The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century 9780199549023, 0199549028

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
PART I: THE LANGUAGES OF PHILOSOPHY IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN
1. Locke and His Influence
2. Newton and Newtonianism in Eighteenth-Century British Thought
3. The Idea of a Science of Human Nature
4. Rhetoric and Eloquence: The Language of Persuasion
PART II: LOGIC AND METAPHYSICS
5. Perception and the Language of Nature
6. Language and Thought
7. The Understanding
8. Mind and Matter
PART III: THE PASSIONS
9. Passions, Affections, Sentiments: Taxonomy and Terminology
10. Reason and the Passions
11. Liberty and Necessity
12. The Government of the Passions
PART IV: MORALS
13. Self-Interest and Sociability
14. Moral Judgment
15. The Nature of Virtue
16. Practical Ethics
PART V: CRITICISM
17. The Pleasures of the Imagination and the Objects of Taste
18. The Faculty of Taste
19. The Pleasures of Tragedy
20. Genius and the Creative Imagination
PART VI: POLITICS
21. The Origin of Civil Government
22. Forms of Government
23. Reform and Revolution
24. Luxury, Commerce, and the Rise of Political Economy
PART VII: PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
25. Causation, Cosmology, and the Limits of Philosophy: The Early Eighteenth-Century British Debate
26. Philosophy, Revealed Religion, and the Enlightenment
27. Religion and Morality
Index
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D
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G
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K
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Citation preview

T H E OX F O R D H A N DB O O K O F

BR IT ISH PHILOSOPH Y I N T H E E IGHT E E N T H CE N T U RY

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the oxford handbook of

BRITISH PHILOSOPHY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY Edited by

JAMES A. HARRIS

1

3

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark  of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © the several contributors 2013 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2013 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored  in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without  the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of  the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at  the address above You must not circulate this work in any other  form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2013941219 ISBN 978–0–19–954902–3 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith  and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

preface

Seven years and more have passed since Peter Momtchiloff wrote to invite me to put this Oxford Handbook together. I am grateful for his patience, and for his advice and encouragement. The contributors to this volume have also been patient, especially those who submitted their chapters some time ago, and I thank them too. A number of people made helpful suggestions early on, including David Owen, Stewart Shapiro, and Kenneth Winkler. Edinburgh, June 2013

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contents

Notes on Contributors

xi

Introduction

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PA RT I T H E L A N G UAG E S OF P H I L O S OP H Y I N E IG H T E E N T H - C E N T U RY B R I TA I N 1. Locke and His Influence Timothy Stanton

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2. Newton and Newtonianism in Eighteenth-Century British Thought Eric Schliesser

41

3. The Idea of a Science of Human Nature Jacqueline Taylor

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4. Rhetoric and Eloquence: The Language of Persuasion Paddy Bullard

84

PA RT I I

L O G IC A N D M E TA P H YSIC S

5. Perception and the Language of Nature Rebecca Copenhaver

107

6. Language and Thought Laurent Jaffro

128

7. The Understanding John P. Wright

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8. Mind and Matter Aaron Garrett

171

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PA RT I I I

T H E PA S SION S

9. Passions, Affections, Sentiments: Taxonomy and Terminology Amy M. Schmitter

197

10. Reason and the Passions Terence Cuneo

226

11. Liberty and Necessity Sean Greenberg

248

12. The Government of the Passions James A. Harris

270

PA RT I V

M OR A L S

13. Self-Interest and Sociability Christian Maurer

291

14. Moral Judgment P. J. E. Kail

315

15. The Nature of Virtue Dario Perinetti

333

16. Practical Ethics Colin Heydt

369

PA RT V

C R I T IC I SM

17. The Pleasures of the Imagination and the Objects of Taste Paul Guyer

393

18. The Faculty of Taste Timothy M. Costelloe

430

19. The Pleasures of Tragedy E.M. Dadlez

450

20. Genius and the Creative Imagination Peter Kivy

468

contents

PA RT V I

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P OL I T IC S

21. The Origin of Civil Government Dario Castiglione

491

22. Forms of Government Craig Smith

530

23. Reform and Revolution Neil McArthur

555

24. Luxury, Commerce, and the Rise of Political Economy Richard Whatmore

575

PA RT V I I

P H I L O S OP H Y A N D R E L IG ION

25. Causation, Cosmology, and the Limits of Philosophy: The Early Eighteenth-Century British Debate Paul Russell

599

26. Philosophy, Revealed Religion, and the Enlightenment Alexander Broadie

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27. Religion and Morality Thomas Ahnert

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Index

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notes on contributors

Thomas Ahnert is Senior Lecturer in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh. He has published on various aspects of German and British intellectual history, from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. His first book, which appeared in 2006, focuses on the thought of a key figure in the early German Enlightenment, Christian Thomasius. Together with the late Susan Manning, Thomas Ahnert also edited a volume of essays on Character, Self and Sociability in the Scottish Enlightenment (2011). At present he is completing a monograph for Yale University Press, on religion and moral culture in Enlightenment Scotland, from c.1690 to c.1800. His next project will be a study of Newtonianism in eighteenth-century Germany. Alexander Broadie was Professor of Logic and Rhetoric at Glasgow University and is now an honorary professorial research fellow there. He is Principal Investigator of the Leverhulme project ‘Scottish philosophers in 17c Scotland and France’. Among his eighteen books are The Scottish Enlightenment: The Historical Age of the Historical Nation (rev. edn, Edinburgh, 2007), A History of Scottish Philosophy (Edinburgh, 2010), and Agreeable Connexions: Scottish Enlightenment Links with France (Edinburgh, 2012). Paddy Bullard is Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of Kent. From January 2005 to December 2009 he was an AHRC research fellow and Rank Junior Research Fellow at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford. His monograph, Edmund Burke and the Art of Rhetoric, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2011. Jonathan Swift and the Eighteenth-Century Book (co-edited with James McLaverty) will be published by Cambridge in 2013. He is currently completing a new edition of Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry. Dario Castiglione teaches Political Theory at the University of Exeter (UK). His main research interests are in the history of modern political thought and theories of democracy, constitutionalism, and civil society. His publications include Constitutional Politics in the EU (Palgrave, 2007); and as editor, The Handbook of Social Capital (Oxford University Press, 2008), and The History of Political Thought in National Context (Cambridge University Press, 2001). Rebecca Copenhaver is Professor of Philosophy at Lewis & Clark College. She is a co-author (with Brian P. Copenhaver) of From Kant to Croce: Modern Philosophy in Italy, 1800–1950 (Toronto University Press, 2012), and of a number of articles on Thomas Reid’s theory of mind, exploring perception, memory, consciousness and methodology.

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Her main area of research is the philosophy of mind, particularly perception, with special attention to modern British theories of mind. Timothy M. Costelloe is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. He is the author of Aesthetics and Morals in the Philosophy of David Hume (Routledge, 2007) and The British Aesthetic Tradition: From Shaftesbury to Wittgenstein (Cambridge, 2013), and editor of The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge, 2012). In 2003 and 2006 he was a Humboldt Fellow at MaximiliansUniversität München. Terence Cuneo is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Vermont. His work focuses primarily on contemporary metaethics and history of modern philosophy. He is the author of The Normative Web (Oxford University Press, 2007) and the co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Reid (Cambridge University Press, 2004). E. M. Dadlez is Professor of Humanities and Philosophy at the University of Central Oklahoma. She is the author of Mirrors to One Another:  Emotion and Value in Jane Austen and David Hume (Wiley Blackwell, 2009) and What’s Hecuba to Him? Fictional Events and Actual Emotions (Penn State Press, 1997), and also of articles on a wide range of issues to do with fiction and emotion. Aaron Garrett is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Boston University. He is the author of Berkeley’s Three Dialogues: A Reader’s Guide (Continuum, 2008) and Meaning in Spinoza’s Method (Cambridge University Press, 2003), and of many articles on early modern philosophy. He has edited texts by Millar, Hutcheson, Monboddo, and Buffon, and is the editor of the forthcoming Routledge Companion to 18th-Century Philosophy. Sean Greenberg is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine. His chief research interest is in early modern moral psychology, especially conceptions of passions and the will:  he has published on Descartes’, Malebranche’s, and Leibniz’s accounts of these topics. He is currently working on three projects: a new edition and translation of Leibniz’s Theodicy (in conjunction with R. C. Sleigh, Jr.); a systematic interpretation of the philosophy of Malebranche; and a history of early modern approaches to human freedom. Paul Guyer is Jonathan Nelson Professor of the Humanities and Philosophy at Brown University. He has published extensively on the philosophy of Kant, and has co-translated three works, including the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of the Power of Judgment, for the Cambridge Edition of Immanuel Kant, of which he is General Co-Editor. His work on the history of aesthetics includes Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and a three-volume History of Modern Aesthetics (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). James A. Harris is Reader in the History of Philosophy at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of Of Liberty and Necessity: The Free Will Debate in Eighteenth-Century British Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2005), and of articles on Hume, Hutcheson,

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Reid, Beattie, Priestley, and a number of themes in eighteenth-century British thought. He has edited texts by Reid (with Knud Haakonnsen), Beattie, Kames, and Abraham Tucker. He is writing an intellectual biography of Hume for Cambridge University Press, and also the eighteenth-century British philosophy volume of the new Oxford History of Philosophy. He has held fellowships from the Leverhulme Trust and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and for the 2012–13 academic year was a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Colin Heydt is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Florida. His work focuses on the history of ethics and political philosophy, particularly that of seventeenth- through nineteenth-century Britain. He is the author of Rethinking Mill’s Ethics (Continuum, 2006)  and of articles on Hume, Smith, and Hutcheson, among others. He is currently writing a history of practical ethics in eighteenth-century Britain. Laurent Jaffro is Professor of Moral Philosophy at Pantheon-Sorbonne University, Paris. Formerly he was Professor of Philosophy at Blaise Pascal University, ClermontFerrand. He is a former fellow of the Ecole Normale Supérieure and, more recently, of the Institut universitaire de France. He has published on the third Earl of Shaftesbury, George Berkeley, John Toland, and Thomas Reid. P. J. E. Kail is University Lecturer in the History of Modern Philosophy, and Official Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at St. Peter’s College, Oxford. He has published articles on Hume, Hutcheson, and Shaftesbury and is the author of Projection and Realism in Hume’s Philosophy (Clarendon Press, 2007)  and the co-editor (with Marina FrascaSpada) of Impressions of Hume (Clarendon Press, 2005). Peter Kivy is Board of Governors Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University. He is the author of many books on aesthetics and the philosophy of art, including Thomas Reid’s Lectures on the Fine Arts (Martinus Nijoff, 1973), Philosophies of Arts (Cambridge University Press, 1997), and The Seventh Sense: Francis Hutcheson and 18th-Century British Aesthetics (second edition, Oxford University Press, 2003). Christian Maurer is Assistant docteur at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland). After his studies at the Universities of Berne and FU Berlin, he taught philosophy at the University of Neuchâtel and wrote his doctoral dissertation on the topic of Self-love in Early ghteenth-Century British Moral Philosophy: Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Hutcheson, Butler and Campbell (2009). He did doctoral and post-doctoral research at the Universities of Glasgow and Blaise Pascal (Clermont-Ferrand II). His research interests include various aspects of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century moral philosophy and moral theology, such as the history of self-love, the passions, and the reception of Stoicism. Neil McArthur is Associate Director of the Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics and Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Manitoba. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Southern California, and is the author of the book David Hume’s Political Theory.

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Dario Perinetti is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Université du Québec à Montréal. His work focuses on the importance of conceptions of history for thinking about normativity both in early modern and in German philosophy. He is the editor (with Carlos Fraenkel and Justin Smith) of The Rationalists: Between Tradition and Revolution (Springer 2010)  and (with Marie-Andrée Ricard) La Phénoménologie de l’esprit de Hegel: lectures contemporaines (Presses universitaires de France, 2009). Paul Russell is Professor in Philosophy at the University of British Columbia. He has held a number of visiting positions, including Stanford University, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His published work includes Freedom and Moral Sentiment: Hume’s Way of Naturalizing Responsibility (Oxford University Press, 1995) and The Riddle of Hume’s Treatise: Skepticism, Naturalism, and Irreligion (Oxford University Press, 2008). In 2010 he was the Fowler Hamilton Visiting Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford. Eric Schliesser is BOF Research Professor at Ghent University. He is the editor (with Leonidas Montes) of New Voices on Adam Smith (Routledge, 2006), (with Andrew Janiak) of Interpreting Newton: Critical Essays (Cambridge University Press, 2012), and (with Chris Smeenk) The Oxford Handbook to Isaac Newton (forthcoming). He is writing the volume on Smith in the Routledge Philosophers series. In addition to publishing on early modern philosophy and science he writes about the philosophy of economics. Amy M.  Schmitter is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Graduate Chair at the University of Alberta (Canada). Her main areas of research are the history of early modern philosophy, and the philosophy of art, with special attention to issues of power, representation and the passions. Most of her work in early modern philosophy has concentrated on continental figures, particularly Descartes, but she has growing interests in Hume and Hobbes. Craig Smith is the Adam Smith Lecturer in the Scottish Enlightenment at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of Adam Smith’s Political Philosophy:  the invisible hand and spontaneous order (Routledge, 2006) and has written widely on eighteenth century political thought. He is the book review editor of the Adam Smith Review. Timothy Stanton is Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of York. He was Beinecke Fellow at Yale University in 2007–8, Vice Chancellor’s Anniversary Lecturer at the University of York in 2008–9, and Balzan-Skinner Fellow in Modern Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge in 2011–12. He is the author of a number of essays on Locke, Hobbes, and issues in intellectual history, and the joint editor, with Jon Parkin, of Natural law and toleration in the early Enlightenment (Oxford University Press, 2013). He is currently completing a critical edition of John Locke’s unpublished ‘Defence of nonconformity’ (1681–2) for the Clarendon Edition of the Works of John Locke. Jacqueline Taylor is Professor of Philosophy at the University of San Francisco. She has research interests in eighteenth-century philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, and feminist

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philosophy. She has published in all these areas. Her book on how Hume’s account of the passions and social theory inform his later moral philosophy is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Richard Whatmore is Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews and Director of the St Andrews Institute of Intellectual History. He is the author of Republicanism and the French Revolution (Oxford, 2000) and Against War and Empire: Geneva, Britain and France in the Eighteenth Century (Yale, 2012). John P. Wright is Professor of Philosophy at Central Michigan University. He is the author of The Sceptical Realism of David Hume (1983). Recent publications include Hume’s ‘A Treatise of Human Nature’:  An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2009); ‘Scepticism, Causal Science, and “The Old Hume” ’, Journal of Scottish Philosophy, 10.2 (2012); ‘Hume on the Origin of “modern Honour”: a study in Hume’s philosophical development’, in Religion and Philosophy in Enlightenment Britain, edited by Ruth Savage (Oxford University Press, 2012).

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introduction James A.  Harris

In this Introduction I consider three questions: first, when did the eighteenth century in British philosophy begin and end? Secondly, is there a reason to talk in terms of British philosophy in this period, as different and distinct from English, Scottish, Welsh, and possibly also Irish and American philosophy? Thirdly, how should philosophy be defined in an eighteenth-century British context? I then explain the structure of the volume, and give a brief indication of the content of each chapter.

I It is obvious, to the point of being platitudinous, that there is no very good reason why the history of philosophy should be divided up into centuries. Nothing happened in 1700 and in 1800 to demarcate that 100 years of philosophizing, in Britain or anywhere else, from what had gone before and what was to come after. ‘Eighteenth-century British philosophy’ is in fact often supposed to have begun before the seventeenth century ended, with the publication in 1690 of John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Almost everything that Locke published appeared in the last decade of the seventeenth century, and, as the editors of the Thoemmes Press Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century British Philosophers remark, it is hard to imagine a history of eighteenth-century British philosophy that did not include Locke (Yolton, Price, and Stephens 1999: vii). Locke’s place at the beginning of the period is secure even when it is acknowledged that several aspects of his philosophy are indicative of an immersion in currents of thought usually thought to have dried up, or at least gone underground, by the beginning of the eighteenth century.1 Locke was generally regarded in the eighteenth century itself as 1

See Nuovo (2011), esp. ch. 7, which explores Locke’s religious (as distinct from philosophical) Platonism, and challenges the idea that he is to be read as a ‘precursor to modernity’.

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marking a new start. Moreover, Locke’s achievement could be, and was, conjoined with that of Isaac Newton, whose Principia had been published in 1687.2 The fact that these new beginnings in the study both of mind and nature coincided with the revolution of 1688, and ensuing replacement of James II with his daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange, only made more vivid the sense that Locke and Newton announced a fundamental alteration of the philosophical landscape. Many of the chapters of this Handbook take Locke as their point of departure. Dating the conclusion of British philosophy’s eighteenth century is more difficult. The French Revolution had a dramatic impact on political thought in Britain, as on everything else, both in so far as it inspired newly confident assertions of universal civil and political rights by some, and in so far as it forced a rethinking by others of the relation between the British constitution and its past. But the debates occasioned in the 1760s and 1770s by John Wilkes and by events in America had already broken down the moderate Whig consensus and seen the formulation of radical republican criticisms of the post-1688 political order. In religion, too, things were changing significantly long before the century was out. The growing success of evangelical Christianity in Britain was altering the understanding of the nature and basis of religious belief, heralding the end of the confident latitudinarianism that might be thought characteristic of Britain in the eighteenth century. In the philosophical study of mind, on the other hand, especially in the Scottish universities where the greatest progress was supposed to have been made in these subjects, there was no sign of very significant change until the 1820s at the earliest. A distinctively nineteenth-century philosophy of mind took shape only gradually, with the slow take-up of Kant and post-Kantian German philosophy, with the equally slow separation off of ‘psychology’ from philosophy. And in philosophical ethics, it was not until the invention of ‘utilitarianism’ that the debates of the eighteenth century began to be superseded. No single end-date for the eighteenth century in British philosophy has been imposed here.

II Can it be said that there was during the eighteenth century such a thing as ‘British philosophy’, as distinct from English philosophy and Scottish philosophy and Welsh philosophy? Are Irish writers on philosophical subjects to be regarded as British for the purposes of a book such as this? What about the philosophers of America? I am able to put the last of these questions to one side, because there is an Oxford Handbook of American Philosophy that begins with a chapter on ‘Jonathan Edwards and EighteenthCentury Religious Philosophy’ (Misak 2008: 1–18). And no one has asserted that the

2

See Buchdahl (1961) for a brief exploration of ways in which the eighteenth century conceived of itself as the age of Newton and Locke.

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fact that there were eighteenth-century Welsh philosophers—most notably Richard Price—is a reason to believe that there was then such a thing as ‘Welsh philosophy’.3  On the other hand, the existence of a tradition of Irish philosophy, beginning on one account in the seventh century of the Christian era, has certainly been affirmed (see Duddy 2002; 2004). A list of eighteenth-century Irish philosophers would include, at a minimum, William Molyneux (if Locke was an eighteenth-century philosopher, so was Molyneux), John Toland, Peter Browne, Edward Synge, William King, Robert Clayton, George Berkeley, Francis Hutcheson, Philip Skelton, and Edmund Burke. These writers, it has been argued, constitute a Hibernian tradition that was ‘largely autochthonous or indigenous’ (Berman 2005: 79).4 Ireland was nominally an independent country, with its own parliament, throughout the eighteenth century, and it might be that there should be an Oxford Handbook of Irish Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century to complement this one. On the other hand, Irish philosophers from Molyneux to Burke made important contributions to the development of philosophy in Britain in the eighteenth century, contributions arguably more important than those made by the philosophers of France or of any other European country, and so it was to be expected that philosophers from Ireland should figure prominently in several of the chapters of this volume. It needs only to be said that it should not be inferred from the fact that a philosopher from Ireland is discussed here that that philosopher is being identified as British rather than Irish. That there was in the eighteenth century a Scottish philosophy different and distinct from English philosophy was first asserted, in a distinctly hostile manner, by Joseph Priestley in his 1774 Examination of works by Reid, Beattie, and Oswald. These Scottish writers, Priestley claimed, had betrayed the Lockean philosophy, as would be obvious when their works were criticized using the principles Priestley had imbibed from Hartley. Where Hartley had established ‘a new and most extensive science’, the common sense philosophers of Scotland postulated a chaos of supposedly original instincts that explained nothing, and apparently sought to explain nothing (Priestley 1774: xix–xxi). Forty years later, in two ‘Dissertations’ written for the Encyclopædia Britannica in 1815 and 1821, Dugald Stewart turned Priestley’s argument on its head. What distinguished Scottish ‘metaphysics’, according to Stewart, was indeed the fact that it refrained from making ‘gratuitous and wild conjectures’ such as characterized the work of Hartley, Bonnet, and their followers (Stewart 1854: Vol. 1, 434). But this was to their credit. Stewart depicted Hume, Reid, Campbell, and Smith as having learned the lessons of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding better than almost of all of ‘Mr. Locke’s English disciples’ (Stewart 1854: Vol. 1, 473). At the end of the nineteenth century a series of writers proclaimed anew the virtues of ‘the Scottish school’, distinguished and

3 The Continuum Encyclopedia of British Philosophy has an entry on ‘Welsh Philosophy’, which begins: ‘Although it makes sense to speak of Scottish philosophy, there has been no equivalent philosophical identity in Wales, besides perhaps that brand of Wittgensteinianism based in the Swansea philosophy department in the latter part of the twentieth century’ (Belsey 2006: 3378). 4 For a collection of texts of Irish enlightenment and ‘counter-enlightenment’ philosophy, see Berman and O’Riordan (2002).

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differentiated not only from English philosophy but also from German (e.g., Seth 1885; Graham 1901; Laurie 1902). They had been preceded by the Scottish American James McCosh, in a study of the ‘peculiar philosophy’ of Scotland ‘in its relation to the national character’. ‘The Scottish philosophy’, McCosh claimed, ‘possesses a unity, not only in the circumstances that its expounders have been Scotchmen, but also, and more specially in its method, its doctrines, and its spirit’. Its method, ‘professedly and really’, was that of ‘observation’; ‘It employs self-consciousness as the instrument of observation’; and ‘By the observations of consciousness, principles are reached which are prior to and independent of experience’ (McCosh 1875: 2–6). In the twentieth century the idea of a Scottish school of philosophy was given a political inflection, principally by the work of George Elder Davie. Davie saw the decline of a distinctively Scottish philosophy in the nineteenth century as part of the process whereby Scotland was assimilated into an increasingly centralized British state, a process by the end of which Scots were right to think of themselves as inhabitants of a province, not a country. The ‘continuity’ of Scottish thought from Hutcheson and Hume to Stewart and beyond, so Davie argued in The Democratic Intellect, ‘depended to a large extent on the peculiar condition of Scotland as a country in the process of being assimilated to the British way of life, but which still retained a certain national feeling for the values of French culture’ (Davie 1961: 272; see also Davie 2001). It mattered, in other words, that Scotland’s way of doing philosophy took more from the Continent than it did from the English. Davie’s work set the scene for historical work on the Scottish Enlightenment, and on Scottish philosophy more generally, that finds in its development no role of any importance for English writers.5  Is it proper to look also for a distinctively English philosophy in the eighteenth century? Leslie Stephen published his two-volume History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century in 1876, but the book’s title is, at best, no more than a particularly flagrant example of perennial English carelessness when it comes to the meaning of the word ‘England’ and its cognates. By ‘English’ Stephen meant ‘British’. So did William Sorley in his History of English Philosophy (1920). So far as I know, no one has sought to present a systematic, as distinct from a polemical (as with Priestley), characterization of an eighteenth-century ‘English school’ of philosophy, where by ‘English’ would be meant ‘not Scottish—or Welsh, or Irish, or American’. What has been looked for, though, and found, is an English version of the Enlightenment. When historians grew sceptical of the confidence shown in some quarters that the Enlightenment was by definition anti-authoritarian and anti-clerical in its politics, materialist and deterministic in its metaphysics, pagan if not atheistic in its religion—in a word, French—interest

5 A distinguished recent example of this trend is Broadie (2009). ‘Scottish philosophy’, Broadie says, ‘is a unitary thing, but not in the sense of a school of philosophy with its set of doctrines to which all in the school subscribed; instead the unity derives from the circumstances of the philosophical activity, of people standing in the relation of friend to friend, of colleague to colleague, of teacher to pupil; they were influenced by the national church (and were in many cases officiants in it), lived under the same legal system, were brought up in the same educational system’ (6).

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grew in the idea that different ‘national contexts’ begot different Enlightenments. It then appeared that England had as a good a claim to have had an Enlightenment as did France, Germany, Scotland, America, and the rest. In an early survey of the terrain, Roy Porter defined ‘pragmatism’ as a key characteristic of Enlightenment in England, a pragmatism that was ‘a philosophy of expediency, the art of living well’, a pursuit of happiness and of the consumer society that happiness amounted to—but a pragmatism that at the same time acknowledged the need for a stable solidarity that would keep self-destructive anarchy at bay (Porter 1981: 8–9; see also Porter 2000). This, obviously enough, was to define the English Enlightenment as a societal project, rather than as something more conventionally the business of philosophers. John Pocock has also argued that Enlightenment in England cannot be characterized using a notion of Enlightenment as by definition the work of radical philosophes. He takes it as obvious that an English Enlightenment was ‘intimately bound up with the special, indeed unique character of the Church of England’ (Pocock 1999: 8). Enlightenment, that is to say, was pursued within the Church, and also, in the case of Dissenters, outwith it. Either way, it was ‘both clerical and conservative—meaning by the last term not a defence of tradition against criticism, but the maintenance of church and state against the aftershocks of the civil wars’ (Pocock 1999: 298). The vigour and longevity of debates between different kinds of Christian kept England an ecclesiastical society, its public sphere constituted by ecclesiastical and sometimes theological dispute, and not by disaffected, irreligious intellectuals. On this interpretation of England in the eighteenth century, men like Bentham and Godwin, and women like Wollstonecraft, announced the end of the Enlightenment and the beginning of something else. For Brian Young, the paradigmatic Enlightenment figure in England was William Warburton, author of The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated (1738–41), whose career in the Church of England culminated in his being made Bishop of Gloucester in 1760 (Young 1998: ch. 5). The present volume may be taken as a manifestation of the conviction of its editor that it remains legitimate to think in terms of British philosophy in an eighteenth-century context. I do not think that it would be appropriate for a putative Oxford Handbook of Irish Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century to be joined by Oxford Handbooks of Scottish and of English philosophy of the same period. Given the nature of philosophizing in Scotland and in England during the eighteenth century, and no matter how long that century is taken to be, it makes sense, I believe, to resist the fragmentation of Great Britain into its constituent parts. The title of Leslie Stephen’s book on the period’s thought might be objectionable, but its lack of regard to borders is true to the spirit of the age in philosophy that began with Locke and ended, let us say, with Dugald Stewart. To take only the most famous example of this insouciance as to origins, Hume in the introduction to A Treatise of Human Nature portrayed himself as pursuing a project outlined before him by ‘some late philosophers in England, who have begun to put the science of man on a new footing’, and then, in a footnote, identified those philosophers as ‘Mr. Locke, my Lord Shaftsbury, Dr. Mandeville, Mr. Hutchinson, Dr. Butler, &c.’ (Hume 1978: xxi). Locke was an inspiration and an opponent for English and Scots alike, for Hartley and for Reid, for James Harris and for Stewart. The desire to refute Mandeville,

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or to answer Hume on miracles, or to find the right definition of liberty of agency, likewise joined Scots and Englishmen, and Irishmen and sometimes Welshmen too, in a British philosophical debate. Philosophers at this time appear to have regarded themselves as British before they regarded themselves as English or Scottish. The border that mattered, it often seems, was the one that divided Britain from the rest of Europe. It is striking how insular philosophical debate in Britain was, how seldom writers from Continental Europe impinged upon it. There was, for example, no serious engagement with Leibniz aside from Samuel Clarke’s. Nor was there—with, perhaps, the exception of Monboddo in On the Origin and Progress of Language—any serious engagement with Rousseau. Rousseau was mentioned, usually critically, by many writers, but his writings were not subject to careful and extended examination. Condillac made no substantial impact, nor did Vico, and nor did Kant. The one obvious exception to this trend, Montesquieu, perhaps only proves the rule, in so far as he was himself so focused on the, as he saw it, wholly remarkable case of Britain.

III So much for eighteenth-century and for British. What of philosophy? What was it in Britain during the period this Handbook covers? Definitions of ‘philosophy’ in dictionaries and encyclopædias of the time suggest that it would not be wise to take it for granted that nothing has changed over the past two or three centuries when it comes to the understanding of what the tasks of philosophy are and how those tasks should be prosecuted. In his Cyclopædia (first edn. 1728), for example, Ephraim Chambers defined ‘Philosophy’ as ‘the knowledge or study of nature and morality, founded on reason and experience’. ‘Philosophy may be divided into two branches, or consider’d under two habitudes’, Chambers claimed, ‘theoretical and practical’. ‘Theoretical, or speculative philosophy,’ he continued, ‘is that employ’d in mere contemplation, and which terminates therein. Such is physicks, which is a bare contemplation of nature, and natural things’; and ‘Theoretical philosophy, again, is usually subdivided into three, viz. pneumaticks; physicks, or somaticks; and metaphysicks, or ontologia.’ Practical philosophy, on the other hand, ‘is that which lays down the rules of vertuous and happy life; and excites us to the practice thereof ’. Practical philosophy ‘is properly ethicks alone, or the method of leading a virtuous and happy life: Yet, most authors divide it into two, answerably to the two sorts of human actions to be directed thereby, viz. logicks, which govern the operations of the understanding . . . and ethicks properly so call’d, which direct those of the will’ (Chambers 1728: Vol. 2, 803). The first edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1768–71) followed Chambers’s lead, defining philosophy as ‘the knowledge or study of nature and morality, founded on reason and experience’. It added: ‘See Mechanics, Optics, Astronomy, Logic, Morals, &c.’ (Smellie 1768–71: Vol. 3, 477). Samuel Johnson (1755) gave four definitions of ‘Philosophy’: ‘1. Knowledge natural or moral. . . . 2. Hypothesis or system upon which natural effects are explained. . . . 3.  Reasoning; argumentation. . . . 4.  The course

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of sciences read in the schools. . . . .’. Thomas Sheridan in his Complete Dictionary of the English Language (1790) followed Johnson to the letter. At some point after the end of the eighteenth century, obviously enough, philosophy became something different and distinct from the knowledge or study of nature. That is, it became something different from what we now call science, with the result that what the eighteenth century called ‘natural philosophy’ is now studied by historians of science. But this is not to say that what we call ‘philosophy’ can be straightforwardly identified with what the eighteenth century called ‘moral philosophy’. Another way of arriving at a definition of philosophy is to look beyond dictionaries and encyclopædias and to consider instead what teachers of philosophy taught in the eighteenth century. This is a topic in need of further study,6 but it is obvious, first, that there was more to what was taught as philosophy than what went on in the classrooms of professors of moral philosophy (there was in addition what went on in the classrooms of professors of logic and metaphysics, and of professors of logic and rhetoric), and, secondly, that a good deal of what professors of moral philosophy taught is not taught by academic philosophers now (as is suggested by, for example, the student lecture notes that have been published as Adam Smith’s Lectures on Jurisprudence and Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres). There is, in addition, the fact that, as Chambers’s entry on ‘Philosophy’ makes clear, the eighteenth century understood the subject to be as much practical as theoretical. A professor of moral philosophy conceived of that part of his syllabus which dealt with ethics as being in large part a matter of teaching the duties we owe to God, to others, and to ourselves. The ‘speculative’ component of ethics was, as Thomas Reid put it, ‘subservient’ to the practical (Reid 2007: 10–12). ‘Moral philosophy’, so Adam Ferguson told his students at Edinburgh, ‘is the knowledge of what ought to be, or the application of rules that ought to determine the choice of voluntary agents’ (Ferguson 1769: 9). Logic, too, was in important respects a practical discipline. In a text that was widely used in eighteenth-century logic classrooms, Isaac Watts defined logic as ‘the art of using our reason well in our enquiries after truth, and the communication of it to others’, an art ‘not only necessary in order to attain any competent knowledge in the sciences, or the affairs of learning, but to govern both the greater and meaner actions of life’ (Watts 1725: 1–2). In eighteenth-century Britain it could not possibly have been said, as it could be now with some plausibility, that philosophy is in essence what salaried professionals teach and publish. A significant number of the period’s most important writers on philosophical topics were not, or were not for very long, university or academy teachers. These included Locke, Shaftesbury, Clarke, Mandeville, Butler, Hume, Warburton, Hartley, Price, Harris, Priestley, Burke, and Wollstonecraft. There is in this respect, it must be said, something of a divide between North and South Britain. Scottish philosophy in the eighteenth century was largely a university business. Even so, Hume was not alone in writing philosophy outside of the academy in Scotland. There were also 6 But see, e.g., Fitzpatrick (1996), McLachlan (1931), Rivers and Wykes (eds) (forthcoming), Wood (1993), Yolton (1986); and also texts such as Ferguson (1769), Doddridge (1763), Jardine (1818), Reid (2005) and (2007).

