by Roy Porter
7 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. 82. For discussions, see Jerome Hamilton Buckley, The Triumph of Time (1967); Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (1980); Sidney Pollard, The Idea of Progress (1968); R. V. Sampson, Progress in the Age of Reason (1956); D. Spadafora, The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-century Britain (1990); Ernest Lee Tuveson, Millennium and Utopia (1964).
8 See Paul K. Alkon, Origins of Futuristic Fiction (1987); I. F. Clarke, The Pattern of Expectation 1644–2001 (1979), p. 16.
9 Quoted in William C. Lehmann, John Millar of Glasgow, 1735–1801: His Life and Thought and His Contributions to Sociological Analysis (1960), p. 218.
10 Richard Price, Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, the Principles of Government, and the Justice and Policy of the War with America (1776), p. 5, and The Evidence for a Future Period of Improvement in the State of Mankind (1787), p. 12; Spadafora, The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-century Britain, p. 237; for Law, see R. S. Crane, The Idea of the Humanities and Other Essays Historical and Critical (1967), vol. i, pp. 216–18.
11 Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), pp. 1–2.
12 John Aikin, Letters from a Father to His Son, 3rd edn (1796 [1792–3]), contents list.
13 David Hartley, Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty and His Expectations (1749), p. 376; quoted in Martin Fitzpatrick, ‘Heretical Religion and Radical Political Ideas in Late Eighteenth-century England’ (1990), p. 343.
14 The ‘state of the world at present,’ Joseph told his students in the 1760s, ‘is vastly preferable to what it was in any former period.’ There was the ‘greatest certainty’ that posterity ‘will be wiser, and therefore the fairest presumption that they will be better than we are’. ‘Thus whatever was the beginning of this world, the end will be glorious and paradisiacal, beyond what our imaginations can now conceive’: Lectures On History (1793), lectures 38 and 56, in John Towill Rutt (ed.), The Theological and Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Priestley (1817–32), vol. xxiv, pp. 225, 425.
15 J. H. Plumb, ‘The Acceptance of Modernity’ (1982), p. 332; Stephen Daniels, Fields of Vision (1993), pp. 8of.; Miles Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity (1998), p. 23.
16 Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1994 [1781]), vol. ii, ch. 38, p. 516; see the discussion in Joseph M. Levine, The Battle of the Books (1992), pp. 178f.; Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress, p. 187; Spadafora, The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-century Britain; and J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion (1999), vol. ii.
17 Buckley, The Triumph of Time. Compare Peacock's Mr Foster in Headlong Hall (1816) who ‘held forth with great energy on the subject of roads and railways, canals and tunnels, manufactures and machinery’. ‘In short,’ said he, ‘every thing we look on attests the progress of mankind in all the arts of life, and demonstrates their gradual advancement towards a state of unlimited perfection’: David Garnett (ed.), The Novels of Thomas Love Peacock (1948), p. 11.
18 John Money, ‘Public Opinion in the West Midlands, 1760–1793’ [1967], ‘Taverns, Coffee Houses and Clubs’ (1971), Experience and Identity (1977), and ‘Birmingham and the West Midlands 1760–1793 (1990); Jacob, Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West, Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People (1995).
19 William Turner, Speculations on the Propriety of Attempting the Establishing a Literary Society in Newcastle upon Tyne (np, 1793), p. 3.
20 Thomas Henry, ‘On the Advantages of Literature and Philosophy in General, and Especially on the Consistency of Literary and Philosophical with Commercial Pursuits’ (1785), pp. 7 and 9. Erasmus Darwin sought ‘gentlemanlike facts’ for the Derby Philosophical Society: see A. E. Musson and Eric Robinson, Science and Technology in the Industrial Revolution (1969), p. 192.
21 William Hutton, An History of Birmingham, 3rd edn (1795), 88–91.
22 Robert E. Schofield, The Lunar Society of Birmingham (1963), p. 440; Paul Langford, Englishness Identified (2000), p. 76. Darwin further helped found a similar society in Derby: Eric H. Robinson, ‘The Derby Philosophical Society’ (1953). The Society, and especially Erasmus Darwin's role in it, is discussed below. Musson and Robinson, Science and Technology in the Industrial Revolution.
