The Age of Louis XIV

by Will Durant

  We do not know if Hobbes’s “state of nature” ever existed; perhaps social organization antedated man. The tribe preceded the state, and custom is older, wider, deeper than law. The family is the biological ground of an altruism that enlarges the ego and its loyalties; Hobbes’s ethic might have been kindlier if he had brought up a family. To let the state define morality (though this too has passed into the totalitarian regimes) is to destroy one of the forces improving the state. The moral sense sometimes enlarges its area of co-operation or devotion, and then prods the law to widen its protection accordingly. In a distant future it may be possible for a state to be Christian, as was once that of Ashoka, who was a Buddhist.

  Hobbes’s strongest influence was his materialism. From intellectual groups “Hobbism” flowed into the professional and business classes; the irate Bentley reported in 1693 that “the taverns and coffeehouses, nay, Westminster Hall [Parliament], and the very churches, were full of it.” 64 Many men in the government privately accepted it, but publicly covered it with a conspicuous respect for the Established Church as a beneficent form of social control that only reckless fools would destroy. In France the materialistic philosophy affected Bayle’s skepticism, and came to bolder developments in La Mettrie, d’Holbach, and Diderot.

  Bayle ranked Hobbes as “one of the greatest geniuses of the seventeenth century.” 65 Honored or denounced, he was recognized as the most powerful philosopher that England had produced since Bacon, and as the first Englishman to present a formal treatise in political theory. One clear debt we owe him: he formulated his philosophy in logical order and lucid prose. Reading him and Bacon and Locke, or Fontenelle and Bayle and Voltaire, we perceive again what the Germans had made us forget, that obscurity need not be the distinguishing mark of a philosopher, and that every art should accept the moral obligation to be intelligible or silent.

  II. HARRINGTON’S UTOPIA

  While Hobbes defended an ailing monarchy, James Harrington proposed a democratic utopia. Now that exploration and commerce were opening up remote areas of the globe, and legends came to Europe with any cargo from overseas, it was a simple matter for imaginative wordsmen to voyage in fancy to some happy corner of the map—or, like Cyrano de Bergerac and Tommaso Campanella, to the moon or the sun—whose political and social customs would shame the tyranny and misery of men under “civilization.” The cult of antiquity by the Renaissance gave way to a futuristic romance of more or less perfect states in distant and uncorrupted lands. So in 1656 Harrington offered his Oceana to the coffeehouses of London.

  Born among the gentry, he naturally moved toward a political philosophy favoring the minor landlords of England. After leaving Oxford he traveled widely on the Continent, admired the Dutch Republic, served in the Dutch army, visited Venice, was impressed by its “republican” institutions, saw the Pope, refused to kiss the papal toe, and, returning to England, had all his sins forgiven when he explained to Charles I that he could not think of kissing the foot of a foreign prince after having kissed the hand of England’s King. When Charles was arrested, Harrington was appointed by Parliament to attend him. He loved the unhappy prisoner, but explained to him the desirability of a republic. He accompanied Charles to the end, was on the scaffold at the execution, and, we are told, nearly died of grief. 66 Comforted by the birth of the English republic, he set himself to expound his republican ideas in fictional form. But while Harrington wrote, Cromwell changed the new republic into a semimonarchical protectorate; and when The Commonwealth of Oceana was passing through the press the Protector ordered it suppressed. Cromwell’s favorite daughter, Mrs. Claypole, interceded for the book, Harrington dedicated it to her father, and it saw the light in 1656.

