Eighteenthcentur 0000 Will

umnAMrr
SfJCTOHlA
VICTORIA. B. C-
VICTORIA C®UOT U*RAM1
VICTORIA. B.C.
THE EIGHTEENTH
CENTURY BACKGROUND
By the same Author
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY BACKGROUND

NINETEENTH CENTURY STUDIES
Chatto & Windus

Victoria coujA»^ LimAmi
VICTOH4A. m. c.
The
Eighteenth Century
Background
Studies on the Idea of Nature
in the Thought of the Period
By
Basil Willey
FELLOW OF PEMBROKE COLLEGE
KING EDWARD VII PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE
IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
1950
CHATTO & WINDUS
LONDON
VICTORIA COLLEGE.
L13RAK (
VICTORIA O
iLLEGC
LIBRARY
VICTORIA, B. C.
PUBLISHED BY
Chatto & Windus
LONDON
*
Clarke, Irwin Company Ltd

TORONTO
FIRST PUBLISHED I94O

FOURTH IMPRESSION 1 950
PRINTED BY THE REPLIKA PROCESS

IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
LUND HUMPHRIES
LONDON BRADFORD
*
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

•
'
(
\\ J ) . 1
Preface
IKE its predecessor The Seventeenth Century Background
(1934), this book is the outcome of lectures delivered
1 in the Faculty of English at Cambridge. It is in-
tended as a companion volume to the other work, and con-

tinues the story down to the end of the eighteenth century.
Whereas for the seventeenth century ‘Truth’ seemed to
be the key-word, this time it is ‘Nature’. I have not
presumed to write even an outline ‘history’ of eighteenth

century thought in general, but have tried to illustrate the
importance, in that century, of the idea of ‘Nature’ in
religion, ethics, philosophy and politics, and in particular
to indicate some stages in that divinization of ‘Nature’
which culminates in Wordsworth. This is the central
theme of the book, and from this it derives whatever unity
it may have —
though I have at times elaborated the study
of certain representative writers to cover a wider field.
Much of what follows can be regarded as prolegomena
to the study of Wordsworth and Coleridge. The whole
book is addressed, partly to the general reader who takes
an unprofessional interest in the history of ideas, and
partly to the literary student who may care to seek for
explanations or analogies outside the sphere of ‘pure’
literature.
The book were written under
closing chapters of the
the shadow of approaching war, and when the catastrophe
finally came I wondered at first whether it was fitting to
come forward, at such a time, with studies so remote from
actuality. But possibly if it is ever worth while to study
past modes of thinking and feeling, it is none the less so
now, and it happens that the eighteenth century can per-
v
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY BACKGROUND
haps offer merely escape or refreshment, but even
us, not
actual guidance in our present troubles.
My acknowledgments are due, and are gratefully given,
to the Clarendon Press for permission to include, as the
first chapter, my contribution to Seventeenth Century
Studies Presented to Sir Herbert Grierson (1938).
B. W.
Pembroke College, Cambridge,
November 1939.
VI
Contents
Preface âie v
Chapter I THE TURN OF THE CENTURY I
1. Natural Science and Natural Religion 3

2. Natural Law 14
3. ‘Nature’ in Literary Theory 18
II THE WISDOM OF GOD IN THE CREATION 27

1. Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth 27
2. John Ray’s Wisdom of God in the Creation 34
3. Derham’s Physico-Theology 39
III COSMIC TORYISM 43

1. Whatever is, is Right 43
'
2. Soame Jenyns and Dr Johnson ^ 48 )
IV NATURAL MORALITY— SHAFTESBURY H

57
1. The Divinization of Nature 61
2. The Religion of Nature 65

3. Man is Naturally Social 67
4. Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit 70
5. The Free Play of Mind 74
V NATURAL MORALITY—JOSEPH BUTLER 76

1 . The Analogy of Religion 77
2. Butler as Moralist 84
VI ‘NATURE’ IN SATIRE 95
1. Mandeville 95
2. A Note on Swift
• •
100 /
Vll
VII DAVID HUME, DEFENDER
OF ‘NATURE’
AGAINST ‘REASON’ Page iio
i. Metaphysics: ‘Nature’ as a Habit of the
Mind
IIO
2 . Ethics: Morality as a Sentiment of the Heart
119
3- Religion: Based on ‘Faith’, not
on ‘Reason’ 126
VIII DAVID HARTLEY AND NATURE’S

EDU-
CATION
*3*
1. The Doctrine of
Vibrations
141
2. The Moral Superstructure
142
IX HOLBACH’S STSTMME DE LA NATURE

155
X JOSEPH PRIESTLEY AND THE

SOCINIAN
MOONLIGHT 1 bo
. ,
1. Matter and Spirit
r 1
73
2. The Doctrine of Philosophic Necessity l
r 8
3. Priestley’s Religious Outlook lgl
4. Politics and History
y
194
XI ‘NATURE’ IN REVOLUTION
t \A7 K ~ ~ T’ 1
AND REACTION 20<
J
i» William Godwin 1 1
205
(i) Natura Naturata and Natura
Naturans 205
(ii) Nonconformity and Moral Inculcation
212
(**"*) Political Justice
2I 7
The Twilight
(ivj
of a Doubtful Immortality
2 35
2. Edmund Burke
240
XII ‘NATURE’ IN WORDSWORTH
2
'• The Evolutionary
Phase: the Uneasy Heart
2. A Never-failing Principle of
Joy ^
INDEX
2 95
Vlll
CHAPTER I
The Turn of the Century

Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night:
God said, Let Newton be! and all was light!
HE eighteenth century
—
‘the silver age of the
T —
European Renaissance’ virtually begins in the
final decades of the seventeenth. When we enter
those decades we recognize on all sides the familiar
eighteenth century landmarks, lit by the familiar illumin-
ation of the time. Glory and loveliness may have passed
away, but so also have the fogs and glooms of history
the common daylight which now descends upon a dis-
tracted world may be prosaic, but at least it is steady and
serene, and has not yet become dark with excessive light.
One meets everywhere a sense of relief and escape, relief
from the strain of living in a mysterious universe, and
escape from the ignorance and barbarism of the Gothic
centuries. Nature’s laws had been explained by the New
Philosophy; sanity, culture, and civilization had revived;
and at last, across the vast gulf of the monkish and deluded
past, one could salute the ancients from an eminence per-
haps as lofty as their own. In England there was added to
the general feeling of emancipation from historic spectres
a sense of security from the upheavals of the Civil War
period. ‘We have been so long together bad English-
men’, wrote Dryden in 1668, ‘that we had not leisure to
be good poets’ but now, ‘with the restoration of our hap-
;
piness, we see revived Poesy lifting up its head, and already

shaking off the rubbish which lay so heavy on it’.
In this ‘noble Eluctation of Truth, wherein, against the
tenacity of Prejudice and Prescription, this Century now
prevaileth’, no conception played a more significant part
than that of ‘Nature’, and in the present chapter it is
A 1
;

proposed to examine some of the uses to which that idea
was put at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of
the eighteenth centuries. ‘Nature’ has been a controlling
idea in Western thought ever since antiquity, but
it has
probably never been so universally active as it was from the
Renaissance to the end of the eighteenth century. Nature
was the grand alternative to all that man had made of man
upon her ground therefore—upon the tabula rasa
solid
prepared by the true philosophy —
must all the religion,
the ethics, the politics, the law, and the art
of the future be
constructed. Leslie Stephen has said that ‘Nature is a
word contrived in order to introduce as many equivoca-
tions as possible into all the theories, political, legal, artistic
or literary, into which it enters ’. An American scholar has
recently distinguished sixty different senses
of the term.
Even in the seventeenth century Robert Boyle 1 the naturai
,
philosopher, could enumerate eight senses
of the word as
used m philosophy and natural science, and
Pierre Bayle , 2
complaining of the ambiguity of the same word,
mentions
that eleven different meanings for it can
be discovered in
i Corinthians. Nevertheless in our period it was not the
ambiguity of ‘Nature’ which people felt most
strongly; it
was rather the clarity, the authority, and the
universal
acceptability of Nature and Nature’s laws.
The laws of
Nature are the laws of reason they are always
; and every-
where the same, and like the axioms of mathematics
they
have only to be presented in order to be
acknowledged as
just and right by all men. The historic
role of ‘Nature’
at this time was to introduce, not further
confusion, but its
precise opposites, peace, concord, toleration,' and pro-
gress in the affairs of men, and, in poetry
and art, perspi-
cuity, order, unity, and proportion.
%
A r£e Inqutty mt0 the VulSarl Received Notion

y of Nature: Works (1744),
vol \J
» Rtponse aux questions d'un Provincial
(1706 ed.), vol. ii, ch. cv, p. 391.
2
THE TURN OF THE CENTURY
i . Natural Science and Natural Religion
This was the Golden Age of natural theology and

deistical freethinking: the age of Spinoza and of Bayle,
of the Cambridge Platonists, of Locke, I'oland, Blount,
Collins, Clarke, Wollaston, Shaftesbury, Tindal, and the
rest. During the Christian centuries religion had rested
upon revelation; now it rested largely upon ‘Nature’, and
even the orthodox, who retained the supernatural basis,
felt that faith must be grounded firmly upon Nature before
one had recourse to super-nature. ‘All the duties of
Christian religion’, says Archbishop Tillotson himself,
‘which respect God, are no other but what natural light
prompts men to, excepting the two sacraments, and pray-
ing to God in the name and by the mediation of Christ.’
1
‘And even these’, continues Anthony quot-
Collins (after
ing this passage), ‘even these, he justly observes, are of
less moment than any of those parts of religion which in
their own nature tend to the Happiness of human Society’.
Whereas ‘Nature’, in one sense, had been opposed to
‘Grace’, and in another sense —
as ‘natural Light’ could —
at best conduct the Christian pilgrim to the point where
Beatrice must supersede Virgil, now ‘Nature’ (in perhaps
yet another sense) was to furnish the principal evidences
of religion, while a somewhat embarrassing Revelation
must be harmonized with it as best might be. How had
this situation arisen? To account fully for the change
would be an intricate task; let us merely remind ourselves
of two relevant forces —
the scientific movement of the six-
teenth and the seventeenth centuries, and the religious
conflicts following the Reformation. By the ‘scientific
movement’ is meant the work of (for example) Coper-
nicus, Kepler, Galileo, Bacon, Harvey, Gilbert, Descartes,
Boyle, the Royal Society, and Newton. For our purposes
the results of this great movement were twofold. First,
it produced a ‘climate of opinion’ in which supernatural
1 Discourse of Freethinking (1713), p. 136.
3
and occult explanations of natural phenomena ceased to
satisfy, and the universe came more and more to be re-
garded as the Great Machine, working by rigidly deter-
mined laws of material causation. The supernatural, in
both its divine and its diabolical forms, was banished from
Nature. But, if one may put it so, Satan was banished on
harsher terms than his divine Antagonist! and this brings
us to the second point, namely, that though the new
philo-
sophy was anti-supernaturalist, it was not at first anti-
religious. Most of the great scientists just mentioned
conceived that they had rendered the highest services
to
religion as well as to science, and Descartes,
Boyle, and
Newton, as is well known, were notable theists. As Bacon
had said (and Sir Fhomas More before him), science
was
the study of the works of God, and this should
be almost,
ifnot quite, as pious a pursuit as the study of his
word.
A little learning might be a dangerous
thing, but deeper
draughts of philosophy would bring us back to sober
faith.
This view involved a changed attitude towards Nature
and
natural science; meant that Nature was rescued from
it
Satan and restored to God. For the physical world, in

spite of its divine origin, was traditionally
held to have
shared in the fatal consequences of the fall
of man, and to
have become the chosen abode of the
apostate spirits.
Science in the Middle Ages was largely
black magic;
Nature was full of pagan divinities turned
devils, and to
meddle with it was to risk damnation. Friar Bacon
was im-
prisoned as a sorcerer, and the Faust story
illustrates the
fascinated horror with which, as late as
the sixteenth cen-
tury, the popular mind regarded
knowledge. But
scientific
now the more fortunate Francis Bacon could announce
with conviction and authority that science
was not the for-
bidden knowledge; that God had provided
two channels
of revelation not one merely: the
Scriptures, of course,
but Nature also. Did not the Psalmist
write Coeli enarrant
gloria m Dei ? And Bacon’s follower,
Sir Thomas Browne
assured his readers that there is no
4
danger to profound
these mysteries’, and that God prefers a ‘devout and
4
, :

’
1
learned admiration’ of his works to that ‘gross rusticity
which stares and gapes at Nature, or trembles at portents
where none were intended.
Science, then, it may be
played an all-important
said,
part in producing the divinized ‘Nature’ of the eighteenth
century (and ultimately of the ‘romantic’ generation).
That science was thus able, for a time, to furnish natural
religion with one of two indispensable foundations
its
— belief in a divine universe —

was perhaps due to the
fact that the findings of science, up to date, could fuse
harmoniously with the presuppositions inherited from
Christianity, which, though shaken by controversy, still
remained as almost unquestioned certainties in men’s
hearts. For what had science revealed? Everywhere
design, order, and law, where hitherto there had been
chaos. Whether one contemplated the infinitely great
through the optic glass of the Tuscan artist, or the in-
finitely little through the microscope of Malpighi, one
received at every turn new assurance that all was ‘accord-
ing to the Ordainer of order and mystical mathematicks of
the city of heaven’. Biology had as yet revealed no dis-
turbing ancestries, and man was still unassailed by anthro-
pology and psycho-analysis. Materialism itself could
scarcely dispense with a divine hypothesis (though this
soon followed): the Great Machine presupposed the
Divine Mechanic. And when Newton bound together
in one dazzling synthesis the great and the little, the stars
in their courses and the fall of an apple, a thankful genera-
tion, at once scientific and pious, could exclaim with its
spokesman, Alexander Pope:
Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night:
God said, Let Newton be! and all was light!
and with its other spokesman, Addison
The spacious firmament on high
With allthe blue aethereal sky
And spangled heavens, a shining frame,
Their great Original procl aim.
1 Religio Medici i, sect. xiii.
5
Secondly, how did the religious conflicts of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries lead up to the growth of natural
religion in our period? Briefly, by calling in doubt all
the points of the faith, and reducing them to the level
of
controversy. Christianity, instead of producing Christian
individuals and societies, seemed for so long to have
been
producing disputes, persecutions, and wars, and had, in
the Protestant countries, not only renounced the
Holy See
but split up further into so many sects, that a
desire
arose during the seventeenth century to formulate
a creed
which should be acceptable to all good and reasonable
men. Christianity was based upon Revelation: well
and
good, but what had in been revealed ? No one seemed
facj:
to know, or rather —
which was worse everybody seemed
to know that his own version was
—
the only correct one.
As Anthony Collins complained in his Discourse oj
Free-
thinking the Bible might be divinely inspired,
,
but this had
not prevented its official interpreters from
disagreeing on
all fundamentals; there was hardly in those days one
clergyman that has consider’d and examin’d
things with
care, that believes all the
Thirty-Nine Articles, in their
proper ând original meaning’. ‘All Faiths have been
shaken writes Charles Blount, ‘but those only
,
which
stand upon the Basis of Common Reason .’ 1
What then ?
Must we abandon religion itself along with the meta-
physical jargon bequeathed by our uncouth
forefathers?
By no means there were ways of escape. The
;
Cambridge
Platomsts, for example, adopted the technique
of setting
religion in a new framework, and changing
the vocabulary
of exhortation. The Platonic and neo-Platonic tradition
was ready at hand to supply them with both.
To platonize
was to avoid the controversial danger-zone;
it was to sug-
gest that salvation did not depend upon
the correct solution
of the credal puzzles. Platonism had after
all been, if not
the Church’s one foundation, at any
rate (as John Smith
observed) the Church’s loving Nurse ’.
‘
The values which

Christians and all men respected had been
taught by Plato
1
Rtligio Laid: Written in a letter to John Dryden, Esq., 1683, p. 85.
;

and the advantage of approaching them by the Hellenic
route was that it led you direct to the summits, and avoided
all the theological morasses which beset you on the Chris-
tian side. But above all, there was the Grand Alternative,
Nature; that proclaimed its divine Original un-
at least
mistakably. The works of Nature everywhere sufficiently
‘
evidence a Deity’, said Locke; sufficiently, that is, for us

to be able to dispense with a troublesome and controverted
revelation. Nature simply obtruded upon us its evidence
for divine activity and wisdom why then seek the living
:
amongst the dead? why seek for evidence of what we

’
already know ? and especially why seek it in the historical ‘
annals of an illiterate Semitic tribe? But that was not all.

Natural religion reaches God not only through the starry
heavens above, but also through the moral law within:
through Reason as well as Nature. Intra te quaere Deum
look for God within thyself. And what exactly would you
find when you looked within ? Not the questionable shapes
revealed by psycho-analysis, but something much more
reassuring: the laws of God and Nature inscribed upon
the heart, the ‘ideas of first impression’, ‘truths of. first
inscription’, ‘common notions {communes notitiaey to —
mention a few of the names by which they were then
known. From these clear imprints Lord Herbert of Cher-
bury had already formulated his fundamentals of natural
religion: acknowledgment of God’s existence, duty to-
wards Him and our neighbour, necessity for repentance,
future state of rewards and punishments. The knowledge
of these points, as even the Schoolmen had held, could be
attained without revelation, by that Reason which, in
Locke’s phrase, is
‘natural Revelation, whereby the Father of Light, and fountain
of all knowledge, communicates to mankind that portion of truth
which he has laid within the reach of their natural faculties .’ 1
These are the saving truths vouchsafed not merely to a

‘chosen people’, but to all mankind, ‘Enacted by the All-
1
Essay Concerning Human Understanding bk.
,
iv, 19, sect. 4.
7
:

wise and Supreme Being from the beginning of the World,
and therefore not to be destroyed or altered by every
whiffling Proclamation of an Enthusiast ’. 1 To the
ques-
tion^ What must I do to be saved ?, therefore, natural
religion made answer: ‘
We want not so much knowledge
to tell us what to do, as Wills to
do that which we may
know!’ You know perfectly well what to do: your own
nature informs you. Follow Reason, the God within;
look after your conduct and your creed will take
care of
itself. In short, whether you looked without or
within,
Nature (without any supernatural revelation) offered
you
all that was needful for salvation.
One should endeavour
to realize how persuasive, and how
sound, these injunc-
tions must have seemed at that time. You
had then upon
the surface a great deal of obvious and
clamorous dis-
sension about doctrinal principles, but below
the surface
a far greater mass of real unanimity
about the nature of
the good life —the end and purpose of living. To this
body of beliefs and attitudes, the product of the
blended
traditions of Greece and of Palestine,
appeal could con-
ndently be made, as to Nature itself. However
furiously
the sects might brawl, these common
notions would re-
main. Whether this attitude can seem so obviously wise
and so available to-day as it did to the Platonists and Deists
of our period, and to such later followers as Matthew
Arnold, Tulloch, or Dean Inge, is open to
cannot now be so sure that it is God we
question. We
shall find if we
look without, and perhaps still less if
we look within.
Even in the seventeenth century some warning
notes were
heard. Pascal found nothing but terror
in the thought of
inter-stellar space; Nature only proved
God to one who
already believed. And even Dryden could write with
well-affected conviction
These truths are not the product of thy Mind,
But dropt from Heaven, and of a Nobler
Kind.
Reveal'd Religion first inform’d thy Sight,
And Reason saw not till Faith sprung the Light.
1
Charles Blount, op. cit., p. 94.
8
Hence all thy Natural Worship takes the Source:
1
’Tis Revelation what thou thinkst Discourse .
But few believed this report: on the contrary, the light

sprung by faith had become so dimmed by controversy
that Nature now seemed to supply the true divine sun-
shine. ’Twas discourse what we thought revealed. Let
us not evade the issues, says Toland, by prating about our
sinful and corrupted state since the Fall. We have got
reason enough if only we will take the trouble to be
reasonable. And the Gospel ‘affords the most illustrious
Example of close and perspicuous Ratiocination conceiv-
able ’. 2 ‘What is revealed in Religion, as it is most useful
and necessary, so it must and may be as easily compre-
hended, and found as consistent with our common Notions,
as what we know of Wood or Stone, of Air, of Water, or
the like. ... As for God, we comprehend nothing better
than His Attributes.’ 3 The essence of the New Testa-
ment revelation was, for Toland, that it did really reveal,
that is, make plain and comprehensible, things formerly
mysterious. Had it been otherwise, where would have
been the superiority of Christianity over ‘the idle dreams
of the philosophers’, the ‘impieties and fables of the
Alcoran’, or the other esoteric quackeries with which the
world was already overstocked? Faith itself is ‘entirely
built upon ratiocination’, since it consists in trusting those
to whom we believe God has spoken, and the latter belief
must be established by evidence. As for ‘the vulgar’,
who are said to be incapable of rational conviction ‘the
—
vulgar are more oblig’d to Christ, who had a better Opinion
of them’. It is the gibberish of the divinity schools which
is above their heads, not the plain, easy truths of Chris-
tianity. Jesus taught pure morals, a reasonable worship,
and just conceptions of heaven; He ‘stripp’d the Truth’
bare of all ceremonial and symbolical trappings, and made
4
it ‘easy and obvious' to the meanest Capacities’. Strip-
1 Religio Laid (1682), 66-71.
2 Toland, Christianity Not Mysterious (1702), p. 46.
3 4 ibid., p. 151.
ibid., pp. 79-86.
9
ping the truth bare was what that age and generation felt
itself to be mainly engaged upon: stripping it bare of
mythology and all the accretions of paganism and popery.
Protestantism, which evolved in England (and elsewhere)
through Puritanism into ‘rationalism’, had always been in
almost equal measure anti-pagan and anti-Catholic; the
sin of popery was that in proselytizing the pagans it
had
absorbed so many of the pagan beliefs and practices. Now
more than ever it was felt that the late era of controversy
had obscured the divine simplicity and rationality of early
Christianity, which had really been so exactly like
the
natural religion of the reign of William and Mary.
That
the freethinkers should have thought their deism
more
natural than paganism or popery illustrates a familiar
ambiguity in the meaning of that term. If ‘natural’ means
what is original or primitive, natural religion would be that
which was most deeply grounded in prehistory and the
collective unconscious, while deism of the Stoical or
eighteenth century varieties would appear as a late product
of civilized sophistication. But, for our deists, ’
natural
‘
meant what is congenial to the mind of an abstract Man

whose traits corresponded to those of the honnete homme
,
the man of parts and sense, who had become
the moral
norm of the age.
Speaking broadly, we are confronted, on approaching
the eighteenth century, with a steady decline
in what has
been called the tragic sense of life. We have gone
on too
^ was felt, repeating that we are miserable offenders,
and that there is no health in us. We must change
these
notes to something more cheerful, something
more befit-
ting a polite and civilized age. As that
excellent repre-
sentative of the time, Halifax, puts it in
The Character of
a Trimmer (1684): there should not always
‘
be Storms or
.Thunder; a clear Sky would sometimes make
the Church
look more like Heaven’, — our Church, especially, which
(thank Heaven) is itself ‘a Trimmer between
the phrenzy
of Platonick visions and the Lethargick
Ignorance of
Popish Dreams’. ‘Religion’, says the same
author in his
10
:

Advice to a Daughter (the daughter who became the mother
of Lord Chesterfield), ‘is a chearful thing, so far from
being always at Cuffs with Good Humour, that it is in-
separably united to it.’ ‘A wise Epicure would be re-
ligious for the sake of Pleasure.’ ‘No other thing is the
better for being Sowre, and it would be hard that Religion
should be so, which is the best of things.’ Exorcize from
religion, therefore, its .sombre and tragic elements its —
jealous and offended God, its conviction of sin; put in
place of Jehovah the Supreme Being, in whom there is
no darkness at all, and see in Adam’s posterity a race who
would always have loved the highest if only designing
priests had not prevented them from seeing it. Against
the Deus absconditus the Dieu irrite of Pascal, Shaftesbury
,
puts forward a deity who is ‘the best-natured Being in the

world’. ‘What a charming Idea does he give us of the
Deity’, says Collins of Tillotson x alone sufficient,
: ‘it is
without any further Argument, to make the Atheist wish

there were a Deity.’ M. Paul Hazard has recently de-
scribed the deists of this time ‘as rationalists with a nos-
talgia for religion’: men, that is, who had allowed the
spirit of the age to separate them from orthodoxy, but who
liked to believe that the slope they had started upon was
not slippery enough to lead them to atheism. Meanwhile,
one might delete from the Beatitudes ‘Blessed are they
that mourn’
On veut detourneryeux du Christ douloureux, crucifie
les
pour le salut des hommes; on ne veut plus entendre l’appel muet

de ses bras. Le bonheur est l’expansion d’une force qui se trouve
spontanement en nous-memes,etqu’ilsuffitdediriger. L’accepta-
tion des peines, l’appetit du sacrifice, la lutte contre l’instinct,
la folie de la croix, ne sont plus que des erreurs de juge-
ment, des habitudes mauvaises. Le Dieu-Raison nous defend
de concevoir notre existence mortelle comme une preparation k
2
rimmortalite .’
1
op. cit., p. 136.
2 La Crise de la Conscience Europdenne (Paris, 1935), vol. ii, p. 93.
Meanwhile significant confirmatory evidence for natural
religion and natural morality had for some time been pour-
ing in from the accounts of voyagers, both real and im-
aginary, to non-Christian lands in distant parts of the
earth. The noble savage had made an important entry
upon the European stage in the sixteenth century, when
Pigafetta, who voyaged round the world with Magellan,
wrote that the Brazilians followed Nature, wore no clothes,
lived to be 140 years of age, and were free from
the
civilized vices.Montaigne, whose essay Of Cannibals is
best known as the source of Gonzalo’s Utopian
speech
in The Tempest describes therein the conduct
, of three
savages at the court of Charles IX, and declares
that
what he had seen of their manners surpassed ‘all the
pictures with which poets had adorned the golden
age’.
In the seventeenth century a host of travellers
repeated
the same tale. Most remarkable of all, perhaps, not
only merchants and philosophic dreamers, but even
Jesuit missionaries to Paraguay, Brazil, Canada,
China,
and elsewhere agreed to praise the virtues of the unspoilt
natural man, whose physique and whose morals
every-
where, it seemed, put those of Christendom to
shame.
The Utopian method of satirizing or criticizing one’s
own civilization was of course a well-established conven-
tion, and many Utopias appeared during
this time: for
example, Foigny’s Terre Australe Connue(i 6 6 )
j
ing an ideal island in the Southern Seas inhabited
—describ-
by
hermaphroditic deists enjoying perfect liberty and
equality
or La Betique in Fenelon’s Telemaque
(1699). Put
the interesting point is that so many actual
travellers and
missionaries wrote in like fashion. Evidently they
wrote
rather as moralists and satirists than as
anthropologists.
Noting what seemed to be the absence from savage
society
of the characteristic institutions of Europe, especially
pro-
perty, inequality, coercive government
and the Church,
they concluded that the primitives lived in the
Paradise
lost long since for us by Adam.
In any case such ac-
counts provided a safe means of indirectly
attacking the
12
: :

institutions of one’s own country. As GeofFroy Atkinson
1
says
‘
En parlant des indigenes de l’Amerique, les auteurs de voyages
ne risquaient pas d’alarmer les autorites qui auraient tres mal reû,
probablement, un traite sur le communisme.’
But even so, the ecclesiastical authorities in France became

seriously perturbed by the end of the century, for there
were awkward theological implications in all this primi-
tivism. These good savages, these sage Chinese, these
noble Indians, these honest negroes, these wise and toler-
ant heathens of every colour —
had they somehow escaped
the curse of Adam ? It was not to be thought of; though
Foigny had indeed suggested that his Australians were
descended, not from Adam, but from a previous being
— an androgyne unmentioned by Moses who had never —
fallen. What seems finally to have awakened the orthodox
to the menace from beyond Christendom -\vas a book about
China by the Jesuit Father Le Comte (1696), in which he
asserted that the Chinese had preserved the true know-
ledge of God for more than two thousand years, and had
practised all the while a purer morality than most Chris-
tians. This book was condemned by the Paris Faculty of
Theology in the following terms
ceux qui ont vecu selon la raison, soit Juifs, soit Gen-
‘Si tous
tiles, ont ete veritablement et proprement Chretiens et en etat de
salut, comme ceux qui ont eu la foi et a qui Jesus-Christ a ete

revels, on peut done se sauver par les forces de la nature, et la foi
en Jesus-Christ Mediateur n’est nullement necessaire.’ 2
On the whole, this was in fact very much what the age
wanted to believe. For centuries Christian kings and
Christian priests had been spreading the dark blight of
tyranny and superstition over a portion of the world’s sur-
1 Les Relations de Voyages du i y e Siecle et l’ Evolution des ldies (Paris, 1926),
p. 40. I am indebted, for the above references, to this work and to the same
author’s English work, The Extraordinary Voyage in French Literature before

1700 (Columbia Univ. Press, 1920).
2 Atkinson, Relations de Voyages
, p. 97.
13
face: only pass beyond that shadow, and you would find
unspoilt Nature, still apparelled in celestial light. These
generations, especially in France, were anxious to escape
from the tragic glooms of history, and they willingly
adopted the touching belief that la-bas on etait bien. La-bas
,
for Montaigne and the sixteenth century, had mostly

meant America, but closer acquaintance with that country
drove the mirage further and further off, until it finally
settled, for the eighteenth century, in Tahiti. It happened
that Bougainville, the explorer, published his glowing
account of Tahiti just at the time when Rousseau had made
the noble savage fashionable. Once again, in Bougain-
ville’s narrative, the dreams of philosophers and poets
seemed to be confirmed by fact. Diderot, in his Supple-
ment au Voyage de Bougainville ,
made use of Tahiti, as his
editor says, ‘to verify, localize, and render more real the
hypothetical reconstruction of the earliest ages in Rous-
seau’s second Discourse ’.
‘
Voulez-vous savoir [he wrote] l’histoire abregee de presque
tout notre misere ? la voici. II existoit un homme natureli
on a introduit au dedans de cet homme un homme artificiel,
et il s est eleve dans la caverne une guerre civile qui dure toute
la vie .’ 1
2. Natural Law
Samuel Pufendorf was the first to occupy a Chair as Pro-
fessor of the Law of Nature and of Nations (at Heidelberg,
c. 1662), but the idea which he
expounded had behind it
a long and venerable history. In antiquity the cry
Follow ‘
Nature’ was raised by Cynics, Stoics, and Epicureans; and

the Stoics, like their later counterparts, linked together
the
starry heavens and the moral law within the law that pre- :
served the stars from wrong was also the rule of

duty.
The Stoic law of Nature, as the source and test of morality,
fused with the jus gentium of the Roman Jurists, which,
1
Diderot, Supplement au Voyage de Bougainville
, ed. G. Chinard (Johns
Hopkins Press, 1935), quoted in editor’s Introd., p. 57.
14
:

originally a body of customary usages employed between
Romans and aliens, came later to be identified with the
laws of that Nature before which all men are equal. The
writings of Cicero (who, by the way, was held in exagger-
ated esteem at the end of the seventeenth century) seem
to have helped towards this fusion
‘Nations and princes may make laws, but they are without the
true character of law if they are not derived from the original
source of law, which existed before the State was established .’ 1
Gaius defines the jus gentium as jus quod naturalis ratio

constituit ,and in Justinian the identification is complete.
The pagan conceptions of the Natural Law and of a life
according to Nature were assimilated and modified by
Christianity. The Law of Nature now becomes the Law of
God, or rather, as St Thomas Aquinas puts it, that part
of the Law Eternal which is made known to man through
his reason 2 Though in Pauline and Augustinian teaching
.
our legal righteousness is mere dross, and our loftiest

virtues only splendid vices, yet Christianity had in Adam
and his prelapsarian bliss a type of the natural man, and
of a State of Nature which, unlike the fabulous Saturnia
regna of the pagan poets, had really once existed. Chris-
tianity was thus able to use the conception of a natural
state, i.e. of a state in which the laws of God and of reason,
and we may add, the Gospel laws especially, should pre-
vail, as a perpetual check upon existing ways of life. From
the first, however, Christian Natural Law had two aspects
corresponding to the ‘original’ and the fallen natures of
man; there was, on the one hand, what was natural in
Eden, and on the other, what was natural in Europe.
Private property, in the opinion of St Ambrose, for ex-
ample, is not an institution of Nature; Nature gave all
things to all men in common it was usurpation and greed
:
which created dominion. Things being as they are since

the Fall, however, property not necessarily an evil.
is
Similarly, men made in the image of God are ‘by nature’

1 De Legibus, i, 7.
2
Summa, la Ilae, Q. xciv, 2.
free, yet sin has made serfdom and all the paraphernalia
of coercion a necessity. The Gospel rule that we should
do as we would be done by was a law of Nature, yet man
in his depravity must be compelled by positive law to obey
this natural law. On the whole, then, the existing system
was sanctioned by God and Nature for the preservation of
order, and departures from it would be unnatural. Yet
still the idea of the first and purer Natural Law hovered in
the background, and man, though severely damaged by

the Fall, could feel that he' had not yet lost all his original
brightness. Liberty, equality, and fraternity were still the
perquisites of his ideal if not of his actual nature, and even
in the Middle Ages the established order could be criti-
cized from this standpoint. For instance, as goods were
originally or by nature held in common, Natural Law still
demands that the rich shall relieve the poor out of their
superfluity. Similarly, slavery was supposed to be con-
trary to Nature (in spite of Aristotle, who had thought it
quite natural), and the various radical revolts of the Middle
Ages were partly inspired by Natural-Law doctrine. On
the whole, however, one may perhaps risk the generaliza-
tion that it was the idea of a controlling Law of Nature
which officially dominated the Middle Ages, rather than
that of the liberating Rights of Nature; and that in passing
into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ‘Nature’
ceases to be mainly a regulating principle, and becomes
mainly a liberating principle. The Middle Ages con-
demned usury as unnatural (‘a
breed of barren metal’),
contrary to Scripture and to Aristotle; and it also con-
demned, in the names of Scripture and Nature, precisely
‘that effort to achieve a continuous and unlimited increase
in material wealth which modern societies applaud as
meritorious ’. 1 The centuries following the Renaissance
liberated the acquisitive impulses, also in the name of
Nature, and severed economic ethics from control by any
comprehensive conception of the ultimate purpose of
human (not to say Christian) living. The inhabitants of
1 Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism , p. 35.
l6
the brave new world could feel that the world was all
before them, and Providence their guide. For, as the

eighteenth century discovered,
Thus God and Nature fixed the general frame,

And bade self-love and social be the same.
So beneficently had God planned the world, that by giving

full rein to his acquisitive appetites the individual was, in
fact, adding his maximum
quota to the sum of human
happiness. Thus, instead of Dante ascending to Paradise
under the guidance of Reason and Grace, instead of
Spenser’s Arthur, fashioned in noble and gentle discipline,
instead of Bunyan’s Pilgrim, setting forth with his load of
sin to escape from the wrath to come, the new world offers
us as its symbolical figure Robinson Crusoe, the isolated
economic man, pitting his lonely strength successfully
against Nature in a remote part of the earth, and carrying
on a little missionary activity as a side-line. The Law of
Nature, which in the Middle Ages had been a check on
unregenerate impulse, had now been transformed into a
sanction for laissez-faire and free competition for the
,
spoils of the world.

Somewhat similarly the idea of a State of Nature, especi-
ally after Locke, came to be used as a means whereby the
new ruling classes could vindicate, against the surviving
restraints of the old feudal and ecclesiastical order, their
cherished rights of individual freedom and of property.
But further, the eighteenth century was haunted by the
philosophical mirage of the State of Nature, and used it as
an ideal standard by which an obsolete actuality could be
condemned. It has often been pointed out that Locke’s
vindication of the Whig Revolution inspired both the
American and the French Revolutions, both of which were
accompanied by declarations of the natural and inalienable
Rights of Man. It was especially his successors, the
French philosophes who ,
(in Bryce’s somewhat rhetorical
phrase) converted ‘that which had been for nearly two
thousand years a harmless maxim, almost a commonplace
b 17
mgss of dynamite which shattered an
of morality’, into ‘a
ancient monarchy and shook the European continent’. 1
Natural Law, sanctioning liberty and progress, was to be
the basis of the modern liberal-bourgeois State.
3. Nature in Literary Theory

First follow Nature, and your judgment frame
By her just standard, which is still the same.
Critics and no less, than theologians, jurists, and
poets,
political philosophers, were at this time referring habitu-
ally to Nature as their standard. The protean ambiguity
of the term is well illustrated in the circumstance that it
was Pope, commonly regarded by the nineteenth century
as the chief exemplar of an ‘artificial’ poetry, who wrote
the lines just quoted, and who described Nature as ‘at once
the source, and end, and test of Art’. The Nature of one
age becomes the Art of the next, and each new school has
to fight against the Nature of the last age. Wordsworth
himself, when rejecting the ‘gaudy and inane phraseology’
of the eighteenth century, hardly felt more conscious of
making a salutary return to Nature than Dryden when
abandoning ‘metaphysics’ and Jacobean over-luxuriance
in favour of the style of Sir John Denham, whose Cooper's
Hill he wrote, ‘is, and ever will be, the exact standard of
,
good writing’. The ‘Nature’ of the critics doubtless bor-

.
rowed some of its authority from physics and theology, but

the special problem in criticism was to reconcile adherence
to Nature with adherence to the rules of Art, and both with
the requirements of reason and good sense. The favourite
solution, that of Rapin and Pope, was to identify Nature,
the ancients, the rules, and sound reason, so that to follow
any was to follow all. ‘Art’, says Rapin, is ‘good Sense
reduc’d to Method’; and again, the Rules were ‘made
only to reduce Nature into Method’. 2 The Rules, in fact,
1
Studies in Jurisprudence , vol. ii, p. 163.
2
Reflections on Aristotle's Treatise of Poesie (1674): Rymer’s translation,
1706 ed., vol. ii, pp. 146 and 240.
18
are those laws in whose service is perfect naturalness; only
by following them does the poet’s work become ‘just, pro-
portionate, and natural’ they are founded on ‘good sense
:
and sound reason, rather than on Authority and Example’

—though, of course, the ancients exhibit these qualities in
the highest degree, and ‘it is in these great Originals that
4
our modern poets ought to consult Nature ’. Further , the
only certain way to please, is by Rules’; hence, what
pleases must be
accordance with the Rules, and must
in
therefore also be an imitation of Nature. What, for in-
stance, is ‘natural’ in poetic diction? Dryden answers:
‘Virgil and Horace, the severest writers of the severest age,

have made frequent use of the hardest metaphors, and of the
strongest hyperboles; and in this case the best authority is the
argument; for generally to have pleased, and through all
best
ages, must bear the force of universal tradition. And if you
would appeal from thence to right reason, you will gain no more
by it in effect, than, first, to set up your reason against those
authors; and, secondly, against all those who have admired them.
... I grant you, that the knowledge of Nature was the original
rule; and that all poets ought to study her, as well as Aristotle and
Horace, her interpreters. But then this also undeniably follows,
that those things which delight all ages must have been an imitation
, y
1
of Nature
.'’
Here ‘imitation of Nature’ seems to approach the sense

of ‘satisfying to the mind or heart or imagination of man’
—an interpretation made explicitly in the next century
by Reynolds:
‘My notion of Nature comprehends not only the forms which
Nature produces, but and internal fabric and or-
also the nature
ganization, as I may call it, of the human mind and imagination.
. He who thinks Nature, in the narrow sense of the word, is
. .
alone to be followed, will produce but a scanty entertainment for

the imagination: everything is to he done with which it is natural
for the mind to be pleased. ... In short whatever pleases has in it
,
1 Apology for Heroic Poetry and Poetic Licence (1677), in Ker’s edition of
Dryden’s Essays, vol. i, p. 183. (My italics.)
19
what is analogous to the mind and
,
is, therefore, in the highest and
1
best sense of the word, natural .’
Whatever pleases whom ? The principle would seem to

sanction the most unlimited individualism in taste. In
fact,however, most educated people between Rapin and
Reynolds were pleased with much the same things, and
‘whatever pleases’ meant whatever pleased them; their
preferences and aversions could well seem those of average
educated humanity. ‘Natural’ in this context (as in most
others at this time) has lost all reference to what is original
or primitive, and has come to mean what is congenial to
those in whom human nature is most fully developed, that
is, to the educated in the most polite nations of the civilized
world. To establish the ‘natural’ in art we must follow
the method of Grotius in establishing the authority of
Natural Law: we must refer to what is received amongst
the ‘most civil’, since ‘what is natural we must judge by
those in whom nature is least corrupt, and not by the
depraved’. 2 What pleased the Goths is not natural, for
in their time poets ‘suffered their Wits to ramble in the
Romantick way’. 3 And what qualities in poetry best
pleased the most civil of our period ? All must be ‘just,
uniform and proportionable’; design or ‘ordonnance’ is
the first consideration. The Epic or Heroic poem is ‘the
greatest Work that Human Wit
capable of’, and the is
weightiest critical remarks of the age refer to this, or to
Tragedy. The Fable should combine the astonishing with
the probable in such a just Temperament as may please the
‘
Fancy without shocking the Reason’. Poetic probability

is preferable to ‘Truth’ (realism): ‘Nothing is brought
into the World that is not remote from the Perfection of
its Idea from its very Birth. Originals and Models are to
be search’d for in Probability, and in the Universal Prin-
ciples of Things, where nothing that is Material and
1
Discourse VII, pp. 193 and 197 in Roger Fry’s edition. (My italics.)
2
Of the Laiv of Warre and Peace, Eng. trans., London, 1655, First Part,
sect. v.
3
Rapin, op. cit., p. 158. The ensuing quotations are from the same treatise.
20
—
Singular enters to corrupt them’. In this theory the two
meanings of ‘Natural’ (a) what is ‘true’ and (b) what is
‘pleasing’ — are harmonized. We are in j act -pleased by
what is true\ but‘
‘true’ here means the universal, not the
particular. ‘Nature’ for the poet is the idea, the form,
the potentiality which in history, and in ‘fact’, strive to
realize themselves in refractory matter. Art completes
what Nature leaves imperfect; Nature offers a brazen
—
world the poets only deliver a golden. The problem
was that which has exercised poets and critics in all ages,
namely, how to intensify Nature without distorting it;
how to attain the universal without abandoning the parti-
cular; how to ‘subject the shows of things to the desires
of the mind’ without producing chimaeras; how to be
poetical without ceasing to be natural; how to be natural
without becoming mean or insipid. The critics of the
neo-classic age could solve the problem in their own way
because they knew what pleased them, and they surmised
that this corresponded with Nature’s own intentions. A
play, says Dryden, ‘to be like Nature, is to be set above
it’ ;
indeed the representation of Nature,
a serious play ‘is
but ’tis Nature wrought up to an higher pitch’. 1 must We

not follow Nature on foot, but mounted upon Pegasus.
So, the characters in our heroic poems or plays must be
types, not individuals; their thoughts, sentiments, and
expressions must be suited to their Age, Sex, Quality,
Employment, and Fortune. In our Eclogues, our shep-
herds and nymphs must not be real rustics, nor should
their talk run too much upon the technicalities of their
calling. We
must avoid alike the gross bucolicism of
Theocritus and Ronsard, and the over-sophistication of
Guarini or Marino. ‘L’illusion et en meme temps l’agre-
ment des bergeries’, wrote Fontenelle, 2 ‘consiste done a
n’offrir aux yeux que la tranquillite de la vie pastorale,
dont on dissimule la bassesse: on en laisse voir la sim-
plicity, mais on en cache la mis£re.’ Similarly our diction
1 Essay of Dramatic Poesy, Ker, vol. i, pp. ioo and 102.

2 Discours sur V Eglogue (1688): Works (1790-2 ed.), vol. v, p. 16.
2 I
must be ‘Apt, Clear, Natural, Splendid, and Numerous '; 1
one must be simple, but nobly simple not base, dull, or —
without sinew; one should aim at the grand manner, but
without conceit or extravagance. Decorum is the most
universal of all the Rules.
All this decorum —
this propriety of thoughts and words,
this unity and proportionableness, this mending of Nature
by Nature herself — to what purpose is it? For delight,
certainly, Dryden and others will say; but Rapin’s state-
ment is sufficiently representative:
‘’Tis true, Delight is the end Poetry aims at, but not the prin-
cipal End, as others pretend.
In effect, Poetry being an Art,
ought to be profitable by the quality of its own Nature, and by
the essential Subordination 'that all Arts should have to Polity,
whose end in general is the publick Good. Heroick Poesie
. . .
proposes the Example of great Virtues and great Vices, to excite

Men to abhor these, and to be in love with the other Tragedy
rectifies the use of Passions, by moderating our Fear, and our
Pity, which are obstacles of Virtue.’ 2
But immediate aim is delight, the poet tries ‘to give

as the
the most common and natural things a fabulous Gloss, to
render them more Admirable, and heighten Truth by
Fiction’. ‘The common and ordinary Terms are not
proper for a Poet.’
As the seventeenth century wore to its close, Nature
and Reason began on the whole to gain upon Aristotle
and the Rules. The great influence of Descartes, who
had taught men to look within for their first certainties,
and had spread abroad the clear light of geometric reas-
oning, told strongly on behalf of ‘Moderns’ versus
‘Ancients’. It was not that one adopted any new stand-
ards supporters of both parties in that controversy seem
:
to have shared the same general scale of values. It was

a sense that the world’s great age was beginning anew,
and that pupilage to antiquity was now unnecessary.
Now that right Reason had down returned to men, we
1
Rapin, op. cit., p. 163. 2 ibid.,
p. I4 o.
22
could address ourselves direct to her, and neglect the
mediation of Aristotle and Horace, her interpreters. But
with the triumph of the Cartesian spirit a new and dis-
quieting question did suggest itself: now that we were
delivered from ancient error, now that our minds were
filled with clear and distinct ideas, should we really need
poetry any more? —
poetry, which heightens Truth by
fiction, and imparts to all things a fabulous gloss? Per-
haps poetry was the ‘mental rattle’ which awakened the
attention of man in the infancy of society, and perhaps
we should now put away childish things ? Let us hear, on
‘the geometric spirit’, a writer whose range of interests
and whose longevity render him singularly representative
of the period under discussion, Fontenelle poet, critic,
mathematician, historian, philosopher, and popularizer of
—
Descartes.
‘L’esprit geometrique n’est pas si attache k la geometric, qu’il
n’en puisse etre tire, et transports k d’autres connoissances. Un
ouvrage de morale, de politique, de critique, peut-etre meme
d’eloquence, en sera plus beau, toutes choses d’ailleurs egales, s’il
est fait de main de geometre. L’ordre, la nettete, la precision,
l’exactitude, qui regnent dans les bons livres depuis un certain
temps, pourraient bien avoir leur premiere source dans cet esprit
geometrique, qui se repand plus que jamais, et qui en quelque
fa$on se communique de proche en proche k ceux meme qui ne
connoissent pas la geometrie. Quelquefois un grand homme
donne leton k tout son siecle; celui [i.e. Descartes] k qui on
pourroit le plus legitimement accorder la gloire d’avoir etabli un
1
nouvel art de raisonner, Stoit un excellent geometre .’
An age which has produced such a man, and in which

truth has so mightily prevailed against prejudice, should
look forwards to a glorious future, not backwards to the
infancy of society. History, the past, is a nightmare from
which we are trying to awake. The sciences are only
recently born, yet what exhilarating advances they have
already made! We
might, indeed, be grateful to the
1 Preface, Sur /’ Utility des Mathtmatiques et de la Physique, etc.: Works,
vol. vi, pp. 67-8.
23
‘ :

ancients for having exhausted wrong theories for
all the
us in advance. It might have been easy, we may think,
to perceive that
tout le jeu de la nature consiste dans les figures et dans les

mouvemens des corps: cependant, avant que d’en venir la, il a
fallu essayer des idees de Platon, des nombres de Pythagore, des
qualites d’Aristote; et tout cela ayant ete reconnu pour faux, on a
ete reduit a prendre le vrai systeme 1
But although we so easily surpass the ancients in physics,

mathematics, and medicine, which depend upon experi-
ment or exact reasoning, it may be otherwise with poetry.
Eloquence and poetry only require a limited outlook, a
little vivacity of imagination, and a few rules,
in order to
arrive at all the perfection of which they are capable, and
thus in these accomplishments quoiqu'elles ne soient pas
—
en elles-memes fort importantes 2
excelled.
the ancients may have
’
—
Fontenelle thinks that they attained this limited
perfection in the century of Augustus. Virgil’s versifica-
tion was the finest in the world, though in ordonnance,
variety, and nobility of characters our romances have re-
vealed new possibilities.
Poetry, moreover, is essentially
something primitive; it began before prose, and it was
bound up with all that pertains to the childhood of man
with fable and myth, which even now are so congenial to
us that ‘nous retombons aisement en enfance’. But
now
that we have reached maturity, now that Descartes
and
Newton have sprung the light, what of poetry? Ce qui '
n est fonde que sur d agreables fantomes n aurait-il

rien a ,
craindre f 3
’
Fontenelle echoes such writers as Thomas
Sprat, and anticipates Johnson and Wordsworth, in his
opinion that the fabulous’ images of poetry have
now
—
worn very thin -they are ‘extremement usees’, though he
admits that they mettent de dans tout cet umvers’
la vie
this universe which is becoming so mechanical. Nothing
1
Fontenelle, Digression sur les Anciens et les Modernes: Works, vol
’ v’
V
p. 287. (My italics.)
2
ibid., pp. 290-1. (My italics.)
3
Fontenelle, Sur la Poesie en gdndral: Works, vol. iii, p. 195.
24
else exempt from the touch of cold philosophy, and it
is
is unlikely that poetry will escape it. Poetry must save

itself, if at all, by becoming philosophic, by concerning
itself less with surface ornament and more with underlying

realities. It must use ‘real’ or ‘material’ images, in defi-
ance of those who think its function is merely ‘se jouer

sur la superficie des choses, la decorer, l’embellir’.
‘Et que seroit-ce si Ton venoit a decouvrir et a s’assurer que

ces ornemens, pris dans un systeme absolument faux et ridicule,
exposes depuis longtems & tous les passans sur les grands chemins
du parnasse, ne sont pas dignes ne valent pas
d’etre employes, et
la peine qu’ils coutent encore a employer? Qu’enfin il
y a . . .
de la puerilite k gener son langage uniquement pour flatter

l’oreille, et a le gener au point que souvent on en dit moins ce
?’ 1
qu’on vouloit, et quelquefois autre chose
When opening a book of poetry, wrote Jean Le Clerc in

the last year of the seventeenth century, the reader should
remember that he is about to peruse ‘the Work of a
Liar, who
intends to entertain him with Fictions. . . .
The poets are full of false thoughts, by which if we are

not deceived, yet we insensibly lose a good Taste and
right judgment, which are the finest ornaments of human
2
nature.’
Cut by philosophy from their traditional machinery’
off ‘
because it was too fabulous, and cut off (in spite of all that
Perrault and Dryden 3 could urge) from Christian material
because it was too sacred, the poets of the new century
may well seem to have stood shivering in a spiritual east
wind. Boileau is reported to have said that Descartes had
cut the throat of poetry; however, it was only pseudo-
poetry that he helped to destroy. Great new subterranean
forces — political, social, and economic —were indeed to be
required in order to break the glittering surface of the
silver age; but meanwhile, by shifting off the dead weight
1 ibid., pp. 195-6.

2 Parrhasiana (1699), Eng. trans., 1700, p. 6.
3 Cf. Parallele des Anciens et des Modemes (1692), vol. iii, pp. 7 ff., and
Ker’s Dryden , vol. ii, pp. 30 ff.
of antique authority, and by clearing away the neo-classic
lumber, the geometric spirit was preparing the way for
the return to a new Nature, and for a poetry which should
devote itself ‘moins au talent qu’a l’esprit, moins aux
ornemens qu’au fond des choses’.
26
CHAPTER II
The Wisdom of God in the Creation
‘ The works of Nature everywhere sufficiently evidence a Deity'

[Locke.]
HE proposition quoted above was, as we have
T seen, very generally accepted as self-evident at the

beginning of the eighteenth century. I propose to
illustrate the manner of its acceptance by examining briefly
three works which enjoyed considerable vogue in their
own day: Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth or
Telluris Theoria Sacra (1681-9), John Ray’s Wisdom of
God manifested in the Works of the Creation (1691), and
William Derham’s Physico-Theology (1713). It is the last
two of these which I am taking as representative of the
period of the Newtonian illumination, when heaven and
earth were felt to be so obtrusively proclaiming their
’
divine original. But the quality of this physico-theology

‘
will perhaps be better appreciated if we first consider, by

way of contrast, the work of Thomas Burnet, in which an
older, darker theology is seen blending with the temper
of the new philosophy.
1. Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth

%
Thomas Burnet (1 635 ?-i 7 5), successively pupil

1
of
Tillotson at Clare, friend of Cudworth, Fellow of Christ’s,
Master of the Charterhouse, and finally Chaplain-in-
Ordinary to William III, deserves to be read, if only for
his stately prose, which, no less than his theory of- the
world, places him unmistakably within the seventeenth
century penumbra. The Sacred Theory for all its eccen- ,
tricity, has about it a certain epic grandeur both in con-

ception and style, and Burnet might be described as a kind
of prose Milton thirty years nearer to Addison.
Burnet grants, with the physico-theologians, that in the
27
—
general economy of Nature there is enough and more —
than enough —
evidence of design to prove a Deity. Where
he differs from them is in not regarding the world in its
present state as the best of possible worlds. The world,
as we know it, is not the world as God designed it, and it
is therefore both unscientific and blasphemous to ground
our devotion upon its alleged perfections. On the con-

trary, the world is a mighty ruin, a damaged paradise
majestic, no doubt (the work of the divine architect could
scarcely be otherwise, even in decay), but a ruin none the
less. It may furnish evidence of God’s anger, but not of
his original intention; disproportioned sin has jarred
against Nature s chime. Burnet rests his argument upon
three main the chaotic state of the terraqueous
points.*
globe as it presents itself to the unflinching eye, the cer-
tainty that this condition arose from sin, and the
theory
that the cataclysm which produced it was the Flood.
It
will be seen, then, that Burnet’s high argument is blended
of aesthetic, moral, theological, and pseudo-scientific in-
gredients. Indeed hope to show in a moment), his
(as I
belief in the parallel and synchronized working of the
scientific laws along with God’s dispensations is one of
the most significant points in the book.
Casting his eye, then, over the physical world, Burnet
(not unlike Pascal contemplating the stellar
scene) is ap-
palled by what he sees.
‘Oratours and Philosophers treat Nature after a very

different
manner; Those represent her with all her graces and
ornaments,
and if there be anything which is not capable of that,
they dis-
semble it, or pass it over slightly. But Philosophers
view Nature
with a more impartial eye, and without favour or
prejudice give
a just and free account, how they find all the parts of the Uni-
verse, some more, some less perfect .’ 1
If we are to describe the earth- as it really is,
though it be handsome and regular enough to the

eye in certain
parts of it, single tracts and single Regions;
yet if we consider the
1
Theory of the Earth (1684 ed.), p. 109.
28
THE WISDOM OF GOD IN THE CREATION
whole surface of it, or the whole Exteriour Region, ’tis as a broken
and confus’d heap of bodies, plac’d in no order to one another, nor
with any correspondency or regularity of parts: And such a body
as the Moon appears to us, when ’tis look’d upon with a good
Glass, rude and ragged. They are both in my judgment the
. . .
image or picture of a great Ruine, and have the true aspect of a

World lying in its rubbish.’
Still would be our horror if we could descend into

greater
the hideous catacombs below the surface of the earth,
‘some filled with smoak and fire, some with water, and
some with vapours and mouldy Air’; if we saw all this,
‘we should not easily believe that God created it into this
form immediately out of nothing; It would have cost no
more to have made things in better order; nay, it had been
more easie and more simple; and accordingly we are
assured that all things were made at first in Beauty and
1
proportion.’
Or again, consider the sea: how aesthetically unsatisfy-
ing arrangement! how unlike what we should have
is its
supposed to be the taste of the divine artificer in world-

planning !
‘If the Sea had been drawn round the Earth in regular figures
and borders, might have been a great Beauty to our Globe, and
it
we should have reasonably concluded it a work of the first

Creation, or of Nature’s first production but finding on the con-;
trary all the marks of disorder and disproportion in it, we may as

reasonably conclude, that it did not belong to the first order of
things, but was something succedaneous, when the degeneracy of
mankind, and the judgments of Gdd had destroy’d the first World,
and subjected the Creation to some kind of Vanity.’ 2
And the very idea of the ocean-bed, with all its slimy cir-
cumstance, fills Burnet with disgust; such things must
not be put down to divine omnipotence. ‘Nature doth
not fall into disorder till mankind be first degenerate and
leads the way.’ Occasionally, it is true, Burnet slips into
a mood of admiration even of our lost planet, and he
1 2
ibid., p. 125. ibid., p. 129.
29
writes then more in the tone of a Spectator-reverie on the
Sublime or on the ruins of antiquity. Mountains, for
example, move him strongly (and perhaps rather un-
expectedly), and he gives us a passage which Derham
could quote in support of his own very different argument:
‘The greatest objects of Nature are, methinks, the most pleas-

ing to behold ; and next to the great Concave of the Heavens, and
those boundless Regions where the Stars inhabit, there is nothing
upon with more pleasure than the wide Sea and the
that I look
Mountains of the Earth. There is something august and stately
in the Air of these things that inspires the mind with great
thoughts and passions; We do naturally upon such occasions
think of God, and his greatness, and whatsoever hath but the
shadow and appearance of Infinite, as all things have that are too
big for our comprehension, they fill and over-bear the
mind with
their Excess, and cast it into a pleasing kind
of stupor and
admiration .’ 1
Almost all that Addison, Gray, Burke, or even Words-

worth could claim for mountains, one might reflect. Yet
this mood, so akin, apparently, to that in
which Gray
wrote of Gordale Scar or ‘that huge creature of God Ingle-
borough soon deserts him, and he returns to his point.
,
The mountains are majestic ruins, and he receives from

them only a sense of awe, as from old Temples and broken
Amphitheaters of the Romans we collect the greatness of
that people’. Burnet has crossed the Alps and
the Apen-
nines, and the sight of ‘those wild, vast and
indigested
heaps of Stones and Earth seems to have been what
’
first
set him upon devising a theory to account
for such pro-
digies. Apparently there were no physical’
maps in those
—
‘
days only ‘political’, for Burnet deplores the absence

of
the former. He also desiderates rough Globes
(i.e. with
mountains shown in relief) instead of the smooth ones
used
in the schools, for then we should see
‘what a rude lump
our World is which we are so apt to dote upon’.
How, then, was the world formed when fresh from the
1
ibid., p. 139.
30
;

hands of God ? and how did it fall into its present state ?
Burnet’s answers to these questions are not greatly our

to
purpose, but they may be briefly indicated for the sake of
their ‘period’ interest. When
the earth was formed from
chaos the elements were arranged in their ‘proper’ order,
with Earth as the centre, surrounded by the Water, and
this in turn by the Air. ‘Water’, however, includes all
fluids, and consequently the watery surface of the globe
had a top coating of oil. Further, before the process of
creation had quite settled down, the air was full of par-
ticles of dust —
earthy matter which had not yet found its
true location. All this sifted down, and formed a thick
crust by mixing with the oily matter on the surface. .This
became the first crust of the world, and was absolutely
smooth, as befitted the paradise which God had designed
for man. Paradise was not confined to one spot of ground
it covered the whole earth. Burnet refutes with great com-
posure and surprising resourcefulness all the possible scien-
tific objections which might be raised against his theory.
The earth was originally in a ‘right posture’ to the sun,

and so it enjoyed perpetual equinox. How was the earth
watered, if there were no seas and no mountains ? Vapours
arose, he replies, from the waters below the crust, passed
through the surface into the air, and then condensed at
the Poles. Thence
the precipitated water ran in radiating
streams towards the equator —
(why? because, the earth
being slightly oval, the Poles were ‘higher’ than the
equator), and there evaporated. In this beautifully geo-
metrical world, then, so much worthier of its divine
original than the ‘torn troubled form we know’ to-day,
man lived awhile in peace and innocence, enjoying the
tranquil climate and attaining great longevity. This was
the true Golden Age dreamed of by the poets, and Burnet,
like all ‘primitivists’ who have sung or discoursed of such
an age, tells us that it was a time of ‘great easiness and
simplicity’,whereas now we have to endure ‘a more pomp-
ous, forc’d and artificial method’. Let no one think this
paradise fabulous or ‘unnatural’: ‘’Tis we that have left
—
the tract of Nature, that are wrought and screw’d up into
artifices, that have disguis’d our selves; and ’tis in our
World that the Scenes are chang’d, and become more
strange and fantastical ’. 1
What, of the cataclysm which shattered this
then,
spherical and world-wide Eden? It was the Flood, of
course, which produced the heavy change; that must be
unquestioned. But it is precisely here that Burnet pro-
duces his most triumphant pseudo-scientific hypothesis.
The Flood? Yes, but Burnet, strongly tinged with the
scientific curiosity of his age, is dissatisfied with what
Browne had called the ‘popular exposition of Moses’.
Assuming that the earth was in its present state at that
time, how could the available waters have covered the
earth, even granting the most torrential downpour of rain
throughout the specified forty days and nights? It was
inconceivable; there was simply not enough water for the
purpose. What really happened was this in the fulness :
of time the earth’s crust, which had been imperceptibly

drying and shrinking throughout the patriarchal period,
began to crack. And when sin had gathered sufficient
head, parts of the crust collapsed and fell inwards upon the
waters below, forcing them out over all the earth. Here,
says Burnet, is the true explanation of that mysterious
phrase ‘the fountains of the great deep were opened’
a phrase insufficiently regarded by the holders of the rain-
fall theory. When the force of the convulsion had abated,
and the water found its level again, the world was left as
we now see the collapsed portions constituting the
it,
ocean-beds, and the rest the dry land with its fretted coast-
linesand broken surfaces. The blend, in Burnet, of the
theologian and the follower of the ‘new philosophy’, is
well seen in his ingenious way of linking together
the laws
of matter and the decrees of God. How
was the world
ruined? By the operation of natural causes which, one
might suppose, would have produced their result even if
man had retained his first innocence. But the things
1 ibid., p. 249.
32
:

which come to pass in the ordinary course of Nature are
no less ‘providential’ than special interpositions; on the
contrary, the regular mechanism of second causes is the
best evidence of God’s wisdom. And Burnet actually
postulates a kind of pre-established harmony between the
material and the moral worlds
‘This seems to me to be the great Art of Divine Providence, so

to adjust the two Worlds, Humane and Natural, Material and
Intellectual, as seeingthrough the possibilities and futuritions of
each, according to the first state and circumstances he puts them
under, they should all along correspond and fit one another, and
1
especially in their great Crises and Periods .’
For once at least, it would seem, disproportion’d sin chimed

punctually with Nature’s crash.
Burnet’s eschatology (Books III and IV ‘The Burn-
—
ing of the World’ and ‘The New Heavens and New
Earth’) may be mentioned, in conclusion, to complete the
picture. The last conflagration, like the Flood, will have
natural causes. All the volcanoes and more will vomit at
once, aided by ‘fiery meteors’ from above. And if you
desire further inflammable material, consider ‘our Brittish
Soyl’, which contains so much coal that England will be a
particularly hot corner when the catastrophe arrives. The
fire will, however, begin at Rome, as being the seat of Anti-
christ. After the fire, the precipitation of the elements
from the vast smoke-cloud begins, and the original para-
disal earth is reproduced. The thousand years’ reign of
Christ and the Saints follows (Satan being in chains), and
at the end of this period Gog and Magog, and the earth- ‘
born’ (a second race produced from the new Earth), will

arise in a final conflict, in which Satan and the giants will
be destroyed, and the saints translated to heaven. The
Earth will become a fixed star.
This theory, of which its author seems justly proud,
carried many difficulties in its wake, but Burnet tackles
them all with that intrepidity which later brought his
1 ibid.,
p. 107.
c 33
orthodoxy into suspicion, and lost him his Clerkship to
William III. For instance, how does he account for the
diffusion of Noah’s progeny after the Flood ? How was
America peopled from Ararat? Perhaps each continent
had its Noah’s Ark, he replies; we may only have been
apprised by Moses of the particular Ark which concerns
our own part of the world. He is excused by his own
theory from assuming more than one Adam, though he is
ready to surmise that other planets have had their floods,
and so, presumably, their original sins. But the point
which, when later developed in his Archaeologiae Philo-
sophicae (1692), cost him his preferment, is already touched
upon in the Review of the Theory (dated 1690). What
explanation was to be offered to anyone who should object
that, after all, Moses described a terraqueous globe, and
not Burnet’s paradise? Moses, replies Burnet, did not
‘Philosophize or Astronomize in that description’; ‘’tis
a narration suited to the capacity of the people, and not
to the strict and physical nature of things’. Moses must
be interpreted so as not to be ‘repugnant to clear and un-
‘
contested science’. ’Tis a dangerous thing to ingage the

authority of Scripture in disputes about the Natural World,
in opposition to Reason, lest Time, which brings all things
to light, should discover that to be evidently false which
we had made Scripture to assert.’ 1 This argument (no
new one even in Burnet’s time) was worthy, one may feel,
of a better kind of ‘science’ than Burnet’s.
2. John Ray’s fVisdom of God in the Creation

Of the two physico-theologians whom we are now to
consider, John Ray (1627-1705) was by far the more dis-
tinguished. Ray has been called the Aristotle of England
‘
and the Linnaeus of his age’, and he is usually accounted

the founder of modern botany and zoology. He was the
son of an Essex blacksmith, and became a Fellow of Trinity
College, Cambridge, the same year as Barrow (1649). In
that age of harmony between science and religion it is not
1
ibid.. Preface.
34
surprising to find that he took orders (1660), though he
resigned them two years later over the question of the
‘Bartholomew’ Act, remaining, however, in lay com-
munion all his life. His Wisdom of God in the Creation ,
which became something of a classic in the eighteenth

century (it was used by two such diverse teachers as
Wesley and Paley), was written as a College exercise, but
was not published until 1691.
In passing from Burnet to Ray and Derham we become
aware of a change of outlook none the less profound for
being unstated. What we are witnessing is simply the
emergence from the tragic shadows of the past into the
common daylight of the eighteenth century. The Fall is
no longer a haunting obsession, and whatever may be true
of Man, Nature is now be contemplated as the finished
to
and unimprovable product of divine wisdom, omnipotence,
and benevolence. How manifold are thy works,
‘
Lord O !
’
represents the prevailing mood of Ray’s book. With a

confident assurance that his words will be readily accept-
able to his readers, he disposes first of the classical argu-
ments for atheism, sometimes working out his own refuta-
tion, and sometimes referring merely to some unimpeach-
able authority. The heresy of Aristotle, that the world is
eternal, has been exploded by Archbishop Tillotson and
Bishop Wilkins. That of the Epicureans, that the world
can be accounted for by postulating matter, a void, and
the declination of atoms, has been exposed by Cudworth
and Stillingfleet, but had in fact been effectively refuted
long since by Cicero, who of all the ancients seemed, at
that time, perhaps the most entirely admirable. Caelestem
‘
ergo admirahilem ordinem incredibilemque constantiam ex