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philosopher-lawyers such as Kames and Monboddo, philosophical medics such as George Cheyne and William Cullen, and philosophical divines such as Robert Wallace and James Oswald. Nor, obviously enough, were the readers of books of philosophy all academics and students. Joseph Addison’s Mr. Spectator famously declared that, as it was said of Socrates that he brought philosophy from the heavens down to Earth, ‘I shall be ambitious to have it said of me, that I have brought philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffee-houses’ (Addison 1965: Vol. 1, 44). Readers—consumers—of philosophy were in large part ordinary men of the middle classes. They were doctors and lawyers and clergymen, merchants and traders, country gentlemen and city financiers. Philosophy was for them a part of what it was to have a civilized mind and a cultivated taste. It was an element of the conversation of the sociable and, to use Johnson’s term, the clubbable. Even university philosophers sometimes wrote with this in mind, as is obvious from the difference between, on the one hand, Hutcheson’s pedagogical texts, and on the other, his Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue and his Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions. These last were in part exercises in politeness. They were, to that extent, contributions to a philosophical discourse that had a place for women as well as for men. Universities were not open to women in the eighteenth century, but philosophy was, as the examples of Damaris Masham, Mary Astell, Elizabeth Montagu, Catherine Macaulay, Catherine Cockburn, and Mary Wollstonecraft show.7  Part and parcel of this impossibility of defining eighteenth-century British philosophy in purely academic terms is the way individual texts can seem, to the twenty-first century reader, in some respects ‘philosophical’ and in other respects not ‘philosophical’ at all. Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks is a case in point. Readers today, looking for a clear presentation of Shaftesbury’s arguments, are apt to pay attention only to the ‘Inquiry concerning virtue’, and to be tempted to dismiss the rest of the book as so much window-dressing and verbiage. To give in to that temptation would be to renounce the task of understanding how Shaftesbury himself conceived of the nature of philosophy. Cultivation of a capacity for ‘soliloquy’, of the sense of humour, and of an ability to see oneself as an element of a much larger whole were, for Shaftesbury, all essential elements of the philosophical project. The Characteristicks was written in a way designed to help its reader with such forms of self-cultivation. Butler’s Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel is another example of a text to which violence is done when ‘content’ is separated out from ‘form’. It matters, in other words, that they are sermons. The fact that they are commentaries on particular biblical passages, written to address a particular audience in a particular place, is vital to their interpretation. Eighteenth-century philosophy did not always come neatly packaged in the form of a treatise or an enquiry or a dissertation. Reflection on the human condition, on our capacities and duties, on our relations with our fellows, with our creator, with ourselves, was to be found in essays and novels and poems as well. That is, essays and novels and 7

That said, available modes of engagement for women in the philosophical part of the world of letters were no more straightforward than they were in other parts; for a recent account, see O’Brien (2009).

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poems—works by Addison and Johnson, or Richardson and Fielding, or Pope and Thomson—were read by eighteenth-century men and women as, in part at least, works of philosophy. They were called ‘philosophical’, and they were seen as having a place on the same intellectual spectrum as treatises and enquiries and dissertations. Hume’s Political Discourses was intended to show that writing on commerce could aspire to the condition of philosophy. It was judged to have been a success in this regard, just as Hume’s History of England was applauded as genuinely ‘philosophical’ history. A large part of the reason why Hume’s History met with near universal acclaim, or at least near universal readership, was the fact that here was a new kind of treatment of a subject that had hitherto been distorted by political and religious partisanship. Looked at from the eighteenth-century point of view, the ‘philosophical’ dimension of the History is not a matter of the way it uses principles taken from the Treatise or the Enquiries. The History is not, as it were, a historical exemplification of ‘Hume’s philosophy’. It is in itself philosophical, in the way it treats its subject matter, in its prose style, in the historical judgments that it makes. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is, or was judged to be, philosophical for much the same reasons. The database Eighteenth-Century Collections Online lists over 1,500 works published in English in the eighteenth-century with the word ‘philosophical’ in their title. Of them, 154 are collected under the heading ‘History and geography’; 9 under ‘Fine arts’; 146 under ‘Social sciences’; 201 under ‘Literature and languages’; 401 under ‘Religion and philosophy’; 2 under ‘Law’; 50 under ‘General reference’; and 558 under ‘Medicine, science and technology’. It would be, to put it mildly, unreasonable to expect ‘philosophical’ to mean the same thing in every case. All in all, it is difficult to know in eighteenth-century Britain when ‘philosophy’ is a subject matter, or several subject matters, defined along the lines of Chambers’s Cyclopædia or of the Encyclopædia Britannica, and when it is what might be termed, very roughly, a style of thinking and of writing, a frame of mind, an attitude, a way of treating a question, whether that question be one in trade or in perception, in chemistry or in ethics. What attention to the texture and detail of eighteenth-century British letters suggests is that we need to be wary of unreflectively taking it for granted that philosophy is a timeless, ahistorical category, the same thing in all times and all places. We need to be alert to the dangers of assuming that we can decide that such-and-such a text, or such-and-such an aspect or part of a text, is not philosophical, just because it would not count as such today. We need to take care in considering how the word ‘philosophy’ is used in different times and places.8 

8 Cp. Haakonssen (2006), esp. 21: ‘In writing the history of philosophy in general and that of the early modern period in particular, we have a choice. We can begin with a more or less fixed notion of what philosophy is . . . and proceed to find historical instantiations of and approximations to it. Or we can let the concept of philosophy itself be part of the object for historical investigation.’

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IV This Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century takes its definition of philosophy from a work that was in many respects very far from being of the mainstream, but which was nonetheless thoroughly of its time in so far as it intended to put on a new and ‘experimental’ footing a wide range of ‘moral subjects’ that had only recently been rescued from the pedantry and obscurantism of scholasticism. Hume’s Treatise was an extraordinarily ambitious attempt to reshape the entire philosophical landscape. It was supposed to be a work of five volumes, the first two on the understanding and the passions, to be followed by three more, on morals, criticism, and politics (see Hume 1978: xi). The volumes on the understanding and the passions do not seem to have been, from their author’s point of view, more important than the rest. They presented a core theory of human nature such as would be the foundation for study of some of the most important domains of human experience. Hume took it as obvious that primary among the things that define us as human beings are the complex and contradictory passion we are subject to, the moral feelings that inspire and inhibit our actions, the pleasure we take in the arts, and the fact that we live in societies structured by custom and law. There was much more to the human condition, in other words, than the fact of our subservience to God and to the brute reality of political power. Hume was of course not the first to understand the human situation in such a way. This was the received wisdom of the new age that had been announced by The Spectator, by Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks, by Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes. The aim of this Oxford Handbook is to be true to this conception of philosophy, and to do so by giving equal space to questions concerning the understanding, concerning the passions, concerning morals, concerning criticism, and concerning politics. Gross distortion and simplification would be the result of allowing a book such as this to be dominated by topics in (what we now call) epistemology and metaphysics, and of giving single chapters to the passions, to ethics, to aesthetics, and to political philosophy. It is not that epistemology and metaphysics were unimportant to philosophical writers in Britain in the eighteenth century. Answering scepticism as to the possibility of knowledge was a concern of many philosophers of the period, and, while metaphysics changed in an age insistent on grounding theories of all kinds in experience rather than in a priori reasoning, it certainly did not disappear altogether. The point, rather, is that the passions, morals, criticism, and politics mattered just as much as, if not more than, epistemology and metaphysics. There is, as we have seen, more than one way of arriving at a definition of what philosophy was in eighteenth-century Britain, but any useful definition would have to make room for the fact that those who wrote philosophy were principally concerned with understanding the world outside their studies. That is, they were concerned with understanding themselves and their fellows, with understanding what mattered to human beings in general, and with understanding why it mattered in the ways that it did. Empirical—what Hume termed ‘experimental’—study of human nature was taken to be the key to all such questions.

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Part 1 of this volume outlines three related discursive contexts in which to understand the chapters contained in Parts 2 to 7. In his book on ‘English’ thought in the eighteenth century, Leslie Stephen declared that Locke was the ‘intellectual ruler’ of the period (Stephen 1876: Vol. 1, 86). But this did not mean that Locke’s views were accepted without argument. Locke could not be ignored, but his conclusions were constantly, and vigorously, disputed. *Chapter 1[oxfordhb-9780199549023-e-002]* provides an overview of the Lockean theories that mattered most to eighteenth-century philosophers, and then gives an indication of the centrality of argument about those theories to subsequent developments. To a large number of British philosophers of the period, Newton’s achievement in the Principia and the Opticks was an inspiration. It raised the question of whether something of comparable significance could be achieved in what Hume termed ‘the science of Man’ (Hume 1978: xv). But Newton’s legacy was complex and contested, as is shown in *Chapter 2[oxfordhb-9780199549023-e-021]*. *Chapter 3[oxfordhb-9780199549023-e-022]* gives a summary account of a number of different eighteenth-century interpretations of what a ‘scientific’ approach to human nature might look like. One of the things that this chapter shows is that Lockeanism and Newtonianism were not all there was to the idea of a science of man. There was also ‘natural history’, itself a term with a number of different meanings. In *Chapter 4[oxfordhb9780199549023-e-020]* the focus switches to theorizations of the language in which philosophical argument—indeed, any kind of argument—needed to be made, and to the larger question of what ‘eloquence’ consisted in and how it was best achieved. The chapter shows that there were important differences between the way these issues were explored in England, Ireland, and Scotland. The first edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica declared that logic ‘may be defined the science or history of the human mind, inasmuch as it traces the progress of our knowledge from our first and most simple ideas through all their different combinations, and conceptions, and all those numerous deductions that result from variously comparing them one with another’ (Smellie 1768–71: Vol. 2, 984). This was an extensive terrain, and Part 2 covers only its most notable features. *Chapter  5[oxfordhb-9780199549023-e-027]* describes important contributions to the theory of perception and the question of how sensory experience served to stock the mind with ideas, giving particular attention to Berkeley and Reid, the most acute critics of the simple representationalism apparently expounded by Locke. Philosophers after Locke thought that before an analysis of the understanding had to come an elucidation of the relation between the simple ideas given in sense perception and the abstract and general concepts deployed in sophisticated ratiocination. Did generality exist only in language, or could ideas themselves properly be called general, or ‘abstract’? Eighteenth-century answers to that question are surveyed in in *Chapter 6[oxfordhb-9780199549023-e-023]*. In *Chapter 7[oxfordhb9780199549023-e-011]* we are moved on to the way in which the mind forms ‘deductions’ by comparing one idea with another, that is, to models of how the faculty of understanding, or reason, functions, and also to the closely related question of what the limits of our cognitive faculties might be. *Chapter 8[oxfordhb-9780199549023-e-017]* provides evidence that general acceptance of the Lockean claim that we have no insight

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into the ‘real essences’ of things did not entail that metaphysical discussion simply ground to a halt. Locke himself noted in Book IV of the Essay that our ignorance as to the fundamental constitution of the mind entailed that, for all we know, thought could be a property ‘superadded’ to matter. This generated a long-running and sophisticated debate about the metaphysics of the mind, the lineaments of which this chapter traces. It has for some time been a truism that, far from being ‘the age of reason’, the eighteenth century was deeply interested in the passionate or emotional side of human nature, and in the contribution made by the passions or emotions to all aspects of human life, from religion to economics. *Chapter 9[oxfordhb-9780199549023-e-018]* opens Part 3 with an account of the complex matter of how the passions—or emotions—or sentiments—or affects—were to be named and classified. There follow two chapters about the relation between the passions and other important faculties of the mind. *Chapter  10[oxfordhb-9780199549023-e-012]* considers the relationship between the passions and the faculty of reason, giving special attention to Hutcheson and to Reid. *Chapter  11[oxfordhb-9780199549023-e-016]* considers the relationship between the passions and the faculty of the will, and the closely connected questions of, first, whether the obvious and undoubted influence of the passions on our choices and actions is such as to justify the claim that our choices and actions are necessitated, and, secondly, whether, if they are, they can be said to be free. Emphasis is placed in this chapter on the fact that these issues are discussed in the eighteenth century as if they were empirical, or, ‘experimental’, in character. Interest in the passions at this time was not, even so, purely speculative. On the contrary, the period was obsessed with ensuring that the passions were properly managed, and it was one of the tasks of philosophy, as it had been in antiquity, to teach ways of governing the passions. *Chapter 12[oxfordhb9780199549023-e-010]* summarizes strategies recommended by philosophical writers as means, not of extirpating the passions, but of bringing them into balance and harmony with each other. One of the things that called for new taxonomies of the passions in the eighteenth century was a growing confidence that human beings are not fundamentally selfinterested in all of their actions. The selfish hypothesis had significant implications for moral philosophy, and, as the hypothesis grew less popular, writers on ethics developed new theories of the basis of social life for human beings. Some of the most notable of those theories are described in the first chapter of Part  4, *Chapter  13[oxfordhb9780199549023-e-019]*. The question of whether or not we are thoroughly selfish creatures was, however, asked more often at the century’s beginning than it was fifty years later. Smith neatly summarized the principal preoccupations of later philosophers when he distinguished between two questions: ‘First, wherein does virtue consist? Or what is the tone of temper, and tenour of conduct, which constitutes the excellent and praise-worthy character, the character which is the natural object of esteem, honour, and approbation? And, secondly, by what power or faculty in the mind is it, that this character, whatever it be, is recommended to us?’ (Smith 1984: 265 [VII.i.2]). *Chapter  14[oxfordhb-9780199549023-e-015]* discusses answers to the first question, *Chapter 15[oxfordhb-9780199549023-e-024]* answers to the second. These are

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questions in, to use the terminology from Thomas Reid introduced above, ‘speculative’ ethics. To most eighteenth-century writers on moral philosophy it was obvious that the practical task of instilling virtue, in the form of respect for the duties human beings had to God, their fellows, and themselves, was a more important matter. A number of systems of practical ethics are summarized in *Chapter 16[oxfordhb-9780199549023-e-003]*. ‘Genuine criticism’, according to Alexander Gerard in An Essay on Taste, ‘is justly esteemed a faithful transcript of nature. For it investigates those qualities in its objects, which, from the invariable principles of human nature, must always please or displease; describes and distinguishes the sentiments, which they in fact produce; and impartially regulates its most general conclusions according to real phænomena’ (Gerard 1759: 186). In The Universal Magazine in 1787 it was asserted that criticism ‘is an art founded wholly on experience; on the observation of such beauties as have approached nearest the standard of taste; that is, of such beauties as have been found to please mankind most generally’ (Vol. 81: 3). The first two chapters of Part 5 spell out in detail some aspects of criticism so understood. *Chapter  17[oxfordhb-9780199549023-e-028]* considers a variety of accounts of what it is that excites approval in the faculty of taste. The chapter makes clear that it was not always beauty that taste was supposed to be engaged by. There was also the sublime, the humorous, and, according to some theorists, imitation as such. *Chapter  18[oxfordhb-9780199549023-e-005]* turns from the objects of taste to taste itself, considered as a faculty or power of the mind, and examines three important analyses of that faculty or power. Some treated taste as a special ‘internal sense’; others treated taste as a function of the imagination; still others understood taste in terms of principles of the association of ideas. The subject of *Chapter 19[oxfordhb-9780199549023-e-006]* is one to which Gerard himself made a substantial contribution: the nature and causes of artistic genius. This is sometimes said to be a distinctively ‘Romantic’ sort of preoccupation, but the chapter shows that there was a substantial British discourse concerning genius, one that began, along with so much else, with essays by Addison in The Spectator. Part 6 makes it clear that the philosophy of politics was, in the eighteenth century, a very wide-ranging business indeed. The new, Protestant, natural jurisprudence of the seventeenth century had provided a set of analytical tools with which to consider the conditions of political society as such and determine the laws absolutely fundamental to peaceful social coexistence. *Chapter 21[oxfordhb-9780199549023-e-025]* examines some eighteenth-century uses of those tools in enquiry into the origins of civil society. British writers were especially, even obsessively, concerned with the character and special virtues of the way of governing and regulating the affairs of a state arrived at in the constitutional settlement that had followed the 1688 Revolution. A number of different approaches to the British constitution are described in *Chapter 22[oxfordhb9780199549023-e-008]*, where it is also shown how interpretations of the constitution changed during the century, sometimes as a response to international developments. By the end of our period, it was being argued that in fact the constitution was not the guarantor of liberty that it had so long been supposed to be. Those who made such arguments were impressed by the political achievements of the revolutions in America

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and in France. But of course the orthodox view was that Britain had already had its revolution, a peaceful one that was in truth not so much a matter of radical change but of the restoration of an ancient order of things, and that it did not need another one. *Chapter 23[oxfordhb-9780199549023-e-009]* charts the century’s discussion of revolution, and of what it might mean for the British to talk, as most of them continued to do, in terms of a right to resist illegitimate authority. Philosophical politics, however, interested itself just as much in the question of how a state might increase its wealth as in how a people might maintain their liberties. Indeed, a state’s wealth and its people’s liberties were increasingly supposed to depend upon each other. *Chapter 24[oxfordhb-9780199549023-e-013]* describes the emergence of the new science of ‘political economy’, and how it was meant to supplant the theory that the strength of a state depended upon the martial vigour and political activity of its citizens. In the concluding Part  7 the question of the relation between philosophy and religion in the eighteenth century is canvassed from three points of view. *Chapter 25[oxfordhb-9780199549023-e-004]* considers the legacy in the first part of the century of Hobbesian scepticism about some traditional religious principles, examining first Clarke’s and Berkeley’s attempts to put religion back on a rational footing, and then turning to Hume’s revival of Hobbes’s irreligion. The chapter concludes by suggesting that the divide between theists and atheists, and between kinds of theists and kinds of atheists, is a better way of schematizing the philosophy of the period than is the old distinction between ‘empiricists’ and ‘rationalists’. In *Chapter 26[oxfordhb9780199549023-e-014]* we move from natural religion to revealed religion, to Locke’s attempted vindication of the rationality of belief in revelation, Hume’s scepticism in ‘Of Miracles’, and George Campbell’s reply to Hume. The debate between Hume and Campbell, it is claimed, provides one way into the issue of what, exactly, ‘Enlightenment’ means in an eighteenth-century British context. *Chapter  27[oxfordhb9780199549023-e-026]*, on the connection between religious belief and virtue, goes some distance toward explaining why religion was such an important issue for philosophical writers on the mind and its powers. For it was generally supposed at this time that it is very hard, if not impossible, to retain a secure commitment to one’s station in life and its duties without belief in, at least, the doctrines of life after death and eternal punishment and reward. The volume thus ends with a return to the concern for practical matters that is an essential characteristic of almost all philosophical writing in Britain in the eighteenth century. In some cases, the topics discussed in different chapters are not easily distinguished and separated from each other, and this has occasionally led to a certain amount overlap between chapters. Some texts, and even some passages from those texts, feature in several of the chapters. There has been no attempt on the part of the editor to enforce a single reading of any passage, text, or author. Variety in interpretation is inevitable in a book such as this. None of the chapters should be taken to be the last word on its subject. Nor does any chapter embody the ‘state of the art’. Each one is best read as a single move in an on-going interpretative debate.

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V It will be obvious this Handbook does not provide an account of everything that went by the name of philosophy in eighteenth-century Britain. It will be equally obvious that the content of the book has not been determined solely by what goes by the name of philosophy today. A survey of everything that was called, or called itself, philosophy in Britain in the eighteenth century would not be very different from a survey of all of the period’s intellectual activity. On the other hand, a portrait of philosophy in the age from Locke to Stewart that limited itself to describing issues that philosophers of the early twentyfirst century also concern themselves with would be so incomplete as to be historically useless. It is a peculiarity of philosophy that its history has usually been, and mostly still is, written by philosophers. Most of the contributors to the present volume are philosophers, but, even so, the editor’s hope is that the book goes some way toward indicating what a historical account of eighteenth-century British philosophy might look like.

Acknowledgments I am grateful for advice on this Introduction to Alexander Broadie, Knud Haakonssen, Tom Jones, M. A. Stewart, and Paul Wood.

References Addison, J. (1965). The Spectator, 5 vols, ed. D. F. Bond. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Belsey, A. (2006). ‘Welsh Philosophy’, in A. Grayling, A. Pyle, and N. Goulder (eds), The Continuum Encyclopedia of British Philosophy London: Thoemmes Continuum, 3378–80. Berman, D. and O’Riordan, P. (eds) (2002). The Irish Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment, 4 vols. Bristol: Thoemmes Press. Berman, D. (2005). Berkeley and Irish Philosophy. London: Continuum. Broadie, A. (2009). A History of Scottish Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Buchdahl, G. (1961). The Image of Newton and Locke in the Age of Reason. London:  Sheed and Ward. Chambers, E. (1728). Cyclopaedia, or an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences. London. Davie, G. E. (1961). The Democratic Intellect: Scotland and Her Universities in the Nineteenth Century. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Davie, G. E. (2001). The Scotch Metaphysics:  A  Century of Enlightenment in Scotland. London: Routledge. Doddridge, P. (1763). A Course of Lectures on the Principal Subjects of Pneumatology, Ethics, and Divinity: With references to the most considerable authors of each subject. London. Duddy, T. (2002). A History of Irish Thought. London: Routledge. Duddy, T. (ed.) (2004). Dictionary of Irish Philosophers. Bristol: Thoemmes Continuum.

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Ferguson, A. (1769). Institutes of Moral Philosophy. For use of Students in the College of Edinburgh. Edinburgh. Fitzpatrick, M. (1996), ‘ “This candid and liberal method”: The Teaching of Philosophy in the Liberal Dissenting Academies of the Late Eighteenth Century in England’, in C. Richmond & I. Harvey (eds), Recognitions: Essays presented to Edmund Fryde. Aberystwyth: National Library of Wales, 481–510. Gerard, A. (1759). An Essay on Taste. London. Graham, H. G. (1901). Scottish Men of Letters in the Eighteenth Century. London:  Adam and Charles Black. Haakonssen, K. (2006). ‘The History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy:  History or Philosophy?’ in K. Haakonssen (ed.), The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 3–25. Hume, D. (1978). A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, rev. P.  H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Jardine, G. (1818). Outlines of Philosophical Education Illustrated by the Method of Teaching the Logic, or First Class of Philosophy, in the University of Glasgow. Glasgow: Oliver and Boyd. Johnson, S. (1755). A Dictionary of the English Language. London. Laurie, H. (1902). Scottish Philosophy in Its National Development. Glasgow : James Maclehose and Sons. McCosh, J. (1875). The Scottish Philosophy, Biographical, Expository, Critical, from Hutcheson to Hamilton. London: Macmillan. McLachlan, H. (1931). English Education under the Test Acts, Being the History of the NonConformist Academies 1662–1820. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Misak, C. (ed.) (2008). The Oxford Handbook of American Philosophy. Oxford:  Oxford University Press. Nuovo, V. (2011). Christianity, Antiquity, and Enlightenment:  Interpretations of Locke. Dordrecht: Springer. O’Brien, K. (2009). Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pocock, J. G. A. (1999). Barbarism and Religion: Vol. 1: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737–1764. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Porter, R. (1981). ‘The Enlightenment in England’, in R. Porter and M. Teich (eds), The Enlightenment in National Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1–18. Porter, R. (2000). Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World. London: Penguin. Priestley, J. (1774). An Examination of Dr Reid’s Inquiry, Dr. Beattie’s Essay, and Dr. Oswald’s Appeal. London. Reid, T. (2005). Thomas Reid on Logic, Rhetoric and the Fine Arts, ed. A. Broadie. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Reid, T. (2007). Thomas Reid on Practical Ethics:  Lectures and Papers on Natural Religion, Self-Government, Natural Jurisprudence and the Law of Nations, ed. K. Haakonssen. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Rivers, I. and Wykes, D. (eds) (forthcoming). A History of the Dissenting Academies in the British Isles, 1660–1860. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Seth, A. (1885). Scottish Philosophy: a Comparison of the Scottish and German Answers to Hume. Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons. [Smellie, W. (ed.)] (1768–71). Encyclopaedia Britannica; or, a dictionary of arts and sciences compiled upon a new plan. Edinburgh.

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Smith, A. (1982). The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Sorley, W. (1920). A History of English Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stephen, L. (1876). History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols. London: Smith, Elder, and Co. Stewart, D. (1854). ‘Dissertation: exhibiting the progress of metaphysical, ethical, and political philosophy, since the revival of letters in Europe. With numerous and important additions now first published’. Vol. 1 of Sir W. Hamilton (ed.), The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart 11 vols. Edinburgh: Thomas Constable. Watts, I. (1725). Logick: or, the right use of reason in the enquiry after truth. London. Wood, P. (1993). The Aberdeen Enlightenment: The Arts Curriculum in the Eighteenth Century Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. Yolton, J. (1986). ‘Schoolmen, Logic and Philosophy’, in L. S. Sutherland and L. G. Mitchell (eds), The History of the University of Oxford: Vol. V: The Eighteenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 565–91. Yolton, J. W., Price, J. V., and Stephens, J. (eds) (1999). The Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century British Philosophers. Bristol: Thoemmes Press. Young, B. W. (1998). Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century England. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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PA R T  I

T H E L A N G UAG E S OF P H I L O S OP H Y I N E IG H T E E N T H C E N T U RY B R I TA I N

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chapter 1

l o c k e a n d h i s i n f lu e n c e Timothy Stanton

John Locke died in 1704. His death removed from English intellectual and political life ‘one of the greatest Philosophers of our Age’ (Le Clerc 1706: 26). Locke’s philosophical celebrity was built on his authorship of An Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690), but the codicil added to his will in September 1704 confirmed what his many friends and his enemies alike suspected, that Locke was, besides the Essay (and Some Thoughts concerning Education), the author of The Reasonableness of Christianity and its Vindications, of Epistola de Tolerantia and its sequels, and of Two Treatises of Government. Here was a body of work as intellectually diverse as it was powerful, proceeding from the hand of one writer, each work powerful enough in its own right to compel attention when considered singly, the whole body together exerting a mighty compound force on subsequent thinking. Almost no area of thought would be immune from its consequences. The ways in which these consequences constitute ‘influence’ is another question. This question can easily become lost in issues about Locke’s supposed contribution to the development of various schools of thought—empiricism, rationalism, sensationalism, and so on—or to more variegated and slinking movements of ideas—utilitarianism, liberalism, secularization, the Enlightenment, or what have you. But if the issue is whether people thought and wrote differently because they were exposed to Locke then only one answer to the question makes sense. Interest in his life and his texts permeated the eighteenth century. Those texts had a continuing presence in public life and a growing presence in the syllabus of the British universities, first of all in Ireland, then Scotland, and, belatedly, in England. Locke’s Essay alone went through twenty editions in English up until 1800 and forty-eight printings in Britain and America (Yolton 1998: 67–189) and it made its mark. There are books, pamphlets, sermons, treatises, lives, and letters that carry the impression, the vocabulary, the preoccupations, the presence, unmistakeably. Sometimes it was the texts themselves that were carried: Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, took a set of Locke’s works with him to India on his first foreign posting in 1796 (Kelly 1989: 23).

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If the issue is presented differently, as a proposition about the overall shape, intellectual coherence, and significance of that legacy, then much remains to be said (see Aarsleff 1994; Harris 1998: 319–30; Dunn 2003). Apparent confusions, contradictions, and omissions were as much a part of Locke’s thinking and writing as anybody else’s, and his reluctance to probe some of his own conceptions and commitments beyond the point of comfort produced a legacy of its own: a great deal of eighteenth-century British philosophy can be seen, without too much distortion, as a single (if very complicated) sequence of argument over the implications for Christianity and natural jurisprudence of the analyses of human knowledge and language that Locke had worked out in the Essay. Locke’s successors were not usually content to take his positions as they found them—his writings rarely functioned straightforwardly as objects of assent—but he raised the problems in a form in which later philosophers, even those who dissented from him, found it fruitful to address them. Perhaps this was what Sir Leslie Stephen meant when he called Locke ‘the intellectual ruler of the eighteenth century’ (Stephen 1876: Vol. 1, 86). This chapter will give an exposition of this sequence of argument, beginning with Locke’s Essay and moving on to examine some of the ways in which his other philosophical writings left their trace on the minds of posterity. One thing must be said generally before proceeding further. That is that ‘philosophy’ in the eighteenth century embraced far more than what many would now consider to be philosophy and that it was not the preserve of a professional class of philosophers. When David Hume, upon reading the manuscript of Thomas Reid’s Inquiry into the Human Mind (1764) expressed to his friend Hugh Blair the ‘wish that the Parsons wou’d confine themselves to their old Occupation of worrying one another; & leave Philosophers to argue with Temper, Moderation, and good Manners’ (Wood 1986: 416), he was making a distinction which had not yet quite hardened into fact. As an anonymous reviewer of Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) had earlier remarked, the taste for philosophy was so widely cultivated and so dominant in Britain that ‘among some English theologians it is now fashionable to sprinkle even their sermons with the most subtle metaphysics. At the least, unless we have Locke at our fingertips, we cannot begin to understand them’ (Norton 2001: 359–60). By Locke the reviewer meant the Essay, and that work is the natural starting point for our exposition, because it stimulated, both in reaction and in admiration, many of the most notable developments in eighteenthcentury thought.

