Enlightment

THE ENLIGHTENMENT WORLD Edited by Martin Fitzpatrick, Peter Jones, Christa Knellwolf and Iain McCalman First published 2004 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, | | | |I INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS OF ENLIGHTENMENT | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |Introduction | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |Peter Jones | | |3 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |1 Science and the coming of Enlightenment | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |John Henry | | |10 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |2 The quest for philosophical certainty | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |Peter Schouls | | |27 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |3 The critique of Christianity | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |James Dybikowski | | |41 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |4 Enquiry, scepticism and Enlightenment | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |Aaron Garrett | | |57 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |5 The Huguenot debate on toleration | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |Luisa Simonutti | | |65 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |II ASPECTS OF ENLIGHTENMENT FORMATIONS | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |Introduction | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |Martin Fitzpatrick | | |81 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |6 The Dutch Republic: 'That mother nation of liberty' | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |Hugh Dunthorne | | |87 | | | | | | | | | | | |7 A crucible for change: Enlightenment in Britain | | |Alexander | | |Murdoch 104 | | |8 The itinerary of a young intellectual in early Enlightenment Germany | | |Martin Mulsow 117 | | |9 The Age of Louis XIV and early Enlightenment in France | | |Martin Fitzpatrick 134 | INTRODUCTION Peter Jones No single idea, belief or practice unites all of the writers associated with Enlightenment thought; no one meaning informed even the banners under which dispute was sustained; no one definition embraces the ways in which the most self-consciously used terms were employed - terms such as 'science', 'republic', 'scepticism', 'Christian', 'atheist'. This does not render such labels useless, because they function as maps, simultaneously reflecting and requiring interpretation. No one map, and no single label, can represent everything that could be represented; each must be drawn up on a certain scale, and all can be misread. An analogy with maps was popular among writers of the time who were keen to signal the challenges of interpreting unfamiliar contexts. Richard Bentley (1662-1742), the first Boyle lecturer, in 1692 was worried by the fact that we can only view the topography of the past as if from a mountain top: the very real obstacles confronting travellers on the ground are flattened out: 'All the Inequality of Surface would be lost to his View; the wide Ocean would appear to him like an even and uniform Plane (uniform as to its Level, though not as to Light and Shade) though every Rock of the Sea was as high as the Pico of Teneriff '(Boyle's Lecture Sermons 1739: vol.1, 84). Moreover, as Anthony Collins (1676-1729) forcefully stated in 1710, maps 'are not designed to represent Mountains, Valleys, Lakes and Rivers, to those who have no Ideas of them. Maps suppose Men to have these Ideas before-hand' (Collins 1710:36). Many writers were aware of the importance of contexts in determining both what to do and how to understand the past. The discipline, familiar to all educated people in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which placed context at the centre was rhetoric, underpinned by grammar. Bishop Berkeley (1685-1753), in 1709, captures the thought, by then almost commonplace, illustrating a point made by Dybikowski (Chapter 3), that remarks deemed unexceptionable from a bishop's pen are perceived as subversive from a freethinker's: 'A word pronounced with certain circumstances, or in a certain context with other words, hath not always the same import and signification that it hath when pronounced in some other circumstances, or different context of words' (Berkeley 1732: para. lxxiii). Rhetoric was supposed to be concerned with effective public communication, but practical success explicitly presupposed many things, above all transparency in -3- meaning: this did not assume that anything was self-evident, but rather that everything required interpretation. Ephraim Chambers (1680-1740), in 1728, echoed an idea trumpeted by almost everyone since Francis Bacon (1561-1626): that wilful obscurity should be condemned because it gives a reader the spurious freedom to invent whatever meaning he wishes, and with it the seductive illusion of ownership. The human mind, he says, 'in apprehending what was hid under a veil, fancies itself in some measure the author of it' (Chambers 1728: 'Mixed Fables'). He recognized, of course, that the more a study of rhetoric was confined within institutions, the more it declined into scholastic formalities. There is something arbitrary and artificial in all writings: they are a kind of draughts, or pictures, where the aspect, attitude, and light, which the objects are taken in, though merely arbitrary, yet sway and direct the whole representation. Books are, as it were, plans or prospects of ideas artfully arranged and exhibited, not to the eye, but to the imagination; and there is a kind of analogous perspective, which obtains in them, wherein we have something not much unlike points of sight, and of distance. An author, in effect, has some particular view or design in drawing our his ideas … The case amounts to the same as the viewing of objects in a mirror; where, unless the form of the mirror be known, viz. whether it be plain, concave, convex, cylindric, or conic, etc., we can make no judgement of the magnitude, figure, etc. of the objects. (Chambers 1728: vol. I, xvi) Clarity of expression was everyone's declared goal, but the frequency with which it was asserted indicated the extent of the struggle. Too often writers failed to define their central terms, or to abide by their definitions. And, as D'Alembert acidly observed in 1751, when it came to acknowledgements, 'the common practice is to refer to sources or to make citations in a way that is vague, often unreliable, and nearly always confused' (Diderot and D'Alembert 1751: xxxvii). Moreover, two theoretical problems seemed to make the tasks of communication intractable: first, the puzzling relations of language to the world; and second, the ubiquitous implications of change. D'Alembert, no doubt reflecting on Chambers, declared that: It is almost as if one were trying to express (a) proposition by means of a language whose nature was being imperceptibly altered, so that the proposition was successively expressed in different ways representing the different states through which the language had passed. Each of these states would be recognized in the one immediately neighbouring it; but in a more remote state we would no longer make it out. (Diderot and D'Alembert 1751: viii-ix) He fears, in other words, that across separated points in time, and in the absence of an intervening medium, we may be unable to work out what was being said. The meaning of many everyday expressions might change independently of any changes -4- in what they described. Action-at-a-distance might be doubtful; meaning-at-a-distance impossible.To grasp the import of such insights, let us consider briefly some of the differences between, say, 1759 and today. In that year Handel died, and the Seven Years War (1756-63) was raging to no one's benefit. In that year, too, Voltaire (1694-1778) published Candide, Samuel Johnson (1696-1772) his moral tale Rasselas, and Adam Smith (1723-90), Theory of Moral Sentiments. With the eighth volume about to be published, the great Encyclopédie of Diderot (1713-84) and D'Alembert (1717-83) was banned by order of King Louis XV, along with De l'Esprit of Helvétius(1715-71). In chapter 30 of Johnson's melancholy novel, Rasselas and his sister declare themselves to have little interest in history. They are firmly rebuked: 'To see men we must see their works, that we may learn what reason has dictated, or passion has incited, and find what are the most powerful motives of action. To judge rightly of the present we must oppose it to the past; for all judgement is comparative, and of the future nothing can be known.'Such a view had been gathering support for over a century, and in 1759 had been conspicuously exemplified in the newly published Tudor volumes of David Hume's History of England. Hume (1711-76) had already identified one unavoidable challenge: historians of the past know the outcome and consequences of actions, but not the intentions necessary for understanding them. The original agents, on the other hand, know their own intentions when they set out, but not the outcome. But there are other kinds of challenge: for example, almost no statistics were available. In 1752 Hume stated, 'We know not exactly the numbers of any European kingdom, or even city, at present' (Hume 1752: vol. 1, 414). Yet, in 1759 no one can be said, in a defensible modern sense, to have known: | |• anything about forms of energy other than light and heat; | | |• anything about the composition of air or water; | | |• anything about the nature of fire, breathing or procreation; | | |• anything about the age of the earth or the size of the universe; | | |• anything about the nature of stars or the origins of life; | | |• anything about the evolution of animals or genetic inheritance. | There were, of course, 'opinions' about such matters, and within a dozen years or so some recognizably modern views were being formulated; but we have beliefs about these things, with varying degrees of assurance, and such beliefs irradiate all our assumptions and attitudes. To enter the minds of 1759, as it were, we would have to un-think what we know, in order to understand what we do not believe. Can it be done' Alongside conceptual challenges of this kind, a second point about context and method should be underlined. There are huge differences over time in what is admitted, by whom, to be a proper question; and in what count as the proper methods for reaching acceptable answers to it. Hume was not the first to insist that scientific and religious views may be understood by ordinary people, and may affect their lives in ways quite other than philosophers acknowledge - this was a fairly standard observation by Deists. The elements of abstract theories that might be translated into common life were always unpredictable, even if detectable. Moreover, -5- an increasing number of writers from the mid-seventeenth century onwards, including Claude Perrault (1613-88) and Fontenelle (1657-1757) in France, and Hume and Adam Ferguson (1723-1816) in Britain, argued that most people were simply not motivated by theories of any kind, and most definitely not purely by reason. Following Bacon, they all held that fact, not doctrine or untestable speculation, was the goal of enquiry. Echoing French contemporaries such as Bayle and Fontenelle, and citing their classical mentor Cicero, the unidentified author of The Spectator, 408, in 1712 (often thought to have been Alexander Pope) prominently declared, 'Reason must be employed in adjusting the Passions, but they must ever remain the Principles of Action' (Spectator, 408). Contemporaries can be as puzzled by terminology as later historians. There was, of course, censorship, and writers might need to disguise what they meant; but readers could also suspect subversive texts where none was intended. In the first two parts we read how writers variously understood such terms as 'Newtonianism', or 'scepticism', and how they employed what today we regard as 'sceptical' arguments in surprisingly selective contexts. Garrett (Chapter 4) emphasizes that many writers influenced by, or even adopting, sceptical arguments did not see themselves as sceptics, nor as addressing sceptical challenges. Indeed, like other labels, including 'republican' and 'Christian', the ideas encompassed under them vary almost to the point of self-contradiction. Overall, however, the goal of many prominent writers accused, or even boasting, of a sceptical approach to knowledge was to promote rigorous, repeatable, experience-based enquiry. That such a goal strikes a modern reader as hardly worthy of comment demonstrates the total success of the approach - and the difficulty of understanding contexts in which such views were vigorously challenged. In Chapter 2 Schouls explains how, for thinkers of the early modern period, tradition was rejected as a principal source of truth and wisdom: both the criteria and objects of certainty lay within individuals themselves. And although neither Descartes nor Locke discarded God from his philosophy, they had established the means by which their immediate followers could, and would, do so. Indeed, in 1753 Turgot (1727-81) surmised that Descartes dared not admit the irrelevance of God to his philosophical position because of the solitude it entailed. The demand and search for certainty may seem incomprehensible to a modern reader, but society itself appeared to be under threat as the authority of those who had claimed knowledge collapsed: was everyone equally ignorant' What were the criteria of justified belief; what warranted the acceptance of other people's claims; how should prejudice be identified and replaced' Prejudice was an important notion because, as Milton (1608-74) stated in his Areopagitica, if a man 'beleeve things only because his Pastor says so … without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds, becomes his heresie' (Milton 1644:38-9). Such anxieties meant that the nature of education had to be addressed, with emphasis on individual effort and achievement, and rejection of the mechanical repetition of traditional methods and ideas. Insistence on thinking and judging for oneself soon led to the view that one's knowledge is essentially made - not passively imbibed, not inherited, not divinely vouchsafed. In his Novum Organum (I.xcv) of 1620, Bacon had famously claimed: -6- Those who have handled sciences have been either men of experiment or men of dogmas. The men of experiment are like the ant; they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes a middle course; it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own. Not unlike is the true business of philosophy. Thereafter, most thinkers up to Condorcet (1743-94) said something about education. Benjamin Franklin in 1749 tells his readers to study Milton, Locke, Hutcheson, Obadiah Walker, Charles Rollin and George Turnbull. The earlier writers, such as Milton and Descartes, initially dismissed tradition, culture and community as irrelevant, but even they soon reabsorbed all three notions into their emerging moral, social and political philosophies. Locke, followed by Hume and his Scottish contemporaries, insisted that knowledge and its pursuit could not be merely individual endeavours: for one thing, no one has enough personal experience to ensure even minimal security in a hostile world. Indeed, knowledge must be regarded as an essentially social phenomenon, requiring the presence of others from whom to learn, and among whom to test one's own ideas. Moreover, Hume, arguably inspired as much by Descartes's successors such as Malebranche (1638-1715) as by Locke, insisted that we cannot understand the nature of the present without some notion of its roots in the past. This required a grasp of the culture and tradition from which the present emerged, and awareness of the often complex causal connections that occurred. Only with such awareness can anyone in the present decide what needs revision or rejection in the repertoire of ideas and practices they have inherited; and only with such awareness can anyone hope to build on past successes and avoid past errors. Obvious: once it has become obvious. By the mid-seventeenth century there had developed a recognition that even if scholastic philosophical and theological obscurities could be successfully shamed into dissolution, the increasingly specialized new enquiries - later labelled as 'scientific' - were generating new obstacles to mutual understanding. Ephraim Chambers, writing only a year after the death of Isaac Newton (1642-1727), deplored the fact that in the modern world people 'of the same profession, no longer understand one another … {and} our knowledge is grown into little other than that of peoples misunderstandings or misapprehensions of one another' (Chambers 1728: xvii). An indication of the extent to which the new, moderately sceptical, experience-based enquiries had permeated most areas of study by the time of the French Revolution in 1789 can be gauged from two brief quotations. In the first, William Robertson, leader of the Moderate clergy in Edinburgh, and Principal of the university there, objects to the ways in which missionary priests had projected their own views on to the peoples whom they wished to convert: They study to reconcile the institutions, which fall under their observations, to their own creed, not to explain them according to the rude notions of the people themselves. They ascribe to them ideas which they are incapable of forming, and suppose them to be acquainted with principles and facts, which it is impossible that they should know. (Robertson 1777: vol. 2, 133) -7- Adopting a similar tone, and writing at the beginning of the Revolution, J.-M.-A. Servan (1741-1808), a distinguished French lawyer, observed that in conjectures about the future one cannot guess the intervening crevasses that might impede progress towards distant mountains - a metaphor that by now had lasted more than a century: No matter how much we study we shall never learn more than a little of the present, far less of the past, and almost nothing, perhaps even nothing at all, of the future … History, in short, provides warning signals; it is a light that alerts us to the dangers of a reef ahead, but it is not a clear chart and compass. (Servan quoted by Bongie 1965:76) Although Enlightenment ideas did influence subsequent thought in so many ways, it is easy to forget one of their central social insights. It is this. Everyone learns and absorbs ideas from other people, from the contexts in which they live and from the traditions with which they become familiar. Very rarely have even the best-known thinkers originated the ideas for which they are famous; typically, what distinguishes them are the ways in which they mould, develop or emphasize existing ideas, make new syntheses and interpret their own context. Countless philosophers before David Hume, for example, reflected on the how and why of change, and thus on the nature of causation, including his immediate predecessors discussed in this book, such as Malebranche, Locke, Descartes and Bacon - quite apart from Aristotle, whose famous distinction in Poetics, II.8, between causal connection and mere temporal sequence, was known to everyone. A rather small group of Hume's contemporaries agreed with his analysis of causation, but it is subsequent interpreters and historians who have singled out his work as peculiarly influential on later thought. Contemporaries and posterity judge authors by different standards and from different perspectives. Most of the discussions in this book refer to activities and ideas of an exceptionally small minority of the total populations: they were the people who held or aspired to power, and who possessed or had access to resources which enabled them to pursue or promote enquiry and implement change. The social benefits of their influence were most marked in the educational opportunities that gradually became available to more people, accompanied by decreasing poverty, and the eventual participation of more people in decisions which affected their own lives. It would be a mistake to think, however, that the names or achievements of those whom we discuss were known to more than a handful of their contemporaries or their descendants. REFERENCES | |Bacon, F. (1620) Novum Organum, in The Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon, ed. John M. Robertson, trans. Ellis and Spedding (1905) | | |London: Routledge. | | | | | |Berkeley, G. (1732) An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision {1709}, 4th edn, in (1975) Philosophical Works, introduction by M. R. Ayers, | | |London: Dent. | | | | -8- |Bongie, L. L. (1965) David Hume Prophet of the Counter-revolution, Oxford: Clarendon Press. | | | | | |{Boyle's Lecture Sermons} (1739) A Defence of Natural and Revealed Religion: Being a Collection of the Sermons Preached at the Lecture | | |Founded by the Honourable Robert Boyle, Esq. (From the Year 1691 to the Year 1732), London. | | | | | |Chambers, Ephraim (1728) Cyclopaedia: or an Universal Dictionary of the Arts and Sciences, 2nd edn, 2 vols (1738) London. | | | | | |{Collins, Anthony} (1710) A Vindication of the Divine Attributes … , London. | | | | | |Diderot, D. and D'Alembert, J. (1751) 'Discours Préliminaire des Editeurs', in Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire Raisonné Des Sciences, Des Arts| | |et Des Métiers, Paris. | | | | | |Hume, D. (1752) 'Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations', in Political Discourses, Edinburgh; quoted in Essays and Treatises on Several | | |Subjects (1764) London. | | | | | |{Johnson, S.} (1759) The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia: A Tale, London. | | | | | |Milton, J. (1644) Areopagitica, ed. John W. Hales (1894) Oxford: Clarendon Press. | | | | | |Robertson, William (1777) The History of America, Dublin. | | | | -9- CHAPTER ONE SCIENCE AND THE COMING OF ENLIGHTENMENT John Henry The seminal influence of the new philosophy, or (as we would say) the new science, of the seventeenth century upon the leading Enlightenment thinkers is so unanimously acknowledged in all the literature on the 'long eighteenth century' that it is in danger of being taken for granted. Because science is such a powerful cultural force in modern life, and since the Enlightenment has been be seen as the beginning of modernity, it is all too easy for us to leave unexamined the powerful influence of seventeenth-century natural philosophy on eighteenth-century thinkers. It is important to realize that it was only in the eighteenth century that scientific knowledge acquired the cultural kudos in the West which it has ever since enjoyed; and only then that science began to be recognized as the supreme cognitive authority, the intellectual system to which all others should defer. This new recognition of the intellectual power of scientific knowledge was not merely a matter of eighteenth-century intellectuals waking up to an obvious, previously unrecognized, truth. There was nothing inevitable about the rise of science. On the contrary, it was the Enlightenment's philosophes who took up the science of the preceding age and helped to establish it as the dominant force in Western culture. They would not have done so had there not been something about the science of that preceding age which profoundly impressed them. It is the aim of this chapter, therefore, to look more closely at the science of the period before the Enlightenment, with a view to understanding what it was that so impressed the intellectuals of the late eighteenth century, and made them believe that, thanks in large measure to recent developments in science, they were living in an age of enlightenment. We will be concerned with developments in the period known to historians as the Scientific Revolution, roughly from the middle of the sixteenth century to the early decades of the seventeenth. This was a period when the finite spherical and earth-centred universe of pre-modern times was replaced by the notion of a sun-centred solar system in an infinite expanse of space. What's more, these changes in cosmology were accompanied by numerous astronomical discoveries, including new stars, satellites and the magnetic nature of the earth. There were numerous advances in the knowledge not only of human anatomy, but also of the anatomy of insects and plants. Knowledge of physiology also improved with the discovery of the circulation of the blood in animals and sexual generation in plants, and life processes in general -10- came to be seen not as the result of the special influence of souls or other vital principles but merely the result of physical and chemical processes. Ancient beliefs in inherent purposes and qualities in things gave way to ideas of cause and effect based merely on the physical interactions of bodies. The idea that bodies were made of four elements having their own characteristic qualities gave way to the belief that all bodies and their properties were simply the result of invisibly small particles of matter in characteristic arrangements. It was also a time when it was first accepted that knowledge of nature and its processes could best be understood by close observation and by mathematical analysis, and when it was first realized that the operations of nature followed precise law-like rules. It might seem, even from a rapid survey like this, that these achievements speak for themselves; that we only have to go through each of them in more detail to understand why the leading philosophes were so impressed. There is no denying the cumulative impact of all these achievements, but the real legacy of the Scientific Revolution was not simply a bundle of newly established knowledge. Its importance was to show how yet more discoveries might be made, and how new truths about the world and everything in it could be established and understood. In short, the Scientific Revolution pointed the way to progress, and the new methodology of science became a major factor in the development of Enlightenment optimism. In what follows, therefore, I do not attempt to consider the manifold achievements of the Scientific Revolution in any detail (there are, after all, many books on the period which are readily available). I simply focus on those aspects of the Scientific Revolution which caused Enlightenment thinkers to believe that knowledge of the natural world, what we would call 'scientific knowledge', should be seen as paradigmatic of all knowledge claims, and, if correctly pursued, would lead to the irresistible progress of mankind. My concern, therefore, is not so much with specific scientific achievements as with what is called 'scientific method'. It was what they perceived to be the new methodology of science which had the most profound influence upon Enlightenment thinkers. The specific achievements of the Scientific Revolution amply demonstrated the efficacy of the new scientific method. For the intellectuals of the succeeding age, therefore, it was simply a matter of bringing that method to bear on other aspects of life and thought. THE NEW PHILOSOPHY, OR NEW PHILOSOPHIES' Late seventeenth-century natural philosophers frequently referred to something called 'the new philosophy', which they contrasted to the old scholastic philosophy, traditionally taught in the universities. It is evident, however, that there was not just one new philosophy. As Voltaire (1694-1778) made plain in his Philosophical Letters, there was a vigorous rivalry, for example, between English and French new philosophies: A Frenchman arriving in London finds quite a change in philosophy as in all else. Behind him he left the world full; here he finds it empty. In Paris one sees -11- the universe composed of vortices of subtle matter; in London one sees nothing of the sort. With us it's the pressure of the moon that causes the rising of the tide; with the English it's the sea gravitating toward the moon; so that when you {French} think the moon ought to give us a high tide, these gentlemen think it ought to be low. (Voltaire 1734: Letter Fourteen, 60) Here, and in the rest of this letter, Voltaire is comparing the rival new philosophies of the great French thinker René Descartes (1596-1650), founder of the so-called 'mechanical philosophy', and the supreme English mathematician and experimental philosopher Isaac Newton (1642-1727). According to Descartes, the world was full, and according to Newton it must be empty. Voltaire writes in an entertaining way, straying even into facetiousness (he suggests that the only way we could decide who was right about the moon's effect on the tides would require seeing the state of affairs at 'the first moment of creation'), but he was fully aware of the far-reaching significance of these and the other 'tremendous contrarieties' that he mentioned. Voltaire, true to his anglomanie, was one of the first Frenchmen to acknowledge the superiority of Newtonian science over Cartesian mechanical philosophy. His Philosophical Letters played a part not only in convincing other Frenchmen that Newtonianism should be taken more seriously, but also in raising the profile of natural philosophy in general as a prime means of discovering the truth about the way things are, and therefore as a major source of intellectual authority, capable even of supplanting ecclesiastical authority. The astonishing wider impact of these philosophies of nature almost certainly stemmed from the fact that they seemed to offer so much promise in discovering the truth. To begin with, Cartesianism seemed so superior to scholastic natural philosophy that it became immensely influential in spite of numerous difficulties. Those difficulties, however, led other natural philosophers to develop refinements or alternatives to the Cartesian system which eventually culminated in the mathematical physics of Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica (1687). Although quickly accepted in England by the majority of natural philosophers, on the Continent Newtonianism seemed to deviate too far from sound Cartesian principles to be acceptable. But it was gradually recognized that Newtonianism could be used to advance beyond Cartesianism, giving rise in the eighteenth century to a newer natural philosophy. Indeed, post-Cartesian and post-Newtonian science became a major factor in Enlightenment optimism. To understand why these new philosophies inspired such optimism, one needs to know how they came to be amalgamated so successfully. CARTESIANISM Inspired partly by the Renaissance revival of knowledge about ancient atomism, the earlier work of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), and the innovative work of his erstwhile friend and collaborator Isaac Beeckman (1588-1637), Descartes developed a natural philosophy in which all physical phenomena could be explained in terms of matter -12- in motion. Descartes's great advance over his precursors was to develop a complete system of philosophy in which there were no unexplained, or inexplicable, phenomena. Assuming that all bodies were composed of invisibly small particles in various combinations and arrangements, Descartes explained all change in terms of the motion and therefore rearrangement of the constituent particles. The crucial difference between Descartes's philosophy and ancient atomism, or even the contemporary 'physico-mathematics' of Beeckman, was the claim that all the required motions could be explained in terms of the working of specific laws of nature. Taking it as axiomatic that motion could never be lost from the world system, but must always remain at a constant level, these laws stipulated how motions were transferred in collisions from one particle to another. Where ancient atomists, or their Renaissance revivers, sometimes invoked unexplained principles of motion to account for the new motions of atoms, Descartes only allowed transfer of motion from one part of the system to another, in accordance with his rules of collision. At least, that's how it was in principle. It followed from this that Descartes was committed to a universe in which nothing could be allowed to hinder the lawlike transfer of motion from one particle to another. There could thus be no empty spaces between particles (spaces which might absorb the vibratory motions of a particle, for example, without passing the motion on to adjacent particles). This is why a Frenchman, according to Voltaire, thinks the world is full. A full universe, however, as the ancient atomists pointed out long ago, was in danger of being a universe locked in stasis. How could anything move if every possible space to move into was already occupied' Descartes avoided this by insisting upon a kind of instantaneous fluidity in the universe, so that as soon as one particle moved, its place was immediately filled by another (to avoid formation of a vacuum), and its place in turn was filled by another, and so on. This process did not have to go on ad infinitum, however. According to Descartes, such movements were locally confined, so that there was a kind of circular displacement initiated by the movement of one particle but closed by completion of a circle of displacement. Such circular displacements could be large or small but they always acted instantaneously, in the sense that there could never be a moment when there was a vacuum left where a particle once had been. These circular displacements, required essentially as part of Descartes's metaphysics, came to play a role in his physics, being invoked to account for the circular motions of the planets and other cosmic phenomena. The name given to such a whirlpool of matter was 'vortex', and this is what Voltaire had in mind in his letter 'On Descartes and Newton', when he wrote that 'In Paris one sees the universe composed of vortices of subtile matter' (Voltaire 1734: Letter Fourteen, 60). Descartes was sufficiently confident of the explanatory power of his new system of philosophy that he was able to claim, at the end of his Principia philosophiae (1644), the fullest account of his system, 'that no phenomena of nature have been omitted by me in this treatise', and that 'there is nothing visible or perceptible in this world that I have not explained' (Descartes 1644: Part IV, §199, 282-3). The claim was not meant to be taken literally, but as a statement of principle. The advantages of this system over the traditional version of Aristotelian philosophy which had become enshrined in university curricula throughout Western -13- Europe were evidently sufficient to ensure its influence. New discoveries and new theories, such as the astronomical theory of Copernicus and the theory of motion of Galileo, not only seemed to undermine Aristotelianism but exposed the unsatisfactory way Aristotelian philosophers defended their traditional positions. Increasingly, Aristotelianism was seen to rely merely on its own definitions of how things are. Copernicus must be wrong, Aristotelians insisted, because the 'natural place' of the earth is at the centre of the world system. One of the most derided of such Aristotelian concepts was the notion of so-called 'substantial forms'. Growing out of Aristotle's original claim that bodies cannot consist simply of matter, since matter can only be understood if it is formed into a particular shape, substantial forms accounted for all of a body's qualities. A piece of matter in the shape of a cube might turn out, on inspection, to be a cube of wood or a cube of iron. Since Aristotle claimed all unformed matter was the same, what makes wood differ from iron' His answer: the (substantial) form. But what this meant was that any poorly understood, or downright inexplicable, phenomena could simply be 'explained' in terms of the substantial form of the body or bodies in question. This was becoming something of a philosophical scandal. The mechanical philosophy did away with the concept of substantial forms at a stroke. Matter, still always the same, was held to exist in countless numbers of particles of different sizes and shapes, but always smaller than could be detected by human senses. It was the combination of these particles, in particular arrangements, or their movements in particular ways, which gave rise to the bodies (wood, iron, etc.) and other phenomena of everyday life. Explanations in these terms (essentially still current in modern science) were considered by converts to the mechanical philosophy to be more intelligible and more plausible than explanations in terms of Aristotelian substantial forms or other scholastic concepts. Nevertheless, there were serious disadvantages to the Cartesian system. In spite of its author's boldly expressed confidence in the unassailable nature of its explanations, it was perfectly clear that the whole system was based entirely upon speculation; given that all explanations depended upon the behaviour of imperceptible movements and particles, there was no accessible evidence for any of the explanations, much less any certainty. Moreover, some well-known physical phenomena seemed very hard to reconcile with Cartesian principles. Many everyday phenomena could be understood in terms of the transfer of motions in collisions, although usually a willing suspension of disbelief was urgently called for, but there were others which seemed inexplicable in Cartesian terms. How can gunpowder send a heavy cannonball flying at high speed and over a great distance just because it is tickled by the gentle motion of a flame' Contrary to Cartesian principles, this looks like the generation of new motion, rather than the transfer of motion from one thing (the flame) to another (the cannonball). Efforts to suggest that the required kind of vigorous motion must somehow be trapped in the gunpowder during its manufacture did not seem convincing - nothing in the making of gunpowder required that the ingredients be implosively brought together in a way that mirrored its subsequent explosiveness. For many, therefore, the Cartesian system seemed merely fantastic - the result of an ingenious imagination, perhaps, but entirely lacking in support. For Voltaire, the problem was that Descartes 'gave himself up to the systematizing -14- spirit. From then on his philosophy was no more than an ingenious romance, at best seeming probable to the ignorant' (Voltaire 1734: Letter Fourteen, 64). Voltaire was condemning Descartes for the very thing that had made his philosophy seem so powerful to many seventeenth-century thinkers. By the early decades of the seventeenth century it was becoming increasingly obvious that Aristotelian philosophy was seriously flawed, maybe even untenable. In spite of the innovations of Copernicus, Galileo and others, however, it was all too clear that there was nothing capable of replacing the fully comprehensive system of Aristotle. Acceptance of Copernican astronomy, or the Galilean theory of motion, immediately raised innumerable questions about other aspects of physics which were simply never addressed by Copernicus or Galileo. What was required was a complete system of natural philosophy, able to offer an account of all phenomena - this was precisely what the Aristotelian system provided. Descartes was the first philosopher ever to provide a coherent, all-embracing system that could replace the Aristotelian system, lock, stock and barrel. For many, this had been the major strength of the Cartesian system. Voltaire, however, was an admirer of English philosophy, where the 'systematizing spirit' was treated with suspicion, if not outright disdain. ENGLAND AND THE EXPERIMENTAL PHILOSOPHY Nowhere, it seems, were philosophers more suspicious of the Cartesian romance than in seventeenth-century England. By mid-century there was already a strong tradition of empiricism in England; a belief that knowledge could be established only by an experience dependent ultimately on sense perceptions. Consequently, even those natural philosophers who immediately recognized the superiority of Cartesianism over scholastic Aristotelianism (and there were many) considered it only as a starting point for thinking about the natural world, not as the final word. The suggested reform of natural philosophy put forward by Francis Bacon (1561-1626), statesman and man of letters, can be seen as both symptomatic of English attitudes and influential in reinforcing them. The emphasis on empiricism was at least partly the result of English experiences following the Henrician Reformation. Being the only Reformation initiated on non-doctrinal grounds, it gave rise to protracted religious disputes between those who wished to remain Anglo-Catholic and those who sought more radical reform. This in turn led to what came to be seen as characteristically English attempts to reach compromise positions to reconcile opposed factions. Since entrenched doctrinal positions were always defended on supposedly well-reasoned grounds, English intellectuals tended to distrust claims based on 'reason' and looked for compromise in more pragmatically based positions. Bacon grew to maturity as the famous 'Elizabethan compromise', based on the supposedly conciliatory Thirty-Nine Articles of the Anglican Church, was being promoted. Against this background, especially of the outdated Aristotelian natural philosophy of the scholastics, it is not surprising that Bacon's work, from the outset, was empiricist and hostile to premature system-building. (He lived too early -15- to oppose the Cartesian system but dismissed earlier anti-Aristotelian systems developed by BernardinoTelesio (1509-88), Francesco Patrizi (1529-97) and others.) Although Bacon was never able to reform natural philosophy in the way that he envisaged, he outlined his methodological prescriptions in a number of published works which proved immensely influential, especially in England. Although Bacon was an empiricist, and a champion of experiment as a way of reaching an understanding of natural processes, his method was uniquely different from other experimentalists. In particular, Bacon was opposed to what he saw as the common practice of performing experiments in order to confirm what one already believed. For Bacon, this was simply another example of what he called 'anticipations of nature', rather than an unbiased means of discovering the truth. It was all too easy, Bacon believed, to design an experiment to prove what you wanted it to prove. For Bacon, experiments should be designed merely to establish facts, to establish precisely what happens in a given set of circumstances. This approach went hand in hand with Bacon's generally natural historical approach; that is to say, his emphasis on gathering natural histories, or catalogues of natural data. Indeed, Bacon spoke often of the need to gather 'natural and experimental' histories. In his most famous book, the Novum Organum (New Organon, or New Instrument, 1620), Bacon described in detail how such empirical data should be set out in what he called 'Tables of Discovery'. The crucial point here was Bacon's belief that the search for explanatory causes, to account for the phenomena listed in the tables, should follow the gathering of data, not precede it. This was the right kind of disciplined approach, Bacon believed, to avoid jumping to unsubstantiated conclusions. 'The understanding', he wrote in the New Organon, 'must not therefore be supplied with wings, but rather hung with weights, to keep it from leaping and flying' from particulars to remote axioms, or principles (Bacon 1620: Book I, Aphorism 104). Bacon's ambition to reform natural philosophy could hardly fail to attract international attention at a time when Aristotelianism was seen to be in terminal decline, but it was undoubtedly in England where he had the most influence. His ideas seemed especially congenial to leading natural philosophers after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. Seeing the Civil War and Interregnum periods as times of religious fanaticism (or enthusiasm, as it was usually called), many among the educated classes turned once again to religious compromise as a way of damping controversy. Latitudinarianism became a prominent movement within the newly restored Anglican Church. Taking inspiration from earlier efforts at compromise during the reign of Edward VI (1547-53), Latitudinarians insisted only upon a few fundamental doctrines, which would be acceptable (they hoped) to all Christians. Other points of religion were held to be indifferent to one's salvation, and therefore believers could hold their own view until the truth should be revealed on the Last Day. In this religious atmosphere Baconianism began to flourish even more. The Baconian emphasis upon compiling natural histories and avoiding commitment to particular theoretical points of view until the time was ripe (when all the relevant data was deemed to have been made available) was seen as a way of avoiding controversy in natural philosophy, analogous to the method of Latitudinarian churchmen. This was important because Aristotelian natural philosophy, traditionally regarded as a 'handmaiden' to the 'Queen of the sciences' (theology), was now -17- seen (particularly after the Galileo affair) as a bolster to Roman Catholicism. Similarly, other rival versions of new philosophies could be associated with sectarian enthusiasm, or with atheism (widely perceived in the seventeenth century to be a new and highly dangerous threat to stable societies). For a leading group of natural philosophers in Restoration England, the way to avoid such charges of ideological bias in natural philosophy was to claim to be dealing only with matters of fact. Bacon provided the philosophical justification for such an approach. The leading scientist in late seventeenth-century England, certainly as far as European onlookers were concerned, was Robert Boyle (1627-91), and nobody exemplified the Baconian method better. The majority of Boyle's publications can be seen as 'natural and experimental histories' in the Baconian mould. Furthermore, Boyle's method was described and justified to natural philosophers all over Europe by his secretary, Henry Oldenburg (c. 1620-77). When Oldenburg became secretary of the Royal Society his correspondence expanded greatly, giving him greater opportunities to promote the new version of Baconianism throughout Europe. Indeed, the Royal Society itself came to be seen abroad as a Baconian institution. Founded in the year of the Restoration, the Royal Society was a new kind of institution, explicitly devoted to the experimental and experiential investigation of nature. Its Baconian antecedents were proudly proclaimed and many of its fellows engaged in the kind of collaborative gathering of data for natural histories which Bacon had insisted was an essential prerequisite for his reform of natural philosophy. The Society was more than once likened to Salomon's House, an imagined research institute devoted to natural philosophy, which Bacon described in his posthumously published Utopian fable, the New Atlantis (1627). In case the significance of the Baconian antecedents of the Royal Society was missed, the leading fellows commissioned and supervised a kind of manifesto of the Society which insisted that the fellows were engaged not upon promoting a particular natural philosophy (which might be construed as a handmaiden to a particular religious faction), but merely upon the gathering of facts, based upon a theoretical (or doctrinal) minimalism. Under a suitably Baconian title, The History of the Royal Society of London (1667), Thomas Sprat (1635-1713), an up-and-coming man of letters, told his readers that the Society pursued the Baconian version of the experimental method, that it had 'wholly omitted doctrines', and was committed only to the gathering of 'matters of fact'. Their aim, therefore, was 'not to lay the Foundation of an English, Scottish, Irish, Popish, or Protestant Philosophy; but a Philosophy of Mankind' (Sprat 1667: Part II, Section VI, 63) Having said this, however, Sprat could not resist drawing the analogy between the method of the Royal Society and the irenic method of the Latitudinarian Church of England: 'Though I cannot carry the Institution of the Royal Society many years back, yet the seeds of it were sown in King Edward the Sixth's, and Queen Elizabeth's Reign … The Church of England therefore may justly be styl'd the Mother of this sort of Knowledge' (Sprat 1667:372). The importance of these English developments is that they contribute forcefully to what has been called the 'prehistory of objectivity' (Daston 1991; Henry 1992). Although the notion of 'objectivity' was yet to be coined, the idea that scientific knowledge is the supreme form of objective knowledge, free from prejudice and partiality, has its beginnings among the Baconian philosophers of Restoration -18- England. Due to their recent collective experience of the political and religious upheaval of the Interregnum, they were the only natural philosophers to whom it seemed important to claim ideological neutrality. The general significance of this was not lost on the intellectuals of the Enlightenment. It is important to note, however, that the Baconianism professed by the leading fellows of the Royal Society was, to a large extent, rhetorical. As a means of persuading contemporaries that their natural philosophy was certain and reliable, being based only on matters of fact gathered by philosophers with no preoccupations about the way things should be, the rhetoric worked well. In practice, however, the natural philosophers of Restoration England often deviated from the methodological precepts of their mentor. This was most noticeable in their fairly unanimous commitment to one version or another of the mechanical philosophy. The philosophical advantages of Cartesianism were recognized even in a would-be Baconian England. The resulting tension between these two philosophical approaches gave rise to what was often called the 'experimental philosophy'. In effect, this was a version of the mechanical philosophy, in which physical phenomena were assumed to be explicable in terms of the motions and interactions of invisible particles or corpuscles (as they were usually designated). What set it apart from Cartesianism, however, was the way in which its claims were justified. Where Descartes had based his claims on a long chain of reasoning starting from initial premises which he took to be indubitable, the English philosophers referred back as often as they could to supposedly empirical supports for their claims. More often than not, the so-called empirical or experiential evidence for English claims was nothing of the sort. Consider, for example, the standard claim that acids are composed of invisibly small particles shaped like needles. The empirical evidence for this is the sensation that acids seem to prick the tongue. Is this undeniably how we experience the taste of an acid' Or did Boyle and his contemporaries think this way because they already believed the action of an acid must be based on the shape of its constituent particles. With hindsight it seems hard to believe that anyone could have accepted there were genuine empirical grounds for believing in the mechanical philosophy. Almost as hard as it is to believe anybody could have accepted Descartes's rational, but (to us) highly implausible, account of the workings of magnetism, gravity, human emotions and numerous other aspects of his philosophy. To understand the powerful influence of these philosophies, we need continually to remind ourselves of the perceived need to come up with something capable of replacing in toto the intellectually bankrupt Aristotelian system. ISAAC NEWTON, BACONIAN For a long time, the supreme exponent of the experimental philosophy was Robert Boyle. He, more than anyone else, pursued the Baconian ideal of gathering data. If he did not quite compile his findings in 'tables of discovery', he was able to show his contemporaries how his findings could be construed as empirical support for the 'corpuscular philosophy', as he called his version of the mechanical philosophy. -19- Teaching Baconian experimental philosophy by example, Boyle's writings played a valuable role in throwing doubt on Cartesian dogmas. A less acute thinker might have insisted that the experiments he performed with the newly invented air-pump, for example, proved the Cartesian plenum was false. Boyle knew that the various unusual phenomena he could bring about in the chamber of his air-pump were the result of the partial evacuation of the air, but he also knew there was still some air in there, to say nothing of light (which, unlike sound, was unaffected by the operation of the pump), or of other invisible effluvia or subtle spirits that might remain in the chamber. True to his Baconianism, therefore, Boyle did not claim to have refuted Cartesianism, nor even to have established the possibility of a vacuum. For the convenience of discussing his experimental results, he referred to the state of affairs within the air-pump as a vacuum Boylianum, but made no further claims as to the wider significance of this. Nevertheless, Boyle's intellectual modesty and cautious empiricism made their marks (Shapin and Schaffer 1985). Long before Voltaire, Cartesianism seemed increasingly to be revealed as an 'ingenious romance', while Boyle continued to base everything on experimentally verified matters of fact. The intellectual development of Isaac Newton was profoundly shaped not just by Robert Boyle, but also by the entire background of English Baconianism (Dear 1985). One of the most significant outcomes of Newton's education was that he was able to exploit in his work the possibility that bodies could attract one another at a distance. Where a Cartesian would have to seek a mechanical explanation, based upon the assumption of direct contact, or a chain of such contacts, Newton could simply point to gravitational attraction as an undeniable 'matter of fact'. Gravity can easily be established experimentally (you could hold this book a few feet above the ground and then let go of it, for example). What's more, in the hands of a Newton it can be analysed mathematically. Newton was a supremely gifted mathematician and was able to compare the fall of a body on earth to the force of attraction required to keep the moon in its orbit. As he put it: 'I … compared the force requisite to keep the Moon in her Orb with the force of gravity at the surface of the earth, and found them answer pretty nearly' (Newton c. 1715, quoted in Westfall 1980:143). This was sufficient for a Baconian like Newton to base his physics upon the assumption that attractive forces between bodies at a distance were undeniable matters of fact (Voltaire 1734: Letter Fifteen, 72-4; Gabbey, Garber, Henry and Joy 1998). For a mechanical philosopher in the Cartesian mould, the notion of action at a distance was completely unacceptable. We can see this in the response of one of the leading Continental natural philosophers, G. W. Leibniz (1646-1716). According to Leibniz, Newton had failed to complete the account of planetary motions in his Principia mathematica (1687) because he had offered no physical explanation of how the attractive forces he had described mathematically were transmitted from one body to another. What Leibniz had in mind, of course, was a typically mechanistic account involving the movement of streams of particles between the 'attracting' bodies which then somehow caused the bodies to move towards one another. Newton was able to call upon the tradition of English Baconianism to give this objection short shrift. He made it clear that he was dealing in his Principia mathematica with matters of fact, and that, unlike Cartesian mechanical philosophers, he did not dabble in unsubstantiated hypotheses: -20- I have not as yet been able to deduce from phenomena the reason for these properties of gravity, and I do not feign hypotheses. For whatever is not deduced from the phenomena must be called a hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, or based on occult qualities, or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. (Newton 1713: General Scholium, 943) -21- What we see in the work of Isaac Newton, then, is the triumphant culmination of English Baconianism. Newton was a mechanical philosopher, but one who tempered his mechanistic worldview with a Baconian concern for matters of fact and avoidance of hypothesis or unsubstantiated speculation. There could be no better vindication of the Royal Society's way of doing natural philosophy than Newton's Principia mathematica, still universally acknowledged as one of the greatest achievements of the human mind. THE COMING OF ENLIGHTENMENT In the Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopaedia (1751), Jean D'Alembert (1717-83) admitted that, while Newton's genius had been quickly accepted in Britain, 'at that time it would have taken a good deal to make Europe likewise accept his works'. D'Alembert went on to portray a France still dominated by scholastic Aristotelianism when Newton 'had already overthrown Cartesian physics' (D'Alembert 1751:88). Although this was generally true, D'Alembert plays down the extent to which the leading natural philosophers in late seventeenth-century France, no less than in Holland, were committed to Cartesianism. By the end of the seventeenth century those in the vanguard of natural philosophy on Continental Europe were for the most part Cartesian mechanists, and it was the prominent use by Newton of action-at-a-distance which led them to dismiss his new philosophy. Indeed, Descartes's influence was so strong that a cultural commentator like Voltaire thought it necessary to teach eighteenth-century Continental philosophers about the philosophy of Francis Bacon before they could be expected to accept Newtonianism. It was no doubt for this reason that Voltaire preceded his discussion of Newton in Philosophical Letters with a letter 'On Chancellor Bacon' (Bacon had been Lord Chancellor of England, 1618-21). Voltaire began by describing Bacon as the 'father of the experimental philosophy' and the experimental method as 'a hidden treasure of which Bacon had some expectations and which all the philosophers, encouraged by his promise, laboured to unearth' (Voltaire 1734:48, 49). But he also portrayed Bacon as pointing the way to the discovery of Newtonian gravitation. 