  “Oceana” is England as the author hoped that Cromwell would remake it. He lays down a principle which, two centuries later, was expanded into the economic interpretation of history: political supremacy, says Harrington, naturally and rightly follows economic supremacy; only in that accord can a state enjoy stability. “Such as is the proportion of property in land, such is the nature of the empire”—i.e., the government. 67 If one man (as in Turkey) owns all the land, the government will be an absolute monarchy; if a few own it, the government will be a “mixed monarchy” supported and limited by an aristocracy; “and if the whole people be landlords, or hold the lands so divided among them that no one man or number of men . . . overbalance them, the empire (without the imposition of force) is a commonwealth.” 68 To Hobbes, who thought that all government rests on force, Harrington answered that armies had to be fed and armed, so power goes to those who can raise the money to feed and arm them. 69 A change in the form or direction of the government is merely an adjustment to a change in the distribution of property. On this basis Harrington explained the victory of the Long Parliament, as representing the gentry, over the King as representing the major landowners.

  To prevent the government from being an oligarchy of large estates, Harrington proposed an “equal agrarian” law limiting any one person to land yielding no more than two thousand pounds a year. Actual democracy requires a wide distribution of property; and the best democracy will be one in which every landowner has a turn in government. In the true English republic the citizens will send landowners to serve in a popular assembly and a senate. The senate alone will propose laws, the assembly alone will pass or reject them. The senators will nominate candidates for public office; from that list the citizens will elect the magistrates by secret ballot. 70 Each year one third of the assemblymen, the senators, and the magistrates will be replaced by other men in a new election; by this rotation all landowners will ultimately have a term in the government. Popular election will protect the community against lawyers serving private interests, and against the clergy—“those declared and inveterate enemies of popular power.” 71 There will be universal education in national schools and colleges, and complete freedom of religion.

  “The Doctrine was very taking,” reported Aubrey, and soon found enthusiastic supporters. Harrington gathered some of these (including Aubrey) in a “Rota” club (1659), which agitated for parliamentary enactment of his rotarian republic. He ascribed the current collapse of the Commonwealth to its failure to confiscate the large estates and redistribute the land in smaller parcels among the people; that failure left the nobles still powerful, and the people still poor and powerless; on the principle that property dictates government, the restoration of an oligarchic monarchy was inevitable unless Parliament voted the “agrarian law.” “But,” says Aubrey, “the greatest part of the Parliament-men perfectly hated this design of Rotation by Ballotting, for they were cursed tyrants and in love with their power”; 72 they preferred to recall Charles II. As Harrington continued to propagate his plan even after the Restoration, the King had him committed to the Tower on a charge of conspiracy (1661). When efforts were made to free him by habeas corpus, he was transported to closer confinement on an island off Plymouth. There he fell into spells of insanity. He was released, but he never regained his health.

  His utopia was more practical than most, and much of it has been realized. Perhaps one weakness lay in its assumption that land is the only form of wealth. Harrington mentioned the power of money in commerce and industry, but did not foresee its rise to political power; he may have felt that even commercial and industrial wealth is ultimately subject to owners of the land. The gradual extension of the franchise, and the secrecy of the ballot, were in line with his hopes; and though Britain rejected rotation in office as an annual dismemberment of experience, the United States accepted it in the periodical election of a part of Congress; and Locke, Montesquieu, and America approved his separation of governmental powers. Let not dreamers despair; time may surprise them with fulfillments, and turn their poetry into prose.

  III. THE DEISTS

  As the religious wars injured religious belief in France, so the Civil War in England shared in generating theological doubts. Memories of the Puritan regime made irreligion popular among the tri
umphant royalists, and made atheism ribald and boisterous at the Restoration court. The first Earl of Shaftesbury, the second Duke of Buckingham, and the second Earl of Rochester were suspected of atheism; so, later, were Halifax and Bolingbroke.