23 Erasmus Darwin, Phytologia (1800), p. vii.
24 Inequality was progressive provided it stopped short of the extremes of despotism and slavery. The ‘inequality of mankind in the present state of the world’ Darwin judged ‘too great for the purposes of producing the greatest quantity of human nourishment, and the greatest sum of human happiness’: Darwin, Phytologia, pt ii, pp. 415, 416. ‘Some must think’ is Zoonomia, 3rd edn (1801 [1794–6], pt ii, p. 416.
25 G. E. Mingay (ed.), Arthur Young and His Times (1975); Harriet Ritvo, ‘Possessing Mother Nature’ (1995).
26 Ritvo, ‘Possessing Mother Nature’. Compare Josiah Wedgwood's aims with his workers: see below.
27 Quoted in Maureen McNeil, Under the Banner of Science (1987), p. 168.
28 James Thomson, ‘The Development of Civilization’ from ‘Autumn’, The Seasons (1744), ll. 1826–30.
29 Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1985 [1719], p. 85.
30 Pat Hudson, The Industrial Revolution (1989).
31 Francis D. Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution (1975), p. 25; Maxine Berg, The Age of Manufactures, 1700–1820 (1994); for historiography, see David Cannadine, ‘The Present and the Past in the English Industrial Revolution, 1880–1980 (1984); Julian Hoppit, ‘Understanding the Industrial Revolution’ (1987).
32 Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution; Charlotte Klonk, Science and the Perception of Nature (1996); Daniels, Fields of Vision (1993), P. 57.
33 H. M. Dickinson, Matthew Boulton (1937), p. 113.
34 Neil McKendrick, Josiah Wedgwood and Factory Discipline’ (1961).
35 Josiah Wedgwood, An Address to the Young Inhabitants of the Pottery (1783), p. 22.
36 Isaac Kramnick, ‘Children's Literature and Bourgeois Ideology’ (1983).
37 George Birkbeck Hill, Boswell's Life of Johnson (1934–50), Friday 22 March, vol. 2, p. 459.
38 Daniels, Fields of Vision, p. 49.
39 Quoted in J. H. Plumb, Men and Places (1966), p. 134. Erasmus Darwin bantered that a fool is ‘a man who never tried an experiment in his life’.
40 Quoted in Stephen Daniels, ‘The Political Iconography of Woodland in Later Georgian England’ (1988), p. 44.
41 Robert Owen, Observations on the Effect of the Manufacturing System (1815), pp. 1–2. Owen's co-operative villages were denounced by Cobbett as ‘parallelograms of pauperism’.
42 Owen, Observations on the Effect of the Manufacturing System, pp. 3–9.
43 Owen, Report to the County of Lanark (1969 [1813]), p. 129.
44 Robert Owen, A New View of Society (1813), pp. 28–9. Owen, Report to the County of Lanark; W. H. G. Armytage, Heavens Below (1961), p. 77. His grand scheme for new men in a new society was:
a national, well digested, unexclusive system for the formation of character, and general amelioration of the lower orders. On the experience of a life devoted to the subject I hesitate not to say, that the members of any community may by degrees be trained to live without idleness, without poverty, without crime, and without punishment; for each of these is the effect of error in the various systems prevalent throughout the world. They are all the necessary consequences of ignorance.
Owen, Report to the County of Lanark, p. 129. This has a very Godwinian ring.
45 Robert Owen, The Book of the New Moral World (1836), vol. i, p. 3.
46 Quoted in Armytage, Heavens Below, p. 77.
47 Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment, pp. 6–7; Edward Duffy, Rousseau in England (1979), pp. 2f., Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Triumph of Life (1965 [1824]).
48 Richard Payne Knight, The Progress of Civil Society (1796), pp. 77–
8; Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment, p. 6. See McNeil, Under the Banner of Science; Michael Clarke and Nicholas Penny (eds.), The Arrogant Connoisseur (1982), pp. 10f.; Ronald L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (1975), p. 211.
49 See McNeil, Under the Banner of Science; Desmond King-Hele, Erasmus Darwin: A Life of Unequalled Achievement (1999), The Letters of Erasmus Darwin (1981), and Erasmus Darwin and the Romantic Poets (1986).
50 R. L. Edgeworth and M. Edgeworth, Practical Education (1798); Erasmus Darwin, Plan for the Conduct of Female Education (1797).