1.1 The Essay An Essay concerning Human Understanding was the first concerted attempt in the English language to provide a survey of the mind’s workings that was both comprehensive and nonAristotelian. It purposed to ‘consider the discerning Faculties of a Man, as they are employ’d about the Objects, which they have to do with’ and to give an ‘Account of the Ways, whereby our Understandings come to attain those Notions of Things we have’ (1975: ‘Introduction’

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§2). Book I subtracted such ways, rather than adding to them, in arguing that the understanding was not, as many of Locke’s contemporaries assumed, stocked with these notions from birth (see Yolton 1956). Locke held that there was no innate knowledge. The remaining three books developed positive accounts of how, and what, men can know and of how they can form beliefs which it is rational for them to believe. Book II claimed that ideas were the basic materials of knowledge, ideas being simply ‘whatsoever is the Object of the Understanding when a Man thinks’ (1975: ‘Introduction’ §7), and that all ideas came from experience. Ideas were of two kinds, simple and complex. Experience, likewise, was of two kinds, either the observation of perceivable objects in the world—‘sensation’—or the inspection and assessment of the contents and operation of our own minds—‘reflection’. Simple ideas derived directly from sensation and reflection, and were irresistible. Complex ideas derived from the voluntary combination and recombination of simple ideas. The understanding could not generate new simple ideas out of itself. Locke had originally thought to move directly from this discussion of ideas to the different ways in which the understanding combined and recombined ideas in coming to knowledge, but he decided that he needed first to consider language, because of the close connection between knowing and speaking. Hence Book III of the Essay, ‘Of Words’. Book III provided an account of the ways in which language both helped and hindered the communication of knowledge. Words, on Locke’s view, stood for ideas. Most words were general, names for sorts of thing (horse) rather than for particular things (Bucephalus), and this implied the existence of general ideas for which those words stood. These general ideas were formed by abstracting away from ideas of particular things deriving from and founded in individual experience the circumstances of time and place and any other ideas which together determined that idea to a particular experiential content. Thus the abstract idea of a horse, for example, would include the idea of a body and a head, four legs, a tail, and a mane, but it would not include peculiarities of size and colouration, since experience tells us that particular horses, having these characteristics in common, vary enormously in size and colour. It was by this process of abstracting that general natures, or the essences of sorts of thing, like ‘horse’, were produced. These were ‘the Inventions and Creatures of the Understanding’ (1975:  III.iii.11) which corresponded to no thing that really existed, for only particular things really existed—Bucephalus, but not horse. This claim went against a train of thought originating with Aristotle and running into later scholastic philosophy, according to which particulars belonged to this or that sort in virtue of participating in and embodying certain universal forms or essences which made them what they were and not another sort of thing. Locke registered his disagreement with this claim by speaking of the relevant abstract ideas as nominal essences, as opposed to the putatively real essences supposed by the scholastics. That nominal essences were made by the mind’s combining the ideas of various observable qualities into one idea denoted by the one name calls for a word about another distinction that Locke (following Descartes, Boyle, and others) had used in Book II, that between primary qualities and secondary qualities.

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Locke called ‘primary’ those qualities of a body that were ‘utterly inseparable’ from it, which really existed in it, and ‘secondary’ qualities the power of the same body to produce certain sensations in us (in view of the primary qualities they possessed). He added, by way of observation rather than definition, that our ideas of the primary qualities of bodies—bulk, figure, texture and the like—were resemblances of those qualities, whereas ideas of secondary qualities resembled nothing in the bodies themselves: ‘what is Sweet, Blue, or Warm in Idea, is but the certain Bulk, Figure and Motion of the insensible Parts in the Bodies themselves, which we call so’ (Locke 1975: II.viii.15). In short, primary qualities were really in bodies whether they were perceived or not, while secondary qualities were products of the interaction between primary-qualitied things and our primary-qualitied sense organs. Locke suggested that this process was doubly mysterious. On the one hand, we were ignorant, and perhaps incurably so, of the real constitution of most things in the world, ourselves included. On the other hand, we could discover no necessary connexions, and perhaps there were none, between secondary qualities and the primary qualities on which they depended (compare Ayers 1991 and Langton 1998: 140–61). A further mystery was what underlay or supported the primary qualities themselves and united them together as qualities of a single thing, the ‘I know not what’ which, from the supposition that it stood under and held up those qualities, we call ‘substance’ (Locke 1975: II.xxiii.1–4). In making these points Locke was saying that the scholastics’ appeal to substantial forms not only failed to explain what it was for a particular thing to be of a general sort but also failed to explain why various qualities were united and naturally conjoined in the first place and why they had the properties they did. Indeed the scholastics spoke unintelligibly to the extent that their words failed to correspond to any clear idea of anything. In Book II Locke had proposed a series of tests for ideas: that they should be clear, distinct, real, adequate, and true. Complex ideas of substance flunked these tests, being both unclear and false. It followed that talking as the scholastics did was a way of impeding rather than communicating knowledge. For knowledge consisted in the ‘perception of the connexion and agreement, or disagreement and repugnancy of any of our Ideas’ (Locke 1975: IV.i.2). If such agreement or disagreement were to be perceivable, ideas had to be clear and distinct. Without that clarity and distinctness, knowledge strictly speaking was not possible. Knowledge of substance, in this frame of reference, did not comprise very much: general propositions about substance would be necessarily uncertain and could not be known to be true. This emphasis on the limitations of the human understanding served two turns. It complemented a relatively modest programme for natural philosophy, in which careful observation—‘experience and history’—replaced the scholastic ambition for a science of nature organized around the categories of form and substance. Locke doubted whether natural philosophy was ‘capable of being made a Science’ (1975: IV.xii.10). At the same time, it reinforced his sense that the scope of human understanding answered to God’s purposes for human beings. It was not knowledge of nature that God required but rather the discovery of what helped or hindered people in the pursuit of His ends: ‘Men’, Locke wrote in the introduction to the Essay, ‘have Reason to be well satisfied with

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what God has thought fit for them, since he has given them . . . Whatsoever is necessary for the Conveniences of Life, and Information of Vertue, and has put within reach of their Discovery the comfortable Provision for this Life and the Way that leads to a better’ (Locke 1975: ‘Introduction’ §5). The implications of this position became clearer in Book IV. What Locke said there, about the extent and objects of human knowledge, was structured by his distinction between real and nominal essence and a distinction between complex ideas of substance and those of modes and of relations. Modes were dependencies on substances or, more informally, features of things which could not exist independently of those things. For example, actions performed by an agent presupposed a substance by virtue of which the agent existed—no such substance, no such action. Actions were conceptualized by Locke as ‘mixed’ modes, because their components (unlike those of simple modes) included several distinct ideas. Relations were products of comparisons between different distinct ideas. The most important of these were the moral relations produced by comparing the complex ideas of particular human actions, together with their circumstances and aims, with the moral rules by reference to which they were evaluated. These accounts of actions and rules were matched by complementary accounts of agency, human agency, and personal identity. Modal and relational ideas were not modelled on likenesses of natural things in the way of ideas of substance. On the contrary, Locke argued, they were made by the mind ‘very arbitrarily’, without reference to the real existence of anything but rather to the purposes and conveniences of human life. Thus it came about that their nominal essences and their real essences were identical, since their names signified the ideas that the mind itself had formed. In its turn this implied the possibility of the instructive general knowledge that was lacking in respect of substances. This possibility had been realized in the case of geometry, in which (for example) the properties of triangles were deducible and demonstrable from the complex idea of three lines enclosing a space, and Locke was ‘bold to think’ that morality too might be capable of demonstration, because the real essence of the things for which moral words stood might in the same terms be perfectly known (1975: III.xi.16). The state of human faculties, then, pointed to morality as ‘the proper Science, and Business of Mankind in general’. Morality, in its fullest sense, embraced ‘the Condition of our eternal Estate’ as well as our earthly estate (Locke 1975: IV.xii.11), and so Locke was moved to consider revelation, for belief in the truth of revelation was widely considered, as he considered it himself, a condition of attaining eternal life. Locke had concluded that moral truths could be known certainly through the use of natural human faculties, that is to say, by reason, but many of the concerns of the present life involved what was merely probable rather than certain. In Book IV Locke addressed the nature of reason and the relation between faith and reason (IV.xvii–xviii). The fourth edition of the Essay (1694) added another chapter which discussed ‘enthusiasm’, by which Locke meant laying reason aside in favour of immediate revelation (IV.xix). Locke argued that revelation was answerable to reason for its authenticity, that faith, properly speaking, concerned matters that were above reason—Locke adduced the resurrection of the dead—or in other words, beyond the discovery of our natural faculties, and that assent should be

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proportioned to evidence in all matters of human understanding (IV.xx). But Locke’s views did not immediately win unanimous assent.

1.2 The Reception of the Essay Locke received regular updates on the early reception of the Essay from his former pupil and friend James Tyrrell. In December 1689 Tyrrell told Locke that he had heard that the Essay was ‘well approved of by those who have began the readeing of it’ in Oxford. A month later Tyrrell sent mixed news from London, where ‘Mr Locks new Book admits of no indifferent Censure, for tis either extreamly commended, or much decry’d, but has ten Enemies for one friend; Metaphysicks being too Serious a subject for this Age’ (Locke 1976–89: Vol. 3, 763, 793). In February 1690 Tyrrell reported that Locke’s denial of innate ideas in Book I had scandalized the clergy because ‘so sweet and easy a part of their sermons: as that the Law written in the heart is rendred false and uselesse’ (Locke 1976–89: Vol. 4, 11). A month later still, exhibiting once again the massive tactlessness that was rapidly cooling friendship into an acquaintance, Tyrrell now informed Locke that ‘a Friend told me the other day that he had from one who pretends to be a great Judge of books: that you had taken all that was good in it; from divers modern French Authours not only as to the notions but manner of connexion of them’ (Locke 1976– 89: Vol. 4, 36), compounding the offence by asking Locke about his suspected authorship of Two Treatises and the Epistola. There was better news to come from Ireland. In August 1692 William Molyneux wrote to Locke from Dublin to tell him that he had never ‘read any Book with More Satisfaction, than your Essay’ (Locke 1976–89: Vol. 4, 508). Molyneux is best remembered today for proposing a problem arising out of the Essay’s account of the way in which diverse senses worked together to convey ideas to the mind. Molyneux’s problem was whether a blind man, his sight restored, given a globe and a cube, could by sight alone tell which was which. Locke would note the problem in the second edition of the Essay, agreeing with Molyneux that the blind man would be unable to do so. The problem rumbled on through the eighteenth century, eliciting comment from eminent philosophers, scientists, and men of letters not only in Britain but also on the Continent: Leibniz, Voltaire, Diderot, La Mettrie, and Condillac among others were drawn into discussion of it. Molyneux’s enthusiasm for the Essay had other effects besides. He had suggested to Locke that the Essay would be adopted more readily in the universities if it were recast in the form of a traditional logic. Locke thanked Molyneux for the suggestion but showed little inclination to take it up himself at this time (Locke 1976–89: Vol. 4, 626–7). In 1696, however, John Wynne, a Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, produced, with Locke’s approval, an abridgement of the Essay which went some way towards making it more digestible to undergraduates. Wynne’s abridgement attained a wide readership— by 1737 it had gone through five editions—but his attempts to place it on the Oxford curriculum foundered in the face of clerical opposition. In the longer run, however, Molyneux’s suggestion would be vindicated.

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A series of indigenous eighteenth-century British logics inspired by Locke, beginning with Isaac Watts’s Logick; or the Right Use of Reason in the Enquiry after Truth (1725), gradually supplanted the older scholastic texts. Watts, an admirer of Descartes, objected to Locke’s attack on innate ideas but drew on the framework of the Essay in propounding his own views. William Duncan’s The Elements of Logick (1748) went further in a Lockean direction, opening (in consciously Lockean vein) with the observation that we found ourselves ‘in this World surrounded with a Variety of Objects; we have Powers and Faculties fitted to deal with them, and are happy and miserable in proportion as we know how to frame a right Judgment of Things, and shape our Actions agreeably to the Circumstances in which we are placed’ (Duncan 1748: 1). It continued in the same vein, taking its examples, order of exposition, and much of its vocabulary, sometimes verbatim, from Locke (Yolton 1984: 117–18). The same is true of Edward Bentham’s An Introduction to Logick: Scholastick and Rational (1773), which moved from an account of how the senses provided the understanding with ideas to an account of language as the vehicle by which ideas were communicated, making Lockean distinctions between simple and complex ideas on the way (Bentham 1773: 1–10). The model quaestiones Bentham listed as examples of the theses students might be asked to defend or refute in examinations included several explicitly Lockean propositions (see Bentham 1773: 100–4). Molyneux produced another effect more directly by recommending the Essay to Dr William King, Bishop of Derry, whose brief and unflattering commentary on Book I—the repudiation of innate ideas, King snorted, was ‘a meer Jangle’ (Locke 1976– 89: Vol. 4, 534)—he would forward to Locke in due course, and yet another by recommending it to George Ashe, Provost of Trinity College, Dublin, who was more receptive to its contents and ‘Orderd it to be read [for examination] by the Batchelors in the Colledge’ (Locke 1976–89: Vol. 4, 602). Here the effect would prove to be far reaching, for it was by this route that the young George Berkeley was introduced to Locke’s philosophy when he became an undergraduate student at Trinity in 1700. Berkeley is famous as (among other things) an acidulous, if not always assiduous, critic of Locke, but he was, for all that, deeply appreciative of Locke’s achievements: ‘Wonderful in Locke that he could w[he]n advanc’d in years see at all thro a mist yt had been so long a gathering & was consequently thick. This more to be admir’d than yt he didn’t see farther’ (Berkeley 1949–58: Vol. 1, 71). Berkeley went on to compare his own achievements to those of a pigmy who had thrown off the molehill which lay upon him and Locke’s to those of a giant who had managed only to shake the mountain that oppressed him (Berkeley 1949–58: Vol. 1, 83). Plainly he saw himself as working within intellectual parameters established by Locke, even as he sought to move beyond them. So much is apparent from Berkeley’s views on language, ideas, and qualities. Berkeley’s view of language was developed in opposition to Locke’s theory of abstraction. Locke held both that the purpose of language was to communicate ideas and that all significant words stood for, or signified, ideas. The conjunction of these two propositions led him to conclude that the understanding was able to take ideas of particulars and turn them into ideas suitable to be the signification of the general terms which abounded in language: his ‘abstract ideas’. Berkeley objected violently to these abstract

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ideas and traced the worst errors of recent philosophy to their door (Berkeley 1949– 58: Vol. 4, 135–6; see at length Vol. 3, 292–329). He provided several parodic examples of such ideas which were utterly indeterminate—a triangle that was neither oblique nor right-angled, neither equilateral, equicrural, or scalene, but all and none of these at once, a man that was not white or black or any particular colour and yet some colour—in order to emphasize both the impossibility of such ideas and the primacy and sufficiency of raw ideas of sensation and reflection. In a pincer movement, Berkeley also criticized Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities by arguing that qualities like bulk, figure, and texture were inseparable from qualities like colour, and that it was impossible to conceive of an object possessing qualities of the first sort and not the second. Thus the ontological distinction Locke wished to make between the primary qualities which constituted the real properties of an object and the secondary qualities which were perceived in the mind was an untenable one. Berkeley added a further criticism, this time of Locke’s thesis that ideas of primary qualities resembled the primary qualities themselves whereas ideas of secondary qualities did not (Berkeley 1949–58: Vol. 2, 246). He agreed with Locke that the immediate objects of perception were ideas in the mind but inferred from this that the resemblance thesis was unverifiable, since we could only perceive our ideas, and that it was, moreover, nonsensical, since it would only make sense if the two things said to resemble one other could in principle be compared and have the same predicate applied to them univocally (Lowe 1995: 55). Berkeley thought that it was meaningless to speak of resemblance between mental ideas and material qualities because ‘an idea can be like nothing but another idea’ (Berkeley 1949–58: Vol. 2, 45) and concluded that Locke had no grounds for distinguishing between our ideas of primary qualities and those of secondary qualities. This conclusion collapsed Locke’s broader distinction between ideas and qualities altogether, so that with Berkeley what we call things—horses and the like—were really ideas in the mind and had no existence independent of it: as he put it, their ‘esse is percipi’ (Berkeley 1949–58: Vol. 2, 42). Berkeley’s criticisms of Locke exploited Locke’s deliberately loose use of the word ‘idea’ to denote ‘the object of understanding’, whatever that object might be. His objections to abstract ideas, in particular, assumed that by ideas Locke meant images or representations of sensible objects. Writing in 1728, Zachary Mayne accused Locke of eliding sensation, imagination, and understanding through what was in fact a recklessly elastic use of that word. Mayne wished to distinguish between ideas on the one hand, which were images or copies of objects perceived by the senses, and notions on the other, which were products of understanding, believing, rather as Berkeley had believed, that Locke had run the two together ruinously ([Mayne] 1728: 115–21; compare Berkeley 1949–58: Vol. 2, 29–30). In the process, he alleged, Locke had obliterated the difference between human beings and brutes that had perceptual capacities, and hence ideas, and so also (on this view) understandings in common with them. This is not a model of penetrating criticism, but it has the great merit of disambiguating the two very different senses in which Locke’s ‘ideas’ increasingly were construed: in a narrower sense, to stand

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for images or impressions of things perceived, and in a broader sense, to stand for the thing that is thought upon. With Mayne, the latter (‘notions’ in his terminology) bore the weight of meaning and led to understanding (Yolton 1984: 120). This line of thought reached an apotheosis in the writings of Thomas Reid, who construed ideas in this second sense, as acts of conceiving, and took it to follow that the objects of understanding were perceived directly, rather than via representative images of those objects (Reid 2002: 171–87; see Yolton 1984). Berkeley had also objected to Locke’s discussion of substance as the most abstract and incomprehensible of all Locke’s abstract ideas. The idea of ‘something’ ‘supporting’ primary and secondary qualities could not be understood in a literal sense, Berkeley thought, and in what other sense it could be intended was not clear. This was part of his wider attack on the idea of matter itself: even if matter exists, Berkeley asked, how is it possible for us to know that it does when we cannot perceive anything but ideas and when it is evident, from our experience of dreams and frenzies, that ideas are not necessarily connected to anything resembling those ideas? And even if it did exist, no adequate account could be given of how it caused ideas in us: those who supposed it to exist were ‘unable to comprehend in what manner body can act upon spirit’ (Berkeley 1949–58: Vol. 2, 49). Now, Berkeley was not opposed to the notion of substance as such. Indeed he was committed to thinking that spirit was substance, and a fortiori that in a strict sense it was the only substance (Berkeley 1949–58: Vol. 2, 261). This half-way house would be demolished in turn by the wrecking ball that was David Hume. Hume pointed out that the case for immaterial substance was no more convincing than for material substance. He showed to his own satisfaction that we have no impression of substance; and, given his principle that ideas are derived from impressions (or that ideas in the narrow sense identified above are the source of ideas in the broader sense), it followed that there was no idea of substance (Hume 2000:  I.i.vi). Hume deployed this argument in the context of the question of whether there was a peculiar substance, be it material or immaterial, called the mind or the soul, in which all our perceptions inhere (2000: I.iv.v). His negative conclusion, that we have no idea of mind or soul and no justification for supposing that there is any such thing, immediately raised the question of what it is that enables us to think of ourselves as one thing continuing in existence from one moment to the next, having these perceptions now, having had those other perceptions then. Hume answered this question with remarkable insouciance: we are really just a congeries of perceptions and the notion that we are the same thing persisting across time is merely an artefact of the way that memories are connected with one another in this congeries—a fiction of the mind, and the mind itself one more fiction of the mind (2000: I.iv.vi; and see Falkenstein 1995: 26). These conclusions, about the soul and about the self, followed out trains of thought that Locke’s Essay had instigated. As Reid observed, Hume, like Berkeley before him, had driven those trains home to a destination far removed from Locke’s original intentions; but he had done so on Locke’s principles (Reid 1997: 3–4). It was Locke, after all, who had stated that the idea of matter was as remote from the understanding as that of spirit, Locke who had emphasized the inescapable obscurity of the relationship between our ideas and the underlying reality,

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Locke who had in the Essay compared mind–body interaction to the mystery of creation (1975: IV.x.18). Locke’s sense of the limitations of our knowledge of matter and mind had prompted him to speculate that God might just as well have superadded to a system of matter the power of thought as joined and fixed to that system a thinking immaterial substance—the soul as conventionally understood (1975: IV.iii.6). That speculation was a central item of controversy in the running debate between materialists and immaterialists that Hume had proposed to derail once and for all. It was a speculation that was attacked here, cited there, and reinforced and expanded towards the end of the century when Joseph Priestley sought to make materialism, hitherto obnoxious, the favourite tenet of rational Christians (Priestley 1777: xvi–xvii). This debate embroiled its participants in further questions about personal identity and morality in which Locke’s views once again provided decisive cues for further thought.

1.3 Thinking Matter, Personal Identity, and Morality Locke nowhere positively affirmed the view that matter does think, but his contemporaries suspected him of having done so by insinuation (see Lee 1702: 246). This view suggested affinities with Hobbes and Spinoza, whose names were bywords for materialism and atheism, and critics were not slow to make the connection: Edward Stillingfleet, William Carroll, and John Witty alike pounced on Locke’s apparent ‘Spinozism’ (Stillingfleet 1698: 30; Carroll 1706; Witty 1707: 11). Suspicions of unorthodoxy were only increased by Locke’s account of personal identity. Locke conceived personal identity in terms that made no direct reference to substance, suggesting that issues about the soul’s materiality or immateriality were irrelevant in that context. He argued instead that the identity of the person consisted in his or her conscious relation to rules, especially divine rules: hence his famous description of ‘person’ as ‘a Forensick term appropriating Actions and their Merit’ which belonged ‘only to intelligent Agents capable of a Law, and Happiness and Misery. This personality [Locke continued] extends itself beyond present Existence to what is past, only by consciousness, whereby it becomes concerned and accountable, owns and imputes to it self past Actions, just upon the same ground, and for the same reason, that it does the present’ (1975: II.xxvii.26). Locke’s argument was revolutionary. It provoked strong reactions. The Boyle lecturer Samuel Clarke reacted by saying that consciousness could only be a quality of some immaterial substance that was simple and indivisible (Clarke 1738: Vol. 3, 730). This was the soul. Personal identity based, as Locke wished to base it, on a transient series of conscious states was illusory and it could not provide, as Locke wished it to provide, grounds on which the distribution of rewards and punishments in this life and the next could be justified. If consciousness was simply a mode of matter in motion (as it would have to be if Locke were really a materialist), then the constant alteration of that matter would lead to a constant change in the identity of the person (Clarke 1738: Vol. 3,

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844, 851–2). This duly provoked a counter-reaction from Locke’s friend and one time protégé Anthony Collins, who insisted, in Lockean language, that personal identity did not depend upon continuity of substance (Clarke 1738: Vol. 3, 875). Collins made much of the role of memory in extending identity across time, often treating consciousness and memory as equivalent terms (see Clarke 1738: Vol. 3, 876–7) and the objections of later philosophers like Joseph Butler and Reid continued the process of identifying (or, if one prefers, confusing) consciousness with memory, even with occurrent memory, finding stupidities in Locke that may have originated closer to home. Butler, for example, accused Locke of a ‘wonderful mistake’ in failing to recognize that consciousness presupposed identity and so could not constitute it. I can remember only my own experiences, Butler agreed, but that is because they are my experiences: memory reveals my identity with some past experience, but it is not what makes that experiencer me. What I am remembering, he argued (much like Clarke), are the experiences of a substance, the same substance that constitutes me now (Butler 1736: 440–1). Reid endorsed Butler’s objection (Reid 2002: 275), developing an equally well-known objection of his own via the story of a brave officer who, in his middle years, as he is taking the standard of his enemy in battle, remembers being flogged for stealing apples as a boy, and who, when a general advanced in years, remembers taking the standard but has no memory of the apple theft and subsequent flogging. Reid claimed that this generated an absurdity, since on Locke’s account the general was both identical to the apple thief (on the principle of the transitivity of identity) and not (since he had no direct memory of the experiences of the boy) (Reid 2002: 276–7). Whether this amounts to an objection to Locke’s view of personal identity is something else again: Edmund Law, for one, doubted that it did, and others since have shared his doubts (see Law 1769; Strawson 2011: 53–7). These doubts turn in the end on the success or failure of Locke’s attempts to separate personal identity from any sort of substance-based identity. Locke’s emphasis on consciousness was vital to this attempt, but so too was his emphasis on rules, and divine rules in particular. These latter were especially crucial to Locke’s views of morality, religion, and politics. Locke’s treatment of personal identity indicated that he thought about morality primarily in terms of law, indeed of divine law. His requirements for morality comprised a law and the possibility that it would be apprehensible by human faculties. This suggested natural law as an appropriate idiom for moral theorizing. At the same time, Locke had suggested that morality might be demonstrated. What would such a demonstration involve? Locke needed to show, first of all, that God existed, that he was capable of being a lawgiver, that he had promulgated rules, that these rules were obligatory, and that they were signified as such. All this would have to be accessible to mankind’s natural faculties, with all the relevant ideas, and the connections between them, available to the human understanding. Locke had duly dealt with all of these things in the Essay, except the last. He had shown that we can apprehend rational precepts and that on his assumptions God was entitled to make those precepts obligatory. What he had not shown was that God had actually done so. He needed to do this if morality was to be demonstrated. Otherwise, there would be a gap in the connection of ideas.

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This gap was present in an obvious way in the Essay, which contained no chapter on the subject. Locke had begun a chapter, intended for the Essay, entitled ‘Of Ethick in General’, but he broke off just at the point we might expect the omission to be rectified: ‘The next thing then to show is, that there are certain rules . . . which it is his will all men should conforme their actions to and that this will of his is sufficiently promulgated and made known to all mankinde’ (Locke 1997: 304). Locke did not say then what these rules were, and the putative chapter never made it into the published essay. Neither was the matter of their associated rewards and punishments clearly worked out. These were necessary features of genuine law on Locke’s account, but he did not prove the existence of an afterlife with certainty in the Essay. It may be that it was impossible to do so in the terms he had set (see Harris 1998: 264–79). However, Locke found a means to assuage the difficulty in The Reasonableness of Christianity. Reason, he conceded there, had failed to establish morality fully upon its true foundations. There was a law of nature, to be sure, but ‘who . . . ever did or undertook to give it us all entire, as a Law, no more, nor no less, than what was contained in, and had the obligation of that Law?’ No one before Jesus Christ: ‘Such a Law of Morality, Jesus Christ hath given us in the New Testament . . . by Revelation. We have from him a full and sufficient Rule for our direction; And conformable to that of Reason’ (Locke 1999: 152–3). Locke conceived Christ as a lawgiver, suggesting that he had come to fully establish the law of nature by revealing ‘the great Rewards and Punishments, for those that would or would not obey him’ (Locke 1999: 154). Revelation repaired the gap in Locke’s account of morality. A similar line would be adopted by the Scottish divine Thomas Halyburton, who employed a broadly Lockean theory of knowledge, and generally sympathetic references to the Reasonableness, in arguing that natural reason could not adequately demonstrate the nature of the deity or of human duty, or the reality of and the preconditions for an afterlife (Halyburton 1714). For the most part, however, Locke’s successors explored alternative possibilities. One alternative was sentimentalism. The Third Earl of Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson sought to evade the problem Locke had encountered by disconnecting ethics from God’s role as a legislator and by insisting instead on a moral sense innate to mankind. Shaftesbury had been Locke’s pupil almost from infancy, but he publicly distanced himself from his old tutor and charged Locke with resolving good and evil into divine fiat: ‘according to Mr. LOCKE . . . Morality . . . depend[s] only on Law and Will:  And GOD indeed is . . . free to any Thing, that is however Ill: For if he wills it, it will be made Good . . . And thus neither Right nor Wrong . . . are any thing in themselves; nor is there any . . . Idea of them naturally imprinted on Human Minds’ (Shaftesbury 1716: 40–1). Locke would be defended against this ‘slander’ by Catherine Cockburn (Cockburn 1751: Vol. 2, 342), but to little effect. The charge would be repeated, more in sorrow than in anger, in Richard Price’s Review of Morals (Price 1948: 43). Shaftesbury had gone even further by suggesting that Locke had completed Hobbes’s work of throwing morality out of the world, holding Locke’s philosophical principles responsible for dealing the death blow (Shaftesbury 1716: 39). Hutcheson, by contrast, did not openly fault Locke’s principles. He agreed that there were no simple ideas underived from sense or reflection, and inferred from the

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uniqueness of moral ideas the existence of a uniquely moral sense (Hutcheson 2004: 21–2, 67, 89–97). The possibilities within sentimentalism would be explored by Adam Smith, Hume, Reid, and others over the course of the eighteenth century. Sentimentalism was never a possibility for Locke, because, as he thought, it confounded moral judgment with the rule or law upon which that judgment ought to be made and so obviated God’s legislative role (Burnet 1989: 63–5). Locke’s wider political theory presupposed that people were dependent creatures, subject inescapably to God’s superior will disclosed through reason as principles of natural law. To have had recourse to sentimentalism would have undercut this structure of thought by removing any source of direction beyond human devices and, with this, the more extensive dependence that Locke required. Locke’s major works in political theory, Epistola de Tolerantia and Two Treatises of Government (both published in 1689) explored the implications of God’s direction of mankind through natural law for the nature of churches and states, their respective jurisdictions, and the relationships between them. These works, too, flowed into the currents of thinking we have been charting.

1.4 Church and State Two Treatises argued that absolutist explanations of political power, which represented it as limitless in scope and its possessors as accountable to God alone, were nonsensical, and proposed an alternative explanation. Locke’s first treatise overthrew the ‘False Principles’ of Sir Robert Filmer while the second set out the ‘True Original, Extent, and End of Civil Government’, that is, the origin and scope of civil jurisdiction (Locke 1960: 169). Locke identified its origin in the consent of people to incorporate into one society under one government in order to secure terrestrial ends, including the better performance of natural duties to oneself and others, which resolved into the conservation and protection of civil goods. Those duties, to preserve oneself and others, generated rights to life, liberty, and property as the means of their fulfilment, which civil government protected, and rights to punish and restrain those whose actions endangered these, which civil government enforced. Being authorized in terms of these rights, it followed that civil governments had jurisdiction over such actions, but not over matters beyond their scope, and that they should be resisted if they overstepped these limits. At the same time Locke showed that civil society was self-subsistent by explaining its origins and purposes in terms which made no mention of Christianity or of churches. Churches were the subject of Locke’s Epistola. The Epistola complemented Two Treatises by showing that churches, like states, were self-subsistent, that each church, like each state, was separate from every other, with jurisdiction over its own members alone, and that religious and civil societies too were independent of one another. In the Latin of the original letter, both were discussed in terms of res, that is, something that can be conceived as a separate entity, and said to be distinct (Locke 1968: 64).

