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Title: A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2 - Third edition, Revised and Expanded, in two volumes
Author: Robertson, John M.
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2 - Third edition, Revised and Expanded, in two volumes" ***
A SHORT HISTORY
OF
FREETHOUGHT
ANCIENT AND MODERN
BY
JOHN M. ROBERTSON
THIRD EDITION, REVISED AND EXPANDED
IN TWO VOLUMES
Vol. II
(ISSUED FOR THE RATIONALIST PRESS ASSOCIATION, LIMITED)
London:
WATTS & CO.,
JOHNSON'S COURT, FLEET STREET, E.C.
1915
CONTENTS
VOLUME II
PAGE
Chap. XIII--The Rise of Modern Freethought (continued)
§ 4. England. Persecution and executions under Henry VIII,
Edward VI, Mary, and Elizabeth. Charges of atheism. Lilly's
polemic. Reginald Scot on witchcraft. The Family of
Love. Hamond, Lewes, Kett. Apologetic literature. Influence
of Machiavelli. Nashe's polemic. Marlowe, Raleigh, Harriott,
Kyd. Protests of Pilkington and Hooker. Polemic of Bishop
Morton. Shakespeare. The drama generally. Executions under
James. Bacon. Suckling 1
§ 5. Popular Thought in Europe. Callidius. Flade. Wier. Coornhert.
Grotius. Gorlæus. Zwicker. Koerbagh. Beverland. Socinianism.
The case of Spain. Cervantes 32
§ 6. Scientific Thought. Copernicus. Giordano Bruno. Vanini.
Galileo. The Aristotelian strife. Vives. Ramus. Descartes.
Gassendi 41
Chap. XIV--British Freethought in the Seventeenth Century
§ 1. Lord Herbert of Cherbury. Hobbes. Selden 69
§ 2. The popular ferment: attempted suppression of heresy by
Parliament. Lawrence Clarkson. The Levellers and Toleration.
Forms of unbelief. The term "rationalist." Propaganda against
atheism. Culverwel. The Polemic of Henry More. Freethought at
the Restoration. The case of Biddle. The protests of Howe,
Stillingfleet, and Baxter. Freethought in Scotland. The
argument of Mackenzie. English Apologetics of Casaubon,
Ingelo, Temple, Wilkins, Tillotson, Cudworth, Boyle, and
others. Martin Clifford. Emergence of Deism. Avowals of
Archdeacon Parker, Sherlock, and South. Dryden. Discussion on
miracles. Charles Blount. Leslie's polemic. Growth of
apologetic literature. Toland. The Licensing Act 75
§ 3. Literary, scientific, and academic developments. Sir
Thomas Browne. Jeremy Taylor. John Spencer. Joseph Glanvill.
Cartesianism. Glisson. Influence of Gassendi.
Resistance to Copernican theory. Lord Falkland. Colonel
Fry. Locke. Bury. Temple. The Marquis of Halifax. Newton.
Unitarianism. Penn. Firmin. Latitudinarianism. Tillotson.
Dr. T. Burnet. Dr. B. Connor. John Craig. The
"rationalists" 100
Chap. XV--French and Dutch Freethought in the Seventeenth Century
1. Influence of Montaigne and Charron. Gui Patin. Naudé. La
Mothe le Vayer 117
2. Catholic Pyrrhonism 120
3. Descartes's influence. Boileau. Jesuit and royal hostility 121
4. Vogue of freethinking. Malherbe. Joan Fontanier. Théophile
de Viau. Claude Petit. Corneille. Molière 122
5. Cyrano de Bergerac 123
6. Pascal's skepticism. Religious quarrels 124
7. Huet's skepticism 126
8. Cartesianism. Malebranche 128
9. Buffier. Scientific movements 130
10. Richard Simon. La Peyrère 131
11. Dutch thought. Louis Meyer. Cartesian heresy 132
12. Spinoza 133
13. Biblical criticism. Spinozism. Deurhoff. B. Bekker 137
14. Bayle 139
15. Developments in France. The polemic of Abbadie. Persecution
of Protestants. Fontenelle 141
16. St. Evremond. Regnard. La Bruyère. Spread of
skepticism. Fanaticism at court 143
Chap. XVI--British Freethought in the Eighteenth Century
§ 1. Toland. Blasphemy Law. Strifes among believers. Cudworth.
Bishops Browne and Berkeley. Heresy in the Church. The
Schools of Newton, Leibnitz, and Clarke. Hutchinson.
Halley. Provincial deism. Saunderson. Simson. Literary
orthodoxy. Addison. Steele. Berkeley. Swift. New deism.
Shaftesbury. Trenchard. Unitarianism. Asgill. Coward.
Dodwell. Whiston 147
§ 2. Anthony Collins. Bentley's attack. Mandeville. Woolston.
Middleton. Deism at Oxford. Tindal. Middleton and
Waterland 154
§ 3. Unitarianism: its spread among Presbyterians. Chubb.
Hall. Elwall 159
§ 4. Berkeley's polemic. Lady Mary Montagu. Pope. Deism and
Atheism. Coward. Strutt 162
§ 5. Parvish. Influence of Spinoza 167
§ 6. William Pitt. Morgan. Annet. Dodwell the Younger 169
§ 7. The work achieved by deism. The social situation. Recent
disparagements and German testimony 170
§ 8. Arrest of English science. Hale. Burnet. Whiston.
Woodward. Effects of Imperialism. Contrast with France.
The mathematicians 176
§ 9. Supposed "decay" of deism. Butler. William Law. Hume 179
§ 10. Freethought in Scotland. Execution of Thomas Aikenhead.
Confiscation of innovating books. Legislation against
deism. Anstruther's and Halyburton's polemic. Strife
over creeds. John Johnstone. William Dudgeon. Hutcheson.
Leechman. Forbes. Miller. Kames. Smith. Ferguson.
Church riots 181
§ 11. Freethought in Ireland. Lord Molesworth. Archbishop Synge.
Bishop Clayton 188
§ 12. Situation in England in 1750. Richardson's lament.
Middleton. Deism among the clergy. Sykes. The deistic
evolution 190
§ 13. Materialism. La Mettrie. Shifting of the social centre:
socio-political forces. Gray's avowal. Hume's estimate.
Goldsmith's. The later deism. Bolingbroke 194
§ 14. Diderot's diagnosis. Influence of Voltaire. Chatterton.
Low state of popular culture. Prosecutions of poor
freethinkers. Jacob Ilive. Peter Annet. Later deistic
literature. Unitarianism. Evanson. Tomkyns. Watts.
Lardner. Priestley. Toulmin. D. Williams 198
§ 15. Gibbon. Spread of unbelief. The creed of the younger
Pitt. Fox. Geology. Hutton. Cowper's and Paley's
complaints. Erasmus Darwin. Mary Wollstonecraft 203
§ 16. Burns and Scotland 208
§ 17. Panic and reaction after the French Revolution. New
aristocratic orthodoxy. Thomas Paine. New democratic
freethought 209
Chap. XVII--French Freethought in the Eighteenth Century
1. Boulainvilliers. Strifes in the Church. Fénelon and Ramsay.
Fanaticism at court. New freethinking. Gilbert. Tyssot de
Patot. Deslandes. Persecution of Protestants 213
2. Output of apologetics 214
3. The political situation 216
4. Huard and Huet 216
5. Montesquieu 217
6. Jean Meslier 219
7. Freethinking priests. Pleas for toleration. Boindin 221
8. Voltaire 222
9. Errors as to the course of development 224
10. Voltaire's character and influence 229
11. Progress of tolerance. Marie Huber. Resistance of bigotry.
De Prades. The Encyclopédie. Fontenelle as censor 233
12. Chronological outline of the literary movement 236
13. New politics. The less famous freethinkers: Burigny;
Fontenelle; De Brosses; Meister; Vauvenargues; Mirabaud;
Fréret 244
14. N.-A. Boulanger. Dumarsais. Prémontval. Solidity of much
of the French product 246
15. General anonymity of the freethinkers. The orthodox defence 250
16. The prominent freethinkers. Rousseau 253
17. Astruc 256
18. Freethought in the Académie. Beginnings in classical
research. Emergence of anti-clericalism. D'Argenson's
notes 257
19. The affair of Pompignan 258
20. Marmontel's Bélisaire 259
21. The scientific movement: La Mettrie 260
22. Study of Nature. Fontenelle. Lenglet du Fresnoy. De
Maillet's Telliamed. Mirabaud. Resistance of Voltaire to
the new ideas. Switzerland. Buffon and the Church 262
23. Maupertuis. Diderot. Condillac. Robinet. Helvétius 264
24. Diderot's doctrines and influence 267
25. D'Alembert and d'Holbach 271
26. Freethought and the Revolution 273
27. The conventional myth and the facts. Necker. Abbé Grégoire.
The argument of Michelet. The legend of the Goddess of
Reason. Sacrilege in the English and French Revolutions.
Hébert. Danton. Chaumette. Clootz. The atheist Salaville 274
28. Religious and political forces of revolt. The polemic
of Rivarol 280
29. The political causation. Rebellion in the ages of faith 281
30. The polemic of Mallet du Pan. Saner views of Barante.
Freethinkers and orthodox in each political camp. Mably.
Voltaire. D'Holbach. Rousseau. Diderot. Orthodoxy of the
mass. The thesis of Chamfort 284
31. The reign of persecution 289
32. Orthodox lovers of tolerance 291
33. Napoleon 292
Chap. XVIII--German Freethought in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth
Centuries
1. Moral Decline under Lutheranism. Freethought before the
Thirty Years' War. Orthodox polemic. The movement of
Matthias Knutzen 294
2. Influence of Spinoza. Stosch. Output of apologetics 297
3. Leibnitz 298
4. Pietism. Orthodox hostility. Spread of Rationalism 300
5. Thomasius 302
6. Dippel 304
7. T. L. Lau 305
8. Wolff 305
9. Freemasonry and freethinking. J. L. Schmidt. Martin Knutzen 306
10. J. C. Edelmann 307
11. Abbot Jerusalem 308
12. English and French influences. The scientific movement.
Orthodox science. Haller. Rapid spread of rationalism 309
13. Frederick the Great 312
14. Mauvillon. Nicolai. Riem. Schade. Basedow. Eberhard.
Steinbart. Spalding. Teller 315
15. Semler. Töllner. Academic rationalism 318
16. Bahrdt 320
17. Moses Mendelssohn. Lessing. Reimarus 322
18. Vogue of deism. Wieland. Cases of Isenbiehl and Steinbuhler.
A secret society. Clerical rationalism. Schulz. The edict of
Frederick William II. Persistence of skepticism. The
Marokkanische Briefe. Mauvillon. Herder 329
19. Goethe 333
20. Schiller 336
21. Kant 337
22. Influence of Kant. The sequel. Hamann. Chr. A. Crusius.
Platner. Beausobre the younger 345
23. Fichte. Philosophic strifes 349
24. Rationalism and conservatism in both camps 350
25. Austria. Jahn. Joseph II. Beethoven 351
Chap. XIX--Freethought in the Remaining European States
§ 1. Holland. Elizabeth Wolff. Leenhof. Booms. Influence of
Bayle. Passerano. Lack of native freethought literature 352
§ 2. The Scandinavian States.
1. Course of the Reformation. Subsequent wars.
Retrogression in Denmark 354
2. Holberg's Nicolas Klimius 355
3. Sweden. Queen Christina 357
4. Swedenborg 358
5. Upper-class indifference. Gustavus III. Kjellgren and
Bellman. Torild. Retrogression in Sweden 359
6. Revival of thought in Denmark. Struensee. Mary
Wollstonecraft's survey 361
§ 3. The Slavonic States.
1. Poland. Liszinski 362
2. Russia. Nikon. Peter the Great. Kantemir. Catherine 363
§ 4. Italy.
1. Decline under Spanish Rule. Naples 365
2. Vico 365
3. Subsequent scientific thought. General revival of
freethought under French influence 367
4. Beccaria. Algarotti. Filangieri. Galiani. Genovesi.
Alfieri. Bettinelli. Dandolo. Giannone. Algarotti and
the Popes. The scientific revival. Progress and reaction
in Tuscany. Effects of the French Revolution 368
§ 5. Spain and Portugal.
1. Progress under Bourbon rule in Spain. Aranda. D'Alba 372
2. Tyranny of the Inquisition. Aranda. Olavidès 373
3. Duke of Almodobar. D'Azara. Ricla 373
4. The case of Samaniego 374
5. Bails. Cagnuelo. Centeno 375
6. Faxardo. Iriarte 375
7. Ista. Salas 376
8. Reaction after Charles III 376
9. Portugal. Pombal 377
§ 6. Switzerland.
Socinianism and its sequelæ. The Turrettini. Geneva and
Rousseau. Burlamaqui. Spread of deism 378
Chap. XX--Early Freethought in the United States
1. Deism of the revolutionary statesmen 381
2. First traces of unbelief. Franklin 381
3. Jefferson. John Adams. Washington 382
4. Thomas Paine 383
5. Paine's treatment in America 384
6. Palmer. Houston. Deism and Unitarianism 385
Chap. XXI.--Freethought in the Nineteenth Century
The Reaction. Tone in England. Clericalism in Italy and
Spain. Movement in France and Germany 386
The Forces of Renascence. International movement. Summary of
critical forces. Developments of science. Lines of resistance 389
Section 1.--Popular Propaganda and Culture
1. Democracy. Paine. Translations from the French 391
2. Huttman. Houston. Wedderburn 393
3. Pietist persecution. Richard Carlile. John Clarke.
Robert Taylor. Charles Southwell. G. J. Holyoake.
Women helpers 393
4. Hetherington. Operation of blasphemy law 395
5. Robert Owen 395
6. The reign of bigotry. Influence of Gibbon 398
7. Charles Bradlaugh and Secularism. Imprisonment of
G. W. Foote. Treatment of Bradlaugh by Parliament.
Resultant energy of secularist attack 399
8. New literary developments. Lecky. Conway. Winwood
Reade. Spencer. Arnold. Mill. Clifford. Stephen.
Amberley. New apologetics 402
9. Freethought in France. Social schemes. Fourier.
Saint-Simon. Comte. Duruy and Sainte-Beuve 404
10. Bigotry in Spain. Popular freethought in Catholic
countries. Journalism 406
11. Fluctuations in Germany. Persistence of religious
liberalism. Marx and Socialism. Official orthodoxy 409
12. The Scandinavian States and Russia 412
13. "Free-religious" societies 413
14. Unitarianism in England and America 414
15. Clerical rationalism in Protestant countries.
Switzerland. Holland. Dutch South Africa 415
16. Developments in Sweden 417
17. The United States. Ingersoll. Lincoln. Stephen
Douglas. Frederick Douglass. Academic persecution.
Changes of front 419
Section 2.--Biblical Criticism
1. Rationalism in Germany. The Schleiermacher reaction:
its heretical character. Orthodox hostility 420
2. Progress in both camps. Strauss's critical syncretism 423
3. Criticism of the Fourth Gospel 425
4. Strauss's achievement 425
5. Official reaction 426
6. Fresh advance. Schwegler. Bruno Bauer 426
7. Strauss's second Life of Jesus. His politics. His
Voltaire and Old and New Faith. His total influence 428
8. Fluctuating progress of criticism. Important issues
passed-by. Nork. Ghillany. Daumer. Ewerbeck. Colenso.
Kuenen. Kalisch. Wellhausen 431
9. New Testament criticism. Baur. Zeller. Van Manen 434
10. Falling-off in German candidates for the ministry as in
congregations. Official orthodox pressures 435
11. Attack and defence in England. The Tractarian reaction.
Progress of criticism. Hennell. The United States:
Parker. English publicists: F. W. Newman; R. W. Mackay;
W. R. Greg. Translations. E. P. Meredith; Thomas Scott;
W. R. Cassels 437
12. New Testament criticism in France. Renan and Havet 439
Section 3.--Poetry and General Literature
1. The French literary reaction. Chateaubriand 440
2. Predominance of freethought in later belles lettres 441
3. Béranger. De Musset. Victor Hugo. Leconte de Lisle. The
critics. The reactionists 442
4. Poetry in England. Shelley. Coleridge. The romantic
movement. Scott. Byron. Keats 443
5. Charles Lamb 445
6. Carlyle. Mill. Froude 447
7. Orthodoxy and conformity. Bain's view of Carlyle,
Macaulay, and Lyell 448
8. The literary influence. Ruskin. Arnold. Intellectual
preponderance of rationalism 450
9. English fiction from Miss Edgeworth to the present
time 451
10. Richard Jefferies 452
11. Poetry since Shelley 452
12. American belles lettres 453
13. Leopardi. Carducci. Kleist. Heine 454
14. Russian belles lettres 456
15. The Scandinavian States 457
Section 4.--The Natural Sciences
1. Progress in cosmology. Laplace and modern astronomy.
Orthodox resistance. Leslie 457
2. Physiology in France. Cabanis 459
3. Physiology in England. Lawrence. Morgan 461
4. Geology after Hutton. Hugh Miller. Baden Powell 462
5. Darwin 464
6. Robert Chambers 464
7. Orthodox resistance. General advance 465
8. Triumph of evolutionism. Spencer. Clifford. Huxley 466
Section 5.--The Sociological Sciences
1. Eighteenth-century sociology. Salverte. Charles
Comte. Auguste Comte 468
2. Progress in England. Orthodoxy of Hallam. Carlyle.
Grote. Thirlwall. Long 468
3. Sociology proper. Orthodox hostility 469
4. Mythology and anthropology. Tylor. Spencer. Avebury.
Frazer 470
Section 6.--Philosophy and Ethics
1. Fichte. Schelling. Hegel 471
2. Germany after Hegel. Schopenhauer. Hartmann 474
3. Feuerbach. Stirner 475
4. Arnold Ruge 478
5. Büchner 478
6. Philosophy in France. Maine de Biran. Cousin. Jouffroy 479
7. Movement of Lamennais 480
8. Comte and Comtism 483
9. Philosophy in Britain. Bentham. James Mill. Grote.
Political rationalism 484
10. Hamilton. Mansel. Spencer 485
11. Semi-rationalism in the churches 487
12. J. S. Mill 489
Section 7.--Modern Jewry
Jewish influence in philosophy since Spinoza. Modern balance
of tendencies 489
Section 8.--The Oriental Civilizations
Asiatic intellectual life. Japan. Discussions on Japanese
psychosis. Fukuzawa. The recent Cult of the Emperor. China.
India. Turkey. Greece 490
Conclusion 499
Index 503
CHAPTER XIII
THE RISE OF MODERN FREETHOUGHT--(Continued)
§ 4. England
While France was thus passing from general fanaticism to a large
measure of freethought, England was passing by a less tempestuous path
to a hardly less advanced stage of opinion. It was indeed a bloody
age; and in 1535 we have record of nineteen men and five women of
Holland, apparently Anabaptists, who denied the "humanity" of Christ
and rejected infant baptism and transubstantiation, being sentenced to
be burned alive--two suffering at Smithfield, and the rest at other
towns, by way of example. Others in Henry's reign suffered the same
penalty for the same offence; and in 1538 a priest named Nicholson
or Lambert, refusing on the King's personal pressure to recant,
was "brent in Smithfield" for denying the bodily presence in the
eucharist. [1] The first decades of "Reformation" in England truly
saw the opening of new vials of blood. More and Fisher and scores of
lesser men died as Catholics for denying the King's "supremacy" in
religion; as many more for denying the Catholic tenets which the King
held to the last; and not a few by the consent of More and Fisher for
translating or circulating the sacred books. Latimer, martyred under
Mary, had applauded the burning of the Anabaptists. One generation
slew for denial of the humanity of Christ; the next for denial of his
divinity. Under Edward VI there were burned no Catholics, but several
heretics, including Joan Bocher and a Dutch Unitarian, George Van Pare,
described as a man of saintly life. [2] Still the English evolution
was less destructive than the French or the German, and the comparative
bloodlessness of the strife between Protestant and Catholic under Mary
[3] and Elizabeth, the treatment of the Jesuit propaganda under the
latter queen as a political rather than a doctrinal question, [4]
prevented any such vehemence of recoil from religious ideals as took
place in France. When in 1575 the law De hæretico comburendo, which
had slept for seventeen years, was set to work anew under Elizabeth,
the first victims were Dutch Anabaptists. Of a congregation of them
at Aldgate, twenty-seven were imprisoned, of whom ten were burned,
and the rest deported. Two others, John Wielmacker and Hendrich Ter
Woort, were anti-Trinitarians, and were burned accordingly. Foxe
appealed to the Queen to appoint any punishment short of death,
or even that of hanging, rather than the horrible death by burning;
but in vain. "All parties at the time concurred" in approving the
course taken. [5] Orthodoxy was rampant.
Unbelief, as we have seen, however, there certainly was; and it is
recorded that Walter, Earl of Essex, on his deathbed at Dublin in 1576,
murmured that among his countrymen neither Popery nor Protestantism
prevailed: "there was nothing but infidelity, infidelity, infidelity;
atheism, atheism; no religion, no religion." [6] And when we turn aside
from the beaten paths of Elizabethan literature we see clearly what is
partly visible from those paths--a number of freethinking variations
from the norm of faith. Ascham, as we saw, found some semblance of
atheism shockingly common among the travelled upper class of his day;
and the testimonies continue. Edward Kirke, writing his "glosses"
to Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar in 1578, observes that "it was
an old opinion, and yet is continued in some men's conceit, that
men of years have no fear of God at all, or not so much as younger
folk," experience having made them skeptical. Erasmus, he notes,
in his Adages makes the proverb "Nemo senex metuit Jovem" signify
merely that "old men are far from superstition and belief in false
Gods." But Kirke insists that, "his great learning notwithstanding,
it is too plain to be gainsaid that old men are much more inclined
to such fond fooleries than younger men," [7] apparently meaning that
elderly men in his day were commonly skeptical about divine providence.
Other writers of the day do not limit unbelief to the aged. Lilly,
in his Euphues (1578), referring to England in general or Oxford
in particular as Athens, asks: "Be there not many in Athens which
think there is no God, no redemption, no resurrection?" Further, he
complains that "it was openly reported of an old man in Naples that
there was more lightness in Athens than in all Italy ... more Papists,
more Atheists, more sects, more schisms, than in all the monarchies
in the world"; [8] and he proceeds to frame an absurd dialogue of
"Euphues and Atheos," in which the latter, "monstrous, yet tractable
to be persuaded," [9] is converted with a burlesque facility. Lilly,
who writes as a man-of-the-world believer, is a poor witness as to the
atheistic arguments current; but those he cites are so much better than
his own, up to the point of terrified collapse on the atheist's part,
that he had doubtless heard them. The atheist speaks as a pantheist,
identifying deity with the universe; and readily meets a simple appeal
to Scripture with the reply that "whosoever denieth a godhead denieth
also the Scriptures which testifie of him." [10] But in one of his own
plays, played in 1584, Lilly puts on the stage a glimpse of current
controversy in a fashion which suggests that he had not remained so
contemptuously confident of the self-evident character of theism. In
Campaspe (i, 3) he introduces, undramatically enough, Plato, Aristotle,
Cleanthes, Crates, and other philosophers, who converse concerning
"natural causes" and "supernatural effects." Aristotle is made to
confess that he "cannot by natural reason give any reason of the
ebbing and flowing of the sea"; and Plato contends against Cleanthes,
"searching for things which are not to be found," that "there is no
man so savage in whom resteth not this divine particle, that there
is an omnipotent, eternal, and divine mover, which may be called
God." Cleanthes replies that "that first mover, which you term God,
is the instrument of all the movings which we attribute to Nature. The
earth ... seasons ... fruits ... the whole firmament ... and whatsoever
else appeareth miraculous, what man almost of mean capacity but
can prove it natural." Nothing is concluded, and the debate is
adjourned. Anaxarchus declares: "I will take part with Aristotle,
that there is Natura naturans, and yet not God"; while Crates rejoins:
"And I with Plato, that there is Deus optimus maximus, and not Nature."
It is a curious dialogue to put upon the stage, by the mouth of
children-actors, and the arbitrary ascription to Aristotle of high
theistic views, in a scene in which he is expressly described by a
fellow philosopher as a Naturalist, suggests that Lilly felt the
danger of giving offence by presenting the supreme philosopher
as an atheist. It is evident, however, both from Euphues and from
Campaspe, that naturalistic views were in some vogue, else they had
not been handled in the theatre and in a book essentially planned
for the general reader. But however firmly held, they could not be
directly published; and a dozen years later, over thirty years after
the outburst of Ascham, we still find only a sporadic and unwritten
freethought, however abundant, going at times in fear of its life.
Private discussion, indeed, there must have been, if there be any
truth in Bacon's phrase that "atheists will ever be talking of that
opinion, as if they ... would be glad to be strengthened by the
consent of others" [11]--an argument which would make short work
of the vast literature of apologetic theism--but even private talk
had need be cautious, and there could be no publication of atheistic
opinions. Printed rationalism could go no further than such a protest
against superstition as Reginald Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft
(1584), which, however, is a sufficiently remarkable expression of
reason in an age in which a Bodin held angrily by the delusion. [12]
Elizabeth was herself substantially irreligious, [13] and preferred
to keep the clergy few in number and subordinate in influence; [14]
but her Ministers regarded the Church as part of the State system,
and punished all open or at least aggressive heresy in the manner
of the Inquisition. Yet the imported doctrine of the subjective
character of hell and heaven, [15] taken up by Marlowe, held its
ground, and is denounced by Stubbes in his Anatomie of Abuses [16]
(1583); and other foreign philosophy of the same order found religious
acceptance. A sect called the "Family of Love," deriving from Holland
(already "a country fruitfull of heretics"), [17] went so far as
to hold that "Christ doth not signify any one person, but a quality
whereof many are partakers"--a doctrine which we have seen ascribed
by Calvin to the libertins of Geneva a generation before; [18] but
it does not appear that they were persecuted. [19] Some isolated
propagandists, however, paid the last penalty. One Matthew Hamont
or Hamond, a ploughwright, of Hetherset, was in 1579 tried by the
Bishop and Consistory of Norwich "for that he denyed Christe," and,
being found guilty, was burned, after having had his ears cut off,
"because he spake wordes of blasphemie against the Queen's Maiistie
and others of her Counsell." [20] The victim would thus seem to have
been given to violence of speech; but the record of his negations,
which suggest developments from the Anabaptist movement, is none the
less notable. In Stow's wording, [21] they run:--
"That the newe Testament and Gospell of Christe are but mere
foolishnesse, a storie of menne, or rather a mere fable.
"Item, that man is restored to grace by the meere mercy of God,
wythout the meane of Christ's bloud, death, and passion.
"Item, that Christe is not God, nor the Saviour of the world,
but a meere man, a sinfull man, and an abhominable Idoll.
"Item, that al they that worshippe him are abhominable Idolaters;
And that Christe did not rise agayne from death to life by the
power of his Godhead, neither, that hee did ascende into Heaven.
"Item, that the holy Ghoste is not God, neither that there is
any suche holy Ghoste.
"Item, that Baptisme is not necessarie in the Churche of God,
neither the use of the sacrament of the body and bloude of Christ."
There is record also of a freethinker named John Lewes burned at the
same place in 1583 for "denying the Godhead of Christ, and holding
other detestable heresies," in the manner of Hamond. [22] In the same
year Elias Thacker and John Coping were hanged at St. Edmonsbury "for
spreading certaine bookes, seditiously penned by one Robert Browne
against the Booke of Common Prayer"; and "their bookes so many as
could be found were burnt before them." [23] Further, one Peter Cole,
an Ipswich tanner, was burned in 1587 (also at Norwich) for similar
doctrine; and Francis Kett, a young clergyman, ex-fellow of Corpus
Christi College, Cambridge, was burned at the same place in 1589 for
heresy of the Unitarian order. [24] Hamond and Cole seem, however,
to have been in their own way religious men, [25] and Kett a devout
mystic, with ideas of a Second Advent. [26] All founded on the Bible.
Most surprising of all perhaps is the record of the trial of
one John Hilton, clerk in holy orders, before the Upper House
of Convocation on December 22, 1584, on the charge of having
"said in a sermon at St. Martin's-in-the-Fields that the Old and
New Testaments are but fables." (Lansdowne MSS. British Museum,
No. 982, fol. 46, cited by Prof. Storojenko, Life of Robert Greene,
Eng. tr. in Grosart's "Huth Library" ed. of Greene's Works, i,
39, note.) As Hilton confessed to the charge and made abjuration,
it may be surmised that he had spoken under the influence of
liquor. Even on that view, however, such an episode tells of a
considerable currency of unbelieving criticism.
Apart from constructive heresy, the perpetual religious dissensions
of the time were sure to stimulate doubt; and there appeared quite
a number of treatises directed wholly or partly against explicit
unbelief, as: The Faith of the Church Militant, translated from
the Latin of the Danish divine Hemming (1581), and addressed "to
the confutation of the Jewes, Turks, Atheists, Papists, Hereticks,
and all other adversaries of the truth whatsoever"; "The Touchstone
of True Religion ... against the impietie of Atheists, Epicures,
Libertines, Hippocrites, and Temporisours of these times" (1590);
An Enemie to Atheisme, translated by T. Rogers from the Latin of
Avenar (1591); the preacher Henry Smith's God's Arrow against Atheists
(1593, rep. 1611); an English translation of the second volume of La
Primaudaye's L'Académie Française, containing a refutation of atheistic
doctrine; and no fewer than three "Treatises of the Nature of God"--all
anonymous, the third known to be by Bishop Thomas Morton--all appearing
in the year 1599.
All this smoke--eight apologetic treatises in eighteen years--implies
some fire; and the translator of La Primaudaye, one "T. B.," declares
in his dedication that there has been a general growth of atheism
in England and on the continent, which he traces to "that Monster
Machiavell." Among English atheists of that school he ranks the
dramatist Robert Greene, who had died in 1592; and it has been argued,
not quite convincingly, that it was to Machiavelli that Greene had
pointed, in his death-bed recantation A Groatsworth of Wit (1592), as
the atheistic instructor of his friend Marlowe, [27] who introduces
"Machiavel" as cynical prologist to his Jew of Malta. Greene's own
"atheism" had been for the most part a matter of bluster and disorderly
living; and we find his zealously orthodox friend Thomas Nashe, in his
Strange News (1592), calling the Puritan zealot who used the pseudonym
of Martin Marprelate "a mighty platformer of atheism"; even as his
own and Greene's enemy, Gabriel Harvey, called Nashe an atheist. [28]
But Nashe in his Christ's Tears over Jerusalem (1592), though he speaks
characteristically of the "atheistical Julian," discusses contemporary
atheism in a fashion descriptive of an actual growth of the opinion,
concerning which he alleges that there is no "sect now in England so
scattered [i.e., so widely spread] as atheisme." The "outward atheist,"
he declares, "establishes reason as his God"; and he offers some
sufficiently primitive arguments by way of confutation. "They follow
the Pironicks [i.e., Pyrrhonists], whose position and opinion it is
that there is no hell or misery but opinion. Impudently they persist
in it, that the late discovered Indians show antiquities thousands
before Adam." For the rest, they not only reject the miracles of Moses
as mere natural expedients misrepresented, but treat the whole Bible
as "some late writers of our side" treat the Apocrypha. And Nashe
complains feelingly that while the atheists "are special men of wit,"
and that "the Romish seminaries have not allured unto them so many
good wits as atheism," the preachers who reply to them are men of
dull understanding, the product of a system under which preferment is
given to graduates on the score not of capacity but of mere gravity
and solemnity. "It is the superabundance of wit," declares Nashe,
"that makes atheists: will you then hope to beat them down with fusty
brown-bread dorbellism?" [29] There had arisen, in short, a ferment of
rationalism which was henceforth never to disappear from English life.
In 1593, indeed, we find atheism formally charged against two
famous men, Christopher Marlowe and Sir Walter Raleigh, of whom the
first is documentarily connected with Kett, and the second in turn
with Marlowe. An official document, [30] preserved by some chance,
reveals that Marlowe was given--whether or not over the wine-cup--to
singularly audacious derision of the received beliefs; and so explicit
is the evidence that it is nearly certain he would have been executed
for blasphemy had he not been privately killed (1593) while the
proceedings were pending. The "atheism" imputed to him is not made
out in any detail; but many of the other utterances are notably in
keeping with Marlowe's daring temper; and they amount to unbelief
of a stringent kind. In Doctor Faustus [31] he makes Mephistopheles
affirm that "Hell hath no limits ... but where we are is hell"--a
doctrine which we have seen to be current before his time; and in
his private talk he had gone much further. Nashe doubtless had him
in mind when he spoke of men of "superabundance of wit." Not only
did he question, with Raleigh, the Biblical chronology: he affirmed
"That Moyses was but a juggler, and that one Heriots" [i.e., Thomas
Harriott, or Harriots, the astronomer, one of Raleigh's circle] "can
do more than he"; and concerning Jesus he used language incomparably
more offensive to orthodox feeling than that of Hamond and Kett. There
is more in all this than a mere assimilation of Machiavelli; though
the further saying "that the first beginning of religion was only
to keep men in awe"--put also by Greene [if not by Marlowe], with
much force of versification, in the mouth of a villain-hero in the
anonymous play of Selimus [32]--tells of that influence. Marlowe was
indeed not the man to swear by any master without adding something of
his own. Atheism, however, is not inferrible from any of his works: on
the contrary, in the second part of his famous first play he makes his
hero, described by the repentant Greene as the "atheist Tamburlaine,"
declaim of deity with signal eloquence, though with a pantheistic cast
of phrase. In another passage, a Moslem personage claims to be on the
side of a Christ who would punish perjury; and in yet another the hero
is made to trample under foot the pretensions of Mohammed. [33] It was
probably his imputation of perjury to Christian rulers in particular
that earned for Marlowe the malignant resentment which inspired the
various edifying comments published after his unedifying death. Had
he not perished as he did in a tavern brawl, he might have had the
nobler fate of a martyr.
Concerning Raleigh, again, there is no shadow of proof of atheism,
though his circle, which included the Earls of Northumberland and
Oxford, was called a "school of atheism" in a Latin pamphlet by the
Jesuit Parsons, [34] published at Rome in 1593; and this reputation
clung to him. It is matter of literary history, however, that he,
like Montaigne, had been influenced by the Hypotyposes of Sextus
Empiricus; [35] his short essay The Sceptick being a naïf exposition
of the thesis that "the sceptick doth neither affirm neither deny any
position; but doubteth of it, and applyeth his Reason against that
which is affirmed, or denied, to justifie his non-consenting." [36]
The essay itself, nevertheless, proceeds upon a set of wildly false
propositions in natural history, concerning which the adventurous
reasoner has no doubts whatever; and altogether we may be sure that
his artificial skepticism did not carry him far in philosophy. In
the Discovery of Guiana (1600) he declares that he is "resolved"
of the truth of the stories of men whose heads grow beneath their
shoulders; and in his History of the World (1603-16) he insists
that the stars and other celestial bodies "incline the will by
mediation of the sensitive appetite." [37] In other directions,
however, he was less credulous. In the same History he points out,
as Marlowe had done in talk, how incompatible was such a phenomenon
as the mature civilization of ancient Egypt in the days of Abraham
with the orthodox chronology. [38] This, indeed, was heresy enough,
then and later, seeing that not only did Bishop Pearson, in 1659, in
a work on The Creed which has been circulated down to the nineteenth
century, indignantly denounce all who departed from the figures in the
margin of the Bible; but Coleridge, a century and a half later, took
the very instance of Egyptian history as triumphantly establishing
the accuracy of the Bible record against the French atheists. [39]
As regards Raleigh's philosophy, the evidence goes to show only
that he was ready to read a Unitarian essay, presumably that already
mentioned, supposed to be Kett's; and that he had intercourse with
Marlowe and others (in particular his secretary, Harriott) known
to be freethinkers. A prosecution begun against him on this score,
at the time of the inquiry concerning Marlowe (when Raleigh was in
disgrace with the Queen), came to nothing. It had been led up to by
a translation of Parsons's pamphlet, which affirmed that his private
group was known as "Sir Walter Rawley's school of Atheisme," and that
therein "both Moyses and our Savior, the Old and the New Testaments,
are jested at, and the scholars taught among other things to spell God
backwards." [40] This seems to have been idle gossip, though it tells
of unbelief somewhere; and Raleigh's own writings always indicate
[41] belief in the Bible; though his dying speech and epitaph are
noticeably deistic. That he was a deist, given to free discussion,
seems the probable truth.
In passing sentence at the close of Raleigh's trial for treason in
1603, in which his guilt is at least no clearer than the inequity of
the proceedings, Lord Chief Justice Popham unscrupulously taunted him
with his reputation for heresy. "You have been taxed by the world with
the defence of the most heathenish and blasphemous opinions, which
I list not to repeat, because Christian ears cannot endure to hear
them, nor the authors and maintainers of them be suffered to live in
any Christian commonwealth. You know what men said of Harpool." [42]
If the preface to his History of the World, written in the Tower,
be authentic, Raleigh was at due pains to make clear his belief in
deity, and to repudiate alike atheism and pantheism. "I do also account
it," he declares, "an impiety monstrous, to confound God and Nature,
be it but in terms." [43] And he is no more tolerant than his judge
when he discusses the question of the eternity of the universe, then
the crucial issue as between orthodoxy and doubt. "Whosoever will
make choice rather to believe in eternal deformity [=want of form]
or in eternal dead matter, than in eternal light and eternal life,
let eternal death be his reward. For it is a madness of that kind, as
wanteth terms to express it." [44] Inasmuch as Aristotle was the great
authority for the denounced opinion, Raleigh is anti-Aristotelean. "I
shall never be persuaded that God hath shut up all light of learning
within the lantern of Aristotle's brains." [45] But in the whole
preface there is only one, and that a conventional, expression
of belief in the Christian dogma of salvation; and as to that we
may note his own words: "We are all in effect become comedians in
religion." [46] Still, untruthful as he certainly was, [47] we may
take him as a convinced theist of the experiential school, standing
at the ordinary position of the deists of the next century.
Notably enough, he anticipates the critical position of Hume as to
reason and experience: "That these and these be the causes of these
and these effects, time hath taught us and not reason; and so hath
experience without art." [48] Such utterance, if not connected with
professions of piety, might in those days give rise to such charges of
unbelief as were so freely cast at him. But the charges seem to have
been in large part mere expressions of the malignity which religion
so normally fosters, and which can seldom have been more bitter than
then. Raleigh is no admirable type of rectitude; but he can hardly
have been a worse man than his orthodox enemies. And we must estimate
such men in full view of the low standards of their age.
The belief about Raleigh's atheism was so strong that we have
Archbishop Abbot writing to Sir Thomas Roe on Feb. 19, 1618-1619,
that Raleigh's end was due to his "questioning" of "God's being
and omnipotence." It is asserted by Francis Osborn, who had known
Raleigh, that he got his title of Atheist from Queen Elizabeth. See
the preface (Author to Reader) to Osborn's Miscellany of Sundry
Essays, etc., in 7th ed. of his Works, 1673. As to atheism at
Elizabeth's court see J. J. Tayler, Retrospect of Relig. Life of
England, 2nd ed. p. 198, and ref. Lilly makes one of his characters
write of the ladies at court that "they never jar about matters
of religion, because they never mean to reason of them" (Euphues,
Arber's ed. p. 194).
A curious use was made of Raleigh's name and fame after his
death for various purposes. In 1620 or 1621 appeared "Vox
Spiritus, or Sir Walter Rawleigh's Ghost; a Conference between
Signr. Gondamier ... and Father Bauldwine"--a "seditious" tract by
one Captain Gainsford. It appears to have been reprinted in 1622 as
"Prosopoeia. Sir Walter Rawleigh's Ghost." Then in 1626 came a new
treatise, "Sir Walter Rawleigh's Ghost, or England's Forewarner,"
published in 1626 at Utrecht by Thomas Scott, an English minister
there, who was assassinated in the same year. The title having
thus had vogue, there was published in 1631 "Rawleigh's Ghost, or,
a Feigned Apparition of Syr Walter Rawleigh to a friend of his,
for the translating into English the Booke of Leonard Lessius
(that most learned man), entituled De Providentia Numinis et
animi immortalitate, written against the Atheists and Polititians
of these days." The translation of a Jesuit's treatise (1613)
thus accredited purports to be by "A. B." In a reprint of 1651
the "feigned" disappears from the title-page; but "Sir Walter
Rawleigh's Ghost" remains to attract readers; and the translation,
now purporting to be by John Holden, who claims to have been a
friend of Raleigh's, is dedicated to his son Carew. In the preface
the Ghost adjures the translator (who professes to have heard him
frequently praise the treatise of Lessius) to translate the work
with Raleigh's name on the title, so as to clear his memory of
"a foul and most unjust aspersion of me for my presumed denial
of a deity."
The latest documentary evidence as to the case of Marlowe is
produced by Mr. F. S. Boas in his article, "New Light on Marlowe
and Kyd," in the Fortnightly Review, February, 1899, reproduced
in his edition of the works of Thomas Kyd (Clarendon Press,
1901). In addition to the formerly known data as to Marlowe's
"atheism," it is now established that Thomas Kyd, his fellow
dramatist, was arrested on the same charge, and that there was
found among his papers one containing "vile hereticall conceiptes
denyinge the divinity of Jhesus Christe our Saviour." This Kyd
declared he had had from Marlowe, denying all sympathy with its
view. Nevertheless, he was put to the torture. The paper, however,
proves to be a vehement Unitarian argument on Scriptural grounds,
and is much more likely to have been written by Francis Kett than
by Marlowe. In the MSS. now brought to light, one Cholmeley, who
"confessed that he was persuaded by Marlowe's reasons to become an
Atheiste," is represented by a spy as speaking "all evil of the
Counsell, saying that they are all Atheistes and Machiavillians,
especially my Lord Admirall." The same "atheist," who imputes
atheism to others as a vice, is described as regretting he had
not killed the Lord Treasurer, "sayenge that he could never have
done God better service."
For the rest, the same spy tells that Cholmeley believed Marlowe
was "able to shewe more sound reasons for Atheisme than any
devine in Englande is able to geve to prove devinitie, and that
Marloe told him that he hath read the Atheist lecture to Sir
Walter Raleigh and others." On the last point there is no further
evidence, save that Sir Walter, his dependent Thomas Harriott,
and Mr. Carewe Rawley, were on March 21, 1593-1594, charged upon
sworn testimonies with holding "impious opinions concerning God
and Providence." There was, however, no prosecution. Harriott
had published in 1588 a work on his travels in Virginia, at the
close of which is a passage in the devoutest vein telling of his
missionary labours (quoted by Mr. Boas, art. cited, p. 225). Yet by
1592 he had, with his master, a reputation for atheism; and that it
was not wholly on the strength of his great scientific knowledge
is suggested by the statement of Anthony à Wood that he "made a
philosophical theology, wherein he cast off the Old Testament."
Of this no trace remains; but it is established that he was
a highly accomplished mathematician, much admired by Kepler;
and that he "applied the telescope to celestial purposes almost
simultaneously with Galileo" (art. Harriott in Dict. of Nat. Biog.;
cp. art. in Encyc. Brit.). "Harriott ... was the first who dared
to say A=B in the form A - B = 0, one of the greatest sources of
progress ever opened in algebra" (Prof. A. De Morgan, Newton, his
Friend and his Niece, 1885, p. 91). Further, he improved algebraic
notation by the use of small italic letters in place of Roman
capitals, and threw out the hypothesis of secondary planets as
well as of stars invisible from their size and distance. "He was
the first to verify the results of Galileo." Rev. Baden Powell,
Hist. of Nat. Philos. 1834, pp. 126, 168. Cp. Rigaud, as cited by
Powell; Ellis's notes on Bacon, in Routledge's 1-vol. ed. 1905,
pp. 674-76; and Storojenko, as above cited, p. 38, note.
Against the aspersion of Harriott at Raleigh's trial may be cited the
high panegyric of Chapman, who terms him "my admired and soul-loved
friend, master of all essential and true knowledge," [49] and one
"whose judgment and knowledge, in all kinds, I know to be incomparable
and bottomless, yea, to be admired as much as his most blameless
life, and the right sacred expense of his time, is to be honoured and
reverenced"; with a further "affirmation of his clear unmatchedness
in all manner of learning." [50]
The frequency of such traces of rationalism at this period is to
be understood in the light of the financial and other scandals of
the Reformation; the bitter strifes of Church and dissent; and the
horrors of the wars of religion in France, concerning which Bacon
remarks in his essay Of Unity in Religion that the spectacle would
have made Lucretius "seven times more Epicure and atheist than he
was." The proceedings against Raleigh and Kyd, accordingly, did
not check the spread of the private avowal of unbelief. A few years
later we find Hooker, in the Fifth Book of his Ecclesiastical Polity
(1597), bitterly declaring that the unbelievers in the higher tenets
of religion are much strengthened by the strifes of believers; [51]
as a dozen years earlier Bishop Pilkington told of "young whelps"
who "in corners make themselves merry with railing and scoffing
at the holy scriptures." [52] And in the Treatise of the Nature of
God, by Bishop Thomas Morton (1599), a quasi-dialogue in which the
arguing is all on one side, the passive interlocutor indicates, in
the process of repudiating them, a full acquaintance with the pleas
of those who "would openly profess themselves to be of that [the
atheistic] judgment, and as far as they might without danger defend
it by argument against any whatever." The pleas include the lack of
moral control in the world, the evidences of natural causation, the
varieties of religious belief, and the contradictions of Scripture. And
such atheists, we are told, "make nature their God." [53]
From Hooker's account also it is clear that, at least with
comparatively patient clerics like himself, the freethinkers would
at times deliberately press the question of theism, and avow the
conviction that belief in God was "a kind of harmless error, bred
and confirmed by the sleights of wiser men." He further notes with
even greater bitterness that some--an "execrable crew"--who were
themselves unbelievers, would in the old pagan manner argue for the
fostering of religion as a matter of State policy, herein conning
the lesson of Machiavelli. For his own part Hooker was confessedly
ill-prepared to debate with the atheists, and his attitude was not
fitted to shake their opinions. His one resource is the inevitable
plea that atheists are such for the sake of throwing off all moral
restraint [54]--a theorem which could hardly be taken seriously by
those who knew the history of the English and French aristocracies,
Protestant and Catholic, for the past hundred years. Hooker's own
measure of rationalism, though remarkable as compared with previous
orthodoxy, went no further than the application of the argument of
Pecock that reason must guide and control all resort to Scripture
and authority; [55] and he came to it under stress of dispute, as a
principle of accommodation for warring believers, not as an expression
of any independent skepticism. When his pious antagonist Travers
cited him as saying that "his best author was his own reason" [56]
he was prompt to reply that he meant "true, sound, divine reason;
... reason proper to that science whereby the things of God are
known; theological reason, which out of principles in Scripture that
are plain, soundly deduceth more doubtful inferences." [57] Of the
application of rational criticism to Scriptural claims he had no
idea. The unbelievers of his day were for him a frightful portent,
menacing all his plans of orthodox toleration; and he would have had
them put down by force--a course which in some cases, as we have seen,
had in that age been actually taken, and was always apt to be resorted
to. But orthodoxy all the while had a sure support in the social
and political conditions which made impossible the publication of
rationalistic opinions. While the whole machinery of public doctrine
remained in religious hands or under ecclesiastical control, the mass
of men of all grades inevitably held by the traditional faith. What
is remarkable is the amount of unbelief, either privately explicit
or implicit in the higher literature, of which we have trace.
Above all there remains the great illustration of the rationalistic
spirit of the English literary renascence of the sixteenth century--the
drama of Shakespeare. Of that it may confidently be said that every
attempt to find for it a religious foundation has failed. [58]
Gervinus, while oddly suggesting that "in not only not seeking a
reference to religion in his works, but in systematically avoiding
it even when opportunity offered," Shakespeare was keeping clear of
an embroilment with the clergy, nevertheless pronounces the plays
to be wholly secular in spirit. While contending that "in action
the religious and divine in man is nothing else than the moral," the
German critic admits that Shakespeare "wholly discarded from his works
... that which religion enjoins as to faith and opinion." [59] And,
while refusing the inference of positive unbelief on the poet's part,
he pronounces that, "Just as Bacon banished religion from science, so
did Shakespeare from art.... From Bacon's example it seems clear that
Shakespeare left religious matters unnoticed on the same grounds." [60]
The latest and weightiest criticism comes to the same conclusion;
and it is only on presupposition that any other can be reached. One
of the ablest of Shakespearean critics sums up that "the Elizabethan
drama was almost wholly secular; and while Shakespeare was writing
he practically confined his view to the world of non-theological
observation and thought, so that he represents it in substantially
one and the same way whether the period of the story is pre-Christian
or Christian."
[Prof. A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, 2nd ed. p. 25. In
the concluding pages of his lecture on Hamlet, Professor Bradley
slightly modifies this statement, suggesting that the ghost is made
to appear as "the representative of the hidden ultimate power,
the messenger of divine justice" (p. 174). Here, it seems to the
present writer, Professor Bradley obtrudes the chief error of
his admirable book--the constant implication that Shakespeare
planned his plays as moral wholes. The fact is that he found
the ghost an integral part of the old play which he rewrote;
and in making it, in Professor Bradley's words, "so majestical
a phantom," he was simply heightening the character as he does
others in the play, and as was his habit in the presentment of a
king. In his volume of lectures entitled Oxford Lectures on Poetry
(1909), Professor Bradley goes more fully into the problem of
Shakespeare's religion. Here he somewhat needlessly obscures the
issue by contending (p. 349) that it is preposterous to suppose
that Shakespeare was "an ardent and devoted atheist or Brownist
or Roman Catholic," and makes the most of the poet's sympathetic
treatment of religious types and religious sentiments; but still
sums up that he "was not, in the distinctive sense of the word,
a religious man," and that "all was, for him, in the end, mystery"
(p. 353).]
This perhaps somewhat understates the case. The Elizabethan drama was
not wholly secular; [61] and certainly the dramatists individually
were not. Peele's David and Bethsabe is wholly Biblical in theme,
and, though sensual in sentiment, substantially orthodox in spirit;
and elsewhere he has many passages of Protestant and propagandist
fervour. [62] Greene and Lodge give a highly Scriptural ring to their
Looking-Glass for London; and Lodge, who uses religious expressions
freely in his early treatise, A Defence of Poetry, Music, and Stage
Plays, [63] later translated Josephus. Kyd in Arden of Feversham [64]
accepts the Christian view at the close, though The Spanish Tragedy
is pagan; and the pre-Shakespearean King Leir and his Three Daughters
(1594), probably the work of Kyd and Lodge, has long passages of
specifically Christian sentiment. Nashe, again, was a hot religious
controversialist despite his Bohemian habits and his indecorous
vein; Greene on his repentant deathbed was profusedly censorious
of atheism; [65] Lilly, as we have seen, is combatively theistic
in his Campaspe; while Jonson, as we shall see, girds at skeptics
in Volpone and The Magnetick Lady, and further wrote a quantity of
devotional verse. Even the "atheist" Marlowe, as we saw, puts theistic
sentiment into the mouth of his "atheist Tamburlaine"; and of Doctor
Faustus, despite incidental heresy, the dénouement is religiously
orthodox. Thomas Heywood may even be pronounced a religious man, [66]
as he was certainly a strong Protestant, [67] though an anti-Puritan;
and his prose treatise The Hierarchy of the Blessed Angels (1635)
exhibits a religious temperament. The same may be said of Dekker, who
is recorded to have written at least the prologue and the epilogue
for a play on Pontius Pilate, [68] and is believed to be the author
of the best scenes in The Virgin Martyr, in which he collaborated
with Massinger. He too uses supererogatory religious expressions,
[69] and shows his warm Protestantism in The Whore of Babylon, as
he does his general religious sentiment in his treatise The Seven
Deadly Sins. Chapman was certainly a devout theist, and probably
a Christian. In the "domestic" tragedy, A Warning for Fair Women
(1599), which is conjecturally ascribed to Lodge, the conclusion is
on Christian lines, as in Arden; and the same holds of The Witch of
Edmonton, by Dekker and others. Of none of these dramatists could it
be said, on the mere strength of his work, that he was "agnostic,"
though Marlowe was certainly a freethinker. The others were, first or
last, avowedly religious. Shakespeare, and Shakespeare alone, after
Marlowe, is persistently non-religious in his handling of life. Lear,
his darkest tragedy, is predominantly pagan; and The Tempest, in
its serener vein, is no less so. But indeed all the genuine plays
alike ignore or tacitly negate the idea of immortality; even the
conventional religious phrases of Macbeth being but incidental poetry.
In the words of a clerical historian, "the religious phrases which
are thinly scattered over his work are little more than expressions
of a distant and imaginative reverence. And on the deeper grounds
of religious faith his silence is significant.... The riddle of life
and death ... he leaves ... a riddle to the last, without heeding the
common theological solutions around him." [70] The practical wisdom
in which he rose above his rivals no less than in dramatic and poetic
genius, kept him prudently reticent on his opinions, as it set him
upon building his worldly fortunes while the others with hardly an
exception lived in shallows and miseries. As so often happens, it was
among the ill-balanced types that there was found the heedless courage
to cry aloud what others thought; but Shakespeare's significant silence
reminds us that the largest spirits of all could live in disregard
of contemporary creeds. For, while there is no record of his having
privately avowed unbelief, and certainly no explicit utterance of it
in his plays, [71] in no genuine work of his is there any more than
bare dramatic conformity to current habits of religious speech; and
there is often significantly less. In Measure for Measure the Duke,
counselling as a friar the condemned Claudio, discusses the ultimate
issues of life and death without a hint of Christian credence.
So silent is the dramatist on the ecclesiastical issues of his day
that Protestants and Catholics are enabled to go on indefinitely
claiming him as theirs; the latter dwelling on his generally kindly
treatment of friars; the former citing the fact that some Protestant
preacher--evidently a protégé of his daughter Susannah--was allowed
lodging at his house. But the preacher was not very hospitably
treated; [72] and other clues fail. There is good reason to think that
Shakespeare was much influenced by Montaigne's Essays, read by him in
Florio's translation, which was issued when he was recasting the old
Hamlet; and the whole treatment of life in the great tragedies and
serious comedies produced by him from that time forward is even more
definitely untheological than Montaigne's own doctrine. [73] Nor can he
be supposed to have disregarded the current disputes as to fundamental
beliefs, implicating as they did his fellow-dramatists Marlowe, Kyd,
and Greene. The treatise of De Mornay, of which Sir Philip Sidney began
and Arthur Golding finished the translation, [74] was in his time
widely circulated in England; and its very inadequate argumentation
might well strengthen in him the anti-theological leaning.
A serious misconception has been set up as to Shakespeare's cast
of mind by the persistence of editors in including among his works
without discrimination plays which are certainly not his, as the Henry
VI group, to which he contributed little, and in particular the First
Part, of which he wrote probably nothing. It is on the assumption that
that play is Shakespeare's work that Lecky (Rationalism in Europe,
ed. 1887, i, 105-106) speaks of "that melancholy picture of Joan
of Arc which is perhaps the darkest blot upon his genius." Now,
whatever passages Shakespeare may have contributed to the Second
and Third Parts, it is certain that he has barely a scene in
the First, and that there is not a line from his hand in the La
Pucelle scenes. Many students think that Dr. Furnivall has even
gone too far in saying that "the only part ... to be put down to
Shakespeare is the Temple Garden scene of the red and white roses"
(Introd. to Leopold Shakespeare, p. xxxviii); so little is there to
suggest even the juvenile Shakespeare there. (The high proportion
of double-endings is a ground for reckoning it a late sample of
Marlowe, who in his posthumously published translation of Lucan had
approached that proportion. Cp. the author's vol. on Titus Andronicus,
p. 190.) But that any critical and qualified reader can still hold
him to have written the worst of the play is unintelligible. The
whole work would be a "blot on his genius" in respect of its literary
weakness. The doubt was raised long before Lecky wrote, and was made
good a generation ago. When Lecky further proceeds, with reference to
the witches in Macbeth, to say (id. note) that it is "probable that
Shakespeare ... believed with an unfaltering faith in the reality
of witchcraft," he strangely misreads that play. Nothing is clearer
than that it grounds Macbeth's action from the first in Macbeth's own
character and his wife's, employing the witch machinery (already used
by Middleton) to meet the popular taste, but never once making the
witches really causal forces. An "unfaltering" believer in witchcraft
who wrote for the stage would surely have turned it to serious account
in other tragedies. This Shakespeare never does. On Lecky's view, he
is to be held as having believed in the fairy magic of the Midsummer
Night's Dream and the Tempest, and in the actuality of such episodes
as that of the ghost in Macbeth. But who for a moment supposes him to
have had any such belief? It is probable that the entire undertaking of
Macbeth (1605?) and later of the Tempest (1610?) was due to a wish on
the part of the theatre management to please King James, whose belief
in witchcraft and magic was notorious. Even the use of the Ghost in
Hamlet is an old stage expedient, common to the pre-Shakespearean
play and to others of Kyd's and Peele's. Shakespeare significantly
altered the dying words of Hamlet from the "heaven receive my soul"
of the old version to "the rest is silence." The bequest of his soul
to the Deity in his will is merely the regulation testamentary formula
of the time. In his sonnets, which hint his personal cast if anything
does, there is no real trace of religious creed or feeling. And it
is clearly the hand of Fletcher, a no less sensual writer than Peele,
that penned the part of Henry VIII in which occurs the Protestant tag:
"In her [Elizabeth's] days ... God shall be truly known." [75]
While, however, Shakespeare is notably naturalistic as compared with
the other Elizabethan dramatists, it remains true that their work in
the mass tells little of a habitually religious way of thinking. Apart
from the plays above named, and from polemic passages and devotional
utterances outside their plays, they hint as little of Christian
dogma as of Christian asceticism. Hence, in fact, the general and
bitter hostility of the Puritans to the stage. Even at and after
Shakespeare's death, the drama is substantially "graceless." Jonson,
who was for a time a Catholic, but reverted to the Church of England,
disliked the Puritans, and in Bartholomew Fair derides them. The age
did not admit of a pietistic drama; and when there was a powerful
pietistic public, it made an end of drama altogether. To Elizabeth's
reign probably belongs the Atheist's Tragedy of Cyril Tourneur, first
published in 1611, but evidently written in its author's early youth--a
coarse and worthless performance, full of extremely bad imitations of
Shakespeare. [76] But to the age of Elizabeth also belongs, perhaps,
the sententious tragedy of Mustapha by Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke,
first surreptitiously published in 1609. A century and a half later
the deists were fond of quoting [77] the concluding Chorus Sacerdotum,
beginning:
O wearisome condition of humanity,
Born under one law, to another bound;
Vainly begot, and yet forbidden vanity;
Created sick, commanded to be sound:
If nature did not take delight in blood,
She would have made more easy ways to good.
It is natural to suspect that the author of such lines was less
orthodox than his own day had reputed him; and yet the whole of
his work shows him much pre-occupied with religion, though perhaps
in a deistic spirit. But Brooke's introspective and undramatic
poetry is an exception: the prevailing colour of the whole drama
of the Shakespearean period is pre-Puritan and semi-pagan; and
the theological spirit of the next generation, intensified by King
James, was recognized by cultured foreigners as a change for the
worse. [78] The spirit of free learning for the time was gone,
expelled by theological rancours; and when Selden ventured in
his History of Tythes (1618) to apply the method of dispassionate
historical criticism to ecclesiastical matters he was compelled to
make a formal retractation. [79] Early Protestants had attacked, as a
papal superstition, the doctrine that tithes were levied jure divino:
Protestants had now come to regard as atheistic the hint that tithes
were levied otherwise. [80]
Not that rationalism became extinct. The "Italianate" incredulity
as to a future state, which Sir John Davies had sought to repel
by his poem, Nosce Teipsum (1599), can hardly have been overthrown
even by that remarkable production, which in the usual orthodox way
pronounces all doubters to be "light and vicious persons," who,
"though they would, cannot quite be beasts." [81] And there were
other forms of doubt. In 1602 appeared The Unmasking of the Politique
Atheist, by J. H. [John Hull], Batchelor of Divinitie, which, however,
is in the main a mere attempt to retort upon Catholics the charge of
atheism laid by them against Protestants. Soon after, in 1605, we find
Dr. John Dove producing a Confutation of Atheisme in the manner of
previous continental treatises, making the word "atheism" cover many
shades of theism; and an essayist writing in 1608 asserts that, on
account of the self-seeking and corruption so common among churchmen,
"prophane Atheisme hath taken footing in the hearts of ignorant and
simple men." [82] The orthodox Ben Jonson, in his Volpone (1607),
puts in the mouth of a fool [83] the lines:--
And then, for your religion, profess none,
But wonder at the diversity of all;
And, for your part, protest, were there no other
But simply the laws o' th' land, you would content you.
Nic Machiavel and Monsieur Bodin both
Were of this mind.
But the testimony is not the less significant; as is the account in
The Magnetick Lady (1632) of
A young physician to the family
That, letting God alone, ascribes to Nature
More than her share; licentious in discourse,
And in his life a profest voluptuary. [84]
Such statements of course prove merely a frequent coolness towards
religion, not a vogue of reasoned unbelief. But the existence
of rationalizing heresy is attested by the burning of two men,
Bartholomew Legate and Edward Wightman, for avowing Unitarian views,
in 1612. These, the last executions for heresy in England, were results
of the theological zeal of King James, stimulated by the Calvinistic
fanaticism of Archbishop Abbot, the predecessor of Laud.
James's career as a persecutor began characteristically in a meddlesome
attack upon a professor in Holland. A German theologian of Socinian
leanings, named Conrad Vorstius, professor at Steinfurth, had produced
in 1606 a somewhat heretical treatise, De Deo, but had nevertheless
been appointed in 1610 professor of theology at Leyden, in succession
to Arminius. It was his acceptance of Arminian views, joined with
his repute as a scholar, [85] that secured him the invitation, which
was given without the knowledge that at a previous period he had been
offered a similar appointment by the Socinians. In his Anti-Bellarminus
contractus, "a brief refutation of the four tomes of Bellarmin,"
he had taken the Arminian line, repudiating the Calvinist positions
which, in the opinion of Arminius, could not be defended against
the Catholic attack. But he was too speculative and ratiocinative
to be safe in an age in which the fear of spreading Socinianism
and the hate of Calvinists towards Arminianism had set up a reign of
terror. Vorstius was both "unsettling" and heterodox. His opinions were
"such as in our own day would certainly disqualify him from holding
such an office in any Christian University"; [86] and James, worked
upon by Abbot, went so far as to make the appointment of Vorstius a
diplomatic question. The stadhouder Maurice and the bulk of the Dutch
clergy being of his view, the more tolerant statesmen of Holland,
and the mercantile aristocracy, yielded from motives of prudence, and
Vorstius was dismissed in order to save the English alliance. Remaining
thenceforth without employment, he was further denounced in 1619 by
the Synod of Dort, and banished by the States General. Thereafter
he lived for two years in hiding; and soon after obtaining a refuge
in Holstein, died, worn out by his troubles. In England, meantime,
James drew up with his own hands a catalogue of the heresies found
by him in Vorstius's treatise, and caused the book to be burned in
London and at the two Universities. [87]
On the heels of this amazing episode came the cases of Wightman
and Legate. Finding, in a personal conversation, that Legate had
"ceased to pray to Christ," the King had him brought before the
Bishop of London's Consistory Court, which sentenced the heretic to
Newgate. Being shortly released, he had the imprudence to threaten an
action for false imprisonment, whereupon he was re-arrested. Chief
Justice Coke held that, technically, the Consistory Court could
not sentence to burning; but Hobart and Bacon, the law officers of
the Crown, and other judges, were of opinion that it could. Legate,
accordingly, was duly tried, sentenced, and burned at Smithfield; and
Wightman a few days later was similarly disposed of at Lichfield. [88]
Bacon's share in this matter is obscure, and has not been discussed by
either his assailants or his vindicators. As for the general public,
the historian records that "not a word was uttered against this
horrible cruelty. As we read over the brief contemporary notices
which have reached us, we look in vain for the slightest intimation
that the death of these two men was regarded with any other feelings
than those with which the writers were accustomed to hear of the
execution of an ordinary murderer. If any remark was made, it was
in praise of James for the devotion which he showed to the cause of
God." [89] That might have been reckoned on. It was not twenty years
since Hamond, Lewis, Cole, and Kett had been burned on similar grounds;
and there had been no outcry then. For generations "direness" had been
too familiar to men's thoughts to admit of their being shocked by a
judicial murder or two the more. Catholic priests had been executed
by the score: why not a pair of Unitarians? [90] Little had gone
on in the average intellectual life in the interim save religious
discussion and Bibliolatry, and not from such culture could there
come any growth of human kindness or any clearer conception of the
law of reciprocity. But, whether by force of recoil from a revival of
the fires of Smithfield or from a perception that mere cruelty did
not avail to destroy heresy, the theological ultima ratio was never
again resorted to on English ground.
Though no public protest was made, the retrospective Fuller testifies
that "such burning of heretics much startled common people, pitying
all in pain, and prone to asperse justice itself with cruelty,
because of the novelty (!) and hideousness of the punishment." [91]
It is noteworthy that within a few years of the burning of Legate
and Wightman there appeared quite a cluster of treatises explicitly
contending for toleration. In 1614 came Religion's Peace: or, a Plea
for Liberty of Conscience, by Leonard Busher, the first English book of
the kind. In 1615 came Persecution for Religion Judged and Condemned;
and in 1620 An Humble Supplication to the King's Majesty, pressing
the same doctrine. [92] There is no record of any outcry over these
works, though they are tolerably freespoken in their indictment of the
coercive school; and they had all to be reprinted a generation later,
their point having never been carried; but it may be surmised that
their appeal, which is substantially well reasoned from a secular
as well as from a theological point of view, had something to do
with the abandonment of persecution unto death. Even King James,
in opening the Parliament of 1614, professed to recognize that no
religion or heresy was ever extirpated by violence.
That an age of cruel repression of heresy had promoted unbelief
is clear from the Atheomastix of Bishop Fotherby (1622), which
notes among other things that as a result of constant disputing
"the Scriptures (with many) have lost their authority, and are
thought onely fit for the ignorant and idiote." [93] On this head
the bishop attempts no answer; and on his chosen theme he is perhaps
the worst of all apologists. His admission that there can be no à
priori proof of deity [94] may be counted to him for candour; but the
childishness of his reasoning à posteriori excludes the ascription
of philosophic insight. He does but use the old pseudo-arguments of
universal consent and design, with the simple device of translating
polytheistic terms into monotheistic. All the while he makes the usual
suggestions that there are few or no atheists to convert, and these
not worth converting--this at a folio's length. The book tells only
of difficulties evaded by vociferation. And while the growing stress
of the strife between the ecclesiasticism of the Crown and the forces
of nonconformity more and more thrust to the front religio-political
issues, there began alongside of those strifes the new and powerful
propaganda of deism, which, beginning with the Latin treatise, De
Veritate, of Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1624), was gradually to leaven
English thought for over a century.
Further, there now came into play the manifold influence of
Francis Bacon, whose case illustrates perhaps more fully than any
other the difficulties, alike external and internal, in the way of
right thinking. Taken as a whole, his work is on account of those
difficulties divided against itself, insisting as he does alternately
on a strict critical method and on the subjection of reason to
the authority of revelation. He sounds a trumpet-call to a new and
universal effort of free and circumspect intelligence; and on the
instant he stipulates for the prerogative of Scripture. Though only
one of many who assailed alike the methodic tyranny of Aristotelianism
[95] and the methodless empiricism of the ordinary "scientific" thought
of the past, he made his attack with a sustained and manifold force
of insight and utterance which still entitles him to pre-eminence
as the great critic of wrong methods and the herald of better. Yet
he not only transgresses often his own principal precepts in his
scientific reasoning; he falls below several of his contemporaries and
predecessors in respect of his formal insistence on the final supremacy
of theology over reason, alike in physics and in ethics. Where Hooker
is ostensibly seeking to widen the field of rational judgment on the
side of creed, Bacon, the very champion of mental emancipation in
the abstract, declares the boundary to be fixed.
Of those lapses from critical good faith, part of the explanation
is to be found in the innate difficulty of vital innovation for
all intelligences; part in the special pressures of the religious
environment. On the latter head Bacon makes such frequent and emphatic
protest that we are bound to infer on his part a personal experience
in his own day of the religious hostility which long followed his
memory. "Generally," he wrote of himself in one fragment, "he perceived
in men of devout simplicity this opinion, that the secrets of nature
were the secrets of God, and part of that glory whereinto the mind of
man if it seek to press shall be oppressed;... and on the other side,
in men of a devout policy he noted an inclination to have the people
depend upon God the more when they are less acquainted with second
causes, and to have no stirring in philosophy, lest it may lead to
innovation in divinity or else should discover matter of further
contradiction to divinity" [96]--a summary of the whole early history
of the resistance to science. [97] In the works which he wrote at the
height of his powers, especially in his masterpiece, the Novum Organum
(1620), where he comes closest to the problems of exact inquiry,
he specifies again and again both popular superstition and orthodox
theology as hindrances to scientific research, commenting on "those
who out of faith and veneration mix their philosophy with theology
and traditions," [98] and declaring that of the drawbacks science
had to contend with "the corruption of philosophy by superstition and
an admixture of theology is far the more widely spread, and does the
greatest harm, whether to entire systems or to their parts. For the
human understanding is obnoxious to the influence of the imagination
no less than to the influence of common notions." [99] In the same
passage he exclaims at the "extreme levity" of those of the moderns who
have attempted to "found a system of natural philosophy on the first
chapter of Genesis, on the book of Job, and other parts of the sacred
writings"; [100] and yet again, coupling as obstinate adversaries
of Natural Philosophy "superstition, and the blind and immoderate
zeal of religion," he roundly affirms that "by the simpleness of
certain divines access to any philosophy, however pure, is well nigh
closed." [101] These charges are repeatedly salved by such claims
as that "true religion" puts no obstacles in the way of science;
[102] that the book of Job runs much to natural philosophy; [103]
and, in particular, in the last book of the De Augmentis Scientiarum,
redacted after his disgrace, by the declaration--more emphatic than
those of the earlier Advancement of Learning--that "Sacred Theology
ought to be derived from the word and oracles of God, and not from
the light of nature or the dictates of reason." [104] In this mood
he goes so far as to declare, with the thorough-going obscurantists,
that "the more discordant and incredible the divine mystery is, the
more honour is shown to God in believing it, and the nobler is the
victory of faith."
[It was probably such deliverances as these that led to the
ascription to Bacon of The Christian Paradoxes, first published
(surreptitiously), without author's name, in 1645. As has been
shown by Dr. Grosart (Lord Bacon NOT the Author of "The Christian
Paradoxes," 1865) that treatise was really by Herbert Palmer,
B.D., who published it in full in part ii of his Memorials
of Godliness and Christianity, 5th ed. 1655. The argument
drawn from this treatise as to Bacon's skepticism is a twofold
mystification. The Paradoxes are the deliberate declaration of a
pietist that he believes the dogmas of revelation without rational
comprehension. The style is plainly not Bacon's; but Bacon had
said the same thing in the sentence quoted above. Dr. Grosart's
explosive defence against the criticism of Ritter (work cited,
p. 14) is an illustration of the intellectual temper involved.]
Yet even in the calculated extravagance of this last pronouncement
there is a ground for question whether the fallen Chancellor, hoping
to retrieve himself, and trying every device of his ripe sagacity to
avert opposition, was not straining his formal orthodoxy beyond his
real intellectual habit. As against such wholesale affirmation we have
his declarations that "certain it is that God worketh nothing in nature
but by second causes," and that any pretence to the contrary "is mere
imposture as it were in favour towards God, and nothing else but to
offer to the author of truth the unclean sacrifice of a lie"; [105]
his repeated objection to the discussion of Final Causes; [106] his
attack on Plato and Aristotle for rejecting the atheistic scientific
method of Democritus; [107] his peremptory assertion that motion is a
property of matter; [108] and his almost Democritean handling of the
final problem, in which he insists that primal matter is, "next to
God, the cause of causes, itself only without a cause." [109] Further,
though he speaks of Scriptural miracles in a conventional way, [110]
he drily pronounces in one passage that, "as for narrations touching
the prodigies and miracles of religions, they are either not true or
not natural, and therefore impertinent for the story of nature." [111]
Finally, as against the formal capitulation to theology at the close of
the De Augmentis, he has left standing in the first book of the Latin
version the ringing doctrine of the original Advancement of Learning
(1605), that "there is no power on earth which setteth up a throne
or chair in the spirits and souls of men, and in their cogitations,
imaginations, opinions, and beliefs, but knowledge and learning";
[112] and in his Wisdom of the Ancients [113] he has contrived to
turn a crude myth into a subtle allegory in behalf of toleration.
Thus, despite his many resorts to and prostrations before the
Scriptures, the general effect of his writings in this regard is
to set up in the minds of his readers the old semi-rationalistic
equivoque of a "two-fold truth"; reminding us as they do that he "did
in the beginning separate the divine testimony from the human." When,
therefore, he announces that "we know by faith" that "matter was
created from nothing," [114] he has the air of juggling with his
problem; and his further suggestion as to the possibility of matter
being endowed with a force of evolution, however cautiously put, is far
removed from orthodoxy. Accordingly, the charge of atheism--which he
notes as commonly brought against all who dwell solely on second causes
[115]--was actually cast at his memory in the next generation. [116]
It was of course false: on the issue of theism he is continually
descanting with quite conventional unction; as in the familiar essay
on atheism. [117] His dismissal of final causes as "barren" meant
merely that the notion was barren of scientific result; [118] and he
refers the question to metaphysic. [119] But if his theism was of a
kind disturbing to believers in a controlling Providence, as little
was it satisfactory to Christian fervour: and it can hardly be doubted
that the main stream of his argument made for a non-Biblical deism,
if not for atheism; his dogmatic orthodoxies being undermined by his
own scientific teaching.
Lechler (Gesch. des englischen Deismus, pp. 23-25) notes that
Bacon involuntarily made for deism. Cp. Amand Saintes, Hist. de
la philos. de Kant, 1844, p. 69; and Kuno Fischer, Francis
Bacon, Eng. tr. 1857, ch. xi, pp. 341-43. Dean Church (Bacon,
in "Men of Letters" series, pp. 174, 205) insists that Bacon
held by revelation and immortality; and can of course cite his
profession of such belief, which is not to be disputed. (Cp. the
careful judgment of Prof. Fowler in his Bacon, pp. 180-91, and
his ed. of the Novum Organum, 1878, pp. 43-53.) But the tendency
of the specific Baconian teaching is none the less to put these
beliefs aside, and to overlay them with a naturalistic habit of
mind. At the first remove from Bacon we have Hobbes.
As regards his intellectual inconsistencies, we can but say that they
are such as meet us in men's thinking at every new turn. Though we
can see that Bacon's orthodoxy "doth protest too much," with an eye
on king and commons and public opinion, we are not led to suppose
that he had ever in his heart cast off his inherited creed. He shows
frequent Christian prejudice in his references to pagans; and can
write that "To seek to extinguish anger utterly is but the bravery
of the Stoics," [120] pretending that the Christian books are more
accommodating, and ignoring the Sermon on the Mount. In arguing that
the "religion of the heathen" set men upon ending "all inquisition
of nature in metaphysical or theological discourse," and in charging
the Turks with a special tendency to "ascribe ordinary effects to the
immediate workings of God," [121] he is playing not very scrupulously
on the vanity of his co-religionists. As he was only too well aware,
both tendencies ruled the Christian thought of his own day, and derive
direct from the sacred books--not from "abuse," as he pretends. And
on the metaphysical as on the common-sense side of his thought he
is self-contradictory, even as most men have been before and since,
because judgment cannot easily fulfil the precepts it frames for
itself in illuminated hours. Latter-day students have been impressed,
as was Leibnitz, by the original insight with which Bacon negated the
possibility of our forming any concrete conception of a primary form
of matter, and insisted on its necessary transcendence of our powers
of knowledge. [122] On the same principle he should have negated
every modal conception of the still more recondite Something which he
put as antecedent to matter, and called God. [123] Yet in his normal
thinking he seems to have been content with the commonplace formula
given in his essay on Atheism--that we cannot suppose the totality of
things to be "without a mind." He has here endorsed in its essentials
what he elsewhere calls "the heresy of the Anthropomorphites," [124]
failing to apply his own law in his philosophy, as elsewhere in his
physics. When, however, we realize that similar inconsistency is fallen
into after him by Spinoza, and wholly escaped perhaps by no thinker,
we are in a way to understand that with all his deflections from his
own higher law Bacon may have profoundly and fruitfully influenced
the thought of the next generation, if not that of his own.
The fact of this influence has been somewhat obscured by the modern
dispute as to whether he had any important influence on scientific
progress. [125] At first sight the old claim for him in that regard
seems to be heavily discounted by the simple fact that he definitely
rejected the Copernican system of astronomy. [126] Though, however,
this gravely emphasizes his fallibility, it does not cancel his
services as a stimulator of scientific thought. At that time only a few
were yet intelligently convinced Copernicans; and we have the record of
how, in Bacon's day, Harvey lost heavily in credit and in his medical
practice by propounding his discovery of the circulation of the blood,
[127] which, it is said, no physician over forty years old at that
time believed in. For the scientific men of that century--and only
among them did Copernicanism find the slightest acceptance--it was
thus no fatal shortcoming in Bacon to have failed to grasp the true
scheme of sidereal motion, any more than it was in Galileo to be wrong
about the tides and comets. They could realize that it was precisely
in astronomy, for lack of special study and expert knowledge, that
Bacon was least qualified to judge. Intellectual influence on science
is not necessarily dependent on actual scientific achievement, though
that of course furthers and establishes it; and the fact of Bacon's
impact on the mind of the next age is abundantly proved by testimonies.
For a time the explicit tributes came chiefly from abroad;
though at all times, even in the first shock of his disgrace,
there were Englishmen perfectly convinced of his greatness. To
the winning of foreign favour he had specially addressed himself
in his adversity. Grown wary in act as well as wise in theory, he
deleted from the Latin De Augmentis a whole series of passages of the
Advancement of Learning which disparaged Catholics and Catholicism;
[128] and he had his reward in being appreciated by many Jesuit and
other Catholic scholars. [129] But Protestants such as Comenius and
Leibnitz were ere long more emphatic than any Catholics; [130] and at
the time of the Restoration we find Bacon enthusiastically praised
among the more open-minded and scientifically biassed thinkers of
England, who included some zealous Christians. [131] It was not that
his special "method" enabled them to reach important results with
any new facility; its impracticability is now insisted on by friends
as well as foes. [132] It was that he arraigned with extraordinary
psychological insight and brilliance of phrase the mental vices which
had made discoveries so rare; the alternate self-complacency and
despair of the average indolent mind; the "opinion of store" which was
"cause of want"; the timid or superstitious evasion of research. In
all this he was using his own highest powers, his comprehension
of human character and his genius for speech. And though his own
scientific results were not to be compared with those of Galileo and
Descartes, the wonderful range of his observation and his curiosity,
the unwearying zest of his scrutiny of well-nigh all the known fields
of Nature, must have been an inspiration to multitudes of students
besides those who have recorded their debt to him. It is probable
that but for his literary genius, which though little discussed is
of a very rare order, his influence would have been both narrower and
less durable; but, being one of the great writers of the modern world,
he has swayed men down till our own day.
Certain it is that alongside of his doctrine there persisted in
England, apart from all printed utterance, a movement of deistic
rationalism, of which the eighteenth century saw only the fuller
development. Sir John Suckling (1609-1641), rewriting about 1637
his letter to the Earl of Dorset, An Account of Religion by Reason,
tells how in a first sketch it "had like to have made me an Atheist at
Court," and how "the fear of Socinianism at this time renders every man
that offers to give an account of religion by reason, suspected to have
none at all"; [133] but he also mentions that he knows it "still to
be the opinion of good wits that the particular religion of Christians
has added little to the general religion of the world." [134] Himself a
young man of talent, he offers quasi-rational reconciliations of faith
with reason which can have satisfied no real doubter, and can hardly
have failed to introduce doubt into the minds of some of his readers.
§ 5. Popular Thought in Europe
Of popular freethought in the rest of Europe there is little to
chronicle for a hundred and fifty years after the Reformation. The
epoch-making work of Copernicus, published in 1543, had little or
no immediate effect in Germany, where, as we have seen, physical
and verbal strifes had begun with the ecclesiastical revolution,
and were to continue to waste the nation's energy for a century. In
1546, all attempts at ecclesiastical reconciliation having failed,
the emperor Charles V, in whom Melanchthon had seen a model monarch,
[135] decided to put down the Protestant heresy by war. Luther had
just died, apprehensive for his cause. Civil war now raged till the
peace of Augsburg in 1555; whereafter Charles abdicated in favour
of his son Philip. Here were in part the conditions which in France
and elsewhere were later followed by a growth of rational unbelief;
and there are some traces even at this time of partial skepticism in
high places in the German world, notably in the case of the Emperor
Maximilian II, who, "grown up in the spirit of doubt," [136] would
never identify himself with either Protestants or Catholics. [137]
But in Germany there was still too little intellectual light, too
little brooding over experience, to permit of the spread of such a
temper; and the balance of forces amounted only to a deadlock between
the ecclesiastical parties. Protestantism on the intellectual side,
as already noted, had sunk into a bitter and barren polemic [138]
among the reformers themselves; and many who had joined the movement
reverted to Catholicism. [139] Meanwhile the teaching and preaching
Jesuits were zealously at work, turning the dissensions of the enemy
to account, and contrasting its schism upon schism with the unity
of the Church. But Protestantism was well welded to the financial
interest of the many princes and others who had acquired the Church
lands confiscated at the Reformation; since a return to Catholicism
would mean the surrender of these. [140] Thus there wrought on the one
side the organized spirit of anti-heresy [141] and on the other the
organized spirit of Bibliolatry, neither gaining ground; and between
the two, intellectual life was paralysed. Protestantism saw no way
of advance; and the prevailing temper began to be that of the Dark
Ages, expectant of the end of the world. [142] Superstition abounded,
especially the belief in witchcraft, now acted on with frightful
cruelty throughout the whole Christian world; [143] and in the nature
of the case Catholicism counted for nothing on the opposite side.
The only element of rationalism that one historian of culture can
detect is the tendency of the German moralists of the time to turn
the devil into an abstraction by identifying him with the different
aspects of human folly and vice. [144] There was, as a matter of fact,
a somewhat higher manifestation of the spirit of reason in the shape
of some new protests against the superstition of sorcery. About 1560
a Catholic priest named Cornelius Loos Callidius was imprisoned by
a papal nuncio for declaring that witches' confessions were merely
the results of torture. Forced to retract, he was released; but again
offended, and was again imprisoned, dying in time to escape the fate
of a councillor of Trèves, named Flade, who was burned alive for
arguing, on the basis of an old canon (mistakenly named from the
Council of Ancyra), that sorcery is an imaginary crime. [145] Such
an infamy explains a great deal of the stagnation of many Christian
generations. But courage was not extinct; and in 1563 there appeared
the famous John Wier's treatise on witchcraft, [146] a work which,
though fully adhering to the belief in the devil and things demoniac,
argued against the notion that witches were conscious workers of
evil. Wier [147] was a physician, and saw the problem partly as one
in pathology. Other laymen, and even priests, as we have seen, had
reacted still more strongly against the prevailing insanity; but it
had the authority of Luther on its side, and with the common people
the earlier protests counted for little.
Reactions against Protestant bigotry in Holland on other lines were
not much more successful, and indeed were not numerous. One of the
most interesting is that of Dirk Coornhert (1522-1590), who by his
manifold literary activities [148] became one of the founders of Dutch
prose. In his youth Coornhert had visited Spain and Portugal, and had
there, it is said, seen an execution of victims of the Inquisition,
[149] deriving thence the aversion to intolerance which stamped
his whole life's work. It does not appear, however, that any such
peninsular experience was required, seeing that the Dutch Inquisition
became abundantly active about the same period. Learning Latin
at thirty, in order to read Augustine, he became a translator of
Cicero and--singularly enough--of Boccaccio. An engraver to trade,
he became first notary and later secretary to the burgomaster of
Haarlem; and, failing to steer clear of the strifes of the time,
was arrested and imprisoned at the Hague in 1567. On his release
he sought safety at Kleef in Santen, whence he returned after the
capture of Brill to become secretary of the new national Government
at Haarlem; but he had again to take to flight, and lived at Kleef
from 1572 to 1577. In 1578 he debated at Leyden with two preachers of
Delft on predestination, which he declared to be unscriptural; and was
officially ordered to keep silence. Thereupon he published a protest,
and got into fresh trouble by drawing up, as notary, an appeal to
the Prince of Orange on behalf of his Catholic fellow-countrymen for
freedom of worship, and by holding another debate at the Hague. [150]
Always his master-ideal was that of toleration, in support of which
he wrote strongly against Beza and Calvin (this in a Latin treatise
published only after his death), declaring the persecution of heretics
to be a crime in the kingdom of God; and it was as a moralist that he
gave the lead to Arminius on the question of predestination. [151]
"Against Protestant and Catholic sacerdotalism and scholastic he
set forth humanist world-wisdom and Biblical ethic," [152] to that
end publishing a translation of Boëthius (1585), and composing his
chief work on Zedekunst (Ethics). Christianity, he insisted, lay not
in profession or creed, but in practice. By way of restraining the
ever-increasing malignity of theological strifes, he made the quaint
proposal that the clergy should not be allowed to utter anything but
the actual words of the Scriptures, and that all works of theology
should be sequestrated. For these and other heteroclite suggestions
he was expelled from Delft (where he sought finally to settle, 1587)
by the magistrates, at the instance of the preachers, but was allowed
to die in peace at Gouda, where he wrote to the last. [153]
All the while, though he drew for doctrine on Plutarch, Cicero, Seneca,
and Marcus Aurelius equally with the Bible, Coornhert habitually
founded on the latter as the final authority. [154] On no other footing
could any one in his age and country stand as a teacher. It was not
till after generations of furious intolerance that a larger outlook
was possible in the Netherlands; and the first steps towards it were
naturally taken independently of theology. Although Grotius figured
for a century as one of the chief exponents of Christian evidences,
it is certain that his great work on the Law of War and Peace (1625)
made for a rationalistic conception of society. "Modern historians
of jurisprudence, like Lerminier and Bluntschli, represent it as the
distinctive merit of Grotius that he freed the science from bondage
to theology." [155] The breach, indeed, is not direct, as theistic
sanctions are paraded in the Prolegomena; but along with these goes
the avowal that natural ethic would be valid even were there no God,
and--as against the formula of Horace, Utilitas justi mater--that
"the mother of natural right is human nature itself." [156]
Where Grotius, defender of the faith, figured as a heretic, unbelief
could not speak out, though there are traces of its underground
life. The charge of atheism was brought against the Excercitationes
Philosophicæ of Gorlæus, published in 1620; but, the book being
posthumous, conclusions could not be tried. Views far short of
atheism, however, were dangerous to their holders; for the merely
Socinian work of Voelkel, published at Amsterdam in 1642, was burned
by order of the authorities, and a second impression shared the same
fate. [157] In 1653 the States of Holland forbade the publication of
all Unitarian books and all Socinian worship; and though the veto
as to books was soon evaded, that on worship was enforced. [158]
Still, Holland was relatively tolerant as beside other countries; and
when the Unitarian physician Daniel Zwicker (1612-1678), of Dantzig,
found his own country too hot to hold him, he came to Holland (about
1652) "for security and convenience." [159] He was able to publish
at Amsterdam in 1658 his Latin Irenicum Irenicorum, wherein he lays
down three principles for the settlement of Christian difficulties,
the first being "the universal reason of mankind," while Scripture
and tradition hold only the second and third places. His book is
a remarkable investigation of the rise of the doctrines of the
Logos and the Trinity, which he traced to polytheism, making out
that the first Christians, whom he identified with the Nazarenes,
regarded Jesus as a man. The book evoked many answers, and it
is somewhat surprising that Zwicker escaped serious persecution,
dying peacefully in Amsterdam in 1678, whereas writers much less
pronounced in their heresy incurred aggressive hostility. Descartes,
as we shall see, during his stay in Holland was menaced by clerical
fanaticism. Some fared worse. In the generation after Grotius, one
Koerbagh, a doctor, for publishing (1668) a dictionary of definitions
containing advanced ideas, had to fly from Amsterdam. At Culenberg he
translated a Unitarian work and began another; but was betrayed, tried
for blasphemy, and sentenced to ten years' imprisonment, to be followed
by ten years' banishment. He compromised by dying in prison within
the year. Even as late as 1678 the juri-consult Hadrian Beverland
(afterwards appointed, through Isaac Vossius, to a lay office under
the Church of England) was imprisoned and struck off the rolls of
Leyden University for his Peccatum Originale, in which he speculated
erotically as to the nature of the sin of Adam and Eve. The book was
furiously answered, and publicly burned. [160] It was only after an
age of such intolerance that Holland, at the end of the seventeenth
century, began to become for England a model of freedom in opinion,
as formerly in trade. And it seems to have been through Holland,
in the latter part of the seventeenth century, that there came the
fresh Unitarian impulse which led to the considerable spread of the
movement in England after the Revolution of 1688. [161]
Unitarianism, which we have seen thus invading Holland somewhat
persistently during half a century, was then as now impotent beyond
a certain point by reason of its divided allegiance, though it has
always had the support of some good minds. Its denial of the deity of
Jesus could not be made out without a certain superposing of reason
on Scripture; and yet to Scripture it always finally appealed. The
majority of men accepting such authority have always tended to
believe more uncritically; and the majority of men who are habitually
critical will always repudiate the Scriptural jurisdiction. In
Poland, accordingly, the movement, so flourishing in its earlier
years, was soon arrested, as we have seen, by the perception that
it drove many Protestants back to Catholicism; among these being
presumably a number whose critical insight showed them that there was
no firm standing-ground between Catholicism and Naturalism. Every new
advance within the Unitarian pale terrified the main body, many of
whom were mere Arians, holding by the term Trinity, and merely making
the Son subordinate to the Father. Thus when one of their most learned
ministers, Simon Budny, followed in the steps of Ferencz Davides (whom
we have seen dying in prison in Transylvania in 1579), and represented
Jesus as a "mere" man, he was condemned by a synod (1582) and deposed
from his office (1584). He recanted, and was reinstated, [162] but
his adherents seem to have been excommunicated. The sect thus formed
were termed Semi-Judaizers by another heretic, Martin Czechowicz, who
himself denied the pre-existence of Jesus, and made him only a species
of demi-god; [163] yet Fausto Sozzini, better known as Faustus Socinus,
who also wrote against them, and who had worked with Biandrata to have
Davides imprisoned, conceded that prayer to Christ was optional. [164]
Faustus, who arrived in Poland in 1579, seems to have been moved
to his strenuously "moderate" policy, which for a time unified the
bulk of the party, mainly by a desire to keep on tolerable terms with
Protestantism. That, however, did not serve him with the Catholics;
and when the reaction set in he suffered severely at their hands. His
treatise, De Jesu Christu Servatore, created bitter resentment; and
in 1598 the Catholic rabble of Cracow, led "as usual by the students
of the university," dragged him from his house. His life was saved
only by the strenuous efforts of the rector and two professors of
the university; and his library was destroyed, with his manuscripts,
whereof "he particularly regretted a treatise which he had composed
against the atheists"; [165] though it is not recorded that the
atheists had ever menaced either his life or his property. He seems to
have been zealous against all heresy that outwent his own, preaching
passive obedience in politics as emphatically as any churchman,
and condemning alike the rising of the Dutch against Spanish rule
and the resistance of the French Protestants to their king. [166]
This attitude may have had something to do with the better side
of the ethical doctrines of the sect, which leant considerably to
non-resistance. Czechowicz (who was deposed by his fellow-Socinians
for schism) seems not only to have preached a patient endurance of
injuries, but to have meant it; [167] and to the Socinian sect belongs
the main credit of setting up a humane compromise on the doctrine
of eternal punishment. [168] The time, of course, had not come for
any favourable reception of such a compromise in Christendom; and
it is noted of the German Socinian, Ernst Schoner (Sonerus), who
wrote against the orthodox dogma, that his works are "exceedingly
scarce." [169] Unitarianism as a whole, indeed, made little headway
outside of Poland and Transylvania.
In Spain, meantime, there was no recovery from the paralysis wrought
by the combined tyranny of Church and Crown, incarnate in the
Inquisition. The monstrous multiplication of her clergy might alone
have sufficed to set up stagnation in her mental life; but, not content
with the turning of a vast multitude [170] of men and women away from
the ordinary work of life, her rulers set themselves to expatriate
as many more on the score of heresy. A century after the expulsion
of the Jews came the turn of the Moors, whose last hold in Spain,
Granada, had been overthrown in 1492. Within a generation they had been
deprived of all exterior practice of their religion; [171] but that
did not suffice, and the Inquisition never left them alone. Harried,
persecuted, compulsorily baptized, deprived of their Arabic books,
they repeatedly revolted, only to be beaten down. At length, in the
opening years of the seventeenth century (1610-1613), under Philip III,
on the score that the great Armada had failed because heretics were
tolerated at home, it was decided to expel the whole race; and now a
million Moriscoes, among the most industrious inhabitants of Spain,
were driven the way of the Jews. It is needless here to recall the
ruinous effect upon the material life of Spain: [172] the aspect
of the matter which specially concerns us is the consummation of
the policy of killing out all intellectual variation. The Moriscoes
may have counted for little in positive culture; but they were one
of the last and most important factors of variation in the country;
and when Spain was thus successively denuded of precisely the most
original and energetic types among the Jewish, the Spanish, and the
Moorish stocks, her mental arrest was complete.
To modern freethought, accordingly, she has till our own age
contributed practically nothing. Huarte seems to have had no Spanish
successors. The brilliant dramatic literature of the reigns of the
three Philips, which influenced the rising drama alike of France
and England, is notably unintellectual, [173] dealing endlessly in
plot and adventure, but yielding no great study of character, and
certainly doing nothing to further ethics. Calderon was a thorough
fanatic, and became a priest; [174] Lope de Vega found solace under
bereavement in zealously performing the duties of an Inquisitor; and
was so utterly swayed by the atrocious creed of persecution which
was blighting Spain that he joined in the general exultation over
the expulsion of the Moriscoes. Even the mind of Cervantes had not on
this side deepened beyond the average of his race and time; [175] his
old wrongs at Moorish hands perhaps warping his better judgment. His
humorous and otherwise kindly spirit, so incongruously neighboured,
must indeed have counted for much in keeping life sweet in Spain
in the succeeding centuries of bigotry and ignorance. But from the
seventeenth century till the other day the brains were out, in the
sense that genius was lacking. That species of variation had been too
effectually extirpated during two centuries to assert itself until
after a similar duration of normal conditions. The "immense advantage
of religious unity," which even a modern Spanish historian [176] has
described as a gain balancing the economic loss from the expulsion of
the Moriscoes, was precisely the condition of minimum intellectual
activity--the unity of stagnation. No kind of ratiocinative thought
was allowed to raise its head. A Latin translation of the Hypotyposes
of Sextus Empiricus had been permitted, or at least published, in
Catholic France; but when Martin Martinez de Cantatapiedra, a learned
orientalist and professor of theology, ventured to do the same thing
in Spain--doubtless with the idea of promoting faith by discouraging
reason--he was haled before the Inquisition, and the book proscribed
(1583). He was further charged with Lutheran leanings on the score
that he had a preference for the actual text of Scripture over that
of the commentators. [177] In such an atmosphere it was natural that
works on mathematics, astronomy, and physics should be censured as
"favouring materialism and sometimes atheism." [178] It has been
held by one historian that at the death of Philip II there arose
some such sense of relief throughout Spain as was felt later in
France at the death of Louis XIV; that "the Spaniards now ventured
to sport with the chains which they had not the power to break";
and that Cervantes profited by the change in conceiving and writing
his Don Quixote. [179] But the same historian had before seen that
"poetic freedom was circumscribed by the same shackles which fettered
moral liberty. Thoughts which could not be expressed without fear of
the dungeon and the stake were no longer materials for the poet to
work on. His imagination, instead of improving them into poetic ideas
... had to be taught to reject them. But the eloquence of prose was
more completely bowed down under the inquisitorial yoke than poetry,
because it was more closely allied to truth, which of all things
was the most dreaded." [180] Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Calderon
proved that within the iron wall of Catholic orthodoxy, in an age
when conclusions were but slowly being tried between dogma and reason,
there could be a vigorous play of imaginative genius on the field of
human nature; even as in Velasquez, sheltered by royal favour, the
genius of colour and portraiture could become incarnate. But after
these have passed away, the laws of social progress are revealed
in the defect of all further Spanish genius. Even of Cervantes it
is recorded--on very doubtful authority, however--that he said "I
could have made Don Quixote much more amusing if it were not for the
Inquisition"; and it is matter of history that a passage in his book
[181] disparaging perfunctory works of charity was in 1619 ordered
by the Holy Office to be expunged as impious and contrary to the faith.
See H. E. Watts, Miguel de Cervantes, p. 167. Don Quixote was
"always under suspicion of the orthodox." Id. p. 166. Mr. Watts,
saying nothing of Cervantes's approval of the expulsion of the
Moriscoes, claims that his "head was clear of the follies and
extravagances of the reigning superstition" (id. p. 231). But
the case is truly summed up by Mr. Ormsby when he says: "For one
passage capable of being tortured into covert satire" against
things ecclesiastical, "there are ten in Don Quixote and the
novels that show--what indeed is very obvious from the little
we know of his life and character--that Cervantes was a faithful
son of the Church" (tr. of Don Quixote, 1885, introd. i, 57).
When the total intellectual life of a nation falls ever further
in the rear of the world's movement, even the imaginative arts are
stunted. Turkey excepted, the civilized nations of Europe which for
two centuries have contributed the fewest great names to the world's
bead-roll have been Spain, Austria, Portugal, Belgium, and Greece,
all noted for their "religious unity." And of all of these Spain is
the supreme instance of positive decadence, she having exhibited in
the first half of the sixteenth century a greater complex of energy
than any of the others. [182] The lesson is monumental.
§ 6. Scientific Thought
It remains to trace briefly the movement of scientific and speculative
thought which constituted the transition between the Scholastic
and the modern philosophy. It may be compendiously noted under the
names of Copernicus, Bruno, Vanini, Galileo, Ramus, Gassendi, Bacon,
and Descartes.
The great performance of Copernicus (Nicolaus Koppernigk, 1473-1543),
given to the world with an editor's treacherous preface as he lay
paralysed on his deathbed, did not become a general possession for
over a hundred years. The long reluctance of its author to let it be
published, despite the express invitation of a cardinal in the name of
the pope, was well founded in his knowledge of the strength of common
prejudice; and perhaps partly in a sense of the scientific imperfection
of his own case. [183] Only the special favour accorded to his first
sketch at Rome--a favour which he had further carefully planned for
in his dedicatory epistle to Pope Paul--saved his main treatise from
prohibition till long after its work was done. [184] It was in fact,
with all its burden of traditional error, the most momentous challenge
that had yet been offered in the modern world to established beliefs,
alike theological and lay, for it seemed to flout "common sense"
as completely as it did the cosmogony of the sacred books. It was
probably from scraps of ancient lore current in Italy in his years
of youthful study there that he first derived his idea; and in Italy
none had dared publicly to propound the geocentric theory. Its gradual
victory, therefore, is the first great modern instance of a triumph
of reason over spontaneous and instilled prejudice; and Galileo's
account of his reception of it should be a classic document in the
history of rationalism.
It was when he was a student in his teens that there came to Pisa
one Christianus Urstitius of Rostock, a follower of Copernicus,
to lecture on the new doctrine. The young Galileo, being satisfied
that "that opinion could be no other than a solemn madness," did
not attend; and those of his acquaintance who did made a jest of the
matter, all save one, "very intelligent and wary," who told him that
"the business was not altogether to be laughed at." Thenceforth he
began to inquire of Copernicans, with the result inevitable to such
a mind as his. "Of as many as I examined I found not so much as one
who told me not that he had been a long time of the contrary opinion,
but to have changed it for this, as convinced by the strength of the
reasons proving the same; and afterwards questioning them one by one,
to see whether they were well possessed of the reasons of the other
side, I found them all to be very ready and perfect in them, so that
I could not truly say that they took this opinion out of ignorance,
vanity, or to show the acuteness of their wits." On the other hand,
the opposing Aristoteleans and Ptolemeans had seldom even superficially
studied the Copernican system, and had in no case been converted from
it. "Whereupon, considering that there was no man who followed the
opinion of Copernicus that had not been first on the contrary side,
and that was not very well acquainted with the reasons of Aristotle and
Ptolemy, while, on the contrary, there was not one of the followers
of Ptolemy that had ever been of the judgment of Copernicus, and
had left that to embrace this of Aristotle," he began to realize
how strong must be the reasons that thus drew men away from beliefs
"imbibed with their milk." [185] We can divine how slow would be the
progress of a doctrine which could only thus begin to find its way
into one of the most gifted scientific minds of the modern world. It
was only a minority of the élite of the intellectual life who could
receive it, even after the lapse of a hundred years.
The doctrine of the earth's two-fold motion, as we have seen,
had actually been taught in the fifteenth century by Nicolaus of
Cusa (1401-1464), who, instead of being prosecuted, was made a
cardinal, so little was the question then considered (Ueberweg,
ii, 23-24). See above, vol. i, p. 368, as to Pulci. Only very
slowly did the work even of Copernicus make its impression. Green
(Short History, ed. 1881, p. 297) makes first the mistake of
stating that it influenced thought in the fifteenth century, and
then the further mistake of saying that it was brought home to the
general intelligence by Galileo and Kepler in the later years of
the sixteenth century (id. p. 412). Galileo's European notoriety
dates from 1616; his Dialogues of the Two Systems of the World
appeared only in 1632; and his Dialogues of the New Sciences in
1638. Kepler's indecisive Mysterium Cosmographicum appeared only in
1597; his treatise on the motions of the planet Mars not till 1609.
One of the first to bring the new cosmological conception to bear on
philosophic thought was Giordano Bruno of Nola (1548-1600), whose
life and death of lonely chivalry have won him his place as the
typical martyr of modern freethought. [186] He may be conceived as a
blending of the pantheistic and naturalistic lore of ancient Greece,
[187] assimilated through the Florentine Platonists, with the spirit
of modern science (itself a revival of the Greek) as it first takes
firm form in Copernicus, whose doctrine Bruno early and ardently
embraced. Baptized Filippo, he took Giordano as his cloister-name
when he entered the great convent of S. Domenico Maggiore at Naples
in 1563, in his fifteenth year. No human being was ever more unfitly
placed among the Dominicans, punningly named the "hounds of the Lord"
(domini canes) for their work as the corps of the Inquisition; and
very early in his cloister life he came near being formally proceeded
against for showing disregard of sacred images, and making light of
the sanctity of the Virgin. [188] He passed his novitiate, however,
without further trouble, and was fully ordained a priest in 1572,
in his twenty-fourth year. Passing then through several Neapolitan
monasteries during a period of three years, he seems to have become
not a little of a freethinker on his return to his first cloister, as
he had already reached Arian opinions in regard to Christ, and soon
proceeded to substitute a mystical and Pythagorean for the orthodox
view of the Trinity. [189]
For the second time a "process" was begun against him, and he
took flight to Rome (1576), presenting himself at a convent of his
Order. News speedily came from Naples of the process against him,
and of the discovery that he had possessed a volume of the works
of Chrysostom and Jerome with the scholia of Erasmus--a prohibited
thing. Only a few months before Bartolomeo Carranza, Bishop of Toledo,
who had won the praise of the Council of Trent for his index of
prohibited books, had been condemned to abjure for the doctrine that
"the worship of the relics of the saints is of human institution,"
and had died in the same year at the convent to which Bruno had
now gone. Thus doubly warned, he threw off his priestly habit, and
fled to the Genoese territory, [190] where, in the commune of Noli,
he taught grammar and astronomy. In 1578 he visited successively
Turin, Venice, Padua, Bergamo, and Milan, resuming at the last-named
town his monk's habit. Thereafter he again returned to Turin,
passing thence to Chambéry at the end of 1578, and thence to Geneva
early in 1579. [191] His wish, he said, was "to live in liberty and
security"; but for that he must first renounce his Dominican habit;
other Italian refugees, of whom there were many at Geneva, helping
him to a layman's suit. Becoming a corrector of the press, he seems
to have conformed externally to Calvinism; but after a stay of two
and a-half months he published a short diatribe against one Antonio
de La Faye, who professed philosophy at the Academy; and for this he
was arrested and sentenced to excommunication, while his bookseller
was subjected to one day's imprisonment and a fine. [192] After three
weeks the excommunication was raised; but he nevertheless left Geneva,
and afterwards spoke of Calvinism as the "deformed religion." After
a few weeks' sojourn at Lyons he went to Toulouse, the very centre
of inquisitional orthodoxy; and there, strangely enough, he was able
to stay for more than a year, [193] taking his degree as Master of
Arts and becoming professor of astronomy. But the civil wars made
Toulouse unsafe; and at length, probably in 1581 or 1582, he reached
Paris, where for a time he lectured as professor extraordinary. [194]
In 1583 he reached England, where he remained till 1585, lecturing,
debating at Oxford on the Copernican theory, and publishing a number
of his works, four of them dedicated to his patron Castelnau de
Mauvissière, the French ambassador. Oxford was then a stronghold
of bigoted Aristotelianism, where bachelors and masters deviating
from the master were fined, or, if openly hostile, expelled. [195]
In that camp Bruno was not welcome. But he had other shelter, at the
French Embassy in London, and there he had notable acquaintances. He
had met Sir Philip Sidney at Milan in 1578; and his dialogue, Cena de
le Ceneri, gives a vivid account of a discussion in which he took a
leading part at a banquet given by Sir Fulke Greville. His picture of
"Oxford ignorance and English ill-manners" [196] is not lenient; and
there is no reason to suppose that his doctrine was then assimilated
by many; [197] but his stay in the household of Castelnau was one
of the happiest periods of his chequered life. While in England he
wrote no fewer than seven works, four of them dedicated to Castelnau,
and two--the Heroic Fervours and the Expulsion of the Triumphant
Beast--to Sir Philip Sidney.
Returning to Paris on the recall of Castelnau in 1585, he made an
attempt to reconcile himself to the Church, but it was fruitless;
and thereafter he went his own way. After a public disputation at the
university in 1586, he set out on a new peregrination, visiting first
Mayence, Marburg, and Wittemberg. At Marburg he was refused leave to
debate; and at Wittemberg he seems to have been carefully conciliatory,
as he not only matriculated but taught for over a year (1586-1588),
till the Calvinist party carried the day over the Lutheran. [198]
Thereafter he reached Prague, Helmstadt, Frankfort, and Zurich. At
length, on the fatal invitation of the Venetian youth Mocenigo, he
re-entered Italian territory, where, in Venice, he was betrayed to
the Inquisition by his treacherous and worthless pupil. [199]
What had been done for freethought by Bruno in his fourteen years of
wandering, debating, and teaching through Europe it is impossible to
estimate; but it is safe to say that he was one of the most powerful
antagonists to orthodox unreason that had yet appeared. Of all men of
his time he had perhaps the least affinity with the Christian creed,
which was repellent to him alike in the Catholic and the Protestant
versions. The attempt to prove him a believer on the strength of
a non-autograph manuscript [200] is idle. His approbation of a
religion for the discipline of uncivilized peoples is put in terms
of unbelief. [201] In the Spaccio della bestia trionfante he derides
the notion of a union of divine and human natures, and substantially
proclaims a natural (theistic) religion, negating all "revealed"
religions alike. Where Boccaccio had accredited all the three leading
religions, Bruno disallows all with paganism, though he puts that
above Christianity. [202] And his disbelief grew more stringent with
his years. Among the heretical propositions charged against him by
the Inquisition were these: that there is transmigration of souls;
that magic is right and proper; that the Holy Spirit is the same thing
as the soul of the world; that the world is eternal; that Moses, like
the Egyptians, wrought miracles by magic; that the sacred writings
are but a romance (sogno); that the devil will be saved; that only
the Hebrews are descended from Adam, other men having descended from
progenitors created by God before Adam; that Christ was not God,
but was a notorious sorcerer (insigne mago), who, having deceived
men, was deservedly hanged, not crucified; that the prophets and
the apostles were bad men and sorcerers, and that many of them were
hanged as such. The cruder of these propositions rest solely on the
allegation of Mocenigo, and were warmly repudiated by Bruno: others
are professedly drawn, always, of course, by forcing his language,
but not without some colourable pretext, from his two "poems,"
De triplice, minimo, et mensura, and De monade, numero et figura,
published at Frankfort in 1591, in the last year of his freedom. [203]
But the allusions in the Sigillus Sigillorum [204] to the weeping
worship of a suffering Adonis, to the exhibition of suffering and
miserable Gods, to transpierced divinities, and to sham miracles,
were certainly intended to contemn the Christian system.
Alike in the details of his propaganda and in the temper of his
utterance, Bruno expresses from first to last the spirit of freethought
and free speech. Libertas philosophica [205] is the breath of his
nostrils; and by his life and his death alike he upholds the ideal
for men as no other before him did. The wariness of Rabelais and the
non-committal skepticism of Montaigne are alike alien to him; he is
too lacking in reticence, too explosive, to give due heed even to
the common-sense amenities of life, much more to hedge his meaning
with safeguarding qualifications. And it was doubtless as much by
the contagion of his mood as by his lore that he impressed men.
His personal and literary influence was probably most powerful in
respect of his eager propaganda of the Copernican doctrine, which he
of his own force vitally expanded and made part of a pantheistic
conception of the universe. [206] Where Copernicus adhered by
implication to the idea of an external and limitary sphere--the last
of the eight of the Ptolemaic theory--Bruno reverted boldly to the
doctrine of Anaximandros, and declared firmly for the infinity of
space and of the series of the worlds. In regard to biology he makes
an equivalent advance, starting from the thought of Empedocles and
Lucretius, and substituting an idea of natural selection for that
of creative providence. [207] The conception is definitely thought
out, and marks him as one of the renovators of scientific no less
than of philosophic thought for the modern world; though the special
paralysis of science under Christian theology kept his ideas on this
side pretty much a dead letter for his own day. And indeed it was
to the universal and not the particular that his thought chiefly
and most enthusiastically turned. A philosophic poet rather than
a philosopher or man of science, he yet set abroad for the modern
world that conception of the physical infinity of the universe which,
once psychologically assimilated, makes an end of the medieval theory
of things. On this head he was eagerly affirmative; and the merely
Pyrrhonic skeptics he assailed as he did the "asinine" orthodox,
though he insisted on doubt as the beginning of wisdom.
Of his extensive literary output not much is stamped with lasting
scientific fitness or literary charm; and some of his treatises, as
those on mnemonics, have no more value than the product of his didactic
model, Raymond Lully. As a writer he is at his best in the sweeping
expatiation of his more general philosophic treatises, where he attains
a lifting ardour of inspiration, a fervour of soaring outlook, that
puts him in the front rank of the thinkers of his age. And if his
literary character is at times open to severe criticism in respect
of his lack of balance, sobriety, and self-command, his final courage
atones for such shortcomings.
His case, indeed, serves to remind us that at certain junctures it is
only the unbalanced types that aid humanity's advance. The perfectly
prudent and self-sufficing man does not achieve revolutions, does
not revolt against tyrannies; he wisely adapts himself and subsists,
letting the evil prevail as it may. It is the more impatient and
unreticent, the eager and hot-brained--in a word, the faulty--who clash
with oppression and break a way for quieter spirits through the hedges
of enthroned authority. The serenely contemplative spirit is rather
a possession than a possessor for his fellows; he may inform and
enlighten, but is not in himself a countering or inspiriting force:
a Shelley avails more than a Goethe against tyrannous power. And it
may be that the battling enthusiast in his own way wins liberation
for himself from "fear of fortune and death," as he wins for others
liberty of action. [208] Even such a liberator, bearing other men's
griefs and taking stripes that they might be kept whole, was Bruno.
And though he quailed at the first shock of capture and torture,
when the end came he vindicated human nature as worthily as could
any quietist. It was a long-drawn test. Charged on the traitor's
testimony with many "blasphemies," he denied them all, [209] but stood
to his published writings [210] and vividly expounded his theories,
[211] professing in the usual manner to believe in conformity with
the Church's teachings, whatever he might write on philosophy. It
is impossible to trust the Inquisition records as to his words
of self-humiliation; [212] though on the other hand no blame can
rationally attach to anyone who, in his place, should try to deceive
such enemies, morally on a level with hostile savages. It is certain
that the Inquisitors frequently wrung recantations by torture. [213]
What is historically certain is that Bruno was not released, but sent
on to Rome, and was kept there in prison for seven years. He was not
the sort of heretic likely to be released; though the fact of his being
a Dominican, and the desire to maintain the Church's intellectual
credit, delayed so long his execution. Certainly not an atheist (he
called himself in several of his book-titles Philotheus; he consigns
insano ateismo to perdition; [214] and his quasi-pantheism or monism
often lapses into theistic modes), [215] he yet was from first to last
essentially though not professedly anti-Christian in his view of the
universe. If the Church had cause to fear any philosophic teaching,
it was his, preached with the ardour of a prophet and the eloquence
of a poet. His doctrine that the worlds in space are innumerable was
as offensive to orthodox ears as his specific negations of Christian
dogma, outgoing as it did the later idea of Kepler and Galileo. He had,
moreover, finally refused to make any fresh recantation; and the only
detailed document extant concerning his final trial describes him as
saying to his judges: "With more fear, perchance, do you pass sentence
on me than I receive it." [216] According to all accessible records,
he was burned alive at Rome in February, 1600, in the Field of Flowers,
near where his statue now stands. As was probably customary, they tied
his tongue before leading him to the stake, lest he should speak to
the people; [217] and his martyrdom was an edifying spectacle for the
vast multitude of pilgrims who had come from all parts of Christendom
for the jubilee of the pope. [218] At the stake, when he was at the
point of death, there was duly presented to him the crucifix, and he
duly put it aside.
An attempt has been made by Professor Desdouits in a pamphlet
(La légende tragique de Jordano Bruno; Paris, 1885) to show that
there is no evidence that Bruno was burned; and an anonymous
writer in the Scottish Review (October, 1888, Art. II), rabidly
hostile to Bruno, has maintained the same proposition. Doubt on
the subject dates from Bayle. Its main ground is the fewness of
the documentary records, of which, further, the genuineness is
now called in question. But no good reason is shown for doubting
them. They are three.
1. The Latin letter of Gaspar Schopp (Scioppius), dated February
17, 1600, is an eye-witness's account of the sentencing and
burning of Bruno at that date. (See it in full, in the original
Latin, in Berti, p. 461 sq., and in App. V to Frith, Life of
Bruno, and partly translated in Prof. Adamson's lectures, as
cited. It was rep. by Struvius in his Acta Literaria, tom. v,
and by La Croze in his Entretiens sur divers sujets in 1711,
p. 287.) It was not printed till 1621, but the grounds urged for
its rejection are totally inadequate, and involve assumptions,
which are themselves entirely unproved, as to what Scioppius was
likely to do. Finally, no intelligible reason is suggested for
the forging of such a document. The remarks of Prof. Desdouits
on this head have no force whatever. The writer in the Scottish
Review (p. 263, and note) suggests as "at least as possible an
hypothesis as any other that he [Bruno] was the author of the
forged accounts of his own death." Comment is unnecessary.
2. There are preserved two extracts from Roman news-letters
(Avvisi) of the time; one, dated February 12, 1600, commenting on
the case; the other, dated February 19, relating the execution
on the 17th. (See both in S. R., pp. 264-65. They were first
printed by Berti in Documenti intorno a Giordano Bruno, Rome,
1880, and are reprinted in his Vita, ed. 1889, cap. xix; also
by Levi, as cited.) Against these testimonies the sole plea is
that they mis-state Bruno's opinions and the duration of his
imprisonment--a test which would reduce to mythology the contents
of most newspapers in our own day. The writer in the Scottish
Review makes the suicidal suggestion that, inasmuch as the errors
as to dates occur in Schopp's letter, "the so-called Schopp
was fabricated from these notices, or they from Schopp"--thus
admitting one to be historical.
3. There has been found, by a Catholic investigator, a double entry
in the books of the Lay Brotherhood of San Giovanni Decollato,
whose function was to minister to prisoners under capital sentence,
giving a circumstantial account of Bruno's execution. (See it in
S. R., pp. 266, 269, 270.) In this case, the main entry being dated
"1600. Thursday. February 16th," the anonymous writer argues that
"the whole thing resolves itself into a make-up," because February
16 was the Wednesday. The entry refers to the procedure of the
Wednesday night and the Thursday morning; and such an error could
easily occur in any case. Whatever may be one day proved, the
cavils thus far count for nothing. All the while, the records
as to Bruno remain in the hands of the Catholic authorities;
but, despite the discredit constantly cast on the Church on the
score of Bruno's execution, they offer no official denial of the
common statement; while they do officially admit (S. R., p. 252)
that on February 8 Bruno was sentenced as an "obstinate heretic,"
and "given over to the Secular Court." On the other hand, the
episode is well vouched; and the argument from the silence of
ambassadors' letters is so far void. No pretence is made of
tracing Bruno anywhere after February, 1600.
Since the foregoing note appeared in the first edition I have
met with the essay of Mr. R. Copley Christie, "Was Giordano
Bruno Really Burned?" (Macmillan's Magazine, October, 1885;
rep. in Mr. Christie's Selected Essays and Papers, 1902). This
is a crushing answer to the thesis of M. Desdouits, showing as
it does clear grounds not only for affirming the genuineness
of the letter of Scioppius, but for doubting the diligence
of M. Desdouits. Mr. Christie points out (1) that in his book
Ecclesiasticus, printed in 1612, Scioppius refers to the burning of
Bruno almost in the words of his letter of 1600; (2) that in 1607
Kepler wrote to a correspondent of the burning of Bruno, giving as
his authority J. M. Wacker, who in 1600 was living at Rome as the
imperial ambassador; and (3) that the tract Machiavellizatio, 1621,
in which the letter of Scioppius was first printed, was well known
in its day, being placed on the Index, and answered by two writers
without eliciting any repudiation from Scioppius, who lived till
1649. As M. Desdouits staked his case on the absence of allusion to
the subject before 1661 (overlooking even the allusion by Mersenne,
in 1624, cited by Bayle), his theory may be taken as exploded.
Bruno has been zealously blackened by Catholic writers for the
obscenity of some of his writing [219] and the alleged freedom of his
life--piquant charges, when we remember the life of the Papal Italy in
which he was born. Lucilio Vanini (otherwise Julius Cæsar Vanini), the
next martyr of freethought, also an Italian (b. at Taurisano, 1585),
is open to the more relevant charges of an inordinate vanity and some
duplicity. Figuring as a Carmelite friar, which he was not, he came
to England (1612) and deceitfully professed to abjure Catholicism,
[220] gaining, however, nothing by the step, and contriving to be
reconciled to the Church, after being imprisoned for forty-nine days
on an unrecorded charge. Previously he had figured, like Bruno,
as a wandering scholar at Amsterdam, Brussels, Cologne, Geneva,
and Lyons; and afterwards he taught natural philosophy for a year
at Genoa. His treatise, Amphitheatrum Æterna Providentiæ (Lyons,
1615), is professedly directed against "ancient philosophers,
Atheists, Epicureans, Peripatetics, and Stoics," and is ostensibly
quite orthodox. [221] In one passage he untruthfully tells how, when
imprisoned in England, he burned with the desire to shed his blood
for the Catholic Church. [222] In another, after declaring that some
Christian doctors have argued very weakly against the Epicureans
on immortality, he avows that he, "Christianus nomine cognomine
Catholicus," could hardly have held the doctrine if he had not
learned it from the Church, "the most certain and infallible mistress
of truth." [223] As usual, the attack leaves us in doubt as to the
amount of real atheism current at the time. The preface asserts that
"Atheotêto autem secta pestilentissima quotidie, latius et latius
vires acquirit eundo," and there are various hostile allusions to
atheists in the text; [224] but the arguments cited from them are
such as might be brought by deists against miracles and the Christian
doctrine of sin; and there is an allusion of the customary kind to
"Nicolaus Machiavellus Atheorum facile princeps," [225] which puts
all in doubt. The later published Dialogues, De Admirandis Naturæ
Arcanis, [226] while showing a freer critical spirit, would seem
to be in part earlier in composition, if we can trust the printer's
preface, which represents them as collected from various quarters,
and published only with the reluctant consent of the author. [227]
This, of course, may be a mystification; in any case the Dialogues
twice mention the Amphitheatrum; and the fourth book, in which this
mention occurs, may be taken on this and other grounds to set forth
his later ideas. Even the Dialogues, however, while discussing many
questions of creed and science in a free fashion, no less profess
orthodoxy; and, while one passage is pantheistic, [228] they also
denounce atheism. [229] And whereas one passage does avow that the
author in his Amphitheatrum had said many things he did not believe,
the context clearly suggests that the reference was not to the main
argument, but to some of its dubious facts. [230] In any case, though
the title--chosen by the editors--speaks daringly enough of "Nature,
the queen and goddess of mortals," Vanini cannot be shown to be an
atheist; [231] and the attacks upon him as an immoral writer are not
any better supported. [232] The publication of the dialogues was in
fact formally authorized by the Sorbonne, [233] and it does not even
appear that when he was charged with atheism and blasphemy at Toulouse
that work was founded on, save in respect of its title. [234] The
charges rested on the testimony of a treacherous associate as to his
private conversation; and, if true, it only amounted to proving his
pantheism, expressed in his use of the word "Nature." At his trial he
expressly avowed and argued for theism. The judges, by one account,
did not agree. Yet he was convicted, by the voices of the majority,
and burned alive (February 9, 1619) on the day of his sentence. Drawn
on a hurdle, in his shirt, with a placard on his shoulders inscribed
"Atheist and Blasphemer of the name of God," he went to his death
with a high heart, rejoicing, as he cried in Italian, to die like
a philosopher. [235] A Catholic historian, [236] who was present,
says he hardily declared that "Jesus facing death sweated with fear:
I die undaunted." But before burning him they tore out his tongue by
the roots; and the Christian historian is humorous over the victim's
long cry of agony. [237] No martyr ever faced death with a more
dauntless courage than this
Lonely antagonist of Destiny
That went down scornful before many spears; [238]
and if the man had all the faults falsely imputed to him, [239]
his death might shame his accusers.
Vanini, like Bruno, can now be recognized and understood as an Italian
of vivacious temperament, studious without the student's calm, early
learned, alert in debate, fluent, imprudent, and ill-balanced. By
his own account he studied theology under the Carmelite Bartolomeo
Argotti, phoenix of the preachers of the time; [240] but from the
English Carmelite, John Bacon, "the prince of Averroïsts," [241] he
declares, he "learned to swear only by Averroës"; and of Pomponazzi
he speaks as his master, and as "prince of the philosophers of our
age." [242] He has criticized both freely in his Amphitheatrum;
but whereas that work is a professed vindication of orthodoxy, we
may infer from the De Arcanis that the arguments of these skeptics,
like those of the contemporary atheists whom he had met in his travels,
had kept their hold on his thought even while he controverted them. For
it cannot be disputed that the long passages which he quotes from the
"atheist at Amsterdam" [243] are put with a zest and cogency which
are not infused into the professed rebuttals, and are in themselves
quite enough to arouse the anger and suspicion of a pious reader. A
writer who set forth so fully the acute arguments of unbelievers,
unprintable by their authors, might well be suspected of writing at
Christianity when he confuted the creeds of the pagans. As was noted
later of Fontenelle, he put arguments against oracles which endangered
prophecy; his dismissal of sorcery as the dream of troubled brains
appeals to reason and not to faith; and his disparagement of pagan
miracles logically bore upon the Christian.
When he comes to the question of immortality he grows overtly
irreverent. Asked by the interlocutor in the last dialogue to give
his views on the immortality of the soul, he begs to be excused,
protesting: "I have vowed to my God that that question shall
not be handled by me till I become old, rich, and a German." And
without overt irreverence he is ever and again unserious. Perfectly
transparent is the irony of the appeal, "Let us give faith to the
prescripts of the Church, and due honour to the sacrosanct Gregorian
apparitions," [244] and the protestation, "I will not invalidate the
powers of holy water, to which Alexander, Doctor and Pontifex of
the Christians, and interpreter of the divine will, accorded such
countless privileges." [245] And even in the Amphitheatrum, with
all the parade of defending the faith, there is a plain balance of
cogency on the side of the case for the attack, [246] and a notable
disposition to rely finally on lines of argument to which faith
could never give real welcome. The writer's mind, it is clear, was
familiar with doubt. In the malice of orthodoxy there is sometimes an
instinctive perception of hostility; and though Vanini had written,
among other things, [247] an Apologia pro lege mosaïcâ et christianâ,
to which he often refers, and an Apologia pro concilio Tridentino,
he can be seen even in the hymn to deity with which he concludes his
Amphitheatrum to have no part in evangelical Christianity.
He was in fact a deist with the inevitable leaning of the philosophic
theist to pantheism; and whatever he may have said to arouse priestly
hatred at Toulouse, he was rather less of an atheist than Spinoza
or Bruno or John Scotus. On his trial, [248] pressed as to his real
beliefs by judges who had doubtless challenged his identification
of God with Nature, he passed from a profession of orthodox faith in
a trinity into a flowing discourse which could as well have availed
for a vindication of pantheism as for the proposition of a personal
God. Seeing a straw on the ground, he picked it up and talked of its
history; and when brought back again from his affirmation of Deity to
his doctrine of Nature, he set forth the familiar orthodox theorem
that, while Nature wrought the succession of seeds and fruits,
there must have been a first seed which was created. It was the
habitual standing ground of theism; and they burned him all the
same. It remains an open question whether personal enmity on the
part of the prosecuting official [249] or a real belief that he had
uttered blasphemies against Jesus or Mary was the determining force,
or whether even less motive sufficed. A vituperative Jesuit of that
age sees intolerable freethinking in his suggestion of the unreality
of demoniacal possession and the futility of exorcisms. [250] And for
that much they were not incapable of burning men in Catholic Toulouse
in the days of Mary de Medici.
There are in fact reasons for surmizing that in the cases alike of
Bruno and of Vanini it was the attitude of the speculator towards
scientific problems that primarily or mainly aroused distrust and anger
among the theologians. Vanini is careful to speak equivocally of the
eternity of the universe; and though he makes a passing mention of
Kepler, [251] he does not name Copernicus. He had learned something
from the fate of Bruno. Yet in the Dialogue De coeli forma et motore
[252] he declares so explicitly for a naturalistic explanation of
the movements of the heavenly bodies that he must have aroused in
some orthodox readers such anger as was set up in Plato by a physical
theory of sun and stars. After an à priori discussion on Aristotelian
lines, the querist in the dialogue asks what may fitly be held, with
an eye to religion, concerning the movements of the spheres. "This,"
answers Vanini, "unless I am in error: the mass of the heaven is
moved in its proper gyratory way by the nature of its elements." "How
then," asks the querist, "are the heavens moved by certain and fixed
laws, unless divine minds, participating in the primal motion,
there operate?" "Where is the wonder?" returns Vanini. "Does not
a certain and fixed law of motion act in the most paltry clockwork
machines, made by a drunken German, even as there works silently in
a tertian and quartan fever a motion which comes and goes at fixed
periods without transgressing its line by a moment? The sea also at
certain and fixed times, by its nature, as you peripatetics affirm,
is moved in progressions and regressions. No less, then, I affirm
the heaven to be forever carried by the same motion in virtue of
its nature (a sua pura forma) and not to be moved by the will of
intelligence." And the disciple assents. Kepler had seen fit, either
in sincerity or of prudence, to leave "divine minds" in the planets;
and Vanini's negation, though not accompanied by any assertion of
the motion of the earth, was enough to provoke the minds which had
only three years before put Copernicus on the Index, and challenged
Galileo for venting his doctrine.
It is at this stage that we begin to realize the full play of the
Counter-Reformation, as against the spirit of science. The movement
of mere theological and ecclesiastical heresy had visibly begun to
recede in the world of mind, and in its stead, alike in Protestant
and in Catholic lands, there was emerging a new activity of scientific
research, vaguely menacing to all theistic faith. Kepler represented
it in Germany, Harriott and Harvey and Gilbert and Bacon in England;
from Italy had come of late the portents of Bruno and Galileo;
even Spain yielded the Examen de Ingenios of Huarte (1575), where
with due protestation of theism the physicist insists upon natural
causation; and now Vanini was exhibiting the same incorrigible zest
for a naturalistic explanation of all things. His dialogues are
full of such questionings; the mere metaphysic and theosophy of
the Amphitheatrum are being superseded by discussions on physical
and physiological phenomena. It was for this, doubtless, that the
De Arcanis won the special vogue over which the Jesuit Garasse was
angrily exclaiming ten years later. [253] Not merely the doubts cast
upon sorcery and diabolical possession, but the whole drift, often
enough erratic, of the inquiry as to how things in nature came about,
caught the curiosity of the time, soon to be stimulated by more potent
and better-governed minds than that of the ill-starred Vanini. And
for every new inquirer there would be a hostile zealot in the Church,
where the anti-intellectual instinct was now so much more potent than
it had been in the days before Luther, when heresy was diagnosed only
as a danger to revenue.
It was with Galileo that there began the practical application
of the Copernican theory to astronomy, and, indeed, the decisive
demonstration of its truth. With him, accordingly, began the positive
rejection of the Copernican theory by the Church; for thus far it had
never been officially vetoed--having indeed been generally treated
as a wild absurdity. Almost immediately after the publication of
Galileo's Sidereus Nuncius (1610) his name is found in the papers
of the Inquisition, with that of Cremonini of Padua, as a subject of
investigation. [254] The juxtaposition is noteworthy. Cremonini was
an Aristotelian, with Averroïst leanings, and reputed an atheist;
[255] and it was presumably on this score that the Inquisition was
looking into his case. At the same time, as an Aristotelian he was
strongly opposed to Galileo, and is said to have been one of those
who refused to look through Galileo's telescope. [256] Galileo, on
the other hand, was ostensibly a good Catholic; but his discovery
of the moons of Jupiter was a signal confirmation of the Copernican
theory, and the new status at once given to that made a corresponding
commotion in the Church. Thus he had against him both the unbelieving
pedants of the schools and the typical priests.
In his book the great discoverer had said nothing explicitly on the
subject of the Copernican theory; but in lectures and conversations
he had freely avowed his belief in it; and the implications of the
published treatise were clear to all thinkers. [257] And though,
when he visited Rome in 1611, he was well received by Pope Paul V,
and his discoveries were favourably reported of by the four scientific
experts nominated at the request of Cardinal Bellarmin to examine them,
[258] it only needed that the Biblical cry should be raised to change
the situation. The Church still contained men individually open to
new scientific ideas; but she was then more than ever dominated
by the forces of tradition; and as soon as those forces had been
practically evoked his prosecution was bound to follow. The cry of
"religion in danger" silenced the saner men at Rome.
The fashion in which Galileo's sidereal discoveries were met is indeed
typical of the whole history of freethought. The clergy pointed to the
story of Joshua stopping the sun and moon; the average layman scouted
the new theory as plain folly; and typical schoolmen insisted that
"the heavens are unchangeable," and that there was no authority in
Aristotle for the new assertions. With such minds the man of science
had to argue, and in deference to such he had at length to affect to
doubt his own demonstrations. [259] The Catholic Reaction had finally
created as bitter a spirit of hostility to free science in the Church
as existed among the Protestants; and in Italy even those who saw the
moons of Jupiter through his telescope dared not avow what they had
seen. [260] It was therefore an unfortunate step on Galileo's part to
go from Padua, which was under the rule of Venice, then anti-papal,
[261] to Tuscany, on the invitation of the Grand Duke. When in 1613
he published his treatise on the solar spots, definitely upholding
Copernicus against Jesuits and Aristotelians, trouble became
inevitable; and his letter [262] to his pupil, Father Castelli,
professor of mathematics at Pisa, discussing the Biblical argument
with which they had both been met, at once evoked an explosion when
circulated by Castelli. New trouble arose when Galileo in 1615 wrote
his apology in the form of a letter to his patroness the Dowager Grand
Duchess Cristina of Tuscany, extracts from which became current. An
outcry of ignorant Dominican monks [263] sufficed to set at work the
machinery of the Index, [264] the first result of which (1616) was to
put on the list of condemned books the great treatise of Copernicus,
published seventy-three years before. Galileo personally escaped for
the present through the friendly intervention of the Pope, Paul V, on
the appeal of his patron, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, apparently on the
ground that he had not publicly taught the Copernican theory. It would
seem as if some of the heads of the Church were at heart Copernicans;
[265] but they were in any case obliged to disown a doctrine felt by
so many others to be subversive of the Church's authority.
See the details of the procedure in Domenico Berti, Il Processo
Originale de Galileo Galilei, ed. 1878, cap. iv; in Fahie,
ch. viii; and in Gebler, ch. vi. The last-cited writer claims
to show that, of two records of the "admonition" to Galileo,
one, the more stringent in its terms, was false, though made at
the date it bears, to permit of subsequent proceedings against
Galileo. But the whole thesis is otiose. It is admitted (Gebler,
p. 89) that Galileo was admonished "not to defend or hold the
Copernican doctrine." Gebler contends, however, that this was not
a command to keep "entire silence," and that therefore Galileo
is not justly to be charged with having disobeyed the injunction
of the Inquisition when, in his Dialogues on the Two Principal
Systems of the World, the Ptolemaic and Copernican (1632),
he dealt dialectically with the subject, neither affirming nor
denying, but treating both theories as hypotheses. But the real
issue is not Galileo's cautious disobedience (see Gebler's own
admissions, p. 149) to an irrational decree, but the crime of
the Church in silencing him. It is not likely that the "enemies"
of Galileo, as Gebler supposes (pp. 90, 338), anticipated his
later dialectical handling of the subject, and so falsified the
decision of the Inquisition against him in 1616. Gebler had at
first adopted the German theory that the absolute command to
silence was forged in 1632; and, finding the document certainly
belonged to 1616, framed the new theory, quite unnecessarily,
to save Galileo's credit. The two records are quite in the
spirit and manner of Inquisitorial diplomacy. As Berti remarks,
"the Holy Office proceeded with much heedlessness (legerezza)
and much confusion" in 1616. Its first judgment, in either form,
merely emphasizes the guilt of the second. Cp. Fahie, pp. 167-69.
Thus officially "admonished" for his heresy, but not punished, in
1616, Galileo kept silence for some years, till in 1618 he published
his (erroneous) theory of the tides, which he sent with an ironical
epistle to the friendly Archduke Leopold of Austria, professing
to be propounding a mere dream, disallowed by the official veto on
Copernicus. [266] This, however, did him less harm than his essay Il
Saggiatore ("The Scales"), in which he opposed the Jesuit Grassi on the
question of comets. Receiving the imprimatur in 1623, it was dedicated
to the new pope, Urban VIII, who, as the Cardinal Maffeo Barberini,
had been Galileo's friend. The latter could now hope for freedom of
speech, as he had all along had a number of friends at the papal court,
besides many priests, among his admirers and disciples. But the enmity
of the Jesuits countervailed all. They did not succeed in procuring a
censure of the Saggiatore, though that subtly vindicates the Copernican
system while professing to hold it disproved by the fiat of the Church;
[267] but when, venturing further, he after another lapse of years
produced his Dialogues on the Two Systems, for which he obtained
the papal imprimatur in 1632, they caught him in their net. Having
constant access to the pope, they contrived to make him believe that
Galileo had ridiculed him in one of the personages of his Dialogues. It
was quite false; but one of the pope's anti-Copernican arguments was
there unconsciously made light of; and his wounded vanity was probably
a main factor in the impeachment which followed. [268] His Holiness
professed to have been deceived into granting the imprimatur; [269]
a Special Commission was set on foot; the proceedings of 1616 were
raked up; and Galileo was again summoned to Rome. He was old and frail,
and sent medical certificates of his unfitness for such travel; but
it was insisted on, and as under the papal tyranny there was no help,
he accordingly made the journey. After many delays he was tried, and,
on his formal abjuration, sentenced to formal imprisonment (1633)
for teaching the "absurd" and "false doctrine" of the motion of the
earth and the non-motion of the sun from east to west. In this case
the pope, whatever were his motives, acted as a hot anti-Copernican,
expressing his personal opinion on the question again and again, and
always in an anti-Copernican sense. In both cases, however, the popes,
while agreeing to the verdict, abstained from officially ratifying it,
[270] so that, in proceeding to force Galileo to abjure his doctrine,
the Inquisition technically exceeded its powers--a circumstance
in which some Catholics appear to find comfort. Seeing that three
of the ten cardinals named in the preamble to the sentence did not
sign, it has been inferred that they dissented; but there is no good
reason to suppose that either the pope or they wilfully abstained
from signing. They had gained their point--the humiliation of the
great discoverer.