, ,
qua conservatio et salus omnium omnis oritur qui vacare

,
?'
mente putat nae ipse mentis expers habendus est
,
Had
Cicero known of the Copernican simplification, and all
that we have since learned, could he have said more?
But what of that more subtle modern atheism, that Car-
tesian teaching which, by reducing the Deity to an abstract
first cause, leaves us with a dead universe of matter and
35
: —
?

motion, virtually untenanting Creation of its God ? As a
biologist,Ray was able to attack mechanical materialism,
if not with new arguments, at least with new evidence and
a new degree of confidence. The laws of motion fail to
account for the very class of phenomena in which he was
—
most interested the organization of the bodies of plants
and animals, their adaptation to their environment, and all
the details of their development and structure
‘These mechanick Philosophers being no way able to give an

account thereof from the necessary Motion of Matter, unguided
by Mind for Ends prudently -therefore break off their System
,
there, when they should come to Animals .’ 1
To account for ‘vital motions’, and the existence and pre-

servation of species, Ray demands a ‘vegetative soul’ or a
‘plastick Nature’, which will both relieve God from setting
his hand to every work, and at the same time bear the re-
sponsibility for what may seem to us Errors and Bungles ’.
‘
But for all the marvels of instinct in the animal kingdom

the parental solicitude of birds, the non-appearance of
wasps until the ‘plumbs’ are ripe, the organization of the
bee-hive, and so forth, as well as for the maintenance of
the due proportion of the sexes in animals —
for all these
and the other manifold instances of design, he postulates
a superintendence by a principle superior to the ‘plastick
or spermatick Nature’. No matter how closely we pry
into Nature, the evidence all repeats the same tale. Had
Pliny looked through one of our microscopes, and seen the
animalculae in a drop of water, how would he have been
‘rapt into an Extasie of Astonishment and Admiration’
The study of Nature is the true ‘preparative to Divinity’;
let us then ‘converse with Nature as well as Books’, not
confining our studies (as is unfortunately too much the
custom in ‘this University’) to tongues, philology, history,
and antiquity. The large-scale phenomena of Nature, no
less than the microscopic, point to their divine original,
and of mountains Ray can write with a much more com-
1
Wisdom of God (1701 ed.), p. 48.
36
—
4
placent sensibility than Burnet. So far from being Warts

and superfluous Excrescencies’,
‘They are very Ornamental to the Earth, affording pleasant

and delightful Prospects, both i. To them that look downwards
from them, upon the subjacent Countries; as they must needs
acknowledge, who have been but on the Downs of Sussex, and
enjoyed that ravishing Prospect of the Sea on one hand, and the
Country far and wide on the other. And 2. To those that look
upward and behold them from the Plains and low Grounds, which
what a refreshing and pleasure it is to the Eye, they are best able
to judge who have lived in the Isle of Ely, or other level
Countries.’ 1
God has placed man in a ‘spacious and well-furnished

world’, and it is man’s duty as well as privilege to exploit
and improve it as much as he can. Ray is with the
Baconians and the moderns against the older theologians
and moralists; the world we are to exploit is no ruin,
blasted by God’s vengeance for mortal sin. It is the brave
new world of science which lies before us. Ray decisively
rejects the golden-age ‘primitivism’ of such as Burnet
that half-belief in a lost paradise which is the natural corol-
lary of belief in the Fall. Like Voltaire later, he prefers
civilization to Arcadia:
‘If a Country thus planted and adorned, thus polished and

civilized, thusimproved to the height ... be not preferred before
a barbarous and inhospitable Scythia ... or a rude and unpolished
America peopled with slothful and naked Indians, instead of well-
built Houses, living in pitiful Huts and Cabans, made of poles set
end-ways; then surely the brute Beasts Condition, and manner
of Living ... is to be esteem’d better than Man’s, and Wit and
Reason was in vain bestowed on him.’ 2
The world and the creatures in it were not, indeed, ‘so

made for Man that they have no other use’, but they were
made for our study, and the Creation can only praise God
through us.And, of course, the grand and pre-eminent in-
—
stance of design is the human body itself its erect posture
1 ibid., p. 22i. 2 ibid., p. 185.
37
:

(proved by anatomical evidence to be intentional), the
admirable and convenient disposition of all its parts, and
so forth (for further testimony we are referred to Mr Boyle
on the teeth, and Mr Clopton Havers on the bones):
‘it seems to me impossible that Matter divided into as minute and
subtle Parts asyou will or can imagine, and those moved accord-
ing to what Catholick laws soever can be devised, should without
the Presidency and Direction of some intelligent Agent, by the
mere agitation of a gentle Heat, run itself into such a curious
Machine, as the Body of Man is .’ 1
Ray anticipates the theory of the survival of the fittest,

or natural selection in the struggle for existence, and con-
demns it as a ‘grand subterfuge of Atheists’. Such a
theory, for him, implies spontaneous generation, which,
besides being theologically unacceptable, can be disproved
scientifically. The contracting muscle of the armadillo
and the hedgehog is no accident of adaptation, as it might
have seemed if it had been bestowed upon a soft-haired
creature. Nature has not produced all sorts of creatures
at random, and then allowed the unfit to be eliminated;
were this so, we should surely now have many monsters ‘
’
which, though undesigned and unwanted, had neverthe-

less managed to survive. One might ask, why has God
made creatures other than Man, and so less perfect ? Ray
answers, with all who have held that whatever is, is right,
that the lower ranks in the scale of being were made ‘for
the manifestation and displaying of his Infinite Power and
Wisdom.’
Finally Ray appends an eloquent discourse, much in the
vein of the Cambridge Platonists, on the use of the body
in the service of God
‘the Body but the dark Lanthorn, the Soul or Spirit

is is the
Candle of the Lord that burns in it.’ 2
And he concludes with a quotation from Bishop Wilkins

embodying the celebrated wager-argument so much in
1
ibid., p. 304. 2 ifad., p. 407.
38
:

vogue at the end of the seventeenth century: even if there
were no God, it behoves us to live as though there were,
for then we at least enjoy the benefits of virtuous living
on earth, while if God does exist we stand to gain an
everlasting reward.
3. Der ham’s Physico-Theology

William Derham (1657-1735), though no way re-
in
markable either as scientist or as theologian, is a worthy
representative of that class of eighteenth century country
parsons who pursued both avocations with confident assur-
ance of their essential harmony. As vicar of Upminster
he made notable collections of birds and insects, and
studied meteorology, astronomy, bird-migration, the habits
of wasps and the death-watch beetle, and ‘mechanics’.
Nor did these preoccupations cause him to neglect his
cure, for we learn that this ‘strong, amiable and healthy’
ecclesiast served his parishioners faithfully both as phy-
sician and as pastor. His researches brought him to the
notice of his scientific contemporaries, and he became a
Fellow of the Royal Society (1702). In 1711 and 1712
he was summoned from his rural parish to deliver the
Boyle Lectures —
a mark of high distinction, considering
that such men as Bentley and Clarke had been amongst
his predecessors. These lectures were embodied in his
Physico-Theology or a Demonstration oj the Being and Attri-
,
butes of God from his Works of Creation (1713), a work

whose wide acceptance can be gauged by its having reached
a twelfth edition within half a century, and by its having
been translated into French, Swedish, and German.
Derham opens with proper acknowledgments to Boyle
himself, of whom he says that
‘it was Opinion, that nothing tended more to cultivate

his settled
true Religion and Piety in a man’s Mind, than a thorough Skill in
Philosophy .’ 1
The effects of this skill were everywhere manifest in

1
Physico-Theology To the Reader.
39
Boyle’s own writings and in his life; they are evident,
says Derham,
‘from his constant Deportment in never mentioning the Name of
God without a Pause, and visible Stop in his Discourse; and from
the noble Foundation of his Lectures for the Honour of God, and
the generous Stipend he allowed for the same.’
There is little excitement in Derham’s book:

intellectual
indeed, it well illustrates what happens when there de-
scends upon a whole generation the ‘deep slumber of
a decided opinion’. He follows Ray very closely, and
constantly refers to him, though he assures us that he
has deliberately refrained from reading him, immediately
before and during composition, so as to make his own
contribution more original.
Physico-Theology consists
mainly of a long catalogue of relevant characteristics of
the terraqueous globe and its living inhabitants, punctu-
ated frequently by pious exclamations. The globe is ‘a
Work too grand for any thing less than a God to make’.
Earlier orthodoxy, from Aristotle to Sidney, had repre-
sented Nature as ‘inferior’ to Art: Art completes what
Nature has left imperfect; Nature’s world is brazen
‘the poets only deliver a golden’. But the eighteenth
century begins to reverse this teaching:
‘Let us cast our Eyes here and there, let us ransack all the
Globe, let us with the greatest accuracy inspect every Part thereof,
search out the inmost Secrets of any of the Creatures; let us ex-
amine them with all our Gauges, measure them with our nicest
Rules, pry into them with our Microscopes, and most exquisite
Instruments, still we find them to bear Testimony to their in-
finite Workman; and that they exceed all humane Skill so far,
as that the most exquisite Copies and Imitations of the best
Artists, are no other than rude bungling Pieces to them .’ 1
And Derham supports his argument by a quotation from

Bishop Wilkins, who had written, in his Natural Religion
,
1 ibid.,
p. 38.
40
that ‘whatever Natural, doth by that appear adorned
is
with all imaginable Elegance and Beauty whereas the . . .
most curious Works of Art, the sharpest, finest Needle,

doth appear as a blunt rough Bar of Iron, coming from
the Furnace or the Forge, ... So vast a Difference is there
betwixt the Skill of Nature, and the Rudeness and Im-
perfection of Art.’
Derham defends the Globe against the strictures of
Thomas Burnet by reasonings which, in their bland in-
consistency, well illustrate the speculative inadequacies of
his book, and perhaps indicate the strength of the will-
to-believe in his age. Even if the Globe were such a rude, ‘
confused, inconvenient Mass as he [Burnet] pretends, yet

is it well enough for a sinful W
orld ’. 1 Poisonous or noxious
creatures are to be regarded as ‘Rods and Scourges to
chastise us’, or as ‘Means to excite our Wisdom, Care
and Industry’. But it is on the material rather than the
moral utility of the monstrosities of creation that Derham
prefers to dwell. ‘Vulcano’s’, for example (or ‘Ignivom-
ous Mountains ’), though of undoubted value as Emblems ‘
or presages of Hell itself’, are also physically essential as

safety-valves for the fires and vapours that would other-
wise ‘make dismal Havock’ (‘and oftentimes’
— he adds, —
with engaging thoughtlessness ‘actually do so’!). As
for ordinary mountains, Derham appeals beyond Burnet
to the ancient and modern poets, and to the common sense
of mankind, to confirm his opinion that they are beautiful.
Who would care to travel, if the earth were everywhere
‘of an even, level, globous Surface’? But above all,
mountains are useful they are health-giving, they furnish
:
pasturage for sheep, they contain minerals, they provide

gradients for streams, and so forth. In the end Derham
stands the argument on its head in a fashion not unknown
to other theologians, declaring that we must not pre-
tend to ‘censure what God doth’, or to ‘know the Ends
and Purposes of his Infinite Will’. This, when alleged
‘blunders’ are in question; in the rest of the book
1
ibid., p. 48 n. (My italics.)
41
Derham knows enough about these very ends and
purposes.
‘All the Works of the Lord, from the most regarded, admired,
and praised, to the meanest and most slighted, are great and glorious
Works, incomparably contrived, and as admirably made, fitted
up, and placed in the World .’ 1
God did not spend so much skill on his creatures to have

them ignored; it is our pious duty, therefore, as well as
our interest, to study Nature. What was true for Galen or
Cicero is still truer for us Christians: did not St Bernard
declare that Natura Codex est Dei ?
‘ ’
1 ibid., p. 465.
42
CHAPTER III
Cosmic Toryism
‘
Tous les evenements sont encha'tnes dans le meilleur des
mondes possibles' [Pangloss.]
All partial evil universal good

, ,
All discord harmony not understood.

,
[Pope.]
T not surprising to find that a certain type of

is
metaphysical optimism was prevalent in this age of

I physico-theology, and that at least two of the most
celebrated works of the time are theodicies. If Nature is
God’s own codex, then certainly the mighty maze of things
cannot lack a plan —
indeed, it must have the best of all
possible plans, and the world must be the best of all pos-
sible worlds. The task confronting all makers of theo-
dicies is to demonstrate the divine wisdom in creating this
particular universe, in which ‘evils’ appear to exist.
The affirmation that ‘whatever is, is right’ may be and
has been made at many different levels, and consequently
may mean many different things. It may represent the
last insight of the mystic when, in a rapture of contempla-
tion, he has transcended good and evil, and reached an
acceptance of all existence as part of a divine pattern.
Such insight can only be purchased at a tremendous price
— at the price, indeed, of the temporary extinction of one’s
separate individuality. To reach it, one must be ‘laid
asleep in body, and become a living soul’, and we are told
that even Plotinus reached this condition only four or five
times in his life. What is seen from these visionary
heights the mystics cannot tell; their experience is essenti-
ally incommunicable, and can only be hinted at in meta-
phor or negation. In such high hours, Wordsworth says,
43
: )

‘thought was not: in enjoyment it expired’. Traherne,
who had the gift of seeing the world as heaven, wrote of
his moments of vision
‘I was (as Plato saith, In summa rationis arce quies habitat

seated in a throne of repose and perfect rest. Whereupon you
will not believe how
was withdrawn from all endeavours of
I
altering and amending outward things. They lay so well, me-
thought, they could not be mended: but I must be mended to
enjoy them.’
Optimism at this level — the level at which Spinoza could

declare that omnis existentiq est perfectio —
so far from being
a facile or complacent creed, is admittedly almost im-
possibly hard to attain, and can never be long sustained
by and blood. For what it demands is no less than
flesh
the performance, by one’s own unaided strength, of the
miracle which, if achieved, would wind up the universe
for good and all: the resolution of the many into the one
— the annihilation by sheer will-power of the gulf between
the absolute and the fallen world. No wonder that in
Stoicism, which tried to translate such vision into terms
of daily living, the special note should have been a sad
earnestness, a fatigued endurance of an almost intolerable
burden.
But these high moods are rare, and much more often
the affirmation that ‘whatever is, is right’ may be a cry of
satisfaction from
complacent and conservative individual
a
or generation. With a Spinoza or a Leibniz, unquestion-
ably, it represents the conclusion of long and arduous
metaphysical reflection. But with Pangloss, and with
many of our Hanoverian poets and moralists, as with such
nineteenth century exponents as Thoreau (‘God himself
culminates in the present moment’) or Browning (‘All’s
right with the world’), it generally seems to denote con-
tentment with the existing state of things. In the early
and middle years of the eighteenth century the wealthy
and the educated of Europe must have enjoyed almost the
nearest approach to earthly felicity ever known to man.
44
COSMIC TORYISM
Centuries of superstition, error, and strife lay behind; most
of the mediaeval ghosts had been laid; a revolutionary era
had been successfully weathered; liberty and philosophy
and the arts were raising their heads once more. ‘The
vulgar’, not yet indoctrinated with the Rights of Man,
were contented with the lot to which an inscrutable Pro-
vidence had fortunately assigned them, or else consoled
themselves, as they were advised to do by the clergy and
moralists, with thoughts of the future life. Most of the
English writers of the time felt that they were living in an
age of enlightenment. The universe had been explained,
—
and what gave added zest to their satisfaction explained —
by an Englishman, and a pious Englishman at that. This
feeling of enlightenment was confined, of course (then,
as perhaps always), to a small group who were conscious
of being in touch with the best that was being thought and
said. Thomson, for example, referring (in The Seasons )
to popular superstitions about comets, says:
But, above
Those superstitious horrors that enslave
The fond sequacious herd, to mystic faith
And blind amazement prone, the enlighten’d few.
Whose godlike minds Philosophy exalts.
The glorious stranger hail .
1
And, elsewhere:
While thus laborious crowds
Ply the tough oar, Philosophy directs
The ruling helm ... 2
— a very gratifying state of affairs (for the philosophers),

and one can understand, and even envy, the satisfaction
felt in it by such men as Shaftesbury, Pope, Addison,
Thomson, or Chesterfield. It is significant that ‘Chear-
fulness’ is one of the qualities that Addison most highly
recommends: the ‘chearfulness’ which ‘keeps up a kind
2
1
Summer, 1 . 1710. ibid., 1. 1776.
45
:

of Day-light in the Mind, and fills it with a steady and
perpetual Serenity ’, 1 and disposes us to regard the whole
Universe as ‘a kind of Theatre filled with Objects that
either raise in us Pleasure, Amusement, or Admiration’.
Addison can even use Locke’s epistemology to demon-
strate the kindly intentions of Providence
‘if Matter had appeared to us endow’d only with those real

Qualities which it actually possesses, it would have made but a
very joyless and uncomfortable Figure ; and why has Providence
given it a Power of producingsuch imaginary Qualities as
in as
Tastes and Colours, Sounds and Smells, Heat and Cold, but that
Man, while he is conversant in the lower Stations of Nature,
might have his Mind cheared and delighted with agreeable
’
Sensations ?
2
The perfections of the universe (and, we may add, of the

existing social order) could be taken as established, and
the main business of the philosopher was to vindicate them
against all subversive criticisms.
There had long been a conflict, in Western thought,
between the idea that God made all things ‘good’, and
the experience that much exists, both in the material and
the moral worlds, which is ‘evil’. On the whole this had
been resolved, for Christendom, by the doctrine of the Fall
and the divine malediction which ensued. Through this
doctrine it had been possible to recognize evil as such, and
to see meaning in human life as a struggle to escape or to
conquer it. But in the new mental climate of the en-
lightenment this was no longer generally acceptable. What
was now desired, as we have seen, was a more favourable
interpretation of the scheme of things. The Newtonian
universe certainly seemed to work as perfectly as if no Fall
had taken place perhaps, then, all things are even now
:
still in their proper order ? perhaps the status quo is what
God intended and intends? Even man is not vile, but

exactly what he should be —
since everything that exists
contributes perforce to the ‘good’ of the whole system?
1
Spectator, 381. 2 387.
46
COSMIC TORYISM
In that case, might seem, we need no longer foster any
it
gloomy conviction of sin, nor any enthusiastic yearning

for salvation, but should aim simply at a sober under-
standing —
or at least acknowledgment of the wisdom of —
God in the creation.
1
Apart altogether from the Christian doctrine of the
Fall, the Western mind had been confronted, since at least
the time of Plato, with the fundamental opposition between
the One and the Many, the Absolute and the world of
‘
things How or why had the unchanging One, or Total
’
.
Being, generated the Many —

this variegated, ‘imperfect’
world of corruptibles ? Apparently the accepted explana-
tion was that of Plato in the Timaeus: that the One was
s
‘Good’, that is to say, it desired to communicate existence

to the not-itself, and having desired this self-overflowing,
it could not deny existence to any possible kind of being.
As Thomas Aquinas expresses it, God’s love did not per-

mit him to remain self-absorbed, without production of
the creatures; the seeds of all things were latent in his
mind, and he could not deny them germination. Thus
we get the paradox that it was the ‘goodness’, the ‘love’
of God which impelled him to generate things which not
only in the sight of God, but even of man, must seem
imperfect or evil. It was argued, however, that any thing
less than God himself must be imperfect, and, in its degree
of imperfection, evil, but that the disadvantage of creating
such things is outweighed by the one grand advantage of
- giving existence to all possibles. From this standpoint
it was ‘better’ to create one angel and one man than two
angels; one man and one monkey than two men, and so
on. The realization of a ‘full’ universe is the greatest of
all ‘goods’.
By the first half of the eighteenth century it had come

to be generally accepted that the universe presented the
spectacle of a continuous scale or ladder of creatures,
1
On the topic of the next few pages see Prof. A. O. Lovejoy’s admirable
work The Great Chain of Being (Harvard, 1936), to which I am here much
indebted.
47
, :

extending without a break from the worm to the seraph.
In this scale there must be such a creature as Man
Of Systems possible, if ’tis confest
That Wisdom infinite must form the best.
Where all must full or not coherent be,
There must be, somewhere, such a rank as Man .
1
If we
don’t like the rank or position assigned to us, we
must console ourselves by reflecting that there would be
a gap in the chain without us, and that, after all, we are
fairly high up in the scale of creation, having all the
animals below us, and probably only the conjectural angels
or ‘superior beings’ between us and God. Man may be
unhappily unique, ‘plac’d on this isthmus of a middle
state’ between animal and angel, but this uniqueness is
due, not to the Fall or to Satan, but to the requirements
of plenitude.
Eighteenth century optimism was thus not essentially
a joyous or hopeful creed, though it may well have suited
the complacent and the shallow. It was in essence an
apologia for the status quo, presenting you with a God
who loved abundance and variety better than happiness
or progress, and a universe whose ‘goodness’ consisted in
its containing the greatest possible range of phenomena,
many of which seem evil to all but the philosophers.

Cease then, nor order imperfection name Submit This ! !
glorification of Things as They Are, and of the God who

wills them so, naturally had social implications (or shall
we of the kind that would be expected.
say, a social basis ?)
These, and other aspects of the doctrine, are well illus-
trated in Soame Jenyns’s Free Enquiry into the Nature and
Origin of Evil (i 757), a book which is not only noteworthy
as containing a full statement of the position I have out-
lined, but has acquired an adventitious fame from the very
unfavourable review written upon it by Dr Johnson. It is
not surprising that Johnson should have rejected Jenyns’s
version of the official optimism of the eighteenth century.
1 Essay on Man i, 42.
48
:
COSMIC TORYISM
As Leslie Stephen has remarked, in an age of shallow
optimism the deeper natures are apt to be pessimists, and
Johnson, who though
not a profound thinker had deep
convictions, had been taught by hard experience that
human life is a.state in which there is little to be enjoyed,
and much to be endured. Even Voltaire, who in dealing
with Pascal seems an optimist, reacted into pessimism
when confronted with the philosophy of Dr Pangloss, and
Candide teaches much the same moral as Rasselas. I give
here, by way of illustration, an outline of some of Jenyns’s
arguments, together with a few extracts from Johnson’s
review.
Speaking of ‘evil’ in general, Jenyns maintains at the
outset that all evils owe their existence to ‘the necessity
of their own natures ’
all power and wisdom could do, was to make choice

that infinite
of that method, which was attended with the least and fewest;
and this not proceeding from any defect of power in the Creator,
but from that imperfection which is inherent in the nature of all
created things .’ 1
be noticed that the ‘nature of things’ here becomes

It will
the culprit. But what things? Those which God has
chosen. Jenyns and his school seem to represent God as
choosing the best out of many samples, but it is not em-
phasized that the samples are of his own manufacture.
Evils of imperfection, Jenyns goes on, are only privations ’, ‘
and are essential to the whole system, which is based on

the principle of ‘just subordination’:
‘the beauty and happiness of the whole depend altogether on the

just inferiority of the parts.’
Do we want a picture devoid of shade or variety? a uni-

verse of archangels? No, plenitude demands the ant and
the bee (he does not specify the tsetse-fly or the mosquito),
with their own inferior ‘happiness’, as well as angel or man
with theirs. At this point we encounter what I referred
1
Free Enquiry (1790 ed.), p. 37.
D 49
to as the social implications of this teaching: the social
order, we are now told, is as much divinely ordained as the
natural order. Just as the lower animals enjoy their
ignorant bliss, so the human poor are happy in their
inferior way. Ignorance, says Jenyns, is the ‘opiate’ (it is
Jenyns’s own word) of the poor, ‘a cordial, administered
by the gracious hand of providence ’.
1
And is it for us
to frustrate the kindly purposes of providence ? No, let us
not presume to deprive the poor of their opiate by ‘an ill-
judged and improper education’. This sentiment evokes
a protest from Johnson:
‘The privileges of education may sometimes

be improperly
bestowed, but I shall always fear to with-hold them, lest I should
be yielding to the suggestions of pride, while I persuade my-
self that I am following the maxims of policy; and under the
appearance of salutary restraints, should be indulging the lust of
dominion, and that malevolence which delights in seeing others
depressed.’ 2
Pain, poverty, toil, and the rest, Jenyns argues, are merely
instances in our own sphere of the imperfection inhering in
all created things, of which he has already demonstrated
the necessity; they are
‘the necessary consequences of human nature; from which it can

no more be divested than matter from extension, or heat from
motion, which proceed from the very modes of their existence.’
In short,we cannot imagine human beings any otherwise

than as we have known them, and though doubtless God
might have made us other than we are, some other creatures
would then have had to ‘occupy our stations in the uni-
versal system’. On
Johnson (who knew that slow
this,
rises worth by poverty depressed) comments:
‘This author and Pope perhaps never saw the miseries which
they imagine thus easily to be borne.’
Are we, because we are philosophers, and therefore cosmic

1 ibid., pp. 49-50.
2 Works (Pickering ed., 1825), vol. vi, p. 57.
5°
COSMIC TORYISM
Tories, to ‘entail irreversible poverty upon generation
after generation’? But Jenyns has no misgivings; the
‘world’ (meaning eighteenth century society?) could not
subsist without poverty, though of course by charity we
m ay — —
and indeed must try to mitigate the evils ‘now
and then pinching a few’. ‘We are therefore little en-
lightened’, Johnson concludes, ‘by a writer who tells us,
that any being in the state of man must suffer what man
suffers, when the only question that requires to be resolved
T
is, \\ hy any being is in this state?’
We now come most notorious passage in the
to the
book, the passage on which Johnson poured his choicest
scorn. Jenyns professes to be persuaded
'that there is something in the abstract nature of pain conducive

to pleasure; that the sufferings of individuals are absolutely
necessary to universal happiness .’ 1
Whose happiness? This universal good, this universal

happiness for the realization of which the creation was
framed, and for which the sufferings of individuals are
essential —
who enjoys it ? Could it be the enlighten’d few
whose godlike minds Philosophy exalts, white laborious
crowds ply the tough oar? One may suspect it, though
naturally this is not Jenyns’s reply. His technique (that
of his age, and probably of all ages, is to project his own
social order upon the universal screen, and interpret it as
part of the unchanging structure of creation. For this
purpose the theory of the Great Chain of Being was ready
to hand. Addison, elaborating upon Locke in his blandest
tones, had argued that
‘Infinite Goodness of so communicative a Nature, that it

is
seems to delight in the conferring of Existence upon every degree

of perceptive Being,’
and that,
‘If the scale of Being rises by such a regular Progress, so high

as Man, we may by parity of Reason suppose that it still proceeds
1
op. at., pp. 67-8.
51
,

gradually through those Beings which are of a Superior Nature
to him, since there is an infinitely greater Space and Room for
Degrees of Perfection, between the Supreme Being and
different
Man, than between Man and the most despicable Insect .’ 1
—though there must, he adds, always remain an infinite
gap between the highest created being and God himself.
Here then we have our answer it is these Superior Beings
:
—
who enjoy the universal happiness it is for their pleasure
that man agonizes. Do not our own pleasures depend
upon the sufferings of other creatures ? Are not empires
and flourishing cities founded upon slavery and degrada-
tion ? Must not the pheasant or the deer yield up their
lives to furnish us with sport, and the pleasures of the
banquet ?
*
Man one link of that vast chain, descending by insensible
is
degrees, from infinite perfection to absolute nothing. As there

are many thousands below him, so must there be many more
above him. If we look downwards, we see innumerable species
of inferior beings, whose happiness and lives are dependent on his
will; we see him cloathed by their spoils, and fed by their
miseries and destruction, inslaving some, tormenting others, and
murdering millions for his luxury or diversion; is it not therefore
analogous and highly probable, that the happiness and life of man
should be equally dependent on the wills of his superiors ? . . .
The fundamental error in all our reasonings on this subject, is

that of placing ourselves wrong in that presumptuous climax of
beast, man and God; from whence, as we suppose falsely that
there is nothing above us except the Supreme Being, we foolishly
conclude that all the evils we labour under must be derived im-
mediately from his omnipotent hand: whereas there may be
numberless intermediate beings who have power to deceive, tor-
ment, or destroy us, for the ends only of their pleasure or utility,
who may be vested with the same privilege over their inferiors,
and as much benefited by the use of them, as ourselves.’ 2
This hypothesis, which evidently seems to Jenyns quite

consonant with the perfections of the Creator and his crea-
tion, illustrates this curious feature of most attempts to
1 2
Spectator 519. Free Enquiry , pp. 71-2.
52
COSMIC TORYISM
vindicate the ways of God to man : that themore you de-
monstrate the rightness of whatever is, the more desperate,
because the more inescapable, the plight of man appears.
Johnson, who looked to literature not for explanations of
the riddle of existence, but for moral and religious support,
was roused to satire by Jenyns’s theory:
‘
Many
a merry bout have these frolick beings at the vicissi-
tudes of an ague, and good sport it is to see a man tumble with
an epilepsy, and revive and tumble again, and all this he knows
not why. As they are wiser and more powerful than we, they
have more exquisite diversions, for we have no way of procuring
any sport so brisk and so lasting, as the paroxysms of the gout and
stone, which undoubtedly must make high mirth, especially if the
play be a little diversified with the blunders and puzzles of the
blind and deaf.’
Another diversion of the Superior Beings, Johnson con-

tinues (pressing home his point more closely), is to fill the
heads of proud mortals with false opinions, ‘till in time
they make their plaything an author’:
‘
Many of the books which now croud the world, may be j ustly
suspected to be written for the sake of some invisible order of
beings, for surely they are of no use to any of the corporeal in-
habitants of the world. The only end of writing, is to enable the
readers better to enjoy life , or better to endure it: and how will
either of those be putmore in our power by him who tells us, that
we are puppets, of which some creature not much wiser than our-
1
selves manages the wires ?’
Having proved to his own satisfaction that God is the

author of the natural evils in the universe, ‘that is, of
all
the fewest possible in the nature of things’, Jenyns pro-

ceeds to ask why God may not be the author of all moral
evil in same manner and on the same principle. Here
the
again we see him clinging to his ‘optimism’ only at the
price of transforming the Deity into the moral equivalent
of Shelley’s Jupiter. Quite apart from the interests of the
Superior Beings, which may again be served, there may
i
Johnson, op. cit., pp. 65-6. (My italics.)
53
be another justification for moral evil: natural evil once
admitted, some men ‘must’ be created bad enough to
deserve it!
‘Men may be inclined to vice in order to render them proper

objects of such a degree of misery as was unavoidably necessary .’ 1
This, says Johnson,
‘isgiven as a satisfactory account of the Origin of moral Evil,

which amounts only to this, that God created beings whose guilt
he foreknew, in order that he might have proper objects of pain,
because the pain of part is, no man knows how or why, necessary
to the felicity of the whole.’
On the subject of political evils, where he can forget

the perfections of the universe and write from experience,
Jenyns talks better sense. His main point is that many
political institutions are absurd and irrational, but that as
man an absurd and irrational creature they suit him all
is
the better for that reason. In politics as in metaphysics,

then, Jenyns supports the existing order, and his argu-
ment is blended of ingredients suggestive both of Hobbes
and of Burke. He gives a Hobbist account of humanity:
self-interest is, he says, ‘the great principle that operates
in the political world in the same manner that attraction
does in the natural’. But his conservatism rests mainly
on a Burkean sense of the relation between politics and
human nature. Enthusiastic reformers are usually wrong-
headed, he declares; they see the undoubted abuses, but
not the necessities from which they spring It is a strange,:
‘
but a certain truth, that in politics most principles specula-

tively right are practically wrong.’ The pageantries of
patriotism, war, and religion are of course ludicrous, yet
it is only by such deceits that men can be successfully
manipulated. Every flourishing nation endeavours to

improve the arts, and to cultivate reason and good sense,
‘yet, if these are extended too far’, he says (echoing
Mandeville), ‘no national government or national religion
i
Jenyns, op. cit ., pp. 104-5.
54
COSMIC TORYISM
can long stand their ground; for it is with old establish-
ments as with old houses, their deformities are commonly
their support, and these can never be removed without
endangering the whole fabric’. These considerations
apply also to Christianity, which (without derogation !)
lacks authenticity and perspicuity, and is subject, like all
other human institutions, secular or religious, to corrup-
tion. The deists, like the political reformers, are intel-
lectually right in their criticisms, but practically wrong in
their conclusions. They are wrong in thinking that the
really divine religion would be perfectly plain and ration-
ally convincing. No
such religion is possible, and we
must therefore not pretend that Christianity is such. The
argument somewhat resembles Butler’s in the Analogy ,
save that Jenyns, cynical and unimplicated, clearly enjoys

showing up the necessary irrationalities of religion, while
Butler is earnestly toiling to defend it. On the whole
book, Johnson concludes:
‘All our effort ends in belief, that for the Evils of life there is
some good reason, and in confession, that the reason cannot be
found. This is all that has been produced by the revival of
Chrysippus’s untractableness of matter, and the Arabian scale of
existence.’
What emerged, then, as the chief outcome of this kind

of ‘optimism’, was a gospel of hopelessness. The status
quo represents the last word of divine wisdom and good-
ness; the scale of being is fixed and unimprovable: what
then is left to us but to content ourselves with the station,
both in the cosmical and the social scale, to which it has
pleased God to call us? No improvements are to be
expected; to demand them is in fact impious. In this
state of affairs not to be wondered at that many of the
it is
really dynamic men of the century —

men like Voltaire,
Rousseau, Diderot, or Holbach in France, and I think
—
we must add John Wesley in England should have been
men who disliked the status quo much too intensely to
want to explain it favourably. And the main tenor of
55
later eighteenth century thought was towards the abolition
of avoidable evils, and an indefinite progress towards per-
fection. Man need not ‘stay put’; perfectibility, as God-
win later said, is one of his main distinguishing marks.
An optimism of progress supersedes the optimism of
acceptance.
I
CHAPTER IV
Natural Morality
I. SHAFTESBURY (1671-1713)
The generous Ashley thine , the friend of man;

IVho scanned his nature with a brother's eye>
'
His weakness prompt to shade to raise his aim

, y
To touch the fner movements of the mind ,
And with the moral beauty charm the heart.

[Thomson’s Seasons .]
W E have seen how some of the most powerful

forces of the early eighteenth century, scientific,
philosophical, and social, were tending to divinize
the idea of Nature, either in the sense of the physical uni-
verse, or in that of the whole order of creation, including
the moral order. The ways of God had been many times
vindicated by physico-theologians, metaphysicians, and
popular writers let us now consider the work of one who,
;
though he also largely treats that theme, may be regarded

as especially important for his vindication of the ways of
man. Shaftesbury is the ‘friend of man’ in the sense that
he makes it his business to defend human nature against
the traditional detractions, particularly those of religion
on the one hand, and of Hobbes on the other. This ‘vir-
tuoso of humanity’ (as Herder called him) or the ‘elegant’
and ‘sublime’ Lord Shaftesbury (as he appears in Fielding
and Hume) was the grandson of Dryden’s Achitophel.
He was educated partly under Locke’s direction, and after-
wards at Winchester; then, after a period of aesthetic
foreign travelling, and a three years’ spell in Parliament,
the remainder of his short life was spent in retirement
Macaulay), and in the com-
(‘intellectual luxury’, says
position of works of which the tone is uniformly serene
57
and sanguine, in spite of their author’s precarious
health.
Shaftesbury is the typical English moralist of the ‘en-
lightenment’, and is usually accounted the founder of the
‘moral sense’ school. Hume says that he was the first
who gave occasion to remark the distinction between two
theories of ethics, that which derives them from Reason,
and that which derives them from ‘an immediate feeling
and finer internal sense’, and in recent times Babbitt has
’
signalized him
the precursor of the
as Rousseauist ‘
moralists who transform the conscience from an inner

check into an expansive emotion. His writings, collected
in Characteristicks of Opinions and Times
Men Manners
, ,
( 1 7 1 1 ), had an immense vogue in the first half of the

eighteenth century, both at home and abroad. Montes-
quieu described him as one of the four great ‘poets’ (of
whom the other three are Plato, Montaigne, and Male-
branche!), and Herder declared (1794) that he had ‘sig-
1
nally influenced the best heads of the eighteenth century.’
Certainly most of the English philosophers, moralists, and
essayists of the period, and some of the poets and novelists
as well, refer to him, not always with approval, but generally
with respect.
Of the seventeenth century moralists, it was the Cam-
bridge Platonists whose doctrine had pointed most clearly
towards an exaltation of the natural moral sense of man;
to act aright, they taught, we need but look within, and
read the natural law written upon the heart. It is there-
fore interesting to find that Shaftesbury’s first published
work was an edition, with Introduction, of Whichcote’s
Select Sermons (1698). We
have, here, in Shaftesbury’s
Introduction, a useful link between seventeenth century
latitudinarian thought and its eighteenth century offspring.
He begins by whimsically apologizing for publishing yet
more sermons, when so great a number have already been
preached and printed, with so little apparent effect. Why
is it that men who profess such a religion as Christianity
1
Sec J. M. Robertson’s Introduction to his edition of the Characteristicks.
NATURAL MORALITY — SHAFTESBURY
live such lives as they do ? Not, he suggests, on account
of any radical depravity in mankind, but rather because
exhortation has been misdirected. Religion has been per-
verted to serve political ends —
and here Shaftesbury pro-
ceeds to the first of his attacks on Hobbes, who, in
reckoning up the passions and affections which produce
society, ‘forgot to mention Kindness, Friendship, Sociable-
ness, Love of Company and Converse, Natural affection,
or anything of this kind’, and substituted only the master-
passion Fear, and the passion for power which never ends
but in death. But Hobbes is not the only culprit; divines,
also, in their efforts to prove the necessity of revealed
religion, have denigrated human nature, ‘as if Good-
nature and religion were enemies’. The view that there
is no natural sociability and goodness in man is thus
acceptable both to atheists and to defenders of religion.

Shaftesbury finds it strange that those who profess to be-
lieve in a Supreme Being who wholly good, and is
is
actuated exclusively by love and good-will toward men,

should think it unsuitable to a rational creature derived
from Him to follow His example, and find pleasure in
‘goodness without Prospect’. ‘That Virtue is her own
reward’, Sir Thomas Browne had written (in the Religio
Medici), ‘is but a cold principle, and not able to maintain
our variable resolutions in a constant and settled way of
goodness.’ But this ‘cold principle’ had now, for ‘en-
lightened’ moralists, become of greater importance than
the older sanctions. With the growth of the secular and
scientific spirit,had come to seem more and more desir-
it
able to base morality not upon rewards and punishments

in the hereafter, but upon human nature, and what was
known as ‘the nature of things’. Writers like Locke and
Samuel Clarke do not, indeed, abandon Revelation, but
with them the centre of gravity has shifted, and Revelation
has become an adjunct, not a first consideration. Clarke
went as far, perhaps, as it is possible to go in deriving good
and evil from the Eternal Fitnesses and Relations of
Things. God, he declares, has chosen to establish these
59
—
Fitnesses, not thereby constituting them good ex arbitrio
‘
’
,
but choosing them because they were antecedently ‘best’,

and the ground of morality lies in these we, also, ought :
to act in accordance with the Fitness and Reason of Things.

When men do wrong, they are Setting-up their own un-
‘
reasonable Self-Will in opposition to the Nature and

Reason of Things’, and attempting to ‘make Things be
what they are not and cannot be’, thus destroying ‘that
Order by which the Universe subsists’. 1 The injunction
to do as you would be done by, has for Clarke the same
force as the proposition ‘if A=B, B=A’, and disobeying
acting a contradiction. 2
it is That which is truly the Law
‘
of Nature, or the Reason of Things, is in like manner the

Will of God’, 3 he subjoins; but it is observable that ‘the
Will of God’ takes second place here, as if its function
were merely to ratify the enactments of the natural legisla-
ture. was Clarke who wrote that ‘Moral Virtue is the
It
Foundation and the Summ, the Essence and the Life of all
true Religion’ 4 whose thesis for the Cambridge D.D.
;
was an argument ‘that no article of Christian faith is

opposed to right reason and whom Bishop Gibson is
reported to have described to Queen Caroline as the most
learned and honest man in her dominions, but with one
defect —
he was not a Christian. .
From the standpoint of Clarke, then, and still more

from that of Shaftesbury, Browne’s conclusion that we
cannot hope to be honest without thought of Heaven or
‘
Hell’, or his pronouncement upon Charity:. ‘I draw not

my purse for his sake that demands it, but His that
enjoined it’, seemed both unchristian and in a sense utili-
tarian. We must not, Browne himself had said, ‘make
the consequences of virtue the end thereof’, but to per-
form virtuous actions for the sake of a heavenly reward
what is this but to reintroduce utilitarian considerations
1
Samuel Clarke, Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God (Boyle
Lectures, 1704), pp. 256-7.
2 Discourse
Concerning the Unchangeable Obligations of Natural Religion
(1705), p. 86.
3 ibid.,
pp. 147-8. 4 p- I4I>
60
NATURAL MORALITY SHAFTESBURY —
onanother level ? To be honest without thought of heaven
and hell is, for Shaftesbury, precisely the mark of the dis-
interested lover of virtue,and an act of charity spring-

ing from an impulse of sympathy for a fellow-creature
would be, in his view, morally superior to one discharged
mechanically as a mere routine duty. He thought it
strange that religious teachers should ‘refer all to Reward ,
thereby excluding spontaneous goodness of heart the—
very thing that ‘true Christianity’ demands. The truth
is, he says, that they were afraid of conceding too much
to ‘good Nature’ lest they might be diminishing the need

for Revelation (‘a thing so highly important to Mankind’,
says Shaftesbury, not without irony), and have been ‘will-
ing to wound Virtue’ rather than ‘admit a sort of rival to
the faith of Divine Revelation’. Thus, with both atheists
ancUbelievers uniting to decry human nature, there was all
the more need for someone to come forward in its defence,
and ‘here it is that our author [Whichcote] has appeared
so signally’. Whichcote, whom Shaftesbury recognizes
as his spiritual predecessor, had inculcated that human
nature not so untoward, but that it retains ‘a secret
is
sympathy with virtue and honesty’; he had taught that

virtue is the foundation of happiness, and that sin punishes
itself. Shaftesbury can therefore describe him as ‘a truly
Christian Philosopher, whom for his appearing thus in
defence of Natural goodness, we may call the preacher of
Good Nature’. This is his excuse for reprinting the ser-
mons in an age when many are prejudiced against pulpit
exhortations, and indeed against religion itself. To such
readers the sermons should, he hopes, have a special appeal
on account of the divine temper shown in them, while
they will make professing Christians like Christianity
better.
We may now consider a few of the leading notions in
the Characters ticks, i As might be expected, Shaftesbury
.
insists upon the divine perfection of ‘Nature’ (in the sense

of the whole order of creation). Here he presents again
the optimistic theory which we have already glanced at,
and which, reaching Pope through Bolingbroke, is
chiefly
versified in the Essay on Man. Nature, for him, is a vast
system of interconnected and interdependent parts, of
which we see little, but enough to be convinced that it is
an admirable Cosmos, moving majestically according to
unalterable laws. What we call ‘evils’ only appear such
to our ignorance, because we are unable to see their justify-
ing relationship to the Whole. The divinity of Nature
(like the ‘good-nature’ of man) is affirmed by Shaftesbury
both against the atheists, who think the universe a dis-
tracted chaos of atoms, and against the orthodox, who hold
that we live in a world which has been permanently ruined
by the fall of Adam. 1 he quality of Shaftesbury’s nature-
worship can best be illustrated from the concluding sections
of his dialogue entitled The Moralists : A Philosophical
Rhapsody* in which Theocles and Philocles discourse upon
natural and moral subjects. In these sections Shaftesbury
casts aside his customary serenity, and through the lips of
I heoclesindulges in an astonishing outburst, in number’d ‘
prose’, on the wonders and perfections of Nature, reveal-

ing here a degree of ‘enthusiasm’ which he will not permit
in any other context. 1 his sermon-panegyric of Theocles
isdelivered, with the Advantage of the Rural Scene around
‘
us’, partly during an ‘Evening-Walk in the Fields’,

and
partly at dawn in similar ‘solemn Places of Retreat’. It
illustrates how
the philosophical passion for the best-of-
possible-worlds could already, in the opening eighteenth
century, pass into fondness for ‘the country’ and for
what
is ‘natural’, in contrast to town life and the ‘artificial’.'
The quality of the writing singular Shaftesbury seems,
is :
in this semi-iambic prose, to be trying to generate

a Platonic
furor poeticus, in which elements from Milton, the pastoral
tradition,and perhaps Lucretius, are also interfused. His
normal prose-style is not to be judged from the samples I
am about to give, but it is instructive, I think, to find so
much emotion displayed, in however spurious a rhetoric,
on such a subject at such a period
(1709).
1
See especially pt. ii, sect. 4, and pt. iii.
62
NATURAL MORALITY —SHAFTESBURY
‘ [Theories] Ye Fields and Woods, my Refuge from the toil-
some World of Business, receive me in your quiet Sanctuarys,

and favour my
Retreat and thoughtful Solitude. \ e verdant
Plains, how gladly I salute ye. Bless’d be ye chaste Abodes of
. . .
happiest Mortals, who here in peaceful Innocence enjoy a Life

unenvy’d, tho Divine; whilst with its bless’d 1 ranquillity it
affords a happy Leisure and Retreat for Man; who, made for
Contemplation, and to search his own and other Natures, may
here best meditate the Cause of Things; and plac’d amidst the
various Scenes of Nature, may nearer view her Works.
* ‘OGlorious Nature !
Good!
supremely Fair, and sovereignly
All-loving and All-lovely, All-divine! Whose every single . . .
Work affords an ampler Scene, and is a nobler Spectacle than all

which ever Art presented! O
mighty Nature\ Wise Substitute
of Providence\ impower’d Creatress\ Or 1. hou impowering
Deity, supreme Creator! Thee I invoke, and T hee alone adore.
To thee this Solitude, this place, these Rural Meditations are
sacred; whilst thus inspir’d with Harmony of Thought, tho un-
confin’d by Words, and in loose Numbers, I sing of Nature’s
Order in created Beings, and celebrate the Beautys which resolve
1
in Thee, the Source and Principle of all Beauty and Perfection.
‘All Nature’s Wonders serve to excite and perfect this Idea of

their Author. ’Tis here he suffers us to see, and even converse
with him, in a manner suitable to our F railty; How glorious is it
to contemplate him, in this noblest of his Works apparent to us,
2
The System of the bigger IVorId.'
Philocles listens enraptured to all this and much more,
for Theocles, before he utters these impassioned strains,
has enunciated a complete nature-philosophy, surveying
in turn the various orders of animals and plants, the stars,
the earth and man, and the problem
all that it contains,
of evil, and shown how all work together to form that
admirable Order and Proportion which we admire as
Beauty, and try to reproduce in our lives as Goodness.
Convinced, amazed, Philocles at length assents in the
following terms:
‘
I shall no longer resist the Passion growing in me for Things
2
1
Works, vol. ii (1727 ed.), pp. 344-5. ibid., vol. ii, p. 370.
63
,, ,

of a natural kind; where neither Art, nor the Conceit or Caprice
of Man has spoil’d their genuine Order by breaking in upon that
primitive State. Even the rude Rocks the mossy Caverns the
irregular unwrought Grotto's, and broken Falls of Waters, with
all the horrid Graces of the Wilderness itself,
as representing
Nature more, will be the more engaging, and appear with a
Magnificence beyond the formal Mockery of princely Gardens .’ 1
At however, Philocles remembers with disquiet

this point,
that those who are ‘deep in this romantick way’ (lunatics,
and poets, for the most part) ‘are look’d upon, you
lovers
know, as a People either plainly out of their wits, or over-
run with Melancholy and Enthusiasm’. Shaftesbury had
written against Enthusiasm 2 in the manner and spirit of
his time, but the rapture inspired by the contemplation of
natural beauty is permissible (he replies through Theocles),
provided that we remember, with Plato, that ‘whatever in
Nature is beautiful or charming, is only the faint Shadow’
of the ‘first Beauty’.
Thus had the divinization of Nature pro-
far, then,
ceeded a hundred years before Wordsworth. Already the.
injunction First follow Nature’ had passed beyond the'
region of ethics and poetics, and the Wordsworthian*
nature-religion can be regarded, less as something wholly *
new, than as the culmination of a process which had been*

implicit in the ‘humanist’ tradition ever since the Renais-
sance.
.
Mr
Aldous Huxley has said (in his essay Words-
worth in the Tropics ) that for the last hundred years or so
‘
it has been an axiom that Naturedivine and morally is

uplifting,
and that for good Wordsworthians a walk in
the country is the equivalent of going to church, a
tour
through Westmorland is as good as a pilgrimage to
Jeru-
salem But, if we leave Westmorland out of account,
.
these were axioms for good Augustans a hundred

years
earlier, and we need not proceed much further
than the
middle of the century to find Westmorland appearing as
a Holy Land also (in Gray’s Letters). Shaftesbury was '
1
ibid., vol. ii, pp. 393-4. 2
Letter Concerning Enthusiasm
(1708).
64
:

not the only apostle of the new religion; Addison, that
most accurate reflector of contemporary moods, can also
write, in one of his papers on Chearfulness’ ‘
‘The Creation is Mind of a good Man,

a perpetual Feast to the
every thing that he sees chears and delights him; Providence has
imprinted so many Smiles on Nature, that it is impossible for a
Mind which is not sunk in more gross and sensual Delights to
take a survey of them without several secret Sensations of
Pleasure. Natural Philosophy quickens this Taste of the
. . .
Creation, and renders it not only pleasing to the Imagination, but

to the Understanding. It does not rest in the Murmur of Brooks,
and the Melody of Birds, in the Shade of Groves and Woods, or
in the Embroidery of Fields and Meadows, but considers the
several Ends of Providence which are served by them, and the
Wonders of Divine Wisdom which appear in them. It heightens
the Pleasures of the Eye, and raises such a rational Admiration in
the Soul as is little inferior to Devotion Such an habitual Dis-
position of Mind consecrates every Field and Wood, turns an
ordinary Walk into a morning or evening Sacrifice, and will im-
prove those transient Gleams of Joy, which naturally brighten
up and refresh the Soul on such Occasions, into an inviolable and
perpetual State of Bliss and Happiness .’ 1
2. It follows from all this that in Shaftesbury’s view

‘true religion’ should be based on ‘Nature’ rather than
on Revelation. We have seen that he considered religion
enemy of virtue in so far as it depreciated ‘good
to be the
nature and recommended reliance on future rewards and
’
punishments. ‘Little were you aware’, exclaims Theocles,

‘that the cruel Enemy oppos’d to Virtue shou’d be Religion it-
self! But . . . Virtue is often treated so, by those who wou’d
magnify to the utmost the Corruption of Man’s Heart; and in
exposing, as they pretend, the Falshood of human Virtue think , to
extol Religion. How many sacred Orators turn all their edge
this way, and strike at moral Virtue as a kind of Stepdame, or
Rival to Religion! ’ 2
1 Spectator, 393 (1712).

a The Moralists, pt. ii, sect. 2: Works, vol. ii, p. 256.
: ,

He concludes:
‘That by building a future State on the Ruins of Virtue Re-

ligion in general, and the Cause of a Deity is betray’d; and by
making Rewards and punishments the principal Motives to Duty,
the Christian Religion in particular is overthrown, and its greatest
Principle, that of Love rejected and expos’d.’ 1
,
But there is orthodoxy is also the

a further implication:
enemy of true (i.e. ‘natural’) religion, because it invites
‘ ’
us to base our faith, not on the beautiful and harmonious

—
Order of Things the best and only genuine external
evidence —
but on miracles, that is, on infractions of that
Order. The contemplation of the Universe, its Laws and
Government, is
‘the only means which cou’d establish the sound Belief of a Deity.
For what tho innumerable Miracles from every part assail’d the
Sense, and gave the trembling Soul no respite ? What tho the
Sky shou’d suddenly open, and all Kinds of Prodigys appear,
Voices be heard, or Characters read ?
’ 2
This would only prove that there were certain Powers cap-
able of producing these effects, not that they were wise or
foolish, good or bad Powers. ‘Power can never serve as
a Proof for Goodness and Goodness is the only Pledg of
;
Truth' Perpetual breaches of that admirable Order,

‘from whence the One infinite and perfect principle is
known’, would merely unhinge Nature, and bring back
‘
the Chaos and Atoms of the Atheists’, or ‘the Magic and
Daemons of the Polytheists ’
‘Yet istumultuous System of the Universe asserted with

this
the highest Zeal by some who wou’d maintain a Deity. ... As if
Atheism were the most natural Inference which cou’d be drawn
from a regular and orderly State of Things 3 !
’
If by harmony and concord we are to be made atheists,

how shall we be convinced of Deity by irregularity and
1 2
ibid., vol. ii, p. 279. ibid., vol. ii, p. 333.
3
ibid., vol. ii, p. 336.
66
—
NATURAL MORALITY SHAFTESBURY
discord? It was fantastic, he thought, to suppose
that
the World is a mere Accident, if it proceeds in Course;
but an Effect of Wisdom, if it runs mad It is perhaps not !
’
surprising that the Bible was not a book which Shaftes-

bury could highly recommend, and we find him, in the
Advice to an Author using a disparaging irony, of the
,
Voltairean type, about certain Old Testament characters.

The stories and characters of the Bible, he warns his
Author, are no fit subjects for a ‘mere poet’, since they
are divinely inspired and thus beyond his
comprehension:
The Wit of the best Poet
not sufficient to reconcile us to the
is
Campaign of a Joshua, or the Retreat of a Moses, by the assistance
of an Egyptian Loan Nor will it be possible, by the Muses Art,
.
to make that Royal Hero appear amiable in human

Eyes, who
found such favour in the Eye of Heaven .* 1
which may be compared with the conclusion

a passage
of Hume’s Essay on Miracles.
3. We next come to that part of Shaftesbury’s teaching

which more especially justifies Thomson in calling him
the friend of Man Like ‘Nature’, Man is essentially
.
‘good’, and—
in opposition to the view of Hobbes
naturally social. Shaftesbury faces up to Hobbes with
the gestures of one who is so confident of victory that he
need do little more than sport with his opponent. How
shall we most effectively deal with so ‘Gothick’
a philo-
sopher? Not, assuredly, by holding up hands in horror:
If we fall presently into Horrors, and Consternation, upon
the
hearing Maxims which are thought poisonous we are in
, no dis-
position to use that familiar and easy Part of Reason, which is the
best Antidote .’ 2
No, let us approach Hobbes in the spirit of raillery let us

;
tell him that it is most friendly of him to communicate his
1
Works, vol. i, p. 358.
2 Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour: Works, vol. i,
p. 91.
67
:

surest
views to us, and that by so doing he has given us the
token that he is not the savage wolf he seemed to
be.
When he, or any of his school, tries to persuade us that

there is no such thing as natural faith or justice, that
Force
alone constitutes right, or that we have no natural im-
pulses tending towards public good, let us thus address
him
‘Sir! Philosophy you have condescended to reveal to us,
The
is most extraordinary. We
are beholden to you for your In-
struction. But, pray, whence is this Zeal on our behalf?
What
are We to You ? ... Is there then such a thing as natural Affection ?
If not, why all this Pains, why all this Danger on our account?
Of what advantage is it to You, to deliver us from the Cheat?
The more are taken in it, the better. ’Tis directly against your
Interest to undeceive Us, and let us know that only private In-
terest governs You; and that nothing nobler, and of a larger kind,
shou’d govern us whom you converse with. Leave us to our-
selves,and to that notable Art by which we are happily tam’d, and
render’d thus mild and sheepish. ’Tis not fit we shou’d know
that by Nature we are all wolves. Is it possible that one who has
really discover’d himself such, shou’d take pains to communicate
’ 1
such a Discovery ?
The Hobbists show up human nature in the worst light,

so that we may be on our guard, whereas real impostors
usually speak well of it, that they may the easier abuse it’.
‘
Shaftesbury adds, in the more sober tone of a disciple of

Locke, that we shall best provide against human ambition,
not by surrendering to a Leviathan, but by a right Divi-
‘
sion and Ballance of Power, and by the Restraint of good

Laws and Limitations, which may secure the publick
Liberty’.
Shaftesbury’s criticism of Hobbes’s ‘state of nature’
has some' importance as one of the earliest attempts to
replace that philosophical abstraction by a historical and
evolutionary view of the origin of society. In order to
refute the idea that the state of nature is a state of war of
all against all, he asks what sort of existence we consider
1 ibid., vol. i, pp. 92-3.

68
k

to be the most ‘natural’ to man as man: to live solitary
and unassociated ? No, he replies, man was a social being
from the start, or at any rate a family man and from the —
family grew the tribe, and thence the state, by natural
evolution.
‘If Eating and Drinking be natural. Herding is so too. If any

Appetite or Sense be natural, the Sense of Fellowship is the same.
If there be anything of Nature in that Affection which is between
the Sexes, the affection is certainly as natural towards the conse-
quent Offspring; and so again between the Offspring themselves,
as Kindred and Companions bred under the same Discipline and
Oeconomy. And thus a Clan or Tribe is gradually form’d; a
.’ 1
Public is recognized. . .
In short, ‘to cantonize is natural’, not artificial, and ‘how

the Wit of Man shou’d so puzzle this Cause, as to make
Civil Government and Society appear a kind of Invention,
or Creature of Art, I know not’. It is absurd, too, to
argue that there were no moral obligations in the state of
nature before the compact; the compact itself was made
in the state of nature, and the Natu? il Knave has the same ‘
reason to be a Civil one\ But Shaftesbury is no ‘primi-

tivist ’, 2 no dreamer of dreams about ages of gold. For him
the ‘natural’ condition of a thing, and so of man, is not its
‘original’ state, but rather that state in which it realizes
most fully its inner intention, or individuating principle.
Just as, for him, the grace of a trained dancer is more
‘natural’ than the uncouth movements of the rustic who
has been taught by ‘Nature’ (in the other sense) only , 3
so society is for man the true State of Nature. Shaftes-
bury’s naturalism is on the whole of the progressivist
rather than the primitivist type 4 shall often have . We
1
ibid., vol. i, p. no.
The Moralists, pt. ii, sect. 4.)
(See also
2 On the whole subject of ‘primitivism’ see Lovejoy and Boas, Documentary
History of Primitivism &
Related Ideas (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Press,
vol. i, 1935).
3 Advice to an Author, pt. i, Works, vol. i, p. 190.
sect. 3 :
4 On this distinction see L. Whitney, Primitivism and the Idea of Progress

in English Popular Literature of the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, 1934).
69
occasion, in the course of these studies, to remark upon
the ambiguities arising from these two leading senses of
‘Nature’.
4. Human virtue consists in ‘following Nature’, in the

sense that it is a reproduction, within the individual micro-
cosm, of the harmony and proportion so manifest in the
greater world. The cry ‘Follow Nature’ had of course
been raised of old by the Cynics, Stoics, and Epicureans, for
all of whom virtue meant the ‘life according to Nature’ in
varying senses it had been revived by More, Montaigne,

;
and other humanists of the Renaissance, and then for-

gotten for a while during the struggles of the seventeenth
century. With Shaftesbury the emphasis often seems to
fall upon the converse of the proposition ‘that to be moral
means to be natural’, for, as we have already partly indi-
cated, he thought it ‘natural’ to be moral.
In the Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit (1699) he pro-
poses to determine which are the ‘good and natural’, and
which the and unnatural’ Affections. We possess by
‘ill
nature a faculty whereby we are able to distinguish and

prefer what is right —
the celebrated ‘moral sense’. This
faculty is closely akin to the aesthetic sense, by which we
recognize and approve of that which is harmonious and
proportionate. The moral sense might be called ‘good
taste in the art of living’, and, like other forms of taste,
it may be improved by training. The man of virtue, then,
like the man of virtu, is the man who recognizes what is
good by its beauty. The virtue of a rational creature con- .
a ‘rational affection’ towards right: a ‘just senti-

sists in
ment’ or ‘proper disposition’. Thus a man begins to be
virtuous when he makes ‘the Conception of Worth and
Honesty to be an Object of his Affection’ he is a ‘good’
man when the natural bent of his affections is towards the
good of society. Shaftesbury does not dissolve morality
entirely into sentiment: Reason also has its function,
1
Works, vol. ii, p. 31.
70
—
which is to ‘secure a right application of the Affections’.
But we are not truly virtuous unless feeling coincides with
reason; reluctant or merely dutiful well-doing is not
genuine virtue. He Moral Sense as ‘a real
defines the
Affection or Love towards Equity and Right for its own ,
sake, and on the account of its own natural Beauty and

Worth’.
There may, however, be wrong conceptions of right
behaviour, and it is typical of Shaftesbury that he men-
tions Religion, as well as superstition and false ideas of
honour, as one of the sources of such errors. Religion
may, for instance, pervert our natural moral sense by in-
culcating false conceptions of the Deity: ‘the ill Character
of a God does injury to the Affections of Man h 1 The fact
is, he believes our natural sense of right and wrong to be
antecedent to, and independent of, any religious beliefs.