'What has surprised me most', he wrote, 'has been to find in explicit terms in his book that novel theory of attraction which Mr Newton is credited with inventing' (Voltaire 1734:49). Bacon also figured prominently in the history of recent science recounted by D'Alembert in the Preliminary Discourse. Tempted to regard him as 'the greatest, the most universal, and the most eloquent of the philosophers', D'Alembert noted Bacon's hostility to philosophical systems and his ambition to catalogue 'what remained to be discovered' (D'Alembert 1751:74, 75). The Encyclopaedia itself was in many ways a Baconian enterprise; a vast textual equivalent of the kind of collaborative knowledge-gathering advocated by Bacon and professed as part of their aim by the fellows of the Royal Society. In organizing the entries for their Encyclopaedia Diderot and D'Alembert developed an 'encyclopaedic tree' of knowledge closely modelled upon the division of the sciences drawn up by Bacon in his De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum (On the Proficiency and Advancement of the Sciences, 1623) (D'Alembert 1751:76-7, 159-64; Darnton 1984). -22- But if Bacon pointed the way forward, so did Descartes. In spite of their harsh criticism of the founder of the mechanical philosophy, both Voltaire and D'Alembert acknowledged his importance in the brief histories of science they presented in Philosophical Letters and the Preliminary Discourse. For Voltaire, Descartes 'gave sight to the blind' by teaching us how to reason. 'He who has set us on the road to truth', he wrote, 'is perhaps as worthy as he who since then has gone on to the end of it' (Voltaire 1734:64). Similarly, for D'Alembert, Descartes pointed philosophers in the right direction: 'He can be thought of as a leader of conspirators who, before anyone else, had the courage to arise against a despotic and arbitrary power and who, in preparing a resounding revolution, laid the foundation of a more just and happier government, which he himself was not able to see established' (D'Alembert 1751:80). It was Newton, however, who succeeded in combining the rational, mathematical approach of Descartes with the experimental method of Bacon and, as D'Alembert said, 'gave philosophy a form which apparently it is to keep' (D'Alembert 1751:81). Like British philosophers before them, Enlightenment philosophes saw Newtonianism as the new method of doing science. The achievement of the Principia mathematica, and of Newton's second great book, the Opticks (1704), seemed to stand out above all the other achievements of the Scientific Revolution. Clearly, Newton had successfully combined the methods extolled by Bacon and Descartes, and demonstrated how natural philosophy should henceforward be pursued. There was a genuine optimism that it was now only matter of time before all truths would be discovered. Newton's influence was dominant in both physics and chemistry, of course, and to a lesser extent in the biomedical sciences (Brown 1987; Guerlac 1981; Hankins 1985; Schofield 1970), but most remarkable was his influence in the new 'human sciences'. Newton himself, perhaps unwittingly, contributed to this general trend. In the closing paragraph of his book on the nature of light, Opticks, arguably more influential on eighteenth-century science than the Principia itself, Newton wrote: 'And if natural Philosophy in all its Parts, by pursuing this Method, shall at length be perfected, the Bounds of Moral Philosophy will be also enlarged' (Newton 1704:405). Newton was a deeply religious thinker and went on to say that our duty towards God, 'as well as that towards one another, will appear to us by the Light of Nature'. For the faithful, Newton showed the importance of the study of nature for revealing the existence and attributes of God, for more secular thinkers it was an easy matter to dismiss the religious gloss and focus on the possibility of a naturalistic ethics. John Locke (1632-1704) saw his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) as a kind of tidying-up, clarifying the workings of the human mind in order better to understand the truths of nature uncovered by Newton and other natural philosophers (Locke 1690: Epistle to the Reader, xxxv). David Hartley (1705-57) paraphrased Newton's account of scientific method and insisted upon its use in morality and religion in his Observations on Man (1749:6): The proper method of philosophizing seems to be, to discover and establish the general laws of action, affecting the subject under consideration, from certain select, well defined and well attested phaenomena, and then to explain -23- and predict the other phenomena by these laws. This is the method of analysis and synthesis recommended and followed by Sir Isaac Newton … It is of the utmost consequence to morality and religion that the Affections and Passions should be analysed into their simple compounding parts, by reversing the steps of the Associations which concur to form them. The newly conceived psychological phenomenon, the association of ideas, was seen by David Hume (1711-76) as 'a kind of attraction, which in the mental world will be found to have as extraordinary effects as in the natural, and to show itself in as many and as various forms' (Hume 1739: Book I, Part I, Section IV). Hume, like many contemporary physicists and chemists, followed Newton's suggestion that all natural phenomena 'may depend on certain forces by which the particles of bodies, by causes not yet known, either are impelled toward one another … or are repelled from one another and recede' (Newton 1687: Preface, 382-3). The attempt to explain human behaviour in terms of two opposing principles, self-love (we would say selfishness) and reason (or common sense), was also largely Newtonian in inspiration. These were the moral equivalents of attraction and repulsion. Any excessive tendency to selfishness would be tempered by our 'rational' or 'experimental' discovery that we could optimize our chances of gaining pleasure and avoiding pain by co-operation with others. When Alexander Pope, in his Essay on Man (1733-4) asked, 'Could he {Newton}, whose rules the rapid Comet bind,/Describe or fix one movement of his Mind'' He answered in the affirmative. Properly applied, the Newtonian method reveals that: | |Two Principles in human nature reign; | | |Self-love to urge, and Reason to restrain … | | |Self-love, the spring of motion, acts the soul; | | |Reason's comparing balance rules the whole. | | |The same Self-love, in all, becomes the cause | | |Of what restrains him, Government and Laws … | | |Self-love forsook the path it first pursu'd, | | |And found the private in the public good … | | |So two consistent motions act the Soul; | | |And one regards itself, and one the Whole. | | |Thus God and Nature link'd the gen'ral frame, | | |And bade Self-love and Social be the same. | (Pope 1733-4: Epistles II and III) The same 'Newtonian' moral principles can be seen to have inspired Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776), and a host of other contributions to the 'science of man'. After all, as Condorcet pointed out, at the beginning of his predictions for man's future progress in the 'Tenth Epoch': The sole foundation for the belief in the natural sciences is this idea, that the general laws directing the phenomena of the universe, known or unknown, are -24- necessary and constant. Why should this principle be any less true for the development of the intellectual and moral faculties of man than for the other operations of nature' (Condorcet 1795) There can be little doubt that Enlightenment thinkers were optimistic about the possibilities of establishing true and certain principles in the social and political sciences because they were inspired by the astonishing success of the new science. For many, that new science owed its success principally to the triumvirate of Bacon, Descartes and Newton. The inspiration was not so much the science itself as the new method, which seemed so potent and successful. Furthermore, that method might be variously interpreted by different thinkers. Some took a more professedly Baconian line than others, while some continued to praise reason and took a more Cartesian line. Some might be said to be genuinely Newtonian in their approach, while others might decry Newton while still employing some Newtonian precepts. It is clear, for example, that both Hume and Hartley were inspired by Newton, but Hume's Newtonianism was secular and lacked the theological dimensions of Hartley. Enlightenment thought was not straightforwardly Newtonian, but Newton, alongside Bacon and Descartes, embodied the scientific method which proved so influential. However loosely conceived, the influence of Newtonianism beyond the physical sciences into what we now call the social sciences shows the crucial importance of scientific developments in the origins of Enlightenment thinking. It also tends to confirm the recent observation that Enlightenment anglomanie was not a precondition for the appreciation of English natural philosophy, but an outcome of it (Israel 2001:518). It is undeniable that Enlightenment thinkers were greatly inspired by the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution. They saw it as the outcome of a scientific method, in which a supremely rational approach was checked and confirmed by experimental investigations, conducted in an entirely impartial and unprejudiced way. It is hardly surprising that they should regard this as the legacy principally of Bacon, Descartes and Newton, the three thinkers most responsible for forging the new scientific method. REFERENCES | |Bacon, Francis (1620) New Organon {Novum Organum}, in The Works, 7 vols, J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis and D. D. Heath (eds) (1857-61) London, | | |vol. IV. | | | | | |Brown, Theodore M. (1987) 'Medicine and the Principia', Journal of the History of Ideas, 48: 629-48. | | | | | |Condorcet, Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de (posth. 1795) Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrés de l'esprit humain, | | |trans. June Barraclough with intro. Stuart Hampshire (1955) Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, London: | | |Weidenfeld & Nicolson. | | | | | |D'Alembert, Jean Le Ronde (1751) Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopaedia of Diderot, trans. Richard N. Schwab (1995) Chicago: University| | |of Chicago Press. | | | | -25- |Darnton, Robert (1984) 'Philosophers Trim the Tree of Knowledge: The Epistemological Strategy of the Encyclopédie', in The Great Cat | |Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History, New York: Basic Books. | | | | | |Daston, Lorraine (1991) 'Baconian Facts, Academic Civility, and the Prehistory of Objectivity', Annals of Scholarship, 8: 337-63. | | | | | |Dear, Peter (1985) 'Totius in verba: Rhetoric and Authority in the Early Royal Society', Isis, 76: 145-61. | | | | | |Descartes, René (1644) Principles of Philosophy {Principia philosophiae}, trans. Valentine Rodger Miller and Reese P. Miller (1983) | | |Dordrecht: D. Reidel. | | | | | |Gabbey, Alan, Garber, Daniel, Henry, John and Joy, Lynn (1998) 'New Doctrines of Body and Its Powers, Place and Space', in The Cambridge | | |History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, D. Garber and M. Ayers (eds) Cambridge:Cambridge University Press. | | | | | |Guerlac, Henry (1981) Newton on the Continent, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. | | | | | |Hankins, Thomas L. (1985) Science and the Enlightenment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. | | | | | |Hartley, David (1749) Observations on Man, his Frame, his Duty, and his Expectations, 5th edn (1810), London. | | | | | |Henry, John (1992) 'England', in The Scientific Revolution in National Context, Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (eds), Cambridge: Cambridge | | |University Press. | | | | | |Hume, David (1739) A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. P. H. Nidditch (1978) Oxford: Clarendon Press. | | | | | |Israel, Jonathan I. (2001) Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650-1750, Oxford: Oxford University Press. | | | | | |Locke, John (1690) An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. John W. Yolton (1961) London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. | | | | | |Newton, Isaac (1687/1713) Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, trans. I. B. Cohen and Anne Whitman (1999) Berkeley: University of| | |California Press. | | | | | |--(1704) Opticks, 2nd edn (1717) London. | | | | | |Pope, Alexander (1733-4) Essay on Man, London. | | | | | |Schofield, Robert E. (1970) Mechanism and Materialism: British Natural Philosophy in an Age of Reason, Princeton: Princeton University | | |Press. | | | | | |Shapin, Steven and Schaffer, Simon (1985) Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life, Princeton: Princeton | | |University Press. | | | | | |Sprat, Thomas (1667) History of the Royal Society of London, ed. Jackson I. Cope and Harold W. Jones (1966) London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.| | | | | |Voltaire (1734) Philosophical Letters, trans. Ernest Dilworth (1961) Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc. | | | | | |Westfall, R. S. (1980) Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. | | | | -26- CHAPTER TWO THE QUEST FOR PHILOSOPHICAL CERTAINTY Peter Schouls CERTAINTY, TRADITION AND TRANSCENDENCE Among the portraits on Jean D'Alembert's walls were those of Voltaire, Frederick II and Descartes. The first, the most erudite and satirical attacker of both secular and religious hierarchies, and the second, a royal patron of Enlightenment culture, form excellent company for this philosopher-mathematician and encyclopaedist. But why Descartes, who, in his Meditations (1641), deems it important to prove God's existence not once but twice, and whose correspondence with Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia as well as his final year of life at the court of Queen Christina of Sweden would seem to indicate an obsequious attitude to royalty and authority' Would not John Locke, champion of individual rights, have been a better choice' For Locke's likeness in a private dwelling we have to go to Ireland, to the home of William Molyneux. When Molyneux requested him to sit for this portrait, Locke displayed characteristic diffidence: 'Painting was designed to represent the gods, or the great men that stood next to them.' Molyneux agreed and presciently pointed Locke to the place which eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers were to assign him: '"Painting, it is true, was designed to represent the gods, and the great men that stand next them;" and therefore it was, that I desired your picture' (Locke 1823: vol. 9, 12 and 26 September 1696, 386, 391). Those troubled by Descartes's inclusion in the Enlightenment's pantheon underestimate his formative influence on Enlightenment thinkers. In their quest for knowledge and certainty, neither Descartes nor Locke sought the relevant tools or criteria for this search in civil or ecclesiastical powers; neither of them looked for the objects of certainty to a Platonic Good or to an Augustinian God's revelation; both located criteria for and objects of certainty within individual searchers for truth. This departure from Greek and medieval dependence on what transcended the human situation was the radical move - in which Descartes was the leader and Locke a critical and innovative follower - which made possible the eighteenth century's revolutionary conception of the nature of human beings and of their relationships, especially in the realm of politics. In the Cartesian project the prominence of God is chiefly a device to reveal the absolute trustworthiness of human reason as the tool to achieve certainty in knowledge and, through its application in -27- the affairs of human life, amelioration of humanity's lot. For Europe's great medieval universities, the founding vision was that truth and certainty derive from God in whose light only can we see light - as intimated through Oxford's motto Deus illuminatio mea. For founders of the intellectual origins of the Enlightenment, truth, wisdom and certainty are to be found, created and established by a humanity whose autonomy requires rejection of tradition. True, Descartes argues that an atheist cannot develop systematic knowledge that may be legitimately stamped as 'immutable and certain' unless he recants his atheistic stance and 'recognizes that he has been created by a true God who cannot be a deceiver' (1985: vol. 2, 289). But, unlike eighteenth-century thinkers, Descartes does not recognize that atheists can consistently be Cartesians, that in some way they can be better Cartesians than Descartes himself. Consider the argument through which Descartes believes he establishes the absolute certainty of human knowledge, an argument best known from its formulation in the first three of his Meditations. -28- Human knowledge, Descartes there argues, has three possible sources: sensation, sensation combined with reason, and reason working alone. If we want to establish absolute certainty, then any item that is a candidate for knowledge will have to prove itself impervious to all possible doubt, no matter how slight or far-fetched such doubt may appear to be. Because of the possibility of sensory illusion or delusion, no sense-based knowledge can withstand this test. Even the most trusted set of sensations, the set that we believe gives us our knowledge of our current position and activity, is not absolutely certain; for there is the possibility, slight though it may be, that we are dreaming. Hence sense-based knowledge fails the test, as does knowledge derived from sensation and reason combined - as in the applied sciences - because it involves the senses. So there remains reason working on its own. Can its pronouncements be deemed absolutely certain' The test which sensation could not pass does not invalidate reason, for whether I am awake or asleep two plus three equals five. But suppose there exists an omnipotent god who, rather than being good, is thoroughly evil and consistently tricks me with respect to what I have always taken to be absolutely certain, such as the judgements I make in arithmetic. On the slight chance that this hypothesis of a deceiving god turns out to be true, I can no longer take the judgements of reason as absolutely certain. There is one exception: no matter how hard he tries, this god cannot make it uncertain or false that I exist when I think I exist - for if I think, then I exist: cogito ergo sum. And there is no doubt about the fact that I now think, for else I could not even entertain the hypothesis; hence there is no doubt that I now exist. From this absolute certainty of the cogito Descartes proceeds to demonstrate that the hypothesis is invalid because self-contradictory, that a good god exists, that reason is absolutely trustworthy and its edicts therefore certain, and that reason can demonstrate to what extent the senses can be trusted. Atheists can be better Cartesians than Descartes because they can entertain the hypothesis that an omnipotent deceiving god exists and show that, on Descartes's grounds, this hypothesis is self-contradictory. They share Descartes's conclusion that his argument refutes the possibility which the hypothesis of the deceiving god advances - including the crucial role of the individual's consciousness as expressed in the cogito - but only the atheist recognizes that Descartes's position on certainty does not depend on proof of the existence of a veracious god. Mere faith or hope in the trustworthiness of reason's edicts and their efficacy to ameliorate humanity's condition once enacted becomes a certainty through the absolute trustworthiness of human reason demonstrated in the cogito's limitation of the omnipotent deceiver's power: even if God exists and is against rather than for me, reason remains trust-worthy and its edicts absolutely certain. In effect, Descartes's argument entails the non-existence of a deceiving god (because 'divinity' and 'deception' cannot co-exist in the same being) as well as the irrelevance of a veracious god (both because the limitation of omnipotence is a contradiction in terms and because reason can now establish its own trustworthiness and that of the senses). So Pascal's complaint was to the point: 'I cannot forgive Descartes. In all of his philosophy he would have been quite willing to dispense with God' (1670:26). And Turgot may have been right as well when he surmised that Descartes dared not admit the irrelevance of God even to himself because 'he was frightened by the solitude in which he had put himself ' (1753:94). -29- UNWARRANTED AND WARRANTED CERTAINTY The seventeenth century's quest for philosophical certainty provided important contents and contours for Enlightenment thought and action. Because they were convinced that the certainties of the past were unwarranted and enslaving, those engaged upon it experienced the quest for certainty as a matter of urgency. Commitment to unwarranted certainty and conformity to it in the affairs of daily life were deemed irrational, hence subhuman action, the kind of action which could never improve the human condition but would always tend to physical and intellectual bondage. Although many seventeenth-century thinkers decried such action, Descartes and Locke stand out among them because they were the most radical in their opposition to it and because their articulation of the new principles proposed for thought and action were widely accepted in the eighteenth century as liberating humanity from its yoke and placing it firmly on the path of indefinite progress. So, when eighteenth-century thinkers looked to the past, Descartes and Locke loomed large. About Descartes, Condorcet wrote that he 'gave men's minds that general impetus which is the first principle of a revolution in the destinies of the human race' for, because of Descartes, 'man could proclaim aloud his right, which for so long had been ignored, to submit all opinions to his own reason'; while Locke, he said, 'grasped the thread by which philosophy should be guided; he showed that an exact and precise analysis of ideas, which reduces them step by step to other ideas of more immediate origin or of simpler composition, is the only way to avoid being lost in that chaos of incomplete, incoherent and indeterminate notions which chance presents to us at hazard and we unthinkingly accept' (Condorcet 1795:147-8, 136, 132-3). Because of their radically novel stance and the eighteenth century's widespread celebration of this novelty, I limit myself to Descartes and Locke in my discussion of the quest for philosophical certainty as one important origin of Enlightenment thinking. Achievement of certainty requires suitable preparation. It demands ability to discern unwarranted certainty for what it is, understanding the process by means of which unwarranted certainty is obtained, and power to erase acquired unwarranted certainty and to forestall subsequent infestation with it. For these preparatory activities, Descartes and Locke took human reason and freedom, working in tandem, as the necessary and sufficient tools. Unwarranted is anything accepted as certain without reason's authorization; only reason's authorization warrants acceptance. Since, as we shall see, the reason in question must be that of each individual, achievement of certainty becomes entirely dependent on individual action, so that reason's opposing prejudice is the individual's opposing external authority. By educating the individual to avoid reliance on unwarranted certainty and to rely only on warranted certainty, Descartes and Locke prepare the ground for Condorcet's utopian vision: 'The time will therefore come when the sun will shine only on free men who know no other master but their reason' because they have learned 'how to recognize and so to destroy, by force of reason, the first seeds of tyranny and superstition' (Condorcet 1795:179). In Descartes and Locke we begin to discern Kant's formulation of the Enlightenment's challenge as well as of its central aim. Although 'rules and formulas … are the shackles of a permanent immaturity' making it 'difficult for any individual -30- man to work himself out of the immaturity that has all but become his nature', it is nevertheless 'each person's calling to think for himself'. Hence Kant's 'motto of enlightenment': 'Have courage to use your own understanding!' Reject 'guidance from another' and so 'emerge' from what is after all 'self-imposed immaturity' (Kant 1784:41-2). PREJUDICE AND UNWARRANTED CERTAINTY Descartes and Locke used various terms and phrases to label beliefs people hold without reason's authorization. Chief among these, for Descartes, is what we tend to translate as 'bias', 'prejudgement' or 'prejudice', words which render Descartes's prévention, préjugement or praejudicium. Their use indicates the doctrine that, as rational beings, we ought not to take any judgement as certain before reason has authorized it as such, that if we neglect such authorization, we act prematurely in prejudgement of what we have no right to judge at that time. Locke uses 'prejudice' in exactly this way but adds phrases pointing to an explanation of our tendency to prejudge matters and attach certainty to such prejudgements, phrases like 'common opinions', 'received hypotheses', 'well-endowed opinions in fashion', 'ill habits'. For both, prejudice arises from uncritically absorbed experience and, given the nature of human beings - 'we were all children before being men and had to be governed for some time by our appetites and our teachers' (Descartes 1985:117) - experience in general and education in particular have riveted prejudices to the mind so securely that the will to examine is often hard to come by. As Descartes's First Meditation states, even when we 'sincerely and freely' examine them, 'ancient and commonly held opinions still revert frequently to my mind, long and familiar custom having given them the right to occupy my mind against my inclination and rendered them almost masters of my belief'. Locke is equally insistent on the power of prejudice. 'Habits have powerful charms … Fashion and the common Opinion having settled wrong Notions, and education and custom ill habits, the just values of things are misplaced' (1690:2.21.69); thus, many if not most, people 'firmly embrace falsehood for truth … because … blinded as they have been from the beginning' by their upbringing, they do not have the freedom or 'vigour of mind able to contest the empire of habit' (1706: para. 41). And, although 'natural reason' is the 'touchstone', 'every man carries about him … to distinguish truth from appearances', its 'use and benefit … is spoiled and lost … by assumed prejudices, overweening presumption, and narrowing our minds' (1706: para. 3). Later, Enlightenment thinkers echo these statements. There is Condorcet, who, like Descartes and Locke, is keenly aware of the vulnerability of youth. These years he characterizes as a time when 'the flexible intelligence and uncertain, pliant soul can be shaped at will', with 'teaching … everywhere in a state of bondage and everywhere exercising a corrupting influence, crippling the minds of children with the weight of religious prejudices and stifling the spirit of liberty in older students with political prejudices'. Like Descartes and Locke, he holds that crippled minds and stifled spirits are not easily liberated or rehabilitated 'because men retain -31- the prejudices of their childhood, their country and their age, long after they have discovered all the truths necessary to destroy them' (Condorcet 1795:118-19, 163, 11). There is Condillac: 'While we are yet in the state of childhood … we fill our heads with such ideas and maxims as chance and education offer. When we come to an age in which the mind begins to arrange its thoughts, we continue to see only those things with which we have been long acquainted' (Condillac 1754:301). And there are Rousseau's inimitable words painting a broader picture: 'Our wisdom is slavish prejudice, our customs consist in control, constraint, compulsion. Civilised man is born and dies a slave. The infant is bound up in swaddling clothes, the corpse is nailed down in his coffin. All his life long, man is imprisoned by our own institutions' (Rousseau 1762:10). Rational people fear prejudice because it curtails reason's efficacy. But because - as Descartes's Meditations demonstrate - reason can destroy prejudice's unwarranted certainty and shake the comfort of the uncritical life to its very foundations, the person prejudiced from childhood on is loath to relinquish its certainty and takes flight in ceaseless invention of ruses to prevent the confrontation of prejudice and reason. Locke's vignette of the 'learned Professor' comes to mind: And who ever by the most cogent arguments will be prevailed with, to disrobe himself at once of all his old Opinions, and Pretences to Knowledge and Learning, which with hard study, he hath all this Time been labouring for; and turn himself out stark naked, in quest a-fresh of new Notions' All the arguments that can be used will be as little able to prevail, as the wind did with the traveller to part with his cloak, which he held only the faster. (Locke 1690:4.20.11) Was not enlightened Thomas Paine saying just that of conservative Edmund Burke' 'Under how many subtleties, or absurdities, has the divine right to govern been imposed on the credulity of mankind! Mr Burke has discovered a new one' (Paine 1791:43). METHOD AND WARRANTED CERTAINTY Descartes (with respect to all knowledge) and Locke (with respect to general knowledge) share a single method coupled with a single set of criteria which serve both to overcome prejudice and to attain and develop the knowledge to which they attached warranted certainty. Since I have presented them elsewhere (Schouls 1992: ch. 1.4), it is not necessary to rehearse the grounds for holding that as far as it concerns general knowledge - which is knowledge founded on universal concepts which the mind creates through abstraction from everyday experience, as in the mathematical and moral sciences - Locke's method is Cartesian. But two things are necessary: first, a brief sketch of this common method; and, second, an indication of the grounds Descartes and Locke share for holding this method to be absolutely trustworthy. For it is this method and the grounds for its trustworthiness which lead them - as well as many later Enlightenment thinkers - to their conviction that -32- warranted certainty is within human grasp, that it can be recognized as such when attained, that it can be developed systematically, and that action on the resulting systematic knowledge will ameliorate humanity's condition. My sketch of the method I interweave with the role of clarity and distinctness, the criteria Descartes articulates for all knowledge and Locke adopts for general knowledge. Their most explicit statement is in Principle 45 of Descartes's Principles of Philosophy, which stipulates that anything is clear only when all of what pertains to the item in question is before the mind, and distinct when we are aware of nothing but what pertains to that item. The connection between clarity and distinctness, on the one hand, and warranted certainty, on the other, is strongest at the foundation of a science where we deal with the simplest of concepts, those irreducible concepts out of which a science is generated. Since such irreducible concepts are a science's simplest parts, no mistakes are possible in our comprehending any one of them: for, if it is before the mind at all, all of it is before the mind and then it cannot but be understood, and is known with certainty. When, in the second part of the Discourse on the Method, Descartes articulates the four rules required to reach and develop certainty, he places them in the context of everyday experience. Since whatever we initially experience is interrelated with other experiences, hence characterized by complexity rather than simplicity, such items cannot be clear and distinct to us. Thus our experience initially always presents us with problems, with situations in which we must doubt the certainty of whatever presents itself. The first rule therefore instructs us not to judge precipitously, to avoid prejudice through always letting our reason be the final judge on any issue that confronts us. The second rule states that, with respect to any matter or question we seek to understand, allowing reason to judge demands that we divide the problem into as many parts as possible. Through a question such as 'Is that which I now experience clear and distinct to me'' it is doubt that propels division of the problem until we reach its clear and distinct parts (if it has any such clear and distinct parts). Then, third, beginning with our knowledge of these clear and distinct simplest parts, we relate them to form more complex knowledge, always taking care that each step in this (re)construction is clear and distinct. Fourth, when we believe that this (re)construction is complete, we review all the steps taken to make certain that nothing relevant was omitted (here we again meet the criterion of clarity) and (dictated by the criterion of distinctness) that nothing irrelevant was included. Condorcet sometimes ascribes this method's origin to Descartes, sometimes to Locke. Whoever he may have believed to have been its source, of its effect he had no doubt: it 'for ever imposed a barrier between mankind and the errors of its infancy, a barrier that should save it from relapsing into its former errors under the influence of new prejudices, just as it should assure the eventual eradication of those that still survive unrecognized' (Condorcet 1795:134). Turgot waxes eloquent on the method's effects: 'What mortal dared to reject the insights of all past ages, and even the ideas he believed most certain' … Great Descartes, if it was not always given to you to find the truth, you did at least destroy tyranny and error' (Turgot 1808-11:89). Second, what, according to Descartes and Locke, are the grounds which warrant the trust we place in this method's efficacy for leading us to knowledge and certainty' There are two main grounds, one concerning the relation of this method to human -33- reason, the other pertaining to the nature of humankind and of the world. Both grounds were widely accepted by eighteenth-century thinkers. I shall deal with them in turn. CERTAINTY, LOGIC AND REASON The method is to be adopted with absolute confidence in its efficacy because it is the articulation of the way reason goes about its business in its pursuit of knowledge and certainty. Thus a statement of proper procedure is in effect a definition of the function of reason, and since it is reason that presents the definition, this statement of method is reason's self-portrait. Descartes emphasizes that without method we cannot obtain certainty about anything (as in the Principles 1:13, 42 and 43); for general knowledge, Locke echoes this doctrine (as in 1690:4.12.7; 4.17.2, 3, 4 and 17). Traditionally, it was 'logic' which indicated the workings of reason. It is then no wonder that in the seventeenth century we meet a juxtaposition of new and old logics, new and old definitions of reasoning. Those who objected to Descartes's mode of procedure and its results are mistaken, says Descartes, because they remain enmeshed in an old form of thinking which is 'of no use whatever to those who wish to investigate the truth of things' (as Regulae 10). So when Gassendi accuses Descartes of prejudice in the way he used the cogito as his Archimedean point, Descartes replies that 'the most important mistake our critic makes here is the supposition that knowledge of particular propositions must always be deduced from universal ones, following the same order as that of a syllogism' (as in scholastic logic), and he dismisses Gassendi's criticism as that of a person who has succeeded only in displaying 'how little he knows of the way in which we should search for the truth', being ignorant of the fact that 'it is certain that if we are to discover the truth, we must always begin with particular notions in order to arrive at general ones later' (Descartes 1985: vol. 2, 271). Descartes's work was widely accepted as a new logic or a new way of thinking. When, in 1662, Antoine Arnauld published La Logique, ou l'art de penser, he acknowledged that parts of it were copied from the manuscript of Descartes's Rules for the Direction of the Mind. Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, from the beginning, was also recognized as presenting a new mode of reasoning or a new logic. In terms evoking Descartes's titles, Molyneux spoke of Locke as one who 'delivered more profound Truths … for the Direction of Man's mind in the Prosecution of knowledge, (which I think may be properly term'd Logick) than are to be met with in all the Volumes of the Antients' (Locke 1976-88: vol. 4, 479). Locke agrees with Molyneux's characterization of his work (Locke 1976-88: vol. 5, 351). This identification of 'method' and 'logic' became commonplace in the eighteenth century, and the logic in question was expected to have its use across a wide spectrum of human endeavour and experience. The full title of a work Isaac Watts published in 1726 illustrates this well: Logick: or, The Right Use of Reason in the Enquiry after Truth, with a Variety of Rules to Guard against Error, in the Affairs of Religion and Human Life, as well as in the Sciences. In language evoking doctrines of both Descartes and Locke, Condillac insists that 'Our first aim, which we ought never to lose sight of, is the study of the -34- human understanding; not to discover its nature, but to know its operations; to observe … how we ought to conduct them, in order to acquire all the knowledge of which we are capable' (1754:5-6). Throughout this work, Condillac reiterates that method is nothing but a functional definition of reason. And, in Condorcet's words, Descartes's 'method for finding and recognizing truth' was not limited 'to the mathematical and physical sciences'; he gave 'mankind that general guidance of which it seemed to stand in need' as he extended 'his method to all the subjects of human thought; God, man and the universe'; and so 'he commanded men to shake off the yoke of authority, to recognize none save that which was avowed by reason' (1795:122). Both Descartes and Locke understood that to advocate a new logic is one thing, to have it recognized and adopted as authoritative quite another. They used identical tactics to make this logic recognized and accepted as the one and only way to certainty. Their shared tactics amounted to shared fundamental principles about education or re-education of children and adults. This tactic involved no abstract set of rules that might be taught, memorized and mechanically applied. Instead, both insisted that only practice in arguments themselves constructed through the use of the new logic would make it familiar and established, for in this exercise reason would come to recognize itself as authoritatively at work. Both believed that everyone must think for her- or himself, that none can think for others or have others think for them. For both, therefore, education - in getting to know the method as well as in its subsequent application - amounts in the end not to being taught by others, but to being placed in positions that allow each person to become self-taught. So Descartes insists: 'I never wanted to force anyone to follow my authority. On the contrary, I pointed out in several places that one should allow oneself to be convinced only by quite evident reasonings' (1985: vol. 2, 272). Locke is no less emphatic: 'we may as well rationally hope to see with other Mens Eyes, as to know by other Mens Understandings' for 'the floating of others Mens Opinions in our brains makes us not one jot the more knowing, though they happen to be true' (1690:1.4.23). This 'thinking for oneself' concerns all possible areas of human experience, including that of faith, where, for Descartes, Locke and later Enlightenment thinkers, imposition of others' thought and hence the rule of prejudice traditionally weighed heaviest on humanity. 'Even with respect to the truths of faith', says Descartes, 'we should perceive some reason which convinces us that they have been revealed by God, before deciding to believe them' (1985: vol. 2, 272-3). And Locke, more pointedly, writes: 'In all things … reason is the proper judge; and revelation … cannot … invalidate its decrees. Faith … can have no authority against the plain and clear dictates of reason' (1690:4.18.6). The ground for the authoritative nature of reason or the trustworthiness of the method therefore needs to be authenticated by each person individually. To that end, Descartes attaches to the Discourse treatises on geometry, optics and meteorology, which, he holds, could not have been developed without the method and whose certainty depends on the method, for it is 'method which gives certainty to mathematics' and to all disciplines which the human mind is capable of developing (as he writes in the paragraph following that which articulates the four rules of the method). The Meditations' exposition is quite deliberately in first-person-singular -35- language to bring home the point that all will have to make this journey for and by themselves because each can know only for her- or himself. And study of the Principles 'will accustom people little by little to form better judgements about all the things they come across, and hence will make them wiser' (1985: vol. 7, 188). Reflection on their reason's progress through these writings will make each reader conscious of the procedures of reason. And whereas the usefulness of the method is established through the results achieved in these treatises, its absolute trustworthiness is established in the Meditations: application of the most excessive doubt imaginable through the hypothesis that God exists and does all he can to deceive me in my reasoning establishes the full trustworthiness of method as the process of reasoning and of the certainty of its conclusions. With reason located in each individual, Descartes ascribes the search for knowledge to each individual. Such autonomy precludes the possibility of others thinking for me, because it places me under the compulsion to think for myself if I want to be human at all; it is an autonomy that makes tradition, culture or community irrelevant for warranted certainty. We now reach certainty through individually exercised freedom to pursue the proper method. No matter how wise or certain some beliefs may be proclaimed to be, all attempts to impose them violate the individual. Wisdom and certainty now have their roots in egocentricity. Since neither wisdom nor certainty comes about except through each individual's uprooting all acquired prejudice and submitting only to the newly acquired dictates of one's own reason, they in effect depend on newly established selves of which each individual is her or his own creator. As Locke puts this in the Conduct of the Understanding, 'The result of our own judgment upon … Examination is what ultimately determines the Man, who could not be free if his will were determin'd by any thing, but his own desire guided by his own Judgment' (1706: para. 71). In Condorcet's pithy statement, everyone must 'refashion his own intelligence' (1795:119). Thus warranted certainty grows in the soil of individual enquiry. Knowledge and certainty are no longer imparted or received, but made; and for all human beings it now holds that each is the maker of her or his own knowledge and certainty. CERTAINTY, AUTONOMY AND NON-RELATIVISM Relativism is not entailed by this position because of two of its underlying assumptions. The first of these concerns the nature of human beings, the second the nature of the world in which humanity finds itself. Descartes believes that wherever the faculty of reason is found, it works in the same way and that reason 'is naturally equal in all men' (1985, vol. 1, 111). Locke shares these assumptions about uniformity and egalitarianism: 'I think the intellectual faculties are made, and operate alike in most men', he writes to Stillingfleet (Locke 1823:4, 139; 1690:1.1.5 and 6, and 2.11.16). He also agrees with Descartes about the necessity of the individual search for knowledge, on the uselessness of rules (as is clear from the Education para. 66, as well as from the Conduct paras 2 and 4), and on the importance of disciplines following the correct method. Two passages -36- from the Conduct, the first from its sixth paragraph and the next from its seventh, are among the clearest statements of these points: Would you have a man reason well, you must use him to it betimes, exercise his mind in observing the connexion of ideas, and following them in train. Nothing does this better than mathematics, which, therefore, I think should be taught all those who have the time and opportunity; not so much to make them mathematicians, as to make them reasonable creatures … And: having got the way of reasoning, which that study necessarily brings the mind to, they might be able to transfer it to other parts of knowledge, as they shall have occasion. For, in all sorts of reasoning, every single argument should be managed as a mathematical demonstration. Through 'reflection' or introspection that makes a person's reason 'its own Object' as it proceeds in a science like mathematics, one reaches legitimate conclusions about 'the Original, Certainty, and Extent of humane Knowledge' (Locke 1690:1.1.1 and 2). Locke is more explicit and critical at this point than is Descartes. Introspection allows infallible knowledge of the workings of one's own mind, but such certainty does not extend to one's knowledge of the workings of other minds, for 'I can but speak of what I find in my self'. There is, however, a 'nevertheless': 'if we will examine the whole course of Men in their several Ages, Countries, and Educations', they 'seem to depend on those foundations which I have laid, and to correspond with this Method, in all the parts and degrees thereof' (1690:2.11.1). Those whom Locke influenced in the eighteenth century tended to replace his tentativeness with certainty on a ground we find in Descartes, Locke and many others both before and after them. That ground is the belief that each person's acts of reasoning, including that of turning one's reason upon itself in introspection, is activity carried out by universal (or, if they retained theological commitments, divine) reason which is present in each individual. 