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Churches came into existence via the consent of people to incorporate into societies organized around certain supernatural claims to worship God publicly in the manner they believed would be acceptable to him for the welfare of their souls, one of the duties of natural law. This worship took place spatially within the commonwealth, but the end it served, homage to God, was no part of the ends of the commonwealth, and so churches were not under its jurisdiction. The civil magistrate, therefore, had no business, ceteris paribus, interfering with any religious societies, his own or any other, while the multiplicity of churches implied by this view had a duty to tolerate one another. Locke’s view of churches proved timely. It answered to a practical need among religious dissenters at the turn of the century to justify their non-conformity to the established church. As early as 1704 Locke’s arguments about toleration were being invoked in works that for the first time had abandoned the implicit aspiration of earlier dissenters to substitute their own desideratum for the established church and embraced pluralism on a Lockean model, along with the conception of churches as voluntary societies that made it possible (Goldie 1999: i, xlii). The dissenters used Lockean arguments to justify their institutional preferences but the same arguments proved useful to others as instruments of subversion. The doctrines and practices of the established church began to be assailed with Lockean weapons by ‘freethinkers’ who regarded institutionalized religion as fraudulent and who wished to impress upon the mind of the English nation the idea that ‘priests are knaves and their congregations fools; that the shepherds fleeced the flock for their own benefit, and the sheep were simple enough to submit to the process’ (Mansel 1873: 298). At the vanguard of this assault was Matthew Tindal. Tindal’s The Rights of the Christian Church Asserted (1706) suggested that the Church of England’s claim to occupy a privileged position in the political life of the nation was bogus. All Christians had the right to judge for themselves what should and should not be believed, and the Church of England—like any other church—was simply a coalition of like-minded believers. Pushed to defend his own view of the church, Tindal ventriloquized Locke, insisting that all were equally capable of deciding for themselves how God ought to be worshipped (Tindal 1708: 28). In his final work Tindal went beyond Locke in suggesting that from this natural equality of capacity it could be inferred that Revelation was redundant and probably inauthentic (Tindal 1730: 370). Tindal showed how Locke’s ideas could be used to support deist conclusions. John Toland had earlier used a coarsened version of Locke’s epistemology to put question marks against the very notion of mysteries in religion (Toland 1696), but the route from Locke to deism was plotted most directly by Anthony Collins. His Essay concerning the Use of Reason (1707) agreed with Locke in making knowledge consist in the perception of the agreement or disagreement of ideas. But it differed from Locke (though not from Toland) in making such perception the sole condition of all assent in matters of faith as in everything else (Collins 1707). In Collins’s view, if not in Locke’s, nothing was above reason—or nothing worth bothering about. Thus religion could have no mystery in it and would need no interpreter beyond everyone’s own reason: Christ himself had merely reiterated what reason could discover. He had not completed the law of nature, because it was already complete. Again following in Toland’s footsteps,

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Collins explained belief in religious mysteries in terms of the craftiness of priests. In this way Locke’s ideas were received as invitations to deism and the disestablishment of the Church of England. But they could be received in other ways too. The Presbyterian George Benson relied on around 4,000 quoted words of ‘that judicious and free inquirer, the excellent Mr. Locke’ to confute Henry Dodwell’s deistic Christianity not founded on Argument (1741) (Benson 1743: 246), while Benjamin Hoadly, Bishop of Bangor, turned to Locke’s ideas to reinvigorate the Church of England. Hoadly’s was perhaps the most sustained early attempt to work through the implications of Locke for the Anglican Church, to reformulate the grounds on which that church stood and issued its pronouncements. Hoadly found a scriptural warrant for the separation of the church and the state that Locke’s political theory required, and used it to validate Locke’s politics and his account of churches and toleration. The Measures of Submission to the Civil Magistrate Consider’d (1706) echoed Locke’s view that civil magistrates had authority only to preserve and extend the happiness and good of civil society. Hoadly echoed Locke again when he suggested that people could take measures to redress their grievances if these purposes were crossed, rather than served, by the powers that be, for they had been ordained to these ends, and only these ends (Hoadly 1706: 10). In The Original and Institution of Civil Government Discuss’d (1710), Hoadly’s debts to Locke were even more pronounced. There Hoadly argued, on Lockean grounds, for the absence of any scriptural warrant for divine right monarchy and paternal rule. He repeated Locke’s view that God did not institute government directly but authorized people to make it for themselves and provided them with the means of doing so (Hoadly 1710: 198). Hoadly added his own emphasis on God’s providence and the special importance of Christ in evidencing it before the world (Hoadly 1710: 73–4). The role of Christ was expanded further in The Nature of the Kingdom, or Church, of Christ (1717), in which Hoadly argued that Christ’s kingdom was not of this world, that he was not the founder of a priesthood, and that he had left behind no successors authorized to cajole or punish in his name. In Hoadly’s hands, Christ became an advocate of Lockean toleration avant la lettre: He alone legislated for Christians, who were all equal subjects in his kingdom and all equally responsible for interpreting his wishes and doing them as they judged best (Hoadly 1717: 11–24). At the same time, Hoadly gave a central role to Scripture in his story, and used terminology friendly to the doctrines of the incarnation and the Trinity. By this channel Locke’s arguments became ‘available not just to Anglicans but to other trinitarian churches as well’ (Moore 1991:  76). No doubt Hoadly intended to be reassuring, to show that it was possible to follow in Locke’s footsteps without destroying the established church and Christianity along with it. But many were not reassured, as the controversy which The Nature of the Kingdom, or Church, of Christ provoked—the so-called Bangorian controversy—showed only too conspicuously (see Starkie 2007). To them, Locke’s way of thinking was like the den of Polyphemus that the sailors of Odysseus had entered, never to return—all the footsteps pointed one way. Among this number the most hostile, and certainly the most penetrating, critic was the non-juror Charles Leslie. He received Locke with dismay, and saw in his arguments the preface to disaster.

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Leslie thought that Locke’s views would prove fatal to the established church and to the monarchical government of England. In defence of both, Leslie presented a revivified version of divine right patriarchalism—the version in which it was attacked by Hoadly. In response to one of Hoadly’s attacks, Leslie revealed just how far the danger posed by Locke’s ideas extended in his eyes. ‘The Sum of the Matter betwixt Mr. Hoadly and Me’, Leslie wrote, ‘is this, I think it most Natural that Authority shou’d Descend, that is, be Derived from a Superiour to an Inferiour, from God to Fathers and Kings; and from Kings and Fathers to Sons and Servants: But Mr. Hoadly wou’d have it, Ascend, from Sons to Fathers, and from Subjects to Sovereigns; nay to God Himself . . . And the Argument does Naturally Carry it all that Way. For if Authority does Ascend, it must Ascend to the Height’ (Leslie 1711: 87). Locke’s principles, as wielded by Hoadly, eviscerated all that they touched. Leslie found the cause in what he represented as Locke’s root assumption: the assumption that ‘I alone am king of ME’ (Leslie 1750: Vol. 1, 86). It was this assumption that made the consent of every individual necessary and made Two Treatises an extremely dangerous and disconcerting book. These disconcerting qualities made Two Treatises difficult to assimilate in its entirety to existing regimes of thought in the century after its publication (see Harris 2007). Extracts from the work were used by some polemicists, including Toland, early in the eighteenth century in the formation of a ‘Whig’ ideology that was immediately retrojected onto Locke—witness Leslie’s sneer that Locke was the oracle of the Whigs and the dismissal of Locke’s political theory by Hume and Adam Smith as partisan and extremist (rather in the way that Leslie had insinuated) (see Leslie 1750: Vol. 1, 231, 332–403; compare Hume 1987: 465–87, Smith 1978: 315–16, 323, 370)—but, on the whole, the Whigs looked as much to various neo-republican and humanist traditions of thinking as to Locke, often combining the two together more or less maladroitly. This amalgam appeared first of all in Tyrrell’s Bibliotheca Politica (1692–4) but versions of it recurred through the century, whether in John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon’s Cato’s Letters (1720–23) or James Burgh’s Political Disquisitions (1774–75). Contrariwise Locke was invoked against the Whigs by eccentric Tories like Bolingbroke, in essays for The Craftsman (see Goldie 1999: Vol. 2, 305–18; Vol. 6, 225–38), and even by Jacobites who wished to use him to disprove the legitimacy of the Hanoverian settlement: a cartoon of 1749 depicts Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender, immersed in the study of Magna Carta and Locke on government (Goldie 1999: Vol. 1, xlvii). In the 1760s Locke’s theories became more prominent in political controversy. They were invoked during the Stamp Act crisis of 1765–66 that presaged the American Revolution and, domestically, in the furore surrounding George III’s alleged attempts to extend royal power beyond its proper limits. At around the same time Locke began to be read through the lens of Rousseau’s description of the state of nature in his Second Discourse. This probably assisted in the process of appropriation of Locke by the English radicals of the next decade, who were already well-disposed to him from his writings on toleration, which subsequently produced a backlash against Locke from their opponents (see Tucker 1781: 1–115). New editions of Locke’s works appeared, the most important being Thomas Hollis’s editions of Two Treatises (1764) and the Letters on toleration

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(1765). Alternative epigraphs were added to other editions of those writings, playing up Locke’s populist (Cicero) and radical (Price) credentials. The publication of Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man (1792) confirmed the association of Locke and radicalism in the popular mind (though Paine affected almost complete ignorance of Locke). This encouraged yet more editions of Locke that purposed to break that association: in 1798 Thomas Elrington produced an annotated ‘Second treatise’ which contrasted Locke’s limited conception of ‘the people’ with the radicals’ far more expansive one in order to drive a wedge between ‘the system of Locke and the themes of the modern democrats’ (Locke 1798: iv–v). Thus the ‘dispute for the soul of Locke’ (Dunn 1969: 60) that had been carried on through the eighteenth century continued to its close.

1.5 Concluding Remarks Writing in 1738, William Warburton, Bishop of Gloucester, called Locke ‘the honour of this age, and the instructor of the future’ (Warburton 1811: Vol. 1, 162). He did so while suggesting that the anti-Christian message that had been extracted by some from Locke’s writings had been extracted illegitimately and that Locke was being used improperly to develop views he would have utterly deplored. Warburton saw two distinct forms of Lockean ‘influence’ at work in his day, one edifying, one malign, one flowing directly from Locke’s texts and the other unintended by their author, corrupted into something quite unlike its initial character and diverted from its original end by those who wished to reduce morality and religion to ruins. This chapter has presented a still more complex picture of Locke’s influence, tracing only some of the countless and crosscutting ways in which his ideas and his writings shaped the course of British philosophy in the 100 years or so after his death. This method of presentation may generate a suspicion that Locke’s contribution is being treated ‘as ubiquitous, and . . . of exclusive importance’ (Pocock 1991: 45), when it has no honest claim to be treated so. Similar suspicions have been aired before: in the first years of the nineteenth century Samuel Taylor Coleridge complained to anyone that would listen that Locke’s gigantic reputation was a motley product of the political situation of 1688, party spirit, and the support of various church groups and infidels, and that, besides, Locke had plagiarized his philosophy entirely from French writers (see Brinkley 1949). Plus ça change. It is for readers to judge whether such suspicions are well founded, but it is very hard for this writer to imagine any adequate account of British philosophy in the eighteenth century in which Locke’s name and influence did not figure integrally. Locke was a defining presence in questions about, and radiating out from his philosophy that had a pervasive place in eighteenth-century thought. This gave him a position that was ultimately indisputable, if one that was subject to detailed criticism. His political role was necessarily less definitive, both because his arguments, though broad in scope, bore directly on a comparatively limited number of points about government

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and society—they had little to say about such eighteenth-century preoccupations as patronage, parties, standing armies, national debt, and trade, for example—and because his was only one among a range of competing positions. Yet it is in this role, more than any other, that Locke is famed and feted at the present day as an instructor of the future (see Dunn 2003). Such are the vagaries of influence. Such too is the enduring impact of Locke.

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Hume, D. (2000). A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. D. F. Norton and M. J. Norton. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hutcheson, F. (2004). An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, ed. W. Leidhold. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund. Kelly, P. (1989). ‘Perceptions of Locke in Eighteenth-Century Ireland’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 89c: 17–35. Langton, R. (1998). Kantian Humility. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Law, E. (1769). A Defence of Mr. Locke’s Opinion Concerning Personal Identity. London. Le Clerc, J. (1706). The Life and Character of Mr. John Locke. London. Lee, H. (1702). Anti-Scepticism. London. Leslie, C. (1711). The Finishing Stroke. London. Leslie, C. (1750). A View of the Times, their Principles and Practices, 4 vols. London. Locke, J. (1798). An Essay concerning the True Original, Extent, and End of Civil Government, ed. T. Elrington. Dublin. Locke, J. (1960). Two Treatises of Government, ed. P.  Laslett. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press. Locke, J. (1968). Epistola de Tolerantia/A Letter on Toleration, ed. R. Klibansky, trans. J. W. Gough. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Locke, J. (1975). An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Locke, J. (1976–89). The Correspondence of John Locke, 8 vols, ed. E. S. de Beer. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Locke, J. (1997). Political Essays, ed. M. Goldie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Locke, J. (1999). The Reasonableness of Christianity, ed. J. C. Higgins-Biddle. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Lowe, E. J. (1995). Locke on Human Understanding. London: Routledge. Mansel, H. L. (1873). ‘Freethinking—Its History and Tendencies’, in H. W. Chandler (ed.), Letters, Lectures, and Reviews, including The Phrontisterion. London: John Murray. [Mayne, Z.] (1728). Two Dissertations concerning Sense and the Imagination. London. Moore, J. T. (1991). ‘Theological Politics: A Study of the Reception of Locke’s Two Treatises of Government in England and Scotland in the Early Eighteenth Century’, in M. P. Thompson (ed.), John Locke und Immanuel Kant: Historische Rezeption und Gegenwärtige Relevanz. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 62–86. Norton, D. F. (2001). ‘From John Locke to Dugald Stewart’. Journal of the History of Ideas, 62(2): 359–65. Pocock, J. G. A. (1991). ‘Negative and Positive Aspects of Locke’s Place in Eighteenth-Century Discourse’, in M. P. Thompson (ed.), John Locke und Immanuel Kant: Historische Rezeption und Gegenwärtige Relevanz. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 45–61. Price, R. (1948). A Review of the Principal Questions in Morals, ed. D. D. Raphael. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Priestley, J. (1777). Disquisitions relating to Matter and Spirit. London. Reid, T. (1997). An Inquiry into the Human Mind: on the Principles of Common Sense, ed. D. R. Brookes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Reid, T. (2002). Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, ed. D. R. Brookes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Shaftesbury, A. A. Cooper, Third Earl of (1716). Several Letters Written by a Noble Lord to a Young Man at the University. London.

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Smith, A. (1978). Lectures on Jurisprudence, ed. R. L. Meek. D. D. Raphael, and P. G. Stein. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Starkie, A. (2007). The Bangorian Controversy and the Church of England, 1717–1721. London: Boydell Press. Stephen, L. (1876). History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols. London: Smith, Elder and Company. Stillingfleet, E. (1698). The Bishop of Worcester’s Answer to Mr. Locke’s Second Letter. London. Strawson, G. (2011). Locke on Personal Identity: Consciousness and Concernment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. [Tindal, M.] (1706). The Rights of the Christian Church Asserted. London. [Tindal, M.] (1708). A Second Defence of the Rights of the Christian Church. London. [Tindal, M.] (1730). Christianity as Old as the Creation. London. Toland, J. (1696). Christianity not Mysterious. London. Tucker, J. (1781). A Treatise concerning Civil Government. London. Warburton, W. (1811). The Works of the Right Reverend William Warburton, D.D, 12 vols London: T. Cadell and W. Davies. Witty, J. (1707). The First Principles of Modern Deism Confuted. London. Wood, P. B. (1986). ‘David Hume on Thomas Reid’s An Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense: A New Letter to Hugh Blair from July 1762’, Mind, 95(380): 411–16. Yolton, J. S. (1998). John Locke: A Descriptive Bibliography. Bristol: Thoemmes Press. Yolton, J. W. (1956). John Locke and the Way of Ideas. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Yolton, J. W. (1983). Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Yolton, J. W. (1984). Perceptual Acquaintance from Descartes to Reid. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

chapter 2

n ew to n a n d n ew to n ia n i sm i n eighteenth - c e nt u ry british thought Eric Schliesser

Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) appeared in three different editions (1687, 1713, 1726). It used advanced geometry punctuated by propositions, scholia, and lemmas. It included a large number of new, extremely technical mathematical results, but contrary to the myth promoted, in part, by Newton himself, there is no evidence that the bulk of the book was composed with the aid of the newly invented calculus (or, in Newton’s terminology, “fluxions”). Newton did deploy fluxions in some of the proofs, and these would have challenged the most advanced readers when it appeared (Dunlop 2012). The Principia included predictions about a large number of terrestrial and celestial phenomena, many of which had not previously been noticed, and appealed to unusually exact empirical evidence in order to make far-reaching claims about the orbits of planets and their satellites, the shape of the Earth, the tides, the orbits of comets, and resistance behavior. It settled the debate about the Copernican hypothesis—the most important outstanding cosmological question. Surprisingly Newton showed that the “sun itself is moved” albeit “not very far from” the common (immovable) center of gravity of the solar system, which is taken as “the center of the universe” (Newton 1999: 817 [Bk 3, Proposition 12, Theorem 12]). Even so, Newton’s claims were not immediately accepted. In the first edition of The Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), Berkeley criticized the Principia. (He softened the tone of these criticisms in later editions, although he remained an ardent critic of the calculus/fluxions; see Schliesser 2011a.) Even Locke, whose views were assimilated with Newton’s by French thinkers of the middle of the eighteenth century such as d’Alembert, expressed cautious reservations about Newton’s claims. He confined the application of Newton’s theory to astronomy (see Domski 2012). It took almost a century of hard

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work by many of the brightest eighteenth-century minds to translate, and to a significant degree recast, Newton’s work into the language of (suitably developed) Leibnizian calculus, to test his predictions, and to answer a number of longstanding empirical challenges pertaining to the shape of the Earth and the lunar orbit. Once these empirical questions were settled, and after the discovery of nutation (a slight variation in the precession of the equinoxes, or wobble in the axis of rotation) by James Bradley in 1748, as well as the publicly celebrated return of Halley’s Comet in 1758, the universal scope of Newton’s great discovery, the inverse-square law of gravity, went unchallenged (see Taton & Wilson 1995). The Principia also inaugurated a new vision of how science was done, one that was difficult to appreciate for Newton’s contemporaries and for eighteenth-century readers. The authority, methodology, and nature of the claims of the Principia became one of the most contested areas of eighteenth-century philosophy. Newton practiced theorymediated measurement in order to argue “more securely” about the nature, class, and relationships of physical magnitudes (Newton 1999: 589 [Bk I, Section II, Proposition 69, Theorem 29, Scholium]). One of Newton’s great achievements was that he used mathematical relationships to permit the use of approximations within inferential arguments about phenomena without loss of epistemic confidence. Moreover, by carefully describing what we would call “mathematical models” of classes of phenomena he generated research strategies in which precisely defined deviations from expected regularities could be turned into second order phenomena, that is, facts that presuppose Newton’s theory (see Ducheyne 2012). This reasoning aimed to establish “the motions that result from any forces whatever and of the forces that are required for any motions whatever” (Newton 1999: 382 [Author’s Preface to the Reader]). Newton accepted the reality of forces within the context of his research, and seemed to have hoped to explain all physical phenomena in terms of attractive and repulsive forces. What one may call the “philosophical framing” of the book shifted dramatically between the first and second editions, especially in response to Leibnizian criticism and to penetrating remarks by the able editor of the second edition, Roger Cotes. In the second edition, at the start of Book III, Newton relabeled his “Hypotheses” as three “rules of reasoning” plus a number of “phenomena.” At the end of the whole book Newton added what Voltaire called “the little treatise on metaphysics” (Voltaire 1901: 173), that is, the “General Scholium,” which included wholly new material on the relationship between natural philosophy, on the one hand, and natural theology and metaphysics, on the other, and which firmly rejected hypotheses in natural philosophy. By “hypotheses” Newton meant the demand by mechanical philosophers that natural phenomena should be explained in terms of the speed, size, and motion of bodies. The second edition also included a rhetorically charged and highly influential introduction by Roger Cotes. Meanwhile, the theologian-classicist, Richard Bentley, drastically rewrote Halley’s very Epicurean ode to Newton at the start of the Principia, in the process removing many of Halley’s more blasphemous lines (see Albury 1978; Schliesser 2012). The changes between the second and third editions were less dramatic, but they included the addition of a whole new fourth rule of reasoning.

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Newton also published another very influential book during his lifetime, namely the  Opticks  (1704), which concerned the nature of colors and diffraction, and included a number of “Queries.” These were expanded in a Latin translation (1706) and through subsequent editions. In the fourth, posthumous, edition of 1730, there were thirty-one queries. These queries speculated about (what we would call) chemistry, and about the ethereal basis for gravity, but also about methodological and metaphysical matters. Many informed observers in the eighteenth century were as impressed by the Opticks as they were by the Principia. For example, in his influential obituary of Newton, Fontenelle called special attention to Newton’s surprising results on the dispersion of light (Fontenelle 1736: 308). One reason why Fontenelle and his contemporaries were so impressed by Newton’s optics was that Newton had showed that sunlight was not, as had been previously thought, the pure form of light. Instead, the spectral colors were. Despite the significance of the Opticks to eighteenth-century experimental natural philosophy, due to space constraints this chapter focuses largely on the debates generated by the  Principia during the eighteenth century. While one can discern many different kinds of Newtonianism during the eighteenth century, a common thread among these is the achievement and authority of the Principia (see Snobelen 1998).  In particular, this chapter explores how Newton’s achievement dramatically influenced debates over the way subsequent philosophers conceived of their activity, something which prepared the way for an institutional and methodological split between philosophy and science. These larger themes are illustrated by attention to a large number of highly detailed debates over the nature and importance of Newton’s legacy. In discussing these debates I indicate where various authors draw on strands within Newton and where they creatively reinterpret Newton. Newton presented his readers with evolving views, such that even some of his closest followers could legitimately claim to present his views in conflicting matters. In this chapter I treat Newton as publically available to informed eighteenth-century readers. Nearly all of Newton’s alchemical research and much of his interest in the political theology remained hidden from public view, and so will not be discussed here.

2.1 Gravity and Matter Theory One of the central questions of eighteenth-century philosophy was the nature and cause of gravity. In discussing these matters we should distinguish among (a)  the force of gravity as a real cause (which is calculated as the product of the masses over the distance squared); (b) the cause of gravity; (c) “the reason for these properties of gravity” (Newton 1999: 943 [General Scholium]); and (d) the medium, if any, through which gravitational force is transmitted. Much discussion of Newton conflates these matters— though, of course, if the medium can explain all the properties of gravity, then it is legitimate to conflate them.

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Now one line of thought made popular by Newton in the General Scholium of the Principia was simply to assert that “gravity does really exist, and act according to the laws which we have explained” (Newton 1999: 943), while remaining agnostic about the causes that might explain it. On this view one could accept the reality of gravity in the absence of an explanation of it. The significance of this was that future research could then be predicated on gravity’s existence without the need to worry about matters external to a relatively autonomous ongoing inquiry. While Newton was not the first to take such an attitude toward inquiry (during the 1660s the Royal Society had taken a similar stance with respect to experimental and mathematical investigation into collision rules), it was his version of it that had the most lasting impact. In the fifth response in his correspondence with Leibniz, Clarke asserted something similar to Newton’s position, although Clarke’s argument sometimes suggests a more instrumentalist stance, in which gravity is assumed in order to track and predict effects, namely the relative motion of bodies (see Leibniz and Clarke 1717: 353–73 [Clarke’s Fifth Reply, §§110–16, 118–23, 124–30]).1 In his yet more revisionary project, Berkeley elaborated this instrumentalist reinterpretation of Newton. For Berkeley, who in this matter echoes the scholastic position of Galileo’s opponents as well as Spinoza’s criticism of the application of mathematics to nature, Newton’s mathematical science cannot assign causes: that is the job of the metaphysician. We find traces of Berkeley’s instrumentalism about the reality of the force in an addition to Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature, where Hume insists that: As long as we confine our speculations to the appearances of objects to our senses, without, entering into disquisitions concerning their real nature and operations, we are safe from all difficulties, and can never be embarrass’d by any question. . . . If we carry our enquiry beyond the appearances of objects to the senses, I am afraid, that most of our conclusions will be full of scepticism and uncertainty. . . . If the Newtonian philosophy be rightly understood, it will be found to mean no more. A vacuum is asserted: That is, bodies are said to be plac’d after such a manner, as to receive bodies betwixt them, without impulsion or penetration. The real nature of this position of bodies is unknown. We are only acquainted with its effects on the senses, and its power of receiving body. Nothing is more suitable to that philosophy, than a modest scepticism to a certain degree, and a fair confession of ignorance in subjects, that exceed all human capacity. (Hume 1978: 638–9)

This is, in fact, the only place where Newton (or Newtonianism) is explicitly mentioned in the Treatise (although there are, of course, several allusions). Yet most eighteenth-century readers of Newton not only accepted gravity as a causally real force, but were also willing to entertain strikingly divergent positions regarding its causes. This divergence was anticipated by Newton, who already in the first edition of the Principia

1

For these references and discussion, see Janiak (2009).

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listed at least three different possible mechanisms which could account for the attraction of bodies: I here use the word attraction in general for any endeavour, of what kind soever, made by bodies to approach each other; whether that [1] endeavour arise from the action of the bodies themselves as [1A] tending mutually to or [1B] agitating each other by spirits emitted; or whether it arises from [2] the action of the [2A] aether or of [2B] the air or of [3] any medium whatsoever whether [3A] corporeal or [3B] incorporeal. (Newton 1999: 588 [Bk I, Section II, Proposition 69, Theorem 29, Scholium; numbers between brackets added to facilitate discussion])2

[1A] involves action at a distance. Some of the earliest readers of Principia suspected that Newton was committed to action at a distance, as modeled on either Stoic sympathy or Epicurean innate gravity (for discussion, see Schliesser 2012, in press). It was an article of faith of much seventeenth-century natural philosophy that matter was passive. But older matter theories that drew on Stoic and, especially, Epicurean thought remained live competitors throughout the period (see Henry 2008: 88ff.). There is eighteenth-century evidence for three accounts of the cause of gravity compatible with [1A]. First, Roger Cotes asserted that gravity was a primary quality of matter. However, in the third rule of reasoning (added to the very edition of the Principia that Cotes edited) Newton apparently rejects this position when he states that he is “by no means affirming that gravity is essential to bodies” (Newton 1999: 796).3 Moreover, in responses to Bentley’s letters, Newton explicitly denied “innate” gravity “as essential and inherent to matter” (Newton 2004: 88). Nevertheless, Cotes’s interpretation became very influential, and was adopted by Priestley (1782: 34ff.) and Immanuel Kant (see Friedman 2012), among others. A second version of [1A] was modeled on Locke’s super-addition thesis: the thesis, that is, God could add mind-like qualities to otherwise passive matter. While gravity is not an essential quality of matter, it was certainly in God’s power to endow matter with gravitational qualities at creation. This interpretation was encouraged by Newton in his exchange with Bentley and it was taken up by many Boyle lecturers who developed eighteenth-century physico-theology. It was also made famous in the French-speaking world by a footnote added by the French translator of Locke’s Essay (see Downing 1997). However, this position needs to attribute to Newton the view that matter is intrinsically passive, and that looks like an a priori commitment out of character with Newton’s more general methodological attitudes. Some eighteenth-century readers of Newton (for example, Thomas Reid and Andrew Baxter) insist that matter is passive. However, while there is some, limited manuscript evidence that Newton at least was tempted by such a view, in his published writings he never embraces this position (which was familiar to 2 In Query 31 of the Opticks, Newton writes, “What I call attraction may be performed by impulse, or by some other means unknown to me” (Newton 1730: 351). 3 Presumably according to Newton and Cotes primary qualities are essential (we would say, intrinsic) qualities.

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him through his Cartesian opponents). (By the second edition of the Principia, Newton maintains a studious agnosticism about the intrinsic nature of matter.) All he is willing to do is attribute a number of universal qualities to it. Nevertheless, in his Disquisitions relating to matter and spirit (first published 1777) Joseph Priestley was quite right to call attention to the Queries of the Opticks where Newton introduces various active principles. In particular, Newton observes that rays of light are reflected by powers acting at some distance from other bodies (Priestley 1782: 29; cf. Query 29 in Newton 1730: 345). A third version of [1A] was put forward by Newton himself in his posthumously published Treatise of the System of the World. Newton called attention to the existence of this suppressed exposition of his views, which he had “composed . . . in popular form,” in the brief “Preface” to Book III in all three editions of the Principia (Newton 1999: 793), but it is unclear if he had a hand in having it published the year after his death. In the Treatise, Newton offers a relational account of action at a distance that is compatible with option [1A]. On the view presented there, all bodies have a disposition to gravitate, but it is only activated in virtue of them having this common nature. While there is evidence that the Treatise was read in the eighteenth century, the relational view seems not to have been very popular. Some people attributed to Newton the view that gravitation is based on the direct will of God. This position was attributed to him by Fatio de Duillier (Janiak 2008: 40 n. 64; see also Van Lunteren 2002). The position is certainly consistent with [3B] above (assuming that God is immaterial), and there are other passages in Newton’s writings that seem compatible with it. For example, in a letter to Bentley, Newton writes, “Gravity must be caused by an agent acting constantly according to certain laws; but whether this agent be material or immaterial I have left to the consideration of my reader” (Newton 2004: 103). Andrew Baxter developed this theory of divine agency in his An Inquiry into the Nature of the Human Soul (1733). Nevertheless, attributing gravity’s cause to God’s direct will appears at odds with a very famous passage in the General Scholium, where Newton articulates what he means by God’s substantial and virtual omnipresence: “In [God] are all things contained and moved; yet neither affects the other:  God suffers nothing from the motion of bodies; bodies find no resistance from the omnipresence of God” (Newton 1999: 941–2). Newton’s footnote to the passage explains he is articulating his understanding of God’s dominion. Whatever this means, it clearly implies that God does not interfere with the motions of bodies. As Hume aptly noted in An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, “It was never the meaning of Sir ISAAC NEWTON to rob second causes of all force or energy; though some of his followers have endeavoured to establish that theory upon his authority” (Hume 1975: 73). Finally, ether theories were very popular during the eighteenth century [2A]. As even the anti-ether theorist Joseph Priestley admitted, ether theories had strict Newtonian precedent (1782:  30):  Newton tentatively put forward ether accounts in the closing paragraph of the General Scholium (Newton 1999: 943–4) (although the “very subtle spirit pervading gross bodies and lying hidden in them” mentioned there pointedly does not account for distant mutual action of bodies). In his Account, MacLaurin draws

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upon Newton’s letters to Boyle to defend the ether theory (Maclaurin 1748: 116–17). Newton’s proposals concerning ether were various. In a (1679) letter to Boyle Newton conceived of ether as a compressible fluid (see Newton 2004: 1–2). In various Queries to the Opticks, Newton emphasized the different densities of the ether around and between celestial bodies, and he speculated about the need for short range repulsive forces within the ether. Ether theories nearly always included action at a distance over relatively short ranges. One general problem with ether theories is that they require ether to have negligible mass, thus making it very hard to detect while at the same time needing to have the strength and rigidity necessary to being capable of transmitting light as fast as Rømer had calculated it travels. Yet Newton clearly did not rule out an immaterial ether composed of spirits of some sort [3B].

