Reason, grace, and sentiment: a study of the language of religion and ethics in England, 1660-1780, Volume II, Shaftesbury to Hume 9780521383417, 9780521021357, 9780511994999

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Preface (page xi)
Abbreviations (page xiii)
Introduction (page 1)
1 The true religion of nature: the freethinkers and their opponents (page 7)
2 Shaftesbury and the defence of natural affection (page 85)
3 Defining the moral faculty: Hutcheson, Butler, and Price (page 153)
4 The ethics of sentiment and the religious hypothesis: Hume and his critics (page 238)
5 The conflict of languages in the later eighteenth century (page 330)
Bibliography (page 357)
Index (page 377)

Citation preview

This volume completes Isabel Rivers’s widely acclaimed exploration of the relationship between religion and ethics from the mid-seventeenth to the later eighteenth centuries. She investigates the effect of attempts to separate ethics from

religion, and to locate the foundation of morals in the constitution of human nature. Focusing on moral philosophy and the educational institutions in which (or in spite of which) these new ideas were developed, the book pays close attention to

the movement of ideas through the British Isles, in particular the spread of Shaftesbury’s thought from England to Ireland and Scotland, and the varied reception of Hume’s scepticism north and south of the border. It also demonstrates the enormous influence of Shaftesbury’s moral thought and the ultimate triumph of the English interpretation of Shaftesbury with the rise of Butler. Meticulously researched and accessibly written, this volume makes a vital contribution to our understanding of eighteenth-century thought.

By the same author

The Poetry of Conservatism 1600-1745: A Study of Poets and Public Affairs from Jonson to

Pope (Gambridge: Rivers Press, 1973). Classical and Christian Ideas in English Renaissance Poetry: A Students’? Guide (2nd edn,

London: Routledge, 1994). Books and their Readers in Etghteenth-Century England (editor) (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1982). Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England,

1660—1780, vol. I: Whichcote to Wesley (Gambridge: Gambridge University Press, 1991).

CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH LITERATURE AND THOUGHT 37

Reason, Grace, and Sentiment, II

CAMBRIDGE STUDIESIN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH LITERATUREAND THOUGHT General editors

Professor HOWARD ERSKINE-HILLE Litt.D., FBA, Pembroke College, Cambridge Professor JOHN RICHETTI, University of Pennsylvania Editonal board Morris Brownell, University of Nevada Leopold Damrosch, Harvard University J. Paul Hunter, University of Chicago Isobel Grundy, University of Alberta Lawrence Lipking, Northwestern University Harold Love, Monash Unwersity Claude Rawson, Yale University Pat Rogers, University of South Florida James Sambrook, University of Southampton

| Some recent trtles Landscape, Liberty and Authority Poetry, Criticasm and Politics from Thomson to Wordsworth

by Tim Fulford Philosophical Dialogue in the British Enlightenment Theology, Aesthetics, and the Novel

by Michael Prince Defoe and the New Sciences

by Ilse Vickers History and the Early English Novel Matters of Fact from Bacon to Defoe

by Robert Mayer Narratives of Enlightenment Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon

by Karen O’Brien Shakespeare, Milton, and Eaighteenth-Century Literary Editing The Beginnings of Interpretative Scholarship

by Marcus Walsh The Triumph of Augustan Poetics English Literary Culture from Butler to Fohnson

by Blanford Parker A complete list of books in this series is given at the end of the volume.

Reason, Grace, and Sentiment A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics

in England, 1660—1780 , VOLUME II

SHAFTESBURY TO HUME ISABEL RIVERS Fellow of St Hugh’s College, Oxford

CAMBRIDGE SB) UNIVERSITY PRESS

PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK) =www.cup.cam.ac.uk 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA www.cup.org 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia Ruiz de Alarcon 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain

© Isabel Rivers 2000 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2000

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

Typeset in Baskerville 9.5/11.5pt. [cE] A catalogue record for this book ts available from the British Library

ISBN 0 521 38341 2 hardback

kor Tom, Olver, and Frances

BLANK PAGE

Contents

Preface page x1 Abbreviations xi

Introduction l

opponents 7

| ‘The true religion of nature: the freethinkers and their

| Freethinking, deism, and atheism 7

2 Irony, equivocation, and esotericism 3] 3 Superstition, religion, and philosophy 50

2 Shaftesbury and the defence of natural affection 85

1 Shaftesbury’s intellectual world 86 2 The making of Characteristicks 98

3 The good and the beautiful 114 3 Defining the moral faculty: Hutcheson, Butler, and Price 153

1 Shaftesbury’s heirs 154 2 The diffusion of Shaftesburian thought 173

3 The foundation of morals 199

Hume and his critics 238 1 ‘The problem of the virtuous sceptic 238

_ 4 The ethics of sentiment and the religious hypothesis:

23. Prudence and raillery 264 The science of human nature 282

9 The conflict of languages in the later eighteenth century 330

Bibliography 357

Index 377 1X

BLANK PAGE

Preface

The publication of this volume, the second of two, represents the conclusion of a project on which I have been working for over twenty-five years. In the course of work on both volumes I have incurred many debts. Over the last few years my most pressing consideration has been finding the time to write the second; fellow academics who have struggled to produce serious works of scholarship against the competing and ever increasing demands of teaching, examining, and administration will understand the

reasons for my delay. I am grateful to the Principal and Fellows of St Hugh’s College for granting me terms of leave in 1992, 1994, and 1997, to

the British Academy for a term of research leave in 1995, and to the Oxford English Faculty for enabling me to have a lighter college teaching load, all of which have helped to make completion of the book possible. Almost all my reading was done in the Bodleian Library; I am grateful to

the Upper Reading Room staff and especially the Keeper of Western Manuscripts, Mary Glapinson, for her skill in retrieving supposedly missing books. ‘The London Library has also proved invaluable.

Of all who have taken an interest in the completion of this project, my thanks go especially to Dr Brian Young of the University of Sussex for reading and commenting on the whole of the second volume with such care. Professor M. A. Stewart has scrutinised Chapters 2, 3, and 4, and has been a mine of information about Scots and Irish writers. I have had my wits sharpened by many discussions with Dr David Womersley, Michael Suarez SJ, and Scott Mandelbrote. Professor Howard Erskine-Hill, Dr Geoffrey Nuttall, Professor Quentin Skinner, Dr John Walsh, and Professor W. R. Ward have offered continued encouragement. Dr Julia Griffin gave me helpful advice on Lord Herbert, and provided me with a translation of Le Clerc for Chapter 2. Material from Chapters | and 4 appeared first in H7, XXXVI (1993), and from Chapters 2 and 3 in J. Garnett and C. Matthew, eds., Revival and Religion since 1700 (1993); material from Chapter 4 will appear in JEH (2001). Over the years I have given parts of the book as seminar papers at Warwick, St Peter’s College, Oxford, Pembroke College, Cambridge, Jesus College, Oxford, Birmingham, Chicago, ‘Trinity College, Dublin, and X1

Xi Preface Sussex, and I would like to thank Dr James Obelkevitch, Dr David Harley, Dr James Raven, Dr Brian Young, Professor Mark Storey, Professor Bruce Redford, Professor David Berman, and Professor Blair Worden for making this possible. I am grateful to those reviewers of the first volume who understood and sympathised with my aims and methods and looked forward to the second, especially Michael Adams, Patricia Bruckmann, J. CG. D. Clark, Francoise Deconinck-Brossard, David W. Lutz, D. A. Pailin, Roger Pooley, Gerard

Reedy, Michael Suarez, and W. R. Ward. I hope they will not be disappointed. I would also like to thank Josie Dixon of Cambridge University Press and Professor Howard Erskine-Hill, editor of the series,

for agreeing to publish the book despite the fact that I failed to meet several deadlines.

I have had neither the time nor the space to do justice to evangelicals and unitarians in this book. I hope to do so in the next one, which will be devoted to The Literary Culture of Evangelicalism and Dissent, 1720—1800.

Ria Audley-Miller, tutors’ secretary at St Hugh’s, kindly typed my first

two chapters before I acquired my own computer. Deborah Quare, Librarian of St Hugh’s, helpfully allowed me to borrow essential rare books. ‘The 1714 edition of Characteristicks has been a constant companion.

The jacket illustration, with the Librarian’s permission, has been photo-

| graphed from this copy. The affection, patience, and support of my family have kept me going over the many years it has taken me to complete my work.

Abbreviations

All titles in the notes are given in shortened form; full titles (except for journals) will be found in the Bibliography. Titles reduced to initials are given below.

AGP Archiv fiir Geschichte der Philosophie

BTA British Journal of Aesthetics CQR Church Quarterly Review DNB Dictionary of National Biography

ECI Eighteenth-Century Ireland EGS Lighteenth-Century Studies ED Enlightenment and Dissent EHR English Historical Review ELH English Literary History EMS English Manuscript Studies ESTC kighteenth-Century Short Title Catalogue

Hy EMistorical fournal HLQ Huntington Library Quarterly

HMC Historical Manuscripts Commission HTR Harvard Theological Review JEH Journal of Ecclestastical History JEGP Journal of English and Germanic Philology

FHI Journal of the History of Ideas FHP Journal of the History of Philosophy GIs Journal of Theological Studies JwWcl Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes

MLR Modern Language Review

NQ Notes and Querwes PAPS Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society PBSA Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America PMLA Publications of the Modern Language Association of America

PQ Philological Quarterly PRA Philosophy Research Archives

Xi

XIV Abbreviations PRIA Proceedings of the Royal Insh Academy

RES Review of English Studies RGS, I Reason, Grace, and Sentiment, vol. I (Gambridge, 1991)

RIP Revue Internationale de Philosophie SEL Studies in English Literature 1500—1900

SP Studies in Philology SVEC Studies on Voltaire and the Eaghteenth Century TAPS Transactions of the American Philosophical Society

Introduction

This book is the second of two volumes on the ways in which crucial changes in the relationship between religion and ethics from the midseventeenth to the later eighteenth centuries were perceived and expressed. The first volume, Whichcote to Wesley, explores what happened to the Reformation doctrine of grace from the 1650s onwards in response to

an increasingly influential emphasis on human reason and free will. ‘The central tenets of the latitudinarian movement in the Church of England —

the rational basis of religion, the co-operation of human reason with divine grace, and the resulting happiness of the moral life — were challenged from the 1660s to the 1780s by the leaders of nonconformity,

dissent, and methodism, who wanted in different ways to continue or return to aspects of the Reformation protestant tradition but whose views were in varying degrees marked by the dominant religion of reason. The second volume looks at the relationship between religion and ethics from the point of view not of the tension between reason and grace but of

that between reason and sentiment. It explores what happened when attempts were made from the 1690s onwards to separate ethics from religion, not necessarily for anti-religious reasons, and to locate what was known as the foundation of morals in the constitution of human nature. A

number of important questions was repeatedly raised. Is there a viable religion of nature separate from revealed religion? Is the foundation of

morals to be sought in human nature or beyond it, in reason, the affections, the moral sense, sentiment, the will of God, the nature of things, or some combination of these? If the constitution of human nature is the starting point for moral enquiry, does it necessarily lead to God, or is this an irrational leap? Is the separation of ethics from religion advantageous or damaging to the latter? Is an atheist morality possible?

Whereas the focus of the first volume is on religious movements and denominations and the implications for ethics of different theological positions, the second volume is largely concerned with moral philosophy and the educational institutions — the English and Scottish universities and the dissenting academies — in which (or in spite of which) new ideas about

its relationship with religion were developed. Several of the leading l

2 Introduction protagonists (like those in the first volume) were clergy or ministers whose object was to express their views as clearly and forcefully as they could in

order to defend the faith against perceived threats, but some of the most important were freethinking or sceptical writers who were not members of groups with agreed systems of belief. Unlike their clerical opponents, it was not in their interests to make their views easily intelligible. One of the concerns of this volume, therefore, is the problem of interpretation their work creates. A related subject is the appeal such writers made to the classical moralists, particularly Cicero and the Stoics, as their intellectual forebears, and the resulting conflict with Christian writers for possession of the ancients and what they meant. The first volume is largely confined to England — the Church of England

and those who dissented from it or sought to change it from within. The second volume pays particular attention to the geographical movement of ideas in the British Isles — the spread of Shaftesburian thought from England to Ireland and thence to Scotland, the different ways in which it was interpreted in England, the varied reception of Humean scepticism north and south of the border, the conflict between English Lockeanism and Scottish Shaftesburianism, and the ultimate triumph of the English over the Scottish interpretation of Shaftesbury.

Chapter 1 concentrates on the anti-Christian polemic of Toland, Shaftesbury, ‘Tindal, and Collins in the period from the 1690s to the 1730s and their sources, and the counter-attack mounted against them by a large number of divines of different persuasions, among them Clarke, Berkeley,

Skelton, and Leland. The main problem addressed is whether the freethinkers really wanted to define and establish the ‘true religion of nature’,

or whether, as their opponents suspected, they used the language of natural religion as a way of expressing anti-religious attitudes which could not in the circumstances find expression in any other form. Their varying

attitudes to Locke, both admiring and critical, and their sometimes mischievous appropriation of Lockean terminology and argument are of particular importance here. Chapter 2 investigates the making of Shaftesbury’s collection of essays, Characteristicks, the serious problems of interpretation it caused contemporary readers, and the reasons why, in the dual role of sceptic and dogmatist, he chose to structure his argument as he did. It is one of the central claims of this volume that Shaftesbury’s methods

and terms shaped thinking and writing about the relationship between

ethics and religion throughout the century in ways that have been insufficiently recognised. Chapter 3 traces the influence of Shaftesbury from the 1720s to the 1750s, particularly on Scottish thinkers, and looks at the ways in which his account of the constitution of human nature and his deliberately tentative formulation of the moral sense were elaborated by his followers, Hutcheson, Turnbull, and Fordyce, appropriated and rede-

Introduction 3 fined by the principal English moralist of the period, Butler, and questioned by rationalists such as Balguy and especially Price. It demonstrates not only the enormous influence of Shaftesbury’s moral thought (much

greater overall than that of Locke) but also the very different ways in which he was interpreted in Scotland, Ireland, and England, and how it was possible for him to be Christianised by some writers and demonised by others. Chapter 4 is concerned with Hume’s demonstration that the ethics

of sentiment, contrary to the view of all its supporters, has no logical connexion with the religious hypothesis, and it charts the mixture of prudence and imprudence with which he made his views public. It compares the reactions to his work in Scotland and England from the 1740s to the 1780s of friendly critics such as Kames and Smith and hostile ones such as Milner and Paley, and shows why the religious assumptions of

his antagonists made it impossible for his arguments to be properly understood. The final chapter sketches the latitudinarian tradition at Cambridge from the 1730s to the 1780s, particularly as represented by Law, Paley, and Watson, its development of Lockean moral theory, and its hostility to Shaftesburianism. In theological terms the principal opponents

of this tradition in the late eighteenth century were high churchmen, evangelicals, and unitarians, but in terms of moral philosophy the most striking development in the early nineteenth century was the denigration within Cambridge of Locke and Paley and the rise of Butler, Shaftesbury’s most important Christian heir. The volume concludes with a brief account of the three major histories of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century moral philosophy written in the first half of the nineteenth century, from differing Scottish and English perspectives, by Stewart, Mackintosh, and Whewell.

The Introduction to the first volume explains the sense in which my subject 1s the language of religion and ethics, sets out my methods of analysis, describes the function of the three-part division of the chapters, and defines the audiences I am addressing.! To the list given there of questions I have asked when reading a given author, I would like to add

several broader considerations which I have taken into account in

interpreting changes in language and thought. (1) ‘The institutional affilia-

tion or else isolation of individual writers is vital, Some were secure in their membership. Doddridge, in his academy at Northampton, Hutcheson, in the university of Glasgow, Paley, at Christ’s College, Cambridge, worked among the likeminded in order to teach and persuade, not to controvert. Some were excluded from institutions because they were

perceived as a threat. Locke lost his Studentship at Christ Church, Oxford; Hume was denied a Chair at Edinburgh. Some changed their affiliations. ‘loland moved from Catholicism to Protestant dissent to ' RGS, 1, 3-4.

4 Introduction pantheism. Butler moved from dissent to the Church of England. One man held himself aloof: Shaftesbury disdained colleges and cells. Another made his afhhation all encompassing: Wesley took the whole world as his parish. (2) ‘Throughout the period, writers were conscious of the history of

their own churches or movements and gave prominence to certain key works of the past. In the eighteenth century English dissenters, Scottish presbyterians, high churchmen, latitudinarians, evangelicals, all looked back to the Reformation and the seventeenth-century divisions in the church in different ways, and singled out specific figures for emulation. Latitudinarians, for example, returned again and again to the examples of Whichcote, Tillotson, and Burnet. Freethinkers and sceptics gave classical writers scriptural status. Shaftesbury venerated Marcus Aurelius; Hume held up De Officus against The Whole Duty of Man. (3) All writers were constrained to a greater or lesser extent, either by their affiliation or their exclusion. Anglican clergy had to find ways of justifying their subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles, though few besides evangelicals believed them literally. Scottish presbyterian moderates were subject to accusations of blasphemy. English dissenters were riven by the controversy over subscription to the doctrine of the ‘Trinity. Freethinkers were constrained by law and prudence from expressing their views freely. (4) Controversial writing assumed that clearly defined sides were ranged against each other. But in

practice the eighteenth-century religious and moral worlds were much more open to each other than such writing implies. Friendship between individuals of different denominations and views was not unusual. Overlapping friendships are of particular interest. Doddridge was at the centre of a huge network of friends of different affiliations, some of whom (e.g. Warburton and Wesley) were resolutely opposed to each other. Hume’s scepticism was very differently regarded by clerics who were his close friends or by those who did not know him. A great deal of reading and teaching was eclectic. Some Protestants read and recommended Roman Catholic works, and some Anglicans read and recommended works by dissenters. University and academy students were introduced to heterodox authors. Hume was not allowed to teach, but his works were lectured on to students at Northampton and Cambridge. This kind of accommodation

was much more common in eighteenth-century intellectual life than is often now assumed.

I have been rebuked by some reviewers and readers, friendly and otherwise, for not entering into debate with modern interpreters. There are three main reasons why I have not done so. The first is simply the practical one of length. ‘The second is that I have concentrated on reading seventeenth- and eighteenth-century debates in their own terms in order to give as accurate an account as possible of what was said and why it was

important at the time. In this volume in particular my approach to

Introduction 5 eighteenth-century moral thought is often very different from that of modern philosophers, though I have indicated my debts to historians of philosophy. I would like to appeal to one of them here. Duncan Forbes uses a striking nautical image to urge historians of political thought to immerse

themselves in their material to such an extent that they can relive and recreate the controversies in which their subjects were engaged: ‘if one is to learn from the study of an old battle or campaign, one must recreate its

every detail with the utmost care and precision, no matter that the uniform, weapons, formations and tactics are wholly outmoded and “irrelevant” ... How many “historians” of political thought are in love with their subjects in the way in which even a novelist like C. S. Forrester, for example, was in love with the ships and naval tactics of the Napoleonic

era? Do we make ourselves equally expert in the spars and rigging and scientific manuals of the old controversies, so that we could, as it were, sail any of those old ships with equal skill ourselves? Most of us would probably be sunk by the lightest pamphleteer.’* I have tried to absorb the language of religion and ethics, to make myself expert in the spars and rigging and manuals of the old controversies, in order to understand just why the ideas of a dissenter or a sceptic or a latitudinarian took the shape and provoked the responses that they did. My third reason for not entering into debates with modern interpreters

is that more than twenty-five years’ experience of reading a very large quantity of controversial literature from the mid-seventeenth to the late eighteenth centuries has convinced me that such debates, then or now, do

not on the whole advance the pursuit of truth, and in them with a few admirable exceptions writers nearly always distort their opponents’ views. When the correspondence of 1651 between Whichcote and ‘Tuckney was first published in 1753, The Monthly Review applauded the fact that the

letters ‘represent to us two men of considerable learning and abilities, preserving an esteem for each other, and living in great friendship and intimacy, notwithstanding an irreconcilable difference of sentiments on

controverted points: an amiable example, and well worthy of being attended to by all who engage in learned controversies.’* The latitudinarian Cambridge divine John Hey, the first Norrisian professor of divinity,

gave in his lectures, delivered in the 1780s and published in 1796, an excellent warning of the dangers of the opposite tendency. Book II, ‘Of Polemical Divinity’, contains a chapter, ‘Of the Qualities of a Controversialist’, in which he defines different kinds of fault, and another, ‘Canons of Controversy’, in which he suggests rules for debate. The faults include

missing the question by ‘urging that such an opinion is held by some 2 Hume’s Philosophical Politics (1975), ‘Introductory Preface’, viii. 3 Monthly Review, YX (1753), 252-3.

6 Introduction person generally disapproved, instead of proving that the opinion is false

... The question is not, whether Mr. Hume wrote such an opinion, but whether it is true.” A common fault is ‘to charge upon our adversary consequences drawn from his doctrines, as if he professed those consequences, as much as the doctrines from which they were drawn’. Another is ‘to throw odium upon an argument, by referring it to an odious party. . .

By the combination of these faults, we find controversy, especially in Books, very different from what it ought to be: a kind of illiberal scolding and fighting, a mutual buffeting of reputations: sometimes, a mere effusion of personal enmity; a wretched disingenuous trial of skill, a literary prizefighting, exhibited to certain spectators, who afford it their attention: the

prize, perhaps, a few followers, or a little applause; or, possibly, the patronage of some powerful Bigots, who have rewards to bestow.’* * Lectures in Divinity (1796), I, 408, 411, 460—66.

The true religion of nature: the freethinkers and their opponents

[The first Earl of Shaftesbury] conferring one day with Major WILDMAN about the many sects of Religion in the world, they came to this conclusion at last; that, notwithstanding those infinite divisions caus’d by the interest of the Priests and the ignorance of the People, ALL WISE MEN ARE OF THE SAME RELIGION: wherupon a Lady in the room, who seem’d to mind her needle more than their discourse, demanded with some concern what that Religion was? to whom the Lord SHAFTESBURY strait reply’d, Madam, wise men never tell. Toland, ‘Clidophorus’, Tetradymus (1720), 94—5

there’s a Religion of Nature and Reason written in the Hearts of every one of us from the first Creation; by which all Mankind must judge of the Truth of any instituted Religion whatever. Tindal, Christeanity as Old as the Creation (1730), 50

Natural Religion, justly so called, is bound up in Revealed, is supported, cherished, and kept alive by it; and cannot so much as subsist in any Vigor without it. To take

away revealed Religion from it, is to strip it of its firmest aids and strongest Securities, leaving it in a very low and languishing State, without Lights sufficient to explain it, or Guards to fence it, or Sanctions to bind it. Waterland, Scripture Vindicated, Part I (1730), 1—2

Certainly whatever evils this nation might have formerly sustained from superstition, no man of common sense will say the evils felt or apprehended at present are from that quarter. Priestcraft is not the reigning distemper at this day. Berkeley, Alciphron (1732)!

What 1s the religion of nature? In what principles is this religion founded? By what

laws is it regulated? What are the bounds by which it is terminated? and what duties does it prescribe? Ogilvie, Inquiry into the Causes of the Infidelity and Scepticism of the Times (1783), 179

1 Freethinking, deism, and atheism The movement known as freethinking or deism has been the subject of a

good deal of confusion, and there has been little agreement among '! Works, ed. Luce and Jessop, III (1950), 218. 7

8 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment historians about either its meaning or its importance. Because of the constrained circumstances in which the freethinkers worked their methods were oblique, with the result that it is often difficult to know how to read

them. Much of their writing was ephemeral and must be disentangled from the contemporary controversies in which they were continually involved, though it is not always possible to separate an argument from its rhetorical context. In recent years several historians have found out a great

deal more about what the freethinkers wrote, the circles in which they moved, and the controversies in which they took part, but this invaluable new information has not produced agreement or solved the problem of interpretation.”

There are three main emphases in the writings of the freethinkers,

though they do not constitute a coherent set of attitudes to which individual freethinkers could subscribe (some of the positions outlined are clearly incompatible with one another). ‘The first is a general anti-Christian stance. Though some freethinkers chose for defensive or other reasons to present themselves at times as Christians and adherents of the Established Church, this is the one position they all share. It consists of hostility on the one hand to Scripture and the scriptural tradition (including the mysteries

contained in it and the process whereby the canon was assembled and transmitted), and on the other to the role of the clergy (always termed priests) and their damaging influence on the people. In the freethinkers’ characteristic terminology the priests exercise a trade called priestcraft, by

means of fraud, cheat and imposture making the people the victims of superstition and prejudice. Sometimes for polemical purposes the true gospel of Christ or primitive Christianity is differentiated from priestly mysteries. This anti-Christian stance is compatible with either a theist

stress on natural religion or with atheist materialism. . The second emphasis is epistemological and methodological. It takes the form of a series of attempts to discover through the use of reason whether religious language has any meaning, whether anything intelligible can be

said about God, and whether the traditional requirement of belief in things above but not contrary to reason is feasible. Though the terms and arguments used are derived from Christian writers — the latitudinarians and Locke — the tendency of these enquiries 1s sceptical, atheist, and

materialist, and freethinkers who accept the existence and traditional * The classic studies are Stephen, English Thought (1876), Chapters 2—4; Robertson, History of Freethought, 4th edn (1936), I. Modern works include Allen, Doubt’s Boundless Sea (1964); Berman, Atheism in Britain (1988), which draws on his earlier articles; Champion, Pillars of Pnestcraft (1992);

Hunter and Wootton, eds., Atheism (1992); M. Jacob, Radical Enlightenment (1981); Lemay, ed., Deism, Masonry, and the Enlightenment (1987); Lund, ed., Margins of Orthodoxy (1995); Redwood, Reason, Ridicule and Religion (1976); Sullivan, Toland and the Deist Controversy (1982). Relevant works

concentrating on continental freethought include Buckley, Origins of Modern Atheism (1987); Kors, Atheism in France, vol. I (1990); Manuel, The Eaghteenth Century Confronts the Gods (1959).

The true religion of nature 9 attributes of God do not engage in them. The implications of these enquiries were not spelt out, though contemporary critics were in no doubt

as to where they led. Some modern readers have been more reluctant to interpret them in a destructive sense. The third emphasis is on natural religion, but the meaning of this much used phrase when divorced from Christianity is problematic. At one end of

the spectrum, it is theoretically possible for natural religion to carry the weight of meaning that it has for the latitudinarian, with the important exception that revealed religion is regarded as being redundant. ‘This position is what is now generally understood by ‘deism’. However, the reason for this separation of natural from revealed religion may be the desire not so much to establish a universal, non-Christian religion as to provide a natural basis for ethics without supernatural religious sanctions.

At the other extreme natural religion may carry the implication of materialism without any religious connotation. In such a situation the phrase is perhaps being used ironically or as a rhetorical device; it 1s certainly being interpreted in a new way. The phrase would obviously mean different things to different kinds of freethinker, for example one who believed in a benevolent providence, one who regarded the concept of

an unknowable first cause as meaningless, or one who regarded God as immanent in nature. Because of this range of opinion freethinking is a better, more inclusive term than deism, which does not describe the views of some freethinkers. There was considerable disagreement at the time about appropriate labels;

often they were applied as terms of opprobrium without any precise meaning attached. Thus the terms Arian, Socinian, and unitarian, which refer to specific versions of Christian theology that were gaining ground in late seventeenth-century England and which in different ways restrict the

function or deny the godhead of Jesus and stress the role of reason in interpreting Scripture, were sometimes loosely jumbled with deist, sceptic, infidel, and atheist, as though they were virtually synonymous. So Toland, summing up the attacks of the clergy on his Christianity not Mysterious (1696), concluded that they made him ‘the Head of all the Arians, Socinians, Deists,

and Infidels in the three Kingdoms’,*® and Collins complained of the way these indiscriminate labels were used against the latitudinarians by their opponents: ‘lf any good Christian happens to reason better than ordinary, they presently charge him with Atheism, Deism, or Socinianism: as if good Sense and

Orthodoxy could not subsist together’ .*

On the face of it these terms are contradictory: the Socinian, however attenuated his theology in the eyes of the orthodox, regards himself as a Christian and takes the Bible seriously; the deist believes in God; the 3 Vindicius Laberius (1702), 150. + Discourse of Free- Thinking (1713), 84.

10 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment atheist does not. But the linking of these terms by the clerical opponents of the freethinkers was more than a smear. The freethinkers borrowed some of their methodology from the Socinians, and their opponents were right to stress this fact. Similarly, there is something to be said for the clergy’s repeated assertion that deism is disguised atheism. ‘Toland complained that

the word atheist was thrown around so much that it was like calling everyone a son of a whore — ‘it ordinarily signifys no more than a Man’s being passionatly displeas’d against those who dissent from him’.? The modern reader must try to distinguish the reasoned use of the term from the careless and vindictive. If the freethinkers were atheists, there were good grounds for them to disguise the fact, as their opponents well knew. Locke’s view of atheists in A Letter concerning Toleration (1689) as destroyers

of all promises, covenants, and oaths who must not be tolerated in society was very widely shared.®° Locke argued in An Essay concerning Human

Understanding that it was fear that prevented atheists from declaring themselves: the Complaints of Atheism, made from the Pulpit, are not without Reason. And though only some profligate Wretches own it too barefacedly now; yet, perhaps,

we should hear, more than we do, of it, from others, did not the fear of the Magistrate’s Sword, or their Neighbour’s Censure, tie up Peoples ‘Tongues; which, were the Apprehensions of Punishment, or Shame taken away, would as openly proclaim their Atheism, as their Lives do.’

Locke was himself unjustly accused of atheism, and in A Vindication of The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) tried to establish criteria to prevent the indiscriminate application of the term: ‘atheism being a crime, which, for

its madness as well as guilt, ought to shut a man out of all sober and civil society, should be very warily charged on any one, by deductions and

consequences, which he himself does not own, or, at least, do not manifestly and unavoidably flow from what he asserts’.° The problem is that in a society in which atheism is a crime the atheist is most unlikely to let such consequences flow manifestly; he must be circumspect and disguise

himself. So all accusations of atheism involve a deductive leap. Richard Bentley succinctly spelt out in his Boyle lectures the assumptions that were

made: |

> Vindicius Liberius, 42.

6 Works, 12th edn (1824), V, 47. Locke’s Latin text was translated by William Popple. See J. Dunn, ‘The Claim to Freedom of Conscience’, in Grell et al., eds., From Persecution to Toleration (1991), 178ff Harris, Mind of Locke (1994), 185ff; Marshall, Locke: Resistance, Religion and Responsibility

(1994), 357-70. ’ Essay, 4th enlarged edn (1700), ed. Nidditch (1975), 88. The Essay was first published in 1690.

8 Works, VI, 161-2. Locke was replying to the attacks of John Edwards. See V. Nuovo, Introductions to The Reasonableness of Christianity (1997) and John Locke and Christianity (1997); the

second includes extracts from Edwards.

The true religion of nature 1] There are some infidels among us that not only disbelieve the Christian religion, but oppose the assertions of Providence, of the ammortalty of the soul, of an universal judgment to come, and of any incorporeal essence; and yet, to avoid the odious name of Atheists, would shelter and screen themselves under a new one of Dersts, which is not quite so obnoxious.

Bentley’s view is that the modern disguised Dezsts do only call themselves so for the former reason of Epicurus, to decline the public odium and resentment of the magistrate, and that they cover the most arrant Atheism under the mask and shadow of a Deity; by

which they understand no more than some eternal inanimate matter, some universal nature, and soul of the world, void of all sense and cogitation, so far from being endowed with infinite wisdom and goodness.?

Bentley’s view is worth taking seriously (and its implications will be considered in sections 2 and 3 below), though he is wrong to lump all ‘deists’ together. Here it is important to note that it is their opponents who

apply the term freely; the ‘deists’ rarely call themselves such. Their favourite name, freethinker, suggests adherence not to a particular religious position or set of ethical tenets but to a frame of mind and a method of enquiry. Collins defines freethinking as ‘The Use of the Understanding, in endeavouring to find out the Meaning of any Proposition whatsoever, in considering the nature of the Evidence for or against 1t, and in judging of it according to the seeming

Force or Weakness of the Evidence.’'° It entails the obligation not to accept any

argument on any authority except that of reason. Collins argues in the Preface to A Discourse of the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion (1724),

setting out an important series of principles, that it is a basic human right and also a duty, because without freethinking and its necessary concomitants, free professing, free teaching, and free debate, error may triumph or truth may be supported only by authority and not by its own merits. The ultimate aim of the freethinker 1s truth: Men have no reason to apprehend any ill consequence to truth (for which alone they ought to have any concern) from /ree debate; but on the contrary to apprehend ill consequence to truth from /ree debate being disallow’d . . . And while free debate is

allow’d, truth will never want a professor thereof, nor an advocate to offer some plea in its behalf: and it can never be wholly banish’d, but where human decisions, back’d with power, carry all before them."

Freethinking is a rational process by which truth is discovered; it does not presuppose what that truth is. The freethinkers’ opponents, however, * Sermon I, ‘The Folly of Atheism, and (what is now called) Deism’ (1692), Works, ed. Dyce (1838), IfI, 4, 6-7. On the Boyle lectures see below, p. 17. Stillingfleet makes a similar point in the Preface to Vindication of the Doctrine of the Trinity (1697), 1h: “if they be pressed home, very few among them will sincerely own any more than a Series of Causes, without any intellectual Perfections, which they call God.’

10 Free- Thinking, 5. 1 Grounds and Reasons, xvii—viii.

12 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment objected strongly to their appropriation of the term. A freethinker, according to the orthodox Euphranor in Berkeley’s Alciphron, ought to mean

‘every honest inquirer after truth in any age or country’.!? But the socalled freethinkers, according to their critics, had no time for those whose

freethinking led to conclusions different from theirs, and far from encouraging freedom of thought they inculcated atheist dogma, the worst kind of slavery: ‘under the specious show of Free-thinking,’ objected Bentley,

‘a Set and System of Opinions are all along inculcated and dogmatically Taught: Opinions the most Slavish, the most abject and base, that Human

Nature is capable of’;'’ ‘upon a thorough and impartial view’, agreed Berkeley, ‘it will be found that their endeavours, instead of advancing the cause of liberty and truth, tend only to introduce slavery and error among men.’'* Bentley suggested that the freethinkers would soon renounce the

name if the clergy were to profess that they were themselves the true freethinkers.'? Berkeley refused to allow them the name and called them instead the minute philosophers, ‘they being a sort of sect which diminish all the most valuable things, the thoughts, views, and hopes of men’.!© Because the freethinkers’ methods had consequences which their opponents deplored, these critics denied that they had any serious methods at all: their real motivation was licentiousness and libertinism, not liberty of thought. This identification of freethinking with libertinism was rightly attacked by the third Earl of Shaftesbury as ‘a treacherous Language, and

Abuse of Words’, but he in turn accused his clerical opponents of deliberately fostering superstition and bigotry: THE artificial Managers of this human Frailty declaim against Free-Thought, and Latitude of Understanding. ‘To go beyond those Bounds of thinking which they have

prescrib’d, is by them declar’d a Sacrilege. To them, FREEDOM of Mind, a MASTERY of Sense, and a LIBERTY in Thought and Action, imply Debauch, Corruption, and Depravity ... *Tis to them doubtless that we owe the Opprobriousness and Abuse of those naturally honest Appellations of Free-Livers, FreeThinkers, Latitudinarians, or whatever other Character implies a Largeness of Mind and generous Use of Understanding. Fain wou’d they confound Licentiousness in Morals, with Liberty in Thought and Action; and make the Libertine, who has the least Mastery of himself, resemble his direct Opposite.’

Each side in the dispute denied that its opponents had intellectual honesty '2 Works, ed. Luce and Jessop, III, 34. 13 Remarks upon a Late Discourse of Free- Thinking (3rd edn, 1713), 4.

4 Berkeley, Guardian no. 83, Works, ed. Luce and Jessop, VII, 216. 'S Remarks, Part II (1713), 19. 16 Alciphron, Works, U1, ed. Luce and Jessop, 46. The label is taken from Cicero’s minuti philosophi, who do not believe in life after death, at the end of De Senectute, xxiii, 85.

'7 Characteristicks (2nd edn, 1714, Ist published 1711), II, 311, 305, 306. All subsequent references are to this edition unless otherwise stated. For publication details see Chapter 2 below. Collins quoted the last sentence (omitting ‘who . . . himself’) on the title page of Free- Thinking.

The true religion of nature 13 or good faith. ‘The freethinkers claimed that the clergy were out to gag and

blind the people in order to keep themselves in business; the clergy claimed that the freethinkers manipulated rational tools for purely destructive purposes and to justify their own immorality. But though they utterly misrepresented each others’ motives, both sides were clearly aware of what the issues at stake were. Though freethinking in some form can be traced back to the Common-

wealth period and earlier, it took recognisable shape in the 1690s in the ideas and activities of a few influential individuals, the most important of whom were John ‘Toland (1670-1722), Anthony Collins (1676-1729), Matthew ‘Tindal (1657-1733), and Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671—1713).'® The principal disseminator of freethinking views before the Revolution of 1688 was Charles Blount (1654—93). The controversy between later freethinkers and their clerical opponents continued well into the 1740s and 50s, but the crucial years are from the late 1690s to the early 1730s. The freethinkers of this period differed consider-

ably from each other in their social position and way of life. Toland, by

birth an Irish Catholic who converted to Presbyterianism and was educated at Scottish and Dutch universities, was a professional writer and political opportunist who was increasingly distrusted by his associates; Collins, educated at Eton and King’s College, Cambridge, was a country gentleman and JP; ‘Tindal was a lawyer and fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, all his adult life, and had been a Roman Catholic convert in the reign of James II; Shaftesbury was a wealthy and politically influential

nobleman. ‘They had, however, certain important points in common. Politically they were extreme Whigs, in varying degrees either sympathetic

to or active propagators of the republican tradition of the 1650s, and hostile to the political power of the Established Church. In the 1690s Toland wrote political tracts in collaboration with Shaftesbury and other Whigs, and edited a very important collection of the political writings and memoirs of republicans of the Commonwealth and Restoration period: Harrington, Milton, Holles, Sidney, and Ludlow.!? In addition to their common political sympathies, the freethinkers in different ways were associated with John Locke (1632—1704).*° Locke had been political adviser and friend to Shaftesbury’s grandfather, the first Earl, and was in

charge of the education of the future third Earl; after Locke’s death 18 On Toland see Des Maizeaux, ‘Some Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mr. John Toland’, in Toland, Miscellaneous Works, ed. Des Maizeaux (1747), I; Champion, Pillars of Pnestcraft; Daniel,

Toland (1984); Heinemann, “Toland and the Age of Enlightenment’, RES, XX (1944), 125-46;

Sullivan, Toland. On Collins see Berman, ‘Collins: Aspects of his Thought and Writings’, Hermathena, XCVIL (1975), 49-70; Berman, History of Atheism, Chapter 3; O’Higgins, Collins (1970). On Shaftesbury see Chapter 2 below, n.4. '9 See Worden, Introduction to Ludlow, Voyce from the Watch Tower (1978). 20 On Locke and his times see Fox Bourne, Life of Locke (1876).

14 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment Shaftesbury made explicit his dislike of Locke’s philosophy. Collins became

an extremely close friend of Locke at the end of his life, as appears from Locke’s affectionate letters of 1703—4.*! Tindal corresponded with Locke, and Toland certainly knew him, though Locke was careful to distance himself once ‘Ioland’s freethinking views and publications had made him an embarrassment.** The ways in which the freethinkers both quarried and undermined Locke’s epistemology and his moral and religious beliefs is a complicated matter which will be explored below. A further common bond was the impact of Holland. With the exception

of ‘Tindal, about the details of whose life not much is known, the freethinkers each spent periods of time in Holland in the 1690s and after, as Locke had done in the 1680s, where they came in contact with Locke’s

friends the Remonstrants Le Clerc and Limborch and the Quaker Benjamin Furly, with the sceptical Calvinist Pierre Bayle, and in general with Huguenot, dissenting, and freethinking groups. Holland, with its tolerance of heterodox ideas and religious sects combined with material

prosperity, seemed a haven of liberty and peace unknown in other countries;*° it could provide both a refuge for freethinkers wishing to avoid the uproar their publications had caused in England (as was the case with Toland and Collins following the receptions respectively of Christianity not Mysterious and A Discourse of Free-Thinking\, and a stimulus for intellectual development (thus ‘Toland originally went to Holland in 1692 to train for

the dissenting ministry and came back a freethinker).** In turn, Dutch journals, publishers and societies were the main channels through which English freethought reached the rest of Europe.”° Despite these significant links the four freethinkers named did not form a cohesive, homogeneous group; indeed, they differed from each other on some essential issues. Shaftesbury was proud of his ‘generall Acquaintance .. . with most of our Modern Authors and free-Writers, severall of whome I have a particular influence over’.2° He knew Collins well, as some letters

of 1711 and 1712 testify?” and for a time both worked with and gave financial support to Toland. The extent of Shaftesbury’s friendship with Toland was concealed by his son, the fourth Earl, who was anxious to present his father as an orthodox Christian. In 1699 ‘Toland published anonymously Shaftesbury’s ethical treatise, An Inquiry concerning Virtue, or Ment, probably with Shaftesbury’s approval (though this was denied by his 2! In Locke, Correspondence, ed. de Beer, vols. 7 and especially 8. 22 See Sullivan, Toland, 6—8, and n.125 below. 23 See Collins, Grounds and Reasons, xxx-XxxXi.

24 Sullivan, Toland, 11, O’Higgins, Collins, 78, M. Jacob, Newtonians (1976), 212-13. 25M. Jacob, Radical Enlightenment, Chapter 5.

26 To Pierre Des Maizeaux, 5 August 1701, in Voitle, Shaftesbury (1984), 90; modernised in Shaftesbury, Life, Letters, ed. Rand (1900), 307.

7 Life, Letters, ed. Rand, 479-80.

The true religion of nature 15 son).7® Yet this very interesting conjunction serves to underline the difference between Shaftesbury and the other freethinkers. Shaftesbury’s unique importance was as the developer of a moral theory grounded in human nature and of a new moral vocabulary which was to have a wide

and lasting influence later in the century, especially in Scotland. In contrast, neither ‘Toland nor Collins wrote ethical works, and ‘lindal’s Christianity as Old as the Creation (1730), which makes some pretension to

that status and which owes a debt to Shaftesbury, is a disappointing book

which deserved some at least of the scorn of its contemporary critics. Tindal, however, like Shaftesbury, was a deist and showed no interest in the materialist theories of Collins and Toland, nor in the sceptical purposes to which Lockean epistemology might be put. Against these lay proponents of freethinking the clergy were drawn up. To the freethinkers it seemed that the priests joined ranks to defend their political power and social position — their trade. But the response was by no means from a monolithic body; clergy and ministers of all denominations and persuasions took part in the attack — it was perhaps the only cause that could temporarily unite them. Scottish Calvinists like ‘Thomas

Halyburton, dissenters like Isaac Watts, nonjurors like William Law, heterodox Anglicans like Samuel Clarke, orthodox ones like Edmund

Gibson, however much they disagreed on matters of doctrine and discipline from the point of view of their respective churches and groupings, were in no doubt that the freethinking movement was not only antiChristian but also fundamentally anti-religious, and consequently that its tendency was to make any kind of coherent and workable ethics impossible except on the basis of libertinism or Hobbesian coercion. Critical writing against the freethinkers took two main forms: general attempts to demolish the principles of freethinking and strengthen the authority of Christianity,

and specific attacks on individual authors and their books. The same attack might embody both forms. Among the general attacks on the freethinkers’ principles, the most important are those by Samuel Clarke

(1675-1729), George Berkeley (1685-1753), and Joseph Butler (1692-1752). Clarke, though heterodox in his theology (his doubts about

the doctrine of the Trinity made it impossible for him to rise in the Church, despite his abilities), was the most influential latitudinarian philosopher in the eighteenth century.*” He gave the Boyle lectures in 1704 and 1705, the first set entitled A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes 28 ‘A Sketch of the Life of the Third Earl of Shaftesbury’, in Life, Letters, ed. Rand, xxiii, xxvi-viii; cf Voitle, Shaftesbury, 134-5, 198-9. 29 On Clarke see Hoadly, ‘An Account of the Life and Writings of Dr. Clarke’, in Hoadly, Works,

III (1773), an adulatory account originally prefixed to Clarke’s Sermons (1730) and his Works (1738); Whiston, Memoirs of Clarke (1730), which concentrates on the heterodoxy that Hoadly avoids; Ferguson, An Eighteenth Century Heretic (1976).

16 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment of God (published 1705), the second A Discourse concerning the Unchangeable Obligations of Natural Religion, and the Truth and Certainty of the Christian

Revelation (1706). ‘he first deals in part with atheism, materialism, and necessitarianism, and is concerned with Hobbes, Spinoza, and _ their followers (among whom Toland is named),*° the second with deism. Although Clarke posits four theoretical kinds of deist, this is purely a hypothesis set up in order to be knocked down. ‘The challenging part of his argument is that there is no tenable position called deism midway between

atheism and Christianity: natural religion supposes revealed religion.*! This view was shared by Berkeley, the most formidable of the freethinkers’ opponents, who could fight them with their own rhetorical weapons. In his lifetime Berkeley was more valued as a defender of the Church (he rose to be Bishop of Cloyne) than as a philosopher.°* He attacked the freethinkers

repeatedly, in particular in a series of essays occasioned by Collins’s Discourse of Free- Thinking and published in Steele’s periodical The Guardian (1713). Berkeley, who in one letter signed himself Misatheus (atheist hater),

undertook to do all he could ‘to render their persons as despicable, and their practices as odious, as they deserve’.°* These attacks were elaborated

in his philosophical dialogue Alciphron (1732), in which Alciphron, a follower of Shaftesbury, and Lysicles, an atheist and libertine, are con-

fronted with the arguments of the Christians Euphranor and Crito. Berkeley objected to the slipperiness and changeableness of the ‘philosophical knight-errants’ and to their misleading emphasis on natural religion, which prevented some of their readers from catching their drift.%* Collins and Shaftesbury were his particular bugbears, with Tindal lagging behind; Toland does not seem to have struck him as important.*° In The Theory of Vision Vindicated (1733) Berkeley summed up his campaign to expose the freethinkers’ methods and intentions: ...1fI see [atheism] in their writings, if they own it in their conversation, if their ideas imply it, if their ends are not answered but by supposing it, if their leading author [Collins] hath pretended to demonstrate atheism, but thought fit to conceal his demonstration from the public; if this was known in their clubs, and yet that author was nevertheless followed, and represented to the world as a believer of natural religion; if these things are so (and I know them to be so), surely what the 30 Being and Attributes (1705), 46, 109-10.

5! Natural Religion (1706), 42—5. The running head for this work is The Evidences of Natural and Revealed Religion, hence it is sometimes cited as Evidences in the eighteenth century. 52 See Berman, Berkeley (1994), Luce, Berkeley (1949), Walmsley, Rhetoric of Berkeley’s Philosophy 1990).

33 Berkeley Works, ed. Luce and Jessop, VU, 176, 224. On the various attempts at identifying Berkeley’s contributions to the Guardian see Berman, Berkeley, 73-7. 5* Berkeley, Works, ed. Luce and Jessop, III, 321.

5° For Berkeley’s attacks on Collins or ‘Diagoras’, see especially Works, ed. Luce and Jessop, I, 2954; Hl, 52, 163-4, 296; VII, 188-90; on Shaftesbury or ‘Cratylus’ see Works, I, 252—3; III, Dialogue 3, 199ff VIL, 198—200; on Tindal see Works, I, 251.

The true religion of nature 17 favourers of their schemes would palliate, it is the duty of others to display and refute.*®

The most long-lived of the main attacks on the principles of freethinking was Butler’s Analogy of Religion Natural and Revealed to the Constitution and

Course of Nature (1736).°’ His Advertisement made clear the occasion of his work:

It 1s come, I know not how, to be taken for granted, by many persons, that Christianity is not so much as a subject of inquiry; but that it 1s, now at length, discovered to be fictitious. And accordingly they treat it, as if, in the present age, © this were an agreed point among all people of discernment; and nothing remained, but to set it up as a principal subject of mirth and ridicule, as it were by way of reprisals, for its having so long interrupted the pleasures of the world.*®

Unlike Clarke and Berkeley, Butler did not descend to attacks on individuals, but parts of his argument were clearly directed at those of Collins and

especially Tindal.°? In his conclusion he made clear that his chosen audience consisted not of scoffers but of those whose infidelity was based on speculative principles and who could be argued with about evidence.*°

Other encounters with freethinking principles do not have the same philosophical importance. But several are worth consulting and make interesting individual points, for example ‘Thomas Halyburton’s Natural Religion Insufficient . . . or, A Rational Enquiry into the Principles of the Modern

Deists (1714), which from a Calvinist point of view blames latitude in no uncertain terms for the rise of deism; Edmund Gibson’s Pastoral Letters to the People of his Diocese (1728-31), particularly the second, in which conversely

the freethinkers’ misapplication of Restoration latitudinarian thought is stressed; and Isaac Watts’s The Strength and Weakness of Human Reason (1731),

which is more gentle in its treatment of freethinkers than many Anglican accounts.*! Freethinking is a continual preoccupation of the early Boyle lectures delivered between 1692 and 1714, to which Bentley was the first contributor; in his dedicatory letter to the Boyle trustees Bentley quotes from Boyle’s will defining the purpose of the sermons as ‘for proving the Christian religion against notorious infidels, viz. Atheists, Deists, Pagans,

Jews, and Mahometans; not descending to any controversies that are among Christians themselves’.** A particularly useful book is the dissenter John Leland’s A View of the Principal Detstical Writers that have appeared in 5©° Works, ed. Luce and Jessop, I, 254—5. For Berkeley’s attitude to Collins see Berman, ‘Collins and the Question of Atheism’, PRIA, LXXV/C (1975), 85-102.

37 On Butler see Chapter 3 below, n.51. 38 Butler, Analogy, Works, ed. Bernard, I, xvii—viii. 39 Analogy, Part I, Chapter 6; Part II, Chapters 1, 6, 8. 40 Analogy, Works, 1, 269—70. 41 For Watts see RGS, I.

*2 Bentley, Works, ed. Dyce, III, xv—xvi. The lectures up to 1732 were collected as A Defence of Natural and Revealed Religion, ed. Letsome and Nicholl, 3 vols. (1739). The series continued throughout the century.

18 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment England in the Last and Present Century.*? Leland begins with Lord Herbert of

Cherbury in the 1620s, and goes through to the infidels of the 1750s, Bolingbroke and Hume — indeed the bulk of the work is devoted to these immediate threats. Leland is useful for two main reasons: he provides an analysis of the arguments of each freethinker and the writers against him (he is superficial on Toland and Collins, sensible on Tindal, and very acute

on Shaftesbury), and he pays some attention to the freethinkers’ use of terms (especially natural religion) and their characteristic rhetorical devices. A forceful and entertaining work which deserves to be much better known is Philip Skelton’s Ophiomaches: or Detsm Revealed (1749, revised

1751), a dialogue (probably influenced by Berkeley’s Alciphron) between Mr Shepherd, an orthodox clergyman, Mr Dechaine, his deist landlord, Mr ‘Templeton, Dechaine’s ward, and Mr Cunningham, a deist clergyman who is Templeton’s tutor. Skelton thought the defenders of orthodoxy were too gentle with their adversaries; his aim was to bring ‘real Deism, and real

Christianity, into the field, to confront each other’.** At the end of the dialogue Shepherd rescues Templeton from the corrupting effects of his education, in the course of which he has had deist principles imposed on him under the guise of Christianity. Like Halyburton, Skelton thought the latitudinarians bore much of the blame for this state of affairs. His targets were thus not only the freethinkers, in particular Shaftesbury and Tindal, but also divines such as Tillotson and Clarke. Attacks on individual writers often came in waves, in response to the publication of a particular book: ‘Toland’s Christianity not Mysterious (1696), Collins’s Discourse of Free-Thinking (1713), Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion (1724) and The Scheme of Lateral Prophecy Considered (1727), ‘Tindal’s The Rights of the Christian Church Asserted (1706) and Christianity as Old as the

Creation (1730) all provoked many replies. ‘Two that are worth attention

because of the important issues they raise are Peter Browne’s reply to Toland, A Letter in Answer to a Book entituled, Christianity not Mysterious (1697),

and William Law’s to Tindal, The Case of Reason, or Natural Religion, Fairly and Fully Stated. In Answer to a Book, entitul’d, Christianity as Old as the Creation

(1731). Browne tried to solve the problem of Toland’s sceptical treatment of belief in things of which we have no clear and distinct ideas by using the

doctrine of analogy;*? he developed this argument at length in The Procedure, Extent, and Limits of Human Understanding (1728), providing in the

Introduction an interesting summary of the freethinkers’ methods as he saw them. Law’s attack on Tindal is based on a questioning of assumptions 43 Deistical Writers was first published in 3 vols. (1754—6), with Vol. II on Hume and Bolingbroke; it was rearranged in 2 vols. in 1757.

*4 Deism Revealed, 2nd edn (1751), I, xiii. For the Irish dimension of attacks on freethinking see Chapter 3 below, n.6. 45 See below, pp. 63—4.

The true religion of nature 19 about the definition and role of reason that were very widely held in the early eighteenth century. But the freethinkers were not always the recipients. Gibson’s Pastoral Letters provoked indignant replies from Tindal, An Address to the Inhabitants of... London and Westminster (1729, revised 1730) and A Second Address (1730). ‘The battle in this case was partly fought over the proper interpretation of intellectual sources. Assessing the origins of freethinking is a complex matter: there has been much disagreement as to the principal influences on the freethinkers and their relative importance. One useful way of considering the problem is to look at the freethinkers’ debt to two main groups, first of those who were

generally regarded as subversive, and second of those who were on the

whole acceptable to the orthodox. The first group includes Herbert, Hobbes, Bruno, Spinoza, Bayle, and the Socinians; the second includes the latitudinarians, Locke, and the classical moralists, especially Cicero. The claims of some of these must be examined. Halyburton devoted several chapters of Natural Religion Insufficient to Herbert, and called him on the title page ‘the great Patron of Deism’; he was followed in this approach by Leland, who gave a fair account of what

he knew of Herbert’s work in the first two letters of Principal Detstical Writers. Leland describes Herbert as ‘one of the first that formed Deism into a System, and asserted the sufficiency, universality, and absolute perfection, of natural religion, with a view to discard all extraordinary revelation, as useless and needless’.*° The main philosophical and religious

works of Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1582—1648), written in Latin and published in the seventeenth century, are De Veritate (1624, with several subsequent editions), De Religione Laci (1645), and De Religione Gentilium (1663).*’7 There was an English translation of the last as The Antient Religion of the Gentiles (1705), the others remaining untranslated until the twentieth century.*® In addition an English work, A Dialogue between a

Tutor and his Pupil, which popularises part of the arguments of the Latin works, circulated in manuscript in the seventeenth century but was not published until 1768.*9 Herbert’s ideas were borrowed and passages from his works incorporated by Charles Blount (who had access to the manuscript Dialogue) in his own Religio Laict (1683) and The Oracles of Reason (1693). ‘The attitudes Herbert most obviously shares with the later freethinkers are bitter and often satirical hostility to priests, superstition, and mysteries, and the championing of philosophy against organised religion. 46 Principal Deistical Writers, 4th edn (1764), I, 3.

#7 On Herbert see Bedford, Defence of Truth (1979) and especially Griffin, ‘Studies in Herbert’ 1993).

48 De Votat trans. Carré (1937); De Religione Laict, Hutcheson (1944). Griffin, p. 213, argues for the title Religio Lait; however, as Hutcheson’s translation 1s cited his title is used. 49 See Griffin, ‘A Dialogue between a Tutor and his Pupil’, EMS, VII (1998), 162-201.

20 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment His most important contribution to religious thought is his theory of the five fundamental articles of religion, which are also designated common

notions or catholic truths: there is a supreme God; he ought to be worshipped; virtue is the most important part of worship and religious practice; men should repent of their sins; there are rewards and punishments after death.°° The epistemology of common notions underlying Herbert’s natural religion as well as that of the latitude-men was attacked by Locke in Book I, Chapter 3 of An Essay concerning Human Understanding.°'

Indeed Herbert’s natural religion is much more like that of the latitudemen than that of the freethinkers (Shaftesbury and Tindal are somewhat closer to Herbert in this respect than Toland and Collins), but the reverse is true of his attitude to revealed religion. In some ways the term ‘deist’ fits

Herbert in the early seventeenth century much better than it does the ‘deists’ in the early eighteenth, who did not acknowledge a specific debt to him (though this is not in itself decisive) and who should not be regarded as his heirs. However it 1s worth comparing his work to theirs, for the differences as well as the similarities, in order to clarify the meaning of the problematic phrase natural religion.°* A more recent approach has been to look for sources for freethinking in

some of the versions of materialism of the Interregnum period. The freethinkers’ opponents were always keen to associate them with Thomas Hobbes (1588—1679), who was frequently linked with Spinoza and Bayle as among their favourite authors.°? Hobbes’s selfish ethics, his author-

itarian political system and his repudiation of religious toleration and freedom of thought all seem to make him a thoroughly inappropriate ancestor of the freethinkers, and indeed Shaftesbury’s ethics are in part an

answer to Hobbes.°* The freethinkers hardly ever name him with approval, though Blount’s friendship with and admiration for Hobbes are plain in The Oracles of Reason, and Collins includes him — ‘notwithstanding

his several false Opinions, and his High-Church Polticks’ — in his list of freethinkers of the past, of which more will be said below.°? Leland devotes Letter III of his Principal Deistical Writers to Hobbes, and observes that not

many modern deists want to be thought to espouse his system, but that several have borrowed some of their principles from him, notably the materiality and mortality of the soul, and the denial of man’s free agency.?°

He probably has Toland and especially Collins in mind: Collins argued 50 De Veritate (1937), 291—302; see also De Religione Laici (1944), 129; Religion of the Gentiles (1705), 300, 354, 367; Dialogue (1768), 7.

91 Essay, ed. Nidditch, 77. On common notions see RGS, I, 59-63. °2 Cf Sullivan, Toland, 220-32. 53. See e.g. Berkeley, Works, ed. Luce and Jessop, I, 254; Law, Case of Reason, 125.

°4 See Chapter 2 below, pp. 88-9. °° Blount, Oracles of Reason, in Miscellaneous Works (1695), 97 Collins, Free- Thinking, 170. °6 Principal Deistical Writers, I, 35.

The true religion of nature 21 that the soul is material and that man is a necessary agent in a series of exchanges with Clarke (1707-8) and in A Philosophical Inquiry concerning Human Liberty (1717). Hobbes is significant as an antecedent not only for his materialism but also for his treatment of priests and Scripture, and his development of an evasive, equivocating rhetoric, something at which the freethinkers were adepts.°’ It seems fair to say that the freethinkers drew on aspects of Hobbes’s treatment of religion and natural philosophy while

discounting the uncongenial aspects of his moral and political thought. Another materialist of the Interregnum and Restoration period and friend of Hobbes, Henry Stubbe (1632-76), has been identified as the principal link between the freethinking of the earlier period and the 1690s. Stubbe’s An Account of the Rise and Progress of Mahometanism, written in the 1670s, circulated in manuscript for some years after; it was drawn on by Blount in

The Oracles of Reason, and may have influenced ‘Toland’s account in Nazarenus (1718) of primitive Christianity and its corruption.?®

Alongside the English tradition of materialist thought was a continental

tradition of pantheism, which was capable of being interpreted in a materialist way and which profoundly influenced Toland. The principal exponents of pantheism — the belief that God and nature are the same and that the universe is eternal and infinite — were the Dutch Jew Benedict de

Spinoza (1632-77) and the Italian Giordano Bruno (1548-1600). Both were outcasts — Spinoza was excommunicated by the Synagogue at Amsterdam, and Bruno was burnt after condemnation by the Inquisition at Rome. Spinoza was regarded by the orthodox in the second half of the

seventeenth century with the same horror as Hobbes: his Yractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670; translated into English, 1689) was soon noted as a

potential threat by Stillingfleet in A Letter to a Deist (1677), and systematic

refutations of his major work, the Hthica (1677), were made by, among others, the dissenter John Howe in The Living Temple, I (1702) and Clarke in The Being and Attributes of God (1705).°? Toland knew Spinoza’s Ethics, and

gave serious consideration to Spinoza in Letters to Serena (1704), IV and V;

although he disagreed with some of Spinoza’s arguments, it was from a materialist point of view, and he praised Spinoza for his qualities as a

97 See e.g. Leviathan, Part I, Chapter 12, Part IV, Chapters 45, 47. On the question of Hobbes’s religious views see P. Springborg, ‘Hobbes on Religion’, in Sorell, ed., Cambridge Companion to Hobbes (1996). On his practice of rhetoric see Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric (1996), Chapter 10. 58 See J. Jacob, Stubbe (1983), Chapters 4 and 8. °9 Stillingfleet, Letter to a Deist (1677), A4”; Howe, Living Temple, Part II, Chapter 1, in Works (1724),

I; Clarke, Being and Attributes, 50, 130, 141. For Howe see RGS, I. See Colie, ‘Spinoza and the Early English Deists’, JHZ, XX (1959), 23—46, ‘Spinoza in England, 1665-1730’, PAPS, CVII

(1963), 183-219; M. Jacob, Radical Enlightenment, 48-53; G. Reedy, ‘Spinoza, Stillingfleet, Prophecy, and “‘Enlightenment’’,’ in Lemay, ed., Deism.

22 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment man.°° In the case of Bruno, who may have exercised some influence on

Spinoza, Toland rediscovered an author who was no longer known in England at the end of the seventeenth century: he acquired and circulated texts and manuscripts in England and on the continent, arranged for the publication of a translation of Bruno’s Spaccio della Bestia Trionfante (1584) (The Expulsion of the Trumphant Beast) n 1713, and made an abridgement of De U’Infinito Universo et Mondi (1584) as ‘An Account of Jordano Bruno’s Book

of the Infinite Universe and Innumerable Worlds’.°! Considerable attention has been given by modern scholars to Toland’s debt to Bruno; it is evident in Letters to Serena IV and V and particularly in the mtroductory ‘Dissertation upon the Infinite and Eternal Universe’ in Pantheisticon (1720, translated 1751), though Bruno himself is not named.” The influence of Pierre Bayle (1647—1706) was of a very ditferent kind:

it was on method, on freethinking itself, rather than on the content of the

freethinkers’ beliefs. Shaftesbury, a correspondent and close friend of Bayle, testified after Bayle’s death in a letter of 21 January 1707 to the nature of that influence: But if to be confirm’d in any good Principle be by Debate & Argument after thorow scrutiny to re-admit what was first implanted by prevention; I may then say, in truth, that whatever is most vallewable to me of this kind has been owing in

great measure to this our Friend whom the World call’d Scepticall. Whatever Opinion of mine stood not the Test of his piercing Reason, I learnt by degrees either to discard as frivilouse, or not to rely on, with that Boldness as before: but That which bore the Tryall I priz’d as purest Gold.®?

Bayle, a French Huguenot who took refuge in Holland, was regarded by most of his contemporaries as an atheist and philosophical sceptic, though the recent tendency has been to see him (perhaps wrongly) as a fideist and orthodox Calvinist.°* He delighted in intellectual contradictions, such as the impossibility of a rational explication of the problem of evil and of reconciling reason and faith, and in challenging received authorities and setting them against each other. He defended the toleration of atheists (an extraordinary position to make public in the late seventeenth century), and in Pensées Diverses sur la Cométe (1680), translated as Miscellaneous Reflections, Occasion’d by the Comet (1708), made the notorious suggestion that a virtuous

atheist was a possibility (Toland refers to this view in his praise of Spinoza, 60 Letters to Serena, 133; cf ‘Mangoneutes’, Tetradymus (1720), 185.

61 The ‘Account’ was published in Des Maizeaux’s posthumous collection of Toland’s Miscellaneous Works, I, 316—49. On Bruno see Singer, Bruno (1950). 62 See Heinemann, RES, XX (1944), 140; M. Jacob, Newtonians, 226-35, 245-7, Radical Enlightenment, 35-9. 63 Voitle, Shaftesbury, 221; also in Life, Letters, ed. Rand, 374.

64 On Bayle’s English reception see Courtines, Bayle’s Relations with England (1938). D. Wootton, ‘Pierre Bayle, Libertine?’, in M. A. Stewart, ed., Studies in Seventeenth-Century European Philosophy

(1997), argues against revisionist readings.

The true religion of nature 23 and Berkeley includes the freethinker Thrasenor, who believed that ‘a republic of atheists might live very happily together’, in his list of minute philosophers in Alciphron).®° Bayle’s major work, his Dictionnaire Historique et

Critique (4 volumes, 1697; 2nd edn 1702), was widely read in England; Des

Maizeaux, the friend of ‘Toland and Collins, did much to make Bayle’s work known in England and published a translation of the Dictionary in five volumes (1734-38), with a Life of Bayle in Volume I.°° Bayle’s sceptical

methods are reflected (though on a smaller scale) in Collins’s work and interests. Collins had an enormous private library of both orthodox and freethinking works, with many items by Bayle,°’ on which he could draw for sceptical purposes: setting authorities against each other and hence destroying the reader’s confidence in them is the basic technique of the Discourse of Hree- Thinking.

A more specific influence on the freethinkers’ methodology was that of the Socinians. The term Socinianism (which derives from the name of the sixteenth-century Italian reformer Faustus Socinus, who spread his doctrines in Poland) was giving way by the end of the seventeenth century to unitarianism, reflecting both the continental and the independent English traditions. The works of the continental Socinians, collected in 1656 as Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum quos Unitartos Vocant, seem to have been fairly

widely known in England. The philanthropist Thomas Firmin (converted during the 1650s by John Biddle) was responsible for commissioning and publishing a collection of tracts in the 1680s and 90s expounding unitarian doctrine, the first, by Stephen Nye, entitled A Brief History of the Unitarians, called also Socinians (1687). The central tenets are that God is one, that Jesus

is man not God, that nothing in faith can be beyond reason, and that there are no mysteries in Scripture because the gospel has made mysteries plain. However, despite their heterodoxy, the unitarians of the 1690s remained within the Established Church.°* The Socinian treatment of reason and mysteries was adopted by Toland in Christianity not Mysterious, but not for the purpose of supporting Socinian beliefs. Critics were angry at the way in which the Socinians provided a stepping stone to freethinking: Stillingfleet did not think it was the design of the Socinians to advance deism, but

65 Bayle, Miscellaneous Reflections (1708), Il, Sections 161, 172, 174, 176, 178; ‘Toland, Letters to Serena, 134; Berkeley, Works, ed. Luce and Jessop, III, 51. Sullivan, Toland, 47, points out that

the second of the Letters to Serena incorporates large sections of Bayle’s article ‘Anaxagoras’. Warburton’s definition of the threefold cord of moral principles in the Divine Legation, discussed in Chapter 3 below, p. 199, is provided as an answer to Miscellaneous Reflections. 66 A longer lived version was Birch’s General Dictionary (1734—41).

67 See O’Higgins, Collins, Chapter 2. 68 See H. J. McLachlan, Socinianism in Seventeenth-Century England (1951), Chapter 16; Reedy, ‘Socinians, John Toland, and the Anglican Rationalists’, H7R, LXX (1977), 285-304; Sullivan, Toland, Chapter 3; Wilbur, History of Unitarianism (1952), Chapter 12.

24 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment ‘such men who are Enemies to all revealed Religion, could not find out better Tools for their purpose than they are’.°°

In the case of authors who were regarded as subversive, it is often difficult to establish the extent of their influence because of the freethinkers’ reluctance to identify them as forebears. In the case of the latitudinarians the problem is exactly the opposite. With the exception of Toland, the freethinkers repeatedly associated themselves with certain seventeenth-century Anglican divines, especially Chillingworth, ‘Taylor, More, Whichcote, Tillotson (probably the most quoted), and Burnet. ‘The highest praise is lavished on ‘Tillotson, ‘than whom none better understood

Human Nature’,’? and ‘whom all English Free-Thinkers own as their Head’.’! The succession of archbishops since 1689 is presented as little short of perfect: Tindal says of Tillotson, Tenison, and Wake, ‘I may challenge all Church-History to show three such Bishops, as to the Honour of the Revolution, have, since that blessed ‘Time, succeeded one another at

Lambeth.’’* The terms freethinker and freethinking are often applied to favourite clerics. Shaftesbury calls ‘Taylor and Tillotson ‘Free-thinking Divines’;’* Collins calls Chillingworth ‘that true Christian and Protestant (and by consequence great Free-Thinker) and the early Church Father Minutius Felix ‘a true modern Latitudinarian Free-Thinking Christian’.’* Collins’s account of great freethinkers includes many classical authors but few moderns, with ‘Tillotson as the final author discussed, directly after Hobbes (though Collins adds a further list of modern freethinkers which includes Erasmus, Grotius, Chillingworth, Herbert, Wilkins, Whichcote, Cudworth, More, and Locke).’? Not surprisingly, the clergy were outraged

at this treatment: Hoadly, for example, objected to Collins including Tillotson in the same list as Epicurus and Hobbes, ‘against both whom [Tillotson] hath expressed himself with so particular a Severity in some parts of his Works’.’° There are three possible views of the freethinkers’ expressed admiration

for the latitudinarians. One is that freethinking genuinely developed from latitudinarianism, and was a logical extension of certain lines of thought pursued within strict limits by the latitudinarians themselves. Halyburton, no friend to latitude, wrote bitterly that ‘the strongest Arguments urged by Deists, have been drawn from unwary Concessions, made them by their Adversaries’; “it would have been long before the Dezsts could have trimm/’d 69 Stillingfleet, Vindication of the Trinity, xlviii; cf Browne, Procedure, 40, on deists, freethinkers, and

atheists as the natural offspring of Socinianism. 70 Tindal, Christianity, 64. 7! Collins, Free- Thinking, 171. 72 Christianity, 288; cf the praise of Wake in Collins’s Letter to Dr. Rogers (1727), 113-14. "3 Characteristicks, 1, 297.

74 Free- Thinking, 34, 163. 75 Free- Thinking, 123-76, 177. 7© Hoadly, Queries (1713), 22.

The true religion of nature 25 up natural Religion so handsomly, and made it appear so like a sufficient Religion, as some have done, who mean’d no such Thing’.’’ Skelton’s Shepherd develops his argument: ‘Lord Shaftesbury hath actually built Deism on this system, adopted by the Divines; and Tindal argues from little else, but quotations taken from their writings.’’® In effect, the latitudinarians got what they deserved.’? The early eighteenth-century latitudinarians, Bentley, Clarke, and Hoadly, for example, naturally did not agree.

The second view is that the freethinkers, whose admiration for the latitudinarians may well have been genuine, used them as a cover and to lend an aura of respectability to their own subversive ideas. This involved misrepresenting the religion of the Restoration divines, as Gibson rightly pointed out.®° The third view is that the freethinkers were activated by

malice or at least by a desire to make fun of the latitudinarians by associating them with freethinking views to which they were certainly not sympathetic. This view is implicit in Jonathan Swift’s funny but unfair parody of Collins, Mr. C —ns’s Discourse of Free- Thinking, Put into plain English,

by Way of Abstract, for the Use of the Poor (1713).°' There may be truth in all

these views. The first can be most readily applied to Tindal, the second to Toland and Collins; Shaftesbury is more slippery. It is not easy to decide what the freethinkers were up to; the ironic tone of freethinking writing

(which will be considered in detail in the next section) makes definite judgement impossible. The problem can be illustrated by a dramatic example. In the last chapter of Miscellaneous Reflections, forming the conclu-

sion to the whole of Characteristicks, Shaftesbury presents a dialogue between a freethinking gentleman of rank and a group of clerical bigots on

the subject of freethinking and professing. At one point the gentleman declaims a long speech on the unreliability of the text of Scripture and the impossibility of interpreting it. He is attacked as ‘a Preacher of pernicious doctrines’, only to reveal that he is quoting from Jeremy ‘Taylor’s Liberty of Prophesying.®? The ‘Lay-Gentleman’ then openly draws on Tillotson, and tells his clerical opponents that he has ‘asserted nothing on this Head of Religion, Faith, or the Sacred Mysterys, which has not been justify’d and confirm’d by the most celebrated Church-Men and respected Divines’.®° Is

Shaftesbury here differentiating between the latitudinarians whom he admires and the high churchmen whom he detests, or is he setting a trap 77 Natural Religion Insufficient, 17-18. 78 Deism Revealed, Il, 213; cf 292. 79 This view is argued by Sullivan, Toland, Chapter 8. R. L. Emerson, ‘Latitudinarianism and the

between the two. |

English Deists’, in Lemay, ed., Deism, objects to studies that suggest there were close links

80 Second Pastoral Letter (1730), 64-6. 81 Swift, Works, ed. Davis, IV. 82 Taylor is quoted for much the same purpose in Collins’s Free-Thinking, 58-61. Aldridge, ‘Shaftesbury and the Deist Manifesto’, TAPS, NS XLI (1951), 364, objects that Shaftesbury misrepresents ‘Taylor. 83 Miscellany V, Characteristicks, WI, 317-44.

26 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment and using what he calls the ‘freethinking divines’ as a cover for quite another kind of freethinking? Shaftesbury’s method makes a direct answer impossible.

There is no doubt about the importance of Locke for the freethinkers, though they reacted to him differently and applied his arguments and his terminology in ways that he neither expected nor approved. Collins and Toland admired him and in effect betrayed him. Locke regarded Collins as his companion in the search for truth;®* Collins did not publish anything till after Locke’s death, so Locke presumably did not know the extent of

the disagreement between them. Toland praised Locke in his lifetime as

‘the greatest Philosopher after CICERO in the Universe’, and later described the Essay as ‘the most useful Book towards attaining universal Knowledg, that is extant in any language’,®? but Locke had become aware

early on of Toland’s dangerous application of the book’s arguments. Paradoxically Locke was both an anticipator and an opponent of freethinking. Several recurring arguments in the Essay (first published in 1690) contributed directly to aspects of freethinking: that individuals should not

rely on authorities, but search for truth themselves; that custom can corrupt men’s thought; that ideas of God and morality are not innate, and that there is no universal consent about the existence of God; that words must correspond with clear and distinct or determinate ideas. ‘Toland seized on the last of these in Christianity not Mysterious, which he began in 1694 and published in 1696. Locke read part of the work in manuscript,

and it appears to have contributed to his change of direction in The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695).8° Nothing distinguishes Locke from the

freethinkers more than his devotion to the Bible, manifest in The Reasonableness of Christianity and the posthumously published commentaries on St Paul (1705-7). As Daniel Waterland observed in his attack on Tindal, ‘Mr Locke... was no Priest, nor a Bigot to Priests: But He understood the high worth and excellency of our Bible.®’ Locke was dismayed at the growing view that natural religion was sufficient without revelation, and he wrote The Reasonableness of Christianity to counter it, modifying his own earlier view of the accessibility of natural religion in the process.®? Because Locke

deliberately ignored or played down certain Christian doctrines, some irate contemporaries charged him with Socinianism, deism, and atheism. However, The Reasonableness of Christianity in its treatment of natural religion

is a more conservative work than earlier latitudinarian accounts, and this conservatism is directly attributable to the spread of freethinking. Locke 84 To Collins, 29 October 1703, Correspondence, ed. de Beer, VIII, 97. 85 Life of Milton (1699), 147; Letters to Serena, 226.

86 See Biddle, ‘Locke on Christianity’ (1972), Chapter 1, and ‘Locke’s Critique of Innate Principles and Toland’s Deism’, HI, XXXVII (1976). 87 Scripture Vindicated, Part Il (1731), 128. 88 See below, pp. 67-9.

The true religion of nature 27 made his aims clear in the Preface to A Second Vindication of the Reasonableness

of Christianity (1697), explaining why he had restricted the role of natural religion and stressed only the fundamentals of Christianity; he hoped it would be of use especially to those, who thought either that there was no need of revelation at all,

or that the revelation of our Saviour required the belief of such articles for salvation, which the settled notions, and their way of reasoning in some, and want of understanding in others, made impossible to them. Upon these two topics the objections seemed to turn, which were with most assurance made by deists, against christianity; but against christianity misunderstood.°9

But it was the Essay that interested the freethinkers. Locke spent three

years engaged in a controversy with Stillingfleet over the meaning of potentially anti-Christian passages in it, a controversy which arose from Stillingfleet’s attack in Chapter 10 of his Vindication of the Doctrine of the Trinity (1697) on ‘Toland’s use of arguments and terms from the Essay in Christianity not Mysterious. Stillingfleet blamed Locke for giving weapons to

the freethinkers, even though they were used in ways Locke had not intended. But Stillingfleet underestimated ‘Toland when he said that ‘none are so bold in attacking the Mysteries of the Christian Faith; as the Smatterers in Ideas, and new Terms of Philosophy, without any true Understanding of them’.?° Toland knew what he was doing with Locke’s language of ideas,

just as he knew what he was doing with the Socinian treatment of mysteries: in each case he drew out the potentially irreligious tendency of certain kinds of argument which were intended to support religion. However, although Lockean epistemology could be used in support of sceptical freethinking (by someone discarding the absolute acceptance of revelation that was essential to Locke’s philosophy as a whole), there is no

evidence that Locke’s writings lent support to deism strictly interpreted, | i.e. natural religion without revelation. After the early accusations against the Essay and The Reasonableness of Christianity had subsided, Locke was defended and relied on by the orthodox as a supporter of Christianity, and often cited against the freethinkers.?' For example Halyburton and Watts cite The Reasonableness of Christianity in support of the view that ‘Nature’s Light affords not a sufficient Rule of Duty’;?? Gibson draws on Locke’s attack on innate ideas and examples of horrid heathen practices in Book I, Chapter 3 of the Essay for the same purpose.?’ Tindal notes the irony of Gibson quoting Locke against deism though Locke had been railed at by | Stillingfleet as ‘a Promoter of Heretical Depravity’.°* But though Tindal 89 Works, VI, 188. 99 Vindication, 273. 91 See Yolton, Locke and the Way of Ideas (1956), Chapter 5. 92 Halyburton, Natural Religion Insufficient, Chapter 7; see also Watts, Strength and Weakness of Human

Reason, Works, ed. Parsons (1800), III, 18, quoted in RGS, I, 188. 93 Second Pastoral Letter, 5—6, 35. 94 Second Address (1730), 50.

28 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment quotes Locke back at Gibson in the Addresses and draws on him occasionally in Christianity as Old as the Creation his position is largely antithetical to Locke’s. Locke might be manipulated in the cause of sceptical freethinking

or he might be properly enlisted on the side of Christian faith, but he

could not be made to support innate universal belief in God or the irreproachable dignity of heathen philosophers. The Christian or the Socinian or the sceptic could draw comfort from Locke’s arguments, but not the deist.?° Probably the most important dispute between the freethinkers and their

opponents over the appropriation or misappropriation of sources related not to the latitudinarians or Locke but to the classical moralists. Both sides were anxious to establish their interpretation of the significance of classical

philosophy and to draw on it to sustain their own views. The clerical opposition pursued two lines of argument, which are not necessarily consistent: that classical philosophy was an insufficient guide to mankind,

and that what was best about it was a faint anticipation of revealed religion. Halyburton and Gibson, for example, put the first case and Berkeley the second.?° The problem is explored in detail by Clarke in Natural Religion, Proposition 6, ‘That all the Teaching and Instruction of the

best Heathen Philosophers, was for many Reasons utterly insufficient to reform Mankind.’?’ The tone of these arguments is inevitably much more cautious when they are directed against eighteenth-century freethinkers rather than (as was the case with the latitude-men) against seventeenthcentury Calvinists. The freethinkers, conversely, both argued the suffi-

ciency of classical philosophy and found in the relationship between

: philosophy and religion in the pagan world a model for their own precarious status in contemporary society. It might seem likely that the two sides would have confronted each other with favourite rival philosophers,

but on the whole this did not happen. There are exceptions. The freethinkers were fond of quoting Plutarch’s On Superstition,?® and their debt to

Seneca and Varro, though not often acknowledged, is evident: Collins praises Seneca for his ‘noble Notion of the Worship of the Gods’, i.e. through acting well, and Varro’s threefold theology (mythical, physical and civil) is

particularly useful to Toland.°? Shaftesbury’s devotion to the Stoics Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, which was to have a profound influence later in the century, was partly concealed.'!°° The clergy were anxious to associate the freethinkers with the Greek atomist Epicurus as a disrepu°° For the Lockean tradition in the later eighteenth century see Chapter 5 below. °° Halyburton, Natural Religion Insufficient, Chapters 4 and 6; Gibson, Second Pastoral Letter, Chapter 2; Berkeley, Alczphron, Works, ed. Luce and Jessop, HI, 242—3.

97 Natural Religion, 207—40. %8 See below, p. 53. °° Collins, Free- Thinking, 147; Toland, ‘Clidophorus’, Tetradymus, 91—3.

100 See Chapter 2 below, pp. 94-5.

The true religion of nature 29 table atheist, and Bentley makes much of the connexion in his second Boyle sermon, ‘Matter and Motion cannot think’, but the freethinkers, whether from lack of interest or caution, rarely mention either Epicurus or his Roman interpreter Lucretius. Collins’s praise of Epicurus as the most virtuous of the philosophers, eminent for friendship, a virtue said to be

unknown to the New Testament, seems exceptionally rash.'°’ Collins caused further annoyance by pointing out that “There is but one compleat Ancient System of Atheism (viz. EPIGURUS’s System written by LUCRETITUS)’, and that the clergy, by their recommendation of the translation by Thomas Creech (himself a clergyman), were in effect propagating it.!°7

The battle was fought over the interpretation of one philosopher, Cicero, with both sides claiming him as their own.'8° In 1712 Toland circulated a plan to publish a new edition of Cicero’s works, Cicero Tilustratus.!°* Toland’s object was in part to show how Cicero should be

read from a freethinking point of view, as a sceptic and opponent of superstition, who should not be identified with the advocates of religious views in his dialogues.'°° This scheme, which annoyed Hoadly,'°° came to nothing, but it indicates how seriously Cicero was taken as a model. In A Discourse of Free- Thinking Collins objects to the way Cicero’s works are cited

against the freethinkers from pulpit and press, and provides a rule, borrowed from Toland’s Cicero Illustratus, for the correct interpretation of the dialogues: Cicero should never be identified with any character in his dialogues except the Academic sceptic or when he speaks in his own name; he should certainly not be identified with Stoic supporters of superstition. So that CICERO is as unfairly dealt with, whenever he is cited against FreeThinking, as the Priests themselves would be, did any one cite as their Sentiments what they make Dersts, Scepticks, and Socinians say, in the Dialogues they compose against those Sects. . . And if CIGERO’s Readers will follow this Rule of common Sense in understanding him, they will find him as great a Free-Thinker as he was a Philosopher, an Orator, a Man of Virtue, and a Patriot.

Far from giving ammunition to the clergy, Collins’s Cicero 1s effectively an atheist, whose writings do not ‘tend to the Service of any Priestly Purpose whatsoever’. !°7

The reaction was predictable: Bentley voiced his ‘scorn and indignation’ at Collins telling priests how to read Cicero, and argued that Collins had misunderstood (whether deliberately or not) the nature of Cicero’s scep101 Free- Thinking, 129-31. For Hume’s association of himself with Epicurus see Chapter 4 below,

pp. 249-50. 102 Free- Thinking, 90-1.

103 See Champion, Pillars of Priestcraft, 183-6, 192—4; Gawlick, ‘Cicero and the Enlightenment’, SVEC, XXV (1963), 657-82. 104 Included in Toland, Miscellaneous Works, I, |xvii, 231—96. 105 Miscellaneous Works, I, 262.

106 Queries, 16. 107 Free- Thinking, 135-40.

, 30 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment tical philosophy and his essentially religious beliefs; Cicero, claims Bentley, ‘declares for the Being and Providence of God, for the Immortality of the Soul, for every Point that approaches to Christianity’.'°° Hoadly similarly

objects to the kind of respect the freethinkers bestow on Cicero, and the way that they ‘have taken upon them to teach us all, how to understand him, by a Key which seems peculiar to themselves’.!°% Swift’s parody deserves to be quoted at length: And because the Priests have the Impudence to quote Cicero in their Pulpits and Pamphlets, against Free-thinking; I am resolved to disarm them of his Authority. You must know, his Philosophical Works are generally in Dialogues, where People are

brought in disputing against one another: Now the priests when they see an Argument to prove a God, offered perhaps by a Stowk, are such Knaves or Blockheads, to quote it as if it were Cicero’s own; whereas Cicero was so noble a Free-

thinker, that he believed nothing at all of the Matter, nor ever shews the least Inclination to favour Superstition, or the Belief of God, and the Immortality of the Soul; unless what he throws out sometimes to save himself from Danger, in his Speeches to the Roman Mob; whose Religion was, however, much more Innocent and less Absurd, than that of Popery at least: And I could say more, — but you

understand me.!!° |

This debate continued through the century. Conyers Middleton, a Gambridge cleric of sceptical sympathies, seems to have incorporated without acknowledgement Collins’s rule for interpreting Cicero’s dialogues in his Life of Cicero (1741): when Cicero gives his own judgement deliberately, in

his own person or in that of an Academic, he is delivering his own opinions. When he does not appear in person, he takes care to indicate which character speaks his own sentiments. “This key will let us into his real thoughts.’ However, Middleton’s Cicero was not a sceptic: he believed

in one God, providence, the immortality of the soul, and a future state, and regarded contemporary Roman religion, though essentially an engine of state or political system, as a wise institution.''! Conversely, the anti-

sceptical writer, James Beattie, argued in his Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth (1770) that Cicero, a Stoic dogmatist, was an Academic

in name rather than reality; he chose this name ‘in order to have a pretence for reasoning on either side of every question, and consequently an ampler field for a display of his rhetorical talents’.'!? The battle over what Cicero meant was thus closely connected with the question of form, of how to read the Ciceronian dialogue, and it was as part of this battle that the freethinkers and their opponents wielded the 108 Remarks, Part I, 45, 70—82. 109° Queries, 15. 110 Mr. C’—ns’s Discourse, Works, ed. Davis, IV, 44. ‘lL Life of Cicero, II, 546—52. "12 Essay on Truth (1770), 243. In later editions (6th edn, 1778, 210n) Beattie noted with approval

Bentley’s defence of Cicero in his Remarks on Collins. For Beattie as a critic of Hume see Chapter 4 below.

The true religion of nature 31 dialogue form against each other. Tindal wrote CAnstanity as Old as the Creation ‘Dialogue-wise’ because of its use by the ancients, claiming that Cicero’s De Natura Deorum and De Divinatione (also singled out by Collins),

‘both levell’'d against the Superstition of his Country-men; are living Monuments of the Expediency, and Usefulness of this Way of Writing’.!'% Tindal’s form itself (though he does not do anything very interesting with

it) is thus part of his quarrel with Clarke in Chapter 14 over the correct interpretation of Cicero.''* Berkeley in Alciphron deliberately employs Ciceronian dialogue in support of Christianity, as does Watts in The Strength and Weakness of Human Reason, but Watts interestingly also uses the form to demolish Cicero: his deist Logisto idolises him, but his orthodox clergyman Pithander is dismissive: ‘His writings and his behaviour are full of self, and

discover one of the proudest and vainest mortals that ever trod upon the earth.’”!!° Skelton’s Shepherd agrees: ‘Cicero, with all his fine talk about religion and virtue, had very little of either.’!'® The final shot in this battle was Hume’s rewriting of De Natura Deorum in Dialogues concerning Natural Religion.'"’

The influence of Cicero was thus of a different kind from the other sources, whether orthodox or subversive, on whom the freethinkers drew.

The nature of that influence can most clearly be seen in the case of Toland. As the philosopher who concealed his views under the cloak of religious observance and kept them for the few, Cicero provided ‘Toland not merely with arguments, style, and method (drawn on freely in Letters to

Serena) but a model (as explained in ‘Clidophorus’) of how to conduct himself. In Pantheisticon Toland made of the works of classical poets and philosophers, especially Cicero — ‘to whom our Society [of pantheists] 1s indebted for so many, and such excellent Things’ — a rival liturgy and a substitute natural religion which was essentially a secular moral code.'!® It was because classical philosophy provided the freethinkers with a role, a stance, a means of expression, a pre-existing alternative to the Christian

tradition that they tried to free it from Christian control and their opponents were so anxious that they should not succeed in appropriating it.

2 Irony, equivocation, and esotericism As writers the freethinkers tended to disguise both their views and their identities. Their books were published often without the name of the author, sometimes without that of the bookseller or printer, and on rare occasions with a false place of publication. ‘Toland, who was far more of a 3 Christianity, iv. 114 See below, pp. 57, 80-1. 11S Watts, Works, ed. Parsons, ITI, 95. 116 Deism Revealed (1751), 1, 82. 117 See Chapter 4 below. 118° Panthetsticon (1751), 102.

32 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment self-publicist and much less cautious than Collins, Tindal, and Shaftesbury,

unlike them put his name to several of his publications; however, his Pantheisticon (perhaps slightly mocking these conventions of discretion) was

published anonymously in 1720 at Cosmopolis with a preface by Janus Junius Eoganesius (i.e. John from Inisowen). In the Addresses attacking Gibson Tindal defended Christianity as Old as the Creation as though he were

not its author, signing himself simply ‘Anti-Pastor’; Collins shared this habit of rushing to his own defence as a third party in his disputes with the clergy. Shaftesbury’s Miscellaneous Reflections, published as the third volume of Characteristicks, are written from the point of view of a sympathetic editor

commenting on the first two volumes.!!? The freethinkers were skilful and

self-conscious manipulators of their roles and their audiences; their ' opponents regarded them as disingenuous, lacking in candour, and stooping to insinuate what they did not dare to publish openly.

These rhetorical practices and the habits of mind that accompanied them can be attributed partly to the freethinkers’ position under the law and partly to deliberate choice. ‘The freethinkers were bound to be careful about what they published. With the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695

there no longer existed a system of licensing, i.e. censorship before publication, but this did not mean that unrestricted publication of unorthodox religious views was possible. Blasphemy — ranging from swearing to denying the existence of God — was a punishable offence at common law: it was regarded as subversive of government as well as religion, and a blasphemer could be proceeded against by justices of the peace as well as in ecclesiastical courts. Further, in 1698 the Blasphemy Act (which was aimed especially at unitarians) made it a punishable offence to deny that any person of the ‘Trinity was God or to maintain that

there were more Gods than one, or to deny the truth of the Christian religion or the divine authority of the Old and New Testaments. The punishment under this act was disablement from public office for the first offence, and three years’ imprisonment for the second, though there seem

to have been no convictions. The usual punishment for blasphemy as a common law offence was fining or imprisonment. (The death penalty for blasphemy was briefly brought in during the Gommonwealth period but not applied, and the old Act for burning heretics was finally repealed after the Restoration.)!*° The legal status of blasphemy, combined with the fact that the law was

not often enforced, was thoroughly unsatisfactory to both sides. The freethinkers were constrained to adopt certain rhetorical tactics because of the threat they were under, while some of the clergy were outraged that 119 See Chapter 2, section 2. '20 The information in this paragraph is derived from Nokes, History of the Crime of Blasphemy (1928).

The true religion of nature 33 what they saw as heresy, however disguised, was able to circulate. The Lower House of Convocation, high church in its sympathies, was especially anxious to proceed against heretics, though it had no legal right to do so; it regarded as such not only freethinkers like ‘Toland and Arians like William Whiston but latitudinarians like Burnet. Indeed in 1717 its zeal against the

latitudinarian Hoadly resulted in its prorogation by George I, and Convocation was to be powerless until the mid-nineteenth century.!*! The

freethinkers sometimes laughed at the inquisitorial aspirations of the clergy: Collins commented on the freethinking of the Old Testament prophets that if any modern Englishmen were to talk like that they would find themselves listed ‘in the Representation of the Lower House of Convocation, as

proofs of the Profaneness, Blasphemy, and Atheism of the Nation’.'*? Shaftes-

bury ridiculed the clergy for not having the courage simply to face the freethinkers in print: ‘Having enter’d the Lists, and agreed to the fair Laws

of Gombat by Wit and Argument, they have no sooner prov’d their Weapon, than you hear ’em crying aloud for help, and delivering over to the Secular Arm.’'*° Their powerlessness now made them absurd: For tho, in reality, there cou’d be nothing less a laughing matter, than the provok’d Rage, Ill-will, and Fury of certain zealous Gentlemen, were they arm’d as lately

they have been known; yet as the Magistrate has since taken care to pare their Talons, there is nothing very terrible in their Encounter. On the contrary, there is

something comical in the case. It brings to one’s mind the Fancy of those Grotesque Figures, and Dragon-Faces, which are seen often in the Frontispiece, and on the Corner-Stones of old Buildings. They seemed plac’d there, as the Defenders and Supporters of the Edifice; but with all their Grimace, are as harmless to People without, as they are useless to the Building within.!**

Nevertheless, blasphemy was a crime and the clergy were not always harmless. Toland’s ChAnstianity not Mysterious was presented by the Grand Jury of Middlesex in 1697 (along with Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity)

for anti- Trinitarianism; the book was condemned to be burnt in Dublin, and ‘Toland had to leave Ireland after a few months’ visit and return to England to avoid arrest. Peter Browne (at that time a Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin) was eager for ‘Toland to be punished: I wou’d deliver him into the hands of the Magistrate, not mov’d by any heat of Passion, but by such a See for an example of the first view [Wishart], Vindication of the Reverend D — B — y (1734), 41, and

of the second Hawkins on Fielding’s vulgarisation of Shaftesbury, Life of Fohnson (1787), 215; also 254—5. For the attribution of the Vindication to Wishart, see M. A. Stewart, ‘Wishart’, Berkeley Newsletter, VI (1982-3), 5—9.

Shaftesbury and the defence of natural affection 87 from the classical Stoics. He constantly deferred to the Greeks as the source of all that was valuable in moral thought, and wished above all to restore the ancient meaning of philosophy as the art of learning to live well, but this does not mean that his programme as a writer was to mimic the classical moralists. He deplored the fact that philosophy had become the property of universities and divines, and sought to rescue it from the cloisters and restore it to the camps and courts. He therefore addressed himself to young men in public life, hoping by the indirections of his style

and method to woo them away from the attractions of scepticism or virtuosoship to the life of virtue. As was recognised by the German philosopher Leibniz, one of his earliest admirers, in this enterprise he united the virtually opposite talents of the contemplative and the man of wit.© Shaftesbury was undoubtedly successful in propagating many of his key terms and concepts and in shaping the direction of subsequent moral argument. But it was precisely this artful concentration on the needs of a particular audience at a particular time that made his meaning ambiguous and by the end of the century, despite his earlier popularity, rendered his

work unreadable. }

Shaftesbury’s sense of the difficulty of finding a platform for developing

his moral theory underlies his first published work, the Preface to the anonymous edition of Whichcote’s Select Sermons (1698), in which he attacks

three different sets of antagonists: Hobbes for ignoring sociableness and

natural affection in his account of the passions, divines for separating morality and religion and making rewards and punishments the motives to virtue, and atheists generally for their reluctance to admit the existence of moral principles because these might provide evidence for the existence of God. In contrast, he asserts that only the ancients understood true piety, the relation between religion and morality, and the latitudinarian Whichcote is presented almost as an ancient philosopher, a divine man (Shaftes-

bury’s favourite phrase for Socrates), who opposed the false views of Christians and non-Christians alike. Shaftesbury’s edition is consciously addressed to both these audiences.’

The edition of Whichcote was not the only example of Shaftesbury © ‘Notre Auteur juge sainement des choses; & au lieu que des personnes de méditation aussi bien que les Beaux Esprits (dont il a retini les talens presque opposez) ont coitume de mépriser les anciennes Langues, les Humanitez & la Critique; il en reconnait importance, méme par raport a la Religion’, ‘Jugement sur les Oeuvres de M. Le Comte de Shaftsbury’, in Des Maizeaux, ed., Recueil de Diverses Preces (1720), I, 286.

7 Select Sermons, Preface, esp. A4” ff. For Whichcote see RGS, I, Chapter 2. On the editing of the sermons (perhaps by William Stephens) and Shaftesbury’s authorship of the Preface see General

Dictionary, YX (1739), 186, n.P; Preface to Whichcote, Select Sermons, ed. Wishart (1742); Whichcote, Moral and Religious Aphorisms, ed. Salter (1753), Preface, xv; Biographia Bntannica, 2nd

edn, IV (1789), 286*, which states that Shaftesbury dictated the Preface to his sister; General Bugraphical Dictionary, new edn, ed. Chalmers, X (1813), 224, which gives Harris as the ultimate source of the information; Voitle, Shaftesbury, 111-12.

88 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment differentiating the latitude-men from other kinds of churchmen, especially their high church critics. In his letters to his protégé Michael Ainsworth, whose education for the ministry he supported, he recommended Barrow, Tillotson, Hoadly, More, and especially Burnet (who ordained Ainsworth), — .

and the Caroline divines Chillingworth and Hammond, while heaping scorn on the generality of churchmen: he warned Ainsworth that he was taking orders ‘in the worst ‘Time for Insolence, Riot, Pride, and Presumption of Clergymen, that ever I knew, or have read of’.® In Miscellaneous Reflections, first published in 1711 as the third volume of Characteristicks, he

delighted in insulting ‘a most malignant party’, as he called them in a letter to his friend the Whig politician Lord Somers,’ and associated himself with Cudworth, More, Tillotson, and Taylor.'° However, his stance with regard to the latitude-men may have been opportunistic."’ Shaftesbury undoubtedly learned from Whichcote’s sermons, Gudworth’s True Intellectual System of the Unwerse, and More’s Enchiridion Ethicum and

Enthusiasmus Triumphatus (though his comments on More are hedged with

irony), but it seems mistaken to regard him as a direct successor to this

religious tradition:'* his own religious views, insofar as they can be uncovered, were of a very different kind. The latitude-men, in their position as moral realists, were Shaftesbury’s allies in his continual battle | against the arch moral nominalist, Hobbes, and the philosopher he regarded as a nominalist of a more insidious and dangerous persuasion, his mentor Locke.!° Shaftesbury was prepared to acknowledge a grudging admiration for the perversity of Hobbes’s views — in a letter to another Whig friend, General 8 The letters, written between 1707 and 1710, were posthumously published as Several Letters Written by a Noble Lord (1716); see pp. 6 (a general list), 37 (Hoadly), 43 (More), 34, 45 (Burnet), 46 (the high church). Several Letters were fairly well known in the eighteenth century: they were

reprinted in 1732, with another collection of letters to Robert Molesworth (first published by Toland in 1721) as Letters of the Earl of Shaftesbury (Glasgow, 1746), and in Volume [V of Charactensticks (Glasgow, 1758); long extracts were included in Birch’s account, General Dictionary, IX (1739), 184—85, n. N. See n. 21 below. 9 30 March 1711, Shaftesbury, Life, Letters, ed. Rand, 432. 10 Characteristicks, III, 64 (Cudworth — see also II, 262), 65-8 (More), 329—34 (Tillotson), 322-4, 326—7 (Taylor).

11 On the difficulty of interpreting the freethinkers’ invocation of the latitude-men, see Chapter | above, pp. 24—6.

12 For example Cassirer, Platonic Renaissance in England (1970; first pub. 1932), Chapter 6, sees Shaftesbury as the heir to the Cambridge Platonists, with a specific debt to Smith’s Dascourses (p. 165); Crane, PQ, XI (1932), 204—5 (reprinted in Idea of the Humanities, 1967, I), places him in

the tradition of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century ‘rationalism’, and compares Culverwell’s Light of Nature; Micheletti, Animal Capax Religionis (1984), follows Cassirer and traces the links between Shaftesbury and the Cambridge Platonists at length; Passmore, Cudworth (1951), 98—9,

suggests Shaftesbury might have had access to Cudworth’s unpublished mss via his daughter, Lady Masham, the friend of Locke. 13 See the use of the terms ‘MORALISTS, Nominal, Real’ in The Moralists, Charactersticks, WU, 257,

and cf 267-8.

Shaftesbury and the defence of natural affection 89 Stanhope, he called him ‘a genius, and even an original among these latter leaders in philosophy’ !* — but his contempt for Hobbes’s account of human

nature is summed up succinctly in the Index to Charactersticks: under ‘Leviathan-Hypothesis we read ‘See Mr HOBBES. Wolf.’, and under this we find ‘Szlly Comparison of Men and Wolves’. He attacks Hobbes specifically in Sensus Communis and The Moralists,'? and more generally both in the frontis-

piece to the second volume of Characteristicks, which illustrates in the top border harmonious societies of bees and ants, and in the illustration for Sensus Gommunis 11 Volume I, in which rival painters depict harmonious Shaftesburian and belligerent Hobbesian views of man.!° Hobbes was an obvious and easy target identified by Shaftesbury at the start of his career, but it was only gradually that he made public his equally

strong disapproval of Locke. In a sketch of Locke’s life made for Jean Le Clerc in 1705 Shaftesbury explained that as adviser to his grandfather,

the first Earl, and arranger of his parents’ marriage, Locke had ‘the absolute direction of my education’, and as a result Shaftesbury ‘ever preserved the highest gratitude and duty’ to him.'’ Early letters from

Shaftesbury to Locke do demonstrate gratitude, friendship, and the exploration of mutual intellectual interests,!® but this cordiality did not last. Essentially Shaftesbury and Locke disagreed about revealed religion, the sources of moral action, the meaning and function of philosophy, and the value of the classical moralists. Kippis, in his article of 1789, quoted information concerning letters from Locke to Shaftesbury which had moved recent readers to tears but had since been lost, in which Locke vainly endeavoured to persuade Shaftesbury of the truth of Christianity. !%

After Locke’s death Shaftesbury made his real views about his mentor known, first in three important private letters, then publicly in Characteristicks. In a letter to a friend of 2 December 1704 he ridiculed the hopes for

another life that Locke had expressed in his last letter to Collins as unbecoming in a philosopher.?° In a letter to Ainsworth of 3 June 1709 he attacked Locke’s ethics as more dangerous than those of Hobbes: 14 7 November 1709, Life, Letters, ed. Rand, 414. 13 Characteristicks, 1, 88-90, 109, 119; II, 319. The attack in Sensus Communis is noted with approval

by Jean Barbeyrac in his annotations to Grotius; see Grotius, Rights of War and Peace (1738), ‘Preliminary Discourse’, xv, n.2 on man’s natural inclination to live in society. '6 As pointed out by Paknadel, ‘Shaftesbury’s Illustrations of Characteristics, JWCI, XXXVII (1974), 301, 306. 17 Life, Letters, ed. Rand, 8 February 1705, 332; Barrell, Shaftesbury and ‘Le Refuge Frangais’— Correspondence (1989), 87.