Compare Gebler, p. 241; Private Life, p. 257, quoting
Tiraboschi. For an exposure of the many perversions of the facts
as to Galileo by Catholic writers see Parchappe, Galilée, sa
vie, etc., 2e Partie. To such straits has the Catholic Church
been reduced in this matter that part of its defence of the
treatment of Galileo is the plea that he unwarrantably asserted
that the fixity of the sun and the motion of the earth were
taught in the Scriptures. Sir Robert Inglis is quoted as having
maintained this view in England in 1824 (Mendham, The Literary
Policy of the Church of Rome, 2nd ed. 1830, p. 176), and the
same proposition was maintained in 1850 by a Roman cardinal. See
Galileo e l'Inquisizione, by Monsignor Marini, Roma, 1850, pp. 1,
53-54, etc. Had Galileo really taught as is there asserted, he
would only have been assenting to what his priestly opponents
constantly dinned in his ears. But in point of fact he had not so
assented; for in his letter to Castelli (see Gebler, pp. 46-50)
he had earnestly deprecated the argument from the Bible, urging
that, though Scripture could not err, its interpreters might
misunderstand it; and even going so far as to argue, with much
ingenuity, that the story of Joshua, literally interpreted,
could be made to harmonize with the Copernican theory, but not
at all with the Ptolemaic.
The thesis revived by Monsignor Marini deserves to rank as the
highest flight of absurdity and effrontery in the entire discussion
(cp. Berti, Giordano Bruno, 1889, p. 306, note). Every step in
both procedures of the Inquisition insists on the falsity and
the anti-scriptural character of the doctrine that the earth
moves round the sun (see Berti, Il Processo, p. 115 sq.; Gebler,
pp. 76-77, 230-34); and never once is it hinted that Galileo's
error lay in ascribing to the Bible the doctrine of the earth's
fixity. In the Roman Index of 1664 the works of Galileo and
Copernicus are alike vetoed, with all other writings affirming
the movement of the earth and the stability of the sun; and in
the Index of 1704 are included libri omnes docentes mobilitatem
terrae et immobilitatem solis (Putnam, The Censorship of the
Church of Rome, 1906-1907, i, 308, 312).
The stories of his being tortured and blinded, and saying "Still
it moves," are indeed myths. [271] The broken-spirited old man was
in no mood so to speak; he was, moreover, in all respects save his
science, an orthodox Catholic, [272] and as such not likely to defy
the Church to its face. In reality he was formally in the custody
of the Inquisition--and this not in a cell, but in the house of an
official--for only twenty-two days. After the sentence he was again
formally detained for some seventeen days in the Villa Medici, but
was then allowed to return to his own rural home at Acatri, [273]
on condition that he lived in solitude, receiving no visitors. He
was thus much more truly a prisoner than the so-called "prisoner of
the Vatican" in our own day. The worst part of the sentence, however,
was the placing of all his works, published and unpublished, on the
Index Expurgatorius, and the gag thus laid on all utterance of rational
scientific thought in Italy--an evil of incalculable influence. "The
lack of liberty and speculation," writes a careful Italian student,
"was the cause of the death first of the Accademia dei Lincei, an
institution unique in its time; then of the Accademia del Cimento. Thus
Italy, after the marvellous period of vigorous native civilization
in the thirteenth century, after a second period of civilization
less native but still its own, as being Latin, saw itself arrested
on the threshold of a third and not less splendid period. Vexations
and prohibitions expelled courage, spontaneity, and universality from
the national mind; literary style became uncertain, indeterminate;
and, forbidden to treat of government, science, or religion,
turned to things frivolous and fruitless. For the great academies,
instituted to renovate and further the study of natural philosophy,
were substituted small ones without any such aim. Intellectual energy,
the love of research and of objective truth, greatness of feeling and
nobility of character, all suffered. Nothing so injures a people as
the compulsion to express or conceal its thought solely from motives
of fear. The nation in which those conditions were set up became
intellectually inferior to those in which it was possible to pass
freely in the vast regions of knowledge. Her culture grew restricted,
devoid of originality, vaporous, umbratile; there arose habits of
servility and dissimulation; great books, great men, great purposes
were denaturalized." [274]
It was thus in the other countries of Europe that Galileo's teaching
bore its fruit, for he speedily got his condemned Dialogues published
in Latin by the Elzevirs; and in 1638, also at the hands of the
Elzevirs, appeared his Dialogues of the New Sciences [i.e., of
mechanics and motion], the "foundation of mechanical physics." By
this time he was totally blind, and then only, when physicians could
not help him save by prolonging his life, was he allowed to live under
strict surveillance in Florence, needing a special indulgence from the
Inquisition to permit him even to go to church at Easter. The desire of
his last blind days, to have with him his best-beloved pupil, Father
Castelli, was granted only under rigid limitation and supervision,
though even the papacy could not keep from him the plaudits of the
thinkers of Europe. Finally he passed away in his rural "prison"--after
five years of blindness--in 1642, the year of Newton's birth. At that
time his doctrines were under anathema in Italy, and known elsewhere
only to a few. Hobbes in 1634 tried in vain to procure for the Earl of
Newcastle a copy of the earlier Dialogues in London, and wrote: "It
is not possible to get it for money.... I hear say it is called-in,
in Italy, as a book that will do more hurt to their religion than
all the books of Luther and Calvin, such opposition they think is
between their religion and natural reason." [275] Not till 1757
did the papacy permit other books teaching the Copernican system;
in 1765 Galileo was still under ban; not until 1822 was permission
given to treat the theory as true; and not until 1835 was the work
of Copernicus withdrawn from the Index. [276]
While modern science was thus being placed on its special basis, a
continuous resistance was being made in the schools to the dogmatism
which held the mutilated lore of Aristotle as the sum of human
wisdom. Like the ecclesiastical revolution, this had been protracted
through centuries. Aristotelianism, whether theistic or pantheistic,
whether orthodox or heterodox, [277] had become a dogmatism like
another, a code that vetoed revision, a fetter laid on the mind. Even
as a negation of Christian superstition it had become impotent, for the
Peripatetics were not only ready to make common cause with the Jesuits
against Galileo, as we have seen; some of them were content even to
join in the appeal to the Bible. [278] The result of such uncritical
partisanship was that the immense service of Aristotle to mental
life--the comprehensive grasp which gave him his long supremacy as
against rival system-makers, and makes him still so much more important
than any of the thinkers who in the sixteenth century revolted against
him--was by opponents disregarded and denied, though the range and
depth of his influence are apparent in all the polemic against him,
notably in that of Bacon, who is constantly citing him, and relates
his reasoning to him, however antagonistically, at every turn.
Naturally, the less sacrosanct dogmatism was the more freely
assailed; and in the sixteenth century the attacks became numerous
and vehement. Luther was a furious anti-Aristotelian, [279] as were
also some Calvinists; but in 1570 we find Beza declaring to Ramus
[280] that "the Genevese have decreed, once and for ever, that they
will never, neither in logic nor in any other branch of learning,
turn away from the teaching of Aristotle." At Oxford the same code
held. [281] In Italy, Telesio, who notably anticipates the tone
of Bacon as to natural science, and is largely followed by him,
influenced Bruno in the anti-Aristotelian direction, [282] though
it was in a long line from Aristotle that he got his principle
of the eternity of the universe. The Spaniard Ludovicus Vives, too
(1492-1540), pronounced by Lange one of the clearest heads of his age,
had insisted on progress beyond Aristotle in the spirit of naturalist
science. [283] But the typical anti-Aristotelian of the century was
Ramus (Pierre de la Ramée, 1515-1572), whose long and strenuous battle
against the ruling school at Paris brought him to his death in the
Massacre of St. Bartholomew. [284] Ramus hardily laid it down that
"there is no authority over reason, but reason ought to be queen and
ruler over authority." [285] Such a message was of more value than
his imperfect attempt to supersede the Aristotelian logic. Bacon, who
carried on in England the warfare against the Aristotelian tradition,
never ventured so to express himself as against the theological
tyranny in particular, though, as we have seen, the general energy and
vividness of his argumentation gave him an influence which undermined
the orthodoxies to which he professed to conform. On the other hand,
he did no such service to exact science as was rendered in his day by
Kepler and Galileo and their English emulators; and his full didactic
influence came much later into play.
Like fallacies to Bacon's may be found in Descartes, whose
seventeenth-century reputation as a champion of theism proved mainly
the eagerness of theists for a plausible defence. Already in his own
day his arguments were logically confuted by both Gassendi and Hobbes;
and his partial success with theists was a success of partisanism. It
was primarily in respect of his habitual appeal to reason and argument,
in disregard of the assumptions of faith, and secondarily in respect of
his real scientific work, that he counts for freethought. Ultimately
his method undermined his creed; and it is not too much to say of
him that, next to Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, [286] he laid a
good part of the foundation of modern philosophy and science, [287]
Gassendi largely aiding. Though he never does justice to Galileo,
from his fear of provoking the Church, it can hardly be doubted that
he owes to him in large part the early determination of his mind to
scientific methods; for it is difficult to believe that the account
he gives of his mental development in the Discours de la Méthode
(1637) is biographically true. It is rather the schemed statement,
by a ripened mind, of how it might best have been developed. Nor did
Descartes, any more than Bacon, live up to the intellectual idea he
had framed. All through his life he anxiously sought to propitiate
the Church; [288] and his scientific as well as his philosophic work
was hampered in consequence. In England Henry More, who latterly
recoiled from his philosophy, still thought his physics had been
spoiled by fear of the Church, declaring that the imprisonment of
Galileo "frighted Des Cartes into such a distorted description of
motion that no man's reason could make good sense of it, nor modesty
permit him to fancy anything nonsense in so excellent an author." [289]
But nonetheless the unusual rationalism of Descartes's method,
avowedly aiming at the uprooting of all his own prejudices [290]
as a first step to truth, displeased the Jesuits, and could not
escape the hostile attention of the Protestant theologians of Holland,
where Descartes passed so many years of his life. Despite his constant
theism, accordingly, he had at length to withdraw. [291] A Jesuit, Père
Bourdin, sought to have the Discours de la Méthode at once condemned by
the French clergy, but the attempt failed for the time being. France
was just then, in fact, the most freethinking part of Europe; [292]
and Descartes, though not so unsparing with his prejudices as he
set out to be, was the greatest innovator in philosophy that had
arisen in the Christian era. He made real scientific discoveries,
too, where Bacon only inspired an approach and schemed a wandering
road to them. He first effectively applied algebra to geometry;
he first scientifically explained the rainbow; he at once accepted
and founded on Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood,
which most physiologists of the day derided; and he welcomed Aselli's
discovery of the lacteals, which was rejected by Harvey. [293] And
though as regards religion his timorous conformities deprive him
of any heroic status, it is perhaps not too much to pronounce him
"the great reformer and liberator of the European intellect." [294]
One not given to warm sympathy with freethought has avowed that "the
common root of modern philosophy is the doubt which is alike Baconian
and Cartesian." [295]
Only less important, in some regards, was the influence of Pierre
Gassend or Gassendi (1592-1655), who, living his life as a canon of
the Church, reverted in his doctrine to the philosophy of Epicurus,
alike in physics and ethics. [296] It seems clear that he never had
any religious leanings, but simply entered the Church on the advice of
friends who pointed out to him how much better a provision it gave,
in income and leisure, than the professorship he held in his youth
at the university of Aix. [297] Professing like Descartes a strict
submission to the Church, he yet set forth a theory of things which
had in all ages been recognized as fundamentally irreconcilable with
the Christian creed; and his substantial exemption from penalties
is to be set down to his position, his prudence, and his careful
conformities. The correspondent of Galileo and Kepler, he was
the friend of La Mothe le Vayer and Naudé; and Gui Patin was his
physician and intimate. [298] Strong as a physicist and astronomer
where Descartes was weak, he divides with him and Galileo the credit
of practically renewing natural philosophy; Newton being Gassendist
rather than Cartesian. [299] Indeed, Gassendi's youthful attack
on the Aristotelian physics (1624) makes him the predecessor of
Descartes; and he expressly opposed his contemporary on points of
physics and metaphysics on which he thought him chimerical, and so
promoted unbelief where Descartes made for orthodoxy. [300] Of the
criticisms on his Méditations to which Descartes published replies,
those of Gassendi are, with the partial exception of those of Hobbes,
distinctly the most searching and sustained. The later position
of Hume, indeed, is explicitly taken up in the first objection of
Cratérus; [301] but the persistent pressure of Gassendi on the theistic
and spiritistic assumptions of Descartes reads like the reasoning of
a modern atheist. [302] Yet the works of Descartes were in time placed
on the Index, condemned by the king's council, and even vetoed in the
universities, while those of Gassendi were not, though his early work
on Aristotelianism had to be stopped after the first volume because
of the anger it aroused. [303] Himself one of the most abstemious of
men, [304] like his master Epicurus (of whom he wrote a Life, 1647),
he attracted disciples of another temperamental cast as well as many
of his own; and as usual his system is associated with the former,
who are duly vilified by orthodoxy, although certainly no worse than
the average orthodox.
Among his other practical services to rationalism was a curious
experiment, made in a village of the Lower Alps, by way of
investigating the doctrine of witchcraft. A drug prepared by one
sorcerer was administered to others of the craft in presence of
witnesses. It threw them into a deep sleep, on awakening from which
they declared that they had been at a witches' Sabbath. As they had
never left their beds, the experiment went far to discredit the
superstition. [305] One significant result of the experiment was
seen in the course later taken by Colbert in overriding a decision
of the Parlement of Rouen as to witchcraft (1670). That Parlement
proposed to burn fourteen sorcerers. Colbert, who had doubtless read
Montaigne as well as Gassendi, gave Montaigne's prescription that
the culprits should be dosed with hellebore--a medicine for brain
disturbance. [306] In 1672, finally, the king issued a declaration
forbidding the tribunals to admit charges of mere sorcery; [307]
and any future condemnations were on the score of blasphemy and
poisoning. Yet further, in the section of his posthumous Syntagma
Philosophicum (1658) entitled De Effectibus Siderum, [308] Gassendi
dealt the first great blow on the rationalist side to the venerable
creed of astrology, assailed often, but to little purpose, from the
side of faith; bringing to his task, indeed, more asperity than he is
commonly credited with, but also a stringent scientific and logical
method, lacking in the polemic of the churchmen, who had attacked
astrology mainly because it ignored revelation. It is sobering to
remember, however, that he was one of those who could not assimilate
Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood, which Descartes
at once adopted and propounded.
Such anomalies meet us many times in the history of scientific as of
other lines of thought; and the residual lesson is the recognition
that progress is infinitely multiplex in its causation. Nothing
is more vital in this regard than scientific truth, which is as a
light-house in seas of speculation; and those who, like Galileo and
Descartes, add to the world's exact knowledge, perform a specific
service not matched by that of the Bacons, who urge right method
without applying it. Yet in that kind also an incalculable influence
has been wielded. Many minds can accept scientific truths without being
thereby led to scientific ways of thought; and thus the reasoners and
speculators, the Brunos and the Vaninis, play their fruitful part, as
do the mentors who turn men's eyes on their own vices of intellectual
habit. And in respect of creeds and philosophies, finally, it is
not so much sheer soundness of result as educativeness of method,
effectual appeal to the thinking faculty and to the spirit of reason,
that determines a thinker's influence. This kind of impact we shall
find historically to be the service done by Descartes to European
thought for a hundred years.
From Descartes, then, as regards philosophy, more than from any
professed thinker of his day, but also from the other thinkers we have
noted, from the reactions of scientific discovery, from the terrible
experience of the potency of religion as a breeder of strife and its
impotence as a curber of evil, and from the practical freethinking
of the more open-minded of that age in general, derives the great
rationalistic movement, which, taking clear literary form first in
the seventeenth century, has with some fluctuations broadened and
deepened down to our own day.
CHAPTER XIV
BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
§ 1
The propagandist literature of deism begins with an English
diplomatist, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, the friend of Bacon, who stood
in the full stream of the current freethought of England and France
[309] in the first quarter of the seventeenth century. English deism,
as literature, is thus at its very outset affiliated with French;
all of its elements, critical and ethical, are germinal in Bodin,
Montaigne, and Charron, each and all of whom had a direct influence
on English thought; and we shall find later French thought, as in
the cases of Gassendi, Bayle, Simon, St. Evremond, and Voltaire,
alternately influenced by and reacting on English. But, apart from
the undeveloped rationalism of the Elizabethan period, which never
found literary expression, the French ferment seems to have given
the first effective impulse; though it is to be remembered that about
the same time the wars of religion in Germany, following on an age of
theological uproar, had developed a common temper of indifferentism
which would react on the thinking of men of affairs in France.
We have seen the state of upper-class and middle-class opinion
in France about 1624. It was in Paris in that year that Herbert
published his De Veritate, after acting for five years as the English
ambassador at the French court--an office from which he was recalled
in the same year. [310] By his own account the book had been "begun
by me in England, and formed there in all its principal parts," [311]
but finished at Paris. He had, however, gone to France in 1608, and
had served in various continental wars in the years following; and it
was presumably in these years, not in his youth in England, that he
had formed the remarkable opinions set forth in his epoch-making book.
Hitherto deism had been represented by unpublished arguments
disingenuously dealt with in published answers; henceforth there
slowly grows up a deistic literature. Herbert was a powerful and
audacious nobleman, with a weak king; and he could venture on a
publication which would have cost an ordinary man dear. Yet even
he saw fit to publish in Latin; and he avowed hesitations. [312]
The most puzzling thing about it is his declaration that Grotius
and the German theologian Tielenus, having read the book in MS.,
exhorted him "earnestly to print and publish it." It is difficult
to believe that they had gathered its substance. Herbert's work
has two aspects, a philosophical and a political, and in both it
is remarkable. [313] Like the Discours de la Méthode of Descartes,
which was to appear thirteen years later, it is inspired by an
original determination to get at the rational grounds of conviction;
and in Herbert's case the overweening self-esteem which disfigures
his Autobiography seems to have been motive force for the production
of a book signally recalcitrant to authority. Where Bacon attacks
Aristotelianism and the habits of mind it had engendered, Herbert
counters the whole conception of revelation in religion. Rejecting
tacitly the theological basis of current philosophy, he divides the
human mind into four faculties--Natural Instinct, Internal Sense,
External Sense, and the Discursive faculty--through one or other of
which all our knowledge emerges. Of course, like Descartes, he makes
the first the verification of his idea of God, pronouncing that to
be primary, independent, and universally entertained, and therefore
not lawfully to be disputed (already a contradiction in terms);
but, inasmuch as scriptural revelation has no place in the process,
the position is conspicuously more advanced than that of Bacon in
the De Augmentis, published the year before, and even than that
of Locke, sixty years later. On the question of concrete religion
Herbert is still more aggressive. His argument [314] is, in brief,
that no professed revelation can have a decisive claim to rational
acceptance; that none escapes sectarian dispute in its own field;
that, as each one misses most of the human race, none seems to be
divine; and that human reason can do for morals all that any one of
them does. The negative generalities of Montaigne here pass into a
positive anti-Christian argument; for Herbert goes on to pronounce
the doctrine of forgiveness for faith immoral.
Like all pioneers, Herbert falls into some inconsistencies on his
own part; the most flagrant being his claim to have had a sign from
heaven--that is, a private and special revelation--encouraging him
to publish his book. [315] But his criticism is nonetheless telling
and persuasive so far as it goes, and remains valid to this day. Nor
do his later and posthumous works [316] add to it in essentials,
though they do much to construct the deistic case on historical
lines. The De religione gentilium in particular is a noteworthy study
of pre-Christian religions, apparently motived by doubt or challenge
as to his theorem of the universality of the God-idea. It proves only
racial universality without agreement; but it is so far a scholarly
beginning of rational hierology. The English Dialogue between a
Teacher and his Pupil, which seems to have been the first form of the
Religio Gentilium, [317] is a characteristic expression of his whole
way of thought, and was doubtless left unpublished for the prudential
reasons which led him to put all his published works in Latin. But the
fact that the Latin quotations are translated shows that the book had
been planned for publication--a risk which he did wisely to shun. The
remarkable thing is that his Latin books were so little debated, the De
Veritate being nowhere discussed before Culverwel. [318] Baxter in 1672
could say that Herbert, "never having been answered, might be thought
unanswerable"; [319] and his own "answer" is merely theological.
The next great freethinking figure in England is Thomas Hobbes
(1588-1679), the most important thinker of his age, after Descartes,
and hardly less influential. But the purpose of Hobbes being always
substantially political and regulative, his unfaith in the current
religion is only incidentally revealed in the writings in which he
seeks to show the need for keeping it under monarchic control. [320]
Hobbes is in fact the anti-Presbyterian or anti-Puritan philosopher;
and to discredit anarchic religion in the eyes of the majority he is
obliged to speak as a judicial Churchman. Yet nothing is more certain
than that he was no orthodox Christian; and even his professed theism
resolves itself somewhat easily into virtual agnosticism on logical
pressure. No thought of prudence could withhold him from showing,
in a discussion on words, that he held the doctrine of the Logos
to be meaningless. [321] Of atheism he was repeatedly accused by
both royalists and rebels; and his answer was forensic rather than
fervent, alike as to his scripturalism, his Christianity, and his
impersonal conception of Deity. [322] Reviving as he did the ancient
rationalistic doctrine of the eternity of the world, [323] he gave
a clear footing for atheism as against the Judæo-Christian view. In
affirming "one God eternal" of whom men "cannot have any idea in
their mind, answerable to his nature," he was negating all creeds. He
expressly contends, it is true, for the principle of a Providence;
but it is hard to believe that he laid any store by prayer, public or
private; and it would appear that whatever thoughtful atheism there
was in England in the latter part of the century looked to him as
its philosopher, insofar as it did not derive from Spinoza. [324]
Nor could the Naturalist school of that day desire a better, terser,
or more drastic scientific definition of religion than Hobbes gave
them: "Fear of power invisible, feigned by the mind or imagined from
tales publicly allowed, Religion; not allowed, Superstition." [325]
As the Churchmen readily saw, his insistence on identifying the
religion of a country with its law plainly implied that no religion
is any more "revealed" than another. With him too begins (1651) the
public criticism of the Bible on literary or documentary grounds;
[326] though, as we have seen, this had already gone far in private;
[327] and he gave a new lead, partly as against Descartes, to a
materialistic philosophy. [328] His replies to the theistic and
spiritistic reasonings of Descartes's Méditations are, like those
of Gassendi, unrefuted and irrefutable; and they are fundamentally
materialistic in their drift. [329] He was, in fact, in a special
and peculiar degree for his age, a freethinker; and so deep was his
intellectual hostility to the clergy of all species that he could not
forego enraging those of his own political side by his sarcasms. [330]
Here he is in marked contrast with Descartes, who dissembled his
opinion about Copernicus and Galileo for peace' sake, [331] and was
the close friend of the apologist Mersenne down to his death. [332]
With the partial exception of the more refined and graceful Pecock,
Hobbes has of all English thinkers down to his period the clearest
and hardest head for all purposes of reasoning, save in the single
field of mathematics, where he meddled without mastery; and against the
theologians of his time his argumentation is as a two-edged sword. That
such a man should have been resolutely on the side of the king in
the Civil War is one of the proofs of the essential fanaticism and
arbitrariness of the orthodox Puritans, who plotted more harm to the
heresies they disliked than was ever wreaked on themselves. Hobbes
came near enough being clerically ostracized among the royalists; but
among the earlier Puritans, or under an Independent Puritan Parliament
at any time, he would have stood a fair chance of execution. It was
doubtless largely due to the anti-persecuting influence of Cromwell,
as well as to his having ostensibly deserted the royalists, that Hobbes
was allowed to settle quietly in England after making his submission
to the Rump Parliament in 1651. In 1666 his Leviathan and De Cive were
together condemned by the Restoration Parliament in its grotesque
panic of piety after the Great Fire of London; and it was actually
proposed to revive against him the writ de heretico comburendo; [333]
but Charles II protected and pensioned him, though he was forbidden
to publish anything further on burning questions, and Leviathan was
not permitted in his lifetime to be republished in English. [334]
He was thus for his generation the typical "infidel," the royalist
clergy being perhaps his bitterest enemies. His spontaneous hostility
to fanaticism shaped his literary career, which began in 1628 with a
translation of Thucydides, undertaken by way of showing the dangers
of democracy. Next came the De Cive (Paris, 1642), written when he
was already an elderly man; and thenceforth the Civil War tinges his
whole temper.
It is in fact by way of a revolt against all theological ethic,
as demonstrably a source of civil anarchy, that Hobbes formulates
a strictly civic or legalist ethic, denying the supremacy of
an abstract or à priori natural moral law (though he founded on
natural law), as well as rejecting all supernatural illumination
of the conscience. [335] In the Church of Rome itself there had
inevitably arisen the practice of Casuistry, in which to a certain
extent ethics had to be rationally studied; and early Protestant
Casuistry, repudiating the authority of the priest, had to rely still
more on reason.
Compare Whewell, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy,
ed. 1862, pp. 25-38, where it is affirmed that, after the
Reformation, "Since the assertions of the teacher had no inherent
authority, he was obliged to give his proofs as well as his
results," and "the determination of cases was replaced by the
discipline of conscience" (p. 29). There is an interesting
progression in English Protestant casuistry from W. Perkins
(1558-1602) and W. Ames (pub. 1630), through Bishops Hall and
Sanderson, to Jeremy Taylor. Mosheim (17 Cent. sec. ii, pt. ii, §
9) pronounces Ames "the first among the Reformed who attempted to
elucidate and arrange the science of morals as distinct from that
of dogmatics." See biog. notes on Perkins and Ames in Whewell,
pp. 27-29, and Reid's Mosheim, p. 681.
But Hobbes passed in two strides to the position that natural morality
is a set of demonstrable inferences as to what adjustments promote
general well-being; and further that there is no practical code
of right and wrong apart from positive social law. [336] He thus
practically introduced once for all into modern Christendom the
fundamental dilemma of rationalistic ethics, not only positing the
problem for his age, [337] but anticipating it as handled in later
times. [338]
How far his rationalism was ahead of that of his age may be
realized by comparing his positions with those of John Selden,
the most learned and, outside of philosophy, one of the shrewdest
of the men of that generation. Selden was sometimes spoken of by
the Hobbists as a freethinker; and his Table Talk contains some
sallies which would startle the orthodox if publicly delivered;
[339] but not only is there explicit testimony by his associates
as to his orthodoxy: [340] his own treatise, De Jure Naturali et
Gentium juxta disciplinam Ebræorum, maintains the ground that the
"Law of Nature" which underlies the variants of the Laws of Nations
is limited to the precepts and traditions set forth in the Talmud
as delivered by Noah to his posterity. [341] Le Clerc said of the
work, justly enough, that in it "Selden only copies the Rabbins, and
scarcely ever reasons." It is likely enough that the furious outcry
against Selden for his strictly historical investigation of tithes,
and the humiliation of apology forced upon him in that connection
in 1618, [342] made him specially chary ever afterwards of any
semblance of a denial of the plenary truth of theological tradition;
but there is no reason to think that he had ever really transcended
the Biblical view of the world's order. He illustrates, in fact,
the extent to which a scholar could in that day be anti-clerical
without being rationalistic. Like the bulk of the Parliamentarians,
though without their fanaticism, he was thoroughly opposed to the
political pretensions of the Church, [343] desiring however to leave
episcopacy alone, as a matter outside of legislation, when the House
of Commons abolished it. Yet he spoke of the name of Puritan as one
which he "trusted he was not either mad enough or foolish enough to
deserve." [344] There were thus in the Parliamentary party men of very
different shades of opinion. The largest party, perhaps, was that of
the fanatics who, as Mrs. Hutchinson--herself fanatical enough--tells
concerning her husband, "would not allow him to be religious because
his hair was not in their cut." [345] Next in strength were the more
or less orthodox but anti-clerical and less pious Scripturalists,
of whom Selden was the most illustrious. By far the smallest group of
all were the freethinkers, men of their type being as often repelled
by the zealotry of the Puritans as by the sacerdotalism of the State
clergy. The Rebellion, in short, though it evoked rationalism, was not
evoked by it. Like all religious strifes--like the vaster Thirty Years'
War in contemporary Germany--it generated both doubt and indifferentism
in men who would otherwise have remained undisturbed in orthodoxy.
§ 2
When, however, we turn from the higher literary propaganda to the
verbal and other transitory debates of the period of the Rebellion,
we realize how much partial rationalism had hitherto subsisted
without notice. In that immense ferment some very advanced opinions,
such as quasi-Anarchism in politics [346] and anti-Scripturalism
in religion, were more or less directly professed. In January,
1646 (N.S.), the authorities of the City of London, alarmed at
the unheard-of amount of discussion, petitioned Parliament to put
down all private meetings; [347] and on February 6, 1646 (N.S.),
a solemn fast, or "day of publique humiliation," was proclaimed on
the score of the increase of "errors, heresies, and blasphemies." On
the same grounds, the Presbyterian party in Parliament pressed an
"Ordinance for the suppression of Blasphemies and Heresies," which,
long held back by Vane and Cromwell, was carried in their despite in
1648, by large majorities, when the royalists renewed hostilities. It
enacted the death penalty against all who should deny the doctrine of
the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the inspiration of the Bible,
a day of judgment, or a future state; and prescribed imprisonment
for Arminianism, rejection of infant baptism, anti-Sabbatarianism,
anti-Presbyterianism, or defence of the doctrine of Purgatory or the
use of images. [348] And of aggressive heresy there are some noteworthy
traces. In a pamphlet entitled "Hell Broke Loose: a Catalogue of the
many spreading Errors, Heresies, and Blasphemies of these Times,
for which we are to be humbled" (March 9, 1646, N.S.), the first
entry--and in the similar Catalogue in Edwards's Gangræna, the second
entry--is a citation of the notable thesis, "That the Scripture,
whether a true manuscript or no, whether Hebrew, Greek, or English,
is but humane, and not able to discover a divine God." [349] This
is cited from "The Pilgrimage of the Saints, by Lawrence Clarkson,"
presumably the Lawrence Clarkson who for his book The Single Eye was
sentenced by resolution of Parliament on September 27, 1650, to be
imprisoned, the book being burned by the common hangman. [350] He is
further cited as teaching that even unbaptized persons may preach and
baptize. Of the other heresies cited the principal is the old denial
of a future life, and especially of a physical and future hell. In
general the heresy is pietistic or antinomian; but we have also the
declaration "that right Reason is the rule of Faith, and that we are to
believe the Scriptures and the doctrine of the Trinity, Incarnation,
Resurrection, so far as we see them to be agreeable to reason and no
further." Concerning Jesus there are various heresies, from simple
Unitarianism to contemptuous disparagement, with the stipulation for
a "Christ formed in us." But though there are cases of unquotable
or ribald blasphemy there is little trace of scholarly criticism
of the Bible, of reasoning against miracles or the inconsistencies
of Scripture, as apart from the doctrine of deity. Nonetheless, it
is very credible that "multitudes, unsettled ... have changed their
faith, either to Scepticisme, to doubt of everything, or Atheisme,
to believe nothing." [351]
Against the furious intolerance of the Puritan legislature some pleaded
with new zeal for tolerance all round; arguing that certainty on
articles of faith and points of religion was impossible--a doctrine
promptly classed as a bad heresy. [352] The plea that toleration
would mean concord was met by the confident and not unfounded retort
that the "sectaries" would themselves persecute if they could. [353]
But this could hardly have been true of all. Notable among the new
parties were the Levellers, who insisted that the State should leave
religion entirely alone, tolerating all creeds, including even atheism;
and who put forward a new and striking ethic, grounding on "universal
reason" the right of all men to the soil. [354] In the strictly
theological field the most striking innovation, apart from simple
Unitarianism, is the denial of the eternity or even the existence of
future torments--a position first taken up, as we have seen, either
by the continental Socinians or by the unnamed English heretics of the
Tudor period, who passed on their heresy to the time of Marlowe. [355]
In this connection the learned booklet [356] entitled Of the Torments
of Hell: the foundations and pillars thereof discover'd, search'd,
shaken, and removed (1658) was rightly thought worth translating into
French by d'Holbach over a century later. [357] It is an argument on
scriptural lines, denying that the conception of a place of eternal
torment is either scriptural or credible; and pointing out that many
had explained it in a "spiritual" sense.
Humane feeling of this kind counted for much in the ferment; but a
contrary hate was no less abundant. The Presbyterian Thomas Edwards,
who in a vociferous passion of fear and zeal set himself to catalogue
the host of heresies that threatened to overwhelm the times, speaks
of "monsters" unheard-of theretofore, "now common among us--as
denying the Scriptures, pleading for a toleration of all religions
and worships, yea, for blasphemy, and denying there is a God." [358]
"A Toleration," he declares, "is the grand design of the Devil, his
masterpiece and chief engine"; "every day now brings forth books for
a Toleration." [359] Among the 180 sects named by him [360] there
were "Libertines," "Antiscripturists," "Skeptics and Questionists,"
[361] who held nothing save the doctrine of free speech and liberty of
conscience; [362] as well as Socinians, Arians, and Anti-trinitarians;
and he speaks of serious men who had not only abandoned their religious
beliefs, but sought to persuade others to do the same. [363] Under
the rule of Cromwell, tolerant as he was of Christian sectarianism,
and even of Unitarianism as represented by Biddle, the more advanced
heresies would get small liberty; though that of Thomas Muggleton and
John Reeve, which took shape about 1651 as the Muggletonian sect, does
not seem to have been molested. Muggleton, a mystic, could teach that
there was no devil or evil spirit, save in "man's spirit of unclean
reason and cursed imagination"; [364] but it was only privately that
such men as Henry Marten and Thomas Chaloner, the regicides, could
avow themselves to be of "the natural religion." The statement of
Bishop Burnet, following Clarendon, that "many of the republicans
began to profess deism," cannot be taken literally, though it is
broadly intelligible that "almost all of them were for destroying
all clergymen ... and for leaving religion free, as they called it,
without either encouragement or restraint."
See Burnet's History of His Own Time, bk. i, ed. 1838, p. 43. The
phrase, "They were for pulling down the churches," again, cannot
be taken literally. Of those who "pretended to little or no
religion and acted only upon the principles of civil liberty,"
Burnet goes on to name Sidney, Henry Nevill, Marten, Wildman, and
Harrington. The last was certainly of Hobbes's way of thinking in
philosophy (Croom Robertson, Hobbes, p. 223, note); but Wildman
was one of the signers of the Anabaptist petition to Charles II
in 1658 (Clarendon, Hist. of the Rebellion, bk. xv, ed. 1843,
p. 855). As to Marten and Chaloner, see Carlyle's Cromwell,
iii, 194; and articles in Nat. Dict. of Biog. Vaughan (Hist. of
England, 1840, ii, 477, note) speaks of Walwyn and Overton as
"among the freethinkers of the times of the Commonwealth." They
were, however, Biblicists, not unbelievers. Prof. Gardiner
(Hist. of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, ii, 253, citing a
News-letter in the Clarendon MSS.) finds record in 1653 of "a man
[who] preached flat atheism in Westminster Hall, uninterrupted by
the soldiers of the guard"; but this obviously counts for little.
Between the advance in speculation forced on by the disputes
themselves, and the usual revolt against the theological spirit
after a long and ferocious display of it, there spread even under
the Commonwealth a new temper of secularity. On the one hand, the
temperamental distaste for theology, antinomian or other, took form
in the private associations for scientific research which were the
antecedents of the Royal Society. On the other hand, the spirit of
religious doubt spread widely in the middle and upper classes; and
between the dislike of the Roundheads for the established clergy and
the anger of the Cavaliers against all Puritanism there was fostered
that "contempt of the clergy" which had become a clerical scandal
at the Restoration and was to remain so for about a century. [365]
Their social status was in general low, and their financial position
bad; and these circumstances, possible only in a time of weakened
religious belief, necessarily tended to further the process of mental
change. Within the sphere of orthodoxy, it operated openly. It is
noteworthy that the term "rationalist" emerges as the label of a
sect of Independents or Presbyterians who declare that "What their
reason dictates to them in church or State stands for good, until
they be convinced with better." [366] The "rationalism," so-called,
of that generation remained ostensibly scriptural; but on other lines
thought went further. Of atheism there are at this stage only dubious
biographical and controversial traces, such as Mrs. Hutchinson's
characterization of a Nottingham physician, possibly a deist, as a
"horrible atheist," [367] and the Rev. John Dove's Confutation of
Atheism (1640), which does not bear out its title. Ephraim Pagitt, in
his Heresiography (1644), speaks loosely of an "atheistical sect who
affirm that men's soules sleep with them until the day of judgment";
and tells of some alleged atheist merely that he "mocked and jeared
at Christ's Incarnation." [368] Similarly a work, entitled Dispute
betwixt an Atheist and a Christian (1646), shows the existence not
of atheists but of deists, and the deist in the dialogue is a Fleming.
More trustworthy is the allusion in Nathaniel Culverwel's Discourse of
the Light of Nature (written in 1646, published posthumously in 1652)
to "those lumps and dunghills of all sects ... that young and upstart
generation of gross anti-scripturalists, that have a powder-plot
against the Gospel, that would very compendiously behead all Christian
religion at one blow, a device which old and ordinary heretics were
never acquainted withal." [369] The reference is presumably to the
followers of Lawrence Clarkson. Yet even here we have no mention of
atheism, which is treated as something almost impossible. Indeed, the
very course of arguing in favour of a "Light of Nature" seems to have
brought suspicion on Culverwel himself, who shows a noticeable liking
for Herbert of Cherbury. [370] He is, however, as may be inferred from
his angry tone towards anti-scripturalists, substantially orthodox,
and not very important.
It is contended for Culverwel by modern admirers (ed. cited,
p. xxi) that he deserves the praise given by Hallam to the later
Bishop Cumberland as "the first Christian writer who sought to
establish systematically the principle of moral right independent
of revelation." [See above, p. 74, the similar tribute of Mosheim
to Ames.] But Culverwel does not really make this attempt. His
proposition is that reason, "the candle of the Lord," discovers
"that all the moral law is founded in natural and common light,
in the light of reason, and that there is nothing in the mysteries
of the Gospel contrary to the light of reason" (Introd. end);
yet he contends not only that faith transcends reason, but that
Abraham's attempt to slay his son was a dutiful obeying of "the
God of nature" (pp. 225-26). He does not achieve the simple step of
noting that the recognition of revelation as such must be performed
by reason, and thus makes no advance on the position of Bacon,
much less on those of Pecock and Hooker. His object, indeed, was
not to justify orthodoxy by reason against rationalistic unbelief,
but to make a case for reason in theology against the Lutherans
and others who, "because Socinus has burnt his wings at this candle
of the Lord," scouted all use of it (Introd.). Culverwel, however,
was one of the learned group in Emanuel College, Cambridge, whose
tradition developed in the next generation into Latitudinarianism;
and he may be taken as a learned type of a number of the clergy
who were led by the abundant discussion all around them into
professing and encouraging a ratiocinative habit of mind. Thus
we find Dean Stuart, Clerk of the Closet to Charles I, devoting
one of his short homilies to Jerome's text, Tentemus animas quæ
deficiunt a fide naturalibus rationibus adjurare. "It is not
enough," he writes, "for you to rest in an imaginary faith, and
easiness in beleeving, except yee know also what and why and how
you come to that beleef. Implicite beleevers, ignorant beleevers,
the adversary may swallow, but the understanding beleever hee must
chaw, and pick bones before hee come to assimilate him, and make
him like himself. The implicite beleever stands in an open field,
and the enemy will ride over him easily: the understanding beleever
is in a fenced town." (Catholique Divinity, 1657, pp. 133-34--a
work written many years earlier.)
The discourse on Atheism, again, in the posthumous works of John
Smith of Cambridge (d. 1652), is entirely retrospective; but soon
another note is sounded. As early as 1652, the year after the issue
of Hobbes's Leviathan, the prolific Walter Charleton, who had been
physician to the king, published a book entitled The Darkness of
Atheism Expelled by the Light of Nature, wherein he asserted that
England "hath of late produced and doth ... foster more swarms of
atheistical monsters ... than any age, than any Nation hath been
infested withal." In the following year Henry More, the Cambridge
Platonist, published his Antidote against Atheism. The flamboyant
dedication to Viscountess Conway affirms that the existence of God
is "as clearly demonstrable as any theorem in mathematicks"; but,
the reverend author adds, "considering the state of things as they
are, I cannot but pronounce that there is more necessity of this my
Antidote than I could wish there were." At the close of the preface he
pleasantly explains that he will use no Biblical arguments, but talk
to the atheist as a "mere Naturalist"; inasmuch as "he that converses
with a barbarian must discourse to him in his own language," and "he
that would gain upon the more weak and sunk minds of sensual mortals
is to accommodate himself to their capacity, who, like the bat and
owl, can see nowhere so well as in the shady glimmerings of their
twilight." Then, after some elementary play with the design argument,
the entire Third Book of forty-six folio pages is devoted to a parade
of old wives' tales of witches and witchcraft, witches' sabbaths,
apparitions, commotions by devils, ghosts, incubi, polter-geists--the
whole vulgar medley of the peasant superstitions of Europe.
It is not that the Platonist does violence to his own philosophic
tastes by way of influencing the "bats and owls" of atheism. This
mass of superstition is his own special pabulum. In the preface he has
announced that, while he may abstain from the use of the Scriptures,
nothing shall restrain him from telling what he knows of spirits. "I
am so cautious and circumspect," he claims, "that I make use of no
narrations that either the avarice of the priest or the credulity
and fancifulness of the melancholist may render suspected." As for
the unbelievers, "their confident ignorance shall never dash me out
of confidence with my well-grounded knowledge; for I have been no
careless inquirer into these things." It is after a polter-geist
tale of the crassest description that he announces that it was
strictly investigated and attested by "that excellently-learned and
noble gentleman, Mr. E. Boyle," who avowed "that all his settled
indisposedness to believe strange things was overcome by this special
conviction." [371] And the section ends with the proposition:
"Assuredly that saying is not more true in politick, No Bishop,
no King, than this in metaphysicks, No Spirit, no God." Such was
the mentality of some of the most eminent and scholarly Christian
apologists of the time. It seems safe to conclude that the Platonist
made few converts.
More avowed that he wrote without having read previous apologists;
and others were similarly spontaneous in the defence of the faith. In
1654 there is noted [372] a treatise called Atheismus Vapulans, by
William Towers, whose message can in part be inferred from his title;
[373] and in 1657 Charleton issued his Immortality of the Human Soul
demonstrated by the Light of Nature, wherein the argument, which
says nothing of revelation, is so singularly unconfident, and so much
broken in upon by excursus, as to leave it doubtful whether the author
was more lacking in dialectic skill or in conviction. And still the
traces of unbelief multiply. Baxter and Howe were agreed, in 1658,
that there were both "infidels and papists" at work around them; and in
1659 Howe writes: "I know some leading men are not Christians." [374]
"Seekers, Vanists, and Behmenists" are specified as groups to which
both infidels and papists attach themselves. And Howe, recognizing
how religious strifes promote unbelief, bears witness "What a cloudy,
wavering, uncertain, lank, spiritless thing is the faith of Christians
in this age become!... Most content themselves to profess it only as
the religion of their country." [375]
Alongside of all this vindication of Christianity there was going on
constant and cruel persecution of heretic Christians. The Unitarian
John Biddle, master of the Gloucester Grammar School, was dismissed
for his denial of the Trinity; and in 1647 he was imprisoned, and
his book burned by the hangman. In 1654 he was again imprisoned; and
in 1655 he was banished to the Scilly Islands. Returning to London
after the Restoration, he was again arrested, and died in gaol in
1662. [376] Under the Commonwealth (1656) James Naylor, the Quaker,
narrowly escaped death for blasphemy, but was whipped through the
streets, pilloried, bored through the tongue with a hot iron, branded
in the forehead, and sent to hard labour in prison. Many hundreds of
Quakers were imprisoned and more or less cruelly handled.
From the Origines Sacræ (1662) of Stillingfleet, nevertheless,
it would appear that both deism and atheism were becoming more and
more common. [377] He states that "the most popular pretences of
the atheists of our age have been the irreconcilableness of the
account of times in Scripture with that of the learned and ancient
heathen nations, the inconsistency of the belief of the Scriptures
with the principles of reason; and the account which may be given
of the origin of things from the principles of philosophy without
the Scriptures." These positions are at least as natural to deists
as to atheists; and Stillingfleet is later found protesting against
the policy of some professed Christians who give up the argument from
miracles as valueless. [378] His whole treatise, in short, assumes the
need for meeting a very widespread unbelief in the Bible, though it
rarely deals with the atheism of which it so constantly speaks. After
the Restoration, naturally, all the new tendencies were greatly
reinforced, [379] alike by the attitude of the king and his companions,
all influenced by French culture, and by the general reaction against
Puritanism. Whatever ways of thought had been characteristic of the
Puritans were now in more or less complete disfavour; the belief in
witchcraft was scouted as much on this ground as on any other; [380]
and the deistic doctrines found a ready audience among royalists,
whose enemies had been above all things Bibliolaters.
There is evidence that Charles II, at least up to the time of
his becoming a Catholic, and probably even to the end, was at
heart a deist. See Burnet's History of his Own Time, ed. 1838,
pp. 61, 175, and notes; and cp. refs. in Buckle, 3-vol. ed. i,
362, note; 1-vol. ed. p. 205. St. Evremond, who knew him and
many of his associates, affirmed expressly that Charles's creed
"étoit seulement ce qui passe vulgairement, quoiqu' injustement,
pour une extinction totale de Religion: je veux dire le Déisme"
(OEuvres mélées: t. viii of OEuvres, ed. 1714, p. 354). His
opinion, St. Evremond admits, was the result of simple recognition
of the actualities of religious life, not of reading, or of much
reflection. And his adoption of Catholicism, in St. Evremond's
opinion, was purely political. He saw that Catholicism made much
more than Protestantism for kingly power, and that his Catholic
subjects were the most subservient.
We gather this, however, still from the apologetic treatises and
the historians, not from new deistic literature; for in virtue of
the Press Licensing Act, passed on behalf of the Church in 1662, no
heretical book could be printed; so that Herbert was thus far the only
professed deistic writer in the field, and Hobbes the only other of
similar influence. Baxter, writing in 1655 on The Unreasonableness of
Infidelity, handles chiefly Anabaptists; and in his Reformed Pastor
(1656), though he avows that "the common ignorant people," seeing
the endless strifes of the clergy, "are hardened by us against
all religion," the only specific unbelief he mentions is that of
"the devil's own agents, the unhappy Socinians," who had written
"so many treatises for ... unity and peace." [381] But in his Reasons
of the Christian Religion, issued in 1667, he thinks fit to prove the
existence of God and a future state, and the truth and the supernatural
character of the Christian religion. Any deist or atheist who took the
trouble to read through it would have been rewarded by the discovery
that the learned author has annihilated his own case. In his first
part he affirms: "If there were no life of Retribution after this,
Obedience to God would be finally men's loss and ruine: But Obedience
to God shall not be finally men's loss and ruine: Ergo, there is
another life." [382] In the second part he writes that "Man's personal
interest is an unfit rule and measure of God's goodness"; [383] and,
going on to meet the new argument against Christianity based on the
inference that an infinity of stars are inhabited, he writes:--
Ask any man who knoweth these things whether all this earth be any
more in comparison of the whole creation than one Prison is to a
Kingdom or Empire, or the paring of one nail ... in comparison
of the whole body. And if God should cast off all this earth,
and use all the sinners in it as they deserve, it is no more sign
of a want of benignity or mercy in him than it is for a King to
cast one subject of a million into a jail ... or than it is to
pare a man's nails, or cut off a wart, or a hair, or to pull out
a rotten aking tooth. [384]
Thus the second part absolutely destroys one of the fundamental
positions of the first. No semblance of levity on the part of the
freethinkers could compare with the profound intellectual insincerity
of such a propaganda as this; and that deism and atheism continued to
gain ground is proved by the multitude of apologetic treatises. Even
in church-ridden Scotland they were found necessary; at least the
young advocate George Mackenzie, afterwards to be famous as the
"bluidy Mackenzie" of the time of persecution, thought it expedient
to make his first appearance in literature with a Religio Stoici
(1663), wherein he sets out with a refutation of atheism. It is
difficult to believe that his counsel to Christians to watch the
"horror-creating beds of dying atheists" [385]--a false pretence as
it stands--represented any knowledge whatever of professed atheism
in his own country; and his discussion of the subject is wholly on
the conventional lines--notably so when he uses the customary plea,
later associated with Pascal, that the theist runs no risk even if
there is no future life, whereas the atheist runs a tremendous risk
if there is one; [386] but when he writes of "that mystery why the
greatest wits are most frequently the greatest atheists," [387] he
must be presumed to refer at least to deists. And other passages show
that he had listened to freethinking arguments. Thus he speaks [388]
of those who "detract from Scripture by attributing the production
of miracles to natural causes"; and again [389] of those who "contend
that the Scriptures are written in a mean and low style; are in some
places too mysterious, in others too obscure; contain many things
incredible, many repetitions, and many contradictions." His own
answers are conspicuously weak. In the latter passage he continues:
"But those miscreants should consider that much of the Scripture's
native splendour is impaired by its translators"; and as to miracles
he makes the inept answer that if secondary causes were in operation
they acted by God's will; going on later to suggest on his own part
that prophecy may be not a miraculous gift, but "a natural (though the
highest) perfection of our human nature." [390] Apart from his weak
dialectic, he writes in general with cleverness and literary finish,
but without any note of sincerity; and his profession of concern that
reason should be respected in theology [391] is as little acted on in
his later life as his protest against persecution. [392] The inference
from the whole essay is that in Scotland, as in England, the civil
war had brought up a considerable crop of reasoned unbelief; and that
Mackenzie, professed defender of the faith as he was at twenty-five,
and official persecutor of nonconformists as he afterwards became, met
with a good deal of it in his cultured circle. In his later booklet,
Reason: an Essay (1690), he speaks of the "ridiculous and impudent
extravagance of some who ... take pains to persuade themselves and
others that there is not a God." [393] He further coarsely asperses
all atheists as debauchees, [394] though he avows that "Infidelity
is not the cause of false reasoning, because such as are not atheists
reason falsely."
When anti-theistic thought could subsist in the ecclesiastical climate
of Puritan Scotland, it must have flourished somewhat in England. In
1667 appeared A Philosophicall Essay towards an eviction of the Being
and Attributes of God, etc., of which the preface proclaims "the bold
and horrid pride of Atheists and Epicures" who "have laboured to
introduce into the world a general Atheism, or at least a doubtful
Skepticisme in matters of Religion." In 1668 was published Meric
Casaubon's treatise, Of Credulity and Incredulity in things Natural,
Civil, and Divine, assailing not only "the Sadducism of these times
in denying spirits, witches," etc., but "Epicurus ... and the juggling
and false dealing lately used to bring Atheism into Credit"--a thrust
at Gassendi. A similar polemic is entombed in a ponderous folio
"romance" entitled Bentivolio and Urania, by Nathaniel Ingelo, D.D.,
a fellow first of Emanuel College, and afterwards of Queen's College,
Cambridge (1660; 4th ed. amended, 1682). The second part, edifyingly
dedicated to the Earl of Lauderdale, one of the worst men of his day,
undertakes to handle the "Atheists, Epicureans, and Skepticks"; and
in the preface the atheists are duly vituperated; while Epicurus is
described as a gross sensualist, in terms of the legend, and the
skeptics as "resigned to the slavery of vice." In the sixth book
the atheists are allowed a momentary hearing in defence of their
"horrid absurdities," from which it appears that there were current
arguments alike anthropological and metaphysical against theism. The
most competent part of the author's own argument, which is unlimited
as to space, is that which controverts the thesis of the invention
of religious beliefs by "politicians" [395]--a notion first put in
currency, as we have seen, by those who insisted on the expediency
and value of such inventions; as, Polybius among the ancients, and
Machiavelli among the moderns; and further by Christian priests,
who described all non-Christian religions as human inventions.
Dr. Ingelo's folio seems to have had many readers; but he avowedly did
not look for converts; and defences of the faith on a less formidable
scale were multiplied. A "Person of Honour" (Sir Charles Wolseley)
produced in 1669 an essay on The Unreasonableness of Atheism made
Manifest, which, without supplying any valid arguments, gives some
explanation of the growth of unbelief in terms of the political and
other antecedents; [396] and in 1670 appeared Richard Barthogge's
Divine Goodness Explicated and Vindicated from the Exceptions of the
Atheists. Baxter in 1671 [397] complains that "infidels are grown
so numerous and so audacious, and look so big and talk so loud";
and still the process continues. In 1672 Sir William Temple writes
indignantly of "those who would pass for wits in our age by saying
things which, David tells us, the fool said in his heart." [398]
In the same year appeared The Reasonableness of Scripture-Belief,
by Sir Charles Wolseley, and The Atheist Silenced, by one J. M.;
in 1674, Dr. Thomas Good's Firmianus et Dubitantius, or Dialogues
concerning Atheism, Infidelity, and Popery; in 1675, the posthumous
treatise of Bishop Wilkins (d. 1672), Of the Principles and Duties
of Natural Religion, with a preface by Tillotson; and a Brevis
Demonstratio, with the modest sub-title, "The Truth of Christian
Religion Demonstrated by Reasons the best that have yet been out in
English"; in 1677, Bishop Stillingfleet's Letter to a Deist; and in
1678 the massive work of Cudworth on The True Intellectual System of
the Universe attacking atheism (not deism) on philosophic lines which
sadly compromised the learned author. [399] English dialectic being
found insufficient, there was even produced in 1679 a translation by
the Rev. Joshua Bonhome of the French L'Athéisme Convaincu of David
Dersdon, published twenty years before.
All of these works explicitly avow the abundance of unbelief;
Tillotson, himself accused of it, pronounces the age "miserably overrun
with Skepticism and Infidelity"; and Wilkins, avowing that these
tendencies are common "not only among sensual men of the vulgar sort,
but even among those who pretend to a more than ordinary measure of
wit and learning," attempts to meet them by a purely deistic argument,
with a claim for Christianity appended, as if he were concerned chiefly
to rebut atheism, and held his own Christianity on a very rationalistic
tenure. The fact was that the orthodox clergy were as hard put to it
to repel religious antinomianism on the one hand as to repel atheism
on the other; and no small part of the deistic movement seems to have
been set up by the reaction against pious lawlessness. [400] Thus
we have Tillotson, writing as Dean of Canterbury, driven to plead
in his preface to the work of Wilkins that "it is a great mistake"
to think the obligation of moral duties "doth solely depend upon the
revelation of God's will made to us in the Holy Scriptures." It was
such reasoning that brought upon him the charge of freethinking.
If it be now possible to form any accurate picture of the state of
belief in the latter part of the seventeenth century, it may perhaps
be done by recognizing three categories of temperament or mental
proclivity. First we have to reckon with the great mass of people
held to religious observance by hebetude, [401] devoid of the deeper
mystical impulse or psychic bias which exhibited itself on the one
hand among the dissenters who partly preserved the "enthusiasms"
of the Commonwealth period, and on the other among the more cultured
pietists of the Church who, banning "enthusiasm" in its stronger forms,
cultivated a certain "enthusiasm" of their own. Religionists of the
latter type were ministered to by superstitious mystics like Henry
More, who, even when undertaking to "prove" the existence of God and
the separate existence of the soul by argument and by demonology,
taught them to cultivate a "warranted enthusiasm," and to "endeavour
after a certain principle more noble and inward than reason itself,
and without which reason will falter, or at least reach but to mean
and frivolous things" ... "something in me while I thus speak, which
I must confess is of so retruse a nature that I want a name for it,
unless I should adventure to term it divine sagacity, which is the
first rise of successful reason, especially in matters of great
comprehension and moment." [402] There was small psychic difference
between this dubiously draped affirmation of the "inner light" and
the more orotund proclamations of it by the dissenters who, for a
considerable section of the people, still carried on the tradition of
rapturous pietism; and the dissenters were not always at a disadvantage
in that faculty for rhetoric which has generally been a main factor
in doctrinal religion. [403]
From the popular and the eclectic pietist alike the generality of the
Anglican clergy stood aloof; and among them, in turn, a rationalistic
and anti-mythical habit of mind in a manner joined men who were divided
in their beliefs. The clergymen who wrote lawyer-like treatises against
schism were akin in psychosis to those who, in their distaste for the
parade of inspiration, veered towards deism. Tillotson was not the
only man reputed to have done so: fervid dissenters declared that many
of the established clergy paid "more respect to the light of reason
than to the light of the Scriptures," and further "left Christ out of
their religion, disowned imputed righteousness, derided the operations
of the holy spirit as the empty pretences of enthusiasts." [404]
Of men of this temperament, some would open dialectic batteries
against dissent; while others, of a more searching proclivity,
would tend to construct for themselves a rationalistic creed out
of the current medley of theological and philosophic doctrine. The
great mass of course maintained an allegiance of habit to the main
formulas of the faith, putting quasi-rational aspects on the trinity,
providence, redemption, and the future life, very much as the adherents
of political parties normally vindicate their supposed principles;
and there was a good deal of surviving temperamental piety even in
the Restoration period. [405] But the outstanding feature of the age,
as contrasted with previous periods, was the increasing commonness
of the skeptical or rationalistic attitude in general society. Sir
Charles Wolseley protests [406] that "Irreligion, 'tis true, in its
practice hath still been the companion of every age, but its open and
public defence seems the peculiar of this"; adding that "most of the
bad principles of this age are of no earlier a date than one very ill
book, and indeed but the spawn of the Leviathan." This, as we have
seen, is a delusion; but the influence of Hobbes was a potent factor.
All the while, the censorship of the press, which was one of the
means by which the clerical party under Charles combated heresy,
prevented any new and outspoken writing on the deistic side. The
Treatise of Humane [i.e. Human] Reason (1674) [407] of Martin
Clifford, a scholarly man-about-town, [408] who was made Master
of the Charterhouse, went indeed to the bottom of the question of
authority by showing, as Spinoza had done shortly before, [409] that
the acceptance of authority is itself in the last resort grounded in
reason. The author makes no overt attack on religion, and professes
Christian belief, but points out that many modern wars had been
on subjects of religion, and elaborates a skilful argument on the
gain to be derived from toleration. Reason alone, fairly used, will
bring a man to the Christian faith: he who denies this cannot be a
Christian. As for schism, it is created not by variation in belief,
but by the refusal to tolerate it. This ingenious and well-written
treatise speedily elicited three replies, all pronouncing it a
pernicious work. Dr. Laney, Bishop of Ely, is reported to have
declared that book and author might fitly be burned together; [410]
and Dr. Isaac Watts, while praising it for "many useful notions,"
found it "exalt reason as the rule of religion as well as the guide,
to a degree very dangerous." [411] Its actual effect seems to have been
to restrain the persecution of dissenters. [412] In 1680, three years
after Clifford's death, there appeared An Apology for a Treatise of
Humane Reason, by Albertus Warren, wherein one of the attacks, entitled
Plain Dealing, by a Cambridge scholar, is specially answered. [413]
This helped to evoke the anonymous Discourse of Things above Reason
(1681), by Robert Boyle, the distinguished author of The Sceptical
Chemist, whom we have seen backing up Henry More in acceptance of
the grossest of ignorant superstitions. The most notable thing about
the Discourse is that it anticipates Berkeley's argument against
freethinking mathematicians. [414]
The stress of new discussion is further to be gathered from the
work of Howe, On the Reconcilableness of God's Prescience of the
Sins of Men with the Wisdom and Sincerity of his Counsels and
Exhortations, produced in 1677 at Boyle's request. As a modern
admirer admits that the thesis was a hopeless one, [415] it is not
to be supposed that it did much to lessen doubt in its own day. The
preface to Stillingfleet's Letter to a Deist (1677), which for
the first time brings that appellation into prominence in English
controversy, tacitly abandoning the usual ascription of atheism to
all unbelievers, avows that "a mean esteem of the Scriptures and the
Christian Religion" has become very common "among the Skepticks of
this Age," and complains very much, as Butler did sixty years later,
of the spirit of "Raillery and Buffoonery" in which the matter was
too commonly approached. The "Letter" shows that a multitude of the
inconsistencies and other blemishes of the Old Testament were being
keenly discussed; and it cannot be said that the Bishop's vindication
was well calculated to check the tendency. Indeed, we have the angry
and reiterated declaration of Archdeacon Parker, writing in 1681,
that "the ignorant and the unlearned among ourselves are become the
greatest pretenders to skepticism; and it is the common people that
nowadays set up for Skepticism and Infidelity"; that "Atheism and
Irreligion are at length become as common as Vice and Debauchery";
and that "Plebeans and Mechanicks have philosophized themselves
into Principles of Impiety, and read their Lectures of Atheism in
the Streets and Highways. And they are able to demonstrate out of
the Leviathan that there is no God nor Providence," and so on. [416]
As the Archdeacon's method of refutation consists mainly in abuse,
he doubtless had the usual measure of success. A similar order of
dialectic is employed by Dr. Sherlock in his Practical Discourse of
Religious Assemblies (1681). The opening section is addressed to the
"speculative atheists," here described as receding from the principles
of their "great Master, Mr. Hobbs," who, "though he had no great
opinion of religion in itself, yet thought it something considerable
when it became the law of the nation." Such atheists, the reverend
writer notes, when it is urged on them that all mankind worship "some
God or other," reply that such an argument is as good for polytheism
and idolatry as for monotheism; so, after formally inviting them to
"cure their souls of that fatal and mortal disease, which makes them
beasts here and devils hereafter," and lamenting that he is not dealing
with "reasonable men," he bethinks him that "the laws of conversation
require us to treat all men with just respects," and admits that there
have been "some few wise and cautious atheists." To such, accordingly,
he suggests that the atheist has already a great advantage in a world
morally restrained by religion, where he is under no such restraint,
and that, "if he should by his wit and learning proselyte a whole
nation to atheism, Hell would break loose on Earth, and he might soon
find himself exposed to all those violences and injuries which he
now securely practises." For the rest, they had better not affront
God, who may after all exist, and be able to revenge himself. [417]
And so forth.
Of deists as such, Sherlock has nothing to say beyond treating
as "practical atheists" men who admit the existence of God, yet
never go to church, though "religious worship is nothing else but
a public acknowledgment of God." Their non-attendance "is as great,
if not a greater affront to God, and contempt of him, than atheism
itself." [418] But the reverend writer's strongest resentment is
aroused by the spectacle of freethinkers asking for liberty of thought.
"It is a fulsome and nauseous thing," he breathlessly protests,
"to see the atheists and infidels of our days to turn great
reformers of religion, to set up a mighty cry for liberty of
conscience. For whatever reformation of religion may be needful
at this time, whatever liberty of conscience may be fit to be
granted, yet what have these men to do to meddle with it; those
who think religion a mere fable, and God to be an Utopian prince,
and conscience a man of clouts set up for a scarecrow to fright
such silly creatures from their beloved enjoyments, and hell and
heaven to be forged in the same mint with the poet's Styx and
Acheron and Elysian Fields? We are like to see blessed times,
if such men had but the reforming of religion." [419]
Dr Sherlock was not going to do good if the devil bade him.
The faith had a wittier champion in South; but he, in a Westminster
Abbey sermon of 1684-5, [420] mournfully declares that
"The weakness of our church discipline since its restoration,
whereby it has been scarce able to get any hold on men's
consciences, and much less able to keep it; and the great
prevalence of that atheistical doctrine of the Leviathan; and
the unhappy propagation of Erastianism; these things (I say)
with some others have been the sad and fatal causes that have
loosed the bands of conscience and eaten out the very heart and
sense of Christianity among us, to that degree, that there is now
scarce any religious tye or restraint upon persons, but merely
from those faint remainders of natural conscience, which God
will be sure to keep alive upon the hearts of men, as long as
they are men, for the great ends of his own providence, whether
they will or no. So that, were it not for this sole obstacle,
religion is not now so much in danger of being divided and torn
piecemeal by sects and factions, as of being at once devoured
by atheism. Which being so, let none wonder that irreligion is
accounted policy when it is grown even to a fashion; and passes
for wit, with some, as well as for wisdom with others."
How general was the ferment of discussion may be gathered from
Dryden's Religio Laici (1682), addressed to the youthful Henry
Dickinson, translator of Père Richard Simon's Critical History of
the Old Testament (Fr. 1678). The French scholar was suspect to begin
with; and Bishop Burnet tells that Richard Hampden (grandson of the
patriot), who was connected with the Rye House Plot and committed
suicide in the reign of William and Mary, had been "much corrupted"
in his religious principles by Simon's conversation at Paris. In
the poem, Dryden recognizes the upsetting tendency of the treatise,
albeit he terms it "matchless":--
For some, who have his secret meaning guessed,
Have found our author not too much a priest;
and his flowing disquisition, which starts from poetic contempt of
reason and ends in prosaic advice to keep quiet about its findings,
leaves the matter at that. The hopelessly confused but musical passage:
Dim as the borrowed beams of moon and stars,
To lonely, weary, wandering travellers,
Is Reason to the soul,
begins the poem; but the poet thinks it necessary both in his preface
and in his piece to argue with the deists in a fashion which must
have entertained them as much as it embarrassed the more thoughtful
orthodox, his simple thesis being that all ideas of deity were débris
from the primeval revelation to Noah, and that natural reason could
never have attained to a God-idea at all. And even at that, as regards
the Herbertian argument:
No supernatural worship can be true,
Because a general law is that alone
Which must to all and everywhere be known:
he confesses that
Of all objections this indeed is chief
To startle reason, stagger frail belief;
and feebly proceeds to argue away the worst meaning of the creed of
"the good old man" Athanasius. Finally, we have a fatherly appeal
for peace and quietness among the sects:--
And after hearing what our Church can say,
If still our reason runs another way,
That private reason 'tis more just to curb
Than by disputes the public peace disturb;
For points obscure are of small use to learn,
But common quiet is mankind's concern.
It must have been the general disbelief in Dryden's sincerity on
religious matters that caused the ascription to him of various
freethinking treatises, for there is no decisive evidence that he
was ever pronouncedly heterodox. His attitude to rationalism in the
Religio Laici is indeed that of one who either could not see the scope
of the problem or was determined not to indicate his recognition of it;
and on the latter view the insincerity of both poem and preface would
be exorbitant. By his nominal hostility to deism, however, Dryden did
freethought a service of some importance. After his antagonism had
been proclaimed, no one could plausibly associate freethinking with
licentiousness, in which Dryden so far exceeded nearly every poet
and dramatist of his age that the non-juror Jeremy Collier was free
to single him out as the representative of theatrical lubricity. But
in simple justice it must also be avowed that of all the opponents
of deism in that day he is one of the least embittered, and that his
amiable superficiality of argument must have tended to stimulate the
claims of reason.
The late Dr. Verrall, a keen but unprejudiced critic, sums up as
regards Dryden's religious poetry in general that "What is clear
is that he had a marked dislike of clergy of all sorts, as such";
that "the main points of Deism are noted in Religio Laici (46-61);
and that "his creed was presumably some sort of Deism" (Lectures
on Dryden, 1914, pp. 148-50). Further, "The State of Innocence is
really deistic and not Christian in tone: in his play of Tyrannic
Love, the religion of St. Catharine may be mere philosophy";
and though the poet in his preface to that play protests that his
"outward conversation shall never be justly taxed with the note of
atheism or profaneness," the disclaimer "proves nothing as to his
positive belief: Deism is not profane." In Absalom and Achitophel,
again, the "coarse satire on Transubstantiation (118 ff.) shows
rather religious insensibility than hostile theology," though
"the poem shows his dislike of liberty and private judgment
(49-50)." Of the Religio Laici the critic asks: "Now in all
this, is there any religion at all?" The poem "might well be
dismissed as mere politics but for its astounding commencement"
(p. 155). The critic unexpectedly fails to note that the admired
commencement is an insoluble confusion of metaphors.
How far the process of reasoning had gone among quiet thinking people
before the Revolution may be gathered from the essay entitled Miracles
no Violations of the Laws of Nature, published in 1683. [421] Its
thesis is that put explicitly by Montaigne and implicitly by Bacon,
that Ignorance is the only worker of miracles; in other words, "that
the power of God and the power of Nature are one and the same"--a
simple and straightforward way of putting a conception which Cudworth
had put circuitously and less courageously a few years before. No
Scriptural miracle is challenged qua event. "Among the many miracles
related to be done in favour of the Israelites," says the writer,
"there is (I think) no one that can be apodictically demonstrated to
be repugnant to th' establisht Order of Nature"; [422] and he calmly
accepts the Biblical account of the first rainbow, explaining it as
passing for a miracle merely because it was the first. He takes his
motto from Pliny: "Quid non miraculo est, cum primum in notitiam
venit?" [423] This is, however, a preliminary strategy; as is the
opening reminder that "most of the ancient Fathers ... and of the
most learned Theologues among the moderns" hold that the Scriptures
as regards natural things do not design to instruct men in physics but
"aim only to excite pious affections in their breasts."
We accordingly reach the position that the Scripture "many times
speaks of natural things, yea even of God himself, very improperly,
as aiming to affect and occupy the imagination of men, not to
convince their reason." Many Scriptural narratives, therefore, "are
either delivered poetically or related according to the preconceived
opinions and prejudices of the writer." "Wherefore we here absolutely
conclude that all the events that are truly related in the Scripture
to have come to pass, proceeded necessarily ... according to the
immutable Laws of Nature; and that if anything be found which can
be apodictically demonstrated to be repugnant to those laws ... we
may safely and piously believe the same not to have been dictated
by divine inspiration, but impiously added to the sacred volume by
sacrilegious men; for whatever is against Nature is against Reason;
and whatever is against Reason is absurd, and therefore also to be
rejected and refuted." [424]
Lest this should be found too hard a doctrine there is added, àpropos
of Joshua's staying of the sun and moon, a literary solution which has
often done duty in later times. "To interpret Scripture-miracles, and
to understand from the narrations of them how they really happened,
'tis necessary to know the opinions of those who first reported
them ... otherwise we shall confound ... things which have really
happen'd with things purely imaginary, and which were only prophetic
representations. For in Scripture many things are related as real, and
which were also believ'd to be real even by the relators themselves,
that notwithstanding were only representations form'd in the brain,
and merely imaginary--as that God, the Supreme Being, descended from
heaven ... upon Mount Sinai...; that Elias ascended to heaven in
a fiery chariot ... which were only representations accommodated to
their opinions who deliver'd them down to us." [425] Such argumentation
had to prepare the way for Hume's Essay Of Miracles, half a century
later; and concerning both reasoners it is to be remembered that
their thought was to be "infidelity" for centuries after them. It
needed real freethinking, then, to produce such doctrine in the days
of the Rye House Plot.
Meanwhile, during an accidental lapse of the press laws, the deist
Charles Blount [426] (1654-1693) had produced with his father's help
his Anima Mundi (1679), in which there is set forth a measure of
cautious unbelief; following it up (1680) by his much more pronounced
essay, Great is Diana of the Ephesians, a keen attack on the principle
of revelation and clericalism in general, and his translation [from
the Latin version] of Philostratus's Life of Apollonius of Tyana, so
annotated [427] as to be an ingenious counterblast to the Christian
claims, and so prefaced as to be an open challenge to orthodoxy. The
book was condemned to be burnt; and only the influence of Blount's
family, [428] probably, prevented his being prosecuted. The propaganda,
however, was resumed by Blount and his friends in small tracts, and
after his suicide [429] in 1693 these were collected as the Oracles of
Reason (1693), his collected works (without the Apollonius) appearing
in 1695. By this time the political tension of the Revolution of 1688
was over; Le Clerc's work on the inspiration of the Old Testament,
raising many doubts as to the authorship of the Pentateuch, had been
translated in 1690; Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670) had
been translated into English in 1689, and had impressed in a similar
sense a number of scholars; his Ethica had given a new direction to
the theistic controversy; the Boyle Lecture had been established for
the confutation of unbelievers; and after the political convulsion of
1688 has subsided it rains refutations. Atheism is now so fiercely
attacked, and with such specific arguments--as in Bentley's Boyle
Lectures (1692), Edwards's Thoughts concerning the Causes of Atheism
(1695), and many other treatises--that there can be no question as
to the private vogue of atheistic or agnostic opinions. If we are to
judge solely from the apologetic literature, it was more common than
deism. Yet it seems impossible to doubt that there were ten deists
for one atheist. Bentley's admission that he never met an explicit
atheist [430] suggests that much of the atheism warred against was
tentative. It was only the deists who could venture on open avowals;
and the replies to them were most discussed.
Much account was made of one of the most compendious, the Short and
Easy Method with the Deists (1697), by the nonjuror Charles Leslie;
but this handy argument (which is really adopted without acknowledgment
from an apologetic treatise by a French Protestant refugee, published
in 1688 [431]) was not only much bantered by deists, but was sharply
censured as incompetent by the French Protestant Le Clerc; [432]
and many other disputants had to come to the rescue. A partial list
will suffice to show the rate of increase of the ferment:--
1683. Dr. Rust, Discourse on the Use of Reason in ... Religion,
against Enthusiasts and Deists.
1685. Duke of Buckingham, A Short Discourse upon the Reasonableness
of men's having a religion or worship of God.
1685. The Atheist Unmask'd. By a Person of Honour.
1688. Peter Allix, D.D. Reflexions, etc., as above cited.
1691. Archbishop Tenison, The Folly of Atheism.
1691. Discourse of Natural and Revealed Religion.
1691. John Ray, Wisdom of God manifested in the Works of the
Creation. (Many reprints.)
1692. C. Ellis, The Folly of Atheism Demonstrated.
1692. Bentley's Sermons on Atheism. (First Boyle Lectures.)
1693. Archbishop Davies, An Anatomy of Atheism. A poem.
1693. A Conference between an Atheist and his Friend.
1694. J. Goodman, A Winter Evening Conference between Neighbours.
1694. Bishop Kidder, A Demonstration of the Messias. (Boyle Lect.)
1695. John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity.
1695. John Edwards, B.D., Some Thoughts concerning the Several Causes
and occasions of Atheism. (Directed against Locke.)
1696. An Account of the Growth of Deism in England.
1696. Reflections on a Pamphlet, etc. (the last named).
1696. Sir C. Wolseley, The Unreasonableness of Atheism Demonstrated.
(Rep.)
1696. Dr. Nichols' Conference with a Theist. Pt. I. (Answer to
Blount.)
1696. J. Edwards, D.D., A Demonstration of the Evidence and
Providence of God.
1696. E. Pelling, Discourse ... on the Existence of God. (Pt. II in
1705).
1697. Stephen Eye, A Discourse concerning Natural and Revealed
Religion.
1697. Bishop Gastrell, The Certainty and Necessity of Religion.
(Boyle Lect.)
1697. H. Prideaux, Discourse vindicating Christianity, etc.
1697. C. Leslie, A Short and Easy Method with the Deists.
1698. Dr. J. Harris, A Refutation of Atheistical Objections. (Boyle
Lect.)
1698. Thos. Emes, The Atheist turned Deist, and the Deist turned
Christian.
1699. C. Lidgould, Proclamation against Atheism, etc.
1699. J. Bradley, An Impartial View of the Truth of Christianity.
(Answer to Blount.)
1700. Bishop Bradford, The Credibility of the Christian Revelation.
(Boyle Lect.)
1700. Rev. P. Berault, Discourses on the Trinity, Atheism, etc.
1701. T. Knaggs, Against Atheism.
1701. W. Scot, Discourses concerning the wisdom and goodness of God.
1702. A Confutation of Atheism.
1702. Dr. Stanhope, The Truth and Excellency of the Christian
Religion. (Boyle Lect.)
1704. An Antidote of Atheism. (? Reprint of More).
1705. Translation of Herbert's Ancient Religion of the Gentiles.
1705. Charles Gildon, The Deist's Manual (a recantation).
1705. Ed. Pelling, Discourse concerning the existence of God. Part
II.
1705. Dr. Samuel Clarke, A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes
of God, etc. (Boyle Lect. of 1704.)
1706. A Preservative against Atheism and Infidelity.
1706. Th. Wise, B.D., A Confutation of the Reason and Philosophy of
Atheism (recast and abridgment of Cudworth).
1706. T. Oldfield, Mille Testes; against the Atheists, Deists, and
Skepticks.
1706. The Case of Deism fully and fairly stated, with Dialogue, etc.
1707. Dr. J. Hancock, Arguments to prove the Being of a God. (Boyle
Lect.)
Still there was no new deistic literature apart from Toland's
Christianity not Mysterious (1696) and his unauthorized issue (of
course without author's name) of Shaftesbury's Inquiry Concerning
Virtue in 1699; and in that there is little direct conflict with
orthodoxy, though it plainly enough implied that scripturalism
would injuriously affect morals. It seems at that date, perhaps
through the author's objection to its circulation, to have attracted
little attention; but he tells that it incurred hostility. [433]
Blount's famous stratagem of 1693 [434] had led to the dropping
of the official censorship of the press, the Licensing Act having
been renewed for only two years in 1693 and dropped in 1695; but
after the prompt issue of Blount's collected works in that year,
and the appearance of Toland's Christianity not Mysterious in the
next, the new and comprehensive Blasphemy Law of 1697 [435] served
sufficiently to terrorize writers and printers in that regard for the
time being. [436] Bare denial of the Trinity, of the truth of the
Christian religion, or of the divine authority of the Scriptures,
was made punishable by disability for any civil office; and on a
second offence by three years' imprisonment, with withdrawal of all
legal rights. The first clear gain from the freedom of the press was
thus simply a cheapening of books in general. By the Licensing Act
of Charles II, and by a separate patent, the Stationers' Company had
a monopoly of printing and selling all classical authors; and while
their editions were disgracefully bad, the importers of the excellent
editions printed in Holland had to pay them a penalty of 6s. 8d. on
each copy. [437] By the same Act, passed under clerical influence,
the number even of master printers and letter-founders had been
reduced, and the number of presses and apprentices strictly limited;
and the total effect of the monopolies was that when Dutch-printed
books were imported in exchange for English, the latter sold more
cheaply at Amsterdam than they did in London, the English consumer,
of course, bearing the burden. [438] The immediate effect, therefore,
of the lapse of the Licensing Act must have been to cheapen greatly
all foreign books by removal of duties, and at the same time to cheapen
English books by leaving printing free. It will be seen above that the
output of treatises against freethought at once increases in 1696. But
the revolution of 1688, like the Great Rebellion, had doubtless given
a new stimulus to freethinking; and the total effect of freer trade
in books, even with a veto on "blasphemy," could only be to further
it. This was ere long to be made plain.
§ 3
Alongside of the more popular and native influences, there were at work
others, foreign and more academic; and even in professedly orthodox
writers there are signs of the influence of deistic thought. Thus Sir
Thomas Browne's Religio Medici (written about 1634, published 1642)
has been repeatedly characterized [439] as tending to promote deism
by its tone and method; and there can be no question that it assumes
a great prevalence of critical unbelief, to which its attitude is an
odd combination of humorous cynicism and tranquil dogmatism, often
recalling Montaigne, [440] and at times anticipating Emerson. There
is little savour of confident belief in the smiling maxim that "to
confirm and establish our belief 'tis best to argue with judgments
below our own"; or in the avowal, "In divinity I love to keep the road;
and though not in an implicit yet an humble faith, follow the great
wheel of the Church, by which I move." [441] The pose of the typical
believer: "I can answer all the objections of Satan and my rebellious
reason with that odd resolution I learned of Tertullian, Certum est
quia impossibile est," [442] tells in his case of no anxious hours; and
such smiling incuriousness is not conducive to conviction in others,
especially when followed by a recital of some of the many insoluble
dilemmas of Scripture. When he reasons he is merely self-subversive,
as in the saying, "'Tis not a ridiculous devotion to say a prayer
before a game at tables; for even in sortileges and matters of
greatest uncertainty there is a settled and pre-ordered course of
effects"; [443] and after remarking that the notions of Fortune and
astral influence "have perverted the devotion of many into atheism,"
he proceeds to avow that his many doubts never inclined him "to any
point of infidelity or desperate positions of atheism; for I have been
these many years of opinion there never was any." [444] Yet in his
later treatise on Vulgar Errors (1645) he devotes a chapter [445] to
the activities of Satan in instilling the belief that "there is no God
at all ... that the necessity of his entity dependeth upon ours...;
that the natural truth of God is an artificial erection of Man,
and the Creator himself but a subtile invention of the Creature." He
further notes as coming from the same source "a secondary and deductive
Atheism--that although men concede there is a God, yet should they
deny his providence. And therefore assertions have flown about,
that he intendeth only the care of the species or common natures,
but letteth loose the guard of individuals, and single existences
therein." [446] Browne now asserts merely that "many there are who
cannot conceive that there was ever any absolute Atheist," and does
not clearly affirm that Satan labours wholly in vain. The broad fact
remains that he avows "reason is a rebel unto faith"; and in the
Vulgar Errors he shows in his own reasoning much of the practical
play of the new skepticism. [447] Yet it is finally on record that in
1664, on the trial of two women for witchcraft, Browne declared that
the fits suffered from by the children said to have been bewitched
"were natural, but heightened by the devil's co-operating with the
malice of the witches, at whose instance he did the villainies." [448]
This amazing deliverance is believed to have "turned the scale" in the
minds of the jury against the poor women, and they were sentenced by
the sitting judge, Sir Matthew Hale, to be hanged. It would seem that
in Browne's latter years the irrational element in him, never long
dormant, overpowered the rational. The judgment is a sad one to have
to pass on one of the greatest masters of prose in any language. In
other men, happily, the progression was different.
The opening even of Jeremy Taylor's Ductor Dubitantium, so far as
it goes, falls little short of the deistic position. [449] A new
vein of rationalism, too, is opened in the theological field by the
great Cambridge scholar John Spencer, whose Discourse concerning
Prodigies (1663; 2nd ed. 1665), though quite orthodox in its main
positions, has in part the effect of a plea for naturalism as against
supernaturalism. Spencer's great work, De legibus Hebræorum (1685), is,
apart from Spinoza, the most scientific view of Hebrew institutions
produced before the rise of German theological rationalism in the
latter part of the eighteenth century. Holding most of the Jewish rites
to have been planned by the deity as substitutes for or safeguards
against those of the Gentiles which they resembled, he unconsciously
laid, with Herbert, the foundations of comparative hierology, bringing
to the work a learning which is still serviceable to scholars. [450]
And there were yet other new departures by clerical writers, who of
course exhibit the difficulty of attaining a consistent rationalism.
One clergyman, Joseph Glanvill, is found publishing a treatise on The
Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661; amended in 1665 under the title Scepsis
Scientifica), [451] wherein, with careful reservation of religion,
the spirit of critical science is applied to the ordinary processes
of opinion with much energy, and the "mechanical philosophy" of
Descartes is embraced with zeal. Following Raleigh and Hobbes, [452]
Glanvill also puts the positive view of causation [453] afterwards
fully developed by Hume. [454] Yet he not only vetoed all innovation
in "divinity," but held stoutly by the crudest forms of the belief in
witchcraft, and was with Henry More its chief English champion in his
day against rational disbelief. [455] In religion he had so little
of the skeptical faculty that he declared "Our religious foundations
are fastened at the pillars of the intellectual world, and the grand
articles of our belief as demonstrable as geometry. Nor will ever
either the subtile attempts of the resolved Atheist, or the passionate
hurricanes of the wild enthusiast, any more be able to prevail against
the reason our faith is built on, than the blustering winds to blow out
the Sun." [456] He had his due reward in being philosophically assailed
by the Catholic priest Thomas White as a promoter of skepticism,
[457] and by an Anglican clergyman, wroth with the Royal Society and
all its works, as an infidel and an atheist. [458]
This was as true as clerical charges of the kind usually were in the
period. But without any animus or violence of interpretation, a reader
of Glanvill's visitation sermon on The Agreement of Reason and Religion
[459] might have inferred that he was a deist. It sets forth that
"religion primarily and mainly consists in worship and vertue," and
that it "in a secondary sense consists in some principles relating to
the worship of God, and of his Son, in the ways of devout and vertuous
living"; Christianity having "superadded" baptism and the Lord's
Supper to "the religion of mankind." Apart from his obsession as to
witchcraft--and perhaps even as to that--Glanvill seems to have grown
more and more rationalistic in his later years. The Scepsis omits
some of the credulous flights of the Vanity of Dogmatizing; [460]
the re-written version in the collected Essays omits such dithyrambs
as that above quoted; and the sermon in its revised form sets out with
the emphatic declaration: "There is not anything that I know which hath
done more mischief to religion than the disparaging of reason under
pretence of respect and favour to it; for hereby the very foundations
of Christian faith have been undermined, and the world prepared for
atheism. And if reason must not be heard, the Being of a God and the
authority of Scripture can neither be proved nor defended; and so our
faith drops to the ground like an house that hath no foundation." Such
reasoning could not but be suspect to the orthodoxy of the age.
Apart from the influence of Hobbes, who, like Descartes, shaped his
thinking from the starting-point of Galileo, the Cartesian philosophy
played in England a great transitional part. At the university of
Cambridge it was already naturalized; [461] and the influence of
Glanvill, who was an active member of the Royal Society, must have
carried it further. The remarkable treatise of the anatomist Glisson,
[462] De natura substantiæ energetica (1672), suggests the influence
of either Descartes or Gassendi; and it is remarkable that the
clerical moralist Cumberland, writing his Disquisitio de legibus
Naturæ (1672) in reply to Hobbes, not only takes up a utilitarian
position akin to Hobbes's own, and expressly avoids any appeal
to the theological doctrine of future punishments, but introduces
physiology into his ethic to the extent of partially figuring as an
ethical materialist. [463] In regard to Gassendi's direct influence it
has to be noted that in 1659 there appeared The Vanity of Judiciary
Astrology, translated by "A Person of Quality," from P. Gassendus;
and further that, as is remarked by Reid, Locke borrowed more from
Gassendi than from any other writer. [464]
[It is stated by Sir Leslie Stephen (English Thought in
the Eighteenth Century, 2nd ed. i, 32) that in England the
philosophy of Descartes made no distinguished disciples;
and that John Norris "seems to be the only exception to
the general indifference." This overlooks (1) Glanvill, who
constantly cites and applauds Descartes (Scepsis Scientifica,
passim). (2) In Henry More's Divine Dialogues, again (1668),
one of the disputants is made to speak (Dial. i, ch. xxiv) of
"that admired wit Descartes"; and he later praises him even when
passing censure (above, p. 65). More had been one of the admirers
in his youth, and changed his view (cp. Ward's Life of Dr. Henry
More, pp. 63-64). But his first letter to Descartes begins: "Quanta
voluptate perfusus est animus meus, Vir clarissime, scriptis tuis
legendis, nemo quisquam præter te unum potest conjectare." (3)
There was published in 1670 a translation of Des Fourneillis's
letter in defence of the Cartesian system, with François Bayle's
General System of the Cartesian Philosophy. (4) The continual
objections to the atheistic tendency of Descartes throughout
Cudworth's True Intellectual System imply anything but "general
indifference"; and (5) Barrow's tone in venturing to oppose him
(cit. in Whewell's Philosophy of Discovery, 1860, p. 179) pays
tribute to his great influence. (6) Molyneux, in the preface to
his translation of the Six Metaphysical Meditations of Descartes
in 1680, speaks of him as "this excellent philosopher" and "this
prodigious man." (7) Maxwell, in a note to his translation (1727)
of Bishop Cumberland's Disquisitio de legibus Naturæ, remarks that
the doctrine of a universal plenum was accepted from the Cartesian
philosophy by Cumberland, "in whose time that philosophy prevailed
much" (p. 120). See again (8) Clarke's Answer to Butler's Fifth
Letter (1718) as to the "universal prevalence" of Descartes's
notions in natural philosophy. (9) The Scottish Lord President
Forbes (d. 1747) summed up that "Descartes's romance kept entire
possession of men's belief for fully fifty years" (Works, ii,
132). (10) And his fellow-judge, Sir William Anstruther, in his
"Discourse against Atheism" (Essays, Moral and Divine, 1701,
pp. 6, 8, 9), cites with much approval the theistic argument of
"the celebrated Descartes" as "the last evidences which appeared
upon the stage of learning" in that connection.
Cp. Berkeley, Siris, § 331. Of Berkeley himself, Professor Adamson
writes (Encyc. Brit. iii, 589) that "Descartes and Locke ... are
his real masters in speculation." The Cartesian view of the
eternity and infinity of matter had further become an accepted
ground for "philosophical atheists" in England before the end
of the century (Molyneux, in Familiar Letters of Locke and his
Friends, 1708, p. 46). As to the many writers who charged Descartes
with promoting atheism, see Mosheim's notes in Harrison's ed. of
Cudworth's Intellectual System, i, 275-76; Clarke, as above cited;
Leibnitz's letter to Philip, cited by Latta, Leibnitz, 1898,
p. 8, note; and Brewster's Memoirs of Newton, ii, 315.
Sir Leslie Stephen seems to have followed, under a misapprehension,
Whewell, who contends merely that the Cartesian doctrine
of vortices was never widely accepted in England (Philos. of
Discovery, pp. 177-78; cp. Hist. of the Induct. Sciences, ed. 1857,
ii, 107, 147-48). Buckle was perhaps similarly misled when he
wrote in his note-book: "Descartes was never popular in England"
(Misc. Works, abridged ed. i, 269). Whewell himself mentions that
Clarke, soon after taking his degree at Cambridge, "was actively
engaged in introducing into the academic course of study, first,
the philosophy of Descartes in its best form, and, next, the
philosophy of Newton" (Lectures on Moral Philosophy, ed. 1862,
pp. 97-98). And Professor Fowler, in correcting his first remarks
on the point, decides that "many of the mathematical teachers at
Cambridge continued to teach the Cartesian system for some time
after the publication of Newton's Principia" (ed. of Nov. Org.,
p. xi).
It is clear, however, that insofar as new science set up a direct
conflict with Scriptural assumptions it gained ground but slowly and
indirectly. It is difficult to-day to realize with what difficulty the
Copernican and Galilean doctrine of the earth's rotation and movement
round the sun found acceptance even among studious men. We have seen
that Bacon finally rejected it. And as Professor Masson points out,
[465] not only does Milton seem uncertain to the last concerning
the truth of the Copernican system, but his friends and literary
associates, the "Smectymnuans," in their answer to Bishop Hall's
Humble Remonstrance (1641), had pointed to the Copernican doctrine as
an unquestioned instance of a supreme absurdity. Glanvill, remarking
in 1665 that "it is generally opinion'd that the Earth rests as the
world's centre," avows that "for a man to go about to counter-argue
this belief is as fruitless as to whistle against the winds. I shall
not undertake to maintain the paradox that confronts this almost
Catholic opinion. Its assertion would be entertained with the hoot
of the rabble; the very mention of it as possible, is among the most
ridiculous." [466] All he ventures to do is to show that the senses do
not really vouch the ordinary view. Not till the eighteenth century,
probably, did the common run of educated people anywhere accept the
scientific teaching.
On the other hand, however, there was growing up not a little Socinian
and other Unitarianism, for some variety of which we have seen two men
burned in 1612. Church measures had been taken against the importation
of Socinian books as early as 1640. The famous Lord Falkland,
slain in the Civil War, is supposed to have leant to that opinion;
[467] and Chillingworth, whose Religion of Protestants (1637) was
already a remarkable application of rational tests to ecclesiastical
questions in defiance of patristic authority, [468] seems in his old
age to have turned Socinian. [469] Violent attacks on the Trinity are
noted among the heresies of 1646. [470] Colonel John Fry, one of the
regicides, who in Parliament was accused of rejecting the Trinity,
cleared himself by explaining that he simply objected to the terms
"persons" and "subsistence," but was one of those who sought to help
the persecuted Unitarian Biddle. In 1652 the Parliament ordered the
destruction of a certain Socinian Catechism; and by 1655 the heresy
seems to have become common. [471] It is now certain that Milton was
substantially a Unitarian, [472] and that Locke and Newton were at
heart no less so. [473]
The temper of the Unitarian school appears perhaps at its best in
the anonymous Rational Catechism published in 1686. It purports to
be "an instructive conference between a father and his son," and is
dedicated by the father to his two daughters. The "Catechism" rises
above the common run of its species in that it is really a dialogue,
in which the rôles are at times reversed, and the catechumen is
permitted to think and speak for himself. The exposition is entirely
unevangelical. Right religion is declared to consist in right conduct;
and while the actuality of the Christian record is maintained on
argued grounds, on the lines of Grotius and Parker, the doctrine of
salvation by faith is strictly excluded, future happiness being posited
as the reward of good life, not of faith. There is no negation, the
author's object being avowedly peace and conciliation; but the Epistle
Dedicatory declares that religious reasoners have hitherto "failed in
their foundation-work. They have too much slighted that philosophy
which is the natural religion of all men; and which, being natural,
must needs be universal and eternal: and upon which therefore, or at
least in conformity with which, all instituted and revealed religion
must be supposed to be built." We have here in effect the position
taken up by Toland ten years later; and, in germ, the principle which
developed deism, albeit in connection with an affirmation of the truth
of the Christian records. Of the central Christian doctrine there is
no acceptance, though there is laudation of Jesus; and reprints after
1695 bore the motto, from Locke: [474] "As the foundation of virtue,
there ought very earnestly to be imprinted on the mind of a young man
a true notion of God, as of the independent supreme Being, Author,
and Maker of all things: And, consequent to this, instil into him a
love and reverence of this supreme Being." We are already more than
half-way from Unitarianism to deism.
Indeed, the theism of Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding
undermined even his Unitarian Scripturalism, inasmuch as it denies,
albeit confusedly, that revelation can ever override reason. In
one passage he declares that "reason is natural revelation," while
"revelation is natural reason enlarged by a new set of discoveries
communicated by God immediately, which reason vouchsafes the truth
of." [475] This compromise appears to be borrowed from Spinoza,
who had put it with similar vagueness in his great Tractatus, [476]
of which pre-eminent work Locke cannot have been ignorant, though he
protested himself little read in the works of Hobbes and Spinoza,
"those justly decried names." [477] The Tractatus being translated
into English in the same year with the publication of the Essay, its
influence would concur with Locke's in a widened circle of readers;
and the substantially naturalistic doctrine of both books inevitably
promoted the deistic movement. We have Locke's own avowal that he
had many doubts as to the Biblical narratives; [478] and he never
attempts to remove the doubts of others. Since, however, his doctrine
provided a sphere for revelation on the territory of ignorance, giving
it prerogative where its assertions were outside knowledge, it counted
substantially for Unitarianism insofar as it did not lead to deism.
See the Essay, bk. iv, ch. xviii. Locke's treatment of revelation
may be said to be the last and most attenuated form of the
doctrine of "two-fold truth." On his principle, any proposition
in a professed revelation that was not provable or disprovable by
reason and knowledge must pass as true. His final position, that
"whatever is divine revelation ought to overrule all our opinions"
(bk. iv, ch. xviii, § 10), is tolerably elastic, inasmuch as he
really reserves the question of the actuality of revelation. Thus
he evades the central issue. Naturally he was by critical
foreigners classed as a deist. Cp. Gostwick, German Culture and
Christianity, 1882, p. 36. The German historian Tennemann sums up
that Clarke wrote his apologetic works because "the consequences
of the empiricism of Locke had become so decidedly favourable to
the cause of atheism, skepticism, materialism, and irreligion"
(Manual of the Hist. of Philos. Eng. tr. Bohn ed. § 349).
In his "practical" treatise on The Reasonableness of Christianity
(1695) Locke played a similar part. It was inspired by the genuine
concern for social peace which had moved him to write an essay on
Toleration as early as 1667, [479] and to produce from 1685 onwards
his famous Letters on Toleration, by far the most persuasive appeal
of the kind that had yet been produced; [480] all the more successful
so far as it went, doubtless, because the first Letter ended with
a memorable capitulation to bigotry: "Lastly, those are not at all
to be tolerated who deny the being of God. Promises, covenants,
and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold
upon an atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in thought,
dissolves all. Besides, also, those that by their atheism undermine
and destroy all religion can have no pretence of religion whereupon to
challenge the privilege of a toleration." This handsome endorsement of
the religion which had repeatedly "dissolved all" in a pandemonium
of internecine hate, as compared with the one heresy which had
never broken treaties or shed blood, is presumably more of a prudent
surrender to normal fanaticism than an expression of the philosopher's
own state of mind; [481] and his treatise on The Reasonableness of
Christianity is an attempt to limit religion to a humane ethic, with
sacraments and mysteries reduced to ceremonies, while claiming that
the gospel ethic was "now with divine authority established into a
legible law, far surpassing all that philosophy and human reason had
attained to." [482] Its effect was, however, to promote rationalism
without doing much to mitigate the fanaticism of belief.
Locke's practical position has been fairly summed up by Prof. Bain:
"Locke proposed, in his Reasonableness of Christianity, to
ascertain the exact meaning of Christianity, by casting aside all
the glosses of commentators and divines, and applying his own
unassisted judgment to spell out its teachings.... The fallacy
of his position obviously was that he could not strip himself
of his education and acquired notions.... He seemed unconscious
of the necessity of trying to make allowance for his unavoidable
prepossessions. In consequence, he simply fell into an old groove
of received doctrines; and these he handled under the set purpose
of simplifying the fundamentals of Christianity to the utmost. Such
purpose was not the result of his Bible study, but of his wish
to overcome the political difficulties of the time. He found, by
keeping close to the Gospels and making proper selections from
the Epistles, that the belief in Christ as the Messiah could
be shown to be the central fact of the Christian faith; that
the other main doctrines followed out of this by a process of
reasoning; and that, as all minds might not perform the process
alike, these doctrines could not be essential to the practice of
Christianity. He got out of the difficulty of framing a creed,
as many others have done, by simply using Scripture language,
without subjecting it to any very strict definition; certainly
without the operation of stripping the meaning of its words,
to see what it amounted to. That his short and easy method was
not very successful the history of the deistical controversy
sufficiently proves" (Practical Essays, pp. 226-27).
That Locke was felt to have injured orthodoxy is further proved by the
many attacks made on him from the orthodox side. Even the first Letter
on Toleration elicited retorts, one of which claims to demonstrate
"the Absurdity and Impiety of an Absolute Toleration." [483] On his
positive teachings he was assailed by Bishop Stillingfleet; by the
Rev. John Milner, B.D.; by the Rev. John Morris; by William Carrol;
and by the Rev. John Edwards, B.D.; [484] his only assailant with a
rationalistic repute being Dr. Thomas Burnet. Some attacked him on his
Essays; some on his Reasonableness of Christianity; orthodoxy finding
in both the same tendency to "subvert the nature and use of divine
revelation and faith." [485] In the opinion of the Rev. Mr. Bolde,
who defended him in Some Considerations published in 1699, the hostile
clericals had treated him "with a rudeness peculiar to some who make a
profession of the Christian religion, and seem to pride themselves in
being the clergy of the Church of England." [486] This is especially
true of Edwards, a notably ignoble type; [487] but hardly of Milner,
whose later Account of Mr. Lock's Religion out of his Own Writings,
and in his Own Words (1700), pressed him shrewdly on the score of
his "Socinianism." In the eyes of a pietist like William Law, again,
Locke's conception of the infant mind as a tabula rasa was "dangerous
to religion," besides being philosophically false. [488] Yet Locke
agreed with Law [489] that moral obligation is dependent solely on
the will of God--a doctrine denounced by the deist Shaftesbury as
the negation of morality.
See the Inquiry concerning Virtue or Merit, pt. iii, § 2; and the
Letters to a Student, under date June 3, 1709 (p. 403 in Rand's
Life, Letters, etc., of Shaftesbury, 1900). The extraordinary
letter of Newton to Locke, written just after or during a spell
of insanity, first apologizes for having believed that Locke
"endeavoured to embroil me with women and by other means,"
and goes on to beg pardon "for representing that you struck at
the root of morality, in a principle you laid down in your book
of ideas." In his subsequent letter, replying to that of Locke
granting forgiveness and gently asking for details, he writes:
"What I said of your book I remember not." (Letters of September
16 and October 5, 1693, given in Fox Bourne's Life of Locke, ii,
226-27, and Sir D. Brewster's Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton, 1855,
ii, 148-51.) Newton, who had been on very friendly terms with
Locke, must have been repeating, when his mind was disordered,
criticisms otherwise current. After printing in full the letters
above cited, Brewster insists, on his principle of sacrificing
all other considerations to Newton's glory (cp. De Morgan, Newton:
his Friend: and his Niece, 1885, pp. 99-111), that all the while
Newton was "in the full possession of his mental powers." The
whole diction of the first letter tells the contrary. If we are
not to suppose that Newton had been temporarily insane, we must
think of his judgment as even less rational, apart from physics,
than it is seen to be in his dissertations on prophecy. Certainly
Newton was at all times apt to be suspicious of his friends to
the point of moral disease (see his attack on Montague, in his
letter to Locke of January 26, 1691-1692; in Fox Bourne, ii,
218; and cp. De Morgan, as cited, p. 146); but the letter to
Locke indicates a point at which the normal malady had upset the
mental balance. It remains, nevertheless, part of the evidence
as to bitter orthodox criticism of Locke.
On the whole, it is clear, the effect of his work, especially
of his naturalistic psychology, was to make for rationalism;
and his compromises furthered instead of checking the movement
of unbelief. His ideal of practical and undogmatic Christianity,
indeed, was hardly distinguishable from that of Hobbes, [490] and,
as previously set forth by the Rev. Arthur Bury in his Naked Gospel
(1690), was so repugnant to the Church that that book was burned at
Oxford as heretical. [491] Locke's position as a believing Christian
was indeed extremely weak, and could easily have been demolished by
a competent deist, such as Collins, [492] or a skeptical dogmatist
who could control his temper and avoid the gross misrepresentation
so often resorted to by Locke's orthodox enemies. But by the deists
he was valued as an auxiliary, and by many latitudinarian Christians
as a helper towards a rationalistic if not a logical compromise.
Rationalism of one or the other tint, in fact, seems to have spread
in all directions. Deism was ascribed to some of the most eminent
public men. Bishop Burnet has a violent passage on Sir William Temple,
to the effect that "He had a true judgment in affairs, and very good
principles with relation to government, but in nothing else. He seemed
to think that things are as they were from all eternity; at least he
thought religion was only for the mob. He was a great admirer of the
sect of Confucius in China, who were atheists themselves, but left
religion to the rabble." [493] The praise of Confucius is the note of
deism; and Burnet rightly held that no orthodox Christian in those
days would sound it. Other prominent men revealed their religious
liberalism. The accomplished and influential George Savile, Marquis of
Halifax, often spoken of as a deist, and even as an atheist, by his
contemporaries, [494] appears clearly from his own writings to have
been either that or a Unitarian; [495] and it is not improbable that
the similar gossip concerning Lord Keeper Somers was substantially
true. [496]
That Sir Isaac Newton was "some kind of Unitarian" [497] is proved by
documents long withheld from publication, and disclosed only in the
second edition of Sir David Brewster's Memoirs. There is indeed no
question that he remained a mere scripturalist, handling the texts as
such, [498] and wasting much time in vain interpretations of Daniel
and the Apocalypse. [499] Temperamentally, also, he was averse to
anything like bold discussion, declaring that "those at Cambridge
ought not to judge and censure their superiors, but to obey and honour
them, according to the law and the doctrine of passive obedience"
[500]--this after he had sat on the Convention which deposed James
II. In no aspect, indeed, apart from his supreme scientific genius,
does he appear as morally [501] or intellectually pre-eminent;
and even on the side of science he was limited by his theological
presuppositions, as when he rejected the nebular hypothesis, writing
to Bentley that "the growth of new systems out of old ones, without
the mediation of a Divine power, seems to me apparently absurd." [502]
There is therefore more than usual absurdity in the proclamation of
his pious biographer that "the apostle of infidelity cowers beneath
the implied rebuke" [503] of his orthodoxy. The very anxiety shown
by Newton and his friends [504] to checkmate "the infidels" is a
proof that his religious work was not scientific even in inception,
but the expression of his neurotic side; and the attempt of some of
his scientific admirers to show that his religious researches belong
solely to the years of his decline is a corresponding oversight. Newton
was always pathologically prepossessed on the side of his religion,
and subordinated his science to his theology even in the Principia. It
is therefore all the more significant of the set of opinion in his
day that, tied as he was to Scriptural interpretations, he drew away
from orthodox dogma as to the Trinity. Not only does he show himself a
destructive critic of Trinitarian texts and an opponent of Athanasius
[505]: he expressly formulates the propositions (1) that "there is
one God the Father ... and one mediator between God and man, the man
Christ Jesus"; (2) that "the Father is the invisible God whom no eye
hath seen or can see. All other beings are sometimes visible"; and
(3) that "the Father hath life in himself, and hath given the Son to
have life in himself." [506] Such opinions, of course, could not be
published: under the Act of 1697 they would have made Newton liable
to loss of office and all civil rights. In his own day, therefore,
his opinions were rather gossipped-of than known; [507] but insofar as
his heresy was realized, it must have wrought much more for unbelief
than could be achieved for orthodoxy by his surprisingly commonplace
strictures on atheism, which show the ordinary inability to see what
atheism means.
The argument of his Short Scheme of True Religion brackets atheism
with idolatry, and goes on: "Atheism is so senseless and odious to
mankind that it never had many professors. Can it be by accident that
all birds, beasts, and men have their right side and left side alike
shaped (except in their bowels), and just two eyes, and no more,
on either side of the face?" etc. (Brewster, ii, 347). The logical
implication is that a monstrous organism, with the sides unlike,
represents "accident," and that in that case there has either been
no causation or no "purpose" by Omnipotence. It is only fair to
remember that no avowedly "atheistic" argument could in Newton's
day find publication; but his remarks are those of a man who had
never contemplated philosophically the negation of his own religious
sentiment at the point in question. Brewster, whose judgment and
good faith are alike precarious, writes that "When Voltaire asserted
that Sir Isaac explained the prophecies in the same manner as those
who went before him, he only exhibited his ignorance of what Newton
wrote, and what others had written" (ii, 331, note; 355). The writer
did not understand what he censured. Voltaire meant that Newton's
treatment of prophecy is on the same plane of credulity as that of
his orthodox predecessors.
Even within the sphere of the Church the Unitarian tendency,
with or without deistic introduction, was traceable. Archbishop
Tillotson (d. 1694) was often accused of Socinianism; and in the
next generation was smilingly spoken of by Anthony Collins as a
leading Freethinker. The pious Dr. Hickes had in fact declared
of the Archbishop that "he caused several to turn atheists and
ridicule the priesthood and religion." [508] The heresy must have
been encouraged even within the Church by the scandal which broke out
when Dean Sherlock's Vindication of Trinitarianism (1690), written
in reply to a widely-circulated antitrinitarian compilation, [509]
was attacked by Dean South [510] as the work of a Tritheist. The
plea of Dr. Wallis, Locke's old teacher, that a doctrine of "three
somewhats"--he objected to the term "persons"--in one God was as
reasonable as the concept of three dimensions, [511] was of course
only a heresy the more. Outside the Church, William Penn, the great
Quaker, held a partially Unitarian attitude; [512] and the first of
his many imprisonments was on a charge of "blasphemy and heresy" in
respect of his treatise The Sandy Foundation Shaken, which denied (1)
that there were in the One God "three distinct and separate persons";
(2) the doctrine of the need of "plenary satisfaction"; and (3) the
justification of sinners by "an imputative righteousness." But though
many of the early Quakers seem to have shunned the doctrine of the
Trinity, Penn really affirmed the divinity of Christ, and was not
a Socinian but a Sabellian in his theology. Positive Unitarianism
all the while was being pushed by a number of tracts which escaped
prosecution, being prudently handled by Locke's friend, Thomas
Firmin. [513] A new impulse had been given to Unitarianism by the
learning and critical energy of the Prussian Dr. Zwicker, who had
settled in Holland; [514] and among those Englishmen whom his works
had found ready for agreement was Gilbert Clerke (b. 1641), who, like
several later heretics, was educated at Sidney College, Cambridge. In
1695 he published a Unitarian work entitled Anti-Nicenismus, and
two other tracts in Latin, all replying to the orthodox polemic of
Dr. Bull, against whom another Unitarian had written Considerations
on the Explications of the Doctrine of the Trinity in 1694, bitterly
resenting his violence. [515] In 1695 appeared yet another treatise of
the same school, The Judgment of the Fathers concerning the Doctrine
of the Trinity. Much was thus done on Unitarian lines to prepare an
audience for the deists of the next reign. [516] But the most effective
influence was probably the ludicrous strife of the orthodox clergy
as to what orthodoxy was. The fray over the doctrine of the Trinity
waxed so furious, and the discredit cast on orthodoxy was so serious,
[517] that in the year 1700 an Act of Parliament was passed forbidding
the publication of any more works on the subject.
Meanwhile the so-called Latitudinarians, [518] all the while aiming
as they did at a non-dogmatic Christianity, served as a connecting
medium for the different forms of liberal thought; and a new element of
critical disintegration was introduced by a speculative treatment of
Genesis in the Archæologiæ Philosophiæ (1692) of Dr. Thomas Burnet,
a professedly orthodox scholar, Master of the Charterhouse and
chaplain in ordinary to King William, who nevertheless treated the
Creation and Fall stories as allegories, and threw doubt on the Mosaic
authorship of parts of the Pentateuch. Though the book was dedicated
to the king, it aroused so much clerical hostility that the king was
obliged to dismiss him from his post at court. [519] His ideas were
partly popularized through a translation of two of his chapters,
with a vindicatory letter, in Blount's Oracles of Reason (1695);
and that they had considerable vogue may be gathered from the Essay
towards a Vindication of the Vulgar Exposition of the Mosaic History
of the Fall of Adam, by John Witty, published in 1705. Burnet, who
published three sets of anonymous Remarks on the philosophy of Locke
(1697-1699), criticizing its sensationist basis, figured after his
death (1715), in posthumous publications, as a heretical theologian
in other regards; and then played his part in the general deistic
movement; but his allegorical view of Genesis does not seem to have
seriously affected speculation in his time, the bulk of the debate
turning on his earlier Telluris Theoria Sacra (1681; trans. 1684),
to which there were many rejoinders, both scientific and orthodox. On
this side he is unimportant, his science being wholly imaginative;
and in the competition between his Theory and J. Woodward's Essay
towards a Natural History of the Earth (1695) nothing was achieved
for scientific progress.
Much more remarkable, but outside of popular discussion, were the
Evangelium medici (1697) of Dr. B. Connor, wherein the gospel miracles
were explained away, on lines later associated with German rationalism,
as natural phenomena; and the curious treatise of Newton's friend,
John Craig, [520] Theologiæ christianæ principia mathematica (1699),
wherein it is argued that all evidence grows progressively less valid
in course of time; [521] and that accordingly the Christian religion
will cease to be believed about the year 3144, when probably will occur
the Second Coming. Connor, when attacked, protested his orthodoxy;
Craig held successively two prebends of the Church of England; [522]
and both lived and died unmolested, probably because they had the
prudence to write in Latin, and maintained gravity of style. About this
time, further, the title of "Rationalist" made some fresh headway as a
designation, not of unbelievers, but of believers who sought to ground
themselves on reason. Such books as those of Clifford and Boyle tell
of much discussion as to the efficacy of "reason" in religious things;
and in 1686, as above noted, there appears A Rational Catechism, [523]
a substantially Unitarian production, notable for its aloofness from
evangelical feeling, despite its many references to Biblical texts in
support of its propositions. In the Essays Moral and Divine of the
Scotch judge, Sir William Anstruther, published in 1701, there is
a reference to "those who arrogantly term themselves Rationalists"
[524] in the sense of claiming to find Christianity not only, as
Locke put it, a reasonable religion, but one making no strain upon
faith. Already the term had become potentially one of vituperation,
and it is applied by the learned judge to "the wicked reprehended by
the Psalmist." [525] Forty years later, however, it was still applied
rather to the Christian who claimed to believe upon rational grounds
than to the deist or unbeliever; [526] and it was to have a still
longer lease of life in Germany as a name for theologians who believed
in "Scripture" on condition that all miracles were explained away.
CHAPTER XV
FRENCH AND DUTCH FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
1. We have seen France, in the first quarter of the seventeenth
century, pervaded in its upper classes by a freethought partly
born of the knowledge that religion counted for little but harm
in public affairs, partly the result of such argumentation as had
been thrown out by Montaigne and codified by Charron. That it was
not the freethinking of mere idle men of the world is clear when
we note the names and writings of La Mothe le Vayer (1588-1672),
Gui Patin (1601-1671), and Gabriel Naudé (1600-1653), all scholars,
all heretics of the skeptical and rationalistic order. The last
two indeed, sided with the Catholics in politics, Patin approving
of the Fronde, and Naudé of the Massacre, on which ground they are
sometimes claimed as believers. [527] But though in the nature of
the case their inclusion on the side of freethought is not to be
zealously contended for, they must be classed in terms of the balance
of testimony. Patin was the admiring friend of Gassendi; and though
he was never explicitly heretical, and indeed wrote of Socinianism
as a pestilent doctrine, [528] his habit of irony and the risk of
written avowals to correspondents must be kept in view in deciding
on his cast of mind. He is constantly anti-clerical; [529] and the
germinal skepticism of Montaigne and Charron clearly persists in him.
It is true that, as one critic puts it, such rationalists were not
"quite clear whither they were bound. At first sight," he adds,
"no one looks more negative than Gui Patin.... He was always
congratulating himself on being 'delivered from the nightmare';
and he rivals the eighteenth century in the scorn he pours on
priests, monks, and especially 'that black Loyolitic scum from
Spain' which called itself the Society of Jesus. Yet Patin was
no freethinker. Skeptics who made game of the kernel of religion
came quite as much under the lash of his tongue as bigots who
dared defend its husks. His letters end with the characteristic
confession: 'Credo in Deum, Christum crucifixum, etc.; ... De
minimis non curat prætor'" (Viscount St. Cyres in Cambridge
Modern History, v, 73). But the last statement is an error, and
Patin did not attack Gassendi, though he did Descartes. He says
of Rabelais: "C'étoit un homme qui se moquoit de tout; en verité
il y a bien des choses dont on doit raisonnablement se moquer
... elles sont presque tous remplies de vanité, d'imposture et
d'ignorance: ceux qui sont un peu philosophes ne doivent-ils
pas s'en moquer?" (Lett. 485, éd. cited, iii, 148). Again he
writes that "la vie humaine n'est qu'un bureau de rencontre et
un théâtre sur lesquels domine la fortune" (Lett. 726, iii,
620). This is pure Montaigne. The formula cited by Viscount
St. Cyres is neither a general nor a final conclusion to the
letters of Patin. It occurs, I think, only once (18 juillet, 1642,
à M. Belin) in the 836 letters, and not at the end of that one
(Lett. 55, éd. cited, i, 90).
Concerning his friend Naudé, Patin writes: "Je suis fort de
l'avis de feu M. Naudé, qui disoit qu'il y avait quatre choses
dont il se fallait garder, afin de n'être point trompé, savoir,
de prophéties, de miracles, de révélations, et d'apparitions"
(Lett. 353, éd. cited, ii, 490). Again, he writes of a symposium
of Naudé, Gassendi, and himself: "Peut-être, tous trois, guéris
de loup-garou et delivrés du mal des scrupules, qui est le
tyran des consciences, nous irons peut-être jusque fort près du
sanctuaire. Je fis l'an passé ce voyage de Gentilly avec M. Naudé,
moi seul avec lui tête-à-tête; il n'y avait point de témoins,
aussi n'y en falloit-il point: nous y parlâmes fort librement de
tout, sans que personne en ait été scandalisé" (Lett. 362, ii,
508). This seems tolerably freethinking.
All that the Christian editor cares to claim upon the latter
passage is that assuredly "l'unité de Dieu, l'immortalité de l'âme,
l'égalité des hommes devant la loi, ces verités fondamentales de
la raison et consacrées par le Christianisme, y étaient placées au
premier rang" in the discussion. As to the skepticism of Naudé the
editor remarks: "Ce qu'il y a de remarquable, c'est que Gui Patin
soutenait que son ami ... avait puisé son opinion, en général très
peu orthodoxe, en Italie, pendant le long séjour qu'il fit dans
ce pays avec le cardinal Bagni" (ii, 490; cp. Lett. 816; iii, 758,
where Naudé is again cited as making small account of religion).
Certainly Patin and Naudé are of less importance for freethought than
La Mothe le Vayer. That scholar, a "Conseiller d'Estat ordinaire,"
tutor of the brother of Louis XIV, and one of the early members of
the new Academy founded by Richelieu, is an interesting figure [530]
in the history of culture, being a skeptic of the school of Sextus
Empiricus, and practically a great friend of tolerance. Standing
in favour with Richelieu, he wrote at that statesman's suggestion a
treatise On the Virtue of the Heathen, [531] justifying toleration by
pagan example--a course which raises the question whether Richelieu
himself was not strongly touched by the rationalism of his age. If it
be true that the great Cardinal "believed as all the world did in his
time," [532] there is little more to be said; for unbelief, as we have
seen, was already abundant, and even somewhat fashionable. Certainly no
ecclesiastic in high power ever followed a less ecclesiastical policy;
[533] and from the date of his appointment as Minister to Louis
XIII (1624), for forty years, there was no burning of heretics or
unbelievers in France. If he was orthodox, it was very passively. [534]
And Le Vayer's way of handling the dicta of St. Augustine and Thomas
Aquinas as to the virtues of unbelievers being merely vices is for
its time so hardy that the Cardinal's protection alone can explain its
immunity from censure. St. Augustine and St. Thomas, says the critic
calmly, had regard merely to eternal happiness, which virtue alone
can obtain for no one. They are, therefore, to be always interpreted
in this special sense. And so at the very outset the ground is
summarily cleared of orthodox obstacles. [535] The Petit discours
chrétien sur l'immortalité de l'âme, also addressed to Richelieu,
tells of a good deal of current unbelief on that subject; and the
epistle dedicatory professes pain over the "philosopher of our day
[Vanini] who has had the impiety to write that, unless one is very
old, very rich, and a German, one should never expatiate on this
subject." But on the very threshold of the discourse, again, the
skeptic tranquilly suggests that there would be "perhaps something
unreasonable" in following Augustine's precept, so popular in later
times, that the problem of immortality should be solved by the dictates
of religion and feeling, not of "uncertain" reason. "Why," he asks,
"should the soul be her own judge?" [536] And he shows a distinct
appreciation of the avowal of Augustine in his Retractationes that
his own book on the Immortality of the Soul was so obscure to him
that in many places he himself could not understand it. [537] The
"Little Christian Discourse" is, in fact, not Christian at all;
and its arguments are but dialectic exercises, on a par with those
of the Discours sceptique sur la musique which follows. He was,
in short, a skeptic by temperament; and his Preface d'une histoire
[538] shows his mind to have played on the "Mississippi of falsehood
called history" very much as did that of Bayle in a later generation.
Le Vayer's Dialogues of Oratius Tubero (1633) is philosophically
his most important work; [539] but its tranquil Pyrrhonism was
not calculated to affect greatly the current thought of his day;
and he ranked rather as a man of all-round learning [540] than as
a polemist, being reputed "a little contradictory, but in no way
bigoted or obstinate, all opinions being to him nearly indifferent,
excepting those of which faith does not permit us to doubt." [541]
The last phrase tells of the fact that it affects to negate: Le Vayer's
general skepticism was well known. [542] He was not indeed an original
thinker, most of his ideas being echoes from the skeptics of antiquity;
[543] and it has been not unjustly said of him that he is rather of
the sixteenth century than of the seventeenth. [544]
2. On the other hand, the resort on the part of the Catholics to a
skeptical method, as against both Protestants and freethinkers, which
we have seen originating soon after the issue of Montaigne's Essais,
seems to have become more and more common; and this process must rank
as in some degree a product of skeptical thought of a more sincere
sort. In any case it was turned vigorously, even recklessly, against
the Protestants. Thus we find Daillé, at the outset of his work On
the True Use of the Fathers, [545] complaining that when Protestants
quote the Scriptures some Romanists at once ask "whence and in what
way those books may be known to be really written by the prophets
and apostles whose names and titles they bear." This challenge,
rashly incurred by Luther and Calvin in their pronouncements on the
Canon, later Protestants did not as a rule attempt to meet, save in
the fashion of La Placette, who in his work De insanibili Ecclesiæ
Romanæ Scepticismo (1688) [546] undertakes to show that Romanists
themselves are without any grounds of certitude for the authority of
the Church. It was indeed certain that the Catholic method would make
more skeptics than it won.
3. Between the negative development of the doctrine of Montaigne and
the vogue of upper-class deism, the philosophy of Descartes, with
its careful profession of submission to the Church, had at first an
easy reception; and on the appearance of the Discours de la Méthode
(1637) it speedily affected the whole thought of France; the women
of the leisured class, now much given to literature, being among
its students. [547] From the first the Jansenists, who were the most
serious religious thinkers of the time, accepted the Cartesian system
as in the main soundly Christian; and its founder's authority had some
such influence in keeping up the prestige of orthodoxy as had that of
Locke later in England. Boileau, who wrote a satire in defence of the
system when it was persecuted after Descartes's death, is named among
those whom he so influenced. [548] But a merely external influence
of this kind could not counteract the fundamental rationalism of
Descartes's thought, and the whole social and intellectual tendency
towards a secular view of life. Soon, indeed, Descartes became
suspect, partly by reason of the hostile activities of the Jesuits,
who opposed him because the Jansenists generally held by him, though he
had been a Jesuit pupil, and had always some adherents in that order;
[549] partly by reason of the inherent naturalism of his system. That
his doctrine was incompatible with the eucharist was the standing
charge against it, [550] and his defence was not found satisfactory,
[551] though his orthodox followers obtained from Queen Christina a
declaration that he had been largely instrumental in converting her
to Catholicism. [552] Pascal reproached him with having done his best
to do without God in his system; [553] and this seems to have been
the common clerical impression. Thirteen years after his death, in
1663, his work was placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, under
a modified censure, [554] and in 1671 a royal order was obtained
under which his philosophy was proscribed in all the universities
of France. [555] Cartesian professors and curés were persecuted and
exiled, or compelled to recant; among the victims being Père Lami of
the Congregation of the Oratory and Père André the Jesuit; [556] and
the Oratorians were in 1678 forced to undergo the humiliation of not
only renouncing Descartes and all his works, but of abjuring their
former Cartesian declarations, in order to preserve their corporate
existence. [557] Precisely in this period of official reaction,
however, there was going on not merely an academic but a social
development of a rationalistic kind, in which the persecuted philosophy
played its part, even though some freethinkers disparaged it.
4. The general tendency is revealed on the one hand by the series
of treatises from eminent Churchmen, defending the faith against
unpublished attacks, and on the other hand by the prevailing tone in
belles lettres. Malherbe, the literary dictator of the first quarter
of the century, had died in 1628 with the character of a scoffer;
[558] and the fashion now lasted till the latter half of the reign of
Louis XIV. In 1621, two years after the burning of Vanini, a young man
named Jean Fontanier had been burned alive on the Place de Grève at
Paris, apparently for the doctrines laid down by him in a manuscript
entitled Le Trésor Inestimable, written on deistic and anti-Catholic
lines. [559] He was said to have been successively Protestant,
Catholic, Turk, Jew, and atheist; and had conducted himself like one
of shaken mind. [560] But the cases of the poet Théophile de Viau,
who about 1623 suffered prosecution on a charge of impiety, [561] and
of his companions Berthelot and Colletet--who like him were condemned
but set free by royal favour--appear to be the only others of the kind
for over a generation. Frivolity of tone sufficed to ward off legal
pursuit. It was in 1665, some years after the death of Mazarin, who had
maintained Richelieu's policy of tolerance, that Claude Petit was burnt
at Paris for "impious pieces"; [562] and even then there was no general
reversion to orthodoxy, the upper-class tone remaining, as in the age
of Richelieu and Mazarin, more or less unbelieving. When Corneille
had introduced a touch of Christian zeal into his Polyeucte (1643)
he had given general offence to the dilettants of both sexes. [563]
Molière, again, the disciple of Gassendi [564] and "the very genius
of reason," [565] was unquestionably an unbeliever; [566] and only
the personal protection of Louis XIV, which after all could not avail
to support such a play as Tartufe against the fury of the bigots,
enabled him to sustain himself at all against them.
5. Equally freethinking was his brilliant predecessor and early
comrade, Cyrano de Bergerac (1620-1655), who did not fear to indicate
his frame of mind in one of his dramas. In La Mort d'Agrippine
he puts in the mouth of Sejanus, as was said by a contemporary,
"horrible things against the Gods," notably the phrase, "whom men
made, and who did not make men," [567] which, however, generally
passed as an attack on polytheism; and though there was certainly
no blasphemous intention in the phrase, Frappons, voilà l'hostie
[= hostia, victim], some pretended to regard it as an insult to the
Catholic host. [568] At times Cyrano writes like a deist; [569] but
in so many other passages does he hold the language of a convinced
materialist, and of a scoffer at that, [570] that he can hardly be
taken seriously on the former head. [571] In short, he was one of
the first of the hardy freethinkers who, under the tolerant rule of
Richelieu and Mazarin, gave clear voice to the newer spirit. Under
any other government, he would have been in danger of his life: as it
was, he was menaced with prosecutions; his Agrippine was forbidden;
the first edition of his Pédant joué was confiscated; during his
last illness there was an attempt to seize his manuscripts; and
down till the time of the Revolution the editions of his works were
eagerly bought up and destroyed by zealots. [572] His recent literary
rehabilitation thus hardly serves to realize his importance in the
history of freethought. Between Cyrano and Molière it would appear
that there was little less of rationalistic ferment in the France of
their day than in England. Bossuet avows in a letter to Huet in 1678
that impiety and unbelief abound more than ever before. [573]
6. Even in the apologetic reasoning of the greatest French prose
writer of that age, Pascal, we have the most pregnant testimony to
the prevalence of unbelief; for not only were the fragments preserved
as Pensées (1670), however originated, [574] developed as part of a
planned defence of religion against contemporary rationalism, [575]
but they themselves show their author profoundly unable to believe
save by a desperate abnegation of reason, though he perpetually
commits the gross fallacy of trusting to reason to prove that reason
is untrustworthy. His work is thus one continuous paralogism, in
which reason is disparaged merely to make way for a parade of bad
reasoning. The case of Pascal is that of Berkeley with a difference:
the latter suffered from hypochondria, but reacted with nervous energy;
Pascal, a physical degenerate, prematurely profound, was prematurely
old; and his pietism in its final form is the expression of the
physical collapse.
This is disputed by M. Lanson, an always weighty authority. He
writes (p. 464) that Pascal was "neither mad nor ill" when
he gave himself up wholly to religion. But ill he certainly
was. He had chronically suffered from intense pains in the head
from his eighteenth year; and M. Lanson admits (p. 451) that
the Pensées were written in intervals of acute suffering. This
indeed understates the case. Pascal several times told his family
that since the age of eighteen he had never passed a day without
pain. His sister, Madame Perier, in her biographical sketch, speaks
of him as suffering "continual and ever-increasing maladies," and
avows that the four last years of his life, in which he penned the
fragments called Pensées, "were but a continual languishment." The
Port Royal preface of 1670 says the same thing, speaking of the
"four years of languor and malady in which he wrote all we have of
the book he planned," and calling the Pensées "the feeble essays
of a sick man." Cp. Pascal's Prière pour demander à Dieu le bon
usage des maladies: and Owen French Skeptics, pp. 746, 784.
Doubtless the levity and licence of the libertins in high places [576]
confirmed him in his revolt against unbelief; but his own credence was
an act rather of despairing emotion than of rational conviction. The
man who advised doubters to make a habit of causing masses to be said
and following religious rites, on the score that cela vous fera croire
et vous abêtira--"that will make you believe and will stupefy you"
[577]--was a pathological case; and though the whole Jansenist
movement latterly stood for a reaction against freethinking, it
can hardly be doubted that the Pensées generally acted as a solvent
rather than as a sustainer of religious beliefs. [578] This charge
was made against them immediately on their publication by the Abbé
de Villars, who pointed out that they did the reverse of what they
claimed to do in the matter of appealing to the heart and to good
sense, since they set forth all the ordinary arguments of Pyrrhonism,
denied that the existence of God could be established by reason or
philosophy, and staked the case on a "wager" which shocked good sense
and feeling alike. "Have you resolved," asks this critic in dialogue,
"to make atheists on pretext of combatting them?" [579]
The same question arises concerning the famous Lettres Provinciales
(1656), written by Pascal in defence of Arnauld against the persecution
of the Jesuits, who carried on in Arnauld's case their campaign against
Jansen, whom they charged with mis-stating the doctrine of Augustine in
his great work expounding that Father. Once more the Catholic Church
was swerving from its own established doctrine of predestination, the
Spanish Jesuit Molina having set up a new movement in the Pelagian or
Arminian direction. The cause of the Jansenists has been represented
as that of freedom of thought and speech; [580] and this it relatively
was insofar as Jansen and Arnauld sought for a hearing, while the
Jesuit-ridden Sorbonne strove to silence and punish them. Pascal had
to go from printer to printer as his Letters succeeded each other, the
first three being successively prosecuted by the clerical authorities;
and in their collected form they found publicity only by being printed
at Rouen and published at Amsterdam, with the rubric of Cologne. All
the while Jansenism claimed to be strict orthodoxy; and it was in
virtue only of the irreducible element of rationalism in Pascal
that the school of Port Royal made for freethought in any higher or
more general sense. Indeed, between his own reputation for piety and
that of the Jansenists for orthodoxy, the Provincial Letters have a
conventional standing as orthodox compositions. It is strange, however,
that those who charge upon the satire of the later philosophers the
downfall of Catholicism in France should not realize the plain tendency
of these brilliant satires to discredit the entire authority of the
Church, and, further, by their own dogmatic weaknesses, to put all
dogma alike under suspicion. [581] Few thoughtful men can now read
the Provinciales without being impressed by the utter absurdity of
the problem over which the entire religious intelligence of a great
nation was engrossed.
It was, in fact, the endless wrangles of the religious factions
over unintelligible issues that more than any other single cause
fostered the unbelief previously set up by religious wars; [582]
and Pascal's writings only deepened the trouble. Even Bossuet, in
his History of the Variations of the Protestant Churches (1688), did
but throw a new light on the hollowness of the grounds of religion;
and for thoughtful readers gave a lead rather to atheism than to
Catholicism. The converts it would make to the Catholic Church would
be precisely those whose adherence was of least value, since they
had not even the temperamental basis which, rather than argument,
kept Bossuet a believer, and were Catholics only for lack of courage
to put all religion aside. When "variation" was put as a sign of error
by a Churchman the bulk of whose life was spent in bitter strifes with
sections of his own Church, critical people were hardly likely to be
confirmed in the faith. Within ten years of writing his book against
the Protestants, Bossuet was engaged in an acrid controversy with
Fénelon, his fellow prelate and fellow demonstrator of the existence
and attributes of God, accusing him of holding unchristian positions;
and both prelates were always fighting their fellow-churchmen the
Jansenists. If the variations of Protestants helped Catholicism,
those of Catholics must have helped unbelief.
7. A similar fatality attended the labours of the learned Huet, Bishop
of Avranches, whose Demonstratio Evangelica (1678) is remarkable (with
Boyle's Discourse of Things above Reason) as anticipating Berkeley in
the argument from the arbitrariness of mathematical assumptions. He
too, by that and by his later works, made for sheer philosophical
skepticism, [583] always a dangerous basis for orthodoxy. [584]
Such an evolution, on the part of a man of uncommon intellectual
energy, challenges attention, the more so seeing that it typifies
a good deal of thinking within the Catholic pale, on lines already
noted as following on the debate with Protestantism. Honestly pious
by bent of mind, but always occupied with processes of reasoning
and research, Huet leant more and more, as he grew in years, to
the skeptical defence against the pressures of Protestantism and
rationalism, at once following and furthering the tendency of his
age. That the skeptical method is a last weapon of defence can be
seen from the temper in which the demonstrator assails Spinoza,
whom he abuses, without naming him, in the fashion of his day, and
to whose arguments concerning the authorship of the Pentateuch he
makes singularly feeble answers. [585] They are too worthless to
have satisfied himself; and it is easy to see how he was driven to
seek a more plausible rebuttal. [586] A distinguished English critic,
noting the general movement, pronounces, justly enough, that Huet took
up philosophy "not as an end, but as a means--not for its own sake,
but for the support of religion"; and then adds that his attitude is
thus quite different from Pascal's. [587] But the two cases are really
on a level. Pascal too was driven to philosophy in reaction against
incredulity; and though Pascal's work is of a more bitter and morbid
intensity, Huet also had in him that psychic craving for a supernatural
support which is the essence of latter-day religion. And if we credit
this spirit to Pascal and to Huet, as we do to Newman, we must suppose
that it partly touched the whole movement of pro-Catholic skepticism
which has been above noted as following on the Reformation. It is
ascribing to it as a whole too much of calculation and strategy to
say of its combatants that "they conceived the desperate design of
first ruining the territory they were prepared to evacuate; before
philosophy was handed over to the philosophers the old Aristotelean
citadel was to be blown into the air." [588] In reality they caught,
as religious men will, with passion rather than with policy, at any
plea that might seem fitted to beat down the presumption of "the wild,
living intellect of man"; [589] and their skepticism had a certain
sincerity inasmuch as, trained to uncritical belief, they had never
found for themselves the grounds of rational certitude.