'Turn on it self thy Godlike Reason's Ray/Thy Mind contemplate, and its Power survey', writes Sir Richard Blackmore (1712:202-3). Introspection is taken to provide knowledge of the universal sameness of reason's mode of operation. And so D'Alembert (1751) writes that Locke, having reflected on the procedures of his own mind, was able to hold up to humankind the mirror in which all can see the operations of their own minds reflected. The second ground for confidence in the trustworthiness of reason and in the certainty of the results that its operations engender is a doctrine about the nature of the world or of the universe as the context of humankind. This doctrine permeates the history of Western philosophy. We meet it in Augustine, in Aquinas, and in seventeenth-century Cambridge Platonists like Ralph Cudworth. It is the definitive presence of rationality in each person as well as in humanity's divinely created context. For Descartes, on the premise that a rational god created a rational universe with rational beings in it, his argument takes the following form: if human beings use their reason to understand whatever they experience of the world, the knowledge -37- they have thereby acquired is certain. That is why Descartes can say that 'I showed what the laws of nature were, and … that they are such that, even if God created many worlds, there could not be any in which they failed to be observed' (1985: vol. 1, 132). Locke employs it in the area of general knowledge, as when, in the Second Treatise, he writes about the 'State of Nature' that 'has a Law of Nature to govern it', and since it is 'Reason, which is that law' therefore the 'Law of Nature' is 'plain and intelligible to all Rational Creatures' (1823: paras 6 and 124). In the form of the possibility of knowledge of 'the constancy of the laws of nature' it is part of the ground on which the Enlightenment thinkers based their hopes for 'the progress reserved for future generations' (e.g. Condorcet 1795:9). CERTAINTY AND ITS LIMITS Since I have focused on origins of Enlightenment quests for certainty, I stressed affinities instead of differences between various thinkers I take to belong to the Enlightenment movement in the broad sense, stretching from Descartes and Locke to Kant and Condorcet. It remains to indicate some differences concerning the nature and extent of certainty. Enlightenment thinkers often praise Locke for recognizing the limitations of human understanding and castigate Descartes for having been uncritical about the extent of reason's province and as a consequence having fallen into dogmatism. Two examples will suffice. First, Locke's commendation derives from his insistence on two kinds of certainty: the absolute certainty achievable in mathematics and morals, that is, in areas of general knowledge; and the probable certainty of the physical sciences, which is the area of knowledge of particular things. It derives, as well, from his modesty in metaphysics - a realm in which he is satisfied that little if anything is known with certainty. His minimalist commitments in metaphysics make Locke adamant about our ignorance concerning the true nature or essences of physical objects, with a result that knowledge about them depends on inductive generalizations whose results are characterized by probability rather than absolute certainty. Descartes is reprimanded because he posits absolute certainty in both mathematics and metaphysics, and the latter therefore allows no Lockean limits to reason which would entail a distinction between general knowledge and knowledge of the particulars of nature, between the absolute certainty of mathematics and the probability of physics. Second, for Descartes, the metaphysical doctrine of mind-body dualism is so fundamental and certain that without it there cannot be human freedom as distinct from natural causality, a distinction he deems necessary for the possibility of science, of progress, and of the amelioration of humanity's condition. Locke, more modest, remained agnostic about dualism and points out that it is as difficult to comprehend that there is spatially extended substance that thinks as it is that there is thinking substance which is spatially non-extended. Because we have no certain knowledge about the truth of either of these possibilities, either one of them may be false - or true. But he believes it to be of no great consequence that 'our Faculties cannot arrive at demonstrative Certainty … about the immateriality of the Soul', for 'All the great Ends of Morality and Religion, are well enough secured, without philosophical Proofs -38- of the Soul's Immateriality' (Locke 1690:2.23.23 and 4.3.6). Enlightenment thinkers approved of Locke's metaphysical modesty, in this second case not the least because it allowed them grounds for deism or atheism. For if it were to be true that extended matter thinks, then God and the universe could be one and the same thing; and that position, even as a mere possibility, indicates that the certainty claimed for religious dogma is unwarranted. So how do Enlightenment thinkers relate to Descartes when, in the name of reason, he asserts so much more as certain than does Locke' Rather than wholesale rejection, they reprimand Descartes for having overstepped the bounds of reason by conflating reason and imagination while assigning to the latter the certainty that properly attaches only to the former. Such conflation, for D'Alembert, is 'bad taste'. For Condorcet it constitutes the main difference between Descartes and Locke: 'Descartes had brought philosophy back to reason; … however, his impatient imagination snatched it from the path he had traced for it … Locke, finally, was the first man who dared set a limit to the human understanding, or rather to determine the nature of the truths that it can come to know' (Condorcet 1795:132-3; see also 122). Descartes, nevertheless, remained one of the Enlightenment's great progenitors. Most members of the Enlightenment did not claim that reason would reveal everything, but they all claimed that reason has the right to question everything. When Descartes intrinsically connected rational analysis with the doubt of questioning or criticism, so opposing reason to prejudice and credulity, and made this new form of reasoning definitive of each individual's human nature, he taught the Enlightenment that questioning is not just a right but a duty of each individual: to be human is to be a critic. Whether directly or by way of Locke, Descartes's questioning stance helped to shape the Enlightenment's contours to the extent that it strove for independence from tradition through rejection of unwarranted certainty, and for founding warranted certainty on personal autonomy. REFERENCES | |Blackmore, Sir Richard (1712) The Creation, London. | | | | | |Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de (1754) Essai sur l'origine des connaissances humaines; trans. and ed. Thomas Nugent (1756) An Essay on the | | |Origin of Human Knowledge, repr. with intro. by James H. Stam (1974) New York: AMS Press. | | | | | |Condorcet, Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de (posth. 1795) Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progress de l'esprit humain; | | |trans. June Barraclough (1955) as Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, Westport: Hyperion Press. | | | | | |D'Alembert, Jean Le Rond (1751) The Encyclopédie: Discours Preliminaire, trans. and ed. John Lough (1971) London: Longman. | | | | | |Descartes, René (1985) The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vols 1 and 2, trans. and ed. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald | | |Murdoch, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. | | | | | |Kant, Immanuel (1784) An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment' in Ted Humphrey (trans. and ed.) (1983) Immanuel Kant, Perpetual | | |Peace and Other Essays, Indianapolis: Hackett. | | | | -39- |Locke, John (1690) An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (1975) Oxford: Clarendon Press. | | | | | |--(1706) Of the Conduct of the Understanding, in Works of John Locke (1823) op. cit. | | | | | |--(1823) Works of John Locke, 10 vols, London; repr. (1963) Aalen. | | | | | |--The Correspondence of John Locke, 8 vols, ed. E. S. de Beer (1976-88) Oxford: Clarendon Press. | | | | | |Paine, Thomas (1791) Rights of Man, notes Henry Collins (1969), intro. Eric Foner (1984) Harmondsworth: Penguin. | | | | | |Pascal, Blaise (posth. 1670) Pensées, trans. and ed. H. S. Thayer (1965) New York. | | | | | |Rousseau, Jean Jacques (1762) Emile, trans. and ed. Barbara Foxley (1976) London and New York: Everyman. | | | | | |Schouls, Peter (1992) Reasoned Freedom: John Locke and Enlightenment, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. | | | | | |Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques (1753) in Ronald L. Meek (1973) Turgot on Progress, Sociology and Economics, Cambridge: Cambridge University | | |Press. | | | | | |--(1808-11) Oeuvres, vol. 2, Paris. | | | | -40- CHAPTER THREE THE CRITIQUE OF CHRISTIANITY James Dybikowski EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL CRITIQUES OF CHRISTIANITY It is useful to distinguish between external and internal critiques of Christianity's claims to truth and certainty as founded on a special and unique revelation from God. Good examples of external critiques are Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus and the clandestine manuscripts that circulated under such titles as L'Esprit de Spinosa or Traité des trois imposteurs (Charles-Daubert 1999). These last were collages drawn from many sources, including Spinoza (1632-77) and Hobbes (1588-1679). The depth of their hostility not only to Christianity but to religion generally was shocking. For them, Jesus was an impostor whose religion made its way in the world by deceit, and whose moral ideas had nothing to recommend them not already present in the writings of other ancient authors. External critics evaluate Christianity from a perspective outside it. For Spinoza, that perspective was his metaphysical system. Internal critics divide into two kinds. The first consists of Christian apologists who acknowledged Christianity's vulnerabilities, but believed that exposing and answering them would secure its foundations. Examples include the Catholic biblical critic and historian Richard Simon (1638-1712); the Remonstrant theologian Jean Le Clerc (1657-1736); and the English latitudinarians, who included Samuel Clarke (1675-1729) and John Locke (1632-1704). The second and for present purposes more significant class of internal critics consists of those who largely adopted their premises from Christian writers, but, variously, laid the foundations for, hinted at, suggested or drew conclusions that weakened or undermined Christianity. For prudential reasons, they did not always make their intentions clear. Like classical sceptics, they often drew premises from one sect to expose the weakness of its rival, while using the strength of the rival to expose the weakness of its opposition. They weakened and undermined Christianity from within rather than from without and included freethinkers such as Anthony Collins (1676-1729), John Toland (1670-1722), Matthew Tindal (1657-1733) and the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713). While they differed from one another in the style and depth of their critiques of Christianity and in their philosophical views, they were bound together by a common -41- commitment to freedom of thought. In drawing on Christian writers, they frequently lavished praise on them and expressed agreement with certain Christian teachings, although they agreed with qualifications, and their critics regularly classed them with Spinoza and Hobbes, on the basis of their supposed intentions rather than their methodology. For that matter, even the boundary between the two sorts of internal critics is not sharp. Simon was seen as a threat to Catholics and Protestants alike; Le Clerc and Clarke were accused of preparing the way for deism; while Locke was at times classed with the freethinkers and at others sharply distinguished from them. Shaftesbury brilliantly illustrated the method of argument to which freethinkers were partial (Shaftesbury 1711: vol. 2, 352-60). An assembled company, cornering a sceptical freethinker, try to force him to concede that Holy Scripture is a sufficient rule to achieve unity of thought, an objective he claims to be neither possible nor desirable. The freethinker responds to the pressure with a question: what does 'Scripture' mean' He cites variant readings, apocryphal and lost books, uncertainties in textual transmission and opportunities for tampering with the text's integrity. He catalogues the difficulties in interpreting the text, whether literally or figuratively, the innumerable commentaries on it as different from one another as the commentators themselves and similarly for the translations. The company is incensed with him as 'a preacher of pernicious doctrines' who is armed with an anti-religious agenda that might seduce the ignorant and the vulgar. What shock they experience when the freethinker reveals he has only been quoting from a great Protestant bishop Jeremy Taylor (1613-67). Remarks scarcely noticed when they emerged from the bishop's pen are perceived as dangerous and subversive when they come from the freethinker's mouth. Taylor only intended his catalogue of difficulties to justify liberty of judgement and a reluctance to allow others to prescribe one's religious opinions. As the company observes, however, when his message is delivered without the reassurance of a bishop's mitre, it does this by raising serious doubt whether Holy Scripture really can provide a clear and secure rule of faith. My focus is largely directed to these freethinkers, whose method of argument made them effective critics. They were familiar with and influenced by the work of Pierre Bayle (1647-1706), Le Clerc, Simon and Spinoza, as well as many other Continental European writers. They also had greater influence in Continental Europe than in Britain, where their ideas were made known initially through Huguenot journalists, such as Pierre Des Maizeaux (c. 1672-1745), who has been seen as a predecessor of Voltaire in making English thought available to the French literary public, and journals. It is necessary to consider them, however, in the light of the apologetic exercises off which they fed, as well as the external critiques that helped provoke the apologetic efforts. While the freethinkers knew these last well, they generally refrained from citing them, even when their arguments followed similar paths. -42- SAMUEL CLARKE AND THE LATITUDINARIANS I begin in Protestant England in January 1704, when Samuel Clarke delivered the first of sixteen Boyle lectures at St Paul's Cathedral (Clarke 1738: vol. 2, 513-758). Then only twenty-eight and a rising star, Clarke was Cambridge educated and an ordained minister in the Church of England identifying with the latitudinarians (Rivers 2000: vol. 2, 15). Intellectually precocious and versatile, he was well versed in and deeply influenced by natural philosophy, Newtonianism in particular. He argued that Newton's system, far from threatening Christianity, powerfully supported it. Clarke would have agreed with the declarations of an earlier latitudinarian, Simon Patrick (1626-1707), that 'True Philosophy can never hurt sound Divinity' and that 'nothing is true in Divinity, which is false in Philosophy, or, on the contrary' (Patrick 1662:24, 11). One and the same faculty, reason, judges everything, whether nature, divine revelation or historical fact. Locke expressed much the same point when he characterized reason as natural revelation, and revelation as natural reason enlarged by God's communication (Locke 1700: IV.19.§4). Spinoza claimed much the same, but with a different intention, when he remarked that all natural knowledge is God's revelation, differing from what ordinarily goes by the name in being commonly accessible to all men and, consequently, less highly valued (Spinoza 1670: ch. 1). Latitudinarianism rejected all traditional authority that set itself beyond the scope of criticism, whether Aristotle's, Rome's or a bishop's, in favour of a new and free philosophy (Patrick 1662:14, 19ff.). It advocated a wider liberty of conscience and rational enquiry. Far from endangering religion, this was the way to free it from the 'scorn and contempt' to which it was otherwise liable (Patrick 1662:24). It was clear to Clarke that Christianity had as much to fear from its internal quarrels and divisions as from external enemies, but his focus, by the terms of Boyle's bequest, was on infidelity, whether open or disguised. His lectures were intended to defend Christianity on a rock-solid foundation of natural religion against atheists and deists. The power of his position turned on his claim that even they must grant his premises. When he considered atheists, he named names: Hobbes, Spinoza and their contemporary followers, including the intellectual maverick and freethinker John Toland, whose scepticism about the New Testament canon occasioned one of his earliest publications, Some Reflections on a Book Called Amyntor (Clarke 1738: vol. 3, 917-26). For Clarke, since God's existence and attributes can be established with demonstrative certainty, atheism is impossible. Its attraction is attributable to stupidity and libertinism. When he turned to the deists, Clarke was less forthcoming, identifying them doctrinally, not by name. He lavished special attention on those who, while they seemingly conceded God's existence, the objectivity of morals and a future state of rewards and punishments, baulked at accepting the Christian revelation. For Clarke, the evidence for revelation, while not demonstrative, shows it to be so morally certain that only a hardened sceptic would reject it. Like William Chillingworth (1602-44), one of latitudinarianism's progenitors, Clarke neither claimed nor demanded assent stronger than the evidence warranted (Chillingworth 1638: II.154). That said, to persist in rejecting it, in view of the combined evidence of miracles, -43- prophecy, history and reason, was to be an atheist in disguise. Unaided reason is not only consistent with scripture and scriptural morality, but can even prove as morally certain that there would be a divine revelation to human beings in their weak and fallen state. It also can show that there will be a future state of rewards and punishments to compensate for the ill usage of the virtuous in this life. For Clarke, Christianity's external enemies reduce to one: atheists. Since reason and natural philosophy show that atheism is untenable, the more serious threats arise from its internal divisions and a reluctance to embrace reason as an ally or return to Christianity's uncorrupted primitive beginnings. For Clarke, scripture alone - not the oral traditions to which Catholics and High Church Anglicans appealed or the Pope's infallibility - is the rule of Christian doctrine, although, like other latitudinarians, he respected the Church Fathers for the light they could shed on the canon. Some revealed truths are not discoverable by human reason, although consistent with and supported by it, while the intellectual perspectives opened by revelation cause the discovery of truths that themselves require no other foundation than human reason. How else is the advance of scientific knowledge, natural religion and systematic morality over anything in the ancient and non-Christian world explainable' On this point Clarke's position is similar to that of Locke, who claimed that before Christ's revelation there was no 'full and sufficient Rule for our direction' (Locke 1695:153). Revelation was necessary not only to discover what unaided reason had not discovered and still could not establish on proper foundations, but also to strengthen human will against the passions. Christian faith, for Clarke, makes few and readily accessible doctrinal demands; Christianity is largely about moral virtue whose foundations are independent of and binding on God's will and to which positive religious duties are subordinate. He was well disposed to a wide-ranging Christian toleration and liberty of examination. He opposed setting limits on what counted as Christianity so narrowly that they could only be satisfied by a particular sect. Still there were certain metaphysical doctrines that Clarke argued are incompatible with Christianity because they are inconsistent with God's existence and attributes as established by natural religion. The doctrine on which he placed most weight is the freedom of the will. For him, if the supreme cause of the universe is necessitated to act as it does, it cannot be identified as God and, a fortiori, as the Christian God, since it can be neither intelligent nor moral. It follows, on his view of matter's essential passivity, that Christianity and materialism are incompatible. Few eighteenth-century Christians challenged this claim, Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) being one of the few who did. Clarke was also confident he could prove the soul's immortality by demonstrating its immateriality. Anthony Collins would challenge these arguments, taking pleasure in showing that Clarke's metaphysics excluded many devout Christians, such as Jansenists and Calvinists, from the Christian fellowship (Clarke 1738: vol. 3, 873). He followed Locke in arguing that it is beyond the power of natural reason to demonstrate the soul's immateriality, but, contrary to Locke, he claimed that available evidence generally supports its materiality. Nevertheless, Clarke articulated a comprehensive Christian metaphysical system exuding self-confidence. It was an intellectual high-water mark in Protestant Christian apologetics. -44- COLLINS, LOCKE AND FREETHINKING Over Christmas of 1703 and through the early days of the New Year, as Clarke turned his mind to his inaugural Boyle lecture, Collins, also Cambridge educated and a year his junior, was visiting Locke, whom he had befriended the year before. Locke, impressed by Collins's intellectual promise, took him into his confidence and treated him as a son. Their intimacy was seminal to Collins's philosophical coming of age. At the time Collins also counted among his friends the notorious freethinkers John Toland and Matthew Tindal, but he was still finding his philosophical identity, while Clarke already possessed settled opinions on the leading questions of philosophy and religion. The dominant theme of Collins's friendship with Locke is the love of truth pursued along tracks not beaten down by others and with indifference about whom it pleases. Locke claimed that the best test of its presence is the refusal to entertain propositions with greater assurance than their proofs warrant (Locke 1700: IV.19.§1). This was a basic premise of freethinking, the idea that pervades Collins's thought: for critics like Clarke, however, freethinking was in reality a pretext for being anti-Christian, a deist or, at its logical conclusion, an atheist.Collins defined freethinking as the impartial use of the understanding to: | |(a) determine the meaning of propositions; | | |(b) assess the evidence for and against them; and | | |(c) judge their truth or falsity, their probability or improbability on the apparent strength or weakness of that evidence (Collins | | |1713:5). | Each element in this account is anchored in Locke's Essay, especially its seminal discussion of faith and reason. Collins defended freethinking so defined as not only a universal human right, but also, in religion, a duty. For him, freethinking is a condition of knowledge and demands a healthy scepticism, particularly in the examination of received ideas. Such a sceptical disposition he was proud to claim in the assessment of historical as well as philosophical claims, but, in religion, he found the clergy had far too little of it. He confided to a correspondent that clerics were oblivious how weak the foundations were for doctrines of the utmost consequence for them. Locke defined faith, as against knowledge, as the mind's assent to a proposition based on its probability (Locke 1700: IV.15.§§2-3). For this reason, Hume later described him as 'the first Christian who ventured openly that faith was nothing but a species of reason' (Hume 1779: Part I), although Locke could easily trace his view to, among others, Chillingworth, who characterizes faith as the understanding's assent proportional to the evidence (Chillingworth 1638: Preface, §2; II.§48). For traditional revelation, Locke added that faith was the assent conferred 'upon the Credit of the Proposer, as coming from God'. Few could legitimately claim to be recipients of an immediate revelation and those who did solely on the basis of an inner light were dismissed by him as enthusiasts who divorced faith from reason to the cost of both (Locke 1700: IV.19). Any proposition clearly attributable to God possesses the highest certainty, since God is no deceiver (Locke 1700: IV.16.§14). Its meaning as well as its attribution to God, however, must be judged by reason on principles applicable to the assessment of any testimony. -45- Locke argued that when a revealed truth is also discoverable by natural reason and thereby constitutes clear knowledge, there is no need for revelation (Locke 1700: IV.17.§4). Natural reason should be our guide, with knowledge trumping faith. When there is clear revelation and natural reason yields only probable conjectures, however, revelation properly carries the day (Locke 1700: IV.18.§8). Since the greater evidence outweighs the lesser, this condition obtains only if the evidence for revelation is more compelling than natural reason on its own, as Locke claimed it was for Christianity (Locke 1695:145). For him, Christ's mission was plainly established by his miracles, while the truth of his teaching was conformable to reason (Locke 1695:153). Locke's principles, accordingly, specify when claims of revelation should, but, more importantly, when they should not determine judgement, even if evidence that supports revelation is available. Although it was not his intention, he effectively identified conditions that could be used to sideline revelation without openly denying its truth. The freethinkers took advantage of this opening. Viewed either as a right or a duty, freethinking opposed restraints on reason, particularly when imposed by 'priestcraft', that is, by the clergy. Among these restraints was the encouragement of fearfulness about the exercise of individual reason because one might embrace views that would result in damnation. Freethinkers and latitudinarians alike defended the innocence of error attributable to an honest effort to use God-given reason. It is morally inconceivable, they argued, that God would punish those who err in this way. This, freethinkers alone emphasized, no matter how far the inquirer falls short of the truth: 'God is not like an Egyptian task-master. He does not require brick, where he gives no straw, and expects not equal knowledge and belief from men of unequal abilities' (Collins 1726b: 426). A further restraint freethinkers identified arose from the notion that Christianity demands the understanding's submission to propositions it cannot grasp. Mysteries, such as the Trinity or Transubstantiation, were said to be 'above reason' to comprehend. For the freethinkers, however, if a claim is incomprehensible, whatever the text or tradition on which it is founded, it has no claim to assent. The proper course is to suspend judgement. There is much one does not understand, they agreed, but to agree with this is not to assent to an idea one does not understand. For them, such doctrines serve only the interest of priests. This attack on the mysteries lies within a Lockean framework, although he sounds a different note. Locke accepted that there are truths 'above reason', but he defined them as truths not discovered by natural reason alone. His standard illustration is not the Trinity, but the Resurrection: an occurrence for which he believed reason could form an idea, but not prove (Locke 1700: IV.17.§23; Collins 1707:24). For Christian critics, however, the freethinkers' rejection of the mysteries was a clear sign that they opposed the attitude of submission to an all-powerful creator necessary for the acceptance of religion. By the same token, freethinkers rejected Bayle's fideist claim that when reason is baffled by difficulties apparently insuperable to it, such as the problem of evil, it should keep close to scripture and allow itself to be captivated by the obedience of faith. Collins applauded Bayle's acumen in his relentless exposure of the difficulties barring a solution to the problem of evil within a Christian framework, but not the moral he appeared to draw from it (Collins 1710:7-10). -46- Freethinkers likewise opposed the institutional claims of Churches and their clergy to authority. They rejected their claims to an independent authority held by divine right. Freethinking was Erastian through and through. They showed a tendency, moreover, to go farther. Collins denied that an established religion is necessary to maintain the public peace (Collins 1713:111-15). Religion, he argued, is 'a matter purely personal', a thesis pointing in the direction of secularism (Collins 1726b: 435). He also denied that priests rightly commanded deference to their expert authority (Collins 1713:107-11). For not only did their differences on nearly every issue undermine such a claim, so did the doctrinal undertakings they gave as a condition of holding office. As the Huguenot editor, translator and natural law theorist Jean Barbeyrac remarked, the history of the science of morals owed scarcely any of its progress to ministers of religion, and nearly everything to the laity (Barbeyrac 1712: esp. i-xii). Anticlericalism is not anti-Christianity, but the notion of 'priestcraft' offered freethinkers a story of how Christianity sustained itself when its rational credentials were as weak as they claimed. In their view, Christianity had too often used its institutional power to limit and discourage the exercise of reason in order to block exposure of weaknesses that would threaten its position. COLLINS AND CLARKE Why start with Collins and Clarke' The short answer is that while freethinkers such as Collins were seen as dangerous critics of Christianity, many charged Clarke and the latitudinarian tradition with preparing the way for them (Berkeley 1732:34). Freethinkers were partial to quoting latitudinarians and their predecessors, Chillingworth and John Hales (1584-1656), in particular. Collins listed Archbishop John Tillotson (1630-94), one of Locke's closest friends, as 'Head' of the English freethinkers, provocatively placing him in his chronological catalogue of freethinkers directly after Hobbes (Collins 1713:171). Collins admired the latitudinarians' commitment to reason and the right to think for oneself. He applauded their acceptance of the innocence of error and their subordination of the positive duties of revealed religion to moral virtue, their theological minimalism and their defence of natural religion as an indispensable foundation to revealed religion (Collins 1713:34, 75-6 and 171-6; Hill 2001). Where Clarke's strategy was to argue from principles acceptable to atheists, Collins argued from principles accepted by clerics. He and his fellow freethinkers claimed that Christianity's resources - its texts, and traditions, their meanings and its proofs from miracles and prophecies - fell short of the moral certainty Clarke and Locke claimed for them. At the same time, the freethinkers argued that criticism of Christianity entailed neither atheism nor moral libertinism and scepticism, as Clarke had insisted. Any true principles espoused by Christianity were available with greater clarity, comprehensiveness and certainty to natural reason. If so, the greater evidence ought to be preferred to the lesser. -47- THE BIBLE Some incautious remarks from Chillingworth set the stage. His bedrock principle is: 'God hath said so, therefore it is true.' The freethinkers did not quarrel with the inference, only with the antecedent. For Chillingworth, God's Word is in a Bible that constitutes a self-sufficient and perfect rule of faith: 'Propose me any thing out of this Book, and require whether I believe or no, and seem it never so incomprehensible to human reason, I will subscribe it with hand and heart, as knowing no Demonstration can be stronger than this, God hath said so, therefore it is true.' (Chillingworth 1638: VI.§56) While parts of the Bible are open to interpretation and debate, much needs neither interpretation nor interpreters. A judge is needed to remedy defects of law with principles of reason. The Bible, however, 'is a perfect Rule of Faith, and therefore needs no supply of the defects of it … all necessary points of Religion are plain and easie, and consequently every man in this cause {is} a competent Judg {sic} for himself' (Chillingworth 1638: II.§§14 and 16). The point about incomprehensibility to human reason has already been dealt with, but the Bible as God's Word and as a perfect rule of faith has not. Spinoza was not as charitably disposed towards the Bible as was Chillingworth. He argued that much of it cannot plausibly be regarded as revelation, since it conveys no sure knowledge God might have revealed to human beings. Its interpretation, which he set out to examine as methodically as the interpretation of nature, demonstrates the necessity of separating religion from philosophy. Philosophy aims at truth; religion, by contrast, at obedience and just so much doctrine - that is to say, very little - as is absolutely necessary to support this objective. The test of religion is not truth, of which it contains little, but effectiveness in moving human beings to devotion by engaging their imaginations. Scriptural prophecies are adapted to their audiences, but, as importantly, they also reflect the limitations of prophets, who are distinguished not by any knowledge they possess; only by their piety. Many of their claims are neither divinely inspired nor true, and it is a mistake to make them so by ingenious metaphorical interpretation. To unite the God of scripture with the God of philosophy is a misguided project to convert scripture into philosophy. In what sense, then, can God be claimed as the Bible's author' Spinoza's answer is that it is 'not because God willed to confer on men a set number of books, but because of the true religion that is taught therein' (Spinoza 1670:153). True religion consists in the teaching of true moral doctrine and this alone establishes the work's divinity (Spinoza 1670:90). That the moral doctrine is true, however, is known by natural investigation (Spinoza 1670:158). Richard Simon agreed that scripture can be properly understood only by an historical analysis of the language and meaning of texts and a grasp of their historical development. He openly acknowledged there had been 'great alterations' in the original texts of the Old Testament, as Spinoza argued in his analysis of the Pentateuch (Spinoza 1670: ch. 8). Simon also argued that the Gospel was established in Churches well before any written text existed, but he denied that such a history undermined the Bible's claim to being inspired. While he opposed some of Spinoza's claims, he vigorously argued that the history of the texts thoroughly undermined the Protestant claim that they are plain and reliable as expressions of God's Word -48- without reference to any further principle. In particular, their claim to divine inspiration depends on the authority of tradition: 'if we join not Tradition with the Scripture, we can hardly affirm any thing for certain in Religion. We cannot be said to quit the word of God by joining therewith the Tradition of the Church, since he who refers us to the Holy Scriptures has also refer'd us to the Church whom he has trusted with his holy pledge' (Simon 1680: author's preface). The freethinkers admired Simon's scholarship. There are dozens of references to him and his works in Collins's works, for example. The freethinkers agreed that if oral tradition carries no authority, there would be no religious certainty. Unlike Simon, however, they affirmed the antecedent. The critical examination of the history of the New Testament canon casts doubt over its claim to divine authority. It was established centuries after the events it relates 'by weak, fallible, factious, and interested men' (Collins 1724:17). The rejection of oral tradition as a reliable foundation for religious truth pervades freethinking writings. Not only did they argue for the uncertainty of tradition and the existence of false traditions, but they claimed that tradition is characteristically projected backwards from the present. A notable example was the projection of the Christian conception of the Messiah back on to the Old Testament, 'thereby explaining former passages by modern faith and notions' (Collins 1726b: 68). The Old Testament's Messiah was a victorious, temporal figure, not the spiritual Messiah of Christianity (Collins 1726b: 83). Such arguments, Collins noted, had been used to justify the doctrine of transubstantiation, since no other explanation, it was claimed by its supporters, could satisfactorily explain the depth and pervasiveness of the belief in it. Such arguments, however, prove too much by relying on the obviously false historical thesis 'that no error can be generally introduced' (Collins 1726b: 70). Far from infallibly transmitting truths across time, tradition does not even continue the same. Even a single individual can not preserve the same notions and practices over a lifetime, let alone a people from one generation to the next (Collins 1726b: 67-91). Tradition, accordingly, cannot bear the weight Simon expected it to carry. Jean Le Clerc, another of Locke's close friends, defended the Protestant cause against Simon, but he did so only after conceding that much of the Bible was neither inspired nor pretended to be. Christianity ought not to saddle itself with indefensible positions. The internal contradictions in the Bible show this, and much of it is and can claim to be no more than historical or eyewitness narrative, although no less morally certain for all that. Even where it is inspired, however, its authors should not be regarded as 'Secretaries of {the} Spirit' (Le Clerc 1690:30). What matters is the substance of their teaching, not the language in which that teaching is conveyed. Only what is directly attributable to Christ can be claimed as infallible; not even the Apostles when they receive the spirit of miracles and tongues (Le Clerc 1690:64-5, 71). It is a concession that weakens the inferences that can be legitimately drawn from miracles. Even the Old Testament's claim to being inspired depends on Christ's general approval and authorization of it (Le Clerc 1690:104, 114). Collins would reply that since Jesus' claim to be the Messiah depends on the Old Testament being inspired, Christianity is saddled with circularity. The New Testament being inspired depends on the Old, but its being inspired depends on the New. We are a -49- long way from the proposition that since the Bible is God's Word, it must be true. On the contrary, the way is open to doubt whether God's Word, strictly speaking, is to be found in it at all. Doubts about the text, its history and interpretation, helped to reinforce scepticism about traditional arguments for the truth of Christianity, those from miracles and fulfilled prophecies, in particular. MIRACLES This is obviously true for Spinoza, whose exposure of the weakness of traditional claims made on behalf of the biblical text surrounds his notorious analysis of miracles. He argues that if miracles are identified as events that contravene nature's order - that is to say, God's order - then, far from supporting God's existence, they cast doubt on it. If, on the other hand, they are merely unusual works beyond the known powers of human agents, they reflect rather on human ignorance. From their occurrence, there is no warranted inference to God's nature or even His existence. In short they cannot show what only philosophy, which has no dependence on revelation, can. They offer no independent support of the truth of revealed religion, serving only as testimonials to the preconceived beliefs of those who rely on them. Although he did as much to distance himself from Spinoza's philosophy as he possibly could, Clarke agreed that God's works as revealed through an investigation of nature were reasons as compelling of God's existence and nature as miracles. He viewed it as careless thinking not to acknowledge as much. Such arguments, however, belong to natural religion and provide no evidence for Christianity as such. Accordingly, he continued to defend the value of miracles as evidence, while he conceded that their attribution to God depends on the goodness of the doctrine to which they testify. Collins would have none of this. As extraordinary works, he argued in keeping with Spinoza, miracles may attest to a being's power, not to its veracity, infallibility or identity. This would be so even if they were performed by Jesus, as long as his claim to be the Messiah is not independently established (Collins 1724:32). But even if miracles are attributable to God due to the content of the doctrine to which they attest, the doctrine serves to prove the miracle, not the miracle the doctrine (Collins 1726a: 26; 1727:92-3). THE ARGUMENT FROM PROPHECY For Collins, as for Locke and Hobbes, among others, a central and critical claim of Christianity is Jesus' identity as the Messiah. It follows, for him, that Jesus' miracles play only a secondary role in showing he fulfils the Old Testament prophecies. No matter how well authenticated the miracles, they, of themselves, cannot establish his identity. There is, however, an apparent lack of fit between the Old Testament prophecies and their fulfilment in Jesus. The Messiah expected by the Jews was a victorious, not a spiritual Messiah. The prophecies by which the New Testament writers tried to establish Jesus' identity as the Christ, such as the virgin birth, appeared in any case to apply to events closer at hand and not to Jesus. Clarke's -50- eccentric friend, William Whiston (1667-1752), argued that the lack of fit between the Old and New Testaments is to be explained by the deliberate corruption of the Old Testament text. Collins agreed that there was compelling evidence, as Simon and others had argued, that the text had been considerably altered over time, but argued that there was none to support Whiston's theory of how it had been altered (Collins 1724:112). The alterations, indeed, posed a question whether many of the prophecies were recorded in scripture after the prophesied event, like prophecies in Virgil's Aeneid (Collins 1724:137). For Whiston, it was crucial that Christ should uniquely and literally fulfil the prophecies. If he only fulfilled them in a secondary or typical or mystical way, prophecy, he conceded, would not support the truth of Christianity. For then there could be multiple fulfilments, but there could be only one Messiah. Christianity would be exposed to ridicule (Whiston 1708: vol. 2, 268-73). Once again, the response of the freethinkers was to accept the inference, but to agree with the Dutch humanist Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) and the tradition of interpretation he represented that the only way to reconcile the Old and New Testaments was by reading their texts in a double sense. Interpretation could reconcile the texts, but, in doing so, it undermined the value of prophecy as evidence for the truth of Christianity. REASON AND MORALS The freethinkers viewed human reason as more limited in certain respects than Clarke had claimed, since they argued that it could not demonstrate the soul's immateriality or immortality. They were more confident than Clarke or Locke about what it could achieve in morals, for them the heart of religion. Tindal's provocative Christianity as Old as the Creation, which rebuts Clarke's claim that Christianity rendered any coherent form of deism impossible, clearly illustrates this. Since Christianity only republishes the religion of nature, although in a language more obscure and allegorical, and less comprehensive in its findings, and since it depends on a corrupt and translated text, there is no reason to pay heed to anything other than the religion of nature. Other religions, for that matter, could equally claim to be further editions of the same text. It is an argument that resulted in the deistic worship introduced by David Williams (1738-1816) at the Margaret Street Chapel in London, based on universal principles shared by all religions. Tindal argued that no scriptural rules can possibly stipulate what should be done in all of life's circumstances. Any such rules would have to be supplemented, interpreted and judged against the light of nature, the fundamental standard of human action. This is true, Tindal added, even for Christ's moral precepts. Plainer they may be, but, literally interpreted, they commit the believer to 'monstrous Absurdities'. Those precepts, he argued, 'are for the most Part deliver'd either so hyperbolically, that they would lead Men astray, were they govern'd by the usual Meaning of Words; or else express'd in so loose, general, and undermin'd a Manner, that Men are as much left to be govern'd by the Reason of Things, as if there were no such Precepts' (Tindal 1730:338). Where Clarke and Locke insisted that -51- revelation is necessary to remedy the shortcomings of human reason, Tindal claimed the reverse: the defects of revelation must be remedied by natural reason (Tindal 1730:201). Revealed religion, accordingly, is not a self-sufficient and perfect rule requiring no interpreters. Locke made concessions to such a view in his Essay: Since then the Precepts of Natural Religion are plain, and very intelligible to all Mankind, and seldom come to be controverted; and other revealed Truths, which are conveyed to us by Books and Languages, are liable to the common and natural obscurities and difficulties incident to Words, methinks it would become us to be more careful and diligent in observing the former, and less magisterial, positive, and imperious, in imposing our own sense and interpretation on the latter. (Locke 1700: III.9.§23) The freethinkers, however, thought that a much stronger conclusion was warranted than the tolerationist one Locke draws. Since natural religion yields knowledge of human duty and virtue while revelation yields probabilities and obscurities, Tindal asked: 'must not Faith be swallow'd up by Knowledge; and Probability by Demonstration'' (Tindal 1730:369-70) How can the lesser and obscurer evidence outweigh the greater and clearer' Tindal expressed confidence in natural reason precisely where Clarke and Locke supposed it to be weak and ineffective. In Clarke's appeal to a fallen state from which mankind was extricated only by special revelation, Tindal located a deep ambivalence about human reason. How could Clarke claim, on the one hand, that a future state of rewards and punishments is 'in general deducible, even demonstrably, by a Chain of clear, and undeniable Reasoning' (Tindal 1730:358) and, on the other, complain about deists who were prepared to rely on his argument' Not, of course, that the deists felt compelled to accept that morality requires justification by reference to a future state. Against the thesis of a fallen state, Tindal counterpoised the notion that human beings are 'created in a State of Innocence, capable of knowing, and doing all God requires of them' (Tindal 1730:375). For him, reason and freethinking actualize this capacity. To judge human reason defective on issues central to living virtuously is to attribute a moral defect to God for providing His creation with means that fall short of the intended end (Tindal 1730:378). It is all part of the Enlightenment project of liberating the understanding from the chains that restrain and enslave it. For Locke, Clarke, Le Clerc and the latitudinarians, the liberation of the understanding was consistent with and, indeed, required Christianity; for the freethinkers, Christianity and revealed religion generally stood in the way. Some Christians concluded that if the argument was framed in this way, the contest was one in which religious faith could not do well. They shifted the basis for faith away from the setting in the theory of knowledge in which Locke and the latitudinarian tradition had located it. From the opposite direction, French atheists, such as the Baron d'Holbach (1723-89) and Jacques André Naigeon (1738-1810), had little patience for the method of argument of those like Collins, which they misunderstood as based on authority rather than as being situated in the -54- sceptical tradition (Naigeon 1791-2: I. 858). For them, Collins spent too much of his considerable philosophical force on arguments with Christian theologians in whose views no person of sound mind would still take any interest and which belonged with the debris of history (Naigeon 1791-2: I.858). For them, his real significance was the systematic defence of the possibility of materialism and the necessity of human action in his metaphysical encounters with Clarke. The refutation of the principles of natural religion on which Christianity was taken to rely obviated any need to concern oneself with the authenticity or meaning of scripture. REFERENCES | |Barbeyrac, J. (1712) Le Droit de la nature et des gens, trans. and ed. Samuel Pufendorf, Amsterdam: Pierre de Coup. | | | | | |Berkeley, G. (1732) Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher, London: J. Tonson; David Berman (ed.) (1993) George Berkeley: Alciphron, or the | | |Minute Philosopher in Focus, London and New York: Routledge. | | | | | |Charles-Daubert, F. (1999) Le 'Traité des trois imposteurs' et 'L'Esprit de Spinosa': Philosophie clandestine entre 1678 et 1768, Oxford: | | |Voltaire Foundation. | | | | | |Chillingworth, W. (1638) The Religion of Protestants, a Safe Way to Salvation, Oxford: L. Lichfield; repr. (1972) Menston: Scolar Press. | | | | | |Clarke, S. (1738) The Works of Samuel Clarke, 4 vols, London: John and Paul Knapton; repr. (1978) New York: Garland Publishing. | | | | | |{Collins, A.} (1707) An Essay Concerning the Use of Reason in Propositions the Evidence whereof Depends upon Human Testimony, London; repr.| | |(1984) in vol. 2 of Peter A. Schouls (ed.) The Philosophy of John Locke, New York and London: Garland Publishing. | | | | | |--(1710) A Vindication of the Divine Attributes, London: A. Baldwin. | | | | | |--(1713) A Discourse of Free-Thinking, London; repr. (1965) ed. Günter Gawlick, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Friedrich Frommann Verlag. | | | | | |--(1724) A Discourse of the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion, London; repr. (1976) New York: Garland Publishing. | | | | | |--(1726a) A Letter to the Author of the Discourse of the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion, London: A. Moore {sic}. | | | | | |--(1726b) The Scheme of Literal Prophecy Considered, London {sic}: T{homas} J{ohnson} for the booksellers of London & Westminster. | | | | | |--(1727) A Letter to the Reverend Dr Rogers, London. | | | | | |Hill, H. (2001) 'Christianity and Natural Religion: John Tillotson', Anglican and Episcopal History, 70: 169-89. | | | | | |Hume, D. (1779) Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, London; repr. (1988) ed. Richard H. Popkin, 2nd edn, Indianapolis and Cambridge: | | |Hackett Publishing. | | | | | |Le Clerc, J. (1690) Five Letters Concerning the Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures, trans. John Locke ('), {London}; excerpted from Richard| | |Simon (1685) Sentimens de quelques Theologiens de Hollande sur l'histoire critique du Vieux Testament, Amsterdam: Henri Desbordes and | | |(1686) Défense des Sentimens de quelques théologiens de Hollande, Amsterdam: Henri Desbordes. | | | | | |Locke, J. (1700) An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 4th edn, London; ed. Peter H. Nidditch (1975) Oxford: Clarendon Press. | | | | | |--(1695) The Reasonableness of Christianity as Delivered in the Scriptures, ed. John C. Higgins-Biddle (1999) Oxford: Clarendon Press. | | | | -55- |Naigeon, J. A. (1791-2) Encyclopédie methodique. Philosophie ancienne et moderne, 3 vols, Paris: Panckoucke. | | | | | |{Patrick, S.} (1662) Brief Account of a New Sect of Latitude-Men, London; repr. (1963) Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library.| | | | | |Rivers, Isabel (1991 and 2000) Reason, Grace and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660-1780, 2 vols, | | |Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. | | | | | |Shaftesbury, A. A. C., 3rd Earl (1711) Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, London: John Darby; ed. John M. Robertson (1900), | | |2 vols, London: Grant Richards. | | | | | |Simon, R. (1680) Histoire critique du Vieux Testament, Paris; trans. H. D. {Henry Dickinson} (1682) A Critical History of the Old | | |Testament, London: Walter Davis. | | | | | |Spinoza, B. (1670) Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, Hamburg: Henricum Künraht {sic}; trans. Samuel Shirley (1998) Theological-Political | | |Treatise, Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing. | | | | | |Tindal, M. (1730) Christianity as Old as the Creation, London; repr. (1999) Bristol: Thoemmes Press. | | | | | |Whiston, W. (1708) The Accomplishment of Scripture Prophecies; rev. and repr. (1739) in A Defence of Natural and Revealed Religion, 3 vols,| | |London: D. Midwinter. | | | | -56- CHAPTER FOUR ENQUIRY, SCEPTICISM AND ENLIGHTENMENT Aaron Garrett In this chapter I shall develop some general considerations about scepticism in the mid- to late seventeenth century and early eighteenth century, concentrating on the relation between scepticism and philosophical enquiry. Following the eminent scholar Richard Popkin, I understand scepticism not as a unified movement, but rather as the employment of arguments and strategies derived from Sextus Empiricus and Renaissance sceptics for undermining positive knowledge claims in various areas of human enquiry. Above all, it was the use of Sextus' ten modes from the Outlines of Pyrrhonism, together with arguments taken from Montaigne and his followers. Consequently, I do not mean that there are knowledge claims which can be shown to be neither true nor false, as claimed by some twentieth-century advocates of 'epistemic scepticism'. Bayle's arguments against our access to the religious beliefs of others, and portions of Hume's 'sceptical argument' at the close of the first book of the Treatise, are sceptical in this sense. As a general definition, though, it is unduly restrictive. Furthermore, loose definition is consistent with the sometimes intentionally vague ways that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century authors discussed scepticism. In the wake of Popkin's highly original research, further work by him and others has identified many varieties of scepticism from Sanchez, Montaigne and Charron to Bayle, Nicole, Hume and beyond. Moreover, he argued for a sceptical counter-tradition existing both alongside and in opposition to some of the most influential anti-sceptical views of early modern philosophers, especially among Cartesians. Renaissance and early modern revivals of scepticism were co-extensive with the rise of the new science and philosophy, as well as the rise of Enlightenment intellectual cultures throughout Europe. Furthermore, there were a number of advocates of scepticism - Gassendi and Nicole are obvious examples - who were important contributors to the new science and new philosophy. The history of the Enlightenment or Enlightenments and the history of scepticism are clearly intertwined, and form a theme of Popkin's great work, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza. I will start from a rather different premise: that many of the most important early modern philosophers - Bacon, Descartes, Arnauld, Locke, Boyle - were not sceptics in a strong sense and did not normally identify themselves as such. This list is not meant to be exhaustive. Others who were considered sceptics (Gassendi), or who -57- were criticized for being sceptical in particularly controversial ways (Hobbes and Spinoza), drew on sceptical arguments in some regions of their philosophies and found them unproblematic in others.I will consider five basic categories of scepticism employed by seventeenth-and eighteenth-century philosophers, or more properly five different ends to which sceptical argument is put. This list is not meant to be exhaustive. For example, scepticism was often taken to be primarily about religion, but I will touch on this only tangentially as it has already been discussed in Chapter 3 of this volume. We can distinguish: | |1 Pragmatic scepticism about the limits of human knowledge in the service of the new science (Glanvill, Locke, Bacon, Boyle, and all the | | |others); also used by some opponents of the new science to argue for Aristotelianism. | | |2 Scepticism about the relation between knowledge and belief, interconnected with issues of religious toleration, as in Bayle and Voltaire.