The Age of Louis XIV
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He defined freethinking as “the use of the understanding in endeavoring to find out the meaning of any proposition whatsoever, in considering the nature of the evidence for or against it, and in judging of it according to the seeming force or weakness of the evidence. . . . There is no other way to discover the truth.” 86 The diversity of creeds, and the contradictory interpretations of Biblical passages, compel us to accept the judgment of reason; to what other court can we turn, unless it be to the arbitrament of force? How, except by evidence and reasoning, can we decide which books of the Bible are to be accepted as authentic, and which should be set aside as apocryphal? Collins quotes a divine as estimating at thirty thousand the number of different readings proposed by scholars for the text of the New Testament alone; and he refers to Richard Simon’s textual criticism of the Scriptures. 87
He tries to answer the objections that cautious men advanced against free thought: that most people have not the capacity to think both freely and harmlessly about fundamental problems; that such freedom would lead to endless divisions of opinion and sects, and therefore to disorders in society; that freethinking may conduce to atheism in religion and libertinism in morals. He gives ancient Greece and modern Turkey .as examples of social order maintained despite freedom of opinion or diversity of faiths. He denies that freethinking makes for atheism; he quotes and supports Bacon’s aphorism about a little thought inclining us to atheism, and more thought turning us away from it; ignorance, he adds, with apparent sincerity, “is the foundation of atheism, and freethinking the cure for it.” 88 He lists freethinkers who were “the most virtuous people in all ages”: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Plutarch, Varro, Cato Censor, Cato of Utica, Cicero, Seneca, Solomon, the Prophets, Origen, Erasmus, Montaigne, Bacon, Hobbes, Milton, Tillotson, Locke; here and in Toland we have a model for Comte’s calendar of positivist saints. And (Collins suggests) another list could be made of those foes of free thought who disgraced humanity with barbarous cruelties under the pretext of glorifying God.
So many replies rained down upon him from pulpits and universities that Collins thought discretion required travel. His stay in Holland may have left upon him some influence from Spinoza and Bayle. Returning to England, he raised another storm with an Inquiry concerning Human Liberty (1715), which stated with clarity and force the case for determinism; Collins found himself a freethinker slave to an unfree will. Nine years later he set the theological air astir by a Discourse on the Grounds and Reason of the Christian Religion. He quoted the Apostles and Pascal as basing their demonstration of Christianity on Old Testament prophecies which the new dispensation had seemingly fulfilled, and he argued that these predictions had no reference to Christianity or Christ. Thirty-five theologians answered him in thirty-five tracts. The controversy was still alive when Voltaire reached England in 1726; he enjoyed it mischievously, and imported it into France, where it entered into the skeptical Enlightenment.
The deistic movement was continued in England by William Whiston, Matthew Tindal, Thomas Chubb, and Conyers Middleton, and passed down through Bolingbroke and the philosopher Shaftesbury to Gibbon and Hume. It became unpopular with the ruling classes when they suspected it of encouraging democratic ideas; but its immediate influence was felt in a temporary decline of religious belief. In 1711 an official report on the subject was drawn up for the Upper House of Convocation of the English clergy in the province of Canterbury. It described a wide spread of unbelief and profanity, denials of Biblical inspiration, rejection of miracles as fables, ridicule of the doctrine of the Trinity, doubts of immortality, and much decrying of priests as impostors. 89 By the beginning of the eighteenth century in England “religion had sunk to deism.” 90 It was in this crisis that some of the ablest minds in Britain rose vigorously to the defense of Christianity.
IV. DEFENDERS OF THE FAITH
Most of them were willing to meet their assailants on the grounds of reason, scholarship, and history; this in itself betrayed the spirit of the age.