It is characteristic of him, and of his comparatively ‘un-
historical’ age, that he should regard a correct theism as
a piece of refined speculation —
the last outcome of refine-
ment and civilization, whereas the simple notions of moral-
ity, however refinable by cultivation, are imprinted on the
heart by ‘nature’. If there be ‘a’ God, He can do no more
than ratify the immutable and self-existent distinctions of
right and wrong, beauty and deformity. On the other
hand, Shaftesbury concedes that an enlightened theism
belief in a Deity who represents the loftiest conceptions of
justice and benevolence, and who, as the universal Mind,
must necessarily be the best-naturd one in the
‘
World 2
’
—
cannot fail to reinforce the dictates of the moral sense. In
effect, we may cultivate a judicious belief in the Supreme
Being of the eighteenth century, but we must keep clear
of Jupiter or Jehovah. An atheist may have a firm grasp
of the fundamental principle of ethics That virtue causes :
happiness and vice misery, yet the atheistic belief that

the Whole is and infinite deformity’, ‘a dis-
‘a vast
tracted universe’, must weaken that love for everything
1
ibid., vol. p. 51.
ii,
2 Letter Concerning Enthusiasm : Works, vol. i, p. 40.
71
:

harmonious and proportionable in which virtue consists.
Whereas
‘Admiration and Love of Order, Harmony and Proportion, in
whatever kind, is naturally improving to the Temper, advan-
tageous to social Affection, and highly assistant to Virtue ; which
is it-self no other than the Love of Order and Beauty in Society.
In the meanest Subjects of the World, the Appearance of Order

gains upon the Mind, and draws the Affection towards it. But
if the Order of the World it-self appears just and beautiful; the
Admiration and Esteem of Order must run higher, and the ele-
gant Passion or Love of Beauty, which is so advantageous to
Virtue, must be the more improv’d by its Exercise in so ample and
magnificent a Subject. For ’tis impossible that such a Divine
Order shou’d be contemplated without Extasy and Rapture .’ 1
As for the belief in future rewardsand punishments, this

(at any rate in its cruder forms) robs our actions of moral
value, yet it can be useful as a safeguard against sudden
temptations, and still more as a general curb upon those
whose moral sense is undeveloped.
Shaftesbury next deals with the motives or obligations
to virtue, and the thesis he tries to prove is that celebrated
x one, that self-love and social are the same. He divides the
‘
affections into three kinds the natural affections ’, which
’
:
‘
tend towards the public good, the ‘self-affections’, which

tend towards one’s private good, and the ‘unnatural’ affec-
i- tions, which tend towards neither. Virtue depends upon
the maintenance of a proper balance between the two first.
The animals exhibit ‘an exact Proportionableness, Con-
stancy and Regularity’ in the balancing of their impulses;
they are, in fact, ‘natural’ without strain and effort. It is
only man who is sometimes vile, that is to say, who does
not always live according to his nature. Since man’s most
usual moral deformity is the predominance of self-love
over social, we must show that it is precisely through the
social affections that we do, in fact, obtain the maximum
of self-enjoyment. To begin with, it is generally admitted
that the completely anti-social man of Hobbes’s state of
1
Inquiry Concerning Virtue Works, vol. ii, p. 75.
72
nature not only ‘morose, rancorous and malignant’, but
is
also thoroughly miserable. Further, Shaftesbury takes it

to be allow d by most people’ that the
pleasures of the
mind are superior to those of the body. But these mental
pleasures, what are they but the ‘natural affections’ them-
selves, or their effects? There should be little need of
proving this, he thinks, to any human being ‘who has ever
known the Condition of the Mind under a lively Affection
Love, Gratitude, Bounty, Generosity, Pity, Succour,’
etc. ‘The very outward Features, the Marks and Signs
which attend this sort of Joy, are expressive of a more
intense, clear, and undisturb’d Pleasure’ than those
attend-
ing the bodily delights. It can even be said that
a man
who knows‘the Principles of Mathematicks will not fail
’
to enjoy, in the discoveries of speculative truth

which he
makes in that fascinating field, pleasures superior to those
of the senses. Or again, the emotion of sympathy
is so
pleasing to us that we actually prefer a Tragedy to any
other entertainment of equal duration. The very
pleasures
of the senses derive any satisfying quality they may
have
from their social appendages: the banquet would be
nought without the guests, the plate, and the equipage.
To possess the social affections full and entire, then, is
‘
to live according to Nature, and the Dictates
and Rules
of supreme Wisdom. This is Morality, Justice, Piety,
and natural Religion.’ The ‘self-affections’, on the other
hand, tend towards misery. Love of Life, Resentment
of
Injury, Love of Luxury, Interest, Ambition,
Love of
Praise, or of Rest —
a certain degree of all these is indeed
allowable and even necessary. But carried beyond this
point they become anti-social and vicious, and so
pro-
ductive of wretchedness. Finally Shaftesbury easily shows
that the third class of passions (the ‘unnatural’),
those
which, like Inhumanity, Misanthropy, Tyranny, and
the
rest, lead to no advantage public or private,
reduce the
lives of their victims to perpetual misery
‘agitated by a
thorow active Spleen, a close,and settled Malignity, and
Rancour’, converting their minds into a wilderness ‘where
73
all is laid waste, everything fair and goodly remov d, and
nothing extant but what is savage and deform d .
‘Thus the Wisdom of what rules, and is First and Chief in

Nature, has made it to be according to the private Interest
and
1 "
Good of every-one, to work towards the general Good
Shaftesbury feels that he has reduced his subject to a

‘Scheme of Moral Arithmetick’ having as much evidence
as Mathematicks. What he has in effect done has
been to
maintain both that virtue should be disinterestedly pur-
sued, and also that it should be cultivated for hedonist
reasons. He favours disinterestedness when he is criticiz-
ing religion for securing virtue by promises and threats.
But when he is refuting Hobbes and the doctrine of self-
love he becomes a hedonist: the motive to virtue is the
realization of the intensest kind of pleasure, and selfishness
is bad and wrong because it is not really pleasant.
As long
as the reward of virtue comes here and now, he accepts it
as part of the beautiful order of things remove it beyond ;
this life, and he rejects it with disdain.
5. Asa practical moralist Shaftesbury lays stress on the

value of Common-Sense, Good-Humour, Raillery, and the
Free Play of Mind. All these were at a high premium in
an age w hich welcomed antidotes for the maladies en-
r
gendered by superstition, enthusiasm, or the spirit of

faction. Addison also, as we have seen, recommended
Chearfulness, and it seemed obvious to both writers that
all the spectres of history could be laid much more effectu-
‘
ally by banter than by zeal. ’Tis the persecuting spirit

has raised the bantering one’, says Shaftesbury, and he
2
adds that if the Jews had treated early Christianity with

raillery and contempt, instead of persecuting it ‘had they
—
but taken the Fancy to act such Puppet-Shows in his
[Christ’s] Contempt as at this hour the Papists are acting
1
2 Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour : Works, vol. i, p. 72.
74
;

in his Honour 1 —they might
possibly have done our re-
ligion more harm than they actually did. And had not the
Gospel been in any case indisputable, its influence
might
have disappeared if the heathens had made a
Bart’lemy
Fair of our primitive founders’, instead
of throwing them
to the lions or burning them at the
stake. We must at all
costs dissociate religion
from melancholy and tragic moods
otherwise, instead of coming to know that
God in whom
there is no darkness at all, we shall be in
danger of ascrib-
ing our own morosity or vindictiveness to
him. Above all,
let us not insult him by
supposing that he resents free en-
quiry even about his own existence. If we
really believed
that God exceeds us as much in good-nature
as in all else,
we should be more alarmed at the idea of there being
no
—
God than at that of his existence whereas, alas, it is often
the other way round.
This free play of mind, however, means for
Shaftesbury
freedom amongst Gentlemen and Friends who
know one ,
another perfectly well ’. 2 The ‘mere Vulgar of
Mankind’
may perhaps often stand in need of such a rectifying
Object as the Gallows before their Eyes’ 3 (just
as they
may need supernatural terrors to prevent them from defy-
ing the parson), but it is really only the
enlightened few
that Shaftesbury takes account of. The evening walk of
Theocles and his interlocutor, which resulted in
such lofty
flights of speculation, was taken in fields
‘from which the
laborious hinds were now retiring’. Shaftesbury’s con-
fidence in the results of philosophical enquiries
‘politely
managed’ presupposes a settled order of society,
with no
shadow of approaching change to perplex the
gentlemen
and friends who know each other perfectly well.
It is
no wonder that Shaftesbury became outmoded
when later
in the century, the ‘free play of mind’ had ceased to be an
aristocratic perquisite.
1
Letter Concerning Enthusiasm'. Works,
vol. i, p. 29.
2
Essay on the Freedom of Wit etc.: Works,
, vol. i, p. 7?
3
ibid., vol. i, p. 127.
75
CHAPTER V
Natural Morality
(continued)
II. JOSEPH BUTLER (1692-1752)
grounds
‘
Others had established the historical and prophetical
that sure testimony of its truth
of the Christian Religion , and
which is found in its perfect adaptation to the heart of
Man .It
Constitution
was reserved for him to develope its Analogy to the
in the
and Course of Nature; and laying his strong foundations
another and irre-
depth of that great argument there to construct
subservient to Faith ,
fragable proof: thus rendering Philosophy
andfinding in outward and visible things the type and
evidence of
those within the veil.' [Epitaph in Bristol Cathedral.]
EISMhad found all-sufficient evidence of God’s
D existence and of his moral government in Nature’

|
and in the conscience of man. The Church had

also moved with the times, and, although its basis
was still
‘
held to be supernatural, it was itself penetrated with

the
spirit of the age. It admitted that Reason could look up
through Nature to Nature’s God, and eminent divines

since the middle of the seventeenth century (Cudworth,
Tillotson, Clarke) had been stressing the reasonableness
of Christianity. Yet the Church could not concede that
‘natural’ religion was enough: its very raison d'etre lay in
the alleged need for Revelation as well. The main effort
of orthodox apologetics was therefore directed towards
demonstrating that Revelation was a necessary adjunct to
natural religion, or, at the lowest, not inconsistent with it.
The difficulty of this task arose in part from the growing
suspicion that the Jehovah of the Old Testament could
hardly be identified with the God of the philosophers the :
God whom both deists and orthodox alike agreed to find

in Nature. would no longer do, in this polite age, to
It
‘
teach one’s haggard and unreclaimed reason to stoop unto
76
NATURAL MORALITY BUTLER
the lure of faith’, or to lose oneself in an o altitudo. The
old explanation of biblical difficulties, that these matters
were ‘mysteries’ above our comprehension, could no longer
be used except in the way of irony — as was done by
Shaftesbury or Voltaire.
Of the champions of orthodoxy in the first half of
all
the eighteenth century, Bishop Butler is usually felt to be

the most effective, and his Analogy of Religion has (1736)
important bearings upon our main theme. I shall con-
sider, first, the argument of this celebrated work; and
secondly, Butler’s attempt (in the Three Sermons) to ground
morality upon human nature, noting especially his diver-
gencies from the school of Shaftesbury.
THE ANALOGY OF RELIGION ( 1736 )
The main summed up in the

thesis of the Analogy is
sentence Butler quotes from Origen, that ‘he who believes
the Scripture to have proceeded from him who is the
Author of Nature, may well expect to find the same sort
of difficulties in it as are found in the constitution of
Nature’. What distinguishes Butler from most other
defenders of the faith is the unusual way in which he
effects the identification between the God of Revelation
and the God of Nature. Instead of proving, in the manner
of the physico-theologians, that all things are bright and
beautiful, and that the good God made them all, he shows
that Nature and Revelation are both baffling and in a sense
unsatisfying, and that it is as such that they both appear
to be the products of the same mind. He finds a place in
his scheme for Revelation, but only by showing it to be as
full of defects as Nature itself.
‘ ’
In passing from Shaftes-
bury to Butler we pass from an optimistic to a relatively
pessimistic theory of the world. not strange that the
It is
champion of orthodoxy should be more pessimistic than
the heretic, for the Christian tradition had always been
77
associated rather with a sense of the imperfection of
Nature and of man, in their present state, than with any
optimism of the eighteenth century type. It is the pre-
dominance of this sense in Butler which constitutes the
real strength of his arguments, as opposed to their ostens-
ible purport, and makes the Analogy after two hundred
,
years, still one of the more impressive works of the period,

Butler is not, indeed, exempt from the eighteenth century
propensity to seek a favourable explanation for all things;
not satisfied with recognizing evil’, he also tries to explain
‘
why God was wise to include it in his plan. But his dis-
tinction is that he looks it more directly in the face, and
with a more disillusioned eye, than the optimists of the
time.
Butler’s method of argument depended upon the fact
(for us highly significant) that he could assume, as a matter
of almost universal consent, the existence of a divine Author
of Nature. It was here that one stood on firm ground in
the early eighteenth century: the natural evidences for
the Divine Original were, as we have seen, felt to be over-
whelming; it was ‘Revelation’ which had to be sub-
stantiated by analogy. The deists found God in Nature
and in the heart of man, but denied Revelation. If God
had really revealed himself in the Hebrew Scriptures, they
argued, he would not have left us in any doubt or per-
plexity; we should find none of the historical, textual, and
which in fact we do find there, and
spiritual difficulties
the God so revealed would correspond with our highest
spiritual and moral conceptions, which, however, is not
always actually the case. To all thisButler replies that
there are just as many difficulties in proving God from the
constitution and course of Nature as there are in accepting
Revelation, and they are difficulties of the same kind. If,
then, in spite of these difficulties, we admit the sufficiency
of the natural evidence, may we not learn to expect ana-
logous difficulties in the sphere of revealed religion, and
to accept them with as good a grace ? For how does God
in fact operate in Nature, and in the moral government of
78
NATURAL MORALITY — BUTLER
the world? It is not Butler’s concern to demonstrate the
wisdom of God in the Creation, after the manner of Ray or
Derham; it is enough for him Nature is
to reaffirm that
an organized whole, working according to general laws
without regard to particular persons or things (so that,
e -g-> gravitation will not cease if you should
happen to step
over a cliff). Natural evils’ of course result from
such a
system, yet the system is admitted to be of divine
work-
manship. And how of the moral government of the world
?
Experience teaches that God’s method of moral govern-
ment does not always correspond with human expectations
or desires. We might, for instance, have
supposed that a
Creator as omnipotent as he is benevolent would only
have
created beings entirely happy, virtuous, and safe
from all
physical and moral harm, whereas we know that
men are
not so created. (We are not certain, however,
that either
happiness or virtue would exist in such circumstances.)
Evil is often used by God for his own inscrutable
pur-
poses; God
works, not directly, but indirectly, always
using subordinate means and agents, and these are
often
disagreeable to us. This, whether we like it or
not, is the
actual state of affairs, and Butler does not
defend it with
any glib assurance. He merely intimates that,
on the
analogy of what we observe in the ‘scheme of
the natural
world’, ‘the things objected to may be, upon
the whole,
friendly and assistant to virtue, and productive
of an over-
balance of happiness ’. 1 But Butler is quite certain, how-
ever, that we can see enough evidences of a moral govern-
ment to be assured that God
governing the world
is
righteously. The
weightiest evidence is to be found in
our own conscience: we know, that is, that
‘upon the
whole ’, virtue produces happiness and vice misery.
There
is enough evidence
for this to justify us in regarding
happi-
ness as the reward bestowed upon us for right
conduct,
and misery as the punishment for vice. In spite
of many
appearances to the contrary, therefore, it is
possible to
hold that all may very well be for the best, or at
least that
1
Analogy, ch. vii, sect. ii.
79
there nothing ridiculous in so thinking. In thus stress-
is
ing the significance of the moral sense (though not in the

tone of his writing) Butler comes near to Shaftesbury, as
he also does in declaring that the world is a complex
structure of interconnected parts, of which no portion
could be altered without injury to the whole. Our limited
purview never takes in more than a fragment of this whole,
so that in objecting to any part of it we must remember
that this part ‘may be relative to other parts unknown to
us’. To all such objections, then, ‘our ignorance is a
satisfactory answer, because some unknown relation, or
some unknown impossibility, may render what is ob-
jected to just and good’. Butler concludes, then, that
these considerations are fully sufficient to engage us
‘to live in the general practice of all virtue and piety,
under the serious apprehension, though it should be mixed
with some doubt, of a righteous administration established
in nature, and a future judgment in consequence of
1
it ’.
Throughout the First Part of the Analogy Butler is care-

ful to refrain from using arguments derived from dogma.
He makes, however, certain assumptions which he takes
to be admitted even by those who deny Revelation. These
are (a) That God exists (this has been proved in innumer-
able ways, he says, and is almost universally allowed), and
(b) that the soul exists and is immortal (this he tries to
prove by arguments not unlike those of Plato in the
Phaedo). These being granted, his object in this Part has
been merely to study, in the rather melancholy yet devout
spirit which is characteristic of him, what, as a matter of
experience, God’s method of natural and moral govern-
ance really is. In Part II he deals with Revelation in the
same manner, with the intention of proving that the
analogies between Revelation and Nature afford strong
presumption of their proceeding from the same Author.
One must remember that Butler feels himself to be living
in an age when unbelief could make out a case strong
1 ibid., pt. i, Conclusion. (My italics.)
8o
enough to test thewhole defensive armoury of orthodoxy:
It is come, I know not how, to be
taken for granted, by many
persons, that Christianity is not so much a
subject for enquiry;
but that it is, now at length, discovered to be
fictitious. And
accordingly they treat it, as if, in the present age, this
were an
agreed point among all people of discernment; and
nothing re-
mained, but to set it up as a principal subject of mirth and ridicule,
as it were by way of reprisals, for its
having so long interrupted
the pleasures of the world .’ 1
But the system of revealed he replies (using his

religion,
habitual technique of testing Revelation against Nature),
is not a subject of ridicule,
unless that of Nature be so
too 2 and to suppose this was, for the eighteenth cen-
tury, the worst of blasphemies. If the deists can accept
Nature as divine, he says in effect, why can they not
similarly accept Revelation ? —
for Nature, to which they
habitually appeal, is full of ‘defects’ analogous to
those
alleged against Revelation. We
have, so to speak, learnt
to recognize God’s style in his first book, the book of
Nature, and we have found it to be shall we say?
somewhat uncongenial style; let us not wonder, then, if
—a
we find the same mannerisms (not to say ‘defects’) in his

other work, Revelation. Tertullian of old could say
credo
quia impossible now an eighteenth century saint
; asks us
to believe Revelation to be authentic because
it is as be-
wildering as an admittedly divine Nature. In this para-
doxical defence Butler may seem to have virtually
wiped
out the distinction between Revelation and Nature indeed,
;
he urges in one place that our notion of what is ‘natural’

is our degree of knowledge, and that there may
relative to
be superior beings in the universe so well informed that
‘the whole Christian dispensation may to them
appear
natural, i.e. analogous or conformable to God’s
dealings
with other parts of his creation; as natural as the visible
known course of things appears to us ’. 3 In dealing, then,
with the deistical objection that Revelation lacks clarity^
1
Advertisement to the first edition. a
Introduction.
3
Analogy , ch. i [adfin).
F 8 I
—
fails to proclaim its divine original, Butler answers: God
does not inform us exactly how, and on what evidence, we
are to act in ordinary life; why therefore should we expect
his procedure to be different in Revelation ? It is probable
that God intends to test and prove our capacities as much
in understanding Revelation as in the practical conduct of
life, or in exploring the secrets of Nature. But, one feels,
if this is so, what has become of the notion of Revelation ?
Has it not in fact been obliterated in the effort to defend
it? If there is no more certainty or clarity in Revelation
than in Nature, then Revelation is part of Nature? To
this pass has orthodoxy come in the reign of George II,
that it can only defend Revelation by denying that it re-
veals. Butler seems to have established precisely that
complete oneness of Scripture with Nature which the
‘freethinkers’ then and since were striving to prove,
though his conscious purpose was, of course, to demon-
strate the analogy, not the identity, of Revelation and
Nature. He deals in a similar way with the objection that
Revelation was not universal, but communicated only to a
small and barbarous tribe of whose doings a mere minority
of mankind have heard even to this day. This, he says, is
but an instance of what we already know by experience,
that God effects his ends not by immediate acts, but in-
directly, through limited human and other agents.
It appears that what chiefly distinguishes Revelation
from Nature in Butler’s own mind is the biblical pro-
phecies and miracles, and on these he leans with his whole
weight. As might be expected, he defends a belief in the
miraculous by the usual appeal to human ignorance. What
do we know of Nature, who only Nature know ? How can
we presume to disbelieve what transcends our narrow pur-
view? A native of the tropics might with equal reason
disbelieve in ice and snow (and so forth). Butler has
another (a typically eighteenth century) argument: we
may well imagine, he says, that certain manifestations
signs and wonders —which would be out of place in
modern times, might have been quite proper in the early
82
NATURAL MORALITY BUTLER
ages of the world. Just so the wise parson in The Spiritual
Quixote warns \\ ildgoose that it is fantastic to attempt to
evangelize Hanoverian England by methods appropriate
enough in the apostolic age! We
have no reason to sup-
pose, Butler adds, that when man first appeared upon this
planet he was able to reason out his religion as we do now.
Therefore he must have acquired it by Revelation no :
other alternative is contemplated. Similarly, if Revelation

is not genuine, it must be an
imposture, and it is easier to
—
suppose it true than false; again no alternative. Butler
belongs, as such remarks indicate, to an age which had
not yet learnt to apply historical methods of interpretation
in the study of religion.
Butler s arguments carry little conviction to us now, and
his main become obsolete and irrelevant. What
thesis has
remains significant in him is his attitude to the universe,
his unusual power of looking dispassionately at the
facts,
and reporting upon them without distortion. This lends
a sombre gravity to his tone, which makes him, like
John-
son, more impressive than the optimists. He saw, what
perhaps we feel now more habitually than was usual in the
eighteenth century, that the universe is not a vast loud-
speaker through which God proclaims himself to man 1
,
and that life would not necessarily be a more desirable

business if truth were really obtruded upon us by a system
of divine broadcasting, whether ‘natural or supernatural \ *
‘
A faith so easy of attainment, he felt, would be worth no

more than a knowledge of the multiplication
Coleridge expressed it later, ‘it could not be intellectually
table —
or, as
more evident without being morally less effective; with-

out counteracting its own end by sacrificing the life of faith
to the cold mechanism of a worthless because compulsory
’. 2
assent Though Butler does not express his dissatis-
faction as we should, he seems to discern the radical defect
1
Cf. A. Huxley: The assertions of Christianity,
when freed from their
mythological incrustations . happen unfortunately to be true. Our universe
. .
is the universe of Behemoth and Leviathan, not of Helvetius and Godwin’

(Music at Night, p. 87).
2
Biographia Literaria , ch, x (Shawcross ed., vol. i, pp. 135-6).
83
of eighteenth century deism, namely that it makes man
the measure of all things, and takes no account of the
—
most significant elements of religious experience those,
namely, which involve an acknowledgment of paradox,
even of irrationality at the heart of things, certainly of
transcendence or ‘otherness’ ; of God not merely as deified
Reason but as mysterium tremendum. And his insistence
that life is a state of probation comes far nearer than the
optimists’ creed to expressing the modern realization that
action is necessary, that the world contains material and
moral jungles, and that the onus of clearing them rests
upon us. same optimism,
Voltaire, reacting against the
condensed, in the familiar words of Candide to Pangloss,
his view of the proper attitude towards these jungles.
After they had experienced almost every possible form of
physical and moral evil, Pangloss (who, being a philo-
sopher, can never contradict himself) repeats his old for-
mula that all events are inter-related in the best of possible
worlds. 'Cela est bien dit\ replies Candide, mats il faut
‘
cultiver le jardin' Butler’s general attitude, his realism

and his freedom from illusion, can be indicated (in con-
clusion) in his reply to the imaginary objector who urges
(with much force) that ‘it is a poor thing to solve diffi-
culties in revelation by saying that there are the same in
natural religion’. ‘Indeed the epithet poor ’, he replies
(and Johnson might have said the same), ‘may be applied,
I fear as properly, to great part or the whole of human life d
’
BUTLER AS MORALIST
Butler’s ethical writings have been spoken of with uni-
form respect by all the historians of ethics I have met with.
He is regarded, by most, as the greatest English moralist
of the eighteenth century. In the middle of the nine-
teenth century, as we learn from Whewell, Butler’s Fifteen
Sermons and particularly the Three Sermons on Human
,
Nature with the Dissertation on Virtue were accepted as the

,
official moral philosophy of the University of Cambridge.

Matthew Arnold, in his long essay on Bishop Butler and
the Zeitgeist ( Vast Essays on Church and Religion speaks
), of
the corresponding reverence paid to him at Oxford (where,
it seems, Butler’s Sermons and Aristotle’s
Ethics shared
equal honours), and quotes several lofty encomiums upon
his work as moralist and philosopher of religion.
And
Professor Broad concludes the chapter on Butler in his
Five Types of Ethical Theory(1930) by saying that ‘though
his system is incomplete,
does seem to contain the pro-
it
legomena to any system of ethics that can claim to do

justice to the facts of moral experience ’d I propose now
briefly to examine the Three Sermons and the Dissertation
in order to illustrate, through Butler’s attempt to
And a
‘natural’ basis for morality, the controlling influence of
the idea of ‘Nature’ in the eighteenth century over minds
as diverse as we have found Shaftesbury’s and Butler’s
to
have been.
Whewell
indicates Butler’s cast of mind as a moralist by
contrasting him with Paley (he might equally well be con-
trasted with any utilitarian moralist, that is to say, with
most English moralists of the century):
‘Paley makes virtue depend upon the consequences of
our
actions; Butler makes it depend upon the due operation of
our
moral Constitution. Paley is the moralist of utility; Butler, of
conscience.’ 2
Of the two ways in which the subject of morals may be

treated (1) by enquiring into the abstract relations
of
things, and (2) by enquiring into the nature of man,
and
distinguishing what course of actions is in conformity with
that nature, Butler proposes to follow the second.
He
takes the old Stoic injunction, Follow Nature! the old —
definition of virtue as
jects
according to Nature
life
to a careful examination.
and sub- —
it In Butler’s deistical and
1 3
op. cit., p. 83. Preface to Three Sermons , 3rd ed.,
1855, p v
: \

free-thinking age, when Nature
‘
some sense was ascend-
’
in
ant over ‘Grace’, and morality seemed likely to be resolved
into an easy following of impulse (even if the impulses
should in fact be benevolent and social), a scrutiny of this
key-word, ‘Nature’, in its ethical uses, seemed peculiarly
desirable. Even Wollaston, in his Religion of Nature De-
lineated had pointed out that ‘to follow Nature’ as an
ethical maxim might turn out to mean ‘acting as any of
the several parts, without distinction, of a man’s nature
happened most to incline him ’. 1 Butler, anxious to save
the principle, asks us to consider what we mean by the
‘nature’ of man. Like a watch, man’s moral nature is
made up of parts: appetites, passions, affections, and the
‘principle of reflection but we have not fully described his
;
nature in giving this catalogue. We

must also give some
account of the relationship of the parts, how they fit to-
gether, and what sort of a system they form as a whole.
Human nature is not the sum of its parts but the constitu-
tion of the whole into an organism, with due subordination ‘
of its faculties to each other according to their relative

worth and dignity’ (if the Coleridgean phrase may be here
applied). We
can only form a true notion of human
nature by considering that certain parts of it have a
‘natural’ prerogative to rule the whole system. Brutes,
indeed, act according to their natures in following the
determination of instinct and environment. But man, in
addition to passions and affections, possesses the ‘principle
of reflection’, or conscience, the faculty which approves
and disapproves, and recognizes the higher and the lower.
Humannature then is such that ‘virtue’, action according
to the approval of conscience, is its end, just as timekeeping
is the watch’s end. The ‘principle of reflection’, Butler
says
‘plainly bears upon it marks of authority over all the rest, and
claims the absolute direction of them all, to allow or forbid their
gratification.’ 2
1 ioid.y Author’s Preface, pp. 8-9. 2 ibid., p. 15.
86
We are therefore not acting according to our nature if we
allow no more weight to this principle than to the various
impulses —
it we allow first one and then another to deter-
mine our actions. The

strength or prevalence of any im-
pulse is thus no indication of its moral value. Moral action
springs only from accprding to conscience the ‘absolute
authority which is due to it’. Butler criticizes Shaftes-
bury for not allowing any weight to this authority in his
Inquiry Shaftesbury has shown convincingly that virtue
.
in fact produces happiness, and vice misery; he has fur-

nished, that is, good utilitarian grounds for morality. But
suppose that there may be exceptional cases where virtue
and happiness are not coincident, or suppose a resolute
sinner or sceptic refuses to believe in their coincidence ?
We must then, says Butler, fall back upon the absolute
imperative of conscience; this at least gives us certainty,
however doubtful the utility of virtue may be. Man is by ‘
nature’ a law unto himself, and he would be under the

same obligation obey that law even though he were
to
ignorant or sceptical of any authority in the universe cap-
able of punishing violation of it.
Butler now enters upon the discussion of ‘self-love and
social’ —
the classic problem of eighteenth century ethics.
There is ‘a strange affectation’, he says and he is allud- —
ing to the Epicureans, to La Rochefoucauld, and above
all to the inevitable Hobbes, who for more than a century
after his own time represented the evil principle for all
orthodox moralists —which consists in regarding the whole
of human life as ‘one continued exercise of self-love’.
Butler distinguishes two grades of ‘selfishness’ (i) Cool
:
and settled selfishness, and (2) Passionate or sensual sel-

fishness. Only actions springing from (1) can be said to
proceed from ‘self-love’, or to deserve the name of
‘interested’ actions. Particular actions, due to passion,
spring not from love of self, but from love of their re-
spective objects wealth, honour, power, etc., and are often
:
performed in contradiction to true self-love. Self-love in

itself, and in its due degree, ‘is as just and morally good as
87
any affection whatever ’
. The ‘
interestedness of an action
’
isnot the criterion of its moral quality, neither is its being

attended with pleasure or pain; the only criterion is
whether it ‘becomes such creatures as we are’. We
can-
not even wish self-love weaker than it is, for we see it
overcome continually by every whim and caprice, by in-
quisitiveness, love, hatred, and any ‘vagrant inclination’.
It is ridiculous, moreover, to call a of self-indulgence
life
or debauchery ‘interested’, for it is plainly contrary to real

self-interest even in this world. In fact, in so far as self-
love contains a principle of reflection or discrimination, it
is a much better guide than passion; and although a life
motivated by it would be neither religious nor moral (since

the ‘felicific calculus’ is not the test of goodness), it were
to be wished that more people would guide themselves by
it rather than, as they commonly do, by mere appetite.
But of course Butler does not accept the analysis of all our
actions into some form of self-love. Human nature, for
him, is as clearly ordered for public as for private good.
There is a ‘natural principle of benevolence in man’,
which has the same relation to society as self-love has to
the individual. At this point Butler seems to resume
common ground with Shaftesbury, or even with Mande-
ville: the social and the self-affections, he agrees, are so
intimately connected, that we cannot procure self-satis-
faction without having some benevolence, and conversely
self-love is the great security for our correct social be-
haviour. Even our passions, those which are neither
benevolent nor self-loving, have de facto (as Mandeville
had said) a tendency to promote both public and private
—
good such is the wisdom with which Providence has
designed the universe. Man is naturally united to his
fellows, and the same principles which would lead him to
injure society lead also to self-injury. The frantic pursuit
of riches and power and honour (the current travesty of
‘self-interested’ action) demonstrably and admittedly fails
to lead to happiness. The fact is that men are commonly
as lacking in reasonable or ‘cool’ self-love as they are in
88
?
NATURAL MORALITY —BUTLER

& • ^
a wise following of both principles
i ^
or their nature would, in fact,
produce the same course of
virtuous action. But these utilitarian
reassurances come
trom Butler, as were, incidentally; they are part of his
it
eighteenth century stock-in-trade, not his

own distinctive
wares. We
recognize him better again when he assures
us that it is safer, and so more truly
moral, to act from
conscience, which is a settled principle,
than merely from
nat aff7ect * on > which may or may not
\xru
function steadily.
What course of life, then, does our real ‘nature’
suggest
as proper for us ? Butler admits
that there is a diversity
among men in respect of their ‘natural sense of moral
good
and evil’, but he thinks nevertheless that there
is a
standard, common
the whole human species, suffi-
to
ciently fixed to enable us to discourse
intelligibly about
human nature’. The existence of an inner check can no
more be questioned than the existence of eyesight, though
both are liable to error. Now religion indeed, requires us,
,
not to do good when we feel so disposed, but to form our
whole scheme of living upon conscience;
to direct it
wholly by loyalty to a categorical imperative
which trans-
cends each passing gust of passion or impulse.
But can it
be demonstrated, he asks, that this surrender
of our lives
to conscience, this living under Duty’s
habitual sway, is in
any real sense ‘living according to our Nature’
(this being
W 6 remembered what he is concerned > to prove)
a ,t l •
Might it not perhaps be more natural

to do as others use
‘ ’
sometimes sporting with Amaryllis in the shade,

and some-
times (perhaps) living laborious days, but
in every case
yielding only to whatever impulse happens
at the time to
be strongest: being, in fact, consistent
only in incon-
sistency ? Butler replies, that
‘ifby following nature were meant only acting as
we please it
would indeed be ridiculous to speak of nature
as any cmide’in 7
morals .’ 1
It would, in fact, be impossible in that case to deviate from

1
ibid., p. 6 1.
89
‘Nature’. The facthe sees, that ‘Nature’ is used in
is,
the
different senses. In one sense our ‘Nature’ implies
in another
notion of ‘that which is a law unto itself ;
It is not this
sense, we are by Nature’ children of wrath.
‘
latter ‘Nature’ that we are to live by,

but that whereby
(in St Paul’s words) the Gentiles ‘do by
nature the things
contained in the law’. It is by the possession of that
‘ which is natural to man,
magisterial faculty’, conscience,
that he becomes a moral agent, and a law to himself. A
man may yield to strong impulse, and yet be violating his
proper ‘Nature’. ‘Suppose a man, foreseeing the
danger
of certain ruin, should rush into it for the sake
of a present
be-
gratification’; there would then be a ‘disproportion’
tween his action and the ‘Nature of man, and it
would
thus be ‘unnatural’ for him so to act. But since
we should
the case
not call the man’s behaviour ‘unnatural if, in
mentioned, self-love had prevailed over passion, self-love
must be a principle superior to passion. Passion may be
contradicted without violating Nature; reasonable self-
love cannot. There really is, then, such a thing as
a natural
superiority of one impulse over another, quite distinct
from
Still more em-
their degrees of strength or frequency.
phatically can it be said that where impulse comes
into
conflictwith reflection or conscience, conscience must be

held to be the ‘naturally’ superior principle, quite apart
from the strength of the impulse. The distinction is ana-
logous to that between mere power and true authority The
.
very notion of ‘conscience includes the idea of its super-

intendence’. ‘Had it strength, as it has right; had it
power, as it had manifest authority, it would absolutely
govern the world .’ 1 Every subordinate impulse is a real
part of our nature, but not the whole. As the ancients
have said, tortures and death are not so contrary to human
nature as injustice.
Butler feels that he has now proved his case, which is,
that ‘exclusive of Revelation’ (how vital it seemed to the
Hanoverian divines, even to so saintly and orthodox a
1 ibid.,
p. 70.
90
—
Christian as Bishop Butler, to ground
their case firmly
upon Nature, before appealing to Revelation!),
man is
demonstrably not a creature of the moment,
left by his
Maker to act at random. And if it be asked: even
if the
moral law be thus written upon our
hearts, what obligation
is there to obey it? Butler answers
(relying implicitly on
the numinous quality of the idea
of Nature) Your obliga-
:
‘
tion to obey this law is its being

the law of your nature ’. 1
lhe imperative of conscience is ‘categorical’.
we h ave seen, it is not Butler’s purpose to
. justify
virtue on the score of its pleasantness;
yet he feels free to
use that argument, when it seems
desirable, in order to
refute those who seek pleasure in
vice. Why, for instance,
should we not take the primrose path
to present ‘good’
without regard for others ? This question
implies the false
assumptions that our own happiness is really
distinct from
that of others, and that vice has
no sting of its own.
Actually, as we have seen, most of our
enjoyments depend
upon our regard for our fellows, and the
states of mind
associated with rage, envy, resentment,
etc., do not yield
greater happiness than meekness,
forgiveness, good-will
nor is the satisfaction arising from riches
and power greater
than that arising from justice and charity.
The restraints
or vice are far more
galling than the easy yoke of duty
which, indeed, by being deliberately worn,
soon becomes
a delight and not a burden. There is seldom any in-
consistency between duty and even what
is commonly
called interest’, still less between duty and what
is really
interest Self-love ‘does in general perfectly
.
coincide
with virtue, and leads to one and the same
courseof life’.
He adds that whatever exceptions there may be to this
rule
—and they are much fewer than is commonly imagined—
all shall be set right at the final distribution of things’
But this consideration, again,belongs to Butler’s reserve-
P ut muc h nt0 front-line action, any more than
i
the hedonic value of virtue or the

equivalence of virtue and
self-love. We
are not to be virtuous for the
sake of plea-
1
ibid., p. 78.
91
sure, or from the motives of even though an
self-love,
unerring felicific calculus, or the insight of perfect

self-
love, would invariably lead to actions identical

with those
dictated conscience.
by In the Dissertation on Virtue he
that we
further argues (against the utilitarian position)
must not confuse even benevolence with virtue. It is taken
as agreed that we have this moral sense or
* conscience ,
and that there is an almost universal agreement about its
dictates; but the proper object of this faculty is right
con-
duct, quite apart consideration of consequences,
from all
whether in terms of our own happiness or that of others.

Butler means, I think, that it is neither safe nor wise for
us to be utilitarians —
to hold that virtue consists in actions
tending to promote the ‘greatest happiness’ of mankind.
‘
Some of great and distinguished merit (Shaftesbury ?), ’
he writes,
‘have, I think, expressed themselves in a manner, which may
occasion some danger to careless readers, of imagining the whole
of virtue to consist in singly aiming, according to the best of their
judgment, at promoting the happiness of mankind in the present
state; and the whole of vice, in doing what they
foresee, or
might foresee, is likely to produce an overbalance of unhappiness

in it: than which mistakes, none can be conceived more
1
terrible.’
Why is the ‘greatest happiness’ good

principle (which for
utilitarians comprised the whole of the law and the
prophets) a terrible mistake ? Because, in Butler’s view,
we simply do not possess, in our present imperfect state,
sufficient clairvoyance for us to be certain about the con-
sequences of our actions, ‘nor do we know what we are
about, when we endeavour to promote the good of man-
kind in any ways but those he [God] has directed’. Shock-
ing actions might be performed with a view to producing
an overbalance of happiness. Such ultimate objectives
as the happiness of mankind are beyond our limited scope,
and we may easily, in attempting to pursue them, become
NATURAL MORALITY —BUTLER
moral monsters. Our safety lies in following
the God-
given instinct which condemns violence,
injustice, and
falsehood, and approves benevolence
towards some (e.g.
kindred, friends, or countrymen) rather
than towards
others; whereas with the more
grandiose aims we may
easily be led into perpetrating the
former, and neglecting
the latter. ‘The happiness of the
world’, he concludes, ‘is
the concern of him who is the Lord
and the proprietor of
it ; our concern is
only with conduct dictated by the sense
of duty. Or as Dr Broad expresses it:
God might be con-
ceived to be a utilitarian ‘were his moral
character merely
that of benevolence; yet ours is not
so’. ‘And though it
is of course our duty’, Butler adds,
‘within the bounds of veracity and justice,

to contribute to the
ease, convenience and even cheerfulness and diversion
of our
fellow-creatures: yet, from our short view, it
is greatly uncertain
whether this endeavour will, in particular instances,
produce an
overbalance of happiness upon the whole;
since so many and
distant things must come into the account.’
Butler has a strong sense (akin to Burke’s)

of the incal-
culable complexity of the moral world, and a
corresponding
distrust of the calculating principle as
a moral dynamic!
W e are so apt to overlook some vital term
in making our
equations, that our only safe course is to leave
moral arith-
metic alone, and keep to conscience and the
sense of duty.
Yet Butler lives in the eighteenth century climate,
and
just as true self-love is probably equivalent
to virtue,
though we must not be virtuous on that account,
so prob-
ably dutiful conduct will in fact maximize
happiness
though we must be dutiful, not for that reason,
but solely
out of regard for the law of our nature— and
of course he
would add (and does add elsewhere), out of regard
for the
Author of that law. In spite of Butler’s decorous
conceal-
ment of his religion, it may be doubted whether after
all
he has succeeded in building morality upon
a ‘natural’
foundation. Or perhaps he has done so only by
including
a supernatural principle in the make-up of
‘human nature \
93
reverence he expects us to pay to conscience
(call it
The
the ‘law of our being’ as he will) is of a kind that
most men
will only accord to something other than
themselves.
From worlds not quickened by the sun

A portion of the gift is won.
94
CHAPTER VI
r 9
Nature in Satire
MANDEVILLE
WO chief views about
T the moral order of the uni-
verse are to be found in the
(often held simultaneously by the
one, that the world is a system
eighteenth century
same thinkers):
which automatically works
together for good, and the other, that
in order to secure
good results we must make good efforts. Associated with
the first of these, as we have seen, is the view
that there is
a natural identity of interest between
the individual and
society (self-love and social are the
same), so that each man
in following his own interest js in fact thereby
promoting
that of the whole. This view, as we see particularly in
_
entham, is compatible with the theory that egoism is the

mainspring of human action. But on the whole the
eighteenth century thought well of
human nature, and it
was generally believed that men were ‘by nature’ sociable,
sympathetic, and benevolent. Good results, therefore
were to be expected from the nature of
man, and as for
vice (which undeniably existed),
the wise ordinances of
.Providence could be relied upon to turn
it to good ends
(or at least to set matters right in
the hereafter). So that
even if we made no good efforts, ‘good’
would ultimately
triumph just the same. On the whole, man’s ‘good
nature was supposed to be a part of
the beneficent auto-
matism of things.
Of the various writers of the time
Mandeville (1670-
1
73 3 ) 1S remarkable, not so much for originality of thought
as for the new and (to his own
generation) startling pattern
he made out of the old materials. For,
as we shall see, he
95
some-
took something from Hobbes and the libertines,
eighteenth
thing from Christianity, and something from
but rea Y~
century optimism. Out of these incongruous
made ingredients he constructed his celebrated Fable
oj
the Bees, of which the paradoxical subtitle was ‘Private

that God and
Vices, Publick Benefits’. Many had urged
private
Nature knew how to evoke good from ill, to turn
(as stated
vice to public advantage, but the orthodox view
—
by Butler) was Woe unto him through whom the
scandal
cometh! We must not put too great a strain upon

the
moral refineries of Providence and the world would

be
;
is with
an even better place without any vice at all, than it
into good.
vice being constantly turned, by divine alchemy,
Mandeville alone had the audacity to declare that the
re-
finery needed the raw material that the public benefits

:
vices.
existed not in spite of, but because of, the private
In the Fable itself, which is a short satire in
Hudibrastic
verse, Society is as a Bee-hive.
shown This hive is pros-
perous and great as long as pride, selfishness, coiruption,
luxury, hypocrisy, fraud, injustice, and every
conceivable
rid the
vice are freely practised. One day, however, Jove
bawling Hive of fraud’, with what result? Trade and the
professions languished, unemployment and depopulation
set in, and the few surviving bees deserted their
hive for a
hollow tree, where they took up their abode, Blest with
Content and Honesty’. The moral, as Mandeville draws
it, is:
Then Fools only strive
leave complaints:
To make a Great an Honest Hive.
T’enjoy the World’s Conveniences,
Be famed in War, yet live in Ease,
Without great Vices, is a vain ,
Eutopia seated in the Brain.
Bare Virtue can’t make nations live
In Splendor.
What we to conclude from this fable ? That the bees

are
were wise who fled from a corrupt society and sought for
96
!
NATURE IN SATIRE — MANDEVILLE

rural innocence in a hollow
forswearing splendour for
tree,
the sake of virtue ?
Or that the Vice which is so beneficial
‘ ’
to society deservessome other name ? The peculiarity of

Mandeville’s position is that he seems to accept
neither of
these alternatives. He is clearly at one with his age in
esinng worldly greatness, in approving
of the splendour
ot the hive, yet he retains a
routine reverence for ‘virtue’
as something of a loftier
order. His point is, however,
that virtue is impracticable, or at any rate unpractised, and
that since it is therefore to vice that
we owe our benefits,
it is more honest and realistic to
recognize it as vice, in-
stead of pretending that it is virtue. For what, according
to Mandeville, is ‘virtue’
? His idea of it is as rigorous as
that ot Butler or Kant: it is, he
says, ‘every Performance,
by which Man, contrary to the impulse
of Nature , should
endeavour the Benefit of others, or the
Conquest of his
own Passions, out of a Rational Ambition of being
good ’. 1
Virtue, then, is self-conquest, altruism and rational be-
haviour well and good Mandeville places
:
; himself securely
on the side of the angels of ethical tradition.
But then he
proceeds to demonstrate that men never
do, in actuality
conquer themselves in this way never do
behave — altru-
istically or rationally. We yet enjoy many good things in
civilized life;whence then can they come? They must
arise from ‘vice’, i.e. from
conduct motivated by pride
selfishness and the rest of the deadly
sins. Christian saints
and moralists have taught that wealth
and power are
vicious, because hostile to the
of the spirit, but they
life
have preached renunciation as the remedy.
Mandeville
adopts the most rigoristic definition of
virtue, not in order
to persuade us to renounce the
world, but to encourage
us to accept it and make the best of
it. Virtue ? Yes
admirable, of course; but it transcends
human
We hve in the splendid hive, and we wish to go onnature.living
in it; therefore, we should take
an honest, scientific in-
terest in its structure. There is much in it that is good,
1
Kaye’s edition of the Fable, vol. i,
pp. 48-9 ( Enquiry into the Origin of
Moral Virtue). (My italics.)
G
97
‘virtue of
but don’t us pretend that this is due to any
let
of virtue prevents
ours. Similarly, Mandeville’s definition
Io any
him from adopting the utilitarian standpoint,
liberal utilitarian who demands how any conduct which
Mandeville replies
benefits society can be called ‘vice’,
the consequences o
that virtue is to be judged, not by
motives are aimos
actions, but by their motives , and human
invariably impure. This is not to deny,
°f course, that it
is these very ‘consequences that interest Mande\i e, ôr
motives can and do
his whole argument is that impure
produce beneficial results. If we should enquire further,
public good.
how can private vices work together for
manner,
Mandeville will refer us, in quite the approved
to the Divine Wisdom:
render the unsearchable depth of the Divine
Wis-
‘nothing can
had
dom more conspicuous, than that Man, whom Providence
designed for Society, should not only by his
own Frailties and
Happiness, but
Imperfections be led into the Road to Temporal
likewise receive, from a seeming Necessity
of Natural Causes, a
to be
Tincture of that Knowledge, in which he was afterwards
1
by the True Religion, to his Eternal Welfare .’
made perfect
curious that Miandeville should have adhered to

his
It is
lofty notion of virtue while accepting with
so good a grace
the viciousness of man and its gratifying consequences;

or,
to put it another way, that he should have

been moralist
enough, after showing (with no apparent disquiet)
how
ubiquitous and inevitable vice is, to add the palinode but
don’t forget that it is vice! It is difficult to say exactly
.
what his motive can have been. Sometimes, as we have

is it then
seen, he uses the traditional language of religion ;
possible that Mandeville is a true Christian satirist,

who,
like Machiavelli, rejected ‘the myth of human goodness,
which thought replaces the belief in Divine
for liberal
Grace’ ? 2 Hardly, for though he confesses that there is
no health in us, he does not ask for mercy upon us miser-
able offenders. He rather thanks God for making sin so
1
ibid., vol.
2 T. S. Eliot, Lancelot Andre<wes, pp. 62-4.
i, p. 57-
98
NATURE IN SATIRE — MANDEVILLE
advantageous Some have supposed that his satire drove
“ J*
°PP° slte direction
cendental
; that he was exposing the trans-
notion of virtue that he ostensibly
accepts, by
revealing its astronomical 1
remoteness Perhaps .
we may
uggest that his aim (it was certainly the outcome of his
work) was to show
the incompatibility between
traditional
:andard s and actual ways of living,
°L the
.? and that he dis-
,
lked
;|
cant of virtue more than the
reality of vice— that
r h n sh °rt. there lived more faith
,
in honest vice than
f° ‘l'>‘
““f i ts
li 6
!
moral weeds. One may add
he was also prepared at times
that like other
to use the loftiest
moral ideals purely as a standard
of satirical reference, and
without implicating himself with
them. His main plea
and herein lies such moral strength
honesty and realism; like
as he has was* for
Machiavelli, he thought we
—
should learn more by looking at
what men are than by en-
larging upon what they should
be. Here we are, honour-
g n Set Fmciples and acting upon another: what
Hto k° i
be done? f
Recognize and accept the facts, and
is
don’t
imagine you are practising virtue
when you are really only
following the promptings of your
egoism, and when the
real practice of virtue (however
admirable in the sight of
heaven) would lead to such
inconvenient consequfnces.
Mandeville belongs to our story only
because he shared
the eighteenth century belief
in Nature— because he
be-
lieved that is to say, that you
had only to accept, to let
natural causes produce their natural
effects, in order to
arrive at a very tolerable state
of affairs. To get a eood
7 U £d 0n y g ° ° n be ng aS Wicked
as you >ike.
’
TWmS, H
ut Mandevillem stands
! ,
queerly poised between several
flicting schools of thought; he
con-
is not of pure
eighteenth
century extraction. Remove his
‘Hobbist’ or ‘cynical'
view of human nature and you get an
eighteenth century
laissez-faire liberal. Remove his
complacent acceptance
of the splendid hive, and you get
a misanthrope or an
austere Christian moralist. As it is, he remains an ob-
stinate amalgam, irreducible to any
simple formula, though
1
Cf. Kaye’s Introduction op.
, cit., vol. i, p. xlix.
99
«

co-existed
made up of ingredients which could only have
in his own age.
A NOTE ON SWIFT
moral
traditional
‘
To show the incompatibility between
phrase used a few
standards and actual ways of living’ (the
lines above)— this is of course the
general aim and end ot
Satire, and it cannot escape notice
that the age we are con-
sidering, the age of Dryden, Pope, Swift,

and Voltaire, was
exceptionally fertile in satiric work. Just
when the meta-
for the best
physicians were demonstrating that all was
in the best of possible worlds, a
number of major writers
was, was
were pointing out that a great deal of whatever
wrong. In Pope there is a combination of both
attitudes,
for the optimism of the Essay on Man

is hardly maintained
the Dunciad. It is evidently possible to

be Pan-
in, say,
and Candide in practice: to believe in-
gloss in theory
tellectually in the BeautifulOrder, or the Great Chain of
in actual
Being, but at the same time to be painfully aware,
living, of what man has made of man.
In my view it was
precisely the prevalence of the belief in
Nature , and
especially in ‘Nature and Reason’, which made
this period
the golden age of satire. If all in Nature pleases, then

Man will times appear vile by contrast; if you worship
at
‘Nature and Reason’, you will be the more afflicted by
human unreason; and perhaps only the effort to see man
as the world’s glory will reveal how far
he is really its jest
and riddle. age which believes in Nature must fit
An
man somehow into the picture; it can either see man, with
Shaftesbury, as naturally reasonable, sociable, and amiable,
and human institutions (with Soame Jenyns) as an exten-
sion of the divine pattern, or it can see him as Yahoo rather
than Houyhnhnm —
deviating at every turn from Nature
and Reason, and following only the devices and desires of
his own corrupt heart. As we saw in Chapter I, the
eighteenth century felt a deep nostalgia, not for the Eden
ioo
a E ge
vicTO
u% r ary''
y cron a coll lg
\ \
LJ Bin ARY
;
‘nature’ IN SATIRE — SWIFT

of theology, but for the State of Nature from
which man
had somehow departed (though possibly the Tahitians
still
enjoyed it). According to venerable theory, at
least as old
as Aristotle, reinforced by Stoicism and Christianity, and
now re-emphasized by Descartes and Locke, man’s essen-
tial nature was his rational soul.
The real State of Nature,
then, as Locke had said, has the Law of
Nature (which is
the law of Reason) to govern it, and
man’s affairs are
rightly ordered only when his institutions
correspond to
the true theory of human nature.
It was by standards of this kind that most of the satire of
this time measured the actual. ‘True Satire’, Mr
Middle- .
ton Murryhas said, ‘implies the condemnation of society

by reference to an ideal ; ‘the satirist’, he goes on,
‘is en-
gaged measuring the monstrous aberration from the
in
’
ideal 1 and he contrasts the satirist with the comedian,
;
who is merely concerned with aberrations from current

social normality, and refers to no remoter
standard than the
accepted conventions. Conditions in the early
eighteenth
century were, I think, especially favourable for the
satiric
kind of measurement. By that time the mediaeval
rack
had sufficiently dislimned for the harsh outlines of
the
modern situation to be clearly visible. Man, hitherto the
immortal soul in quest of salvation, or the rational soul
in
quest of virtue, was now seen to be the economic
or
political ego in quest of wealth, power, and
position. Dur-
ing the seventeenth century the acquisitive urges still
hid
behind religious and political outworks, but by now it was
too clear that what both individuals and states were
really
after was the material spoils of the world, now lying
readier
for exploitation than they had ever been for the
Tambur-
laines or Jews of Malta. Yet—and this is the point—yet
the old standards lived on in ghostly fashion,
sitting
crowned upon the graves of Christianity and Humanism
it was to them that one still instinctively
turned, and by
them one was still, in theory, supposed to be living. Any-
one, then who still held firmly to them, and yet
had the
1
The Problem of Style, p. 65.
IOI
giftof seeing things as they really were, could find all the
materials of satire ready to hand the ideal and the actual
:
in sharp juxtaposition. Such a one was Swift, who, says

Mr Aldous Huxley, could never forgive man for being a
vertebrate mammal as well as an immortal soul. One
^
thinks at once of his distinction between and ‘real
‘nominal’ Christianity in the Argument Against Abolishing

Christianity or between rational man (Houyhnhnm) and
,
brute man (Yahoo) in Gulliver s "Travels Swift differs .
from Mandeville mainly, one might say, in not being con-

tent with the ‘splendid hive’ as it is, and in not imagining
virtue to be by His satires imply
definition unattainable.
a reference to a standard of Nature and Reason which is
as old as creation, and is attainable, if only men would not
perversely depart from it. The Houyhnhnm, it will be
remembered, ‘thought Nature and Reason were sufficient
guides for a reasonable animal, as we pretended to be, in
’. 1
showing us what we ought to do, and what to avoid
But Swift’s position is full of ambiguities, particularly with
respect to the Christian religion. Is ‘real’ Christianity,
for him, equivalent to Nature and Reason, as it was for

many contemporary minds? Would he, like a true
Christian divine, reject the splendid hive in its favour?
His account of the likely effects of introducing ‘real’
Christianity into a modern society closely resembles Man-
deville’s account of the effects of introducing virtue into
the hive:
‘
hope no reader imagines me so weak to stand up in the de-
I
fence of real Christianity, such as used, in primitive times (if we

may believe the writers of those ages) to have an influence upon
men’s belief and actions: to offer at the restoring of that, would
indeed be a wild project; it would be to dig up foundations: to
destroy at one blow all the wit, and half the learning of the king-
dom: to break the entire frame and constitution of things; to
ruin trade, extinguish arts and sciences, with the professors of
them; in short, to turn our courts, exchanges, and shops, into
deserts; and would be full as absurd as the proposal of Horace,
1 Gulliver, bk. iv, ch. 5.
102
‘nature* IN SATIRE —SWIFT
where he advises the Romans, all in a body, to leave their city, and
seek a new seat in some remote part of
the world, by way of cure
for the corruption of their manners .’ 1
The logic of the irony in the Argument

which Swift’s in
,
device is to adopt the tone of the ‘nominal’
Christians and
to defend Christianity for the wrong
reasons, would seem
to place him as an
upholder of the ‘real’ or primitive
Christianity. On the other hand, his writings in general
show his attachment to reason and good sense, to the
Anglican Church as their embodiment, and to settled and
orderly government. He does not really want a revolu-
tionary Christianity; no one hates religious
enthusiasm
more than he, and no one has analysed more devastatingly
the sources of fanaticism (‘Aeolism’) and of any
kind of
megalomania. As a Church of England man, a friend of
Revolution principles, and a statesman, he accepts the
splendid hive —
our present schemes of wealth and power ’,
with which he says real Christianity is utterly inconsistent.
Both his life and his writings show that he had no wish to
abandon those schemes, or to ‘break the entire frame and
constitution of things ’. He does not believe, with Mande-
ville, that the hive must needs be vicious
to be great; in-
deed, he is a satirist precisely because he feels that
it
should and could be directed by standards which would
have been acceptable to Plato or Cicero standards of
rationality, ‘nature’ and civilization for which the great
—
ancients stood, and for which the Church of England
now
stands. Swift was for the ancients against the moderns
because he saw history not as progressive amelioration,
but as a struggle, often marked by phases of disastrous
failure, to maintain the values fixed for ever by
antiquity.
Modern philosophy, science, criticism, and politics, and
much modern religion, were for him so many fantastic
divagations from the plain path of Nature and Reason.
The Goths of ignorance, pedantry, pride, or corruption
were ever ready to swarm from their frozen North and
1
Argument Against Abolishing Christianity {ad init).
103
bury all in universal darkness, and the few friends of
Nature and of civilization must be continually vigilant in
their defence. The crooked designs of statesmen, the
subtleties of divines and lawyers, the follies of
projectors
and natural philosophers, the affected refinements of poets

— all these must be checked by perpetual
reference to the
God hath given
simple canons of Reason and Nature.
the bulk of mankind a capacity to understand reason when
it is fairly offered; and by reason they would easily be
.’ 1
governed, if it were left to their choice
A remark of Mill’s about Bentham aptly describes the
purport and method of Swift’s satire: Bentham, he says,
took his stand ‘outside the received opinion and surveyed
it ‘as an entire stranger to it’. Indeed it is the aim of all
major satire to trick us into seeing actual and familiar con-
ditions as if for the first time, or as though we were visitors
from some Utopian planet, or from China, Persia, or any
other supposed headquarters of Reason. Hence arise the
classic technical devices of satire, all of which are em-
ployed by Swift. The actual may be depicted in a dis-
torted or inverted form, so that we judge and condemn it
first, and only then recognize its essential likeness to
our
own system (Lilliput). Or the actual may be described
and explained to some person who is entirely ignorant of
existing conditions, and who can therefore stand for un-
corrupted Nature and Reason (the King of Brobdingnag,
or— to take a modern instance —
Plato, in Lowes Dickin-
son’s After Two Thousand Tears'). The mere recital of the
facts to one who is assumed to view things entirely accord-
ing to true theory, produces the satiric situation. One
might to-day, for example, try to expound the meaning of
such terms as ‘Christendom’, ‘Democracy’, ‘Peace’, and
the like, to a child (or might we say, to a genuine Hindoo
yogi ?) the result, if one were sufficiently accurate, would
;
be satire. A variant of this method is to introduce into

the actual world some unsophisticated stranger from China,
1 Some Free Thoughts upon the Present State of Affairs (1714), quoted by
R. Quintana, The Mind and Art of J Swift (1936), q.v., especially ch. iv.
.
IO4
NATURE IN SATIRE SWIFT
Persia, Mars, etc., and to give us, through his artless com-
ments, a glimpse of how we
look to the eyes of first
innocence Or the satirist may prefer simply to depict a
Utopia where all is rationally
ordered, and leave us to
make the required application to actuality.
Swift occasion-
ally drops into the
Utopian method, as in the passage
where he tells us that the Lilliputians,
in choosing public
ofhcers^had more regard to good
morals than to great
a ilities , since Providence
^
never intended to make the
management of Public affairs a mystery,
to be compre-
nded only by a few persons of sublime
genius, of which
there seldom are three born
in an age; but they suppose
truth, justice, temperance,
and the like, to be in every
man s power .1 Swift adds, it is true,
that in describing
these and other Utopian
regulations in Lilliput he ‘would
on y be understood to mean the
original institutions, and
not the most scandalous
corruptions into which these
people are fallen by the degenerate
nature of man’. He
is thinking here of
their political corruptions, for,
as Sir
Charles Firth has pointed out, ‘as
soon as Swift turns to
describe the politics of Lilliput it
ceases to be Utopia and
ecomes ngland itself, instead of being an
example to
Lngland .It is consoling to our
national pride to re-
member, in this connexion, that the greatest
French satirist
of the eighteenth century found
in the same England a
norm of Nature and Reason whereby to
measure the aber-
rations of the ancten regime in
France. It would doubtless
v
g
,°T
g t0° h n t0 su Sgest that Voltaire’s Letters on the
„
English Nation (better known in
the French version as
Genres Fhdosofhtques are an example
) of the Utopian
method of satire; Voltaire’s clear sight
did not overlook
the many deviations from reason
on this side of the Channel
as well and we find them duly
noted—as in his remarks
on Shakespeare, and on the English
temperament (its sus-
ceptibility to the effects of an east
wind). But England
seemed sufficiently Utopian in 1726-9 to serve his^pre-
sent purpose. It was a convenient method of
1
attacking
Gulliver, bk. i, ch. 6. * Essays Historical and Literary (x 93 8) .
p 2I
IO5
:

views of an English
traditional theology to describe the
sect (the Quakers) who seemed to
have reached a religious
It was an equally
outlook almost Chinese in its rationality. _
to describe
convenient means of attacking scholasticism
the rise of English philosophy from
Bacon to its culmina-
of philosophers,
tion in that most modern and reasonable
Mr Locke, and to enlarge upon the triumphs of the scien-
tific method in Newton’s work.
Similarly he; could con-
trast the commercial propensities of

the English nobi ity
and Lord
(Lord Townshend’s brother was a city merchant,
fastidious-
Oxford’s a ‘factor’ in Aleppo) with the quixotic
ness of continental aristocrats, many of
whom had no patri-
o
mony save their escutcheons and their pride. .
impressed
was present at Newton’s funeral, and was deeply
paid to men ot
by this, and by other signs of the honour
served many
genius in England. China, as is well known,
writers of this period as a symbol of
Nature and Reason,
also; but
and it is made use of in this way by Voltaire
that for once
readers of Swift may be gratified to find
since England
Voltaire had no occasion to appeal to China,
was closer to hand.
Whatever technique the satirist uses (there are many
gradations of irony, in Swift, for instance, which
I am not
to strip the object
to examine here ), his effort is always
x
satirized of the film of familiarity which

normally recon-
ciles us to it, and to make us see it as
in itself it really is, as
Andersen s
the child saw the unclothed emperor in Hans
story. This frustration of the ‘stock-response’ is some-
times achieved in Swift and Voltaire, for
example, by a
deliberate refusal to see, in some ignoble
object which
further
custom has consecrated or made symbolic, anything
than the object itself. Thus Voltaire s Quaker,
who for
a recruiting
the time being represents Reason, says of
campaign
‘Our God, who has commanded us to love our enemies, and
suffer without repining, would certainly not
permit us to cross
to
Swift’s irony see the excellent essay of that

title by F. R. Leavis
1 On
in Determinations.
106
-
NATURE IN SATIRE SWIFT

the seas, merely because
murderers cloath’d in scarlet, and wear-
ing caps two foot high,
enlist citizens by a noise made with
little sticks on an
two
ass’s skin extended .’ 1
Or when enlightening the King’s ignorance

Gulliver,
the advantages of gunpowder,
on
explains
‘that we often put this powder into large hollow
balls of iron, and
rge by an engine into some city we
,‘^îch would rip up the
were besieging,
pavements, tear the houses to pieces
° W SP ln te S °" ever side dashin
of all who
or came /
2 ,
X g out the brains
-
near.
Bentham, says Mill, habitually missed

the truth that is in
received opinions that at any
; rate, I suggest, is what the
satirist does and must do.
He must, whether deliberately
or no, miss precisely those
aspects of the ignoble thing
which in fact make it endurable to
the non-iatiric every-
day eye; that to say, he must ignore the
is
explanation of
the thing satirized —
how it came to be, its history. It is
a fact of experience that tout
comprendre c’est tout pardonner
and the satirist ex officio cannot pardon, ,
so he must decline
to understand all and explain
all. Satire is by nature non-
constructive, since to construct
effectively— to educate, for
example, to reform, or to evangelize
actual situations and actual
—
one must study
persons in their historical set
ing, and thiskind of study destroys the satiric
approach.
This is not to say that satire is not
or has not been
often amost valuable weapon for the moralist.
pardon I have spoken of means the
the When
toleration of avoid-
able evil, satire has an important
function. But ‘pardon’
is not the only or the
inevitable attitude engendered
by a
7
historical study of persons and institutions
; one may if
one is a moralist, an educator, an apostle
or a revolutionary
desire to alter and amend things
after having explained
them. Satire seems to occur somewhere
between accept-
ance and revolution, and it is not
surprising, if this is so,
that the early eighteenth century
should have been its most
Letters on the English Nation
2
(17V1), p. io
Gulliver, bk. ii, ch. 7.
107
high and palmy time. Swift himself, for all his discontent
his satire,
(divine or pathological), was no revolutionary ;
to standards which
as we have suggested, always refers
with-
existready-made, and which would become operative
out need for subversive change, if only
men would not
standards, how-
perversely depart from them. To these
ever, Yahoo man will not adhere, and
Swift seems at last
to throw up the sponge —
to abandon hope of ever lessen-
actual. Instead,
ing the disparity between the ideal and the
reason, and
he barricades himself within his ivory tower of
there ‘enjoys’ the bitter satisfaction of
knowing himself
world, or, at
the only wise being in an insane or bestial
(Pope or
most, of sharing, with a few kindred spirits
Arbuthnot), his own consciousness of superiority.
Other
satirists — Cervantes, Fielding, Dickens —have been known
to fall in lovewith their abstractions, and Don Quixote,
full-formed
Joseph Andrews, and Pickwick have emerged
and
from the satiric shadow-world. But Swift fell more
more out of love with man, and the result his final tragedy
was the total dissociation of Houyhnhnm from Yahoo.
symbolize
So remote became his ideal that he could not
his disembodied rationals as men at all, but
only as horses.
Man delighted him not, no, nor woman neither, so lie
escaped into his satiric fairyland or solaced himself

with
the strange baby-prattle of the 'Journal to Stella d
the eighteenth century wore on, it was discovered

As
at all, but
that the ‘Nature’ of man was not his ‘reason’
his instincts, emotions, and ‘sensibilities’, and
what was
more, people began to glory in this discovery, and to re-
gard reason itself as an aberration from ‘Nature’. Cogito
ergo sum is superseded by th eje sens , done je suis
associated
with Rousseau. Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume had

prepared the way by proclaiming that our moral judg-
ments, like our aesthetic judgments, are not the offspring
of Reason at all; but proceed from an inner sentiment or
1 On this aspect of Swift see Aldous Huxley s essay in Do What you Will.
108
‘nature’ in satire
feding which unanalysable.
is Burke announced that
politics ought to be adapted, not to human reason, but
to human nature, of which
reason is but a part, and that by
no means the greatest part’. Wesley and Whitefield
range
the world, converting their ten
thousands, not by rational
ethical suasion, but by impassioned appeals to the heart.
hen we reach this phase satire declines, and ceases
to be
the normal reaction of representative
minds to existence.
It survives mainly in minds
(jane Austen, Byron, Peacock,
bamuel Butler, Anatole France) which retain an
affinity
with the early eighteenth century.
109
,
CHAPTER VII
David Hume
*
Dejender oj Nature c ’ against Reason
‘All probable reasoning isnothing but a species of sensation.

’ Tis not solely in poetry and music , we must follow our taste and
sentiment , but likewise in philosophy.'’
Treatise of Human Nature bk. i, pt. iii, sect. 8.]
[
METAPHYSICS: ‘NATURE’ AS A HABIT OF THE MIND
AVID HUME would belong to our present story
D only because he is
if the fine flower of the English
(or shall we say the Anglo-Scottish) eighteenth
century mind, but more specifically (since the present
volume does not pretend to be a history of eighteenth
century thought) because he can be represented as the
defender of Nature against Reason.
Hume is usually, and rightly, regarded as the arch-
sceptic who overturned the philosophic card-castle erected
by Descartes and his successors. He did, indeed, destroy
all traditional certainties matter, the soul, God, Nature,
:
causation, miracles and by more rigorously applying the

;
methods of Locke and of Berkeley he demonstrated that

their philosophy led nowhere. A
fresh start had to be
made after his work had been done, and in approaching
him we begin to cross the great intellectual watershed of
the mid-century. Hume is perhaps the writer in whom
the distinctive characteristics of ‘our excellent and indis-
pensable eighteenth century’ are most completely ex-
pressed, and he is representative not least in this that his —
function was not so much to break new ground as to break
up old ground. Of his ‘excellence’ (as of that of his
i io
, i
DAVID HUME
century) there can be no
question ; it is enough to say that
e writes philosophy with
an exquisite decorum which
pu s us a to shame. As for the
1
‘indispensability’ of the
eighteenth century, it may be said
that that century repre-
sented a necessary stage or
climacteric in the life-cycle of
es ern civilization, so that
a
country like Russia can be
diagnosed by a modern historian as
one that has never had
an eighteenth century. It was
‘indispensable’ as a period
in which the dry light of reason was free to
penetrate to
the furthest limits of the
universe, scattering the yellow-
skirted fays and all the last
enchantments of the Middle
Ages. It was perhaps not least indispensable as a time
w en, as in Hume,
the illumination became dark
with
excessive light, and reason was
used to reveal the limita-
10 ns of reason. Before Hume: empiricism and sensa-
ona ism a ter him, the Copernican revolution of ‘
’
Kant; before him, Nature and

Reason go hand in hand;
after him, Nature and Feeling.
Hume was ‘indispens-
e if only because, by
, the very completeness of his
destructive efficacy, he showed
that man cannot live by
6 B Ut aS Professor Laing has shown,
Hume s thought has
d?" K. u
’
-
its more positive and

'
constructive
side, and it is this that am
mainly concerned to em-
I
phasize. Hume desired,
not merely to destroy the flimsy
superstructures of pure reason,
but also to show (in
Halevy s words) that it is a good thing
to trust to instinct,
t0 NatUre> With0Ut bein du ed
lo°|cd musion’T S P * “7
s ub-title of Humes Treatise oj Human Nature

IS = An Attempt
to introduce the
experimental
method of reasoning into Moral
declares himself to bebng to the
Subjects.’ thus Hume
very tradition he did so
much to undermine. The Treatise is one of the many con-
2 ^ (Benn's -Leaders of Philosophy’

Growth of Philosophic Radicalism
I I I
p. n.
scries, 1932).
:

temporary formulate a ‘moral Newtonianism’
efforts to
to
(Halevy’s phrase) to find, that is, a moral counterpart
:
gravitation, a principle which should unify

the moral
world as ‘attraction’ had unified the physical.
Some
thought they had found it in self-love, others in benevol-
ence or the principle of utility (both notions appear
in
Hutcheson’s System of Moral Philosophy). But the most

important of these "moral Newtonianisms was the principle
of the Association of Ideas. The elaboration of this
doctrine was mainly the work of David Hartley (
Observa-
tions on Man 1749; see Chapter VIII below),
but Hume
,
I pro-
had already made great use of it in the Treatise.
pose now briefly to examine part of that work, with
a
view to showing its bearing on the main subject of these

studies.
Hume from his modern philosophical prede-
differs
cessors in having no theological presuppositions, no
deus
ex machina in reserve, to extricate him from any

speculative
crux (such as the interaction of matter and mind had been
to the Cartesians). He begins, where he hopes, to end,
with experience, what is ‘given’, our perceptions which ,
he divides into ‘impressions’ (‘all our sensations, passions

and emotions, as they make their first appearance in the
soul’) arid ‘ideas’ (‘the faint images of these in thinking
and reasoning’). 1 He continues with an orthodox account
of ‘memory’ and ‘imagination’, contrasting the insepar-
able connexion of ideas in memory with the liberty of the
‘
imagination to transpose and change its ideas’ as in —

‘poems and romances’, where Nature is totally con-
founded, and nothing mentioned but winged horses, fiery
dragons, and monstrous giants’.
2 The incorrigibly pro-
of the English philosophic tradition at this
saic character
time comes out well here, as elsewhere in Hume, cf.
‘The imagination of man is naturally sublime, delighted with
whatever is remote and extraordinary, and running, without con-
troul, into the most distant parts of space and time in order to
2 ibid., bk. i, pt. i, sect. 3.