Inasmuch too as Protestantism had no such ground, and rationalism
was still far from having cleared its bases, Huet, as things went,
was within his moral rights when he set forth his transcendentalist
skepticism in his Quæstiones Alnetanæ in 1690. Though written in very
limpid Latin, [590] that work attracted practically no attention;
and though, having a repute for provincialism in his French style,
Huet was loth to resort to the vernacular, he did devote his spare
hours through a number of his latter years to preparing his Traité
Philosophique de la faiblesse de l'esprit humain, which, dying in 1722,
he left to be published posthumously (1723). The outcry against his
criticism of Descartes and his Demonstratio had indisposed him for
further personal strife; but he was determined to leave a completed
message. Thus it came about that a sincere and devoted Catholic
bishop "left, as his last legacy to his fellow-men, a work of the
most outrageous skepticism." [591]
8. Meanwhile the philosophy of Descartes, if less strictly propitious
to science at some points than that of Gassendi, was both directly and
indirectly making for the activity of reason. In virtue of its formal
"spiritualism," it found access where any clearly materialistic
doctrine would have been tabooed; so that we find the Cartesian
ecclesiastic Régis not only eagerly listened to and acclaimed at
Toulouse in 1665, but offered a civic pension by the magistrates
[592]--this within two years of the placing of Descartes's works on
the Index. After arousing a similar enthusiasm at Montpellier and
at Paris, Régis was silenced by the Archbishop, whereupon he set
himself to develop the Cartesian philosophy in his study. The result
was that he ultimately went beyond his master, openly rejecting the
idea of creation out of nothing, [593] and finally following Locke
in rejecting the innate ideas which Descartes had affirmed. [594]
Another young Churchman, Desgabets, developing from Descartes and his
pupil Malebranche, combined with their "spiritist" doctrine much of
the virtual materialism of Gassendi, arriving at a kind of pantheism,
and at a courageous pantheistic ethic, wherein God is recognized as
the author alike of good and evil [595]--a doctrine which we find even
getting a hearing in general society, and noticed in the correspondence
of Madame de Sévigné in 1677. [596]
Malebranche's treatise De la Recherche de la Vérité (1674) was in fact
a development of Descartes which on the one hand sought to connect
his doctrine of innate ideas with his God-idea, and on the other hand
headed the whole system towards pantheism. The tendency had arisen
before him in the congregation of the Oratory, to which he belonged,
and in which the Cartesian philosophy had so spread that when, in
1678, the alarmed superiors proposed to eradicate it, they were told
by the members that, "If Cartesianism is a plague, there are two
hundred of us who are infected." [597] But if Cartesianism alarmed
the official orthodox, Malebranche wrought a deeper disintegration
of the faith. In his old age his young disciple De Mairan, who had
deeply studied Spinoza, pressed him fatally hard on the virtual
coincidence of his philosophy with that of the more thoroughgoing
pantheist; and Malebranche indignantly repudiated all agreement with
"the miserable Spinoza," [598] "the atheist," [599] whose system he
pronounced "a frightful and ridiculous chimera." [600] "Nevertheless,
it was towards this chimera that Malebranche tended." [601] On all
hands the new development set up new strife; and Malebranche, who
disliked controversy, found himself embroiled alike with Jansenists
and Jesuits, with orthodox and with innovating Cartesians, and with his
own Spinozistic disciples. The Jansenist Arnauld attacked his book in
a long and stringent treatise, Des vrayes at des fausses idées (1683),
[602] accumulating denials and contradictions with a cold tenacity
of ratiocination which never lapsed into passion, and was all the
more destructive. For the Jansenists Malebranche was a danger to the
faith in the ratio of his exaltation of it, inasmuch as reference of
the most ordinary beliefs back to "faith" left them no ground upon
which to argue up to faith. [603] This seems to have been a common
feeling among his readers. For the same reason he made no appeal to
men of science. He would have no recognition of secondary causes,
the acceptance of which he declared to be a dangerous relapse into
paganism. [604] There was thus no scientific principle in the new
doctrine which could enable it to solve the problems or absorb the
systems of other schools. Locke was as little moved by it as were the
Jansenists. Malebranche won readers everywhere by his charm of style;
[605] but he was as much of a disturber as of a reconciler. The very
controversies which he set up made for disintegration; and Fénelon
found it necessary to "refute" Malebranche as well as Spinoza, and
did his censure with as great severity as Arnauld's. [606] The mere
fact that Malebranche put aside miracles in the name of divine law
was fatal from the point of view of orthodoxy.
9. Yet another philosophic figure of the reign of Louis XIV, the Jesuit
Père Buffier (1661-1737), deserves a passing notice here--out of his
chronological order--though the historians of philosophy have mostly
ignored him. [607] He is indeed of no permanent philosophic importance,
being a precursor of the Scottish school of Reid, nourished on Locke,
and somewhat on Descartes; but he is significant for the element
of practical rationalism which pervades his reasoning, and which
recommended him to Voltaire, Reid, and Destutt de Tracy. On the
question of "primary truths in theology" he declares so boldly for
the authority of revelation in all dogmas which pass comprehension,
and for the non-concern of theology with any process of rational proof,
[608] that it is hardly possible to suppose him a believer. On those
principles, Islam has exactly the same authority as Christianity. In
his metaphysic "he rejects all the ontological proofs of the existence
of God, and, among others, the proof of Descartes from infinitude:
he maintains that the idea of God is not innate, and that it can
be reached only from consideration of the order of nature." [609]
He is thus as much of a force for deism as was his master, Locke;
and he outgoes him in point of rationalism when he puts the primary
ethic of reciprocity as a universally recognized truth, [610] where
Locke had helplessly fallen back on "the will of God." On the other
hand he censures Descartes for not admitting the equal validity of
other tests with that of primary consciousness, thus in effect putting
himself in line with Gassendi. For the rest, his Examen des préjugés
vulgaires, the most popular of his works, is so full of practical
rationalism, and declares among other things so strongly in favour
of free discussion, that its influence must have been wholly in the
direction of freethought. "Give me," he makes one of his disputants
say, "a nation where they do not dispute, do not contest: it will be,
I assure you, a very stupid and a very ignorant nation." [611] Such
reasoning could hardly please the Jesuits, [612] and must have pleased
freethinkers. And yet Buffier, like Gassendi, in virtue of his clerical
status and his purely professional orthodoxy, escaped all persecution.
While an evolving Cartesianism, modified by the thought of Locke and
the critical evolution of that, was thus reacting on thought in all
directions, the primary and proper impulse of Descartes and Locke
was doing on the Continent what that of Bacon had already done in
England--setting men on actual scientific observation and experiment,
and turning them from traditionalism of every kind. The more religious
minds, as Malebranche, set their faces almost fanatically against
erudition, thus making an enemy of the all-learned Huet, [613]
but on the other hand preparing the way for the scientific age. For
the rest we find the influence of Descartes at work in heresies at
which he had not hinted. Finally we shall see it taking deep root in
Holland, furthering a rationalistic view of the Bible and of popular
superstitions.
10. Yet another new departure was made in the France of Louis XIV
by the scholarly performance of Richard Simon (1638-1712), who was
as regards the Scriptural texts what Spencer of Cambridge was as
regards the culture-history of the Hebrews, one of the founders of
modern methodical criticism. It was as a devout Catholic refuting
Protestants, and a champion of the Bible against Spinoza, that
Simon began his work; but, more sincerely critical than Huet, he
reached views more akin to those of Spinoza than to those of the
Church. [614] The congregation of the Oratory, where Simon laid the
foundations of his learning, was so little inclined to his critical
views that he decided to leave it; and though persuaded to stay,
and to become for a time a professor of philosophy at Julli, he at
length broke with the Order. Then, from his native town of Dieppe,
came his strenuous series of critical works--L'histoire critique du
Vieux Testament (1678), which among other things decisively impugned
the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch; the Histoire critique du
texte du Nouveau Testament (Rotterdam, 1689); numerous other volumes
of critical studies on texts, versions, and commentators; and finally
a French translation of the New Testament with notes. His Bibliothèque
Critique (4 vols. under the name of Saint-Jore) was suppressed by an
order in council; the translation was condemned by Bossuet and the
Archbishop of Paris; and the two first-named works were suppressed by
the Parlement of Paris and attacked by a host of orthodox scholars;
but they were translated promptly into Latin and English; and they
gave a new breadth of footing to the deistic argument, though Simon
always wrote as an avowed believer.
Before Simon, the Protestant Isaac la Peyrère, the friend of La
Mothe le Vayer and Gassendi, and the librarian of Condé, had fired
a somewhat startling shot at the Pentateuch in his Præadamitæ [615]
and Systema Theologica ex Præ-adamitarum Hypothesi (both 1655: printed
in Holland [616]), for which he was imprisoned at Brussels, with the
result that he recanted and joined the Church of Rome, going to the
Pope in person to receive absolution, and publishing an Epistola ad
Philotimum (Frankfort, 1658), in which he professed to explain his
reasons for abjuring at once his Calvinism and his treatise. It
is clear that all this was done to save his skin, for there is
explicit testimony that he held firmly by his Preadamite doctrine
to the end of his life, despite the seven or eight confutations of
his work published in 1656. [617] Were it not for his constructive
theses--especially his idea that Adam was a real person, but simply
the father of the Hebrews and not of the human race--he would deserve
to rank high among the scientific pioneers of modern rationalism,
for his negative work is shrewd and sound. Like so many other early
rationalists, collectively accused of "destroying without replacing,"
he erred precisely in his eagerness to build up, for his negations
have all become accepted truths. [618] As it is, he may be ranked,
after Toland, as a main founder of the older rationalism, developed
chiefly in Germany, which sought to reduce as many miracles as possible
to natural events misunderstood. But he was too far before his time to
win a fair hearing. Where Simon laid a cautious scholarly foundation,
Peyrère suddenly challenged immemorial beliefs, and failed accordingly.
11. Such an evolution could not occur in France without affecting the
neighbouring civilization of Holland. We have seen Dutch life at the
beginning of the seventeenth century full of Protestant fanaticism
and sectarian strife; and in the time of Descartes these elements,
especially on the Calvinist side, were strong enough virtually to
drive him out of Holland (1647) after nineteen years' residence. [619]
He had, however, made disciples; and his doctrine bore fruit, finding
doubtless some old soil ready. Thus in 1666 one of his disciples, the
Amsterdam physician Louis Meyer, published a work entitled Philosophia
Sacrae Scripturae Interpres, [620] in which, after formally affirming
that the Scripture is the infallible Word of God, he proceeds to argue
that the interpretation of the Word must be made by the human reason,
and accordingly sets aside all meanings which are irreconcilable
therewith, reducing them to allegories or tropes. Apart from this,
there is somewhat strong evidence that in Holland in the second
half of the century Cartesianism was in large part identified with
a widespread movement of rationalism, of a sufficiently pronounced
kind. Peter von Mastricht, Professor of Theology at Utrecht, published
in 1677 a Latin treatise, Novitatum Cartesianarum Gangræna, in which
he made out a list of fifty-six anti-Christian propositions maintained
by Cartesians. Among them are these: That the divine essence, also
that of angels, and that of the soul, consists only in Cogitation;
That philosophy is not subservient to divinity, and is no less certain
and no less revealed; That in things natural, moral, and practical,
and also in matters of faith, the Scripture speaks according to the
erroneous notions of the vulgar; That the mystery of the Trinity may
be demonstrated by natural reason; That the first chaos was able of
itself to produce all things material; That the world has a soul;
and that it may be infinite in extent. [621] The theologian was thus
visibly justified in maintaining that the "novelties" of Cartesianism
outwent by a long way those of Arminianism. [622] It had in fact
established a new point of view; seeing that Arminius had claimed
for theology all the supremacy ever accorded to it in the Church. [623]
12. As Meyer was one of the most intimate friends of Spinoza, being
with him at death, and became the editor of his posthumous works,
it can hardly be doubted that his treatise, which preceded Spinoza's
Tractatus by four years, influenced the great Jew, who speedily
eclipsed him. [624] Spinoza, however (1632-1677), was first led
to rationalize by his Amsterdam friend and teacher, Van den Ende,
a scientific materialist, hostile to all religion; [625] and it
was while under his influence that he was excommunicated by his
father's synagogue. From the first, apparently, Spinoza's thought
was shaped partly by the medieval Hebrew philosophy [626] (which, as
we have seen, combined Aristotelean and Saracen influences), partly
by the teaching of Bruno, though he modified and corrected that at
various points. [627] Later he was deeply influenced by Descartes,
whom he specially expounded for a pupil in a tractate. [628] Here
he endorses Descartes's doctrine of freewill, which he was later
to repudiate and overthrow. But he drew from Descartes his retained
principle that evil is not a real existence. In a much less degree he
was influenced by Bacon, whose psychology he ultimately condemned;
but from Hobbes he took not only his rationalistic attitude towards
"revelation," but his doctrine of ecclesiastical subordination. [629]
Finally evolving his own conceptions, he produced a philosophic system
which was destined to affect all European thought, remaining the while
quietly occupied with the handicraft of lens-grinding by which he
earned his livelihood. The Grand Pensionary of the Netherlands, John
de Witt, seems to have been in full sympathy with the young heretic,
on whom he conferred a small pension before he had published anything
save his Cartesian Principia (1663).
The much more daring and powerful Tractatus Theologico-Politicus
(1670 [630]) was promptly condemned by a Dutch clerical synod, along
with Hobbes's Leviathan, which it greatly surpassed in the matter of
criticism of the scriptural text. It was the most stringent censure
of supernaturalism that had thus far appeared in any modern language;
and its preface is an even more mordant attack on popular religion and
clericalism than the main body of the work. What seems to-day an odd
compromise--the reservation of supra-rational authority for revelation,
alongside of unqualified claims for the freedom of reason [631]--was
but an adaptation of the old scholastic formula of "twofold truth,"
and was perhaps at the time the possible maximum of open rationalism
in regard to the current creed, since both Bacon and Locke, as we have
seen, were fain to resort to it. As revealed in his letters, Spinoza
in almost all things stood at the point of view of the cultivated
rationalism of two centuries later. He believed in a historical Jesus,
rejecting the Resurrection; [632] disbelieved in ghosts and spirits;
[633] rejected miracles; [634] and refused to think of God as ever
angry; [635] avowing that he could not understand the Scriptures, and
had been able to learn nothing from them as to God's attributes. [636]
The Tractatus could not go so far; but it went far enough to horrify
many who counted themselves latitudinarian. It was only in Holland
that so aggressive a criticism of Christian faith and practice could
then appear; and even there neither publisher nor author dared avow
himself. Spinoza even vetoed a translation into Dutch, foreseeing
that such a book would be placed under an interdict. [637] It was
as much an appeal for freedom of thought (libertas philosophandi)
as a demonstration of rational truth; and Spinoza dexterously pointed
(c. 20) to the social effects of the religious liberty already enjoyed
in Amsterdam as a reason for carrying liberty further. There can
be no question that it powerfully furthered alike the deistic and
the Unitarian movements in England from the year of its appearance;
and, though the States-General felt bound formally to prohibit it on
the issue of the second edition in 1674, its effect in Holland was
probably as great as elsewhere: at least there seems to have gone on
there from this time a rapid modification of the old orthodoxy.
Still more profound, probably, was the effect of the posthumous Ethica
(1677), which he had been prevented from publishing in his lifetime,
[638] and which not only propounded in parts an absolute pantheism (=
atheism [639]), but definitely grounded ethics in human nature. If
more were needed to arouse theological rage, it was to be found
in the repeated and insistent criticism of the moral and mental
perversity of the defenders of the faith [640]--a position not
indeed quite consistent with the primary teaching of the treatise on
the subject of Will, of which it denies the entity in the ordinary
sense. Spinoza was here reverting to the practical attitude of Bacon,
which, under a partial misconception, he had repudiated; and he did
not formally solve the contradiction. His purpose was to confute the
ordinary orthodox dogma that unbelief is wilful sin; and to retort
the charge without reconciling it with the thesis was to impair
the philosophic argument. [641] It was not on that score, however,
that it was resented, but as an unpardonable attack on orthodoxy,
not to be atoned for by any words about the spirit of Christ. [642]
The discussion went deep and far. A reply to the Tractatus which
appeared in 1674, by an Utrecht professor (then dead), is spoken of
by Spinoza with contempt; [643] but abler discussion followed, though
the assailants mostly fell foul of each other. Franz Cuper or Kuyper
of Amsterdam, who in 1676 published an Arcana Atheismi Revelata,
professedly refuting Spinoza's Tractatus, was charged with writing
in bad faith and with being on Spinoza's side--an accusation which
he promptly retorted on other critics, apparently with justice. [644]
The able treatise of Prof. E. E. Powell on Spinoza and Religion
is open to demur at one point--its reiterated dictum that
Spinoza's character was marred by "lack of moral courage"
(p. 44). This expression is later in a measure retreated from:
after "his habitual attitude of timid caution," we have: "Spinoza's
timidity, or, if you will, his peaceable disposition." If the
last-cited concession is to stand, the other phrases should be
withdrawn. Moral courage, like every other human attribute,
is to be estimated comparatively; and the test-question here
is: Did any other writer in Spinoza's day venture further than
he? Moral courage is not identical with the fanaticism which
invites destruction; fanaticism supplies a motive which dispenses
with courage, though it operates as courage might. But refusal to
challenge destruction gratuitously does not imply lack of courage,
though of course it may be thereby motived. A quite brave man,
it has been noted, will quietly shun a gratuitous risk where
one who is "afraid of being afraid" may face it. When all is
said, Spinoza was one of the most daring writers of his day;
and his ethic made it no more a dereliction of duty for him to
avoid provoking arrest and capital punishment than it is for
either a Protestant or a rationalist to refrain from courting
death by openly defying Catholic beliefs before a Catholic
mob in Spain. It is easy for any of us to-day to be far more
explicit than Spinoza was. It is doubtful whether any of us,
if we had lived in his day and were capable of going as far in
heresy, would have run such risks as he did in publishing the
Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. For those who have lived much in
his society, it should be difficult to doubt that, if allowed, he
would have dared death on the night of the mob-murder of the De
Witts. The formerly suppressed proof of his very plain speaking
on the subject of prayer, and his indications of aversion to
the practice of grace before meals (Powell, pp. 323-25) show
lack even of prudence on his part. Prof. Powell is certainly
entitled to censure those recent writers who have wilfully kept
up a mystification as to Spinoza's religiosity; but their lack
of courage or candour does not justify an imputation of the same
kind upon him. That Spinoza was "no saint" (Powell, p. 43) is
true in the remote sense that he was not incapable of anger. But
it would be hard to find a Christian who would compare with him
in general nobility of character. The proposition that he was not
"in any sense religious" (id. ib.) seems open to verbal challenge.
13. The appearance in 1678 of a Dutch treatise "against all sorts of
atheists," [645] and in 1681, at Amsterdam, of an attack in French on
Spinoza's Scriptural criticism, [646] points to a movement outside of
the clerical and scholarly class. All along, indeed, the atmosphere of
the Arminian or "Remonstrant" School in Holland must have been fairly
liberal. [647] Already in 1685 Locke's friend Le Clerc had taken up
the position of Hobbes and Spinoza and Simon on the Pentateuch in his
Sentimens de quelques théologiens de Hollande (translated into English
and published in 1690 as "Five Letters Concerning the Inspiration of
the Holy Scriptures"). [648] And although Le Clerc always remained
something of a Scripturalist, and refused to go the way of Spinoza,
he had courage enough to revive an ancient heresy by urging, in his
commentary on the fourth Gospel (1701), that "the Logos" should be
rendered "Reason"--an idea which he probably derived from the Unitarian
Zwicker without realizing how far it could take him. His ultimate
recantation, on the subject of the authorship of the Pentateuch,
served only to weaken his credit with freethinkers, and came too late
to arrest the intellectual movement which he had forwarded.
A rationalizing spirit had now begun to spread widely in Holland; and
within twenty years of Spinoza's death there had arisen a Dutch sect,
led by Pontiaan van Hattem, a pastor at Philipsland, which blended
Spinozism with evangelicalism in such a way as to incur the anathema of
the Church. [649] In the time of the English Civil War the fear of the
opponents of the new multitude of sects was that England should become
"another Amsterdam." [650] This very multiplicity tended to promote
doubt; and in 1713 we find Anthony Collins [651] pointing to Holland
as a country where freedom to think has undermined superstition to a
remarkable degree. During his stay, in the previous generation, Locke
had found a measure of liberal theology, in harmony with his own; but
in those days downright heresy was still dangerous. Deurhoff (d. 1717),
who translated Descartes and was accused of Spinozism, though he
strongly attacked it, [652] had at one time to fly Holland, though
by his writings he founded a pantheistic sect known as Deurhovians;
and Balthasar Bekker, a Cartesian, persecuted first for Socinianism,
incurred so much odium by publishing in 1691 a treatise denying the
reality of witchcraft that he had to give up his office as a preacher.
Cp. art. in Biographie Universelle, and Mosheim, 17 Cent. pt. ii,
ch. ii, § 35, and notes in Reid's ed. Bekker was not the first
to combat demonology on scriptural grounds; Arnold Geulincx,
of Leyden, and the French Protestant refugee Daillon having
less confidently put the view before him, the latter in his
Daimonologia, 1687 (trans. in English, 1723), and the former in
his system of ethics. Gassendi, as we saw, had notably discredited
witchcraft a generation earlier; Reginald Scot had impugned its
actuality in 1584; and Wier, still earlier, in 1563. And even
before the Reformation the learned King Christian II of Denmark
(deposed 1523) had vetoed witch-burning in his dominions. (Allen,
Hist. de Danemark, French tr. 1878, i, 281.) As Scot's Discoverie
had been translated into Dutch in 1609, Bekker probably had
a lead from him. Glanvill's Blow at Modern Sadducism (1688),
reproduced in Sadducismus Triumphatus, undertakes to answer some
objections of the kind later urged by Bekker; and the discussion
was practically international. Bekker's treatise, entitled De
Betooverte Wereld, was translated into English--first in 1695,
from the French, under the title The World Bewitched (only 1
vol. published), and again in 1700 as The World turned upside
down. In the French translation, Le Monde Enchanté (4 tom. 1694),
it had a great vogue. A refutation was published in English in
An Historical Treatise of Spirits, by J. Beaumont, in 1705. It is
noteworthy that Bekker was included as one of "four modern sages
(vier neuer Welt-Weisen)" with Descartes, Hobbes, and Spinoza,
in a German folio tractate (hostile) of 1702.
14. No greater service was rendered in that age to the spread of
rational views than that embodied in the great Dictionnaire Historique
et Critique [653] of Pierre Bayle (1647-1706), who, born in France,
but driven out by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, spent the
best part of his life and did his main work at Rotterdam. Persecuted
there for his freethinking, to the extent of having to give up his
professorship, he yet produced a virtual encyclopedia for freethinkers
in his incomparable Dictionary, baffling hostility by the Pyrrhonian
impartiality with which he handled all religious questions. In his
youth, when sent by his Protestant father to study at Toulouse,
he had been temporarily converted, as was the young Gibbon later,
to Catholicism; [654] and the retrospect of that experience seems
in Bayle's case, as in Gibbon's, to have been a permanent motive
to practical skepticism. [655] But, again, in the one case as in
the other, skepticism was fortified by abundant knowledge. Bayle
had read everything and mastered every controversy, and was thereby
the better able to seem to have no convictions of his own. But even
apart from the notable defence of the character of atheists dropped by
him in the famous Pensées diverses sur la Comète (1682), and in the
Éclaircissements in which he defended it, it is abundantly evident
that he was an unbeliever. The only alternative view is that he
was strictly or philosophically a skeptic, reaching no conclusions
for himself; but this is excluded by the whole management of his
expositions. [656] It is recorded that it was his vehement description
of himself as a Protestant "in the full force of the term," accompanied
with a quotation from Lucretius, that set the clerical diplomatist
Polignac upon re-reading the Roman atheist and writing his poem
Anti-Lucretius. [657] Bayle's ostensible Pyrrhonism was simply the
tactic forced on him by his conditions; and it was the positive
unbelievers who specially delighted in his volumes. He laid down no
cosmic doctrines, but he illuminated all; and his air of repudiating
such views as Spinoza's had the effect rather of forcing Spinozists
to leave neutral ground than of rehabilitating orthodoxy.
On one theme he spoke without any semblance of doubt. Above all
men who had yet written he is the champion of toleration. [658] At
a time when in England the school of Locke still held that atheism
must not be tolerated, he would accept no such position, insisting
that error as such is not culpable, and that, save in the case of
a sect positively inciting to violence and disorder, all punishment
of opinion is irrational and unjust. [659] On this theme, moved by
the memory of his own life of exile and the atrocious persecution
of the Protestants of France, he lost his normal imperturbability,
as in his Letter to an Abbé (if it be really his), entitled Ce que
c'est que la France toute catholique sous le règne de Louis le Grand,
in which a controlled passion of accusation makes every sentence bite
like an acid, leaving a mark that no dialectic can efface. But it was
not only from Catholicism that he suffered, and not only to Catholics
that his message was addressed. One of his most malignant enemies
was the Protestant Jurieu, who it was that succeeded in having him
deprived of his chair of philosophy and history at Rotterdam (1693)
on the score of the freethinking of his Pensées sur la Comète. This
wrong cast a shadow over his life, reducing him to financial straits
in which he had to curtail greatly the plan of his Dictionary. Further,
it moved him to some inconsistent censure of the political writings of
French Protestant refugees [660]--Jurieu being the reputed author of a
violent attack on the rule of Louis XIV, under the title Les Soupirs de
la France esclave qui aspire après la liberté (1689). [661] Yet again,
the malicious Jurieu induced the Consistory of Rotterdam to censure
the Dictionary on the score of the tone and tendency of the article
"David" and the renewed vindications of atheists.
But nothing could turn Bayle from his loyalty to reason and toleration;
and the malice of the bigots could not deprive him of his literary
vogue, which was in the ratio of his unparalleled industry. As a mere
writer he is admirable: save in point of sheer wit, of which, however,
he has not a little, he is to this day as readable as Voltaire. By
force of unfailing lucidity, wisdom, and knowledge, he made the
conquest of literary Europe; and fifty years after his death we find
the Jesuit Delamare in his (anonymous) apologetic treatise, La Foi
justifiée de tout reproche de contradiction avec la raison (1761),
speaking of him to the deists as "their theologian, their doctor,
their oracle." [662] He was indeed no less; and his serene exposure
of the historic failure of Christianity was all the more deadly as
coming from a master of theological history.
15. Meantime, Spinoza had reinforced the critical movement in France,
[663] where decline of belief can be seen proceeding after as before
the definite adoption of pietistic courses by the king, under the
influence of Madame de Maintenon. Abbadie, writing his Traité de
la verité de la religion chrétienne at Berlin in 1684, speaks of an
"infinity" of prejudiced deists as against the "infinity" of prejudiced
believers [664]--evidently thinking of northern Europeans in general;
and he strives hard to refute both Hobbes and Spinoza on points
of Biblical criticism. In France he could not turn the tide. That
radical distrust of religious motives and illumination which can be
seen growing up in every country in modern Europe where religion led
to war, was bound to be strengthened by the spectacle of the reformed
sensualist harrying heresy in his own kingdom in the intervals of
his wars with his neighbours. The crowning folly of the revocation of
the Edict of Nantes [665] (1685), forcing the flight from France of
some three hundred thousand industrious [666] and educated inhabitants
for the offence of Protestantism, was as mad a blow to religion as to
the State. Less paralysing to economic life than the similar policy
of the Church against the Moriscoes in Spain, it is no less striking
a proof of the paralysis of practical judgment to which unreasoning
faith and systematic ecclesiasticism can lead. Orthodoxy in France was
as ecstatic in its praise of the act as had been that of Spain in the
case of the expulsion of the Moriscoes. The deed is not to be laid at
the single door of the king or of any of his advisers, male or female:
the act which deprived France of a vast host of her soundest citizens
was applauded by nearly all cultured Catholicism. [667] Not merely the
bishops, Bossuet and Fénelon [668] and Masillon, but the Jansenist
Arnauld; not merely the female devotees, Mademoiselle de Scudéry
and Madame Deshoulières, but Racine, La Bruyère, and the senile la
Fontaine--all extolled the senseless deed. The not over-pious Madame de
Sévigné was delighted with the "dragonnades," declaring that "nothing
could be finer: no king has done or will do anything more memorable";
the still less mystical Bussy, author of the Histoire amoureuse des
Gaules, was moved to pious exultation; and the dying Chancelier le
Tellier, on signing the edict of revocation, repeated the legendary
cry of Simeon, Nunc dimitte servum tuum, Domine! To this pass had the
Catholic creed and discipline brought the mind of France. Only the
men of affairs, nourished upon realities--the Vaubans, Saint Simons,
and Catinats--realized the insanity of the action, which Colbert
(d. 1683) would never have allowed to come to birth.
The triumphers, doubtless, did not contemplate the expatriation of the
myriads of Protestants who escaped over the frontiers in the closing
years of the century in spite of all the efforts of the royal police,
"carrying with them," as a later French historian writes, "our arts,
the secrets of our manufactures, and their hatred of the king." The
Catholics, as deep in civics as in science, thought only of the
humiliation and subjection of the heretics--doubtless feeling that
they were getting a revenge against Protestantism for the Test Act and
the atrocities of the Popish Plot mania in England. The blow recoiled
on their country. Within a generation, their children were enduring
the agonies of utter defeat at the hands of a coalition of Protestant
nations every one of which had been strengthened by the piously exiled
sons of France; and in the midst of their mortal struggle the revolted
Protestants of the Cévennes so furiously assailed from the rear that
the drain upon the king's forces precipitated the loss of their hold
on Germany.
For every Protestant who crossed the frontiers between 1685 and 1700,
perhaps, a Catholic neared or crossed the line between indifferentism
and active doubt. The steady advance of science all the while
infallibly undermined faith; and hardly was the bolt launched against
the Protestants when new sapping and mining was going on. Fontenelle
(1657-1757), whose Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (1686)
popularized for the elegant world the new cosmology, cannot but
have undermined dogmatic faith in some directions; above all by
his graceful and skilful Histoire des Oracles (also 1686), where
"the argumentation passes beyond the thesis advanced. All that he
says of oracles could be said of miracles." [669] The Jesuits found
the book essentially "impious"; and a French culture-historian sees
in it "the first attack which directs the scientific spirit against
the foundations of Christianity. All the purely philosophic arguments
with which religion has been assailed are in principle in the work of
Fontenelle." [670] In his abstract thinking he was no less radical,
and his Traité de la Liberté [671] established so well the determinist
position that it was decisively held by the majority of the French
freethinkers who followed. Living to his hundredth year, he could
join hands with the freethought of Gassendi and Voltaire, [672]
Descartes and Diderot. Yet we shall find him later, in his official
capacity of censor of literature, refusing to pass heretical books,
on principles that would have vetoed his own. He is in fact a type of
the freethought of the age of Louis XIV--Epicurean in the common sense,
unheroic, resolute only to evade penalties, guiltless of over-zeal. Not
in that age could men generate an enthusiasm for truth.
16. Of the new Epicureans, the most famous in his day was
Saint-Evremond, [673] who, exiled from France for his politics,
maintained both in London and in Paris, by his writings, a leadership
in polite letters. In England he greatly influenced young men like
Bolingbroke; and a translation (attributed to Dryden) of one of his
writings seems to have given Bishop Butler the provocation to the
first and weakest chapter of his Analogy. [674] As to his skepticism
there was no doubt in his own day; and his compliments to Christianity
are much on a par with those paid later by the equally conforming and
unbelieving Shaftesbury, whom he also anticipated in his persuasive
advocacy of toleration. [675] Regnard, the dramatist, had a similar
private repute as an "Epicurean." And even among the nominally orthodox
writers of the time in France a subtle skepticism touches nearly all
opinion. La Bruyère is almost the only lay classic of the period
who is pronouncedly religious; and his essay on the freethinkers,
[676] against whom his reasoning is so forcibly feeble, testifies to
their numbers and to the stress of debate set up by them. Even he, too,
writes as a deist against atheists, hardly as a believing Christian. If
he were a believer he certainly found no comfort in his faith: whatever
were his capacity for good feeling, no great writer of his age betrays
such bitterness of spirit, such suffering from the brutalities of life,
such utter disillusionment, such unfaith in men. And a certain doubt
is cast upon all his professions of opinion by the sombre avowal:
"A man born a Christian and a Frenchman finds himself constrained
[677] in satire: the great subjects are forbidden him: he takes them
up at times, and then turns aside to little things, which he elevates
by his ... genius and his style." [678]
M. Lanson remarks that "we must not let ourselves be abused by
the last chapter [Des esprits forts], a collection of philosophic
reflections and reasonings, where La Bruyère mingles Plato,
Descartes, and Pascal in a vague Christian spiritualism. This
chapter, evidently sincere, but without individuality, and
containing only the reflex of the thoughts of others, is not a
conclusion to which the whole work conducts. It marks, on the
contrary, the lack of conclusion and of general views. What is
more, with the chapter On the Sovereign, placed in the middle of
the volume, it is destined to disarm the temporal and spiritual
powers, to serve as passport for the independent freedom of
observation in the rest of the Caractères" (p. 599).
On this it may be remarked that the essay in question is not so
much Christian as theistic; but the suggestion as to the object
is plausible. Taine (Essais de critique et d'histoire, ed. 1901)
first remarks (p. 11) on the "christianisme" of the essay, and then
decides (p. 12) that "he merely exposes in brief and imperious
style the reasonings of the school of Descartes." It should be
noted, however, that in this essay La Bruyère does not scruple to
write: "If all religion is a respectful fear of God, what is to be
thought of those who dare to wound him in his most living image,
which is the sovereign?" (§ 27 in ed. Walckenaer, p. 578. Pascal
holds the same tone. Vie, par Madame Perier.) This appears first
in the fourth edition; and many other passages were inserted in
that and later issues: the whole is an inharmonious mosaic.
Concerning La Bruyère, the truth would seem to be that the
inconsequences in the structure of his essays were symptomatic of
variability in his moods and opinions. Taine and Lanson are struck
by the premonitions of the revolution in his famous picture of
the peasants, and other passages; and the latter remarks (p. 603)
that "the points touched by La Bruyère are precisely those where
the writers of the next age undermined the old order: La Bruyère
is already philosophe in the sense which Voltaire and Diderot
gave to that term." But we cannot be sure that the plunges into
convention were not real swervings of a vacillating spirit. It
is difficult otherwise to explain his recorded approbation of
the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
The Dialogues sur le Quiétisme, published posthumously under his
name (1699), appear to be spurious. This was emphatically asserted
by contemporaries (Sentiments critiques sur les Caractères de
M. de la Bruyère, 1701, p. 447; Apologie de M. de la Bruyère,
1701, p. 357, both cited by Walckenaer) who on other points
were in opposition. Baron Walckenaer (Étude, ed. cited, p. 76
sq.) pronounces that they were the work of Elliès du Pin, a doctor
of the Sorbonne, and gives good reasons for the attribution. The
Abbé d'Olivet in his Histoire de l'Académie française declares that
La Bruyère only drafted them, and that du Pin edited them; but
the internal evidence is against their containing anything of La
Bruyère's draught. They are indeed so feeble that no admirer cares
to accept them as his. (Cp. note to Suard's Notice sur la personne
et les écrits de la Bruyère, in Didot ed. 1865, p. 20.) Written
against Madame Guyon, they were not worth his while.
If the apologetics of Huet and Pascal, Bossuet and Fénelon, had any
influence on the rationalistic spirit, it was but in the direction of
making it more circumspect, never of driving it out. It is significant
that whereas in the year of the issue of the Demonstratio the Duchesse
d'Orléans could write that "every young man either is or affects to
be an atheist," Le Vassor wrote in 1688: "People talk only of reason,
of good taste, of force of mind, of the advantage of those who can
raise themselves above the prejudices of education and of the society
in which one is born. Pyrrhonism is the fashion in many things: men
say that rectitude of mind consists in 'not believing lightly' and
in being 'ready to doubt.'" [679] Pascal and Huet between them had
only multiplied doubters. On both lines, obviously, freethought was
the gainer; and in a Jesuit treatise, Le Monde condamné par luymesme,
published in 1695, the Préface contre l'incrédulité des libertins sets
out with the avowal that "to draw the condemnation of the world out
of its own mouth, it is necessary to attack first the incredulity of
the unbelievers (libertins), who compose the main part of it, and who
under some appearance of Christianity conceal a mind either Judaic
[read deistic] or pagan." Such was France to a religious eye at the
height of the Catholic triumph over Protestantism. The statement that
the libertins formed the majority of "the world" is of course a furious
extravagance. But there must have been a good deal of unbelief to have
moved a priest to such an explosion. And the unbelief must have been
as much a product of revulsion from religious savagery as a result
of direct critical impulse, for there was as yet no circulation
of positively freethinking literature. For a time, indeed, there
was a general falling away in French intellectual prestige, [680]
the result, not of the mere "protective spirit" in literature, as
is sometimes argued, but of the immense diversion of national energy
under Louis XIV to militarism; [681] and the freethinkers lost some
of the confidence as well as some of the competence they had exhibited
in the days of Molière. [682] There had been too little solid thinking
done to preclude a reaction when the king, led by Madame de Maintenon,
went about to atone for his debaucheries by an old age of piety. "The
king had been put in such fear of hell that he believed that all who
had not been instructed by the Jesuits were damned. To ruin anyone
it was necessary only to say, 'He is a Huguenot, or a Jansenist,'
and the thing was done." [683] In this state of things there spread
in France the revived doctrine or temper of Quietism, set up by the
Spanish priest, Miguel de Molinos (1640-1697), whose Spiritual Guide,
published in Spanish in 1675, appeared in 1681 in Italian at Rome,
where he was a highly influential confessor. It was soon translated
into Latin, French, and Dutch. In 1685 he was cited before the
Inquisition; in 1687 the book was condemned to be burned, and he
was compelled to retract sixty-eight propositions declared to be
heretical; whereafter, nonetheless, he was imprisoned till his death
in 1696. In France, whence the attack on him had begun, his teaching
made many converts, notably Madame Guyon, and may be said to have
created a measure of religious revival. But when Fénelon took it up
(1697), modifying the terminology of Molinos to evade the official
condemnation, he was bitterly attacked by Bossuet as putting forth
doctrine incompatible with Christianity; the prelates fought for two
years; and finally the Pope condemned Fénelon's book, whereupon he
submitted, limiting his polemic to attacks on the Jansenists. Thus
the gloomy orthodoxy of the court and the mysticism of the new school
alike failed to affect the general intelligence; there was no real
building up of belief; and the forward movement at length recommenced.
CHAPTER XVI
BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
§ 1
It appears from our survey that the "deistic movement," commonly
assigned to the eighteenth century, had been abundantly prepared
for in the seventeenth, which, in turn, was but developing ideas
current in the sixteenth. When, in 1696, John Toland published his
Christianity Not Mysterious, the sensation it made was due not so
much to any unheard-of boldness in its thought as to the simple fact
that deistic ideas had thus found their way into print. [684] So far
the deistic position was explicitly represented in English literature
only by the works of Herbert, Hobbes, and Blount; and of these only
the first (who wrote in Latin) and the third had put the case at any
length. Against the deists or atheists of the school of Hobbes, and
the Scriptural Unitarians who thought with Newton and Locke, there
stood arrayed the great mass of orthodox intolerance which clamoured
for the violent suppression of every sort of "infidelity." It was
this feeling, of which the army of ignorant rural clergy were the
spokesmen, that found vent in the Blasphemy Act of 1697. The new
literary growth dating from the time of Toland is the evidence of
the richness of the rationalistic soil already created. Thinking men
craved a new atmosphere. Locke's Reasonableness of Christianity is an
unsuccessful compromise: Toland's book begins a new propagandist era.
Toland's treatise, [685] heretical as it was, professed to be a
defence of the faith, and avowedly founded on Locke's anonymous
Reasonableness of Christianity, its young author being on terms of
acquaintance with the philosopher. [686] He claimed, in fact, to take
for granted "the Divinity of the New Testament," and to "demonstrate
the verity of divine revelation against atheists and all enemies of
revealed religion," from whom, accordingly, he expected to receive no
quarter. Brought up, as he declared, "from my cradle, in the grossest
superstition and idolatry," he had been divinely led to make use of
his own reason; and he assured his Christian readers of his perfect
sincerity in "defending the true religion." [687] Twenty years later,
his primary positions were hardly to be distinguished from those of
ratiocinative champions of the creed, save in respect that he was
challenging orthodoxy where they were replying to unbelievers. Toland,
however, lacked alike the timidity and the prudence which so safely
guided Locke in his latter years; and though his argument was only
a logical and outspoken extension of Locke's position, to the end
of showing that there was nothing supra-rational in Christianity of
Locke's type, it separated him from "respectable" society in England
and Ireland for the rest of his life. The book was "presented" by the
Grand Juries of Middlesex and Dublin; [688] the dissenters in Dublin
being chiefly active in denouncing it--with or without knowledge
of its contents; [689] half-a-dozen answers appeared; and when in
1698 Toland produced another, entitled Amyntor, showing the infirm
foundation of the Christian canon, there was again a speedy crop of
replies. Despite the oversights inevitable to such pioneer work, this
opens, from the side of freethought, the era of documentary criticism
of the New Testament; and in some of his later freethinking books,
as the Nazarenus (1718) and the Pantheisticon (1720), he continues to
show himself in advance of his time in "opening new windows" for his
mind. [690] The latter work represents in particular the influence
of Spinoza, whom he had formerly criticized somewhat forcibly [691]
for his failure to recognize that motion is inherent in matter. On
that head he lays down [692] the doctrine that "motion is but matter
under a certain consideration"--an essentially "materialist" position,
deriving from the pre-Socratic Greeks, and incidentally affirmed by
Bacon. [693] He was not exactly an industrious student or writer;
but he had scholarly knowledge and instinct, and several of his works
show close study of Bayle.
As regards his more original views on Christian origins, he is not
impressive to the modern reader; but theses which to-day stand for
little were in their own day important. Thus in his Hodegus (pt. i of
the Tetradymus, 1720) it is elaborately argued that the "pillar of
fire by night and of cloud by day" was no miracle, but the regular
procedure of guides in deserts, where night marches are the rule;
the "cloud" being simply the smoke of the vanguard's fire, which by
night flared red. Later criticism decides that the whole narrative
of the Exodus is myth. Toland's method, however, was relatively so
advanced that it had not been abandoned by theological "rationalists" a
century later. Of that movement he must be ranked an energetic pioneer:
though he lacked somewhat the strength of character that in his day
was peculiarly needed to sustain a freethinker. Much of his later life
was spent abroad; and his Letters to Serena (1704) show him permitted
to discourse to the Queen of Prussia on such topics as the origin
and force of prejudice, the history of the doctrine of immortality,
and the origin of idolatry. He pays his correspondent the compliment
of treating his topics with much learning; and his manner of assuming
her own orthodoxy in regard to revelation could have served as a model
to Gibbon. [694] But, despite such distinguished patronage, his life
was largely passed in poverty, cheerfully endured, [695] with only
chronic help from well-to-do sympathizers, such as Shaftesbury, who
was not over-sympathetic. When it is noted that down to 1761 there
had appeared no fewer than fifty-four answers to his first book,
[696] his importance as an intellectual influence may be realized.
A certain amount of evasion was forced upon Toland by the Blasphemy
Law of 1697; inferentially, however, he was a thorough deist until
he became pantheist; and the discussion over his books showed that
views essentially deistic were held even among his antagonists. One,
an Irish bishop, got into trouble by setting forth a notion of
deity which squared with that of Hobbes. [697] The whole of our
present subject, indeed, is much complicated by the distribution
of heretical views among the nominally orthodox, and of orthodox
views among heretics. [698] Thus the school of Cudworth, zealous
against atheism, was less truly theistic than that of Blount, [699]
who, following Hobbes, pointed out that to deny to God a continual
personal and providential control of human affairs was to hold to
atheism under the name of theism; [700] whereas Cudworth, the champion
of theism against the atheists, entangled himself hopelessly [701]
in a theory which made deity endow Nature with "plastic" powers and
leave it to its own evolution. The position was serenely demolished
by Bayle, [702] as against Le Clerc, who sought to defend it; and
in England the clerical outcry was so general that Cudworth gave
up authorship. [703] Over the same crux, in Ireland, Bishop Browne
and Bishop Berkeley accused each other of promoting atheism; and
Archbishop King was embroiled in the dispute. [704] On the other hand,
the theistic Descartes had laid down a "mechanical" theory of the
universe which perfectly comported with atheism, and partly promoted
that way of thinking; [705] and a selection from Gassendi's ethical
writings, translated into English [706] (1699), wrought in the same
direction. The Church itself contained Cartesians and Cudworthians,
Socinians and deists. [707] Each group, further, had inner differences
as to free-will [708] and Providence; and the theistic schools of
Newton, Clarke, and Leibnitz rejected each other's philosophies as well
as that of Descartes. Leibnitz complained grimly that Newton and his
followers had "a very odd opinion concerning the Work of God," making
the universe an imperfect machine, which the deity had frequently to
mend; and treating space as an organ by which God perceives things,
which are thus regarded as not produced or maintained by him. [709]
Newton's principles of explanation, he insisted, were those of
the materialists. [710] John Hutchinson, a professor at Cambridge,
in his Treatise of Power, Essential and Mechanical, also bitterly
assailed Newton as a deistical and anti-scriptural sophist. [711]
Clarke, on the other hand, declared that the philosophy of Leibnitz
was "tending to banish God from the world." [712] Alongside of such
internecine strife, it was not surprising that the great astronomer
Halley, who accepted Newton's principles in physics, was commonly
reputed an atheist; and that the freethinkers pitted his name in that
connection against Newton's. [713] As it was he who first suggested
[714] the idea of the total motion of the entire solar system in
space--described by a modern pietist as "this great cosmical truth,
the grandest in astronomy" [715]--they were not ill justified. It can
hardly be doubted that if intellectual England could have been polled
in 1710, under no restraints from economic, social, and legal pressure,
some form of rationalism inconsistent with Christianity would have
been found to be nearly as common as orthodoxy. In outlying provinces,
in Devon and Cornwall, in Ulster, in Edinburgh and Glasgow, as well as
in the metropolis, the pressure of deism on the popular creed evoked
expressions of Arian and Socinian thought among the clergy. [716]
It was, in fact, the various restraints under notice that determined
the outward fortunes of belief and unbelief, and have substantially
determined them since. When the devout Whiston was deposed from
his professorship for his Arianism, and the unbelieving Saunderson
was put in his place, [717] and when Simson was suspended from his
ministerial functions in Glasgow, [718] the lesson was learned that
outward conformity was the sufficient way to income. [719]
Hard as it was, however, to kick against the pricks of law and
prejudice, it is clear that many in the upper and middle classes
privately did so. The clerical and the new popular literature of
the time prove this abundantly. In the Tatler and its successors,
[720] the decorous Addison and the indecorous Steele, neither of
them a competent thinker, frigidly or furiously asperse the new
tribe of freethinkers; while the evangelically pious Berkeley and
the extremely unevangelical Swift rival each other in the malice of
their attacks on those who rejected their creed. Berkeley, a man of
philosophic genius but intense prepossessions, maintained Christianity
on grounds which are the negation of philosophy. [721] Swift, the
genius of neurotic misanthropy, who, in the words of Macaulay, "though
he had no religion, had a great deal of professional spirit," [722]
fought venomously for the creed of salvation. And still the deists
multiplied. In the Earl of Shaftesbury [723] they had a satirist with a
finer and keener weapon than was wielded by either Steele or Addison,
and a much better temper than was owned by Swift or Berkeley. He did
not venture to parade his unbelief: to do so was positively dangerous;
but his thrusts at faith left little doubt as to his theory. He was at
once dealt with by the orthodox as an enemy, and as promptly adopted
by the deists as a champion, important no less for his ability than
for his rank. Nor, indeed, is he lacking in boldness in comparison
with contemporary writers. The anonymous pamphlet entitled The Natural
History of Superstition, by the deist John Trenchard, M.P. (1709),
does not venture on overt heresy. But Shaftesbury's Letter Concerning
Enthusiasm (1708), his Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour (1709),
and his treatise The Moralists (1709), had need be anonymous because
of their essential hostility to the reigning religious ethic.
Such polemic marks a new stage in rationalistic propaganda. Swift,
writing in 1709, angrily proposes to "prevent the publishing of
such pernicious works as under pretence of freethinking endeavour to
overthrow those tenets in religion which have been held inviolable
in almost all ages." [724] But his further protest that "the doctrine
of the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the immortality of the soul,
and even the truth of all revelation, are daily exploded and denied in
books openly printed," points mainly to the Unitarian propaganda. Among
freethinkers he names, in his Argument Against Abolishing Christianity
(1708), Asgill, Coward, Toland, and Tindal. But the first was
an ultra-Christian; the second was a Christian upholder of the
thesis that spirit is not immaterial; and the last, at that date,
had published only his Four Discourses (collected in 1709) and his
Rights of the Christian Church, which are anti-clerical, but not
anti-Christian. Prof. Henry Dodwell, who about 1673 published Two
Letters of Advice, I, For the Susception of Holy Orders; II, For
Studies Theological, especially such as are Rational, and in 1706
an Epistolary Discourse Concerning the Soul's Natural Mortality,
maintaining the doctrine of conditional immortality, [725] which he
made dependent on baptism in the apostolical succession, was a devout
Christian; and no writer of that date went further. Dodwell is in fact
blamed by Bishop Burnet for stirring up fanaticism against lay-baptism
among dissenters. [726] It would appear that Swift spoke mainly from
hearsay, and on the strength of the conversational freethinking so
common in society. [727] But the anonymous essays of Shaftesbury
which were issued in 1709 might be the immediate provocation of his
outbreak. [728]
An official picture of the situation is formally drawn in A
Representation of the Present State of Religion, with regard to the
late excessive growth of infidelity, heresy, and profaneness, drawn
up by the Upper House of Convocation of the province of Canterbury
in 1711. [729] This sets forth, as a result of the disorders of
the Rebellion, a growth of all manner of unbelief and profanity,
including denial of inspiration and the authority of the canon;
the likening of Christian miracles to heathen fables; the treating
of all religious mysteries as absurd speculations; Arianism and
Socinianism and scoffing at the doctrine of the Trinity; denial of
natural immortality; Erastianism; mockery of baptism and the Lord's
Supper; decrying of all priests as impostors; the collecting and
reprinting of infidel works; and publication of mock catechisms. It
is explained that all such printing has greatly increased "since
the expiration of the Act for restraining the press"; and mention
is made of an Arian work just published to which the author has put
his name, and which he has dedicated to the Convocation itself. This
was the first volume of Whiston's Primitive Christianity Revived, the
work of a devout eccentric, who had just before been deprived of his
professorship at Cambridge for his orally avowed heresy. Whiston, whose
cause was championed, and whose clerical opponents were lampooned,
in an indecorous but vigorous sketch, The Tryal of William Whiston,
Clerk, for defaming and denying the Holy Trinity, before the Lord
Chief Justice Reason (1712; 3rd ed. 1740), always remained perfectly
devout in his Arian orthodoxy; but his and his friends' arguments
were rather better fitted to make deists than to persuade Christians;
and Convocation's appeal for a new Act "restraining the present
excessive and scandalous liberty of printing wicked books at home,
and importing the like from abroad" was not responded to. There was
no love lost between Bolingbroke and Shaftesbury; but the government
in which the former, a known deist, was Secretary of State, could
hardly undertake to suppress the works of the latter.
§ 2
Deism had been thus made in a manner fashionable [730] when, in 1713,
Anthony Collins (1676-1729) began a new development by his Discourse
of Freethinking. He had previously published a notably freethinking
Essay Concerning the Use of Reason (1707), albeit without specific
impeachment of the reigning creed; carried on a discussion with
Clarke on the question of the immateriality of the soul; and issued
treatises entitled Priestcraft in Perfection (1709, dealing with the
history of the Thirty-nine Articles) [731] and A Vindication of the
Divine Attributes (1710), exposing the Hobbesian theism of Archbishop
King on lines followed twenty years later by Berkeley in his Minute
Philosopher. But none of these works aroused such a tumult as the
Discourse of Freethinking, which may be said to sum up and unify
the drift not only of previous English freethinking, but of the
great contribution of Bayle, whose learning and temper influence
all English deism from Shaftesbury onwards. [732] Collins's book,
however, was unique in its outspokenness. To the reader of to-day,
indeed, it is no very aggressive performance: the writer was a man
of imperturbable amenity and genuine kindliness of nature; and his
style is the completest possible contrast to that of the furious
replies it elicited. It was to Collins that Locke wrote, in 1703:
"Believe it, my good friend, to love truth for truth's sake is the
principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot
of all other virtues; and, if I mistake not, you have as much of it
as I ever met with in anybody." [733] The Discourse does no discredit
to this uncommon encomium, being a luminous and learned plea for the
conditions under which alone truth can be prosperously studied, and
the habits of mind which alone can attain it. Of the many replies, the
most notorious is that of Bentley writing as Phileleutherus Lipsiensis,
a performance which, on the strength of its author's reputation for
scholarship, has been uncritically applauded by not a few critics,
of whom some of the most eminent do not appear to have read Collins's
treatise. [734] Bentley's is in reality pre-eminent only for insolence
and bad faith, the latter complicated by lapses of scholarship hardly
credible on its author's part.
See the details in Dynamics of Religion, ch. vii. I am compelled
to call attention to the uncritical verdict given on this matter by
the late Sir Leslie Stephen, who asserts (English Thought, i, 206)
that Bentley convicts Collins of "unworthy shuffling" in respect
of his claim that freethinking had "banished the devil." Bentley
affirmed that this had been the work, not of the freethinkers,
but of "the Royal Society, the Boyles and the Newtons"; and
Sir Leslie comments that "nothing could be more true." Nothing
could be more untrue. As we have seen (above p. 82), Boyle was
a convinced believer in demonology; and Newton did absolutely
nothing to disperse it. Glanvill, a Royal Society man, had been
a vehement supporter of the belief in witchcraft; and the Society
as such never meddled with the matter. As to Collins's claim for
the virtue of freethinking, Sir Leslie strangely misses the point
that Collins meant by the word not unbelief, but free inquiry. He
could not have meant to say that Holland was full of deists. In
Collins's sense of the word, the Royal Society's work in general
was freethinking work.
One mistranslation which appears to have been a printer's error,
and one mis-spelling of a Greek name, are the only heads on which
Bentley confutes his author. He had, in fact, neither the kind of
knowledge nor the candour that could fit him to handle the problems
raised. It was Bentley's cue to represent Collins as an atheist,
though he was a very pronounced deist; [735] and in the first uproar
Collins thought it well to fly to Holland to avoid arrest. [736] But
deism was too general to permit of such a representative being exiled;
and he returned to study quietly, leaving Bentley's vituperation and
prevarication unanswered, with the other attacks made upon him. In
1715 he published his brief but masterly Inquiry Concerning Human
Liberty--anonymous, like all his works--which remains unsurpassed as
a statement of the case for Determinism. [737]
The welcome given to Bentley's attack upon Collins by the orthodox
was warm in proportion to their sense of the general inadequacy of the
apologetics on their side. Amid the common swarm of voluble futilities
put forth by Churchmen, the strident vehemence as well as the erudite
repute of the old scholar were fitted at least to attract the attention
of lay readers in general. Most of the contemporary vindications of the
faith, however, were fitted only to move intelligent men to new doubt
or mere contempt. A sample of the current defence against deism is
the treatise of Joseph Smith on The Unreasonableness of Deism, or, the
Certainty of a Divine Revelation, etc. 1720, where deists in general
are called "the Wicked and Unhappy men we have to deal with": [738]
and the argumentation consists in alleging that a good God must reveal
himself, and that if the miracle stories of the New Testament had been
false the Jews would have exposed and discarded them. Against such
nugatory traditionalism, the criticism of Collins shone with the spirit
of science. Not till 1723 did he publish his next work, A Discourse of
the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion, a weighty attack on
the argument from prophecy, to which the replies numbered thirty-five;
on which followed in 1727 his Scheme of Literal Prophecy Considered,
a reply to criticisms. The former work was pronounced by Warburton
one of the most plausible ever written against Christianity, and he
might well say so. It faced the argument from prophecy not merely
with the skepticism of the ordinary deist, but with that weapon of
critical analysis of which the use had been briefly shown by Hobbes
and Spinoza. Apparently for the first time, he pointed out that the
"virgin prophecy" in Isaiah had a plain reference to contemporary
and not to future events; he showed that the "out of Egypt" prophecy
referred to the Hebrew past; and he revived the ancient demonstration
of Porphyry that the Book of Daniel is Maccabean. The general dilemma
put by Collins--that either the prophecies must be reduced, textually
and otherwise, to non-prophetic utterances, or Christianity must give
up prophetic claims--has never since been solved.
The deistic movement was now in full flood, the acute Mandeville
[739] having issued in 1720 his Free Thoughts on Religion, and in
1723 a freshly-expanded edition of his very anti-evangelical Fable of
the Bees; while an eccentric ex-clergyman, Thomas Woolston, who had
already lost his fellowship of Sidney-Sussex College, Cambridge, for
vagaries of doctrine and action, contributed in 1726-28 his freshly
reasoned but heedlessly ribald Discourses on Miracles. Voltaire, who
was in England in 1728, tells that thirty thousand copies were sold;
[740] while sixty pamphlets were written in opposition. Woolston's
were indeed well fitted to arouse wrath and rejoinder. The dialectic
against the argument from miracles in general, and the irrelevance
or nullity of certain miracles in particular, is really cogent,
and anticipates at points the thought of the nineteenth century. But
Woolston was of the tribe who can argue no issue without jesting, and
who stamp levity on every cause by force of innate whimsicality. Thus
he could best sway the light-hearted when his cause called for the
winning-over of the earnest. Arguments that might have been made
convincing were made to pass as banter, and serious spirits were
repelled. It was during this debate that Conyers Middleton, Fellow
of Trinity College, Cambridge, produced his Letter from Rome (1729),
wherein the part of paganism in Christianity is so set forth as to
carry inference further than the argument ostensibly goes. In that
year the heads of Oxford University publicly lamented the spread of
open deism among the students; and the proclamation did nothing to
check the contagion. In Fogg's Weekly Journal of July 4, 1730, it is
announced that "one of the principal colleges in Oxford has of late
been infested with deists; and that three deistical students have been
expelled; and a fourth has had his degree deferred two years, during
which he is to be closely confined in college; and, among other things,
is to translate Leslie's Short and Easy Method with the Deists." [741]
It is not hard to divine the effect of such exegetic methods. In 1731,
the author of an apologetic pamphlet in reply to Woolston laments that
even at the universities young men "too often" become tainted with
"infidelity"; and, on the other hand, directing his battery against
those who "causelessly profess to build their skeptical notions"
on the writings of Locke, he complains of Dr. Holdsworth and other
academic polemists who had sought to rob orthodoxy of the credit of
such a champion as Locke by "consigning him over to that class of
freethinkers and skeptics to which he was an adversary." [742]
With the most famous work of Matthew Tindal, [743] Christianity
as Old as Creation (1730), the excitement seems to have reached
high-water mark. Here was vivacity without flippancy, and argument
without irrelevant mirth; and the work elicited from first to last
over a hundred and fifty replies, at home and abroad. Tindal's thesis
is that the idea of a good God involved that of a simple, perfect,
and universal religion, which must always have existed among mankind,
and must have essentially consisted in moral conduct. Christianity,
insofar as it is true, must therefore be a statement of this primordial
religion; and moral reason must be the test, not tradition or
Scripture. One of the first replies was the Vindication of Scripture
by Waterland, to which Middleton promptly offered a biting retort in a
Letter to Dr. Waterland (1731) that serves to show the slightness of
its author's faith. After demolishing Waterland's case as calculated
rather to arouse than to allay skepticism, he undertakes to offer
a better reply of his own. It is to the simple effect that some
religion is necessary to mankind in modern as in ancient times; that
Christianity meets the need very well; and that to set up reason
in its place is "impracticable" and "the attempt therefore foolish
and irrational," in addition to being "criminal and immoral," when
politically considered. [744] Such legalist criticism, if seriously
meant, was hardly likely to discredit Tindal's book. Its directness
and simplicity of appeal to what passed for theistic common-sense were
indeed fitted to give it the widest audience yet won by any deist;
and its anti-clericalism would carry it far among his fellow Whigs
to begin with. [745] One tract of the period, dedicated to the Queen
Regent, complains that "the present raging infidelity threatens an
universal infection," and that it is not confined to the capital, but
"is disseminated even to the confines of your kingdom." [746] Tindal,
like Collins, wrote anonymously, and so escaped prosecution, dying in
1733, when the second part of his book, left ready for publication, was
deliberately destroyed by Bishop Gibson, into whose hands it came. In
1736 he and Shaftesbury are described by an orthodox apologist as the
"two oracles of deism." [747]
Woolston, who put his name to his books, after being arrested in May,
1728, and released on bail, was prosecuted in 1729 on the charge of
blasphemy, in that he had derided the gospel miracles and represented
Jesus alternately as an impostor, a sorcerer, and a magician. His
friendly counsel ingeniously argued that Woolston had aimed at
safeguarding Christianity by returning to the allegorical method of
the early Fathers; and that he had shown his reverence for Jesus and
religion by many specific expressions; but the jury took a simpler
view, and, without leaving the court, found Woolston guilty. He was
sentenced to pay a fine of £100, to suffer a year's imprisonment,
and either to find surety for his future good conduct or pay or give
sureties for £2,000. [748] He is commonly said to have paid the penalty
of imprisonment for the rest of his life (d. 1733), being unable to
pay the fine of £100; but Voltaire positively asserts that "nothing
is more false" than the statement that he died in prison; adding:
"Several of my friends have seen him in his house: he died there, at
liberty." [749] The solution of the conflict seems to be that he lived
in his own house "in the rules of" the King's Bench Prison--that is,
in the precincts, and under technical supervision. [750] In any case,
he was sentenced; and the punishment was the measure of the anger felt
at the continuous advance of deistic opinions, or at least against
hostile criticism of the Scriptures.
§ 3
Unitarianism, formerly a hated heresy, was now in comparison leniently
treated, because of its deference to Scriptural authority. Where
the deists rejected all revelation, Unitarianism held by the Bible,
calling only for a revision of the central Christian dogma. It
had indeed gained much theological ground in the past quarter of
a century. Nothing is more instructive in the culture-history
of the period than the rapidity with which the Presbyterian
succession of clergy passed from violent Calvinism, by way of
"Baxterian" Arminianism, to Arianism, and thence in many cases to
Unitarianism. First they virtually adopted the creed of the detested
Laud, whom their fathers had hated for it; then they passed step by
step to a heresy for which their fathers had slain men. A closely
similar process took place in Geneva, where Servetus after death
triumphed over his slayer. [751] In 1691, after a generation of
common suffering, a precarious union was effected between the English
Presbyterians, now mostly semi-Arminians, and the Independents, still
mostly Calvinists: but in 1694 it was dissolved. [752] Thereafter
the former body, largely endowed by the will of Lady Hewley in 1710,
became as regards its Trust Deeds the freest of all the English sects
in matters of doctrine. [753] The recognition of past changes had made
their clergy chary of a rigid subscription. Naturally the movement did
not gain in popularity as it fell away from fanaticism; but the decline
of Nonconformity in the first half of the eighteenth century was common
to all the sects, and did not specially affect the Presbyterians. Of
the many "free" churches established in England and Wales after the
Act of Toleration (1689), about half were extinct in 1715; [754] and
of the Presbyterian churches the number in Yorkshire alone fell from
fifty-nine in 1715 to a little over forty in 1730. [755] Economic
causes were probably the main ones. The State-endowed parish priest
had an enduring advantage over his rival. But the Hewley endowment
gave a certain economic basis to the Presbyterians; and the concern
for scholarship which had always marked their body kept them more open
to intellectual influences than the ostensibly more free-minded and
certainly more democratic sectaries of the Independent and Baptist
bodies. [756]
The result was that, with free Trust Deeds, the Presbyterians openly
exhibited a tendency which was latent in all the other churches. In
1719, at a special assembly of Presbyterian ministers at Salters'
Hall, it was decided by a majority of 73 to 69 that subscription to
the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity should no longer be demanded of
candidates for the ministry. [757] Of the 73, the majority professed to
be themselves orthodox; but there was no question that antitrinitarian
opinions had become common, especially in Devonshire, where the heresy
case of Mr. Peirce of Exeter had brought the matter to a crisis. [758]
From this date "Arian" opinions spread more rapidly in the dwindling
denomination, shading yet further into Unitarianism, step for step with
the deistic movement in the Church. "In less than half a century the
doctrines of the great founders of Presbyterianism could scarcely be
heard from any Presbyterian pulpit in England." [759] "In the English
Presbyterian ministry the process was from Arian opinions to those
called Unitarian ... by a gradual sliding," even as the transition had
been made from Calvinism to Arminianism in the previous century. [760]
Presbyterianism having thus come pretty much into line with
Anglicanism on the old question of predestination, while still
holding fast by Scriptural standards as against the deists, the
old stress of Anglican dislike had slackened, despite the rise of
the new heretical element. Unitarian arguments were now forthcoming
from quarters not associated with dissent, as in the case of Thomas
Chubb's first treatise, The Supremacy of the Father Asserted (1715),
courteously dedicated "To the Reverend the Clergy, and in particular
to the Right Reverend Gilbert Lord Bishop of Sarum, our vigilant
and laborious Diocesan." Chubb (1679-1747) had been trained to
glove-making, and, as his opponents took care to record, acted
also as a tallow-chandler; [761] and the good literary quality of
his work made some sensation in an England which had not learned to
think respectfully of Bunyan. Chubb's impulse to write had come from
the perusal of Whiston's Primitive Christianity Revived, in 1711,
and that single-minded Arian published his book for him.
The Unitarians would naturally repudiate all connection with such a
performance as A Sober Reply to Mr. Higgs's Merry Arguments from the
Light of Nature for the Tritheistic Doctrine of the Trinity, which was
condemned by the House of Lords on February 12, 1720, to be burnt,
as having "in a daring, impious manner, ridiculed the doctrine of
the Trinity and all revealed religion." Its author, Joseph Hall, a
serjeant-at-arms to the King, seems to have undergone no punishment,
and more decorous antitrinitarians received public countenance. Thus
the Unitarian Edward Elwall, [762] who had published a book called
A True Testimony for God and his Sacred Law (1724), for which he was
prosecuted at Stafford in 1726, was allowed by the judge to argue his
cause fully, and was unconditionally acquitted, to the displeasure
of the clergy.
§ 4
Anti-scriptural writers could not hope for such toleration, being
doubly odious to the Church. Berkeley, in 1721, had complained bitterly
[763] of the general indifference to religion, which his writings had
done nothing to alter; and in 1736 he angrily demanded that blasphemy
should be punished like high treason. [764] His Minute Philosopher
(1732) betrays throughout his angry consciousness of the vogue of
freethinking after twenty years of resistance from his profession;
and that performance is singularly ill fitted to alter the opinions
of unbelievers. In his earlier papers attacking them he had put a
stress of malice that, in a mind of his calibre, is startling even
to the student of religious history. [765] It reveals him as no less
possessed by the passion of creed than the most ignorant priest of
his Church. For him all freethinkers were detested disturbers of his
emotional life; and of the best of them, as Collins, Shaftesbury,
and Spinoza, he speaks with positive fury. In the Minute Philosopher,
half-conscious of the wrongness of his temper, he sets himself to
make the unbelievers figure in dialogue as ignorant, pretentious,
and coarse-natured; while his own mouthpieces are meant to be benign,
urbane, wise, and persuasive. Yet in the very pages so planned he
unwittingly reveals that the freethinkers whom he goes about to
caricature were commonly good-natured in tone, while he becomes as
virulent as ever in his eagerness to discredit them. Not a paragraph in
the book attains to the spirit of judgment or fairness; all is special
pleading, overstrained and embittered sarcasm, rankling animus. Gifted
alike for literature and for philosophy, keen of vision in economic
problems where the mass of men were short-sighted, he was flawed on the
side of his faith by the hysteria to which it always stirred him. No
man was less qualified to write a well-balanced dialogue as between
his own side and its opponents. To candour he never attains, unless
it be in the sense that his passion recoils on his own case. Even
while setting up ninepins of ill-put "infidel" argument to knock down,
he elaborates futilities of rebuttal, indicating to every attentive
reader the slightness of his rational basis.
On the strength of this performance he might fitly be termed the most
ill-conditioned sophist of his age, were it not for the perception
that religious feeling in him has become a pathological phase, and
that he suffers incomparably more from his own passions than he can
inflict on his enemies by his eager thrusts at them. More than almost
any gifted pietist of modern times he sets us wondering at the power
of creed in certain cases to overgrow judgment and turn to naught
the rarest faculties. No man in Berkeley's day had a finer natural
lucidity and suppleness of intelligence; yet perhaps no polemist on
his side did less either to make converts or to establish a sound
intellectual practice. Plain men on the freethinking side he must
either have bewildered by his metaphysic or revolted by his spite;
while to the more efficient minds he stood revealed as a kind of
inspired child, rapt in the construction and manipulation of a set
of brilliant sophisms which availed as much for any other creed as
for his own. To the armoury of Christian apologetic now growing up
in England he contributed a special form of the skeptical argument:
freethinkers, he declared, made certain arbitrary or irrational
assumptions in accepting Newton's doctrine of fluxions, and it was only
their prejudice that prevented them from being similarly accommodating
to Christian mysteries. [766] It is a kind of argument dear to minds
pre-convinced and incapable of a logical revision, but worse than
inept as against opponents; and it availed no more in Berkeley's
hands than it had done in those of Huet. [767] To theosophy, indeed,
Berkeley rendered a more successful service in presenting it with the
no better formula of "existence [i.e., in consciousness] dependent upon
consciousness"--a verbalism which has served the purposes of theology
in the philosophic schools down till our own day. For his, however,
the popular polemic value of such a theorem must have been sufficiently
countervailed by his vehement championship of the doctrine of passive
obedience in its most extreme form--"that loyalty is a virtue or moral
duty; and disloyalty or rebellion, in the most strict and proper sense,
a vice or crime against the law of nature." [768]
It belonged to the overstrung temperament of Berkeley that, like
a nervous artist, he should figure to himself all his freethinking
antagonists as personally odious, himself growing odious under the
obsession; and he solemnly asserts, in his Discourse to Magistrates,
that there had been "lately set up within this city of Dublin" an
"execrable fraternity of blasphemers," calling themselves "blasters,"
and forming "a distinct society, whereof the proper and avowed business
shall be to shock all serious Christians by the most impious and
horrid blasphemies, uttered in the most public manner." [769] There
appears to be not a grain of truth in this astonishing assertion,
to which no subsequent historian has paid the slightest attention. In
a period in which freethinking books had been again and again burned
in Dublin by the public hangman, such a society could be projected
only in a nightmare; and Berkeley's hallucination may serve as a
sign of the extent to which his judgment had been deranged by his
passions. [770] His forensic temper is really on a level with that
of the most incompetent swashbucklers on his side.
When educated Christians could be so habitually envenomed as was
Berkeley, there was doubtless a measure of contrary heat among English
unbelievers; but, apart altogether from what could be described as
blasphemy, unbelief abounded in the most cultured society of the
day. Bolingbroke's rationalism had been privately well known; and so
distinguished a personage as the brilliant and scholarly Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu, hated by Pope, is one of the reputed freethinkers
of her time. [771] In the very year of the publication of Berkeley's
Minute Philosopher, the first two epistles of the Essay on Man of
his own friend and admirer, Pope, gave a new currency to the form
of optimistic deism created by Shaftesbury, and later elaborated by
Bolingbroke. Pope was always anxiously hostile in his allusions to the
professed freethinkers [772]--among whom Bolingbroke only posthumously
enrolled himself--and in private he specially aspersed Shaftesbury,
from whom he had taken so much; [773] but his prudential tactic gave
all the more currency to the virtual deism he enunciated. Given out
without any critical allusion to Christianity, and put forward as a
vindication of the ways of God to men, it gave to heresy, albeit in
a philosophically incoherent exposition, the status of a well-bred
piety. A good authority pronounces that "the Essay on Man did more to
spread English deism in France than all the works of Shaftesbury";
[774] and we have explicit testimony that the poet privately avowed
the deistic view of things. [775]
The line of the Essay which now reads:
The soul, uneasy and confined from home,
originally ran "at home"; but, says Warton, "this expression
seeming to exclude a future existence, as, to speak the plain
truth, it was intended to do, it was altered"--presumably
by Warburton. (Warton's Essay on Pope, 4th ed. ii, 67.) The
Spinozistic or pantheistic character of much of the Essay
on Man was noted by various critics, in particular by the
French Academician De Crousaz (Examen de l'Essay de M. Pope sur
l'Homme, 1748, p. 90, etc.) After promising to justify the ways
of God to man, writes Crousaz (p. 33), Pope turns round and
justifies man, leaving God charged with all men's sins. When
the younger Racine, writing to the Chevalier Ramsay in 1742,
charged the Essay with irreligion, Pope wrote him repudiating
alike Spinoza and Leibnitz. (Warton, ii, 121.) In 1755, however,
the Abbé Gauchat renewed the attack, declaring that the Essay
was "neither Christian nor philosophic" (Lettres Critiques, i,
346). Warburton at first charged the poem with rank atheism, and
afterwards vindicated it in his manner. (Warton, i, 125.) But in
Germany, in the youth of Goethe, we find the Essay regarded by
Christians as an unequivocally deistic poem. (Goethe's Wahrheit
und Dichtung, Th. II, B. vii: Werke, ed. 1866, xi, 263.) And
by a modern Christian polemist the Essay is described as "the
best positive result of English deism in the eighteenth century"
(Gostwick, German Culture and Christianity, 1882, p. 31).
In point of fact, deism was the fashionable way of thinking among
cultured people. Though Voltaire testifies from personal knowledge
that there were in England in his day many principled atheists, [776]
there was little overt atheism, [777] whether by reason of the special
odium attaching to that way of thought, or of a real production of
theistic belief by the concurrence of the deistic propaganda on this
head with that of the clergy, themselves in so many cases deists. [778]
Bishop Burnet, in the Conclusion to the History of his Own Time,
pronounces that "there are few atheists, but many infidels, who are
indeed very little better than the atheists." Collins observed that
nobody had doubted the existence of God until the Boyle lecturers
began to prove it; and Clarke had more than justified the jest by
arguing, in his Boyle Lectures for 1705, that all deism logically
leads to atheism. But though the apologists roused much discussion on
the theistic issue, the stress of the apologetic literature passed
from the theme of atheism to that of deism. Shaftesbury's early
Inquiry Concerning Virtue had assumed the existence of a good deal
of atheism; but his later writings, and those of his school, do not
indicate much atheistic opposition. [779] Even the revived discussion
on the immateriality and immortality of the soul--which began with
the Grand Essay of Dr. William Coward, [780] in 1704, and was taken
up, as we have seen, by the non-juror Dodwell [781]--was conducted
on either orthodox or deistic lines. Coward wrote as a professed
Christian, [782] to maintain, "against impostures of philosophy,"
that "matter and motion must be the foundation of thought in men
and brutes." Collins maintained against Clarke the proposition that
matter is capable of thought; and Samuel Strutt ("of the Temple"),
whose Philosophical Inquiry into the Physical Spring of Human Actions,
and the Immediate Cause of Thinking (1732), is a most tersely cogent
sequence of materialistic argument, never raises any question of
deity. The result was that the problem of "materialism" was virtually
dropped, Strutt's essay in particular passing into general oblivion.
It was replied to, however, with the Inquiry of Collins, as late
as 1760, by a Christian controversialist who admits Strutt to
have been "a gentleman of an excellent genius for philosophical
inquiries, and a close reasoner from those principles he laid
down" (An Essay towards demonstrating the Immateriality and Free
Agency of the Soul, 1760, p. 94). The Rev. Mr. Monk, in his Life
of Bentley (2nd ed. 1833, ii, 391), absurdly speaks of Strutt as
having "dressed up the arguments of Lord Herbert of Cherbury and
other enemies of religion in a new shape." The reverend gentleman
cannot have paid any attention to the arguments either of Herbert
or of Strutt, which have no more in common than those of Toland
and Hume. Strutt's book was much too closely reasoned to be
popular. His name was for the time, however, associated with a
famous scandal at Cambridge University. When in 1739 proceedings
were taken against what was described as an "atheistical society"
there, Strutt was spoken of as its "oracle." One of the members
was Paul Whitehead, satirized by Pope. Another, Tinkler Ducket,
a Fellow of Caius College, in holy orders, was prosecuted in the
Vice-Chancellor's Court on the twofold charge of proselytizing for
atheism and of attempting to seduce a "female." In his defence he
explained that he had been for some time "once more a believer in
God and Christianity"; but was nevertheless expelled. See Monk's
Life of Bentley, as cited, ii, 391 sq.
§ 5
No less marked is the failure to develop the "higher criticism" from
the notable start made in 1739 in the very remarkable Inquiry into
the Jewish and Christian Revelations by Samuel Parvish, who made the
vital discovery that Deuteronomy is a product of the seventh century
B.C. [783] His book, which is in the form of a dialogue between a
Christian and a Japanese, went into a second edition (1746); but his
idea struck too deep for the critical faculty of that age, and not
till the nineteenth century was the clue found again by De Wette, in
Germany. [784] Parvish came at the end of the main deistic movement,
[785] and by that time the more open-minded men had come to a point of
view from which it did not greatly matter when Deuteronomy was written,
or precisely how a cultus was built up; while orthodoxy could not dream
of abandoning its view of inspiration. There was thus an arrest alike
of historical criticism and of the higher philosophic thought under
the stress of the concrete disputes over ethics, miracles, prophecy,
and politics; and a habit of taking deity for granted became normal,
with the result that when the weak point was pressed upon by Law and
Butler there was a sense of blankness on both sides. But among men
theistically inclined, the argument of Tindal against revelationism
was extremely telling, and it had more literary impressiveness
than any writing on the orthodox side before Butler. By this time
the philosophic influence of Spinoza--seen as early as 1699 in
Shaftesbury's Inquiry Concerning Virtue, [786] and avowed by Clarke
when he addressed his Demonstration (1705) "more particularly in
answer to Mr. Hobbs, Spinoza, and their followers"--had spread among
the studious class, greatly reinforcing the deistic movement; so that
in 1732 Berkeley, who ranked him among "weak and wicked writers,"
described him as "the great leader of our modern infidels."
See the Minute Philosopher, Dial. vii, § 29. Similarly Leland,
in the Supplement (1756) to his View of the Deistical Writers
(afterwards incorporated as Letter VI), speaks of Spinoza as "the
most applauded doctor of modern atheism." Sir Leslie Stephen's
opinion (English Thought, i, 33), that "few of the deists,
probably," read Spinoza, seems to be thus outweighed. If they
did not in great numbers read the Ethica, they certainly read the
Tractatus and the letters. As early as 1677 we find Stillingfleet,
in the preface to his Letter to a Deist, speaking of Spinoza as
"a late author [who] I hear is mightily in vogue among many who
cry up anything on the atheistical side, though never so weak
and trifling"; and further of a mooted proposal to translate the
Tractatus Theologico-Politicus into English. A translation was
published in 1689. In 1685 the Scotch Professor George Sinclar,
in the "Preface to the Reader" of his Satan's Invisible World
Discovered, writes that "There are a monstrous rabble of men,
who following the Hobbesian and Spinosian principles, slight
religion and undervalue the Scripture," etc. In Gildon's work of
recantation, The Deist's Manual (1705, p. 192), the indifferent
Pleonexus, who "took more delight in bags than in books,"
and demurs to accumulating the latter, avows that he has a few,
among them being Hobbes and Spinoza. Evelyn, writing about 1680-90,
speaks of "that infamous book, the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus,"
as "a wretched obstacle to the searchers of holy truth" (The
History of Religion, 1850, p. xxvii). Cp. Halyburton, Natural
Religion Insufficient, Edinburgh, 1714, p. 31, as to the "great
vogue among our young Gentry and Students" of Hobbes, Spinoza,
and others.
§ 6
Among the deists of the upper classes was the young William Pitt,
afterwards Lord Chatham, if, as has been alleged, it was he who in
1733, two years before he entered Parliament, contributed to the
London Journal a "Letter on Superstition," the work of a pronounced
freethinker. [787] On the other hand, such deistic writing as that
with which Chubb, in a multitude of tracts, followed up his early
Unitarian essay of 1715, brought an ethical "Christian rationalism"
within the range of the unscholarly many. Thomas Morgan (d. 1741),
a physician, began in the Moral Philosopher, 1739-1740, [788] to
sketch a rationalistic theory of Christian origins, besides putting
the critical case with new completeness. Morgan had been at one time a
dissenting minister at Frome, Somerset, and had been dismissed because
of his deistical opinions. Towards the Jehovah and the ethic of the
Old Testament he holds, however, the attitude rather of an ancient
Gnostic than of a modern rationalist; and in his philosophy he is
either a very "godly" deist or a pantheist miscarried. [789]
At the same time Peter Annet (1693-1769), a schoolmaster and
inventor of a system of shorthand, widened the propaganda in other
directions. He seems to have been the first freethought lecturer, for
his first pamphlet, Judging for Ourselves: or, Freethinking the Great
Duty of Religion, "By P. A., Minister of the Gospel" (1739), consists
of "Two Lectures delivered at Plaisterers' Hall." Through all his
propaganda, of which the more notable portions are his Supernaturals
Examined and a series of controversies on the Resurrection, there runs
a train of shrewd critical sense, put forth in crisp and vivacious
English, which made him a popular force. What he lacked was the
due gravity and dignity for the handling of such a theme as the
reversal of a nation's faith. Like Woolston, he is facetious where
he should be serious; entertaining where he had need be impressive;
provocative where he should have aimed at persuasion. We cannot say
what types he influenced, or how deep his influence went: it appears
only that he swayed many whose suffrages weighed little. At length,
when in 1761 he issued nine numbers of The Free Inquirer, in which
he attacked the Pentateuch with much insight and cogency, but with
a certain want of rational balance (shown also in his treatise,
Social Bliss Considered, 1749), he was made a victim of the then
strengthened spirit of persecution, being sentenced to stand thrice
in the pillory with the label "For Blasphemy," and to suffer a year's
hard labour. Nevertheless, he was popular enough to start a school
on his release.
Such popularity, of course, was alien to the literary and social
traditions of the century; and from the literary point of view the main
line of deistic propaganda, as apart from the essays and treatises of
Hume and the posthumous works of Bolingbroke, ends with the younger
Henry Dodwell's (anonymous) ironical essay, Christianity not Founded
on Argument (1741). So rigorously congruous is the reasoning of that
brilliant treatise that some have not quite unjustifiably taken it
for the work of a dogmatic believer, standing at some such position
as that taken up before him by Huet, and in recent times by Cardinal
Newman. [790] He argues, for instance, not merely that reason can yield
none of the confidence which belongs to true faith, but that it cannot
duly strengthen the moral will against temptations. [791] But the book
at once elicited a number of replies, all treating it unhesitatingly
as an anti-Christian work; and Leland assails it as bitterly as he
does any openly freethinking treatise. [792] Its thesis might have
been seriously supported by reference to the intellectual history
of the preceding thirty years, wherein much argument had certainly
failed to establish the reigning creed or to discredit the unbelievers.
§ 7
Of the work done by English deism thus far, it may suffice to say that
within two generations it had more profoundly altered the intellectual
temper of educated men than any religious movement had ever done in
the same time. This appears above all from the literature produced
by orthodoxy in reply, where the mere defensive resort to reasoning,
apart from the accounts of current rationalism, outgoes anything
in the previous history of literature. The whole evolution is a
remarkable instance of the effect on intellectual progress of the
diversion of a nation's general energy from war and intense political
faction to mental activities. A similar diversion had taken place
at the Restoration, to be followed by a return to civil and foreign
strife, which arrested it. It was in the closing years of Anne, and
in the steady régime of Walpole under the first two Georges, that the
ferment worked at its height. Collins's Discourse of Freethinking was
synchronous with the Peace of Utrecht: the era of war re-opened in
1739, much against the will of Walpole, who resigned in 1742. Home and
foreign wars thereafter became common; and in 1751 Clive opened the
period of imperialistic expansion, determining national developments
on that main line, concurrently with that of the new industry. Could
the discussion have been continuous--could England have remained what
she was in the main deistic period, a workshop of investigation and
a battleground of ideas--all European development might have been
indefinitely hastened. But the deists, for the most part educated
men appealing to educated men or to the shrewdest readers among the
artisans, had not learned to reckon with the greater social forces;
and beyond a certain point they could not affect England's intellectual
destinies.
It is worse than idle to argue that "the true cause of the decay of
deism is to be sought in its internal weakness," in the sense that
"it was not rooted in the deepest convictions, nor associated with
the most powerful emotions of its adherents." [793] No such charge
can be even partially proved. The deists were at least as much in
earnest as two-thirds of the clergy: the determining difference,
in this regard, was the economic basis of the latter, and their
social hold of an ignorant population. The clergy, who could not
argue the deists down in the court of culture, had in their own
jurisdiction the great mass of the uneducated lower classes, and
the great mass of the women of all classes, whom the ideals of the
age kept uneducated, with a difference. And while the more cultured
clergy were themselves in large measure deists, the majority, in
the country parishes, remained uncritical and unreflective, caring
little even to cultivate belief among their flocks. The "contempt of
the clergy" which had subsisted from the middle of the seventeenth
century (if, indeed, it should not be dated from the middle of the
sixteenth) meant among other things that popular culture remained on
a lower plane. With the multitude remaining a ready hotbed for new
"enthusiasm," and the women of the middle and upper orders no less
ready nurturers of new generations of young believers, the work of
emancipation was but begun when deism was made "fashionable." And with
England on the way to a new era at once of industrial and imperial
expansion, in which the energies that for a generation had made her
a leader of European thought were diverted to arms and to commerce,
the critical and rationalizing work of the deistical generation could
not go on as it had begun. That generation left its specific mark
on the statute-book in a complete repeal of the old laws relating to
witchcraft; [794] on literature in a whole library of propaganda and
apology; on moral and historic science in a new movement of humanism,
which was to find its check in the French Revolution.
How it affected the general intelligence for good may be partly
gathered from a comparison of the common English political
attitudes towards Ireland in the first and the last quarters of
the century. Under William was wrought the arrest of Irish industry
and commerce, begun after the Restoration; under Anne were enacted
the penal laws against Catholics--as signal an example of religious
iniquity as can well be found in all history. By the middle of the
century these laws had become anachronisms for all save bigots.
"The wave of freethought that was spreading over Europe and
permeating its literature had not failed to affect Ireland.... An
atmosphere of skepticism was fatal to the Penal Code. What element
of religious persecution there had been in it had long ceased to be
operative" (R. Dunlop, in Camb. Mod. Hist. vi, 489). Macaulay's
testimony on this head is noteworthy: "The philosophy of the
eighteenth century had purified English Whiggism of the deep
taint of intolerance which had been contracted during a long and
close alliance with the Puritanism of the eighteenth century"
(History, ch. xvii, end).
The denunciations of the penal laws by Arthur Young in 1780 [795]
are the outcome of two generations of deistic thinking; the spirit
of religion has been ousted by judgment. [796] Could that spirit have
had freer play, less hindrance from blind passion, later history would
have been a happier record. But for reasons lying in the environment
as well as in its own standpoint, deism was not destined to rise on
continuous stepping-stones to social dominion.
Currency has been given to a misconception of intellectual history
by the authoritative statement that in the deistic controversy
"all that was intellectually venerable in England" appeared
"on the side of Christianity" (Sir Leslie Stephen, English
Thought in the Eighteenth Century, i, 86). The same thing,
in effect, is said by Lecky: "It was to repel these [deistic]
attacks ['upon the miracles'] that the evidential school arose,
and the annals of religious controversy narrate few more complete
victories than they achieved" (Rise and Influence of Rationalism,
pop. ed. i, 175). The proposition seems to be an echo of orthodox
historiography, as Buckle had before written in his note-book:
"In England skepticism made no head. Such men as Toland and
Tindal, Collins, Shaftesbury, Woolston, were no match for Clarke,
Warburton, and Lardner. They could make no head till the time
of Middleton" (Misc. Works, abridged ed. i, 321)--a strain
of assertion which clearly proceeds on no close study of the
period. In the first place, all the writing on the freethinking
side was done under peril of Blasphemy Laws, and under menace of
all the calumny and ostracism that in Christian society follow
on advanced heresy; while the orthodox side could draw on the
entire clerical profession, over ten thousand strong, and trained
for and pledged to defence of the faith. Yet, when all is said,
the ordinary list of deists amply suffices to disprove Sir
L. Stephen's phrase. His "intellectually venerable" list runs:
Bentley, Locke, Berkeley, Clarke, Butler, Waterland, Warburton,
Sherlock, Gibson, Conybeare, Smalbroke, Leslie, Law, Leland,
Lardner, Foster, Doddridge, Lyttelton, Barrington, Addison, Pope,
Swift. He might have added Newton and Boyle. Sykes, [797] Balguy,
Stebbing, and a "host of others," he declares to be "now for the
most part as much forgotten as their victims"; Young and Blackmore
he admits to be in similar case. It is expressly told of Doddridge,
he might have added, that whereas that well-meaning apologist
put before his students at Northampton the ablest writings both
for and against Christianity, leaving them to draw their own
conclusions, many of his pupils, "on leaving his institution,
became confirmed Arians and Socinians" (Nichols in App. P to Life
of Arminius--Works of Arminius, 1825, i, 223-25). This hardly
spells success. [798] All told, the list includes only three or
four men of any permanent interest as thinkers, apart from Newton;
and only three or four more important as writers. The description
of Waterland, [799] Warburton, [800] Smalbroke, [801] Sherlock,
Leslie, and half-a-dozen more as "intellectually venerable"
is grotesque; even Bentley is a strange subject for veneration.
On the other hand, the list of "the despised deists," who "make
but a poor show when compared with this imposing list," runs thus:
Herbert, Hobbes, Blount, Halley (well known to be an unbeliever,
though he did not write on the subject), Toland, Shaftesbury,
Collins, Mandeville, Tindal, Chubb, Morgan, Dodwell, Middleton,
Hume, Bolingbroke, Gibbon. It would be interesting to know on
what principles this group is excluded from the intellectual
veneration so liberally allotted to the other. It is nothing
to the purpose that Shaftesbury and Mandeville wrote "covertly"
and "indirectly." The law and the conditions compelled them to do
so. It is still more beside the case to say that "Hume can scarcely
be reckoned among the deists. He is already [when?] emerging
into a higher atmosphere." Hume wrote explicitly as a deist;
and only in his posthumous Dialogues did he pass on to the
atheistic position. At no time, moreover, was he "on the side of
Christianity." On the other hand, Locke and Clarke and Pope were
clearly "emerging into a higher atmosphere" than Christianity,
since Locke is commonly reckoned by the culture-historians,
and even by Sir Leslie Stephen, as making for deism; Pope was
the pupil of Bolingbroke, and wrote as such; and Clarke was
shunned as an Arian. Newton, again, was a Unitarian, and Leibnitz
accused his system of making for irreligion. It would be hard
to show, further, who are the "forgotten victims" of Balguy and
the rest. Balguy criticized Shaftesbury, whose name is still a
good deal better known than Balguy's. The main line of deists is
pretty well remembered. And if we pair off Hume against Berkeley,
Hobbes against Locke, Middleton (as historical critic) against
Bentley, Shaftesbury against Addison, Mandeville against Swift,
Bolingbroke against Butler, Collins against Clarke, Herbert against
Lyttelton, Tindal against Waterland, and Gibbon against--shall
we say?--Warburton, it hardly appears that the overplus of merit
goes as Sir Leslie Stephen alleges, even if we leave Newton,
with brain unhinged, standing against Halley. The statement that
the deists "are but a ragged regiment," and that "in speculative
ability most of them were children by the side of their ablest
antagonists," is simply unintelligible unless the names of all
the ablest deists are left out. Locke, be it remembered, did not
live to meet the main deistic attack on Christianity; and Sir
Leslie admits the weakness of his pro-Christian performance.
The bases of Sir Leslie Stephen's verdict may be tested by his
remarks that "Collins, a respectable country gentleman, showed
considerable acuteness; Toland, a poor denizen of Grub Street, and
Tindal, a Fellow of All Souls, made a certain display of learning,
and succeeded in planting some effective arguments." Elsewhere
(pp. 217-227) Sir Leslie admits that Collins had the best of the
argument against his "venerable" opponents on Prophecy; and Huxley
credits him with equal success in the argument with Clarke. The
work of Collins on Human Liberty, praised by a long series of
students and experts, and entirely above the capacity of Bentley,
is philosophically as durable as any portion of Locke, who made
Collins his chosen friend and trustee, and who did not live to
meet his anti-Biblical arguments. Tindal, who had also won Locke's
high praise by his political essays, profoundly influenced such
a student as Laukhard (Lechler, p. 451). And Toland, whom even
Mr. A. S. Farrar (Bampton Lectures, p. 179) admitted to possess
"much originality and learning," has struck Lange as a notable
thinker, though he was a poor man. Leibnitz, who answered him,
praises his acuteness, as does Pusey, who further admits the
uncommon ability of Morgan and Collins (Histor. Enq. into German
Rationalism, 1828, p. 126). It is time that the conventional
English standards in these matters should be abandoned by modern
rationalists.
The unfortunate effect of Sir Leslie Stephen's dictum is
seen in the assertion of Prof. Höffding (Hist. of Modern
Philos. Eng. tr. 1900, i, 403), that Sir Leslie "rightly remarks
of the English deists that they were altogether inferior to their
adversaries"; and further (p. 405), that by the later deists,
"Collins, Tindal, Morgan, etc., the dispute as to miracles
was carried on with great violence." It is here evident that
Prof. Höffding has not read the writers he depreciates, for those
he names were far from being violent. Had he known the literature,
he would have named Woolston, not Collins and Tindal and Morgan. He
is merely echoing, without inquiring for himself, a judgment which
he regards as authoritative. In the same passage he declares that
"only one of all the men formerly known as the 'English deists'
[Toland] has rendered contributions of any value to the history
of thought." If this is said with a knowledge of the works of
Collins, Shaftesbury, and Mandeville, it argues a sad lack of
critical judgment. But there is reason to infer here also that
Prof. Höffding writes in ignorance of the literature he discusses.
While some professed rationalists thus belittle a series of
pioneers who did so much to make later rationalism possible, some
eminent theologians do them justice. Thus does Prof. Cheyne begin
his series of lectures on Founders of Old Testament Criticism
(1893): "A well-known and honoured representative of progressive
German orthodoxy (J. A. Dorner) has set a fine example of
historical candour by admitting the obligations of his country to
a much-disliked form of English heterodoxy. He says that English
deism, which found so many apt disciples in Germany, 'by clearing
away dead matter, prepared the way for a reconstruction of theology
from the very depths of the heart's beliefs, and also subjected
man's nature to stricter observation.' [802] This, however, as it
appears to me, is a very inadequate description of the facts. It
was not merely a new constructive stage of German theoretic
theology, and a keener psychological investigation, for which deism
helped to prepare the way, but also a great movement, which has in
our own day become in a strict sense international, concerned with
the literary and historical criticism of the Scriptures. Beyond
all doubt, the Biblical discussions which abound in the works of
the deists and their opponents contributed in no slight degree
to the development of that semi-apologetic criticism of the
Old Testament of which J. D. Michaelis, and in some degree even
Eichhorn, were leading representatives.... It is indeed singular
that deism should have passed away in England without having
produced a great critical movement among ourselves." Not quite
so singular, perhaps, when we note that in our own day Sir Leslie
Stephen and Lecky and Prof. Höffding could sum up the work of the
deists without a glance at what it meant for Biblical criticism.
§ 8
If we were to set up a theory of intellectual possibilities from
what has actually taken place in the history of thought, and without
regard to the economic and political conditions above mentioned, we
might reason that deism failed permanently to overthrow the current
creed because it was not properly preceded by discipline in natural
science. There might well be stagnation in the higher criticism of
the Hebrew Scriptures when all natural science was still coloured
by them. In nothing, perhaps, is the danger of Sacred Books more
fully exemplified than in their influence for the suppression of
true scientific thought. A hundredfold more potently than the faiths
of ancient Greece has that of Christendom blocked the way to all
intellectually vital discovery. If even the fame and the pietism
of Newton could not save him from the charge of promoting atheism,
much less could obscure men hope to set up any view of natural things
which clashed with pulpit prejudice. But the harm lay deeper, inasmuch
as the ground was preoccupied by pseudo-scientific theories which
were at best fanciful modifications of the myths of Genesis. Types
of these performances are the treatise of Sir Matthew Hale on The
Primitive Origination of Mankind (1685); Dr. Thomas Burnet's Sacred
Theory of the Earth (1680-1689); and Whiston's New Theory of the
Earth (1696)--all devoid of scientific value; Hale's work being
pre-Newtonian; Burnet's anti-Newtonian, though partly critical as
regards the sources of the Pentateuch; and Whiston's a combination
of Newton and myth with his own quaint speculations. Even the Natural
History of the Earth of Prof. John Woodward (1695), after recognizing
that fossils were really prehistoric remains, decided that they were
deposited by the Deluge. [803]
Woodward's book is in its own way instructive as regards the history
of opinion. A "Professor of Physick" in Gresham College, F.C.P.,
and F.R.S., he goes about his work in a methodical and ostensibly
scientific fashion, colligates the phenomena, examines temperately
the hypotheses of the many previous inquirers, and shows no violence
of orthodox prepossession. He claims to have considered Moses "only
as an historian," and to give him credit finally because he finds his
narrative "punctually true." [804] He had before him an abundance of
facts irreconcilable with the explanation offered by the Flood story;
yet he actually adds to that myth a thesis of universal decomposition
and dissolution of the earth's strata by the flood's action [805]--a
hypothesis far more extravagant than any of those he dismissed. With
all his method and scrutiny he had remained possessed by the tradition,
and could not cast it off. It would seem as if such a book, reducing
the tradition to an absurdity, was bound at least to put its more
thoughtful readers on the right track. But the legend remained in
possession of the general intelligence as of Woodward's; and beyond
his standpoint science made little advance for many years. Moral and
historical criticism, then, as regards some main issues, had gone
further than scientific; and men's thinking on certain problems of
cosmic philosophy was thus arrested for lack of due basis or discipline
in experiential science.
The final account of the arrest of exact Biblical criticism in the
eighteenth century, however, is that which explains also the arrest
of the sciences. English energy, broadly speaking, was diverted
into other channels. In the age of Chatham it became more and
more military and industrial, imperialist and commercial; and the
scientific work of Newton was considerably less developed by English
hands than was the critical work of the first deists. Long before
the French Revolution, mathematical and astronomical science were
being advanced by French minds, the English doing nothing. Lagrange
and Euler, Clairaut and D'Alembert, carried on the task, till Laplace
consummated it in his great theory, which is to Newton's what Newton's
was to that of Copernicus. It was Frenchmen, freethinkers to a man,
who built up the new astronomy, while England was producing only
eulogies of Newton's greatness. "No British name is ever mentioned
in the list of mathematicians who followed Newton in his brilliant
career and completed the magnificent edifice of which he laid the
foundation." [806] "Scotland contributed her Maclaurin, but England
no European name." [807] Throughout the latter half of the eighteenth
century "there was hardly an individual in this country who possessed
an intimate acquaintance with the methods of investigation which had
conducted the foreign mathematicians to so many sublime results." [808]
"The English mathematicians seem to have been so dazzled with the
splendour of Newton's discoveries that they never conceived them
capable of being extended or improved upon"; [809] and Newton's
name was all the while vaunted, unwarrantably enough, as being on
the side of Christian orthodoxy. Halley's great hypothesis of the
motion of the solar system in space, put forward in 1718, borne out
by Cassini and Le Monnier, was left to be established by Mayer of
Göttingen. [810] There was nothing specially incidental to deism,
then, in the non-development of the higher criticism in England
after Collins and Parvish, or in the lull of critical speculation
in the latter half of the century. It was part of a general social
readjustment in which English attention was turned from the mental
life to the physical, from intension of thought to extension of empire.
Playfair (as cited, p. 39; Brewster, Memoirs of Newton, i,
348, note) puts forward the theory that the progress of the
higher science in France was due to the "small pensions and great
honours" bestowed on scientific men by the Academy of Sciences. The
lack of such an institution in England he traces to "mercantile
prejudices," without explaining these in their turn. They are
to be understood as the consequences of the special expansion
of commercial and industrial life in England in the eighteenth
century, when France, on the contrary, losing India and North
America, had her energies in a proportional degree thrown back on
the life of the mind. French freethought, it will be observed,
expanded with science, while in England there occurred, not
a spontaneous reversion to orthodoxy any more than a surrender
of the doctrine of Newton, but a general turning of attention in
other directions. It is significant that the most important names
in the literature of deism after 1740 are those of Hume and Smith,
late products of the intellectual atmosphere of pre-industrial
Scotland; of Bolingbroke, an aristocrat of the deistic generation,
long an exile in France, who left his works to be published after
his death; and of Gibbon, who also breathed the intellectual air
of France.
§ 9
It has been commonly assumed that after Chubb and Morgan the
deistic movement in England "decayed," or "passed into skepticism"
with Hume; and that the decay was mainly owing to the persuasive
effect of Bishop Butler's Analogy (1736). [811] This appears to be
a complete misconception, arising out of the habit of looking to
the mere succession of books without considering their vogue and the
accompanying social conditions. Butler's book had very little influence
till long after his death, [812] being indeed very ill-fitted to turn
contemporary deists to Christianity. It does but develop one form of
the skeptical argument for faith, as Berkeley had developed another;
and that form of reasoning never does attain to anything better
than a success of despair. The main argument being that natural
religion is open to the same objections as revealed, on the score
(1) of the inconsistency of Nature with divine benevolence, and
(2) that we must be guided in opinion as in conduct by probability,
a Mohammedan could as well use the theorem for the Koran as could
a Christian for the Bible; and the argument against the justice of
Nature tended logically to atheism. But the deists had left to them
the resource of our modern theists--that of surmising a beneficence
above human comprehension; and it is clear that if Butler made any
converts they must have been of a very unenthusiastic kind. It is
therefore safe to say with Pattison that "To whatever causes is
to be attributed the decline of deism from 1750 onwards, the books
polemically written against it cannot be reckoned among them." [813]
On the other hand, even deists who were affected by the plea that the
Bible need not be more consistent and satisfactory than Nature, could
find refuge in Unitarianism, a creed which, as industriously propounded
by Priestley [814] towards the end of the century, made a numerical
progress out of all proportion to that of orthodoxy. The argument
of William Law, [815] again, which insisted on the irreconcilability
of the course of things with human reason, and called for an abject
submission to revelation, could appeal only to minds already thus
prostrate. Both his and Butler's methods, in fact, prepared the way
for Hume. And in the year 1741, five years after the issue of the
Analogy and seven before the issue of Hume's Essay on Miracles, we
find the thesis of that essay tersely affirmed in a note to Book II
of an anonymous translation (ascribed to T. Francklin) of Cicero's
De Natura Deorum.
The passage is worth comparing with Hume: "Hence we see what
little credit ought to be paid to facts said to be done out
of the ordinary course of nature. These miracles [cutting the
whetstone, etc., related by Cicero, De Div. i, c. xvii] are well
attested. They were recorded in the annals of a great people,
believed by many learned and otherwise sagacious persons, and
received as religious truths by the populace; but the testimonies
of ancient records, the credulity of some learned men, and the
implicit faith of the vulgar, can never prove that to have been,
which is impossible in the nature of things ever to be." M. Tullius
Cicero Of the Nature of the Gods ... with Notes, London, 1741,
p. 85. It does not appear to have been noted that in regard to
this as to another of his best-known theses, Hume develops a
proposition laid down before him.
What Hume did was to elaborate the skeptical argument with a power
and fullness which forced attention once for all, alike in England
and on the Continent. It is not to be supposed, however, that
Hume's philosophy, insofar as it was strictly skeptical--that is,
suspensory--drew away deists from their former attitude of confidence
to one of absolute doubt. Nor did Hume ever aim at such a result. What
he did was to countermine the mines of Berkeley and others, who,
finding their supra-rational dogmas set aside by rationalism, deistic
or atheistic, sought to discredit at once deistic and atheistic
philosophies based on study of the external world, and to establish
their creed anew on the basis of their subjective consciousness. As
against that method, Hume showed the futility of all apriorism
alike, destroying the sham skepticism of the Christian theists by
forcing their method to its conclusions. If the universe was to be
reduced to a mere contingent of consciousness, he calmly showed,
consciousness itself was as easily reducible, on the same principles,
to a mere series of states. Idealistic skepticism, having disposed
of the universe, must make short work of the hypostatized process
of perception. Hume, knowing that strict skepticism is practically
null in life, counted on leaving the ground cleared for experiential
rationalism. And he did, insofar as he was read. His essay, Of Miracles
(with the rest of the Inquiries of 1748-1751, which recast his early
Treatise of Human Nature, 1739), posits a principle valid against all
supernaturalism whatever; while his Natural History of Religion (1757),
though affirming deism, rejected the theory of a primordial monotheism,
and laid the basis of the science of Comparative Hierology. [816]
Finally, his posthumous Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
(1779) admit, though indirectly, the untenableness of deism, and
fall back decisively upon the atheistic or agnostic position. [817]
Like Descartes, he lacked the heroic fibre; but like him he recast
philosophy for modern Europe; and its subsequent course is but a
development of or a reaction against his work.
§ 10
It is remarkable that this development of opinion took place in
that part of the British Islands where religious fanaticism had gone
furthest, and speech and thought were socially least free. Freethought
in Scotland before the middle of the seventeenth century can have
existed only as a thing furtive and accursed; and though, as we have
seen from the Religio Stoici of Sir George Mackenzie, unbelief had
emerged in some abundance at or before the Restoration, only wealthy
men could dare openly to avow their deism. [818] Early in 1697 the
clergy had actually succeeded in getting a lad of eighteen, Thomas
Aikenhead, hanged for professing deism in general, and in particular
for calling the Old Testament "Ezra's Fables," ridiculing the doctrines
of the Trinity and the Incarnation, and expressing the hope and
belief that Christianity would be extinct within a century. [819]
The spirit of the prosecution may be gathered from the facts that
the boy broke down and pleaded penitence, [820] and that the statute
enacted the capital penalty only for obstinately persisting in the
denial of any of the persons of the Trinity. [821] He had talked
recklessly against the current creed among youths about his own age,
one of whom was in Locke's opinion "the decoy who gave him the books
and made him speak as he did." [822] It would appear that a victim
was very much wanted; and Aikenhead was not allowed the help of a
counsel. It is characteristic of the deadening effect of dogmatic
religion on the heart that an act of such brutish cruelty elicited
no cry of horror from any Christian writer. At this date the clergy
were hounding on the Privy Council to new activity in trying witches;
and all works of supposed heretical tendency imported from England
were confiscated in the Edinburgh shops, among them being Thomas
Burnet's Sacred Theory of the Earth. [823] Scottish intellectual
development had in fact been arrested by the Reformation, so that,
save for Napier's Logarithms (1614) and such a political treatise as
Rutherford's Lex Rex (1644), the nation of Dunbar and Lyndsay produced
for two centuries no secular literature of the least value, and not
even a theology of any enduring interest. Deism, accordingly, seems in
the latter half of the seventeenth and the early part of the eighteenth
century to have made fully as much progress in Scotland as in England;
and the bigoted clergy could offer little intellectual resistance.
As early as 1696 the Scottish General Assembly, with theological
candour, passed an Act "against the Atheistical opinions of
the Deists." (Abridgment of the Acts of the General Assemblies,
1721, pp. 16, 76; Cunningham, Hist. of the Ch. of Scotland, ii,
313.) The opinions specified were "The denying of all revealed
religion, the grand mysteries of the gospels ... the resurrection
of the dead, and, in a word, the certainty and authority of
Scripture revelation; as also, their asserting that there must
be a mathematical evidence for each purpose ... and that Natural
Light is sufficient to Salvation." All this is deism, pure and
simple. But Sir W. Anstruther (a judge in the Court of Session),
in the preface to his Essays Moral and Divine, Edinburgh, 1710,
speaks of "the spreading contagion of atheism, which threatens the
ruin of our excellent and holy religion." To atheism he devotes
two essays; and neither in these nor in one on the Incarnation
does he discuss deism, the arguments he handles being really
atheistic. Scottish freethought would seem thus to have gone
further than English at the period in question.
As to the prevalence of deism, however, see the posthumous
work of Prof. Halyburton, of St. Andrews, Natural Religion
Insufficient (Edinburgh, 1714), Epist. of Recom.; pref. pp. 25,
27, and pp. 8, 15, 19, 23, 31, etc. Halyburton's treatise is
interesting as showing the psychological state of argumentative
Scotch orthodoxy in his day. He professes to repel the deistical
argument throughout by reason; he follows Huet, and concurs with
Berkeley in contending that mathematics involves anti-rational
assumptions; and he takes entire satisfaction in the execution
of the lad Aikenhead for deism. Yet in a second treatise, An
Essay Concerning the Nature of Faith, he contends, as against
Locke and the "Rationalists," that the power to believe in the
word of God is "expressly deny'd to man in his natural estate,"
and is a supernatural gift. Thus the Calvinists, like Baxter,
were at bottom absolutely insincere in their profession to act
upon reason, while insolently charging insincerity on others.
Even apart from deism there had arisen a widespread aversion to
dogmatic theology and formal creeds, so that an apologist of 1715
speaks of his day as "a time when creeds and Confessions of Faith are
so generally decried, and not only exposed to contempt, as useless
inventions ... but are loaded by many writers of distinguished wit
and learning with the most fatal and dangerous consequences." [824]
This writer admits the intense bitterness of the theological disputes
of the time; [825] and he speaks, on the other hand, of seeing "the
most sacred mysteries of godliness impudently denied and impugned"
by some, while the "distinguishing doctrines of Christianity are by
others treacherously undermined, subtilized into an airy phantom,
or at least doubted, if not disclaimed." [826] His references are
probably to works published in England, notably those of Locke, Toland,
Shaftesbury, and Collins, since in Scotland no such literature could
then be published; but he doubtless has an eye to Scottish opinion.
While, however, the rationalism of the time could not take book
form, there are clear traces of its existence among educated men,
even apart from the general complaints of the apologists. Thus the
Professor of Medicine at Glasgow University in the opening years of
the eighteenth century, John Johnston, was a known freethinker. [827]
In the way of moderate or Christian rationalism, the teaching of the
prosecuted Simson seems to have counted for something, seeing that
Francis Hutcheson at least imbibed from him "liberal" views about
future punishment and the salvation of the heathen, which gave much
offence in the Presbyterian pulpit in Ulster. [828] And Hutcheson's
later vindication of the ethical system of Shaftesbury in his Inquiry
Concerning the Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725) must have tended
to attract attention in Scotland to the Characteristics after his
instalment as a Professor at Glasgow. In an English pamphlet, in 1732,
he was satirized as introducing Shaftesbury's system into a University,
[829] and it was from the Shaftesbury camp that the first literary
expression of freethought in Scotland was sent forth. A young Scotch
deist of that school, William Dudgeon, published in 1732 a dialogue
entitled The State of the Moral World Considered, wherein the
optimistic position was taken up with uncommon explicitness; and in
1739 the same writer printed A Catechism Founded upon Experience and
Reason, prefaced by an Introductory Letter on Natural Religion, which
takes a distinctly anti-clerical attitude. The Catechism answers to
its title, save insofar as it is à priori in its theism and optimistic
in its ethic, as is another work of its author in the same year, A
View of the Necessarian or Best Scheme, defending the Shaftesburyan
doctrine against the criticism of Crousaz on Pope's Essay. Still more
heterodox is his little volume of Philosophical Letters Concerning
the Being and Attributes of God (1737), where the doctrine goes far
towards pantheism. All this propaganda seems to have elicited only
one printed reply--an attack on his first treatise in 1732. In the
letter prefaced to his Catechism, however, he tells that "the bare
suspicion of my not believing the opinions in fashion in our country
hath already caused me sufficient trouble." [830] His case had in fact
been raised in the Church courts, the proceedings going through many
stages in the years 1732-36; but in the end no decision was taken,
[831] and the special stress of his rationalism in 1739 doubtless
owes something alike to the prosecution and to its collapse. Despite
such hostility, he must privately have had fair support. [832]
The prosecution of Hutcheson before the Glasgow Presbytery in 1738
reveals vividly the theological temper of the time. He was indicted
for teaching to his students "the following two false and dangerous
doctrines: first, that the standard of moral goodness was the promotion
of the happiness of others; and, second, that we could have a knowledge
of good and evil without and prior to a knowledge of God." [833] There
has been a natural disposition on the orthodox side to suppress the
fact that such teachings were ever ecclesiastically denounced as false,
dangerous, and irreligious; and the prosecution seems to have had no
effect beyond intensifying the devotion of Hutcheson's students. Among
them was Adam Smith, of whom it has justly been said that, "if he was
any man's disciple, he was Hutcheson's," inasmuch as he derived from
his teacher the bases alike of his moral and political philosophy and
of his deistic optimism. [834] Another prosecution soon afterwards
showed that the new influences were vitally affecting thought within
the Church itself. Hutcheson's friend Leechman, whom he and his party
contrived to elect as professor of theology in Glasgow University,
was in turn proceeded against (1743-44) for a sermon on Prayer, which
Hutcheson and his sympathizers pronounced "noble," [835] but which
"resolved the efficacy of prayer into its reflex influence on the
mind of the worshipper" [836]--a theorem which has chronically made
its appearance in the Scottish Church ever since, still ranking as
a heresy, after having brought a clerical prosecution in the last
century on at least one divine, Prof. William Knight, and rousing a
scandal against another, the late Dr. Robert Wallace. [837]
Leechman in turn held his ground, and later became Principal of
his University; but still the orthodox in Scotland fought bitterly
against every semblance of rationalism. Even the anti-deistic essays
of Lord-President Forbes of Culloden, head of the Court of Session,
when collected [838] and posthumously published, were offensive to the
Church as laying undue stress on reason; as accepting the heterodox
Biblical theories of Dr. John Hutchinson; and as making the awkward
admission that "the freethinkers, with all their perversity, generally
are sensible of the social duties, and act up to them better than
others do who in other respects think more justly than they." [839]
Such an utterance from such a dignitary told of a profound change;
and, largely through the influence of Hutcheson and Leechman on a
generation of students, the educated Scotland of the latter half
of the eighteenth century was in large part either "Moderate" or
deistic. After generations of barren controversy, [840] the very
aridity of the Presbyterian life intensified the recoil among the
educated classes to philosophical and historical interests, leading to
the performances of Hume, Smith, Robertson, Millar, Ferguson, and yet
others, all rationalists in method and sociologists in their interests.
Of these, Millar, one of Smith's favourite pupils, and a table-talker
of "magical vivacity," [841] was known to be rationalistic in a high
degree; [842] while Smith and Ferguson were certainly deists, as was
Henry Home (the judge, Lord Kames), who had the distinction of being
attacked along with his friend Hume in the General Assembly of the
Church of Scotland in 1755-56. Home wrote expressly to controvert Hume,
alike as to utilitarianism and the idea of causation; but his book,
Essays on Morality and Natural Religion (published anonymously,
1751), handled the thorny question of free-will in such fashion
as to give no less offence than Hume had done; and the orthodox
bracketed him with the subject of his criticism. His doctrine was
indeed singular, its purport being that there can be no free-will,
but that the deity has for wise purposes implanted in men the feeling
that their wills are free. The fact of his having been made a judge of
the Court of Session since writing his book had probably something to
do with the rejection of the whole subject by the General Assembly,
and afterwards by the Edinburgh Presbytery; but there had evidently
arisen a certain diffidence in the Church, which would be assiduously
promoted by "moderates" such as Principal Robertson, the historian. It
is noteworthy that, while Home and Hume thus escaped, the other Home,
John, who wrote the then admired tragedy of Douglas, was soon after
forced to resign his position as a minister of the Church for that
authorship, deism having apparently more friends in the fold than
drama. [843] While the theatre was thus being treated as a place of
sin, many of the churches in Scotland were the scenes of repeated
Sunday riots. A new manner of psalm-singing had been introduced, and
it frequently happened that the congregations divided into two parties,
each singing in its own way, till they came to blows. According to one
of Hume's biographers, unbelievers were at this period wont to go to
church to see the fun. [844] Naturally orthodoxy did not gain ground.
In the case of Adam Smith we have one of the leading instances of the
divorce between culture and creed in the Scotland of that age. His
intellectual tendencies, primed by Hutcheson, were already revealing
themselves when, seeking for something worth study in the unstudious
Oxford of his day, he was found by some suspicious supervisor reading
Hume's Treatise of Human Nature. The book was seized and the student
scolded. [845] When, in 1751, he became Professor of Moral Philosophy
in Glasgow University, he aroused orthodox comment by abandoning the
Sunday class on Christian Evidences set up by Hutcheson, and still
further, it is said, by petitioning the Senatus to be allowed to
be relieved of the duty of opening his class with prayer. [846] The
permission was not given; and the compulsory prayers were "thought
to savour strongly of natural religion"; while the lectures on
Natural Theology, which were part of the work of the chair, were
said to lead "presumptuous striplings" to hold that "the great
truths of theology, together with the duties which man owes to
God and his neighbours, may be discovered by the light of nature
without any special revelation." [847] Smith was thus well founded
in rationalism before he became personally acquainted with Voltaire
and the other French freethinkers; and the pious contemporary who
deplores his associations avows that neither before nor after his
French tour was his religious creed ever "properly ascertained." [848]
It is clear, however, that it steadily developed in a rationalistic
direction. In the Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) the prevailing
vein of theistic optimism is sufficiently uncritical; but even there
there emerges an apparent doubt on the doctrine of a future state,
and positive hostility to certain ecclesiastical forms of it. [849]
In the sixth edition, which he prepared for the press in 1790, he
deleted the passage which pronounced the doctrine of the Atonement
to be in harmony with natural ethics. [850] But most noteworthy of
all is his handling of the question of religious establishments in
the Wealth of Nations. [851] It is so completely naturalistic that
only the habit of taking the Christian religion for granted could make
men miss seeing that its account of the conditions of the rise of new
cults applied to that in its origin no less than to the rise of any
of its sects. As a whole, the argument might form part of Gibbon's
fifteenth chapter. And even allowing for the slowness of the average
believer to see the application of a general sociological law to his
own system, there must be inferred a great change in the intellectual
climate of Scottish life before we can account for Smith's general
popularity at home as well as abroad after his handling of "enthusiasm
and superstition" in the Wealth of Nations. The fact stands out that
the two most eminent thinkers in Scotland in the latter half of the
eighteenth century were non-Christians, [852] and that their most
intellectual associates were in general sympathy with them.
§ 11
In Ireland, at least in Dublin, during the earlier part of the
century, there occurred, on a smaller scale, a similar movement of
rationalism, also largely associated with Shaftesbury. In Dublin
towards the close of the seventeenth century we have seen Molyneux,
the friend and correspondent of Locke, interested in "freethought,"
albeit much scared by the imprudence of Toland. At the same period
there germinated a growth of Unitarianism, which was even more fiercely
persecuted than that of Toland's deism. The Rev. Thomas Emlyn, an
Englishman, co-pastor of the Protestant Dissenting Congregation of
Wood Street (now Strand Street), Dublin, was found by a Presbyterian
and a Baptist to be heretical on the subject of the Trinity, and
was indicted in 1702 for blasphemy. He was sentenced to two years'
imprisonment and a fine of £1,000, which was partly commuted on his
release. He protested that South and Sherlock and other writers on the
Trinitarian controversy might have been as justly prosecuted as he;
but Irish Protestant orthodoxy was of a keener scent than English,
and Emlyn was fain, when released, to return to his native land. [853]
His colleague Boyse, like many other Churchmen, wished that the unhappy
trinitarian controversy "were buried in silence," but was careful to
conform doctrinally. More advanced thinkers had double reason to be
reticent. As usual, however, persecution provoked the growth it sought
to stifle; and after the passing of the Irish Toleration Act of 1719,
a more liberal measure than the English, there developed in Ulster,
and even in Dublin, a Unitarian movement akin to that proceeding
in England. [854] In the next generation we find in the same city
a coterie of Shaftesburyans, centring around Lord Molesworth,
the friend of Hutcheson, a man of affairs devoted to intellectual
interests. It was within a few years of his meeting Molesworth that
Hutcheson produced his Inquiry, championing Shaftesbury's ideas;
[855] and other literary men were similarly influenced. It is even
suggested that Hutcheson's clerical friend Synge, whom we have seen
[856] in 1713 attempting a ratiocinative answer to the unbelief
he declared to be abundant around him, was not only influenced by
Shaftesbury through Molesworth, but latterly "avoided publication
lest his opinions should prejudice his career in the Church." [857]
After the death of Molesworth, in 1725, the movement he set up seems
to have languished; [858] but, as we have seen, there were among the
Irish bishops men given to philosophic controversy, and the influence
of Berkeley cannot have been wholly obscurantist. When in 1756 we
read of the Arian Bishop Clayton [859] proposing in the Irish House
of Lords to drop the Nicene and Athanasian creeds, we realize that in
Ireland thought was far from stagnant. The heretic bishop, however,
died (February, 1758) just as he was about to be prosecuted for the
anti-Athanasian heresies of his last book; and thenceforth Ireland
plays no noticeable part in the development of rationalism, political
interests soon taking the place of religious, with the result that
orthodoxy recovered ground.
It cannot be doubted that the spectacle of religious wickedness
presented by the operation of the odious penal laws against Catholics,
and the temper of the Protestant Ascendancy party in religious matters,
had bred rational skepticism in Ireland in the usual way. Molesworth
stands out in Irish history as a founder of a new and saner patriotism;
and his doctrines would specially appeal to men of a secular and
critical way of thinking. Heretical bishops imply heretical laymen. But
the environment was unpropitious to dispassionate thinking. The
very relaxation of the Penal Code favoured a reversion to "moderate"
orthodoxy; and the new political strifes of the last quarter of the
century, destined as they were to be reopened in the next, determined
the course of Irish culture in another way.
§ 12
In England, meanwhile, there was beginning the redistribution of
energies which can be seen to have prepared for the intellectual and
political reaction of the end of the century. There had been no such
victory of faith as is supposed to have been wrought by the forensic
theorem of Butler. An orthodox German observer, making a close inquest
about 1750, cites the British Magazine as stating in 1749 that half
the educated people were then deists; and he, after full inquiry,
agrees. [860] In the same year, Richardson speaks tragically in
the Postscriptum to Clarissa of seeing "skepticism and infidelity
openly avowed, and even endeavoured to be propagated from the press;
the great doctrines of the gospel brought into question"; and he
describes himself as "seeking to steal in with a disguised plea for
religion." Instead of being destroyed by the clerical defence, the
deistic movement had really penetrated the Church, which was become
as rationalistic in its methods as its function would permit, and the
educated classes, which had arrived at a state of compromise. Pope,
the chief poet of the preceding generation, had been visibly deistic
in his thinking; as Dryden had inferribly been before him; and to such
literary prestige was added the prestige of scholarship. The academic
Conyers Middleton, whose Letter from Rome had told so heavily against
Christianity in exposing the pagan derivations of much of Catholicism,
and who had further damaged the doctrine of inspiration in his
anonymous Letter to Dr. Waterland (1731), while professing to refute
Tindal, had carried to yet further lengths his service to the critical
spirit. In his famous Free Inquiry into the miracles of post-apostolic
Christianity (1749), again professing to strike at Rome, he had laid
the foundations of a new structure of comparative criticism, and had
given permanent grounds for rejecting the miracles of the sacred books.
Middleton's book appeared a year after Hume's essay Of Miracles, and
it made out no such philosophic case as Hume's against the concept of
miracle; but it created at once, by its literary brilliance and its
cogent argument, a sensation such as had thus far been made neither
by Hume's philosophic argument nor by Francklin's anticipation of
that. [861] Middleton had duly safeguarded himself by positing the
certainty of the gospel miracles and of those wrought by the Apostles,
on the old principle [862] that prodigies were divinely arranged
so far forth as was necessary to establish Christianity, but no
further. "The history of the gospel," he writes, "I hope may be true,
though the history of the Church be fabulous." [863] But his argument
against post-Apostolic miracles is so strictly naturalistic that no
vigilant reader could fail to realize its fuller bearing upon all
miracles whatsoever. With Hume and Francklin, he insisted that facts
incredible in themselves could not be established by any amount or kind
of testimony; and he suggested no measure of comparative credibility
as between the two orders of miracle. With the deists in general,
he argued that knowledge "either of the ways or will of the Creator"
was to be had only through study of "that revelation which he made of
himself from the beginning in the beautiful fabric of this visible
world." [864] An antagonist accordingly wrote that his theses were:
"First, that there were no miracles wrought in the primitive Church;
Secondly, that all the primitive fathers were fools or knaves, and most
of them both one and the other. And it is easy to observe, the whole
tenor of your argument tends to prove, Thirdly, that no miracles were
wrought by Christ or his apostles; and Fourthly, that these too were
fools or knaves, or both." [865] A more temperate opponent pressed the
same point in less explosive language. Citing Middleton's demand for
an inductive method, this critic asks with much point: "What does he
mean by 'deserting the path of Nature and experience,' but giving in
to the belief of any miracles, and acknowledging the reality of events
contrary to the known effects of the established Laws of Nature?" [866]
No other answer was seriously possible. In the very act of
ostentatiously terming Tindal an "infidel," Middleton describes an
answer made to him by the apologist Chapman as a sample of a kind of
writing which did "more hurt and discredit" to Christianity "than
all the attacks of its open adversaries." [867] In support of the
miracles of the gospel and the apostolic history he offers merely
conventional pleas: against the miracles related by the Fathers he
brings to bear an incessant battery of destructive criticism. We may
sum up that by the middle of the eighteenth century the essentials
of the Christian creed, openly challenged for a generation by avowed
deists, were abandoned by not a few scholars within the pale of the
Church, of whom Middleton was merely the least reticent. After his
death was published his Vindication of the Inquiry (1751); and in his
collected works (1752) was included his Reflections on the Variations
or Inconsistencies which are found among the Four Evangelists, wherein
it is demonstrated that "the belief of the inspiration and absolute
infallibility of the evangelists seems to be more absurd than even that
of transubstantiation itself." [868] The main grounds of orthodoxy were
thus put in doubt in the name of a critical orthodoxy. In short, the
deistic movement had done what it lay in it to do. The old evangelical
or pietistic view of life was discredited among instructed people,
and in this sense it was Christianity that had "decayed." Its later
recovery was economic, not intellectual.
Thus Skelton writes in 1751 that "our modern apologists for
Christianity often defend it on deistical principles" (Deism
Revealed, pref. p. xii. Cp. vol. ii, pp. 234, 237). See also
Sir Leslie Stephen as cited above, p. 149, note; and Gostwick,
German Culture and Christianity, 1882, pp. 33-36.
An interesting instance of liberalizing orthodoxy is furnished
by the Rev. Arthur Ashley Sykes, who contributed many volumes to
the general deistic discussion, some of them anonymously. In the
preface to his Essay on the Truth of the Christian Religion (1732;
2nd ed. enlarged, 1755) Sykes remarks that "since ... systematical
opinions have been received and embraced in such a manner that it
has not been safe to contradict them, the burden of vindicating
Christianity has been very much increased. Its friends have been
much embarrassed through fear of speaking against local truths; and
its adversaries have so successfully attacked those weaknesses that
Christianity itself has been deemed indefensible, when in reality
the follies of Christians alone have been so." Were Christians left
to the simple doctrines of Christ and the Apostles, he contends,
Infidelity could make no converts. And at the close of the book
he writes: "Would to God that Christians would be content with the
plainness and simplicity of the gospel.... That they would not vend
under the name of evangelical truth the absurd and contradictory
schemes of ignorant or wicked men! That they would part with that
load of rubbish which makes thinking men almost sink under the
weight, and gives too great a handle for Infidelity!" Such writing
could not give satisfaction to the ecclesiastical authorities;
and as little could Sykes's remarkable admission (The Principles
and Connection of Natural and Revealed Religion, 1740, p. 242):
"When the advantages of revelation are to be specified, I cannot
conceive that it should be maintained as necessary to fix a rule
of morality. For what one principle of morality is there which
the heathen moralists had not asserted or maintained? Before ever
any revelation is offered to mankind they are supposed to be so
well acquainted with moral truths as from them to judge of the
truth of the revelation itself." Again he writes:--
"Nor can revelation be necessary to ascertain religion. For
religion consisting in nothing but doing our duties from a sense
of the being of God, revelation is not necessary to this end,
unless it be said that we cannot know that there is a God, and what
our duties are, without it. Reason will teach us that there is a
God ... that we are to be just and charitable to our neighbours;
that we are to be temperate and sober in ourselves" (id. p. 244).
This is simple Shaftesburyan deism, and all that the apologist
goes on to contend for is that revelation "contains motives and
reasons for the practice of what is right, more and different
from what natural reason without this help can suggest." He seems,
however, to have believed in miracles, though an anonymous Essay
on the Nature, Design, and Origin of Sacrifices (1748) which
is ascribed to him quietly undermines the whole evangelical
doctrine. Throughout, he is remarkable for the amenity of his
tone towards "infidels."
Balguy, a man of less ability, is notably latitudinarian in
his theology. In the very act of criticizing the deists, he
complains of Locke's arbitrariness in deriving morality from the
will of God. Religion, he argues, is so derived, but morality is
inherent in the whole nature of things, and is the same for God
and men. This position, common to the school of Clarke, is at
bottom that of Shaftesbury and the Naturalists. All that Balguy
says for religion is that a doctrine of rewards and punishments
is necessary to stimulate the average moral sense; and that the
Christian story of the condescension of Omnipotence in coming to
earth and suffering misery for man's sake ought to overwhelm the
imagination! (See A Letter to a Deist, 2nd ed. 1730, pp. 5, 14,
15, 31; Foundation of Moral Goodness, pt. ii, 1729, p. 41 sq.)
The next intellectual step in natural course would have been a
revision of the deistic assumptions, insofar, that is, as certain
positive assumptions were common to the deists. But, as we have seen,
certain fresh issues were raised as among the deists themselves. In
addition to those above noted, there was the profoundly important one
as to ethics. Shaftesbury, who rejected the religious basis, held
a creed of optimism; and this optimism was assailed by Mandeville,
who in consequence was opposed as warmly by the deist Hutcheson
and others as by Law and Berkeley. To grapple with this problem,
and with the underlying cosmic problem, there was needed at least as
much general mental activity as went to the antecedent discussion; and
the main activity of the nation was now being otherwise directed. The
negative process, the impeachment of Christian supernaturalism, had
been accomplished so far as the current arguments went. Toland and
Collins had fought the battle of free discussion, forcing ratiocination
on the Church; Collins had shaken the creed of prophecy; Shaftesbury
had impugned the religious conception of morals; and Mandeville
had done so more profoundly, laying the foundations of scientific
utilitarianism. [869] So effective had been the utilitarian propaganda
in general that the orthodox Brown (author of the once famous Estimate
of the life of his countrymen), in his criticism of Shaftesbury (1751),
wrote as a pure utilitarian against an inconsistent one, and defended
Christianity on strictly utilitarian lines. Woolston, following up
Collins, had shaken the faith in New Testament miracles; Middleton
had done it afresh with all the decorum that Woolston lacked; and
Hume had laid down with masterly clearness the philosophic principle
which rebuts all attempts to prove miracles as such. [870] Tindal
had clinched the case for "natural" theism as against revelationism;
and the later deists, notably Morgan, had to some extent combined
these results. [871] This literature was generally distributed;
and so far the case had been thrashed out.
§ 13
To carry intellectual progress much further there was needed a
general movement of scientific study and a reform in education. The
translation of La Mettrie's Man a Machine (1749) [872] found a public
no better prepared for the problems he raised than that addressed by
Strutt eighteen years before; and the reply of Luzac, Man More than a
Machine, in the preface to which the translator (1752) declared that
"irreligion and infidelity overspread the land," probably satisfied
what appetite there was for such a discussion. There had begun a
change in the prevailing mental life, a diversion of interest from
ideas as such to political and mercantile interests. The middle and
latter part of the eighteenth century is the period of the rise of (1)
the new machine industries, and (2) the new imperialistic policy of
Chatham. [873] Both alike withdrew men from problems of mere belief,
whether theological or scientific. [874] That the reaction was not
one of mere fatigue over deism we have already seen. It was a general
diversion of energy, analogous to what had previously taken place in
France in the reign of Louis XIV. As the poet Gray, himself orthodox,
put the case in 1754, "the mode of freethinking has given place to
the mode of not thinking at all." [875] In Hume's opinion the general
pitch of national intelligence south of the Tweed was lowered. [876]
This state of things of course was favourable to religious revival;
but what took place was rather a new growth of emotional pietism
in the new industrial masses (the population being now on a rapid
increase), under the ministry of the Wesleys and Whitefield, and a
further growth of similar religion in the new provincial middle-class
that grew up on the industrial basis. The universities all the while
were at the lowest ebb of culture, but officially rabid against
philosophic freethinking. [877]
It would be a great mistake, however, to suppose that all this meant
a dying out of deism among the educated classes. The statement of
Goldsmith, about 1760, that deists in general "have been driven
into a confession of the necessity of revelation, or an open
avowal of atheism," [878] is not to be taken seriously. Goldsmith,
whose own orthodoxy is very doubtful, had a whimsical theory that
skepticism, though it might not injure morals, has a "manifest
tendency to subvert the literary merits" of any country; [879]
and argued accordingly. Deism, remaining fashionable, did but fall
partly into the background of living interests, the more concrete
issues of politics and the new imaginative literature occupying the
foreground. It was early in the reign of George III that Sir William
Blackstone, having had the curiosity to listen in succession to
the preaching of every clergyman in London, "did not hear a single
discourse which had more Christianity in it than the writings of
Cicero," and declared that it would have been impossible for him to
discover from what he heard whether the preacher were a follower of
Confucius, of Mahomet, or of Christ. [880] When the Church was thus
deistic, the educated laity can have been no less so. The literary
status of deism after 1750 was really higher than ever. It was now
represented by Hume; by Adam Smith (Moral Sentiments, 1759); by the
scholarship of Conyers Middleton; and by the posthumous works (1752-54)
of Lord Bolingbroke, who, albeit more of a debater than a thinker,
debated often with masterly skill, in a style unmatched for harmony and
energetic grace, which had already won him a great literary prestige,
though the visible insincerity of his character, and the habit of
browbeating, always countervailed his charm. His influence, commonly
belittled, was much greater than writers like Johnson would admit;
and it went deep. Voltaire, who had been his intimate, tells [881]
that he had known some young pupils of Bolingbroke who altogether
denied the historic actuality of the Gospel Jesus--a stretch of
criticism beyond the assimilative power of that age.
His motive to write for posthumous publication, however, seems
rather to have been the venting of his tumultuous feelings than
any philosophic purpose. An overweening deist, he is yet at much
pains to disparage the à priori argument for deism, bestowing some
of his most violent epithets on Dr. Samuel Clarke, who seems to
have exasperated him in politics. But his castigation of "divines"
is tolerably impartial on that side; and he is largely concerned to
deprive them of grounds for their functions, though he finally insists
that churches are necessary for purposes of public moral teaching. His
own teachings represent an effort to rationalize deism. The God
whom he affirms is to be conceived or described only as omnipotent
and omniscient (or all-wise), not as good or benevolent any more
than as vindictive. Thus he had assimilated part of the Spinozistic
and the atheistic case against anthropomorphism, while still using
anthropomorphic language on the score that "we must speak of God after
the manner of men." Beyond this point he compromises to the extent
of denying special while admitting collective or social providences;
though he is positive in his denial of the actuality or the moral
need of a future state. As to morals he takes the ordinary deistic
line, putting the innate "law of nature" as the sufficient and only
revelation by the deity to his creatures. On the basis of that inner
testimony he rejects the Old Testament as utterly unworthy of deity,
but endorses the universal morality found in the gospels, while
rejecting their theology. It was very much the deism of Voltaire,
save that it made more concessions to anti-theistic logic.
The weak side of Bolingbroke's polemic was its inconsistency--a flaw
deriving from his character. In the spirit of a partisan debater he
threw out at any point any criticism that appeared for the moment
plausible; and, having no scientific basis or saving rectitude,
would elsewhere take up another and a contradictory position. Careful
antagonists could thus discredit him by mere collation of his own
utterances. [882] But, the enemy being no more consistent than he,
his influence was not seriously affected in the world of ordinary
readers; and much of his attack on "divines," on dogmas, and on
Old Testament morality must have appealed to many, thus carrying
on the discredit of orthodoxy in general. Leland devoted to him an
entire volume of his View of the Principal Deistical Writers, and in
all bestows more space upon him than on all the others together--a
sufficient indication of his vogue.