51 Darwin's chief works are The Botanic Garden (1789–91), Zoonomia (1794–6), Phytologia (1800), and The Temple of Nature (1803). For ‘theory’ in Zoonomia, see vol. i, p. viii.
52 Schofield, The Lunar Society of Birmingham, pp. 75, 108, 154.
53 Darwin, The Botanic Garden; Janet Browne, ‘Botany for Gentlemen’ (1989).
54 Cited in Charles Darwin, Life of Erasmus Darwin (1887), pp. 35–6.
55 King-Hele, The Letters of Erasmus Darwin, p. 8, letter no. 54A, to Thomas Oakes (23[?] November 1754). Coleridge was impressed by Darwin when he visited Derby in 1796 – but found him no Christian:
Derby is full of curiosities, the cotton, the silk mills, Wright, the painter, and Dr Darwin, the everything, except the Christian! Dr Darwin possesses, perhaps, a greater range of knowledge than any other man in Europe, and is the most inventive of philosophical men. He thinks in a new train on all subjects except religion. He bantered me on the subject of religion… He deems that there is a certain self-evidence in infidelity, and becomes an atheist by intuition. Well did St Paul say: Ye have an evil heart of unbelief’.
Earl Leslie Griggs (ed.), Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1956–68), vol. i, pp. 177, 178, 216.
56 King-Hele, The Letters of Erasmus Darwin, p. 104, letter no. 81A, to James Watt (6 January 1781).
57 King-Hele, Doctor of Revolution (1977), p. 75.
58 King-Hele, Erasmus Darwin: A Life of Unequalled Achievement, p. 102.
59 C. C. Hankin (ed.), Life of Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck (1858), vol. i, pp. 151–3, 242.
60 King-Hele, The Letters of Erasmus Darwin, p. 42, letter no. 67A, to unknown man (7 February 1767). Mark Jackson, New-Born Child Murder (1996).
61 Darwin, Zoonomia, vol. ii, pp. 526–7: ‘In the present insane state of human society… war and its preparations employ the ingenuity and labour of almost all nations; and mankind destroy or enslave each other with as little mercy as they destroy and enslave the bestial world.’
62 King-Hele, The Letters of Erasmus Darwin, p. 189, letter no. 89D, to Josiah Wedgwood (13 April 1789). For slave collars, see Folarin Shyllon, Black People in Britain 1555–1833 (1977), p. 9.
63 Thus requested, however, to ‘leave the unfruitful fields of polemical theology’, Priestley objected: ‘Excuse me, however, if I still join theological to philosophical studies, and if I consider the former as greatly superior in importance to mankind to the latter’: King-Hele, Erasmus Darwin: A Life of Unequalled Achievement, p. 257.
64 Darwin, Zoonomia, 3rd edn, vol. ii, p. 505, as quoted in McNeil, Under the Banner of Science, pp. 100f.
65 MacNeil, Under the Banner of Science; King-Hele, Doctor of Revolution; Roy Porter, ‘Erasmus Darwin: Doctor of Evolution?’ (1989); P. J. Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea (1984).
66 Darwin, Zoonomia, vol. i, p. 514.
67 Darwin, Zoonomia.
68 Darwin, Zoonomia, vol. i, p. 505.
69 Darwin, Zoonomia, vol. i, p. 92. See also Karl Figlio, ‘Theories of Perception and the Physiology of Mind in the Late Eighteenth Century’ (1975).
70 Darwin, Zoonomia, vol. i, p. 148.
71 Darwin, Zoonomia, vol. i, p. 96.
72 Darwin, Zoonomia, vol. i, p. 72:
All our emotions and passions seem to arise out of the exertions of these two faculties of the animal sensorium. Pride, hope, joy, are the names of particular pleasures; shame, despair, sorrow, are the names of peculiar pains; and love, ambition, avarice, of particular desires: hatred, disgust, fear, anxiety, of particular aversions.
73 Darwin, Zoonomia, vol. i, p. 376.
74 The education of the mind through imitation and habit is a key theme of Darwin's Plan for the Conduct of Female Education. Darwin's views on imitation are spelt out most graphically in The Temple of Nature (1803), p. 107 canto 3, ll. 285–8.