18 For example Locke, Correspondence [August 1689], III, 666—71; 25 February [1692], IV, 394; 3 March 1692, IV, 404; 8 September 1694, V, 123—5; 29 September 1694, V, 150-3. 19 Biographia Britannica, 2nd edn, IV (1789), 286*. These letters are not in Locke, Correspondence. Chalmers, General Biographical Dictionary, X (1813), 224, states that Huntingford, Kippis’s informant, had his information from Harris. 20 Life, Letters, ed. Rand, 344—7; see Voitle, Shaftesbury, 228-30.

90 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment "TWAS Mr. LOCKE, that struck the home Blow: For Mr. HOBBES’s Character and base slavish Principles in Government took off the Poyson of his Philosophy. “Twas Mr. LOCKE that struck at all Fundamentals, threw all Order and Virtue out of the World, and made the very /deas of these (which are the same as those of GOD) unnatural, and without Foundation in our Minds.”!

In a letter to Stanhope of 7 November 1709 (quoted above) he again derided Locke’s account of human nature and at the same time explained his caution about exposing their disagreements: Thus have I ventured to make you the greatest confidence in the world, which is that of my philosophy, even against my old tutor and governor, whose name is so established in the world, but with whom I ever concealed my differences as much as possible. For as ill a builder as he 1s, and as little able to treat the home-points of philosophy, he is of admirable use against the rubbish of the schools in which most of us have been bred up.7?

Shaftesbury had expressed a similar view about the usefulness of Locke’s

Essay in combating the barbarism of the schools in an earlier letter to Ainsworth of 24 February 1707 — ‘No one has done more towards the Recalling of Philosophy from Barbarity, into Use and Practice of the World, and into the Company of the better and politer Sort ... No one has opened a better or clearer way to Reasoning’** — but he obviously came

to believe that the damage inflicted by the Essay outweighed its benefits, and that he must state this openly. Several pages of Soliloquy: or, Advice to an

Author, first published in 1710, are devoted to exposing the absurdity of Lockean speculation about ideas, modes, substance, etc., contrasted with true philosophical self-examination: ‘For whatever its other Virtues are; it relates not to Me myself, 1t concerns not the Man, nor any otherwise affects

the Mind than by the Conceit of Knowledg’. Shaftesbury does not name

Locke, nor is he included in the index, but he quotes the words of ‘a renown’d modern Philosopher’ in the expectation that they will be recognised.** Later readers such as Warburton and Kippis who drew attention to this passage castigated Shaftesbury for his betrayal of and ingratitude to Locke.*? However, Shaftesbury was intending to go much further in his exposure: in the essay on ‘Plastics’ he was preparing at his death, which remained unpublished until 1914, his criticism of Locke’s 21 Several Letters, 39-40; also Life, Letters, ed. Rand, 403-5. This letter is cited by Doddridge, Lecture VII, ‘Of Innate Propositions’, Course of Lectures, Works, ed. Williams and Parsons, IV (1803), 313. See also Chapter 3 below, pp. 192-4. 22 Life, Letters, ed. Rand, 414-16; see Voitle, Shaftesbury, 303. Shaftesbury is probably referring to Locke’s self-portrait in “The Epistle to the Reader’, Essay, ed. Nidditch, 10: ‘’tzs Ambition enough to be employed as an Under-Labourer in clearing Ground a little, and removing some of the Rubbish, that les in the way to Knowledge’.

23 Several Letters, 4—5; not in Life, Letters, ed. Rand. 24 Characteristicks, 1, 299-301. 25 Warburton, Divine Legation of Moses, I (1738), ‘Dedication to the Free-thinkers’, xxiii-v; Kippis, Biographia Britannica, 2nd edn, IV (1789), 275*-6*.

Shaftesbury and the defence of natural affection 9] dismissal of innate ideas, voiced in the letters to Ainsworth and Stanhope,

is now openly contemptuous, and Locke is linked with Hobbes as a barbarian.?° A significant difference between Shaftesbury and Locke, which cannot be overemphasised, is that Shaftesbury had no experience of university

education. English moral philosophy in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was typically the province of those who had been educated

at the universities of England, Scotland, or Ireland, or the dissenting academies. Locke had spent some fifteen years at Christ Church, Oxford, before joining the service of the first Earl in 1667, and the Essay is in part a refutation of the scholastic philosophy that was still taught there. Shaftes-

bury, however, had no first-hand knowledge of this material. After his grandfather’s death in 1683 and Locke’s flight to Holland, Shaftesbury spent approximately two unhappy years at school at Winchester, a period with a private tutor, and two years on the Grand Tour, returning in 1689. He had no further formal education. He always spoke ill of universities,

| warning Ainsworth at Oxford that the study of logic, metaphysics, theology, and natural philosophy was dangerous for young minds,?’ complaining in The Moralsts that philosophy had been immured in colleges and cells and moral enquiries appropriated by scholastics,*® and deploring to Le Clerc the ‘captious, insulting, emulous, and quarrelsome humour for which universities are so famous’.*?

Shaftesbury was in no doubt as to where true knowledge was to be found. He told Stanhope that Locke would have avoided many of his errors if ‘he had known but ever so little of antiquity, or been tolerably learned in the state of philosophy with the ancients’,°? and when Ainsworth asked him ‘concerning the Foundations of Learning, and the Source and Fountain of those Lights we have, whether in Morality or Diwinity’, he pointed out ‘where the Spring-Head lay’, in Greek philosophy.*! The most useful summary is provided by Birch: ‘Among these writings those which he most admired, and carried always with him, were the moral works of

Xenophon, Horace, the Commentaries and Enchiridion of Epictetus as published by Arrian, and Marcus Antoninus.’ And Birch adds: “These authors are now extant in his library, filled throughout with marginal 26 Second Characters, ed. Rand (1914), 105-7, 178. Voitle, Shaftesbury, 355, points out that Rand misreads Mr. L. (i.e. Locke) as McC (and warns generally against the errors in Rand’s editions).

For a general (not entirely convincing) comparison of Locke and Shaftesbury see Spellman, Locke and the Problem of Depravity (1988), Chapter 7.

27 Several Letters, 24 February 1707, 4; 28 January 1709, 21—2; not in Life, Letters, ed. Rand. 28 Characteristicks, 11, 184—5; cf III, 287. 29 Life, Letters, ed. Rand, 19 July 1710, 423; Barrell, ‘Le Refuge Francais’, 98.

3° Life, Letters, ed. Rand, 416. Huntingford, Kippis’s informant, stated that Locke and Shaftesbury disputed about the merits of ancient learning, Biographia Britannica, 2nd edn, IV (1789), 286*. 31 Several Letters, 28 January 1709, 20.

92 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment notes, references, and explanations, all written with his own hand.’*? _ _Kippis comments: “To this catalogue Plato should undoubtedly have been added, of whom it is evident that the Earl of Shaftesbury was a diligent reader, an ardent admirer, and a zealous imitator.’°? However, Shaftesbury was somewhat cautious in revealing the extent of his attachment to the ancient moralists. In the portrait that faces the title page of the first volume of the second edition of Characteristicks, Shaftesbury 1s shown with three large folio volumes on a pedestal and one small duodecimo one held close to his side in his right hand. ‘Two of the former have their titles on their

spines: the Xenophon is upright, the Plato lies sideways underneath: Edgar Wind argues that this placing shows that Shaftesbury’s philosophy was not Platonic in the accepted sense: his true master was Socrates, and Xenophon was more important to him than Plato.°* Voitle suggests that

the third large unidentified volume is Epictetus, and that the small unidentified one closest to him, physically and metaphorically, is Marcus

Aurelius.°° There is a clear difference in emphasis if Shaftesbury’s published and unpublished writings are compared, and it is worth looking at the clues he left for his readers and the debts he kept to himself. In an important letter of | October 1706 to the Huguenot Pierre Coste, analysing Horace’s philosophical development from Stoic to Epicurean and back to Stoic, Shaftesbury argued that there were essentially only two classical philosophies, one deriving from Socrates and descending through

the Old Academy and the Peripatetics to the Stoics, the other deriving from Democritus and descending through the Cyrenaics to the Epicureans (scepticism is not regarded as constituting a distinct philosophy). “The first

... of these philosophies is to be called the civil, social, Theistic; the second, the contrary.’°° Shaftesbury saw himself as the modern defender of 32 General Dictionary, UX (1739), 186, n.Q, Probyn, Sociable Humanist, 62, stresses the special meaning

this note had for Harris, who supplied it. Upton’s edition of Epictetus (1739-41) draws on Shaftesbury’s annotations and the contributions of Harris. Shaftesbury’s annotated copies of Horace and Marcus Aurelius, inscribed by Harris, are in the Bodleian (shelfmark Don f.533 and Don f.532). See note by R. Klibansky to Wind, Hume and the Herotc Portrait (1986), 65. The

Marcus Aurelius contains quotations from Xenophon and Plato in the front endpapers and from Epictetus in the back in Shaftesbury’s hand, certified by Harris. Kippis prints Huntingford’s transcription of Shaftesbury’s annotations of Horace, presumably acquired from Harris, Bugraphia Britannica, 2nd edn, IV (1789), 288*—98*, n.O. 33 Biographia Britannica, 2nd edn, TV (1789) 272*.

$4 ‘Shaftesbury as a Patron of Art’, JWCT, II (1938/9), 186, reprinted in Hume and the Heroic Portrait, 64; cf Paknadel, JWCI, XXXVII (1974), 297. 35. Shaftesbury, 344.

36 Life, Letters, ed. Rand, 359; Barrell, ‘Le Refuge Frangais’, 164. Cf Grean, Shaftesbury’s Philosophy, 7.

Birch quotes the relevant passage from this letter in General Dictionary, [CX (1739), 186, n.R. For his (or rather Harris’s) comment see below, p. 116. Klein, Shaftesbury, 107—11, describes an important project for a “Socratick History’ he has found among Shaftesbury’s papers in the Public Record Office (PRO 30/24/27/14), unnoted by Voitle, which was to consist of a series

of translations of the chief ancient sources for the life of Socrates (Xenophon, Diogenes Laertius, Aristophanes, Cebes, Plato) with introductions, essays, and notes by Shaftesbury.

Shaftesbury and the defence of natural affection 93 this civil, social, theistic philosophy founded by Socrates, to which Xeno-

phon, Plato, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius were the most important contributors. Yet in Charactertsticks he is deliberately oblique in referring to his antecedents. Socrates is called periphrastically “Che divinest Man who

had ever appear’d in the Heathen World’, “THE Philosophical Hero of these Poems’ (Plato’s and Xenophon’s dialogues), ‘the Philosophical PATRIARCH’, and ‘the greatest of Philosophers, the very Founder of Philosophy it-

self’.2” Though Socratic appears as an adjective, coupled with irony or raillery and ‘charts’,°? Shaftesbury does not name him directly. In a late letter, referring to a sentence in The Moralists in which Socrates is implied,

he explains, ‘For of that name, you know, I am ever very tender’.°” Though he does occasionally name Xenophon and Plato, the passages in

which he praises them, the recorders of Socrates’ life and thought for posterity, are similarly oblique. Plato is ‘the Philosopher whom the earliest Christian Fathers call’d Divine’ and the ‘Disciple of noble Birth and lofty Genius, who aspir’d to Poetry and Rhetorick, took the Sublime part, and shone above his other Condisciples’.*? Xenophon, Shaftesbury’s model in some ways, is ‘another noble Disciple, whose Genius was towards Action’: He join’d what was deepest and most solid in Philosophy, with what was easiest and most refin’d in Breeding, and in the Character and Manner of a Gentleman.*’ “TIS to the early Banishment and long Retirement of a Heroick Youth out of his Native Country, that we owe an original System of Works, the politest, wisest, usefullest, and (to those who can understand the Divineness of a just Simplicity) the

most amiable, and even the most elevating and exalting of all un-inspir’d and merely human Authors.*”

It is not that he is concealing the very high estimation in which he holds

Socrates, Xenophon, and Plato: rather, the manner in which they are

introduced is indirect and their various appearances in the text are unexpected, and the reader is drawn into an understanding of their significance. For the second edition of Charactertsticks, with the inclusion of

the portrait containing the named volumes, Shaftesbury clearly decided that the reader should be made to grasp their importance from the outset. This decision was reinforced by his choice of an episode from Book II of Xenophon’s Memorabilia, Socrates’ account of Prodicus’ story of the judgement of Hercules (mentioned without explanation in The Moralists),*° 37 Characteristicks, Letter concerning Enthusiasm, 1, 31; Soliloquy, I, 194, 254; Miscellaneous Reflections, UI,

244, The philosophical patriarch and founder in effect triumphs over the biblical ones. 38 Discussed below, p. 109.

39 Life, Letters, ed. Rand, to T. Micklethwayte, 23 February 1712, 474. The reference is to Charactensticks, IY, 253-4. 40 Characteristicks, Letter concerning Enthusiasm, 1, 53; Soliloquy, I, 254.

41 Characteristicks, Soliloquy, 1, 254-5. 42 Characteristicks, Miscellaneous Reflections, III, 248. 43° Characteristicks, I1, 254.

94 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment as the subject of the painting he commissioned in Naples in 1712 and his treatise of instructions to the painter, A Notion of the Historical Draught or Tablature of the Fudgment of Hercules.**

In the case of Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus Shaftesbury was far more

indirect, and the hasty reader could be forgiven for missing them altogether: they do not appear in the index, unlike the other important classical figures, but are quoted in a handful of footnotes. Yet two of the notes in Miscellaneous Reflections contain the essence of their authors’ teaching and are crucial to the underlying ethic of Characteristicks.*° Shaftesbury chose to stress the importance of these quotations in two ways: through cross references to key passages in Soltloguy and The Moralists, and,

in particular, through the emblematic illustration on the title page of Volume I of Characteristicks. The emblem (the only one in the first edition of Characteristicks) is designed to encapsulate the meaning of the two Stoic

moralists: it illustrates the metaphors of a calm harbour from Marcus and a ray of light on a bowl of water from Epictetus, and Marcus’ favourite phrase, TavtTa uTrOANYI5, 1.e. ‘everything is opinion’, is quoted at the top.

However, Shaftesbury must have come to realise that he had made the reader’s task too difficult. For the second edition he added a cross reference to the relevant pages in Miscellaneous Reflections at the foot of the emblem.*°

The emblem thus tells the careful reader who follows the references through that Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus are at the centre of Shaftesbury’s thought. Yet their names are not spelt out: two of the volumes in the facing portrait are unidentified. What the eighteenth-century reader of Characteristicks could not know,

but what is obvious to the twentieth-century reader of Shaftesbury’s private GoKnyata or exercises, designated ‘Philosophical Regimen’ by their editor Rand, is that Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus were far more important to Shaftesbury the Stoic meditator and self-examiner than to the public man of letters. There are certainly important discussions of Socrates in the exercises, with some subordinate references to Xenophon and Plato,*’ but these are insignificant in comparison to the astonishing wealth of quotation from Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus. The exercises

show that Shaftesbury had thoroughly internalised the thought and assimilated the vocabulary of his Greek Stoic masters.*® Yet this is scarcely

apparent in Characteristicks. Why does Shaftesbury conceal this depen44 See Second Characters, ed. Rand, xii—xv; Voitle, Shaftesbury, 352—4; and n. 85 below. 45 Characteristicks, TI, 199n, 202n.

46 Characteristicks, III, 198, 199. See Paknadel, JWCT (1974), 297—8. See below, pp. 118-19. 47 See especially ‘Human Affairs’, ‘Necessity’, ‘Simplicity’, ‘Character’, ‘Maxims’, in Life, Letters, ed. Rand, 80-1, 98—9, 182, 192, 226—7.

48 There are approximately 110 quotations from Epictetus in Rand’s edition of the exercises (90 from the Discourses, 20 from the Encheirndion); there are also 13 passages from the Discourses copied in the back of Shaftesbury’s Marcus Aurelius (see n.32 above). ‘There are approximately

Shaftesbury and the defence of natural affection 95 dence? There seem to be two main reasons. One is rhetorical: the structure

and style of Characteristicks are designed to capture a particular public audience, and the intimate exploration of Shaftesbury’s personal beliefs

. ° . ° ° 49 °

and feelings through the medium of Stoic self-discipline that we find in the exercises would be inappropriate and ineffectual, though he does draw on the exercises in certain passages of Soliloquy and The Moralists.*~ It 1s

perhaps for this reason that Horace plays a relatively large part in Characteristicks: Shaftesbury reads him as a serious philosophical poet who disguises his seriousness with Socratic irony, and who 1s misinterpreted by modern readers as an Epicurean court poet. He can thus be used as a kind of fifth-columnist for insinuating some of Shaftesbury’s key ideas.°° The

second reason is more fundamental: Shaftesbury is not a historian interested in tracing the descent of the civil, social, theistic philosophy from Socrates through the Old Academy and the Peripatetics?! to the Stoics. Meditating in his most pessimistic private mood in the exercise on

‘Human Affairs’ on the inevitable cyclic recurrence of barbarity, he reminds himself that it is the philosophy he has learned from the ancients

that matters, and whether their works or even their names survive 1s unimportant: what though Socrates and Diogenes be forgotten, or most ridiculously represented? These were such as were not concerned for this themselves. Why art thou concerned? ... in a little time neither shall the name of Socrates, or Epictetus or

Marcus, remain... If I am contented that the ancients should have been but are not; if I am contented that the ancients should have been ancients, and the moderns, moderns; if it be indifferent to me when these remaining books perish, which must perish

within a very little time; if it be enough to me that I have that which serves to guide and conduct me in life, knowing that all depends upon myself: in this disposition I may safely read, otherwise I may perchance learn other matters and improve in other ways; but (what is most absurd and ridiculous) I shall unlearn

that for the sake of which I read, and for which alone I have recourse to the ancients.°”

35 quotations from Marcus in the exercises. The significance of some of these passages is explored in section 3 below. 49 Shaftesbury reminds himself that his business is to improve by the rules, not to publish, profess, or teach them: Life, Letters, ed. Rand, 242. Rand notes most but not all of the following parallels: Life, Letters, 34, Characteristicks, 1, 401; Lafe, Letters, 35, Characteristicks, 11, 337-8; Life, Letters, 165, Characteristicks, 1, 311; Life, Letters, 174, Characteristicks, 1, 322, 324; Life, Letters, 186—8, Characteristicks, II, 306—9; Life, Letters, 246 ff, Charactertsticks, U1, 182—6; Life, Letters, 267, Characteristicks, II, 299-301; Lafe, Letters, 270—1, Characteristicks, W, 438—9, 440-1.

°° For interesting comments on Horace see Miscellaneous Reflections, Characteristicks, TTI, 202n,

248-9. The index entry says that Horace is cited passim, unlike any other classical author. Horace is cited more frequently in the exercises than Plato or Xenophon. 5! For Shaftesbury’s criticism of Aristotelian method see Soliloquy, Characteristicks, I, 256. 52 Tafe, Letters, ed. Rand, 76, 78.

96 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment As a public writer, Shaftesbury’s concern is to redefine this philosophy for

| his contemporaries and to present it in the most persuasive manner so that it will come to replace the prevailing false philosophies of the day, whether Christian or non-Christian. Shaftesbury’s intellectual career illustrates the classical tension between

ottum and negotium, between on the one hand private retirement, selfexamination, and individual virtue, and on the other public service, love of country, and the good of the whole. In theory these are not separable: for Shaftesbury true self-knowledge is not possible without wide commerce with the world, private virtue without commitment to public good. The part does not exist independently of the whole. In practice we can see a tension between the private and the public in both Shaftesbury’s life and his writing. He pursued his study of the ancients, practised his Stoic selfdiscipline, and developed his moral theory during three main periods of retirement from public affairs: for about five years after his return from the

Grand Tour in 1689, and in Holland in 1698-9 and 1703-4. Holland represented for Shaftesbury both an escape from the demands of public life (it was here that he began recording his exercises in 1698) and, among the French Protestants, the principal modern example of the republic of

letters, a society in which conflicting views could be exchanged and published, the nearest modern equivalent to the conversation and dialogue of the ancients that he valued so highly. In Holland (which he first visited

in 1687) he came to know Locke’s old friends, the English Quaker merchant Benjamin Furly, famous for his library, the Remonstrant theolo-

gian and biblical scholar Jean Le Clerc, and his antagonist, the sceptic Pierre Bayle.?? The friendship of these men was to prove in different ways

immensely valuable to Shaftesbury. Bayle provided both an essential stimulus to his thought, through their fundamental disagreement about politics and philosophy, and a model of philosophical conduct; after Bayle’s death Shaftesbury wrote of him, ‘whatever he might be in speculation, he was in practice one of the best of Christians, and almost the only man I ever knew who, professing philosophy, lived truly as a philosopher; with that innocence, virtue, temperance, humility, and contempt of the world and interest which might be called exemplary’.°* Le Clerc, in his role as journal editor, and Pierre Coste, also a Huguenot,

whom Locke had brought to England, performed the same service in publicising Shaftesbury’s works on the continent that they had done for Locke: Le Clerc published very favourable French summaries and reviews of Characteristicks in Bibliotheque chotsie, as he had done of Locke’s Essay in Bibliotheque universelle;?? Coste, who published translations of Locke’s Essay °3 See Voitle, Shaftesbury, 67-8, 86-91, 220—1, and Barrell, Le Refuge Frangais’. 54 Jife, Letters, ed. Rand, to Mr. Darby, 2 February 1708, 385—6. See Chapter 1 above, p. 22. 59 Letter concerning Enthusiasm, The Moralists, Sensus Communis, Bibliotheque choisie, XTX (1709),

Shaftesbury and the defence of natural affection 97 and The Reasonableness of Christianity, also translated Shaftesbury’s Sensus

Communis and was responsible for giving a copy of Characteristicks to Leibniz.°® Pierre Des Maizeaux, another Huguenot, whom Shaftesbury met through Bayle and brought to England, translated part of the first version of Shaftesbury’s Inquiry concerning Virtue and planned to send it to Bayle with Shaftesbury’s approval, and later published Leibniz’s admiring essay on Characteristics.’ Shaftesbury’s friendship with Furly, which lasted

many years, illustrates the way in which retirement and philosophy were not ultimately separable from politics and public affairs: in a letter to Furly written at the end of his life from his last retirement in Naples, thanking him ruefully for the bad news about the course of the war with Louis XIV and expressing shame for the British betrayal of their allies, Shaftesbury called Furly ‘a friend with whom I have jointly spent my life in labouring

for the public, and by personal action, advice, study, thought, and the employment of almost all the hours of my life, endeavouring to serve that country and common cause which we now see sinking’.°®

As grandson to the first Earl of Shaftesbury and one-time protégé of Locke, Shaftesbury was heir to the Old Whig tradition, and he briefly represented it in Parliament, in the Commons from 1695 to 1698, and in the Lords (he inherited the title on his father’s death in 1699) at the end of William’s reign.°? Two factors made Shaftesbury a reluctant politician: the

split between the Old (or Country) and New (or Court) Whigs that developed at the turn of the century, and the increasing ill-health that made it virtually impossible for him to live in London and eventually drove him to Italy in 1711. But these obstacles to his practical involvement did

not affect his constant commitment to political and intellectual liberty, which he saw as mutually dependent. His friendships with freethinking Whigs of various persuasions, Toland, Somers, Stanhope, and Molesworth, show how his writings gradually became the means whereby he united his philosophical and political concerns and exercised his longlasting public influence. Toland, Shaftesbury’s protégé and perhaps his collaborator on 427-38; Soliloquy, XXI, premiére partie (1710), 177-97; Inquiry, Miscellaneous Reflections, XXIII, premiére partie (1711), 89-168. Locke’s Essay, Bibliotheque universelle, VIII (1688), 49-142; XVII (1690), 399-427. See Barnes, Le Clerc (1938), 156—9, 168-75. °6 Barrell, ‘Le Refuge Francais’, 102—3, Coste to Shaftesbury, 10 November 1711, 143; Shaftesbury to Coste, 12 January 1712, 200; ditto in Life, Letters, ed. Rand, 460.

9’ Barrell, Ze Refuge Francais’, 217; Des Maizeaux to Shaftesbury, 21 July 1701, 219; Shaftesbury to Des Maizeaux, 5 August 1701, 230; ditto in Life, Letters, ed. Rand, 307—08; to Lord Halifax, 6 December 1708, 395. See Aldridge, TAPS, NS XLI (1951), 307; Voitle, Shaftesbury, 135. For Leibniz see n.6 above. 58 Life, Letters, ed. Rand, 9 August 1712, 510—11. For the argument that Shaftesbury saw politics as continuous with philosophy see Cunliffe, ‘Shaftesbury’ (1981), which stresses his political interest in the Netherlands. Klein, Shaftesbury, 21, argues that Shaftesbury’s polite philosophy was subsumed by the project of polite Whiggism. °° Voitle, Shaftesbury, 70—7, 205-13.

98 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment some political tracts, the most intellectually daring and disreputable man in his circle, was responsible for the publication of the first version of the

Inquiry in 1699.°° John, Lord Somers (1651-1716), lawyer, patron of letters, Wiliam II’s Lord Chancellor, and leader of the Whig Junto in Anne’s reign, was the most politically powerful and influential of his friends. From 1705 Shaftesbury sent a copy of each of his works to Somers,

accompanied by a letter in lieu of a public dedication;®! Somers is the anonymous lord and friend addressed in A Letter concerning Enthusiasm and Sensus Gommunis. Writing from Naples to his old friend ‘Thomas Micklethwayte about his last literary endeavours, Shaftesbury defined his debt to Somers: “The first fruits of my pen having been for him, as perhaps the last

may be, my best thoughts in this way, as I have professed, having been raised in me from the fancy of his agreeable genius and conversation.”°” General James Stanhope (1673-1721), MP, soldier, and diplomat, captured by the French forces in Spain, later one of George I’s ministers, seems to have been the most intellectually sympathetic of Shaftesbury’s younger Whig friends; he responded with great enthusiasm to Characteristicks and translated it into Latin, and Shaftesbury appointed his ‘great disciple’, whom he perhaps saw as a kind of modern Xenophon, as one of his executors.°° His friendship with the Irish commonwealthman Robert Molesworth (1656-1725), author of An Account of Denmark (1694), had the

most far-reaching effects of all these connexions with Whig writers and politicians: it was through Molesworth’s advocacy that Shaftesbury’s moral

philosophy was studied in Dublin in the 1720s and taken up by Francis Hutcheson among others, and hence achieved its most significant influence on the development of later thought.®*

2 The making of Characteristicks In his article on Shaftesbury in the General Dictionary, Birch included a long

note on the method and connexion of Characteristicks, arguing that the three volumes form a complete whole and citing several of Shaftesbury’s

60 See Chapter | above, pp. 14-15. 61 Life, Letters, ed. Rand, 20 October 1705, 336-41; 12 July 1708, 386-7; 10 December 1708, 394—5; 2 June 1709 [Voitle, Shaftesbury, 295, dates it 2 May], 400—2; 26 May 1710, 420—1; 30

March 1711, 430-2. 62 Tife, Letters, ed. Rand, 478.

63 Life, Letters, ed. Rand, Stanhope to Sir John Cropley, 26 April 1712, 500; to T. Micklethwayte, 2 August 1712, 508; to Cropley, 10 January 1713, 531; Voitle, Shaftesbury, 408. Klein, Shaftesbury,

46, also makes the point about Stanhope as a modern Xenophon. 64 See Chapter 3 below, pp. 175-6. Letters from Shafiesbury to Molesworth (1721), published by Toland to Molesworth’s embarrassment, are largely concerned with Shaftesbury’s search for a wife.

Shaftesbury and the defence of natural affection 99 own explanations of his structure. The organisation of the whole 1s defended in terms of Shaftesbury’s relationship with his audience: Indeed, as he had a peculiar system, as well of Divinity as of Ethics, and had many things to advance, to which the ears of mankind had been little accustomed, it was necessary before he assumed the formal systematic and didactic character, that he should first appear in the preparatory, the corrective, or refutative.°°

This is a sympathetic and intelligent account, very much from Shaftesbury’s point of view, but it is by no means typical of eighteenth-century responses. In the Biographia Britannica Kippis quotes from this note but then repudiates its argument: in his view A Letter concerning Enthusiasm, Sensus Communis, and Miscellaneous Reflections could profitably have been dropped from Characteristicks, the Inquiry, The Moralsts, and (with serious qualifications) Soliloquy constitute Shaftesbury’s works of lasting value.®°° Kippis at

least aimed to present a balanced view of his subject. Shaftesbury’s enemies, who detested his moral philosophy on theological grounds, were

equally scornful of his literary pretensions. Skelton objected in Deism Revealed that Shaftesbury’s cross references and index ‘are the only cement that connects and methodizes his matter’; his ‘method (if we can call it so) may be termed, the obscure, or the desultory method, the patch-work, the riff-raff, the hotch-potch, of the Belles Lettres’.°’ To the sympathetic reader Shaftesbury’s method was explicable; to the hostile one it was risible. No

one could deny that it was complex, and that it required considerable effort on the part of the reader who wished to determine Shaftesbury’s meaning. Few modern readers, however, seem to have paid enough attention to the process whereby Shaftesbury put his work together, the ways in which he sought to manipulate his audience, or the variety of forms he employed; yet if this is not done his philosophy is bound to seem obscure and contradictory.°®

The group of works to which Shaftesbury gave the collective title . Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, and which he organised and

revised with such meticulous care in the hope that it would form a coherent and self-explanatory structure, initially appeared in a random fashion and, if Shaftesbury is to be believed, against his wishes. ‘The chronology of writing and first publication of the component parts differs significantly from the order in which they are arranged in Characteristicks. The three volumes form a kind of triptych. ‘The second volume, containing 65 General Dictionary, TX (1739), 183-4, n.M. The citations are Characteristicks, II, 135, 189-90, 284—5. Probyn, Soczable Enthusiast, 80, assumes that the note is by Harris. 66 Biographia Britannica, 2nd edn, IV (1789), 282*. 67 Deism Revealed, 2nd edn (1751), I, 256-7.

68 Interesting recent studies of some of these topics are Marsh, ‘Shaftesbury’s Theory of Poetry’, ELH, XXVIII (1961); Price, To the Palace of Wisdom (1964), Chapter 3; Marshall, Figure of Theater (1986), Part 1. _

100 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment the concise systematic treatise An Inquiry concerning Virtue, or Ment and the philosophical dialogue The Moralists, constitutes the intellectual and moral core: the Jnquiry has always been regarded as Shaftesbury’s one significant

contribution to moral philosophy,°? and The Moralists was probably his most influential work in the eighteenth century. ‘The volumes on either side

stand in a dependent and somewhat enigmatic relationship. Ostensibly

their function is first to prepare the reader mentally to receive the doctrines to be expounded in the central texts, and afterwards to clarify

them further and explain the relationship between the parts. But the bewildering shifts of tone in these volumes function as much to exasperate as to enlighten the reader. ‘The first contains three teasing methodological— critical-moral essays, the short A Letter concerning Enthusiasm and Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour, and the substantial Soliloquy: or, Advice to an Author. ‘The third volume, entitled Miscellaneous

Reflections, consists of five ‘Miscellanies’ which revert to the style and method of the essays in the first volume, but which comment editorially on

both the preceding volumes as though they were the work of another hand. A superficial appearance of homogeneity is given by the individual

title pages of the component works which label them as Treatises I-VI (with the whole of Miscellaneous Reflections as the sixth treatise), and by the

frequent references to the previous treatises by number in the notes to Volume III.’° It required considerable ingenuity on Shaftesbury’s part to present as a coherent set of treatises the five disparate works of the first two volumes, all originally published separately. The earliest work was the Jnguiry: it was written in the early 1690s and published by Toland in 1699.’! This edition

differs substantially in wording and organisation but not at all in fundamental argument from the revised version in Characteristicks. Shaftesbury was inconsistent in his attitude to the first version: he told Ainsworth ten years later ‘it was an imperfect Thing, brought into the World many Years since, contrary to the Author’s Design, in his Absence beyond Sea, and in a disguis’d disorder’d Style’,’* and in Miscellaneous Reflections he described it

as ‘an unshapen Foetus, or false Birth’ which would not have reappeared in 69 Extracts are included in the three principal modern anthologies of eighteenth-century moral philosophy: British Moralists, ed. Selby-Bigge (1897); British Moralhsts, ed. Raphael (1969); Moral Philosophy from Montaigne to Kant, ed. Schneewind (1990). 70 In Miscellaneous Reflections, Characteristicks, 111, 20n, the author disclaims responsibility for the use

of the name ‘treatise’ and blames the bookseller. 71 See Life, Letters, ed. Rand, xxiti; Aldridge, “Two Versions of Shaftesbury’s Inquiry concerning Virtue, HLQ, XIII (1950), 207—14; Inquiry concerning Virtue, ed. Walford (1977), vii—x1; Voitle,

Shaftesbury, 133-5. The 1699 text is included in Shaftesbury, Complete Works, ed. Benda, Hemmerich, and Schédlbauer, II, 2 (1984). Klein analyses the 1699 Jngury in Shaftesbury, Chapter 2. 72 Several Letters, 3 Jane 1709, 42; Life, Letters, ed. Rand, 405.

Shaftesbury and the defence of natural affection 101 revised form had it not been for the accidental publication of A Letter concerning Enthusiasm, which ‘occasion’d the revival of this abortive Piece,

and gave Usherance to its Companions’,’? yet he approved of Des Maizeaux translating it.’* The next work was the first version of The Moralists, privately printed in 1703 or 04 as The Sociable Enthustast,’° one of

the aims of which was to defend the Inquiry by explaining its rhetorical objectives and clarifying Shaftesbury’s religious position. It seems that at this stage of his career Shaftesbury wished his philosophical works to circulate only among a few friends. However, when he discovered that the manuscript of A Letter concerning Enthusiasm, written in 1707, was about to

be published and attributed to the author of A Tale of a Tub, he issued it himself in 1708,’ following it in 1709 with the revised version of The Moralists and Sensus Communis and in 1710 with Solloguy. These four works

all remained anonymous. ‘The Letter provoked at least three replies, one probably by Edward Fowler, which firmly identified the anonymous author as an enemy to religion.’’ Sensus Communis partly defends the raillery employed in the Letter and partly develops the social and moral basis of

Shaftesbury’s thought; Soldoguy introduces his method of Stoic selfexamination to the reader (it is advertised in “The Printer to the Reader’ as ‘only a Preliminary Discourse to a more Elaborate Treatise’).’° Shaftesbury clearly came to believe that the order in which he presented these

works and established the relationship between them was of crucial importance, hence the holding back of the Inquwry and The Moralists to Volume II of Characteristicks and the elaborate and self-conscious explications in Volume III.

The first edition of Characteristicks in three volumes was published in 1711. The Inquiry was considerably revised to make it clearer and more

readable; minor corrections were made to the other works in J and II; Miscellaneous Reflections was published for the first time. Shaftesbury’s name

does not appear on the title page, but he identifies himself at the end of the Preface by his initials and year of birth. Apart from the important emblem on the title page to the whole work”? there are no elaborate illustrations, 73 Characteristicks, III, 190. Barrell, ‘Le Refuge Francais’, 230; Life, Letters, ed. Rand, 307-8. S Life, Letters, ed. Rand, to Somers, 20 October 1705, 336; Voitle, Shaftesbury, 313-14. The Sociable Enthusiast is included in Shaftesbury, Complete Works, ed. Benda, Hemmerich, and Schédlbauer, IT, 1 (1987).

76 Voitl, Shaiesbury 323—4. For Shaftesbury’s contempt for Swift and A Tale of a Tub (published

1704, dedicated to Somers) see Life, Letters, ed. Rand, to Coste, 25 July 1712, 504; ditto in Barrell, Le Refuge Francais’, 208-9. 7 [Fowler], Remarks upon the Letter (1708). See Aldridge, Shaftesbury and the Deist Manifesto, 37). Shaftesbury refers contemptuously to these replies in Miscellaneous Reflections, Characteristicks, 1, 16. For Fowler see RGS, I. 78 Soliloquy (1710), iv. Shaftesbury refers to this advertisement in Miscellaneous Reflections, Characterasticks, III, 190.

79 Described above, p. 94.

102 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment simply the device of a bowl containing fire on the title pages to each of the three volumes. But Shaftesbury was evidently not satisfied with Characteristicks in this form. For the posthumously published second edition of 1714

he made numerous stylistic changes and, far more important, provided extremely detailed instructions for explanatory emblems, nine in all, to precede each volume and each individual work, instructions which were almost all faithfully carried out.®° Seriously ill in Naples in the last year of his life, Shaftesbury was alternately downcast and enthusiastic about this project. Enquiring after the success of Le Clerc’s extract from Charactertsticks in Bibliothéque choiste, he told Micklethwayte: ‘I would not waste my time in meditating future improvements and virtuoso embellishments if the

public really grows indifferent, and there be no earnest call for another edition.’®! But he was much heartened by learning of Stanhope’s enthusilastic response: I am now come again to the same agreeable study, and resolve in composition and design of every kind (both pen and pencil) to support, adorn, and recommend as well as I can those tracts which so brave a soul and so excellent a genius believes to be of advantage to mankind, and likely to prove beneficial to my countrymen, and to the cause of liberty and virtue.®”

Shaftesbury need not have doubted his posthumous popularity. ‘The 1714 edition, incorporating his revisions and illustrations, with the frontis-

piece portrait and his name on the title page, was the basis for the many subsequent editions published in the eighteenth century.°’ Two other works from Shaftesbury’s Naples period became absorbed into Characteris-

ticks, though it was his intention that they should form part of another unfinished work, to be entitled Second Characters, or the Language of Forms.®*

These are A Notion of the Historical Draught or Tablature of the Judgment of Hercules, first published in French in 1712 and in English in 1713, added to some copies of the 1714 edition of Characteristicks and included thereafter,°° 80 Life, Letters, ed. Rand, to T. Micklethwayte, 8 December 1711, 451; 29 December 1711, 455-8;

19 January 1712, 463-5; 28 June 1712, 496—7; 19 July 1712, 500; 3 January 1713, 529-31. Shaftesbury died in February 1713. For a detailed account see Paknadel, JWCT, XXXVII (1974); he states (p. 310) that the emblem for Miscellaneous Reflections does not reflect Shaftesbury’s intentions.

81 Life, Letters, ed. Rand, 28 June 1712, 497. 82 19 July 1712, 500. 83 Alderman, ‘English Editions of Shaftesbury’s Characteristics, PBSA, LXI (1967), describes 13

editions to 1790; the ESTC adds two more. Several editions after 1732 excluded the illustrations. 84 Rand’s edition of Second Characters (1914) contains, in addition to the two finished works, notes towards an essay on art entitled ‘Plastics’, and a translation of the Tablet of Cebes which may not be by Shaftesbury, though he had been intending to write a commentary on it. 89 See Judgment of Hercules (1713), ‘Advertisement’; Life, Letters, ed. Rand, to T. Micklethwayte,

23 February 1712, 473; to Coste, 5 June 1712, 493; 25 July 1712, 503; to Cropley, 27 November 1712, 526-7; Voitle, Shaftesbury, 352—4; Barrell, Le Refuge Francais’, 104—5; to Coste,

5 June 1712, 203. According to George Turnbull in a letter of 3 August 1722 to Shaftesbury’s

Shaftesbury and the defence of natural affection 103 and A Letter concerning the Art or Science of Design, added to the fifth edition of

Characteristicks of 1732 and included thereafter. To judge simply from the distribution of editions — though there is a good deal of other corroborating evidence — the crucial decades for Shaftesbury’s popularity were the

1720s to the 1750s. Of particular interest is the four-volume Glasgow edition of 1758, which includes in the unusual fourth volume not only The Judgment of Hercules and the Letter concerning Design, but Letters to a Student at the

Unwersity (1.e. the letters to Ainsworth), the letters to Molesworth published by ‘Toland in 1721, further letters taken from Birch’s account in the General Dictionary, and the Preface to Whichcote’s Select Sermons. It is in effect an

edition of the complete works, in so far as these were known in the eighteenth century. By the time of the 1773 Baskerville edition, the last edition of the century published in the British Isles, Shaftesbury’s popularity was fading.®°

In his character as miscellaneous writer in Volume III, Shaftesbury casts

himself in the roles of critic, interpreter, apologist, ‘airy Assistant, and humorous Paraphrast to the author of the five treatises in Volumes I and II.8’ As such he is careful, despite his tone of levity, to demonstrate the ‘Series and Dependency of these joint Treatises’,?® most clearly stated

when he begins his commentary on the Inquiry at the beginning of Miscellany IV: YT wil appear therefore in this Jomt-Edition of our Author’s Five Treaitses, that the Three former are preparatory to the Fourth, on which we are now enter’d; and the fifth (with which he concludes) a kind of Afology for this reviv’d Treatise concerning

Virtue and Religion.®° ,

The apparent sceptic of Volume I has a dogma of his own to reveal:

NOTWITHSTANDING the high Airs of SCEPTICISM which our Author assumes in his first Piece; I cannot, after all, but imagine that even there he proves

himself, at the bottom, a real DOGMATIST, and shews plainly that he has his private Opinion, Beltef, or Faith, as strong as any Devotee or Religionist of ’em all. ‘Tho

he affects perhaps to strike at other Hypotheses and Schemes; he has something of friend Molesworth, the Judgment was printed in only 30 copies of Characteristicks; HMC, MSS in Various Collections, VIII (1913), 344 (for Turnbull see Chapter 3 below). 86 The 1790 edition was published in Basel, and reflects Shaftesbury’s continental influence. Volume

I was edited with annotations by Hatch (1870); Shaftesbury’s marginal notes are replaced by Hatch’s, and the interpretations are unconvincing, but there is interesting material in the

footnotes and appendices II and III. The edition most widely used by modern critics is Robertson’s modernised version (1900, reissued with introduction by Grean, 1964); unfortunately, Robertson omitted the marginal headings in Volume I (crucial for indicating the

importance of terms) and the illustrations. A new edition by Benda, Hemmerich, and Schédlbauer is in progress (1981—); unfortunately, this is based on the 1711 text, though it includes the 1714 revisions and the earlier versions. A complete edition by Ayres, based on Shaftesbury’s copy of the 1711 text revised for the second edition, has just been published (1999). 87 Characteristicks, IN, 7, 63, 143, 163. 88 Characteristicks, III, 135n. 89 Characteristicks, III, 190-1.

104 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment his own still in reserve, and holds a certain Plan or System peculiar to himself, or such, at least, in which he has at present but few Companions or Followers.?°

Leibniz remarked in a private letter on Shaftesbury’s extraordinary metamorphosis from Lucian to Plato in the course of Characteristicks, and in

his analysis he expressed his disappointment at the descent from the sublime in Miscellaneous Reflections, though he accepted that Volume III as a

supplement to the others was in its proper place.?! When Shaftesbury received Leibniz’s criticism from Coste he acknowledged ‘the candour and justness of [Leibniz’s] censure’ of his concessions to raillery: Does not the author himself secretly confess as much in his work? And does he not

seem to despise himself in his third and last volume of Miscellanies at the very entrance when, after having passed his principal and main philosophical work in the middle volume, he returns again to his mixed satirical ways of raillery and irony, so fashionable in our nation, which can be hardly brought to attend to any writing, or consider anything as witty, able, or ingenious which has not strongly this turn???

Despite this embarrassed disclaimer, Shaftesbury was obviously convinced of the rhetorical value of the manner and style of the Miscellanies, since he was planning to continue in the same vein in Second Characters.?°

As his complaint to Coste shows, he attributed his peculiar mixture of styles and methods, his oscillation between raillery and enthusiasm, satire and philosophy, scepticism and dogmatism, or, in Leibniz’s characterisa-

tion, Lucian and Plato, to the difficulty of attracting and holding the attention of his chosen audience. Essentially he wanted to address free-

thinking Whig youth in public life in order to turn them away from Hobbesianism and scepticism to his own idiosyncratic philosophy of enthusiasm; at the same time he had to detach his methods, forms, and argument from any association with divines and theology, partly because of his own hostility to them, and partly because of his audience’s assumed distaste for anything that smacked of preaching. In another letter to Coste he characterised himself as an enthusiast poised between the men of wit on one side and the bigots on the other.?* He reverts to this problem several times in Characteristicks. He identifies his audience at different stages as ‘a young Gentleman chiefly of a Court-Breeding’; ‘Men of Note; whether 90 Characteristicks, TI, 133.

9! Letter to M. Remond, 11 February 1715: ‘d’un Lucien il étoit devenu un Platon: métamorphose assirement fort extraordinaire’; ‘Jugement sur les Oeuvres ... de Shaftsbury’, in Des Maizeaux, ed., Recueil, II, 191, 284. Des Maizeaux in his Preface (I, Ixxv) takes exception to Leibniz’s attribution of metamorphosis, uncritically finding the same wit and genius in all Shaftesbury’s works. See n.6 above. 92 Life, Letters, ed. Rand, to Coste, 25 July 1712, 504; ditto in Barrell, ‘Le Refuge Francais’, 208.

93 Second Characters, ed. Rand, 6—7. This point is made by Hayman, ‘Shaftesbury and the Search for a Persona’, SEL, X (1970), 502. 94 Life, Letters, ed. Rand, 19 February 1709, 399; ditto in Barrell, ‘Le Refuge Francais’, 192.

Shaftesbury and the defence of natural affection 105 they are Authors or Politicians, Virtuost or Fine-Gentlemen’; ‘those who delight

in the open and free Gommerce of the World’; ‘the grown Youth of our polite World’; ‘Personages and Characters of no inferiour Rank’.9? The difficulty is to make this audience take moral philosophy seriously. This is partly because their appetite has been ruined by divines: I'l’ may be properly alledg’d perhaps, as a Reason for this general Shyness in Moral

Inquirys; that the People to whom it has principally belong’d to handle these

Subjects, have done it in such a manner as to put the better Sort out of countenance with the Undertaking.”°

This 1s also partly because of their own frivolity. Thus the author of the Miscellanies is obliged to give ‘more of the fashionable Air and Manner of the World’ to the author of the /nquiry and the Moralssts, ‘For these [works] being of the more regular and formal kind, may easily be oppressive to the airy Reader’.’’ Shaftesbury’s exasperation with his audience is manifest in his account of the difficulty he had in setting the scene for The Moralists: IT appears, indeed, that as high as our Author, in his critical Capacity, wou’d pretend to carry the refin’d Manner and accurate SIMPLICITY of the Antients; he dares not, in his own Model and principal Performance, attempt to unite his Philosophy in one solid and uniform Body, nor carry on his Argument in one continu’d Chain or Thred. Here our Author’s Timorousness is visible. In the very Plan or Model of his Work, he is apparently put to a hard shift, to contrive how or with what probability he might introduce Men of any Note or Fashion, reasoning expressly and purposely, without play or trifling, for two or three hours together, on mere PHILOSOPHY and MORALS. He finds these Subjects (as he confesses) so wide of common Conversation, and, by long Custom, so appropriated to the School, the University-Chair, or Pulpit, that he thinks it hardly safe or practicable to treat of them elsewhere, or in a different Tone.?®

Shaftesbury seems to apportion blame for the complexities of his own

style and method equally between the men of wit, who cannot take philosophy plain without comic relief,?? and the bigots, who have mis-

appropriated philosophy for their own ends and from whose malign influence it must be rescued. Yet in presenting himself as constrained by circumstances to write in certain ways Shaftesbury is not telling the whole story. The ancient simplicity of which he professes himself an admirer 1s, as he explains on several occasions, deceptive: ‘the natural and simple Manner which conceals and covers ART, is the most truly artful, and of the genteelest, 9 Sensus Communis, Characteristicks, 1, 122n; Miscellaneous Reflections, III, 136; 155; 179; 187.

96 Moralists, Characteristicks, I, 185. 97 Miscellaneous Reflections, Characteristicks, WI, 8. 98 Characteristicks, III, 286—7. Klein, Shaftesbury, 112ff, in his otherwise useful account of Shaftes-

bury’s methods as a polite philosophical writer does not note his important ambivalence about politeness and his choice of form for The Moralists.

99 The Miscellanies are offered as the farce that follows tragedy in the French theatre or the dessert that rectifies the palate at the end of a meal, Characterssticks, III, 6, 191.

106 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment truest and best-study’d Taste’.!°° The reader is to be artfully enticed into sympathy for Shaftesbury’s views not merely because this is the most rhetorically adroit way to deal with the philosophical reluctance of the man of wit but because it is through the carefully controlled medium of Socratic irony that Shaftesbury’s enthusiastic theism can most effectively be revealed. In Soliloquy Shaftesbury defines Socrates’ irony both as a means of differentiating the careful from the superficial reader and as a mixture of styles which illuminates by contrast. ‘The Socratic hero was in himself a perfect Character; yet, in some respects, so veil’d, and in a Cloud, that to the unattentive Surveyor he seem’d often to be very different from what he really was: and this chiefly by reason of a certain exquisite and refin’d Raillery which belong’d to his Manner, and by virtue of which he cou’d treat the highest

Subjects, and those of the commonest Capacity both together, and render ’em explanatory of each other. So that in this Genius of writing, there appear’d both the heroick and the simple, the tragick and the comick Vein.'®!

The exercises show how far Shaftesbury’s imitation of the Socratic manner was a consciously adopted role: Remember, therefore, in manner and degree, the same involution, shadow, curtain, the same soft irony; and strive to find a character in this kind according to

proportion both in respect of self and times. Seek to find such a tenour as this,

such a key, tone, voice, consistent with true gravity and simplicity, though accompanied with humour and a kind raillery, agreeable with a divine pleasantry. 0?

This would suggest that the rhetorical and formal complexity of Charactensticks represents not a betrayal of the ‘simplicity’ of classical philosophy as Shaftesbury understood it but a true appreciation of its implications.

Shaftesbury himself identified the four different literary forms he employed in his six treatises as the demonstrative, epistolary, miscellaneous, and dialogue kinds.'°* Meditation or soliloquy might seem to be an omission from this list, except that Shaftesbury counted it as an aspect of dialogue. Of these kinds the two that he chose for the key works of the second volume, demonstrative for the /nqguiry and dialogue for The Moraksts,

are most worth investigating: in each case he had the task of dissociating 100 Characteristicks, III, 142; Shaftesbury cross-refers to III, 21 and Soliloquy, I, 257-8; see also I,

233-4. 101 Characteristicks, 1, 194—5.

102 ‘Character’, Life, Letters, ed. Rand, 192; cf 197, 226-7, also ‘Plastics’, Second Characters, ed.

Rand, 170. Toland draws attention to the vein of Socratic irony running through all Shaftesbury’s writings, Letters to Molesworth, vii. Birch, General Dictionary, TX (1739), 182 n.H,

quotes a letter from Shaftesbury to Coste: “There is a due proportion in irony well known to all polite writers, especially Horace, who so well copied that noted Socratic kind’; see Life, Letters, ed. Rarid, | October 1706, 357, and Barrell, ‘Le Refuge Francais’, 162.

103 To T. Micklethwayte, 1 September 1712, quoted in Heinemann, ‘The Philosopher of Enthusiasm’, RIP VI (1952), 314 (not in Lafe, Letters, ed. Rand).

Shaftesbury and the defence of natural affection 107 his chosen forms from their use by contemporary divines and philosophers and fitting them to the taste of his assumed audience while remaining true to the moral beliefs he was attempting to inculcate.

In his character as miscellany-writer and commentator on Volume II Shaftesbury speaks apologetically and with apparent embarrassment of ‘the dry PHILOSOPHY, and rigid Manner of the author of the Inguiry, who

‘discovers himself openly, as a plain Dogmatist, a Formalist, and Man of Method; with his Hypothesis tack’d to him, and his Opinions so closesticking, as wou’d force one to call to mind the Figure of some precise and strait-lac’d Professor in a University.’ The reader accustomed to the raillery and humour of the author of Volume I will now ‘see him [in Volume IT] in a new aspect, “a formal and profess’d Philosopher, a System-Writer, a Dogmatist, and Expounder’’.'°* This apologetic tone occasionally manifests

itself in the /nguiry: for example Shaftesbury warns his reader that at the beginning of his analysis “’tis necessary to take Things pretty deep’, adding

encouragingly ‘if we can happily get clear of this thorny part of our Philosophy; the rest, ’tis hop’d, may prove more plain and easy’. Later he rephrases an argument which may ‘appear perhaps too scholastically stated,

and in ‘Terms and Phrases, which are not of familiar use’, and in his account of the passion of resentment he explains why he avoids enumerating its ill effects:

By these Particulars we may grow too tedious. These are of the moral sort of Subjects, join’d commonly with Religion, and treated so rhetorically, and with such inforce’d repetition in publick, as to be apt to raise the Satiety of Mankind.!°

These passages were added to the 1711 edition of the /nquiry. Shaftesbury evidently assumes a reader with a fairly short attention span, a distaste for philosophical treatises, and a contempt for sermons. It is for the benefit of such readers, freethinkers whose hostility to religion makes them unwilling to consider the principles of morality seriously,!°° that he undertakes the main philosophical task of the /nguzry, to establish the foundation of ethics independently of religion, and chooses the form of brief, plain, systematic

exposition. Yet the very brevity, clarity, and evenhandedness of the argument are to some extent deceptive. In the following treatise, The Moralists, Shaftesbury reveals his rhetorical strategy. ‘Theocles, the spokesman for philosophical theism, in his long defence of the Inquiry explains that its author thought he would have much more success in arguing with persons ‘loose in the very Grounds and Principles of all Religion’ if he avoided the usual invective of divines and instead attempted a different method, ‘by which a Writer might offer Reason to these Men 104 Characteristicks, Miscellaneous Reflections, III, 191,135, 187. 105 Characteristicks, Il, 8, 114, 147.

106 Characteristicks, 11, 7, quoted in the epigraph above, p. 85.

108 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment with so much more Favour and Advantage, as he appear’d un-prepossess’d,

and willing to examine every thing with the greatest Unconcern and Indifference’. Whereas divines treat these men with detestation, Our Author, on the contrary, whose Character exceeds not that of a Lay-man, endeavours to shew Civility and Favour, by keeping the fairest Measures he possibly can with the Men of this sort; allowing ’em all he is able; and arguing with a perfect Indifference, even on the Subject of a Deity. He offers to conclude nothing positive himself, but leaves it to others to draw Conclusions from his Principles:

having this one chief Aim and Intention; “How, in the first place, to reconcile these Persons to the Principles of Virtue; That, by this means, a Way might be laid open to Religion.” !°’

Theocles suggests that the Inquiry is a fundamentally religious work, something that is not immediately apparent to the irreligious reader, who is to be inveigled into accepting the truth of theism. It is of course possible to read ‘Theocles’ explanation as Shaftesbury defending himself disingenuously against the charge of irreligion. Either way, the Inqwry and The Moralists are firmly tied to each other. The Jnguiry is not a self-sufficient, self-contained work; its apparently plain and straightforward exposition is deepened and complicated by the enigmatic dialogue that follows it.'°® The chief passages in which Shaftesbury discusses the principles and practice of dialogue are in Soliloguy, The Moralists, and Miscellaneous Reflections.'°° He sets himself three tasks in these passages: to establish the

essential connexion between soliloquy and dialogue; to explain the function of dialogue in the ancient world; and to attempt to overcome the obstacles to the successful use of dialogue by the moderns. ‘The practice of soliloquy or self-examination is for Shaftesbury the necessary first step to philosophy (and as such will be discussed in section 3 below): ‘’Tis the hardest thing in the world to be a good Thinker, without being a strong Se/fExaminer, and thorow-pac’d Dialogist, in this solitary way.’'!° Though soliloquy, otherwise defined as “Self-Discourse’ or “Self-Correspondence , apparently

begins at home with the self, it is in its origins and effects a social and public act (and to be clearly differentiated from the Christian tradition of meditation that Shaftesbury despises):!!! The Sources of this improving Art of Self Correspondence he derives from the highest 107 Characteristicks, 11, 264—5, 266; cf 279. The full defence of the Inquiry is on pp. 261-80.

108 Leibniz saw the relationship between the Inquiry and The Moralists as that between antechamber and inner sanctum: ‘je me suis appercu que je n’avois été que dans |’Antichambre, & j’ai été tout surpris de me trouver maintenant dans le Cabinet, ou pour dire quelque chose de plus convenable, dans le Sacrarium de la plus sublime Philosophie’, Des Maizeaux, ed., Recueil, II, 82.

109 Characteristic, I, 168, 192—6, 201-6 (cf Sensus Communis, I, 73); II, 187-8, 191; TI, 285-8, 290—6. On dialogue see Prince, Philosophical Dialogue (1996). 110 Soliloquy, Characteristicks, I, 168.

'1l For his hostility to Christian meditation see Soliloquy, Characteristicks, 1, 164—6, 343.

Shaftesbury and the defence of natural affection 109 Politeness and Elegance of antient Dualogue, and Debate, in matters of Wit, Knowledg and Ingenuity. And nothing, according to our Author, can so well revive this self-corresponding Practice, as the same Search and Study of the highest

Politeness in modern Conversation.'!* , It functions as a mirror for self-knowledge, and here its closest connexion with dialogue is seen. ‘The emblem on the first page of Soliloquy shows on the left a young man holding a mirror up and looking straight into it, on the right another, distracted by monsters, turning away from the mirror he holds, and in the centre a darkened mirror with no one present. Below the clear-sighted young man 1s a list of cross-references to the pages where Shaftesbury develops the mirror analogy.'!* The best mirror to self-knowledge is that provided by the Socratic dialogues (Shaftesbury presumably

means those of Xenophon as well as Plato; he names neither). In introducing them he quotes two lines from Horace’s Ars Poetica: Screbendi recté, sapere est & principium © fons,

Rem tibi SOCRATICAE poterunt ostendere CHARTAE.|'*

Charta means writing or poem (derived from papyrus leaf), but Shaftesbury

puns on the English nautical meaning, so that the Socratic charts are defined as ‘Philosophical Sea-Cards, by which the adventurous Gentus’s of the

times were wont to steer their Courses, and govern their impetuous Muse.

These were the CHARTAE of our Roman Master-Poet, and these the Pieces of Art, the Mirrours, the Exemplars he bids us place before our Eyes.’

In formal terms classical dialogue has affinities with mime, epic, and drama; in philosophical terms its object is to teach us not only to know others but more especially to know ourselves. We arrive at this knowledge

through comparing the interaction between the principal character Socrates and the underparts or secondary characters he interrogates: We might here, therefore, as in a Looking-Glass, discover our-selves, and see our

minutest Features nicely delineated, and suted to our own Apprehension and Cognizance. No-one who was ever so little a while an Inspector, cou’d fail of becoming acquainted with his own Heart. And, what was of singular note in these magical Glasses; it wou’d happen, that by constant and long Inspection, the Partys accustom’d to the Practice, wou’d acquire a peculiar speculative Habit; so as virtually to carry about with ’em a sort of Pocket-Mirrour, always ready, and in use. In this, there were Two Faces which wou’d naturally present themselves to our view: One of them, like the commanding Genus, the Leader and Chief above-mention’d [l1.e. Socrates]; the other like that rude, undisciplin’d and head-strong Creature, whom we our-selves in our natural Capacity most exactly resembled. Whatever we were

employ’d in, whatever we set about; if once we had acquir’d the habit of this 112° Miscellaneous Reflections, Characteristicks, U1, 155.

HS *195, 199, 205, 321, &c.’, Soliloquy, Characteristicks, 1, 153.

114 Characteristicks, I, 192. ‘Of good writing the source and fount is wisdom. Your matter the Socratic pages can set forth’, Ars Poetica, ll. 309-10, trans. H. R. Fairclough.

110 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment Mirrour; we shou’d, by virtue of the double Reflection, distinguish our-selves into two different Partys. And in this Dramatick Method, the Work of Se//-Inspection wou’d proceed with admirable Success.'!°

The speculative habit for Shaftesbury thus means the pursuit not of metaphysics or abstruse thought in the scholastic or Lockean manner but of self-knowledge; Socratic dialogue and the mental and moral discipline it engenders is the mirror the individual holds up to see his true Socratic self challenging and transforming his lesser natural self. In the ancient world the form of the philosophical dialogue reflected

real dialogue and free debate in public:'!© ‘Reason and Wit had their Academy, and underwent this Trial; not in a formal way, apart from the World; but openly, among the better sort, and as an Exercise of the genteeler kind.’!'!’ There is, however, no modern equivalent of ancient dialogue, because there is no equivalent of the intellectual, social, political world in which it originated. Modern manners — with all their attendant circumstances of civility and ceremonial — make it impossible for a writer to represent a poor philosopher in dialogue with a rich nobleman. “THIS is the plain Dilemma against that antient manner of Writing, which we can neither well imitate, nor translate’.'!® It would be simply false to portray

fashionable conversation as consisting of the steady, coherent, rational examination of a subject. ‘WE need not wonder, therefore, that the sort of Moral Painting, by way of Dialogue, is so much out of fashion; and that we see no more of these Philosophical Portraitures now-a-days. For where are the Originals?’ !19

The low repute in which philosophical dialogue is held by the moderns is compounded by the fact that as a form dialogue is now the province of

orthodox divines who use raillery and wit as weapons against the heterodox. These ‘reverend Authors’ make no attempt to paint to the life the

sceptics and atheists they purport to refute: the characters they create are puppets, set up to be knocked down. As a result the victories they portray

are unbelievable, and their raillery is turned against themselves. So Shaftesbury in his role as miscellany critic gives them some friendly advice: “Gentlemen! Be not so cautious of furnishing your Representative SCGEPTICK with

too good Arguments, or too shreud a Turn of Wit or Humour. Be not so fearful of giving Quarter. Allow your Adversary his full Reason, his Ingenuity, Sense, and Art. Trust to the chief Character or HERO of your Piece. Make him as dazling bright, as

you are able. He will undoubtedly overcome the utmost Force of his Opponent, and dispel the Darkness or Cloud, which the Adversary may unluckily have rais’d ... For if real Gentlemen seduc’d, as you pretend, and made erroneous in their Religion or Philosophy, discover not the least Feature of their real Faces in your 115 Characteristicks, 1, 205-6, 193—4, 195-6. 116 Sensus Communts, Characteristicks, I, 73. 117 Moralists, Characteristicks, II, 191. 118 Soliloquy, Characteristicks, I, 202—4. 119° Moralists, Characteristicks, 11, 187—8.

Shaftesbury and the defence of natural affection 111 Looking-glass, nor know themselves, in the least, by your Description; they will hardly be apt to think they are refuted.’’!*°

Shaftesbury’s exceptional self-consciousness about the form of The Moralists and his ambivalence about the solutions he adopts are manifest both in the commentary in Miscellany V, Chapter 2 and in the dialogue itself. The question of form is complicated by the fact that, both in the

1709 version and in Characteristicks, The Moralsts is subtitled not a philosophical dialogue but a philosophical rhapsody: an immediate tension is generated between controlled argument and formless rapture.!*! In his character as critic in Miscellaneous Reflections Shaftesbury includes in a note

the rather defensive advertisement at the front of the 1709 edition, in which the piece is further labelled a philosophical romance. However, in

the note Shaftesbury goes on to argue that he has called his work a rhapsody — ‘of that Essay or mix’d kind of Works, which come abroad with

an affected Air of Negligence and Irregularity’ — to conceal his strict imitation of ancient dialogue. ‘But whatever our Author may have affected in his TYztle-Page, ’twas so little his Intention to write after that Model of

incoherent Workmanship, that it appears to be sorely against his Will, if this Dialogue-Piece of his has not the just Character, and correct Form of those antient Poems describ’d.’ And the critic indicates how the author might have given his dialogue the unities of time, place, and action in order to make it match the simplicity of the ancient form.'** In the body of the text Shaftesbury criticises his own timorousness in avoiding the continuous philosophical argument of ancient dialogue, yet he has just made it abundantly clear that The Moralists is a more important work than the Jnguiry, and that its very rhetorical complexity increases its value: Tis not only at the bottom, as Systematical, Didactick and Preceptiwe, as that other Piece of formal Structure; but 1t assumes withal another Garb, and more fashionable Turn of Wit. It conceals what is Scholastical, under the appearance of a polite Work. It aspires to Dialogue, and carrys with it not only those Poetick Features of the Pieces antiently call’d MIMES; but it attempts to unite the several Personages and Characters in ONE Action, or Story, within a determinate Compass of Time, regularly divided, and drawn into different and proportion’d Scenes: And this, too, with variety of STILE; the Simple, Comick, Rhetorical, and even the Poetick or Sublime;

such as is the aptest to run into Enthusiasm and Extravagance. So much is our Author, by virtue of this Piece, A POET in due form. . .'*° 120 Miscellaneous Reflections, Characteristicks, III, 291—6. Wishart quotes these pages approvingly in “The Predictions of the late Earl of Shaftsbury, concerning Alciphron’, Vindication, 55—9.

121 On the form of rhapsody see Rogers, ‘Shaftesbury and the Aesthetics of Rhapsody’, B7A, XII

(1972), and Terry, “The Rhapsodical Manner in the Eighteenth Century’, MLR, LXXXVII (1992). Shaftesbury uses the term rhapsody pejoratively in Miscellaneous Reflections, Characteris-

ticks, III, 260n, but in ‘Plastics’, Second Characters, 163, he refers to The Moralsts by this label quite neutrally. Later eighteenth-century readers often refer to it in the same way. 122° Miscellaneous Reflections, Characteristicks, 11, 285n—6n. 123 Characteristicks, II, 287, 285.

112 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment The formal complications that Shaftesbury alternately praises and blames — the changes of time and place, the movement between polite conversation, rational argument, and enthusiastic rapture — are not so much a concession to the audience’s intellectual laziness as an educative process. In his letter to Coste of 19 February 1709 Shaftesbury made clear how isolated he was in his views, and by implication how difficult 1t would be to make others see his way: You know me for a great enthusiast, at least as the world goes. For to talk of the world as harmony, or of a master of the music, is on every side a mystery. ‘The men

of wit believe no such hand at all, and the bigots know not what to do with the | dissonances.!**

In the Socratic chart or mirror of The Moralists Shaftesbury shows an ideal

transformation: the underpart or second character Philocles, the man of wit and sceptic, who plays the role of infidel in debate, relates to Palemon, the man of affairs with a philosophical turn,'*? how he was converted to

the enthusiastic theism of the principal, Socratic character, Theocles. Theocles puts his case variously in the form of debate, Socratic questioning, sermon, and rapturous meditation. Shaftesbury is careful to balance Theocles’ meditation — characterised at different times as loose numbers, a dream, a warm fit, a rapturous strain, transport, numbered prose, the sublime — with Philocles’ observations and interruptions and Theocles’ own cool reason: it is a calculated combination of emotion and argument that persuades Philocles.'*° Yet in Miscellaneous Reflections Shaftes-

bury purports to rebuke himself for the games he has made his ‘Gentleman-

Philosopher’ play: ‘even when his real Character comes on, he hardly dares stand it out; but to deal the better with his Sceptick-Friend, he falls again to personating, and takes up the Humour of the Poet and Enthusiast 17 It is both the essence and the justification of Shaftesbury’s method in Characteristicks that a freethinking, sceptical reader like Philocles, whom Shaftesbury was proud of having impersonated,!*® could be entertained, flattered, drawn in, and ultimately, to his surprise, converted to the love of moral beauty. Shaftesbury continued to believe that the subject to which he was above all devoted could not be broached to the modern audience he wanted to address except by this indirect means: his notes for Second Characters show that the ostensible subject, art, was to be the vehicle for the 124 Life, Letters, ed. Rand, 399; ditto in Barrell, ‘Le Refuge Frangais’, 192.

125 James Arbuckle, one of Molesworth’s correspondents in the 1720s, assumes that Molesworth is ‘the same person with Palemon in the Rhapsody’, HMC, MSS in Various Collections, VIII, 355 (for Arbuckle see Chapter 3 below). 126 Theocles’ meditation is in Moralists, Part III, section 1, Characteristicks, Tl, 344-6, 366-74, 376-80, 383-91. The index provides titles which are not given in the margin.

127 Characteristicks, III, 287-8. 128 Characteristicks, 1, 314.

Shaftesbury and the defence of natural affection 113 true subject, ‘the precepts, demonstrations, etc. of real ethics’. Interestingly, he now thought dialogue ‘too ponderous and vast’, but he intended to involve his readers in a similar manner by the ‘scenes and machines’ of personification. He may also have come to think that the shifts in tone and between levels of reader in Characteristicks were unnecessarily confusing: for Second Characters he was proposing to make a distinction, perhaps modelled on Bayle’s Dictionary, between the ‘easy, smooth, and polite’ text, aimed at

the genteel world, and two kinds of footnote, the harder ‘fit only for the critic, the real virtuoso, or philosopher’.'?? Shaftesbury paid a high price for his indirection. On one side he put a

weapon in the hands of his enemies. Some later critics, like Balguy and Leland, praised the politeness and graces of his style, apparently as a concession to his admirers but in fact as a springboard to an attack on his sentiments.'°? Berkeley, his most ferocious and intellectually formidable adversary, who felt no qualms about misrepresenting his views in Alciphron

in order to demolish his reputation, ridiculed his pretensions to serious self-examination by printing as verse a passage read out by Alciphron from Soliloquy; to Alciphron’s praise of Shaftesbury’s ‘divine strain’ EKuphranor asks in astonishment: ‘Is this he who despiseth our universities, and sets up

for reforming the style and taste of the age?’!%' Berkeley attacked Shaftesbury’s style partly as a way of refusing to take his ideas seriously. Wishart tried to defend Shaftesbury from this tactic by playing the same trick on Alciphron as read out by one Tom Ratle:!%* the flippancy of its readers cannot be the test of a book. On the other side there is no doubt

that many of Shaftesbury’s most fervent admirers were misled by his method into misinterpreting his thought. Some of his followers at Scottish universities, for example Wishart and David Fordyce, read him as a true defender of Christianity.'°? Others, like the many imitators of Theocles’ rapturous meditation,!** ignored the rational, intellectual core hidden in the layers of politeness and enthusiasm. The pleasure of reading Characterwsticks, intended to entice a reluctant, philosophically ignorant audience into the pursuit of virtue, became instead an end in itself, a substitute for

moral thought. Skelton, an acute but hostile critic of Shaftesbury’s method, suggested that this unhappy consequence was indeed what he 129 Second Characters ed. Rand, 6—9. On different levels of character addressed by Shaftesbury see Voitle, Shaftesbury, 336—7. 130 Baleguy, Letter to a Detst (1726), 4; Leland, Principal Deistical Writers (Ath edn, 1764), I, 49.

131 Berkeley, Works, ed. Luce and Jessop, III, 198-200. Alciphron reads from Soliloquy, Characterasticks, I, 318—20.

132 Wishart, Vindication, 10; see also the ‘Advertisement’ at the end. 133 Vindication, 8, 41, 74; Fordyce, Dialogues concerning Education, I (1745), especially Dialogue IX.

See Chapter 3 below, pp. 181-2. 134 For poetic imitators see Moore, ‘Shaftesbury and the Ethical Poets in England’, PMLA, XXXI (1916), reprinted in Backgrounds of English Literature (1969).

114 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment intended because there was no intellectual core. In his witty Swiftian squib, The Candid Reader, Skelton characterises Shaftesbury as a genie from the Arabian Nights, a writer who bewitches his readers, an ignis fatuus who leads them into bogs, a circumventer of reason by stratagem. ‘He can hold

tion:

the Imagination in play with a Rapture or a Flight, till he hath passed a fine Expression on the Judgment, for a Reason, and a Witicism, for a convincing Argument.’ His writings are not susceptible of rational refutaIf any one attempts to be on the Offensive with him, and to give Chase to an Opinion of his, the fugitive Sentiment immediately takes Cover in a Thicket of fine

Words, and poetical Rants, where, with the greatest Ease, it can elude the most diligent Pursuit . . . all the Performances of this inimitable Genius are absolutely unanswerable.!°° |

Skelton was wrong (and indeed it is precisely because he discerned the

anti-Christian nature of Shaftesbury’s ethics that he detested him so much), but his exasperation has certainly been shared by more dispassionate readers.

3 The good and the beautiful In Miscellaneous Reflections Shaftesbury makes two important general statements about his aims as a moral philosopher. Before he begins his analysis

of Soliloquy in Miscellany II, Chapter 1, he claims, anticipating his audience’s resistance, that his ‘Design is to advance something new, or at least something different from what is commonly current in PHILOSOPHY and MORALS. To support this Design of his, he seems intent chiefly on

this single Point; “To discover, how we may, to best Advantage, form within our-selves what in the polite World is call’d a Relish, or Good TASTE.”’ And in Miscellany V, Chapter 3 he sums up his enterprise as follows: I'l’ HAS been the main Scope and principal End of these Volumes, ““To assert the Reality of a BEAUTY and GHARM in Moral as well as Natural Subjects; and to

demonstrate the Reasonableness of a proportionate TASTE, and determinate CHOICE, in Life and Manners.”” The STANDARD of this kind, and the noted Character of Moral TRUTH appear so firmly establish’d in Nature it-self, and so

widely display’d thro the intelligent World, that there is no Genius, Mind, or thinking Principle which (if I may say so) is not really conscious in the case.!*°

‘These statements, in which Shaftesbury attempts to present his philosophical position and his rhetorical objective clearly and succinctly, illustrate some of the main problems of interpretation faced by the modern reader. 135 Candid Reader (1744), 23-5, 49. On unanswerable writing see Chapter 3 below, n. 104. 136 Characteristicks, II, 154, 303.

Shaftesbury and the defence of natural affection 115 One problem concerns Shaftesbury’s claim to be advancing something new, or at least different, in moral philosophy. Does his claim apply as much to his views as to his method? How far should he be read in the context of seventeenth-century thinkers, either those against whom he manifestly reacted: Hobbes, Locke, and ‘mercenary’ theologians, or those to whom some critics have argued he was indebted: Whichcote, More, Cudworth, Cumberland? How far should he be read from the perspectives of sympathetic eighteenth-century readers, especially in Scotland, who fastened on some of his key terms and concepts and gave them currency, but ignored others? How far should he be read as attempting to put Plato, Xenophon, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius into modern dress? A further problem arises from Shaftesbury’s deliberate fusion in these statements of different terminologies — the traditional terms employed by

moral philosophers* (truth, nature, mind) with the fashionable ones of virtuosi and the polite world (relish, taste, charm). Is this fusion to be interpreted rhetorically — as part of Shaftesbury’s device for luring virtuosi

to virtue — or is it a more fundamental attempt to unite ethics and aesthetics? Are Shaftesbury’s underlying principles open to systematic exposition, once his method has been allowed for, or is he careless and inconsistent in the use of his own terminology so that his meanings can only be loosely defined?!°’

An authoritative statement of Shaftesbury’s relation to ancient philosophy and of the central tenets of his thought was included by Birch in a note to his article on Shaftesbury in the General Dictionary. ‘The note,

provided by Harris, takes the form of a comment on Shaftesbury’s account in his letter to Coste (already cited) of the two fundamentally opposed philosophies of antiquity. Shaftesbury characterises them as follows:

The first . . . of these two philosophies recommended action, concernment in civil

affairs, religion. The second derided all, and advised inaction and retreat, and with good reason. For the first maintained that society, right, and wrong was founded in Nature, and that Nature had a meaning, and was herself, that is to say in her wits, well governed and administered by one simple and perfect intelligence. The second again derided this, and made Providence and Dame Nature not so sensible as a doting old woman. The first, therefore, of these philosophies is to be called the civil, social, Theistic; the second, the contrary. !*°

137 For attempts to establish Shaftesbury’s position see (in addition to the works cited in n.4 above): Bernstein, ‘Shaftesbury’s Identification of the Good with the Beautiful’, ECS, X (1976/77); Heinemann, “The Philosopher of Enthusiasm’, RIP VI (1952); Tiffany, ‘Shaftesbury as Stoic’, PMLA, XX XVIII (1923); Voitle, ‘“Shaftesbury’s Moral Sense’, SB LI (1955). 138 Life, Letters, ed. Rand, 359; ditto in Barrell, ‘Le Refuge Francais’, 163—4. See above p. 92. The wording and punctuation of the extract in General Dictionary, YX (1739), 186, n. R are slightly different, and Coste is not identified as the recipient.

116 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment To this Harris adds:

Every page of his works sufficiently demonstrate him to have been a most sincere assertor of what he calls the civil, social, and theistic. Hence the whole of his Philosophy seems to have been the inculcating its two principles, viz. that there 1s a Providence, which administers and consults for the whole, to the absolute exclusion

of general evil and disorder, and that man is made by that Providence a political or social animal, whose constitution can only find its true and natural end in the pursuit and exercise

of the moral and social virtues. Such however has been the fate of this author, that

while some only captivated with his wit and humour, have highly extolled him

for things delivered perhaps too freely, though bearing no relation to his Philosophy; and others on the opposite side have been wholly employed in censuring these freedoms (which they call refuting him;) his real system and opinions have in a manner been overlooked, or treated at least as a visionary

scheme of his own invention to idolize moral virtue, though they may be proved in every part to be in fact no other than the concurring sentiments of the best writers among the ancients.!%9

Harris suggests that Shaftesbury’s ideas can and indeed should be separated from his freethinking rhetoric in order for them to be fully understood, that eighteenth-century readers have failed to see this, and that as a result Shaftesbury has seemed a philosophical eccentric. In contrast, Harris emphasises the centrality of Shaftesbury’s thought and his place in

a long philosophical tradition. While it must be recognised that this separation 1s to some extent misleading, and that it is a hopeless task to _make Characteristicks completely clear and perspicuous for the reader, nevertheless Harris was right to try. However, in summarising Shaftesbury’s central tenets he moved from the whole to the part, from Providence to man, thus ignoring the order of the arguments in Characteristicks. The account given here, which is based largely on Soliloquy, the Inquiry, The Moraltsts, and the critical analyses of these works in Miscellaneous Reflections,

follows Shaftesbury’s movement from the part to the whole, from the mind of man to the universal mind: the topics analysed are the process of self-

examination; the human economy and the origin of morals; the relation between virtue and religion; and the concepts of harmony and proportion. Detailed systematic exposition of this kind (a method Shaftesbury himself used sparingly) is necessary if his shifting but highly influential terms and concepts are to be grasped, but it must not be forgotten that for Shaftesbury the speculative habit is a moral not an intellectual one, and that his

aim was to transform his readers into lovers of moral beauty and philosophical enthusiasts.

'39 General Dictionary, TX (1739), 186, n.R. There is a slightly modified version of this passage in A New and General Biographical Dictionary, III (1761), 448—9.

Shaftesbury and the defence of natural affection 117 Soltloguy

Knowledge of the self — also variously termed self-examination, selfconverse, self-correspondence, self-discovery, self-inspection, self-practice,

and soliloquy — is both the essential preliminary to all philosophical investigation of the place of man in the world and a continuing process whereby the exercise of moral virtue is made possible.'*° Each person must make an inward journey or descent into the self before any other moral or religious questions can fruitfully be asked: Men must acquire a very peculiar and strong Habit of turning their Eye inwards, in order to explore the znteriour Regions and Recesses of the MIND, the hollow Caverns of deep Thought, the private Seats of Fancy, and the Wastes and Wildernesses as well as the more fruitful and cultivated Tracts of this obscure Climate.'*!

But this arduous process must not be confused either with the experience of religious education or with what currently passes for philosophical

investigation. ‘The imposition on the child of the fixed questions and answers of the catechism unfortunately discourages the adult from the practice of real, open self-questioning,!*? while the kind of metaphysical speculation about identity associated with Descartes and Locke tells us nothing useful about ourselves.'** Shaftesbury declares contemptuously “That it is, in a manner, necessary for One who wou’d usefully philosophize, to have a Anowledg in this part of Philosophy sufficient to satisfy him that there is no Knowledg or Wisdom to be learnt from it.’!** Modern schools of philosophy have neglected its true province, which 1s ‘to teach us our-selves,

keep us the self-same Persons, and so regulate our governing Fancys, Passions, and Humours, as to make us comprehensible to our-selves’. In its prime sense philosophy should be taken to mean ‘Mastership in LIFE and MANNERS’, and the practitioner of this philosophy, who asks himself the 140 E.g. Soliloquy, Characteristicks, 1, 167, 168, 196, 277, 306; Inquiry, II, 118; Moralists, I, 426, 427; Miscellaneous Reflections, III, 155, 192, 204. See also Locke, Correspondence, V, 153, quoted in the

epigraph above, p. 85. 141 Miscellaneous Reflections, Characteristicks, U1, 211. For emphasis on inward (frequently coupled with constitution, economy, anatomy etc.) see Soltloguy, I, 338; Inquiry, H, 83, 134; Morahsts, U, 415; Miscellaneous Reflections, U1, 201. See also the phrase ‘sacred recesses of the mind’ (from Persius, Satire IT, 1.73) in ‘Self’, Lafe, Letters, ed. Rand, 117. For descent into the self see Letter concerning Enthusiasm, I, 41; Soltloguy, 1, 355; Miscellaneous Reflections, I, 158. 142 Soltloquy, 1, Characteristicks, 306-7.

43 For criticism of Descartes see Characteristicks, 1, 291—4; Miscellaneous Reflections, II, 192—4. For criticism of Locke see n. 24 above. 144 Characteristicks, III, 210-11. Cf Soliloquy, I, 286-90; Locke, Correspondence, V, 152; Several Letters,

28 January, 1709, 21—2: ‘all that Philosophy, which is built on the Comparison and Compounding of /deas, complex, implex, reflex, and all that Din and Noise of Metaphysicks; all that pretended Study and Science of Nature call’d Natural Philosophy, Arstotelean, Cartesian, or whatever else it be ... are so far from being necessary Improvements of the Mind, that without the utmost Care they serve only to blow it up in Conceit and Folly’. ‘This letter is not in Life, Letters, ed. Rand.

118 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment crucial questions ‘Who or What he 1s; Whence he arose, or had his Being; to

what End he was design’d; and to what Course of Action he is by his natural Frame and Constitution destin’d’, should both ‘descend on this account into himself, and examine his inward Powers and Facultys’ and ‘ascend beyond his own immediate Species, City, or Community, to discover and recognize his higher Polity, or Community (that common and universal-one, of which he is born a Member;)’.'*°

How is this process of self-knowledge, which leads both to descent inwards and ascent outwards and relates the part to the whole, the self to the world, to be achieved? Shaftesbury’s debt here is to his Stoic masters,

though he does not make this explicit until late in Charactersticks. He introduces a medical metaphor in Soliloquy to make the process clear. By means of ‘the wholesom Regimen of Self-Practice’ or ‘Discipline of the Fancys’

which he prescribes his reader-patient, the will is enabled to control fancy and opinion instead of being controlled by them so that the self achieves its

true identity: ‘he shall know where to find himself; be sure of his own Meaning and Design; and as to all his Desires, Opinions, and Inclinations, be warranted one and the same Person to day as yesterday, and to morrow as

to day’.!*° The crucial terms here are fancy and opinion, translations respectively of the Greek gpavtaoia (usually rendered impression or imagination in modern versions) and uTOAnWis as used by Epictetus and

Marcus Aurelius. ‘The Stoic teaching on the importance of controlling fancy or impressions and having the right opinion of things within and outside our control, on real and false goods, on desire and aversion, which

is introduced in an indirect and embarrassed manner in Solzloquy, 1s presented much more clearly in Miscellany IV, Chapter |, where Shaftes-

bury both summarises and quotes from ‘the learned Masters in this Science’. As a gloss on his statements that ‘the highest Good or Happiness

must depend on right Opinion, and the highest Misery be deriv’d from wrong, and ‘HERE therefore arises Work and Employment for us Within. “To regulate FANCY, and rectify OPINION, on which all depends” ’,!*’

he quotes in Greek the crucial passages from Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus that form the basis of the emblem on the title page of Volume I. The following are later eighteenth-century translations: ALL depends on your opinions: These are in your power. Remove, therefore, when you incline, your opinion; and then, as when one has turned the promontory,

and got into a bay, all is calm; so, all shall become stable to you, and a still harbour.!*° 145 Soliloquy, Characteristicks, 1, 283, Miscellaneous Reflections, U1, 157-9.

146 Characteristicks, 1, 167, 186-7. Note Rand’s title for the exercises, ‘Philosophical Regimen’. 147 Characteristicks, 1, 202, 196, 198-9.

148 Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trans. Hutcheson and Moor (1742), XII, 22; Greek text in Characteristicks, 11, 199n (ed. Robertson, II, 278—9, with trans.), also in part in Lefe, Letters, ed.

Shaftesbury and the defence of natural affection 119 The Soul resembles a Vessel filled with Water: the Appearances of ‘Things resemble a Ray falling upon its Surface. If the Water is moved, the Ray will seem to be moved likewise, though it is in reality without Motion. Whenever therefore, any one is seized with a Swimming in his Head, it is not the Arts and Virtues that

are confounded, but the Mind, in which they are: and, if this recover its Composure, so will they likewise.'*9

‘To emphasise the centrality of this belief that right opinion is within our

power, Shaftesbury cross-refers after these quotations both to his rather rambling account of the regimen of the fancies in Soliloquy and to the conclusion of The Moralists, in which ‘Theocles demolishes moral relativism

and explains to Philocles in what sense ‘OPINION is all in all’.!°° The disinterested reader of Charactensticks should be able to grasp that Shaftes-

bury 1s advocating a rigorous mental and moral discipline, the object of which is the creation of a unified stable self which 1s untouched by the vicissitudes of life but which is fundamentally at home in the world. However, unlike Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, Shaftesbury does not provide the reader with an effective model of a philosophical regimen for him to use. If his aim is to inculcate the practice of soliloquy or selfexamination through example in order to replace the Christian meditative

tradition he despises, then he fails lamentably. ‘This is perhaps why Berkeley chooses to ridicule by printing as verse Shaftesbury’s laboured and affected illustration of a soliloquy in which he contends with Fancy and Opinion.'°! It could be argued that in his address to the enchantress

Indolence and the phantom Avarice in this soliloquy Shaftesbury is imitating the method of Marcus Aurelius in his apostrophe to pavtacia (fancy):

Be gone, then, imagination! Go, by the God’s! [sic] as you came: for I have no more use for you. You came, according to the old custom: I am not angry with you; only, be gone.!°?

Shaftesbury draws on this apostrophe several times in his exercises, on one occasion embellishing Marcus’ introductory question as follows: Rand, 160, 221. See also M. Aurelius, II, 15; IV, 3; XU, 8, for uméAnyis; V, 2; VII, 17, 29, 54;

VIII, 26, for pavtacia. For the translation by Hutcheson and Moor see Chapter 3 below . 160. 149 Epictetus, Discourses, in Works, trans. Carter (1758), III, iti, 6; Greek text in Charactersticks, U1,

199n (ed. Robertson, Il, 278-9, with trans.). See also Discourses, I, xi, 33; III, xvi, 13; Encheiridion, 1, 1, for UTéAnyWis; Discourses, IV, 11, 7; Enchendion, 1, 5, for pavtacia; cf Life, Letters, ed. Rand, 221, 235, 269. Shaftesbury quotes Discourses, III, xin, 21; UI, xxu, 13; IV, 1, 84; Encheiridion, 2, 2, on desire (Ope§1s) and aversion (éxKAtots), in Characteristicks, III, 202n (ed. Robertson, II, 280—2, with trans.).

150 Characteristicks, I, 185ff, 294-6, 324ff; Il, 437. The false relativist interpretation of ‘All is OPINION’ is put in the mouth ofa sceptic by Theocles, I, 417-18. 151 Soliloquy, Characteristicks, 1, 318—20; Berkeley, Alciphron, Works, ed. Luce and Jessop, III, 199.

152M. Aurelius, Meditations, VII, 17, trans. Hutcheson and Moor.

120 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment Thus must the persuader, the deceiver, the fair impostress, enchantress, be talked to; sometimes fairly, sometimes (as they say) roundly. Or if thou talkest not thus with her; expect that she should talk with thee, on a high tone; put thee to silence, and manage thee as she pleases.'°°

Yet Shaftesbury’s excessive self-consciousness about what he is doing in Soliloquy deprives his example of practical value,'°* and Berkeley’s scorn is

justified. What is not justified is Berkeley’s complete (and presumably deliberate) misrepresentation of what Shaftesbury means by his motto TavtTa uTOAnWis, “OPINION is all in all’. As the culmination of his attack on Shaftesbury, Berkeley puts this final confession into Alciphron’s mouth:

‘T will now reveal what I take to be the sum and substance, the grand arcanum and ultimate conclusion of our sect, and that in two words, TavtTa uToAnyis.’ To which the orthodox Crito replies: “You are then a downright sceptic.’'°? But as Wishart angrily points out in his attack on Berkeley, Shaftesbury uses the phrase in the same sense as Marcus, from whom he takes it: “Tis obvious what Use my Lord Shaftsbury always makes of that Sentiment; and that it could be no more his Design than M. Antonine’s to mean by it, that there was no Certainty in any ‘Thing, seeing it is the profess’d and declar’d Design of his Inquiry, to shew, that the Principles of Virtue may be established with the highest Certainty;'°°

One of the corroborating passages to which Wishart draws the reader’s attention in a note is the following from the conclusion to the /nquzry: For let us carry Scepticism ever so far; let us doubt, if we can, of every thing about us; we cannot doubt of what passes within ourselves. Our Passions and Affections are

known to us. They are certain, whatever the Odjects may be, on which they are employ’d.!?’

The moral economy

In his role as physician of the self, it is Shaftesbury’s object to teach his readers through the method of soliloquy how to control their fancies and form the right opinion of the relationship between the self and the world. However, self knowledge cannot be achieved and put into practice without 153 “Fancies or Appearances’, Life, Letters, ed. Rand, 177; cf “The Assents of the Judgment’, 210, 12.

154 See also the expostulation of the Grecian prince and his friend with Fancy and the attempt to make us bring the case home to ourselves, Characteristicks, 1, 325-7. 155 Works, ed. Luce and Jessop, HI, 321-2. The quotation from M. Aurelius and its relevance for Shaftesbury are not identified by Jessop. 156 Wishart, Vindication, 43—4.

157 Characteristicks, I1, 173. Wishart refers to II, 435, 437, III, 186, 196—9 on opinion, and I, 173, 174 on certainty.

Shaftesbury and the defence of natural affection 12] a thorough understanding of the working of the human constitution. In his dogmatic role, therefore, it is his task to analyse and explain the inward economy, the natural affections and their function, the origin of the moral sense or taste, and the essential sociableness of the human animal. Skelton

complained that ‘he so refines the plain and intelligible Science of Morality, that it is impossible for his Reader to find out its Foundation, to

distinguish, whether it is seated in the rational, or sensitive Part of our Nature, or to form a clear, or any, Idea of Virtue’,'?® a complaint shared by several later readers. Since Skelton’s own position is a later example of one that Shaftesbury was trying to dislodge, his objection is unsurprising. But it should not be discounted: Skelton was right to stress the ambiguities created by Shaftesbury’s choice of vocabulary, and the difficulty of trying

to abstract from his work a clear statement of the natural foundation of morals.

Shaftesbury’s account of the constitution of human nature is partly expressed through a series of metaphors which he extended in the course of revising Characteristicks. These metaphors derive from the assumption that, although for the purposes of analysis human nature can temporarily be taken in isolation from nature in its widest sense, in fact the part can

only be understood in relation to the whole. In The Moralsts Philocles laments that though man is frequently analysed as a member of a political society, “Yet, to consider him as a Citizen or Commoner of the World, to trace

his Pedegree a step higher, and view his End and Constitution in Nature itself, must pass, it seems, for some intricate or over-refin’d Speculation.’!””

The recurrent terms that express the working of human nature in itself and in relation to the greater nature are economy, architecture, fabric, system, order, symmetry, and anatomy, often prefixed by inward.'°° Theocles asks Philocles: have you consider’d of the Fabrick of the Mind, the Constitution of the Soul, the Connexion and Frame of all its Passions and Affections; to know accordingly the Order and Symmetry of the Part, and how it either improves or suffers; what its Force is, when naturally preserv’d in its sound State; and what becomes of it, when corrupted and abus’d?!®!

Until this is done, Theocles insists, it is useless to think of understanding virtue and vice.

In his Preface to Whichcote Shaftesbury objected that Hobbes, in ‘reckoning up the Passions, or Affections, by which Men are held together in Society. . . forgot to mention Kindness, Friendship, Sociableness, Love of Company and Converse, 158 Skelton, Candid Reader, 24. 159 Characteristicks, II, 185. 160 E.g. Inquiry, Characteristicks, I, 19, 83, 92, 134, 135, Moralists, II, 388-9; cf ‘Deity’, ‘Self’, Lefe, Letters, ed. Rand, 31, 116. 161 Moralists, II, 292-3.

122 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment Natural Affection, or any thing of this kind ,'®* a point that is developed in Sensus

Communis. Against Hobbesian self-interest as the motivating force of the

human mechanism Shaftesbury argues that ‘the main Springs of this Machine will be found to be either these very natural Affections themselves,

or a compound kind deriv’d from them, and retaining more than one half of their Nature’. Natural affection, which has its origin in the preservation,

welfare, and support of the species,'®’ is the basis of morals: it is ‘by Affection merely that a Creature is esteem’d good or ill, natural or unnatural .'°* Much of Book II of the Inquiry is devoted to demonstrating

the function of the affections within the individual, the social, and the universal systems. ‘Chere are three kinds of affection: the natural affections,

which lead to public good; the self-affections, which lead only to private

| good; and the unnatural affections, which lead to neither. To have the natural affections ‘(such as are founded in Love, Complacency, Good-will, and in a Sympathy with the Kind or Species)’ is to have the chief means of self-enjoyment. ‘To be without the natural affections, or to have too strong self-affections, or to have unnatural affections, is to be miserable.!®° The

highest form of affection, which Shaftesbury calls ‘intire’ affection or integrity of mind, operates on three planes, private, social, and universal: ‘It is equal, constant, accountable to it-self, ever satisfactory, and pleasing

... it carrys with it a Consciousness of merited Love and Approbation from all Society, from all intelligent Creatures, and from whatever is Original to all other Intelligence.’!°°

Shaftesbury was not the first to attempt a broad definition of natural affection as a way of combating Hobbes’s theory of self-interest and his denial of natural moral distinctions.'°’ In Miscellaneous Reflections, summar-

ising the account of the affections in the Jnquiry, Shaftesbury traces the

expression ‘natural affection’ back from his broad application to its original Greek meaning of parental and filial love: THE social or natural Affections, which our Author considers as essential to the Health, Wholeness, or Integrity of the particular Creature, are such as contribute to the Welfare and Prosperity of that Whole or Species, to which he is by nature join’d.

All the Affections of this kind our Author comprehends in that single name of 162 Whichcote, Select Sermons, A4”—[A5]. 163 Sensus Communis, Characteristicks, 1, 115-16, 110.

164 Inquiry, Characteristicks, WU, 22. The marginal heading on p. 21 is ‘Goodness thro Affection.’ Heinemann, RIP VI (1952), 301—2, sees this as the most original point in Shaftesbury’s ethics. Sidgwick, History of Ethics (1886), 181, argues that no one before Shaftesbury had made natural affections the cardinal point in his system. 165 Characteristicks, HW, 86-7, 98—9, 139, 171.

166 Characteristicks, Il, 113. The text here is more tentative about the original intelligence than the 1699 edition, p. 119. '67 See Hobbes, Elements of Law, ed. Tonnies (2nd edn, 1969), Part I, Chapter 7, 29; Chapter 9, 47—8; Leviathan, ed. Macpherson (1968), Part I, Chapter 6, 120; Chapter 13; Part II, Chapter 29, 365.

Shaftesbury and the defence of natural affection 123 natural. But as the Design or End of Nature in each Animal-System, is exhibited chiefly in the Support and Propagation of the particular Species; it happens, of consequence, that those Affections of earliest Alliance and mutual Kindness between the Parent and the Offspring, are known more particularly by the name of natural Affection.

To which he adds the note: “2t6pyn. For which we have no particular Name, in our Language.’!®® Richard Cumberland, in his long and detailed attack on Hobbesian principles in his Treatise of the Laws of Nature, argues that observation of animal and human behaviour shows that self-preservation and benevolence have the same internal causes, and that in the case of

humans the long period of nurturing increases natural parental affection and forms the basis of all other kinds of love: ‘into it finally is to be resolv’d, both the reciprocal Love of Children toward their Parents, and the Benevolence of Relations toward one another, which will, at length, extend it self to a Love of

all Mankind, an argument which 1s also made by Theocles. In his Latin text

Cumberland uses the Greek otopyn, which his translator Maxwell, much influenced by Shaftesbury, renders natural affection. However, Gumber-

land’s argument moves at this point in a very different direction from Shaftesbury’s: natural affection extends itself to love of all mankind ‘when once we come to know, from the most authentick Histories... ‘““That all Men are descended from the same common Parents’’’.!°° Shaftesbury would not have dreamt of seeking scriptural backing for his account. In the /nquiry Shaftesbury puts forward natural affection as the basis of

all human good with respect to self, society, and the world, though his synonym for entire affection, integrity of mind, suggests a significant movement away from biological impulse. In the tough Stoic analysis of natural affection in his private exercises, he takes a very different view of the term. Here he distinguishes between the ordinary natural affection of

the father, friend, and patriot and the higher natural affection of the rational creature, and urges himself ‘not to think any more of natural affection in the imperfect and vulgar sense, but according to the just sense and meaning of the word and what it imports’. In this higher sense to have natural affection is to cherish the laws not of one’s family, society, or state but of one’s real country, i.e. the natural order. This means that whatever

calamity, misfortune, death, vice, or political collapse occurs, he must 168 Characteristicks, TIT, 222. Hobbes, Elements of Law, Chapter 9, 44, deals with otopy% in his account of charity but does not see it as the basis of wider affection. 169 Cumberland, Treatise of the Laws of Nature, trans. Maxwell (1727), Chapter 1, 132, 156—7; De Legibus Naturae (1672), Chapter 1, § xxvii. Cf Moralists, Characteristicks, I, 308-9, 317-19. For

the use of otopyn by the Scottish Shaftesburians see Chapter 3 below, pp. 209-10. Shaftesbury nowhere mentions Cumberland, but there are other points of similarity: e.g. both argue that Hobbes’s theory of a compact exercised in the state of nature (Leviathan, Part I, Chapter 14) does not work (Cumberland, Treatise, Chapter 5, 295; Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, I, 109). For a recent account see Kirk, Cumberland and Natural Law (1987).

124 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment learn to accept that everything is according to the laws of his real country. ‘See therefore how it is thou cherishest, lovest, embracest those laws, and accordingly thou mayest say thou either hast or wantest Natural Affection.’ This essay transforms the meaning of natural affection into something that looks like its opposite: the higher kind based on reason displaces the lower kind based on feeling.”

There is no hint of this private sternness in Characteristicks. But in Shaftesbury’s account of the process whereby we make moral choices there is an unresolved tension, identified by Skelton in the passage quoted at the beginning of this section and by many subsequent commentators, between

the rational and the feeling side of our natures. Since this was such an important issue in eighteenth-century moral philosophy, and since some of Shaftesbury’s terms and definitions were so influential, they deserve to be looked at with care.

Shaftesbury uses a number of terms and phrases in different parts of Characteristicks to designate the faculty or faculties that are the source of moral choice and action. They are: innate, natural, or connatural ideas, instinct, common sense, moral conscience, sense of right and wrong, moral sense, preconception, anticipation, presensation or sensation, imagination, relish, and taste. Sometimes reason or mind are linked with one or more of

these terms, sometimes they are opposed to them. He does not seem to have a favourite term, though some are used more often than others. His looseness may be attributable partly to his temperamental and rhetorical

reluctance to write too scholastically and dogmatically, partly to the genuine difficulty he found in defining his concept. Moral sense — the phrase taken up and popularised by Hutcheson — is scarcely used by Shaftesbury. It appears in six marginal headings in Book I of the Jnquiry, but only once in the text.!”! It does not appear at all in the 1699 version. Sense of right and wrong, the phrase in the 1699 version, 1s used several times as an equivalent for moral sense in Book I of the Inquiry.'’* Moral or

natural conscience appears briefly in Book Il of the Jnquiry; although Shaftesbury differentiates it from religious conscience he perhaps avoids it

elsewhere because of its religious connotations.'’? Common sense, the 170 Life, Letters, ed. Rand, ‘Natural Affection’, 5, 8, 12.