Charles Leslie led the defense with A Short and Easy Method with the Deists (1697), intended originally as a reply to Blount. The evidences for the Biblical narratives, he argued, were of the same nature, and as convincing, as for the careers of Alexander and Caesar; the miracles were attested by testimony as plentiful and reliable as that which is accepted as adequate in English courts; priests could never have persuaded peoples of such miracles as the parting of the Red Sea unless many eyewitnesses had corroborated them. Leslie rounded out his argument by portraying Judaism as a primitive covenant superseded by the coming of Christ, Mohammedanism as an ungrateful imitation of Christianity by an ambitious impostor, and paganism as a mass of fables too childish for rational belief. Only the Christian religion met all the tests of evidence and reason.
Samuel Clarke, who knew enough mathematics and physics to defend Newton against Leibniz, undertook to prove the Christian creed by demonstrations as rigorous as geometry. In his Boyle lectures of 1704 he forged a chain of twelve propositions which in his judgment established the existence, omnipresence, omnipotence, omniscience, and benevolence of God. The chain of contingent or dependent beings and causes, he supposed, compels us to assume a necessary and independent being who is the first cause of all causes. God must have intelligence, for there is intelligence in created beings, and the creator must be more perfect than the creature; God must be free, for otherwise His intelligence would be a senseless slavery. This, of course, added nothing to ancient or medieval philosophy; but in the second series of his Boyle lectures Clarke proposed to prove “the truth and certainty of the Christian revelation.” Moral principles, he thought, are as absolute as the laws of nature; man’s depraved nature, however, can be led to obey these moral rules only through the inculcation of religious beliefs; hence it was necessary that God give us the Bible, and the doctrines of heaven and hell. History, with its usual humor, adds that Clarke was dismissed by Queen Anne as her chaplain because he was suspected of doubting the Trinity. In the next reign, according to the impish Voltaire, he was prevented from becoming archbishop of Canterbury because a bishop informed Princess Caroline that Clarke was the most learned man in England, but had one defect—he was not a Christian. 91
The still more learned Bentley had already demonstrated “the Folly and Unreasonableness of Atheism” in the Boyle lectures of 1692–93. Twenty years later he was aroused by Collins’ book to issue some Remarks on a Late Discourse of Freethinking. This chiefly consisted of exposing errors in Collins’ scholarship; the argument seemed overwhelming, and the senate of Cambridge University gave Bentley a unanimous vote of thanks. Jonathan Swift, who was then serving the deist Bolingbroke, thought that Collins, for having revealed a secret that all gentlemen kept to themselves, deserved additional chastisement; this he administered in a tract called Mr. Collins’ Discourse of Freethinking, Put into Plain English . . . for the Use of the Poor. He burlesqued Collins’ arguments by humorous exaggerations; he added that since most men are fools, it would be disastrous to leave them free to think; “the bulk of mankind is as well qualified for flying as for thinking” 92—which is now a more hopeful statement than Swift intended it to be. He agreed with Hobbes that dictatorship, even in spiritualibus, is the sole alternative to anarchy. We have seen that the Irish Anglicans thought the gloomy Dean would make an excellent prelate if he believed in God.