In his lifetime, however, Bolingbroke had been extremely careful
to avoid compromising himself. Mr. Arthur Hassall, in his
generally excellent monograph on Bolingbroke (Statesmen Series,
1889, p. 226), writes, in answer to the attack of Johnson,
that "Bolingbroke, during his lifetime, had never scrupled to
publish criticisms, remarkable for their freedom, on religious
subjects." I cannot gather to what he refers; and Mr. Walter
Sichel, in his copious biography (2 vols. 1901-1902), indicates no
such publications. The Letters on the Study and Use of History,
which contain (Lett. iii, sect. 2) a skeptical discussion of
the Pentateuch as history, though written in 1735-36, were only
posthumously published, in 1752. The Examen Important de Milord
Bolingbroke, produced by Voltaire in 1767, but dated 1736,
is Voltaire's own work, based on Bolingbroke. In his letter to
Swift of September 12, 1724 (Swift's Works, Scott's ed. 1824,
xvi, 448-49), Bolingbroke angrily repudiates the title of esprit
fort, declaring, in the very temper in which pious posterity has
aspersed himself, that "such are the pests of society, because
they endeavour to loosen the bands of it.... I therefore not
only disown, but I detest, this character." In this letter he
even affects to believe in "the truth of the divine revelation
of Christianity." He began to write his essays, it is true,
before his withdrawal to France in 1735, but with no intention
of speedily publishing them. In his Letter to Mr. Pope (published
with the Letter to Wyndham, 1753), p. 481, he writes: "I have been
a martyr of faction in politics, and have no vocation to be so
in philosophy." Cp. pp. 485-86. It is thus a complete blunder on
the part of Bagehot to say (Literary Studies, Hutton's ed. iii,
137) that Butler's Analogy, published in 1736, was "designed as
a confutation of Shaftesbury and Bolingbroke." It is even said
(Warton, Essay on Pope, 4th ed. ii, 294-95) that Pope did not
know Bolingbroke's real opinions; but Pope's untruthfulness was
such as to discredit such a statement. Cp. Bolingbroke's Letter
as cited, p. 521, and his Philosophical Works, 8vo-ed. 1754, ii,
405. It is noteworthy that a volume of controversial sermons
entitled A Preservative against unsettled notions and Want of
Principles in Religion, so entirely stupid in its apologetics as
to be at times positively entertaining, was published in 1715
by Joseph Trapp, M.A., "Chaplain to the Right Honble. The Lord
Viscount Bolingbroke."
In seeking to estimate Bolingbroke's posthumous influence we have
to remember that after the publication of his works the orthodox
members of his own party, who otherwise would have forgiven him
all his vices and insincerities, have held him up to hatred. Scott,
for instance, founding on Bolingbroke's own dishonest denunciation
of freethinkers as men seeking to loosen the bands of society,
pronounced his arrangement for the posthumous issue of his works
"an act of wickedness more purely diabolical than any hitherto upon
record in the history of any age or nation" (Note to Bolingbroke's
letter above cited in Swift's Works, xvi, 450). It would be an
error, on the other hand, to class him among either the great
sociologists or the great philosophers. Mr. Sichel undertakes to
show (vol. ii, ch. x) that Bolingbroke had stimulated Gibbon to a
considerable extent in his treatment of early Christianity. This
is in itself quite probable, and some of the parallels cited are
noteworthy; but Mr. Sichel, who always writes as a panegyrist,
makes no attempt to trace the common French sources for both. He
does show that Voltaire manipulated Bolingbroke's opinions
in reproducing them. But he does not critically recognize the
incoherence of Bolingbroke's eloquent treatises. Mr. Hassall's
summary is nearer the truth; but that in turn does not note how
well fitted was Bolingbroke's swift and graceful declamation to
do its work with the general public, which (if it accepted him
at all) would make small account of self-contradiction.
§ 14
In view of such a reinforcement of its propaganda, deism could not
be regarded as in the least degree written down. In 1765, in fact, we
find Diderot recounting, on the authority of d'Holbach, who had just
returned from a visit to this country, that "the Christian religion is
nearly extinct in England. The deists are innumerable; there are almost
no atheists; those who are so conceal it. An atheist and a scoundrel
are almost synonymous terms for them." [883] Nor did the output of
deistic literature end with the posthumous works of Bolingbroke. These
were followed by translations of the new writings of Voltaire, [884]
who had assimilated the whole propaganda of English deism, and gave it
out anew with a wit and brilliancy hitherto unknown in argumentative
and critical literature. The freethinking of the third quarter of
the century, though kept secondary to more pressing questions, was
thus at least as deeply rooted and as convinced as that of the first
quarter; and it was probably not much less common among educated men,
though new social influences caused it to be more decried.
The hapless Chatterton, fatally precocious, a boy in years and
experience of life, a man in understanding at seventeen, incurred
posthumous obloquy more for his "infidelity" than for the harmless
literary forgeries which reveal his poetic affinity to a less prosaic
age. It is a memorable fact that this first recovery of the lost note
of imaginative poetry in that "age of prose and reason" is the exploit
of a boy whose mind was as independently "freethinking" on current
religion as it was original even in its imitative reversion to the
poetics of the past. Turning away from the impossible mythicism and
mysticism of the Tudor and Stuart literatures, as from the fanaticism
of the Puritans, the changing English world after the Restoration had
let fall the artistic possession of imaginative feeling and style
which was the true glory of the time of Renascence. The ill-strung
genius of Chatterton seems to have been the first to reunite the
sense of romantic beauty with the spirit of critical reason. He was a
convinced deist, avowing in his verse, in his pathetic will (1770), in
a late letter, and at times in his talk, that he was "no Christian,"
and contemning the ethic of Scripture history and the absurdity of
literal inspiration. [885] Many there must have been who went as far,
with less courage of avowal.
What was lacking to the age, once more, was a social foundation on
which it could not only endure but develop. In a nation of which the
majority had no intellectual culture, such a foundation could not
exist. Green exaggerates [886] when he writes that "schools there
were none, save the grammar schools of Edward and Elizabeth"; [887]
but by another account only twelve public schools were founded in the
long reign of George III; [888] and, as a result of the indifference
of two generations, masses of the people "were ignorant and brutal
to a degree which it is hard to conceive." [889] A great increase of
population had followed on the growth of towns and the development
of commerce and manufactures even between 1700 and 1760; [890]
and thereafter the multiplication was still more rapid. There was
thus a positive fall in the culture standards of the majority of the
people. According to Massey, "hardly any tradesman in 1760 had more
instruction than qualified him to add up a bill"; and "a labourer,
mechanic, or domestic servant who could read or write possessed a rare
accomplishment." [891] As for the Charity Schools established between
1700 and 1750, their express object was to rear humble tradesmen and
domestics, not to educate in the proper sense of the term.
In the view of life which accepted this state of things the educated
deists seem to have shared; at least, there is no record of any
agitation by them for betterment. The state of political thought was
typified in the struggle over "Wilkes and Liberty," from which cool
temperaments like Hume's turned away in contempt; and it is significant
that poor men were persecuted for freethinking while the better-placed
went free. Jacob Ilive, for denying in a pamphlet (1753) the truth of
revelation, was pilloried thrice, and sent to hard labour for three
years. In 1754 the Grand Jury of Middlesex "presented" the editor and
publisher of Bolingbroke's posthumous works [892]--a distinction that
in the previous generation had been bestowed on Mandeville's Fable of
the Bees; and in 1761, as before noted, Peter Annet, aged seventy, was
pilloried twice and sent to prison for discrediting the Pentateuch;
as if that were a more serious offence than his former attacks on
the gospels and on St. Paul. The personal influence of George III,
further, told everywhere against freethinking; and the revival of
penalties would have checked publishing even if there had been no
withdrawal of interest to politics.
Yet more or less freethinking treatises did appear at intervals
in addition to the works of the better-known writers, such as
Bolingbroke and Hume, after the period commonly marked as that
of the "decline of deism." In the list may be included a few by
Unitarians, who at this stage were doing critical work. Like
a number of the earlier works above mentioned, the following
(save Evanson) are overlooked in Sir Leslie Stephen's survey:--
1746. Essay on Natural Religion. Falsely attributed to Dryden.
1746. Deism fairly stated and fully vindicated, etc. Anon.
1749. J. G. Cooper, Life of Socrates.
1750. John Dove, A Creed founded on Truth and Common Sense.
1750. The British Oracle. (Two numbers only.)
1752. The Pillars of Priestcraft and Orthodoxy Shaken. Four vols.
of freethinking pamphlets, collected (and some written) by
Thomas Gordon, formerly secretary to Trenchard. Edited by
R. Barron. (Rep. 1768.)
1765. W. Dudgeon, Philosophical Works (reprints of those of 1732,
-4, -7, -9, above mentioned). Privately printed--at
Glasgow?
1772. E. Evanson, The Doctrines of a Trinity and the
Incarnation, etc.
1773. ---- Three Discourses (1. Upon the Man after God's own
Heart; 2. Upon the Faith of Abraham; 3. Upon the Seal of
the Foundation of God).
1777. ---- Letter to Bishop Hurd.
1781. W. Nicholson, The Doubts of the Infidels. (Rep. by R.
Carlile.)
1782. W. Turner, Answer to Dr. Priestley's Letters to a
Philosophical Unbeliever.
1785. Dr. G. Hoggart Toulmin, The Antiquity and Duration of the
World.
1789. ---- The Eternity of the Universe. [893] (Rep. 1825.)
1789. Dr. T. Cooper, Tracts, Ethical, Theological, and Political.
1792. E. Evanson, The Dissonance of the Four Evangelists.
(Rep. 1805.)
1795. Dr. J. A. O'Keefe, On the Progress of the Human
Understanding.
1797. John C. Davies, The Scripturian's Creed. Prosecuted and
imprisoned. (Book rep. 1822 and 1839.)
Of the work here noted a considerable amount was done by Unitarians,
Evanson being of that persuasion, though at the time of writing his
earlier Unitarian works he was an Anglican vicar. [894] During the
first half of the eighteenth century, despite the movement at the
end of the seventeenth, specific anti-Trinitarianism was not much in
evidence, the deistic controversy holding the foreground. But gradually
Unitarianism made fresh headway. One dissenting clergyman, Martin
Tomkyns, who had been dismissed by his congregation at Stoke Newington
for his "Arian or Unitarian opinions," published in 1722 A Sober Appeal
to a Turk or an Indian, concerning the plain sense of the Trinity,
in reply to the treatise of Dr. Isaac Watts on The Christian Doctrine
of the Trinity. A second edition of Tomkyns's book appeared in 1748,
with a further reply to Watts's Dissertations of 1724. The result seems
to have been an unsettlement of the orthodoxy of the hymn-writer. There
is express testimony from Dr. Lardner, a very trustworthy witness, that
Watts in his latter years, "before he was seized with an imbecility
of his faculties," was substantially a Unitarian. His special papers
on the subject were suppressed by his executors; but the full text
of his Solemn Address to the Great and Blessed God goes far to bear
out Lardner's express assertion. [895] Other prominent religionists
were more outspoken. The most distinguished names associated with the
position were those of Lardner and Priestley, of whom the former,
trained as a simple "dissenter," avowedly reached his conclusions
without much reference to Socinian literature; [896] and the second,
who was similarly educated, no less independently gave up the doctrines
of the Atonement and the Trinity, passing later from the Arian to the
Socinian position after reading Lardner's Letter on the Logos. [897]
As Priestley derived his determinism from Collins, [898] it would
appear that the deistical movement had set up a general habit of
reasoning which thus wrought even on Christians who, like Lardner and
Priestley, undertook to rebut the objections of unbelievers to their
faith. A generally rationalistic influence is to be noted in the works
of the Unitarian Antipædobaptist Dr. Joshua Toulmin, author of lives
of Socinus (1777) and Biddle (1789), and many other solid works,
including a sermon on "The Injustice of classing Unitarians with
Deists and Infidels" (1797). In his case the "classing" was certainly
inconvenient. In 1791 the effigy of Paine was burned before his door,
and his windows broken. His house was saved by being closely guarded;
but his businesses of schoolkeeping and bookselling had to be given
up. It thus becomes intelligible how, after a period in which Dissent,
contemned by the State Church, learned to criticize that Church's
creed, there emerged in England towards the close of the eighteenth
century a fresh movement of specific Unitarianism.
Evanson and Toulmin were scholarly writers, though without the large
learning of Lardner and the propagandist energy and reputation of
Priestley; and the Unitarian movement, in a quiet fashion, made a
numerical progress out of all proportion to that of orthodoxy. It
owed much of its immunity at this stage, doubtless, to the large
element of tacit deism in the Church; and apart from the scholarly
work of Lardner both Priestley and Evanson did something for New
Testament criticism, as well as towards the clearing-up of Christian
origins. Evanson was actually prosecuted in 1773, on local initiative,
for a sermon of Unitarian character delivered by him in the parish
church of Tewkesbury on Easter-Day of 1771; and, what is much more
remarkable, members of his congregation, at a single defence-meeting
in an inn, collected £150 to meet his costs. [899] Five years later he
had given up the belief in eternal punishment, though continuing to
believe in "long protracted" misery for sinners. [900] Still later,
after producing his Dissonance, he became uncommonly drastic in his
handling of the Canon. He lived well into the nineteenth century,
and published in 1805 a vigorous tractate, Second Thoughts on
the Trinity, recommended to the Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of
Gloucester. In that he treats the First Gospel as a forgery of the
second century. The method is indiscriminating, and the author lays
much uncritical stress upon prophecy. On the whole, the Unitarian
contribution to rational thought, then as later, was secondary
or ancillary, though on the side of historical investigation it
was important. Lardner's candour is as uncommon as his learning;
and Priestley [901] and Evanson have a solvent virtue. [902] In all
three the limitation lies in the fixed adherence to the concept of
revelation, which withheld them from radical rationalism even as it did
from Arianism. Evanson's ultra-orthodox acceptance of the Apocalypse is
significant of his limitations; and Priestley's calibre is indicated
by his life-long refusal to accept the true scientific inference from
his own discovery of oxygen. A more pronounced evolution was that of
the Welsh deist David Williams, who, after publishing two volumes of
Sermons on Religious Hypocrisy (1774), gave up his post as a dissenting
preacher, and, in conjunction with Franklin and other freethinkers,
opened a short-lived deistic chapel in Margaret Street, London (1776),
where there was used a "Liturgy on the Universal Principles of Religion
and Morality." [903]
§ 15
On the other hand, apart from the revival of popular religion under
Whitefield and Wesley, which won multitudes of the people whom no
higher culture could reach, there was no recovery of educated belief
upon intellectual lines; though there was a steady detachment of
energy to the new activities of conquest and commerce which mark the
second half of the eighteenth century in England. On this state of
things supervened the massive performance of the greatest historical
writer England had yet produced. Gibbon, educated not by Oxford but
by the recent scholarly literature of France, had as a mere boy seen,
on reading Bossuet, the theoretic weakness of Protestantism, and
had straightway professed Romanism. Shaken as to that by a skilled
Swiss Protestant, he speedily became a rationalist pure and simple,
with as little of the dregs of deism in him as any writer of his
age; and his great work begins, or rather signalizes (since Hume
and Robertson preceded him), a new era of historical writing, not
merely by its sociological treatment of the rise of Christianity,
but by its absolutely anti-theological handling of all things.
The importance of the new approach may be at once measured by the
zeal of the opposition. In no case, perhaps, has the essentially
passional character of religious resistance to new thought been more
vividly shown than in that of the contemporary attacks upon Gibbon's
History. There is not to be found in controversial literature such
another annihilating rejoinder as was made by Gibbon to the clerical
zealots who undertook to confound him on points of scholarship,
history, and ratiocination. The contrast between the mostly spiteful
incompetence of the attack and the finished mastery of the reply
put the faith at a disadvantage from which it never intellectually
recovered, though other forces reinstated it socially. By the admission
of Macaulay, who thought Gibbon "most unfair" to religion, the whole
troup of his assailants are now "utterly forgotten"; and those orthodox
commentators who later sought to improve on their criticism have in
turn, with a notable uniformity, been rebutted by their successors;
till Gibbon's critical section ranks as the first systematically
scientific handling of the problem of the rise of Christianity. He
can be seen to have profited by all the relevant deistic work done
before him, learning alike from Toland, from Middleton, and from
Bolingbroke; though his acknowledgments are mostly paid to respectable
Protestants and Catholics, as Basnage, Beausobre, Lardner, Mosheim,
and Tillemont; and the sheer solidity of the work has sustained it
against a hundred years of hostile comment. [904] While Gibbon was
thus earning for his country a new literary distinction, the orthodox
interest was concerned above all things to convict him of ignorance,
incompetence, and dishonesty; and Davis, the one of his assailants
who most fully manifested all of these qualities, and who will long
be remembered solely from Gibbon's deadly exposure, was rewarded
with a royal pension. Another, Apthorp, received an archiepiscopal
living; while Chelsum, the one who almost alone wrote against him
like a gentleman, got nothing. But no cabal could avail to prevent
the instant recognition, at home and abroad, of the advent of a new
master in history; and in the worst times of reaction which followed,
the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire impassively
defied the claims of the ruling creed.
In a literary world which was eagerly reading Gibbon [905] and
Voltaire, [906] there was a peculiar absurdity in Burke's famous
question (1790) as to "Who now reads Bolingbroke" and the rest of
the older deists. [907] The fashionable public was actually reading
Bolingbroke even then; [908] and the work of the older deists was being
done with new incisiveness and thoroughness by their successors. [909]
In the unstudious world of politics, if the readers were few the
indifferentists were many. Evanson could truthfully write to Bishop
Hurd in 1777 that "That general unbelief of revealed religion among
the higher orders of our countrymen, which, however your Lordship and I
might differ in our manner of accounting for it, is too notorious for
either of us to doubt of, hath, by a necessary consequence, produced
in the majority of our present legislators an absolute indifference
towards religious questions of every kind." [910] Beside Burke in
Parliament, all the while, was the Prime Minister, William Pitt the
younger, an agnostic deist.
Whether or not the elder Pitt was a deist, the younger gave
very plain signs of being at least no more. Gladstone (Studies
subsidiary to the Works of Bishop Butler, ed. 1896, pp. 30-33) has
sought to discredit the recorded testimony of Wilberforce (Life of
Wilberforce, 1838, i, 98) that Pitt told him "Bishop Butler's work
raised in his mind more doubts than it had answered." Gladstone
points to another passage in Wilberforce's diary which states that
Pitt "commended Butler's Analogy" (Life, i, 90). But the context
shows that Pitt had commended the book for the express purpose of
turning Wilberforce's mind from its evangelical bias. Wilberforce
was never a deist, and the purpose accordingly could not have
been to make him orthodox. The two testimonies are thus perfectly
consistent; especially when we note the further statement credibly
reported to have been made by Wilberforce (Life, i, 95), that
Pitt later "tried to reason me out of my convictions." We have
yet further the emphatic declaration of Pitt's niece, Lady Hester
Stanhope, that he "never went to church in his life ... never even
talked about religion" (Memoirs of Lady Hester Stanhope, 1845, iii,
166-67). This was said in emphatic denial of the genuineness of
the unctuous death-bed speech put in Pitt's mouth by Gifford. Lady
Hester's high veracity is accredited by her physician (Travels
of Lady Hester Stanhope, 1846, i, pref. p. 11). No such character
can be given to the conventional English biography of the period.
We have further to note the circumstantial account by Wilberforce
in his letter to the Rev. S. Gisborne immediately after Pitt's
death (Correspondence, 1840, ii, 69-70), giving the details he
had had in confidence from the Bishop of Lincoln. They are to
the effect that, after some demur on Pitt's part ("that he was
not worthy to offer up any prayer, or was too weak,") the Bishop
prayed with him once. Wilberforce adds his "fear" that "no further
religious intercourse took place before or after, and I own I
thought what was inserted in the papers impossible to be true."
There is clear testimony that Charles James Fox, Pitt's illustrious
rival, was no more of a believer than he, [911] though equally careful
to make no profession of unbelief. And it was Fox who, above all the
English statesmen of his day, fought the battle of religious toleration
[912]--a service which finally puts him above Burke, and atones for
many levities of political action.
Among thinking men too the nascent science of geology was setting up
a new criticism of "revelation"--this twenty years before the issue of
the epoch-making works of Hutton. [913] In England the impulse seems to
have come from the writings of the Abbé Langlet du Fresnoy, De Maillet,
and Mirabaud, challenging the Biblical account of the antiquity of the
earth. The new phase of "infidelity" was of course furiously denounced,
one of the most angry and most absurd of its opponents being the poet
Cowper. [914] Still rationalism persisted. Paley, writing in 1786,
protests that "Infidelity is now served up in every shape that is
likely to allure, surprise, or beguile the imagination, in a fable,
a tale, a novel, or a poem, in interspersed or broken hints, remote
and oblique surmises, in books of travel, of philosophy, of natural
history--in a word, in any form rather than that of a professed
and regular disquisition." [915] The orthodox Dr. J. Ogilvie, in
the introduction to his Inquiry into the Causes of the Infidelity
and Skepticism of the Times (1783), begins: "That the opinions of
the deists and skeptics have spread more universally during a part
of the last century and in the present than at any former æra since
the resurrection of letters, is a truth to which the friends and the
enemies of religion will give their suffrage without hesitation." In
short, until the general reversal of all progress which followed on
the French Revolution, there had been no such change of opinion as
Burke alleged.
One of the most popular poets and writers of the day was the
celebrated Erasmus Darwin, a deist, whose Zoonomia (1794) brought on
him the charge of atheism, as it well might. However he might poetize
about the Creator, Dr. Darwin in his verse and prose alike laid the
foundations of the doctrines of the transmutation of species and
the aqueous origin of simple forms of life which evolved into higher
forms; though the idea of the descent of man from a simian species
had been broached before him by Buffon and Helvétius in France, and
Lords Kames and Monboddo in Scotland. The idea of a Natura naturans
was indeed ancient; but it has been authoritatively said of Erasmus
Darwin that "he was the first who proposed and consistently carried
out a well-rounded theory with regard to the development of the living
world--a merit which shines forth more brilliantly when we compare it
with the vacillating and confused attempts of Buffon, Linnæus, and
Goethe. It is the idea of a power working from within the organisms
to improve their natural position" [916]--the idea which, developed
by Lamarck, was modified by the great Darwin of the nineteenth century
into the doctrine of natural selection.
And in the closing years of the century there arose a new promise of
higher life in the apparition of Mary Wollstonecraft, ill-starred but
noble, whose Letters on Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) show her
to have been a freethinking deist of remarkable original faculty,
[917] and whose Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) was the
first great plea for the emancipation of her sex.
§ 16
Even in rural Scotland, the vogue of the poetry of Burns told of
germinal doubt. To say nothing of his mordant satires on pietistic
types--notably Holy Willie's Prayer, his masterpiece in that
line--Burns even in his avowed poems [918] shows small regard for
orthodox beliefs; and his letters reveal him as substantially a deist,
shading into a Unitarian. Such pieces as A Prayer in the prospect of
Death, and A Prayer under the pressure of Violent Anguish, are plainly
unevangelical; [919] and the allusions to Jesus in his letters, even
when writing to Mrs. Maclehose, who desired to bring him to confession,
exclude orthodox belief, [920] though they suggest Unitarianism. He
frequently refers to religion in his letters, yet so constantly
restricts himself to the affirmation of a belief in a benevolent God
and in a future state that he cannot be supposed to have held the
further beliefs which his orthodox correspondents would wish him to
express. A rationalistic habit is shown even in his professions of
belief, as here: "Still I am a very sincere believer in the Bible;
but I am drawn by the conviction of a man, not the halter of an ass";
[921] and in the passage: "Though I have no objection to what the
Christian system tells us of another world, yet I own I am partial to
those proofs and ideas of it which we have wrought out of our own heads
and hearts." [922] Withal, Burns always claimed to be "religious,"
and was so even in a somewhat conventional sense. The lines:
An atheist-laugh's a poor exchange
For Deity offended [923]
exhibit a sufficiently commonplace conception of Omnipotence; and
there is no sign that the poet ever did any hard thinking on the
problem. But, emotionalist of genius as he was, his influence as
a satirist and mitigator of the crudities and barbarities of Scots
religion has been incalculably great, and underlies all popular culture
progress in Scotland since his time. Constantly aspersed in his own
day and world as an "infidel," he yet from the first conquered the
devotion of the mass of his countrymen; though he would have been
more potent for intellectual liberation if he had been by them more
intelligently read. Few of them now, probably, realize that their
adored poet was either a deist or a Unitarian--presumably the former.
§ 17
With the infelicity in prediction which is so much commoner with him
than the "prescience" for which he is praised, Burke had announced that
the whole deist school "repose in lasting oblivion." The proposition
would be much more true of 999 out of every thousand writers on behalf
of Christianity. It is characteristic of Burke, however, that he does
not name Shaftesbury, a Whig nobleman of the sacred period. [924] A
seeming justice was given to Burke's phrase by the undoubted reaction
which took place immediately afterwards. In the vast panic which
followed on the French Revolution, the multitude of mediocre minds
in the middle and upper classes, formerly deistic or indifferent,
took fright at unbelief as something now visibly connected with
democracy and regicide; new money endowments were rapidly bestowed
on the Church; and orthodoxy became fashionable on political grounds
just as skepticism had become fashionable at the Restoration. Class
interest and political prejudice wrought much in both cases; only
in opposite directions. Democracy was no longer Bibliolatrous,
therefore aristocracy was fain to became so, or at least to grow
respectful towards the Church as a means of social control. Gibbon,
in his closing years, went with the stream. And as religious wars
have always tended to discredit religion, so a war partly associated
with the freethinking of the French revolutionists tended to discredit
freethought. The brutish wrecking of Priestley's house and library and
chapel by a mob at Birmingham in 1791 was but an extreme manifestation
of a reaction which affected every form of mental life. But while
Priestley went to die in the United States, another English exile,
temporarily returned thence to his native land, was opening a new era
of popular rationalism. Even in the height of the revolutionary tumult,
and while Burke was blustering about the disappearance of unbelief,
Thomas Paine was laying deep and wide the English foundations of a new
democratic freethought; and the upper-class reaction in the nature of
the case was doomed to impermanency, though it was to arrest English
intellectual progress for over a generation. The French Revolution
had re-introduced freethought as a vital issue, even in causing it
to be banned as a danger.
That freethought at the end of the century was rather driven
inwards and downwards than expelled is made clear by the multitude
of fresh treatises on Christian evidences. Growing numerous
after 1790, they positively swarm for a generation after Paley
(1794). Cp. Essays on the Evidence and Influence of Christianity,
Bath, 1790, pref.; Andrew Fuller, The Gospel its own Witness,
1799, pref. and concluding address to deists; Watson's sermon
of 1795, in Two Apologies, ed. 1806, p. 399; Priestley's Memoirs
(written in 1795), 1806, pp. 127-28; Wilberforce's Practical View,
1797, passim (e.g., pp. 366-69, 8th ed. 1841); Rev. D. Simpson,
A Plea for Religion ... addressed to the Disciples of Thomas Paine,
1797. The latter writer states (2nd ed. p. 126) that "infidelity is
at this moment running like wildfire among the common people"; and
Fuller (2nd ed. p. 128) speaks of the Monthly Magazine as "pretty
evidently devoted to the cause of infidelity." A pamphlet on The
Rise and Dissolution of the Infidel Societies in this Metropolis
(London, 1800), by W. Hamilton Reid, describes the period as the
first "in which the doctrines of infidelity have been extensively
circulated among the lower orders"; and a Summary of Christian
Evidences, by Bishop Porteous (1800; 16th ed. 1826), affirms,
in agreement with the 1799 Report of the Lords' Committee on
Treasonable Societies, that "new compendiums of infidelity,
and new libels on Christianity, are dispersed continually,
with indefatigable industry, through every part of the kingdom,
and every class of the community." Freethought, in short, was
becoming democratized.
As regards England, Paine is the great popular factor; and it is the
bare truth to say that he brought into the old debate a new earnestness
and a new moral impetus. The first part of the Age of Reason, hastily
put together in expectation of speedy death in 1793, and including
some astronomic matter that apparently antedates 1781, [925] is
a swift outline of the position of the rationalizing deist, newly
conscious of firm standing-ground in astronomic science. That is the
special note of Paine's gospel. He was no scholar; and the champions
of the "religion of Galilee" have always been prompt to disparage
any unlearned person who meddles with religion as an antagonist;
but in the second part of his book Paine put hard criticism enough
to keep a world of popular readers interested for well over a hundred
years. The many replies are forgotten: the Biblical criticism of Paine
will continue to do its work till popular orthodoxy follows the lead
of professional scholarship and gives up at once the acceptance and
the circulation of things incredible and indefensible as sacrosanct.
Mr. Benn (Hist. of Eng. Rationalism in the Nineteenth Century, i,
217) remarks that Paine's New Testament criticisms are "such as at
all times would naturally occur to a reader of independent mind and
strong common sense." If so, these had been up to Paine's time,
and remained long afterwards, rare characteristics. And there
is some mistake about Mr. Benn's criticism that "the repeated
charges of fraud and imposture brought against the Apostles and
Evangelists ... jar painfully on a modern ear. But they are
largely due to the mistaken notion, shared by Paine with his
orthodox contemporaries, that the Gospels and Acts were written
by contemporaries and eye-witnesses of the events related." Many
times over, Paine argues that the documents could not have been
so written. E.g. in Conway's ed. of Works, pp. 157, 158, 159,
160, 164, 167, 168, etc. The reiterated proposition is "that the
writers cannot have been eye-witnesses and ear-witnesses of what
they relate; ... and consequently that the books have not been
written by the persons called apostles" (p. 168). And there is some
exaggeration even in Mr. Benn's remark that, "strangely enough, he
accepts the Book of Daniel as genuine." Paine (ed. p. 144) merely
puts a balance of probability in favour of the genuineness. It may
be sometimes--it is certainly not always--true that Paine "cannot
distinguish between legendary or [? and] mythical narratives"
(Benn, p. 216); but it is to be feared that the disability subsists
to-day in more scholarly quarters.
Despite his deadly directness, Paine, in virtue of his strong
sincerity, probably jars much less on the modern ear than
he did on that of his own, which was so ready to make felony
of any opinion hostile to reigning prejudices. But if it be
otherwise, it is to be feared that no less offence will be given
by Mr. Benn's own account of the Hexateuch as "the records kept
by a lying and bloodthirsty priesthood"; even if that estimate be
followed by the very challengeable admission that "priesthoods
are generally distinguished for their superior humanity" (Benn,
p. 350, and note).
Henceforth there is a vital difference in the fortunes of freethought
and religion alike. Always in the past the institutional strength
of religion and the social weakness of freethought had lain in the
credulity of the ignorant mass, which had turned to naught an infinity
of rational effort. After the French Revolution, when over a large area
the critical spirit began simultaneously to play on faith and life,
politics and religion, its doubled activity gave it a new breadth of
outlook as of energy, and the slow enlightenment of the mass opened
up a new promise for the ultimate reign of reason.
CHAPTER XVII
FRENCH FREETHOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
1. The fruits of the intellectual movement of the seventeenth
century are seen beginning to take form on the very threshold of
the eighteenth. In 1700, at the height of the reign of the King's
confessors, there was privately printed the Lettre d'Hippocrate à
Damagète, described as "the first French work openly destructive
of Christianity." It was ascribed to the Comte de Boulainvilliers,
a pillar of the feudal system. [926] Thus early is the sound of
disintegration heard in the composite fabric of Church and State;
and various fissures are seen in all parts of the structure. The king
himself, so long morally discredited, could only discredit pietism by
his adoption of it; the Jansenists and the Molinists [i.e., the school
of Molina, not of Molinos] fought incessantly; even on the side of
authority there was bitter dissension between Bossuet and Fénelon;
[927] and the movement of mysticism associated with the latter came
to nothing, though he had the rare credit of converting, albeit
to a doubtful orthodoxy, the emotional young Scotch deist Chevalier
Ramsay. [928] Where the subtlety of Fénelon was not allowed to operate,
the loud dialectic of Bossuet could not avail for faith as against
rationalism, whatever it might do to upset the imperfect logic of
Protestant sects. In no society, indeed, does mere declamation play
a larger part than in that of modern France; but in no society, on
the other hand, is mere declamation more sure to be disdained and
derided by the keener spirits. In the years of disaster and decadence
which rounded off in gloom the life of the Grand Monarque, with
defeat dogging his armies and bankruptcy threatening his finances,
the spirit of criticism was not likely to slacken. Literary polemic,
indeed, was hardly to be thought of at such a time, even if it had
been safe. In 1709 the king destroyed the Jansenist seminary of Port
Royal, wreaking an ignoble vengeance on the very bones of the dead
there buried; and more heretical thinkers had need go warily.
Yet even in those years of calamity, perhaps by reason of the very
stress of it, some freethinking books somehow passed the press,
though a system of police espionage had been built up by the king,
step for step with some real reforms in the municipal government
of Paris. The first was a romance of the favourite type, in which a
traveller discovers a strange land inhabited by surprisingly rational
people. Such appear to have been the Histoire de Calejava, by Claude
Gilbert, produced at Dijon in 1700, and the imaginary travels of
Juan de Posos, published at Amsterdam in 1708. Both of these were
promptly suppressed; the next contrived to get into circulation. The
work of Symon Tyssot de Patot, Voyages et Avantures de Jacques Massé,
published in 1710, puts in the mouths of priests of the imaginary
land discovered by the traveller such mordant arguments against the
idea of a resurrection, the story of the fall, and other items of
the Christian creed, that there could be small question of the deism
of the author; [929] and the prefatory Lettre de l'éditeur indicates
misgivings. The Réflexions sur les grands hommes qui sont morts en
plaisantant, by Deslandes, ostensibly published at Amsterdam in 1712,
seems to have had a precarious circulation, inasmuch as Brunet never
saw the first edition. To permit of the issue of such a book as Jacques
Massé--even at Bordeaux--the censure must have been notably lax; as
it was again in the year of the king's death, when there appeared a
translation of Collins's Discourse of Freethinking. For the moment
the Government was occupied over an insensate renewal of the old
persecution of Protestants, promulgating in 1715 a decree that all
who died after refusing the sacraments should be refused burial,
and that their goods should be confiscated. The edict seems to have
been in large measure disregarded.
2. At the same time the continuous output of apologetics testified
to the gathering tide of unbelief. The Benedictine Lami followed
up his attack on Spinoza with a more popular treatise, L'Incrédule
amené à la religion par la raison (1710); the Abbé Genest turned
Descartes into verse by way of Preuves naturelles de l'existence de
Dieu et de l'immortalité de l'âme (1716); and the Anti-Lucretius of
Cardinal Polignac (1661-1741), though only posthumously published
in full (1745), did but pass on to the next age, when deism was the
prevailing heresy, a deistic argument against atheism. It is difficult
to see any Christian sentiment in that dialectic performance of a
born diplomatist. [930]
When the old king died, even the fashion of conformity passed
away among the upper classes; [931] and the feverish manufacture of
apologetic works testifies to an unslackened activity of unbelief. In
1719 Jean Denyse, professor of philosophy at the college of Montaigu,
produced La vérité de la religion chrétienne demontrée par ordre
géométrique (a title apparently suggested by Spinoza's early exposition
of Descartes), without making any permanent impression on heterodox
opinion. Not more successful, apparently, was the performance of the
Abbé Houteville, first published in 1722. [932] Much more amiable
in tone, and more scientific in temper, than the common run of
defences, it was found, says an orthodox biographical dictionary,
to be "better fitted to make unbelievers than to convert them,"
seeing that "objections were presented with much force and fulness,
and the replies with more amenity than weight." [933] That the
Abbé was in fact not rigorously orthodox might almost be suspected
from his having been appointed, in the last year of his life (1742),
"perpetual secretary" to the Académie, an office which somehow tended
to fall to more or less freethinking members, being held before him
by the Abbé Dubos, and after him by Mirabaud, the Abbé Duclos, [934]
D'Alembert, and Marmontel. The Traités des Premières Veritéz of the
Jesuit Father Buffier (1724) can hardly have been more helpful to
the faith. [935] Another experiment by way of popularizing orthodoxy,
the copious Histoire du peuple de Dieu, by the Jesuit Berruyer, first
published in 1728, [936] had little better fortune, inasmuch as it
scandalized the orthodox by its secularity of tone without persuading
the freethinkers. Condemned by the Bishop of Montpellier in 1731,
it was censured by Rome in 1734; and the second part, produced long
afterwards, aroused even more antagonism.
3. There was thus no adaptation on the side of the Church to the forces
which in an increasing degree menaced her rule. Under the regency of
Orléans (1715-1723), the open disorder of the court on the one hand
and the ruin of the disastrous financial experiment of Law on the
other were at least favourable to toleration; but under the Duc de
Bourbon, put in power and soon superseded by Fleury (bishop of Fréjus
and tutor of Louis XV; later cardinal) there was a renewal of the
rigours against the Protestants and the Jansenists; the edict of 1715
was renewed; emigration recommenced; and only public outcry checked
the policy of persecution on that side. But Fleury and the king went
on fighting the Jansenists; and while this embittered strife of the
religious sections could not but favour the growth of freethought,
it was incompatible alike with official tolerance of unbelief and
with any effectual diffusion of liberal culture. Had the terrorism and
the waste of Louis XIV been followed by a sane system of finance and
one of religious toleration; and had not the exhausted and bankrupt
country been kept for another half century--save for eight years
of peace and prosperity from 1748 to 1755--on the rack of ruinous
wars, alike under the regency of Orléans and the rule of Louis XV,
the intellectual life might have gone fast and far. As it was, war
after war absorbed its energy; and the debt of five milliards left
by Louis XIV was never seriously lightened. Under such a system the
vestiges of constitutional government were gradually swept away.
4. As the new intellectual movement began to find expression, then, it
found the forces of resistance more and more organized. In particular,
the autocracy long maintained the severest checks on printing, so that
freethought could not save by a rare chance attain to open speech. Any
book with the least tendency to rationalism had to seek printers, or
at least publishers, in Holland. Huard, in publishing his anonymous
translation of the Hypotyposes of Sextus Empiricus (1725), is careful
to say in his preface that he "makes no application of the Pyrrhonian
objections to any dogma that may be called theological"; but he goes
on to add that the scandalous quarrels of Christian sects are well
fitted to confirm Pyrrhonists in their doubts, the sects having no
solid ground on which to condemn each other. As such an assertion was
rank heresy, the translation had to be issued in Amsterdam, and even
there without a publisher's name. [937] And still it remains clear that
the age of Louis XIV had passed on to the next a heritage of hidden
freethinking, as well as one of debt and misgovernment. What takes
place thereafter is rather an evolution of and a clerical resistance
to a growth known to have begun previously, and always feared and
hated, than any new planting of unbelief in orthodox soil. As we
have seen, indeed, a part of the early work of skepticism was done
by distinguished apologists. Huet, dying in 1722, left for posthumous
publication his Traité philosophique de la faiblesse de l'esprit humain
(1723). It was immediately translated into English and German; and
though it was probably found somewhat superfluous in deistic England,
and supersubtle in Lutheran Germany, it helped to prepare the ground
for the active unbelief of the next generation in France.
5. A continuous development may be traced throughout the
century. Montesquieu, who in his early Persian Letters (1721) had
revealed himself as "fundamentally irreligious" [938] and a censor
of intolerance, [939] proceeded in his masterly little book on the
Greatness and Decadence of the Romans (1734) and his famous Spirit of
Laws (1748) to treat the problems of human history in an absolutely
secular and scientific spirit, making only such conventional allusions
to religion as were advisable in an age in which all heretical works
were suppressible. [940] The attempts of La Harpe and Villemain [941]
to establish the inference that he repented his youthful levity in the
Persian Letters, and recognized in Christianity the main pillar of
society, will not bear examination. The very passages on which they
found [942] are entirely secular in tone and purpose, and tell of
no belief. [943] So late as 1751 there appeared a work, Les Lettres
Persanes convaincues d'impiété, by the Abbé Gaultier. The election
of Montesquieu was in fact the beginning of the struggle between
the Philosophe party in the Academy and their opponents; [944]
and in his own day there was never much doubt about Montesquieu's
deism. In his posthumous Pensées his anti-clericalism is sufficiently
emphatic. "Churchmen," he writes, "are interested in keeping the
people ignorant." He expresses himself as a convinced deist, and,
with no great air of conviction, as a believer in immortality. But
there his faith ends. "I call piety," he says, "a malady of the heart,
which plants in the soul a malady of the most ineradicable kind." "The
false notion of miracles comes of our vanity, which makes us believe
we are important enough for the Supreme Being to upset Nature on
our behalf." "Three incredibilities among incredibilities: the pure
mechanism of animals [the doctrine of Descartes]; passive obedience;
and the infallibility of the Pope." [945] His heresy was of course
divined by the guardians of the faith, through all his panegyric of
it. Even in his lifetime, Jesuits and Jansenists combined to attack
the Spirit of Laws, which was denounced at an assembly of the clergy,
put on the Roman Index, and prohibited by the censure until Malesherbes
came into office in 1750. [946] The Count de Cataneo, a Venetian noble
in the service of the King of Prussia, published in French about 1751
a treatise on The Source, the Strength, and the True Spirit of Laws,
[947] in which the political rationalism and the ethical utilitarianism
of Cumberland and Grotius were alike repelled as irreconcilable
with the doctrine of revelation. It was doubtless because of this
atmosphere of hostility that on the death of Montesquieu at Paris, in
1755, Diderot was the only man of letters who attended his funeral,
[948] though the Académie performed a commemorative service. [949]
Nevertheless, Montesquieu was throughout his life a figure in "good
society," and suffered no molestation apart from the outcry against
his books. He lived under a tradition of private freethinking and
public clericalism, even as did Molière in the previous century; and
where the two traditions had to clash, as at interment, the clerical
dominion affirmed itself. But even in the Church there were always
successors of Gassendi, to wit, philosophic unbelievers, as well as
quiet friends of toleration. And it was given to an obscure Churchman
to show the way of freethought to a generation of lay combatants.
6. One of the most comprehensive freethinking works of the century, the
Testament of Jean Meslier, curé of Etrépigny, in Champagne (d. 1723,
1729, or 1733), though it inspired numbers of eighteenth-century
freethinkers who read it in manuscript, was never printed till
1861-64. It deserves here some special notice. [950] At his death, by
common account, Meslier left two autograph copies of his book, after
having deposited a third copy in the archives of the jurisdiction of
Sainte-Menehould. By a strange chance one was permitted to circulate,
and ultimately there were some hundred copies in Paris, selling at ten
louis apiece. As he told on the wrapper of the copy he left for his
parishioners, he had not dared to speak out during his life; but he
had made full amends. He is recorded to have been an exceptionally
charitable priest, devoted to his parishioners, whose interests
he indignantly championed against a tyrannous lord of the manor;
[951] apropos of Descartes's doctrine of animal automatism, which he
fiercely repudiates, he denounces with deep feeling all cruelty to
animals, at whose slaughter for food he winces; and his book reveals
him as a man profoundly impressed at once by the sufferings of the
people under heartless kings and nobles, and the immense imposture of
religion which, in his eyes, maintained the whole evil system. Some
men before him had impugned miracles, some the gospels, some dogma,
some the conception of deity, some the tyranny of kings. He impugns
all; and where nearly all the deists had eulogized the character of
the Gospel Jesus, the priest envelops it in his harshest invective.
He must have written during whole years, with a sombre, invincible
patience, dumbly building up, in his lonely leisure, his unfaltering
negation of all that the men around him held for sacred, and
that he was sworn to preach--the whole to be his testament to his
parishioners. In the slow, heavy style--the style of a cart horse,
Voltaire called it--there is an indubitable sincerity, a smouldering
passion, but no haste, no explosion. The long-drawn, formless, prolix
sentences say everything that can be said on their theme; and when
the long book was done it was slowly copied, and yet again copied, by
the same heavy, unwearying hand. He had read few books, it seems--only
the Bible, some of the Fathers, Montaigne, the "Turkish Spy," Naudé,
Charron, Pliny, Tournémine on atheism, and Fénelon on the existence of
God, with some history, and Moreri's Dictionary; but he had re-read
them often. He does not cite Bayle; and Montaigne is evidently his
chief master. But on his modest reading he had reached as absolute a
conviction of the untruth of the entire Judæo-Christian religion as any
freethinker ever had. Moved above all by his sense of the corruption
and misrule around him, he sets out with a twofold indictment against
religion and government, of which each part sustains the other, and
he tells his parishioners how he had been "hundreds of times" [952]
on the point of bursting out with an indignant avowal of his contempt
for the rites he was compelled to administer, and the superstitions
he had to inculcate. Then, in a grimly-planned order, he proceeds to
demolish, section by section, the whole structure.
Religions in general he exhibits as tissues of error, illusion, and
imposture, the endless sources of troubles and strifes for men. Their
historical proofs and documentary bases are then assailed, and the
gospels in particular are ground between the slow mill-stones of
his dialectic; miracles, promises, and prophecies being handled in
turn. The ethic and the doctrine are next assailed all along the line,
from their theoretic bases to their political results; and the kings
of France fare no better than their creed. As against the theistic
argument of Fénelon, the entire theistic system is then oppugned,
sometimes with precarious erudition, generally with cumbrous but
solid reasoning; and the eternity of matter is affirmed with more than
Averroïstic conviction, the Cartesians coming in for a long series of
heavy blows. Immortality is further denied, as miracles had been; and
the treatise ends with a stern affirmation of its author's rectitude,
and, as it were, a massive gesture of contempt for all that will be
said against him when he has passed into the nothingness which he is
nearing. "I have never committed any crime," he writes, [953] "nor
any bad or malicious action: I defy any man to make me on this head,
with justice, any serious reproach"; but he quotes from the Psalms,
with grim zest, phrases of hate towards workers of iniquity. There
is not even the hint of a smile at the astonishing bequest he was
laying up for his parishioners and his country. He was sure he would
be read, and he was right. The whole polemic of the next sixty years,
the indictment of the government no less than that of the creed,
is laid out in his sombre treatise.
To the general public, however, he was never known save by the
"Extract"--really a deistic adaptation--made by Voltaire, [954] and
the re-written summary by d'Holbach and Diderot entitled Le Bon Sens
du Curé Meslier (1772). [955] Even this publicity was delayed for
a generation, since Voltaire, who heard of the Testament as early
as 1735, seems to have made no use of it till 1762. But the entire
group of fighting freethinkers of the age was in some sense inspired
by the old priest's legacy.
7. Apart from this direct influence, too, others of the cloth bore
some part in the general process of enlightenment. A good type of
the agnostic priest of the period was the Abbé Terrasson, the author
of the philosophic romance Sethos (1732), who died in 1750. Not very
judicious in his theory of human evolution (which he represented as a
continuous growth from a stage of literary infancy, seen in Homer),
he adopted the Newtonian theory at a time when the entire Academy
stood by Cartesianism. Among his friends he tranquilly avowed his
atheism. [956] He died "without the sacraments," and when asked whether
he believed all the doctrine of the Church, he replied that for him
that was not possible. [957] Another anti-clerical Abbé was Gaidi,
whose poem, La Religion à l'Assemblé du Clergé de France (1762),
was condemned to be burned. [958]
Among or alongside of such disillusioned Churchmen there must have
been a certain number who, desiring no breach with the organization
to which they belonged, saw the fatal tendency of the spirit of
persecution upon which its rulers always fell back in their struggle
with freethought, and sought to open their eyes to the folly and
futility of their course. Freethinkers, of course, had to lead the
way, as we have seen. It was the young Turgot who in 1753 published
two powerful Lettres sur la tolérance, and in 1754 a further series of
admirable Lettres d'un ecclésiastique à un magistrat, pleading the same
cause. [959] But similar appeals were anonymously made, by a clerical
pen, at a moment when the Church was about to enter on a new and
exasperating conflict with the growing band of freethinking writers who
rallied round Voltaire. The small book of Questions sur la tolérance,
ascribed to the Abbé Tailhé or Tailhié and the canonist Maultrot
(Geneva, 1758), is conceived in the very spirit of rationalism, yet
with a careful concern to persuade the clergy to sane courses, and is
to this day worth reading as a utilitarian argument. But the Church
was not fated to be led by such light. The principle of toleration
was left to become the watchword of freethought, while the Church
identified herself collectively with that of tyranny.
Anecdotes of the time reveal the coincidence of tyranny and evasion,
intolerance and defiance. Of Nicolas Boindin (1676-1751), procureur
in the royal Bureau des Finances, who was received into the Academy of
Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres in 1706, it is told that he "would have
been received in the French Academy if the public profession he made
of being an atheist had not excluded him." [960] But the publicity
was guarded. When he conversed with the young Marmontel [961] and
others at the Café Procope, they used a conversational code in which
the soul was called Margot, religion Javotte, liberty Jeanneton,
and the deity Monsieur de l'Être. Once a listener of furtive aspect
asked Boindin who might be this Monsieur de l'Être who behaved so ill,
and with whom they were so displeased? "Monsieur," replied Boindin,
"he is a police spy"--such being the avocation of the questioner. [962]
"The morals of Boindin," says a biographical dictionary of the period,
"were as pure as those of an atheist can be; his heart was generous;
but to these virtues he joined presumption and the obstinacy which
follows from it, a bizarre humour, and an unsociable character." [963]
Other testimonies occur on the first two heads, not on the last. But he
was fittingly refused "Christian" interment, and was buried by night,
"sans pompe."
8. With the ground prepared as we have seen, freethought was bound
to progress in France in the age of Louis XV; but it chanced that
the lead fell into the hands of the most brilliant and fecund of all
the writers of the century. Voltaire [964] (1694-1778) was already
something of a freethinker when a mere child. So common was deism
already become in Paris at the end of the seventeenth century that his
godfather, an abbé, is said to have taught him, at the age of three,
a poem by J. B. Rousseau, [965] then privately circulated, in which
Moses in particular and religious revelations in general are derided
as fraudulent. [966] Knowing this poem by heart in his childhood,
the boy was well on the way to his life's work. It is on record
that many of his school-fellows were, like himself, already deists,
though his brother, a juvenile Jansenist, made vows to propitiate
the deity on the small unbeliever's behalf. [967] It may have been
a general reputation for audacious thinking that led to his being
charged with the authorship of a stinging philippic published in
1715, after the death of Louis XIV. The unknown author, a young man,
enumerated the manifold abuses and iniquities of the reign, concluding:
"I have seen all these, and I am not twenty years old." Voltaire was
then twenty-two; but D'Argenson, who in the poem had been called
"the enemy of the human race," finding no likelier author for the
verses, put him under surveillance and exiled him from Paris; and on
his imprudent return imprisoned him for nearly a year in the Bastille
(1716), releasing him only when the real author of the verses avowed
himself. Unconquerable then as always, Voltaire devoted himself in
prison to his literary ambitions, planning his Henriade and completing
his OEdipe, which was produced in 1718 with signal success.
Voltaire was thus already a distinguished young poet and dramatist
when, in 1726, after enduring the affronts of an assault by a
nobleman's lacqueys, and of imprisonment in the Bastille for seeking
amends by duel, he came to England, where, like Deslandes before him,
he met with a ready welcome from the freethinkers. [968] Four years
previously, in the powerful poem, For and Against, [969] he had
put his early deistic conviction in a vehement impeachment of the
immoral creed of salvation and damnation, making the declaration,
"I am not a Christian." Thus what he had to learn in England was
not deism, but the physics of Newton and the details of the deist
campaign against revelationism; and these he mastered. [970] Not
only was he directly and powerfully influenced by Bolingbroke, who
became his intimate friend, but he read widely in the philosophic,
scientific, and deistic English literature of the day, [971] and
went back to France, after three years' stay, not only equipped for
his ultimate battle with tyrannous religion, but deeply impressed by
the moral wholesomeness of free discussion. [972] Not all at once,
indeed, did he become the mouthpiece of critical reason for his age:
his literary ambitions were primarily on the lines of belles lettres,
and secondarily on those of historical writing. After his Pour et
Contre, his first freethinking production was the not very heretical
Lettres philosophiques or Lettres anglaises, written in England in
1728, and, after circulating in MS., published in five editions in
1734; and the official burning of the book by the common hangman,
followed by the imprisonment of the bookseller in the Bastille, [973]
was a sufficient check on such activity for the time. Save for the
jests about Adam and Eve in the Mondain (1736), a slight satire for
which he had to fly from Paris; and the indirect though effective
thrusts at bigotry in the Ligue (1723; later the Henriade); in the
tragedy of Mahomet (1739; printed in 1742), in the tales of Memnon
and Zadig (1747-48), and in the Idées de La Mothe le Vayer (1751) and
the Défense de Milord Bolingbroke (1752), he produced nothing else
markedly deistic till 1755, when he published the "Poem to the King
of Prussia," otherwise named Sur la loi naturelle (which appears to
have been written in 1751, while he was on a visit to the Margravine
of Bayreuth), and that on the Earthquake of Lisbon. So definitely did
the former poem base all morality on natural principles that it was
ordered to be burned by the Parlement of Paris, then equally alarmed
at freethinking and at Molinism. [974] And so impossible was it still
in France to print any specific criticism of Christianity that when
in 1759 he issued his verse translations of the Song of Solomon and
Ecclesiastes they also were publicly burned, though he had actually
softened instead of heightening the eroticism of the first and the
"materialism" of the second. [975]
9. It is thus a complete mistake on the part of Buckle to affirm
that the activity of the French reformers up to 1750 was directed
against religion, and that it was thereafter turned against the
State. Certainly there was much freethinking among instructed men
and others, but it proceeded, as under Louis XIV, mainly by way of
manuscripts and conversation, or at best by the circulation of English
books and a few translations of these; and only guardedly before 1745
by means of published French books. [976] The Abbé Ranchon, in his
MS. Life of Cardinal Fleury, truly says that "the time of the Regency
was a period of the spirit of dissoluteness and irreligion"; but when
he ascribes to "those times" many "licentious and destructive writings"
he can specify only those of the English deists. "Precisely in the
time of the Regency a multitude of those offensive and irreligious
books were brought over the sea: France was deluged with them." [977]
It is incredible that multitudes of Frenchmen read English in the days
of the Regency. French freethinkers like Saint Evremond and Deslandes,
who visited or sojourned in London before 1715, took their freethought
there with them; and the only translations then in print were those
of Collins's Discourse of Freethinking and Shaftesbury's essays on
the Use of Ridicule and on Enthusiasm. Apart from these, the only
known French freethinking book of the Regency period was the work of
Vroes, a councillor at the court of Brabant, on the Spirit of Spinoza,
reprinted as Des trois imposteurs. Meslier died not earlier than 1729;
the Histoire de la philosophie payenne of Burigny belongs to 1724;
the Lettres philosophiques of Voltaire to 1734; the earlier works
of d'Argens to 1737-38; the Nouvelles libertés de penser, edited by
Dumarsais, to 1743; and the militant treatise of De la Serre, best
known as the Examen de la Religion, to 1745.
The ferment thus kept up was indeed so great that about 1748 the
ecclesiastical authorities decided on the remarkable step of adopting
for their purposes the apologetic treatise adapted by Jacob Vernet,
professor of belles lettres at Geneva, from the works of Jean-Alphonse
Turrettin, [978] not only a Protestant but a substantially Socinian
professor of ecclesiastical history at the same university. The
treatise is itself a testimony to the advance of rationalism in the
Protestant world; and its adoption, even under correction, by the
Catholic Church in France tells of a keen consciousness of need. But
the dreaded advance, as we have seen, was only to a small extent yet
traceable by new literature. The Examen critique des apologistes de la
religion chrétienne of Lévesque de Burigny was probably written about
1732, and then and thereafter circulated in manuscript, but it was
not published till 1766; and even in manuscript its circulation was
probably small, though various apologetic works had testified to the
increasing uneasiness of the orthodox world. Such titles as La religion
chrétienne demontrée par la Resurrection (by Armand de la Chapelle,
1728) and La religion chrétienne prouvée par l'accomplissement des
prophéties (by Père Baltus, 1728) tell of private unbelief under the
Regency. In 1737 appeared the voluminous treatise (anonymous) of the
Abbé de la Chambre, Traité de la véritable religion contre les athées,
les déistes, etc. (5 vols.). In 1747, again, there appeared a learned,
laborious, and unintelligent work in three volumes (authorized in
1742), Le Libertinage combattu par la témoignage des auteurs profanes,
by an unnamed Benedictine [979] of the Congregation of St. Vanne. It
declares that, between atheism and deism, there has never been so
much unbelief as now; but it cites no modern books, and is devoted to
arraying classic arguments in support of theism and morals. Part of the
exposition consists in showing that Epicurus, Lucian, and Euripides,
whom modern atheists are wont to cite as their masters, were not and
could not have been atheists; and the pious author roundly declares
in favour of paganism as against atheism.
So much smoke tells of fire; but only in 1745 and 1746 did the printed
Examen of De la Serre and the Pensées philosophiques of Diderot begin
to build up in France the modern school of critical and philosophic
deism. When in 1751 the Abbé Gauchat began his series of Lettres
critiques, he set out by attacking Voltaire's Lettres philosophiques,
Diderot's Pensées philosophiques, the anonymous Discours sur la vie
heureuse (1748), Les Moeurs [980] (1748), and Pope's Essay on Man;
taking up in his second volume the Lettres Persanes of Montesquieu
(1721), and other sets of Lettres written in imitation of them. In the
third volume he has nothing more aggressive of Voltaire's to deal with
than La Henriade, the Mahomet, and some of his fugitive pieces. And
the Bishop of Puy, writing in 1754 his La Dévotion conciliée avec
l'esprit, could say to the faithful: "You live in an age fertile in
pretended esprits forts, who, too weak nevertheless to attack in front
an invincible religion, skirmish lightly around it, and in default of
the reasons they lack, employ raillery." [981] The chivalrous bishop
knew perfectly well that had a serious attack been published author
and publisher would have been sent if possible to the Bastille, if
not to the scaffold. But his evidence is explicit. There is here no
recognition of any literary bombardment, though there was certainly
an abundance of unbelief. [982]
Buckle has probably mistaken the meaning of the summing up of some
previous writer to the effect that up to 1750 or a few years later
the political opposition to the Court was religious, in the sense of
ecclesiastical or sectarian (Jansenist), [983] and that it afterwards
turned to matters of public administration. [984] It would be truer
to say that the early Lettres philosophiques, the reading of which
later made the boy Lafayette a republican at nine, were a polemic for
political and social freedom, and as such a more direct criticism of
the French administrative system than Voltaire ever penned afterwards,
save in the Voix du Sage et du Peuple (1750). In point of fact, as
will be shown below, only some twenty scattered freethinking works had
appeared in French up to 1745, almost none of them directly attacking
Christian beliefs; and, despite the above-noted sallies of Voltaire,
Condorcet comes to the general conclusion that it was the hardihood
of Rousseau's deism in the "Confession of a Savoyard Vicar" in his
Émile (1762) that spurred Voltaire to new activity. [985] This is
perhaps not quite certain; there is some reason to believe that his
"Sermon of the Fifty," his "first frontal attack on Christianity,"
[986] was written a year before; but in any case that and other
productions of his at once left Rousseau far in the rear. Even now he
had no fixed purpose of continuous warfare against so powerful and
cruel an enemy as the Church, which in 1757 had actually procured
an edict pronouncing the death penalty against all writers of works
attacking religion; though the fall of the Jesuits in 1764 raised new
hopes of freedom. But when, after that hopeful episode, there began
a new movement of Jansenist fanaticism; and when, after the age of
religious savagery had seemed to be over, there began a new series
of religious atrocities in France itself (1762-66), he girded on a
sword that was not to be laid down till his death.
Even so late as 1768, in his last letter to Damilaville (8 fév.),
Voltaire expresses a revulsion against the aggressive freethought
propaganda of the time which is either one of his epistolary
stratagems or the expression of a nervous reaction in a time of
protracted bad health. "Mes chagrins redoublent," he writes, "par
la quantité incroyable d'écrits contre la religion chrétienne, qui
se succédent aussi rapidement en Hollande que les gazettes et les
journaux." His enemies have the barbarism to impute to him, at his
age, "une partie de ces extravagances composées par de jeunes gens
et par des moines défroqués." His immediate ground for chagrin may
have been the fact that this outbreak of anti-Christian literature
was likely to thwart him in the campaign he was then making to
secure justice to the Sirven family as he had already vindicated
that of Calas. Sirven barely missed the fate of the latter.
The misconception of Buckle, above discussed, has been widely
shared even among students. Thus Lord Morley, discussing the
"Creed of the Savoyard Vicar" in Rousseau's Émile (1762), writes
that "Souls weary of the fierce mockeries that had so long been
flying like fiery shafts against the far Jehovah of the Hebrews,
and the silent Christ of the later doctors and dignitaries,"
may well have turned to it with ardour (Rousseau, ed. 1886, ii,
266). He further speaks of the "superiority of the sceptical parts
of the Savoyard Vicar's profession ... over the biting mockeries
which Voltaire had made the fashionable method of assault"
(p. 294). No specifications are offered, and the chronology is
seen to be astray. The only mockeries which Voltaire could be said
to have made fashionable before 1760 were those of his Lettres
philosophiques, his Mondain, his Défense de Milord Bolingbroke,
and his philosophically humorous tales, as Candide, Zadig,
Micromégas, etc.: all his distinctive attacks on Judaism and
Christianity were yet to come. [The Abbé Guyon, in his L'Oracle
des nouveaux philosophes (Berne, 1759-60, 2 tom.), proclaims an
attack on doctrines taught "dans les livres de nos beaux esprits"
(Avert. p. xi); but he specifies only denials of (1) revelation,
(2) immortality, and (3) the Biblical account of man's creation;
and he is largely occupied with Diderot's Pensées philosophiques,
though his book is written at Voltaire. The second volume is
devoted to Candide and the Précis of Ecclesiastes and the Song
of Solomon--not very fierce performances.] Lord Morley, as it
happens, does not make this chronological mistake in his earlier
work on Voltaire, where he rightly represents him as beginning his
attack on "the Infamous" after he had settled at Ferney (1758). His
"fierce mockeries" begin at the earliest in 1761. The mistake may
have arisen through taking as true the fictitious date of 1736
for the writing of the Examen Important de Milord Bolingbroke. It
belongs to 1767. Buckle's error, it may be noted, is repeated by
so careful a student as Dr. Redlich, Local Government in England,
Eng. tr. 1903, i, 64.
10. The rest of Voltaire's long life was a sleepless and dexterous
warfare, by all manner of literary stratagem, [987] facilitated by
vast literary fame and ample acquired wealth, against what he called
"the Infamous"--the Church and the creed which he found still swift to
slay for mere variation of belief, and slow to let any good thing be
wrought for the bettering of men's lives. Of his prodigious literary
performance it is probably within the truth to say that in respect
of rapid influence on the general intelligence of the world it has
never been equalled by any one man's writing; and that, whatever its
measure of error and of personal misdirection, its broader influence
was invariably for peace on earth, for tolerance among men, and for
reason in all things. His faults were many, and some were serious; but
to no other man of his age, save possibly Beccaria, can be attributed
so much beneficent accomplishment. He can perhaps better be estimated
as a force than as a man. So great was the area of his literary
energy that he is inevitably inadequate at many points. Lessing
could successfully impugn him in drama; Diderot in metaphysic;
Gibbon in history; and it is noteworthy that all of these men [988]
at different times criticized him with asperity, testing him by the
given item of performance, and disparaging his personality. Yet in
his own way he was a greater power than any of them; and his range,
as distinguished from his depth, outgoes theirs. In sum, he was the
greatest mental fighter of his age, perhaps of any age: in that aspect
he is a "power-house" not to be matched in human history; and his
polemic is mainly for good. It was a distinguished English academic
who declared that "civilization owes more to Voltaire than to all the
Fathers of the Church put together." [989] If in a literary way he
hated his personal foes, much more did he hate cruelty and bigotry;
and it was his work more than any that made impossible a repetition in
Europe of such clerical crimes as the hanging of the Protestant pastor,
La Rochette; the execution of the Protestant, Calas, on an unproved
and absurdly false charge; the torture of his widow and children;
the beheading of the lad La Barre for ill-proved blasphemy. [990]
As against his many humanities, there is not to be charged on him one
act of public malevolence. In his relations with his fickle admirer,
Frederick the Great, and with others of his fellow-thinkers, he and
they painfully brought home to freethinkers the lesson that for them
as for all men there is a personal art of life that has to be learned,
over and above the rectification of opinion. But he and the others
wrought immensely towards that liberation alike from unreason and
from bondage which must precede any great improvement of human things.
Voltaire's constant burden was that religion was not only untrue
but pernicious, and when he was not dramatically showing this of
Christianity, as in his poem La Ligue (1723), he was saying it by
implication in such plays as Zaïre (1732) and Mahomet (1742), dealing
with the fanaticism of Islam; while in the Essai sur les moeurs (1756),
really a broad survey of general history, and in the Siècle de Louis
XIV, he applied the method of Montesquieu, with pungent criticism
thrown in. Later, he added to his output direct criticisms of the
Christian books, as in the Examen important de Milord Bolingbroke
(1767), and the Recherches historiques sur le Christianisme (? 1769),
continuing all his former lines of activity. Meanwhile, with the aid of
his companion the Marquise du Chatelet, an accomplished mathematician,
he had done much to popularize the physics of Newton and discredit
the scientific fallacies of the system of Descartes; all the while
preaching a Newtonian but rather agnostic deism. This is the purport
of his Philosophe Ignorant, his longest philosophical essay. [991]
The destruction of Lisbon by the earthquake of 1755 seems to have
shaken him in his deistic faith, since the upshot of his poem on that
subject is to leave the moral government of the universe an absolute
enigma; and in the later Candide (1759) he attacks theistic optimism
with his matchless ridicule. Indeed, as early as 1749, in his Traité
de la Métaphysique, written for the Marquise du Chatelet, he reaches
virtually pantheistic positions in defence of the God-idea, declaring
with Spinoza that deity can be neither good nor bad. But, like so
many professed pantheists, he relapsed, and he never accepted the
atheistic view; on the contrary, we find him arguing absurdly enough,
in his Homily on Atheism (1765), that atheism had been the destruction
of morality in Rome; [992] on the publication of d'Holbach's System
of Nature in 1770 he threw off an article Dieu: réponse au Système
de la Nature, where he argued on the old deistic lines; and his tale
of Jenni; or, the Sage and the Atheist (1775), is a polemic on the
same theme. By this time the inconsistent deism of his youth had
itself been discredited among the more thoroughgoing freethinkers;
and for years it had been said in one section of literary society
that Voltaire after all "is a bigot; he is a deist!" [993]
But for freethinkers of all schools the supreme service of Voltaire lay
in his twofold triumph over the spirit of religious persecution. He
had contrived at once to make it hateful and to make it ridiculous;
and it is a great theistic poet of our own day that has pronounced
his blade the
sharpest, shrewdest steel that ever stabbed
To death Imposture through the armour joints. [994]
To be perfect, the tribute should have noted that he hated cruelty
much more than imposture; and such is the note of the whole movement of
which his name was the oriflamme. Voltaire personally was at once the
most pugnacious and the most forgiving of men. Few of the Christians
who hated him had so often as he fulfilled their own precept of
returning good for evil to enemies; and none excelled him in hearty
philanthropy. It is notable that most of the humanitarian ideas of
the latter half of the century--the demand for the reform of criminal
treatment, the denunciation of war and slavery, the insistence on
good government, and toleration of all creeds--are more definitely
associated with the freethinking than with any religious party,
excepting perhaps the laudable but uninfluential sect of Quakers.
The character of Voltaire is still the subject of chronic debate;
but the old deadlock of laudation and abuse is being solved
in a critical recognition of him as a man of genius flawed by
the instability which genius so commonly involves. Carlyle
(that model of serenity), while dwelling on his perpetual
perturbations, half-humanely suggests that we should think of
him as one constantly hag-ridden by maladies of many kinds; and
this recognition is really even more important in Voltaire's
case than in Carlyle's own. He was "a bundle of nerves," and
the clear light of his sympathetic intelligence was often blown
aside by gusts of passion--often enough excusably. But while his
temperamental weaknesses exposed him at times to humiliation,
and often to sarcasm; and while his compelled resort to constant
stratagem made him more prone to trickery than his admirers can
well care to think him, the balance of his character is abundantly
on the side of generosity and humanity.
One of the most unjustifiable of recent attacks upon him
(one regrets to have to say it) came from the pen of the late
Prof. Churton Collins. In his book on Voltaire, Montesquieu,
and Rousseau in England (1908) that critic gives in the main
an unbiassed account of Voltaire's English experience; but at
one point (p. 39) he plunges into a violent impeachment with
the slightest possible justification. He in effect adopts the
old allegation of Ruffhead, the biographer of Pope--a statement
repeated by Johnson--that Voltaire used his acquaintance with Pope
and Bolingbroke to play the spy on them, conveying information
to Walpole, for which he was rewarded. The whole story collapses
upon critical examination. Ruffhead's story is, in brief, that
Pope purposely lied to Voltaire as to the authorship of certain
published letters attacking Walpole. They were by Bolingbroke;
but Pope, questioned by Voltaire, said they were his own, begging
him to keep the fact absolutely secret. Next day at court everyone
was speaking of the letters as Pope's; and Pope accordingly knew
that Voltaire was a traitor. For this tale there is absolutely
nothing but hearsay evidence. Ruffhead, as Johnson declared, knew
nothing of Pope, and simply used Warburton's material. The one
quasi-confirmation cited by Mr. Collins is Bolingbroke's letter
to Swift (May 18, 1727) asking him to "insinuate" that Walpole's
only ground for ascribing the letters to Bolingbroke "is the
authority of one of his spies ... who reports, not what he hears
... but what he guesses." This is an absolute contradiction of the
Pope story, at two points. It refers to a guess at Bolingbroke,
and tells of no citation from Pope. To put it as confirming the
charge is to exhibit a complete failure of judgment.
After this irrational argument, Mr. Collins offers a worse. He
admits (p. 43) that Voltaire always remained on friendly
terms with both Pope and Bolingbroke; but adds that this "can
scarcely be alleged as a proof of his innocence, for neither
Pope nor Bolingbroke would, for such an offence, have been
likely to quarrel with a man in a position so peculiar as that
of Voltaire. His flattery was pleasant...." Such an argument is
worse than nugatory. That Bolingbroke spoke ill in private of
Voltaire on general grounds counts for nothing. He did the same of
Pope and of nearly all his friends. Mr. Collins further accuses
Voltaire of baseness, falsehood, and hypocrisy on the mere score
of his habit of extravagant flattery. This was notoriously the
French mode in that age; but it had been just as much the mode
in seventeenth-century England, from the Jacobean translators of
the Bible to Dryden--to name no others. And Mr. Collins in effect
charges systematic hypocrisy upon both Pope and Bolingbroke.
Other stories of Ruffhead's against Voltaire are equally improbable
and ill-vouched--as Mr. Collins incidentally admits, though he
forgets the admission. They all come from Warburton, himself
convicted of double-dealing with Pope; and they finally stand for
the hatred of Frenchmen which was so common in eighteenth-century
England, and is apparently not yet quite extinct. Those who would
have a sane, searching, and competent estimate of Voltaire,
leaning humanely to the side of goodwill, should turn to the
Voltaire of M. Champion. A brief estimate was attempted by the
present writer in the R. P. A. Annual for 1912.
11. It is difficult to realize how far the mere demand for
tolerance which sounds from Voltaire's plays and poems before he
has begun to assail credences was a signal and an inspiration to new
thinkers. Certain it is that the principle of toleration, passed on
by Holland to England, was regarded by the orthodox priesthood in
France as the abomination of desolation, and resisted by them with all
their power. But the contagion was unquenchable. It was presumably in
Holland that there were printed in 1738 the two volumes of Lettres sur
la religion essentielle à l'homme, distinguée de ce qui n'en est que
l'accessoire, by Marie Huber, a Genevese lady living in Lyons; also the
two following parts (1739), replying to criticisms on the earlier. In
its gentle way, the book stands very distinctly for the "natural" and
ethical principle in religion, denying that the deity demands from men
either service or worship, or that he can be wronged by their deeds,
or that he can punish them eternally for their sins. This was one
of the first French fruits, after Voltaire, of the English deistic
influence; [995] and it is difficult to understand how the authoress
escaped molestation. Perhaps the memory of the persecution inflicted
on the mystic Madame Guyon withheld the hand of power. As it was,
four Protestant theologians opened fire on her, regarding her doctrine
as hostile to Christianity. One pastor wrote from Geneva, one from
Amsterdam, and two professors from Zurich--the two last in Latin. [996]
From about 1746 onwards, the rationalist movement in eighteenth-century
France rapidly widens and deepens. The number of rationalistic
writers, despite the press laws which in that age inflicted the
indignity of imprisonment on half the men of letters, increased
from decade to decade, and the rising prestige of the philosophes
in connection with the Encyclopédie (1751-72) gave new courage to
writers and printers. At once the ecclesiastical powers saw in the
Encyclopédie a dangerous enemy; and in January, 1752, the Sorbonne
condemned a thesis "To the celestial Jerusalem," by the Abbé de
Prades. It had at first (1751) been received with official applause,
but was found on study to breathe the spirit of the new work, [997]
to which the Abbé had contributed, and whose editor, Diderot, was his
friend. Sooth to say, it contained not a little matter calculated
to act as a solvent of faith. Under the form of a vindication of
orthodox Catholicism, it negated alike Descartes and Leibnitz; and
declared that the science of Newton and the Dutch physiologists was
a better defence of religion than the theses of Clarke, Descartes,
Cudworth, and Malebranche, which made for materialism. The handling,
too, of the question of natural versus revealed religion, in which
"theism" is declared to be superior to all religions si unam excipias
veram, "if you except the one true," might well arouse distrust in a
vigilant Catholic reader. [998] The whole argument savours far more
of the scientific comparative method than was natural in the work
of an eighteenth-century seminarist; and the principle, "Either we
are ocular witnesses of the facts or we know them only by hearsay,"
[999] was plainly as dangerous to the Christian creed as to any
other. According to Naigeon, [1000] the treatise was wholly the work of
de Prades and another Abbé, Yvon; [1001] but it remains probable that
Diderot inspired not a little of the reasoning; and the clericals,
bent on putting down the Encyclopédie, professed to have discovered
that he was the real author of the thesis. Either this belief or a
desire to strike at the Encyclopédie through one of its collaborators
[1002] was the motive of the absurdly belated censure. Such a fiasco
evoked much derision from the philosophic party, particularly from
Voltaire; and the Sorbonne compassed a new revenge. Soon after came
the formal condemnation of the first two volumes of the Encyclopédie,
of which the second had just appeared. [1003]
D'Argenson, watching in his vigilant retirement the course of things
on all hands, sees in the episode a new and dangerous development,
"the establishment of a veritable inquisition in France, of which the
Jesuits joyfully take charge," though he repeatedly remarks also on
the eagerness of the Jansenists to outgo the Jesuits. [1004] But soon
the publication of the Encyclopédie is resumed; and in 1753 D'Argenson
contentedly notes the official bestowal of "tacit permissions to print
secretly" books which could not obtain formal authorization. The
permission had been given first by the President Malesherbes; but
even when that official lost the king's confidence the practice was
continued by the lieutenant of police. [1005] Despite the staggering
blow of the suppression of the Encyclopédie, the philosophes speedily
triumphed. So great was the discontent even at court that soon (1752)
Madame de Pompadour and some of the ministry invited D'Alembert and
Diderot to resume their work, "observing a necessary reserve in all
things touching religion and authority." Madame de Pompadour was in
fact, as D'Alembert said at her death, "in her heart one of ours,"
as was D'Argenson. But D'Alembert, in a long private conference with
D'Argenson, insisted that they must write in freedom like the English
and the Prussians, or not at all. Already there was talk of suppressing
the philosophic works of Condillac, which a few years before had gone
uncondemned; and freedom must be preserved at any cost. "I acquiesce,"
writes the ex-Minister, "in these arguments." [1006]
Curiously enough, the freethinking Fontenelle, who for a time (the
dates are elusive) held the office of royal censor, was more rigorous
than other officials who had not his reputation for heterodoxy. One
day he refused to pass a certain manuscript, and the author put the
challenge: "You, sir, who have published the Histoire des Oracles,
refuse me this?" "If I had been the censor of the Oracles," replied
Fontenelle, "I should not have passed it." [1007] And he had cause for
his caution. The unlucky Tercier, who, engrossed in "foreign affairs,"
had authorized the publication of the De l'Esprit of Helvétius,
was compelled to resign the censorship, and severely rebuked by
the Paris Parlement. [1008] But the culture-history of the period,
like the political, was one of ups and downs. From time to time the
philosophic party had friends at court, as in the persons of the
Marquis D'Argenson, Malesherbes, and the Duc de Choiseul, of whom
the last-named engineered the suppression of the Jesuits. [1009]
Then there were checks to the forward movement in the press, as when,
in 1770, Choiseul was forced to retire on the advent of Madame Du
Barry. The output of freethinking books is after that year visibly
curtailed. But nothing could arrest the forward movement of opinion.
12. A new era of propaganda and struggle had visibly begun. In
the earlier part of the century freethought had been disseminated
largely by way of manuscripts [1010] and reprints of foreign books in
translation; but from the middle onwards, despite denunciations and
prohibitions, new books multiply. To the policy of tacit toleration
imposed by Malesherbes a violent end was temporarily put in 1757,
when the Jesuits obtained a proclamation of the death penalty
against all writers who should attack the Christian religion,
directly or indirectly. It was doubtless under the menace of this
decree that Deslandes, before dying in 1757, caused to be drawn
up by two notaries an acte by which he disavowed and denounced not
only his Grands hommes morts en plaisantant but all his other works,
whether printed or in MS., in which he had "laid down principles
or sustained sentiments contrary to the spirit of religion." [1011]
But in 1764, on the suppression of the Jesuits, there was a vigorous
resumption of propaganda. "There are books," writes Voltaire in 1765,
"of which forty years ago one would not have trusted the manuscript
to one's friends, and of which there are now published six editions
in eighteen months." [1012] Voltaire single-handed produced a
library; and d'Holbach is credited with at least a dozen freethinking
treatises, every one remarkable in its day. But there were many more
combatants. The reputation of Voltaire has overshadowed even that of
his leading contemporaries, and theirs and his have further obscured
that of the lesser men; but a list of miscellaneous freethinking works
by French writers during the century, up to the Revolution, will serve
to show how general was the activity after 1750. It will be seen that
very little was published in France in the period in which English
deism was most fecund. A noticeable activity of publication begins
about 1745. But it was when the long period of chronic warfare ended
for France with the peace of Paris (1763); when she had lost India
and North America; when she had suppressed the Jesuit order (1764);
and when England had in the main turned from intellectual interests to
the pursuit of empire and the development of manufacturing industry,
that the released French intelligence [1013] turned with irresistible
energy to the rational criticism of established opinions. The following
table is thus symbolic of the whole century's development:--
1700. Lettre d'Hypocrate à Damagète, attributed to the Comte de
Boulainvilliers. (Cologne.) Rep. in Bibliothèque Volante,
Amsterdam, 1700.
1700. [Claude Gilbert.] Histoire de Calejava, ou de l'isle des hommes
raisonnables, avec le parallèle de leur morale et du
Christianisme. Dijon. Suppressed by the author: only one copy
known to have escaped.
1704. [Gueudeville.] Dialogues de M. le Baron de la Houtan et d'un
sauvage dans l'Amérique. (Amsterdam.)
1709. Lettre sur l'enthousiasme (Fr. tr. of Shaftesbury, by Samson).
La Haye.
1710. [Tyssot de Patot, Symon.] Voyages et Avantures de Jaques Massé.
(Bourdeaux.)
1710. Essai sur l'usage de la raillerie (Fr. tr. of Shaftesbury, by
Van Effen). La Haye.
1712. [Deslandes, A. F. B.] Reflexions sur les grands hommes qui sont
morts en plaisantant. [1014] (Amsterdam.)
1714. Discours sur la liberté de penser [French tr. of Collins's
Discourse of Freethinking], traduit de l'anglois et augmenté
d'une Lettre d'un Médecin Arabe. (Tr. by Henri Scheurléer and
Jean Rousset.) [Rep. 1717.] [1015]
1719. [Vroes.] La Vie et l'Esprit de M. Benoît de Spinoza.
1720. Same work rep. under the double title: De tribus impostoribus:
Des trois imposteurs. Frankfort on Main.
1724. [Lévesque de Burigny.] Histoire de la philosophie payenne. La
Haye, 2 tom.
1730. [Bernard, J.-F.] Dialogues critiques et philosophiques. "Par
l'Abbé de Charte-Livry." (Amsterdam.) Rep. 1735.
1731. Réfutation des erreurs de Benoît de Spinoza, par Fénelon, le P.
Laury, benédictin, et Boulainvilliers, avec la vie de Spinoza
... par Colerus, etc. (collected and published by Lenglet du
Fresnoy). Bruxelles (really Amsterdam). The treatise of
Boulainvilliers is really a popular exposition.
1732. Re-issue of Deslandes's Réflexions.
1734. [Voltaire.] Lettres philosophiques. 4 edd. within the year.
[Condemned to be burned. Publisher imprisoned.]
1734. [Longue, Louis-Pierre de.] Les Princesses Malabares, ou le
Célibat Philosophique. Deistic allegory. [Condemned to be
burned.]
1737. Marquis D'Argens. La Philosophie du Bon Sens. (Berlin: 8th
edition, Dresden, 1754.)
1738. ----, Lettres Juives. 6 tom. (Berlin.)
1738. [Marie Huber.] Lettres sur la religion essentielle à l'homme,
distingue de ce qui n'en est que l'accessoire. 2 tom.
(Nominally London.) Rep. 1739 and 1756.
1739. ----, Suite to the foregoing, "servant de réponse aux
objections," etc. Also Suite de la troisième partie.
1741. [Deslandes.] Pigmalion, ou la Statue animée. [Condemned to be
burnt by Parlement of Dijon, 1742.]
1741. ----, De la Certitude des connaissances humaines ... traduit de
l'anglais par F. A. D. L. V.
1743. Nouvelles libertés de penser. Amsterdam. [Edited by Dumarsais.
Contains the first print of Fontenelle's Traité de la Liberté,
Dumarsais's short essays Le Philosophe and De la raison,
Mirabaud's Sentimens des philosophes sur la nature de l'âme,
etc.]
1745. [Lieut. De la Serre.] La vraie religion traduite de l'Ecriture
Sainte, par permission de Jean, Luc, Marc, et Matthieu.
(Nominally Trévoux, "aux dépens des Pères de la Société de
Jésus.") [Appeared later as Examen, etc. Condemned to be burnt
by Parlement of Paris.]
This book was republished in the same year with "demontrée par"
substituted in the title for "traduite de," and purporting to be
"traduit de l'Anglais de Gilbert Burnet," with the imprint "Londres,
G. Cock, 1745." It appeared again in 1761 as Examen de la religion
dont on cherche l'éclaircissement de bonne foi. Attribué à M. de
Saint-Evremont, traduit, etc., with the same imprint. It again bore
the latter title when reprinted in 1763, and again in the Évangile
de la Raison in 1764. Voltaire in 1763 declared it to be the work
of Dumarsais, pronouncing it to be assuredly not in the style of
Saint-Evremond (Grimm, iv, 85-88; Voltaire, Lettre à Damilaville,
6 déc. 1763), adding "mais il est fort tronqué et détestablement
imprimé." This is true of the reprints in the Évangile de la Raison
(1764, etc.), of one of which the present writer possesses a copy to
which there has been appended in MS. a long section which had been
lacking. The Évangile as a whole purports to be "Ouvrage posthume
de M. D. M......y." [1016] But its first volume includes four pieces
of Voltaire's, and his abridged Testament de Jean Meslier. Further,
De la Serre is recorded to have claimed the authorship in writing on
the eve of his death. Barbier, Dict. des Anonymes, 2e éd, No. 6158. He
is said to have been hanged as a spy at Maestricht, April 11, 1748.
1745. [La Mettrie.] Histoire naturelle de l'âme. [Condemned to be
burnt, 1746.] Rep. as Traité de l'âme.
1746. [Diderot.] Pensées philosophiques. [Condemned to be burnt.]
1748. [P. Estève.] L'Origine de l'Univers expliquée par un principe
de matière. (Berlin.)
1748. [Benoît de Maillet.] Telliamed, ou Entretiens d'un philosophe
indien avec un missionaire français. (Printed privately, 1735;
rep. 1755.)
1748. [La Mettrie.] L'Homme Machine.
1750. Nouvelles libertés de penser. Rep.
1751. [Mirabaud, J. B. de.] Le Monde, son origine et son antiquité.
[Edited by the Abbé Le Maserier (who contributed the preface
and the third part) and Dumarsais.]
1751. De Prades. Sorbonne Thesis.
1752. [Gouvest, J. H. Maubert de.] Lettres Iroquoises. "Irocopolis,
chez les Vénérables." 2 tom. (Rep. 1769 as Lettres
cherakésiennes.)
1752. [Génard, F.] L'École de l'homme, ou Parallèle des Portraits du
siècle et des tableaux de l'écriture sainte. [1017] Amsterdam,
3 tom. [Author imprisoned.]
1753. [Baume-Desdossat, Canon of Avignon.] La Christiade. [Book
suppressed. Author fined.] [1018]
1753. Maupertuis. Système de la nature.
1753. Astruc, Jean. Conjectures sur les mémoires originaux dont il
parait que Moïse s'est servi pour composer le livre de la
Genèse. Bruxelles.
1754. Prémontval, A. I. le Guay de. Le Diogène de d'Alembert, ou
Pensées libres sur l'homme. Berlin. (2nd ed. enlarged, 1755.)
1754. Burigny, J. L. Théologie payenne. 2 tom. (New ed. of his
Histoire de la philosophie, 1724.)
1754. [Diderot.] Pensées sur l'interpretation de la nature.
1754. Beausobre, L. de (the younger). Pyrrhonisme du Sage. Berlin.
(Burned by Paris Parlement.)
1755. Recherches philosophiques sur la liberté de l'homme. Trans. of
Collins's Philosophical Inquiry concerning Human Liberty.
1755. [Voltaire.] Poème Sur la loi naturelle.
1755. Analyse raisonnée de Bayle. 4 tom. [By the Abbé de Marsy.
Suppressed. [1019] Continued in 1773, in 4 new vols., by
Robinet.]
1755. Morelly. Code de la Nature.
1755. [Deleyre.] Analyse de la philosophie de Bacon. (Largely an
exposition of Deleyre's own views.)
1757. Prémontval. Vues Philosophiques. (Amsterdam.)
In this year--apparently after one of vigilant repression--was
pronounced the death penalty against all writers attacking
religion. Hence a general suspension of publication. In 1764 the
Jesuits were suppressed, and the policy of censorship was soon
paralysed.
1758. Helvétius. De l'Esprit. (Authorized. Then condemned.)
1759. [Voltaire.] Candide. ("Genève.")
1759. Translation of Hume's Natural History of Religion and
Philosophical Essays. (By Mérian.) Amsterdam.
1761. [N.-A. Boulanger. [1020]] Recherches sur l'origine du
despotisme oriental, et des superstitions. "Ouvrage posthume de
Mr. D. J. D. P. E. C."
1761. Rep. of De la Serre's La vraie religion as Examen de la
religion, etc.
1761. [D'Holbach.] Le Christianisme dévoilé. [Imprint: "Londres,
1756." Really printed at Nancy in 1761. Wrongly attributed to
Boulanger and to Damilaville.] Rep. 1767 and 1777.
Grimm (Corr. inédite, 1829, p. 194) speaks in 1763 of this book
in his notice of Boulanger, remarking that the title was apparently
meant to suggest the author of L'Antiquité dévoilée, but that it was
obviously by another hand. The Antiquité, in fact, was the concluding
section of Boulanger's posthumous Despotisme Oriental (1761), and
was not published till 1766. Grimm professed ignorance as to the
authorship, but must have known it, as did Voltaire, who by way of
mystification ascribed the book to Damilaville. See Barbier.
1762. Rousseau. Émile. [Publicly burned at Paris and at Geneva.
Condemned by the Sorbonne.]
1762. Robinet, J. B. De la nature. Vol. i. (Vol. ii in 1764; iii and
iv in 1766.)
1763. [Voltaire.] Saül. Genève.
1763. ---- Dialogue entre un Caloyer et un honnête homme.
1763. Rep. of De la Serres' Examen.
1764. Discours sur la liberté de penser. (Rep. of trans. of Collins.)
1764. [Voltaire.] Dictionnaire philosophique portatif. [1021] [First
form of the Dictionnaire philosophique. Burned in 1765.]
1764. Lettres secrètes de M. de Voltaire. [Holland. Collection of
tracts made by Robinet, against Voltaire's will.]
1764. [Voltaire.] Mélanges, 3 tom. Genève.
1764. [Dulaurens, Abbé H. J.] L'Arétin.
1764. L'Évangile de la Raison. Ouvrage posthume de M. D. M----y. [Ed.
by Abbé Dulaurens; containing the Testament de Jean Meslier
(greatly abridged and adapted by Voltaire); Voltaire's
Catéchisme de l'honnête homme, Sermon des cinquante, etc.; the
Examen de la religion, attribué à M. de St. Evremond;
Rousseau's Vicaire Savoyard, from Émile; Dumarsais's Analyse de
la religion chrétienne, etc. Rep. 1765 and 1766.]
1765. Recueil Nécessaire, avec L'Évangile de la Raison, 2 tom.
Rep. of parts of the Évangile. Rep. 1767, [1022] 1768, with
Voltaire's Examen important de Milord Bolingbroke substituted for that
of De la Serre (attribué a M. de St. Evremond), and with a revised
set of extracts from Meslier.
1765. Castillon, J. L. Essai de philosophic morale.
1766. Boulanger, N. A. L'Antiquité dévoilée. [1023] 3 tom. [Recast by
d'Holbach. Life of author by Diderot.]
1766. Voyage de Robertson aux terres australes. Traduit sur le
Manuscrit Anglois. Amsterdam.
Barbier (Dict. des Ouvr. Anon., 2e éd. iii, 437) has a note
concerning this Voyage which pleasantly illustrates the strategy that
went on in the issue of freethinking books. An ex-censor of the period,
he tells us, wrote a note on the original edition pointing out that
it contains (pp. 145-54) a tirade against "Parlements." This passage
was "suppressed to obtain permission to bring the book into France,"
and a new passage attacking the Encyclopédistes under the name of
Pansophistes was inserted at another point. The ex-censor had a copy
of an edition of 1767, in 12mo, better printed than the first and on
better paper. In this, at p. 87, line 30, begins the attack on the
Encyclopédistes, which continues to p. 93.
If this is accurate, there has taken place a double mystification. I
possess a copy dated 1767, in 12mo, in which no page has so many as 30
lines, and in which there has been no typographical change whatever
in pp. 87-93, where there is no mention of Encyclopédistes. But
pp. 145-54 are clearly a typographical substitution, in different
type, with fewer lines to the page. Here there is a narrative about
the Pansophistes of the imaginary "Australie"; but while it begins
with enigmatic satire it ends by praising them for bringing about a
great intellectual and social reform.
If the censure was induced to pass the book as it is in this edition by
this insertion, it was either very heedless or very indulgent. There is
a sweeping attack on the papacy (pp. 91-99), and another on the Jesuits
(pp. 100-102); and it leans a good deal towards republicanism. But on
a balance, though clearly anti-clerical, it is rather socio-political
than freethinking in its criticism. The words on the title-page,
traduit sur le manuscrit anglois, are of course pure mystification. It
is a romance of the Utopia school, and criticizes English conditions
as well as French.
1766. De Prades. Abrégé de l'histoire ecclésiastique de Fleury.
(Berlin.) Pref. by Frederick the Great. (Rep. 1767.)
1766. [Burigny.] Examen critique des Apologistes de la religion
chrétienne. Published (by Naigeon ?) under the name of Fréret.
[1024] [Twice rep. in 1767. Condemned to be burnt, 1770.]
1766. [Voltaire.] Le philosophe ignorant.
1766. [Abbé Millot.] Histoire philosophique de l'homme. [Naturalistic
theory of human beginnings.]
1767. Castillon. Almanach Philosophique.
1767. Doutes sur la religion (attributed to Gueroult de Pival), suivi
de l'Analyse du Traité théologique-politique de Spinoza (by
Boulainvilliers). [Rep. with additions in 1792 under the title
Doutes sur les religions révélées, adressés à Voltaire, par
Émilie du Chatelet. Ouvrage posthume.]
1767. [Dulaurens.] L'antipapisme révélé.
1767. Lettre de Thrasybule à Leucippe. [Published under the name of
Fréret (d. 1749). Written or edited by Naigeon. [1025]]
1767. [D'Holbach.] L'Imposture sacerdotale, ou Recueil de pièces sur
la clergé, traduites de l'anglois.
1767. [Voltaire.] Collection des lettres sur les miracles.
1767. ---- Examen important de milord Bolingbroke.
1767. Marmontel. Bélisaire. (Censured by the Sorbonne.)
1767. [Damilaville.] L'honnêtetê théologique.
1767. Reprint of Le Christianisme dévoilé. [Condemned to be burnt,
1768 and 1770.]
1767. [Voltaire.] Questions sur les Miracles. Par un Proposant.
1767. Seconde partie of the Recherches sur l'origine du despotisme.
1768. Meister, J. H. De l'origine des principes religieux.
Author banished from his native town, Zurich, "in perpetuity"
(decree rescinded in 1772), and book publicly burned there by the
hangman. [1026] Meister published a modified edition at Zurich in
1769. Orig. rep. in the Recueil Philosophique, 1770.
1768. Catalogue raisonné des esprits forts, depuis le curé
Rabelais jusqu'au curé Meslier.
1768. [D'Holbach.] La Contagion sacrée, ou histoire naturelle de
la superstition. [Condemned to be burnt, 1770.]
1768. ---- Lettres philosophiques sur l'origine des préjugés,
etc., traduites de l'anglois (of Toland).
1768. ---- Lettres à Eugénie, ou preservatif contre les
préjugés. 2 tom.
1768. ---- Théologie Portative. "Par l'abbé Bernier." [Also
burnt, 1776.]
1768. Traité des trois Imposteurs. (See 1719 and 1720.) Rep.
1775, 1777, 1793.
1768. Naigeon, J. A. Le militaire philosophe. [Adaptation of a
MS. The last chapter by d'Holbach.]
1768. D'Argens. OEuvres complètes, 24 tom. Berlin.
1768. Examen des prophéties qui servent de fondement à la
religion chrétienne (tr. from Collins by d'Holbach).
1768. Robinet. Considérations philosophiques.
1769-1780. L'Évangile du jour. 18 tom. Series of pieces, chiefly by
Voltaire.
1769. [Diderot. Also ascribed to Castillon.] Histoire générale
des dogmes et opinions philosophiques ... tirée du
Dictionnaire encyclopédique. Londres, 3 tom.
1769. [Mirabaud.] Opinions des anciens sur les juifs, and
Réflexions impartiales sur l'Évangile [1027] (rep. in 1777
as Examen critique du Nouveau Testament).
1769. [Isoard-Delisle, otherwise Delisle de Sales.] De la
Philosophie de la Nature. 6 tom. [Author imprisoned. Book
condemned to be burnt, 1775.]
1769. [Seguier de Saint-Brisson.] Traité des Droits de Génie,
dans lequel on examine si la connoissance de la verité est
avantageuse aux hommes et possible au philosophe.
"Carolsrouhe," 1769. [A strictly naturalistic-ethical
theory of society. Contains an attack on the doctrine of
Rousseau, in Émile, on the usefulness of religious error.]
1769. L'enfer détruit, traduit de l'Anglois [by d'Holbach.]
1770. [D'Holbach.] Histoire critique de Jésus Christ.
1770. ---- Examen critique de la vie et des ouvrages de Saint
Paul (tr. from English of Peter Annet).
1770. ---- Essai sur les Préjugés. (Not by Dumarsais, whose name
on the title-page is a mystification.)
1770. ---- Système de la Nature. 2 tom.
1770. Recueil Philosophique. 2 tom. [Edited by Naigeon. Contains
a rep. of Dumarsais's essays Le Philosophe and De la
raison, an extract from Tindal, essays by Vauvenargues and
Fréret (or Fontenelle), three by Mirabaud, Diderot's
Pensées sur la religion, several essays by d'Holbach,
Meister's De l'origine des principes religieux, etc.]
1770. Analyse de Bayle. Rep. of the four vols. of De Marsy, with
four more by Robinet.
1770. L'Esprit du Judaisme. (Trans. from Collins by d'Holbach.)
1770. Raynal (with Diderot and others). Histoire philosophique
des deux Indes. Containing atheistic arguments by Diderot.
[Suppressed, 1772.]
In this year there were condemned to be burned seven freethinking
works: d'Holbach's Contagion Sacrée; Voltaire's Dieu et les Hommes; the
French translation (undated) of Woolston's Discourses on the Miracles
of Jesus Christ; Fréret's (really Burigny's) Examen critique de la
religion chrétienne; an Examen impartial des principales religions
du monde, undated; d'Holbach's Christianisme dévoilé; and his Système
de la Nature.
1772. Le Bon Sens. [Adaptation from Meslier by Diderot and
d'Holbach. Condemned to be burnt, 1774.]
1772. De la nature humaine. [Trans. of Hobbes by d'Holbach.]
1773. Helvétius. De l'Homme. Ouvrage posthume. 2 tom. [Condemned to
be burnt, Jan. 10, 1774. Rep. 1775.]
1773. Carra, J. L. Système de la Raison, ou le prophète philosophe.
1773. [Burigny (?).] Recherches sur les miracles.
1773. [D'Holbach.] La politique naturelle. 2 tom.
1773. ----. Système Sociale. 3 tom.
1774. Abauzit, F. Réflexions impartiales sur les Évangiles, suivies
d'un essai sur l'Apocalypse. (Abauzit died 1767.)
1774. [Condorcet.] Lettres d'un Théologien. (Atheistic.)
1774. New edition of Theologie Portative. 2 tom. [Condemned to be
burnt.]
1775. [Voltaire.] Histoire de Jenni, ou Le Sage et l'Athée. [Attack
on atheism.]
1776. [D'Holbach.] La morale universelle. 3 tom.
1776. ---- Ethocratie.
1777. Examen critique du Nouveau Testament, "par M. Fréret." [Not
by Fréret. A rep. of Mirabaud's Réflexions impartiales sur
l'Évangile, 1769, which was probably written about 1750,
being replied to in the Réfutation du Celse moderne of the
Abbé Gautier, 1752 and 1765.]
1777. Carra. Esprit de la morale et de la philosophie.
1778. Barthez, P. J. Nouveaux éléments de la science de l'homme.
1779. Vie d'Apollonius de Tyane par Philostrate, avec les
commentaires donnés en anglois par Charles Blount sur les
deux premiers livres. [Trans. by J.-F. Salvemini de
Castillon, Berlin.] Amsterdam, 4 tom. (In addition to
Blount's pref. and notes there is a scoffing dedication to
Pope Clement XIV.)
1780. Duvernet, Abbé Th. J. L'Intolérance religieuse.
1780. Clootz, Anacharsis. La Certitude des preuves du Mahométisme.
[Reply by way of parody to Bergier's work, noted on p. 250.]
1780. Second ed. of Raynal's Histoire philosophique, with
additions. (Condemned to be burnt, 1781.)
1781. Maréchal, Sylvain. Le nouveau Lucrèce.
1783. Brissot de Warville. Lettres philosophiques sur S. Paul.
1784. Doray de Longrais. Faustin, ou le siècle philosophique.
1784. Pougens, M. C. J. de. Récréations de philosophie et de
morale.
1785. Maréchal. Livre échappé au Déluge. [Author dismissed.]
1787. Marquis Pastoret. Zoroastre, Confucius, et Mahomet.
1788. Meister. De la morale naturelle.
1788. Pastoret. Moïse considéré comme legislateur et comme
moraliste.
1788. Maréchal. Almanach des honnêtes gens. [Author imprisoned;
book burnt.]
1789. Volney. Les Ruines des Empires.
1789. Duvernet, Abbé. Les Dévotions de Madame de Betzamooth.
1789. Cerutti (Jesuit Father). Bréviaire Philosophique, ou Histoire
du Judaisme, du Christianisme, et du Déisme.
1791-3. Naigeon. Dictionnaire de la philosophie ancienne et moderne.
1795. Dupuis. De l'origine de tous les Cultes. 5 tom.
1795. La Fable de Christ dévoilée; ou Lettre du muphti de
Constantinople à Jean Ange Braschy, muphti de Rome.
1797. Rep. of d'Holbach's Contagion sacrée, with notes by Lemaire.
1798. Maréchal. Pensées libres sur les prêtres. A Rome, et se
trouve à Paris, chez les Marchands de Nouveautés. L'An Ier de
la Raison, et VI de la République Française.
13. It will be noted that after 1770--coincidently, indeed, with a
renewed restraint upon the press--there is a notable falling-off in the
freethinking output. Rationalism had now permeated educated France;
and, for different but analogous reasons, the stress of discussion
gradually shifted as it had done in England. France in 1760 stood to
the religious problem somewhat as England did in 1730, repeating the
deistic evolution with a difference. By that time England was committed
to the new paths of imperialism and commercialism; whereas France,
thrown back on the life of ideas and on her own politico-economic
problems, went on producing the abundant propaganda we have noted,
and, alongside of it, an independent propaganda of economics and
politics. At the end of 1767, the leading French diarist [1028] notes
that "there is formed at Paris a new sect, called the Economists,"
and names its leading personages, Quesnay, Mirabeau the elder, the
Abbé Baudeau, Mercier de la Rivière, and Turgot. These developed the
doctrine of agricultural or "real" production which so stimulated
and influenced Adam Smith. But immediately afterwards [1029] the
diarist notes a rival sect, the school of Forbonnais, who founded
mainly on the importance of commerce and manufactures. Each "sect"
had its journal. The intellectual ferment had inevitably fructified
thought upon economic as upon historical, religious, and scientific
problems; and there was in operation a fourfold movement, all tending
to make possible the immense disintegration of the State which began
in 1789. After the Economists came the "Patriots," who directed
towards the actual political machine the spirit of investigation and
reform. And the whole effective movement is not unplausibly to be
dated from the fall of the Jesuits in 1764. [1030] Inevitably the
forces interacted: Montesquieu and Rousseau alike dealt with both
the religious and the social issues; d'Holbach in his first polemic,
the Christianisme dévoilé, opens the stern impeachment of kings and
rulers which he develops so powerfully in the Essai sur les Préjugés;
and the Encyclopédie sent its search-rays over all the fields of
inquiry. But of the manifold work done by the French intellect in
the second and third generations of the eighteenth century, the
most copious and the most widely influential body of writings that
can be put under one category is that of which we have above made a
chronological conspectus.
Of these works the merit is of course very various; but the total
effect of the propaganda was formidable, and some of the treatises
are extremely effective. The Examen critique of Burigny, [1031] for
instance, which quickly won a wide circulation when printed, is one of
the most telling attacks thus far made on the Christian system, raising
as it does most of the issues fought over by modern criticism. It
tells indeed of a whole generation of private investigation and
debate; and the Abbé Bergier, assuming it to be the work of Fréret,
in whose name it is published, avows that its author "has written
it in the same style as his academic dissertations: he has spread
over it the same erudition; he seems to have read everything and
mastered everything." [1032] Perhaps not the least effective part
of the book is the chapter which asks: "Are men more perfect since
the coming of Jesus Christ?"; and it is here that the clerical reply
is most feeble. The critic cites the claims made by apologists as
to the betterment of life by Christianity, and then contrasts with
those claims the thousand-and-one lamentations by Christian writers
over the utter badness of all the life around them. Bergier in reply
follows the tactic habitually employed in the same difficulty to-day:
he ignores the fact that his own apologists have been claiming a vast
betterment, and contends that religion is not to be blamed for the
evils it condemns. Not by such furtive sophistry could the Church
turn the attack, which, as Bergier bitterly observes, was being made
by Voltaire in a new book every year.
As always, the weaker side of the critical propaganda is its effort at
reconstruction. As in England, so in France, the faithful accused the
critics of "pulling down without building up," when in point of fact
their chief error was to build up--that is, to rewrite the history
of human thought--before they had the required materials, or had even
mastered those which existed. Thus Voltaire and Rousseau alike framed
à priori syntheses of the origins of religion and society. But there
were closer thinkers than they in the rationalistic ranks. Fontenelle's
essay De l'origine des fables, though not wholly exempt from error,
admittedly lays aright the foundations of mythology and hierology;
and De Brosses in his treatise Du Culte des dieux fétiches (1760)
does a similar service on the side of anthropology. Meister's essay
De l'origine des principes religieux is full of insight and breadth;
and, despite some errors due to the backwardness of anthropology,
essentially scientific in temper and standpoint. His later essay,
De la morale naturelle, shows the same independence and fineness of
speculation, seeming indeed to tell of a character which missed fame
by reason of over-delicacy of fibre and lack of the driving force
which marked the foremost men of that tempestuous time. Vauvenargues's
essay De la suffisance de la religion naturelle is no less clinching,
granted its deism. So, on the side of philosophy, Mirabaud, who was
secretary of the Académie from 1742 to 1755, handles the problem of the
relation of deism to ethics--if the posthumous essays in the Recueil
philosophique be indeed his--in a much more philosophic fashion than
does Voltaire, arguing unanswerably for the ultimate self-dependence
of morals. The Lettre de Thrasybule à Leucippe, ascribed to Fréret,
again, is a notably skilful attack on theism.
14. One of the most remarkable of the company in some respects is
Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger (1722-1759), of whom Diderot gives a vivid
account in a sketch prefixed to the posthumous L'Antiquité dévoilée par
ses usages (1766). At the Collège de Beauvais, Boulanger was so little
stimulated by his scholastic teachers that they looked for nothing from
him in his maturity. When, however, at the age of seventeen, he began
to study mathematics and architecture, his faculties began to develop;
and the life, first of a military engineer in 1743-44, and later
in the service of the notable department of Roads and Bridges--the
most efficient of all State services under Louis XV--made him an
independent and energetic thinker. The chronic spectacle of the corvée,
the forced labour of peasants on the roads, moved him to indignation;
but he sought peace in manifold study, the engineer's contact with
nature arousing in him all manner of speculations, geological and
sociological. Seeking for historic light, he mastered Latin, which he
had failed to do at school, reading widely and voraciously; and when
the Latins failed to yield him the light he craved he systematically
mastered Greek, reading the Greeks as hungrily and with as little
satisfaction. Then he turned indefatigably to Hebrew, Syriac, and
Arabic, gleaning at best verbal clues which at length he wrought into
a large, loose, imaginative yet immensely erudite schema of ancient
social evolution, in which the physicist's pioneer study of the
structure and development of the globe controls the anthropologist's
guesswork as to the beginnings of human society. The whole is set forth
in the bulky posthumous work Recherches sur l'origine du despotisme
oriental (1761), and in the further treatise L'antiquité dévoilée
(3 tom. 1766), which is but the concluding section of the first-named.
It all yields nothing to modern science; the unwearying research
is all carried on, as it were, in the dark; and the sleepless
brain of the pioneer can but weave webs of impermanent speculation
from masses of unsifted and unmanageable material. Powers which
to-day, on a prepared ground of ascertained science, might yield
the greatest results, were wasted in a gigantic effort to build a
social science out of the chaos of undeciphered antiquity, natural
and human. But the man is nonetheless morally memorable. Diderot
pictures him with a head Socratically ugly, simple and innocent of
life, gentle though vivacious, reading Rabbinical Hebrew in his
walks on the high roads, suffering all his life from "domestic
persecution," "little contradictory though infinitely learned,"
and capable of passing in a moment, on the stimulus of a new idea,
into a state of profound and entranced absorption. Diderot is always
enthusiastically generous in praise; but in reading and reviewing
Boulanger's work we can hardly refuse assent to his friend's claim
that "if ever man has shown in his career the true characters of
genius, it was he." His immense research was all compassed in a life
of thirty-seven years, occupied throughout in an active profession;
and the diction in which he sets forth his imaginative construction
of the past reveals a constant intensity of thought rarely combined
with scholarly knowledge. But it was an age of concentrated energy,
carrying in its womb the Revolution. The perusal of Boulanger is a
sufficient safeguard against the long-cherished hallucination that
the French freethinking of his age was but a sparkle of raillery.
Even among some rationalists, however, who are content to take
hearsay report on these matters, there appears still to subsist a
notion that the main body of the French freethinkers of the eighteenth
century were mere scoffers, proceeding upon no basis of knowledge and
with no concern for research. Such an opinion is possible only to
those who have not examined their work. To say nothing more of the
effort of Boulanger, an erudition much more exact than Voltaire's
and a deeper insight than his and Rousseau's into the causation of
primitive religion inspires the writings of men like Burigny and
Fréret on the one hand, and Fontenelle and Meister on the other. The
philosophic reach of Diderot, one of the most convinced opponents
of the ruling religion, was recognized by Goethe. And no critic of
the "philosophes" handled more uncompromisingly than did Dumarsais
[1033] the vanity of the assumption that a man became a philosopher
by merely setting himself in opposition to orthodox belief. Dumarsais,
long scholastically famous for his youthful treatise Des Tropes, lived
up to his standard, whatever some of the more eminent philosophes may
have done, being found eminently lovable by pietists who knew him;
while for D'Alembert he was "the La Fontaine of the philosophers"
in virtue of his lucid simplicity of style. [1034] The Analyse de la
religion chrétienne printed under his name in some editions of the
Évangile de la Raison has been pronounced supposititious. It seems
to be the work of at least two hands [1035] of different degrees
of instruction; but, apart from some errors due to one of these,
it does him no discredit, being a vigorous criticism of Scriptural
contradictions and anomalies, such as a "Jansenist atheist" might
well compose, though it makes the usual profession of deistic belief.
Later polemic works, inspired by those above noticed, reproduce some
of their arguments, but with an advance in literary skill, as in the
anonymous Bon Sens given forth (1772) by Diderot and d'Holbach as the
work of Jean Meslier, but really an independent compilation, embodying
other arguments with his, and putting the whole with a concision
and brilliancy to which he could make no approach. Prémontval, a
bad writer, [1036] contrives nonetheless to say many pungent things
of a deistic order in his Diogène de d'Alembert, and, following
Marie Huber, puts forward the formula of religion versus theology,
which has done so much duty in the nineteenth century. Of the whole
literature it is not too much to say that it covered cogently most
of the important grounds of latter-day debate, from the questions of
revelation and the doctrine of torments to the bases of ethics and the
problem of deity; and it would be hard to show that the nineteenth
century has handled the main issues with more sincerity, lucidity,
or logic than were attained by Frenchmen in the eighteenth. To-day, no
doubt, in the light of a century and a-half of scientific, historic,
and philosophic accumulation, the rationalist case is put with more
profundity and accuracy by many writers than it could be in the
eighteenth century. But we have to weigh the freethinkers of that
age against their opponents, and the French performers against those
of other countries, to make a fair estimate. When this is done their
credit is safe. When German and other writers say with Tholuck that
"unbelief entered Germany not by the weapons of mere wit and scoffing
as in France; it grounded itself on learned research," [1037] they
merely prove their ignorance of French culture-history. An abundance
of learned research in France preceded the triumphant campaign
of Voltaire, who did most of the witty writing on the subject; and
whose light artillery was to the last reinforced by the heavier guns
of d'Holbach. It is only in the analysis of the historical problem
by the newer tests of anthropology and hierology, and in the light
of latterly discovered documents, that our generation has made much
advance on the strenuous pioneers of the age of Voltaire. And even
in the field of anthropology the sound thinking of Fontenelle and
De Brosses long preceded any equally valid work by rationalists in
Germany; though Spencer of Cambridge had preceded them in his work
of constructive orthodoxy.
15. Though the bibliographers claim to have traced the authorship in
most cases, such works were in the first instance generally published
anonymously, [1038] as were those of Voltaire, d'Holbach, and the
leading freethinkers; and the clerical policy of suppression had
the result of leaving them generally unanswered, save in anonymous
writings, when they nevertheless got into private circulation. It was
generally impolitic that an official answer should appear to a book
which was officially held not to exist; so that the orthodox defence
was long confined mainly to the classic performances of Pascal,
Bossuet, Huet, Fénelon, and some outsiders such as the Protestant
Abbadie, who settled first in Berlin and later in London. The polemic
of every one of the writers named is a work of ability; even that of
Abbadie (Traité de la Vérité de la religion chrétienne, 1684), though
now little known, was in its day much esteemed. [1039] In the age of
Louis XIV those classic answers to unbelief were by believers held
to be conclusive; and thus far the French defence was certainly more
thorough and philosophical than the English. But French freethought,
which in Herbert's day had given the lead to English, now drew new
energy from the English growth; and the general arguments of the
old apologists did not explicitly meet the new attack. Their books
having been written to meet the mostly unpublished objections of
previous generations, the Church through its chosen policy had the
air of utter inability to confute the newer propaganda, though some
apologetic treatises of fair power did appear, in particular those
of the Abbé Bergier. [1040] By the avowal of a Christian historian,
"So low had the talents of the once illustrious Church of France fallen
that in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when Christianity
itself was assailed, not one champion of note appeared in its ranks;
and when the convocation of the clergy, in 1770, published their
famous anathema against the dangers of unbelief, and offered rewards
for the best essays in defence of the Christian faith, the productions
called forth were so despicable that they sensibly injured the cause
of religion." [1041]
The freethinking attack, in fact, had now become overwhelming. After
the suppression of the Jesuit Order (1764) [1042] the press grew
practically more and more free; and when, after the accession of Pope
Clement XIV (1769), the freethinking books circulated with less and
less restraint, Bergier extended his attack on deism, and deists and
clerics joined in answering the atheistic Système de la Nature of
d'Holbach. But by this time the deistic books were legion, and the
political battle over the taxation of Church property had become
the more pressing problem, especially seeing that the mass of the
people remained conforming. The manifesto of the clergy in 1770 was
accompanied by an address to the king "On the evil results of liberty
of thought and printing," following up a previous appeal by the pope;
[1043] and in consideration of the donation by the clergy of sixteen
million livres the Government recommended the Parlement of Paris
to proceed against impious books. There seems accordingly to have
been some hindrance to publication for a year or two; but in 1772
appeared the Bon Sens of d'Holbach and Diderot; and there was no
further serious check, the Jesuits being disbanded by the pope in 1773.
The English view that French orthodoxy made a "bad" defence
to the freethinking attack as compared with what was done in
England (Sir J. F. Stephen, Horæ Sabbaticæ, 2nd. ser. p. 281;
Alison, as cited above) proceeds on some misconception of the
circumstances, which, as has been shown, were substantially
different in the two countries. Could the English clergy have
resorted to official suppression of deistic literature, they
too would doubtless have done so. Swift and Berkeley bitterly
desired to. But the view that the English defence was relatively
"good," and that Butler's in particular was decisive, is also,
as we have seen, fallacious. In Sir Leslie Stephen's analysis,
as apart from his preamble, the orthodox defence is exhibited as
generally weak, and often absurd. Nothing could be more futile
than the three "Pastoral Letters" published by the Bishop of
London (1728, 1730, 1731) as counterblasts to the freethinking
books of this period. In France the defence began sooner, and
was more profound and even more methodical. Pascal at least went
deeper, and Bossuet (in his Discours sur l'Histoire Universelle)
more widely, into certain inward and outward problems of the
controversy than did any of the English apologists; Huet produced,
in his Demonstratio Evangelica, one of the most methodical of all
the defensive treatises of the time; Abbadie, as before noted,
gave great satisfaction, and certainly grappled zealously with
Hobbes and Spinoza; Allix, though no great dialectician, gave a
lead to English apologetics against the deists (above, p. 97),
and was even adapted by Paley; and Fénelon, though his Traité de
l'Existence et des Attributs de Dieu (1712) and Lettres sur la
Religion (1716) are not very powerful processes of reasoning,
contributed through his reproduced conversations (1710) with
Ramsay a set of arguments at least as plausible as anything on
the English side, and, what is more notable, marked by an amenity
which almost no English apologist attained.
The ground had been thus very fully covered by the defence in
France before the main battle in England began; and when a new
French campaign commenced with Voltaire, the defence against
that incomparable attack, so far as the system allowed of any,
was probably as good as it could have been made in England, save
insofar as the Protestants gave up modern miracles, while most of
the Catholics claimed them for their Church. Counterblasts such
as the essay of Linguet, Le Fanatisme des Philosophes (1764),
were but general indictments of rationalism; and other apologetic
treatises, as we saw, handled only the most prominent books on
the other side. It should be noted, too, that as late as 1764
the police made it almost impossible to obtain in Paris works
of Voltaire recently printed in Holland (Grimm, vii, 123, 133,
434). But, as Paley admitted with reference to Gibbon ("Who can
refute a sneer?"), the new attack was in any case very hard to
meet. A sneer is not hard to refute when it is unfounded, inasmuch
as it implies a proposition, which can be rebutted or turned by
another sneer. The Anglican Church had been well enough pleased by
the polemic sneers of Swift and Berkeley; but the other side had
the heavier guns, and of the mass of defences produced in England
nothing remains save in the neat compilation of Paley. Alison's
whole avowal might equally well apply to anything produced in
England as against Voltaire. The skeptical line of argument for
faith had been already employed by Huet and Pascal and Fénelon,
with visibly small success; Berkeley had achieved nothing with
it as against English deism; and Butler had no such effect in his
day in England as to induce French Catholics to use him. (He does
not appear to have been translated into French till 1821.)
An Oratorian priest, again, translated the anti-deistic essays
of President Forbes; and the Pensées Theologiques relatives aux
erreurs du temps of Père Jamin (1768; 4e édit. 1773) were thought
worthy of being translated into German, poor as they were. With
their empty affirmation of authority they suggest so much blank
cartridge, which could avail nothing with thinking men; and here
doubtless the English defence makes a better impression. But,
on the other hand, Voltaire circulated widely in England, and was
no better answered there than in France. His attack was, in truth,
at many points peculiarly baffling, were it only by its inimitable
wit. The English replies to Spinoza, again, were as entirely
inefficient or deficient as the French; the only intelligent
English answers to Hume on Miracles (the replies on other issues
were of no account) made use of the French investigations of the
Jansenist miracles; and the replies to Gibbon were in general
ignominious failures.
Finally, though the deeper reasonings of Diderot were over the
heads alike of the French and the English clergy, the Système
de la Nature of d'Holbach was met skilfully enough at many
points by G. J. Holland (1772), who, though not a Frenchman,
wrote excellent French, and supplied for French readers a
very respectable rejoinder; [1044] whereas in England there was
practically none. In this case, of course, the defence was deistic;
as was that of Voltaire, who criticized d'Holbach as Bolingbroke
attacked Spinoza and Hobbes. But the Examen du Matérialisme of the
Abbé Bergier (1771), who was a member of the Academy of Sciences,
was at least as good as anything that could then have been done in
the Church of England; and the same may be said of his reply to
Fréret's (really Burigny's) Examen. It is certainly poor enough;
but Bishop Watson used some of its arguments for his reply to
Paine. Broadly speaking, as we have said, much more of French
than of English intelligence had been turned to the dispute
in the third quarter of the century. In England, political and
industrial discussion relieved the pressure on creed; in France,
before the Revolution, the whole habit of absolutism tended to
restrict discussion to questions of creed; and the attack would
in any case have had the best of it, because it embodied all
the critical forces hitherto available. The controversy thus
went much further than the pre-Humian issues raised in England;
and the English orthodoxy of the end of the century was, in
comparison, intellectually as weak as politically and socially it
was strong. In France, from the first, the greater intellectual
freedom in social intercourse, exemplified in the readiness of
women to declare themselves freethinkers (cp. Jamin, as cited,
ch. xix, § 1), would have made the task of the apologists harder
even had they been more competent.
16. Above the scattered band of minor combatants rises a group of
writers of special power, several of whom, without equalling Voltaire
in ubiquity of influence, rivalled him in intellectual power and
industry. The names of Diderot, D'Holbach, D'Alembert, Helvétius, and
Condorcet are among the first in literary France of the generation
before the Revolution; after them come Volney and Dupuis; and in
touch with the whole series stands the line of great mathematicians
and physicists (to which also belongs D'Alembert), Laplace, Lagrange,
Lalande, Delambre. When to these we add the names of Montesquieu,
Buffon, Chamfort, Rivarol, Vauvenargues; of the materialists La Mettrie
and Cabanis; of the philosophers Condillac and Destutt de Tracy; of
the historian Raynal; of the poet André Chénier; of the politicians
Turgot, Mirabeau, Danton, Desmoulins, Robespierre--all (save perhaps
Raynal) deists or else pantheists or atheists--it becomes clear that
the intelligence of France was predominantly rationalistic before
the Revolution, though the mass of the nation certainly was not.
It is necessary to deprecate Mr. Lecky's statement (Rationalism
in Europe, i, 176) that "Raynal has taken, with Diderot, a place
in French literature which is probably permanent"--an estimate as
far astray as the declaration on the same page that the English
deists are buried in "unbroken silence." Raynal's vogue in his
day was indeed immense (cp. Morley, Diderot, ch. xv); and Edmond
Scherer (Études sur la litt. du 18e Siècle, 1891, pp. 277-78) held
that Raynal's Histoire philosophique des deux Indes had had more
influence on the French Revolution than even Rousseau's Contrat
Social. But the book has long been discredited (cp. Scherer,
pp. 275-76). A biographical Dictionary of 1844 spoke of it as
"cet ouvrage ampoulé qu'on ne lit pas aujourd'hui." Although the
first edition (1770) passed the censure only by means of bribery,
and the second (1780) was publicly burned, and its author forced to
leave France, he was said to reject, in religion, "only the pope,
hell, and monks" (Scherer, p. 286); and most of the anti-religious
declamation in the first edition of the Histoire is said to be
from the pen of Diderot, who wrote it very much at random, at
Raynal's request.
No list of orthodox names remotely comparable with these can be drawn
from the literature of France, or indeed of any other country of that
time. Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), the one other pre-eminent
figure, though not an anti-Christian propagandist, is distinctly on
the side of deism. In the Contrat Social, [1045] writing with express
approbation of Hobbes, he declares that "the Christian law is at bottom
more injurious than useful to the sound constitution of the State"; and
even the famous Confession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar in the Émile is
anti-revelationist, and practically anti-clerical. He was accordingly
anathematized by the Sorbonne, which found in Émile nineteen heresies;
the book was seized and burned both at Paris and at Geneva within a few
weeks of its appearance, [1046] and the author decreed to be arrested;
even the Contrat Social was seized and its vendors imprisoned. All
the while he had maintained in Émile doctrines of the usefulness of
religious delusion and fanaticism. Still, although his temperamental
way of regarding things has a clear affinity with some later religious
philosophy of a more systematic sort, he undoubtedly made for
freethought as well as for the revolutionary spirit in general. Thus
the cause of Christianity stood almost denuded of intellectually
eminent adherents in the France of 1789; for even among the writers
who had dealt with public questions without discussing religion, or
who had criticized Rousseau and the philosophes--as the Abbés Mably,
Morellet, Millot--the tone was essentially rationalistic.
It has been justly enough argued, concerning Rousseau (see
below, p. 287), that the generation of the Revolution made him
its prophet in his own despite, and that had he lived twenty
years longer he would have been its vehement adversary. But this
does not alter the facts as to his influence. A great writer of
emotional genius, like Rousseau, inevitably impels men beyond the
range of his own ideals, as in recent times Ruskin and Tolstoy,
both anti-Socialists, have led thousands towards Socialism. In
his own generation and the next, Rousseau counted essentially for
criticism of the existing order; and it was the revolutionaries,
never the conservatives, who acclaimed him. De Tocqueville
(Hist. philos. du règne de Louis XV, 1849, i, 33) speaks of his
"impiété dogmatique." Martin du Theil, in his J. J. Rousseau
apologiste de la religion chrétienne (2e édit. 1840), makes out
his case by identifying emotional deism with Christianity, as did
Rousseau himself when he insisted that "the true Christianity
is only natural religion well explained." Rousseau's praise of
the gospel and of the character of Jesus was such as many deists
acquiesced in. Similar language, in the mouth of Matthew Arnold,
gave rather more offence to Gladstone, as a believing Christian,
than did the language of simple unbelief; and a recent Christian
polemist, at the close of a copious monograph, has repudiated the
association of Rousseau with the faith (see J. F. Nourrisson,
J. J. Rousseau et le Rousseauisme, 1903, p. 497 sq.). What
is true of him is that he was more religiously a theist than
Voltaire, whose impeachment of Providence in the poem on the
Earthquake of Lisbon he sought strenuously though not very
persuasively to refute in a letter to the author. But, with
all his manifold inconsistencies, which may be worked down
to the neurosis so painfully manifest in his life and in his
relations to his contemporaries, he never writes as a believer
in the dogmas of Christianity or in the principle of revelation;
and it was as a deist that he was recognized by his Christian
contemporaries. A demi-Christian is all that Michelet will call
him. His compatriot the Swiss pastor Roustan, located in London,
directed against him his Offrande aux Autels et à la Patrie, ou
Défense du Christianisme (1764), regarding him as an assailant. The
work of the Abbé Bergier, Le Déisme refuté par lui-même (1765,
and later), takes the form of letters addressed to Rousseau, and
is throughout an attack on his works, especially the Émile. When,
therefore, Buckle (1-vol. ed. p. 475) speaks of him as not having
attacked Christianity, and Lord Morley (Rousseau, ch. xiv) treats
him as creating a religious reaction against the deists, they do
not fully represent his influence on his time. As we have seen,
he stimulated Voltaire to new audacities by his example.
17. An interlude in the critical campaign, little noticed at the time,
developed importance a generation later. In 1753 Jean Astruc, doctor
of medicine, published after long hesitation his Conjectures on the
original documents which Moses seems to have used in composing the
book of Genesis. Only in respect of his flash of insight into the
composite structure of the Pentateuch was Astruc a freethinker. His
hesitation to publish was due to his fear that les pretendus esprits
forts might make a bad use of his work; and he was quite satisfied
that Moses was the author of the Pentateuch as it stands. The denial
of that authorship, implied in the criticisms of Hobbes and Spinoza,
he described as "the disease of the last century." This attitude may
explain the lack of interest in Astruc's work shown by the freethinkers
of the time. [1047] Nonetheless, by his perception of the clue given
by the narrative use of the two names Yahweh and Elohim in Genesis,
he laid a new foundation of the Higher Criticism of the Bible in modern
times, advancing alike on Spinoza and on Simon. For freethought he had
"builded better than he knew."
18. In the select Parisian arena of the Académie, the intellectual
movement of the age is as it were dramatized; and there more clearly
than in the literary record we can trace the struggle of opinions,
from the admission of Voltaire (1746) onwards. In the old days
the Académie had been rather the home of convention, royalism,
and orthodoxy than of ideas, though before Voltaire there were some
freethinking members of the lesser Académies, notably Boindin. [1048]
The admission of Montesquieu (1728), after much opposition from
the court, preludes a new era; and from the entrance of Voltaire,
fourteen years after his first attempt, [1049] the atmosphere begins
perceptibly to change. When, in 1727, the academician Bonamy had read
a memoir On the character and the paganism of the emperor Julian,
partly vindicating him against the aspersions of the Christian Fathers,
the Academy feared to print the paper, though its author was a devout
Catholic. [1050] When the Abbé La Bletterie, also orthodox, read to
the Academy portions of his Vie de Julien, the members were not now
scandalized, though the Abbé's Jansenism moved the King to veto his
nomination. So, when Blanchard in 1735 read a memoir on Les exorcismes
magiques there was much trepidation among the members, and again the
Secretary inserted merely an analysis, concluding with the words of
Philetas, "Believe and fear God; beware of questioning." [1051] Even
such a play of criticism as the challenging of the early history
of Rome by Lévesque de Pouilly (brother of Lévesque de Burigny)
in a dissertation before the Académie in 1722, roused the fears and
the resentment of the orthodox; the Abbé Sallier, in undertaking to
refute him, insinuated that he had shown a spirit which might be
dangerous to other beliefs; and whispers of atheism passed among
the academicians. [1052] Pouilly, who had been made a freethinker
by English contacts, went again to England later, and spent his last
years at Rheims. [1053] His thesis was much more powerfully sustained
in 1738 by Beaufort, in the famous dissertation Sur l'incertitude des
cinq premiers siècles de l'histoire romaine; but Beaufort was of a
refugee-Huguenot stock; his book was published, under his initials,
at Utrecht; and not till 1753 did the Académie award him a medal--on
the score of an earlier treatise. And in 1748 the Religio veterum
Persarum of the English Orientalist Hyde, published as long before
as 1700, found a vehement assailant within the Academy in the Abbé
Foucher, who saw danger in a favourable view of any heathen religion.
Yet even in the time of Louis XIV the Abbé Mongault, tutor of the son
of the Regent, and noted alike for his private freethinking and for
the rigid orthodoxy which he instilled into his pupil, treated the
historic subject of the divine honours rendered to Roman governors
with such latitude as to elicit from Fréret, in his éloge of Mongault,
the remark that the tutor had reserved to himself a liberty of thought
which he doubtless felt to be dangerous in a prince. [1054] And after
1750 the old order can be seen passing away. D'Argenson notes in his
diary in 1754: "I observe in the Académie de belles-lettres, of which
I am a member, that there begins to be a decided stir against the
priests. It began to show itself at the death of Boindin, to whom our
bigots refused a service at the Oratory and a public commemoration. Our
deist philosophers were shocked, and ever since, at each election,
they are on guard against the priests and the bigots. Nowhere is
this division so marked, and it begins to bear fruits." [1055] The
old statesman indicates his own sympathies by adding: "Why has a bad
name been made of the title of deist? It is that of those who have
true religion in their hearts, and who have abjured a superstition
that is destructive to the whole world." It was in this year that
D'Alembert, who took nearly as much pains to stay out as Voltaire
had done to enter, [1056] was elected a member; and with two leading
encyclopédistes in the forty, and a friendly abbé (Duclos) in the
secretaryship (1755), and another zealous freethinker, Lévesque de
Burigny, admitted in 1756, [1057] the fortunes of freethought were
visibly rising. Its influence was thrown on the side of the academic
orator Thomas, a sincere believer but a hater of all persecution,
and as such offensive to the Church party. [1058]
19. In 1759 there came a check. The Encyclopédie, which had been
allowed to resume publication after its first suppression in 1752,
was again stopped; and the battle between philosophes and fanatics,
dramatized for the time being in Palissot's comedy Les Philosophes
and in Voltaire's rejoinder to Fréron, L'Écossaise, came to be
fought out in the Academy itself. The poet Lefranc de Pompignan,
[1059] elected in 1759 without any opposition from the freethinkers,
had in his youth translated Pope's "Deist's Prayer," and had suffered
for it to the extent of being deprived by D'Aguesseau of his official
charge [1060] for six months. With such a past, with a keen concern
for status, and with a character that did not stick at tergiversation,
Pompignan saw fit to signalize his election by making his discours
de réception (March, 1760) a violent attack on the whole philosophic
school, which, in his conclusion, he declared to be undermining
"equally the throne and the altar." The academicians heard him
out in perfect silence, leaving it to the few pietists among the
audience to applaud; but as soon as the reports reached Ferney there
began the vengeance of Voltaire. First came a leaflet of stinging
sentences, each beginning with Quand: "When one has translated
and even exaggerated the 'Deist's Prayer' composed by Pope ...,"
and so on. The maddened Pompignan addressed a fatuous memorial to
the King (who notoriously hated the philosophes, and had assented
only under petticoat influence to Voltaire's election [1061]); and,
presuming to print it without the usual official sanction, suffered
at the hands of Malesherbes the blow of having the printer's plant
smashed. Other combatants entered the fray. Voltaire's leaflet "les
quand" was followed by "les si, les pour, les qui, les quoi, les car,
les ah!"--by him or others--and the master-mocker produced in swift
succession three satires in verse, [1062] all accompanied by murderous
prose annotations. The speedy result was Pompignan's retirement into
provincial life. He could not face the merciless hail of rejoinders;
and when at his death, twenty-five years later, the Abbé Maury had
to pronounce his éloge, the mention of his famous humiliation was
hardly tempered by compassion. [1063]
20. Voltaire could not compass, as he for a time schemed, the election
of Diderot; but other philosophes of less note entered from time
to time; [1064] Marmontel was elected in 1763; and when in 1764
the Academy's prize for poetry was given to Chamfort for a piece
which savoured of what were then called "the detestable principles
of Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Helvétius," and in 1768 its prize for
eloquence went to the same writer, the society as a whole had acquired
a certain character for impiety. [1065] In 1767 there had occurred
the famous ecclesiastical explosion over Marmontel's philosophic
romance Bélisaire, a performance in which it is somewhat difficult
to-day to detect any exciting quality. It was by a chapter in praise
of toleration that the "universal and mediocre Marmontel" [1066]
secured from the Sorbonne the finest advertisement ever given to a
work of fiction, the ecclesiastics of the old school being still too
thoroughly steeped in the past to realize that a gospel of persecution
was a bad warcry for a religion that was being more and more put on the
defensive. Only an angry fear before the rising flood of unlicensed
literature, combining with the long-baffled desire to strike some
blow at freethinking, could have moved the Sorbonne to select for
censure the duly licensed work [1067] of a popular academician and
novelist; and it should be remembered that it was at a time of great
activity in the unlicensed production of freethinking literature
that the attack was made. The blow recoiled signally. The book
was of course promptly translated into all the languages of Europe,
selling by tens of thousands; [1068] and two sovereigns took occasion
to give it their express approval. These were the Empress Catherine
(who caused the book to be translated by members of her court while
she was making a tour of her empire, she herself taking a chapter),
and the Empress Maria-Theresa. From Catherine, herself a freethinker,
the approbation might have been expected; but the known orthodoxy
and austerity of Maria-Theresa made her support the more telling. In
France a small literary tempest raged for a year. Marmontel published
his correspondence with the syndic of the Sorbonne and with Voltaire;
and in all there appeared some dozen documents pro and con, among
them an anonymous satire by Turgot, Les xxxvii verités opposées aux
xxxvii impiétés de Bélisaire, "Par un Bachelier Ubiquiste," [1069]
which, with the contributions of Voltaire, gave the victim very much
the best of the battle.
21. Alongside of the more strictly literary or humanist movement,
too, there went on one of a scientific kind, which divided into two
lines, a speculative and a practical. On the former the freelance
philosopher Julien Offray la Mettrie gave a powerful initial push by
his materialistic theses, in which a medical knowledge that for the
time was advanced is applied with a very keen if unsystematic reasoning
faculty to the primary problem of mind and body; and others after
him continued the impulse. La Mettrie produced his Natural History
of the Mind in 1745; [1070] and in 1746 appeared the Essay on the
Origin of Human Knowledge of the Abbé Condillac, both essentially
rationalistic and anti-theological works, though differing in their
psychological positions, Condillac being a non-materialist, though
a strong upholder of "sensism." La Mettrie followed up his doctrine
with the more definitely materialistic but less heedfully planned
works, L'Homme Plante and L'Homme Machine (1748), the second of which,
published at Leyden [1071] and wickedly dedicated to the pious Baron
von Haller, was burned by order of the magistrates, its author being
at the same time expelled from Holland. Both books are remarkable
for their originality of thought, biological and ethical. Though
La Mettrie professed to think the "greatest degree of probability"
was in favour of the existence of a personal God, [1072] his other
writings gave small support to the hypothesis; and even in putting
it he rejects any inference as to worship. And he goes on to quote
very placidly an atheist who insists that only an atheistic world can
attain to happiness. It is notable that he, the typical materialist of
his age, seems to have been one of its kindliest men, by the consent
of all who knew him, [1073] though heedless in his life to the point
of ending it by eating a monstrous meal out of bravado.
The conventional denunciation of La Mettrie (endorsed by Lord
Morley, Voltaire, p. 122) proceeds ostensibly upon those of his
writings in which he discussed sexual questions with absolute
scientific freedom. He, however, insisted that his theoretic
discussion had nothing whatever to do with his practice; and there
is no evidence that he lived otherwise than as most men did in his
age, and ours. Still, the severe censure passed on him by Diderot
(Essai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron, ed. 1782, ii, 22-24)
seems to convict him of at least levity of character. Voltaire
several times holds the same tone. But Diderot writes so angrily
that his verdict incurs suspicion.
As Lange notes, there has been much loose generalization as to
the place and bearing of La Mettrie in the history of French
thought. Hettner, who apparently had not thought it worth while
to read him, has ascribed his mental movement to the influence
of Diderot's Pensées philosophiques (1746), whereas it had
begun in his own Histoire naturelle de l'âme, published a year
before. La Mettrie's originality and influence in general have been
underestimated as a result of the hostility set up by disparagement
of his character. The idea of a fundamental unity of type in
nature--an idea underlying all the successive steps of Lamarck,
Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Goethe, and others, towards the complete
conception of evolution--is set forth by him in L'Homme Plante in
1748, the year in which appeared De Maillet's Telliamed. Buffon
follows in time as in thought, only beginning his great work
in 1749; Maupertuis, with his pseudonymous dissertation on the
Universal system of Nature, applies La Mettrie's conception in
1751; and Diderot's Pensées sur l'interprétation de la nature,
stimulated by Maupertuis, appeared only in 1754. La Mettrie
proceeded from the classification of Linnæus, but did not
there find his idea. In the words of Lange, "these forgotten
writings are in nowise so empty and superficial as is commonly
assumed." Gesch. des Materialismus, i, 328-29. Lange seems to
have been the first to make a judicial study of La Mettrie's work,
as distinguished from the scandals about his character.