171 Characteristicks, II, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 53 (marginal headings), 46 (text). The 1699 edition does

not have marginal headings. ‘The 1714 Index entry ‘Moral Sense’ includes references to passages where the phrase itself does not appear. Because Robertson’s edition excludes the marginal headings some modern readers who rely on it have missed Shaftesbury’s use of the rase.

172 henasteristioks I, 31, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 51, 52, 53, 54. “Sense of right and wrong’ on p. 46 of the 1699 edition is replaced by ‘moral sense’ in Characteristicks, II, 46. 173° Characteristicks, Il, 119-22. Wishart, Vindication, Appendix, 82—92, objects strongly to Butler

borrowing from Shaftesbury in his sermons without acknowledgement and then rebuking him for ignormg conscience (see Chapter 3 below, p. 167). Wishart regards Shaftesbury’s moral sense as synonymous with conscience.

Shaftesbury and the defence of natural affection 125 sensus communis of Horace and Juvenal,'’* is in part the subject of the

second treatise, though the phrase is rarely used thereafter. Innate or natural ideas, instinct, anticipation, preconception, and presensation are discussed in The Moralists and further analysed in Miscellaneous Reflections.‘’°

Imagination is used briefly as a synonym for sense.'’° Taste, sometimes coupled with relish, recurs several times as an aesthetic analogue to the moral faculty Shaftesbury is above all concerned with: it 1s introduced in Soliloquy,‘’’ further mentioned in The Moralists,!’® and discussed at length in Miscellaneous Reflections.'’°

It will be apparent from the distribution of these terms and phrases that Shaftesbury changed his mind at different stages as to which were the most appropriate ones to use, but in the revised edition of Characteristicks he tried to link them by his system of cross-references and footnotes. The following are examples of his usage of some of the key terms: if there be any further meaning in this Sense of Right and Wrong; if in reality there be any Sense of this kind which an absolute wicked Creature has not; it must consist in a real Antipathy or Aversion to Jnjustice or Wrong, and in a real Affection or Love towards Equity and Right, for its own sake, and on the account of its own natural Beauty and Worth.!®° we cannot resist our natural Anticipation in behalf of NATURE; according to whose

suppos’d Standard we perpetually approve and disapprove, and to whom in all natural Appearances, all moral Actions (whatever we contemplate, whatever we have in debate) we inevitably appeal, and pay our constant Homage, with the most apparent Zeal and Passion.'®!

the necessary Being and Prevalency of some such IMAGINATION or SENSE (natural and common to all Men, irresistible, of original Growth in the Mind, the Guide of our Affections, and the Ground of our Admiration, Contempt, Shame, Honour,

Disdain, and other natural and unavoidable Impressions) . . . 18”

in the very nature of Things there must of necessity be the Foundation of a right

174 Sensus Communis, Characteristicks, I, 103n—5n. Reid quotes from Sensus Communis in support of his

own theory, Jntellectual Powers (1785), Essay VI, Chapter 2, ‘Of Common Sense’, 525-7. For Reid see Chapter 4 below. 175° Moralists, Characteristicks, 11, 411-12; Miscellaneous Reflections, WI, 214n—15n. Harris in ‘Con-

cerning Happiness, a Dialogue’, Three Treatises (1744), 286, gives the Latin and Greek equivalents for preconceptions in a note: praenotiones, anticipationes, TpOAT els, or Evvoial together with the epithets Koivai, EupuTo1, puoiKai. 176 Miscellaneous Reflections, Characteristicks, II, 197n. 177 Characteristicks, I, 336, 338—9.

178 Characteristicks, TI, 401. The index entry for this passage reads ‘Moral Taste or Sense’, a conjunction not in the text. 179 Characteristicks, I, 154—5, 162; Miscellany 3, Chapter 2, III, 163—88; III, 303-4. 180 Inquiry, Characteristicks, II, 42.

181 Miscellaneous Reflections, Characteristicks, 1, 214-16 (praised by Leibniz, ‘Jugement’, in Des Maizeaux, ed., Recueil, I, 286). 182 Miscellaneous Reflections, Characteristicks, III, 197n.

126 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment and wrong ‘TASTE, as well in respect of inward Characters and Features, as of outward Person, Behaviour, and Action. !*°

If Shaftesbury’s various accounts of the moral faculty are looked at together, three main strands are clear: the natural or emotional, the rational or educational, and the aesthetic. First, moral distinctions are real, and the faculty that discerns them is natural. Second, this natural faculty does not operate unaided and uncontrolled; it requires some element of rational reflection, education, or discipline (though Shaftesbury changes his mind about the extent) to bring it out. ‘Third, the process whereby we make moral judgements of good and bad is very like the process whereby we make aesthetic judgements of beauty and deformity. ‘The third of these strands is notoriously difficult to unravel, and the task will be deferred for the time being. The tension between the first and second strands can be understood partly in terms of Shaftesbury’s attempt to maintain a Stoic and Socratic view of ethics in opposition to Locke.

In a note to ‘natural Anticipation in the passage quoted above, after | cross-referring to his use of sensus communis, natural ideas, and preconceptions or presensations, the Stoic treoAnweis, Shaftesbury quotes in Latin from a recent work by his and Locke’s friend Le Clerc which deals with the question of whether virtue can be taught: We shall briefly add, by the way, that the Socratic doctrine which we have set forth could be very useful, if properly considered, in resolving the controversy which arose a few years ago among the learned, especially in Britain, over innate ideas or EUMuTO! evvotal. For although, strictly speaking, there are no ideas fixed by nature in our minds, still, no one could deny that there are faculties of our minds which nature has so disposed that as soon as we have the use of reason, we begin in some way to distinguish truth from falsehood, bad from good. ‘The appearance of truth is always pleasing to us, while that of falsehood is displeasing; we indeed prefer what is honest to what is dishonest, because of seeds implanted in us, which finally emerge into the light when we are able to reason, and bear the better fruit as our reasoning improves, and we receive the benefit of a more elaborate education.'**

In Book I, Chapter 2 of the Essay Locke had argued against the supposition (quoting the terminology widely used by latitudinarian divines) “That there are in the Understanding certain innate Principles; some primary Notions,

Koivai evvoiai, Characters, as it were stamped upon the Mind of Man, which the Soul receives in its very first Being; and brings into the World with it.’ His objection is based partly on the fact that there is no universal

consent about these supposed principles (though even if there were 183 Soliloquy, Characteristicks, 1, 336.

184 Miscellaneous Reflections, Characteristicks, III, 214n—15n: Le Clerc, ed., Aeschines, Socratici Dialog

(1711),‘Silvae Philologicae’, Chapter 2, ‘An Virtus doceri possit?’ (a commentary on Aeschines’

first dialogue), 176. I am grateful to Dr Julia Griffin for translating this passage (Robertson does not translate it in his edition of Characteristics).

Shaftesbury and the defence of natural affection 127 universal consent, 1t would not make the principles innate), and partly on

the fact that children and idiots are unaware of them.'®? Conscience cannot be a proof of innate principles, since its promptings are different for different individuals. We wrongly assume our principles to be innate because we cannot remember when we were taught them. Locke accepts ‘that there are natural tendencies imprinted on the Minds of Men; and that, from the very first instances of Sense and Perception, there are some things, that are grateful, and others unwelcome to them’, but he insists that ‘this makes nothing for innate Characters on the Mind, which are to be the Principles of Knowledge, regulating our Practice’.!®° For Locke, notoriously, the mind is white paper, and all our knowledge is founded on

experience. One source of our ideas is sensation, of which external, material things are the object; the other is reflection, of which the operations of our own minds are the object, and which includes all the mental activities of thinking, believing, reasoning, and so on.'®’ Our knowledge of moral principles is arrived at by a process of rational deduction. God ‘hath furnished Man with those Faculties, which will serve for the sufficient discovery of all things requisite to the end of such a Being; ...a Man by the right use of his natural Abilities, may, without any innate Principles, attain the Knowledge of a God, and other things that concern him.’'®® Locke defines three laws to which men refer their actions: the divine law, by which they judge their actions to be sins or duties, the civil law, by which they judge them to be criminal or innocent, and the law of

opinion or reputation, by which they judge them to be virtues or vices. Moral principles are a part of the divine law God has given us and which we must obey: That God has given a Rule whereby Men should govern themselves, I think there is no body so brutish as to deny. He has a Right to do it, we are his Creatures: He has Goodness and Wisdom to direct our Actions to that which is best: and he has Power to enforce it by Rewards and Punishments, of infinite weight and duration, in another Life: for no body can take us out of his hands. This is the only true touchstone of moral Rectitude; and by comparing them to this Law, it is, that Men judge of the most considerable Moral Good or Evil of their Actions; that is, whether as Duties, or Sins, they are like to procure them happiness, or misery, from the hands of the ALMIGHTY:.!°?

Shaftesbury found much of this account both absurd and dangerous. In his letter to Ainsworth of 3 June 1709 he objected to Locke playing on the 185 Locke, Essay, ed. Nidditch, 48—9. For the use of this terminology by latitudinarians see RGS, I,

59-64. 186 F’ssay, ed. Nidditch, Book I, Chapter 3, 70, 82, 67. 187 Essay, ed. Nidditch, Book I], Chapter 1, 104—5. 188 F’ssay, ed. Nidditch, Book I, Chapter 4, 91. 189 Fissay, ed. Nidditch, Book I, Chapter 28, 352.

128 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment word innate (“The right Word, tho’ less used, is connatural’), insisting that it

is irrelevant to ask at what age ideas entered, ‘But whether the Constitu-

tion of Man be such, that being adult and grown up, at such or such a Time, sooner or later (no matter when) the Idea and Sense of Order, Administration, and a GOD will not infallibly, inevitably, necessarily spring

up in him.’ He complained that Locke had made morality dependent on divine law and will: ‘thus neither Right nor Wrong, Virtue nor Vice are any

thing in themselves; nor is there any Trace or Idea of them naturally umprinted on Human Minds. Experience and our Catechism teach us all!

... Your THEOCLES . . . laughs at this’.!9° In his letter to Stanhope of 7 November 1709 he called the debate over innate principles ‘one of the childishest disputes that ever was’, the issue being “Not whether the very

philosophical propositions about right and wrong were innate; but whether the passion or affection towards society was such: that is to say, whether it was natural and came of itself, or was taught by art’.!9! This argument is developed in The Moralsts, Miscellaneous Reflections, and ‘Plas-

tics’. ‘To Philocles’ question whether ‘the Notions and Principles of Faz, Just, and Honest, with the rest of these /deas, are innate?’ ‘Theocles replies

that “he Question is, whether the Principles spoken of are from Art, or Nature?’ What matters is not the time that they appear — before or after birth, or later — but that ‘Lzfe, and the Sensations which accompany Life, come when they will, are from mere Nature, and nothing else.’ Theocles is

prepared to change the term innate for instinct, meaning ‘that which Nature teaches, exclusive of Art, Culture or Discipline’. And he goes on to take

up the terms preconceptions and presensations which Philocles had applied to animals to show how these also function in human beings.!% Shaftesbury cross-refers to this passage in the footnote (quoted above) in which he brings in Le Clerc in support of his account of preconceptions or TmooAnweis. Both in the quotation from Le Clerc and in Epictetus, who 190 Several Letters, 39—41; also in Life, Letters, ed. Rand, 403—4. For Whichcote’s use of connatural

see RGS, I, 77—8. For a criticism of this letter as fundamentally misrepresenting Locke’s position see Catharine Cockburn to her niece, 29 September 1748, in Cockburn, Works (1751), If, 341-3. She evidently read Shaftesbury’s letters to Ainsworth and Molesworth in the Glasgow edition of 1746; Works, II, 326. Conversely, Dugald Stewart, Dussertation First, Supplement to the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1824), V, Part Il, 30—1, gives this letter high praise: “In

this last remark [the sentence ending ‘spring up in him’| Shaftesbury appears to me to place the question about innate ideas upon the right and only philosophical footing; and to afford a key to all the confusion running through Locke’s argument against their existence.’ For Warburton’s attempt to reconcile Locke and Shaftesbury on innate ideas see his Unpublished Papers (1841), ed. Kulvert, 324—5.

191 [afe, Letters, ed. Rand, 414-15. 192 Moralists, Characteristicks, I1, 411ff. Cf the account of instinct and the further attack on Locke in ‘Plastics’, Second Characters, ed. Rand, 105-7. For a criticism from a Shaftesburian perspective of Locke’s attack on innate ideas see Maxwell, ‘A Dissertation on the Law of Nature’, Chapter 2, 147—59, appended to his translation of Gumberland’s Treatise (not noted in Yolton, Locke and the Way of Ideas). See also Hutcheson’s criticism of Locke quoted in Chapter 3 below, pp. 208-9.

Shaftesbury and the defence of natural affection 129 uses the term frequently, there is a combined emphasis on nature and art: it is through the process of reasoning and education that we learn how to apply our preconceptions to the circumstances of our lives.'9? Shaftesbury

is not arguing that our moral behaviour is entirely instinctive and prerational. But he is arguing, against Locke, that our very nature as human beings disposes us to act morally, that our knowledge of moral principles is not derived solely from the divine law we have been taught or

have reasoned for ourselves, but that our natural instincts refined by education and reason provide the basis of our moral judgements and make us social beings.

In his portrait of the natural human tendency towards society Shaftesbury draws on a number of terms made popular by seventeenth-century latitudinarian divines, especially Whichcote: good nature, good temper, benignity, candour, ingenuity, sociableness.'°* Whichcote’s voice is very much present in a passage such as the following: To be without Honesty, is, in effect, to be without natural Affection or Sociableness of any kind. And a Life without natural Affection, Friendship, or Sociableness, wou’d be found a wretched one, were it to be try’d. "Tis as these Feelings and Affections are intrinsecally valuable and worthy, that Sedf-Interest is to be rated and esteem’d. A Man is by nothing so much himself, as by his Temper, and the Character of his Passions and Affections.'°

To have these natural affections is to have the true means of happiness and self-enjoyment.'?° Many of these ideas are brought together in Theocles’ summary towards the end of The Moralsts of the goods of the mind: May we not esteem as Happiness, that Self-Enjoyment which arises from a Consistency of Life and Manners, a Harmony of Affections, a Freedom from the Reproach of Shame or Guilt, and a Consciousness of Worth and Merit with all Mankind, our Society, Country, and Friends: all which is founded in Virtue only?

A Mind subordinate to Reason, a Temper humaniz’d, and fitted to all natural Affection; an Exercise of Friendship uninterrupted; a thorow Candour, Benignity, and Good Nature. . .\°"

Like these divines, Shaftesbury insists against Hobbes that the social affections, love of family, friends, country, the public good, are natural not artificial. Like them, he illustrates the point by means of a series of words that embody the ‘combining Principle’: correspondency, country, commun195 See e.g. Epictetus, Discourses, I, xxii, 9; I, xi, 1—12; IV, i, 41-4, and Shaftesbury’s account of TmpoAnwers in the exercises, Life, Letters, ed. Rand 214 ff, 222.

194 E.g. Inquiry, Characteristicks, 11, 81, Moralists, 1, 242 (good nature); Inquiry, Il, 63, Moralists, I,

425 (candour and benignity); Jngury, Il, 74, 105 (benignity). This terminology is more important in the revised edition of the Jnquiry (the earlier version presumably antedates Shaftesbury’s reading of Whichcote). Contrast e.g. Inquiry, I, 62—3, with the 1699 edn, 63-4. 195 Sensus Communis, Characteristicks, 1, 121. 196 Inquiry, Characteristicks, I, 99. 197 Characteristicks, II, 434.

130 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment ity, common, conjunction, commonwealth, concert, confederating: ‘Nothing is so delightful as to incorporate’.!¥° In their agreed emphasis on

the reality of moral distinctions, on the need for the post-Hobbesian analysis of the constitution of human nature, and on the importance of identifying social not selfish affections as the motives to moral and social action, there are obvious parallels between Shaftesbury and More, Cud-

worth, Cumberland, and Whichcote, parallels which have often been pointed out. For example More in Enchiridion Ethicum (which Shaftesbury told Ainsworth was ‘a right good Piece of sound Morals’)!%? states that the passions are intrinsically good, stresses the importance of inward propensities and inclinations which come from nature and God and hence dictate what is really good and just, and identifies the faculty that ‘enables us to distinguish not only what is simply and absolutely the best, but to relish it, and to have pleasure in that alone’ as ‘the Boniform Faculty of the Soul, the fruits of which are love, benignity, and beneficence.*°° The second of the three fundamentals of true religion that Cudworth identifies in the Preface to The True Intellectual System of the Unwerse (1678) is that there is “Something in

its own Nature, Immutably and Eternally Just’,*°' and Books I and II of his Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality (not published till 1731) are

devoted to demolishing the views of Hobbes on the one hand that there is no right or wrong in the state of nature and of certain theologians on the

other that there is no right or wrong outside God’s arbitrary will. For Cudworth moral knowledge is innate. The soul cannot be a tabula rasa, with all knowledge derived from sensation: if this were so there would be no moral good and evil. Unlike More, however, Cudworth firmly separates mind from sense or passion and sees knowledge of moral distinctions as purely intellectual.7°* Cumberland’s stated aim in writing his Treatise of the Laws of Nature 1s ‘to promote the publick Good, by plainly proposing to the Minds of Men, the Standard of Virtue and Society, taken from the Nature of all ‘Things’. His key term is benevolence: the exercise of the benevolent affections results in both the pleasure and happiness of each individual and

27. ,

the common good of all. He dismisses innate ideas as an irrelevance, thereby firmly differentiating himself from his Cambridge contemporaries, but he argues that knowledge of the law of nature, i.e. that ‘promoting the

common Good of the whole System of rational Agents, conduces .. . to 198 Sensus Communis, Characteristicks, I, 109-14; cf RGS, I, 77-8. For public good see e.g. Inquiry, II, 199 Several Letters, 30 December 1709, 43 (not in Life, Letters, ed. Rand). 20° Enchiridion Ethicum (1667), trans. as An Account of Virtue (1690), Book I, Chapter 2, 6; Chapter 3,

18; Chapter 12, 78—9; Book II, Chapter 9, 156-7.

201 True Intellectual System (1678) A3™.

202 Eternal and Immutable Morality (1731), Book I, Chapter 1, 8-9; Book IV, Chapter 2, 172; Chapter 3, 219-20; Chapter 6, 287. There is an abridged edition by S. Hutton (1996) with useful introduction.

Shaftesbury and the defence of natural affection 131 the good of every Part’, is impressed on our minds by the nature of things.?°%

In his Preface to Whichcote’s Select Sermons Shaftesbury makes it clear

why he finds so important Whichcote’s emphasis on good nature as the foundation of morals. Whichcote is presented as offering a return to the unified view of religion and morality held by the ancients: Piety (which was their best Word to signifie Religion) had more than half its Sence, in Natural and Good Affection; and stood not only for the Adoration, and Worship of God; but for the Natural Affections of Parents to their Children, and of Children to their Parents; of Men to thear Native Country; and, indeed, of all Men in their several Relations one to another.

Shaftesbury differentiates Whichcote from his Christian contemporaries

who have denigrated morality and by stressing the sanction of divine rewards and punishments have made religion mercenary, applauding Whichcote as a ‘truly Christian Philosopher, whom, for his appearing thus in Defence of Natural Goodness, we may call the Preacher of Good-nature’.?*

But this account obscures, as the following sermons reveal, the impor-

tance of the gospel for Whichcote, the fact that it is religion, the deification of man by Christ, that causes the practice of benevolence.?°° The similarity between the language and attitudes of Shaftesbury and the latitudinarian divines should not be overplayed. Where Shaftesbury parts company with them — and here the distance between them is enormous — is over the question of moral obligation and the role of revelation. ‘To

state that our natural affections or good nature dispose us to act benevolently and for the common good 1s not, for the divines, a sufficient explanation of why we should do so. Moral obligation is dependent on

religion, both natural and revealed. Cudworth insists that ‘it is not possible that there should be any such ‘Thing as Morality, unless there be

a God, that is, an Infinite Eternal Mind that is the first Original and Source of all Things, whose Nature is the first Rule and Exemplar of Morality’.*°° For More the moral life is subsumed in the divine life, and he ends Enchiridion Ethicum on a strongly Christian note: the heathen philosophers to whom he has attached such importance throughout the work turn out to owe all their knowledge of God, the soul, and virtue to

Jewish tradition.*°’ For Cumberland, whose approach is far more legalistic, it is God’s will that men should pursue the common good, and it is by means of his rewards and punishments that he ensures that they

fulfil it (the doctrine that Shaftesbury finds repugnant in Locke and 203 Treatise, Introduction, 14, 16, 36; Chapter 5, 189, 213, 226, 238, 269; Chapter 6, 310. 204 Whichcote, Select Sermons, Preface [A6], [A8]. Cf Theocles on virtue being made a rival to religion, Moralists, Characteristcks, UW, 256.

209 Eg. Select Sermons, Part II, Sermon 3, 347; Sermon 6, 431 (quoted ARGS, I, 25). 206 Eternal and Immutable Morality, Book IV, Chapter 6, 298. 207 Account of Virtue, Book III, Chapter 3, 197—8; Chapter 10, 267-8.

132 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment attacks in the Preface to Whichcote).7°° The benevolent dispositions and

affections God has given them and the happiness they enjoy from the exercise of these affections are not in themselves a sufficient motive to virtue. Virtue and religion

In Chapter 2 of Miscellany IV, after considering the economy of men and animals, the natural affections and preconceptions, and the convergence of

the interests of self and society, private and public good, Shaftesbury comes to the question of the relation of the particular economies or systems to the universal whole. On this last point he refers his readers back

to the Inquiry and The Moralsts, and then comments that if what he advances there concerning ‘the Universal Nature and Cause of things’ is real or

probable it will follow, ““That since MAN has been so constituted, by means of his rational

part, as to be conscious of this his more immediate Relation to the Universal System, and Principle of Order and Intelligence; he is not only by Nature sociable,

within the Limits of his own Species, or Kind; but in a yet more generous and extensive manner. He is not only born to VIRTUE, Imendship, Honesty and Faith, but to RELIGION, Piety, Adoration, and a generous Surrender of his Mind to whatever happens from that Supreme CAUSE, or ORDER of Things, which he acknowledges intirely just, and perfect.”

Apparently anxious that his flippant miscellany-writer’s mask will prevent him from being taken seriously, he assures his readers that “THESE ARE our Author’s formal and grave Sentiments.’*°” It seems reasonable to take Shaftesbury at his word here, but that does not solve the problem of what

these sentiments are. In the /nguiry he asks himself the questions what virtue is, how it is influenced by religion, how far religion implies virtue,

and whether it is possible for an atheist to be virtuous.?7/° To these a further question should be added: what did Shaftesbury mean by religion? Eighteenth-century readers who asked this question tended to think either (like Berkeley) that Shaftesbury’s views were not religious in any sense, or (like Wishart and other Scottish Shaftesburians) that they were essentially

compatible with Christianity. Neither of these interpretations seems correct.*!! The problem is partly that of deciding the relationship between the Inquiry and The Moralists, and partly of determining what Shaftesbury

meant by the universal cause, order, or system of which the individual systems form a part. 208 Treatise, Chapter 5, 225. 209 Miscellaneous Reflections, Characteristicks, III, 224—5. 210 Characteristicks, UW, 7.

211 See the epigraph from Berkeley, p. 86 above. For the Scottish Shaftesburians see Chapter 3 below.

Shaftesbury and the defence of natural affection 133 Shaftesbury uses a number of terms to denote the spectrum of possible views about religion: theism, atheism, polytheism, daemonism, deism, and scepticism. The first four are defined in the Inquiry. The theist believes that

everything is governed ‘for the best, by a designing Principle, or Mind, necessarily good and permanent’. The atheist believes in no designing

principle. The polytheist believes in more than one good designing principle. ‘The daemonist believes that this principle is not necessarily good

and is capable of acting according to mere will. Shaftesbury calls each of these positions perfect (1.e. complete) if held consistently; otherwise they can be held intermittently or combined in various ways.*!* Deism is a term he very rarely uses. He appears to dislike it because of its association

with the fashionable kind of freethinking from which he wished to dissociate himself.2'? Indeed, in the exercises he is explicitly hostile, inveighing against misappropriation of the term in ways Berkeley would have approved: ‘Who are these Deists? How assume this name? By what title or pretence?’ ‘The crucial question is ‘Mind? or not mind? If mind, a providence, the idea perfect: a God. If not mind, what in the place? For whatever it be, it cannot without absurdity be called God or Deity; nor the opinion without absurdity be called Deism ... What is this Deism they talk of ? How does it differ from mere Atheism?’?!* Scepticism is a term Shaftesbury uses much more than deism, but again he dissociates himself

from its negative connotations. Fashionable scepticism is seen as unthinking, bigoted, and playing into the hands of religious authoritarians.*'°

Shaftesbury insists that ‘he is as littl a SCEPTICK (according to the vulgar Sense of that word) as he is Hpicurean, or Atheist’, and he reminds his

readers that ‘in its original and plain signification, the word imports no more than barely, ““Chat State or Frame of Mind in which every one remains, on every Subject of which he is not certain’. In the Inguary, as Shaftesbury points out, despite his sceptical airs in the first treatise, he is a real dogmatist.*'®

Shaftesbury’s questions in the /nguiry about the relationship between religion and virtue can be put in more pointed ways than those above. Does any of the kinds of religious or irreligious belief he defines damage virtue? Does any of these kinds generate virtue? Is the absence of religious

belief relevant or irrelevant to virtue? In his answers to these questions Shaftesbury stands apart from the religious traditions of his time, and several eighteenth-century readers comment adversely on the positions he 212 Characteristicks, I, 11—14.

213 See the comments of Palemon and Theocles in Moralists, II, 209, 268. 214 Tafe, Letters, ed. Rand, ‘Deity’, 38-9.

215 See Philocles’ portrayal of scepticism, Moralists, Characteristicks, Tl, 205-7, and Theocles’ criticism, II, 230—1, 268-9, 306. 216 Miscellaneous Reflections, Characteristicks, U1, 70—1, 133. See also p. 107 above.

134 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment takes. However, these positions are not altogether consistent or easy to follow, and they deserve looking at carefully to clarify whether this is the result of confusion or rhetorical choice. In Book I of the Jnquiry Shaftesbury defines virtue before examining its relation to religion (in the 1699 version the two books are usefully entitled ‘Of Virtue, and the Belief of a Deity’ and ‘Of the Obligations to Virtue’,

but these titles are dropped in Characteristicks). Virtue differs from the natural affection that is typical of all animals (Shaftesbury usually calls them ‘sensible creatures’) in that it implies the use of reason and applies only to humans. The sense of right and wrong involves reflection on the operation of the affections, and is in effect ‘another kind of Affection towards those very Affections themselves’ or ‘Reflex Affection’; it is ‘a

Sentiment or Judgment of what is done, thro just, equal, and good Affection, or the contrary’. Virtue depends on ‘a knowledg of Right and Wrong, and on a use of Reason, sufficient to secure a right application of the Affections’; it is summarily defined as ‘a certain just Disposition, or proportionable Affection of a rational Creature towards the Moral Objects of Right and

Wrong’. Just as it is impossible to conceive a mere sensible creature without

social affection, so it is impossible to conceive a rational creature indifferent to virtue. Sense of right and wrong is as natural as natural affection and ‘a first Principle in our Constitution and Make’, and it is therefore very difficult for any religious or irreligious belief, theism, atheism, daemonism, or any other, to affect 1t except indirectly through

another affection.*'’ It is essential to Shaftesbury’s account of human | nature that the moral sense is prior to any notion of a God; indeed, he claims that this priority will hardly be questioned. ‘The capacity for virtue

and the sense of right and wrong are the product of a reflecting faculty being combined with natural affection, whereas a more refined sort of reflection, of which only the adult is capable, is necessary to deal with the

question of God’s existence (Shaftesbury manages to hold both antiLockean and Lockean views here):

BEFORE the time, therefore, that a Creature can have any plain or positive Notion one way or other, concerning the Subject of a GOD, he may be suppos’d to have an Apprehension or Sense of Right and Wrong, and be possess’d of Virtue and Vice in different Degrees.?!®

In what ways then does Shaftesbury consider that it is possible for religious or irreligious belief to affect virtue? (The following analysis does not follow precisely Shaftesbury’s own ordering of his argument.) First, he 217 Characteristicks, II, 28, 31, 35, 40, 43—5. 218 Characteristicks, I, 53-4. Voitle in SP LIT (1955) and Shaftesbury, 125ff, argues that Shaftesbury’s

use of the term reflection is deliberately Lockean. The same point is made in McCosh, The

Scottish Philosophy (1875), 34.

Shaftesbury and the defence of natural affection 135 is keen to show that the wrong kind of religious belief damages virtue. This happens in two ways. Superstition, which Shaftesbury uses as a synonym for daemonism (and which evidently denotes several aspects of Christian theology), renders moral terms meaningless. Shaftesbury’s argument here resembles Cudworth’s, but in its examples it is insulting to Christianity in general, not just to predestinarianism. Whoever believes God to be good

believes in the independent existence of right and wrong, according to which he pronounces that God is good. But on the other hand, ‘If the mere Will, Decree, or Law of God be said absolutely to constitute Right and Wrong, then are these latter words of no significancy at all.’ For example, ‘if one Person were decreed to suffer for another’s fault, the Sentence wou’d be just and equitable’ (presumably a reference to the crucifixion). Again, ‘if

arbitrarily, and without reason, some Beings were destin’d to endure perpetual Ill, and others as constantly to enjoy Good’, this would also be deemed just. So if a believer worships a God who ‘is represented otherwise

than as really and truly just and good; there must ensue a Loss of Rectitude, a Disturbance of Thought, and a Corruption of Temper and Manners in the Believer’. The ‘ill Character of a GOD does injury to the Affections of Men, and disturbs and impairs the natural Sense of Right and Wrong’.?!9

The other way in which the wrong kind of religious belief damages virtue is in relation to the doctrine that God enforces obedience to his will through rewards and punishments. An action is not virtuous if it is done not for its own sake but merely out of hope or fear of the consequences. A man is not good because he is prevented from doing mischief by having his hands tied up. “There is no more of Rectitude, Prety, or Sanctity in a Creature

thus reform’d, than there is Meekness or Gentleness in a ‘Tyger strongly chain’d, or Innocence and Sobriety in a Monkey under the Discipline of the Whip.’ This is nothing but servility. Shaftesbury summarises his objections as follows: neither this Fear or Hope can possibly be of the kind call’d good Affections, such as are

acknowledg’d the Springs and Sources of all Actions truly good. Nor can this Fear

or Hope ... consist in reality with Virtue, or Goodness; if it either stands as essential to any moral Performance, or as a considerable Motwe to any Act, of which some better Affection ought, alone, to have been a sufficient Cause.?*°

This mercenary kind of religion promotes the pursuit of self-love and selfinterest at the expense of the social affections. If God is loved only as a cause of private good, he is only a means not an end: ‘the more there is of this violent Affection towards private Good, the less room 1s there for the 219 Characteristicks, 11, 49-51. The attack on Christianity is more explicit in the revised version: contrast the 1699 edn, 50. 220 Characteristicks, TI, 21, 55, 57—8.

136 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment other sort towards Goodness it-self’. If anyone submits to God ‘only on the expectation of infinite Retribution or Reward, he discovers no more Worth or Virtue here, than in any other Bargain of Interest’.**! In this attack on the damage to virtue caused by the doctrine of rewards and punishments, Shaftesbury is firmly dissociating himself both from the increasing emphasis in late seventeenth-century Anglicanism on the profit-

ableness of religion as a motive to virtue,*** and from the sterner argument, which does not necessarily coexist with the first, that virtue constitutes obedience to divine law and that the human duty to obey is enforced by sanctions. Shaftesbury might have had in mind the abridgement of Cumberland’s Treatise of the Laws of Nature, entitled A Bnef Disquisition of the Law of Nature, by Locke’s friend James ‘Tyrrell, published in

1692 approximately a couple of years before the writing of the Jnquzry. Tyrrell in his dedicatory letter to Cumberland particularly praises Gumberland’s account of rewards and punishments, and in his Preface lists six plain postulata, moving from the existence of God to the duty of man to obey his will and the establishment of the law of nature by rewards and punishments, a progression which Shaftesbury sets out to demolish in the Inquiry.2*° Whether or not Shaftesbury encountered this argument in Cumberland and Tyrrell, he certainly knew that it was Locke’s. In the Essay Locke clearly presents the motivating force of divine rewards and punishments: The Rewards and Punishments of another Life, which the Almighty has established, as the Enforcements of his Law, are of weight enough to determine the Choice, against whatever Pleasure or Pain this Life can shew, when the eternal State is considered but in its bare possibility, which no Body can make any doubt of. He that will allow exquisite and endless Happiness to be but the possible consequence of a good Life here, and the contrary state the possible Reward of a bad one, must own himself to judge very much amiss, if he does not conclude, That a vertuous Life, with the certain expectation of everlasting Bliss, which may come, is to be preferred to a vicious one, with the fear of that dreadful state of Misery, which ’tis very possible may overtake the guilty.?**

Shaftesbury’s dislike of this doctrine is commented on by several of his eighteenth-century readers, who also point out the modifications of and 221 Characteristicks, 11, 58—9. Cf Sensus Communis, 1, 97-8; Moralists, I, 247; Miscellaneous Reflections,

Ill, 306—7. 222 See RGS, I, 85—6, 161-2. 223 Tyrrell, Brief Disquisition, “Yo .. . Richard, Lord Bishop of Peterborough’ and ‘Preface to the

Reader’, unpaginated; Chapter 3, 133ff on rewards and punishments. ‘Tyrrell borrows extensively from Wilkins’s Natural Religion, More’s Enchiridion Ethicum, and Locke’s Essay. Cumberland stresses the importance of rewards and punishments in Treatise, Chapter 5, 225. Aldridge, TAPS, NS XLI (1951), 304—5, discusses the debate about rewards and punishments between Atterbury and Hoadly. 224 Locke, Essay, ed. Nidditch, Book I, Chapter 21, 281.

Shaftesbury and the defence of natural affection 137 inconsistencies in his position. Maxwell, Gumberland’s translator, whose

own beliefs are unequivocally Christian, disapproves of the prudential aspect of Cumberland’s account of morality and quotes at length and with great approval Shaftesbury’s various attacks on mercenary religion, including passages in which Shaftesbury argues the advantages of religious

belief and concedes some usefulness to the doctrine of rewards and punishments.?7? John Balguy in A Letter to a Deist (1726), which consists largely of an analysis of the /nquzry, is far more hostile: although he agrees with Shaftesbury that virtue is not founded on self-interest, this does not

mean that ‘Virtue, and the Rewards of Virtue must needs be separated,

and set at Variance.’ The motives of religion strengthen rather than weaken benevolence. In support of his case Balguy uses some of Shaftesbury’s own arguments.*7° Leland in Principal Deistical Writers similarly points out that although Shaftesbury attacks the doctrine of rewards and punishments as mercenary he can see its usefulness. Leland further notices the problem of reconciling the different objectives of the /nquiry and The

Moralists: in the Inquiry Shaftesbury sets up the notion of virtue as independent of religion, but in The Moralists he suggests that his intention in the Jnquiry was to reclaim men from atheism. Leland objects that men

will not be reclaimed from atheism if they think they can have virtue without religion. It is his opinion that one of the most important services

that can be done to mankind is to show the close connexion between religion and virtue, and that the latter cannot be maintained without the former; in support of this view he cites the passage from Miscellaneous Reflections (quoted at the beginning of this section) on man as being born to religion as well as to virtue.**’ In what ways does Shaftesbury think religious belief is to the advantage

of virtue, notwithstanding his attacks on mercenary religion? Does the right kind of religious belief positively induce the practice of virtue? Is atheism disadvantageous to virtue, despite the priority of the sense of right

and wrong over belief in a God? The most important argument that Shaftesbury puts forward concerns the effect that theism — belief in a good designing principle — has on the mind of the believer. Just as belief in the ill character of a God disturbs the sense of right and wrong, so belief in a just

and good God helps to confirm it. The example of a God who has ‘a Concern for the good of All, and an Affection of Benevolence and Love towards the Whole’ must serve ‘to raise and increase the Affection towards Virtue, and help to submit and subdue all other Affections to that alone.’ Belief that such a being is a continual spectator of all our lives contributes 225 Maxwell, ‘Dissertation on the Law of Nature’, Chapter 1, 47, 58-68, appended to Cumberland, Treatise. Maxwell quotes Characteristicks, 1, 97-8, 125—7; II, 54—69, 271-4. 226 Letter to a Deist, 6, 9-10, 12-16. 227 Principal Deistical Writers (4th edn, 1764), I, Letter 5, 50, 55; Letter 6, 68-9, 73-6, 78, 82.

138 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment greatly to the shame of guilty actions and the honour of good ones, especially when the latter are censured by the world: ‘in this Case, ’tis very apparent how conducing a perfect Theism must be to Virtue, and how great Deficiency there is in Atheism’.?7° On a lower level, fear of punishment and hope of reward, though in themselves not good affections but mercenary and servile, may be of advantage to virtue by calming or strengthening the mind in certain circumstances and eventually making the good affections valued for themselves. Indeed if the hope of reward means ‘the Love and

Desire of virtuous Enjoyment, or of the very Practice and Exercise of Virtue in another Life; the Expectation or Hope of this kind 1s so far from being derogatory to Virtue, that it is an Evidence of our loving it the more sincerely and for its own sake’.*°9

Essentially, virtue requires security: ‘there is a necessity for the Preservation of Virtue, that it shou’d be thought to have no quarrel with true Interest, and Self-Enjoyment .2°° This is what theism gives it and atheism denies it. In

theory it is possible for the atheist to see the advantages of virtue, but in practice ‘the natural Tendency of Atheism is very different’. The chief support of the belief that virtue causes happiness is direct experience of the satisfaction arising from the love of virtue, which Shaftesbury calls ‘this generous moral Affection’. But it is difficult to love goodness or beauty in the part when there is no belief in goodness or beauty in the whole. The effect is that the individual capacity for good affection may be undermined:

NOTHING indeed can be more melancholy, than the Thought of living in a distracted Universe, from whence many Ills may be suspected, and where there is

nothing good or lovely which presents itself, nothing which can satisfy in Contemplation, or raise any Passion besides that of Contempt, Hatred, or Dislike. Such an Opinion as this may by degrees imbitter the Temper, and not only make the Love of Virtue to be less felt, but help to impair and ruin the very Principle of Virtue, viz. natural and kind Affection.

The perfect theist, on the contrary, whatever his opinions as to a future hfe

and its rewards and punishments, who believes in a mind that rules ‘all

things with the highest perfection of Goodness, ... must necessarily believe Virtue to be naturally good and advantageous’, for to believe otherwise would be to suppose ‘a Blot and Imperfection in the general Constitution of Things’. In those cases where the individual is faced by calamitous circumstances, the responses of the atheist and the theist will be

very different. The atheist will be unable ‘to prevent a natural kind of Abhorrence and Spleen, which will be entertain’d and kept alive by the 228 Inquiry, Characteristicks, 11, 51, 56-7. 229 Characteristicks, Il, 6(0—1, 63, 65—6. 230 Characteristicks, 1, 67. This argument is developed by Butler: see Chapter 3 below, pp. 225-6. For a criticism of Shaftesbury’s inconsistencies on the subjects of virtue, interest, and happiness see Rutherforth, Essay on the Nature and Obligations of Virtue (1744), 195-203.

Shaftesbury and the defence of natural affection 139 Imagination of so perverse an Order of Things’. But the theist, who believes ‘That whatever the Order of the World produces, 1s in the main both just and

good’, is able by reflection to have patience and acquiesce in his lot, and may even ‘make the Lot itself an Object of his good Affection; while he

strives to maintain this generous Fealty, and stands so well-dispos’d towards the Laws and Government of his higher Country’.*°! (This is one

of the most conspicuously Stoic passages in the Inquiry.)*°* Whereas atheism embitters the temper, theism ‘cannot fail of producing still a greater Equality, Gentleness, and Benignity in the Temper.’ ‘Theism directly increases the good affection of a rational creature towards society

and the public good and thus causes an increase in virtue. Towards the end of Book I Shaftesbury introduces an important paragraph which does not appear in the 1699 version and which is written in a language more appropriate to The Moralists than the /nquiry. Contemplation of the beauty of the divine order induces ecstasy and rapture, which Shaftesbury also calls ‘Religious Affection’ (in the marginal heading) and ‘Divine Passion’. If the hypothesis of theism is false, this passion is still good in that it proves advantageous to virtue; if the hypothesis is true, this passion “becomes absolutely due and requisite in every rational Creature’. Hence Shaftesbury concludes that virtue is only complete in piety, since without piety ‘there can neither be the same Benignity, Firmness, or Constancy; the same good Composure of the Affections, or Uniformity of Mind’.*°°

In the /nquiry atheism and theism are treated as hypotheses and the psychological effect of holding each hypothesis is tested. In The Moralists religion is treated very differently. Theocles, in his long defence of the Inquiry, suggests that the organisation of the argument in the earlier work 1s to some extent a rhetorical ploy to enable Shaftesbury ‘to argue with those who are not as yet induc’d to own a GOD, or Future State.’ But, ‘Theocles claims, ‘notwithstanding He has thus made VIRTUE his chief Subject, and in some measure independent on Religion, yet I fancy he may possibly appear at last as high a Divine as he is a Moralist (a claim Leland set himself to demolish). And Theocles asserts it as a rule “Chat whoever sincerely defends VIRTUE, and is a Realist in MORALITY, must of necessity, in a

manner, by the same Scheme of Reasoning, prove as very a Realist in DIVINITY.’2°*

In what sense is Shaftesbury a realist in divinity? What does he mean by

God? The most important passages in The Moralsts that are relevant to these questions are Philocles’ summary to Palemon in Part I, Section 3 of : what he has learned from Theocles, and Theocles’ explanation to Philocles in Part II, Section 4 and Part III Section 1 of the universal system.*%° It 231 Characteristicks, 11, 69-71, 72—4. 232 Cf ‘Natural Affection’, Life, Letters, ed. Rand. 233 Characteristicks, 11, 74—6. 234 Moralists, Characteristicks, 11, 266—8.

235 Characteristicks, IL, 211-17 (esp. 212-13); 282-95; 345—7; 352, 358-66, 369-70.

140 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment must be borne in mind that some of Theocles’ claims to orthodoxy are also

a rhetorical ploy intended to disarm Shaftesbury’s Christian critics.*%° These passages should be read in the light of the remarks on ‘Deity’ in the exercises.*°/

The principal terms and phrases Shaftesbury uses for God are deity, universal or sovereign or supreme mind, the whole, supreme nature, providence, order, universal system, universal or sovereign genius, and designing principle. There is an ambiguity in that terms such as nature, system, and order sometimes mean what is created and controlled by the organising principle, and sometimes that principle itself. Nevertheless Shaftesbury’s religious realism can be summarised in a simplified form as follows. The reflecting individual mind proceeds from observation of order in the parts, the separate systems, of the universe to observation of order in

the whole, the universal system, and hence to the universal designing mind. Each system taken separately is complete in itself in terms of its internal mechanism, but it must also be considered in relation to the greater system of which it is a part — the individual to the species, the species to the world, the world to the universe. This collective universal system is one, animated by one universal mind. Each individual system

strives to achieve its own end, its own good, and at the same time the activities of the constituent parts all contribute to the good of the whole.

Since the universal system is good, any apparent individual ill which contributes to the good of the whole is really good in itself.*°? The

individual self or mind is a copy of the original mind and hence endeavours to conform to it as far as possible and to submit its own good to the greater good. This is how Theocles defines the ‘Fazth of Theism’ (as

the marginal heading calls it): | I consider, That as there is one general Mass, one Body of the Whole; so to this Body there is an Order, to this Order, a MIND: That to this general MIND each particular-one must have relation; as being of like Substance (as much as we can understand of Substance) alike active upon Body, original to Motion and Order; alike simple, uncompounded, individual; of like Energy, Effect, and Operation; and more like still, if it co-operates with It to general Good, and strives to will

according to that best of Wills. So that it cannot but seem natural, “That the particular MIND shou’d seek its Happiness in conformity with the general-one, and endeavour to resemble it in its highest Simplicity and Excellence.”

In his defence of the Jnquiry Theocles suggests that belief in a future state may follow from theism,’°? but this consideration is strictly irrelevant to

his own argument and is deftly skirted. In his private notes on ‘Deity’ Shaftesbury reveals both his personal disgust with orthodox Christianity — 236 E..9. Characteristicks, 11, 269-70, 275-7. 237 Life, Letters, ed. Rand, 13-39. 238 Inquiry, Characteristicks, 11, 20. 239 Moralists, Characteristicks, II, 358—9, 275-6.

Shaftesbury and the defence of natural affection 14] ‘vulgar religion . . . that sordid, shameful nauseous idea of Deity’ — and his

fear that freethinking attempts to undermine it will simply introduce atheism. ‘he perfect Stoic theist understands the relation of the part to the whole, of his mind to the universal mind, without any need of these vulgar trappings: Happy he! whose faith in Deity, satisfaction, assurance, acquiescing, rejoicing in Providence and in the universal administration and order of things depends, not on any history, or tale, or tradition, or wonder amongst men; not on man himself, or any set of men; not on any particular schemes, or systems, or solutions, of the

phenomena of the world; no, not even on that great solution by a futurity; but who, leaving the present things to be as they are, and future ones to be as they are to be, committing all this to Providence, to be or not to be, as to that seems best,

knows, feels, and is satisfied that all things are for the best; nothing ill-made, nothing ill-governed, nothing but what contributes to the perfection of the whole, and to the felicity of Him who is the whole in the whole.**9 Harmony and proportion

Shaftesbury’s apparent concession that it is possible in theory but extremely difficult in practice for the atheist who believes himself to be living in

a disordered, inharmonious world to be virtuous turns out not to be a concession at all. It is only the theist who understands the relation of his private moral economy to the perfect order and harmony of the whole and who seeks to conform his mind to the universal mind who is capable of true virtue. The stages of Shaftesbury’s argument from the part to the whole are designed to show that the realist in morality must be a realist in divinity, but they also show the converse, that unless one is a realist in divinity one cannot be a realist in morality. But how is this knowledge

achieved and communicated? There is no revealed source. It is not reached by metaphysical speculation (although Theocles engages Philocles in metaphysical argument before summarising the faith of theism, Shaftesbury’s methods are not like Cudworth’s). Nor is it demonstrated through minute empirical observation of the hand of the divine artificer in natural phenomena (the enormously influential method of Ray and Derham).**! The basis of Shaftesbury’s epistemology is psychological, and it depends on a fusion of the vocabularies of ethics and aesthetics, the good and the beautiful, which is ultimately Platonic in origin, though Shaftesbury’s own emphases are not always Platonic, and which for a variety of reasons has probably proved the most influential aspect of his thought, despite the fact that in some respects his meaning remains elusive. Many of his key terms

and ideas — order, harmony, proportion, beauty — are included in the 740 Life, Letters, ed. Rand, 24—6, 28-9, 36. 241 Ray, Wisdom of God (1691); Derham, Physico- Theology (1713).

142 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment paragraph already cited that is placed towards the end of Book I of the Inquiry:

THIS too is certain; That the Admiration and Love of Order, Harmony and Proportion, in whatever kind, 1s naturally improving to the ‘Temper, advantageous to social Affection, and highly assistant to Virtue; which is it-self no other than the Love of Order and Beauty in Society. In the meanest Subjects of the World, the Appearance of Order gains upon the Mind, and draws the Affection towards it. But if the Order of the World it-self appears just and beautiful; the Admiration and Esteem of Order must run higher, and the elegant Passion or Love of Beauty, which is so advantageous to Virtue, must be the more improv’d by its Exercise in so ample and magnificent a Subject. For tis impossible that such a Divine Order shou’d be

contemplated without Extasy and Rapture; since, in the common Subjects of

Science, and the liberal Arts, whatever is according to just Harmony and Proportion, is so transporting to those who have any Knowledg or Practice in the Kind.?**

Shaftesbury here draws on some of the terminology of the Letter concerning Enthusiasm and Soliloquy, and points the reader forward to the central part

of the argument of The Moralsts. In a note to ‘Extasy and Rapture’ he specifically cross-refers to passages on enthusiasm in The Moralists and Miscellaneous Reflections.**° He further develops these ideas in the account of

taste in Miscellany III, Chapter 2 (which forms an appendix to Soluoquy),-** and they are touched on in summary form in ‘Plastics’ (where he instructs himself to ‘Self-cite also on good occasion the theological passages referring to art in Inquiry’, including the one quoted above).**° There are also relevant passages in the exercises, notably under the heading “The Beautiful (td KaAdv)’.24° The essence of the argument, bringing together several key terms, is in the loaded question Shaftesbury asks in Miscellany III, Chapter 2, about the mind (after he has considered manners and the

body): ‘Will it not be found in this respect, above all, “That what is BEAUTIFUL is Harmonious and Proportionable; what 1s Harmonious and Proportionable, is ‘TRUE; and what is at once both Beautiful and True, is of

consequence, Agreeable and GOOD?”’ And in a long note Shaftesbury adds, “This is the HONESTUM, the PULCHRUM, To kaAdv, on which our Author lays the stress of VIRTUE, and the Merits of this Cause.’**’ 242° Characteristicks, 1, 75. Cf More, Divine Dialogues (1668), I, 285-7. 243 'The cross-references are to Moralists, Characteristicks, TI, 394, 400, and Miscellaneous Reflections,

III, 30. On these pages there are references back to Letter concerning Enthusiasm, I, 53-4 and Inquiry, UW, 75.

244 Praised by Leibniz, ‘Jugement’, in Des Maizeaux, ed., Recueil, II, 285. 245 Second Characters, ed. Rand, 177. 246 Tafe, Letters, ed. Rand, 244—52. 247 Characteristicks, U1, 182-3, 182n; cf Soliloquy, I, 353; Inquiry, Tl, 105; Several Letters, 28 January 1709, 31. Maxwell quotes III, 182—3 and several other passages in his Shaftesburian account

of moral beauty in ‘Dissertation on the Law of Nature’, Chapter 1, 70—2, appended to Cumberland, Treatise. Berkeley suggests that Shaftesbury misrepresents the ancient definition of TO KaAdv, Alciphron, Works, ed. Luce and Jessop, HI, 118, 133-5.

Shaftesbury and the defence of natural affection 143 Shaftesbury assumes that harmony and proportion, symmetry and numbers, are inherent in all things, natural and artificial, external and internal — the natural world, society, works of art, human manners and

morals, mental acts — and that they are a reflection of the universal

mind. The human mind is so constituted that it cannot help but recognise and respond to this harmony, the response consisting in the

love of beauty. This love of beauty is both an instinctive natural affection which in heightened form becomes rapture, transport, and

ecstasy, and a taste which is not innate but which is formed and acquired and can be directed to specific objects. The pursuit of beauty, whether natural, aesthetic, or moral, is enthusiasm; true, noble enthusiasm for moral beauty resulting in virtuous acts is the highest form of human response to universal harmony. However, many fail to under-

stand this relation between lower and higher forms of enthusiasm: virtuosi direct their affection only to lesser objects — paintings, houses, gardens, intellectual speculation. It is the rhetorical task of the philosophical enthusiast to lure the virtuoso to virtue, to refashion his taste so

that he learns the true standard of beauty and falls in love with the moral Venus.

This summary, though it is based on many scattered statements, 1s an oversimplification. In several places, especially in the unpublished writings but also in Characteristicks, Shaftesbury shows his ambivalence about using the language of aesthetics to discuss ethics. In some places it seems that he

is drawing an analogy purely for rhetorical purposes between art and morals, in others that he really means that the beautiful is the good.**® This difficulty is not lost on his critics. ‘Thus John Brown in his Essays on the Characteristics (1751) objects to Shaftesbury’s use of metaphorical expres-

sions such as the harmony, proportion, and beauty of virtue, the last borrowed from the ancients. After quoting Cicero’s famous Platonic saying that if virtue could be seen she would be loved he comments tartly: “Of this our Author and his Followers, especially the most ingenious of them [l.e. Hutcheson], are so enamoured, that they seem utterly to have forgot they are talking in Metaphor, when they describe the Charms of this sovereign Fair?**9 To this the dissenting minister Charles Bulkley in his Vindication of Shaftesbury on the Subjects of Morality and Religion (1752) retorts: ‘the noble writer and his followers are so far from _ forgetting this, that they never once imagined

it to be the case. They believed a real harmony, a real proportion, a real 248 See Voitle, Shaftesbury, 339ff.

249 Essays on the Characteristics (5th edn, 1764), Essay I, ‘On the Motives to Virtue’, 161—2. Brown

quotes inaccurately from De Officis, I, v, 15, which refers to Phaedrus 250D: “You see here, Marcus, my son, the very form and as it were the face of Moral Goodness; “‘and if,” as Plato says, “it could be seen with the physical eye, it would awaken a marvellous love of wisdom” ’, trans. W. Miller (Loeb), 17. For Brown see Chapter 3 below, p. 204.

144 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment beauty in virtue.’?°° To try to disentangle this problem it is helpful to look first at Shaftesbury’s comparison between the virtuoso and the philosopher and the related account of taste, and then at his advocacy of enthusiasm for moral beauty. Sometimes it appears that the virtuoso 1s the subordinate partner of the philosopher, engaged with him, though at a lower level, in the common

pursuit of beauty, and that the philosopher is attempting to lead the virtuoso onto the higher moral plane; at others it appears that they are rivals, that the philosopher has contempt for the virtuoso and is using the language of virtuosoship in order to subvert it. The first of these positions is the one Shaftesbury chooses to emphasise. Thus he asserts: Every-one is a Virtuoso, of a higher or lower degree: Every-one pursues a GRACE, and courts a VENUS of one kind or another. The Venustum, the Honestum, the Decorum of Things, will force its way. They who refuse to give it scope in the nobler

Subjects of a rational and moral kind, will find its Prevalency elsewhere, in an inferiour Order of Things.??! the Sense of inward Numbers, the Knowledg and Practice of the social Virtues, and the Familiarity and Favour of the moral GRACES, are essential to the Character of a deserving Artist, and just Favourite of the MUSES. Thus are the Arts and Virtues

mutually Friends: and thus the Science of Virtuoso’s, and that of Virtue it-self, become, in a manner, one and the same.?°”

‘Had Mr. Locke been a virtuoso’, Shaftesbury told Stanhope, he would not have made the error of calling virtue and honesty the law of opinion, for

‘harmony is harmony by nature, let particular ears be ever so bad, or let

men judge ever so ill of music ... The same is the case of virtue and honesty’.*°? Because Hobbes and Locke deny the absolute standard of virtue they are linked with anti-virtuosi as barbarians.*°* A more general name for the virtuoso is the man of good breeding, who stands in the same subordinate but complementary role to the philosopher: To philosophize, in a just Signification, is but To carry Good-Breeding a step higher. For the Accomplishment of Breeding is, To learn whatever is decent in Company, or beautiful in Arts: and the Sum of Philosophy is, ‘To learn what is just in Society, and beautiful in Nature, and the Order of the World.?>° 290 Vindication, 15. Bulkley had previously published a vindication of Shaftesbury on ridicule (1751), an answer to Brown’s first essay. Bulkley, who was educated at Doddridge’s academy, is a very interesting example of a Christian supporter of Shaftesbury. For Doddridge’s attitude to Shaftesbury see Chapter 3 below, p. 194. 251 Sensus Communis, Characteristicks, 1, 138—9. 252 Soliloquy, Characteristicks, 1, 338.

293 Life, Letters, ed. Rand, 7 November 1709, 416-17. For Locke’s law of opinion see above, p. 127. Locke explicitly denies that his position is relativist. Warburton, in Divine Legation, I, ‘Dedication to the Free-thinkers’, xxiv—v, castigates Shaftesbury for misrepresenting Locke on this point in Sensus Communis, Characteristicks, 1, 80. 254 ‘Plastics’, Second Characters, ed. Rand, 178. 255 Miscellaneous Reflections, Characteristicks, III, 161.

Shaftesbury and the defence of natural affection 145 The curious tone of this last definition, both patronising and selfdeprecating, should warn us to be careful about taking some of these statements entirely at face value. ‘The philosopher from his exalted position

is flattering the virtuoso and the gentleman into thinking that they are closer to him than they really are, with the object of weaning them away from their inferior pursuits. This perspective is evident in the prefatory notes for Second Characters, where Shaftesbury tells himself “To twist, as it

were, and interweave morality with plasticks, that supreme beauty with this subaltern: those high and severe maxims with these curious and severe in their kind’, and insists that ‘He only. . . can despise and rally virtuosos, who is himself the great virtuoso, sage, philosopher, self-measurer, selfexaminer, critic, student and pursuer of beauty. . . of the highest order’.?°° Shaftesbury’s distrust of virtuosi is most apparent in the comments on “The Beautiful’ written in Naples at the same time as he was engaged on Second Characters. Uhe pursuit of beauty in externals — pictures, statues, houses, gardens — indicates ‘faint imperfect endeavours and impotent reaches after the to KaAov.’ If the relationship between outer and inner beauty were understood, the transition would be easy. But the minds of virtuosi have no inner harmony. If they had, ‘there would be no need of this exterior sort: no admiration: no search of order here: no passion towards this beauty, or any beauty of this sort’. It is inner beauty, ‘the gardens and groves within’,

that should be cultivated: “There build, there erect what statues, what virtues, what ornaments or orders of architecture thou thinkest noblest.’ For this a bare field will serve. Those who pursue beauty in externals are Gothic and grotesque within. ‘The beauty that the virtuosi seek and that Shaftesbury’s philosophic masters teach are of completely different kinds: ‘If the TO KaAdv, therefore, be here, where they lead, it cannot be where those of another kind lead. If these are heroes, those were puny wretches. But if there be a cause such as thou hast imagined, if that be indeed a right cause, then is this but imposture and deceit.’ To choose philosophy is to reject the virtuosi’s playthings.*°’ Towards the end of the essay Shaftesbury quotes a few words from Socrates’ prayer at the end of the Phaedrus, which

he also copied out in full in the front endpapers of his Marcus Aurelius. The Loeb translation 1s as follows:

O beloved Pan and all ye other gods of this place, grant to me that I be made beautiful in my soul within, and that all external possessions be in harmony with my inner man. May I consider the wise man rich; and may I have such wealth as only the self-restrained man can bear or endure.””®

This late essay is as much concerned with Shaftesbury’s presumably 256 Second Characters, ed. Rand, 9, 13. 257 Tafe, Letters, ed. Rand, 246-7, 250-1. 258 Tife, Letters, ed. Rand, 251, also 123. For Shaftesbury’s Marcus Aurelius see n. 32 above. Phaedrus, 279 B—C, trans. H. N. Fowler, in Plato, Euthyphro, etc. (Loeb), 576-9.

146 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment temporary disillusionment with his own virtuoso activities as with the failure of the virtuosi themselves. But it suggests that in one mood he saw a crucial rhetorical assumption of Characteristicks, that the virtuosi can be

lured to virtue, as flawed. “The Beautiful’ is in part an expansion of material in Miscellaneous Reflections. ‘The long note (already cited) to Miscellany III, Chapter 2 sets out as does the essay the idea of a scale of beauty in things animate, inanimate, and mixed, with different examples of the pursuit of beauty, concluding with ‘the Virtuoso-Passion, the Love of Painting, and the Designing Arts of every kind. . . all those Symmetrys which silently express a reigning Order, Peace, Harmony, and Beauty’. The ‘Selfdiscoursing Author’ then asks himself: ‘But what is there answerable to this, in the MINDS of the Possessors? ... What Peace, what Harmony WITHIN?’

He himself disdains the inferior species of beauty, and refuses ‘to be captivated by any thing less than the superiour, orginal, and genuine Kind’. From his detached position of ‘deep philosophical Reserve’ he observes that those who pursue lower forms of beauty grow ‘deform’d and monstrous, servile and abject’ .*°°

This bitter consciousness of the divergence between the pursuits of lower and higher forms of beauty perhaps explains why in his account of taste Shaftesbury puts so much emphasis on discipline and control.*°° The virtuoso who understands that true taste in the arts is acquired with effort

must be made to transfer this effort to the proper object. In Soliloquy Shaftesbury draws a parallel between taste in art and taste in life and manners: in each case nature can be forced in order for a good taste to be formed.*°! This point is amplified by Theocles: How long e’er a true Taste is gain’d! How many things shocking, how many offensive at first, which afterwards are known and acknowledg’d the highest Beautys! For *tis not instantly we acquire the Sense by which these Beautys are discoverable. Labour and Pains are requir’d, and Time to cultivate a natural Genius, ever so apt or forward. But Who is there once thinks of cultivating this Soil, or of improving any Sense or Faculty which Nature may have given of this kind? . . . Is Study, Science, or Learning necessary to understand all Beautys else? And for the Sovereign BEAUTY, is there no Skill or Science requir’d?*°*

The parallel between the two kinds of taste is again made in Miscellaneous Reflections, with further emphasis on the pains involved. With regard to the

arts pursued in the polite world, ‘whatever good Facultys, Senses, or 259 Characteristicks, TI, 182n—186n (also in 1711 edn). See n. 247 above. Rand does not note the parallels with “The Beautiful’. Shaftesbury stresses the importance of this essay in the prefatory matter to Second Characters, ed. Rand, 10.

260 On the problems in Shaftesbury’s account of taste see Tiffany, PMLA, XXXVIII (1923), 664—5, and Aldridge, TAPS, NS XLI (1951), 337. 261 Characteristicks, 1, 339.

262 Moralists, Characteristicks, 11, 401—2; cf ‘Deity’, Life, Letters, ed. Rand, 34. Rand does not note

the parallel but Tiffany does, p. 668. .

Shaftesbury and the defence of natural affection 147 anticipating Sensations, and Imaginations, may be of Nature’s Growth’, taste itself is not innate. ‘A legitimate and just ‘TASTE can neither be begotten, made, conceiv’d or produc’d, without the antecedent Labour and

Pains of GRITICISM.’ And in a note discussing the impossibility of portraying the truly virtuous man in literature, Shaftesbury observes that “The Perfection of Virtue is from long A7t and Management, Self-Controul, and, as it were, Force on Nature’: the virtuous man is a ‘new and artificial Creature’ formed by ‘Restraints, Allays and Corrections’.2°°? The analogy

between the virtuoso and the philosopher thus functions on different occasions as a lure and a goad. Usually it is designed to make the step from the lower to the higher forms of beauty seem easy and attractive. At other times it is designed to stress not only the degradation of those who confine themselves to the lower forms but also the huge task of self-discipline faced by those who would devote themselves to the higher. ‘This tension 1s never resolved in Characteristicks.

Is Shaftesbury talking in metaphor when he talks of the beauty of virtue? When he compares the virtuoso and the philosopher and taste in art with taste in morals he 1s manifestly drawing an analogy for rhetorical purposes.

But this does not mean that his account of the higher, inner beauty 1s

similarly rhetorical, or that his ideas can be fully expressed if this terminology is excluded. Interestingly, the equation of the good with the beautiful 1s missing from the 1699 version of the /nquzry, and in one of the places where Shaftesbury introduces it in the revised version he does so in a tentative fashion: ‘If there be no real Amiableness or Deformity in Moral Acts, there is at least an imaginary one of full force.’*°* However, it can be

safely stated that the reality of this equation becomes one of the most important features of Shaftesbury’s philosophy, and, with a little exaggeration, the most easily open to ridicule. Hence Berkeley’s parody: To go to the bottom of things, to analyse virtue into its first principles, and fix a scheme of morals on its true basis, you must understand that there is an idea of Beauty natural to the mind of man. This all men desire, this they are pleased and delighted with for its own sake, purely from an instinct of nature. A man needs no arguments to make him discern and approve what is beautiful; it strikes at first sight, and attracts without a reason. And as this beauty is found in the shape and form of corporeal things, so also is there analogous to it a beauty of another kind,

an order, a symmetry, and comeliness, in the moral world. And as the eye perceiveth the one, so the mind doth, by a certain interior sense, perceive the other; which sense, talent, or faculty is ever quickest and purest in the noblest mind. Thus, as by sight I discern the beauty of a plant or an animal, even so the 263 Characterwsticks, III, 164—5, 260n. Cf the emblems of the bit and the bridle, Judgment of Hercules, Characteristicks, II, 385—6.

264 Characteristicks, Il, 43. Crucial passages on moral beauty missing from the 1699 edn are II, 28—30, 75.

148 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment mind apprehends the moral excellence, the beauty and decorum of justice and temperance. And as we readily pronounce a dress becoming, or an attitude graceful, we can, with the same free untutored judgment, at once declare whether __ this or that conduct or action be comely and beautiful.

This is close enough to the original to be instantly recognisable (Alciphron does not attribute these views to Cratylus, Berkeley’s caricature of Shaftes-

bury), while at the same time Shaftesbury’s crucial qualifications and complexities (particularly his emphasis on control) are deliberately suppressed.*®° A reaction such as this helps explain why Shaftesbury arrived at the exposition of his principal doctrine in The Moralists by such a selfconsciously oblique and circumlocutionary path.

In Miscellany III, Chapter 2, following the question in which the beautiful, harmonious, proportionable, true, agreeable, and good are identified with each other, Shaftesbury goes on to ask: ‘WHERE then is this BEAUTY or Harmony to be found? How is this SYMMETRY to be discover’d and apply’d? Is it any other Art than that of PHILOSOPHY, or the Study of inward Numbers and Proportions, which can exhibit this in Life?’?°°

The discovery of the beauty of inward numbers and how to apply it is the most important lesson that Theocles teaches Philocles in The Moralists. Self-discipline plays an essential part in this process, as already indicated, but it is enthusiasm for this beauty that is the motivating force. Shaftesbury is very careful to distinguish true noble philosophical enthusiasm from the false, vulgar, religious kind. At the end of the Letter concerning Enthusiasm after he has demolished the latter he summarily justifies the former, and agrees with Plato in ‘ascribing to a noble ENTHUSIASM, whatever 1s greatly perform’d by’ heroes, statesmen, poets, orators, musicians, and philosophers. He here cross-refers to the passage on the love of order and

beauty at the end of the Jnquwry (quoted above), the introduction to Theocles’ crucial account of beauty towards the end of The Moralists, and the beginning of the ‘Review of ENTHUSIASM’ in Miscellany II, Chapter 1.2©” Shaftesbury’s self-consciousness about espousing the noble kind of enthusiasm in the face of its opposite is evident in Philocles’ defence of

Theocles to Palemon: ‘he had nothing of that savage Air of the vulgar Enthusiastick Kind . . . tho he had all of the Enthusiast, he had nothing of the Bigot.’*°* That this represents a struggle Shaftesbury himself experi-

265 Alciphron, Works, ed. Luce and Jessop, III, 116-17. The portrait of Cratylus is on pp. 132-3. Bernstein, ECS, X (1976/77), rightly stresses the reality of Shaftesbury’s equation. 268 Characteristicks, III, 184—5.

267 Characteristicks, 1, 53—4. The references are to II, 75—6, 393-4; III, 30, 33-4, 37. For vulgar enthusiasm see e.g. III, 305; Second Characters, ed. Rand, 120. 268 Moralists, Characteristicks, 11, 218-19; cf 374-5, where Theocles expects Philocles to pluck him by the sleeve when he grows extravagant.

Shaftesbury and the defence of natural affection 149 enced can be seen from the exercises, where he is particularly anxious to differentiate his own enthusiasm from that of the virtuost: Why fear enthusiasm? Why shun the name? Where should I be ecstasied but here? Where enamoured but here? . . . Shall I be ashamed of this diviner love and of an object of love so far excelling all those objects in dignity, majesty, grace, beauty and amiableness? Is this enthusiasm? Be it: and so may I be ever an enthusiast.?°9

We must assume that when he describes himself in his letters to Somers as

‘your enthusiastic friend’ he is to be understood in this sense.*’° In Miscellany II, Chapter | he puts the case for enthusiasm as clearly as he can: So far is he from degrading Enthusiasm, or disclaiming it in himself; that he looks on this Passion, simply consider’d, as the most natural, and its Object as the justest in the World. Even VIRTUE it-self he takes to be no other than a noble Enthusiasm

justly directed, and regulated by that high Standard which he supposes in the Nature of Things.?’!

In the account of Theocles’ conversion of Philocles to philosophical enthusiasm in Part III of The Moralists Shaftesbury employs a ponderous method of progressive revelation which has misled some modern readers into thinking that he has moved onto a new aesthetic or mystical plane.?””

But Shaftesbury is here bringing together and casting into a new form ideas that are important elsewhere in Characteristicks, and his central emphasis, as always, remains the supreme beauty of the moral life. It 1s useful to compare some of his other statements with the key passages in The Moralists. In Sensus Communis he says that of all the beauties pursued by

virtuosi or celebrated by poets or artists, the most affecting is that which is drawn from life and the passions, “such as the Beauty of Sentiments; the Grace of Actions; the Turn of Characters, and the Proportions and Features of a human Mind;

‘the most natural Beauty in the World is Honesty, and Moral Truth’. ‘The idea is developed in Soliloquy: the true poet is a moral artist, who imitates the creator in expressing inward harmony. In the /nquiry he discusses the means whereby the mind discerns proportion: ‘It feels the Soft and Harsh, the Agreeable and Disagreeable, in the Affections; and finds a Foul and

Faw, a Harmonious and a Dissonant, as really and truly here, as in any musical Numbers, or in the outward Forms or Representations of sensible Things.’*’° In a particularly striking passage (which he draws to his own attention in ‘Plastics’ as ‘A principal and fundamental citation for plastic beauty and contemplation’)*’* he describes the contemplative pleasure to 269 ‘Deity’, Life, Letters, ed. Rand, 33.

270 Tafe, Letters, ed. Rand, 12 July 1708, 386; 10 December 1708, 394; 26 May 1710, 421; 30 March 1711, 430. 271 Characteristicks, UI, 33. 272 Fg. Cassirer, Platonic Renaissance, Chapter 6. 273 Characteristicks, 1, 135—6, 142, 207-8, II, 29. 274 Second Characters, ed. Rand, 173.

150 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment be derived from mathematics as ‘A natural Joy in the Contemplation of those Numbers, that Harmony, Proportion, and Concord, which supports the

universal Nature, and is essential in the Constitution and Form of every particular Species, or Order of Beings’. But this speculative pleasure, in a deliberate inversion of the classical placing of such pleasure at the summit of human experience,*’° is said to be ‘far surpass’d by virtuous Motion, and the Exercise of Benignity and Goodness; . . . For where is there on Earth a fairer

Matter of Speculation, a goodlier View or Contemplation, than that of a beautiful, proportion’d and becoming Action?’*’°

What these passages stress in an unsystematic way is that moral beauty

is both a product of and perceived by the human mind, that it has a greater value and reality than any other kinds of beauty that humans enjoy, material, artistic, or speculative, and that it is a reflection of the beauty of the universal mind. Theocles teaches Philocles all these things in a careful series of steps that take him up from natural, artistic, speculative,

and moral beauty to the universal mind that informs the whole — ‘the Supreme and Sovereign BEAUTY, the Original of all which is Good or Amiable’, ‘the source and Principle of all Beauty and Perfection’ — and

: then crucially back to moral beauty and moral action at the centre of human life. He warns Philocles ‘never to admire the RepresentativeBEAUTY, except for the sake of the Onginal; nor aim at other Enjoyment, than of the rational kind’.*’’ In an important passage of Socratic question and answer, he leads Philocles to see that the source of beauty and object of admiration is mind: ‘What is it you admire but MIND, or the Effect of

Mind *Tis Mind alone which forms.’ There are three orders of beauty: first, material forms, which have been formed by man or nature and have no forming power or intelligence; second, forms which form, ‘that is, which have Intelligence, Action, and Operation’, i.e. human beings, and which have a double beauty of body, the form, and mind, the forming power; and third, the ultimate form which forms the second order, ‘which fashions even Minds themselves [and] contains in it-self all the Beautys fashion’d by those Minds; and is consequently the Principle, Source, and Fountain of all Beauty’. All the beauty of the second order thus derives from

the third. Theocles brings Philocles to see that the greatest beauties formed by man are not aesthetic — architecture, music, sculpture — but moral: ‘your Sentiments, your Resolutions, Principles, Determinations, Actions;

whatsoever is handsom and noble in the kind; whatever flows from your good Understanding, Sense, Knowledg and Will; whatever is engender’d in your 279 Eg. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, X, vii—viii places perfect happiness in contemplation and treats the life of virtuous action as only secondary happiness. 276 Inquiry, Characteristicks, Il, 105. For other statements of the reality of moral beauty and affection see Miscellaneous Reflections, III, 168, and ‘Plastics’, Second Characters, ed. Rand, 175, 178. 277 Moralists, Characteristicks, 1, 294, 345, 395.

Shaftesbury and the defence of natural affection 151 Heart . . . or derives it-self from your Parent-MIND’. Philocles promises to

do all he can ‘to propagate that lovely Race of mental Children’.?’° Theocles, recapitulating the stages through which he has led his friend, summarises what they have learned together: there is nothing so divine as BEAUTY: which belonging not to Body, nor having any Principle or Existence except in MIND and REASON, is alone discover’d and acquir’d by this diviner Part, when it inspects /t-self, the only Object worthy of itself.

He prays that they may become ‘Artists in the kind’, in knowledge of their

own nature. The true artist leaves aside lesser forms of beauty and ‘becomes in truth The Architect of his own Life and Fortune; by laying within himself the lasting and sure Foundations of Order, Peace and Concord.’*’°

It is remarkable that a book of such complex construction and so hard to interpret as Characteristicks had such a profound influence on subsequent

thought.7°° To make sense of it readers either had to reconcile the freethinking sceptic of the first two essays and Miscellaneous Reflections with the dogmatic moralist of Soliloquy, the Inquiry, and The Moralists, or separate

them. However, Shaftesbury’s hope that the convolutions of his method would prove an enticement to his moral theory does not seem to have been

borne out. Harris feared that too much attention was paid to his freethinking wit by friends and foes alike at the expense of his systematic thought.?®! His orthodox critics, such as Berkeley, Skelton, and Leland, were keen to remind his readers that the freethinker and the moralist were

one and the same in order to discredit his philosophy, but his serious philosophical followers seem to have paid little attention to the sceptical essays and to have concentrated their attention on the works in Volume II, the Inquiry and The Moralists. ‘This tendency is illustrated in the Glasgow edition of Characteristicks of 1743-5: Volume II appeared first, followed at yearly intervals by I and II. Shaftesbury’s prefatory essays and editorial commentaries were clearly not felt to be essential to an understanding of his moral works, but this may explain why it was possible for his thought to

be interpreted in unexpected ways. There can be no doubt that Shaftesbury’s own contempt for Christianity and his decision to analyse ethics separately from religion, even though his moral philosophy is eventually shown to be essentially religious, freed him from the prudential Christian ethics of obedience and reward and enabled him to mark out a new way of thinking and writing about morals, based on the constitution of human nature and the primacy of natural affection. His philosophical followers, 278 Characteristicks, 11, 405-10. 279 Characteristicks, I, 426—7. 280 For Shaftesbury as anticipator of developments in eighteenth-century philosophy see Heinemann, RIP VI (1952), 300. 281 See above, p. 116.

152 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment by disregarding on the whole his sceptical side, were able to incorporate

his ethics into the Christian tradition from which he had deliberately divorced himself. It was by this means that his greatest influence was felt right through the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, despite the inevitable decline in his reputation as a writer. This decline was noted by Kippis in 1789 in the Brographia Britannica: Kippis quotes Lord Monboddo’s

rapturous praise of The Moralists and his regret that though all Shaftesbury’s writings were in high estimation fifty years before, they were now out of fashion.*®* Kippis summarises Shaftesbury’s fate as an author: ‘For a considerable time he stood in high reputation as a polite writer, and was regarded by many as a standard of elegant composition. His imitators, as

well as admirers, were numerous, and he was esteemed the Head of the School of the sentimental Philosophy. Of late years, he has been as much depreciated as he was heretofore applauded; and in both cases the matter has been carried to an extreme.’*®° But the eclipse of Characteristicks does not effect Shaftesbury’s standing: his legacy was not so much a book as a language. 282 Biosraphia Britannica, 2nd edn, IV (1789), 277*, 282*; Monboddo, Ongin and Progress of Language

(1787), IV, 344-71, 383-8. For some speculations on the reasons for the decline in Shaftesbury’s popularity in the later eighteenth century see Brett, Shaftesbury (1951), 205; Chapin, PRA, XIII (1987-8), 324—6; Voitle, Shaftesbury, 414.

283 Biographia Britannica, 1V, 290—4*. For a strong disparagement of Shaftesbury’s method and character by a philosopher indebted to the Shaftesburian tradition, see Adam Smith, Lectures on Rhetoric, ed. Bryce (1983), 56—61.

Defining the moral faculty: Hutcheson,

Butler, and Price :

Now all men of reflection, from the age of Socrates to that of Addison, have sufficiently proved that the truest, most constant, and lively pleasure, the happiest enjoyment of life, consists in kind affections to our fellow-creatures, gratitude and love to the deity, submission to his will, and trust in his providence, with a course of suitable actions. Hutcheson, Remarks upon The Fable of the Bees (1726)!

It is manifest great part of common language, and of common behaviour over the

world, is formed upon supposition of ... a moral faculty; whether called conscience, moral reason, moral sense, or Divine reason; whether considered as a sentiment of the understanding, or as a perception of the heart; or, which seems the truth, as including both. Butler, Dissertation II, ‘Of the Nature of Virtue’ (1736)?

the soul of man, not only bears a resemblance of the Divine Intelligence in its rational faculties, but also of the Divine disinterested benignity in its social and public affections: and thus too our int ed. Bernardernal constitution, formed for pursuing the general good, beautifully tallies with the constitution of the universe. Leechman, Preface to Hutcheson, System of Moral Philosophy (1755), I, xix VIRTUE 1s of tntrinsick value and good desert, and of indispensible obligation; not the creature of will, but necessary and immutable; not local or temporary, but of equal extent

and antiquity with the DIVINE MIND; not a mode of SENSATION, but everlasting TRUTH; not dependent on power, but the guide of all power. Price, Review of the Principal Questions in Morals (3rd edn, 1787)°

Power may compel, interest may bribe, pleasure may persuade; but reason only can oblige. This is the only authority which rational beings can own, and to which they owe obedience. William Adams, The Nature and Obligation of Virtue (1754)*

' Reflections and Remarks (1750), 45; first published in the Dublin Weekly Journal (1726). 2 Analogy of Religion, Works, ed. Bernard, II, 287.

3 Ed. Raphael (1948), 265-6; first published 1758.

* Quoted by Price, Review, ed. Raphael, 117n. 153

154 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment I Shaftesbury’s heirs Shaftesbury’s principal legacy to eighteenth-century moralists was a twofold conviction: first, that morality must be deduced from the nature of

man as it 1s, a procedure later to become known as the experimental method in morals or the study of matter of fact, and second, that the human system or constitution 1s a complex compound of natural affection

and a self-conscious faculty of reason or reflection, in which moral judgement and action have their origin. The heterodoxy of his views on religion and the difficulty of determining his precise views on morality (amply demonstrated in the first and second chapters respectively) meant that later Christian moralists who were indebted to Shaftesbury tended to play down that debt and to concentrate on clarifying and developing the implications of his thought. What emerged in the 1720s was an important

and continuing debate concerning the foundation of morals and the correct definition of the moral faculty, a debate that centred on the relative functions of reason and the affections in the moral life. Characteristicks was, of course, not the only earlier work of moral philosophy to stimulate this

debate, but it played a crucial part in setting its terms. Thus it was the emphasis on natural affection, instinct, benevolence and the moral sense made by Shaftesbury’s principal follower, Francis Hutcheson, that provoked critics such as John Balguy to a restatement of the rationalist position and a new analysis of reason, conscience, and rectitude. ‘The most

important contributor to the debate about the foundation of morals, Joseph Butler, who attempted an analysis of human nature that would fully account for the role of reason and the affections, drew heavily on Shaftesbury but criticised Hutcheson’s development of Shaftesbury’s thought. In turn, Hutcheson modified his terms and arguments in response to Butler.

A generation later, Richard Price, a declared admirer of Butler and opponent of Hutcheson, in the course of his defence of reason and attack on instinct claimed Shaftesbury as a forebear. It is possible to trace with some precision the spread of Shaftesburian ideas, particularly through educational institutions, and the attempts that

were made to develop, modify, or contain them. Given Shaftesbury’s contempt for university education, it is an interesting paradox that the principal medium through which his ideas were diffused was moral philosophy teaching at universities and academies. His admirers were mainly to be found among tutors at dissenting academies in Ireland and England and especially among the first generation of so-called moderates

in the Church of Scotland, several of whom were professors of moral philosophy at Scottish universities; his detractors were mainly to be found among the clergy and bishops of the Churches of England and Ireland, and the orthodox, anti-moderate ministers of the Church of Scotland. A

Defining the moral faculty 155 key figure in the initial stages was Shaftesbury’s Irish friend Viscount Molesworth, who acted as a propagandist for Shaftesbury’s thought in his circle in Dublin in the early 1720s and corresponded with eager disciples

in Scottish universities. The most important of these interpreters and disseminators of Shaftesburianism were Hutcheson, who was the tutor of a _ dissenting academy in Dublin before becoming Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow, George Turnbull and David Fordyce, who both taught moral philosophy at Aberdeen, and William Wishart, who became Principal of the University of Edinburgh. The response to Shaftesburian ideas

in the principal English dissenting academies, in which considerable importance was attached to moral philosophy teaching and analysis of the

function of the affections in the religious life, was more complex and critical. An influential example is provided by Philip Doddridge, tutor of the academy at Northampton for over twenty years until his death in 1751 and a friend and correspondent of Fordyce, who encouraged his students

to read a very wide range of both orthodox and heterodox writers. Conversely, Shaftesburian ideas seem to have had less direct impact at

Oxford and Cambridge, where moral philosophy teaching was more conservative than in the dissenting academies and Scottish universities, and where the influence of Locke, particularly in Cambridge, was greater. Shaftesbury’s principal English follower, his nephew James Harris, seems to have been a relatively isolated figure, though he had a devoted admirer in the Scottish philosopher Lord Monboddo: in The Origin and Progress of Language Monboddo pronounced Harris the best writer of the age on philosophy next to Shaftesbury.°

It is the insidious christianising of Shaftesbury by followers such as Hutcheson, Turnbull, and Fordyce and the subsequent infiltration of Shaftesburian ideas into educational institutions that explains the virulence

of the attacks mounted largely but not entirely by members of the established Church. It may well be because of Hutcheson’s Irish origins and the far-reaching influence of Molesworth’s proselytising from Dublin to Glasgow, Aberdeen, and Edinburgh and thence to England that the fiercest attacks on Shaftesbury came from Ireland, two emanating from the established Church, Berkeley’s Alciphron and Skelton’s Deism Revealed, and one from dissent, Leland’s View of the Principal Deistical Writers.° So far as

Skelton was concerned there was little to choose between Shaftesbury and Hutcheson; his orthodox parson Shepherd in Deism Revealed complains of members of the clergy edifying their hearers ‘with a fine philosophical ° Monboddo, Origin and Progress of Language, IV, 388—9. For Harris see Chapter 2 above.

© For the importance of these works in the fight against freethinking see Chapter 1 above and especially Berman, “The Culmination and Causation of Irish Philosophy’, AGP LXIV (1982), 257—79, and ‘Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment in Irish Philosophy’, AGP LXIV (1982), 148-65,

156 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment essay about moral beauty, and the internal senses, wiredrawn from the writings of Mr. Hutcheson, who only refines on those of Lord Shaftesbury’ .’ In

the Church of England the aggressive William Warburton (1698-1779), who rose to be Bishop of Gloucester, made himself the centre of heresy hunting and drew members of his circle such as Richard Hurd and John Brown into running down Shaftesbury. Thus it was on his recommendation, as he informed Hurd, that Brown wrote his Essays on the Characteristics

(1751). It is worth noting that among this group the defeat of Shaftesbury was attempted through the championing of Locke, whose standing among Scottish moral philosophers was not high. Warburton set the tone in his ‘Dedication to the Free-thinkers’ prefacing the first volume of The Divine Legation of Moses,? and Hurd followed suit in his Dialogues on the Uses of Foreign Travel (1764), pointedly using Shaftesbury’s favourite philosophical form against him. This work is ostensibly an account addressed by Shaftesbury to Molesworth in the year 1700 of a conversation between himself and Locke, in which Locke is clearly the victor. Shaftesbury’s contempt for ‘monkish education’ is overborne by Locke’s defence of the clergy in their

role as tutors and his prophetic celebration of the improvement of the English universities, an optimistic reference to Hurd’s own time. Shaftesbury’s emphasis on politeness and the education of gentlemen is seen as trivial in comparison with the serious development of philosophy teaching at Oxford and Cambridge in the later eighteenth century.!° Ironically, in

his attempt to demonstrate Shaftesbury’s irrelevance to modern times Hurd appears to have ignored the way his influence was exercised through his followers, a mistake not made by Warburton. In a letter of 1750 Hurd

had warmly recommended his patron to read Hutcheson. In a letter the following year Warburton apologised for an attack on Hutcheson in his edition of Pope, but made the ground of his objection clear: ‘I did not intend to give him a personal stroke; though his giving so much vogue to Shaftsbury’s system has hurt the science of morals, and his giving so much credit to Shaftsbury’s book has done discredit to religion.’!! 7 Deism Revealed, 2nd edn (1751), Il, 234; see also I, 180, Il, 214, and The Candid Reader (1744), 28:

‘My Lord Shaftsbury, and his Imitator Hucheson, have the present Generation of Obscurists entirely to themselves.’ 8 Warburton, Letters from a Prelate (1808), 30 January 1749/50, 27; for his criticisms of Brown’s execution of the project see 23 December 1750, 52—3, and 15 February 1750/1, 58—9. 9 Divine Legation, I (1738), xxii—v.

10 Hurd, Foreign Travel (1764), 5, 42—3, 48, 73, 112, 115, 120—3. See the epigraph to Chapter 5 below. Hurd did, however, place The Moralists on a par with Alciphron and Addison’s Treatise on Medals in the Preface to his own Moral and Political Dialogues, 3rd edn (1765), I, xv; see also |-h. It is evident from Hurd’s Commonplace Book, in Kilvert, Memoirs of Hurd (1860), 253, that Hurd had read Charactensticks carefully.

'l Warburton, Letters, 10 February 1749/50, 30; 11 July 1751, 60. Warburton’s note to The Dunciad, IV, 487 (an attack on The Moralists) reads in part: “This Jgnis fatuus has in these our times appeared again in the North; and the writings of Hutcheson, Geddes, and their followers, are

Defining the moral faculty 157 By birth a Northern Irish Presbyterian of Scottish ancestry, Hutcheson (1694—1746) was educated for the ministry at the University of Glasgow, spent about ten years in Dublin as the tutor of a dissenting academy, and returned to Glasgow in 1730 as Professor of Moral Philosophy, a post he

held for the rest of his life.'* His education coincided with a period of significant change in the Church of Scotland, similar to that which had occurred in England fifty years earlier, when the tenets of Calvinism were

challenged by a new emphasis on the powers of human nature. John Simson, Professor of Divinity at Glasgow while Hutcheson was a student,

was prosecuted for teaching doctrine not agreeable to the Westminster Confession of Faith.'? Hutcheson, when preaching on behalf of his father

in Ulster after his return from Glasgow, was allegedly criticised by members of the congregation for not teaching the doctrines of election, reprobation, original sin and faith.'* Shortly thereafter he was invited to Dublin to start an academy, and came under the crucial influence of the Shaftesburian Molesworth. Other important friendships he made at this time were with James Arbuckle, also a Shaftesburian, and Edward Synge, later to become Bishop of Elphin. He resisted invitations to conform to the established Church. It is hard to believe that he did not know the two most famous churchmen of the day in Ireland, Berkeley and Swift, particularly since Berkeley was the friend of Synge and Swift the friend of Molesworth,

but there is no evidence to this effect.'° The later hostility of Skelton, himself a student at ‘Trinity College, Dublin, while Hutcheson was running

his academy and a great admirer of Berkeley and imitator of Swift, is perhaps indicative of their attitudes.'° Another important friendship was that of the Lord Lieutenant, Lord Carteret, who sought out Hutcheson full of its wonders’; Pope, Works, ed. Warburton (1751), V, 211. Two years later Hurd thanked Warburton for softening his criticism of Hutcheson in the ‘small edition’ of Pope, 2 July 1753, 105—6.

12 The most useful accounts of Hutcheson’s life and work are Fowler, Shaftesbury and Hutcheson

(1882); Leechman, “he Preface, giving some Account of the Life, Writings, and Character of the Author’, Hutcheson, System of Moral Philosophy, 1; McCosh, The Scottish Philosophy (1875), Article 7; Scott, Hutcheson (1900). For recent interpretations which correct some

errors in earlier accounts see Smyth, ed., Hutcheson, Supplement to Fortnight, GCCVIII (1992).

'S See J. K. Cameron, “Theological Controversy: A Factor in the Origins of the Scottish Enlightenment’, in Campbell and Skinner, eds., Origins and Nature of the Scottish Enlightenment (1982). For the theology of the Westminster Confession see RGS, I, 13-15. '4 Scott, Hutcheson, 20—1. Cf the complaint of Tillotson’s early congregation, RGS, I, 51.

'S For Hutcheson’s friendships see Leechman, Preface to Hutcheson, System, I, vii—viii; Scott, Hutcheson, 28ff. For Hutcheson and Berkeley see D. Berman, ‘Dr Berkly’s Books’, in Smyth, ed., Hutcheson, 23. Berman suggests that Hutcheson was ‘one of Berkeley’s implied but unnamed targets’ in Dialogue III of Alciphron. See also Berman, ed., Alciphron in Focus (1993), 4.

16 Skelton places Berkeley and Hutcheson in opposite lists in The Candid Reader, 8: ‘As on the one hand, I would not have the Works of Homer, Plato, Pascall, Newton, or Berkley destroyed; so neither would I vote, that the Lucubrations of Tom Brown, Durfey, Quarles, Forster, Morgan, Hucheson, or Drummond should perish.’

158 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment after the anonymous publication of An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue in 1725: Hutcheson dedicated the subsequent editions to

him. He may also at this time have known Carteret’s chaplain John Maxwell, the translator of Gumberland’s Treatise of the Laws of Nature (1727)

and another admirer of Shaftesbury. '’

In Dublin Hutcheson worked out the elements of his thought and established himself as a philosophical writer; in Glasgow during his years as Professor of Moral Philosophy he developed and modified his system and became famous as a teacher. He was described by his friend William Leechman in the preface to Hutcheson’s posthumously published lectures as ‘one of the most masterly and engaging teachers that has appeared in our age’. Leechman explained the reason for his success: He apprehended that he was answering the design of his office as effectually, when he dwelt in a more diffusive manner upon such moral considerations as are suited to touch the heart, and excite a relish for virtue, as when explaining or establishing any doctrine, even of real importance, with the most philosophical exactness: he regarded the culture of the heart as the main end of all moral instruction.!®

Leechman stated that at Glasgow, unlike the Dublin academy where he was obliged to teach languages and all the different parts of philosophy, Hutcheson ‘had leisure to turn his chief attention to his favourite study Human Nature’; his teaching covered natural religion, morals, jurispru-

dence, government, the Greek and Latin moralists, and the truth and excellency of Christianity.'? In addition to his well attested influence on his students (the most famous of whom was Adam Smith, who succeeded him after an interval as Professor of Moral Philosophy in 1752) Hutcheson did

much to shape the direction of the university through the two appointments with which he was particularly associated: Leechman, who was elected Professor of Divinity in 1743 (and subsequently Principal of the University in 1761), and James Moor, who was elected Professor of Greek in 1746, shortly before Hutcheson’s death. Hutcheson claimed in a letter

that Leechman’s election would ‘put a new face upon Theology in Scotland’.*° Moor was involved in Hutcheson’s influential campaign to ‘7 For this suggestion see Hutcheson, On Human Nature, ed. T. Mautner (1993), 119. For Maxwell’s Shaftesburian sympathies see Chapter 2 above, nn. 192, 225, 247. 18 Leechman, Preface to Hutcheson, System, I, xxx—xxxi; cf D. Stewart, ‘Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith’, Memoirs of Smith, Robertson, and Red (1811), Note B, 122—3; Scott, Hutcheson, Chapter 4; R. B. Sher, ‘Professors of Virtue’, in M. A. Stewart, ed., Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment (1990), 94—9.

'9 Leechman, Preface to Hutcheson, System, I, xii—xiii, xxxvi. 20 'To Thomas Drennan, November 1743, Scott, Hutcheson, 89. For Leechman see Scott, Hutcheson,

85—95; T. D. Kennedy, ‘William Leechman, Pulpit Eloquence and the Glasgow Enlightenment’, in Hook and Sher, eds., The Glasgow Enlightenment (1995). For Leechman’s influence on English dissenting academies see McLachlan, English Education under the Test Acts (1931), 31-2.

McLachlan posits a spiritual succession through Hutcheson and Leechman to English pupils at Glasgow who subsequently taught in academies.

Defining the moral faculty 159 further the study of the Greek moralists and collaborated with him in his translation of Marcus Aurelius.*!

There is some disagreement as to the significance of the changes in Hutcheson’s thought at different stages of his career and the impact of different thinkers on him.** Hutcheson always associated himself with those moralists who identified the affections and the natural disposition to

benevolence as the basis of human morality and society, and strongly criticised those who founded morality and society on self-love. He was more ambivalent in his attitude to others who made the will of God or natural law or reason central to their systems, and at different stages incorporated aspects of their views and responded to criticisms of his work in ways which had the effect of modifying or even contradicting his own

earlier positions. Leechman stated that ‘In the earlier part of his life he entered deeply into the spirit of the ancients’,*’ and in his two main philosophical works of the Dublin period Hutcheson insisted on this debt. Thus in the Preface to the Inquiry (1725) he wrote, ‘The chief Ground of his Assurance that his Opinions in the main are just, 1s this, That as he took the first Hints of them from some of the greatest Writers of Antiquity, so the more he has convers’d with them, he finds his Illustrations the more conformable to their Sentiments’, and in

the Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections (1728) he

claimed more generally that its main practical principles had been ‘taught

and propagated by the best of Men in all Ages’.** Hutcheson’s chief objective in his earliest published work was to uphold the ancient view of man as an essentially sociable being, of which Cicero and latterly Shaftesbury were the most important representatives, against the notorious selflove theorists old and new, Epicurus, Hobbes, and Mandeville. ‘The details

of this battle appear in section 2 below, but here it is worth noting an important clause on the title page of the first edition of the Inquiry: ‘In which The Principles of the late Earl of SHAFTESBURY are Explain’d and Defended, against the Author of the Fable of the Bees: And The Ideas of

Moral Good and Evil are establish’d, according to the Sentiments of the Antient Moralists.’ ‘This clause was deleted from subsequent editions of the Inquiry and replaced by a paragraph in the preface in which high praise — ‘TO recommend the Lord SHAFTESBURY’s Writings to the World, 1s a very needless Attempt. They will be esteemed while any Reflection remains among Men.’ —

21 Leechman, Preface to System, I, xxxvii. See section 2 below, p. 185.

22 See e.g. Scott, Hutcheson, Chapters 9-12, who argues for four forms of his thought; J. Moore, ‘The Two Systems of Francis Hutcheson’, in M. A. Stewart, ed., Scottish Enlightenment. On Hutcheson’s intellectual environment see Mautner, Introduction to Hutcheson, Human Nature. 23 Leechman, Preface to System, I, xx. 24 Hutcheson, Inquiry (4th edn, 1738), xxi; Essay (3rd edn, 1742), 111 (the statements are in the first editions).

160 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment is qualified by regret for Shaftesbury’s prejudice against Christianity and the misuse of his writings by the dissolute and debauched.?° Despite this evidence of caution Hutcheson never ceased to associate his

views with those of Shaftesbury: in his Glasgow lectures he continued to link Shaftesbury’s account of the foundation of morals with that of the ancients.*° If the number of references in the System of Moral Philosophy is anything to go by, the classical works to which he was most indebted as a thinker and teacher were Cicero’s De Finibus, Tusculan Disputations, and De Officiis.*’ But it seems highly appropriate that at the same time he should

have given a new prominence to the thought and terms of one of Shaftesbury’s favourite moralists, Marcus Aurelius. In 1742 Hutcheson published a compend of moral philosophy, Philosophiae Moralis Institutio Compendiaria, translated as A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy (1747), designed to help his students ‘recall to their memories the points more largely

insisted upon in their lectures’.*® Facing the contents page of the Latin compend are Greek quotations from Epictetus, Plato, and Marcus. The quotation from Marcus in the English version of 1747 epitomises Hutcheson’s Shaftesburianism: ‘In this one thing delight and rest yourself, in going on constantly from one social action to another with remembrance of the Deity.’ Hutcheson’s translation of The Meditations (the first two books

by Moor, the rest by himself) appeared in the same year as the Latin compend; its educational influence can be judged from the fact that it was reissued three times after his death and that devotion to Marcus became a badge of Hutcheson’s followers.*?

Hutcheson’s attitude to and relationship with other moralists is more problematical. Some of the expressions and statements in the Dublin treatises are Lockean, but his view of moral motivation is quite different

from Locke’s and on several occasions he points out the dangerous consequences of Locke’s attack on innate ideas. Locke is not usually named on such occasions, but barbed references to ‘some great Men’ and ‘elaborate ‘lreatises of great Philosophers about innate Ideas’ seem clearly 25 Inquiry (4th edn, 1738), xix. The preface to the later editions also identified Hutcheson’s debt to Molesworth and Synge, who are thanked but not named in the first edition. 2© “Inaugural Lecture on the Social Nature of Man’, trans. Mautner from De Naturali Hominum

Soctalttate Oratio Inauguralis (1730), in Hutcheson, Human Nature, ed. Mautner, 136; Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy (1747), 11, 4; System, I, 45n.

27 See e.g. Essay (3rd edn, 1742), 13, 210, on the account of Epicureanism in De Finibus, I, and 59, on the Stoic division of the passions in Tusculan Disputations, IV; System, I, 8, on the motions of the will in Tusculan Disputations, WI and IV; 61, finding support for the moral sense in De Finibus,

I; 143, on the noble sentiments concerning pain in Tusculan Disputations, I; 290, on the benefits of larger societies in De Officiis, II. 28 Short Introduction, ii.

29 Scott, Hutcheson, 81, 144, 246ff; Gaskell, Bibliography of the Foulis Press, 2nd edn (1986), nos. 14

(1742), 126 (1749), 221 (1752), 427 (1764). For the impact of Marcus see the attack by Witherspoon in section 2 below, pp. 188-9.

Defining the moral faculty 161 directed at him.°° In his inaugural lecture at Glasgow Hutcheson made a damaging comparison of the Lockean approach to moral enquiry with that of the ancients which is very much in tune with Shaftesbury’s view: the ancients said that all ideas, apprehensions, and judgements which we form of things under the guidance of nature — no matter at what time — or which are

universally and, as it were, necessarily received by no matter which natural faculties of ours, are innate. And it would certainly be much more useful to inquire into these natural judgements, perceptions, and appearances of things that nature

presents, than to dwell on what may or may not be observed in that animalcule which ultimately develops into a human being, or in some very few unfortunates born in some barren corner of the earth, who eke out a rough and brutish life, without any of the skills and conditions of life proper to human beings.°’

On the one hand it seems fair to say that Hutcheson increasingly distanced himself from key aspects of Locke’s account of the origin of morals, but on the other it must be recognised that Hutcheson recommended Locke to his students as a writer on the law of nature and nations, along with Grotius, Pufendorf, Cumberland, and Barbeyrac.** There is a similar problem with respect to these writers, Pufendorf in particular.*° The works of Samuel Pufendorf (1632—94, professor of law at Heidelberg and Lund and counsellor to the Kings of Sweden and Prussia) were very

widely known in their original Latin and in translation into several languages, and used as textbooks for students in universities and academies

throughout Europe and North America until the end of the eighteenth century.°* Pufendorf’s major work, the monumental De Jure Naturae et Gentium (1672), was translated by Basil Kennett as Of the Law of Nature and

Nations (1710); the fourth edition of 1729 contains both the voluminous notes of Jean Barbeyrac and his ‘Historical and Critical Account of the Science of Morality’. Pufendorf’s abridged version of De Jure designed for students, De Officio Hominis et Civis Fuxta Legem Naturalem (1673), was translated by Andrew Tooke as The Whole Duty of Man According to the Law of

Nature (1691, with several later editions).°°? Gershom Carmichael, who taught moral philosophy at Glasgow from 1694 and as the first holder of the Chair of Moral Philosophy in 1727 was Hutcheson’s predecessor, 39° Inquiry (4th edn, 1738), 148; Essay (3rd edn, 1742), 200.

31 Human Nature, trans. Mautner, 144. Hutcheson seems to have in mind Locke’s Essay, Book I, Chapter 3; cf Shaftesbury’s comments to Ainsworth quoted in Chapter 2 above, pp. 127-8. 32 Short Introduction, iv. See also Hutcheson’s favourable reference to Locke’s Essay in Synopsis Metaphysicae (3rd edn, 1749), 20, 59n.