2.2 Laws of Nature Newton called his three “laws of motion” “axioms” (Newton 1999: 416). He made little effort to justify these laws and he does not explain why he calls them axioms. But the three laws of motion assimilate the core results of seventeenth-century mechanics (as is made clear by the examples accompanying both Newton’s statement of the laws and the following Scholium; Newton 1999: 416–30), and the first two were independently confirmed by pendulum experiments (as made by Newton and Huygens). The main debate turned on the application of the third law to systems that included non-contiguous bodies. The empirical success of the Principia and the research predicated on them vindicated the adoption of these laws as principles of natural philosophy (Stein 1990). One of the main achievements of the Principia was to show that if one accepted the laws of motion and the existence of inverse-square centripetal forces, then the orbits of planets and satellites necessarily followed Keplerian trajectories. Of course, Newton went on to prove that the real planetary orbits deviated from Keplerian laws, and that these deviations could themselves be explained by the application of his laws of motion. He proceeded to argue that the inverse-square law held for all bodies and their parts universally. The bold inductive step was licensed by Newton’s third rule of reasoning: “The qualities of bodies, which admit neither intensification nor remission of degrees, and which are found to belong to all bodies within the reach of our experiments, are to be esteemed the universal qualities of all bodies whatsoever” (Newton 1999: 795). Newton did not take his laws to be necessary in the same way as had Descartes. According to Newton the world could have been different had God chosen otherwise, for, as Newton wrote in Query 31 of the Opticks, “it may be also allowed that God is able to create particles of matter of several sizes and figures, and in several proportions to space, and perhaps of different densities and forces, and thereby to vary the laws of nature, and made worlds of several sorts in several parts of the universe” (Newton 1730: 379–80). In this passage the laws of nature are a consequence (“thereby”) of the

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nature and matter and force, suggesting a nominalist understanding of laws (which is not something one would infer from the Principia). Here it seems that laws are not metaphysically basic, but rather more akin to book-keeping entities that keep track of matter and forces. Moreover, Newton allows that different parts of the universe may be governed by differing laws of nature. So, while in research one must assume the universal reach of the laws, it is quite conceivable that other parts of the universe have different laws. As the quote from Query 31 indicates, the status of laws is connected to views about God’s power. Leibniz, for example, was scandalized by the Newtonian claim that God could alter the constitution of nature at will. Ironically, near the end of the eighteenth century, Newtonian mechanics became associated with a clockwork conception of nature in which God would frame the machine and then leave it to run on its own. This picture does more justice to, say, Descartes’ conception than to Newton’s official position. Nevertheless, because of the success of the Principia, philosophical reflection on the nature of physics and metaphysics moved decisively towards a sustained reflection on the status of laws of nature. In his early works, Berkeley insisted that Newton’s laws were really no more than calculation and prediction devices (see Downing 1995). As noted above, there are hints of this view in Clarke’s defense of Newton’s views on gravity. But in the wake of ‘s Gravesande’s widely translated and influential Newtonian textbook, Mathematical elements of natural philosophy, confirm’d by experiments: or, an introduction to Sir Isaac Newton’s philosophy (1720–1), most eighteenth-century readers were inclined to give the laws of nature a more expansive, explanatory role beyond calculating devices (see Ducheyne, MS). For example, Hume self-consciously modeled the explanatory reductionism of his laws of association on Newton’s laws of motion. And yet it is striking that the laws of nature and law-talk more generally play almost no role in Hume’s Treatise; there is neither discussion of laws of nature nor are explanations offered in terms of such laws (for a minor exception, see Hume 1978: 185 [1.4.1.10]). By contrast, in the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume freely discussed laws of nature, most notably in his treatment of miracles (which are defined violations of a law of nature). Somewhat surprisingly, however, although in the first Enquiry Hume introduced a counterfactual interpretation (“if the first object had not been, the second never had existed”) of his own definition of causation, he did not connect this with an analysis of laws of nature. This was left to his philosophical opponent, Thomas Reid. Reid offered a new and enduringly influential interpretation of the laws of nature. He argued that we should distinguish between causes understood as constant conjunctions and laws of nature. When two events are conjoined by what he calls a “physical cause” then there is a law of nature. “The laws of nature are the rules according to which the effects are produced; but there must be a cause which operates according to these rules” (Reid 2010: 38). Reid’s laws of nature are not themselves causal agents (or in the jargon of the day, secondary causes); they always presuppose an efficient cause. Yet that efficient cause, which cannot be discovered by natural philosophy, ensures the existence of some physical cause, which can be discovered by natural philosophy, that connects

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events together. For Reid the whole purpose of natural philosophy is the empirical discovery of such laws of nature (leaving the discovery of efficient causes to the metaphysician—here there are echoes of Berkeley’s position). It is due to Reid’s conception of Newton’s laws of nature that philosophical attention has come to be focused on laws (see Ducheyne 2006).

2.3 Natural Religion and Final Causes The first generation of new philosophers of the seventeenth century (e.g., Descartes, Hobbes, Bacon) had targeted the significant role of final causes as a form of explanation in scholastic natural philosophy. In the Appendix to Part 1 of the Ethics, Spinoza famously generalized their criticism to the application of final causes more generally. Final causes were ridiculed as presupposing mind-like attributes within matter; the commitment to final causation was seen as a superstitious anthropomorphizing of nature, the product of our fears and desires rather than sound methodology. These arguments coincided with a more general skepticism about the ability of finite enquirers to have knowledge of God’s general providential plan. In England the influence of these anti-teleological arguments, promoted by Toland (1704), was short-lived. One of the great champions of the new corpuscular philosophy, Robert Boyle, accepted that particular final causes should be banished from natural philosophy, but in a series of influential arguments he also aimed at carving out a role for general, providential, final causes (see Osler 1996). In his will Boyle endowed a lecture series to promote natural religion. Boyle’s arguments gained significant social traction after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 when providential arguments became very popular in justifying the new political settlement. Among the most significant advocates of the use of general final causes were the newly influential Bishop Stillingfleet (now best remembered as a critic of Locke), his ambitious protégé Richard Bentley (who gave the first series of “Boyle Lectures” in 1692), and Samuel Clarke, the leading spokesman for Newton’s philosophy and Boyle Lecturer in 1703. Readers of the first edition of the Principia would have had every reason to be surprised by the opening sentence of Newton’s letter to Bentley of 10 December 1692: “Sir, When I wrote my Treatise about our System, I had an Eye upon such Principles as might work with considering Men, for the Belief of a Deity; nothing can rejoice me more than to find it useful for that Purpose” (Newton 2004: 93). After all, the following remark from the Scholium to the Definitions in Book 1 seems to give a more accurate account of Newton’s initial purposes in writing the Principia: “In what follows, a fuller explanation will be given of how to determine true motions from their causes, effects, and apparent differences, and conversely, of how to determine from motions whether true or apparent, their causes and effects. For this was the purpose for which I composed the following treatise” (Newton 1999: 415). Only a very careful reader of the first edition of the Principia would not have been astonished that in his letter to Bentley, Newton goes on to

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deny that a “blind” cause (that is one “without contrivance or design”) would have been able to place the “sun in the centre of the six primary planets, placed Saturn in the centre of orbits of its five secondary planets, and Jupiter in the centre of its four secondary planets, and the earth in the centre of the moon’s orbit . . . the motions which the planets now have could not spring from any natural cause alone, but were impressed by an intelligent agent” (Newton 2004: 93–4). The only hint of such an argument in the first edition of the Principia is to be found in Book 3, proposition 8, corollary 5: “Therefore God placed the planets at different distances from the sun so that each one might, according to the degree of density, enjoy a greater or smaller amount of heat from the sun” (Newton 1999: 814 fn). This is the only mention of God in the first edition of the Principia. The passage was reworded in the second edition and the mention of God dropped. In Newton’s posthumously published Treatise, presumably written in the mid 1680s, the claim is made only conditionally: “if God has placed different bodies at different distances from the Sun, so as the denser bodies always possess the nearest places, and each body enjoys a degree of heat suitable to its condition, and proper for its nourishment” (Newton 1728: 34). The charge of promoting an Epicurean cosmological outlook hovered around the Principia from the first edition. It permeated and animated Leibniz’s correspondence with Clarke. Newton’s Letters to Bentley and the General Scholium (added to the second edition of the Principia in 1713) are clearly designed, in part, to distance his account from the system of “blind metaphysical necessity” (Newton 1999: 942; see Schliesser 2012, in press). One can infer from their surviving correspondence that Bentley had sent Newton a draft of his Boyle Lectures after they were delivered but before they were published. From Newton’s first letter, we can infer that Bentley had approached him with five queries concerning Newton’s views on how celestial phenomena can be used to argue for the existence of a deity. In response (and throughout the correspondence with Bentley) Newton supplied arguments from design. Newton’s letters to Bentley were subsequently published as an appendix to Bentley’s Boyle Lectures and were widely read. Newton reiterated some of these arguments in the General Scholium of the Principia and in the Queries of the Opticks. It may be a coincidence, but Berkeley, who also advocated the respectability of final causes, removed some of his most explicit criticisms of Newton in later editions of The Principles of Human Knowledge. Newton’s design argument in the General Scholium seems to originate in views first made public by Clarke in the published version of his Boyle Lectures, A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God. (Clarke is often explicitly targeting Spinoza’s arguments; see Schliesser 2012, in press). Newton claims that mere “mechanical causes” could not account for the origin of “regular” planetary and comet orbits (Newton 1999: 942). In what follows Newton packs quite a bit into this claim. In particular, it turns out that for Newton the regularity consists not merely in their being law-governed, but also that the trajectories and mutual attractions of the planets and comets hinder each other’s motion least This culminates in Newton’s conclusion that “This most elegant system of the sun, planets, and comets, could not have arisen without the design and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being” (Newton 1999:  940). Without

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further argument Newton rules out the possibility that these particular three features (that is, (i) law-governed orbits that (ii) hinder each other minimally and that (iii) are jointly beautiful) could be caused by any other cause than God. Newton then offers the “immense distances” among the planetary systems, which thus avoid the possibility of gravity-induced mutual collapse, as another empirical phenomenon that supports his argument from inconceivability. Newton’s position rules out two contrasting, alternative approaches, both discussed later in the General Scholium:  (i)  that God is constantly arranging things in nature (“In him are all things contained and moved; yet neither affects the other”: no further argument is offered against an hyperactive God), and (ii) that everything is the product of “blind metaphysical necessity,” a view associated with the neo-Epicurean systems of Spinoza and Hobbes. Newton offers an independent argument against this second approach, namely, that given that necessity is uniform, it cannot account for observed variety. This is a telling objection against Spinozism in so far as Spinozism is committed to the principle of sufficient reason (and thus rules out brute fact). But it is less compelling objection against necessitarians who embrace brute facts. Moreover, in the absence of a discussion of the initial conditions of the universe, Newton’s claim begs the question. At best he has shifted the burden of proof. The problem he has raised is not insurmountable: all a necessitarian needs to show is how the laws and the “regular” orbits are possible given some prior situation. Of course, Newton is not merely pressing the existence of general variety against the necessitarian, but is calling attention to the significance of what he considers a very particular “diversity of created things, each [suitable] in its place and time” (Newton 1999: 942). As we have seen Newton argues from (i) law-governed orbits that (ii) hinder each other minimally and that (iii) are jointly beautiful to the conclusion that an all powerful and intelligent God must have been their cause. Moreover, he uses (iv) the distance among planetary systems as a further argument to insist that God must be “wise.” Regardless of how plausible one finds such an argument to a providential designer, Newton’s version is not an anthropocentric (in the pre-Copernican sense) argument. In particular, not only is our solar system beautiful to us, but countless other solar systems, too far apart to be of interest to us (but clearly of interest to inhabitants of these systems and God), are also beautiful. Newton is clearly implying that there is sentient life on other planets. Natural diversity is suited to times and places that have nothing to do with human interest. We can understand many of Hume’s writings as aimed at the authority of Newton within natural religion, especially the role of Newtonian cosmology in securing God’s general providence (a wildly popular argument in eighteenth-century British thought). In the closing lines of the Opticks, Newton had claimed that “if natural Philosophy in all its Parts . . . shall at length be perfected, the Bounds of Moral Philosophy will be also enlarged. For so far as we can know by natural Philosophy what is the first Cause, what Power he has over us, and what Benefits we receive from him, so far our Duty towards him, as well as that towards one another, will appear to us by the Light of Nature” (Newton 1730: 381). This is most obviously the target of Hume’s arguments in Section

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XI of the first Enquiry and in the posthumously published Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. But it also shows up in areas that most modern scholars of Hume associate with his “scientific” outlook. In particular, Hume’s analysis of causation in terms of the constant conjunction of spatially and temporally contiguous objects (or events) rules out the very possibility of final causes as well as simultaneous causes. (Hume dropped the contiguity requirement in the first Enquiry.) Also, Hume’s rules of reasoning that are supposed to guide the assignation of causes make it highly improbable that causal efficacy should be assigned to God. For while Newton’s God is in space and time so in some sense passes the spatial and temporal contiguity test (Hume 1978: 173 [1.3.15]), it is hard to see how it might pass muster by the other rules.4 

2.4 Newton and the Authority of Science The most important consequence for philosophy of Newton’s Principia is also the least remarked upon. In the wake of the Principia’s success, Newton’s authority was used to settle debates within philosophy and to change the character of philosophical theorizing. A clear statement of the attitude that I have in mind can be found in a widely read Newtonian textbook of the time, P. van Musschenbroek’s Elementa Physica conscriptica in usus academicos (The Elements of Natural Philosophy), first published in 1726, but repeatedly reprinted, and enlarged. I quote what at first sight may appear as a passing comment about a minor issue, a comment that in fact turns out to be the only further significant mention of metaphysics within the book and is therefore very revealing: “Therefore they that endeavour to prove from Metaphysicks, that all bodies should necessarily be distinguished by some mark, have delivered a doctrine which is contrary to the nature of things themselves. They always fall into such mistakes, who attempt to explain natural philosophy from Metaphysicks” (Musschenbroek 1744: 35; emphasis added).5 Musschenbroek insists without argument that pure metaphysics leads only to error if it attempts to make explanations about and within natural philosophy. This rules out in advance any contribution metaphysics might make to natural knowledge, and makes natural philosophy immune to metaphysical challenge. It is precisely the dogmatic, ex cathedra nature of this remark that signals that we are dealing with an argument from authority. We find similar arguments in Euler and ‘s Gravesande. (For details, see Schliesser 2011a.) Newton’s successes have dramatically changed Europe’s intellectual landscape.

4

For more on Hume’s multifaceted engagement with Newtonian design arguments, see Hurlbutt (1985) and Russell (2008). 5 From the context it is hard to nail down whom Musschenbroek’s particular opponent is here. Presumably he is attacking a variant of Leibniz’s principle of identity of indiscernibles. The issue is debated in the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence.

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Newton’s authority was repeatedly used to combat real and perceived Spinozistic elements in others. Clarke, in particular, was very effective in finding problems in Spinoza’s treatment of the origin and nature of motion in order to argue for a more active role for God in creation (see Schliesser 2012 and 2012, in press for detailed discussion; for Dutch context, see Jorink 2009). We get a sense of what is at stake in the anti-Spinozistic use of the authority of Newton in a characteristic passage from Colin Maclaurin: In all of these, Spinoza has added largely from his imagination, to what he had learned from Des cartes. But from a comparison of their method and principles, we may beware of the danger of setting out in philosophy so high and presumptuous a manner; while both pretend to deduce compleat systems from the clear and true ideas, which they imagined they had, of eternal essences and necessary causes. If we attend to the consequences of such principles, we shall the more willingly submit to experimental philosophy, as the only sort that is suited to our faculties . . . (MacLaurin 1748: 77)

MacLaurin rejects not merely the method (inspecting ideas), the explanatory model (eternal essences and causes), but also the immodest pride that animates systematic nature of the Spinozistic enterprise. MacLaurin introduces the language of submission when advocating a piecemeal method that suits our cognitive limitations. MacLaurin’s anti-Spinozism is not an instance of the empiricist versus the rationalist divide familiar from textbook history of philosophy. Rather, MacLaurin’s attack on the method of inspecting ideas cuts across this division. Anybody committed to the way of ideas—which would include Locke, Berkeley, and Hume in the Treatise—is subject to similar criticism.6 Of course, one might think that MacLaurin is only criticizing attempts to deduce complete systems from one’s ideas. But for MacLaurin natural philosophy is a “sure basis for religion.” And in MacLaurin’s natural philosophy we do not rely on “deficient ideas”, but rather on “experiment and observation, with the aid of geometry, only” (MacLaurin 1748: 95). Whole generations of Newtonians were committed to a package of claims: (1) that empirical “success” trumps other (rational/methodological) claims (of course, what “empirical” means may be quite controversial: in eighteenth-century Newtonian circles, “empirical” tends to mean “measured” or “measurable”); (2) that natural philosophy is the foundational science, needing no ultimate foundations itself; (3) that reason should limit itself in various ways (by (a) avoiding the fallacy of systematicity, because it does not try to say everything about everything, and (b) avoiding the fallacy of (metaphysical) foundationalism, because it does not try to secure its practice in unshakeable first principles); (4) that Newtonianism involves submission to a careful, painstaking, modest method that allows for sustained progress; (5) that experimental physics is a selfdirected and autonomous practice (one moves from one experiment to the next); and

6

Berkeley was one MacLaurin’s targets in the controversy over fluxions, but that debate involved other issues; see Guicciardini (2003a and 2003b) for details.

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(6) that the Newtonian enterprise is to be opposed to a licentious (because daring to doubt God’s providence), even unintelligible, enterprise associated with past failures.

2.5 Newton’s Rules Newton made refinements to the Principia. From a methodological approach the most significant of these was the relabeling and rewording of nine “hypotheses” at the start of Book III (Newton 1999: 794–801) Five of these became empirical “phenomena” that Newton lists just before his argument for the existence of the inverse-square law. (Newton added an original “phenomenon 2” to the second edition.) The first two hypotheses were renamed the first two “rules for the study of natural philosophy.” A third, the original hypothesis 3, reads “Every body can be transformed into a body of any other kind and successively take on all the intermediate degrees of qualities” (see Newton 1999: 198). This transformation thesis is a very broad assertion of the homogeneity of matter. Something like this claim was a staple of the mechanical philosophy and may have also motivated the alchemical search to turn lead into gold. Newton appealed to it only once in the Principia, in Book 3, Proposition 6, Corollary 2. He dropped it in the second edition and reworded the proposition in subsequent editions. Mass as a quantity or measure also presupposes homogeneity of matter in some thinner sense, but does not require the transformation thesis. In An Account MacLaurin even goes so far as to suggest there might be different kinds of matter with different kinds of resistance to change (Maclaurin 1748: 100). Something of the spirit of this dropped hypothesis reappeared in Query 30 of the Opticks: “Are not gross Bodies and Light convertible into one another, and may not Bodies receive much of their Activity from the Particles of Light which enter into their Composition? . . . The changing of Bodies into Light, and Light into Bodies, is very conformable to the Course of Nature, which seems delighted with Transmutations” (Newton 1718: 349). The “hypothesis” that became the third rule of reasoning was heavily reworded in the second edition. The fourth rule was added only in the third edition of the Principia. Both will be discussed below. Much eighteenth-century methodological discussions appealed to Newton’s first rules as source(s) of methodological authority. Aspects of Newton’s rules had Cartesian and Scholastic precedents (see Ducheyne 2012, chapter 1). But the exact wording of all four rules appears to be original with Newton. The first two rules are as follows: Rule I: No more causes of natural things should be admitted than are both true and sufficient to explain their phenomena. As the philosophers say:  Nature does nothing in vain, and more causes are in vain when fewer suffice; for Nature is simple, and does not indulge the luxury of superfluous causes. Rule II: Therefore, the causes assigned to natural effects of the same kind must be, so far as possible, the same.

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Examples are the cause of respiration in man and in beast, or of the falling of stones in Europe and America; or of the light of a kitchen fire and the sun, or of the reflection of light on our earth, and the planets. (Newton 1999: 794–5)

I treat these two rules together because their wording (“therefore” in the second rule) encourages understanding the second rule as a consequence of the first. In eighteenthcentury discussions also they are often discussed jointly. The first thing to note about these two rules is their focus on how to match causes and effects. Newton’s science is causal. Both rules promote causal parsimony and simplicity. Newton strikingly deploys the two rules in Proposition 4 of Book III, where in the so-called moon-test, he identifies the centripetal force maintaining the moon in its orbit with terrestrial gravity and concludes they must be have a common cause, that is, the same force. Notice that Newton’s strategy advocates an epistemic reductionism, but does not entail metaphysical (or ontic) reductionism. Priestley and Reid debated the content of these two rules. In claiming that “same” can be read in the sense of likeness, Priestley thought that the second rule promoted analogical reasoning. Reid denied this. (Reid may have been working with the second edition, which does not have Newton’s “as far as possible,” while Priestley was relying on the third edition which is quoted above.) Of course, Reid did accept the argument to design, which is, in part, based on analogical reasoning. Reid’s rejection of the analogical reading was motivated by his stress on the “true and sufficient” condition of the first rule. On Reid’s reading this ruled out merely plausible hypotheses. In the Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, Reid takes Hartley to task for self-consciously going against Newton on this point (Reid 2002: 78–87) Reid even went so far as to suggest that Newton’s “suspicion that all phenomena may depend on certain forces by which the particles of bodies . . . either are impelled toward on another and cohere . . . or are expelled from another and recede” (Newton 1999: 382–3 [Author’s Preface to the Reader]) was itself the consequence of excessive commitment to simplicity (Reid 2002: 533). I now quote the third rule, but not Newton’s lengthy, complicated gloss on it: “Those qualities of bodies that cannot be intended or remitted and that belong to all bodies on which experiments can be made should be taken as qualities universally” (Newton 1999: 795). While the first two rules promote causal parsimony the third rule promotes a kind of inductive boldness. In particular, it licenses induction to very distant and to very small objects. The latter is often called “transduction” in the literature. As will become clear in my analysis of the fourth rule, Newton recognized the limits and dangers of induction: recall he thought “it may be also allowed that God is able . . . to vary the laws of nature, and made worlds of several sorts in several parts of the universe,” (Query 31, Newton 1730: 403–4). Nevertheless, within the context of research he advocated bold generalization from the empirically available domain to domains beyond our experimental grasp. David Hume recognized something of Newton’s boldness: in the History of England, he writes that Newton was “cautious in admitting no principles but such as were founded on experiment; but resolute to adopt every such principle, however new or unusual” (Hume 1985: Vol. 6, 542).

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The third rule presupposes the scale invariance of nature. After two centuries and the rise of quantum mechanics this turned out to be false. To be clear, Newton had put a lot of experimental and theoretical work into showing that he was allowed to sum “motions of the individual parts” into “the motion of a whole” (Newton 1999: 404 [Definition 2]). By analogy Newton now asserted as a methodological rule that “extension, hardness, impenetrability, mobility, and force of inertia of the whole [body] arise from the extension, hardness, impenetrability, mobility, and force of inertia of each of the [body’s] parts” (Newton 1999:  795). Newton underscored the importance of this summation assumption by adding that “this is the foundation of all natural philosophy” (Newton 1999: 796). The rule thus licenses quantitative inferences from empirical evidence to parts of nature beyond the reach of our investigations. I cannot do justice here to the full complexity of Newton’s other remarks in his gloss on the rule. But note three things. First, the rule takes an agnostic stance on atomism. The Principia flirts with atomism in Book 3, Proposition 6, Corollary 3, where Newton seems to rely on the counterfactual (and, thus, speculative) assumption that were there no space between matter, all matter would be of the same density.7 In Query 31 of the Opticks, Newton freely speculates about “the small Particles of Bodies” that have “certain Powers, Virtues, or Forces, by which they act at a distance, not only upon the Rays of Light for reflecting, refracting and inflecting them, but also upon one another for producing a great Part of the Phenomena of Nature” (Newton 1718: 350). We should be careful not to conflate Newton’s undoubted corpuscularianism with atomism. Nevertheless, at several places in the Opticks, Newton speculated about perfectly “hard bodies” out of which other bodies might be composed (Newton 1999: 364ff.; 370; 375–8). Second, the rule contains a not-so-subtle dig at Huygens’s Cartesian skepticism about the very possibility and intelligibility of “universal gravitation of all bodies.” For Newton points out that the empirical argument for the “principle of mutual gravitation” is far stronger than the argument for the “impenetrability” of matter (which is presupposed by Cartesians following Part 2, Section 43 of Descartes’ Principia). This is a point noted by Priestley in his attack on the passivity of matter.8 The third rule rejects appeals to “sensation” and “experiments” and rejects “reason” as authoritative in natural philosophy. Third, the rule itself deploys the plural “bodies.” The plural is used throughout Newton’s gloss. This modifies a bit the nature of the inductive leap that Newton 7 Wouter Valentin (in correspondence) has offered a reconstruction of the counterfactual that shows it presupposes atomism. Here’s the outline of his reconstruction of Newton’s argument: (1) There is an unperceivable micro-level and a perceivable macro-level; (2A) there is a counterfactual situation on the micro-level (“if all spaces were full”), which presupposes a homogeneity of matter (i.e., when spaces are fully filled it has greatest density (more about this below)); (2B) by way of a perceived situation on the macro-level one infers a connection between the micro and macro levels [transduction]. (3) Rather than [i] inferring that empty spaces in matter explains the enormous variety in the density of perceived (macro-level) matter, one infers that [ii] fully compressed matter in empty space [“a vacuum is necessary”] explains the enormous variety in the density of perceived macro-level matter. (4) 3[ii] is atomism. 8 See Priestley 1782: 16; Priestley repeatedly calls attention to the importance of the first two rules, and this is a rare, tacit reference to the third.

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advocates. Newton is offering an account in terms of the behavior of systems of bodies, not an account that has its source in the nature of body as such.9 In fact, in the Principia Newton never defines the nature of body. It is tempting to see the three laws of motion as jointly offering a law-constitutive conception of body: that is, any group of entities that obey the laws of motion just will be bodies (Brading 2012). Moreover, this law-constitutive approach leaves entirely open what the other qualities of bodies are. In the gloss on the third rule, Newton is careful to distinguish between essential and universal qualities of bodies. By “essential” Newton means what we would call “intrinsic” qualities of bodies, that is, qualities that are presupposed in the very conception or nature of body. The rule limits itself to asserting a range of universal qualities and it maintains a studious agnosticism about the list of essential qualities of bodies. This is not a minor issue.10  Finally, Rule IV, which was added to the third edition, and its gloss read: “In experimental philosophy, propositions gathered from phenomena by induction should be considered either exactly or very nearly true notwithstanding any contrary hypotheses, until yet other phenomena make such propositions either more accurate or liable to exceptions. This rule should be followed so that arguments based on induction may not be nullified by hypotheses” (Newton 1999: 796). This rule has been the subject of considerable recent scholarly attention (Smith 2002; Schliesser 2004, 2005; Harper 2012, Chapter 7). Yet I have been unable to locate a single explicit discussion of it during the eighteenth century! The main purpose of this rule is to settle one’s attitude toward ongoing research. On the one hand, it encourages one to accept one’s going theory as true (or “very nearly” so). On the other hand, the rule refuses to recognize a vantage point outside of ongoing research as providing legitimate sources of principles that could motivate theoretical reinterpretations of one’s empirical results. But the rule has two further important implications. First, notwithstanding the bold inductive leap that the third rule encourages, the fourth rule is a clear expression of Newton’s fallibilism. He knows he could be wrong. This echoes the “Author’s Preface” to the Principia, where Newton says that “I hope that the principles set down here will shed light on either this mode of philosophizing or some truer one” (Newton 1999: 383). Newton accepts that physical inquiry is forward-looking and may be open-ended; not only may its theories evolve, but also its methods. Second, the rule encourages the search for systematic deviations from known regularities. Discrepancies need to be turned into “phenomena.” Systematic discrepancies are not in the first instance disconfirmations but possible sources of much more subtle evidence than previously imagined.11  While the fourth rule goes largely undiscussed, I can offer a striking bit of evidence that its significance did not go completely unrecognized. In his posthumously published

9

The language of the third law is always in terms the plural “bodies,” not one body. See Miller (2009). For example, in his otherwise useful treatment of the Reid–Priestley debate, Tapper (2002: 520) conflates the two. 11 See Harper (2012) and Ducheyne (2012) for a fuller articulation of this view. 10

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“History of Astronomy,” Adam Smith pointed out that Descartes’ theory does not explain deviations from general rules, but attempts to explain them away: So far, therefore, from accommodating his [i.e., Descartes’] system to all the minute irregularities, which Kepler has ascertained in the movements of the Planets; or from shewing, particularly, how these irregularities, and no other, should arise from it, he contented himself with observing, that perfect uniformity could not be expected in their motions, from the nature of the causes which produced them; that certain irregularities might take place in them, for a great number of successive revolutions, and afterwards give way to others of a different kind:  a remark which, happily, relieved him from the necessity of applying his system to the observations of Kepler, and the other Astronomers. (Smith 1982: 97)

Here I ignore why Smith calls Keplerian motions “irregularities.” The passage shows that Smith was aware of the importance of pursuing empirical accuracy and exactitude in judging systems. Elsewhere, Smith criticizes Descartes for claiming that it was not necessary “to suppose, that they [the orbits of the planets] described with geometrical accuracy, or even that they described always precisely the same figure. It rarely happens, that nature can be mathematically exact with regard to figure of the objects she produces” (Smith 1982: 95). The need to accommodate one’s theory “to all the minute irregularities” is akin to what we would call careful curve-fitting. But the previously quoted passage also shows that Smith thought it a legitimate requirement on a system that it should provide a systematic account of how discrepancies from regularities can arise within it. According to Smith, a theory should both stipulate what would count as evidence for or against it and what type of deviations from regularities one could expect with it. This feature of Newtonian methodology is, for example, completely missed by Reid when, while favorably contrasting Newton’s methodology to Descartes’, he summarizes Newton’s rules as follows:  “From real facts ascertained by observation and experiment, to collect by just induction the laws of Nature, and to apply the laws so discovered, to account for the phenomena of Nature” (Reid 2002: 121).12  David Hume offers a subtle attempt at improving and revising Newton’s rules. In Treatise 1.3.15, he states eight “rules by which to judge of causes and effects.” He thinks such rules are needed because it is “possible for all objects to become causes or effects to each other.” So, the rules help us find actual causes among the many possible ones (Hume 1978: 173). Earlier in the Treatise, Hume was adamant about the regulative character of these rules: “We shall afterwards take notice of some general rules, by which we ought to regulate our judgment concerning causes and effects; and these rules are form’d on the nature of our understanding, and on our experience of its operations in the judgments we form concerning objects” (1978: 149 [1.3.13]). So, these rules prescribe how

12 One might think that Reid never looked at the third edition, however in Essay VI of the Intellectual Powers he shows awareness that Newton may have had four rules (although his wording betrays uncertainty if there are three or four, but this may also be due to reading the first two rules as one).

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we should ascribe causes to “objects” in the world, especially in “most of our philosophical reasonings” (see Martin 1993). With the exception of the first three (which define what causes are), Hume’s rules of reasoning have a much remarked upon and strong resemblance to Newton’s four “Rules for the Study of Natural Philosophy.” On Hume’s interpretation, Newton’s second rule, which he summarizes as “where any principle has been found to have a great force and energy in one instance, to ascribe to it a like energy in all similar instances,” is the most important one. In the first Enquiry Hume says it is “Newton’s chief rule of philosophizing” (Hume 1975: 203–4). Hume captures the point in his fourth rule: “The same cause always produces the same effect, and the same effect never arises but from the same cause. This Principle we derive from experience, and is the source of most of our philosophical reasonings” (Hume 1978: 173 [1.3.15]). It is a crucial because Hume’s fifth and sixth rules are, by Hume’s lights, mere extensions of the fourth. However, Hume’s seventh rule (“When any object encreases or diminishes with the encrease or diminution of its cause, it is to be regarded as a compounded effect, derived from the union of the several different effects, which arise from the several different parts of the cause. The absence or presence of one part of the cause is here supposed to be always attended with the absence or presence of a proportionable part of the effect”) and eighth rule (“an object, which exists for any time in its full perfection without any effect, is not the sole cause of that effect, but requires to be assisted by some other principle, which may forward its influences and operation. For as like effects necessarily follow from like causes, and in a contiguous time and place, their separation for a moment shews, that these causes are not compleat ones”) do not directly echo Newton’s four rules. Hume admits, however, that one should be cautious in applying and extending the seventh rule because one cannot extrapolate from a “few experiments”. Hume’s eighth rule is, as Hume himself implies, a refinement of Hume’s fourth rule; it prevents overzealous causal ascription. It can thus be said to capture the spirit behind the “true and sufficient” condition of Newton’s first rule. Moreover, the conjunction of Hume’s fourth and seventh rules produces a new rule, stated as follows in the essay “Of Interest”: “An effect always holds proportion with its cause” (Hume 1987: 297). We can call this Hume’s ninth rule. If one assumes (or prescribes) that proportional causal relationships are the only possible ones, this new rule allows Hume to rule out competing claims that posit the existence of causal relationships that are not “proportional.” Hume can use the rule as a constraint on theory. Of course, Hume leaves unexplained what he means by “proportional.” This ninth rule also has Newtonian debts. Newton implicitly uses a rule like it throughout the Principia. For example, the importance of a proportion between cause and effect is emphasized throughout the treatment of the behavior of bodies in resisting fluids (e.g., the Scholium to Proposition 40, Book 2, Section 7, especially Experiment 14). Moreover, there is a prominent place in the Principia (the Scholium following Proposition 69, Book I, Section 11), where Newton implicitly transforms a version of Hume’s seventh rule into Hume’s ninth rule in which proportionality is emphasized (Newton 1999: 588–9). In this Scholium, Newton starts employing the language and

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emphasizing the importance of proportionality. This is not ruled out by Newton’s own rules, but it was not emphasized there. Despite all of these similarities there are two, connected differences between Hume’s and Newton’s rules. First, Hume never quite endorses the universal reach implied by Newton’s third rule. According to Newton we extend the known qualities of bodies within our experimental reach to all bodies in the universe. Hume’s fourth rule does not go that far. In a footnote to Section XI of the first Enquiry Hume states a “maxim” which argues against inferring new effects from any cause only “known only by its particular effects” (Hume 1975: 145). This rejects Newton’s strategy of making ever more audacious inferences (about planetary motions, the tides, the shape of the Earth, comets, etc.) on the basis of acceptance of universal gravity. The argument in favor of the “maxim” reveals the tension with Newton’s third rule: “To say, that the new effects proceed only from a continuation of the same energy, which is already known from the first effects, will not remove the difficulty. For even granting this to be the case (which can seldom be supposed), the very continuation and exertion of a like energy (for it is impossible it can be absolutely the same), I say, this exertion of a like energy, in a different period of space and time, is a very arbitrary supposition . . .” (Hume 1975: 145). Newton’s first three rules offer a bold methodological program that attempts to unify science across different periods of space and time. It is a bet on the causal unity of nature. Hume’s maxim cautions against overconfidence in this regard. Second, Hume lacks an equivalent to Newton’s Rule 4. This omission has important implications for his philosophy and its relationship to Newton’s. Hume replaces the authority of natural philosophy with his own criterion as to questions concerning existence and meaning, the “copy principle.” Only the ideas that can be traced to a distinct impression are permissible. Thus, Hume’s “science of man,” or “true philosophy,” offers to evaluate the claims of natural philosophy from a privileged position.