1 Treatise, bk. i, pt. i, sect. 1.
I 12
DAVID HUME
S’ m
A correct Sr CUSt ° haS rendered too familiar
to it.
Hume's position on the eighteenth century
S “K ° f "" Col ' rid «“"

watershed nave
'
'™*f » wXugh
;££;s?
“
?=«ii n
”““ S o^cÎati^ToTK
^
sembUc
5
°' der
C0nt 'S mt y ln Ti ™
’
or Place, and Cause
Effecl and
° f Un ''° n ° r cohesion amon

ourlmpTeTdeJ Tnd inth
inseparable
'
^
S
found
fou^d'::
From
nd ° f ATTR
to have
h
0N
as extraordinary 4 ^^2* >
world v^ll be
effects as in the natural.’ 2
this associative principle

(whose causes ‘must he
resolv d into original
qualities of human nature
pretend not to explain’) are
comprising Relations, Modes,
derived the ‘
and
which f
Substances. Here I
li fe’
illonly quote a few characteristic
substance for example, we
pronouncements Of
have no idea ‘dis“ from
that of a collection of
particular qualities’; and
idea of a substance Te & ‘crnlH ’l again
~~ ‘the >
d J aS Wel1 n
L g as that of a mode
i
Te
Le.g.
P- heantv’l
beauty ] Jo
‘
f u'-
is nothing ? '
but a collection of simple

^^
ideas
lma S Ination ’• In all this
die influ-
“encerf
!
° f Berkeley
Berl^l
ited on the topic of
ls a PParent, and
r Berkeley is expressly
Abstract Ideas, as ‘the
of the greatest and most author of one
valuable discoveries that
made of late years in the republic has been
of letters' —the discovery
namely, that Abstract Ideas
‘are in themselves
however they become general in indTvidual’
their representation ’
that in conceiving such an an d

idea ‘the image in the
milid is
• «*• **
H 1 r
3
application of it in
only that of a particular object, tho’ the
our reasoning be the same, as if it were
universal . A
particular idea becomes general by
being annex d to a
general term; that is, to a term, which
from a customary
particular ideas,
conjunction has a relation to many other
and readily recals them in the imagination.’
‘no separate or
Again, the ideas of Space and Time are
distinct ideas, but merely those of the
manner or order, in
which objects exist’.
2 This brings Hume to the funda-
External Exist-
mental problem of the Not-Ourselves, of
ence: what is the relation between our ideas
and Ihings .
happen-
can we know Things-in-Themselves ? or what is
ing when we suppose that we do ? Hume replies,
‘Let us fix our attention out of ourselves as
much as possible:
let us chace our imagination to
the heavens, or to the utmost
limits of the universe; we never really
advance a step beyond
existence, but those per-
ourselves, nor can conceive any kind of
compass. This is
ceptions, which have appear’d in that narrow
of the imagination, nor have we any idea but
what is
the universe
3
there produc’d.’
As for the origin of the impressions, this

must always be
‘perfectly inexplicable’, and
characteristically re- Hume
jects the three standard explanations: we
cannot say, he
declares, whether impressions ‘arise
immediately from the
object, or are produc’d by the creative power of the mind,
or are deriv’d from the author of our being’.
But all this
not mean for Hume that all our perceptions are
on a
does
level; he assumes that there is ‘Nature’, a real order of
existence, and that this may be either justly
represented by
our ideas, or else distorted. How, then, since we are
irrevocably shut up within the narrow compass of our

own
representation
ideas, are we to distinguish what is ‘just’
1 ibid., bk. i, pt. i, sect. 7. have italicized republic of letters for its period
I
interest. It seems to me to indicate a view of the status of philosophic literature

very different from that which now prevails.
sect. 4. Cf. Leibniz’s view: ‘Space is the order of co-
2 ibid., bk. i, pt. ii,
monad’s perceptions.’ (H. Wildon

existence, time the order of succession, in the
Carr, Leibniz,, Benn, 1929, p. 1.53.)
3 ibid., bk. i, pt. ii, sect. 6.
“ ,
DAVID HUME
1S lllusi ° n fiction > poetry,
or faith ? As Carr
>
r^r? /^
3 6
^
01'^ "
8 Le ' bniz > <the order in îch we
hmgS T1USt h ave its reason in an ord
1
eXt! Kb V
” tk reals re P res ented 1
!
er which ,
’
ft l' pnn :ip , es Can We tel1 when we are

'
but how, on ;
the r M representing ’
; W
l
en We are merel y constructing private
worldTi H UmC s ans er
!"
to these questions seems
the S^
virtual]*
existence of
h
h
f an
1
?
63
mpUgn the common-sense belief in the
eternal order— indeed, no one
'
.
does not in
t0
Ycomrnon~
,
sen se’. He
to be
in 1, y tHan he
believed
He mcrel >' denies that this
bel efTs fn ded T -
£
t
r SOn ’ an< that reason alone can
account
c .
t n?°r.
. !
'
?
Belief , he says, ‘is more
properly an act
f
e S 1V e
and onr K r f
o? radonal H
n °f
u6
C0 S itative part of our natures’,
° f Nature though not capable
^ >
0nStrat 0
?’
15
P racdcall 7 valid because it
arises from1 ‘T
rises ?mn
!
the principles of human
nature’. But the
WCen rUC d falS6 ideaa remains sub- ’
‘ ’
lectivlît
jective. it consists, Vhe tells ,f us, in
the ‘superior force or
r '
d7edT‘t°
eS
-’ ° r S
^-T
dea “ Slmpl
dinC1S 2 ° f the tme ; deas.
’in-
idea having these character-
T“
stics, to h
fstks r
believe ‘ >;
is simply to
feel this ‘vivacity’. Belief
s .omething felt by the mind, which
distinguishes the
deas of the judgment from the
fictions of the imagina-
Sented different from a fictitious
idea’— d tb
p
® s an
invoking end on t. Hume is here
the f
famous Principles of Constant Conjunction,
,
Connexion, and the Association of

Customarf
Ideas, in order to give
us back the world of which his
scepticism seemed likely to
rob us ‘Things’ may all be ‘facts of mind’ for all
can tell, but that daily-reiterated system
we
of ‘ideas’ which
we caH the world , and which is
apparently common to
all sane men, controls our whole
practical lives, because
only by conforming to its ‘laws’
can we continue to exist
tor a single hour.
*’l is not solely in poetry and music,

we must follow our taste
1
op. cit.y p. 92.
Treatise bk. i, pt. iii, sect. 7.
and sentiment, but likewise in philosophy.
When I am con-
idea, which strikes mo
vinc’d of any principle, ’tis only an
Objects have no discoverable
connexion
strongly upon me. . . .
principle but custom operating

together; nor is it from any other
inference from the
upon the imagination, that we c^n draw any
appearance of one to the existence of another.
When we believe in the ‘order of Nature’, then, we are^not

principles, which
determined by reason, but by ‘certain
objects, and unite
associate together the ideas of these
them in the imagination’.
should upon
‘Our reason never does, nor is it possible that
it
continu’d and distinct

any supposition, give us an assurance of the
2
existence of body.’
belief in such continued existence is the

The common
product of imagination, not of reason.
What we call ‘causation’ a main example of these
is
principles, for it consists in a ‘vivacious feeling arising

from the customary connexion of certain ideas. One or
would not
two instances of idea ‘B’ following idea ‘A’
generate the idea of ‘cause’, but when ‘B’ is
invariably
found to follow ‘A’, we call ‘A’ the cause of B

though ,
constant
nothing has happened save that a feeling of their
conjunction has been set up in our minds.
‘All ideas are deriv’d from, and represent,
impressions. We
never have any impression, that contains any
power or efficacy
[e.g.‘power’ of fire to burn, or of a magnet to attract].
We
never therefore have any idea of power. ...
‘The several instances of resembling conjunctions leads us into
instances are in them-
the notion of power and necessity. These
selves totally distinct from each other, and
have no union but in
3
the mind, which observes them, and collects
their ideas.’
Hume professes to be exposing the arguments of that fan-

‘
sect’ (the total sceptics) when he proclaims

that ‘all
tastic
our reasonings concerning causes and effects are deriv’d
from nothing but custom; and that belief is more properly
2 - ibid., bk. pt. iv, sect. 2.
i
ibid., bk. i, pt. iii, sect. 8. i,
3 ibid., bk. i, pt. iii, sect. 14.
I l6
DAVID HUME
th SenSitiVe ’ than of the c
nature/x M °g itative part of our
.
He means > presumably, that this customary
connexion in our minds, though
it may refer to no cor-
responding external order, is
yet as important for us as if
dlC a d at a man ° f correct
r ^ u ^
regard the vivacity of his
judgment may therefore
‘beliefs' as a reliable index that
hey are just representations
of Nature (or, if we prefer
°
py
SO he
’
?y
m
exc sabl give the name of
V y ‘Nature’
to that, pattern of vivacious
ideas which he shares with
^reasonable mdivid Is )' Hume can pose as
sceptic because it is not human f an anti-
reason that primarily con-
cerns him, but human nature—
of which reason is but a
part, and perhaps not the
greatest part. What custom
has
no man P ut sunder; and Hume
antled!%
,
has only dis-

the machine in order to put
it together again,
in so doing to reveal its 8 and
true workings.
It will not have escaped
notice that in thus committing
himself to imagination Hume is ’
(from his own point of
view) entering upon dangerous
ground. Is he not basing
practical life upon the very
faculty which, in ‘poets
orators utterly confounds Nature
and
,
by changing fnd trans-
posing its ideas? The reply is,
I think? that he
uses
imagination in two main senses in
one, he means what
:
since Coleridge we generally call ‘fancy’ (the faculty which

produces winged horses, fiery dragons,
etc.); in the other,
he means that mental screen
whereon, in men of correct
judgment, the customary connexions
of ‘just’ ideas are pro-
jected. That Hume felt a little uneas? on
this score wn
be conjectured from the sections he
devotes to poetic belief
and to education. He admits that
‘assent’, being founded
on vivacity of ideas, is akin to the
less respectable off-
spring of the imagination its ‘whimsies and:
prejudices’.
Wherein, then, does the force or vivacity
of poetic fiction
ffer from that which accompanies
(or is) true belief?
All Hume can say is that they
‘feel different. Poets are
’
liars by profession and we never get from poetry

,
that
feeling of solidity and ‘force
’
which accompanies ‘reason-
’
1
ibid., bk. i, pt. iv, sect. i.
”7
8

ings from causation’. Whatever emotion the poetical en-
‘
thusiasm may give to the spirits, ’tis still the mere

phantom
of belief or persuasion
’. 1 The poetic imagination could
not yet seem an important mode of apprehending
reality.
Hume admits, too, that half the opinions that prevail

among mankind are produced, not by ‘reasonings from
causation ’, but by education. But education is an
artificial
and not a natural cause’, and so is not recognized by

philosophers.
In what has been said I have tried to indicate what was
meant by calling Hume a ‘defender of Nature against
Reason’. Just as in ethics and aesthetics (as we shall see
in a moment) the correct standard is the
approval or dis-
approval of average educated men, so in metaphysics
Reality (‘Nature’) is the mental habit of all men except —
perhaps lunatics, lovers, and poets. Poetry is a most
elegant amusement, but its world is really brazen ; men of
sense, only, deliver a world which, if not golden, is at least
inhabitable. Hume ends this part of the treatise with a
most engaging and highly characteristic chapter of per-
sonal confession. After completing his sceptical round by
demolishing ‘the soul’ and even ‘personal identity’, he
stops, and ironically scrutinizes his own philosophizing
with a levity, and a freedom from implication, which are
the product both of his century and of his own tranquil
temper, and which contrast significantly with the high
(and */<>/’) seriousness of some of his philosophical suc-
cessors. What is all this he has been saying? What is
the use of all this philosophizing, which leads only to
doubts and contradictions? Reason has destroyed itself:
shall we then abandon it, and yield to the illusions of
ordinary life ? Hume is not certain what answer to give,
but he knows very well what is done in practice: the
dilemma is ignored. Since Reason cannot dispel the
clouds, let ‘Nature’ break in with a dinner or a game at
backgammon and then, when the philosopher returns to
;
his study, his speculations ‘appear so cold, and strain’d,

1 ibid., bk. i, pt. iii, sect. io.
1 1
DAVID HUME
and ridiculous
7 that he can hardly find
it in his heart to
enter into them any further.
Indeed, there is no particular
reason why Hume or anybody
else should philosophize,
un ess they feel a serious
good-humour’d disposition’ to
ao so. We
ought to preserve a ‘careless disposition’
in
our studies; and Hume
goes to the length of prescribing
this attitude as the cure
for sceptical doubt:
Carelessness and inattention alone

can afford us any remedy,
or this reason I rely entirely
upon them; and take it for granted,
w atever may be the reader’s opinion
at this present moment,
at an hour hence he will
be persuaded there is both an external
and internal world.’ 2
ETHICS: MORALITY AS A SENTIMENT

OF
THE HEART
The scepticism of Hume, then, as Haldvy
puts it, ‘can
be thought, not lived’; ‘reason is
insignificant as com-
pared with the instinct by which we live’. 3 Hume’s re-
mark that whenever he left his study all his doubts
vanished is deservedly well known, for
perhaps in this
it is
that he is most representative
of the eighteenth century
spirit in these islands: intrepidity in speculation co-exist-
ing with conservatism in practice.
It is true that in his
ethical as in his metaphysical
enquiries Hume carries the
experimental method as far as it will go,
but in his con-
clusions, as in his own life, he was no more a moral
experimenter than he was a revolutionary in
atheist Hume’, whose name was a
politics. The
legend of horror to the
orthodox was affectionately known to
his friends as Te
bon David After his burial it was thought
.
desirable to
place two men to guard his tomb for
eight nights for fear
of mob-outrage; yet Adam Smith,
who knew him best,
wrote of him Upon the whole, I have always considered
:
1
ibid., bk. i, pt. iv, sect. 7. 2
ibid., bk. i,.pt. iv,
3 sect. 2.
op. cit., p. 10.
I 19
.

him, both in his lifetime and since his death, as approach-
ing as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous
man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit^
It has often been pointed out that in the France of Hume’s
time speculative freedom was associated with the revolu-
tionary spirit (see Chapter IX below). Why was Hume s
voice not joined with Voltaire’s in the cry of ecrasex
Vinjdfne ? Amongst the possible reasons (of which his
own serene temper was one) perhaps the most important
was that England had already had both its religious ‘re-
formation’ and its bourgeois revolution (though not its
industrial sequel), whereas in France the forms and
privileges of feudalism and' of mediaeval religion had sur-
vived almost intact into the heart of the enlightenment, so
that the new and the old confronted each other there with
a sharpness of contrast which was blurred on this side of
the Channel. Hume and those of his class could thus feel,
as no bourgeois Frenchman could, that conditions in this
country were on the whole favourable to the sort of lives
they preferred to live and to see lived. Accordingly, the
Rights of Man did not interest him, and of the various
possible forms of government, he favoured benevolent
despotism, as the one likely to be best administered, and
to cause least disturbance. ‘Absolute monarchy, there-
fore, is the easiest death, the true Euthanasia, of the
1
British Constitution .’
It is in his writings on morals that Hume’s conformity
to accepted social standards comes out most clearly. Just
as in his metaphysics his scepticism is directed against the
traditional bogus entities and not against common sense,
so in his ethics he criticizes, not existing moral conven-
tions, but only older ethical theories. He rejects all super-
natural and metaphysical sanctions for morality, but finds
allthe sanctions he requires in human nature. His ethical
position thus corresponds to his position in metaphysics;
here again he rejects Reason in favour of Nature. Just as
he had reduced the other ‘Nature’, the not-ourselves, to a
1 Essays, Moral ,
Political and Literary, vii.
120
DAVID HUME
bit f ° Ur ° Wn S n0W he
’ reduces morality to
s^ntimllf
sentiment. R°
Reason ?
is not the source of moral judgments
° f belief ; k is kerned w
‘
affLTV*
affairs and affirmations
'th states of
of; ‘is’ or ‘is not’, and no contem-
plation of a state of affairs
as such is a moral judgment
Such a judgment only occurs
when a sentiment of approval
or disapproval is aroused, or
in other words, when
pleasure
n 3 £ P roduced We know
^f*
•
j
-
nothing but our own
minds and hearts; what can we reason
but from what we
know? In ethics therefore, the
proper method is to en-
6 SUb8tan Ce of men s moral ’
, judgments, and
sTe what ihp
aCt com ose d of. His conclusion
briefly Ts
annrrLti
h
approbation and disapprobation.
^P
c om Posed of the
,
sentiments of
‘This is good’ means
sion’
|S
In
PP y
is bad me a nT Th
a
rde V ^
S dlsa
is
!
object of estfem’; ‘This
PP roved of; this arouses aver-
° dlscover the na ture of the
se",,:
J’ I r
the bad , therefore, we
have not to embark upon any
‘good’ and
kctical enqmnes; we have dia-
only to collect statistics,
method was so simple that nothing, The
have prevented mankind from
Hume believed, could
hitting upon it long before
except theological and ’
metaphysical presuppositions.
r
[
> that hen
u Pronounce any action
y°
rtuous or]7vicious, you
or character to be
mean nothing, but that from the
stitution of your nature con
you have a feeling or sentiment
proval or] blame from the of raD -
contemplation of it. Vice and
fferefore, may be compar’d virtue
to sounds, colours,
heat and cold’
which’ according to modern
philosophy, are not qualities
ijects but perceptions in
in the mind: And
this discovery in
morals, like tnat other in physics,
is to be regarded
as a consider-
able advancement of the
speculative sciences] tho’
like that too
'
Y
real, 01
htt,e or influence on practice.
concern us more, than our own
Nothing
sentimentsof pleasure or
be mo r
’
in
uneasiness; and if these be
favourable to virtue, andinfavour-
able to vice, no more can be requisite to the regulation of o
conduct and behaviour ’ i our
Hume was proud of his discovery, and (rather

surprisingly)
Treatise, bk. iii, pt. i, sect. i.
I 2 I
regarded his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals
his writings.
(1751) as ‘incomparably the best’ of all
Perhaps this was because his solution satisfied his deepest
instincts, which were also those of his time and of his class.
‘This is good’ means ‘This is approved’, but approved —
by whom ? The fact that Hume does not feel called upon
to raise and answer this question indicates how complete
was his acceptance of current values. He is aware, indeed,
and races have approved different things,
that different ages
but for his purpose it is sufficient to make a catalogue of
the qualities approved and condemned by his own age
and social group. The moral judgments of this group, he
evidently feels, are sufficiently representative to be taken
as those of average humanity. It is worth noting that in
the Essay Of the Standard of Taste he does examine this

1
problem in its relation to aesthetic judgments, and the dis-

cussion is relevant, since for Hume (as for Shaftesbury)
aesthetic and moral judgments are closely akin. If Hume
had been pressed whose approval determined the
to declare
good, it is reasonable to suppose that he would have
answered somewhat as he did to the question, whose
approval determines the beautiful ?
‘Strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by prac-
tice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice, can
alone entitle critics to this valuable character; and the joint ver-
dict of such, wherever they are to be found, is the true standard of
taste and beauty.’
But when actually speaking of moral judgments, he seems

to take it for granted that all are good critics
2
that ‘what —
is approved’ means ‘what all approve’. This assump-
tion, I think, indicates what may be called the social and
cultural solidarity of the ‘republic of letters’ in the pre-
revolutionary eighteenth century; it would not be avail-
able to-day for any but ‘totalitarian’ moralists.
1 No. xxm.
2 He allows, however, that the taste for moral beauty, as for aesthetic, may
be cultivated. ( Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals , sect, i.)
122
,
DAVID HUME
ei” phasis
n ‘approbation’ and ‘esteem’ is
htghly characteristic, ? both of himself and of his
age—
be
Sf’S
L
tile
1
j
e shou d
was also the age of Lord Chef fer-
P lease excite the approbation of
,
,
’
—
t he hei ht °f
for hk
& Chesterfield’s ambition
' m
And s lar ly with Hume, we hear little
'
,
,
about
«/ftnnr
^//-approval, or of the morality of living
|
for some prin-
SLctt't a -iT.
l ‘
T h7
v,Vf ue
Ura 0
™!
"i.
1S definition one which gives
pleasure to
Se "? e ° f those who contemplate
it. Your
may be described as ‘my approval
of you’- mv
virtue ,s ‘your approval
of me’/ file's moral world if
and nt< r 0Ck ed SyS em ° f mUtUal
‘
admiration and
°cLm very ilike
criiticism— [ the
k
society’ of
. -
Chesterfield’s Letters.
j-‘
ee n observes, ‘respectability’, the virtue of
* „ .
“h W nei S hbours becomes, in

this kind
ofwoM
or world, Th the summurn bonum. 1
>
In the Enquiry Concerning

the Principles of Morals,
pur-
HlS P lan of collecting moral
statistics, and rejecting
al/thf*
theoi les not founded upon
fact and observation ’, ‘
proceeds to enumerate the qualities Hume

that go to form what
we call personal merit or demerit,
and to
common properties in each list. He decides indite the
that personal
merit consists simply in the
possession of qualified useful ‘
or agreeable to the person

himself or to others'? Hume
adopts a hedonistic and utilitarian thus
ous quality is one which excites
standpoint. meritori A
a sentiment of pleasure
but many such qualities please
because of their utility’
All men agree to admire the
social virtues of benevolence
humanity, friendship, gratitude,
public spirit, etc and
part at least, of the merit of
such virtues li« In ’their
tendency to promote the interests
of our species’ and to
bestow happiness on human society’
(‘utility’ being thus
readily reducible to
conduciveness-to-happiness’). ffthey
are exercised in such a manner
as to produce perniciouf
instead of useful consequences,
we cease to approve (as,
1
Introduction to bk. ii of the Treatise, p. 70
2
Enquiry , sect, ix, pt. i.
12 3
e.g., insuch matters as unwise alms-giving, tyrannicide,
etc.). ‘Justice', again, derives its merit solely from its
usefulness as the foundation and support of society; this
can be shown by imagining either a Golden Age in which
every possible human need was satisfied, or a state of war
or extreme destitution —
in both of which justice would be
useless, and therefore no longer a virtue. This truth is so ‘
natural and obvious’, Hume says, that it has not escaped

‘even the poets’, who have depicted such conditions in
their accounts of the Saturnia regna. This agreeable fiction
of the poets (Hume adds) is analogous to the philosophical
fiction of the ‘state of nature’, except that the latter is
depicted as ‘a state of mutual war and violence’.
1 Hume
himself, it is interesting to find, does not believe in this
‘state of nature’; actually, men are born members of a
family, and the notion of justice arising there (as ‘what is
useful for the family’) gradually expands, as family unites

with family to become tribe and finally nation. At every
stage ‘justice’ ends where the notion of ‘advantage to one’s
own’ ends. function of ‘justice’ now is the
The main
protection ofproperty, and Hume emphatically denounces the
j
sophistries of writers on natural law ’, and others, who con-

‘
fuse ‘justice’ with chimerical visions of human equality.

Fanatics may have supposed that ‘dominion is founded on
grace’, and levellers may have demanded ‘an equal dis-
tribution of property’, ‘but the civil magistrate very justly
puts these sublime theorists on the same footing with
common robbers, and teaches them by the severest dis-
which, in speculation, may seem the
cipline, that a rule,
most advantageous to society, may yet be found, in prac-
pernicious and destructive’. All this illustrates
tice, totally
Hume’s complete acceptance of the social order of the
ancien regime (cf. above, pp. 119-20). Equalitarian doc-
trines suggested to him nothing but the excesses of
1
Hume refers here in a footnote to Hobbes, who, he says, was not the first
so to depict it, for Plato has tried to refute ‘an hypothesis very like it in the
2nd, 3rd arid 4th books de republica,’ while Cicero (in one passage at least)
assumes it to be universally acknowledged. ( Enquiry , sect, iii, pt. 1.)
124
DAVID HUME
mediaeval or seventeenth century religious
frenzy, and
they could be confidently dismissed,
together with every-
t Gothic, as destructive to that power and
authority,
and that due subordination of class to
class, on which the
social order depends.
Now since
on account of their ‘utility’ that we
it is
approve of the above-mentioned virtues,
‘utility’ itself
must please us. Why is this? must be
It either from
considerations of self-interest, or from
more generous or
a truistic motives; and Hume’s
opinion is that our ap-
probation of the useful extends beyond
ourselves, and
includes the interest of others. We
have within us a
natural tendency to sympathize with
the joy or sorrow
of others; we are even pleased
by the virtue of a
magnanimous foe. This principle of human
nature
.accounts in great part, for the origin of
morality’. It
is even the source of our
enjoyment in the theatre, where
we rejoice with the hero in his success, or weep with
hirn in his adversity, while ‘our breasts are affected
with the liveliest resentment against the author of these
calamities’. We experience pain when we hear a person
stutter and, so delicate is our sympathy’, that
y it is
a rule in literary criticism, that a
harsh collocation of
syllables is to be avoided, because of
the pain it would
give to anyone pronouncing it.
Would any man, how-
ever selfish, tread as willingly upon another’s gouty toes,
whom he has no quarrel with, as upon the
"hard flint
and pavement’? Hume elaborates this
argument by
showing that there are many qualities of
which we ap-
prove simply because they are useful or
agreeable to their
possessors, because they conduce to his
happiness, and to
ours only through ‘sympathy’. Such are industry, dis-
cretion, frugality, personal beauty,
‘chearfulness’, mag-
nanimity, tranquillity of mind. Even
poetic talent is a
very considerable merit’ of this type, and
so is delicacy
of taste. Lastly, of course, there are all
the qualities
associated with social success and the
arts of pleasing-
good manners (which restrain our self-love in social
inter-
125
course), wit, eloquence, modesty, decency, cleanliness,
and the je ne sais quoi , qui plait.
In conclusion Hume professes to be amazed that it
should be necessary, in so late an age’, to prove by lengthy
‘
argument so obvious a proposition as that Personal Merit

consists in the possession of qualities either useful or agree-
able to oneself or to others. ‘
Systems and hypotheses or ,
‘the delusive glosses of superstition and false religion’,

must have perverted our natural understandings, for so
simple a truth to have escaped our notice for so long. Why
do ‘men of sense’ everywhere despise the ‘monkish vir-
tues’ of celibacy, fasting, penance, mortification, self-

denial, humility, silence, solitude ? Because these virtues
‘serve to no manner of purpose; neither advance a man’s
fortune in the world, nor render him a more valuable
member of society; neither qualify him for the entertain-
ment of company, nor increase his power of self-enjoy-
ment’. We have here, in the bland assurance with which
Hume contrasts his own list of meritorious qualities with
the monkish virtues, a fair illustration of the eighteenth
century sense of enlightenment, and of immunity from
disturbing contacts with the transcendental. Hume is
troubled by no suspicion that the contrast might not, in
every particular, work in favour of his own list. The
social foundations of eighteenth century morality were still
too secure to admit of any misgiving, and Hume can con-
clude his paragraph by saying that ‘a gloomy, hair-
brained enthusiast, after his death, may have a place in the
calendar; but will scarcely ever be admitted, when alive,
into intimacy and society, except by those who are as
delirious and dismal as himself’.
RELIGION: BASED ON ‘FAITH’, NOT ON ‘REASON’

Whitehead has described the eighteenth century as an
age of reason based upon faith —
the faith in question being
a confidence in the stability and regularity of the universal
126
DAVID HUME
frame of Nature. Nothing can
better illustrate Hume’s
adherence to this faith, and its separation
in his mind from
is
p uosophical scepticism, than his celebrated Essay Of
Miracles The very man who proved that, for all we can
e ’ may be the ‘cause’ of anything, was also the
man who disproved the possibility of
miracles because
they violated the invariable laws
of Nature. The customary
connexion of ideas which we call
‘Nature’, be its meta-
physical status what it may, is yet
the fountain-light of all
our day, and when confronted with
‘arrogant bigotry and
superstition’ Hume appeals to ‘Nature’ as confidently as if
no sceptical
doubts had ever crossed his mind. History
both sacred and profane, teems
with accounts of miracles
and prodigies, and Hume flatters
himself that he has dis-
covered an argument, resembling
Archbishop Tillotson’s
against the Real Presence, which
will be an ‘everlasting
check to all kinds of superstitious
delusion’. The Essay
is so well known that it will not be necessary to discuss it
J
in detail.
The argument hinges upon the question of belief in
the truth of ‘testimony’. Like all our beliefs, this one
rests
men ave
upon experience — our experience, in this case, that
memories,
and are on the whole veracious
tfut testimonies may conflict,
or their authority may
be rendered doubtful by the manner
of their delivery.
And when the ‘facts’ related are ‘marvellous’,
and not
corroborated by ‘experience’, ‘the very
same principle
of experience, which gives us a
certain degree of assur-
ance in the testimony of witnesses,
gives us also, in
this case, another degree of
assurance against the fact
which they endeavour to establish’. But
suppose the
eV nt related 1S n0t on marveI1 °us, but ‘miraculous’
j ty
and that the testimony, in and by itself,
i_
amounts to a
proof. Now
miracle is a violation of the laws
‘a
of
^
nature and as ‘a firm and unalterable experience
,
has
established these Jaws’, we are confronted
here with
proof against proof, of which the strongest
must pre-
1
Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding,
sect. x.
127
vail’. There must, he continues, be a uniform experi-
ence against
‘every miraculous event, otherwise the event would not merit
that appellation. And as a uniform experience amounts to a
proof, there is here a full and direct proof, from the nature of the
the existence of any miracle; nor can such a proof be
fact, against
destroyed, or the miracle rendered credible, but by an opposite
1
proof, which is superior .’
Can a testimony ever constitute such an opposite and

superior proof? No there never was a miraculous event
:
‘
established on so full an evidence’ that its falsehood would

be more miraculous than the ‘fact’ related. We must
always reject the greater of, two miracles, and false evidence
is never a very great miracle. ‘There is not to be found,’
says Hume, in a passage of unusual trenchancy,
‘There is not to be found in all history, any miracle attested by
a sufficient number of men, of such unquestioned good-sense,
education, and learning, as to secure us against all delusion in
themselves; of such undoubted integrity, as to place them beyond
all suspicion of any design to deceive others; of such credit and
reputation in the eyes of mankind, as to have a great deal to lose
in case of their being detected in any falsehood; and at the same
time attesting performed in such a public manner, and in so
facts,
celebrated a part of the world, as to render the detection unavoid-
able: All which circumstances are requisite to give us a full
2
assurance in the testimony of men.’
For the orthodox apologist (Paley, for instance) the apostles

were precisely a ‘sufficient number of men’, possessing
the right credentials. But to Hume, the apostolic virtues
could not appear ‘useful or agreeable’, and those primitive
enthusiasts could only figure, in his view, as members of
the lower orders, uneducated and lacking ‘reputation in
the eyes of mankind’. Neither could Palestine, in an age
whose affinity was with Athens, and Rome, and Paris,
really be regarded as a celebrated part of the world’. The
‘
1 ibid. Works (ed. Green and Grose), vol. ii, p. 93.

2 ibid., vol. ii, pp. 94-5.
128
DAVID HUME
passion of surprise and wonder’
is strong in us all, and
when this is reinforced by the spirit
of religion, ‘there is
an end of common
sense, and human testimony, in
these
circumstances, loses all pretensions
strong presumption against
to authority’. A
miracles lies in the fact that
ey abound most in the beginnings
of time, and amongst
primitive and barbarous peoples,
and tend to disappear
as we advance nearer the
enlightened ages ’. Moreover,
all religions abound in miracles
wrought in support of
their several doctrines, and
as these different religions can-
not all be true, the miracles
are mutually destructive.
Well-attested miracles are even related
of eminent pagans
like Vespasian, and of course they still occur in
Popish
countries, but we do not trouble
to believe these because
we do not believe in the opinions they
are supposed to
support Credulity and delusion, then, are
two very
natural things; and shall we’
(Hume rhetorically asks),
rather than have recourse to so
natural a solution, allow of
3 ° US V1 ° lat,0n of the most established
’^ laws of
nature
The ending of the Essay is of special interest:
it is one
Ot those passages in which
Hume seems to be delicately
poised upon the escarpment of
eighteenth century thought
and need, ng only a touch to topple
him down the Kantian
chne Nature is a habit of the mind,
morality is a senti-
ment of the heart, belief is a product
of the imagination,
not of the reason; what next?
Hume has accepted all
these cone usions, preferring
‘nature’ to reason in the last
resort: will he now tell us that
religion is founded upon
taith, not upen reason, and
urge us to render unto faith
that which is faith s? This is
what he actually says:
‘I am
the better pleased with the
method of reasoning here
delivered, as I think ,t may serve
to confound those dangerous
friends or disguised enemies to
the Christian Religion, who
have
undertaken to defend it by the principles of
human reason. Our
most holy religion is founded on Faith,
not on reason; and it is a
sure method of exposing it to
put it to such a trial as it is by
means fitted to endure.’ y no
129
the
If read the Pentateuch in any other way than as
we
word of God himself, would the falsehood of such a book
be more miraculous than all the miracles it relates ?
the Christian
‘So that, upon the whole, we may conclude that
Religion not only was at first attended with miracles,
but even at
this day cannot be believed by any reasonable
person without one.
Mere reason is insufficient to convince us of its veracity. And
whoever is moved by Faith to assent to it, is conscious of a con-
principles
tinued miracle in his own person, which subverts all the
believe
of his understanding, and gives him a determination to
.’ 1
what is most contrary to custom and experience
Defenders of the faith had used these arguments before,

and were soon to use them again moreover, Hume had ;
himself taught us that ‘mere reason’ was insufficient to

convince us of the reality of Nature and Nature’s laws.
His own principles, then, would have allowed him to take
the next step, and urge us, in all earnestness, to build
religion, not upon reason, but upon our experience as
moral
beings. But, of course, that is not what Hume is doing
here. However nearly he seems to approach to the edge
of the slippery slope, he is, in reality, attached by tough,
cords to an eighteenth century base. And when he is con-
fronted by religion (just as when he leaves his study), he
‘ ’
forgets his sceptical doubts, and becomes one of the

average ‘reasonable persons’ of his time. ‘Custom’ and
‘experience’ were to be relied upon as long as they offered
us nothing but the clear, familiar outlines of the New-
tonian world and the society of the old regime; directly
they seem to point towards encompassing mysteries they
become suspect, and he falls back upon the much-despised
‘reason’ (now used in the popular sense). Belief is not
reasoning, yet our beliefs must be ‘reasonable’, or the
priests and the poets and the hare-brained enthusiasts may
yet have it all their own way again. ‘Nature’ is only
‘natural’ if it is methodized in the eighteenth century
taste.
1 ibid., vol. ii, pp. 107-8.
130
DAVID HUME
The same precarious poise
reassumed in the Dialogues
is
Concerning Natural Religion and the
Natural History oj
e In these two important works
Hume enquires
into the foundations of religion
in ‘reason’ and in ‘human
nature , and decides (quite correctly,
as we may well think)
that it is founded upon ‘nature’
rather than upon ‘reason’.
™. doe s, it is true, allow that a refined and
philosophical
theism may be rationally arrived at:
‘The whole frame of nature bespeaks an intelligent author;
and no rational enquirer can, after serious
reflection, suspend his
belief a moment with regard to
the primary principles of genuine
theism and Religion .’ 1
But an honest God’s the noblest work of man,

and ‘though
I allow’, says Hume,
‘that the order and frame of the
universe, when
accurately examined, affords such an argu-
ment , he cannot suppose that a ‘barbarous
and neces-
sitous animal ’, such as primitive
man, could have formed
his idea of God by contemplating
‘the regular face of
nature There is a great difference ’, he wisely remarks
.
‘
between historical facts and speculative

opinions’, 2 and
the actual origins of religion turn out
to be much less
respectable than an eighteenth century theist
might have
hoped. It was not by contemplating the
spacious firma-
ment on high that primitive man arrived at his
notions of
a divine original. He simply personified
his own hopes
and fears, and then proceeded to worship and
placate the
gods he had made in his own image. ‘Even at
this
“ day’
says Hume, ; 5
‘Even and in Europe, ask any of the vulgar, why

at this day,
he
believes in an omnipotent creator of the
world; he will never
mention the beauty of final causes, of which he is
wholly igno-
rant: He will not hold out his hand,
and bid you contemplate
the suppleness and variety of joints in his fingers,
their bending all
one way, the counterpoise which they receive from
the thumb
the softness and fleshy parts of the inside of his
hand, with all the
other circumstances, which render that member
fit for the use, to
1
Natural History of Religion , Introduction. 2
ibid., sect. i.
131
which it was destined. To these he has been long accustomed;
and he beholds them with listlessness and unconcern. He
will
tell you of the sudden and unexpected death of

such a one: The
fall and bruise of such another: The excessive
drought of this
season: The cold and rains of another. These he ascribes to the
immediate operation of providence: And such events, as, with
good reasoners, are the chief difficulties in admitting a supieme
.’ 1
intelligence, are with him the sole arguments for it
Fear of the unknown, hope for next year’s crops, dread of

famine, and a sense of dependence upon blind chance
these, and not the topics of Ray, Shaftesbury, or Derham,
were and are still the sources of popular religion. There
are unknown causes to be placated, and naturally these are
personified. ‘Personifications’, indeed, furnish a useful
example of the kind of fictions or pseudo-statements to
which Hume is always directing our attention. Their
prevalence in poetry, he says, proves that they spring from
a natural propensity in us they bear witness to a certain
‘
tendency in the imagination, without which they could be

neither beautiful nor natural’. But, of course, the per-
sonifications of poetry ‘gain not on the belief’ of educated
men, whereas those of popular religion did and do enter
into the real creed of the ‘ignorant vulgar’. In the de-
velopment of religion from crude polytheism to philo-
sophic theism, a stage reached, he grants, when men
is
finally ascribe all power and perfection to one supreme

god. They do this partly in order to flatter their deity,
partly so as not to be outdone by the deities of other tribes,
and partly through genuine enlightenment. But there is
a perpetual tendency to fall back into idolatry, because
men’s ‘feeble apprehensions’ cannot long be kept to the
contemplation of abstract Deity. Hence arise subordinate
agents or mediators between God and man these gradu- ;
ally become chief objects of devotion, and a new kind of

idolatry begins afresh.
Hume’s historical treatment of these matters is on the
whole pleasantly objective. It bears witness to his own
1 ibid., sect. vi.
132
,
DAVID HUME
and the century’s awakening of the import-
to a realization
ance of historical explanations. But history has seldom
been without a purpose ’, and the eighteenth century wrote
‘
and read history, not so much to record and learn ‘facts’,

as to discover the general nature of man, which had be-
come overlaid with evil customs in particular the errors —
associated with the Christian centuries 1 There had been .
good’ historical eras, such as the ages of Pericles and

Augustus, or the Renaissance, and bad ones like the Dark
and Middle Ages. The aim of history was to exhibit the
universal principles’ of human nature fully realized in
the former, and thwarted in the latter. Moreover, the
eighteenth century itself must be seen as one of the ages
of enlightenment, and (as C. L. Becker has pointed out)
its programme must be regarded as a phase of the endless
conflict between light and darkness, and not as a local

squabble between philosophers and priests. Hume, unlike
the French philosophers, had no programme to advertise,
no ‘infame’ to destroy, but he fully shared the anti-clerical
sentiments of the eighteenth century intellectuals. Priests,
he wrote, ‘being elevated above humanity, acquire a uni-
form character, which own, and which, in
is entirely their
my opinion, is, generally speaking, not the most amiable
that is to be met with in human society ’. 2 But Hume’s
dislike of established religion was based, more widely,
upon the feeling that church-Christianity was still a force
hostile to true philosophy —
that it represented, in a word,
all the powers of popular delusion and superstition em-
battled against the light. This is why, I think, in spite of

his professed adherence to a refined theism, he allows a
touch of animus to appear whenever he speaks of actual
‘religion’. Philosophy is still in danger of being corrupted
by theology. This feeling appears clearly towards the end
of the Natural History of Religion where he discusses the ,
1
Cf. Hume’s remark: ‘History’s chief use is only to discover the constant
and universal principles of human nature’ (quoted by C. L. Becker, The
Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers pp. 85 ff., q.v.).
2 Essays, pt. i, xxi :
Of National Characters.
r
33
,

relations between religion and philosophy. Where theism
forms the chief principle of a popular religion, he says
(characteristically disguising his reference to the present
time in high generalities), philosophy is apt to be incor-
porated with its theology. And if the other dogmas of
this system are contained in a sacred book, such as the
Alcoran (useful, as ever, when the Bible is to be discreetly
glanced at), or determined by a visible authority, such as
the Pope (he does not say Parliament), speculative reasoners
tend naturally to embrace these dogmas, which have been
instilled into them from their earliest childhood. In time,
however, the friendly partnership between speculation and
orthodoxy becomes impossible, for philosophy finds itself
‘perverted to serve the purposes of superstition ’. Now all
popular theology, he goes on,
‘has a kind of appetite for absurdity and contradiction.
If that
theology went not beyond reason and common sense, her doctrines
would appear too easy and familiar. Amazement must of
necessity be raised: Mystery Darkness and obscurity
affected:
sought after: And a foundation of merit afforded to the devout
votaries, who desire an opportunity of subduing their rebellious
reason, by the belief of the most unintelligible sophisms.’ 1
We know how, some hundred years before, Sir Thomas

Browne had rejoiced in the wingy mysteries of divinity,
and subdued his rebellious reason with Tertullian’s certum
est quia impossible est, and a^ comparison between the cele-
brated passage in the Religio Medici and this of Hume’s
affords a measure of the change which those hundred
years have produced in the intellectual climate. Hume,
like most of his contemporaries, had a distaste for mystery,
and realizing that existing religion is founded upon mystery,
he rejects it with repugnance. But the queerness of his posi-
tion is revealed again in the Dialogues Concerning Natural
Religion where the sceptical Philo (who surely represents
,
part of Hume’s own mind) is made to show that though

even philosophic theism has no sure foundation in reason,
1
Natural History of Religion sect. xi.
134
DAVID HUME
yet ‘the cause or causes of order in the universe probably
bear some remote analogy to human intelligence’. And
what is still more remarkable, Philo adds that ‘the most
natural sentiment which a well-disposed mind will feel’
when confronted with this vague and vestigial theism is
‘a longing desire and expectation, that heaven would be pleased
to dissipate, at least to alleviate this profound ignorance, by afford-
ing some particular revelation to mankind, and making dis-
coveries of the nature, attributes, and operations of the divine
1
object of our faith .’
Once again Hume seems to be balancing upon the edge of

the escarpment. Religion is irrational, theism is permis-
sible only in utter attenuation: oh for a revelation! but
not, if you please, the one we are supposed to have had
already.
1
op. cit. y ad fin.
*35
CHAPTER VIII
David Hartley and Nature s Education

he of mortal kind
Wisest he first
,
who marked the ideal tribes
Up the fine fibres through the sentient brain .
[Coleridge, Religious Musings , 368.]
N 1796 Coleridge’s eldest child was born at Clevedon,

and in naming him ‘David Hartley’ he expressed the
I hope that if he grew to manhood ‘his head will be con-
vinced of, and his heart saturated with, the truths so ably
supported by that great master of Christian philosophy’. 1
David Hartley, who preceded Coleridge at Jesus College,
Cambridge, by some three-quarters of a century, had been
intended for the Church, but, having had scruples on the
subject of eternal punishment, had taken up medicine in-
stead. Throughout his Observations on Man (1749) there
is to be found a characteristic blend —
rare even in England
after the eighteenth century, and by that time virtually
extinct in France —
of scientific ardour with religious cer-
tainty. Hartley was a man of unusual originality and
penetration, and he writes with the zest of one who knows
he is engaged in pioneering work, but who feels, at the
same time, that he is building up morality and religion on
unshakable foundations. In this respect Hartley is clearly
in the apostolical succession of English physico-theologians
from Bacon, through Boyle, Locke, and Newton, to Joseph
Priestley. In eighteenth century France, although English
scientific and thought had been a major emancipat-
deistic
ing influence, the enlightened philosophers found them-
selves, for the most part, militant enemies of religion.
That peculiarly English phenomenon, the holy alliance
between science and religion, persisted (in spite of Hume)
1
Letters of S T. Coleridge (ed. E. H. Coleridge, 1895), vol. i, p. 169.
136
;
DAVID HARTLEY
near the close of the century. It is Hartley’s distinction
till
that he evolves his religion, not from the starry heavens,

but from a study of human psychology. Hartley was both
necessitarian and Christian, materialist and religious, and
as this was approximately Coleridge’s position in 1796
one can understand the reverence Hartley inspired in him. 1
For our present purposes he is of importance chiefly be-
cause he showed how Nature builds up for us ‘the being
that we are’, from sensation, through imagination to
re-
flexion, and because he' is therefore a spiritual
forerunner
of Wordsworth. 2
As we have seen, there existed in the eighteenth cen-

tury a widespread desire to equate the moral with the
physical world: to see in an order comparable with the
it
order of Nature. Newton’s principle of gravitation had
bound together all physical bodies into a harmonious unity
could not some principle be found which should unite
moral phenomena into an analogous synthesis ? Sometimes
it seemed that the principle of self-love
was the true moral
counterpart of gravitation sometimes, that it was the
;
principle of universal benevolence. But, as we saw in the

last chapter, 3 the most important of these varieties
of moral
gravitation was the principle of the Association of Ideas.
It is for the elaboration of this doctrine that
Hartley is
chiefly remembered, but Hume (as we saw) had already
made great use of it in his Treatise. For Hume the whole
order of Nature, with its so-called laws of causation, is
bundle of ideas connected together in our minds by
itself a
customary association. Hartley, on the other hand, uses
the principle to explain not only the mechanism of all
our
mental processes, but also the evolution of our moral
characters from childhood to manhood, and the develop-
ment of the moral sense out of simple sensation.
1 Cf. Religious Musings (written 1794), footnote to 1. 42— ‘see this demon-
strated by Hartley \
2
The question of Wordsworth’s affinities with Hartley has been
elaborately
investigated by A. Beatty, Wordsworth , his Doctrine and Art in their Historical
Relations (Madison, 1927).
3 Cf.
above, p. 112.
137
Hartley takes as his starting-point certain suggestions
of Newton, Locke, and the Rev. John Gay. Newton fur-
nished him with the doctrine of vibrations Locke and Gay :
with the first hints towards an associationist psychology.

In the Preface to the first edition of the Principia Newton
had said:
‘
I offer this work as the mathematical principles of philosophy,
for the whole burden of philosophy seems to consist in this —from

the phenomena of motions phenomena.
to demonstrate the other
... I wish we could derive the rest of the phenomena of Nature
by the same kind of reasoning from mechanical principles, for I
am induced by many reasons to suspect that they may all depend
upon certain forces by which the particles of bodies, by some
causes hitherto are either mutually impelled towards
unknown,
one another, and cohere in regular figures, or are repelled and
1
recede from one another .’
And end of the Opticks he had declared that to

at the
demonstrate how the properties and actions of all things
follow from two or three principles of motion ‘would be
a very great step in Philosophy’, adding that
‘if natural Philosophy in all its Parts, by pursuing this Method,

shall at length be perfected, the Bounds of Moral Philosophy will
also be enlarged. For so far as we can know by natural Philosophy
what is the first Cause, what Power he has over us, what benefits
we receive from him, so far our Duty towards him, as well as that
towards one another, will appear to us by the Light of Nature.’ 2
There is no need to re-emphasize the all-importance of the

mechanical world-picture in the eighteenth century, but it
is interesting to observe the tone in which Newton is intro-
duced to eighteenth century readers by a Plumian Professor

3
at Cambridge in 1713. In his Preface to the second
edition of the Principia the Professor first demonstrates
the superiority of the Newtonian philosophy to that of the
1
Motte’s (1729) translation, ed. Cajoli (California, 1934).
2 Opticks , bk. iii, pt. 1, qu. 31 (1st ed., 1704; reprint, ed. E. T. Whittaker,
1931).
3 Roger Cotes.
138
DAVID HARTLEY
peripatetics (‘that useless
medley of words’), and to that
of Descartes, whose ‘vortices’ are disproved by the be-
haviour of comets. He then proclaims its religious tend-
ency in the following terms:
Fair and equal judges will therefore give sentence in favour of

this most excellent method of philosophy, which
is founded on
experiments and observations. And it can hardly be said or
imagined, what light, what splendor hath accrued
method to that
from this admirable work of our illustrious author, whose happy
and sublime genius, resolving the most difficult problems, and
reaching to discoveries of which the mind of man was thought
incapable before, is deservedly admired by all those who are some-
what more than superficially versed in these matters. The gates
are now open, and by the passage he has revealed we may
set
freely enter into the knowledge of the hidden secrets and
wonders
of natural things. 7 herefore we may now more clearly behold
. . .
the beauties of Nature, and entertain ourselves with the

delightful
contemplation; and, which is the best and most valuable fruit of
philosophy, be thence incited the more profoundly to reverence
and adore the great IVIaker and Lord of all. Newton’s dis-
. . .
tinguished work will be the safest protection against the attacks

of
and nowhere more surely than from this quiver can one
atheists,
draw forth missiles against the band of godless men.’ 1
No wonder, then, that Hartley, ‘that great master of

Christian philosophy’, could take his cue from Newton.
For had not that sublime genius predicted, not only that
the mechanical principles would prove the key to unlock
mysteries yet unexplained, but that such further discoveries
would lead us back towards heaven ? One further illus-
tration may
serve to illustrate the prevalence, during our
period, of this religiose attitude towards Nature, and
—
wards Newton the authorized interpreter of her laws to
to-
man : taken from a popular exposition of Newtonian-

this is
ism which appeared in 1775:

‘Our views of Nature, however imperfect, serve to represent
to us, in the most sensible manner, that mighty power
which pre-
1
op. cit., p. xxxii.
r
39
\

vails throughout, acting with a force and efficacy that appears to
suffer no diminution from the greatest distances of space or in-
tervals of time; and that wisdom which we see equally displayed
in the exquisite structure and just motions of the greatest and
subtilest parts. These, with the perfect goodness, by which they
are evidently directed, constitute the supreme object of the specu-
lations of a philosopher; who, while he contemplates and admires
so excellent a system, cannot but be himself excited and animated
1
to correspond with the general harmony of Nature .’
From Locke and John Gay, on the other hand, Hartley

learned of the influence of Association over our opinions
and affections. His indebtedness to Gay, which he ex-
pressly acknowledges in the Preface to the Observations on
Man can be briefly illustrated. The Rev. John Gay had
,
composed a Dissertation Concerning the Fundamental Prin-

ciples of Virtue or Morality which had been prefixed by
Bishop Law to his translation of King’s Essay on the Origin
of Evil. In that Preface Hartley read, amongst other
things, that ‘though Happiness, private Happiness, is the
proper and ultimate end of all our Actions whatever’, yet
the particular means of happiness we adopt are often con-
nected with the main end only by Association. These
means of happiness Gay calls Resting Places, or acquired
principles of action. We
first connect the idea of pleasure
with certain objects, and then ‘those things and Pleasure

are so ty’d together and associated in our Minds, that one
cannot present itself but the other will also occur. And
the Association remains even after that which at first gave
them the Connection is quite forgot’ (as with money,
knowledge, fame, and so on). Further, says Gay, ‘it is
necessary in order to solve the principal Actions of human
life to suppose a Moral Sense and also public Affections;
. . .
but I deny that this Moral Sense, or these public Affec-

tions, are innate, or implanted in us: they are acquired
either from our own Observation or the Imitation of others ’. 2
1
Colin Maclaurin, An Account of Sir I. Newton's Philosophical Discoveries
(quoted by C. L. Becker in The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Phil-
osophers (Yale, 1932), pp. 62-3).
2 Gay’s Dissertation, sect, iv (from Law’s translation
of King, 1732 ed.).
I4O
DAVID HARTLEY
We shall see how Hartley combined and elaborated these
suggestions.
The part of the Observations on Man need not
first
detain us long. It consists of an elaborate description
(admittedly conjectural) of the mechanism of sensation,
and may be said to develop, in much greater detail, the
views of Hobbes on this subject. The white medullary
substance of the brain, he says, is ‘the immediate Instru-
ment of Sensation’; it is also the ‘immediate Instrument,
by which Ideas are presented to the Mind: or in other
words, whatever Changes are made in this Substance, cor-
responding Changes are made in our Ideas, and vice versa’
(Propositions I and II). The minute particles of this sub-
stance receive, and can reproduce, vibrations from sensible
objects. ‘Sensory Vibrations, by being often repeated,
beget in the medullary Substance of the Brain, a Dis-
position to diminutive Vibrations, which may also be
called Vibratiuncles and Miniatures, corresponding to
themselves respectively’ (Prop. IX). Further
‘Any Sensations, A, B, C, by being associated with one

etc.,
another a sufficient Number of Times, get such a power over the
corresponding Ideas a, b, c, etc., that any one of the Sensations A,
when impressed alone, shall be able to excite in the Mind b, c,
etc., the Ideas of the rest.’ [Prop. X.J
Simple Ideas ‘run into complex ones’ by means of Associa-

tion, and when this occurs, ‘we are to suppose that the
simple miniature Vibrations corresponding to those simple
Ideas run, in like manner, into a complex miniature Vibra-
tion, corresponding to the resulting complex Idea’ (Prop*
XIII); he thinks, moreover, that ‘some of the complex
Vibrations attending upon complex Ideas may be as
. . .
vivid as any of the sensory Vibrations excited by the direct

Action of Objects’ (Prop. XIV).
Hartley strongly suspects that the workings of the
‘mind’ can be truly pictured in some such mechanical
fashion, and he explains each of the senses in turn accord-
ing to the hypothesis of vibrations and vibratiuncles. But,
141
unlike Hobbes, or even Locke, he will not commit himself
to the view that Matter can be endued with the Power of
‘
Sensation \ 1 He postulates, instead, a parallelism between

brain and ‘mind’, whereby the vibrations and the sensa-
tions ‘attend upon’ each other, whatever may be the
connexion between them. All he asserts is that whatever
changes are made in the brain-substance, corresponding
changes are made in our ideas, and vice versa; he claims,
moreover, that this theory, like the ‘pre-established har-
mony’ of Leibniz or the ‘occasionalism’ of Malebranche
(to both of which, he believes, his own system bears a near
relation 2 ), avoids the difficulty of having to ‘explain’ the
connexion. But, unlike some philosophers, Hartley can
be critically watchful of his own pet theory. Like Dr
Richards with his system* of mental magnetic-needles,
Hartley admits, for instance, that the whole doctrine of
vibrations may be fictitious. Nevertheless it may be a
useful myth, if it helps to provide a scientific method of
approach to psychology (cf. ‘Principles which, though
fictitious, are, at least, clear and intelligible’, p. 109).
Where any kind of explanation is probably mythical, it
only concerns us to have a good myth rather than a bad
one. So he conjectures that Propositions I and II (quoted
above) may be true, in a very useful practical Sense, yet
‘
they are not so in an ultimate and precise one’. He is also

clear-sighted enough
to perceive that the doctrine of the
Association of Ideas may stand, even if the Vibrations
have to be abandoned. 3 Is not its truth presupposed in
all and moderns alike have taught us about
that ancients
Custom, Habit, and Education?
Howthen does Hartley build up his moral super-

structure on the basis of association? His fundamental
1 Observations on Man (1749), vol. i, p. 33. 2 ibid., vol. i, p. m.
3
‘The Doctrine 'of Association may be laid down as a certain
Foundation,
and a Clue to direct our future Inquiries, whatever becomes of that of Vibra-
tions’ (ibid., vol. i, p. 72).
I42
,
DAVID HARTLEY
doctrine, as expressed by J. S. Mill, is ‘the formation of
all human character by circumstances, through the uni-
versal principle of Association, and the consequent un-

limited possibility of improving the moral and intellectual
condition of mankind by education.’ 1 Hartley is an
optimist of the progressive and perfectibilist type: ‘As-
sociation has a Tendency to reduce the State of those who
have eaten of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and
Evil, back again to a paradisiacal one’. 2 How can this be ?
It is because, in the first place, we are all similar, and all
exposed to the gentle and irremissive action of the mighty
sum of things, so that in the end our ‘particular differ-
ences’ will be smoothed away, and ‘if one be happy, all
must’. That happiness is the final end, and not misery,
follows, for Hartley, first from his conception of the world
3
as a Providentially designed ‘system of benevolence’, and
secondly from his own special view of the workings of the
association-principle. ‘Some degree of spirituality’, he
writes, ‘is the necessary Consequence of passing through
life. The sensible Pleasures and Pains must be trans-
ferred by Association more and more every Day, upon
things that afford neither sensible Pleasure nor sensible
Pain in themselves, and so beget the intellectual Pleasures
and Pains.’ 4 Hartley, following the Rev. John Gay,
taught that
‘Our Passions or Affections can be no more than Aggregates
of simple Ideas united by Association.’ 6
The moral not inborn, but ‘factitious’

sense is that is, —
acquired through the association of pleasurable sensations
with certain objects. We
can, of course, associate pleasure
with the wrong objects, but the world was in fact designed
by Providence as a system of benevolence, so that ideally,
or under a proper educational regimen, our characters are
built up for us by what Wordsworth calls the powers that ‘
1
Autobiography p. 91 (‘World’s Classics’ ed.).
2 3
Hartley, op. cit., pp. 82-3. ibid., vol. ii, p. 245
4 6
ibid., vol. i, p. 82. ibid., vol. i, p. 368.
H3
of themselves our minds impress’, and we need only cul-
tivate ‘wise passiveness’ in order to proceed from child-
hood, through youth, to the ‘years that bring the philo-
sophic mind’.
i. We
begin, then, with Sensation, and proceed, by
associating pleasure with ever loftier and wider objects,
until we reach the stage when God is All in All:
Since God is the source of all Good, and consequently must at

lastappear to be be associated with all our Pleasures, it
so, i.e.
seems to follow that the Idea of God, and of the Ways by
. . .
which his Goodness and Happiness are made manifest, must, at

last, take place of, and absorb other Ideas, and He
himselfbecome,
according to the Language of the Scriptures, All in All .’ 1
The human individual, then,

be regarded as a sort of may
refinery in which the loftiest spirituality is being mechanic-
ally distilled out of sense. But only, of course, as long as
our days are indeed bound each to each by natural piety:
only as long as our minds are in what Wordsworth has
called ‘a healthy state of association’. Only then is the
benevolent scheme of Providence being realized according
to its own intention. The development may be deflected
or arrested, and the child may be father of a monster in-
stead of a man. In such cases, when a faulty education
has produced a Peter Bell, or the ‘young man’ of
the
Letter to The Friend (1809-10), the only course
"
’
for the
sufferer is to be ‘remanded to Nature’, to ‘go
back, as
occasion will permit, to Nature and to solitude’,
and to
‘measure back the track of life he has trod’. 2 Similarly
Hartley tells us that
‘It is of the utmost Consequence to Morality and Religion,
3
ibid., vol. i, p. 114. This is one of the passages referred to by Coleridge
in the footnote to Religious Musings. Cf. his
‘
Till by exclusive consciousness of God
All self-annihilated it shall make
God its Identity: God all in all 1
We
and our Father one [R.M., 42.] ! ’
2 Wordsworth’s phrases: Letter to ' Tie Friend’, Dec.

1809-Jan. 1810.
I44
DAVID HARTLEY
that the Affections and Passions
should be analysed into their
simple compounding Parts, by reversing
the Steps of the Associa-
tions which concur to form
them. For thus we may learn how
to cherish and improve good
ones, check and root out such as are
mischievous and immoral, and how to suit our Manner of Life,
tC>lerable Measure » to our intellectual and religious
Wanted 1
Just so Peter Bell, after the terrors of his

night’s adventure
ave turned him adrift into the
past’, sits deeply musing,
As if his mind were sinking deep

Through years that have been long asleep , 2
and at last awakensnew life breathed into him by

to the
Nature. Just so Wordsworth himself,
after the French
episode and the temptation in the
Godwinian wilderness,
sank back upon himself and upon his
past, and fetched
invigorating thoughts from former years’.
So build we
up the being that we are.
Hartley reminds us, in his second
volume, that the
Pleasures of Sense, though they are the
foundation of the
whole pyramid of association, must not be
made an im-
mediate end throughout life. To attempt this
is to defeat
oneself, for experience teaches that
‘he who would obtain
the Maximum of the sensible Pleasures,
even those of
Taste, must not give himself up to them;
but restrain
them, and make them subject to Benevolence,
Piety, and
the Moral Sense It is also to defeat Providence,
.
which
intends the great business and purport of
this present life
r
to be
the Transformation of Sensuality into

Spirituality, by associating
the sensible Pleasures, and their Traces,
with proper foreign
Objects, and so forming Motives to beneficent
Actions, and
diffusing them over the whole
general Course of our
Existence.’ 3
1
Observations on Man , vol. i, p. 81.
2 3
1. 1093. Observations on Man vol.
, ii, p. 214
K H5
2 . Next after Sensation comes Imagination:
‘The Recurrence of and audible ones,
Ideas, especially visible
in a vivid manner, but without any regard to the
Order observed
in past Facts, is ascribed to the Power of Imagination or Fancy.
(Coleridge, be observed, did not learn from Hartley

it will
to desynonymize Fancy and imagination.
Hartley s de-
scription of Imagination or Fancy
4
indeed, resembles ,
Coleridge’s definition of ‘Fancy’, as a mode of memory

emancipated from the order of time and space .^) The
the
pleasures of the Imagination are the first category of
intellectual pleasures, pleasures which are not
original ,
but deducible from the sensible ones by association. For

instance, our delight in the Beauty of Nature (the first kind
of imaginative pleasure he considers) is built out- of such
original elements as delight in tastes, colours, smells of
flowers and fruit, warmth and coolness, country sports and
pastimes, together with the healthfulness, tranquillity, and
innocence of the country contrasted with the offensiveness,
dangers, and corruptions of cities. Thus, in vacant or in
pensive mOod, or amidst the dreary intercourse of daily
life, there may come gleams like the flashing of
a shield,
and spots of time may be recalled, whereby the mind is
3 Hartley has this im-
nourished and invisibly repaired .
portant point to add here, that the pleasures of Theopathy

(sense of union with God), that is, one of the last to be
generated, can be and often are transferred to Nature:
‘Those persons who have already formed high Ideas of the

Power, Knowledge, and Goodness of the Author of Nature . . .
generally feel the exalted Pleasures of Devotion upon every View

4
and Contemplation of his Works.’
However, Hartley observes of the Pleasures of the Im-

agination in general, that ‘from the Nature of our Frame’
they must necessarily decline in intensity after youth,
1 ibid., vol. i, p. 383.

2 Biog. Lit., ch. xiii, ad fin.
3 For composite Wordsworthian sentence no apologies are proffered.
this
4 Observations on Man, vol. i, p. 420.
I46
Victoria coluAjs
VICTORIA. B .c
DAVID HARTLEY
yielding place to more
much of all
exalted and purer pleasures. How
this teaching not only influenced
Wordsworth,
but actually accounts in advance for
some of the peculiari-
S
fcn*
^1 e ^°P ment as a poet, is an interesting topic
°fl t*
Another section of the Pleasures of the

Imagination is
concerned with Poetry and the Arts, and
here Hartley
anticipates Peacock’s view of poetry
as the ‘mental rattle’
r he n anCy ° f SOciet
m
c u 1 dish
u f T
t0 be disc a r ded, along with other
things, in maturity. As imaginative
pleasures are
proper mainly to the period of youth, so
the arts are proper
to the early ages of the world’.
. . . if we consider Mankind as one great Individual, advancing

m Age perpetually, seems natural to expect, that in the Infancy
it
of Knowledge, in the early Ages of
the World, the Tasteof Man-
kind would turn much upon the Pleasures
of this Class.’ 2
The arts give pleasure largely in
virtue of a principle
which was to be invoked by a series of later
critics and
aestheticians, including Wordsworth and Coleridge the
principle of uniformity in variety.
Hartley’s scientific
rea ism as an associationist is seen
in his not scrupling to
reckon social snobbery, also, amongst the
sources of our
pleasure in the arts; we associate music
and painting, in
particular, with High Rank.
But there must always be
great divergencies in ‘taste’, and the
preferences of no
age, nation, or class should be set up
as the criterion of
excellence:
‘The only Things

that can be set up as natural Criterions
here
seem to be Uniformity with Variety, Usefulness
in general, and
the particular subserviency of this or that
artificial Beauty to im-
prove the Mind, so as to make it suit best
with our present Cir-
cumstances and future Expectations.’ 3
But Hartley adopts, in the end, a Platonico-religious

atti-
tude towards the arts. The pleasures of the imagination
1
See Beatty, op. cit., especially ch. vi.
* Observations on Man, vol. i, p. 43 ,.
H7
3 ibid< vo ,
p ^
must not be made a lifelong pursuit, if only because they
‘come to their Height early in Life, and decline in old
Age ’. 1 If we do not some day sing our Ode to Duty, if
years do not at last bring the philosophic mind, the benign
workings of Association are somehow being hindered.
‘The Pleasures of the Imagination are the next remove above
the sensible ones, and have, in their proper Place and Degree, a
great Efficacy in improving and perfecting our Natures. They
are to Men in the early Part of their adult Age, what Playthings
are to Children; they teach them a love for Regularity, Exact-
ness, Truth, Simplicity; they lead them to the knowledge of
many important Truths relating to themselves, the external
World, and its Author; they habituate to invent, and reason by
Analogy and Induction; and when the social, moral, and re-
ligious Affections begin to be generated in us, we may make a
much quicker Progress towards the Perfection of our Natures by
having a due Stock, and no more than a due Stock, of Knowledge
in natural and artificial Things, of a relish for naturaland artificial
Beauty.’ 2
As Plato had taught, the love of beautiful things and per-

sons is important at the beginning of the soul’s education,
to allure it on its upward path, but in due course we must
bid these joys farewell and pass them for a nobler life. All
earthly beauty fades; our hopes are with infinitude, and
only there. Moreover, Hartley shares with Plato and the
Puritans other grounds for condemning the pursuit of the
‘polite arts’; it is evident, he says, ‘that most kinds of
Music, Painting, and Poetry, have close connexions with
Vice’. They ‘cannot be enjoyed without evil Communica-
tions, and Concurrence in the Pagan Shew and Pomp of
the World’, and they ‘introduce a Frame of Mind, quite
opposite to that of Devotion, and earnest Concern for our
own and others’ future Welfare’. Indeed, ‘the polite Arts
are scarce to be allowed, except when consecrated to re-
3
ligious Purposes ’. It is highly significant, however, that
all this censure is reserved mainly for artificial beauty; the
1 ibid., vol. ii, 2 ibid., vol.

p. 244. ii, p. 244.
3 ibid., vol. ii, pp. 253-4.
I48
—
DAVID HARTLEY
Beauties of Nature, as the handiwork of God, are of a
nobler kind:
‘they lead to Humility, Devotion, and the Study of the Ways of
Providence. We
ought therefore much rather to apply ourselves
to the Contemplation of natural than of artificial Beauty .’ 1
The critics, down at least to Dryden and Pope, had held

that the poets can offer beauty ‘as perfectly, and more
delightfully than Nature’; Nature’s world is brazen,
poetry alone delivers a golden. But we are now in the age
of physico-theology, when, as we have seen, religious emo-
tions formerly attached to super-nature are being trans-
ferred more and more to ‘Nature’. And half a century
later, the associationist poet gives thanks to the Spirit of
the Universe for linking up his early passions and
affections
Not with the mean and vulgar works of man,

But with high objects, with enduring things
With life and nature purifying thus
The elements of feeling and of thought 2
—
.
Next come the Pleasures and Pains of Ambition.