33 For an attempt to solve this problem see Moore, “The ‘Two Systems of Francis Hutcheson’, in M. A. Stewart, ed., Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment. 34 D. Stewart, Dissertation First, Supplement to the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1824), 1, 71, 131—6, notes

the good and bad effects of the influence of Grotius and Pufendorf on university education. McLachlan, English Education, 302, lists academies which used Pufendorf as a textbook. For the influence of the natural law tradition on Scottish thought see Haakonssen, Natural Law (1996). 35 The most recent translation is On the Duty of Man, ed. Tully, trans. Silverthorne (1991).

162 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment lectured on De Officio Hominis et Cwis and published an annotated edition in 1718.°° Hutcheson was thoroughly familiar with Pufendorf’s work, and as

a professor he was to make considerable use of it. But as a Shaftesburian , he disagreed with Pufendorf’s theory of the foundation of morals in selfinterest and the will of a superior and deplored his damaging influence on

the development of moral thought. In an early essay against Hobbes, written for the Dublin Weekly Journal in 1725 and published posthumously with others as Reflections upon Laughter, and Remarks upon The Fable of the Bees

(1750), Hutcheson complained that Pufendorf has been made the grand instructor in morals to all who have of late given themselves to that study: hence it is that the old notions of natural affections, and

kind instincts, the sensus communis, the decorum, and honestum, are almost banished out of our books of morals; we must never hear of them in any of our lectures for fear of innate ideas: all must be interest, and some selfish view.?/

In his inaugural lecture Hutcheson presented a mixed view of Pufendorf, on the one hand complaining that he derived benevolence from self-love but on the other granting that he saw social life as natural to man.°? As a teacher he was willing to use those aspects of Pufendorf’s work that did not directly contradict his own, though they perhaps sit rather uneasily

together. The compend of moral philosophy, much of which is taken, according to Hutcheson, from Cicero, Aristotle, and Pufendorf as corrected by Carmichael,*’ is divided into two books, “The Elements of Ethicks’ and ‘Elements of the Law of Nature’. It is in the second book that

Hutcheson’s debt to Pufendorf and the natural law tradition of the ‘civilians’ is evident; his ethical position, both here and in the System, remains very different from Pufendorf’s. There is evidence, however, that Hutcheson did modify his view of the basis of morals, or at least his choice of terms, in response to his rationalist critics. As a student at Glasgow he had written to Samuel Clarke criticising his demonstration of the being and attributes of God.*° After the publica-

tion of the Jnguiry Gilbert Burnet, son of the latitudinarian Bishop of 36 On Carmichael see McCosh, Scottish Philosophy, Article 5; Moore and Silverthorne, ‘Gershom Carmichael and the Natural Jurisprudence Tradition in Eighteenth-century Scotland’, in Hont and Ignatieff, eds., Wealth and Virtue (1983).

37 Reflections and Remarks (1750), 7. See Moore in M. A. Stewart, ed., Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment, 47—8. Cf Hutcheson’s attack on Pufendorf in two letters in the London Journal

(1724), printed by Mautner as ‘Reflections on the Common Systems of Morality’, in Hutcheson, Human Nature, 98, 105, and see Mautner’s Introduction, 51, 53. 38) Human Nature, ed. Mautner, 134—5. 39 “To the Students in Universities’, Short Introduction, i-ii.

#0 Leechman, Preface to System, I, v; Scott, Hutcheson, 16-17. This correspondence has not survived. Leechman, v—vi, thought Hutcheson’s objection to the search for demonstration where probability only could be obtained influenced his view of morals: “This opinion . . . first led Dr. Hutcheson to treat morals as a matter of fact, and not as founded on the abstract relations of things.’

Defining the moral faculty 163 Salisbury, began an exchange of letters with Hutcheson in the London Journal in 1725, subsequently published as Letters Concerning the True Foundation of Virtue, with Burnet writing as Philaretus, the lover of truth,

and Hutcheson as Philanthropus, the lover of man. Burnet was highly critical of Hutcheson’s terms and arguments and wrote on behalf of the account of morals provided by Cumberland, by Clarke at the beginning of

his second series of Boyle lectures, and by Clarke’s follower Wiliam Wollaston.*! This exchange prompted Hutcheson to write Illustrations on the Moral Sense, as he explained in the Preface to the Essay on the Passions, with

which it was published in 1728: he had hoped to continue a private correspondence with Philaretus but was prevented by his death, and therefore attempted to answer all his objections in the Illustrations.*” Hutcheson was made by Burnet to rethink his position and to cast his arguments into a particular form, but he faced more formidable opponents. John Balguy, who in A Letter to a Deist had recently pointed out deficiencies in Shaftesbury’s Inquiry Concerning Virtue, observing in passing

that Hutcheson’s moral sense would prove no more effectual than Shaftesbury’s taste,*’ turned his critical attention to Hutcheson’s Inquiry and Illustrations as soon as the second appeared. In the two parts of The Foundation of Moral Goodness (1728 and 1729) he systematically analysed Hutcheson’s terms and arguments, warning Hutcheson of the unforeseen and undesirable consequences of the position he had adopted. A staunch follower of Clarke, Balguy professed himself unable to understand Hutcheson’s disparagement of Clarke’s Boyle lectures in the Illustrations, ‘unless | may have leave to attribute it to too close an Attachment to the celebrated

Author of the Characteristicks’.** Balguy was not happy with Locke’s account of the foundation of virtue either, but he was sure that it was better than Hutcheson’s.*° However, Hutcheson had already made significant modifications to his ideas and their expression in the Essay on the Passions in response to his reading of Butler.*° Butler’s Fifteen Sermons (1726) appeared the year after

Hutcheson’s IJnquiry In the Preface to the first edition of the Essay Hutcheson enthusiastically claimed Butler as an ally: I HOPE it is a good Omen of something still better on this Subject to be expected in the learned World, that Mr. Butler, in his Sermons at the Rolls Chapel, has done 41 Burnet, Letters (1772, first published in this form 1735), Preface, iii—iv. For the correct London

Journal dating of 1725 see B. Peach, “The Correspondence between Francis Hutcheson and Gilbert Burnet: The Problem of the Date’, JHP VUI (1970), 87-91. 42 Essay, 3rd edn (1742), Preface, xix—xx. 43° Letter to a Deist (1726), 16. 44 Foundation of Moral Goodness (1728), 29. 45 Foundation of Moral Goodness, Part II (1729), 46.

#6 Scott, Hutcheson, 196-202. Mautner, Introduction to Hutcheson, Human Nature, 39—41, compares Hutcheson and Butler.

164 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment so much Justice to the wise and good Order of our Nature, that the Gentlemen, who have oppos’d some other Sentiments of the Author of the Jnquiry, seem convine’d of a moral Sense.*’

Interestingly, Hutcheson deleted the first part of this séntence up to ‘Gentlemen’ from the third edition of the Essay (1742), which might suggest that he thought Butler’s path had diverged from his own, and he

scarcely mentioned Butler thereafter.*® But his modifications of his account of self-love and benevolence in the Essay and his introduction of the ruling power of conscience into his teaching at Glasgow, beginning with his inaugural lecture, all suggest that Hutcheson saw Butler’s powerful analysis of these key concepts as a way of refining his own hitherto rather unbalanced borrowing from and interpretation of Shaftesbury. As a result he was able to avoid a dangerously deterministic emphasis on instinct and give due weight to the role of reason in moral choice and action.*? These

developments suggest that Hutcheson’s Glasgow lectures cannot be regarded as fundamentally separate from and inferior to his Dublin treatises as sources of his moral thought.

‘Hutcheson’s influence’ according to his biographer, W. R. Scott, in a thoughtful comparison, ‘passed directly into men; Butler’s remained in his

books’.°° But Hutcheson’s faded in the second half of the eighteenth century, whereas Butler’s continued to grow right through the nineteenth. The parallels and divergences between the careers of the two are of great interest. By birth and upbringing a Presbyterian, Butler (1692—1752) was

educated to the age of 22 at Samuel Jones’s dissenting academy at Tewkesbury, but he then conformed to the Church of England and moved to Oriel College, Oxford, which proved to be something of an intellectual

: disappointment in comparison.?! After taking orders he obtained a number of important preferments, largely through the friendship of the Talbot family: beginning as Preacher at the Rolls Chapel in London, he spent several years in seclusion in the north as Rector of Stanhope in the diocese of Durham, then came south again, joining the court as Clerk of the Closet to Queen Caroline and rising to be Bishop of Bristol and finally Bishop of Durham. 47 Essay (1728), xix. 48 He criticises Butler’s treatment of ill-desert in The Analogy in System, I, 256.

#9 Tnaugural lecture in Human Nature, ed. Mautner, 131-2. Hume complained in a letter to Hutcheson of 10 January 1743 commenting on the Latin compend that Hutcheson had adopted Butler’s opinion in his Sermons of the authority of the moral sense, Letters of Hume, ed.

Greig (1932), I, 47. Scott, Hutcheson, 246, 248, attributes the treatment of conscience in the compend to the influence of Butler’s Dissertation on Virtue appended to the Analogy Cf Raphael, The Moral Sense (1947), 15—16, on Butler’s influence on the compend and System. °° Scott, Hutcheson, 148.

51 The most useful general accounts of Butler are Bernard, Introduction to Works (1900), J; Duncan-Jones, Butler’s Moral Philosophy (1952); Mossner, Bishop Butler (1936); and Penelhum, Butler (1985).

Defining the moral faculty 165 Because Butler’s private papers were destroyed at his request after his death, very little is known about the details of his life. However, it is clear that his education at ‘Tewkesbury was crucial in forming his intellectual interests and sympathies. His friend and fellow student Thomas Secker,

who later conformed to the Church of England partly under Butler’s influence and rose to become Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote a letter in

1711 to the Congregational minister and educationalist Isaac Watts, thanking him for getting him a place at the academy and describing Jones’s teaching methods and the students’ reading.°* While at Tewkesbury in 1713—14 Butler began an anonymous correspondence with Clarke, one of the two English philosophers who were to have a significant impact on

the development of his own thought. Butler wrote to express his doubts about some of Clarke’s arguments in his first set of Boyle lectures, A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, just as Hutcheson was to do

four years later, and in reply Clarke tried to meet his objections. With both integrity and grace Butler told Clarke, ‘as I design the search after truth as the business of my life, I shall not be ashamed to learn from any person;

though, at the same time, I cannot but be sensible, that instruction from some men is like the gift of a prince, it reflects an honour on the person on whom it lays an obligation’.°’ So impressed was Clarke by both the mind and demeanour of his adversary — ‘I cannot but take notice, I have very

seldom met with persons so reasonable and unprejudiced as yourself, in such debates as these’ — that he included the correspondence in the fourth edition of his Boyle lectures published in 1716.°* Butler was then 24 years

old. This exchange developed into friendship: he continued writing to Clarke on philosophical subjects at Oxford, where he complained he was obliged to waste time ‘in attending frivolous lectures and unintelligible disputations’,’’ and he was helped by Clarke in his subsequent career. Thus it was partly owing to Clarke that Butler obtained the Preachership of the Rolls, and as a favourite of the Princess of Wales, later Queen Caroline, Clarke was probably responsible for introducing Butler into her circle. But whereas Clarke’s heretical views on the Trinity made his own advancement to high office in the Church impossible (he remained Rector of St James’s, Picadilly for twenty years), Butler faced no such obstacle. As a writer Butler contributed two works of enduring importance to two

central moral and religious debates of the first half of the eighteenth 92 Gibbons, Memoirs of Watts (1780), 346—52. Secker says they read the greater part of Locke’s

Essay tor the logic course, but he does not specify the ethics texts. The content of Jones’s teaching and the influence of his collection of Dutch theologians on Butler is currently being studied by R.G. Frey. For Watts see RGS, I, Chapter 4. °3 Butler to Clarke, 16 December 1713, in Butler, Works, ed. Bernard, I, 326. °* Clarke to Butler, 8 April 1714, in Works, ed. Bernard, 1, 329. The correspondence is discussed in Ferguson, Philosophy of Clarke (1974), 32—6.

°° Butler to Clarke, 30 September [1717], in Works, ed. Bernard, I, 332.

166 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment century, on the constitution of human nature and the evidences of natural and revealed religion. Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel (1726) 1s his contribution to the first, and The Analogy of Religion Natural and Revealed to the Constitution and Course of Nature (1736), the product of his years of retirement

at Stanhope, to the second, though there is much in the later work that 1s of direct relevance to the first debate. Like his predecessor Shaftesbury and his contemporary Hutcheson, Butler undertook to expose the inadequacy

of Hobbes’s account of human nature, but his approach was more systematic. In Sermon I, ‘Upon the Social Nature of Man’, and V, ‘Upon Compassion’, he included notes criticising Hobbes’s reduction in the ninth chapter of Human Nature of benevolence to the love of power and pity to fear, justifying his minute analysis in the second of these on the grounds that ‘It is fit such sort of accounts of human nature should be shewn to be what they really are, because there is raised upon them a general scheme,

which undermines the whole foundation of common justice and honesty.°° Butler was particularly concerned to show that the true meaning of self-love (the topic of Sermon XI, ‘Upon the Love of our Neighbour’) had been radically distorted by Hobbes and his kind, as he explained in the preface to the second edition of Fifteen Sermons published in 1729: There is a strange affectation in many people of explaining away all particular affections, and representing the whole of life as nothing but one continued exercise of self-love. Hence arises that surprising confusion and perplexity in the Epicureans of old, Hobbes, the author of Reflexions, Sentences, et Maximes Morales |1.e.

Rochefoucauld], and this whole set of writers; the confusion of calling actions interested which are done in contradiction to the most manifest known interest, merely for the gratification of a present passion.°’

In the preface Butler presented his own analysis of the constitution of human nature and the foundation of morals as an explanation of what the ancients had meant by saying that virtue consists in following nature.?®

Among recent moralists he found himself weighing the rationalist and experimental methods of Clarke and Shaftesbury respectively and trying to give a true account that would include the best features of each. He wrote to Clarke in one of his letters from Oxford: A disposition in our natures to be influenced by right motives is as absolutely necessary to render us moral agents, as a capacity to discern right motives 1s. These two are, I think, quite distinct perceptions, the former proceeding from a desire inseparable from a conscious being of its own happiness, the latter being only our understanding, or faculty of seeing truth.°° °6 Works, ed. Bernard, I, 27—29n, 72—74n. W. Whewell particularly approved the note to Sermon I in his preface to Mackintosh, Dissertation on the Progress of Ethical Philosophy (2nd edn, 1837), 11.

57 Works, ed. Bernard, I, 16. 58 Works, ed. Bernard, I, 5—6, 8. °9 3 October [1717], in Works, ed. Bernard, I, 336.

Defining the moral faculty 167 Clarke thought that there was nothing in this distinction, but the relation

between the disposition to act from right motives and the capacity to discern them is precisely what was to occupy Butler as a moralist. He was aware that Shaftesbury had touched on it, but not dealt with it satisfactorily, and he set himself to improve on Shaftesbury’s account. However, though Butler’s debt to Shaftesbury’s analysis of the constitution of human nature in the Inquiry concerning Virtue is evident,°° he scarcely mentions him,

and then only to point out weaknesses in his position. ‘Thus in the preface to the Sermons Butler complained that Shaftesbury had overlooked the authority of conscience, the keystone of his own moral edifice: “The not

taking into consideration this authority, which is implied in the idea of reflex approbation or disapprobation, seems a material deficiency or omission in Lord Shaftesbury’s Inquiry concerning Virtue.’”®’ Wishart,

who as Dean of Faculty at Glasgow had been one of the electors of Hutcheson to the Chair of Moral Philosophy, was infuriated at this treatment of their mutual hero, and added an appendix to his satirical Vindication of the Reverend D[ean] B/erkele]y reproaching Butler

Who, after he had plumed himself up in the borrowed Feathers of Lord Shafisbury; and published a Volume of curious and elaborate Discourses, under the Title of

Sermons, wherein it may be evident to any one who reads both, that he has borrowed almost all his Light and Discoveries from him, without ever making the least Acknowledgement to him; has in a second Edition, publish’d a Preface; in which he has misrepresented him in the grossest Manner, and so as it is hard for any Man to help thinking the Misrepresentations to be wilful and design’d.

Wishart lamented what he took to be the explanation for this cowardice: °"Twas somewhat hard to think, that the obnoxious Character my Lord Shafisbury had got among many Clergymen . . . should render it dangerous for any of the Cloath to own what Good they had received from him.’ This criticism seems misplaced; Butler named remarkably few of his

antecedents or contemporaries, dangerous or not. ‘Thus he made no explicit reference to Hutcheson, though it is very likely that passages in Dissertation II, ‘Of the Nature of Virtue’ (appended to the Analogy), are directed to him.°®° In the case of Clarke, he indicated his debt in a curiously oblique way. His method in the Analogy 1s essentially empirical: he treats

religion, as he states several times, as a matter of fact not as an abstract 60 “His partiality to Shaftesbury appears often in hidden references, the discovery of which clears up his text’, Bonar, Moral Sense (1930), 58. Cf McCosh, Scottish Philosophy, 35n; Mackintosh, Dissertation, 191; Scott, Hutcheson, 196—7.

61 Works, ed. Bernard, I, 11. Two other criticisms of Shaftesbury are made in the preface, 12—14. See also Analogy, in Works, I, 48.

62 Vindication (1734), 82—3, 100. For the attribution of the Vindication to Wishart and for his attack on Berkeley see Chapter 2 above, n.5. and p. 120. 63 Suggested by Fowler, Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, 218; Scott, Hutcheson, 97; Bernard, Introduction to Butler, Works, I, xxi. See below, pp. 223-4.

168 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment truth. In the penultimate chapter, “Of the Objections which may be made against arguing from the Analogy of Nature, to Religion’, he explains why he has done this and what as a result he has omitted despite its supreme importance for him: in this treatise [ have argued upon the principles of others [glossed in a note as ‘notwithstanding them’|, not my own: and have omitted what I think true, and of the

utmost importance, because by others thought unintelligible, or not true. Thus I have argued upon the principles of the Fatalists [notably Collins], which I do not believe: and have omitted a thing of the utmost importance which I do believe, the moral fitness and unfitness of actions, prior to all will whatever; which I apprehend as certainly to determine the Divine conduct, as speculative truth and falsehood necessarily determine the Divine judgment.

He here associates himself with the rationalist account of the foundation of morals, and in particular with the terms — fitness and unfitness — that were

identified as Clarke’s. And yet at the same time he explains that for rhetorical reasons he cannot adopt Clarke’s method of arguing, because he

will not be believed. This passage is a clear warning to the reader of the difficulty of disentangling Butler’s respective debts to Clarke and Shaftesbury and establishing his real views.

Whereas Butler was hesitant about revealing his intellectual ancestry and commenting on or criticising the work of his contemporaries, Price, one of Butler’s greatest admirers, was to provide a remarkable assessment

of the ways in which thinking about the foundation of morals had developed since the work of Gudworth and Locke, directing his criticism mainly at Hutcheson and Hume, and in passing commenting acutely on most of the important contributors to the debate in the first three quarters of the eighteenth century. ‘The son of a Welsh high Calvinist minister, Price (1723-91) was educated at dissenting academies in Wales and London and passed most of his life in the dissenting community of Newington, first as

chaplain in a private family and then as preacher at the Presbyterian chapel at Newington Green.®? He developed a wide range of interests and

talents in middle life and was to become both famous and reviled as the supporter of American Independence and the French Revolution, but as a young man his main concern was with philosophy, in particular with correcting the dangerous errors of some of his famous contemporaries and establishing morals on what he regarded as its true foundation, rectitude. His intellectual position remained strikingly consistent. As a student he gave up his father’s Calvinist views under the influence of Clarke and Butler: according to Morgan, Price’s father threw Clarke’s sermons in the &* Works, ed. Bernard, I, 264—5. Penelhum, Butler, 11, emphasises the importance of this passage. ®> An account of Price’s life was written by his nephew William Morgan, Memoirs (1815). For his life and thought as a whole see Thomas, The Honest Mind (1977); for the intellectual tradition to which he belongs see Prior, Logic and the Basis of Ethics (1949).

Defining the moral faculty 169 fire when he caught the boy reading them, and Price read the Analogy walking over the mountains in severe frost to the academy of Vavasour Griffiths at Talgarth.°° Price later wrote of the Analogy: ‘I reckon it happy for me that this book was one of the first that fell into my hands. It taught

me the proper mode of reasoning on moral and religious subjects, and particularly the importance of paying a due regard to the imperfections of human knowledge.”°’ Price’s invaluable Review of the Principal Questions and Difficulties in Morals

was first published in 1758. The second and third corrected editions appeared in 1769 and 1787, the third (which omits ‘and Difficulties’ from

the title) containing a good deal of new material in the form of notes responding to recent publications, together with ‘A Dissertation on the Being and Attributes of the Deity’.°® In the preface to the first edition Price acknowledged that he was more indebted to Butler than to any other writer, stressing that when he was conscious of following him he either mentioned or quoted him, and that he did the same with respect to others to whom he owed a debt. In the text he praised Butler as ‘this incomparable writer’, particularly approving Butler’s account of the supremacy of

the principle of reflection and his criticism in the ‘Dissertation of the

Nature of Virtue’ of the view that the whole of virtue consists in benevolence.®°

After Butler, Price’s main debt was to writers who founded morality in reason: Plato among the ancients, and Cudworth and Clarke among the moderns.’° In some ways in his attitude to modern developments in moral thought Price saw himself as reliving the contest between Socrates and

Protagoras, reason and sense, immutable truth and scepticism, as described by Plato in Theaetetus. He evidently read with care Cudworth’s recently published Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morahty, in which

the Platonic position is defended against the modern Protagoras, Hobbes, and he must have taken to heart the prefatory comment by Cudworth’s editor, Edward Chandler (Butler’s predecessor as Bishop of Durham): ‘It 1s

well known, that the loose principles, with regard to morality, that are opposed in this book, are defended by too many in our time. It 1s hoped also that the new controversies springing up, that have some relation to

this subject, may be cleared and shortned by the reasons herein 66 Morgan, Price, 6, 8. The ethics texts at Griffiths’s academy in the 1740s included Pufendorf, De

Officio Hominis et Civis, Hutcheson’s compend, and the works of Clarke and Wollaston; McLachlan, Enghsh Education, 54.

Revolution (Dublin, 1785), 61-2.

67 Quoted in Thomas, Honest Mind, 9, from Price, Observations on the Importance of the American

68 Raphael’s edition of the third (1948) was the first new edition since Price’s death. Subsequent references are to this edition unless otherwise stated. 69 Review, 3, 119, 131-2. 70 Review, ed. Raphael, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, x, xiv; Thomas, Honest Mind, 19.

170 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment proposed.’’! Price seems to have derived his Platonic sources from Cudworth,’* and in Chapter 1, ‘Of the Origin of our Ideas of Right and Wrong’, he repeatedly appeals to and quotes from Cudworth and Plato as the main supporters of his position. In Chapter 6, “Of Fitness, and Moral Obligation’, he approves of Clarke’s account of obligation in his Discourse concerning Natural Religion, associating it with Butler’s, but his principal debt

to Clarke emerges in the Dissertation added to the third edition, which draws and comments on Clarke’s Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God and his correspondence with Butler.’°

In marked contrast to his admiration for the views of Butler, Cudworth, and Clarke, Price strongly criticised Locke’s assertion that all our ideas are derived from sensation and reflection, complaining that it ‘wants much

explication to render it consistent with any tolerable account of the original of our moral ideas’, and pointing out the dangerous consequences of his famous definition of rectitude as conformity to three kinds of law.

‘But, it is undoubted,’ he added in fairness, ‘that this great man would have detested these consequences.’’* His sharpest criticism was reserved for Hutcheson and Hume. Analysing their errors made it easier for him to

clarify his own position, as Morgan explained: ‘the author with his accustomed modesty was used to express himself greatly indebted in the composition of [the Rewew] to Hutcheson, Balguy, Clark, Butler and Hume; but particularly to the latter, whose doubts and objections led him to examine the ground on which he stood, before he ventured to raise his own structure upon it’.’° The starting point for Price’s question concerning

the foundation of morals was what he saw as Hutcheson’s deplorable emphasis in his Ingutry and Illustrations on sensation, taste, and feeling.’° He also scrutinised the System carefully, noting Hutcheson’s inconsistencies and

drawing attention to the similarity of the account of the moral faculty given there to that of Butler in his Sermons. “Though I entirely approve these sentiments,’ he comments, ‘I cannot help detaining the reader while I make a few remarks, in order to shew him how difficult it is to reconcile them with this writer’s other sentiments of virtue.’ He then shows how

muddled ‘this very ingenious and able writer’ really is.’” Although Hutcheson with the help of Butler might on some occasions have come 7 Cudworth, Eternal and Immutable Morality (1731), xi. The ms was made available by Francis Masham, Cudworth’s grandson. 72 Cudworth identifies the sceptical philosophers in Plato as Protagoras in Theaetetus, Polus and Callicles in Gorgias, and Thrasymachus and Glaucon in The Republic; Eternal and Immutable

Morality, 2, 4. .

73 Review, 118, 286, 291.

74 Review, 17—18, 42—3. See Locke, Essay, Book II, Chapter 28, 352, quoted in Chapter 2 above, . 127. 79 Morgen, Price, 19.

76 Review, 14—15. 77 Review, 215—16n.

Defining the moral faculty 171 within reach of a true conception of the moral faculty, the same could not be said of Hume. Price thought that Hume’s account of the origin of our ideas in the Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40) and the Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understanding (1748), ‘when pursued to its consequences,

ends in the destruction of all truth and the subversion of our intellectual faculties’.’® In an impassioned conclusion to Chapter 1 Price lamented that modern writers had ‘revived, perhaps even exceeded, the wildest doctrines of ancient scepticism’: Thus, is there neither matter, nor morality, nor Deity, nor any kind of external existence left. All our discoveries and boasted knowledge vanish, and the whole universe is reduced into a creature of fancy. Every sentiment of every being is equally just. Nothing being present to our minds besides our own ideas, there can be no conception of any thing distinct from them; no beings but ourselves; no distinction between past and future time; no possibility of remembering wrong, or foreseeing wrong. He is the wisest man, who has the most fertile imagination, and whose mind is stored with the greatest number of notions, their conformity to the truth of things being incapable of being questioned.

This was the ‘system of scepticism’ of Hume, ‘a writer of the greatest talents’.’” Yet Price had no difficulty divorcing the system from the man.

Morgan notes that Hume, ‘admiring the liberal manner in which his doctrines had been controverted, conceived so favourable an opinion of the writer, that it gave rise to an acquaintance, which was continued on both sides with uninterrupted esteem and friendship’.°° Unlike his response to Hutcheson, Price’s treatment of Shaftesbury was

largely favourable. It could be argued, indeed, that a minor aim of the Review was to rescue Shaftesbury from Hutcheson’s misreading. After an important passage in Chapter 8, ‘Of the Principle of Action in a virtuous

Agent’, in which he contrasts the roles of reason and instinct and emphasises that virtue supposes intelligence and reflection, Price observes, ‘I have the pleasure to find the author of the Characteristicks agreeing with me in these sentiments.’ He provides several quotations in support of this

statement, then adds in a note: “This truly noble author has no where expressed clearly and distinctly his sentiments concerning the original of

our ideas of virtue; but from some expressions he has used, it seems probable that he was for a surer and deeper foundation of morals, than either arbitrary will or implanted senses.’ Thus in Price’s view Shaftesbury not only did oppose Locke’s account of the origin of morals but would have opposed Hutcheson’s also: Hutcheson’s moral sense theory could not properly find its support in Characteristicks. ‘The rest of Price’s note, gently lamenting Shaftesbury’s failings, does not detract from this essential point: 78 Review, 42~3. 79” Review, 55-6. 80 Morgan, Price, 16.

172 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment His account of virtue in his Enquiry, is, indeed, on several accounts extremely deficient, particularly on account of his limiting virtue so much as in general he seems to do, to the cultivation of natural affection and benevolence; and overlooking entirely, as Dr. Butler observes, the authority belonging to virtue and the principle of reflexion. Yet he has, I think, made many excellent observations on virtue and providence, on life and manners; nor can it be enough lamented, that his prejudices against Christianity have contributed so much towards defeating the good effects of them, and staining his works.®!

When Price revised the Review for the third edition he cited more recent

authors who took their stand on one side or other of the great debate about the foundation of morals. On the side of Plato, GCudworth, Clarke, and Butler he singled out Harris, one of the ‘patrons and friends’ of Plato’s philosophy,°* and particularly Thomas Reid, ‘whose concurrence with me in all that is most important on this subject, gives me particular satisfaction’.8° Of Adam Smith — ‘a writer above any praise from me’ — he noted with disappointment: that our primary notions of moral good and evil are derived from sensation and not from reason, or that they are feelings of some kind or other, and not perceptions of the intellectual faculty, he represents as in his opinion so abundantly proved by Dr. HUTCQHESON, as to make it a matter of wonder, that any controversy should be kept up about it.®*

Price’s utter condemnation was reserved for William Paley, who discarded the moral sense and conscience as sources of moral knowledge but instead provided a Lockean account of the obligation to obey divine will: Mr. PALEY’s theory of morals seems to be resolvable into these two propositions; ‘that God’s command is the measure and standard of all duty,’ and, ‘that the duty

itself of obeying his command is the necessity of obeying it in order to avoid punishment.’

Never indeed have I met with a theory of morals which has appeared to me more exceptionable. . .°°

Unlike Hutcheson and Butler, Price cannot strictly be called one of Shaftesbury’s heirs. But not only did he present in the Review the fullest

and most convincing defence in the mid-eighteenth century of the rationalist account of the foundation of morals, he also as a subordinate enterprise provided a very important history of how and why thinking

about morals had developed in the ways that it did. He saw that Hutcheson had ignored the rational element in Shaftesbury’s thought and 81 Review, 189-90. 82 Review, 90n. 83 Review, Note D, 282. For Reid see Chapter 4 below, pp. 301-3. 84 Review, Note D, 281—2. For Smith see Chapter 4 below, pp. 303—5. 85 Review, Note F, 282—3. For Paley see Chapter 5 below, pp. 336--9.

Defining the moral faculty 173 believed that he erred, at least in his Dublin works, in making feeling and instinct paramount in morals. Butler, conversely, had recognised what was missing in Shaftesbury’s account of the constitution of human nature and

had corrected it by giving the commanding role to conscience, in the process persuading Hutcheson in his Glasgow lectures to modify his earlier view. But Hutcheson’s followers had failed to take account of Butler’s work and had perpetuated Hutcheson’s worst errors. Ironically, both sides could claim descent from Shaftesbury.

2 The diffusion of Shaftesburian thought | In the opening paragraphs of An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), Hume considered two controversies with which moral thinkers had

recently been occupied: the first, which he took to be exhausted, concerned whether moral distinctions have any reality; the second, which he thought much more worthwhile and to which his own book was directed, concerned whether morals are derived from reason or sentiment. ‘The second controversy, he suggests, 1s a complicated one: the ancients afhrmed that virtue is conformity to reason but derived morals from sentiment; the

moderns talk about the beauty of virtue and deformity of vice but base these distinctions on abstract reasoning. Hume continues: “The elegant Lord Shaftesbury, who first gave occasion to remark this distinction, and who, in general, adhered to the principles of the ancients, is not, himself, entirely free from the same confusion.’°°

These comments provide both a useful reminder of two key moral controversies of the first half of the eighteenth century, and a striking indication, despite the somewhat sardonic tone, of Hume’s sense of the importance of Shaftesbury’s part in them — he 1s the only moralist to be named in the first section of the Enquiry. Although Hume’s focus was on the second controversy, it is noteworthy that Shaftesbury played a central part in both. The following account illustrates the principal literary means — controversial works, essays, dialogues, translations, lectures, educational textbooks — through which Shaftesburian thought was interpreted, propa-

! gated, developed, and modified from the second decade of the eighteenth century, and it suggests that there was a significant difference between Scottish and English responses. The early replies to Shaftesbury seized on his freethinking contempt for

Christianity, and are not relevant here. Shaftesbury’s analysis of human nature and his definition of virtue were given a sudden prominence in the 1720s by the attack on him made by Mandeville and the defences that this 86 Enquiries, ed. Selby-Bigge, rev. Nidditch (1975), 169-71. For a detailed account of Hume’s position on this question see Chapter 4, section 3 below.

174 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment generated. Shaftesbury thus came to the fore as a combatant in the controversy that Hume later considered to have been decided, on the reality of moral distinctions. Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733), who to some extent came to replace Hobbes as the official proponent of the view that morality is not eternal and immutable but conventional, had argued in ‘An Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue’ in The Fable of the Bees (1714) that humans are essentially selfish and that they are flattered by lawgivers through manipulation of their sense of honour and shame into

regard for the public interest. In Mandeville’s notorious, much quoted formulation, ‘the nearer we search into human Nature, the more we shall be convinced, that the Moral Virtues are the Political Offspring which Flattery begot upon Pride’.®’ In the next edition published in 1723 Mandeville decided to strengthen his case by contrasting it with Shaftesbury’s. Mandeville had previously treated Shaftesbury with respect, quoting with approval in Free Thoughts on Religion (1720) his attack on religious persecution.?? He now added an essay to the Fable entitled ‘A Search into the Nature of Society’, in which he used a crudely simplified model of Shaftesbury’s view of human nature — ‘He seems to require and

expect Goodness in his Species, as we do a sweet Taste in Grapes and China Oranges’ — as a rhetorical antithesis to his own convictions that

taste and morals are equally relative, that they depend on custom, education, and temper, and that society arises from self-love: “The attentive Reader. . . will soon perceive that two Systems cannot be more opposite than his Lordship’s and mine.’*’ The antithesis was to be elaborated in the second part of the Fable (1729), a series of dialogues between Horatio, who is an admirer of Characteristicks, and Cleomenes, who has been converted by the first part.?°

Mandeville’s challenge to the reader to juxtapose the two systems was ‘immediately taken up by the clergyman and historian Richard Fiddes. In the preface to A General Treatise of Morality (1724) Fiddes concentrated on Mandeville’s ‘Enquiry’ and ‘Search’, criticising at length his account of the lack of certainty in morals, and quoting Shaftesbury with approval ‘not only, as he hath asserted the immutable Distinction of Moral Good and Evil, in the strongest

Terms, but hath also in his Inquiry concerning Virtue, employed some very pertinent and beautiful Illustrations in Proof of it’. Fiddes dissociated himself 87 The Fable of the Bees, ed. Kaye (1924), I, 51. See Kaye’s history of the editions, I, xxxiii—vii and

list of responses, II, 418-53. 88 Free Thoughts (1720), Chapter 9, ‘Of Toleration and Persecution’, 239—41, 360. See Fable, ed. Kaye, Introduction, I, Ixxii-v; Hundert, The Enlightenment’s Fable (1994), 117-26; I. Primer,

‘Mandeville and Shaftesbury: Some Facts and Problems’, in Primer, ed., Mandeville Studies 1975).

89 able a Kaye, I, 323—4. Shaftesbury is also criticised in Remark T, added in 1723, I, 233-4. 9° Fable, ed. Kaye, I, 15-16, 20.

Defining the moral faculty 175 from Shaftesbury’s freethinking essays (the aspect of Shaftesbury that Mandeville approved) but fairly argued that this should not detract from praise due to the principles expressed in the Jnqury. In his concluding summary, perhaps with the Judgment of Hercules in mind, Fiddes presents Mandeville and Shaftesbury almost as allegorical figures confronted by a fundamental moral and religious choice: ‘Under these two different Distinctions, of those, who argue from the Defects, and of others, who argue from the proper Faculties

of human Nature, and the End of God in them, the Authors of the Search into the Nature of Society, and of the Inquiry concerning Virtue, have dwided, and taken a separate Part.’?!

In the ‘Search’ Mandeville ridiculed not only Shaftesbury’s views but his

character, portraying him with dormant passions, ‘an Indolent ‘Temper and Unactive Spirit’: Virtue consists in Action, and whoever is possest of this Social Love and kind Affection to his Species, and by his Birth or Quality can claim any Post in the Publick Management, ought not to sit still when he can be Serviceable, but exert himself to the utmost for the good of his Fellow Subjects.

...the calm Virtues recommended in the Characteristicks, are good for nothing but to breed Drones, and might qualify a Man for the stupid Enjoyments of a Monastick Life, or at best a Country Justice of Peace, but they would never fit him for Labour and Assiduity, or stir him up to great Atchievements and perilous Undertakings.”

Mandeville’s ad hominem attack suggests that he feared Shaftesbury’s reputation was rising among those who should have known better — he notes that Shaftesbury ‘is now much read by Men of Sense’.?? He was clearly indignant at the thought of Shaftesbury’s sociable view of human nature being used in support of public virtue and commercial expansion, which for Mandeville, with his doctrine of ‘private vices, public benefits’ (the infamous subtitle of the Fable), were necessarily the product of conflict and self-love. Ironically, this is just the purpose for which Shaftesburian ideas were to be developed in Scotland. It is not clear whether Mandeville had any particular interpreters of Shaftesbury in mind, but the Scots and dissenting Irish who came under Molesworth’s influence at this time read Shaftesbury in the way that Mandeville deplored and leaped to his defence against Mandeville’s caricature. From mid-1722 until his death in 1725 Molesworth lived in retirement

near Dublin. In 1722-3 several young men in Scotland who shared his Shaftesburian views about human nature, education, and liberty, including Turnbull in Aberdeen, Wishart in Edinburgh, and Arbuckle in Glasgow,

9! Fiddes, General Treatise (1724), xvii, xxxii—vi, xxxixff, lxix, Ixxv—vii.

92 Fable, ed. Kaye, I, 331-3. 93 Fable, ed. Kaye, I, 323.

176 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment began a correspondence with him.°* Their letters throw some light on the

peculiar process whereby it was possible for Shaftesbury to become christianised. ‘They manifest adulation for Shaftesbury, contempt for both clerical bigotry and popular prejudice, and a conviction that the function of religion is essentially moral and social. ‘Thus ‘Turnbull writes of Shaftesbury: ‘I never received so much real benefit from any uninspired writings, so incomparably perfect 1s the composure of all his pieces, and so divine

the energy with which these form the genuine principles of virtue and goodness, and a true relish of beauty and truth of every sort in the mind of a well-disposed reader’.?? After expressing interest in Collins and Toland in a later letter, Turnbull told Molesworth that he had written a treatise on religion which the printers refused to publish: “The design of it was to shew that a fair and impartial exercise of reason was the best and worthiest part

an understanding creature could act in matters of thought or faith, and that no rational society could have any common interest in matters of that

sort but the common and noblest privilege of rational beings.’ In ‘the interest of true religion’ the magistrates should protect everyone ‘in the easy and quiet use of the thinking and reasoning liberty; ... all other public meddling in religion must be prejudicial’ to all the interests of society. Turnbull went on to explain that though he was still a lover of freethinking he had now come to believe that ‘for the right management’

of society an established religion and public order of priests were necessary.?°

Wishart, who had a congregation of his own in Edinburgh, after asserting to Molesworth his love of virtue and liberty justified his caution about expressing his views publicly: ‘it may be questioned whether the principles of virtue oblige a man to lay open strong truths to weak eyes,

and to run the hazard of being ever after deprived of access to act in a certain way for the interests-of goodness, for the satisfaction of once in his life openly contradicting some received and established prejudices, when

no good is to be done by it’. He went on to explain that he tried to inculcate in his flock the belief that ‘religion is virtue and charity, that the

promoting of these is the great design of Christianity, and that the perfection of those noble qualities is the chief ingredient in that happiness

94 The correspondence is in HMC, MSS in Various Collections, VIII (1913). There are several useful secondary accounts: P. Jones, “Che Scottish Professoriate and the Polite Academy, 1720—46’, in

Hont and Ignatieff, eds., Wealth and Virtue, 93-5; Moore in M. A. Stewart, ed., Scottish Enlightenment, 45—7; Robbins, Lighteenth-Century Commonwealthman (1959), 167ff; Scott, Hutcheson,

26—8, 30—6; Stewart, ‘George Turnbull and Educational Reform’, in Carter and Pittock, eds., Aberdeen and the Enlightenment (1987), 96; Wood, Aberdeen Enlightenment (1993), 40, 46—9.

9° MSS in Various Collections, VIII, 3 August 1722, 343. For Arbuckle on Shaftesbury see 13 February 1723, 355. 96 14 May 1723, 360.

Defining the moral faculty 177 and those rewards by which it animates us’, but he complained that the abettors of ‘savage zeal, fierce bigotry and dire superstition’ were making it very difficult for him to teach the common people true virtue.’’ In a later

letter he reported on his reading of authors recommended to him by Molesworth. One of them was Tillotson, whom he had now reread after knowing his work for several years. Though he found much to praise, including Tillotson’s promotion ‘of a religion entirely calculated for the benefit and happiness of mankind’, he objected that ‘even his views of certain dogmata are sometimes too narrow and too much inclined to the system’, and that ‘in handling the nature and grounds of moral virtue he does not go enough to the bottom of things’.2° These letters, which may have been couched in a certain style to impress the freethinking Molesworth, nevertheless raise doubts about the nature of the Christianity these Shaftesburians were later to espouse in their published works. The first literary evidence of this relationship came from the Molesworth

circle in Dublin, which Arbuckle joined in 1724 after leaving Glasgow. Under the name of Hibernicus Arbuckle wrote and edited literary and philosophical letters in the Dublin Weekly Journal from April 1725 to March 1727, and had them reprinted in London as A Collection of Letters and Essays on Several Subjects (two volumes, 1729), with the running head of Hibernicus’s Letters. Arbuckle dedicated this collection to Molesworth’s son John, also a friend of Shaftesbury, stating that many of the letters had been composed

under his father’s roof and published under his protection and by his command, and describing the collection as ‘A WORK calculated to promote the Cause of Liberty and Virtue’.?? Shaftesbury is only occasionally mentioned,'°° but there is a general tone of dilute Shaftesburianism in the series of philosophical letters on happiness (particularly numbers 6, 13, 25, and 27), emphasising the naturalness of social affection, the pleasures

of benevolence, and the irrelevance of intellectual speculation: ‘the generous and kind Instincts which Nature has planted in us, are a much

97 13 October 1722, 347—9. In 1737 the Edinburgh Presbytery refused to concur with the call to

the ministry given to Wishart by the City of Edinburgh, on the ground that two sermons he had preached in London in 1731—2 contained passages inconsistent with the doctrines of the Church; Answers for William Wishart (1738), Advertisement. “The certain and unchangeable Difference betwixt Moral Good and Evil’, preached before the Societies for the Reformation of Manners at Salters’ Hall, 3 July 1732 (one of the sermons complained of) is much indebted to Shaftesbury; see Wishart, Discourses (1753). In 1745 as Principal of Edinburgh University Wishart was one of those who prevented Hume from obtaining the Chair of Moral Philosophy. See Chapter 4 below, p. 255. 98-7 November, 1723, 366—7. Molesworth also recommended Machiavelli, Harrington, and Confucius. For ‘Tillotson see RGS, I, Chapter 2. 99° Hibernicus’s Letters (1729), I, iii, v.

100 Hibernicus’s Letters, 1, 338, Il, 142, 181, 242. Other authors praised include Hutcheson and Wollaston, IT, 32, 181, Molesworth, I, 187, II, 385, and Butler, II, 423.

178 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment surer and better Guide to us than long and fine-spun Deductions from the Nature and Relations of Things’.'°' In the final number Arbuckle identified Hutcheson as author of six of the letters, three of them directed against Hobbes (numbers 10, 11, and 12, 1725) and three against Mandeville (numbers 45, 46, and 47, 1726);'°? they were to be republished posthumously in Glasgow as Reflections upon Laughter, and Remarks upon The Fable of the Bees (1750). The title page of Hutcheson’s Jnguiry (1725), as already pointed out, claimed allegiance to the principles of Shaftesbury against those of Mandeville, and Hutcheson

made a laboured attempt to refute on these principles Mandeville’s derivation of virtue: So far is Virtue from being (in the Language of a late Author) the Offspring of Flattery, begot upon Pride; that Pride, in the bad Meaning of that Word, zs the spurious Brood of Ignorance by our moral Sense, and Flattery only an Engine, which the Cunning may use to turn this moral Sense in others, to the Purposes of Self-Love in the Flatterer.'°°

In his letters to Hibernicus Hutcheson continued his attack on Mandeville, adopting the tactic that Skelton was later to use against Shaftesbury: he argued that Mandeville’s ambiguities, contradictions and inconsistencies

made him an unanswerable writer.!°* In the second part of the Fable Mandeville retaliated by simultaneously ridiculing Hutcheson’s mathematical calculations in the Jnquiry and his Shaftesburian naiveté about human nature. Cleomenes observes:

Mr. Hutcheson ... seems to be very expert at weighing and measuring the Quantities of Affection, Benevolence, &c. I wish that curious Metaphysician would give himself the Trouble, at his Leisure, to weigh two things separately: First, the real Love Men have for their Country, abstracted from Selfishness. Secondly, the Ambition they have, of being thought to act from that Love, tho’ they feel none.!°°

An unconvincing attempt to adjudicate in this quarrel was made by the Scottish minister Archibald Campbell, Professor of Ecclesiastical History at St Andrews. In his Enquiry into the Orginal of Moral Virtue (1733)'°° 101 Hitbernicus’s Letters, 1, 205—6. 102 Fibernicus’s Letters, I, 429. 103 Hutcheson, Inquiry, 4th edn (1738), 229. For other criticisms of Mandeville see pp. 124, 162. Hutcheson cites the 3rd edn of the Fable (1724). 104 Fibernicus’s Letters, 1, 370, 39448; Reflections and Remarks (1750), 41, 68ff. Hutcheson took his description of ‘unanswerable writing’ from Addison’s Whig Examiner, no. 4, 5 October 1710. For Skelton’s similar attack on Shaftesbury see Chapter 2 above, p. 114. An ironical defence of Mandeville against Shaftesbury was made by ‘Isaac Alogist’? (whom Arbuckle was unable to identify) in no. 82, AHubernicus’s Letters, Il, 241-2. In no. 76, II, 181 the unreasonable ‘Alogist’,

who is in fact defending reason and common sense against Mandevillian relativism, links Shaftesbury, the Spectator, Wollaston, and Hutcheson as rationalists. 105 Fable, ed. Kaye, I, 345-6. 106 Campbell wrote his Enquiry in 1726; it was fraudulently published in 1728 by Alexander Innes as APETH-AOTIA. Mandeville dismissed it in the preface to the second part of the Fadl, ed. Kaye, II, 24-7.

Defining the moral faculty 179 Campbell, arguing from the position that self-love is the standard by which

we judge of the virtue of actions, attacked Mandeville and Hobbes for making moral virtue imaginary and claimed that Hutcheson’s position in the Inquiry, appearances notwithstanding, coincided with his own.'%” Campbell regretted that Hutcheson described holders of views such as his

as no better than disciples of Epicurus. He demanded in an aggrieved tone: ‘Is a Thing false, because Epicurus maintain’d it? Or is a Thing true, because the late Earl of Shaftsbury (whose Principles Mr. Hutcheson professes to explain and defend) was pleased to declare for it??'°®

The last comment suggests that appeals to the authority of Shaftesbury were becoming widespread. ‘The most important of the means by which Shaftesburian thought was diffused from the 1720s onwards was moral philosophy teaching at Scottish universities, those chiefly responsible being Turnbull and Fordyce at Aberdeen and Hutcheson at Glasgow. Because of the different kinds of publication in which this teaching was incorporated — published lecture courses, books based on lectures given years earlier, educational manifestos, student handbooks, classics textbooks — its influence was felt far beyond the confines of these universities and in England as well as in Scotland. After studying at Edinburgh, Turnbull (1698—1748)

taught philosophy from 1721 to 1727 at Marischal College, Aberdeen, where [Thomas Reid was one of his pupils, but he left both Scotland and the Presbyterian Church, travelling as a tutor on the continent for several years, moving in literary circles in London, taking orders in the Church of

England, and eventually holding a living in northern Ireland.'°? He published a range of works on religious, aesthetic, scientific, and philosophical subjects, the most important from the perspective of Shaftesburian thought being The Principles of Moral Philosophy (1740). In the preface

Turnbull explained that the book had been read (1.e. as lectures) to students of moral philosophy over a dozen years earlier, but he took full

account of the important new publications that had appeared since he taught the subject, listing the modern authors from whom he had received most help, and paying generous tribute to Butler and Hutcheson as well as Shaftesbury. He 1s effusive about Butler’s method in his Sermons: ‘that true 107 Campbell, Enquiry (1733), Preface, xvi—xviii, Treatise II, 319-22. Campbell’s new preface to his own edition is dated September 1733, by which time Hutcheson was teaching at Glasgow. Campbell states, p. xii, that Simson, Professor of Theology at Glasgow, had read his book with approval. 108 Campbell, Enguiry (1733), Preface, xiti—xiv. For Hutcheson’s point about Epicurus see Inquiry,

. 4th edn (1738), 211—12; also Essay on the Passions, 3rd edn (1742), 13. 109 On Turnbull’s life see Stewart, in Carter and Pittock, eds., Aberdeen and the Enlightenment, 95-8;

on his thought see McCosh, Scottish Philosophy, Article 12, Norton, Hume (1982), 153-74, Wood, Aberdeen Enlightenment, 40—9. McCosh and Wood emphasise Turnbull’s priority over Hutcheson in propagating Shaftesburianism in Scotland. Wood points out (p. 39) that David Verner was the first Aberdeen regent to cite Shaftesbury.

180 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment method of enquiring into human nature, which 1s delineated with such force and persprcuity of argument in the admtrable preface to these divine discourses, being strictly kept to in them, they make a full vindication of human nature, and of the ways of God to

man. His comment on Shaftesbury is particularly interesting in the light of his letters to Molesworth nearly twenty years earlier: I cannot express the vast satisfaction, and equal benefit, with which I have often read the Earl of Shaftsbury’s Characteristicks: a work that must live for ever in the esteem of all who delight

in moral enquiries. There 1s in his Essay on virtue and merit, and his moral Rapsody, a complete system of Moral Philosophy demonstrated in the strictest manner, which fully secures that first step to revelation, the belief of a Detty and providence.

Turnbull went on to say that he had borrowed most from Hutcheson,

whom he described as having done eminent service to virtue and religion.'!° In addition to these debts to moral philosophers, Turnbull emphasised how much the method and the structure of the Principles owed respectively to Isaac Newton and Alexander Pope, natural philosopher and poet. The essential aim of the book, to establish the general laws of human nature by means of experimental enquiry and to show the providential ordering of this life and the next, is, Turnbull claims in several places, an application to moral philosophy of the Newtonian method in natural philosophy.'"! The title page quotes a passage from Newton’s Optics (1704) from which Turnbull derived this idea, and a line from Pope’s Essay on Man (1733-4) summarising it: ‘Account for Moral, as for Nat’ral Things’.''* Turnbull’s often repeated intention to vindicate human nature and the ways of God

to man is also an adaptation of Pope,'!® and much of the book seems designed to illustrate and explicate lengthy quotations from the Essay,

Turnbull had seen his own early interest in Shaftesburian thought developed independently by other writers, and it may be that in organising his Principles in the way that he did he was attempting both to make explicit

his own standing as one of Shaftesbury’s heirs alongside Butler and Hutcheson and to attach himself to an increasingly fashionable movement. 110 Principles, xiii, viii—x. Turnbull also published Christian Philosophy in 1740, reissuing it under the title The Principles of Moral and Christian Philosophy, vol. II, as a companion volume to Principles of

Moral Philosophy. He had a very high opinion of Shaftesbury as an educationalist and literary critic, and extracted a number of relevant passages in Three Dissertations (1740); see Preface, Xvilli-xxii, and ‘A Character of Augustus, Maecenas and Horace; with some Reflections on the Works of Horace, by the Earl of Shaftsbury’, 20—67. ‘ll Principles, “The Epistle Dedicatory’, i, Preface, iii, iv. He hopes for a certain poet (presumably James Thomson) to be a counter-Lucretius and sing Newton’s praises, Preface, xii. Wood, Aberdeen Enlightenment, 181, n29, suggests that Turnbull and Hume may both have learned the

idea that natural and moral philosophy share a common method from Robert Steuart, Professor of Natural Philosophy at Edinburgh. 112 Poems, ed. J. Butt (1968), Essay on Man, Epistle I, 1. 162.

'13 Eg. in the title of Part I, and see the praise of Butler quoted above. Pope urges, ‘But vindicate the ways of God to Man’, Epistle I, 1. 16.

Defining the moral faculty 18] Fordyce, one of Turnbull’s successors at Aberdeen, was to reach a far wider audience, not only in England and Scotland but on the continent and in America. After studying at Marischal College in the 1720s, though not under Turnbull, Fordyce (1711—51) spent a few years from about | 737 in England, part of the time at Doddridge’s academy at Northampton.'!*

The relationship with Doddridge was to prove particularly fruitful; it illustrates both convergences and differences between the moderate wings of English dissent and Scottish Presbyterianism, not least in the ways both movements responded to Shaftesbury. ‘Though he was licensed to preach in the Church of Scotland, Fordyce never became a settled minister; he

returned to Aberdeen where he taught moral philosophy from 1742 to 1750. He was lost at sea when returning from a continental tour. After leaving Northampton, Fordyce kept up a literary correspondence with Doddridge, describing his reading (including ‘Turnbull’s Principles), sending Doddridge a copy of an essay on human nature for his comments, exchanging information about new publications, and responding warmly

to Doddridge’s Life of Colonel Gardiner.''? The principal record of this friendship was Fordyce’s manifesto for educational reform, Dualogues concerning Education (two volumes, 1745, 1748), in which Shaftesbury’s moral philosophy and programme for self-discipline and Doddridge’s

educational methods and the affectionate temper of his religion are explored through the medium of Shaftesburian dialogue and rhapsody.'!® Like Turnbull, Fordyce had no difficulty in christianising Shaftesbury; in the academy of Euphranor,'!” his ideal educator, Shaftesbury’s enthusiastic philosophy and Doddridge’s affectionate religion combine to produce men who are not only citizens of the intellectual and political worlds but also active Christians. The philosophical club at the academy is devoted to the

discussion of Shaftesburian topics: ‘How Men are formed? by what Methods their Interests are best secured? how these are impaired? How

the Balance of our Passions and Affections may be kept? How the 114 For Fordyce’s life see General Biographical Dictionary, ed. A. Chalmers, XIV (1814), 468-70, based on Kippis’s unpublished Biographia Britannica, V1, Part I; for his thought see Wood, Aberdeen Enlightenment, 50—5. For Doddridge see RGS, I, Chapter 4. John Aikin, Doddridge’s assistant at Northampton during Fordyce’s time there, was an admirer of ‘Turnbull (communication from M. A. Stewart). 115 Doddridge, Correspondence and Diary, ed. Humphreys (1829-31), TI, 416 (Turnbull), 442 (essay on human nature), IV, 24 (Middleton’s Life of Cicero), 536—7 (Middleton’s Discourse Concerning the Miraculous Powers), V, 55 (Lafe of Gardiner); also in Nuttall, ed., Calendar of the Correspondence of

Doddridge (1979), nos 587, 565, 675, 1242, 1325. Note that Nuttall provides new dates for many of the letters. On the Life of Gardiner see RGS, I, 197-203. 116 For further acounts see P. Jones, “The Polite Academy and the Presbyterians, 1720-1770’, in Dwyer ¢ al., eds., Politics and Culture of Early Modern Scotland (1982), Rivers, ‘Shaftesburian Enthusiasm and the Evangelical Revival’, in Garnett and Matthew, eds., Revival and Religion since 1700 (1993).

117 Perhaps a criticism of the orthodox Euphranor of Berkeley’s Alcephron.

182 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment Disorders of this domestic Government are to be rectified? and by what Means the Conduct may be formed to Decency and Virtue?’!!® The books recommended are what one would expect from a follower of Shaftesbury. A female character (outside the academy), Cleora, describes how much she has benefited from reading two pieces recommended to her ‘containing the very Quintessence of practical moral Philosophy’: Shaftesbury’s Soliloquy and Hutcheson’s Essay on the Passions. In his general plan of

education Euphranor urges the importance of those ancient and modern moralists ‘the principal Object of whose Care seems to have been the human Hear: the ancients are Socrates as portrayed by Xenophon, Cebes, Epictetus, his commentators Simplicius and Arrian, and especially Marcus Aurelius. The most Christianly devout of the students, Hiero, expresses a truly Shaftesburian devotion to Marcus, ‘whose Principles are so sublime, and his Maxims of Virtue so stupendously great and commanding, that no Man can enter into his Soliloquies without becoming a greater and better Man, a Creature more elevated above the World, and more enlarged in

his Affections to Human-kind, and the whole of Things’. But these Shaftesburian heroes cannot stand alone. In addition to her moral improvement through Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, Cleora has had her soul set on fire by reading Fenelon, Scougal’s Life of God in the Soul of Man,

and Smith’s Select Discourses. And after a long discussion in the final dialogue about education as moral medicine and the functioning of the different classical schools of philosophy, Hiero recommends for enlightening and warming the soul the works of Fenelon, the latitude-men Cudworth, Smith, Whichcote, Patrick, and Worthington, and one of Doddridge’s favourite authors, the Scottish Episcopalian Leighton.'!9 Shaftesbury has been incongruously united with Doddridge and reabsorbed into the Christian tradition.

Perhaps because of the success of the first volume of the Dialogues Fordyce was commissioned by the London bookseller and entrepreneur Robert Dodsley to contribute to his educational textbook The Preceptor (two

volumes, 1748). ‘This was divided into twelve parts, covering a range of

subjects from letter writing to government, with a preface by Samuel Johnson. All the contributors were anonymous. Fordyce was responsible for Part [X, which is variously described on the title page to Volume II, on its own title page, and on the first page of text, as ‘On Ethics, or Morality’, ‘On Moral Philosophy’, and “The Elements of Moral Philosophy’. Its success is shown by the fact that in 1754 (after Fordyce’s death) Dodsley reissued it with the last of these titles as a separate volume, and it was later to be incorporated in slightly abridged form into the third volume of the 118 Fordyce, Dialogues, I, 67.

119 Dialogues, II, 140-1, 143—4, 301-2, 340-1, 461.

Defining the moral faculty 183 Encyclopaedia Britannica (1771), edited by Wiliam Smellie, as the article on ‘Moral Philosophy, or Morals’.'?° It is likely that the Elements was based on the lectures on ethics that Fordyce gave at Aberdeen, which thus achieved

through these three separate forms of publication an extraordinarily wide audience. '*! Unlike the Dialogues, there is only one direct reference in the Elements to

Shaftesbury, but the whole work is imbued with Shaftesburian thought as modified by both Hutcheson and Butler. Like his predecessors, including

Turnbull, Fordyce takes as his subject of enquiry human nature as it is constituted, and he assumes that a moral sense under various designations

is an essential constituent of that nature. He paraphrases with approval part of Book II of Shaftesbury’s Jnquiry on the individual’s delight in his sympathy of affections and interests with the rest of the human race, and he draws on Harris’s Shaftesburian dialogue on happiness from Three Treatises (1744) for a similar purpose.'** He cites Whichcote on virtue,

Hutcheson on the balance of the passions (from the Essay) and the conscience (from his Latin compend), and Butler’s sermons on compassion,

forgiveness of injuries, and gratitude to God.'*? Drawing on Butler’s

Analogy in a similar manner to ‘Turnbull, he reaches the very un-Shaftesburian conclusion in the final section entitled ‘Motive to Virtue from the Immortality of the Soul’ that it is in the after-life that man will

find a stage for action proportioned to his sublimer powers and that human nature will attain its completiori. The section culminates with a brief but enthusiastic celebration of the advantages of the Christian scheme and its connexion with natural religion.'** In case this conclusion is perceived as an insufficient account of the Christian basis of morality, Johnson’s preface to The Preceptor, which goes through each of the twelve parts in turn, introduces Fordyce’s ‘Elements’ with the following admoni-

tion: ‘When therefore the Obligations of Morality are taught, let the Sanctions of Christianity never be forgotten; by which it will be shown, that they give Strength and Lustre to each other, Religion will appear to be the Voice of Reason, and Morality the Will of God.’!*° The final part of The Preceptor, ‘On Human Life and Manners’, may have derived from a suggestion in the eleventh of Fordyce’s Dralogues, which 1s 120 R. L. Emerson, ‘Science and Moral Philosophy in the Scottish Enlightenment’, in M. A. Stewart, ed., Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment, 25—7; J. Price, Introduction to Fordyce, Elements (1990, facsimile of 1754 edn). Elements was reviewed briefly by the rational dissenter

William Rose in the Monthly Review, X (1754), 394, as ‘the most entertaining and useful compendium of moral philosophy in our own, or perhaps in any other language.’ Rose’s contributions to the Monthly are identified in Nangle, Monthly Review First Serres 1749-1789 1934).

12] Wood Aberdeen Enlightenment, 53. 122 Elements, 265, 271. 123 Elements, 282, 83—4, 106, 82, 181, 217.

124 Elements, 292-3, 304—5. 125 Preceptor (1748), I, xxviii.

184 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment devoted to a discussion of allegory, fable, dialogue, and history-painting as

the most effective means of conveying moral sentiments. ‘The principal ancient examples are Shaftesbury’s favourites, the judgement of Hercules (as told by Prodicus in Xenophon’s Memorabilia) and the Table of Cebes, and Shaftesbury’s commission of de Matteis’s painting is singled out for special

praise: ‘the beautiful Fable of Prodicus, has been turned, by a celebrated Philosopher of these After-Ages, into one of the noblest Historic Pieces or Tablatures, Ancient or Modern’.!*© At one point the suggestion is made that the best ancient and modern allegories should be collected in one volume

for youth ‘as so many Philosophical Pictures or History-Pieces of human Life’.!*” Dodsley’s ‘On Human Life and Manners’ contains three allegories, one modern, Johnson’s “The Vision of ‘Theodore’, written specifically for The Preceptor, followed by two ancient, “Che Choice of Hercules’, a

poem by Robert Lowth based on Prodicus’ fable, and “The Picture of Human Life’, a translation by Joseph Spence of the Table of Cebes, both previously published.'*° In this arrangement, crucially, the interpretation of the classical allegories is determined by the modern one, which gives

, pride of place to the figure of Religion. What is at issue here is a fundamental difference between the Shaftesburian and the orthodox Christian ways of reading the classical moralists, a difference which would have been only too obvious to Johnson but which does not seem to have troubled Fordyce. A further very important means of propagating the Shaftesburian moral

and educational programme which both grew out of and influenced the development of Scottish moral philosophy teaching was the Foulis Press in Glasgow.'*° Robert Foulis, later joined by his brother Andrew, set up as a

printer and bookseller in 1741 with Hutcheson’s encouragement, and subsequently was appointed University Printer. ‘The Press was responsible for publishing all of Hutcheson’s works which derived from his university

teaching,'*° and in addition the works of the Dublin period (previously

126 Fordyce, Dialogues, I, 368-9, 375, 392, 408, 410—11. Two of Fordyce’s characters, Eugenio and Sophron, express very different views of the merits of Shaftesbury’s use of the dialogue form, p. 391. On Cebes see also I, 259. For The Judgment of Hercules see Chapter 2 above,

. 93-4, 127 Flues I, 407. See Editor’s Introduction to “The Vision of Theodore’, Johnson, Rasselas, ed. Kolb (1990), 189-90. 128 Rasselas, ed. Kolb, 179-85. 129 See the full list in Gaskell, Foults Press. See also Sher, ‘Commerce, religion and the enlightenment in eighteenth-century Glasgow’, in Devine and Jackson, eds., Glasgow, I (1995), 325-31. 130 These included his Latin moral compend, Philosophiae Morals Institutio Compendiana (1742, 1745, 1755), and its English translation, A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy (1747, 1753, 1764, 1772); his posthumous System of Moral Philosophy (2 vols., 1755); and his inaugural lecture, De Natura Hominum Soctaltate (1756; 1st published 1730).

Defining the moral faculty 185 published in London) were reissued.'*! Hutcheson was the most popular author on the Foulis list: twenty-eight separate editions of his works were issued in the course of about thirty-five years.!°* Hutcheson’s status within

the university is the obvious explanation for this fact, but it does not account for the continued popularity of the Dublin works after his death.

It might seem that the work of Shaftesbury himself was read less: the Foulis Press issued one edition of Characteristicks in three volumes in 1743—5, with The Moralists also issued separately, and one of the Letters (to

Ainsworth and Molesworth) in 1746, sometimes advertised as the fourth volume. However, the four-volume Glasgow edition of 1758, published by

the Foulis’s rival Robert Urie, suggests a continuing demand in Scotland.!%° Locke was represented by an abridged edition of the Essay (1744,

1752) and two small educational works published together, Elements of Natural Philosophy and Thoughts Concerning Reading and Study for a Gentleman (1751).

It was through the publication of classical, particularly Greek, authors

that the Foulis Press became famous, and here it seems likely that Hutcheson and Moor were deliberately putting a Shaftesburian programme into effect. Moor, who became University Librarian in 1742 and Professor of Greek in 1746, edited the Foulis classical texts and wrote

grammars and primers to teach the students to read them (his Greek Grammar, with eleven editions, was the Press’s most popular single work).!°*

The Press issued Greek texts both in translation and in the original. Thus the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius appeared in two different versions: the translation by Moor and Hutcheson, which must have been widely read (1742, 1749, 1752, 1764), and a version in Greek and Latin (1744).'°° The

importance attached to Cebes is shown by the fact that Moor read an essay ‘On the Composition of the Picture described in the Dialogue of Cebes’ to the Glasgow Literary Society, one of his Essays published by Foulis in 1759. Lowth’s poem on The Judgement of Hercules (attributed to Shenstone) was published together with The Golden Verses of Pythagoras

(1743). A particularly interesting collection of 1744 contained in Greek 131 Reflections upon Laughter, and Remarks upon The Fable of the Bees, the first separate publication of the

essays from Hibernicus’s Letters (1750, 1758); An Essay on the Passions (1769, 1772); Letters Concerning Virtue, his correspondence with Burnet (1772); and An Inquiry into Virtue (1772). 132 Gaskell, Foulis Press, 18. See also Scott, Hutcheson, 143—5.

153 See Chapter 2 above, pp. 103, 151.

154 Gaskell, Foulis Press, 18. On Moor see Hilson, Introduction to Moor, Essay on Historical Composition (1978).

135 Other Greek works reflecting Shaftesburian taste include Epictetus’s Manual, in English (1743,

1750), in Latin (1744), in Greek and Latin (1748, 1758, 1775), and in Greek (1751, 1765); Xenophon’s Symposium in English (1750), Memorabilia in Greek (1761), and Cyropaedia in Greek

and Latin (1767); and the Table of Cebes in English, translated by Samuel Boyse (1742, 1750,

1771), and in Greek and Latin (1747, 1757, 1771). The Irish Presbyterian Boyse wrote an essay on liberty indebted to Shaftesbury and Molesworth for Hibernicus’s Letters, no. 97.

186 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment and Latin the Manual of Epictetus, the Table of Cebes, the Fudgement of Hercules of Prodicus, and the Hymn to Xeus of Cleanthes, representing an

epitome of Socratic and Stoic moral teaching. ‘The Foulis brothers’ ambitions for a multi-volume edition of Plato in Greek and Latin for which they issued proposals in 1750—1 were unfulfilled, but they did publish an English translation of the Republic (1763).

The most important Latin author published by Foulis was Cicero: there

were twenty-four editions of his works, making him the most popular

author on the list after Hutcheson.'°° Here there is a difference of emphasis between Shaftesbury and his followers. Shaftesbury assumed his

readers’ knowledge of Cicero and praised him on both literary and political grounds, but in only one passage of Characteristicks, the long note in Miscellaneous Reflections on the honestum and pulchrum, does he closely

associate himself with Cicero as a moralist.'?’ Hutcheson, on the other hand, as suggested earlier, drew heavily on De Finibus, Tusculan Disputations,

and De Offciis in his moral philosophy teaching, as did Turnbull,!*® and it

was obviously the intention of the Foulis brothers and their advisers to make Cicero as widely available as possible. The Press’s third publication was the Latin text of De Natura Deorum (1741), followed by Tusculanae Quaestiones (1744); huge resources must have been devoted to the twenty volumes of Cicero’s complete works in Latin (1748-9). Alongside classical moral philosophy the Press also published a range of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century religious writers, many of a latitudinarian or moderate persuasion. Several works by Gilbert Burnet, one-time Professor of Divinity at Glasgow and subsequently Bishop of Salisbury, were included, among them his Life of Rochester (1741, 1752) and Discourse of the Pastoral Care (1762). Other significant seventeenth-century latitudinarian

works in the list were John Smith’s The Excellency and Nobleness of True Religion, taken from his Select Discourses (1745), and Henry More’s Divine Dialogues (1743).'°° The Scottish Episcopalians Scougal and Leighton, to

whom Burnet was devoted and whose eighteenth-century admirers included Doddridge, Fordyce, and Wishart, were also represented: Scougal’s Life of God in the Soul of Man (originally edited by Burnet in 1677) was published together with Leighton’s Rules and Instructions for a Holy Life (1751,

136 Gaskell, Foulis Press, 18.

137 Characteristicks (1714 edn), II, 182 (see Chapter 2 above, p. 142). For praise of Cicero see Soliloquy, 1, 208.

138 See n. 27 above. There is much quotation from these works and from De Legibus in Turnbull’s Principles; see e.g. Part I, Chapter 4 (on reason and the moral sense), 107—9, 113, 116, 131, 138, 140.

139 ‘The Editor [Hutcheson?] to the Reader’, in justifying the publication of More, notes that ‘even the ingenious Earl of Shaftsbury has done the highest honour to this author’s Enchiridion Ethicum’,

pp. ui. For Burnet and Smith see RGS, I, Chapter 2.

Defining the moral faculty 187 1770).'*° Of contemporary Scottish religious writers, the most popular was

Hutcheson’s colleague and biographer Leechman, Professor of Divinity and later Principal of the University: two of his sermons, The Temper of a Minister and The Nature of Prayer, were issued seven and six times respectively

between 1741 and 1769. The most important contemporary English religious writer in the list was Butler, though his impact seems to have been slightly delayed: Fifteen Sermons appeared in 1759 and the Analogy in 1764.

In addition to these English and Scottish divines, there were thirteen editions of religious, literary, and educational works by Fenelon, Archbishop of Cambrai. The Foulis Press thus had no denominational bias: it published works by Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and Roman Catholics, but it concentrated on moral or devotional works which, in the eclectic manner characteristic of Scottish Shaftesburianism and exemplified by Fordyce’s Dialogues, could be read alongside and in the light of the works of the ancient moralists without any sense of conflict or inconsistency.

It is not surprising that more orthodox Christians responded with horror to the Shaftesburian educational and publishing programme that began in the 1720s and burgeoned in the 1740s with the work of Turnbull, Fordyce, Hutcheson, Moor, and the Foulis brothers. The writers of two

important attacks of the late 1740s and early 1750s insisted that the Shaftesburian programme must be exposed as an attempt to inculcate deism under the guise of Christianity. In Skelton’s Deism Revealed the deistical parson Cunningham, despite his membership of the established

Church, is portrayed as having been educated at Glasgow, where, according to his patron, the deist Dechaine, ‘the minds of young persons are formed to a much more open and liberal turn, than in the Universities

of England, and he is employed specifically to impress Shaftesburian notions on the mind of Dechaine’s ward, young Templeton.'*! The orthodox Shepherd, who rescues ‘Templeton from the corrupting effects of this Shaftesburian-Scottish education, in the course of his lengthy criticism of Shaftesbury’s principles and methods points out the damaging effects of this process on the young: There cannot, therefore, be a more improper writer for the hands of a young man, who would acquire a clearness of conception, together with a natural and elegant habit of expression; because his beauties serve only to pass his enormous defects on the undiscerning reader. His performances, which convey an infinity of bad principles, of self-sufficiency, conceit, confusion, and affectation, into minds as yet

unformed, under the cover of superficial reasonings, and a glare of false wit, '40 Wishart published an edition of Scougal’s Life of God in 1739 with a new preface (reissued in 1791). For Wesley’s edition of Scougal see Rivers, ed., Books and their Readers (1982), 156; for Doddridge’s edition of Leighton see RGS, I, 181-2. 141 Deism Revealed, 2nd edn (1751), I, 10-12. Cunningham is revealed to be a Socinian, I, 258ff. M. A. Stewart has suggested privately that he may be meant to represent Turnbull.

188 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment should be considered as lumps of poison, wrapped in leaf-gold: the covering thin, and the poison massy.!*?

From his position in the Church of Ireland Skelton was clearly aware of the link between Shaftesburianism and moderate Presbyterianism, both Irish and Scottish, though he was more concerned with the way in which the seventeenth-century latitudinarian divines of the Church of England

had opened the door to the freethinkers.'*° Four years after the first publication of Skelton’s book a witty attack was aimed at the moderate ministers of the Church of Scotland by an orthodox Calvinist minister

of the same church, John Witherspoon, later to become President of Princeton and one of the signatories of the American Declaration of Independence. The title of Ecclesiastical Characteristics (published anon-

ymously in Edinburgh in 1753 and reissued four times in the next ten years) firmly identifies the Shaftesburian origins of the fashionable religion now being taught in the universities and preached from the pulpits. In the voice of a supposed moderate Witherspoon’s satire provides ‘a complete system of moderation’. ‘he maxims of its adherents include:

(1) tenderness for heretics, though the moderates are careful never to identify themselves as such. Heretics lack prudence and policy, and ‘affront the public to its face, which Lord Shaftsbury tells us ought not to be done. On the other hand, men thorough-paced in modera-

tion, discover their principles only at such times, and to such persons, as are able to bear them. By this means they preserve themselves from heresy’;

(2) good-humoured vices, which are justified because they flow from benevolence, ‘an affection for which our whole fraternity have the highest regard, insomuch that no surer mark can be taken of a man’s being ONE OF US, than the frequent returns of this expression in his discourses or writings’;

(3) contempt for the Westminster Confession of Faith and its adherents,

‘the damners of the adorable Heathens, Socrates, Plato, Marcus Antoninus, &c.’;

(4) the preaching of social duties from the rational considerations of the

beauty and advantages of virtue without regard to a future state,

| drawn from heathen writers not Scripture: ‘all of our stamp avoid the word grace as much as possible, and have agreed to substitute the moral virtues in the room of the graces of the Spirit, which is the orthodox

expression’; ‘let religion be constantly and uniformly called virtue, and let the Heathen philosophers be set up as the great patterns and promoters of it’, particularly Marcus Aurelius, ‘because an eminent 142° Deism Revealed, U1, 259. 143 See Chapter | above, p. 25.

Defining the moral faculty 189 person, of the moderate character, says, his Meditations is the BEST book that ever was written for forming the heart’; (5) politeness, learned from ‘the inimitable Lord Shaftsbury’;'** (6) contempt for all kinds of learning except Leibniz’s scheme, ‘the chief parts of which are so beautifully painted, and so harmoniously sung by Lord Shafisbury, and which has been so well licked into form and method by the late ummortal Mr H[utcheso]n.’

Moderates have no need of divinity; instead they scatter their sermons with phrases such as ‘harmony, order, proportion, taste, sense of beauty, balance of

the affections. ‘The moderate’s basic library includes Leibniz’s Theodicy, Characteristicks, Collins’s Inquiry concerning Human Liberty, all of Hutcheson, Tindal’s Christianity as Old as the Creation, and Kames’s Essays on the Principles

of Morality (Hume does not belong in the library, partly because the moderates do not really hold him in high esteem but largely because he is

a sceptic whereas they are dogmatists). The contents of the library are summarised by “The ATHENIAN CREED’, which concludes as follows: ‘I

believe in the divinity of L. Shaftesbury], the saintship of Marcus Antoninus, the perspicuity and sublimity of A[kensidJe [?], and the perpetual duration of Mr H[utcheso|n’s works, notwithstanding their present tendency to oblivion.’!*°

In summary, Witherspoon claims that he has made ‘a complete system for the education and accomplishment of a moderate clergyman’, much more profitable for youth than antiquated Reformation theology; ‘nay, I am persuaded, it is more exactly calculated for the present times, than even the more modern authors, Epictetus and Marcus Antoninus, which last, in Mr Foulis’s translation, hath, by many young divines, in their first year, been mistaken for Markti Medulla Theologiae’.'*°

After the fifth edition of his satire Witherspoon dropped his persona and in A Serious Apology for the Ecclesiastical Characteristics justified his deliberately

offensive use of Shaftesburian ridicule against the outraged moderates. The principal aim of the Apology was to expose the failings in the current doctrine, discipline, and government of the Church of Scotland, but in the first half he cited biblical, patristic, and more recent clerical precedents for ridicule and quoted the favourable reaction to his performance of several 144 Ecclestastical Characteristics, 5th edn (1763), 18, 21, 22—3, 24—5, 26—7, 31, 36. For further ironic

praise of Shaftesbury see pp. 29, 30, and especially 45: ‘if ever any one attained to perfection, surely Lord Shaftsbury was the man’. Gompare Witherspoon’s ironic praise of Marcus with that of Fordyce, quoted above p. 182. 149° Ecclesiastical Characteristics, 37-41. Mark Akenside’s poem The Pleasures of Imagination (1744) is

much indebted to Shaftesbury. There are six further maxims, mostly dealing with church government and relations between the moderates and the orthodox. '46 Ecclesiastical Characteristics, 65-7. Witherspoon is presumably alluding to William Ames’s Medulla Sacrae Theologiae (1627), long a standard Calvinist textbook. See RGS, I, Chapter 1.

190 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment eminent clergy of the Church of England. He was pleased to note that Warburton had described it in a letter to a minister in Scotland as ‘A fine piece of raillery against a party to which we are no strangers here.’'*’ However, there are important differences to be noted in the prevailing attitudes to Shaftesburianism in English education. There were undoubtedly heterodox thinkers among the Anglican clergy and dissenting minis-

ters, particularly the Presbyterians, but on the whole their heterodoxy, unlike that of the Scottish moderates, was of a rationalist, unitarian bent. It is instructive briefly to compare moral philosophy teaching at the bestknown English dissenting academies and Oxford and Cambridge with the Scottish developments described above: in England much less importance

was attached to the moral sense than to reason as the basis of moral judgement and action, and of Shaftesbury’s principal followers Hutcheson was much less valued than Butler. Henry Grove (1684—1738) was educated at ‘Taunton Academy at the

turn of the century, briefly studied at Newington Green under Thomas Rowe (who was also Isaac Watts’s tutor), and returned to ‘Taunton in 1706 to become tutor in ethics and pneumatology, later also taking on responsibility for mathematics, natural philosophy, and divinity. Like several other

aspiring philosophers he corresponded with Clarke on the being and attributes of God, and his publications included four papers in The Spectator

in 1714 dealing among other topics with human nature and benevolence.!*® According to his editor and successor Thomas Amory he lectured

on ethics for over thirty years, continually correcting and improving his favourite work. Before his death he began transcribing his lectures for the press, adding further observations and asking Amory to complete the task for him. Amory published Grove’s System of Moral Philosophy in two volumes

in 1749; for the benefit of students he added at the end of each chapter a

list of the principal writers on the subject treated, and he was largely responsible for the contents of the second volume. '!*°

Grove’s introduction is entitled ‘Of the Importance and Certainty of Morality’; his object was to construct a rational system of ethics which would meet Locke’s unfulfilled claim in the Essay that morality is capable

of demonstration, and he was unpersuaded by the fear of the orthodox churchman Daniel Waterland ‘that one thing which hath occasioned the growth of Deism, hath been mens advancing Morality so much as they have 147 Apology (1763), 27.

148 See Amory, Preface to Grove, Sermons and Tracts (1740), I, xiv—xvi, xxvili—ix; McLachlan,

English Education, 72-3; Sell, ‘Henry Grove: A Dissenter at the Parting of the Ways’, in Dissenting Thought (1990). Grove’s contributions to the Spectator are nos. 588, 601, 626, and 635; ed. Bond, Introduction, I, lxxix—xxx.

149 Amory, Preface to Grove, System (1749), I. This was the first work to be reviewed (by William Rose) in the new Monthly Review, I (1749), 3—28.

Defining the moral faculty 19] done’.!°° The System shows thorough knowledge of classical ethics, particu-

larly Cicero, followed by Aristotle, Xenophon, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. Grove obviously much admired ‘the great Roman Moralist:'?' according to Amory he thought Cicero’s De Legibus contained ‘the solid : principles on which the unalterable excellence and obligation of morality is founded, tho’ not with all the order and exactness in which they have been since ranged’.'°? However, he repeatedly points out the inadequacy of classical ethics: in Part I, Chapters 2, ‘Of the necessity of fixing right our chief End’ and 4, ‘Of the highest Happiness attainable in the present life’, he insists that none of the classical moralists understood that God alone 1s man’s chief good and that the favour of God and intercourse with him are

the highest happiness in this life. Essentially Grove is a rationalist in morals: in the first three chapters of Part Il he identifies three internal principles, inclination, reason, and will, explaining that inclination is a bias upon nature previous to the exercise of thought and is never to be made the immediate rule of action, that reason, Marcus Aurelius’s T6 NYENovikov, ‘the supream and governing power’, excites to action and 1s a rule

as well as a principle, and that will 1s the power which orders the doing | and forebearing of actions.'°? A considerable part of Chapter 3 is devoted to a defence of the freedom of the will, and Chapters 8—10 explore the

nature and function of the passions. The modern authors whom Grove cites with approval include Clarke, Gumberland, Pufendorf, and More. Butler is presumably one of Grove’s later additions: in Chapter 10, ‘Of the mixed Passions’, he quotes at length from Butler’s sermons on compassion

and resentment.!°* The reading lists added by Amory, which include a wide range of ancient and modern references, can partly be seen as an attempt to encourage students to read Shaftesburian authors in addition to those cited by Grove. There is only one reference to Shaftesbury in the

System, and that a critical one: in the Introduction Grove objects to Shaftesbury treating sciences other than the moral with contempt.!°° There is a favourable reference in Part II, Chapter 7, ‘Of the Passions in general’, to Hutcheson’s account in the Essay on the Passions of our calm desire for universal happiness,'°® but on the whole Grove’s philosophical

system, which denies a moral role to inclination, is antipathetic to 150 System, I, 11. Grove notes that Waterland cites Locke to the effect that the Gospel contains a

perfect body of ethics. Cf Bentham, p. 198 below. The reference is to Locke’s letter to Molyneux, 30 March 1696, in Works (1714), II, 546: ‘Did the World want a Rule, I confess there could be no Work so necessary, nor so commendable. But the Gospel contains so perfect a Body of Ethicks, that Reason may be excused from that Enquiry, since she may find Man’s Duty clearer and easier in Revelation than in herself.’ See also Locke, Correspondence, ed. de Beer, V, 595.

151 System, I, 108. 152 Preface to Grove, Sermons, I, xi. 153 System, I, 133, 147-51, 158. 154 System, 1, 395-7, 402. 155 System, I, 46, objecting to Soliloquy, Part III, Section 1. 156 System, I, 282.

192 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment Hutcheson’s. Yet Amory, with the eclecticism characteristic of much eighteenth-century moral philosophy teaching, encourages the student to

consider both sides. Thus the list added to Chapter 1 on inclination includes Hutcheson’s /nquiry and Turnbull’s Principles (Grove could not have known the latter), and to Chapter 2 on reason Wollaston’s Religion of Nature, Hutcheson’s /nquiry, the letters between Hutcheson and Burnet, and Balguy’s Foundation of Moral Virtue (i.e. Goodness).'°’ In the case of Chapter 2

it might be considered that the weighting is given to the rationalist side, but the lists in general sit rather oddly with Grove’s declared principles. Such eclecticism is an essential aspect of what was probably the most detailed and influential set of philosophy lectures produced in eighteenthcentury England, Doddridge’s posthumously published Course of Lectures on the Principal Subjects in Pneumatology, Ethics, and Diwinity (1763), the outline of

the course he taught at Northampton for over twenty years until his death

in 1751.'°® Fordyce’s portrait of the ideal tutor Euphranor confirms Doddridge’s own accounts of his teaching methods: we are taught more in the way of Conversation than in a formal didactic manner. We generally know beforehand, what Subjects are to be canvassed and debated at next meeting. That we may be the riper on these, Euphranor recommends to us the best Books which treat of them. He urges and accustoms us to start Questions, and propose our Difficulties in every Subject he handles. For he does not seem to be afraid, either of diminishing his Authority, by his Openness and Familiarity with

his Scholars, or of exposing his Character as a Teacher, by allowing them to grapple with him in free Debate.!°°

Of the 10 parts of the course, divided into 230 lectures, those relevant to the subject of the foundation of morals are the first 4, ‘Of the Powers and Faculties of the Human Mind’, ‘Of the Being of a God and his Natural Perfections’, ‘Of the Nature of Moral Virtue in general, and the Moral Attributes of God. Of the Several Branches of Virtue .. .’, and ‘Of the

Immortality and Immateriality of the Soul: its Original: the general Obligations to Virtue, and State of it in the World’. The lectures consist of definitions, propositions, demonstrations, and corollaries, with references which both support and contradict the positions that Doddridge advances. Much of this part of the course is given to the detailed examination of the

arguments of recent moralists, and students going through it in the intended fashion would form a good sense of the current debate about the

foundation of morals and the nature of the moral faculty. There were several editions of the Lectures, of which the most important are those by 157 System, I, 144, 156. For further recommendations of Hutcheson see 249, 318, 361, and of Turnbull 172, 361. '58 For further details see McLachlan, English Education, 303-4; Rivers, Books and their Readers, 136-8, RGS, I, 182-3. 159 Fordyce, Dialogues, I, 19.

Defining the moral faculty 193 Samuel Clark (1763), Andrew Kippis (1794), and Williams and Parsons in Volumes IV and V (1803-4) of their edition of Doddridge’s Works. Both

Clark and Kippis as former pupils of Doddridge had experienced the lectures at first hand, and both made use of them as academy tutors, the Congregational Clark at Daventry (to which the Northampton Academy migrated after Doddridge’s death) and the Presbyterian Kippis at Hoxton and Hackney (with which Price was associated). The editors provided additional references and notes, and gave some indication of how they expected the Lectures to be used by tutors and students. Kippis explained that he had no wish to confirm or gainsay Doddridge’s opinions: It is the business of individual tutors to enlarge upon the Lectures in that way which accords

with their own sentiments. My sole aim is to mention, with freedom and impartiality,

the writers on all sides of the different questions which are the objects of discussion, that thereby the mind of the student may be duly enlarged, and that he may be able, with the greater advantage, to prosecute his searches after truth.'°°

Williams and Parsons were of the view that the Lectures ‘should be considered as a book of reference, when investigating the history of opinions on

Pneumatology, Ethics, and Divinity’, and that it was ‘the most complete syllabus of controversial theology, in the largest sense of the term, ever published in the English language’.'°! It was an essential part of Doddridge’s plan to introduce his students to as wide as possible a variety of opinions: authors they were encouraged to read in the debate on morals included Clarke, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Balguy, Wollaston, Cumberland, Butler, and Pope. Yet at the same time Doddridge was certain that properly conducted comparison of contra-

dictory opinions would lead to knowledge of the truth, and his own position on the crucial questions in morals is clearly laid out in the Lectures.

Like Grove, he believed morality to be capable of demonstration. In Lecture LIT he provided two key definitions very much in Clarke’s terms:

“The agreement of the actions of any intelligent being with the nature, circumstances, and relation of things, 1s called the MORAL FITNESS, or

the VIRTUE of that action’ and ‘The MORAL RECTITUDE or

VIRTUE of any being consists, in acting knowingly and designedly in a manner agreeable to the moral fitness of things’. Doddridge thus began his analysis of moral virtue from a rationalist perspective, a fact recognised by his editors: to the first of these definitions Kippis added a note recommending Price’s Review, and Williams and Parsons a further note recommending Cudworth’s Eternal and Immutable Morality, to which, as they pointed out, Price was beholden.!®? In the highly pertinent Lecture LX 160 Doddridge, Works, ed. Williams and Parsons, IV, 284, ‘Extract from Dr. Kippis’s Preface’. 161 Doddridge, Works, ed. Williams and Parsons, IV, 281—2, Advertisement. 162 Doddridge, Works, ed. Williams and Parsons, IV, 414, 416.

194 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment Doddridge set out to consider definitions of virtue and accounts of its foundation, and compare them with the second of the definitions quoted above. ‘This is the position of Clarke and Balguy, and with it he compares those of Wollaston and Hutcheson. He accepts the existence of the moral

sense as defined by Hutcheson, but he then objects that Hutcheson has made instinct the foundation of virtue, and he summarises with approval Balguy’s criticisms. He goes on to make a striking observation: though Lord SHAFTESBURY uses many expressions, which Dr. HUTCHESON has adopted, yet it seems that he in the main falls in with the account given above [i.e. Balguy’s]; since he considers virtue as founded on “the eternal measure and immutable relation of things,’ or in other words as consisting “in a certain just disposition of a rational creature towards the moral objects of right and wrong,”!®°

Though Doddridge states in the following lecture that the important writers on virtue differ more in expression than in meaning,'®* he evidently believes that there are significant differences: he regards Shaftes-

bury as a rationalist in morals (just as Price does), and he criticises Hutcheson both for his erroneous account of the foundation of morals and his misrepresentation of Shaftesbury’s position. Doddridge’s later editors added an important group of writers to these lectures on definitions of virtue: Kippis summarised the theories of Hume, Smith, and Paley, whereas Williams and Parsons, departing from Kippis’s impartiality, urged the superiority of a specifically Christian account of ethics, On the Nature of True Virtue (1765) by the New England theologian

Jonathan Edwards, which they called ‘the most elaborate, acute, and rational account of this interesting subject’.!°° At the end of Part IV Kippis made a recommendation of a very different kind, implicitly criticising Doddridge severely for his neglect of the classical moralists; after

adding the names of Aristotle, Plato, Xenophon, Cebes, Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Plutarch, he commented with careful understatement: ‘It is not of small importance to be master of what the ancients have written on ethical subjects.!°° The relationship between Doddridge and Fordyce can thus be taken as a

revealing case study for comparing Scottish Shaftesburianism and the 163 Doddridge, Works, ed. Williams and Parsons, IV, 433—4. Doddridge’s second quotation is from Shaftesbury’s Inquiry, Characteristicks, I, 40. He considers that the existence of the moral sense

has been illustrated and proved in Hutcheson’s Inquiry, Treatise II, section 1, and Spectator no. 588, by Grove. 164 Doddridge, Works, ed. Williams and Parsons, IV, 436. He here objects to placing virtue in a wise regard to one’s own interest, as is done by Waterland and two of Hutcheson’s opponents, Clarke of Hull and Rutherforth (who was to influence Paley). 165 Doddridge, Works, ed. Williams and Parsons, IV, 436. Fiering, Edwards’s Moral Thought (1981),

Chapters 3 and 7, reads True Virtue as an attack on Hutcheson; this view is criticised in Edwards, Ethical Writings, ed. Ramsay (1989), Appendix II. 166 Doddridge, Works, ed. Williams and Parsons, IV, 541.

Defining the moral faculty 195 moral philosophy of English dissent. Fordyce’s celebration of Doddridge’s academy in his Dialogues was an act of creative transformation that masked

the significant differences between the philosophy teaching of the two men, in their account of virtue, their interpretation of Shaftesbury, and their attitude to the classical moralists. But this case was not unique. There seems to have been a similar kind of tension in the relationship between

the English Arian dissenter John Taylor (1694-1761) and Hutcheson’s friend Leechman. In Kcclestastical Characteristics Witherspoon ironically praised ‘Taylor for his ‘truly laudable intention’ of ‘altering Christianity, to reconcile it to moderation and common sense’, thus identifying ‘Taylor

with the Scottish moderates.'®’ Leechman arranged for Taylor to be awarded the degree of D.D. by Glasgow in 1756, corresponded with him, and visited him in 1759 at the new Warrington Academy where he was briefly and unsuccessfully tutor in divinity and moral philosophy.'®® Yet Taylor was a resolute opponent of Hutcheson’s ethics from a rationalist standpoint. In his EKxamination of the Scheme of Morality, Advanced by Dr.

Hutcheson (1759) he questioned the existence of the moral sense and objected that instinctive actions were not the actions of a moral agent: “This is a blow at the root of all morality, human agency, or freedom’, and

in his Sketch of Moral Philosophy (1760), designed for his students at Warrington as an introduction to their reading of Wollaston’s Religion of Nature, he acknowledged a debt to Price’s Review,!®? It seems fair to argue

that English dissenters, whether of an evangelical persuasion lke Doddridge, or of a more rationalist bent like Grove, Price, and ‘Taylor, however personally sympathetic they were to their colleagues in Scottish universities

developed their moral philosophy teaching along different lines from the Scottish Shaftesburians and were more in tune with Butler’s than Hutcheson’s reading of Shaftesbury.

How much impact did Shaftesburianism in any form have on Cambridge or Oxford? To judge from three important undergraduate guides, Waterland’s Advice to a Young Student, Johnson’s Quaestiones Philosophicae, and

Bentham’s An Introduction to Moral Philosophy, it was of a limited kind, and

came through Hutcheson rather than Shaftesbury. Given Shaftesbury’s

hostility to the English universities and the established Church, it 1s unsurprising that the clerical tutors of Gambridge and Oxford largely neglected his work. Daniel Waterland (1683-1740) was educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge and spent much of his career there, first as

167 Ecclestastical Characteristics, 34.

168 McLachlan,English Education, 31-2. Taylor was succeeded by John Aikin, an admirer of Turnbull and a pupil of Doddridge, who used Doddridge’s lectures but criticised them freely, McLachlan, 214. 169 ‘Taylor, Examination, 14f, 30; Sketch, iv.

196 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment a Fellow and subsequently as Master.'’° He was a champion of orthodoxy against the Arianism of Clarke and the deism of Tindal, and a supporter of

the view that divine will is the basis of moral obligation. He was thus thoroughly out of sympathy with Shaftesburianism of either the rational or the sentimental kind. The Advice was first published in 1730 but written, according to the author’s Advertisement, twenty-five years earlier for the private use of his pupils (i.e. before the publication of Characteristicks). After an introductory chapter recommending devotional books, Waterland goes

through a four-year course of study in philosophy (natural as well as moral), classical learning, and divinity, listing tables for reading in each

year. In philosophy (to which Waterland seems to have attached less importance than to other subjects) the student is encouraged to read Locke, Grotius, and Pufendorf, and for the latest and best general view of ethics Daniel Whitby’s Ethices Compendium (1684). An appendix provides guidance for the intending divine after the first four years. The religious

writers listed in the third table include Tillotson, Stillingfleet, Clarke’s Boyle lectures (an interesting recommendation in view of Waterland’s hostility to Clarke), and Burnet on the Thirty-Nine Articles, and for the intending divine Hammond’s Practical Catechism and Wilkins’s Principles and Duties of Natural Religion. In the Advertisement Waterland explained that he

was publishing the Advice because it had appeared the previous year in an

unauthorised, altered version, but he also encouraged present tutors to make improvements for their own use.'’' The anonymous Advertisement to the second edition, published posthumously at Oxford in 1755, explains

that it contains references to books lately published and now in use, without prescribing to tutors in universities who are themselves the properest judges. The reading of the intending divine now includes Wollaston’s Religion of Nature and Butler’s Analogy and Sermons. For a general

view of ethics, Hutcheson and Fordyce are now recommended as the latest and best systems.!7? Thomas Johnson (d. 1737), also a Fellow of Magdalene, Cambridge, a firm follower of Locke and opponent of Clarke’s moral philosophy, was the author of An Essay on Moral Obligation (1731) and editor of Pufendorf’s De Officio Hominis et Civis (1737, with later editions).!’° His Latin textbook, Quaestiones Philosophicae (1734, third edition 1741), poses a long list of

philosophical questions for debate and lists under each question the 170 On Waterland see Young, Religion and Enlightenment (1998), 35—8.

171 Advice (1730), A2—A2”, 22, 25-7, 31. For the importance of the last three texts see RGS, I. 172 Advice (1755), 28, 29, 33, 34. The editor may have been Edmund Law, for whom see Chapter

5 below, pp. 334—5. It is worth noting that both Hurd and Thomas Balguy (son of John and Fellow and philosophy tutor of St John’s, Cambridge) were subscribers to Hutcheson’s System (1755); see the list at the front of the first volume.

'73 On Johnson see J. Stephens, ‘Edmund Law and his Circle at Cambridge’, in Rogers and Tomaselli, ed., Philosophical Canon (1996), 169. See also Chapter 5 below, p. 335.

Defining the moral faculty 197 authorities who affirm or deny it. Although there is no interpretative commentary Johnson’s own Lockean standpoint 1s clear. His students were obviously encouraged to be adventurous in their reading: the two lengthy

chapters (10 and 11) of metaphysical and moral questions cover a wide range of topics and list heterodox as well as Christian authors.'’* The latter include seventeenth-century latitudinarian divines, for example Cudworth, Smith, More, Stillingfleet, and Wilkins; the Boyle lecturers; Locke

and Clarke (who are both particularly prominent); and among living writers Balguy, Butler, Johnson’s Cambridge contemporary Edmund Law,

and Johnson himself. Heterodox authors include Herbert, Hobbes (frequently cited), Bayle, Blount, Toland, Collins, and ‘Tindal. In this impressive range of authors there is limited reference to Shaftesburians. Under the third of the ethical questions, whether there is an innate moral sense, Johnson lines up on the affirmative side Shaftesbury’s Jnquzry, Hutcheson’s Jnquiry and Illustrations, Butler’s three sermons on conscience, the preface to his Sermons, and his ‘Dissertation on Virtue’; against them

Johnson sets among other works Locke’s Essay (Book I, Chapter 3), Berkeley’s Alciphron (Dialogue 3), and his own Essay on Moral Obligation.'’°

Shaftesburianism did reach the stronghold of Lockeanism in the 1730s,

though it is doubtful whether it had much impact there. The main development of moral philosophy teaching at Gambridge was hostile to the derivation of morals from an analysis of the constitution of human nature that the Scots and Butler had learned from Shaftesbury. ‘This tradition was to culminate in the immensely influential work to which Price was so hostile, Paley’s Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785),

based on lectures he gave while a tutor at Christ’s College from 1768 to 1775. The philosophical climate at mid-eighteenth-century Oxford was rather different. Bentham’s Introduction to Moral Philosophy (1745) can usefully be compared with the teaching of Hutcheson, ‘Turnbull, Fordyce, Grove, and Doddridge. Edward Bentham (1707-76) spent all his working

lite at Oxford: he was an undergraduate at Corpus Christi, for twenty years a Fellow and ‘Tutor of Oriel, and subsequently a Canon of Christ Church and Regius Professor of Divinity.'’° In the preface to his Introduction he acknowledged his great debt to Butler, but somewhat defensively pointed out the unsuitability of the Sermons and Analogy for beginners: _ It 1s true, that those excellent Books contain many things well suited to general apprehension, and very useful to settle our notions of morality upon a rational bottom, and to lead us from thence to 174 Quaestiones Philosophicae, 3rd edn (1741), 186-230.

175 Quaestiones Philosophicae, 219-20. Johnson also includes the Shaftesburian Maxwell (p. 222),

and Hutcheson with Watts on the passions (p. 230). For Johnson’s support of Locke and hostility to Clarke, Butler, and the moral sense see Moral Obligation (1731), Chapters 1, 4, 5.

'76 On Bentham see R. Greaves, ‘Religion in the University’, and J. Yolton, ‘Schoolmen, Logic, and Philosophy’, in Sutherland and Mitchell, eds., History of the Uniwersity of Oxford, V (1986).

198 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment the acknowledgment of such doctrines as are properly Christian . . . But it 1s no less certain, that those performances, being the produce of mature thought, extensive observation, and strong penetration in the Writer, must require some share of each in the Reader. ’Tis therefore no wonder

uf They, to whom his Lordship does not address himself,if Novices in thinking, at one time complain of the Reflections and Reasonings as abstruse, at another affect to despise them for being trite and obvious.+""

Bentham’s aim was to open up moral philosophy to novices in thinking by presenting a huge range of material in two carefully arranged tables, the first ‘Of reference to English discourses and sermons upon moral Subjects’,

organised according to topics outlined in his introductory chapter and with specific page references, the second ‘of several of the principal Writers in Moral Philosophy’. In the first table Bentham gives a fair representation of different moral positions held by English writers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, including Locke, Wollaston, Butler, Clarke, Watts, Hutcheson, Waterland, Balguy, and a large number of Anglican writers of sermons, but excluding freethinkers.!’® In the second table he provides a very full list of moralists from antiquity to the present day, including Socrates, Cebes, Plato, Xenophon, Aristotle,

Epictetus, Plutarch, Marcus Aurelius, Cicero, and Seneca among the ancients, some of the Church Fathers, Aquinas, and a number of more recent writers in Latin and English. He differentiates modern writers of ethical systems (some on the Aristotelian model) from others such as Whitby who take Christian doctrines of morality into account, including in

the last group works such as The Whole Duty of Man and Hammond’s Practical Catechism. Moralists from the seventeenth century include Grotius,

Cumberland, Pufendorf, and More, and from the eighteenth Wollaston, Butler, Rutherforth, Hutcheson (the Jnguiry, the Essay, and the recently published Latin compend of moral philosophy), and Balguy. To the list of

English discourses he adds at the end Turnbull and Pope. Though Bentham prefaced this table by citing Locke (as Grove complained that Waterland did) on the gospel as a perfect body of ethics,’’? he evidently had a strong interest in the history of moral thought and in the different

ways in which systems of ethics might be arranged. As a convinced follower of Butler he was happy to introduce his students to the Scottish Shaftesburians, though Shaftesbury himself makes no appearance. Two points are worth stressing at the conclusion of this survey of the diffusion of Shaftesburian thought. The first is that it was not Shaftesbury’s 177 Introduction to Moral Philosophy (1745), [a2’—a3].