2.6 The History and Philosophy of Science after Newton In the eighteenth century it became quite common to insist that Newton had caused a revolution in natural philosophy. One consequence of this revolution was that technical and empirical advance could be made on rather focused, highly esoteric problems in celestial mechanics, rational mechanics, and related disciplines. Some of the important figures in this development—the Bernoullis, Varignon, Clauraut, Euler, Maupertuis, D’Alembert, Lagrange, MacLaurin—are not familiar names in philosophy anymore. While many did occasionally write philosophical tracts for the republic of letters (and nearly all of them were famous in their own day), most of their lasting, technical contributions were produced in journal articles and memoirs of scientific academies aimed at specialist audiences.

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There were, of course, what one might call Newtonian sciences—electricity, optics— where the (often mathematical) gap between esoteric research and the republic of letters did not widen before the end of the eighteenth century. Benjamin Franklin, Priestley, Boerhaave, Hartley, and Van Ingenhousz are characteristic natural philosophers, at home researching the phenomena of nature (see Cohen 1956). For example, one of the key texts of eighteenth-century medicine, moral psychology, and natural religion, David Hartley’s Observations on man, his frame, his duty, and his expectations (1749), explicitly appeals to the closing lines of the “General Scholium” and several of the Queries to the Optics, in order to develop an account of sensation based on vibrations within the nerves (in turn to be explained by a Newtonian ether) (see Hartley 1801: 5, 9–10, 13–15, 25–32). Another new development was the widespread reflection on methodological and conceptual issues pertaining to Newton’s achievements by people who were not making what we might call cutting-edge contributions in ongoing science. This chapter has called attention to a number of these already. Some of the more surprising and innovative of such methodological reflections can be found in Smith’s “The History of Astronomy.” Smith’s essay went against the mostly triumphalist, (what we would call) Whiggish histories of science leading up to Newton. Colin Maclaurin’s Account is an example of such history and is one of Smith’s targets. Smith viewed the history of astronomy as a social enterprise in which passionate inquirers made appeal to the (passionate) judgments of their fellow inquirers. Developing aspects of Hume’s theory of mind, Smith treats scientific theories as products of the imagination. The social nature of inquiry had become a staple of Newtonian reflection on the nature of inquiry since ‘s Gravesande (who was very popular in England) defended the moral certainty of Newtonian science as being the same kind of certainty as social conventions govern our reasonable expectations (see Cassirer 1951: 61ff.). Smith’s innovation consisted in embedding this social epistemology in a historical framework in which successive revolutions in the acceptance of various astronomical theories by different communities (and sub-communities) since the times of Eudoxus and Aristotle are analyzed. These theories have a regular pattern of development which produces new revolutions. Newton’s theory is not treated as the last word. In his writings, Smith diagnosed psychological incommensurabilities among different theories, thereby anticipating Kuhnian “paradigms.” Yet Smith does not treat the revolutions as irrational or unjustified. He believed that norms of evaluation evolve with scientific theories and that often it is quite reasonable to accept the leading theory even if one accepts the open-ended nature of inquiry, just as Newton had advocated. In the hands of the gifted mathematician, Condorcet, writing under the shadow of the Terror, this new understanding of inquiry, which he traced to Priestley, became accompanied with the gospel of progress generally (Condorcet 1795: 257). The story of mankind was not to be understood cyclically as a pendulum moving back and forth anymore, but as an upward line, unrolling infinitely forward.

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Acknowledgments This chapter overlaps considerably with my “Newton and Newtonianism in Eighteenth Century Thought,” forthcoming in The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth Century Philosophy, edited by Aaron Garrett, as well as my “Newton’s Principia” co-authored with Chris Smeenk, forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook on the History of Physics, edited by Jed Buchwald and Robert Fox. I am grateful to the editors, Chris Smeenk, and the presses permitting this self-plagiarism. I am grateful for extensive and very critical comments by Ryan Hanley, John Henry, David Hyder, and Charles Wolfe. Many thanks to James Harris for his encouragement, trust, suggestions, and friendship.

References Albury, W. R. (1978). “Halley’s Ode on the Principia of Newton and the Epicurean Revival in England”. Journal of the History of Ideas, 39: 24–43. Brading, K. (2012). “Newton’s Law-Constitutive Approach to Bodies:  A  Response to Descartes”, in A. Janiak and E. Schliesser (eds), Interpreting Newton:  Critical Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 13–32. Cassirer, E. (1951). The Philosophy of the Enlightenment. Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press. Cohen, I. B. (1956). Franklin and Newton: An Inquiry into Speculative Newtonian Experimental Science and Franklin’s Work in Electricity As an Example Thereof, Memoirs of American Philosophical Society, Vol. 43. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society. Condorcet, M. (1795). Outlines of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind. London. Domski, M. (2012). “Locke’s Qualified Embrace of Newton’s Principia”, in A. Janiak and E. Schliesser (eds), Interpreting Newton:  Critical Essays. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 48–68. Downing, L. (1995). “Siris and the Scope of Berkeley’s Instrumentalism”. The British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 3: 279–300. Downing, L. (1997). “Locke’s Newtonianism and Lockean Newtonianism”. Perspectives on Science: Historical, Philosophical, Social, 5: 285–310. Ducheyne, S. (2006). “Reid’s Adaptation and Radicalization of Newton’s Natural Philosophy”. History of European Ideas, 32: 173–89. Ducheyne, S. (2012). The Main Business of Natural Philosophy:  Isaac Newton’s NaturalPhilosophical Methodology. Dordrecht: Springer. Ducheyne, S. (MS). “ Gravesande’s appropriation of Newton’s natural philosophy: Epistemological, theological and methodological issues.” Dunlop, K. (2012). “The Mathematical Form of Measurement and the Argument for Proposition I in Newton’s Principia”. Synthese, 186: 191–229. Fontenelle, B. (1738). Oeuvres diverses de m. de Fontenelle, Vol. 5. The Hague: Antoine van Dole. Friedman, M. (2012). “Newton and Kant on Absolute Space:  From Theology to Transcendental Philosophy”, in A. Janiak and E. Schliesser (eds), Interpreting Newton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 342–59. Guicciardini, N. (2003a) The Development of Newtonian Calculus in Britain, 1700–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

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Guicciardini, N. (2003b). Reading the Principia: The Debate on Newton’s Mathematical Methods for Natural Philosophy from 1687 to 1736. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harper, W. L. (2012). Isaac Newton’s Scientific Method: Turning Data into Evidence about Gravity and Cosmology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hartley, D. (1801). Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations, 4th edn. London: J. Johnson. Henry, J. (2008). The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science, 3rd edn. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hume, D. (1975). Enquiries concerning Human Understanding and the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 3rd edn rev. P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hume, D. (1978). A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 2nd edn rev. P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hume, D. (1985). The History of England, 6 vols, ed. W. Todd. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Hume, D. (1987). Essays Moral, Political, Literary, ed. E. Millar. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Hurlbutt, R. H. (1985). Hume, Newton, and the Design Argument, rev edn. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Janiak, A. (2008). Newton as Philosopher. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Janiak, A. (2009). “Newton’s Philosophy”. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2009 Edition). ed. Zalta. . Jorink, E. (2009). “Honouring Sir Isaac, or, Exorcising the Ghost of Spinoza: Some Remarks on the Success of Newton in the Dutch Republic”, in S. Ducheyne (ed.), Future Perspectives on Newton Scholarship and the Newtonian Legacy in Eighteenth-Century Science and Philosophy. Brussels: Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie van België voor Wetenschappen en Kunsten, 23–33. Leibniz, G. W. F. and Clarke, S. (1717). A Collection of Papers, Which passed between the late Learned Mr. Leibnitz, and Dr. Clarke, In the Years 1715 and 1716. London. MacLaurin, C. (1748). An Account of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy, 2nd edn. Edinburgh. Martin, M. (1993). “The Rational Warrant for Hume’s General Rules”, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 31: 245–57. Miller, D.M. (2009). “Qualities, properties, and laws in Newton’s method of induction”, Philosophy of Science, 76: 1052–63. Musschenbroek, P. van (1744). The Elements of Natural Philosophy: Chiefly intended for the use of students in universities, transl. John Colson. London. Newton, I. (1728). A Treatise of the System of the World. London: F. Fayram. Newton, I. (1730). Opticks: or, A treatise of the reflections, refractions, inflections, and colours of light, 4th corrected edn. London. Newton, I. (1999). The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, translated by I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman. Berkeley : The University of California Press. Newton, I. (2004). Philosophical Writings, ed. A. Janiak. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Osler, M. (1996). “From Immanent Natures to Nature as Artifice: The Reinterpretation of Final Causes in Seventeenth-Century Natural Philosophy”. The Monist, 79: 388–407. Priestley, J. (1782). Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit. Birmingham: J. Johnson. Reid, T. (2002). Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, ed. D. Brookes and K. Haakonssen. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Reid, T. (2010). Essays on the Active Powers of Man, ed. K. Haakonssen and J. Harris. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Russell, P. (2008). The Riddle of Hume’s Treatise:  Skepticism, Naturalism, and Irreligion. New York: Oxford University Press. Schliesser, E. (2004). “Hume’s Missing Shade of Blue Reconsidered from a Newtonian Perspective”. Journal of Scottish Philosophy, 2(2): 164–75. Schliesser, E. (2005). “On the Origin of Modern Naturalism: The Significance of Berkeley’s Response to a Newtonian Indispensibility Argument”. PHILOSOPHICA-GENT-, 76: 45. Schliesser, E. (2011a) “Newton’s Challenge to Philosophy: A Programmatic Essay”. HOPOS: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science, 1: 101–28. Schliesser, E. (2011b) “Newton’s Substance Monism, Distant Action, and the Nature of Newton’s Empiricism:  Discussion of H.  Kochiras ‘Gravity and Newton’s substance counting problem’ ”. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 30: 160–6. Schliesser, E. (2012) “The Newtonian refutation of Spinoza:  Newton’s Challenge and the Socratic Problem”, in A. Janiak and E. Schliesser (eds), Interpreting Newton: Critical Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 299–219. Schliesser, E. (2012, in press) “On Reading Newton as an Epicurean: Kant, Spinozism and the changes to the Principia”. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A. . Smith, A. (1982). Essays on Philosophical Subjects, ed. W.P.D. Wightman and J.C. Bryce. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Smith, G. E. (2002). “The Methodology of the Principia”, in I. B. Cohen and G. E. Smith (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Newton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 138–73. Snobelen, S. D. (1998). “On Reading Isaac Newton’s Principia in the 18th Century”. Endeavour, 22: 159–63. Stein, H. (1990). “ ‘From the Phenomena of Motions to the Forces of Nature’: Hypothesis or Deduction?” PSA, 2: 209–22. Tapper, A. (2002). “Reid and Priestley on Method and the Mind”. The Philosophical Quarterly, 52: 511–25. Taton, R. and Wilson, C. (eds) (1995). The General History of Astronomy: Volume 2, Planetary Astronomy from the Renaissance to the Rise of Astrophysics. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press. Toland, John (1704). Letters to Serena, London: Bernard Lintot. Van Lunteren, F. (2002). “Nicolas Fatio de Duillier on the Mechanical Cause of Universal Gravitation, in the book Pushing Gravity”, in M. Edwards (ed.), Pushing Gravity:  New perspectives on Le Sage’s theory of gravitation. Montréal: Apeiron, 41–59. Voltaire (1901) Essays on Literature, Philosophy, Art, History, Vol. XIX — Part I, ed. E. R. DuMont. New York: The St. Hubert Guild Press.

chapter 3

the idea of a science of human nature Jacqueline  Taylor

The study of human nature intensified and developed during the eighteenth century. Britain was the site of some especially interesting developments that were both influential in their own time and left enduring legacies. There were refinements to the kind of studies of the workings of the human mind that Hobbes, Locke, and others had provided in the seventeenth century. These new studies extended accounts of perception, focusing especially on belief, and on internal or reflex senses that afforded aesthetic and moral perception. Philosophers anatomized the affections and internal sensibilities to explore and explain the origin of religious belief, our perceptions of beauty and deformity, the sublime, moral good and evil, and virtue and vice. British thinkers also showed a keen interest in social progress and refinement in the arts and sciences, and in the importance of social manners in the age of a new commercial sensibility. Different views were advanced regarding human sociability and the flourishing of society with appeals variously to self-interest or vanity, benevolence, or sympathy. The awareness of a new economic age, and of the civil and social refinement that accompanied it, was also reflected in theories of the stages of development that societies underwent. Travel literature made possible fact-based comparative analyses of forms of government, and of social institutions such as marriage, the market, and labor practices, as well as of customs and traditions. In Britain, the science of human nature tended to include moral concerns so that attention was given both to self-cultivation and to social reform. By the end of the century, as revolutions took place in America and France, the stage was set in Britain for an age of more radical philosophy that championed far-reaching social reform. Many eighteenth-century British theorists of human nature commonly employed the discourse of natural philosophy to achieve a more systematic and observation-based approach to their subject. My goal here is to investigate how the adoption of scientific discourse and the adaptation of the methods of natural philosophy, including natural history, contributed to the understanding of human nature in the eighteenth century.

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The early modern scientific achievements of the great natural philosophers such as Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton, along with lesser but no less successful achievements in many of the areas that Francis Bacon had catalogued in the “Preparative towards a Natural and Experimental History” in his Great Renewal, inspired attempts to make progress on a similarly firm footing in the study of human nature. Bacon’s reconstruction of the sciences places their foundation in natural history, which aims “to shed light on the discovery of causes” (Bacon 2000: 20). Natural history and induction can also be applied to “the other sciences, logic, ethics, and politics” (Bacon 2000: 98). Bacon asserts that we can form a history of the passions, of political matters, and of the various operations of the mind. Like other natural philosophers, Bacon argues that appeal to final causes “actually distorts the sciences.” But he makes an exception for just those sciences that have to do with “human actions” (Bacon 2000: 102). Explanations in terms of final causes are a recurring feature in many, but not all, eighteenth-century accounts of human nature. Bacon argued that success in natural philosophy required a just interpretation of nature. Justly interpreting nature meant going to the facts, and constructing natural histories. A number of eighteenth-century thinkers emphasized the importance of establishing the facts about human nature through observation and experience. For example, Joseph Butler, arguing against selfish theorists such as Hobbes and Mandeville, notes in the Preface to his Sermons that in considering morals as a science, morals can be treated in two ways: either in terms of abstract relations, or from matters of fact about the nature of man, its parts and economy (Butler 1729: vi). Butler centers his analysis on the facts of human nature. Every particular nature has an economy or system, the parts working for some purpose beyond itself, which makes it conducive to this end. Just as the parts of a watch are adapted to keeping time, the parts of man’s “inward frame,” especially in light of the relations between appetites, passions, and the principle of reflection, or conscience, are adapted to virtue (Butler 1729: x). Butler argues that we can observe “that man is thus by his very nature a law to himself ” (Butler 1729: xx). In Sermon One, considering the selfish theory of human nature, Butler counters that whether man possesses the principle of benevolence “is a meer question of fact or natural history” (Butler 1729: 8). The facts, established by observation and testimony, prove that men do possess at least some degree of benevolence and good will, thus refuting what Butler took to be Hobbes’s hypothesis concerning man’s fundamental selfishness. In his Essay on the History of Civil Society, Adam Ferguson argues against speculative accounts of a supposed state of nature, such as those of Thomas Hobbes and Jean Jacques Rousseau. Ferguson writes, “In every other instance . . . the natural historian thinks himself obliged to collect facts, not to offer conjectures” (Ferguson 1995: 8). Ferguson insists that in a study of man and society, “Mankind are to be taken in groups, as they have always subsisted” (Ferguson 1995: 10). Advances in physical anatomy, important for medicine, art, and zoology, among other fields, inspired calls for an inward anatomy of the mind. In his Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit, Shaftesbury argues that “study and observation” enable us “to demonstrate with great exactness” the purpose of the parts of the human mind, and the

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proportion of its passions (Shaftesbury 2001: Vol. 2, 9). Indeed, “the parts and proportions of the mind, their mutual relation and dependency, the connection and frame of those passions which constitute the soul or temper, may easily be understood by anyone who thinks it worth his while to study this inward anatomy.” An inward anatomy reveals an order “no less real and exact than that of the body.” Shaftesbury suggests that anatomizing the human mind is part of a science akin to medicine, and requiring “surgeons of another sort” to separate and study the mind’s parts (Shaftesbury 2001: Vol. 2, 35).1  Mandeville, who both practiced and wrote about medicine, also uses the analogy with anatomy, to different effect than Shaftesbury, with whose account of human nature and virtue he strongly disagreed. In the Preface to The Fable of the Bees, Mandeville writes that “Laws and government are to the political bodies of civil societies, what the vital spirits and life it self are to the natural bodies of animated creatures,” so that just as the anatomist must look under the skin, muscles, nerves and bones, to discover the seemingly “trifling” minute parts required to continue bodily motion, the student of human nature will find that what makes man sociable are “his vilest and most hateful qualities,” particularly his vanity (Mandeville 1988: Vol. I, 3–4). George Turnbull, in the Preface to his Principles of Moral Philosophy, asserted that a moral anatomy is “an enquiry into a real part of nature,” and indeed, “the most useful part of natural philosophy” (Turnbull 1740: i). Abraham Tucker, in his analysis of human action, also appeals to anatomy: “to become intimately acquainted with our mind we must, as I say, dissect it, that is, analyze action into its first constituent parts” (Search [Tucker] 1768: 35). Thomas Reid, in the Introduction to his Inquiry into the Human Mind writes, “All that we know of the body, is owing to anatomical dissection and observation, and it must be by anatomy of the mind that we can discover its powers and principles” (Reid 1997: 12). Reid, Hartley, Turnbull, and Hume are among those seeking to establish general laws or rules regarding perception, motives, action, and manners.2 What thinkers regarded as Newton’s method, as articulated in both the Principia and the Optics, was appropriated for the study of human nature. In Observations on Man, David Hartley writes “The proper method of philosophizing seems to be, to discover and establish the general laws of action, affecting the subject under consideration, from certain select, well-defined, and well-attested phaenomena, and then to explain and predict the other phaenomena by these laws. This is the method of analysis and synthesis recommended and followed by Sir Isaac Newton” (Hartley 1749: I, 6). Thomas Reid argues that we must acquire accurate knowledge of the principles of the human constitution through observation and experiment. We already have a “propensity to trace particular facts and observation to general rules, and to apply such general rules to account for other effects, or to direct

1 In the conclusion to the Inquiry, Shaftesbury also refers to his account of the proper balance of the various affections as a “scheme of moral arithmetick,” one with as much certainty as mathematics (Shaftesbury 2001: Vol. 2, 68). 2 It is noteworthy that, as Paul Wood points out, both Hume and Turnbull studied with the Edinburgh professor of Natural Philosophy, Robert Steuart (Wood 1990: 133, n. 16). According to Michael Barfoot, Steuart’s syllabus included works by John Keill, David Gregory, and Isaac Newton (Barfoot 1990: 152).

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us in the production of human life,” thus showing that Newton’s method and his “regulae philosophandi are maxims of common sense and are practiced every day in common life” (Reid 1997: 12). Turnbull, on the title page of his Principles, cites Newton’s claim in the Optics, that his methods might not only perfect natural philosophy but also enlarge the bounds of moral philosophy. David Hume famously refers to Bacon’s success in the introduction to the Treatise of Human Nature. He observes that “some late philosophers in England,” a group including Locke, Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Hutcheson, and Butler, “have begun to put the science of man on a new footing” (Hume 1978: xvii). As Bacon had argued for a “reconstruction” of the sciences, Hume urges the need for a “reformation” in “the science of man”; a task perhaps of “greater importance” than that in natural philosophy (Hume 1978: xvii). Indeed, Hume goes a step further, suggesting that “the science of man is the only solid foundation for the other sciences,” including mathematics, natural philosophy, and natural religion, insofar as the former studies the human faculties on which the other sciences rely (Hume 1978: xvi). We see, then, that among moral philosophers of the eighteenth century who we would regard as more committed to empirical observation and other methods, shared appeals are made to the discourse of the natural sciences, including natural history. They tend to make these appeals in one of two ways: either by invoking natural scientific terms for mental and other human phenomena: forces, facts, (efficient) causes, general laws, or rules;3 or by seeking in some way to appropriate the methods of particular sciences, including natural history, anatomy, medicine, and hydraulics. Despite this shared confidence in the language and methods of natural philosophy, and in the appropriateness of their application to what Hume calls “moral subjects,” we should note that the thinkers discussed above represent diverse approaches to a variety of phenomena that might fall under the heading of human nature. While they shared a commitment to what Roger Smith terms “the language of human nature,” not all of them had aspirations for establishing a systematic science of man (Smith 1995: 88–111). Butler’s moral philosophy is set out in sermons that demonstrate his belief that, as Smith aptly puts it, “his responsibility as an Anglican clergyman was to inspire his people with an empirical account of God’s design in human nature” (Smith 1995: 89). The tremendous success of Mandeville’s Fable, and that author’s attack on Shaftesbury in later editions, led Butler also to remedy the deficiencies in Shaftesbury’s moral philosophy, particularly the lack of recognition of the authority of conscience. Much of Shaftesbury’s writing focuses on “self-study” (Shaftesbury 2001: I, 124), and the cultivation and disciplining of one’s own mind. Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees made him one of the best-selling authors of his day and much admired for his literary skill and philosophy, although he also drew much criticism and attack. In contrast, Hutcheson corrects and extends the program of Locke, who claimed to be using “the plain historical method” to examine human understanding. Hutcheson argued that it is not enough to seek after truth; in addition, we must 3

Where these laws are in a qualified sense modeled on the laws of motion of natural science rather than on the theological conception of natural law (see Larrère 2008: 199–214).

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find out which are our greatest pleasures, and the means to acquiring them (Hutcheson 2002: 7). Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, John Millar, and Henry Home, Lord Kames, all contributed to stadial theory, or what Dugald Stewart, with reference to Smith, called “conjectural” history. These Scottish thinkers saw themselves as contributing to natural history. Hume claims to be reforming the science of man and using the experimental method without recourse to explanation in terms of final causes. Hartley combines an associationist psychology with a physiological account of the brain, nerves, and human movement, to make the case for the improvement of human nature itself. In the rest of this chapter, I canvas the views of philosophers engaged in a more systematic study of human nature, those who assimilate methods of the natural sciences to the phenomena of human perception and action, as well as those who believe that acquiring knowledge of human nature also advances the aim of extending knowledge of the natural world. Francis Hutcheson provides a nice example of this latter approach, and I begin with his account of our perception of beauty, focusing especially on his emphasis on the beauty of nature and of our theorizing about nature. While some parts of his account are less successful, especially the appeal to design and final causes, his attention to the variety of beauty, and to how much of it extends human knowledge of the world, deserves discussion in an essay on the eighteenth-century science of man. I shall then turn to three experimental accounts of association, and how explanation within the framework of association serves to explain how people value themselves or others in the various ways that they do. My focus here will be on David Hume, David Hartley, and Mary Wollstonecraft. The final section examines what is variously known as stadial theory or conjectural history. The Scots, including Adam Ferguson, Henry Home, Lord Kames, Adam Smith, and John Millar, were particularly active in this area. Millar, in particular, is exemplary in the historical evidence brought to bear on his analysis of social relations within the various stages of the development of societies.

3.1 Francis Hutcheson on the Pleasures of Beauty in Nature and Science In the Preface to his Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, Hutcheson asserts that “a just knowledge of human nature, and its various powers and dispositions” comprises the most important part of philosophy. While some late studies of the understanding have shown the importance of truth, especially for human happiness, a study of happiness itself, especially of “the greatest and most lasting pleasures,” must “be of the greatest importance” (Hutcheson 2004: 7). The starting point in establishing such knowledge appeals to “definitions, and observations, either universally acknowledg’d, or sufficiently prov’d by many writers both ancient and modern” (Hutcheson 2004: 19). Hutcheson argues for the existence of various internal senses that

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provide us with our perceptions of beauty, virtue, honor, and sympathetic perceptions of others’ happiness or misery. I shall focus here on the sense of beauty. As with the physical senses, the internal sense works in such a way that we receive our ideas of beauty immediately, without knowledge of the object, and the ideas are necessarily pleasant, independently of interest or advantage. Following Locke, Hutcheson draws a contrast between the primary and secondary qualities of objects that produce ideas in perceivers. He writes, By Absolute or Original Beauty, is not understood any Quality suppos’d to be in the Object, which should of itself be beautiful, without relation to any Mind which perceives it:  For Beauty, like other Names of sensible Ideas, properly denotes the Perception of some Mind; . . . to which perhaps there is no resemblance in the Objects, which excites these Ideas in us, however we generally imagine that there is something in the Object just like our Perception. The Ideas of Beauty and Harmony being excited upon our Perception of some primary Quality, . . . and yet were there no Mind with a Sense of Beauty to contemplate Objects, I see not how they could be call’d beautiful. (Hutcheson 2004: 27)

Without a sense of beauty, we might still respond to certain objects with pleasure, but it will be the pleasure of interest or advantage. While he considers the relative beauty of the imitative arts, Hutcheson’s primary interest is in the beauties of nature and of our theorems about both nature and morality. Following Locke’s primary–secondary quality model, Hutcheson argues that beautiful things have a primary quality that produces in us the perception of beauty. Hutcheson’s emphasis on the nature of this primary quality shows him to believe that it is a theoretically measurable quality, one that potentially allows us to rank the orders of nature in terms of that which makes them beautiful with the laws of nature being the most important, and thereby to gain greater knowledge of nature.4 He turns in Section II to ascertain “what Quality in Objects excites these Ideas, or is the occasion of them” (Hutcheson 2004: 28). He begins with simple figures, and proceeds from there to examine whether more complex beautiful objects have the same quality. Starting with simple figures allows Hutcheson to set aside other qualities that might excite pleasure, such as grandeur or novelty, which typically belong to more complex entities. What makes simple figures beautiful, “to speak in the Mathematical Style, seems to be in a compound Ratio of Uniformity and Variety,” with variety increasing the beauty of equal uniformity (making a square more beautiful than an equilateral triangle), and uniformity increasing the beauty of equal variety (the equilateral triangle is more beautiful than the scalenum) (Hutcheson 2004: 29). Children might confirm such observation, since they, according to Hutcheson, prefer regular figures. According to Hutcheson, someone, such as a child, may not comprehend the uniformity–variety ratio, but can still respond with pleasure 4 Paul Wood notes Hutcheson’s similar view of benevolence. Hutcheson aimed to show how benevolence could be quantified in the first edition of his Inquiry into virtue that accompanied the treatise on beauty, but came under attack from critics for doing so (Wood 2003: 815).

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to the beauty of the object. Conversely, someone might comprehend the uniformity– variety ratio, but fail to find the object beautiful because they lack a sense of beauty, or because that sense is not functioning properly. The uniformity–variety ratio makes the object beautiful, but only those with the sense of beauty will find it beautiful. Hutcheson argues that the same foundation, ratios of uniformity and variety, accounts for the beauty we find in nature. Whether through direct observation, or by reasoning and reflection, for example, on the motions of great bodies, we find generally the “Structure, Order, and Motion, agreeable to our Sense of Beauty” (Hutcheson 2004: 30). The orbit of the planets, the alternate succession of day and night, the “regular Diversity” of the seasons, all please and charm (Hutcheson 2004: 31). This is also the foundation for the pleasure we take in harmonious sounds, art, poetry, gardens, architecture, theorems, and the forces and laws of nature. One of the most interesting parts of Hutcheson’s discussion concerns the beauty of theorems and their corollaries, an area where we find “an amazing Variety with Uniformity” (Hutcheson 2004: 36). Hutcheson speculates that we may need to form theorems and abstract ideas because our minds are limited in such a way that we cannot think about multiple single ideas simultaneously. Having the power to abstract and theorize “gives us an Evidence of the Largeness of the human Capacity above our Imagination” (Hutcheson 2004: 36). He draws attention to the beauty of the knowledge of key principles or universal forces, which have numerous different effects. Hutcheson’s examples emphasize the similarity between natural and moral science: “Such is Gravitation in Sir Isaac Newton’s Scheme; such also is the Knowledge of the Original of Rights . . . from whence the greatest Part of moral Dutys may be deduc’d in the various Relations of human Life” (Hutcheson 2004: 38). Such principles and forces may also be useful for human life, but Hutcheson argues that our perception or pleasurable response to their beauty itself motivates us to discover further truths. In Section V, Hutcheson introduces “something like a Theorem” of his own to deal with a skeptical concern (Hutcheson 2004: 51), similar to skeptical concerns that Locke raised in his Essay concerning Human Understanding. This concern is that “There seems to be no necessary Connection of our pleasing Ideas of Beauty with the Uniformity or Regularity of the Objects, from the Nature of things, antecedent to some Constitution of the Author our Nature, which has made such Forms pleasant to us” (Hutcheson 2004: 46). We might then suppose that our sense of beauty was an arbitrary choice on the part of the Author of our nature, and that there might in principle be an infinite number of different senses of beauty. But Hutcheson’s aim has been to show that our greatest pleasures, those derived from genuine beauty and virtue, truly are good for us. His solution is to argue that the regularity we perceive in the world must exist as it does by design, and that the cause of our finding such regularity beautiful must be owing to a cause both wise and benevolent. He presents a series of complex arguments from probability and what he calls the “Laws of Hazard” to show that the various kinds of regularity we find in the world, including the same effects from the same causes, the replication of geometrical figures, and the “Frequency of regular Bodys of one Form,” including plants, animals and human beings, cannot be the product of chance or undersigned

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force; such regularity must derive from design (Hutcheson 2004: 51).5 Since we do find uniformity beautiful, and the pleasure of beauty is a good to us, this proves the wisdom and benevolence of the Author of our nature, for whom our happiness is good and desirable (Hutcheson 2004: 81).6 

3.2 Association and the Passions: Hume, Hartley, and Wollstonecraft Theories of the association of perceptions were common in British philosophy of the early modern period. Bacon introduces mental associations through his doctrine of the Idols. The Idols of the Tribe, the Cave, the Marketplace, and the Theater are those biases of the human mind that arise from the very nature of human understanding, from individual temperament, experience, and education, from the communication between men and wrong use of words that fills their discourse, and from various philosophical doctrines. The remedy, especially for the corruption of thought that prevents progress in the sciences, is the proper use of induction and the forming of natural histories using Bacon’s tabulae. For Hobbes, in contrast, association is part of the motion of the mind and explains our “train of thoughts, or mental discourse,” which is of two sorts, unguided (which is like the free association of thought), and thought that is guided by desire and design (Hobbes 1994: 12). Our train of thought is regulated either by imagining an effect, something that we desire, for example, and thinking about its cause or the means to produce it, or by thinking of a cause and imagining all of its possible effects. Hobbes writes, “In sum, the discourse of the mind, when it is guided by design, is nothing but seeking, or the faculty of invention” (Hobbes 1994:  13). Locke distinguishes between the natural correspondence of ideas and the association of ideas that is due to chance or custom. The former provides reason with its proper “Office and Excellency” in tracing and preserving the union and correspondence of ideas “which is founded in their peculiar Beings” (Locke 1975: 395). In contrast, the association of ideas is “not ally’d by Nature,” but results rather from the mind’s customary habits, based in bad education, for example, or in chance connections (Locke 1975: 96). This way of thinking makes men obstinate, unreasonable, prejudiced, and subject to a disease which Locke calls a form of madness. It disturbs not only our understanding but sets us “awry in our Actions,” and in our passions, morals, and reasoning, and is often at the root of religious or philosophical sects (Locke 1975: 397). Hutcheson follows Locke in seeing danger in the associations of ideas. Through bad habits or erroneous education, people form wild 5 Hutcheson is sometimes less emphatic, claiming “presumptions of design,” or a designing cause “at least as probable a Notion as Chance, general Force, Conatus ad motum, or the Clinamen Principiorum to account for any effect whatsoever” (Hutcheson 2004: 56). 6 For critical discussion of the limits of Hutcheson’s approach, see Kivy (2003).