75 See Darwin, Zoonomia, vol. i, p. 376:
Man is termed by Aristotle an imitative animal; this propensity to imitation not only appears in the actions of children, but in all the customs and fashions of the world.
76 Darwin, Zoonomia, vol. i, pp. 38, 61, 76.
77 Darwin, Zoonomia, vol. i, p. 13.
Association is an exertion or change of some extreme part of the sensorium residing in the muscles or organs of sense, in consequence of some antecedent or attendant fibrous contractions.
78 Darwin, Zoonmia, vol. ii, p. 255.
79 Darwin, Zoonomia, vol. ii, p. 263; McNeil, Under the Banner of Science, pp. 98f.
80 Darwin, Zoonomia, vol. ii, pp. 264, 270; see James Blondel, The Strength of Imagination in Pregnant Women Examin'd (1727); Dennis Todd, Imagining Monsters (1995).
81 Darwin, Zoonomia, vol. ii, p. 270.
82 Darwin, Phytologia, pt 3, p. 557.
83 Darwin, Zoonomia, vol. ii, pp. 13–14. Darwin thus celebrated the joyous eroticism of Tahiti: ‘about 100 males and 100 females, who form one promiscuous marriage’:
Thus where pleased VENUS, in the southern main,
Sheds all her smiles on Otaheite's plain,
Wide o'er the isle her silken net she draws,
And the Loves laugh at all but Nature's laws.
The Botanic Garden, p. 200, canto 4. See the discussion in chapter 11 above.
84 Darwin, Zoonomia, vol. ii, p. 235.
85 Darwin, Zoonomia, vol. ii, p. 240.
86 Darwin, The Temple of Nature, p. 24, canto 1, ll. 269–72.
87 Darwin, The Temple of Nature, p. 25, canto 1, ll. 273–4.
88 Darwin, The Temple of Nature, p. 25, canto 1, 11. 277–80; compare p. 107, canto 3, 11. 279–86:
Hence when the inquiring hands with contact fine
Trace on hard forms the circumscribing line;
Which then the language of the rolling eyes
From distant scenes of earth and heaven supplies;
Those clear idea of the touch and sight
Rouse the quick sense to anguish or delight;
Whence the fine power of IMITATION springs,
And the outlines of external things.
89 Darwin, The Temple of Nature, p. 86, canto 3, ll. 41–6.
90 Darwin, Zoonomia, vol. ii, p. 318.
91 Darwin, The Temple of Nature, p. 134, canto 4, ll. 65–6.
92 Darwin, The Temple of Nature, p. 166, canto 4, ll. 451–4.
93 In the counter-revolutionary age, it met a frosty reception: Norton Garfinkle, ‘Science and Religion in England, 1790–1800’ (1955).
94 Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man (1733–4), epistle 2, 1. 10, in John Butt (ed.), The Poems of Alexander Pope (1965), p. 516.
95 See A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (1936).
96 Pope, An Essay on Man, epistle ii, ll. 15–16, in Butt, The Poems of Alexander Pope, p. 516.
97 Darwin, The Temple of Nature, p. 86, canto 3, ll. 43–6.
98 McNeil, Under the Banner of Science.
99 Darwin, The Temple of Nature, pp. 139–40, canto 4, ll. 369–82:
So human progenies, if unrestrain'd,
By climate friended, and by food sustain'd,
O'er seas and soils, prolific hordes! would spread
Erelong, and deluge their terraqueous bed;
But war, and pestilence, disease, and dearth
Sweep the superfluous myriads from the earth…
The births and deaths contend with equal strife,
And every pore of Nature teems with Life;
Which buds or bre
athes from Indus to the Poles,
And Earth's vast surface kindles as it rolls!
100 This is one of the themes of M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (1971).
20 THE REVOLUTIONARY ERA: ‘MODERN PHILOSOPHY’
1 William Godwin, An Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1985 [1793]), title of bk I, ch. 5.
2 Thomas Paine, The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine (1945), vol. i, p. 354.
3 C. B. Jewson, Jacobin City (1975), pp. 12–13.
4 For the air of self-congratulation, see Nicholas Rogers, Crowds, Culture and Politics in Georgian Britain (1998), p. 180: ‘The jubilee was an opportunity to glory in British achievements, not dwell on past and present failures’.