178 He also refers the reader on p. 101 to ‘the catalogue of writers upon moral subjects’ given in Wilkins’s Ecclesiastes (for which see RGS, I, 38-9). An interleaved edition of Bentham’s Introduction annotated by several hands is described by Scott, Adam Smith as Student and Professor (1937), 40—2. 179 Introduction, 102; cf n. 150 above.

Defining the moral faculty 199 works themselves so much as his terms and ideas reinterpreted and incorporated by his followers into an eclectic kind of Christian Shaftesbur-

lanism that had such a wide impact. The second is that Shaftesburian thought does not necessarily imply, as some twentieth-century readers have perhaps too easily assumed, an exclusive emphasis on natural affection and benevolence as the sources of moral action. English interpreters of Shaftesbury were aware that the Scottish Shaftesburians were guilty of oversimplifying his moral position and smoothing over the difficulty of establishing the respective roles of reason and the affections in

the moral life. As Hume pointed out, this was a crucial difficulty in contemporary moral debate, and one that Shaftesbury had not been able to resolve.

3 The foundation of morals In the first volume of The Divine Legation of Moses Warburton undertook with characteristic confidence to trace moral duty to its first principles and in one overarching definition to reconcile the conflicting positions of his contemporaries. In his account three principles are necessary, moral sense (or instinct) and reason in man, subordinated to the will of God. Without the third, the first two have no power to oblige: For though INSTINCT discovered a Difference in Actions; and REASON proved that Difference to be founded in the Nature of Things; yet it was WILL only that could make a Compliance with that Difference, a DUTY. On these Principles then, namely the Moral Sense,—the Essential Difference in Human Actions,—and the Will of God, is built the whole Edifice of Practical Morality: Each of

which Principles hath its distinct Motive to inforce it; Compliance with the Moral Sense being attended with a grateful Sensation; Compliance with the essential Differences of Things being the promoting the Order and Harmony of the Universe;

and Compliance with the Will of God, the obtaining Reward and avoiding Punishment.

Warburton suggests that these principles have been tailored by God to the needs of different kinds of men, the first to the elegant of mind, the second to the profound reasoners, and the third to the common run. And he goes on to complain that “This admirable Provision for the support of Virtue hath been, in great measure, defeated by its pretended Advocates; who, in

their eternal Squabbles about the true Foundation of Morality, and the Obligation to its Practice, have sacrilegiously untwisted this threefold Cord.’ As a result libertines and infidels (he has in mind particularly Mandeville and Shaftesbury) ‘have reciprocally forged a Scheme of Religion indepen-

dent of Morality; and a Scheme of Morality independent of Religion .. . But as the Moralist’s is the more plausible Scheme, it is become most in fashion: So that of late Years a Deluge of Moral Systems, in which either

200 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment the Moral Sense, or the Essential Difference makes the sole Foundation, have over-run the learned World.’!®° There 1s much that is useful in this summary. Warburton was right to see

squabbles about the foundation of morals as characteristic of recent moral philosophy writing (Turnbull called it ‘quibling and jangling about obligation’),'®' he was right to identify the moral sense, reason, and the will of God as the most important principles on which discussion focused, and he was also right to see that analyses of the competing claims of the moral sense and reason led to the increasing separation of morality from religion. But in other ways his account is unsatisfactory. His proffered solution to the problem was crude and unworkable, and he also failed to recognise the range and complexity of the positions he thought he could twist up again into the threefold cord. Several other writers besides Warburton tried to set out the principal views of the foundation of morals as they identified them, sometimes to show that there was no real difference between them but more often in order to expose their opponents’ mistakes and establish the validity of their own position. A brief and schematic comparison of a number of these summaries by supporters of different schools of thought taken in the order of Warburton’s analysis shows that he was optimistic in thinking they could be readily reconciled. The first group of examples is provided by the Scottish Shaftesburians. Hutcheson was particularly fond of listing rival views: thus in the Introduction to Treatise II of the Inquiry, ‘Concerning Moral Good and Evil’,'®* he identifies three: (1) that moral qualities are constituted by the laws of a superior power which operate by the sanction of rewards and punishments and appeal to self-interest; (2) that actions are naturally good, that we are

determined by our nature to pursue the beauty of virtue and derive pleasure from reflecting on it, but that it is self-interest or private advantage, the desire to obtain this pleasure, that excites us to the pursuit;

(3) (Hutcheson’s own view) that our moral sense determines us to the pursuit and love of virtue without any regard to self-interest or any legal sanction.'®° In Illustrations on the Moral Sense (appended to the Essay) he defines two: (1) the view of the Epicureans as described by Cicero in De

Finibus, Book I, and revived by Hobbes, that all desires are reducible to self-love or private happiness; (2) that we have not only self-love but

benevolent affections, and that our moral sense approves all these 180 Divine Legation, I (1738), 36-8, 40—1. Warburton paraphrased this passage in his Preface to Catharine Cockburn, Remarks upon Rutherforth’s Essay on the Nature and Obligations of Virtue (1747),

in Cockburn, Works (1751), I, 3. 181 Principles, 171.

182 In the first edition only, the title to Treatise II reads ‘Concerning the Original of our Ideas of Virtue or Moral Good’. 183 Inquiry, 4th edn (1738), 108-10; see also p. 274 (this last account is not in the first edition).

Defining the moral faculty 201 affections and all good actions flowmg from them without any regard to private happiness. The first of these views, he claims, does not represent human nature as it is.'°* In the Introduction to Moral Philosophy he identifies

three possible origins for virtue: (1) the constitution of our nature; (2) instruction and habit; (3) divine influence.!®? In the System of Moral Philosophy more dogmatically he states that moral goodness derives not from (1) pleasure, (2) usefulness or advantage, (3) conformity to divine laws

or conformity to the truth or reason of things, but from (4) the original determination of our nature, the moral sense.'®° Interestingly, in his preface to the System Leechman points out that Hutcheson thought inappropriate to the pulpit speculative questions such as ‘whether the original of duty or moral obligation is from natural conscience, or moral sense, from law, or from rational views of interest’, partly because all the different ways of explaining moral obligation ‘conspire to press the same virtuous course of action, which is the main thing the sacred orator should be concerned about’.!®’ Turnbull comes to a very similar conclusion in The Principles of Moral Philosophy: ‘Whether we consider the fitness of things,

the truth of the case, our interest or our dignity, ’twill still come out, that virtue is what man is made for.’ He sets out the rival views of the basis of obligation — (1) law enforced by a superior power; (2) moral necessity or self-interest; (3) the natural excellence of virtue — in order to argue that (1) and (2) are dependent on (3): we cannot have an idea of God without a

prior idea of virtue, and no action is virtuous unless done for its own sake.'8® Fordyce, in ‘Various Hypotheses concerning Moral Obligation’, identifies four: (1) Hobbesian self-preservation and love of power, from which all other passions are deduced (a hypothesis contrary to common experience); (2) conformity to the divine will, which we are obliged to obey by self-interest; (3) the truth, nature, reason, and fitness of things (the view of Clarke and Wollaston); (4) the constitution of human nature and the moral sense (Fordyce’s own view).!°9

Those espousing the rationalist position naturally arranged these lists

differently. In his account of ‘the true Ground and Foundation of all Eternal Moral Obligations’ in A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, Clarke distinguishes the correct view (1) the different relations, fitness, and reasons of things from (2) the will of God and (3) human laws. ‘Those

founding obligation on (2) and (3) must have recourse to (1) to explain them.'° In The Religion of Nature Delineated Wollaston, after putting forward

his own view, (1) conformity to truth, considers several other rules by which actions ought to be squared: (2) the honestum; (3) following nature; 184 F’ssay, 3rd edn (1742), 210-13. 185 Introduction (1747), 68. 186 System (1755), I, 53-8. 187 System, I, xxxvili—ix. 188 Principles, 171—3. 189 Elements, Book I, section 3, 51-73. 190 Demonstration (1705), 255-8; cf Natural Religion (1706), 45, 51-2, 61-2.

202 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment (4) right reason; (5) common sense; (6) innate principles; (7) pleasure and pain; (8) the middle way, but only in order to dismiss them.!?! Catharine Cockburn, a public defender of both Locke and Clarke and an admirer of Butler and Balguy, asserts in Remarks upon Some Writers in the Controversy concerning the Foundation of Moral Virtue and Moral Obligation (1743) that Clarke

and his followers maintain that (1) the fitness of things and (2) conscience or the moral sense (not meaning instinct) have in themselves an obligatory power and that (3) the will of God enforces this obligation.!9? In The Nature and Obligation of Virtue (1754), William Adams (the friend of Price and Samuel Johnson) after establishing the only source of obligation (1) reason and right, lists the erroneous views: (2) the will or power of God; (3) good affections, instinct, the moral sense; (4) public good, utility, happiness, and goes on to consider the obscurity in the statement (5) (of Wollaston and Clarke, who are unnamed) that virtue consists in conformity to truth or the reason and fitness of things.'?° In ‘The Question stated concerning the Foundation of Morals’ at the beginning of the Review, Price considers that only two views can properly be debated, (1) reason and (2) the moral sense; other schemes which found morality on (3) self-love, (4) positive laws and compacts, and (5) divine will reduce the meaning of good to advantageous or willed. Laws, wills, and compacts are not constituents of right but owe

their force and obligation to it. In Chapter 6, ‘Of Fitness, and Moral Obligation, and the various Forms of Expression, which have been used by different Writers in explaining Morality’, Price sets out his own position in

detail, again making law and will subordinate to reason, and in passing considers the accounts among others of Warburton, Hutcheson, Clarke, Wollaston, and Adams.!"4

Supporters of the third strand in Warburton’s cord, the will of God,

offered yet another account of the various positions. In ‘No innate Practical Principles’, Book I, Chapter 3 of the Essay concerning Human Understanding, Locke says that three different answers would be given to the

question why a man must keep his word by (1) a Christian, (2) a Hobbist,

and (3) a heathen philosopher: it is (1) required by God, who has the power of eternal life and death, (2) required by the public, and Leviathan has the power of punishment, and (3) appropriate to the dignity of man and the perfection of human nature. In Book II, Chapter 28 he identifies the laws to which men refer their actions as (1) divine law, (2) civil law, and 191 Religion of Nature (1722), 14-18.

192 Cockburn, Works, I, 407. Though sympathetic to Warburton, Cockburn finds fault with the

threefold cord, p. 442. She is a strong critic of the Cambridge theologians Law, Gay, T. Johnson, and Rutherforth. 193 Nature and Obligation of Virtue, 3rd edn (1754), 16-17, 19-20, 28-34. See the epigraph to this chapter, p. 153. 194 Review, ed. Raphael, Chapter 1, section 1, 14—17; 116, 117n, 118, 126, 127n.

Defining the moral faculty 203 (3) the law of opinion or reputation, by which men judge their actions to be (1) sins or duties, (2) criminal or innocent, and (3) virtues or vices. When (3) is properly applied, though it rarely is so, it is coincident with (1), which is ‘the only true touchstone of moral Rectitude; and by comparing them to this Law, it is, that Men judge of the most considerable Moral Good or Evil of their Actions; that is, whether as Duties, or Sins, they are like to procure

them happiness, or misery, from the hands of the ALMIGHTY’. In Book IV, Chapter 12 he makes a twofold division between the principles that (1) right and wrong are defined by laws, not by nature (the view of Archelaus, but presumably Hobbes is intended), and (2) ‘we are under Obligations antecedent to all humane Constitutions’.'%° Barbeyrac, in his annotations to Grotius’ Rights of War and Peace, provides a long note to Book I, Chapter 1 in which he is extremely critical of those who hold ‘that the Rules of the

Law of Nature and Morality do in themselves impose an indispensible Necessity of conforming to them, independently of the Will of GOD.’ Neither (1) the nature or fitness of things nor (2) our own reason can impose obligation; only (3) the will of God can give the maxims of reason the force of law. God can command nothing contrary to fitness, but the obligation to regulate our conduct by it proceeds from his will, otherwise his authority would be no more than a sort of accessory.'7° A fourth school of thought, ignored by Warburton because he disap-

proved of it but increasingly important at Gambridge, founded moral obligation not in moral sense or reason but in happiness, and thereby gave a rather different account of the will of God. There is some support for this view in Book II, Chapter 21 of Locke’s Essay, ‘Of Power’.'?’ John Clarke of Hull in The Foundation of Moralty in Theory and Practice (1726) objects to founding morality in (1) the relations, differences, fitness, and nature of things (Samuel Clarke’s view) and (2) disinterested benevolence and (with qualifications) the moral sense (Hutcheson’s), and instead argues for (3) pleasure, private happiness, and self-love, controlled by divine rewards and punishments.'¥° John Gay, in his dissertation Concerning the Fundamental Principle of Virtue or Moralty, which prefaces Edmund Law’s translation of William King’s Essay on the Ongin of Evil (1731), states that obligation founded on the prospect of happiness is considered in four different ways

according to how it is induced: (1) natural obligation, from the consequences of things according to the law of nature; (2) virtuous, from merit; (3) civil, from the authority of the magistrate, and (4) religious, from the authority of God. God wills the happiness of mankind. The will of God is the criterion of virtue; the happiness of mankind is the criterion of the will 195 Essay, ed. Nidditch, 68, 352—4, 642. See Chapter 2 above, p. 127. ‘96 Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace (1738), 9-10, n.3. 197 Essay, ed. Nidditch, especially 258, 266. 198 Foundation of Morality, 8, 16, 31-2, 47, 63, 97-100.

204 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment of God; the happiness of mankind is thus the criterion of virtue.'99 Thomas Rutherforth, in An Essay on the Nature and Obligations of Virtue (1744),

argues that (1) an instinctive approbation of virtue (Hutcheson’s and Shaftesbury’s view) and (2) the differences and fitness of things (Samuel Clarke’s and Balguy’s) cannot be the cause of moral obligation; (3) it 1s not virtue but the prospect of happiness that obliges us to act, and (4) only the

revealed will of God can oblige us to virtue by rewarding us with happiness.?°° Warburton’s protégé Brown, in ‘On the Motives to Virtue’, the second of his Essays on the Characteristics, lists three definitions of virtue,

conformity to (1) the fair and handsome, the sublime and beautiful (Shaftesbury’s view); (2) the fitness, reasons, and relations of things (Clarke’s); and (3) the truth of things (Wollaston’s), in order to emphasise

their defects and to substitute his own, (4) the public good or the production of the greatest happiness. Brown complains that the defective definitions ‘are little more than direct ‘Transcripts of what the old Greek Philosophers, and Tully after them, have said on the same Subject’, and he quotes from Harris’s Three Treatises to prove his point. He specifically associates his own position with that of Gay in the Preliminary Dissertation. ‘The essence of his view lies in his statement that the beauty, fitness, truth, or virtue of actions do not reside in the actions themselves but in their ends or consequences; the tendency of actions to produce happiness is the only measure of their moral worth. ‘The only motive to the practice of virtue is private happiness.?°!

Rather than the threefold cord posited by Warburton, this survey from several perspectives of accounts of the foundation of morals suggests that six main positions can usefully be distinguished. The terms and thinkers associated with each position, including some not given above, can be grouped as follows: (1) self-love, self-interest, private advantage, private happiness, private or selfish affections, pleasure (Epicurus, Hobbes, Locke, Mandeville, J. Clarke, Gampbell, ‘I. Johnson, Rutherforth, E. Law, Brown,

Paley); (2) moral sense, natural, kind, and social affections, instinct, sentiment, the constitution and dignity of our nature, implanted determinations and dispositions of our nature, disinterested benevolence (the Stoics, 199 King, Essay on the Origin of Evil, Preliminary Dissertation, xviii—xix.

200 Essay on Virtue, Chapters 5, 6, 8, 10. Cf for a similar argument Waterland, Supplement to the Treatise (1730), 2-12. Warburton was reponsible for publishing Cockburn’s critical Remarks on Rutherforth (1747); see ‘I. Birch, “The Life of Mrs Catharine Cockburn’ prefacing her Works, I, xlv.

201 Essays, 5th edn (1764), 113-22, 122—3n, 124, 136—7, 136n, 159. In a letter to Hurd of 15 February 1751 Warburton objected that Brown did not distinguish motive from obligation and reiterated his view that obligation arises from the will of a superior. He came to regret the encouragement he had given Brown. See Letters from a Prelate, 27, 52—3, 58—9, 282. ‘The same

objection that advocates of the new system of private happiness do not distinguish between motive and obligation is made by Adams, Nature and Obligation of Virtue, 32 (Adams does not name Brown though he clearly has him in mind).

Defining the moral faculty 205 Cicero, Whichcote, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Butler, Turnbull, Fordyce, Wishart, Hume, A. Smith); (3) the nature, fitness, reason, differences, and relations of things, reason, truth, rectitude, self-evident principles, conscience (Cudworth, 8. Clarke, Wollaston, Balguy, Butler, Cockburn, Adams, Price); (4) the will of God, divine law, the law of a superior, rewards

and punishments hereafter (Gumberland, Locke, Pufendorf, Barbeyrac, Waterland, Warburton, Skelton, E. Law, ‘TI. Johnson, Rutherforth, Paley);

(5) positive human law, civil law, rewards and punishments, education, association, habit (Hobbes, Locke, Pufendorf, Barbeyrac, Hartley, E. Law, Paley); (6) the greatest happiness, public good, interest, utility (the Stoics, Cicero, Gumberland, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Gay, Brown, Hume, Paley). It should be noted that these views are not necessarily mutually exclusive; thus (1) can be held with (5) (4) with (5), aspects of (2) with aspects of (3),

aspects of (2) with aspects of (6). It is not always easy to differentiate positions, and some thinkers are guilty of combining positions in ways that

are confusing or incompatible. The remainder of this section will be primarily concerned with (2) and (3), and to a lesser extent with (1) and (6); it will explore the attempts made by Hutcheson, Butler, and Price to arrive

at a satisfactory account of the foundation of morals and the faculty that makes us capable of moral judgement and action. Hutcheson and the moral sense

Although Hutcheson over a period of twenty years tried hard to formulate a more coherent ethical system than that of Shaftesbury, which would both

develop Shaftesbury’s suggestions and meet the objections of his own critics, given the complexities of his analysis and his reworkings of his arguments in his Dublin and Glasgow works it is not surprising that many

later readers have had difficulty in trying to establish exactly what that system was and whether its parts were consistent with each other. The following account does not attempt to solve this problem of Hutcheson’s system taken as a whole; instead, it deals with three of his central concepts, the moral sense, benevolence, and natural affection, and their relation to happiness, self-love, and reason, and considers why these Shaftesburian

concepts that were developed to counter Hobbesian determinism and what was thought to be Lockean relativism came to appear to Hutcheson’s critics to be themselves dangerously determinist and relativist.?° 202 The main sources are the Inquiry, Treatise I: section 1, ‘Of the Moral Sense by which we perceive Virtue and Vice, and approve or disapprove them in others’, section 2, ‘Concerning the ammediate Motive to virtuous Actions’, and section 3, “The Sense of Virtue, and the various Opinions

about it, reducible to one general Foundation’; the Essay: section 1, ‘A general Account of our several SENSES and DESIRES’, section 2, ‘Of the Affections and Passions’, and section 6, ‘Some general Conclusions’; Illustrations upon the Moral Sense (which had its origin in the exchange of

206 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment In Hutcheson’s account of the constitution of human nature, God has

implanted in us certain determinations which cause us to respond to affections, actions or characters or to act in certain ways. Uhese determinations, which are also called dispositions or instincts, include affections and

internal senses. ‘The affections are variously categorised, but the most important distinction is between self-love and the kind, social, generous, disinterested affections, which include natural affection (the love of parents

for children), and of which the most important is benevolence, also designated universal calm goodwill. ‘This distinction is sometimes resolved

into two grand determinations of our nature, towards private happiness and towards the greatest universal happiness. These may conflict, but ideally they coincide: “The most benign and wise constitution of a rational

system is that in which the degree of selfish affection most useful to the individual is consistent with the interest of the system; and where the degree of generous affections most useful to the system is ordinarily consistent with

or subservient to the greatest happiness of the individual.’*°° ‘All Virtue Benevolence’ are the words of one marginal heading. ‘That Action is best, which procures the greatest Happiness tor the greatest Numbers’; ‘the highest Perfection of Virtue is an universal calm Good-will toward all sensitive Natures.’*°*

In addition to the affections there are a number of internal senses,?°° of

which the most important is the moral sense. It is the source of moral obligation; by its means God determines us both to approve the virtuous affections, actions, and characters of others, and to act virtuously ourselves without regard to self-interest: ‘we have a moral Sense or Determination of our Mind, to approve every kind Affection either in ourselves or others, and all

publickly useful Actions which we imagine flow from such Affection, without our having a view to our private Happiness, in our Approbation of these Actions’.?°° It solves the problem of the relationship between the two grand determinations, to private and public happiness; when there is an letters with Burnet): section 4, “Shewing the Use of Reason concerning Virtue and Vice, upon Supposition that we receive these Ideas by a Moral Sense’; the System, Book I, ‘Concerning the

Constitution of Human Nature, and the Supreme Good’: Chapter 2, ‘Concerning the finer Powers of Perception’, Chapter 3, “Concerning the Ultimate Determinations of the Will, and Benevolent Affections’, Chapter 4, “Concerning the Moral Sense, or Faculty of perceiving Moral Excellence, and its Supreme Objects’; Book I, Part II, ‘An Enquiry into the Supreme Happiness of Mankind’: Chapter 7, ‘A Comparison of the several sorts of Enjoyment . . . to find their Importance to Happiness’, and Chapter 8, ‘A Comparison of the several Tempers and Characters in point of Happiness or Misery’. 203 System, I, 149; cf 50, 139, 154. 204 Inquiry, 4th edn (1738), 166, 181, 183. Subsequent references are to this edition.

205 Hutcheson identified among others a sense of beauty, a public sense, and a sense of honour and shame; Inquiry, 12; Essay, 3rd edn (1742), 5, 6 (subsequent references are to this edition); System, I, 25. Gay commented sardonically, ‘I cannot but wonder why the Pecuniary Sense, a Sense of Power and Party, &c. were not mention’d’, King, Essay on the Ongin of Evil (1731), Preliminary Dissertation, xxx. 206 T[ilustrations (published with the Essay), 213; Inquiry, xiii.

Defining the moral faculty 207 inconsistency between them it chooses the second: ‘where the moral sense

is in its full vigour, it makes the generous determination to publick happiness the supreme one in the soul’.*°’ It has several important features: it cannot be bribed by views of our own advantage; it 1s not founded on religion, nor derived from custom or education, nor does it suppose innate ideas.7°° The truth of these propositions and the universality of the moral sense can be shown from the sentiments of children when they hear stories: They always passionately interest themselves on that Side where Azndness and Humanity are found; and detest the Cruel, the Covetous, the Selfish, or the Treacherous. How strongly do we see their Passions of Foy, Sorrow, Love, and Indignation, mov’d by

these moral Representations, even tho’ there has been no Pains taken to give them Ideas of a DEITY, of Laws, or a future State, or of the more intricate ‘Tendency of the universal Good to that of each Individual!?°°

Without the moral sense no explication can be given of our ideas of morality. We cannot find exciting or justifying reasons for our actions without recourse to kind affections and the moral sense.*!° Although reason and understanding have their uses in moral judgement, they are essentially subservient. The understanding judges about means or subordinate ends, ‘but about the ultimate ends there is no reasoning. We prosecute

them by some immediate disposition or determination of soul, which in the order of action is always prior to all reasoning,’*!!

Although Hutcheson argues that the moral sense is not influenced by self-interest or education and is superior to reason, nevertheless he allows self-interest, education, and reason an auxiliary role. Additional motives to virtue from interest are provided by the advantages of virtue in this life

and its future rewards in the next.?* It is the business of the moral philosopher to show that universal benevolence tends to the happiness of the benevolent, so that benevolence will be assisted by self-love even though self-love cannot in itself raise benevolence, and to find out what course of action most effectually promotes universal good, that so our good Inclinations may be directed by Reason, and a just Knowledge of the Interests of Mankind. But Virtue itself, or good Dispositions of Mind, are not directly taught, or produc’d by Jnstruction; they must be originally implanted in our Nature

by its great AUTHOR, and afterwards strengthen’d and confirm’d by our own Cultivation.?!° 207 System, I, 51, 77. 208 Inquiry, 120, 122, 128, 129. 209 Inquiry, 217; cf System, I, 25. 210 T[lustrations, 286, 218ff; cf Burnet and Hutcheson, Letters Concerning Virtue (1772), 56ff, System, I,

a7,

211 System, I, 38, 58. 12 Inquiry, 150, Illustrations, 305—6. 213 Inquiry, 270—1. Hutcheson altered the end of the sentence to emphasise cultivation; in the first edition it read, ‘but are the Effect of the great AUTHOR of all things, who forms our Nature for them’.

208 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment Several difficulties arise from this account of human nature, some of which were pointed out by Hutcheson’s critics and which he attempted to resolve in his revisions and later works. Among the most important are his attitude to innate ideas, his treatment of natural affection, and the relation between instinct and reason in his account of the moral sense. Aspects of these difficulties, in varying degrees of detail, will be considered in turn. Unlike Shaftesbury, Hutcheson was ambivalent in his attitude to Locke,

and this ambivalence was to produce some curious contortions. On the one hand he wished to associate himself with the fashionable Lockean epistemology, and thus he insisted on several occasions that the internal senses and especially the moral sense have nothing to do with imnate ideas.*!* On the other hand he thought that dangerous use had been made of arguments from Locke with the effect of undermining discussion of the foundation of morals. Thus in the /nguzry he objected in a similar way to Shaftesbury that ‘Nothing is more ordinary among those, who after Mr. LOCKE have rejected innate Ideas, than to alledge, ‘“That all our Relish for Beauty and Order, is either from Prospect of Advantage, Custom, or Education,”

for no other Reason but the Variety of Fancys in the World’,?'° and in the

Essay he regretted that the ‘beloved maxim’ that all our ideas are from sensation and reflection was interpreted to mean external sensation, pointing out that Locke described reflection as internal sensation and deliberately associating his own use of the phrase internal sense with it.7!° Despite trying to present himself as an accurate and sympathetic reader of

Locke, however, elsewhere in the Essay Hutcheson summed up the Shaftesburian argument against Locke’s dismissal of mmnate ideas in an important passage which is worth quoting at length: SOME elaborate Treatises of great Philosophers about innate Ideas, or Principles practical or speculative, amount to no more than this, ‘““That in the Beginning of our Existence we have no Ideas or Judgments; they might have added too, no Sight, Taste, Smell, Hearing, Desire, Volition. Such Dissertations are just as useful for understanding human Nature, as it would be in explaining the animal Oeconomy, to prove that the Foetus is animated before it has Teeth, Nazls, Hair, or before it can eat, drink, digest, or breathe: Or in a natural History of Vegetables, to prove that Trees begin to grow before they have Branches, Leaves, Flower, Fruit, or Seed: And consequently that all these things were adventitious, or the Effect of Art. BUT if we call “‘that State, those Dispositions and Actions, natural, to which we are inclined by some part of our Constitution, antecedently to any Volition of our own; or

which flow from some Principles in our Nature, not brought upon us by our own Art, or that of others;” then it may appear. . . that ‘“‘a State of Good-will, Humanity,

48—50. :

214 Inquiry, xv, 80, 129; System, I, 97.

215 Inquiry, 78. In the first edition of the Inquiry Hutcheson wrote ‘the groundless Opinions about innate Ideas’, p. 73. Cf Moore in M. A. Stewart, ed., Philosophy of the Scottish Enhghtenment, 216 Essay, x—Xi.

Defining the moral faculty 209 Compassion, mutual Aid, propagating and supporting Offspring, Love of a Community or Country, Devotion, or Love and Gratitude to some governing Mind, 1s our natural State,”’ to

which we are naturally inclined, and do actually arrive, as universally, and with as much uniformity, as we do to a certain Stature and Shape.?*"

Hutcheson took over Shaftesbury’s concept of natural affection, particularly in its restricted meaning of parental affection or otopyn, and gave it

a prominent place in his account of the disinterested kind affections or determinations of our nature to public good.*!° In this he was followed by

Turnbull and Fordyce, and indeed use of the term otopyr became something of a badge of adherence to Shaftesburian views, though Hutcheson himself used it sparingly.7!? In section 2 of the Essay, in an attempt to answer the question why the constitution of our nature includes the confused, uneasy sensations called passions, Hutcheson speculates that

God may have created ‘Orders of rational Beings ... without these particular limited Attachments, to which our Natures are subjected; who may perhaps have no Parental Affection, Friendships, or Love to a Country, or to any special smaller Systems; but have Universal Good-will to all, and

this solely proportioned to the moral Excellencies of the several Objects, without any other Bonds of Affection’.*?° For human beings, however,

these bonds of affection are essential to establish the foundations of society:

An Offspring of such Creatures as Men are, could not be preserved without perpetual Labour and Care; which we find could not be expected from the more general Ties of Benevolence. Here then again appears the Necessity of strengthening the 2topyn), or natural Affection, with strong Sensations, or Pains of Desire, sufficient

to counter-ballance the Pains of Labour, and the sensations of the selfish Appetites.**!

In agreement with this view ‘Turnbull asks in Principles of Moral Philosophy: 217 Essay, 200-1; cf Shaftesbury’s quotation from Le Clerc, Chapter 2 above, p. 126. Fiering, Edwards’s Moral Thought, 125, correctly sees the moral sense as an outright repudiation of Lockean empiricism. See also Fiering’s excellent comments on the problems of the moral sense, pp. 136-7. 218 Eg. Inquiry, 142, 160, 219; Essay, 109; Illustrations, 211; ‘Inaugural Lecture’, On Human Nature, ed. Mautner, 138, 146; Introduction to Moral Philosophy, 24, 82, 256, 257; System, I, 33-4, UL, 152—3, 185—6. For Shaftesbury’s account see Chapter 2 above, pp. 122-3. 219 The English translation of ‘otopy7) a natura insita’ in the Latin text of the compend, Jnstitutio Compendiaria (1745), 264, is ‘natural love of offspring’, Introduction, 257. Fiering, Edwards’s Moral

Thought, 159, 193-4, gives examples of the use of otopy? by Leibniz, More, Wollaston, and Turnbull.

Virtue.’ |

220 Fissay, 51. It is possible that Hutcheson was here thinking of the Houhynhnms, devoid of natural affection for their offspring, in Swift, Gullwver’s Travels (1726), Book IV, Chapter 8, ed. Davis (1959), 268: “They will have it that Nature teaches them to love the whole Species, and it is Reason only that maketh a Distinction of Persons, where there is a superior Degree of

221 Essay, 53.

210 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment ‘What are the otopyn; 2.¢. natural affection to offspring, sympathy, friendship, the love of ones country; or, in one word, all our social feelings, which make up, or lay the foundation for so much of our happiness, but so many necessary ties by which we are linked together and make one system?’??? Fordyce similarly in his sketch of man at the beginning of Elements of Moral Philosophy argues that the natural affection of parents and children forms ‘the first Links of the Moral Chain’ which binds individuals to families and societies, the private to the universal system, human beings to God.??°

This treatment of natural affection was recognised by the Shaftesburlans’ critics as a mark of their school, and otopyf as a cant term to be ridiculed. ‘Thus in Skelton’s Dessm Revealed Dechaine’s summary of deist notions appropriately includes an emphasis on the role of otopy7 and its

relation to benevolence.??* In the first part of The Foundation of Moral Goodness (1728) Balguy addresses some difficulties involved in Hutcheson’s

stress on parental affection, difficulties of which Hutcheson was certainly aware. Parental kindness is less meritorious than other species of bene-

volence because the instinct is so strong that it lays a constraint on the

parents. “Their Virtue therefore is diminished in proportion to the Strength of this Natural Bias, and the weight that is laid upon their Wills . .. On the contrary, supposing the otopyn, or Natural Affection suspended, or taken off; the Virtue of those Parents, who nevertheless discharged their Duty, would be exceedingly encreased.’**? Hutcheson recognised the force of this argument in his /ntroduction to Moral Philosophy: “The stronger that the

natural impulse is in any narrower ties of affection, the less there is of moral beauty in performing any supposed offices’.**° This objection forms

part of Balguy’s acute criticism from a rationalist perspective of Hutcheson’s emphasis on instinct, a criticism which will be considered shortly. Hutcheson himself was further aware of the danger that natural affection instead of forming the basis of universal benevolence may actually impede it. In the /nguiry concerning Virtue Shaftesbury had described excessive love

for children as a vicious fondness, a remark picked up by Brown in the second of his Essays on the Characteristics.**’ For Shaftesbury true natural affection cannot be partial; it must be entire, that is directed to the whole.

Hutcheson, who in general is much more interested than Shaftesbury in natural affection as manifested in marriage and childrearing, on several 222 Principles, 183. Turnbull quotes from De Legibus, I and De Officiis, I in support of this view. 223 Elements, section 1, ‘Of Man and his Connections’, 11. 224 Deism Revealed, 1, 40. 225 Foundation of Moral Goodness, 18-19.

226 Introduction, 133. The Latin original of ‘natural impulse’ is ‘naturae vinculum’, the chain of nature, Institutio Compendiania, 138.

227 Brown, Essays (1764), 134—5, referring to Shaftesbury, Inqucry, Characteristicks, Il, 87-8. Cf Fordyce, Elements, 27.

Defining the moral faculty 211 occasions concedes that such affection needs a bridle rather than a spur; thus natural affection towards a worthless offspring may be restrained “by setting our publick Affections and our moral Sense against it’.**° The difficulty

is that universal benevolence has its origins in the natural affections and includes them all, and indeed would not be possible without them, but these affections may conflict with the ends to which universal benevolence is directed: The calm extensive good-will, the desire of moral excellence, the love of God, and

resignation to his will, can never exceed: as they exclude not any partial good affection as far as it is useful, nor any just regard to private good. But the more confined affections even of the generous sort may exceed their due proportion, and exclude or over-power other affections of a better sort: as we often see in

parental love, pity, party-zeal, @c.**9

As already suggested, Hutcheson’s rationalist opponents, notably Burnet, Balguy, and at a later stage Price and ‘Taylor, criticised his account

of natural affection as part of a fundamental objection to the status accorded to determinations, dispositions, propensities, senses, and instincts

in his moral system, and the correspondingly subordinate and auxiliary status accorded to reason. It will be helpful first to summarise the list of objections made by Balguy — ‘the most candid, the clearest, and most

judicious writer, that ever undertook the defence of this scheme of morality’ according to his opponent Rutherforth?°° — and then to consider the problems of definition that Hutcheson faced and the attempts he made in response to such criticism to reconcile reason and instinct and to revise

his account of the moral sense. Balguy, who starts from the assumption that the foundation of virtue is truth and right reason and that senses, instincts, and affections are subservient, argues among others the following

points: in Hutcheson’s scheme virtue is arbitrary, because it depends on instincts, affections, and dispositions which might have been different if God had created us differently. If virtue consists in instincts and affections or actions consequent on them, we cannot deny virtue to brutes. But it 1s intelligence, precisely the faculty we do not share with brutes, that makes us moral beings. Again, if virtue consists in affections, then the stronger

the affection, the greater the virtue. In fact we know the opposite is the case. It is impossible to reconcile virtue with necessity: ‘As far as any Actions spring from a necessary Principle, so far they must be, in a Moral Sense, worthless.’ Natural affection is not a strength but a weakness, given us as an involuntary aid to the acts of rational choice we find so difficult. “To speak properly, Reason was not given us to regulate Natural Affection; 228 Essay, 108. 229 System, 1, 150. 230 Essay on Virtue, 130. Rutherforth was of course writing some years before the publication of Price’s Review.

212 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment but Natural Affection was given us to reinforce Reason’.**! If virtue consists in what is agreeable to implanted affection and moral sense, then nothing in morality is capable of demonstration: what 1s repugnant to one person’s moral sense may be agreeable to another’s. Instincts and senti-

ments may be effaced by corrupt education and vicious habits. ‘The foundation of virtue in sentiment takes away the merit of virtuous actions, ‘For how can any Action be meritorious, to which the Agent is determined by the Force of a mere /mpulse?’ ‘In short, acting according to Jnstinct, may be looked upon as the Infant State of Virtue; but acting according to Reason, its Maturity and Perfection.’*°" There is no doubt that the criticisms of Burnet and Balguy and, most important, the views of Butler caused Hutcheson to rethink aspects of his

account of the moral sense. This point can best be illustrated by considering the synonyms and paraphrases Hutcheson provided in different works, and his attempts to incorporate reason into his definitions. In the Inquiry he refers to the moral sense as a perception of moral good and a natural determination of our minds to receive the simple ideas of approbation and condemnation; complex moral ideas of obligation and right are deduced from the moral sense, and its implantation in rational agents 1s

one of the strongest evidences of God’s goodness.?°° In the letters to Burnet he associates the moral sense with public affections and benevolent

instinct, states that it is implanted by God, and explains that ‘Our moral sense and affections determine our end, but reason must find out the -means.’ There are many additional motives to public good necessary

besides the moral sense and kind affections, but the moral sense 1s antecedent. All reasons exciting us to action resolve in instinct, and all reasons justifying action resolve in the moral sense. ‘The moral sense enables us to approve God’s actions; without it ‘we should have had no moral ideas, either concerning the Deity, or ourselves’.*°* In the preface to the Essay Hutcheson begins to move away from the Shaftesburian terminology of moral sense and kind affection, and probably under the influence of Butler (whom he praises in the first edition)**? adds the adjective calm 231 Foundation of Moral Goodness (1728), 7—9, 14—15, 21, 39. : 232 Foundation of Moral Goodness, Part II (1729), 52—3, 58, 63, 65, 82. Similar arguments about the

subordination of the affections and moral sense to reason are put by Philaretus (Burnet) in Letters Concerning Virtue, 23-4, 42—5, 51, 53. Taylor, Examination (1759), 14 ff, 20ff, 31, denies

the existence of the moral sense and distinguishes sharply between the roles of reason and instinct, but suggests that Hutcheson was unaware of the dangerous consequences of his scheme.

233 Inquiry, 111, 128-9, section 7, 272, 303. On p. 272 Hutcheson answers Gay’s criticism that the moral sense is an occult quality, King, Essay on the Ongin of Evil, Preliminary Dissertation, XIV.

234 Letters from Philanthropus (Hutcheson), in Letters Concerning Virtue, 30, 31, 34, 35, 36-7, 58, 60, 61. 235 See above, pp. 163-4.

Defining the moral faculty 213 to benevolence and offers an alternative to the definition of virtue by agreeableness to the moral sense: ‘if any one like these Descriptions better, he may call Virtue, with many of the Antients, “Vita secundum naturam;”’ [lite

according to nature] or ‘“‘acting according to what we may see from the

Constitution of our Nature, we were intended for by our Creator’. He corrects those who mistakenly attribute discovery of the moral sense to him by referring them to the classical phrases sensus decor et honest [the sense of what is seemly and good] and o1Adv@pwtov Kai ayadoedes [benevolence and seeming good].*°° Later in the Essay he describes the moral sense, when assisted by understanding and application and governed and regulated by a regard to the tendency of our actions, as a constant source of pleasure.*°’ In Illustrations on the Moral Sense he is careful to define

the respective functions of reason and the moral sense and to explain what he means by instinct in order to meet his critics’ objections. Moral ideas are received by an internal sense of the soul, whereas reasoning or intellect

cannot raise ideas but only discern the relations of ideas previously received. Section 4 of the Jilustrations is devoted to showing the use of reason concerning moral ideas after their perception by the moral sense. We know the moral sense is universal and that it approves kind affection simply by reflecting on our own sentiments. Where reason is crucial is in deciding what actions really do evidence kind affections or tend to the greatest public good (the whole field of natural and civil law 1s included here). Hutcheson regrets that the epithet ‘reasonable’ has come to be opposed to what flows from instinct, affection, and passion. A distinction should be drawn between passionate actions and those resulting from ‘calm Desire or Affection which employs our Reason freely’, but 1t is wrong to ‘set

rational Actions in Opposition to those from Instinct, Desire or Affection’. He , acknowledges that instinct cannot be the spring of virtue if its meaning is restricted to motions or powers divorced from knowledge or intention of an end, but he sees the natural determination of the soul to the approbation of certain affections as analogous to the instinctive actions of brutes. And he urges those who dislike this application to find another word.*°® In his Glasgow works Hutcheson further emphasised the part played by

reason in moral approbation and sought for other ways of describing the moral sense. Here there is increasing evidence of Butler’s influence. In his inaugural lecture Hutcheson calls the moral sense both natural conscience and, following Marcus Aurelius, TO Nyevovikov (the ruling faculty), and in

Butlerian tones he asserts that the true condition of nature cannot be 236 Essay, xv—xix. In the first edition the Greek phrase is AUvapis &yaboedi\5 [the power of seeming good]. For decorum et honestum see e.g Cicero, De Offictis, I, xx (Loeb), 68. In the System,

I, 162n, Hutcheson states that pudor and d180s (i.e. modesty) were used to mean moral sense. 237 Essay, 110, 193. 238 Tllustrations, 240—1, 280—1, 283, 291-2.

214 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment restored till conscience is reinstated on its throne.*°? The Introduction to Moral Philosophy gives the following synonyms, some of which have a Shaftesburian flavour: ‘the sense of moral good and evil, or conscience’, ‘Rectt et honest. sensus’, ‘this Divine Sense or Conscience’, ‘this moral power or Conscience distinguishing between right and wrong’, ‘that conscience or sense of what is right and honourable’, ‘our natural sense and love of moral excellence’, ‘this sense of right and wrong’.?*? Conscience does not appear in these phrases in the Latin text, and the original of moral sense is simply sensus; the phrases recti et honesti sensus, decori et honesta sensus are regularly

translated as sense of right and wrong and conscience.7*! But in an interesting passage in Book II of the Introduction, ‘Elements of the Law of Nature’, both the English and Latin texts spell out the relation between conscience, sense, and reason: THAT inward power called Conscience, so much talked of, 1s either this very moral sense or faculty we have explained, or includes it as its most essential part; since

without this sense we could discern no moral qualities. But when this is presupposed, our reason will shew what external actions are laudable or censurable according as they evidence good or evil affections of soul. Conscience 1s

commonly defined to be a “man’s judgment concerning the morality of his actions;”’ or his judgment about his actions as to their conformity or contrariety to the law.?*”

The use of ‘faculty’ as an equivalent for ‘sense’ in this passage points to a shift that is more clearly visible in the System of Moral Philosophy. In the title of Book I, Chapter 4 the synonym for the moral sense is the ‘Faculty of perceiving Moral Excellence’. Hutcheson insists, as in the Jlustrations, that when this determination is called a sense or instinct it does not mean a low kind dependent on bodily organs, and that for those who know Latin no apology is needed for using instinct to mean the highest powers.*** He

seems concerned to free the moral sense from any corporeal association and to give it the authoritative dimension of the conscience while retaining its sensational element: “This moral sense from its very nature appears to be designed for regulating and controlling all our powers. ‘This dignity and commanding nature we are immediately conscious of, as we are conscious 239 On Human Nature, ed. Mautner, 131-2. 240 Introduction, Contents, 20, 24, 37, 51, 75, 112. The translator may have been Moor or George Muirhead (communication from M. A. Stewart). 241 Instituto Compendiaria, Argumenta, 18, 22, 26, 81, 84, 117. It is also worth noting that sensus communis in the Latin Argumentia is translated as sympathy in the English Contents. 242 Introduction, 125. The Latin text reads: CONSCIENTIAE nomen decantatum, primario denotat ipsum honesti et turpis sensum; aut saltem in omni conscientiae notione includitur necessario hic sensus, sine quo nulla cerneretur honest aut turpis species. Hoc autem posito, ratio monstrabit, quaenam sint actiones externae, quae

laudandas aut damnandas indicant animi affectiones. Vulgo definitur conscientia, “judicium hominis de actiontbus suis, quod ad moralem attinet speciem,” sive de actionibus ad legis praescriptum examinatts, Institutio, 129. 243 System, I, 58, 9n. Cf the Ciceronian instinctu divino, by divine inspiration.

Defining the moral faculty 215 of the power itself. Nor can such matters of immediate feeling be otherways proved but by appeals to our hearts.’*** The account that he gives of the human constitution in the System is increasingly complex, hence the need for a faculty that will control all the subordinate powers and senses: ‘Without a distinct consideration of this moral faculty, a species endued with such a variety of senses, and of desires frequently interfering, must appear a complex confused fabrick, without any order or regular consistent design. By means of it, all is capable of harmony, and all its powers may conspire in one direction, and be consistent with each other.’**° To call it a faculty is to differentiate it from the lesser senses, yet it is itself a sense. Hutcheson’s confusion can be seen from the frequent appearance of moral sense in the margin alongside moral faculty in the text.**° However, to Price’s chagrin, despite these attempts to accommodate his opponents’ views Hutcheson never identified the moral sense with reason, and he continued to regard reason as a subordinate and indeed potentially dangerous faculty. In the /nguiry, Treatise II, section 4, he tried to answer

the question why there is a vast diversity of moral principles among mankind despite the approbation of moral actions by the moral sense. He attributed this to three causes: different opinions of what tends to happi-

ness or public good; the diversity of systems to which men confine benevolence; false opinions of the will or laws of the deity. In all these cases

the moral sense is misdirected by wrong judgement or opinion.?*’ In the System, Book I, Chapter 5, the same argument is put forward with the same three causes given, but here the blame is explicitly put on reason: ‘almost all our diversities in moral sentiments, and opposite approbations, and condemnations, arise from opposite conclusions of reason about the effects of actions upon the publick, or the affections from which they flowed’.**® For Hutcheson the moral sense, the divine implantation that determines our nature to the desire of universal good, cannot err; moral error arises when reason fails to define correctly what constitutes that good. Butler and conscience

In the preface to his fifteen Sermons Butler differentiates two ways of treating morals, theoretical and empirical (though he does not use these terms): one starts from the abstract relations of things, and the other from a matter of fact, the nature of man. Though he recognises the value of the 244 System, I, 61.

245 System, I, 74. This seems a Butlerian point; cf preface to Sermons, Works, ed. Bernard, I, 10. 246 Eg. System, I, 209. 247 Inquiry, 204—14. Jonathan Edwards speaks approvingly of this section in True Virtue, in Ethical Writings, ed. Ramsey, 625. 248 System, I, 92-4.

216 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment first method (that of Clarke), it is the second (that of Shaftesbury) which forms the basis of his analysis in the Sermons and the Analogy.?*? In part he

chose this approach for rhetorical reasons, as suggested earlier, but also because he was anxious to refine the valuable analysis of human nature that Shaftesbury had developed from the work of the ancients in order to make this analysis the basis of a fully Christian ethic. His object was ‘to explain what is meant by the nature of man, when it is said that virtue consists in following, and vice in deviating from it; and by explaining to

shew that the assertion is true’. When the ancients said that virtue consisted in following nature this was ‘a manner of speaking not loose and

undeterminate, but clear and distinct, strictly just and true’.*°° The following account is concerned with the three key principles of human nature as Butler defined them, conscience, self-love, and benevolence, and

his attempt to rectify the errors and supply the deficiencies in the definitions of his predecessors and contemporaries.7”!

Butler starts with the Shaftesburian proposition that every work of nature or art is a system, economy, or constitution in which the parts have

a relation to the whole.*°* In order to understand the constitution of human nature as a whole it is essential to understand the relation between the parts. ‘he inward frame or constitution of man consists of a number of principles, variously denominated instincts, propensions, appetites, affec-

tions, and passions, several of which are shared with brutes (note that Butler does not use the term principle to mean rule). But the functioning

of these principles, particularly self-love and benevolence, cannot be understood without reference to the superior principle which brutes do not have, reflection or conscience.*”*

As pointed out earlier, Butler specifically criticises Shaftesbury in the preface for neglecting the authority of the conscience,*°* but his summary account of the constitution of human nature also implicitly takes issue with

contemporary writers on the foundation of morals whom he does not name. The first edition of the Sermons was published in 1726, the year after 2439 Works, ed. Bernard, I, 4. He does not name his predecessors here. For other appeals to matter of fact see I, 12, 29n, 73n; I, 110, 112, 265, 266. 259 Works, ed. Bernard, I, preface, 5, 9. Butler objected to Wollaston’s statement that following

nature 1s ‘a loose way of talk’, p. 6; see Relegion of Nature, 16. For a further comment on following nature see Sermon II, ‘Upon Human Nature’, Works, I, 43.

251 The chief sources are the preface to the Sermons, Sermons I-III, ‘Upon Human Nature’, V, ‘Upon Compassion’, and XI—XII, ‘Upon the Love of our Neighbour’; and the Analogy, Part I, Chapter 3, ‘Of the Moral Government of God’, 5, ‘Of a State of Probation, as intended for Moral Discipline and Improvement’, and Dissertation I, ‘Of the Nature of Virtue’. 252 Works, ed. Bernard, I, preface, 7; cf 52. For Shaftesbury’s use of the terms system, economy and constitution see Characteristicks, Il, 15-16, 19-20, 92, 134, 139; II, 185, 285—6, 287, 290, 292, 388; III, 201, 224. 253 Works, ed. Bernard, I, preface, 9—11; cf Dissertation II, Works, II, 286. 254 See above, p. 167.

Defining the moral faculty 217 Hutcheson’s Jnguiry; the second, with the preface added, was published in 1729, the year after Hutcheson’s Essay and Balguy’s Foundation of Moral Goodness, and the same year as Balguy’s Second Part. It is fair to assume that

Butler was attempting to break down the opposition between sense and

reason which played such an important part in the debate between Hutcheson and Balguy about the nature of the moral faculty, hence the care with which he chose the terms, phrases, and metaphors with which he described the conscience.*°? The most important features in his definition are as follows. First, conscience is supreme — the separate title of Sermons

II and III (the text for which is Romans 2: 14) is ‘Upon the natural Supremacy of Conscience’. It ‘plainly bears upon it marks of authority

over all the rest [of the principles of action], and claims the absolute direction of them all’. No human being acts in conformity with his own nature ‘unless he allows to that superior principle the absolute authority which is due to it’: ‘the very constitution of our nature requires, that we bring our whole conduct before this superior faculty; wait its determination; enforce upon ourselves its authority, and make it the business of our lives, as it is absolutely the whole business of a moral agent, to conform ourselves to it’.2°° This account in the preface provides a foretaste of the more eloquent portrait in Sermon II: you cannot form a notion of this faculty, conscience, without taking in judgment, direction, superintendency. This is a constituent part of the idea, that 1s, of the faculty itself: and to preside and govern, from the very economy and constitution

of man, belongs to it. Had it strength, as it has right; had it power, as it has manifest authority, it would absolutely govern the world.*°’

It is this authority of the conscience to which Paul refers when he says that the Gentiles ‘having not the law, are a law unto themselves’: leaving aside the authority of revelation, ‘from his make, constitution, or nature, [man] is in the strictest and most proper sense a law to himself. He hath the rule

of right within’. The obligation to obey this law is intrinsic and is quite separate from the consideration of the rewards and punishments annexed to it: “Your obligation to obey this law, is its being the law of your nature.’ Conscience is its own authority.?°° The second feature of the conscience that Butler stresses is reflection. On several occasions he calls it the principle of reflection or conscience,*?” and in Sermon I he explains the connexion between the two terms: 255 On the problems of naming this faculty see Whewell, Lectures (1852), nos 7 and 8, esp. 92—3, 101—2, 108-9. Mackintosh, Dissertation on the Progress of Ethical Philosophy, 2nd edn (1837), 198,

is critical of Butler multiplying appellations and metaphors. See Chapter 5 below. 256 Works, ed. Bernard, I, preface, 7, 10—11. 257 Works, ed. Bernard, I, no. II, 48. 258 Works, ed. Bernard, I, no. III, 53, 54. 259 E.g. Works, ed. Bernard, I, preface, 9, 10, 11, nos I, 32, II, 45, 47, 48.

218 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment There 1s a principle of reflection in men, by which they distinguish between, approve and disapprove their own actions. We are plainly constituted such sort of creatures as to reflect upon our own nature. The mind can take a view of what passes within itself, its propensions, aversions, passions, affections ... and of the

several actions consequent thereupon ... This principle in man, by which he approves or disapproves his heart, temper, and actions, 1s conscience.

And he gives the example of natural affection to show the force and difference of reflection: ‘this added to the affection becomes a much more settled principle . . . This indeed is impossible, to do that which 1s good,

and not to approve of it; for which reason they are frequently not considered as distinct, though they really are’.2°° Butler may have in mind here Shaftesbury’s comments on reflex affection in the Jnquiry concerning

Virtue, whereby actions and affections are ‘brought into the Mind by Reflection’, ‘So that, by means of this reflected Sense, there arises another kind of Affection towards those very Affections themselves’.*°! However,

he attributes immeasurably more importance than Shaftesbury does to reflection as a separate principle, and he draws a much sharper distinction

than Hutcheson does between sensation and reflection. Thus in the Analogy, in the context of a discussion of immortality, he distinguishes between two states of human life and perception: “When any of our senses are affected or appetites gratified with the objects of them, we may be said to exist or live in a state of sensation. When none of our senses are affected or appetites gratified, and yet we perceive, and reason, and act; we may be said to exist or live in a state of reflection.’*°7 Elsewhere in his account of conscience Butler does not entirely divorce

reflection from sensation, and indeed his deliberate association of conscience with the heart, inward principles, and inward feelings is the third notable feature of his analysis, though he treats this association in different ways.7°° Heart and conscience are linked by Paul: the Gentiles ‘shew the

work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness’.2°* For Butler heart can be an inclusive term (his usage may owe something to the dissenting tradition in which he was brought up); thus in Sermon XII he refers to ‘the whole system, as I may speak, of affections (including rationality,) which constitute the heart, as this word 1s used in Scripture and on moral subjects’ (he has just defined rationality as ‘the

discernment of what is right, and a disposition to regulate ourselves by it’).°°° However, in Sermon II after linking heart and conscience he goes 260 Works, ed. Bernard, I, no. I, 31-2. 261 Characteristicks, II, 28. 262° Works, ed. Bernard, II, Part I, Chapter 1, 24. 263 Works, ed. Bernard, I, no. II, 41. 264 Romans, 2: 15. The Greek for heart is kapdia and for conscience ouveiSnors.

265 Works, ed. Bernard, I, no. XII, 159, 158. For some dissenting uses of heart see the index to RGS, I.

Defining the moral faculty 219 on to place conscience in the position of superiority. He comments on Romans 2: 15: ‘If there be a distinction to be made between the works written in ther hearts, and the witness of conscience; by the former must be meant the natural disposition to kindness and compassion, . . . that part of the nature of man . . . which with very little reflection and of course leads him to society’. But this cannot be a law. Man is a law to himself by the

‘superior principle of reflection or conscience ... which distinguishes between the internal principles of his heart’. It is ‘not to be considered merely as a principle in his heart’ but ‘as a faculty in kind and in nature supreme over all others’.2°° Thus conscience is both itself an internal or inward principle, one of the variety of principles which belong to the nature of man,*°’ and it is a separate ruling faculty or power, which controls and judges the other principles. In the dissertation ‘Of the Nature of Virtue’ (published ten years later) Butler was to substitute the phrase

moral faculty for conscience, but this was not because he wished to emphasise its reflective and controlling aspect at the expense of its status as an internal principle or feeling. He begins the dissertation by stating that

the capacity of reflecting on our actions, the moral approving and disapproving faculty, has a double function: it both determines actions to be good or evil and ‘determines itself to be the guide of action and of life,

in contradistinction from all other faculties, or natural principles of action’.*°° But when he goes on to speak of the universality of the moral faculty he seems studiedly indifferent to specifying its origins or insisting on a particular set of terms to define it, perhaps because his emphasis in the dissertation 1s on correcting certain errors in contemporary accounts of virtue: It is manifest great part of common language, and of common behaviour over the

world, is formed upon supposition of such a moral faculty; whether called conscience, moral reason, moral sense, or Divine reason; whether considered as a sentiment of the understanding, or as a perception of the heart; or, which seems the truth, as including both.?°?

The debate about the respective claims of reason or sense to represent the

origins of the moral faculty (and Butler has hitherto carefully used the term reflection in preference to reason and avoided the phrase moral 266 Works, ed. Bernard, I, no. II, 44—5. 267 Works, ed. Bernard, I, no. I, 27. : 268 Works, ed. Bernard, I, 286 and n. Butler points out that the epithets approving and disapproving, Sokipaotikt) and atrodoKipaotikt), come from Epictetus, Discourses, I, i. But he must surely have known that Hutcheson had popularised them by attaching them to the moral sense. For other references to the moral faculty in the Analogy (where Butler cross-refers to the dissertation) see Part I, Chapter 6, Works, II, 110, 111, 112. Butler’s choice of phrase may have influenced Hutcheson’s substitution of moral faculty for moral sense in the System. 269 Works, ed. Bernard, II, 287.

220 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment sense) is here deemed irrelevant to the analysis of what it is that the moral faculty does.?’° The final crucial feature in Butler’s account of the conscience is that it is

implanted by God. He expresses this view in a much stronger form than

Hutcheson does when he says that the moral sense is an implanted determination of our nature. For Butler the conscience 1s God’s surrogate:

it passes judgement on actions and actors, and ‘if not forcibly stopped, naturally and always of course goes on to anticipate a higher and more effectual sentence, which shall hereafter second and affirm its own’; ‘this faculty was placed within to be our proper governor; to direct and regulate all under principles, passions, and motives of action. This 1s its right and office: thus sacred is its authority.’ Conscience ‘carries its own authority

with it, that it is our natural guide: the guide assigned us by the Author of our nature’.?’! In the Sermons Butler says that it is beyond his present design to consider this aspect of conscience, but in the Analogy the operation of our moral nature is urged as proof that we are under the moral government of God.?’* Thus he argues that we can prove that the dictates of the moral faculty are the laws of God because our sense of good and ill desert is a presentiment of the judgement to come.?’° And in the final lines of the Conclusion to Part I he shows how his theory

of the conscience brings together natural religion, ethics, and revealed religion: the proper motives to Religion are the proper proofs of it, from our moral nature, from the presages of conscience, and our natural apprehension of God under the

character of a righteous Governor and Judge; a nature and conscience and apprehension given us by Him; and from the confirmation of the dictates of reason, by “‘life and immortality brought to light by the Gospel; and the wrath of God revealed from Heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men [II Timothy 1: 10; Romans 1: 18].’’*74

Butler’s treatment of the superior principle, despite some shifts in his

terms, 1s much easier to grasp than his account of the subordinate principles and the relation or proportion between them, partly because he may be undecided about it and partly because the subject is continually 270 This deliberate indifference is imitated by later writers, e.g. Turnbull: ‘it is no great matter for

the name, if the thing itself in question be acknowledged . .. Let therefore the capacity or faculty of perceiving moral differences of actions or characters, be called reason, as it is exercised about actions and their moral differences, moral discernment, or moral conscience; we shall not dispute for any word . . . But moral sense, moral taste, moral discernment, or moral conscience, well express it’, Principles, I, 125, 128. Fordyce treats conscience and moral sense as equivalents, Elements, 19, 32. Cf Bentham, Introduction, Chapter 6.

271 Works, ed. Bernard, I, no. II, 45, 48, no. III, 54. 272 Works, ed. Bernard, I, no. II, 45; II, Part I, Chapter 3, 55. 273 Works, ed. Bernard, II, Part I, Chapter 6, 111. 274 Works, ed. Bernard, II, 135.

Defining the moral faculty 221 shifting. Thus in Sermon XII, in which he moves from self-love (the subject of the previous sermon) to benevolence, he comments: “The principles in our mind may be contradictory, or checks and allays only, or

incentives and assistants to each other. And principles, which in their nature have no kind of contrariety or affinity, may yet accidentally be each other’s allays or incentives.’*’° His aim is to show that contrary to what is

often stated the two most important subordinate principles in human nature, self-love and benevolence, are not opposed to each other, and further that virtue, duty, interest, and happiness if properly understood can all be reconciled.

Butler defines self-love in relation to the particular passions and affections, to benevolence, and to conscience, and in the light of interest and happiness. The emphasis changes slightly according to which relationship 1s being considered at the time. Self-love is ‘an affection to ourselves; a

regard to our own interest, happiness, and private good’. It 1s not one of the particular affections, passions, and appetites; the latter always pursue an external object, whereas the former pursues an internal object, happi-

ness. Gratification of a particular affection may be detrimental to our happiness or advantage, and it is therefore wrong to resolve all affections

into self-love. “here is then a distinction between the cool principle of self-love, or general desire of our happiness, as one part of our nature, and one principle of action; and the particular affections towards particular

external objects, as another part of our nature, and another principle of action.’ Butler suggests that another way of drawing the distinction (though he does not favour it) would be to call the first ‘cool or settled selfishness, and the other passionate or sensual selfishness’. In general he prefers to distinguish cool self-love from passion and appetite, emphasising that they are different in nature and kind and that ‘self-love is in human nature a superior principle to passion’.*’° This does not mean, however, that appetites, passions, and affections are weaknesses in our nature. On

the contrary: “The private interest of the individual would not be sufficiently provided for by reasonable and cool self-love alone; therefore

the appetites and passions are placed within as a guard and further security, without which it would not be taken due care of.’*”/

In his account of the relation of self-love to the particular passions

Butler is anxious to show the difference between them; pursuit of particular passions may or may not, depending on the case, coincide with cool self-love. His object here is to undercut the selfish theorists of human

nature, Hobbes and Mandeville and their more respectable adherents, 279 Works, ed. Bernard, I, 158; cf no. ITI, 52n. 278 Works, I, ed. Bernard, no XI, 138—40; preface, 16; no. I, 36, no. II, 47.

277 Works, ed. Bernard, I, no. V, ‘Upon Compassion’, 75—6, 79. This is a rather different view from that of Balguy and Price.

222 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment who attempted to identify the operation of all the passions with self-love. In his account of the relation of self-love to benevolence his aim is more complicated, partly because he has in his sights both selfish theorists and supporters of benevolence such as Hutcheson, and it is not always easy to establish exactly what his view of benevolence is. In Sermon I, the text for

which is Romans 12: 4-5 on many members being one body in Christ, and Sermons XI—XII, the text for which is Romans 13: 9, “Thou shalt love

thy neighbour as thyself’, he 1s concerned to show that self-love and benevolence, regard for individual and society, private and public good, though distinct are perfectly coincident. He defines benevolence as follows: There is a natural principle of benevolence in man; which is in some degree to society,

what self-love is to the individual. And if there be in mankind any disposition to friendship; if there be any such thing as compassion, for compassion is momentary love; if there be any such thing as the paternal or filial affections; if there be any affection in human nature, the object and end of which is the good of another; this is itself benevolence, or the love of another.*”?

Other synonyms are charity and good-will, ‘an affection to the good and happiness of our fellow creatures’.*’? Like self-love, benevolence is an affection, and also like self-love it needs the assistance of other affections to function fully: Is it possible any can in earnest think, that a public spirit, 2.¢. a settled reasonable principle of benevolence to mankind, is so prevalent and strong in the species, as that we may venture to throw off the under affections, which are its assistants, carry it forward and mark out particular courses for it; family, friends, neighbourhood, the distressed, our country?*°?

Again like self-love, benevolence is a reasonable principle, and stands in a

certain relation to the principle of reflection or conscience. But at this point the relative standing of the two subordinate principles is difficult to determine. Sometimes it appears that they are equal, and that conscience governs both; but on one occasion at the end of Sermon III Butler suggests that self-love and conscience are equal, and thus by implication benevolence is a less important principle: ‘Reasonable self-love and conscience are the chief or superior principles in the nature of man: because an action may be suitable to this nature, though all other principles be violated; but becomes unsuitable, if either of those are. Conscience and self-love, if we

understand our true happiness, always lead us the same way.’*°! What then is the relation of benevolence to conscience and self-love?

In order to attempt to answer this question it is necessary to consider

Butler’s approach to a proposition central to Hutcheson’s account of 278 Works, ed. Bernard, I, no. I, 27—9; cf no. XI, 142—4, 147-8. 279 Works, ed. Bernard, I, no. XII, 154.

280 Works, ed. Bernard, I, no. V, 79-80. 281 Works, ed. Bernard, I, 57.

Defining the moral faculty 223 human nature, that all virtue is benevolence.*?* In Sermon XII Butler takes his text, Romans 13: 9, in reverse order, and considers first the different implications of loving our neighbour as ourselves, and lastly in what sense this commandment comprehends all others. Though he does come to the conclusion that ‘the common virtues, and the common vices of mankind, may be traced up to benevolence, or the want of it’, he adds two important qualifications which have the effect of making his portrait of benevolence radically different from Hutcheson’s. First, benevolence 1s subservient to the principle of reflection: when benevolence is said to be the sum of virtue, it is not spoken of as a blind propension, but as a principle in reasonable creatures, and so to be directed by their reason: for reason and reflection comes into our notion of a moral agent. And that will lead us to consider distant consequences, as well as the immediate tendency of an action . . . Thus, upon supposition that it were in the strictest sense true, without limitation, that benevolence includes in it all virtues; yet reason must

come in as its guide and director, in order to attain its own end, the end of benevolence, the greatest public good.?°°

Second, Butler is not convinced that all virtue is benevolence, or, in Hutcheson’s terms, that ‘That Action 1s best, which procures the greatest Happiness for the greatest Numbers’ .*®* He adds a footnote pointing out that : as we are not competent judges, what is upon the whole for the good of the world,

there may be other immediate ends appointed us to pursue, besides that one of doing good, or producing happiness ... there are certain dispositions of mind, and certain actions, which are in themselves approved or disapproved by mankind, abstracted from the consideration of their tendency to the happiness or misery of the world; approved or disapproved by reflection, by that principle within, which is the guide of life, the judge of right and wrong.*®°

This recognition that we cannot adequately measure the tendency or the consequences of our actions and that some actions are right or wrong regardless of their effects makes benevolence a less important principle than at first it appears, certainly less important than it is in Hutcheson’s system. In the dissertation ‘Of the Nature of Virtue’ Butler distances himself further from Hutcheson and abandons the hesitancy of his critique in Sermon XII. He makes a number of observations concerning the moral faculty, the first being that action, ‘abstracted from all regard to what is, in

fact and event, the consequence of it, is itself the natural object of the

moral discernment’. Intention is part of the action, ‘but though the intended good or bad consequences do not follow, we have exactly the same sense of the action as if they did’. ‘The fifth observation is that benevolence and the want of it are not the whole of virtue and vice. If the 282 See above, p. 206. 283 Works, ed. Bernard, I, 166, 164—5. 284 Inquiry, 181. 285 Works, ed. Bernard, I, no. XII, 166—7n.

224 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment opposite were true we would only approve benevolence and disapprove injustice insofar as we foresaw that they would produce happiness or

misery. But we are constituted to condemn injustice and approve of benevolence ‘abstracted from all consideration, which conduct 1s likeliest to produce an overbalance of happiness or misery’. Butler insists on this point because of the errors that some of his predecessors (probably Shaftesbury and Hutcheson) have made: some of great and distinguished merit have, I think, expressed themselves in a manner, which may occasion some danger, to careless readers, of imagining the whole of virtue to consist in singly aiming, according to the best of their judgment, at promoting the happiness of mankind in the present state; and the whole of vice, in doing what they foresee, or might foresee, is likely to produce an overbalance of unhappiness in it; than which mistakes, none can be conceived more terrible.*°°

The end of happiness cannot be offered as a justification of the means employed, partly because we cannot ever be sure what will produce happiness, and partly because in pursuit of this end we might commit acts that conscience would disapprove. From this it is clear that Butler thinks our duty to act in a certain way as approved by the principle of reflection

or conscience or the moral faculty always takes precedence over the benevolent motive to do so, the consideration that an action may produce happiness. This is very different from Hutcheson’s view of the relation

between moral sense and benevolence or the determination to public happiness.

It seems fair to assume, though Butler does not state it in so many words, that of the two subordinate reasonable principles self-love 1s superior to benevolence. When both are properly controlled by the principle of reflection and supported by the inferior appetites, passions, and affections the individual acts virtuously. But given that Butler believes that there may be conflict between what the conscience approves and what we may wrongly perceive to be conducive to happiness, how is it possible for virtue, duty, interest, and happiness to coincide? On several occasions he states in no uncertain terms that they do coincide. For example: It is manifest that, in the common course of life, there is seldom any inconsistency

between duty and what is called interest: it is much seldomer that there is any inconsistency between duty and what is really our present interest; meaning by interest, happiness and satisfaction. Self-love then, though confined to the interest of the present world, does in general perfectly coincide with virtue; and leads us to one and the same course of life.*°’

It is important to realise that one of Butler’s aims in emphasising self-love 286 Works, ed. Bernard, II, 288, 292—3, 294. 287 Works, ed. Bernard, I, no. III, 56; cf no. XV, 199.

Defining the moral faculty 225 and interest is rhetorical: he takes over and redefines the terminology of the selfish theorists in order to give a religious meaning to words that have

been corrupted through misapplication to a temporal and material level.

In doing this he is following in the path of the seventeenth-century latitudinarian divines, particularly Wilkins, who devoted much energy to arguing that the religious life is profitable, advantageous, and in man’s best interest.2°° So in some passages he uses the terms self-love and interest in his opponents’ sense, in order to show that they are self-defeating. Thus at

the beginning of Sermon XI he observes that it is ‘very much the distinction of the present to profess a contracted spirit, and greater regards to self-interest, than appears to have been done formerly’, and he enquires

‘whether private interest is likely to be promoted in proportion to the degree in which self-love engrosses us, and prevails over all other principles; or whether the contracted affection may not possibly be so prevalent as to disappoint itself, and even contradict its own end, private eood’.*®9 Towards the end of the sermon, in an important passage that has

been much debated by twentieth-century readers, he wrests the terms away from his opponents and gives them his own meaning. He claims that religion often addresses itself to self-love and always to the rational state of mind, and that no access can be had to the latter without convincing men that what is urged is not contrary to their interest. He continues: It may be allowed, without any prejudice to the cause of virtue and religion, that

our ideas of happiness and misery are of all our ideas the nearest and most important to us; that they will, nay, if you please, that they ought to prevail over those of order, and beauty, and harmony, and proportion, if there should ever be, as it is impossible there ever should be, any inconsistence between them: though these last too, as expressing the fitness of actions, are real as truth itself. Let it be allowed, though virtue or moral rectitude does indeed consist in affection to and pursuit of what is right and good, as such; yet, that when we sit down in a cool hour, we can neither justify to ourselves this or any other pursuit, till we are convinced that it will be for our happiness, or at least not contrary to it.

Butler is bringing together accounts of behaviour which are thought by selfish theorists to be incompatible — that virtue consists in doing what is right for its own sake (employing Shaftesbury’s terms order, beauty, harmony, and proportion, and Clarke’s term fitness), and that the only motive for action is self-interest — and by endorsing the latter he 1s

reinforcing the former. There is a certain irony in his subsequent comment, ‘so far as the interests of virtue depend upon the theory of it being secured from open scorn, so far its very being in the world [in which 288 See RGS, I, 85-7. 289 Works, ed. Bernard, I, 137—8. On p. 142 the answer to the two parts of the question is no and yes respectively.

226 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment the selfish theory is pervasive] depends upon its appearing to have no contrariety to private interest and self-love’.??°

However, there is no doubt that for Butler there is ultimately no contrariety between virtue and our true interest. This position is briefly

explained at the end of Sermon III: ‘Duty and interest are perfectly coincident; for the most part in this world, but entirely and in every instance if we take in the future, and the whole; this being implied in the notion of a good and perfect administration of things.’ Those who regard only their supposed interest will find ‘that he who has given up all the advantages of the present world, rather than violate his conscience and the relations of life, has infinitely better provided for himself, and secured his own interest and happiness’.*”' This distinction between true and false interest and self-love and the coincidence of the former with virtue and conscience is developed further in Part I, Chapter 5 of the Analogy, in which Butler discusses in a much more sombre tone the effort required to improve the principle of virtue by discipline and the difficulty of discerning where our true interest leads. For, though self-love, considered merely as an active principle leading us to pursue

our chief interest, cannot but be uniformly coincident with the principle of obedience to God’s commands, our interest being rightly understood; because this obedience, and the pursuit of our own chief interest, must be in every case one and the same thing: yet it may be questioned, whether self-love, considered merely as the desire of our own interest or happiness, can, from its nature, be thus absolutely and uniformly coincident with the will of God; any more than particular affections can.?9?

The relation between conscience, self-love, and benevolence in Butler’s

account of the constitution of human nature may be summarised as follows. Only actions approved by conscience are virtuous. Conscience and true self-love cannot conflict, unlike conscience and benevolence. It 1s

always in our interest to act virtuously by following the dictates of our conscience, which will include acting benevolently to our fellows, though not all virtuous actions are benevolent. If motivated by benevolence we try to calculate what actions are conducive to the happiness of others and then act accordingly, we run the double danger of getting the calculation wrong

and of acting against what our conscience says is right. But if we act according to the dictates of our conscience and hence virtuously, we are always acting in accordance with self-love and self-interest and we will attain happiness, probably in this world and certainly in the next. 290 Works, ed. Bernard, I, 151. On readings of this passage see Penelhum, Butler (1985), 73-4. 291 Works, ed. Bernard, I, 57.

292 Works, ed. Bernard, II, 96. On interest cf 87n, Part II, Chapter 8, 259, and on prudence Dissertation II, 290-1.

Defining the moral faculty 227 Price and rectitude

In the opening paragraph of the Introduction to the first edition of the Review (1758), a paragraph he later deleted, Price insisted that investigations into natural philosophy were of little consequence compared with a

subject that was still involved in obscurity and confusion, ‘the true account, original and foundation of our ideas of virtue and morality’, and

he hoped that he might be able to contribute ‘towards removing this obscurity and confusion, towards fixing the true foundation of morals, and determining a controversy of so great importance’.??° In pursuit of this

aim Price set out to show what was wrong with the moral sense theory elaborated by Hutcheson that based moral judgement and action on implanted determinations of our nature, and to strengthen Butler’s view of the authority of the principle of reflection by making it part of a theory of rectitude. ‘The following account will focus on his objections to the moral sense and his own alternative theory of the foundation of morals. In the first section of Chapter 1, “The Question stated concerning the

Foundation of Morals’, Price starts from the premise that we all feel ourselves determined to approve some actions and disapprove others. The question 1s what the power is within us which determines us. After giving a brief sketch of Hutcheson’s moral sense theory he explains that right and wrong are either real qualities of actions, as he believes, or only sensations or feelings, as he claims Hutcheson believes. ‘If the former is true, then is morality equally unchangeable with all truth: If, on the contrary, the latter is true, then 1s it that only which, according to the different constitutions of

the senses of beings, it appears to be to them.’ His own answer to the question ‘What is the power within us that perceives the distinctions of right and wrong?’ is the understanding.?°* From the outset Price sets up a

fundamental opposition between two rival theories of the origin of our

moral ideas, one postulating sense and the other understanding, an opposition that is maintained throughout the Review At the beginning of the tenth and final chapter (which is principally concerned with natural religion) he devotes a few pages to clarifying what he means by the phrase

the foundation of morals or virtue.” It can mean (1) the true account or 293 Review (1758), 1-2.

294 Review, ed. Raphael, 13, 15-16, 17. Subsequent references are to this edition unless otherwise stated. 295 In the first edition of the Review (1758), 407, Price recommended the letters between Thomas

Sharp, Archdeacon of Northumberland, and Catharine Cockburn (included in Cockburn’s Works, II) on the subject of the latter’s Remarks (see p. 202 above). Sharp gives a good deal of attention to three questions: what is meant by the word foundation; whether moral virtue and moral obligation must have the same foundation; and whether the reason of things antecedent to divine will is obligatory to morality, Cockburn, Works, Il, 354-5, 362-73. Price also recommended these letters on pp. 154 and 307 of the first edition of the Review but dropped

228 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment reason why actions are right; (2) the considerations that render particular actions right; (3) the motives that lead us to the practice of virtue. Price is concerned with the first meaning. ‘There are, he insists, in this meaning only two possible accounts why actions are right: It may be said either, that ght is a species of sensation, like taste or colour, and therefore denotes nothing absolutely true of the actions to which we apply it; which lays the foundation of it entirely in the will and good pleasure of the author of our natures. Or, on the other hand, it may be said, that it denotes a real character of actions, or something true of them; something necessary and immutable and independent of our perceptions, like equality, difference, proportion, or connexion; and,

therefore, that no other account is to be given, why such and such actions are right, than why the natures of things are what they are...

Price argues that those who put forward reasons such as private happiness or the will of God must have the second meaning in mind, and that those who try to unite the several schemes (he may be referring to Warburton) ‘and represent the will of God, self-interest, the reasons of things, and the moral

sense, as all distinct and coincident foundations of virtue’ must mean the third. He agrees that all of these together ‘carry us to virtue’, 1.e. function as motives. But ‘only one or other of the two last [the reasons of things and the moral sense] can be the true foundation of virtue’.*°° It is his object to show that any attempt to found moral ideas on the second of these must lead to scepticism and the destruction of all morality. Why is Price so hostile to the theory of the moral sense? In answer to

this question it is helpful to look at his treatment of terms that figure prominently in the writings of Hutcheson and his critics, including instinct,

affections and passions, and benevolence, and his designation of the attempt to ground morals on these features of human nature as arbitrary.

For Price, the constitution of human nature is arbitrary because God created us with certain senses, passions, and instincts and could have created us with different ones had he so willed it. ‘To make an internal sense the judge of right and wrong actions is to make virtue itself arbitrary,

because we might have been constituted by God to approve actions opposite to the ones that we do approve. On this scheme right and wrong inhere in the sense and not in the actions. According to Price, Hutcheson considered the moral sense ‘as the effect of a positive constitution of our minds, or as an zmplanted and arbitrary principle’ (the attribution of a quasi-

Hobbesian position to him here is significant, though the linking of implanted with arbitrary is unusual); in Hutcheson’s view our perceptions

of right and wrong ‘are particular modifications of our minds, or the references from the third edition. His debt to Sharp’s and Cockburn’s analysis of the debate on the foundation of morals deserves investigation. 296 Review, 233—5.

Defining the moral faculty 229 impressions which they are made to receive from the contemplation of certain actions, which the contrary actions might have occasioned, had the Author of nature so pleased’.2°’ Price here (and elsewhere) agrees with Balguy, who finds it an insuperable difficulty in Hutcheson’s scheme ‘that Virtue appears in it to be of an arbitrary and positive Nature; as entirely depending upon Instincts, that might originally have been otherwise, or even contrary to what they now are’.*?° Price always speaks of sensations, instincts, passions, and affections as evidence of the weakness of human nature. The weakness is of a double kind. Reason in us is imperfect, hence God has ‘established a due balance in our frame by annexing to our intellectual perceptions sensations and instincts, which give them greater weight and force’. Yet instinct is in itself

a major weakness and source of danger. ‘It is that part of our moral constitution which depends on instinct, that is chiefly liable to the corruption produced by’ custom and education.**” Resisting our strongest

instincts and following the determinations of reason is considered the highest virtue.°°° We should labour to improve our reason and diminish the occasion for instinctive principles. The older and wiser and better men grow, the more they are disengaged from instinct. At the same time we should be grateful to God for providing us with instinctive determinations to protect us from the evils arising from the weakness of human reason. The instincts are intended for good, and the evils they often cause are our

own fault and ‘proceed from the unnatural abuse and corruption of them’.°°! But when we compare instinct and reason there is no doubt about the supremacy of the latter: Instinct drives and precipitates; but reason commands. The impulses of instinct we may

resist, without doing any violence to ourselves. Our highest merit and perfection often consist in this. The dictates of reason we can, in no instance, contradict, without

a sense of shame, and giving our beings a wound in their most essential and sensible part. The experience we have of the operations of the former, is an argument of our imperfection, and meanness, and low rank. The other prevails most in the higher ranks of beings.°°”

At the end of Chapter 3 Price claims that he is not ‘solicitous about determining nicely, in all cases, what in our natures is to be resolved into mstinct, and what not. It is sufficient, if it appears, that the most important of our desires and affections have a higher and less precarious original.’ 297 Review, Chapter 1, 14—15. For other relevant uses of the term arbitrary see pp. 52, 74. 298 Foundation of Moral Goodness (1728), 8—9. See pp. 211-12 above.

299 Review, Chapter 2, 62, Chapter 7, 173.

500 Review, Chapter 8, ‘Of the Principle of Action in a virtuous Agent’, 192—3. Price notes here that Balguy has said more to this purpose. 301 Review, Chapter 3, ‘Of the Origin of our Desires and Affections’, 77—8. 302 Review, Chapter 8, 188.

230 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment However, he tries in this chapter to distinguish affections, passions, and appetites according to the part played by reason and instinct, though he 1s aware that common usage is inconsistent. Affections ‘signify the desires founded in the reasonable nature itself, and essential to it; such as self-love,

benevolence, and the love of truth’. When these affections are strength-

ened by instinctive determinations they are called passions. Merely instinctive determinations are called appetites or passions indifferently. Some of our passions and appetites are subordinate to self-love, others are subordinate to benevolence, but they are needed only because of our weakness: “Reason alone, did we possess it in a higher degree, would answer all the ends of them.’ And Price gives short shrift to the natural or parental affection that figures prominently in the arguments of Shaftesbur-

ians: ‘there would be no need of the parental affection, were all parents sufficiently acquainted with the reasons for taking upon them the guidance and support of those whom nature has placed under their care, and were

they virtuous enough to be always determined by those reasons’.°°° Similarly in Chapter 8 he distinguishes between rational and instinctive benevolence and insists that the latter ‘1s no principle of virtue, nor are any actions flowing merely from it virtuous’. Hence the tenderness of parents for their offspring, a fond mother’s exposing her life to save her child, and all actions proceeding from the nearer attachments of nature appear to have as much less moral value, as they are derived more from natural instinct, and less attended with reflexion on their reasonableness and fitness. As long as this reflexion is wanting, it is in a moral account indifferent, whether the action proceeds from kind affection or any other affection.

Price wishes to convince the defenders of kind affection that ‘benevolence

is essential to intelligence, and not merely an implanted principle or instinct’, and he is anxious to establish the conclusion “that the virtue of an

agent is always /ess in proportion to the degree in which natural temper and propensities fall in with his actions, instinctive principles operate, and rational reflexion on what is right to be done, is wanting’.°°*

Price thus finds the moral sense theory of Hutcheson and his kind and the concomitant emphasis on sensation, instinct, propensities, implanted determinations, and kind affection to be untenable for two main reasons: it denies the independent existence of right and wrong and it removes moral responsibility from the agent. Conversely, his own theory of rectitude asserts the reality of moral distinctions, makes the understanding the basis

of moral judgement and action, and further insists that the practice of virtue involves difficulties and conflicts that the rival theory of the moral sense cannot account for.

Price employs several synonyms to designate the faculty whereby we 303 Review, 78, 74, 76. 304 Review, 191-3, 195.

Defining the moral faculty 231 discern right and wrong: understanding, intuition, intellectual discernment, reason, conscience, reflection, the moral faculty. He tends to make greater use of the first four in the earlier chapters when he is establishing his theory of morals, and of the last three in the later chapters when he 1s considering the practice of virtue, though this division is not hard and fast.

The influence of Gudworth predominates in the earlier part and that of Butler in the later. In the second section of Chapter 1, ‘Of the Origin of our Ideas in general’, Price stresses, partly against Locke, that the source of

ideas he insists on, the faculty that discerns truth, is not reasoning or deduction but intuition, and in the following section he argues that intuition is the source of our moral ideas.°°? In a brief survey of the grounds of belief and assent in Chapter 5 he clearly summarises the difference between intuition and deduction. ‘To the former ‘we owe our belief of all self-evident truths; our ideas of the general, abstract affections and relations of things; our moral ideas, and whatsoever else we discover, without making use of any process of reasoning’. Intuition is the ultimate source of our knowledge, without which subordinate reasoning would not be possible; the truths it discovers appear by their own light and cannot be

proved.°°° Right and wrong are thus immediately perceived, and no further account of this process can be given:

There are, undoubtedly, some actions that are ultmately approved, and for justifying which no reason can be assigned; as there are some ends, which are ultimately desired, and for chusing which no reason can be given. Were not this true; there would be an infinite progression of reasons and ends, and therefore nothing could be at all approved or desired.°°”

Once the act of discerning or intuiting right and wrong has taken place

the authority of the faculty that discerns as Price describes it in later chapters is absolutely binding. ‘The following are examples of his synonyms for this faculty: Reason 1s the guide, the natural and authoritative guide of a rational being. Where he

has no discernment of right and wrong, there, and there only, is he (morally speaking) free. But where he has this discernment, where moral good appears to him,

and he cannot avoid pronouncing concerning an action, that it is fit to be done, and evil to omit it; here he is tied in the most strict and absolute manner, in bonds that no power in nature can dissolve. . . °°8 Whatever our consciences dictate to us, and we know to be right to be done, that [God] commands more evidently and undeniably, than if by a voice from heaven we had been called upon to do it.%°° 305 Review, 18, 40, 41—2. In the preface to the first edition, p. 3, Price emphasised the importance of the reader attending to the first chapter and particularly the second section.

306 Review, 98. $07 Review, Chapter 1, 41. 308 Review, Chapter 6, 109. 509 Review, Chapter 7, 147.

232 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment In the nature of [the reflecting principle] is implied (to speak after Dr. Butler) that it belongs to it, in all cases, to examine, judge, decide, direct, command, and forbid; that it should yield to nothing whatsoever; that it ought to model and superintend our whole lives; and that every motion and thought, every affection and desire, should be subjected constantly and wholly to its inspection and influence. . . The essential pre-eminence now observed to belong to the reasonable faculty, is

what ought chiefly to be considered, in settling the true idea of human nature... Now Goodness in mankind is this state restored and established. It is the power of reflexion raised to its due seat of direction and sovereignty in the mind; conscience fixed and kept in the throne, and holding under its sway all our passions.?'°

Price’s acknowledged debt to Butler in argument and terminology is clear. Indeed in considering the relation between reason and instinct in Chapter

2 he uncharacteristically but in Butlerian terms states that ‘in contemplating the actions of moral agents, we have both a perception of the understanding, and a feeling of the heart’.°'' But where Butler deliberately confines himself to an analysis based on the constitution of human nature, Price arrives at his account of the role of the understanding in the practice of virtue after he has established the divine basis of rectitude. To use the terms of the preface to Butler’s Sermons, he is as much concerned with the abstract relations of things as with a matter of fact, the particular nature of man.°!? Following Cudworth, Price argues that morality is eternal and immutable, ‘fixed on an immoveable basis, and appears not to be, in any sense, factitious; or the arbitrary production of any power human or divine; but equally everlasting and necessary with all truth and reason’.?!° In Chapter 5, ‘Of the

relation of Morality to the Divine Nature’, he answers the objection that this makes morality independent of God. Truth and morality are independent of God’s will, but not independent of his nature. Absolute rectitude is

included in the divine intelligence; to say that morality is eternal and immutable ‘is only saying that God himself is eternal and immutable, and making his nature the high and sacred original of virtue’.*!* Essentially, as Price explains in the first half of Chapter 6, ‘rightness implies oughtness’, and 310 Review, Chapter. 9, 214-15, 217. Price adds a long note on pp. 215-17 in support of Butler’s account of the moral faculty, pointing out inconsistencies in Hutcheson’s System of Moral Philosophy, and insisting that the commanding principle must be understanding and reason. 311 Review 62; cf Butler, Works, ed. Bernard, II, 287, quoted above p. 219. Note that Price reverses perception and feeling. 312 Works, ed. Bernard, I, 4. See above, pp. 215-16.

513 Review, Chapter 1, 50, 52. Cf Cudworth’s opening attack on pretended philosophers who maintain that nothing is ‘Good and Evil, ust and Unjust, Naturally and Immutably; but that all these things were Positive, Arbitrary and Factitious only’, Eternal and Immutable Morality (1731), 1.

$14 Review, 85, 87, 89. One of Sharp’s anxieties which Cockburn succeeded in alleviating was that Clarke’s followers made moral fitnesses independent of God, Cockburn, Works, II, 385.

Defining the moral faculty 233 God, morality, rectitude, and obligation are synonymous. Rectitude is the universal law by which the whole creation is ruled. ‘It is the source and

guide of all the actions of the Deity himself, and on it his throne and government are founded.’ Its repeal cannot be conceived. ‘It is prior to all things. It is self-valid and self-originated.’ It is superior to and the basis of

all authority. ‘It is, in short, the one authority in nature, the same in all times and in all places; or, in one word, the DIVINE authority.’*!? Those

who say that only the will of God can oblige resolve this power into rewards and punishments, and hence subvert the independent existence of right and wrong and reduce virtue and vice to pleasure and pain, prudence and imprudence. Price devotes the latter half of Chapter 6 to a consideration first of other accounts of obligation, attacking those that have recourse

to the will of God or the nature of man and ignore the autonomy of rectitude, and second of expressions such as ‘acting suitably to the natures of

things and ‘conformity to truth’ (the language of Clarke and Wollaston),

pointing out that these expressions cannot define virtue because they presuppose it.°'© The whole thrust of his argument is that morality is identical with God and independent of the human understanding that perceives it. Price’s theory of rectitude has some very interesting implications for his

account of the nature and practice of virtue in the later chapters of the Review. ‘he most important are his criticism of contemporary theories that

define virtuous actions only in terms of their consequences, particularly pleasure and utility, and that ground virtuous actions in particular features of human nature, sympathy, kind affection, and benevolence, and his own

emphasis on the abstract unity of virtue combined with the practical difficulty of reconciling different kinds of virtuous action and of making duty, interest, and happiness coincide. In Chapter 4, ‘Of our Ideas of good and ill Desert’, Price insists that the rewardableness of virtue and demerit of vice ‘are instances of absolute and eternal rectitude, the ideas of which arise in us immediately upon the consideration of virtuous and vicious characters, appear always along with them, and are, by no means, wholly coincident with or resolvable into views of publick utility and inutility’.°'" At the beginning of Chapter 7, ‘Of the Subject-matter of Virtue’, he quotes at length from Butler’s dissertation in support of the view that benevolence is

not the whole of virtue, adding a number of examples of his own, and concluding ‘it is not to be conceived, that promoting the happiness of others should comprehend the whole of our duty, or that the consideration 315 Review, 105, 109-10. The full title of the chapter is ‘Of Fitness, and Moral Obligation, and the

various Forms of Expression, which have been used by different Writers in explaining Morality.’ Cf Clarke on right reason and the law of nature, Natural Religion (1706), Proposition I, 104—5, adapted from Cicero, De Re Publica, U1, and De Legibus, TI and III.

316 Review, 106, 125. 317 Review, 83.

234 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment of publick good should be that alone in al// circumstances which can have any concern in determining what is right or wrong’.°!® Taking the three traditional divisions of virtue or heads of duty in turn, our duty to God, ourselves, and others, Price points out that our duty to God is independent of all considerations of utility and that true self-love is ‘another instance of right behaviour, the principle of which 1s not kind affection, and which no views of public utility, or sympathy with others can possibly explain’. This does not mean that Price belittles the importance of the third of the duties,

which he calls beneficence or the study of the good of others; on the contrary, he urges that ‘there is not any thing which appears to our thoughts with greater light and evidence, or of which we have more undeniably an intuitive perception, than that it 1s right to promote and pursue’ public happiness.?!9

At this stage of his argument in Chapter 7 Price draws attention to the crucial difference between abstract and practical virtue which he discusses

more fully in the following chapter. The main branches of virtue, which

include veracity, gratitude, and justice in addition to the three duties | already mentioned, all form part of the universal law of rectitude. But this law, ‘though in the abstract idea of it always invariably the same, must be continually varying in its particular demands and obligations’. On the one hand virtue is uniform and universal. ‘To be truly virtuous is to fulfil all the duties of virtue; to neglect one of them is to neglect them all. The virtues agree in requiring the same actions from us: ‘if we will look forwards to the whole of our existence, the three great principles of the love of God, the love of man, and true self-love, will always draw us the same way’. On the

other hand in particular cases the virtues interfere with each other and ‘lead us contrary ways’. ‘hough truth and right always require one way of acting, our imperfect faculties prevent us from perceiving this and so we make errors in our moral judgements.°*° At the beginning of Chapter 8 Price clarifies this problem by distinguishing abstract virtue, which denotes the quality of an action independent of the agent’s judgement, or what it 1s

absolutely right that an agent should do, from practical virtue, which depends on an agent’s view of what he should do, and about which he may be mistaken. We must follow our consciences having taken care to inform them as best we can, even though from the perspective of abstract virtue they may be misinformed. ‘It is happy for us, that our title to the character

of virtuous beings depends not upon the justness of our opinions, or the constant olyective rectitude of all we do; but upon the conformity of our actions to the sincere conviction of our minds.’ Practical virtue supposes the agent’s liberty, intelligence, and consciousness of rectitude as his rule 318 Review, 131—8. For Butler’s view see above pp. 223-4.

319° Review, 139, 149, 151. 320 Review, 165-8.

Defining the moral faculty 235 and end. Nothing constitutes virtuous action but what is done out of regard to virtue itself: virtue ‘must be desired, loved, and practised on its own account’.°*! In Chapter 9 Price considers how we know that the love of virtue is predominant in us, and lists four essential marks of a good character: virtue must be what we think of most, it must show itself in our actual practice, we must delight in it, and we must be insatiable in our pursuit of it. “Virtue is the object of the chief complacency of every virtuous man; the exercise of it is his chief delight; and the consciousness of it gives him his highest joy.’???

But Price is anxious to show that the pleasure inseparable from virtue does not make it less disinterested: pleasure is a consequence of and not a motive to virtue. He has consistently attacked Hutcheson for his confusion of the ‘rectetude of an action’ with ‘its gratefulness’. “But what can be more evident, than that mght and pleasure, wrong and pain, are as different as a cause and its effect; what is understood, and what is felt; absolute truth, and its agreeableness to the mind.’°*° In similar vein, when considering the moral

attributes of God in Chapter 10 he emphasises the difference between rectitude and happiness: ‘Happiness is the end, and the only end conceivable

by us, of God’s providence and government: But he pursues this end in subordination to rectitude, and by those methods only which rectitude requires.’°** In his account of the moral government of the world towards the end of this chapter,*?? Price confronts the problem that though virtue always tends to our happiness it does not always achieve it in the world as it is now. Earlier he has pointed out that ‘the very expression, virtue tends to

our happiness, and the supposition that, in certain cases, it may be inconsistent with it, imply that it may exist independently of any connexion with private interest’; if virtue were identical with private interest then the expression, implying ‘that what is advantageous to us, may be disadvantageous

to us’, would not make sense.**° Like Butler, Price argues in Chapter 10 that ‘this world appears fitted more to be a school for the education of virtue, than a station of honour to it; and the course of human affairs is favourable to it more by exercising it, than by rewarding it.’ Further, ‘the most

worthy characters are so far, in the present state of things, from always 321 Review, ‘Of the Nature and Essentials of Virtue in Practice, as distinguished from absolute Virtue;

and, the Principle of Action in a virtuous Agent’, 177—9, 181, 183, 184, 199. Price points out at the beginning of Chapter 8 in the first edition, p. 307, that there is a similar distinction between abstract and practical virtue in the letters between Sharp and Cockburn. $22 Review, ‘Of the different Degrees of Virtue and Vice . . . Of difficulties attending the Practice of Virtue. . . and the Essentials of a good and bad Character’, 219-20, 222—3, 224—5. 323 Review, Chapter 2, 63. Hume is included in the criticism, 63n. 324 Review, 250.

329 He is clearly indebted to Butler’s Analogy, Part 1, Chapters 3, ‘Of the Moral Government of God’, and 5, ‘Of a State of Probation’. 326 Review, Chapter 6, 107.

236 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment enjoying the highest happiness, that they are sometimes the greatest sufferers; and the most vicious the least unhappy’.°*’ This is of course a traditional argument for a future state of rewards and punishments, and Price makes full use of it as such. But that is not the main significance of these statements in relation to his general theory of rectitude. Throughout the Review Price has insisted that however corrupted our faculties may be,

our understanding is capable of perceiving right, and that right 1s independent of our perception of it and does not have its origin in the constitution of human nature. Where Hutcheson in the interests of his theory of the moral sense is forced to underplay the extent of evil and deny the possibility that misery outweighs happiness,?*° Price can recognise that the life of virtue is arduous and that the constitution of human nature may be an obstacle to its practice, and at the same time hold an optimistic view of abstract virtue as its own authority and of the human love of virtue for

its own sake. However erroneous we may be in our practices and judgements, ‘the grand lines and primary principles of morality are so deeply wrought into our hearts, and one with our minds, that they will be for ever legible. ‘The general approbation of certain virtues, and dislike of their contraries, must always remain, and cannot be erased but with the destruction of all intellectual perception.’??° Enquiries into the foundation of morals exercised a large number of clergy, ministers, and educationalists of different denominations and formed an

essential part of the curricula of the Scottish universities, the English dissenting academies, and Oxford and Cambridge in the mid-eighteenth century. The range, complexity, and subtlety of the positions explored were much greater than is often recognised now; further, it 1s crucial to

understand that arguments were developed in conscious response to opposing ones, and that students were encouraged to compare them. In this chapter the focus has been on the exploration of the relation between reason and the affections, and in particular on the development of and responses to the ambiguous and potentially dangerous theory of the moral sense. Shaftesbury, writing outside and in opposition to the established religion and its educational institutions, had made the constitution of human nature the centre of ethical enquiry by divorcing it from traditional theological questions about God’s purposes and promises for humanity. The Scottish Shaftesburians pursued this enquiry in the universities and christianised it, but with dangerous implications that Price among others

was anxious to expose. Leechman objected that some had mistaken 327 Review, 256—8; cf Butler, Works, II, 77.

$28 Hutcheson, System, I, Book I, Part I, Chapter 9. Part of this chapter is a reworking of the Essay, section 6. 329 Review, Chapter 7, 173.

Defining the moral faculty 237 Hutcheson so far ‘as to imagine, that when he says we are laid under a most real and intimate obligation by the moral sense to act virtuously, he meant to assert that all other obligations from the consideration of the will of God, and the effects of his favour or displeasure in this and in another world were superseded. Nothing could be further from his thoughts; nor is it a consequence of his scheme.’**° But this was precisely the consequence that Hume spelt out. 330 Preface to Hutcheson, System, xviin.

The ethics of sentiment and the religious hypothesis: Hume and his critics

I wish from my Heart, I coud avoid concluding, that since Morality, according to your Opinion as well as mine, is determin’d merely by Sentiment, it regards only

human Nature & human Life. This has been often urg’d against you, & the Consequences are very momentous. Hume to Hutcheson (1740)!

All the philosophy. . . in the world, and all the religion, which is nothing but a species of philosophy, will never be able to carry us beyond the usual course of experience, or give us measures of conduct and behaviour different from those which are furnished by reflections on common life. No new fact can ever be inferred from the religious hypothesis; no event foreseen or foretold; no reward or punishment expected or dreaded, beyond what is already known by practice and observation. Hume, Enquiry concerning Human Understanding?

What Danger can ever come from ingenious Reasoning & Enquiry? The worst speculative Sceptic ever I knew, was a much better man than the best superstitious Devotee & Bigot. Hume to Gilbert Elliot (1751)?

Where the moral sense 1s entire, there must be a sense of religion; and if a man who has no sense of religion live decently in society, he is more indebted for his conduct to good temper than to sound morals. Kames, Sketches of the History of Man (1774)*

The enemies of Religion are awake; let not her friends sleep. Horne, Letter to Adam Smith (1777)?

1 The problem of the virtuous sceptic English and Scottish moralists in the Shaftesburian tradition who founded

morality in human nature were agreed that God had constituted that | 16 March 1740, Hume, Letters, ed. Greig, I, 40. 2 Enquiries, ed. Selby-Bigge and Nidditch (1975), 146 (subsequently referred to as first Enquiry). The first Enquiry was published in 1748 as Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understanding and

received its new title in 1758.

3 10 March 1751, Letters, ed. Greig, I, 154. * 2nd edn (1778), IV, 345. > A Letter to Adam Smith LL.D. on the Life, Death, and Philosophy of his Friend David Hume Esq. (1777), ii.

238

The ethics of sentiment and the religious hypothesis 239

nature and that the moral faculty, however identified, was a divine implantation. Ethics and religion were inseparable, because the moral human being reflecting on his own constitution could not but recognise that his benevolent affections and moral sense were the gift of his creator and confirmed that creator’s existence. In An Inquiry concerning Virtue Shaftesbury had canvassed the hypothesis of virtuous atheism, but had concluded that in practice virtue is attainable only by the theist who seeks

to conform his mind to the universal mind, whereas for the atheist the thought of living in a distracted universe embitters his temper and impairs natural affection, the very principle of virtue.® Bayle’s vision in Pensées Diverses sur la Cométe of a society of virtuous atheists remained a speculative

fancy.’ But the case of David Hume (1711-76) presented a real problem for his contemporaries.® For Hume, the basis of morality in sentiment, in human passions, affections, and feelings, meant necessarily that it con-

cerned only human life. Human experience provided no possibility of knowledge beyond the human, of the creator or first cause of the universe, his hypothetical attributes, or his relationship with his supposed creation. Ethics and religion were separate subjects of enquiry. Hume was convinced that the effects of Christianity on ethics had been entirely damaging, and

one of his aims was to restore the perspective of a particular group of classical moralists. At the same time he recognised that popular religion had its origin in the passions, and that the religious hypothesis, though rationally indefensible, provided very important kinds of satisfaction for the mind. As a philosopher he attempted to provide an original analysis of

human moral principles that had no connexion with religion, and he regarded this as his most important contribution to philosophy. He was also concerned to explain why both natural and revealed religion managed

to maintain their ascendancy in human belief and practice. In this latter endeavour he was restricted, as were all freethinkers in the eighteenth century, from saying clearly what he meant,’ and for this reason there has been much disagreement among modern readers as to what his position really was.