| | |3 Closely connected with this was scepticism about the grounding of moral principles, for example in Bayle, Spinoza, Hume, Gibbon, | | |Mandeville, Nicole. | | |4 Deflationary scepticism as in Bayle, Sanchez, Montaigne, Hume, and so on. | | |5 Cartesian a priori extreme scepticism about the grounds of knowledge as such. | Strictly speaking, these distinctions signal two domains in which scepticism operates - those of knowledge and moral principles - and three overlapping forms in which it was pursued - extreme, deflationary and pragmatic. For example, Hume's arguments about animal reasoning seek to deflate assumptions about man's superiority over other animals by showing that all share the same fundamental passions: the pride of a peacock is the same as that of man. Hume's arguments are ultimately derived from Montaigne's Apologie pour Raimond Sebond, similar claims in Mandeville's Fable of the Bees and Bayle's article 'Rorarius' in the Dictionnaire. Montaigne insisted that at best we are no better than other animals. Hume, combining elements of both scepticism and Epicureanism in Mandeville, used such scepticism to limit the power of reason. A single explanation in terms of natural causes suffices for both human and animal passions, because there is no detectable difference between them. With the obvious exception of Descartes, most authors did not take general a priori scepticism very seriously. Particular arguments, however, were taken seriously within particular contexts: Were there unshakeable principles in morality' Was there a definitive argument for or against Copernicanism' Was our experience trustworthy' But the subversive arguments of Sextus or Montaigne were employed in the service of positive knowledge claims far more often than they were used to argue for a thoroughgoing scepticism. Even many of the self-identified sceptics, as I will discuss in a moment, pursued their scepticism in tandem with positive knowledge claims. Spinoza is one of many philosophers who, while using limited forms of scepticism, did not take extreme Cartesian doubt seriously. His attention centres on Descartes's Principles and the Discourse on Method, which certainly discussed scepticism, but not to the extent of the Meditations. Indeed, in his central work, The Ethics, Spinoza hardly mentions doubt, in spite of his debts to Descartes. Attempting to draw limits around -58- cognition, Spinoza argued that many philosophical errors arise from failing to distinguish what we can know from what we cannot. He was deeply sceptical about the authority of revealed religion. This 'on again-off again' attitude towards scepticism was the norm. Many thinkers affected by sceptical arguments neither saw themselves as sceptics nor addressed sceptical challenges. Rather, they used them to emphasize the subjective character of belief and the uncertainty of knowledge. Locke, for example, holding that Aristotle's views were an obstacle to scientific advancement, denied that knowledge of the real essence of things is possible. In Pyrrhonian fashion, he argues that real essences are unknowable: using traditional vocabulary to distinguish ways of approaching the issue, he holds that we can know a subject only by means of its predicates, a substance by means of its qualities, and the real essence of something by means of the nominal essences actually experienced in the world. For example, all we can know about sheep is derived from our experiences of them, which include their shape, their wool, their number of legs and so on. Such experiential knowledge, nevertheless, does not reveal the real essence of sheep or their underlying substance - if there is one. Locke emphasizes that such knowledge, strictly speaking, is imprecise or incomplete. But it is all that we have got, and should not be set aside under the persistent pressure of sceptical doubt. Berkeley is another philosopher who used sceptical arguments negatively and positively simultaneously: his arguments against the existence of material objects were used to support an argument from design and for the benign providence of God. One might say that scepticism was somewhat like republicanism, an idea in many minds but one that few, if any, seemed to advocate wholesale. Just as there were many mixed monarchy theorists in the eighteenth century with republican sentiments, so there were many neo-Epicureans, neo-Stoics, Cartesians, Royal Society members and others in the seventeenth century who drew on sceptical ideas in order to attack dogmatism but not necessarily to advocate full-blooded scepticism - by which I mean a way of life advocated by Sextus Empiricus or by Bayle and Montaigne. Sceptical argument is certainly at the heart of early modern and Enlightenment scientific and philosophical enquiry, but normally in a selective way. For example, the prominent self-proclaimed sceptic Joseph Glanvill, author of The Vanity of Dogmatizing, on most issues was no more sceptical than Locke, and, on some issues, far less. Like Locke, he accepted the basic methods of the Royal Society, and favoured toleration in matters of religion. He also distinguished types of sceptic: {T}he Free Philosophers are by others accounted Scepticks from their way of enquiry, which is not to continue still poring upon the Writings and Opinions of Philosophers, but to seek Truth in the Great Book of Nature; and in that search to proceed with wariness and circumspection … This, among others, hath been the way of those Great Men the Lord Bacon, and Des-Cartes; and is now the method of the Royal Society of London … This is Scepticism with some; and if it be so is indeed, 'tis such Scepticism, as is the only way to sure and grounded knowledge, to which confidence in uncertain Opinions is the most fatal Enemy … I am absolved from being a Sceptick, in the ill sense; for I neither derogate from Faith, nor despair of Science; and the Opinion of -59- those of that character are directly destructive of the one, and everlasting discouragements of the other. (Glanvill 1676:44-5) Glanvill clearly thought that there was a well-founded distinction between ill or destructive sceptics - those 'desperate Renegados whose intellects are … debauched by Vice' and enquirers who seek to use scepticism to combat dogmatism. For Glanvill, there was no reason why scepticism should in and of itself lead to the destruction of faith or knowledge: well-founded scepticism is consistent with both faith and liberal toleration. And, as for knowledge, If I should say, we are to expect no more from our Experiments and Inquiries, than great likelihood, and such degrees of probability, as might deserve hopeful assent; yet thus much of diffidence and uncertainty would not make me a Sceptick; since They taught, That no one thing was more probable than an other; and so with-held assent from all things. (Glanvill 1676:44-5) Scepticism is as capable of deforming into dogmatism as are other sorts of human knowledge, a point well made by Hume. Non-dogmatic scepticism, for Glanvill, was consistent with the Royal Society agenda in the sciences in a way also found in Locke's and in Boyle's criticisms of the doctrine of forms. The dogmatic sceptic assumes that anything we can know is either certain or not certain, whereas the non-dogmatic sceptic grants that the more or less probable is sufficient for science; in particular a science emphasizing scientific instruments, natural history, experiment and intervention in the tradition of Bacon and Boyle. The emphasis on well-founded judgements from probability was common among many with sceptical leanings, such as Pierre-Daniel Huet, Simon Foucher and Pierre Gassendi. The basic mistake of the sceptical dogmatist is to become dogmatically committed and overly 'enthusiastic' about sceptical argumentation. A temperate scepticism leads in quite a different direction, towards the expansion of useful probable knowledge. Gassendi was in many ways the paradigm of this sort of temperate scepticism, and of how the temperate sceptic may also be an agitator for a different non-sceptical position. On the one hand, in the Excitationes Paradoxicae adversus Aristoteleos (1624), the Syntagma Philosophicum (1658) and many other works he laid out powerful sceptical arguments, both specific arguments against many Aristotelian and Cartesian doctrines and general catalogues of sceptical argument strategies. Yet Gassendi was interested in using his sceptical arguments to promote a probabilistically based Epicurean empiricism, which was consistent with his own devout and fideistic Christianity. Hence he also wrote Philosophiae Epicuri Syntagma (1658), as well as many other works that emphasized both a physics and a theory of the passions in an Epicurean tradition. His consistent position seems to have been that, although 'we cannot be admitted into the very inner shrines of nature, we can still live among certain of the outer altars' (Gassendi 1658: I.2.5; Brush 1972:327) - Epicureanism provided positive knowledge which satisfied this desire. -60- This was already a current in the work of the Renaissance sceptic Francisco Sanchez, author of Quod Nihil Scitur (1581) - That Nothing Is Known. Together with Montaigne's Essays, Sanchez's work is central to early modern scepticism. Like Gassendi after him, Sanchez offered a series of powerful Pyrrhonian arguments against Aristotelian natural science, and an encouragement to philosophers to think for themselves. Although it is unclear whether he was an Epicurean when it came to the physical sciences, it is clear that like Gassendi, his main purpose was to clear the way for the new science. So, in Glanvill, Sanchez, Gassendi and others, there are forms of scepticism, derived from different sources, but all serving to promote the quest for knowledge. We can see this in the work of Montaigne's popularizer, Pierre Charron, whose widely disseminated work De la Sagesse (1601) fused moderate scepticism and stoicism. This point is made most clearly by the greatest of all modern British sceptics, David Hume. In 1742 Hume published, in his second volume of Essays, Moral and Political, a quartet of essays each presenting a character type associated with one of the major schools of ancient philosophy: 'The Epicurean', 'The Platonist', 'The Stoic' and 'The Sceptic'. The last of these was nearly as long as the other three combined. Hume's four essays are useful for analysing general tendencies in early modern philosophy, and also offer insight into how modern sceptics thought about scepticism and its alternatives. There were many neo-Stoics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including Justus Lipsius, Spinoza, Shaftesbury and Hutcheson. For Hume, Stoics are seeking an undisturbed state of mind, which should result from their questioning, while maintaining their belief in providence. There were also many Platonists, immediately before and up to the time of Hume, including Descartes, Arnauld, Henry More, Cudworth and Berkeley. Finally, there were many Epicureans, arguing for atomism, efficient causes and chance: Gassendi, Hobbes, Toland, Walter Charleton, Saint Evremond, Collins, Mandeville and, shortly, Helvétius, Diderot and D'Holbach. Hume's character types, therefore, helpfully signal modern trends of thinking, if not schools in a strict sense. Although the voice of the sceptic is mostly Hume's own, there are many features in the essays on 'The Epicurean' and 'The Stoic' that were also integral to his philosophy. Unlike the Epicurean, the moderate sceptic does not believe that there is a natural man to be uncovered, superior to artifice. Unlike the Stoic, he does not believe that passions should be extirpated. And unlike the Platonist, he does not believe in a realm of universals with its concomitant realist assumptions. But the moderate sceptic agrees with both the Epicurean and the Stoic that natural explanations of human passions and mores are possible. He is a reductionist, like the Epicurean, but agrees with the Stoic that human artifice is a key for understanding man. Essentially, however, the moderate sceptic strives to avoid any hint of dogmatism. Hume is concerned that the sceptic carries his arguments too far and fails to acknowledge that we can all acquire stable moral principles. Hume's moderate scepticism, derived from so many different sources, is entirely commonplace among philosophers of his own and the previous generation. All were selective in their use of sceptical arguments and none was consistently sceptical in all contexts. There is the Hobbesian-Cartesianism of Velthuysen, Spinoza and Pufendorf; the Scholastico-Cartesianism of Clauberg and Geulincx; the Sceptico- -61- Epicureanism of Gassendi; the Sceptico-Stoicism of Charron; and the Sceptico-Platonism of Shaftesbury. It may well be true that Montaigne and Bayle are themselves only moderate sceptics, like everyone else. In the seventeenth century the former's thought was often presented in a form which revealed Epicurean and Stoic elements, but it is not necessary to discuss it further here. Bayle, however, requires comment because of his profound influence on eighteenth-century writers. He offered a compelling argument for the independence of religion and morality as well as for the natural status of morality. His arguments on these matters, and against superstition in Reflections on the Comet (1682), in his discussion of Spinoza in that volume and in the Dictionnaire (1696), were often taken to be a defence of morality independent of revelation, but consistent with toleration. Shaftesbury, for example, was deeply influenced by Bayle, and used his arguments to support a neo-Roman natural morality of a kind that Bayle would probably not have approved. Diderot's Letter on the Blind (1749) blends elements from Bayle with an empiricism derived from Condillac. If all knowledge is derived from the senses, and morality is naturally acquired, then morality will differ as the senses differ; and the moral codes of the blind will differ from ours. Diderot's goal, probably not shared by Bayle, was to deflate the pretensions of moralists and to render plausible the Epicurean theory of man. There were a number of important thinkers who cannot be viewed as sceptics in any helpful sense, quite aside from the Cambridge Platonists or neo-Scholastics. Three noted materialist philosophers of mind - David Hartley, Joseph Priestley and Anthony Collins - might fit Hume's account of the Epicurean. Yet, although Hartley occasionally uses sceptical strategies, it would be implausible to class this most earnest advocate of the theology of love as a sceptic. Similarly for Joseph Priestley: his attacks on Hume, Gibbon and other sceptics were completely consistent with his own variant of materialism. Indeed, he consciously identified himself as a bulwark against the loathsome scepticism of the age. By contrast, a third materialist philosopher, Anthony Collins, was sceptical in all of the first four senses listed at the beginning of this chapter. I have already mentioned many philosophers who were prepared to use sceptical arguments in some contexts but refused to do so on the topics of religion and morality. Jesuits, for example, used arguments about the relative character of morality in support of the revealed status of religion. A number of writers have been interpreted as fideists, notably Bayle and Montaigne, and it is indubitable that Johann Georg Hamann, inspired by Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, also used sceptical arguments to support fideism. Conversely, critics of established religion, such as Shaftesbury, used sceptical strategies to criticize it but also held a fairly rigid, naturalistic and universalistic theory of morals. Scepticism, though, was particularly important in the creation of one of the great positive achievements of all the national Enlightenments: movements for religious toleration. Bayle and Spinoza both developed important arguments for toleration, built on our lack of access to other minds and the impossibility of certainty about others' beliefs. In the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670) Spinoza held that since the state could not control the thought of its citizens, attempts to do so were not only fruitless but undermined state security. This enabled him to formulate a pragmatic -62- argument for freedom of speech. Bayle developed more radical arguments, perhaps derived in part from Spinoza. In the Philosophical Commentary (1686/7) (a copy of which Thomas Jefferson kept in his library) Bayle criticized the parable of the feast (Luke 14, 12-24), in which a rich man, unable to fill places at his table, instructed his servant to compel strangers to come in. The words 'compel them to come in' were notoriously used by the French Catholic Church in its persecution of the Huguenots. At the heart of his commentary, Bayle, himself a Huguenot in exile, argues that not only can we never be sure of another person's beliefs, but we cannot change them even by force. Each individual alone has access to his own beliefs and the sole ability to change them. The only way to deal with persecutors and bigots is to try to help them to see for themselves, and to accept that their own views have no special standing. [pic] Figure 4.1 Pierre Bayle, medal S387, Jean Dassier. By permission of the Trustees of the Wallace Collection, London. Bayle provided a powerful case for toleration and his arguments were taken up by Voltaire without embracing the radical sceptical consequences. More importantly the sceptical solution 'know yourself', 'think for yourself', and change yourself accordingly, became a leitmotif of the French and German Enlightenments. This was rarely presented as the consequence of the radical sceptical argument. Instead, it was erected on very different grounds. Yet Enlightenment and radical sceptics shared an inheritance, even if the former normally rejected the arguments of the latter and reached safer conclusions. Finally, I would like to consider scepticism about the foundation of morals, which was a driving force in moral philosophy throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and many of the central claims related to matters of virtue: the claim ascribed to Hugo Grotius that there might be a stable natural morality independent of revealed religion; Hobbes's arguments that morality arises with the Commonwealth and derives from self-interest; Bayle's radicalization of Grotius in arguing that virtue might be independent of all religion; Mandeville's claim in the Fable of the Bees that vice was intrinsic to successful and stable societies. Such arguments naturally provoked legions of authors: Richard Cumberland, Samuel Pufendorf, -63- Samuel Clarke, Joseph Butler, Francis Hutcheson and many others. Among the many responses to the sceptics and their associates were those of Hutcheson who attempted to establish an unshakeable moral sense and show benevolence to be intrinsic to our moral judgement, and Clarke who argued that there were real 'fitnesses' between things, providing a secure backing for morals. From the middle of the eighteenth century a group of philosophers, beginning with David Hume, attempted to set their account of human morals and practices in a historical context, while also arguing for a set of stable human dispositions which express themselves differently at different times. Hume, in his History of England (1754-62) and many essays, and Gibbon, in his The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88), presented a range of character types who behave differently over time. Adam Smith, in most of his works, and John Millar, in The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (1771), argued for the shape that moral and customary associations might take. In different ways, therefore, they all attempted to historicize moral philosophy, and applied their restrained scepticism creatively to the development of the 'science of man'. Thus, as Popkin and others have suggested, the rise of the human and moral sciences, together with philosophical history, can be understood as one of the most profound legacies of scepticism in the Enlightenment. REFERENCES | |Brush, C. (ed. and trans.) (1972) The Selected Works of Pierre Gassendi, New York: Johnson Reprint Corp. | | | | | |Gassendi, P. (1658) Opuscula Philosophica, 6 vols, Lyon: Annisson. | | | | | |Glanvill, J. (1676) Essays on Several Important Subjects in Philosophy and Religion, London. | | | | | |Hume, David (1742) Essays, Moral and Political, in Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (1777), rev. edn ed. E. F. Miller (1985) | | |Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. | | | | | |Popkin, R. H. (1960) The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes, Assen: Van Gorcum. | | | | -64- CHAPTER FIVE THE HUGUENOT DEBATE ON TOLERATION Luisa Simonutti Huguenot thought, particularly its political-religious aspects, contributed to the delineation of a number of concepts which became central to the early Enlightenment and also to the mature development of the same philosophy. The discussion about religion and the possibility of concord or toleration in relation to the problem of different faiths existing within the same territory or the confines of the same nation; debate about the role of the monarchy and the concept of despotism within the political-religious sphere; the shift from the idea of political sovereignty as a concession of privileges to the idea of sovereignty as an acquisition of rights; these were some of the questions which exercised Huguenot thinkers in the early days of the modern age. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the circulation of this complex of matters for debate was not limited to France, but expanded to England, and also to the rest of Continental Europe. It gained a particularly strong foothold in Holland, as a result of the experience of the Refuge and the contribution of the Huguenots, who became particularly active in the circulation of ideas through the publication of books and pamphlets, as well as through their personal correspondence; and, above all, through some of the major European scholarly reviews which flourished in the second half of the seventeenth century and the early decades of the eighteenth. RECONCILIATION AND LIBERTY OF CONSCIENCE From the 1530s on, the Calvinist Reformation had to obtain a foothold within a realm where the inhabitants were already convinced of being a Christian people enjoying special divine protection, and whose king was known by the epithet très chrétien. The King of France was traditionally honoured by this title as a result of the oath taken at both the anointing and the coronation, sacred rituals which ensured absolute devotion and endowed him with miraculous powers (see Crouzet 1996). The period in which the initial political-religious conflicts emerged with increasing asperity between Huguenots and Catholics was one of particular economic and social difficulty in France. A significant rise in the population coincided with an agricultural crisis and a lowering of living standards, which prejudiced attempts at social concord or at overcoming the political and religious tensions. -65- The edicts of pacification and the policy of reconciliation pursued by Catherine de Medici - which were to culminate in the Edict of Nantes - were followed by several decades of coexistence between the two creeds, both on a strictly theological level and in terms of the political order and state organization. This regime of coexistence and civil concord, achieved after forty years of political and religious struggles and accompanied by a widespread pamphlet literature, proved to be impermanent. The seventeenth century witnessed a progressive hardening of attitudes on the part of the Gallican clergy and of the representatives of the crown. The result was to bring to light the legislative and textual difficulties inherent in the, supposedly tolerant, Edict of Nantes, showing up its ambiguities and limitations, both political and social. The edict represented a crucial point in the formulation of a policy of toleration in the early modern age, but what came to be increasingly emphasized, especially in Catholic quarters, was not the natural and social rights which had been effectively achieved for all subjects but the special circumstances in which it was granted and the particular privileges it conferred. The ascent to the throne of Louis XIV marked a further alteration in the condition of the French Protestants: a progressive reduction of their political representation and an increasing limitation of their religious liberty (see Daussy 2002; Jouanna 1996; Jouanna et al. 1998). During the reign of Henry IV, and in the course of the seventeenth century, the demand for the legitimization of Protestantism in France had found its principal argument in the political and military support which the Huguenots had supplied to the King, their recognition of his absolute sovereignty and loyalty to the crown. This military support, juridical assent and allegiance to the monarchy were reaffirmed during the period of the Fronde. But in the years of the persecution perpetrated by the Sun King, until the Revocation, religious coercion and social repression led to a critical reconsideration of this consensus and provoked comparison with other European political experiences, especially those of England and Holland. However, the political concepts of the Huguenots were not marked by a complete and passive acceptance of absolutism; on the contrary, in the 1570s and 1580s there was a flourishing controversial literature which brought into question the origins of the power of the monarch and his absolute authority in religious and political spheres, issues which were to be debated with renewed vigour at the time of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. THE RIGHT OF RESISTANCE AND RELIGIOUS COEXISTENCE IN THE REIGN OF HENRY IV During the Wars of Religion, through their words and deeds, the Chancellor Michel de L'Hospital and Philippe Duplessis-Mornay sought through the coexistence of the 'two religions' a means of conciliating the rival creeds each with its imperative of conversion. A similar approach had, in other countries, such as the kingdom of Poland, calmed the political tumult and given rise to a regime of toleration. The proposed solution to the problems of conversion and coexistence was undermined by its incompatibility with the underlying conviction of each creed that it alone was -66- true. Besides, the presence of the 'two religions' on French soil was felt by the Catholic exponents to be counter to the concept of national unity, while for the Huguenots the difference in faith made a complete political and cultural identification with the central government difficult. This ensured that confessional strife invaded the specific sphere of politics. In seeking a solution to such problems, the figure of Duplessis-Mornay was emblematic. Actively committed to the defence of the Reformed religion from the attacks of the Catholics and from the polemics of the Reformed Church itself, the Huguenot thinker played a leading role in ensuring the support and loyalty of the Reformed subjects for the peaceful policy of Henry IV, on the one hand, thus distancing himself from suspicion of sedition, and, on the other, standing warranty himself among his co-believers for the political credibility of the monarch, regardless of the latter's religious choices. Contrary to any policy designed to 'asservir la conscience d'autruy', and at the same time concerned to maintain a distinction between the spheres of politics and religion, in his writings and public letters he consistently underlines the advantages for the nation of social concord (Duplessis-Mornay 1585:2-3). He exhorts the King to support a conciliatory project inspired by ideals opposed to those expressed at the notorious Council of Trent. In spite of his commitment to religious coexistence, the ideals of religious liberty expounded by Duplessis-Mornay were limited by the pre-eminent requirement to protect the legitimacy of the Reformed creed from Protestant and Catholic polemic, and by the effort to achieve the unification of all the Reformed brethren. A contemporary Catholic defender of coexistence, Michel de L'Hospital was convinced that, after years of political weakness and court conflicts, the only way to reinforce the authority of the monarch was through liberty and concord. In his writings and public addresses the Chancellor of State sought to open the eyes of the parlement and of the King himself to the fact that the liberal coexistence of the two religions would not weaken the power of the King over his subjects, nor his authority in relation to neighbouring states. In the address he made at Poissy in 1561 before the prelates of France, he warned his listeners not to brand the Reformed as seditious. They had shown themselves to be loyal subjects on every possible occasion. Since the King was responsible for the care of consciences and the salvation of souls, in this crucial assignment it was in his interests to choose 'the most gentle and indulgent way possible of resolving the conflicts' (de L'Hospital 1561). It was, he argued, a requisite for national stability that a pacific agreement be reached with the Reformed subjects and aristocrats as they represented an extensive and authoritative segment of the population. Seditious movements which had developed among certain sectors of the population had been provoked by resentment for the offences suffered and by political and economic maltreatment. He also emphasized the very nature of Christian preaching, founded on the persuasive force of words and example, not on that of arms and coercion. Chancellor de L'Hospital proved to be equally determined in his denial of any right of resistance on the part of the subjects, and in his affirmation of the illegality of tyrannicide, thus distancing himself from the formulations of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. Although acknowledging the deep social roots of religious conflict, he was unwilling to subordinate religion to political reason, remaining a convinced supporter -67- of the humanistic ideal of Christian concord which finds its roots in the universalist matrix of the medieval Church. He was moved by an ecumenical spirit in which the theological roots of toleration are to be found in the Christian precepts of a charitable forbearance of those in error, not unrelated to a commitment to convert the Reformed to the true faith through a persevering proselytism based on biblical precepts and right reason. For de L'Hospital, civil peace constituted an essential political goal in the government of the nation, to be achieved only by conciliation. His calls for a national council to assuage and resolve the religious conflicts were overruled by the clergy and the Catholic members of the parlement, and by monarchist policy. Although on opposite sides, the political and religious ideals expressed by Duplessis-Mornay and by de L'Hospital, inspired by a common religious zeal and directed towards proselytism, subordinated abstract rights of toleration to a policy of religious coexistence. These remained lively ideals in French society, along with the 'poetic concept of liberty of conscience' which characterized the related public addresses and speeches of the Catholic and Huguenot pamphleteers in the following the decades. In the work of de L'Hospital, exhortations to lay one's trust in the judgement of God, to call a universal council, the metaphor of the French nation as a ship which requires a strong crew or sound government in order to confront the storm, and finally another metaphor of the King as a good doctor who cures the sick body of the state, avoiding remedies which are too radical, and seeking to prevent the onset of maladies, constituted an effective rhetorical use of traditional figures which were to return as stock themes in the numerous writings that animated the political debate at the time of the civil wars. However, at the end of the sixteenth century, the question which the moderate exponents of both the Catholic and Protestant factions wished to settle, by pacific means, was not only that of the unity of creed, but also of the conformity of the religion of the King with that of the rest of the country. The anonymous author of the Discours sur une question d'estat de ce temps (1591) added his voice to those of the Gallican humanists of the late sixteenth century. Having recalled the Christian princes to their role as defenders of the universal Church, he concluded his reflections by assigning to the members of a general and supranational conference the task of agreeing and resolving all controversies in a public and general confession of faith, requesting all representatives religiously and inviolably to maintain that which the assembly should decree. On the part of the Reformed, the anonymous author of De la Concorde de l'Estat par l'observation des Edicts de Pacification (1599) emphasized the need to maintain la toleration e le libre exercice of the Reformed religion promulgated by the edicts. While being convinced that religious concord is a desirable end and one of great benefit to the good of the state, he did not consider that it was a prerequisite for the functioning of civil society. Civil concord nonetheless represented an essential feature of any peaceful and prosperous society, and for that religious concord also was necessary (Anon. 1599:83; see Turchetti 1998). In spite of the dramatic political instability following the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre (1572), there were many ready to assert with conviction that 'Legalité est la première partie de l'equité' (Anon. 1574). The guarantees of justice on the part of the magistrates and the King would conduct the vessel of state towards a safe -68- harbour far from the storms of civil war and internal sedition, bringing all the people to strive for the public good (Anon. 1599:40). But, in spite of many moderate writings, the majority of texts proclaimed one or other of the rival views as mutually exclusive (see Yardeni 1971). Through the diverse proposals for political and religious stability there ran the conviction that the horrors of the Wars of Religion had not favoured the cause of religion but rather had encouraged atheism, libertinism and Epicureanism. Nonetheless, theological-dogmatic confrontation remains central in these writings, thus protecting the integrity of the doctrine, be it Catholic or Reformed, not only from the opposite ranks, but also from those who propose a Nicodemus-type behaviour, against which both sides are vociferous in invoking an open declaration of faith and an active proselytism. Similarly opposed was an eirenic strategy aimed at reuniting all Christians around a fundamental nucleus of dogmas, a solution which was unpopular with the Catholics and the Reformed alike, both of whom clung to their own doctrine and dogmas, and who saw this as opening the floodgates to religious indifference and atheism. In the last years of the century, the hardening of the attitudes of both Churches, deaf to the appeal to follow the teachings of the ancient Fathers of the Church, led to the failure of the conciliatory attempt to achieve ecclesiastical peace, promoted at length by the influential Huguenot pastor Jean de Serres. The doctrinal difficulties which obstructed the debate regarding the rights of conscience, together with the pressure of historical events, contributed to accentuate the political dimensions of toleration. Not only in minor literature, but also in more authoritative Huguenot writings, such as the Discours politiques et militaires (1587) by de la Nouë, the proposed concord and toleration between the two religions increasingly becomes a political rather than a religious goal. After having pointed out the damage caused by false zeal on the one hand and by the true enemies of the republic - that is the supporters of civil war - on the other, de la Nouë exhorts the King and the government pragmatically to follow the easiest road: that of peaceful coexistence and political concord. This was a conviction which was shared by the Catholic pamphleteers. The anonymous author of the Remonstrance des Catholiques pacifiques, pour la paix (1585), after having declared his commitment to reunir and not ruiner, stated that the Reformed and the Catholics were in agreement on the principal aspects of salvation. Yet he calls for prudence, reminding that the remedy must not be so drastic as to cause the death of the patient. In the writings examined so far, the idea of the authority of the King and the divine origin of monarchical power remained unquestioned. However, the recognition of the Catholic prince as the guarantor and intermediary between God and the people, and as prime mover towards the consolidation of the 'two religions' in France, highlighted issues concerning the foundations and limitations of sovereign power, especially in relation to matters of faith. Huguenot politicians and theologians, such as de la Boétie, Innocent Gentillet and the author (Junius Brutus) of Vindiciae contra tyrannos, were already reflecting critically on the foundations and limits of regal authority. Alongside the monarchist pamphlets which sustained the typical absolutist theories, emphasizing in particular the divine right of kings and the sacred bond -69- which bound the subjects to their sovereign - pamphlets which evoked and reworked Bodin's ideas in more generic terms - there were also numerous pamphlets which gave voice to a question frequently brought up in the anti-absolutist political literature of the second half of the sixteenth century: how far should the authority of the sovereign legitimately extend. The principal themes of de la Boétie were exhortation to satisfy man's natural desire for freedom and encouragement to resist a sovereign who impoverishes his people and enslaves their consciences. His work became a landmark of Huguenot pamphleteering in the 1570s. While, in the course of his brief life, de la Boétie moulded his political commitment on the conciliatory policy of Chancellor de L'Hospital, his Discours de la servitude volontaire expressed with all its radical force his conviction of the moral obligation of every subject to rediscover and defend his neglected liberties, including the religious. FROM PRIVILEGE TO RIGHT: THE APPEAL TO TOLERATION IN THE REIGN OF LOUIS XIV It was, above all, the Huguenot pamphleteers who in the second half of the seventeenth century were to draw inspiration from the historic events and the writings which circulated in France at the time of the Wars of Religion. This was an epoch which effectively found an extraordinary epilogue in the promulgation of the Edict of Nantes on the part of Henry IV, an edict which was based upon the theories and politico-philosophical thinking of the major Huguenot humanists - Hotman, Languet and Duplessis-Mornay - and anti-monarchist thinkers of the sixteenth century. While in the minor writings which are the main subject of this study the flavour of polemic and appropriate retort prevails, in the works of the more important exponents, both Reformed and Catholic, there emerges the requirement to define an ethics and a policy which, distancing itself from prejudice and faction, can effectively be proposed as the connective tissue of this redesigned social order. While limited here to an analysis of certain aspects of the Huguenot pamphleteering activities of the late Renaissance and the seventeenth century, we should nevertheless bear in mind that this type of literary production was a widespread phenomenon of vast cultural and social relevance. This was the case not only in France, but throughout the Protestant countries, where questions relating to toleration, liberty of conscience and the definition of the duties and limitations of political power could not be eluded (see Solé 1997). These pamphlets extended over a broad theoretical range, but were above all expressed in numerous discours, exhortations, lettres, remonstrances, propositions and harangues, frequently anonymous. The most complete and well-expressed formulation of these polemical views appear in the famous debate between Bayle and Jurieu, and in the writings of Claude and others which are the culmination of debates provoked by over a century of religious wars and persecution. In January 1685, a few months before the Revocation of the Edict of Toleration, Claude - the major interpreter of contemporary Huguenot ideas - addressed to Louis XIV a petition in defence of the Reformed religion, reminding him of past history and the obligatory laws which had been passed by -70- previous monarchs. A year later he published Les Plaintes des Protestants (1686), in which, albeit indirectly, he once again addressed himself to the King. He recalled the inviolable loyalty of the Protestants during the revolts of the Fronde and underlined the immutable nature of the laws of the state. The positions which he adopted, which were of an increasingly political nature, were taken up in various articles and pamphlets. In 1688 Charles Ancillon, basing his arguments on the principle of natural right and the rights of the people, defended the contractarian foundations of the state and the irrevocability of the Edict of Nantes against the deceptive glory promised to the King and the nation by the clergy and the persecutors. This latter theme was to be amply developed in the slightly later essay (attributed to Ancillon), La France interessée a rétablir l'Edit de Nantes. At the beginning of the 1680s, and in particular when the first persecutions began to make themselves felt, appeals and remonstrances in defence of the Reformed religion addressed directly to the person of the sovereign were fairly frequent. As a result, the Lettre au Roy Tres-Chrestien, which appeared in 1683, assigned to Louis XIV the role of settling the various wars which tormented the Continent, and of putting himself forward as the new emperor who would guarantee the civil and religious peace of all peoples. A similar allegiance to the laws and figure of the sovereign is explicitly confirmed in a brief pamphlet, published several years later, entitled Très-humbles remonstrances à toutes les puissances Protestantes, reformées et evangéliques, sur le rétablissement des Eglises Protestantes de France. The anonymous author calls for the annulment of the orders contained in the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and for the foreign powers of Protestant faith to declare themselves guarantors of the irrevocability of Henry IV's edict. Significantly, however, the author, unlike more zealous apologists, does not entertain any hope of intervention by the Protestant powers against the sovereign and the Catholic clergy. In 1685, Elie Merlat finally completed and published Traité de pouvoir absolu des souverains. Condemning all forms of republic, he declares that temporal sovereigns may enjoy unlimited and absolute power, to which their subjects may offer no resistance whatsoever on pain of falling into sin. He holds that the political subjection of the human race, and the need to delegate to the absolute power of the magistrates and the prince the guidance of society, is the fruit of the Fall. In this condition man has lost his original innocence, along with liberty and equality, and is falling prey to passions, reciprocal oppression, self-love and so on. Merlat identifies ten sources for the origins of absolute power, starting with the 'primary cause' (God) and going on to list the 'secondary causes' consequent upon the corruption of the human race. Only absolute power can prevent the destruction of the human race and the decline into anarchy. Merlat analyses various forms of government where the power of the sovereign is limited, demonstrating their inadequacy. In his account of absolute power, the people are left with no legislative power or control over the operation of the King, nor have they the right to resist a tyrant or a sovereign professing a different religion. Nevertheless, Merlat accepts that if the sovereign were to attack their own religion, it is preferable to obey God rather than the sovereign: while legitimizing absolute power, he concedes the liberty of the internal conscience. In the second part of his book, Merlat does not restate this position. On the contrary, he frequently distances himself from it: true religion exists in the conscience -71- of men, and it is for God alone, the magistrate of kings and princes, to judge, punish and oust tyrants. Merlat explains Louis's persecution of Huguenots in terms of his relations with the Gallican clergy and with Rome. Accordingly, he follows other Huguenot writers in urging a return to the fundamental laws of the French state, towards which they had always been and continued to be loyal. Merlat acknowledges that in many respects he was adopting the political but not the moral philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. Indeed, man's self-love and wickedness, which Hobbes regards as natural, he regards as resulting from the Fall, and not as intrinsic to man's nature. He holds that absolute power is not an end in itself, but merely the extreme remedy to render men sociable and to establish a civil society based on reason and free will. As well as being a significant text illustrating the moderate Huguenot tradition, contrary to the political theory of popular sovereignty, Merlat's work is also an explicit testimony of how this strand of thought came to be enriched by more recent political theories - in particular those of Hobbes - and succeeded in gathering themes and arguments from these in spite of the general reprobation with which they were greeted upon their appearance (see Grandjean and Roussel 1998). THE REFUGE In March 1686, a few months after the Revocation, there appeared an impassioned pamphlet by Pierre Bayle, Ce que c'est que la France toute Catholique, and, shortly afterwards, the first two parts of his Commentaire philosophique. In these two writings he resumes his earlier defence of Protestant doctrine against the Jesuit arguments of Maimbourg in Critique générale de l'histoire du Calvinisme. He extends his defence of atheist society in his own Pensées diverses to embrace paganism and the errant conscience and argues that religious diversity is immaterial to development. In Avis important aux réfugiés he defends the absolute power of the sovereign against every form of participatory government with the precise purpose of guaranteeing the ideals of liberty of conscience and civil toleration. His views represented a level of elaboration which was fairly advanced for the period, even in relation to the proponents of civil toleration, such as Locke and, much later, Voltaire. In his essay Ce que c'est que la France toute Catholique Bayle pointed to English society as an example of the political coexistence of different religions where the medieval principle by which subjects had to adapt themselves to the religion of the sovereign did not hold (James II was Catholic, while his subjects were, for the most part, Protestant). Faith in a specific religion, or any other choices related to the inner conscience, must be neither required of nor imposed on subjects. Heresy is merely error, and even the persistence in error - invincible ignorance - cannot be punished by the laws of the state or by the secular arm. For Bayle, the Protestants should not infringe the laws of the French state, hoping, in the wake of the events in England (1688/9), for the overthrow of the tyrannical King, possibly with the assistance of foreign powers. Like Merlat, Bayle argues that Huguenots should not lay themselves open to the accusation of sedition, but rather should appeal to the King for the annulment of the Revocation of the Edict, and -72- the recall of exiles and refugees. What in Merlat's work was only hinted at in Bayle becomes the fundamental condition for civil toleration, namely, the separation of the divine sphere from the temporal. According to Bayle, only moderate behaviour, devoid of any republican sympathy, could make the King well disposed towards the reinstatement of the Edict. Nor did he consider feasible either the overthrow or conversion of Louis XIV (as Jurieu had at one point hoped). So, in the Avis Bayle directs his polemic not only against contemporaries, notably Jurieu, but also against anti-monarchist theories (by which Jurieu seems to be directly inspired) and against the Vindiciae contra tyrannos, which had defended the sovereignty of the people and the legitimacy of tyrannicide. Bayle takes over the political theories of the supporters of the absolute power of the sovereign. Replying to the accusations of Jurieu contained in Des Droits des deux souverains en matière de Religion, written to refute the Commentaire philosophique, he raises the argument to an impassioned querelle which would last until his death. Jurieu presents himself as a supporter of William of Orange, and defender of the Glorious Revolution, to which he frequently turns his attention in the course of the Lettres pastorales. For Jurieu, toleration necessarily leads to religious indifference and, like the majority of his contemporaries, he draws no distinction between civil toleration and religious toleration: his erastianism and his anti-absolutist political stance represent a means of achieving a more liberal political order and contained the implicit aspiration that the King would embrace Protestantism. In this sense he is closer to the political-religious ideals of the Catholic champion Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet than to the thought of Bayle and Locke. Affairs in England in the late 1680s strengthened opposition to absolutism and became a matter of contention among Jurieu and his contemporaries. Bayle and others accused Jurieu and Protestants who shared his views of the most extreme anti-monarchist ideals, especially as regards the sovereignty of the people. In 1691 Jurieu replied to the accusations, summarizing the central themes of his political and religious thought. He agrees with Bayle's argument in the Avis that in order to set up an organized society the people must necessarily place their sovereignty in the hands of a monarch or of a number of governors, but immediately distances himself from the promoters of absolute royal power by maintaining that, at times, the people may legitimately preserve privileges or rights which are inalienable under any form of monarchy. Several authors attempted to discover a middle way between the theories of Bayle and Jurieu. Elie Saurin, a pastor of the Walloon church of Utrecht, in an extensive essay of 1697 distanced himself from both indifference in questions of religion to which Bayle's ideas naturally led, and from the intolerant epilogue which was the outcome of those of Jurieu. Aubert de Versé also emphasized the risks of Protestant zeal. In Le Protestant pacifique he argued that, for the coexistence of all the Christian sects, including the Socinians, the Arminians, the Anabaptists and the Quakers, society must be founded on civil toleration and religious peace. The dictates of faith are taught to us by the Christian religion, and, by following the principles of reason, we are free to choose our religious creed, which cannot be forced. It follows that the guarantor of religious liberty has to be a state in which the power of the king and -73- the magistrates is limited by law. For supporters of toleration, social order typically requires the limitation of the power of the sovereign and magistrates, but essentially requires a distinction between the religious and political spheres, thereby avoiding ambiguity in the concepts of toleration and a confessional state detectable in the thought of Jurieu, in whose work he finds an indirect justification of persecution (Guggisberg et al. 1991). And so the doctrine of civil toleration finds its greatest development not among the ranks of the most zealous Protestants (such as Jurieu and Claude), but among thinkers such as Bayle and de Versé; that is, among the supporters of the principle that the toleration of all religions does not constitute a threat to the political order of a state, whether it be based on a royalist, oligarchic or democratic regime. It is significant that the doctrines of toleration of Locke and Voltaire were based on these same principles, and they were moreover concepts which were widespread in the political-religious thought of the second half of the seventeenth century. A further example is furnished by the essay Traité de la liberté de religion, published in London in 1678, but which refers principally to the French situation. This text, analysing the need to grant liberty of conscience to the heretics, focuses on the fact that the latter are no more dangerous than the infidels, the pagans or believers in other Christian faiths. Moreover, it is pointless to persecute or exile them, since, as had happened in other countries, such measures serve only to consolidate and confirm their religious convictions. The only option open to the Catholics is that of pacific coexistence within civil society, as was taught by the Fathers of the Church. The anonymous author of the Traité deliberately does not dwell on the ways in which religious concord should be achieved or implemented, but devotes the entire work to a demonstration of how heretics can live in peace and observe the laws of civil society by, like all other citizens, obeying the rules which regulate the social order. The author also maintains that the heretics cannot be punished when they err out of ignorance, a concept which was to become central to the thought of Bayle. Within the sphere of Huguenot thought, there were numerous promoters of religious toleration, including D'Huisseau, Isaac Papin and Gédéon Huet. These writers maintained the possibility of distinguishing between fundamental and inessential doctrines of the Christian religion. Accordingly, believers should come together on essentials and be tolerant of disagreement over non-essentials. Such suggestions provoked strong reactions on the part of the 'zealots'; Jurieu accused these critics of Socinianism or even atheism. As early as 1667, in his Essay on Toleration, John Locke had outlined the framework for a liberal and tolerant society. But after his exile in Holland, when he came into contact with Huguenot and Dutch Protestant thought, he elaborated his views in Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration. Some credit for his more sustained analysis is due to the extensive, and often clandestine, Huguenot pamphleteers whose work we have discussed. -74- A GLANCE AHEAD In 1763, outraged by the judicial murder of the Huguenot Jean Calas, Voltaire, in his Traité sur la tolérance, returns to one of his favourite themes: civil toleration. Familiar with Huguenot pamphlets, but above all with the extensive arguments of Bayle, he adopts Locke's arguments for civil toleration and subordination of religious matters to the authority of the magistrate. The only limitation to toleration concerns defence of public order, and each sect should uphold the political structure of society at large. In spite of being obliged to adopt a more cautious tone than the Protestants, he analysed aspects of ancient and pagan history and the customs of Middle Eastern peoples in relation to their creeds. In many respects, Voltaire is closer to Bayle than to Locke in the extent to which he upholds toleration. He recognizes that Christians themselves had promoted intolerance. In spite of his moderate tone, his work goes beyond the professions of faith by which Bayle and Locke felt themselves to be bound, even bringing into question the dogmatic heritage of Christianity and the possibility of a natural religion devoid of fanaticism (see Laursen and Nederman 1996 and 1998). Such reflections, elaborated both in his own works and those of his contemporaries, were indissolubly linked to the development of civil liberty and the progress of Enlightenment. REFERENCES | |Ancillon, Charles (1688) L'Irrévocabilité de l'edit de Nantes, Amsterdam. | | | | | |{Ancillon, Charles attrib.