22. A more general influence, naturally, attached to the
simple concrete handling of scientific problems. The interest
in such questions, noticeable in England at the Restoration
and radiating thence, is seen widely diffused in France after
the publication of Fontenelle's Entretiens, and thenceforward it
rapidly strengthens. Barren theological disputations set men not
merely against theology, but upon the study of Nature, where real
knowledge was visibly possible. To a certain extent the study took
openly heretical lines. The Abbé Lenglet du Fresnoy, who was four
times imprisoned in the Bastille, supplied material of which D'Argens
made much use, tending to overthrow the Biblical chronology and to
discredit the story of the Flood. [1074] Benoît de Maillet (1656-1738),
who had been for fifteen years inspector of the French establishments
in Egypt and Barbary, left for posthumous publication (1748) a work
of which the first title was an anagram of his name, Telliamed, ou
Entretiens d'un philosophe indien avec un missionaire français. Of
this treatise the thesis is that the shell deposits in the Alps and
elsewhere showed the sea to have been where land now was; and that the
rocks were gradually deposited in their different kinds in the fashion
in which even now are being formed mud, sand, and shingle. De Maillet
had thus anticipated the central conception of modern geology, albeit
retaining many traditional delusions. His abstention from publication
during his lifetime testifies to his sense of the danger he underwent,
the treatise having been printed by him only in 1735, at the age of
seventy-nine; and not till ten years after his death was it given to
the world, with "a preface and dedication so worded as, in case of
necessity, to give the printer a fair chance of falling back on the
excuse that the work was intended for a mere jeu d'esprit." [1075]
The thesis was adopted, indeed plagiarized, [1076] by Mirabaud in
his Le Monde, son origine et son antiquité (1751). Strangely enough,
Voltaire refused to be convinced, and offered amazing suggestions
as to the possible deposit of shells by pilgrims. [1077] It is not
unlikely that it was Voltaire's opposition rather than any orthodox
argumentation that retarded in France the acceptance of an evolutionary
view of the origin of the earth and of life. It probably had a more
practical effect on scientific thought in England [1078]--at least
as regards geology: its speculations on the modification of species,
which loosely but noticeably anticipate some of the inferences of
Darwin, found no acceptance anywhere till Lamarck. In the opinion
of Huxley, the speculations of Robinet, in the next generation, "are
rather behind than in advance of those of De Maillet"; [1079] and it
may be added that the former, with his pet theory that all Nature
is "animated," and that the stars and planets have the faculty of
reproducing themselves like animals, wandered as far from sound bases
as De Maillet ever did. The very form of De Maillet's work, indeed,
was not favourable to its serious acceptance; and in his case, as in
those of so many pioneers of new ideas, errors and extravagances and
oversights in regard to matters of detail went to justify "practical"
men in dismissing novel speculations. Needless to say, the common run
of scientific men remained largely under the influence of religious
presuppositions in science even when they had turned their backs
on the Church. Nonetheless, on all sides the study of natural fact
began to play its part in breaking down the dominion of creed. Even
in hidebound Protestant Switzerland, the sheer ennui of Puritanism is
seen driving the descendants of the Huguenot refugees to the physical
sciences for an interest and an occupation, before any freethinking
can safely be avowed; and in France, as Buckle has shown in abundant
detail, the study of the physical sciences became for many years
before the Revolution almost a fashionable mania. And at the start
the Church had contrived that such study should rank as unbelief,
and so make unbelievers.
When Buffon [1080] in 1749-50 published his Histoire Naturelle,
the delight which was given to most readers by its finished style
was paralleled by the wrath which its Théorie de la Terre aroused
among the clergy. After much discussion Buffon received early in 1751
from the Sorbonne an official letter specifying as reprehensible in
his book fourteen propositions which he was invited to retract. He
stoically obeyed in a declaration to the effect that he had "no
intention to contradict the text of Scripture," and that he believed
"most firmly all there related about the creation," adding: "I abandon
everything in my book respecting the formation of the earth." [1081]
Still he was attacked as an unbeliever by the Bishop of Auxerre in that
prelate's pastoral against the thesis of de Prades. [1082] During the
rest of his life he outwardly conformed to religious usage, but all
men knew that in his heart he believed what he had written; and the
memory of the affront that the Church had thus put upon so honoured
a student helped to identify her cause no less with ignorance than
with insolence and oppression. For all such insults, and for the long
roll of her cruelties, the Church was soon to pay a tremendous penalty.
23. But science, like theology, had its schisms, and the rationalizing
camp had its own strifes. Maupertuis, for instance, is remembered
mainly as one of the victims of the mockery of Voltaire (which he
well earned by his own antagonism at the court of Frederick); yet he
was really an energetic man of science, and had preceded Voltaire in
setting up in France the Newtonian against the Cartesian physics. In
his System of Nature [1083] (not to be confused with the later work of
d'Holbach under the same title) he in 1751 propounded a new version of
the hylozoisms of ancient Greece; developed the idea of an underlying
unity in the forms of natural life, already propounded by La Mettrie
in his L'Homme Plante; connected it with Leibnitz's formula of the
economy of nature ("minimum of action"--the germ of the modern "line
of least resistance"), and at the same time anticipated some of the
special philosophic positions of Kant. [1084] Diderot, impressed by
but professedly dissenting from Maupertuis's Système in his Pensées
sur l'interprétation de la nature (1754), promptly pointed out that
the conception of a primordially vitalized atom excluded that of a
Creator, and for his own part thereafter took that standpoint. [1085]
In 1754 came the Traité des Sensations of Condillac, in which is most
systematically developed the physio-psychological conception of man as
an "animated statue," of which the thought is wholly conditioned by the
senses. The mode of approach had been laid down before by La Mettrie,
by Diderot, and by Buffon; and Condillac is rather a developer and
systematizer than an originator; [1086] but in this case the process
of unification was to the full as important as the first steps; [1087]
and Condillac has an importance which is latterly being rediscovered
by the school of Spencer on the one hand and by that of James on
the other. Condillac, commonly termed a materialist, no more held
the legendary materialistic view than any other so named; and the
same may be said of the next figure in the "materialistic" series,
J. B. Robinet, a Frenchman settled at Amsterdam, after having been,
it is said, a Jesuit. His Nature (4 vols. 1761-1768) is a remarkable
attempt to reach a strictly naturalistic conception of things. [1088]
But he is a theorist, not an investigator. Even in his fixed idea
that the universe is an "animal" he had perhaps a premonition of
the modern discovery of the immense diffusion of bacterial life;
but he seems to have had more deriders than disciples. He founds
at once on Descartes and on Leibnitz, but in his Philosophical
Considerations on the natural gradation of living forms (1768)
he definitely sets aside theism as illusory, and puts ethics on a
strictly scientific and human footing, [1089] extending the arguments
of Hume and Hutcheson somewhat on the lines of Mandeville. [1090] On
another line of reasoning a similar application of Mandeville's thesis
had already been made by Helvétius in his Traité de l'Esprit [1091]
(1758), a work which excited a hostility now difficult to understand,
but still reflected in censures no less surprising.
One of the worst misrepresentations in theological literature is
the account of Helvétius by the late Principal Cairns (Unbelief
in the Eighteenth Century, 1881, p. 158) as appealing to
government "to promote luxury, and, through luxury, public good,
by abolishing all those laws that cherish a false modesty and
restrain libertinage." Helvétius simply pressed the consequences
of the existing theory of luxury, which for his own part he
disclaimed. De l'Esprit, Disc. ii, ch. xv. Dr. Pünjer (i, 462)
falls so far below his usual standard as to speak of Helvétius
in a similar fashion. As against such detraction it is fitting to
note that Helvétius, like La Mettrie, was one of the most lovable
and most beloved men of his time, though, like him, sufficiently
licentious in his youth.
It was at once suppressed by royal order as scandalous, licentious,
and dangerous, though Helvétius held a post at court as maître d'hôtel
to the Queen. Ordered to make a public retractation, he did so in a
letter addressed to a Jesuit; and this being deemed insufficient,
he had to sign another, "so humiliating," wrote Grimm, [1092]
"that one would not have been astonished to see a man take refuge
with the Hottentots rather than put his name to such avowals." The
wits explained that the censor who had passed the book, being an
official in the Bureau of Foreign Affairs, had treated De l'Esprit
as belonging to that department. [1093] A swarm of replies appeared,
and the book was formally burnt, with Voltaire's poem Sur la loi
naturelle, and several obscure works of older standing. [1094] The
De l'Esprit, appearing alongside of the ever-advancing Encyclopédie,
[1095] was in short a formidable challenge to the powers of bigotry.
Its real faults are lack of system, undue straining after popularity,
some hasty generalization, and a greater concern for the air of paradox
than for persuasion; but it abounds in acuteness and critical wisdom,
and it definitely and seriously founds public ethics on utility. Its
most serious error, the assumption that all men are born with equal
faculties, and that education is the sole differentiating force, was
repeated in our own age by John Stuart Mill; but in Helvétius the
error is balanced by the thoroughly sound and profoundly important
thesis that the general superiorities of nations are the result of
their culture-conditions and politics. [1096] The over-balance of his
stress on self-interest [1097] is an error easily soluble. On the other
hand, we have the memorable testimony of Beccaria that it was the work
of Helvétius that inspired him to his great effort for the humanizing
of penal laws and policy; [1098] and the only less notable testimony
of Bentham that Helvétius was his teacher and inspirer. [1099] It may
be doubted whether any such fruits can be claimed for the teachings
of the whole of the orthodox moralists of the age. For the rest,
Helvétius is not to be ranked among the great abstract thinkers; but it
is noteworthy that his thinking went on advancing to the end. Always
greatly influenced by Voltaire, he did not philosophically harden as
did his master; and though in his posthumous work, Les Progrès de la
Raison dans la recherche du Vrai (published in 1775), he stands for
deism against atheism, the argument ends in the pantheism to which
Voltaire had once attained, but did not adhere.
24. Over all of these men, and even in some measure over Voltaire,
Diderot (1713-1784) stands pre-eminent, on retrospect, for variety
of power and depth and subtlety of thought; though for these very
reasons, as well as because some of his most masterly works were never
printed in his lifetime, he was less of a recognized popular force
than some of his friends. In his own mental history he reproduces the
course of the French thought of his time. Beginning as a deist, he
assailed the contemporary materialists; in the end, with whatever of
inconsistency, he was emphatically an atheist and a materialist. One
of his most intimate friends was Damilaville, of whom Voltaire speaks
as a vehement anti-theist; [1100] and his biographer Naigeon, who at
times overstated his positions but always revered him, was the most
zealous atheist of his day. [1101]
Compare, as to Diderot's position, Soury's contention (p. 577)
that we shall never make an atheist and a materialist out of
"this enthusiastic artist, this poet-pantheist" (citing Rosenkranz
in support), with his own admissions, pp. 589-90, and with Lord
Morley's remarks, pp. 33, 401, 418. See also Lange, i, 310 sq.;
ii, 63 (Eng. tr. ii, 32, 256). In the affectionate éloge of his
friend Meister (1786) there is an express avowal that "it had been
much to be desired for the reputation of Diderot, perhaps even for
the honour of his age, that he had not been an atheist, or that he
had been so with less zeal." The fact is thus put beyond reasonable
doubt. In the Correspondance Littéraire of Grimm and Diderot, under
date September 15, 1765 (vii, 366), there is a letter in criticism
of Descartes, thoroughly atheistic in its reasoning, which is
almost certainly by Diderot. And if the criticism of Voltaire's
Dieu, above referred to (p. 231), be not by him, he was certainly
in entire agreement with it, as with Grimm in general. Rosenkranz
finally (ii, 421) sums up that "Diderot war als Atheist Pantheist,"
which is merely a way of saying that he was scientifically monistic
in his atheism. Lange points out in this connection (i, 310) that
the Hegelian schema of philosophic evolution, "with its sovereign
contempt for chronology," has wrought much confusion as to the
real developments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
It is recorded that Diderot's own last words in serious conversation
were: "The beginning of philosophy is incredulity"; and it may
be inferred from his writings that his first impulses to searching
thought came from his study of Montaigne, who must always have been
for him one of the most congenial of spirits. [1102] At an early stage
of his independent mental life we find him turning to the literature
which in that age yielded to such a mind as his the largest measure
both of nutriment and stimulus--the English. In 1745 he translated
Shaftesbury's Inquiry concerning Virtue and Merit; and he must have
read with prompt appreciation the other English freethinkers then
famous. Ere long, however, he had risen above the deistical plane of
thought, and grappled with the fundamental issues which the deists
took for granted, partly because of an innate bent to psychological
analysis, partly because he was more interested in scientific problems
than in scholarly research. The Pensées philosophiques, published
in 1746, really deserve their name; and though they exhibit him as
still a satisfied deist, and an opponent of the constructive atheism
then beginning to suggest itself, they contain abstract reasonings
sufficiently disturbing to the deistic position. [1103] The Promenade
du Sceptique (written about 1747, published posthumously) goes further,
and presents tentatively the reply to the design argument which was
adopted by Hume.
In its brilliant pages may be found a conspectus of the intellectual
life of the day, on the side of the religious problem. Every type
of thinker is there tersely characterized--the orthodox, the deist,
the atheist, the sheer skeptic, the scoffer, the pantheist, the
solipsist, and the freethinking libertine, the last figuring as
no small nuisance to the serious unbeliever. So drastic is the
criticism of orthodoxy that the book was unprintable in its day;
[1104] and it was little known even in manuscript. But ere long there
appeared the Letter on the Blind, for the use of those who see (1749),
in which a logical rebuttal alike of the ethical and the cosmological
assumptions of theism, developed from hints in the Pensées, is put
in the mouth of the blind English mathematician, Sanderson. It is not
surprising that whereas the Pensées had been, with some other books,
ordered by the Paris Parlement to be burnt by the common hangman,
the Lettre sur les Aveugles led to his arrest and an imprisonment
of six months [1105] in the Château de Vincennes. Both books had of
course been published without licence; [1106] but the second book was
more than a defiance of the censorship: it was a challenge alike to
the philosophy and the faith of Christendom; and as such could not
have missed denunciation. [1107]
But Diderot was not the kind of man to be silenced by menaces. In
the famous Sorbonne thesis of the Abbé de Prades (1751) he probably
had, as we have seen, some share; and when De Prades was condemned
and deprived of his licence (1752) Diderot wrote the third part of
the Apologie (published by De Prades in Holland), which defended his
positions; and possibly assisted in the other parts. [1108] The hand
of Diderot perhaps may be discovered in the skilful allusions to the
skeptical Demonstratio Evangelica of Huet, which De Prades professes
to have translated when at his seminary, seeking there the antidote
to the poison of the deists. The entire handling of the question of
pagan and Christian miracles, too, suggests the skilled dialectician,
though it is substantially an adaptation of Leslie's Short and Easy
Method with the Deists. The alternate eulogy and criticism of Locke
are likely to be his, as is indeed the abundant knowledge of English
thought shown alike in the thesis and in the Apologie. Whether he
wrote the passage which claims to rebut an argument in his own Pensées
philosophiques [1109] is surely doubtful. But his, certainly, is the
further reply to the pastoral of the Jansenist Bishop of Auxerre
against de Prades's thesis, in which the perpetual disparagement
of reason by Catholic theologians is denounced [1110] as the most
injurious of all procedures against religion. And his, probably,
is the peroration [1111] arraigning the Jansenists and imputing to
their fanaticism and superstition, their miracle-mongering and their
sectarian bitterness, the discredit which among thinking men had
latterly fallen upon Church and creed alike. [1112]
De Prades, who in his thesis and Apologie had always professed to be a
believing Christian, was not a useful recruit to rationalism. Passing
from Holland to Berlin, he was there appointed, through the influence
of Voltaire, reader and amanuensis to the King, [1113] who in 1754
arranged for him an official reconciliation with the Church. A formal
retractation was sent to the Pope, the Sorbonne, and the Bishop of
Montauban; [1114] and Frederick in due course presented him to a
Catholic canonry at Glogau. In 1757, however, he was put under arrest
on the charge, it is commonly said, of supplying military information
to his countrymen; [1115] and thereafter, returning to France in 1759,
he obtained a French benefice. Diderot, who was now a recognized
champion of freethought, turned away with indignation. [1116]
Thenceforward he never faltered on his path. It is his peculiar
excellence to be an original and innovating thinker not only in
philosophy but in psychology, in æsthetics, in ethics, in dramatic
art; and his endless and miscellaneous labours in the Encyclopédie,
of which he was the most loyal and devoted producer, represent an
extraordinary range of interests. He suffered from his position as a
hack writer and as a forced dissembler in his articles on religious
matters; and there is probably a very real connection between his
compulsory insincerities [1117] in the Encyclopédie--to say nothing
of the official prosecution of that and of others of his works--and
his misdeeds in the way of indecent fiction. When organized society
is made to figure as the heartless enemy of thinking men, it is no
great wonder if they are careless at times about the effect of their
writings on society. But it stands to his lasting honour that his
sufferings at the hands of priests, printers, and parlements never
soured his natural goodness of heart. [1118] Having in his youth known
a day's unrelieved hunger, he made a vow that he would never refuse
help to any human being; and, says his daughter, no vow was ever more
faithfully kept. No one in trouble was ever turned away from his door;
and even his enemies were helped when they were base enough to beg of
him. It seems no exaggeration to say that the bulk of his life was
given to helping other people; and the indirect effect of his work,
which is rather intellectually disinterested than didactic, is no
less liberative and humanitarian. "To do good, and to find truth,"
were his mottoes for life.
His daughter, Madame de Vandeul, who in her old age remained
tranquilly divided between the religion instilled into her by her
pious mother and the rationalism she had gathered from her father and
his friends, testified, then, to his constant goodness in the home;
[1119] and his father bore a similar testimony, contrasting him
with his pious brother. [1120] He was, in his way, as beneficent as
Voltaire, without Voltaire's faults of private malice; and his life's
work was a great ministry of light. It was Goethe who said of him in
the next generation that "whoever holds him or his doings cheaply is
a Philistine." His large humanity reaches from the planes of expert
thought to that of popular feeling; and while by his Letter on the
Blind he could advance speculative psychology and pure philosophy,
he could by his tale The Nun (La Religeuse, [1121] written about
1760, published 1796) enlist the sympathies of the people against
the rule of the Church. It belonged to his character to be generously
appreciative of all excellence; he delighted in other men's capacity as
in pictures and poetry; and he loved to praise. At a time when Bacon
and Hobbes were little regarded in England he made them newly famous
throughout Europe by his praises. In him was realized Bacon's saying,
Admiratio semen scientiae, in every sense, for his curiosity was as
keen as his sensibility.
25. With Diderot were specially associated, in different ways,
D'Alembert, the mathematician, for some years his special colleague
on the Encyclopédie, and Baron d'Holbach. The former, one of
the staunchest friends of Voltaire, though a less invincible
fighter than Diderot, counted for practical freethought by his
miscellaneous articles, his little book on the Jesuits (1765), his
Pensées philosophiques, his physics, and the general rationalism of
his Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopédie. It is noteworthy that
in his intimate correspondence with Voltaire he never avows theism,
and that his and Diderot's friend, the atheist Damilaville, died
in his arms. [1122] On Dumarsais, too, he penned an éloge of which
Voltaire wrote: "Dumarsais only begins to live since his death;
you have given him existence and immortality." [1123] And perpetual
secretary as he was of the Academy, the fanatical daughter of Madame
Geoffrin could write to him in 1776: "For many years you have set
all respectable people against you by your indecent and imprudent
manner of speaking against religion." [1124] Baron d'Holbach, a
naturalized German of large fortune, was on the other hand one of the
most strenuous propagandists of freethought in his age. Personally no
less beloved than Helvétius, [1125] he gave his life and his fortune
to the work of enlightening men on all the lines on which he felt
they needed light. Much of the progress of the physical sciences in
pre-revolutionary France was due to the long series--at least eleven
in all--of his translations of solid treatises from the German;
and his still longer series of original works and translations from
the English in all branches of freethought--a really astonishing
movement of intellectual energy despite the emotion attaching
to the subject-matter--was for the most part prepared in the same
essentially scientific temper. Of all the freethinkers of the period
he had perhaps the largest range of practical erudition; [1126] and
he drew upon it with unhasting and unresting industry. Imitating the
tactic of Voltaire, he produced, with some assistance from Diderot,
Naigeon, and others, a small library of anti-Christian treatises under
a variety of pseudonyms; [1127] and his principal work, the famous
System of Nature (1770), was put out under the name of Mirabaud,
an actual person, then dead. Summing up as it does with stringent
force the whole anti-theological propaganda of the age, it has been
described as a "thundering engine of revolt and destruction." [1128]
It was the first published atheistic [1129] treatise of a systematic
kind, if we except that of Robinet, issued some years before; and it
significantly marks the era of modern freethought, as does the powerful
Essai sur les préjugés, published in the same year, [1130] by its stern
impeachment of the sins of monarchy--here carrying on the note struck
by Jean Meslier in his manuscript of half-a-century earlier. Rather
a practical argument than a dispassionate philosophic research,
its polemic against human folly laid it open to the regulation
retort that on its own necessarian principles no such polemic was
admissible. That retort is, of course, ultimately invalid when the
denunciation is resolved into demonstration. If, however, it be termed
"shallow" on the score of its censorious treatment of the past, [1131]
the term will have to be applied to the Hebrew books, to the Gospel
Jesus, to the Christian Fathers, to Pascal, Milton, Carlyle, Ruskin,
and a good many other prophets, ancient and modern. The synthesis of
the book is really emotional rather than philosophic, and hortatory
rather than scientific; and it was all the more influential on that
account. To the sensation it produced is to be ascribed the edict
of 1770 condemning a whole shelf of previous works to be burnt along
with it by the common hangman.
26. The death of d'Holbach (1789) brings us to the French
Revolution. By that time all the great freethinking propagandists
and non-combatant deists of the Voltairean group were gone, save
Condorcet. Voltaire and Rousseau had died in 1778, Helvétius in
1771, Turgot in 1781, D'Alembert in 1783, Diderot in 1784. After
all their labours, only the educated minority, broadly speaking,
had been made freethinkers; and of these, despite the vogue of the
System of Nature, only a minority were atheists. Deism prevailed,
as we have seen, among the foremost revolutionists; but atheism
was relatively rare. Voltaire, indeed, impressed by the number of
cultured men of his acquaintance who avowed it, latterly speaks [1132]
of them as very numerous; and Grimm must have had a good many among
the subscribers to his correspondence, to permit of his penning or
passing the atheistic criticism there given of Voltaire's first reply
to d'Holbach. Nevertheless, there was no continuous atheistic movement;
and after 1789 the new freethinking works run to critical and ethical
attack on the Christian system rather than on theism. Volney combined
both lines of attack in his famous Ruins of Empires (1791); and the
learned Dupuis, in his voluminous Origin of all Cults (1795), took
an important step, not yet fully reckoned with by later mythologists,
towards the mythological analysis of the gospel narrative. After these
vigorous performances, the popular progress of French freethought was
for long practically suspended [1133] by the tumult of the Revolution
and the reaction which followed it, though Laplace went on his way
with his epoch-making theory of the origin of the solar system,
for which, as he told Napoleon, he had "no need of the hypothesis"
of a God. The admirable Condorcet had died, perhaps by his own hand,
in 1794, when in hiding from the Terrorists, leaving behind him his
Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrès de l'esprit humain,
in which the most sanguine convictions of the rationalistic school
are reformulated without a trace of bitterness or of despair.
27. No part of the history of freethought has been more distorted
than that at which it is embroiled in the French Revolution. The
conventional view in England still is that the Revolution was
the work of deists and atheists, but chiefly of the latter; that
they suppressed Christianity and set up a worship of a Goddess of
Reason, represented by a woman of the town; and that the bloodshed
of the Terror represented the application of their principles to
government, or at least the political result of the withdrawal
of religious checks. [1134] Those who remember in the briefest
summary the records of massacre connected with the affirmation of
religious beliefs--the internecine wars of Christian sects under
the Roman Empire; the vast slaughters of Manichæans in the East;
the bloodshed of the period of propagation in Northern Europe,
from Charlemagne onwards; the story of the Crusades, in which nine
millions of human beings are estimated to have been destroyed;
the generation of wholesale murder of the heretics of Languedoc by
the papacy; the protracted savageries of the Hussite War; the early
holocaust of Protestant heretics in France; the massacres of German
peasants and Anabaptists; the reciprocal persecutions in England; the
civil strifes of sectaries in Switzerland; the ferocious wars of the
French Huguenots and the League; the long-drawn agony of the war of
thirty years in Germany; the annihilation of myriads of Mexicans and
Peruvians by the conquering Spaniards in the name of the Cross--those
who recall these things need spend no time over the proposition that
rationalism stands for a removal of restraints on bloodshed. But it
is necessary to put concisely the facts as against the legend in the
case of the French Revolution.
(a) That many of the leading men among the revolutionists were
deists is true; and the fact goes to prove that it was chiefly the
men of ability in France who rejected Christianity. Of a number of
these the normal attitude was represented in the work of Necker,
Sur l'importance des idées religieuses (1787), which repudiated the
destructive attitude of the few, and may be described as an utterance
of pious theism or Unitarianism. [1135] Orthodox he cannot well have
been, since, like his wife, he was the friend of Voltaire. [1136]
But the majority of the Constituent Assembly was never even deistic;
it professed itself cordially Catholic; [1137] and the atheists there
might be counted on the fingers of one hand. [1138]
The Abbé Bergier, in answering d'Holbach (Examen du Matérialisme,
ii, ch. i, § 1), denies that there has been any wide spread of
atheistic opinion. This is much more probable than the statement
of the Archbishop of Toulouse, on a deputation to the king
in 1775, that "le monstrueux athéisme est devenu l'opinion
dominante" (Soulavie, Règne de Louis XVI, iii, 16; cited by
Buckle, 1-vol. ed. p. 488, note). Joseph Droz, a monarchist and a
Christian, writing under Louis Philippe, sums up that "the atheists
formed only a small number of adepts" (Histoire du Règne de Louis
XVI, éd. 1839, p. 42). And Rivarol, who at the time of writing
his Lettres à M. Necker was substantially an atheist, says in
so many words that, while Rousseau's "Confession of a Savoyard
Vicar" was naturally very attractive to many, such a book as the
"Système de la Nature," were it as attractive as it is tedious,
would win nobody" (OEuvres, éd. 1852, p. 134). Still, it ran into
seven editions between 1770 and 1780.
Nor were there lacking vigorous representatives of orthodoxy:
the powerful Abbé Grégoire, in particular, was a convinced
Jansenist Christian, and at the same time an ardent democrat and
anti-royalist. [1139] He saw the immense importance to the Church
of a good understanding with the Revolution, and he accepted
the constitution of 1790. With him went a very large number of
priests. M. Léonce de Lavergne, who was pious enough to write that
"the philosophy of the eighteenth century had had the audacity to
lay hands on God; and this impious attempt has had for punishment
the revolutionary expiation," also admits that, "of the clergy,
it was not the minority but the majority which went along with the
Tiers État." [1140] Many of the clergy, however, being refractory,
the Assembly pressed its point, and the breach widened. It was solely
through this political hostility on the part of the Church to the
new constitution that any civic interference with public worship ever
took place. Grégoire was extremely popular with the advanced types,
[1141] though his piety was conspicuous; [1142] and there were not a
few priests of his way of thinking, [1143] among them being some of
the ablest bishops. [1144] On the flight of the king, he and they went
with the democracy; and it was the obstinate refusal of the others to
accept the constitution that provoked the new Legislative Assembly to
coerce them. Though the new body was more anti-clerical than the old,
however, it was simply doing what successive Protestant monarchs had
done in England and Ireland; and probably no Government in the world
would then have acted otherwise in a similar case. [1145] Patience
might perhaps have won the day; but the Revolution was fighting for
its life; and the conservative Church, as all men knew, was eager to
strangle it. Had the clergy left politics alone, or simply accepted
the constitutional action of the State, there would have been no
religious question. To speak of such a body of priests, who had at
all times been eager to put men to death for heresy, as vindicating
"liberty of conscience" when they refused fealty to the constitution,
[1146] is somewhat to strain the terms. The expulsion of the Jesuits
under the Old Régime had been a more coercive measure than the demand
of the Assembly on the allegiance of the State clergy. And all the
while the reactionary section of the priesthood was known to be
conspiring with the royalists abroad. It was only when, in 1793,
the conservative clergy were seen to be the great obstacle to the
levy of an army of defence, that the more radical spirits began to
think of interfering with their functions. [1147]
(b) An à priori method has served alike in freethinkers' and in
pietists' hands to obscure the facts. When Michelet insists on the
"irreconcilable opposition of Christianity to the Revolution"--a
thesis in which he was heartily supported by Proudhon [1148]--he
means that the central Christian dogmas of salvation by sacrifice and
faith exclude any political ethic of justice [1149]--any doctrine
of equality and equity. But this is only to say that Christianity
as an organization is in perpetual contradiction with some main
part of its professed creed; and that has been a commonplace since
Constantine. It does not mean that either Christians in multitudes
or their churches as organizations have not constantly proceeded on
ordinary political motives, whether populist or anti-populist. In
Germany we have seen Lutheranism first fomenting and afterwards
repudiating the movement of the peasants for betterment; and in
England in the next century both parties in the civil war invoke
religious doctrines, meeting texts with texts. Jansenism was in
constant friction with the monarchy from its outset; and Louis
XIV and Louis XV alike regarded the Jansenists as the enemies of
the throne. "Christianity" could be as easily "reconciled" with a
democratic movement in the last quarter of the eighteenth century as
with the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew's Day in the sixteenth. If those
Christians who still charge "the bloodshed of the French Revolution"
on the spirit of incredulity desire to corroborate Michelet to the
extent of making Christianity the bulwark of absolute monarchy, the
friend of a cruel feudalism, and the guardian genius of the Bastille,
they may be left to the criticism of their fellow-believers who have
embraced the newer principle that the truth of the Christian religion
is to be proved by connecting it in practice with the spirit of social
reform. To point out to either party, as did Michelet, that evangelical
Christianity is a religion of submission and preparation for the end
of all things, and has nothing to do with rational political reform,
is to bestow logic where logic is indomiciliable. While rationalism
undoubtedly fosters the critical spirit, professed Christians have
during many ages shown themselves as prone to rebellion as to war,
whether on religious or on political pretexts.
(c) For the rest, the legend falsifies what took place. The facts
are now established by exact documentary research. The Government
never substituted any species of religion for the Catholic. [1150]
The Festival of Reason at Nôtre Dame was an act not of the Convention
but of the Commune of Paris and the Department; the Convention had
no part in promoting it; half the members stayed away when invited to
attend; and there was no Goddess of Reason in the ceremony, but only
a Goddess of Liberty, represented by an actress who cannot even be
identified. [1151] Throughout, the devoutly theistic Rousseau was the
chief literary hero of the movement. The two executive Committees in
no way countenanced the dechristianization of the Churches, but on the
contrary imprisoned persons who removed church properties; and these
in turn protested that they had no thought of abolishing religion. The
acts of irresponsible violence did not amount to a hundredth part of
the "sacrilege" wrought in Protestant countries at the Reformation,
and do not compare with the acts charged on Cromwell's troopers. The
policy of inviting priests and bishops to abdicate their functions
was strictly political; and the Archbishop Gobel did not abjure
Catholicism, but only surrendered his office. That a number of priests
did gratuitously abjure their religion is only a proof of what was
well known--that a good many priests were simple deists. We have seen
how many abbés fought in the freethought ranks, or near them. Diderot
in a letter of 1769 tells of a day which he and a friend had passed
with two monks who were atheists. "One of them read the first draft
of a very fresh and very vigorous treatise on atheism, full of new
and bold ideas; I learned with edification that this doctrine was the
current doctrine of their cloisters. For the rest, these two monks
were the 'big bonnets' of their monastery; they had intellect, gaiety,
good feeling, knowledge." [1152] And a priest of the cathedral of
Auxerre, whose recollections went back to the revolutionary period,
has confessed that at that time "philosophic" opinions prevailed in
most of the monasteries. His words even imply that in his opinion the
unbelieving monks were the majority. [1153] In the provinces, where
the movement went on with various degrees of activity, it had the same
general character. "Reason" itself was often identified with deity,
or declared to be an emanation thereof. Hébert, commonly described
as an atheist for his share in the movement, expressly denied the
charge, and claimed to have exhorted the people to read the gospels
and obey Christ. [1154] Danton, though at his death he disavowed
belief in immortality, had declared in the Convention in 1793 that
"we have not striven to abolish superstition in order to establish the
reign of atheism." [1155] Even Chaumette was not an atheist; [1156]
and the Prussian Clootz, who probably was, had certainly little or no
doctrinary influence; while the two or three other professed atheists
of the Assembly had no part in the public action.
(d) Finally, Robespierre was all along thoroughly hostile to the
movement; in his character of Rousseauist and deist he argued
that atheism was "aristocratic"; he put to death the leaders of
the Cult of Reason; and he set up the Worship of the Supreme Being
as a counter-move. Broadly speaking, he affiliated to Necker, and
stood very much at the standpoint of the English Unitarianism of the
present day. Thus the bloodshed of the Reign of Terror, if it is to
be charged on any species of philosophic doctrine rather than on the
unscrupulous policy of the enemies of the Revolution in and out of
France, stands to the credit of the belief in a God, the creed of
Frederick, Turgot, Necker, Franklin, Pitt, and Washington. The one
convinced and reasoning atheist among the publicists of the Revolution,
the journalist Salaville, [1157] opposed the Cult of Reason with sound
and serious and persuasive argument, and strongly blamed all forcible
interference with worship, while at the same time calmly maintaining
atheism as against theism. The age of atheism had not come, any more
than the triumph of Reason.
Mallet du Pan specifies, as among those who "since 1788 have
pushed the blood-stained car of anarchy and atheism," Chamfort,
Gronvelle, Garat, and Cerutti. Chamfort was as high-minded a
man as Mallet himself, and is to-day so recognized by every
unprejudiced reader. The others are forgotten. Gronvelle,
who as secretary of the executive council read to Louis XVI
his death-sentence, wrote De l'autorité de Montesquieu dans la
révolution présente (1789). Garat was Minister of Justice in 1792
and of the Interior in 1793, and was ennobled by Napoleon. He had
published Considérations sur la Révolution (1792) and a Mémoire
sur la Révolution (1795). Cerutti, originally a Jesuit, became a
member of the Legislative Assembly, and was the friend of Mirabeau,
whose funeral oration he delivered.
28. The anti-atheistic and anti-philosophic legend was born of the
exasperation and bad faith of the dethroned aristocracy, themselves
often unbelievers in the day of their ascendancy, and, whether
unbelievers or not, responsible with the Church and the court for
that long insensate resistance to reform which made the revolution
inevitable. Mere random denunciation of new ideas as tending to
generate rebellion was of course an ancient commonplace. Medieval
heretics had been so denounced; Wiclif was in his day; and when the
Count de Cataneo attacked Montesquieu's Spirit of Laws, he spoke
of all such reasonings as "attempts which shake the sacred basis of
thrones." [1158] But he and his contemporaries knew that freethinkers
were not specially given to mutiny; and when, later, French Churchmen
had begun systematically to accuse the philosophers of undermining
alike the Church and the throne, [1159] the unbelieving nobles,
conscious of entire political conservatism, had simply laughed. Better
than anyone else they knew that political revolt had other roots and
motives than incredulity; and they could not but remember how many
French kings had been rebelled against by the Church, and how many
slain by priestly hands. Their acceptance of the priestly formula came
later. In the life of the brilliant Rivarol, who associated with the
noblesse while disdained by many of them because of his obscure birth,
we may read the intellectual history of the case. Brilliant without
patience, keen without scientific coherence, [1160] Rivarol in 1787
met the pious deism of Necker with a dialectic in which cynicism as
often disorders as illuminates the argument. With prompt veracity he
first rejects the ideal of a beneficent reign of delusion, and insists
that religion is seen in all history powerless alike to overrule
men's passions and prejudices, and to console the oppressed by its
promise of a reversal of earthly conditions in another world. But in
the same breath, by way of proving that the atheist is less disturbing
to convention than the deist, he insists that the unbeliever soon
learns to see that "irreverences are crimes against society"; and
then, in order to justify such conformity, asserts what he had before
denied. And the self-contradiction recurs. [1161] The underlying
motive of the whole polemic is simply the grudge of the upper class
diner-out against the serious and conscientious bourgeois who strives
to reform the existing system. Conscious of being more enlightened,
the wit is eager at once to disparage Necker for his religiosity
and to discredit him politically as the enemy of the socially useful
ecclesiastical order. Yet in his second letter Sur la morale (1788)
he is so plainly an unbeliever that the treatise had to be printed
at Berlin. The due sequence is that when the Revolution breaks out
Rivarol sides with the court and the noblesse, while perfectly aware of
the ineptitude and malfeasance of both; [1162] and, living in exile,
proceeds to denounce the philosophers as having caused the overturn
by their universal criticism. In 1787 he had declared that he would
not even have written his Letters to Necker if he were not certain
that "the people does not read." Then the people had read neither the
philosophers nor him. But in exile he must needs frame for the émigrés
a formula, true or false. It is the falsity of men divided against
themselves, who pay themselves with recriminations rather than realize
their own deserts. [1163] And in the end Rivarol is but a deist.
29. If any careful attempt be made to analyse the situation, the
stirring example of the precedent revolution in the British American
colonies will probably be recognized as counting for very much more
than any merely literary influence in promoting that of France. A
certain "republican" spirit had indeed existed among educated men in
France throughout the reign of Louis XV: D'Argenson noted it in 1750
and later. [1164] But this spirit, which D'Argenson in large measure
shared, while holding firmly by monarchy, [1165] was simply the spirit
of constitutionalism, the love of law and good government, and it
derived from English example and the teachings of such Englishmen
as Locke, [1166] insofar as it was not spontaneous. If acceptance
of the doctrine of constitutional government can lead to anarchy,
let it be avowed; but let not the cause be pretended to be deism or
atheism. The political teaching for which the Paris Parlement denounced
Rousseau's Émile in 1762, and for which the theologians of the Sorbonne
censured Marmontel's Bélisaire in 1767, was the old doctrine of the
sovereignty of the people. But this had been maintained by a whole
school of English Protestant Christians before Bossuet denounced the
Protestant Jurieu for maintaining it. Nay, it had been repeatedly
maintained by Catholic theologians, from Thomas Aquinas to Suarez,
[1167] especially when there was any question of putting down a
Protestant monarch. Protestants on their part protested indignantly,
and reciprocated. The recriminations of Protestants and Catholics on
this head form one of the standing farces of human history. Coger,
attacking Marmontel, unctuously cites Bayle's censure of his fellow
Protestants in his Avis aux Réfugiéz [1168] for their tone towards
kings and monarchy, but says nothing of Bayle's quarrel with Jurieu,
which motived such an utterance, or of his Critique Générale of
Maimbourg's Histoire du Calvinisme, in which he shows how the
Catholic historian's principles would justify the rebellion alike
of Catholics in every Protestant country and of Protestants in every
Catholic country, [1169] though all the while it is assumed that true
Christians never resort to violence. And, unless there has been an
error as to his authorship, Bayle himself, be it remembered, had in
his letter Ce que c'est que la France toute catholique sous le règne
de Louis le Grand passed as scathing a criticism on Louis XIV as any
Protestant refugee could well have compassed. Sectarian hypocrisies
apart, the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people--for opposing
which the freethinker Hobbes has been execrated by generations of
Christians--is the professed political creed of the very classes
who, in England and the United States, have so long denounced
French freethinkers for an alleged "subversive" social teaching
which fell far short of what English and American Protestants had
actually practised. The revolt of the American colonies, in fact,
precipitated democratic feeling in France in a way that no writing had
ever done. Lafayette, no freethinker, declared himself republican at
once on reading the American declaration of the Rights of Man. [1170]
In all this the freethinking propaganda counted for nothing directly
and for little indirectly, inasmuch as there was no clerical quarrel
in the colonies. And if we seek for even an indirect or general
influence, apart from the affirmation of the duty of kings to their
people, the thesis as to the activity of the philosophes must at
once be restricted to the cases of Rousseau, Helvétius, Raynal,
and d'Holbach, for Marmontel never passed beyond "sound" generalities.
As for the pretence that it was freethinking doctrines that brought
Louis XVI to the scaffold, it is either the most impudent or the
most ignorant of historical imputations. The "right" of tyrannicide
had been maintained by Catholic schoolmen before the Reformation,
and by both Protestants and Catholics afterwards, times without
number, even as they maintained the right of the people to depose and
change kings. The doctrine was in fact not even a modern innovation,
the theory being so well primed by the practice--under every sort of
government, Jewish and pagan in antiquity, Moslem in the Middle Ages,
and Christian from the day of Pepin to the day of John Knox--that a
certain novelty lay on the side of the "divine right of kings" when
that was popularly formulated. And on the whole question of revolution,
or the right of peoples to recast their laws, the general doctrine
of the most advanced of the French freethinkers is paralleled or
outgone by popes and Church Councils in the Middle Ages, by Occam and
Marsiglio of Padua and Wiclif and more than one German legist in the
fourteenth century, by John Major and George Buchanan in Scotland, by
Goodman in England, and by many Huguenots in France, in the sixteenth;
by Hotman in his Francogallia in 1574; by the author of the Soupirs
de la France Esclave [1171] in 1689; and by the whole propagandist
literature of the English and American Revolutions in the seventeenth
and eighteenth. So far from being a specialty of freethinkers,
"sedition" was in all these and other cases habitually grounded on
Biblical texts and religious protestations; so that Bacon, little
given as he was to defending rationalists, could confidently avow that
"Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety,
to laws, to reputation ... but superstition dismounts all these,
and erecteth an absolute monarchy in the minds of men. Therefore
atheism did never perturb states.... But superstition hath been the
confusion of many states." For "superstition" read "sectarianism,"
"fanaticism," and "ecclesiasticism." Bacon's generalization is of
course merely empirical, atheism being capable of alliance with
revolutionary passion in its turn; but the historical summary holds
good. Only by men who had not read or had forgotten universal history
could the ascription of the French Revolution to rationalistic thought
have been made. [1172]
30. A survey of the work and attitude of the leading French
freethinkers of the century may serve to settle the point once
for all. Voltaire is admittedly out of the question. Mallet du Pan,
whose resistance to the Revolution developed into a fanaticism hardly
less perturbing to judgment [1173] than that of Burke, expressly
disparaged him as having so repelled men by his cynicism that he had
little influence on their feelings, and so could not be reckoned a
prime force in preparing the Revolution. [1174] "Mably," the critic
adds, "whose republican declamations have intoxicated many modern
democrats, was religious to austerity: at the first stroke of the
tocsin against the Church of Rome, he would have thrown his books
in the fire, excepting his scathing apostrophes to Voltaire and the
atheists. Marmontel, Saint-Lambert, Morellet, Encyclopedists, were
adversaries of the revolution." [1175] On the other hand, Barante
avows that Mably, detesting as he did the freethinking philosophers
of his day, followed no less than others "a destructive course,
and contributed, without knowing it, to weaken the already frayed
ties which still united the parts of an ancient society." [1176] As
Barante had previously ascribed the whole dissolution to the autocratic
process under Louis XIV, [1177] even this indictment of the orthodox
Mably is invalid. Voltaire, on the other hand, Barante charges with
an undue leaning to the methods of Louis XIV. Voltaire, in fact, was
in things political a conservative, save insofar as he fought for
toleration, for lenity, and for the most necessary reforms. And if
Voltaire's attack on what he held to be a demoralizing and knew to be
a persecuting religion be saddled with the causation of the political
crash, the blame will have to be carried back equally to the English
deists and the tyranny of Louis XIV. To such indictments, as Barante
protests, there is no limit: every age pivots on its predecessor; and
to blame for the French Revolution everybody but a corrupt aristocracy,
a tyrannous and ruinously spendthrift monarchy, and a cruel church,
is to miss the last semblance of judicial method. It may be conceded
that the works of Meslier and d'Holbach, neither of whom is noticed
by Barante, are directly though only generally revolutionary in their
bearing. But the main works of d'Holbach appeared too close upon
the Revolution to be credited with generating it; and Meslier, as we
know, had been generally read only in abridgments and adaptations,
in which his political doctrine disappears.
Mallet du Pan, striking in all directions, indicts alternately
Rousseau, whose vogue lay largely among religious people, and the
downright freethinkers. The great fomenter of the Revolution,
the critic avows, was Rousseau. "He had a hundred times more
readers than Voltaire in the middle and lower classes.... No one
has more openly attacked the right of property in declaring it a
usurpation.... It is he alone who has inoculated the French with
the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, and with its most
extreme consequences." [1178] After this "he alone," the critic
obliviously proceeds to exclaim: "Diderot and Condorcet: there are
the true chiefs of the revolutionary school," adding that Diderot had
"proclaimed equality before Marat; the Rights of Man before Siéyès;
sacred insurrection before Mirabeau and Lafayette; the massacre of
priests before the Septembrists." [1179] But this is mere furious
declamation. Only by heedless misreading or malice can support be
given to the pretence that Diderot wrought for the violent overthrow
of the existing political system. Passages denouncing kingly tyranny
had been inserted in their plays by both Corneille and Voltaire,
and applauded by audiences who never dreamt of abolishing monarchy. A
phrase about strangling kings in the bowels of priests is expressly put
by Diderot in the mouth of an Éleuthéromane or Liberty-maniac; [1180]
which shows that the type had arisen in his lifetime in opposition to
his own bias. This very poem he read to the Prince von Galitzin, the
ambassador of the Empress Catherine and his own esteemed friend. [1181]
The tyranny of the French Government, swayed by the king's mistresses
and favourites and by the Jesuits, he did indeed detest, as he had
cause to do, and as every man of good feeling did with him; but no
writing of his wrought measurably for its violent overthrow. [1182]
D'Argenson in 1751 was expressing his fears of a revolution, and
noting the "désobeissance constante" of the Parlement of Paris and the
disaffection of the people, before he had heard of "un M. Diderot,
qui a beaucoup d'esprit, mais qui affecte trop l'irreligion." And
when he notes that the Jesuits have secured the suppression of the
Encyclopédie as being hostile "to God and the royal authority," he
does not attach the slightest weight to the charge. He knew that Louis
called the pious Jansenists "enemies of God and of the king." [1183]
Mallet du Pan grounds his charge against Diderot almost solely on
"those incendiary diatribes intercalated in the Histoire philosophique
des deux Indes which dishonour that work, and which Raynal, in
his latter days, excised with horror from a new edition which he
was preparing." But supposing the passages in question to be all
Diderot's [1184]--which is far from certain--they are to be saddled
with responsibility for the Reign of Terror only on the principle
that it was more provocative in the days of tyranny to denounce
than to exercise it. To this complexion Mallet du Pan came, with
the anti-Revolutionists in general; but to-day we can recognize in
the whole process of reasoning a reductio ad absurdum. The school
in question came in all seriousness to ascribe the evils of the
Revolution to everything and everybody save the men and classes whose
misgovernment made the Revolution inevitable.
Some of the philosophers, it is true, themselves gave colour to the
view that they were the makers of the Revolution, as when D'Alembert
said to Romilly that "philosophy" had produced in his time that change
in the popular mind which exhibited itself in the indifference with
which they received the news of the birth of the dauphin. [1185]
The error is none the less plain. The philosophes had done nothing
to promote anti-monarchism among the common people, who did not
read. [1186] It was the whole political and social evolution of
two generations that had wrought the change; and the people were
still for the most part believing Catholics. Frederick the Great
was probably within the mark when in 1769 he privately reminded the
more optimistic philosophers that their entire French public did
not number above 200,000 persons. The people of Paris, who played
the chief part in precipitating the Revolution, were spontaneously
mutinous and disorderly, but were certainly not in any considerable
number unbelievers. "While Voltaire dechristianized a portion of polite
society the people remained very pious, even at Paris. In 1766 Louis
XV, so unpopular, was acclaimed because he knelt, on the Pont Neuf,
before the Holy Sacrament." [1187]
And this is the final answer to any pretence that the Revolution was
the work of the school of d'Holbach. Bergier the priest, and Rivarol
the conservative unbeliever, alike denied that d'Holbach's systematic
writings had any wide public. Doubtless the same men were ready to
eat their words for the satisfaction of vilifying an opponent. It
has always been the way of orthodoxy to tell atheists alternately
that they are an impotent handful and that they are the ruin of
society. But by this time it ought to be a matter of elementary
knowledge that a great political revolution can be wrought only by
far-reaching political forces, whether or not these may concur with
a propaganda of rationalism in religion. [1188] If any "philosopher"
so-called is to be credited with specially promoting the Revolution,
it is either Rousseau, who is so often hailed latterly as the engineer
of a religious reaction, and whose works, as has been repeatedly
remarked, "contain much that is utterly and irreconcilably opposed"
to the Revolution, [1189] or Raynal, who was only anti-clerical,
not anti-Christian, and who actually censured the revolutionary
procedure. When he published his first edition he must be held to have
acquiesced in its doctrine, whether it were from Diderot's pen or his
own. Rousseau and Raynal were the two most popular writers of their
day who dealt with social as apart from religious or philosophical
issues, and to both is thus imputed a general subversiveness. But
here too the charge rests upon a sociological fallacy. The Parlement
of Paris, composed of rich bourgeois and aristocrats, many of them
Jansenists, very few of them freethinkers, most of them ready to burn
freethinking books, played a "subversive" part throughout the century,
inasmuch as it so frequently resisted the king's will. [1190] The
stars in their courses fought against the old despotism. Rousseau was
ultimately influential towards change because change was inevitable
and essential, not because he was restless. The whole drift of things
furthered his ideas, which at the outset won no great vogue. He
was followed because he set forth what so many felt; and similarly
Raynal was read because he chimed with a strengthening feeling. In
direct contradiction to Mallet du Pan, Chamfort, a keener observer,
wrote while the Revolution was still in action that "the priesthood
was the first bulwark of absolute power, and Voltaire overthrew
it. Without this decisive and indispensable first step nothing
would have been done." [1191] The same observer goes on to say that
Rousseau's political works, and particularly the Contrat Social,
"were fitted for few readers, and caused no alarm at court.... That
theory was regarded as a hollow speculation which could have no
further consequences than the enthusiasm for liberty and the contempt
of royalty carried so far in the pieces of Corneille, and applauded
at court by the most absolute of kings, Louis XIV. All that seemed
to belong to another world, and to have no connection with ours;
... in a word, Voltaire above all has made the Revolution, because
he has written for all; Rousseau above all has made the Constitution
because he has written for the thinkers." [1192] And so the changes
may be rung for ever. The final philosophy of history cannot be
reached by any such artificial selection of factors; [1193] and the
ethical problem equally evades such solutions. If we are to pass any
ethico-political judgment whatever, it must be that the evils of the
Revolution lie at the door not of the reformers, but of the men, the
classes, and the institutions which first provoked and then resisted
it. [1194] To describe the former as the authors of the process is as
intelligent as it was to charge upon Sokrates the decay of orthodox
tradition in Athens, and to charge upon that the later downfall of
the Athenian empire. The wisest men of the age, notably the great
Turgot, sought a gradual transformation, a peaceful and harmless
transition from unconstitutional to constitutional government. Their
policy was furiously resisted by an unteachable aristocracy. When at
last fortuitous violence made a breach in the feudal walls, a people
unprepared for self-rule, and fought by an aristocracy eager for blood,
surged into anarchy, and convulsion followed on convulsion. That is
in brief the history of the Revolution.
31. While the true causation of the Revolution is thus kept clear,
it must not be forgotten, further, that to the very last, save where
controlled by disguised rationalists like Malesherbes, the tendency
of the old régime was to persecute brutally and senselessly wherever
it could lay hands on a freethinker. In 1788, only a year before
the first explosion of the Revolution, there appeared the Almanach
des Honnêtes Gens of Sylvain Maréchal, a work of which the offence
consisted not in any attack upon religion, but in simply constructing
a calendar in which the names of renowned laymen were substituted for
saints. Instantly it was denounced by the Paris Parlement, the printer
prosecuted, and the author imprisoned; and De Sauvigny, the censor
who had passed the book, was exiled thirty leagues from Paris. [1195]
Some idea of the intensity of the tyranny over all literature
in France under the Old Régime may be gathered from Buckle's
compendious account of the books officially condemned, and
of authors punished, during the two generations before the
Revolution. Apart from the record of the treatment of Buffon,
Marmontel, Morellet, Voltaire, and Diderot, it runs: "The
... tendency was shown in matters so trifling that nothing but
the gravity of their ultimate results prevents them from being
ridiculous. In 1770, Imbert translated Clarke's Letters on Spain,
one of the best works then existing on that country. This book,
however, was suppressed as soon as it appeared; and the only
reason assigned for such a stretch of power is that it contained
some remarks respecting the passion of Charles III for hunting,
which were considered disrespectful to the French crown, because
Louis XV himself was a great hunter. Several years before this
La Bletterie, who was favourably known in France by his works,
was elected a member of the French Academy. But he, it seems,
was a Jansenist, and had moreover ventured to assert that the
Emperor Julian, notwithstanding his apostasy, was not entirely
devoid of good qualities. Such offences could not be overlooked
in so pure an age; and the king obliged the Academy to exclude
La Bletterie from their society. That the punishment extended no
further was an instance of remarkable leniency; for Fréret, an
eminent critic and scholar, was confined in the Bastille because he
stated, in one of his memoirs, that the earliest Frankish chiefs
had received their titles from the Romans. The same penalty was
inflicted four different times upon Lenglet du Fresnoy. In the
case of this amiable and accomplished man, there seems to have
been hardly the shadow of a pretext for the cruelty with which
he was treated; though on one occasion the alleged offence was
that he had published a supplement to the History of De Thou.
"Indeed, we have only to open the biographies and correspondence
of that time to find instances crowding upon us from all
quarters. Rousseau was threatened with imprisonment, was driven
from France, and his works were publicly burned. The celebrated
treatise of Helvétius on the Mind was suppressed by an order of the
Royal Council; it was burned by the common hangman, and the author
was compelled to write two letters retracting his opinions. Some
of the geological views of Buffon having offended the clergy,
that illustrious naturalist was obliged to publish a formal
recantation of doctrines which are now known to be perfectly
accurate. The learned Observations on the History of France, by
Mably, were suppressed as soon as they appeared: for what reason
it would be hard to say, since M. Guizot, certainly no friend
either to anarchy or to irreligion, has thought it worth while to
republish them, and thus stamp them with the authority of his own
great name. The History of the Indies, by Raynal, was condemned
to the flames, and the author ordered to be arrested. Lanjuinais,
in his well-known work on Joseph II, advocated not only religious
toleration, but even the abolition of slavery; his book,
therefore, was declared to be 'seditious'; it was pronounced
'destructive of all subordination,' and was sentenced to be
burned. The Analysis of Bayle, by Marsy, was suppressed, and the
author was imprisoned. The History of the Jesuits, by Linguet,
was delivered to the flames; eight years later his journal was
suppressed; and, three years after that, as he still persisted
in writing, his Political Annals were suppressed, and he himself
was thrown into the Bastille. Delisle de Sales was sentenced to
perpetual exile and confiscation of all his property on account
of his work on the Philosophy of Nature. The treatise by Mey, on
French Law, was suppressed; that by Boncerf, on Feudal Law, was
burned. The Memoirs of Beaumarchais were likewise burned; the Éloge
on Fénelon, by La Harpe, was merely suppressed. Duvernet, having
written a History of the Sorbonne, which was still unpublished,
was seized and thrown into the Bastille, while the manuscript
was yet in his own possession. The celebrated work of De Lolme
on the English constitution was suppressed by edict directly it
appeared. The fate of being suppressed or prohibited also awaited
the Letters of Gervaise in 1724; the Dissertations of Courayer in
1727; the Letters of Montgon in 1732; the History of Tamerlane,
by Margat, also in 1732; the Essay on Taste, by Cartaud, in 1736;
The Life of Domat, by Prévost de la Jannès, in 1742; the History
of Louis XI, by Duclos, in 1745; the Letters of Bargeton in 1750;
the Memoirs on Troyes, by Grosley, in the same year; the History
of Clement XI, by Reboulet, in 1752; The School of Man, by Génard,
also in 1752; the Therapeutics of Garlon in 1756; the celebrated
thesis of Louis, on Generation, in 1754; the treatise on Presidial
Jurisdiction, by Jousse, in 1755; the Ericie of Fontenelle in 1768;
the Thoughts of Jamin in 1769; the History of Siam, by Turpin,
and the Éloge of Marcus Aurelius, by Thomas, both in 1770;
the works on Finance by Darigrand, in 1764, and by Le Trosne in
1779; the Essay on Military Tactics, by Guibert, in 1772; the
Letters of Boucquet in the same year; and the Memoirs of Terrai,
by Coquereau, in 1776. Such wanton destruction of property was,
however, mercy itself compared to the treatment experienced
by other literary men in France. Desforges, for example, having
written against the arrest of the Pretender to the English throne,
was, solely on that account, buried in a dungeon eight feet square
and confined there for three years. This happened in 1749; and in
1770, Audra, professor at the College of Toulouse, and a man of
some reputation, published the first volume of his Abridgement of
General History. Beyond this the work never proceeded; it was at
once condemned by the archbishop of the diocese, and the author
was deprived of his office. Audra, held up to public opprobrium,
the whole of his labours rendered useless, and the prospects of
his life suddenly blighted, was unable to survive the shock. He
was struck with apoplexy, and within twenty-four hours was lying
a corpse in his own house."
32. Among many other illustrations of the passion for persecution in
the period may be noted the fact that after the death of the atheist
Damilaville his enemies contrived to deprive his brother of a post
from which he had his sole livelihood. [1196] It is but one of an
infinity of proofs that the spirit of sheer sectarian malevolence,
which is far from being eliminated in modern life, was in the French
Church of the eighteenth century the ruling passion. Lovers of moderate
courses there were, even in the Church; but even among professors of
lenity we find an ingrained belief in the virtue of vituperation and
coercion. And it is not until the persecuted minority has developed
its power of written retaliation, and the deadly arrows of Voltaire
have aroused in the minds of persecutors a new terror, that there
seems to arise on that side a suspicion that there can be any better
way of handling unbelief than by invective and imprisonment. After
they had taught the heretics to defend themselves, and found them
possessed of weapons such as orthodoxy could not hope to handle, we
find Churchmen talking newly of the duty of gentleness towards error;
and even then clinging to the last to the weapons of public ostracism
and aspersion. So the fight was of necessity fought on the side of
freethought in the temper of men warring on incorrigible oppression
and cruelty as well as on error. The wonder is that the freethinkers
preserved so much amenity.
33. This section would not be complete even in outline without some
notice of the attitude held towards religion by Napoleon, who at once
crowned and in large measure undid the work of the Revolution. He
has his place in its religious legend in the current datum that he
wrought for the faith by restoring a suppressed public worship and
enabling the people of France once more to hear church-bells. In
point of fact, as was pointed out by Bishop Grégoire in 1826, "it
is materially proved that in 1796, before he was Consul, and four
years before the Concordat, according to a statement drawn up at the
office of the Domaines Nationaux, there were in France 32,214 parishes
where the culte was carried on." [1197] Other commonplaces concerning
Napoleon are not much better founded. On the strength of a number of
oral utterances, many of them imperfectly vouched for, and none of them
marked by much deliberation, he has been claimed by Carlyle [1198] as
a theist who philosophically disdained the "clatter of materialism,"
and believed in a Personal Creator of an infinite universe; while by
others he is put forward as a kind of expert in character study who
vouched for the divinity of Jesus. [1199] In effect, his verdict
that "this was not a man" would tell, if anything, in favour of
the view that Jesus is a mythical construction. He was, indeed, by
temperament quasi-religious, liking the sound of church bells and
the atmosphere of devotion; and in his boyhood he had been a rather
fervent Catholic. As he grew up he read, like his contemporaries,
the French deists of his time, and became a deist like his fellows,
recognizing that religions were human productions. Declaring that he
was "loin d'être athée," he propounded to O'Meara all the conventional
views--that religion should be made a support to morals and law; that
men need to believe in marvels; that religion is a great consolation
to those who believe in it; and that "no one can tell what he will do
in his last moments." [1200] The opinion to which he seems to have
adhered most steadily was that every man should die in the religion
in which he had been brought up. And he himself officially did so,
though he put off almost to the last the formality of a deathbed
profession. His language on the subject is irreconcilable with
any real belief in the Christian religion: he was "a deist à la
Voltaire who recalled with tenderness his Catholic childhood, and
who at death reverted to his first beliefs." [1201] For the rest,
he certainly believed in religion as a part of the machinery of the
State, and repeated the usual platitudes about its value as a moral
restraint. He was candid enough, however, not to pretend that it had
ever restrained him; and no freethinker condemned more sweepingly
than he the paralysing effect of the Catholic system on Spain. [1202]
To the Church his attitude was purely political; and his personal
liking for the Pope never moved him to yield, where he could avoid it,
to the temporal pretensions of the papacy. The Concordat of 1802,
that "brilliant triumph over the genius of the Revolution," [1203]
was purely and simply a political measure. If he had had his way,
he would have set up a system of religious councils in France, to
be utilized against all disturbing tendencies in politics. [1204]
Had he succeeded, he was capable of suppressing all manifestations
of freethought in the interests of "order." [1205] He had, in fact,
no disinterested love of truth; and we have his express declaration,
at St. Helena, on the subject of Molière's Tartufe: "I do not hesitate
to say that if the piece had been written in my time, I would not
have permitted its representation." [1206] Freethought can make no
warm claim to the allegiance of such a ruler; and if the Church of
Rome is concerned to claim him as a son on the score of his deathbed
adherence, after a reign which led the Catholic clergy of Spain to
hold him up to the faithful as an incarnation of the devil, [1207]
she will hardly gain by the association. Napoleon's ideas on religious
questions were in fact no more noteworthy than his views on economics,
which were thoroughly conventional.
CHAPTER XVIII
GERMAN FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES
1. When two generations of Protestant strife had turned to naught the
intellectual promise of the Reformation, and much of the ground first
won by it had lapsed to Catholicism, the general forward movement of
European thought availed to set up in Germany as elsewhere a measure of
critical unbelief. There is abundant evidence that the Lutheran clergy
not only failed to hold the best intelligence of the country with them,
but in large part fell into personal disrepute. [1208] "The scenes of
clerical immorality," says an eminently orthodox historian, "are enough
to chill one's blood even at the distance of two centuries." [1209]
A Church Ordinance of 1600 acknowledges information to the effect
that a number of clergymen and schoolmasters are guilty of "whoredom
and fornication," and commands that "if they are notoriously guilty
they shall be suspended." Details are preserved of cases of clerical
drunkenness and ruffianism; and the women of the priests' families do
not escape the pillory. [1210] Nearly a century later, Arnold resigned
his professorship at Giessen "from despair of producing any amendment
in the dissolute habits of the students." [1211] It is noted that
"the great moral decline of the clergy was confined chiefly to the
Lutheran Church. The Reformed [Calvinistic] was earnest, pious,
and aggressive" [1212]--the usual result of official hostility.
In such circumstances, the active freethought existing in France at the
beginning of the seventeenth century could not fail to affect Germany;
and even before the date of the polemic of Garasse and Mersenne there
appeared (1615) a counterblast to the new thought in the Theologia
Naturalis of J. H. Alsted, of Frankfort, directed adversus atheos,
Epicureos, et sophistas hujus temporis. The preface to this solid
quarto (a remarkable sample of good printing for the period) declares
that "there are men in this diseased (exulcerato) age who dare to
oppose science to revelation, reason to faith, nature to grace,
the creator to the redeemer, and truth to truth"; and the writer
undertakes to rise argumentatively from nature to the Christian God,
without, however, transcending the logical plane of De Mornay. The
trouble of the time, unhappily for the faith, was not rationalism,
but the inextinguishable hatreds of Protestant and Catholic, and the
strife of economic interests dating from the appropriations of the
first reformers. At length, after a generation of gloomy suspense,
came the explosion of the hostile ecclesiastical interests, and
the long-drawn horror of the Thirty Years' War, which left Germany
mangled, devastated, drained of blood and treasure, decivilized, and
well-nigh destitute of the machinery of culture. No such printing
as that of Alsted's book was to be done in the German world for
many generations. But as in France, so in Germany, the exhausting
experience of the moral and physical evil of religious war wrought
something of an antidote, in the shape of a new spirit of rationalism.
Not only was the Peace of Westphalia an essentially secular
arrangement, subordinating all religious claims to a political
settlement, [1213] but the drift of opinion was markedly
freethinking. Already in 1630 one writer describes "three classes
of skeptics among the nobility of Hamburg: first, those who believe
that religion is nothing but a mere fiction, invented to keep the
masses in restraint; second, those who give preference to no faith,
but think that all religions have a germ of truth; and third, those
who, confessing that there must be one true religion, are unable to
decide whether it is papal, Calvinist, or Lutheran, and consequently
believe nothing at all." No less explicit is the written testimony
of Walther, the court chaplain of Ulrich II of East Friesland, 1637:
"These infernal courtiers, among whom I am compelled to live against
my will, doubt those truths which even the heathen have learned
to believe." [1214] In Germany as in France the freethinking which
thus grew up during the religious war expanded after the peace. As
usual, this is to be gathered from the orthodox propaganda against it,
setting out in 1662 with a Preservative against the Pest of Present-day
Atheists, [1215] by one Theophilus Gegenbauer. So far was this from
attaining its end that there ensued ere long a more positive and
aggressive development of freethinking than any other country had yet
seen. A wandering scholar, Matthias Knutzen of Holstein (b. 1645),
who had studied philosophy at Königsberg, went about in 1674 teaching
a hardy Religion of Humanity, rejecting alike immortality, God and
Devil, churches and priests, and insisting that conscience could
perfectly well take the place of the Bible as a guide to conduct. His
doctrines are to be gathered chiefly from a curious Latin letter,
[1216] written by him for circulation, headed Amicus Amicis Amica;
and in this the profession of atheism is explicit: "Insuper Deum
negamus." In two dialogues in German he set forth the same ideas. His
followers, as holding by conscience, were called Gewissener; and
he or another of his group asserted that in Jena alone there were
seven hundred of them. [1217] The figures were fantastic, and the
whole movement passed rapidly out of sight--hardly by reason of the
orthodox refutations, however. Germany was in no state to sustain
such a party; and what happened was a necessarily slow gestation of
the seed of new thought thus cast abroad.
Knutzen's Latin letter is given in full by a Welsh scholar settled
in Germany, Jenkinus Thomasius (Jenkin Thomas), in his Historia
Atheismi (Altdorf, 1692), ed. Basel, 1709, pp. 97-101; also
by La Croze in his (anon.) Entretiens sur divers sujets, 1711,
p. 402 sq. Thomasius thus codifies its doctrine:--"1. There is
neither God nor Devil. 2. The magistrate is nothing to be esteemed;
temples are to be condemned, priests to be rejected. 3. In place
of the magistrate and the priest are to be put knowledge and
reason, joined with conscience, which teaches to live honestly,
to injure none, and to give each his own. 4. Marriage and free
union do not differ. 5. This is the only life: after it, there
is neither reward nor punishment. 6. The Scripture contradicts
itself." Knutzen admittedly wrote like a scholar (Thomasius,
p. 97); but his treatment of Scripture contradictions belongs
to the infancy of criticism; though La Croze, replying thirty
years later, could only meet it with charges of impiety and
stupidity. As to the numbers of the movement see Trinius,
Freydenker Lexicon, 1759, s. v. Knutzen. Kurtz (Hist. of the
Christian Church, Eng. tr. 1864, i, 213) states that a careful
academic investigation proved the claim to a membership of 700
to be an empty boast (citing H. Rossel, Studien und Kritiken,
1844, iv). This doubtless refers to the treatise of Musæus, Jena,
1675, cited by La Croze, p. 401. Some converts Knutzen certainly
made; and as only the hardiest would dare to avow themselves, his
influence may have been considerable. "Examples of total unbelief
come only singly to knowledge," says Tholuck; "but total unbelief
had still to the end of the century to bear penal treatment." He
gives the instances (1) of the Swedish Baron Skytte, reported in
1669 by Spener to the Frankfort authorities for having said at
table, before the court preacher, that the Scriptures were not
holy, and not from God but from men; and (2) "a certain minister"
who at the end of the century was prosecuted for blasphemy. (Das
kirchliche Leben des 17ten Jahrhunderts, 2 Abth. pp. 56-57.) Even
Anabaptists were still liable to banishment in the middle of
the century. Id. 1 Abth. 1861, p. 36. As to clerical intolerance
see pp. 40-44. On the merits of the Knutzen movement cp. Pünjer,
Hist, of the Christian Philos. of Religion, Eng. tr. i, 437-8.
2. While, however, clerical action could drive such a movement under
the surface, it could not prevent the spread of rationalism in all
directions; and there was now germinating a philosophic unbelief
[1218] under the influence of Spinoza. Nowhere were there more
prompt and numerous answers to Spinoza than in Germany, [1219]
whence it may be inferred that within the educated class he soon
had a good many adherents. In point of fact the Elector Palatine
offered him a professorship of philosophy at Heidelberg in 1673,
promising him "the most ample freedom in philosophical teaching,"
and merely stipulating that he should not use it "to disturb the
religion publicly established." [1220] On the other hand, Professor
Rappolt, of Leipzig, attacked him as an atheist, in an Oratio contra
naturalistas in 1670; Professor Musæus, of Jena, assailed him in 1674;
[1221] and the Chancellor Kortholt, of Kiel, grouped him, Herbert,
and Hobbes as The Three Great Impostors in 1680. [1222] After the
appearance of the Ethica the replies multiplied. On the other hand,
Cuffelaer vindicated Spinoza in 1684; and in 1691 F. W. Stosch, a
court official, and son of the court preacher, published a stringent
attack on revelationism, entitled Concordia rationis et fidei, partly
on Spinozistic lines, which created much commotion, and was forcibly
suppressed and condemned to be burnt by the hangman at Berlin, [1223]
as it denied not only the immateriality but the immortality of the
soul and the historical truth of the Scriptural narratives. This
seems to have been the first work of modern freethought published
by a German, [1224] apart from Knutzen's letter; but a partial list
of the apologetic works of the period, from Gegenbauer onwards,
may suffice to suggest the real vogue of heterodox opinions:--
1662. Th. Gegenbauer. Preservatio wider die Pest der heutigen
Atheisten. Erfurt.
1668. J. Musæus. Examen Cherburianismi. Contra E. Herbertum de
Cherbury.
1668. Anton Reiser. De origine, progressu, et incremento Antitheismi
seu Atheismi. [1225] Augsburg.
1670. Rappolt. Oratio contra Naturalistas. Leipzig.
1672. J. Müller. Atheismus devictus (in German). Hamburg.
1672. J. Lassen. Arcana-Politica-Atheistica (in German).
1673. ---- Besiegte Atheisterey.
1673. Chr. Pfaff. Disputatio contra Atheistas.
1674. J. Musæus. Spinozismus. Jena.
1677. Val. Greissing. Corona Transylvani; Exerc. 2, de Atheismo,
contra Cartesium et Math. Knutzen. Wittemberg.
1677. Tobias Wagner. Examen ... atheismi speculativi. Tübingen.
1677. K. Rudrauff, Giessen. Dissertatio de Atheismo.
1680. Chr. Kortholt. De tribus impostoribus magnis liber. Kiloni.
1689. Th. Undereyck. Der Närrische Atheist in seiner Thorheit
ueberzeugt. Bremen.
1692. Jenkinus Thomasius. Historia Atheismi. Altdorf.
1696. J. Lassen. Arcana-Politica-Atheistica. Reprint.
1697. A. H. Grosse. An Atheismus necessario ducat ad corruptionem
morum. Rostock.
1697. Em. Weber. Beurtheilung der Atheisterei.
1700. Tribbechov. Historia Naturalismi. Jena.
1708. Loescher. Prænotiones Theologicæ contra Naturalistarum et
Fanaticorum omne genus, Atheos, Deistas, Indifferentistas, etc.
Wittemberg.
1708. Schwartz. Demonstrationes Dei. Leipzig.
1708. Rechenberg. Fundamenta veræ religionis Prudentum, adversus
Atheos, etc.
1710. J. C. Wolfius. Dissertatio de Atheismi falso suspectis.
Wittemberg.
1713. J. N. Fromman. Atheus Stultus. Tübingen.
1713. Anon. Widerlegung der Atheisten, Deisten, und neuen Zweifeler.
Frankfort.
[Later came the works of Buddeus (1716) and Reimmann and Fabricius,
noted above, vol. i, ch. i, § 2.]
3. For a community in which the reading class was mainly clerical and
scholastic, the seeds of rationalism were thus in part sown in the
seventeenth century; but the ground was not yet propitious. Leibnitz
(1646-1716), the chief thinker produced by Germany before Kant,
lived in a state of singular intellectual isolation; [1226] and
showed his sense of it by writing his philosophic treatises chiefly
in French. One of the most widely learned men of his age, he was wont
from his boyhood to grapple critically with every system of thought
that came in his way; and, while claiming to be always eager to learn,
[1227] he was as a rule strongly concerned to affirm his own powerful
bias. Early in life he writes that it horrifies him to think how
many men he has met who were at once intelligent and atheistic;
[1228] and his propaganda is always dominated by the desire rather
to confute unbelief than to find out the truth. As early as 1668
(aet. 22) he wrote an essay to that end, which was published as
a Confessio naturæ contra Atheistas. Against Spinoza he reacted
instantly and violently, pronouncing the Tractatus on its first
(anonymous) appearance an "unbearably bold (licentiosum) book,"
and resenting the Hobbesian criticism which it "dared to apply to
sacred Scripture." [1229] Yet in the next year we find him writing
to Arnauld in earnest protest against the hidebound orthodoxy of the
Church. "A philosophic age," he declares, "is about to begin, in which
the concern for truth, flourishing outside the schools, will spread
even among politicians. Nothing is more likely to strengthen atheism
and to upset faith, already so shaken by the attacks of great but bad
men [a pleasing allusion to Spinoza], than to see on the one side the
mysteries of the faith preached upon as the creed of all, and on the
other hand become matter of derision to all, convicted of absurdity
by the most certain rules of common reason. The worst enemies of the
Church are in the Church. Let us take care lest the latest heresy--I
will not say atheism, but--naturalism, be publicly professed." [1230]
For a time he seemed thus disposed to liberalize. He wrote to Spinoza
on points of optics before he discovered the authorship; and he is
represented later as speaking of the Tractatus with respect. He even
visited Spinoza in 1676, and obtained a perusal of the manuscript
of the Ethica; but he remained hostile to him in theology and
philosophy. To the last he called Spinoza a mere developer of
Descartes, [1231] whom he also habitually resisted.
This was not hopeful; and Leibnitz, with all his power and originality,
really wrought little for the direct rationalization of religious
thought. [1232] His philosophy, with all its ingenuity, has the common
stamp of the determination of the theist to find reasons for the God
in whom he believed beforehand; and his principle that all is for
the best is the fatal rounding of his argumentative circle. Thus his
doctrine that that is true which is clear was turned to the account
of an empiricism of which the "clearness" was really predetermined
by the conviction of truth. His Theodicée, [1233] written in reply
to Bayle, is by the admission even of admirers [1234] a process of
begging the question. Deity, a mere "infinition" of finite qualities,
is proved à priori, though it is expressly argued that a finite mind
cannot grasp infinity; and the necessary goodness of necessary deity
is posited in the same fashion. It is very significant that such a
philosopher, himself much given to denying the religiousness of other
men's theories, was nevertheless accused among both the educated
and the populace of being essentially non-religious. Nominally he
adhered to the entire Christian system, including miracles, though he
declared that his belief in dogma rested on the agreement of reason
with faith, and claimed to keep his thought free on unassailed
truths; [1235] and he always discussed the Bible as a believer;
yet he rarely went to church; [1236] and the Low German nickname
Lövenix (= Glaubet nichts, "believes nothing") expressed his local
reputation. No clergyman attended his funeral; but indeed no one
else went, save his secretary. [1237] It is on the whole difficult to
doubt that his indirect influence not only in Germany but elsewhere
had been and has been for deism and atheism. [1238] He and Newton
were the most distinguished mathematicians and theists of the age;
and Leibnitz, as we saw, busied himself to show that the philosophy
of Newton [1239] tended to atheism, and that that of their theistic
predecessor Descartes would not stand criticism. [1240] Spinoza being,
according to him, in still worse case, and Locke hardly any sounder,
[1241] there remained for theists only his cosmology of monads and
his ethic of optimism--all for the best in the best of all possible
worlds--which seems at least as well fitted as any other theism to
make thoughtful men give up the principle.
4. Other culture-conditions concurred to set up a spirit of rationalism
in Germany. After the Thirty Years' War there arose a religious
movement, called Pietism by its theological opponents, which aimed at
an emotional inwardness of religious life as against what its adherents
held to be an irreligious orthodoxy around them. [1242] Contending
against rigid articles of credence, they inevitably prepared the way
for less credent forms of thought. [1243] Though the first leaders
of Pietism grew embittered with their unsuccess and the attacks of
their religious enemies, [1244] their impulse went far, and greatly
influenced the clergy through the university of Halle, which in the
first part of the eighteenth century turned out 6,000 clergymen in
one generation. [1245] Against the Pietists were furiously arrayed
the Lutherans of the old order, who even contrived in many places to
suppress their schools. [1246] Virtues generated under persecution,
however, underwent the law of degeneration which dogs all intellectual
subjection; and the inner life of Pietism, lacking mental freedom
and intellectual play, grew as cramped in its emotionalism as that
of orthodoxy in its dogmatism. Religion was thus represented by a
species of extremely unattractive and frequently absurd formalists on
the one hand, and on the other by a school which at its best unsettled
religious usage, and otherwise tended alternately to fanaticism and
cant. [1247] Thus "the rationalist tendencies of the age were promoted
by this treble exhibition of the aberrations of belief." [1248]
"How sorely," says Tholuck, "the hold not only of ecclesiastical
but of Biblical belief on men of all grades had been shaken at the
beginning of the eighteenth century is seen in many instances." [1249]
Orthodoxy selects that of a Holstein student who hanged himself at
Wittemberg in 1688, leaving written in his New Testament, in Latin,
the declaration that "Our soul is mortal; religion is a popular
delusion, invented to gull the ignorant, and so govern the world the
better." [1250] But again there is the testimony of the mint-master
at Hanover that at court there all lived as "free atheists." And
though the name "freethinker" was not yet much used in discussion,
it had become current in the form of Freigeist--the German equivalent
still used. This, as we have noted, [1251] was probably a survival
from the name of the old sect of the "Free Spirit," rather than an
adaptation from the French esprit fort or the English "freethinker."
5. After the collapse of the popular movement of Matthias Knutzen,
the thin end of the new wedge may be seen in the manifold work of
Christian Thomasius (1655-1728), who in 1687 published a treatise
on "Divine Jurisprudence," in which the principles of Pufendorf
on natural law, already offensive to the theologians, were carried
so far as to give new offence. Reading Pufendorf in his nonage as a
student of jurisprudence, he was so conscious of the conflict between
the utilitarian and the Scriptural view of moral law that, taught
by a master who had denounced Pufendorf, he recoiled in a state of
theological fear. [1252] Some years later, gaining self-possession, he
recognized the rationality of Pufendorf's system, and both expounded
and defended him, thus earning his share in the hostility which the
great jurist encountered at clerical hands. Between that hostility
and the naturalist bias which he had acquired from Pufendorf,
there grew up in him an aversion to the methods and pretensions
of theologians which made him their lifelong antagonist. [1253]
Pufendorf had but guardedly introduced some of the fundamental
principles of Hobbes, relating morals to the social state, and thus
preparing the way for utilitarianism. [1254] This sufficed to make
the theologians his enemies; and it is significant that Thomasius,
heterodox at the outset only thus far forth, becomes from that point
onwards an important pioneer of freethought, toleration, and humane
reform. Innovating in all things, he began, while still a Privatdocent
at Leipzig University, a campaign on behalf of the German language;
and, not content with arousing much pedantic enmity by delivering
lectures for the first time in his mother tongue, and deriding
at the same time the bad scholastic Latin of his compatriots,
he set on foot the first vernacular German periodical, [1255]
which ran for two years (1688-90), and caused so much anger that
he was twice prosecuted before the ecclesiastical court of Dresden,
the second time on a charge of contempt of religion. The periodical
was in effect a crusade against all the pedantries, the theologians
coming in for the hardest blows. [1256] Other satirical writings,
and a defence of intermarriage between Calvinists and Lutherans,
[1257] at length put him in such danger that, to escape imprisonment,
he sought the protection of the Elector of Brandenburg at Halle, where
he ultimately became professor of jurisprudence in the new university,
founded by his advice. There for a time he leant towards the Pietists,
finding in that body a concern for natural liberty of feeling and
thinking which was absent from the mental life of orthodoxy; but he
was "of another spirit" than they, and took his own way.
In philosophy an unsystematic pantheist, he taught, after Plutarch,
Bayle, and Bacon, that "superstition is worse than atheism"; but
his great practical service to German civilization, over and above
his furthering of the native speech, was his vigorous polemic against
prosecutions for heresy, trials for witchcraft, and the use of torture,
all of which he did more than any other German to discredit, though
judicial torture subsisted for another half-century. [1258] It was by
his propaganda that the princes of Germany were moved to abolish all
trials for sorcery. [1259] In such a battle he of course had the clergy
against him all along the line; and it is as an anti-clerical that
he figures in clerical history. The clerical hostility to his ethics
he repaid with interest, setting himself to develop to the utmost,
in the interest of lay freedom, the Lutheran admission of the divine
right of princes. [1260] This he turned not against freedom of opinion
but against ecclesiastical claims, very much in the spirit of Hobbes,
who may have influenced him.
The perturbed Mosheim, while candidly confessing that Thomasius
is the founder of academic freedom in Germany, pronounces that the
"famous jurists" who were led by Thomasius "set up a new fundamental
principle of church polity--namely, the supreme authority and power
of the civil magistrate," so tending to create the opinion "that the
ministers of religion are not to be accounted ambassadors of God,
but vicegerents of the chief magistrates. They also weakened not a
little the few remaining prerogatives and advantages which were left
of the vast number formerly possessed by the clergy; and maintained
that many of the maxims and regulations of our churches which had
come down from our fathers were relics of popish superstition. This
afforded matter for long and pernicious feuds and contests between
our theologians and our jurists.... It will be sufficient for us to
observe, what is abundantly attested, that they diminished much in
various places the respect for the clergy, the reverence for religion,
and the security and prosperity of the Lutheran Church." [1261]
Pusey, in turn, grudgingly allows that "the study of history was
revived and transformed through the views of Thomasius." [1262]
6. A personality of a very different kind emerges in the same period
in Johann Conrad Dippel (1673-1734), who developed a system of
rationalistic mysticism, and as to whom, says an orthodox historian,
"one is doubtful whether to place him in the class of pietists or
of rationalists, of enthusiasts or of scoffers, of mystics or of
freethinkers." [1263] The son of a preacher, he yet "exhibited in his
ninth year strong doubts as to the catechism." After a tolerably free
life as a student he turned Pietist at Strasburg, lectured on astrology
and palmistry, preached, and got into trouble with the police. In
1698 he published under the pen-name of "Christianus Democritus"
his book, Gestäuptes Papstthum der Protestirenden ("The Popery of
the Protestantizers Whipped"), in which he so attacked the current
Christian ethic of salvation as to exasperate both Churches. [1264] The
stress of his criticism fell firstly on the unthinking Scripturalism of
the average Protestant, who, he said, while reproaching the Catholic
with setting up in the crucifix a God of wood, was apt to make for
himself a God of paper. [1265] In his repudiation of the "bargain" or
"redemption" doctrine of the historic Church he took up positions which
were as old as Abailard, and which were one day to become respectable;
but in his own life he was much of an Ishmaelite, with wild notions
of alchemy and gold-making; and after predicting that he should live
till 1808, he died suddenly in 1734, leaving a doctrine which appealed
only to those constitutionally inclined, on the lines of the earlier
English Quakers, to set the inner light above Scripture. [1266]
7. Among the pupils of Thomasius at Halle was Theodore Louis Lau,
who, born of an aristocratic family, became Minister of Finances to
the Duke of Courland, and after leaving that post held a high place
in the service of the Elector Palatine. While holding that office
Lau published a small Latin volume of pensées entitled Meditationes
Theologicæ-Physicæ, notably deistic in tone. This gave rise to such an
outcry among the clergy that he had to leave Frankfort, only, however,
to be summoned before the consistory of Königsberg, his native town,
and charged with atheism (1719). He thereupon retired to Altona,
where he had freedom enough to publish a reply to his clerical
persecutors. [1267]
8. While Thomasius was still at work, a new force arose of a more
distinctly academic cast. This was the adaptation of Leibnitz's
system by Christian Wolff, who, after building up a large influence
among students by his method of teaching, [1268] came into public
prominence by a rectorial address [1269] at Halle (1721) in which
he warmly praised the ethics of Confucius. Such praise was naturally
held to imply disparagement of Christianity; and as a result of the
pietist outcry Wolff was condemned by the king to exile from Prussia,
under penalty of the gallows, [1270] all "atheistical" writings being
at the same time forbidden. Wolff's system, however, prevailed so
completely, in virtue of its lucidity and the rationalizing tendency
of the age, that in the year 1738 there were said to be already 107
authors of his cast of thinking. Nevertheless, he refused to return
to Halle on any invitation till the accession (1740) of Frederick
the Great, one of his warmest admirers, whereafter he figured as
the German thinker of his age. His teaching, which for the first
time popularized philosophy in the German language, in turn helped
greatly, by its ratiocinative cast, to promote the rationalistic
temper, though orthodox enough from the modern point of view. Under
the new reign, however, pietism and Wolffism alike lost prestige,
[1271] and the age of anti-Christian and Christian rationalism
began. Thus the period of freethinking in Germany follows close upon
one of religious revival. The 6,000 theologians trained at Halle in the
first generation of the century had "worked like a leaven through all
Germany." [1272] "Not since the time of the Reformation had Germany
such a large number of truly pious preachers and laymen as towards
the end of the first half of the eighteenth century." [1273] There,
as elsewhere, religion intellectually collapsed.
As to Wolff's rationalistic influence see Cairns, Unbelief in
the Eighteenth Century, 1881, p. 173; Pusey, pp. 115-19; Pünjer,
p. 529; Lechler, pp. 448-49. "It cannot be questioned that, in
his philosophy, the main stress rests upon the rational" (Kahnis,
as cited, p. 28). "Francke and Lange (pietists) ... saw atheism
and corruption of manners springing up from Wolff's school"
(before his exile). Id. p. 113. Wolff's chief offence lay in
stressing natural religion, and in indicating, as Tholuck observes,
that that could be demonstrated, whereas revealed religion could
only be believed (Abriss, p. 18). He greatly pleased Voltaire
by the dictum that men ought to be just even though they had
the misfortune to be atheists. It is noted by Tholuck, however
(Abriss, as cited, p. 11, note), that the decree for Wolff's
expulsion was inspired not by his theological colleagues but
by two military advisers of the king. Tholuck's own criticism
resolves itself into a protest against Wolff's predilection for
logical connection in his exposition. The fatal thing was that
Wolff accustomed German Christians to reason.
9. Even before the generation of active pressure from English and
French deism there were clear signs that rationalism had taken root in
German life. On the impulse set up by the establishment of the Grand
Lodge at London in 1717, Freemasonic lodges began to spring up in
Germany, the first being founded at Hamburg in 1733. [1274] The deism
which in the English lodges was later toned down by orthodox reaction
was from the first pronounced in the German societies, which ultimately
passed on the tradition to the other parts of the Continent. But
the new spirit was not confined to secret societies. Wolffianism
worked widely. In the so-called Wertheim Bible (1735) Johann
Lorenz Schmid, in the spirit of the Leibnitz-Wolffian theology,
"undertook to translate the Bible, and to explain it according to the
principle that in revelation only that can be accepted as true which
does not contradict the reason." [1275] This of course involved no
thorough-going criticism; but the spirit of innovation was strong
enough in Schmid to make him undermine tradition at many points,
and later carried him so far as to translate Tindal's Christianity as
old as Creation. So far was he in advance of his time that when his
Wertheim Bible was officially condemned throughout Germany he found no
defenders. [1276] The Wolffians were in comparison generally orthodox;
and another writer of the same school, Martin Knutzen, professor at
Königsberg (1715-1751), undertook in a youthful thesis De æternitate
mundi impossibili (1735) to rebut the old Averroïst doctrine, revived
by modern science, of the indestructibility of the universe. A few
years later (1739) he published a treatise entitled The Truth of
Christianity Demonstrated by Mathematics, which succeeded as might
have been expected.
10. To the same period belong the first activities of Johann Christian
Edelmann (1698-1767), one of the most energetic freethinkers of his
age. Trained philosophically at Jena under the theologian Budde,
a bitter opponent of Wolff, and theologically in the school of the
Pietists, he was strongly influenced against official orthodoxy
through reading the Impartial History of the Church and of Heretics,
by Gottfried Arnold, an eminently anti-clerical work, which nearly
always takes the side of the heretics. [1277] In the same heterodox
direction he was swayed by the works of Dippel. At this stage Edelmann
produced his Unschuldige Wahrheiten ("Innocent Truths"), in which
he takes up a pronouncedly rationalist and latitudinarian position,
but without rejecting "revelation"; and in 1736 he went to Berleburg,
where he worked on the Berleburg translation of the Bible, a Pietist
undertaking, somewhat on the lines of Dippel's mystical doctrine,
in which a variety of incredible Scriptural narratives, from the six
days' creation onwards, are turned to mystical purpose. [1278] In
this occupation Edelmann seems to have passed some years. Gradually,
however, he came more and more under the influence of the English
deists; and he at length withdrew from the Pietist camp, attacking
his former associates for the fanaticism into which their thought
was degenerating. It was under the influence of Spinoza, however,
that he took his most important steps. A few months after meeting
with the Tractatus he began (1740) the first part of his treatise
Moses mit aufgedecktem Angesichte ("Moses with unveiled face"),
an attack at once on the doctrine of inspiration and on that of
the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. The book was intended to
consist of twelve parts; but after the appearance of three it was
prohibited by the imperial fisc, and the published parts burned by the
hangman at Hamburg and elsewhere. Nonetheless, Edelmann continued his
propaganda, publishing in 1741 or 1742 The Divinity of Reason, [1279]
and in 1741 Christ and Belial. In 1749 or 1750 his works were again
publicly burned at Frankfurt by order of the imperial authorities;
and he had much ado to find anywhere in Germany safe harbourage, till
he found protection under Frederick at Berlin, where he died in 1767.
Edelmann's teaching was essentially Spinozist and pantheistic, [1280]
with a leaning to the doctrine of metempsychosis. As a pantheist he of
course entirely rejected the divinity of Jesus, pronouncing inspiration
the appanage of all; and the gospels were by him dismissed as late
fabrications, from which the true teachings of the founder could not
be learned; though, like nearly all the freethinkers of that age,
he estimated Jesus highly. [1281] A German theologian complains,
nevertheless, that he was "more just toward heathenism than toward
Judaism; and more just toward Judaism than toward Christianity";
adding: "What he taught had been thoroughly and ingeniously said in
France and England; but from a German theologian, and that with such
eloquent coarseness, with such a mastery in expatiating in blasphemy,
such things were unheard of." [1282] The force of Edelmann's attack
may be gathered from the same writer's account of him as a "bird of
prey" who rose to a "wicked height of opposition, not only against
the Lutheran Church, but against Christianity in general."
11. Even from decorous and official exponents of religion, however,
there came "naturalistic" and semi-rationalistic teaching, as in
the Reflections on the most important truths of religion [1283]
(1768-1769) of J. F. W. Jerusalem, Abbot of Marienthal in Brunswick,
and later of Riddagshausen (1709-1789). Jerusalem had travelled
in Europe, and had spent two years in Holland and one in England,
where he studied the deists and their opponents. "In England alone,"
he declared, "is mankind original." [1284] Though really written by
way of defending Christianity against the freethinkers, in particular
against Bolingbroke and Voltaire, [1285] the very title of his book
is suggestive of a process of disintegration; and in it certain
unedifying Scriptural miracles are actually rejected. [1286] It was
probably this measure of adaptation to new needs that gave it its
great popularity in Germany and secured its translation into several
other languages. Goethe called him a "freely and gently thinking
theologian"; and a modern orthodox historian of the Church groups him
with those who "contributed to the spread of Rationalism by sermons
and by popular doctrinal and devotional works." [1287] Jerusalem was,
however, at most a semi-rationalist, taking a view of the fundamental
Christian dogmas which approached closely to that of Locke. [1288]
It was, as Goethe said later, the epoch of common sense; and the very
theologians tended to a "religion of nature." [1289]
12. Alongside of home-made heresy there had come into play a new
initiative force in the literature of English deism, which began to
be translated after 1740, [1290] and was widely circulated till, in
the last third of the century, it was superseded by the French. The
English answers to the deists were frequently translated likewise,
and notoriously helped to promote deism [1291]--another proof that
it was not their influence that had changed the balance of activity
in England. Under a freethinking king, even clergymen began guardedly
to accept the deistic methods; and the optimism of Shaftesbury began
to overlay the optimism of Leibnitz; [1292] while a French scientific
influence began with La Mettrie, [1293] Maupertuis, and Robinet. Even
the Leibnitzian school, proceeding on the principle of immortal
monads, developed a doctrine of the immortality of the souls of animals
[1294]--a position not helpful to orthodoxy. There was thus a general
stirring of doubt among educated people, [1295] and we find mention
in Goethe's Autobiography of an old gentleman of Frankfort who avowed,
as against the optimists, "Even in God I find defects (Fehler)." [1296]
On the other hand, there were instances in Germany of the phenomenon,
already seen in England in Newton and Boyle, of men of science
devoting themselves to the defence of the faith. The most notable
cases were those of the mathematician Euler and the biologist von
Haller. The latter wrote Letters (to his Daughter) On the most
important Truths of Revelation (1772) [1297] and other apologetic
works. Euler in 1747 published at Berlin, where he was professor,
his Defence of Revelation against the Reproaches of Freethinkers;
[1298] and in 1769 his Letters to a German Princess, of which the
argument notably coincides with part of that of Berkeley against
the freethinking mathematicians. Haller's position comes to the same
thing. All three men, in fact, grasped at the argument of despair--the
inadequacy of the human faculties to sound the mystery of things;
and all alike were entirely unable to see that it logically cancelled
their own judgments. Even a theologian, contemplating Haller's theorem
of an incomprehensible omnipotence countered in its merciful plan
of salvation by the set of worms it sought to save, comments on the
childishness of the philosophy which confidently described the plans
of deity in terms of what it declared to be the blank ignorance of
the worms in question. [1299] Euler and Haller, like some later men of
science, kept their scientific method for the mechanical or physical
problems of their scientific work, and brought to the deepest problems
of all the self-will, the emotionalism, and the irresponsibility of
the ignorant average man. Each did but express in his own way the
resentment of the undisciplined mind at attacks upon its prejudices;
and Haller's resort to poetry as a vehicle for his religion gives the
measure of his powers on that side. Thus in Germany as in England the
"answer" to the freethinkers was a failure. Men of science playing
at theology and theologians playing at science alike failed to turn
the tide of opinion, now socially favoured by the known deism of the
king. German orthodoxy, says a recent Christian apologist, fell "with
a rapidity reminding one of the capture of Jericho." [1300] Goethe,
writing of the general attitude to Christianity about 1768, sums up
that "the Christian religion wavered between its own historic-positive
base and a pure deism, which, grounded on morality, was in turn to
re-establish ethics." [1301]
Frederick's attitude, said an early Kantian, had had "an almost
magical influence" on popular opinion (Willich, Elements of the
Critical Philosophy, 1798, p. 2). With this his French teachers
must have had much to do. Lord Morley pronounces (Voltaire,
4th ed. p. 123) that French deism "never made any impression on
Germany," and that "the teaching of Leibnitz and Wolff stood like a
fortified wall against the French invasion." This is contradicted
by much German testimony; in particular by Lange's (Gesch. des
Mater. i, 318), though he notes that French materialism could not
get the upper hand. Laukhard, who expressed the highest admiration
for Tindal, as having wholly delivered him from dogmatism, avowed
that Voltaire, whom everybody read, had perhaps done more harm
to priest religion than all the books of the English and German
deists together (Leben, 1792-1802, Th. i, p. 268).
Tholuck gravely affirms (Abriss, p. 33) that the acquaintance
with the French "deistery and frivolity" in Germany belongs to
a "somewhat later period than that of the English." Naturally
it did. The bulk of the English deistic literature was printed
before the printing of the French had begun! French MSS. would
reach German princes, but not German pastors. But Tholuck sadly
avows that the French deism (of the serious and pre-Voltairean
portions of which he seems to have known nothing) had a
"frightful" influence on the upper classes, though not on the
clergy (p. 34). Following him, Kahnis writes (Internal History,
p. 41) that "English and French Deism met with a very favourable
reception in Germany--the latter chiefly in the higher circles,
the former rather among the educated middle classes." (He
should have added, "the younger theologians.") Baur, even
in speaking disparagingly of the French as compared with the
English influence, admits (Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, 2te
Aufl. p. 347) that the former told upon Germany. Cp. Tennemann,
Bohn. tr. pp. 385, 388. Hagenbach shows great ignorance of English
deism, but he must have known something of German; and he writes
(tr. p. 57) that "the imported deism," both English and French,
"soon swept through the rifts of the Church, and gained supreme
control of literature." Cp. pp. 67-68. See Croom Robertson's
Hobbes, pp. 225-26, as to the persistence of a succession of
Hobbes and Locke in Germany in the teeth of the Wolffian school,
which soon lost ground after 1740. It is further noteworthy that
Brucker's copious Historia Critica Philosophiæ (1742-44), which as
a mere learned record has great merit, and was long the standard
authority in Germany, gives great praise to Locke and little space
to Wolff. (See Enfield's abstract, pp. 614, 619 sq.) The Wolffian
philosophy, too, had been rejected and disparaged by both Herder
and Kant--who were alike deeply influenced by Rousseau--in the
third quarter of the century; and was generally discredited,
save in the schools, when Kant produced the Critique of Pure
Reason. See below, pp. 337, 345.
13. Frederick, though reputed a Voltairean freethinker par excellence,
may be claimed for Germany as partly a product of the rationalizing
philosophy of Wolff. In his first letter to Voltaire, written in 1736,
four years before his accession, he promises to send him a translation
he has had made of the "accusation and the justification" of Wolff,
"the most celebrated philosopher of our days, who, for having carried
light into the darkest places of metaphysics, and for having treated
the most difficult matters in a manner no less elevated than precise
and clear, is cruelly accused of irreligion and atheism"; and he
speaks of getting translated Wolff's Treatise of God, the Soul, and
the World. When he became a thoroughgoing freethinker is not clear,
for Voltaire at this time had produced no explicit anti-Christian
propaganda. At first the new king showed himself disposed to act
on the old maxim that freethought is bad for the common people. In
1743-44 he caused to be suppressed two German treatises by one
Gebhardi, a contributor to Gottsched's magazines, attacking the
Biblical miracles; and in 1748 he sent a young man named Rüdiger to
Spandau for six months' confinement for printing an anti-Christian
work by one Dr. Pott. [1302] But as he grew more confident in his own
methods he extended to men of his own way of thinking the toleration
he allowed to all religionists, save insofar as he vetoed the mutual
vituperation of the sects, and such proselytizing as tended to create
strife. With an even hand he protected Catholics, Greek Christians,
and Unitarians, letting them have churches where they would; [1303]
and when, after the battle of Striegau, a body of Protestant peasantry
asked his permission to slay all the Catholics they could find,
he answered with the gospel precept, "Love your enemies." [1304]
Beyond the toleration of all forms of religion, however, he never
went; though he himself added to the literature of deism. Apart from
his verses we have from him the posthumous treatise Pensées sur la
Religion, probably written early in his life, where the rational case
against the concepts of revelation and of miracles is put with a calm
and sustained force. Like the rest, he is uncritical in his deism;
but, that granted, his reasoning is unanswerable. In talk he was wont
to treat the clergy with small respect; [1305] and he wrote more
denunciatory things concerning them than almost any freethinker of
the century. [1306] Bayle, Voltaire, and Lucretius were his favourite
studies; and as the then crude German literature had no attraction for
him, he drew to his court many distinguished Frenchmen, including La
Mettrie, Maupertuis, D'Alembert, D'Argens, and above all Voltaire,
between whom and him there was an incurable incompatibility of
temper and character, and a persistent attraction of force of mind,
which left them admiring without respecting each other, and unable
to abstain from mutual vituperation. Under Frederick's vigorous rule
all speech was free save such as he considered personally offensive,
as Voltaire's attack on Maupertuis; and after a stormy reign he could
say, when asked by Prince William of Brunswick whether he did not
think religion one of the best supports of a king's authority, "I
find order and the laws sufficient.... Depend upon it, countries have
been admirably governed when your religion had no existence." [1307]
Religion certainly had no part in his personality in the ordinary
sense of the term. Voltaire was wont to impute to him atheism; when
La Mettrie died, the mocker, then at Frederick's court, remarked
that the post of his majesty's atheist was vacant, but happily the
Abbé de Prades was there to fill it. In effect, Frederick professed
Voltaire's own deism; but of all the deists of the time he had least
of the religious temperament and most of sheer cynicism.
The attempt of Carlyle to exhibit Frederick as a practical
believer is a flagrant instance of that writer's subjective
method. He tells (Hist. of Friedrich, bk. xviii, ch. x) that at
the beginning of the battle of Leuthen a column of troops near
the king sang a hymn of duty (which Carlyle calls "the sound of
Psalms"); that an officer asked whether the singing should be
stopped, and that the king said "By no means." His "hard heart
seems to have been touched by it. Indeed, there is in him, in
those grim days, a tone (!) as of trust in the Eternal, as of
real religious piety and faith, scarcely noticeable elsewhere
in his history. His religion--and he had in withered forms a
good deal of it, if we will look well--being almost always in
a strictly voiceless state, nay, ultra voiceless, or voiced the
wrong way, as is too well known." Then comes the assertion that
"a moment after" the king said "to someone, Ziethen probably,
'With men like these, don't you think I shall have victory this
day!'" Here, with the very spirit of unveracity at work before his
eyes, Carlyle plumps for the fable. Yet the story, even if true,
would give no proof whatever of religious belief.
In point of fact, Frederick was a much less "religious" deist
than Voltaire. He erected no temple to his unloved God. And a
perusal of his dialogue of Pompadour and the Virgin (Dialogues
des morts) may serve to dispose of the thesis that the German
mind dealt reverently and decently with matters which the French
mind handled frivolously. That performance outgoes in ribaldry
anything of the age in French.
As the first modern freethinking king, Frederick is something of a test
case. Son of a man of narrow mind and odious character, he was himself
no admirable type, being neither benevolent nor considerate, neither
truthful nor generous; and in international politics, after writing in
his youth a treatise in censure of Machiavelli, he played the old game
of unscrupulous aggression. Yet he was not only the most competent,
but, as regards home administration, the most conscientious king of his
time. To find him a rival we must go back to the pagan Antonines and
Julian, or at least to St. Louis of France, who, however, was rather
worsened than bettered by his creed. [1308] Henri IV of France, who
rivalled him in sagacity and greatly excelled him in human kindness,
was far his inferior in devotion to duty.
The effect of Frederick's training is seen in his final attitude to
the advanced criticism of the school of d'Holbach, which assailed
governments and creeds with the same unsparing severity of logic and
moral reprobation. Stung by the uncompromising attack, Frederick
retorts by censuring the rashness which would plunge nations into
civil strife because kings miscarry where no human wisdom could avoid
miscarriage. He who had wantonly plunged all Germany into a hell of
war for his sole ambition, bringing myriads to misery, thousands
to violent death, and hundreds of his own soldiers to suicide,
could be virtuously indignant at the irresponsible audacity of
writers who indicted the whole existing system for its imbecility and
injustice. But he did reason on the criticism; he did ponder it; he did
feel bound to meet argument with argument; and he left his arguments to
the world. The advance on previous regal practice is noteworthy: the
whole problem of politics is at once brought to the test of judgment
and persuasion. Beside the Christian Georges and the Louis's of his
century, and beside his Christian father, his superiority in judgment
and even in some essential points of character is signal. Such was
the great deist king of the deist age; a deist of the least religious
temper and of no very fine moral material to begin with.
The one contemporary monarch who in any way compares with him in
enlightenment, Joseph II of Austria, belonged to the same school. The
main charge against Frederick as a ruler is that he did not act up
to the ideals of the school of Voltaire. In reply to the demand of
the French deists for an abolition of all superstitious teaching,
he observed that among the 16,000,000 inhabitants of France
at most 200,000 were capable of philosophic views, and that the
remaining 15,800,000 were held to their opinions by "insurmountable
obstacles." [1309] This, however, had been said by the deists
themselves (e.g., d'Holbach, préf. to Christianisme dévoilé); and
such an answer meant that he had no idea of so spreading instruction
that all men should have a chance of reaching rational beliefs. This
attitude was his inheritance from the past. Yet it was under him that
Prussia began to figure as a first-rate culture force in Europe.
14. The social vogue of deistic thought could now be traced in much of
the German belles-lettres of the time. The young Jakob von Mauvillon
(1743-1794), secretary of the King of Poland and author of several
histories, in his youth translated from the Latin into French Holberg's
Voyage of Nicolas Klimius (1766), which made the tour of Europe, and
had a special vogue in Germany. Later in life, besides translating
and writing abundantly and intelligently on matters of economic and
military science--in the latter of which he had something like expert
status--Mauvillon became a pronounced heretic, though careful to keep
his propaganda anonymous.
The most systematic dissemination of the new ideas was that carried on
in the periodical published by Christoph Friedrich Nicolai (1733-1811)
under the title of The General German Library (founded 1765), which
began with fifty contributors, and at the height of its power had
a hundred and thirty, among them being Lessing, Eberhard, and Moses
Mendelssohn. In the period from its start to the year 1792 it ran to
106 volumes; and it has always been more or less bitterly spoken of
by later orthodoxy as the great library of that movement. Nicolai,
himself an industrious and scholarly writer, produced among many
other things a satirical romance famous in its day, the Life and
Opinions of Magister Sebaldus Nothanker, ridiculing the bigots and
persecutors the type of Klotz, the antagonist of Lessing, and some
of Nicolai's less unamiable antagonists, [1310] as well as various
aspects of the general social and literary life of the time. To
Nicolai is fully due the genial tribute paid to him by Heine, [1311]
were it only for the national service of his "Library." Its many
translations from the English and French freethinkers, older and
newer, concurred with native work to spread a deistic rationalism,
labelled Aufklärung, or enlightenment, through the whole middle class
of Germany. [1312] Native writers in independent works added to the
propaganda. Andreas Riem (1749-1807), a Berlin preacher, appointed
by Frederick a hospital chaplain, [1313] wrote anonymously against
priestcraft as no other priest had yet done. "No class of men," he
declared, in language perhaps echoed from his king, "has ever been
so pernicious to the world as the priesthood. There were laws at all
times against murderers and bandits, but not against the assassin in
the priestly garb. War was repelled by war, and it came to an end. The
war of the priesthood against reason has lasted for thousands of years,
and it still goes on without ceasing." [1314] Georg Schade (1712-1795),
who appears to have been one of the believers in the immortality of
animals, and who in 1770 was imprisoned for his opinions in the Danish
island of Christiansoe, was no less emphatic, declaring, in a work on
Natural Religion on the lines of Tindal (1760), that "all who assert a
supernatural religion are godless impostors." [1315] Constructive work
of great importance, again, was done by J. B. Basedow (1723-1790), who
early became an active deist, but distinguished himself chiefly as an
educational reformer, on the inspiration of Rousseau's Émile, [1316]
setting up a system which "tore education away from the Christian
basis," [1317] and becoming in virtue of that one of the most popular
writers of his day. It is latterly admitted even by orthodoxy that
school education in Germany had in the seventeenth century become a
matter of learning by rote, and that such reforms as had been set up
in some of the schools of the Pietists had in Basedow's day come to
nothing. [1318] As Basedow was the first to set up vigorous reforms,
it is not too much to call him an instaurator of rational education,
whose chief fault was to be too far ahead of his age. This, with the
personal flaw of an unamiable habit of wrangling in all companies,
caused the failure of his "Philanthropic Institute," established in
1771, on the invitation of the Prince of Dessau, to carry out his
educational ideals. Quite a number of other institutions, similarly
planned, after his lead, by men of the same way of thinking, as Canope
and Salzmann, in the same period, had no better success.
Goethe, who was clearly much impressed by Basedow, and travelled
with him, draws a somewhat antagonistic picture of him on
retrospect (Wahrheit und Dichtung, B. xiv). He accuses him in
particular of always obtruding his anti-orthodox opinions; not
choosing to admit that religious opinions were being constantly
obtruded on Basedow. Praising Lavater for his more amiable
nature, Goethe reveals that Lavater was constantly propounding
his orthodoxy. Goethe, in fine, was always lenient to pietism,
in which he had been brought up, and to which he was wont to make
sentimental concessions. He could never forget his courtly duties
towards the established convention, and so far played the game of
bigotry. Hagenbach notes (i, 298, note), without any deprecation,
that after Basedow had published in 1763-1764 his Philalethie,
a perfectly serious treatise on natural as against revealed
religion, one of the many orthodox answers, that by Pastor Goeze,
so inflamed against him the people of his native town of Hamburg
that he could not show himself there without danger. And this
is the man accused of "obtruding his views." Baur is driven, by
way of disparagement of Basedow and his school, to censure their
self-confidence--precisely the quality which, in religious teachers
with whom he agreed, he as a theologian would treat as a mark
of superiority. Baur's attack on the moral utilitarianism of the
school is still less worthy of him. (Gesch. der christl. Kirche,
iv, 595-96). It reads like an echo of Kahnis (as cited, p. 46 sq.).
Yet another influential deist was Johann August Eberhard (1739-1809),
for a time a preacher at Charlottenburg, but driven out of the Church
for the heresy of his New Apology of Sokrates; or the Final Salvation
of the Heathen (1772). [1319] The work in effect placed Sokrates on
a level with Jesus, [1320] which was blasphemy. [1321] But the outcry
attracted the attention of Frederick, who made Eberhard a Professor of
Philosophy at Halle, where later he opposed the idealism of both Kant
and Fichte. Substantially of the same school was the less pronouncedly
deistic cleric Steinbart, [1322] author of a utilitarian System of
Pure Philosophy, or Christian doctrine of Happiness, now forgotten,
who had been variously influenced by Locke and Voltaire. [1323] Among
the less heterodox but still rationalizing clergy of the period were
J. J. Spalding, author of a work on The Utility of the Preacher's
Office, a man of the type labelled "Moderate" in the Scotland of the
same period, and as such antipathetic to emotional pietists; [1324]
and Zollikofer, of the same school--both inferribly influenced by the
deism of their day. Considerably more of a rationalist than these was
the clergyman W. A. Teller (1734-1804), author of a New Testament
Lexicon, who reached a position virtually deistic, and intimated
to the Jews of Berlin that he would receive them into his church on
their making a deistic profession of faith. [1325]
15. If it be true that even the rationalizing defenders of Christianity
led men on the whole towards deism, [1326] much more must this hold
true of the new school who applied rationalistic methods to religious
questions in their capacity as theologians. Of this school the founder
was Johann Salomo Semler (1725-1791), who, trained as a Pietist at
Halle, early thought himself into a more critical attitude, [1327]
albeit remaining a theological teacher. Son of a much-travelled army
chaplain, who in his many campaigns had learned much of the world,
and in particular seen something of religious frauds in the Catholic
countries, Semler started with a critical bias which was cultivated
by wide miscellaneous reading from his boyhood onwards. As early as
1750, in his doctoral dissertation defending certain texts against
the criticism of Whiston, he set forth the view, developed a century
later by Baur, that the early Christian Church contained a Pauline and
a Petrine party, mutually hostile. The merit of his research won him
a professorship at Halle; and this position he held till his death,
despite such heresy as his rejection from the canon of the books of
Ruth, Esther, Ezra, Nehemiah, the Song of Solomon, the two books of
Chronicles, and the Apocalypse, in his Freie Untersuchung des Canons
(1771-1774)--a work apparently inspired by the earlier performance of
Richard Simon. [1328] His intellectual life was for long a continuous
advance, always in the direction of a more rationalistic comprehension
of religious history; and he reached, for his day, a remarkably
critical view of the mythical element in the Old Testament. [1329]
Not only did he recognize that Genesis must have pre-Mosaic origins,
and that such books as the Proverbs and the Psalms were of later
date and other origin than those traditionally assigned: [1330] his
historical sense worked on the whole narrative. Thus he recognized
the mythical character of the story of Samson, and was at least on
the way towards a scientific handling of the New Testament. [1331]
But in his period and environment a systematic rationalism was
impossible; he was always a "revelation-believing Christian"; his
critical intelligence was always divided against itself; [1332]
and his powers were expended in an immense number of works, [1333]
which failed to yield any orderly system, while setting up a general
stimulus, in despite of their admitted unreadableness. [1334]
In his latter days he strongly opposed and condemned the more
radical rationalism of his pupil Bahrdt, and of the posthumous work
of Reimarus, here exemplifying the common danger of the intellectual
life, for critical as well as uncritical minds. After provoking many
orthodox men by his own challenges, he is roused to fury alike by the
genial rationalism of Bahrdt and by the cold analysis of Reimarus;
and his attack on the Wolfenbüttel Fragments published by Lessing
is loaded with a vocabulary of abuse such as he had never before
employed [1335]--a sure sign that he had no scientific hold of his own
historical conception. Like the similarly infuriated semi-rational
defenders of the historicity of Jesus in our own day, he merely
"followed the tactic of exposing the lack of scientific knowledge and
theological learning" of the innovating writer. Always temperamentally
religious, he died in the evangelical faith. But his own influence in
promoting rationalism is now obvious and unquestioned, [1336] and he is
rightly to be reckoned a main founder of "German rationalism"--that is,
academic rationalism on theologico-historical lines [1337]--although
he always professed to be merely rectifying orthodox conceptions. In
the opinion of Pusey "the revival of historical interpretation by
Semler became the most extensive instrument of the degradation of
Christianity."
Among the other theologians of the time who exercised a similar
influence to the Wolffian, Töllner attracts notice by the comparative
courage with which, in the words of an orthodox critic, he "raised, as
much as possible, natural religion to revelation," and, "on the other
hand, lowered Scripture to the level of natural light." [1338] First
he published (1764) True Reasons why God has not furnished Revelation
with evident proofs, [1339] arguing for the modern attenuation of
the idea of revelation; then a work on Divine Inspiration (1771) in
which he explicitly avowed that "God has in no way, either inwardly
or outwardly, dictated the sacred books. The writers were the real
authors" [1340]--a declaration not to be counterbalanced by further
generalities about actual divine influence. Later still he published a
Proof that God leads men to salvation even by his revelation in Nature
[1341] (1766)--a form of Christianity little removed from deism. Other
theologians, such as Ernesti, went far with the tide of illuminism;
and when the orthodox Chr. A. Crusius died at Leipzig in 1781, Jean
Paul Richter, then a student, wrote that people had become "too much
imbued with the spirit of illuminism" to be of his school. "Most,
almost all the students," adds Richter, incline to heterodoxy; and
of the professor Morus he tells that "wherever he can explain away a
miracle, the devil, etc., he does so." Of this order of accommodators,
a prominent example was Michaelis (1717-1791), whose reduction of
the Mosaic legislation to motives of every-day utility is still
entertaining.
16. Much more notorious than any other German deist of his time was
Carl Friedrich Bahrdt (1741-1792), a kind of raw Teutonic Voltaire,
and the most popularly influential German freethinker of his age. In
all he is said to have published a hundred and twenty-six books
and tracts, [1342] thus approximating to Voltaire in quantity if
not in quality. Theological hatred has so pursued him that it is
hard to form a fair opinion as to his character; but the record
runs that he led a somewhat Bohemian and disorderly life, though a
very industrious one. While a preacher in Leipzig in 1768 he first
got into trouble--"persecution" by his own account; "disgrace for
licentious conduct," by that of his enemies. In any case, he was
at this period quite orthodox in his beliefs. [1343] That there was
no serious disgrace is suggested by the fact that he was appointed
Professor of Biblical Antiquities at Erfurt; and soon afterwards, on
the recommendation of Semler and Ernesti, at Giessen (1771). While
holding that post he published his "modernized" translation of the
New Testament, done from the point of view of belief in revelation,
following it up by his New Revelations of God in Letters and Tales
(1773), which aroused Protestant hostility. After teaching for a time
in a new Swiss "Philanthropin"--an educational institution on Basedow's
lines--he obtained a post as a district ecclesiastical superintendent
in the principality of Türkheim on the Hardt; whereafter he was enabled
to set up a "Philanthropin" of his own in the castle of Heidesheim,
near Worms. The second edition of his translation of the New Testament,
however, aroused Catholic hostility in the district; the edition was
confiscated, and he found it prudent to make a tour in Holland and
England, only to receive, on his return, a missive from the imperial
consistory declaring him disabled for any spiritual office in the Holy
German Empire. Seeking refuge in Halle, he found Semler grown hostile;
but made the acquaintance of Eberhard, with the result of abandoning
the remains of his orthodox faith. Henceforth he regarded Jesus, albeit
with admiration, as simply a great teacher, "like Moses, Confucius,
Sokrates, Semler, Luther, and myself"; [1344] and to this view he gave
effect; in the third edition of his New Testament translation, which
was followed in 1782 by his Letters on the Bible in Popular Style
(Volkston), and in 1784 by his Completion (Ausführung) of the Plan
and Aim of Jesus in Letters (1784), and his System of Moral Religion
(1787). More and more fiercely antagonized, he duly retaliated on the
clergy in his Church and Heretic Almanack (1781); and after for a time
keeping a tavern, he got into fresh trouble by printing anonymous
satires on the religious edict of 1788, directed against all kinds
of heresy, [1345] and was sentenced to two years' imprisonment in a
fortress--a term reduced by the king to one year. Thereafter he ended
not very happily his troublous life in Halle in 1792.
The weakest part of Bahrdt's performance is now seen to be
his application of the empirical method of the early theological
rationalists, who were wont to take every Biblical prodigy as a merely
perverted account of an incident which certainly happened. That
method--which became identified with the so-called "rationalism"
of Germany in that age, and is not yet discarded by rationalizing
theologians--is reduced to open absurdity in his hands, as when
he makes Moses employ fireworks on Mount Sinai, and Jesus feed the
five thousand by stratagem, without miracle. But it was not by such
extravagances that he won and kept a hearing throughout his life. It
is easy to see on retrospect that the source of his influence as a
writer lay above all things in his healthy critical ethic, his own
mode of progression being by way of simple common sense and natural
feeling, not of critical research. His first step in rationalism
was to ask himself "how Three Persons could be One God"--this while
believing devoutly in revelation, miracles, the divinity of Jesus,
and the Atonement. Under the influence of a naturalist travelling
in his district, he gave up the orthodox doctrine of the Atonement,
feeling himself "as if new-born" in being freed of what he had learned
to see as a "pernicious and damnable error." [1346] It was for such
writing that he was hated and persecuted, despite his habitual eulogy
of Christ as "the greatest and most venerable of mortals." His offence
was not against morals, but against theology; and he heightened the
offence by his vanity.
Bahrdt's real power may be inferred from the fury of some of his
opponents. "The wretched Bahrdt" is Dr. Pusey's Christian account
of him. Even F. C. Baur is abusive. The American translators
of Hagenbach, Messrs. Gage and Stuckenberg, have thought fit to
insert in their chapter-heading the phrase "Bahrdt, the Theodore
Parker of Germany." As Hagenbach has spoken of Bahrdt with special
contempt, the intention can be appreciated; but the intended
insult may now serve as a certificate of merit to Bahrdt. Bishop
Hurst solemnly affirms that "What Jeffreys is to the judicial
history of England, Bahrdt is to the religious history of German
Protestantism. Whatever he touched was disgraced by the vileness
of his heart and the Satanic daring of his mind" (History of
Rationalism, ed. 1867, p. 119; ed. 1901, p. 139). This concerning
doctrines of a nearly invariable moral soundness, which to-day
would be almost universally received with approbation. Pünjer,
who cannot at any point indict the doctrines, falls back on
the professional device of classing them with the "platitudes"
of the Aufklärung; and, finding this insufficient to convey
a disparaging impression to the general reader, intimates that
Bahrdt, connecting ethic with rational sanitation, "does not shrink
from the coarseness of laying down" a rule for bodily health,
which Pünjer does not shrink from quoting (pp. 549-50). Finally
Bahrdt is dismissed as "the theological public-house-keeper of
Halle." So hard is it for men clerically trained to attain to
a manly rectitude in their criticism of anti-clericals. Bahrdt
was a great admirer of the Gospel Jesus; so Cairns (p. 178)
takes a lenient view of his life. On that and his doctrine
cp. Hagenbach, pp. 107-10; Pünjer, i, 546-50; Noack, Th. iii,
Kap. 5. Goethe satirized him in a youthful Prolog, but speaks of
him not unkindly in the Wahrheit und Dichtung. As a writer he is
much above the German average.
17. Alongside of these propagators of popular rationalism stood
a group of companion deists usually considered together--Gotthold
Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781), Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694-1768), and
Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786). The last-named, a Jew, "lived entirely
in the sphere of deism and of natural religion," [1347] and sought,
like the deists in general, to give religion an ethical structure;
but he was popular chiefly as a constructive theist and a defender
of the doctrine of immortality on non-Christian lines. His Phædon
(1767), setting forth that view, had a great vogue. [1348] One of
his more notable teachings was an earnest declaration against any
connection between Church and State; but like Locke and Rousseau he
so far sank below his own ideals as to agree in arguing for a State
enforcement of a profession of belief in a God [1349]--a negation of
his own plea. With much contemporary popularity, he had no permanent
influence; and he seems to have been completely broken-hearted over
Jacobi's disclosure of the final pantheism of Lessing, for whom he
had a great affection.
See the monograph of Rabbi Schreiber, of Bonn, Moses Mendelssohn's
Verdienste um die deutsche Nation (Zürich, 1880), pp. 41-42. The
strongest claim made for Mendelssohn by Rabbi Schreiber is that he,
a Jew, was much more of a German patriot than Goethe, Schiller,
or Lessing. Heine, however, pronounces that "As Luther against the
Papacy, so Mendelssohn rebelled against the Talmud" (Zur Gesch. der
Relig. und Philos. in Deutschland: Werke, ed. 1876, iii, 65).
Lessing, on the other hand, is one of the outstanding figures in
the history of Biblical criticism, as well as of German literature in
general. The son of a Lutheran pastor, Lessing became in a considerable
measure a rationalist, while constantly resenting, as did Goethe,
the treatment of religion in the fashion in which he himself treated
non-religious opinions with which he did not agree. [1350] It is
clear that already in his student days he had become substantially an
unbeliever, and that it was on this as well as other grounds that he
refused to become a clergyman. [1351] Nor was he unready to jeer at
the bigots when they chanced to hate where he was sympathetic. [1352]
On the side of religious problems, he was primarily and permanently
influenced by two such singularly different minds as Bayle [1353]
and Rousseau, the first appealing to and eliciting his keen critical
faculty, the second his warm emotional nature; and he never quite
unified the result. From first to last he was a freethinker in the
sense that he never admitted any principle of authority, and was
stedfastly loyal to the principle of freedom of utterance. He steadily
refused to break with his freethinking friend Mylius, and he never
sought to raise odium against any more advanced freethinker on the
score of his audacity. [1354] In his Hamburgische Dramaturgie, indeed,
dealing with a German play in which Mohammedanism in general, and one
Ismenor in particular, in the time of the Crusades are charged with
the sin of persecution, he remarks that "these very Crusades, which
in their origin were a political stratagem of the popes, developed
into the most inhuman persecutions of which Christian superstition
has ever made itself guilty: the true religion had then the most and
the bloodiest Ismenors." [1355] In his early Rettungen (Vindications),
again, he defends the dubious Cardan and impersonally argues the pros
and cons of Christianity and Mohammedanism in a fashion possible only
to a skeptical mind. [1356] And in his youth, as in his last years, he
maintained that "there have long been men who disregarded all revealed
religions and have yet been good men. [1357] In his youth, however,
he was more of a Rousseauist than of an intellectual philosopher,
setting up a principle of "the heart" against every species of analytic
thought, including even that of Leibnitz, which he early championed
against the Wolfian adaptation of it. [1358] The sound principle that
conduct is more important than opinion he was always apt, on the
religious side, to strain into the really contrary principle that
opinions which often went with good conduct were necessarily to be
esteemed. So when the rationalism of the day seriously or otherwise
(in Voltairean Berlin it was too apt to be otherwise) assailed the
creed of his parents, whom he loved and honoured, sympathy in his
case as in Goethe's always predetermined his attitude; [1359] and it
is not untruly said of him that he did prefer the orthodox to the
heterodox party, like Gibbon, "inasmuch as the balance of learning
which attracted his esteem was [then] on that side." [1360] We thus
find him, about the time when he announces to his father that he had
doubted concerning the Christian dogmas, [1361] rather nervously
proving his essential religiousness by dramatically defending the
clergy against the prejudices of popular freethought as represented
by his friend Mylius, who for a time ran in Leipzig a journal called
the Freigeist--not a very advanced organ. [1362]
Lessing was in fact, with his versatile genius and his vast reading,
a man of moods rather than a systematic thinker, despite his powerful
critical faculty; and alike his emotional and his critical side
determined his aversion to the attempts of the "rationalizing"
clergy to put religion on a common-sense footing. His personal
animosity to Voltaire and to Frederick would also influence him; but
he repugned even the decorous "rationalism" of the theologians of
his own country. When his brother wrote him to the effect that the
basis of the current religion was false, and the structure the work
of shallow bunglers, he replied that he admitted the falsity of the
basis, but not the incompetence of those who built up the system,
in which he saw much skill and address. Shallow bunglers, on the
other hand, he termed the schemers of the new system of compromise
and accommodation. [1363] In short, as he avowed in his fragment on
Bibliolatry, he was always "pulled this way and that" in his thought
on the problem of religion. [1364] For himself, he framed (or perhaps
adopted) [1365] a pseudo-theory of the Education of the Human Race
(1780), which has served the semi-rationalistic clergy of our own day
in good stead; and adapted Rousseau's catching doctrine that the true
test of religion lies in feeling and not in argument. [1366] Neither
doctrine, in short, has a whit more philosophical value than the other
"popular philosophy" of the time, and neither was fitted to have much
immediate influence; but both pointed a way to the more philosophic
apologists of religion, while baulking the orthodox. [1367] If all this
were more than a piece of defensive strategy, it was no more scientific
than the semi-rationalist theology which he contemned. The "education"
theorem, on its merits, is indeed a discreditable paralogism; and
only our knowledge of his affectional bias can withhold us from
counting it a mystification. On analysis it is found to have no
logical content whatever. "Christianity" Lessing made out to be a
"universal principle," independent of its pseudo-historical setting;
thus giving to the totality of the admittedly false tradition the
credit of an ethic which in the terms of the case is simply human, and
in all essentials demonstrably pre-Christian. His propaganda of this
kind squares ill with his paper on The Origin of Revealed Religion,
written about 1860. There he professes to hold by a naturalist view
of religion. All "positive" or dogmatic creeds he ascribes to the
arrangements that men from time to time found it necessary to make
as to the means of applying "natural" religion. "Hence all positive
and revealed religions are alike true and alike false; alike true,
inasmuch as it has everywhere been necessary to come to terms over
different things in order to secure agreement and unity in the public
religion; alike false, inasmuch as that over which men came to terms
does not so much stand close to the essential (nicht sowohl ... neben
dem Wesentlichen besteht), but rather weakens and oppresses it. The
best revealed or positive religion is that which contains the fewest
conventional additions to natural religion; that which least limits the
effects of natural religion." [1368] This is the position of Tindal
and the English deists in general; and it seems to have been in this
mood that Lessing wrote to Mendelssohn about being able to "help the
downfall of the most frightful structure of nonsense only under the
pretext of giving it a new foundation." [1369] On the historical
side, too, he had early convinced himself that Christianity was
established and propagated "by entirely natural means" [1370]--this
before Gibbon. But, fighter as he was, he was not prepared to lay
his cards on the table in the society in which he found himself. In
his strongest polemic there was always an element of mystification;
[1371] and his final pantheism was only privately avowed.
It was through a series of outside influences that he went so far,
in the open, as he did. Becoming the librarian of the great Bibliothek
of Wolfenbüttel, the possession of the hereditary Prince (afterwards
Duke) of Brunswick, he was led to publish the "Anonymous Fragments"
known as the Wolfenbüttel Fragments (1774-1778), wherein the methods
of the English and French deists are applied with a new severity to
both the Old and the New Testament narratives. It is now put beyond
doubt that they were the work of Reimarus, [1372] who had in 1755
produced a defence of "Natural Religion"--that is, of the theory of
a Providence--against La Mettrie, Maupertuis, and older materialists,
which had a great success in its day. [1373] At his death, accordingly,
Reimarus ranked as an admired defender of theism and of the belief
in immortality. [1374] He was the son-in-law of the esteemed scholar
Fabricius, and was for many years Professor of Oriental Languages in
the Hamburg Academy. The famous research which preserves his memory
was begun by him at the age of fifty, for his own satisfaction, and
was elaborated by him during twenty years, while he silently endured
the regimen of the intolerant Lutheranism of his day. [1375] As he
left the book it was a complete treatise entitled An Apology for the
Rational Worshipper of God; but his son feared to have it published,
though Lessing offered to take the whole risk; and it was only by the
help of the daughter, Elise Reimarus, [1376] Lessing's friend, that the
fragments came to light. As the Berlin censor would not give official
permission, [1377] Lessing took the course of issuing them piecemeal
in a periodical series of selections from the treasures of the
Wolfenbüttel Library, which had privilege of publication. The first,
On the Toleration of Deists, which attracted little notice, appeared
in 1774; four more, which made a stir, in 1777; and only in 1778 was
"the most audacious of all," On the Aim of Jesus and his Disciples,
[1378] published as a separate book. Collectively they constituted
the most serious attack yet made in Germany on the current creed,
though their theory of the true manner of the gospel history of course
smacks of the pre-scientific period. A generation later, however,
they were still "the radical book of the anti-supernaturalists"
in Germany. [1379]
As against miracles in general, the Resurrection in
particular, and Biblical ethics in general, the attack of
Reimarus was irresistible, but his historical construction is
pre-scientific. The method is, to accept as real occurrences
all the non-miraculous episodes, and to explain them by a
general theory. Thus the appointment of the seventy apostles--a
palpable myth--is taken as a fact, and explained as part of
a scheme by Jesus to obtain temporal power; and the scourging
of the money-changers from the Temple, improbable enough as it
stands, is made still more so by supposing it to be part of a
scheme of insurrection. The method further involves charges of
calculated fraud against the disciples or evangelists--a historical
misconception which Lessing repudiated, albeit not on the right
grounds. See the sketch in Cairns, p. 197 sq., which indicates the
portions of the treatise produced later by Strauss. Cp. Pünjer,
i, 550-57; Noack, Th. iii, Kap. 4. Schweitzer (Von Reimarus zu
Wrede), in his satisfaction at the agreement of Reimarus with his
own conception of an "eschatological" Jesus, occupied with "the
last things," gives Reimarus extravagant praise. Strauss rightly
notes the weakness of the indictment of Moses as a worker of fraud
(Voltaire, 2te Ausg. p. 407).
It is but fair to say that Reimarus's fallacy of method, which
was the prevailing one in his day, has not yet disappeared from
criticism. As we have seen, it was employed by Pomponazzi in
the Renaissance (vol. i, p. 377), and reintroduced in the modern
period by Connor and Toland. It is still employed by some professed
rationalists, as Dr. Conybeare. It has, however, in all likelihood
suggested itself spontaneously to many inquirers. In the Phædrus
Plato presents it as applied by empirical rationalizers to myths
at that time.