His contemporaries did not have this difficulty. ‘They were clear that

Hume was a sceptic, an infidel, and an atheist (though he himself © Characteristicks (1714), Il, 70—1; see Chapter 2 above, p. 138. This passage was to be quoted by Beattie, Essay on Truth, 6th edn (1778, 407n), and echoed in the last revised edition (1790) of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (ed. Raphael and Macfie, 235); see below, pp. 260—1. Hume may have derived his phrase ‘the religious hypothesis’ from Shaftesbury’s treatment of theism as a hypothesis in the Inquiry.

’ See Chapter 1 above, pp. 22-3. 8 For Hume in his context see Letters, ed. Greig, 2 vols. (1932), New Letters, ed. Klibansky and Mossner (1954), Mossner, Hume, 2nd edn (1980); M. A. Stewart, ed., Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment (1990), Stewart and Wright, eds., Hume and Hume’s Connexions (1994).

9 See Chapter | above, section 2.

240 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment acknowledged only the first of these labels). They faced a rather different, and to them much more important, problem. In the sphere of speculation Hume the sceptic developed an ethics of sentiment which in some respects

recognisably derived from the work of his theist predecessors. In the sphere of practice he was recognised to be a good man who was manifestly not embittered in the way that Shaftesbury had imagined an atheist would be by the experience of living in a godless world. His critics and opponents

of various denominations and persuasions reacted to this problem in different ways.!° Those who knew him and loved him, those who admired his work in many fields of philosophy, politics, and history were prepared to grant that his speculative sceptical principles were not dangerous and had no practical moral consequences, though they deplored his views on religion and would have preferred him not to express them. This grouping included Hume’s friends among the moderates in the Church of Scotland

and certain English dissenters. ‘Those who knew him only through his books and who belonged to orthodox, evangelical, or high church circles in England, Scotland and Ireland regarded his sceptical principles as inseparable from his whole activity as a philosopher, and concluded that his philosophy was inherently dangerous to religion, morality, and society. Hume is thus a significant figure in the history of the relationship between

religion and ethics not only for his own highly original attempt to undo this relationship, but also for the different ways in which his critics tried to come to terms with the implications or avert the effects of this attempt.

It is clear from the evidence of Hume’s own statements, his surviving memoranda of his reading, and his works themselves that he had read widely in philosophy ancient and modern and formed his essential views about religion and ethics when he was still very young.'! After four years as a boy at Edinburgh University (1722-5), where his studies included classics, metaphysics, natural philosophy, and pneumatics (natural religion), he spent a further ten years (interrupted by failed attempts to pursue law or trade as a career and a depressive illness) devouring books, thinking, and scribbling. Fairly early in this programme he decided to take nothing in philosophy on authority and to seek a new way to establish truth: by the

age of 18 ‘a new Scene of Thought’ had opened up to him.!* The programme culminated during his long stay in France from 1734 to 1737 in the preparation for and writing of A Treatise of Human Nature.

In the Introduction to Volume I of the Treatise (1739) Hume associates '9 See also Rivers, ‘Responses to Hume on Religion by Anglicans and Dissenters’, 7EH, forthcoming (2001).

'l See Mossner, Hume, Chapters 4—6. The most important statements by Hume are in a draft letter of 1734 (Letters, ed. Greig, I, 12—18) and ‘My Own Life’ (written 1776, first published 1777, Letters, 1, 1-7; both also in Norton, ed., Cambridge Companion to Hume, Appendix). '2 Letters, ed. Greig, I, 13.

The ethics of sentiment and the religious hypothesis 241 himself with ‘some late philosophers in England, who have begun to put the

science of man on a new footing’ — Locke, Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Hutcheson, and Butler. He cites these philosophers again in his Abstract of the Treatise (1740) for their agreement ‘in founding their accurate disquis1tions of human nature intirely upon experience’.!* But if we trace Hume’s references or allusions to these writers through his works, what we find is a

process of distancing. He retains their particular arguments, phrases, or

terms when these are useful to him, but he ceases to feel the need to validate his own work by appeal to their example. ‘This is particularly clear in the case of Shaftesbury, the key influence on Scottish moral philosophy

in the 1720s and 30s, and Hutcheson, the contemporary philosopher whom, together with Butler, he was most anxious to impress. In the Treatise

the ‘great genius’ Shaftesbury is rebuked for his fanciful ‘reasonings concerning the uniting principles of the universe’ in The Moralists; Hume

regrets Shaftesbury’s theism, but still honours him as a moral philosopher.'* The clearest evidence of Hume gesturing towards popular Shaftesburianism comes in his Essays, Moral and Political (1741-2). A passage on

the power of the social passions in ‘Of the Dignity of Human Nature’ (1741) urges the reader who wishes to see this question treated ‘with the greatest Force of Argument and Eloquence’ to consult Shaftesbury’s Inquiry; this passage was to be dropped from later editions.'? The parodic

portraits of “he Stoic’ and “he Platonist’ mimic the rhapsodic mode of The Moralists (in contradiction to the criticism expressed in the Treatise, and implied in An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding), while “The Sceptic’ 1s

urged to have recourse to ‘the sublimity of Shaftesbury’.'® This fashionable sublimity perhaps became something of an embarrassment to Hume. “The

elegant and sublime Lord Shaftesbury” of the first edition of An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751) shrinks to ‘elegant’ in later editions.’

A similar process can be observed in Hume’s references to Hutcheson.'® In A Letter from a Gentleman to his Friend in Edinburgh (1745), his defence of the

Treatise against a damaging attack by William Wishart, Hume denies Wishart’s sixth charge that he has sapped the foundations of morality by ‘denying the natural and essential Difference betwixt Right and Wrong, '3. Treatise, ed. Selby-Bigge and Nidditch (1978), xvii, 646. '4 Treatise, 254n. Hume owned a copy of the 1723 edition of Characteristicks, which he signed and dated 1726 (when he was about 15): the Nortons, Hume Library (1996), 16. 15 Essays, ed. Miller (1987), 620. 16 Fissays, ed. Miller, 153—4, 157-8, 179n. The Shaftesburian account of the relation of the parts to the whole is attacked in the first Enquiry, 101—2, though Shaftesbury is not named here.

second Enquiry). |

17 Enquiry (1751), 3; Enquiries, ed. Selby-Bigge and Nidditch, 171 (subsequently referred to as

18 For a survey of the relations between the two and how they have been perceived by modern critics, see J. Moore, ‘Hume and Hutcheson’, in Stewart and Wright, eds., Hume and Hume’s Connexions. See also Mossner, Hume, Chapter 11.

242 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment Good and Evil, Justice and Injustice’. He admits that he has denied the eternal difference of right and wrong in Clarke’s and Wollaston’s sense, Le. that the propositions of morality are ‘the Objects merely of Reason, not the Feelings of our internal Tastes and Sentiments’. He continues significantly: “In this Opinion he concurs with all the antient Moralists, as well as with Mr. Hutchison Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Glasgow, who,

with others, has revived the antient Philosophy in this Particular’, and he regrets that some ‘are displeased with Mr. Hutchison’s Philosophy, in founding all the Virtues so much on Instinct, and admitting so little of Reason and Reflection’ .'° In a long note to the first of his Philosophical Essays

(1748), Hume attributes to Hutcheson the overthrow of the foundation of morality on ‘eternal and immutable Relations’: But a flate Philosopher has taught us, by the most convincing Arguments, that Morality is nothing in the abstract nature of Things, but is entirely relative to the

Sentiment or mental Taste of each particular Being ... Moral Perceptions therefore, ought not to be class’d with the Operations of the Understanding, but

with the Tastes or Sentiments. +Mr. Hutcheson.?° In these passages Hume firmly identifies Hutcheson as the proponent of the ethics of sentiment and himself as Hutcheson’s follower. But there were crucial differences. In 1739—40 Hume wrote three letters to Hutcheson on the subject of the manuscript of Book III of the Treatise.*! Responding in

the first letter of 17 September 1739 to Hutcheson’s reading of the manuscript, Hume spelt out a number of disagreements between them, including a very important point that he was to raise again in the third letter of 16 March 1740: Hutcheson’s understanding of the natural and of sentiment quite illogically depended on final causes and the existence of superior beings, which from Hume’s perspective were utterly unknowable.** Hutcheson failed to understand the implications of the ethics of

sentiment as Hume saw them, and in due course it ceased to seem advantageous to Hume to identify himself with Hutcheson. ‘Thus the footnote attributing the anti-rationalist revolution in ethics to Hutcheson was to be deleted from later editions of the first Anguzry. Nevertheless, 19 Letter from a Gentleman, ed. Mossner and Price (1967), 18, 30, 31. 20 Philosophical Essays, 14—15n.

21 Hume, Letters, ed. Greig, I, nos. 13, 15, 16. Their mutual friend Henry Home, later Lord Kames, sent Hutcheson Volumes I and II containing Books I and II on publication, after Hume had asked him to find a serious reader. For Hume’s request to Kames see New Letters, ed. Klibansky and Mossner, 4; for Hutcheson’s reply to Kames see Ross, Kames (1972), 78-9, and Mossner, Hume, 628. (Though Henry Home did not acquire the title of Kames until 1752, for convenience he is hereafter referred to by it.) In April 1739 Hume sent the first two volumes for

comment to Des Maizeaux, the friend of Shaftesbury and Toland, Letters, ed. Greig, 29-30, Mossner, Hume, 119-20.

22 Letters, ed. Greig, I, 33, 40 (see the first epigraph above). See also Moore, in Stewart and Wright, eds., Hume and Hume’s Connexions, 35-8.

The ethics of sentiment and the religious hypothesis 243 Hume took seriously Hutcheson’s criticisms of Book II of the Treatise, even

though he was unconvinced by them, and in turn in a fourth letter of 10 January 1743 offered detailed criticisms of Hutcheson’s Latin compend,

regretting the influence of Butler on Hutcheson’s account of the moral

sense, but owning himself pleased ‘to see such Philosophy & such instructive Morals’ in the schools. ‘I hope they will next get into the World, & then into the Churches.’?°

Partly under the influence of Kames, who had met Butler in London in 1737 and whose own Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion

(1751) are indebted to him,** Hume determined to submit the Treatise for

Butler’s approval. In a letter to Kames of 2 December 1737 he selfconsciously admitted the mutilation required: I am at present castrating my Work, that is, cutting off its noble Parts, that 1s, endeavouring it shall give as little Offence as possible; before which I cou’d not pretend to put it into the Drs hands. This 1s a Piece of Cowardice, for which I blame myself; tho I believe none of my Friends will blame me.?°

Hume sent Butler a copy in 1739, but there is no evidence that he read it.

However, in a letter of 13 June 1742 Hume proudly told Kames on information received from London that Butler had everywhere recommended his Essays, Moral and Political.*° Hume advertised his intellectual link with Butler, as with Hutcheson, in the Treatise, the Abstract, and the subsequently deleted note to the Philosophical Essays. In the last Butler 1s praised for his treatment of the passions in his Sermons, in particular for his account of the complex relationship between the so-called selfish passions (Butler’s self-love) and benevolence. Hume takes Hutcheson on sentiment and Butler on the passions to illustrate ‘the Nature and Importance of this Species of Philosophy’.*’ But it was only in the early stages of his career that he thought such illustration necessary. After his own philosophical position was firmly established in the 1750s,

Hume no longer felt the need to invoke the names of Hutcheson and Butler, the two most important living philosophers in his youth, whose differences from him he had not publicly admitted. He always treated Locke more robustly, as had Shaftesbury and Hutcheson before him. In the Treatise and more explicitly in the Abstract and first Enquiry he indicated

that one of his aims was to correct Locke’s errors, particularly his account of innate ideas, power, and probability.*° In the first section of Book I of 23 Letters, ed. Greig, I, 47, 48. For Hutcheson’s compend see Chapter 3 above, p. 160. 24 Ross, Kames, 35; Kames, Principles of Morality, 3rd edn (1779), 42: ‘DR Butler, a manly and acute

writer, hath gone farther than any other, to assign a just foundation for moral duty.’ 25 New Letters, 3. On the issue of cowardice see pp. 271—2 below. 26 New Letters, 4, 10. 27 Philosophical Essays, 15—16n.

28 For power see Treatise, 157, first Enquiry, 64n; for probability see Treatise, 647, first Enquiry, 56n (summarising Treatise, 124, where Locke is not named).

244 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment the Treatise he objected to Locke’s perverting of the meaning of idea, a criticism developed in the Abstract:

it may be observed, as an inaccuracy of that famous philosopher, that he comprehends all our perceptions under the term of idea, in which sense it is false,

that we have no innate ideas. For it is evident our stronger perceptions or impressions are innate, and that natural affection, love of virtue, resentment, and all the other passions, arise immediately from nature.*?

In making this criticism Hume was fully in accord with Shaftesbury and Hutcheson.*° He repeated this criticism of Locke’s inaccurate use of the terms innate and idea more vigorously in a note to section 2 of the first Enquiry, ‘Of the Origin of Ideas’, in language which echoes Shaftesbury’s.

The note concludes with a derogatory comparison that would have seemed to Locke the ultimate insult: LOCKE was betrayed into this question by the schoolmen, who, making use of undefined terms, draw out their disputes to a tedious length, without ever touching the point in question. A like ambiguity and circumlocution seems to run through that philosopher’s reasonings on this as well as most other subjects.°!

Hume originally tempered this criticism with praise: ‘that philosopher’s reasonings’ in the sentence just quoted first appeared as ‘that Great Man’s’ in the Philosophical Essays. Similarly, in Essay 1 he appended the following

note to the prediction that as an abstruse philosopher Locke would be forgotten: “his is not intended any way to detract from the Merit of Mr. Locke, who was really a great Philosopher, and a just and modest Reasoner.’ This note was deleted from later editions of the first Enquiry.°* The most

striking of Hume’s references to Locke was made in the posthumously published Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779) by Cleanthes, the spokesman for theism: LOCKE seems to have been the first Christian, who ventured openly to assert, that faith was nothing but a species of reason, that religion was only a branch of philosophy, and that a chain of arguments, similar to that which established any truth in morals, politics, or physics, was always employed in discovering all the principles of theology, natural and revealed.°°

Ostensibly a celebration of Locke’s influence, this claim, in the light of Hume’s view of the impossibility of establishing a rational foundation for religious belief, is in fact extremely damaging to Locke’s authority.

The inclusion of the name of Mandeville, Shaftesbury’s goad and Hutcheson’s bugbear, in the two lists of the five philosophers who had 29 Treatise, 2n, 648. 5° See above, Chapters 2, pp. 127—8, and 3, pp. 208-9. $1 First Enquiry, 22n. See below, pp. 290-1. 32 Philosophical Essays, 29, 5n; cf first Enquiry, 7. (On changing the title of Philosophical Essays to Enquiry [see n.2 above] Hume also changed its constituent essays to sections.) 33 Dialogues, ed. Kemp Smith (1935), 171. Subsequent references are to this edition.

The ethics of sentiment and the religious hypothesis 245 begun to put the science of man on a new footing looks like provocation.** It does not imply that Hume is endorsing Mandeville’s account of human nature as entirely self-interested and morality as the construction of skilful politicians. On the contrary, in the Treatise and again in the second Enquiry

Hume is at pains to show that the artifice of politicians and the moral vocabulary of honour and shame that they exploit would be meaningless without original natural sentiment: “Che utmost politicians can perform, is, to extend the natural sentiments beyond their original bounds; but still

nature must furnish the materials, and give us some notion of moral distinctions.’°°

Hume does not name Mandeville in these passages, though The Fable of the Bees is clearly recognisable as his main target; instead, he casts his net more widely by referring to ‘certain writers on morals’, ‘some philosophers’, and, significantly, ‘sceptics, both ancient and modern’.°° He seems to have used Mandeville’s name in the two lists to stand as well for earlier

unorthodox writers such as Hobbes and Bayle whose view of human nature he did not endorse but whose decision to separate their account of morality from religion coincided with his own enterprise. As with Mandeville, Hume makes it clear in the Treatise that he finds Hobbes’s portrait of human nature incredible: ‘a traveller wou’d meet with as little credit, who shou’d inform us of people exactly of the same character with those in Plato’s Republic on the one hand, or those in Hobbes’s Leviathan on the other’.°’ Some years later in The History of England he was to condemn

Hobbes outright on political, moral, and especially epistemological grounds, by implication recommending his own sceptical treatment of religion in place of Hobbes’s dogmatism: Hobbes’s politics are fitted only to promote tyranny, and his morals to encourage licentiousness. ‘Though an enemy to religion, he partakes nothing of the spirit of scepticism; but is as positive and dogmatical as if human reason, and his reason in particular, could attain a thorough conviction in these subjects.°®

Bayle was far more important than Hobbes to Hume, but the nature and extent of the debt is difficult to determine.’? He seems to have begun 5# See n. 13 above. For the hostility of Hutcheson and other Shaftesburians to Mandeville, see Chapter 3 above, pp 174—5, 178. Hundert, Enlightenment’s Fable, 82—6, sees Hume as closer to Mandeville. 35. Treatise, 500, second Enquiry, 214.

36 Treatise, 500, 578-9, second Enquiry, 214. See also Treatise, 570, which develops what Hume regards as Mandeville’s obvious account of the origin of female modesty. Cf Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, ed. Kaye (1924), I, 65.

37 Treatise, 402; see also doubts about the state of nature in second Enquiry, 189-90. 38 History of England, ed. Todd (1983, based on Hume’s posthumous revised edn of 1778), VI, 153, first published as The History of Great Britain, II (1757).

39 Popkin, ‘Bayle and Hume’, in High Road to Pyrrhonism (1993), 149-59, and Moore, in Stewart and Wright, eds., Hume and Hume’s Connexions, 27.

246 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment reading Bayle in 1732 and continued in France, and in a letter of 26 August 1737, written shortly before he returned from France with the manuscript of the Treatise, Hume asked his friend Michael Ramsay to read Malebranche’s Recherche de la Verité, Berkeley’s Principles of Human Knowledge,

and the more metaphysical articles of Bayle’s Dictionary, such as ‘Zeno’ and ‘Spinoza’, together with Descartes’ Meditations: “Vhese Books will make you

easily comprehend the metaphysical Parts of my Reasoning’.*° Hume seems to have drawn on Bayle for both negative and positive purposes in the Treatise, for the scepticism of Book I, Part IV, and the non-religious ethics of Book III: his response to Bayle was thus the very opposite of that taken by Bayle’s friend, the anti-sceptical theist Shaftesbury. In his early publications he identified Bayle’s Dictionary as a source of particular kinds of information and argument, about Spinoza in the Treatise and the Jesuits in the first Enquiry.*! His memoranda indicate great interest in what Bayle has to say about the possibility of virtuous atheism, for example: ‘Atheists

plainly make a Distinction betwixt good Reasoning & bad. Why not betwixt Vice & Virtue? Baile.’** He finally advertised his allegiance to Bayle ironically, by means of the continuation of Cleanthes’ praise of Locke in the Dialogues:

The ill use, which BAYLE and other libertines made of the philosophical scepticism of the Fathers and first Reformers, still farther propagated the judicious sentiment of Mr. LOCKE: And it is now, in a manner, avowed, by all pretenders to reasoning and philosophy, that atheist and sceptic are almost synonymous.**

Despite Hume’s association of himself with five modern philosophers, it is arguable that as a moral philosopher he was far more sympathetic to the ancients. But he was not consistent on this matter. Sometimes he implied that his position was entirely original and that he was indebted to no one. He told Michael Ramsay after recommending the books that would help him with the metaphysical parts of the Treatise, ‘as to the rest, they have so little Dependence on all former systems of Philosophy, that your natural

Good Sense will afford you Light enough to judge of their Force & Solidity’.** This claim is borne out by the statement in the Treatise (in relation to his discussion of the passions of pride and humility) that ‘moral philosophy is in the same condition as natural, with regard to astronomy #9 March 1732, Letters, ed. Greig, I, 12; 26 August 1737, Mossner, Hume, 104, 627. For Hume’s published references to Berkeley see Treatese, 17, Letter from a Gentleman, 26, 30, and especially first Enquiry, 155n. 41 Treatise, 243n; first Enquiry, 200n.

42 Mossner, ‘Hume’s Early Memoranda, 1729-1740’, FHI, TX (1948), 500, no. 10. Mossner points out (p. 494) that 16 out of 40 notes under the heading ‘Philosophy’ refer to Bayle. See also New Letters, 1ln; Kemp Smith, Introduction to Dialogues, 45-8 and Appendix B; Pittion, ‘Hume’s Reading of Bayle’, JHB XV (1977), 373-86.

43 See n. 33 above. 44 Mossner, Hume, 627.

The ethics of sentiment and the religious hypothesis 247 before the time of Copernicus’.*” As the Copernicus of moral philosophy, Hume would have no time for the Ptolemies. Consistent with this position, sometimes we find him speaking of the ancient moralists in dismissive or at

best condescending terms. ‘Thus in the draft autobiographical letter of 1734 he complained: I found that the moral Philosophy transmitted to us by Antiquity, labor’d under the same Inconvenience that has been found in their natural Philosophy, of being entirely Hypothetical, & depending more upon Invention than Experience. Every one consulted his Fancy in erecting Schemes of Virtue & of Happiness, without regarding human Nature, upon which every moral Conclusion must depend.

And he went on to imply that he was unique in making human nature his principal study.*© In the Abstract the complaint is qualified: the ancient philosophers ‘who treated of human nature, have shewn more of a delicacy of sentiment, a just sense of morals, or a greatness of soul, than a depth of

reasoning and reflection’, and they did not create ‘a regular science’. Hume’s aim, in contrast, is to see if the science of man can be made as accurate as natural philosophy.*’ But elsewhere he suggested that however deficient the ancients were in natural philosophy, in moral they assuredly

outshone the moderns. In one of the memoranda he observed, “The Moderns have not treated Morals so well as the Antients merely from their Reasoning turn, which carry’d them away from Sentiment.’*® This point

of view is put more forcibly in the second Enquiry, where the ancient moralists are called ‘the best models’: in the concluding ‘Dialogue’ Hume’s first-person spokesman wonders at his opponent Palamedes accusing the

ancients of ignorance in the science of morals, ‘the only one, in my opinion, in which they are not surpassed by the moderns’.*” This more general question of whether Hume thought that the ancients had failed to create a science of morals, of which he was now supplying the

deficiency, or had created one, on which he was now building, is complicated by the range of his attitudes to particular moralists. Shaftesbury had argued that there were essentially only two classical philosophies, the Socratic/Stoic which was civil and theistic and the Epicurean which was the contrary; scepticism was not to be considered a distinct philosophy.°° The eclectic Scottish-Shaftesburian tradition that flourished from the 1720s onwards managed to incorporate Xenophon, Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus together with Cicero into moderate Presbyterianism, but Hume took a hard look both at the classical moralists themselves and at the uses his contemporaries were making of them. His own preferences 45 Treatise, 282. 46 Letters, ed. Greig, I, 16. 47 Treatise, 645. *8 Mossner, FHI, TX (1948), 517, no. 257. Mossner observes (p. 496) that this ‘presents the very epitome of Hume’s ethical position’.

#9 Second Enquiry, 318, 330. °0 See Chapter 2 above, pp. 92, 115.

248 ) Reason, Grace, and Sentiment were arrived at for very different reasons. He informed readers of his group of four essays entitled “The Epicurean’, “The Stoic’, “Che Platonist’, and “Lhe Sceptic’ (two essays representing Shaftesburian positions flanked by two rather more Humean ones) that their intention was ‘not so much to explain accurately the sentiments of the ancient sects of philosophy, as to deliver the sentiments of sects, that naturally form themselves in the world, and entertain different ideas of human life and of happiness’.°?! The note warns the reader against treating the essays as serious historical analysis,

but at the same time suggests their contemporary relevance: indeed Hume’s Stoic looks very much a product of moral-philosophy teaching in Scottish universities. Despite their mixture of literary exercise and parody, these essays contain serious elements that Hume was to elaborate elsewhere. His Sceptic is highly critical of the ‘refined reflections’ of Stoics such as Epictetus because they are too subtle to take place in common life and cannot diminish the vicious passions without diminishing the virtuous ones at the same time. ‘It will be easy, by one glance of the eye, to find one or other of these defects in most of those philosophical reflections, so much

celebrated both in ancient and modern times.’?* This double criticism recurs in the first Enquiry: It is certain that, while we aspire to the magnanimous firmness of the philosophic sage, and endeavour to confine our pleasures altogether within our own minds, we may, at last, render our philosophy like that of Epictetus, and other Stozcs, only a more refined system of selfishness, and reason ourselves out of all virtue as well as social enjoyment.°°

Another of Hume’s repeated objections to the Stoics was that their theism (which recommended them to the Shaftesburians) was tainted by superstition. In The Natural History of Religion, Hume says he ‘can scarcely allow

the principles even of MARCUS AURELIUS, PLUTARCH, and some other Stoics and Academics, though much more refined than the pagan

superstition, to be worthy of the honourable apellation of theism’.°* Superstition undermines the moral pretensions (such as they are) of the Stoic sage:

The STOICS bestowed many magnificent and even impious epithets on their sage; that he alone was rich, free, a king, and equal to the immortal gods. ‘They >! Tn Essays, Moral and Political, 11(1742); Essays, ed. Miller, 138n. See M. A. Stewart, “The Stoic Legacy

in the Early Scottish Enlightentment’, in Osler, ed., Atoms, Pneuma, and Tranquillity (1991).

92 Essays, ed. Miller, 172-3.

°3 First Enquiry, 40. Hume treats Epictetus’ tranquillity and firmness more kindly in second Enquiry, 256, 319. The Sceptic’s criticism of the Stoic argument that ills arise from the order of the universe (Essays, ed. Miller, 173) is developed in first Enquiry, 101. 54 Natural History of Religion, in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Green and Grose (1875), II,

325; first published in Four Dissertations (1757). Instances of the credulity of Shaftesbury’s hero Xenophon (see p. 93 above) are itemised in a long note, p. 351.

The ethics of sentiment and the religious hypothesis 249 forgot to add, that he was not inferior in prudence and understanding to an old

woman ... Thus the STOICS join a philosophical enthusiasm to a religious superstition.°°

Hume’s highest praise is reserved for those ancient sceptics who reject superstition and treat morals as separate from religion: the satirist Lucian, Epicurus, and (controversially) Cicero. Horace (‘one of the best Moralists

of Antiquity’),°° Tacitus (‘the greatest and most penetrating genius, perhaps, of all antiquity’),°’ and Plutarch (‘there is scarcely, in all antiquity,

a philosopher less superstitious’)’® are also included in their number. In the Enquiries Hume points out that whereas ‘that sage emperor’ Marcus

Aurelius was deluded by the false prophet Alexander, Lucian opened men’s eyes to his impostures; however, he regrets that ‘the perpetual cant of the Stoics and Cynics concerning virtue, their magnificent professions and slender performances’, made it difficult for Lucian, ‘a very moral writer’,

to talk of virtue ‘without betraying symptoms of spleen and irony’.°” Despite this qualification, Lucian remained a favourite author: a few days before his death, to the disgust of his orthodox critics, Hume was reading Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead.

Hume’s evocation in his principal works on religion of the name of Epicurus, traditionally regarded by the orthodox as a thinly disguised atheist,°? was even more offensive. In section 11 of the first Enquzry, Hume’s first direct attack on natural religion, the sceptical friend in the dialogue impersonates Epicurus haranguing the Athenians in order to expose the deficiencies of the religious hypothesis. In The Natural History of Religion Hume tells the story of the boy Epicurus reading Hesiod’s verses on Chaos: the young scholar first betrayed his inquisitive genius, by asking, And chaos whence? But was told by his preceptor, that he must have recourse to the philosophers for a

solution of such questions. And from this hint EPICURUS left philology and all other studies, in order to betake himself to that science, whence alone he expected satisfaction with regard to these sublime subjects.

In the same work Hume refers to Lucretius exalting his master Epicurus for freeing us from the terrors of religion.®! Finally, in the Dialogues Epicurus’ ‘old questions’ about the divine attributes are said to be ‘yet 55 Natural History, in Essays, ed. Green and Grose, II, 350—51.

56 To Hutcheson, 17 September 1739, Letters, ed. Greig, I, 33. Unlike Shaftesbury, Hume regards Horace as an Epicurean; see second Enquiry, 296.

57 First Enquiry, 123. 58 ‘Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations’, Essays, ed. Miller, 463n. °9 First Enquiry, 120—1; second Enquiry, 242.

60 See Bentley’s comparison of the freethinkers with Epicurus, Chapter 1 above, p. 11. 61 Natural History, in Essays, ed. Green and Grose, I, 324, from Sextus Empiricus; 352n. Colver in his edition of Natural History (1976), 80n, quotes the relevant passage in praise of Epicurus from Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, Book I, ll. 62—79.

250 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment unanswered’.°* Hume makes it plain that in asking these unanswered and indeed unanswerable questions, he as much as Lucretius is to be considered Epicurus’ disciple.

Much the most important of these ancient sceptics for Hume was Cicero. To some extent he was following in the steps of the earlier freethinkers who had battled with their orthodox opponents over the fundamental question of whether Cicero was to be aligned with freethinking or with Christianity, but there were certain differences in his attitude.°? Hume concentrated on three main aspects of Cicero’s life and

work: as a moralist, a sceptical critic of superstition, and a tolerant pragmatist who accepted the political need for religious observance and lived amicably with men of different philosophical persuasions. In his letter to Hutcheson of 17 September 1739 on the subject of Book HI of the Treatise, Hume firmly identified himself as a Ciceronian not a Christian moralist: ‘I desire to take my Catalogue of Virtues from Cicero’s Offices, not from the Whole Duty of Man. I had, indeed, the former Book in my Eye in all my Reasonings.’ This opposition is set out more provocatively in the

second Enquiry, where (unlike the Treatise) Hume’s debt to Cicero the moralist is repeatedly advertised: I suppose, if Cicero were now alive, it would be found difficult to fetter his moral

sentiments by narrow systems; or persuade him, that no qualities were to be admitted as virtues, or acknowledged to be a part of personal merit, but what were recommended by The Whole Duty of Man.°*

Hume also often indicated his sympathy for Cicero the sceptic. In the Letter from a Gentleman this is done somewhat disingenuously: as part of his

defence that the sceptical principles of the Treatise are not threatening to religion, Hume points out that Socrates, ‘the wisest and most religious of

the Greek Philosophers’, and Cicero (whose religious credentials are assumed) ‘carried their Philosophical Doubts to the highest Degree of Scepticism’.® In his Essays he is more explicit about the implications of Cicero’s hostility to superstition: thus in ‘Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations’ Cicero is linked with Plutarch and Lucian for his freedom from superstition,°® and in the posthumously published ‘Of Suicide’ he is cited on the miserable life of the superstitious man.°®’ In a very revealing passage 62 Dialogues, 244. 63 See Chapter | above, pp. 29-31. 64 Letters, ed. Greig, I, 34; second Enquiry, 319n. For a comparison of Hume and Cicero see Jones, Hume’s Sentiments (1982). For the Whole Duty see n. 280 below.

65 Letter from a Gentleman, 20—1. He goes on to link their scepticism with that of the Fathers, the

Reformers, and the Roman Catholic French theologian Huet. Cf Cleanthes on the scepticism of the last three, Dialogues, 171.

66 See n. 58 above. 67 Essays, ed. Miller, 579. ‘Of Suicide’ was originally intended for publication in the volume which became Four Dissertations but suppressed; see Miller’s note, 577—8, and section 2 below.

The ethics of sentiment and the religious hypothesis 251 deleted from the final editions of the essay ‘Of the Rise and Progress of the

Arts and Sciences’, Hume argues that Cicero, ‘being a great sceptic in matters of religion, and unwilling to determine any thing on that head among the different sects of philosophy’, deliberately did not make himself a speaker in his dialogue De Natura Deorum, “because, forsooth, it would have been an impropriety for so great a genius as himself, had he spoke, not to have said something decisive on the subject, and have carried every

thing before him, as he always does on other occasions’. (The sardonic tone is directed at Cicero’s lack of polite deference, which Hume sees as typical of the ancients, not at his principles.)°’ Cicero is presented in these essays as both opposing superstition and deliberately refusing to commit himself on the question of whether religion 1s true or false. Hume’s most interesting and complex allusions to Cicero as both sceptic and religious observer are made in The Natural History of Religion and the work explicitly modelled on De Natura Deorum, the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion.©° In section 12 of The Natural History, the most important section for the light it sheds on Hume’s own attitudes, Cicero is portrayed

as sceptical in his character as philosopher and lawyer but apparently devout in his private life: If ever there was a nation or a time, in which the public religion lost all authority

over mankind, we might expect, that infidelity in ROME, during the CICERONIAN age, would openly have erected its throne, and that CICERO himself, in

every speech and action, would have been its most declared abettor. But it appears, that, whatever sceptical liberties that great man might take, in his writings or in philosophical conversation; he yet avoided, in the common conduct of life, the imputation of deism and profaneness. Even in his own family, and to his wife

TERENTIA, whom he highly trusted, he was willing to appear a devout religionist.

The same CICERO, who affected, in his own family, to appear a devout religionist, makes no scruple, in a public court of judicature, of treating the doctrine of a future state as a most ridiculous fable.’°

Although from the perspective of an eighteenth-century freethinker there are some oddities in this situation (Cicero’s modern equivalent would feel obliged to appear a devout religionist in public but would have no qualms about ridiculing the doctrine of a future state in private), the important

point to which Hume draws attention here is the combination in one person of the sceptical liberties of the philosopher with the apparent religious observance of the common man. In De Natura Deorum the 68 Essays, ed. Miller, 623, n. h; 128-9. 69 See C. Battersby, “The Dialogues as Original Imitation’, in Norton ¢é¢ al., eds., McGill Hume Studies 1979).

70 Nana FMistory, in Essays, ed. Green and Grose, I, 347, 351-2.

252 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment character representing this position is Cotta the Academic, both sceptic

and priest, who in Book III attacks the rational account of religion provided by Balbus the Stoic but at the same time defends observance of the state religion on the authority of tradition. Interestingly, in The Natural EMistory Hume sees Cotta’s role as essentially destructive:

Though some parts of the national religion hung loose upon the minds of men, other parts adhered more closely to them: And it was the chief business of the sceptical philosophers to show, that there was no more foundation for one than for the other. This is the artifice of GOTTA in the dialogues concerning the nature of the gods.”'

In Hume’s own Dialogues, the role of Cotta is taken by the sceptic Philo (the name of the Academic philosopher who taught Cicero) and that of Balbus

by the defender of natural religion, Cleanthes (the name of the Stoic philosopher who succeeded Zeno, the founder of Stoicism).’* The third party to the dialogues, Cicero’s Velle1us the Epicurean, is replaced by the orthodox Demea, who somewhat unconvincingly combines the positions of rationalist and mystic.’’ Velleius at the end of Cicero’s dialogues sides with Cotta; Hume’s Philo is both Academic and Epicurean. Cicero as silent observer, who cautiously concludes that Balbus’ argument approximates more closely to the truth than Cotta’s, is replaced by Cleanthes’

pupil Pamphilus, who thinks Philo’s principles more probable than Demea’s, but those of Cleanthes nearer to the truth.’* The question of Hume’s intentions in the Dialogues will be considered in sections 2 and 3

below; here, it is worth noting that what he prized in Cicero as a philosopher of religion was a combination of scepticism, caution, and tolerance. Cicero provided a model of how the sceptic might live in a superstitious pagan society, allowing the national religion to hang loosely

on his mind, unperturbed by and indeed delighting in friendly philosophical disagreements. The difficulty lay in trying to apply this model to a Christian society in the mid-eighteenth century. In two very interesting statements made in the 1750s Hume argued for

its contemporary application. In a letter of 15 March 1753 to the anonymous author (James Balfour) of the recently published A Delineation of the Nature and Obligation of Morality, a criticism of the second Enquiry, Hume after thanking him for his civilities continued: Our connexion with each other, as men of letters, is greater than our difference as adhering to different sects or systems. Let us revive the happy times, when Atticus 71 Natural History, in Essays, ed. Green and Grose, II, 352. 72 The views of Philo and Cleanthes are discussed in De Natura Deorum, e.g. I, vii, xiv; U, v; III, vii. 73 Prince, Philosophical Dialogue (1996), 140—1, suggests that Hume took the name Demea from a

minor character in Berkeley’s Alciphron representing Christian anti-rationalism. See also Berkeley, Alciphron in Focus, ed. Berman (1995), Introduction, 5. 74 De Natura Deorum (Loeb), 382-3; Dialogues, 282.

The ethics of sentiment and the religious hypothesis 253 and Cassius the Epicureans, Cicero the Academic, and Brutus the Stoic, could, all of them, live in unreserved friendship together, and were insensible to all those

distinctions, except so far as they furnished agreeable matter to discourse and conversation. ’°

In 1757 Hume dedicated Four Dissertations to his friend the moderate Presbyterian minister and playwright John Home, who was in danger of being disciplined by the Edinburgh Presbytery for his tragedy Douglas.’® The dedication, addressed by a sceptic to a minister, good friends despite the differences in their speculative tenets, was intended as an attempt to revive ancient liberty of thought, which engaged men of letters, however different in their abstract opinions, to maintain a mutual friendship and regard; and never to quarrel about principles, while they agreed in inclinations and manners. Science was often the subject of disputation, never of animosity. Cicero, an academic, addressed his philosophical treatises, sometimes to Brutus, a stoic; sometimes to Afticus, an epicurean.’/

But Hume was well aware that amicable disputes between members of different philosophical sects were not comparable to fundamental disagreements between freethinkers and Christians or between members of different Christian denominations. His attempts to replicate the friendship between

Cicero, Brutus, and Atticus were severely constrained. From his own embarrassing experience he knew that the relationship between philosophy and religion was very different in the ancient and modern worlds. At the opening of section |1 of the first Enguzry, the first-person narrator contrasts the freedom of philosophy in the ancient world with the ‘harsh winds of calumny and persecution’ which now blow on her. His Epicurean friend explains that ‘speculative dogmas of religion, the present occasions of such furious dispute,’ did not exist in the ancient world; ancient religion

consisted ‘of such tales chiefly as were the objects of traditional belief, more than of argument or disputation’. Ancient philosophers were therefore able to live ‘in great harmony with the established superstition’.’® When Hume published the first version of these words in 1748, he had recently failed to find a way of living in this kind of harmony. In 1744—5

he was a candidate for the Chair of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh University.’? According to new university regulations of 1734, the holder 2 Letters, ed. Greig, I, 172-3.

76 For the Douglas affair and the difficulties caused by the dedication see Hume to Millar, 20 January 1757, and to Mure, February 1757, Letters, ed. Greig, 1, 239-40, 242—3; Mossner, Hume, Chapter 26; Sher, Church and University (1985), 74—92.

17 Essays, ed. Green and Grose, II, 439. 78 First Enquiry, 132-3. In Philosophical Essays, 207, ‘superstition’ is plural. The revised singular makes the allusion to the established Church more obvious. 79 See Sher, ‘Professors of Virtue: the Social History of the Edinburgh Moral Philosophy Chair in the Eighteenth Century’, in Stewart, ed., Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment, 103-8; R. L.

Emerson, “The “Affair” at Edinburgh and the “Project” at Glasgow: the Politics of Hume’s

254 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment of this Chair was required to teach ‘the Pneumaticks, that is, the being and perfections of the one true God, the nature of Angels and the Soul of man, with the duties of natural religion to which rational Creatures are bound

towards the Supreme being’, moral philosophy, and ‘the truth of the Christian religion’. Further, ‘If any book from which he shall teach shall contain any thing contrary to the Scriptures or the [Westminster] Confession of faith or good manners, he shall confute the Same to prevent the youth’s being corrupted with errour or immorality.’°° It is certainly the case that much of the moral philosophy teaching of the Scottish Shaftesburians was contrary to the Westminster Confession, and all the Presbyterian moderates had to make some kind of accommodation between their official and their actual beliefs. The position for Hume was much more extreme. He regarded the speculative dogmas of religion as untenable because they implied ‘express absurdity and demonstrative contradiction’, but was prepared to allow the traditional tales of the national religion to hang loosely on his mind.®! He might just have found it possible to teach the Christian religion in a Ciceronian way. A letter written twenty years later to a freethinking friend, James Edmonstoune, on the dilemma faced by a clergyman of Humean views, indicates the kind of dissimulation he would have practised: It is putting too great a Respect on the Vulgar, and on their Superstitions, to pique one’self on Sincerity with regard to them. Did ever one make it a point of Honour

to speak Truth to Children or Madmen? If the thing were worth being treated

gravely, I shoud tell him, that the Pythian Oracle, with the approbation of Xenophon, advisd every one to worship the Gods vou tdAews.** I wish it were still in my Power to be a Hypocrite in this particular: The common Duties of Society usually require it; and the ecclesiastical Profession only adds a little more to an innocent Dissimulation or rather Simulation, without which it is impossible to pass thro the World.®°

Since Scottish undergraduates were little more than children, Hume would have felt no obligation to speak truth to them, and the interests of society would have justified his professional hypocrisy. It is, however, difficult to see how this approach would have enabled him to teach what were considered to be the demonstrable tenets of natural religion. He was Attempts to become a Professor’, in Stewart and Wright, eds., Hume and Hume’s Connexions, 1-23; and especially Stewart, The Kirk and the Infidel (1994). 80 Quoted by Sher in Stewart, ed., Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment, 99—100.

8! Natural History, in Essays, ed. Green and Grose, II, 352.

82 According to the law of the city, or (in contemporary parlance) by law established. Paley, Evidences of Christianity, 2nd edn (1794), 30n, 34, 76-7, objected strongly to this aspect of paganism: Plato, Xenophon, Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus, all ‘allowed, or rather enjoined, men to worship the gods of the country, and in the established form’. 83 New Letters, 83; also in Letters, ed. Greig, I, 439. For Edmonstoune’s account of the clergyman

see II, 353-4.

The ethics of sentiment and the religious hypothesis 2995 not to be given the opportunity. The Treatise (which Hume mistakenly thought he had rendered inoffensive to clerics) had done the damage. His appointment was blocked for several reasons, among them (to his surprise) the opposition of Hutcheson and Leechman in Glasgow and of Principal Wishart, himself a candidate for the Chair, in Edinburgh.?* Hume was to experience a similar failure with the Chair of Logic in Glasgow in 1751-2, vacant after Adam Smith moved from the Logic to the Moral Philosophy Chair on the death of Hutcheson’s immediate successor. By this date, after

the publication of the explicitly anti-religious Philosophical Essays, the outcome was no surprise to Hume. Smith’s comment in a letter to one of Hume’s backers, William Cullen, Professor of Medicine at Glasgow, made

the difficulty plain: ‘I should prefer David Hume to any man for a colleague; but I am afraid the public would not be of my opinion; and the interest of the society will oblige us to have some regard to the opinion of the public.’®°

Hume’s Ciceronian attitude to the established superstition was not enough to make him acceptable as a university teacher of religion and ethics, but it did not hinder him from being given public appointments in three capitals in the course of his career, including Librarian of the Faculty

of Advocates in Edinburgh (1752-7), Secretary to the Ambassador to Paris, Lord Hertford, who was known for his piety (1763-6), and Under-

Secretary of State for the Northern Department in London, where his duties ironically included exercising patronage in the Church of Scotland (1767-—9).°° He was also the recipient of a substantial pension from George

III.?’ With the increasing notoriety and commercial success in the 1750s and 60s of his philosophical works and especially his History of England (1754-62), Hume was internationally famous as a man of letters, reviled by his orthodox opponents, detached in his religious, moral, and political

views from his contemporaries in Scotland, contemptuous of the barbarism, superstition, and ignorance of the English, seduced by the adulation of the French, vain of his reputation and independence,”® yet happy to 84 See the letter of 4 August 1744 to Mure complaining that Hutcheson and Leechman deemed him unfit for the office, Letters, ed. Greig, I, 57-8. Hume had ridiculed Leechman’s The Nature of Prayer (1743), one of the most popular single works of the Foulis Press (Gaskell, Foulis Press, 18),

in a letter to Mure of 30 June 1743, New Letters, 10-14. He wrote Letter from a Gentleman in response to Wishart’s charge of scepticism and atheism; see letter to Kames of 13-15 June 1745, New Letters, 14—15. He protested his innocence and hoped for favour ‘if we really live in a

Country of Freedom, where Informers and Inquisitors are so deservedly held in universal Detestation, where Liberty, at least of Philosophy, is so highly valu’d and esteem’d’, Letter to a Gentleman, 34.

85 Letters, ed. Greig, I, 163; Smith, Correspondence (1987), ed. Mossner and Ross, 5, Ross, Life of Smith (1995), 112-13. 86 Mossner, Hume, 249-54; 434—8; 534, 537-40. 87 Letters, ed. Greig, I, 517n; Mossner, Hume, 438, 494, 555. 88 See e.g. to Elliot, 22 September 1764, Letters, ed. Greig, I, 470; to Blair, 6 April 1765, 498; to

256 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment retire to Edinburgh in the intervals of public office to a life of philosophic ease among his moderate Presbyterian friends. Hume had a small number of friends with whom he could joke freely about priests, superstition, and bigotry, the physician John Clephane, the army officer James Edmonstoune, and the MP William Mure. In response to Leland’s attack on him in Principal Deistical Writers he announced to Edmonstoune that he would ‘proceed directly to attack the Lord’s Prayer & the ten Commandments & the single Cat[echism]; and to recommend Suicide & Adultery: And so persist, till it shall please the Lord to take me to himself.’°? His friendships with the moderate clergy and other supporters of religion, revealed or natural, were more complicated.”? His most interesting older clerical friend was the mathematician Robert Wallace,

who, like the other moderates, opposed the attempt made in 1755-6 by orthodox members of the General Assembly to excommunicate him for infidelity, but deplored his attack in ‘Of National Characters’ (included in Essays, Moral and Political in 1748) on the clerical profession. Wallace thanked Hume in the appropriate spirit for a copy of the second Enquiry: ‘I

can be finely entertained with an ingenious vain of Thinking tho very

different from my own & much out of the common road (the more uncommon perhaps the greater entertainment, if one 1s not a bigott & can

make proper allowances to a philosophical genius)’, to which Hume replied: ‘Why cannot all the World entertain different Opinions about any Subject, as amicably as we do?’’! His younger clerical friends included Hugh Blair, Professor of Rhetoric at Edinburgh, who arranged for Hume

to read in manuscript some important attacks on his religious and philosophical scepticism by the Aberdeen philosophers George Campbell and Thomas Reid (Smith’s successor at Glasgow).?* Hume specified the

bounds to what was clearly an affectionate relationship, warning Blair c.1761 not to attempt to discuss religion with him: ‘I have, long since, done with all inquiries on such subjects, and am become incapable of instruction; tho I own no one is more capable of conveying it than yourself.’?? In his last illness Hume joked to John Home about the consolatory spiritual assistance he could expect from Blair, Wiliam Robertson the historian, Smith, 5 November 1765, 521; to Walpole, 20 November 1766, H, 111; to Gibbon, 18 March 1776, 310; to Percy, 16 January 1773, New Letters, 199.

89 29 September 1757, New Letters, 43. See also to Clephane, 18 February 1751, 4 February 1752, 1 September 1754, Letters, ed. Greig, I, 150, 164—7, 189; to Edmonstoune (n. 83 above); to Mure (n. 84 above). 90 Sher, Church and Uniwersity, provides a full account of the moderates. See also Mossner, Hume, Chapter 21. 3! New Letters, 15—16n; 29 September 1751, 30; Mossner, Hume, 159, 260—1, 265.

92 [1761], 25 February 1763, Letters, ed. Greig, I, 348-51, 375-8; Mossner, Hume, 292—4, 298-9; Reid, Jnquiry into the Human Mind, ed. Brookes, 256ff. 93 Letters, ed. Greig, I, 351.

The ethics of sentiment and the religious hypothesis 257 and his other friends among the moderate ministers.?* In his will he left copies of his writings to Blair, Adam Smith, John Home, and Edmonstoune, ‘all of them Persons all very dear to me’.”°

Hume’s intriguing friendship with the moderates, combining affection

with caution and irony, is In some ways exemplified by that between Philo and Cleanthes: in Part 12 of the Dzalogues Philo tells Cleanthes that he lives with him ‘in unreserved intimacy’, as a prelude to a long speech

of dissimulation which has caused much confusion among modern readers.?° But Hume’s friends, and not only his clerical ones, regretted that his own dissimulation was too careless. In terms of the impact and

interpretation of his writings on ethics and religion Hume’s most important friendships were with Kames and Smith, two thinkers who both borrowed from his work and sought to distance themselves from it,

and who regretted for different reasons his willingness to make his

sceptical view of religion public. Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696-1782), judge, legal and literary theorist, cultural historian, and moralist, was a strong supporter of Hume during the period when he was launching the Treatise and the Essays, Moral and Political and making a bid

for the Edinburgh Chair; Kames tried to help him by publishing the apologetic Letter from a Gentleman, and Hume at this stage regarded him as his best friend.?’ But Kames disliked Hume’s argument against miracles,

which Hume had sent him in 1737, and their friendship cooled after Hume ignored Kames’s advice and published the Philosophical Essays, to which the noble parts cut off from the Treatise were restored. Hume told Kames frankly: ‘I won’t justify the prudence of this step, any other way than by expressing my indifference about all the consequences that may follow.’?? In his Principles of Morality and Natural Religion (1751, revised

1758 and 1779) Kames criticises Shaftesbury, Clarke, Hutcheson, and Hume (with reference to both the Treatise and the Philosophical Essays) from a Butlerian perspective for failing to give an adequate account of moral obligation; Hume is further taken to task for his account of justice

as an artificial virtue and for his inconsistent treatment of utility.?9 Ironically, in view of the increasing intellectual differences between them,

Hume and Kames were the joint targets of the unsuccessful attempt at excommunication referred to above, against which Blair is thought to 94 12 April 1776, Letters, ed. Greig, I, 315. 95 Mossner, Hume, 599. Mure, his ‘oldest and best friend’, died a few months before him, New Letters, 312, 314.

96 Dialogues, 264—6. 97 Ross, Kames, Chapter 5; 13-15 June 1745, New Letters, 14—17. 98 2 December 1737, New Letters, 2; 9 February 1748, Letters, ed. Greig, I, 111; Ross, Kames, 86.

99 Kames, Principles of Morality, 3rd edn (1779), Part I, Essay 3, Chapters 3, 6, 9 (the numbering

differs from the Ist edn). Like Hutcheson, Butler, and Grove, as a young man Kames corresponded with Clarke on metaphysical problems; Tytler, Memoirs of Kames (1807), I, Appendix 2; Ross, Kames, 61-2.

258 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment have been one of their chief defenders.!°? One of Kames’s objects in the Principles of Morality and his late work Sketches of the History of Man (1774)

was to show that the source of human knowledge of the deity is sense, not reason, and that morality and natural religion are closely linked because they are apprehended in the same way. Hume’s writings against religion were an obvious target. In the Principles of Morality Kames tried to

demolish the argument put by ‘Epicurus’ against the benevolence of the deity in Essay 11 of Hume’s Philosophical Essays,‘°! and in the History of Man he offered a historical account of the progress of theology that was clearly intended to replace Hume’s Natural History of Religion.'°* He added

an indignant passage to the third edition of the Principles of Morality objecting that in the Dialogues Hume had ignored his arguments in this work and the History of Man: “Uhese books are in the hands of every one,

and could not have been unknown to Mr Hume.’ He could not believe

that Hume thought them trifling. ‘May I not then suspect him of an artifice, not uncommon, That if an argument cannot be answered, to say nothing about it.’ Nevertheless, Kames summed up their relationship in

terms Hume would have approved: ‘Whatever prejudice I may have against the doctrines of the [second] Enquiry, my conscience acquits me of any prejudice against the author. Our friendship was sincere while he lived, without ever a difference, except in matters of opinion.”!°°

. The Dialogues that offended Kames’s beliefs and his vanity proved a stumbling block to Smith as well, though of a different kind. The most original heir of Scottish Shaftesburianism, Adam Smith (1723-90) modified his heritage in important ways yet retained its essential feature, the belief that the human nature in which morality has its origin is divinely constituted. As a student at Glasgow (1737-40) he was taught pneumatics and moral philosophy by ‘the never to be forgotten’ Hutcheson,!°* who exercised a considerable influence on his own moral theory. He then spent six years at Balliol College, Oxford as a Snell Exhibitioner, ostensibly for

the purpose of training to be an episcopalian minister.!°° Smith was notoriously critical of the education he received at Oxford, and in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), his most

famous work, he devoted part of the section entitled ‘Of the Expence of the Institutions for the Education of Youth’ to comparing the idleness of 100 See Mossner, Hume, Chapter 25, Ross, Kames, Chapter 8, Sher, Church and University, 65-74. Kames was attacked for his account of necessity in Essay 3, which will not be considered here. 101 3rd edn (1779), Part II, Essay 8. Kames continued to use Hume’s old title for the first Enquiry, 102 Flistory of Man, 2nd edn (1778), IV, Part II, Sketch 3.

103 (1779), 367-9, 149. The Dialogues were published in the same year. Ross, Kames, 110, sees Kames as a possible springboard for Cleanthes. 104 ‘The phrase is Smith’s, in Correspondence, ed. Mossner and Ross, 309. See Ross, Smith, Chapter 4.

105 Ross, Smith, 59.

The ethics of sentiment and the religious hypothesis 259 salaried college tutors whose students were tied to them with the vigour of

Scottish professors whose voluntary students paid them fees.!°° He attributed the problems and anachronisms of the modern curriculum to the fact that universities were in origin ecclesiastical corporations for the education of churchmen. The ancient Greek division of philosophy into physics or natural philosophy, ethics or moral philosophy, and logic, a division ‘perfectly agreeable to the nature of things’, was corrupted so that

philosophy became subservient to theology, metaphysics or pneumatics were set in opposition to physics, and moral philosophy, by far the most important branch, had its function inverted and ceased to be concerned

with the happiness of this life. In the curriculum subsisting in most universities to the present time pneumatology, ‘the doctrine concerning the nature of the human soul and of the Deity’, was followed by ‘a debased system of moral philosophy, which was considered as immediately con-

nected with the doctrines of Pneumatology, with the immortality of the

human soul, and with the rewards and punishments which, from the justice of the Deity, were to be expected in a life to come’. Most of the modern improvements in philosophy had not been made in universities. The best endowed universities (Oxford is obviously intended) had been the

slowest to adopt the improvements, which were more easily introduced

into poorer universities (such as Glasgow), ‘in which the teachers, depending upon their reputation for the greater part of their subsistence,

were obliged to pay more attention to the current opinions of the world’. !°7

Smith energetically put into practice his views on the need for the teaching of modern improvements in philosophy. Turning his back on the episcopalian Church, he gave public lectures in the city of Edinburgh for a

period of three years (1748-51), partly through Kames’s patronage, on rhetoric and belles lettres, history of philosophy, and law (including politics and economics).!° Owing to the success of these lectures, in 1751 he was elected Professor of Logic at Glasgow, and the following year Professor of

Moral Philosophy, resigning his post in 1764 to travel in France. At Glasgow he adapted the logic course to include rhetoric, and, developing and modifying Hutcheson’s system of moral philosophy, taught natural theology, ethics, jurisprudence, and the principles of political prosperity.'°°

From the second and fourth parts of these lectures respectively he developed his major works, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759, with five subsequent editions) and The Wealth of Nations. ‘The least important part of 106 Wealth of Nations, ed. Campbell and Skinner (1976), II, 758-64.

107 Wealth of Nations, I, 765-73. 108 Ross, Kames, 91—4, Smith, Chapters 6—7. 109 Ross, Smith, Chapter 8. The topics of Smith’s moral philosophy lectures were described to Dugald Stewart by John Millar: Stewart, Memoirs of Smith, 12—16; Smith, Moral Sentiments, ed.

Raphael and Macfie, Introduction, 1-2.

260 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment his course was natural theology; he deliberately reversed what seemed to

him the false dependence of moral philosophy on the doctrines of pneumatology, and made the pursuit of happiness public and private in this life central to his teaching.

But this does not mean that Smith shared Hume’s view that theology has nothing to do with ethics and that the religious hypothesis can tell us nothing about human life beyond what is already known by experience. Smith soon came under Hume’s influence: they probably met c. 1750, and by 1752 were corresponding as good friends; Smith’s post as travelling tutor in France and Switzerland (1764—6) was arranged by Hume. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments Hume is complimented as ‘an ingenious and agreeable philosopher, who joins the greatest depth of thought to the greatest elegance of expression, and possesses the singular and happy talent of treating the abstrusest subjects not only with the most perfect

perspicuity, but with the most lively eloquence’.!!° But despite their common interests, in ethics, political, social, and economic thought, the ancients, and the French philosophes, and despite their shared hostility to what they saw as the stifling influence of the churches on the development

of modern philosophy, there were important intellectual differences between them. As a moralist Smith was eclectic: he associated himself with

Hutcheson, Kames, and Hume in founding morality in sentiment, with Hutcheson’s rationalist critics in disputing the existence of the moral sense,

with Hume in making sympathy the origin of moral sentiment, with Shaftesbury, Butler, and Kames in developing the role of the impartial spectator, with Kames in criticising Hume’s account of utility.''! Nevertheless, though he was ambivalent in his attitudes to his teacher Hutcheson

and contemptuous of Hutcheson’s hero Shaftesbury,'!* Smith remained recognisably a Stoic moralist in the Shaftesburian mould, not least in the

manner in which he treated religion. ‘Towards the end of his life he became increasingly critical of Christian doctrine and Christian virtues, which he attacked explicitly in the sixth edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1790), but, just as Shaftesbury argued that the thought of living

in a distracted universe would impair natural affection, so Smith claimed that the universal benevolence that we feel for all beings can be the source of no solid happiness to any man who is not thoroughly convinced that all the inhabitants of the universe ... are under the immediate care and protection of that great, benevolent, and all-wise Being, who directs all

the movements of nature; and who is determined, by his own unalterable 110 Ross, Smith, 113—14, 195; Scott, Smith, 64; Stewart, Smith, 11; Moral Sentiments, 179.

111 See below, pp. 303-6. On the relation between the views of Hutcheson, Kames, Hume, and Smith see Ross, Smith, 161 ff.

112 See Chapter 2 above, n.283.

The ethics of sentiment and the religious hypothesis 261 perfections, to maintain in it, at all times, the greatest possible quantity of happiness. ‘To this universal benevolence, on the contrary, the very suspicion of a fatherless world, must be the most melancholy of all reflections. . .

Smith cites neither Shaftesbury nor Hutcheson in this late distillation of their thought; instead he turns to its ultimate source, Marcus Aurelius.''? When at the end of his life Hume made a will asking Smith to arrange for the publication of his Dialogues after his death, he presented him with a painful dilemma.!!* Smith evidently made his reluctance plain. Though Hume thought Smith’s scruples groundless, he charged him instead with the publication of his autobiographical essay, ‘My Own Life’, asking for it

to be prefixed to future editions of his work, and he altered the will, leaving the manuscript to his publisher William Strahan, with the proviso that it should fall to his nephew David to publish the book if Strahan did

not do so.'!° Smith presumably did not wish to be responsible for publishing the Dialogues partly because he thought it might damage his own position (this is the implication of Hume’s first letter of 3 May 1776),

and partly because he did not wish to associate himself with Hume’s sceptical view of natural religion, which was largely at odds with his own. Nevertheless, in accordance with Hume’s account of scepticism though not with his own stoicism as expressed in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith

accepted in his judgement of Hume the man that his speculations had nothing to do with practice. With his friend’s permission,'!® he added to Hume’s autobiography his own account of Hume’s behaviour during his last illness, together with his considered verdict on his character. ‘These were published first in the form of a separate pamphlet, The Life of David Hume, Esq. Written by Himself and Letter from Adam Smith, LL.D. to William

Strahan, Esq. (1777), and then included in subsequent editions of Hume’s

works. The Letter to Strahan candidly presents Hume as the bantering freethinker, reading Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead in his last days, engaging in an imaginary dialogue with Charon to avoid stepping into his boat: ‘I have been endeavouring to open the eyes of the Public. If I live a few years longer, I may have the satisfaction of seeing the downfal of some of the prevailing systems of superstition.’ But Charon would then lose all temper and decency. “You loitering rogue, that will not happen these many hundred years. . .’.'"” 113 ‘Of universal Benevolence’, Moral Sentiments, 235-7.

114 This story has often been told: see Dialogues, ed. Kemp Smith, Appendix C; Letters, ed. Greig, II, Appendix M; Mossner, Hume, Chapters 39-40; Ross, Smith, Chapter 17, 338-41. 115 "To Smith, 3 May 1776 (two letters); to Strahan, 8 June 1776; to Smith, 15 August 1776; Letters, ed. Greig, II, 316—18, 323-4, 334. 116 To Smith, 23 August 1776, Letters, ed. Greig, II, 336. Hume died two days later.

117 To Strahan, 9 November 1776, Correspondence, ed. Mossner and Ross, 219. In a letter to Alexander Wedderburn, 14 August 1776, Smith approved of Hume dying ‘with more real resignation to the necessary course of things, than any Whining Christian ever dyed with pretended resignation to the will of God’. He here reported Hume’s words to Charon as more

262 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment Did Smith remember that in the first Enquiry Hume contrasts Lucian the opener of the eyes of mankind with the deluded Marcus Aurelius?!!® In

the final paragraph he shifts tone markedly, differentiatng Hume’s philosophical opinions, which will be judged variously, from his character

and conduct, over which ‘there can scarce be a difference of opinion’. Smith emphasises Hume’s balanced temper, combining frugality with charity, gentleness with firmness, pleasantry with modesty, harmless gaiety

with depth of thought. The letter ends with the transformation of Hume from Lucianic railer to Socratic hero: ‘Upon the whole, I have always considered him, both in his lifetime and since his death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit.’!!9

Smith, who was apprehensive about the reception of the as yet unpublished Dialogues, was clearly unprepared for the shock felt by contemporary readers of the Letter to Strahan. But it was precisely the separation of speculation from practice underlined in Smith’s account that had always proved intolerable to Hume’s orthodox critics. ‘Twenty-five years earlier Hume told Gilbert Elliot that he agreed with the thinking of the ancients that those who professed philosophy, of whatever sect, atheists and Epicureans as much as Stoics and Platonists, were equally regular in their lives and manners and unlikely to be corrupted, whereas a modern zealot would have thought the corruption of the former unavoidable.'?°

Modern ‘zealots’ did not necessarily think Hume’s life and manners corrupted, but they certainly thought them corrupting. ‘To Warburton the defence that Hume was a good man was irrelevant in the face of the public damage caused by his writings. He wrote to Hurd in 1757 on the subject of Hume’s Natural History of Religion (and used almost identical terms in a letter to Hume’s publisher Millar): “They say this man has several moral qualities. It may be so. But there are vices of the mind as well as body: and

a wickeder heart, and more determined to do public mischief, I think I never knew.’!?! Lord Lyttelton made the point more subtly in a letter to

the Aberdeen moralist and literary critic James Beattie, praising his notorious attack on Humean and other scepticisms, An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth (1770), in which Beattie complained: “His philoacerbic: ‘I have been endeavouring to open the eyes of people; have a little patience only till I have the pleasure of seeing the churches shut up, and the Clergy sent about their business’, Correspondence, 203—4. See Ross, Smith, 298—9.

118 First Enquiry, 120—1; see above, p. 249.

119 Correspondence, 220—1. Raphael points out that Smith is imitating Plato’s praise of Socrates in the last sentence of the Phaedo, Moral Sentiments, 401. Cf Leibniz on Shaftesbury’s metamorphosis from Lucian to Plato, Chapter 2 above, p. 104. 120 10 March 1751, Letters, ed. Greig, I, 154—5 (see n. 3 above). 121 7 February 1757, Letters from a Prelate (1808), 175; cf Unpublished Papers, ed. Kilvert (1841),

309-10.

The ethics of sentiment and the religious hypothesis 263 sophy hath done great harm. Its admirers, I know, are very numerous; but I have not as yet met with one person, who both admired and understood

it.'** Though apparently more generous about Hume’s qualities than Warburton or Beattie, Lyttelton argued that these very qualities brought damnation on his followers: Mr Hume, as a man, from his probity, candour, and the humanity of his manners, deserves esteem and respect; but the more authority he draws from his personal character, or from the merit of his other books, the more care should be taken to prevent the ill impressions which his sceptical writings may make on a number of

readers, who, having been used to admire him, and trust in his judgment, are disposed to let him also judge for them in these points, where the being misled must be fatal.!7°

Among his many objections to modern scepticism in the Essay on Truth, Beattie took particular exception to Socrates and Cicero being annexed to

the sceptic cause: ‘the reasonings, the sentiments, and the conduct, of Socrates, are altogether incompatible with universal scepticism’.'** These

and similar arguments were rehearsed by George Horne, President of Magdalen College, Oxford, in his Letter to Adam Smith (1777). For the intellectual content, such as it is, of his attack on Hume’s scepticism in the Treatise and Enquiries he relied heavily on Beattie’s Essay on Truth, quoting from it without naming it on the assumption that it was widely known and

approved,'*° but Horne had no intention of examining Hume’s philosophical principles seriously. He was particularly angry at Smith’s account of

Hume’s imaginary conversation with Charon and his characterisation of his friend as wise and virtuous. He was not deceived by Smith’s muffled reference to ‘the prevailing systems of superstition’: “We all know, Sir, what

the word SUPERSTITION denotes, in Mr. HUME?’s vocabulary, and against what Religion his shafts are levelled, under that name.’ Horne

responded partly by ridiculing the Stoic Smith, portraying him as delighting in destruction: surely, he who can reflect, with complacency, on a friend thus misemploying his

talents in his life, and then amusing himself with LUCIAN, WHIST, and CHARON, at his death, may smile over BABYLON in ruins; esteem the earthquake, which destroyed LISBON, an agreeable occurrence; and congratulate the hardened PHAROAH, on his overthrow in the Red sea . . . Would we know the 122° Essay on Truth, Introduction, 12. 123 6 October 1770, W. Forbes, Life and Writings of Beattie (1806), I, 178-9. 124 Essay on Truth, 237 (my italics).

125 Letter to Smith (1777), 18-24, 39-46; compare Essay on Truth, Part I, Chapter 3, ‘Consequences of Metaphysical Scepticism’, 499ff, and Chapter 2, ‘Causes of the degeneracy of Moral Science’, 455ff. Horne’s debt to Beattie was identified by Academicus (presumably Horne himself) in Gentleman’s Magazine, XLVI (1777), 256; cf 325. For Beattie’s gratitude to Horne for endorsing his view of Hume see W. Forbes, Beatte, II, 101-2.

264 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment baneful and pestilential influences of false philosophy on the human heart? We need only contemplate them in this most deplorable instance of Mr. HUME.

But he also offered a moving counter example, the holy life and death of the sixteenth-century theologian Richard Hooker.'*° He would have found the defence of Hume that Blair made to Beattie in response to his Essay on Truth a pusillanimous abrogation of clerical responsibility:

I have not altogether those formidable Views which you entertain of the consequences of Scepticism. It may prove dangerous to be sure, and it is right to combat it: the Ballance should always be kept hanging in the right side; but a little fluctuation, now and then, to the sceptical side, tends perhaps to humble the Pride of Understanding, and to check biggotry; and the consequences as to practice, I am enclined to think, are not very great.'*’

For the orthodox, philosophical scepticism was inherently evil, and the orthodox response to the problem of virtuous scepticism was straightforward: the more apparently virtuous the sceptic, the more likely he was to ensnare his readers into accepting his arguments unthinkingly, and the

more important it became to demolish them. For the moderate, the position was more complex: although scepticism was intellectually erroneous and the expression of sceptical views was often regrettable, sceptical speculation, as the sceptic himself contended and as his own life might illustrate, did not have practical implications. Virtuous practice was to be judged on its own merits. Further (though this argument was rarely pushed very far), the sceptic, whether virtuous or not, might have a beneficial influence on proponents of opposing systems by making them rethink and strengthen their own positions. But the moderates, as the orthodox feared, by arguing in this way were implicitly accepting the sceptic’s separation of ethics from religion and thereby weakening the theist cause.

2 Prudence and raillery Throughout his career as philosopher, historian, and man of letters, Hume was exercised by the question of prudence. This had a double aspect: what form and style should he adopt in order to reach and influence as wide an audience as possible without weakening the force of his arguments?!*® How much caution and self-censorship should he exercise, how far should 126 Letter to Smith, 9-12, 29-36. Horne was criticised in Monthly Review, LVI (1777), 403, for mingling serious and ludicrous arguments. For another attack on Smith’s encomium, which

contrasts Hume’s character with that of the late seventeenth-century unitarian ‘Thomas Firmin, see ‘Towers, Essay on Johnson (1786), 111—13, quoted by Priestley, Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever, 2nd edn (1787), Works, ed. Rutt, [IV (1818), 411 and n.

127 Quoted in Mossner, Hume, 580. 128 See Box, Suasive Art of Hume (1990), for a thorough account of this aspect of the Treatise, Essays, and Enquiries.

The ethics of sentiment and the religious hypothesis 265 he veil his arguments in irony and equivocation to avoid making his work too offensive to be read or published? He soon came to see that in writing

the Treatise he had unduly neglected the first aspect of the question, admitting to Kames a few months after publication of the first two volumes in 1739 that ‘My Fondness for what I imagin’d new Discoveries made me overlook all common Rules of Prudence’.'*” Looking back in ‘My Own Life’, he claimed always to have attributed its lack of success — ‘It fell deadborn from the Press’ — to the manner not the matter.'*° In the Abstract (1740),

designed to render the Treatise ‘more intelligible to ordinary capacities’, he acknowledged that it had been found obscure and difficult to understand, probably because of the length as much as the argument. He pointed out

the paradox that he had submitted his work to the judgement of the learned even though his philosophy was more closely related to common modes of thought: ‘’Zis Ais misfortune, that he cannot make an appeal to the people, who in all matters of common reason and eloquence are found so infallible a tribunal. He must be judg’d by the FEW, whose verdict 1s more apt to be corrupted by

partiality and prejudice’ .‘°' This lament chimes with the statement in Book I that there are three levels of opinion, of the vulgar, of the false philosophy,

and of the true, and that ‘the true philosophy approaches nearer to the sentiments of the vulgar, than to those of a mistaken knowledge’. In the Advertisement to Volume III, published in the same year as the Abstract, he vainly hoped that this volume might be understood by ordinary readers.'*?

On several occasions he expressed his regret at having published the Treatise.'°° At the end of his life, as a summary way of dealing with its critics, Beattie in particular, he wrote an Advertisement to be prefixed to future editions of Essays and Treatises (the collective name he gave his mature philosophical works): he here dismissed the Treatise as an unacknowledged juvenile work and asked that only his collected works be regarded ‘as containing his philosophical sentiments and principles’ .‘°*

Hume originally resisted Hutcheson’s criticism of Book HI of the Treatise, ‘that there wants a certain Warmth in the Cause of Virtue’: his answer was that one might consider the mind ‘either as an Anatomist or as

a Painter; either to discover its most secret Springs & Principles or to describe the Grace & Beauty of its Actions’. But just as an anatomist could give good advice to a painter, so could a metaphysician to a moralist, ‘tho’ I cannot easily conceive these two Characters united in the same Work’. Nevertheless he went on to say that he would try ‘to make the Moralist & 129 4 June 1739, New Letters, 5. 130 Letters, ed. Greig, I, 2—3. 131 Tyeatise, 643—4. 132 Treatise, 222—3, facing p. 455; cf 216. 133 Letter from a Gentleman, 33; to Elliot, [1751], to [ John Stewart], [1754], Letters, ed. Greig, I, 158,

187.

134 To Strahan, 26 October 1775, Letters, ed. Greig, II, 301-2; Enquiries, ed. Selby-Bigge and Nidditch, 2.

266 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment Metaphysician agree a little better’.'°? The metaphor of the anatomist recurs in each book of the Treatise and in the Abstract: in Book I Hume describes the activity in which he is engaged as ‘the accurate anatomy of human nature’ and in Book II as the anatomy of the mind; at the end of Book III, restating his answer to Hutcheson more strongly, he insists both

on the differences between the anatomist and the painter and on the indispensability of the former to the latter. The anatomist ought never to emulate the painter: nor in his accurate dissections and portraitures of the smaller parts of the human body, pretend to give his figures any graceful and engaging attitude or expression ... An anatomist, however, 1s admirably fitted to give advice to a painter; and ’tis even impracticable to excel in

the latter art, without the assistance of the formér. We must have an exact knowledge of the parts, their situation and connexion, before we can design with any elegance or correctness. And thus the most abstract speculations concerning human nature, however cold and unentertaining, become subservient to practical morality; and may render this latter science more correct in its precepts, and more persuasive in its exhortations.'%°

In thus proudly drawing attention to the coldness and inelegance of his abstract investigations into human nature in the last words of his book, Hume was firmly distancing himself from two traditions: the tradition of

affectionate practical religion associated in both England and Scotland with dissenters and revivalists of various denominations, for whom warmth was a key term,!*’’ and the Shaftesburian tradition, in which philosophy was to be freed from the tedium of colleges and cells and provided with an alluring dress to ensnare its fashionable opponents in the polite world. With some dextrous excisions the two had been brought

together by the Scottish Shaftesburians. In his reply to Hutcheson’s implied request for more warmth, Hume skilfully suggested that this would violate a principal Shaftesburian criterion: ‘Any warm Sentiments

of Morals, I am afraid, wou’d have the Air of Declamation amidst abstract Reasonings, & wou’d be esteem’d contrary to good Taste.’'%® Public indifference to the Treatise caused him to rethink his manner of approaching his potential readers and his rejection of fashionable models: although he never attempted to make himself into the kind of practical moralist that Hutcheson would have approved, he became increasingly

concerned with the problem of bringing together the learned and the | conversible worlds, the anatomist and the painter, the abstruse and the easy philosophy. From the learned form of the treatise he turned to the polite essay, describing his persona in ‘Of Essay-Writing’ as ‘a Kind of Resident or Ambassador from the Dominions of Learning to those of 135 'To Hutcheson, 17 September 1739, Letters, ed. Greig, I, 32-3. 136 Treatise, 263, 325—6, 620—1, 646. 137 See RGS, I, Chapters 3 and 4, esp. 175-6. 138 Tetters, ed. Greig, I, 33. Cf Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, I, 70.

The ethics of sentiment and the religious hypothesis 267 Conversation’.'°” The success of the two volumes of Essays, Moral and Political (1741—2), which he reshaped, enlarged and revised for the rest of his life, collecting them in 1758 under the title Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary,'*° persuaded him that this was the appropriate form in which to

cast the Treatise anew.'*! Book I, ‘Of the Understanding’, was recast as Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understanding (1748, renamed An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding in 1758), Book II, ‘Of the Passions’,

as the second of Four Dissertations (1757), and Book II, ‘Of Morals’, as An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751). Hume thought the Philoso-

phical Essays contained everything of consequence relating to the understanding in the Treatise: ‘By shortening & simplifying the Questions, I

really render them much more complete’; he also thought the book ‘better illustrated & exprest’.'** He consistently valued the second Enquiry

above the rest of his work: ‘the most tolerable of anything I have composd’; “my favorite Performance, tho’ the other [the first Enquiry] has

made more Noise’; ‘of all my writings, historical, philosophical, or literary, incomparably the best’.'*° In the two Enquiries Hume tried to establish a new relationship between

abstract and practical, or abstruse and easy philosophy, and to give a different emphasis to the metaphor of the anatomist and the painter which

in the letter to Hutcheson and the conclusion of the Treatise had been turned so much to the anatomist’s advantage. In the Treatise ‘abstruse’ is usually a term that he uses positively but defensively, as he does in the essay “Of Commerce’ (1752), which begins by contrasting shallow with abstruse thinkers, the most rare, useful and valuable.'** In the Introduction to the Treatise, Hume berates the reader for his assumed prejudice against abstruse argument: For if truth be at all within the reach of human capacity, ’tis certain it must lie very

deep and abstruse; and to hope we shall arrive at it without pains, while the greatest geniuses have failed with the utmost pains, must certainly be esteemed

suficiently vain and presumptuous. I pretend to no such advantage in the philosophy I am going to unfold, and would esteem it a strong presumption against it, were it so very easy and obvious. '39 Essays, ed. Miller, 535. This lightweight essay, which echoes the opening of The Moralists as well as Addison’s Spectator no. 10 (ed. Bond [1965], I, 44), appeared in the 1742 volume only. For Hume’s literary objectives in the Essays see Box, Chapter 3.

'40 For the details of Hume’s additions, excisions, and rearrangements see Miller’s Foreword to Essays. He withdrew some of his early essays because they were frivolous: to Erskine, 13 February 1748; to Smith, 24 September 1752; Letters, ed. Greig, I, 112, 168. ‘41 Hume uses the phrase ‘cast . . . anew’ in the Advertisement repudiating the Treatise, Enquiries, 2, and ‘My Own Life’, Letters, ed. Greig, I, 3. 142 To Elliot [1751]; to [John Stewart] [1754]; Letters, ed. Greig, I, 158, 187. 143 To Lord Hailes, 3 May 1753; to Abbé Le Blanc, 5 November 1755; ‘My Own Life’; Letters, ed. Greig, I, 175, 227, 4. 44 Essays, ed. Miller, 253.

268 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment The same tone (which resembles Butler’s in the Preface to /fteen Sermons) recurs at the beginning of Book III: despite his awareness of the difficulty of convincing the reader by a long chain of abstruse reasoning, he embarks on the investigation of morals, encouraged by the fact that this is a subject that interests us above all others. ‘Without this advantage I never should have ventur’d upon a third volume of such abstruse philosophy, in an age,

wherein the greatest part of men seem agreed to convert reading into an

amusement, and to reject every thing that requires any considerable degree of attention to be comprehended.’!*” By abstruse Hume primarily

means difficult, making demands on the reader, rather than obscure, impossible to fathom. He shared the frustration Butler expressed in his Preface: ‘general criticisms concerning obscurity. . . may be nothing more at the bottom than complaints, that everything is not to be understood with the same ease, that some things are’. And he would have sympathised with Secker’s comment on his attempt to make Butler’s Sermons more lucid: ‘I took much Pains in making his meaning easier to be apprehended. Yet they were called obscure. But Dr Clarke said rightly, that they were only hard, like Euclid.’!*°

However, in the Treatise Hume does sometimes use abstruse to mean obscure and impossible to fathom, as when he says in Book I that ‘there is no question in philosophy more abstruse than that concerning identity, and the nature of the uniting principle, which constitutes a person’.'*7 This is a meaning that is developed in the first Enguzry In the carefully constructed opening section Hume distinguishes the features of the easy and the abstruse philosophy, with the object of showing what is only touched on at the end of the Treatise, the subserviency of the abstruse to the easy and of the anatomist to the painter, and the uses of the abstruse both negative and positive. He summarises the differences as follows. The easy and obvious philosophy is concerned with action and sentiment, the accurate, abstruse, and profound with reasoning and original principles; the first reforms the conduct, whereas the second has little influence on it. The easy enters into common life, the abstruse 1s unintelligible to common readers. ‘The easy philosopher — for example Cicero, La Bruyére, Addison — adheres to the common sense of mankind and achieves durable fame, the abstruse — Aristotle, Malebranche, Locke — 1s much more likely to make

mistakes in his reasoning and to be forgotten. Compositions of the easy style are agreeable as well as instructive, whereas the researches of the abstruse philosopher involve him in melancholy and uncertainty, and his works are coldly received (a clear reference to the fate of the Treatise).‘*®

At this point Hume, who has seemed to favour the easy philosophy, 145 Treatise, xiv—xv, 455-6.

'46 Butler, Works, ed. Bernard, I, 3; Secker, Autobiography, ed. Macauley and Greaves (1988), f. 10.

147 Treatise, 189. 148 “Of the different Species of Philosophy’, first Enquiry, 5—9.

The ethics of sentiment and the religious hypothesis 269 changes tack, and mounts a defence of the abstruse, ‘or what is commonly called metaphysics’. Far from being detached and useless, it is subservient to (i.e. essential to the proper functioning of) the easy philosophy. ‘All polite letters are nothing but pictures of human life’, and in order to succeed the artist needs ‘an accurate knowledge of the internal fabric, the operations of the understanding, the workings of the passions, and the various species of sentiments which distinguish vice from virtue’ (the subjects of the three books of the Treatise and the three works into which it was recast), just as without the help of the anatomist the painter cannot delineate accurately the inward structure of the body. It is not only the easy philosophy that is useful and agreeable: the accuracy of the abstruse kind is useful to law and government, and its very difficulty is pleasing to its practitioners. Hume here reaches the last and most important part of his argument in this-first section, the consideration of the negative and positive functions of abstruse

philosophy. There are two ways in which metaphysics is false, when it supports either the vain pretensions of the understanding or the craft of superstition. But it is only by using the tools of abstruse philosophy for negative purposes that we can prevent ourselves from being imposed on by its abusers and establish the limits of what can be known: The only method of freeing learning, at once, from these abstruse questions, is to

enquire seriously into the nature of human understanding, and show, from an exact analysis of its powers and capacity, that it is by no means fitted for such remote and abstruse subjects. We must submit to this fatigue, in order to live at ease ever after: And must cultivate true metaphysics with some care, in order to destroy the false and adulterate . . . Accurate and just reasoning. . . is alone able to subvert that abstruse philosophy and metaphysical jargon, which, being mixed

up with popular superstition, renders it in a manner impenetrable to careless reasoners, and gives it the air of science and wisdom. !*9

In addition to this crucially important negative function, it is only through positive use of the abstruse philosophy that the economy of the mind can

be explored. In his final paragraph Hume returns to the problem of the common distaste for the abstruse and his own attempt, by means of ‘care and art’ and the avoidance of unnecessary detail, to make his abstruse reasonings seem easy: ‘Happy, if we can unite the boundaries of the different species of philosophy, by reconciling profound enquiry with clearness, and truth with novelty!’ This apparently simple and prudent aim is immediately followed by a much more dangerous one: ‘And still more

happy, if, reasoning in this easy manner, we can undermine the founda- , 143 First Enquiry, 9-13. The emphasis on the limits of the understanding resembles Locke’s in the Introduction to the Essay, ed. Nidditch, 44—5, but for Hume Locke represents the false use of the abstruse. Contrast Shaftesbury’s different reasons for rejecting metaphysical speculation in Chapter 2 above, p. 117.

270 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment tions of an abstruse philosophy, which seems to have hitherto served only as a shelter to superstition, and a cover to absurdity and error!’!°° It was Hume’s success in combining the abstruse with the easy for the purpose of demolishing the support given by false abstruse reasoning to superstition that gave his recast works the audience that the Treatise had failed to achieve, even though much of this audience was hostile. His easy

manner in the two Enquiries implied a number of forms and devices, including personification (such as Nature’s crucial myunction to the abstruse philosopher, “Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be

still a man’, or virtue’s assurance that her sole purpose is to make her votaries happy),'?! allegory (for example the brief but chilling narrative of popular superstitions as robbers hiding in the forest, lying in wait to break in on the mind),!°* dialogue (ranging from brief debates with hypothetical interlocutors to the sustained dialogues between the first-person speaker and his sceptical opponents, ‘Epicurus’ and Palamedes),'°* concessions or apologies to readers with no taste for the abstract,'°* portraits of exemplary figures (such as Cleanthes, the model of perfect virtue),!°° and literary

examples and illustrations from a wide range of ancient and modern authors, few of whom figure in the Treatise. Ease also required important

changes in length and structure. Thus in the second Hnqury Hume relegated crucial parts of the argument to footnotes or postponed them to

appendices in order to avoid ‘intricate speculations ... unfit for moral discourses’ .!°®

Hume’s ‘care and art’ came to mean an almost obsessive concern for revision and correction, as he himself recognised in the imaginary dialogue

with Charon reported by Adam Smith. It is Hume’s first excuse for not entering the boat: ‘Good Charon, I have been correcting my works for a new edition. Allow me a little time, that I may see how the Public receives the alterations.’ But Charon

150 First Enquiry, 13-16. 151 First Enguiry, 9, second Enquiry, 279. 152 First Enquiry, 11.

153 First Enquiry, 38, second Enquiry, 288-89; first Enquiry, section 11, second Enquiry, ‘A Dialogue’. 154 First Enquiry, 47, second Enquiry, 317n.

195 Second Enquiry, 269-70; cf the equivalent passage in Treatise, 606, where the same point is made without the accompanying portrait. 156 Second Enquiry, 285. See e.g. 219-20n, on the impossibility of finding the origin of the principle of fellow-feeling. Hume increased the number of appendices from two to four: the

1751 edition had two appendices, I ‘Concerning Moral Sentiment’, II ‘Some farther Considerations with regard to Justice’; in the 1764 edition section 6.1 became Appendix HI, ‘Of some verbal Disputes’, and in the 1777 edition section 2.1 became Appendix II, ‘Of Selflove’, with II and III renumbered as III and IV. See Jessop, Bibliography of Hume (1938). For Hume’s instructions to Strahan on Appendix II, ‘Of Self-love’, see 30 July 1776, Letters, ed. Greig, II, 329-30. As a result of this alteration, the last sentence of the note on p. 298 of this Appendix has ever since failed to make sense.

The ethics of sentiment and the religious hypothesis 271 would answer, ‘When you have seen the effect of these, you will be for making other alterations. There will be no end of such excuses. . .”!°’

Hume brought together the two Enquines and his essays under the general title Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects in four volumes from 1753 to 1756. With the publication of The Natural History of Religion and Of the Passions in. Four Dissertations (1757), he put into print all his philosophical works (with the exception of the suppressed essays ‘Of Suicide’ and “Of the Immortality of the Soul’ and the withheld Dialogues). ‘The Four Dissertations were then added to Essays and Treatises in 1758 (the philosophical disserta-

tions to the treatises and the literary ones to the essays), and Hume brought out seven more editions of this collection, the last posthumously published edition (1777) containing the corrections that failed to impress Charon. He asked Strahan to make a handsome French Cicero the model

for the 1768 edition, hoping ‘to rival Cicero in Garb and Accoutrements’.!°® In sending Strahan a corrected copy of his philosophical pieces in 1771 he told him (wrongly) that he was unlikely to correct it again, and

that it was probably ‘more labour’d than any other production in our Language’, adding that the chief advantage of printing was the power it gave ‘of continually improving and correcting our Works in successive Editions’; he further hoped to bring his History of England ‘to the same degree of Accuracy’.!°? Two months before his death he told Strahan he was satisfied he had made his work ‘extremely correct’ and could not improve it further (though the dialogue with Charon suggests otherwise): This is some small Satisfaction to me in my present Situation; and I may add that it is almost the only one that my Writings ever afforded me: For as to any suitable

Returns of Approbation from the Public, for the Care, Accuracy, Labour, Disinterestedness, and Courage of my Compositions, they are yet to come.'°°

Hume probably remembered the words of the Advertisement to the first volume of the Treatise, “The approbation of the public I consider as the greatest reward of my labours’. This late assertion that his public had disregarded his

painstaking attempts over many years to reconcile ‘profound enquiry with clearness, and truth with novelty’ is unduly pessimistic (understandably so in view of his discovery that his illness was incurable), and it contradicts his claim in ‘My Own Life’ that ‘my Love of literary Fame, my ruling Passion,

never soured my humour, nothwithstanding my frequent Disappointments’.'©! What is significant here is the list of qualities that have failed to '57 ‘To Strahan, 9 November 1776, Smith, Correspondence, ed. Mossner and Ross, 219. 158 [March 1767], Letters, ed. Greig, II, 127. 159 95 March 1771, Letters, ed. Greig, I, 239. This edition of Essays and Treatises appeared in 1772. 160 8 June 1776, Letters, ed. Greig, II, 322. Hume’s last correction, to the second Enquiry, was made on 12 August 1776, II, 331; he died on 25 August. 161 First Enquiry, 16; Letters, ed. Greig, I, 7.

272 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment meet public approval: literary and scholarly virtues are conjoined with moral ones, care with courage.

Although in adopting the easy manner Hume was prudent in the first sense identified at the beginning of this section, finding an appropriate form and style for his audience, at the same time he became increasingly imprudent in the second, causing offence to that audience and putting himself in the position of having to suppress material or withhold it from publication. Care and courage did not prove to be compatible. Initially Hume was deliberately uncourageous. He called his own decision to render the first two books of the Treatise inoffensive ‘a Piece of Cowardice’,

and he reluctantly accepted Hutcheson’s advice to alter passages in the third book that were ‘defective in Point of Prudence’, though he thought Hutcheson too delicate in this case: Except a Man be in Orders, or be immediatly concern’d in the Instruction of Youth, I do not think his Character depends upon his philosophical Speculations, as the World 1s now model’d; & a little Liberty seems requisite to bring into the public Notice a Book that is calculated for so few Readers.

As a result of his prudence, he did not think the clergy would find ‘any great Matter of Offence’ in the third volume.!°?

At the same time as he adopted the prudent, because popular, form of the essay, Hume abandoned the prudence with regard to argument and

subject that Hutcheson and Kames had urged him to observe. In the Advertisement to the first volume of the Treatise he had announced his intention of proceeding ‘to the examination of morals, politics, and criticism’;

the first was covered in Book III, the second and third in the essays, and the second also in the Astory. In the course of his political analyses in the

early essays of 1741-2, especially ‘Whether the British Government inclines more to Absolute Monarchy or to a Republic’, ‘Of Parties in General’, ‘Of the Parties of Great Britain’, Of Superstition and Enthusiasm’, and ‘Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences’, he mounted explicit attacks on bigotry, superstition, priestly power, and the reliance of monarchy on priests, culminating in the diatribe on the clerical | character in ‘Of National Characters’ (1748).'°° In the Philosophical Essays

(1748) he turned his attention to the undermining of both natural and revealed religion, making explicit what he had hitherto only hinted at. 162 New Letters, 3, quoted above, p. 243; Letters, ed. Greig, I, 34, 36. Note that Hume here defends the exercise of ‘liberty’ on rhetorical grounds: it would bring him a wider audience. This was the motive of which John Brown was to accuse him in attacking the first volume of the History. The separation of character from philosophical speculations is precisely Smith’s point in the Letter to Strahan. Despite Hume’s excisions there is still matter to cause clerical offence in the Treatise, e.g. 1, 99-100, 101, 115, 264; TIT, 515-16, 524—5, 609. Several but not all of these references concern Roman Catholicism. 163 Essays, ed. Miller, e.g. 51, 59, 61-3, 65-7, 75, 617, 126, 199—201n, 608.

The ethics of sentiment and the religious hypothesis 273 Essays 10, ‘Of Miracles’ (shown to Kames in an early version in 1737),'°* and 11, ‘Of the Practical Consequences of Natural Religion’ (renamed ‘Of

a particular Providence and of a future State’ in 1750), unsurprisingly provoked widespread clerical hostility over the years: two notable early examples are the churchman William Adams’s Essay on Mr. Hume’s Essay on Miracles (1752) and the dissenter John Leland’s Principal Detstical Writers, (1755). The blatantly non-religious ethics of the second Enquiry (1751) and

especially ‘A Dialogue’ appended to it were the target of Balfour’s Delineation of the Nature and Obligation of Moralty (1753); Hume was grateful

for the moderation of Balfour’s criticism, very different in tone though not in substance from Beattie’s intemperate attack on the same work for the same reasons in the Essay on Truth (1770).

Hume’s next act of courage or imprudence was the inclusion at the beginning of Volume I of The History of Great Britain (1754) of a long passage on the ‘Character of the puritans’, stressing the fanaticism and enthusiasm of

the sixteenth-century reformers, and another on the ‘Character of the catholics’, suggesting that the conduct of the reformers had had the effect of exacerbating Roman Catholic superstition and stifling the development of

learning and philosophy; he also included a number of shorter passages criticising all denominations from the perspective of philosophical scepticism.'®° These passages caused much offence. In Letters on Mr Hume’s Mistory of Great Britain (1756) the Presbyterian minister Daniel MacQueen spelt out at length the sceptical implications of Hume’s attack on the first

reformers and praise of pre-Reformation Italy. Hume was initially confident that he had judged his tone carefully; shortly before publication but after some sheets had circulated he told his freethinking friend Clephane, who was evidently anxious on this point, that there was no occasion for the imputation of imprudence in the first volume: A few Christians only (and but a few) think I speak like a Libertine in religion: be assured I am tolerably reserved on this head . . . | composed it ad populum as well

as ad clerum, and thought, that scepticism was not in its place in an historical production. !°©°

The volume’s reception taught him his mistake.'®’ ‘I shall give no farther

Umbrage to the Godly’, he assured his publisher Millar, though he thought the main objections to the book were political rather than religious.'°° He admitted to Clephane that ‘whatever I have said of 164 Letters, ed. Greig, I, 24; see the account of the origin of the argument against miracles, I, 361. 165° History of Great Britain, I (1754), 7-8, 25—7; see below, pp. 315-16. For shorter passages see e.g.

40, 63-4, 330, 453-4. Hume first used the title History of England for the two Tudor volumes 1759).

166 September 1754, Letters, ed. Greig, I, 189. The last statement is not consistent with the tone of the passages listed in the previous note. 167 See ‘My Own Life’, Letters, ed. Greig, I, 4. 168 12 April 1755, Letters, ed. Greig, I, 218.

274 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment religion should have received some more softenings’.'°? He therefore included a long footnote at the end of the second volume claiming disingenuously that as a historian he was concerned only with the abuse, not the proper use, of religion: The historian .. . has scarce occasion to mention any other kind of religion; and he may retain the highest regard for true piety, even while he exposes all the abuses of the false. He may even think, that he cannot better show his attachment to the former than by detecting the latter, and laying open its absurdities and pernicious tendency. '’°

In the second edition of 1759 he also deleted the offending long passages on puritans and Catholics and either deleted or softened the wording of

the shorter ones.'’! These revisions were incorporated in the complete FNstory of England (1762); Hume’s final revisions, the majority stylistic rather

than substantial, appeared in the posthumous edition of 1778.

The History of Great Britain was to Warburton and his followers a provocation that could not be ignored. After reading Philosophical Essays

Warburton told Hurd he was tempted ‘to have a stroke at Hume’, particularly his argument against miracles, but he was reluctant to give Hume the advantage of adverse publicity if he were little known: ‘I should be sorry to contribute to his advancement to any place but the pillory.’’”? He was disgusted like other clerical readers at Hume’s account of religion as superstition and enthusiasm in the first volume of the History, and utterly unconvinced by his apology in the second, devoting most of Remark II of Remarks on the Natural History of Religion (1757) to exposing the contradictions

in the latter: his own Apology has reduced him to this Dilemma. If he says, he intends the definition of Religion here given [differentiating true from false religion], for the definition of the Christian, how came he to comprise all Religion, as he does in the first volume of his History, under the names of Superstition and Fanaticism? . . .

If he says, he means Natural Religion by his definition; he only fixes the charge

169 [21756], Letters, ed. Greig, I, 237.

170 Eistory of Great Britain, II (1757), 449-—50n. The note was originally intended as a preface to Volume II. For the text of the original unpublished version, in which no claim is made for true

piety, see Mossner, Hume, 306-7. Hume subsequently deleted the note from the History but used part of it in the Dialogues; see below, pp. 326—7.

171 | was first alerted to the revisions by Slater, ‘Authorship and Authority in Hume’s History of England (1990), Chapter 5. For examples of prudent alterations compare Great Bniain, I, 415, with History, ed. Todd, V, 482, where a comparison of the clergy with Druids was dropped; Great Britain, 1, 453-4, where a substantial passage on Charles [’s superstitious views of

communion was similarly deleted. Hume regularly altered ‘superstition’ to ‘religion’ or ‘ceremonies’, e.g. Great Britain, I, 75, History, ed. Todd, V, 80; Great Britain, I, 396, History, ed. Todd, V, 459. 172 98 September 1749, Letters from a Prelate, 11. Warburton’s notes on the essay on miracles are in his Unpublished Papers, ed. Kilvert (1841), 311-15.

The ethics of sentiment and the religious hypothesis 2795 against him the more strongly, namely, Irreverence and contempt of Revelation.!79

At least Warburton paid Hume the compliment of taking his analysis of the social effects of religion seriously; his former protégé John Brown alleged in his Estemate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (1757—8) that

Hume’s sole motive for larding the first volume of his History with irreligion

was to make it sell; when he discovered that it failed to do so, because infidels are not readers of large quartos and the clergy, his best customers, were offended, he issued the second volume with ‘not a Smack of Irreligion

in it’, concluding with his apology. Hume had made the mistake of assuming that the ungodly readers of the essays (presumably the Essays, Moral and Political and the Philosophical Essays), 11 which he had insulted Christianity and shaken the foundations of religion, would also want to

read the History.'’* Warburton, however, remained unpersuaded that Hume had purged his offence: on the publication of the Tudor volumes of the History (1759), he remarked to Hurd that Hume had ‘out done himself . . .in shewing his contempt of religion’.'”° For a period from the early 1740s to the mid-1750s Hume experimented with a prudential kind of imprudence: acting at the same time from selfinterest and courage, he risked offending the clergy in order both to bring

his work to public notice and to tell the truth as he saw it. In ‘My Own Life’ he suggested that causing offence helped his sales and his reputation: ‘T found by Dr Warburtons Railing that the Books were beginning to be esteemed in good Company.’!’° But a combination of clerical opposition and friendly advice forced him to retreat. The revisions to the History are

one manifestation of this process; more significant are the alterations to the work that finally became Four Dissertations and the decision not to publish the Dialogues in his lifetime. The unpublished Five Dissertations (1756), which was to have included ‘Of Suicide’ and ‘Of the Immortality of the Soul’, was suppressed by Hume (‘from my abundant Prudence’),

partly because of the danger of prosecution to his publisher Millar. Strahan did not act on Hume’s request to publish the essays after his 173 Warburton, Remarks, 23; Hume, History of Great Britain, Il, 449-50n. Remarks appeared anonymously, with a dedicatory letter to Warburton (by Hurd); in his General Preface to Warburton’s Works (1794) Hurd explained that he transcribed Warburton’s words with little alteration except for a short introduction and conclusion to colour the fiction (p. 81). See Letters from a Prelate, 1795.

174 Brown, Estimate (1757), 57-8; II (1758), 86-8; Mossner, Hume, 308. Brown provides a similar

explanation for the cold reception of Bolingbroke’s five-volume Works (1754): ‘Had they appeared under the inviting Shape of “ESSAYS philosophical and moral,” they might have come

within the Compass of a Breakfast-reading, or amused the Man of Fashion while under the Discipline of the curling Tongs: But five huge Quarto Volumes (like five coarse Dishes of Beef and

Mutton) tho’ fraught with the very Marrow of Infidelity, what puny modern Appetite could possibly set down to?’ (1757), 56—7.

175 3 March, 1759, Letters from a Prelate, 207. 176 Letters, ed. Greig, I, 3.

276 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment death; they appeared in unauthorised editions in 1777 and 1783.'7’ The published version of The Natural History of Religion, the first of the Four Dissertations (1757), was ‘somewhat amended in point of Prudence’ (as Hume told Adam Smith, who had read it in manuscript). Warburton, who had read Five Dissertations in proof, was not impressed by Hume’s revisions;

he told Millar that ‘All the good his mutilation and fitting it up for the public has done, is only to add to its other follies, that of contradiction.’ In Remarks on the Natural History of Religion he exposed Hume’s subterfuge,

pointing out that this is expected of the reader: ‘We see what the man would be at, thro’ all his disguises. And, no doubt, he would be much mortified, if we did not’.!”?

Hume had written much of the Dialogues by 1751, shortly after the second Enquiry, but he withheld the manuscript from publication out of deference to the feelings of his friends. (He teased Blair, who was very anxious that it should not see the light, that if he ever published it he would dedicate it to him.)'’? At the end of his life he explained to Strahan: I have hitherto foreborne to publish it, because I was of late desirous to live quietly, and keep remote from all Clamour: For though it be not more exceptionable than some things I had formerly published; yet you know some of these were thought very exceptionable; and in prudence, perhaps, I ought to have suppressed them. I there introduce a Sceptic, who is indeed refuted, and at last gives up the Argument, nay confesses that he was only amusing himself by all his Cavils; yet before he is silenced, he advances several ‘Topics, which will give Umbrage, and will be deemed very bold and free, as well as much out of the Gommon Road.

Having stressed the objectionable aspects of the work, Hume then went on

to urge that as Strahan had avowed his publication of the first Enquiry there was no reason why he ‘shoud have the least Scruple with regard to these Dialogues. ‘They will be much less obnoxious to the Law, and not more exposed to popular Clamour’.'®° If he were to act as printer Strahan would have nothing to fear. Hume also told the reluctant Smith, who had no wish to be associated with their publication, “On revising them (which I have not done these 15 Years) I find that nothing can be more cautiously and more artfully written.’!®!

