auto-icon sits in state in University College, London.

  127 John Bowring, The Works of Jeremy Bentham (1995 [1843]), vol. ii, p. 501.

  128 Schaffer, ‘States of Mind’, p. 274; Crimmins, Secular Utilitarianism.

  129 Halévy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism, p. 291.

  130 Bowring, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. x, p. 595.

  131 For Bentham, see Janet Semple, Bentham's Prison (1993), p. 28; see also Jonas Hanway, Solitude in Imprisonment (1776), p. 210 – Hanway rather than Bentham was the architect of the solitary system, the latter fearing that excessive solitude would drive prisoners mad. Margaret Delacy, Prison Reform in Lancashire, 1700–1850 (1986); R. Evans, The Fabrication of Virtue (1982); Foucault, Discipline And Punish; Michael Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain (1978); V.A.C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree (1994); John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary (1987); Norval Morris and David J. Rothman (eds.), The Oxford History of the Prison (1995). More generally on the rise of disciplinary society, see Mitchell Dean, The Constitution of Poverty (1991).

  132 Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain.

  133 Semple, Bentham's Prison, p. 116.

  134 Milne, The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, vol. iv, p. 342.

  135 Semple, Bentham's Prison, pp. 100, 288, and ‘Foucault and Bentham: A Defence of Panopticism’ (1992); Jeremy Bentham, The ‘Panopticon’ Writings (1995), p. 100; Jeremy Bentham, Panopticon (1791).

  136 Halévy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism, p. 84; see discussion in Semple, Bentham's Prison, p. 112.

  137 Foucault, Discipline And Punish; Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain; Duncan Forbes, Hume Philosophical Politics (1975). For Bentham, moreover, the beauty of the panopticon – that ‘magnificent instrument with which I then dreamed of revolutionizing the world’ was that it could be adapted to serve all manner of social purposes as a model of efficient control: it could even be accommodated to battery-farming.

  138 Semple, Bentham's Prison, p. 301.

  139 Bentham, Panopticon. Bentham knew he was playing God. The scheme, he wrote, would combine ‘the apparent omnipresence of the inspector (if divines will allow me the expression)’ with ‘the extreme facility of his real presence’.

  140 Mack, Jeremy Bentham, An Odyssey of Ideas, 1748–1792, p. 337. Bentham recognized his own ‘madness’. ‘I do not like to look among Panopticon papers. It is like opening a drawer where devils are locked up – it is breaking into a haunted house’: quoted in Gertrude Himmelfarb, Victorian Minds (1968), p. 32.

  141 Samuel Romilly, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Samuel Romilly (1971 [1840]).

  142 B. Mazlish, James and John Stuart Mill: Father and Son in the Nineteenth Century (1975); Halévy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism, p. 249. ‘If I had time to write a book,’ James Mill claimed in 1817, ‘I would make the human mind as plain as the road from Charing Cross to St Paul's’: Schaffer, ‘States of Mind’, p. 289.

  143 Dudley Miles, Francis Place 1771–1854: The Life of a Remarkable Radical (1988), pp. 139f; Mary Thale (ed.), The Autobiography of Francis Place (1771–1854) (1972); Bahmueller, The National Charity Company, p. 94. For other sexual radicals, see M. L. Bush (ed.), What Is Love? (1998); Place commented on the christening of Queen Victoria's daughter: ‘Surely the time will come when these Barbaric Ceremonies will cease’: Thale, The Autobiography of Francis Place, pp. xii, xxiii.

  144 Waterman, ‘A Cambridge “Via Media” in Late Georgian Anglicanism’, p. 423; M. L. Clark, Paley: Evidences for the Man (1974). While fairly radical, Paley supposedly declined to support Jebb's anti-subscription campaign, on the grounds that he could not afford to keep a conscience. For theological utilitarians before Paley, see Jacob Viner, The Role of Providence in the Social Order (1972), p. 71.

  145 If you should see a flock of pigeons in a field of corn: and if, instead of each picking what and where it liked, you should see ninety-nine of them gathering all they had got into a heap, reserving nothing for themselves but the chaff and refuse, keeping this heap for one – and that the weakest, perhaps, and the worst pigeon of the flock: sitting round and looking on all winter whilst this one was devouring, throwing about and wasting it: and, if a pigeon more hardy or hungry than the rest touched a grain of the hoard, all the others instantly flying upon it, and tearing it to pieces – If you should see this, you would see nothing more than what is today practised and established among men.

  William Paley, The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785), p. 93. See Searby, A History of the University of Cambridge, vol. iii, p. 307; Waterman, ‘A Cambridge “Via Media” in Late Georgian Anglicanism’, p. 423.

  146 Searby, A History of the University of Cambridge, vol. iii, p. 307; Paley, The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, and Reasons for Contentment Addressed to the Labouring Poor of the British Public (1793).

  147 Thomas Walker, A Review of Some of the Political Events Which Have Occu
rred in Manchester During the Last Five Years, etc. (1794), p. 46, quoted in Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism, p. 57. See also Frida Knight, The Strange Case of Thomas Walker (1957).

  19 PROGRESS

  1 Edward Young, Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality (1780), bk vi, 1. 691.

  2 Thomas Holcroft, preface to The Adventures of Hugh Trevor (1973 [1794]), pp. vi–vii.

  3 Annie Watt to her son Gregory, quoted in Margaret C. Jacob, Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West (1997), p. 124.

  4 Josiah Tucker, Four Tracts (1774), p. 23.

  5 Desmond King-Hele (ed.), The Letters of Erasmus Darwin (1981), p. 16, letter 63a, to Matthew Boulton (1 July 1763).

  6 For historical visions, see Stephen Bann, The Clothing of Clio (1984); Laird Okie, Augustan Historical Writing (1992); Karen O'Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment (1997).

 

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