3.
These are Hume’s social reactions they are the pleasures :
and pains arising from the approbation and disapprobation

of others. By association we come to seek whatever pro-
duces the former and to avoid what produces the latter.
Here the automatic generation of virtue is illustrated, for
men’s very pride and vanity, for example, will lead them
to seek the praise of humility.
4. Self-Interest. The same principle is exemplified still

more strikingly under this heading. There is, first, ‘gross
self-interest then, ‘refined self-interest’ (as when friend-
’
;
ship and even devotion are cultivated for the sake of their
‘ ’
1 ibid., vol. ii, p. 249.

2 The Prelude , bk. i, 408. (Cf. what was said above, p. 40, on Wilkins
and Derham.)
I49
:

attendant pleasures); and lastly, ‘rational self-interest’,
which merges with the ‘abstract Desire of Happiness’.
Hartley is confident that the first should evolve naturally
into the last in the course of life’s probation. learn We
by checks and disappointments where to seek our lasting
satisfactions, and are eventually impelled to ‘resign all to
God’
‘It appears . .Aggregates of Pleasure
. that all must, from . . .
the Mechanism and Necessity of our Natures, and of the world

that surrounds us, be made at last to centre and rest upon Him
who is the inexhaustible Fountain of all Power, Knowledge,
Goodness, Majesty, Glory, Property, etc. So that even Avarice
and Ambition are, in their respective Ways, carrying on the bene-
volent Designs of Him who is All in All. And the same thing
may be hoped of every other Passion and Pursuit. One may
hope, that they all agree and unite in leading to ultimate Happi-
ness and Perfection .’ 1
Thus all things work together for good under the kindly
superintendence of the laws of Association.
5. Sympathy. Compassion, Mercy, and Sociability

are generated by association in early life. The selfish in-
gredient in these impulses is gradually eliminated, and we
have thus a proof, says Hartley, ‘from the Doctrine of
Association, that there is, and must be, such a Thing as
pure disinterested Benevolence’. 2 The pleasures of Sym-
pathy, unlike those of Sense, Imagination, and the rest,
are not transitory; moreover, they turn us from children
of wrath into inheritors of the glorious liberty of the Sons
of God.
6. Theopathy. Love of God may, at first, contain ele-

ments of self-interest, but ‘after all the several Sources of
the Love of God have coalesced together, this Affection
becomes as disinterested as any other’.
1
Observations on Man, vol. i, p. 463.
2
I 5°
DAVID HARTLEY
7.Lastly comes the Moral Sense, not, as with Shaftes- .
bury or Hutcheson, an innate faculty, but the resultant

and complex of all the preceding. At this stage
‘the reiterated Impressions of those Associations will at last make
Duty itself a Pleasure, and convert Sin into a Pain, giving a
Lustre and Deformity respectively to all their Appellations; and
that without any express Recollection of the Hopes and Fears of
another World.’
The moral sense, regarded as the final outcome of Nature’s

holy plan,
‘employs the Force and Authority of the whole Nature of Man
against any particular Part of it, that rebels against the Deter-
minations and Commands of the Conscience or Moral J udgment. ’
Arrived at this point, a man may love or hate ‘merely

because he ought’. 1 As against the ‘moral sense’ school,
then, or those who base moral judgments on rational in-
sight into the relations of things, Hartley favours the
‘Deduction of all our moral Judgments, Approbations,
and Disapprobations, from Association alone’.
It may suggest itself that, in spite of Hartley’s religiosity,
we have here a philosophy which looks back to Hobbes
and forward to Godwin. For it appears to be, on the one
hand, materialist, mechanistic, and necessitarian, and on
the other hand perfectibilist. In the Preface Hartley con-
fesses that he is a necessitarian, explaining that he did
not realize that Associationism implied ‘Necessity’ until
several years after he had begun his enquiries, and that he
had only admitted it at last with the ‘greatest reluctance’.
He would never commit himself to frank materialism, or
to any of the accepted hypotheses which tried to account
for the union of soul and body:
one to the Purpose of the foregoing Theory, whether the

‘it is all
Motions in the medullary Substance be the physical Cause of the

Sensations, according to the System of the Schools; or the occa-
sional Cause, according to Malebranche; or only an Adjunct,
1
ibid., vol. i, pp. 497-8.
l l
5
according to Leibnitz. However, this is not supposing Matter to
be endued with Sensation, or any way explaining what the Soul
is; but only taking its Existence and Connexion
2 with the bodily
Organs in the most simple Case, for granted, in order to make
farther Inquiries .’ 1
His own theory, he stand firm whatever meta-

feels, will
physical basis we care to assume. But on the necessitarian
issue he tries to take a firm lipe: the moral sense is
* generated necessarily and mechanically ’, he tells us. Are
we then, we may ask, simply to fold our hands in wise
passiveness and let our affections gently lead us on, until,
after a sufficient interval of moral laissez-faire we awake to ,
find ourselves complete theopaths ? There is, it appears

to me, the usual fundamental confusion in this part of
Hartley’s teaching —
a confusion which is seen in all the
necessitarian moralists of the time: in Holbach, for in-
stance, and again in Godwin later. The very people who,
as necessitarians, loudly proclaim that men’s characters
are the product of circumstances, are also the people who,
as moralists and educators, are most anxious to control
and alter circumstances so as to produce the right kind of
character. Hartley’s second volume, dealing with religion
and the Rule of Life, is full of ‘oughts’ and ‘shoulds’,
whereas in the first part, where he is showing the in-
evitability of our progress towards perfection, ‘is’ tends to
predominate. The doctrine of mechanism, he says (antici-
pating Godwin),
‘has a Tendency to make us labour more earnestly with our-
selves and others, particularly Children, from the greater Cer-
tainty attending all Endeavours that operate in a mechanical
way.’ 8
In other words, if we want to produce better behaviour, if

we want the laws of association to exert their maximum
influence for good, we must see to it that they have free
play, or rather we must arrange the circumstances so as to
1 ibid., vol. 2
i, p. 51 1. ibid., vol. i,
p. 504.
3 ibid., vol. i, p. 510.
152
—
DAVID HARTLEY
secure for these laws the attainment of their own end. But
what are we in this proposition ? The theory seems to
me to reintroduce free-will by imputing to us the power
of originating such arrangements, whereas Hartley
has
expressly disallowed any power in us to begin motion.
According to his associationism, we are passive all along
the line; as he has said, the moral sense ‘is’ generated
in
us mechanically. Yet he goes on to describe the trans-
formation of sensuality into spirituality as the great busi-
ness of life: we must not rest content with the pleasures
of the senses or of the imagination we ought never to
;
*
be
’
satisfied until ‘we arrive at perfect Self-annihilation,

and
the pure Love ot God ’. 1 Why this severe, this earnest
air? one may be inclined to ask. The answer
seems to be
that with one part of his mind Hartley assumes
that we
are capable of altering the circumstances out
of which
character is formed. We may agree that a man would
not
be free to do either A or B if the previous circumstances
were the same in both cases, but to grasp the full im-
plications of this we must exhaust all the circumstances.
And the chief of them is the state of mind of the agent.
X s state of mind, let us say, produces A,
Y’s produces
B, all other circumstances being assumed to be
identical.
Why is this ? Perhaps because has disciplined himself
X
to respond in that way to the stimuli which, from
Y, pro-
duce B. This does not overthrow necessity, perhaps,
but
it suggests that there may be different
levels of necessity,
and that man is ‘free’ to place himself upon one or other
of these levels. There may be deliberation in face
of A
or B: which law shall I identify myself with?
After the
decision, the action follows ‘necessarily'. The two halves
of Hartley’s doctrine, then on the one hand,
laissez-faire
and conscious effort towards perfection on the other
do
not seem to me to hang together. His confusion is
highly
characteristic of the materialist position in the
eighteenth
century, in which man appears simultaneously as
the pro-
duct and the changer of circumstances, though there
is no
1 ibid.,
vol. ii, p. 282.
r
53
theoretic acceptance of this paradox as yet. All one can
expect the eighteenth century materialists to do is, first to
compound the mind out of the senses,and character out of

circumstances — and then, as moralists and world-changers,
to insist on our pressing forward towards perfection. In
Godwin, I think, it is the changing which occupies most
of the picture; in Hartley, on the whole, it is the passivity.
Hartley’s significant contribution is his joining up a
materialist psychology, not with a Hobbist pessimism,
but with the optimistic theism of his century, to yield a
confident faith in the necessity of progress towards per-
fection. He thus contributed to the stream of tendency
which flowed into the nineteenth century as philosophic
radicalism, and also as Wordsworthian naturalism.
T
54
s , J
CHAPTER IX
Holbach' Systeme de la Nature (1770)

Ceux qui connoitront la vaste chaine des maux que les syst ernes
errones de la superstition ont produits sur la terre, reconnoitront
l tmpor tance de leur opposer des syst ernes plus vrais, puises dans la
nature, fondes sur V experience'
[Systeme de la Nature vol i, p. 225.
N the course of his celebrated work, the Systeme de la

Nature Holbach himself points out that in countries
,
I like England, and the other Protestant lands, where

toleration exists, there are plenty of Deists and infidels,
but very few atheists. As he is passionately proclaiming
the necessity of atheism as a means to the attainment of
the liberties partial realized in England, he has to explain
ly
this circumstance. It is due
suggested above) to this:
(as
that the English have already had their bourgeois reforma-
tion and revolution, and have thus reached a degree of
tolerance, whereas in France, feudalism and superstition
still flourish side by side with the philosophes.
In France
the enlightened are impelled by oppression to ‘cite the
Divinity itself to the bar of reason the more fortunate
’
;
English, on the other hand, can rest content with merely

having rejected the grosser superstitions. The work of
Holbach (and the other Encyclopedistes) is of peculiar
importance to our present studies, if only because in it we
can see the ‘Nature ’-philosophy of the century working
itself out to its ultimate conclusions, and touched to revolu-
tionary issues. Hume
philosophizes boldly in the study,
but becomes conventional again in ethics and politics;
Hartley and Priestley, in English fashion, manage to be
Christians of sorts as well as materialists and necessi-
tarians. With Holbach and Helvetius (to mention no
others) ‘Nature’ is seen no longer as a christianized demi-
l
55
urge, working obediently under heavenly auspices, but as
a defiant Titaness who would dethrone the established
gods and overturn all earthly altars and thrones, the sym-
bols of priestcraft and tyranny. It is worth while to turn
our attention to such writers, so as to observe what

‘
Nature can mean when divested of religious associations,
’
and when used as a slogan of revolution. Moreover, by

the middle of the eighteenth century, after the passing of
Newton, Locke, and the deists, it was no longer England
but France which was conducting the main speculative
attack— and this because, for reasons already hinted at,
the philosophes were compelled to be world-changers rather
than world-explainers. The familiar Marxian phrases
serve to suggest what is indeed the fact, that very many of
the characteristics of modern revolutionary theory are to
be found already in the French materialists of the
eighteenth century. The divergencies are, of course,
equally unmistakable, and have often been pointed out:
that the eighteenth century materialists were metaphysical
rather than historical or dialectical, bourgeois and not
proletarian in affinity and outlook, and so forth. It is also
sometimes maintained that the eighteenth century lacked
a comprehensive theory of the inter-relations of man and
Nature, that it saw them merely as unrelated opposites,
and civilization as ‘artificial’, because diverging from a
fixed ‘Nature’.As we shall see, this is only partially true
of Holbach, who in moments of insight saw through this
false antithesis of ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’, and could de-
clare (for example) that Tart n’est que la Nature agissante
k l’aide des instruments qu’elle a faits’. 1 More habitually,
however, Holbach falls into the typical confusion of the
century. His book opens with the assertion that man is
part of Nature, that he is a purely physical being, that his
moral nature is part of his physical nature, that he is part
of the chain of causation; yet in the same breath he de-
clares that all our misfortunes are due to our neglecting
and departing from Nature, and the rest of the book is one
1 Syst&me de la Nature (1780 ed.), vol. i, p. 3.
156
HOLBACH’s SrSTEME DE LA NATURE
long lament over man’s perversions of Nature’s holy plan.
How comes it, then, that Nature engenders such ‘un-
natural’ offspring? Or if all is ‘Nature’, and there is
nothing unnatural, our unhappiness -‘natural’ ? The
is all
reason why Holbach cannot admit this is that, after all,

he is a man of the eighteenth century, and therefore he
cannot help thinking in terms of an unspoilt Nature which
he worships, and an erring humanity which he con-
demns. Our errors cannot be ‘natural’, are not what
Nature intended; yet there is nothing which Nature has
not produced, nothing which does not fall within the
‘domain of causality’. For these contradictions two
typically eighceenth century mental habits are chiefly re-
sponsible: first (one which we have previously noticed),
that of honouring Nature with a reverence which, in
spite of professed atheism, is in fact religious or trans-
ferred from religion, and secondly, that of taking too
abstract a view of human institutions, so that they
appear, not as the result of historical growth, but as
mere departures from a fixed norm of Nature and
Reason.
With these considerations in mind we can now examine
Holbach at closer rdnge. He began by writing Ency-
clopedia articles on minerals and kindred subjects, and
ended as a moralist and sociologist. In this development
he was representative of his age, which was increasingly
trying to use science as a foundation for a new and better
social order. It was, he believed, because man had dis-
dained to learn from Nature and experience, that he had
fallen into slavery and superstition, and remained in so
protracted an infancy. Faute de connoitre la nature, il se
‘
forma des Dieux’. Now the universe, says Holbach, con-

sists solely of matter and movement; but matter should
not be thought of as ‘inert’ by definition, and consequently
motionless until impelled from without. Nor is matter
simply homogeneous ‘body’, variously modified or con-
figured. Matter is eternally in motion this is its nature
:
or essence (Holbach refers here to Toland’s Letters to

*57
Serena where the same doctrine was maintained), and
, it
is heterogeneous in texture.
‘If, by “Nature”, we
understand a mass of dead material,
devoid of all properties and entirely passive, we shall doubtless be
compelled to search outside this Nature for the principle of its
movements. But if by Nature we understand that which it really
is, a whole of which the various parts have various properties,
behave in accordance with these properties, and are in a state of

perpetual interaction upon each other then we shall have no —
need to have recourse to supernatural forces in order to account
for the objects and the phenomena that we see .’ 1
So, he concludes (boldly making choice of the most con-

genial doctrine),
‘let usbe content to say that matter has always existed, that it
moves in virtue of its own essence, and that all the phenomena of
Nature are due to the different movements of the various kinds of
matter of which Nature consists.’ 2
Nature isa realm of complete determinism; it knows no

order and ‘disorder’. We
call ‘disorder’ what disturbs
or afflicts us, but truth ‘order’, in the sense that
all is in
all occurs by fixed causation; order is just simply ‘what
happens’. Man, as we have seen, is part of this order;
how does he fit into it? All things are trying to be them-
selves; man seeks his own happiness. In Nature the
principles of attraction and repulsion rule supreme; in
man, desire and aversion; in Nature, the laws of inertia
or of conservation in man, self-love. IVfan is, at every
;
moment of hisexistence, a passive instrument in the hands

of destiny. Yet, finding that he was able to ‘act’, he
imagined that he possessed within himself a motive prin-
cipleindependent of the rest of Nature, and from this error
sprang all the false doctrines about the soul and its im-
mortality. The soul is in truth the body in its aspects
of thinking, feeling, and willing. Rather than assert, with
the Christians and the Cartesians, an unbridgeable
dualism
uf mind and matter, would it not be more natural simply
to
1
ibid., vol. p. 24. (For convenience
i, I have translated some of the longer
extracts 0 2
158
HOLBACh’s STSTEME DE LA NATURE
say: As man, who is material, can think, therefore matter
is capable of thought? Holbach continues by giving the
Hobbist account of sensation, reflexion, memory, and
imagination. We
cannot inspect the inner mechanism of
the material soul, but then neither do we know the
mechanism of gravity or repulsion ; and we only land our-
selves in worse difficulties by imagining the soul to be an
ineffable entity. Since the soul is a function of the body,
the way to the soul lies through the body, and medicine
is the true key to morality. Morality and politics there-
fore stand to gain from materialism advantages such as
‘spiritualism’ can never offer, and such as it prevents us
from even dreaming of. Let us therefore aim at improving
men’s material environment, and we shall soon find their
morals improving. You will always get vicious ‘souls’ as
long as the bodies they inhabit are miserable. Men are
‘by nature’ neither good nor evil; Nature makes them
simply machines, some more and some less energetic, for
the attainment of happiness. If they are wicked it is
because they are made so; at present government, educa-
tion, public opinion, and religion all conspire to corrupt
humanity. The distinctions between good and bad, vice
and virtue, are not founded upon human conventions, still
less upon the supposed will of a supernatural being, but
upon the eternal and invariable relations between human
beings in society. Virtue is all that is truly and constantly
useful to society. Our ‘duties’ are the means without
which we cannot arrive at our ends, and ‘moral obligation’
is the necessity of employing the means proper to make
happy those with whom we live, so that they in turn may

make us happy. It is our own greatest interest to be
virtuous this is the true foundation of morality, and would
;
be recognized as such in a properly ordered state. The

purpose of Law is to prevent individuals from seeking
their private good at the expense of the whole, and
‘politics’ ought to be
‘the art of regulating the passions of men, and directing them

l
S9
towards the good of society. They are commonly so corrupt,
. . .
only because they are not founded upon nature, expediency and
the general utility, but on the passions, caprices and particular
utility of those who govern society .’ 1
Holbach adds some declamation, much in the manner of

the modern materialists, against the doctrine of a future
life —
that mirage which blinds men to the real and remedi-
able evils of the present life. Having acknowledged that
post mortem nihil est we can then concentrate our laws and
,
our educational system upon the task of making it men’s

interest and happiness to be virtuous here and now.
Holbach’s main attack on religion is developed in his
second volume, and we must especially attend to his argu-
ments here because ‘Nature’, for him, derives its special
significant# from its supposed opposition to super-nature,
and it is by exposing religion that he hopes to persuade us
to come forth into the light of things, and let Nature be
our teacher. Religion, he proclaims, is to be condemned
on three main counts it offers a wrong basis for morality,
:
itsteachings are contrary to scientific truth, and it is the

mainstay of a corrupt political and social order. He follows
Hobbes in ascribing its origin to primeval fear of the un-
known; it has always been, he says,
‘a system of conduct invented by imagination and ignorance in
order to conciliate the unknown powers to which Nature was
thought to be subjected. Some irascible and placable divinity was
always at the bottom of it, and it was on this puerile and absurd
notion that the priesthood founded its rights, its temples, its altars,
its wealth, its authority and its dogmas. On such crude founda-
tions rest all the religious systems of the world; invented origin-
allyby savages, they still have the power to control the fate of the
most civilized nations.’ 2
To-day, religion has become

‘the art of intoxicating men with enthusiasm, so as to divert their
attention from the evils with which their rulers load them here on
1
ibid., vol. i, p. 141. 2 ibid., vol. ii, p. 15.
l6o
HOLBACh’s STSTEME DE LA NATURE
earth. . . . "They are made to hope that if they agree to being
unhappy in this world, they will be happier
in the next .’ 1
It is injurious to morality, since whoever discovers the

a sity of the alleged religious
foundations of ethics will
naturally suppose that the morality
is as chimerical as the
religion. That is why
the words infidel and libertine have
become synonyms. There
would be no such disadvantage if a natural morality
were taught,
instead of a theological. Instead of prohibiting debauchery,
crime and God and religion forbid them, we ought
vice, because
to say that all excess is harmful to
man’s conservation, makes him
despicable in the eyes of society, is
forbidden by reason, which
wants each man to conserve himself, and is
forbidden by nature,
which wants him to work for his lasting happiness.’ 2
Ignorance begets gods; enlightenment destroys

them.
heir persistence in an age of
enlightenment, ‘in which
natural law had provided a more satisfactory
explanation of
natural phenomena ,
is due entirely to the sinister influ-
ence of the clergy. Tantum religio potuit suadere
malorum\
and he who should now succeed in destroying the
notion
of ‘God’ would be the greatest friend of man.
Next, Hoi bach inserts an interesting section on
Samuel
Clarke’s Treatise on the Being and Attributes oj God
(1704),
a standard work of orthodox apologetic to
which allusion
has been made above (pp. 59-60). Holbach treats
Clarke
rather as Marx afterwards treated Hegel; all that
Clarke
says of ‘God’, he assures us, may truly be said,
and in-
telligibly said, of ‘Matter’ or ‘Nature’.
Attributed to
God such properties as eternity, infinity, uniqueness,
,
etc.* are incomprehensible. The habit of so speaking

merely sets up a fictitious being abstracted from Nature,
whereas it is precisely to ‘matter’ that we ought to attri-
bute such properties. Of matter, indeed, we can also
say
that essence (the thing-in-itself) is incomprehensible,
its
but then we do know its ecorce ’, and are affected ‘
by it
1
Christianisme Dfivoilt, quoted by Wickwar, Baron d' Holbach
y 5 ’
n ri0
2
Wickwar, op. cit., p. 127.
L l6l
every moment of our lives. Of incomprehensible non-
matter we know just nothing, and we may therefore regard
it as nothing. Movement is as much a necessary attribute
of matter as extension or figure, so why should we seek for
a ‘motor’ outside Nature? For Holbach, the impulse to
seek some supernatural first cause is the last infirmity of
noble mind, and he remarks that even the great, the im-
mortal Newton, as soon as he leaves geometry and physics,
becomes a child. As for Descartes’ ‘ontological’ argu-
ment, this would equally prove the existence of hippogriffs.
‘
Nature ’, then, is all and produces all. Nor does this mean
that effects are produced ‘by chance’, for Nature acts in-
variably by fixed laws. It does mean, however, that we
must base our lives on ‘experience’, and fear no ghosts.
Holbach accepts quite cheerfully the idea that matter,
existing from eternity, having certain properties and sub-
ject to certain laws, could spontaneously generate such a
system as our universe. He condemns ‘
Spinozistic’ pan-
theism, but it may well seem that his own ‘
Matter’, having
so many wonderful ‘attributes’ and ‘potentialities’ and
‘principles’ within it, becomes, after all, something toler-
ably godlike before he has finished with it. It is of the
‘
essence’ of a seed to grow: it is its ‘nature’ so to do:

this is Holbach’s constant refrain, and this is the kind of
statement which evidently satisfies him. Why, you ask,
does Nature exist? To what end? Where the dogmatic
schoolman had pointed to God, the eighteenth century
atheist points to Nature itself; Nature is its own end it —
has no other aim but to exist, to act, to preserve its own
‘ensemble’. In distinguishing ‘God’ from ‘Nature’, the
‘soul’ from the body, ‘life’ from the living organism, and
so forth, men are making the same inveterate mistake all
the time. Nor is this merely a metaphysical error having
no importance for conduct, since in addressing themselves
Deity men have come to expect everything
to a fictitious
from Him, and have ceased to rely upon Nature and their
own activity. We
must teach men that beyond Nature
there is nothing, and that ‘science’ alone (i.e. knowledge
162
of Nature applied to the conduct of man
in society) can
rnake them happy. When Holbach says
of men: ‘il leur
faut du mystere pour remuer leur imagination ’,* he is com-
p aining of a weakness in them, not stating an inescapable
psychological fact. He goes on, in the usual eighteenth
century way, to blame the priests, in whose
‘interest’ it is
to maintain the mysteries:
‘a religionwhich was clear, intelligible and without mystery

would not seem particularly divine to the ordinary
man, and
would be of little use to the priests.’ 2
Natural’ religion, though certainly preferable

to the
priestly variety, has equally precarious
foundations. Those
who imagine they see God in ‘Nature’ are deceived, for
they see only a corner of the universal picture,
not the
so-called ‘natural’ religion has an
•
'Ll J
^
inevitable tendency to degenerate into superstition ’.

The ‘
spectacle of the actual world is so impossible to

harmonize
with mere theism, that the theist is bound to fall
back suc-
cessively upon all the reveries of theology. Was not Jesus
a theist? and yet has not the religion he founded become
the most noxious superstition in the world ?
It thus evident that the deists or theists have no

is
real ground
for distinguishing themselves from the superstitious,
and that it is
impossible to fix the line of demarcation which
separates them
from the most credulous men.’ 3
(One remembers that it came to be said of Voltaire

‘Voltaire est bigot, il ‘The moment a man
est ddiste’.)
can admit the God of theology, there is no longer anything
’
else in religion that he cannot admit 4
indeed the religious
;
are really more logical than the ‘enlightened’ theists. "The

acuteness of these latter observations will not have
con-
cealed from the reader the typical confusion into
which
Holbach has fallen in speaking of the ‘spectacle of the
actual world . When he is refuting theism he makes the
%!*}"* ela Nature> voL U > P- i8 5-

2
ibid. , vol.
[
ibtd" V0h
i ii, p. i8c
P- * ibid , VOI.
. ii, p. 22 y
i6 3
very worst of that spectacle, and finds it irreconcilable with
the notion of an omnipotent and benevolent creator. The
creator of such a world could only be regarded as a moral
being by deliberately averting one’s eyes from the facts,
and arbitrarily attributing to him a number of human
qualities. Yet we have only to call the ‘actual world’
Nature and Holbach’s tone changes to one of semi-
,
religious exaltation. What would be odious as divine pur-

pose becomes admirable as natural law. have already We
noticed the further difficulties which spring from trying
to combine vehement disapproval of the status quo with
theoretical approval of all that Nature has produced.
‘
‘Nature’, he writes (and he might equally have said ‘the

founder of Christianity’),
‘bids man be sociable, to love his fellows, to be just, peaceful,
indulgent, beneficent, to make or leave his associates happy’:
—whereas ‘religion’
‘counsels him to flee society, to detach himself from all creatures,

to hate them when their imagination furnishes them with dreams
different from his own, to break, in the name of his God, all the
most sacred links, to torment, to afflict, to persecute, to massacre
1
those who refuse to be mad in his fashion.’
‘Nature’ bids men be self-reliant, and conquer removable

evils by mastering the natural laws ; religion diverts them
‘ ’
from this, their true end, by bidding them turn their gaze
towards heaven. Holbach appends here one of those foot-
notes which are sometimes more graphic than his text:
‘In 1725, the city of Paris was afflicted by a famine which was
considered likely to cause a popular rising, so they brought down
the casket of St Genevieve, patron and tutelary goddess of the
Parisians, and carried it round in procession in order to end this
calamity, which was caused by monopolies in which the mistress
of the first minister of those days was interested.’ 2
*
The priests have good reason to be the enemies of science,
1 2
ibid., vol. ii, p. 277. ibid., vol. ii, p. 289.
164
for the progress of light will put an end, sooner
or later,
to the ideas of superstition/
What, finally, is be said of this atheism of whose ne-
to
cessity Holbach is so firmly persuaded? Will it, as is
often suggested, produce moral monsters ? No: it is super-
stition that releases all the evil passions, while atheism,
by
confining our views to this life, promotes the social virtues.
Holbach admits that a man may embrace atheism because
he wrongly thinks it will enable him to drink on and defy
the parson; there are admittedly vicious men who will
attack the gods because they think them enemies of their
passions. The good man attacks them because he finds
them enemies of virtue. Atheism will not make a good
man bad, or a bad man good, but
if an atheist chances to
be a wicked man he can at least not- pretend that his mis-
deeds are authorized by God. An atheist who reasons
aright will probably be good, and meanwhile let us re-
member those illustrious ‘atheists’ who have been peace-
able and studious men: Epicurus, Lucretius, Bodin,
Spinoza. ‘Hobbes did not cause bloodshed in England,
where in his lifetime religious fanaticism put a king to
death on the scaffold 1
Atheism is not a creed for ‘the
.’
people ,
so we need not fear its political consequences.
But Holbach has been accusing ‘religion’ of baffling ‘the
people’ with its subtleties, while ‘Nature’ is clear and
plain to all. Is religion, then, perhaps, ‘useful’ even if
false? No! Holbach will not have this either, for there
is always most vice where there is most
superstition. He
avoids this difficulty by saying that we cannot convert a
whole people at once to atheism; an enlightened author
writes and works for posterity and for the human race, and
not merely for his own times or his actual fellow-country-
men, for whom his doctrine too advanced. Let it not
is
be supposed, in spite of the great Lord Bacon, that deeper
thinking will bring posterity back to religion; what more
often happens is that shallow thinkers arrive at seeing the
absurdities of religion, but, through being unaccustomed
1
i6 5
to meditation, are plunged by further thought back into
the theological labyrinth.
In the final chapters Holbach’s tone becomes more and
more exalted: ‘chaleur’, ‘attendrissement’, and ‘senti-
ment’ infuse the style increasingly, and finally there is a
hymn or prayer to Nature, from which it seems evident
that he has not outgrown all religious sentiment, but rather
transferred it to another divinity. I shall quote the passage
in the original, in order to convey its quality more pre-
‘O Nature! souveraine de tous les etres! et vous ses filles ador-

ables vertu, raison, verite! soyez a jamais nos seules Divinites;
c’est k vous que sont dus l’encens et les hommages de la terre.
Montre-nous done, 6 nature! ce que 1’homme doit faire pour

obtenir le bonheur que tu lui fais d6sirer. Inspirez du courage . . .
k l’etre intelligent; donnez-lui de l’energie; qu’il ose enfin

s’aimer, s’estimer, sentir sa dignite; qu’il ose s’affranchir, qu’il soit
heureux et libre, qu’il ne soit jamais l’esclave que de vos loix;
qu’il perfectionne son sort; qu’il cherisse ses semblables; qu’il
1
jouisse lui-meme, qu’il fasse jouir les autres.’
This was the book which Goethe, recalling his youthful

revulsion from the spirit of eighteenth century France,
described as ‘so gloomy, so Cimmerian, so deathlike, that
we found it difficult to endure its presence, and shuddered
at it as at a spectre’. 2 There was, indeed, one ‘Ro-
mantic’ poet —
the one in w hom the spirit of the eighteenth
century philosophers most clearly survives, though im-
aginatively transfigured —
who read it with enthusiasm in
his youth. In his notes to Queen Mab Shelley quotes ,
from the Systeme de la Nature two passages, one demon-

strating the rigid necessity controlling all seemingly
‘chance’ phenomena in Nature, and the other exposing
the origin, and denouncing the inadequacy, of the popular
notion of God. But ten years later (1822) he wrote that
the doctrines of the French materialists ‘are as false as they
1 ibid., vol. ii, p. 415.
* Poetry and Truth (Bohn ed., translation by Miss M. Steele Smith), vol. ii,
p. 38.
166
are pernicious; but still they are better than Christianity,
inasmuch as anarchy is better than despotism’. Shelley
never lost the passion for human improvement which en-
nobled eighteenth century materialism, but his repudia-
tion of that philosophy is typical of the spiritual
reaction
which accompanied, and largely produced, the best poetry
of the next era. We shall see something analogous in
Wordsworth’s rejection of Godwin, and in the modifi-
cations which Godwin himself —
the chief English ex-
—
ponent of Holbach’s ideas afterwards introduced into
his original system.
167
!
CHAPTER X
Joseph Priestley and the Socmia?i Moonlight

‘
Socinianism, moonlight ; methodism, a stove. 0 for some sun
to unite heat and light ’ [Coleridge, Anima Poetae.]
OMING back England, we encounter once
C
to
again in Priestley, the follower of Hartley, what I
above that typically English phenomenon of

called
the period, the holy alliance between science and religion
‘
’.
Priestley belongs to the present story, not so much as the

chief apostle of modern Unitarianism but as the last repre-
sentative of the fusion of two main currents in English life
and thought: the mechanical philosophy and the tradi-
tional spirit of Protestant Dissent. It does not enter into
my present scheme to speak of the Methodist stove, but

without some reference to the Socinian moonlight our
picture of natural religion in the eighteenth century would
be incomplete. We have spoken of the Deists and the
physico-theologians, and it is needless to repeat how wide-
spread was the belief, amongst the educated in this cen-
tury, in the validity, if not the all-sufficiency, of ‘natural’
religion. But with the Deists ‘Nature’ came before ‘re-
ligion’, whereas with Priestley, physicist and chemist as he
was, it was the reverse. In approaching Priestley we enter
(to repeat the insolent phrase) the Protestant underworld ’,
‘
and indeed, for the student of life and thought, his volu-
minous works are mainly important because they show
how the mind of English Dissent matured into an autumn
inflorescence in the chilly climate of eighteenth century
rationalism. In the seventeenth century, before the com-
ing of toleration, the Church was often more ‘liberal’ in
doctrine than the sects, but now that toleration had reduced
the theological temperature and diminished the need for
credal rigidity, the Establishment necessarily remained
1 68
JOSEPH PRIESTLEY AND THE SOCINIAN MOONLIGHT
nominally orthodox, while the sects were free to follow the
contemporary stream of tendency towards a more and
more explicit liberalism. In orthodox quarters theology
could not develop in genuine harmony with the spirit of
the age; it remained, perforce, a Gothic shrine in a
Palladian basilica. I he Dissenters of this century, on the
other hand, were men Who had accepted the political and
social disabilities of nonconformity, and had therefore
nothing to lose in following, wherever it led, what seemed
to them to be the light of truth. It is for such reasons that
Priestley can illustrate, more completely than Horsley or
Paley, the last developments of religious thought within
the limits of the Nature ’-philosophy of the century.
‘
In the variety and scope of his interests Priestley recalls

the Renaissance rather than the age of specialization. In
the histories of science he figures as the distinguished dis-
coverer of oxygen (though he persisted in regarding the
new gas as dephlogisticated air’), nitric and nitrous oxide,
and the absorption of carbon dioxide (‘fixed air’) by
chlorophyll in sunlight. He was made a Fellow of the
Royal Society for his History of Electricity and became
,
the honoured friend or acquaintance of many of the most

eminent scientists and philosophers of the time, both in
England and France, consorting in London with men
like Franklin, Pringle and Price, in Paris with Lavoisier,
Morellet, Turgot, and the Encyclopedistes, or at Bir-
mingham with Erasmus Darwin, Day, Edgeworth and
the othermembers of the Lunar Society. Before the
Birmingham riots his collection of ‘philosophical instru-
ments’ was one of the best in the world. But Priestley’s
science, though he revelled with boyish ingenuousness in
his experiments, was always a side-interest. Religion was
the core of his life, and the propagation of what he believed
to be true Christianity was the main object of his labours.
His miscellaneous works, which extend to upwards of
twenty volumes, include writings on Church History (e.g.
the History of the Corruptions of Christianity
, 1782, and the
History of Early Opinions Concerning Jesus Christy
1786),
169
Metaphysics (
Matter and Spirit
Disquisitions Relating to ,
1777), Politics ( Essay on the First Principles of Government

,
1768), together with Lectures on History, two works

on English Grammar, and innumerable tracts, treatises,
and letters on moral, political, and theological subjects.
Bentham acknowledged his indebtedness to Priestley’s
Essay on Government for suggesting to him the ‘greatest
happiness principle’. And all the while, except for his
period of seven years as librarian and secretary to Lord
Shelburne, and his last years of retirement in America,
Priestley was actively engaged as minister of religion or
schoolmaster, or both at once. Priestley’s incessant transi-
tions between religion and philosophy, and his diffuse
productivity as a writer, suggest, what is indeed the fact,
that his mind was comprehensive rather than profound.
He does not qualify for the first rank in any one field,
except perhaps in ‘pneumatic chemistry’, and even here
his results were correctly interpreted not by himself but
by Lavoisier. But through this very versatility his work
becomes interesting as a compendium of contemporary
notions, and it would be hard to find a better representative
of what was admirable in the mind and spirit of the late
eighteenth century. Though his style lacks distinction,
his transparent candour, the noble singleness of his aim,
and the innocence of his life, compel admiration. Priestley
was one of those who have believed that Truth was attain-
able, that it should be unceasingly pursued, that it need
only be declared to be acknowledged, and that its pro-
mulgation must make for the glory of God and the relief
of man’s estate. Like Hartley, Priestley believed in pro-
gress and perfectibility, and he never doubted that a dawn,
in which it would be bliss to be alive, was even then
breaking upon his own generation. This confidence gives
a characteristic buoyancy, and, the modern reader may
feel, a certain pathos, to the tone of all his writings. ‘The
morning is opening upon us,’ he writes in 1782, ‘and we
cannot doubt but that the light will increase, and extend
itself more and more unto the perfect day. Happy are they
170
who contribute to diffuse the pure light of this everlasting
gospel. 1 This was written of religious enlightenment,
but for him truth had religious value, and he
all
worked
at his philosophical instruments in the
same spirit. In the
Preface to his volume on Air he says that scientific
first
experiment reminds him of ‘Pope’s description of travel-
ling among the Alps, with this difference, that here there
is not only a succession but an increase of new objects and
,
difficulties for the works of God are, like himself, infinite

,
and inexhaustible ’. 2 The progress of scientific know-

ledge, he continues, will put an end
‘to allundue and usurped authority in the business of religion as
,
well as of science and all the efforts of the interested friends

; of
corrupt establishments of all kinds will be ineffectual for their
support in this enlightened age; though, by retarding their down-
tall, they may make the final ruin of them
more complete and
glorious. was ill policy in Leo the X to patronize polite
It
literature. He was cherishing an enemy in disguise. And the
English hierarchy (if there be any thing unsound in its
con-
stitution) has equal reason to tremble even at an air pump,
or an
electrical machine.’ 3
Priestley s visit to Paris in 1774 ^ as a

certain symbolic
value, for it illustrates with special clearness the contrast
referred to above, between the outlook of English
and
French philosophers at the time. Priestley, the Yorkshire
Nonconformist, at the table of Holbach and of Turgot!
this indeed a juxtaposition for the historical imagination
is
to dwell upon. Priestley had been forewarned, so that

it was the philosophes and not he, who
, received the shock.
‘As I was sufficiently apprised of the fact’, he writes in
his Memoirs,
‘I did not wonder, asotherwise should have done, to find all

I
the philosophical persons to whom I was introduced
at Paris,
unbelievers in Christianity, and even professed atheists.
As I
1
History of the Corruptions of Christianity. Works (ed.
Rutt), vol. v,’ p. 4
2
Quoted by Anne Holt, Joseph Priestley , p. 97.
3
ibid., p. 98.
chose on all occasions to appear as a Christian, by some I was told
of them that I was the only person they had ever met with, of
whose understanding they had any opinion, who professed to
believe Christianity. But on interrogating them on the subject,
I soon found that they had given no proper attention to it, and
1
did not really know what Christianity was .’
When he was dining with Turgot, M. de Chastellux told

him that
‘the two gentlemen opposite me were the Bishop of Aix and the
Archbishop of Toulouse, “but”, said he, “they are no more be-
lievers than you or I”. I assured him that I was a believer; but
he would not believe me; and Le Roi, the philosopher, told me

2
that I was the only man of sense he knew that was a Christian.’
In England, Priestley’s more normal avocation was to

defend ‘Christianity’ against the ‘Christians’, and it is a
queer spectacle to find him championing it against the
infidel with arguments which the orthodox would have
condemned However, there were infidels at
as heretical.
home as well as at the ‘Cafe de l’Europe’, and Priestley,
always ready to fight on two fronts alternately, hoped to
‘combat their prejudices with some advantage’ also. He
deals with Gibbon as he did with the philosophical persons
in Paris; Gibbon does not know what Christianity itself
really is —
he only knows what for too many centuries,
alas! it has unfortunately seemed to be.
*
can truly say that the greatest satisfaction I receive from the
I
success of my philosophical pursuits arises from the weight it may
give to my attempts to defend Christianity, and to free it from
those corruptions which prevent its reception with philosophical
and thinking persons, whose influence with the vulgar and un-
thinking is very great.’ 3
His advantage, then, in tackling Gibbon, is that he is
not obliged, like the orthodox apologist, to defend the

‘
superstitious outworks of Christianity. He grants freely
’
1 Memoirs (Centenary ed.), p. 48.

2 Early Life of S. Rogers p. 266, quoted by A. Holt, op. cit., p. 94.
,
3 Memoirs, p. 49.
172
that no historical evidence and no miracles could prove
such doctrines as the incarnation, the atonement, or the
Trinity:
‘They are things that

no miracles can prove. As soon should
I propose to him the belief of Mahomet’s journey to the third
heavens, and all his conversations with God while a pitcher of
water was falling, or the doctrine of transubstantiation, neither of
which are more absurd, and both of them are much more
innocent .’ 1
Mr Gibbon should learn to distinguish between Chris-

tianity and its corruptions:
‘Hitherto he seems to have been acquainted with nothing but
the corrupt establishments of what is very improperly called
Christianity; whereas it is incumbent upon him to read and study
the New Testament for himself. . . . Had Mr Gibbon lived in
France, Spain or Italy, he might, with the same reason, have
ranked the doctrine of transubstantiation, and the worship of
saints and angels, among the essentials of Christianity, as the
doctrines of the Trinity and of atonement.’ 2
What, then, in Priestley’s view, was this ‘genuine and

rational’ Christianity, which needed rescuing from the
pseudo-Christians and recommending to the unbelievers?
In order to answer this question I propose first to refer
briefly to Priestley's metaphysical views and then to give
an outline of the development of his religious beliefs, a
development which is sufficiently representative to be of
general interest.
MATTER AND SPIRIT
We may illustrate Priestley’s metaphysical position from

his Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit and The
Doctrine oj Philosophical Necessity Illustrated
(1777), both
1 History of the Corruptions: Works, vol. v, p. 492.
2
ibid., vol. v, p. 493.
173
composed Caine while he was in the service of Lord
at
Shelburne. Priestley had read Hartley as a youth, and
had been so deeply impressed by him that in 1775
republished the Observations on Man omitting, however,,
most of the anatomical as well as the theological matter.

He did this because, like Hartley himself, he believed that
the theory of the association of ideas would stand firm in
isolation, and he was anxious to promote its acceptance.
In producing this edition, Priestley became an important
link in the transmission of Hartley’s ideas to the nineteenth
century. In one of the Three Dissertations prefixed to
this work, Priestley had ‘expressed some doubt of the
immateriality of the sentient principle in man; and the
outcry that was made on Y'hat I casually expressed on that
subject can hardly be imagined. In all the newspapers,
and most of the periodical publications, I was represented
as an unbeliever in revelation, and no better than an
Atheist’. 1 It was mainly to clarify his position on these
issues that he wrote his Disquisitions two years later.
The main purpose of the Disquisitions was to combine a
thorough-going materialist theory of man with what
Priestley understood by ‘genuine’ Christianity. In read-
ing it, especially after reading Holbach, one may share the
astonishment of M. de Chastellux that such seeming in-
compatibles should be found thus conjoined. Priestley
goes further than Hartley, indeed he is at one with Hol-
bach, in accepting the full doctrine of the materiality of
man. But he would not be Priestley if he did not profess
also to be aiming, throughout, at ‘the firm establishment
of the system of -pure Revelation in opposition to that of a
,
vain and absurd philosophy\ In order to attain his end he

sees that he must remove from ‘matter’ the odium attach-
ing to it from its supposed sluggishness, solidity, and the
like. Once done, the distinction between matter
this is
and ‘spirit’ ceases to be important, and ‘matter’ will no
longer seem incompatible with ‘thought’ or ‘sensation’.
It was with the inertness and impenetrability of matter
1
Memoirs , p. 52.
174
that sensation and thought were always held be irrecon- to
cilable; but matter is neither inert nor impenetrable. It
is not inert, for powers of attraction and repulsion are
inherent in it, and are the true causes of its so-called

‘solidity’ and ‘resistance’. Priestley claims, then, that his
kind of materialism is one from which ‘the reproach of
matter is wiped off ’. 1 He proceeds boldly to deny the
existence of a separate immaterial ‘soul’, and to accept all
(or all but one) of the implications of this denial. Thought
and sensation are never found but in connexion with an
organized system of matter. The brain is the seat of
thought, and there is no recorded instance of thought sur-
viving the destruction of the brain. This system avoids
all the difficulties (which Priestley rehearses) arising
out of
the Cartesian dualism of mind and body. It is a gross
error, he agrees, to suppose that ‘the vibrations of the
brain are themselves the perceptions’. The correct view
is that ‘the brain, besides its vibrating power, has super-
added to it a percipient or sentient power, likewise’; and

he reproves Locke for seeing this possibility and yet
clinging to an immaterial soul. Locke should have
had the courage or consistency to declare for a full
materialism.
Why, one may ask, should this Christian philosopher
have been so zealous to destroy the soul, hitherto the
corner-stone of the religious fabric ? Once again we must
remember that Priestley’s characteristic method of defend-
ing ‘Christianity’ was to expose and remove its ‘cor-
ruptions , which for him included nearly everything
considered by the orthodox to be of its very essence. The
notion of the soul as a substance distinct from the body, he
continues, was ‘part of the system of heathenism, and was
from thence introduced into Christianity which has de-
rived the greatest part of its corruptions from this source ’. 2
This thought, which, as we shall see, he developed more
fully in his later writings on the history of Christian cor-
ruptions, furnishes the main clue to his advocacy of
1
Disquisitions (1777 ed.), p. 109. 2 ibid., p. 31.
1
75
materialism. He hoped that materialism, when properly
defined and understood, so far from leading to the atheism
of a Holbach, would enable him to rescue Christianity
from all the accretions which, as a Unitarian, he wished
to be rid of, and especially the doctrine of the pre-existence
of Christ the demiurge. Further, ‘the common opinion
of the soul of man surviving the body was (as will be
shown) introduced in Christianity from the Oriental and
Greek philosophy, which in many respects exceedingly
’. 1
altered and debased the true Christian system Priestley
was a mortalist of the same type as Milton; at death we
die wholly. But here again we must note the eclecticism
of Priestley’s thought; in spite of all his heresies he always
deferred to Scripture as he understood it, and the general
resurrection at the Last Day was one of the teachings
which he took to be incontestably scriptural. Hobbes and
Milton had already used the Resurrection for the same
purpose ; both they, and Priestley after them, found that
by removing immortality to this safe and miraculous dis-
tance they could combine materialism with the faith.
What rises again must have died, and what has died is the
whole man. What has decomposed may be recomposed
by the being who first composed it, and this will probably
be effected, not by a miracle, but by some natural law un-
known to us. This doctrine, he claims, frees us from
many of the traditional difficulties; we are dispensed, for
instance, from enquiring when, exactly, the soul enters the
body, or whether there are unbodied souls waiting their
turn for incarnation, or whether the animals will rise again
at the Last Day (many of them deserve it, he quaintly
adds, after all they have undergone in this life). Priestley,
whose constant use of the historical method is one of his
claims to distinction, does not leave his subject without
offering a historical sketch of the origin and growth of
opinions about the soul and the state of the dead. ‘
Im-
materiality’ in the strict sense is a modern notion: ‘ It is no
article of faith that I am oppugning, but really an upstart
1
ibid., p. 156.
176
thing, and a nonentity.’ He sums up in a passage which
may deserve full quotation:
The modernidea of an immaterial being is by no means the
same thing that was so denominated by the ancients; it being
well known to the learned that what the ancients meant by an
. . .
immaterial being, was only a finer kind of what we should now call
matter; something like air or breath which first
, supplied a name
for the soul, or else like fire or
which was probably sug-
flame ,
gested by the warmth of the living body.
Consequently the
ancients did not exclude from mind the property
of extension and
,
local presence. It had, in their idea, some common properties
with matter, was capable of being united to it, of
acting and being
acted upon by it, and of moving from place to place
along with it.
But it was justly considered
by the moderns, that such an
immaterial substance as this was, in fact, no immaterial
substance
at all, but a material one; it being the
opinion of all modern
philosophers (though it was unknown to the ancients)
that all
matter is ultimately the same thing, all kinds of bodies
differing
from one another only in the size or
arrangement of their ultimate
particles, oratoms. It was therefore seen, that if the powers of
sensation or thought could belong to such a material
substance as
the ancients had denominated an immaterial one
... it might be
imparted to the very grossest matter; ... and therefore
that the
soul and body being in reality the same kind
, of substance, must
die together.
To avoid this conclusion,
of which divines entertained a very
unreasonable dread, they refined upon the former notion
of spirit,
excluding from it every property which it held in common
with
matter; making
it, in the strict metaphysical sense
of the term,
an immaterial thing without extension, that is, occupying
,
no
portion of space and therefore bearing no relation to it;
and con-
sequently incapable of motion from one place to another, 1
etc .’
The Scriptures, Priestley finds it possible to say, do

not
teach the doctrine of a separable soul. His materialism
is
on all grounds unassailable, because not unscriptural,
it is
because his matter is as immaterial as any one could
wish for ’, and because it leaves untouched the true founda-
tions of religious faith. No proofs of man’s materiality
1
ibid., p. 222.
M 1 77
can be applied to God, whose ‘essence’ must remain un-
known to us. Meanwhile the evidences for God s exist-
ence and power stand firm:
the foundation that the nature of things admits
of
‘I have all
for a firm belief in a first,unchangeable and intelligent

eternal,
given of
cause of all things; and I have all the proof that can be
providence.
his almighty power, infinite goodness, and constant
And this system of natural religion affords all the foundation that
can be had in support of revealed religion, the history of which
is
contained in the books of scripture, which I most cordially and

1
thankfully receive .’
THE DOCTRINE OF PHILOSOPHIC NECESSITY

In The Doctrine of Philosophic Necessity Illustrated (i 777)
Priestley again enlarges upon Hartley. He writes of
Necessity in a rapturous tone, referring, in his Dedication
to Dr John Jebb, to ‘these great and just views of the
glorious system to which we belong’. It may seem
strange, though it is an evident characteristic of this

period, that belief in Necessity should have been part of
the creed of those the most ardent exponents of
who were
political, intellectual, and religious Liberty. To accept
Necessity meant to accept the scientific view of the uni-
verse; meant the acceptance of those unalterable laws
it
which preserve the stars from wrong, and the rejection of

superstition and the supernatural. It was therefore indis-
pensable to all who entertained ‘enlightened and just’
views of Nature. Priestley, like Hartley before him and
Godwin after him, knows how to turn his Necessity to
glorious gain, though, again like them, he may not always
seem quite consistent in his attempt to make a virtue
of it.
In denying what he calls philosophical liberty’ Priestley
‘
is simply denying the possibility of arbitrary caprice, or

chance’ decisions. We
cannot act without ‘motive’.
Identical causes must always
produce identical effects;
p aced in the same circumstances (including my
state of
mind, outlook, etc.) I must always act in the
same manner.
A good man
one who is determined by ‘good’
is
motives; a bad man, one who is
determined by bad
motives. Like the other necessitarians,
he tries to ‘have
it both ways’ a farmer who through fatalism is
:
neglectful
of his labours, is told that if
he is fated to eat he is also
rated to plough and to sow. Yet
one of the advantages of
Necessitarianism is said to be that it produces
resignation
since whatever is, is right:
.
‘S° lon g as we ^
practically believe that there is but one
in the whole universe, that this
will
one will, exclusive of all Chance
,
or the interference of any other will,
disposes of things, even
all
to their minutest circumstances,
and al ways for the best of pur-
poses it is impossible but that we must rejoice in, and be thankful
ror, all events, without distinction .’ 1
It is
interesting to find Priestley comparing
this philo-
sophic creed of his manhood with the
Calvinism in which
he had been brought up. Necessity, he
would persuade
us, makes for morality
where Calvinism undermines it,
since Necessity represents all our
actions as due to our-
selves our susceptibility to ‘motives’), while
(i.e.
Calvinism
removes all into the hands of God. He seems
in fact to
be using, in criticism of predestination,
the very argu-
ments usually brought against Necessitarianism.
Under
Calvinism, he says in effect, you cannot
urge anyone to
turn from his wickedness and live:
under Necessity you
can and must. Why? Because men’s
conduct follows
necessarily from their motives, and you
can supply them
by persuasion, with ever better and better
motives. His
emphasis is thus placed not on the passive
or submissive
aspect of the doctrine —
though he will sometimes use this
as the chief consolation of philosophy
scientific* manipulation of circumstances
but on the active —
so as to produce
1
Philosophical Necessity
(1777), Dedication, p. xii.
O 179
: :

*
improvement’. Some might argue that precisely herein
— that we can change circumstances as well as merely

—
our freedom
them liesbut for
react mechanically to ;
Priestley (in this context) freedom only

meant caprice,
think
whim, action arbitrarily disjoined from causation. I
that Priestley underestimates, in his theory,
the possibility
implies its
of change or rebirth, though his argument
importance. Doubtless an avaricious or selfish man
will
always behave avariciously or selfishly, provided that his

dispositionand environment remain constant; but if and
when he turns from the unrighteousness that he has com-
mitted, what has happened ? The same stimuli now
pro-
duce opposite results, because his state of mind has

altered. For Priestley this would mean, I suppose, that
another set of motives has now increased in strength, so
that a new type of behaviour is necessarily produced.
But
this is just what distinguishes man from a billiard-ball
the latter responds unvaryingly to the same forces, whereas
man may be ‘converted’. This, it might be argued, is an
account of man’s ‘freedom’: not that he can will things
‘arbitrarily’, but that he can submit himself to higher and
higher types of ‘necessity’ —
his highest ‘freedom’ con-
sisting, shall we say, in the most complete submission to
moral law, Nature, phrase of Hartley be pre-
or, if the
ferred, to God as All in All. Hartley seemed to teach that
the mere passage through life must needs generate godli-
ness, but he, like Priestley and the other perfectibilist
necessitarians (and like ourselves), knew that this is not so,
but that we must take thought, and exert ourselves con-
tinually, to approach perfection. Priestley seems to feel
that he has dodged the difficulty when he writes
‘With temper and disposition of mind, considered

respect to the
in a moral respect a man has, certainly, more encouragement to
,
take pains to improve it, when he is sensible that, according to the

settled constitution, and established laws of nature, it depends
.’ 1
entirely upon himself whether it be improved or not
1
ibid., p. 97.
I 80
But what he further subjoins on the subject of Cal-
vinism is also, I think, applicable to Necessitarianism:
Icannot, however, conclude this section without acknow-
ledging that though I consider the proper Calvinistic system
. . .
as a most gloomy one, and particularly unfavourable

to virtue, it is
only so when consistently pursued and when every part equally
,
,
impresses the mind. But this is never, in fact, the case with any
system. If there be in our minds a prevalence
of good principles
and good dispositions, we naturally turn our eyes from everything
in our respective systems that, even by a just
construction,
is unfavourable to virtue and goodness, and we reflect with
pleasure, and act upon, those parts of them only that have a good
tendency .’ 1
For Priestley and those like him, ‘Necessity’ had come to

be associated with Truth and Enlightenment, just as Cal-
vinism was associated with Error and Superstition, and he
could accordingly turn his eyes from everything in his
own system that might seem ‘unfavourable to virtue’,
while remaining alive to the same dangers in the teaching
of others.
3
PRIESTLEY’S RELIGIOUS OUTLOOK
‘I think’, says Coleridge in the Table Talk ‘Priestley
,
must be considered the author of the modern Unitarian-

ism’, and this broadly true, if, by emphasizing the word
is
‘modern’, we understand Coleridge to have intended to

distinguish Unitarianism as an English nonconformist sect
from the Unitarianism of Socinus, or of Christ and the
Apostles (who according to Priestley were the first Uni-
tarians).But Priestley in his development from Calvinism
to Unitarianism merely illustrates in epitome what was
going on widely amongst the dissenting congregations
in the eighteenth century. By ‘dissenting congrega-
tions’ is chiefly meant the worshippers — Presbyterian,
1 ibid., pp. x6i-2.
i 8 i
Independent, and Baptist —
in the thousand (or there-
abouts) meeting-houses which were built during the thirty

years following the Toleration Act. These congregations,
it must be emphasized, were originally
quite orthodox in
doctrine —
often, indeed, more strictly orthodox than the
Church which had produced Arminians and Latitudin-
and which now countenanced Dr Samuel Clarke.
arians,
They remained separate from the Church either because
they objected to the principle of a State Establishment, or
because they disapproved of certain rites and ceremonies
contained in the Prayer-Book. But, as suggested above,
these dissenters, having no social or political persuasives
to orthodoxy (they were disqualified for all public prefer-
ment, and for graduating at Oxford and Cambridge), were
exposed in a unique degree to the contemporary winds of
doctrine, and, most of their chapels having been founded
on the principle of the ‘open Trust’ (they were licensed
simply ‘for the worship of Almighty God’, or ‘for the
purpose of divine worship’), there was nothing to prevent
them from becoming, as many of them did, more and more
‘liberal’. Nor is this surprising, for these people, the
descendants of the Puritans, were naturally disposed to
welcome whatever made for ‘liberty’ in every sphere, and
in religion, now that the battle for toleration was at least
partly won, meant the ever-increasing
‘liberty’ necessarily
rationalization of belief. Dissent was traditionally based
on Scripture rather than on creed, and the Scriptures
— that is to say, a whole body of literature —
could be made
to harmonize, much more readily than the creeds, with
the intellectual predispositions of the eighteenth century.
Methodism and the Evangelical movement, which really
belong to the reaction against all that the eighteenth
century stood for, checked the progress of rational dis-
‘ ’
sent; but before their impact was fully felt many of

the congregations had ‘lapsed’ through Arianism into
Unitarianism. The Unitarianism of the last quarter of
the eighteenth century, indeed, came very close to the
Deism of the earlier decades ; it differed mainly in origin
182
and organization. Deism was largely the perquisite of
gentlemen Unitarianism was bourgeois. Deism was
,
professed by isolated free-thinkers, while the Unitarian

Congregation, having evolved by imperceptible stages
from the older forms of dissent, retained a strong group-
consciousness as a religious fellowship. ‘The generation
of the modern worldly Dissenter was thus’, says Coleridge,
‘Presbyterian, Arian, Socinian, and last Unitarian ’. 1 No
one, especially after reading Professor Tawney’s Religion
and the Rise of Capitalism need deny that Puritanism could
,
and did generate, or degenerate into, worldliness, losing its

original religious impulse and forgetting good works in its
passion for (financially profitable) hard work. But Pro-
testant Dissent was not the only form of religion which
became worldly in the eighteenth century, and it was un-
fair of Coleridge to imply that the Unitarian was the
worldliest of the series. Perhaps his remark is connected
with his having professed Unitarianism himself as a young
man, and then, as he puts it, to his having ‘gone much
further than the Unitarians, and so having come round to
the other side ’. 2 At any rate, it can be truthfully affirmed
of men like Priestley and Lindsey that, so far from being
worldly-wise, they were prepared to sacrifice everything
dear for the sake of what they deemed to be truth ’. The ‘
epithet ‘worldly’ seems more applicable to those who

would have loved the same ‘truth’ just as much, had they
not loved ‘honour’ more. The Unitarianism of Priestley
and Lindsey must seem cold to those who seek in religion
for colour, and symbol, and ecstasy, but in its combination
of ‘moonlight ’-illumination with religious conviction it
remains one of the most characteristic, and not the least
admirable, of the products of the English eighteenth
century.
Priestley, son of a Yorkshire cloth-dresser of the Inde-
pendent persuasion, was brought up, he tells us 3 ‘with ,
sentiments of piety, but without bigotry’. His aunt, Mrs

1
Table Talk (Oxford ed.), p. 311. * ibid.,
p. 308.
* In his Memoirs from which ensuing phrases are quoted.
,
'83
Keighley, who was responsible for his education, was truly
Calvinistic in principle, but was far from confining salva-
tion to those who thought as she did on religious subjects.
Being left in good circumstances, her home was the resort
of all the Dissenting ministers in the neighbourhood with-
out distinction, and those who were the most obnoxious
on account of their heresy were almost as welcome to her,
if she thought them good and honest men .., as any
.
others’. With Mr Walker, one of the most heretical of

these (that is to say, a ‘rational Christian’), who was also
an excellent classical scholar, Priestley struck up a lasting
friendship, receiving from him frequent letters in the Latin
language, and a legacy of £ 200 when he died. As a child
he was of sickly constitution, and happening at this time
1
to read some ‘books of experiences he fell into great dis-

,
tress of mind, to which in later life he always looked back

with horror. Though he retained, from these Bunyan-
esque agonies, ‘a deep reverence for divine things’, the
recollection of them gave him ‘a peculiar sense of the value
of rational principles in religion ’, and of the importance of
always inculcating ‘just views of things, assuring ourselves
that proper feelings and right conduct will be the conse-
quence of them’. Mainly as a result of his ill-health, he
made extraordinary progress at his books, and before going
to the ‘Academy’ he had acquired —
partly at home and
Dissenting ministers
—
partly at various schools, but also from certain learned
‘a pretty good knowledge’ of
Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French, Italian, ‘High Dutch’,
Chaldee and Syriac, geometry and algebra; and he had
also read some philosophy and logic. Before he left home
he had already shown ‘heretical’ tendencies, and was re-
fused admittance as a communicant in his congregation
because he was unsound on the subject of the sin of Adam.
In spite of his early unorthodoxies and his later changes of
opinion he always acknowledged a great debt to his early
religious training, and the picture he draws of the life of
his congregation may usefully remind us how vigorously
the business of religion was still attended to, in the heart
184
of the ‘age of reason*, in Dissenting circles quite un-
touched by Methodism. There were catechizings, almost
daily meetings of some part of the congregation, and great
strictness in the keeping of the Lord’s Day. ‘No victuals
were dressed on that day in. any family. No member of it
was permitted to walk out for recreation, but the whole of
the day was spent at the public meeting, or at home in
reading, meditation, and prayer.’ Priestley was himself
so serious-minded that he had ‘a great aversion to plays
and romances’, and once seeing his brother Timothy
reading a book of Knight-errantry he snatched it out of
’
his hands with great indignation and threw it away. (The

unfortunate Timothy afterwards became, ‘if possible,
more serious than I had been’, and ‘after an imperfect
education’ — —as Priestley writes, perhaps not without
fraternal malice ‘took up the profession of a minister
among the Independents’.) Priestley left home for the
‘Academy’ an Arminian, but he had as yet ‘by no means
rejected the doctrine of the Trinity or that of the
Atonement’.
The Dissenting ‘Academies’, it has been said, ‘were
the greatest schools of their day. During a period when the
grammar schools slept and the Universities were sterile’,
they were ‘thoroughly alive and active’. At a time when,
according to Gibbon, the Oxford dons had absolved their
consciences from the toil of reading, thinking, writing,
and teaching, ‘while their dull and deep potations in-
creased the intemperance of youth’, and when unreformed
Cambridge, according to Chesterfield, was ‘sunk in the
lowest obscurity’, these Academies were the real centres
of higher education in England. They were open to all,
without oath or subscription, and Anglicans as well as
Dissenters attended them. The Daventry Academy, to
which Priestley went in 1752, was the successor to the
Northampton Academy in which Philip Doddridge, the
most celebrated of the eighteenth century tutors, had
taught and ministered from 1729 to 1751. Like the con-
gregations, these Colleges were evolving with the times
185
towards theological liberty. Doddridge himself was or-
thodox, but his daughter could say of him that ‘the
orthodoxy my father taught his children was charity’, and
he himself declared that he loved and honoured ‘every
benevolent and useful man in society’, ‘whether he be or
be not a Christian ’. 1 ‘In my time’, says Priestley, ‘the
academy was favourable to the serious
in a state peculiarly
pursuit of truth, as the students were about equally
divided upon every question of much importance. Our . . .
tutors also were of different opinions, Dr Ashworth [Dodd-

ridge’s successor] taking the orthodox side of every
question, and Mr Clark, the sub-tutor, that of heresy,
f
though always with the greatest modesty.’ Here Priestley

first came under the influence of Hartley, to whom he
ascribes a decisive and beneficial influence uponwhole
his
future development. The Observations on Man he ,
declares,
‘established me in the belief of the doctrine of Necessity, which I

first learned from Collins; it greatly improved that disposition to
piety which brought to the Academy, and freed it from the
I
rigour with which it had been tinctured. Indeed, I do not know

whether the consideration of Dr Hartley’s theory contributes
more to enlighten the mind or improve the heart: it effects both
in so supereminent a degree.’
In spite of the freedom of discussion here encouraged, ‘the

extreme of heresy among us was Arianism ’, and Priestley
left Daventry with a ‘more or less qualified’ belief in the
Atonement.
not to our purpose to follow Priestley’s subsequent
It is
career in any detail, but merely to indicate some signi-
ficant points in the development of his views. At Need-
ham Market, where he conducted his first ministry for
three years, he became convinced, after ‘much pains and
thought’, of the falsity of the doctrine of the Atonement,
and his examination of St Paul’s epistles satisfied him
1
The foregoing references are quoted by Gow, The Unitarians (1928),
ch. x, q.<v.
186
that the apostle s reasoning
4
was many
in places far from
being conclusive’. He had not yet studied the Socinian
doctrine, but his Ananism was enough to antagonize
his
flock, and he removed to Nantwich.
Here he ran a
school as well as a chapel, and earned enough to purchase
his first ‘philosophical instruments’. In 1760 Priestley
was appointed tutor in languages at the famous Warrington
Academy, under the principalship of Dr Aikin, the father
ot Mrs Barbauld. Here he was once again in congenial
society; the tutors were all Arians and Necessitarians,
and
not even some ‘obscure notions’ of Dr Aikin ’s on the sub-
ject of Atonement could disturb their unanimity. It
was
while here, too, that he was introduced to Price
and
Franklin in London, wrote his History of Electricity and
,
became a Fellow of the Royal Society. The next stage in
Priestley’s theological progress was reached during
his
ministry at the Mill Hill chapel, Leeds, where he suc-
ceeded the Rev. Thomas Walker in 1767. Here, by
reading Lardner s Eetter on the Logos he became ‘what
,
is called a Socinian’, which may be taken

to mean, in the
eighteenth century, a Unitarian —
one who holds that God
is the only proper object of worship, and
who rejects the
Trinitarian doctrine of Christ’s divinity, and the Arian
doctrine of his pre-existence. The chief events of this
period were Priestley’s efforts to reanimate the waning
zeal of his flock, and the attempt —
significant of the
times, though of course unsuccessful —
by Archdeacon
Blackburne, the Rev. Theophilus Lindsey (Priestley’s
close friend), and other Anglican clergymen, to
obtain
from subscription to articles in which they
legal relief
had ceased to believe. The main outcome of the move-
ment was the secession of Lindsey, and his establish-
ment of the first avowedly Unitarian chapel, in Essex
Street, Strand. Of
Lindsey, Priestley speaks with the
warmest affection. ‘To his society’, he says, ‘I owe
much of my zeal for the doctrine of the divine unity,
forwhich he made so great sacrifices, and in the defence
of which he so much distinguished himself, so as
to
187
occasion a new era in the history of religion in this
country.’
The seven years following Priestley’s ministry at Leeds
was the period (1773-80) of his employment with Shel-
burne, to which reference has already been made. It was
devoted mainly to scientific and philosophical work. At
this time, during the winter he spent in London, he im-
proved his acquaintance with Benjamin Franklin. He
much regretted that Franklin, with his good character and
great influence, should have been an unbeliever, and he
recommended him some good reading on the evidences of
Christianity (selected portions of Hartley, and his own
Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion). But the
American war intervened, and Franklin ceased to have
leisure enough to be converted.
Next followed what he calls ‘the happiest event of my
life’, his settlement in Birmingham as minister of the New
Meeting. This was ‘highly favourable to every object I
had in view, philosophical or theological’. Here he had
the society of scientific friends, including James Watt the
inventor, Withering the botanist, Erasmus Darwin, and
the other members of the Lunar Society; and he had,
moreover, the ‘most liberal’ congregation in England.
Soon after he settled in Birmingham he wrote his History
of the Corruptions of Christianity (1782), a work which is
sufficiently representative of his mature outlook, and of
which I propose, therefore, to give a brief account.
As we have seen, the ‘corruptions’ of Christianity in-
cluded, for Priestley, most of what had been considered its
fundamental doctrines: the Trinity, the Miraculous Con-
ception, Original Sin, Predestination, the Atonement, the
plenary inspiration of Scripture. In the Preface he ex-
plains, as no doubt he did to M.
de Chastellux and M. Le
Roi, and as he did at the conclusion of the book to Mr
Gibbon, that it is only these corruptions that prevent the
universal acceptance of Christianity; that the corruptions
occasion justifiable indifference in those who are not Chris-
tians, and righteous indignation in those who are; and that
188
the only course now is to preserve Christianity by exposing
the falsehood of ‘what has so long passed for Christianity’
and demonstrating ‘what is truly so’. The argument has
a familiar ring: it had been used by the Protestant re-
formers, by Herbert of Cherbury, by the Cambridge
Platonists, by Blount and Locke and Toland, and it was
to be used again by Matthew Arnold and by some modern ‘
churchmen’ of the latter days. Coming from Priestley,

however, it has a peculiar force, for Priestley was a pastor
of acknowledged zeal and purity of life, and could by no
means be accused of merely critical or destructive in-
tentions. He speaks, too, for liberalism at its most hope-
ful and heroic phase, when revolutionary possibilities were
opening on all sides, and human nature seemed about to
be born anew. Something of the rapture of those expan-
sive days sounds through Priestley’s otherwise humdrum
prose from time to time, as when in his dedicatory address
to Lindsey he exclaims The gross darkness of that night
:
‘
which has for many centuries obscured our holy religion,

we may clearly see, is past; the morning is opening
upon us. . .
Priestley’s method is a version of the ‘primitivism’ so

often found in the ethical and political theory of the cen-
tury. He treats all the corruptions historically, and tries
to demonstrate that each is a departure from the original
‘
scheme’, Scripture —
context playing the part of
in this
—
‘
Nature Although he rejected the plenary inspiration ’,
’. ‘
he still belongs to the ‘Scriptural’ phase of liberal religious

thought; to impugn a doctrine it is still necessary, or
sufficient, for him to prove that ‘no where laid down,
it is
or asserted, in the Scriptures’. Good sense and a ‘just

view of things’ are, to be sure, his real standards, but
Scripture, often admittedly in natural harmony with these
standards, must be made to corroborate them, if necessary
by force. The Atonement, for example, is ‘unscriptural’.
In the first part of the book he gives a historical account
(afterwards expanded in another work) of the growth of
opinions concerning Jesus Christ. The apostles and the
189
earliest Christians were Unitarians: Christ was, as in
Acts ii. man approved by God, by wonders and
22 ,
‘a
signs which God did by him’, or as in i Timothy ii. 5,
‘There is one God, and one mediator between God and
men, the man Christ Jesus'. Priestley cites Athanasius as
saying that the Jews were so firmly persuaded that their
Messiah was to be human, that ‘the apostles were obliged
to use great caution in divulging the doctrine of the proper
divinity of Christ'. He goes on: ‘but what the apostles
did not teach, I think we should be cautious how we be-
lieve. The apostles were never backward to combat other
Jewish prejudices, and certainly would have opposed this
opinion of theirs, if it had been an error.’ 1 How, then,
has Jesus come to be equated with ‘the supreme eternal
God, the maker of heaven and earth, and of all things
visible and invisible’? The
divinizing of Jesus was due
to the desire of the ‘philosophizing Christians’, who were
recommending the faith to the Gentiles, to overcome the
stumbling-block of the Cross; their object was ‘to make
the religion of Christ more reputable, by adding to the
dignity of our Lord’s person’. ‘The doctrine of the
separate divinity of Christ was at first nothing more than
a personification of a diyipe attribute ’^the Logos, or
divine Reason. We
return to the question posed earlier
in this chapter: What, then, did Priestley conceive
‘genuine’ (which for him is equivalent to ‘original’)
Christianity to have been ? He has stated his view of
Christianity, in another work, as follows:
‘Christianity is less to be considered as a system of opinions,

than a rule of life. But of what significance is a rule if it be not
complied with ? All the doctrines of Christianity have for their
object Christian morals, which are none other than the well-
known duties of life, and the advantage we derive from this re-
ligion is that the principles of it assist us in maintaining that steady
regard to the providence of God and to a future state, which
facilitates and ensures the practice of those duties, inspiring greater
piety towards God, greater benevolence to man, and that heavenly-
1
History of the Corruptions : Works, vol. v, p. 19.
190
:

mindedness which raises the heart and the affections above those
mean and low pursuits which are the source of almost all vices .’ 1
The great object of the mission and death of Christ’, he

says in the work we are, considering, was ‘to give the
fullestproof of a future life of retribution, in order to
supply the strongest motives to virtue ’. 2 In spite of his
materialism and mortalism Priestley believed, as we have
seen, in the final resurrection, and he also retained from
traditional doctrine the belief in the miracles and the
•
resurrection of Christ. Christ being wholly man, his life

and death are to be regarded as examples for us, and his
resurrection as a type or earnest of that of all men.
Priestley s views are so completely summarized in the
General Conclusion, Part I, ‘Containing Considerations
addressed to Unbelievers, and especially to Mr Gibbon’,
that I venture to quote from this section at some length
To consider* the system (if it may be called a system] of