} (1690) La France interessée a rétablir l'Edit de Nantes. | | | | | |--(1574) Declaration des causes qui ont meu ceux de la Religion à reprendre les armes pour leur conservatio, Montauban. | | | | | |--(1585) Remonstrance des Catholiques pacifiques, pour la paix. | | | | | |--(1591) Discours sur une question d'estat de ce temps. | | | | | |--(1599) De la Concorde de l'Estat par l'observation des Edicts de Pacification. | | | | | |--(1678) Traité de la liberté de religion, London. | | | | | |--(1683) Lettre au Roy Tres-Chrestien. | | | | | |Bayle, Pierre (1682) Critique générale de l'histoire du Calvinisme de Mr Maimbourg, Amsterdam. | | | | | |--(1683) Pensées Diverses, ecrites a un Docteur de Sorbonne, a l'occasion de la Comete qui parut au mois de Decembre 1680, Rotterdam. | | | | | |--(1686) Ce que c'est que la France toute Catholique, Amsterdam. | | | | | |--(1686) Commentaire philosophique sur ces paroles de Jesus-Christ contrain-les d'entrer, Amsterdam. | | | | | |--{and Larroque, Daniel de '} (1690) Avis important aux réfugiés sur leur prochain retour en France, The Hague. | | | | | |--(1697) Dictionnaire historique et critique, Rotterdam. | | | | | |Boétie, Estienne de la (1577) Discours de la servitude volontaire. | | | | | |{Brutus, Junius, pseud.} (1579) Vindiciae contra tyrannos, Edinburgh. | | | | | |--(1581) De la puissance legitime du prince sur le peuple, et du peuple sur le prince. Traité tresutile et digne de lecture en ce temps, | | |escrit en Latin par Estienne Junius Brutus. | | | | | |Crouzet, Denis (1996) La Genèse de la Réforme française 1520-1562, Paris: SEDES. | | | | | |Daussy, Hugues (2002) Les Huguenots et le Roi: Le Combat politique de Philippe Duplessis-Mornay (1572-1600), Geneva: Droz. | | | | -75- |Duplessis-Mornay, Philippe (1574) Exortation à la paix aux Catholiques François, Poitiers. | | | | | |--(1585) Lettres particulieres envoyez au Roy, par un gentilhomme françoy. | | | | | |Gentillet, Innocent (1574) Remonstrance au Roy Tres Chrestien Henry III. de ce nom, Roy de France et de Pologne, sur le faict des deux | | |Edicts de sa Maiesté donnés a Lyon, l'un du X. de Septembre, et l'autre du XIII. d'Octobre dernier passé, présente année 1574: Touchant la | | |nécessité de la paix, et moyens de la faire, Frankfurt. | | | | | |--(1576) Discours sur le moyens de bien gouverner et maintenir en bonne paix un Royaume ou autre Principauté, divisez en trois partes à | | |savoir du Conseil, de la Religion et Police, que doit tenir un Prince: Contre Nicolas Machiavel Florentin. | | | | | |Grandjean, Michel and Roussel, Bernard (eds) (1998) Coexister dans l'intolérance: L'Edit de Nantes, 1598, 'Histoire et Société', 37, | | |Geneva: Labor et Fides. | | | | | |Graverol, Jean (1687) Instructions pour les Nicodemites, où après avoir convaincu ceux qui sont tombez de la grandeur de leur crime, on | | |fait voir qu'aucune violence ne peut dispenser les hommes de l'obligation de professer la verité, Amsterdam. | | | | | |Guggisberg, Hans R., Lestringant, Frank and Margolin, Jean-Claude (eds) (1991) La Liberté de conscience XVIe-XVIIe siècles, Actes de | | |Colloque de Mulhouse et Bâle, 1989, Etudes de Philologie et d'Histoire, 44, Geneva: Droz. | | | | | |L'Hospital, M. de (1561) Proposition et harangue faite par Monsieur le Chancelier de France, sur le fait de la religion, en la ville de | | |Poissy … Imprimé nouvellement. | | | | | |Jouanna, Arlette (1996) La France du XVIe siècle 1483-1598, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. | | | | | |Jouanna, Arlette, Boucher, Jacqueline, Biloghi, Dominique and Le Thiec, Guy (eds) (1998) Histoire et dictionnaire des guerres de religion, | | |Paris: Robert Laffont. | | | | | |{Jurieu, Pierre} (1686) Lettres pastorales aux fidèles de France, Rotterdam. | | | | | |--(1687) Des Droits des deux souverains en matière de religion, Rotterdam. | | | | | |--(1691) Examen d'un libelle contre la religion, contre l'état et contre la revolution d'Angleterre. Intitulé: 'Avis important aux réfugiés| | |sur leur prochain retour en France', The Hague. | | | | | |Laursen, John Christian and Nederman, Cary J. (eds) (1996) Difference and Dissent: Theories of Toleration in Medieval and Early Modern | | |Europe, Lanham, Md. and London: Rowman & Littlefield. | | | | | |--(eds) (1998) Beyond the Persecuting Society: Religious Toleration before the Enlightenment, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania | | |Press. | | | | | |Locke, John (1667) Essay on Toleration. | | | | | |--(1689) A Letter Concerning Toleration, London. | | | | | |--(1690) Two Treatises of Government, London. | | | | | |Merlat, Elie (1685) Traité de pouvoir absolu des Souverains, pour servir d'instruction, de consolation et d'apologie aux Eglises Reformées | | |de France qui sont affligees, Cologne. | | | | | |Nouë, François de la (1587) Discours politiques et militaires, Basle. | | | | | |Papin, Isaac (1687) La Foy réduite à ses veritables principes et renfermée dans ses justes bornes. | | | | | |Saurin, Elie (1697) Réflexions sur les droits de la conscience, Utrecht. | | | | | |Serres, Jean (1597) Voeu pour la prospérité du Roy et du Royaume, l'an mil cin cens nonantes sept, Paris. | | | | | |Solé, Jacques (1997) Les Origines intellectuelles de la Révocation de l'Edit de Nantes, Saint-Etienne: Publications de l'Université de | | |Saint-Etienne. | | | | | |Turchetti, Mario (1998) 'L'arrière-plan politique de l'édit de Nantes, avec un aperçu de l'anonyme "De la concorde de l'Estat. Par | | |l'observation des Edicts de Pacification"', in Grandjean, Michel and Roussel, Bernard (eds) Coexister dans l'intolérance, op. cit.: 93-114.| | | | | |Versé, Aubert de (1684) Le Protestant pacifique, Amsterdam. | | | | | |--(1687) Traité de la liberté de conscience ou de l'autorité des souverains sur la religion des peuples, Cologne. | | | | -76- |Voltaire (1763) Traité sur la tolérance, Geneva. | | | | | |Yardeni, Myriam (1971) La Conscience nationale en France pendant les guerres de religion (1559-1598), Publication de la Faculté des lettres| | |et sciences humaines de Paris-Sorbonne, Série Recherches, t. 59; Travaux du Centre de recherches sur la civilisation de l'Europe moderne, | | |facs. 8; Louvain: Editions Nauwelaerts; Paris: Béatrice-Nauwelaerts. | | | | -77- PART II ASPECTS OF ENLIGHTENMENT FORMATIONS -79- INTRODUCTION Martin Fitzpatrick One way of viewing the Enlightenment is to see it as a movement which originated in the leading Protestant countries of Europe, England and the United Provinces, spilled over into neighbouring countries, and moved decisively into France during the period of the regency of Philip of Orleans. Thereafter, with Montesquieu and Voltaire at its head, the French assumed leadership of the movement which they never relinquished. This interpretation would appear to be persuasive, explaining Enlightenment origins and later the key position of France. It is certainly true that almost all the leading figures in early Enlightenment thought were English, Dutch or lived for some time in England or the United Provinces: for example, Grotius, Descartes, Bacon, Locke, Newton and Bayle. Shaftesbury, with his notion of Enlightenment as a movement casting light from the more enlightened nations to the less, and his euphoric expectation that it would 'spread itself over the whole world', captured the sense of Enlightenment leadership emanating from that part of Europe. Shaftesbury was writing at a time when the achievements of Newton and Locke were beginning to make a considerable impact, but it was the Dutch republic which set the early example. As Hugh Dunthorne (Chapter 6) shows, the republic stood for liberty and independence. The Dutch prided themselves on the fact that self-government, unlike foreign tyranny, was good government. It made for a prosperous nation and society. The rule of law, equality before the law, religious toleration and the humane treatment of citizens were virtues also associated with prosperity. Such arguments were fortified by the success of the Dutch in wars against Spain and France, by their advanced financial systems and commercial dominance which made the republic the envy of Colbert. Dutch society was respectful of new knowledge and receptive to new ideas. Press freedom, albeit at times haphazard, made it attractive to authors and 'the intellectual entrepôt of Europe'. The number of printers and publishers in Amsterdam was astonishing at that time, as was the range of works published. No wonder so many French writers published their works in Amsterdam, many of which subsequently circulated clandestinely in less free countries, including their own. The complex mix of freedom and repression which could be found in Europe at this time was a factor in assisting the success of the idea of a cosmopolitan republic of letters. Enlightenment thinkers often had more in common with writers, -81- correspondents and readers in other countries than with the other social groups in their own. It is significant that Huguenots, who had experienced repression (French) and freedom (Dutch), played such a significant part in the creation and development of the republic of letters, so deliberately fostered by Pierre Bayle. They also played a crucial role in ensuring that the language of the Enlightenment would be French - it is doubtful whether this would have happened without them, whatever the contemporary belief of the French that their language and culture were superior to all others. Yet it was not a French émigré but a Portuguese Jew, Spinoza, who added a further dimension to Dutch Enlightenment. His works were highly influential, but were so offensive to the authorities and conventional thinkers that they had to be distributed in secret. He proved a key figure in the development of a clandestine Enlightenment which existed and overlapped with public Enlightenment. Its existence allowed Enlightenment thinkers to express themselves in different ways, including clandestine manuscripts for the advanced few, clandestine publications for the enlightened cognoscenti and expurgated works for the literate many. The cosmopolitan network of enlightened thinkers would also be furthered by the development of Freemasonry. The fact that Enlightenment had a clandestine aspect to it qualifies Shaftesbury's notion of it as a mighty light. Alexander Murdoch (Chapter 7) shows how a diffusionist view of Enlightenment is simplistic, both in terms of chronology and geography. Within Britain there were Enlightenments with different emphases, national or provincial, rural or urban, with complex interconnections both within Britain and between Britain and the Continent. London could be a generator for Enlightenment elsewhere (as Paris would for distant parts of France) and an exporter of ideas, yet it could also receive ideas from the Continent not only directly from Holland or France but also via Scottish thinkers. Scotland, of course, was not only receptive to Enlightenment ideas coming directly from the Continent but to the new Newtonian science from south of the border. Scots were among the first to teach Newtonian mathematics; one of the best expositions of Newtonian science for the educated layman was written by a Scot, Colin Maclaurin. Martin Mulsow's (Chapter 8) investigation of the early Enlightenment in Germany is indicative of the diversity within Enlightenment thought at this time. In Germany this mirrored the variety of political structures within the Holy Roman Empire. The development of Enlightenment, as elsewhere, reflected in part political needs. As Germany recovered from the Thirty Years war there was a need for an educated elite capable of transforming the fortunes of their countries. At the same time as German states were drawn into the conflict between Louis XIV, the United Provinces and Britain, they were also increasingly influenced by early Enlightenment thinking in those countries. Stolle and his companions were travelling through Prussia and Hanover when they were both at war with the France of Louis XIV. It does not seem to have affected their perambulations. The anti-French coalition forces under the Duke of Marlborough were operating in southern Germany. Further north, Stolle could sample all the trends in early Enlightenment culture. A key aspect of his quest was to find a suitable religion for new enlightened times. While eclecticism was the order of the day and would indeed continue to find favour in the Enlightenment, partly because it was associated with a non-partisan approach to -82- knowledge, the constituents of Enlightenment thought needed to have a degree of consistency. Old attitudes towards the Bible, heresy, persecution, witchcraft, the devil and all his works were being challenged. Proponents of new thinking, such as Thomasius, were operating on the boundaries of acceptability, and part of their skill was to express their ideas in such a way as to make prosecution difficult, but their meaning clear. The intellectual journey often had unusual twists and turns, as well as unpredictable endings, such as Speeth's conversion to Judaism. Mystical and spiritualist traditions mixed with new ideas on the reasonableness of Christianity influenced by the new science. Enthusiasm and reason found unusual combinations at the beginning of the Enlightenment as they did at the end. Both Dutch and British societies were freer and more tolerant than the larger monarchical kingdoms of Europe. Commercial society and toleration were felt to go hand in hand, and foreign commentators agreed. The belief that what was right was also beneficial became a commonplace of enlightenment thought. In 1744 Lord Chief Justice Willes ruled that treating infidels as perpetual enemies was contrary to 'common sense and common humanity' as well as to scripture. He went on to declare, 'besides the irreligion of it, it is a most impolitic notion and would at once destroy all that trade and commerce from which this nation reaps such great benefits' (Salbstein 1982:31). When the Danish city of Altona sought to rival Hamburg, it introduced a policy of toleration in order to encourage trade and prosperity. As I note (Chapter 9), Voltaire contrasted the toleration in England favourably with French intolerance. Toleration would become a defining feature of Enlightenment campaigning to improve society. It would be so, because absolute monarchs proved reluctant to accept enlightened arguments. Toleration was associated with freedom of thought which was subversive of the social order. Divine right absolutism, moreover, viewed the state as a religious entity, the king as God's lieutenant on earth, and not only regarded Protestantism as heretical, but thought toleration would lead to even more subversive ideas. Enormous effort was invested in preventing the circulation of ideas critical of orthodox religion and that included those which did not accord with the dominant religious currents at court. When censorship was reorganized in France in 1699 and the Abbé Bignon became director of the book trade (see Chapter 22), over half of the sixty or so censors under his control spent their time checking religious works. Works of piety were subject to policing, as were less orthodox works, and the policy continued even in the regime of Malesherbes, friend of the philosophes, who ventured to suggest that the works of Father Quesnel might have been more harmful that those of Spinoza. Toleration was also associated with societies which enjoyed Addisonian sociability, societies in which intellectual life had moved beyond the academies and universities to the clubs and coffee houses. This was a deliberate strategy on Addison's part, for he wrote: It was said of Socrates that he brought philosophy down from heaven, to inhabit among men; and I shall be ambitious to have it said of me, that I have brought Philosophy out of the closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffee-houses. (Spectator, 10, 12 March 1710/11) -83- The Spectator and the Tatler would be imitated all over Europe. They came to be viewed as essential ingredients in Enlightenment culture. If the pretensions of their editors now seem overblown, if not ridiculous, they are indicative of that Enlightenment optimism expressed by Shaftesbury. In the prospectus for the Edinburgh weekly The Bee, James Anderson outlined his editorial ambitions thus: The world at large he considers as the proper theatre for literary improvements, and the whole human race, as constituting but one great society, whose general advancement in knowledge must tend to augment the prosperity of all its parts. (The Bee 1790: viii; cited by Klancher 1987:25) While rulers could be drawn down the route of encouraging journals - and perhaps none more so than Catherine the Great of Russia - the sociability they encouraged could be a cause for concern. Margaret C. Jacob (Chapter 17) notes how Catholic authorities equated polite sociability with licence and irreligion, and the concern of the Inquisitions in Italy, Spain and Avignon about the social mixing of Christian and Jew. Court-sponsored institutions were much safer. Thus Philip V (1700-46), the first Bourbon king of Spain, would follow the example of his grandfather Louis XIV in such matters. He established academies of language (1713), medicine (1734) and history (1738). Versailles set the pattern and pace for other rulers, too, for almost all rulers from the highest to the lowest felt that they had to follow Louis XIV and demonstrate their power and significance by living in courtly magnificence. The cultural adornment of power was an essential part of the process, but although politeness was essential for courtiers, critical thinking was not. One should not, however, think of the court in the narrow sense of those who surround monarchs in their palaces. The court set the standard for the elite in society who maintained loyalty to monarchy even as they queried some of its values. For all the significance of the Dutch and English/British examples, the French pattern of Enlightenment established at the very outset of Louis XIV's personal reign, especially through the efforts of Colbert, would eventually become dominant. Courts did not exist in isolation; they were invariably in or nearby capital cities, notably Berlin, Vienna, Madrid, St Petersburg and, of course, Paris. Just as Versailles provided the supreme example for court culture, Paris set the example followed by other cities within and outside France. It is worth bearing in mind that France, with a population of about 20 million, was the largest and most populous country in Europe, and during the eighteenth century the population would increase by some 5-7 million people. Although London was almost double the size of Paris (the population of which was about 600,000 at the end of the century), there were more substantial cities in France than in Britain - Bordeaux, Lyon, Marseille and Rouen. These would have their academies and libraries, salons and clubs. Perhaps most important of these were the provincial academies. Daniel Roche estimates (1993:438-9) that three-quarters of the cities with populations of over 20,000 had academies and that there were roughly forty cities in the category. Following the pattern established in Paris in Louis XIV's reign, they 'everywhere saw their link to the monarchy as the justification for their existence'. Yet they did develop a critical spirit and increasingly became progenitors of schemes for the public good. Their -84- membership would include the names of leading philosophes, and although exclusive (about 6,000 were involved) they would increasingly reach out to the public. Among monarchies, the great exception to this paradigm was Britain, where the monarchy was limited and the court was different in character from that in the rest of Europe. The Hanoverians did not live in palatial splendour, nor did they surround themselves with innumerable courtiers. The city rather than the court determined the pattern of Enlightenment. Of course, there were patrons in eighteenth-century Britain, including politicians seeking to influence the political nation and wealthy patrons wishing to show off their Enlightenment credentials, but the monarch was just one among them, and the market to a considerable extent was the major factor in cultural and intellectual exchange. Addison had deliberately encouraged Enlightenment in the public spaces provided by town and cities. Although he attempted to lay down the parameters for polite conversation, in comparison with formal institutions such as universities and academies, these informal urban developments challenged court-sponsored Enlightenment. If the practices of the British, Dutch and some of the German states could not be completely replicated elsewhere, primarily because of their freer political structures, the development of sociability and with it a wider public for enlightened ideas would create strains not only in the cultural formation of court societies but also in the relationship between the writers, their patrons, their institutional affiliations and their public. Yet not even the more liberal societies could accept all of the challenging new ideas, especially those relating to religion. Writers in the early days of the Enlightenment tried to find appropriate ways of communicating with very different audiences. They were quite capable of speaking with several voices. Newton kept his millenarian and Socinian ideas out of his published works. Thomas Burnet confined the full exposition of his millenarian ideas to the original Latin edition of his Sacred Theory of the Earth (Part II, 1689; English trans., 1690). The Dutch Calvinist minister Balthasar Bekker attacked witchcraft in his De Betoverde Weereld (1691) - The World Bewitched, but carefully omitted the anti-Catholic passages from the French translation, Le Monde enchanté. Only clandestine works, such as the Three Impostors, took no account of the sensitivities of the audience, or rather enjoyed speaking their mind to the fortunate few. There are about 200 catalogued copies of the manuscript treatise, considerably more than any other clandestine work of the early Enlightenment period. That gives some indication of the size of the audience and the nature of its influence. Writers had to make their own compromises, dependent on the society in which they lived, the source of their livelihood and their own personalities. The Curé Meslier was an atheist and yet remained in the Church all his life. He was imprisoned in 1716 for subversive preaching, but for the most part he kept his radical thoughts to himself, leaving on his death three copies of Mémoire of his thoughts. Extracts circulated clandestinely and were known to Voltaire, who published one. The subterfuges employed concerning religion would later in the eighteenth century be used more dangerously in relation to politics. Yet, as this part demonstrates, many of the tensions which proved so creative when Enlightenment was at its height were present at the outset. -85- REFERENCES | |Klancher, Jon P. (1987) The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790-1832, Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press. | | | | | |Roche, Daniel (1993) La France des Lumières, Paris: Fayard; trans. Arthur Goldhammer (1998) as France in the Enlightenment, Cambridge, | | |Mass., and London: Harvard University Press. | | | | | |Salbstein, M. C. N. (1982) The Emancipation of the Jews in Britain. The Question of the Admission of the Jews to Parliament, 1828-1860, | | |Toronto and London: Associated University Presses. | | | | -86- CHAPTER SIX THE DUTCH REPUBLIC 'That mother nation of liberty' Hugh Dunthorne One of the earliest allusions to the dawning of an Age of Enlightenment in Europe occurs in a letter of the philosopher 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, written in 1706 to the theologian and journalist Jean Le Clerc. 'There is a mighty light,' Shaftesbury observes, 'which spreads itself over the whole world, especially in those two free nations of England and Holland, on whom the affairs of all Europe now turn' (Gay 1967:11). As a way of describing the growth and diffusion of knowledge and ideas, the metaphor of light was to become increasingly familiar. But why did Shaftesbury apply it particularly to Holland, the country in which he had been living a couple of years earlier and where Le Clerc spent most of his adult life' Was he conscious of a specifically Dutch Enlightenment' And how might he have defined the role of the Netherlands in the wider European Enlightenment of these early years' PROPAGANDA AND PUBLIC INTEREST Any attempt to answer these questions must begin with the Dutch Republic itself, 'that mother nation of liberty', as Shaftesbury called it on another occasion (Haley 1988:179). Around 1700 it was still a relatively new state, one which had emerged only a century earlier out of the flames of the Low Countries' rebellion against Spanish misrule and which had quickly acquired an enviable reputation for good government, economic prosperity and freedom. That reputation was largely of the Hollanders' own making. Fighting Spain had forced them to become propagandists as well as soldiers, and during the course of the war (1568-1648) and for some time afterwards reams of material were produced by the printing presses of the Netherlands in order to justify their cause and trumpet their successes. This propaganda was successful, too. Europeans became fascinated by the story of the rise of the Dutch Republic as well as by what they saw when they visited the country, as, in growing numbers, they did. And by the later seventeenth century (the period which historians now call the early Enlightenment), foreigners as well as native Netherlanders were writing and publishing works on the recent history and present state of the Dutch Republic. One of the earliest and most perceptive of these accounts was Sir William Temple's -87- Observations upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands, first printed in London in the spring of 1673. It is a work worth exploring briefly for what it can tell us about the reputation that the Netherlands state and society enjoyed in the late seventeenth century, and indeed continued to enjoy for much of the eighteenth. At the time when he wrote the Observations, Temple was best known as a diplomat, having served during the 1660s as Charles II's ambassador in the Spanish Netherlands, as well as in the Dutch Republic. But he was also a man of the Enlightenment (though the term itself was not yet current) and he was soon to be numbered among Britain's leading freethinkers. He was influenced by the new scientific mentality of his time and was in some senses a political scientist, a pioneer of what later generations would call the 'science of man'. Anticipating Montesquieu, he paid attention to factors like climate and physical geography. Like the philosophical historians of the next century, he held that 'most national customs are the effect of some unseen, or unobserved, natural causes or necessities' (Temple 1673:81). And, as Voltaire was to do in his Letters Concerning the English Nation (1733), Temple approached his subject in the belief not only that it was interesting in itself but also that lessons could be learned from his analysis by the rulers of other countries, including his own. A STATE TO BE EMULATED Temple was an admirer of the Netherlands; but he was not uncritical, being concerned to correct certain received opinions and popular misconceptions about the country. In analysing the Dutch Revolt, for example, he argued that the Netherlanders' hatred of Spanish misrule had been a stronger motive for rebellion than 'love for their liberties', pointing out that the rule of their own magistrates under the new Republic was hardly less 'absolute' than that of the hated Spaniards which it replaced (Temple 1673:34-6). The difference lay not in the extent of the government's power but rather in the quality of those who now rose to high office and in the fact that those in authority did not exploit their public position for private gain. Government by assembly or committee, which existed at all levels in the Dutch Republic, was in Temple's opinion an effective way of enabling the ablest administrators and policy-makers to emerge. And, although the regime was oligarchical not democratic, its members could not afford to ignore the country's active and well-informed public opinion (Temple 1673:68-9, 70-2). Dutch laws might be harsh, but they treated everyone impartially; and although taxes were high, they were accepted because they were used to promote the welfare of the whole community - for example, in the various charitable institutions which Temple admired (as did many other visitors to the Low Countries), though he was aware that they also served as a means of social control (Temple 1673:86-8). Temple's affinities with the Enlightenment are no less apparent in his chapter on the religious life of the Netherlands, providing both an analysis of the system of religious toleration for which the Dutch Republic had already become famous (or notorious, depending on one's point of view) and a demonstration of the benefits which he believed such a system brought. Like John Locke's later writings on toleration, Temple's argument was more practical than -88- theological. Tolerance of those who dissented from the state Church was desirable, he believed, because it ensured 'civil peace' and social harmony, allowing people to live together as the Dutch themselves did - 'like citizens of the world, associated by the common ties of humanity and by the bonds of peace … with equal encouragement of all art and equal freedom of speculation and enquiry' (Temple 1673:106-7). Toleration was good for business too, since it encouraged immigration into the country and so increased its density of population, which Temple considered one of the two pillars of Dutch economic prosperity. The other pillar was the rule of law, as distinct from arbitrary rule. Trade would flourish, he believed, only where government was trusted and property secure - and both conditions were fulfilled in the Dutch Republic (Temple 1673:109-15). [pic] Figure 6.1 'T Oude Mannen en Vrouwen Huys, old people's home from Dapper's Historische beschryving der stadt Amsterdam. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the towns of the Dutch Republic were widely admired for their institutions of social welfare. This print, from a description of Amsterdam published in 1663, shows the old men's and old women's home on the Oudezijdsvoorburgwal. It accommodated citizens over fifty years of age who were unable to live alone; in return, their own property was forfeited to the institution. By permission of Gemeentearchief (the Municipal Archives), Amsterdam. Temple's account of Dutch government and society, summarized here, was by no means the only book of its kind. Others soon followed, including several works by Huguenot refugees, such as François Michel Janiçon's Etat présent de la République des Provinces-Unies (1729). Yet, for all its imitators, Temple's book proved the most enduring of these accounts - and probably the most influential. Between its initial publication in 1673 and the mid-eighteenth century, it went through no fewer than -89- eight English editions, besides being translated into French and Dutch. It provided David Hume and other Scots writers with most of what they knew about the growth of the Dutch economy, while it supplied the founding fathers of the American Republic with insights into federalism. The English deist Anthony Collins quoted Temple at length on the political and social advantages of religious liberalism (Collins 1724: xxxi-xxxiv). Nor is it surprising that Temple's concluding bon mot on this subject - 'Religion may possibly do more good in other places, but it does less hurt here' (Temple 1673:107) - should have proved irresistible to Diderot, who reproduced it word for word (without acknowledgement) in his 'Voyage de Hollande' (Diderot 1773:432). By the time Diderot visited the country in 1773, Temple was in some respects decidedly out-of-date. The Dutch Republic was no longer the great power that it had been a century earlier. Its economy was partially in decline, and corruption was seeping into its government. Yet, however idealized, the image of the Netherlands which Temple and others had projected - of a free nation, well governed, educated, tolerant and prosperous - continued to be valued precisely because it was an ideal, and thus an inspiration to rulers and policy-makers in an age of enlightened reform. Dutch ways of doing things continued to be emulated, from commercial and industrial techniques to policies of toleration, education and penal justice. In the middle decades of the eighteenth century, for example, British advocates of penal reform, from Bishop Berkeley to John Howard, repeatedly referred to the Dutch houses of correction as models of humane and effective punishment and urged the adoption of a similar penal regime in Britain (Berkeley 1735-7: 109; Howard 1777:44-6) - a process eventually set in motion with the passing of the Penitentiary Act in 1779 (Beattie 1986:549-54, 568-76). IMMIGRATION AND INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHING One important part of Holland's role in the early Enlightenment, then, was to set an example to Europe, to show how a well-administered state could flourish. Moreover, the early reputation of the Dutch Republic as a model community had practical consequences which allowed it to contribute to European intellectual life in a second and more direct way. For good government and prosperity were qualities that did more than attract attention and encourage emulation. They also attracted thousands of immigrants, including a significant number of writers, printers and booksellers. Many of those who came to the Dutch Republic were fleeing from religious persecution at home - Calvinists from the Spanish Netherlands, such as the printer Louis Elsevier; Bohemian and Moravian Protestants, among them Comenius, the educationalist; Socinians (i.e., Unitarians) from Poland and dissenters of various kinds from France, including the Jansenist Antoine Arnauld and the Huguenot Pierre Bayle. Other newcomers were political refugees. During and after the English Civil War royalists like Bishop John Bramhall and the London bookseller Samuel Browne moved to the Netherlands (Keblusek 2001:151-8), as did members of the Whig opposition, including John Locke and Gilbert Burnet, in the 1680s. Others again -90- were victims of public criticism, as in the case of Anthony Collins, who retreated to Holland in 1713 following the publication of his controversial Discourse of Free-Thinking. Yet, whatever the varying circumstances which drove these émigrés out of their own countries, the conditions which attracted them to the Dutch Republic were always much the same. As René Descartes remarked of the society in which he lived for twenty years, the Hollanders were 'a great people' who offered the scholar 'repose as well as liberty' (Schama 1981:59). And liberty meant not only freedom of thought and of conscience but also freedom of the press. This is not to say that publishing in the Netherlands was entirely unrestricted. Especially at times of domestic or international tension, publications on religion or politics that were considered blasphemous or seditious could be banned by provincial or municipal authorites and fines could be imposed on authors and publishers. Yet, thanks to the uncentralized character of the Dutch state and to the commercial priorities of its rulers, controls of this kind were haphazardly imposed, allowing the press much greater latitude than it had elsewhere in Europe. It is thus unsurprising that the province of Holland, where most of the country's printers were based, should have been called 'the Mecca of authors' by a French writer in 1687 (Groenveld 1987:63), nor that a modern scholar should describe the Dutch Republic of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as 'unquestionably the intellectual entrepôt of Europe' (Gibbs 1971:323). For, just as Dutch merchants and seafarers had established their pre-eminence by the mid-seventeenth century as the commercial carriers of Europe and Dutch towns had become the great commodity market of the Continent, where goods and services of every kind were bought and sold, so by the 1660s those same towns had won an unrivalled position in the international publishing industry and Dutch booksellers were making themselves indispensable as traders in print to Europe's republic of letters. In Holland in 1600 there were 55 printing presses; by 1675 this had increased to 203, with more than half of that number in Amsterdam alone. Some 230 booksellers are recorded as doing business in the city between 1680 and 1710. What these presses printed and what Dutch booksellers and their agents abroad distributed was extremely varied, ranging from Bibles to newspapers and embracing, according to a German traveller in Holland, 'all literary tongues known to Europe' (Barbour 1963:65). Good modern editions of Latin and Greek texts appeared, often in the cheap duodecimo format which the Dutch helped to pioneer. There were works in Oriental languages - Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic and Syriac - for which the necessary type was at this time manufactured only in the Netherlands. Ancient and modern histories were published, alongside medical and other scientific treatises. And there were works of a radical or polemical kind, known in France as livres de Hollande, which had to be printed in the Netherlands because it was thought too dangerous to publish them in the country of their origin. Among philosophers who at one time or another found it necessary to publish their work in the Dutch entrepôt were Richard Simon, Fontenelle, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Holbach, La Mettrie and Rousseau. What is more, wherever sufficient sources survive to allow the activities of individual printers or booksellers to be reconstructed, that evidence invariably reveals the variety and geographical breadth of their business. Pieter van der Aa, for -91- [pic] Figure 6.2 Huguenot Bookshops in Amsterdam, from {Johannes Phoonsen} (1715) Les Loix et les coutumes de change, trans Jean Pierre Ricard, Amsterdam: E. Roger. Taken from the title-page of an early eighteenth-century guide to commercial exchange rates in Holland, this print shows the Amsterdam bookshops of François l'Honoré and Jaques Desbordes, two of the many Huguenot publishers who sought refuge in the Dutch Republic during the last quarter of the seventeenth century. Desbordes was the nephew of Pierre Bayle's printer, Henry Desbordes, and he continued the tradition of publishing French-language literary and political journals. By permission of Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague. -92- example, heir to the Elsevier publishing dynasty at Leiden and from 1715 printer to the university, had contacts with fellow-booksellers in Berlin, Venice and Paris, as well as through the annual Frankfurt book fairs. He built up a catalogue of scholarly publications, ranging from the complete works of Erasmus (edited by Le Clerc) to Christiaan Huygens's treatise on the wave theory of light, and for the popular side of the market he produced a series of pocket-sized travel books covering Italy, Spain and Portugal, Britain and Ireland, ancient and modern Rome, and Switzerland. He supplied medical treatises and Latin classics to a leading London bookseller, published the voluminous geographical and geological studies of the Zurich professor Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, and provided the imperial library at St Petersburg with atlases and other works of reference (Hoftijzer 1992:169-84). A NEW KIND OF JOURNALISM It could be argued that entrepreneurs such as van der Aa, for all their aggressive commercialism, were simply extending and expanding activities which had been undertaken in earlier times by members of the Venetian and German book trades. Yet, in one respect at least, the printers of the Netherlands and the authors whom they served were unquestionably pioneers. This was in developing, if not inventing, the new medium of the monthly literary and scientific journal, offering critical book reviews, scholarly news and occasional articles, all tailored to an international readership. The earliest of these journals, with the inspired title Nouvelles de la République des Lettres, was founded in 1684 by Pierre Bayle, in its first three years, largely written by him, and printed in Amsterdam by a fellow-Huguenot refugee, Henry Desbordes. Bayle's aim was to create a forum of ideas and information with the broadest possible appeal - moderate in opinion, informal and accessible in style, varied in content. Religion and theology were most noticed in its pages, but there was room also for history and literature, science and medicine. And good taste was carefully observed. If a piece was thought likely to prove shocking to some readers - as in the case of Antonij van Leeuwenhoek's letters on human reproduction - then it appeared decently clothed in Latin. Though banned in France after 1685, the journal continued to circulate there through the post and by other, more surreptitious means. And wherever French was understood it found a ready market - in the Low Countries and Italy, among Catholics and Protestants, scholars and amateurs. Where Bayle and Desbordes led, others quickly followed. In 1686 Jean Le Clerc and a group of Amsterdam publishers launched the Bibliothèque Universelle et Historique, the journal in which the exiled Locke was persuaded to make his first forays into print. And over the next thirty years a dozen or so similar periodicals appeared in Holland, the majority edited by Huguenots and written in French, though several were in the hands of Dutch publishers, and one - Pieter Rabus's Boekzaal van Europe, founded in 1692 - was a wholly Dutch venture. Taken together, these Franco-Dutch journals performed an invaluable service, enabling readers across western Europe to keep abreast of new publications and new ideas, even if they lacked the means to acquire the books for themselves. It is the kind of service that we take for granted today, but in the 1680s it was quite new. -93- SPINOZISM AND TOLERATION Besides setting an example to other states, then, the Dutch Republic also served the early Enlightenment by putting its ideas into print and distributing them across Europe and giving asylum to exiles of every kind. In Bayle's well-known phrase, Holland was 'the great ark of the refugees' (Bayle 1697:2.255, 'Kuchlin'): 'the fatherland of philosophers', as a French émigré of the next generation called it (d'Argens 1737:308). Yet, indispensable as these services were, they also raised doubts. Wasn't there something rather passive and menial about the role of the Dutch as middlemen in the international republic of letters' The Netherlanders seemed to be the artisans rather than the architects of the Enlightenment, its protectors rather than its protagonists. Where were the Dutch philosophes - the Dutch Montesquieu or the Dutch Hume' Was there no distinctively Dutch intellectual contribution to the early Enlightenment' One way of answering these questions would be to point to the looming figure of Benedict de Spinoza, the pioneer of historically informed biblical criticism, the advocate of democratic republicanism as 'the most natural form of state', the pantheist who identified God with Nature and who denied the possibility of miracles because 'nothing … can happen in Nature to contravene her own universal laws' (Spinoza 1670: XVI, 243; VI, 126). Born into the Amsterdam community of Sephardic Jews, Spinoza did all his philosophical work in Holland, mixing with ecumenical Dutch Collegiants and even counting a few members of the Republic's political élite among his friends and protectors. Yet, for all that, it is difficult to see him as a representative figure in Dutch intellectual life. For one thing, Spinoza's work met with an overwhelmingly hostile reception in his own country. Condemned as 'utterly pestilential', 'profane, blasphemous and atheistic' (Israel 2001:276, 292), both his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670) and his Opera Posthuma (1677) were banned in Holland and Utrecht and had to be distributed in secret (with considerable success, it should be said). Second, though he attracted small circles of associates and followers in the towns of Holland and Overijssel - they included the lexicographer Lodewijk Meyer and the academic physicist Burchardus de Volder in Amsterdam, the jurist Abraham Johannes Cuffeler at The Hague and the liberal Calvinist minister Frederik van Leenhof in Zwolle - the 'radical Enlightenment' which his philosophy spawned was essentially a European movement rather than a Dutch one. In Holland, the clandestine cultivation of Spinoza's ideas had passed its peak by the 1720s (Israel 2001:308). As the leading Netherlands historian of the Enlightenment has pointed out, 'a creative Dutch Spinozism … did not emerge before the nineteenth century' (Mijnhardt 1992:204). Yet, if Spinoza's radicalism placed him outside the mainstream of Dutch intellectual life, he did make an important contribution to one of its central debates. This was over religious toleration, which accompanied the gradual emergence of a practical system of confessional coexistence in the Netherlands. Such a sytem was not achieved easily; nor did it satisfy everyone. How far toleration should go, whether freedom of conscience implied freedom of public worship, whether it should embrace freedom of expression and even equality of civil status - these were always matters of intense controversy in the Dutch Republic. There, as elsewhere in Europe, the most -94- eloquently argued pleas for tolerance often came from 'the disappointed' or 'the dispossessed' (Pettegree 1996:198). Thus, around 1580, as militant Calvinists tightened their grip on Holland's towns and sought to have Catholicism banned, it was the Christian humanist Dirck Volckertsz Coornhert who defended liberty of conscience and of worship and upheld the freedom to publish on religious matters. The Bible, he pointed out, provided no authority for persecuting heretics. And since no one except God could be certain what was heresy and what was true religion, it was better to avoid all 'faction, dispute, condemnation, banishment and persecution' (Gelderen 1992:243-56). Similarly, after the National Synod of Dordrecht in 1618-19 had upheld Calvinist orthodoxy and condemned liberal Arminianism, it was the Arminian Simon Episcopius who renewed Coornhert's plea. Challenging the conventional wisdom that religious uniformity was essential to a country's political and social stability, his Vrije Godes-Dienst (Free Religion; 1627) argued that permitting differences of opinion and of practice within and between coexisting Churches not only encouraged fruitful theological enquiry but also eliminated the feelings of resentment which would otherwise build up. A state offering its citizens religious freedom would earn their loyalty, though he conceded that a special oath of loyalty would be required from Dutch Catholics (Israel 1997:19-20). And again, in the wake of anti-Socinian laws passed in Holland during the 1650s, it was Spinoza (among others) who took up the case for tolerance once more, stung into action by the death in prison of his fellow-radical Adriaen Koerbagh, whose crime was to have written books rejecting the doctrine of the Trinity and asserting that Jesus was not God but only a great teacher. Spinoza argued for religious toleration, of course. Anticipating Rousseau, he proposed a dominant ecumenical civil religion, with more modest Churches for dissenters. But his prime concern, set out in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, was to make the broader case for intellectual toleration. Implicit in man's inalienable 'freedom to judge and think as he pleases' was the right to publish, provided what was published did not conflict directly with the constitution of the state; and any attempt by confessional 'agitators' to restrain that right could only cause social discord (Spinoza 1670: XX, 291-9). The Netherlands' debate over toleration - intellectual and religious - continued intermittently during the eighteenth century. Orthodox Calvinist attempts to ban the distribution of La Mettrie's materialist tract L'Homme Machine (1747), for example, prompted the book's Leiden publisher, Elie Luzac, to write a vigorous Essai (1749) in defence of 'freedom of expression' (Velema 1993:6-22); while clerical objections to the appearance of Voltaire's Traité sur la Tolérance in Dutch translation (1764) provoked dissenters and liberal Calvinists into attacking the whole privileged position of the Dutch Reformed Church. They demanded a 'mutual toleration' that would have amounted to equality - and that was eventually achieved with the separation of Church and state under the new Batavian Republic in 1796 (Wall 2000:115-27). As the comparison of Spinoza with Rousseau suggests, there were affinities between the arguments for tolerance voiced by Netherlands writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and those used by writers in other countries. Reviewing Locke's first Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), Le Clerc pointed out how much it reflected Arminian teaching (Colie 1960:126). And Bishop William Warburton -95- (1698-1779), writing in 1771, went further. For him, the Arminians of Holland were the 'Heroes' to whom 'this enlightened Age' was 'principally indebted' (Wall 2000:125). Yet, it would