The Cambridge Platonists defended Christianity with less wit and more sincerity. They went back to Plato and Plotinus to find a bridge between reason and God, and they illustrated their faith not so much by arguments as by the integrity and devotion of their lives. They had so strong a sense of divinity surrounding them that this seemed to them the most immediate testimony of reason. Hence their first leader, Benjamin Whichcote, claimed that “reason is the voice of God.” 93
Henry More, the outstanding member of this once famous group, went beyond the philosophies of Europe to an almost Hindu sense of the vanity, the literal emptiness, of sense knowledge, its in
capacity to satisfy the longing of the solitary soul for some companionship and significance in the universe. The cosmic mechanism of Descartes gave him no comfort; he found more to his needs in the Neoplatonists, the Jewish mystics, and Jakob Böhme. He wondered “whether the knowledge of things was really that supreme felicity of man, or something greater and more divine was; or, supposing it to be so, whether it was to be acquired by such an eagerness or intentness in the reading of authors, or contemplating of things; or by the purging of the mind from all sorts of vices whatsoever.” 94 He resolved to cleanse himself of all self-seeking, all worldliness, all intellectual curiosity. “When this inordinate desire after the knowledge of things was thus allayed in me, and I aspired after nothing but this sole purity and simplicity of mind, there shone in upon me daily a greater assurance than ever I could have expected, even of those things which before I had the greatest desire to know.” 95 Gradually, he tells us, he so purified himself in body and soul that his flesh, in the spring season, gave forth a sweet odor, and his urine had the fragrance of violets. 96
So cleansed, he seemed to feel the reality of spirit in himself as the most convincing experience possible to man; and from this conviction he passed readily to the belief that the world was peopled by other spirits, of ascending grades, from the lowest to God Himself. All motion in matter, he thought, is the operation of some species of spirit. Instead of the material plenum of Hobbes, More proposed a spiritual universe in which matter was merely the tool and vehicle of spirit. This animating anima occasionally expanded beyond its habitation; how else explain magnetism, electricity, and gravity? More went on to accept the reality of devils, witches, and ghosts. He was an amiable and unselfish soul, refusing the worldly preferments offered him, and remaining on friendly terms with materialist Hobbes. Hobbes said that if he ever found his own opinions untenable, he “would embrace the philosophy of Dr. More.” 97
Ralph Cudworth, the most learned of the Cambridge Platonists, undertook to prove Hobbes’s opinions untenable. The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678) challenged Hobbes to explain why, in addition to the various sensory and muscular motions to which he had reduced the operations of the mind, there is also, in many cases, an awareness of these motions; how can a materialist philosophy find room and function for consciousness? If all is matter in motion, why should not the nervous system, through sensation and response, as in reflexes, attend to everything, and not be bothered with a superfluous consciousness? How can we deny reality—even primacy—to a consciousness without which no reality whatever could be known? Knowledge is no passive receptacle of sensations, it is the active transformation of sensations into ideas. 98 Here, in Cudworth, we have, long in advance, the answer of Berkeley and Kant to Hobbes and Hume.
Joseph Glanvill, chaplain to Charles II, was not geographically one of the Cambridge Platonists, but he strongly agreed with them. In The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661) he turned the guilt of dogmatism upon science and philosophy, arguing that they had built up grandiose systems of doctrine upon insecure foundations. So the notion of cause (which Glanvill supposed indispensable to science) is an unwarrantable assumption; we know sequences, relations, and occasions, but we have no idea of what it is in one thing that produces an effect in itself or another (another premonition of Hume). Consider, says Glanvill, how ignorant we are of the most basic things—the nature and origin of the soul, and its relation to the body. “How should a thought be united to . . . a lump of clay? The freezing of the words in the air in northern climes is as inconceivable as this strange union. . . . And to hang weights on the wings-of the wind seems far more intelligible.” 99 Anticipating Bergson, Glanvill charges the intellect with being a constitutional materialist—so used to dealing with matter that it loses capacity to think of other realities except by a “return to material phantasms,” or images. 100 How fallible our senses are! They make it appear that the earth is at rest in space, whereas the latest pundits assure us that it is dizzy with a variety of simultaneous motions. And even supposing that our senses have not deceived us, how often do we reason wrongly from correct premises! Our feelings time and again mislead us; “we easily believe what we wish.” And our mental environment often dominates our reasoning.
Opinions have their climes and national diversities. . . . They that never peeped beyond the common belief in which their easy understandings were at first indoctrinated, are indubitably assured of the Truth and comparative excellency of their receptions. . . . The larger souls, that have traveled the divers climates of opinion [here is born a famous phrase] are more cautious in their resolves, and more sparing to determine. 101
Despite these warnings to science, Glanvill was a zealous member of the Royal Society, defended it against charges of irreligion, applauded its achievements, and looked forward to a world of marvels to come from scientific research:
I doubt not but posterity will find many things, that are now but rumors, verified into practical realities. It may be, some ages hence, a voyage to the Southern unknown tracts, yea possibly to the moon, will not be more strange than one to America. To them that come after us it may be as ordinary to buy a pair of wings to fly into remotest regions, as now a pair of boots to ride a journey. And to confer at the distance of the Indies by sympathetic conveyances may be as usual to future times, as to us in a literary correspondence. The restoration of gray hairs to juvenility, and renewing the exhausted marrow, may at length be effected without a miracle; and the turning of the now comparatively desert world into a paradise may not improbably be expected from late agriculture. 102
We must add that Glanvill, like Cudworth and Henry More, believed in witches. They argued that if there is a spiritual as well as a material world, there must be spirits as well as bodies in the universe; and judging from the parlous state of things some of these spirits must be devilish. If pious people communicate with God or saints or angels, why should not wicked people communicate with Satan and his demons? The Devil’s last stratagem, said Glanvill, is to spread the belief that he does not exist. “Those that dare not bluntly say, There is no God, content themselves (for a fair step and introduction) to deny that there are spirits and witches.” 103 Satan had to be rescued for God’s sake.