Christianity a priori , one would think it very little liable to cor-
ruption, or abuse. The great outline of it is, that the Universal
Parent of Mankind commissioned Jesus Christ to invite men to
the practice of virtue, by the assurance of his mercy to the
peni-
tent, and of his purpose to raise to immortal life and
happiness all
the virtuous and good, but to inflict an adequate punishment
on
the wicked. In proof of this he wrought many miracles, and after
a public execution he rose again from the dead. He also
directed
that proselytes to his religion should be admitted by
baptism , and
that his disciples should eat bread and drink wine in
commemora-
tion of his death.
‘Here nothing that any person could imagine would lead to
is
much subtle speculation, at least such as could excite much

animosity. And a person unacquainted with the state of things
. . .
at the time of its promulgation would look in vain

for any prob-
able source of the monstrous corruptions and abuses
which crept
into the system afterwards. . . .
In reality, however, the causes of the succeeding corruptions
1
Quoted from The Evidences of Revealed Religion by W. Lloyd, Protestant
Dissent and English Unitariariism (1899), p. 184.
a
History of the Corruptions : Works, vol. v,
p. 103.
191
did then exist; and accordingly, without any thing more than
their natural operation, all the abuses rose to their full height; and
what is more wonderful still, by the operation of natural causes also ,
without any miraculous interposition of Providence we see the abuses ,
gradually corrected, and Christianity recovering its primitive beauty

1
and glory .
causes of the corruptions were almost wholly contained

‘The
in the established opinions of the heathen world, and especially
the philosophical part of it; so that when those Heathens em-
braced Christianity, they mixed their former tenets and prejudices
with it. Also, both Jews and Heathens were so much scandalized
at the idea of being the disciples of a man who had been crucified
as a common malefactor that Christians in general were suffi-
ciently disposed to adopt any opinion that would most effectually
wipe away this reproach.
‘The opinion of belonging to a
the mental faculties of man
substance distinct from his body, or brain, and of this invisible
spiritual part, or soul being capable of subsisting before and after
,
its union to the body, which had taken the deepest root in all the
schools of philosophy, was wonderfully calculated to answer this

purpose. For by this means Christians were enabled to give to
the soul of Christ what rank they pleased in the heavenly regions
before his incarnation. . . .
‘The abuses of the positive institutions of Christianity, mon-

strous as they were, naturally arose from the opinion of the
purifying and sanctifying virtue of rites and ceremonies, which
was the very basis of all the worship of the Heathens. We like- . . .
wise see the rudiments of all the monkish austerities in the

opinions and practices of the Heathens, who thought to purify
and exalt the soul by macerating and mortifying the body.’ 2
It is noteworthy that Priestley can accept the historical

miracles, while rejecting the doctrinal mysteries, of Chris-
tianity. He urges Gibbon to consider that Christianity
would not have spread as it did if it had not been ‘true’,
and if the miracles had not proved it beyond dispute. If
the Gospel history had been untrue, the total subversion
of paganism by Christianity would have been more extra-
ordinary than that history itself. ‘
In short, the question
1
My italics.
2 Works,
History of the Corruptions : vol. v, pp. 480-1.
I92
is,whether Mr Gibbon or myself, believe in more
numerous, more extraordinary, or more useless miracles.’
Suc h> then, was the faith of a representative
t
English
rational Dissenter at the time of the outbreak of the
French Revolution. In his Memoirs writing in 1787,
,
four years before the Church and King’
riots in Birming-
ham, he records his gratitude for having lived ‘in an
age
and country in which I have been at full liberty
both to
investigate, and by preaching and writing
to propagate,
religious truth The story of those riots is well known,
.
and need not be recounted in any detail here. It was

one
of the disgraceful episodes of that period of
panic and
reaction, which for a time curtailed the ‘liberty’
in which
Priestley had been ‘singularly happy’, and
which had been
one of the glories of eighteenth century England.
He
records the event with no elaboration in his
Memoirs :
... on occasion of the celebration of the anniversary of

the
French Revolution, on July 14, 1791, by several of my
friends,
but with which I had little to do, a mob, encouraged by some
persons in power, first burned the Meeting-house
in which I
preached, then another Meeting-house in the town,
and then my
dwelling-house, demolishing my library, apparatus, and,
as far as
they could, every thing belonging to me.’
Three years following this ‘effervescence of the public

mind ,
as Pitt euphemistically called it, Priestley set sail
for America (April
1794), in the expectation of joining
7,
the large settlement for the friends of liberty in
general,
near the head of the Susquehanna which had been
, pro-
jected by Thomas Cooper and Priestley’s son.
Exactly
one day before Priestley’s embarkation S. T. Coleridge
secured his discharge from the army, and two
months
later he was eagerly scheming with Southey
and others for
the establishment of Pantisocracy on the banks of
the same
delightful river, which was recommended to him
for ‘its
excessive Beauty, and its security from hostile Indians’. 1
1
Letter to Southey, Sept. 6, I794 (quoted by L. Hanson, Life
Colertdge (1938), p. 52).
J J S
of * T
*
N 1
93
Priestley was next to Hartley, the special
at this time,
Christian hero of Coleridge, and evidently the emigration
of the ‘patriot, saint and sage’, driven with vain hate from
his loved native land by Statesmen bloodstained and
‘
priests idolatrous’,
1
gave added zest to the pantisocratic
dream. In view of the tone of Coleridge’s later references
to Priestley the following sonnet, composed in December
is of some significance. It illustrates not only the
1794,
quality of Coleridge’s poetry before his intimacy with
Wordsworth, but also the completeness with which
Priestley then personified his religious, political, and in-
tellectual ideals:
Though rous’d by that dark Vizir Riot rude

Have driven our Priestley o’er the Ocean swell;
Though Superstitionand her wolfish brood
Bay his mild radiance, impotent and fell;
Calm in his halls of brightness he shall dwell!
For lo! Religion at his strong behest
Starts with mild anger from the Papal spell,
And Earth her tinsel-glittering vest,
flings to
Her mitred State and cumbrous Pomp unholy;
And Justice wakes to bid th’Oppressor wail
Insulting aye the wrongs of patient Folly;
And from her dark retreat by Wisdom won
Meek Nature slowly lifts her matron veil
To smile with fondness on her gazing Son!
4
POLITICS AND HISTORY
(0
be appropriate to consider now, in conclusion,
It will
Priestley’s Essay on the First Principles of Government and on ,
the Nature of Political Civil and Religious Liberty (1768),

,
and his Lectures on History (1788). We

enter here the
eighteenth century stream of liberal political thinking; in
1 The phrases are from S. T. Coleridge’s tribute to Priestley, Religious
Musings (Dec. 1794), 37 r -
*94
the immediate background are Locke,
Russell, and Sidney,
and in the far distance, Harmodius and
Aristogiton.
Hartley also there, to
issupply the psychological basis for
perfectibility a theme —
on which Priestley writes with
more than his accustomed hopefulness. Physical
pains
and pleasures are transformed by association into
intel-
and man attains to larger and larger views, at
lectual ones,
length approaching the angels in scope,
and even dimly
glimpsing the divine standpoint from which all partial
evil
is universal good. Meanwhile
‘The great instrument in the hand of divine providence, of this
progress of society towards improvement, is
society , and conse-
quently government .’ 1
The economic
which Adam
basis is provided by the principle
Smith was so shortly (1776)
—on
to enlarge
authoritatively
gress
—
of the division of labour, whereby pro-
is immensely accelerated. In the same way
‘all knowledge will be subdivided and extended; and
knowledge ,
as Lord Bacon observes, being power
the human powers will, in ,
fact, be increased; nature, including

both its materials, and its
laws, will be more at our command; men
will make their situa-
tion in this world abundantly more easy and
comfortable; they
will probably prolong their existence in
it, and will grow daily
more happy, each in himself, and more able (and, I
believe, more
disposed) to communicate happiness to others.
Thus, whatever
was the beginning of this world\ the end will be glorious
and para-
disaical, beyond what our imaginations
can now conceive
Priestley s paradise,
be observed, lies in the future,
it will
not in any antique golden age or state of Nature,
and the
contemplation of that prospect, he tells us, ‘always
makes
me happy’. It is a Baconian paradise, based on command
over Nature, that he here expects, not the
Kingdom of
God anticipated by Milton in Of Reformation in England 2
1
Essay on Government (1768), p. 6.
2
Wh th ° U ’ th
?
eternal and
shortl y King . . shah put an end
,; T,
to all earthly tyrannies,
.
proclaiming thy universal and mild monarchy

through
6
heaven and earth.’ (Prose Works, Bohn ed. vol. ii, p. 4i 9 )
J 9S
yet there an affinity between these two religious liber-
is
tarians, and not least in that they both

lived to witness,
their im-
with unconquerable mind, the shattering of
mediate hopes. In our own bad days it is perhaps
the
*
happiness of these men, rather than their disappointment,
*
which leaves us mourning. _ } .
Priestley distinguishes between ‘political

and civil
liberty: ‘political’ liberty is the possession
of a voice in
the government, or a vote; ‘civil , tne power
over their
own actions, which the members of the state reserve to
themselves, and which their officers must not infringe^.
His thesis on political liberty is an expansion of Locke’s
defence of revolution. Governments exist for the pro-
motion of general utility; where this utility is not being
enjoyed, the ‘people’ must resume their ‘natural’ liberties
and punish or remove their servants In a large and .
complex state like ours there is little danger of oft-repeated

rebellion on these principles. Priestley is surprised that
the utilitarian doctrine should have been so largely over-
looked — the principle, that is, that
‘The good and happiness of the members, that is the majority of

the members of any state, is the great standard by which every
thing relating to that state must finally be determined. . . .
‘Virtue and right conduct consist in those affections and

actions which terminate in the public good; justice and veracity,
for instance, having nothing intrinsically excellent in them,
separate from their relation to the happiness of mankind ; and the
1
whole system of right to power, property and everything else in

society, must be regulated by the same consideration: the decisive
question, when any of these subjects are examined being; what is
?’ 1
it that the good of the community requires
It is, of course, bourgeois ‘liberty’ that Priestley wants;

the good of the community does not and cannot require
perfect political liberty in England. None but persons ‘
of considerable fortune’, or those with the best education,

are eligible for the highest offices, and ‘dependents’ should
1 ibid., vol. ii,

pp. 17-19.
196
not have a vote in the election of the chief magistrates.
On the other hand, when and if the risk of attempting
a revolution is less than existing evils and
oppressions,
in the name of God, I ask, what principles are those, which
oiight to restrain an injured and insulted people from asserting
their natural rights?’
He has a suitable reply for the rich prelate who urges that
‘the powers that be are ordained of God’ :
It a sufficient answer to such an absurd quotation as this, that,

is
for the same reason, the powers which will be will

be ordained of
God also .’ 1
‘No man can be supposed to resign his natural liberty,

but on conditions and these conditions are violated
,
whenever the plain and obvious ends of government are

not answered’.
On ‘civil liberty’
Priestley expresses the doctrines of
what became orthodox liberal individualism. sense of A
political and civil liberty gives a man a ‘constant feeling
of his own power and importance; and is the foundation
of his indulging in a free, bold, and manly turn of think-
ing, unrestrained by the most distant idea of
control’.
The government ought never to interfere, ‘without the
greatest caution, in things that do not immediately affect
the lives, liberty or property of the members of the com-
munity’. For example, Priestley is opposed, on libertarian
grounds, to public education. Here is one important
sphere in which the public good can only be secured by
leaving things to nature ,
that is, to individual action and
initiative. He
sees clearly that public education might
be perverted to produce a totalitarian uniformity; ‘one
method of education ’, as he says, would only produce one ‘
kind of men; but the great excellence of human nature

consists in the variety of which capable’.
it is The argu-
ment of Mill On Liberty is anticipated here, and where
1
T
97
Priestley insists on the importance of diversity for the
vigorous intellectual life of a nation; the Dissenters, for
instance, are valuable in this way to the Establishment
itself. Is it not universally considered as an advantage
‘
to England, that it contains so great a variety of original

characters?’ The argument is clearly the counterpart, as
the near contemporary, of that of
it is Quesnay and Adam
Smith in the economic sphere.
In the section on Religious Liberty and Toleration we
reach the heart of Priestley’s thought, and touch the true
mainspring of his libertarian ardour. Applying the utili-
tarian test, he first shows that the happiest countries have
been those in which there was least religious intolerance
and interference. Flanders was ruined by Philip II, and
France by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes; whereas
Holland and England have prospered, and Pennsylvania
has flourished better than less tolerant states. As for the
extravagances of zeal, or of popery, it is ‘absolutely
chimerical’ to fear them ‘in this enlightened age’. He
would not propose to abolish ‘establishments’ all at once,
but he would recommend reducing the Thirty-Nine Articles
by thirty-eight to begin with, and completing the tolera-
tion which is at present only partial. He reminds us that
‘it is not the law, but the mildness of the administration
and the spirit of the times, to which we are indebted for

our present liberties’, and urges that Dissenters should
be capable of civil office. The thought of a potentially
‘enlightened’ France disturbs him (as it had disturbed
Brown of the Estimate ); we must look to our laurels, for
if France should begin to reform herself, she would do it
much more thoroughly than we did.
Lastly, in the section Of the Progress of Civil Societies
‘
to a State of greater Perfection, showing that it is retarded

by Encroachments on Civil and Religious Liberty’, he
generalizes his theme and proclaims once again the gospel
of perfectibility:
‘As all things (and particularly whatever depends upon science)

198
—
have of late years been in a quicker progress towards perfection
than ever; we may safely conclude the same with respect to any
political state now in being. . .
1
‘This seems to be the time, when the minds of men are open-
ing to large and generous views of things.’ 2
Priestley’s assumption that Providence is leading us slowly

but inevitably to happiness along the path of progress gives
him complete assurance in enunciating the laissez-faire
faith in its most general form:
‘It an universal maxim, that the more liberty is given to

is
every thing which is in a state of growth, the more perfect it will

become.’ 3
Let us then keep things moving! Establishments tend

to an unhealthy fixity. If even Locke, or Clarke, or
Hoadly, had drawn up a creed only half a century ago,
how unsatisfactory would it now seem! ‘The hand of
power ... on the side of any set of principles cannot but
be a suspicious circumstance.’ The question of relief
from ‘subscription’ being thefi much in the air, it is
natural to find Priestley referring, near the end, to those
clergymen
‘who may have some reluctance to subscribe what they do not
believe,and who may feel, notwithstanding every evasion to
which they can have recourse, that a church preferment is dearly
bought at the expense of a solemn falsehood.’ 4
The true course for such was to do what Theophilus

Lindsey did a few years later (1773) to sacrifice worldly
advantage for the sake of conviction:
‘A number of spirited and conscientious men, openly refusing to
enter into the church, or throwing up the livings which they hold
upon those iniquitous and enslaving terms would rouse the. . .
attention of the temporal heads of our spiritual church.’
1 2
ibid., vol. ii, p. 13 1. ibid., vol. ii, p. 188.
3 ibid., vol. 4 ibid.,
ii, p. 137. vol. ii, p. 185.
199
:
(
2)
Priestley’s Lectures on Historyand General Policy were

composed for delivery at the Warrington Academy, but
they were not published until 1788, by which time he had
considerably enlarged and altered them. He introduced
these lectures on history, political theory, and economics,
he tells us, because he considered the existing curriculum
defective
‘though most of our pupils were young men designed for situa-
tions in civil and active life, every article in the plan of their
education was adapted to the learned professions.’
As a recent biographer has remarked, he reformed the

curriculum of the Warrington Academy sixty years before
the foundation of a Chair of Economics at Oxford, and
more than a hundred years before history became a
separate school. 1
History in the eighteenth century (as in some other
centuries) was in general written and read with a purpose,
and Priestley as a historian has several axes to grind. He
regarded history as edifying, educative, and encouraging.
It was the assembling of the evidences, not 'this time of
Christianity, but of Providence; the arrangement of past
events to illustrate Priestley’s view of the world. He
would not have disagreed, perhaps, with Hume’s remark
that ‘history’s chief use is only to discover the constant and
universal principles of human nature’, 2 but he would add
that it teaches us to see the past and the present as stages
in. a glorious scheme of amelioration. He had read The
Decline and Fall but the Roman Empire was not every-
,
thing, and even Gibbon, whose great work has been

described as ‘a memorial oration’, could ‘acquiesce in the
pleasing conclusion that every age of the world has in-
creased, and still increases, the real wealth, the happiness,
1 A. Holt, Life of Priestley (Oxford, 1931), p. 30.

2
Cf. above, p. 133, n. 1.
200
the knowledge and perhaps the virtue
of the human race’. 1
If Giobon could still believe
this after describing ‘the
triumph of barbarism and religion ’, and without
Priestley’s
religious grounds for hope,
not surprising that
it is
Priestley could advise his student to
‘attend to every
advantage which the present age enjoys above ancient
times, and see whether he cannot perceive
marks of things
being in a progress towards a state of greater
perfection’. 2
History, like Nature, is a mighty maze, but
not without
a plan;
it is, in reality,
an exhibition of the ways of God, and jointly
with the works of nature (which at first sight,
present a prospect
equally confused and perplexed) leads us to the
knowledge of his
perfections, and his will.’
History is useful, also, because it furnishes the data for

political science; like the other sciences, that of govern-
ment has now a vast stock of facts to work upon
;
in
history, as in a laboratory, various forms
and theories of
government have been tested, ‘and the new governments
in North America are so many new
experiments of which ,
political philosophers cannot fail to make the greatest use’.
Through the historical process of trial and error, ‘the only
proper object of government, the happiness
of the people, is
now almost universally seen, and alone attended to’. The
period of history which delights him most, and
on which
he enlarges most lovingly, is naturally the
Renaissance (he
still uses the old term, the ‘revival
of letters’) and the suc-
ceeding centuries. This was the era which saw the
breaking of ‘the prodigious power of the pope’,
the rise of
manufactures, the perfecting of the arts of life,
and the
increase of politeness and of humanity, to
such a degree
that ‘this part of the world is now a paradise
in comparison
with what it was’. In English history the revolution
of 1688 was the most important event: ‘a
revolution
so remarkable, and attended with such
happy conse-
1
Quoted by Bury, The Idea of Progress
, p. 222.
2
Lectures on History (1788),
p. 531.
201
the
quences, has perhaps no parallel in the history of
world’; and
. little did the Greeks and Romans imagine that the Divtst
toto or be Britt ani . . . would ever make the figure they do

now, and go beyond whatever they had attained
so infinitely
to in respect of science, commerce, riches, power, and I
may
1
add, happiness .’
This decided preference for ‘modern’ oyer ‘ancient’ is

revealed also in Priestley’s emphatic rejection of the
popular ‘primitivism’ of the period, according to which
civilization is a degeneration from an age of gold, or
a
departure from Nature’s holy plan:
‘Idleness, treachery an^l cruelty are predominant in all un-
civilized countries; notwithstanding the boasts which the poets
2
make of the golden age of mankind . .
and he agrees with Voltaire that, despite the vices of

civilized countries, no one would ‘think his life and
property so secure in the hands of a Moor, or a Tartar, as
in those of a French or English gentleman’. Between
delivering and publishing these lectures Priestley had read
Adam Smith, and he now presents the case for economic
as well as moral individualism. He quotes Adam Smith
to the effect that ‘it is the highest impertinence and pre-
sumption in kings, and ministers, to pretend to watch
’. 3
over the oeconomy of private people If goods can be
imported more cheaply than they can be made at home,
this is an indication that we had better not engage in that
particular manufacture. In the absence of all ‘artificial’
restrictions the only advantage will be on the side of

industry and ingenuity, ‘and no man, or nation, ought to
wish it to be anywhere else’. Under the beneficent sway
of Nature, wealth will increase and be diffused through
‘the lower ranks of society’. Wealth and innocent luxury
(i.e. love of refinement and ornament) are not intrinsically
1 2 ibid., p. 324.
ibid., p. 270.
8 ibid., p. 372.
202
bad; education and enlightenment will teach the wealthy
how to use their riches ‘for the good of the whole’.
Millionaires are, in fact, Nature’s elect those to whom
obedience to natural law has opened the earthly paradise:
—
Men of wealth and influence, who act upon the principles of
virtue, and religion, and conscientiously make their power sub-
servient to the good of their country, are the men
who are the
greatest honoui to human nature, and the greatest
blessing to
human societies .’ 1
If onlywe will allow free scope to ‘this natural course of

things commerce will bring international peace, and
,
‘the
world would in time recover its pristine paradisal state’ (an
allusion, presumably, to Eden, since Priestley
has rejected
the poetic age of gold).
we
‘In time’
wait for this happy consummation ?
—
but how long must
And here Priestley remembers the spectre of War.

How will this buoyant progressivist deal with that?
We
must especially hope, he says, that ‘societies, fully in-
structed by experience, will with the utmost care avoid
the
^*^^ôus expences and devastation of (wut which may
dis- ‘
,
sipate in^ one year more than they can accumulate

in a
hundred’. He
notes, further, the hypocrisy of the war-
making powers :
To see the spirit of benevolence, tenderness, equity

and
honour, that appears in all our declarations of war, and the
mani-
festos which are published upon entering an
enemy’s country, a
common reader would think that the princes of Europe
were
more than men; but then he would be surprised that when
all
princes entertained those excellent pacific sentiments,
they should
be obliged to have recourse to sanguinary methods in
order to
terminate their differences. He would think that when
all parties
concerned were so happily disposed, they would bear
everything
from one another, rather than go to war.’ 2
Alas for progress and perfectibility the ‘common

reader’
!
of to-day has the same cause for ‘surprise’ as

Priestley
in 1788, and much more for despair. Never, perhaps, has
1 2
ibid., p. 423. ibid., p. 253.
203
:

the prophecy of a good and wise man been more hideously
falsified than this of Priestley’s
‘As the world advances in civilization, and national animosity
abates , war becomes less distressing to peaceable individuals who do
'
1
not bear arms
Priestley spent the last ten years of his life in America,

and though for a time he was suspected both on religious
and political grounds (Pickering, Secretary of State under
Adams, wanted to deport him under the Aliens Act), those
years were on the whole spent in the happy pursuit of his
old activities. He was welcomed by various learned
societies, and offered the Professorship of Chemistry in
the University of Pennsylvania. He was disappointed in
his hopes of becoming the ‘apostle of rational religion in
the New World’, 2 but in the spring of 1796 he was able
to deliver, in the new church of the Universalists at Phila-
delphia, a series of discourses on the Evidences of Chris-
tianity which were attended by a large and appreciative
audience, including Adams and many members of both
Houses of Congress; and from this a Unitarian Society
took its rise. But it was Jefferson’s election to the Presid-
ency that brought Priestley at last the peace he had come
in search of. Under Jefferson’s administration, he writes
to Dr Logan now, for the first time in my life (and I
:
‘
I
shall soon enter my 70th year), find myself in any degree of

favour with the government of the country in which I have
lived, and I hope I shall die in the same pleasing situation ’. 3
His wish was granted, and in 1804 he died peacefully,
where he had lived, at Northumberland, on the banks of
that Susquehanna River of which Coleridge and the
Pantisocrats had only dreamed.
1
ibid., p. 499. (My italics.) 2
A. Holt, op. cit., p. 187.
3 A. Holt, op. cit., p. 205.
204
—
CHAPTER XI
‘
Nature' in Revolution and Reaction
I. WILLIAM GODWIN
i
W E are now to consider some of the

manifestations
of the Idea of Nature in the complicated period
of Revolution and Reaction through which the
eighteenth century passed into the nineteenth. Through-
out that turbulent time ‘Nature’ remained the dominant
concept —
indeed in all the phases of ‘romantic’ philo-
sophy and poetry it attained an unexampled authority
but never, perhaps, were its many meanings, particularly
its two fundamental more confusingly intertwined.
senses,
Rousseau, prophet of revolution, was afterwards appealed
to by the reactionaries; the Revolution was made in the
name of Nature, Burke attacked it in the name of Nature,
and in eodem nomine Tom Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft,
and Godwin replied to Burke. Wordsworth and Cole-
ridge saw Nature symbolized first in revolutionary France,
and then in reactionary England; and Wordsworth’s best
‘Nature ’-poetry arose from his rejection of the Nature-
philosophy of the Jacobins and of Godwin. Perhaps the
safest clue through this labyrinth is to bear in mind what I
have just called the two fundamental senses of ‘Nature’:
we may call them the ‘historical’ and the ‘philosophical’.
In the ‘historical’ sense Nature means ‘things as they now
are or have become’, natura naturata\ in the other sense,'
‘things as they may become’, natura naturans. But there
are further sources of confusion. The ‘nature’ of anything
may be conceived either as its ‘
original state when fresh
’
from the hands of God and before ithas acquired any

state, when it has attained
‘
artificial ’
accretions, or as its final
205
;

the fullest development of which it is capable, and realized
most perfectly its own inner principle. All depends upon
whether ‘Nature’ is regarded as a fixed state or as a
dynamic process, as something already realized or some-
thing ‘evermore about to be’. Now it is possible to be
‘progressive’ and yet to be also a ‘primitivist’; one may
be eager for reform, and yet believe, as to some extent
Rousseau seems to have done, that the true reforms are
those which will lead back to some earlier, simpler, and
happier mode of existence. Thus ‘philosophical’ natural-
ism becomes historical (in quite another sense) if, in your
‘ ’
view of ‘what things might become’, you contemplate a

return to a lost paradise. Again, you may believe, like
Burke, that ‘Nature’ is best expressed in ‘things as they
are’, that is, in what history has actually produced, and
yet not be merely conservative for if Nature has produced
;
the present, it will also produce the future. And on the

other hand, you may be an ardent perfectibilist, like
Priestley, and yet believe that the best way to attain per-
fection is to ‘let be’, to let Nature pursue its own bene-
ficent course. Laissez-faire without the belief in perfecti-
bility yields the conservatism of Burke or of the later
Wordsworth; with that belief, it produces the liberalism
of Priestley and the nineteenth century —though even
from this standpoint you might have first to remove
obstacles in order that Nature rrjight function freely.
Lastly— —
and this is the creed of revolution one might
treat Nature as dross to be moulded in our own likeness
we must alter rather than explain, and make the future
instead of letting be, writing justice, equality, and brother-
hood where history has only left a record of crimes and
follies. Man is Nature’s growing point; it is in him that
Nature can be most clearly seen as naturans\ and all that
he fashions according to reason will then be most natural’.
‘
As Holbach said, Tart n’est que la Nature agissante a

l’aide des instruments qu’elle a faits’. 1 Yet it was pre-
cisely men like Holbach and (as we shall see) his follower
1
Cf. above, p. 156.
206
‘nature’ in revolution and reaction
Godwin who were most anxious to represent man as part
of the mechanism of Nature, and human character as the
product of environment. Moreover, these were also the
men who regarded most of what ‘Nature’ had actually
produced (existing institutions) as ‘unnatural’. Dizzied
by these contradictions, we seem to understand how it
was that at one time Wordsworth was ready to ‘yield up
moral questions in despair’. John Mor ley has said that
Burke was of that class of minds which prefers ‘that which
has grown to that which is made’, and perhaps this dis-
tinction may help us in classifying the doctrines of our
period. Our problem turns upon the degree of human
participation which is supposed needed to produce
to be
the best world. Burke, or the ‘Tory’ Wordsworth,
desires the minimum of this; Nature (history) produces
what is best (most natural), and our part is to realize the
complexity of things, explaining where we can, and rever-
encing where we cannot. The Liberal (Priestley or Adam
Smith) wants us to leave Nature to itself, but first to
remove the ‘artificial’ restrictions with which wicked men
have somehow hampered it. The Revolutionary wants
the maximum of human action to fashion all things fain
‘Nature’ left to itself produces jungles and slums; if we
want better conditions we must make them ourselves.
This view was implicit in Holbach and the Jacobin philo-
sophy generally, but the eighteenth century reverence for
Nature prevented it from reaching full theoretic develop-
ment until the time of Marx.
Another broad distinction may
perhaps be made at this
point: ‘Nature’ may be conceived rationally or emotion-
ally. Indeed the history of the idea in the eighteenth
century can be described in the most general terms as its
development from a rational into an emotional principle.
Nature and Reason are normally associated in the earlier
part of the century, Nature and Feeling in the later. This
change is associated with the growth of the cult of sensi-
bility, the substitution of ‘je sens, doncje suis’ for
‘cogito,
.
ergo sum’, the increasing value attributed to impulse and
207
spontaneity, and the decreasing importance attached to
pure reason. It is also peculiarly associated with the name
of Rousseau —
the Rousseau of the Confessions the Nouvelle ,
Heloise , and the Vicaire Savoyard, and also the Rousseau

who, in Morley’s phrase, converted the blank practice of
the political philvsophes into a deadly affair of ball and shell.
Rousseau was a romantic, but even in Hume, that pure
product of the century, we have seen ‘Nature ’, as ‘Feeling
’,
exalted in the place of Reason. This is a familiar symptom

of the great reaction against the eighteenth century and
all its works, which marks the end of our present enquiries.
But we must not be misled by our own generalizations;

nothing, in this period, is clear and simple. For instance,
‘Nature and Reason’ continued their partnership long
after the cult of sensibility began, and the revolutionary
struggle was carried on in the joint name of both. And
Godwin, whom we shall presently be considering, was the
man who, in the very dawn of romanticism, made the most
determined effort to
abstract the hopes of Man
Out of his feelings
and to make ‘our Reason’s naked self’ the object of his fer-
vour 1 The great traditions overlap, and the authentic
.
voice of the eighteenth century heard, not only

is still
throughout the ‘romantic’ era in Godwin, but far into the

nineteenth century in J. S. Mill and others. Nevertheless
the generalizations hold good in some degree; the
emotional temperature, even in the rationalists, was much
higher in the latter than in the earlier part of the century.
This heightening of tone can be felt in all the writings
of the age (down to its epitaphs); it imparts a certain
vehemence and incandescence to the entirely colourless
prose of Godwin. Amongst the causes of this change,
political emotion must, I think, be counted high. The
peace of the Augustans was over, and great issues, fraught
with untold possibilities for good or ill, were once more
1 The Prelude, bk. xi, 224, 234.
208
—
dignifying the political scene. The rights and dignity
of
man, the nobleness of life and the Roman virtues were in
the minds and mouths of many:
O times,
In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute, took at once
The attraction of a country in romance!
When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights
^ hen most intent on making of herself
A —
prime enchantress to assist the work
Which then was going forward in her name !
1
Europe at that time was thrilled with joy,

France standing on the top of golden hours.
And human nature seeming born again 2 .
‘The Germano-Coleridgean doctrine’, wrote

J. S. Mill,
[as opposed to that of Hartley and Bentham]
expresses
the revolt of the human mind against the philosophy
of
the eighteenth century.’ Where the eighteenth century
was innovative, he goes on to say, the nineteenth was con-
servative; where the eighteenth was infidel, the nineteenth
was religious; the eighteenth ‘abstract and metaphysical’,
the nineteenth concrete and historical ; the eighteenth ’
prosaic, the nineteenth poetical. The raising of the

emotional temperature, to which I have referred, can be
connected with this transition, in the region of politics,
from abstract’ to ‘concrete’; for now, what had been
merely a theory or a philosophic dream was to be realized
in actuality, and men
Were called upon to exercise their skill
—
Not in Utopia, subterranean fields,
Or some Heaven knows where!
secreted island,
But in the very world, which is the world
Of all of —
the place where, in the end,
us,
We find our happiness, or not at all! 3
The same transition, which is parallel to the movement

from ‘rational’ to ‘emotional’, can be seen in the develop-
1 ibid'> bk - *i, 109. 2 bk# vi
3 y
ibid., bk. xi, 139.
o 209
: :

merit of the idea of ‘Nature*, and in the contrast between
the ‘Nature ’-poetry of Pope or Thomson and that of
Wordsworth. Thomson can observe finely, but his Nature-
worship has the ‘spectral 1 quality of eighteenth century
’
deism; the deity he celebrates is the First Cause, the

Supreme Being of the natural philosophers
Hail! Source of Being! Universal Soul
Of Heaven and Earth Essential Presence, hail!
!
To Thee I bend the knee; to Thee my thoughts,

Continual, climb; who, with a master hand,
Hast the great whole into perfection touch’d.
2
By thee the various vegetative tribes, etc .
Compare this with

I held unconscious intercourse with beauty
Old as creation, drinking in a pure
Organic pleasure from the silver wreaths
Of curling mist, or from the level plain
Of waters coloured by impending clouds 3 .
or
To every natural form, rock, fruit, or flower,
Even the loose stones that cover the high-way,
I gave a moral saw them feel,
life: I
Or linked them to some feeling: the great mass

Lay bedded in a quickening soul, and all
That I beheld respired with inward meaning 4 .
The second-hand quality of the feeling in Thomson can be

felt in the rhetorical rumble and the pseudo-Miltonics;
the ‘great whole’ is an idea (and a currently accepted idea)
rather than ‘a feeling and a love’. In Wordsworth’s slow
pace, his references to particular objects, and even in his
prosaisms, we are apprised of direct dealings between the
poet and things themselves. His observation is the basis
of his deism, whereas with Thomson they are in essence
unconnected. It is a commonplace that in nineteenth cen-
tury literature Nature’ typically refers to particular scenes,
‘
2
1 Dr Inge’s word. The Seasons ‘ Spring ’.
3 4 ibid., bk.
The Prelude , bk. i, 562. iii, 127.
2 10
—
NATURE IN REVOLUTION AND REACTION
places,and objects, or ‘the country’ (especially picturesque
country), and no longer so much to a
great abstraction, or
to the ‘general properties and large appearances’ of Dr
Johnson. But the transition from ‘abstract’ to ‘concrete’,
concerned by Mill as the overthrow of the
Locke-Hartley
tradition by the Germano-Coleridgean
doctrine’, is best
expressed in the actual development of such
men as
ordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and even Godwin
him-
self, men who lived through
the revolutionary era and
epitomized its successive phases. In England, emotional
naturalism turned almost inevitably into Toryism,
or some-
thing akin to it. Wordsworth’s development
illustrates
this principlewith peculiar clearness. Greeting the early
days of the Revolution with a purely emotional
dilation,
as if France had suddenly achieved
the spontaneity and
joyous instinctiveness of his own childhood days
. . . the events
Seemed nothing out of nature’s certain course,
A gift that was come rather late than soon 1 —
he came later to feel that it was the ‘meddling intellect’,
not Nature, which was directing the course of
events. So,
after a short but harrowing temptation
in the wilderness
of Godwinism, he made the vital transition of
his life, and
relapsed upon the ‘cool flowery lap of
Earth’. The
Revolution had been made by Man, not evolved by
Nature.
Once he had convinced himself that, owing to the nature
of our being, radical alteration of the status
quo and the
worship of naked Reason were more likely to lead
into the
desert than into the Promised Land, then
how infinitely
preferable seemed things as they are to things as they may
be made, the feelings to the reason, instinctive
living to
thinking, children and rustics to philosophers,
one impulse
from a vernal wood to all the sages, England
to France ’
the Lake District to the rest of England !
Be thankful, thou, for though unholy deeds

Ravage the world, tranquillity is here! 2
1
The Prelude bk.
, ix, 246. 2
Sonnet, Clouds lingering yet
(1807).
2 I I
An odd circumstance, which well illustrates the com-
plexity of these times, is that Godwin himself,
who for
Wordsworth and contemporaries represented the wor-
his
ship of ‘naked Reason’ in its extremest form, had
rejected
or greatly modified his own ‘Godwinism by 179

year in which Wordsworth published his anti-Godwinian
Lyrical Ballads .
If Mill was right century ‘in-

in calling the eighteenth
novative, infidel, abstract, metaphysical, and prosaic then ,
Godwin, though he lived until 1836, must be its living

embodiment, for he had all these characteristics in a high
degree. Like Mill, who also possessed them (though the
nineteenth century sea-change later affected him much
more profoundly), Godwin seems never to have been a
child. ‘I remember, when I was a very little boy he ,
writes, ‘saying to myself, “What shall I do, when I have

read through the books that there are in the world?”
all
Intellect was strongly developed in him from the outset, at

the expense of bodily health, imagination, and feeling.
There are interesting parallels between his story and
Priestley’s, he too came of Dissenting stock.
for His
.
father and grandfather were both Nonconformist ministers,

and Godwin himself, as is not always remembered, was a
minister for several years, and published a volume of ser-
mons. In the words of one of his biographers, he was
‘the perfect flower of a stock devoted for many generations
1
to nonconformity and moral inculcation’; he ‘reminded
those who knew him’, says Hazlitt, ‘of the metaphysician
2 Unlike Priestley,
engrafted on the Dissenting Minister’.
he ‘succumbed’ to the philosophic influences which
Priestley combated, but, even in his infidel later life, non-
conformity and moral inculcation remained the very stuff
of his being. It is significant that ‘Godwinism’, or the
1 Ford K. Brown, Life of W Godwin (1926),
. p. 3.
2 Spirit of the Age William Godwin, ad fin.
,
212
:
NATURE y
IN REVOLUTION AND REACTION
worship of naked Reason, which for a short time so
dazzled the generation of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Hazlitt,
and the rest, and later the youthful Shelley, was one of the
forms into which eighteenth century rational Dissent was
capable of evolving. The peculiar missionary fervour of
Political "Justice is more explicable when we remember its
religious pedigree. Priestley stopped short at Unitarian-
ism, while Godwin followed Holbach into atheism,
but
thisdivergence seems less important than the heritage
which they received in common from the Dissenting tradi-
tion. In both, Calvinism passed naturally into Necessi-
tarianism and in his passion for reforming the world
; the
atheist even exceeded the believer —
for Priestley’s main
concern was rather with the exposure of error.
Several of Godwin ’s later characteristics were manifested
atan early age, particularly his vanity and self-confidence,
and his exclusive absorption in intellectual concerns. ‘All
my amusements were sedentary; I had scarcely any
pleasure but in reading.’ There is an illustration of
his
self-dramatizing vanity, which somehow falls short of the
Miltonic standard, in the following anecdote from his
autobiography. At the age of thirteen or fourteen he went
one day alone to the Assizes, and placed himself im-
mediately next to the Bench
As I some hours, I at one time relieved my posture by
stayed
leaning my elbow on the corner of the cushion placed
before his
lordship. On one occasion, probably when he was going to
address the jury, he laid his hand gently on my elbowand
removed
it. On this occasion I recollect having silently remarked, if his
lordship knew what the lad beside him will perhaps one day
become, I am not so sure that he would have removed mv
elbow .’ 1 7
Godwin was never merely an intellectual

machine other ;
essential ingredients in his
make-up, without which Political
Justice and Caleb Williams would not hold their
actual
place in literature, were ‘sensibility’ and
‘enthusiasm’
1
Quoted by F. K. Brown, op. cit., p. 9.
213
:

—both secular derivatives, perhaps, from the Puritan
source
‘He read “with the volumes (in

greatest transports” the early
English) of Rollin’s Ancient History. “Few bosoms ever beat
with greater ardour than mine did "While perusing the story of the
grand struggle of the Greeks for independence against the assaults
of the Persian despot, and this scene awakened a passion in my
1 ’
soul which will never cease but with life.”
The special mark of Godwin’s blend of

best writing is its
abstract, intellectualized diction with an almost frantic

‘intensity’ of feeling. At its worst, as sometimes in Fleet-
wood, for instance, this degenerates into hysteria, but
at its best it yields the capital melodrama of Caleb Williams
— a book which, whatever its defects, still reads like a
work composed under an afflatus or imaginative ‘posses-
sion’.
Underthe influence of a schoolmaster Godwin adopted
Sandemanianism, a variety of Calvinism in which some of
the principles of Political Justice seem foreshadowed as, —
for example, that political methods of reform are vain com-
pared with the dissemination of the of Christspirit
(‘benevolence’ and ‘justice’ in Godwin), and that as there
is no New Testament sanction for the accumulation of
wealth, each man must consider his property to be at the

disposal of the needy. Godwin was always ready to lend,
but it is too well known how many other men’s property
he came later to consider to be at his own disposal. After
five years at the Dissenting Academy at Hoxton, where he
was taught by Dr Kippis (pupil of Doddridge and friend
of Priestley), and where he managed to retain hjs Sande-
manianism in spite of Arian and Socinian influences
(though he seems already to have doubted the being of a ‘
God’), he entered the ministry (1778). While ministering

to a congregation at Stowmarket he read Holbach and
Helv^tius, and within five years he had left the ministry
for good, though he found a temporary resting-place in
1 ibid., p. 8.
214
nature’ in revolution and reaction
the Socinianism which satisfied Priestley
for life. An
abortive scheme for starting a ‘seminary’ at Epsom re-
sulted only in a Prospectus, consisting largely of
excerpts
from Rousseau and Hoi bach, but looking forward so
clearly to P olitical Justice that a few quotations may be of
interest:
The state of society is incontestably artificial; the power of

one man over another must be always derived from convention,
or from conquest; by nature we are equal. The necessary
conse-
quence is, government must always depend upon the
that
opinion of the governed. Let the most oppressed people
under heaven once change their mode of thinking, and they
1
are free.’
‘Government and education are therefore “the two prin-

cipal objects of human power”, and of the two,
education
is the more important.’
‘Government very limited in its powers of making men

is
either virtuous or happy; it is only in the infancy of

society that
it can do anything considerable; in its
maturity it can only direct
a few of our outward actions .’ 1
His final transition to complete ‘unbelief’, which oc-

curred in 1787, is partly attributable to his friendship
with Thomas Holcroft, whose vigorous personality seems
at this time to have galvanized the more placid
temper of
Godwin into unwonted activity:
‘My mind, though fraught with sensibility, and occasionally

ardent and enthusiastic, is perhaps in its genuine habits too tran-
quil and unimpassioned for successful composition,
and stands
greatly in need for stimulus and excitement. I am deeply in-
debted in this point to Holcroft.’ 2
The French Revolution, which began when he was thirty-

three years old, soon provided him with more ‘stimulus
and excitement’, and, though he always hated mob viol-
c
ence, his heart beat high with great swelling sentiments
1
Quoted, ibid., p. 17. a i
bid j p> z6
2I 5
of Liberty’. The idea of Political 'Justice was conceived in
May 1791, after the appearance of Burke’s Reflexions ,

Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Men and
Tom Paine’s Rights of Man at the time, that is, when the
;
‘friends of liberty’ began to be aware of the onset of panic

and reaction.
In the Preface to the first edition (January 1 793 )?
declared that it was twelve years since he had become
‘satisfied that monarchy was a species of government un-
avoidably corrupt’, and that he owed this conviction to
the political writings of Swift, to Holbach, Helvetius, and
Rousseau, and to the Latin historians. Long before pub-
lication, therefore, he had been forming his main ideas on
justice, the rights of man, the omnipotence of opinion,
gratitude, promises and the rest, but ‘of the desirableness
of a government in the utmost degree simple he was not
made fully aware, but by ideas suggested by the French
Revolution. To the same event he owes the determination
of mind which gave existence to this work.’ 1 But though
occasioned by the French Revolution, the book is so far
from being an incitement to further revolution that it has
‘for one of its express objects the dissuading from tumult
and violence’. It is meant to be an appeal, beyond pre-
judice and turmoil, to the immutable principles of justice
and reason, and is addressed to ‘men of study and re-
flection’. ‘He conceived politics’, he says (writing of
himself in the third person), ‘to be the proper vehicle of
a liberal morality’, and was accordingly
‘desirous of producing a work from the perusal of which no man
should without being strengthened in habits of sincerity,
rise,
fortitude and justice.’ 2
The book is being published, he knows, at a singularly in-

auspicious moment, when the public is panic-struck, and
a project may be actually on foot for ‘suppressing the
activity of mind’ altogether. ‘All the prejudices of the
1
Political Justice (2nd ed., 1796), pp. ix-x.
2
ibid., pp. vi-vii.
2 I 6
‘nature* in revolution and reaction
human mind are in arms’ against the doctrines he is about
to deliver, and even an unguarded word may be punished.
Godwin evidently relished his own Roman virtue; it is
known, however, that, Mr
thought a book published
Pitt
at three guineas a copy not worth suppressing.
Godwin is largely known to literary students to-day as

a malign influence upon Wordsworth or as the source of
most of Shelley’s ideas. He appears in the literary his-
tories and text-books mainly as a ‘crank’, and his doctrines
are described by Mr Garrod, for example, as ‘poisonous
nonsense’. Those who so regard him are usually spokes-
men of the Nature-and-Feeling’ phase of romanticism,
‘
and they have at any rate this justification for their attitude,
that much goodpoetry, especially Wordsworth’s, was
written in revolt against Godwin and all that he stood for.
Yet Godwin is worth considering for his own sake, and
perhaps still more as a representative figure: as the writer
who enunciated the extreme conclusions of eighteenth
century rationalism at the very moment of incipient re-
action, and who thereby, in his own life-story and in his
influence upon his contemporaries, acquired a certain sym-
bolic importance. The
reasons for his rapid eclipse may
appear as we proceed, but for the moment we may support
ourselves with the comment of Hazlitt (whose essay on
Godwin in The Spirit of the Age is still the fairest and most
discerning summary I know of):
Captain Parry would be thought to have rendered a service to

‘
navigation and his country, no less by proving that there is

no
North-West Passage, than if he had ascertained that there is one:
so Mr Godwin has rendered an essential service to moral science
by attempting (in vain) to pass the Arctic Circle and Frozen
Regions, where the understanding is no longer warmed by the
affections, nor fanned by the breeze of fancy.’
He enjoyed the respect of many of his distinguished con-

217
temporaries, and Wordsworth, in the very passage where
he relates his rejection of Godwinism ’, adds: ‘
yet I feel about ten years later]

[i.e.
(Sustained by worthier as by wiser thoughts)

1
The aspiration, nor shall ever cease to feel it .
A more ordinary, and therefore more representative con-

temporary, Crabb Robinson, wrote of Political Justice It :
‘
made me feel more generously. I had never felt before,

nor, I am afraid, have I ever since felt so strongly, the duty
of not living to oneself, but x)f having for one’s sole object
the good of the community.’ What was the ‘aspiration’
spoken of by Wordsworth ? We
find in Godwin so much
that has become familiar in the course of our discussions,
that a brief account of his main notions should suffice.
There is, to begin with, a full acceptance of mechanical
materialism and its moral counterpart, Necessitarianism,
the whole being touched to revolutionary (not insur-
rectionary) issues by an unbounded faith in perfectibility.
True to the Locke-Hartley tradition, he begins with the
sheet of white paper the moral character of man is built
:
up out of sensations, by association. But if the Characters ‘
of Men originate in External Circumstances’, then the

nature of those circumstances becomes a matter of vital
importance. Of those circumstances, physical influences
(climate, etc.) are negligible in comparison with ‘moral’
causes, and chief among moral causes are education and
government. Now ‘perfectibility’, as we have seen, is a
deduction from the white-paper theory; anything or
everything can be inscribed by moral agencies upon the
blank sheet:
‘Perfectibility is one of the most unequivocal characteristics of
the human species.’ 2
‘Man, considered in himself, is merely a being capable of im-

pression, a recipient of perceptions. What is there in this abstract
character that precludes him from advancement ? ’ 3
1 The Prelude , bk. 2 Political Justice (1st ed.), bk.

xi, 255. i, ch. 2.
3 ibid., bk. v, ch. 8 (vol. ii, p. 452).
2l8
Why, then, is man so does he
little advanced? Why
languish under wars, tyrannies, superstitions, penal codes ?
It is because ‘of all modes of operating upon
mind, govern-
ment is the most considerable’, and governments, un-
fortunately, are powerful for evil only, and powerless for
good. Government, he writes (doubtless with Burke’s
Reflexions in mind),
‘gives substance and permanence to our errors. It reverses the

genuine propensities of mind, and instead of suffering us to look
forward, teaches us to look backward for perfection. It prompts
us to seek the public welfare, not in innovation and improvement,
but in a timid reverence for the decisions of our ancestors, as if it
were the nature of mind always to degenerate, never to advance .’ 1
It may
reasonably be doubted whether error could ever
be formidable or long-lived if government did not lend it
support.’ Now, must we accept this state of affairs as un-
alterable? No! it is precisely because moral causes are
all-important that we may work and hope for amelioration.
If government operates upon mind, mind is first the
foundation of government, or, as Godwin puts it, govern-
ment founded upon ‘opinion’ alone.
is Change the
‘opinion’, therefore, and the government will vanish like
smoke. Slavery exists, not because certain climates or
national characters favour it, but because it is the interest
of tyrants to prevent their subjects from seeing the obvious
advantages of freedom.
In reality the chains
‘
fall off of themselves, when the magic of
opinion is dissolved.’ 2
The real enemies of liberty in any country are those higher ‘
orders who profit by a contrary system’. We are all de-

luded by the spells and charms of ancient imposture; the
age of chivalry, alas is very far from being gone.
!
‘There a perpetual struggle between the genuine sentiments

is
of understanding, which tell us that all this is imposition, and the
1
ibid., bk. i, ch. 4 (vol. i, p. 31).
2
ibid., bk. i, ch. 7 (vol. i, p. 64).
219
—
imperious voice of government, which bids us reverence and
1
obey .’
The present systems, gilded though they are by impudent ‘
mysticism’, are simply devices for perpetuating inequality,

slavery, and every kind of imperfection, whereas the natural
propensity of mind is to advance. Nothing stands in the
way of emancipation except the enchantments of despot-
ism, which persuade us that the existing system is ‘too
sacred to be looked into’. But all this will be changed in
the twinkling of an eye; when the fated hour arrives,
‘when the true crisis shall come, not a sword will need to be
drawn, not a finger to be lifted up,’ 2
and Jupiter will simply fall from his throne. But, in spite
of Necessitarianism, we are not to await this crisis with
folded hands ; in the meantime we are to prepare for it
how? The true technique for the overthrow of Jupiter is
to awaken men’s minds by argument and persuasion. The
present order exhibits a perpetual spectacle of unreason
and injustice; very well, show men the possibility of
another kind of spectacle, and they will welcome it with
rapture. ‘It is the inalienable tendency of positive in-
stitution, to retain that with which it is conversant for ever
in the same state’; while, on the other hand, ‘it is one of
the most unquestionable properties of mind to be sus-
ceptible of perpetual improvement’. Therefore,
‘let truth be incessantly studied, illustrated and propagated, and

the effect is inevitable.’ 3
Let us meanwhile, however, ‘attempt no abrupt changes’,

but ‘calmly wait until the harvest of opinion is ripe’.
Though the change, when it comes, will be sudden, the
preliminaries must be gradual:
‘The error lies, not in tolerating the worst forms of govern-

2
ibid., bk. iv, ch. 2 (vol. i, p. 223).
3
ibid., bk. vi, ch. 1 (vol. ii, p. 593).
220
: :

ment for a time, but in supposing a change impracticable, and not
incessantly looking forward to its accomplishment .’ 1
It can hardly fail to suggest itself that Godwin is here

sketching out in advance the technique of propaganda
which, rendered a thousand times more effective by modern
science, has been employed in our own day to accomplish
political changes. The difference is that his methods are
now generally used to extinguish liberty, whereas it never
occurred to Godwin that any cause could be so promoted
except the true one. It is, however, in some cases still
open to the friends of liberty, as well as their opponents,
to propagate their opinions in the way Godwin suggested,
although in certain quarters the machinery for ‘suppress-
ing the activity of mind’ is so much more efficient than
that of 1793 as to make the attempt highly dangerous.
What kind of truths, then, should be disseminated, in
order to prepare for the unbinding of Prometheus ? It is
in Godwin’s answers to this question, especially, that the
characteristic teachings of ‘Godwinism’ make their ap-
pearance. The guiding principle has been best stated,
perhaps, by Wordsworth and by Hazlitt. It was first put
by Wordsworth into the mouth of Oswald, the Godwinian
Iago of The Borderers (1 795-6)
To-day you have thrown off a tyranny
That lives but in the torpid acquiescence
Of our emasculated souls, the tyranny
Of the world’s masters with the musty rules
By which they uphold their craft from age to age:
You have obeyed the only law that sense
Submits to recognize; the immediate law,
From the clear light of circumstances, flashed
Upon an independent Intellect .
2
And again in The Prelude, describing the brief period of

his full acceptance of these doctrines, he exclaims
the dream
Flattered the young, pleased with extremes, nor least
1
ibid., bk. i, ch. 7 (vol. i, p. 70).
2
The Borderers, 1488.
22 I
,

With which makes our Reason’s naked self
that
The object of its fervour. What delight!
How glorious in self-knowledge and self-rule,
!
To look through all the frailties of the world.

And, with a resolute mastery shaking off
Infirmities of nature, time, and place,
Build social upon personal Liberty,
Which, to the blind restraints of general laws
Superior, magisterially adopts
One guide, the light of circumstances, flashed
Upon an independent intellect 1 .
‘He places the human mind,’ says Hazlitt,

‘on an elevation, from which it commands a view of the whole
line of moral consequences; and requires it to conform its acts to
the larger and more enlightened conscience which it has thus
acquired. He absolves man from the gross and narrow ties of
sense, custom, authority, private and local attachment, in order
that he may devote himself to the boundless pursuit of universal
benevolence.’ 2
Rejecting the ‘supplementary aids of an imperfect vir-

tue’, Godwin would have us take Reason as our sole guide
and abstract Good as our sole end. ‘The genuine and
wholesome state of mind,’ he writes (and this is probably
one of the passages versified by Wordsworth in the above
quotations),
‘is from shackles, and to expand every fibre of its

to be unloosed
frame according to the independent and individual impressions of
truth upon the mind.’ 3
We must accordingly teach, and practise, universal bene-

volence and justice; in every situation that presents itself
we must determine our course of action, not by any pre-
judice or maxim of traditional morality, but by the sole
consideration of what will produce the greatest benefit to
society. ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’, for example,
is a rule which, admirable as it is, and pointing in the right
1 The Prelude, bk. 2

xi, 232. The Spirit of the Age, loc. cit.
3 Political Justice bk. v, ch. 23 (vol. ii, p. 569).
222
:

direction, not ‘modelled with the strictness of philo-
is
sophical accuracy’. One ‘neighbour’ may be a ‘being of
more worth and importance’ than another. Godwin’s
illustration of F^nelon and his chambermaid has become
classical
The illustrious bishop

of Cambrai was of more worth than
his chambermaid, and there are few of us that would hesitate to
pronounce, if his palace were in flames, and the life of only one
of them could be preserved, which of the two ought to be pre-
ferred.’ 1
It would have been‘just’ in the chambermaid herself to

prefer Fenelon’s life to her own. But if she had been
‘my wife’ or ‘my mother’ what then? ‘What magic —
is there’, Godwin rejoins,
What magic there in the pronoun “my” to overturn the

is
decisions of everlasting truth ? My

wife or my mother may be a
fool, or a prostitute, malicious, lying or deceitful.
If they be, of
what consequence is it that they are mine ?’
Similarly, ‘gratitude’, like filial affection, no part of is

justice or virtue; it is merely ‘a sentiment which would
lead me to prefer one man to another from some other
consideration than that of his superior usefulness or worth ’.
I ought to be ‘constantly and carefully
enquiring into the
deserts of all with whom I am connected’. To do
all the
good in my power is what is ‘just’ for me. Generosity is
not a virtue, it is simply a duty; it is ‘impossible for me
to confer upon any man a favour, I can only do him a
right’:
‘My neighbour is in want of £10 that I can spare his claim is

as complete as if he had my bond in his
—
possession,) or had supplied
me with goods to this amount.’
This principle, which can obviously work both ways,
was
one of those which Godwin never abandoned, and in
later
life, during long years of financial
embarrassment, he in-
1
ibid., bk. ii, ch. z (vol. i, pp. 82 ff.).
223
cessantly urged upon his friends (especially Shelley) the
completeness of his claim to the many hundreds of pounds
of which he was always in want.
‘My neighbour has just as much right to put an end to my

existence with dagger or poison as to deny me that pecuniary
assistance without which I must starve, or as to deny me
that
assistance without which my intellectual attainments or my

moral
1
exertions will be materially injured .’
From these Micawberish utterances it is somewhat of

a relief to turn to Godwin’s remarks on the penal laws, and
still more to those on war and patriotism. must work We
for the reform of the penal laws, because our whole theory
of punishment is wrong. It is based upon the notions of
‘retribution’ or deterrent example, whereas our sole care
should be for the reformation of the criminal and the
benefit of society. A
crime is simply an error, for which
in most cases society itself is finally responsible; and
punishment is not the best way of correcting men’s errors.
It is ‘a menace of violence made use of to persuade them
of the truth or falsehood of a proposition’; it has little
chance of making them wise, and can scarcely fail to make
them ‘timid, dissembling, and corrupt’. Godwin’s most
telling point is perhaps this:
‘What . can be more shameless than for society to make an

. .
example of those whom she has goaded to the breach of order, in-
stead of amending her own institutions which, by straining order
2
into tyranny, produced the mischief?’
The argument widens into a general condemnation of

the use of violence in human relationships. He enunciates
the most advanced (as well as the oldest) truths about non-
violence —
here (as so often) translating Gospel maxims
into Godwinese. ‘Resist not him that is evil’ becomes:
‘the powers of reason and truth are yet unfathomed. Who . . .
shall say how far the whole species might be improved, were they
1
ibid., bk. ii, ch. 6 (vol. i, p. 112).
2
ibid., bk. vii, ch. 3 (vol. ii, p. 713).
224
‘nature" in revolution and reaction
accustomed to despise force in others, and did they refuse to em-
ploy it for themselves. •
Coercion, for ‘example’, fails of its effect; ‘the whole

scope of gloomy invention is exhausted in vain’. Our
prisons, too, are known to be nurseries of vice, and
even
Howard’s proposed ‘solitary confinement’ is objection-
able. However, Godwin admits that in the present state
of humanity ‘human beings are such tyros in the art of
reasoning’ that we cannot simply dispense with punish-
ment; we must abolish selfishness and vice, and pre-
first
pare the field for reason. But though we must put up
with second-bests during the period of transition, we must
remember that the true remedy for our present plight is
not more coercion, but simplification of the vicious com-
plexities of the present system. In a small ideal com-
munity such as Godwin desires, we should all live under
our neighbours’ eyes, and be subject only to coercion
derived from ‘the system of the universe’.
Godwin’s advocacy of non-violence is wholehearted he
;
applies it not only to personal human relations
and to
internal revolution in a state, but also to international
politics. On the subject of war his view is almost that of
absolute pacificism. War is justifiable, if at all, only to
repel invasion, not to forestall it, and still less ‘to
impart
a healthful and vigorous tone to the public mind ’. 1
The
wars which desolate mankind would probably nearly
cease
if they were supported only by the voluntary
contributions
of those who approved of their principles, and there
would
be less discussion about ‘justifiable’ causes of war,
‘if we were
accustomed, along with the word, to call up to
our
minds the thing which that word is intended to represent .’ 2
‘
We can have no adequate idea of this evil, unless we visit
at least in imagination, a field of battle.’ He will have
none of the usual excuses — that another nation is pre-
1
ibid., bk. v, ch. 16 (vol. ii, p. 516).
a
ibid., bk. v, ch. (vol. p. 5x9). (My
i’6 ii, italics, The same argument has
been effectively used by Mr Aldous Huxley.)
P 225
:

paring, or that national honour must be vindicated. The
supposed distinction between private and international
morality is an error: ‘the morality that ought to govern
the conduct of individuals and of nations is in all cases the
same ’
During the transitipn-time wars if we must have
.
—
—
them should be conducted with the utmost magnanimity
and humanity, as an intermediate stage towards their aboli-
tion. It is a fallacy to think that war may be abolished by
making it more and more terrible
‘The direct contrary of this is the truth. ... It is a most mis-
taken way of teaching men to feel that they are brothers, by im-
1
buing their minds with perpetual hatred .’
Godwin sees only the bad effects of soldiering, also, upon

the minds of individual men the man that is merely a
:
‘
soldier, must always be uncommonly depraved’. How

can the man who
has been trained to regard a loaded
weapon as his argument ‘entertain all that confidence in
reason and distaste of violence which severe truth pre-
scribes’? ‘It cannot be a matter of indifference for the
human mind be systematically familiarized to thoughts
to
of murder and desolation.’ Let us especially eschew the
fallacy of ‘national glory’; individuals are everything:
society, abstracted from its component individuals, nothing.
Do not be deceived by the cant of ‘benefits to the whole’
for which no single individual is the better. Patriotism,
or the ‘love of our country’, is
‘another of those specious illusions, which have been invented by

impostors in order to render the multitude the blind instruments
2
of their crooked designs.’
For the wise man, ‘wherever there are men who under-
stand the value of political justice and are prepared to
assert it, that is his country’. Do I owe gratitude and
reverence to the British Constitution as such? No: who-
ever wants me to respect it must rely on one of two motives
226
ithas a claim upon my support, either because it is
good, or because it is British’. Godwin’s views were here
so advanced’ as to seem, in his own time, merely
per-
verse; and nationalism is to-day, in some countries, more
exorbitant than he would have thought conceivable.
Nevertheless, in his usual way, he is anticipating some of
the most hopeful developments of thought in our own
time- in this case, what is being urged by the supporters
of Federal Union’. He sees clearly that ‘the much-
vaunted independence of the European states is an object
of an equivocal nature the despotism which at present
’
;
‘
prevails among them, is certainly not so excellent as

to
make us very anxious for its preservation He desiderates
the ‘united states of Europe’, and even suggests that free-
dom might have a better chance in a ‘mighty empire’
(to-day, a union of the great democracies?).
One of Godwinmost firmly held convictions was (the
s
Pecksniffian doctrine) that Truth must prevail, and Virtue
—
be triumphant or, as he puts it,
‘We should not be creatures of a rational and intellectual
nature, if the victory of truth over error were not
ultimately
certain.’
Magna est veritas et praevalebit: but it is for

it will prevail,
'
ys to make it prevail by incessantly propagating it
‘saturating men with argument’, in Leslie Stephen’s
phrase. Men always act upon ‘apprehensions of prefer-
^
ableness ; if, therefore, we show them what is truly prefer-
’
able, they will follow it; and they will not only love
the
highest when they see it, but, ‘having thus gained one step
in the acquisition of truth, it cannot be easily conceived
of
as lost’. was from
It this sense of the supreme duty of
broadcasting Truth on occasions that Godwin deduced
all
his celebrated teaching on the importance of Perfect
Sin-
cerity. Here, as elsewhere, he seems to anticipate the
methods and of the ‘Oxford’ Group; he proposes
ideals
that every man should make himself a kind of missionary
Alceste, telling everybody everything about himself and
227
themselves, for the purpose of doing them good. Let us
outdo the Papists by turning the whole world into our
v confessional If every man would tell all the truth he
!
knows, there would be no more falsehood in three years.