  The extension of geographical, historical, and scientific knowledge widened the skeptical current. Every day some traveler or chronicler told of great nations whose religion and morals were shockingly different from the Christian, but usually as virtuous, and seldom as homicidal. The mechanical view of the world encouraged by the pious Descartes and the apocalyptic Newton seemed to be pushing Providence out of sight; the discovery of law in nature was making miracles indigestible; the slow triumph of Copernicus and the dramatic prosecution of Galileo contributed to the erosion of belief. The brave attempt of many Christian theologians to demonstrate the creed by reason weakened the creed; no one, said Anthony Collins, doubted the existence of God until the Boyle lecturers undertook to prove it. 73

  The refutations of atheism attested its spread. Sir William Temple wrote (1672) “of those who would pass for wits . . . by saying things which, David tells us, the fool hath said in his heart.” 74 In the same year Sir Charles Wolseley remarked that “irreligion in its practice hath been the companion of every age, but its open and public defense seems to be peculiar to this.” 75 According to Archdeacon Samuel Parker (1681),

  . . . the ignorant and unlearned among ourselves are become the greatest pretenders to skepticism and infidelity. . . . Atheism and irreligion are at length become as common as vice and debauchery. . . . Plebeians and mechanics have philosophized themselves into principles of impiety, and read their lectures of atheism in the streets and highways. And they are able to demonstrate out of The Leviathan that there is no God. 76

  Among the educated classes doubt sought a compromise in Unitarianism, “natural religion,” and deism. The Unitarians questioned the equality of Christ with the Father, but they usually accepted the divine authority of the Bible. The advocates of natural religion preferred a faith independent of Scripture and limited to beliefs which they thought universal—in God and immortality. The deists, who made their chief stir in England, required only a belief in God, whom they sometimes depersonalized into a synonym for Nature, or the Prime Pusher of the Cartesian or Newtonian world machine. The word deist first came into prominence in 1677, through Archdeacon Edward Stillingfleet’s Letter to a Deist, but the deistic literature had begun with Lord Herbert of Cherbury’s De Veritate in 1624.

  Lord Herbert’s disciple, Charles Blount, carried on with Anima Mundi (1679). All organized religion, ran the argument, was the creation of impostors seeking political power or material gain; heaven and hell were among their clever inventions to control and milk the populace. The soul dies with the body. Men and beasts are so alike that “some authors are of opinion that man is nothing but an ape cultivated.” In Great Is Diana of the Ephesians, or The Origin of Idolatry (1680), Blount made priests themselves the tools of privileged classes that fattened on the patient labor and credulity of the people. With impish subtlety he translated Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana, indicated the similarities between the miracles ascribed to the pagan wonder-worker and those attributed to Christians, and gently suggested their equal incredibility. In A Summary Account of the Deists’ Religion (1686) Blount proposed a religion free from all cult and ritual, and consisting only of the worship of God by a moral life. In The Oracles of Reason (1693) he pointed out that the Christian theology was at first based upon the erroneous expectation of an early end to the world. He ridiculed the Biblical stories of Creation, of Eve’s birth from Adam’s rib, of original sin, of the stopping of the sun by Joshua, as childish absurdities, and suggested that “to believe our modern earth (a blind and sordid particle of the universe, inferior to each of the fixed stars as well in bulk as in dignity) to be the heart, the most noble and vital part, of so vast a body, is irrational and repugnant to the nature of things.” An anonymous work uncertainly ascribed to Blount, Miracles No Violations of the Laws of Nature (1683), tried to explain many miracle stories as honest misconceptions, by simple minds, of natural causes and events. The Bible, it added, was written to “excite pious affections,” not to teach physics, and it should be interpreted accordingly. “Whatever is against Nature is against Reason, and whatever is against Reason is absurd, and should be rejected.” 77 Blount himself did not worship reason to the end, if we may believe the report that he killed himself (1693) because English law would not let him marry his deceased wife’s sister.