be a mistake to regard the arguments of Coornhert, Episcopius and their successors as peculiarly Dutch. They were part of a common stock of more or less liberal ideas that stretched back to ancient times. What gave Dutch versions of these ideas greater force was the social context in which they took shape. For in the Netherlands, more than in any other European country, confessional coexistence had become an everyday experience, a workable and profitable way of life. It was this way of life, observed during his years of exile in the Netherlands, that caused Bishop Burnet to become 'much in love with toleration', and which he found more persuasive than any amount of speculative theory (Burnet 1724:93-4). ENLIGHTENED EDUCATION Perhaps, then, we should look for a distinctively Dutch intellectual contribution to the early Enlightenment not in the ideas of a single philosopher, however radical, nor in those of a group of writers, however influential, but rather in the institutions which shaped Dutch society and culture. And no institutions were more formative than those which made up the Republic's system of education, from basic schooling up to university instruction. For this was a highly educated society - by the late seventeenth century perhaps the most literate and numerate in Europe. During the previous hundred years the northern Netherlands (and especially the maritime provinces of Holland, Friesland and Zeeland) had undergone something of an educational revolution, stimulated both by the Protestantization of the country and by the combined demands of commercial development and modern scientific warfare. In village after village during the late sixteenth century, the establishment of the first Calvinist minister was quickly followed by the installation of the first schoolmaster 'to educate the children in reading, writing and reckoning and the catechism' (Vries 1974:211). And in the towns, besides the common schools funded by the municipality, private commercial schools were soon springing up to teach arithmetic and book-keeping, as well as technical institutes such as the so-called Duytsche Mathematique, established at Leiden in 1600 to train surveyors and military and civil engineers, and Rotterdam's Collegium Mechanicum, founded in 1626. One symptom of the twin processes of education and commercialization was the early decline in the northern Netherlands of belief in witchcraft (Holland's last formal witchcraft trial, ending in acquittal, took place in 1614), for this was a society - it has been argued - whose mathematical conception of causality left little room for fears of sorcery and the supernatural (Waardt 1991:201-8). Thus, when in 1691 the Cartesian Balthasar Bekker published De Betoverde Weereld (The World Bewitched), denying the devil's power to influence human life and the natural world, his views, for all the fuss that they caused among orthodox Calvinists, were not revolutionary or original but broadly in line with a developing popular tradition of reasoned scepticism. The Dutch Republic's institutions of higher learning, and especially its five universities, were also characterized by trends in more sophisticated reasoning. Like -96- the state itself, the universities were new institutions, founded between 1575 and 1636 at Leiden, Franeker (in Friesland), Harderwijk (in Gelderland), Groningen and Utrecht. Unimpeded by past scholastic traditions, they were able to explore new fields of study, such as physics and other natural sciences, and to develop new ways of teaching old disciplines, as with clinical instruction in medicine and post-mortem anatomy demonstrations. They were also well endowed financially, reflecting the wish of municipal and provincial authorities that the universities should be a means of winning international prestige for the young republic. Thus botanical gardens were planted; anatomy theatres, astronomical observatories and physics and chemistry laboratories were built, and equipped with growing collections of scientific instruments; and a cosmopolitan professoriate was appointed. At Groningen, for example, more than half the professors employed during the seventeenth century were foreigners. Since teaching was conducted in Latin, the result was to attract students from across Europe and - more importantly - to open the universities to currents of international thought. Despite initial disapproval from the authorities in Church and state, Cartesian rationalism was absorbed into the Dutch universities during the middle decades of the seventeenth century, and by 1700 the inductive experimental method associated with Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton was being assimilated, too. Willem 's Gravesande, professor of mathematics at Leiden, did more than anyone to introduce Newtonian science to Continental Europe - partly through the Journal Littéraire, which he edited from 1713 with Justus van Effen and the French émigré Prosper Marchand, partly through his lectures at the university (which Voltaire himself attended during the winter of 1736-7), and partly through publishing the first textbook on Newton's physics with detailed engravings of the instruments which he used in his lecture-demonstrations, a book whose original Latin text was quickly translated into various modern European languages ('s Gravesande 1720/1; Israel 1995:1042). Herman Boerhaave, 's Gravesande's older colleague, also lectured on Newton, notably in his rectorial address De comparando certo in physicis (On the Achievement of Certainty in Physics; Leiden, 1715). Moreover, he applied Newton's inductive method to his own fields of medicine, chemistry and botany, further strengthening the Leiden medical faculty's international reputation as a progressive centre of clinical teaching and empirical research. It was, indeed, as an inspiring teacher that Boerhaave was most widely known. His textbooks - Institutes of Medicine (1708), Aphorisms on the Diagnosis and Treatment of Diseases (1708) and Elements of Chemistry (1732) - were endlessly reprinted, pirated and translated, even into non-European languages such as Turkish and Japanese. And his students, the majority of whom came from outside the Netherlands and who included major figures, such as Albrecht von Haller (1708-77), Gerhard van Swieten (1700-72) and Alexander Monro (1697-1767), went on to found medical schools on the Leiden pattern in Berlin, Göttingen, Vienna and Edinburgh. At Leiden itself, ironically, the practice of clinical teaching was allowed to lapse for half a century after Boerhaave's death in 1738. But elsewhere in the Netherlands his legacy was sustained, notably in the work in clinical surgery and comparative anatomy undertaken at Groningen by one of his last pupils, Petrus Camper. -97- [pic] Figure 6.3 Boerhaave Delivering a Rectorial Address on Newton, engraving from the frontispiece of Boerhaave's Orations (1983) Leiden: Leiden University Press.The title-page of Boerhaave's De comparando certo in physicis, this engraving shows him giving his rectorial address to the University of Leiden on 8 February 1715, the first occasion on which the principles of Newtonian science were expounded to a Continental audience. A popular lecturer and a pioneer in the clinical teaching of medicine, Boerhaave continued to sustain Leiden's international reputation for more than twenty years. By permission of the Sir Thomas Browne Institute, University of Leiden. Photograph by permission of the National Library of Australia. -98- SCIENCE, RELIGION AND THE PROFESSIONS The absorption into Dutch universities of first Cartesian and then Newtonian ideas did not mean that science was to be separated from religion. On the contrary, 's Gravesande, Boerhaave and their followers stressed the presence of divine providence in nature and contributed through their teaching to the growth of a Dutch tradition of 'physico-theology'. This was a term coined by the English scientist William Derham in his Boyle Lectures of 1711-12. But the idea which it conveyed, of nature as a form of divine revelation, was already current in the Netherlands. It underlay the entomological work of Jan Swammerdam in the later 1670s: 'the Almighty Finger of God', he believed, could be seen even 'in the anatomy of a louse, in which you will find wonder piled upon wonder and God's Wisdom clearly exposed in one minute particle' (Cook 1992:140-1). And it found its most influential exponent in Bernard Nieuwentijt, physician and burgomaster of Purmerend in northern Holland. His Regt Gebruick der Wereltbeschouwingen (1715), translated into English as The Religious Philosopher; or the Right Use of Contemplating the Works of the Creator … Designed for the Conviction of Atheists and Infidels (1718) quickly became a best-seller not only in the Netherlands and Britain but in France and Germany too. Moreover, while academics and members of the political elite sought to reconcile science and religion, the very structure of the faculties in the universities of the Netherlands also helped to link the new sciences to more traditional areas of the curriculum. Study in the arts faculty was regarded as a necessary preliminary to the professional education provided by the higher faculties of theology, law and medicine. And since it was in the arts faculty that mathematics and philosophy (including natural philosophy, or physics) were taught, many clergymen, lawyers and doctors went from university into their professional careers with more than a passing interest in the mathematical and natural sciences (Hackmann 1975:96). It is thus not as incongruous as it might seem that the physicist and astronomer Christiaan Huygens should have begun by taking a law degree at Leiden, nor that Swammerdam should have been a graduate in medicine. Neither man went on to practise the profession for which he had been trained. But many who did - members of Holland's large professional middle class - were able to combine their ordinary duties with a lively taste for scientific enquiry. This explains the popularity of public scientific lectures, pioneered by Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit in Amsterdam from 1718. And it explains, too, the fashion for exploring the natural history of the Netherlands and its overseas empire in illustrated books and collections of 'rarities'. In 1699 the German émigré artist Maria Sibylla Merian left Holland for Surinam, where she spent two years studying the insects and plants depicted in her Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium (Amsterdam 1705); while from the East Indies a decade later the missionary François Valentijn returned home to Dordrecht with a celebrated collection of Moluccan seashells and the idea of setting up a society of conchologists. When he did so in 1714, scientific societies were rare in the Netherlands. But the later eighteenth century would see them proliferate to an astonishing extent, from a minority of semi-official bodies like the Holland Society of Science (founded at Haarlem in 1752) to a much larger number of less formal local groups. By 1778 -99- [pic] Figure 6.4 Plate 26 from Maria Sibylla Merian (1718) Erucarum ortus, Amsterdam; from facs. edn, The Wondrous Transformation of Caterpillars (1978) London: Scolar Press. Painter, engraver and pioneering entomologist, Maria Sibylla Merian did much to establish the study of plants and insects as a fashionable pastime during the eighteenth century. This plate, showing a peacock butterfly, an ichneumonid (below left) and a tachinid fly (below right) around a common nettle, comes from her earliest work, a study of European insects, originally published at Nuremberg in 1679 and later reissued in Dutch, Latin and French editions. It laid the foundations for her more famous book on the entomology of Surinam. -100- Haarlem had a second society, too, established on the initiative of the merchant Pieter Teyler van der Hulst. Known as Teyler's Museum, its collections can still be seen in the town today, housed and displayed much as they were in the 1780s. TOWARDS THE LATER ENLIGHTENMENT This chapter has suggested some of the ways in which the Dutch contributed to the early European Enlightenment: as members of an exemplary state and society, as intellectual entrepreneurs, and as enlightened educators. In all three capacities, their conduct was energetic, confident and forward-looking. Yet, by 1730 a change of direction is discernible, and with it a loss of confidence that was to darken the middle and later years of the eighteenth century. For, while foreign observers continued to think of the Dutch Republic much as Temple had described it in 1673, the Dutch themselves were uneasily aware of their country's decline - of its loss of international standing and growing burden of public debt, of moral corruption, social and religious tension and natural disasters. In the European war crisis of 1733 the republic retreated into diplomatic neutrality, partly for financial reasons, while other disasters loomed on the domestic front. Scarcely had Dutch self-esteem recovered from the 'sodomite scandal' and subsequent executions of 1730-1 than it was rocked by outbursts of anti-popery, the spread of cattle plague and reports that the country's sea-defences were being destroyed by a lethal and previously unknown species of pile-worm. Signs of the growing anxiety caused by such developments can be found in the pages of a new literary journal, De Hollandsche Spectator, founded in 1731 by Justus van Effen as a Dutch imitation of the English Spectator of Joseph Addison. In some ways its tone was conventional enough. Socially conservative, it recommended reason and moderate religion as the guides to virtuous conduct. Yet, woven into van Effen's writing was a new concern about the republic's difficulties, and especially its waning international position. The cause of decline, he believed, was moral. Native Dutch virtue was being sapped by French manners and vices. The remedy lay in reviving the commercial culture of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. His message, in other words, was that the present must be reformed by looking to the past. Van Effen was not alone in taking this view. It was a theme that was to be repeated with increasing conviction in Dutch public debate for much of the remainder of the eighteenth century, and it lent a retrospective and self-obsessed quality to the later years of the Dutch Enlightenment. REFERENCES | |Argens, J. B. de Boyer d', Marquis (1737) Mémoires de Monsieur le Marquis d'Argens, 2nd edn, 'Londres' {Amsterdam'}. | | | | | |Barbour, V. (1963) Capitalism in Amsterdam in the Seventeenth Century, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. | | | | | |Bayle, P. (1697) Dictionnaire Historique et Critique, Rotterdam: R. Leers. | | | | -101- |Beattie, J. M. (1986) Crime and the Courts in England 1660-1800, Oxford: Clarendon Press. | | | | | |Berkeley, G. (1735-7) The Querist, Containing Several Queries Proposed to the Consideration of the Public, ed. T. E. Jessop (1953) Works of| | |George Berkeley Bishop of Cloyne, Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson. | | | | | |Burnet, G. (1724) A Supplement to Bishop Burnet's History of My Own Time, ed. H. C. Foxcroft (1902) Oxford: Clarendon Press. | | | | | |{Collins, A.} (1724) A Discourse of the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion, repr. (1976) New York: Garland. | | | | | |Colie, R. L. (1960) 'John Locke in the Republic of Letters', in J. S. Bromley and E. H. Kossmann (eds) Britain and the Netherlands: Papers | | |Delivered to the Oxford-Netherlands Historical Conference 1959, London: Chatto & Windus. | | | | | |Cook, H. J. (1992) 'The New Philosophy in the Low Countries', in R. Porter and M. Teich (eds) The Scientific Revolution in National | | |Context, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. | | | | | |Diderot, D. (1773) 'Voyage de Hollande', in J. Assézat and M. Tourneux (eds) (1876) Oeuvres complètes de Denis Diderot, Paris: Garnier. | | | | | |Gay, P. (1967) The Enlightenment: An Interpretation: The Rise of Modern Paganism, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. | | | | | |Gelderen, M. van (1992) The Political Thought of the Dutch Revolt 1555-1590, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. | | | | | |Gibbs, G. C. (1971) 'The Role of the Dutch Republic as the Intellectual Entrepôt of Europe in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries', | | |Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, 86: 323-49. | | | | | |Gravesande, W. J. 's (1720/1) Mathematical Elements of Natural Philosophy, Confirm'd by Experiments; or an Introduction to Sir Isaac | | |Newton's Philosophy, trans. J. Th. Desaguliers, London: J. Senex and W. Taylor. | | | | | |Groenveld, S. (1987) 'The Mecca of Authors' State Assemblies and Censorship in the Seventeenth-century Dutch Republic', in A. C. Duke and | | |C. A. Tamse (eds) Too Mighty to be Free: Censorship and the Press in Britain and the Netherlands(Britain and the Netherlands, 11), Zutphen:| | |De Walburg Pers. | | | | | |Hackmann, W. D. (1975) 'The Growth of Science in the Netherlands in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries', in M. Crosland (ed.) | | |The Emergence of Science in Western Europe, London: Macmillan. | | | | | |Haley, K. H. D. (1988) The British and the Dutch: Political and Cultural Relations through the Ages, London: George Philip. | | | | | |Hoftijzer, P. G. (1992) 'The Leiden Bookseller Pieter van der Aa (1659-1733) and the International Book Trade', in C. Berkvens-Stevelinck, | | |H. Bots, P. G. Hoftijzer and O. S. Lankhorst (eds) Le Magasin de l'Univers: The Dutch Republic as the Centre of the European Book Trade, | | |Leiden: Brill. | | | | | |Howard, J. (1777) The State of the Prisons in England and Wales, with … an Account of Some Foreign Prisons, 4th edn (1792), London: J. | | |Johnson, C. Dilly and T. Cadell. | | | | | |Israel, J. I. (1995) The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477-1806, Oxford: Oxford University Press. | | | | | |--(1997) 'The Intellectual Debate about Toleration in the Dutch Republic', in C. Berkvens-Stevelinck, J. Israel and G. H. M. Posthumus | | |Meyjes (eds) The Emergence of Tolerance in the Dutch Republic, Leiden: Brill. | | | | | |--(2001) Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750, Oxford: Oxford University Press. | | | | | |Keblusek, M. (2001) 'The Exile Experience: Royalist and Anglican Book Culture in the Low Countries (1640-60)', in L. Hellinga et al. (eds) | | |The Bookshop of the World: The Role of the Low Countries in the Book-trade 1473-1941, 't Goy-Houten, Netherlands: Hes & De Graaf. | | | | -102- | |Mijnhardt, W. W. (1992) 'The Dutch Enlightenment: Humanism, Nationalism and Decline', in M. C. Jacob and W. W. Mijnhardt (eds) The Dutch | | |Republic in the Eighteenth Century, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. | | | | | |Pettegree, A. (1996) 'The Politics of Toleration in the Free Netherlands, 1572-1620', in O. P. Grell and B. Scribner (eds) Tolerance and | | |Intolerance in the European Reformation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. | | | | | |Schama, S. (1981) 'The Enlightenment in the Netherlands', in R. Porter and M. Teich (eds) The Enlightenment in National Context, Cambridge:| | |Cambridge University Press. | | | | | |Spinoza, B. de (1670) Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, ed. S. Shirley (1989) Leiden: Brill. | | | | | |Temple, Sir William (1673) Observations upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands, ed. Sir G. Clark (1972) Oxford: Clarendon Press. | | | | | |Velema, W. R. E. (1993) Enlightenment and Conservatism in the Dutch Republic: The Political Thought of Elie Luzac (1721-1796), | | |Assen/Maastricht: Van Gorcum. | | | | | |Vries, J. de (1991) The Dutch Rural Economy in the Golden Age 1500-1700, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. | | | | | |Waardt, H. de (1991) Toverij en Samenleving: Holland 1500-1800, The Hague: Stichting Hollandse Historische Reeks. | | | | | |Wall, E. van der (2000) 'Toleration and Enlightenment in the Dutch Republic', in O. P. Grell and R. Porter (eds) Toleration in | | |Enlightenment Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. | | | | -103- CHAPTER SEVEN A CRUCIBLE FOR CHANGE: ENLIGHTENMENT IN BRITAIN Alexander Murdoch INTRODUCTION There are three aspects of early Enlightenment formations in Britain which will receive particular emphasis in this chapter. First, it is a mistake to perceive early Enlightenment formations in Britain as interchangeable with the spread of English cultural influence elsewhere in the archipelago. 'Britain' was a term and an idea that came into use during the early formation of the Enlightenment in the British Isles, as older national traditions in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland came into contact with Enlightenment ideas. Second, there was an insular element to British participation in a more cosmopolitan European Enlightenment. Many of the Enlightenment ideas perceived as distinctly British were in origin imported from the humanist culture of northern Europe and beyond (Porter 2000; Allan 2000). Third, recent research has demonstrated in compelling detail the 'urban renaissance' in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England which provided the forum for the development of the Enlightenment in Britain (Borsay 1989; Sweet 1997). Later they would provide the crucible for the transformation of British public life in the eighteenth century as being British became less about Enlightenment toleration, human liberty and confidence in the power of scientific knowledge and more about the issues of British empire which came to preoccupy public discourse (Money 1977; Wilson 2002). NEWTON AND ENLIGHTENMENT IN BRITAIN The personification of the early Enlightenment in Britain was Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727), whose image became a defining symbol of the growing influence of science, knowledge and an educated public who appreciated their virtues. Science, knowledge, reason, freedom and liberty all became linked in a manner that suggested that the very formation of Britain was a result of the Enlightenment. As Pope wrote in the couplet intended originally for Newton's monument at Westminster Abbey: -104- |All nature and its laws lay hid in night | |God said: Let Newton be: and all was light. | Newton's career lay at the centre of the spread of ideas of Enlightenment in Britain during the reigns of the restored Stuart kings, Charles II and his brother James II, and their successors, Mary and her husband William of Orange. The amazing advances in scientific knowledge that Newton and his associates achieved by the time of his death in 1727 appeared to many in Britain to presage equally important discoveries regarding the laws governing the politics and economics of human society. The very term 'Glorious Revolution' reflected the public influence of the scientific culture personified by Newton, implying that the movement of monarchs in response to complex forces could mirror the movement of the planets as they revolved within the solar system. This idea began to change after 1688, but the elements of continuity with early Enlightenment formations under the restored Stuart monarchs were just as important as the dynamic for change unleashed in 1688; 'glorious' in England, but violent and contested in the rest of what became Britain between 1707 and 1801. The formation of the Royal Society in London under charter from Charles II in 1662 occurred two years after his restoration. The charter brought no royal income, but the subscription money raised from those eager for the status of Fellows of the Royal Society helped to pay for the publication of the Philosophical Transactions, in which Newton published seventeen papers from 1672 to 1676, thereby establishing his reputation as a scientist of genius. The Society was not able to raise funds to publish Newton's Principia in 1686, but it authorized their president to license the printing of the book, which Newton dedicated to the Society. The eventual replacement of Pepys as President by Newton demonstrated the changing politics of public science. Pepys resigned at the time of the revolution of government in 1688, and Newton's subsequent election to the council of the Society in 1697 and to the presidency in 1703 marked the gradual change from aristocratic patronage to the patronage of the public in early Enlightenment Britain. 'Newton thus rescued the Society from the distractions of the virtuosi rather than succeeding in establishing it as a major centre of scientific research' (Gjertsen 1986:535). Newton's presidency of the Royal Society marked his place in the public pantheon of early Enlightenment Britain as the symbol of its achievements. If his mathematics and physics were not widely understood, the popularization of his ideas in terms of discovery of hitherto unknown laws governing the physical universe had an enormous impact in eighteenth-century Britain, particularly through events such as the Boyle Lectures in London. As provincial learned and scientific societies began to establish themselves in British towns in imitation of the Royal Society, their members aspired to do as Newton had done in his Royal Society papers of 1672-4: they hoped to launch new ideas into the world through the transactions of their societies and receive public acknowledgement (and reward) of their contribution to the advancement of knowledge and progress. -105- [pic] Figure 7.1 A Philosopher Giving that Lecture on the Orrery, in which a Lamp is Put in the Place of the Sun, Joseph Wright of Derby. A famous representation of the popularization of Newton's discoveries through public lectures in English provincial towns. By permission of the Museum and Art Gallery, Derby. THE HUGUENOTS AND EUROPEAN INFLUENCE ON THE EARLY ENLIGHTENMENT IN BRITAIN Sir Isaac Newton was no John Bull, but in many respects he was quintessentially English. He spent his entire life in the eastern counties of England, from Lincolnshire to Cambridge. Yet the public world in which he operated as Master of the Mint and President of the Royal Society in London was becoming less purely English and casting its net ever wider. An important part of early Enlightenment culture in Britain came from northern Europe even before the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660. French Huguenots had been seeking refuge in the south-east of England since the religious wars of the sixteenth century and by the time of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes were well established in London, having been encouraged to immigrate even before 1685 by the Stuart monarchy. They flourished in all trades associated with fashion, such as cabinet-making, textiles (especially silk) and silversmithing. They brought a Calvinistic element to London life that reinforced the impact of the Scottish Covenanters (who owed much to French Calvinism) during the middle of the seventeenth century. Of course, the Huguenots also migrated to Scotland, Wales and, especially, Ireland, and on the Continent many settled in Holland, Prussia and Switzerland. Some also went to British North America. This dispersal helped create international networks of correspondents. -106- The Huguenots played an important role in establishing the direct communication between London and Amsterdam that became a major axis for cultural, political and economic exchange throughout the period of the early Enlightenment. Prominent among the Huguenot refugees in the Netherlands was Pierre Bayle, whose 'use of scepticism as an instrument of study, which he had acquired from Descartes … was broadcast throughout Europe by his influential Historical and Critical Dictionary of 1695-7' (Gwynn 1985:84-5). John Locke's exile in Amsterdam during the latter days of the Stuart regime, his acquaintance with Huguenot intellectuals such as Bayle and, later, Molyneux in Dublin, and his key role in constructing the ideological basis of the change of political regime and British constitution in 1688 all make him almost the equal of Newton as a personification and icon of the early Enlightenment. Ideas of England and British liberty were then exported throughout Europe by an international network of northern European intellectuals in which the Huguenots loomed large, but which also included the Dutch and many Germans. The arrival in what had become Britain by 1707 of a Hanoverian king, whose mother, Sophie, was a patron of advanced ideas in Germany (Israel 2001), consolidated the hold of early Enlightenment culture in Britain as much as it consolidated the British state formed by the union of the parliaments of England and Wales and Scotland in 1707. THE REVOLUTION OF 1688 The revolution of 1688 was a multiple British revolution, or rather it marked a dramatic shift in the relation of the separate kingdoms within Britain, which resulted in the creation of the British state, drawing on the long-standing idea of a strong Protestant Britain as guarantor of cultural and political change in northern Europe (Harris 1999; Williamson 1982). It was 'Britain' rather than England which emerged as the principal opponent of the French Bourbon project for a universal monarchy. In essence Britain was created because the Dutch, Huguenot and German soldiers in the service of William of Orange, with some English, Welsh, Scottish and Protestant Irish support, undermined the military edifice supporting the monarchy of James II and went on to secure military victory in contested territory in Scotland and Ireland. The political and constitutional transformation in Britain after 1688, though perhaps not as glorious nor as revolutionary as it has sometimes been represented, still marked a significant departure in European history by establishing a regime which, in England at least, shared executive authority with a parliament containing all of the nobility and elected representatives of landowners and urban property-holders. Voltaire's admiring account of British liberties under the Hanoverian monarchy circulated widely in Europe and was often read as an implicit criticism of absolute monarchy. With the lapse in 1695 of the Licensing Act introduced under Charles II after his restoration, the content and availability of the culture of print expanded significantly (Fox 2000:392-4). The courts of law were less subject to government interference (although not quite as free from it as admirers of British liberties sometimes thought) (Connolly 1992; Prest 1998). The monarchy survived -107- the early death of James II's daughter Mary as joint monarch despite William of Orange's preoccupation with Continental war. Under William's sister-in-law and cousin, Anne, the project of parliamentary union with Scotland was achieved by co-option of key members of the Scottish nobility and the promise of the continued establishment of Presbyterianism in the Church of Scotland. Britain was thus an idea long before it became a political reality, but the achievement of an agreement, in law if not in practice, marked early Enlightenment culture in Britain. This was illustrated in the career of Daniel Defoe, a government spy in Edinburgh during the union negotiations of 1707, and propagandist for the completion of the union in his A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-7). David Gregory, the Newtonian astronomer, and John Arbuthnott, writer and future physician of the royal family, similarly participated in early metropolitan Enlightenment by migrating from Scotland to London. Stability, peace and consolidation arrived with the end of the war in Europe (1713), the peaceful succession to the British throne of the Elector of Hanover as George I in 1714, and the defeat of a major Jacobite rebellion in Scotland (with the help of Dutch troops provided under a treaty of mutual British/Netherlands defence) in 1715. The example of the United Provinces and the important role of the Dutch in establishing the Williamite regime in Britain fostered the idea that political and constitutional change was associated with broader changes in society and culture, which came to be perceived in Britain as part of the Enlightenment. Adam Smith, for example, wrote in 1760 of the beneficial effects of the union on Scotland, despite its early unpopularity: the disaffection of Scotland was excusable, as the immediate effect of British union 'was to hurt the interest of every single order of men in {Scotland}', although in time 'infinite Good had been derived' there (Smith 1977). What kind of 'Good' did he mean' Economic development and an increase of wealth, naturally, but also social and cultural development, as more wealth reached more people, and reduced the dependence of the many upon the wealthy few that had characterized early modern Scottish society. Culturally these ideas were often associated with tolerance, and with the liberalization of English society which made the development of an expanding commercial economy possible in England and in Britain more generally. THE GROWTH OF TOLERATION IN BRITAIN Toleration of a Presbyterian Church in Scotland under the terms of the parliamentary union was matched by growing acceptance of Protestant dissenters in England and Wales as entitled to participation in the public culture of the country. This toleration was never complete. Increasingly, dissenters became integrated into English society, and commerce and the use of leisure for social activity became more important than religious orthodoxy. Although the English Toleration Act of 1689 failed to extend full civil rights to English Protestants who were not members of the Church of England, it did create the impression to foreigners, such as Voltaire, of a tolerant and pluralistic society. This was further reinforced by the peaceful accession to the British throne in 1714 of the Lutheran Elector of Hanover as King George I, a British -108- king who never spoke English, who maintained a Lutheran established Church in his German electorate, and who supported and conformed to the Episcopalian Church of England. At the same time, George accepted a Presbyterian Church of Scotland which declared its loyalty to his regime when faced with the threat of restoration of the Roman Catholic Stuart dynasty at the time of the rebellion of 1715. This 'Jacobite' rebellion was supported by the large number of Scottish Episcopalians in the Highlands and north-east Scotland, who, despite some shared principles of church government with the Church of England, remained loyal to the Stuart dynasty. Despite the misfortunes of the Jacobites, the strides made by the Protestant dissenting academies of England and Presbyterian colleges of Scotland in pioneering new developments in education epitomized the country's religious plurality. Ironically, the 'Church of England' came to play a key role in the revival of Welsh-speaking culture in Wales during the eighteenth century. Sermons in Welsh were given more frequently over the course of the century, and the Church encouraged the publication of more books and the scriptures in the language. Thus, the Church of England, by embracing the vernacular, brought the Welsh language into print, and laid the basis for important changes in Welsh culture which preserved that culture into modern times (Davies 1993:295-8). By the 1770s, the unthinkable was countenanced, with public relief for the rights of Roman Catholics in England and Wales. And although parliamentary legislation failed Scotland in 1779, the leaders of the legal and ecclesiastical establishments there were known to favour it. Jacobitism and its discontents appeared to die in 1766 with the 'Old Pretender', the putative James VIII, rather than linger until the death of his eldest son Charles Edward in 1788. By the 1770s, Roman Catholics in Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland were important sources of military manpower for the prosecution of the war against the rebellious colonies in America. There was, therefore, a certain pragmatism in the British government's sponsorship of Catholic relief. This provoked considerable public hostility, leading to the Anti-Popery riots in Scotland in 1779 and the Gordon Riots in London in 1780, both of which witnessed the deeply unenlightened spectacle of the burning of books. The mob burned the library of the Roman Catholic Bishop of Scotland, in Edinburgh, and the library of the judge William Murray, Earl of Mansfield, in London. From a Perthshire Jacobite family, Mansfield (whom even Scottish-hating Dr Johnson admired) fell suspect of encouraging authoritarian tendencies in the British monarchy. Catholic relief was seen by some as a plot to allow the army to acquire troops which would support executive rather than parliamentary privilege: Enlightenment interest in toleration encouraged the government to defend it. The measure was extended in 1791 to give Roman Catholics the same status as Protestant dissenters, and indeed in Ireland to give many Roman Catholic tenant farmers the vote. THE RISE OF THE PUBLIC As religious loyalties became less overt in Britain, public culture came to be associated less with religion than with leisure and social intercourse. Public life -109- developed in which culture could be seen to be about consumption and display, as much as ideas and toleration. The coffee-house culture of late seventeenth-century London, which spawned the journalism of Addison and Steele and the triumphs of The Spectator and the Tatler became less political early in the eighteenth century, though this trend was later reversed. A small group of writers clustered around John Dryden (1631-1700), Alexander Pope (1688-1744), Joseph Addison (1672-1719) and Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), described their age as 'Augustan', claiming that it possessed the same cultural excellence as the supposedly golden age of intellectual achievement during the reign of the Roman Emperor Augustus (27 BC - AD 14). The Augustan England of the early British Enlightenment gave way to a commercial, urban, middle-class culture of paternalistic Whig elites, presiding over an expanding urban commercial society. This was a world which witnessed the triumph of the medium of print, in the form of books, pamphlets, broadsheets, prints and newspapers. Print, no longer the preserve of a metropolitan and aristocratic elite, brought about a continuous expansion of production that generated the popular triumph of the writers of England's Augustan age (approx. 1690-1740). The development of publication by subscription enabled Alexander Pope to live comfortably from his publications, but he could be scathing about such writers as Defoe, who wrote for a less discriminating audience. This is an indication of the many possibilities which opened up through the expansion of printing and readership. Print also made possible the establishment of more localized cultures, as in the revival of Welsh, the resurgence of Scots song and poetry, and the emergence of regionally distinct English poets and working-class artists such as Stephen Duck, John Clare and Thomas Bewick. Public culture extended into public participation in local dancing assemblies, musical societies, scientific and philosophical associations and committees established to promote the foundation of medical infirmaries, turnpike roads, canals and other civic and regional amenities. A rich store of local studies also charts the spread of Enlightenment ideas to many urban areas in eighteenth-century Britain. In Halifax in 1774 a group of manufacturers advertised their intent to raise a subscription to build a cloth hall in the town. The result was the formation of a voluntary association dominated by wealthy merchants and 'manufacturers' (in fact, merchants who paid other people to make things and assemble them). Artisans were excluded by the level of financial subscription required for the Halifax Piece Hall, but when it opened in 1779 they were included as members of a celebratory procession which paraded before the subscribers, described as 'ladies and gentlemen'. Decisions of the subscription association had been taken by ballot of the subscribers, and there was no aristocratic patronage. Instead, pride was expressed by subscribers in the 'elegant simplicity' adopted for the design of the hall, created manifestly as a place for trade and utility rather than pleasure and entertainment (Smail 1994:142-4). 'Civic improvement' became the rage. Medieval town gates were removed, streets and bridges were widened, markets were moved to increase the public amenity of the central areas of towns which they had formerly occupied (Clark 1984:41). Poor houses, infirmaries and 'bedlams' (lunatic asylums) were constructed in increasing numbers across urban communities in Britain to accommodate, or perhaps control, those less fortunate. In -110- [pic] Figure 7.2 Painting Room of the Foulis Academy, c. 1760. David Allan. Robert and Andrew Foulis extended their activities as booksellers and publishers to establishing a collection to support public instruction in fine art in Scotland. By permission of the Mitchell Library, Glasgow. this growing public sphere, women found a role as readers and purchasers of the expanding volume of printed books, including the novel, and as guests or members of local assemblies, musical societies and public lectures sponsored by scientific and philosophical societies. While denied political and legal rights, women gained access to the public culture of the Enlightenment in Britain through membership of the audience which made possible the expansion of public performance, social interaction and the availability of printed literature (see Chapter 16 of this volume.) AN EXPANDING ECONOMY The government of Sir Robert Walpole (Prime Minister: 1720-44) brought a period of peace. Its policy of state participation in the economy created the wealth and leisure that enabled the public culture of the Enlightenment to expand so dramatically in Britain over the course of the eighteenth century. With Walpole's fall from power over the issue of war with Spain from 1739, and the subsequent outbreak of war with France, government involvement in London's financial markets -111- became ever more entrenched. At the same time the links forged with the Dutch Republic after 1688 began to loosen. As the British state became involved in wars of empire, so those with a financial interest in its continued expansion grew in numbers. Likewise, the mercantile world of London became more diverse as Scots, German, Huguenot, Dutch and Jewish immigrants all increased their participation (Brewer 1989). Expansion of London's financial markets led to greater debate over the respective cultural merits of metropolis and province, which in turn drew Enlightenment culture away from London and its parliamentary politics towards smaller, expanding urban centres in the provinces - in Britain, Ireland or British North America. This increased cultural confidence in the English regions and Scotland, and fostered the expansion of the British union to Ireland in the United Kingdom, established in 1801, even as it also generated grievances in more distant urban centres in British North America. Dissatisfaction with the perceived corruption of the British monarchy and Parliament produced the first secession from Britain in 1783 by English colonies, increasingly developing societies which were more diverse than those on the island of Britain itself. As the Philadelphian Benjamin Franklin wrote to a fellow British provincial, the Scottish judge Henry Home, Lord Kames, in 1767, 'Scotland and Ireland are differently circumstanced. Confined by the sea, they can scarcely increase in numbers, wealth and strength, so as to over-balance England.' But, to Franklin, America was a very different proposition in terms of Britishness, 'an immense territory, favoured by Nature with all advantages of climate, soil, great navigable rivers, and lakes &c must become a great country, populous and mighty' (Franklin 1970:69-70). The failure of British efforts to retain America provoked a re-examination of the institutions of the British state, which reflected the influence of Enlightenment ideas of utility, public debate and moral accountability. Recent scholarship has emphasized that this debate contributed to the cultural developments which recreated Britain as an imperial state in the early nineteenth century, led by an elite schooled in the public culture of the British Enlightenment which sought moral and public regeneration in Britain even as it turned its back on political reform (Colley 1992). THE EXTENSION OF ENGLISHNESS If there was a British Enlightenment, was it merely the result of an expansion of English culture into other areas of Britain' If Franklin saw a British union as inevitably dominated by England through force of numbers and influence of wealth, there were Scots, Irishmen and kindred spirits in provincial England and Wales who looked to reinvent Britain as something more dynamic than the extension of English culture and institutions to provincial societies. What has come to be called the Scottish Enlightenment was no less than a project by leaders of the Scottish professional middle classes to reinvent their ancient country as a dynamic part of a modern and expanding British polity which would give Scots access to expanding world markets through the economies of scale and the protection of a powerful British navy. It would also open up opportunities for public advancement and cultural achievement by Scots at many levels - through the modernization of their -112- Church as a national institution of instruction and debate; the evolution of the universities from ecclesiastical seminaries into secular academies of the liberal arts on the model of the Dutch colleges; a readjustment of the law to the needs of modern commercial society. Franklin's correspondent Henry Home played a full role in this endeavour (Phillipson 1981:19-40). If the Dutch had helped bring English ideas to a Continental audience, the Scots came to mediate between a modern anglophone Enlightenment of economic and social enquiry and a European audience for the works of the British Enlightenment. Scots played a vigorous role in introducing the ideas of Rousseau, Goethe and many other Europeans into anglophone discourse (Oz-Salzberger 1995) through the first Edinburgh Review in the 1750s to the second, founded in 1802, and the impact of Sir Walter Scott's Romantic poetry and prose in the early nineteenth century. They generated the idea of Britishness as an umbrella of constitutional stability, personal liberty and commercial culture which could be made available to all who wished access to it. This was demonstrated by the role of Scots, such as James Murray (first British governor of Quebec), Lord Mansfield and Alexander Wedderburn, in the formulation of British policy towards the French-speaking Roman Catholic population which came under its authority in 1763. The Quebec Act (1774) which recognized local institutions that were not 'British' in the interests of long-term integration echoed the Scottish experience of 1707. Many Scots perceived Britishness as an important part of Enlightenment. THE URBAN RENAISSANCE An expanding urban Enlightenment featured many recruits from younger members of gentry families (Borsay 1989). Provincial mercantile elites in cities such as Birmingham or towns like Halifax drew on the cultural life of the local gentry based on the county town as well as on London metropolitan examples. This process allowed a middle class to create its own culture by following earlier practices of public protest and challenging elite culture (Murdoch and Sher 1988; Smail 1994). The Scottish Enlightenment may be seen as a mediation of French thought and culture into the commercial world of the eighteenth century. It did not invent the modern world, as some of its most enthusiastic supporters have claimed; it represented an accommodation of locality and province to the state in a manner which preserved the vigour and distinctiveness of a variety of cultures within one polity (Sher 1985). There were no large-scale urban markets in the Highlands, as there were none in most of Wales and in many localities of England, though smaller markets were prevalent in all these areas, and urbanization in provincial England became a crucible of early Enlightenment culture (Clark and Houston in Clark (ed.) 2000). Much of this occurred through the clubs and societies which began to proliferate in English towns during the early Enlightenment. The model of Addison's Spectator was a major influence, but this was not a development which involved imitation of metropolitan culture in a provincial setting. There was a dynamic in which toleration and the pursuit of knowledge became important civic values at a time when the 'middling sorts' were acquiring access to increased leisure and disposable income. If the urban renaissance began in metropolitan London, its legacy was the vigour of Enlightenment -113- culture in English provincial towns over the course of the eighteenth century (Borsay 1989:257-83). There was a symbiotic cultural relationship between London and the provincial town, with periodicals from London achieving national circulation and booksellers in the towns importing a steady stream of London publications that spread Enlightenment values through their customers and their localities. However, this was not a one-way process, and as the eighteenth century progressed, so provincial elites gained confidence in their ability to participate in the mainstream of Enlightenment culture. CLUBS AND SOCIETIES Enlightenment ideas were fostered within the culture of clubs which, over the course of the eighteenth century, became national social institutions in Britain (Clark 2000:60-93). Several contrasting developments in British public life showed this tendency to move away from formal politics and towards social networking and cultural activity. This period saw the growth of Freemasonry and of more specialized learned societies concerned with scientific or antiquarian expertise. Freemasonry, having long ceased to be specific to a trade, instead developed social rituals which attracted new recruits from a less hierarchical urban middle-class sector interested in social intercourse rather than public display. The constitution published by the Grand Lodge of London in 1723 became immensely influential in Britain and through translated editions appearing across Europe. The Grand Lodge influenced the development of Freemasonry across Britain, where it became part of the public culture of the urban middle class who were the shock troops of the Enlightenment (see Chapter 17 of this volume). The scientific societies of Enlightenment Britain owed much to the example of the Royal Society (see above) and proliferated in their hundreds across the country. If their scientific and artistic achievements seldom matched their sense of self-regard, they nevertheless acted as the medium through which the public culture of the coffee house and the club became more serious. This emphasis on learning may have come at the expense of an earlier convivial vitality found in, for example, the 'Easy Club' of Edinburgh, led by the poet Allan Ramsay early in the eighteenth century, and Samuel Johnson's literary 'Club', recorded later by James Boswell. CONCLUSION The early Enlightenment in Britain went hand in hand with an expansion of urban culture which, by the middle of the eighteenth century, had transformed Bristol, Birmingham, Buxton and many other provincial urban centres. This expansion provided the students for the dissenting academies and Scottish universities. Britain as a concept was a product and creation of the early Enlightenment period. It can be seen in the parliamentary union of Scotland and England in 1707 which created a kingdom of Great Britain for the first time, and in the determination of a king (George III) of German descent to announce at his coronation in 1761 that he 'gloried -114- in the name of Briton', only to find himself denounced as a dupe of the Scots by suspicious political opponents in England. This was a Britain which excluded Ireland and eventually most of 'British' North America as well. The subsequent incorporation of the former was a response to the lessons of conflict with the second, although in the long term this proved unsuccessful. The new Britain was one in which the Welsh in Wales and London could claim cultural precedence as the descendants of the first Britons. The Scot Tobias Smollett, whose grandfather had been one of the Scots who negotiated the parliamentary union of 1707, made the principal narrator of his novel Humphrey Clinker the Welsh gentleman Matthew Bramble, in another literary effort to complete the British union. The reinvention of Welsh culture and identity by the Welsh of eighteenth-century London was an important and neglected aspect of the development of Enlightenment culture in Britain. Enlightenment interest in cultural diversity led to the discovery of new worlds within Britain as well as beyond Europe. REFERENCES | |Allan, D. (2000) Philosophy and Politics in Later Stuart Scotland, East Linton: Tuckwell Press. | | | | | |Borsay, P. (1989) The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town, 1660-1770, Oxford: Clarendon Press. | | | | | |Brewer, J. (1989) Sinews of Power, London: Unwin Hyman. | | | | | |Broadie, A. (2001) The Scottish Enlightenment, Edinburgh: Birlinn. | | | | | |Clark, P. (1984) The Transformation of English Provincial Towns, London: Hutchinson. | | | | | |--(2000) British Clubs and Societies, 1580-1800, Oxford: Clarendon