This sincerity (not cynicism) would clarify and ennoble all
our social intercourse. It should be followed out in every
detail; for example, we should not teach our servants to
exclude unwanted visitors by saying ‘
not at home ’, if we
are really there.
‘Throw aside your books of chemistry’, Wordsworth

is reported to have said to a young student, ‘and read
Godwin on Necessity.’ We, however, Hart-
after reading
ley, Holbach, and Priestley on the subject, may perhaps
be excused if we do no more than glance at Godwin’s
version of the creed. In the infancy of science, men flew
for explanations to ‘chance’, but the more their ‘improve-
ments extended’ the more convinced they became that
‘everything takes place in Nature according to necessary
and universal laws’. The same laws of causation, which
admittedly govern the universe, govern mind as well;
‘thought’ is a link in the chain of necessity. Nothing in
Nature could have happened otherwise than it has actually
happened, and similarly it was ‘impossible for a man to
act in any instance otherwise than he has acted’. Like
the other eighteenth century necessitarians, Godwin tries
to eat his cakeand have it; nothing could have been other-
wise, yet we both can and must make it otherwise The !
value of the idea of necessity, for Godwin, is threefold it :
enables him to exonerate the criminal from the crime

which not he alone, but the whole system of things, has
produced it enables him to preach truth and justice, and
;
the duty of so preaching (because like effects follow like

causes, and men must ‘necessarily’ be improved by hear-r
ing good sermons) and it enables him to believe in per-
;
fectibility,because ‘reason’, ‘truth’, ‘justice’ are equi-

valent, for him, to that which must prevail
‘
As workers
’
.
228
for mankind, we are to regard mind as a chief link in the
chain of causes, and work incessantly upon other minds in
order to release them from their bondage. Once truth is
seen, it must convince: the laws of necessity will ensure
that. But occasionally Godwin relapses into the fatalistic
type of Necessitarianism: ‘the assassin cannot help the
murder he commits any more than the dagger’, he says;
or, to take a more respectable example: ‘our disapproba-
tion of vice will be of the same nature as our disapproba-
tion of an infectious distemper’. The element of resent-
ment in the punishment of criminals should be eliminated
by Necessitarianism (as later in Butler’s Erewhon and a
),
genera] tolerant acceptance of human failings generated.
A ‘virtue’, or a ‘vice’, is not a subject for praise or blame,
it is merely a characteristic, like a knife’s capacity to cut.
A knife is made ‘good’ by sharpening; a man is made
‘virtuous’ by persuasion. In persuading, a necessitarian
will not exhort or threaten, as if the listener were free to
choose; he merely ‘represents’ and ‘elucidates’; Truth
will do the rest. There is in all this the usual strange
blend of active and passive, effort and relaxation. It may
seem queer that the missionary whose main concern, after
all, is in converting men and improving the world,
should
have based his gospel upon the very philosophy which
enables the assassin to excuse himself, and might give
every man a pretext for staying as he is. Necessity, ‘the
tyrant’s plea’, gives the bad man too easy an acquittal, and
good and bad men alike too little incentive to bestir them-
selves. But, as we have
already suggested, ‘necessity’
was an essential part of the intellectual outfit of ‘en-
lightened’ persons at that time; it was too useful a
weapon against religion, superstition, and the super-
natural dogmas and claims of the Church, for its incon-
veniences to be much felt. To acknowledge it was part
of your Roman virtue, your Stoic dignity; it marked your
disdain for the magic of sacrament, holy water or rosary,
and your kinship with Nature. Nevertheless, I doubt
whether Godwin, or any of our necessitarians, would have
229
:

found their philosophy so satisfying if they had not re-
tained, as unconscious presuppositions, certain axioms
derived from religion: man’s capacity to be born again,
for instance; the ‘duty’ of loving our fellows, and of
working unsparingly for their betterment. The Cal-
vinism in which Godwin had been brought up minimized,
in theory, the value of good works, but silently admitted
them in practice; and his later Necessitarianism remained
moral only because he tacitly admitted that someone even ,
if it were only himself, could be an originating ‘cause’ of

reformative action.
Godwin’s political ideal was a kind of philosophic
anarchism. Government is an unnecessary evil, per-
petuating historic imposture and injustice, and he hoped
it would at length wither away altogether. The annihila-
tion (of course by argument and persuasion) of the
‘quackery’ of government will be one of the most memor-
able stages of human improvement
‘With what delight must every well-informed friend of man-
kind look forward to the auspicious period, the dissolution of
political government, of that brute engine, which has been the
only perennial cause of the vices of mankind, and which has . . .
mischiefs of various sorts incorporated with its substance, and no

otherwise to be removed than by its utter annihilation !’ 1
He dwells upon the inefficacy of all attempts to produce

virtue by government regulation, and upon the ill effects
of the political superintendence of opinion. ‘Erroneous’
opinions on politics or religion must not be suppressed;
they are probably just criticisms of a corrupt establish-
ment, and in any case Truth has nothing to fear. Reason ‘
and good sense will not fail to augur ill of that system of
things which is too sacred to be looked into.’ In spite of
his passion for education Godwin opposes state education
as yet another means of rendering permanent the existing
order of things. If every child could receive the educa-
tion of an Emile, all would be well, but ‘public educa-
230
tion has always expended its energies in the support of
prejudice’.
‘It has commonly been observed of universities and extensive

establishments for the purpose of education that the knowledge
taught there is a century behind the knowledge which exists
among the unshackled and unprejudiced members of the same
political community .’ 1
In Godwin’s anarchist Utopia, equalization of property

is an indispensable condition, and he cites Plato, More,
Swift, and Mably support of his equalitarian principles.
in
At present a King’s income may be equivalent to the
earnings of 50,000 labourers: ‘is this a state of human
beings that must be regarded as the last improvement of
political wisdom?’ Both the favoured and the deprived
classes are ‘corrupted by their unnatural situation’ 2 the
;
juxtaposition of extreme poverty with ostentatious wealth

is a main source of crime. Aristocracy is a system for
rendering permanent the inequality of mankind, whereas
men, considered as sentient and percipient beings, are by
nature approximately equal. The feudal system was a
‘ferocious monster devouring, wherever it came, all that
the friend of humanity regards with attachment and love’,
and empty titles still preserve the name and style of terri-
torial overlordship without the thing ‘history labours
—
under the Gothic and unintelligible burden’. Burke has
invested the existing order with a halo of awe and rever-
ence, but ‘it is strongly to be suspected that that regulation
which dares not rest upon its own reasonableness, conduces
to the benefit of a few at the expense of the many’. No
man has a right to superfluities while others lack neces-
sities ;
moreover, superfluous wealth ruins the health and
happiness of its possessor. In his novels Godwin dilates
with truly Rousseauistic sentiment upon scenes of patri-
archal simplicity, generally in mountainous country as —
the Fleetwood home in Merionethshire, or the Swiss
1
ibid., bk. vi, ch. 8 (vol. ii, p. 667).
231
— !

retreats of Ruffigny and St Leon; and these scenes are
characteristically contrasted with pictures of riot and
misery in ‘high’ life
that voluptuous life

Unfeeling, where the man who is of soul
The meanest thrives the most; where dignity,
True personal dignity, abideth Hot;
A and vain world cut off
light, a cruel
From the natural inlets of just sentiment,
From lowly sympathy and chastening truth .
1
‘
Let us length dismiss artificial tastes ’, cries Marguerite
at
to the repentant St Leon (after he has wasted his patrimony
in riotous living at Paris, and retired upon a pittance to a
Swiss fastness):
‘and idle and visionary pursuits, that do not flow in a direct line
from any of the genuine principles of our nature! . Here we . .
may live in true patriarchal simplicity. What is chivalry, what

are military prowess and glory ? Believe me, they are the passions
of a mind depraved, that with ambitious refinement seeks to be
wise beyond the dictates of sentiment or reason! There is no
happiness so solid, or so perfect, as that which disdains these refine-
ments. You, like me, are fond of the luxuriant and romantic
scenes of nature. Here we are placed of them. How
in the midst
idle it would be, to wish to change our arbours, our verdant lanes
and thickets, for vaulted roofs, and gloomy halls, and massy plate
Alas, Reginald! it is, I fear, too true, that the splendour in which
we and that the super-
lately lived has its basis in oppression;
fluities of the rich are a boon extorted from the hunger and
misery of the poor. Here we see a peasantry more peaceful and
less oppressed than perhaps any other tract of the earth can ex-
hibit. They are erect and independent, at once friendly and fear-
less. Is not this a refreshing spectacle ?’ 2
Marguerite continues in this vein for a considerable time,

extolling the joys of rustic moderation, innocence, and
freedom. But it soon appears that Godwin (as might be
supposed from what we have seen) does not hold with the
alleged ‘primitivism’ of Rousseau; the rustic joys are to
1
The Prelude bk.
, ix, 345. * St Leon (1831 ed.), p. 85.
232
be tasted by the sophisticated mind. An
honest plough-
man, he had taught in Political Justice cannot be as
,vir-
tuous as Cato unless he is also an educated man, for
‘virtue
consists in a desire of the benefit of the species’,
and ‘that
desire only can be denominated virtuous, which
flows from
a distinct perception of the value, and
consequently of the
nature, of the thing desired’. ‘Though I love the sight
of peasants, I would not be a peasant’, Marguerite
declares
with commendable frankness I would have a larger stock
‘
;
of ideas, and a wider field of activity. ... I

would not
sacrifice in prone oblivion the best characteristics
of my
nature. I put in my claim for refinements
and luxuries,
but they are the refinements and purifying of intellect,
and
the luxuries of uncostly, simple taste.’ It was in this
manner that Godwin combine ‘Primitivism’ with
tried to
belief in ‘progress’, ‘Nature’ with ‘cultivation’;
and he
supposes himself, perhaps wrongly 1 to differ from Rous-
,
seau on this point. The savage state was not the
genuine
and proper condition of man, as he assumes that Rousseau
believed; it was, however, by a very slight mistake
that
Rousseau missed the opposite opinion, which it is the
business of the present volume to establish ’. 2 He
had at
least seen, and been the first to teach, that the
imperfections
of government have been ‘the only permanent source
of
the vices of mankind .Godwin’s ideal society would have
.
been a small community or parish inhabited by a cultured

peasantry, each family subsisting upon small holdings
of
equal size, and attending with equal devotion to the
hus-
bandry of the soil and of the mind. It is an attractive
ideal, and has allured other social
experimenters besides
the Pantisocrats. But he insists that an intellectual
accept-
ance of the principles of reason is the indispensable
pre-
condition of the equalization of property. For there
must
be no state-superintendence; even accumulation will
not
be prohibited, but it will be regarded as so absurd
that no
1
Cf. Lovejoy, The Supposed Primitivism
( Modem Philology , xxi, 1923).
" ™
of Rousseau’s Discourse on Ineoualitx
2
Political Justice, bk. v, ch.
15 (vol. ii, p 503).
233
one attempt it. Our present respect for mere pos-
will
sessions will be transferred to intrinsic worth. Men will
have a ‘right’ only to what they need, or can use; any-
thing further, even if made by themselves, will be passed
on. There will still be some division of labour, but much
less than now. Godwin’s equality and fraternity, of course,
must be strictly consistent with Liberty in the bourgeois
sense; he wants no communism — particularly of house
or meals; individuality must at all costs be preserved.
Marriage, however, will disappear, along with other forms
of exclusive appropriation, and so will parental affection,
which is contrary to the principles of Political Justice
(tender care of the young will of course continue, but their
exact parentage will be a matter of no account). Towards
the end of the book Godwin gives the reins to his imagina-
tion, and forecasts a time when, as Franklin had said, mind
will be omnipotent over matter, and men may conquer
disease and even lengthen their lives indefinitely by so
willing. Even now, cheerfulness and serenity of mind
have incalculable physical effects, and a relapse into
vacancy, sleep, or melancholy is so much cut off from
life. Let no one fear that if men become too happy they
will multiply too rapidly; beings who can control death
will be able to control the birth-rate. The first step to-
wards the realization of these visions is the removal of the
present odious governments of Europe. But argument,
writing, and persuasion are to be the means employed,
not incitement to tumult; we must await, in calm con-
fidence, the arrival of the great crisis of human affairs, the
day of ultimate hope for humanity.
Such, in briefest outline, are some of the contents of
that celebrated book, which immediately won for its author
the fame he had thirsted for, and influenced some of the
best heads of the generation. Within a few weeks of its
appearance, and for some years afterwards, Godwin blazed
‘
as a sun in the firmament of reputation ; no one was more

talked of, more looked up to, more sought after, and
wherever liberty, truth, justice was the theme, his name
234
;

was not far off’. 1 Almost as remarkable as his meteoric
ascent, and quite as significant, was his later obscuration
now he has sunk below the horizon', wrote Hazlitt
twenty-five years afterwards, ‘and enjoys the serene twi-
light of a doubtful immortality’. The reasons for this
change have already been hinted at, and indeed a mere
summary of the contents of Political Justice is perhaps
enough to suggest its likelihood. Godwin caught the
ardent tone of 1793? an d uttered what was then in the
hearts of the young and the eager, but the tide that carried
him was just about to turn, and his fame was lost in the
opposite currents that now began to flow steadily, bring-
ing in the nineteenth century. The development of
Wordsworth and Coleridge is often described in terms
of ‘Godwinism’ and ‘Reaction’, but it is not so often
remembered that Godwin himself moved in the new
direction almost as quickly, though never so completely.
Godwin, like the poets, was caught at the meeting-point
of the two centuries, but, unlike them, he had done his
best work in the eighteenth century tradition, and for all
his later development, he never ceased to be thought of as
a voicefrom the past. The younger men were able, before
age and other causes silenced them, themselves to identify
with ‘the revolt of the human mind against the philosophy
of the eighteenth century’, and to reveal what had been
undreamed of in that philosophy.
4
It is not my purpose to follow Godwin through his years
of twilight, but a word may be said about his own crossing
of the dividing watershed between 1793 and 1800. He,
like Wordsworth, came to see ‘Nature’ as ‘Feeling’, and
not merely as Reason ’. ‘I am filled with grief’, he wrote
*
in his memoranda,
‘when I reflect on the possibility that any extravagances or over-
1
Hazlitt, loc cit
. .
235
:

sightsof mine should bring into disrepute the great truths I have
endeavoured to propagate. But thus my mind is constituted. I
have, perhaps, never been without the possession of important
views and forcible reasonings; but they have ever been mixed
with absurd and precipitate judgments, of which subsequent con-
.’ 1
sideration has made me profoundly ashamed
The theoretic basis of Political Justice was defective, he

came to believe, in not yielding enough importance to
feeling:
‘the voluntary actions of are under the direction of their

men
feelings. . Reason, accurately speaking, has not the smallest
. ,
degree of power to put any one limb or articulation of our bodies

into action. wholly confined
Its province, in a practical view, is
to adjusting the comparison between different objects of desire,

and investigating the most successful mode of attaining those
objects.’
Similarly, the family affections are not objects of moral

censure
‘The benefits we
can confer upon the world are few. The . . .
benefits we can confer upon those with whom we are closely con-
nected are of great magnitude, or continual occurrence. It is
impossible that we should be continually thinking of the whole
world, or not confer a smile or a kindness but as we are prompted
to it by an abstract principle of philanthropy.’
‘
But it seems equally certain ’, he adds, in a rather pathetic
effort to stick to his old though not the
guns, ‘
that utility,
source, will be the regulator’ of a good man’s actions, and
that ‘however ardent be his parental, domestic, or friendly-
exertions, he will from time to time examine into their
coincidence with the greatest sum of happiness in his
power to produce’. Again, education remains a most
powerful instrument, but he came to allow more weight to
‘differences of the highest importance’ existing between
human beings from their birth.
1 Quoted by F. K. Brown, op. cit., pp. 135-6.
236
As early as in the Preiace to the second edition (dated
October 29, 4
795) he says that he has in several instances

1
detected error’, and speaks of the ‘duty of a sevefe and

assiduous revisal’. He had, in fact, rewritten the first
four and the last books, and had modified many of the
extremer views, notably on Property, on Marriage, on
Personal Virtue and Duties, on Promises, on Sincerity,
on Longevity, and on Political Change. He had said, for
example, that nearly all private property was unjust; now
(perhaps thinking of what he had earned for Political
Justice and Caleb Williams') he allows the individual the
disposal of property earned by service to the human
species. Sincerity might sometimes be infringed on
grounds of utility; after marriage is abolished there should
still be permanent attachments; political change should
be brought about, not only without violence, but by

almost imperceptible degrees. ‘No man can more fer-
vently deprecate scenes of commotion and tumult than
the author of this book’, he says, and he hopes that his
work will be found favourable to ‘the increase and pre-
servation of genuine kindness and benevolence’. Finally,
in the Preface to St Leon
(1799), there occurs the following
passage :
‘Some readers of my graver productions will, perhaps, in perus-

ing these volumes, accuse me of inconsistency j the affections
little
and charities of private life being everywhere in this publication a

topic of the warmest eulogium, while in the Enquiry Concerning
Political Justice they seemed to be treated with no great degree of
indulgence and favour. In answer to this objection, all I think it
necessary to say on the present occasion is, that, for more than
four years, I have been anxiobs for opportunity and leisure to
modify some of the earlier chapters of that work in conformity to
the sentiments inculcated in this. Not that I see cause to make
any change respecting the principle of justice, or any thing else
fundamental to the system there delivered, but that I apprehend
domestic and private affections inseparable from the nature of
man, and from what may be styled the culture of the heart , and am
fully persuaded that they are not incompatible with a profound
237
and active sense of justice in the mind of him that cherishes
1
them .’
(Marguerite, the heroine of this novel, it may be remem-

bered, was an idealized portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft.)
I have italicized the phrase ‘culture of the heart’ to bring
out the analogy between Godwin and his spiritual kins-

man of the next century, J. S. Mill, who, describing his
recovery from the arid intellectualism and nervous collapse
of his youth, tells us that he found in Wordsworth’s poetry
’. 2
‘the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of
Much has been made, and rightly, of the anti-Godwinian
theme in The Borderers and in Lyrical Ballads , but even
while Wordsworth was writing against the meddling in-
tellect, and in praise of parental love, gratitude, love of
home and personal possessions, and all the ‘supplementary
aids of an imperfect virtue ’, Godwin was making the same
criticisms on his earlier self. That he was capable of
such self-criticism is perhaps also to
to his credit (and
Mary Wollstonecraft’s), but it is not surprising that he
lost his influence with those who had revered him solely
as the voice of Immutable Truth, the Truth that makes us
free. Political Justice whatever its perversities, had at
,
least had some distant affinity with the Gospels; it was,

indeed, in Hazlitt’s phrase, ‘a metaphysical and logical
commentary on some of the most beautiful and striking
texts of Scripture’. One mother?
recalls: ‘Who is my
and who are my brethren ? whosoever shall do the will
. . .
of my Father which is in heaven, he is my brother, and

sister and mother’; or the injunction to leave house, and
wife, and brethren, and parents, and children for the
Kingdom of God’s sake. It is not commonly suggested
that the Kingdom of Heaven, because difficult of access, is
not worth trying to enter; but many, including Godwin
himself, came to think the Godwinian heaven a worse place
than this imperfect world. There was ‘a want in all his
1 St Leon (1831 ed.), pp. ix-x. (My italics.)

8 Mill’s Autobiography (‘World’s Classics’ ed.), p. 125.
238
system of the mild and persuasive tone of the Gospel ’, and
perhaps the rationalises arguments, addressed exclusively
to the head (and so, to the few who can understand), are
more liable to perversion than the exhortations of religion,
which humble the pride of intellect and use the heart’s
affections in obedience to an absolute command. And
what might not the foolish or unscrupulous do with the
maxims of universal benevolence! ‘There was danger’,
says Hazlitt, ‘that the unseasoned novice might substitute
some pragmatical conceit of his own for the rule of right
reason, and mistake a heartless indifference for a superi-
ority to more and generous feelings’, or the
natural
‘perfectibility code’ might turn out in practice to be a
scheme for the accommodation of the enterprising and
cunning, at the expense of the credulous and honest’. It
might be that average humanity was unequal to the strain
of living the life of pure reason —
as indeed Swift had
hinted by making his ideal creatures, not philosophers, but
horses. Perfected humanity could perhaps dispense with
the poor, irrational ‘virtues’ of gratitude, filial and
parental affection, patriotism, or piety. But supposing we
dispensed with them, and yet failed of perfection, might
we not discover too late that these virtues are what alone
prevent us, not from advancing to perfection, but from
sinking into brutality?
Misgivings of this kind were in Wordsworth’s mind
when he composed The Borderers (1795-6), and similar
fears, though relating to the Jacobin philosophy and not
to Godwin, led Burke to write the Reflexions on the Revolu-
tion in France (1790). In order to show how, in ‘the
revolt of the human mind against the philosophy of the
eighteenth century’, ‘Nature’ in the sense of ‘the his-
torical and the actual’ came to be used in opposition to
‘Nature’ in the sense of ‘the abstract and potential’, I
shall conclude with some observations on these two
representatives of the new way of thought.
239
— — J
II. EDMUND BURKE

I see him, — but vigorous in age,
old,
Stand like an oak whose stag-horn branches start
Out of its leafy brow, the more to awe
The younger brethren of the grove . . .
While he forewarns, denounces, launches forth

Against systems built on abstract rights.
all
Keen ridicule; the majesty proclaims

Of Institutes and Laws, hallowed by time;
Declares the vital power of social ties
Endeared by Custom; and with high disdain.
Exploding upstart Theory, insists
Upon the allegiance to which men are born
[ The Prelude bk. ,

vii, 5 1 9.
No writer, says Leslie Stephen, has received or deserved

more splendid panegyrics than Burke. The above-quoted
passage from The Prelude represents Wordsworth’s mature
attitude, and not the state of mind in which he heard
Burke in the year 1791, nor the mood in which he wrote
the Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff (1793). But even
Hazlitt, whoalmost alone of his literary compeers resisted
the master-current of his time, and said, I would rather ‘
quarrel with my best friend than admit the right of the

—
Bourbons to the throne of France’ even Hazlitt said of
Burke, It has always been with me a test of the sense and
‘
candour of anyone belonging to the opposite party,

whether he allowed Burke to be a great man ‘in arriving ’ ;
at one error he discovered a hundred truths’. It is not

my purpose to enlarge in any detail upon Burke’s political
philosophy, but merely to give him the place which seems
his due in our particular story.
All down the eighteenth century, both in England and
France, there had been a succession of novels, plays, poems,
and treatises exalting the natural over the artificial man,
the primitive (as being fresher from the hands of God or
Nature) over the sophisticated, the rustic over the urban.
240
One could mention, as belonging in some sense to this
all
tradition, Shaftesbury, Addison, Thomson, Rousseau,
Cowper, Brown (of the Estimate
1757), Henry Brooke,
,
Lord Karnes, Thomas Day, Mary Wollstonecraft, Hol-

croft, Bage, Mrs Inchbald, and many others.
Much of
this body of literature, especially in England,
remained on
the level of sentimental reverie or escapism’; some of
*
it
may be characterized as a cultivated blend of classical
(especially Horatian) with Christian feeling against luxury
and in favour of simplicity. But the principle so concisely
stated by Rousseau in the opening sentence of the
Contrat
Social ,
and by Diderotthe Supplement au Voyage de
in
Bougainville (cf. above, p. 14), was capable, as we have
seen, of being turned towards revolutionary ends if
like —
most of the French philosophers of the century you were
sufficiently indignant with the existing order.
—When the
French Revolution broke out, it was received in England
(as has been said) with mingled astonishment
and sym-
pathy. Fox’s exclamation has become classical, but it
should be remembered how far, in much contemporary
popular literature, the ‘Jacobinical’ values were being
taken for granted. In the novels of Day, Holcroft, Bage,
and Mrs Inchbald, virtue is found in the cottage, vice in
the palace. What is a peer of the realm’, asks Holcroft,
*
but a man educated in vice, nurtured in prejudices from
his earliest childhood, and daily breathing the same in-
fection ashe first respired ? Or again
’
Men are rendered
:
‘
selfish and corrupt by the baneful influence of the

system
under which they live They are not in love with base-
ness, forced upon them.’ In Mrs Inchbald’s Nature
it is
and Art the theme is the contrast between two cousins,

one of whom has been pampered by rich parents, and goes
to the dogs, while the other —
the hero of the book—has
had the good fortune to be cast ashore upon a tropical
island in infancy, and to be brought up by the noble
savages. Further back, in Cowper and in Brown’s Estimate
,
one encounters a sense of the contrast between the cor-
ruption in high places, and the health and wholesomeness
Q 241
—
which dwelt among the poor a great reservoir of vital
world
energy which would at last overflow and renovate the
by washing away the tawdry ruins of the ancient regime.
It is no wonder that, to the considerable body
of opinion
here represented, the Revolution seemed nothing out of
Nature’s certain course’. ‘What temper at the prospect
did not wake To happiness unthought of? asks Words-
worth. The answer is simple: that of Edmund Burke
did not. It was precisely in 1790, when Europe was still
‘thrilled with joy’, and many could still regard the Revolu-
tion as the triumph of Nature and Reason over
ancient
wrong, that Burke uttered his solemn warning, and made
those prophecies whose speedy fulfilment caused him to be
admired as an oracle of prescience. In the eighties, as
Fanny Burney tells us, Burke’s name had been unmention-
able at Court, because he had supported the Americans,
because he had proposed to reform the King’s Kitchen,
and because he was prosecuting Warren Hastings. But
when the Reflexions appeared, he found himself for the
first time the darling of the dynasts, and George
III is
reported to have said that this was ‘a good book, a very

good book, and every gentleman ought to read it’. In
spite of such praise, however, and the approval of all who
had vested interests in the social ties endeared by Custom
‘
the Reflexions must always command respect as an explora-

tion of the one avenue which was shaded from the eyes of
the reformers. Burke sees so far into what was missed by
the Holbachs and the Godwins, and states his case with
such rhetorical opulence, that he has perhaps been over-
praised at their expense.
In a passage already referred to, J. S. Mill takes
Bentham as typical of the sort of mind which questions
things established, asking of any ancient or received
opinion, ‘Is it Coleridge, on the other hand, see-
true?’
ing so much further into the complexities of the human
intellect and feelings, asks rather ‘What is the meaning
of it?’ and considers ‘the long or extensive prevalence of
any opinion as a presumption that it was not altogether a
242
fallacy 1
, Coleridge with Burke in this, and indeed he
is
had learnt much from him. The central instinct of Burke,
as Morley rightly insisted, was his preference for that
which has grown to that which is made; it was this which
gave unity to his superficially diverse attitudes, especially
on the American and French Revolutions. The colonists
had grown into an independent people, and they claimed
not the ‘rights of man’, but the rights of Englishmen,
which had been the same since the beginning of history.
It was the narrow imperialism of George III
and his
ministers which, in the name of mere abstract ‘right’,
was misshaping this fine natural growth. The French
Revolutionists, on the other hand, were sweeping away,
in the names of ‘reason’ and ‘abstract right’, nothing
less
than the whole complex organism of society, the product
of centuries of development and adaptation, on which alone
depended the possibility of civilized living. Destroy rank,
privilege, established religion, property, and the reverence
with which prescription had invested them, and you de-
stroy the only framework within which poor human nature
had proved capable of virtue. Set up reason in their ‘ ’
place, and you are setting up something essentially feeble

and fallible, and, moreover, liable to become enslaved by
the very passions it claims to rule; you are opening the
way to ‘calculators’ and exploiters, and banishing ‘the
unbought grace of life’ which lingers amongst the feudal
forms. Politics said Burke, ‘ought to be adjusted, not
,
to human reasonings, but to human nature; of which

the
reason is but a part, and by no means the greatest part.’ 2
This celebrated remark illustrates the manner in which
Burke counters ‘Nature’ the abstraction with ‘Nature’
the actuality, the metaphysical with the historical, natura
naturans with natura naturata and it may stand as a symbol
,
of the transition from the eighteenth century mental climate

to that of the nineteenth. Burke belongs to the eighteenth
1
Mill, Dissertations and Discussions, vol. i, p. 394.
2
Quoted by A. Cobban, Edmund Burke and the Revolt against the Eighteenth
^
Century, p. 77.
243
:

century in his acceptance of a divine purpose as immanent
in the existing order of things
‘the awful Author of our being is the Author of our place in the
order of existence; and .having disposed and marshalled us by
. .
a divine tactic, not according to our will, but according to His, he

has, in and by that disposition, virtually subjected us to act the
.’ 1
part which belongs to the place assigned us
In this and similar pronouncements Burke seems to return,

though admittedly with a much finer sense of history and
a greatly strengthened imaginative power, to the stand-
point of ‘whatever is, is right’. What has actually come
into being must be ‘right’ and ‘natural’, because it must
accord with the Will that has permitted it. But Burke
belongs also to the ‘romantic’ reaction inasmuch as he
rejects the abstract intellectualism into which the eighteenth
century had evolved, and which in his time was being
pushed to revolutionary conclusions. As a believer in
what is felt in the heart rather than in what is excogitated
by the brain he is with Rousseau as well as with Words-
worth. But Rousseau had excluded human societies from
the ‘Nature’ he worshipped; ‘Nature’ had been adorable
because it was untainted by the ‘mean and vulgar works
of man’, and man-made things, for him as for the rest of
the revolutionary school, were bad because ‘artificial’.
Burke, on the contrary, includes human society in his con-
ception of ‘Nature’; the political organisms evolved by
history are as venerable to him, therefore, as mountains,
forests, and lakes were to Rousseau. For Rousseau the
principle of evil lay in the ‘artificial’ system which, by
some unexplained process, had been foisted from outside
upon unspoiled, instinctive man; for Burke it lay in the
meddling intellect which presumes to interfere with the
mysterious march of God in the world. Burke was of the
company of those who are continually conscious of the
weight of all this unintelligible world; he was more aware
of the complex forces which hem us in and condition all
1
ibid., p. 94.
244
—
we do, than of any power in us to act back Upon and
modify the very environment that limits us.
‘The nature of man is intricate; the objects of society are of
the greatest possible complexity: and therefore no simple dis-
position or direction of power can be suitable either
to man’s
nature, or to the quality of his affairs. [The revolutionistsJ are
. .
.
so taken up with their theories about the rights of man,
that they
have totally forgotten his nature .’ 1
But if the unaided reason is feeble, and productive of

nothing but cobweb-abstractions as
the reason need never be unaided, for
— Bacon had taught
has at its disposal, it
not what Bacon had meant by ‘Nature’, but what was
truly Nature’ for Burke: the funded wisdom of the
ages.
The individual is foolish, but the species is wise. The
present order of society, like a great forest tree, has grown
with the majestic slowness of Nature herself, and its
present shape, as the result of natural adaptation to en-
vironment, is morje ‘natural’ than it could be after any
lopping and pruning that men could inflict upon it. Men
may, indeed, remove from it any ivy or mistletoe which is
checking its growth, and so leave it freer to develop its
own nature, but if they apply the axe or the saw they can
only deface it, and may destroy its life altogether.
Itwas, of course, comparatively easy for Burke to accept
the English Constitution as part of the order of Nature;
with all its defects it was a
organism of proved adapt-
living
ability and power of growth, whereas in France the Con-
stitution could be likened, if to any biological form,
only
to the fossil of an extinct creature. But probably what
Burke really reverenced was less the English Constitution
as it actually was in the reign of George III, than an
ideal
English Constitution, stripped of its ugly incrustations,
and working freely according to its inner intention an :
ideal almost, but not quite, as remote as Plato’s city

which
is in heaven. The distance between idea and reality can
be measured by comparing his noble eulogies of the idea
1
Reflexions , pp. 59 and 62 (‘Everyman’ ed.).
245
,

of our Constitution, and of our aristocracy, with his own
account of the state of both in Thoughts on the Present
Discontents . But his conviction always was, like Dante’s
or Langland’s, that the organism was healthy at the core,
and that it only needed wise direction to ensure the har-
monious working of its parts. Burke takes pleasure in
comparing the state with the family; we in England, he
tells his French friend, have managed to combine our
political and domestic instincts. The perfections of our
Constitution, he writes, are
‘the happy effect o( following nature which is wisdom without

reflection, and above it. ... By a constitutional policy, working
after the pattern of nature we receive, we hold, we transmit our
,
government and our privileges, in the same manner in which we

enjoy and transmit our property and our lives. Our political
. . .
system is placed in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order

of the world and with the mode of existence
,
decreed to a per-
manent body composed of transitory parts; wherein, by the dis-
position of a stupendous wisdom, moulding together the great
mysterious incorporation of the human race, the whole, at one
time, is never old, or middle-aged, or young. Thus, by pre-
. . .
serving the method of nature in the conduct of the state, in what

we improve, we are never wholly new; in what we retain, we
are never wholly obsolete. By adhering in this manner and on
those principles to our forefathers, we are guided not by the super-
stition of antiquarians, but by the spirit of philosophic analogy.
In this choice of inheritance we have given to our frame of polity
the image of a relation in blood; binding up the constitution of
our country with our dearest domestic ties; adopting our funda-
mental laws into the bosom of our family affections; keeping in-
separable and cherishing with the warmth of all their combined
and mutually reflected charities, our state, our hearths, our
1
sepulchres, and our altars .’
All this has been achieved by ‘a conformity to nature in

our artificial institutions’, and by ‘calling in the aid of her
unerring and powerful instincts, to fortify the fallible and
feeble contrivances of our reason’. He challenges the
1 Reflexions, pp. 31-2. (My italics.)
246
sophisters of France to produce any better plan than we
—
have followed we ‘who have chosen our nature rather
than our speculations, our breasts rather than our in-
ventions, for the great conservatories and magazines of
our rights and privileges \ You think you are combating
‘
prejudice, but you are at war with nature.’ It is thus that

Burke rescues ‘Nature’ from its professed disciples the —
Nature which he feels to be real, because deeply rooted,
far below the probings of superficial analysis, in history,
in the unconscious mind of man, and ultimately in the
purposes of God. In spite of the ‘importunate chink’ of
Dr Price, and the other English revolutionary grass-
hoppers, the thousand great cattle, ‘reposed beneath the
shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent’.
This is Burke’s imagery for expressing the contrast, so
constantly present to his mind, between the transitory and
the permanent, the specious and the real the same thought
;
is expressed in the even more characteristic image of the
‘proud keep of Windsor, rising in the majesty of pro-

portion, and girt with the double belt of its kindred and
coeval towers’, contrasted with the ‘pickaxes of all the
levellers of France’. And so he would have us reverence
tradition, prescription, even prejudice:
‘We are not the converts of Rousseau; we are not the dis-
ciples of Voltaire; Helvetius has made no progress amongst us.
Atheists are not our preachers; madmen are not our lawgivers.
We know that we have made no discoveries, and we think that
no discoveries are to be made, in morality; nor many in the great
principles of government, nor in the ideas of liberty, which were
understood long before we were born, altogether as well as they
will be after the grave has heaped its mould upon our pre-
sumption, and the silent tomb shall have imposed its law on our
1
pert loquacity.
The tone more forensic, the rhythm less subtle, and the
is
afflatus more windy than in Browne or Taylor, but it is

clear nevertheless that we have left the eighteenth century
1 ibid., p. 83.
247
that we knew, and are back amongst the imaginatives,
at the line where men and mountains meet. Burke con-
tinues :
‘We fear God; we look
up with awe to Kings; with affection
to Parliaments; with duty to magistrates; with reverence to
priests; and with respect to nobility. Why? Because when
such ideas are brought before our minds, it is natural to be so
1
affected .’
And then follows the defence of prejudice, which, in its

anticipation of Wordsworth and Coleridge, reads more
like an answer to Godwin than (what it actually was) an
occasion for one of Godwin’s most celebrated pronounce-
ments (cf. above, pp. 219-22):
‘We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own
private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each
man is and that the individuals would do better to avail
small,
themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.
Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding general
prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom
which prevails in them. If they find what they seek, and they
seldom fail, they think it more wise to continue the prejudice,
with the reason involved, than to cast away the coat of prejudice,
and to leave nothing but the naked reason; because prejudice,
with its reason, has a motive to give action to that reason, and an
affection which will give it permanence. Prejudice is of ready
application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in
a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man
hesitating in the moment of decision, sceptical, puzzled, and un-
resolved. Prejudice renders a man's duty his habit ; and not a
2
series of unconnected acts'
It is Burke’s main distinction that, in an age which was

willing to abolish history and amend human nature, he
was alive to the inescapable power of both. According to
the Jacobin philosophy, which derives from Locke, man
brings nothing into the world with him except a sensitive
1 (Burke’s
ibid., pp. 83-4. italics.)
2 ibid., p. 84. (My italics: contrast Godwin’s ‘the genuine and wholesome
state of mind,’ etc., p. 222 above.)
248
percipience on which any sort of impressions may be in-
scribed. Heredity, history, physical environment, count
for nothing. The rules of justice and reason (the laws of
Nature) are therefore applicable to all times and all places.
If history has been for a long time inscribing erroneous
impressions on the blank sheet of the mind, let us 'abolish ’
history— as d’Alembert suggested. Let us only begin to

write reason and justice where history has written prejudice,
slavery, and superstition, and we shall change human
nature in one generation. To all this Burke replies by
an appeal to psychological fact, and to history itself. Man
is not a blank sheet at birth; he is born with
a mass of
predispositions inherited from an incalculable past, and
these vary according to place and time. There is there-
fore no one, universal, ‘natural’, and best form of society
or of government; ‘I cannot’, Burke writes, ‘stand for-
ward, and give praise or blame to anything which relates
to human actions, and human concerns, on a simple view
of the object, as it stands stripped of every relation, in all
the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction.
Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for
nothing) give in reality to every political principle its dis-
tinguishing colour and discriminating effect.’ These in-
herited predispositions, call them prejudices if we will, are
in fact the fountain-light of all our day. The effort to
wipe them out, and live by unsupported reason, will result,
not in truly rational and virtuous conduct, but in moral
anarchy. Ideally, perhaps, man may aspire to a fully
rational consciousness, but actually reason is by no means
the most important part of his nature, and thus to try
to live by it will mean catastrophe. The events of the
Terror gave point to Burke’s teaching, and readers of
Wordsworth recognize that he repeated, in his revolt
will
from France and from Godwin, Burke’s general revolt
against the revolutionary creed. The famous eighteenth
century alliance between Nature and Reason had begun
to crumble Reason,
; it was found, could lead one way,
and Nature another. Or, putting it another way, the
249
:

‘Nature’ to which the century had so confidently appealed
could have two main sets of meanings it could mean the :
head, or it could mean the heart; ideas or facts; theories

or history; what is congenial to abstract reason, or what
is dear to the heart. The nineteenth century went on
believing in ‘Nature’, but not without misgivings due to
the inherent contradictions of the creed. Was Nature best
expressed in the ‘march of mind’, or in the hearts
affections —including new-found affection for mossy
its
ruins ? These things, it was found, could conflict. The

dilemma was thus expressed by George Eliot
‘Is not the striving after something better and better in our
surroundings the grand-characteristic that distinguishes man from
the brute ? . But Heaven knows where that striving might lead
. .
us, if our affections had not a trick of twining round those old
inferior things —
if the loves and sanctities of our life had no deep
1
immovable roots in memory .’
The ‘truth’, seemed, was not all upon the side of Burke,
it
nor all upon the side of Godwin. It would be a poor and

chaotic world, no doubt, in which men were put to live
and trade each upon his private stock of reason. But what
sort of world should we get if existing systems were always
to be regarded as too sacred to be looked into ? Because
‘ ’
custom and prejudice are often wise, because in them is

often embodied the accumulated wisdom of ages for the
guidance of the erring individual, is the light of reason
never to be directed upon them ? Burke is in many ways
a spiritual progenitor of the nineteenth century. It has
been truly said that Scott, in his novels, translated into the
dialect of fiction Burke’s basic principles and the attempts ;
of Coleridge, Carlyle, Green, and Ruskin to reintroduce

a conception of the state as a spiritual and not merely an
economic partnership derive in part from him. So, too,
does the corollary of that attempt —
the recognition that
theMiddle Ages had in some sort realized that ideal for ;
Burke was one of the first philosophic admirers of the

1
The Mill on the Floss, p. 173. (‘World’s Classics’ ed.)
25O
‘age of Chivalry’. For us it is of more concern that he
was the first to formulate the principles of the nineteenth
century brand of patriotic ‘nationalism’, believing that
this was the only weapon with which to fight an ‘armed
doctrine’. The French, become oppressors in their turn ’,
‘
and their revolutionary £lan deflected into conquest and

Napoleonism, could be effectively met by no mere com-
bination of effete dynasties, but only by the awakening of
a national spirit as ardent as their own. As Mr Cobban
says, ‘Pitt was waging a nineteenth century war on
eighteenth century methods’, and ‘Burke, and for a long
time Burke alone, comprehended that a new system was
needed ’. 1 All through the era of struggles for national
independence and liberty, and down to the Treaty of
Versailles, the authority of this idea has seemed absolute.
It has been reserved for our own unhappy generation to
see nationalism itself become an armed doctrine, as aggres-
sive as Napoleonism, and more sinister. In face or this
dangerous degeneration of the nationality principle we may
have to return for deliverance, behind Burke and the con- ‘
crete’, to the grand leading abstractions of the eighteenth

century —
to liberty, equality, and fraternity, to the Rights
of Man, and the Laws of Nature. Dr Catlin (in a book
on the Anglo-Saxon Tradition, just published at the time
of writing), has said of the present situation that Unless ‘
there is an emotion for this free community of ours more

powerful than that aroused in the Marxist for class war,
or in the Hitlerian for his race, then these and not we will
shape the world’s future ’. 2 Unfortunately it is far harder
armed nationality with an abstract doctrine than
to fight
an armed doctrine with nationality, particularly when, as
now, the militant ‘armed doctrines’ as
nationalities are
well. The question of our time is whether the liberal
tradition (now mainly represented by the three great de-
mocracies) can hold its own against militant racialism —by
Federal Union or other means —
without invoking its own
1
op. cit., p. 129.
2
Quoted in Times Lit. Supp. review, Aug. 12, 1939.
25 l
race-passions and so opposes
becoming the very thing it
— propter vitam vivendi perdere causas. If this can be

achieved 1 the eighteenth century will not have existed in
,
vain. The alternative is to leave the future to be shaped

by war and the ensuing revolution.
* See Clarence K. Streit, Union Now (Cape, 1939).
252
CHAPTER XII
9
‘ Nature in Wordsworth
W ORDSWORTH’S importance in the history of

the Idea of Nature is not likely to be under-
estimated, and it will not be expected that much
can be added to what he himself and numerous critics and
biographers have written on the subject. Nevertheless it
is essential to the rounding-off of our story that Words-
worth’s ‘Nature’ should be seen in its relation to the

background we have been describing, and particularly in
relation to the political thought of his age. The diviniza-
tion of Nature, which began in the modern world at the
Renaissance, and proceeded during the eighteenth century
in the way we have seen, culminates for English literature
in Wordsworth. This is commonly agreed; but why it
culminated in the particular form of a passion for ‘mute,
insensate things’, for ‘green grass and mountains bare’,
for Man ‘ennobled outwardly’ by mergence with the in-
animate (Michael, the Leech Gatherer, ‘Nature’s Lady’)
— all this can only be fully understood by tracing the
growth of Wordsworth’s political sympathies between

1790 and 1798. Much else is, of course, necessary be-
sides this, especially an understanding of his childhood
and youth, of his love-affair in France, and of the in-
fluence of Dorothy Wordsworth and Coleridge. But in
the present context it seems most relevant to fix our atten-
tion on what I have called the vital transition of his life,
when, after his early attachments to France and to Godwin,
he came to share Burke’s evaluation, and to regard the
Revolution as made by man, not evolved by ‘Nature*.
This transition is of special importance as a symbol of the
transference, then in progress, from the eighteenth cen-
2 53
—
tury senses of ‘Nature’ to the nineteenth. In the develop-
ment of Wordsworth during the last decade of our century
we can see, what we have hitherto found mainly in separate
minds, ‘Nature’ turning from a revolutionary into a con-
servative principle, and the emphasis shifting from the
abstract to the concrete, from reason to feeling. For
Wordsworth’s generation it was political emotion, above
all, which gave warmth to that conception of a divine
Nature which had hitherto been held mainly as an intel-

lectual abstraction. In Wordsworth himself it was re-
action from politics which gave the special fervour to the
poetry of his ‘inspired decade’, and led him back to those
‘grand and permanent forms’ in which the wisdom and
spirit of the universe seemed most unmistakably manifest.
Wordsworth is thought of mainly as a recluse, yet Harper
can describe him as, v/ith the exception of Milton, the most
political of our poets. This may be so, and we must
believeWordsworth when he said (in 1 833) that although ‘
he was known to the world only as a poet, he had given

twelve hours’ thought to the conditions and prospects
of society, for one to poetry’. Yet it was not when he
—
was most political whether in youth or in later life
that he was most ‘poetical’. What breathes in his best
work is rather the rapture of an escape from uncongenial
political preoccupations, and the joy of the discovery that
amidst
the calm oblivious tendencies
Of Nature, ’mid her plants, and weeds, and flowers,
And silent overgrowings , 1
he could correct his despondency and find tranquil restora-

tion. In a passage now incorporated in Book IV of The
Excursion but written by March 1798 (that is, at the time
,
of his most intense communing with ‘earth and every

common sight’), he explains, more explicitly than in
Tintern Abbey how he has found in Nature (in the sense
,
of ‘all that we behold from this green earth’) the anchor

1
The Excursion, bk. i, 928.
254
: — :
‘nature’ IN WORDSWORTH
of his purest thoughts, the guide and guardian of his
heart
For, the Man
Who, in this spirit, communes with the Forms
Of Nature, who with understanding heart
Both knows and loves such objects as excite
No morbid no disquietude,
passions,
No vengeance, and no hatred needs must — feel
The joy of that pure principle of love
So deeply, that, unsatisfied with aught
Less pure and exquisite, he cannot choose
But seek for objects of a kindred love
In fellow-natures and a kindred joy.
Accordingly he by degrees perceives
His feelings of aversion softened down;
A holy tenderness pervade his frame.
His sanity of reason not impaired.
Say rather, all his thoughts now flowing clear,
From a clear fountain flowing, he looks round
And seeks for good; and finds the good he seeks.
So build we up the Being that we are;

Thus deeply drinking-in the soul of things,
We shall be wise perforce 1 .
At the very same time (April 1798) Coleridge, quoting

Wordsworth’s lines and expressing their conjoint senti-
ments in those ecstatic Alfoxden days, wrote to his brother
that he had ‘snapped his squeaking baby-trumpet of
sedition’ and withdrawn himself totally from ‘French
metaphysics, French politics, French ethics, and French
theology’, in order to meditate upon the 'causa causarum '
‘
devote myself to such works as encroach not on the anti-
I
social passions —
in poetry, to elevate the imagination and set the
affections in right tune by the beauty of the inanimate impreg-
nated as with a living soul by the presence of life in prose to the —
seeking with patience what our faculties are and what they
. . .
are capable of becoming. I love fields and woods and mountains
1
The Excursion, bk. iv, 1208-66
2 SS
,

with almost a visionary fondness. And because I have found
benevolence and quietness growing within me as that fondness
has increased, therefore I should wish to be the means of im-
planting it in others, and to destroy the bad passions not by
1
combating them but by keeping them in inaction .’
And in a phrase which seems to glance at Wordsworth’s

Borderers , he adds that he regulating his mind so as to
is
prevent the passions from turning the reason into a hired

*
advocate’. There was nothing new, it may be remarked,

nothing very startling, in the discovery that one can find
peace and contentment in rural retirement: from Horace
to Cowper (to go no further afield) there had seldom
lacked poets, satirists, and moralists to recommend plain
living and high thinking. But the ‘Nature’ of Words-
worth and Coleridge was apprehended with a new kind of
intensity. In a sense, like Burke, they return to ‘whatever
is, is right’, but it is on a higher level of insight the level —
of Plotinus, Spinoza, and the mystics. And the passion
with which they mingled themselves with landscape was
derived, partly indeed from their rejection of the mechanical
philosophy which had yielded ‘a universe of death’, but
primarily from the deflection into imaginative channels of
their thwarted political ardours. They had thought to see
human nature born again, and the millennium realized,
whether in Europe or on the banks of the Susquehanna.
Defeated of these hopes by the Terror, the war, and ‘the
chain of harsh necessity’, they found deliverance in trans-
forming the world, not by political action, but by tke
‘modifying colours of the imagination’. That this was
possible, they felt, was owing to the existence of a bond
between Nature and the soul of man. So exquisitely was
Nature fitted to the mind, and the mind to Nature, that
the creation which they ‘with blended might accomplish’
must needs be both beautiful and ‘true’. It was thus to
the achievement of a ‘fine balance of truth in observing,
with the imaginative faculty in modifying the objects
1
Letters of S. T. C., ed. E. H. Coleridge, vol. i, p. 244. (Quoted in
L. Hanson, Life of S. T. C., The Early Tears p. 275.)
256
‘nature* IN WORDSWORTH
observed’ (abalance already reached by Wordsworth in
The Female Vagrant^ in Coleridge’s view) that the
two poets
dedicated themselves during those happy months
of in-
timacy between Alfoxden and Stowey. The
Quantock
Hills, transfigured by the mind’s
‘auxiliar light’, replaced
for them the vanished France and
the impossible Panti-
socracy. Let us then, in the hope of capturing
some faint
echo of the emotions of 1798, briefly retrace the
path that
led Wordsworth from France to Racedown and Alfoxden.
It isneedless to recapitulate in detail the familiar tale,
so graphically told in The Prelude, and
, so amply filled out
by the critics, of Wordsworth’s early enthusiasm
for the
Revolution, at the time when ‘a homeless sound
of joy was
in the air and the political scene took on, for ardent
,
youth, ‘the attraction of a country in romance’.

I shall
dwell mainly upon the theme suggested above
ance and rejection of Godwin. Of his first
his accept- —
revolutionary
sympathies during the summer tour of
1790, he himself
has said, that he ‘âs touched, but with
no intimate
concern’. The memorable passage in Book VI, which
describes that tour, is not the account of the
Festival of
the Federation, of which he saw the
gaudy ‘reliques’
‘flowers left to wither on triumphal arcs’
scription of the crossing of the Alps, with
but the de- —
the apocalyptic
vision which ensued. It is instructive, by the way,
to
compare this passage, written ten years afterwards,
when
the experience had had time to incubate in his mind, with
a letter written in September 1790 to Dorothy,
in which
he blandly informs her— like any other
‘picturesque’
tourist of the eighteenth century —
that he is ‘a perfect
enthusiast in my admiration of nature in all
her various
forms’. 1 Wordsworth was always more responsive to
single impressions, whether great or
small, than to the
chequered human scene, and just as the
Simplon Pass
meant more to him than the rejoicing millions of
France
so in describing London he succeeds best
when he can
fuse its multitudinousness into a unity
1
—
when at night he
Harper’s Lifey vol. i,
pp. 93-5.
R 257
sees ‘moonlight and stars, and empty streets ,
and hears
sounds ‘unfrequent as in deserts’, or when at dawn
all
.
that mighty heart is lying still Even when he was enjoy-

1-2 )
ing the ‘heart-bracing colloquies’ of Beaupuy (i 79
on their walks in the Touraine, and feeling a fervour in
part genuine and in part ‘less genuine and wrought
up
within myself’, he allowed his imagination, at the sight
the
of royal castles and dismantled convents, to mitigate
‘bigotry of a youthful patriot’s mind’. In George Eliot’s
phrase, he indulged in ‘a little Toryism on the sly and in ,
his own, ‘on these spots with many gleams I looked

Of
chivalrous delight’. quality of his revolutionary
The
ardour at its height is best expressed in the factitious
rhetoric of Descriptive Sketches (mostly written on the

banks of the Loire in 179 1-2), a poem whose forced
accents betoken a Wordsworth still far from his true
anchorage. He tells us, in the tones of conventional
poetic dejection, that
Me, lur’d by hope her sorrows to remove,

A heart, that could not much itself approve,
O’er Gallia’s wastes of corn dejected led,
and we hear how, at the destruction of the Chartreuse,

‘Blasphemy the shuddering fane alarms’, while ‘start th’
astonish’d shades at female eyes’, and ‘the thundering
tube the aged angler hears’. Coming to the Alps and the
pastoral Swiss, he indulgesa passage ot old-style
in
‘primitivism’. In these peasants, though fallen indeed
from the bliss of the legendary Golden Age of the Alps, he
sees ‘the traces of primaeval Man
appear’; guarded by
Nature’ they still
‘vestal enjoy the blessings ‘only given to
uncorrupted hearts’.
Once Man entirely free, alone and wild.
Was bless’d as free — for he was Nature’s child.
He, all superior but his God disdain’d,
Walk’d none restraining, and by none restrain’d,
Confessed no law but what his reason taught,
Did all he wish’d, and wish’d but what he ought.
258
:
From this Rousseauistic Eden man has, of course, been
largely driven by his oppressors:
Still have mypilgrim feet unfailing found.

As despot courts their blaze of gems display,
Ev’n by the secret cottage far away,
The lily of domestic joy decay.
But he concludes with a redeunt saturnia regna addressed
to emancipated France: ‘all nature smiles’ as ‘Freedom
spreads her pow’r the very cocks crow with ear-piercing
’
;
‘
power till then unheard’, and in spite of warlike threats

from the enemies of liberty,
Nature, as in her prime, her virgin reign
Begins, and Love and Truth compose her train
The poem ends in a rhetorical prayer, bristling

with per-
sonifications, for the success of the cause and arms of
Freedom, and the destruction of the dynasts
Oh give, great God,
Freedom’s waves to ridv
to
Sublime o’er Conquest, Avarice, and Pride,
To break, the vales where Death with Famine scow’rs,
And dark Oppression builds her thick-ribb’d tow’rs;
Where Machination her fell soul resigns
Fled panting to the centre of her mines;
Where Persecution decks with ghastly smiles
Her bed, his mountains mad Ambition piles;
And grant that every sceptred child of clay,

Who cries, presumptuous, ‘hefe their tides shall stay’,
Swept in their anger from th’affrighted shore.
With all his creatures sink —
to rise no more.
This ‘Nature’, which now begins her virgin reign, is the

abstract goddess of the eighteenth century, not the Nature
of Wordsworth’s maturer communings. If tone and
diction are indications, as much as sense, of the ‘sincerity’
of poetic speech, then we may trust the statement in The
Prelude , spoken in Wordsworth’s authentic voice that
much of this emotion was ‘wrought up within myself’
—
259
rather than the strident ventriloquisms of Descriptive
Sketches.
Wordsworth returned to England ‘a patriot of the
world’, and therefore unable at once to ‘glide into com-
munion with her sylvan shades’. For about six months
‘it pleased me more To abide in the great City'. In The
Prelude he speaks of his period of discipleship to Godwin
as following his abandonment of hope for France, when
become oppressors in their turn

F renchmen had changed a war of self-defence
For one of conquest, losing sight of all
Which they had struggled for. [Bk. xi, 206.]
Yet it is from several of his writings that he was

clear
familiar with Political Justice from the time of its publica-
tion in 1 793, at the very time, that is, when his sympathies
were all with the ‘Herculean Commonwealth’ then en-
gaged in ‘throttling with an infant godhead’s might The
snakes about her cradle’ (including the British forces).
His most ‘Godwinian’ compositions belong to 1 793 x 794 > >
and 1795, an<^ by x 795 be was at work on The Borderers ,
which we must recognize as marking his partial revolt

from Godwin. We
are therefore compelled to suppose
that during those important but obscure years Words-
worth passed rapidly through a series of phases. In
1 793-4, though demonstrably steeped in Godwinian
notions and phraseology, he had only surrendered him-
self to those parts of Political Justice which fitted in as —
so much of it did —
with the ‘heart-bracing colloquies’
of Beaupuy: the passion for justice and equality, the
humanitarianism, the hatred of privilege, of caste, of war,
and of the penal code, the determination to judge all
things, not in the light of tradition and prejudice, but by
the fixed standards of justice and utility. All this was
common heritage from eighteenth century revolutionary
theory, and it may be said that Wordsworth had already
absorbed it in France. Probably Political Justice served
at first chiefly to clarify and systematize his ideas on these
260
5
‘nature IN WORDSWORTH
subjects, and it had an immediate effect on his
certainly
vocabulary, as we may briefly illustrate from his Letter
to
the Bishop of Llandajf 1 and his
correspondence of 1 794-5.
The Letter to Bishop Watson, written in 1
793, is the com-
pletest statement of Wordsworth’s early
revolutionary
principles. Watson, who may be regarded as a sort of
third-rate Burke, had been formerly known as
the ‘level-
ling Prelate and the ‘Bishop of the
Dissenters’, but had
recently published a recantation of his liberal
principles,
praising the British Constitution and recommending
con-
tentment with the status quo. Wordsworth’s reply, which
was never published in his lifetime, can be classed among
the best of the counterblasts to Burke’s
Reflexions.
Watson had expressed horror at the execution of
Louis XVI, just as Burke had bewailed the sufferings
of
Marie Antoinette. All this, says Wordsworth, is mere
modish lamentation The only rational sorrow would
.
be for the sufferings of twenty-five millions of

French
people, and for the unnatural folly of a system
which
forces one man into a position of irresponsible
authority,
demanding from him more than human virtue and ability’
and at the same time precludes him from attaining even
a moderate knowledge of common life’. 2 As for
the con-
fiscation of Church property, deplored by
Watson as by
Burke, we may console ourselves for the sad fate which
has
deprived the hero of the diamond necklace of
1,300,000
livres per annum, by reflecting that part of the
spoil has
gone to preserve some thousands of poor cur<*s from famine.
You say that in a republic men live under the most odious
of tyrannies, that of their equals.
all
What we should
rather regret is that oppression by so-called ‘superiors’
is
not odious to so many, owing to their breeding in slavery.
The great advantage of a republic is, to Wordsworth (as
toGodwin), that the governors have not an interest separate
from that of the governed. He pauses to consider
the
objection that the people are unfit to govern themselves,
and
1
In Knight’s Prose Works of W. Wordsworth, vol. i, pp. 1-27
a
Cf. Political Justice, vol. ii, bk. 5, ch. ii.
26l
described
ve here see him wrestling with the difficulties
.n The Prelude Book X.
,
This was the period when any
sanguine view of human nature and of human capacity
for freedom and self-rule seemed refuted by
the present
fact of the Terror. Wordsworth admits that probably
every European state is so corrupt that if the original
power of the people should be restored only a change of
tyranny would result*. But what is accountable for this
state of affairs? Not human nature, but customs and
institutions, and in particular the institution of monarchy.
Here we find Wordsworth, like Holbach, Godwin, and
allthe party, refusing to see institutions as the expression
of something in human nature, even if it be only of its
wickedness; while Burke and the traditionalists on their
side over-emphasized the fixity of both, and in insisting
that institutions were fitted to man’s nature if not to his
reason, ignored the possibility that an evolving humanity
might have outgrown its institutions. As a proof of the
capacity of Church and King to debauch the popular mind,
Wordsworth asks: ‘left to the quiet exercise of their own
judgment, do you think that the people would have thought
it necessary to set fire to the house of
the philosophic
Priestley ?’, or that they would now be crying out for a war
which will only increase their already intolerable burdens ?
Like Godwin, he argues that a philosopher should look
beyond such considerations, and not labour to perpetuate
injustice. The terrific reservoir of guilt once emptied
— alas, not without violence and chaos —
the stream of
public affairs will steadily become clearer. In the republic
there will be no Machiavellian diplomacy; all will be con-
ducted in the daylight. It will no longer be the interest
of the governors to keep the people in ignorance, hence
‘a moderate portion of useful knowledge would be univers-
ally disseminated’. penal code, now full of dis-
The
proportionate penalties, will be reformed. As for property,
the present system of fixed inequality is pernicious, and
must go. In protecting property, our laws have forgotten
the property of a labourer, which is his power to support
Mature’ in wordsworth
himself and his family. Wordsworth deplores the im-
mense salaries annexed to useless and hereditary offices,
and points out the debasing effect of titles, stars, ribbons,
—
and garters all the apparatus of ‘nobility’, and the social
hypocrisy and snobbery to which it leads. In his perora-
tion he denounces the Bishop for having ‘aimed an arrow
at liberty and philosophy, the eyes of the human race’,
and for having tried to divert men from fruitful enquiry
by telling them that perfection has already been attained.
Finally, from the Bishop’s silence about the war, Words-
worth assumes that he supports ‘that infatuation which is
now giving up to the sword so large a portion of the poor,
and consigning the rest to the more slow and more painful
consumption of want’.
If any further proof were needed of the extent to which
\\ ordsworth had absorbed Political Justice one might take
these remarks from letters written in 1794 to Mathews, in
which not only the ideas but also the phraseology of
Godwin are echoed:
‘The enlightened friend of mankind should let slip no oppor-
tunity of explaining and enforcing those general principles of
social order which are applicable to all times and places. ... He
should diffuse by every method a knowledge of those rules of
political justice from which the further any government deviates
the more effectually must it defeat the object for which govern-
ment was ordained. ... You know perhaps already that I am of
that odious class of men called democrats, and of that class I shall
for ever continue. ... I disapprove of monarchical and aristo-
cratic governments, however modified. Hereditary distinctions
and privileged orders of every species I think must necessarily
counteract the progress of human improvement: hence it follows
that I am not amongst the admirers of the British Constitution .’ 1
The poem now and Sorrow was in part

entitled Guilt
composed during the summer of 1793, and is full of the
gloom of that troubled year. Busy with the thoughts just
summarized, and with other uneasiness in his heart,
Wordsworth watched from the Isle of Wight in July the
1
Cf. Harper’s Life, vol. i, pp. 242-4.
263
naval preparations against France, and the sound of the
sunset cannon filled him with ‘melancholy forebodings'.
Afterwards, when he was wandering over Salisbury Plain,
the sight of Stonehenge made him think of old, unhappy,
far-off things, and he wondered whether the ancient savage
rites had caused as much suffering as the wars of modern
times. These thoughts, mingling with a story he had
heard some time before (that of the ‘Female Vagrant’),
were the origin of the poem, of which *the main purpose
was ‘to expose the vices of the penal code and the cala-
mities of war, as they affect individuals’
1
— particularly
the poor. The poem as we now have it has undergone
successive revisions, and & comparison between Guilt and
Sorrow as published in 1842 with that portion printed as
The Female Vagrant in Lyrical Ballads shows that it was
precisely the most ‘Godwinian’ passages which Words-
worth softened down. A returned sailor is shown driven
to crime, and a soldier’s widow to destitution, after the
American War, and Wordsworth deploys all his rhetoric
to paint the horrors of war and the callousness of society
towards those whose lives it has ruined. The Vagrant is
made to exclaim,
Or in the streets and walks where proud men are,
Better our dying bodies to obtrude,
Than dog-like, wading of war,
at the heels
Protract a curst existence, with the brood
That lap (their very nourishment!) their brothers* blood.
— a description of soldiering which was omitted from all
editions after 1 800. A band of gypsies are represented as

the first to treat the Vagrant kindly on her return (compare
the highway-robbers’ entertainment of Caleb Williams
after his escape from prison). In The Female Vagrant the
beginning of all the woman’s woes is the tyranny of a
greedy landlord who buys out the neighbouring cottagers
and persecutes those who, like her father, refuse ‘the
proffered gold’; while in Guilt and Sorrow this is sum-
1 Letter to Wrangham, Nov. 20, 1795. Harper’s Life , vol. i, p. 272.