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associations that alter their appetites, and “raise the Passions into an extravagant Degree, beyond the proportion of real Good in the Object” (Hutcheson 2002: 69). Hutcheson sees, however, that the association of ideas is inevitable since “all our Language and much of our Memory depends upon it,” but we must exercise attention either to prevent wild associations or to separate ideas once joined (Hutcheson 2002: 21). An early rejoinder to Hutcheson’s views came from John Gay in his Preliminary Dissertation, Concerning the Fundamental Principle of Virtue or Morality, prefixed to Edmund Law’s translation of William King’s Essay on the Origin of Evil. Gay employs an account of association, similar to that of Hobbes, to ground a sophisticated Epicurean system of morality and virtue. Virtue consists in “conformity to a rule of life,” which directs our actions for both our own and one another’s happiness; the rule obliges us, and those confirming to the rule gain the esteem of others for so doing (Gay 1781: xxix). The question thus arises as to the true criterion of virtue, and its requirements for action and living well. Gay rejects such candidates as reason or fitness, and argues that only the will of God can be the true criterion. The will of God stipulates what an agent must do or not do in order to be happy. Obligation is thus “evidently founded on the prospect of happiness,” either present or future, and derives from the authority of God (Gay 1781: xxx). God’s will is the immediate criterion of virtue, obliging us to act in particular ways to further and sustain private happiness. Private happiness is nevertheless consistent with acting meritoriously on behalf of others, since it earns the agent the approbation of others, which gratifies his desire of being esteemed. Gay accepts Hutcheson’s point that men act virtuously without regard for private happiness, but he in turn argues that we do so only because the mind’s habits of association produce “resting places” where our thought terminates, neglecting to consider the ultimate end for which we act (Gay 1781: xli). If acting benevolently procures us pleasure in the form of the approbation of others, we gradually form a habitual association between benevolent action and pleasure. Much of our association-based knowledge of goods and evils is acquired by education or through the imitation of, or sympathy with, others. Thus for Gay, and against Hutcheson, the moral sense reflects our acquired affections, rather than innate sentiments of approbation and disapprobation. According to Richard Olson, Gay’s views were influential on David Hume and, especially, David Hartley, who stated that Gay’s work directly motivated him to explore the power of mental association (Hartley 1749: I, v; see Olson 1993: 97–8). Both Hume and Hartley use an account of association to ground their respective conceptions of the science of human nature. I begin with Hume, and the role association plays in his account of the passions. In his Treatise of Human Nature, Hume’s investigation into human nature gave a central role to the experimental method, applied here to moral subjects. Recent scholars have either tended to neglect Hume’s characterization of this method and what it shows about the passions, or have denigrated his effort, claiming that Hume understood neither science nor psychology (see, for example, Noxon 1973). Hume begins his account of the passions with a special subset that he names the indirect passions, and which include pride, humility, love, hatred, and various mixed passions such as respect and contempt. These passions are directed at persons, either oneself or another, and

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typically convey a valuing or devaluing of the person who is their object. Hume’s aim is to give an account, in terms of association and using the experimental method, of the nature, causes, and effects of these passions. Just as Newton proclaimed that an experiment begins with the phenomena, so too does Hume, suggesting to his readers that the passions are familiar to us and that we each know what it is like to experience the elation of pride or the dejection of humility. We experience pride as a pleasant passion, while humility is an uneasy one. Hume then moves to more theoretically refined observations, consistent with the associationist framework set out in Book I, that identify the features and circumstances of the indirect passions. Keeping the focus on pride, Hume asserts that in terms of its status as a perception of the mind, pride is an impression, one with a distinctly pleasurable feel to it. The impression of pride (as a feeling of exaltation) is preceded by an idea regarding the cause of pride (for example, the idea, or really complex belief, that this is my beautiful house), and pride in turn produces another idea regarding the self, which is the object of pride. Hume makes the supposition that the “idea” of the cause, which more accurately is a belief, or even a set of beliefs (on this point, see Taylor 1985), concerns the cause as something of value and with a relation to the self; for example, the person believes that she possesses wit, a trait valued for the pleasure and entertainment it produces for herself and others. The passion of pride produces in its turn an idea of the self as advantaged and admired in virtue of possessing wit. The elements are now in place to discover the efficacious circumstance common to every instance of pride. The causes of pride are varied, including qualities of mind and of body, external advantages such as lineage, and wealth and property. Yet since pride is produced as a perception in the mind by other perceptions (the idea of the cause and the pleasurable impression it typically produces), there is just one common circumstance that is the efficient cause of pride. Hume makes the crucial supposition that the cause of pride must produce a pleasure that is separate from the pleasure of pride. Witty people, for example, are entertaining, and witty entertainment is pleasing to others. This point about the independent pleasure allows Hume to argue that impressions, and not just ideas, can be associated together on the basis of resemblance. The double association of impressions, that is, the pleasure produced by wit and the pleasure of pride, and of ideas, concerning the cause as related to self, and of self as advantaged by possessing the feature causing pride, comprise the “real, efficient causes” of pride, as Hume puts it in his Dissertation on the Passions (Hume 2008: 8). In keeping with the style of some experimental reports in the natural sciences, Hume dramatizes this discovery: “taking these suppositions [about the cause] to be just, the true system breaks in upon me with an irresistible evidence. That cause, which excites the passion, is related to the object, which nature has attributed to the passion; the sensation, which the cause separately produces, is related to the sensation of the passion: From this double relation of ideas and impressions, the passion is deriv’d” (Hume 1978: 286). In order to provide further proof in support of his system of the passions, Hume next examines the particular causes—the qualities of mind and body, external advantages, and wealth, along with the secondary cause of the sympathetic sentiments of others directed towards ourselves—and finds that, with respect to producing pride,

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the double relation can be discovered in each. We can also note that Hume uses analogies, most notably with the passions of animals, and employs metaphors from a range of the natural sciences to emphasize points about the dynamics of association. Similar strategies were features of the experimental method in the natural sciences (see, for example, Hackmann 1989). In Part 2 of Book 2 of the Treatise, Hume argues that the same causes that produce pride also produce love when they belong to another person; similarly, the causes of humility can produce hatred of another. In a series of thought experiments (see Hume 1978: 332–47), Hume asks his readers to envision these four indirect passions in terms of a conceptual model: pride and love associated by pleasure, humility and hatred by pain; pride and humility associated by the same object, the self, while love and hatred have as their object another person. In the first four experiments, Hume removes and replaces the various relations in turn, asking what we would expect a priori, on the basis of the model, with respect to which passion is produced or extinguished. The really interesting thought experiments are the sixth and seventh, which according to the a priori reasoning lead to results contrary to what experience shows us. Hume takes this opportunity to make a point, about, first, how the imagination and the passions facilitate one another’s operations (in the sixth experiment), and, second, how the passions are a more powerful principle than that of the imagination. This second point is consistent with Hume’s claims elsewhere in the work about the influence of belief on the passions, the influence of the passions on belief, and the influence of the imagination on the direct passions. Taken narrowly, we see that Hume’s experimental method thus explains the relations between the principles of the imagination and the passions, and their effects on the movements and contents of our thoughts and feelings. More broadly, we should note that Hume also examines the relations between, on the one hand, the operations of the mind such as the imagination and the passions, and on the other, the influence of social customs and institutions. Hume is thus able to account for the ways in which our expression and attribution of the passions both reflect and sustain community understandings of social identities. The most important of these identities, for Hume’s analysis, are “rank” and “sex,” but he also attends to the role of sympathy and custom in shaping the general characters shared by the members of nations, and of the various professions. Like Hume, David Hartley invokes association to explain the power over our thoughts, feelings, and character, of such influences as habit, custom, example, education, authority, and prejudice. He also agrees with Hume that association produces our complex ideas (the initial function Hume ascribed to association, in Treatise 1.1.4.1). But Hartley might be thought to go beyond Hume in two ways. First, Hartley, inspired by some remarks of Newton in his Principia and in the queries at the end of the Optics, attempts to give a physiological explanation of the laws of our bodily powers, through his doctrine of vibrations. The brain, spinal marrow, and nerves together are the instrument of sensation, and subsequently of the ideas presented to the mind. Hartley invokes the doctrine of vibrations to explain movement and action, both voluntary and involuntary, the use of speech and language, our capacity for memory, and the imagination. The laws of our bodily powers and the doctrine of vibrations correspond to the laws

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of our mental powers. Second, Hartley proceeds systematically to show how association explains six classes of intellectual pleasures and pains. These are the pleasures and pains of the imagination, ambition, self-interest, sympathy, theopathy, and the moral sense. Interestingly, Hartley makes it clear that he thinks that association is crucial for explaining the origin of our intellectual pleasures and pains, so that even if the general law of vibrations in the brain is not the foundation of association, some other law will be, and the effects of mental association can be analyzed independently of its physical counterpart. I shall focus here on the effects of association with respect to sympathy and the moral sense. Hartley distinguishes the intellectual pleasures and pains from sensible ones. The latter are original, and might be called simple since they originate in a sensation. The intellectual pleasures and pains, being formed associatively from simple ones, are thus essentially complex. Hartley identifies four classes of sympathetic affection. Some, such as sociability, good will, generosity, and gratitude, arise from our joy in other’s happiness. Those arising from our grief in other’s misery include compassion and mercy. When we rejoice in another’s misery, we experience passions such as anger, jealousy, cruelty, malice, and revenge, while we experience envy or a desire to emulate others when we feel grief at their happiness (Hartley 1749: I, 471). Hartley argues that the various sympathetic affections arise from association, and he points to the development of sociality in early childhood, where children associate many pleasures with the care of their parents, or with playing with other children. Similarly, children cultivate compassion for others as they become familiar with situations that cause misery and the signs of mental or physical distress. Benevolence shares these sources, and benevolent actions get associated with honor and esteem, and generate reciprocal attitudes in those who associate one another with kind attitudes and actions. Gratitude also has the same sources, and arises from the association of pleasure with the benefits received from others, as well as a hope for future benefits; the painfulness of shame gets associated with ingratitude. Sociality and in particular benevolence, with its connection to honor and the esteem of others, create further associations that help to constitute our moral sense, in part because they can move us to give up pleasure or even assume pain in order to benefit others. The pleasures of these moral associations can, independently of reward, outweigh the agent’s pain or self-denial. Hartley argues that our ability to act against our own interest in order to benefit others provides proof that pure disinterested benevolence is possible for us. Of course, virtue is sometimes attended with reward and vice with punishment, and the pleasures of reward and pains of punishment also help to form and sustain the associations of the moral sense. In addition to moral affections, such as charity and benevolence, that move us to act on behalf of others, we also have moral affections towards God, including piety and gratitude. Other moral affections, including temperance, patience, and being content reflect the agent’s regard for herself. The moral sense also allows us to reflect not only on the merit or demerit of others, but also on our own good qualities which, through our association with the general regard for them in society, “will at last beget in us a general, mixed, pleasing idea and consciousness, when we reflect upon our own virtuous affections or actions”; similarly,

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we experience negative affections when we reflect upon our vices (Hartley 1749: I, 495). While we at first associate the pleasure of love that we feel towards another’s virtuous character with the particular person, we learn to abstract and thus to associate our love and hatred with the virtues and vices, respectively. Because the moral sense is constituted through these various associations, Hartley allows that various historical, cultural, and even intrasocial differences, based on such things as education, rank, sex, temper, or profession, influence how the moral sense is shaped as well as that to which it responds. Optimistically, he urges that the power of association, in forming all our reasoning and affection, makes it possible for us to improve our nature. By forming a pure love for God, and meditating on God’s mercy, holiness, and perfection, we ourselves may become merciful, holy, and perfect. Both Hume and Hartley emphasize the crucial role of education and experience in leading us to form the associations that shape human character, conscience and the moral sense. Their work, particularly that of Hartley, inspired the next generations of English radicals, who worked to bring about reforms in education, religion, the English Parliament, and other social and political institutions.7 Joseph Priestley, a great admirer of the Observations, published a redacted version of Hartley’s work, Hartley’s Theory of the Human Mind on the Principle of the Association of Ideas (1775), which omitted the more speculative doctrine of vibrations. Hartley’s work also influenced the views of many others, including Erasmus Darwin, William Godwin, Abraham Tucker, and Thomas Brown, and through Brown, James Mill. In perhaps his most famous work, Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill sets out an associationist account of the human conscience. Hume’s work, especially his Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, on the science of politics and the relation between institutions and human well-being, had a significant influence on the Founders in America as they created the new Constitution that united the states (see Colbourn 1998). Another important and influential eighteenth-century work that emphasizes the role of the association of ideas on passion and character is Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792). This work followed Wollstonecraft’s 1790 Vindication of the Rights of Man, which took the form of a long letter, addressed to Edmund Burke, responding to his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). In A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Wollstonecraft begins with a short dedication to Talleyrand, in which she responds to his pamphlet on public instruction in France, asking him to reconsider how girls are educated and to revise the Constitution to include the rights of women. In the first part of the Vindication, Wollstonecraft begins with a critical analysis of political power and the subordination of the members of society, and she advocates the establishing of a true civilization, one whose members are mature, and have cultivated reason and virtue. She then turns to examine views on women, especially on how girls and women should be educated, in works penned primarily by men. She takes to task Rousseau (some of whose political theory she admired) for his chapter on the education 7

For further discussion of the influence of Hume and Hartley on English radicalism, see Halévy (1955).

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of girls and women in Émile (1762), James Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women (1765), and John Gregory’s “A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters” (1774). All three works advocate a “disorderly” education that renders women weak, ignorant, obedient, and useless. After this critical analysis, Wollstonecraft places at the center of the work a short chapter, “The Effect which an Early Association of Ideas has upon the Character.” She distinguishes between an instantaneous association, the flights of imagination we find in poetry, for example, and the habitual association of ideas that, as she puts it (after Pope), “grows ‘with our growth’ ” and “has a great effect on the moral character of mankind.” The habitual associations formed in the female mind, based in large part on how girls are raised, results in a gendered mind and character. Since these habits of the mind develop at an early age, when the understanding is particularly “ductile,” the associations “can seldom be disentangled by reason.”8 The way in which girls are raised “serves to fix impressions, call forth emotions, and associate ideas, that give a sexual character to the mind” (Wollstonecraft 1995: 201). While Wollstonecraft is often associated with the valorization of reason, especially given the rise of romanticism and the cult of feeling and sensibility, both reason and feeling are for her capacities habitually shaped by association (see Bour 1999: 301–5). For Wollstonecraft, as for Hume and Hartley, association helps to constitute reason and our critical capacities. But, Wollstonecraft argues, as Hume does with respect to prejudice, that more insidious associations can block the cultivation of reason and judgment, and instead adversely affect the passions and even the physical condition of the body. Again, just as Hume draws a distinction between the delicacy of passion, which leaves someone over-sensitive and self-absorbed, and the delicacy of taste, which requires cultivation and employs reasoning and reflection, Wollstonecraft attacks the false associations that lead to delicate or inflamed passions. These twisted habits of feeling are reflected in the body and its physical expressions, such as an acute sensitivity, fainting or physical frailty. Moreover, girls quickly learn that they only have power and pleasure when they act in ways that please men. The emphasis for girls on learning by rote makes them the objects of sarcasm, and their attention to manners over morals leaves them with a weakened capacity for critical judgment. The lack of training of the understanding and of the cultivation of virtue further leaves them without the strength of mind to reflect on and undo these pernicious associations. In the revolutionary final chapters, Wollstonecraft argues for schooling of boys and girls together in day schools, where they could cultivate modesty and learn to associate modesty with respect (rather than with an “artful veil” for women’s wantonness). Wollstonecraft envisions more freedom for girls in physical activity, moral cultivation, and a civic sense. When both women and men acquire “a rational affection for their country, founded on knowledge,” both can assert the rights that they will truly have earned (Wollstonecraft 1995: 291). 8 Wollstonecraft does not spare boys’ education from criticism, noting in particular that boys in boarding school tend to become selfish and vicious. She argues that the day school should provide a co-educational setting for boys and girls, with a common curriculum, uniform clothing, and exposure to good manners, the arts, and our shared humanity.

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3.3 Conjectural Histories of the Development of Society Wollstonecraft was not the only thinker to examine in depth the need to better the position of women. John Millar was a pioneer in terms of the particular methodological approach he takes towards the relation between the position and treatment of women, and the particular mode of subsistence and kinds of institutions from which women’s social roles derive. Millar is one of several Scottish thinkers interested in analyzing society in terms of what they regarded as the universal stages of development. It should be emphasized that the Scottish stadial theorists did not think of social progress as inevitable and predetermined. Indeed, all introduced versions of the theory of unintended consequences, which examined how an unintended result, such as social stability, arose from a quite different motive, such as self-interest or admiring and emulating the wealthy. I will first briefly examine some of the most notable of these thinkers, and then look in more depth at Millar’s unique achievement. Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society argues for a fact-based natural history of the development of societies and its members. Ferguson challenges the speculative conjectures of those such as Hobbes or Rousseau who want to analyze human nature in terms of the individual outside a social setting. To such speculative accounts, Ferguson responds, “Mankind are to be taken in groups, as they have always subsisted” (Ferguson 1782: 6). As with any other animal, the natural historian must suppose that their present qualities and dispositions are consistent with those that existed in prior ages. Nevertheless, a major difference between man and other animals is that whereas in the case of the latter, each individual realizes its nature as it lives out its natural lifespan, in the case of man, by contrast, both the species and the individual progresses: men “build on the foundations laid by their ancestors, . . . [and] tend to a perfection in the application of their faculties, to which the aid of long experience is required, and to which many generations must have combined their endeavours” (Ferguson 1782: 7). As Hume had also argued, the use of art and the establishment of artifices are both natural to man. The development of his reason and language, and the capacity of his imagination, impel him to improve his condition. It is important to note that Ferguson both describes the development of society, progressing from rude (savage and barbarian) to polished and commercial, and also allows for great diversity of institutions and customs within each stage of development. The differences in the mode of subsistence, of government, and other institutions influence both moral values and views about the passions through which people express their moral commitments. These aspects of Ferguson’s thought were influential on both eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thinkers, including Herder, Hegel, and Marx. Ferguson is also recognized as one of the early founders of the modern social sciences (see Olson 1993: ch. 10). In An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith systematically analyzes what he took to be the four key stages of social development: hunter, pastoral, agricultural, and commercial (with manufacturing followed by foreign commerce). Smith focuses on the economy and how the human tendency to “truck,

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barter, and exchange,” fosters the gradual and progressive improvement of the means to afford subsistence for members of a society (Smith 1981: Vol. 1, 25). In The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks, John Millar adopts the fourfold view of the stages of society, but does so with an eye to analyzing the differences in each stage to four main kinds of authority: that of men over women, fathers over children, political leaders over subjects or citizens, and masters over servants or slaves. Millar’s approach reveals both his deep interest, following Montesquieu, in how laws and institutions influence the lives of the people living under them, and his commitment to attending closely to a wide variety of written material to establish evidence for his arguments. In the Introduction, he writes that we must study the following aspects of a particular society: “the fertility or barrenness of the soil, the nature of its productions, the species of labour requisite for procuring subsistence, the number of individuals collected together in one community, their proficiency in arts, the advantages which they enjoy for entering into mutual transactions, and for maintaining an intimate correspondence” (Millar 2006: 83). These aspects influence a community’s values, beliefs, habits, and dispositions. Criticizing those historians who focus only on great historical events and who give too much credit to the “heroes and sages” who supposedly shape a society, Millar argues for in-depth examination of legislation, travel writing (where there is sufficient evidence that its content is credible), and other texts to gain greater understanding of how the influences that shape the lives of various members of the different kinds of society (Millar 2006: 87). In Chapter 1, “Of the Rank and Condition of Women in Different Ages,” Millar draws on a variety of historical and travel literatures to discuss various customs of the hunter stage of social development. This includes comparative analysis to show that some of these customs are common, whether they hold in a hunter society in the current age or in one from long ago. Such customs include pre-marital sex, marriage by use, and possessing wives in common, and are accompanied by certain manners, including a lack of modesty and refinement. Millar focuses on the fact that hunting societies are ones in which, since it is the men who primarily hunt for valued food and defend the group, it is men who earn respect. Insightfully, and in anticipation of Friedrich Engels and Sherrie Ortner, among others, Millar argues that women, without the opportunity to cultivate hunting skills, were not respected, and had to occupy a humbler place, taking care of the inferior concerns of the household. Their role is thus one of serving men. By the time a society reaches the fourth stage, that of commerce, and where it has reached a certain degree of opulence, at least some classes of people have the leisure to cultivate more polished manners, to learn and acquire more knowledge, to achieve greater refinement in the arts, and to mix freely for the sake of spreading knowledge and culture. Millar makes reference to the salon culture of Europe, and points to the respect and admiration that women earn due to their agreeable characters, their art in conversation, and also, their rank and position in society. Echoing Hume’s views in “Of Polygamy and Divorce,” he cautions against possible corruption or dissipation in an opulent society, especially when it combines with customs such as polygamy, which again enslaves women, or frequency of divorce in ancient Rome. Although there are uniform dispositions, passions, and sentiments in human nature, some, such as the freedom and confidence of women,

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and a genuine respect for their qualities and attainments, can only be cultivated in a society arranged in such a way as to give them the opportunity to do so and to value their doing so. While Adam Smith’s work, particularly his lectures on jurisprudence, has long been recognized as a significant influence on Millar’s work, we should note also that Hume influenced the latter’s methodological approach to the analysis of slavery. Hume’s discussion of slavery in his essay “Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations” has been crucial to understanding the ideological dimension of slavery throughout history (see Finley 1998). His careful documentation of laws, speeches, and other texts from ancient Greek and Roman societies anticipate the philosophical historical method that Millar brings to bear on his treatment of women, and on practices of parenting, political leadership, and the hiring or owning of domestic and public labor. Millar’s critically rigorous analysis of modern slavery, in Eastern Europe and the European colonies, and of the gradual abolition of indentured servitude in Britain, is particularly impressive for its detail of facts about various practices, laws, and ideologies. It goes well beyond Adam Smith’s anemic, in comparison, discussion of slavery in the Americas. For Millar, as for Hume, although they differ in some details, slavery has a detrimental effect on morality, rendering slave owners abusive and inhumane. Millar does agree with Smith on the point that workers are more industrious when they are paid for their work. As Millar points out, it is the liberty of nations that promotes progress in commerce and the arts, and when extended to the masses, results in national happiness and prosperity. Both the prosperity and the security of a society are consistent with the liberty afforded its members.

3.4 Conclusion I have here aimed to show, first, that British thinkers of the eighteenth century (as well as their contemporaries elsewhere in the world), aware of the progress in natural philosophy with the development of new empirical and mathematical methods, as well as instrumentation, began to incorporate the discourse of natural philosophical methods into their own work on human nature. Nevertheless, these same thinkers had very different approaches and objectives with respect to their analyses of human nature. I have focused on some of those who proceeded more systematically, for example, using associationist frameworks, or drawing on a range of literatures and documents as evidence for the stages of human society. These thinkers left important legacies, resulting in the case of associationism in important social reforms in the law, government, and education.

References Bacon, Francis (2000). The New Organon, ed. Lisa Jardine & Michael Silverthorne. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barfoot, Michael (1990). “Hume and the Culture of Science in the Early Eighteenth Century”, in M. A. Stewart (ed), Studies in the Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 151–90).

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Bour, Isabelle (1999). “Epistemological Ambiguities: Reason, Sensibility, and Association of Ideas in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman”, XVII, XVIII: Bulletin de la société d’études anglo-américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, 49: 299–310. Butler, Joseph (1729). Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel, 2nd edn. London. Colbourn, Trevor (ed.) (1998). Fame and the Founding Fathers:  Essays by Douglas Adair. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Ferguson, Adam (1782). An Essay on the History of Civil Society. London. Finley, Moses I. (1998). Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, ed. Brent D. Shaw. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers. Gay, J. (1781). “Preliminary Dissertation, concerning the Fundamental Principle of Virtue or Morality”, in W. King, An Essay on the Origin of Evil, ed. and transl. Edmund Law, 5th edn. London. Hackmann, W. D. (1989). “Scientific Instruments: Models of Brass and Aids to Discovery”, in Gooding, D., T. Pinch, & S. Schaffer (eds), The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 31–65. Halévy, Elie (1955). The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism, transl., Mary Morri. Boston:  The Beacon Press. Hartley, David (1749). Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations. In Two Parts. London. Hobbes, Thomas (1994 [1651]). Leviathan, ed. Edwin Curley. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., Inc. Hume, David (1978 [1739/1740]). A Treatise of Human Nature. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hume, David (2008 [1757]). A Dissertation on the Passions; The Natural History of Religion, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hutcheson, Francis (2002 [1728]). An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, with Illustrations on the Moral Sense, ed. Aaron Garrett. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Hutcheson, Francis (2004). An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, ed. Wolfgang Leidhold. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Kivy, Peter (2003). The Seventh Sense:  Francis Hutcheson and Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics, 2nd edn. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Larrère, Catherine (2008). “In Search of the Newton of the Moral World: The Intelligibility of Society and the Naturalist Model of Law from the End of the Seventeenth Century to the Middle of the Eighteenth Century”, in Lorraine Daston & Michael Stolleis (eds), Natural Law and Laws of Nature in Early Modern Europe: Jurisprudence, Theology, Moral and Natural Philosophy. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 249–64. Locke, John (1975 [1700]). An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Mandeville, Bernard (1988 [1924]). The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits. Commentary by F. B. Kaye. 2 vols. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Millar, John (2006 [1806]). The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks, ed. Aaron Garrett. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Noxon, James (1973). Hume’s Philosophical Development:  A  Study of His Methods. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Olson, Richard (1993). The Emergence of the Social Sciences, 1642–1792. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company. Porter, Roy (ed.) (2003). The Cambridge History of Science, Vol. 4: Eighteenth-Century Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Reid, Thomas (1997). An Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense, ed. D. Brookes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Search, Edward, pseud. [Abraham Tucker] (1768). The Light of Nature Pursued. London. Shaftesbury, A. Cooper, 3rd Earl of (2001). Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, Adam (1981 [1976]). An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell & A. S. Skinner; W. B. Todd, text ed. 2 vols. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Smith, Roger (1995). “The Language of Human Nature”, in Christopher Fox, Roy Porter, & Robert Wokler (eds), Inventing Human Science: Eighteenth-Century Domains. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 88–111. Taylor, Gabriele (1985). Pride, Shame, and Guilt:  Emotions of Self-Assessment. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Turnbull, George (1740). Principles of Moral Philosophy. London. Wollstonecraft, Mary (1995). A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Sylvana Tomaselli. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wood, Paul (1990). “Science and the Pursuit of Virtue in the Aberdeen Enlightenment”, in M. A. Stewart (ed.), Studies in the Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment. Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 127–50. Wood, Paul (2003). “Science, Philosophy, and the Mind”, in Roy Porter (ed.), The Cambridge History of Science, Vol. 4: Eighteenth-Century Science. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 800–24.

chapter 4

rh etoric and e l o qu e n c e :  t h e l a n g uag e of persuasion Paddy Bullard

Rhetoric is the art of persuasion, according to the simple Aristotelian definition, and is based on the systematic analysis of natural or non-artistic eloquence (see e.g., Cicero, De Oratore, I.xxxii.146). After the revival of learning, the Humanists worked hard to put the art on a modern footing by perfecting its systematic form—a process that involved much dispute over its shared boundaries with the art of logic. Without entirely neglecting these academic quarrels, philosophers of the Enlightenment turned their attention back towards the foundations of the art. Eighteenth-century rhetoric is characterized above all by its urge to observe the natural sources of eloquence, to describe the phenomenon of untaught excellence in speaking and writing. A philosophical rhetoric is one that identifies the general causes of eloquence. This is a line of investigation pursued by many eighteenth-century writers who did not think of themselves as rhetoricians in the old tradition. Indeed, the figure who best represents this general tendency is a fictional one: Walter Shandy, the father of the eponymous hero of Laurence Sterne’s Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent. (1759–67). When Tristram goes up to Jesus College, Cambridge, as he reports it, his tutors are amazed that his father is so proficiently argumentative without knowing so much as the names of the schemes he is using: Walter ‘was born an orator’, Tristram comments; ‘Persuasion hung upon his lips, and the Elements of Logick and Rhetorick were so blended up in him,–and, withal, he had so shrewd a guess at the weaknesses and passions of his respondent,—that Nature might have stood up and said,– “This man is eloquent’’’ (Sterne 1759: Vol. 1, 119). Part of the joke about rhetoric in Tristram Shandy is that Walter turns out to be much less eloquent than other characters who lack even his amateurish dedication to the art. His brother Toby, usually gagged by modesty, makes an impassioned ‘Apologetical Oration’ in defence of his soldiering in volume six, and Toby’s servant Trim gives the most moving speech of all in volume

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five, dropping his hat—with perfectly-judged finesse—to enact the premature death of Tristram’s brother Bobby. As Joseph Priestley observes in the first of A Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism (delivered at Warrington Academy from 1762), the art of eloquence has a general appeal ‘because, language being common to us all, men can the more easily conceive both the importance, and the difficulty of the improvements of which it is capable’ (Priestley 1777: 1–2). Eighteenth-century commentators on rhetoric understood that the improvement of eloquence is deeply involved with its commonality. The development of critical commentary on the art of eloquence during the eighteenth century can be seen most clearly in terms of national context. English, Irish, and Scottish approaches to the subject diverge because of variations in constitutional context; because of conflicting local allegiances to earlier thinkers; and because academic institutions had traditions of approaching the subject in contrasting ways. In England, the sense of relative proximity to a functioning, legislating parliament seems to have fostered a general tendency towards pragmatism, realism, and a degree of cynicism in the way that commentators approached rhetoric. In Scotland, by contrast, the closure of the national parliament in 1709 seems to have diverted cultural energies that might once have been channelled into deliberative rhetoric, and fostered a sense of nostalgia for public eloquence that could be satisfied only in part by pulpit oratory. Most interestingly of all, in Ireland the existence of a working though constitutionally handicapped parliament at College Green provided Irish orators with opportunities to practise their art. But it also presented political frustrations—and these made the improvement of Irish eloquence seem an urgent patriotic duty. Divergent philosophical traditions also help distinguish the characters of rhetorical thought in the three nations.