  John Toland continued the campaign. Born in Ireland, he was brought up as a Roman Catholic, but was converted to Protestantism in his youth. He studied at Glasgow, Leiden, and Oxford. At twenty-six he issued anonymously Christianity Not Mysterious (1696), which he described as “a treatise showing that there is nothing in the Gospel contrary to reason, nor above it.” Accepting Locke’s recent Essay concerning Human Understanding as having proved the sense origin of all knowledge, he drew from it a thoroughgoing rationalism:

  We hold that Reason is the only foundation of all our certitude, and that nothing revealed . . . is more exempted from its disquisitions than the ordinary phenomena of Nature. . . . To believe the divinity of Scripture, or the sense of any passage thereof, without rational proof and an evident consistency, is a blamable credulity . . . ordinarily grounded upon an ignorant and willful disposition, but more generally maintained out of a gainful prospect. 78

  This was a declaration of war, but as Toland proceeded he unveiled an olive branch by arguing that the basic doctrines of Christianity, excepting transubstantiation, are quite reasonable. Nevertheless his challenge was not ignored. The grand juries of Middlesex and Dublin joined hands across the Irish Sea to condemn the book; it was officially burned before the doors of the Irish Parliament, and Toland was sentenced to jail. He escaped to England, but, unable to secure employment there, he migrated to the Continent. For a time he found welcome with Electress Sophia of Hanover and her daughter Sophia Charlotte, Queen of Prussia.

  To the latter he addressed Letters to Serena (1704). One of these tried to trace the origin and growth of the belief in immortality; this was among the first attempts at a natural history of supernatural beliefs. Another letter disputed the view that matter is by itself inert and motionless; motion, said Toland, is inherent in matter, and no body is in absolute rest. All objective phenomena are the motions of matter, including the actions of animals, and this might be true of man as well. 79 Here, however, Toland checked himself; such thoughts should not be publicly expressed, for the uneducated multitude must be left in undisturbed orthodoxy as a means of moral and social control. Freethinking should be the duty, and the exclusive privilege, of the educated minority. Among these there should be no censorship; “let all men freely speak what they think, without being ever branded or punished but for wicked practices.” 80 The terms freethinker and pantheist were apparently coined by Toland. 81

  His essay Nazarenus (1718) suggested that Christ had not intended to separate his followers from Judaism, and that the Jewish Christians, who continued to observe the Mosaic Law, represented “the true original plan of Christianity.” A pamphlet, Pantheisticus, expounded the creed and ritual of an imaginary secret society; perhaps Toland was a member of the “Mother Grand Lodge” of Freemasonry which was established in London in 1717. The society described by Toland rejected all supernatural revelations, proposed a new religion agreeing with philosophy, identified God with the universe, and replaced the saints of the Christian calendar with the heroes of liberty and thought. The society allowed its members to conform to the popular worship so long as, through their political influence, they could render fanaticism harmless. 82

  After a fitful and varied career Toland retired to a life of poverty in England, kept from starvation by Lord Molesworth and the philosopher Shaftesbury. He bore up stoutly under the storm of refutations (fifty-four in sixty years) that fell upon his books. He claimed that philosophy had granted him
“perfect tranquillity,” and had freed him from “the terrors of death.” 83 Attacked by an incurable disease at the age of fifty-two (1722), he composed his own proud epitaph:

  Here lies John Toland, who was born . . . near Londonderry. . . . He cultivated the various literatures, and was acquainted with more than ten languages. The Champion of Truth, the Defender of Liberty, he bound himself to no man, on no man did he fawn. Neither threats nor misfortunes deterred him from his appointed course, which he pursued to the very end, subordinating his own interest to the pursuit of the Good. His soul is united with the Heavenly Father, from whom he first proceeded. Beyond all doubt he will live again unto all eternity, yet never will there be another Toland. . . . For the rest consult his writings. 84

  Anthony Collins took up the deist cause with more skill and modesty. He had the advantages of money, a house in the country, a house in the town; he could not be refuted by starvation. He was a man of fine manners and irreproachable character. Locke, who knew him well, wrote to him: “To love truth for truth’s sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues; and, if I mistake not, you have as much of it as ever I met with in anybody.” 85 Collins’ Discourse of Freethinking (1713) was the ablest exposition that deism received in this age.