In these late letters Hume drew attention at the same time to the deliberate offensiveness of Philo’s arguments and the artfulness with which '77 ‘To Strahan, 25 January 1772, Letters, ed. Greig, II, 252—3; Mossner, Hume, Chapter 24; Essays,

ed. Miller, 577—8n; Price, Introduction to facsimile (1992) of 1783 edn; information from M. A. Stewart. 178 Letters, ed. Greig, I, 245; Mossner, Hume, 326, 618; Natural History, in Essays, ed. Green and Grose, II, 331n, 332n; Remarks, 44. 179 'To Elliot, 12 March 1763, to Blair, 6 October 1763, New Letters, 71—3. 180 8 June 1776, Letters, ed. Greig, II, 323—4. For the posthumous publication of the Dialogues see n.114 above. 181 15 August 1776, Letters, ed. Greig, I, 334.

The ethics of sentiment and the religious hypothesis 277 he had apparently disarmed them. He tried to argue that though he had been prudent in not publishing the Dialogues (and imprudent in publishing the first Enquiry and some other works), nevertheless through his prudent

employment of the dialogue form he had succeeded in making this dangerous work safe. ‘Though Hume’s reassurances here are obviously selfinterested — at this final stage of his career he was concerned above all with ensuring the posthumous publication of the Dialogues — his emphasis on the

artfulness of his writing is important. It seems that having moved in the 1740s from the form of the treatise to that of the essay specifically in order

to reach a wider audience, he then turned to the dialogue from more complex motives.'®* The Enquiries contained two important experiments in

the form, between the first-person narrator and ‘Epicurus’ on the argument from design in ‘Of a particular Providence and of a future State’, and a similar narrator and Palamedes on the relativity of morals in ‘A Dialogue’. Despite his initial uncertainty — he told Elliot of the latter, ‘I have scarcely wrote any thing more whimsical, or whose Merit I am more diffident of’'®’ — he obviously found dialogue a valuable way of treating natural religion. Several reasons for Hume’s choice of form in the Dialogues can be suggested. He could rewrite De Natura Deorum to rescue Cicero from

his Christian readers and restore him to scepticism; he could take advantage of the popularity of The Moralists and at the same time undermine Shaftesbury’s portrait of the conversion of the sceptic Philocles by the theist Theocles; he could have revenge on Berkeley’s Alcephron, in particular the caricature of the sceptic Lysicles, some of whose arguments he puts in

Philo’s mouth; he could show the impossibility of offering convincing dogmatic statements about religion (both Shaftesbury and Berkeley in very

different ways had tried to present the triumph of dogmatism over scepticism); he could test his intellectual and social ideal of men of different

sects or systems maintaining mutual friendship and not quarrelling about principles; he could employ irony, raillery, and ridicule in the manner of earlier freethinkers, and like them equivocate about his own position and conceal himself from those readers who might be too ready to jump to conclusions. Hume discussed the genesis of the subject matter of the Dialogues and the

problems of the form in an important letter to Elliot, in which he both asked Elhot to help him strengthen the side of the argument represented by Cleanthes, ‘the Hero of the Dialogue’, and made it clear that Philo’s views had for many years been his own: ‘tis not long ago that I burn’d an old Manuscript Book, wrote before I was twenty; which contain’d, Page 182 There is an interesting contrast between Shaftesbury’s and Hume’s use of the form by M. Malherbe, ‘Hume and the Art of Dialogue’, in Stewart and Wright, eds., Hume and Hume’s Connexions. See also Prince, Philosophical Dialogue, Chapter 5.

183 10 February, 1751, Letters, ed. Greig, I, 145.

278 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment after Page, the gradual Progress of my Thoughts on that head’.!®* He went on to suggest that the best way of composing a Dialogue, wou’d be for two Persons that are of different Opinions about any Question of Importance, to write alternately the different Parts of the Discourse, & reply to each other. By this Means, that vulgar Error woud be avoided, of putting nothing but Nonsense into the Mouth of the Adversary: And at the same time, a Variety of Character & Genius being upheld, woud make the whole look more natural & unaffected.

Hume could have taken the part of Philo (which you’ll own I coud have supported naturally enough’), and Elliot that of Cleanthes.'®° Thus fairness, verisimilitude, and literary judgement as well as prudence all required that the spokesman for design be given a strong case in order to allow the sceptic a free rein. Hume was not consistent in his attitude to the use of raillery and ridicule

in philosophical argument. In a note to his historical essay ‘Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations’ he rather solemnly objected against Swift that Gulliver’s Travels could not be used by future historians: ‘It is dangerous to rely upon writers who deal in ridicule and satyr.’!®® He objected to the flippant misrepresentation of his arguments in the Treatise and Philosophical Essays by John Stewart, Professor of Natural Philosophy at

Edinburgh: ‘All raillery ought to be avoided in philosophical Argument; both because it is unphilosophical, and because it cannot but be offensive, let it be ever so gentle.’'®’ He disapproved of ad hominem controversial writing because, as he explained after reading the manuscript of Campbell’s Dissertation on Miracles, ‘it is almost impossible to preserve decency and good manners in it’.'®° This is partly why he kept to his resolution never to reply to his attackers, particularly the Warburtonians.!*° It 1s difficult to reconcile these views with the deliberate offensiveness and bad manners of some of Hume’s own writing against religion; though this was not directed at individuals, Hume knew very well that individuals would be hurt by it. His prudent revisions of the History of England and The Natural Eistory of Religion indicate his awareness that he had gone too far.

The dialogue form, however, allowed him both to offend and apparently

retract in the same work; as he told Strahan, Philo ‘at last gives up the. 184 A recently discovered ms, possibly an excised part of the Treatise, strengthens the connexion between Philo and Hume: see Stewart, ‘An Early Fragment on Evil’, in Stewart and Wright, eds., Hume and Hume’s Connexions.

185 10 March 1751, Letters, ed. Greig, I, 153-5. 186 Essays, 414n.

187 Feb. 1754], Letters, ed. Greig, I, 186. '88 ‘To Blair, [1761], Letters, ed. Greig, I, 349. Hume later thanked Campbell for his civil treatment in the published text of 1762, 7 June 1762, I, 360.

189 See ‘My Own Life’, Letters, ed. Greig, I, 3; to Millar, 20 May 1757 (re Brown), I, 250; to Strahan, [ June 1757] (re Hurd), I, 252; to Millar, 3 September 1757 (re Warburton), I, 265; to Campbell, I, 361.

The ethics of sentiment and the religious hypothesis 279 Argument, nay confesses that he was only amusing himself by all his Cavils; yet before he is silenced, he advances several ‘Topics, which will give Umbrage’.!9° It seems undeniable that there is a strong element of mischief in the Dialogues of a kind that would have appealed to Toland. As portrayed by Cleanthes’ somewhat obtuse pupil Pamphilus and Cleanthes himself, Philo appears as a characteristic early eighteenth-century free-

thinker: Pamphilus thinks that Cleanthes perceives ‘some raillery or artificial malice in the reasonings of PHILO’, that Philo proceeds “between jest and earnest’ and manifests to the last ‘his spirit of opposition, and his

censure of established opinions’; Cleanthes clearly does not credit ‘the

pious declamations of PHILO’, and at different times refers to his ‘sceptical play and wantonness’, his ‘rambling way’, and his too luxuriant

fertility of thought and invention; he further detects Philo’s ‘concealed

battery’, and the fact that throughout the dialogue Philo ‘has been amusing himself’ at the expense of his opponents.'”’ In defending the Treatise early in his career Hume had insisted that ‘a

great Distinction ought always to be made betwixt a Man’s positive and avowed Opinions, and the Inferences which it may please others to draw from them’.'%? In the Dialogues, by means of the expedient of not avowing

Philo’s opinions, he in principle made himself doubly secure from his readers’ inferences. But in practice, as he must have anticipated, the early clerical readers of the Dialogues were quick to see their way through the raillery, to compare Philo’s arguments with those expressed in the Enquiries,

to identify Philo with Hume, and to spell out Hume’s intentions. Hugh Hamilton, Dean of Armagh and subsequently Bishop of Ossory, in the long Introduction to An Attempt to Prove the Existence and Absolute Perfection of

the Supreme Unoriginated Being (1784) surveyed the arguments used hitherto

to prove the existence and attributes of God, Hume’s attacks on them, and ways in which they might be strengthened. He assumed that the Treatise

and first Enguiry had been satisfactorily refuted by Leland in Principal Deistical Writers and Beattie in the Essay on Truth, and concentrated his attention on an acute reading of the Dialogues. Hamilton observes: Two of the persons engaged in this dialogue are little more than cyphers [so much for Hume’s attempt to strengthen Cleanthes’ side of the argument]; the third who conducts and concludes the conversation, and gives the result of the whole, is much employed in recapitulating the difficulties and objections Mr. Hume, in his essays, had proposed on this subject; and therefore we are to suppose he expresses the author’s own sentiments. 190 See n.180 above. Hume here emphasises the importance of what Philo says following his

| ‘recantation’.

191 Dialogues, 162, 185, 263, 176, 190, 192, 223, 244, 262. 192 Letter from a Gentleman, 24. For John Hey’s insistence on this point see the Introduction above,

p. 6.

280 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment Though he gives up most of these objections, yet he goes on to treat the subject of natural theology with great levity through a large part of the work, and with a kind of studied inconsistency throughout the whole, running himself frequently, and without the least hesitation, into the most palpable contradictions.

Hamilton fairly sums up Hume’s ‘great artifice’ as ‘to make his readers imagine that the supreme Being must be so utterly incomprehensible to us,

that we must despair of arriving at any rational or consistent conclusion with regard to his nature and attributes’. He is concerned by the intended and likely rhetorical impact of the Dialogues:

He is a celebrated writer, and has been thought one of our most formidable opponents: it may therefore be fashionable to read, and perhaps, to admire, this work of his; especially as he is known to have set a particular value upon it, by the provision he made in his will for having it published after his decease. And though

he has written most part of this work in a manner between jest and earnest, no

doubt he expected it would have a serious effect in promoting the cause of infidelity and scepticism in which he had laboured so long. For he has here openly

inveighed against revealed religion under the title of vulgar and popular supersition, and endeavoured to remove the very foundation of natural religion by denying the probability of God’s moral attributes.'!°

Clerical critics of extremely divergent persuasions and denominations similarly interpreted Hume’s intentions in the Dialogues. ‘The evangelical

historian Joseph Milner argued that they contained the substance of Hume’s sceptical essays: notwithstanding his declaration at the close in favour of Cleanthes, the natural religionist, it is evident from the whole tenour of the book, and still more so from the entire scepticism of his former publications, that Philois [sic] is his favourite.'”*

The rational dissenter Joseph Priestley gave Hume credit for conducting the dialogue ‘ingeniously and artfully’, but objected that Philo’s antagonists are not given satisfactory replies. And when, at the last, evidently to save appearances, [Philo] relinquishes the argument, on which he had expatiated with so much triumph, it is without alleging

any suficient reason; so that his arguments are left, as no doubt the writer intended, to have their full effect on the mind of the reader. Also, though the debate seemingly closes in favour of the theist, the victory is clearly on the side of the atheist.

Priestley testifies to the popularity of the Dialogues: they are the topic of conversation in the societies frequented by the addressee of his letters, the philosophical unbeliever, and he expects them to have ‘a considerable 193° Supreme Unoriginated Being (1784), 14—19, 26, 34—5. This early criticism of the Dialogues does not

feature in Jessop, Bibliography of Hume (1938); modern readers seem to be unaware of it. . 194 Gibbon’s Account of Christianity Considered: Together with Some Strictures on Hume’s Dialogues (1781), 199.

The ethics of sentiment and the religious hypothesis 281 effect in promoting the cause of atheism’.'’? The orthodox churchman Horne (one of Priestley’s antagonists) turned Philo’s jesting against Hume in ‘A Dialogue between ‘Thomas and ‘Timothy on philosophical scepticism’ — ‘If philosophers will amuse themselves with talking nonsense, they must give us leave to amuse ourselves by laughing at it’ — but he saw clearly that

despite Philo’s disclaimers his arguments were intended to undermine belief in not only the attributes but the existence of the deity.'?°

A uniquely sympathetic clerical reader, Robert Morehead, a Scottish Episcopalian minister,'’’ wrote a remarkable continuation of Hume’s Dialogues as Dialogues on Natural and Revealed Religion (1830), in which the

older Philo, now a Christian, attempts to persuade Cleanthes of the truth of a more elaborate version of the design argument.'’® Unusually for his

time, Morehead thought that Hume’s great work was the little-read Treatise, for which he accurately projected an influential future. From this perspective he commented very interestingly on the prudential considerations which have been the subject of this section. He regretted the double bid for popularity Hume had made by breaking the Treatise into essays and infusing them with fashionable infidelity: Mr Hume would have been a greater man if he had not courted popularity by aiming at giving a smart, lively air to his opinions, when he found them neglected in the simplicity of their first dress. He ought to have let them find their own level,

as their intrinsic value was ultimately secure of being acknowledged. This unfortunate desire of present fame was, I believe, too, the cause of that strong infusion of infidelity, with respect to revealed religion, which, at the time, gave

them a zest, but 1s now generally felt as a blot upon the Essays. It was the fashionable tone of the times.!9°

This view is the exact opposite of the much more representative one expressed by Beattie: “The style of The Treatise of Human Nature is so obscure

and uninteresting, that if the author had not in his Essays republished the capital doctrines of that work in a more elegant and sprightly manner, a confutation of them would have been altogether unnecessary.’?°° The risk Hume took in giving smartness, sprightliness, and zest to his work was that his critics would focus on those aspects to which their attention had been deliberately drawn. It was disingenuous for him to complain to Blair that Campbell had denominated him an infidel writer on the basis of the ten or 195 Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever, Works, ed. Rutt, IV (1818), Letter 9, 368. 196 Letters on Infidelity (1784), Letter 4, 58-62.

197 Morehead does not feature in DNB. There is biographical information in Charles Morehead, ed., Memorials of Robert Morehead (1875).

198 The first two parts (written in 1807 according to C. Morehead, Memorials, 207) were published

anonymously in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, WI (April and May, 1818). Morehead employed Cleanthes and Philo again in The Tour of the Holy Land (1831) and Philosophical Dialogues (1845).

199 Morehead, Dialogues, n. O, 444. 200 Essay on Truth (1770), 488.

282 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment twelve pages of the essay on miracles, ‘while I have wrote so many volumes

on history, literature, politics, trade, morals, which, in that particular at least, are entirely inoffensive’.2°' The complaint suggests a refusal to recognise what he knew only too well, that for his critics religion was the foundation of all human thought and action and could not be, as it was for him, a discrete subject of philosophical investigation. ‘This was the essence of their disagreement.

3 The science of human nature Hume was the only eighteenth-century moralist responding to the Scottish Shaftesburian tradition to argue consistently for an experimental theory of morals based solely on experience and observation of human behaviour, society, and history, divorced from any attempt at religious explanation.?°" He thought his contemporaries’ search for the foundation of morals and the principles of action in the nature of the deity and his government of

the world was bound to fail. Further, this fruitless pursuit of ultimate principles and unprovable hypotheses drew attention away from and distorted the study of what could be known. At the end of Book I of the Treatise, after a long account of the melancholy he had experienced from both external and internal causes (the expected enmity of metaphysicians and theologians and his own doubts about the validity of his opinions), he indicated in a more optimistic mood where his interests lay: I cannot forbear having a curiosity to be acquainted with the principles of moral good and evil, the nature and foundation of government, and the cause of those several passions and inclinations, which actuate and govern me. I am uneasy to think I approve of one object, and disapprove of another; call one thing beautiful, and another deform’d; decide concerning truth and falshood, reason and folly, without knowing upon what principles I proceed. [am concern’d for the condition of the learned world, which lies under such a deplorable ignorance in all these particulars.

Human Nature is the only science of man; and yet has been hitherto the most neglected. "Iwill be sufficient for me, if | can bring it a little more into fashion.

In the Adstract he observed that ‘’tis at least worth while to try if the science of man will not admit of the same accuracy which several parts of natural philosophy are found susceptible of’.*°° But before Hume could embark on the science of human nature he had to show what the limits of 201 Letters, ed. Greig, I, 351.

202 For important uses of the terms experimental, experience, and observation in this context see Treatise, title page, Introduction, xvi-xix, Book I, 64, 87, 89, 139; Adstract, 646; first Enquary, 83-5, 142, 164; second Enquiry, 174—5. 203 Treatise, 270—1, 273, 645. For other references to the science of man or of human nature see Treatise, xvi, xvii, xvi; Abstract, 646; first Enquiry, 5. In the last example the science of human

The ethics of sentiment and the religious hypothesis 283 human knowledge were and why philosophy could not go beyond them. He also had to come to terms with his recognition that his novel account of the purely human basis of morals was unlikely to be accepted, and that the religious hypothesis he deemed unverifiable, together with the superstitious practices that accompanied it, were unlikely to be dislodged in the foreseeable future by his philosopical scepticism. The following account explores in turn his view of the role of the philosopher and the negative

and positive aspects of his scepticism (in Book I of the Treatise, the Appendix,?°* the Abstract, and the first Enquiry); his non-religious moral theory (in Books I and III of the Treatise and the second Enquiry); and his view of religion and its intended and actual consequences (in the Essays, the first Enquiry, The Natural History of Religion, The History of England, and the

Dialogues). The responses of friendly critics, such as Kames, Smith, and Reid, and hostile ones, such as Beattie, Milner, Horne, and Paley, show

that he was right to be pessimistic about the persuasive power of his arguments. Mitigated scepticism

The difference between the theologian or metaphysician on the one hand and the true philosopher on the other is that the former is dogmatical and presents hypotheses as certainties, whereas the latter is careful to differentiate what is demonstrable from what is only probable and thus always open to question. The temptation to pursue ‘flights of the imagination’ has led to most of the mistakes in philosophy. Modest scepticism 1s essential. Nothing is more requisite for a true philosopher, than to restrain the intemperate

desire of searching into causes, and having establish’d any doctrine upon a sufficient number of experiments, rest contented with that, when he sees a farther examination would lead him into obscure and uncertain speculations.*°°

In the wording of the Treatise, there are two kinds of operations of the understanding: comparing of ideas, and inferring of matter of fact; in that

of the first Enquiry, there are two objects of human reason or enquiry: relations of ideas, and matters of fact. The first of these operations 1s concerned only with what is intuitively or demonstratively certain, and is limited to mathematics. This perfect kind of knowledge cannot be reached with regard to any other object. Knowledge of the second kind, inferring of matter of fact, depends entirely on experience and can only be probable. It includes all the sciences concerned with particular facts, such as history, nature is synonymous with moral philosophy. See also the draft letter of 1734, Letters, ed. Greig, 16.

204 The Appendix, published with Volume III of the Treatise, clarifies part of the argument of Book I. 205 Treatise, 267, 639, 13.

284 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment and all those concerned with general facts, such as natural philosophy. All the subjects of the science of human nature which Hume identified in the Advertisement to the first volume of the Treatise as his particular concern — the understanding, passions, morals, politics, and criticism — are matters of fact. Theology only has a claim ‘so far as it is supported by experience’. There are no other objects of knowledge apart from these two categories. Much of what has hitherto passed for knowledge is therefore worthless. In the words of the provocative conclusion to the first Enquary: If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask; Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Gommit it

then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.?°°

Though the term reasoning is used of operations of the understanding concerned with both categories, it refers to two very different kinds of mental activity. There are two kinds of reasoning, demonstrative, about relations of ideas, and what Hume calls on different occasions probable or moral or experimental, about matter of fact. ‘The second 1s not strictly a process of reasoning at all but of sensation.*°’ It depends on our reasoning concerning the relation of cause and effect, which is reached only through

experience, custom, and belief. This is the central tenet of Hume’s philosophy, the basis of his theory of morals and of his unwillingness to

regard natural and revealed religion as objects of knowledge. In his account of scepticism in Book I, Part IV of the Treatise he explains: My intention . . . in displaying so carefully the arguments of that fantastic sect, 1s only to make the reader sensible of the truth of my hypothesis, that all our reasonings concerning causes and effects are derww’d from nothing but custom; and that belief 1s more properly an act of the sensitive, than of the cogitative part of our natures.?°°

Hume’s arguments concerning cause and effect, experience, custom, and belief are set out at length in Book I, Part III of the Treatise and more concisely in the Appendix, the Adstract and sections 4 and 5 of the first Enquiry. What is often called reason is really experience. The inference that we draw from cause to effect, from the constant conjunction of two objects (e.g. flame and heat, or a moving billiard ball striking a stationary one) 1s

the effect of custom, not reasoning; ‘all reasonings from experience are

founded on the supposition, that the course of nature will continue uniformly the same’. It is by custom that we suppose the future conformable to the past; it is custom, not reason, that is ‘the great guide of human life’. On this process of inference depend ‘all our reasonings in the conduct

of life’, ‘all our belief in history’ and ‘all philosophy, excepting only 206 Treatise, 463, 413, first Enquiry, 25-6, 163—5. 207 First Enquiry, 35, Treatise, 103. 208 Treatise, 183.

The ethics of sentiment and the religious hypothesis 285 geometry and arithmetic’. It is not possible to learn from an object in itself what its effects will be without experience of those effects: Adam, with perfect rational faculties but without experience, could not have inferred

the effect of a moving ball on a stationary one. Reason, unassisted by experience, can never ‘draw any inference concerning real existence and matter of fact’.2°° This theory has very important implications for Hume’s

view as to whether anything can be known about the deity and his attributes, as will be shown below. In the Abstract Hume summarises the chain of propositions from cause and effect to belief: No matter of fact can be proved but from its cause or its effect. Nothing can be known to be the cause of another but by experience. We can give no reason for extending to the future our experience in the past; but are entirely determined by custom, when we conceive an effect to follow from its usual cause. But we also believe an effect to follow, as well as conceive it. This belief joins no new idea to the conception. It only varies the manner of conceiving, and makes a difference to the feeling or sentiment. Belief, therefore, in all matters of fact arises only from custom, and is an idea conceived in a peculiar manner.*!°

Hume 1s especially exercised by the hitherto unexamined question of ‘what

the nature is of that belief, which arises from the relation of cause and effect’. Belief is not the same as the mind’s conception of something that has been demonstratively proved, where it is impossible to conceive the opposite. Nor is it the same as imagination, over which there are no limits. The operation of the mind which constitutes belief of matter of fact (this

has nothing to do with religious belief or faith) is for Hume one of the greatest mysteries of philosophy; some kind of sentiment or feeling is an essential part of it. His best definition is that ‘it is something felt by the mind, which distinguishes the ideas of the judgment from the fictions of the imagination’.7!! This is the belief we exercise constantly in common life.

Just as Hume 1s keen to differentiate the true sceptical philosopher from the false dogmatic one, so he is careful to save the sceptical philosopher from the destructive consequences of excessive scepticism by aligning his habits of thought with those of the vulgar as employed in common life.*!? This argument is developed in the Treatise (Book I, Part IV, sections 1, 2,

and 7), and section 12 of the first Enquiry Excessive or Pyrrhonian scepticism, in which there is no confidence in the human faculties or in the 209 First Enquiry, 26-30, 43-4; Abstract, Treatise, 649-52. 210 Treatise, 654. 211 Appendix to Treatise, 623, 628-29; first Enquiry, 47-9 (much of the wording is from the Appendix). 212 See above, p. 265. For some important uses of the phrases common life and common affairs of life, see Treatise, 181, 267—9, 455, first Enquiry, 81, 103, second Enguiry, 269, Dialogues, 165-6. See also Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life (1984).

286 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment possibility of even probable knowledge of the external world, is untenable for more than a short period of time and while it lasts has no beneficial influence; if Gmpossibly) Pyrrhonian principles were to prevail, human life would perish. Excessive scepticism is undermined by what Hume calls variously nature or natural instinct, and by human society: ‘nature breaks the force of all sceptical arguments in time, and keeps them from having

any considerable influence on the understanding’. ‘Philosophy wou’d render us entirely Pyrrhonian, were not nature too strong for it.*!° ‘Nor need we fear that this philosophy, while it endeavours to limit our enquiries

to common life, should ever undermine the reasonings of common life, and carry its doubts so far as to destroy all action, as well as speculation. Nature will always maintain her rights, and prevail in the end over any abstract reasoning whatsoever.’ All the operations of the mind which result

in belief of matters of fact ‘are a species of natural instincts, which no reasoning or process of the thought and understanding is able either to produce or to prevent’. “he great subverter of Pyrrhonism or the excessive principles of scepticism is action, and employment, and the occupations of common life.’*!*

But whereas Pyrrhonian scepticism causes nothing but ‘momentary amazement’,”!° mitigated or Academic scepticism, resulting from excessive scepticism corrected by common sense, may be more lasting and have

important beneficial consequences (Hume is properly cautious about making any definite claims). Mitigated scepticism is a valuable corrective to dogmatism; just reasoning should always be accompanied by a degree of doubt, caution, and modesty. Mitigated scepticism makes us limit our enquiries to subjects suited to the narrow capacity of the understanding, leaving the ‘sublime topics’ of theology and metaphysics ‘to the embellish-

ment of poets and orators, or to the arts of priests and politicians’. Philosophers who understand the tension between Pyrrhonian doubt and natural instinct will continue their researches, because they know that ‘philosophical decisions are nothing but the reflections of common life, methodized and corrected. But they will never be tempted to go beyond common life, so long as they consider the imperfections of those faculties

which they employ, their narrow reach, and their inaccurate operations.’?!©

Hume’s differentiation (implicit in the Treatise but more clearly and carefully spelt out in these terms in the first Enquiry) between excessive or Pyrrhonian scepticism, which is inherently destructive and has no social 213° Treatise, 187; Abstract, 657 (Hume here summarises his sceptical topics). Cf Treatise, 214.

214 First Enquiry, 41, 46-7, 158-60. Cf 55, Dialogues, 163. See M. F. Burnyeat, ‘Can the Skeptic live his Skepticism?’, and R. J. Fogelin, “Che Tendency of Hume’s Skepticism’, in Burnyeat, ed., The Skeptical Tradition (1983).

215 First Enquiry, 155n, 160. 216 First Enquiry, 161—2; cf 30—1, Dialogues, 165-6.

The ethics of sentiment and the religious hypothesis 287 use, and mitigated or Academic scepticism, which frees the philosopher from fruitless speculation about the unknowable ultimate springs and principles of life to concentrate his efforts on the only science of man,

human nature, was not understood by his critics; indeed, given their religious assumptions, it could not be understood. Wishart’s first charge against the Treatise was that Hume maintained ‘Universal Scepticism’, to which Hume replied that ‘Modesty... and Humility, with regard to the Operations of our natural Faculties, is the Result of Scepticosm; not an universal Doubt, which it is impossible for any Man to support, and which the first and most trivial Accident in Life must immediately disconcert and destroy.’?!’ Some of his critics triumphantly repeated his own criticisms of Pyrrhonian scepticism as though this answered him. ‘Thus Adams claimed

that the character of Hume’s philosophical writings could be given in Hume’s own words on Berkeley’s arguments: “Uhey admit of no answer, and produce no conviction: their only effect 1s to cause that momentary amazement and irresolution and confusion, which is the result of scepticism.’*!8 Although Hume had stated explicitly that sceptical arguments lead to contradiction,*'? Beattie went to great pains in the Essay on Truth ‘to show the world, that the sceptical philosophy is contradictory to itself, and destructive of genuine philosophy, as well as of religion and virtue’.*?° ‘Were it rightly understood, no confutation of it would be necessary; for it does in fact confute itself’. The conclusion of Beattie’s argument was that it would be impossible for society to exist under the influence of Hume’s opinions,. precisely the point that Hume made about Pyrrhonian scepticism.27! The great difference between Hume and his critics was that for the latter since scepticism destroyed religion it therefore destroyed morality too. Beattie wrote indignantly in a Postscript added to subsequent editions of the Essay on Truth that the scepticism he opposed was ‘totally subversive of science, morality, and religion, both natural and revealed. And this 1s the scepticism which I am blamed for having opposed with warmth and earnestness.’*** But the advantage of Hume’s destructive scepticism is that it breaks this chain of connexion. His mitigated sceptic confines himself to common life, matter of fact, experience. ‘This alone is the sphere of morals. 217 The other charges were: (2) ‘Principles leading to downright Atheism’, (3) ‘Errors concerning the very Being and Existence ofa God’, (4) ‘Errors concerning God’s being the first Cause, and prime Mover of the Universe’, (5) ‘denying the Immateriality of the Soul’, (6) ‘sapping the Foundations of Morality’ (for the last see above, pp. 241—2), Hume, Letter from a Gentleman, 17-19. 218 Essay on Mr. Hume’s Essay on Miracles (1752), 131n; cf first Enguery, 155n.

219 Treatise, 266-7. 220 Beattie to Blacklock, 9 January 1769, in W. Forbes, Beattie, I, 133. 221 Essay on Truth (1770), Introduction, 7, Part III, Chapter 3, ‘Consequences of Metaphysical Scepticism’, 495. Cf Reid, Inquiry (1764), ed. Brookes, 3—4. For Price’s criticism of Hume’s scepticism see Chapter 3 above, p. 171. 222 Essay on Truth, 6th edn (1778), 452. Cf John Gregory’s elaboration of this point to Beattie, 26 November 1771, in W. Forbes, Beattze, I, 189-90.

288 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment Personal merit

From Hume’s perspective the worst errors in modern accounts of the principles of morals are attributable to the uniting of ethics with theology. As a result philosophers, ‘or rather divines under that disguise, treating all morals on a like footing with civil laws, guarded by the sanctions of reward and punishment’, made the distinction between voluntary and involuntary actions ‘the foundation of their whole theory’.**° Because of this bias of

theological ethics, the whole nature of virtue has been misrepresented. Hume’s aim is to give an account of the principles of morals based solely

on human nature. The foundation of ethics is a question of fact, not abstract science, and can only be discovered by following the experimental method.*** The hypothesis is confirmed by a general view of the inalterable passions, principles, and operations of human nature, which remains unchanging, immutable, and uniform in all nations and ages.**° In making

this survey Hume draws to some extent on the concepts and terms of Hutcheson and the Shaftesburian tradition, but since for him there is no available evidence that human nature is divinely constituted or that God has implanted our instincts, his account, despite its superficial similarities, is fundamentally different. His key terms are sentiment, sympathy, benevolence, and humanity; he demolishes the false opposition between reason

and passion, elides the false separation between natural abilities and virtues, and redefines virtue as personal merit, or what is useful and agreeable to ourselves and to others. In doing so he finds himself, the philosophical sceptic who deplores dogmatism, in the paradoxical position of strongly defending a hypothesis of which he is convinced on the basis of experimental reasoning, while recognising that men still dispute about the

foundation of morals. This recognition leads him to question his own conviction: ‘I fall back into diffidence and scepticism, and suspect that an hypothesis, so obvious, had it been a true one, would, long ere now, have

been received by the unanimous suffrage and consent of mankind.’*° Despite this self-questioning, the fact that Hume chose to give the theory of personal merit prominence in the second Enquiry by making it simpler

and clearer in comparison with its origins in Book III of the Treatise suggests that he was sure of its truth. The second Enquiry was, after all, the

work of which he was most proud.**’ In the Treatise he pays far more attention than he does in the second Enquiry to the dispute among his contemporaries about the origin of morals in reason or in sentiment. 223 Second Enquiry, 322; cf Treatise, 609. See the account of the will of God in Chapter 3 above, section 3. 224 Second Enquiry, 174. 225 Treatise, 363, 521, 281, 620, first Engucry, 83-4.

226 Second Enquiry, 278. 227 See above, n. 143.

The ethics of sentiment and the religious hypothesis 289 Though this dispute has its place in the later work, it is there presented as

subordinate to Hume’s own argument. |

From Hume’s perspective the debate about reason and sentiment collapses when it is understood that the term reason can only strictly be used in relation to what is demonstratively certain and in a looser sense in inferring matters of fact. In the Treatise (Book H, Part II, section 3) he objects that most ancient and modern moral philosophy is founded on the opposition of reason to passion: ‘Nothing is more usual in philosophy, and even in common life, than to talk of the combat of passion and reason, to

give the preference to reason, and to assert that men are only so far virtuous as they conform themselves to its dictates.’ But this is not a philosophical way of speaking. The province of reason is not the same as

that of the will. Reason properly understood in its two methods of operating cannot be a motive to action nor oppose passion; it is a subordinate tool, not an initiating or restraining force. ‘Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.’ The term reason has been misused for what are properly calm desires, passions or affections, in contrast to violent ones.?7° ‘What is commonly, in a popular sense, called reason, and is so much recommended in moral discourses, 1s nothing but a

general and a calm passion, which takes a comprehensive and distant view ,

‘of its object, and actuates the will, without exciting any sensible emotion.’?*9 ‘Generally speaking, the violent passions have a more powerful influence on the will; tho’ ’tis often found, that the calm ones, when corroborated by reflection, and seconded by resolution, are able to controul them in their most furious movements.’*°° Following on from this

argument, Hume states in the Treatise (Book III, Part III, section 1) that moral distinctions, which influence our actions, cannot be derived from

reason, which has been shown to be incapable of doing so. Reason distinguishes between truth and falsehood (either of relations of ideas or matters of fact), not vice and virtue; all previous systems of morality which move imperceptibly from ‘is’ to ‘ought’ have failed to notice this crucial point. Morality does not consist of any relations which can be demonstrated nor of any matter of fact which can be inferred by reason.?! Although neither demonstrative nor experimental reason can be the source of a sense of morals, this does not mean that experimental reason 228 Treatise, 413—18; cf 437, 583, second Enquiry, 239. 229 Of the Passions, section 5, Four Dissertations (1757), 170. Cf Hutcheson on calm desire, Chapter 3

above, p. 213. 230 Treatise, 437-8.

231 Treatise, 457-8, 468—70. In the course of this section Hume objects to the rationalist arguments of Clarke, Wollaston, and Locke (without naming them), especially the opinion ‘that morality is susceptible of demonstration’, 463. Cf second Enquiry, Appendix I, 287-94.

290 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment has no function in the moral life. In the first section of the second Engqury, after setting out the rival views of the proponents of reason and sentiment,

Hume suggests that ‘reason and sentiment concur in almost all moral determinations and conclusions’. Though it is probably ‘some internal sense or feeling’ ‘which renders morality an active principle and constitutes virtue our happiness, and vice our misery’, nevertheless much reasoning

precedes the operation of this sentiment: ‘moral beauty... demands the assistance of our intellectual faculties, in order to give it a suitable influence

on the human mind’.?°? This argument is developed in Appendix 1, ‘Concerning Moral Sentiment’: though sentiment is the source of moral blame or approbation of qualities or actions, only reason can instruct us in their tendency; ‘this partition between the faculties of understanding and sentiment’ occurs ‘in all moral decisions’. “Thus the distinct boundaries and offices of reason and taste are easily ascertained. The former conveys ° the knowledge of truth and falsehood: the latter gives the sentiment of beauty and deformity, vice and virtue.’?°°

How does Hume define the approving and disapproving sentiment that

is the source of moral distinctions, and what is it, traditionally denomi- | nated virtue and vice, that this sentiment approves and disapproves? Interestingly, he gives the term sentiment the same weight of meaning that it has for Hutcheson’s critic Balguy; both Shaftesbury and Hutcheson use

sentiment to mean judgement or opinion.7** Hume uses a number of different terms and phrases in addition to sentiment, some of them derived

from his predecessors, some with a particular inflection of his own: impressions, instinct, inclination (the last two often prefixed by natural), impulse, feeling, sense (internal or moral),*°° sensation, propensity, propension, taste, passion, affection. ‘These terms indicate the non-rational, innate source of morals in sentiment. Hume avoided the problems faced by Hutcheson, who had tried to combine the theory of the moral sense with Lockean epistemology, by rejecting from the outset Locke’s account of knowledge and the way moral principles are acquired.*°° There are two kinds of perception of the human mind, impressions**’ and ideas; the first, which are strong and lively, consist of sensations, passions, emotions, 82 Second Enquiry, 172—3. Hume’s language and argument are indebted to both Butler and Shaftesbury here. 233 Second Enquiry, 285-6, 294.

234 For Balguy on the opposition of reason to sentiment see Chapter 3 above, p. 212; for Shaftesbury’s use of sentiment see e.g. Chapter 2 above, p. 134. 235 Hume rarely uses the phrase moral sense; it figures in the title of the Treatise, Book III, Part I, section 2, ‘Moral distinctions deriv’d from a moral sense’, also p. 588.

236 See p. 244 above. 287 Hume points out that he is using the term impression in a new sense, Treatise, 647, first Enquiry,

18. Presumably this is because there is no divine hand making the impression. Cf the metaphors of inscription and impression popular in seventeenth-century Anglican writing, RGS, I, 61—2. Cf also Shaftesbury’s use of the term impression, Chapter 2 above, p. 182.

The ethics of sentiment and the religious hypothesis 291 affections, sentiments; the second, which are fainter and weaker, are images or copies of the first kind in thinking and reasoning, memory and

imagination. ‘he distinction is ‘as evident as that betwixt feeling and thinking’. Impressions are prior to ideas; all ideas have their origin in impressions. If innate is used to mean ‘what is original or copied from no

precedent perception, then may we assert that all our impressions are innate, and our ideas not innate’. Moral distinctions have their origin not in ideas but in impressions.?°°

The following examples illustrate Hume’s often repeated statements of the role of feeling, sentiment, and taste in morals: when you pronounce any action or character to be vicious, you mean nothing, but that from the constitution of your nature you have a feeling or sentiment of blame from the contemplation of it. . . And this discovery in morals. . . is to be regarded as a considerable advancement of the speculative sciences.?°9 Morality. . . is more properly felt than judg’d of . . . ‘To have the sense of virtue, is

| nothing but to feel a satisfaction of a particular kind from the contemplation of a character.?*”

The approbation of moral qualities most certainly is not deriv’d from reason, or any comparison of ideas; but proceeds entirely from a moral taste, and from certain sentiments of pleasure or disgust, which arise upon the contemplation and view of particular qualities or characters.**!

Morals and criticism are not so properly objects of the understanding as of taste

and sentiment. Beauty, whether moral or natural, is felt, more properly than perceived.**?

the ultimate ends of human actions can never... be accounted for by reason, but recommend themselves entirely to the sentiments and affections of mankind, without any dependance on the intellectual faculties.**°

it is requisite that there should be some sentiment which it [virtue] touches, some internal taste or feeling, or whatever you please to call it, which distinguishes moral good and evil, and which embraces the one and rejects the other.?**

The terms that he uses to indicate the particular nature and tendency of this moral sentiment are sympathy, humanity, and benevolence. Sympathy receives far more attention in the Treatise than in the second Enquiry; in the

latter, benevolence, humanity, and sympathy are frequently treated as synonyms.**° Sympathy is the result of a process whereby ideas are 238 Treatise, 1, 7, Advertisement to Vol. III, facing p. 455, 456, 647-8; first Enquery, 18, 22n.

Hume’s objection in this note to misuse of the term innate should be compared with Shaftesbury, Charactersticks, I, 411 ff (see Chapter 2 above, p. 128).

239 Treatise, 469. Hume quoted this passage in his important letter to Hutcheson of 16 March 1740, asking ‘Is not this laid a little [too stro]ng?’, Letters, ed. Greig, 1, 39-40.

40 Treatise, 470-1. 241 Treatise, 581. 242 First Enquiry, 165. 243 Second Enquiry, 293. 244 Second Enquiry, 294. 245 For sympathy, see Treatise, Book II, Part I, section 11, Book III, Part III, section 1; second

292 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment converted into impressions: ‘when we sympathize with the passions and sentiments of others, these movements appear at first in our mind as mere ideas’, then ‘the ideas of the affections of others are converted into the very impressions they represent, and . . . the passions arise in conformity to the images we form of them’.**° It is ‘the chief source of moral distinctions’. ‘No quality of human nature is more remarkable, both in itself and in its consequences, than that propensity we have to sympathize with others,

and to receive by communication their inclinations and sentiments, however different from, or even contrary to our own.’**’ Sympathy includes many other sentiments: ‘no qualities are more intitled to the general good-will and approbation of mankind than beneficence and humanity, friendship and gratitude, natural affection and public spirit, or whatever proceeds from a tender sympathy with others, and a generous concern for our kind and species’. Hume assumes the sentiment of ‘general benevolence, or humanity, or sympathy’ to be ‘real, from general expertence, without any other proof’.7*® ‘To the most careless observer there

appear to be such dispositions as benevolence and generosity; such affections as love, friendship, compassion, gratitude. These sentiments have their causes, effects, objects, and operations, marked by common language and observation, and plainly distinguished from those of the selfish passions.’**9 His favourite terms are frequently linked, for example:

‘these principles of humanity and sympathy enter so deeply into all our sentiments, and have so powerful an influence, as may enable them to excite the strongest censure and applause’. “The social virtues of humanity and benevolence exert their influence immediately by a direct tendency or instinct’.?°° At times Hume seems to make benevolence the most important moral sentiment: ‘it seems undeniable, that nothing can bestow more

merit on any human creature than the sentiment of benevolence in an eminent degree’;*?! ‘the merit, ascribed to the social virtues, appears still uniform, and arises chiefly from that regard, which the natural sentiment of benevolence engages us to pay to the interests of mankind and society’; ‘the benevolent concern for others is diffused, in a greater or lesser degree, over all men, and is the same in all’.2°? The term that he seems ultimately

Enquiry, section 5.2. For benevolence, see Treatise, Book LUI, Part III, section 3; second Enguzry, section 2.

246 Treatise, 319. 247 Treatise, 618, 316; cf 363, second Enquiry, 221. 248 Second Enquiry, 178, 298n. 249 Second Enquiry, 298. Cf 228 on general language. 259 Second Enquiry, 231, 303. 251 Second Enquiry, 181. Hume’s last revision before his death was to delete after ‘undeniable’ ‘that

there is such a Sentiment in human Nature as disinterested Benevolence’ (1751 edn, p. 32); see letter to Strahan, 12 August 1776, Letters, ed. Greig, Il, 331. The meaning is not changed; Hume may have decided that he had adequately emphasised the existence of benevolence. 252 Second Enquiry, 230, 275.

The ethics of sentiment and the religious hypothesis 293 to prefer is humanity; it 1s given pride of place in the Conclusion to the second Enquiry:

The notion of morals implies some sentiment common to all mankind, which recommends the same object to general approbation, and makes every man, or most men, agree in the same opinion or decision concerning it. It also implies some sentiment, so universal and comprehensive as to extend to all mankind, and render the actions and conduct, even of the persons the most remote, an object of applause or censure, according as they agree or disagree with that rule of right which is established. These two requisite circumstances belong alone to

the sentiment of humanity here insisted on ... While the human heart is compounded of the same elements as at present, it will never be wholly indifferent to public good, nor entirely unaffected with the tendency of characters

and manners. And though this affection of humanity may not generally be esteemed so strong as vanity or ambition, yet, being common to all men, it can

alone be the foundation of morals, or of any general system of blame or praise.*°°

In his assumption that the source of morals is feeling not reason, his use of terms such as taste, sense, instinct, affection, and benevolence, and his

attempt to undo the damage caused by Locke’s attack on innate ideas, Hume’s debt to the Shaftesburian tradition is clear. He implies at one point that in his emphasis on the naturalness of the social virtues he is rehearsing hackneyed and hence ineffectual arguments: ‘such continued ostentation, of late years, has prevailed among men in active life with regard to public spirit, and among those in speculative with regard to benevolence’, that men of the world are inclined to deny the existence of these moral endowments.*°* Read superficially and selectively, the second

Enquiry can be seen as supporting some of the truisms that Anglican moralists had been advocating for nearly a hundred years, for example in

its portrait of virtue ‘in all her genuine and most engaging charms’ as contributing to the pleasure, happiness, and ‘true interest of each individual’.*°° However, the great gap between Hume and his predecessors is evident in the ways in which he illustrates his definition of personal merit

as what is useful and agreeable to ourselves and to others. Four key elements were unacceptable to contemporary readers: his distinction between the natural and the artificial virtues, his emphasis on the utility and tendency of actions, his insistence that natural abilities cannot be separated from moral virtues, and his refusal to search outside human nature for the origins of moral principles and the obligation to perform moral duties. 253 Second Enquiry, 272—3. For the Restoration latitudinarians’ use of the term humanity and Wesley’s attack on its currency see RGS, I, 77, 78, 231. This attack 1s echoed by Milner, Gibbon’s Account of Christianity, 127: “Humanity is the boast of the present day.’

294 Second Enquiry, 242. 299 Second Enquiry, 279-80; cf RGS, I, 84—7.

294 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment | Hume explains his distinction between natural and artificial virtues at length in the Treatise (Book II, Part I, sections 1 and 2, Part III, section 1) and summarises it succinctly in the Letter to a Gentleman; he presents a modified version, in which (probably in response to criticism) he is now cautious about the antithesis between natural and artificial, in the essay ‘Of the Original Contract’? (1748) and the second Enquiry (section 3, Appendix III). He tries to separate the different meanings of nature or

natural when opposed to what is miraculous, unusual, or artificial, ultimately without complete conviction — ‘all these disputes are merely verbal’.*°° The natural virtues are instinctive, whereas the artificial virtues, notably justice, ‘require, along with a natural Instinct, a certain Reflection

on the general Interests of Human Society, and a Combination with others. In the same Sense, Sucking is an Action natural to Man, and Speech is artificial.’*°’ (It should be noted that whereas for Butler reflection 1s another name for conscience, for Hume it is simply the process of experimental reasoning that assists the sentiments.) By the somewhat misleading term artificial he does not mean arbitrary: ‘In another sense of the word [natural]; as no principle of the human mind is

more natural than a sense of virtue; so no virtue is more natural than justice.’*°® The distinction between virtues which are instinctive or natural and those which are artificial, in the sense that they run counter to original

instinct and depend on reflection, is best clarified in ‘Of the Original Contract’ (though here Hume avoids the term artificial): All moral duties may be divided into two kinds. The first are those, to which men are impelled by a natural instinct or immediate propensity, which operates on them, independent of all ideas of obligation, and of all views, either to public or private utility. Of this nature are, love of children, gratitude to benefactors, pity to the unfortunate. When we reflect on the advantage, which results to society from

such humane instincts, we pay them the just tribute of moral approbation and esteem: But the person, actuated by them, feels their power and influence, antecedent to any such reflection. The second kind of moral duties are such as are not supported by any original instinct of nature, but are performed entirely from a sense of obligation, when we consider the necessities of human society, and the impossibility of supporting it, if these duties were neglected. It is thus justice or a regard to the property of others, fidelity or the observance of promises, become obligatory, and acquire an authority over mankind.?°9

The source of the esteem paid to the artificial virtues is sympathy (which,

as Hume has earlier explained, starts as an idea and becomes an impression).*°° By means of this division of the virtues Hume avoided both

the Mandevillian position that sentiments of virtue are produced entirely 256 Treatise, 474, second Enquiry, 307—8n. 257 Letter to a Gentleman, 31.

258 Treatise, 484. 259 Essays, ed. Miller, 479-80. 260 Treatise, 577.

The ethics of sentiment and the religious hypothesis 295 by the artifice of politicians,?°! and Hutcheson’s absurd multiplication of internal senses, including the public sense,?°* but it confused several of his critics. In the conclusion to Book III of the Treatise Hume argues strongly for the superiority of his theory of sympathy over that which resolves ‘the

sense of morals into original instincts of the human mind’ (he is here replying to Hutcheson). His treatment of the artificial virtues strengthens the point. “Tho” justice be artificial, the sense of its morality is natural. "Tis

the combination of men, in a system of conduct, which renders any act of justice beneficial to society. But when once it has that tendency, we naturally

approve of it; and if we did not so, ’tis impossible any combination or convention cou’d ever produce that sentiment.’*°°

Hume’s distinction between natural virtues, which are instinctive and operate without regard to consequences, and artificial virtues, which do

not arise from instinct but result from reflection on the beneficial tendency of actions and are then approved by the moral sentiment of sympathy, seems to have been worked out prior to his fourfold definition of personal merit, though they are clearly related. According to Hume’s account of the origin of moral distinctions at the beginning of Book III of the Treatise, we approve of qualities that cause us pleasure or satisfaction

and disapprove of those that cause us pain or uneasiness, and we denominate the former virtues and the latter vices. (Hume originally refers to actions, sentiments, or characters as the objects of our approbation or disapprobation, but later argues that only qualities or characters

are durable enough.)*°* Towards the end of Book III he reaches the account of the four sources of moral distinctions with his claim that moral sentiments arise either from the ‘appearance of characters and passions, or from reflexions on their tendency to the happiness of mankind, and of particular persons’. ‘The outlines of the four sources of morals then become clear: ‘the distinction of vice and virtue arises from the four principles of the advantage and of the pleasure of the person himself,

and of others’.*°° In the second Enquiry he brings the fourfold definition under the general heading of personal merit, a phrase he does not use in

the Treatise. At the end of the first section he explains that his object, ‘following the experimental method’, is to ‘analyse that complication of mental qualities, which form what, in common life, we call Personal Merit, ... and thence to reach the foundation of ethics, and find those universal principles, from which all censure or approbation is ultimately derived’.*°° In the Conclusion Hume is satisfied that he has proved ‘that personal Merit consists altogether in the possession of mental qualities, 261 Tyeatise, 500, 578-9, second Enquiry, 214. See Chapter 3 above, p. 174.

262 See Chapter 3 above, n. 205. 263 Treatise, 619-20. 264 Treatise, 471, 475, 574—5. 262 Treatise, 589—91, 601. 266 Second Enquiry, 173—4.

296 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment useful or agreeable to the person himself or to others. As a culminating

illustration of how the theory functions he paints the portrait of the ‘model of perfect virtue’, Cleanthes, in terms of the praises lavished on him by others for his conduct in private and public life: these all indicate (as Hume spells out in his notes) “Qualities useful to others’, ‘useful to the

person himself’, ‘immediately agreeable to others’, and ‘immediately agreeable to the person himself’.*°’ This vignette of the social context of moral approbation also illustrates Hume’s argument about sympathy, that the ‘intercourse of sentiments ... in society and conversation, makes us

form some general inalterable standard, by which we may approve or disapprove of characters and manners’.?°°

One aspect of this definition of merit that caused unhappiness to Hume’s readers was his emphasis on the useful, or utility, which he also describes as the tendency of qualities to the good of society or of mankind. He treats the subject at length in sections 5 and 6 of the second Enguzry, ‘Why Utility pleases’ and ‘Of Qualities useful to Ourselves’, but there are several other important discussions. Perhaps as the result of criticism, he seems to have changed his mind about its relative importance in recasting Book III of the Treatise in the second Enquiry. In his second main account of sympathy in the Treatise, he argues that most of the qualities we naturally

approve of have a tendency to the good of society, and in the case of the artificial virtues this tendency ‘is the sole cause of our approbation’. This argument 1s repeated in section 3 of the second Enquiry: utility is ‘the source of a considerable part of the merit ascribed to humanity, benevolence, friendship’ etc., and ‘the sole source of the moral approbation paid to fidelity, justice, veracity’ etc.*°? When introducing the fourfold definition in the Treatise, he claims that ‘reflexions on the tendencies of actions have by far the greatest influence, and determine all the great lines of our duty’. In discussing natural abilities he allows that in some cases ‘we must have

recourse to a certain sense, which acts without reflexion, and regards not the tendencies of qualities and characters’, but arguing against moralists who plausibly account for all the sentiments of virtue from this sense, he pushes his own hypothesis that since almost all the virtues have tendencies which ‘are sufficient alone to give a strong sentiment of approbation’, then ‘qualities are approv’d of, in proportion to the advantage, which results 207 Second Enquiry, 268-70. The fourfold definition is partly anticipated in the titles of sections 6—8, and recurs on pp. 261n, 277, 278, 336, 337—8. This portrait is the key illustration of the subservience of the anatomist to the painter; see above, pp. 266, 269. Cf the portrait of the beneficent man, 178—9, and of the perfect character, Treatise, 606. Hume found a historical example of the perfect character in King Alfred, History, ed. Todd, I, 74—5. 268 Treatise, 603, repeated in second Enquiry, 229.

289 Treatise, 577—8, second Enquiry, 204; cf 231. In his letter to Hutcheson of 17 September 1739 he quotes Horace, Sates, I, 3, 1. 98, ‘Atque ipsa utilitas justi prope mater & aequi’ [utility the mother of justice and right], Letters, ed. Greig, I, 33.

The ethics of sentiment and the religious hypothesis 297 from them’.*’° This crude emphasis on actual advantage is modified in the second Enquiry, where Hume explains that ‘the tendencies of actions and

characters, not their real accidental consequences, are alone regarded in our moral determinations’.*’! In the Enquiry these tendencies come under the heading of utility or what is useful. Utility 1s ‘a foundation of the chief

part of morals, which has a reference to mankind and our fellowcreatures’. But the weight that Hume gives to utility should not be exaggerated. It ‘is only a tendency to a certain end’. We would not value the means if we did not value the end. It is the sentiment of humanity, the feeling for the happiness of mankind, that makes us approve what is useful, i.e. what tends towards that end.*’* Humanity or benevolence or sympathy are therefore prior to utility. Further, the useful and the agreeable jointly contribute to Hume’s fourfold definition. Some virtues are both useful and agreeable: thus the utility of benevolence 1s a source of a considerable part

of the esteem paid to it, but the benevolent feelings are delightful in themselves and communicate themselves to the spectators, who then share

in the enjoyment. There is also a set of mental qualities agreeable to ourselves (such as courage or philosophical tranquillity), or to others (such

as good manners or wit), which diffuses satisfaction to the beholders by natural sympathy ‘without any utility or any tendency to farther good’. But the sentiment of approbation in these cases is similar to that which arises from utility, because ‘the same social sympathy, . . . or fellow-feeling with

human happiness or misery, gives rise to both’.*’? Hume’s definition of personal merit, therefore, resolves ultimately into sympathy.

A more disturbing component of Hume’s definition of merit for his contemporaries than his account of utility was his treatment of natural abilities, one of the most interesting aspects of his moral theory. These are

analysed chiefly in ‘Of natural abilities’ and ‘Some farther reflexions concerning the natural virtues’ (Treatise, Book III, Part III, sections 4 and 5), and ‘Of Qualities useful to Ourselves’ and ‘Of some verbal Disputes’ (second Hnquiry, section 6 and Appendix IV — originally section 6.1). From

a theological perspective Hume’s account was shocking, but he was pleased to argue that he was only following common practice and the example of the ancients. His main aim was to abolish the distinction between voluntary and involuntary actions and the restriction of the name

of virtue to voluntary ones that was characteristic of Christian ethics, hence his deliberate use of a number of other terms in addition and sometimes in preference to virtue: merit, qualities, natural abilities, endowments, and talents. (In the second Enquiry he usually substitutes talents and 270 Treatise, 590, 612. Butler’s stern criticism of Hutcheson’s theory of benevolence is pertinent here; see Chapter 3 above, p. 224. 271 Second Enquiry, 228n. 272 Second Enquiry, 231, 286; cf 219. 273 Second Enquiry, sections 7 and 8, 257, 250-1, 260; cf Treatise, 604.

298 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment endowments for natural abilities.)?’* The customary distinction between natural abilities and moral virtues is essentially a verbal one and is the business of grammarians rather than philosophers. Traditional moralists

accord no moral worth to natural abilities, placing them on the same footing with bodily endowments, but it is obvious that natural abilities, though they are different from what are usually called moral virtues, meet the criterion of approbation.*’° Hume defines virtue as ‘a quality of the mind agreeable to or approved of by every one who considers or contemplates it or ‘whatever mental action or quality gives to a spectator the pleasing sentiment of approbation’; his

experimental method as a moralist involves collecting a list of those qualities that are so approved and thus form part of personal merit.*’° This list includes natural abilities or endowments or talents which are qualities useful or agreeable to ourselves, such as good sense, good humour, prudence, and constancy, as well as the social virtues (admittedly the most valuable) such as benevolence and justice. It even extends, to the disgust of his critics, to cleanliness and bodily endowments such as the sexual prowess of ‘good women’s men’ .*’”

In his refusal to separate involuntary endowments from voluntary virtues Hume made explicit his hostility to Christian ethics and allied himself with the classical moralists, especially Cicero. In the Treatise he argues that the reason divines have insisted on the difference is that only voluntary actions can be regulated by the sanctions of reward and punishment. Men in common life and moralists ‘whose judgment is not perverted by a strict adherence to a system’ (i.e. Christianity) disregard this distinc-

tion, and ‘consider prudence under the character of virtue as well as benevolence, and penetration as well as justice . . . the antient moralists in particular made no scruple of placing prudence at the head of the cardinal virtues’.*’° In a very revealing paragraph in the second Enquiry Hume

enlarges his point about this crucial difference between ancient and Christian moralists: ‘the ancient moralists, the best models, made no material distinction among the different species of mental endowments and defects, but treated all alike under the appellation of virtues and vices, and made them indiscriminately the object of their moral reasonings.’ He 274 Compare natural abilities, Treatise, 6(06—7, with talents, second Enquiry, 312-13. Treatise, 608

reads: ‘And indeed we may oberve, that the natural abilities, no more than the other virtues, produce not, all of them, the same kind of approbation.’ The second Enquiry, 317, reads ‘endowments’ for ‘natural abilities’ in an almost identical sentence. In the first edition (1751), 110, Hume had kept ‘natural abilities’. 279 Treatise, 606-7, 610; cf second Enquiry, 312—13, to Hutcheson, 17 September 1739, Letters, ed. Greig, I, 33. 278 Second Enquiry, 261n, 289, 312. 277 Treatise, 611, and second Enquiry, 266-67, for cleanliness; Treatise, 614—15, and second Enquiry,

first edition (1751), 135n, for good women’s men. Probably because of criticism (see below, p. 306), Hume cut the last passage from subsequent editions. 278 Treatise, 609; cf second Enquiry, 322, above, p. 288.

The ethics of sentiment and the religious hypothesis 299 instances the treatment of the four cardinal virtues in De Officus (the work he told Hutcheson he had in his eye in all his reasonings in Book III of the

Treatise): Cicero means by prudence ‘that sagacity, which leads to the discovery of truth, and preserves us from error and mistake’. For Cicero ‘our social duties form but one head’ in his division of the subject.*’? In the accompanying note Hume quotes a lengthy passage from De Oratore to

which he breathtakingly attributes a quasi-scriptural status: it ‘must, on account of the author, carry an authority, from which there can be no appeal’. This passage, in which Cicero distinguishes virtues directed to humankind or to self and which are pleasing or admirable, evidently contains the seeds of Hume’s fourfold definition of personal merit. Hume then uses Cicero as a means of rejecting the traditional Anglican catalogue

of virtues: ‘if Cicero were now alive, it would be found difficult to... persuade him, that no qualities were to be admitted as virtues, or acknowledged to be a part of personal merit, but what were recommended by The Whole Duty of Man’ .*°°

This paragraph and the accompanying note deserve several comments. Hume is not simply making the point that the ancients gave the name of virtue to a wide range of endowments that were not accepted as such by modern Christians. Several of the qualities that he designates as endowments were in fact regarded as moral virtues to be actively chosen, as he must have been well aware. Surprisingly, he lists courage, equanimity, patience, and self-command as qualities ‘that depend little or not at all on our choice’.?®! In treating prudence as an involuntary endowment he was

deliberately stripping it of the significance it had acquired over the centuries in Christian usage.*°* In setting up De Officiis (Of Duties) against

The Whole Duty of Man he was implicitly advocating his own fourfold definition of personal merit as a secular definition of duty to counter the three Christian duties to God, one’s neighbour, and oneself expressed in the biblical texts central to the book and the tradition he was rejecting: ‘Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man’ (Ecclesiastes 12: 13), and ‘we should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in 279 Second Enquiry, 318-19; Letters, ed. Greig, I, 34 (see above, p. 250). The four cardinal virtues, usually designated prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance, are analysed under four heads in De Offictis, Book I as (1) cognitio, or saptentia and prudentia (learning, or wisdom and prudence)

(2) communitas, or tustitia and beneficentia (social instinct, or justice and beneficence) (3) magnanimitas and fortitudo (greatness of soul and courage), and (4) moderatio or temperantia (moderation or temperance). Cicero places (2) highest. He is concerned in De Officus not with the end of life but with practical duties. 280 Second Enquiry, 319n. For the significance of The Whole Duty of Man see RGS, I, 18-23. Several

recent commentators on Hume erroneously call this a Calvinist work; this error can be traced back to Kemp Smith’s edition of the Dialogues, 6. For Boswell’s report of Hume testing himself as a young man against the catalogue of vices in The Whole Duty see the same edition, p. 97. 281 Second Enquiry, 313. 282 For some examples see RGS, I, 85-7.

300 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment this present world’ (Titus 2:12).*°° At the end of Appendix IV he observes,

“That we owe a duty to ourselves is confessed even in the most vulgar system of morals; and it must be of consequence to examine that duty, in

order to see whether it bears any affinity to that which we owe to society.’*°* But it is evident that he understands by duty something very different from his predecessors, both Christian and classical. In the Treatise he states that ‘No action can be requir’d of us as our duty, unless there be implanted in human nature some actuating passion or motive, capable of producing the action. This motive cannot be the sense of duty. A sense of duty supposes an antecedent obligation’.*°° That obligation lies in our sentiments. Hume is emphatically opposed to the tradition that sees acting

in accordance with duty as acting against our passions. Indeed, he explicitly categorises self-denial, humility, and ‘the whole train of monkish virtues’ as vices because they serve no use and produce no enjoyment. And when the moral sceptic Palamedes, in the dialogue appended to the second Enquiry, offers the ‘artificial lives and manners’ of the Cynic Diogenes and the Jansenist Pascal as examples to disprove Hume’s moral theory, his firstperson spokesman replies conclusively: “Chey are in a different element from the rest of mankind; and the natural principles of their mind play not with the same regularity, as if left to themselves, free from the illusions of religious superstition or philosophical enthusiasm.’*°° The final aspect of Hume’s moral theory that rendered it unacceptable was his refusal to search for the origins of morals beyond what could be established by the experimental method. In the Conclusion to the second Enquiry he explains the rise of moral distinctions: language ‘must invent a

peculiar set of terms, in order to express those universal sentiments of censure or approbation, which arise from humanity, or from views of general usefulness and its contrary. Virtue and Vice become then known; morals are recognised’.?°’ But no explanation is possible for the existence

of these sentiments. On several occasions in the Treatise and the first Enquiry Hume stresses the impossibility of arriving at ultimate principles.?°°

He objects that Hutcheson’s understanding of the meaning of natural (evidently a criticism of his account of the artificial virtues) is founded on final causes, ‘which is a Consideration, that appears to me pretty uncertain & unphilosophical’. Questions about the end of man ‘are endless, & quite 283 Paley, Moral Philosophy (1818 edn), 33, notes that the division into the three duties rather than

the four cardinal virtues is now customary. For Price’s treatment of the three duties see Chapter 3 above, p. 234. Wesley criticised Hutcheson for making love of our neighbour independent of love of God; see RGS, I, 230. 284 Second Enquiry, 322-3. 285 Treatise, 518; cf 479 and to Hutcheson, Letters, ed. Greig, I, 35.

286 Second Enquiry, 270, 341-3. On monkish virtues cf Natural History, in Essays, ed. Green and Grose, II, 339. In the Treatise, 297, 600, his treatment of Christian humility is more oblique. 287 Second Enquiry, 274. 288 Treatise, xviii; Abstract, 646; first Enquiry, 30-1.

The ethics of sentiment and the religious hypothesis 301 wide of my Purpose’.?®9 In the second Enquiry he is deliberately cavalier in

his dismissal of such questions. His fullest statement of indifference 1s relegated to a footnote: It is needless to push our researches so far as to ask, why we have humanity or a fellow-feeling with others. It is sufficient, that this is experienced to be a principle

in human nature. We must stop somewhere in our examination of causes; and there are, 1n every science, some general principles, beyond which we cannot hope to find any principle more general. . . It is not probable, that these principles can

be resolved into principles more simple and universal, whatever attempts may have been made to that purpose. But if it were possible, it belongs not to the present subject.?9°

Hume thought, when his scepticism was in abeyance, that his theory of personal merit had solved the problem of the foundation of morals. By excluding the pursuit of final causes he perhaps hoped he could avoid theological if not philosophical controversy. He told his friend Wallace, just before the publication of the second Enquiry, ‘I hope you will not find my Ethics hable to much Exception, on the Side of Orthodoxy, whatever they may on the Side of Argument & Philosophy.’*?! But if this remark was not made tongue in cheek, then it was culpably naive: his critics attacked both

the details of his argument and, in almost all cases, the absence of a theological foundation to his theory. Both Reid and Beattie accuse Hume of abusing words. Reid objects that Hume uses moral sense in the 7Yreatise (Book III, Part I, section 2) to mean not ‘the power of judging in morals’ but ‘only a power of feeling, without

judging’. Similarly, those ‘who place moral approbation in feeling only, very often use the word sentiment, to express feeling without judgment’. But in normal usage it never ‘signifies mere feeling, but judgment accompanied with feeling’.?9* Beattie observes that ‘Opinion, notion, judgement, is the

true English meaning of sentiment, which of course implies the use of reason. Of moral sentument, therefore, we may speak with strict propriety; but moral sensation is not proper English: and yet, if the suggestions of the moral faculty were understood to be mere feelings, 1t would seem captious

to object to it.’29° Reid regards Hume’s redefinition of reason, which allows him to conclude that ‘Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions’, as ‘a gross and palpable misuse of words’. He accuses Hume of misusing reason in two ways, by ‘including the most important part of 289 Letters, ed. Greig, I, 33. 299 Second Enquiry, 219-20n; cf 268, 293. Priestley contrasts Hume’s refusal to push his researches

further with Hartley’s discovery that all principles hitherto thought to be instinctive derive from association, Philosophical Unbeliever, Works, ed. Rutt, IV, 410.

291 92 Sept 1751, New Letters, 29. 292 Reid, Active Powers of Man (1788), 479. 293 Beattie, Elements of Moral Science, I (1793), 56. S. Johnson’s primary definition of sentiment in his Dictionary (1755) is “Thought; notion; opinion.’

302 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment reason under passion, and making the least important part of reason to be

the whole’, and appeals to common usage for his own definition: ‘As mankind have, in all ages, understood reason to mean the power by which not only our speculative opinions, but our actions ought to be regulated, we may say, with perfect propriety, that all vice is contrary to reason; that, by reason, we are to judge of what we ought to do, as well as of what we ought to believe.’??*

Some of the strongest criticisms of Hume are made from a Butlerian perspective. Kames shares Hume’s emphasis on sympathy, ‘the cement of human society’, ‘a principle implanted in the breast of every man’, but he objects that Hume resolves the moral sense into pure sympathy: ‘there 1s no more in morality, but approving or disapproving an action, after we discover by reflection that it tends to the good or hurt of society’. Thus for

Hume as for Hutcheson the terms of duty and obligation have no meaning. Kames praises Butler for going further than anyone ‘to assign a just foundation for moral duty’ in his account of conscience, but he makes a very influential modification to Butler’s theory. Conscience is intuitive: the authority of conscience does not consist merely in an act of reflection. It arises from a direct perception, which we have upon presenting the object, without the intervention of any sort of reflection. And the authority lies in this circumstance, that we perceive the action to be our duty, and what we are indispensably bound to perform. It is in this manner that the moral sense . . . plainly bears upon it the marks of authority over all our appetites and passions. It is the voice of God within us, which commands our strictest obedience, just as much as when his will is declared by express revelation.?°°

Locke would have been pleased by the discovery that moral duties ‘are founded upon intuitive perception’.29° Hume, however, throughout the second Enquiry has ‘totally overlooked that innate sense of duty, that authority of conscience, which is a law to man’. Further, Kames argues that our knowledge of God is intuitive: we have an internal sense, the sense of deity, which is closely associated with the moral sense. Moral duties are ‘enforced not only by a moral but by a religious principle’.*?’ Reid shares Kames’s Butlerian identification of the moral sense or moral faculty with 294 Reid, Active Powers, 212, 482. Reid endorses Johnson’s Dictionary definition of ought, “To be obliged by duty’. 295 Kames, Principles of Morality, 3rd edn (1779), Part I, Essay 1, 16, Essay 2, Chapter 3, ‘Duty and Obligation’, 47, 39—40, 42, 43-4. Kames originally used the phrase ‘direct feeling’ in the first edition (1751), 63, and then substituted ‘perception’, presumably to distance himself further

from Hutcheson and Hume. There are several such changes in the chapter on duty; see e.g. (1751), 59, (1779), 41. Kames repeats the claim that the conscience or moral sense is the voice of God; see e.g. (1779), 53, and History of Man, IV, 24. 296 History of Man, TV, 24; Principles of Morality (1779), 145.

297 Principles of Morality (1779), Part II, Essay 8, ‘Knowledge of the Deity’, 336—7, 341—3; History of

Man, IV, Sketch III, Chapter 1, ‘Existence of a Deity’, 199-205, and Chapter 3, ‘Religious Worship’, 282.

The ethics of sentiment and the religious hypothesis 303 conscience, asserting that its authority over the other active principles of the mind is self-evident: ‘Other principles may urge and impel, but this only authorises.’*°* Beattie begins his lengthy analysis of modern scepticism by distinguishing the various meanings of reason and common sense. The former is ‘that faculty which enables us, from relations or ideas that are known, to investigate such as are unknown; and without which we never could proceed in the discovery of truth a single step beyond first principles or intuitive axioms’. The latter signifies

that power of the mind which perceives truth, or commands belief, not by progressive argumentation, but by an instantaneous, instinctive, and irresistible impulse; derived neither from education nor from habit, but from nature; acting

independently on our will, whenever its object is presented, according to an established law, and therefore properly called Sense; and acting in a similar manner

upon all, or at least upon a great majority of mankind, and therefore properly called Gommon Sense.

There is an essential difference between the two faculties: ‘We believe the truth of an investigated conclusion, because we can assign a reason for our belief; we believe an intuitive principle, without being able to assign any other reason for our belief than this, that the law of our nature determines us to believe it’. Moral sentiments and notions of duty form a central part of this intuitive common sense; they are ‘the dictates of [human] nature, that is, the voice of God’.??” A more complex criticism of Hume’s moral theory, both directly and by

implication, is provided by Adam Smith, who shares Hume’s emphasis on sentiment and sympathy, but whose understanding of the nature of virtue is as demanding as Butler’s. In Part VII of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ‘Of systems of Moral Philosophy’, Smith compares different accounts first of the nature of virtue and second of the faculty of mind that approves it. In relation to the second topic, he names self-love, reason, and sentiment

as the three sources that have been assigned for the principle of approbation. He argues that in some sense reason may be said to be the source of approbation as it is ‘undoubtedly the source of the general rules of morality, and of all the moral judgments which we form by means of them’. But the first perceptions of right and wrong ‘cannot be the object of reason, but of immediate sense and feeling’. ‘Reason may show that this 298 Active Powers, Essay II, Part III, Chapter 6, ‘Of the Sense of Duty’, and Chapter 8, ‘Observations concerning Conscience’, 261. For Reid’s friendship with and debt to Kames see Reid, Intellectual Powers (1785), iv, and Ross, Kames, 99, 357ff. For another Butlerian account of conscience and rebuttal of Hume see Milner, Gzbbon’s Account of Christianity, 203-6.

299 Beattie, Essay on Truth (1770), 38, 41-2, 72. Beattie includes a detailed note on the classical meanings of sensus communis or Koivds Adyos, 33—4n. He derives his usage from Reid; see Inqury, ed. Brookes, 18-19, and Intellectual Powers (which postdates Beattie’s Essay), Essay VI, Chapter 2, ‘Of Common Sense’.

304 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment object is the means of obtaining some other which is naturally either pleasing or displeasing .. . But nothing can be agreeable or disagreeable for its own sake, which is not rendered such by immediate sense and feeling.°°° However, although Smith congratulates Hutcheson for being ‘the first who distinguished with any degree of precision in what respect all

moral distinctions may be said to arise from reason, and in what respect they are founded upon immediate sense and feeling’,?°! he objects strongly to Hutcheson’s definition of a peculiar sentiment called the moral sense as the source of moral approbation: Against every account of the principle of approbation, which makes it depend upon a peculiar sentiment, distinct from every other, I would object; that it is strange that this sentiment, which Providence undoubtedly intended to be the governing principle of human nature, should hitherto have been so little taken notice of, as not to have got a name in any language. ‘The word moral sense 1s of very late formation, and cannot yet be considered as making part of the English tongue.?”?

Instead of this peculiar sentiment, Smith derives moral approbation from sympathy, a concept he takes from Hume but develops differently. Smith objects that Hume’s system ‘places virtue in utility, and accounts for

the pleasure with which the spectator surveys the utility of any quality from sympathy with the happiness of those who are affected by it’. This differs from his own system, in which sympathy means entering both into the motives of the agent and the gratitude of those who benefit from his

actions.°°° For Smith sympathy is by no means synonymous with humanity, as it is for Hume. Indeed, humanity and benevolence (Hume’s favourite sentiments) are soft, feeble, and feminine.°°* In place of Hume’s fourfold definition of merit, Smith makes a clear distinction between two sets of virtues, the amiable, exemplified by humanity, and the awful or respectable, exemplified by self-command, and two standards of character and conduct, variously called virtue, or exact propriety and perfection, and mere propriety, or the ordinary degree of excellence. ‘The man who

$09 Moral Sentiments, 265—7, 315, 319-20. (Part VII was numbered VI until the edition of 1790.) The editors argue (320n) that the last passage is indebted to Hume’s Treatise, Book III, Part I], sections |—2. 301 Moral Sentiments, 320. For Price’s disapproval of this passage see Chapter 3 above, p. 172. Ina

letter of 22 December 1785 (antedating Price’s comments on Smith in the 3rd edition of the Review) Smith described Price as ‘a most superficial Philosopher’, Correspondence, ed. Mossner and Ross, 290. Cf Moral Sentiments, 229n. In his comment on Hutcheson Smith may be echoing Hume’s on Shaftesbury, second Enquiry, 171; see Chapter 3 above, p. 173. 302° Moral Sentiments, 321-3, 326-7.

303 Moral Sentiments, 327. For other criticisms of Hume on utility see pp. 20, 179, 188, 306. See also Kames, Principles of Morality (1779), 128ff. 304 Moral Sentiments, 40, 137, 190.

The ethics of sentiment and the religious hypothesis 305 achieves the highest standard is the one who combines the awful and the amiable virtues: The man of the most perfect virtue, the man whom we naturally love and revere the most, is he who joins, to the most perfect command of his own original and selfish feelings, the most exquisite sensibility both to the original and sympathetic feelings of others. ‘The man who, to all the soft, the amiable, and the gentle virtues, joins all the great, the awful, and the respectable, must surely be the natural and proper object of our highest love and admiration.°°°

What enables us to practise the awful virtues, particularly self-command, is ‘the Principle of Self-approbation and of Self-disapprobation’ that Smith variously names (in terms which recall Marcus Aurelius, Shaftesbury, and Butler) the impartial spectator, the looking-glass or mirror, the man within

the breast, reason, conscience, the vicegerent, the demigod, the higher tribunal: It is not the soft power of humanity, it is not that feeble spark of benevolence which Nature has lighted up in the human heart, that is thus capable of counteracting the strongest impulses of self-love. It is a stronger power, a more forcible motive, which exerts itself upon such occasions. It is reason, principle, conscience,

the inhabitant of the breast, the man within, the great judge and arbiter of our conduct.°°°

Occasionally Smith echoes Hume’s contempt for monkish or false Chris-

tian virtues, finding it unsurprising that the Christian perversion of the doctrine of rewards and punishments ‘should sometimes have exposed it to

contempt and derision’,°°’? but in complete opposition to Hume he consistently attributes moral government to the author and director of nature, ‘the all-seeing Judge of the world’, and regards the rules of morality

as ‘the commands and laws of the Deity, who will finally reward the obedient, and punish the transgressors of their duty’.°°®

Smith thus distances himself firmly from what must have seemed the soft and undemanding aspects of Hume’s fourfold definition of merit, and explicitly objects to Hume making utility a primary ground of approbation

rather than propriety because this blurs moral distinctions: ‘it seems impossible that the approbation of virtue should be a sentiment of the same kind with that by which we approve of a convenient or well-contrived 305 Moral Sentiments, 23-6, 247—8, 152. Smith increased the importance of self-command in the 6th edition; editors’ Introduction, /8. For Hume, as noted above, p. 299, self-command is not voluntary. 306 Moral Sentiments, 109-13, 130, 146—7, 167, 247, 137. 307 Moral Sentiments, 133—4; cf 176-8. 308 Moral Sentiments, 77-8, 105~—6, 131-2; ‘Of the influence and authority of the general Rules of

Morality, and that they are justly regarded as the Laws of the Deity’, 161—70. Smith’s debt to

Butler is noted by the editors, 164n. In the 6th edition Smith withdrew an earlier passage on the afterlife (91-2) which implied acceptance of revelation; see Appendix II.

306 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment building; or that we should have no other reason for praising a man than

that for which we commend a chest of drawers’.°°? Others seize on Hume’s account of natural abilities on similar grounds. Balfour complains

that Hume has applied his subtlety and acuteness ‘to extenuate, and render as imperceptible as possible, the difference betwixt virtue and vice, nay, to confound both in one undistinguishable chaos’. A piece of sophistry runs through all his reasoning: he ‘carries the mind from qualities truly

noble and excellent ... to qualities whose value is scarcely at all perceivable; and whilst he resolves them all into a sentiment of the same kind, we are apt to confound them’. His notion of the useful and agreeable has led him to rank among moral virtues not only qualities of the mind but properties of the body, such as cleanliness. Balfour is especially outraged by Hume’s use of the favourable reception of good women’s men to illustrate the principle of approbation.*'° Beattie similarly objects to Hume making

moral, intellectual, and corporeal virtues of the same kind and contemplated with the same sentiment.*’’ Horne, drawing on Beattie, mockingly paraphrases Hume’s meaning: ‘In other words, that to want honesty, and to want understanding, and to want a leg, are equally the objects of moral disapprobation.’>'* To Hume’s definition of virtue as ‘a quality of the mind agreeable to or approved of by every one who considers or contemplates it Beattie

replies that approbation is used in a different signification when it refers to

a fine face or a great genius or a virtue such as humanity. Moral actions are in our power though beauty and genius are not.’'’ Reid agrees: ‘What is in no degree voluntary, can neither deserve moral approbation nor blame.’?!*

Hume’s attempt to support his moral theory by appeal to the ancients is widely condemned, implicitly or explicitly. Smith’s view of the ancient moralists is radically different from Hume’s: in his analysis of the accounts of the nature of virtue in Part VII of Moral Sentiments he identifies three, propriety, prudence, and benevolence, associating most of the classical

moralists, especially the Stoics, with the first, and Epicurus with the second. The first group ‘recommend the great, the awful, and the respectable virtues, the virtues of self-government and self-command’, 393° Moral Sentiments, 188.

310 Obligation of Morality (1753), Section 4, ‘Reflexions upon Mr. Hume’s Scheme in general’, 103,

105, 116-17, 118. See n. 277 above. Balfour is responding to the first edition of the second Enquiry (1751). Cf Horne’s indignation in Letters on Infidelity (1784), 30-2, at Hume’s comments on female infidelity in ‘A Dialogue’, second Enquiry, 339. Balfour misread Palamedes’ moral relativism in ‘A Dialogue’ as contradicting Hume’s own scheme, Obligation of Morality, 127-8,

to which Hume justly objected in his letter to Balfour of 15 March 1753, Letters, ed. Greig, I, 173.

311 Essay on Truth, 421—2. 312 [etter to Adam Smith, 45. 313 Second Enquiry, 261n; Essay on Truth, 422, 424, 427. 314 Active Powers, 370 (though without direct reference to Hume).

The ethics of sentiment and the religious hypothesis 307 regarding the amiable virtues as weaknesses. Only Epicurus among the ancients did not think that virtue was to be pursued for its own sake. Supporters of the view that virtue consists in benevolence (of whom Hutcheson is the chief example) regard the awful qualities not as virtues but abilities. The system that makes virtue consist in prudence ‘seems to degrade equally both the amiable and respectable virtues, and to strip the former of all their beauty, and the latter of all their grandeur’. Though Hume is not named in this analysis, it is clear that the only one of the ancients with whom Smith could associate him is Epicurus.’'? Beattie adduces much evidence to show the falsity of Hume’s claim that the ancients ‘made no material distinction among the different species of mental endowments and defects’. “Io every person who has read them, the contrary is well known’. Cicero, for example, clearly differentiated wisdom

from prudence.?!® Balfour suggests that the one ancient scheme of morality with which Hume’s can be identified is that of Epicurus: ‘there 1s no other difference, but that the Epicureans used the word pleasure, where our author adopts that of virtue’.°'’ Reid also claims that Hume’s system agrees with that of the Epicureans, because for both the dulce (agreeable)

and the utile (useful) are the whole sum of merit, with no room left for honestum (propriety or the good) (though Reid is bound to acknowledge the importance of non-Epicurean disinterested affections for Hume).?'® Hume’s critics could not find in his moral theory, devoid as it 1s of the

concept of conscience,’!? the sanctions of reward and punishment, or the duty of obedience to a higher power, any adequate motivation or obligation to act morally. His introduction of interest as the basis of obligation in

the second part of the Conclusion seemed utterly inadequate. A clear statement of the difficulty is expressed by Paley, who, though he had as much contempt for the Scottish Shaftesburians as for Hume, may here be allowed to speak for all of Hume’s critics on this fundamental point. Mr Hume, in his fourth Appendix to his Principles of Morals, has been pleased to 315 Moral Sentiments, 266—7, 299-300, 301, 306—7. In Part VI, 216, Smith distinguishes inferior,

Epicurean prudence from superior prudence. Smith does not seem to have attached much importance to Cicero’s De Officiis, Hume’s favourite: it deals with what the Stoics regarded as ‘imperfect, but attainable virtues’, 291—2. 316 Second Enquiry, 318; Essay on Truth, 433—44. See n. 279 above. Cf Balfour, Obligation of Morality,

112-13. 317 Obligation of Morality, 123, 162—3.

318 Active Powers, 410-11. Hume specifically associates Epicurus with the selfish philosophers against whom he argues in Appendix II of the second Enquiry, 296. Moore, in Stewart and Wright, eds., Hume and Hume’s Connexions, 26-33, argues that Hume is continuing the

Epicurean tradition in morals.

319 ‘If any man might be conceived to have conquered in himself this awful principle, so as to have lost all idea of its influence, one is tempted to think it was Mr. Hume’, Milner, Gibbon’s Account of Christianity, 203-4. Milner draws attention to Hume’s account of the effects of ‘that still voice’ on Somerset’s deterioration, History, ed. ‘Todd, V, 60-1.

308 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment complain of the modern scheme of uniting Ethics with the Christian Theology. Those who find themselves disposed to join in this complaint, will do well to observe what Mr Hume himself has been able to make of morality without this union. And for that purpose let them read the second part of the ninth section of the above essay, which part contains the practical application of the whole treatise, — a treatise, which Mr Hume declares to be “‘incomparably the best he ever wrote.’ When they have read it over, let them consider, whether any motives there proposed are likely to be found sufficient to withold men from the gratification of lust, revenge, envy, ambition, avarice, or to prevent the existence of these passions. Unless they rise up from this celebrated essay with very different impressions upon their minds than it ever left upon mine, they will acknowledge the necessity of additional sanctions.°?°

Essentially, as a moralist Hume refused to accept that the moral life is

arduous, that, as Reid insists, ‘Human nature must gather strength by struggle and effort.’°*' It was this position as much as his divorce of ethics

from religion that made his moral theory incomprehensible to his contemporaries. Hume was bound to ask himself the question why his obvious

hypothesis about the foundation of morals had not been unanimously received long before.°?? One possible answer, which despite his sceptical self-questioning he manifestly did not accept, was that he was wrong; the other was the apparently irresistible power of the religious hypothesis. Religion and its consequences

Hume applies the experimental method of reasoning to religion in two different ways. One is essentially historical: he examines the origins of religion in human nature and society, the differences between polytheism

and theism, paganism and Christianity, the role of the priesthood, the social effects of different beliefs, practices, and denominations (particularly

in the period from the Reformation to 1688), and the significant change that occurred in the late seventeenth century in the relationship between religion and philosophy. His conclusions are largely though not entirely negative. The other is philosophical: he tests the religious hypothesis — the doctrines of both natural and revealed religion — and finds it unverifiable,

and he exposes what seem to him the self-destructive tendencies in the rational theology of the day. He explores the first set of topics in the Essays, The Natural History of Rehgion, and The History of England, and the second in

the first Enquiry (sections 10 and 11), the Dialogues, and the suppressed essays ‘Of Suicide’ and ‘Of the Immortality of the Soul’, though there 1s

some overlap. As a moral philosopher his aim is to show that the $20 Moral Philosophy (1818 edn), 49; second Enquiry, 322, 278-84; ‘My Own Life’, Letters, ed. Greig, I, 4. For Paley see Chapter 5 below.

321 Active Powers, 186. $22 Second Enquiry, 278; see above, p. 288.

The ethics of sentiment and the religious hypothesis 309 consequences of religion for society and morals have been extremely damaging, and that there is no logical connexion, as is supposed by contemporary Christian apologists, between natural religion, revealed , religion, and ethics. At the same time he recognises that only a handful of philosophical sceptics are capable of such a detached view of religion, and that most people will remain attached to it in one of its current varieties — superstition, enthusiasm, or theism.°*°

Is there in human nature a propensity (a favourite term) to religious belief? If there 1s, what does it entail? At the end of the Dialogues, after Philo’s apparent recantation, Cleanthes dogmatically claims that sceptical suspense of judgement cannot be maintained ‘in opposition to a theory [the argument from design], supported by strong and obvious reason, by

natural propensity, and by early education’. In a letter to Gilbert Elliot written at the time of the composition of the Dialogues, Hume sceptically points out that Roman Catholics and Protestants have undermined each others’ attempts to base religion on reasoning and authority, but that the

answer cannot be to base it on sentiment: ‘this were a very convenient Way, and what a Philosopher wou’d be very well pleas’d to comply with, if he coud distinguish Sentiment from Education’. In his next letter to Elliot, discussing the first draft of the Dialogues, Hume comments sceptically on the position of Cleanthes that he is trying to strengthen for argumentative and rhetorical purposes: The Propensity of the Mind towards [the argument from design], unless that

Propensity were as strong & universal as that to believe in our Senses & Experience, will still, I am afraid, be esteem’d a suspicious Foundation. Tis here I

wish for your Assistance. We must endeavour to prove that this Propensity is somewhat different from our Inclination to find our own Figures in the Clouds, our Face in the Moon, our Passions & Sentiments even in inanimate Matter. Such an Inclination may, & ought to be controul’d, & can never be a legitimate Ground of Assent.°74

According to Hume’s private statements, propensity to religious belief is not the same as propensity to belief in matter of fact, and it is clearly not the same thing as reason, though it may be difficult to disentangle it from education. The nature of this propensity is explored in The Natural ENstory of Religion. Hume begins by stating that there are two important questions concerning religion, ‘its foundation in reason’, and ‘its origin in human nature’. For the purposes of the Natural History he disingenuously assumes throughout that the first has been established, and concentrates on the second. He insists (as Locke had done, though to very different $23 For different approaches see Siebert, The Moral Animus of Hume (1990), and Gaskin, Hume’s Philosophy of Rehgion, 2nd edn (1988).

$24 Dialogues, 267; 18 February, 10 March, 1751, Letters, ed. Greig, I, 151, 155.

310 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment ends),°*° that belief in intelligent invisible power is not universal or uniform, and that therefore it does not spring from ‘an original instinct or primary impression of nature’. Rather, it arises from secondary principles and may be perverted or even prevented by various accidents and causes. Briefly, early religion is polytheistic, and arises not from ‘contemplation of the works of nature’ (as in theistic natural religion), but from ‘the incessant hopes and fears, which actuate the human mind’. (These are of course the passions, as Hume would expect his reader to recognise, to which the Christian sanctions of reward and punishment are directed.) The object of these hopes and fears is the unknown causes

which operate in human life. ‘here is a propensity in human nature which leads the ignorant multitude who are unable to analyse these causes to a system ‘that gives them some satisfaction’. The wording here is close to that of the second letter to Elliot: ‘We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds; and by a natural propensity, if not corrected by experience and reflection, ascribe malice or good-will to every thing,

that hurts or pleases us.’ Our responses to these unknown causes are contradictory: ‘Our natural terrors present the notion of a devilish and malicious deity: Our propensity to adulation leads us to acknowledge an excellent and divine.’ Polytheism results from two strong propensities: ‘to

believe invisible, intelligent power in nature’, and ‘to rest... attention on sensible, visible objects’. ‘These contradictory principles (i.e. originating causes) of religion lead to a perpetual flux and reflux between polytheism and theism. Although priests certainly magnify human fear of

the divine, they are not its cause: ‘the artifices of men aggravate our natural infirmities and follies of this kind, but never originally beget them. Their root strikes deeper into the mind, and springs from the essential and universal properties of human nature.’ Hume acknowledges,

in his pithy concluding summary of the paradoxes and absurdities of religious belief and practice, that ‘[t]he universal propensity to believe in

invisible, intelligent power, if not an original instinct, [is] at least a general attendant of human nature’, but the existence of this propensity cannot in itself make opposing superstitions true. ‘Doubt, uncertainty, suspence of judgment’ are the result of the philosopher’s scrutiny of the ‘inexplicable mystery’ of religion.°*° One of Hume’s main objects in the Natural History, despite his apparent 325 Locke, Essay, Book I, Chapter 4, § 8. This point is made by Jones, Hume’s Sentiments (1982), 80.

326 Natural History, in Essays, ed. Green and Grose, II, 311—12, 315, 316-17, 353, 325, 334-6, 360-3. In ‘Of the Immortality of the Soul’, Essays, ed. Miller, 598, Hume observes that ‘All doctrines are to be suspected, which are favoured by our passions. And the hopes and fears which give rise to this doctrine, are very obvious.’ His account of daemonism (p. 354) may be indebted to Shaftesbury; see Chapter 2 above, p. 133. For Kames religion does not have its origin in fear; the sense of deity is universal and innate, History of Man, IV, 192ff, 283.

The ethics of sentiment and the religious hypothesis 311 support for theism, is to show the advantages of polytheism over theism and of paganism over Christianity, a position which coincides with observations

in the Essays and Enguiries. In ‘Of Parties in General’ he explains why religious wars and divisions have characterised Christianity: in religions which consist of traditional tales there 1s not much disputation between sects, but Christianity as a system of speculative opinions has encouraged

keenness in dispute, divisions, heresies, and mutual hatred. ‘Sects of philosophy, in the ancient world, were more zealous than parties of religion; but in modern times, parties of religion are more furious and enraged than the most cruel factions that ever arose from interest and ambition.’**’ At the end of ‘A Dialogue’ appended to the second Enquiry this important Humean distinction is voiced by Palamedes (whose scepticism concerning the source of morals 1s definitely not Hume’s): in the ancient world religion had very

little influence on life and manners outside the temple and philosophy regulated behaviour, whereas in the modern world it is the other way round;

the influence of philosophy is now confined to speculations in the closet, whereas modern religion ‘inspects our whole conduct, and prescribes an

universal rule to our actions, to our words, to our very thoughts and inclinations’.**° This contrast is developed at length in the Natural History. Idolaters or polytheists tolerate each others’ religions, whereas theists are intolerant. The corruption of theism is more pernicious to society than the corruption of polytheism. ‘The virtues of the pagan heroes were manifestly

superior to those of the Catholic saints.**? Pagan theology consists of traditional stories rather than philosophical argument, but theism perverts philosophy ‘to serve the purposes of superstition’. Ancient religions were much looser than modern, because ‘the former were traditional and the latter are scriptura?. When compared with Christianity, paganism is found to be less absurd and irrational and less damaging to the individual: Upon the whole, the greatest and most observable differences between a traditional, mythological religion, and a systematical, scholastic one are two: The former is often

more reasonable, as consisting only of a multitude of stories, which, however groundless, imply no express absurdity and demonstrative contradiction; and sits

also so easy and light on men’s minds, that, though it may be as universally received, it happily makes no such deep impression on the affections and understanding.?%° $27 Essays, ed. Miller, 62-3. 328 Second Enguiry, 341—2. Balfour objects strongly to this account of ancient religion, Obligation of Morality, 145.

329 Natural History, sections 9, 10. Cf Hume’s judgement of Joan of Arc, History, ed. Todd, I, 410: “This admirable heroine, to whom the more generous superstition of the ancients would have

erected altars, was, on pretence of heresy and magic, delivered over alive to the flames, and expiated by that dreadful punishment the signal services which she had rendered to her prince and to her native country.’ 330 Natural History, in Essays, ed. Green and Grose, H, 341, 348, 352.

312 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment In considering the malign influence of Christian priests Hume repeats some of the accusations made by earlier freethinkers,**! but important differences in his analysis lead him, perhaps surprisingly, to the view that an ecclesiastical establishment of salaried clergy is ‘advantageous to the political interests of society’.°°? His principal objection is that priests destroy freedom, both political and intellectual: ‘in all ages of the world, _ priests have been enemies to liberty’; since the establishment of Christianity ‘they have engendered a spirit of persecution, which has ever since

been the poison of human society’; ‘the stronger mixture there is of superstition [in any religious sect], the higher is the authority of the priesthood’; ‘monarchies, receiving their chief stability from a superstitious

reverence to priests and princes, have commonly abridged the liberty of reasoning, with regard to religion, and politics, and consequently metaphysics and morals’.*°° Priests are driven by self-interest: they foster terrors with regard to futurity to support their own livelihood, and oppose heresy and infidelity for temporal reasons.°°* The peculiar circumstances of their profession encourage a number of vices, namely hypocrisy, conceit, rancour, and revenge. Ambition is usually beneficial to society, but ‘[t]he ambition of the clergy can often be satisfied only by promoting ignorance and superstition and implicit faith and pious frauds’.°*° In Hume’s analysis

priests are not the inventors of superstition but rather are invented by it: they ‘may justly be regarded as an invention of a timorous and abject superstition, which, ever diffident of itself, dares not offer up its own devotions, but ignorantly thinks to recommend itself to the Divinity, by the

mediation of his supposed friends and servants.’ Given the difficulty of eradicating this propensity, the only effective way in which priestly power can be controlled is by a public establishment of religion. In a note Hume differentiates priests from clergymen: the latter ‘are set apart by the laws, to

the care of sacred matters, and to the conducting our public devotions with greater decency and order. There is no rank of men more to be respected than the latter.’°°° The last sentence is probably ironical, and Hume is clearly not consistent in differentiating the terms, but the legal status of the clergy is obviously of great importance. In his ideal common331 See Chapter 1 above, section 3, ‘Priests and Philosophers’. Hume told Elliot, 18 February 1751, ‘I have frequently had it in my Intentions to write a Supplement to Gulliver, containing the Ridicule of Priests’, Letters, ed. Greig, I, 153. $32 History, ed. Todd, III, 136.

$33 ‘Of the Parties of Great Britain’, ‘Of Parties in General’, ‘Of Superstition and Enthusiasm’, ‘Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences’, Essays, ed. Miller, 65, 62, 75, 126. 334 ‘Of the Immortality of the Soul’, Essays, ed. Miller, 593, 595, cf Natural History, in Essays, ed. Green and Grose, II, 360. 335 ‘Of National Characters’, Essays, ed. Miller, 199n—201n; cf on hypocrisy Dialogues, 275. For Wallace’s unpublished reply in the guise of a freethinker, defending the latitudinarian clergy and their successors for promoting the spirit of enquiry, see Mossner, Hume, 260—2. $36 ‘Of Superstition and Enthusiasm’, Essays, ed. Miller, 75, 619; cf History, ed. Todd, I, 215.

The ethics of sentiment and the religious hypothesis 313 wealth ‘Presbyterian government is established .. . The magistrates may try, and depose or suspend any presbyter.’ “Without the dependence of the

clergy on the civil magistrates ... it is in vain to think that any free government will ever have security or stability.’ Philo enquires rhetorically:

‘Is there any maxim in politics more certain and infallible, than that both the number and authority of priests should be confined within very narrow limits, and that the civil magistrate ought, for ever, to keep his fasces and axes from such dangerous hands?’’°’ Hume’s most important statement on this subject is the ‘Digression concerning the ecclesiastical state in Chapter 29 of the History of England. ‘Treating ecclesiastics as a profession and deliberately

speaking in economic terms, he argues that it is dangerous to allow them to be supported by the liberality of individuals who benefit from their ministry: this interested diligence of the clergy is what every wise legislator will study to prevent ... Each ghostly practitioner, in order to render himself more precious and sacred in the eyes of his retainers, will inspire them with the most violent abhorrence of all other sects, and continually endeavour, by some novelty, to excite the languid devotion of his audience. No regard will be paid to truth, morals, or decency in the doctrines inculcated. Every tenet will be adopted that best suits the

disorderly affections of the human frame. Customers will be drawn to each conventicle by new industry and address in practising on the passions and credulity of the populace. And in the end, the civil magistrate will find, that he has dearly paid for his pretended frugality, in saving a fixed establishment for the priests; and that in reality the most decent and advantageous composition, which he can make with the spiritual guides, is to bribe their indolence, by assigning stated salaries to their profession, and rendering it superfluous for them to be farther active, than merely to prevent their flock from straying in quest of new pastures.°*®

An ecclesiastical establishment is thus advantageous to society because it is the means of controlling both the self-interest of priests and the religious propensities of human nature.

In his writing about religion Hume is careful to separate social and intellectual factors. As a historian, both in the Essays and the History of $37 ‘Tdea of a Perfect Commonwealth’, Essays, ed. Miller, 520, 525; Dialogues, 275-6.

$38 History, ed. Todd, II, 135-6. This passage from ‘by far the most illustrious philosopher and historian of the present age’ is quoted by Smith, Wealth of Nations, Il, 790—1. Smith disagrees with Hume’s argument for establishment, preferring a model with hundreds or even thousands of small sects: “he teachers of each little sect, finding themselves almost alone, would be obliged to respect those of almost every other sect, and the concessions which they would

mutually find it both convenient and agreeable to make to one another, might in time probably reduce the doctrine of the greater part of them to that pure and rational religion, free from every mixture of absurdity, imposture, or fanaticism, such as wise men have in all ages of the world wished to see established’ (p. 793). See also History, ed. Todd, I, 311 (in relation to the quarrel between Henry II and Becket): “The union of the civil and ecclesiastical

power serves extremely, in every civilized government, to the maintenance of peace and order’.

314 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment England, he is particularly interested in the conflict since the Reformation

between superstition and enthusiasm, Roman Catholicism and purtitanism, and the different ways in which the tendencies of these opposing movements and denominations were damaging or, occasionally, beneficial to society. From the detached perspective of the sceptical philosopher who shares the beliefs of neither side, he assesses the extent to which they hampered or assisted the conditions that make the pursuit of philosophy possible — liberty, toleration, the rise of learning, the freedom of the press — and he searches for faint indications that the hold of religion over the

human mind is weakening, but what he finds rather is an important

change in doctrine in the later seventeenth century and a closer identification of religion with philosophy. To his contemporaries this philosophical theism seems triumphant; to Hume it is manifestly precarious, and incapable of sustaining the ethical weight that has been placed on it.

In the early essay ‘Of Superstition and Enthusiasm’ Hume describes these two manifestations as corruptions of true religion, an approach also adopted by Philo, though it appears that this phrase is little more than camouflage. Superstition (associated with Roman Catholics and high churchmen) is characterised by ‘ceremonies, observances, mortifications,

sacrifices’ etc., and its sources lie in weakness, fear, and ignorance. Enthusiasm or fanaticism (associated primarily with sectaries) is characterised by ‘raptures, transports, and surprising flights of fancy’, and its sources lie in hope, pride, a warm imagination, and ignorance. Hume makes three observations about their political and social effects: superstition is favourable to priestly power, enthusiasm hostile to it (more so than philosophy); enthusiasm in its origins is more violent than superstition but becomes more moderate; superstition is an enemy to civil liberty and enthusiasm a friend.°°? In the Natural History and the History of England he explores their effects in much greater detail and comes to similar conclusions, with some important qualifications. The Druids provide the archetypal standard of religious tyranny — ‘No species of superstition was ever

more terrible’**° — but Hume’s focus is on the long history and wide influence of the Roman Catholic Church. Catholicism is castigated for mummeries and relics, the absurd doctrine of the real presence, the cruelty

of the inquisition, the rapacity and frauds of the popes.**! The early 339 Essays, ed. Miller, 73—9; Dialogues, 271-2, 274. The distinction between superstition and enthusiasm is repeated in History of Great Britain, I, 8 (subsequently cut); History, ed. ‘Todd, I, Foreword, xiv. Siebert, Moral Animus, 83, 91, argues not entirely convincingly that in the History Hume changed his preference to superstition over enthusiasm. 340 History, ed. Todd, I, 6; cf the account of Germanic superstition, 26—7. 541° Treatise, 99-101 (cf first Enquiry, 51—3); Natural History, in Essays, ed. Green and Grose, II, 343, 339: History, ed. Todd, I, 214, I, 4.