Though Lessing at many points oppugned the positions of the Fragments,
he was led into a fiery controversy over them, in which he was
unworthily attacked by, among others, Semler, from whom he had looked
for support; and the series was finally stopped by authority. There
can now be no doubt that Lessing at heart agreed with Reimarus on
most points of negative criticism, [1380] but reached a different
emotional estimate and attitude. All the greater is the merit of
his battle for freedom of thought. Thereafter, as a final check to
his opponents, he produced his famous drama Nathan the Wise, which
embodies Boccaccio's story of The Three Rings, and has ever since
served as a popular lesson of tolerance in Germany. [1381] In the end,
he seems to have become, to at least some extent, a pantheist; [1382]
but he never expounded any coherent and comprehensive set of opinions,
[1383] preferring, as he put it in an oft-quoted sentence, the state
of search for truth to any consciousness of possessing it. [1384]
He left behind him, however, an important fragment, which constituted
one of his most important services to national culture--his "New
Hypothesis concerning the evangelists as merely human writers." He
himself thought that he had done nothing "more important or ingenious"
[1385] of the kind; and though his results were in part unsound and
impermanent, he is justly to be credited with the first scientific
attempt to deduce the process of composition of the gospels [1386]
from primary writings by the first Christians. Holding as he did to
the authenticity and historicity of the fourth gospel, he cannot be
said to have gone very deep; but two generations were to pass before
the specialists got any further. Lessing had shown more science and
more courage than any other pro-Christian scholar of the time, and,
as the orthodox historian of rationalism has it, "Though he did not
array himself as a champion of rationalism, he proved himself one of
the strongest promoters of its reign." [1387]
18. Deism was now as prevalent in educated Germany as in France or
England; and, according to a contemporary preacher, "Berliner" was
about 1777 a synonym for "rationalist." [1388] Wieland, one of the
foremost German men of letters of his time, is known to have become
a deist of the school of Shaftesbury; [1389] and in the leading
journal of the day he wrote on the free use of reason in matters of
faith. [1390] Some acts of persecution by the Church show how far the
movement had gone. In 1774 we find a Catholic professor at Mayence,
Lorenzo Isenbiehl, deposed and sent back to the seminary for two
years on the score of "deficient theological knowledge," because he
argued (after Collins) that the text Isaiah vii, 14 applied not to
the mother of Jesus but to a contemporary of the prophet; and when,
four years later, he published a book on the same thesis, in Latin, he
was imprisoned. Three years later still, a young Jesuit of Salzburg,
named Steinbuhler, was actually condemned to death for writing some
satires on Roman Catholic ceremonies, and, though afterwards pardoned,
died of the ill-usage he had undergone in prison. [1391] It may have
been the sense of danger aroused by such persecution that led to the
founding, in 1780, of a curious society which combined an element
of freethinking Jesuitism with freemasonry, and which included a
number of statesmen, noblemen, and professors--Goethe, Herder, and
the Duke of Weimar being among its adherents. But it is difficult to
take seriously the accounts given of the order. [1392]
The spirit of rationalism, in any case, was now so prevalent that
it began to dominate the work of the more intelligent theologians,
to whose consequent illogical attempts to strain out by the most
dubious means the supernatural elements from the Bible narratives
[1393] the name of "rationalism" came to be specially applied, [1394]
that being the kind of criticism naturally most discussed among the
clergy. Taking rise broadly in the work of Semler, reinforced by that
of the English and French deists and that of Reimarus, the method led
stage by stage to the scientific performance of Strauss and Baur, and
the recent "higher criticism" of the Old and New Testaments. Noteworthy
at its outset as exhibiting the tendency of official believers to
make men, in the words of Lessing, irrational philosophers by way of
making them rational Christians, [1395] this order of "rationalism"
in its intermediate stages belongs rather to the history of Biblical
scholarship than to that of freethought, since more radical work was
being done by unprofessional writers outside, and deeper problems were
raised by the new systems of philosophy. Within the Lutheran pale,
however, there were some hardy thinkers. A striking figure of the time,
in respect of his courage and thoroughness, is the Lutheran pastor
J. H. Schulz, [1396] who so strongly combatted the compromises of the
Semler school in regard to the Pentateuch, and argued so plainly for a
severance of morals from religion as to bring about his own dismissal
(1792). [1397] Schulz's Philosophical Meditation on Theology and
Religion [1398] (1784) is indeed one of the most pronounced attacks on
orthodox religion produced in that age. But it is in itself a purely
speculative construction. Following the current historical method,
he makes Moses the child of the Egyptian princess, and represents him
as imposing on the ignorant Israelites a religion invented by himself,
and expressive only of his own passions. Jesus in turn is extolled in
the terms common to the freethinkers of the age; but his conception
of God is dismissed as chimerical; and Schulz finally rests in the
position of Edelmann, that the only rational conception of deity is
that of the "sufficient ground of the world," and that on this view
no man is an atheist. [1399]
Schulz's dismissal appears to have been one of the fruits of the
orthodox edict (1788) of the new king, Frederick William II, the
brother of Frederick, who succeeded in 1786. It announced him--in
reality a "strange compound of lawless debauchery and priest-ridden
superstition" [1400]--as the champion of religion and the enemy of
freethinking; forbade all proselytizing, and menaced with penalties
all forms of heresy, [1401] while professing to maintain freedom of
conscience. The edict seems to have been specially provoked by fresh
literature of a pronouncedly freethinking stamp, though it lays stress
on the fact that "so many clergymen have the boldness to disseminate
the doctrines of the Socinians, Deists, and Naturalists under the name
of Aufklärung." The work of Schulz would be one of the provocatives,
and there were others. In 1785 had appeared the anonymous Moroccan
Letters, [1402] wherein, after the model of the Persian Letters
and others, the life and creeds of Germany are handled in a quite
Voltairean fashion. The writer is evidently familiar with French
and English deistic literature, and draws freely on both, making
no pretence of systematic treatment. Such writing, quietly turning
a disenchanting light of common sense on Scriptural incredibilities
and Christian historical scandals, without a trace of polemical zeal,
illustrated at once the futility of Kant's claim, in the second edition
of his Critique of Pure Reason, to counteract "freethinking unbelief"
by transcendental philosophy. And though the writer is careful to point
to the frequent association of Christian fanaticism with regicide,
his very explicit appeal for a unification of Germany, [1403] his
account of the German Protestant peasant and labourer as the most
dismal figure in Germany, Holland, and Switzerland, [1404] and his
charge against Germans of degrading their women, [1405] would not
enlist the favour of the authorities for his work. Within two years
(1787) appeared, unsigned, an even more strongly anti-Christian and
anti-clerical work, The In Part Only True System of the Christian
Religion, [1406] ascribed to Jakob von Mauvillon, [1407] whom we have
seen twenty-one years before translating the freethinking romance of
Holberg. Beginning his career as a serious publicist by translating
Raynal's explosive history of the Indies (7 vols. 1774-78), he had done
solid work as a historian and as an economist, and also as an officer
in the service of the Duke of Brunswick and a writer on military
science. The True System is hostile alike to priesthoods and to the
accommodating theologians, whose attempt to rationalize Christianity on
historical lines it flouts in Lessing's vein as futile. Mauvillon finds
unthinkable the idea of a revelation which could not be universal;
rejects miracles and prophecies as vain bases for a creed; sums up the
New Testament as planless; and pronounces the ethic of Christianity,
commonly regarded as its strongest side, the weakest side of all. He
sums up, in fact, in a logical whole, the work of the English and
French deists. [1408] To such propaganda the edict of repression was
the official answer. It naturally roused a strong opposition; [1409]
but though it ultimately failed, through the general breakdown of
European despotisms, it was not without injurious effect. The first
edict was followed in a few months by one which placed the press and
all literature, native and foreign, under censorship. This policy,
which was chiefly inspired by the new king's Minister of Religion,
Woellner, was followed up in 1791 by the appointment of a committee
of three reactionaries--Hermes, Hilmer, and Woltersdorf--who not
only saw to the execution of the edicts, but supervised the schools
and churches. Such a regimen, aided by the reaction against the
Revolution, for a time prevented any open propaganda on the part of
men officially placed; and we shall see it hampering and humiliating
Kant; but it left the leaven of anti-supernaturalism to work all the
more effectively among the increasing crowd of university students.
Many minds of the period, doubtless, are typified by Herder,
who, though a practising clergyman, was clearly a Spinozistic
theist, accommodating himself to popular Christianity in a genially
latitudinarian spirit. [1410] When in his youth he published an essay
discussing Genesis as a piece of oriental poetry, not to be treated as
science or theology, he evoked an amount of hostility which startled
him. [1411] Learning his lesson, he was for the future guarded enough
to escape persecution. He was led by his own temperamental bias,
however, to a transcendental position in philosophy. Originally in
agreement with Kant, [1412] as against the current metaphysic, in the
period before the issue of the latter's Critique of Pure Reason, he
nourished his religious instincts by a discursive reading of history,
which he handled in a comparatively scientific yet above all poetic
or theosophic spirit, while Kant, who had little or no interest in
history, developed his thought on the side of physical science. [1413]
The philosophic methods of the two men thus became opposed; and when
Herder found Kant's philosophy producing a strongly rationalistic
cast of thought among the divinity students who came before him
for examination, he directly and sharply antagonized it [1414] in
a theistic sense. Yet his own influence on his age was on the whole
latitudinarian and anti-theological; he opposed to the apriorism of
Kant the view that the concepts of space and time are the results of
experience and an abstraction of its contents; his historic studies
had developed in him a conception of the process of evolution alike
in life, opinion, and faculty; and orthodoxy and philosophy alike
incline to rank him as a pantheist. [1415]
19. Meanwhile, the drift of the age of Aufklärung was apparent in
the practically freethinking attitude of the two foremost men of
letters in the new Germany--Goethe and Schiller. Of the former,
despite the bluster of Carlyle, and despite the æsthetic favour
shown to Christianity in Wilhelm Meister, no religious ingenuity
can make more than a pantheist, [1416] who, insofar as he touched
on Biblical questions, copied the half-grown rationalism of the
school of Semler. [1417] "The great Pagan" was the common label
among his orthodox or conformist contemporaries. [1418] As a boy,
learning a little Hebrew, he was already at the critical point of
view in regard to Biblical marvels, [1419] though he never became a
scientific critic. He has told how, in his youth, when Lavater insisted
that he must choose between orthodox Christianity and atheism, he
answered that, if he were not free to be a Christian in his own way
(wie ich es bisher gehegt hätte), he would as soon turn atheist as
Christian, the more so as he saw that nobody knew very well what
either signified. [1420] As he puts it, he had made a Christ and
a Christianity of his own. [1421] His admired friend Fräulein von
Klettenberg, the "Beautiful Soul" of one of his pieces, told him
that he never satisfied her when he used the Christian terminology,
which he never seemed to get right; and he tells how he gradually
turned away from her religion, which he had for a time approached,
in its Moravian aspect, with a too passionate zeal. [1422] In his
letters to Lavater, he wrote quite explicitly that a voice from heaven
would not make him believe in a virgin birth and a resurrection,
such tales being for him rather blasphemies against the great God
and his revelation in Nature. Thousands of pages of earlier and later
writings, he declared, were for him as beautiful as the gospel. [1423]
Nor did he ever yield to the Christian Church more than a Platonic
amity; so that much of the peculiar hostility that was long felt
for his poetry and was long shown to his memory in Germany is to be
explained as an expression of the normal malice of pietism against
unbelievers. [1424] Such utterances as the avowal that he revered
Jesus as he revered the Sun, [1425] and the other to the effect that
Christianity has nothing to do with philosophy, where Hegel sought
to bring it--that it is simply a beneficent influence, and is not to
be looked to for proof of immortality [1426]--are clearly not those
of a believer. To-day belief is glad to claim Goethe as a friend in
respect of his many concessions to it, as well as of his occasional
flings at more consistent freethinkers. But a "great pagan" he remains
for the student. In the opinion of later orthodoxy his "influence on
religion was very pernicious." [1427] He indeed showed small concern
for religious susceptibilities when he humorously wrote that from
his youth up he believed himself to stand so well with his God as to
fancy that he might even "have something to forgive Him." [1428]
One passage in Goethe's essay on the Pentateuch, appended to the
West-Oestlicher Divan, is worth noting here as illustrating the
ability of genius to cherish and propagate historical fallacies. It
runs: "The peculiar, unique, and deepest theme of the history
of the world and man, to which all others are subordinate,
is always the conflict of belief and unbelief. All epochs
in which belief rules, under whatever form, are illustrious,
inspiriting, and fruitful for that time and the future. All
epochs, on the other hand, in which unbelief, in whatever form,
secures a miserable victory, even though for a moment they
may flaunt it proudly, disappear for posterity, because no man
willingly troubles himself with knowledge of the unfruitful"
(first ed. pp. 424-25). Goethe goes on to speak of the four
latter books of Moses as occupied with the theme of unbelief,
and of the first as occupied with belief. Thus his formula was
based, to begin with, on purely fabulous history, into the nature
of which his poetic faculty gave him no true insight. (See his
idyllic recast of the patriarchal history in Th. I, B. iv of the
Wahrheit und Dichtung.) Applied to real history, his formula has
no validity save on a definition which implies either an equivoque
or an argument in a circle. If it refer, in the natural sense, to
epochs in which any given religion is widely rejected and assailed,
it is palpably false. The Renaissance and Goethe's own century were
ages of such unbelief; and they remain much more deeply interesting
than the Ages of Faith. St. Peter's at Rome is the work of a
reputedly unbelieving pope. If on the other hand his formula be
meant to apply to belief in the sense of energy and enthusiasm, it
is still fallacious. The crusades were manifestations of energy and
enthusiasm; but they were profoundly "unfruitful," and they are not
deeply interesting. The only sense in which Goethe's formula could
stand would be one in which it is recognized that all vigorous
intellectual life stands for "belief"--that is to say, that
Lucretius and Voltaire, Paine and d'Holbach, stand for "belief"
when confidently attacking beliefs. The formula is thus true only
in a strained and non-natural sense; whereas it is sure to be
read and to be believed, by thoughtless admirers, in its natural
and false sense, though the whole history of Byzantium and modern
Islam is a history of stagnant and unfruitful belief, and that of
modern Europe a history of fruitful doubt, disbelief, and denial,
involving new affirmations. Goethe's own mind on the subject was in
a state of verbalizing confusion, the result or expression of his
temperamental aversion to clear analytical thought ("Above all," he
boasts, "I never thought about thinking") and his habit of poetic
allegory and apriorism. "Logic was invincibly repugnant to him"
(Lewes, Life of Goethe, 3rd ed. p. 38). The mosaic of his thinking
is sufficiently indicated in Lewes's sympathetically confused
account (id. pp. 523-27). Where he himself doubted and denied
current creeds, as in his work in natural science, he was most
fruitful [1429] (though he was not always right--e.g., his polemic
against Newton's theory of colour); and the permanently interesting
teaching of his Faust is precisely that which artistically utters
the doubt through which he passed to a pantheistic Naturalism.
20. No less certain is the unbelief of Schiller (1759-1805), whom
Hagenbach even takes as "the representative of the rationalism of his
age." In his juvenile Robbers, indeed, he makes his worst villains
freethinkers; and in the preface he stoutly champions religion
against all assailants; but hardly ever after that piece does he give
a favourable portrait of a priest. [1430] He himself soon joined the
Aufklärung; and all his æsthetic appreciation of Christianity never
carried him beyond the position that it virtually had the tendency
(Anlage) to the highest and noblest, though that was in general
tastelessly and repulsively represented by Christians. He added that
in a certain sense it is the only æsthetic religion, whence it is
that it gives such pleasure to the feminine nature, and that only
among women is it to be met with in a tolerable form. [1431] Like
Goethe, he sought to reduce the Biblical supernatural to the plane
of possibility, [1432] in the manner of the liberal theologians of
the period; and like him he often writes as a deist, [1433] though
professedly for a time a Kantist. On the other hand, he does not
hesitate to say that a healthy nature (which Goethe had said needed
no morality, no Natur-recht, [1434] and no political metaphysic)
required neither deity nor immortality to sustain it. [1435]
21. The critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) may be said
to represent most comprehensively the outcome in German intelligence
of the higher freethought of the age, insofar as its results could
be at all widely assimilated. In its most truly critical part, the
analytic treatment of previous theistic systems in the Critique of
Pure Reason (1781), he is fundamentally anti-theological; the effect
of the argument being to negate all previously current proofs of the
existence and cognizableness of a "supreme power" or deity. Already
the metaphysics of the Leibnitz-Wolff school were discredited;
[1436] and so far Kant could count on a fair hearing for a system
which rejected that of the schools. Certainly he meant his book to
be an antidote to the prevailing religious credulity. "Henceforth
there were to be no more dreams of ghost-seers, metaphysicians, and
enthusiasts." [1437] On his own part, however, no doubt in sympathy
with the attitude of many of his readers, there followed a species of
intuitional reaction. In his short essay What is Freethinking? [1438]
(1784) he defines Aufklärung or freethinking as "the advance of men
from their self-imputed minority"; and "minority" as the inability to
use one's own understanding without another's guidance. "Sapere aude;
dare to use thine own understanding," he declares to be the motto of
freethought: and he dwells on the laziness of spirit which keeps men
in the state of minority, letting others do their thinking for them
as the doctor prescribes their medicine. In this spirit he justifies
the movement of rational criticism while insisting, justly enough,
that men have still far to go ere they can reason soundly in all
things. If, he observes, "we ask whether we live in an enlightened
(aufgeklärt) age the answer is, No, but in an age of enlightening
(aufklärung)." There is still great lack of capacity among men in
general to think for themselves, free of leading-strings. "Only slowly
can a community (Publikum) attain to freethinking." But he repeats
that "the age is the age of aufklärung, the age of Frederick the
Great": and he pays a high tribute to the king who repudiated even
the arrogant pretence of "toleration," and alone among monarchs said
to his subjects, "Reason as you will; only obey!"
But the element of apprehension gained ground in the aging
freethinker. In 1787 appeared the second edition of the Critique,
with a preface avowing sympathy with religious as against freethinking
tendencies; and in the Critique of Practical Reason (1788) he makes
an almost avowedly unscientific attempt to restore the reign of
theism on a basis of a mere emotional and ethical necessity assumed
to exist in human nature--a necessity which he never even attempts to
demonstrate. With the magic wand of the Practical Reason, as Heine has
it, he reanimated the corpse of theism, which the Theoretic Reason had
slain. [1439] In this adjustment he was perhaps consciously copying
Rousseau, who had greatly influenced him, [1440] and whose theism is
an avowedly subjectivist predication. But the same attitude to the
problem had been substantially adopted by Lessing; [1441] and indeed
the process is at bottom identical with that of the quasi-skeptics,
Pascal, Huet, Berkeley, and the rest, who at once impugn and employ
the rational process, reasoning that reason is not reasonable. Kant
did but set up the "practical" against the "pure" reason, as other
theists before him had set up faith against science, or the "heart"
against the "head," and as theists to-day exalt the "will" against
"knowledge," the emotional nature against the logical. It is tolerably
clear that Kant's motive at this stage was an unphilosophic fear that
Naturalism would work moral harm [1442]--a fear shared by him with
the mass of the average minds of his age.
The same motive and purpose are clearly at work in his treatise on
Religion within the bounds of Pure [i.e. Mere] Reason (1792-1794),
where, while insisting on the purely ethical and rational character
of true religion, he painfully elaborates reasons for continuing
to use the Bible (concerning which he contends that, in view of
its practically "godly" contents, no one can deny the possibility
of its being held as a revelation) as "the basis of ecclesiastical
instruction" no less than a means of swaying the populace. [1443]
Miracles, he in effect avows, are not true; still, there must be no
carping criticism of the miracle stories, which serve a good end. There
is to be no persecution; but there is to be no such open disputation as
would provoke it. [1444] Again and again, with a visible uneasiness,
the writer returns to the thesis that even "revealed" religion
cannot do without sacred books which are partly untrue. [1445]
The doctrine of the Trinity he laboriously metamorphosed, as so
many had done before him, and as Coleridge and Hegel did after him,
into a formula of three modes or aspects of the moral deity [1446]
which his ethical purpose required. And all this divagation from the
plain path of Truth is justified in the interest of Goodness.
All the while the book is from beginning to end profoundly
divided against itself. It indicates disbelief in every one of the
standing Christian dogmas--Creation, Fall, Salvation, Miracles,
and the supernatural basis of morals. The first paragraph of the
preface insists that morality is founded on the free reason, and
that it needs no religion to aid it. Again and again this note is
sounded. "The pure religious faith is that alone which can serve as
basis for a universal Church; because it is a pure reason-faith, in
which everyone can participate." [1447] But without the slightest
attempt at justification there is thrown in the formula that "no
religion is thinkable without belief in a future life." [1448] Thus
heaven and hell [1449] and Bible and church are arbitrarily imposed
on the "pure religion" for the comfort of unbelieving clergymen and
the moralizing of life. Error is to cast out error, and evil, evil.
The process of Kant's adjustment of his philosophy to social needs
as he regarded them is to be understood by following the chronology
and the vogue of his writings. The first edition of the Critique of
Pure Reason "excited little attention" (Stuckenberg, Life of Kant,
p. 368); but in 1787 appeared the second and modified edition,
with a new preface, clearly written with a propitiatory eye to
the orthodox reaction. "All at once the work now became popular,
and the praise was as loud and as fulsome as at first the silence
had been profound. The literature of the day began to teem with
Kantian ideas, with discussions of the new philosophy, and with
the praises of its author.... High officials in Berlin would
lay aside the weighty affairs of State to consider the Kritik,
and among them were found warm admirers of the work and its
author." Id. p. 369. Cp. Heine, Rel. und Phil. in Deutschland,
B. iii--Werke, iii, 75, 82.
This popularity becomes intelligible in the light of the new
edition and its preface. To say nothing of the alterations in the
text, pronounced by Schopenhauer to be cowardly accommodations
(as to which question see Adamson, as cited, and Stuckenberg,
p. 461, note 94), Kant writes in the preface that he had been
"obliged to destroy knowledge in order to make room for faith";
and, again, that "only through criticism can the roots be
cut of materialism, fatalism, atheism, freethinking unbelief
(freigeisterischen Unglauben), fanaticism and superstition, which
may become universally injurious; also of idealism and skepticism,
which are dangerous rather to the Schools, and can hardly reach the
general public." (Meiklejohn mistranslates: "which are universally
injurious"--Bohn ed. p. xxxvii.) This passage virtually puts the
popular religion and all philosophies save Kant's own on one level
of moral dubiety. It is, however, distinctly uncandid as regards
the "freethinking unbelief," for Kant himself was certainly an
unbeliever in Christian miracles and dogmas.
His readiness to make an appeal to prejudice appears again
in the second edition of the Critique when he asks: "Whence
does the freethinker derive his knowledge that there is, for
instance, no Supreme Being?" (Kritik der reinen Vernunft,
Transc. Methodenlehre, 1 H. 2 Absch. ed. Kirchmann, 1879,
p. 587; Bohn tr. p. 458.) He had just before professed to be
dealing with denial of the "existence of God"--a proposition of
no significance whatever unless "God" be defined. He now without
warning substitutes the still more undefined expression "Supreme
Being" for "God," thus imputing a proposition probably never
sustained with clear verbal purpose by any human being. Either,
then, Kant's own proposition was the entirely vacuous one that
nobody can demonstrate the impossibility of an alleged undefined
existence, or he was virtually asserting that no one can disprove
any alleged supernatural existence--spirit, demon, Moloch, Krishna,
Bel, Siva, Aphrodite, or Isis and Osiris. In the latter case he
would be absolutely stultifying his own claim to cut the roots of
"superstition" and "fanaticism" as well as of freethinking and
materialism; for, if the freethinker cannot disprove Jehovah,
neither can the Kantist disprove Allah and Satan; and Kant had
no basis for denying, as he did with Spinoza, the existence of
ghosts or spirits. From this dilemma Kant's argument cannot be
delivered. And as he finally introduces deity as a psychologically
and morally necessary regulative idea, howbeit indemonstrable,
he leaves every species of superstition exactly where it stood
before--every superstition being practically held, as against
"freethinking unbelief," on just such a tenure.
If he could thus react against freethinking before 1789, he
must needs carry the reaction further after the outbreak of the
French Revolution; and his Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der
blossen Vernunft (1792-1794) is a systematic effort to draw the
teeth of the Aufklärung, modified only by his resentment of the
tyranny of the political authority towards himself. Concerning the
age-long opposition between rationalism (Verstandesaufklärung)
and intuitionism or emotionalism (Gefühlsphilosophie), it is
claimed by modern transcendentalists that Kant, or Herder,
or another, has effected a solution on a plane higher than
either. (E.g. Kronenberg, Herder's Philosophie, 1889, p. 6.) The
true solution certainly must account for both points of view--no
very difficult matter; but no solution is really attained by
either of these writers. Kant alternately stood at the two
positions; and his unhistorical mind did not seek to unify them
in a study of human evolution. For popular purposes he let pass
the assumption that a cosmic emotion is a clue to the nature of
the cosmos, as the water-finder's hazel-twig is said to point
to the whereabouts of water. Herder, recognisant of evolution,
would not follow out any rational analysis.
All the while, however, Kant's theism was radically irreconcilable with
the prevailing religion. As appears from his cordial hostility to the
belief in ghosts, he really lacked the religious temperament. "He
himself," says a recent biographer, "was too suspicious of the
emotions to desire to inspire any enthusiasm with reference to his own
heart." [1450] This misstates the fact that his "Practical Reason"
was but an abstraction of his own emotional predilection; but it
remains true that that predilection was nearly free from the commoner
forms of pious psychosis; and typical Christians have never found him
satisfactory. "From my heart," writes one of his first biographers,
"I wish that Kant had not regarded the Christian religion merely as
a necessity for the State, or as an institution to be tolerated for
the sake of the weak (which now so many, following his example, do
even in the pulpit), but had known that which is positive, improving,
and blessed in Christianity." [1451] He had in fact never kept up any
theological study; [1452] and his plan of compromise had thus, like
those of Spencer and Mill in a later day, a fatal unreality for all
men who have discarded theology with a full knowledge of its structure,
though it appeals very conveniently to those disposed to retain it as
a means of popular influence. All his adaptations, therefore, failed
to conciliate the mass of the orthodox; and even after the issue of
the second Critique (Kritik der praktischen Vernunft) he had been
the subject of discussion among the reactionists. [1453] But that
Critique, and the preface to the second edition of the first, were
at bottom only pleas for a revised ethic, Kant's concern with current
religion being solely ethical; [1454] and the force of that concern led
him at length, in what was schemed as a series of magazine articles,
[1455] to expound his notion of religion in relation to morals. When
he did so he aroused a resentment much more energetic than that
felt by the older academics against his philosophy. The title of his
complete treatise, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, is
obviously framed to parry criticism; yet so drastic is its treatment
of its problems that the College of Censors at Berlin under the new
theological régime vetoed the second part. By the terms of the law
as to the censorship, the publisher was entitled to know the reason
for the decision; but on his asking for it he was informed that
"another instruction was on hand, which the censor followed as his
law, but whose contents he refused to make known." [1456] Greatly
incensed, Kant submitted the rejected article with the rest of his
book to the theological faculty of his own university of Königsberg,
asking them to decide in which faculty the censorship was properly
vested. They referred the decision to the philosophical faculty, which
duly proceeded to license the book (1793). As completed, it contained
passages markedly hostile to the Church. His opponents in turn were
now so enraged that they procured a royal cabinet order (October,
1794) charging him with "distorting and degrading many of the chief
and fundamental doctrines of the Holy Scriptures and of Christianity,"
and ordering all the instructors at the university not to lecture on
the book. [1457] Such was the reward for a capitulation of philosophy
to the philosophic ideals of the police.
Kant, called upon to render an account of his conduct to the
Government, formally defended it, but in conclusion decorously said:
"I think it safest, in order to obviate the least suspicion in this
respect, as your Royal Majesty's most faithful subject, to declare
solemnly that henceforth I will refrain altogether from all public
discussion of religion, whether natural or revealed, both in lectures
and in writings." After the death of Frederick William II (1797) and
the accession of Frederick William III, who suspended the edict of
1788, Kant held himself free to speak out again, and published (1798)
an essay on "The Strife of the [University] Faculties," wherein he
argued that philosophers should be free to discuss all questions of
religion so long as they did not handle Biblical theology as such. The
belated protest, however, led to nothing. By this time the philosopher
was incapable of further efficient work; and when he died in 1804 the
chief manuscript he left, planned as a synthesis of his philosophic
teaching, was found to be hopelessly confused. [1458]
The attitude, then, in which Kant stood to the reigning religion in his
latter years remained fundamentally hostile, from the point of view
of believing Christians as distinguished from that of ecclesiastical
opportunists. What were for temporizers arguments in defence of
didactic deceit, were for sincerer spirits fresh grounds for recoiling
from the whole ecclesiastical field. Kant must have made more rebels
than compliers by his very doctrine of compliance. Religion was
for him essentially ethic; and there is no reconciling the process
of propitiation of deity, in the Christian or any other cult, with
his express declaration that all attempts to win God's favour save
by simple right-living are sheer fetichism. [1459] He thus ends
practically at the point of view of the deists, whose influence on
him in early life is seen in his work on cosmogony. [1460] He had,
moreover, long ceased to go to church or follow any religious usage,
even refusing to attend the services on the installation of a new
university rector, save when he himself held the office. At the close
of his treatise on religion, after all his anxious accommodations,
he becomes almost violent in his repudiations of sacerdotalism and
sectarian self-esteem. "He did not like the singing in the churches,
and pronounced it mere bawling. In prayer, whether public or private,
he had not the least faith; and in his conversation as well as his
writings he treated it as a superstition, holding that to address
anything unseen would open the way for fanaticism. Not only did
he argue against prayer; he also ridiculed it, and declared that
a man would be ashamed to be caught by another in the attitude of
prayer." One of his maxims was that "To kneel or prostrate himself on
the earth, even for the purpose of symbolizing to himself reverence
for a heavenly object, is unworthy of man." [1461] So too he held
that the doctrine of the Trinity had no practical value, and he had a
"low opinion" of the Old Testament.
Yet his effort at compromise had carried him to positions which are
the negation of some of his own most emphatic ethical teachings. Like
Plato, he is finally occupied in discussing the "right fictions"
for didactic purposes. Swerving from thoroughgoing freethought for
fear of moral harm, he ends by sacrificing intellectual morality
to what seems to him social security. His doctrine, borrowed from
Lessing, of a "conceivable" revelation which told man only what he
could find out for himself, is a mere flout to reason. While he
carries his "categorical imperative," or à priori conception of
duty, so extravagantly far as to argue that it is wrong even to
tell a falsehood to a would-be murderer in order to mislead him,
he approves of the systematic employment of the pulpit function by
men who do not believe in the creed they there expound. The priest,
with Kant's encouragement, is to "draw all the practical lessons for
his congregation from dogmas which he himself cannot subscribe with
a full conviction of their truth, but which he can teach, since it
is not altogether impossible that truth may be concealed therein,"
while he remains free as a scholar to write in a contrary sense in
his own name. And this doctrine, set forth in the censured work of
1793, is repeated in the moralist's last treatise (1798), wherein
he explains that the preacher, when speaking doctrinally, "can put
into the passage under consideration his own rational views, whether
found there or not." Kant thus ended by reviving for the convenience
of churchmen, in a worse form, the medieval principle of a "twofold
truth." So little efficacy is there in a transcendental ethic for
any of the actual emergencies of life.
On this question compare Kant's Religion innerhalb der Grenzen
der blossen Vernunft, Stück iii, Abth. i, § 6; Stück iv,
Th. ii, preamble and §§ i, 3, and 4; with the essay Ueber ein
vermeintes Recht aus Menschenliebe zu lügen (1797), in reply
to Constant--rep. in Kant's Vorzügliche kleine Schriften, 1833,
Bd. ii, and in App. to Rosenkranz's ed. of Werke, vii, 295--given
by T. K. Abbott in his tr. of the Critique of Judgment. See
also Stuckenberg, pp. 341-45, and the general comment of Baur,
Kirchengeschichte des 19ten Jahrhunderts, 1862, p. 65. "Kant's
recognition of Scripture is purely a matter of expedience. The
State needs the Bible to control the people; the masses need it in
order that they, having weak consciences, may recognize their duty;
and the philosopher finds it a convenient vehicle for conveying
to the people the faith of reason. Were it rejected it might
be difficult, if not impossible, to put in its place another
book which would inspire as much confidence." All the while
"Kant's principles of course led him to deny that the Bible is
authoritative in matters of religion, or that it is of itself
a safe guide in morals.... Its value consists in the fact that,
owing to the confidence of the people in it, reason can use it to
interpret into Scripture its own doctrines, and can thus make it
the means of popularizing rational faith. If anyone imagines that
the aim of the interpretation is to obtain the real meaning of
Scripture, he is no Kantian on this point" (Stuckenberg, p. 341).
22. The total performance of Kant thus left Germany with a powerful
lead on the one hand towards that unbelief in religion which in the
last reign had been fashionable, and on the other hand a series of
prescriptions for compromise; the monarchy all the while throwing
its weight against all innovation in doctrine and practice. In 1799
Fichte is found expressing the utmost alarm at the combination of the
European despotisms to "rout out freethought"; [1462] and so strong
did the official reaction become that in the opinion of Heine all
the German philosophers and their ideas would have been suppressed
by wheel and gallows but for Napoleon, [1463] who intervened in the
year 1805. The Prussian despotism being thus weakened, what actually
happened was an adaptation of Kant's teaching to the needs alike of
religion and of rationalism. The religious world was assured by it
that, though all previous arguments for theism were philosophically
worthless, theism was now safe on the fluid basis of feeling. On the
other hand, rationalism alike in ethics and in historical criticism
was visibly reinforced on all sides. Herder, as before noted, found
divinity students grounding their unbelief on Kant's teaching. Staüdlin
begins the preface to his History and Spirit of Skepticism (1794) with
the remark that "Skepticism begins to be a disease of the age"; and
Kant is the last in his list of skeptics. At the close of the century
"the number of Kantian theologians was legion," and it was through
the Kantian influence that "the various anti-orthodox tendencies
which flourished during the period of Illumination were concentrated
in Rationalism" [1464]--in the tendency, that is, to bring rational
criticism to bear alike on history, dogma, and philosophy. Borowski
in 1804 complains that "beardless youths and idle babblers" devoid of
knowledge "appeal to Kant's views respecting Christianity." [1465]
These views, as we have seen, were partly accommodating, partly
subversive in the extreme. Kant regards Jesus as an edifying ideal
of perfect manhood, "belief" in whom as such makes a man acceptable
to God, because of following a good model. "While he thus treats
the historical account of Jesus as of no significance, except as a
shell into which the practical reason puts the kernel, his whole
argument tends to destroy faith in the historic person of Jesus
as given in the gospel, treating the account itself as something
whose truthfulness it is not worth while to investigate." [1466]
In point of fact we find his devoted disciple Erhard declaring:
"I regard Christian morality as something which has been falsely
imputed to Christianity; and the existence of Christ does not at all
seem to me to be a probable historical fact"--this while declaring
that Kant had given him "the indescribable comfort of being able to
call himself openly, and with a good conscience, a Christian." [1467]
While therefore a multitude of preachers availed themselves of
Kant's philosophic licence to rationalize in the pulpit and out
of it as occasion offered, and yet others opposed them only on
the score that all divergence from orthodoxy should be avowed,
the dissolution of orthodoxy in Germany was rapid and general; and
the anti-supernaturalist handling of Scripture, prepared for as we
have seen, went on continuously. Even the positive disparagement
of Christianity was carried on by Kantian students; and Hamann,
dubbed "the Magician of the North" for his alluring exposition
of emotional theism, caused one of them, a tutor, to be brought
before a clerical consistory for having taught his pupil to throw all
specifically Christian doctrines aside. The tutor admitted the charge,
and with four others signed a declaration "that neither morality
nor sound reason nor public welfare could exist in connection with
Christianity." [1468] Hamann's own influence was too much a matter
of literary talent and caprice to be durable; and recent attempts to
re-establish his reputation have evoked the deliberate judgment that
he has no permanent importance. [1469]
Against the intellectual influence thus set up by Kant there was none
in contemporary Germany capable of resistance. Philosophy for the most
part went in Kant's direction, having indeed been so tending before
his day. Rationalism of a kind had already had a representative in
Chr. A. Crusius (1712-1775), who in treatises on logic and metaphysics
opposed alike Leibnitz and Wolff, and taught for his own part a kind
of Epicureanism, nominally Christianized. To his school belonged
Platner (much admired by Jean Paul Richter, his pupil) and Tetens,
"the German Locke," who attempted a common-sense answer to Hume. His
ideal was a philosophy "at once intelligible and religious, agreeable
to God and accessible to the people." [1470] Platner on the other hand,
leaning strongly towards a psychological and anthropological view of
human problems, [1471] opposed first to atheism [1472] and later to
Kantian theism [1473] a moderate Pyrrhonic skepticism; here following a
remarkable lead from the younger Beausobre, who in 1755 had published
in French, at Berlin, a treatise entitled Le Pyrrhonisme Raisonnable,
taking up the position, among others, that while it is hard to prove
the existence of God by reason it is impossible to disprove it. This
was virtually the position of Kant a generation later; and it is
clear that thus early the dogmatic position was discredited.
23. Some philosophic opposition there was to Kant, alike on
intuitionist grounds, as in the cases of Hamann and Herder, and
on grounds of academic prejudice, as in the case of Kraus; but the
more important thinkers who followed him were all as heterodox as
he. In particular, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), who began in
authorship by being a Kantian zealot, gave even greater scandal than
the Master had done. Fichte's whole career is a kind of "abstract
and brief chronicle" of the movements of thought in Germany during
his life. In his boyhood, at the public school of Pforta, we find
him and his comrades already influenced by the new currents. "Books
imbued with all the spirit of free inquiry were secretly obtained,
and, in spite of the strictest prohibitions, great part of the
night was spent in their perusal. The works of Wieland, Lessing,
and Goethe were positively forbidden; yet they found their way
within the walls, and were eagerly studied." [1474] In particular,
Fichte followed closely the controversy of Lessing with Goeze;
and Lessing's lead gave him at once the spirit of freethought,
as distinct from any specific opinion. Never a consistent thinker,
Fichte in his student and tutorial days is found professing at once
determinism and a belief in "Providence," accepting Spinoza and
contemplating a village pastorate. [1475] But while ready to frame a
plea for Christianity on the score of its psychic adaptation to "the
sinner," he swerved from the pastorate when it came within sight,
declaring that "no purely Christian community now exists." [1476]
About the age of twenty-eight he became an enthusiastic convert to the
Kantian philosophy, especially to the Critique of Practical Reason,
and threw over determinism on what appear to be grounds of empirical
utilitarianism, failing to face the philosophical issue. Within
a year of his visit to Kant, however, he was writing to a friend
that "Kant has only indicated the truth, but neither unfolded nor
proved it," and that he himself has "discovered a new principle,
from which all philosophy can easily be deduced.... In a couple of
years we shall have a philosophy with all the clearness of geometrical
demonstration." [1477] He had in fact passed, perhaps under Spinoza's
influence, to pantheism, from which standpoint he rejected Kant's
anti-rational ground for affirming a God not immanent in things, and
claimed, as did his contemporaries Schelling and Hegel, to establish
theism on rational grounds. Rejecting, further, Kant's reiterated
doctrine that religion is ethic, Fichte ultimately insisted that, on
the contrary, religion is knowledge, and that "it is only a corrupt
society that has to use religion as an impulse to moral action."
But alike in his Kantian youth and later he was definitely
anti-revelationist, however much he conformed to clerical prejudice
by attacks upon the movement of freethought. In his "wander-years"
he writes with vehemence of the "worse than Spanish inquisition"
under which the German clergy are compelled to "cringe and dissemble,"
partly because of lack of ability, partly through economic need. [1478]
In his Versuch einer Kritik aller Offenbarung ("Essay towards a
Critique of all Revelation"), published with some difficulty, Kant
helping (1792), he in effect negates the orthodox assumption, and,
in the spirit of Kant and Lessing, but with more directness than they
had shown, concludes that belief in revelation "is an element, and an
important element, in the moral education of humanity, but it is not
a final stage for human thought." [1479] In Kant's bi-frontal fashion,
he had professed [1480] to "silence the opponents of positive religion
not less than its dogmatical defenders"; but that result did not follow
on either side, and ere long, as a professor at Jena, he was being
represented as one of the most aggressive of the opponents. Soon
after producing his Critique of all Revelation he had published
anonymously two pamphlets vindicating the spirit as distinguished
from the conduct of the French Revolution; and upon a young writer
known to harbour such ideas enmity was bound to fall. Soon it took
the form of charges of atheism. It does not appear to be true that
he ever told his students at Jena: "In five years there will be
no more Christian religion: reason is our religion"; [1481] and it
would seem that the first charges of atheism brought against him were
purely malicious. [1482] But his career henceforth was one of strife
and friction, first with the student-blackguardism which had been
rife in the German universities ever since the Thirty Years' War,
and which he partly subdued; then with the academic authorities and
the traditionalists, who, when he began lecturing on Sunday mornings,
accused him of attempting to throw over Christianity and set up the
worship of reason. He was arraigned before the High Consistory of
Weimar and acquitted; but his wife was insulted in the streets of
Jena; his house was riotously attacked in the night; and he ceased to
reside there. Then, in his Wissenschaftslehre ("Doctrine of Knowledge,"
1794-95) he came into conflict with the Kantians, with whom his rupture
steadily deepened on ethical grounds. Again he was accused of atheism
in print; and after a defence in which he retorted the charge on the
utilitarian theists he resigned.
In Berlin, where the new king held the old view that the wrongs of
the Gods were the Gods' affair, he found harbourage; and sought to
put himself right with the religious world by his book Die Bestimmung
des Menschen ("The Vocation of Man," 1800), wherein he speaks of the
Eternal Infinite Will as regulating human reason so far as human reason
is right--the old counter-sense and the old evasion. By this book
he repelled his rationalistic friends Schelling and the Schlegels;
while his religious ally Schleiermacher, who chose another tactic,
wrote on it a bitter and contemptuous review, and "could hardly find
words strong enough to express his detestation of it." [1483] A few
years later Fichte was writing no less contemptuously of Schelling;
and in his remaining years, though the Napoleonic wars partly brought
him into sympathy with his countrymen, from whom he had turned away
in angry alienation, he remained a philosophic Ishmael, warring and
warred upon all round. He was thus left to figure for posterity as a
religionist "for his own hand," who rejected all current religion while
angrily dismissing current unbelief as "freethinking chatter." [1484]
If his philosophy be estimated by its logical content as distinguished
from its conflicting verbalisms, it is fundamentally as atheistic as
that of Spinoza. [1485] That he was conscious of a vital sunderance
between his thought and that of the past is made clear by his answer,
in 1805, to the complaint that the people had lost their "religious
feeling" (Religiosität). His retort is that a new religious feeling
has taken the place of the old; [1486] and that was the position
taken up by the generation which swore by him, in the German manner,
as the last had sworn by Kant.
But the successive philosophies of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel,
all rising out of the "Illumination" of the eighteenth century, have
been alike impermanent. Nothing is more remarkable in the history
of thought than the internecine strife of the systems which insisted
on "putting something in the place" of the untenable systems of the
past. They have been but so many "toppling spires of cloud." Fichte,
like Herder, broke away from the doctrine of Kant; and later became
bitterly opposed to that of his former friend Schelling, as did Hegel
in his turn. Schleiermacher, hostile to Kant, was still more hostile
to Fichte; and Hegel, detesting Schleiermacher [1487] and developing
Fichte, give rise to schools arrayed against each other, of which the
anti-Christian was by far the stronger. All that is permanent in the
product of the age of German Rationalism is the fundamental principle
upon which it proceeded, the confutation of the dogmas and legends
of the past, and the concrete results of the historical, critical,
and physical research to which the principle and the confutation led.
24. It is true that the progressive work was not all done by the
Rationalists so-called. As always, incoherences in the pioneers led
to retorts which made for rectification. One of the errors of bias
of the early naturalists, as we have noted, was their tendency to
take every religious document as genuine and at bottom trustworthy,
provided only that its allegations of miracles were explained away
as misinterpretations of natural phenomena. So satisfied were many
of them with this inexpensive method that they positively resisted
the attempts of supernaturalists, seeking a way out of their special
dilemma, to rectify the false ascriptions of the documents. Bent solely
on one solution, they were oddly blind to evidential considerations
which pointed to interpolation, forgery, variety of source, and error
of literary tradition; while scholars bent on saving "inspiration"
were often ready in some measure for such recognitions. These arrests
of insight took place alternately on both sides, in the normal way of
intellectual progress by alternate movements. All the while, it is the
same primary force of reason that sets up the alternate pressures,
and the secondary pressures are generated by, and are impossible
without, the first.
25. The emancipation, too, was limited in area in the German-speaking
world. In Austria, despite a certain amount of French culture, the
rule of the Jesuits in the eighteenth century was too effective to
permit of any intellectual developments. Maria Theresa, who knew
too well that the boundless sexual licence against which she fought
had nothing to do with innovating ideas, had to issue a special
order to permit the importation of Montesquieu's Esprit des Lois;
and works of more subversive doctrine could not openly pass the
frontiers at all. An attempt to bring Lessing to Vienna in 1774,
with a view to founding a new literary Academy, collapsed before the
opposition; and when Prof. Jahn, of the Vienna University--described
as "freethinking, latitudinarian, anti-supernaturalistic"--developed
somewhat anti-clerical tendencies in his teaching and writing, he
was forced to resign, and died a simple Canon. [1488] The Emperor
Joseph II in his day passed for an unbeliever; [1489] but there was
no general movement. "Austria, in a time of universal effervescence,
produced only musicians, and showed zest only for pleasure." [1490]
Yet among the music-makers was the German-born Beethoven, the greatest
master of his age. Kindred in spirit to Goethe, and much more of a
revolutionist than he in all things, Beethoven spent the creative part
of his life at Vienna without ceasing to be a freethinker. [1491]
"Formal religion he apparently had none." He copied out a kind of
theistic creed consisting of three ancient formulas: "I am that which
is": "I am all that is, that was, that shall be": "He is alone by
Himself; and to Him alone do all things owe their being." Beyond this
his beliefs did not go. When his friend Moscheles at the end of his
arrangement of Fidelio wrote: "Fine, with God's help," Beethoven added,
"O man, help thyself." [1492] His reception of the Catholic sacraments
in extremis was not his act. He had left to mankind a purer and a more
lasting gift than either the creeds or the philosophies of his age.
CHAPTER XIX
FREETHOUGHT IN THE REMAINING EUROPEAN STATES
§ 1. Holland
Holland, so notable for relative hospitality to freethinking in the
seventeenth century, continued to exhibit it in the eighteenth, though
without putting forth much native response. After her desperate wars
with Louis XIV, the Dutch State, now monarchically ruled, turned on
the intellectual side rather to imitative belles lettres than to the
problems which had begun to exercise so much of English thought. It
was an age of "retrogression and weakness." [1493] Elizabeth Wolff,
née Bekker, one of the most famous of the numerous Dutch women-writers
of the century (1738-1804), is notable for her religious as well
as for her political liberalism; [1494] but her main activity was
in novel-writing; and there are few other signs of freethinking
tendencies in popular Dutch culture. It was impossible, however,
that the influences at work in the neighbouring lands should be shut
out; and if Holland did not produce innovating books she printed many
throughout the century.
In 1708 there was published at Amsterdam a work under the pseudonym of
"Juan di Posos," wherein, by way of a relation of imaginary travels,
something like atheism was said to be taught; but the pastor Leenhof
had in 1703 been accused of atheism for his treatise, Heaven on
Earth, which was at most Spinozistic. [1495] Even as late as 1714
a Spinozist shoemaker, Booms, was banished for his writings; but
henceforth liberal influences, largely traceable to the works of Bayle,
begin to predominate. Welcomed by students everywhere, Bayle must have
made powerfully for tolerance and rationalism in his adopted country,
which after his time became a centre of culture for the States of
northern Europe rather than a source of original works. Holland in
the eighteenth century was receptive alike of French and English
thought and literature, especially the former; [1496] and, besides
reprinting many of the French deists' works and translating some of
the English, the Dutch cities harboured such heretics as the Italian
Alberto Radicati, Count Passerano, who, dying at Rotterdam in 1736,
left a collection of deistic treatises of a strongly freethinking
cast to be posthumously published.
The German traveller Alberti, [1497] citing the London Magazine,
1732, states that Passerano visited England and published works
in English through a translator, Joseph Morgan, and that both were
sentenced to imprisonment. This presumably refers to his anonymous
Philosophical Dissertation upon Death, "by a friend to truth,"
published in English in 1732. [1498] It is a remarkable treatise,
being a hardy justification of suicide, "composed for the consolation
of the unhappy," from a practically atheistic standpoint. Two years
earlier he had published in English, also anonymously, a tract
entitled Christianity set in a True Light, by a Pagan Philosopher
newly converted; and it may be that the startling nature of the second
pamphlet elicited a prosecution which included both. The pamphlet of
1730, however, is a eulogy of the ethic of Jesus, who is deistically
treated as a simple man, but with all the amenity which the deists
usually brought to bear on that theme. Passerano's Recueil des pièces
curieuses sur les matières les plus interessants, published with his
name at Rotterdam in 1736, [1499] includes a translation of Swift's
ironical Project concerning babies, and an Histoire abregée de la
profession sacerdotale, which was published in a separate English
translation. [1500] Passerano is noticeable chiefly for the relative
thoroughness of his rationalism. [1501] In the Recueil he speaks of
deists and atheists as being the same, those called atheists having
always admitted a first cause under the names God, Nature, Eternal
Germs, movement, or universal soul. [1502]
In 1737 was published in French a small mystification consisting
of a Sermon prêché dans la grande Assemblée des Quakers de
Londres, par le fameux Frère E. E., and another little tract,
La Religion Muhamedane comparée à la païenne de l'Indostan,
par Ali-Ebn-Omar. "E. E." stood for Edward Elwall, a well-known
Unitarian of the time, who, as we saw, was tried at Stafford
Assizes in 1726 for publishing a Unitarian treatise, and who in
1742 published another, entitled The Supernatural Incarnation of
Jesus Christ proved to be false ... and that our Lord Jesus Christ
was the real son of Joseph and Mary. The two tracts are both by
Passerano, and are on deistic lines, the text of the Sermon being
(in English) "The Religion of the Gospel is the true Original
Religion of Reason and Nature." The proposition is of course
purely ethical in its bearing.
The currency given in Holland to such literature tells of growing
liberality of thought as well as of political freedom. But the
conditions were not favourable to such general literary activity as
prevailed in the larger States, though good work was done in medicine
and the natural sciences. Not till the nineteenth century did Dutch
scholars again give a lead to Europe in religious thought.
§ 2. The Scandinavian States
1. Traces of new rationalistic life are to be seen in the Scandinavian
countries at least as early as the times of Descartes. There, as
elsewhere, the Reformation had been substantially a fiscal or economic
revolution, proceeding on various lines. In Denmark the movement,
favoured by the king, began among the people; the nobility rapidly
following, to their own great profit; and finally Christian III, who
ruled both Denmark and Norway, acting with the nobles, suppressed
Catholic worship, and confiscated to the crown the "castles,
fortresses, and vast domains of the prelates." [1503] In Sweden
the king, Gustavus Vasa, took the initiative, moved by sore need of
funds, and a thoroughly anti-ecclesiastical temper, [1504] the clergy
having supported the Danish rule which he threw off. The burghers and
peasants promptly joined him against the clergy and nobles, enabling
him to confiscate the bishops' castles and estates, as was done in
Denmark; and he finally secured himself with the nobles by letting
them reclaim lands granted by their ancestors to monasteries. [1505]
His anti-feudal reforms having stimulated new life in many ways,
further evolution followed.
In Sweden the stimulative reign of Gustavus Vasa was followed by a
long period of the strife which everywhere trod on the heels of the
Reformation. The second successor of Gustavus, his son John, had
married a daughter of the Catholic Sigismund of Poland, and sought
to restore her religion to power, causing much turmoil until her
death, whereafter he abandoned the cause. His Catholic son Sigismund
recklessly renewed the effort, and was deposed in consequence; John's
brother Charles becoming king. In Denmark, meanwhile, Frederick II
(d. 1588) had been a bigoted champion of Lutheranism, expelling a
professor of Calvinistic leanings on the Eucharist, and refusing a
landing to the Calvinists who fled from the Netherlands. On the other
hand he patronized and pensioned Tycho Brahé, who, until driven into
banishment by a court cabal during the minority of Christian IV,
did much for astronomy, though unable to accept Copernicanism.
In 1611 there broke out between Sweden and Denmark the sanguinary
two-years' "War of Calmar," their common religion availing nothing to
avert strife. Thereafter Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, as Protestant
champion in the Thirty Years' War, in succession to Christian IV of
Denmark, fills the eye of Europe till his death in 1632; eleven years
after which event Sweden and Denmark were again at war. In 1660 the
latter country, for lack of goodwill between nobles and commoners,
underwent a political revolution whereby its king, whose predecessors
had held the crown on an elective tenure, became absolute, and set
up a hereditary line. The first result was a marked intellectual
stagnation. "Divinity, law, and philosophy were wholly neglected;
surgery was practised only by barbers; and when Frederick IV and his
queen required medical aid, no native physician could be found to whom
it was deemed safe to entrust the cure of the royal patients.... The
only name, after Tycho Brahé, of which astronomy can boast, is that
of Peter Horrebow, and with him the cultivation of the science became
extinct." [1506]
2. For long, the only personality making powerfully for culture was
Holberg, [1507] certainly a host in himself. Of all the writers of his
age, the only one who can be compared with him in versatility of power
is Voltaire, whom he emulated as satirist, dramatist, and historian;
but all his dramatic genius could not avail to sustain against the
puritanical pietism which then flourished, the Danish drama of which
he was the fecund creator. After producing a brilliant series of plays
(1722-1727) he had to witness the closing of the Copenhagen Theatre,
and take to general writing, historical and didactic. In 1741 he
produced in Latin his famous Subterranean Journey of Nicolas Klimius,
[1508] one of the most widely famous performances of its age. [1509]
He knew English, and must have been influenced by Swift's Gulliver's
Travels, which his story frequently recalls. The hero catastrophically
reaches a "subterranean" planet, with another social system, and
peopled by moving trees and civilized and socialized animals. With
the tree-people, the Potuans, the tale deals at some length, giving
a chapter on their religion, [1510] after the manner of Tyssot de
Patot in Jacques Massé. They are simple deists, knowing nothing of
Christianity; and the author makes them the mouthpieces of criticisms
upon Christian prayers, Te Deums, and hymn-singing in general. They
believe in future recompenses, but not in providential government of
this life; and at various points they improve upon the current ethic
of Christendom. [1511]
There is a trace of the tone of Frederick alike in the eulogy of
tolerance and in the intimation that anyone who disputes about the
character of the deity and the properties of spirits or souls is
"condemned to phlebotomy" and to be detained in the general hospital
(nosocomium). [1512] It was probably by way of precaution that in
the closing paragraph of the chapter the Potuans are alleged to
maintain that, though their creed "seemed mere natural religion,
it was all revealed in a book which was sent from the sky some
centuries ago"; but the precaution is slight, as they are declared to
have practically no dogmas at all. It is thus easy to read between
the lines of the declaration of Potuan orthodoxy: "Formerly our
ancestors contented themselves to live in natural religion alone;
but experience has shown that the mere light of nature does not
suffice, and that its precepts are effaced in time by the sloth
and negligence of some and the philosophic subtleties of others,
so that nothing can arrest freethinking (libertatem cogitandi) or
keep it within just bounds. Thence came depravation; and therefore
it was that God had chosen to give them a written law." [1513] Such
a confutation of "the error of those who pretend that a revelation is
unnecessary" must have given more entertainment to those in question
than satisfaction to the defenders of the faith. But a general tone
of levity and satire, maintained at the expense of various European
nations, England included, [1514] together with his popularity as a
dramatist, saved Holberg from the imputation of heresy. His satire
reached and was realized by the cultured few alone: the multitude
was quite unaffected; and during the reign of Christian VI all
intellectual efforts beyond the reign of science were subjected to
rigorous control. [1515] As a culture force, Protestantism had failed
in the north lands as completely as Catholicism in the south.
3. In Sweden, meantime, there had occurred some reflex of the
intellectual renascence. Towards the middle of the seventeenth century
there are increasing traces of rationalism at the court of the famous
Christina, who already in her youth is found much interested in the
objections of "Jews, heathens, and philosophers against Christian
doctrine"; [1516] and her invitation of Descartes to her court
(1649) implies that Sweden had been not a little affected by the
revulsion of popular thought which followed on the Thirty Years' War
in Germany. Christina herself, however, was a remarkable personality,
unfeminine, strong-willed, with a vigorous but immature intelligence;
and she did much of her early skeptical thinking for herself. In
the course of a few years, the new spirit had gone so far as to
make church-going matter for open scoffing at the Swedish court;
[1517] and the Queen's adoption of Romanism, for which she prepared
by abdicating the crown, appears to have been by way of revulsion
from a state of mind approaching atheism, to which she had been led
by her freethinking French physician, Bourdelot, after Descartes's
death. [1518] It has been confidently asserted that she really cared
for neither creed, and embraced Catholicism only by way of conformity
for social purposes, retaining her freethinking views. [1519] It is
certain that she was always unhappy in her Swedish surroundings. But
her course may more reasonably be explained as that of a mind which
could not rest in deism or face atheism, and sought in Catholicism
the sense of anchorage which is craved by temperaments ill-framed for
the discipline of reason. The author of the Histoire des intrigues
galantes de la reine Christine de Suède (1697), who seems to have
been one of her suite, insists that while she "loved bigots no more
than atheists," [1520] and although her religion had been shaken in
her youth by Bourdelot and other freethinkers, she was regular in all
Catholic observances; and that once, looking at the portrait of her
father, she said he had failed to provide for the safety of his soul,
and thanked God for having guided her aright. [1521]
Her annotations of Descartes are of little importance; but it is
noteworthy that she accorded to his orthodox adherents a declaration
that he had "greatly contributed" to her "glorious conversion" to the
Catholic faith. [1522] Whatever favour she may have shown to liberty
of thought in her youth, no important literary results could follow
in the then state of Swedish culture, when the studies at even the
new colleges were mainly confined to Latin and theology. [1523] The
German Pufendorf, indeed, by his treatises On the Law of Nature and
Nations and On the Duty of Man and Citizen (published at Lund, where he
was professor, in 1672-73), did much to establish the utilitarian and
naturalistic tendency in ethics which was at work at the same time in
England; but his latent deism had no great influence even in Germany,
his Scripture-citing orthodoxy countervailing it, although he argued
for a separation of Church and State. [1524]
4. That there was, however, in eighteenth-century Sweden a considerable
amount of unpublished rationalism may be gathered from the writings
of Emanuel Swedenborg, himself something of a freethinker in his
very supernaturalism. His frequent subacid allusions to those who
"regarded Nature instead of the divine," and "thought from science,"
[1525] tell not merely of much passive opposition to his own prophetic
claims (which he avenged by much serene malediction and the allotment
of bad quarters in the next world), but of reasoned rejection of all
Scriptural claims. Thus in his Sapientia Angelica de Divina Providentia
[1526] (1764) he sets himself [1527] to deal with a number of the
ways in which "the merely natural man confirms himself in favour of
Nature against God" and "comes to the conclusion that religion in
itself is nothing, but yet that it is necessary because it serves as
a restraint." Among the sources of unbelief specified are ethical
revolt alike against the Biblical narratives and against the lack
of moral government in the world; the recognition of the success of
other religions than the Christian, and of the many heresies within
that; and dissatisfaction with the Christian dogmas. As Swedenborg
sojourned much in other countries, he may be describing men other
than his countrymen; but it is very unlikely that the larger part of
his intercourse with his fellows counted for nothing in this account
of contemporary rationalism.
With his odd mixture of scripturalism and innovating dogmatism,
Swedenborg disposes of difficulties about Genesis by reducing Adam
and Eve to an allegory of the "Most Ancient Church," tranquilly
dismissing the orthodox belief by asking, "For who can suppose that
the creation of the world could have been as there described?" [1528]
His own scientific training, which had enabled him to make his notable
anticipation of the nebular theory, [1529] made it also easy for him
to reduce to allegory the text of what he nevertheless insisted on
treating as a divine revelation; and his moral sense, active where
he felt no perverting resentment of contradiction by reasoners,
[1530] made him reject the orthodox doctrine of salvation by faith,
even as he did the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity. On these points
he seems to have had a lead from his father, Bishop Jasper Svedberg,
[1531] as he had in his overwhelming physiological bias to subjective
vision-making. But a message which finally amounted to the oracular
propounding of a new and bewildering supernaturalism, to be taken on
authority like the old, could make for freethought only by rousing
rational reaction. It was Swedenborg's destiny to establish, in virtue
of his great power of orderly dogmatism, a new supernaturalist and
scripturalist sect, while his scientific conceptions were left for
other men to develop. In his own country, in his own day, he had
little success qua prophet, though always esteemed for his character
and his high secular competence; and he finally figured rather as a
heresiarch than otherwise. [1532]
5. According to one of Swedenborg's biographers, the worldliness of
most of the Swedish clergy in the middle of the eighteenth century so
far outwent even that of the English Church that the laity were left
to themselves; while "gentlemen disdained the least taint of religion,
and except on formal occasions would have been ashamed to be caught
church-going." [1533] But this was a matter rather of fashion than
of freethought; and there is little trace of critical life in the
period. In the latter part of the eighteenth century, doubtless,
the aristocracies and the cultured class in the Scandinavian States
were influenced like the rest of Europe by the spirit of French
freethought, [1534] which everywhere followed the vogue of the French
language and literature. Thus we find Gustavus III of Sweden, an ardent
admirer of Voltaire, defending him in company, and proposing in 1770,
before the death of his father prevented it, to make a pilgrimage to
Ferney. [1535] It is without regard to this testimony that Gustavus,
who was assassinated, is said to have died "with the fortitude
and resignation of a Christian." [1536] He was indeed flighty and
changeable, [1537] and after growing up a Voltairean was turned for a
year or two into a credulous mystic, the dupe of pseudo-Swedenborgian
charlatans; [1538] but there is small sign of religious earnestness
in his fashion of making his dying confession. [1539] Claiming at
an earlier date to believe more than Joseph II, who in his opinion
"believed in nothing at all," he makes light of their joint parade of
piety at Rome, [1540] and seems to have been at bottom a good deal
of an indifferentist. During his reign his influence on literature
fostered a measure of the spirit of freethought in belles lettres;
and in the poets J. H. Kjellgren and J. M. Bellman (both d. 1795)
there is to be seen the effect of the German Aufklärung and the
spirit of Voltaire. [1541] Their contemporary, Tomas Thoren, who
called himself Torild (d. 1812), though more of an innovator in
poetic style than in thought, wrote among other things a pamphlet
on The Freedom of the General Intelligence. But Torild's nickname,
"the mad magister," tells of his extravagance; and none of the Swedish
belletrists of that age amounted to a European influence. Finally,
in the calamitous period which followed on the assassination of
Gustavus III, all Swedish culture sank heavily. The desperate energies
of Charles XII had left his country half-ruined in 1718; and even
while Linnæus and his pupils were building up the modern science of
botany in the latter half of the century the economic exhaustion of
the people was a check on general culture. The University of Upsala,
which at one time had over 2,000 students, counted only some 500 at
the close of the eighteenth century. [1542]
6. In Denmark, on the other hand, the stagnation of nearly a hundred
years had been ended at the accession of Frederick V in 1746. [1543]
National literature, revivified by Holberg, was further advanced
by the establishment of a society of polite learning in 1763;
under Frederick's auspices Danish naturalists and scholars were sent
abroad for study; and in particular a literary expedition was sent to
Arabia. The European movement of science, in short, had gripped the
little kingdom, and the usual intellectual results began to follow,
though, as in Catholic Spain, the forces of reaction soon rallied
against a movement which had been imposed from above rather than
evolved from within.
The most celebrated northern unbeliever of the French period was
Count Struensee, who for some years (1770-72) virtually ruled Denmark
as the favourite of the young queen, the king being half-witted and
worthless. Struensee was an energetic and capable though injudicious
reformer: he abolished torture; emancipated the enslaved peasantry;
secured toleration for all sects; encouraged the arts and industry;
established freedom of the press; and reformed the finances, the
police, the law courts, and sanitation. [1544] His very reforms,
being made with headlong rapidity, made his position untenable, and
his enemies soon effected his downfall and death. The young queen,
who was not alleged to have been a freethinker, was savagely seized by
the hostile faction and put on her trial on a charge of adultery, which
being wholly unproved, the aristocratic faction proposed to try her on
a charge of drugging her husband. Only by the efforts of the British
court was she saved from imprisonment for life in a fortress, and sent
to Hanover, where, three years later, she died. She too was a reformer,
and it was on that score that she was hated by the nobles. [1545] Both
she and Struensee, in short, were the victims of a violent political
reaction. There is an elaborate account of Struensee's conversion
to Christianity in prison by the German Dr. Munter, [1546] which
makes him out by his own confession an excessive voluptuary. It is
an extremely suspicious document, exhibiting strong political bias,
and giving Struensee no credit for reforms; the apparent assumption
being that the conversion of a reprobate was of more evidential value
than that of a reputable and reflective type.
In spite of the reaction, rationalism persisted among the cultured
class. Mary Wollstonecraft, visiting Denmark in 1795, noted that there
and in Norway the press was free, and that new French publications
were translated and freely discussed. The press had in fact been
freed by Struensee, and was left free by his enemies because of the
facilities it had given them to attack him. [1547] "On the subject of
religion," she added, "they are likewise becoming tolerant, at least,
and perhaps have advanced a step further in freethinking. One writer
has ventured to deny the divinity of Jesus Christ, and to question the
necessity or utility of the Christian system, without being considered
universally as a monster, which would have been the case a few years
ago." [1548] She likewise noted that there was in Norway very little
of the fanaticism she had seen gaining ground, on Wesleyan lines,
in England. [1549] But though the Danes had "translated many German
works on education," they had "not adopted any of their plans";
there were few schools, and those not good. Norway, again, had been
kept without a university under Danish rule; and not until one was
established at Christiania in 1811 could Norwegian faculty play its
part in the intellectual life of Europe. The reaction, accordingly,
soon afterwards began to gain head. Already in 1790 "precautionary
measures" had been attempted against the press; [1550] and, these being
found inefficient, an edict was issued in 1799 enforcing penalties
against all anonymous writers--a plan which of course struck at
the publishers. But the great geographer, Malte-Brun, was exiled,
as were Heiberg, the dramatic poet, and others; and again there
was "a temporary stagnation in literature," which, however, soon
passed away in the nineteenth century. Meantime Sweden and Denmark
had alike contributed vitally to the progress of European science;
though neither had shared in the work of freethought as against dogma.
§ 3. The Slavonic States
1. In Poland, where, as we saw, Unitarian heresy had spread
considerably in the sixteenth century, positive atheism is heard of in
1688-89, when Count Liszinski (or Lyszczynski), among whose papers,
it was said, had been found the written statement that there is no
God, or that man had made God out of nothing, was denounced by the
bishops of Posen and Kioff, tried, and found guilty of denying not
only the existence of God but the doctrine of the Trinity and the
Virgin Birth. After being tortured, beheaded, and burned, his ashes
were scattered from a cannon. [1551] The first step was to tear out
his tongue, "with which he had been cruel towards God"; the next to
burn his hands at a slow fire. It is all told by Zulaski, the leading
Inquisitionist. [1552] But even had a less murderous treatment been
meted out to such heresy, anarchic Poland, ridden by Jesuits, was
in no state to develop a rationalistic literature. The old king,
John Sobieski, made no attempt to stop the execution, though he is
credited with a philosophical habit of mind, and with reprimanding
the clergy for not admitting modern philosophy in the universities
and schools. [1553]
2. In Russia the possibilities of modern freethought emerge only in
the seventeenth century, when Muscovy was struggling out of Byzantine
barbarism. The late-recovered treasure of ancient folk-poesy,
partly preserved by chance among the northern peasantry, tells of
the complete rupture wrought in the racial life by the imposition
of Byzantine Christianity from the south. As early as the fourteenth
century the Strigolniks, who abounded at Novgorod, had held strongly
by anti-ecclesiastical doctrines of the Paulician and Lollard type;
[1554] but orthodox fanaticism ruled life in general down to the age
of Peter the Great. In the sixteenth century we find the usual symptom
of criticism of the lives of the monks; [1555] but the culture was
almost wholly ecclesiastical; and in the seventeenth century the
effort of the turbulent Patriarch Nikon (1605-1681), to correct
the corrupt sacred texts and the traditional heterodox practices,
was furiously resisted, to the point of a great schism. [1556]
He himself had violently denounced other innovations, destroying
pictures and an organ in the manner of Savonarola; but his own
elementary reforms were found intolerable by the orthodox, [1557]
though they were favoured by Sophia, the able and ambitious sister of
Peter. [1558] The priest Kriezanitch (1617-1678), who wrote a work on
"The Russian Empire in the second half of the Seventeenth Century,"
denounced researches in physical science as "devilish heresies";
[1559] and it is on record that scholars were obliged to study
in secret and by night for fear of the hostility of the common
people. [1560] Half-a-century later the orthodox majority seems to
have remained convinced of the atheistic tendency of all science;
[1561] and the friends of the new light doubtless included deists
from the first. Not till the reforms of Peter had begun to bear
fruit, however, could freethought raise its head. The great Czar, who
promoted printing and literature as he did every other new activity
of a practical kind, took the singular step of actually withdrawing
writing materials from the monks, whose influence he held to be wholly
reactionary. [1562] In 1703 appeared the first Russian journal; and in
1724 Peter founded the first Academy of Sciences, enjoining upon it
the study of languages and the production of translations. Now began
the era of foreign culture and translations from the French. [1563]
Prince Kantemir, the satirist, who was with the Russian embassy in
London in 1733, pronounced England, then at the height of the deistic
tide, "the most civilized and enlightened of European nations." [1564]
The fact that he translated Fontenelle on The Plurality of Worlds
tells further of his liberalism. [1565] Gradually there arose a new
secular faction, under Western influences; and other forms of culture
slowly advanced likewise, notably under Elisabeth Petrovna. At length,
in the reign of Catherine II, called the Great, French ideas, already
heralded by belles lettres, found comparatively free headway. She
herself was a deist, and a satirist of bigots in her comedies;
[1566] she accomplished what Peter had planned, the secularization of
Church property; [1567] and she was long the admiring correspondent
of Voltaire, to whom and to D'Alembert and Diderot she offered warm
invitations to reside at her court. Diderot alone accepted, and him she
specially befriended, buying his library when he was fain to sell it,
and constituting him its salaried keeper. In no country, not excepting
England, was there more of practical freedom than in Russia under her
rule; [1568] and if after the outbreak of the Revolution she turned
political persecutor, she was still not below the English level. Her
half-crazy son Paul II, whom she had given cause to hate her, undid
her work wherever he could. But neither her reaction nor his rule
could eradicate the movement of thought begun in the educated classes;
though in Russia, as in the Scandinavian States, it was not till the
nineteenth century that original serious literature flourished.
§ 4. Italy
1. Returning to Italy, no longer the leader of European thought, but
still full of veiled freethinking, we find in the seventeenth century
the proof that no amount of such predisposition can countervail
thoroughly bad political conditions. Ground down by the matchless
misrule of Spain, from which the conspiracy of the monk Campanella
vainly sought to free her, and by the kindred tyranny of the papacy,
Italy could produce in its educated class, save for the men of science
and the students of economics, only triflers, whose unbelief was of
a piece with their cynicism. While Naples and the south decayed,
mental energy had for a time flourished in Tuscany, where, under
the grand dukes from Ferdinando I onwards, industry and commerce
had revived; and even after a time of retrogression Ferdinando II
encouraged science, now made newly glorious by the names of Galileo
and Torricelli. But again there was a relapse; and at the end of
the century, under a bigoted duke, Florence was priest-ridden and,
at least in outward seeming, gloomily superstitious; while, save for
the better conditions secured at Naples under the viceroyalty of the
Marquis of Carpi, [1569] the rest of Italy was cynically corrupt
and intellectually superficial. [1570] Even in Naples, of course,
enlightenment was restricted to the few. Burnet observes that "there
are societies of men at Naples of freer thoughts than can be found
in any other place of Italy"; and he admits a general tendency of
intelligent Italians to recoil from Christianity by reason of Catholic
corruption. But at the same time he insists that, though the laity
speak with scorn of the clergy, "yet they are masters of the spirits
of the people." [1571] Yet it only needed the breathing time and the
improved conditions under the Bourbon rule in the eighteenth century
to set up a wonderful intellectual revival.
2. First came the great work of Vico, the Principles of a New Science
(1725), whereof the originality and the depth--qualities in which,
despite its incoherences, it on the whole excels Montesquieu's Spirit
of Laws--place him among the great freethinkers in philosophy. It
was significant of much that Vico's book, while constantly using the
vocabulary of faith, grappled with the science of human development
in an essentially secular and scientific spirit. This is the note
of the whole eighteenth century in Italy. [1572] Vico posits Deity
and Providence, but proceeds nevertheless to study the laws of
civilization inductively from its phenomena. He permanently obscured
his case, indeed, by insisting on putting it theologically, and
condemning Grotius and others for separating the idea of law from
that of religion. Only in a pantheistic sense has Vico's formula any
validity; and he never avows a pantheistic view, refusing even to go
with Grotius in allowing that Hebrew law was akin to that of other
nations. But a rationalistic view, had he put it, would have been
barred. The wonder is, in the circumstances, not that he makes so
much parade of religion, but that he could venture to undermine so
vitally its pretensions, especially after he had found it prudent to
renounce the project of annotating the great work of Grotius, De Jure
Belli et Pacis, on the score that (as he puts it in his Autobiography)
a good Catholic must not endorse a heretic.
Signor Benedetto Croce, in his valuable work on Vico (The
Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, Eng. tr. 1913, pp. 89-94), admits
that Vico is fundamentally at one with the Naturalists: "Like
them, in constructing his science of human society, he excludes
with Grotius all idea of God, and with Pufendorf considers man as
without help or attention from God, excluding him, that is, from
revealed religion and its God." Of Vico's opposition to Grotius,
Signor Croce offers two unsatisfactory explanations. First:
"Vico's opposition, which he expresses with his accustomed
confusion and obscurity, turns ... upon the actual conception
of religion.... Religion ... means for Vico not necessarily
revelation, but conception of reality." This reduces the defence
to a quibble; but finally Signor Croce asks himself "Why--if Vico
agreed with the natural-right school in ignoring revelation,
and if he instead of it deepened their superficial immanental
doctrine--why he put himself forward as their implacable enemy
and persisted in boasting loudly before prelates and pontiffs
of having formulated a system of natural rights different from
that of the three Protestant authors and adapted to the Roman
Church." The natural suggestion of "politic caution" Signor
Croce rejects, declaring that "the spotless character of Vico
entirely precludes it; and we can only suppose that, lacking as
his ideas always were in clarity, on this occasion he indulged
his tendency to confusion and nourished his illusions, to the
extent of conferring upon himself the flattering style and title
of Defensor Ecclesiæ at the very moment when he was destroying
the religion of the Church by means of humanity."
It is very doubtful whether this equivocal vindication is more
serviceable to Vico's fame than the plain avowal that a writer
placed as he was, in the Catholic world of 1720, could not be
expected to be straightforward upon such an issue. Vico comported
himself towards the Catholic Church very much as Descartes did. His
own declaration as to his motives is surely valid as against
a formula which combines "spotless character" with a cherished
"tendency to confusion." The familiar "tendency to hedge" is a
simpler conception.
3. It is noteworthy, indeed, that the "New Science," as Vico boasted,
arose in the Catholic and not in the Protestant world. We might say
that, genius apart, the reason was that the energy which elsewhere ran
to criticism of religion as such had in Catholic Italy to take other
channels. By attacking a Protestant position which was really less
deeply heterodox than his own, Vico secured Catholic currency for a
philosopheme which on its own merits Catholic theologians would have
scouted as atheism. As it was, Vico's sociology aroused on the one
hand new rationalistic speculation as to the origin of civilization,
and on the other orthodox protest on the score of its fundamentally
anti-Biblical character. It was thus attacked in 1749 by Damiano
Romano, and later by Finetti, a professor at Padua, àpropos of the
propaganda raised by Vico's followers as to the animal origin of
the human race. This began with Vico's disciple, Emmanuele Duni, a
professor at Rome, who published a series of sociological essays in
1763. Thenceforth for many years there raged, "under the eyes of Pope
and cardinals," an Italian debate between the Ferini and Antiferini,
the affirmers and deniers of the animal origin of man, the latter
of course taking up their ground on the Bible, from which Finetti
drew twenty-three objections to Vico. [1573] Duni found it prudent
to declare that he had "no intention of discussing the origin of
the world, still less that of the Hebrew nation, but solely that
of the Gentile nations"; but even when thus limited the debate
set up far-reaching disturbance. At this stage Italian sociology
doubtless owed something to Montesquieu and Rousseau; but the fact
remains that the Scienza Nuova was a book "truly Italian; Italian par
excellence." [1574] It was Vico, too, who led the way in the critical
handling of early Roman history, taken up later by Beaufort, and still
later by Niebuhr; and it was he who began the scientific analysis
of Homer, followed up later by F. A. Wolf. [1575] By a fortunate
coincidence, the papal chair was held at the middle of the century
(1740-1758) by the most learned, tolerant, and judicious of modern
popes, Benedict XIV, [1576] whose influence was used for political
peace in Europe and for toleration in Italy; and whom we shall find,
like Clement XIV, on friendly terms with a freethinker. In the same age
Muratori and Giannone amassed their unequalled historical learning;
and a whole series of Italian writers broke new ground on the field
of social science, Italy having led the way in this as formerly in
philosophy and physics. [1577] The Hanoverian Dr. G. W. Alberti,
of Italian descent, writes in 1752 that "Italy is full of atheists";
[1578] and Grimm, writing in 1765, records that according to capable
observers the effect of the French freethinking literature in the
past thirty years had been immense, especially in Tuscany. [1579]
4. Between 1737 and 1798 may be counted twenty-eight Italian writers
on political economy; and among them was one, Cesare Beccaria, who
on another theme produced perhaps the most practically influential
single book of the eighteenth century, [1580] the treatise on Crimes
and Punishments (1764), which affected penal methods for the better
throughout the whole of Europe. Even were he not known to be a deist,
his strictly secular and rationalist method would have brought upon
him priestly suspicion; and he had in fact to defend himself against
pertinacious and unscrupulous attacks, [1581] though he had sought
in his book to guard himself by occasionally "veiling the truth
in clouds." [1582] As we have seen, Beccaria owed his intellectual
awakening first to Montesquieu and above all to Helvétius--another
testimony to the reformative virtue of all freethought.
Of the aforesaid eight-and-twenty writers on economics, probably the
majority were freethinkers. Among them, at all events, were Count
Algarotti (1712-1764), the distinguished æsthetician, one of the
group round Frederick at Berlin and author of Il Newtonianismo per
le dame (1737); Filangieri, whose work on legislation (put on the
Index by the papacy) won the high praise of Franklin; the Neapolitan
abbate Ferdinando Galiani, one of the brightest and soundest wits in
the circle of the French philosophes; the other Neapolitan abbate
Antonio Genovesi (1712-1769), the "redeemer of the Italian mind,"
[1583] and the chief establisher of economic science for modern
Italy. [1584] To these names may be added those of Alfieri, one
of the strongest anti-clericalists of his age; Bettinelli, the
correspondent of Voltaire and author of The Resurrection of Italy
(1775); Count Dandolo, author of a French work on The New Men (1799);
and the learned Giannone, author of the great anti-papal History of
the Kingdom of Naples (1723), who, after more than one narrow escape,
was thrown in prison by the king of Sardinia, and died there (1748)
after twelve years' confinement.
To the merits of Algarotti and Genovesi there are high contemporary
testimonies. Algarotti was on friendly terms with Cardinal Ganganelli,
who in 1769 became Pope Clement XIV. In 1754 the latter writes [1585]
him: "My dear Count, Contrive matters so, in spite of your philosophy,
that I may see you in heaven; for I should be very sorry to lose sight
of you for an eternity. You are one of those rare men, both for heart
and understanding, whom we could wish to love even beyond the grave,
when we have once had the advantage of knowing them. No one has more
reasons to be convinced of the spirituality and immortality of the
soul than you have. The years glide away for the philosophers as well
as for the ignorant; and what is to be the term of them cannot but
employ a man who thinks. Own that I can manage sermons so as not to
frighten away a bel esprit; and that if every one delivered as short
and as friendly sermons as I do, you would sometimes go to hear a
preacher. But barely hearing will not do ... the amiable Algarotti
must become as good a Christian as he is a philosopher: then should
I doubly be his friend and servant." [1586]
In an earlier letter, Ganganelli writes: "The Pope [Benedict XIV]
is ever great and entertaining for his bons mots. He was saying the
other day that he had always loved you, and that it would give him very
great pleasure to see you again. He speaks with admiration of the king
of Prussia ... whose history will make one of the finest monuments of
the eighteenth century. See here and acknowledge my generosity! For
that prince makes the greatest jest possible of the Court of Rome,
and of us monks and friars. Cardinal Querini will not be satisfied
unless he have you with him for some time at Brescia. He one day told
me that he would invite you to come and dedicate his library.... There
is no harm in preaching to a philosopher who seldom goes to hear a
sermon, and who will not have become a great saint by residing at
Potsdam. You are there three men whose talents might be of great
use to religion if you would change their direction--viz. Yourself,
Mons. de Voltaire, and M. de Maupertuis. But that is not the ton
of the age, and you are resolved to follow the fashion." [1587]
Ganganelli in his correspondence reveals himself as an admirer
of Newton [1588] and somewhat averse to religious zeal. [1589] Of
the papal government he admitted that it was favourable "neither
to commerce, to agriculture, nor to population, which precisely
constitute the essence of public felicity," while suavely reminding
the Englishman of the "inconveniences" of his own government. [1590]
To the learned Muratori, who suffered at the hands of the bigots,
he and Pope Benedict XIV gave their sympathy. [1591]
But Ganganelli's own thinking on the issues between reason and religion
was entirely commonplace. "Whatever," he wrote, "departs from the
account given of the Creation in the book of Genesis has nothing to
support it but paradoxes, or, at most, mere hypotheses. Moses alone,
as being an inspired author, could perfectly acquaint us with the
formation of the world, and the development of its parts.... Whoever
does not see the truth in what Moses relates was never born to know
it." [1592] It was only in his relation to the bigots of his own Church
that his thinking was rationalistic. "The Pope," he writes to a French
marquis, "relies on Providence; but God does not perform miracles
every time he is asked to do it. Besides, is he to perform one that
Rome may enjoy a right of seignory over the Duchy of Parma?" [1593]
At his death an Italian wrote of him that "the distinction he was
able to draw between dogmas or discipline and ultramontane opinions
gave him the courage to take many opportunities of promoting the
peace of the State." His tolerance is sufficiently exhibited in one
of his letters to Algarotti: "I hope that you will preach to me some
of these days, so that each may have his turn." [1594] Freethought
had achieved something when a Roman Cardinal, a predestinate Pope,
could so write to an avowed freethinker. Concerning Galiani we have
the warm panegyric of Grimm. "If I have any vanity with which to
reproach myself," he writes, "it is that which I derive in spite of
myself from the fact of the conformity of my ideas with those of
the two rarest men whom I have the happiness to know, Galiani and
Denis Diderot." [1595] Grimm held Galiani to be of all men the best
qualified to write a true ecclesiastical history. But the history that
would have satisfied him and Grimm was not to be published in that age.
Italy, however, had done her full share, considering her heritage
of burdens and hindrances, in the intellectual work of the century;
and in the names of Galvani and Volta stands the record of one more of
her great contributions to human enlightenment. Under Duke Leopold II
of Tuscany the papacy was so far defied that books put on the Index
were produced for him under the imprint of London; [1596] and the
papacy itself at length gave way to the spirit of reform, Clement XIV
consenting among other things to abolish the Order of Jesuits (1773),
after his predecessor had died of grief over his proved impotence to
resist the secular policy of the States around him. [1597] In Tuscany,
indeed, the reaction against the French Revolution was instant and
severe. Leopold succeeded his brother Joseph as emperor of Austria in
1790, but died in 1792; and in his realm, as was the case in Denmark
and in Spain in the same century, the reforms imposed from above
by a liberal sovereign were found to have left much traditionalism
untouched. After 1792, Ferdinando III suspended some of his father's
most liberal edicts, amid the applause of the reactionaries; and in
1799, after the first short stay of the revolutionary French army, out
of its one million inhabitants no fewer than 22,000 were prosecuted for
"French opinions." [1598] Certainly some of the "French opinions" were
wild enough; for instance, the practice among ladies of dressing alla
ghigliottina, with a red ribbon round the neck, a usage borrowed about
1795 from France. [1599] As Quinet sums up, the revolution was too
strong a medicine for the Italy of that age. The young abbate Monti,
the chief poet of the time, was a freethinker, but he alternated his
strokes for freedom with unworthy compliances. [1600] Such was the dawn
of the new Italian day that has since slowly but steadily broadened,
albeit under many a cloud.
§ 5. Spain and Portugal
1. For the rest of Europe during the eighteenth century, we have
to note only traces of receptive thought. Spain under Bourbon rule,
as already noted, experienced an administrative renascence. Such men
as Count Aranda (1718-99) and Aszo y del Rio (1742-1814) wrought to
cut the claws of the Inquisition and to put down the Jesuits; but not
yet, after the long work of destruction accomplished by the Church in
the past, could Spain produce a fresh literature of any far-reaching
power. When Aranda was about to be appointed in 1766, his friends
the French Encyclopédistes prematurely proclaimed their exultation
in the reforms he was to accomplish; and he sadly protested that they
had thereby limited his possibilities. [1601] Nonetheless he wrought
much, the power of the Inquisition in Spain being already on the
wane. Dr. Joaquin Villanueva, one of the ecclesiastical statesmen who
took part in its suppression by the Cortes at Cadiz in 1813, tells how,
in his youth, under the reign of Charles III, it was a current saying
among the students at college that while the clever ones could rise to
important posts in the Church, or in the law, the blockheads would be
sure to find places in the Inquisition. [1602] It was of course still
powerful for social terrorism and minor persecution; but its power of
taking life was rapidly dwindling. Between 1746 and 1759 it had burned
only ten persons; from 1759 until 1781 it burned only four; thereafter
none, [1603] the last case having provoked protests which testified
to the moral change wrought in Europe by a generation of freethought.
In Spain too, as elsewhere, freethought had made way among the upper
classes; and in 1773 we find the Duke d'Alba (formerly Huescar),
ex-ambassador of Spain to France, subscribing eighty louis for a
statue to Voltaire. "Condemned to cultivate my reason in secret,"
he wrote to D'Alembert, "I see this opportunity to give a public
testimony of my gratitude to and admiration for the great man who
first showed me the way." [1604]
2. Still all freethinking in Spain ran immense risks, even under
Charles III. The Spanish admiral Solano was denounced by his almoner
to the Inquisition for having read Raynal, and had to demand pardon on
his knees of the Inquisition and God. [1605] Aranda himself was from
first to last four times arraigned before the Inquisition, [1606]
escaping only by his prestige and power. So eminent a personage as
P. A. J. Olavidès, known in France as the Count of Pilos (1726-1803),
could not thus escape. He had been appointed by Charles III prefect of
Seville, and had carried out for the king the great work of colonizing
the Sierra Morena, [1607] of which region he was governor. At the
height of his career, in 1776, he was arrested and imprisoned, "as
suspected of professing impious sentiments, particularly those of
Voltaire and Rousseau, with whom he had carried on a very intimate
correspondence." He had spoken unwarily to inhabitants of the new
towns under his jurisdiction concerning the exterior worship of deity
in Spain, the worship of images, the fast days, the cessation of work
on holy days, the offerings at mass, and all the rest of the apparatus
of popular Catholicism. [1608] Olavidès prudently confessed his error,
declaring that he had "never lost his inner faith." After two years'
detention he was forced to make his penance at a lesser auto da fé in
presence of sixty persons of distinction, many of whom were suspected
of holding similar opinions, and were thus grimly warned to keep
their counsel. During four hours the reading of his process went on,
and then came the sentence. He was condemned to pass eight years in
a convent; to be banished forever from Madrid, Seville, Cordova, and
the new towns of the Sierra Morena, and to lose all his property; he
was pronounced incapable henceforth of holding any public employment
or title of honour; and he was forbidden to mount a horse, to wear
any ornament of gold, silver, pearls, diamonds, or other precious
stones, or clothing of silk or fine linen. On hearing his sentence he
fainted. Afterwards, on his knees, he received absolution. Escaping
some time afterwards from his convent, he reached France. After
some years more, he cynically produced a work entitled The Gospel
Triumphant, or the Philosopher Converted, which availed to procure a
repeal of his sentence; and he returned into favour. [1609] In his
youth he "had not the talent to play the hypocrite." In the end he
mastered the art as few had done.
3. Another grandee, Don Christophe Ximenez de Gongora, Duke of
Almodobar, published a free and expurgated translation of Raynal's
History of the Indies under another title; [1610] and though he put
upon the book only an anagram of his name, he presented copies to the
king. The inquisitors, learning as much, denounced him as "suspected
of having embraced the systems of unbelieving philosophers"; but
this time the prosecution broke down for lack of evidence. [1611] A
similar escape was made by Don Joseph Nicholas d'Azara, who had been
minister of foreign affairs, minister plenipotentiary of the king at
Rome, and ambassador extraordinary at Paris, and was yet denounced at
Saragossa and Madrid as an "unbelieving philosopher." [1612] Count
Ricla, minister of war under Charles III, was similarly charged,
and similarly escaped for lack of proofs. [1613]
4. In another case, a freethinking priest skilfully anticipated
prosecution. Don Philip de Samaniego, "priest, archdeacon of Pampeluna,
chevalier of the order of St. James, counsellor of the king and
secretary-general, interpreter of foreign languages," was one of those
invited to assist at the auto da fé of Olavidès. The impression made
upon him was so strong that he speedily prepared with his own hand
a confession to the effect that he had read many forbidden books,
such as those of Voltaire, Mirabeau, Rousseau, Hobbes, Spinoza,
Montesquieu, Bayle, D'Alembert, and Diderot; and that he had been
thus led into skepticism; but that after serious reflection he had
resolved to attach himself firmly and forever to the Catholic faith,
and now begged to be absolved. The sentence was memorable. He was
ordered first to confirm his confession by oath; then to state how
and from whom he had obtained the prohibited books, where they now
were, with what persons he had talked on these matters, what persons
had either refuted or adopted his views, and which of those persons
had seemed to be aware of such doctrines in advance; such a detailed
statement being the condition of his absolution. Samaniego obeyed,
and produced a long declaration in which he incriminated nearly
every enlightened man at the court, naming Aranda, the Duke of
Almodobar, Ricla, and the minister Florida Blanca; also General
Ricardos, Count of Truillas, General Massones, Count of Montalvo,
ambassador at Paris and brother of the Duke of Sotomayor; and Counts
Campomanes, Orreilly, and Lascy. Proceedings were begun against one
and all; but the undertaking was too comprehensive, and the proofs
were avowed to be insufficient. [1614] What became of Samaniego,
history saith not. A namesake of his, Don Felix-Maria de Samaniego,
one of the leading men of letters of the reign of Charles IV, was
arraigned before the Inquisition of Logrogno as "suspected of having
embraced the errors of modern philosophers and read prohibited books,"
but contrived, through his friendship with the minister of justice,
to arrange the matter privately. [1615]
5. Out of a long series of other men of letters persecuted by the
Inquisition for giving signs of enlightenment, a few cases are
preserved by its historian, Llorente. Don Benedict Bails, professor
of mathematics at Madrid and author of a school-book on the subject,
was proceeded against in his old age, towards the end of the reign
of Charles III, as suspected of "atheism and materialism." He was
ingenuous enough to confess that he had "had doubts on the existence of
God and the immortality of the soul," but that after serious reflection
he was repentant and ready to abjure all his errors. He thus escaped,
after an imprisonment. Don Louis Cagnuelo, advocate, was forced to
abjure for having written against popular superstition and against
monks in his journal The Censor, and was forbidden to write in future
on any subject of religion or morals. F. P. Centeno, one of the leading
critics of the reigns of Charles III and Charles IV, was an Augustinian
monk; but his profession did not save him from the Inquisition when
he made enemies by his satirical criticisms, though he was patronized
by the minister Florida Blanca. To make quite sure, he was accused
at once of atheism and Lutheranism. He had in fact preached against
ceremonialism, and as censor he had deleted from a catechism for the
free schools of Madrid an article affirming the existence of the Limbo
of children who had died unbaptized. Despite a most learned defence,
he was condemned as "violently suspected of heresy" and forced to
abjure, whereafter he went mad and in that state died. [1616]
6. Another savant of the same period, Don Joseph de Clavijo y Faxardo,
director of the natural history collection at Madrid, was in turn
arraigned as having "adopted the anti-Christian principles of modern
philosophy." He had been the friend of Buffon and Voltaire at Paris,
had admirably translated Buffon's Natural History, with notes, and was
naturally something of a deist and materialist. Having the protection
of Aranda, he escaped with a secret penance and abjuration. [1617]
Don Thomas Iriarte, chief of the archives in the ministry of foreign
affairs, was likewise indicted towards the end of the reign of Charles
III, as "suspected of anti-Christian philosophy," and escaped with
similarly light punishment. [1618]
7. Still in the same reign, the Jesuit Francisco de Ista, author of an
extremely popular satire against absurd preachers, the History of the
famous preacher Fray Gerondif, published under the pseudonym of Don
Francisco Lobon de Salazar--a kind of ecclesiastical Don Quixote--so
infuriated the preaching monks that the Holy Office received "an
almost infinite number of denunciations of the book." Ista, however,
was a Jesuit, and escaped, through the influence of his order, with
a warning. [1619] Influence, indeed, could achieve almost anything in
the Holy Office, whether for culprits or against the uninculpable. In
1796, Don Raymond de Salas, a professor at Salamanca, was actually
prosecuted by the Inquisition of Madrid as being suspected of having
adopted the principles of Voltaire, Rousseau, and other modern
philosophers, he having read their works. The poor man proved that
he had done so only in order to refute them, and produced the theses
publicly maintained at Salamanca by his pupils as a result of his
teachings. The prosecution was a pure work of personal enmity on the
part of the Archbishop of Santiago (formerly bishop of Salamanca)
and others, and Salas was acquitted, with the statement that he was
entitled to reparation. Again and again did his enemies revive the
case, despite repeated acquittals, he being all the while in durance,
and at length he had to "abjure," and was banished the capital. After
a time the matter was forced on the attention of the Government,
with the result that even Charles IV was asked by his ministers to
ordain that henceforth the Inquisition should not arrest anyone without
prior intimation to the king. At this stage, however, the intriguing
archbishop successfully intervened, and the ancient machinery for
the stifling of thought remained intact for the time. [1620]
8. It is plain that the combined power of the Church, the orders,
and the Inquisition, even under Charles III, had been substantially
unimpaired, and rested on a broad foundation of popular fanaticism and
ignorance. The Inquisition attacked not merely freethought but heresy
of every kind, persecuting Jansenists and Molinists as of old it had
persecuted Lutherans, only with less power of murder. That much the
Bourbon kings and their ministers could accomplish, but no more. The
trouble was that the enlightened administration of Charles III in
Spain did not build up a valid popular education, the sole security
for durable rationalism. Its school policy, though not without zeal,
was undemocratic, and so left the priests in control of the mind of
the multitude; and throughout the reign the ecclesiastical revenues
had been allowed to increase greatly from private sources. [1621]
Like Leopold of Tuscany, he was in advance of his people, and imposed
his reforms from above. When, accordingly, the weak and pious Charles
IV succeeded in 1788, three of the anti-clerical Ministers of his
predecessor, including Aranda, were put under arrest, [1622] and
clericalism resumed full sway, to the extent even of vetoing the
study of moral philosophy in the universities. [1623] Mentally and
materially alike, Spain relapsed to her former state of indigence;
and the struggle for national existence against Napoleon helped rather
traditionalist sentiment than the spirit of innovation.
9. Portugal in the same period, despite the anti-clerical policy
of the famous Marquis of Pombal, made no noticeable intellectual
progress. Though that powerful statesman in 1761 abolished slavery
in the kingdom, [1624] he too failed to see the need for popular
education, while promoting that of the upper classes. [1625] His
expulsion of the Jesuits, accordingly, did but raise up against him
a new set of enemies in the shape of the Jacobeos, "the Blessed,"
a species of Catholic Puritan, who accused him of impiety. His
somewhat forensic defence [1626] leaves the impression that he was
in reality a deist; but though he fought the fanatics by imprisoning
the Bishop of Coimbra, their leader, and by causing Molière's Tartufe
to be translated and performed, he does not seem to have shown any
favour to the deistical literature of which the Bishop had composed
a local Index Expurgatorius. [1627] In Portugal, as later in Spain,
accordingly, a complete reaction set in with the death of the
enlightened king. Dom Joseph died in 1777, and Pombal was at once
disgraced and his enemies released, the pious Queen Maria and her
Ministers subjecting him to persecution for some years. In 1783,
the Queen, who became a religious maniac, and died insane, [1628]
is found establishing new nunneries, and so adding to one of the main
factors in the impoverishment, moral and financial, of Portugal.
§ 6. Switzerland
During the period we have been surveying, up to the French Revolution,
Switzerland, which owed much of new intellectual life to the influx of
French Protestants at the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, [1629]
exhibited no less than the other European countries the inability
of the traditionary creed to stand criticism. Calvinism by its very
rigour generated a reaction within its own special field; and the
spirit of the slain Servetus triumphed strangely over that of his
slayer. Genevan Calvinism, like that of the English Presbyterians,
was transmuted first into a modified Arminianism, then into "Arianism"
or Socinianism, then into the Unitarianism of modern times. In the
eighteenth century Switzerland contributed to the European movement
some names, of which by far the most famous is Rousseau; and the
potent presence of Voltaire cannot have failed to affect Swiss
culture. Before his period of influence, indeed, there had taken
place not a little silent evolution of a Unitarian and deistic kind;
Socinianism, as usual, leading the way. Among the families of Italian
Protestant refugees who helped to invigorate the life of Switzerland,
as French Protestants did later that of Germany, were the Turrettini,
of whom Francesco came to Geneva in the last quarter of the sixteenth
century. One of his sons, Benedict, made a professor at twenty-four,
became a leading theologian and preacher of orthodox Calvinism,
and distinguished himself as an opponent of Arminianism. [1630]
Still more distinguished in his day was Benedict's son François
(1623-1687), also a professor, who repeated his father's services,
political and controversial, to orthodoxy, and combated Socinianism,
as Benedict had done Arminianism. But François's son Jean-Alphonse,
also a professor (whose Latin work on Christian evidences, translated
into French by a colleague, we have seen adopted and adapted by
the Catholic authorities in France), became a virtual Unitarian
[1631] (1671-1737), and as such is still anathematized by Swiss
Calvinists. Against the deists, however, he was industrious, as his
grandfather, a heretic to Catholicism, had been against the Arminians,
and his father against the Socinians. The family evolution in some
degree typifies the theological process from the sixteenth to the
eighteenth century; and the apologetics of Jean-Alphonse testify to
the vogue of critical deism among the educated class at Geneva in
the days of Voltaire's nonage. He (or his translator) deals with the
"natural" objections to the faith, cites approvingly Locke, Lardner,
and Clarke, and combats Woolston, but names no other English deist. The
heresy, therefore, would seem to be a domestic development from the
roots noted by Viret nearly two centuries before. One of Turrettini's
annotators complacently observes [1632] that though deists talk of
natural religion, none of them has ever written a book in exposition
of it, the task being left to the Christians. The writer must have
been aware, on the one hand, that any deist who in those days should
openly expound natural religion as against revealed would be liable to
execution for blasphemy in any European country save England, where,
as it happened, Herbert, Hobbes, Blount, Toland, Collins, Shaftesbury,
and Tindal had all maintained the position, and on the other hand
he must have known that the Ethica of Spinoza was naturalistic. The
false taunt merely goes to prove that deists could maintain their
heresy on the Continent at that time without the support of books. But
soon after Turrettini's time they give literary indication of their
existence even in Switzerland; and in 1763 we find Voltaire sending
a package of copies of his treatise on Toleration by the hand of "a
young M. Turretin of Geneva," who "is worthy to see the brethren,
though he is the grandson of a celebrated priest of Baal. He is
reserved, but decided, as are most of the Genevese. Calvin begins
in our cantons to have no more credit than the pope." [1633] For
this fling there was a good deal of justification. When in 1763 the
Council of Geneva officially burned a pamphlet reprint of the Vicaire
Savoyard from Rousseau's Émile there was an immediate public protest
by "two hundred persons, among whom there were three priests"; [1634]
and some five weeks later "a hundred persons came for the third time to
protest.... They say that it is permissible to every citizen to write
what he will on religion; that he should not be condemned without a
hearing; and that the rights of men must be respected." [1635] All this
was not a sudden product of the freethinking influence of Voltaire and
Rousseau, which had but recently begun. An older leaven had long been
at work. The Principes du Droit Naturel of J. J. Burlamaqui (1748),
save for its subsumption of deity as the originator of all human
tendencies, is strictly naturalistic and utilitarian in its reasoning,
and clearly exhibits the influence of Hobbes and Mandeville. [1636]
Voltaire, too, in his correspondence, is found frequently speaking
with a wicked chuckle of the Unitarianism of the clergy of Geneva,
[1637] a theme on which D'Alembert had written openly in his article
Genève in the Encyclopédie in 1756. [1638] So early as 1757, Voltaire
roundly affirms that there are only a few Calvinists left: "tous les
honnêtes gens sont déistes par Christ." [1639] And when the younger
Salchi, professor at Lausanne, writes in 1759 that "deism is become
the fashionable religion.... Europe is inundated with the works of
deists; and their partisans have made perhaps more proselytes in the
space of eighty years than were made by the apostles and the first
Fathers of the Church," [1640] he must be held to testify in some
degree concerning Switzerland. The chief native service to intellectual
progress thus far, however, was rendered in the field of the natural
sciences, Swiss religious opinion being only passively liberalized,
mainly in a Unitarian direction.
CHAPTER XX
EARLY FREETHOUGHT IN THE UNITED STATES
1. Perhaps the most signal of all the proofs of the change wrought
in the opinion of the civilized world in the eighteenth century is
the fact that at the time of the War of Independence the leading
statesmen of the American colonies were deists. Such were Benjamin
Franklin, the diplomatist of the Revolution; Thomas Paine, its prophet
and inspirer; Washington, its commander; and Jefferson, its typical
legislator. But for these four men the American Revolution probably
could not have been accomplished in that age; and they thus represent
in a peculiar degree the power of new ideas, in fit conditions,
to transform societies, at least politically. On the other hand,
the fashion in which their relation to the creeds of their time has
been garbled, alike in American and English histories, proves how
completely they were in advance of the average thought of their day;
and also how effectively the mere institutional influence of creeds
can arrest a nation's mental development. It is still one of the
stock doctrines of religious sociology in England and America that
deism, miscalled atheism, wrought the Reign of Terror in the French
Revolution; when as a matter of fact the same deism was at the head
of affairs in the American.
2. The rise of rationalism in the colonies must be traced in the main
to the imported English literature of the eighteenth century; for
the first Puritan settlements had contained at most only a fraction
of freethought; and the conditions, so deadly for all manner even
of devout heresy, made avowed unbelief impossible. The superstitions
and cruelties of the Puritan clergy, however, must have bred a silent
reaction, which prepared a soil for the deism of the next age. [1641]
"The perusal of Shaftesbury and Collins," writes Franklin with
reference to his early youth, "had made me a skeptic," after being
"previously so as to many doctrines of Christianity." [1642] This
was in his seventeenth or eighteenth year, about 1720, so that the
importation of deism had been prompt. [1643] Throughout life he held
to the same opinion, conforming sufficiently to keep on fair terms
with his neighbours, [1644] and avoiding anything like critical
propaganda; though on challenge, in the last year of his life, he
avowed his negatively deistic position. [1645]
3. Similarly prudent was Jefferson, who, like Franklin and Paine,
extolled the Gospel Jesus and his teachings, but rejected the
notion of supernatural revelation. [1646] In a letter written so
late as 1822 to a Unitarian correspondent, while refusing to publish
another of similar tone, on the score that he was too old for strife,
he declared that he "should as soon undertake to bring the crazy
skulls of Bedlam to sound understanding as to inculcate reason into
that of an Athanasian." [1647] His experience of the New England
clergy is expressed in allusions to Connecticut as having been
"the last retreat of monkish darkness, bigotry, and abhorrence
of those advances of the mind which had carried the other States
a century ahead of them"; and in congratulations with John Adams
(who had written that "this would be the best of all possible worlds
if there were no religion in it"), when "this den of the priesthood
is at last broken up." [1648] John Adams, whose letters with their
"crowd of skepticisms" kept even Jefferson from sleep, [1649] seems
to have figured as a member of a Congregationalist church, while
in reality a Unitarian. [1650] Still more prudent was Washington,
who seems to have ranked habitually as a member of the Episcopal
church; but concerning whom Jefferson relates that, when the clergy,
having noted his constant abstention from any public mention of the
Christian religion, so penned an address to him on his withdrawal from
the Presidency as almost to force him to some declaration, he answered
every part of the address but that, which he entirely ignored. It is
further noted that only in his valedictory letter to the governors of
the States, on resigning his commission, did he speak of the "benign
influence of the Christian religion" [1651]--the common tone of the
American deists of that day. It is further established that Washington
avoided the Communion in church. [1652] For the rest, the broad fact
that all mention of deity was excluded from the Constitution of the
United States must be historically taken to signify a profound change
in the convictions of the leading minds among the people as compared
with the beliefs of their ancestors. At the same time, the fact that
they as a rule dissembled their unbelief is a proof that, even where
legal penalties do not attach to an avowal of serious heresy, there
inheres in the menace of mere social ostracism a power sufficient to
coerce the outward life of public and professional men of all grades,
in a democratic community where faith maintains and is maintained by
a competitive multitude of priests. With this force the freethought
of our own age has to reckon, after Inquisitions and blasphemy laws
have become obsolete.
4. Nothing in American culture-history more clearly proves the last
proposition than the case of Thomas Paine, the virtual founder of
modern democratic freethought in Great Britain and the States. [1653]
It does not appear that Paine openly professed any heresy while he
lived in England, or in America before the French Revolution. Yet
the first sentence of his Age of Reason, of which the first part was
written shortly before his imprisonment, under sentence of death from
the Robespierre Government, in Paris (1793), shows that he had long
held pronounced deistic opinions. [1654] They were probably matured
in the States, where, as we have seen, such views were often privately
held, though there, as Franklin is said to have jesuitically declared
in his old age, by way of encouraging immigration: "Atheism is unknown;
infidelity rare and secret, so that persons may live to a great age
in this country without having their piety shocked by meeting with
either an atheist or an infidel." Paine did an unequalled service
to the American Revolution by his Common Sense and his series of
pamphlets headed The Crisis: there is, in fact, little question that
but for the intense stimulus thus given by him at critical moments
the movement might have collapsed at an early stage. Yet he seems
to have had no thought there and then of avowing his deism. It was
in part for the express purpose of resisting the ever-strengthening
attack of atheism in France on deism itself that he undertook to save
it by repudiating the Judæo-Christian revelation; and it is not even
certain that he would have issued the Age of Reason when it did appear,
had he not supposed he was going to his death when put under arrest,
on which score he left the manuscript for publication. [1655]
5. Its immediate effect was much greater in Britain, where his Rights
of Man had already won him a vast popularity in the teeth of the most
furious reaction, than in America. There, to his profound chagrin, he
found that his honest utterance of his heresy brought on him hatred,
calumny, ostracism, and even personal and political molestation. In
1797 he had founded in Paris the little "Church of Theo-philanthropy,"
beginning his inaugural discourse with the words: "Religion has two
principal enemies, Fanaticism and Infidelity, or that which is called
atheism. The first requires to be combated by reason and morality;
the other by natural philosophy." [1656] These were his settled
convictions; and he lived to find himself shunned and vilified, in the
name of religion, in the country whose freedom he had so puissantly
wrought to win. [1657] The Quakers, his father's sect, refused him a
burial-place. He has had sympathy and fair play, as a rule, only from
the atheists whom he distrusted and opposed, or from thinkers who no
longer hold by deism. There is reason to think that in his last years
the deistic optimism which survived the deep disappointments of the
French Revolution began to give way before deeper reflection on the
cosmic problem, [1658] if not before the treatment he had undergone at
the hands of Unitarians and Trinitarians alike. The Butlerian argument,
that Nature is as unsatisfactory as revelation, had been pressed upon
him by Bishop Watson in a reply to the Age of Reason; and though, like
most deists of his age, he regarded it as a vain defence of orthodoxy,
he was not the man to remain long blind to its force against deistic
assumptions. Like Franklin, he had energetically absorbed and given out
the new ideals of physical science; his originality in the invention of
a tubular iron bridge, and in the application of steam to navigation,
[1659] being nearly as notable as that of Franklin's great discovery
concerning electricity. Had the two men drawn their philosophy from
the France of the latter part of the century instead of the England
of the first, they had doubtless gone deeper. As it was, temperamental
optimism had kept both satisfied with the transitional formula; and in
the France of before and after the Revolution they lived pre-occupied
with politics.
6. The habit of reticence or dissimulation among American public men
was only too surely confirmed by the treatment meted out to Paine. Few
stood by him; and the vigorous deistic movement set up in his latter
years by Elihu Palmer soon succumbed to the conditions, [1660] though
Palmer's book, The Principles of Nature (1802, rep. by Richard Carlile,
1819), is a powerful attack on the Judaic and Christian systems all
along the line. George Houston, leaving England after two years'
imprisonment for his translation of d'Holbach's Ecce Homo, went to
New York, where he edited the Minerva (1822), reprinted his book,
and started a freethought journal, The Correspondence. That, however,
lasted only eighteen months. All the while, such statesmen as Madison
and Monroe, the latter Paine's personal friend, seem to have been of
his way of thinking, [1661] though the evidence is scanty. Thus it came
about that, save for the liberal movement of the Hicksite Quakers,
[1662] the American deism of Paine's day was decorously transformed
into the later Unitarianism, the extremely rapid advance of which in
the next generation is the best proof of the commonness of private
unbelief. The influence of Priestley, who, persecuted at home, went to
end his days in the States, had doubtless much to do with the Unitarian
development there, as in England; but it seems certain that the whole
deistic movement, including the work of Paine and Palmer, had tended
to move out of orthodoxy many of those who now, recoiling from the
fierce hostility directed against the outspoken freethinkers, sought
a more rational form of creed than that of the orthodox churches. The
deistic tradition in a manner centred in the name of Jefferson, and the
known deism of that leader would do much to make fashionable a heresy
which combined his views with a decorous attitude to the Sacred Books.
CHAPTER XXI
FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
The Reaction
All over the civilized world, as we have seen, the terrors of the
French Revolution evoked an intellectual no less than a political
reaction, its stress being most apparent and most destructive in
those countries in which there had been previously the largest
measure of liberty. Nowhere was it more intense or more disastrous
than in England. In countries such as Denmark and Spain, only lately
and superficially liberalized, there was no great progress to undo:
in England, though liberty was never left without an indomitable
witness, there was a violent reversal of general movement, not to be
wholly rectified in half a century. Joined in a new activity with the
civil power for the suppression of all innovating thought, the Church
rapidly attained to an influence it had not possessed since the days
of Sacheverel and a degree of wealth it had not before reached since
the Reformation. The wealth of the upper class was at its disposal
to an unheard-of extent, there being apparently no better way of
fighting the new danger of democracy; and dissent joined hands with
the establishment to promote orthodoxy.
The average tone in England in the first quarter of the century may be
gathered from the language held by a man so enlightened, comparatively
speaking, as Sydney Smith, wit, humourist, Whig, and clergyman. In
1801 we find him, in a preface never reprinted, prescribing various
measures of religious strategy in addition "to the just, necessary,
and innumerable invectives which have been levelled against Rousseau,
Voltaire, D'Alembert, and the whole pandemonium of those martyrs to
atheism, who toiled with such laborious malice, and suffered odium with
such inflexible profligacy, for the wretchedness and despair of their
fellow creatures." [1663] That this was not jesting may be gathered
from his daughter's account of his indignation when a publisher sent
him "a work of irreligious tendency," and when Jeffrey admitted
"irreligious opinions" to the Edinburgh Review. To the former he
writes that every principle of suspicion and fear would be excited
in me by a man who professed himself an infidel"; and to Jeffrey:
"Do you mean to take care that the Review shall not profess infidel
principles? Unless this is the case I must absolutely give up all
connection with it." [1664] All the while any semblance of "infidelity"
in any article in the Review must have been of the most cautious kind.
In the Catholic countries, naturally, the reaction was no less
violent. In Italy, as we saw, it began in Tuscany almost at once. The
rule of Napoleon, it is true, secured complete freedom of the Press
as regarded translation of freethinking books, an entire liberty of
conscience in religious matters, and a sharp repression of clericalism,
the latter policy going to the length of expelling all the religious
orders and confiscating their property. [1665] All this counted
for change; but the Napoleonic rule all the while choked one of the
springs of vital thought--to wit, the spirit of political liberty;
and in 1814-15 the clerical system returned in full force, as it did
all over Italy. Everywhere freethought was banned. All criticism
of Catholicism was a penal offence; and in the kingdom of Naples
alone, in 1825, there were 27,612 priests, 8,455 monks, 8,185 nuns,
20 archbishops, and 73 bishops, though in 1807 the French influence
had caused the dissolution of some 250 convents. [1666] At Florence
the Censure forbade, in 1817, the issue of a new edition of the
translated work of Cabanis on Les Rapports du physique et du moral;
and Mascagni, the physiologist, was invited to delete from his work
a definition of man in which no notice was taken of the soul. [1667]
It was even proclaimed that the works of Voltaire and Rousseau were not
to be read in the public libraries without ecclesiastical permission;
but this veto was not seriously treated. [1668] All native energy,
however, was either cowed or cajoled into passivity. If, accordingly,
the mind of Italy was to survive, it must be by the assimilation of the
culture of freer States; and this culture, reinforced by the writings
of Leopardi, generated a new intellectual life, which was a main factor
in the ultimate achievement of Italian liberation from Austrian rule.
Spain, under Charles IV, became so thoroughly re-clericalized at the
very outbreak of the Revolution that no more leeway seemed possible;
but even in Spain, early in the nineteenth century, the government
found means to retrogress yet further, and the minister Caballero
sent an order to the universities forbidding the study of moral
philosophy. The king, he justly declared, did not want philosophers,
but good and obedient subjects. [1669]
In France, where the downfall of Napoleon meant the restoration of
the monarchy, the intellectual reaction was really less powerful
than in England. The new spirit had been too widely and continuously
at work, from Voltaire onwards, to be politically expelled; and
the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 gave the proof that even on the
political side the old spirit was incapable of permanent recovery. In
Germany, where freethinking was associated not with the beaten cause
of the Revolution but in large measure with the national movement
for liberation from the tyranny of Napoleon, [1670] the religious
reaction was substantially emotional and unintellectual, though it
had intellectual representatives, notably Schleiermacher. Apart
from his culture-movement, the revival consisted mainly in a new
Pietism, partly orthodox, partly mystical; [1671] and on those
lines it ran later to the grossest excesses. But among the educated
classes of Germany there was the minimum of arrest, because there the
intellectual life was least directly associated with the political,
and the ecclesiastical life relatively the least organized. The very
separateness of the German States, then and later so often deplored
by German patriots, was really a condition of relative security for
freedom of thought and research; and the resulting multiplicity of
universities meant a variety of intellectual effort not then paralleled
in any other country. [1672] What may be ranked as the most important
effect of the reaction in Germany--the turning of Kant, Fichte, and
Hegel in succession to the task of reconciling rational philosophy
with religion in the interests of social order--was in itself a
rationalistic process as compared with the attitude of orthodoxy in
other lands. German scholarship, led by the re-organized university of
Berlin, was in fact one of the most progressive intellectual forces
in Europe during the first half of the nineteenth century; and only
its comparative isolation, its confinement to a cultured class,
prevented it from affecting popular thought as widely as deism had
done in the preceding century. Even in the countries in which popular
and university culture were less sharply divided, the German influence
was held at bay like others.
But in time the spirit of progress regained strength, the most
decisive form of recovery being the new development of the struggle
for political liberty from about 1830 onwards. In England the advance
thenceforward was to be broadly continuous on the political side. On
the Continent it culminated for the time in the explosions of 1848,
which were followed in the Germanic world by another political
reaction, in which freethought suffered; and in France, after a
few years, by the Second Empire, in which clericalism was again
fostered. But these checks have proved impermanent.
The Forces of Renascence
As with the cause of democracy, so with the cause of rationalism, the
forward movement grew only the deeper and more powerful through the
check; and the nineteenth century closed on a record of freethinking
progress which may be said to outbulk that of all the previous
centuries of the modern era together. So great was the activity
of the century in point of mere quantity that it is impossible,
within the scheme of a "Short History," to treat it on even such
a reduced scale of narrative as has been applied to the past. A
detailed history on national lines from the French Revolution onwards
would mean another book as large as the present. On however large a
scale it might be written, further, it would involve a recognition
of international influences such as had never before been evolved,
save when on a much smaller scale the educated world all round read
and wrote Latin. Since Goethe, the international aspect of culture upon
which he laid stress has become ever more apparent; and scientific and
philosophical thought, in particular, are world-wide in their scope
and bearing. It must here suffice, therefore, to take a series of
broad and general views of the past century's work, leaving adequate
critical and narrative treatment for separate undertakings. [1673]
The most helpful method seems to be that of a conspectus (1) of
the main movements and forces that during the century affected
in varying degrees the thought of the civilized world, and (2)
of the main advances made and the point reached in the culture of
the nations, separately considered. At the same time, the forces of
rationalism may be discriminated into Particular and General. We may
then roughly represent the lines of movement, in non-chronological
order, as follows:--
I.--Forces of criticism and corrective thought bearing expressly
on religious beliefs.
1. In Great Britain and America, the new movements of popular
freethought begun by Paine, and lasting continuously to the
present day.
2. In France and elsewhere, the reverberation of the attack
of Voltaire, d'Holbach, Dupuis, and Volney, carried on most
persistently in Catholic countries by the Freemasons, as against
official orthodoxy after 1815.
3. German "rationalism," proceeding from English deism, moving
towards naturalist as against supernaturalist conceptions,
dissolving the notion of the miraculous in both Old and New
Testament history, analysing the literary structure of the sacred
books, and all along affecting studious thought in other countries.
4. The literary compromise of Lessing, claiming for all religions
a place in a scheme of "divine education."
5. In England, the neo-Christianity of the school of Coleridge,
a disintegrating force, promoting the "Broad Church" tendency,
which in Dean Milman was so pronounced as to bring on him charges
of rationalism.
6. The utilitarianism of the school of Bentham, carried into
moral and social science.
7. Comtism, making little direct impression on the "constructive"
lines laid by the founder, but affecting critical thought in
many directions.
8. German philosophy, Kantian and post-Kantian, in particular
the Hegelian, turned to anti-Christian and anti-supernaturalist
account by Strauss, Vatke, Bruno Bauer, Feuerbach, and Marx.
9. German atheism and scientific "materialism"--represented
by Feuerbach and Büchner (who, however, rejected the term
"materialism" as inappropriate).
10. Revived English deism, involving destructive criticism
of Christianity, as in Hennell, F. W. Newman, R. W. Mackay,
W. R. Greg, Theodore Parker, and Thomas Scott, partly in
co-operation with Unitarianism.
11. American transcendentalism or pantheism--the school of Emerson.
12. Colenso's preliminary attack on the narrative of the
Pentateuch, a systematized return to Voltairean common-sense,
rectifying the unscientific course of the earlier "higher
criticism" on the historical issue.
13. The later or scientific "higher criticism" of the Old
Testament--represented by Kuenen, Wellhausen, and their successors.
14. New historical criticism of Christian origins, in particular
the work of Strauss and Baur in Germany, Renan and Havet in France,
and their successors.
15. Exhibition of rationalism within the churches, as in Germany,
Holland, and Switzerland generally; in England in the Essays and
Reviews; later in multitudes of essays and books, and in the
ethical criticism of the Old Testament; in America in popular
theology.
16. Association of rationalistic doctrine with the Socialist
movements, new and old, from Owen to Bebel.
17. Communication of doubt and moral questioning through poetry and
belles-lettres--as in Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, Clough, Tennyson,
Carlyle, Arnold, Browning, Swinburne, Goethe, Schiller, Heine,
Victor Hugo, Leconte de Lisle, Leopardi, and certain French and
English novelists.
II.--Modern Science, physical, mental, and moral, sapping the
bases of all supernaturalist systems.
1. Astronomy, newly directed by Laplace.
2. Geology, gradually connected (as in Britain by Chambers) with
3. Biology, made definitely non-deistic by Darwin.
4. The comprehension of all science in the Evolution Theory,
as by Spencer, advancing on Comte.
5. Psychology, as regards localization of brain functions.
6. Comparative mythology, as yet imperfectly applied to Christism.
7. Sociology, as outlined by Comte, Buckle, Spencer, Winwood Reade,
Lester Ward, Giddings, Tarde, Durkheim, and others, on strictly
naturalistic lines.
8. Comparative Hierology; the methodical application of principles
insisted on by all the deists, and formulated in the interests
of deism by Lessing, but latterly freed of his implications.
9. Above all, the later development of Anthropology (in the wide
English sense of the term), which, beginning to take shape in the
eighteenth century, came to new life in the latter part of the
nineteenth; and is now one of the most widely cultivated of all the
sciences--especially on the side of religious creed and psychology.
On the other hand, we may group somewhat as follows the general forces
of retardation of freethought operating throughout the century:--
1. Penal laws, still operative in Britain and Germany against
popular freethought propaganda, and till recently in Britain
against any endowment of freethought.
2. Class interests, involving in the first half of the century
a social conspiracy against rationalism in England.
3. Commercial pressure thus set up, and always involved in the
influence of churches.
4. In England, identification of orthodox Dissent with political
Liberalism--a sedative.
5. Concessions by the clergy, especially in England and the United
States--to many, another sedative.
6. Above all, the production of new masses of popular ignorance
in the industrial nations, and continued lack of education in
the others.
7. On this basis, business-like and in large part secular-minded
organization of the endowed churches, as against a freethought
propaganda hampered by the previously named causes, and in England
by laws which veto all direct endowment of anti-Christian heresy.
It remains to make, with forced brevity, the surveys thus outlined.
Section 1.--Popular Propaganda and Culture
1. If any one circumstance more than another differentiates the life
of to-day from that of older civilizations, or from that of previous
centuries of the modern era, it is the diffusion of rationalistic
views among the "common people." In no other era is to be found the
phenomenon of widespread critical skepticism among the labouring
masses: in all previous ages, though chronic complaint is made of
some unbelief among the uneducated, the constant and abject ignorance
of the mass of the people has been the sure foothold of superstitious
systems. Within the last century the area of the recognizably civilized
world has grown far vaster; and in the immense populations that have
thus arisen there is a relative degree of enlightenment, coupled with
a degree of political power never before attained. Merely to survey,
then, the broad movement of popular culture in the period in question
will yield a useful notion of the dynamic change in the balance of
thought in modern times, and will make more intelligible the special
aspects of the culture process.
This vital change in the distribution of knowledge is largely to
be attributed to the written and spoken teaching of a line of men
who made popular enlightenment their great aim. Their leading type
among the English-speaking races is Thomas Paine, whom we have seen
combining a gospel of democracy with a gospel of critical reason in
the midst of the French Revolution. Never before had rationalism been
made widely popular. The English and French deists had written for
the middle and upper classes. Peter Annet was practically the first
who sought to reach the multitude; and his punishment expressed
the special resentment aroused in the governing classes by such
a policy. Of all the English freethinkers of the earlier deistical
period he alone was selected for reprinting by the propagandists of the
Paine period. Paine was to Annet, however, as a cannon to a musket,
and through the democratic ferment of his day he won an audience
a hundredfold wider than Annet could have dreamt of reaching. The
anger of the governing classes, in a time of anti-democratic panic,
was proportional. Paine would have been at least imprisoned for
his Rights of Man had he not fled from England in time; and the
sale of all his books was furiously prohibited and ferociously
punished. Yet they circulated everywhere, even in Protestant Ireland,
[1674] hitherto affected only under the surface of upper-class life by
deism. The circulation of Bishop Watson's Apology in reply only served
to spread the contagion, as it brought the issues before multitudes
who would not otherwise have heard of them. [1675] All the while,
direct propaganda was carried on by translations and reprints as
well as by fresh English tractates. Diderot's Thoughts on Religion,
and Fréret's Letter from Thrasybulus to Leucippus, seem to have been
great favourites among the Painites, as was Elihu Palmer's Principles
of Nature; and Volney's Ruins of Empires had a large vogue. Condorcet's
Esquisse had been promptly translated in 1795; the translation of
d'Holbach's System of Nature reached a third edition in 1817; [1676]
that of Raynal's History had been reprinted in 1804; and that of
Helvétius On the Mind in 1810; while an English abridgment of Bayle
in four volumes, on freethinking lines, appeared in 1826.
2. Meantime, new writers arose to carry into fuller detail the attacks
of Paine, sharpening their weapons on those of the more scholarly
French deists. A Life of Jesus, including his Apocryphal History,
[1677] was published in 1818, with such astute avoidance of all
comment that it escaped prosecution. Others, taking a more daring
course, fared accordingly. George Houston translated the Ecce Homo of
d'Holbach, first publishing it at Edinburgh in 1799, and reprinting it
in London in 1813. For the second issue he was prosecuted, fined £200,
and imprisoned for two years in Newgate. Robert Wedderburn, a mulatto
calling himself "the Rev.," in reality a superannuated journeyman
tailor who officiated in Hopkins Street Unitarian Chapel, London, was
in 1820 sentenced to two years' imprisonment in Dorchester Jail for a
"blasphemous libel" contained in one of his pulpit discourses. His
Letters to the Rev. Solomon Herschell (the Jewish Chief Rabbi) and to
the Archbishop of Canterbury show a happy vein of orderly irony and
not a little learning, despite his profession of apostolic ignorance;
and at the trial the judge admitted his defence to be "exceedingly
well drawn up." His publications naturally received a new impetus,
and passed to a more drastic order of mockery.
3. As the years went on, the persecution in England grew still fiercer;
but it was met with a stubborn hardihood which wore out even the
bitter malice of piety. One of the worst features of the religious
crusade was that it affected to attack not unbelief but "vice," such
being the plea on which Wilberforce and others prosecuted, during a
period of more than twenty years, the publishers and booksellers who
issued the works of Paine. [1678] But even that dissembling device
did not ultimately avail. A name not to be forgotten by those who
value obscure service to human freedom is that of Richard Carlile,
who between 1819 and 1835 underwent nine years' imprisonment in his
unyielding struggle for the freedom of the Press, of thought, and of
speech. [1679] John Clarke, an ex-Methodist, became one of Carlile's
shopmen, was tried in 1824 for selling one of his publications,
and "after a spirited defence, in which he read many of the worst
passages of the Bible," was sentenced to three years' imprisonment,
and to find securities for good behaviour during life. The latter
disability he effectively anticipated by writing, while in prison, A
Critical Review of the Life, Character, and Miracles of Jesus, wherein
Christian feelings were treated as Christians had treated the feelings
of freethinkers, with a much more destructive result. Published first,
strangely enough, in the Newgate Magazine, it was republished in 1825
and 1839, with impunity. Thus did a brutal bigotry bring upon itself
ever a deadlier retaliation, till it sickened of the contest. Those
who threw up the struggle on the orthodox side declaimed as before
about the tone of the unbeliever's attack, failing to read the plain
lesson that, while noisy fanaticism, doing its own worst and vilest,
deterred from utterance all the gentler and more sympathetic spirits
on the side of reason, the work of reason could be done only by
the harder natures, which gave back blow for blow and insult for
insult, rejoicing in the encounter. Thus championed, freethought
could not be crushed. The propagandist and publishing work done by
Carlile was carried on diversely by such free lances as Robert Taylor
(ex-clergyman, author of the Diegesis, 1829, and The Devil's Pulpit,
1830), Charles Southwell (1814-1860), and William Hone, [1680] who
ultimately became an independent preacher. Southwell, a disciple of
Robert Owen, who edited The Oracle of Reason, was imprisoned for a year
in 1840 for publishing in that journal an article entitled "The Jew
Book"; and was succeeded in the editorship by George Jacob Holyoake
(1817-1906), another Owenite missionary, who met a similar sentence;
whereafter George Adams and his wife, who continued to publish the
journal, were imprisoned in turn. Matilda Roalfe and Mrs. Emma Martin
about the same period underwent imprisonment for like causes. [1681]
In this fashion, by the steady courage of a much-enduring band of men
and women, was set on foot a systematic Secularist propaganda--the
name having relation to the term "Secularism," coined by Holyoake.
4. In this evolution political activities played an important
part. Henry Hetherington (1792-1849), the strenuous democrat who
in 1830 began the trade union movement, and so became the founder of
Chartism, fought for the right of publication in matters of freethought
as in politics. After undergoing two imprisonments of six months
each (1832), and carrying on for three and a half years the struggle
for an untaxed Press, which ended in his victory (1834), he was in
1840 indicted for publishing Haslam's Letters to the Clergy of all
Denominations, a freethinking criticism of Old Testament morality. He
defended himself so ably that Lord Denman, the judge, confessed to have
"listened with feelings of great interest and sentiments of respect
too"; and Justice Talfourd later spoke of the defence as marked by
"great propriety and talent." Nevertheless, he was punished by four
months' imprisonment. [1682] In the following year, on the advice of
Francis Place, he brought a test prosecution for blasphemy against
Moxon, the poet-publisher, for issuing Shelley's complete works,
including Queen Mab. Talfourd, then Serjeant, defended Moxon, and
pleaded that there "must be some alteration of the law, or some
restriction of the right to put it in action"; but the jury were
impartial enough to find the publisher guilty, though he received
no punishment. [1683] Among other works published by Hetherington
was one entitled A Hunt after the Devil, "by Dr. P. Y." (really by
Lieutenant Lecount), in which the story of Noah's ark was subjected
to a destructive criticism. [1684]
5. Holyoake had been a missionary and martyr in the movement
of Socialism set up by Robert Owen, whose teaching, essentially
scientific on its psychological or philosophical side, was the first
effort to give systematic effect to democratic ideals by organizing
industry. It was in the discussions of the "Association of all Classes
of all Nations," formed by Owen in 1835, that the word "Socialism"
first became current. [1685] Owen was a freethinker in all things;
[1686] and his whole movement was so penetrated by an anti-theological
spirit that the clergy as a rule became its bitter enemies, though
such publicists as Macaulay and John Mill also combined with them
in scouting it on political and economic grounds. [1687] Up till
the middle of 1817 he had on his side a large body of "respectable"
and highly-placed philanthropists, his notable success in his own
social and commercial undertakings being his main recommendation. His
early Essays on the Formation of Character, indeed, were sufficient
to reveal his heterodoxy; but not until, at his memorable public
meeting on August 21, 1817, he began to expatiate on "the gross
errors that have been combined with the fundamental notions of every
religion that has hitherto been taught to men" [1688] did he rank as
an aggressive freethinker. It was in his own view the turning-point of
his life. He was not prosecuted; though Brougham declared that if any
politician had said half as much he would have been "burned alive";
but the alienation of "moderate" opinion at once began; and Owen,
always more fervid than prudent, never recovered his influence among
the upper classes. Nonetheless, "his secularistic teaching gained
such influence among the working classes as to give occasion for the
statement in the Westminster Review (1839) that his principles were
the actual creed of a great portion of them." [1689]
Owen's polemic method--if it could properly be so called--was not
so much a criticism of dogma as a calm impeachment of religion in a
spirit of philanthropy. No reformer was ever more entirely free from
the spirit of wrath: on this side Owen towers above comparison. "There
is no place found in him for scorn or indignation. He cannot bring
himself to speak or think evil of any man. He carried out in his daily
life his own teaching that man is not the proper object of praise or
blame. Throughout his numerous works there is hardly a sentence of
indignation--of personal denunciation never. He loves the sinner, and
can hardly bring himself to hate the sin." [1690] He had come by his
rationalism through the influence rather of Rousseau than of Voltaire;
and he had assimilated the philosophic doctrine of determinism--of all
ideals the most difficult to realize in conduct--with a thoroughness
of which the flawed Rousseau was incapable. There was thus presented
to the world the curious case of a man who on the side of character
carried rationalism to the perfection of ideal "saintliness," while
in the general application of rational thought to concrete problems
he was virtually unteachable. For an absolute and immovable conviction
in his own practical rightness was in Owen as essential a constituent
as his absolute benevolence. [1691] These were the two poles of his
personality. He was, in short, a fair embodiment of the ideal formed
by many people--doctrine and dogma apart--of the Gospel Jesus. And
most Christians accordingly shunned and feared or hated him.
Such a personality was evidently a formidable force as against the
reinforced English orthodoxy of the first generation of the nineteenth
century. The nature of Owen's propaganda as against religion may
be best sampled from his lecture, "The New Religion: or, Religion
founded on the Immutable Laws of the Universe, contrasted with all
Religions founded on Human Testimony," delivered at the London Tavern
on October 20, 1830: [1692]--
"Under the arrangements which have hitherto existed for educating
and governing man, four general characters have been produced
among the human race. These four characters appear to be formed,
under the past and present arrangements of society, from four
different original organizations at birth....
"No. 1. May be termed the conscientious religious in all countries.
No. 2. Unbelievers in the truth of any religion, but who
strenuously support the religion of their country, under the
conviction that, although religion is not necessary to insure
their own good conduct, it is eminently required to compel others
to act right.
No. 3. Unbelievers who openly avow their disbelief in the truth
of any religion, such as Deists, Atheists, Skeptics, etc., etc.,
but who do not perceive the laws of nature relative to man as an
individual, or when united in a social state.
No. 4. Disbelievers in all past and present religions, but
believers in the eternal unchanging laws of the universe, as
developed by facts derived from all past experience; and who,
by a careful study of these facts, deduce from them the religion
of nature.
Class No. 1 is formed, under certain circumstances, from those
original organizations which possess at birth strong moral and
weak intellectual faculties.... Class No. 2 is composed of those
individuals who by nature possess a smaller quantity of moral
and a larger quantity of intellectual faculty.... Class No. 3
is composed of men of strong moral and moderate intellectual
faculty.... Class No. 4 comprises those who, by nature, possess
a high degree of intellectual and moral faculty...."
Thus all forms of opinion were shown to proceed either from
intellectual or moral defect, save the opinions of Owen. Such
propositions, tranquilly elaborated, were probably as effective
in producing irritation as any frontal attack upon any dogmas,
narratives, or polities. But, though not even consistent (inasmuch as
the fundamental thesis that "character is formed by circumstances" is
undermined by the datum of four varieties of organization), they were
potent to influence serious men otherwise broadly instructed as to the
nature of religious history and the irrationality of dogma; and Owen
for a generation, despite the inevitable failure and frustration of
his social schemes, exercised by his movement a very wide influence
on popular life. To a considerable extent it was furthered by the
popular deistic philosophy of George and Andrew Combe--a kind of
deistic positivism--which then had a great vogue; [1693] and by
the implications of phrenology, then also in its most scientific
and progressive stage. When, for various reasons, Owen's movement
dissolved, the freethinking element seems to have been absorbed in the
secular party, while the others appear to have gone in large part to
build up the movement of Co-operation. On the whole, the movement of
popular freethought in England could be described as poor, struggling,
and persecuted, only the most hardy and zealous venturing to associate
themselves with it. The imprisonment of Holyoake (1842) for six months,
on a trifling charge of blasphemy, is an illustration of the brutal
spirit of public orthodoxy at the time. [1694] Where bigotry could
thus only injure and oppress without suppressing heresy, it stimulated
resistance; and the result of the stimulus was a revival of popular
propaganda which led to the founding of a Secular Society in 1852.
6. This date broadly coincides with the maximum domination of
conventional orthodoxy in English life. From about the middle
of the century the balance gradually changes. In 1852 we find the
publisher Henry Bohn reissuing the worthless apologetic works of the
Rev. Andrew Fuller, with a "publisher's preface" in which they are
said to "maintain an acknowledged pre-eminence," though written "at a
period of our national history when the writings of Volney and Gibbon,
and especially of Thomas Paine, fostered by the political effects
of the French Revolution, had deteriorated the morals of the people,
and infused the poison of infidelity into the disaffected portion of
the public." We have here still the note of early-nineteenth-century
Anglican respectability, not easily to be matched in human history
for hollowness and blatancy. Fuller is at once one of the most
rabid and one of the most futile of the thousand and one defenders
of the faith. A sample of his mind and method is the verdict that
"If the light that is gone abroad on earth would permit the rearing
of temples to Venus, or Bacchus, or any of the rabble of heathen
deities, there is little doubt but that modern unbelievers would in
great numbers become their devotees; but, seeing they cannot have
a God whose worship shall accord with their inclinations, they seem
determined not to worship at all." [1695] In the very next year the
same publisher began the issue of a reprint of Gibbon, with variorum
notes, edited by "An English Churchman," who for the most part defended
Gibbon against his orthodox critics. This enterprise in turn brought
upon the pious publisher a fair share of odium. But the second half
of the century, albeit soon darkened by new wars in Europe, Asia, and
America, was to be for England one of Liberalism alike in politics and
in thought, free trade, and relatively free publication, with progress
in enlightenment for both the populace and the "educated" classes.
7. In 1858 there was elected to the presidency of the London Secular
Society the young Charles Bradlaugh, one of the greatest orators of
his age, and one of the most powerful personalities ever associated
with a progressive movement. Early experience of clerical persecution,
which even drove the boy from his father's roof, helped to make him
a fighter, but never infirmed his humanity. In the main self-taught,
he acquired a large measure of culture in French and English, and
his rare natural gift for debate was sharpened by a legal training. A
personal admirer of Owen, he never accepted his social polity, but was
at all times the most zealous of democratic reformers. Thenceforward
the working masses in England were in large part kept in touch
with a freethought which drew on the results of the scientific and
scholarly research of the time, and wielded a dialectic of which
trained opponents confessed the power. [1696] In the place of the bland
dogmatism of Owen, and the calm assumption that all mankind could and
should be schoolmastered into happiness and order, there came the alert
recognition of the absoluteness of individualism as regards conviction,
and its present pre-potency as regards social arrangements. Every
thesis was brought to the test of argument and evidence; and in due
course many who had complained that Owen would not argue, complained
that the new school argued everything. The essential thing was that
the people were receiving vitally needed instruction; and were being
taught with a new power to think for themselves. Incidentally they were
freed from an old burden by Bradlaugh's successful resistance to the
demand of suretyship from newspapers, and by his no less successful
battle for the right of non-theistic witnesses to make affirmation
instead of taking the oath in the law courts. [1697]
The inspiration and the instruction of the popular movement thus
maintained were at once literary, scientific, ethical, historical,
scholarly, and philosophic. Shelley was its poet; Voltaire its first
story-teller; and Gibbon its favourite historian. In philosophy,
Bradlaugh learned less from Hume than from Spinoza; in Biblical
criticism--himself possessing a working knowledge of Hebrew--he
collated the work of English and French specialists, down to
and including Colenso, applying all the while to the consecrated
record the merciless tests of a consistent ethic. At the same time,
the whole battery of argument from the natural sciences was turned
against traditionalism and supernaturalism, alike in the lectures
of Bradlaugh and the other speakers of his party, and in the pages
of his journal, The National Reformer. The general outcome was
an unprecedented diffusion of critical thought among the English
masses, and a proportionate antagonism to those who had wrought
such a result. When, therefore, Bradlaugh, as deeply concerned for
political as for intellectual righteousness, set himself to the task
of entering Parliament, he commenced a struggle which shortened his
life, though it promoted his main objects. Not till after a series
of electoral contests extending over twelve years was he elected for
Northampton in 1880; and the House of Commons in a manner enacted
afresh the long resistance made to him in that city. [1698] When,
however, on his election in 1880, the Conservative Opposition began
the historic proceedings over the Oath question, they probably did
even more to deepen and diffuse the popular freethought movement than
Bradlaugh himself had done in the whole of his previous career. The
process was furthered by the policy of prosecuting and imprisoning
(1883) Mr. G. W. Foote, editor of the Freethinker, under the Blasphemy
Laws--a course not directly ventured on as against Bradlaugh, though it
was sought to connect him with the publication of Mr. Foote's journal.