4.1 England The English contribution to the debate is least distinctive, perhaps because it is most thoroughly overshadowed by anti-rhetorical sentiment. At the end of the previous century the experimental scientists of the Royal Academy had declared their ‘constant Resolution to reject all the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style’ in their discourses (Sprat 1667: 113), and John Locke had attacked rhetoric as ‘the great Art of Deceit and Errour’ (1975: III.x.34). Locke held that the natural and divine purpose of language was the sociable exchange of ideas between individuals. In their primary signification, words ‘stand for nothing, but the Ideas in the Mind of him that uses them’ (1975: III.ii.2), but they fulfil their communicative function by taking on ‘secondary significations’, which refer to the ideas of a speaker’s interlocutors, and to the reality of things. Locke’s objection to rhetoric is that it must necessarily pervert this communicative process, being designed to ‘insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment’ (1975: III.x.34). Much of the commentary on rhetoric written in England during the eighteenth century returns to these themes. Locke’s campaign against rhetoric made a particularly strong impression on his followers among the

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eighteenth-century commonwealthsmen and radical Whigs, who might ordinarily be expected to have cherished eloquence as the life-blood of republican assemblies. When the Irish-born freethinker John Toland writes Clito: A Poem on the Force of Eloquence in 1700, the career of his rhapsody on the political power of rhetoric is knocked off its course repeatedly by Lockean doubts. The effect is incongruous, if not to say bathetic: As furious Winds sweep down whate’er resists, So shall my Tongue perform whate’er it lists, With large impetuous Floods of Eloquence Tickle the Fancy and bewitch the Sense; Make what it will the justest Cause appear, And what’s perplex’d or dark, look bright and clear. . . (Toland 1700: 7)

This sort of indecision over the virtues and vices of eloquence—is it a triumphantly impetuous art, or a meanly ticklish one?—is common in English writings on the subject. Another example is the essay on eloquence written by the Old Whig John Trenchard for his journal Cato’s Letters (‘Eloquence, considered politically’, no. 103, 17 Nov. 1722). Trenchard offers a conventionally positive account of the achievements of the ancient orators, before turning suddenly into an angry Lockean lament for the evil that their arts have caused: eloquence ‘fills the mind with false ideas; and, by raising a tempest in the heart, misleads the judgment: It confounds good and evil, by throwing false colours over them; and deceives men with their own approbation’ (Trenchard and Gordon 1995: Vol. 2, 733). Trenchard concludes that eloquence is at once necessary and fatal to free governments: ‘it is an evil growing out of much good; and nothing but the abolishing of all liberty and learning can absolutely cure it’. This paradox is explored again by the Patriot Whig George Lyttelton in Letters from a Persian: ‘look into History’, he advises in Letter XLVI, ‘you will find that the same Period which carried Eloquence to its Perfection, was almost always mortal to Liberty. The Republicks of Greece and that of Rome did not see their most celebrated Orators, till the very moment that their Constitutions were over-turn’d’ (Lyttelton 1735: 146). Both Trenchard and Lyttelton were themselves parliamentarians, and this conflicted attitude to the powers and dangers of eloquence is perhaps peculiar to those English commentators with firsthand experience of legislative deliberation. The Lockean species of anti-rhetorical sentiment is also common in English writings of a more reflective and critical stamp. Bishop William Warburton, for example, uses a recognizably Lockean idiom when he argues in The Doctrine of Grace that even a divinely inspired eloquence would not display the qualities of purity, elegance, or sublimity, since those qualities are not natural or congenial to language itself. Their value is determined entirely by local cultural convention. Only the qualities of clearness and precision are essential to language ‘as it is distinguished from jargon’, according to Warburton: eloquence ‘is accidental and arbitrary, and depends on custom and fashion’—its final purpose is ‘to stifle reason, and inflame the passions’ (Warburton 1763: Vol. 1, 76, 68, 75). Locke and Warburton presented a determinedly disillusioned account of eloquence. A popular

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anecdote among those who emphasized the occult power of oratory was Plutarch’s story of the trial of Quintus Ligarius—it is retold in Thomas Gordon’s essay on ‘Eloquence, considered philosophically’ for Cato’s Letters (no. 104, 24 Nov. 1722), and discussed by many eighteenth-century writers on rhetoric (e.g., Rollin 1734: Vol. 2, 207; Ward 1759: Vol. 1, 205–7; Young 1759: 47; Steele 1987: Vol. 1, 483). Caesar had resolved that Ligarius, an ally of Pompey, should be condemned to death through the Roman courts. Cicero undertook his defence, and spoke, as Gordon puts it, ‘with such a variety of pathos, and such an amazing grace, that Caesar often changed countenance; and it was plain his soul was in a hurricane’ (Trenchard and Gordon 1995: 739). Caesar dropped his papers, and acquitted Ligarius. The polemicist John Brown, a protégé of William Warburton who shared his Lockean prejudices against eloquence, offered a witty and characteristically cynical re-reading of Plutarch’s story in one of his Essays on the Characteristics. The real triumph of rhetoric here, Brown conjectures, was Caesar’s, not Cicero’s. The whole performance of trembling and paper-dropping was put on to flatter the oratorical vanity of Cicero, whom Caesar had reasons for conciliating at that moment: ‘With perfect Address therefore he played back the Orator’s Art upon himself ’ (Brown 1751: 27–8). Brown shows how the true pursuit of rhetoric’s pragmatic (rather than artistic) ends must get the better of eloquence itself—as though offering a cynical inversion of Pascal’s maxim, that ‘le vrai éloquence se moque de l’éloquence’ (Pascal 1954: 576). Another protégé of Warburton, Bishop Richard Hurd, dramatized this very process of inversion in his dialogue ‘On Sincerity in the Commerce of the World’, an imagined conversation between the poet and courtier Edmund Waller and the Cambridge Platonist Henry More. More is the ‘eloquent moralist’ devoted to spiritual truth, whose ‘affections readily flame out at the touch of his own fiery meditations’; Waller is cast as the plain man of experience, reconciled to the necessity of worldly accommodation (Hurd 1759: 6). In Hurd’s story, Waller’s mastery of persuasive practice leaves his ‘eloquent’ opponent speechless, especially when he describes the campaign of bribery, dissimulation, and self-exculpatory oratory by which he saved himself from parliamentary prosecution for treason during the Interregnum. Warburton, Brown, and Hurd each condemn the arts of eloquence, while relishing the enactment of rhetoric’s triumph over itself.

4.2 Ireland The contribution of Irish rhetoricians to the eighteenth-century conversation about eloquence is particularly original, despite the smallness of their number and their relative lack of support from institutions. Where Lockean anti-rhetorical sentiment predominates in English thought on the subject, much that was distinctive in rhetorical criticism from Ireland can be traced to the writings of George Berkeley. In the first place, there is a disagreement between Berkeley and Locke about the origins of language. Locke says that language progresses from individual perception to conceptual abstraction by the capacity of words to represent ‘abstract general ideas’. In the introduction to his Treatise

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concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), Berkeley denies that we have any real experience of such ideas. When a word takes on a general signification it refers not to a distinct abstract idea, Berkeley argues, but to ‘several particular Ideas, any one of which it indifferently suggests to the Mind’ as representative of the others in its class (Berkeley 1710: 15). According to Locke and his followers the chief purpose of language is to communicate ideas. Once again, Berkeley is doubtful about this arbitration of ends. It is the rhetorical energies of words, he argues, not their communicative purpose, that determine their main functions. These include ‘the raising of some Passions, the exciting to, or deterring from an Action, [or] the putting the Mind in some particular Disposition, to which [the idea] is in many Cases barely subservient, and sometimes intirely omitted, when these can be obtained without it, as I think doeth not infrequently happen in the familiar use of Language’ (Berkeley 1710: 30). Berkeley proposes that verbal communication is, for the most part, purely affective, and as such incapable of ‘clarity’, ‘vividness’, or any other characteristic explained by analogy with the visual faculty. The latter part of Berkeley’s argument here—that words often affect us without evoking any sort of idea—is redeployed in a critical context by Edmund Burke, during the concluding part of his Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). Burke uses it to challenge one of the central tenets of classical rhetoric. According to Quintilian’s doctrine of enargia, the orator must learn to paint vivid images in his own mind, and to evoke those same images in the minds of his audience through description (Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, [VI.ii.29], ii. 432–4; [X.vii.15], iv. 140). This ability is one of most powerful instruments of eloquence, because images are supremely efficient vehicles of emotion: for Quintilian, they give ideas presence. Following Berkeley, Burke denies that language has any such power to denote or to communicate mental images. Descriptive utterances operate ‘not by presenting any image to the mind, but by having from use the same effect on being mentioned, that their original has when it is seen . . . It is not only of those ideas which are commonly called abstract, and of which no image at all can be formed, but even of particular real beings, that we converse without having any idea of them excited in the imagination’ (Burke 1958: 167, 170). Burke draws upon Berkeley’s principles to suggest that the emotional energy of poetic language discharges itself by bypassing the imagination altogether: ‘we yield to sympathy, what we refuse to description’ (Burke 1958: 175). One of Burke’s closest literary friends from his student years at Trinity College, Dublin was Thomas Leland, whose Dissertation on the Principles of Human Eloquence (1764) owes a similar debt to Berkeley. Unusually for a treatise on rhetoric, the Dissertation is a controversial work, written against William Warburton’s Lockean argument that all standards of human eloquence are arbitrary, except the qualities of clearness and precision. Leland’s reply to Warburton is that the schemes described by the ancient rhetoricians are neither indeterminate nor artificial: ‘they are in themselves the real, natural, and necessary result of real passion and emotion’ (Leland 1764: 77)—though they may be employed deceptively, like other signs. Berkeley is one of the authorities quoted by Leland to support his contention that affectionate language is natural and congenial to human speech. While the more radical sorts of English Whig tended to deprecate rhetoric, their Irish counterparts were unhesitating promoters of the art, especially in its applied

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and practical forms. When Berkeley wondered in The Querist (1735) whether ‘half the Learning and Study of these Kingdoms is not useless, for want of proper Delivery and Pronunciation being taught in our Schools and Colleges’ (Berkeley 1752: Vol. 2, 140–1), he repeated a question that many patriotic Irishmen had asked before him, including Robert Molesworth, Jonathan Swift, James Arbuckle, and Berkeley’s friend Samuel Madden.1 The cure prescribed for the bashfulness of the Protestant ruling classes was that they should be taught ‘to pronounce some of the best Orations in the Classicks . . . and to deliver them with due Emphasis and Action, with proper Motion and Cadence of Voice, and a full Sense of the Subject they speak on’ (Madden 1738: 76–85, esp. 78–9). These reiterated calls for a revival of civic instruction in eloquence were answered, first, by the actor Thomas Sheridan, who in 1757 initiated plans for a new ‘Hibernian Academy’ in Dublin. Sheridan had sketched out a curriculum for the academy in his treatise British Education, proposing a patriot educational system based around the ‘art of elocution’—by which he meant little more than the ‘graceful management of the voice, countenance, and gesture’ (Sheridan 1756:  158). The core of Sheridan’s rather intricate argument is that the British constitution requires defence through a combination of senatorial eloquence and pulpit oratory, since, in a constitutional monarchy like Britain’s, only religious sanctions have enough moral purchase on human venality to keep civic virtue alive. Sheridan imagined a new generation of legislators and high-church preachers receiving instruction, side by side, in the arts of public speech. A second, more conventional response to the educational enthusiasms of Irish patriots was the increased provision of rhetorical instruction at Trinity College. In 1753 John Lawson became the first tenant of the chair in history and rhetoric, established in 1724, to concentrate on the latter art. His Lectures concerning Oratory, published posthumously in 1758, show his commitment to the practical agenda of Molesworth, Berkeley, and Madden: ‘The end now proposed is Improvement in Eloquence; And how is this Eloquence to be exerted? In our own Tongue. Thus it is, we are to speak at the Bar, in the Senate, in the Pulpit . . . General Precepts avail little to this End, without Experience; their Use lieth in the practical Application, in frequent Trials . . . ’ (Lawson 1758: 21, 23). Lawson’s successor in the chair, which was dedicated to rhetoric by university statute in 1762, was John Leland, who had already served a term as principal of the Hibernian Academy initiated by Sheridan. The rhetorical interests that Burke and Leland had pursued informally as undergraduates in the 1750s were, by the 1760s, an established part of university teaching in Ireland.

4.3 Scotland If the English brought a sceptical reserve to the conversation about eloquence, and the Irish introduced a certain experimenting pragmatism based on a keen awareness of 1

See e.g., Berkeley 1752: Vol. 1, 140–1; Molesworth (1694): b4r-v, 233–5; Swift 1939–74: Vol. 9, 79–80, Vol. 12, 161; Arbuckle 1734: Vol. 2, 155–62.

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physical sensation, then the distinctive contribution of Scottish thinkers to eighteenthcentury rhetoric was their ambition to broaden its systematic scope. The Scots set out to integrate the discipline into much wider investigations of politics, society, and the ‘science of man’. Of the Scottish thinkers who wrote most extensively about eloquence— Adam Smith, Lord Kames, Hugh Blair, and George Campbell—each has a different sense of how far the art of rhetoric should trespass upon the science of ethics. But they are agreed about one thing: that the subject is attractive because it obliges its students to consider how relevant taste, imagination and all the subtler forms of critical thought might be to the more severe demands of moral obligation and civic duty. In his essay ‘Of Eloquence’ (1742) David Hume argued that the art in question, ‘being merely calculated for the public, and for men of the world, cannot, with any pretense to reason, appeal from the people to more refined judges; but must submit to public verdict, without reserve or limitation’ (Hume 1987: 107). However, the criticism of rhetoric written by Hume’s compatriots might almost have been dedicated to proving him wrong. Scottish rhetoricians of the eighteenth century insisted that ‘taste’ was an indispensable critical category for the study of eloquence. As Kames summarizes it in his Elements of Criticism (1762), ‘a taste in the fine arts goes hand in hand with the moral sense, to which it is nearly allied: both of them discover what is right and what is wrong . . . neither of them are arbitrary or local; being rooted in human nature’ (Kames 2005: Vol. 1, 14). Kames sets out to demonstrate how the arts are a suitable topic for reasoned, philosophical analysis, rather than of mere animal response: ‘Instead of a painful and tedious examination of the several passions and emotions’, he writes, ‘I purpose to confine my inquiries to such attributes, relations, and circumstances, as in the fine arts are chiefly employ’d to raise agreeable emotions’ (Kames 2005: Vol. 1, 196). Kames’s project established a psychological basis for the Scottish criticism of eloquence, but it also opened opportunities for further research. According to Hugh Blair in his Edinburgh Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (delivered annually from 1759), the study of taste gives us knowledge of ourselves, leading us ‘. . . to reflect on the operations of the imagination, and the movements of the heart; and increase our acquaintance with some of the most refined feelings which belong to our frame’ (Blair 1783: Vol. 1, 9–10). George Campbell acknowledges his debt to the Elements in his own treatise on the Philosophy of Rhetoric (read publicly, 1757), but suggests that Kames’s self-confinement to the pleasures of taste, imagination, and passion fails to do justice to the scope of the ancient art upon which his inquiry is based. ‘But to treat [rhetoric] also as a useful art, and closely connected with the understanding and the will’, says Campbell—that is what will distinguish his own ‘philosophical’ approach to the art from Kames’s straightforwardly critical one (Campbell 1776: 13). The writings of Adam Smith provide the Scottish Enlightenment’s most complete account of the interpenetration between psychology, rhetoric, and ethics. In 1748 Smith began delivering lectures on rhetoric and belles-lettres to a public audience ‘chiefly composed of students in law and theology’ in Edinburgh, and he continued to give them as ‘private classes’ after his appointment to the chairs of logic (1751) and of moral philosophy (1752) at Glasgow University. The student transcript that constitutes the only surviving textual record of the lectures dates from 1762–3, three years after Smith

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published The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The first two sections of the Theory are linked to the Lectures on Rhetoric by a shared concern with the concept of ‘propriety’. In the Lectures, the propriety that interests Smith is that of the relation between the expression of the author and the sentiment (which is to say, the content) that is designed to be conveyed: ‘the perfection of stile’, he states at the start of lecture 11, ‘consists in Express in the most concise, proper and precise manner the thought of the author, and that in the manner which best conveys the sentiment, passion or affection with which it affects or he pretends it does affect him and which he designs to communicate to his reader’ (Smith 1983: 55; cf. 24, 40). The interesting thing about this statement is that it says so little about the mechanics of sentimental conveyance. All it considers is the relative inefficiency of sentimental communication when an author’s style is in some way affected. Smith reserves nearly all of the substantial moral speculation—the conjectures that actually explain his theory of rhetoric—for his larger moral treatise. According to the rule of propriety outlined in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the representations we make of other people’s feelings in our imaginations are much more powerful than any direct exchange of sympathy or affection (such as those involving the ‘feeble spark of benevolence’), not because they amplify the corresponding passions, but because they depress or temper them. In order to make the indifferent spectator ‘go along’ with the emotions of a suffering individual, the harsh primary colours of that individual’s sentiments need dimming and shadowing. The passionate sufferer longs for the ‘sole consolation’ of sharing his ‘violent and disagreeable passions’ with others, but ‘he must flatten, if I may be allowed to say so, the sharpness of his natural tone, in order to reduce it to harmony and concord with the emotions of those who are about him’ (Smith 1976: 22 [I.i.4]). Sentimental communication depends upon the rounding of the passions, the smoothing of their natural edges, so that they fit with propriety into the world of sympathy. As Smith presents it, this process of interesting other people in one’s own sentiments is essentially rhetorical: it is a technique for persuading them to yield up their sympathy. But the most elevated moral sentiments—indeed, the ‘perfection of humanity’ itself — arise specifically from the disciplines of restraint and benevolence, and from the kinds of affectionate exchange, that one enjoys only as a result of having mastered that originally self-motivated process. One consequence of rhetoric being placed within a broader range of moral sciences was that its delicate, psychological component was examined closely in terms of creative function. Scottish philosophers found it hard to decide whether rhetoric was primarily a liberal, critical art, or whether it was a mechanical, practical one. Should rhetoric be dedicated, on the one hand, to establishing rules of literary judgment and fixing standards of taste? Or should it retain, on the other, its traditional role: as the worldly art of discovering language’s most persuasive applications? At the start of his Philosophy of Rhetoric George Campbell hedges his bets on the question, suggesting that eloquence is similar to architecture, in so far as both arts ‘are to be considered as of a mixed nature, wherein utility and beauty have almost equal influence’ (Campbell 1776: 8). Later on in the treatise he qualifies the analogy. Just as architects employ masons to dispose their materials, rhetoricians have grammarians to regulate theirs. But while an architect need never put

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hand to hammer or trowel, the orator is usually obliged both ‘to design and to execute’ (Campbell 1776: 102). In other words, the practical ends of eloquence have a tendency to dominate, or at least to obtrude upon the critical function of rhetoric emphasized by Kames and Blair. The discourse of eloquence has a natural bias, Campbell implies, that tends to displace it from the calm and philosophical sphere of judgment. The word eloquence in its greatest latitude denotes, ‘That art or talent by which the discourse is adapted to its end’. Hugh Blair himself acknowledged this tendency with his severe definition of rhetoric as ‘the Art of Speaking in such a manner as to attain the end for which we speak’. Pleasure and instruction, the ends of criticism, have their place in the art, says Blair, but ‘as the most important subject of discourse is Action, or Conduct, the power of Eloquence chiefly appears when it is employed to influence Conduct, and persuade to Action’ (Blair 1783: Vol. 2, 2). And yet Blair, like Campbell, claims that his lectures are aimed at both speculative critic and practising artist: ‘and the same instructions which assist others in composing, will assist them is judging of, and relishing, the beauties of composition’ (Blair 1783: Vol. 1, 8). Although the Scottish belles-lettristes are committed to a critical methodology by their philosophical ambitions, practical imperatives hang heavily about their writings on rhetoric.

4.4 Rhetoric and Modernity The fact that it is possible to speak at all about eighteenth-century eloquence in terms of national contexts suggests how firmly the art was rooted in local circumstances, especially institutional ones. But commentators on rhetoric from England, Ireland, and Scotland shared a classical and humanistic inheritance as the basis of their criticism, and they also felt that they were involved in a common conversation. Often this conversation is antagonistic, as when Leland confronts Warburton’s anti-rhetorical arguments, or when Kames and Blair take issue with Burke’s theory of the sublime. And often it is consensual. The classes that Joseph Priestley gave at Warrington Academy set out to apply David Hartley’s psychological theories of the association of ideas to rhetorical theory. As such, they follow the Scottish example of Lord Kames (Priestley acknowledged his influence) by placing a special emphasis on ‘those finer feelings which constitute the pleasures of the imagination, and which are seldom attended to in any delineations of human nature’ (Priestley 1777: 125, 72). It is especially hard to locate the pervasive eighteenthcentury concern with gesture and elocution to origins in any one of the three nations. Joseph Addison and his English collaborators in The Spectator discuss the importance of physical gesture for eloquence (Addison 1965:  Vol. 3, 520–3 (on English inhibitions about gestural expression) and Vol. 4, 432–7 (on the applicability of oratorical gesture to theatrical performance)), and Addison’s friend and rival Jonathan Swift also makes much of it. With acknowledgments to Swift, the Irish elocutionists who follow Thomas Sheridan place the topic at the centre of the art of rhetoric; Sheridan lectures in

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Edinburgh in 1761, and the mark of his influence in emphasizing elocution is especially evident in Blair’s lectures.2  Another trend in eighteenth-century rhetoric that cuts across national boundaries is the widespread interest in its historical progress as an ancient art with changing modern uses. The art of eloquence was distinguished from the other critical disciplines, it was felt, by its singular lack of development during the modern age. As such, rhetoric represented both an anomaly in Enlightenment intellectual history, and an attractive opportunity for involvement in its solution. In his essay ‘On Eloquence’ David Hume identifies the progress of the art as the key question in contemporary rhetoric: why in a modern nation like Britain—polite, well-educated, and possessed of a popular government—has the art of public speaking been so entirely neglected ‘in comparison of the advances, which we have made in all other parts of learning’ (Hume 1987: 102; see Potkay 1994)? Edward Young concurred in his Conjectures on Original Composition: ‘the modern powers are equal to those before them; modern performance in general is deplorably short’ (Young 1759: 46). Hume’s answer is striking because he denies, by implication, that the problem is a philosophical one at all—which is to say, Hume doubts that the failure of the moderns to cultivate eloquence has any general historical cause. He considers the possibility that the proliferation of laws has narrowed the freedom of modern forensic eloquence at the bar, but he cannot see why that would constrain deliberative eloquence in parliament. He also wonders whether modern audiences are simply too sensible to fall for the tricks of rhetoric, in the way that John Locke thought they ought to be—but he cannot see why this should hold back technical progress: ‘it should make [modern rhetoricians] redouble their art, not abandon it entirely’ (Hume 1987: 104). Hume’s conclusion is that political eloquence remains uncultivated in eighteenth-century Britain because progress in the arts relies upon the innovations of very gifted individual pioneers. It is a matter of pure contingency, he suggests, that no genius has emerged to transform the practice of modern oratory, and to surpass the ancient achievements of Demosthenes and Cicero. Although Hume’s essay on eloquence seems to shunt the subject into the sidings of philosophy, it contains an implicit comparison between public eloquence and poetry that has a broader significance. Hume follows a well-established narrative in Augustan criticism about the refinement of literature during the seventeenth century. According to this narrative, modern vernacular poetry was raised out of scholastic and humanistic barbarity into a state of elegance and politeness (symbolized by the decline of the pedantic metaphysical ‘conceit’, and the evolution of the closed heroic couplet) by the refinements of an isolated artistic pioneer—Malherbe in the French version of the story told by Boileau (1674: Vol. 2, 131ff.), Edmund Waller in the British version told by Dryden (1962: Vol. 1, 7), and re-rehearsed by Thomas Rymer (1956: 127), Hume (1987: 106, 137), and many others. This particular narrative of artistic progress became increasingly 2 Thomas Sheridan tells the story of how Swift (a close friend of his father) first urged him to study elocution in An Oration Pronounced before a Numerous Body of the Nobility and Gentry (Sheridan 1757: 19–20); for Sheridan’s lecture tours see Goring 2005: 99–101; see also Blair 1783: Vol. 2, 203–225.

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important to commentators during the mid eighteenth century. For Jean d’Alembert or Edward Gibbon, the development of polite and elegant vernacular poetry during the seventeenth century heralds, and even gives impetus to the scientific and philosophical developments of the high Enlightenment (see D’Alembert 1995: 66, 96–8; Gibbon 1814: Vol. 4, 19). In so far as poetry belongs within the family of the rhetorical arts— George Campbell, for example, considers poetry a ‘branch of oratory’—it is obvious that the philosophical critic must adjust the general technology of rhetoric to accommodate developments already established in its subsidiary classes. Of the Scottish rhetoricians, Hugh Blair is most explicit about what the true progress and refinement of eloquence must involve. The declared purpose of Blair’s lectures on oratory is to substitute the principles of refinement and taste ‘in the place of artificial and scholastic rhetoric; in an endeavor to explode false ornament, to direct attention more towards substance than show, to recommend good sense as the foundation of all good composition, and simplicity as essential to all true ornament’ (Blair 1783: Vol. 1, 3; cf. Vol. 1, 291, where at the close of his lecture on figures of speech Blair declines to examine the scholastic system of individual tropes). The implication is that the technical discourse of rhetoric has held back the progress of eloquence. A new rhetoric must replace the old scholastic model, and the essence of its modernity will be its capacity to yield to the natural development of artistic practices. A general speculative account of those contexts is given by Francis Hutcheson in a brief passage on eloquence in his Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue. Hutcheson’s interest in eloquence is distinctively modern in so far as it is focused on the audience, not the orator. His attention is directed towards the relative complexity of an audience’s response to spoken eloquence, and also to the mixture of emotional openness and disinterest with which it approaches a speech. Audiences listening to oratory—especially forensic oratory, the defence or accusation of defendants in the courts of law—are invited to form sentiments about the moral states of strangers. Since ‘human Nature is calm and undisturb’d’ while these sentiments are formed, Hutcheson feels that it then tends to ‘shew its true face’ (Hutcheson 2004: 163). The sentiments are complex, because the audience must form a direct opinion about the character of the speaker at the same time as it forms indirect opinions about people the speaker is prosecuting or defending. The orator’s gestures and figures of speech ‘only move the Hearers, by giving the Audience a lively Representation of the Passions of the Speaker’, while, at a slightly deeper level of moral representation, ‘all the bold Metaphors, or Descriptions [give] the Audience a stronger impression of the moral Qualitys of the Person accus’d, or defended; of the Action advis’d, or dissuaded’ (Hutcheson 2004: 171). Hutcheson’s point is that ordinary audiences make these very complicated assessments instantly, and without any consideration of personal interest, or knowledge of ‘the Schemes of Moralists and Politicians, or the Art of Rhetorick’. Their judgments show the uninstructed ‘moral sense’ in action. Even among those who understand the art of rhetoric, ‘rude Nature is still open to every moral Impression, and Carry’d furiously along without Caution, or Suspense’ (Hutcheson 2004: 172). Human nature is adjusted more to assent than to scepticism.

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Leaving the anti-rhetorical opinions of Locke and Warburton to one side, there was in fact something approaching a consensus among eighteenth-century commentators on eloquence that the disposition of the author is more often revealed than concealed by style. This was understood to be a characteristically polite and modern perspective to take on the morality of rhetoric. Of course the possibility of dissimulation is everpresent, but the prevailing tendency of eloquence is toward sincerity. In his treatise on the sublime, Longinus had been candid about one morally dubious advantage of deploying very heightened language: that the power of great eloquence overwhelms an audience too suddenly to allow proper critical reflection. Artists can dissemble their art behind the sheer force of its affective power. David Hume repeats this equivocal observation, but qualifies it instantly with an ironic metanoeia, or self-correction: the ancient orators ‘hurried away with such a torrent of sublime and pathetic’, he writes ‘that they left their hearers no leisure to perceive the artifice, by which they were deceived. Nay, to consider the matter aright, they were not deceived by any artifice. The orator, by the force of his own genius and eloquence, first inflamed himself with anger, indignation, pity, sorrow; then communicated those impetuous movements to his audience’ (Hume 1987: 104). There is a trace of irony in Hume’s ambiguous syntax here—perhaps the audience is deceived, if not by art concealing artifice, then by the orator’s willed (and as such artificial) self-persuasion. But the point remains: that even the most powerful eloquence operates by sympathy, and that those impetuous emotions will only be communicated if the orator is sincerely inflamed. Effectiveness is an adequate sign of their truth to the orator’s intention. ‘Style that is merely figurative and ornamented’, comments Joseph Priestley, ‘is far from being calculated to deceive. For whenever it is used, no other language, or mode of speech, could give so true an idea of the state of the speaker’s mind’ (Priestley 1777: 76). There is always some calculation of probability still to be made by the audience, according to Priestley, and ‘if the circumstances and occasions of the address will not justify such vehemence of style, a man makes himself look ridiculous by attempting the imposition’ (Priestley 1777: 113). Standards of propriety smooth the process of social exchange, but they also establish circumstantial norms that make it relatively easy for audiences to guard against imposition. The Scottish rhetoricians place particular emphasis on the orator’s character as being the chief of those circumstances. ‘Style has always some reference to an author’s manner of thinking’, writes Blair; ‘it is a picture of the ideas which rise in his mind, and of the manner in which they rise there; and, hence, when we are examining an author’s composition, it is, in many cases, extremely difficult to separate the Style from the sentiment’ (Blair 1783: Vol. 1, 183–4). Blair’s emphasis on the personal dimension of eloquence belongs very much to Adam Smith’s school of rhetorical thought—Blair, who in 1762 became the first occupant of the Regius Chair in Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres at Edinburgh, had attended Smith’s lectures as an undergraduate. Smith doubts that figurative language has any occult power over the passions. He argues that it is meaningless for a rhetorician to make abstract prescriptions about the correct figure or style for particular sentiments, since styles always refer to characters first. ‘When all other circumstances are alike’, Smith says in lecture eight, ‘the character of the author must

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make the style different’ (Smith 1983: 40). Human beings, in all their varieties of disposition, truck with one another using a common linguistic currency—‘the natural desire every one has to persuade’. ‘The offering of a shilling’, Smith explains in the sixth of his Lectures on Jurisprudence, ‘is in reality offering an argument to persuade one to do so and so as it is for his interest . . . And in this manner every one is practicing oratory on others thro the whole of his life.—You are uneasy whenever one differs from you, and you endeavour to persuade