The ethics of sentiment and the religious hypothesis 315 monks ‘were strongly infected with credulity, with the love of wonder, and

with a propensity to imposture; vices almost inseparable from their profession, and manner of life’. The Christianity of the early Saxons, received from Rome, ‘carried along with it a great mixture of credulity and superstition, equally destructive to the understanding and to morals’. Confession was ‘one of the most powerful engines that ever was contrived for degrading the laity, and giving their spiritual guides an entire ascendant

over them’.°*? But the picture is not entirely one of greed, ignorance, barbarity, the suppression of knowledge, and the destruction of morals. Hume acknowledges that the preservation of the annals of early English history is owed entirely to the Roman Catholic clergy, who ‘preserved the precious literature of antiquity from a total extinction’, and that monks did perform a useful social role: ‘Scarce any institution can be imagined less

favourable, in the main, to the interests of mankind than that of monks and friars; yet was it followed by many good effects, which, having ceased by the suppression of the monasteries, were much regretted by the people

of England.’ The sale of indulgences, attacked by Protestant writers for leading to the dissolution of morality and civil society, was harmless, since

civil punishment, infamy, and conscience regulate conduct much more than hell fire: “The philosophy of Cicero, who allowed of an Elysium, but , rejected all Tartarus, was a much more universal indulgence than that preached by Arcemboldi or Tetzel: Yet nobody will suspect Cicero of any design to promote immorality.’**°

Hume’s most interesting and provocative comments on ‘the Roman catholic superstition, its genius and spirit’ are made in the long passage entitled ‘Character of the catholics’ in Volume I of The History of Great Britain

and subsequently cut. He argues that had the Reformation not taken the form it did, the Roman Catholic Church might gradually have corrected its abuses and, more important, allowed the free development of learning and philosophy: like the ancient pagan idolatry, the popular religion consisted more of exterior practices and observances, than of any principles, which either took possession of the heart, or influenced the conduct. It might have been hoped, that learning and knowledge, as of old in Greece, stealing in gradually, would have opened the eyes

of men... It had been observed, that, upon the revival of letters, very generous and enlarged sentiments of religion prevailed thro’out all Italy.

But in response to the fanaticism of the reformers, the Church zealously attacked her enemies and ‘extended her jealousy even towards learning and philosophy, whom, in her supine security, she had formerly over342 History, ed. Todd, I, 25 (cf Il, 71—2), 51; IL, 355.

343 History, ed. Todd, II, 518; III, 472. Note that Hume does not use the term conscience in this way in his philosophical works.

316 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment looked, as harmless and inoffensive’.°** On the basis of this argument, what Hume might have called mitigated superstition would, left to itself, have been more favourable to philosophical scepticism than enthusiasm and fanaticism. In his analysis of the enthusiasm of the sixteenth-century reformers and the seventeenth-century sectarians Hume similarly deplores its character-

istic features and approves its eventual and paradoxical contribution to

freedom of thought. Reason had little to do with the success of the Reformation: ‘For of all branches of literature, philosophy had, as yet, and

till long afterwards, made the most inconsiderable progress; neither is there any instance that argument has ever been able to free the people from that enormous load of absurdity, with which superstition has every where overwhelmed them.’ In contrast to Roman superstition, the reformers ‘adopted an enthusiastic strain of devotion, which admitted of no observances, rites, or ceremonies, but placed all merit in a mysterious species of faith, in inward vision, rapture, and ecstasy’. ‘They exhibited a ‘rage of dispute’, ‘disdain of ecclesiastical subjection’, “contempt of ceremonies’, and ‘inflexible intrepidity’. ‘The devotion of the Scottish refor-

mers, rejecting the aid of the senses, ‘was observed to occasion great disturbances [1754: the most enormous ravages] in the breast, and in many respects to confound all rational principles of conduct and behaviour’.°*° Archbishop Laud’s reintroduction of ceremonies, though pollitically self-defeating, at least provided some compensation for the inevitable failure of enthusiasm to communicate with the divine: Whatever ridicule, to a philosophical mind, may be thrown on pious ceremonies, it must be confessed, that, during a very religious age, no institutions can be more

advantageous to the rude multitude, and tend more to mollify that fierce and gloomy spirit of devotion, to which they are subject . . . Laud and his associates, by reviving a few primitive institutions of this nature, corrected the error of the first reformers, and presented to the frightened and astonished mind, some sensible, exterior observances, which might occupy it during its religious exercises, and abate the violence of its disappointed efforts.°*°

A complex kind of hypocrisy was the inevitable concomitant of the fanaticism of Charles I’s opponents, who were ‘the dupes of their own zeal’.

$44 Flistory of Great Britain, 1, 25-6; History, ed. Todd, I, Foreword, xvi. See above, p. 273. MacQueen, Letters on Hume’s History, 103-6, assumes (probably correctly) that by “generous and enlarged sentiments of religion’ Hume means ‘the principles of scepticism and infidelity’; he provides a paraphrase to spell out the meaning. 345 History, ed. Todd, III, 140, 141 (cf 339); History of Great Britain, I, 8, History, ed. Todd, I, Foreword, xiv; V, 68, History of Great Britain, I, 62.

346 History, ed. Todd, V, 459-60. This passage caused particular offence to MacQueen, Letters on Hume’s History, 304—6.

The ethics of sentiment and the religious hypothesis 317 Hypocrisy, quite pure and free from fanaticism, is perhaps, except among men fixed in a determined philosophical scepticism, then unknown, as rare as fanaticism entirely purged

from all mixture of hypocrisy. So congenial to the human mind are religious sentiments, that it is impossible to counterfeit long these holy fervours, without feeling some share of the assumed warmth. And, on the other hand, so precarious and temporary, from the frailty of human nature, is the operation of these spiritual views, that the religious ecstasies, if constantly employed, must often be counterfeit, and must be warped by those more familiar motives of interest and ambition, which insensibly gain upon the mind. This indeed seems the key to most of the celebrated characters of that age. [my italics]°*’

Despite these unlovely portraits of the enthusiastic mind, Hume was clear that the effects of the Reformation were ultimately beneficial. He

praised the Church of England under Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Elizabeth for creating the circumstances in which the excesses of both superstition and enthusiasm could be controlled. The royal supremacy prepared the way ‘for checking the exorbitancies of superstition, and breaking those shackles, by which all human reason, policy, and industry had so long been encumbered’. At the same time, the worst dangers of the

genius of enthusiasm were averted by the preservation of ‘much of the ancient religion’. ‘And the new religion, by mitigating the genius of the ancient superstition, and rendering it more compatible with the peace and interests of society, had preserved itself in that happy medium, which wise men have always sought, and which the people have so seldom been able to maintain.’ But Hume attributes to the Reformation more than simply the civil control of the two opposing geniuses of religion: ‘on the whole, there followed from this revolution many beneficial consequences; though perhaps neither foreseen nor intended by the persons who had the chief hand in conducting it’.**° One of the most important of these unintended consequences was toleration. In the Natural History he stresses that tolerance is characteristic of polytheism amd intolerance of theism. ‘And if, among CHRISTIANS, the ENGLISH and DUTCH have embraced the

principles of toleration, this singularity has proceeded from the steady resolution of the civil magistrate, in opposition to the continued efforts of priests and bigots.’ But in the History of England he admits that this is not

the whole story. Whereas both Catholics confident of infallibility and Presbyterians in their bigoted zeal espoused the theory and practice of persecution, ironically the Independents ‘from the extremity of the same zeal’ became supporters of toleration: ‘Of all christian sects, this was the first, which, during its prosperity, as well as its adversity, always adopted 347 Ffistory, ed. Todd, V, 572 (cf VI, 142). In 1754 (p. 330) instead of the italicised passage in the

first sentence, the second sentence reads ‘that, where the temper is not guarded by a philosophical scepticism, the most cool and determined, it is impossible. . .’. 348 History, ed. Todd, III, 206—7, 339; IV, 119—20.

318 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment the principle of toleration; and, it is remarkable, that so reasonable a doctrine owed its origin, not to reasoning, but to the height of extravagance and fanaticism.’?*9

In surveying the ancient world and English and Scottish history to 1688 for the effects of religious superstition and enthusiasm on human morals, manners, and institutions, Hume repeatedly observes the conjunction of ignorance, irrationality, tyranny, and cruelty, and the importance of two crucial factors in moderating these effects, the regulation and toleration of

religious societies by the magistrate, and the growth of learning and philosophy. On finishing his survey of pre-Tudor history, he observes, ‘if

the aspect [of human manners] in some periods seems horrid and deformed, we may thence learn to cherish with the greater anxiety that science and civility, which has so close a connexion with virtue and humanity, and which, as it is a sovereign antidote against superstition, is also the most effectual remedy against vice and disorders of every kind’.°°° Science for Hume, though in general a term used loosely for knowledge of all kinds, means essentially the experimental knowledge of human nature

guided by mitigated scepticism that he defines in the Treatise and first Enquiry; 1t umplies a rejection not only of superstition but of theism. He finds few examples of the rise of science in this sense. Pre-Reformation Italy (as noted above) was a potential nursery, only to be stifled by the reformers’ fanaticism. He summarises Herbert’s account in his Life and Reign of Henry VITT of the sceptical views of religion voiced by a member of parliament in 1529, but stresses how untypical these views were: The member insists upon the vast variety of theological opinions, which prevailed in different nations and ages; the endless inextricable controversies maintained by the several sects; .. . the necessity of ignorance and a suspence of judgment with regard to all those objects of dispute: And upon the whole, he infers, that the only religion obligatory on mankind is the belief of one supreme Being, the author of

nature; and the necessity of good morals, in order to obtain his favour and protection. Such sentiments would be deemed latitudinarian, even in our time, and would not be advanced, without some precaution, in a public assembly. But though the first broaching of religious controversy might encourage the sceptical turn in a few persons of a studious disposition; the zeal, with which men soon after attached themselves to their several parties, served effectually to banish for a long time all such obnoxious liberties.°*”! 349 Natural History, in Essays, ed. Green and Grose, II, 338; History, ed. Todd, V, 442—3. For other important arguments for toleration see ITI, 431—3; V, 130; VI, 322-3. 359 History, ed. Todd, II, 518-19.

$51 History, ed. Todd, III, 186—7. Hume rather misrepresents this (obviously imaginary) speech.

Herbert uses it as an opportunity to advertise his theory of common notions. The ‘MP’ concludes, Henry VIII (1740), 239: “Let us, therefore, establish and fix these Catholick or universal Notions. They will not hinder us to believe whatsoever else is faithfully taught upon the Authority of the Church . . . we Laicks may so build upon those Catholick and infallible

The ethics of sentiment and the religious hypothesis 319 Sir Walter Raleigh was ‘suspected to be of that philosophical sect, who

were then extremely rare in. England, and have since received the appellation of free thinkers’. In his analysis of seventeenth-century fanaticism

(quoted above) Hume states baldly that philosophical scepticism was unknown in the mid-seventeenth century. He describes republicans of the 1650s such as Harrington and Sidney as deists “who denied utterly the

truth of revelation, and insinuated, that all the various sects, so heated against each other, were alike founded in folly and in error’; he applies the same term to the first earl of Shaftesbury, Buckingham, and Rochester in

the reign of Charles II.°°* What he notes, correctly, is the rise not of philosophical scepticism but of philosophical theism, accompanying the

abandonment of the enthusiastic Reformation doctrine of absolute decrees: ‘at the restoration, the church, though she still retained her old subscriptions and articles of faith, was found to have totally changed her speculative doctrines’.*°? The implications of the changed relationship between philosophy and religion and the turn to rational theology are spelt out in the Dialogues, which can be read in part as Hume’s continuation

of his history of religion to the present day. Cleanthes and Philo agree at the outset that whereas the early Fathers, followed by the reformers, set faith in opposition to reason, since the late seventeenth century, partly because of the new association of philosophical scepticism with atheism,

divines have appealed to reason in support of faith. As Philo says ominously, ‘our sagacious divines have changed their whole system of

philosophy, and talk the language of STOICS, PLATONISTS, and PERIPATETICS, not that of PYRRHONIANS and ACADEMICS. If we

distrust human reason, we have now no other principle to lead us into religion.’ Philo further points out that at the same time modern divines have abandoned their former insistence that human life was vanity and misery and now maintain, with some hesitation, that there are more goods

than evils in this life. ‘When religion stood entirely upon temper and education, it was thought proper to encourage melancholy. . . But as men

have now learned to form principles, and to draw consequences, it is necessary to change the batteries, and to make use of such arguments as will endure, at least some scrutiny and examination.’*°* In scrutinising philosophical theism Hume has two main aims: to show first that arguments offered in its support are not tenable, that faith is not a Grounds of Religion, as whatsoever Superstructures of Faith be rais’d, those Foundations yet may support them.’ See Chapter | above, pp. 19-20. 352 History, ed. Todd, V, 8-9; VI, 59, 539. For other uses of the term deist applied to Quakers, republicans and Whigs see ‘Of Superstition and Enthusiasm’, Essays, ed. Miller, 78-9. 353 History, ed. Todd, V, 131. For the end of enthusiasm see also Hume’s comments on anti-popery in 1679 proceeding from party rather than religious zeal, VI, 377. Philo uses the phrase ‘philosophical theists’, Dialogues, 281. 354 Dialogues, 170~3 (see above, p. 244 for Locke as the supposed originator of this view), 262.

320 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment species of reason, and second that philosophical theism, like philosophical scepticism, has no implications for conduct. ‘To adapt the words of the original title of Essay 11 of the Philosophical Essays, natural religion has no practical consequences. Theism, which Hume sometimes calls true religion, thus differs significantly from religion in its usual manifestations of

superstition and enthusiasm, which as shown in The Natural History of Religion and The History of England has a damaging and deforming effect on

manners and morals. His undermining of the rational foundation of theism occurs principally in the first Enquiry and the Dialogues, though there are hints of his intentions in the Treatise. Provokingly, Hume also provides

several statements that suggest an acceptance of theism to a greater or lesser degree, even though these statements are evidently incompatible with his analyses. For example, he concludes the section ‘Of the immatertality of the soul’ in the Treatise with the claim that his philosophy neither takes away from nor adds to the arguments for religion. In the Appendix he claims that “The order of the universe proves an omnipotent mind; that is, a mind whose will is constantly attended with the obedience of every creature and being.’ Similarly, in the Natural History, as mentioned above,

he takes theism for granted. “The whole frame of nature bespeaks an intelligent author; and no rational enquirer can, after serious reflection, suspend his belief a moment with regard to the primary principles of genuine Theism and Religion.’ ‘A purpose, an intention, a design 1s evident in every thing; and when our comprehension is so far enlarged as to contemplate the first rise of this visible system, we must adopt, with the strongest conviction, the idea of some intelligent cause or author.’*®? Even more provocative is Hume’s contradictory claim at the end of the essay “Of Miracles’ to be denigrating reason in the interests of Christianity: ‘Our

most holy religion is founded on Faith, not on reason’.°°° The same position is elaborated by Philo at the end of the Dialogues: A person, seasoned with a just sense of the imperfections of natural reason, will fly

to revealed truth with the greatest avidity: While the haughty dogmatist, persuaded that he can erect a complete system of theology by the mere help of philosophy, disdains any farther aid, and rejects this adventitious instructor. ‘To be

a philosophical sceptic is, in a man of letters, the first and most essential step towards being a sound, believing Christian.°°’

355 Treatise, 250—1, 633; Natural History, in Essays, ed. Green and Grose, I, 309, 361. See Gaskin’s comments on these passages, Hume’s Philosophy of Religion, 21 9ff, and in Norton, ed., Cambridge Companion to Hume, 319-22. For other such statements see Letter from a Gentleman, 24, 28; second Enquiry, 294; Natural Fistory, 325.

356 First Enquiry, 130. Hoadly would have treated Hume’s reference to ‘our most holy religion’ as banter; see Chapter 1 above, p. 37. 357 Dialogues, 282. Hume is probably turning round Palemon’s claim in Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks, II, 209, ‘that to be a settled Christian, it is necessary to be first of all a good THEIST”.

The ethics of sentiment and the religious hypothesis 321 On the whole contemporaries had less difficulty than modern readers in interpreting these contradictory statements, in which Hume ostensibly

defends two different kinds of religion, rational and irrational: they regarded them as ironic or teasing or self-protective. Warburton, surprisingly, suggested on the evidence of those in the Natural History that Hume was ‘approaching to the borders’ of theism, on which Horne commented

sarcastically that ‘I could never find that he penetrated far into the country.’°°® It was obvious to Milner that Hume’s ‘professions of respect for revealed religion’ at the end of the Dialogues were insincere and to Priestley

that they were made ‘by way of cover and irony’. John Hey, Norrisian Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, observing that we are not always bound to take men in a literal sense when they profess their motives for writing, cited the conclusion of the essay on miracles as an example of pretences that are ‘intended to ward off danger, or prevent legal prosecution’.2°° Contemporary readers of the first Enguiry, the Natural History, and

the Dialogues almost all saw that Hume’s mock defences, like those of earlier freethinkers, were not to be taken at face value. Hume in his own person, ‘Epicurus’ and Philo are agreed that it is rash for religious philosophers to try ‘how far they can establish religion upon

the principles of reason’, that those who have undertaken to do so are ‘dangerous friends or disguised enemies’.°°° This assumption underlies Philo’s temporary alliance with Demea against Cleanthes. Hume might appear to be siding with orthodox critics of the crying up of natural theology, such as Halyburton, Skelton, or Horne, the last of whom was convinced as an undergraduate at Oxford that ‘infinite mischief had been done, not only by the tribe of Deists and Philosophers, but by some of our most celebrated divines, in extolling the dignity of human nature and the wisdom of human reason’.°°! It takes some time for Demea to understand

that Philo is not on his side. The essential difference is that whereas orthodox critics of the defence of religion by reason see the effect of this

process as the undermining of revealed religion and the setting up of natural religion as a self-sufficient substitute, Hume, having disposed of the

claims of Scripture in ‘Of Miracles’, goes on to show that the vaunted claims of theism are equally insecure. The chief argument against the religious hypothesis put by ‘Epicurus’ in

section 11 is that it is not possible to reason from the effects to a cause 358 Warburton, Remarks, 9; Horne, Letters on Infidelity, 15. 359 Milner, Gibbon’s Account of Christianity, 219; Priestley, Letters to a Philosophical Unbeltever, Works, ed.

Rutt, IV, 378; Hey, Lectures in Divinity (1796), I, 463. There are several references and replies to Hume in the Lectures: see especially I, 11-12, 157—8, 184, 190n, 280. 360 First Enquiry, 135, 130.

361 Jones, Memoirs of Horne (1795), 32 (from letters to Horne’s father written in 1749). For Halyburton and Skelton see Chapter 1.

322 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment known only by its effects and then proceed to infer further new effects from that cause. The existence of God is deduced from the marks of intelligence and design in nature. It is Ulegitimate then to ascribe to the divine creator attributes beyond those which are evident in the creation. The argument from design provides no grounds for attributing ‘superlative intelligence and benevolence’ to the creator of a world which is ‘so full of

ill and disorder’. As the deity is a single being and known only by his works, we cannot attribute to him further qualities by analogy with other beings. Such attributes are the product on our part not of reasoning but imagination. ‘If [philosophers] tell me, that they have mounted on the steps or by the gradual ascent of reason, and by drawing inferences from effects to causes, I still insist, that they have aided the ascent of reason by

the wings of imagination; otherwise they could not thus change their manner of inference, and argue from causes to effects’. The strictures of ‘Epicurus’ apply not only to the divine attributes but especially to the doctrine of a better state of existence — ‘the supposition, that, in distant

regions of space or periods of time, there has been, or will be, a more magnificent display of these attributes, and a scheme of administration more suitable to such imaginary virtues.’ ‘There is no rational basis for the theory that this life 1s merely a passage or porch or prologue to something

better. (The Butlerian account of God’s moral government of the world and of human life as a state of probation seems particularly to be aimed at here.) “No new fact can ever be inferred from the religious hypothesis; no event foreseen or foretold; no reward or punishment expected or dreaded, beyond what is already known by practice and observation.’ The religious hypothesis thus has no moral implications, and can have no influence on ‘the peace of society and security of government’.>°

‘Epicurus’ starts from the position that he is not questioning the existence of God; his argument is directed against imaginary attributes and impossible inferences. However, at the end of the dialogue Hume the author insinuates that his ultimate aim is far more destructive by invoking the account of customary conjunction in sections 4 and 5. His first-person speaker points out to ‘Epicurus’ that his initial premise is false. It is not possible to reason from a unique effect to a unique cause: ‘It is only when two species of objects are found to be constantly conjoined, that we can infer the one from the other; and were an effect presented, which was entirely singular, and could not be comprehended under any known species,

I do not see, that we could form any conjecture or inference at all concerning its cause.’ ‘The speaker refuses to spell out his meaning, leaving

it to “Epicurus’ and the reader to do so. Hume cannot have thought this $62 First Enquiry, 135-42, 144-6. Cf Hume’s objection to Hutcheson, 16 March 1740, Letters, ed. Greig, I, 40: ‘What Experience have we with regard to superior Beings? How can we ascribe to them any Sentiments at all?’

The ethics of sentiment and the religious hypothesis 323 would be difficult to unravel; he means that a creator cannot be inferred from a single effect, the universe.*°* There is a similar superficial deception in the Dialogues. Pamphilus takes for granted in his introductory letter that

no truth is more obvious than the being of God. What is obscure is his nature — ‘his attributes, his decrees, his plan of providence’. Again, Philo solemnly agrees with Demea that ‘the question can never be concerning the being, but only the nature of the Deity’.°°* However, as the dialogue proceeds, the falsity of these statements becomes apparent. We are offered several ways of thinking about both the existence and the nature of God by the three protagonists. Demea, appealing to the authority of Malebranche and Plotinus, insists that every aspect of God’s nature is incomprehensible and mysterious to men because of the infirmities of human understanding.

Human sentiments and the materials and manner of thinking of the human mind in no way resemble the divine: ‘the infirmities of our nature do not permit us to reach any ideas, which in the least correspond to the ineffable sublimity of the divine attributes’. In Part 9, somewhat inconsistently, he puts forward Clarke’s a priori argument for a ‘necessarily existent Being, who carries the REASON of his existence in himself’. Finally, he offers an account of religious belief that Wesley would have recognised as the internal evidence: ‘each man feels, in a manner, the truth of religion

within his own breast; and from a consciousness of his imbecility and misery, rather than from any reasoning, is led to seek protection from that Being, on whom he and all nature is dependent’.°®°? To Cleanthes, Demea as a mystic who maintains God’s incomprehensibility scarcely differs from a sceptic or atheist who asserts ‘that the first cause of All is unknown and unintelligible’. Cleanthes himself takes up (with much repetition) the voice of the philosophical theist of the Natural History: “The order and arrangement of nature, the curious adjustment of final causes, the plain use and

intention of every part and organ; all these bespeak in the clearest language an intelligent cause or Author.°°° Whereas for Demea it is 363 First Enquiry, 147—8.

$84 Dialogues, 158, 174—5. Hurd, in his ‘Preface on the manner of writing dialogue’ added to Moral and Political Dialogues (3rd edn, 1765), I, ix—x, argues that ‘We should forbear to dispute some

things, because they are such as, both for their sacredness, and certainty, no man in his senses affects to disbelieve.’ He goes on to translate freely from Balbus’ concluding words to Book II , of De Natura Deorum: ‘it 1s a wicked and impious custom to dispute against the Being, Attributes, and Providence of God, whether ut be under an assumed character, or in one’s own.’ Cicero’s text reads (Loeb,

284): ‘Mala enim et impia consuetudo est contra deos disputandi, sive ex animo id fit sive simulate.’

$65 Dialogues, 193-4, 231—2, 237. Milner observed tersely, ‘I have taken no notice of Hume’s Demea, because I cannot find a feature of Christianity about him. Dr Clark’s metaphysicks and the Gospel have, I think, no sort of connection’, Gibbon’s Account, 221. Hamilton regretted that Hume did not take the a priori argument seriously, and called Demea ‘a silly character’, Supreme Unoriginated Being, 31, 114. For Wesley on the internal evidence see RGS, I, 235ff. 366 Dialogues, 195, 202 (cf Natural History, in Essays, ed. Green and Grose, IT, 309, quoted above).

324 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment human misery that leads us to God, for Cleanthes conversely it is the pursuit of happiness that does so. He objects vigorously to Demea’s melancholy depiction of human life, in terms which resemble Hutcheson’s optimism about the general prevalence in the present world and through human history of good over evil and happiness over misery: The only method of supporting divine benevolence (and it is what I willingly embrace) 1s to deny absolutely the misery and wickedness of man. Your representations are exaggerated: Your melancholy views mostly fictitious: Your inferences

contrary to fact and experience. Health is more common than sickness: Pleasure than pain: Happiness than misery.°°’

In Part 12 he summarises the moral implications of his theistic position as follows:

The most agreeable reflection, which it is possible for human imagination to suggest, is that of genuine theism, which represents us as the workmanship of a Being perfectly good, wise, and powerful; who created us for happiness, and who, having implanted in us immeasurable desires of good, will prolong our existence to all eternity, and will transfer us into an infinite variety of scenes, in order to satisfy those desires, and render our felicity complete and durable. Next to such a Being himself (if the comparison be allowed) the happiest lot which we can imagine, is that of being under his guardianship and protection.*©°

Cleanthes’ use of the term imagination here, when considered in the light of the argument of ‘Epicurus’, condemns his theism as an irrational fiction. Philo exposes the fallacies of both sets of arguments for God’s existence and attributes. The greater part of his attack, in Parts 2 and 4—8, in which he poses as Demea’s ally and mischievously espouses mysticism, is devoted to demonstrating the irrational basis of Cleanthes’ hypothesis of design in a series of elaborations of the position advanced by ‘Epicurus’.*°? Philo

makes his own position clear: ‘It were ... wise in us, to limit all our enquiries to the present world, without looking farther. No satisfaction can

ever be attained by these speculations, which so far exceed the narrow bounds of human understanding.’ ‘I have still asserted, that we have no data to establish any system of cosmogony.’ He teases Cleanthes with speculations and hypotheses which can with as much justice be derived

from the data — the world is the work of an infant or inferior or 367 Dialogues, 246. See Hutcheson, System of Moral Philosophy, 1, Book I, Chapter 9, especially

sections x and xi. The writing of the Dialogues predates the publication of the System, and Hume’s emphasis on the predominance of evil in the world goes back to the period of the Treatise (see Stewart, ‘An Early Fragment on Evil’, in Stewart and Wright, eds., Hume and Hume’s Connexions), but Hume may be echoing Hutcheson’s known views.

368 Dialogues, 278. Hume’s distinction between imagination and belief should be borne in mind; see n.211 above. 569 For Philo’s ‘mysticism’ see 212, 244. He stresses the absence of constant conjunction on p. 185.

The ethics of sentiment and the religious hypothesis 325 superannuated deity, or it is an animal or vegetable whose origin ‘ought rather to be ascribed to generation or vegetation than to reason or design’. Philo’s point is that the religious hypothesis is as much to be attributed to : what Cleanthes calls ‘fertility of invention’ as his own whimsies.°’° The most important part of Philo’s argument is devoted to his attack in Parts 10 and 11 on the moral attributes of God and his demonstration in Part 12 that even if an extremely limited aspect of the religious hypothesis — the existence of some kind of cause — is granted, this has no implications whatsoever for ethics. Again, Philo’s alliance with Demea is assumed for the purpose of defeating Cleanthes. After leading the unwary Demea on to heap up examples of human misery, Philo poses the unanswered questions of Epicurus: ‘Is [the deity] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able

and willing? whence then is evil?’?’! The only possible answer is that ‘these subjects exceed all human capacity’. Philo is confident that it is much easier to show the impossibility of inferring the moral attributes of justice, benevolence, and mercy than the natural attributes of intelligence and design from the state of the world. Of the four possible hypotheses concerning the first causes of the universe (Philo deliberately avoids speaking in monotheistic terms), that they have perfect goodness, perfect malice, both, or neither, the last is the most probable.?’* When Demea finally understands Philo’s deceit, Cleanthes makes the same complaint as Berkeley in Dialogue IV of Alciphron:

the injudicious reasoning of our vulgar theology has given [Philo] but too just a handle of ridicule. ‘The total infirmity of human reason, the absolute incomprehen-

sibility of the divine nature, the great and universal misery and still greater wickedness of men; these are strange topics surely to be so fondly cherished by orthodox divines and doctors.°’°

However, although Cleanthes easily sees the point of the game that Philo is playing with Demea, he never understands the game that Philo 1s playing with him. Philo twists and turns all through Part 12: he seemingly

recants his scepticism and warmly espouses natural religion and the argument from design, then reduces the difference between theism and atheism or dogmatism and scepticism to a verbal dispute, differentiates true religion from vulgar superstition, provides a long account of the $70 Dialogues, 219, 209, 217, 223-4. Philo here resembles Shaftesbury’s Philocles, of whom Theocles notes, Characteristicks, I1, 306, “you can pleasantly improve even what your Antagonist brings as a Support to his own Hypothesis’. 371 Dialogues, 244. In addition to the source in Bayle, Dictionary, ‘Paulicians’, noted by Price in his edition of the Dialogues, 227n, Hume may have had in mind Cudworth, True Intellectual System (1678), Book I, Chapter 2, 78-9. $72 Dialogues, 247-8, 260-1. Contrast Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, II, 11; see Chapter 2 above, . 133. 373 Dialogues 262. See Chapter | above, p. 66.

326 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment dismal consequences of the latter, defines natural theology in a way which effectively deprives it of meaning, and finally suggests that the only solution is to fly to revealed truth. Part 12 serves many functions: it is a summary of Hume’s views on theism, superstition, and enthusiasm as worked out in the first Enquiry, the Natural History, and the History of England, an exploration of

how a religious sceptic can live among theists, a final attempt to dissolve the authority of rational religion, a recognition that sceptical arguments

have little influence, and a pessimistic meditation on what the future relationship between religion and ethics will be. It seems clear that one of Hume’s main aims is to separate the natural from the moral attributes of the deity and to detach natural religion, in the form of the argument from

design, from its association with revealed religion and ethics as first popularised by the Restoration latitudinarian divines. He does this obliquely in his opening ‘recantation’ by not applying in the conventional manner an argument drawn from Galen, in a passage which can be traced back to John Wilkins, Of the Principles and Duties of Natural Religion (1675).°”*

Another passage in which he seeks more openly to undermine the traditional argument for the association between religion and ethics resembles part of the apologetic note in Volume II of The History of Great Britain. Philo’s complaint of the ‘dismal consequences’ of vulgar super-

stition (which he has just differentiated from true religion) is a clear allusion to Hume’s History: ‘If the religious spirit be ever mentioned in any

historical narration, we are sure to meet afterwards with a detail of the miseries which attend it.’ Cleanthes replies:

The proper office of religion is to regulate the heart of men, humanize their conduct, infuse the spirit of temperance, order, and obedience; and as its operation is silent, and only enforces the motives of morality and justice, it 1s in danger of being overlooked, and confounded with these other motives. When it distinguishes

itself, and acts as a separate principle over men, it has departed from its proper sphere, and has become only a cover to faction and ambition.°”°

The equivalent passage in the History, n which Hume responds to criticism of his concentration on the effects of superstition and enthusiasm, reads as follows:

The proper office of religion is to reform men’s lives, to purify their hearts, to inforce all moral duties, and to secure obedience to the laws and civil magistrate. While it pursues these salutary purposes, its operations, tho’ infinitely valuable, are

secret and silent, and seldom come under the cognizance of history. That 374 Dialogues, 265—6. For the development of this argument at length, see Rivers, ‘ ““Galen’s Muscles”’, H7, XXXVI (1993), 577-97. Hume’s mistreatment of Wilkins may be compared with that of Tillotson’s argument against transubstantiation in order to attack miracles, first Enquiry, 109.

579 Dialogues, 271—2. If the draft of the Dialogues was complete by 1751, then this passage anticipates that in the History (communication from M. A. Stewart).

The ethics of sentiment and the religious hypothesis 327 adulterate species of it alone, which inflames faction, animates sedition, and prompts rebellion, distinguishes itself on the open theatre of the world, and is the great source of revolutions and public convulsions.*/°

Cleanthes and the equivocating Hume of the apologetic note are voicing

the view constantly inculcated by the latitudinarian divines that the function of true religion is to enforce the practice of moral duties.°’’ However, Philo’s aim is to show that it 1s impossible for religion, however

defined, to have this function. ‘It is certain, from experience, that the smallest grain of natural honesty and benevolence has more effect on men’s conduct, than the most pompous views suggested by theological theories and systems.’ Superstition and enthusiasm ‘weaken extremely men’s attachment to the natural motives of justice and humanity’. True religion ‘has no such pernicious consequences’; but that is because it is impossible for it to have any implications for morality at all. Theism is a species of philosophy, and is necessarily confined to the few. Philo has already argued (in a passage added in Hume’s final revision of 1776) that the dispute concerning theism is ‘incurably ambiguous’. “The theist allows, that the original intelligence is very different from human reason: ‘The

atheist allows, that the original principle of order bears some remote analogy to it. Will you quarrel, Gentlemen, about the degrees, and enter

into a controversy, which admits not of any precise meaning, nor consequently of any determination?’ At the end of the dialogue (also in the final revision), Philo appears to give his conditional assent to a version of

what he calls natural theology which bears no resemblance to natural religion as contemporary Christians understood it and which explicitly excludes any possibility of divine moral attributes or influence on human conduct. The traditional connexion between God’s existence, his natural attributes, his moral attributes, human moral duties, and revealed religion, breaks down at the first stage of the definition: If the whole of natural theology, as some people seem to maintain, resolves itself into one simple, though somewhat ambiguous, at least undefined proposition, that the cause or causes of order in the universe probably bear some remote analogy to human

intelligence. If this proposition be not capable of extension, variation, or more particular explication: If it afford no inference that affects human life, or can be the source of any action or forbearance: And if the analogy, imperfect as it 1s, can

be carried no further than to the human intelligence; and cannot be transferred, with any appearance of probability, to the other qualities of the mind: If this really $76 Flistory of Great Britain, II (1757), 450n. The note appears only in the first edition. For part of the continuation, in which Hume defends himself as historian, and Warburton’s criticism see pp. 274-5 above. Kemp Smith draws attention to Hume speaking in the manner of Cleanthes in this note, Dialogues, 27. Cf Hume’s letter to Mure, 30 June [1743], Letters, ed. Greig, I, 50, objecting to ‘every thing we commonly call Religion, except the Practice of Morality, & the Assent of the Understanding to the Proposition that God exists’. 377 See RGS, I, Chapter 2, section 3.

328 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment be the case, what can the most inquisitive, contemplative, and religious man do

more than give a plain, philosophical assent to the proposition, as often as it occurs; and believe that the arguments, on which it is established, exceed the objections which lie against it??”®

Early in his career Hume objected strongly to the method of reasoning

that endeavoured to refute a hypothesis on the grounds that it was dangerous to religion and morality. The falsity and the dangerous consequences of an opinion were two separate questions; such methods simply had the effect of making the person of an antagonist odious. At the same time he claimed that his treatment of his immediate subject, necessity, was in no way dangerous.°’? Beattie, typically, was outraged by this claim for

sympathy by the author of a book, the first Enquiry, ‘in which are many doctrines fatal to human happiness, and subversive of human society’. He regarded section 1] as a vindication of atheism, defining an atheist as follows: ‘A reasonable creature, who disbelieves the being of God, or thinks

it inconsistent with sound reason, to believe, that the Great First Cause is

perfect in holiness, power, wisdom, justice, and beneficence, — is a speculative Atheast; and he who endeavours to instil the same unbelief into

others, is a practical Atheist.’°®° Beattie regarded Hume as both a speculative and a practical atheist, a dangerous proselytiser for a system of thought that would destroy society. Hume was sure that he posed no such

danger. ‘he attack on religion was not damaging to morals; the only danger to morals came from religion itself in the form of superstition and enthusiasm. ‘The sentiments of benevolence, sympathy, and humanity were demonstrably perverted by a system of belief that preyed on hope and fear.

Yet Hume doubted whether his sceptical account of religion would or indeed could exert any influence. Thus, unlike the development of the narrative in The Moralists and Alciphron, in Hume’s Dialogues there is no conversion of one character by another. Philo tells Cleanthes that on the subject of natural religion he can never ‘corrupt the principles of any man

of common sense’; he knows that his scepticism will have no effect on Cleanthes and his pupil Pamphilus, that the influence of education and propensity cannot be overturned by reasoning.*°! Hume’s friend the 378 Dialogues, 273, 274, 276-7, 269, 270, 281. Cf Collins’s ironic Vindication of the Divine Attributes,

quoted in Chapter | above, pp. 64—5. Contrast Shaftesbury’s Theocles: ‘Nothing can be more unbecoming than to talk magisterially and in venerable Terms of “A Supreme NATURE, an Infinite Being, and A DEITY;” when all the while a Providence is never meant, nor any thing like Order or the Government of a Mind admitted. For when these are understood, and real Divinity acknowledg’d; the Notion is not dry, and barren; but such Consequences are necessarily drawn from it, as must set us in Action, and find Employment for our strongest Affections. All the Dutys of RELIGION evidently follow hence’; Characteristicks, HW, 269. See also Berkeley’s Lysicles, Chapter | above, p. 66. 379 Treatise, 409, repeated first Enquiry, 96—7; cf second Enquiry, 279.

380 Essay on Truth, 357-61, 487—8n. 381 Dialogues, 264.

The ethics of sentiment and the religious hypothesis 329 rational dissenter William Rose, reviewing the Dialogues in the Monthly Review, took a bleak view of the implications of Hume’s arguments: ‘If the principles which he has laboured with so much zeal and earnestness to establish be true, the wicked are set free from every restraint but that of the laws; the virtuous are robbed of their most substantial comforts; every generous ardor of the human mind is damped; the world we live in 1s a fatherless world; we are chained down to a life full of wretchedness and

misery; and we have no hope beyond the grave.’ But Rose went on cheerfully to adapt Philo’s words: ‘Mr Hume’s Dialogues cannot possibly

hurt any man of a philosophical turn, or, indeed, any man of common sense’.°°* Such optimism is what Hume would have expected from a philosophical theist. 382 Monthly Review, LXI (1779), 354—5. Rose’s contributions are identified in Nangle, Monthly Review (1934).

J

The conflict of languages in the later eighteenth century

THE TIME will come, my Lord, and I even assure myself it is at no great distance, when the Universities of England will be as respectable, for the learning they teach,

the principles they instil, and the morals they inculcate, as they are now contemptible, in your Lordship’s eye at least, on these several accounts. I SEE the Day, when a scholastic theology shall give place to a rational Divinity,

conducted on the principles of sound criticism and well-interpreted Scripture: When their Sums and Systems shall fly before enlightened Reason and sober Speculation ... When their Physics shall be Fact; their Metaphysics, common sense; and their Ethics, human nature. ‘Locke’ to ‘Shaftesbury’, in Hurd, Dialogues on the Uses of Foreign Travel (1764), 192-3!

reason has impertinently intermeddled with the Gospel, and that with such overbearing sedulity, as to darken it more and more; and rivers of tears would not suffice to bewail the increase of moral misery, which, since Mr. Locke’s time, has pervaded these kingdoms. Milner, Gibbon’s Account of Christianity Considered (1781), 156

the aera is approaching very fast, when Theological Acrimony shall be swallowed

up in Evangelical Charity, and a liberal toleration become the distinguishing feature of every church in Christendom. The ruling powers in Protestant and Catholic states begin at length every where to perceive, that an uniformity of sentiment in matters of religion is a circumstance impossible to be obtained; that it has never yet existed in the church of Christ, from the Apostolic age to our own. Watson, Collection of Theological Tracts (1785), 1, xvi

the question seems really to have been this; whether Christianity, in the truth and spirit of it, ought to be preserved; or whether a spiritless thing, called by the name

of Christianity, would answer the purpose better: in other words, whether the religion of Man’s Philosophy, or the religion of God’s Revelation, should prevail. Jones, Memoirs of Horne (1795), 94

| Hurd wrote to his friend William Mason, 22 January 1764, Correspondence of Hurd and Mason, ed.

Pearce and Whibley (1932), 63: ‘As to the Prediction, I think a good part of it is, or at least has been fulfilled: & for what remains, the Universities, if they are wise, will understand it as a hint for their further improvement.’

330

The conflict of languages in the later eighteenth century 331 The Cambridge Calvinist divine Anthony Tuckney, writing in 1651 to his university colleague Benjamin Whichcote, inspirer of several generations of latitudinarians and moderates in the Church of England and beyond,

complained that Whichcote had ‘minted’ in his Cambridge lectures a ‘kinde of a Moral Divinitie . . . onlie with a little tincture of Christ added’. He went on to warn that the fashionable habit of attacking the Calvinist

concern for doctrinal orthodoxy as notions and speculations — ‘as all opinions are accounted, which a man may hold, and yett bee never the better man for them’ — would lead in due course to the separation of ethics from religion: ‘that there is a God and a Christ, will thus come to bee but a notion and speculation’.* Whichcote’s importance as the progenitor of a new moral and rational kind of Christianity — ‘a doctrine sent from God,

both to elevate and sweeten humane nature’ — was emphasised by the latitudinarian bishop Gilbert Burnet in his influential account of the mid-

seventeenth-century origins of latitude at Cambridge.’ On the first publication of the letters between ‘Tuckney and Whichcote 100 years after they were written, William Rose reviewed Whichcote’s contribution from the perspective of his own tradition of rational dissent: the mid-eighteenthcentury reader would find in them ‘a spirit of rational piety, much candor,

and generous sentiments of religion, notwithstanding the fanatical and ridiculous cant which prevailed in the age wherein he lived’.* Richard Watson (1737-1816), Tuckney’s late-eighteenth-century successor as Regius Professor of Divinity, included in his Collection of Theological Tracts (1785) a list of the questions publicly disputed in the theological schools at

Cambridge in the last twenty-five to thirty years under his immediate predecessor Thomas Rutherforth and himself, contrasting them with lists of those disputed in the early and mid-seventeenth century under John Davenant and Tuckney. Watson obviously assumed that much progress had been made in the understanding of religion, but he warned the reader not to be complacent: ‘If he should think that we have in some instances a

more enlarged view of the Christian system, and more liberal notions concerning the manner in which dissentients from our particular mode of faith and worship ought to be treated than they had, I will take the liberty to say, that there is room for improvement in both these points.’ But the

enlarged view of theology and liberal notions of toleration to which Watson appealed were by no means universally shared. Joseph Milner (1744-97), clergyman and headmaster of the grammar school at Hull, 2 Whichcote, Eight Letters, ed. Salter (1753), 39. For the Tuckney—Whichcote letters see RGS, I, 8. 3 Burnet, History, I (1724), 187. See RGS, I, 28, 33-5. 4 Monthly Review, TX (1753), 252.

5 Tracts, ed. Watson, I, Preface, xxi—xxx, xxviii. Watson gives an account of his tenure of the Regius Chair (1771—87) in his Anecdotes (1817), 35ff. Davenant, Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity in the reign of James I, was a moderate Calvinist.

332 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment who graduated from Cambridge in 1766 and became an evangelical

convert in about 1770, saw the history of religion from the midseventeenth to the later eighteenth century as one of dangerous decline from the principles of the Reformation. At the conclusion of his attack on Hume and Gibbon he quoted with strong disapproval Burnet’s account of Whichcote. For Milner, the latitude-men heralded not the renewal but the

destruction of Christianity: ‘in attempting to cure the patient, they destroyed him’. In an important statement he drew attention to what he saw among both churchmen and dissenters as the erosion of doctrine, the neglect of feeling, the reliance on latitudinarian models, the exaltation of reason, the chafing at the restraint of subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles, and the increasing autonomy of ethics: With difficulty, a barren orthodoxy of sentiment, with reference to the Trinity and the Atonement, was for a while preserved: But the influence of the Holy Ghost in regeneration and sanctification, together with justification by faith in Christ alone, and the Scripture-views of the true character of God and of fallen man, were soon destroyed or debilitated among us. All idea of feeling in religion . . . was ridiculed as Enthusiasm. The indolent part of the Clergy contented themselves with a servile imitation of the admired models; the laborious and more enterprizing have made

bolder advances into the province of haughty reason. Many Dissenters have caught the infection, and, being less restrained by subscriptions, have openly avowed principles directly opposite to the real Gospel. The science of Ethics alone is left in repute; Christian mysteries are excluded as occult, or frivolous, or false; and the leaven of reason* has spread itself through all Christianity, and threatens to leave neither root nor branch.°®

This volume has been largely concerned with the question of how far it became possible in the course of the eighteenth century for ethics to be treated as separate from religion. The focus has been on the experimental method in morals, on the analysis of the constitution of human nature and the relative parts played by reason and the affections in the moral life, as developed initially by Shaftesbury (with the unwitting help of the latitudemen) in opposition to Locke. This tradition, which was of such importance from the 1720s onwards in both positive and negative ways in the Scottish

universities, had much less impact in Cambridge.’ Here the dominant tradition from the mid-eighteenth to the early nineteenth century was Lockean. In theology this meant reliance on Scripture and avoidance of what were considered matters of indifference, together with the deliberate © Gibbon’s Account (1781), 250—3. Milner adds the note: ‘* The candid reader will easily see, that I

mean by the word reason, a spirit of religious investigation, which exerts itself independantly of revealed truth.’ For Milner’s view of the continuous historical battle between pagan philosophical moralism and the experimental doctrines of grace, see Walsh, ‘Milner’s Evangelical History’, JEH, X (1959), 178. ’ The best study is Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of the Enlightenment (1989), though this is not concerned with ethics and is not always accurate in its characterisation of intellectual positions.

The conflict of languages in the later eighteenth century 333 doctrinal caution Locke had displayed in The Reasonableness of Christianity; it

did not necessarily imply heterodoxy of an Arian or unitarian kind. In ethics (where Locke’s influence was perhaps more significant) it meant the rejection of the Shaftesburian moral sense tradition and the insistence on the will of God as the foundation of morals with a concomitant emphasis on happiness as the end and utility as the measure of virtue.

William Paley (1743-1805), the best known figure in this tradition, reformulated the arguments of the previous generation of Cambridge Lockeans in three remarkably successful and influential works which were to have a long life as textbooks well into the nineteenth century.® Paley was

a student and then in 1766 a Fellow of Christ’s College (a stronghold of

latitude in the mid-seventeenth century), and from 1768 lectured on metaphysics, morals, and the Greek ‘Testament until he left Cambridge in 1775 to take up a series of clerical posts in the north, the most valuable

being the archdeaconry of Carlisle. The first of these three works, The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785), was based on his undergraduate lectures; it was followed by A View of the Evidences of Christianity

(1794) and Natural Theology (1802). In the dedication to the last he explained that he had written the books in the reverse order to that in which they should be read. They now made up a system: evidences of natural religion, evidences of revealed religion, and an account of the duties that result from both. Paley thus firmly tied together the tripartite structure that Hume had set himself to undo.? In his preface to Moral Philosophy he quoted with approval the passage from Samuel Johnson’s preface to Dodsley’s Preceptor that urged the uniting of the sanctions of Christianity with the obligations of morality.'° His method in this work,

based as it was on years of lecture notes, made it difficult for him to identify his borrowings, but he acknowledged his debt to The Light of Nature

(1768) by the eccentric Lockean Abraham ‘Tucker, alias Edward Search.

He indicated his primary debt by dedicating his book to Edmund Law, who is pictured as having spent his life ‘in the most interesting of all human pursuits, — the investigation of moral and religious truth, — in | constant and unwearied endeavours to advance the discovery, communication, and success of both’.!! 8 See Meadley, Memoirs of Paley (1809); E. Paley, An Account of the Life and Writings of W. Paley

D.D.’, prefixed to Paley, Works (1825, new edn 1838), I; Clarke, Paley (1974); Waterman, ‘A Cambridge “Via Media”’’, JEH, XLII (1991), 419-36, on Paley, Watson, and Hey. 9 Natural Theology (1802), vii. Paley argues against Hume on miracles in Evidences, 1 (2nd edn, 1794), 6-14; Natural Theology restates the design argument, with a brief reference to Hume’s Dialogues at the end of Chapter 26 (7th edn, 1804), 556 (I owe the last reference to M. A. Stewart). On the argument of Natural Theology see Nuovo, ‘Rethinking Paley’, Synthese, XCI (1992), 29-51. ‘0 Quoted in Chapter 3 above, p. 183; Moral Philosophy (1818 edn), xiv. 11 Moral Philosophy, xix, xviii, tii. Paley wrote A Short Memoir of Law (1800). On their friendship see

334 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment At different stages of his career a Fellow of Christ’s, Master of Peterhouse, Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy, and Bishop of Carlisle,

Edmund Law (1703-87) was the principal channel for the diffusion of Lockean thought in Cambridge.'!* His most important works in this connexion were his translation of King’s Essay on the Origin of Evil, prefaced by Gay’s Dissertation Concerning Virtue and accompanied with his own notes (1731, with several later enlarged editions), Considerations on the Theory of Religion (1745, similarly revised and enlarged in subsequent editions), and his edition of The Works of Fohn Locke (1777). Of the last Paley commented:

‘Mr. Locke’s writings and character he held in the highest esteem, and seems to have drawn from them many of his own principles: he was a disciple of that school.’!° Law used his preface to Locke partly as a means

of summarising his own views of ethics and attacking contemporary theories of the moral sense: ‘by the very same arguments which that great Author used with so much success in extirpating innate IJdeas, he most effectually eradicated all innate or connate senses, instincts, &c ... these same senses, or instincts, with whatever titles decorated, whether stiled sympathetic or sentimental, common or intuitive, — ought to be looked upon as

no more than mere HABITS’. All such ‘pompous’ theories of morals come

to the same thing and ‘always take the main point, the ground of obligation, for granted’. ‘Mr Locke went a far different way to work, at the very entrance on his Essay, pointing out the true origin of all our passions and affections, 1.e. sensitive pleasure and pain; and accordingly directing

us to the proper principle and end of virtue, private happiness, in each individual; as well as laying down the adequate rule and only solid ground of moral obligation, the Divine Will.’'* Law was here summarising the

substance of his essays ‘On Morality and Religion’ and “The Nature and Obligations of Man, as a Sensible and Rational Being’ prefixed to later editions of King’s Essay on Evil. In the first of these he provided the definition of virtue that Paley was to make famous. Having criticised other definitions of the moral good — following nature or acting according to

reason, truth, the relations of things, or in obedience to God — because they all omitted crucial aspects, he went on: ‘A compleat definition of virtue, or morality, should take in all these particulars, and can be only this: the doing good to mankind, 1n obedience to the will of God, and for the sake of

everlasting happiness.’ In the second essay he explained that the principle of

association, whereby the moral sense could be seen to be no more than E. Paley, ‘Account of Paley’, Works, I, lvi. E. Paley prints the first few pages of his father’s ‘lecture book’ on moral philosophy (xc—ci).

'2 On Law see J. Stephens, ‘Edmund Law and his Circle at Cambridge’, in Rogers and Tomaselli, eds., Philosophical Canon (1996); Young, Religion and Enlightenment (1998), Chapters 2 and 3. 13 Paley, Memoir of Law, 9. '4 Works of Locke, ed. Law, I, viii—ix.

The conflict of languages in the later eighteenth century 3395 habit, had been hinted at by Locke, developed by Gay, and fully elaborated by Hartley, and claimed that had more attention been paid to Locke then the true theory of morals would have been found sooner.!° In the Preface to Observations on Man (1749), Hartley acknowledged his debt to Gay’s preliminary dissertation to Law’s translation of King, which he read on its

first publication in 1731, and he argued in the section ‘Of the Pleasures and Pains of the Moral Sense’ that all moral judgements, approbations, and disapprobations are deduced from association alone.'© Law thus in effect incorporated into his later editions of King the arguments of an influential work which the first edition had generated. Law’s Theory of Religion, the object of which was to demonstrate that religion, like the arts

and sciences, progresses over time, contains similar points about innate notions, implanted instincts, natural affection, happiness, and habit. The notes, enlarged over the years, were designed as a kind of index to modern authors. Thus Law recommended Hartley, rebuked both Shaftesbury and

Mandeville, praised John Brown, and confidently quoted twice over his own solution to the question of the foundation of morals as given in his

edition of King. The second version reads: ‘obedience to God is the principle, the good of mankind the matter, our own happiness the end, of all that 1s properly termed moral virtue. ‘This has been shewn to be the true theory of virtue.’!” Despite its inherent difficulty and its unattractive format, Law’s edition

of King seems to have been an important textbook in mid-century Cambridge. ‘Thomas Johnson of Magdalene, who shared Law’s views on ethics, cites it repeatedly in his Quaestiones Philosophicae (1734, third edition

1741). For example, under the sixth of the ethical questions, whether private happiness should be the ultimate end of moral actions, and the seventh, whether the will of God alone is an adequate rule for moral actions, he cites among other texts on the affirmative side Gay’s preliminary dissertation and Law’s notes.'* The importance of Law at Cambridge is even more apparent when Johnson’s textbook is compared with the contemporary Oxford one, Edward Bentham’s Introduction to Moral Philosophy (1745): Bentham refers only once to Law’s translation of King, and it is clearly King’s work that is recommended, not Law’s notes. !? 'S King, Essay on Evil, 5th edn (1781), liv, lix—xi. Hutcheson is rebuked (p. Ix) for slighting the principle of association in his System of Moral Philosophy. Paley, Memoir of Law, 2, says that Law

always spoke of Gay ‘in terms of the greatest respect. In the bible, and in the writings of Mr. Locke, no man, he was used to say, was so well versed.’ 16 Observations on Man (1749), I, v; Part I, Chapter 4, section 6, 499.

'7 Theory of Religion, 6th edn (1774), 11, v, 28, vi-vii, 12n, 252n, 254n. See Crane, ‘Anglican Apologetics and the Idea of Progress, 1699-1745’, in The Idea of the Humanities (1967), I. 18 Quaestiones Philosophicae (3rd edn, 1741), 221, 223-4.

'S Bentham, Introduction to Moral Philosophy (1745), 81. On Johnson and Bentham see also Chapter

3 above, pp. 196-8.

336 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment Law’s success was nothing in comparison to Paley’s. There were fifteen editions of Moral Philosophy in Paley’s lifetime; the year after its publication it was made a standard textbook in the university for disputations and the

B.A. examinations, and it replaced other ethical works used for college teaching.*° Paley’s educational triumph can be partly attributed to the extraordinary clarity with which he laid out religious and ethical problems, and the ease with which he disposed of questions on which writers in the

Shaftesburian tradition had expended so many pages. In the Preface to Moral Philosophy he listed the faults that characterised previous treatises of morals: the principle was erroneous, or indistinctly explained, or ‘the rules

deduced from it were not sufficiently adapted to real life’, or the law of nature was kept separate from revelation, or such works were laid out as a series of detached propositions without a continuous argument, or labour and prolixity were wasted on defining words and phrases. As a conse-

quence of the last fault, ‘they for whose use such books are chiefly intended, will not be persuaded to read them at all’. Paley set out to make

his work both attractive and useful to the reader, and to deal only with questions which were relevant ‘to the life of an inhabitant of this country

in these times’: ‘I have examined no doubts, I have discussed no obscurities, | have encountered no errors, but what I have seen actually to exist.’*!

In the first two books of Moral Philosophy Paley dealt crisply with the

question of the foundation of morals that had so much exercised his predecessors. In Book I, Chapter 5, “The Moral Sense’, he argued that the existence of an innate, instinctive, natural sense or conscience could not be proved because a human subject ‘under no possible influence of example, authority, education, sympathy, or habit’ could not be found and tested.

On the basis of probable reasoning, the existence of such a sense 1s unlikely. Paley adduced the Lockean argument that there is no uniform agreement among different societies about approved actions. ‘That there 1s general though not universal approbation can be explained by association,

custom, authority, imitation, reading, conversation, language, ‘and the various other causes by which it universally comes to pass, that a society

of men, touched in the feeblest degree with the same passion, soon communicate to one another a great degree of it’.2? Paley’s conclusion is

‘either that there exist no such instincts as compose what is called the moral sense, or that they are not now to be distinguished from prejudices 20 Meadley, Paley, 77, 93; E. Paley, ‘Account of Paley’, Works, I, lxxxii; Clarke, Paley, 127ff; Hilton, Age of Atonement (1988), 171. Paley’s Evidences was a compulsory examination text as late as 1909.

21 Moral Philosophy, xiii—xvii. Paley found fault with Grotius, Pufendorf, Adam Ferguson, and Rutherforth. He could have objected to Law’s works on some of these grounds. 22 Moral Philosophy, 8-12. In support of this last point Paley quotes from section 9 of Hume’s second Enquiry.

The conflict of languages in the later eighteenth century 337

and habits; on which account they cannot be depended upon in moral reasoning’. Men are only too prone to mistake the laws of custom for the order of nature and to justify institutions such as slavery on this basis; ‘a system of morality, built upon instincts, will only find out reasons and excuses for opinions and practices already established, — will seldom

correct or reform either’. Even if the existence of moral instincts is granted, the problem of their authority remains. The remorse of conscience may be borne with. If the sinner feels the pleasure of sin to exceed the remorse it entails, then ‘the moral instinct man. . . has nothing more to offer’. (So much for Butler’s self-authorising principle.) If he alleges that these instincts are indications of the will of God, then he is resorting to an ulterior rule and motive, knowledge of which can be gained a better way. Whether or not we have such instincts is simply irrelevant. “This celebrated question, therefore, becomes in our system a question of pure curiosity;

and as such, we dismiss it to the determination of those who are more inquisitive than we are concerned to be, about the natural history and constitution of the human species.’*°

Having disposed of the moral sense and the tradition that derived morality from the constitution of human nature, Paley restated the theory of virtue he had developed from Locke, Gay, Law, and Hartley: ‘VIRTUE is “‘the doing good to mankind, in obedience to the will of God, and for the sake of

everlasting happiness.’ According to which definition, “the good of mankind’’ is the subject; the ‘“‘will of God” the rule; and “everlasting happiness,” the

motive of human virtue.”** At the beginning of Book II, ‘Of Moral Obligation’, he argued, following Gay, that different accounts of why we are obliged to act morally — because it is right, or agreeable to the fitness of things, or conformable to reason and nature or to truth, or promotes the

public good, or is required by the will of God — all coincide in public happiness, and that whatever different principles moralists set out from, they commonly meet in their conclusions. However, none of these accounts explains obligation properly. Obligation means being ‘urged by a violent motwe resulting from the command of another, and a violent motive means

something that we stand to gain or lose by. The nature of this motive is central to Paley’s argument. ‘As we should not be obliged to obey the laws,

or the magistrate, unless rewards or punishments, pleasure or pain, somehow or other depended upon our obedience; so neither should we, without the same reason, be obliged to do what is right, to practise virtue, or to obey the commands of God.’ ‘The violent motive is the expectation of

rewards or punishments after death. “Therefore, private happiness [the 23° Moral Philosophy, 14-16.

24 Moral Philosophy, Book I, Chapter 7, 32. Meadley, Paley, 79, identifies Paley’s definition as taken

from the 5th edition of Law’s translation of King (see n. 15 above), liv and 256, n. 52, and the 7th edn of The Theory of Religion, 269, n.d.

338 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment heavenly reward] is our motive, and the will of God [that we should promote public happiness in this life] our rule.’ Paley considered this to be

the solution of the subject, and that no further question about obligation could reasonably be asked.?? Paley’s moral theory was indissolubly bound up with Scripture. In Book

I, Chapter 4, he claimed that Scripture presupposes a knowledge of natural justice, and that its use is ‘not so much to teach new rules of morality, as to enforce the practice of it by new sanctions, and a greater certainty’ .*° In Book II, Chapter 3, he differentiated between prudence, according to which we assess gains or losses in this world, and duty, according to which we assess gains or losses in the next.*’ He made the point that those wishing to establish a system of morality without a future state would need a different idea of moral obligation, unless they could show that virtue leads to certain happiness in this life. In his chapter on happiness he offered much advice about its present achievement, but emphasised that only those endeavouring after happiness in a future state could have a truly satisfying lifelong object. For Christians there are two questions: will there be a distribution of rewards and punishments after life, and if so, what actions will be rewarded and punished? In answer to the first question, both Christianity and the light of nature assure us that this distribution will take place. In Moral Philosophy this assurance, although it is the foundation of the whole system, is explicitly taken for granted; the

task of proving it was to be reserved for the Evidences of Christianity, In answer to the second question, the will of God which constitutes morality can similarly be learnt from both Scripture and the hght of nature. Paley emphasised ‘the absurdity of separating natural and revealed religion from each other. ‘The object of both is the same, to discover the will of God, — and, provided we do but discover it, it matters nothing by what means.’?® Paley assumed (on grounds Hume would have found risible) that God 1s benevolent and wills the happiness of his creatures. The possibility that he wishes their misery or is indifferent to either their misery or their happiness is quickly dismissed. ‘The method of coming at the will of God by the light 22° Moral Philosophy, Book Il, Chapters 1—3, 42—6. For Price’s response see Chapter 3 above, p. 172. 26 Moral Philosophy, 6; cf Evidences, I, 25: “The direct object . . . of the design [of revelation] is, to

supply motives, and not rules; sanctions, and not precepts.’ Scripture morality is discussed in Moral Philosophy, Book I, Chapter 7, 38-41, and in Evidences, Il, Part Hf, Chapter 2, “The Morality of the Gospel’, drawing on two essays by Paley, ‘Observations upon the Character and Example of Christ, and the Morality of the Gospel’, appended to the 6th edition of Law’s Theory of Religion and reprinted in Meadley, Paley, 47—70.

27 Moral Philosophy, 47. Price asks sarcastically in his note on Paley, Review of Morals, ed. Raphael,

Note F, 283: ‘A man, therefore, who either does not believe in a future world, or who does not carry his views to it, can have no perception of duty?’ 28 Moral Philosophy, Book I, Chapter 6, 27; Book II, Chapters 3—4, 47—8. Paley here complained

at the absence of motive in section 9 of Hume’s second Enquiry; see Chapter 4 above, pp. 307-8.

The conflict of languages in the later eighteenth century 339 of nature is to enquire into the tendency of actions to promote or diminish that happiness, i.e. their utility. This was the keystone of Paley’s argument. Ironically, as his critics were to point out, this aspect of his theory linked him with Hume, though Paley’s version was much cruder: ‘Whatever is expedient is right. It is the utility of any moral rule alone which constitutes

the obligation of it.’ Since utility is defined by general not particular consequences, there can be no conflict between what is useful and what is right.?° As a moral philosopher Paley had no difficulty in selecting what seemed

to him the most convincing arguments of his predecessors and simply ignoring their qualifications and dismissing their favourite concerns. He scorned the admiration for the classical moralists that accompanied the Shaftesburian emphasis on the constitution of human nature.?? The tensions between reason and sentiment or self-love and benevolence played no part in his system. He was, however, aware that his theory of utility could not be exactly fitted to the gospel, which may explain why he valued revelation more for its motives and sanctions than its precepts. In his essay on the morality of the gospel, he included in a list of its principal

articles the estimating of actions by their intent not their effect and the extending of morality to the regulation of the thoughts, and he further observed that “(he gospel maxims of loving our neighbour as ourselves, and doing as we would be done by, are much superior rules of life to the To Tpetrov

of the Greek, or the honestum of the Latin moralists, in forming ideas of which, people put in or left out just what they pleased; and better than the utile, or general expediency of the modern, which few can estimate.’*! In a

note at the beginning of his chapter on utility in Moral Philosophy, he differentiated between actions in the abstract, which are right or wrong according to their tendency, and agents, who are virtuous or vicious according to their design. He made it clear that his concern was with actions in the abstract.°* The estimating of expediency, of the general consequences of actions, was an essential aspect of his account of virtue. His aim was to unite private and public virtue, the self-interested pursuit of

private happiness in the form of reward in the next life together with obedience to the will of God in order to earn that reward by promoting public happiness in this life; he thus popularised for generations of Cambridge undergraduates in a peculiarly uncompromising form the mercenary theory of morals against which Shaftesbury had long ago so influentially set himself. 29 Moral Philosophy, Book II, Chapters 4—8, 50—4, 59.

50 See e.g. the accounts of the moralists’ vices in Evidences, II, 75ff, and of their confusion over honestum and utile in Moral Philosophy, 61.

3! Meadley, Paley, articles (8), 63, (9), 64, 66; cf Clarke, Paley, 69-70. 32° Moral Philosophy, Book II, Chapter 6, 53—4n.

340 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment A very different work emanating from the Cambridge Lockean tradition which illustrates its theological rather than its ethical dimension is Richard Watson’s edition of A Collection of Theological Tracts in six volumes, published

in the same year as Paley’s Moral Philosophy. ‘This collection, together with

Watson’s preface, introductory comments on the individual tracts, and annotated ‘Catalogue of Books in Divinity’, provides a remarkable insight into late eighteenth-century latitudinarianism or liberal religion as it was now called, its debt to its late seventeenth-century origins, and its relationship with dissent and heterodoxy. Watson, like Paley, warmly acknowl-

edged the intellectual influence of Edmund Law. In his autobiography (published after his death by his son) he recorded that as an undergraduate at ‘Trinity College he ‘studied with much attention’ Locke, Clarke, Law’s edition of King, and Pufendorf. After he had taken his B.A. in 1759, Law, then Master of Peterhouse, sent for him in order to make his acquaintance. ‘From my friendship with that excellent man, I derived much knowledge and liberality of sentiment in theology; and I shall ever continue to think my early intimacy with him a fortunate event in my life.” As Moderator in 1762 he was responsible for undergraduate disputations (Paley was one of the candidates), and he included in his autobiography a list of the questions that were argued that year, in order to show, in contrast to Oxford, ‘the depths of science, and the liberality of principles in which the University of Cambridge initiates her sons’. Many of the philosophical questions are of a

distinctly Lockean cast — for example on whether there is or is not an innate moral sense, or whether virtue consists in conformity to the will of God — and resemble those listed by Thomas Johnson in his Quaestiones Philosophicae over twenty years earlier. One startling question asks whether

Hume is right to claim that a future state cannot be deduced from the justice of God (presumably with reference to section 11 of the first Enquiry).°> In 1771 Watson was elected Regius Professor of Divinity in succession to Rutherforth, and ‘immediately applied [him]self with great eagerness to the study of divinity’. Three main points emerge from his description of his professorial principles: a traditionally Protestant as much as Lockean emphasis on sola scriptura — ‘I reduced the study of divinity into

as narrow a compass as I could, for | determined to study nothing but my Bible’; a refusal to make the Thirty-Nine Articles doctrinally authoritative in disputations in the divinity schools — he took the view that it was not his

function, contrary to the practice of his predecessors, ‘to demolish every

opinion which militated against what is called the orthodoxy of the Church of England’; and ‘an insuperable objection to every degree of dogmatical intolerance’. These methods introduced, he claimed, ‘a liberal spirit in the University’ .°** 33 Watson, Anecdotes (1817), 8-9, 22, 25-7. 34 Anecdotes, 38—9.

The conflict of languages in the later eighteenth century 34] Although Watson’s Collection of Tracts did not have nearly such a long life as Paley’s Moral Philosophy, according to his own account it ‘was very well received by the world, near a thousand copies having been sold in less than

three months; and very ill recetved by the bishops, on account of my having printed some tracts originally written by Dissenters.’ It went through two large editions (1785 and 1791): ‘The dissenter Andrew Kippis observed that ‘For the noble, manly and truly evangelical preface [Watson

was] entitled to the gratitude of the Christian world.’*? In the Preface, Watson defined the audience for whom the tracts were intended, explained the basis of his selection, gave instructions on how they were to be read, and put forward his own liberal understanding of Christianity. Watson’s

primary audience was the younger and less-informed clergy — those , ordained from country schools who had little money for books as well as those educated at the universities — and students intending to take orders. He encouraged the last group to make theology a regular part of their plan

of undergraduate study, and suggested that they should read the whole collection through two or three times before taking their first degree. But he stressed that the collection was not restricted to a clerical or even an Anglican audience. He also aimed at ‘young persons of every denomination’, and at young men of rank and fortune who were susceptible to ‘that contagion of Infidelity which is the disgrace of the age’. In selecting works he was concerned not so much with discussion of particular doctrines as

with general arguments that would produce in the clergy and others ‘a well-grounded persuasion that Christianity is not a cunningly devised fable, but the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth [Romans 1: 16]’.°°

Watson presented to his readers the traditional latitudinarian argument that Christianity would be serviceable to them in this world: ‘there is not a

single precept in the Gospel ... which is not calculated to promote our happiness. Christianity regulates, but does not extinguish our affections; and in the due regulation of our affections consists our happiness as reasonable beings.’ He further provided a liberal and Lockean account of the nature of Christianity. Most established systems obstruct the truth; ecclesiastical history ‘is littke more, than the history of the struggles of different sects to overturn the systems of others, in order to build up their own’. The fundamental doctrine (Watson would presumably expect his readers to recognise Locke’s emphasis in The Reasonableness of Christianity) is

that Jesus is the Messiah; the other fundamental truths are much more difficult to determine. I do not conceive it to be any man’s duty, to anathematize those who cannot 3° Anecdotes, 136—7. For Kippis’s edition of Doddridge’s Course of Lectures (1794) see Chapter 3 above, p. 193. 36 Tracts, ed. Watson, I, v—ix.

342 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment subscribe to Azs catalogue of fundamental Christian verities. That man is not to be esteemed an Atheist, who acknowledges the existence of a God the Creator of the universe; though he cannot assent to all the truths of natural religion, which other

men may undertake to deduce from that principle: nor is he to be esteemed a Deist, who acknowledges that Jesus of Nazareth ts indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the world, though he cannot assent to all the truths of revealed religion which other men may think themselves warranted in deducing from thence.°’

In answer to those who might think he spoke too freely and encouraged ‘sceptical and latitudmarian principles’, Watson insisted that he had no regard for latitudinarian principles, only for principles of truth. Every man must endeavour to investigate truth for himself, and he is most likely to succeed by examining ‘with candour and care, what can be urged on each side of a greatly controverted question’. This may produce doubt, hesitation, and suspension of judgement, but at the same time it will produce mutual forbearance and good temper: ‘our charity will be enlarged, as our

understanding is improved’. What must be avoided is prejudice, i.e. grounding opinions on fashion, fancy, interest, the unexamined tenets of family, sect, or party, on anything rather than ‘the solid foundation of cool and dispassionate reasoning’. Both churchmen and dissenters ‘are apt to give a degree of assent to opinions beyond what they can give a reason for; this is the very essence of prejudice’. What is required is a consciousness of intellectual weakness, which is ‘ever most conspicuous in minds the most enlightened, and which, wherever it subsists, puts a stop to dogmatism and intolerance of every kind’. In keeping with these principles, in his preface to the first tract in the first volume of the Collection of Tracts, the dissenter John Taylor’s Scheme of Scripture Divinity, Watson quoted with great approval

the charge to his pupils with which Taylor always began his lectures, the last paragraph of which reads: “That you keep your mind always open to evidence. — ‘That you labour to banish from your breast all prejudice, prepossession, and party-zeal. — ‘That you study to live in peace and love with

all your fellow-christians; and that you steddily assert for yourself, and

freely allow to others, the unalienable rights of judgment and conscience.’?®

Watson knew that his choice of so many works by dissenters for his collection would not please some churchmen, but, he explained, ‘the truth is, I did not at all consider the quarter from whence the matter was taken,

but whether it was good, and suited to my purpose’.°? The first three volumes of Scripture commentary and interpretation include works by the

dissenters Lardner and Chandler as well as Taylor. The most notable works by Anglicans in the remaining volumes are Locke’s Reasonableness of 37 Tracts, ed. Watson, I, x, xiv—xv. 38 Tracts, ed. Watson, I, xvi—xvii, xix; 1—ii.

39 Tracts, ed. Watson, I, xix.

The conflict of languages in the later eighteenth century 343 Christianity and Clarke’s Boyle lectures (Volume IV), Hartley’s Of the Truth of the Christian Religion from the second volume of Observations on Man (Volume

V), and Fowler’s Design of Christianity (1671, Volume VI). Watson added

brief introductory remarks and additional recommendations by way of preface to the individual works. The Reasonableness of Christianity ‘has long

been very generally approved’. His comment on Clarke indicates that he valued him not for his moral theory but for his treatment of the evidences, precisely the part for which Tindal had such contempt: ‘Whatever opinion the reader may entertain of the principles advanced in this book relative to the foundation of Morality; he will admire the strength and perspicuity with which the whole of it is written; and derive the singular benefit from that part of it, which treats of the Evidences of revealed Religion.’ Noting that Clarke is said to have drawn on Part II of Baxter’s Reasons of the

Christian Religion (1667), he urges the reader to compare them.*° Of Hartley Watson comments, ‘I know not any author, Grotzus excepted, who has, in so short a compass, said more to the purpose on that subject than

Doctor Hartley has done.’ He regrets that there have not been as many editions of Fowler’s Design of Christianity ‘as, from the worth of it, might

have been expected’, and points out that works of a similar tendency include The Whole Duty of Man, Holy Living and Dying, and The Imitation of

Christ (but surprisingly Watson includes no other such work in his collec-

tion).*! The appendix to the sixth volume, the lengthy unpaginated ‘Catalogue of Books in Divinity’, provides further invaluable illustration of

Watson’s view of the latitudinarian tradition descending from the late seventeenth century, mid-eighteenth-century dissent, and contemporary unitarianism. He expects that ‘some may find fault with me for having introduced books . . . which maintain Doctrines opposite to the Articles of

the Church of England’. The seventeenth-century Anglican works he recommends include Taylor’s Liberty of Prophesying, Hammond’s Practical Catechism, Wilkins’s Principles and Duties of Natural Religion, Gudworth’s True

Intellectual System, Burnet’s Discourse of the Pastoral Care, and the works of Barrow, Stillingfleet, and Tillotson.*” Earlier eighteenth-century Anglican works include those of Clarke with his life by Hoadly, A Defence of Natural and Revealed Religion (the collected Boyle lectures) — ‘If all other Defences of Religion were lost, there is solid Reasoning enough (if properly weighed) in these three volumes to remove the Scruples of most Unbelievers’ — Butler’s Analogy, Wollaston’s Religion of Nature, and Warburton’s Divine Legation. A few 40 Tracts, ed. Watson, IV, Locke, A2, Clarke, iv. For Tindal’s view of Clarke see Chapter | above,

. 79-81. 41 Tracts, ed. Watson, V, Hartley, A2; VI, Fowler. Law also recommends Fowler’s Design in ‘Reflections of the Life and Character of Christ’, Theory of Religion, 6th edn (1774), 308n. For The Design, The Whole Duty, and Holy Living see RGS, I.

42 For Hammond, Wilkins, Burnet, Barrow, Stillingfleet, and Tillotson see RGS, I.

344 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment authors of high-church sympathies appear, notably Bull and Waterland. The anti-freethinking works of Leland and Ogilvie, and replies to Hume on miracles by Douglas and Campbell, provide a significant Irish and Scottish contribution to the campaign against infidelity. ‘The contributions

| by English dissenters include Doddridge’s Family Expositor (1739-56) and Course of Lectures, and the works of Watts.*° Heterodox authors and works

include the unitarians Lindsey and Priestley (together with the high churchman Horsley’s attack on the latter), and John ‘Taylor’s Scripture Doctrine of Original Sin.** It should be noted, however, that in this long, eclectic, and generous list there are no works by Anglican evangelicals or Methodists. As a religious educationalist Watson had more in common with Baxter and Doddridge than with Wesley. He had once intended to have digested the whole of theology into a connected series of propositions, with references to authors ancients and modern on either side; among the aids he recommended to someone undertaking a work of this nature was Doddridge’s Course of Lectures.*°

In his Preface, his choice of texts, and his Catalogue, Watson stressed

the importance of English divinity from the mid-seventeenth century onward for the development of religious thought, and the service that freedom of enquiry in eighteenth-century England had done to the cause of Christianity. Addressing the younger clergy in his Preface, he made clear that they could only rely on the Bible for faith and doctrine (the point that he made to disputants at Cambridge), but that as far as the helps of human learning were concerned, the most difficult points of theology had been as well discussed by English divines as by those of any other nation. Further, although the works of deistical writers had made some converts to infidelity (and provided the French and German freethinkers with their arguments), they had proved ultimately beneficial through the replies they had provoked: ‘we must needs allow, that these works have stimulated some distinguished characters amongst the Laity, and many amongst the Clergy, to exert their talents in removing such difficulties in the Christian system, as would otherwise be likely to perplex the unlearned, to shipwreck

the faith of the unstable, and to induce a reluctant scepticism into the 43 The Family Expositor is frequently cited by Law in Theory of Religion. For Doddridge and Watts see RGS, I. #4 For Wesley’s attack on Taylor’s Original Sin see RGS, 1, 227-8.

45 Tracts, ed. Watson, I, xxxi—ii. On Baxter, Doddridge, and Wesley as educationalists see RGS, I and ‘Dissenting and Methodist Books’ in Rivers, ed., Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century

England (1982). Watson’s enterprise should also be compared with Warburton’s unfinished, posthumously published Dorections for the Study of Theology, included by Hurd in Volume V of his

edition of Warburton’s Works (1788). Among seventeenth-century English authors Warburton recommends Locke’s Essay, Reasonableness of Christianity, Letters on Toleration, and his paraphrases

of St Paul; Cumberland, Cudworth, Stillingfleet, Chillingworth, ‘[aylor’s Liberty of Prophesying,

and Barrow; among eighteenth-century authors (far fewer in number) he recommends Wollaston’s Religion of Nature and Clarke’s sermons.

The conflict of languages in the later eighteenth century 345

minds of the most serious and best intentioned’. Like Law, and unlike Hume, Watson believed that the development of learning and the exercise

of reason strengthened religion. Some ‘affect to believe, that as the restoration of letters was ruinous to the Romish Religion, so the further cultivation of them will be subversive of Christianity itself. Of this there is no danger.’*° In relation to the other denominations and movements of the time, the

mid- to late-eighteenth-century latitudinarians at Cambridge shared a number of intellectual, moral, and religious positions.*’ Some of these derived from those of their late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century predecessors, but some were the product of a very different intellectual climate. They were sure of their epistemology and moral theory; convinced Lockeans, they had little interest in the Shaftesburian moral sense tradition or in Scottish philosophy. ‘They were sympathetic to the dissenters, and deplored the bigotry of the high churchmen towards them. ‘They disliked

what they perceived as the anti-rationalism of the evangelicals and methodists. They were opposed to sceptics and freethinkers, and joined

forces with the dissenters in defending natural and revealed religion against them, but they thought that freedom of enquiry and debate assisted the continuous improvement of religion. ‘They were cautious, however, in their attempts to reform the structures of the church. They supported the

legal requirement of subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles on the erounds of expediency, i.e. of political and social stability.*® In terms of doctrine, they were able to subscribe to the Articles by interpreting them liberally, and they were thus opposed to the literal interpretations both of the calvinist evangelicals, who accepted justification by faith alone (Article XI) and predestination (Article XVID, and of the unitarians, who were unable to accept the trinitarian articles or original sin (Articles I, VII, TX).

The failure in the 1770s of the campaign to have the requirement to subscribe removed meant a rift between latitudinarian churchmen who continued to subscribe and unitarians who felt unable to do so, but the former remained sympathetic to the latter.*? Thus Watson in his Catalogue

commented in relation to Francis Blackburne’s The Confessional (third 46 Tracts, ed. Watson, I, xii—xiii.

*7 Focusing on the last, Waterman calls this ‘A Cambridge ‘“‘Via Media”’, EH, XLII (1991). #8 On the subscription controversy see J. Gascoigne, ‘Anglican latitudinarianism, Rational Dissent and political radicalism in the late eighteenth century’, in Haakonsen, ed., Hnlightenment and Religion (1996); M. Fitzpatrick, ‘Latitudinarianism at the parting of the ways’, in Walsh, e¢ al., eds., Church of England c. 1689—c. 1833 (1993); Walsh, “The Thirty-Nine Articles and Anglican Identity in the Eighteenth Century’, in d’Haussy, ed., Quand Religions et Confessions se Regardent (1998); Young, Religion and Enlightenment, Chapter 2.

#9 The Feathers Tavern petition to Parliament demanding the abolition of subscription was overwhelmingly rejected in 1772 and 1774. However, in 1779 dissenting ministers were freed from the requirement to subscribe to the doctrinal articles; G.M. Ditchfield, ‘Ecclesiastical policy under Lord North,’ in Walsh, et al., eds., Church of England, 235.

346 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment edition, 1770), which objected that the obligation to subscribe infringed the right of private judgement: “The controversy is still unsettled; it is still a

question, whether any Christian Church has a right to require from its public teachers any other Profession of Faith, than that of a belief in the Bible, as containing a revelation from God? — It 1s still a question, whether, granting the Abstract Right, the Use of it be expedient in any degree, and to what degree, in the present condition of the Church of England?’”°° Watson

did think (like Hoadly earlier) that a national church had the right to require subscription to human articles of faith. He also thought (a view not shared by evangelicals or high churchmen) that unitarians were Christians: ‘If any one thinks that an Unitarian is not a Christian, I plainly say, without being myself an Unitarian, that I think otherwise.’?’

The Cambridge latitudinarians and the latitudinarian position in general in the later eighteenth century have been perceived by some recent historians as being under threat or in retreat.°? It is certainly the case that this position was under attack from several quarters (as indeed it had been since the 1660s), but this does not necessarily mean that its influence did

not continue to be strongly felt well into the next century. Its chief opponents in terms of Christian doctrine were high churchmen, evangelicals, and unitarians; in terms of ethics its nineteenth-century critics came

partly from the Scottish common sense tradition but most influentially from within Cambridge itself. The old battle between Locke and Shaftes-

bury was played out again; the victor proved to be Butler, the most umportant English moralist in the Shaftesburian tradition. High church and evangelical critics agreed that the Gambridge Lockean

tradition was fundamentally anti-Christian. George Horne (1730-92), student of University College, Oxford in the late 1740s, Fellow and subsequently President of Magdalen, Vice-Chancellor of the University,

Dean of Canterbury, and Bishop of Norwich, from his high-church perspective in mid-eighteenth-century Oxford deplored the importance placed on the undergraduate study of metaphysics and ethics, which he thought ‘had a near alliance to Deism’. He complained that at university a student ‘learns a system of Ethics, which teaches morals without religious data, as the Heathens did. After which, he probably goes on to Wollaston, Shaftsbury, and others; and is at length fixed in the opinion, that reason is sufficient for a man without revelation.”?? In his Apology for Certain Gentlemen °° Tracts, ed. Watson, VI, np. The Confessional (first published 1767) precipitated the movement for abolition of subscription; see Fitzpatrick in Walsh, e¢ al., eds., Church of England, 216-20. 21 Anecdotes, 41, 43, 47.

92 See e.g. Gascoigne, Cambridge, Chapters 7 and 8. A more sanguine view is taken by Ditchfield, in Walsh, et al., eds., Church of England, 230—5, and Lindsey (1998), 22—3.

23 Jones, Memoirs of Horne, 31, 34 (from letters to Horne’s father written in 1749, the year he graduated).

The conflict of languages in the later eighteenth century 347 in the University of Oxford (1756), he emphasised the difference between an

ethical divine and a Christian preacher; quoting Articles X and XII (on

the impossibility of works without grace and faith), he insisted that ‘whoever preaches works, or moral duties, disjoined from faith in Christ, with it’s motives, and principles of action, preaches a doctrine contrary to the whole tenor of the bible’. From this perspective he saw Law’s annotations to King as profoundly dangerous. “That such kind of learning as that book 1s filled

with, and the present age is much given to admire, has done no service to the cause of truth, but on the contrary, that it has done infinite disservice to it, and almost reduced us from the unity of Christian faith, to the wrangling of philosophic scepticism, is the opinion of many, besides ourselves; and too surely founded on fatal experience.’°* Horne’s biographer, his lifelong friend

the high churchman William Jones of Nayland, noted sarcastically that Law’s edition of King ‘was in great request at Cambridge, between the years 1740 and 1750; and was extolled by some young men who studied it, as a grand repository of human wisdom’.°®? The evangelical Joseph Milner provides a striking example of a student damaged, as he came to believe,

by his Lockean education at Cambridge about ten years after Horne’s attack. After his conversion, he wrote in 1771 to the evangelical clergyman

John Newton: ‘Cambridge metaphysics I am obliged to for much of that enmity and reasoning that has distressed me. In vain did I desire, when God shewed me the Gospel in some measure, to preserve a good understanding between the Scripture and King’s Ongin of Evil, Locke, Clark, and other Metaphysicks; which J had read with greediness, digested with kind

affection, and remembered (and still remember) with obstinate retention.”°° According to his brother Isaac, who shared his evangelical views,

and who later as President of Queens’ made his college a centre of evangelicalism, Joseph Milner now ‘believed the Articles of the Church in

their plain, literal and grammatical sense’. He came to think that the contemporary clergy had very much deviated from the principles which they profess, and to which they subscribe their assent: That the reading desk and the pulpit were often at variance; and that instead of setting forth to the understanding with plainness, and pressing upon the conscience with energy, the great and peculiar truths of the Gospel, such as the doctrines of Original Sin, of Justification by Faith, and of Regeneration by the Holy Spirit, as stated in the Articles and Homilies of the Church of England, the Clergy in general were substituting in their place a system of little more than Pagan Ethics.°’ 54 Horne, Apology, 9-10, 17. 55 Jones, Memoirs of Horne, 92.

56 Milner, Practical Sermons (1830), Preface by E. Bickersteth, viii—ix; Walsh, ‘Milner’s Evangelical History’, JEH, X (1959), 176. 57 J. Milner, Account of Foseph Milner (1804), xxvii—viii.

348 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment Milner had no doubt that the blame for the substitution of rational for evangelical religion was to be laid at the door of Locke and his followers: Mr. Locke led the fashion in introducing a pompous parade of reasoning into religion; from that time a rational religion has been the cant term, with all who profess to be wiser than others . . . Infidels have not stopped where Mr. Locke did; he was at least a speculative believer, though he appears to know little or nothing of that divine faith which the Scripture describes; from Locke down to Hume, that is to say, from a cold historical assent down to Atheism itself, or to what is much

the same, there has been a gradual melancholy declension from evangelical simplicity. °°

Miulner’s contempt for the Lockean tradition is in marked contrast to his

veneration for Butler. On the subject of ethics he considered himself greatly indebted to Butler’s account of the authority of the conscience. In

the course of his answer to Hume he challenged ‘any man, who has attended to his own feelings, [to] ask himself whether it be possible for any mode of education, either to implant or to eradicate this moral sense’, an

objection which seems to be directed at Law and the ethics Milner had been taught at Cambridge rather than at Hume. He went on to state of Butler: ‘I once for all acknowledge here my great obligations to this author . . . He who would learn to cultivate his judgment, and at the same time to chastise his imagination in subjects of this nature, will do well to meditate this writer. He will at the same time furnish himself with an answer to all

the deistical or sceptical speculations that ever were, or perhaps will be published.”?*

After the failure of the campaign against subscription, criticism of a very different kind was levelled at the Cambridge latitudinarians from the other end of the theological spectrum. Following the publication of Priestley’s story of the Corruptions of Christianity (1782), the high churchmen Horsley

and Horne engaged in a pamphlet and sermon war with Priestley in defence of trinitarian orthodoxy against unitarianism.°° In one of his rephes, Letters to Dr. Horne, Dean of Canterbury; [and] to the Young Men, who are in a Course of Education for the Christian Minwstry, at the Universities of Oxford and

Cambridge (1787), Priestley carried the war into the universities on the grounds that Horne was head of an Oxford college.°! He was answered by Horne in one of his characteristically witty and offensive pieces, A Letter to the Reverend Doctor Priestley, by an Undergraduate (1787), in which the under-

graduate declines Priestley’s offer to act as his director of theological studies on the grounds that unitarianism ‘is a religion without a Redeemer, °8 Gibbon’s Account, 154—5; see also the second epigraph to this chapter. 29 Gibbon’s Account, 202n, 203n.

6° On Horsley’s answers to Priestley see Mather, High Church Prophet (1992), Chapter 4; on Horne’s see Aston, ‘Horne and Heterodoxy’, KHR, CVIIT (1993), 909-13. ©! Priestley, Letters to Horne (1787), Preface, ix.

The conflict of languages in the later eighteenth century 349 without a Sanctifier, without grace, without a sacrifice, without a priest,

without an intercessor ... should we be catechized, as your pupils, at present, the exercise is short, and must stand thus — Q What do you believe? A. Nothing.’°

Priestley was warmly defended against Horne’s attack by a unitarian

who was not a dissenter by origin but a Cambridge-educated former Anglican with a particular view of the Lockean tradition. Theophilus Lindsey (1723—1808) was a student and subsequently a Fellow of St John’s in the 1740s; as a clergyman he moved to a living in Catterick, Yorkshire,

to be near his friend and father-in-law Francis Blackburne. He was a strong supporter of the campaign against subscription; after the first rejection by Parliament of the Feathers Tavern petition in 1772 he was one of a very small number of Anglican clerics to leave the Church on doctrinal grounds. In 1773 he resigned his living and for the next twenty years was minister of a unitarian chapel in Essex Street, London. His persistent but frustrated hope was that the Church of England would be reformed from within.©? In his reply to Horne, Vindiciae Priestleianae: An Address to the Students of Oxford and Cambridge (1788), Lindsey provided a particular reading of the English latitudinarian tradition from Whichcote, Tillotson,

Burnet, and Patrick through Locke, Clarke, and Hoadly to Blackburne, Law and Paley, suggesting that this tradition led inevitably to unitarianism.

Addressing the seventeenth-century latitudinarians, he told them they would not have hesitated to reform the Articles and the liturgy, ‘had ye enjoyed those lights concerning the equal rights of men, and the incompetency of human authority in the things of religion, with which the world

hath been blest since your time, by the labours of Locke, Hoadley, Blackburne, Law’. In his apostrophe to Locke, Lindsey spelt out that his epistemology led inevitably to unitarianism: ‘Nor did he more excell in thus investigating, and teaching the use of our natural reasoning powers, than in descrying, and pointing out the proper application of them, to the right understanding of the written records of divine revelation, of which he

was a firm believer ... In religious opinion he was strictly unitarian; holding the supreme, omnipotent Father to be God alone, and no other person besides him.’ Despite the Parliamentary rejection of the petition against subscription, Lindsey was confident that it represented a general disposition throughout the country to reformation of the ecclesiastical system. He rebuked Horne for attacking Priestley’s statement, ‘J wll not pretend to say, when my creed will be fixed’; ‘Tillotson, in his funeral sermon for 62 Letter to Priestley, by an Undergraduate, 2nd edn (1787), 1, 6. Jones, Memozrs of Horne, 132, regarded

this letter together with the Letter to Adam Smith and Letters on Infidelity as ‘three choice pieces upon the same argument, which should always go together’. 63 See Ditchfield, Lindsey. Priestley, Letters to Horne, 55, recommended all Lindsey’s writings to the

undergraduates.

350 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment Whichcote, had expressed the same view as Priestley when he described Whichcote as ‘so wise as to be willing to learn to the last. ‘Vhus Whichcote, in

Lindsey’s view, never had a fixed creed. Lindsey warmly recommended to his undergraduate audience Law’s Theory of Religion ‘for shewing, that religion and science have been in a state of progressive improvement from

the beginning of things’, and he quoted with approval Paley’s praise of Law in the dedication to Moral Philosophy.©* In contrast to the optimism of these latitudinarian heroes, Lindsey lamented the gloomy and superstitious religious temper of Butler.°? One of the clear aims of Vindiciae Priestleianae was to encourage what Lindsey saw as the logical fulfilment of the liberal

religious principles currently taught at the universities, particularly at Cambridge, so that the movement begun in the late seventeenth century

would be brought to unitarian fruition and the Articles and liturgy reformed at last. But Law and Paley, however liberal their principles, were

not signatories of the petition against subscription. Lindsey, by putting

himself outside the pale of the Church of England and becoming a reluctant dissenter, effectively cut off what influence he had with his former allies and probably damaged their cause.

The Cambridge elevation of Locke was deplored in the Scottish universities, unsurprisingly, for epistemological and moral rather than doctrinal reasons: this disapproval was combined with admiration for Shaftesbury and especially Butler. Dugald Stewart (1753—1828), Professor

of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh from 1785 to 1810, the former pupil and friend of Reid at Glasgow, noted in his ‘Account of the Life and Writings of Reid’ that Reid held Butler ‘in the highest estimation’:

the short Dissertation on Virtue ... together with the Discourses on Human Nature... he used always to recommend as the most satisfactory account that has yet appeared of the fundamental principles of Morals: Nor could he conceal his regret, that the profound philosophy which these Discourses contain, should of late have been so generally supplanted in England, by the speculations of some other moralists who, while they profess to idolize the memory of Locke, “‘approve little or nothing in his writings, but his errors.”’©°

In his ambitious Dissertation First: Exhibiting a General View of the Progress of Metaphysical, Ethical, and Political Philosophy, since the Revival of Letters in Europe

(written for the Encyclopaedia Britannica), Stewart was anxious to vindicate 64 Vindiciae Priestleianae, 28, 36-7, 47—8, 77-8, 258-9. See also Lindsey, Apology (1774), Chapter 2. Priestley’s Corruptions of Chnstranity is dedicated to Lindsey.

°5 Vindiciae Prestleranae, ix—x, 254. Blackburne also attacked Butler; see Young, Religion and Enlightenment, 48.

66 Memoirs of Smith, Robertson, and Reid (1811), 511-12. Stewart explains that the words in inverted commas are adapted from Clarke on Locke’s earlier followers. On Stewart see ‘Dugald Stewart and his Pupils’ in Collini, Winch, and Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics (1983), and R. B. Sher, “Professors of Virtue’, in M. A. Stewart, ed., Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment, 123—5.

The conflict of languages in the later eighteenth century 351

Locke both from the censures of his opponents and the mistaken comments and eulogies of his admirers. He criticised the overvaluing and misreading of Locke in eighteenth-century Cambridge: the Essay was ‘regarded with a reverence approaching to idolatry: and to the authority of

some distinguished persons connected with that learned body may be

traced ... the origin of the greater part of the extravagancies which, towards the close of the last century, were grafted on Locke’s errors, by the disciples of Hartley, of Law, of Priestley’. In the Scottish universities, in contrast, Locke was not blindly accepted.°’ Paley was sharply rebuked for

his error concerning the moral sense in Book I, Chapter 5 of his Moral Philosophy and for being too much a follower of Law, but Stewart approved of his Natural Theology, in which he had supposedly moved closer to Scottish philosophy.°? Stewart’s dissertation was never finished: he acknowledged in his Advertisement to Part II, on eighteenth-century metaphysics, that he

was unlikely to finish his ‘Sketch of the Progress of Ethical and Political Philosophy during the Eighteenth Century’, though his existing account has much that is relevant to moral philosophy. As he explained at the start of his section on Locke, the connexion between metaphysics and ethics is very close, ‘the theory of Morals having furnished, ever since the time of Cudworth, several of the most abstruse questions which have been agitated

concerning the general principles, both intellectual and active, of the human frame’.°9

Stewart’s project was continued by his friend Sir James Mackintosh (1765-1832), student at Aberdeen, barrister, Recorder of Bombay, MP, and Professor at the East India College, Haileybury, in his Dissertation on the Progress of Ethical Philosophy, chiefly during the Seventeenth and Eughteenth Centu-

ries.’° In Section 5, ‘Controversies concerning the Moral Faculties and the Social Affections’, Mackintosh praised the seventeenth-century latitudinarlans, drawing attention to what he called (with justice) Burnet’s beautiful

account of them, and analysed Shaftesbury’s ethics at length. He commented on the singular fortune of Characteristics — a work first admired more than it warranted, then too severely condemned, and now (in the early nineteenth century) unjustly generally neglected. He described 67 Stewart, Dissertation, in Supplement to the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica

(1824), V, Part II, 2, Section 1, 10. See 24n on ‘the school of Bishop Law’, and Section 5 on ‘Hartleian School’. For Stewart’s approval of Shaftesbury’s criticism of Locke see Chapter 2 above, n. 190. 68 Dissertation, Supplement, V, Part II, Section 8, 200—1n, 202n. 69 Dissertation, Supplement, V, Part II, Section 1, 3. 70 According to the Advertisement, Dissertation on Ethical Philosophy, 2nd edn (Edinburgh, 1837), vi,

Mackintosh was asked in 1828 by the editor of the Encylopaedia Britannica to write a dissertation in continuation of Stewart’s. It was first published as a supplement to the Encylopaedia in 1830,

and separately in 1836. On Mackintosh see Collini, Winch, and Burrow, That Noble Science of Poktics, 45—6.

352 Reason, Grace, and Sentiment Shaftesbury’s /nquiry as ‘unquestionably entitled to a place in the first rank of English tracts on Moral Philosophy’ and containing ‘more intimations of an original and important nature on the theory of Ethics, than perhaps any preceding work of modern times’. Mackintosh spelt out these intimations, arguing that the most important aspect of Shaftesbury’s theory was that certain affections of the mind, being contemplated by the mind itself through a reflex sense, become objects of love or the contrary. Shaftesbury had not enquired further into this reflex sense, but, emphasised Mack-

intosh, ‘It should never be forgotten, that we owe to these hints the reception, into ethical theory, of a moral sense; which, whatever may be

thought of its origin, or in whatever words it may be described, must always retain its place in such theory as a main principle of our moral nature’. Mackintosh also argued that Shaftesbury’s demonstration of the utility of virtue surpassed other accounts because it was founded not on advantage but on the delight of social affection and virtuous sentiment, and the agony of the malevolent passions. Quoting Shaftesbury’s passage

on the moral validity of the hope of reward if it means the desire of enjoying or practising virtue in another life, Mackintosh observed: “he relation of religion to morality, as far as it can be discovered by human reason, was never more justly or more beautifully stated.’’! In Section 6, ‘Foundations of a more just ‘Theory of Ethics’, he gave very high praise to Butler’s Sermons, pointing out that Butler owed more to Shaftesbury than to anyone else, described Hutcheson, the father of speculative philosophy in Scotland in modern times, though now little studied, as a better writer but

less original than Shaftesbury and Butler, and listed the best ethical treatises in English as Shaftesbury’s Inquiry, Butler’s Sermons, Hume’s second Enguiry, and Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. He admitted Hume

to this company, despite his fault in overlooking the moral faculty’s consciousness of rightful supremacy, for his proof from induction of the beneficial tendency of virtue, his arguments for human disinterestedness, and his observations on the respective provinces of reason and sentiment in morals. Mackintosh’s own allegiances are obvious, yet he treated the Cambridge Lockeans with much more respect than was shown by Stewart. Despite the fact that Paley laid the foundations of religion and virtue in selfishness, Mackintosh thought he should be ranked after Clarke and Butler among the brightest ornaments of the eighteenth-century English Church. ”* Mackintosh’s Dissertation on Ethical Philosophy was reissued separately with

a preface by Whewell (dated 1835), in which he extracted from the 71 Dissertation on Ethical Philosophy (1837), 138, 158-66. For Shaftesbury’s ‘reflex affection’ and the hope of reward (Characteristicks, UW, 28, 65—6) see Chapter 2 above, pp. 134, 138. Cf Kippis on

the decline of Shaftesbury’s reputation, Chapter 2 above, p. 152. 72 Dissertation on Ethical Philosophy, 191, 204, 207-8, 231, 251, 268, 273, 279.

The conflict of languages in the later eighteenth century 353

historical account in the dissertation Mackintosh’s own views on the disinterestedness of the benevolent affections and the supremacy of the conscience or moral faculty, and emphasised the high esteem in which Mackintosh held Butler.’* It was primarily through the efforts of William Whewell (1794—1866), student, Fellow, and tutor of Trinity College, Gambridge, Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy (the Chair that Law had held), and eventually Master of ‘Trinity, that the influence of Locke and Paley in Cambridge was challenged and Butler set up as their rival.’* Whewell was not the first Cambridge opponent of Paley. Latham Wainewright of Emmanuel College, enemy to dissenting academies, Scottish common sense philosophy, unitarianism, and Calvinist evangelicalism, and ardent supporter of Paley and the Lockean tradition, took up the cudgels

against Paley’s critics, the evangelical Thomas Gisborne, the Scottish philosophers Stewart and his colleague ‘Thomas Brown, and, from within Cambridge, the high churchman Edward Pearson of Sidney Sussex.’? A more influential Cambridge critic than Pearson was Whewell’s colleague at ‘Irinity, Adam Sedgwick, Professor of Geology, who in A Discourse on the Studies of the University (1834), an expanded version of a sermon delivered

the year before, attacked the use of Locke’s Essay and Paley’s Moral Philosophy as textbooks because, essentially, they were morally degrading. In

his preface Sedgwick regretted that there was no English work on morals ‘at once unexceptionable in its principles, and cast in such a form as to meet the wants of the University’. Noting that Butler’s three sermons on

human nature and his dissertation on the nature of virtue had now become subjects of examination in Trinity, he pointed out that despite their ‘inestimable value’ they were devoted ‘rather to the discussion of the

principles of morality than to the establishment of a system of moral philosophy’, and they were too difficult and uninviting for students.’° Though he acknowledged the importance of Locke’s Essay, Sedgwick objected that it took a ‘contracted view... of the capacities of man... depriving him both of his powers of imagination and of his moral sense’, and hence produced “a chilling effect on the philosophic writings of the last century’. Everything faulty in Paley’s Moral Philosophy could be blamed on 73 Dissertation on Ethical Philosophy, Preface, 3, 4, 13, 22.

74 On critics of Paley see Garland, Cambridge before Darwin (1980), Chapters 2 and 3 (a superficial

account) and Schneewind, Sidgwick’s Ethics (1977), 140—4, 149-51; on nineteenth-century attitudes to Butler see J. Garnett, ‘Bishop Butler and the