To this day it is common to give a false account of the origin of
the episode, representing Bradlaugh as having "forced" his opinions
on the attention of the House. Rather he strove unduly to avoid
wounding religious feeling. Wont to make affirmation by law in the
courts of justice, he held that the same law applied to the "oath of
allegiance," and felt that it would be unseemly on his part to use
the words of adjuration if he could legally affirm. On this point
he expressly consulted the law officers of the Crown, and they gave
the opinion that he had the legal right, which was his own belief
as a lawyer. The faction called the "fourth party," however, saw an
opportunity to embarrass the Gladstone Government by challenging the
act of affirmation, and thus arose the protracted struggle. Only when
a committee of the House decided that he could not properly affirm
did Bradlaugh propose to take the oath, in order to take his seat.
The pretence of zeal for religion, made by the politicians who had
raised the issue, was known by all men to be the merest hypocrisy. Lord
Randolph Churchill, who distinguished himself by insisting on the moral
necessity for a belief in "some divinity or other," is recorded to
have professed a special esteem for Mr. (now Lord) Morley, the most
distinguished Positivist of his time. [1699] The whole procedure,
in Parliament and out, was so visibly that of the lowest political
malice, exploiting the crudest religious intolerance, that it turned
into active freethinkers many who had before been only passive
doubters, and raised the secularist party to an intensity of zeal
never before seen. At no period in modern British history had there
been so constant and so keen a platform propaganda of unbelief; so
unsparing an indictment of Christian doctrine, history, and practice;
such contemptuous rebuttal of every Christian pretension; such asperity
of spirit against the creed which was once more being championed by
chicanery, calumny, and injustice. In those five years of indignant
warfare were sown the seeds of a more abundant growth of rationalism
than had ever before been known in the British Islands. With invincible
determination Bradlaugh fought his case through Parliament and the
law courts, incurring debts which forced upon him further toils that
clearly shortened his life, but never yielding for an instant in his
battle with the bigotry of half the nation. Liberalism was shamed by
many defections; Conservatism, with the assent of Mr. Balfour, was
solid for injustice; [1700] and in the entire Church of England less
than a dozen priests stood for tolerance. But the cause at stake was
indestructible. When Bradlaugh at length took the oath and his seat
in 1886, under a ruling of the new Speaker (Peel) which stultified the
whole action of the Speaker and majorities of the previous Parliament,
and no less that of the law courts, straightforward freethought stood
three-fold stronger in England than in any previous generation. Apart
from their educative work, the struggles and sufferings of the
secularist leaders won for Great Britain the abolition within one
generation of the old burden of suretyship on newspapers, and of
the disabilities of non-theistic witnesses; the freedom of public
meeting in the London parks; the right of avowed atheists to sit
in Parliament (Bradlaugh having secured in 1888 their title to
make affirmation instead of oath); and the virtual discredit of the
Blasphemy Laws as such. It is probable also that the treatment meted
out to Mrs. Besant--then associated with Bradlaugh in freethought
propaganda--marked the end of another form of tyrannous outrage,
already made historic in the case of Shelley. Secured the custody of
her children under a marital deed of separation, she was deprived of
it at law (1879) on her avowal of atheistic opinions, with the result
that her influence as a propagandist was immensely increased.
8. The special energy of the English secularist movement in the ninth
decade was partly due to the fact that by that time there had appeared
a remarkable amount of modern freethinking literature of high literary
and intellectual quality, and good "social" status. Down to 1870
the new literary names committed to the rejection of Christianity,
apart from the men of science who kept to their own work, were the
theists Hennell, F. W. Newman, W. E. Greg, R. W. Mackay, Buckle,
and W. E. H. Lecky, all of them influential, but none of them at once
recognized as a first-rate force. But with the appearance of Lecky's
History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in
Europe (1865), lacking though it was in clearness of thought, a new
tone began to prevail; and his History of European Morals from Augustus
to Charlemagne (1869), equally readable and not more uncompromising,
was soon followed by a series of powerful pronouncements of a more
explicit kind. One of the first of the literary class to come forward
with an express impeachment of Christianity was Moncure Daniel Conway,
whose Earthward Pilgrimage (1870) was the artistic record of a gifted
preacher's progress from Wesleyan Methodism, through Unitarianism,
to a theism which was soon to pass into agnosticism. In 1871 appeared
the remarkable work of Winwood Reade, The Martyrdom of Man, wherein
a rapid survey of ancient and medieval history, and of the growth of
religion from savage beginnings, leads up to a definitely anti-theistic
presentment of the future of human life with the claim to have shown
"that the destruction of Christianity is essential to the interests of
civilization." [1701] Some eighteen editions tell of the acceptance
won by the book. Less vogue, but some startled notice, was won by
the Duke of Somerset's Christian Theology and Modern Scepticism
(1872), a work of moderate rationalism, but by a peer. In 1873
appeared Herbert Spencer's Introduction to the Study of Sociology,
wherein the implicit anti-supernaturalism of that philosopher's First
Principles was advanced upon, in the chapter on "The Theological Bias,"
by a mordant attack on that Christian creed.
That attack had been preceded by Matthew Arnold's Literature and
Dogma (1872), wherein the publicist who had censured Colenso for not
writing in Latin described the Christian doctrine of the Trinity
as "the fairy-tale of three Lord Shaftesburys." Much pleading for
the recognition by unbelievers of the value of the Bible failed to
convince Christians of the value of such a thinker's Christianity. A
more important sensation was provided in 1873 by the posthumous
publication of Mill's Autobiography, and, in the following year,
by his Three Essays on Religion, which exhibited its esteemed author
as not only not a Christian but as never having been one, although he
formulated a species of limited liability theism, as unsatisfactory to
the rationalists as to the orthodox. Still the fresh manifestations of
freethinking multiplied. On the one hand the massive treatise entitled
Supernatural Religion (1874), and on the other the freethinking
essays of Prof. W. K. Clifford in the Fortnightly Review, the most
vigorously outspoken ever yet written by an English academic, showed
that the whole field of debate was being reopened with a new power and
confidence. The History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century,
by Leslie Stephen (1876), set up the same impression from another side;
yet another social sensation was created by the appearance of Viscount
Amberley's Analysis of Religious Belief (1877); and all the while the
"Higher Criticism" proceeded within the pale of the Church.
The literary situation was now so changed that, whereas from 1850
to 1880 the "sensations" in the religious world were those made
by rationalistic attacks, thereafter they were those made by new
defences. H. Drummond's Natural Law in the Spiritual World (1883),
Mr. Balfour's Defence of Philosophic Doubt (1879) and Foundations
of Belief (1895), and Mr. Kidd's Social Evolution (1894), were
successively welcomed as being declared to render such a service. It is
doubtful whether they are to-day valued upon that score in any quarter.
9. In the first half of the century popular forms of freethought
propaganda were hardly possible in other European countries. France
had been too long used to regulation alike under the monarchy and
under the empire to permit of open promotion of unbelief in the early
years of the Restoration. Yet as early as 1828 we find the Protestant
Coquerel avowing that in his day the Bourbonism of the Catholic clergy
had revived the old anti-clericalism, and that it was common to find
the most high-minded patriots unbelievers and materialists. [1702]
But still more remarkable was the persistence of deep freethinking
currents in the Catholic world throughout the century. About 1830
rationalism had become normal among the younger students at Paris;
[1703] and the revolution of that year elicited a charter putting
all religions on an equality. [1704] Soon the throne and the chambers
were on a footing of practical hostility to the Church. [1705] Under
Louis Philippe men dared to teach in the Collège de France that
"the Christian dispensation is but one link in the chain of divine
revelations to man." [1706] Even during the first period of reaction
after the restoration numerous editions of Volney's Ruines and of the
Abrégé [1707] of Dupuis's Origine de tous les Cultes served to maintain
among the more intelligent of the proletariat an almost scientific
rationalism, which can hardly be said to have been improved on by such
historiography as that of Renan's Vie de Jésus. And there were other
forces, over and above freemasonry, which in France and other Latin
countries has since the Revolution been steadily anti-clerical. The
would-be social reconstructor Charles Fourier (1772-1837) was an
independent and non-Christian though not an anti-clerical theist,
and his system may have counted for something as organizing the
secular spirit among the workers in the period of the monarchic and
Catholic reaction. Fourier approximated to Christianity inasmuch as he
believed in a divine Providence; but like Owen he had an unbounded and
heterodox faith in human goodness and perfectibility; and he claimed
to have discovered the "plan of God" for men. But Fourier was never,
like Owen, a popular force; and popular rationalism went on other
lines. At no time was the proletariat of Paris otherwise than largely
Voltairean after the Revolution, of which one of the great services
(carried on by Napoleon) was an improvement in popular education. The
rival non-Christian systems of Saint-Simon (1760-1823) and Auguste
Comte (1798-1857) also never took any practical hold among them;
but throughout the century they have been fully the most freethinking
working-class population in the world.
As to Fourier see the OEuvres Choisies de Fourier, ed. Ch. Gide,
pp. 1-3, 9. Cp. Solidarité: Vue Synthétique sur la doctrine de
Ch. Fourier, par Hippolyte Renaud, 3e édit. 1846, ch. i: "Pour
ramener l'homme à la foi" [en Dieu], writes Renaud, "il faut lui
offrir aujourd'hui une foi complète et composée, une foi solidement
assise sur le témoignage de la raison. Pour cela il faut que la
flambeau de la science dissipe toutes les obscurités" (p. 9). This
is not propitious to dogma; but Fourier planned and promised
to leave priests and ministers undisturbed in his new world,
and even declared religions to be "much superior to uncertain
sciences." Gide, introd. to OEuvres Choisies, pp. xxii-xxiii,
citing Manuscrits, vol. de 1853-1856, p. 293. Cp. Dr. Ch. Pellarin,
Fourier, sa vie et sa théorie, 5e édit. p. 143.
Saint-Simon, who proposed a "new Christianity," expressly guarded
against direct appeals to the people. See Weil, Saint-Simon et
son OEuvre, 1894, p. 193. As to the Saint-Simonian sect, see an
interesting testimony by Renan, Les Apôtres, p. 148.
The generation after the fall of Napoleon was pre-eminently the period
of new schemes of society; and it is noteworthy that they were all
non-Christian, though all, including even Owen's, claimed to provide
a "religion," and the French may seem all to have been convinced by
Napoleon's practice that some kind of cult must be provided for the
peoples. Owen alone rejected alike supernaturalism and cultus; and
his movement left the most definite rationalistic traces. All seem
to have been generated by the double influence of (1) the social
failure of the French Revolution, which left so many anxious for
another and better effort at reconstruction, and (2) of the spectacle
of the rule of Napoleon, which seems to have elicited new ideals of
beneficent autocracy. Owen, Fourier, Saint-Simon, and Comte were all
alike would-be founders of a new society or social religion. It seems
probable that this proclivity to systematic reconstruction, in a world
which still carried a panic-memory of one great social overturn, helped
to lengthen the rule of orthodoxy. Considerably more progress was made
when freethought became detached from special plans of polity, and
grew up anew by way of sheer truth-seeking on all the lines of inquiry.
In France, however, the freethinking tradition from the eighteenth
century never passed away, at least as regards the life of the great
towns. And while Napoleon III made it his business to conciliate the
Church, which in the person of the somewhat latitudinarian Darboy,
Archbishop of Paris, had endorsed his coup d'état of 1851, [1708]
even under his rule the irreversible movement of freethought revealed
itself among his own ministers. Victor Duruy, the eminent historian,
his energetic Minister of Education, was a freethinker, non-aggressive
towards the Church, but perfectly determined not to permit aggression
by it. [1709] And when the Church, in its immemorial way, declaimed
against all forms of rationalistic teaching in the colleges, and
insisted on controlling the instruction in all the schools, [1710]
his firm resistance made him one of its most hated antagonists. Even
in the Senate, then the asylum of all forms of antiquated thought and
prejudice, Duruy was able to carry his point against the prelates,
Sainte-Beuve strongly and skilfully supporting him. [1711] Thus in
the France of the Third Empire, on the open field of the educational
battle-ground between faith and reason, the rationalistic advance
was apparent in administration no less than in the teaching of the
professed men of science and the polemic of the professed critics
of religion.
10. In other Catholic countries the course of popular culture in
the first half of the century was not greatly dissimilar to that
seen in France, though less rapid and expansive. Thus we find the
Spanish Inquisitor-General in 1815 declaring that "all the world
sees with horror the rapid progress of unbelief," and denouncing
"the errors and the new and dangerous doctrines" which have passed
from other countries to Spain. [1712] This evolution was to some
extent checked; but in the latter half of the century, especially
in the last thirty years, all the Catholic countries of Europe were
more or less permeated with demotic freethought, usually going hand
in hand with republican or socialistic propaganda in politics. It is
indeed a significant fact that freethought propaganda is often most
active in countries where the Catholic Church is most powerful. Thus
in Belgium there are at least three separate federations, standing
for hundreds of freethinking "groups"; in Spain, a few years ago,
there were freethought societies in all the large towns, and at
least half-a-dozen freethought journals; in Portugal there have
been a number of societies--a weekly journal, O Secolo, of Lisbon,
and a monthly review, O Livre Exame. In France and Italy, where
educated society is in large measure rationalistic, the Masonic
lodges do most of the personal and social propaganda; but there are
federations of freethought societies in both countries. In Switzerland
freethought is more aggressive in the Catholic than in the Protestant
cantons. [1713] In the South American republics, again, as in Italy
and France, the Masonic lodges are predominantly freethinking; and in
Peru there was, a few years ago, a Freethought League, with a weekly
organ. As long ago as 1856 the American diplomatist and archæologist,
Squier, wrote that, "Although the people of Honduras, in common with
those of Central America in general, are nominally Catholics, yet,
among those capable of reflection or possessed of education, there
are more who are destitute of any fixed creed--Rationalists or, as
they are sometimes called, Freethinkers, than adherents of any form
of religion." [1714] That the movement is also active in the other
republics of the southern continent may be inferred from the facts
that a Positivist organization has long subsisted in Brazil; that its
members were active in the peaceful revolution which there substituted
a republic for a monarchy; and that at the Freethought Congresses of
Rome and Paris in 1904 and 1905 there was an energetic demand for a
Congress at Buenos Aires, which was finally agreed to for 1906.
While popular propaganda is hardly possible save on political lines,
freethinking journalism has counted for much in the most Catholic parts
of Southern Europe. The influence of such journals is to be measured
not by their circulation, which is never great, but by their keeping up
a habit of more or less instructed freethinking among readers, to many
of whom the instruction is not otherwise easily accessible. Probably
the least ambitious of them is an intellectual force of a higher order
than the highest grade of popular religious journalism; while some of
the stronger, as De Dageraad of Amsterdam, have ranked as high-class
serious reviews. In the more free and progressive countries, however,
freethought affects all periodical literature; and in France it partly
permeates the ordinary newspapers. In England, where a series of
monthly or weekly publications of an emphatically freethinking sort
has been nearly continuous from about 1840, [1715] new ones rising
in place of those which succumbed to the commercial difficulties,
such periodicals suffer an economic pinch in that they cannot hope
for much income from advertisements, which are the chief sustenance
of popular journals and magazines. The same law holds elsewhere; but
in England and America the high-priced reviews have been gradually
opened to rationalistic articles, the way being led by the English
Westminster Review [1716] and Fortnightly Review, both founded with
an eye to freer discussion.
Among the earlier freethinking periodicals may be noted The
Republican, 1819-26 (edited by Carlile); The Deist's Magazine,
1820; The Lion, 1828 (Carlile); The Prompter, 1830 (Carlile);
The Gauntlet, 1833 (Carlile); The Atheist and Republican, 1841-42;
The Blasphemer, 1842; The Oracle of Reason (founded by Southwell),
1842, etc.; The Reasoner and Herald of Progress (largely conducted
by Holyoake), 1846-1861; Cooper's Journal; or, unfettered
Thinker, etc., 1850, etc.; The Movement, 1843; The Freethinker's
Information for the People (undated: after 1840); Freethinker's
Magazine, 1850, etc.; London Investigator, 1854, etc. Bradlaugh's
National Reformer, begun in 1860, lasted till 1893. Mr. Foote's
Freethinker, begun in 1881, still subsists. Various freethinking
monthlies have risen and fallen since 1880--e.g., Our Corner,
edited by Mrs. Besant, 1883-88; The Liberal and Progress, edited
by Mr. Foote, 1879-87; the Free Review, transformed into the
University Magazine, 1893-1898. The Reformer, a monthly, edited by
Mrs. Bradlaugh Bonner, subsisted from 1897 to 1904. The Literary
Guide, which began as a small sheet in 1885, flourishes. Since
1900, a popular Socialist journal, The Clarion, has declared for
rationalism through the pen of its editor, Mr. R. Blatchford
("Nunquam"), whose polemic has caused much controversy. For a
generation back, further, rationalistic essays have appeared
from time to time not only in the Fortnightly Review (founded
by G. H. Lewes, and long edited by Mr. John (now Lord) Morley,
much of whose writing on the French philosophes appeared in its
pages), but in the Nineteenth Century, wherein was carried on,
for instance, the famous controversy between Mr. Gladstone and
Prof. Huxley. In the early 'seventies, the Cornhill Magazine,
under the editorship of Leslie Stephen, issued serially Matthew
Arnold's Literature and Dogma and St. Paul and Protestantism. In
the latter years of the century quite a number of reviews, some of
them short-lived, gave space to advanced opinions. But propaganda
has latterly become more and more a matter of all-pervading
literary influence, the immense circulation of the sixpenny
reprints of the R. P. A. having put the advanced literature of
the last generation within the reach of all.
11. In Germany, as we have seen, the relative selectness of culture,
the comparative aloofness of the "enlightened" from the mass of the
people, made possible after the War of Independence a certain pietistic
reaction, in the absence of any popular propagandist machinery
or purpose on the side of the rationalists. In the opinion of an
evangelical authority, at the beginning of the nineteenth century,
"through modern enlightenment (Aufklärung) the people had become
indifferent to the Church; the Bible was regarded as a merely human
book, the Saviour merely as a person who had lived and taught long ago,
not as one whose almighty presence is with his people still." [1717]
According to the same authority, "before the war, the indifference to
the word of God which prevailed among the upper classes had penetrated
to the lower; but after it, a desire for the Scriptures was everywhere
felt." [1718] This involves an admission that the "religion of the
heart" propounded by Schleiermacher in his addresses On Religion
"to the educated among its despisers" [1719] (1799) was not really a
Christian revival at all. Schleiermacher himself in 1803 declared that
in Prussia there was almost no attendance on public worship, and the
clergy had fallen into profound discredit. [1720] A pietistic movement
had, however, begun during the period of the French ascendancy; [1721]
and seeing that the freethinking of the previous generation had been
in part associated with French opinion, it was natural that on this
side anti-French feeling should promote a reversion to older and more
"national" forms of feeling. Thus after the fall of Napoleon the tone
of the students who had fought in the war seems to have been more
religious than that of previous years. [1722] Inasmuch, however, as
the "enlightenment" of the scholarly class was maintained, and applied
anew to critical problems, the religious revival did not turn back the
course of progress. "When the third centenary commemoration, in 1817,
of the Reformation approached, the Prussian people were in a state
of stolid indifference, apparently, on religious matters." [1723]
Alongside of the pietistic reaction of the Liberation period there
went on an open ecclesiastical strife, dating from an anti-rationalist
declaration by the Court preacher Reinhard at Dresden in 1811, [1724]
between the rationalists or "Friends of Light" and the Scripturalists
of the old school; and the effect was a general disintegration of
orthodoxy, despite, or it may be largely in virtue of, the governmental
policy of rewarding the Pietists and discouraging their opponents
in the way of official appointments. [1725] The Prussian measure
(1817) of forcibly uniting the Lutheran and Calvinistic Churches,
with a neutral sacramental ritual in which the eucharist was treated
as a historical commemoration, tended to the same consequences,
though it also revived old Lutheran zeal; [1726] and when the
new revolutionary movement broke out in 1848, popular feeling was
substantially non-religious. "In the south of Germany especially
the conflict of political opinions and revolutionary tendencies
produced, in the first instance, an entire prostration of religious
sentiment." The bulk of society showed entire indifference to worship,
the churches being everywhere deserted; and "atheism was openly avowed,
and Christianity ridiculed as the invention of priestcraft." [1727]
One result was a desperate effort of the clergy to "effect a union
among all who retained any measure of Christian belief, in order to
raise up their national religion and faith from the lowest state into
which it has ever fallen since the French Revolution."
But the clerical effort evoked a counter effort. Already, in 1846,
official interference with freedom of utterance led to the formation
of a "free religious" society by Dr. Rupp, of Königsberg, one of
the "Friends of Light" in the State Church; and he was followed by
Wislicenus of Halle, a Hegelian, and by Uhlich of Magdeburg. [1728]
As a result of the determined pressure, social and official, which
ensued on the collapse of the revolution of 1848, these societies
failed to develop on the scale of their beginnings; and that of
Magdeburg, which at the outset had 7,000 members, has latterly
only 500; though that of Berlin has nearly 4,000. [1729] There is
further a Freidenker Bund, with branches in many towns; and the two
organizations, with their total membership of some fifty thousand,
may be held to represent the militant side of popular freethought
in Germany. This, however, constitutes only a fraction of the
total amount of passive rationalism. There is a large measure of
enlightenment in both the working and the middle classes; and the
ostensible force of orthodoxy among the official and conformist
middle class is in many respects illusory. The German police laws
put a rigid check on all manner of platform and press propaganda
which could be indicted as hurting the feelings of religious people;
so that a jest at the Holy Coat of Trèves could even in recent years
send a journalist to jail, and the platform work of the militant
societies is closely trammelled. Yet there are, or have been, over
a dozen journals which so far as may be take the freethought side;
[1730] and the whole stress of Bismarckian reaction and of official
orthodoxy under the present Kaiser has never availed to make the tone
of popular thought pietistic. Karl Marx, the prophet of the German
Socialist movement (1818-1883), laid it down as part of its mission
"to free consciousness from the religious spectre"; and his two most
influential followers in Germany, Bebel and Liebknecht, were avowed
atheists, the former even going so far as to avow officially in the
Reichstag that "the aim of our party is on the political plane the
republican form of State; on the economic, Socialism; and on the plane
which we term the religious, atheism"; [1731] though the party attempts
no propaganda of the latter order. "Christianity and Social-Democracy,"
said Bebel again, "are opposed as fire and water." [1732]
Some index to the amount of popular freethought that normally exists
under the surface in Germany is furnished, further, by the strength of
the German freethought movement in the United States, where, despite
the tendency to the adoption of the common speech, there grew up in
the last quarter of the nineteenth century many German freethinking
societies, a German federation of atheists, and a vigorous popular
organ, Der Freidenker.
Thus, under the sounder moral and economic conditions of the life of
the proletariate in Germany, straightforward rationalism, as apart
from propaganda, is becoming among them more and more the rule. The
bureaucratic control of education forces religious teaching in the
common schools; and there is no "conscience clause" for unbelieving
parents. [1733] A Protestant pastor at the end of the century made
an investigation into the state of religious opinion among the
working Socialists of some provincial towns and rural districts,
and found everywhere a determined attitude of rationalism. The
formula of the Social Democrats, "Religion is a private matter," he
bitterly perceives to carry the implication "a private matter for the
fools"; and while he holds that the belief in a speedy collapse of
the Christian religion is latterly less common than formerly among
the upper and middle classes, he complains that the Socialists are
not similarly enlightened. [1734] Bebel's drastic teaching as to the
economic and social conditions of the rise of Christianity, [1735]
and the materialistic theory of history set forth by Marx and Engels,
he finds generally accepted. Not only do most of the party leaders
declare themselves to be without religion, but those who do not so
declare themselves are so no less. [1736] Nor is the unbelief a mere
sequel to the Socialism: often the development is the other way. [1737]
The opinion is almost universal, further, that the clergy in general
do not believe what they teach. [1738] Atheists are numerous among the
peasantry; more numerous among the workers in the provincial towns;
and still more numerous in the large towns; [1739] and while many take
a sympathetic view of Jesus as a man and teacher, not a few deny his
historic existence [1740]--a view set forth in non-Socialist circles
also. [1741]
12. Under the widely-different political conditions in Russia and
the Scandinavian States it is the more significant that in all alike
rationalism is latterly common among the educated classes. In Norway
the latter perhaps include a larger proportion of working people
than can be so classed even in Germany; and rationalism is relatively
hopeful, though social freedom is still far from perfect. It is the
old story of toleration for a dangerously well-placed freethought,
and intolerance for that which reaches the common people. In Russia
rationalism has before it the task of transmuting a system of autocracy
into one of self-government. In no European country, perhaps, is
rationalism more general among the educated classes; and in none
is there a greater mass of popular ignorance. [1742] The popular
icon-worship in Moscow can hardly be paralleled outside of Asia. On
the other hand, the aristocracy became Voltairean in the eighteenth
century, and has remained more or less incredulous since, though it
now joins hands with the Church; while the democratic movement, in its
various phases of socialism, constitutionalism, and Nihilism, has been
markedly anti-religious since the second quarter of the century. [1743]
Subsidiary revivals of mysticism, such as are chronicled in other
countries, are of course to be seen in Russia; but the instructed
class, the intelliguentia, is essentially naturalistic in its cast of
thought. This state of things subsists despite the readiness of the
government to suppress the slightest sign of official heterodoxy in
the universities. [1744] The struggle is thus substantially between
the spirit of freedom and that of arbitrary rule; and the fortunes
of freethought go with the former.
13. "Free-religious" societies, such as have been noted in Germany,
may be rated as forms of moderate freethought propaganda, and
are to be found in all Protestant countries, with all shades of
development. A movement of the kind has existed for a number of
years back in America, in the New England States and elsewhere,
and may be held to represent a theistic or agnostic thought too
advanced to adhere even to the Unitarianism which during the two
middle quarters of the century was perhaps the predominant creed
in New England. The Theistic Church conducted by the Rev. Charles
Voysey after his expulsion from the Church of England in 1871 to
his death in 1912, and since then by the Rev. Dr. Walter Walsh, is
an example. Another type of such a gradual and peaceful evolution
is the South Place Institute (formerly "Chapel") of London, where,
under the famous orator W. J. Fox, nominally a Unitarian, there was
preached between 1824 and 1852 a theism tending to pantheism, perhaps
traceable to elements in the doctrine of Priestley, and passed on by
Mr. Fox to Robert Browning. [1745] In 1864 the charge passed to Moncure
D. Conway, under whom the congregation quietly advanced during twenty
years from Unitarianism to a non-scriptural rationalism, embracing
the shades of philosophic theism, agnosticism, and anti-theism. In
Conway's Lessons for the Day will be found a series of peculiarly vivid
mementos of that period, a kind of itinerary, more intimate than any
retrospective record. The latter part of his life, partly preserved
in one of the most interesting autobiographies of the century, was
spent between England and the United States and in travel. After
his first withdrawal to the States in 1884 the Institute became an
open platform for rationalist and non-theological ethics and social
and historical teaching, and it now stands as an "Ethical Society" in
touch with the numerous groups so named which have come into existence
in England in the last dozen years on lines originally laid down by
Dr. Felix Adler in New York. At the time of the present writing the
English societies of this kind number between twenty and thirty, the
majority being in London and its environs. Their open adherents, who
are some thousands strong, are in most cases non-theistic rationalists,
and include many former members of the Secularist movement, of which
the organization has latterly dwindled. On partly similar lines there
were developed in provincial towns about the end of the century
a small number of "Labour Churches," in which the tendency was to
substitute a rationalist humanitarian ethic for supernaturalism;
and the same lecturers frequently spoke from their platforms and
from those of Ethical and Secularist societies. Of late, however,
the Labour Churches have tended to disappear. All this means no
resumption of church-going, but, by the confession of the Churches,
a completer secularization of the Sunday.
14. Alongside of the lines of movement before sketched, there has
subsisted in England during the greater part of the nineteenth century
a considerable organization of Unitarianism. In the early years of
the nineteenth century it was strong enough to obtain the repeal
(1813) of the penal laws against anti-Trinitarianism, whereafter the
use of the name "Unitarian" became more common, and a sect so called
was founded formally in 1825. When the heretical preachers of the
Presbyterian sect began openly to declare themselves as Unitarians,
there naturally arose a protest from the orthodox, and an attempt
was made in 1833 to save from its new destination the property owned
by the heretical congregations. [1746] This was frustrated by the
Dissenters' Chapels Act of 1844, which gave to each group singly the
power to interpret its trust in its own fashion. Thenceforward the
sect prospered considerably, albeit not so greatly as in the United
States. During the century English Unitarianism has been associated
with scholarship through such names as John Kenrick and Samuel Sharpe,
the historians of Egypt, and J. J. Tayler; and, less directly, with
philosophy in the person of Dr. James Martineau, who, however, was
rather a coadjutor than a champion of the sect. In the United States
the movement, greatly aided to popularity by the eloquent humanism of
the two Channings, lost the prestige of the name of Emerson, who had
been one of its ministers, by the inability of his congregation to go
the whole way with him in his opinions. In 1853 Emerson told the young
Moncure Conway that "the Unitarian Churches were stated to be no longer
producing ministers equal to their forerunners, but were more and more
finding their best men in those coming from orthodox Churches," who
"would, of course, have some enthusiasm for their new faith." [1747]
Latterly Unitarians have been entitled to say that the Trinitarian
Churches are approximating to their position. [1748] Such an approach,
however, involves rather a weakening than a strengthening of the
smaller body; though some of its teachers are to the full as bigoted
and embittered in their propaganda as the bulk of the traditionally
orthodox. Others adhere to their ritual practices in the spirit of
use and wont, as Emerson found when he sought to rationalize in his
own Church the usage of the eucharist. [1749] On the other hand,
numbers have passed from Unitarianism to thoroughgoing rationalism;
and some whole congregations, following more or less the example of
that of South Place Chapel, have latterly reached a position scarcely
distinguishable from that of the Ethical Societies.
15. A partly similar evolution has taken place among the Protestant
Churches of France, Switzerland, Hungary, and Holland. French
Protestantism could not but be intellectually moved by the intense
ferment of the Revolution; and, when finally secured against
active oppression from the Catholic side, could not but develop
an intellectual opposition to the Catholic Reaction after 1815. In
Switzerland, always in intellectual touch with France and Germany,
the tendencies which had been stamped as Socinian in the days
of Voltaire soon reasserted themselves so strongly as to provoke
fanatical reaction. [1750] The nomination of Strauss to a chair of
theology at Zürich by a Radical Government in 1839 actually gave rise
to a violent revolt, inflamed and led by Protestant clergymen. The
Executive Council were expelled, and a number of persons killed in
the strife. [1751] In the canton of Aargau in 1841, again, the cry of
"religion in danger" sufficed to bring about a Catholic insurrection
against a Liberal Council; and yet again in 1844 it led, among the
Catholics of the Valais canton, to the bloodiest insurrection of
all. Since these disgraceful outbreaks the progress of Rationalism
in Switzerland has been steady. In 1847 a chair was given at Berne
to the rationalistic scholar Zeller, without any such resistance
as was made to Strauss at Zürich. In 1892, out of a total number
of 3,151 students in the five universities of Switzerland and in
the academies of Fribourg and Neuchâtel, the number of theological
students was only 374, positively less than that of the teaching
staff, which was 431. Leaving out the academies named, which had
no medical faculty, the number of theological students stood at
275 out of 2,917. The Church in Switzerland has thus undergone the
relative restriction in power and prestige seen in the other European
countries of long-established culture. The evolution, however, remains
negative rather than positive. Though a number of pastors latterly
call themselves libres penseurs or penseurs libres, and a movement
of ethical culture (morale sociale) has made progress, the forces of
positive freethought are not numerically strong. An economic basis
still supports the Churches, and the lack of it leaves rationalism
non-aggressive. [1752]
A somewhat similar state of things exists in Holland, where the
"higher criticism" of both the Old and New Testaments made notable
progress in the middle decades of the century. There then resulted not
only an extensive decay of orthodoxy within the Protestant Church,
but a movement of aggressive popular freethought, which was for a
number of years well represented in journalism. To-day, orthodoxy
and freethought are alike less demonstrative; the broad explanation
being that the Dutch people in the mass has ceased to be pietistic,
and has secularized its life. Even in the Bible-loving Boer Republic
of South Africa (Transvaal), in its time one of the most orthodox of
the civilized communities of the world, there was seen in the past
generation the phenomenon of an agnostic ex-clergyman's election to
the post of president, in the person of T. F. Burgers, who succeeded
Pretorius in 1871. His election was of course on political and not on
religious grounds; and panic fear on the score of his heresy, besides
driving some fanatics to emigrate, is said to have disorganized a
Boer expedition under his command; [1753] but his views were known
when he was elected. In the years 1899-1902 the terrible experience of
the last Boer War, in South Africa as in Britain, perhaps did more to
turn critical minds against supernaturalism than was accomplished by
almost any other agency in the same period. In Britain the overturn
was by way of the revolt of many ethically-minded Christians against
the attitude of the orthodox churches, which were so generally
and so unscrupulously belligerent as to astonish many even of their
freethinking opponents. [1754] As regards the Boers and the Cape Dutch
the resultant unbelief was among the younger men, who harassed their
elders with challenges as to the justice or the activity of a God
who permitted the liberties of his most devoted worshippers to be
wantonly destroyed. Among the more educated burghers in the Orange
Free State commandos unbelief asserted itself with increasing force
and frequency. [1755] An ethical rationalism thus motived is not
likely to be displaced; and the Christian churches of Britain have
thus the sobering knowledge that the war which they so vociferously
glorified [1756] has wrought to the discredit of their creed alike
in their own country and among the vanquished.
16. The history of popular freethought in Sweden yields a good
illustration, in a compact form, [1757] of the normal play of
forces and counter-forces. Since the day of Christina, as we saw,
though there have been many evidences of passive unbelief, active
rationalism has been little known in her kingdom down till modern
times, Sweden as a whole having been little touched by the great
ferment of the eighteenth century. The French Revolution, however,
stirred the waters there as elsewhere. Tegnér, the poet-bishop,
author of the once-famous Frithiof's Saga, was notable in his day
for a determined rejection of the evangelical doctrine of salvation;
and his letters contain much criticism of the ruling system. But the
first recognizable champion of freethought in Sweden is the thinker
and historian E. G. Geijer (d. 1847), whose history of his native
land is one of the best European performances of his generation. In
1820 he was prosecuted for his attack upon the dogmas of the Trinity
and redemption--long the special themes of discussion in Sweden--in
his book Thorild; but was acquitted by the jury. Thenceforth Sweden
follows the general development of Europe. In 1841 Strauss's Leben
Jesu was translated in Swedish, and wrought its usual effect. On the
popular side the poet Wilhelm von Braun carried on an anti-Biblical
warfare; and a blacksmith in a provincial town contrived to
print in 1850 a translation of Paine's Age of Reason. Once more
the spirit of persecution blazed forth, and he was prosecuted and
imprisoned. H. B. Palmaer (d. 1854) was likewise prosecuted for his
satire, The Last Judgment in Cocaigne (Kräkwinkel), with the result
that his defence extended his influence. In the same period the
Stockholm curate Nils Ignell (d. 1864) produced a whole series of
critical pamphlets and a naturalistic History of the Development of
Man, besides supplying a preface to the Swedish translation of Renan's
Vie de Jésus. Meantime translations of the works of Theodore Parker,
by V. Pfeiff and A. F. Akerberg, had a large circulation and a wide
influence; and the courage of the gymnasium rector N. J. Cramer
(d. 1893), author of The Farewell to the Church, gave an edge to
the movement. The partly rationalistic doctrine of Victor Rydberg
(d. 1895) was in comparison uncritical, and was proportionally popular.
On another line the books of Dr. Nils Lilja (d. 1870), written for
working people, created a current of rationalism among the masses;
and in the next generation G. J. Leufstedt maintained it by popular
lectures and by the issue of translations of Colenso, Ingersoll,
Büchner, and Renan. Hjalmar Stromer (d. 1886) did similar platform
work. Meantime the followers of Parker and Rydberg founded in 1877
a monthly review, The Truthseeker, which lasted till 1894, and an
association of "Believers in Reason," closely resembling the British
Ethical Societies of our own day. Among its leading adherents has been
K. P. Arnoldson, the well-known peace advocate. Liberal clerics were
now fairly numerous; Positivism, represented by Dr. Anton Nyström's
General History of Civilization, played its part; and the more radical
freethinking movement, nourished by new translations, became specially
active, with the usual effect on orthodox feeling. August Strindberg,
author and lecturer, was prosecuted in 1884 on a charge of ridiculing
the eucharist, but was declared not guilty. The strenuous Victor
Lennstrand, lecturer and journalist, prosecuted in 1888 and later
for his anti-Christian propaganda, was twice fined and imprisoned,
with the result of extending his influence and discrediting his
opponents. "Utilitarian Associations," created by his activity,
were set up in many parts of the country; and his movement survives
his death.
17. Only in the United States has the public lecture platform been
made a means of propaganda to anything like the extent seen in Britain;
and the greatest part of the work in the States has thus far been done
by the late Colonel Ingersoll, the leading American orator of the last
generation, and the most widely influential platform propagandist of
the last century. No other single freethinker, it is believed, has
reached such an audience by public speech; and between his propaganda
and that of the freethought journals there has been maintained for
a generation back a large body of vigorous freethinking opinion in
all parts of the States. Before the Civil War this could hardly
be said. In the middle decades of the century the conditions had
been so little changed that after the death of President Lincoln,
who was certainly a non-Christian deist, and an agnostic deist at
that, [1758] it was sought to be established that he was latterly
orthodox. In his presidential campaign of 1860 he escaped attack on
his opinions simply because his opponent, Stephen A. Douglas, was
likewise an unbeliever. [1759] The great negro orator, Frederick
Douglas, was as heterodox as Lincoln. [1760] It is even alleged
that President Grant [1761] was of the same cast of opinion. Such
is the general drift of intelligent thought in the United States,
from Washington onwards; and still the social conditions impose
on public men the burden of concealment, while popular history is
garbled for the same reasons. Despite the great propagandist power of
the late Colonel Ingersoll, therefore, American freethought remains
dependent largely on struggling organizations and journals, [1762]
and its special literature is rather of the popularizing than of the
scholarly order. Nowhere else has every new advance of rationalistic
science been more angrily opposed by the priesthood; because nowhere is
the ordinary prejudice of the priest more voluble or better-bottomed in
self-complacency. As late as 1891 the Methodist Bishop Keener delivered
a ridiculous attack on the evolution theory before the OEcumenical
Council of Methodism at Washington, declaring that it had been utterly
refuted by a certain "wonderful deposit of the Ashley beds." [1763]
Various professors in ecclesiastical colleges have been driven from
their posts for accepting in turn the discoveries of geology, biology,
and the "higher criticism"--for instance, Woodrow of Columbia, South
Carolina; Toy of Louisville; Winchell of Vanderbilt University; and
more than one professor in the American college at Beyrout. [1764]
In every one of the three former cases, it is true, the denounced
professor has been called to a better chair; and latterly some of
the more liberal clergy have even commercially exploited the higher
criticism by producing the "Rainbow Bible." Generally speaking,
however, in the United States sheer preoccupation with business,
and lack of leisure, counteract in a measure the relative advantage
of social freedom; and while culture is more widely diffused than
in England, it remains on the whole less radical in the "educated"
classes so-called. So far as it is possible to make a quantitative
estimate, it may be said that in the more densely populated parts of
the States there is latterly less of studious freethinking because
there is less leisure than in England; but that in the Western States
there is a relative superiority, class for class, because of the
special freedom of the conditions and the independent character of
many of the immigrants who constitute the new populations. [1765]
Section 2.--Biblical Criticism
It is within the last generation that the critical analysis of the
Jewish and Christian sacred books has been most generally carried on;
but the process has never been suspended since the German Aufklärung
arose on the stimuli of English and French deism.
1. At the beginning of the century, educated men in general
believed in the Semitic myths of creation, as given in Genesis:
long before the end of it they had more or less explicitly
rectified their beliefs in the light of new natural science and
new archæology. The change became rapid after 1860; but it had
been led up to even in the period of reaction. While in France,
under the restored monarchy, rationalistic activity was mainly
headed into historical, philosophical, and sociological study,
and in England orthodoxy predominated in theological discussion,
the German rationalistic movement went on among the specialists,
despite the liberal religious reaction of Schleiermacher, [1766]
who himself gave forth such an uncertain sound. His case and that of
his father, an army chaplain, tell signally of the power of the mere
clerical occupation to develop a species of emotional belief in one who
has even attained rationalism. When the son, trained for the church,
avowed to his father (1787) that he had lost faith in the supernatural
Jesus, the father professed to mourn bitterly, but three years later
avowed that he in his own youth had preached Christianity for twelve
years while similarly disbelieving its fundamental tenet. [1767] He
professionally counselled compromise, which the son duly practised,
with such success that, whereas he originally addressed his Discourses
on Religion (1799) to "the educated among its despisers," he was able
to say in the preface to the third edition, twenty years later (1821),
that the need now was to reason with the pietists and literalists, the
ignorant and bigoted, the credulous and superstitious. [1768] In short,
he and others had been able to set up a fashion of poetic religion
among deists, but not to lighten the darkness of orthodox belief.
The ostensible religious revival associated with Schleiermacher's
name was in fact a reaction of temperament, akin to the romantic
movement in literature, of which Chateaubriand in France was the
exponent as regarded religious feeling. The German "rationalism"
of the latter part of the eighteenth century, with its stolid
translation of the miraculous into the historical, and its official
accommodation of the result to the purposes of the pulpit, had not
reached any firm scientific foundation; and Schleiermacher on the other
side, protesting that religion was a matter not of knowledge but of
feeling, attracted alike the religious emotionalists, the seekers of
compromise, and the romantics. His personal and literary charm, and
his tolerance of mundane morals, gave him a German vogue not unlike
that of Chateaubriand in France. His intellectual cast and ultimate
philosophic bias, however, together with his freedom of private life,
[1769] ultimately alienated him from the orthodox, and thus it was that
he died (1834) in the odour of heresy. Heresy, in fact, he had preached
from the outset; and it was only in a highly emancipated society that
his teaching could have been fashionable. The statement that by his
Discourses "with one stroke he overthrew the card-castle of rationalism
and the old fortress of orthodoxy" [1770] is literally quite false,
for the old compromising pseudo-rationalism survived a long while,
and orthodoxy still longer; and it is quite misleading inasmuch as
it suggests a resurgence of faith. The same historian proceeds to
record that some saw in the work "only a slightly disguised return
to superstition, and others a brilliant confession of unbelief." "The
general public saw in the Discourses a new assault of romanticism upon
religion. The clergy in particular were painfully aroused, and did not
dissemble their irritation. Spalding himself could not restrain his
anger." Schleiermacher's friend Sach, who had passed the Discourses
in manuscript, woke up to denounce them as unchristian, pantheistic,
and denuded of the ideas of God, immortality, and morality. [1771]
In England the work would have been so denounced on all sides; and
the bulk of Schleiermacher's teaching would there have been reckoned
revolutionary and "godless." He was a lover of both political and
social freedom; and in his Two Memoranda on the Church Question in
regard to Prussia (1803) he made "a veritable declaration of war on the
clerical spirit." [1772] Recognizing that ecclesiastical discipline
had reached a low ebb, he even proposed that civil marriage should
precede religious marriage, and be alone obligatory; besides planning a
drastic subjection of the Prussian Church to State regulation. [1773]
In his pamphlet on The So-called Epistle to Timothy, of which he
denied the authenticity, he played the part of a "destructive"
critic. [1774] He "saw with pain the approach of the rising tide of
confessionalism"--that is, the movement for an exact statement of
creed. [1775] Nor can it be said that, despite his attempts in later
life to reach a more definite theology, Schleiermacher really held
firmly any Christian or even theistic dogma. He seems to have been
at bottom a pantheist; [1776] and the secret of his attraction for
so many German preachers and theologians then and since is that he
offered them in eloquent and moving diction a kind of profession of
faith which avoided alike the fatal undertaking of the old religious
rationalism to reduce the sacred narratives to terms of reason, and
the dogged refusal of orthodoxy to admit that there was anything to
explain away. Philosophically and critically speaking, his teaching
has no lasting intellectual substance, being first a negation of
intellectual tests and then a belated attempt to apply them. It is not
even original, being a development from Rousseau and Lessing. But it
had undoubtedly a freeing and civilizing influence for many years; and
it did little harm save insofar as it fostered the German proclivity to
the nebulous in thought and language, and partly encouraged the normal
resistance to the critical spirit. All irrationalism, to be sure, in
some sort spells self-will and lawlessness; but the orthodox negation
of reason was far more primitive than Schleiermacher's. From that side,
accordingly, he never had any sympathy. When, soon after his funeral,
in which his coffin was borne and followed by troops of students,
his church was closed to the friends who wished there to commemorate
him, it was fairly clear that his own popularity lay mainly with the
progressive spirits, and not among the orthodox; and in the end his
influence tended to merge in that of the critical movement. [1777]
2. Gradually that had developed a greater precision of method,
though there were to be witnessed repetitions of the intellectual
anomalies of the past, so-called rationalists losing the way while
supernaturalists occasionally found it. It has been remarked by
Reuss that Paulus, a clerical "rationalist," fought for the Pauline
authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews in the very year in which
Tholuck, a reconverted evangelical, gave up the Pauline authorship
as hopeless; that when Schleiermacher, ostensibly a believer in
inspiration, denied the authenticity of the Epistle to Timothy,
the [theological] rationalist Wegscheider opposed him; and that
the rationalistic Eichhorn maintained the Mosaic authorship of
the Pentateuch long after the supernaturalist Vater had disproved
it. [1778] Still the general movement was inevitably and irrevocably
rationalistic. Beginning with the Old Testament, criticism gradually
saw more and more of mere myth where of old men had seen miracle, and
where the first rationalists saw natural events misconceived. Soon the
process reached the New Testament, every successive step being resisted
in the old fashion; and much laborious work, now mostly forgotten,
was done by a whole company of scholars, among whom Paulus, Eichhorn,
De Wette, G. L. Bauer, Wegscheider, Bretschneider, and Gabler were
prominent. [1779] The train as it were exploded on the world in
the great Life of Jesus by Strauss (1835), a year after the death
of Schleiermacher.
This was in some respects the high-water mark of rational critical
science for the century, inasmuch as it represented the fullest use
of free judgment. The powerful and orderly mind of Strauss, working
systematically on a large body of previous unsystematic criticism,
produced something more massive and coherent than any previous writer
had achieved. It was not that he applied any new principle. Criticism
had long been slowly disengaging itself from the primary fallacy of
taking all scriptural records as standing for facts, and explaining
away the supernatural side. Step by step it was recognized that not
misinterpretation of events but mythology underlay much of the sacred
history. Already in 1799 an anonymous and almost unnoticed writer
[1780] had argued that the entire gospel story was a pre-existent
conception in the Jewish mind. In 1802 G. L. Bauer had produced
a treatise on Hebrew Mythology, [1781] in which not only was the
actuality of myth in Bible narrative insisted on, but the general
principle of animism in savage thought was clearly formulated. Semler
had seen that the stories of Samson and Esther were myths. Even
Eichhorn--who reduced all the Old Testament stories to natural
events misunderstood, accepted Noah and the patriarchs as historical
personages, and followed Bahrdt in making Moses light a fire on Mount
Sinai--changed his method on coming to the New Testament, and pointed
out that only indemonstrable hypotheses could be reached by turning
supernatural events into natural where there was no outside historical
evidence. Other writers--as Krug, Gabler, Kaiser, Wegscheider, and
Horst--ably pressed the mythical principle, some of them preceding
Bauer. The so-called "natural" theory--which was not at all that of the
"naturalists" but the specialty of the compromising "rationalists"--was
thus effectively shaken by a whole series of critics.
But the power of intellectual habit and environment was still
strikingly illustrated in the inability of all of the critics to shake
off completely the old fallacy. Bauer explained the divine promise to
Abraham as standing for the patriarch's own prophetic anticipation,
set up by a contemplation of the starry heavens. Another gave up
the supernatural promise of the birth of the Baptist, but held to
the dumbness of Zechariah. Krug similarly accepted the item of
the childless marriage, and claimed to be applying the mythical
principle in taking the Magi without the star, and calling them
oriental merchants. Kaiser took the story of the fish with a coin in
its mouth as fact, while complaining of other less absurd reductions
of miracle to natural occurrences. The method of Paulus, [1782] the
"Christian Evêmeros"--who loyally rejected all miracles, but got rid
of them on the plan of explaining, e.g., that when Jesus was supposed
to be walking on the water he was really walking on the bank--was
still popular, a generation after Schleiermacher's Reden. The mythical
theory as a whole went on hesitating among definitions and genera--saga
and legend, historical myth, mythical history, philosophical myth,
poetic myth--and the differences of the mythological school over
method arrested the acceptance of their fundamental principle.
3. No less remarkable was the check to the few attempts which had
been made at clearing the ground by removing the Fourth Gospel from
the historical field. Lessing had taken this gospel as peculiarly
historical, as did Fichte and Schleiermacher and the main body of
critics after him. Only in England (by Evanson) had the case been more
radically handled. In 1820 Bretschneider, following up a few tentative
German utterances, put forth, by way of hypothesis, a general argument
[1783] to the effect that the whole presentment of Jesus in the Fourth
Gospel is irreconcilable with that of the Synoptics, that it could
not be taken as historical, and that it could not therefore be the
work of the Apostle John. [1784] The result was a general discussion
and a general rejection. The innovation in theory was too sudden for
assimilation: and Bretschneider, finding no support, later declared
that he had been "relieved of his doubts" by the discussion, and had
thus attained his object. Strauss himself, in his first Leben Jesu,
failed to realize the case; and it was not till the second (1863)
that he developed it, profiting by the intermediate work of F. C. Baur.
4. But as regards the gospel history in general, the first Leben
Jesu is a great "advance in force" as compared with all preceding
work. Himself holding undoubtingly to the vital assumption of the
rationalizing school that the central story of Jesus and the disciples
and the crucifixion was history, he yet applied the mythical principle
systematically to nearly all the episodes, handling the case with
the calmness of a great judge and the skill of a great critic. Even
Strauss, indeed, paid the penalty which seems so generally to attach
to the academic discipline--the lack of ultimate hold on life. After
showing that much of the gospel narrative was mere myth, and leaving
utterly problematical all the rest, he saw fit to begin and end with
the announcement that nothing really mattered--that the ideal Jesus
was unaffected by historic analysis, and that it was the ideal that
counted. [1785] In a world in which nine honest believers out of ten
held that the facts mattered everything, there could be no speedy or
practical triumph for a demonstration which thus announced its own
inutility. Strauss had achieved for New Testament criticism what Kant
and Fichte and Hegel had compassed for rational philosophy in general,
ostensibly proffering together bane and antidote. As in their case,
however, so in his, the truly critical work had an effect in despite
of the theoretic surrender. Among instructed men, historical belief
in the gospels has never been the same since Strauss wrote; and he
lived to figure for his countrymen as one of the most thoroughgoing
freethinkers of his age.
5. For a time there was undoubtedly "reaction," engineered with the
full power of the Prussian State in particular. The pious Frederick
William IV, already furious against Swiss Radicalism in 1847, was
moved by the revolutionary outbreaks of 1848 to a fierce repression
of everything liberal in theological teaching. "This dismal period of
Prussian history was the bloom-period of the Hengsterbergan theology"
[1786]--the school of rabid orthodoxy. In 1854, Eduard Zeller, bringing
out in book form his work on the Acts of the Apostles (originally
produced in the Tübingen Theological Journal, 1848-51), writes that
"The exertions of our ecclesiastics, assisted by political reaction,
have been so effectual that the majority of our theologians not only
look with suspicion or indifference on this or that scientific opinion,
but regard scientific knowledge in general with the same feelings";
and he leaves it an open question "whether time will bring a change, or
whether German Protestantism will stagnate in the Byzantine conditions
towards which it is now hastening with all sail on." [1787] For his own
part, Zeller abandoned the field of theology for that of philosophy,
producing a history of Greek philosophy, and one of German philosophy
since Leibnitz.
6. Another expert of Baur's school, Albrecht Schwegler, author of
works on Montanism, the Post-Apostolic Age, and other problems of early
Christian history, and of a Handbook of the History of Philosophy which
for half a century had an immense circulation, was similarly driven
out of theological research by the virulence of the reaction, [1788]
and turned to the task of Roman history, in which he distinguished
himself as he did in every other he essayed. The brains were being
expelled from the chairs of theology. But this very fact tended to
discredit the reaction itself; and outside of the Prussian sphere of
influence German criticism went actively on. Gustav Volkmar, turning
his back on Germany in 1854, settled in Switzerland, and in 1863 became
professor at Zürich, where he added to his early Religion Jesu (1857)
and other powerful works his treatises on the Origin of the Gospels
(1866), The Gospels (1869), Commentary on the Apocalypse (1860-65),
and Jesus Nazarenus (1881)--all stringent critical performances,
irreconcilable with orthodoxy. Elsewhere too there was a general
resumption of progress.
To this a certain contribution was made by Bruno Bauer (1809-1882),
who, after setting out as an orthodox Hegelian, outwent Strauss
in the opposite direction. In 1838, as a licentiate at Bonn, he
produced two volumes on The Religion of the Old Testament, in which
the only critical element is the notion of a "historical evolution
of revelation." Soon he had got beyond belief in revelation. In
1840 appeared his Critique of the Gospel History of John, and in
1841 his much more disturbing Critique of the Gospel History of the
Synoptics, wherein there is substituted for Strauss's formula of the
"community-mind" working on tradition, that of individual literary
construction. Weisse and Wilcke had convinced him that Mark was
the first gospel, and Wilcke in particular that it was no mere copy
of an oral tradition but an artistic construction. As he claimed,
this was a much more "positive" conception than Strauss's, which was
fundamentally "mysterious." [1789] Unfortunately, though he saw that
the new position involved the non-historicity of the Gospel Jesus,
he left his own historic conception "mysterious," giving no reason why
the "Urevangelist" framed his romance. Bauer was non-anthropological,
and left his theory as it began, one of an arbitrary construction by
gospel-makers. Immediately after his book appeared that of Ghillany
on Human Sacrifice among the ancient Hebrews (1842), which might have
given him clues; but they seem to have had for him no significance.
As it was, his book on the Synoptics raised a great storm; and when
the official request for the views of the university faculties as to
the continuance of his licence evoked varying answers, Bauer settled
the matter by a violent attack on professional theologians in general,
and was duly expelled. [1790] For the rest of his long life he was a
freelance, doing some relatively valid work on the Pauline problem,
but pouring out his turbid spirit in a variety of political writings,
figuring by turns as an anti-Semite (1843), a culture-historian,
[1791] and a pre-Bismarckian imperialist, despairing of German
unity, but looking hopefully to German absorption in a vast empire of
Russia. [1792] Naturally he found political happiness in 1870, [1793]
living on, a spent force, to do fresh books on Christian origins,
[1794] on German culture-history, and on the glories of imperialism.
7. In 1864, after an abstention of twenty years from discussion of
the problem, Strauss restated his case in a Life of Jesus, adapted for
the German People. Here, accepting the contention of F. C. Baur that
the proper line of inquiry was to settle the order of composition of
the synoptic gospels, and agreeing in Baur's view that Matthew came
first, he undertook to offer more of positive result than was reached
in his earlier research, which simply dealt scientifically with the
abundant elements of dubiety in the records. The new procedure was
really much less valid than the old. Baur had quite unwarrantably
decided that the Sermon on the Mount was one of the most certainly
genuine of the discourses ascribed to Jesus; [1795] and Strauss,
while exhibiting a reserve of doubt [1796] as to all "such speeches,"
nonetheless committed himself to the "certain" genuineness alike of
the Sermon and of the seven parables in the thirteenth chapter of
Matthew. [1797] Many scholars who continue to hold by the historicity
of Jesus have since recognized that the Sermon is no real discourse,
but a compilation of gnomic sayings or maxims previously current in
Jewish literature. [1798] Thus the certainties of Baur and Strauss pass
into the category of the cruder certainties which Strauss impugned;
and the latter left the life of Jesus an unsolved enigma after all
his analysis.
As he himself noted, the German New Testament criticism of the
previous twenty years had "run to seed" [1799] in a multitude of
treatises on the sources, aims, composition, and mutual relations of
the Synoptics, as if these were the final issues. They had settled
nothing; and after a lapse of fifty years the same problems are
being endlessly discussed. The scientific course for Strauss would
have been to develop more radically the method of his first Life:
failing to do this, he made no new contribution to the problem,
though he deftly enough indicated how little difference there was,
save in formula, between Baur's negations and his own.
Something of the explanation is to be detected in the sub-title,
"Adapted for the German People." From his first entrance into the
arena he had met with endless odium theologicum; being at once
deprived of his post as a philosophical lecturer at Tübingen, and
virulently denounced on all hands. His proposed appointment to a
chair at Zürich in 1839, as we have seen, led there to something
approaching a revolution. Later, he found that acquaintance with him
was made a ground of damage to his friends; and though he had actually
been elected to the Wirtemberg Diet in 1848 by his fellow citizens
of Ludwigsburg town, after being defeated in his candidature for
the new parliament at Frankfort through the hostility of the rural
voters, he had abundant cause to regard himself as a banned person
in Germany. A craving for the goodwill of the people as against
the hatred of the priests was thus very naturally and justifiably
operative in the conception of his second work; and this none the
less because his fundamental political conservatism had soon cut
short his representation of radical Ludwigsburg. As he justly said,
the question of the true history of Christianity was not one for
theologians alone. But the emotional aim affected the intellectual
process. As previously in his Life of Ulrich von Hutten, he strove to
establish the proposition that the new Reformation he desired was akin
to the old; and that the Germans, as the "people of the Reformation,"
would show themselves true to their past by casting out the religion
of dogma and supernaturalism. Such an attempt to identify the spirit
of freethought with the old spirit of Bibliolatry was in itself
fantastic, and could not create a genuine movement, though the book
had a wide audience. The Glaubenslehre, in which he made good his
maxim that "the true criticism of dogma is its history," is a sounder
performance. Strauss's avowed desire to write a book as suitable to
Germans as was Renan's Vie de Jésus to Frenchmen was something less
than scientific. The right book would be written for all nations.
Like most other Germans, Strauss exulted immensely over the war of
1870. In what is now recognized as the national manner, he wrote two
boastful open-letters to Renan explaining that whatsoever Germany
did was right, and whatsoever France did was wrong, and that the
annexation of Alsace and Lorraine was altogether just. These letters
form an important contribution to the vast cairn of self-praise
raised by latter-day German culture. But Strauss's literary life
ended on a nobler note and in a higher warfare. After all his efforts
at popularity, and all his fraternization with his people on the
ground of racial animosity (not visible in his volume of lectures on
Voltaire, written and delivered at the request of the Princess Alice),
his fundamental sincerity moved him to produce a final "Confession,"
under the title of The Old and the New Faith (1872). It asked the
questions: "Are we still Christians?"; "Have we still religion?";
"How do we conceive the world?"; "How do we order our life?"; and it
answered them all in a calmly and uncompromisingly naturalistic sense,
dismissing all that men commonly call religious belief. The book
as a whole is heterogeneous in respect of its two final chapters,
"Of our Great Poets" and "Of our Great Musicians," which seem to
have been appended by way of keeping up the attitude of national
fraternity evoked by the war. But they could not and did not avail
to conciliate the theologians, who opened fire on the book with all
their old animosity, and with an unconcealed delight in the definite
committal of the great negative critic to an attitude of practical
atheism. The book ran through six editions in as many months, and
crystallized much of the indefinite freethinking of Germany into
something clearer and firmer. All the more was it a new engine of
strife and disintegration; and the aging author, shocked but steadied
by the unexpected outburst of hostility, penned a quatrain to himself,
ending: "In storm hast thou begun; in storm shalt thou end."
On the last day of the year he wrote an "afterword" summing up his work
and his position. He had not written, he declared, by way of contending
with opponents; he had sought rather to commune with those of his own
way of thinking; and to them, he felt, he had the right to appeal to
live up to their convictions, not compromising with other opinions,
and not adhering to any Church. For his "Confession" he anticipated
the thanks of a more enlightened future generation. "The time of
agreement," he concluded, "will come, as it came for the Leben Jesu;
only this time I shall not live to see it." [1800] A little more than
a year later (1874) he passed away.
It is noteworthy that he should have held that agreement had come as
to the first Leben Jesu. He was in fact convinced that all educated
men--at least in Germany--had ceased to believe in miracles and the
supernatural, however they might affect to conform to orthodoxy. And,
broadly speaking, this was true: all New Testament criticism of
any standing had come round to the naturalistic point of view. But,
as we have seen, the second Leben Jesu was far enough from reaching
a solid historical footing; and the generation which followed made
only a piecemeal and unsystematic advance to a scientific solution.
8. And it was long before even Strauss's early method of scientific
criticism was applied to the initial problems of Old Testament
history. The investigation lagged strangely. Starting from the clues
given by Hobbes, Spinoza, and Simon, and above all by the suggestion
of Astruc (1753) as to the twofold element implied in the God-names
Jehovah and Elohim, it had proceeded, for sheer lack of radical
skepticism, on the assumption that the Pentateuchal history was
true. On this basis, modern Old Testament criticism of a professional
kind may be said to have been founded by Eichhorn, who hoped by a
quasi-rationalistic method to bring back unbelievers to belief. [1801]
Of his successors, some, like Ilgen, were ahead of their time; some,
like De Wette, failed to make progress in their criticism; some,
like Ewald, remained always arbitrary; and some of the ablest and most
original, as Vatke, failed to coördinate fully their critical methods
and results. [1802] Thus, despite all the German activity, little
sure progress had been made, apart from discrimination of sources,
between the issue of the Critical Remarks on the Hebrew Scriptures of
the Scotch Catholic priest, Dr. Geddes, in 1800, and the publication
of the first part of the work of Bishop Colenso on The Pentateuch
(1862). This, by the admission of Kuenen, who had begun as a rather
narrow believer, [1803] corrected the initial error of the German
specialists by applying to the narrative the common-sense tests
suggested long before by Voltaire. [1804] That academic scholarship
thus wasted two generations in its determination to adhere to the
"reverent" method, and in its aversion to the "irreverence" which
proceeded on the simple power to see facts, is a sufficient comment
on the Kantian doctrine that it was the business of scholars to adapt
the sacred books to popular needs. Tampering with the judgment of
their flocks, the German theologians injured their own.
As of old, part of the explanation lay in the malignant resistance
of orthodoxy to every new advance. We have seen how Strauss's
appointment to a chair at Zürich was met by Swiss pietism. The same
spirit sought to revert, even in "intellectually free" Germany, to
its old methods of repression. The authorities of Berlin discussed
with Neander the propriety of suppressing Strauss's Leben Jesu;
[1805] and after a time those who shared his views were excluded
even from philosophical chairs. [1806] Later, the brochure in
which Edgar Bauer defended his brother Bruno against his opponents
(1842) was seized by the police; and in the following year, for
publishing The Strife of Criticism with Church and State, the same
writer was sentenced to four years' imprisonment. In private life,
persecution was carried on in the usual ways; and the virulence
of the theological resistance recalled the palmy days of Lutheran
polemics. In the sense that the mass of orthodoxy held its ground
for the time being, the attack failed. Naturally the most advanced
and uncompromisingly scientific positions were least discussed, the
stress of dispute going on around the criticism which modified without
annihilating the main elements in the current creed, or that which
did the work of annihilation on a popular level of thought. Only in
our day is German "expert" criticism beginning openly to reckon with
propositions fairly and fully made out by German writers of three
or more generations back. Thus in 1781 Corodi in his Geschichte des
Chiliasmus dwelt on the pre-Hebraic origins of the belief in angels,
in immortality, and heaven and hell, and on the Persian derivation of
the Jewish seven archangels; Wegscheider in 1819 in his Institutes of
Theology indicated further connections of the same order, and cited
pagan parallels to the virgin-birth; J. A. L. Richter in the same year
pointed to Indian and Persian precedents for the Logos and many other
Christian doctrines; and several other writers, Strauss included,
pointed to both Persian and Babylonian influences on Jewish theology
and myth. [1807] The mythologist and Hebraist F. Korn (who wrote as
"F. Nork"), in a series of learned and vigorous but rather loosely
speculative works, [1808] indicated many of the mythological elements
in Christianity, and endorsed many of the astronomical arguments of
Dupuis, while holding to the historicity of Jesus. [1809]
When even these theses were in the main ignored, more mordant doctrine
was necessarily burked. Such subversive criticism of religious
history as Ghillany's Die Menschenopfer der alten Hebräer (1842),
insisting that human sacrifice had been habitual in early Jewry,
and that ritual cannibalism underlay the paschal eucharist, found
even fewer students prepared to appreciate it than did the searching
ethico-philosophical criticism passed on the Christian creed by
Feuerbach. F. Daumer, [1810] who in 1842 published a treatise on the
same lines as Ghillany's (Der Feuer und Molochdienst), and followed it
up in 1847 with another on the Christian mysteries, nearly as drastic,
wavered later in his rationalism and avowed his conversion to a species
of faith. Hence a certain setback for his school. In France the genial
German revolutionist and exile Ewerbeck published, under the titles
of Qu'est ce que la Religion? and Qu'est ce que la Bible? (1850), two
volumes of very freely edited translations from Feuerbach, Daumer,
Ghillany, Lützelberger (on the simple humanity of Jesus), and Bruno
Bauer, avowing that after vainly seeking a publisher for years he had
produced the books at his own expense. He had, however, so mutilated
the originals as to make the work ineffectual for scholars, without
making it attractive to the general public; and there is nothing
to show that his formidable-looking arsenal of explosives had much
effect on contemporary French thought, which developed on other lines.
Old Testament criticism, nevertheless, has in the last generation been
much developed, after having long missed some of the first lines of
advance. After Colenso's rectification of the fundamental error as
to the historicity of the narrative of the Pentateuch, so long and
so obstinately persisted in by the German specialists in contempt
of Voltaire, the "higher criticism" proceeded with such substantial
certainty on the scientific lines of Kuenen and Wellhausen that,
whereas Professor Robertson Smith had to leave the Free Church of
Scotland in 1881 [1811] for propagating Kuenen's views, before the
century was out Canons of the English Church were doing the work with
the acquiescence of perhaps six clergymen out of ten; and American
preachers were found promoting an edition of the Bible which exhibited
some of the critical results to the general reader. Heresy on this
score had "become merchandise." Nevertheless, the professional tendency
to compromise (a result of economic and other pressures) keeps most
of the ecclesiastical critics far short of the outspoken utterances of
M. M. Kalisch, who in his Commentary on Leviticus (1867-72) repudiates
every vestige of the doctrine of inspiration. [1812] Later clerical
critics, notably Canon Driver, use language on that subject which
cannot be read with critical respect. [1813] But among students at the
end of the century the orthodox view was practically extinct. Whereas
the defenders of the faith even a generation before habitually stood to
the "argument from prophecy," the conception of prophecy as prediction
has now become meaningless as regards the so-called Mosaic books; and
the constant disclosure of interpolations and adaptations in the others
has discredited it as regards the "prophets" themselves. For the rest,
much of the secular history still accepted is tentatively reduced
to myth in the Geschichte Israels of Hugo Winckler (1895-1900). The
peculiar theory of Dr. Cheyne is no less "destructive."
9. In New Testament criticism, though the strict critical method of
Strauss's first book was not faithfully followed, critical research
went on continuously; and the school of F. C. Baur of Tübingen in
particular imposed a measure of rational criticism on theologians in
general. Apart from Strauss, Baur was probably the ablest Christian
scholar of his day. Always lamed by his professionalism, he yet toiled
endlessly to bring scientific method into Christian research. His
Paulus, der Apostel Jesu Christi, 1845; Kritische Untersuchungen
über die Kanonischen Evangelien, 1847; and Das Christenthum und
die christliche Kirche der drei ersten Jahrhunderte, 1853, were
epoch-marking works, which recast so radically, in the name of
orthodoxy, the historical conception of Christian origins, that he
figured as the most unsettling critic of his time after Strauss. With
his earlier researches in the history of the first Christian sects
and his history of the Church, they constitute a memorable mass
of studious and original work. In the case of the Tübingen school
as of every other there was "reaction," with the usual pretence
by professional orthodoxy that the innovating criticism had been
disposed of; but no real refutation has ever taken place. Where Baur
reduced the genuine Pauline epistles to four, the last years of the
century witnessed the advent of Van Manen, who, following up earlier
suggestions, wrought out the thesis that the epistles are all alike
supposititious. This may or may not hold good; but there has been
no restoration of traditionary faith among the mass of open-minded
inquirers. Such work as Zeller's Contents and Origin of the Acts of
the Apostles (1854), produced in Baur's circle, has substantially
held its ground; and such a comparatively "safe" book of the next
generation as Weizsäcker's Apostolic Age (Eng. tr. of 2nd ed. 1893)
leaves no doubt as to the untrustworthiness of the Acts. Thus at the
close of the century the current professional treatises indicated
a "Christianity" stripped not only of all supernaturalism, and
therefore of the main religious content of the historic creed, but
even of credibility as regards large parts of the non-supernaturalist
narratives of its sacred books. The minute analysis and collocation
of texts which has occupied so much of critical industry has but made
clearer the extreme precariousness of every item in the records. The
amount of credit for historicity that continues to be given to them is
demonstrably unjustifiable on scientific grounds; and the stand for a
"Christianity without dogma" is more and more clearly seen to be an
economic adjustment, not an outcome of faithful criticism.
10. The movement of Biblical and other criticism in Germany has had
a significant effect on the supply of students for the theological
profession. The numbers of Protestant and Catholic theological students
in all Germany have varied as follows:--Protestant: 1831, 4,147; 1851,
1,631; 1860, 2,520; 1876, 1,539; 1882-83, 3,168. Catholic: 1831, 1,801;
1840, 866; 1850, 1,393; 1860, 1,209; 1880, 619. [1814] Thus, under
the reign of reaction which set in after 1848 there was a prolonged
recovery; and again since 1876 the figures rise for Protestantism
through financial stimulus. When, however, we take population into
account, the main movement is clear. In an increasing proportion, the
theological students come from the rural districts (69·4 in 1861-70),
the towns furnishing ever fewer; [1815] so that the conservative
measures do but outwardly and formally affect the course of thought;
the clergy themselves showing less and less inclination to make
clergymen of their sons. [1816] Even among the Catholic population,
though that has increased from ten millions in 1830 to sixteen millions
in 1880, the number of theological students has fallen from eleven
to four per 100,000 inhabitants. [1817] Thus, after many "reactions"
and much Bismarckism, the Zeit-Geist in Germany was still pronouncedly
skeptical in all classes in 1881, [1818] when the church accommodation
in Berlin provided only two per cent. of the population, and even
that provision outwent the demand. [1819] And though there have been
yet other alleged reactions since, and the imperial influence is
zealously used for orthodoxy, a large proportion of the intelligent
workers in the towns remain socialistic and freethinking; and the
mass of the educated classes remain unorthodox in the teeth of the
socialist menace. Reactionary professors can make an academic fashion:
the majority of instructed men remain tacitly naturalistic.
Alongside of the inveterate rationalism of modern Germany, however,
a no less inveterate bureaucratism preserves a certain official
conformity to religion. University freedom does not extend to open
and direct criticism of the orthodox creed. On the other hand, the
applause won by Virchow in 1877 on his declaration against the doctrine
of evolution, and the tactic resorted to by him in putting upon that
doctrine the responsibility of Socialist violence, are instances of the
normal operation of the lower motives against freedom in scientific
teaching. [1820] The pressure operates in other spheres in Germany,
especially under such a regimen as the present. Men who never go to
church save on official occasions, and who have absolutely no belief
in the Church's doctrine, nevertheless remain nominally its adherents;
[1821] and the Press laws make it peculiarly difficult to reach the
common people with freethinking literature, save through Socialist
channels. Thus the Catholic Church is perhaps nowhere--save in Ireland
and the United States--more practically influential than in nominally
"Protestant" Germany, where it wields a compact vote of a hundred or
more in the Reichstag, and can generally count on well-filled churches
as beside the half-empty temples of Protestantism.
Another circumstance partly favourable to reaction is the simple
maintenance of all the old theological chairs in the universities. As
the field of scientific work widens, and increasing commerce raises
the social standard of comfort, men of original intellectual power
grow less apt to devote themselves to theological pursuits even
under the comparatively free conditions which so long kept German
Biblical scholarship far above that of other countries. It can
hardly be said that men of the mental calibre of Strauss, Baur,
Volkmar, and Wellhausen continue to arise among the specialists in
their studies. Harnack, the most prominent German Biblical scholar
of our day, despite his great learning, creates no such impression of
originality and insight, and, though latterly forced forward by more
independent minds, exhibits often a very uncritical orthodoxy. Thus
it is à priori possible enough that the orthodox reactions so often
claimed have actually occurred, in the sense that the experts have
reverted to a prior type. A scientifically-minded "theologian" in
Germany has now little official scope for his faculty save in the
analysis of the Hebrew Sacred Books and the New Testament documents
as such; and this has been on the whole very well done, short of
the point of express impeachment of the historic delusion; but there
is a limit to the attraction of such studies for minds of a modern
cast. Thus there is always a chance that chairs will be filled by
men of another type.
11. On a less extensive scale than in Germany, critical study of the
sacred books made some progress in England, France, and America in the
first half of the century; though for a time the attention even of the
educated world was centred much more upon the Oxford "tractarian"
religious reaction than upon the movement of rationalism. The
reaction, associated mainly with the name of John Henry Newman, was
rather against the political Erastianism and æsthetic apathy of the
Whig type of Christian than against German or other criticism, of
which Newman knew little. But against the attitude of those moderate
Anglicans who were disposed to disestablish the Church in Ireland
and to modernize the liturgy somewhat, the language of the "Tracts
for the Times" is as authoritarian and anti-rationalistic as that
of Catholics denouncing freethought. Such expressions as "the filth
of heretical novelty" [1822] are meant to apply to anything in the
nature of innovation; the causes at stake are ritual and precedent,
the apostolic succession and the status of the priest, not the truth
of revelation or the credibility of the scriptures. The third Tract
appeals to the clergy to "resist the alteration of even one jot or
tittle" of the liturgy; and concerning the burial service the line of
argument is: "Do you pretend you can discriminate the wheat from the
tares? Of course not." All attempts even to modify the ritual are an
"abuse of reason"; and the true believer is adjured to stand fast in
the ancient ways. [1823] At a pinch he is to "consider what Reason
says; which surely, as well as Scripture, was given us for religious
ends"; [1824] but the only "reason" thus recognized is one which
accepts the whole apparatus of revelation. Previous to and alongside
of this single-minded reversion to the ideals of the Dark Ages--a
phenomenon not unconnected with the revival of romanticism by Scott
and Chateaubriand--there was going on a movement of modernism, of which
one of the overt traces is Milman's History of the Jews (1829), a work
to-day regarded as harmless even by the orthodox, but sufficient in
its time to let Newman see whither religious "Liberalism" was heading.
Other and later researches dug much deeper into the problems of
religious historiography. The Unitarian C. C. Hennell produced an
Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity (1838), so important for
its time as to be thought worth translating into German by Strauss;
and this found a considerable response from the educated English
public of its day. In the preface to his second edition (1841) Hennell
spoke very plainly of "the large and probably increasing amount of
unbelief in all classes around us"; and made the then remarkably
courageous declarations that in his experience "neither deism,
pantheism, nor even atheism indicates modes of thought incompatible
with uprightness and benevolence"; and that "the real or affected
horror which it is still a prevailing custom to exhibit towards their
names would be better reserved for those of the selfish, the cruel,
the bigot, and other tormentors of mankind." It was in the circle of
Hennell that Marian Evans, later to become famous as George Eliot,
grew into a rationalist in despite of her religious temperament;
and it was she who, when Hennell's bride gave up the task, undertook
the toil of translating Strauss's Leben Jesu--though at many points
she "thought him wrong." [1825] In the churches he had of course no
overt acceptance. At this stage, English orthodoxy was of such a cast
that the pious Tregelles, himself fiercely opposed to all forms of
rationalism, had to complain that the most incontrovertible corrections
of the current text of the New Testament were angrily denounced. [1826]
In the next generation Theodore Parker in the United States, developing
his critical faculty chiefly by study of the Germans, at the cost of
much obloquy forced some knowledge of critical results and a measure of
theistic or pantheistic rationalism on the attention of the orthodox
world; promoting at the same time a semi-philosophic, semi-ethical
reaction against the Calvinistic theology of Jonathan Edwards,
theretofore prevalent among the orthodox of New England. In the old
country a number of writers developed new movements of criticism
from theistic points of view. F. W. Newman, the scholarly brother
of John Henry, [1827] produced a book entitled The Soul (1849), and
another, Phases of Faith (1853), which had much influence in promoting
rationalism of a rather rigidly theistic cast. R. W. Mackay in the
same period published two learned treatises, A Sketch of the Rise
and Progress of Christianity (1854), notably scientific in method
for its time; and The Progress of the Intellect as Exemplified in the
Religious Development of the Greeks and Hebrews (1850), which won the
admiration of Buckle; "George Eliot" translated Feuerbach's Essence of
Christianity (1854) under her own name, Marian Evans; and W. R. Greg,
one of the leading publicists of his day, put forth a rationalist
study of The Creed of Christendom: Its Foundations Contrasted with
its Superstructure (1850), which has gone through many editions and
is still reprinted. In 1864 appeared The Prophet of Nazareth, by Evan
Powell Meredith, who had been a Baptist minister in Wales. The book
is a bulky prize essay on the theme of New Testament eschatology,
which develops into a deistic attack on the central Christian
dogma and on gospel ethics. Another zealous theist, Thomas Scott,
whose pamphlet-propaganda on deistic lines had so wide an influence
during many years, produced an English Life of Jesus (1871), which,
though less important than the works of Strauss and less popular than
those of Renan, played a considerable part in the disintegration of
the traditional faith among English churchmen. Still the primacy in
critical research on scholarly lines lay with the Germans; and it was
the results of their work that were co-ordinated, from a theistic
standpoint, [1828] in the anonymous work, Supernatural Religion
(1874-77), a massive and decisive performance, too powerful to be
disposed of by the episcopal and other attacks made upon it. [1829]
Since its assimilation the orthodox or inspirationist view of the
gospels has lost credit among competent scholars even within the
churches. The battleground is now removed to the problem of the
historicity of the ostensible origins of the cult; and scholarly
orthodoxy takes for granted many positions which fifty years ago were
typical of "German rationalism."
12. In France systematic criticism of the sacred books recommenced
in the second half of the century with such writings as those of
P. Larroque (Examen Critique des doctrines de la religion chrétienne,
1860); Gustave d'Eichthal (Les Évangiles, ptie. i, 1863); and Alphonse
Peyrat (Histoire élémentaire et critique de Jésus, 1864); whereafter
the rationalistic view was applied with singular literary charm, if
with imperfect consistency, by Renan in his series of seven volumes
on the origins of Christianity, and with more scientific breadth
of view by Ernest Havet in his Christianisme et ses Origines (1872,
etc.). Renan's Vie de Jésus (1863) especially has been read throughout
the civilized world. It has been quite justly pronounced, by German
and other critics, a romance; but no other "life" properly so called
has been anything else, Strauss's first Life being an analysis rather
than a construction; and the epithet was but an unwitting avowal
that to accept the gospels, barring miracles, as biography--which
is what Renan did--is to be committed to the unhistorical. He began
by accepting the fourth as equipollent with the synoptics; and upon
this Strauss in his second Life confidently called for a recantation,
which came in due course. But Renan, in his fitful way, had critical
glimpses which were denied to Strauss--for instance, as to the material
of the Sermon on the Mount. The whole series of the Origines, which
wound up with Marc Aurèle (1882), has a similar fluctuating value,
showing on the whole a progressive critical sense. The Saint Paul,
for example, at the close suddenly discards the traditional view
previously accepted in Les Apôtres, and recognizes that the ministry
of Paul can have been no more than a propaganda of small conventicles,
whose total membership throughout the Empire could not have been above
a thousand. But Renan's total service consisted rather in a highly
artistic and winning application of rational historical methods to
early Christian history, with the effect of displacing the traditionist
method, than in any lasting or comprehensive solution of the problem
of the origins. Havet's survey is both corrective and complementary
to his. Renan's influence on opinion throughout the world, however,
was enormous, were it only because he was one of the most finished
literary artists of his time.
Section 3.--Poetry and General Literature
1. The whole imaginative literature of Europe, in the generation
after the French Revolution, reveals directly or indirectly the
transmutation that the eighteenth century had worked in religious
thought. Either it reacts against or it develops the rationalistic
movement. In France the literary reaction is one of the first factors
in the orthodox revival. Its leader and type was Chateaubriand,
in whose typical work, the Génie du Christianisme (1802), lies the
proof that, whatever might be the "shallowness" of Voltairism, it
was profundity beside the philosophy of the majority who repelled
it. On one who now reads it with the slightest scientific preparation,
the book makes an impression in parts of something like fatuity. The
handling of the scientific question at the threshold of the inquiry
is that of a man incapable of a scientific idea. All the accumulating
evidence of geology and palæontology is disposed of by the grotesque
theorem that God made the world out of nothing with all the marks
of antiquity upon it--the oaks at the start bearing "last year's
nests"--on the ground that, "if the world were not at once young and
old, the great, the serious, the moral would disappear from nature,
for these sentiments by their essence attach to antique things." [1830]
In the same fashion the fable of the serpent is with perfect gravity
homologated as a literal truth, on the strength of an anecdote about
the charming of a rattlesnake with music. [1831] It is humiliating,
but instructive, to realize that only a century ago a "Christian
reaction," in a civilized country, was inspired by such an order
of ideas; and that in the nation of Laplace, with his theory in
view, it was the fashion thus to prattle in the taste of the Dark
Ages. [1832] The book is merely the eloquent expression of a nervous
recoil from everything savouring of cool reason and clear thought,
a recoil partly initiated by the sheer stress of excitement of the
near past; partly fostered by the vague belief that freethinking in
religion had caused the Revolution; partly enhanced by the tendency
of every warlike period to develop emotional rather than reflective
life. What was really masterly in Chateaubriand was the style; and
sentimental pietism had now the prestige of fine writing, so long
the specialty of the other side. Yet a generation of monarchism
served to wear out the ill-based credit of the literary reaction;
and belles lettres began to be rationalistic as soon as politics
began again to be radical. Thus the prestige of the neo-Christian
school was already spent before the revolution of 1848; [1833] and
the inordinate vanity of Chateaubriand, who died in that year, had
undone his special influence still earlier. He had created merely a
literary mode and sentiment.
2. The literary history of France since his death decides the question,
so far as it can be thus decided. From 1848 till our own day it has
been predominantly naturalistic and non-religious. After Guizot and
the Thierrys, the nearest approach to Christianity by an influential
French historian is perhaps in the case of the very heterodox Edgar
Quinet. Michelet was a mere heretic in the eyes of the faithful,
Saisset describing his book Du Prêtre, de la Femme, et de la Famille
(1845), as a "renaissance of Voltaireanism." [1834] His whole brilliant
History, indeed, is from beginning to end rationalistic, challenging
as it does all the decorous traditions, exposing the failure of the
faith to civilize, pronouncing that "the monastic Middle Age is an
age of idiots" and the scholastic world which followed it an age of
artificially formed fools, [1835] flouting dogma and discrediting
creed over each of their miscarriages. [1836] And he was popular,
withal, not only because of his vividness and unfailing freshness,
but because his convictions were those of the best intelligence
around him. In poetry and fiction the predominance of one or other
shade of freethinking is signal. Balzac, who grew up in the age of
reaction, makes essentially for rationalism by his intense analysis;
and after him the difficulty is to find a great French novelist who is
not frankly rationalistic. George Sand will probably not be claimed
by orthodoxy; and Beyle, Constant, Flaubert, Mérimée, Zola, Daudet,
Maupassant, and the De Goncourts make a list against which can be
set only the names of M. Bourget, an artist of the second order,
and of the distinguished décadent Huysmans, who became a Trappist
after a life marked by a philosophy and practice of an extremely
different complexion.
3. In French poetry the case is hardly otherwise. Béranger, who
passed for a Voltairean, did indeed claim to have "saved from the
wreck an indestructible belief"; [1837] and Lamartine goes to the
side of Christianity; but de Musset, the most inspired of décadents,
was no more Christian than Heine, save for what a critic has called
"la banale religiosité de l'Espoir en Dieu", [1838] and the pessimist
Baudelaire had not even that to show. De Musset's absurd attack
on Voltaire in his Byronic poem, Rolla, well deserves the same
epithets. It is a mere product of hysteria, representing neither
knowledge nor reflection. The grandiose theism of Victor Hugo,
again, is stamped only with his own image and superscription; and
in his great contemporary Leconte de Lisle we have one of the most
convinced and aggressive freethinkers of the century, a fine scholar
and a self-controlled pessimist, who felt it well worth his while to
write a little Popular History of Christianity (1871) which would have
delighted d'Holbach. It is significant, on the other hand, that the
exquisite religious verse of Verlaine was the product of an incurable
neuropath, like the later work of Huysmans, and stands for decadence
pure and simple. While French belles lettres thus in general made for
rationalism, criticism was naturally not behindhand. Sainte-Beuve,
the most widely appreciative though not the most scientific or just
of critics, had only a literary sympathy with the religious types
over whom he spent so much effusive research; [1839] Edmond Scherer
was an unbeliever almost against his will; Taine, though reactionary
on political grounds in his latter years, was the typical French
rationalist of his time; and though M. Brunetière, whose preferences
were all for Bossuet, made "the bankruptcy of science" the text of
his very facile philosophy, the most scientific and philosophic head
in the whole line of French critics, the late Émile Hennequin, was
wholly a rationalist; and even the rather reactionary Jules Lemaître
did not maintain his early attitude of austerity towards Renan.
4. In England it was due above all to Shelley that the very age of
reaction was confronted with unbelief in lyric form. His immature Queen
Mab was vital enough with conviction to serve as an inspiration to a
whole host of unlettered freethinkers not only in its own generation
but in the next. Its notes preserved, and greatly expanded, the
tract entitled The Necessity of Atheism, for which he was expelled
from Oxford; and against his will it became a people's book, the law
refusing him copyright in his own work, on the memorable principle that
there could be no "protection" for a book setting forth pernicious
opinions. Whether he might not in later life, had he survived, have
passed to a species of mystic Christianity, reacting like Coleridge,
but with a necessary difference, is a question raised by parts of
the Hellas. Gladstone seems to have thought that he had in him such
a potentiality. But Shelley's work, as done, sufficed to keep for
radicalism and rationalism the crown of song as against the final
Tory orthodoxy [1840] of the elderly Wordsworth and of Southey; and
Coleridge's zeal for (amended) dogma came upon him after his hour of
poetic transfiguration was past.
And even Coleridge, who held the heresies of a modal Trinity and
the non-expiatory character of the death of Christ, was widely
distrusted by the pious, and expressed himself privately in
terms which would have outraged them. Miracles, he declared,
"are supererogatory. The law of God and the great principles
of the Christian religion would have been the same had Christ
never assumed humanity. It is for these things, and for such as
these, for telling unwelcome truths, that I have been termed an
atheist. It is for these opinions that William Smith assured the
Archbishop of Canterbury that I was (what half the clergy are in
their lives) an atheist. Little do these men know what atheism
is. Not one man in a thousand has either strength of mind or
goodness of heart to be an atheist. I repeat it. Not one man in
ten thousand has goodness of heart or strength of mind to be an
atheist." Allsopp's Letters, etc., as cited, p. 47. But at other
times Coleridge was a defender of the faith, while contemning
the methods of the evidential school. Id. pp. 13-14, 31.
On the other side, Scott's honest but unintellectual romanticism,
as we know from Newman, certainly favoured the Tractarian reaction,
to which it was æsthetically though hardly emotionally akin. Yet
George Eliot could say in later life that it was the influence
of Scott that first unsettled her orthodoxy; [1841] meaning,
doubtless, that the prevailing secularity of his view of life and
his objective handling of sects and faiths excluded even a theistic
solution. Scott's orthodoxy was in fact nearly on all fours with his
Jacobitism--a matter of temperamental loyalty to a tradition. [1842]
But the far more potent influence of Byron, too wayward to hold a
firm philosophy, but too intensely alive to realities to be capable
of Scott's feudal orthodoxy, must have counted much for heresy even
in England, and was one of the literary forces of revolutionary
revival for the whole of Europe. Though he never came to a clear
atheistical decision as did Shelley, [1843] and often in private gave
himself out for a Calvinist, he so handled theological problems in
his Cain that he, like Shelley, was refused copyright in his work;
[1844] and it was widely appropriated for freethinkers' purposes. The
orthodox Southey was on the same grounds denied the right to suppress
his early revolutionary drama, Wat Tyler, which accordingly was made
to do duty in Radical propaganda by freethinking publishers. Keats,
again, though he melodiously declaimed, in a boyish mood, against
the scientific analysis of the rainbow, and though he never assented
to Shelley's impeachments of Christianity, was in no active sense a
believer in it, and after his long sickness met death gladly without
the "consolations" ascribed to creed. [1845]
5. One of the best-beloved names in English literature, Charles Lamb,
is on several counts to be numbered with those of the freethinkers
of his day--who included Godwin and Hazlitt--though he had no part
in any direct propaganda. Himself at most a Unitarian, but not at
all given to argument on points of faith, he did his work for reason
partly by way of the subtle and winning humanism of such an essay as
New Year's Eve, which seems to have been what brought upon him the
pedantically pious censure of Southey, apparently for its lack of
allusion to a future state; partly by his delicately-entitled letter,
The Tombs in the Abbey, in which he replied to Southey's stricture. "A
book which wants only a sounder religious feeling to be as delightful
as it is original" had been Southey's pompous criticism, in a paper on
Infidelity. [1846] In his reply, Lamb commented on Southey's life-long
habit of scoffing at the Church of Rome, and gravely repudiated the
test of orthodoxy for human character.
Lamb's words are not generally known, and are worth remembering. "I
own," he wrote, "I never could think so considerably of myself
as to decline the society of an agreeable or worthy man upon
difference of opinion only. The impediments and the facilitations
to a sound belief are various and inscrutable as the heart of
man. Some believe upon weak principles; others cannot feel the
efficacy of the strongest. One of the most candid, most upright,
and single-meaning men I ever knew was the late Thomas Holcroft. I
believe he never said one thing and meant another in his life;
and, as near as I can guess, he never acted otherwise than
with the most scrupulous attention to conscience. Ought we to
wish the character false for the sake of a hollow compliment to
Christianity?" Of the freethinking and unpopular Hazlitt, who had
soured towards Lamb in his perverse way, the essayist spoke still
more generously. Of Leigh Hunt he speaks more critically, but with
the same resolution to stand by a man known as a heretic. But the
severest flout to Southey and his Church is in the next paragraph,
where, after the avowal that "the last sect with which you can
remember me to have made common profession were the Unitarians,"
he tells how, on the previous Easter Sunday, he had attended the
service in Westminster Abbey, and when he would have lingered
afterwards among the tombs to meditate, was "turned, like a dog
or some profane person, out into the common street, with feelings
which I could not help, but not very congenial to the day or the
discourse. I do not know," he adds, "that I shall ever venture
myself again into one of your churches."
These words were published in the London Magazine in 1825; but
in the posthumous collected edition of the Essays of Elia all
the portions above cited were dropped, and the paragraph last
quoted from was modified, leaving out the last words. The essay
does not seem to have been reprinted in full till it appeared in
R. H. Shepherd's edition of 1878. But the original issue in the
London Magazine created a tradition among the lovers of Lamb,
and his name has always been associated with some repute for
freethinking. There is further very important testimony as to
Lamb's opinions in one of Allsopp's records of the conversation
of Coleridge:--
"No, no; Lamb's skepticism has not come lightly, nor is he
a skeptic [sic: Query, scoffer?]. The harsh reproof to Godwin
for his contemptuous allusion to Christ before a well-trained
child proves that he is not a skeptic [? scoffer]. His mind,
never prone to analysis, seems to have been disgusted with the
hollow pretences, the false reasonings and absurdities of the
rogues and fools with whom all establishments, and all creeds
seeking to become established, abound. I look upon Lamb as one
hovering between earth and heaven; neither hoping much nor fearing
anything. It is curious that he should retain many usages which he
learnt or adopted in the fervour of his early religious feelings,
now that his faith is in a state of suspended animation. Believe
me, who know him well, that Lamb, say what he will, has more
of the essentials of Christianity than ninety-nine out of a
hundred professing Christians. He has all that would still have
been Christian had Christ never lived or been made manifest upon
earth." (Allsopp's Letters, etc., as cited, p. 46.) In connection
with the frequently cited anecdote as to Lamb's religious feeling
given in Leigh Hunt's Autobiography (rep. p. 253), also by
Hazlitt (Winterslow, essay ii, ed. 1902, p. 39), may be noted the
following, given by Allsopp: "After a visit to Coleridge, during
which the conversation had taken a religious turn, Leigh Hunt
... expressed his surprise that such a man as Coleridge should,
when speaking of Christ, always call him Our Saviour. Lamb, who
had been exhilarated by one glass of that gooseberry or raisin
cordial which he has so often anathematized, stammered out:
'Ne-ne-never mind what Coleridge says; he is full of fun.'"
6. While a semi-Bohemian like Lamb could thus dare to challenge the
reigning bigotry, the graver English writers of the first half of the
century who had abandoned or never accepted orthodoxy felt themselves
for the most part compelled to silence or ostensible compliance. It
was made clear by Carlyle's posthumous Reminiscences that he had
early turned away from Christian dogma, having in fact given up a
clerical career because of unbelief. Later evidence abounds. At the
age of fifteen, by his own account, he had horrified his mother with
the question: "Did God Almighty come down and make wheel-barrows in a
shop?" [1847] Of his college life he told: "I studied the evidences
of Christianity for several years, with the greatest desire to be
convinced, but in vain. I read Gibbon, and then first clearly saw
that Christianity was not true. Then came the most trying time of my
life." [1848] Goethe, he claimed, led him to peace; but philosophic
peace he never attained. "He was contemptuous to those who held
to Christian dogmas; he was angry with those who gave them up;
he was furious with those who attacked them. If equanimity be the
mark of a Philosopher, he was of all great-minded men the least of a
Philosopher." [1849] To all freethinking work, scholarly or other,
he was hostile with the hostility of a man consciously in a false
position. Strauss's Leben Jesu he pronounced, quite late in life,
"a revolutionary and ill-advised enterprise, setting forth in
words what all wise men had in their minds for fifty years past,
and thought it fittest to hold their peace about." [1850] He was,
in fact, so false to his own doctrine of veracity as to disparage all
who spoke out; while privately agreeing with Mill as to the need for
speaking out. [1851] Even Mill did so only partially in his lifetime,
as in his address to the St. Andrews students (1867), when, "in the
reception given to the Address, he was most struck by the vociferous
applause of the divinity students at the freethought passage." [1852]
In the first half of the century such displays of courage were rare
indeed. Only after the death of Romilly was it tacitly avowed, by
the publication of a deistic prayer found among his papers, that he
had had no belief in revelation. [1853] Much later in the century,
Harriet Martineau, for openly avowing her unbelief, incurred the
angry public censure of her own brother.
Despite his anxious caution, Carlyle's writing conveyed to susceptible
readers a non-Christian view of things. We know from a posthumous
writing of Mr. Froude's that, when that writer had gone through the
university and taken holy orders without ever having had a single doubt
as to his creed, Carlyle's books "taught him that the religion in which
he had been reared was but one of many dresses in which spiritual truth
had arrayed itself, and that the creed was not literally true so far as
it was a narrative of facts." [1854] It was presumably from the Sartor
Resartus and some of the Essays, such as that on Voltaire--perhaps,
also, negatively from the general absence of Christian sentiment in
Carlyle's works--that such lessons were learned; and though it is
certain that many non-zealous Christians saw no harm in Carlyle,
there is reason to believe that for multitudes of readers he had
the same awakening virtue. It need hardly be said that his friend
Emerson exercised it in no less degree. Mr. Froude was remarkable
in his youth for his surrender of the clerical profession, in the
teeth of a bitter opposition from his family, and further for his
publication of a freethinking romance, The Nemesis of Faith (1849);
but he went far to conciliate Anglican orthodoxy by his History. The
romance had a temporary vogue rather above its artistic merits as a
result of being publicly burned by the authorities of Exeter College,
Oxford, of which he was a Fellow. [1855]
7. This attitude of orthodoxy, threatening ostracism to any avowed
freethinker who had a position to lose, must be kept in mind in
estimating the English evolution of that time. A professed man of
science could write in 1838 that "the new mode of interpreting the
Scriptures which has sprung up in Germany is the darkest cloud which
lowers upon the horizon of that country.... The Germans have been
conducted by some of their teachers to the borders of a precipice,
one leap from which will plunge them into deism." He added that in
various parts of Europe "the heaviest calamity impending over the
whole fabric of society in our time is the lengthening stride of bold
skepticism in some parts, and the more stealthy onwards-creeping
step of critical cavil in others." [1856] Such declamation could
terrorize the timid and constrain the prudent in such a society as
that of early Victorian England. The prevailing note is struck in
Macaulay's description of Charles Blount as "an infidel, and the head
of a small school of infidels who were troubled with a morbid desire to
make converts." [1857] All the while, Macaulay was himself privately
"infidel"; [1858] but he cleared his conscience by thus denouncing
those who had the courage of their opinions. In this simple fashion
some of the sanest writers in history were complacently put below
the level of the commonplace dissemblers who aspersed them; and the
average educated man saw no baseness in the procedure.
The opinion deliberately expressed in this connection by the late
Professor Bain is worth noting:--
"It can at last be clearly seen what was the motive of Carlyle's
perplexing style of composition. We now know what his opinions
were when he began to write, and that to express them would have
been fatal to his success; yet he was not a man to indulge in
rank hypocrisy. He accordingly adopted a studied and ambiguous
phraseology, which for long imposed upon the religious public,
who put their own interpretation upon his mystical utterances, and
gave him the benefit of any doubt. In the Life of Sterling he threw
off the mask, but still was not taken at his word. Had there been a
perfect tolerance of all opinions, he would have begun as he ended;
and his strain of composition, while still mystical and high-flown,
would never have been identified with our national orthodoxy.
"I have grave doubts as to whether we possess Macaulay's real
opinions on religion. His way of dealing with the subject is
so like the hedging of an unbeliever that, without some good
assurance to the contrary, I must include him also among the
imitators of Aristotle's 'caution.'...
"When Sir Charles Lyell brought out his Antiquity of Man, he too
was cautious. Knowing the dangers of his footing, he abstained
from giving an estimate of the extension of time required by the
evidences of human remains. Society in London, however, would
not put up with this reticence, and he had to disclose at dinner
parties what he had withheld from the public--namely, that in his
opinion the duration of man could not be less than 50,000 years"
(Practical Essays, p. 274.)
8. Thus for a whole generation honest and narrow-minded believers were
trained to suppose that their views were triumphant over all attacks,
[1859] and to see in "infidelity" a disease of an ill-informed past;
and as the Church had really gained in conventional culture as well
as in wealth and prestige in the period of reaction, the power of
mere convention to override ideas was still enormous. But through
the whole stress of reaction and conservatism, even apart from the
positive criticism of creed which from time to time forced its head
up, there is a visible play of a new spirit in the most notable
of the serious writing of the time. Carlyle undermined orthodoxy
even in his asseveration of unreasoned theism; Emerson disturbs it
alike when he acclaims mystics and welcomes evolutionary science;
and the whole inspiration of Mill's Logic no less than of his Liberty
is something alien to the principle of authority. Of Ruskin, again,
the same may be asserted in respect of his many searching thrusts at
clerical and lay practice, his defence of Colenso, and the obvious
disappearance from his later books of the evangelical orthodoxy of the
earlier. [1860] Thus the most celebrated writers of serious English
prose in the latter half of the century were in a measure associated
with the spirit of critical thought on matters religious. In a
much stronger degree the same thing may be predicated finally of
the writer who in the field of English belles lettres, apart from
fiction, came nearest them in fame and influence. Matthew Arnold,
passing insensibly from the English attitude of academic orthodoxy
to that of the humanist for whom Christ is but an admirable teacher
and God a "Something not ourselves which makes for righteousness,"
became for the England of his later years the favourite pilot across
the bar between supernaturalism and naturalism. Only in England,
perhaps, could his curious gospel of church-going and Bible-reading
atheism have prospered, but there it prospered exceedingly. Alike as
poet and as essayist, even when essaying to disparage Colenso or to
confute the Germans where they jostled his predilection for the Fourth
Gospel, he was a disintegrator of tradition, and, in his dogmatic way,
a dissolver of dogmatism. When, therefore, beside the four names just
mentioned the British public placed those of the philosophers Spencer,
Lewes, and Mill, and the scientists Darwin, Huxley, Clifford, and
Tyndall, they could not but recognize that the mind of the age was
divorced from the nominal faith of the Church.
9. In English fiction, the beginning of the end of genuine faith
was apparent to the prophetic eyes of Wilberforce and Robert Hall,
of whom the former lamented the total absence of Christian sentiment
from nearly all the successful fiction even of his day; [1861] and
the latter avowed the pain with which he noted that Miss Edgeworth,
whom he admired for her style and art, put absolutely no religion
in her books, [1862] while Hannah More, whose principles were so
excellent, had such a vicious style. With Thackeray and Dickens,
indeed, serious fiction might seem to be on the side of faith,
both being liberally orthodox, though neither ventured on religious
romance; but with George Eliot the balance began to lean the other
way, her sympathetic treatment of religious types counting for little
as against her known rationalism. At the end of the century almost
all of the leading writers of the higher fiction were known to be
either rationalists or simple theists; and against the heavy metal of
Mr. Meredith, Mr. Conrad, Mr. Hardy, Mr. Bennett, Mr. Moore (whose
sympathetic handling of religious motives suggests the influence of
Huysmans), and the didactic-deistic Mrs. Humphry-Ward, orthodoxy can
but claim artists of the third or lower grades. The championship of
some of the latter may be regarded as the last humiliation of faith.
In 1905 there was current a vulgar novel entitled When it was
Dark, wherein was said to be drawn a blood-curdling picture
of what would happen in the event of a general surrender of
Christian faith. Despite some episcopal approbation, the book
excited much disgust among the more enlightened clergy. The
preface to Miss Marie Corelli's Mighty Atom may serve to
convey to the many readers who cannot peruse the works of
that lady an idea of the temper in which she vindicates her
faith. Another popular novelist of a low artistic grade, the
late Mr. Seton-Merriman, has avowed his religious soundness in a
romance with a Russian plot, entitled The Sowers. Referring to
the impressions produced by great scenes of Nature, he writes:
"These places and these times are good for convalescent atheists
and such as pose as unbelievers--the cheapest form of notoriety"
(p. 168). The novelist's own Christian ethic is thus indicated:
"He had Jewish blood in his veins, which ... carried with it
the usual tendency to cringe. It is in the blood; it is part of
that which the people who stood without Pilate's palace took
upon themselves and their children" (p. 59). But the enormous
mass of modern novels includes some tolerable pleas for faith,
as well as many manifestoes of agnosticism. One of the works of
the late "Edna Lyall," We Two, was notable as the expression of
the sympathy of a devout, generous, and amiable Christian lady
with the personality and career of Mr. Bradlaugh.
10. Among the most artistically gifted of the English story-writers and
essayists of the last generation of the century was Richard Jefferies
(d. 1887), who in The Story of My Heart (1883) has told how "the last
traces and relics of superstitions acquired compulsorily in childhood"
finally passed away from his mind, leaving him a Naturalist in every
sense of the word. In the Eulogy of Richard Jefferies published
by Sir Walter Besant in 1888 it is asserted that on his deathbed
Jefferies returned to his faith, and "died listening with faith and
love to the words contained in the Old Book." A popular account of this
"conversion" accordingly became current, and was employed to the usual
purpose. As has been shown by a careful student, and as was admitted
on inquiry by Sir Walter Besant, there had been no conversion whatever,
Jefferies having simply listened to his wife's reading without hinting
at any change in his convictions. [1863] Despite his biographer's
express admission of his error, Christian journals, such as the
Spectator, have burked the facts; one, the Christian, has piously
charged dishonesty on the writer who brought them to light; and a
third, the Salvationist War Cry, has pronounced his action "the basest
form of chicanery and falsehood." [1864] The episode is worth noting
as indicating the qualities which still attach to orthodox propaganda.
11. Though Shelley was anathema to English Christians in his own
clay, his fame and standing steadily rose in the generations after
his death. Nor has the balance of English poetry ever reverted
to the side of faith. Even Tennyson, who more than once struck at
rationalism below the belt, is in his own despite the poet of doubt
as much as of credence, however he might wilfully attune himself to
the key of faith; and the unparalleled optimism of Browning evolved a
form of Christianity sufficiently alien to the historic creed. [1865]
In Clough and Matthew Arnold, again, we have the positive record of
surrendered faith. Alongside of Arnold, Swinburne put into his verse
the freethinking temper that Leconte de Lisle reserved for prose;
and the ill-starred but finely gifted James Thomson ("B.V.") was no
less definitely though despairingly an unbeliever. Among our later
poets, finally, the balance is pretty much the same. Mr. Watson has
declared in worthily noble diction for a high agnosticism, and the
late John Davidson defied orthodox ethics in the name of his very
antinomian theology; [1866] while on the side of the regulation
religion--since Mr. Yeats is but a stray Druid--can be cited at best
the regimental psalmody of Mr. Kipling, lyrist of trumpet and drum;
the stained-glass Mariolatries of the late Francis Thompson; the
declamatory orthodoxy of Mr. Noyes; and the Godism of W. E. Henley,
whereat the prosaic godly look askance.
12. Of the imaginative literature of the United States, as of that of
England, the same generalization broadly holds good. The incomparable
Hawthorne, whatever his psychological sympathy with the Puritan past,
wrought inevitably by his art for the loosening of its intellectual
hold; Poe, though he did not venture till his days of downfall to write
his Eureka, thereby proves himself an entirely non-Christian theist;
and Emerson's poetry, no less than his prose, constantly expresses
his pantheism; while his gifted disciple Thoreau, in some ways a
more stringent thinker than his master, was either a pantheist or a
Lucretian theist, standing aloof from all churches. [1867] The economic
conditions of American life have till recently been unfavourable to
the higher literature, as apart from fiction; but the unique figure
of Walt Whitman stands for a thoroughly naturalistic view of life;
[1868] Mr. Howells appears to be at most a theist; Mr. Henry James
has not even exhibited the bias of his gifted brother to the theism
of their no less gifted father; and some of the most esteemed men
of letters since the Civil War, as Dr. Wendell Holmes and Colonel
Wentworth Higginson, have been avowedly on the side of rationalism,
or, as the term goes in the States, "liberalism." Though the tone of
ordinary conversation is more often reminiscent of religion in the
United States than in England, the novel and the newspaper have been
perhaps more thoroughly secularized there than here; and in the public
honour done to so thorough a rationalist as the late Dr. Moncure Conway
at the hands of his alma mater, the Dickinson College, West Virginia,
may be seen the proof that the official orthodoxy of his youth has
disappeared from the region of his birth.
13. Of the vast modern output of belles lettres in continental Europe,
finally, a similar account is to be given. The supreme poet of modern
Italy, Leopardi, is one of the most definitely rationalistic as well
as one of the greatest philosophic poets in literature; Carducci,
the greatest of his successors, was explicitly anti-Christian; and
despite all the claims of the Catholic socialists, there is little
modern Catholic literature in Italy of any European value. One of
the most distinguished of modern Italian scholars, Professor A. de
Gubernatis, has in his Letture sopra la mitologia vedica (1874)
explicitly treated the Christian legend as a myth. In Germany we
have seen Goethe and Schiller distinctly counting for naturalism;
and of Jean Paul Richter (1763-1825) an orthodox historian declares
that his "religion was a chaotic fermenting of the mind, out of
which now deism, then Christianity, then a new religion, seems to
come forth." [1869] The naturalistic line is found to be continued
in Heinrich von Kleist, the unhappy but masterly dramatist of Der
Zerbrochene Krug, one of the truest geniuses of his time; and above
all in Heine, whose characteristic profession of reconciling himself
on his deathbed with the deity he imaged as "the Aristophanes of
heaven" [1870] serves so scantily to console the orthodox lovers of
his matchless song. His criticism of Kant and Fichte is a sufficient
clue to his serious convictions; and that "God is all that there is"
[1871] is the sufficient expression of his pantheism. The whole purport
of his brilliant sketch of the History of Religion and Philosophy
in Germany (1834; 2nd ed. 1852) is a propaganda of the very spirit
of freethinking, which constitutes for Germany at once a literary
classic and a manifesto of rationalism. As he himself said of the
return of the aged Schelling to Catholicism, we may say of Heine, that
a deathbed reversion to early beliefs is a pathological phenomenon.
The use latterly made of Heine's deathbed re-conversion by
orthodoxy in England is characteristic. The late letters and
conversations in which he said edifying things of God and the
Bible are cited for readers who know nothing of the context,
and almost as little of the speaker. He had similarly praised
the Bible in 1830 (Letter of July, in B. iii of his volume on
Börne--Werke, vii, 160). To the reader of the whole it is clear
that, while Heine's verbal renunciation of his former pantheism,
and his characterization of the pantheistic position as a "timid
atheism," might have been made independently of his physical
prostration, his profession of the theism at which he had formerly
scoffed is only momentarily serious, even at a time when such a
reversion would have been in no way surprising. His return to and
praise of the Bible, the book of his childhood, during years of
extreme suffering and utter helplessness, was in the ordinary way
of physiological reaction. But inasmuch as his thinking faculty
was never extinguished by his tortures, he chronically indicated
that his religious talk was a half-conscious indulgence of the
overstrained emotional nature, and substantially an exercise of
his poetic feeling--always as large a part of his psychosis as his
reasoning faculty. Even in deathbed profession he was neither a
Jew nor a Christian, his language being that of a deism "scarcely
distinguishable in any essential element from that of Voltaire
or Diderot" (Strodtmann, Heine's Leben und Werke, 2te Aufl. ii,
386). "My religious convictions and views," he writes in the
preface to the late Romancero, "remain free of all churchism.... I
have abjured nothing, not even my old heathen Gods, from whom I
have parted in love and friendship." In his will he peremptorily
forbade any clerical procedure at his funeral; and his feeling on
that side is revealed in his sad jests to his friend Meissner in
1850. "If I could only go out on crutches!" he exclaimed; adding:
"Do you know where I should go? Straight to church." On his friends
expressing disbelief, he went on: "Certainly, to church! Where
should a man go on crutches? Naturally, if I could walk without
crutches, I should go to the laughing boulevards or the Jardin
Mabille." The story is told in England without the conclusion,
as a piece of "Christian Evidence."
But even as to his theism Heine was never more than wilfully and
poetically a believer. In 1849 we find him jesting about "God" and
"the Gods," declaring he will not offend the lieber Gott, whose
vultures he knows and respects. "Opium is also a religion," he
writes in 1850. "Christianity is useless for the healthy ... for
the sick it is a very good religion." "If the German people in
their need accept the King of Prussia, why should not I accept the
personal God?" And in speaking of the postscript to the Romancero
he writes in 1851: "Alas, I had neither time nor mood to say there
what I wanted--namely, that I die as a Poet, who needs neither
religion nor philosophy, and has nothing to do with either. The
Poet understands very well the symbolic idiom of Religion, and the
abstract jargon of Philosophy; but neither the religious gentry nor
those of philosophy will ever understand the Poet." A few weeks
before his death he signs a New Year letter, "Nebuchadnezzar
II, formerly Prussian Atheist, now Lotosflower-adorer." At
this time he was taking immense doses of morphia to make his
tortures bearable. A few hours before his death a querying
pietist got from him the answer: "God will pardon me; it is his
business." The Geständnisse, written in 1854, ends in absolute
irony; and his alleged grounds for giving up atheism, sometimes
quoted seriously, are purely humorous (Werke, iv, 33). If it be
in any sense true, as he tells in the preface to the Romancero,
that "the high clerisy of atheism pronounced its anathema" over
him--that is to say, that former friends denounced him as a weak
turncoat--it needed only the publication of his Life and Letters
to enable freethinkers to take an entirely sympathetic view of his
case, which may serve as a supreme example of "the martyrdom of
man." On the whole question see Strodtmann, as cited, ii, 372 sq.,
and the Geständnisse, which should be compared with the earlier
written fragments of Briefe über Deutschland (Werke, iii, 110),
where there are some significant variations in statements of fact.
Since Heine, German belles lettres has not been a first-rate influence
in Europe; but some of the leading novelists, as Auerbach and Heyse,
are well known to have shared in the rational philosophy of their age;
and the Christianity of Wagner, whose precarious support to the cause
of faith has been welcomed chiefly by its heteroclite adherents,
counts for nothing in the critical scale. [1872]
14. But perhaps the most considerable evidence, in belles lettres,
of the predominance of rationalism in modern Europe is to be found
in the literary history of the Scandinavian States and Russia. The
Russian development indeed had gone far ere the modern Scandinavian
literatures had well begun. Already in the first quarter of the century
the poet Poushkine was an avowed heretic; and Gogol even let his
art suffer from his preoccupations with the new humanitarian ideas;
while the critic Biélinsky, classed by Tourguénief as the Lessing
of Russia, [1873] was pronouncedly rationalistic, [1874] as was his
contemporary the critic Granovsky, [1875] reputed the finest Russian
stylist of his day. At this period belles lettres stood for every
form of intellectual influence in Russia, [1876] and all educated
thought was moulded by it. The most perfect artistic result is the
fiction of the freethinker Tourguénief, [1877] the Sophocles of the
modern novel. His two great contemporaries, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy,
count indeed for supernaturalism; but the truly wonderful genius of
the former was something apart from his philosophy, which was merely
childlike; and the latter, the least masterly if the most strenuous
artist of the three, made his religious converts in Russia chiefly
among the uneducated, and was in any case sharply antagonistic to
orthodox Christianity. It does not appear that the younger writer,
Potapenko, a fine artist, is orthodox, despite his extremely
sympathetic presentment of a superior priest; and the still younger
Gorky is an absolute Naturalist.
15. In the Scandinavian States, again, there are hardly any
exceptions to the freethinking tendency among the leading living men
of letters. In the person of the abnormal religionist Sören Kierkegaard
(1813-1855) a new force of criticism began to stir in Denmark. Setting
out as a theologian, Kierkegaard gradually developed, always on
quasi-religious lines, into a vehement assailant of conventional
Christianity, somewhat in the spirit of Pascal, somewhat in that
of Feuerbach, again in that of Ruskin; and in a temper recalling
now a Berserker and now a Hebrew prophet. The general effect of his
teaching may be gathered from the mass of the work of Henrik Ibsen,
who was his disciple, and in particular from Ibsen's Brand, of which
the hero is partly modelled on Kierkegaard. [1878] Ibsen, though
his Brand was counted to him for righteousness by the Churches,
showed himself a thorough-going naturalist in all his later work;
Björnson was an active freethinker; the eminent Danish critic, Georg
Brandes, early avowed himself to the same effect; and his brother,
the dramatist, Edward Brandes, was elected to the Danish Parliament in
1871 despite his declaration that he believed in neither the Christian
nor the Jewish God. Most of the younger littérateurs of Norway and
Sweden seem to be of the same cast of thought.
Section 4.--The Natural Sciences
1. The power of intellectual habit and tradition had preserved
among the majority of educated men, to the end of the eighteenth
century, a notion of deity either slightly removed from that of the
ancient Hebrews or ethically purified without being philosophically
transformed, though the astronomy of Copernicus, Galileo, and
Newton had immensely modified the Hebraic conception of the physical
universe. We have seen that Newton did not really hold by the Christian
scheme--he wrote, at times, in fact, as a pantheist--but some later
astronomers seem to have done so. When, however, the great Laplace
developed the nebular hypothesis, previously guessed at by Bruno and
outlined by Kant, orthodox psychological habit was rudely shaken
as regards the Biblical account of creation; and like every other
previous advance in physical science this was denounced as atheistic
[1879]--which, as we know, it was, Laplace having declared in reply
to Napoleon that he had no need of the God hypothesis. Confirmed
in essentials by all subsequent science, Laplace's system widens
immensely the gulf between modern cosmology and the historic theism
of the Christian era; and the subsequent concrete developments
of astronomy, giving as they do such an insistent and overwhelming
impression of physical infinity, have made the "Christian hypothesis"
[1880] fantastic save for minds capable of enduring any strain on the
sense of consistency. Paine had brought the difficulty vividly home
to the common intelligence; and though the history of orthodoxy is
a history of the success of institutions and majorities in imposing
incongruous conformities, the perception of the incongruity on this
side must have been a force of disintegration. The freethinking of the
French astronomers of the Revolution period marks a decisive change;
and as early as 1826 we find in a work on Jewish antiquities by a
Scotch clergyman a very plain indication [1881] of disbelief in the
Hebrew story of the stopping of the sun and moon, or (alternatively) of
the rotation of the earth. It is typical of the tenacity of religious
delusion that a quarter of a century later this among other irrational
credences was contended for by the Swiss theologian Gaussen, [1882]
and by the orthodox majority elsewhere, when for all scientifically
trained men they had become untenable. And that the general growth
of scientific thought was disintegrating among scientific men the
old belief in miracles may be gathered from an article, remarkable
in its day, which appeared in the Edinburgh Review of January, 1814
(No. 46), and was "universally attributed to Prof. Leslie," [1883] the
distinguished physicist. Reviewing the argument of Laplace's essay,
Sur les probabilités, it substantially endorsed the thesis of Hume
that miracles cannot be proved by any testimony.
Leslie's own case is one of the milestones marking the slow recovery
of progress in Britain after the Revolution. His appointment to the
chair of Mathematics, after Playfair, at Edinburgh University in
1805 was bitterly resisted by the orthodox on the score that he was
a disbeliever in miracles and an "infidel" of the school of Hume,
who had been his personal friend. Nevertheless he again succeeded
Playfair in the chair of Physics in 1819, and was knighted in 1832. The
invention of the hygrometer and the discovery of the relations of light
and heat had begun to count for more in science than the profession
of orthodoxy.
2. From France came likewise the impulse to a naturalistic handling
of biology, long before the day of Darwin. The protagonist in this
case was the physician P.-J.-G. Cabanis (1737-1808), the colleague of
Laplace in the School of Sciences. Growing up in the generation of
the Revolution, Cabanis had met, in the salon of Madame Helvétius,
d'Holbach, Diderot, D'Alembert, Condorcet, Laplace, Condillac,
Volney, Franklin, and Jefferson, and became the physician of
Mirabeau. His treatise on the Rapports du physique et du morale de
l'homme (1796-1802) [1884] might be described as the systematic
application to psychology of that "positive" method to which all
the keenest thought of the eighteenth century had been tending,
yet with much of the literary or rhetorical tone by which the French
writers of that age had nearly all been characterized. For Cabanis,
the psychology of Helvétius and Condillac had been hampered by their
ignorance of physiology; [1885] and he easily put aside the primary
errors, such as the "equality of minds" and the entity of "the soul,"
which they took over from previous thinkers. His own work is on the
whole the most searching and original handling of the main problems
of psycho-physiology that had yet been achieved; and to this day its
suggestiveness has not been exhausted.
But Cabanis, in his turn, made the mistake of Helvétius and
Condillac. Not content with presenting the results of his study
in the province in which he was relatively master, he undertook
to reach ultimate truth in those of ethics and philosophy, in
which he was not so. In the preface to the Rapports he lays down
an emphatically agnostic conviction as to final causes: "ignorance
the most invincible," he declares, is all that is possible to man
on that issue. [1886] But not only does he in his main work freely
and loosely generalize on the phenomena of history and overleap the
ethical problem: he penned shortly before his death a Lettre sur les
causes premières, addressed to Fauriel, [1887] in which the aging
intelligence is seen reverting to à priori processes, and concluding
in favour of a "sort of stoic pantheism" [1888] with a balance towards
normal theism and a belief in immortality. The final doctrine did not
in the least affect the argument of the earlier, which was simply one
of positive science; but the clerical world, which had in the usual
fashion denounced the scientific doctrine, not on the score of any
attack by Cabanis upon religion, but because of its incompatibility
with the notion of the soul, naturally made much of the mystical,
[1889] and accorded its framer authority from that moment.
As for the conception of "vitalism" put forward in the Letter to
Fauriel by way of explanation of the phenomena of life, it is but
a reversion to the earlier doctrine of Stahl, of which Cabanis had
been a partisan in his youth. [1890] The fact remains that he gave an
enduring impulse to positive science, [1891] his own final vacillation
failing to arrest the employment of the method he had inherited and
improved. Most people know him solely through one misquotation, the
famous phrase that "the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes
bile." This is not only an imperfect statement of his doctrine: it
suppresses precisely the idea by which Cabanis differentiates from pure
"sensationalism." What he taught was that "impressions, reaching the
brain, set it in activity, as aliments reaching the stomach excite it
to a more abundant secretion of gastric juice.... The function proper
to the first is to perceive particular impressions, to attach to them
signs, to combine different impressions, to separate them, to draw from
them judgments and determinations, as the function of the second is to
act on nutritive substances," etc. [1892] It is after this statement
of the known processus, and after pointing out that there is as much
of pure inference in the one case as in the other, that he concludes:
"The brain in a manner digests impressions, and makes organically the
secretion of thought" and this conclusion, he points out, disposes of
the difficulty of those who "cannot conceive how judging, reasoning,
imagining, can ever be anything else than feeling. The difficulty
ceases when one recognizes, in these different operations, the action
of the brain upon the impressions which are passed on to it." The
doctrine is, in short, an elementary truth of psychological science,
as distinguished from the pseudo-science of the Ego considered as
an entity. To that pseudo-science Cabanis gave a vital wound; and
his derided formula is for true science to-day almost a truism. The
attacks made upon his doctrine in the next generation only served to
emphasize anew the eternal dilemma of theism. On the one hand his
final "vitalism" was repugnant to those who, on traditional lines,
insisted upon a distinction between "soul" and "vital force"; on
the other hand, those who sought to make a philosophic case for
theism against him made the usual plunge into pantheism, and were
reproached accordingly by the orthodox. [1893] All that remained was
the indisputable "positive" gain.
3. In England the influence of the French stimulus in physiology
was seen even more clearly than that of the great generalization of
Laplace. Professor William Lawrence (1783-1867), the physiologist,
published in 1816 an Introduction to Comparative Anatomy and
Physiology, containing some remarks on the nature of life,
which elicited from the then famous Dr. Abernethy a foul attack
in his Physiological Lectures delivered before the College of
Surgeons. Lawrence was charged with belonging to the party of French
physiological skeptics whose aim was to "loosen those restraints on
which the welfare of mankind depends." [1894] In the introductory
lecture of his course of 1817 before the College of Physicians,
Lawrence severely retaliated, repudiating the general charge, but
reasserting that the dependence of life on organization is as clear
as the derivation of daylight from the sun. The war was adroitly
carried at once into the enemy's territory in the declaration that
"The profound, the virtuous, and fervently pious Pascal acknowledged,
what all sound theologians maintain, that the immortality of the
soul, the great truths of religion, and the fundamental principles
of morals cannot be demonstrably proved by mere reason; and that
revelation alone is capable of dissipating the uncertainties
which perplex those who inquire too curiously into the sources of
these important principles. All will acknowledge that, as no other
remedy can be so perfect and satisfactory as this, no other can
be necessary, if we resort to this with firm faith." [1895] The
value of this pronouncement is indicated later in the same volume
by subacid allusions to "those who regard the Hebrew Scriptures as
writings composed with the assistance of divine inspiration," and
who receive Genesis "as a narrative of actual events." Indicating
various "grounds of doubt respecting inspiration," the lecturer adds
that the stories of the naming of the animals and their collection
in the ark, "if we are to understand them as applied to the living
inhabitants of the whole world, are zoologically impossible." [1896]
On the principle then governing such matters Lawrence was in 1822,
on the score of his heresies, refused copyright in his lectures,
which were accordingly reprinted many times in a cheap stereotyped
edition, and thus widely diffused. [1897]
This hardy attack was reinforced in 1819 by the publication of
Sir T. C. Morgan's Sketches of the Philosophy of Life, wherein the
physiological materialism of Cabanis is quietly but firmly developed,
and a typical sentence of his figures as a motto on the title-page. The
method is strictly naturalistic, alike on the medical and on the
philosophic side; and "vitalism" is argued down as explicitly as is
anthropomorphism. [1898] As a whole the book tells notably of the
stimulus of recent French thought upon English.
4. A more general effect, however, was probably wrought by the science
of geology, which in a stable and tested form belongs to the nineteenth
century. Of its theoretic founders in the eighteenth century, Werner
and Dr. James Hutton (1726-1797), the latter and more important [1899]
is known from his Investigation of the Principles of Knowledge (1794)
to have been consciously a freethinker on more grounds than that of
his naturalistic science; and his Theory of the World (1795) was
duly denounced as atheistic. [1900] Whereas the physical infinity
of the universe almost forced the orthodox to concede a vast cosmic
process of some kind as preceding the shaping of the earth and solar
system, the formation of these within six days was one of the plainest
assertions in the sacred books; and every system of geology excluded
such a conception. As the evidence accumulated, in the hands of men
mostly content to deprecate religious opposition, [1901] there was duly
evolved the quaint compromise of the doctrine that the Biblical six
"days" meant six ages--a fantasy still cherished in the pulpit. On
the ground of that absurdity, nevertheless, there gradually grew
up a new conception of the antiquity of the earth. Thus a popular
work on geology such as The Ancient World, by Prof. Ansted (1847),
could begin with the proposition that "long before the human race
had been introduced on the earth this world of ours existed as the
habitation of living things different from those now inhabiting its
surface." Even the thesis of "six ages," and others of the same order,
drew upon their supporters angry charges of "infidelity." Hugh Miller,
whose natural gifts for geological research were chronically turned to
confusion by his orthodox bias, was repeatedly so assailed, when in
point of fact he was perpetually tampering with the facts to salve
the Scriptures. [1902] Of all the inductive sciences geology had
been most retarded by the Christian canonization of error. [1903]
Even the plain fact that what is dry land had once been sea was
obstinately distorted through centuries, though Ovid [1904] had put
the observations of Pythagoras in the way of all scholars; and though
Leonardo da Vinci had insisted on the visible evidence; nay, deistic
habit could keep even Voltaire, as we saw, preposterously incredulous
on the subject. When the scientific truth began to force its way in
the teeth of such authorities as Cuvier, who stood for the "Mosaic"
doctrine, the effect was proportionately marked; and whether or not the
suicide of Miller (1856) was in any way due to despair on perception of
the collapse of his reconciliation of geology with Genesis, [1905] the
scientific demonstration made an end of revelationism for many. What
helped most to save orthodoxy from humiliation on the scientific side
was the attitude of men like Professor Baden Powell, whose scientific
knowledge and habit of mind moved him to attack the Judaism of the
Bibliolaters in the name of Christianity, and in the name of truth
to declare that "nothing in geology bears the smallest semblance to
any part of the Mosaic cosmogony, torture the interpretation to what
extent we may." [1906] In 1857 this was very bold language.
5. Still more rousing, finally, was the effect of the science of
zoology, as placed upon a broad scientific foundation by Charles
Darwin. Here again steps had been taken in previous generations on the
right path, without any general movement on the part of scientific
and educated men. Darwin's own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had in
his Zoonomia (1794) anticipated many of the positions of the French
Lamarck, who in 1801 began developing the views he fully elaborated
in 1815, as to the descendance of all existing species from earlier
forms. [1907] As early as 1795 Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire had begun to
suspect that all species are variants on a primordial form of life;
and at the same time (1794-95) Goethe in Germany had reached similar
convictions. [1908] That views thus reached almost simultaneously in
Germany, England, and France, at the time of the French Revolution,
should have to wait for two generations before even meeting the
full stress of battle, must be put down as one of the results of
the general reaction. Saint-Hilaire, publishing his views in 1828,
was officially overborne by the Cuvier school in France. In England,
indeed, so late as 1855, we find Sir David Brewster denouncing the
Nebular Hypothesis: "that dull and dangerous heresy of the age.... An
omnipotent arm was required to give the planets their position and
motion in space, and a presiding intelligence to assign to them the
different functions they had to perform." [1909] And Murchison the
geologist was no less emphatic against Darwinism, which he rejected
till his dying day (1871).
6. Other anticipations of Darwin's doctrine in England and elsewhere
came practically to nothing, [1910] as regarded the general opinion,
until Robert Chambers in 1844 published anonymously his Vestiges of
the Natural History of Creation, a work which found a wide audience,
incurring bitter hostility not only from the clergy but from some
specialists who, like Huxley, were later to take the evolutionist
view on Darwin's persuasion. Chambers it was that brought the
issue within general knowledge; and he improved his position in
successive editions. A hostile clerical reader, Whewell, admitted of
him, in a letter to a less hostile member of his profession, that,
"as to the degree of resemblance between the author and the French
physiological atheists, he uses reverent phrases: theirs would not be
tolerated in England"; adding: "You would be surprised to hear the
contempt and abhorrence with which Owen and Sedgwick speak of the
Vestiges." [1911] Hugh Miller, himself accused of "infidelity" for
his measure of inductive candour, held a similar tone towards men of
greater intellectual rectitude, calling the liberalizing religionists
of his day "vermin" and "reptiles," [1912] and classifying as "degraded
and lost" [1913] all who should accept the new doctrine of evolution,
which, as put by Chambers, was then coming forward to evict his own
delusions from the field of science. The young Max Müller, with the
certitude born of an entire ignorance of physical science, declared
in 1856 that the doctrine of a human evolution from lower types
"can never be maintained again," and pronounced it an "unhallowed
imputation." [1914]
7. "Contempt and abhorrence" had in fact at all times constituted
the common Christian temper towards every form of critical dissent
from the body of received opinion; and only since the contempt,
doubled with criticism, began to be in a large degree retorted on
the bigots by instructed men has a better spirit prevailed. Such a
reaction was greatly promoted by the establishment of the Darwinian
theory. It was after the above-noted preparation, popular and academic,
and after the theory of transmutation of species had been definitely
pronounced erroneous by the omniscient Whewell, [1915] that Darwin
produced (1859) his irresistible arsenal of arguments and facts, the
Origin of Species, expounding systematically the principle of Natural
Selection, suggested to him by the economic philosophy of Malthus,
and independently and contemporaneously arrived at by Dr. Alfred
Russel Wallace. The outcry was enormous; and the Church, as always,
arrayed itself violently against the new truth. Bishop Wilberforce
pointed out in the Quarterly Review that "the principle of natural
selection is absolutely incompatible with the word of God," [1916]
which was perfectly true; and at a famous meeting of the British
Association in 1860 he so travestied the doctrine as to goad Huxley
into a fierce declaration that he would rather be a descendant of
an ape than of a man who (like the Bishop) plunged into questions
with which he had no real acquaintance, only to obscure them and
distract his hearers by appeals to religious prejudice. [1917]
The mass of the clergy kept up the warfare of ignorance; but the
battle was practically won within twenty years. In France, Germany,
and the United States leading theologians had made the same suicidal
declarations, entitling all men to say that, if evolution proved
to be true, Christianity was false. Professor Luthardt, of Leipzig,
took up the same position as Bishop Wilberforce, declaring that "the
whole superstructure of personal religion is built upon the doctrine
of creation"; [1918] leading American theologians pronounced the new
doctrine atheistic; and everywhere gross vituperation eked out the
theological argument. [1919]
8. Thus the idea of a specific creation of all forms of life by an
originating deity--the conception which virtually united the deists
and Christians of the eighteenth century against the atheists--was
at length scientifically exploded. The principle of personal divine
rule or providential intervention had now been philosophically
excluded successively (1) from astronomy by the system of Newton;
(2) from the science of earth-formation by the system of Laplace
and the new geology; (3) from the science of living organisms by
the new zoology. It only needed that the deistic conception should
be further excluded from the human sciences--from anthropology, from
the philosophy of history, and from ethics--to complete, at least in
outline, the rationalization of modern thought. Not that the process
was complete in detail even as regarded zoology. Despite the plain
implications of the Origin of Species, the doctrine of the Descent of
Man (1871) came on many as a shocking surprise and evoked a new fury
of protest. The lacunæ in Darwin, further, had to be supplemented;
and much speculative power has been spent on the task by Haeckel,
without thus far establishing complete agreement. But the desperate
stand so long made on the score of the "missing link" seems to have
been finally discredited in 1894; and the Judæo-Christian doctrine
of special creation and providential design appears, even in the
imperfectly educated society of our day, to be already a lost cause.
As we have seen, however, it was not merely the clerical class that
resisted the new truth: the men of science themselves were often
disgracefully hostile; and that "class" continued to give a sufficiency
of support to clericalism. If the study of the physical sciences be no
guarantee for recognition of new truth in those sciences, still less is
it a sure preparation for right judgment in matters of sociology, or,
indeed, for a courageous attitude towards conventions. Spencer in his
earlier works used the language of deism [1920] at a time when Comte
had discarded it. It takes a rare combination of intellectual power,
moral courage, and official freedom to permit of such a directly
rationalistic propaganda as was carried on by Professor Clifford, or
even such as has been accomplished by President Andrew White in America
under the comparatively popular profession of deism. It was only in
his leisured latter years that Huxley carried on a general conflict
with orthodoxy. In middle age he frequently covered himself by attacks
on professed freethinkers; and he did more than any other man of his
time in England to conserve the Bible as a school manual by his politic
panegyric of it in that aspect at a time when bolder rationalists were
striving to get it excluded from the State schools. [1921] Other men of
science have furnished an abundance of support to orthodoxy by more or
less vaguely religious pronouncements on the problem of the universe;
so that Catholic and other obscurantist agencies are able to cite from
them many quasi-scientific phrases [1922]--taking care not to ask what
bearing their language has on the dogmas of the Churches. Physicists
who attempt to be more precise are rarely found to be orthodox; and
the moral and social science of such writers is too often a species
of charlatanism. But the whole tendency of natural science, which as
such is necessarily alien to supernaturalism, makes for a rejection of
the religious tradition; and the real leaders of science are found more
and more openly alienated from the creed of faith. We know that Darwin,
though the son and grandson of freethinkers, was brought up in ordinary
orthodoxy by his mother, and "gave up common religious belief almost
independently from his own reflections." [1923] All over the world that
has since been an increasingly common experience among scientific men.