264
—
‘NATURE* IN WORDSWORTH
marized as ‘severe mischance and cruel wrong’. Origin-
ally, if the letter to Wrangham may
be credited, the poem
must have been meant to end in an indictment of capital
punishment, whereas the revised version ends incon-
gruously with the sailor’s submission to it as a religious
expiation.
Two other poems composed at the end of this period
may be briefly noted, both of which reflect the same God-
winian humanitarianism, and imply bitter criticism of the
social system. The first is The Convict published in ,
Lyrical Ballads and never reprinted by Wordsworth. It

illustrates one of the main themes of Political "Justice and of
Caleb Williams —
the cruelty and injustice of the penal
laws. Two points are relevant: first, the original version
of the poem, which appeared in the Morning Post of
December 14, 1797, contained these two stanzas
When from the dark Synod, or blood-reeking field
To his chamber the Monarch is led.
All soothers of sense their soft virtue shall yield
And silent attention shall pillow his head.
If the less guilty Convict a moment would doze
And oblivion his tortures appease,
On the iron that galls him his limbs must repose,
In the damp-dropping vault of disease 1 .
A reference to this poem as appeared in Lyrical Ballads

it
shows that although the contrast between monarch and

convict is retained, its sting has been lost through the
omission of the Godwinian imputation of greater guilt to
the monarch. (The vapidity of this solemn doggerel com-
pels the passing remark that it is not through the God-
winian fire and whirlwind that Wordsworth’s true voice is
heard.) Secondly, Godwin’s proposal to substitute trans-
portation and a fresh start in life for penal servitude and
death is embodied in the last verse. The other poem I
referred to The Ruined Cottage or the story of Margaret,
is
,
also composed at this time, though now to be found

1 Cf. Harper’s Lifey vol. i, p. 301, and Lyrical Ballads (1798), p. 198.
265
3 J

in Book
of The ExcursionI This story bears some re- .
semblance to that of Guilt and Sorrow in that it tells of

the misery befalling the wife of a man who enlists in
desperation and leaves her destitute. It may be classed
with that group of Wordsworth’s works which deal, in a

Godwinian spirit, with the evils of war, though Godwin is
here but a shadowy recollection, and Wordsworth has
already begun to write with his ‘noble bareness’. own
It must be remembered that a considerable part of this
body of notions was retained by Wordsworth (in a modi-
fied form) to the end of his life.
1
It is not from the
republican, humanitarian, pacifist Godwin that he records
his deliverance in Book XI of The Prelude nor is it these ,
teachings that he renounces in The Borderers and in

Lyrical Ballads. In i 804 he could still say of the whole
system of Godwin that it was
A noble aspiration!^*/ I feel
(Sustained by worthier as by wiser thoughts)
The aspiration, nor shall ever cease
To feel it. . . [The Prelude, bk. xi, 255.
.
Throughout 1793 and 1794 he was clinging desperately

to his faith in France as the embodiment of the aspiration,
and suffered the double misery (so vividly described in
Book X) of resisting patriotic sentiment and of seeming
to condone the Terror. After a time, he hoped, the viol-
ence would abate —
if only it were left to itself. But the
dynasts would not leave it to itself, and they were therefore
morally accountable for the excesses of 1793-94, and the
endless war which followed. Wordsworth loved England,
but at this time of interference abroad and persecution of
liberals at home he was compelled to accept Godwin’s view
of patriotism as a specious illusion. The death of Robes-
pierre (July 28, 1794) revived his hopes for a while, so
that we are brought to the threshold of 1795 before we
1
See, on this subject, The Later Wordsworth, by E. C. Batho (Cambridge,
1
93 )> e -g • PP- 196 ff-> and p. 200 (‘I have a great deal of the Chartist in
me’).
266
;
can be sure that he had renounced France in favour of the
whole Godwinian doctrine. This means that he was only
under the full dominion of Godwin for the first six months
of that year, for by September 1795 h a d already
realized some of the dangers of his doctrine. What were
these teachings which he adopted in disillusionment and
rejected again so soon? One would suppose, from the
brevity of their hold upon him, that they were theories
essentially hostile to his inmost nature, and that is pre-
cisely what we find* As suggested above, what tem-
porarily attracted him were the ‘speculative schemes that
promised to abstract the hopes of man out of his feelings’
it Was Godwin’s abstract individualism, which made ‘our
Reason’s naked self the object of its fervour’. He sought

escape not only in Godwin’s abstract world, but even in
mathematics, ‘where the disturbances of space and time
find no admission’.
This brief phase of Wordsworth’s development marks
a temporary denial of his normal mood, which was one of
trust in instinctive and spontaneous living, and of con-
fidence in what Keats calls ‘the holiness of the heart’s
affections’. Up to a point, ‘Nature’ had seemed to be
realizing itself in the course of public events — the ideal
expressing itself in the actual. When
events became too
much for him he for a time rejected the actual, and took
refuge in pure abstraction. This amounted to an ad-
mission that ideal and actual belonged to separate regions,
and for Wordsworth, in whom distrust of abstractions
was innate, this could only be the first stage of a return to
the actual. And the ‘actual’ to which he did in fact return
was ‘Nature’, now finally identified with the English land-
scape to which he had long ago dedicated his heart. By
the summer of 1795 the effort to rise superior to ‘in-
firmities of nature, time and place’ had landed him in
moral scepticism, and he reached ‘the crisis of that strong
disease’ in which he ‘yielded up moral questions in
despair’. Recovering from this crisis in the congenial
atmosphere of Racedown, he composed The Borderers ,
267
— ]

which may be taken to represent his convalescence, and
which embodies his verdict upon Godwinian ethics. He
wrote this tragedy chiefly to show that the attempt to live
by the naked reason, though it might be a noble aspira-
tion, is apt to produce monsters rather than supermen.
His own experience had taught him that the process
of dragging all precepts and maxims, to the bar of reason
led to moral chaos; might not the heart, then, be a safer
guide than the head? When we strip off the tradi-
tional and inhibitions (‘prejudices’ though
affections
they may be called), what happens? the reason is left
supreme ? No, the passions gain
the privilege to work

And never hear the sound of their own names
[The Prelude , bk. xi, 232 .
reason becoming their slave and not their master. In the

1842 note to The Borderers , Wordsworth says that he
wrote the tragedy while he had fresh in his memory
examples of this process from the events of the French
Revolution, where sin and crime had been seen to result
from the most exalted principles. The interest of The
Borderers centres in the complex character of Oswald,
Wordsworth’s Godwinian Iago. His prefatory essay,
long mislaid and only republished in 1926 by Professor
de Selincourt, 1 is entirely devoted to a subtle analysis of
this character (no doubt he realized that he had not fully
succeeded in exhibiting it dramatically). Oswald is a
young man of acute intellect who uses his reason to
rise superior to conventional morality, and Wordsworth
wishes to show that this superiority may quite easily be-
come the source of evil. At the beginning of his career
Oswald has been betrayed into the commission of a terrible
crime, that of leaving a man to starve upon a desert island,
on suspicions which he afterwards finds to be groundless.
Instead of repenting, he ban.shes remorse by adopting
1
In The Nineteenth Century, Nov. 1926, p. 723.
268
, —
a moral sophistry which condemns all human feelings
as weaknesses. ‘His feelings are interested in making
him a moral sceptic*; ‘he disguises from himself his
own malignity by assuming the character of a specu-
lator in morals’. ‘Remorse’, he exclaims,
Remorse
It cannot live with thought; think on, think on.
And it will die .
1
He examines established opinions, and rightly finding

many of them unreasonable, he is confirmed in his sense
of superiority. Oswald exerts his intellect and asserts his
moral freedom by poisoning the mind of Marmaduke with
an atrocious story about his betrothed, and thereby leading
him virtually to repeat his own crime. In so doing, he is
not acting as a disinterested Godwinian who desires to
confer upon his friend the blessings of moral emancipa-
tion. Heacting from the more complex motives of an
is
—
Iago -from and indeed ‘motiveless
pride, restlessness,
malignity’, and though Wordsworth means his behaviour
to illustrate the abuse and not the true intention of God-
winism, he also means that it is a perversion into which
that philosophy easily degenerates. The general moral,
Wordsworth says explicitly, is ‘to show the dangerous use
which may be made of reason when a man has committed
a great crime’, and also to show ‘that from abuses inter-
woven with the texture of society a bad man may be
furnished with sophisms in support of his crimes which it
would be difficult to answer’. The new philosophy ex-
poses ordinary unsuspecting folk to exploitation by un-
scrupulous sophists.
It was thus that Wordsworth was preparing, in The
Borderers , the foundations of the faith of his great decade.
Once he could convince himself that pure intellectualism
in morals was more likely to produce or justify crime than
virtue, then with what ‘deep power of joy’ he could regain
1 The Borderers 1560.

269
—
a ‘saving intercourse’ with his own past, and allow himself
to be led, by Dorothy, and by ‘Nature’s self’
back through opening day

To those sweet counsels between head and heart
Whence grew that genuine knowledge, fraught with peace.
[The Prelude bk.
,
xi, 35 2 -j
William Hale White (‘Mark Rutherford’), a lesser-

known but true Wordsworthian, has written with insight
about Wordsworth’s recovery from Godwinism. Words-
worth’s temporary subjugation by Political Justice he sug- ,
gests, was due, not to pure intellectual conviction, but to

that ‘hypochondriacal graft in his nature’ which was re-
marked more than once by Coleridge, and which must
have held him most strongly in those unhappy years from
1793 to 1795. ‘Certain beliefs’, he writes, ‘at any rate
with men of Wordsworth’s stamp, are sickness’, and ‘with
appear’; and again

—
the restoration of vitality and the influx of joy they dis-
‘There is no evidence that Words-
worth attempted any reasoned confutation of Political
Justice. It was falsified in him by Racedown, by better
health, by the society of his beloved sister, and finally by
the friendship with Coleridge’. 1 Mark Rutherford’s
understanding of Wordsworth’s case was due to his own
experience, for he had known himself (and has described
with a power like Bunyan’s in Grace Abounding ) what it
was to be pierced ‘with the fang of some monomaniacal
idea which cannot be wrenched out’, and he had also
known sometimes how, when ‘the clouds rolled off with
the south-west wind into detached, fleecy masses, separated
by liquid blue gulfs, in which were sown the stars’, there
would come ‘a kind of flush in the brain and a momentary
relief’, together with ‘a sense of the infinite, extinguishing
1 More rages from a Journal, p. 214.
27O
:
all mean cares’. 1
In any attempt to understand what
‘Nature’ meant to Wordsworth due weight should be
given, I think, to the healing power of the impersonal over
a sick mind. It was when the ‘fretful stir Unprofitable,
and the fever of the world’ had long ‘hung upon the
beatings of my heart’ that Wordsworth turned to the
sylvan Wye, and found ‘for this uneasy heart of ours a
never-failing principle of joy’. Wordsworth speaks so
often of ‘dim sadness and blind thoughts’, of ‘listlessness
from vain perplexity’ and ‘the heavy weight of many a
weary day Not mine’, and on the other hand of ‘tranquil
restoration’ and ‘renovation’ —
indeed, ‘Despondency
Corrected is so much his central theme
’
that we are left —
in no doubt upon this point. He found, amongst the
‘calm oblivious tendencies of Nature’, both stimulus and
anodyne
I well remember that those very plumes.
Those weeds, and the high spear-grass on that wall,
By mist and silent rain-drops silvered o’er,
As once I passed, into my heart conveyed
So still an image of tranquillity,
So calm and still, and looked so beautiful
Amid the uneasy thoughts which filled my mind.
That what we feel of sorrow and despair
From ruin and from change, and all the grief
That passing shows of Being leave behind.
Appeared an idle dream 2 .
%
made
1
795
*
of the French cause had
later sinkings’
it vain to keep up any longer the unprofitable strife,
and vain too (as he probably felt with relief) to torment

himself with further thoughts of duty to Annette. With
Raisley Calvert’s legacy as an economic deliverance, with
Dorothy, with Racedown, and ‘long months of ease and
undisturbed delight’ in prospect, he could forget France,
and Godwin, and ‘all the ways of men, so vain and
1
Autobiography of Mark Rutherford, pp. 98, 95, 37.
2
The Excursion , bk. i, 942.
271
—

melancholy’. Like his own Ruth (if one may adapt
the lines)
Among the fields he breathed again:
The master-current of his brain
Ran permanent and free
that ‘current’ which was native to the hills,and had only

lost its direction for a while in political and emotional
meanderings. It is perhaps worthy of remark that those
who have felt most powerfully the healing influence of
‘Nature’ have often been those who were most subject, in
their ordinary moments, to gloom and nervous depression.
One thinks of Cowper, and Rousseau, and Gray, Words-
worth himself, Tennyson, Arnold, and Mark Rutherford.
Moreover, remarking that all these men belong to the later
eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, we may con-
jecture that it was owing to the commanding authority of
the idea of Nature at that time, as well to the more obvious
sanative virtues of the open-air, that they could find amongst
fields and mountains a substitute religion — even, as with
Cowper and Rutherford, a cure for religion, or at least for
religious melancholy. That ease of heart which religion
—
had formerly given which a Bunyan could find at the
foot of the Cross — could now best be derived from ‘the
silent looks of happy things, Or flowing from the universal
face Of earth and sky’. Wordsworth says of his Wanderer
(i.e. himself) that though he had early learnt to reverence
the Bible, yet ‘in the mountains did he feel his faith . .
.,
nor did he believe, — he saw'. What Wordsworth saw in

mountains was due, most assuredly, to what his eyes
brought means of seeing; but we may also say that neither
he nor others of his time might have lifted up their eyes
to the hills for such help if the eighteenth century had
not so unfalteringly directed them towards the visible
universe as the clearest evidence of God.
It is sometimes argued that Wordsworth’s belief in the
moral value of the love of fine scenery is a fallacy; that
communion with mountains does not generate any ‘pure
272
principle of love ,
butonly a form of self-glorification,
is
leading to an anti-social habit of mind and producing the
egotistical sublime’. Hazlitt remarked with bitterness
that Wordsworth himself could sympathize
only with
objects that could enter into no sort of competition with
him. From another angle Mr Aldous Huxley attacks
Wordsworth’s Nature-religion as the product of ‘the cosy
sublimities of Westmorland’, and reminds us that Nature
in the Tropics is apt to produce worship
of the devil rather
than of God. And Mr Empson can dismiss Wordsworth
with the remark that Wordsworth frankly had no inspira-
tion other than his own use, when a boy, of
the mountains
as a totem or father-substitute’. Wuh all
these and other
reasons for suspecting that Wordsworth’s particular faith
or philosophy is now inaccessible to many, the
question
arises once more, can we separate his ‘poetry’
from his
‘philosophy’? Can we say* with Matthew Arnold, that
the ‘poetry is the reality, and the ‘philosophy the illusion
’
’
?
In saying this, Arnold must have been referring only
to
Wordsworth’s passages of explicit moralizing (such as led
Leslie Stephen to praise him as a systematic ethical
philo-
sopher), for he himself believed in Wordsworth’s central
doctrine, namely that ‘the source of joy from which he
draws’ (Nature) ‘is the truest and most unfailing source
of joy accessible to man Arnold praises Wordsworth
.
for ‘the extraordinary power with which, in case after case,

he shows us this joy, and renders it so as to make us share
it. But suppose that, lacking Wordsworth’s sense of the
sacredness of the created world, of the dignity of the
human spirit, and of the affinity between Nature and the
soul, we are incapable of sharing it? ‘How shall
he fully
enjoy Wordsworth’, said Coleridge (in Table Talk) ‘who
has never meditated on the truths which Wordsworth
has
—
wedded to immortal verse?’ or, shall we say, for whom
they have ceased to be truths ? I do not propose here to
enter into the highly complicated question of ‘poetry
and
beliefs’, but it may perhaps be hazarded that
what most
readers want from a poet is his ‘experience’, not his
be-
s 273
to be
thoughtheir appreciation of him is likely
liefs,
greater if they also regard his beliefs —

however secondary
in interest —
as being ‘true’. Many readers, I think, are
now retaining their respect for Wordsworth by trying to
separate, in his poetry, what they feel to
be genuine
dated
‘experience’ from what they feel to be false or
belief. They are virtually using the distinction made by
Dr Richards in reference to the poetry of D. H. Lawrence:
is genuine (it is felt) when he
is feeling
Wordsworth
something’, and often relatively false, for us, when he is
‘feeling that so-and-so’. Can we, then, by separating

experience from intellectual superstructure, detect where
Wordsworth has ‘felt something’ and communicated it,
and define what it is that he has felt? To answer this
question fully would take us far beyond the limits of the
present study. I can only indicate a possible method

of
procedure, namely to make a collection of the passages in
which Wordsworth seems to be communicating imagina-
tive experience, and then by collating them to
discover, as
far as may be, what was the quality of that

experience.
I think we should find that the experiences preceded the
beliefs which Wordsworth later (with Coleridge’s assist-
ance) elaborated out of them, and that they can therefore
be shared by the reader for whom those beliefs are no
longer ‘immortal truths’. Let us take a few examples;
first, the familiar episodes from Book I of The
Prelude :
(a) Iheard among the solitary hills

Low breathings coming after me, and sounds
Of undistinguishable motion, steps
Almost as silent as the turf they trod. [3 2I d
(b) Suspended by the blast that blew amain,

Shouldering the naked crag, oh, at that time
While on the perilous ridge I hung alone,
With what strange utterance did the loud dry wind
Blow through my ear! the sky seemed not a sky
—
Of earth and with what motion moved the clouds!
[334-]
274
:
M a
but after I had seen
T hat spectacle, for many days, my brain
Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
Of unknown modes of being ; o'er my thoughts
There hung a darkness, call it solitude.
Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes
Remained, no pleasant images of trees.
Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields;
But huge and mighty forms, that do not live
Like living men, moved slowly through the mind
By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.
[ 390 .]
With these may
be taken the passage from Book XII,
which commemorates an experience of similar quality.
Ihe child is lost on the
and is suddenly terrified
hills,
by coming upon a place where a murderer had been
hanged in chains, and seeing his name carved in huge
letters in the grass:
(d) A casual glance had shown them, and I fled.

Faltering and faint, and ignorant of the road:
Then, reascending the bare common, saw
A naked pool that lay beneath the hills,
The beacon on the summit, and, more near,
A girl, who bore a pitcher on her head,
And seemed with difficult steps to force her way
Against the blowing wind. It was, in truth.
An ordinary sight; but I should need
Colours and words that are unknown to man,
To paint the visionary dreariness
Which, while I round for my lost guide,
looked all
Invested moorland waste, and naked pool,
The beacon crowning the lone eminence.
The female and her garments vexed and tossed
By the strong wind. r
2
In all these recollections there is one common

experience
the child is startled by terror or suspense into a
heightened
state of consciousness, through which he sees surrounding
objects in a preternatural light. It was not always fear
which worked the tnagic; the coarser pleasures of my
275
—
boyish days and their glad animal movements could also
do it, as when in skating
with the din
M Smitten, the precipices rang aloud;
The leafless trees and every icy crag
Tinkled while far distant hills
like iron;
Into the tumult sent an alien sound
Of melancholy not unnoticed, while the stars
Eastward were sparkling clear, and in the west
The orange sky of evening died away.
^ 439.]
Or the more rarefied excitement of mimicking the owls

across the lake, and when a pause of silence came
(/) Then sometimes, in that silence while he hung

Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise
Has carried far into his heart the sound
Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind.
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,
Itswoods, and that uncertain heaven, received
Into the bosom of the steady lake. rgk. v> 364.]
There is no reason to suppose that what the boy Words-

worth felt on these occasions arose from anything but that
simple ‘animism V as W. H. Hudson has called it, ‘that
sense of something in Nature which to the enlightened or
civilized man is not there, and in the civilized man’s child,
if it be admitted that he has it at all, is but a faint survival
of a phase of the primitive mind’, and which in Words-
1
worth (as in Hudson) persisted throughout life. So far

no question of intellectual superstructure or belief has
arisen. But when we ask why Wordsworth valued these
recollections so highly, or what were his explicit reasons
for commemorating them, we at once encounter such
beliefs. We find the primitive animism being refined into
pantheism; and we find that ‘Nature’ has been acting as
a sort of glorified parent or schoolmistress. He gives
‘thanks to the means which Nature deigned to employ’
1 Far Away and Long Ago (Hudson’s Prelude ’), pp.
‘
r.24 ff.
276
:
‘nature* IN WORDSWORTH
—the discipline of fear
and joy through which her benign
Hartleian curriculum has been fulfilled.
The first three
passages quoted above are given by him as examples of
Nature s ‘ministries’ and ‘interventions’, whereby she
re-
proved his childish delinquencies. It is at this point that
we egin to see the cleavage between
experience and be-
le * w hat matters, for us (and, we feel, for
Wordsworth
too), simply that he should have had these
is
moments of
imaginative energy, in which the earth and
every common
sight were apparelled— not only in
celestial light, but also
sometimes in visionary dreariness, and that he
should have
been able, as few others have done, to
remember and com-
municate them. The theory about Nature’s
Education
no doubt attributable to Hartley via Coleridge,
can be dis-
regarded we will. But Wordsworth himself gives other
if
interpretations of his own experiences,
other reasons for
cherishing his recollections, and some of
them give us still
urther confidence in our winnowing
process. One of
them is given at the beginning of the passage
from which
extract (
d ) above is taken
There are in our existence spots of time
Which with distinct
pre-eminence retain
A renovating virtue, whence ... our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repaired.
[Bk. xii, 208 .]
Certain recollections have the power to evoke
in him the
dormant imaginative energy, so that he can literally
fetch
invigorating thoughts from former years’
[Bk. I 620]
At the time when he is writing The Prelude he
appears
already as the historian, rather than the
present possessor
ot the visionary power. The regular action of the world
has already had its effect, and he is turning
for stimulus to
the past. After he has drawn his moral
from passage
r & (J)
v
he continues:
The
days gone by
Return upon me
almost from the dawn
Of life: the hiding-places of man’s power
Open; I would approach them, but they close.
277
:

I see by glimpses now; when age comes on,
May scarcely see at all; and I would give.
While yet we may, as far as words can give,

enshrining,
Substance and life to what I feel,
Such is my hope, the spirit of the Past
For future restoration. . ..
[Bk. xu, 277.]
By the time that this passage was

composed (probably
1 802) Wordsworth
was fighting a rearguard action against
matter-of-factness
the adult consciousness, against the
irresistible tendency
in himself, and against Nature’s own
to turn the enchanted moonbeams
of Alfoxden into the
light of common day. He wrote The Prelude chiefly
his early ‘visitings of
in order to ‘rescue from decay’
the composi-
imaginative power’ and to brace himself for
tion of his great unwritten
philosophical poem. Here
too no unacceptable beliefs are
involved; Wordsworth
was an imaginative child; as a man he can best revive
his flagging energies by evoking past
moments of creative-
ness; and, as all his deepest emotions
have been associated
he can best
with natural objects, it is through them that
recapture what was so fugitive.
But Wordsworth has a further point to make, hy w
these recollections invigorating ? By the
time that
were
had
he was ready to answer this question Wordsworth
acquired, partly through conversation and
collaboration
with Coleridge and partly from reflexion on his own

experi-
the relation-
ence, a set of theories about the imagination,
ship ’of the Mind with Nature, and the
psychology of
poetic creation. In the light of these theories he offers
the following explanation
This efficacious spirit chiefly lurks
Among those passages of life that give
Profoundest knowledge to what point and how
The mind is lord and master, outward sense
The obedient servant of her will.
[Bk. xii, 219.]
In the ceaseless interplay of Mind and Nature sometimes

278
the one and sometimes the other predominant.
is He
speaks of two main states of his own soul, one the un-
creative, in which he is under the ‘despotism of the eye’,
and the mind is ‘prostrate, overborne’, a mere passive
‘pensioner on outward forms’, the other the creative, in
which ‘the mind is lord and master’, and through its own
‘plastic power’ can transfigure without distorting all it
contemplates, adding the ‘visionary’ quality to natural
objects, darkening the ‘midnight storm’, or adding ‘new
splendour to the setting sun. Passage (</) from Book XII
is of particular interest here, because
Wordsworth inter-
prets the ‘visionary dreariness’ episode entirely in the light
of this theory, and we are not confused, as in Book I, by
the suggestion that Nature is acting in a disciplinary way.
At first sight not too obvious how the recollection
it is
of the pool, the beacon, and the girl with a pitcher can
be so^ invigorating, or can illustrate the principle of the
mind’s predominance over the senses. But, of course, the
clue is in the visionary’ quality of the scene;
surprised
by fright, just as when he had been bird’s-nesting or steal-
ing the boat, his mind had been aroused, and had impressed
its own mood upon the ‘vulgar forms of
present things’.
Later, when ‘in the blessed hours of early love’ he revisits
the same scene with Mary Hutchinson, there is shed upon
pool and beacon another sort of light, ‘a spirit of pleasure
and youth’s golden gleam’; but his joy even in this is
enhanced by the old remembrances, and by ‘the power
they had left behind’.
So feeling comes in aid

Of feeling, and diversity of strength
Attends us, if but once we have been strong.
[Bk. xii, 269.]
To have been ‘strong’ means, here, to have been imagina-

tively creative, to have had the power of conferring
the
visionary qualityupon an ordinary sight. With his unique
gift for reading the palimpsest of his own memory,
he
remembers how he had felt as a frightened child, and how
279
the scene had looked in the light of that feeling, and
recognizes that then, unknown to himself, he had exercised
the modifying power which he has since come to regard as
the master-faculty. And so infrequent have the moments
of vision become
— ‘ by glimpses now; when age
I see
—
comes on, may scarcely see at all* that he now cherishes
with a miser’s care each recollected ‘spot of time’ in which
he had been ‘strong’. Not that he was unable still to
exercise the power: in a poem like Resolution and Inde-
pendence we can see the transforming process actually at
work, as the figure of the old leech-gatherer passes suc-
cessively into stone, sea-beast, and cloud, and finally
evaporates into a spirit of lonely places. But none the less
he knows that a glory is passing from the earth, and he
comes more and more to feel the superiority of the child’s
endowment over the man’s:
Oh mystery of man, from what a depth
!
Proceed thy honours. I am lost, but see

In simple childhood something of the base
On which thy greatness stands.
[Bk. xii, 272.]
The child possesses what the adult is toiling to find, and

so becomes for him the type and symbol of creative
strength. ‘To that dream-like vividness and splendour
which invest objects of sight in childhood, everyone, I
believe, if he would look back, could bear testimony’, says
the prefatory note to the ‘Immortality’ Ode. In his own
childhood, he there further tells us, his mind was so pre-
dominant over the senses that he had frequently to grasp
at a tree or stone to rescue him from the ‘abyss of idealism’,
and assure himself of their existence outside himself.
Later, he has had reason to deplore, as we all have, ‘a
subjugation of an opposite character’; the world has re-
sisted the plastic power more and more stubbornly; and
with the fading of the vision has come the need to cherish
those ‘shadowy recollections’ which are the ‘fountain-
light of all our day’. We
may recoil, as even Coleridge
280
;
did, from some of Wordsworth’s idealizations of the child
(‘mighty prophet, seer blest’, etc.), but in what has just
been summarized there is otherwise little but introspec-
tion and accurate psychology. Both as child and as man
Wordsworth possessed unusual sensibility, and had
associated his inner life,' far more than most men, with
natural objects; but no ‘dated’ beliefs are involved, and
nothing which need antagonize a modern reader.
It would appear, then, that as long as Wordsworth is
communicating experiences of this kind, and not merely
discussing or rationalizing them, his poetry can still be
read with unabated interest. Sometimes he is doing both
at once, and sometimes, again, one can see the ‘join where ’
an ethical superstructure has been cemented on to an

imaginative foundation (the ending of Resolution and
Independence for example). One may perhaps venture to
,
guess that the elements in him which will now be found

least congenial by most people are precisely those for
which he was once most valued: his
‘cheerful faith, that all that we behold is full of blessings’
optimism — his
his ‘spilt religion’ (in T. E. Hulme’s phrase):
Far and wide the clouds were touched,

And in their silent faces could he read
Unutterable love. . . .
Rapt into still communion that transcends

The imperfect offices of prayer and praise. . . .
[The Excursion , bk. i, 203-15.]

(I include these extracts with hesitation, for I think their
magnificence must be acknowledged by the most hardened
unbeliever in ‘natural religion’); his belief in the moral
influence of Nature:
But he had felt the power
Of Nature, and already was prepared,
By his intense conceptions, to receive
Deeply the lesson deep of love, which he,
Whom Nature, by whatever means, has taught
To feel intensely, cannot but receive.
[The Excursion bk. i, 191.] ,
28 I
:

or,
Thus deeply drinking-in the soul of things

We shall be wise perforce.
[The Excursion, bk. iv, 1264.J
and perhaps his Coleridgean belief in the bond between

Nature and the soul of man
How exquisitely . . .
The external World is fitted to the Mind;

[Preface to The Excursion, 63 ff.J
— all these, it will be observed, being examples of ‘feelings

that so-and-so’. (I exclude his later religious orthodoxy,
for that not under discussion.)

is
If, with these considerations in mind, we now return in
imagination to 1 795-8, the period of Wordsworth’s vital

transition, we shall perhaps be able to recapture something
of the meaning which ‘Nature’ had for him then, what-
ever it may mean or not mean to us now. Let us remind
ourselves, first, of all that he had passed through in the
years 1790-5, of the emotional and intellectual distress he
had experienced. When
he came to Racedown he was in
the condition of that youth to whom he wrote advice in
the Letter to The Friend (1809), unsettled, perplexed, and
adrift from his moorings. His greatest needs were to
recover contact with his own past self and to resolve the
inner discords set up in him by the revolutionary period.
And his peaceful retirement wfith Dorothy, who gave him
eyes and ears, and an ‘‘exquisite regard for common
-
things’, satisfied both these needs. He seeks Nature

now, ‘not as in the hour of thoughtless youth’, not for the
sake of the old animistic thrills and the glad animal move- ‘
ments ’, but with the longing of a sick man for the sources
of health. His dealings with Nature are now those of a
man who has been depressed ‘by false opinion or con-
tentious thought’, who has lived ‘amid the many shapes
of joyless daylight’, and known ‘the dreary intercourse of
daily life’. It is in this spiritual context, and after such
282
knowledge, that Nature acquires for him her great sooth-
ing and cheering power, and revives for him with new
significance those dormant emotions which have been
linked with her by long association. Thus Nature’s heal-
ing power, which for some may be merely an outworn
doctrine, was for him a fact of experience, and the rapture
of that experience, which glows through Tinterrt Abbey and
much of his best poetry, can be caught by any reader,
without reference to the ethical and philosophical theories
which Wordsworth evolved from it. Two main charac-
teristics of Wordsworth’s poetry can now perhaps be
viewed with somewhat fuller understanding: his rever-
ence for childhood, and his passion for mergence with
‘mute insensate things’. I will comment briefly on these.
On the passage already referred to, W. H. Hudson
makes these relevant observations:
‘It is difficult, impossible I am
any one to recall his
told, for
boyhood exactly as it was. It could not have been what it seems
to the adult mind, since we cannot escape from what we are, how-
ever great our detachment may be; and in going back we must
take our present selves with us: the mind has taken a different
colour, and this is thrown back upon our past. The poet has
reversed the true order of things when he tells us that we come
of glory, which melt away and are
trailing clouds lost as we pro-
ceed on our journey .’ 1
Perhaps it is the adult nostalgia which really imparts the

glory and the freshness to recollections of early childhood
— the celestial light being, in truth, the symbol of a yearn-
ing for the pre-adult consciousness. Early experiences
came back to Wordsworth with a new intensity when he
recollected them in the context I have sketched; now that
he sees it across a waste of unprofitable years he realizes
his own childhood as a ‘golden time’, a ‘visible scene, on
which the sun is shining’. Moreover, his childhood’s
experiences are now re-interpreted in the light of the
philosophy which he is building up out of his return to
1 Far Away and Long Ago, pp. 225-6.
283
Nature, and its accompanying emotions; he is forming
a system of beliefs about the imagination ‘the vision and
—
the faculty divine’ —
and each imaginative moment is wel-
comed, each past one remembered, as an evidence, not
only of his own continued vitality, but of the sublime
power and dignity of the human soul.
A comparison between the ‘spots of time’ passage in
The Prelude and the ‘Immortality’ Ode provides a use-
ful illustration of the contrast in Wordsworth between
‘experience’ and ‘superstructure’ — if we will, between
‘truth’ and ‘falsification’ —and raises further questions of
importance. In the Prelude passage, as we saw, Words-
worth not only attempts to communicate one of his vital
experiences (with only partial success: ‘I should need
colours and words that are unknown to man, to paint the
visionary dreariness’), but also makes a serious attempt
to explain, in purely scientific and psychological terms,
the importance of the experience. Wordsworth seems to
have felt that this account was ‘true’ to his experience;
indeed, doubt whether he could have yielded full intel-
I
lectual assent to any other sort of account. In The Prelude

he expressly disclaims any attempt to ground a mystical
faith on such experiences.
I guess not what of Being past

this tells
Nor what it augurs of the life to come,
he writes (Book V, 510); and his reference to the

isthmus, which our spirits cross
In progress from their native continent
To earth and human life.
[Bk. v, 536.]
seems clearly made in full consciousness that this is ‘mere’

metaphor. What, then, is to be said of the Ode ? I think
it must be allowed that the Ode is greatly superior, as
poetry, to its ‘psychological’ counterpart in The Prelude

(Book XII), and yet at first sight it seems to contain a
serious falsification of Wordsworth’s essential experience.
This falsification comes in with the mythology of the Ode
‘ ’
284
which, by shifting back all the ‘glory’ into pre-existence
and super-nature, forces Wordsworth to degrade earth into
a foster-mother, and Nature into a medium to which the
heaven-born visitant is gradually subdued. Is not this a
denial of his most central certainties, that Nature needs no
glory from ‘worlds not quickened by the sun’, and that
the child is in fact exquisitely fitted to its environment by
those firstborn affinities that fit
Our new existence to existing things.

[The Prelude bk. , i, 555.]
has been plausibly argued 1 that if the Ode is admitted
It
to be finer poetry than most of The Prelude it must neces-
,
sarily be in some sense ‘truer’. And yet the semi-Platonic

machinery of pre-existence, reincarnation, and recollection
by flashes seems intrusive, and foreign to Wordsworth;
and we know from the Fenwick note that he used it with
no more than a momentary suspension of disbelief, and for
a ‘merely poetic’ purpose. The Ode, in fact, has the air
of being a departure from Wordsworth’s general practice
of making verse deal boldly with substantial things; he
appears here to have admitted what he normally eschews
—a piece of mythology which intervenes between him and
his object. I think, however, that we can trust our sense
of the poem’s superiority, indeed of its unique position

among Wordsworth’s works, while granting that he has
departed from his customary asceticism. For what, after
all, is the real subject of the poem? What is it that he is
trying — in this case successfully — to communicate ? Not
one of the ‘spots of time’; not a particular mystical or
imaginative moment. The poem is an impassioned cele-
bration of childhood as the period of most intense vitality,
written by a man who realizes that ‘the hiding-places of
man’s power’ are closing. It derives its passionate quality
from a sense of loss and alienation, in spite of the claims
of the concluding lines. What Wordsworth had to express
1
By Prof. G. Wilson Knight, in an article in the Toronto University
1
Magazine (alas, full early lost, and fruitlessly deplored
!), of which the
’
substance, he tells me, appears in his Christian Renaissance.
285
here was his sense of vast distance from the sources of
energy and vision. The ‘philosophic mind’ is but con-
solation; it is a poor substitute for the splendour in the
grass and glory in the flower. This sense of estrangement,
of loss, of subjugation by the adult consciousness and the
frost ofcustom, had become so insistent that Wordsworth
could only convey it by ascribing a supernatural endow-
ment to childhood, and a supernatural authority to the
surviving gleams that reached him through recollection.
He had written The Prelude in order to rescue from decay
the essential ‘spots of time’, but that work, both from its
great length and from the circumstance of its being written
for Coleridge, was inevitably couched in a discursive and
analytic style, and represents an effort to give the ‘philo-
sophical’ or ‘scientific’ account of his mind’s growth
(‘Not in a mystical and idle sense, But in the words of
—
Reason deeply weighed’ Book II, 230). But in the Ode
he gathers all his strength together, and in one concentrated
utterance bids farewell to the past which he has so care-
fully explored. What suffuses the Ode almost throughout
with unwonted power and warmth is, I think, this sense
that he is giving final and definitive expression to the most
poignant experience of his poetic life. He is not trying,
as often elsewhere, to convey the ineffable; he is lament-
ing his inability to experience it any more. This is partly
why the poem succeeds ; such sorrow can be uttered, while
the ineffable moments of vision can only be hinted at and
discussed. Moreover, the unique passion behind the Ode
has driven him to adopt, for once, a myth. It happened
that this particular one was available for him, and it was
free from the objectionable associations connected with
most of the classical machinery used by eighteenth century
poets. Itlooks as if Wordsworth had found in this
Platonic or Oriental fiction a symbolism which, though a
falsification of ‘psychological truth’, yet enabled him to
embody his experience objectively, and elevate it to a
degree of impersonality normally beyond his reach. For
by using it he has turned his personal experience into a
286
universal journey of man away from the East, and inland
from the sea. The comparative strength and concentra-
tion of the feeling behind this poem can be gauged by the
‘concreteness’ of its diction; the vagueness and abstract-
ness of the ‘psychological’ Prelude here gives place to
a profusion of precise images. In a word, he is creating
or ‘realizing’, not merely describing and analysing; he is
creating a sense of the splendour and inaccessibility of
childhood, when viewed, from within the ‘prison-house’,
by one who remembers how he felt, but can no longer
experience what he had felt.
But even though the Ode be his most ‘splendid’ poem,
its very uniqueness renders it not wholly characteristic of
him. We find the more typical ‘Wordsworthian’ quality
in those passages where he has recorded, not loss of vision,
but his more successful dealings with the world of eye and
ear. And it is here that we meet with the second charac-
teristic mentioned above: his passion for mergence with
impersonal things. As we have seen, his most urgent
needs, when he ‘returned to Nature’, were tranquillity
and restoration. And he could find these best by assimi-
lating himself and other men as closely as possible with
the landscape, and with the goings-on of the elements. He
could best forget his ‘old remembrances’ and ‘all the ways
of men, so vain and melancholy’ by fusing himself, and
mankind in general, with natural backgrounds and pro-
cesses. He loved to think of himself as ‘clothed with the
heavens and crowned with the stars’, and this explains his
need for solitude as a condition of inspiration. Mergence
of the human figure with Nature gave it that degree of
dignity, of separation from the mere social crowd, in
virtue of which alone it could become, for Wordsworth,
a worthy symbol of human life as he understood it. So
viewed, the figures are seen in abstraction from all that in
everyday humanity is disturbing, distressing, or unin-
teresting, and take on something of
the silence and the calm
Of mute insensate things.
287
Three Tears She Grew (from which this phrase is taken)
communicates with special force this passion for the fusion
of the human with the impersonal a passion which is —
concentrated, perhaps most intensely of all, in the ‘Sub-
lime Epitaph’:
Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course
With rocks, and stones, and trees.
But the same thing occurring constantly.

is I have re-
ferred already to the de-humanizing of the old man’s

figure in Resolution and Independence in The Thorn , again, ;
the finest passage is that in which the tragic figure comes

nearest to union with the elements:
And she is known to every star
And every wind that blows.
The Knight in Hartleap-Well is introduced to us riding

down from Wensley Moor
With the slow motion of a summer’s cloud.
Michael owes much of his impressiveness to the statement

that
When others heeded not, he heard the South
Make subterraneous music.
The Shepherd in Book VIII of The Prelude seen ,

against
a mountain background, is
man
Ennobled outwardly before my sight,
and Wordsworth thanks the God of Nature and of Man

that
men before my
inexperienced eyes
Did first present themselves thus purified,
Removed, and to a distance that was fit.
In Tintern Abbey , addressing his sister, he exclaims:
Therefore let the moon

Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;
And let the misty mountain-winds be free
To blow against thee. . . .
288
—
thy mind
Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,
Thy memory be as a dwelling-place
For all sweet sounds and harmonies.
What was amiss with Peter Bell, and made him (in his
unregenerate days) a moral monster, was that
At noon, when by the forest’s edge
He lay beneath the branches high,
The soft blue sky did never melt
Into his heart; he never felt
The witchery of the soft blue sky!
Examples need not be further multiplied; it is recognized
that Wordsworth’s typical human figures The Highland
Girl, Lucy, the Wanderer, the Old Cumberland Beggar
—
are those which are most intimately ‘engaged’ with their
natural background. And
he felt a special exaltation when
he could feel himself, also, mingled with the cosmic pro-
cesses; it gave him a sense of release from responsibility,
from the weight of separate existence; a feeling of
‘grandeur in the beatings of the heart’. It may be re-
marked, as a kindred characteristic in Wordsworth, that
it seems to have been necessary for him to ‘distance’ an
object
space
— particularly a distressing or tragic object in
or time, in order to think and feel freely about it.
—
His need to see man ‘removed to a distance that was fit’ is
analogous to his need to recollect emotion in tranquillity.
The music of humanity comes restoringly to him only
when
can feel
it is still
most
and sad
fully the
—purged by distance, just as he
old unhappy far-off things

And battles long ago,
or the
Sorr.ow barricadoed evermore
Within the walls of cities.
The story of Margaret is related as a happening of many

years ago.
t 289
;

These soothing and cheering influences are probably as
available now as they were in Wordsworth s time, though
the communings of the modern Nature-lover with the
‘misty mountain-wind’ will probably lack the sacramental
unction imputed to them by Wordsworth. It may be
doubted, too, whether a modern father would treat his

squalling infant as Coleridge (then at his most Words-
worthian stage) treated Hartley
once, when he awoke
In most distressful mood . . .
I hurried with him to our orchard-plot,

And he beheld the moon, and, hushed at once,
Suspends his sobs, and laughs most silently,
While his fair eyes, that swam with undropped tears,
1
Did glitter in the yellow moon-beam !
No wonder Coleridge ‘deemed it wise’ to make the infant

‘Nature’s playmate’, and in another poem could thus
address him:
For I was reared
In the great city, pent mid cloisters dim,
• • •
•
But thou, my babe, shalt wander like a breeze
By and sandy shores, beneath the crags

lakes
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
... so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself 2 .
The prophecy was but the results of Nature’s

fulfilled,
schooling, in Hartley’s case, failed to come up to expecta-

tions.
The tranquil restoration and the renewal of faith
which Nature brought to Wordsworth was brought by
his own poetry to certain nineteenth century readers.
1 Coleridge, The Nightingale, 98 (1798).

2 Frost at Midnight, 51 (1798).
290
Mark Rutherford may be quoted once more here; he is
speaking of his discovery of Lyrical Ballads while strug-
gling for release from theological fetters:
conveyed to me no new doctrine, and yet the change it

It
wrought in me could only be compared with that which is said to
have been wrought on Paul himself by the Divine apparition.
. . .
God is nowhere formally deposed, and Wordsworth would have

been the last man to say that he had lost his faith in the God of
his fathers. But his real God is not the God of the Church, but
the God of the the abstraction Nature [after what has been
hills,
said the reader will not be misled by
this use of “abstraction”],
and to this my reverence was transferred. Instead of an
object of
worship which was altogether artificial, remote,
never coming
into genuine contact with me, I had now
one which I thought
to be real, one in which literally I could
live and move and have
my being, an actual fact before my eyes. God was brought from
that heaven of the books, and dwelt on the
downs in the far-away
distances, and in every cloud-shadow which
wandered across the
valley. Wordsworth unconsciously did for me what every re-
ligious reformer has done, —he re-created my Supreme Divinity;
substituting a new and living spirit for the old deity, once alive,
but gradually hardened into an idol .’ 1
For many another escaped Puritan or overwrought intel-

lectual in the nineteenth century, and for
many a sufferer
from the strange disease of modern life, looking
up from
amongst the dark Satanic mills of the industrial age, the
authority of the Wordsworthian Nature-religion
has seemed
absolute. Nevertheless it was probably only
relative to a
certain passing^ phase of civilization for an age, and not:
for all time. Vestiges of the Wordsworthian

impulse still
survive in the activities of bodies like the National
Trust
or the Society for the Preservation of Rural
England, and
amongst the hordes of hikers and cyclists who wander
weekly over the countryside in search of they
know not
what (I have recently seen Wordsworth and Dorothy
praised as the first hikers ).All these, like the poet of
W oi dsworth s Epitaph ,
have viewed the outward shows
‘
1
Autobiography , pp. 18-19.
29I
—
of sky and earth, of hill and valley’, but it may be doubted
whether ‘impulses of deeper birth have come to them in
solitude’. With the scientific ‘neutralization’ of Nature
(in Dr Richards’s phrase) the heart of her mystery has been
plucked out, and the joy which she still spreads in wider
commonalty than ever, and will doubtless continue to
spread, is for the most part that of physical and nervous
regeneration rather than of spiritual assurance. As Pascal
long ago saw, Nature proves God only to those who believe
in Him already on other grounds. And the religious roots
from which the Nature-worship of Wordsworth sprang
have, I think it must be admitted, largely withered away.
One further observation of a different order may here be
added: perhaps the healing power of Nature is only felt
to the full, as Ruskin found, by those who return to it
at intervals after being long ‘in populous cities pent .
Even to Wordsworth Nature meant most as long as he

could retain a sense of escape into it; when he had long
been domiciled there it glory and freshness.
lost its In
his callow Jacobinical days he had written Cataracts and
:
‘
mountains are good occasional society, but they will not

do for constant companions His later life perhaps proved
’
.
the truth of this statement, though he would never have

admitted it. It is significant that Wordsworth to some
extent abandoned Nature himself, as if he had discovered
its inadequacy; abandoned it first for ‘Duty’, and then
for Faith. Wordsworth wrote much excellent poetry to
the end of his life, but his best powers were spent in
expressing the rapture of his reunion with Nature after
exile, and of the ‘high moments’ which followed
moments which in the nature of things were bound to
recur less frequently once he had regained his equilibrium,
and which in any case are probably the special privilege of
youth. Much of his later poetry deals with experiences
and subjects other than the moments of vision whiph are
admittedly his special prerogative, and is consequently felt
to be of less importance. But, as Miss Batho has shown,
it is incorrect to attribute arrested development’ or decay’
‘ ‘
292
to Wordsworth. There is, indeed, a certain pathos in the
circumstance that his most splendidly sustained utterance
should have been a farewell to his own visionary power.
But the power had lasted as long as the best period of most
poets, who in general are not blamed (as Wordsworth has
been) for doing their finest work before the age of forty.
The Ode occurred at a unique climacteric moment in
Wordsworth s history, and in his later work the ‘worlds
not quickened by the sun’ approximate more and more to
the orthodox heaven. But though he may always be valued
as the poet of the first and not the latter phase, this change
is the natural development of
a mystic who wishes to
improve those transient Gleams of Joy into an in-
. . .
violable and perpetual State of Bliss and Happiness ’. 1

Men cannot live by gleams alone, and though Words-
worth may have been a worse poet as he grew older, it
has been argued (by a Dean, it is true) that he was a better
man . This cannot be expected to impress those whose
only concern is with his poetry. But from the point of
view of this book it is of much interest and importance
to note, in the later life of our greatest ‘Nature’ poet,
that
there a steady retreat towards the religious sources of
is
his mysticism, and grace supplants the visionary gleam.
1
Addison, Spectator, 393.
293
. , , ,
INDEX
Addison, 5, 27, 30; on ‘Chear- Beaupuy, 258, 260.
fulness,’ 45-6, 74; on the Becker, C. L., The Heavenly
Scale of Being, 51- 2; on the City of the Eighteenth Century
Creation, 65, 241, 292. Philosophers, 133, 140 n.
Aikin, Dr, 187. Bentham, Mill on, 104, 107,
Alfoxden, 255, 257, 278. 209 ; indebted to Priestley,
Ambrose, St, on private prop- 170.
erty, 15. Bentley, 39.
Aquinas, on the Law of Nature, Berkeley, and Hume, no, 1 13.
‘
J5; 47- Bernard, St, Natura codex est
Aristotle, 16; Poetics, 18 ff.; Dei ,’ 42.
eternity of the world, 35; Blackburne, Archdeacon, 187.
Nature and Art, 40; Ethics Blount, Charles, 3, 6, 8n.;
85, 10 1 189.
Arnold, Matthew, 8; on Jo- Bodin, Holbach on, 165.
seph Butler, 85; 189, 272; Boileau, on Descartes, 25.
on Wordsworth, 273. Bolingbroke, 62.
Athanasius, 190. Bougainville, 14, 241.
Atkinson, GeofFroy, works Boyle, Robert, 2, 3, 4, 38, 39-
quoted, 13. 4°, 136.
Austen, Jane, 109. Broad, Prof. C. D., Five Types
of Ethical Theory, on Butler,
Babbitt, Irving, on Shattesbury, 85> 93-
58 . Brooke, Henry, 241.
Bacon, Francis, 3, 4; Voltaire Brown’s Estimate 198, 241.
on, 106; 136; Holbach on, Browne, Sir T., 4,
on 325
165; Priestley on, 195; and ‘Virtue isown Reward,’
her
Burke, 245. 59; on Charity, 60 and ;
Bacon, Roger, 4. Hume, 134; Burke com-

Bage, R., 241. pared with, 247.
Barbauld, Mrs, 187. Browning, Robert, 44.
Batho, Miss E. C., The Later Bryce, 17-18.
JVordsworth 266 292. n., Bunyan, 17, 270, 272.
Bayle, Pierre, 2, 3. Burke, Edmund, 30, 54, 93,
Beatty, A., on Wordsworth and 109, 205-07, 216, 219, 231,
Hartley, 137 n. 239; 240-52.
295
,

Burnet, Thomas, Sacred Theory Priestley, 181, 1945 on
of the Earth , 27-34; 37, 41. ‘The modern worldly Dis-
Burney, Fanny, 242. senter,’183; Pantisocracy,
Butler, Joseph, 55; 76-94 Ana-\ 193; 205, 211, 213, 235;
logy , 77-84; Three Sermons and Burke, 242-3, 248,
and Dissertation 84-94; 96, , 250, 256; and Words-
97- worth, 253, 274, 278;
Butler, Samuel, 109, 229. ‘snapped my squeaking baby-
Byron, 109. trumpet of sedition,’ 255"
256; ‘Nature,’ 256; and
Calvinism, Priestley’s, 179-81; Wordsworth’s ‘hypochondri-
Godwin’s, 213, 230. acal graft,’ 270; on en-
Cambridge Platonists, 3, 6, 38, joying Wordsworth’s poetry,
58, 189. 273; The Prelude written
Caroline, Queen, 60. for, 286; treatment of his
Carr, H. Wildon, on Leibniz, son Hartley, 290.
114 n., 1 15. Collins, Anthony, 3, 6, 11.
Catlin, Dr, 251. Copernicus, 3.
Cervantes, 108. Cotes, Roger, on Newton, 138-
Chastellux, De, 172, 174, 188. 139-
Chesterfield, Lord, 10,45; an d Cowper, 241, 256, 272.
Hume, 123; on Cambridge, Cudworth, 35, 76. .
185. Cynics, 14, 70.

Cicero, De Legibus , 15; on
the celestial order, 35; 42, d’Alembert, 249.
103. Dante, 17, 246.
^
Clarke, Samuel, 3, 39; on the Darwin, Erasmus, 169, 188.
‘Reason of Things,’ 59-60; Day, Thomas, 169, 241.
76; Holbach on, 161 182, ; Deism, and Natural Religion,
199. i-ij, 55, 65-7, 76 ff., 1 31
Cobban, A., Edmund Burke 1
5 5-65, 168; and Uni-
and the Revolt against the tarianism, 182-3; 272, 291-
Eighteenth Century , 243 n., 292.
251. Denham, Sir John, 18.
Coleridge, S. T., on the evi- Derham, William, 27, 30;
dence of religion, 83; Imag- Physic 0- Theology, 39-42; 79,
ination, 1
1 Fancy,
3, 146; 132, 149 n.
1 17, 146; and Hartley, 136- Descartes, 3, 4; and the geo-
13 7> H4 n -> 146, H7> metric spirit, 22-3; 24; and
194, 277; on Socinianism poetry, 25; 100; and Hume,
and Methodism, 168; on 1 10; Holbach on, 162.
296
; ,. ,
INDEX
De Selincourt, Prof. E., and Franklin, Benjamin, and Priest-
Wordsworth’s Borderers 268. , ley, 169, 187, 188; and
Dickens, 108. Godwin, 234.
Dickinson, G. Lowes, dfter
Two Thousand Tears 104. , Gaius, 15.
Diderot, Supplement au Toy age Galen, 42.
de Bougainville, 14, 241; 55. Galileo, 3, 5.
Dissenting Academies, 1 85- Garrod, Prof., 21 n.
187, 214. Gay, Rev. John, and Hartley,
Doddridge, Philip, 185, 214. 138,140, 143.
Dryden, 1; Religio Laid , 8-9 Gibbon, Priestley on, 172-3,
on Denham, 18; on the 19 1-3; oh Oxford, 185; 188;
‘natural’ in poetic diction, on Progress, 200-01.
19; ‘Nature wrought up to Gibson, Bishop, on Samuel
an higher pitch,’ 21; 25; Clarke, 60.
100; ‘more delightfully than Gilbert, W., 3.
Nature,’ 149. Godwin, and Hartley, 5
1 1
152 154; 167; 178; 205-

,
Edgeworth, R. L., 169. 239; and Burke, 205-07,

Eliot, George, Mill on the 216, 219, 231, 239, 248-
Floss quoted, 250; 258. 250; and Wordsworth, 212,
Eliot, T. S., on Machiavelli,
213, 217-18, 221, 222, 228,
.
98 *
2 35> 2 38 .
239, 253, 257,
Empson, W., on Wordsworth, 260-71.
273 -
Goethe, on Holbach, 1 66.
Epicureans, 14, 70, 87. Golden Ages, 12, 31, 37, 69,
Epicurus, Holbach on, 165. 124, 195, 202-03, 258.
Gray, Thomas, 30, 64, 272.
Federal Union, 227, 251. Green, T. H., on Hume, 123;
Fenelon, Telemaque , 12; God- and Burke, 250.
win’s illustration, 223. Grotius, 20.
Fielding, 57, 108. Guarini, 21.
Firth, Sir Charles, on Swift,
105. Halevy, Growth of Philosophic
Foigny, Terre Australe Connue, Radicalism 1 1 1 ; ‘moral
12. Newtonianism,’ 112; on
Fontenelle, on the Eclogue, Hume, 1 19.
21; on Descartes, 23; on Halifax, Character of a Trim-
Ancients and Moderns, 24. mer, 1 o- 1 1
Fox, C. J., 241. Harmodius and Aristogiton,
France, Anatole, 109. 195 .
297
Harper, Prof., on Wordsworth, 276; on recollecting boy-
254 . hood, 283.
Hartley, 112; 136-54; and Hulme, T. E., ‘spilt religion,’
Holbach, 155; and Priestley, 281.
168, 170, 174, 178, 180, Hume, 57, 67, 108; 110-35;
186, 188, 209, 228; and 136, 137; an d Hartley, 149;
Wordsworth, 137, 143, and Holbach, 155; on His-
144 145, 147, 149; and
n., tory, 200; 208.
Coleridge, 136-7, 144 n., Hutcheson, 108, 112, 15 1.
146, 147, 194, 277. Hutchinson, Mary, 279.
Harvey, W., 3. Huxley, Aldous, on Words-
Hastings, Warren, 242. worth, 64, 273; on ‘Behe-
Havers, Clopton, 38. moth and Leviathan,’ 83 n.;
Hazard, Paul, on the Deists,- on Swift, 102, 108 n.; on
1 1. War, 225 n.
on Godwin, 212, 217,
Hazlitt,
221-2, on Inchbald, Mrs, 241.
235, 238-9;
Burke, 240; on Words-
Jebb, Dr J., 178.
worth, 273.
Jenyns, Soame, Free Enquiry
Hegel, 1 61.
into the Nature and Origin
Helvetius, 155; and Godwin,
of Evil, 48-55; IOO.
214, 216; Burke on, 247.
Johnson, Dr, 24, 48-9 on ;
Herbert of Cherbury, Lord, 7,
Soame Jenyns, 50-5; 84;
189.
‘general properties and large
Herder, on Shaftesbury, 57-8.
appearances,’ 21 1.
Hoadly, Bishop, 199.
Jus Gentium 14-15. ,
Hobbes, 54, 57; Shaftesbury
on, 59, 67-9, 72-3, 74; Karnes, Lord, 241.
Butler on, 87; and Mande- Kant, 97; and Hume, 111.
96;
ville, Hume on, 124m; Keats, 267.
and Hartley, 142, 15 1; and Kepler, 3.
Holbach, 159, 160; and Kippis/Dr, 214.
Priestley, 176.
Holbach, 55; and Hartley, 152;
Knight, Prof. G. Wilson, 285 m
Systeme de la Nature , 155- Laing, Prof., on Hume, 1 1 1.
167; and Priestley, 171, 174, Laissez-faire, 17, 152, 197-9,

176; 206, 207; and God- 202, 206.
win, 213-16; 228, 262. Lake District, 21 1.
Holcroft, Thomas, 215, 241. Langland, 246.
Horsley, Archdeacon, 169. Lardner, Letter on the Logos ,
Hudson, W. H., on ‘animism,’ 187.
298
INDEX
La Rochefoucauld, 87. Mandeville, 54, 88; Fable of
Lavoisier, 169, 170. the Bees 95-1 00; and Swift,
,
Law, Bishop, translation of 102, 103.

King’s Origin of Evil, 140. Marino, 21.
Lawrence, D. H., 274. Marx, 156, 1 61, 207.
Leavis, F. R., on Swift, 106 n. Methodism, 182, 185.
Le Clerc, on the Poet as liar, Mill, J. S., on Bentham, 104,
25 .
107; 242; and Associa-
Le Comte, on Chinese morality, tion ism, 143; On Liberty ,
*3- 197; 208; ‘Germano-Cole- -
Le Roi, 172, 188. ridgean doctrine,’ 209, 21 1;

Leibniz, 44, 114m, 115; and on the eighteenth century,
Hartley, 142, 152. 209, 212; and Godwin,
Lindsey, Theophilus, 183, 187, 212, 238; on Coleridge,
189, 199. 242.
Locke, 3; on Natural Revela- Milton, 27, 62; and Priestley,
tion, 7; State of Nature, 176; Of Reformation, 195;
17,
100; Addison on, 46; 57, and Wordsworth, 254.
59, 68; Voltaire on, 106; Missionaries, Jesuit, 12.
and Hume, no; 136; and Montaigne, Of Cannibals, 12;
Hartley, 138, 140, 142; 14, 58, 70.
156; and Priestley, 175, Montesquieu, on Shaftesbury,
*89, J 95> J 9^> 1 99 ; and 58 .
Jacobinism, 248. More, Sir T., 4, 70; cited by

Lovejoy, Prof. A. O., The Godwin, 231.
Great Chain of Being , 47 Morellet, 169.
ff. ; on ‘primitivism,’ 69 n.; Morley, John, on Burke, 207,
The Supposed Primitivism of 243; on Rousseau, 208.
Rousseau's Discourse on In- Murry, J. Middleton, on Satire,
equality , 233 n. IOI.
Lucretius, 62; Holbach on,
165. Natura naturans and naturata,
Lunar Society, 169, 188. 205, 243-
Necessitarianism, Hartley’s,
Mably, cited by Godwin, 231. 1
5 1 “4 ; Holbach’s,
158;
Macaulay, on Shaftesbury, 57. Priestley’s,178-81; God-
Machiavelli, 98, 99. win’s, 213, 218, 220, 228-
Magellan, 12. 230.
Malebranche, 58; and Hartley, Newton, Sir Isaac, 3, 4, 5, 24;
142, 151. Voltaire on, 106; 136; and
Malpighi, 5. Hartley, 138; eighteenth
299
century views on, 138-40; Pufendorf, 14.
156; Holbach on, 162. Puritanism, and ‘rationalism,’
10; and eighteenth century
Origen, 77. Dissent, 182-3.
‘Oxford’ Group, 227.
Quantock Hills, 257.
Paine, Tom, 205, 216. Quesnay, 198.
Paley, 35; contrasted with Quintana, R., The Mind and
Butler, 85; 128, 169. Art of J. Swift 104 n.,
Pangloss, 44, 49, 84, 100.

Pascal, 8; Dieu irrite, 10; 28, Rapin, Reflections on Aristotle's
49, 292. Treatise of Poesie, 18, 20-2.
Peacock, T. L., 109, 147. Ray, John, 27; Wisdom of God
Perfectibility, 56, 143, 154, in the Creation 34-9;’ 40,
,
199, 201-03, 218, 220, 7 9> 132.

239- Reynolds, Sir Joshua, on imita-
Perrault, 25. tion of Nature, 19-20.
Pigafetta, 12. Richards, I. A., 142, 274.
Pitt, William, 193, 217, 251. Robertson, J. M., 58 n.
‘Plastick Nature,’ Ray on, 36. Robespierre, 266.
Plato, 6; One and Many, 47; Robinson, Crabb, on Godwin,
58, 64; Phaedo, 80; 103; 218.
Hume on, 124 n.; and Hart- Robinson Crusoe, 17.
ley, 148; cited by Godwin, Ronsard, 21.
231; and Burke, 245. Rousseau, and the Noble Savage,
Pliny, 36. 14; 55 > je sens done je suis y
Plotinus, 43, 256. 108; 205, '206, 208; and
Pope, Alexander, 5; on Nature Godwin, 215, 216, 231-3;
as ‘source, and end, and test 241; Contrat Social, 241;
of art,’ 18;' 45; on the Scale and Burke, 244, 247; 272.
of Being, 48; and Shaftes- Royal Society, The, 3.
bury, 62; 100; and Swift, Ruskin, 250, 292.
108; 149; and Hartley, Russell,Lord William, 195.
171- ‘Rutherford, Mark,’ on Words-
Price, Dr, 169, 187; and worth, 270-2, 290-1.
Burke, 247.
Priestley, Joseph, 136; and Sandemanianism, Godwin’s,
Holbach, 155; 168-204; 214.
206,207; and Godwin, 21 2, Satire, 100-9.
213; 214, 215, 228. Saturnia regna, 15; Hume on,
Pringle, 169. 124; Wordsworth’s, 259.
300
INDEX
Scott, Sir W., 250. Tennyson, 272.
Shaftesbury, 3, 45 Charac-
1 1
, ; Tertullian, 81, 134.
teristicks , 57-75; 77/80; Theocritus, 21.
Butler on, 87, 88; 100,108; Thomson, James, on ‘the
and Hume, 122; 132; and enlighten’d few,’ 45; on
Hartley, 15 1; 241. Shaftesbury, 57, 67; com-
Shakespeare, 105. pared with Wordsworth,
Shelburne, Lord, 170, 174, 188. 2ioj 241.
Shelley, 53; and Holbach, 1 66- Thoreau, H. D., 44.
1
67 ; and Godwin, 213,217, Tillotson, Archbishop, 3, 11,-
224. 35, 76; and Hume, 127.
Sidney, Algernon, 195. Tindal, Matthew, 3.
Sidney, Sir Philip, 40. Toland, John, 3; Christianity
Smith, Adam, on Hume, 119; Not Mysterious 9- 1 o Letters
, ;
division of labour, 195; 198; toSerena 157-8;, 189.

economic individualism, 202, Traherne, 44.
20 7. Tulloch, 8.
Smith, John, 6. Turgot, 169, 7 1-2.
1
Southey, Robert, 193, 21 1.
Spenser, 17.
Spinoza, Omnis existentia est Unitarianism, and
168, 181;
44; Holbach
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Spiritual Quixote , 83. Utopias, 12, 104-05; God-
Sprat, Thomas, 24. win’s, 231.
Stephen, Leslie, 2, 227; on
Burke, 240; on Words-
Vespasian, 129.
worth, 273.
Voltaire, 37, 49, 55,
Stillingfleet, Bishop, 35. 77;
Candide 84, 100;
, Lettres
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70, 85, 101 , 229.
sez Linfame 120; ‘il est
Streit, Clarence K., Union Now ,
deiste,’
,
and
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252 n.
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Swift,100-09; an( i Godwin,
216, 231, 239.
War, Priestley on, 203; God-
Tahiti, 14. win on, 225-6.
Tawney, Prof., Religion and Watson, Bishop, Wordsworth’s
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Taylor, Jeremy, Burke com- Watt, James, 188.
pared with, 247, Wesley, John, 35, 55, 109.
301
Whewell, on Joseph Butler, Wordsworth, Dorothy, 253>
84-5. 257, 271, 282, 291.
Whichcote, Shaftesbury’s edi- Wordsworth, William, 24, 3°>
tion of Select Sermons , 58- ‘Thought was not,’ 43-4;
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White, W r
. Hale, see ‘Mark Hartley, 137, 143, 144 n.,
Rutherford.’ 145, 147, 149; 167, 194,
Whitefield, 109. 205-07, 277 compared
;
W r
hitehead, A. N., 126. with Thomson, 210; ‘Be
Whitney, L., on ‘primitivism,’ thankful thou,’ 21 1; and
69 n. Godwin, 212, 213, 217-
Wilkins, Bishop, 35, 38; on 218, 221, 222, 228, 235,
Nature and Art, 40-1, 149 n. 238, 239, 253, 257, 260-
Withering, botanist, 188. 271; and Burke, 240, 242,
Wollaston, 3} Religion of 244, 248, 249, 253, 261,
Nature, 86. 262; and Coleridge, 253,
Wollstonecraft, Mary, 205, 270, 273,
" 274, 278, 286;
216, 238, 241. 253-93*
B1301
WB Willey, Basil
c.l Eighteenth century back-
ground.

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umnAMrr

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY BACKGROUND

Chatto & Windus

Clarke, Irwin Company Ltd

FIRST PUBLISHED I94O

PRINTED BY THE REPLIKA PROCESS

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

tended as a companion volume to the other work, and con-

presumed to write even an outline ‘history’ of eighteenth

Chapter I THE TURN OF THE CENTURY I

1. Natural Science and Natural Religion 3

3. ‘Nature’ in Literary Theory 18

II THE WISDOM OF GOD IN THE CREATION 27

III COSMIC TORYISM 43

2. Soame Jenyns and Dr Johnson ^ 48 )

IV NATURAL MORALITY— SHAFTESBURY H

2. The Religion of Nature 65

V NATURAL MORALITY—JOSEPH BUTLER 76

VIII DAVID HARTLEY AND NATURE’S

IX HOLBACH’S STSTMME DE LA NATURE

X JOSEPH PRIESTLEY AND THE

The Turn of the Century

piness, we see revived Poesy lifting up its head, and already

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY BACKGROUND

A r£e Inqutty mt0 the VulSarl Received Notion

i . Natural Science and Natural Religion

This was the Golden Age of natural theology and

Satan and restored to God. For the physical world, in

THE TURN OF THE CENTURY

— belief in a divine universe —

The values which

THE TURN OF THE CENTURY

evidence a Deity’, said Locke; sufficiently, that is, for us

amongst the dead? why seek for evidence of what we

already know ? and especially why seek it in the historical ‘

annals of an illiterate Semitic tribe? But that was not all.

These are the saving truths vouchsafed not merely to a

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY BACKGROUND

But few believed this report: on the contrary, the light

meant what is congenial to the mind of an abstract Man

THE TURN OF THE CENTURY

puts forward a deity who is ‘the best-natured Being in the

without any further Argument, to make the Atheist wish

pour le salut des hommes; on ne veut plus entendre l’appel muet

THE TURN OF THE CENTURY

But even so, the ecclesiastical authorities in France became

salut, comme ceux qui ont eu la foi et a qui Jesus-Christ a ete

author’s English work, The Extraordinary Voyage in French Literature before

for Montaigne and the sixteenth century, had mostly

Nature’ was raised by Cynics, Stoics, and Epicureans; and

served the stars from wrong was also the rule of

THE TURN OF THE CENTURY

Gaius defines the jus gentium as jus quod naturalis ratio

our legal righteousness is mere dross, and our loftiest

which created dominion. Things being as they are since

Similarly, men made in the image of God are ‘by nature’

the background, and man, though severely damaged by

before them, and Providence their guide. For, as the

Thus God and Nature fixed the general frame,