V. JOHN LOCKE: 1632–1704
1. Biography
The most influential philosopher of this age was born at Wrington, near Bristol, in the same year as Spinoza. He grew up in an England that made a bloody revolution and killed its King; he became the voice of a peaceful revolution and an age of moderation and tolerance, and represented English compromise at its sanest and best. His father was a Puritan attorney, who at some sacrifice supported the Parliamentary cause, and expounded to his son the doctrines of popular sovereignty and representative government. Locke remained faithful to these lessons, and grateful for the paternal discipline that trained him to sobriety, simplicity, and industry. Lady Masham said of Locke’s father that he
used a conduct towards him when young that he [the son] often spoke of afterwards with great approbation. It was the being severe to him by keeping him in much awe and at a distance when he was a boy, but relaxing still by degrees of that severity as he grew up to be a man, till, he being become capable of it, he lived perfectly with him as a friend. 104
Locke bore no similar gratitude toward his teachers. At Westminster School he was choked with Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic, and was probably not allowed to witness the execution of Charles I (1649) in nearby Whitehall Palace Yard; but that event left a mark on his philosophy. The turmoil of the Civil War delayed his entry into Christ College, Oxford, till he was twenty years old. There he studied Aristotle as dressed in Latin Scholastic form; more Greek; some geometry and rhetoric; much logic and ethics, most of which he later disgorged as antequated in substance and indigestible in form. After taking his master’s degree (1658) he remained at Oxford as a don, tutoring and lecturing. He had a love affair which for a time “robbed me of the use of my reason”; 105 he regained his reason and los
t the lady. Like nearly all the philosophers in this period—Malebranche, Bayle, Fontenelle, Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibniz—he never married. He was advised to enter the ministry, but he demurred at “being lifted into a place which perhaps I cannot fill, and from whence there is no descending without tumbling.” 106
In 1661 his father died of tuberculosis, leaving him with a small fortune and weak lungs. He studied medicine, but did not take the medical degree till 1674. Meanwhile he read Descartes, and felt the fascination of philosophy when it spoke intelligibly. He helped Robert Boyle in laboratory experiments, and acquired an admiration for scientific method. In 1667 he received an invitation to come and live at Exeter House as personal physician to Anthony Ashley Cooper, soon to be first Earl of Shaftesbury, member of the Cabal ministry under Charles II. From that time onward, though keeping Oxford as his legal home till 1683, Locke found himself in the stream of English politics, whose events and figures molded his thought.
As physician he saved Shaftesbury’s life by a skillful operation for tumor (1668). He helped to negotiate the marriage of the Earl’s son, attended the daughter-in-law in her confinement, and directed the education of the grandson, his successor in philosophy. “Mr. Locke,” recalled this third Earl of Shaftesbury,
grew so much in esteem with my grandfather that, as great a man as he experienced him in physic, he looked upon this as but his least part. He encouraged him to turn his thoughts another way; nor would he suffer him to practice physic except in his own family, and as a kindness to some particular friend. He put him upon the study of the religious and civil affairs of the nation, with whatsoever related to the business of a minister of state; in which he was so successful that my grandfather began to use him as a friend, and consult with him on all occasions of that kind. 107