Press. | | | | | |--(ed.) (2000) The Cambridge Urban History of Britain: Volume II, 1540-1840, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. | | | | | |Colley, L. (1992) Britons, London: Yale University Press. | | | | | |Connolly, S. J. (1992) Religion, Law and Power: The Making of Protestant Ireland 1660-1760, Oxford: Clarendon Press. | | | | | |Davies, J. (1993) A History of Wales, London: Penguin. | | | | | |Dunthorne, H. (1987) '"An Inseparable Alliance"' Scotland and Holland in the Age of Improvement', Documentatieblad 18E EEUW, 19: 157-70. | | | | | |Fitzpatrick, M. (2001) 'Natural Law, Natural Rights and the Toleration Act in England and Wales, 1688-1829', unpublished paper. | | | | | |Fox, A. (2000) Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500-1700, Oxford: Oxford University Press. | | | | | |Franklin, B. (1970) Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 14, ed. L. Labaree, London: Yale University Press. | | | | | |Gjertsen, D. (1986) The Newton Handbook, London: Routledge. | | | | | |Gwynn, R. (1985) Huguenot Heritage: The History and Contribution of the Huguenots in Britain, London: Routledge. | | | | | |Harris, T. (1999) 'The People, the Law and the Constitution in Scotland and England', Journal of British Studies, 38: 28-58. | | | | | |Israel, J. I. (2001) Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650-1750, Oxford: Oxford University Press. | | | | | |Jenkins, P. (1983) The Making of a Ruling Class: The Glamorgan Gentry 1640-1790, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. | | | | -115- |Melton, J. (2001) The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. | | | | | |Money, J. (1977) Experience and Identity: Birmingham and the West Midlands, Manchester: Manchester University Press. | | | | | |Murdoch, A. (1980) 'The People Above', Edinburgh: John Donald. | | | | | |Murdoch, A. and Sher, R. (1988) 'Literary and Learned Culture', in T. M. Devine and R. Mitchison (eds) People and Society in Scotland: | | |Volume I, 1760-1830, Edinburgh: John Donald. | | | | | |--(1999) British History 1660-1832, Basingstoke: Macmillan (now Palgrave). | | | | | |Neeson, J. (1993) Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England 1700-1820, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. | | | | | |Oz-Salzberger, F. (1995) Translating the Enlightenment, Oxford: Clarendon Press. | | | | | |Phillipson, N. (1981) 'The Scottish Enlightenment', in R. Porter and M. Teich (eds) The Enlightenment in National Context, Cambridge: | | |Cambridge University Press. | | | | | |Porter, R. (2000) Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World, London: Penguin. | | | | | |Prest, W. (1998) Albion Ascendant: English History 1660-1815, Oxford: Oxford University Press. | | | | | |Sher, R. (1985) Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. | | | | | |Smail, J. (1994) Origins of Middle-class Culture: Halifax, Yorkshire, 1660-1780, London: Cornell University Press. | | | | | |Smith, A. (1977) Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. E. Mossner and I. Ross, Oxford: Clarendon Press. | | | | | |Sweet, R. (1997) The Writing of Urban Histories in Eighteenth Century England, Oxford: Clarendon Press. | | | | | |Williamson, A. (1982) 'Scotland, Antichrist and the Invention of Great Britain', in J. Dwyer et al. (eds) New Perspectives on the Politics | | |and Culture of Early Modern Scotland, Edinburgh: John Donald. | | | | | |Wilson, K. (2002) Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century, London: Routledge. | | | | -116- CHAPTER EIGHT THE ITINERARY OF A YOUNG INTELLECTUAL IN EARLY ENLIGHTENMENT GERMANY Martin Mulsow The Early Enlightenment in Germany was not a unified movement. Although launched at the University of Halle, founded in 1694, with Christian Thomasius as its most prominent figure, its impetus came from all directions, and its dissemination throughout the Holy Roman Empire brought it to a variety of milieux: urban bourgeoisie, universities of different traditions and confessions, small states and their courts. It developed along several alternative lines. The leading professors lent it a liberal Protestant reforming character, with different accents depending on whether the protagonists were theologians, scientists or jurists, and some underground authors gave it a note that was radically critical of religion or radically spiritualistic. The German intellectual scene of the eighteenth century was marked by different types: there were Pietists, scholarly sceptics, courtly secular gallants, prolific polymaths, erudite merchants and millenarian ministers, cunning schoolmasters and young, adventurous globe-trotters. The fact that, on the one hand, 'Germany' was a patchwork of small states, kingdoms, duchies and principalities, and, on the other hand, it had a multi-faceted intellectual scene made it both weak and strong. There may have been territories that firmly clung to old traditions, but there were many others in which innovation was a possibility. If you wanted to carry through your interests you had to know how to handle all those rivalries and differences and how to use relevant networks and connections. The Thirty Years War claimed more than a third of Germany's population. In 1648 there were hardly 10 million inhabitants left, and up to the 1680s we are talking about a post-war society. There were exceptions, of course, as there had always been, in this 'monster' called the Holy Roman Empire. Different denominational shades within Lutheranism, Calvinism and Catholicism would still fundamentally colour society. For a long time, Germany tried hard to catch up with the rapid cultural developments in France, Britain and the Netherlands, but the means were lacking. The situation changed with the advent of the new movement in the 1690s. People resumed reading the journals and writings that came across the borders from Western Europe, and there were fresh ideas and approaches again. Everyone read them differently, and drew different conclusions. Let us follow the itinerary of a young intellectual in order to get an idea of the plurality of views in Germany in the early eighteenth century. -117- SETTING OUT FOR A JOURNEY THROUGH GERMANY Halle, April 1703: three young men prepare for a journey. They want to get to know Germany and the Netherlands; they want to travel to university towns and courts; they want to talk to scholars and people who know about life and the world. Gottlieb Stolle, a Silesian from Liegnitz, who studied in Leipzig and Halle and reached the age of thirty in February, is the leader of the trio. Stolle was badly off: for the last few years in Halle, he had lived off nothing but stale bread. To him, it was of such great concern to be at the centre of Germany's intellectual resurrection, later to be called the 'early Enlightenment', that he put up with these privations. A few years before, Halle had still been a sleepy place of 5,000 inhabitants. There had been a university for nine years, and in this short span of time thousands of students, predominantly of law, but also of theology, had moved into the town, because the university had earned the reputation of being the most progressive in Germany. It belonged to Brandenburg (which had lately become Prussia), and was mainly designed to educate the ruling elite. Since the seventeenth century, there had been a growing demand in the territorial states for officials qualified as jurists. New disciplines such as Public Law of the Empire ('Reichspublicistik') and Cameralism and Study of the European State System ('Staatenkunde'), which were essential for the operation of the state, were emerging. In Halle, these disciplines were cultivated and developed. And, of course, it suited the university well that its fame attracted students from all countries. Thomasius was the crowd-puller of the institute. In 1687, when he was still in Leipzig, he caused a sensation when he announced a lecture, the first ever to be delivered in German, not Latin, on How Far to Imitate the French in Everyday Life and Situations. The question was how Germany could take advantage of the innovative impetus from France without becoming dependent on French culture. Afterwards, Thomasius was successful with his Monatsgespräche, a monthly magazine containing reviews in German. At the same time, he had drawn up a programme for a courtly philosophy. This would adopt the secular ideals of conversation, and develop the critical self-confidence to challenge the pedantry of the existing Aristotelian university system. These aims and objectives stirred Stolle and drew hundreds of enthusiastic students to the city. 'If you go to Halle,' people in German cities would say, 'you will return as a Pietist or as an atheist'; Pietist because of the orphanage (Waisenhaus) founded by August Hermann Francke, which in the course of the eighteenth century became one of the leading centres of educational theory and practice. Thomasius himself, at least in the 1690s, was attracted to Pietism and shared its desire for reformation, for a simple and undogmatic piety and for its rejection of 'scholastic' teachings. The Halle early Enlightenment was primarily a movement of jurists. The spiritualist Friedrich Breckling agreed with Thomasius 'that God will finally choose the jurists to wreck many a theolongo {Breckling's expression for the theologians} and to integrate that kind of extravagantes with the rules juris humani' (Breckling to Thomasius, Ms. Sup. Ep. 4,33). That was the objective: to 'integrate', that is, to stop theological encroachment on civil life by means of jurisprudence and to draw clear -118- [pic] Figure 8.1 Germany in the early eighteenth century, illustrating the places Stolle visited. -119- [pic] Figure 8.2 Christian Thomasius. By permission of the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich. -120- and definite lines between secular law on the one hand and private convictions on the other. Many traditionalists already called this 'atheism'. These lines of demarcation concerned the divorce laws, the persecution of heretics and political reason (politische Klugheit). Pufendorf's De habitu religionis ad vitam civilem of 1687 was the decisive work, although some cunning jurists attempted to surpass it with a polemic entitled De habitu superstitionis ad vitam civilem, which reproached religion for being potentially superstitious and subversive of the civil order. The majority of the supporters of the early Enlightenment were not anti-religious. Superstitio was associated with Catholicism, partly also with 'papist' excesses within Lutheran orthodoxy, but the identity of the Lutheran Reformation and its links with original, pre-Constantine Christendom was still strong enough to allow Thomasius and his friends to see themselves as Christians. They had a basically moral conception of Christendom, but the fundamental concepts of their philosophy were theological. In Thomasius's view, for instance, the deprivation of the will by the Fall characterizes the conditio humana, and yet he believed that an appropriate life could be achieved through charitas ordinata, that is, reasonable love. However, when Thomasius talks about natural state and the Fall of man, he does not only mean theology, but also the Hippocratic teaching of the four humours and Samuel Pufendorf's natural law. The early Enlightenment in Germany is unthinkable without Pufendorf. His most important work, De jure naturae et gentium of 1672, contained the teaching of human Socialitas, that is, the predisposition of man to society. It allowed him to set up a system of social ethics rooted in anthropology and based on reason rather than revelation. The doctrine of the four humours, which Thomasius outlined in his Ausübung der Sittenlehre of 1696, was central to his anthropology. It provided psychological ideas for the evaluation of behaviour, national character, political types and moral tendencies, and even literary and philosophical works. Whenever Stolle describes his interlocutors in his travel diary, he does it by using the terminology he had been taught by Thomasius: so, for instance, a man who has a melancholic and sanguine temperament tends to have the prejudice of 'precipitation', or he tends to be precise and conceited, since he is choleric. IN RENGER'S BOOKSHOP IN HALLE When, in the days prior to his departure, Stolle was strolling past Renger's bookshop in the basement of the town hall on the marketplace, he could see in the window the latest writings printed in Halle, such as, for example, the second edition of Fundamenta Medicinae, the textbook by the medical professor Friedrich Hoffmann, a mechanist and the academic opponent of his colleague Georg Ernst Stahl, who had a vitalistic conception of the human body. They were both regarded as leading German medical authorities. Next to the textbook lay some impudent books written in German, which sold well, such as Sieben böse Geister welche heutigen Tages guten Theils die Küster, oder so genandte Dorff-Schulmeister regieren (Seven Evil Spirits that Nowadays Often Rule over the Vergers or So-called Village Schoolmasters), written in the style of the reformist writings of the satirical theologian Johann Balthasar Schupp -121- [pic] Figure 8.3 A Shop in Germany, from Andreas Rüdiger (1711) Philosophia synthetica. -122- from the middle of the previous century. Its author was Johann Georg Zeidler, who earned his living as a prolific writer and translator of a great variety of works. He was, after all, one of those in Halle who tried to breathe new life into the decrepit structures of Church and education. Another work in the window was the seventh and latest issue of the periodical Observationes selectae ad rem litterariam spectantes. The Observationes contained short, scholarly essays by Halle professors such as Thomasius, Budde, Gundling, Stahl and several others. In comparison to the Acta eruditorum, a magazine edited by Otto Mencke in Leipzig and established throughout Europe, this one was of marginal importance. It was still significant as all its essays were presented anonymously. Whenever a new issue was out, Stolle and his friends would try to puzzle out who might be the authors of the new contributions. Anonymity allowed authors to advance controversial theses. Thomasius made extensive use of these periodicals to publish materials from his father Jakob's estate. In this way, he filled a large part of the issues from 1700 to 1703. The latest issue, the one lying in the window, included contributions on Church law, literary conversations and metal refining. Almost all of the authors of the Observationes had been teachers of Stolle. Nikolaus Hieronymus Gundling was hardly older than Stolle. He was studying for a doctorate in law, and would give lectures in that very year. In his writing, he was as bold as Thomasius, and courageous enough to broach philosophical and historical topics. Budde's latest work Elementa philosophiae instrumentalis, published by the orphanage, was not, however, displayed in Renger's shop. In this book, Budde, like Thomasius, proposed a reformed logic and methodology, focusing on the term 'eclectics'. This was a vogue word among the Halle professors, meaning an undogmatic digest of convictions, compiled after a thorough examination of all knowledge that was available, regardless of faction or 'sect'. Independent thinking and freedom to decide were what mattered. As early as 1691, Thomasius had put forth a Vernunftlehre ('theory of reason') which opposed an eclectic sensualism to the metaphysics, which still predominated at that time. When in the years following 1700 French and Latin translations made John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding better known in Halle, a number of similarities between the two approaches would be revealed. The book of one of Stolle's former fellow-students was for sale, too: Unterschiedliche Schrifften vom Unfug des Hexen-Proceβes, zu fernerer Untersuchung der Zauberey (Various Writings on the Injustice of Witch Trials and on the Examination of Witchcraft). The editor was Johann Reiche, whose doctorate with Thomasius two years earlier had been followed with close interest by Stolle and many others. In a big lecture hall (which had to be rented since the university did not have a building of its own) Thomasius and Reiche disputed De criminae magiae and deplored the witch trials, which had ravaged seventeenth-century Germany and still took place. In general, Thomasius used these disputes to wage his campaigns against prejudice and superstition. He let his students take the lead, some of whom, such as Theodor Ludwig Lau, were to become yet more radical than he. The year before, the witchcraft dispute had enabled some theologians openly to suspect that Thomasius no longer believed in the devil's existence. So, at the beginning of the winter semester, Thomasius put up notices at the entrance of the lecture halls, reading: -123- Just as I - firstly - believe in the devil and I - secondly - believe he is the general root of all evil and thus - thirdly - also for the Fall of man; I - fourthly - also believe that there are sorcerers and witches … But I still deny constantly, since I cannot believe it, that the devil has horns, hooves and claws, that he looks like a Pharisee, a monk, or a monster, or any other way he is generally depicted. I cannot believe that he can take any form and appear to people in any of these or in whatever form. (Thomasius: 177f.) In view of such theses, it is small wonder that the seeds of the conflict with the theologians had been sown. Even the moderate Halle theologians were sometimes tough customers. Stolle earned his living by giving private lessons. In these lessons, he read with his students Johann Gottfried Arnold's Unpartheiische Kirchen- und Ketzer-Historie (An Impartial History of the Church and of its Heretics), which was published in 1699 and 1700 in two large volumes. Thomasius had recommended it as 'the most important book after the Bible'. This work, like Bayle's Dictionnaire, published in Rotterdam, contained contributions by numerous intellectuals, constituting a 'counter-history': the history of the persecuted and suppressed 'heretics' who, according to Arnold, were merely searching for the truth. In such ways Pietists and the supporters of the early Enlightenment created a history for themselves. RESTLESS SEARCHERS: PIETISTS AND RADICAL SUPPORTERS OF THE EARLY ENLIGHTENMENT On 27 April, Stolle and his friends arrive at Helmstedt. The university, during the times of the quarrel on syncretism in the first half of the seventeenth century, had been a leading institution and symbol of moderate Lutheranism. Although it no longer provided such stimulation, having become rather petty, Stolle nonetheless gains valuable information here. For example, Hermann von der Hardt, an expert in Oriental studies, tells him about Johann Peter Speeth, a Protestant from Augsburg who became a Catholic, reverted to Protestantism, gravitated towards Socinianism and Quakerism, and finally converted to Judaism in Amsterdam. 'As he found nobody', von der Hardt told Stolle, 'who agreed with him but always somebody whose opinion was contrary to that of the other, he finally decided: omnia esse incerta, nisi hoc: unum scilicet esse Deum {everything is uncertain except this: there is only one God}, and thus he converted to Judaism in order to satisfy his conscience.' Speeth's story reveals the networks of the spiritualists and Pietists (still quite a vague term at that time). In Germany distances were considerable, but letters and conversations with itinerant students, friends or visitors facilitated the spread of ideas. There emerged, as it were, a physical and intellectual map marked out by the great unorthodox religious authorities of that time. One key symbol on the map stands for the theologian Philipp Jakob Spener, originally from Frankfurt, principal court chaplain in Dresden (1686-91) and now in Berlin (1691 on), the first man to -124- organize Pietistic conventicles and a proponent of a reformed piety. Another symbol stands for Gottfried Arnold, former professor in Gießen, author of the Ketzerhistorie and now living as a preacher in Saxony-Eisenach. Others were Johann Wilhelm Petersen and his wife, spiritualistic advocates of chiliasm and of the 'Apokatastasis panton' ('universal salvation'). Petersen was superintendent in Lüneburg and had lived a secluded life on an estate near Magdeburg since 1692. Last but not least there was Friedrich Breckling, head of the spiritualists and administrator of their tradition. Breckling ran his activities from Amsterdam. As befits a searcher, Speeth had all their addresses in his notebook. He called on Spener, Breckling and Petersen in his quest for his true self, a quest driven by deep anxiety about his spiritual welfare and his fate after death, and often informed by mystical speculations. In 1700 Jakob Böhme's books were still quite well known, and within Pietist and spiritualistic networks in particular he was considered a special authority. But, despite this interest in the mystical tradition, the Pietist network was also a source of reforms and radical views. Maybe one could even call it a 'theosophic' kind of early Enlightenment - an expression that is not as paradoxical as it seems. For example, Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont moved in the circles of Benjamin Furly, Philipp van Limborch and John Locke. He opposed the doctrine of eternal torments of hell and had mapped out plans to reform education; or the Hermeticist Johann Konrad Dippel, who wrote under the pseudonym 'Christianus Democritus', and made discoveries in chemistry and secularized thinking about redemption. As for Speeth, his return to Judaism embraced at the same time a progressive biblical criticism, the historical criticism of the Platonic influence on Christian thought and anti-Trinitarian rationalism. Speeth had died in 1701, and rumour had it that other Jews from Amsterdam had poisoned him because he did not want to believe in the 'rabbinic yarns'. In his last years he had got to know Johann Georg Wachter, a young German, who felt he had to denounce him as a supporter of the Kabbalah and Spinozism. Wachter even held the opinion that the Kabbalah and Spinozism were almost the same in their idolatrous glorification of the world. However, Wachter had got Speeth completely wrong. The latter had long since dissociated himself from van Helmont's Kabbalistics and he had nothing to do with Spinoza, either. Wachter himself, though, became increasingly embroiled in this world, and, during his stay in Amsterdam in 1699/ 1700, became a Kabbalistic Spinozist. He thinks that the Jewish tradition is the first formulation of the view that the world had one origin, by means of a spiritual mediator, which, in Wachter's view, Spinoza described in a purely rational way. Even Trinitarian Christology could be interpreted in the light of this tradition of ideas. In 1702 Wachter had set down this theory in Elucidarius cabalisticus, but neither Stolle nor anybody else knew the text, since Wachter still hesitated to publish it. When he finally did so in 1706, because he combined elements of opposing views, he satisfied neither the spiritualistic radicals nor the anti-Trinitarian radicals (including some atheists). In retrospect it is more evident than it could ever have been to a contemporary such as Stolle that there were several routes to Enlightenment. Some took the simple path of reason, preferring anti-Trinitarian, Jewish and Socinian arguments; others followed a more complex path and used Platonic, -125- Kabbalistic or Hermetic bases for their 'reasonable' religion beyond Revelation. The first line may be associated with Locke, Collins, Lau or Speeth; the second with Cudworth, Wachter or - years later - Herder. CONTINUING THE TRADITION Stolle roams a world in which absolute regimes are well established; but also one in which intellectual and religious ideas were in a state of flux - at least behind the façade of orthodoxy. Stolle notes a 'dissimulation' in many scholars, for instance in Leibniz. Although Leibniz goes to church from time to time to take part in the festivities of the Holy Communion, Stolle considers him a 'naturalist'. He speaks of professors who love 'contradiction' and who follow Hobbes, and of others who deny entry to their libraries, for the 'paradoxical' writings they keep there. In order to avoid his being 'denounced as a heretic from the pulpit', von der Hardt asks his students to keep his lectures to themselves in case his views may be misconstrued. Often it was important to use the relations and connections one had to the prince to counter the distrust of other theologians. But sometimes just the opposite was true: one needed to bring the various faculties together in order to stand up to the court. After the appearance of the Pietists it had become even more difficult to maintain such a 'private prudence' (Privatklugheit), because they often drew attention to themselves. Stolle understands that in Hanover a Pietist had grabbed the wig off a courtier's head. In Celle, he meets a mint master who bears private, heretical thoughts in his heart, namely that the Father as well as the Son would come to earth and become human. People wrote refutations, but they did so secretly and without publishing anything. They wanted to avoid attention and trouble. Since the Reformation, such 'enthusiastic' variations had occurred time and again in Germany. But now, around 1700, they could include 'Enlightenment' ideas. Examples were not only Speeth or Wachter, but Matthias Knutzen, who as early as the 1670s had started to connect Bible criticism and anticlericalism with missionary ambitions which one could compare to those of the Baptists. Once the Tractatus theologico-politicus by Spinoza and the Leviathan by Hobbes had been read, such hybrid connections were possible in Germany. Not far away from Helmstedt, about seventy miles to the east, there was the University of Wittenberg, which in the early eighteenth century was still the home of Lutheran orthodoxy. There, the journal Unschuldige Nachrichten (Innocent News) was closely monitoring 'enthusiastic', 'naturalistic' or Socinian dangers. The 'enthusiastic' followers of Böhme and Weigel were still considered the biggest threat, although the perspective has changed in the meantime. 'Platonism', including Hermeticism and Kabbalah, which they considered the political basis for effusive heretical thoughts, was now regarded by some as the foundation of Spinoza's dangerous ideas. It is by no means possible simply to juxtapose 'orthodox' environments such as that in Wittenberg with environments of the early Enlightenment in Halle. There existed connections between Thomasians and Pietistic and spiritual networks. Sceptical scholars, too, could be found in Wittenberg, such as the jurist Johann Georg Heber, who took a critical position towards pedantic attitudes and worked -126- with Thomasius. Moreover, there were students, such as Hoelmann, Gerhardt and Burghardt, all Silesians, like Stolle, who wrote poems directed against metaphysical ideas. These were published by Benjamin Neukirk in an anthology of lyrics. One rhyme read: 'Ein Metaphysicus und Alchymist,/Die sonsten weiter nichts mehr seyn/Die treffen wohl in vielen ueberein;/Der will aus allem fast die besten kraeffte zwingen/Und jener alles unter eine decke bringen.' This speaks of a metaphysician and an alchemist who have quite a lot in common. One wants to get the best out of everything, the other wants to combine everything! On 23 August 1704, one such student, Urban Gottfried Bucher, was to play the role of an opponent in a medical disputation on the subject of the immortality of the souls of animals. In Wittenberg it was common formally to oppose Cartesian mechanism by emphasizing the immaterial souls in humans and animals. Bucher boldly opposed such views with a radical mechanistic argument. He said that if you can tackle the problem why animals react in a certain way without considering a soul, would not then a soul be unnecessary in men as well' In his view, animal reactions were indeed explicable without reference to a soul. In 1704, this was still bold advocacy but uncertain theory. Bucher's own doubts were soon resolved through reading, in the Unschuldige Nachrichten, about Coward and the English debates on the mortality of the soul, and researching local traditions in Wittenberg, such as, for example, Melanchthon's emphasis on the close connection between the body and the soul with its various emotions. According to that theory, there was no substantial soul in man, and therefore nothing that would survive the death of the mortal part. Bucher formulated his thoughts in correspondence with his professor. When the professor died, the correspondence was published without Bucher's permission as Zweier guten Freunde vertrauter Brief-Wechsel vom Wesen der Seelen (Letters of Two Good Friends on the Subject of the Nature of the Soul). In this way, not only had excessive orthodoxy turned into heterodoxy, but also a 'freethinker' who had never wanted to articulate more than private doubts was created. Who then published these letters in Jena in 1713' Possibly Gottlieb Stolle' URBANITY, POETRY AND SCIENCE On 17 May, Stolle arrives at Hamburg, a huge seaport with 80,000 inhabitants. Although at the time there was no university there, just an 'academic secondary school', the town boasted numerous scholars of distinction. This made Hamburg an attractive place to visit. Here everything came together: trade, cosmopolitan attitudes, urbanity and philological thoroughness. Only Frankfurt am Main during the book fair and Leipzig had similar features. In Germany, a search for a 'conservative Enlightenment' in the sense of a theology based on physical evidence (Physikotheologie), the upholding of commerce and sociability, and the connection between science and revelation normally brought you to Hamburg. The port was the German gate to English culture. People went to the opera, would imitate the letters of the English Spectator in the journal Patriot, have meetings in the drawing rooms of Jewish merchants or in the fashionable 'coffee houses'; there was a form of 'public sphere' in which a refinement of good taste could evolve. -127- A figurehead of this kind of Enlightenment was Johann Albert Fabricius, a Greek and Latin scholar with a huge library. Stolle visits him immediately, just as the patrician Zacharias Konrad von Uffenbach from Frankfurt would do eight years later, when he comes through Hamburg during his peregrinatio. Apparently, Fabricius could - without any problem - combine the humanist heritage with an eye for criticism and progressive natural sciences. His friend Barthold Hinrich Brockes expressed in rhyme theological ideas based on physical science, drawing on Irdisches Vergnügen in Gott (Earthly Pleasure through God), a popular multi-volumed work that had been in print since the 1620s. Fabricius and Brockes performed a necessary role as conciliators. In the 1690s, the argument between Pietism and orthodoxy had escalated in Hamburg: there had been riots and street violence, although the situation was now calmer. However, hatred against orthodox Lutherans and their power in the city had prepared the ground for many heterodox activities. For example, two years after Stolle had left Hamburg, an anonymous author called 'Alethophilus' published a translation of the Corpus Hermeticum (based on the Dutch version). By doing that, he wanted to support the opposition. Not far from Hamburg, the young Peter Friedrich Arpe spent his time writing a work in which he defended the assumed arch-atheist Giulio Cesare Vanini. Fabricius himself, one of Arpe's mentors, told Stolle that there were no 'atheistic views' in Vanini's writings, although he had been burned for his atheism. So one could pick up diverse heterodox ideas from Arnold of Brescia, Bayle or Thomasius and hopefully view the burning of a philosopher for atheism as an act of barbarism of times now past. Stolle noticed that in Hamburg everyone is tolerated, whatever his beliefs, as long as he lives silently. Apparently, there are not just Reformed Christians, Jews and Pietists here, but also Catholics, Quakers, Mennists, Boehmists and Indifferentists. But none of these sects holds public divine services here in Hamburg. The Reformed Christians, the Catholics, the Mennists, Quakers and Jews go to church in Altona. Altona was a Danish settlement outside Hamburg, in which a policy of tolerance was pursued in order to draw people and commerce away from the city. The religious diversity, and at the same time the strong position of Lutheran orthodoxy, had bizarre consequences in which heterodoxy and satire combined in strange ways. Just a few blocks away from where Fabricius lived, in the house of the orthodox pastor Johann Friedrich Mayer, there was, for example, a Latin manuscript with the title De imposturis religionum. The few people who had seen it thought that it might be the legendary writing De tribus impostoribus, of which rumours had circulated since the Middle Ages. In fact, this work, in which Moses, Jesus and Mohammed were called religious political imposters, had never existed. But in 1688 Mayer's friend Johann Joachim Müller started - secretly - to write it (as a forged original version). He then passed it on anonymously to the pastor. The reason for that was that Mayer, the opponent of the Pietists, was - as were many of his colleagues - very fond of tracking down atheistic writings. Müller then wanted to fool him with his De imposturis religionum and, with that, present him with new -128- evidence in his crusade against atheists. But the very evidence which Müller compiled, including Hobbes, Herbert of Cherbury and many other heterodox sources, could be responsible for undermining orthodoxy. In the course of the eighteenth century, this compilation became one of the most widely read clandestine writings of the Enlightenment. HUGUENOTS, ALCHEMISTS, SOCINIANS From Hamburg, Stolle goes to the Netherlands, apart from England the most progressive and liberal country in Europe. Stolle and his friends stay there for several months. Thomasius had given them the advice to 'be aware of the Spinozists'. The monism of the Dutch Jew was considered a danger for their own reformatory projects in Halle. But Stolle is far too curious to heed Thomasius's warning. Very often his first question is whether somebody had known Spinoza, or whether somebody knew something of him. On his way back from Holland, Stolle comes to Berlin. There he spends the winter of 1703/4. In January, Leibniz comes from Hanover to Berlin - as he often does - for two weeks to speak with his friend, the Prussian Queen Sophie Charlotte, and to promote the project of an 'Academy of Sciences' modelled after the academies in England and France. It had been authorized for about three years as a small 'Societät', but it was not until 1711 that it became a real Academie. Leibniz was by then already famous throughout Europe, but not much was known about his philosophy, apart from a few articles. The Theodicée was published in 1710, the Nouveaux Essais against Locke only posthumously in 1765, and a great part of his writings only in the nineteenth century. Christian Wolff can claim responsibility for making Leibniz's thinking influential, although in his own version. In March, Leibniz contacts the King's new librarian, the Frenchman Mathurin Veyssière La Croze. He had fled to Prussia from the Parisian monastery of Saint Germain des Prés because he could no longer approve of Louis XIV's religious policy. In Berlin he became part of the considerable colony of Huguenots. Following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 the Great Elector had encouraged the fleeing French Protestants to settle. La Croze and other scholars in this colony, such as Jaquelot, Beausobre, Barbeyrac, Ancillon and Lenfant, combined francophone with German ideas. Barbeyrac in particular made French Enlightenment thinkers familiar with Pufendorf's work on The Law of Nature and Nations. Leibniz, when he was in Berlin, spoke with La Croze about medieval writings, the Chinese language, Socinianism and much else besides, but possibly not the dogmatic niceties of theologians. In this year, 1704, Johann Konrad Dippel, the Hermetic doctor, also comes to Berlin. In Hesse he had fallen into debt because of his experiments and was hoping to find support from the court in Berlin. Unfortunately, Dippel had some 'inconvenient' views. For him, as for Knutzen, the only authority was conscience, and he believed in personal salvation through the 'inner light'. Spener urged him to come immediately for a visit and to have a conversation about common Pietistic views. Despite a friendly reception, Dippel's connections with Berlin did not last. At the beginning of 1707, he was put in jail, but would later -129- flee in Swedish disguise. He reached Frankfurt via Kösteritz, and afterwards found a safe haven in Holland. Back to Spener: at that time he was working on a voluminous book directed against the Socinians. These anti-Trinitarian followers of a radical Reformation were, after having been expelled from Poland, tolerated in some areas in Prussia. Most people shunned them, but free-minded intellectuals like La Croze were by no means timid: time and again he had meetings with Samuel Crell, a Socinian theologian. Crell could report on his journeys through western Europe, on his contacts with Locke, Newton, Le Clerc, Bayle and Shaftesbury. La Croze held that it had been a mistake to persecute the Socinians, although they might be wrong in their beliefs. Spener, on the other hand, considered Socinianism a danger. Their movement could, in his eyes, lead to rationalism and deism, as in Holland and England. A scandal of this nature had occurred even in Berlin 1692: the son of the court chaplain, Stosch, had become a Spinozist, perhaps because he originally belonged to Reformed circles sympathetic to Socinianism. ERUDITION AND SCEPTICISM In April 1704, Stolle is back in Halle. Thomasius is meanwhile working on his Fundamenta Juris Naturae et Gentium, in which he will express a pessimistic anthropology and argue for strict separation between law, morality and decorum; Gundling is writing a historic and critical revision of the origins of philosophy; Budde, as rumours have it, is about to become Professor of Theology in Jena. When this happens in1706, Stolle follows him there, staying for the several years, except for short interruptions. On Saturdays between two and four o'clock he probably attended the small discussion group which had been founded by Burkhard Gotthelf Struve. Meeting in Struve's house, they discussed newly published books and writings as well as current topics of interest. Among those who attended was Ephraim Gerhard, a student who composed poetry; years later, he would be the first and only scholar in Germany to apply Locke's Second Treatise on Government to the imperial context. Struve inaugurated this group with a lecture on the 'Scholar as an Atheist'. An important issue for all who attended, he addressed the speculation surrounding those suspected of atheism, including naturalists such as Pomponazzi and Vanini and 'politicians' such as Machiavelli. This topic gave the young German scholars goose pimples, but at the same time it held an irresistible fascination for them. What secularizing potential was to be found in erudition and science' Was it not possible to oppose a specific 'Christian' form of erudition to this tendency' Even Christian Thomasius had to endure a personal crisis on account of such questions. He undertook an intense study of the contemporary mystic Pierre Poiret, who established a Christian eruditio solida, opposed to the eruditio superficiaria and falsa. Many young scholars, including Struve, Reimmann and even Stolle, underwent such a crisis, and in the process reread the mystics of the late Middle Ages, notably Thomas à Kempis. What followed from this crisis of scholars' Was one to become a Pietist or a sceptic' Such possibilities were not necessarily contradictory; St Paul had already -130- warned of the stupidity of secular knowledge. This scepticism, however, could lead to a fideistic rejection of philosophy, as was the case with the Pietist Joachim Lange, but it could also lead to a moderate scepticism, which purported to cleanse traditional views of error by means of a historical criticism. Reading the Dictionnaire by Bayle, or the writings of the French libertines Naudé and La Mothe Le Vayer added to the crisis. When Stolle was away in 1703, Joachim Lange visited his friend Jakob Friedrich Reimmann in his house in Halberstadt to talk with him about the two directions of scepticism. They could not reach an agreement. Lange accused Reimmann of being a godless philosopher (which, of course, was not true), who associated the biblical Solomon with the libertine scepticism of Le Vayer. Reimmann, on the other hand, insisted that the best form of eclecticism incorporated a sceptical approach. Other students of Thomasius, such as Friedrich Wilhelm Bierling and Christoph August Heumann, adopted a moderately sceptical erudition compatible with secular knowledge. While Stolle was travelling, Bierling, a professor in Rinteln, wrote De iudicio historico, in which Pyrrhonist doubts were raised about many historical claims. Later, Heumann became a professor in Göttingen, and a founder of a critical historiography: there were so many tales and legends about history and alleged oriental wisdom that one had to destroy! Until the 1740s, the great historiographic historia literaria collections of Struve, Heumann, Gundling and Reimmann or Jakob Brucker would greatly influence the form of German erudition: a polymathic erudition with a great number of footnotes and digressions. In the middle of the eighteenth century this kind of erudition was criticized as exaggeratedly meticulous, and in the course of a few years almost all footnotes disappeared from such works. At the time, however, scholars considered themselves as being very modern and enlightening by avoiding seemingly timeless speculation. Reimmann very bluntly demanded professorial chairs for historia literaria instead of metaphysics. SCIENCES Metaphysics would regain its vogue in Germany in the 1720s and 1730s but before then its adherents saw themselves as under siege. Stolle, returning briefly to Halle from Jena, met Christian Wolff, the mathematician and philosopher, who had arrived there the previous year from Leipzig. Unfortunately, his mathematical and mechanical ideas did not appeal to those in Thomasius's circle, and Gundling, among others, was quick to attack him. Only the physician Friedrich Hoffmann found his ideas congenial. Followers of Thomasius were not on good terms with supporters of Cartesian or Boyleian approaches to the natural sciences. In Versuch vom Wesen des Geistes (1699), Thomasius committed himself to a search for the spiritual essence of physical science. Wolff found just a few allies in favour of his mechanistic views: Tschirnhaus in Saxony, who was associated the development of Dresden porcelain; and his own patron, Leibniz, in Hanover. A robust defender of metaphysics, Leibniz provided a counterpoise to the movement in Halle. Attributing the radicalizing and secularizing -131- tendencies of the early Enlightenment to the school of natural law, he suggested that 'Pufendorf and the Messieurs Thomasius and Gundling opened the door to exaggerated freedom way too far' (Leibniz 1716:516). Wolff would adopt the tradition of experimental physics, which had been developed by Johann Christoph Sturm in Altdorf, a German form of the sceptical science of Robert Boyle. Altdorf had the necessary environment for experimental physics. As the university of the Free Imperial Town of Nuremberg, it had the background of a citizenry with a tradition of societates curiosae; favourable to experiments and their practical consequences. Following correspondence between Boyle, Hoffman and Sturm, the latter's Philosophia eclectica of 1686 proclaimed eclecticism as essential for the promotion of empirical investigations and tolerance among the community of scientists. The scene changed again in the 1720s and 1730s, when Wolff's philosophy became successful and started its triumphant progress throughout Germany. Wolff was a systematician. In the voluminous edition of his complete works, written in German and Latin, he spoke of virtually all disciplines: ontology, ethics, natural law, mathematics and physics. A number of the 'scholastic' Aristotelian elements discarded by Thomasius re-emerged and were connected with ideas formulated by Leibniz. This was the first time that a philosophical reform spread beyond the boundaries of the university to the educated citizenry. The followers of Thomasius had concentrated on the reform of the practical and moral disciplines, but now 'Enlightenment' in all domains was required. Many of the old obstacles remained, however. Like Thomasius before him, Wolff came under suspicion from the theologians. In 1723, he had to leave Halle because of accusations formulated by the Pietists, and only after Frederick the Great became King in 1740 could he return. By now the period of the early Enlightenment was over and a new phase had begun. REFERENCES | |Breckling's letters to Christian Thomasius, Supellex Epistolica Uffenbachii et Wolfiorum, University Library of Hamburg. | | | | | |Gierl, Martin (1997) Pietismus und Aufklärung: Theologische Polemik und die Kommuni-kationsreform der Wissenschaft am Ende des 17. | | |Jahrhunderts, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. | | | | | |Hammerstein, Notker (1972) Jus und Historie: Ein Beitrag zum historischen Denken an den deutschen Universitäten im späten 17. und 18. | | |Jahrhundert, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. | | | | | |Hochstrasser, Tim (2000) Natural Law Theories in the Early Enlightenment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. | | | | | |Kemper, Hans-Georg (1991) Deutsche Lyrik in der frühen Neuzeit, vols 5/I and 5/II, Tübingen: Niemeyer. | | | | | |Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1716) 'Letter to la Croze, 29 May', in vol. 5 of (1768) Opera omnia, ed. Louis Dutens, 6 vols, Geneva. | | | | | |Mulsow, Martin (2002) Moderne aus dem Untergrund: Radikale Frühaufklärung in Deutschland 1680-1720, Hamburg: F. Meiner. | | | | | |Pott, Martin (1992) Aufklärung und Aberglaube: Die deutsche Frühaufklärung im Spiegel ihrer Aberglaubenskritik, Tübingen: Niemeyer. | | | | -132- |Schilling, Heinz (1994) Höfe und Allianzen: Deutschland 1648-1763, Berlin: Siedler Verlag. | | | | | |Schneiders, Werner (1971) Naturrecht und Liebesethik: Zur Geschichte der praktischen Philosophie im Hinblick auf Christian Thomasius, | | |Hildesheim and New York: G. Olms. | | | | | |Simons, Olaf (2001) Marteaus Europa oder Der Roman, bevor er Literatur wurde, Amsterdam: Rodopi. | | | | | |Stolle, Gottlieb (1703/4) Reise dreyer vertrauter Freunde durch Holland und einen Theil Deutschlands, Ms. Cod. IV oct. 49 und Ms. R 766, | | |Biblioteka Uniwersytecka, Wrocław. | | | | | |Thomasius, Christian (1970) Deutsche Schriften, ed. Peter von Düffel, Stuttgart: Reclam. | | | | -133- CHAPTER NINE THE AGE OF LOUIS XIV AND EARLY ENLIGHTENMENT IN FRANCE Martin Fitzpatrick The purpose of this chapter is to discuss not so much early Enlightenment intellectual trends as the broad social and political context in which they found expression. It will argue that Enlightenment in France began within the court society of Louis XIV and remained within its ambit in the eighteenth century even while growing increasingly critical of such a society. The Regency, which is often taken to signal the moment when Enlightenment forces in France become irresistible, will be examined briefly to show the elements of continuity from Louis XIV's time and the new trends which favoured the development of a spirit of criticism. LOUIS XIV AND THE AGE OF REASON In 1751, Voltaire published his Le Siècle de Louis XIV. The work had taken him some twenty years to write. Around the time he began writing his study of the century of Louis XIV he published his Letters on England (1733), published subsequently as the Lettres philosophiques (1734), in which he was deeply critical of French government and society, notably for their lack of freedom, religious tolerance and social recognition for the arts and sciences: It seems to me that at the present time the taste at Court is far removed from letters. Perhaps in a short time the fashion for using one's mind will come back - a king has only to have the will and he makes what he likes of a nation. In England as a rule people think, and literature is more honoured than in France. This advantage is a natural outcome of the form of their government. In London there are some eight hundred people with the right to speak in public and uphold the interests of the nation; about five or six thousand aspire to the same honour in their turn, all the rest set themselves to sit in judgement on these, and anybody can print what he thinks about public affairs. (Voltaire 1733: Letter 20, 101) Almost twenty years later, he painted a more positive picture in Le Siècle de Louis XIV. He still thought that the English were superior to the French in their -134- achievements in philosophy, but those of his countrymen were not to be ignored. Colbert, jealous of the English Royal Society (founded in 1662) had established an Academy of Science in 1666. By offering large cash incentives, he attracted leading scientists of the day to work in the Academy: Domenico Cassini from Italy, Huygens from Holland and Roemer from Denmark. Nonetheless, Voltaire conceded 'the philosophy of reason did not make such great progress in France as in England' (Voltaire 1751:357). It was in language and literature that France eclipsed other nations and set new standards of good taste. Whereas in his Letters on England he had been very critical of the French Academy, notably for the reams of eulogistic addresses which it published (Voltaire 1733: Letter 24, 116-18), in his Siècle he attributed the growing refinement and standardization of the French language to 'the French Academy and above all to Vaugelas' - his Translations of Quintus Curtius (1646). He noted, too, of the leading writers of the age - Corneille, Racine, Boileau, Molière, Quinault - that 'all these great men … were protected by Louis XIV, with the exception of La Fontaine' (Voltaire 1751:358, 367). He argued that, through its literary achievement (in history, works 'of reflection, and light literature') France set the pattern for enlightening Europe, and its achievements were carried abroad through the agency of the French writers, especially Huguenots, and instanced Pierre Bayle, Rapin de Thoyras, Saint Evremond, the Duchesse de Mazarin and Mme d'Olbreuses (later the Duchess von Zell). He concluded: Of all the nations, France has produced the greatest number of such works. Its language has become the language of Europe … The social spirit is the natural heritage of the French; it is a merit and a pleasure of which other nations have felt the need. The French language is of all languages that which expresses with the greatest of ease, exactness and delicacy all subjects of conversation which can arise among gentlefolk; and it thus contributes throughout all Europe to one of the most agreeable diversions of life. (Voltaire 1751:371) For Voltaire, that was the summit of French achievement, but it was not the sum total, for he praised French excellence in music, architecture, sculpture, painting, engraving and the art of surgery. Royal patronage played a key role in many of these achievements. Although Le Siècle de Louis XIV which Voltaire recounted, 'began in the time of Richelieu, and ended in our days', it was above all the kingship of Louis XIV which led to French cultural ascendancy. The age marked 'the progress of the human spirit' and, were it to be eclipsed by a more enlightened age, it would 'remain the model of more fortunate ages, to which it will have given birth' (Voltaire 1751:375). Voltaire's divided opinions will form the basis of our discussion of the early Enlightenment in France. Indeed, it was the combination of the cultural brilliance of France and the ascendancy of the French language set against the failings of absolutism, and the existence of an alternative set of values and practices across the Channel, which would shape the very nature of the Enlightenment in France and the rest of Europe. -135- LOUIS XIV In 1661, the personal rule of Louis XIV began after the death of his chief minister, Cardinal Mazarin. He inherited a bankrupt state, one which had suffered the civil wars of La Fronde (1648-53). At the time there had been a flood of scurrilous literature directed against Mazarin, who on his death left the greatest fortune ever accumulated in ancien régime France. Mazarin recommended to Louis that his own personal intendant of affairs, Jean Baptiste Colbert, should become his chief minister. Louis ignored the advice. He was determined to assert his own role as king and to be his own chief minister, informing his courtiers that he would 'personally administer the finances with the aid of loyal men acting under me' (Lossky 1967:341). Mazarin had offered to leave his enormous fortune to Louis while cleverly inviting him to make the magnanimous gesture of turning it down. Louis duly obliged (Dessert 1987:225-8). He did, however, choose to inherit Mazarin's trusty servant, Colbert, who sorted out the tangle of financial mismanagement which had begun with the death of Cardinal Richelieu in 1643. In time Colbert would become first minister in all but name. He sought to build up French economic power through mercantilist policies, namely protectionism and the patronage of French industry, especially the production of luxuries. Although not as bellicose as Louvois, Minister of War, he was just as anxious to promote French ascendancy in Europe. His mercantilism was warfare by other means and, if it failed, then war became almost inevitable. His protective tariffs proved to be a major cause of the war with the Dutch, 1672-8. Colbert accepted that at the heart of Bourbon absolutism was the pursuit of la gloire. Writing to the King in 1666, he suggested it is a 'beautiful maxim that it is necessary to save five sous on unessential things, and to pour out millions when it is a question of your glory' (Cole 1939: vol. 1, 292). ABSOLUTE MONARCHY AND LA GLOIRE When Louis began his personal rule he could draw on theorists of absolutism who stressed his unique power and responsibility. Cardinal Richelieu, in his Testament politique, likened the position of the king to that of God. He ruled through sovereign authority which stood above all particular interests of individuals and groups, and his role was to ensure that the public interest prevailed. In Richelieu's ideal state the monarch would order and govern his earthly territory as effectively as God was able to order and govern His universe. But, although his vision of government was one of power and control emanating from the centre, he accepted that force alone could not ensure the smooth running of government and society: For that, it was necessary to supplement force with reason: 'authority constrains men to obedience, but reason persuades them to do it' (Testament politique quoted in Keohane 1980:177). The public interest as understood by Richelieu had little to do with the humanistic notion of public well-being. For him it meant strengthening the power of the monarch, both within his state and in relation to other states. Schooled by Mazarin, Louis shared the same vision. It was a lesson he readily imbibed, for he was a child of the Fronde. His own description of the situation which he inherited -136- [pic] Figure 9.1 The Celebration of Louis celebrated, Louis Simonneau after a drawing by Noel Coypel, frontispiece of Medailles sur les principaux evénements du regne de Louis le Grand (1702). This handsome volume, published by the royal press, provided a medallic history of Louis XIV's reign. It was indicative of the continuing concern to record the great moments of his reign and to provide a permanent record and reminder of his glorious achievements. By permission of the British Library. -137- was bleak: serious internal instability which limited the effective prosecution of the war with Spain and in his own court 'little fidelity without personal interest' (Louis's Mémoires quoted in Wolf 1970:61). With such a background, Louis XIV knew that there was a huge gulf between absolutist theory and the actual authority which he was able to exercise. Churchmen were particularly prone to elevate the king's authority above all worldly things. The notion of the divine right of kings became especially powerful during the late sixteenth century and the seventeenth. The term 'absolute monarch' was popularized by Jean Bodin, in his Six Books of the Republic (1576), in which he argued that the king was not subject to human laws, but only to natural, divine and fundamental law. Symbolic of this monarch's power was his right to pardon criminals, especially at his coronation. On his coronation in 1654, Louis XIV pardoned a range of offences, some of which might be construed as contrary to natural, divine and fundamental law - such as premeditated murder and duelling. Yet the growing tendency to deify the monarchy was such that the distinction between the king being subject to divine law and the king as a source of divine law could easily become blurred. In an ode composed by the Jesuits for Louis's coronation, he was placed alongside Jesus Christ as 'God-given'. When Bishop Bossuet, in a much-cited sermon of 1662, said of kings that 'you are gods', he was only repeating a declaration of the Assembly of the Clergy of 1625 (Jackson 1984:108-12, 206-20). Nonetheless, absolutist propaganda reached its zenith in Louis XIV's reign and divine right theory found its supreme exponent in Bossuet's Politics Founded on Holy Scripture, written for the edification of the Dauphin. If the propaganda of Louis XIV's monarchy was not original, it was supremely powerful. The melding of classical with Christian symbolism, pagan gods with Christian divinity, Christian kingship with Roman imperialism, had occurred in the late sixteenth century and was strongly present at the coronation entry into Reims of Louis XIII in 1610. The myth that the Franks were descended from the Trojans who founded Rome provided the justification for much of the symbolism, but there were other dimensions to it. At the coronation, solar symbolism played a major role. Louis XIV and his propagandists, however, proved to be supreme in combining classical with Christian imagery to create a shining vision of monarchical power. At his coronation in 1653, he chose the sun as his personal symbol. His bedroom at Versailles faced east to enable him to witness the rising of the sun, and his lever and coucher imitated sunrise and sunset (Jackson 1984:148-54, 180-85, 213). Louis and his ministers created a notion of kingship with many dimensions. Imagery supplemented and arguably transcended absolutist theory. The King appeared as the father of his people, as their protector, and as the focus of their affections, as a saint with divine attributes who healed divisions and unified the nation, as the almighty King without equal in the world, who would brook no opposition (Pommier 1992:299). He was both a pagan god of mythic powers, and His Most Christian Majesty. All this seems very contradictory, but it was undoubtedly a potent mixture drawing on well-established traditions (Wolf 1970:460-2). The ultimate aim was to create the sense that monarchical power was irresistible. Despite Richelieu's emphasis on supplementing force with reason, the symbolic embellishment of power made subordination much more attractive than the cold logic and -138- the threat of force. Indeed, Richelieu (just after the passage cited earlier, in which he talked of reason supplementing force) wrote of insensibly winning over men's wills. The pursuit of gloire undoubtedly facilitated the monarch's task of giving unity and coherence to a country which was more like a federation than a unitary state (Shennan 1969:22). Of course, the theory of absolutism and its symbolism had to bear an approximate relation to reality in order not to be undermined by scepticism and ridicule. One can only imagine what many thought when extensive use was made of solar imagery at the coronation of Louis XVI in 1775. One image had the accompanying verse attached to it: 'I regulate the seasons, I divide the days; the universe embellishes itself with my prolific light, and faithful to the law that governs my heart, I am the benefactor of the world' (Jackson 1984:184). By that time, there was a rival Enlightenment which believed it could serve the world through its own exertions and not that of the monarch. Long before then, however, Enlightenment thinking in France would develop as a result of both the desire of the monarchy to enhance its gloire through cultural means and the failings of that enterprise towards the end of Louis XIV's reign. Louis XIV was fortunate enough to inherit a kingdom which was much stronger internally and externally than it had been at the accession of his father. Some of the baroque complexity of the state was being resolved, although government and society were shot through with privileges regarded by many as rights. A major obstacle to the reform of the state was the fact that most offices were purchased, and the cost of buying out office-holders was prohibitive - Colbert estimated it would cost 419.6 million livres to do so, almost four times the cost of Versailles (Bonney 1978:450, n. 2; Wolf 1970:444). They would, however, be made to pay for their privileges through taxation. At the same time, institutional rights and privileges which stood in the way of the exercise of kingly authority would be modified. The most notable instance of this was the withdrawal in 1673 of the right of the parlements to hold up royal edicts by refusing to register them immediately and remonstrating against them. This did not prevent opposition to some royal edicts, but by 1683 all parts of the kingdom had their own royal provincial intendants, officials directly answerable to the King, who often took on groups of the privileged within the provinces in order to secure royal wishes, and to protect the interests of the more vulnerable members of the community. Theory and practice were therefore not too out of joint, and the idea of the Sun King whose rays illuminated his kingdom did not seem at all ridiculous. THE COURT The centre of the King's social and political authority was the court. Blaise Pascal noted, 'People go away and hide themselves for eight months in the country so they can shine for four months at Court' (Pascal 1670: Additional Pensée 7, 358). Louis XIV's new palace at Versailles, substantially completed by 1688, became the symbolic centre of his power, the actual centre of his government, the focus of social aspirations and a model for imitation at home and abroad. Every aspect - the -139- buildings, the gardens, the furnishings, the paintings and tapestries - was designed to impress the elite with the brilliance of the King's authority and to remind them of the values of serving him. But the court was not a static hierarchy; rather, individuals and groups jostled for precedence, rather like the Soviet generals at Chairman Andropov's funeral. Versailles provides a good example of the nature of French monarchy. Norbert Elias has argued that the court was 'a complex of interdependent groups competing with each other and holding each other in check' (Elias 1983:270-4). The King dominated this system and made creative use of the conflicts and tensions within his own court. There was huge scope for such a role, for distinctions of all sorts, within families as well as between orders, were endless, including rank and birth, as well as merit and wealth (Le Roy Ladurie 1997:23-61). Louis XIV proved to be a master of the art of manipulation, and had a genius for inducing others to do what he wanted them to do (Campbell 1993:110; Levron 1976:133-4; Revel 1992:92-6). Government operated in the kingdom in a similar way. If the King was ultimately sovereign, it was always better to achieve one's ends through the power of one's reputation and the creation of a deferential public, rather than through the exercise of physical power. He wrote early on in his career, 'A king need never be ashamed of seeking fame, for it is a good that must be ceaselessly and avidly desired, and which alone is better able to secure success of our aims than any other thing. Reputation is often more effective than the most powerful armies' (quoted in Wolf 1970:241). He kept to his own advice rather more in the early years of his personal reign than later. That is the period when he unleashed the energies of Colbert to create court-sponsored Enlightenment. The institutions he and his associates created not only served to add to the prestige of the Sun King but also provided opportunities for fame for philosophers and writers. The list is impressive. In 1663 Colbert established the Petite Académie, with the purpose of glorifying the King. It dealt with everything connected with belles-lettres, and co-operated with Charles Lebrun in arbitrating on matters of taste. In 1696 it became an independent academy with the title of the Académie Royale des Médailles et Inscriptions. The title was changed again in 1701, and finally in 1717, first to the Académie des Inscriptions et Médailles and then to Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres. In 1663-4 the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, founded in 1648, was reorganized and handsomely funded. With Lebrun as its chancellor (1661-90), it was extremely influential at court, and all artists working for the King were required to be members. The reorganization was followed by the creation of the Académie Française de Rome (1666), providing the elite of its students with an opportunity to study in Rome: it offered three-year bursaries for a dozen young French artists. In 1671 the Académie d'Architecture was established, as was the Académie d'Opera, although the latter was replaced in the following year by the Académie Royale de Musique. An Académie des Spetacles was founded in 1674 but never registered (Burke 1992: esp. 50-1; Parker 1983:132-3; Friedman 1990:211, 214). These academies ensured that artistic and intellectual life focused on the court, that the elevation of the image of the monarch was constantly in mind, and that cultural control was exercised in a whole variety of ways. Here, we shall focus -140- primarily on two key institutions and two leading individuals associated with them. One of the institutions, the Académie Française, had been established by Cardinal Richelieu in 1635. INSTITUTIONS OF EARLY ENLIGHTENMENT In 1672, Louis XIV became the protector of the Académie Française. He was the first king to assume this role. The academy had been established in order to purify and standardize the French language and make it comprehensible to all. The core of academicians had gathered informally since 1629, and Richelieu's intention in formalizing the academy was to subvert the development of private cultural circles and to harness the men of letters in service to the state (Maland 1970:96). They, in turn, benefited from the prestige he conferred on them. Indeed, they were deemed the 'immortals' (from the device 'to Immortality' on the seal given to the academy by Richelieu). The academicians - there were initially twenty-seven and subsequently forty, elected by their peers - decided that, in order to fulfil their purpose, they needed to compose 'a comprehensive dictionary and a most precise grammar' (Maland 1970:99-100). Claude Favre, Seigneur de Vaugelas, praised by Voltaire, played a major role in purifying and standardizing the language. His concept of bon usage illustrates the fusion of court standards with those of men of letters, for he defined it as 'the manner of speech of the most sensible men at court with the manner of writing of the soundest authors of the time' (Maland 1970:101). He also especially commended the unselfconscious language of aristocratic women. The compilation of the dictionary proceeded slowly and it was not published until the height of Louis's reign, in two volumes in 1694. A second edition was published in 1718 and two further editions followed before the end of the ancien régime. As Voltaire noted, during this period French became the premier language of Europe, thus fulfilling one of Richelieu's aspirations. Moreover, the value of linguistic uniformity within France was not lost on the servants of Louis XIV, many of whose subjects were not even French speaking (Goubert 1969:273, 277-8; Roche 1993:239-40). The language of the academy, however, was not the French of the common people, but that of the court and polite society - of Versailles and Paris, as Vaugelas made clear: 'le bon {usage} … est composé, non pas de la pluralité, mais de l'élite des voix' (quoted in Lough 1954:247). The dominant language for Enlightenment thought was the aristocratic and self-consciously modern language of the age of Louis XIV (Lough 1954:251-5). Patronage of the arts and letters was just one aspect of absolutist policy designed to encourage unity and engender loyalty to the King and pride in his country, especially among the governing elite, whose loyalty in the mid-century had been in doubt. Through his manifold activities, Colbert founded a veritable 'department of glory' which controlled the image of the King and presented the events of his reign to the public (Burke 1992:58-9). Academies held competitions for the best construction of appropriate aspects of Louis's gloire. Relying on specialists for concrete suggestions, notably Jean Chapelain (literature), Charles Lebrun (painting and -141- sculpture) and Claude Perrault (architecture), Colbert's organization spanned the spectrum of cultural activity. 'Artists, writers, and scholars' were all mobilized 'in the service of the king' (Burke 1992:50): recipients of Louis's pensions and gratifications in a single year included three theologians, eight linguists, twenty-five French and three foreign 'men of letters', five historians, one painter, one lawyer, six students of physics, four surgeons and medical men, one botanist and one mathematician. Men of the distinction of Molière, Racine, Perrault, Boileau, Tellemont, Godefroy and de La Croix were supported in this way (Wolf 1970:455) and considerable sums of money were lavished on their academies (King 1949:287-9). The policy was a great success and institutions created and patronized by the crown provided a secure livelihood for a 'high proportion' of men of letters (Waller 1977). The resulting self-confidence permeated French intellectual society and played a significant role in the emergence of Enlightenment thought. Charles Perrault (1628-1703) is a good example of the opportunities which royal service provided and of the confidence in the age which a successful career engendered. Trained as a lawyer, he began his career as clerk, entered the service of Colbert in 1663, then became in 1665 chief clerk at the department of buildings of the royal household. In 1667 he supervised the building of the Royal Observatory, using the plans of his brother Claude, also a beneficiary of royal patronage. Although Charles had written an ode to the King which attracted some attention, he had written little when elected to the Académie Française in 1671. The following year he was elected chancellor of the academy and a year later its librarian. He had achieved these distinctions before he wrote his long narrative poem Le Siècle de Louis le Grand (1687), in which the age of Louis is seen as worthy of comparison with that of Augustus, foreshadowing Voltaire's homage to the age. For Perrault, the greatness of Louis and his people provided 'the necessary foundation for great literary achievement' (DeJean 1997:43), and in his subsequent Parallèle des anciens et des modernes, en ce qui regard les arts et les sciences (1688-97), he made the case for the superiority of the achievements of the moderns and reanimated a controversy that had been raging for about a century. Not all agreed that the modern age was superior to that of the ancients, but those engaged in the controversy agreed that knowledge of natural philosophy and the applied sciences (including military technology) had progressed, and all celebrated the age of Louis XIV (DeJean 1997:43; Sonnino 1990:201). Colbert's role in the creation of this self-confidence was crucial. Naturally, he made sure that those who benefited from royal patronage rendered appropriate service to the King, but his real importance lay in his broad understanding of the contribution of all the arts and sciences to the glory of Louis and the systematic way he went about achieving such ends. Thus the Académie Royale des Sciences, established in 1666 on his initiative, was not set up just in imitation of the Royal Society in England (as Voltaire later maintained); rather, it formed part of an ambitious scheme for the creation of la Grande Académie, which would be divided into four sections: belles-lettres, history, philosophy and mathematics. This was successfully opposed by the Académie Française and other corporate interests, leaving the Académie Royale des Sciences as an institution devoted primarily to mathematics and natural philosophy (see Briggs 1991:42). -142- Yet, out of the compromises Colbert was forced to make by the competing interests in the state, a new form of scientific organization was born. It had arisen not from the demands of the practitioners of the new science, for they had their own patrons; rather, this new institution for early Enlightenment thought had grown out of the imperatives of the court society of Louis XIV. With its establishment, private patronage of the new science was superseded, which suited Colbert well (Lux 1991:191-4). He regarded the patronage of scientific research as providing a new dimension to a king's gloire and as being of great potential service to the state, especially in military and naval affairs. Sebastién le Clerc engraved the King visiting the recently established Académie Royale des Sciences as the frontispiece for Claude Perrault's Mémoires pour l'histoire naturelle des animaux (1671), even though the King never made such a visit (Burke 1992:54 and plate 18). He had limited interest in science (see Stroup 1992:225-7; Hahn 1992:196-7). He visited the academy in 1681 and the Royal Observatory the following year, apparently his only visit (King 1949:290; Wolf 1970:456; Stroup 1992:226). In 1699, the academy was reorganized. It received new letters patents and its official status was enhanced. Colbert's vision of a mutually beneficial relationship between science, the monarchy and the state remained the inspiration, notably for Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle. Already a member of the Académie Française, he owed his appointment as its perpetual secretary in 1697 to his reputation as a popularizer of science, and he lived up to it. From 1699 to 1740 he produced an annual Histoire de l'Académie des Sciences in which his literary skills were employed in making new science accessible to the Parisian elite (Niklaus 1985:165). His éloges of great scientists - he composed sixty-nine during his long time in office - summed up their achievements in non-technical language and created a genre that outlasted him and informed an educated public throughout the Enlightenment period. He also set a pattern and style imitated by later Enlightenment writers. He was the inspiration for the encyclopaedists and an early philosophe (Niklaus 1985). Fontenelle admired Colbert greatly and, like him, saw no conflict between service to the crown and intellectual activity. Moreover, the public to which many philosophes appealed had already developed in Louis XIV's reign, and that indeed accounts for Fontenelle's style - he aimed to explain difficult scientific truths to 'an assembly of honnêtes hommes and femmes' (Paul 1980:18), a matter of some importance since the academies were all masculine institutions. Fontenelle possessed all the necessary qualities for a philosophe living under an absolutist regime. He was socially and intellectually deft, knowing how to dress up dangerous ideas in polite and entertaining ways, how to divorce social criticism from social conformity and broadly to please his masters and retain their patronage while maintaining intellectual freedom, a not inconsiderable achievement and one which few philosophes matched (Sonnino 1990:203-4). Thus he was one of the few to criticize the persecution leading to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in a fictional letter from Borneo. Yet, even Pierre Bayle, who published the letter, was slow to decode its covert criticism. When the message did sink in, Fontenelle's career was not immediately impeded because he took out an insurance on his orthodoxy by translating Latin allegorical verses into French, which could be construed as supporting the revocation. They were intended as a backdrop for the occasion of a -143- panegyric to be delivered on the revocation by Père Quartier (Adams 1991:25-7). Although ashamed of the price he had to pay on this occasion for his intellectual freedom, Fontenelle nonetheless succeeded in setting the pattern for philosophes by which ideas could be popularized through entertaining writing, and 'vulgarisation could be made more effective' paradoxically 'by appealing to the "happy few", the more intelligent and discerning reader' (Niklaus 1985:172-3).In this way, he propagated early Enlightenment thinking, possessing the unusual ability simultaneously to absorb the ideas of others, enhance their subversive scepticism, and disguise their force: his Histoire des Oracles (1687) and De L'Origine des Fables (1724) well illustrate this skill. It was not complete proof against his critics and he also needed powerful protectors at court. According to Voltaire, his Histoire des Oracles got him into hot water at the end of Louis's reign. The work popularized the ideas of the Dutch scholar Anthonie van Dale (1638-1708). In 1713, the King's confessor, the Jesuit Le Tellier, accused Fontenelle of atheism. He would have been stripped of 'his pension, his office, and his freedom' had not the Marquis d'Argenson intervened on his behalf (Voltaire 1764: art. Philosophe, 423; Israel 2001:359-61, 370-1). Nor had the letter from Borneo been forgotten: it contributed to the danger he was in at that time (Adams 1991:26).Fontenelle, however, continued to tread the fine line between conformity and criticism, for he was the only member of the Académie Française to protest against the expulsion of the Abbé de Saint-Pierre for his Polysnodie, in which he recommended the administrative regime initially adopted by the Regency in reaction to that of Louis XIV. This was the academy's first notable act under the Regency, and it was a sign that it would not move with the times, but would seek to preserve the reputation and ideals of the Sun King (Brunel 1884:9-11) FREEDOM AND CONTROL The skills of a Fontenelle were at a premium because the position of an intellectual under absolutism was fraught with contradiction and difficulty. There was a sense in which philosophers saw themselves as apart from society, and free to think their own thoughts. When the Académie Française in its first dictionary, published in 1694, listed philosophe, it offered three definitions: | |1 A student of the sciences (in the language of the late seventeenth century this meant someone seeking certain knowledge, usually with a | | |mathematical basis). | | |2 A wise man who lives a quiet life. | | |3 A man who by freethinking puts himself above the ordinary duties and obligations of civil and religious life. | The full original phrasing is: 'un homme, qui, par libertinage d'esprit, se met au dessus des devoirs et des obligations ordinaires de la vie civile et chrétienne. C'est un homme qui ne se refuse rien, qui ne se contraint sur rien, et qui mème une vie de Philosophe' (Smith 1934:309-10; Commager 1977:236-45; Beales 1985:169-70). Taken together, these present the picture of a learned, disinterested thinker who places himself apart from the ordinary strains and stresses of life; this was indeed -144- Fontenelle's ideal (Rappaport 1981:226). At the same time there is the implication that the thoughts and behaviour of the philosophe were unsuitable for society at large. Here lurked a potential danger, for, although 'dictionaries record innovations only after due deliberation' (Ozouf 1988: S2), even at the time there was perhaps an element of wishful thinking in these definitions. Already in the late seventeenth century the notion that the philosophe was a critic of ordinary values was beginning to imply that he should play a public role in attempting to ameliorate some of the excesses of superstition, dogmatism and prejudice. Moreover, the man of letters, whatever his inclination, could not afford to ignore completely the world around him, for he almost invariably depended on patronage for his position. That came at a price, for patrons were interested in the opinions of their clients. Thus the situation of the philosophes was fraught with ambiguity. Although they regarded themselves as members of an intellectual community of equals, they were also, as members of institutions of 'Enlightenment' fostered by the government, expected to serve the government, for their pensions were not sinecures (King 1949:293). The national academies and their counterparts in the provinces had one central purpose: the enhancement of the gloire of the King. Between 1669 and 1695 six provincial academies modelled on the Académie Française were established - at Arles, Soissons, Nîmes, Angers, Villefranche and Toulouse; three were founded on the model of the Académie Royale des Sciences - at Caen, Montpellier and Bordeaux; and an opera house and an academy of music on the Parisian model was set up in Marseille in 1684 (Burke 1992:155). These were institutions which needed nurturing and controlling. The latter extended from the regulation of their manner of proceeding - Colbert set out the precise number of hours that the Académie Française should meet and gave its members a very expensive pendulum clock to ensure that they kept to time - to the quest for the most suitable recipients of patronage (Chapelain wrote reports on ninety writers), and finally to the control of publications and ideas (Burke 1992:53, 58). Indeed, the 'degree of government control' exercised over 'the entire spectrum of artistic and intellectual activity' was 'unsurpassed before the twentieth century' (Parker 1983:131-2). From the time peace was restored after the Fronde, the government had been anxious to prevent the circulation of seditious ideas. In 1652 and 1653 measures were announced in the official Gazette for restoring control over the press and preventing the publication of 'any posters or books and slanderous tracts with a seditious tendency' (Rossel 1982:108-9). New philosophical ideas might appear to be several stages removed from such things, but it was vitally important that the elites in society learned new ideas in acceptable forms, especially those which did not upset received religious orthodoxy, on which it was felt the moral and political order rested. The absolute state was deeply sensitive to anything which might encourage religious dissidence. It also took for granted its right to control opinion. The weekly Journal des Savants, founded in 1665, contained obituaries of scholars, information about experiments and reviews of books. In spreading news of the world of learning it also advertised the King's patronage. Published by the royal press, it was edited by creatures of Colbert, although the first editor, Denis de Sallo, overstepped the mark and was replaced by the Abbé Gallois (Rossel 1982:33-4; Maland 1970:290). -145- The fall of Foucquet, who had maintained an extravagant lifestyle at his chateau at Vaux le Vicomte, was an indication that the King would brook no rivals as a modern Maecenas, and after the conclusion of his trial in 1667, when Louis overruled the judges to increase his sentence from exile to perpetual imprisonment, censorship was tightened. This was supervised by the newly appointed lieutenant of police, La Reynie. As the reign progressed the Journal des Savants was subject to increasing official control (Vittu 1994:108). In 1699, through the creation of the office of overseer of books, an attempt was made to collate information on authors, printers and booksellers. Authors, rather like academics applying for support today, were required to provide written justifications for their publications (Parker 1983:145). The elevated status granted to the Académie Royale des Sciences included giving its members the powers of censorship (Chapin 1990:188). As in other spheres, instruments intended for the sustenance of absolutism contained the potential for its subversion. The Journal des Savants, in providing a model for other journals devoted to the latest ideas, helped to foster the republic of letters which spread ideas critical of the intellectual apparatus of absolutism (Rossel 1982:34). Censorship encouraged writers not only to seek clandestine methods of publication but also to find new and ingenious ways of expressing their ideas. Irony and satire, key elements in the weaponry of the philosophes, were increasingly used against official orthodoxies. At the same time readers grew more sophisticated (and sceptical) in their reading. The Parisian intelligentsia became used to reading texts in a knowing way, in the expectation that writers, constrained by censorship, would present their views in a covert or restrained manner. Elisabeth Labrousse has argued that the Parisian intelligentsia, reading Pierre Bayle during the Regency, viewed him as anti-Christian rather than anti-Catholic because they assumed that his message was more subversive than the surface appearance of the text. They failed to appreciate that Bayle could write almost as he wished in the much more liberal environment of Holland (Labrousse 1987:11; see also Niklaus 1985:172). The judgement of the authorities could also be affected by the climate of suspicion which the desire to control created. The loyalty of the Huguenots was felt to be suspect when the evidence suggested otherwise, at least since the Peace of Alais of 1629. Similarly, the piety of the Jansenists was felt to have a dangerously critical dimension. When Quesnel's pietistic Moral Reflections on the New Testament (1678) was condemned by the papacy, as a result of French pressure, in the Bull Unigenitus (1713), it included in the condemnation Quesnel's injunction that all must read scripture (McManners 1975:260; Maire 1992:308). Yet, for all the hazards of the enterprise, the monarchy had little choice but to attempt to cultivate and shape opinion. Lacking representative institutions which might have provided support for the policies of the monarchy and the political theology of absolutism, the King had to woo and cajole the influential (Parker 1983:146). PUBLIC OPINION It was a fairly common notion among the educated in the early modern period that opinion was 'queen of the world'. Blaise Pascal noted that power needed to appeal -146- to the imagination to make itself effective, although, curiously, he exempted the monarchs from this rule, for 'they do not wear the trappings, they simply have the power'. He died in 1662, before he could witness how effectively Louis XIV wore the trappings (Pascal 1670:41). The queen of the world needed to be courted in order to make the reign of force less obvious. Although this helped to tame the seditious tendencies in society, especially of the nobility, opinion was not viewed as an independent force; rather, it was seen as something diffused through different sectors of a hierarchically organized society. France lacked representative institutions to give authenticity to the notion of public opinion as an independent force which could restrain as well as incite governmental action. In Britain, opinion first came to be seen as an independent force operating on government, rather than as a force shaped by government, (Gunn 1983:265). For that notion to be plausible, one needed institutions which were responsive to the public, and opinion had to be free from censorship, or censorship had to be either weak or ineffective, and there had to be a fairly large reading public. These conditions were first fulfilled in the relatively liberal British and Dutch societies. In France public opinion would not emerge as a result of a straightforward process of liberalization. It was believed that opinion needed to be shaped rather than consulted, for, left to its own devices, it was often prejudiced and ignorant. Yet, as the reading public grew, and as rival groups and authorities - the monarchy, the parlements, the Jansenists and then the philosophes - sought to win it over, it was increasingly treated as an independent force. Although philosophes liked to emphasize their role in 'creating' or 'shaping' public opinion, they were in fact doing just what the monarchy itself had been doing for some considerable time. At the same time, institutions which had been intended in the seventeenth century to promote the gloire of the King, in the mid-eighteenth century began to take on the role of enlightening the public. Indeed, it is significant that the friend and protector of the philosophes, Malesherbes, traced the birth of public opinion to the establishment of the Académie Française (Ozouf 1988: S6-7). In Louis XIV's reign, through the development of the system of royal provincial intendants, the monarchy became much more aware of local opinions, problems and grievances. In the closing decades of his reign, the government began to communicate its official decisions in a different way. The standard means had been through public criers, posters and the reading of edicts from the pulpit. Now the government began to use commercial publication for edicts and information, and sent copies to all officials with an interest in public order. This, Daniel Roche notes, created two publics: the general public, who heard of decisions in the old way, or were prepared to buy news-sheets; and an elite public of nobles and bourgeoisie who were 'integrated into the management of affairs'. The former were passive, the latter active. They formed part of a living court society which 'was held up as a model of political participation for regulating differences between the state and its constitutive corps' (Roche 1993:269-70). The value of print in creating an esprit de corps was a lesson that would not be lost on the philosophes. Nor could the 'passive' public be ignored. The government needed to know what was politically possible. Moreover, the government became interested in public opinion in new ways as part of what can be described as the development of government as a science; that -147- is, government which based its decisions on systematic empirical data. The great inspiration for the development of a more informed and professional government was Colbert, but in the eighteenth century the government would test opinion in ways which were inconceivable in his time. The most important example of this comes from 1745 when Orry, the contrôleur general, deliberately tested public opinion by circulating a rumour about a rise in taxation (Ozouf 1988: S8). Orry's purpose was to ascertain the attitude of the public to a rise in taxes during a time of war. Public opinion came thus to be viewed as a tribunal, and one in which the philosophes themselves put their case. In Louis XIV's reign, an experiment like Orry's would have risked serious popular disturbances. Maybe such an experiment would not have been possible even had it been deemed wise, for Mona Ozouf has suggested that 'there was no public opinion under Louis XIV for the brilliance of the monarchy outshone it' (Ozouf 1988: S10). Certainly public culture in the reign of Louis XIV was inseparable from absolutism since it was shaped by the ambitions of the Sun King, and by the superb orchestration of the arts and sciences. Royal patronage ensured that public culture looked upwards to the King and not outward to a wider audience. New ideas could be accepted so long as they could be enlisted in the cause of an absolutist vision of a hierarchical society in which individuals and corporate institutions knew their place. Thus Fontenelle's Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686) presented Cartesian natural philosophy as 'the cosmic justification for the status quo' (Jacob 1987:268), though it is worth noting that Fontenelle managed to write the work without mentioning God (Niklaus 1985:170). A wider and more fluid public sphere did develop in the eighteenth century, yet few writers freed themselves from patronage, and nor did they uniformly embrace the notion of an unregulated public sphere. Their public sphere was outside neither the state nor civil society, but was one in which it was implicitly accepted that 'opinion' could be used as a lever for change. The growing failures of Louis XIV's kingship in the closing decades of his reign were crucial in altering the relationship between writers and the state (Rothkrug 1965:372-469). The public culture, which in the early decades of Louis XIV's reign had successfully served the needs of absolutism, began to break up. Although it would not be until the mid-eighteenth century that writers began to address a wider audience and to break through the restrictions of patronage and court control (Simon 1995:6-7), the transition began in the closing years of Louis's reign. Since his reign witnessed the growing ascendancy of French culture in Europe, conditions were also being created for the assumption of leadership of Enlightenment by philosophes deeply critical of the status quo (Fumaroli 1992:602). CONTINUITY AND CHANGE In a famous study of the changes in European thought between 1680 and 1720, Paul Hazard declared that 'One day the French people, almost to a man were thinking like Bossuet. The day after they were thinking like Voltaire' (Hazard 1935:7). Hazard's emphasis was on the intellectual changes which occurred in the period, but it is significant that he chose Bossuet as representative of the old order of thinking. -148- Although Bossuet used the words 'propres paroles' in the title of his Politics Founded on the Very Words of Holy Scripture (Politique tirée des propres paroles de l'Ecriture Sainte), he was less concerned with the true meaning of scripture than with maintaining its authority as a foundation for divine right absolutism (Kearns 1979:123). This left him vulnerable not only to enlightened biblical critics who questioned his interpretation of scripture but also to those who wondered whether such absolutism actually performed the Christian role he ascribed to it. In 1685 Louis XIV, by the Edict of Fontainebleau, revoked the Edict of Nantes, which since 1598 had given Huguenots a measure of toleration. This was the last of a series of intolerant actions against the Huguenots and it forced them into maintaining their faith in a clandestine way or going into exile. Some 200,000 left France and found a haven in Protestant Europe and America. Few in France regretted the action at the time. Bossuet supported the execution of the new penal legislation in its full force and praised the 'moderation' of the chancellor, Le Tellier, who revoked the edict. He was untroubled by the fact that he had argued that the King should protect all his subjects, should be solicitous for the welfare of the weak, should use his power wisely and rationally, and should persuade rather than compel his subjects into obedience (Kearns 1979:124; Adams 1991:22-3). Although some thought it was irrational to repress some of France's most industrious subjects, most, like Bossuet, regarded Protestantism as sinful and worthy of separate treatment. The same could not be said of movements within the Catholic Church which the monarchy also regarded as dissident. The repression of Quietism, a spiritual movement which took Bossuet's concern for the King's subjects too literally, and of Jansenism, which was subject to particularly brutal treatment (Sedgwick 1998:236-7), led many to call into question the professed ambitions of absolutism. Jansenism, which was initially rather like a puritan movement within the Catholic Church, Augustinian in theology, spiritually ascetic and morally strict, became politicized by Louis XIV's actions. With influential supporters among the parlement of Paris, enthusiastic support among the lower clergy, though decreasingly among the episcopate, it was a thorn in the side of the monarchy under Louis XV. Jansenists maintained the most successful clandestine publication in eighteenth-century France, the weekly Nouvelles ecclésiastiques (Coward 1981; Maire 1992:317). It eluded all the efforts of the police to track it down. In seeking papal support for the repression of the Jansenists, culminating in the disastrous Bull Unigenitus (1713), Louis had departed from the monarch's traditional policy of supporting the rights of the Gallican Church against the papacy. The submissive culture of absolutism in the heyday of his reign would never be recreated; a climate of criticism began to develop, and in the mid-eighteenth century the bickering of Jesuits, Ultramontains, Gallicans and Jansenists diverted attention from the more dangerous ideas emerging from the philosophes and fortified anticlericalism (McManners 1975:270-3). Criticism did not develop solely because of Louis XIV's intolerance. The aspirations of the Sun King had captured the imagination of France's 'spiritual and intellectual elite' and they were 'eager collaborators' in his policy of intolerance, celebrating it in art, poetry and prose. The Académie Française offered prizes for works which celebrated the elimination of heresy (Adams 1991:19, 30). From the -149- first, however, dissident voices were heard and these would grow stronger as the wider ambitions of Louis XIV suffered setbacks in the War of the League of Augsburg (1688-97) and then defeat in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-13). It is in the context of the crumbling of these ambitions that criticism began to coalesce, constituting something like an enlightened alternative set of values to those of divine right absolutism. Critics attacked the appropriation of Christian values by absolutism, the authoritarian nature of French mercantilism, the inadequacies of the French fiscal system, the inequity of taxation, the financial chaos caused by the cost of warfare, and the huge fortunes accumulated by speculators. The monarchy was also criticized for events beyond its control (the famines of the 1690s and the hunger caused by the 'great winter' of 1708-9), a sure sign that it was losing its aura (Perry 1990:53). THE REGENCY The criticism which had emerged before the end of Louis XIV's reign demonstrates that the Regency of Philippe, Duc d'Orleans, does not represent a sharp break with Louis's reign, although it does represent a break with some of the latter's practices. The Regency period seemed to be opening the way to a more liberal and tolerant regime, and it did lead to the bold financial and economic experiments of John Law, which, had they succeeded, would have modernized the economy and established a state bank. Freed from reliance on private finance for public purposes and on venal office-holders (sale of offices was suspended during the Regency), the state and the social order may have been liberalized in other ways. But Law's experiments failed, and that had an inhibiting effect on future reform. Still, there were other grounds for viewing the Regency as a liberal regime. Louis XIV had been powerless to prevent the circulation of radical works from abroad, especially those stemming from the Huguenot community in exile, but in 1720 the Regent actually accepted the dedication of an edition of Bayle's Dictionnaire, arguably the most important of the subversive books. More than a decade before Voltaire fixed the English model of liberal constitutionalism in the enlightened imagination through his Lettres philosophique, the Regent was being instructed in the workings of the House of Commons. Furthermore, reform ideas patterned on the notion of the restoration of Christian aristocratic values were being replaced by more fundamental suggestions for change based on new philosophical ideas (Roche 1993:457). The prospect of the Regent carrying through liberal constitutional reform proved chimerical. His task was to preserve the inheritance of the young Louis XV. He acted more like a nascent enlightened absolutist than a nascent constitutional monarch. Voltaire saw the inside of the Bastille during his rule and Montesquieu was not confident enough in the liberality of the regime to put his own name to the Persian Letters (1721), in which he satirized the pretensions of divine right absolutism. The philosophes had some way to go before they formed a confident party intent on changing things. Their attitude remained in many ways defensive (Fletcher 1985:24) and their emphasis was on spreading ideas among an elite rather than addressing -150- a wider audience directly. Their location was in the academies and the salons; that is, within the parameters of court society. Nonetheless, court society did lose some of its coherence in the Regency period. In 1715 the court moved to Paris, and, although it returned to Versailles in 1723, it never regained the dominance which had been its feature in the heyday of Louis XIV. The Regent's mother complained bitterly about the collapse of court society and what she saw as a bourgeois takeover. Parisian society, however, provided a welcome home for Enlightenment sociability, notably in the salons. SALONS Salon society in the late seventeenth century was characteristically aristocratic, organized in the salons of Parisian town houses (hôtels) by women of special charm and ability. In their salons, men of letters from the third estate learned to control the disputatiousness of the French scholarly tradition and to adopt the social graces necessary for conversing with the great, for, in the salons, as in the academies, all were on an equal intellectual footing. Although there were tensions between aristocrat and bourgeois - one dispute led Voltaire to seek exile in England - generally salon society from the Regency onwards came to provide an enlightened forum to rival the masculine academies. If it was not until the 1740s, with Madame Geoffrin's salon, that the model enlightened salon was finally established (Goodman 1994:91), by 1720 there were salons in Paris to cater for different interests and tastes. Salon settings often represented a reaction to the classicism of Louis XIV's reign, which self-consciously displayed order, reason and discipline. Rococo style, which became the rage in the Regency, created agreeable surroundings for public conversation in private surroundings, appropriate for salon society rather than for a court (Goodman 1994:84-9). It was especially suitable for the Parisian hôtels of the aristocracy and would reach its apogee in the oval salons installed about 1735 by Germain Boffrand and painted by Charles Natoire in the Hôtel de Soubise, the splendid home of the Prince and Princess of Soubise (Tadgel 1978:133-7). Of course, rococo would be adopted by the French court, but its ethos was far removed from the grandeur of classicism. Indeed, it is noteworthy that Colbert had opposed Le Vau's idea of an oval salon. Yet if, as Dena Goodman has suggested, the salons represented a rival to the court and the academies and belonged to a republic of letters antipathetic to ancien régime society, they were not simply a reaction to the ideals of Louis XIV. They also represented a combination of privilege and Enlightenment familiar in his reign. As she herself has noted, 'Upon entering the Republic of Letters, the philosophes did not leave Old Regime France. Even on their own ground, they still found themselves acting and speaking like Old Regime Frenchmen' (Goodman 1994:98-9). The domination of the court had been 'provisional' and with the Regency it lost its cultural hegemony. Indeed, a new definition of culture was already emerging in Louis XIV's reign, as a 'form of commerce between … respectable people', and the salons were eminently respectable (Revel 1992:113-16). As the court lost its centrality as a repository for all cultural values, opportunities occurred for Enlightenment ways of thinking. Charles Perrault could declare without -151- irony that 'no sooner' would a prince declare, '"let there be a palace" than an admirable palace rose from the earth' (Revel 1992:108). This type of veneration of the sovereign by intellectuals did not survive the Regency and would be lampooned in Montesquieu's Persian Letters. However, the break with the age of Louis XIV was far from complete. Indeed, perhaps the best way to envisage the period of the Regency is as a period of 'thaw' (Ladurie 1997:344-5), or 'the beginning of a period of "conservative transition"' (Roche 1993:453). The form and structure of the early Enlightenment remained roughly the same but relationships were more relaxed than under the Sun King. France continued to be a society of privilege, patronage and individual and corporate liberties. CONCLUSION Although the role of court society weakened during the eighteenth century, no coherent alternative emerged. The philosophes liked to think that they were leading society in an enlightened direction, but, like absolutism itself, they were caught in the cusp of change. Voltaire's alternative English model was more useful for its critique of ancien régime France than as a serious proposal for a more liberal constitutional structure and a different set of social values. The court society of the Sun King, given canonical expression in Le Siècle de Louis XIV, was a lasting source of pride and an exemplar of French refinement and cultural ascendancy (Revel 1992:72-3). The sense of nostalgia for a period of matchless perfection may have been more acute as a result of the intuition that the institutional forms of Enlightenment which developed under Louis could not cope with the new more democratic world of public opinion which they helped to create. Louis XIV aimed to appeal to the imagination, the philosophes to reason, but force lay behind the brilliance of Versailles, and the general public was treated as passive. The philosophes thought they could replace the appeal of absolutism, and that they required no force other than that of reason. But in cultivating opinion and trying to use it as an instrument for change, they played a key role in creating an active public sphere in which opinions could be expressed beyond their control, in ways which were less than polite, and some of them would come to be viewed as creatures of a discredited regime (Darnton 1971). 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