Section 5.--The Sociological Sciences
1. A rationalistic treatment of human history had been explicit or
implicit in the whole literature of Deism; and had been attempted with
various degrees of success by Bodin, Vico, Montesquieu, Mandeville,
Hume, Smith, Voltaire, Volney, and Condorcet, as well as by lesser
men. [1924] So clear had been the classic lead to naturalistic views
of social growth in the Politics of Aristotle, and so strong the
influence of the new naturalistic spirit, that it is seen even in the
work of Goguet (1769), who sets out as biblically as Bossuet; while
in Germany Herder and Kant framed really luminous generalizations;
and a whole group of sociological writers rose up in the Scotland
of the middle and latter parts of the century. [1925] Here again
there was reaction; but in France the orthodox Guizot did much to
promote broader views than his own; Eusèbe Salverte in his essay De
la Civilisation (1813) made a highly intelligent effort towards a
general view; and Charles Comte in his Traité de Législation (1826)
made a marked scientific advance on the suggestive work of Herder. As
we have seen, the eclectic Jouffroy put human affairs in the sphere
of natural law equally with cosmic phenomena. At length, in the great
work of Auguste Comte, scientific method was applied so effectively and
concretely to the general problem that, despite his serious fallacies,
social science again took rank as a solid study.
2. In England the anti-revolution reaction was visible in this as
in other fields of thought. Hume and Gibbon had set the example
of a strictly naturalistic treatment of history; and the clerical
Robertson was faithful to their method; but Hallam makes a stand
for supernaturalism even in applying a generally scientific critical
standard. The majority of historical events he is content to let pass
as natural, even as the average man sees the hand of the doctor in
his escape from rheumatism, but the hand of God in his escape from
a railway accident. Discussing the defeat of Barbarossa at Legnano,
Hallam pronounces that it is not "material to allege ... that the
accidental destruction of Frederic's army by disease enabled the
cities of Lombardy to succeed in their resistance.... Providence
reserves to itself various means by which the bonds of the oppressor
may be broken; and it is not for human sagacity to anticipate whether
the army of a conqueror shall moulder in the unwholesome marshes of
Rome or stiffen with frost in a Russian winter." [1926]
But Hallam was nearly the last historian of distinction to vend
such nugatory oracles as either a philosophy or a religion of
history. Even the oracular Carlyle did not clearly stipulate for
"special providences" in his histories, though he leant to that
conception; and though Ranke also uses mystifying language, he writes
as a Naturalist; while Michelet is openly anti-clerical. Grote
was wholly a rationalist; the historic method of his friend and
competitor, Bishop Thirlwall, was as non-theological as his; Macaulay,
whatever might be his conformities or his bias, wrote in his most
secular spirit when exhibiting theological evolution; and George
Long indicated his rationalism again and again. [1927] It is only
in the writings of the most primitively prejudiced of those German
historians who eliminate ethics from historiography that the "God"
factor is latterly emphasized in ostensibly expert historiography.
3. All study of economics and of political history fostered such
views, and at length, in England and America, by the works of Draper
and Buckle, in the sixth and later decades of the century, the
conception of law in human history was widely if slowly popularized,
to the due indignation of the supernaturalists, who saw the last
great field of natural phenomena passing like others into the realm
of science. Draper's avowed theism partly protected him from attack;
but Buckle's straightforward attacks on creeds and on Churches brought
upon him a peculiarly fierce hostility, which was unmollified by
his incidental avowal of belief in a future life and his erratic
attacks upon unbelievers. For long this hostility told against his
sociological teaching. Spencer's Principles of Sociology nevertheless
clinched the scientific claim by taking sociological law for granted;
and the new science has continually progressed in acceptance. In the
hands of all its leading modern exponents in all countries--Lester
Ward, Giddings, Guyau, Letourneau, Tarde, Ferri, Durkheim, De Greef,
Gumplowicz, Lilienfeld, Schäffle--it has been entirely naturalistic,
though some Catholic professors continue to inject into it theological
assumptions. It cannot be said, however, that a general doctrine
of social evolution is even yet fully established. The problem is
complicated by the profoundly contentious issues of practical politics;
and in the resulting diffidence of official teachers there arises a
notable opening for obscurantism, which has been duly forthcoming. In
the first half of the century such an eminent Churchman as Dean Milman
incurred at the hands of J. H. Newman and others the charge of writing
the history of the Jews and of early Christianity in a rationalistic
spirit, presenting religion as a "human" phenomenon. [1928] Later
Churchmen, with all their preparation, have rarely gone further.
4. Two lines of scientific study, it would appear, must be thoroughly
followed up before the ground can be pronounced clear for authoritative
conclusions--those of anthropological archæology (including comparative
mythology and comparative hierology) and economic analysis. On both
lines, however, great progress has been made; and on the former in
particular the result is profoundly disintegrating to traditional
belief. The lessons of anthropology had been long available to the
modern world before they began to be scientifically applied to the
"science of religion." The issues raised by Fontenelle and De Brosses
in the eighteenth century were in practice put aside in favour of
direct debate over Christian history, dogma, and ethic; though many
of the deists dwelt on the analogies of "heathen" and "revealed"
religion. As early as 1824 Benjamin Constant made a vigorous attempt
to bring the whole phenomena under a general evolutionary conception
in his work De la Religion. [1929] But it was not till the treasure of
modern anthropology had been scientifically massed by such students
as Theodor Waitz (Anthropologie der Naturvölker, 6 Bde. 1859-71) and
Adolf Bastian (Der Mensch in der Geschichte, 3 Bde. 1860), and above
all by Sir Edward Tylor, who first lucidly elaborated the science
of it all, that the arbitrary religious conception of the psychic
evolution of humanity began to be decisively superseded.
In 1871 Tylor could still say that "to many educated minds there seems
something presumptuous and repulsive in the view that the history of
mankind is part and parcel of the history of nature; that our thoughts,
wills, and actions accord with laws as definite as those which govern
the motion of waves, the combination of acids and bases, and the growth
of plants and animals." [1930] But the old repulsion had already been
profoundly impaired by biological and social science; and Tylor's book
met with hardly any of the odium that had been lavished on Darwin and
Buckle. "It will make me for the future look on religion--a belief
in the soul, etc.--from a different point of view," wrote Darwin
[1931] to Tylor on its appearance. So thoroughly did the book press
home the fact of the evolution of religious thought from savagery
that thenceforward the science of mythology, which had never yet
risen in professional hands to the height of vision of Fontenelle,
began to be decisively adapted to the anthropological standpoint.
In the hands of Spencer [1932] all the phenomena of primitive mental
life--beliefs, practices, institutions--are considered as purely
natural data, no other point of view being recognized; and the
anthropological treatises of Lord Avebury (Sir John Lubbock) are at
the same standpoint. When at length the mass of savage usages which
lie around the beginnings of historic religion began to be closely
scanned and classified, notably in the great latter-day compilations
of Sir J. G. Frazer, what had appeared to be sacred peculiarities
of the Christian cult were seen to be but variants of universal
primitive practice. Thenceforth the problem for serious inquirers
was not whether Christianity was a supernatural revelation--the
supernatural is no longer a ground of serious discussion--but whether
the central narrative is historical in any degree whatever. The defence
is latterly conducted from a standpoint indistinguishable from the
Unitarian. But an enormous amount of anthropological research is
being carried on without any reference to such issues, the total
effect being to exclude the supernaturalist premiss from the study
of religion as completely as from that of astronomy.
Section 6.--Philosophy and Ethics
1. The philosophy of Kant, while giving the theological class a new
apparatus of defence as against common-sense freethinking, forced none
the less on theistic philosophy a great advance from the orthodox
positions. Thus his immediate successors, Fichte and Schelling,
produced systems of which one was loudly denounced as atheistic, and
the other as pantheistic, [1933] despite its dualism. Neither seems
to have had much influence on concrete religious opinion outside the
universities; [1934] and when Schelling in old age turned Catholic
obscurantist, the gain to clericalism was not great. Hegel in turn
loosely wrought out a system of which the great merit is to substitute
the conception of existence as relation for the nihilistic idealism
of Fichte and the unsolved dualism of Schelling. This system he
latterly adapted to practical exigencies [1935] by formulating, as
Kant had recently done, a philosophic Trinity and hardily defining
Christianity as "Absolute Religion" in comparison with the various
forms of "Natural Religion." Nevertheless, he counted in a great
degree as a disintegrating influence, and was in a very practical
way anti-Christian. More explicitly than Kant, he admitted that the
Aufklärung, the freethinking movement of the past generation, had
made good its case so far as it went; and though, by the admission
of admirers, he took for granted without justification that it had
carried its point with the world at large, [1936] he was chronically
at strife with the theologians as such, charging them on the one hand
with deserting the dogmas which he re-stated, [1937] and on the other
declaring that the common run of them "know as little of God as a
blind man sees of a painting, even though he handles the frame." [1938]
Of the belief in miracles he was simply contemptuous. "Whether at the
marriage of Cana the guests got a little more wine or a little less is
a matter of absolutely no importance; nor is it any more essential to
demand whether the man with the withered hand was healed; for millions
of men go about with withered and crippled limbs, whose limbs no man
heals." On the story of the marks made for the information of the
angel on the Hebrew houses at the Passover he asks: "Would the angel
not have known them without these marks?", adding: "This faith has
no real interest for Spirit." [1939] Such writing, from the orthodox
point of view, was not compensated for by a philosophy of Christianity
which denaturalized its dogmas, and a presentment of the God-idea and
of moral law which made religion alternately a phase of philosophy
and a form of political utilitarianism.
As to the impression made by Hegel on most Christians, compare
Hagenbach, German Rationalism (Eng. tr. of Kirchengeschichte),
pp. 364-69; Renan, Études d'histoire religieuse, 5e édit. p. 406;
J. D. Morell, Histor. and Crit. View of the Spec. Philos. of
Europe in the Nineteenth Century, 2nd ed. 1847, ii, 189-91;
Robins, A Defence of the Faith, 1862, pt. i, pp. 135-41, 176;
Eschenmenger, Die Hegel'sche Religions-philosophie, 1834; quoted
in Beard's Voices of the Church, p. 8; Leo, Die Hegelingen,
1838; and Reinhard, Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Philosophie,
2nd ed. 1839, pp. 753-54--also cited by Beard, pp. 9-12.
The gist of Hegel's rehabilitation of Christianity is well
set forth by Prof. A. Seth Pringle-Pattison in his essay on
The Philosophy of Religion in Kant and Hegel (rep. in The
Philos. Radicals and other Essays, 1907), ch. iii. Considered
in connection with his demonstration that in politics the
Prussian State was the ideal government, it is seen to be even
more of an arbitrary and unveridical accommodation to the social
environment than Kant's Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen
Vernunft. It approximates intellectually to the process by which
the neo-Platonists and other eclectics of the classic decadence
found a semblance of allegorical or symbolical justification for
every item in the old theology. Nothing could be more false to
the spirit of Hegel's general philosophy than the representing
of Christianity as a culmination or "ultimate" of all religion;
and nothing, in fact, was more readily seen by his contemporaries.
We who look back, however, may take a more lenient view of Hegel's
process of adaptation than was taken in the next generation
by Haym, who, in his Hegel und seine Zeit (1857), presented
him as always following the prevailing fashion in thought, and
lending himself as the tool of reactionary government. Hegel's
officialism was in the main probably wholehearted. Even as Kant
felt driven to do something for social conservation at the outbreak
of the French Revolution, and Fichte to shape for his country
the sinister ideal of The Closed Industrial State, so Hegel,
after seeing Prussia shaken to its foundations at the battle of
Jena and being turned out of his own house by the looting French
soldiers, was very naturally impelled to support the existing
State by quasi-philosophico-religious considerations. It was an
abandonment of the true function of philosophy; but it may have
been done in all good faith. An intense political conservatism
was equally marked in Strauss, who dreaded "demagogy," and in
Schopenhauer, who left his fortune to the fund for the widows and
families of soldiers killed or injured in the revolutionary strifes
of 1848. It came in their case from the same source--an alarmed
memory of social convulsion. The fact remains that Hegel had no
real part in the State religion which he crowned with formulas.
Not only does Hegel's conception of the Absolute make deity simply
the eternal process of the universe, and the divine consciousness
indistinguishable from the total consciousness of mankind, [1940]
but his abstractions lend themselves equally to all creeds; [1941]
and some of the most revolutionary of the succeeding movements of
German thought--as those of Vatke, Strauss, [1942] Feuerbach, and
Marx--professedly founded on him. It is certainly a striking testimony
to the influence of Hegel that five such powerful innovators as Vatke
[1943] in Old-Testament, Bruno Bauer and Strauss in New-Testament
criticism, Feuerbach in the philosophy of religion, and Marx in social
philosophy, should at first fly the Hegelian flag. It can hardly have
been that Hegel's formulas sufficed to generate the criticism they
all brought to bear upon their subject matter; rather we must suppose
that their naturally powerful minds were attracted by the critical
and reconstructive aspects of his doctrine; but the philosophy which
stimulated them must have had great affinities for revolution, as
well as for all forms of the idea of evolution.
2. In respect of his formal championship of Christianity Hegel's
method, arbitrary even for him, appealed neither to the orthodox nor,
with a few exceptions, [1944] to his own disciples, some of whom,
as Ruge, at length definitely renounced Christianity. [1945] In 1854
Heine told his French readers that there were in Germany "fanatical
monks of atheism" who would willingly burn Voltaire as a besotted
deist; [1946] and Heine himself, in his last years of suffering
and of revived poetic religiosity, could see in Hegel's system only
atheism. Bruno Bauer at first opposed Strauss, and afterwards went
even further than he, professing Hegelianism all the while. [1947]
Schopenhauer and Hartmann in turn being even less sustaining to
orthodoxy, and later orthodox systems failing to impress, there came
in due course the cry of "Back to Kant," where at least orthodoxy
had some formal semblance of sanction.
Hartmann's work on The Self-Decomposition of Christianity [1948]
is a stringent exposure of the unreality of what passed for
"liberal Christianity" in Germany a generation ago, and an appeal
for a "new concrete religion" of monism or pantheism as a bulwark
against Ultramontanism. On this monism, however, Hartmann insisted
on grounding his pessimism; and with this pessimistic pantheism he
hoped to outbid Catholicism against the "irreligious" Strauss and the
liberal Christians--in his view no less irreligious. It does not seem
to have had much acceptance. On the whole, the effect of all German
philosophy has probably been to make for the general discredit of
theistic thinking, the surviving forms of Hegelianism being little
propitious to current religion. And though Schopenhauer and Nietzsche
can hardly be said to carry on the task of philosophy either in spirit
or in effect, yet the rapid intensification of hostility to current
religion which their writings in particular manifest [1949] must be
admitted to stand for a deep revolt against the Kantian compromise. And
this revolt was bound to come about. The truth-shunning tactic of Kant,
Fichte, and Hegel--aiming at the final discrediting of the Aufklärung
as a force that had done its work, and could find no more to do,
however it be explained and excused--was a mere expression of their
own final lack of scientific instinct. It is hard to believe that
thinkers who had perceived and asserted the fact of progression in
religion could suppose that true philosophy consisted in putting a
stop on à priori grounds to the historical analysis, and setting up an
"ultimate" of philosophic theory. The straightforward investigators,
seeking simply for truth, have passed on to posterity a spirit
which, correcting their inevitable errors, reaches a far deeper
and wider comprehension of religious evolution and psychosis than
could be reached by the verbalizing methods of the self-satisfied
and self-sufficing metaphysicians. These, so far as they prevailed,
did but delay the advance of real knowledge. Their work, in fact,
was fatally shaped by the general reaction against the Revolution,
which in their case took a quasi-philosophic form, while in France
and England it worked out as a crude return to clerical and political
authoritarianism. [1950]
3. From the collisions of philosophic systems in Germany there
emerged two great practical freethinking forces, the teachings of
Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-76), who was obliged to give up his lecturing
at Erlangen in 1830 after the issue of his Thoughts upon Death and
Immortality, and Ludwig Büchner, who was deprived of his chair of
clinic at Tübingen in 1855 for his Force and Matter. The former,
originally a Hegelian, expressly broke away from his master,
declaring that, whereas Hegel belonged to the "Old Testament"
of modern philosophy, he himself would set forth the New, wherein
Hegel's fundamentally incoherent treatment of deity (as the total
process of things on the one hand, and an objective personality
on the other) should be cured. [1951] Feuerbach accordingly, in
his Essence of Christianity (1841) and Essence of Religion (1851),
supplied one of the first adequate modern statements of the positively
rationalistic position as against Christianity and theism, in terms
of philosophic as well as historical insight--a statement to which
there is no characteristically modern answer save in terms of the
refined sentimentalism of the youthful Renan, [1952] fundamentally
averse alike to scientific precision and to intellectual consistency.
Feuerbach's special service consists in the rebuttal of the metaphysic
in which religion had chronically taken refuge from the straightforward
criticism of freethinkers, in itself admittedly unanswerable. They
had shown many times over its historic falsity, its moral perversity,
and its philosophic self-contradiction; and the more astute official
defenders, leaving to the less competent the task of re-vindicating
miracles and prophecy and defending the indefensible, proceeded
to shroud the particular defeat in a pseudo-philosophic process
which claimed for all religion alike an indestructible inner truth,
in the light of which the instinctive believer could again make
shift to affirm his discredited credences. It was this process which
Feuerbach exploded, for all who cared to read him. He had gone through
it. Intensely religious in his youth, he had found in the teaching of
Hegel an attractive philosophic garb for his intuitional thought. But a
wider concern than Hegel's for actual knowledge, and for the knowledge
of the actual, moved him to say to his teacher, on leaving: "Two years
have I attached myself to you; two years have I completely devoted to
your philosophy. Now I feel the necessity of starting in the directly
opposite way: I am going to study anatomy." [1953] It may have been
that what saved him from the Hegelian fate of turning to the end the
squirrel-cage of conformist philosophy was the personal experience
which put him in fixed antagonism to the governmental forces that
Hegel was moved to serve. The hostility evoked by his Thoughts on
Death and Immortality completed his alienation from the official
side of things, and left him to the life of a devoted truth-seeker--a
career as rare in Germany as elsewhere. The upshot was that Feuerbach,
in the words of Strauss, "broke the double yoke in which, under Hegel,
philosophy and theology still went." [1954]
For the task he undertook he had consummately equipped himself. In
a series of four volumes (History of Modern Philosophy from Bacon to
Spinoza, 1833; Exposition and Criticism of the Leibnitzian Philosophy,
1837; Pierre Bayle, 1838; On Philosophy and Christianity, 1839)
he explored the field of philosophy, and re-studied theology in
the light of moral and historical criticism, before he produced
his masterpiece, Das Wesen des Christenthums. Here the tactic of
Hegel is turned irresistibly on the Hegelian defence; and religion,
defiantly declared by Hegel to be an affair of self-consciousness,
[1955] is shown to be in very truth nothing else. "Such as are a
man's thoughts and dispositions, such is his God; so much worth as
a man has, so much and no more has his God. Consciousness of God is
self-consciousness; knowledge of God is self-knowledge." [1956] This
of course is openly what Hegelian theism is in effect--philosophic
atheism; and though Feuerbach at times disclaimed the term, he declares
in his preface that "atheism, at least in the sense of this work, is
the secret of religion itself; that religion itself ... in its heart,
in its essence, believes in nothing else than the truth and divinity of
human nature." In the preliminary section on The Essence of Religion
he makes his position clear once for all: "A God who has abstract
predicates has also an abstract existence.... Not the attribute of
the divinity, but the divineness or deity of the attribute, is the
first true Divine Being. Thus what theology and philosophy have held
to be God, the Absolute, the Infinite, is not God; but that which they
have held not to be God, is God--namely the attribute, the quality,
whatever has reality. Hence, he alone is the true atheist to whom the
predicates of the Divine Being--for example, love, wisdom, justice--are
nothing; not he to whom merely the subject of these predicates is
nothing.... These have an intrinsic, independent reality; they force
their recognition upon man by their very nature; they are self-evident
truths to him; they approve, they attest themselves.... The idea of
God is dependent on the idea of justice, of benevolence...."
This is obviously the answer to Baur, who, after paying tribute
to the personality of Feuerbach, and presenting a tolerably fair
summary of his critical philosophy, can find no answer to it save
the inept protest that it is one-sided in respect of its reduction
of religion to the subjective (the very course insisted on by a
hundred defenders!), that it favours the communistic and other extreme
tendencies of the time, and that it brings everything "under the rude
rule of egoism." [1957] Here a philosophic and an aspersive meaning
are furtively combined in one word. The scientific subjectivism
of Feuerbach's analysis of religion is no more a vindication or
acceptance of "rude egoism" than is the Christian formula of "God's
will" a condonation of murder. The restraint of egoism by altruism
lies in human character and polity alike for the rationalist and
for the irrationalist, as Baur must have known well enough after his
long survey of Church history. His really contemptible escape from
Feuerbach's criticism, under cover of alternate cries of "Communism"
and "egoism"--a self-stultification which needs no comment--is simply
one more illustration of the fashion in which, since the time of Kant,
philosophy in Germany as elsewhere has been chronically demoralized
by resort to non-philosophical tests. "Max Stirner" (pen-name of
Johann Caspar Schmidt, 1806-1856) carried the philosophic "egoism" of
Feuerbach about as far in words as might be; but his work on the Ego
(Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum, 1845) remains an ethical curiosity
rather than a force. [1958]
4. Arnold Ruge (1802-1880), who was of the same philosophical school,
[1959] gave his life to a disinterested propaganda of democracy and
light; and if in 1870 he capitulated to the new Empire, and thereby won
a small pension for the two last years of his life, he was but going
the way of many another veteran, dazzled in his old age by very old
fires. His Addresses on Religion, its Rise and Fall: to the educated
among its Reverers [1960] (1869) is a lucid and powerful performance,
proceeding from a mythological analysis of religion to a cordial
plea for rationalism in all things. The charge of "materialism"
was for him no bugbear. "Truly," he writes, "we are not without the
earth and the solar system, not without the plants and the animals,
not without head. But whoever has head enough to understand science
and its conquests in the field of nature and of mind (Geist) knows
also that the material world rests in the immaterial, moves in it,
and is by it animated, freed, and ensouled; that soul and idea are
incarnate in Nature, but that also logic, idea, spirit, and science
free themselves out of Nature, become abstracted and as immaterial
Power erect their own realm, the realm of spirit in State, science,
and art." [1961]
5. On Feuerbach's Essence of Religion followed the resounding explosion
of Büchner's Force and Matter (1855), which in large measure, but
with much greater mastery of scientific detail, does for the plain
man of his century what d'Holbach in his chief work sought to do
for his day. Constantly vilified, even in the name of philosophy,
in the exact tone and spirit of animal irritation which marks the
religious vituperation of all forms of rationalism in previous ages;
and constantly misrepresented as professing to explain an infinite
universe when it does but show the hollowness of all supernaturalist
explanations, [1962] the book steadily holds its ground as a manual of
anti-mysticism. [1963] Between them, Feuerbach and Büchner may be said
to have framed for their age an atheistic "System of Nature," concrete
and abstract, without falling into the old error of substituting one
apriorism for another. Whosoever endorses Baur's protest against the
"one-sidedness" of Feuerbach, who treats of religion on its chosen
ground of self-consciousness, has but to turn to Büchner's study of
the objective world and see whether his cause fares any better.
6. In France the course of thought had been hardly less
revolutionary. Philosophy, like everything else, had been affected
by the legitimist restoration; and between Victor Cousin and the
other "classic philosophers" of the first third of the century
orthodoxy was nominally reinstated. Yet even among these there was
no firm coherence. Maine de Biran, one of the shrinking spirits who
passed gradually into an intolerant authoritarianism from fear of
the perpetual pressures of reason, latterly declared (1821) that a
philosophy which ascribed to deity only infinite thought or supreme
intelligence, eliminating volition and love, was pure atheism;
and this pronouncement struck at the philosophy of Cousin. Nor
was this species of orthodoxy any more successful than the furious
irrationalism of Joseph De Maistre in setting up a philosophic form of
faith, as distinct from the cult of rhetoric and sentiment founded by
Chateaubriand. Cousin was deeply distrusted by those who knew him, and
at the height of his popularity he was contemned by the more competent
minds around him, such as Sainte-Beuve, Comte, and Edgar Quinet. [1964]
The latter thinker himself counted for a measure of rationalism, though
he argued for theism, and undertook to make good the historicity of
Jesus against those who challenged it. For the rest, even among the
ostensibly conservative and official philosophers, Théodore Jouffroy,
an eclectic, who held the chair of moral philosophy in the Faculté
des Lettres at Paris, was at heart an unbeliever from his youth up,
[1965] and even in his guarded writings was far from satisfying the
orthodox. "God," he wrote, [1966] "interposes as little in the regular
development of humanity as in the course of the solar system." He
added a fatalistic theorem of divine predetermination, which he
verbally salved in the usual way by saying that predetermination
presupposed individual liberty. Eclecticism thus fell, as usual,
between two stools; but it was not orthodoxy that would gain. On
another line Jouffroy openly bantered the authoritarians on their
appeal to a popular judgment which they declared to be incapable of
pronouncing on religious questions. [1967]
7. On retrospect, the whole official French philosophy of the period,
however conservative in profession, is found to have been at bottom
rationalistic, and only superficially friendly to faith. The Abbé
Felice de Lamennais declaimed warmly against L'indifférence en
matière de religion (4 vols. 1818-24), resorting to the old Catholic
device, first employed by Montaigne, of turning Pyrrhonism against
unbelief. Having ostensibly discredited the authority of the senses and
the reason (by which he was to be read and understood), he proceeded
in the customary way to set up the ancient standard of the consensus
universalis, the authority of the majority, the least reflective and
the most fallacious. This he sought to elevate into a kind of corporate
wisdom, superior to all individual judgment; and he marched straight
into the countersense of claiming the pagan consensus as a confirmation
of religion in general, while arguing for a religion which claimed to
put aside paganism as error. The final logical content of the thesis
was the inanity that the majority for the time being must be right.
Damiron, writing his Essai sur l'histoire de la philosophie en
France au XIXe Siècle in 1828, replies in a fashion more amiable than
reassuring, commenting on the "strange skepticism" of Lamennais as
to the human reason. [1968] For himself, he takes up the parable of
Lessing, and declares that where Lessing spoke doubtfully, men had
now reached conviction. It was no longer a question of whether, but of
when, religion was to be recast in terms of fuller intelligence. "In
this religious regeneration we shall be to the Christians what the
Christians were to the Jews, and the Jews to the patriarchs: we shall
be Christians and something more." The theologian of the future will
be half-physicist, half-philosopher. "We shall study God through
nature and through men; and a new Messiah will not be necessary
to teach us miraculously what we can learn of ourselves and by our
natural lights." Christianity has been a useful discipline; but "our
education is so advanced that henceforth we can be our own teachers;
and, having no need of an extraneous inspiration, we draw faith from
science." [1969] "Prayer is good, doubtless," but it "has only a
mysterious, uncertain, remote action on our environment." [1970] All
this under Louis Philippe, from a professor at the École Normale. Not
to this day has official academic philosophy in Britain ventured
to go so far. In France the brains were never out, even under
the Restoration. Lamennais himself gave the proof. His employment
of skepticism as an aid to faith had been, like Montaigne's, the
expression of a temperament slow to reach rational positions, but
surely driven thither. As a boy of twelve, when a priest sought to
prepare him for communion, he had shown such abnormal incredulity
that the priest gave him up; and later he read omnivorously among
the deists of the eighteenth century, Rousseau attracting him in
particular. Later he passed through a religious crisis, slowly covering
ground which others traverse early. He did not become a communicant
till he was twenty-two; he entered the seminary only at twenty-seven;
and he was ordained only when he was nearly thirty-two.
Yet he had experienced much. Already in 1808 his Réflexions sur
l'état de l'église had been suppressed by Napoleon's police; in 1814
he had written, along with his brother, in whose seminary he taught
mathematics, a treatise maintaining the papal claims; and in the
Hundred Days of 1815 he took flight to London. His mind was always at
work. His Essay on Indifference expressed his need of a conviction;
with unbelief he could reckon and sympathize; with indifference
he could not; but when the indifference was by his own account the
result of reflective unbelief he treated it in the same fashion as
the spontaneous form. At bottom, his quarrel was with reason. Yet
the very element in his mind which prompted his anti-rational polemic
was ratiocinative; and as he slowly reached clearness of thought he
came more and more into conflict with Catholicism. It was all very
well to flout the individual reason in the name of the universal;
but to give mankind a total infallibility was not the way to satisfy
a pope or a Church which claimed a monopoly of the gift. In 1824
he was well received by the pope; but when in 1830 he began to write
Liberal articles in the journal L'Avenir, in which he collaborated with
Lacordaire, the Comte de Montalembert, and other neo-Catholics, offence
was quickly taken, and the journal was soon suspended. Lamennais
and his disciples Lacordaire and Montalembert went to Rome to plead
their cause, but were coldly received; and on their way home in 1832
received at Munich a missive of severe reprimand.
Rendering formal obedience, Lamennais retired, disillusioned, with
his friends to his and his brother's estate in Brittany, and began
his process of intellectual severance. In January, 1833, he performed
mass, and at this stage he held by his artificial distinction between
the spheres of faith and reason. In May of that year he declared his
determination to place himself "as a writer outside of the Church and
Catholicism," declaring that "outside of Catholicism, outside faith,
there is reason; outside of the Church there is humanity; I place
myself (je me renferme) in this sphere." [1971] Still he claimed to
be simple fidèle en religion, and to combine "fidelity in obedience
with liberty in science." [1972] In January of 1834, however, he had
ceased to perform any clerical function; and his Paroles d'un Croyant,
published in that year, stand for a faith which the Church reckoned
as infidelity.
Lacordaire, separating from his insubordinate colleague, published
an Examen de la philosophie de M. de Lamennais, in which the true
papal standpoint was duly taken. Thenceforth Lamennais was an
Ishmaelite. Feeling as strongly in politics as in everything else,
he was infuriated by the brutal suppression of the Polish rising
in 1831-32; and the government of Louis Philippe pleased him as
little as that of Charles X had done. In 1841 he was sentenced to
a year's imprisonment for his brochure Le pays et le gouvernement
(1840). Shortly before his death in 1854 he claimed that he had never
changed: "I have gone on, that is all." But he had in effect changed
from a Catholic to a pantheist; [1973] and in 1848, as a member of
the National Assembly, he more than once startled his colleagues by
"an affectation of impiety." [1974] On his deathbed he refused to
receive the curé of the parish, and by his own wish he was buried
without any religious ceremony, in the fosse commune of the poor and
with no cross on his grave.
Such a type does not very clearly belong to rationalism; and Lamennais
never enrolled himself save negatively under that flag. Always
emotional and impulsive, he had in his period of aggressive fervour
as a Churchman played a rather sinister part in the matter of
the temporary insanity of Auguste Comte, lending himself to the
unscrupulous tactics of the philosopher's mother, who did not stick
at libelling her son's wife in order to get him put under clerical
control. [1975] It was perhaps well for him that he was forced out
of the Church; for his love of liberty was too subjective to have
qualified him for a wise use of power. But the spectacle of such
a temperament forced into antagonism with the Church on moral and
social grounds could not but stimulate anti-clericalism in France,
whatever his philosophy may have done to promote rational thinking.
8. The most energetic and characteristic philosophy produced in the new
France was that of Auguste Comte, which as set forth in the Cours de
Philosophie Positive (1830-42) practically reaffirmed while it recast
and supplemented the essentials of the anti-theological rationalism
of the previous age, and in that sense rebuilt French positivism,
giving that new name to the naturalistic principle. Though Comte's
direct following was never large, it is significant that soon after the
completion of his Cours we find Saisset lamenting that the war between
the clergy and the philosophers, "suspended by the great political
commotion of 1830," had been "revived with a new energy." [1976]
The later effort of Comte to frame a politico-ecclesiastical system
never succeeded beyond the formation of a politically powerless sect;
and the attempt to prove its consistency with his philosophic system
by claiming that from the first he had harboured a plan of social
regulation [1977] is beside the case. A man's way of thinking may
involve intellectual contradictions all through his life; and Comte's
did. Positivism in the scientific sense cannot be committed to any
one man's scheme for regulating society and conserving "cultus"; and
Comte's was merely one of the many evoked in France by the memory
of an age of revolutions. It belongs, indeed, to the unscientific
and unphilosophic side of his mind, the craving for authority and the
temper of ascendency, which connect with his admiration of the medieval
Church. Himself philosophically an atheist, he condemned atheists
because they mostly contemned his passion for regimentation. By
reason of this idiosyncrasy and of the habitually dictatorial tone
of his doctrine, he has made his converts latterly more from the
religious than from the freethinking ranks. But both in France and
in England his philosophy tinged all the new thought of his time, his
leading English adherents in particular being among the most esteemed
publicists of the day. Above all, he introduced the conception of a
"science of society" where hitherto there had ruled the haziest forms
of "providentialism." In France the general effect of the rationalistic
movement had been such that when Taine, under the Third Empire,
assailed the whole "classic" school in his Philosophes classiques
(1857), his success was at once generally recognized, and a non-Comtist
positivism was thenceforth the ruling philosophy. The same thing has
happened in Italy, where quite a number of university professors are
explicitly positivist in their philosophic teaching. [1978]
9. In Britain, where abstract philosophy after Berkeley had been mainly
left to Hume and the Scotch thinkers who opposed him, metaphysics
was for a generation practically overriden by the moral and social
sciences; Hartley's Christian Materialism making small headway
as formulated by him, though it was followed up by the Unitarian
Priestley. The reaction against the Revolution, indeed, seems to have
evicted everything in the nature of active philosophic thought from
the universities in the first decade of the nineteenth century; at
Oxford it was taught in a merely traditionary fashion, in lamentable
contrast to what was going on in Germany; [1979] and in Scotland in
the 'thirties things had fallen to a similar level. [1980] It was over
practical issues that new thought germinated in England. The proof of
the change wrought in the direction of native thought is seen in the
personalities of the men who, in the teeth of the reaction, applied
rationalistic method to ethics and psychology. Bentham and James
Mill were in their kindred fields among the most convinced and active
freethinkers of their day, the former attacking both clericalism and
orthodoxy; [1981] while the latter, no less pronounced in his private
opinions, more cautiously built up a rigorously naturalistic psychology
in his Analysis of the Human Mind (1829). Bentham's utilitarianism
was so essentially anti-Christian that he could hardly have been
more disliked by discerning theists if he had avowed his share in
the authorship of the atheistic Analysis of the Influence of Natural
Religion, which, elaborated from his manuscript by no less a thinker
than George Grote, was published in 1822. [1982] Pseudonymous as
that essay is, it seeks to guard against the risk of prosecution
by the elaborate stipulation that what it discusses is always the
influence of natural religion on life, revealed religion being another
matter. But this is of course the merest stratagem, the whole drift of
the book being a criticism of the effects of the current religion on
contemporary society. It greatly influenced J. S. Mill, whose essay
on The Utility of Religion echoes its beginning; and if it had been
a little less drab in style it might have influenced many more.
But Bentham's ostensible restriction of his logic to practical problems
of law and morals secured him a wider influence than was wielded by any
of the higher publicists of his day. The whole tendency of his school
was intensely rationalistic; and it indirectly affected all thought
by its treatment of economics, which from Hume and Smith onwards had
been practically divorced from theology. Even clerical economists,
such as Malthus and Chalmers, alike orthodox in religion, furthered
naturalism in philosophy in spite of themselves by their insistence
on the law of population, which is the negation of divine benevolence
as popularly conceived. A not unnatural result was a religious fear
of all reasoning whatever, and a disparagement of the very faculty
of reason. This, however, was sharply resisted by the more cultured
champions of orthodoxy, [1983] to the great advantage of critical
discussion.
10. When English metaphysical philosophy revived with Sir William
Hamilton, [1984] it was on the lines of a dialectical resistance
to the pantheism of Germany, in the interests of faith; though
Hamilton's dogmatic views were always doubtful. [1985] Admirably
learned, and adroit in metaphysical fence, he always grounded his
theism on the alleged "needs of our moral nature"--a declaration of
philosophical bankruptcy. The vital issue was brought to the front
after his death in the Bampton Lectures (1858) of his supporter
Dean Mansel; and between them they gave the decisive proof that the
orthodox cause had been philosophically lost while being socially
won, since their theism emphasized in the strongest way the negative
criticism of Kant, leaving deity void of all philosophically cognizable
qualities. Hamilton and Mansel alike have received severe treatment
at the hands of Mill and others for the calculated irrationalism
and the consequent immoralism of their doctrine, which insisted on
attributing moral bias to an admittedly Unknowable Absolute, and on
standing for Christian mysteries on the skeptical ground that reason
is an imperfect instrument, and that our moral faculties and feelings
"demand" the traditional beliefs. But they did exactly what was
needed to force rationalism upon open and able minds. It is indeed
astonishing to find so constantly repeated by trained reasoners the
old religious blunder of reasoning from the inadequacy of reason to
the need for faith. The disputant says in effect: "Our reason is not
to be trusted; let us then on that score rationally decide to believe
what is handed down to us": for if the argument is not a process of
reasoning it is nothing; and if it is to stand, it is an assertion
of the validity it denies. Evidently the number of minds capable of
such self-stultification is great; but among minds at once honest
and competent the number capable of detecting the absurdity must be
considerable; and the invariable result of its use down to our own
time is to multiply unbelievers in the creed so absurdly defended.
It is difficult to free Mansel from the charge of seeking to confuse
and bewilder; but mere contact with the processes of reasoning in
his Bampton Lectures is almost refreshing after much acquaintance
with the see-saw of vituperation and platitude which up to that time
mostly passed muster for defence of religion in nineteenth-century
England. He made for a revival of intellectual life. And he suffered
enough at the hands of his co-religionists, including F. D. Maurice,
to set up something like compassion in the mind of the retrospective
rationalist. Accused of having adopted "the absolute and infinite,
as defined after the leaders of German metaphysics," as a "synonym
for the true and living God," he protested that he had done
"exactly the reverse. I assert that the absolute and infinite,
as defined in the German metaphysics, and in all other metaphysics
with which I am acquainted, is a notion which destroys itself by
its own contradictions. I believe also that God is, in some manner
incomprehensible by me, both absolute and infinite; and that those
attributes exist in Him without any repugnance or contradiction at
all. Hence I maintain throughout that the infinite of philosophy is
not the true infinite." [1986] Charged further with borrowing without
acknowledgment from Newman, the Dean was reduced to crediting Newman
with "transcendent gifts" while claiming to have read almost nothing
by him, [1987] and winding up with a quotation from Newman inviting
men to seek solace from the sense of nescience in blind belief.
It was said of Hamilton that, "having scratched his eyes out in the
bush of reason, he scratched them in again in the bush of faith";
and when that could obviously be said also of his reverend pupil,
the philosophic tide was clearly on the turn. Within two years of the
delivery of Mansel's lectures his and Hamilton's philosophic positions
were being confidently employed as an open and avowed basis for the
naturalistic First Principles (1860-62) of Herbert Spencer, wherein,
with an unfortunate laxity of metaphysic on the author's own part,
and a no less unfortunate lack of consistency as regards the criticism
of religious and anti-religious positions, [1988] the new cosmic
conceptions are unified in a masterly conception of evolution as a
universal law. This service, the rendering of which was quite beyond
the capacity of the multitude of Spencer's metaphysical critics, marks
him as one of the great influences of his age. Strictly, the book is a
"System of Nature" rather than a philosophy in the sense of a study
of the grounds and limitations of knowledge; that is to say, it is on
the former ground alone that it is coherent and original. But its very
imperfections on the other side have probably promoted its reception
among minds already shaken in theology by the progress of concrete
science; while at the same time such imperfections give a hostile
foothold to the revived forms of theism. In any case, the "agnostic"
foundation supplied by the despairing dialectic of Hamilton and Mansel
has always constituted the most effective part of the Spencerian case.
11. The effect of the ethical pressure of the deistic attack on
the intelligence of educated Christians was fully seen even within
the Anglican Church before the middle of the century. The unstable
Coleridge, who had gone round the whole compass of opinion [1989] when
he began to wield an influence over the more sensitive of the younger
Churchmen, was strenuous in a formal affirmation of the doctrine of
the Trinity, but no less anxious to modify the doctrine of Atonement
on which the conception of the Trinity was historically founded. In
the hands of Maurice the doctrine of sacrifice became one of example to
the end of subjective regeneration of the sinner. This view, which was
developed by John the Scot--perhaps from hints in Origen [1990]--and
again by Bernardino Ochino, [1991] is specially associated with the
teaching of Coleridge; but it was quite independently held in England
before him by the Anglican Dr. Parr (1747-1825), who appears to have
been heterodox upon most points in the orthodox creed, [1992] and who,
like Servetus and Coleridge and Hegel, held by a modal as against a
"personal" Trinity. The advance in ethical sensitiveness which had
latterly marked English thought, and which may perhaps be traced in
equal degrees to the influence of Shelley and to that of Bentham,
counted for much in this shifting of Christian ground. The doctrine of
salvation by faith was by many felt to be morally indefensible. Such
Unitarian accommodations presumably reconciled to Christianity and
the Church many who would otherwise have abandoned them; and the only
orthodox rebuttal seems to have been the old and dangerous resort to
the Butlerian argument, to the effect that the God of Nature shows no
such benign fatherliness as the anti-sacrificial school ascribe to
him. [1993] This could only serve to emphasize the moral bankruptcy
of Butler's philosophy, to which Mansel, in an astonishing passage
of his Bampton Lectures, [1994] had shown himself incredibly blind.
The same pressure of moral argument was doubtless potent in the
development of "Socinian" or other rationalistic views in the
Protestant Churches of Germany, Holland, Hungary, Switzerland, and
France in the first half of the century. Such development had gone
so far that by the middle of the century the Churches in question
were, to the eye of an English evangelical champion, predominantly
rationalistic, and in that sense "infidel." [1995] Reactions have been
claimed before and since; but in our own age there is little to show
for them. In the United States, again, the ethical element probably
predominated in the recoil of Emerson from Christian orthodoxy even of
the Unitarian stamp, as well as in the heresy of Theodore Parker, whose
aversion to the theistic ethic of Jonathan Edwards was so strong as
to make him blind to the reasoning power of that stringent Calvinist.
12. A powerful and wholesome stimulus was given to English thought
throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century by the many-sided
influence of John Stuart Mill, who, beginning by a brilliant System
of Logic (1843), which he followed up with a less durable exposition
of the Principles of Political Economy (1848), became through his
shorter works On Liberty and on various political problems one of
the most popular of the serious writers of his age. It was not till
the posthumous issue of his Autobiography and his Three Essays on
Religion (1874) that many of his readers realized how complete was
his alienation from the current religion, from his childhood up. In
his Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy (1865), indeed,
he had indignantly repudiated the worship of an unintelligibly good
God; but he had there seemed to take for granted the God-idea; and
save in inconclusive passages in the Liberty (1859) he had indicated
no rejection of Christianity. But though the Liberty was praised by
Kingsley and contemned by Carlyle, it made for freethinking no less
than for tolerance; and his whole life's work made for reason. "The
saint of rationalism" was Gladstone's [1996] account of him as a
parliamentarian. His posthumous presentment to the world of the strange
conception of a limited-liability God, the victim of circumstances--a
theorem which meets neither the demand for a theistic explanation of
the universe nor the worshipper's craving for support--sets up some
wonder as to his philosophy; but was probably as disintegrative of
orthodoxy as a more philosophical performance would have been.
Section 7.--Modern Jewry
In the culture-life of the dispersed Jews, in the modern period,
there is probably as much variety of credence in regard to religion
as occurs in the life of Christendom so called. Such names as those
of Spinoza, Jacobi, Moses Mendelssohn, Heine, and Karl Marx tell
sufficiently of Jewish service to freethought; and each one of these
must have had many disciples of his own race. Deism among the educated
Jews of Germany in the eighteenth century was probably common. [1997]
The famous Rabbi Elijah of Wilna (d. 1797), entitled the Gaon, "the
great one," set up a movement of relatively rationalistic pietism
that led to the establishment in 1803 of a Rabbinical college at
Walosin, which has flourished ever since, and had in 1888 no fewer
than 400 students, among whose successors there goes on a certain
amount of independent study. [1998] In the freer world outside
critical thought has asserted itself within the pale of orthodox
Judaism; witness such a writer as Nachman Krochmal (1785-1840),
whose posthumous Guide to the Perplexed of the Time [1999] (1851),
though not a scientific work, is ethically and philosophically in
advance of the orthodox Judaism of its age. Of Krochmal it has been
said that he "was inspired in his work by the study of Hegel, just
as Maimonides had been by the study of Aristotle." [2000] The result
is only a liberalizing of Jewish orthodoxy in the light of historic
study, [2001] such as went on among Christians in the same period;
but it is thus a stepping-stone to further science.
To-day educated Jewry is divided in somewhat the same proportions
as Christendom into absolute rationalists and liberal and fanatical
believers; and representatives of all three types, of different
social grades, may be found among the Zionists, whose movement for the
acquisition of a new racial home has attracted so much attention and
sympathy in recent years. Whether or not that movement attains to any
decisive political success, Judaism clearly cannot escape the solvent
influences which affect all European opinion. As in the case of the
Christian Church, the synagogue in the centres of culture keeps the
formal adherence of some who no longer think on its plane; but while
attempts are made from time to time to set up more rationalistic
institutions for Jews with the modern bias, the general tendency is
to a division between devotees of the old forms and those who have
decided to live by reason.
Section 8.--The Oriental Civilizations
We have already seen, in discussing the culture histories of India,
China, and Moslem Persia, how ancient elements of rationalism continue
to germinate more or less obscurely in the unpropitious soils of
Asiatic life. Ignorance is in most oriental countries too immensely
preponderant to permit of any other species of survival. But sociology,
while recognizing the vast obstacles to the higher life presented by
conditions which with a fatal facility multiply the lower, can set
no limit to the possibilities of upward evolution. The case of Japan
is a sufficient rebuke to the thoughtless iterators of the formula of
the "unprogressiveness of the East." While a cheerfully superstitious
religion is there still normal among the mass, the transformation of
the political ideals and practice of the nation under the influence of
European example is so great as to be unparalleled in human history;
and it has inevitably involved the substitution of rationalism for
supernaturalism among the great majority of the educated younger
generation. The late Yukichi Fukuzawa, who did more than any other man
to prepare the Japanese mind for the great transformation effected in
his time, was spontaneously a freethinker from his childhood; [2002]
and through a long life of devoted teaching he trained thousands to
a naturalist way of thought. That they should revert to Christian
or native orthodoxy seems as impossible as such an evolution
is seen to be in educated Hindostan, where the higher orders of
intelligence are probably not relatively more common than among the
Japanese. The final question, there as everywhere, is one of social
reconstruction and organization; and in the enormous population of
China the problem, though very different in degree of imminence, is
the same in kind. Perhaps the most hopeful consideration of all is
that of the ever-increasing inter-communication which makes European
and American progress tend in every succeeding generation to tell
more and more on Asiatic life.
As to Japan, Professor B. H. Chamberlain pronounced twenty years
ago that the Japanese "now bow down before the shrine of Herbert
Spencer" (Things Japanese, 3rd ed. 1898, p. 321. Cp. Religious
Systems of the World, 3rd ed. p. 103), proceeding in another
connection (p. 352) to describe them as essentially an undevotional
people. Such a judgment would be hard to sustain. The Japanese
people in the past have exhibited the amount of superstition
normal in their culture stage (cp. the Voyages de C. P. Thunberg
au Japon, French tr. 1796, iii, 206); and in our own day they
differ from Western peoples on this side merely in respect of
their greater general serenity of temperament. There were in
Japan in 1894 no fewer than 71,831 Buddhist temples, and 190,803
Shinto temples and shrines; and the largest temple of all, costing
"several million dollars," was built in the last dozen years of
the nineteenth century. To the larger shrines there are habitual
pilgrimages, the numbers annually visiting one leading Buddhist
shrine reaching from 200,000 to 250,000, while at the Shintô
shrine of Kompira the pilgrims are said to number about 900,000
each year. (See The Evolution of the Japanese, 1903, by L. Gulick,
an American missionary organizer.)
Professor Chamberlain appears to have construed "devotional" in the
light of a special conception of true devotion. Yet a Christian
observer testifies, of the revivalist sect of Nichirenites,
"the Ranters of Buddhism," that "the wildest excesses that seek
the mantle of religion in other lands are by them equalled if
not excelled" (Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, 1876, p. 163); and
Professor Chamberlain admits that "the religion of the family binds
them [the Japanese in general, including the 'most materialistic']
down in truly sacred bonds"; while another writer, who thinks
Christianity desirable for Japan, though he apparently ranks
Japanese morals above Christian, declares that in his travels he
was much reassured by the superstition of the innkeepers, feeling
thankful that his hosts were "not Agnostics or Secularists," but
devout believers in future punishments (Tracy, Rambles through
Japan without a Guide, 1892, pp. 131, 276, etc.).
A third authority with Japanese experience, Professor W. G. Dixon,
while noting a generation ago that "among certain classes in Japan
not only religious earnestness but fanaticism and superstition
still prevail," decides that "at the same time it remains true
that the Japanese are not in the main a very religious people,
and that at the present day religion is in lower repute than
probably it has ever been in the country's history. Religious
indifference is one of the prominent features of new Japan" (The
Land of the Morning, 1882, p. 517). The reconciliation of these
estimates lies in the recognition of the fact that the Japanese
populace is religious in very much the same way as those of Italy
and England, while the more educated classes are rationalistic, not
because of any "essential" incapacity for "devotion," but because
of enlightenment and lack of countervailing social pressure. To
the eye of the devotional Protestant the Catholics of Italy,
with their regard to externals, seem "essentially" irreligious;
and vice versâ. Such formulas miss science. Two hundred years ago
Charron, following previous schematists, made a classification in
which northerners figured as strong, active, stupid, warlike, and
little given to religion; the southerners as slight, abstinent,
obstinate, unwarlike, and superstitious; and the "middle"
peoples as between the two. La Sagesse, liv. i, ch. 42. The
cognate formulas of to-day are hardly more trustworthy. Buddhism
triumphed over Shintôism in Japan both in ancient and modern times
precisely because its lore and ritual make so much more appeal
to the devotional sense. (Cp. Chamberlain, pp. 358-62; Dixon,
ch. x; Religious Systems of the World, pp. 103, 111; Griffis,
p. 166.) But the æsthetically charming cult of the family,
with its poetic recognition of ancestral spirits (as to which
see Lafcadio Hearn, Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation, 1904),
seems to hold its ground as well as any.
So universal is sociological like other law that we find in
Japan, among some freethinkers, the same disposition as among
some in Europe to decide that religion is necessary for the
people. Professor Chamberlain (p. 352) cites Fukuzawa, "Japan's
most representative thinker and educationist," as openly declaring
that "It goes without saying that the maintenance of peace and
security in society requires a religion. For this purpose any
religion will do. I lack a religious nature, and have never
believed in any religion. I am thus open to the charge that I
am advising others to be religious while I am not so. Yet my
conscience does not permit me to clothe myself with religion
when I have it not at heart.... Of religions there are several
kinds--Buddhism, Christianity, and what not. From my standpoint
there is no more difference between those than between green
tea and black.... See that the stock is well selected and the
prices cheap...." (Japan Herald, September 9, 1897). To this view,
however, Fukuzawa did not finally adhere. The Rev. Isaac Dooman,
a missionary in Japan who knew him well, testifies to a change
that was taking place in his views in later life regarding the
value of religion. In an unpublished letter to Mr. Robert Young,
of Kobe, Mr. Dooman says that on one occasion, when conversing
on the subject of Christianity, Fukuzawa remarked: "There was
a time when I advocated its adoption as a means to elevate our
lower classes; but, after finding out that all Christian countries
have their own lower classes just as bad, if not worse than ours,
I changed my mind." Further reflection, marked by equal candour,
may lead the pupils of Fukuzawa to see that nations cannot be
led to adore any form of "tea" by the mere assurance of its
indispensableness from leaders who confess they never take
any. His view is doubtless shared by those priests concerning
whom "it may be questioned whether in their fundamental beliefs
the more scholarly of the Shinshiû priests differ very widely
from the materialistic agnostics of Europe" (Dixon, p. 516). In
this state of things the Christian thinks he sees his special
opportunity. Professor Dixon writes (p. 518), in the manner of
the missionary, that "decaying shrines and broken gods are to
be seen everywhere. Not only is there indifference, but there
is a rapidly-growing skepticism.... The masses too are becoming
affected by it.... Shintôism and ... Buddhism are doomed. What
is to take their place?... It must be either Christianity or
Atheism. We have the brightest hopes that the former will triumph
in the near future...."
The American missionary before cited, Mr. Gulick, argues
alternately that the educated Japanese are religious and that
they are not, meaning that they have "religious instincts,"
while rejecting current creeds. The so-called religious
instinct is in fact simply the spirit of moral and intellectual
seriousness. Mr. Gulick's summing-up, as distinct from his
theory and forecast, is as follows: "For about three hundred
years the intelligence of the nation has been dominated by
Confucian thought, which rejects active belief in supra-human
beings.... The tendency of all persons trained in Confucian
classics was towards thoroughgoing skepticism as to divine
beings and their relation to this world. For this reason, beyond
doubt, has Western agnosticism found so easy an entrance into
Japan.... Complete indifference to religion is characteristic
of the educated classes of to-day. Japanese and foreigners,
Christians and non-Christians alike, unite in this opinion. The
impression usually conveyed by this statement, however, is that
agnosticism is a new thing in Japan. In point of fact, the old
agnosticism is merely reinforced by ... the agnosticism of the
West" (The Evolution of the Japanese, pp. 286-87). This may be
taken as broadly accurate. Cp. the author's paper on "Freethought
in Japan" in the Agnostic Annual for 1906. Professor E. H. Parker
notes (China and Religion, 1905, p. 263) that "the Japanese in
translating Western books are beginning, to the dismay of our
missionaries, to leave out all the Christianity that is in them."
But a very grave danger to the intellectual and moral life of Japan
has been of late set up by a new application of Shintôism, on the
lines of the emperor-worship of ancient Rome. A recent pamphlet
by Professor Chamberlain, entitled The Invention of a New Religion
(R. P. A.; 1912), incidentally shows that the Japanese temperament
is so far from being "essentially" devoid of devotion as to be
capable of building up a fresh cultus to order. It appears that
since the so-called Restoration of 1868, when the Imperial House,
after more than two centuries of seclusion in Kyoto, was brought
from its retirement and the Emperor publicly installed as ruler by
right of his divine origin, the sentiment of religious devotion to
the Imperial House has been steadily inculcated, reaching its height
during the Russo-Japanese War, when the messages of victorious generals
and admirals piously ascribed their successes over the enemy to the
"virtues of the Imperial Ancestors." In every school throughout the
Empire there hangs a portrait of the emperor, which is regarded and
treated as is a sacred image in Russia and in Catholic countries. The
curators of schools have been known on occasion of fire and earthquake
to save the imperial portrait before wife or child; and their action
has elicited popular acclamation. On the imperial birthday teachers
and pupils assemble, and passing singly before the portrait, bow in
solemn adoration. The divine origin of the Imperial House and the
grossly mythical history of the early emperors are taught as articles
of faith in Japanese schools precisely as the cosmogony of Genesis
has been taught for ages in the schools of Christendom. Some years
ago a professor who exposed the absurdity of the chronology upon
which the religion is based was removed from his post, and a teacher
who declined to bow before a casket containing an imperial rescript
was dismissed. His life was, in fact, for some time in danger from
the fury of the populace. So dominant has Mikado-worship become that
some Japanese Christian pastors have endeavoured to reconcile it with
Christianity, and to be Mikado-worshippers and Christ-worshippers at
the same time. [2003] All creeds are nominally tolerated in Japan,
but avowed heresy as to the divine origin of the Imperial House is
a bar to public employment, and exposes the heretic to suspicion of
treason. The new religion, which is merely old Shintôism revised,
has been invented as a political expedient, and may possibly not long
survive the decease of Mutsu Hito, the late emperor, who continued
throughout his reign to live in comparative seclusion, and has been
succeeded by a young prince educated on European lines. But the cult
has obtained a strong hold upon the people; and by reason of social
pressure receives the conventional support of educated men exactly
as Christianity does in England, America, Germany, and Russia.
Thus there is not "plain sailing" for freethought in Japan. In such a
political atmosphere neither moral nor scientific thought has a good
prognosis; and if it be not changed for the better much of the Japanese
advance may be lost. Rationalism on any large scale is always a product
of culture; and culture for the mass of the people of Japan has only
recently begun. Down till the middle of the nineteenth century nothing
more than sporadic freethought existed. [2004] Some famous captains
were irreverent as to the omens; and in a seventeenth-century manual of
the principles of government, ascribed to the great founder of modern
feudalism, Iyéyasu, the sacrifices of vassals at the graves of their
lords are denounced, and Confucius is even cited as ridiculing the
burial of effigies in substitution. [2005] But, as elsewhere under
similar conditions, such displays of originality were confined to the
ruling caste. [2006] I have seen, indeed, a delightful popular satire,
apparently a product of mother-wit, on the methods of popular Buddhist
shrine-making; but, supposing it to be genuine and vernacular, it can
stand only for that measure of freethought which is never absent from
any society not pithed by a long process of religious tyranny. Old
Japan, with its intense feudal discipline and its indurated etiquette,
exhibited the social order, the grace, the moral charm, and the
intellectual vacuity of a hive of bees. The higher mental life was
hardly in evidence; and the ethical literature of native inspiration
is of no importance. [2007] To this day the educated Chinese, though
lacking in Japanese "efficiency" and devotion to drill of all kinds,
are the more freely intellectual in their habits of mind. The Japanese
feudal system, indeed, was so immitigably ironbound, so incomparably
destructive of individuality in word, thought, and deed, that only
in the uncodified life of art and handicraft was any free play of
faculty possible. What has happened of late is the rapid and docile
assimilation of western science. Another and a necessarily longer
step is the independent development of the speculative and critical
intelligence; and in the East, as in the West, this is subject to
economic conditions.
A similar generalization holds good as to the other Oriental
civilizations. Analogous developments to those seen in the latter-day
Mohammedan world, and equally marked by fluctuation, have been noted in
the mental life alike of the non-Mohammedan and the Mohammedan peoples
of India; and at the present day the thought of the relatively small
educated class is undoubtedly much affected by the changes going on
in that of Europe, and especially of England. The vast Indian masses,
however, are far from anything in the nature of critical culture;
and though some system of education for them is probably on the way
to establishment, [2008] their life must long remain quasi-primitive,
mentally as well as physically. Buddhism is theoretically more capable
of adaptation to a rationalist view of life than is Christianity; but
its intellectual activities at present seem to tend more towards an
"esoteric" credulity than towards a rational or scientific adjustment
to life.
Of the nature of the influence of Buddhism in Burmah, where it
has prospered, a vivid and thoughtful account is given in the
work of H. Fielding, The Soul of a People, 1898. At its best
the cult there deifies the Buddha; elsewhere, it is interwoven
with aboriginal polytheism and superstition (Davids, Buddhism,
pp. 207-211; Max Müller, Anthro. Rel., P. 132).
Within Brahmanism, again, there have been at different times
attempts to set up partly naturalistic reforms in religious
thought--e.g. that of Chaitanya in the sixteenth century; but
these have never been pronouncedly freethinking, and Chaitanya
preached a "surrender of all to Krishna," very much in the manner
of evangelical Christianity. Finally he has been deified by his
followers. (Müller, Nat. Rel. p. 100; Phys. Rel. p. 356.)
More definitely freethinking was the monotheistic cult set up among
the Sikhs in the fifteenth century, as the history runs, by Nanak,
who had been influenced both by Parsees and by Mohammedans, and
whose ethical system repudiated caste. But though Nanak objected
to any adoration of himself, he and all his descendants have
been virtually deified by his devotees, despite their profession
of a theoretically pantheistic creed. (Cp. De la Saussaye,
Manual of the Science of Religion, Eng. tr. pp. 659-62; Müller,
Phys. Rel. p. 355.) Trumpp (Die Religion der Sikhs, 1881, p. 123)
tells of other Sikh sects, including one of a markedly atheistic
character belonging to the nineteenth century; but all alike seem
to gravitate towards Hinduism.
Similarly among the Jainas, who compare with the Buddhists in
their nominal atheism as in their tenderness to animals and
in some other respects, there has been decline and compromise;
and their numbers appear steadily to dwindle, though in India
they survived while Buddhism disappeared. Cp. De la Saussaye,
Manual, pp. 557-63; Rev. J. Robson, Hinduism, 1874, pp. 80-86;
Tiele, Outlines, p. 141. Finally, the Brahmo-Somaj movement of
the nineteenth century appears to have come to little in the way
of rationalism (Mitchell, Hinduism, pp. 224-46; De la Saussaye,
pp. 669-71; Tiele, p. 160).
The principle of the interdependence of the external and the internal
life, finally, applies even in the case of Turkey. The notion
that Turkish civilization in Europe is unimprovable, though partly
countenanced by despondent thinkers even among the enlightened Turks,
[2009] had no justification in social science, though bad politics
may ruin the Turkish, like other Moslem States; and although Turkish
freethinking has not in general passed the theistic stage, [2010]
and its spread is grievously hindered by the national religiosity,
[2011] which the age-long hostility of the Christian States so
much tends to intensify, a gradual improvement in the educational
and political conditions would suffice to evolve it, according to
the observed laws of all civilization. It may be that a result of
the rationalistic evolution in the other European States will be to
make them intelligently friendly to such a process, where at present
they are either piously malevolent towards the rival creed or merely
self-seeking as against each other's influence on Turkish destinies.
In any case, it cannot seriously be pretended that the mental life of
Christian Greece in modern times has yielded, apart from services to
simple scholarship, a much better result to the world at large than
has that of Turkey. The usual reactions in individual cases of course
take place. An American traveller writing in 1856 notes how illiterate
Greek priests glory in their ignorance, "asserting that a more liberal
education has the effect of making atheists of the youth." He adds that
he has "known several deacons and others in the University [of Athens]
that were skeptics even as to the truth of religion," and would gladly
have become laymen if they could have secured a livelihood. [2012]
But there was then and later in the century no measurable movement
of a rationalistic kind. At the time of the emancipation the Greek
priesthood was "in general at once the most ignorant and the most
vicious portion of the community"; [2013] and it remained socially
predominant and reactionary. "Whatever progress has been made in Greece
has received but little assistance from them." [2014] Liberal-minded
professors in the theological school were mutinied against by bigoted
students, [2015] a type still much in evidence at Athens; and the
liberal thinker Theophilus Kaïres, charged with teaching "atheistic
doctrines," and found guilty with three of his followers, died of
jail fever while his appeal to the Areopagus was pending. [2016]
Thus far Christian bigotry seems to have held its own in what
once was Hellas. On the surface, Greece shows little trace of
instructed freethought; while in Bulgaria, by Greek testimony,
school teachers openly proclaim their rationalism, and call for the
exclusion of religious teaching from the schools. [2017] Despite the
political freedom of the Christian State, there has thus far occurred
there no such general fertilization by the culture of the rest of
Europe as is needed to produce a new intellectual evolution of any
importance. The mere geographical isolation of modern Greece from
the main currents of European thought and commerce is probably the
most retardative of her conditions; and it is hard to see how it can
be countervailed. Italy, in comparison, is pulsating with original
life, industrial and intellectual. But, given either a renascence of
Mohammedan civilization or a great political reconstruction such as
is latterly on foot, the whole life of the nearer East may take a new
departure; and in such an evolution Greece would be likely to share.
CONCLUSION
Any fuller survey of the intellectual history of the nineteenth century
will but reveal more fully the signal and ever-widening growth of
rational thought among all classes of the more advanced nations,
and among the more instructed of the less advanced. The retrospect
of the whole past tells of a continuous evolution, which in the
twentieth century proceeds more extensively than ever before. There
has emerged the curious fact that in our own country a measure of
rational doubt has been almost constantly at work in the sphere in
which it could perhaps least confidently be expected--to wit, that
of poetry. From Chaucer onwards it is hard to find a great orthodox
poet. Even Spenser was as much Platonist as Christian; and Marlowe,
Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Burns, Wordsworth, Shelley,
Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Tennyson, Arnold, and Browning (to name no
others) in their various ways baffle the demand of faith. Latterly,
the sex which has always been reckoned the more given to religion
has shown many signs of adaptation to the higher law. In Britain,
as in France, women began to appear in the ranks of reason in the
eighteenth century. [2018] In the nineteenth the number has increased
at a significant rate. Already in the fierce battles fought in the
time of reaction after the French Revolution women took their place on
the side of freedom; and Frances Wright (Madame d'Arusmont) played a
notable part as a freethinking publicist and philanthropist. [2019]
Since her day the names of Harriet Martineau and George Eliot tell
of the continual gain of knowledge; and women rationalists are now
to be counted by thousands in all the more civilized countries.
The same law holds of public life in general. Gladstone eagerly
maintained in his latter years that politicians, in virtue of their
practical hold of life, were little given to skepticism; but the facts
were and are increasingly against him. The balance of the evidence
is against the ascription of orthodoxy to either of the Pitts, or to
Fox; and we have seen that the statesmen of the American Revolution,
as of the French, were in general deists. Garibaldi [2020] in Italy,
and Gambetta in France, were freethinkers; Lincoln and his opponent,
Douglas, were deists; towards the close of the century, in New Zealand,
Sir Robert Stout and the late Mr. John Ballance, avowed rationalists,
were among the foremost politicians of their generation; and in the
English Cabinet rationalism began to be represented in the person of
Lord Morley.
While such developments have been possible in the fierce light of
political strife, the process of disintegration and decomposition has
proceeded in society at large till unbelief can hardly be reckoned a
singularity. Within the pale of all the Christian Churches dogmatic
belief has greatly dwindled, and goes on dwindling: and "Christianity"
is made to figure more and more as an ethical doctrine which has
abandoned its historical foundations, while preserving formulas and
rituals which have no part in rational ethics. The mythical cosmogony
out of which the whole originally grew is no longer believed in by
any educated person, though it is habitually presented to the young
as divine truth. Thousands of clergymen, economically gripped to
a false position, would gladly rectify their professed creeds, but
cannot; because the political and economic bases involve the consent
of the majority, and changes cannot be made without angry resistance
and uproar among the less instructed multitude of all classes. The
Protestant Churches collectively dread to figure as repudiating the
historic creed; while the Roman Catholic Church, conscious of the
situation, maintains a semblance of rigid discipline and a minimum
standard of instruction for its adherents, counting on holding its
ground while the faculty of uncritical faith subsists. Only by the
silent alienation of the more thoughtful and sincere minds from the
priesthood can the show of orthodoxy be maintained even within the
Catholic pale.
In all orders alike, nevertheless, the "practice" of religion
decays with the theory. The Churches are constantly challenged to
justify their existence by social reforms and philanthropic works:
no other plea passes as generally valid; and it is only by reason of
a general transference of interest from religious to social problems
that the decay of belief is disguised. "Piety," in the old sense,
counts relatively for little; and while orthodoxy is still a means
of advantage in political life, religion counts for nothing in
international relations. In the war of 1899-1902, "Bible-loving"
England forced a quarrel on the most Bible-loving race in the
world; and at the time of the penning of these lines six nations
are waging the greatest war of all time irrespectively of racial and
religious ties alike, though all alike officially claim the support
of Omnipotence. In Berlin a popular preacher edifies great audiences
by proclaiming that "God is not neutral"; and his Emperor habitually
parades the same faith, with the support of all the theologians of
Germany--the State supremely guilty of the whole embroilment, and the
deliberate perpetrator of the grossest aggression in modern history. On
the side of the Allies "Christianity" is less systematically but
still frequently invoked. On both sides the forms of prayer are
officially practised by the non-combatants, very much as the Romans
in their wars maintained the practice of augury from the entrails of
sacrificed victims; and "family prayer" is said to be reviving.
Everywhere, nevertheless, the more rational, remembering how in the
"ages of faith" deadly wars were waged for whole generations in the
very name of religion, recognize that Christianity furnishes neither
control for the present nor solution for the future; and that the
hope of civilization lies in the resort of the nations to human
standards of sanity and reciprocity. The ties which hold are those
of fellow-citizenship.
There can be no doubt among rationalists that if modern civilization
escapes the ruin which militarism brought upon those of all previous
eras, the principle of reason will continually widen its control,
latterly seen to be everywhere strengthening apart from the dangerous
persistence of militarist ideals and impulses. When it controls
international relations, it will be dominant in the life of thought. In
the words of a great fighter for freethought, "No man ever saw a
religion die"; and there are abundant survivals of pre-Christian
paganism in Europe after two thousand years of Christianity; but
it seems likely that when the history of the twentieth century is
written it will be recognized that what has historically figured as
religion belongs in all its forms to the past.
The question is sometimes raised whether the age of decline will
be marked by movements of active and persecuting fanaticism. Here,
again, the answer must be that everything depends upon the general
fortunes of civilization. It is significant that a number of clerical
voices proclaim a revival of religion as a product of war, while
others complain that the state of struggle has a sterilizing effect
upon religious life. While organized religions subsist, there will
always be adherents with the will to persecute; and from time to time
acts of public persecution occur, in addition to many of a private
character. But in Britain public persecution is latterly restricted
to cases in which the technical offence of "blasphemy" is associated
with acts which come under ordinary police jurisdiction. After the
unquestionable blasphemies of Arnold and Swinburne had to be officially
ignored, it became impossible, in the present stage of civilization,
that any serious and decent literary indictment of the prevailing
creeds should be made a subject of persecution; and before long,
probably, such indictments will be abandoned in the cases of offenders
against police regulations.
The main danger appears to lie in Catholic countries, and from the
action of the Catholic hierarchy. The common people everywhere,
save in the most backward countries, are increasingly disinclined
to persecution. In Ireland there is much less of that spirit among
the Catholic population than among that of Protestant Ulster. But
the infamous execution of Francisco Ferrer in Spain, in 1909,
which aroused passionate reprobation in every civilized country,
was defended in England and elsewhere with extravagant baseness by
Catholic littérateurs, who, with their reactionary priests, are the
last to learn the lesson of tolerance. The indignation everywhere
excited by the judicial murder [2021] of Ferrer, however, gives
promise that even the most zealous fanatics of the Catholic Church
will hesitate again to rouse the wrath of the nations by such a
reversion to the methods of the eras of religious rule.
NOTES
[1] Stow's Annals, ed. 1615, pp. 570, 575.
[2] Burnet, Hist. of the Reformation, ed. Nares, ii, 179; iii, 289;
Strype, Memorials of Cranmer, ed. 1848-54, ii, 100.
[3] The Marian persecutions undoubtedly did much to stimulate
Protestantism. It is not generally realized that many of the burnings
of heretics under Mary were quasi-sacrifices on her behalf. On each
occasion of her hopes of pregnancy being disappointed, some victims
were sent to the stake. See Strype, ed. cited, iii, 196, and Peter
Martyr, there cited; Froude, ed. 1870, v, 521 sq., 539 sq. The
influence of Spanish ecclesiastics may be inferred. The expulsions
of the Jews and the Moriscoes from Spain were by way of averting the
wrath of God. Still, a Spanish priest at Court preached in favour of
mercy. Lingard, ed. 1855, v, 231.
[4] The number slain was certainly not small. It amounted to at
least 190, perhaps to 204. Soames, Elizabethan Religious History,
1839, p. 596-98. Under Mary there perished some 288. Durham Dunlop,
The Church under the Tudors, 1869, p. 104 and refs.
[5] Soames, as cited, pp. 213-18, and refs.
[6] Froude, Hist. of England, ed. 1870, x, 545 (ed. 1875, xi, 199),
citing MSS. Ireland.
[7] Gloss to February in the Shepherd's Calendar, Globe ed. pp. 451-52.
[8] Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit, Arber's reprint, pp. 140, 153. That
the reference was mainly to Oxford is to be inferred from the address
"To my verie good friends the Gentlemen Schollers of Oxford," prefixed
to the ed. of 1581. Id. p. 207.
[9] Id. p. 158.
[10] Id. pp. 161, 166.
[11] Essay Of Atheism.
[12] Lecky, Rationalism, i, 103-104. Scot's book (now made accessible
by a reprint, 1886) had practically no influence in his own day;
and King James, who wrote against it, caused it to be burned by the
hangman in the next. Scot inserts the "infidelitie of atheists" in
the list of intellectual evils on his title-page; but save for an
allusion to "the abhomination of idolatrie" all the others indicted
are aspects of the black art.
[13] "No woman ever lived who was so totally destitute of the sentiment
of religion" (Green, Short History, ch. vii, § 3, p. 369).
[14] Cp. Soames, Elizabethan Religious History, 1839, p. 225. Yet
when Morris, the attorney of the Duchy of Lancaster, introduced in
Parliament a Bill to restrain the power of the ecclesiastical courts,
she had him dismissed and imprisoned for life, being determined
that the control should remain, through those courts, in her own
hands. Heylyn, Hist. of the Reformation, ed. 1849, pref. vol. i,
pp. xiv-xv.
[15] See above, vol. i, pp. 435, 446, 459.
[16] Collier's Reprint, p. 190.
[17] Camden, Annals of Elizabeth, sub. ann. 1580; 3rd ed. 1635,
p. 218. Cp. Soames, p. 214.
[18] Hooker, Pref. to Ecclesiastical Polity, ch. iii, §
9, ed. 1850. Camden (p. 219) states that the Dutch teacher Henry
Nichalai, whose works were translated for the sect, "gave out that
he did partake of God, and God of his humanity."
[19] See above, i, 458, as to a much more pronounced heresy in 1549,
which also seems to have escaped punishment. Camden tells that the
books of the "Family of Love" were burnt in 1580, but mentions no
other penalties. Stow records that on October 9, 1580, "proclamation
was published at London for the apprehension and severe punishing
of all persons suspected to be of the family of love." Ed. 1615,
p. 687. Five of them had been frightened into a public recantation
in 1575. Id. p. 679.
[20] May 13, 1579. The burning was on the 20th.
[21] Stow's Annals, ed. 1580, pp. 1, 194-95. Ed. 1615, p. 695.
[22] Stow, ed. 1615, p. 697; David's Evidence, by William Burton,
Preacher of Reading, 1592 (?), p. 125.
[23] Stow, ed. 1615, p. 696.
[24] Burton, as cited. See below, pp. 7, 12, as to Kett's writings.
[25] Art. Matthew Hamond, in Dict. of Nat. Biog.
[26] Art. Francis Kett, in Dict. of Nat. Biog.
[27] Prof. Storojenko, Life of Greene, Eng. tr. in Grosart's
"Huth Library" ed. of Greene's Works, i, 42-50. It is quite clear
that Malone and the critics who have followed him were wrong in
supposing the unnamed instructor to be Francis Kett, who was a devout
Unitarian. Prof. Storojenko speaks of Kett as having been made an
Arian at Norwich, after his return there in 1585, by the influence
of Lewes and Haworth. Query Hamond?
[28] In Pierce's Supererogation, Collier's ed. p. 85.
[29] Rep. of Nashe's Works in Grosart's "Huth Library" ed. vol. iv,
pp. 172, 173, 178, 182, 183. etc. Ed. McKerrow. 1904, ii, 114-129.
[30] MS. Harl. 6853, fol. 320. It is given in full in the appendix
to the first issue of the selected plays of Marlowe in the Mermaid
Series, edited by Mr. Havelock Ellis: and, with omissions, in the
editions of Cunningham, Dyce, and Bullen.
[31] Act II, sc. i.
[32] Grosart's ed. in "Temple Dramatists" series, 11. 246-371. There
is plenty of "irreligion" in the passage, but not atheism, though
there is a denial of a future state (365-70). The lines in question
strongly suggest Marlowe's influence or authorship, which indeed is
claimed by Mr. C. Crawford for the whole play. But all the external
evidence ascribes the play to Greene.
[33] Tamburlaine, Part II, Act II, sc. ii, iii; V, sc. i.
[34] Writing as Andrew Philopater. See Dict. of Nat. Biog., art. Robert
Parsons, and Storojenko, as cited, i, 36, and note.
[35] Translated into Latin by Henri Estienne in 1562.
[36] Remains of Sir Walter Raleigh, ed. 1657, p. 123.
[37] Bk. i, ch. i, sec. 11.
[38] Bk. ii, ch. i, sec. 7.
[39] Essay on the Prometheus.
[40] Art. Raleigh, in Dict. of Nat. Biog., xlvii, 192.
[41] Id. pp. 200-201.
[42] Report in 1736 ed. of History of the World, p. ccxlix. "Harpool"
seems an error for Harriott. Cp. Edwards, Life of Sir Walter Raleigh,
1868, i, 432, 436. It is after naming "Harpool" that the judge says:
"Let not any devil persuade you to think there is no eternity in
heaven."
[43] Ed. cited, p. xxviii.
[44] Id. p. xxiv.
[45] Id. p. xxii.
[46] Id. p. xvi.
[47] Cp. Gardiner, History of England, 1603-1642, 10-vol. ed. i,
132-35; iii, 150, 152.
[48] Ed. cited, p. xxii.
[49] Title of verses appended to trans. of Achilles Shield,
1598. Chapman spells the name Harriots.
[50] Pref. to complete trans. of Iliad.
[51] Bk. v, ch. ii, §§ 1-4. Works, ed. 1850, i, 432-36.
[52] Exposition upon Nehemiah (1585) in Parker Soc. ed. of Works,
1812, p. 401.
[53] Work cited, pp. 8-11, 22.
[54] Works, i, 432; ii, 762-63.
[55] Eccles. Pol. bk. i, ch. vii; bk. ii, ch. i, vii; bk. iii,
ch. viii, § 16; bk. v, ch. viii; bk. vii, ch. xi; bk. viii, § 6 (Works,
i, 165, 231, 300, 446; ii, 388, 537). See the citations in Buckle,
3-vol. ed. iii, 341-42; 1-vol. ed. pp. 193-94.
[56] Supplication of Travers, in Hooker's Works, ed. 1850, ii, 662.
[57] Answer to Travers, id. p. 693.
[58] Some typical attempts of the kind are discussed in the author's
two lectures on The Religion of Shakespeare, 1887 (South Place
Institute).
[59] Shakespeare Commentaries, Eng. tr. 1863, ii, 618-19.
[60] Id. ii, 586.
[61] In the last edition I had written to that effect; but I have
modified the opinion.
[62] The allusion to "popish ceremonies" in Titus Andronicus is
probably from his hand. See the author's work, Did Shakespeare Write
"Titus Andronicus"?, where it is argued that the play in question is
substantially Peele's and Greene's.
[63] Shakespeare Soc. rep. 1853, pp. 14, 16-17, 18, 24, 28, etc.
[64] This has been shown to be his by Fleay and Mr. Crawford.
[65] See his Groatsworth of Wit Bought with a Million of Repentance.
[66] Compare the Jane Shore portions of his Edward IV with the close
of A Woman Killed with Kindness. Note also the conclusion of The
English Traveller.
[67] See the poem England's Elizabeth, 1631.
[68] Henslowe's Diary, ed. Greg, i, fol. 96.
[69] E.g., the lines,
The best of men
That e'er wore earth about him, was a sufferer,
A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit,
The first true gentleman that ever breathed,
at the close of Part I of The Honest Whore; and the phrase, "Heaven's
great arithmetician," at the close of Old Fortunatus.
[70] Green, Short Hist. ch. vii, § 7 end. Cp. Ruskin, Sesame and
Lilies, Lect. iii, § 115.
[71] The old work of W. J. Birch, M.A., An Inquiry into the Philosophy
and Religion of Shakspere (1848), is an unjudicial ex parte statement
of the case for Shakespeare's unbelief; but it is worth study.
[72] The town paid for his bread and wine, no doubt by way of
compliment.
[73] Cp. the author's Montaigne and Shakespeare, 2nd ed. sec. viii.
[74] A Woorke concerning the trewnesse of the Christian Religion,
1587. Reprinted in 1592, 1604, and 1617.
[75] As to the expert analysis of this play, which shows it to be in
large part Fletcher's, see Furnivall, as cited, pp. xciii-xcvi.
[76] Cp. Seccombe and Allen, The Age of Shakspere, 1903, ii, 189.
[77] Alberti, Briefe betreffende den Zustand der Religion in
Gross-Britannien, Hanover, 1752, ii, 429. Alberti reads "God" at the
end of the passage; I follow Grosart's edition.
[78] Hallam, Lit. Europe, ii, 371, 376; Pattison, Isaac Casaubon,
2nd ed. p. 286 sq.
[79] Pattison, as cited, p. 290; G. W. Johnson, Memoirs of John Selden,
1835, pp. 56-70.
[80] Memoirs cited, pp. 60-61. On the whole question see the
Review appended by Selden to his History after a few copies had
been distributed.
[81] Poems of Sir John Davies, ed. Grosart, 1876, i, 82, 83.
[82] Essaies Politicke and Morall, by D. T. Gent, 1608, fol. 9.
[83] Act iv, sc. 1.
[84] Act i, sc. 1. Jonson himself could have been so indicted on the
strength of certain verses.
[85] He had been offered professorships of divinity at Saumur and
Marburg.
[86] Gardiner, History of England, 1603-1642, 4th ed. ii,
128. Cp. Bayle, art. Vorstius, Note N. By his theological opponents and
by James, Vorstius was of course called an atheist. He was in reality
not a Socinian, but a "strict Arian, who believed that the Son of God
was at first created by the Father, and then delegated to create the
universe--a sort of inferior deity, who was nevertheless entitled to
religious homage" (James Nichols, note to App. P. on Brandt's Life
of Arminius in Works of Arminius, 1825, i, 218). Nichols gives a full
survey of the subject, pp. 202-237. Fuller (Ch. Hist. B. x, cent. 17,
sec. iv, §§ 1-5) tells the story, and pronounces the opinions of
Vorstius "fitter to be remanded to hell than committed to writing."
[87] Bayle (art. cited, Note F) says both Universities, as does
Fuller. At the Synod of Dort, however, the British representatives read
only, it seems, a decree (dated Sept. 21, 1611) of the Vice-Chancellor
of Cambridge, ordering the burning of the book there. (Nichols,
Account of the Synod of Dort, in Works of Arminius, i, 497).
[88] Gardiner, pp. 129-30. Fuller (as last cited, §§ 6-14) gives a
list of Legate's "damnable tenets." See it in Mrs. Bradlaugh Bonner's
Penalties upon Opinion, pp. 12-14.
[89] Gardiner, as cited. Fuller is cheerfully acquiescent, though
he notes the private demurs, which he denounces. "God," he says,
"may seem well pleased with this seasonable severity."
[90] In 1580 Stow records how one Randall was put on trial for
"conjuring to know where treasure was hid in the earth and goods
feloniously taken were become"; and four others were tried "for being
present." Four were found guilty and sentenced to be hanged. Randall
was executed, and the others reprieved. (Ed. 1615, p. 688.)
[91] Fuller actually alleges that "there was none ever after that
openly avowed these heretical doctrines"--an unintelligible figment.
[92] All reprinted in 1816 for the Hanserd Knollys Society, with
histor. introd. by E. B. Underhill, in the vol. Tracts on Liberty of
Conscience and Persecution, 1614-1661. They do not speak of Legate
or Wightman.
[93] Atheomastix, 1622, pref. Sig. B. 3, verso. The work was posthumous
and incomplete.
[94] Bk. i, ch. i, p. 5.
[95] In the Advancement of Learning, bk. i (Routledge ed. p. 54),
he himself notes how, long before his time, the new learning had in
part discredited the schoolmen.
[96] Filum Labyrinthi--an English version of the Cogitata et Visa--§ 7.
[97] Cp. Huarte, cited above, p. 471.
[98] Nov. Org. bk. i. Aph. 62 (Works, Routledge ed. p. 271).
[99] Id. Aph. 65.
[100] Id. ib. Cp. the Advancement of Learning, bk. ii, and the De
Augmentis, bk. ix, near end. (Ed. cited, pp. 173, 634.)
[101] Nov. Org. Aph. 89. Cp. Aph. 46, 49, 96; the Valerius Terminus,
ch. xxv; the English Filum Labyrinthi, § 7; and the De Principiis
atque Originibus (ed. cited, p. 650).
[102] Valerius Terminus, cap. i. (Ed. cited, p. 188.)
[103] Id. p. 187; Filum Labyrinthi, p. 209.
[104] Bk. ix, ch. i. (Ed. cited, p. 631.) Compare Valerius Terminus,
ch. i (p. 186), and De Aug. bk. iii, ch. ii (p. 456), as to the
impossibility of knowing the will and character of God from Nature,
though (De Aug. last cit.) it reveals his power and glory.
[105] Advancement, bk. i (ed. cited, p. 45). Cp. Valerius Terminus,
ch. i (p. 187).
[106] Advancement, bk. ii; De Augmentis, bk. iii, chs. iv and v;
Valerius Terminus, ch. xxv; Novum Organum, bk. i, Aph. 48; bk. ii,
Aph. 2. (Ed. cited, pp. 96, 205, 266, 302, 471, 473.)
[107] De Principiis atque Originibus. (Ed. cited,
pp. 649-50.) Elsewhere (De Aug. bk. iii, ch. iv, p. 471) he expressly
puts it that the system of Democritus, which "removed God and mind
from the structure of things," was more favourable to true science
than the teleology and theology of Plato and Aristotle.
[108] Id. pp. 651, 657.
[109] Id. p. 648.
[110] De Augmentis, bk. iii, ch. ii; bk. iv, ch. ii. (Ed. cited,
pp. 456, 482.)
[111] Id. bk. ii, ch. i. (Ed. cited, p. 428.)
[112] De Augmentis, ed. cited, p. 73.
[113] No. xviii, Diomedes. Ed. cited, p. 841.
[114] De Principiis atque Originibus, p. 664.
[115] Nov. Org. i. 89; Filum Labyrinthi, § 7; Essay 16.
[116] Francis Osborn, pref. to his "Miscellany," in Works, 7th
ed. 1673.
[117] Cp. Valerius Terminus, ch. i.
[118] This is noted by Glassford in his tr. of the Novum Organum
(1844, p. 26); and by Ellis in his and Spedding's edition of the
Works. (Routledge ed. pp. 32, 473, note.)
[119] De Augmentis, bk. iii, ch. iv, end.
[120] Essay 57, Of Anger.
[121] Valerius Terminus, ch. xxv.
[122] De Principiis, ed. cited, pp. 648-49. Cp. pp. 612-43.
[123] Id. p. 648.
[124] Valerius Terminus, ch. ii; De Augmentis, bk. v,
ch. iv. Ed. cited, pp. 199, 517.
[125] Cp. Brewster, Life of Newton, 1855, ii, 400-404; Draper,
Intel. Devel. of Europe, ed. 1875, ii, 258-60; Dean Church, Bacon,
pp. 180-201; Fowler, Bacon, ch. vi; Lodge, Pioneers of Science,
pp. 145-51; Lange, Gesch. d. Materialismus, i, 197 sq. (Eng. tr. i,
236-37), and cit. from Liebig--as to whom, however, see Fowler,
pp. 133, 157.
[126] Novum Organum, ii, 46 and 48, § 17; De Aug. iii, 4; Thema
Coeli. Ed. cited, pp. 364, 375, 461, 705, 709. Whewell (Hist. of
Induct. Sciences, 3rd ed. i, 296, 298) ignores the second and third
of these passages in denying Hume's assertion that Bacon rejected the
Copernican theory with "disdain." It is true, however, that Bacon had
vacillated. The facts are fairly faced by Prof. Fowler in his Bacon,
1881, pp. 151-52, and his ed. of Novum Organum, Introd. pp. 30-36. See
also the summing-up of Ellis in notes to passages above cited, and
at p. 675.
[127] Aubrey, Lives of Eminent Persons, ed. 1813, vol. ii, pt. ii,
p. 383.
[128] See notes in ed. cited, pp. 50, 53, 61, 63, 68, 75, 76, 84, 110.
[129] Fowler, ed. of Nov. Org. § 14, pp. 101-104.
[130] Id. § 14, p. 108; Ellis in ed. cited, p. 643.
[131] Rawley's Life, in ed. cited, p. 9; Osborn, as above cited;
Fowler, ed. of Nov. Org. Introd. § 14; T. Martin, Character of Bacon,
1835, pp. 216, 227, 222-23.
[132] Cp. Fowler, Bacon, pp. 139-41; Mill, Logic, bk. vi, ch. v, §
5; Jevons, Princ. of Science, 1-vol. ed. p. 576; Tyndall, Scientific
Use of the Imagination, 3rd ed. pp. 4, 8-9, 42-43; T. Martin, as
cited, pp. 210-38; Bagehot, Postulates of Eng. Polit. Econ. ed. 1885,
pp. 18-19; Ellis and Spedding, in ed. cited, pp. x, xii, 22, 389. The
notion of a dialectic method which should mechanically enable any
man to make discoveries is an irredeemable fallacy, and must be
abandoned. Bacon's own remarkable anticipation of modern scientific
thought in the formula that heat is a mode of motion (Nov. Org. ii,
20) is not mechanically yielded by his own process, noteworthy and
suggestive though that is.
[133] Pref. Epistle.
[134] Works, ed. Dublin. 1766, p. 159; ed. 1910, p. 344.
[135] Kohlrausch, Hist. of Germany, Eng. tr. p. 385.
[136] Moritz Ritter, Geschichte der deutschen Union, 1867-73, ii, 55.
[137] Menzel, Geschichte der Deutschen, 3te Aufl. Cap. 416.
[138] Cp. Gardiner, Thirty Years' War, pp. 12-13; Kohlrausch, p. 438;
Pusey, Histor. Enq. into Ger. Rationalism, pp. 9-25; Henderson,
Short Hist. of Germany, i, ch. xvi.
[139] Kohlrausch, p. 439. A specially strong reaction set in about
1573. Ritter, Geschichte der deutschen Union, i, 19. Cp. Menzel,
Cap. 433.
[140] Cp. Gardiner, Thirty Years' War, pp. 16, 18, 21; Kohlrausch,
p. 370.
[141] As to this see Moritz Ritter, as cited, i, 9, 27; ii, 122 sq.;
Dunham, Hist. of the Germanic Empire, iii, 186; Henderson, i, 411 sq.
[142] Freytag, Bilder aus d. deutschen Vergangenheit, Bd. ii, 1883,
p. 381; Bd. iii, ad init.
[143] Cp. Lecky, Rationalism in Europe, i, 53-83.
[144] Freytag, Bilder, Bd. ii, Abth. ii, p. 378.
[145] The Pope and the Council, Eng. tr. p. 260; French tr. p. 285.
[146] De Praestigiis Daemonum, 1563. See it described by Lecky,
Rationalism, i, 85-87; Hallam, Lit. of Europe, ii, 76.
[147] By Dutch historians Wier is claimed as a Dutchman. He was born
at Grave, in North Brabant, but studied medicine at Paris and Orleans,
and after practising physic at Arnheim in the Netherlands was called to
Düsseldorf as physician to the Duke of Jülich, to whom he dedicated his
treatise. His ideas are probably traceable to his studies in France.
[148] His collected works (1632) amount to nearly 7,000 folio
pages. J. Ten Brink, Kleine Geschiedenis der Nederlandsche Letteren,
1882, p. 91.
[149] Ten Brink, p. 86. Jonckbloet (Beknopte Geschiedenis der
Nederl. Letterkunde, ed. 1880, p. 148) is less specific.
[150] Ten Brink, pp. 89-90.
[151] Hallam, Lit. of Europe, ii, 83.
[152] Ten Brink, p. 87.
[153] Jonckbloet, Beknopte Geschiedenis, p. 149; Ten Brink,
p. 91; Bayle, Dictionnaire, art. Koornhert; Pünjer, Hist. of the
Chr. Philos. of Religion, Eng. tr. p. 269; Dr. E. Gosse, art. on
Dutch Literature in Encyc. Brit. 9th ed. xii, 93.
[154] Ten Brink, p. 91.
[155] Flint, Vico, p. 142.
[156] De Jure Belli et Pacis, proleg. §§ 11, 16.
[157] Bayle, art. Voelkel.
[158] Schlegel's note on Mosheim, Reid's ed. p. 862.
[159] Nelson, Life of Bishop Bull, 2nd ed. 1714, p. 392.
[160] Nicéron, Mémoires pour servir, etc., xiv (1731), 340 sq. One of
the replies is the Justa Detestatio sceleratissimi libelli Adriani
Beverlandi De Peccato Originali, by Leonard Ryssen, 1680. A very
free version of Beverland's book appeared in French in 1714 under
the title Etat de l'Homme dans le Peché Originel. It reached a sixth
edition in 1741.
[161] Nelson, Life of Bishop Bull, as cited, p. 280.
[162] Krasinski, Ref. in Poland, 1840, ii, 363; Mosheim, 16
Cent. sec. iii, pt. ii, ch. iv, § 22. Budny translated the Bible,
with rationalistic notes.
[163] Krasinski, p. 361.
[164] Mosheim, last cit. § 23, note 4.
[165] Krasinski, p. 367; Wallace, Antitrin. Biog. 1850, ii, 320.
[166] Bayle, art. Fauste Socin. Krasinski, p. 374.
[167] Krasinski, pp. 361-62. Fausto Sozzini also could apparently
forgive everybody save those who believed less than he did.
[168] Cp. the inquiry as to Locke's Socinianism in J. Milner's Account
of Mr. Lock's Religion out of his own Writings, 1706, and Lessing's
Zur Geschichte und Literatur, i, as to Leibnitz's criticism of Sonerus.
[169] Enfield's History of Philosophy (an abstract of Brucker),
ed. 1840, p. 537.
[170] In the dominions of Philip II there are said to have been 58
archbishops, 684 bishops, 11,400 abbeys, 23,000 religious fraternities,
46,000 monasteries, 13,500 nunneries, 312,000 secular priests, 400,000
monks, 200,000 friars and other ecclesiastics. H. E. Watts, Miguel
de Cervantes, 1895, pp. 67-68. Spain alone had 9,088 monasteries.
[171] Buckle, 3-vol. ed. ii, 484; 1-vol. ed. p. 564, and refs.
[172] Cp. Buckle, 3-vol. ed. ii, 497-99; 1-vol. ed. pp. 572-73;
La Rigaudière, Hist. des Perséc. Relig. en Espagne, 1860, pp. 220-26.
[173] Cp. Lewes, Spanish Drama, passim.
[174] "He inspires me only with horror for the faith which he
professes. No one ever so far disfigured Christianity; no one ever
assigned to it passions so ferocious, or morals so corrupt" (Sismondi,
Lit. of South of Europe, Bohn tr. ii, 379).
[175] Ticknor, Hist. of Spanish Lit. 6th ed. ii, 501; Don Quixote,
pt. ii, ch. liv; Ormsby, tr. of Don Quixote, 1885, introd. i, 58.
[176] Lafuente, Historia de España, 1856, xvii, 340. It is not quite
certain that Lafuente expressed his sincere opinion.
[177] Llorente, ii. 433.
[178] Id. p. 420.
[179] Bouterwek, Hist. of Spanish and Portuguese Literature,
Eng. tr. 1823, i, 331.
[180] Id. p. 151.
[181] Part II, ch. xxxvi.
[182] Bouterwek, whose sociology, though meritorious, is ill-clarified,
argues that the Inquisition was in a manner congenital to Spain because
before its establishment the suspicion of heresy was already "more
degrading in Spain than the most odious crimes in other countries." But
the same might have been said of the other countries also. As to
earlier Spanish heresy see above, vol. i, p. 337 sq.
[183] Despite the many fallacies retained by Copernicus from the
current astronomy, he must be pronounced an exceptionally scientific
spirit. Trained as a mathematician, astronomer, and physician,
he showed a keen and competent interest in the practical problem of
currency; and one of the two treatises which alone he published of his
own accord was a sound scheme for the rectification of that of his
own government. Though a canon of Frauenburg, he never took orders;
but did manifold and unselfish secular service.
[184] It was shielded by thirteen popes--from Paul III to Paul V.
[185] Galileo, Dialogi dei due massimi sistemi del mondo, ii (Opere,
ed. 1811, xi, 303-304).
[186] A good study of Bruno is supplied by Owen in his Skeptics of
the Italian Renaissance. He has, however, omitted to embody the later
discoveries of Dufour and Berti, and has some wrong dates. The Life
of Giordano Bruno, by I. Frith (Mrs. Oppenheim), 1887, gives all the
data, but is inadequate on the philosophic side. A competent estimate
is given in the late Prof. Adamson's lectures on The Development
of Modern Philosophy, etc., 1903, ii, 23 sq.; also in his art. in
Encyc. Brit. For a hostile view see Hallam, Lit. of Europe, ii,
105-111. The biography of Bartholmèss, Jordano Bruno, 1846, is
extremely full and sympathetic, but was unavoidably loose as to
dates. Much new matter has since been collected, for which see the
Vita di Giordano Bruno of Domenico Berti, rev. and enlarged ed. 1889;
Prof. J. L. McIntyre, Giordano Bruno, 1903; Dufour, Giordano Bruno
à Génève: Documents Inédits, 1884; David Levi, Giordano Bruno, o
la religione del pensiero: l'uomo, l'apostolo e il martire, 1887;
Dr. H. Brunnhofer's Giordano Bruno's Weltanschauung und Verhängniss,
1882; and the doctoral treatise of C. Sigwart, Die Lebensgeschichte
Giordano Brunos, Tübingen, 1880. For other authorities see Owen's
and I. Frith's lists, and the final Literaturnachweis in Gustav
Louis's Giordano Bruno, seine Weltanschauung und Lebensverfassung,
Berlin, 1900. The study of Bruno has been carried further in Germany
than in England; but Mr. Whittaker (Essays and Notices, 1895) and
Prof. McIntyre make up much leeway.
[187] Cp. Bartholmèss, i, 49-53; Lange, Gesch. des Materialismus, i,
191-94 (Eng. tr. i, 232); Gustav Louis, as cited, pp. 11, 88.
[188] Berti, Vita di Giordano Bruno, 1889, pp. 40-41, 420. Bruno
gives the facts in his own narrative before the Inquisitors at Venice.
[189] Berti, pp. 42-43, 47; Owen, p. 265.
[190] Not to Genoa, as Berti stated in his first ed. See ed. 1889,
pp. 54, 392.
[191] Berti, p. 65. Owen has the uncorrected date, 1576.
[192] Dufour, Giordano Bruno à Génève: Documents Inédits, 1884; Berti,
pp. 95-97; Gustav Louis, Giordano Bruno, pp. 73-75. Owen (p. 269)
has overlooked these facts, set forth by Dufour in 1884. The documents
are given in full in Frith, Life, 1887, p. 60 sq.
[193] The dates are in doubt. Cp. Berti, p. 115, and Frith, p. 65.
[194] See his own narrative before the Inquisitors in 1592. Berti,
p. 394.
[195] McIntyre, Giordano Bruno, 1907, pp. 21-22.
[196] Frith, Life, p. 121, and refs.; Owen, p. 275; Bartholmèss,
Jordano Bruno, i, 136-38.
[197] Cp. Hallam, Lit. of Europe, ii, 111, note. As to Bruno's
supposed influence on Bacon and Shakespeare, cp. Bartholmèss, i,
134-35; Frith, Life, pp. 104-48; and the author's Montaigne and
Shakspere, pp. 132-38. Here there is no case; but there is much
to be said for Mr. Whittaker's view (Essays and Notices, p. 94)
that Spenser's late Cantos on Mutability were suggested by Bruno's
Spaccio. Prof. McIntyre supports.
[198] His praise of Luther, and his compliments to the Lutherans,
are in notable contrast to his verdict on Calvinism. What happened
was that at Wittemberg he was on his best behaviour, and was well
treated accordingly.
[199] As to the traitor's motives cp. McIntyre, p. 66 sq.; Berti,
p. 262 sq.
[200] Noroff, as cited in Frith, p. 345.
[201] De l'Infinito, ed. Wagner, ii, 27; Cena de la Ceneri, ed. Wagner,
i, 173; Acrotismus, ed. Gfrörer, p. 12.
[202] Cp. Berti, pp. 187-88; Whittaker, Essays and Notices, 1895,
p. 89; and Louis's section, Stellung zu Christenthum und Kirche.
[203] Berti, pp. 297-98. It takes much searching in the two poems
to find any of the ideas in question, and Berti has attempted
no collation; but, allowing for distortions, the Inquisition has
sufficient ground for outcry.
[204] Sigillus Sigillorum: De duodecima contractionis
speciae. Cp. F. J. Clemens, Giordano Bruno und Nicolaus von Cusa, 1847,
pp. 176, 183; and H. Brunnhofer, Giordano Bruno's Weltanschauung und
Verhängniss, 1882, pp. 227, 237.
[205] In the treatise De Lampade combinatoria Lulliana
(1587). According to Berti (p. 220) he is the first to employ this
phrase, which becomes the watchword of Spinoza (libertas philosophandi)
a century later.
[206] Berti, cap. iv; Owen, p. 249; Ueberweg, ii, 27; Pünjer, p. 93
sq.; Whittaker, Essays and Notices, p. 66. As to Bruno's debt to
Nicolaus of Cusa cp. Gustav Louis, as cited, p. 11; Pünjer, as cited;
Carriere, Die philosophische Weltanschauung der Reformationszeit,
p. 25; and Whittaker, p. 68. The argument of Carriere's second edition
is analysed and rebutted by Mr. Whittaker, p. 253 sq.
[207] De Immenso, vii, c. 18, cited by Whittaker, Essays and Notices,
p. 70.
[208] As to Bruno's own claim in the Eroici Furori, cp. Whittaker,
Essays, p. 90.
[209] Documents in Berti, pp. 407-18; McIntyre, p. 75 sq.
[210] See the document in Berti, p. 398 sq.; Frith, pp. 270-81.
[211] Berti, p. 400 sq.
[212] See Berti, p. 396; Owen, pp. 285-86; Frith, pp. 282-83.
[213] The controversy as to whether Galileo was tortured leaves it
clear that torture was common. See Dr. Parchappe, Galilée, sa vie,
etc., 1866, Ptie. ii, ch. 7.
[214] Spaccio della bestia trionfante, ed. Wagner, ii, 120.
[215] Prof. Carriere has contended that a transition from pantheism
to theism marks the growth of his thought; but, as is shown by
Mr. Whittaker, he is markedly pantheistic in his latest work of all,
though his pantheism is not merely naturalistic. Essays and Notices,
pp. 72, 253-58.
[216] Italian versions differ verbally. Cp. Levi, p. 379; Berti,
p. 386. That inscribed on the Bruno statue at Rome is a close rendering
of the Latin: Majori forsan cum timore sententiam in me fertis quam
ego accipiam, preserved by Scioppius.
[217] Avviso, in Berti, p. 329; in Levi, p. 386.
[218] Levi, pp. 384-92. Levi relates (p. 390) that Bruno at the stake
was heard to utter the words: "O Eterno, io fo uno sforzo supremo per
attrarre in me quanto vi tra di più divino nell'universo." He cites
no authority. An Avviso reports that Bruno said his soul would rise
with the smoke to Paradise (p. 386; Berti, p. 330), but does not
state that this was said at the stake. And Levi accepts the other
report that Bruno was gagged.
[219] Notably his comedy Il Candelaio.
[220] Owen, Skeptics of the Italian Renaissance, p. 357. A full
narrative, from the documents, is given in R. C. Christie's essay,
"Vanini in England," in the English Historical Review of April, 1895,
reprinted in his Selected Essays and Papers, 1902.
[221] See it analysed by Owen, pp. 361-68, and by Carriere,
Weltanschauung, pp. 496-504.
[222] Amphitheatrum, 1615, Exercit. xix, pp. 117-18.
[223] Amphitheatrum, Exercit. xxvii, p. 161.
[224] Id. pp. 72, 73, 78, 113, etc.
[225] P. 35. Machiavelli is elsewhere attacked. Pp. 36, 50.
[226] Julii Cæsaris Vanini Neapolitani, Theologi, Philosophi, et juris
utriusque Doctoris, de Admirandis Naturæ Reginæque Deæque Mortalium
Arcanis, libri quatuor. Lutetiæ, 1616.
[227] Mr. Owen makes a serious misstatement on this point, by which
I was formerly misled. He writes (p. 369) that from the publisher's
preface we "learn that the Dialogues were not written by Vanini, but
by his disciples. They are a collection of discursive conversations
embodying their master's opinions." This is not what the preface
says. It tells, after a high-pitched eulogy of Vanini, that "nos
publicæ utilitatis solliciti, alia eius monumenta, quæ avarius
retinebat, per idoneos ex scriptores nancisci curavimus." In ascribing
the matter of the dialogues to Vanini's young days, Mr. Owen forgets
the references to the Amphitheatrum.
[228] "Alex. Sed in qua nam Religione verè et piè Deum coli vetusti
Philosophi existimarunt? Vanini. In unica Naturæ lege, quam ipsa
Natura, quæ Deus est (est enim principium motus)...." De Arcanis,
as cited, p. 366. Lib. iv, Dial. 50. See Rousselot's French tr. 1842,
p. 227. This passage is cited by Hallam (Lit. Hist. ii, 461) as avowing
"disbelief of all religion except such as Nature ... has planted in
the minds of men"--a heedless perversion.
[229] De Arcanis, pp. 354-60, 420-22 (Dial. 50, 56); Rousselot,
pp. 219-23, 271-73.
[230] The special reference (lib. iv, dial. 56, p. 428) is to
a story of an infant prophesying when only twenty-four hours
old. (Amphitheatrum, Ex. vi, p. 38; cp. Owen, p. 368, note.) On this
and on other points Cousin (cited by Owen, pp. 368, 371, 377) and
Hallam (Lit. Hist. ii, 461) make highly prejudiced statements. Quoting
the final pages on which the dialoguist passes from serious debate
to a profession of levity, and ends by calling for the play-table,
the English historian dismisses him as "the wretched man."
[231] Cp. Carriere's analysis of the Dialogues, pp. 505-59; and the
Apologia pro Jul. Cæsare Vanino (by Arpe), 1712.
[232] See Owen's vindication, pp. 371-74. Renan's criticism (Averroès,
pp. 420-23) is not quite judicial. See many others cited by Carriere,
p. 516.
[233] It is difficult to understand how the censor could let pass
the description of Nature in the title; but this may have been
added after the authorization. The book is dedicated by Vanini to
Marshal Bassompierre, and the epistle dedicatory makes mention of
the Serenissima Regina aeterni nominis Maria Medicæa, which would
disarm suspicion. In any case the permit was revoked, and the book
condemned to be burned.
[234] Owen, p. 395.
[235] Mercure Français, 1619, tom. v, p. 64.
[236] Gramond (Barthélemi de Grammont), Historia Galliæ ab excessu
Henrici IV, 1643, p. 209. Carriere translates the passage in full,
pp. 500-12, 515; as does David Durand in his hostile Vie et Sentimens
de Lucilio Vanini, 1717. As to Gramond see the Lettres de Gui Patin,
who (Lett. 428, ed. Reveillé-Parise) calls him âme foible et bigote,
and guilty of falsehood and flattery.
[237] Gramond, p. 210. Of Vanini, as of Bruno, it is recorded that at
the stake he repelled the proffered crucifix. Owen and other writers,
who justly remark that he well might, overlook the once received
belief that it was the official practice, with obstinate heretics,
to proffer a red-hot crucifix, so that the victim should be sure to
spurn it with open anger.
[238] Stephen Phillips, Marpessa.
[239] Cp. Owen, pp. 389, 391, and Carriere, pp. 512-13, as to the
worst calumnies. It is significant that Vanini was tried solely for
blasphemy and atheism. What is proved against him is that he and an
associate practised a rather gross fraud on the English ecclesiastical
authorities, having apparently no higher motive than gain and a free
life. Mr. Christie notes, however, that Vanini in his writings always
speaks very kindly of England and the English, and so did not add
ingratitude to his act of imposture.
[240] De Arcanis, p. 205. Lib. iii, dial. 30.
[241] Amphitheatrum, p. 17.
[242] De Arcanis, lib. iv, dial. 52, p. 379; dial. 51,
p. 373. Cp. Amphitheatrum, p. 36; and De Arcanis, p. 20.
[243] De Arcanis, dial. 50 and 56. In the Amphitheatrum he adduces
an equally skilful German atheist (p. 73).
[244] Dial. li, p. 371.
[245] Dial. liv, p. 407.
[246] Cp. Rousselot, notice, p. xi.
[247] Durand compiles a list of ten or eleven works of Vanini from
the allusions in the Amphitheatrum and the De Arcanis.
[248] Reported by Gramond, as cited.
[249] Owen, pp. 393-94.
[250] Garasse, Doctrine curieuse des beaux esprits, 1623.
[251] De Arcanis, dial. vii, p. 36.
[252] Dial. iv, p. 21.
[253] Doctrine curieuse des beaux esprits de ce temps, 1623, p. 848.
[254] Karl von Gebler, Galileo Galilei and the Roman Curia,
Eng. tr. 1879, pp. 36-37.
[255] This appears from the letters of Sagredo to Galileo. Gebler,
p. 37. Cp. Gui Patin, Lett. 816, ed. Reveillé-Parise, 1846, iii,
758; Bayle, art. Cremonin, notes C and D; and Renan, Averroès, 3e
édit. pp. 408-13. Patin writes that his friend Naudé "avoit été intime
ami de Cremonin, qui n'étoit point meilleur Chrétien que Pomponace,
que Machiavel, que Cardan et telles autres ... dont le pays abonde."
[256] Lange, Gesch. des Materialismus, i, 183 (Eng. tr. i, 220);
Gebler, p. 25. Libri actually made the refusal; but all that is
proved as to Cremonini is that he opposed Galileo's discoveries à
priori. As to the attitude of such opponents see Galileo's letter to
Kepler. J. J. Fahie, Galileo: his Life and Work, 1903. pp. 101-102.
[257] Fahie, Galileo, p. 100.
[258] Id. p. 127.
[259] Gebler, pp. 54, 129, and passim; The Private Life of Galileo
(by Mrs. Olney), Boston, 1870, pp. 67-72.
[260] Galileo's letter to Kepler, cited by Gebler, p. 26.
[261] The Jesuits were expelled from Venice in 1616, in retaliation
for a papal interdict.
[262] See it summarized by Gebler, pp. 46-60, and quoted in the
Private Life, pp. 83-85.
[263] The measure of reverence with which the orthodox handled the
matter may be inferred from the fact that the Dominican Caccini, who
preached against Galileo in Florence, took as one of his texts the
verse in Acts i: "Viri Galilaei, quid statis aspicientes in coelum,"
making a pun on the Scripture.
[264] See this summarized by Gebler, pp. 64-70.
[265] See The Private Life of Galileo, pp. 86-87, 91, 99; Gebler,
p. 44; Fahie, pp. 169-70; Berti, Il Processo Originale de Galileo
Galilei, 1878, p. 53.
[266] Gebler (p. 101) solemnly comments on this letter as a lapse into
"servility" on Galileo's part.
[267] Gebler, pp. 112-13.
[268] Private Life, pp. 216-18; Gebler, pp. 157-62.
[269] Berti, pp. 61-64; Private Life, pp. 212-13; Gebler, p. 162.
[270] Gebler, p. 239; Private Life, p. 256.
[271] Gebler, pp. 249-63; Private Life, pp. 255-56; Marini,
pp. 55-57. The "e pur si muove" story is first heard of in 1774. As
to the torture, it is to be remembered that Galileo recanted under
threat of it. See Berti, pp. 93-101; Marini, p. 59; Sir O. Lodge,
Pioneers of Science, 1893, pp. 128-31. Berti argues that only the
special humanity of the Commissary-General, Macolano, saved him from
the torture. Cp. Gebler, p. 259, note.
[272] Gebler, p. 281.
[273] Private Life, pp. 265-60, 268; Gebler, p. 252.
[274] Berti, Il Processo di Galileo, pp. 111-12.
[275] Letter of Hobbes to Newcastle, in Report of the
Hist. Mss. Comm. on the Duke of Portland's Papers, 1892, ii. Hobbes
explains that few copies were brought over, "and they that buy such
books are not such men as to part with them again." "I doubt not,"
he adds, "but the translation of it will here be publicly embraced."
[276] Gebler, pp. 312-15; Putnam, Censorship of the Church of Rome,
i, 313-14.
[277] See Ueberweg, ii, 12, as to the conflicting types. In addition
to Cremonini, several leading Aristotelians in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries were accused of atheism (Hallam, Lit. Hist. ii,
101-102), the old charge against the Peripatetic school. Hallam
(p. 102) complains that Cesalpini of Pisa "substitutes the barren
unity of pantheism for religion." Cp. Ueberweg, ii, 14; Renan,
Averroès, 3e édit. p. 417. An Averroïst on some points, he believed
in separate immortality.
[278] Gebler, pp. 37, 45. Gebler appears to surmise that Cremonini
may have escaped the attack upon himself by turning suspicion upon
Galileo, but as to this there is no evidence.
[279] Ueberweg, ii, 17.
[280] Epist. 36.
[281] See above, p. 45.
[282] Bartholmèss, Jordano Bruno, i, 49.
[283] Lange, Gesch. des Mater. i, 189-90 (Eng. tr. i, 228). Born
in Valencia and trained at Paris, Vives became a humanist teacher
at Louvain, and was called to England (1523) to be tutor to the
Princess Mary. During his stay he taught at Oxford. Being opposed to
the divorce of Henry VIII, he was imprisoned for a time, afterwards
living at Bruges.
[284] See the monograph, Ramus, sa vie, ses écrits, et ses opinions,
par Ch. Waddington, 1855. Owen has a good account of Ramus in his
French Skeptics.
[285] Scholæ math. l. iii, p. 78, cited by Waddington, p. 343.
[286] "In many respects Galileo deserves to be ranked with Descartes
as inaugurating modern philosophy." Prof. Adamson, Development of
Mod. Philos. 1903, i, 5. "We may compare his [Hobbes's] thought with
Descartes's, but the impulse came to him from the physical reasonings
of Galileo." Prof. Croom Robertson, Hobbes, 1886, p. 42.
[287] Buckle, 1-vol. ed. pp. 327-36; 3-vol. ed. ii, 77-85. Cp. Lange,
i, 425 (Eng. tr. i, 248, note); Adamson, Philosophy of Kant, 1879,
p. 194.
[288] Cp. Lange, i, 425 (Eng. tr. i, 248-49, note); Bouillier,
Hist. de la philos. cartésienne, 1854, i, 40-47, 185-86; Bartholmèss,
Jordano Bruno, i, 354-55; Memoir in Garnier ed. of OEuvres Choisies,
p. v, also pp. 6, 17, 19, 21. Bossuet pronounced the precautions of
Descartes excessive. But cp. Dr. Land's notes in Spinoza: Four Essays,
1882, p. 55.
[289] Coll. of Philos. Writings, ed. 1712, pref. p. xi.
[290] Discours de la Méthode, pties. i, ii, iii, iv (OEuvres Choisies,
pp. 8, 10, 11, 22, 24); Meditation I (id. pp. 73-74).
[291] Full details in Kuno Fischer's Descartes and his School,
Eng. tr. 1890, bk. i, ch. vi; Bouillier, i, chs. xii, xiii.
[292] Buckle, 1-vol. ed. pp. 337-39; 3-vol. ed. ii, 94, 97.
[293] Buckle, pp. 327-30; ii, 81.
[294] Id. p. 330; ii, 82. The process is traced hereinafter.
[295] Kuno Fischer, Francis Bacon, Eng. tr. 1857, p. 74.
[296] For an exact summary and criticism of Gassendi's positions see
the masterly monograph of Prof. Brett of Lahore, The Philosophy of
Gassendi, 1908--a real contribution to the history of philosophy.
[297] Cp. Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, bk. v, ch. i (McCulloch's
ed. 1839, pp. 364-65). It is told of him, with doubtful authority, that
when dying he said: "I know not who brought me into the world, neither
do I know what was to do there, nor why I go out of it." Reflections
on the Death of Freethinkers, by Deslandes (Eng. tr. of the Réflexions
sur les grands hommes qui sont morts en plaisantant), 1713, p. 105.
[298] For a good account of Gassendi and his group (founded on Lange, §
iii, ch. i) see Soury, Bréviaire de l'hist. de matérialisme, ptie. iii,
ch. ii.
[299] Voltaire, Éléments de philos. de Newton, ch. ii; Lange, i, 232
(Eng. tr. i, 267) and 269.
[300] Bayle, art. Pomponace, Notes F. and G. The complaint was made
by Arnauld, who with the rest of the Jansenists was substantially
a Cartesian.
[301] See it in Garnier's ed. of Descartes's OEuvres Choisies, p. 145.
[302] Id. pp. 158-64.
[303] Apparently just because the Jansenists adopted Descartes
and opposed Gassendi. But Gassendi is extremely guarded in all his
statements, save, indeed, in his objections to the Méditations of
Descartes.
[304] See Soury, pp. 397-98, as to a water-drinking "debauch" of
Gassendi and his friends.
[305] Rambaud, as cited, p. 154.
[306] Id. p. 155.
[307] Voltaire, Siècle de Louis XIV, ed. Didot, p. 366. "On ne l'eût
pas osé sous Henri IV et sous Louis XIII," adds Voltaire. Cp. Michelet,
La Sorcière, éd. Séailles, 1903, p. 302.
[308] Tr. into English in 1659, under the title The Vanity of Judiciary
Astrology.
[309] Jenkin Thomasius in his Historia Atheismi (1692) joins Herbert
with Bodin as having five points in common with him (ed. 1709, ch. ix,
§ 2, pp. 76-77).
[310] It might have been supposed that he was recalled on account
of his book; but it was not so. He was recalled by letter in April,
returned home in July, and seems to have sent his book thence to
Paris to be printed.
[311] Autobiography, Sir S. Lee's 2nd ed. p. 132.
[312] The book was reprinted at London in Latin in 1633; again at
Paris in 1636; and again at London in 1645. It was translated and
published in French in 1639, but never in English.
[313] Compare the verdict of Hamilton in his ed. of Reid, note A, §
6, 35 (p. 781).
[314] For a good analysis see Pünjer, Hist. of the Christ. Philos. of
Religion, Eng. trans. 1887, pp. 292-99; also Noack, Die Freidenker
in der Religion, Bern, 1853, i, 17-40; and Lechler, Geschichte des
englischen Deismus, pp. 36-54.
[315] See his Autobiography, as cited, pp. 133-34.
[316] De causis errorum, una cum tractate de religione laici et
appendice ad sacerdotes (1645); De religione gentilium (1663). The
latter was translated into English in 1705. The former are short
appendices to the De Veritate. In 1768 was published for the first time
from a manuscript, A Dialogue between a Tutor and his Pupil, which,
despite the doubts of Lechler, may confidently be pronounced Herbert's
from internal evidence. See the "Advertisement" by the editor of the
volume, and cp. Lee, p. xxx, and notes there referred to. The "five
points," in particular, occur not only in the Religio Gentilium, but
in the De Veritate. The style is clearly of the seventeenth century.
[317] Sir Sidney Lee can hardly be right in taking the Dialogue to be
the "little treatise" which Herbert proposed to write on behaviour
(Autobiography, Lee's 2nd ed. p. 43). It does not answer to that
description, being rather an elaborate discussion of the themes of
Herbert's main treatises, running to 272 quarto pages.
[318] See below, p. 80.
[319] More Reasons for the Christian Religion, 1672, p. 79.
[320] It is to be remembered that the doctrine of the supremacy of
the civil power in religious matters (Erastianism) was maintained by
some of the ablest men on the Parliamentary side, in particular Selden.
[321] Leviathan, ch. iv, H. Morley's ed. p. 26.
[322] Cp. his letter to an opponent, Considerations upon the
Reputation, etc., of Thomas Hobbes, 1680, with chs. xi and xii of
Leviathan, and De Corpore Politico, pt. ii, c. 6. One of his most
explicit declarations for theism is in the De Homine, c. 1, where
he employs the design argument, declaring that he who will not see
that the bodily organs are a mente aliqua conditas ordinatasque ad
sua quasque officia must be himself without mind. This ascription of
"mind," however, he tacitly negates in Leviathan, ch. xi, and De
Corpore Politico, pt. ii, c. 6.
[323] De Corpore, pt. ii, c. 8, § 20.
[324] Cp. Bentley's letter to Bernard, 1692, cited in Dynamics of
Religion, pp. 82-83.
[325] Leviathan, pt. i, ch. vi. Morley's ed. p. 34.
[326] Leviathan, pt. iii, ch. xxxiii.
[327] Above, p. 24.
[328] On this see Lange, Hist. of Materialism, sec. iii, ch. ii.
[329] Molyneux, an anti-Hobbesian, in translating Hobbes's objections
along with the Meditations (1680) claims that the slightness of
Descartes's replies was due to his unacquaintance with Hobbes's works
and philosophy in general (trans. cited, p. 114). This is an obviously
lame defence. Descartes does parry some of the thrusts of Hobbes;
others he simply cannot meet.
[330] E.g., Leviathan, pt. iv, ch. xlvii.
[331] Kuno Fischer, Descartes and his School, pp. 232-35. Cp. Bentley,
Sermons on Atheism (i.e., his Boyle Lectures), ed. 1724, p. 8.
[332] Hobbes also was of Mersenne's acquaintance, but only as a man of
science. When, in 1647, Hobbes was believed to be dying, Mersenne for
the first time sought to discuss theology with him; but the sick man
instantly changed the subject. In 1648 Mersenne died. He thus did not
live to meet the strain of Leviathan (1651), which enraged the French
no less than the English clergy. (Croom Robertson's Hobbes, pp. 63-65.)
[333] Hobbes lived to see this law abolished (1677). There was left,
however, the jurisdiction of the bishops and ecclesiastical courts
over cases of atheism, blasphemy, heresy, and schism, short of the
death penalty.
[334] Croom Robertson, Hobbes, p. 196; Pepys's Diary, Sept. 3, 1668.
[335] Leviathan, ch. ii; Morley's ed. p. 19; chs. xiv, xv, pp. 66,
71, 72, 78; ch. xxix, pp. 148, 149.
[336] Leviathan, chs. xv, xvii, xviii. Morley's ed. pp. 72, 82, 83, 85.
[337] "For two generations the effort to construct morality on a
philosophical basis takes more or less the form of answers to Hobbes"
(Sidgwick, Outlines of the History of Ethics, 3rd ed. p. 169).
[338] As when he presents the law of Nature as "dictating peace,
for a means of the conservation of men in multitudes" (Leviathan,
ch. xv. Morley's ed. p. 77).
[339] See the headings, Council, Religion, etc.
[340] G. W. Johnson, Memoirs of John Selden, 1835, pp. 348, 362.
[341] G. W. Johnson, p. 264.
[342] Above, p. 20.
[343] G. W. Johnson, pp. 258, 302.
[344] Id. p. 302. Cp. in the Table Talk, art. Trinity, his view of
the Roundheads.
[345] Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson, ed. 1810, i, 181. Cp. i, 292;
ii, 44.
[346] Cp. Overton's pamphlet, An Arrow against all Tyrants and
Tyranny (1646), cited in the History of Passive Obedience since the
Reformation, 1689, i, 59; pt. ii of Thomas Edwards's Gangræna: or a
Catalogue and Discovery of many of the Errours, Heresies, Blasphemies,
and pernicious Practices of the Sectaries of this time, etc., 2nd
ed. 1646, pp. 33-34 (Nos. 151-53).
[347] Lords Journals, January 16, 1645-1646; Gangræna, as cited,
p. 150; cp. Gardiner, Hist. of the Civil War, ed. 1893, iii, 11.
[348] Green, Short Hist. ch. viii, § 8, pp. 551-52; Gardiner, Hist. of
the Civil War, iv, 22.
[349] Gangræna, p. 18.
[350] In 1644 he had been imprisoned at Bury St. Edmunds for
"dipping" adults, and after six months' durance had been released on a
recantation and promise of amendment. Gangræna, as cited, pp. 104-105.
[351] Rev. James Cranford, Hæreseo-Machia, a Sermon, 1646, p. 10.
[352] No. 100 in Gangræna.
[353] Cranford, as cited, p. 11 sq.
[354] See G. P. Gooch's Hist. of Democ. Ideas in England in the 17th
Century, 1898, ch. vi.
[355] Above, pp. 4 and 8.
[356] In the British Museum copy the name Richardson is penned, not in
a contemporary hand, at the end of the preface; and in the preface to
vol. ii of the Phenix, 1708, in which the treatise is reprinted, the
same name is given, but with uncertainty. The Richardson pointed at
was the author of The Necessity of Toleration in Matters of Religion
(1647). E. B. Underhill, in his collection of that and other Tracts
on Liberty of Conscience for the Hanserd Knollys Society, 1846,
remains doubtful (p. 247) as to the authorship of the tract on hell.
[357] The fourth English edition appeared in 1754.
[358] Gangræna, ep. ded. (p. 5). Cp. pp. 47, 151, 178-79; and Bailie's
Letters, ed. 1841, ii, 234-37; iii, 393. The most sweeping plea for
toleration seems to have been the book entitled Toleration Justified,
1646. (Gangræna, p. 151.) The Hanserd Knollys collection, above
mentioned, does not contain one of that title.
[359] Gangræna, pp. 152-53.
[360] Pp. 18-36.
[361] Id. p. 15. As to other sects mentioned by him cp. Tayler, p. 194.
[362] On the intense aversion of most of the Presbyterians to
toleration see Tayler, Retrospect of Relig. Life of Eng. p. 136. They
insisted, rightly enough, that the principle was never recognized in
the Bible.
[363] See the citations in Buckle, 3-vol. ed. i, 347;
1-vol. ed. p. 196.
[364] Alex. Ross, Pansebeia, 4th ed. 1672, p. 379.
[365] Cp. the present writer's Buckle and his Critics, 1895, ch. viii,
§ 2.
[366] See above, vol. i, p. 5.
[367] Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson, 3rd ed. i, 200.
[368] Heresiography: The Heretics and Sectaries of these Times,
1614. Epist. Ded.
[369] Discourse, ed. 1857, p. 226.
[370] Dr. J. Brown's pref. to ed. of 1857, p. xxii.
[371] More, Collection of Philosophical Writings, 4th ed. 1692, p. 95.
[372] Fabricius, Delectus Argumentorum et Syllabus Scriptorum, 1725,
p. 341.
[373] No copy in British Museum.
[374] Urwick, Life of John Howe, with 1846 ed. of Howe's Select Works,
pp. xiii, xix. Urwick, a learned evangelical, fully admits the presence
of "infidels" on both sides in the politics of the time.
[375] Discourse Concerning Union Among Protestants, ed. cited, pp. 146,
156, 158. In the preface to his treatise, The Redeemer's Tears Wept
over Lost Souls, Howe complains of "the atheism of some, the avowed
mere theism of others," and of a fashionable habit of ridiculing
religion. This sermon, however, appears to have been first published
in 1684; and the date of its application is uncertain.
[376] Wallace, Antitrinitarian Biography, Art. 285.
[377] The preface begins: "It is neither to satisfie the importunity
of friends, nor to prevent false copies (which and such like excuses
I know are expected in usual prefaces), that I have adventured abroad
this following treatise: but it is out of a just resentment of the
affronts and indignities which have been cast on religion, by such
who account it a matter of judgment to disbelieve the Scriptures,
and a piece of wit to dispute themselves out of the possibility of
being happy in another world."
[378] See bk. ii, ch. x. Page 338, 3rd ed. 1666.
[379] Cp. Glanvill, pref. Address to his Scepsis Scientifica, Owen's
ed. 1885, pp. lv-lvii; and Henry More's Divine Dialogues, Dial. i,
ch. xxxii.
[380] Cp. Lecky, Rationalism in Europe, i. 109.
[381] The Reformed Pastor, abr. ed. 1826, pp. 236, 239.
[382] Work cited, ed. 1667, p. 136. The proposition is reiterated.
[383] Id. p. 388.
[384] Reasons of the Christian Religion, pp. 388-89.
[385] Religio Stoici, Edinburgh, 1663. p. 19. The essay was reprinted
in 1665, and in London in 1693 under the title of The Religious Stoic.
[386] Id. p. 18.
[387] Id. p. 124.
[388] Id. p. 76.
[389] Id. p. 69.
[390] Religio Stoici, p. 116.
[391] Id. p. 122.
[392] This last is interesting as a probable echo of opinions he had
heard from some of his older contemporaries: "Opinion kept within its
proper bounds is an [ = the Scottish "ane"] pure act of the mind;
and so it would appear that to punish the body for that which is a
guilt of the soul is as unjust as to punish one relation for another"
(pref. pp. 10-11). He adds that "the Almighty hath left no warrand
upon holy record for persecuting such as dissent from us."
[393] Reason: an Essay, ed. 1690, p. 21. Cp. p. 152.
[394] Id. p. 82. It is noteworthy that Mackenzie puts in a protest
against "implicit Faith and Infallibility, those great tyrants
over Reason" (p. 88). But the essay as a whole is ill-planned and
unimpressive.
[395] Work cited, 2nd ed. pt. ii, pp. 106-15.
[396] Cp. Dynamics of Religion, pp. 86-87, 89-90. This explanation
is also given by Bishop Wilkins in his treatise on Natural Religion,
7th ed. p. 354.
[397] Replying to Herbert's De Veritate, which he seems not to have
read before.
[398] Pref. to Obs. upon the United Prov. of the Netherlands, in Works,
ed. 1814, i, 36.
[399] Cp. Dynamics of Religion, pp. 87, 94-98, 111, 112.
[400] As to the religious immoralism see Mosheim, 17 Cent. sec. ii,
pt. ii, ch. ii, § 23, and Murdock's notes.
[401] Compare the picture of average Protestant deportment given by
Benjamin Bennet in his Discourses against Popery, 1714, p. 377.
[402] More, Coll. of Philos. Writings, 4th ed. 1712, gen. pref. p. 7.
[403] Compare some of the extracts in Thomas Bennet's Defence of
the Discourse of Schism, etc., 2nd ed. 1704, from the sermons of
R. Gouge (1688). The description of men as "mortal crumbling bits
of dependency, yesterday's start-ups, that come out of the abyss of
nothing, hastening to the bosom of their mother earth" (work cited,
p. 93) is a reminder that the resonant and cadenced rhetoric of
the Brownes and Taylors and Cudworths was an art of the age, at the
command of different orders of propaganda.
[404] Cited by Bonnet, A Defence of the Discourse of Schism, etc.,
as cited, p. 41.
[405] Thus Henry More's biographer, the Rev. Richard Ward, says "the
late Mr. Chiswel told a friend of mine that for twenty years together
after the return of King Charles the Second the Mystery of Godliness,
and Dr. More's other works, ruled all the booksellers in London"
(Life of More, 1710, pp. 162-63). We have seen the nature of some of
More's "other works."
[406] The Reasonableness of Scripture Belief, 1672, Epist. Ded.
[407] Rep. 1675; 2nd ed. 1691; rep. in the Phoenix, vol. ii, 1708;
3rd ed. 1736.
[408] A very hostile account of him is given in Dict. of Nat. Biog. He
was, however, the friend of Cowley, and the "M. Clifford" to whom Sprat
addressed his sketch of Cowley's Life. He was also a foe of Dryden--the
"malicious Matt Clifford" of Dryden's Sessions of the Poets; and he
attacked the poet in Notes on Dryden's Poems (published 1687), and
is supposed to have had a hand in the Rehearsal. He was befriended
by Shaftesbury.
[409] Tract. Theol. Polit. c. 15.
[410] Wood, Athenæ Oxonienses, ii, 381-82; Granger, Biog. Hist. of
England, 5th ed. v, 293.
[411] Johnson's Life of Dr. Watts, 1785, App. i.
[412] Toulmin, Hist. of the Prot. Dissenters, 1814, citing Johnson's
Life of Dr. Watts.
[413] It has been suggested that this was really written by Clifford,
for posthumous publication. The humorous sketch of "His Character"
at the close, suggesting that his vices seem to the writer to have
outweighed his virtues, hints of ironical mystification.
[414] Work cited, pp. 10, 14, 30, 55.
[415] Dr. Urwick, Life of Howe, as cited, p. xxxii.
[416] A Demonstration of the Divine Authority of the Law of Nature and
of the Christian Religion, by Samuel Parker, D.D., 1681, pref. The
first part of this treatise is avowedly a popularization of the
argument of Cumberland's Disquisitio de Legibus Naturæ, 1672. Parker
had previously published in Latin a Disiputatio de Deo et Providentia
Divina, in which he raised the question, An Philosophorum ulli,
et quinam Athei fuerunt (1678).
[417] Work cited, 2nd ed. 1682, pp. 32, 38-40, 45-48.
[418] Id. pp. 54-55.
[419] Id. p. 52.
[420] Twelve Sermons Preached upon Several Occasions, 1692, pp. 438-39.
[421] This has been ascribed, without any good ground, to Charles
Blount. It does not seem to me to be in his style.
[422] Premonition to the Candid Reader.
[423] Hist. Nat. vii, 1.
[424] Pamphlet cited, pp. 20, 21.
[425] Id. p. 23.
[426] Concerning whom see Macaulay's History, ch. xix, ed. 1877, ii,
411-12--a very prejudiced account. Blount is there spoken of as "one
of the most unscrupulous plagiaries that ever lived," and as having
"stolen" from Milton, because he issued a pamphlet "By Philopatris,"
largely made up from the Areopagitica. Compare Macaulay's treatment of
Locke, who adopted Dudley North's currency scheme (ch. xxi, vol. ii,
p. 547).
[427] Bayle (art. Apollonius, note), who is followed by the French
translator of Philostratus with Blount's notes in 1779 (J. F. Salvemini
de Castillon), says the notes were drawn from the papers of Lord
Herbert of Cherbury; but of this Blount says nothing.
[428] As to these see the Dict. of Nat. Biog. The statements of Anthony
Wood as to the writings of Blount's father, relied on in the author's
Dynamics of Religion, appear to be erroneous. Sir Thomas Pope Blount,
Charles's eldest brother, shows a skeptical turn of mind in his Essays
(3rd ed. 1697, Essay 7). Himself a learned man, he disparages learning
as checking thought; and, professing belief in the longevity of the
patriarchs (p. 187), pronounces popery and pagan religion to be mere
works of priestcraft (Essay 1). He detested theological controversy
and intolerance, and seems to have been a Lockian.
[429] All that is known of this tragedy is that Blount loved his
deceased wife's sister and wished to marry her; but she held it
unlawful, and he was in despair. According to Pope, a sufficiently
untrustworthy authority, he "gave himself a stab in the arm, as
pretending to kill himself, of the consequence of which he really died"
(note to Epilogue to the Satires, i, 123). An overstrung nervous
system may be diagnosed from his writing.
[430] Boyle Lectures on Atheism, ed. 1724, p. 4.
[431] Reflexions upon the Books of the Holy Scriptures to establish the
Truth of the Christian Religion, by Peter Allix, D.D., 1688, i, 6-7.
[432] As cited by Leslie, Truth of Christianity Demonstrated, 1711,
pp. 17-21.
[433] Characteristics, ii, 263 (Moralists, pt. ii, § 3). One of the
most dangerous positions from the orthodox point of view would be the
thesis that while religion could do either great good or great harm to
morals, atheism could do neither. (Bk. I, pt. iii, § 1.) Cp. Bacon's
Essay, Of Atheism.
[434] Blount, after assailing in anonymous pamphlets Bohun the
licenser, induced him to license a work entitled King William and Queen
Mary Conquerors, which infuriated the nation. Macaulay calls the device
"a base and wicked scheme." It was almost innocent in comparison
with Blount's promotion of the "Popish plot" mania. See Who Killed
Sir Edmund Godfrey Berry? by Alfred Marks. 1905, pp. 133-35, 150.
[435] See the text in Mrs. Bradlaugh Bonner's Penalties upon Opinion,
pp. 19-21. Macaulay does not mention this measure.
[436] The Act had been preceded by a proclamation of the king, dated
Feb. 24. 1697.
[437] As to an earlier monopoly of the London booksellers, see George
Herbert's letters to the Archbishop of Canterbury and to Bacon,
Jan. 29, 1620. In Works of George Herbert, ed. 1841, i. 217-18.
[438] See Locke's notes on the Licensing Act in Lord King's Life of
Locke, 1829, pp. 203-206; Fox Bourne's Life of Locke, ii. 313-14;
Macaulay's History, ii, 504.
[439] Trinius, Freydenker-Lexicon, 1759, p. 120; Pünjer, i, 291,
300-301. Browne was even called an atheist. Arpe, Apologia pro Vanino,
1712, p. 27, citing Welschius. Mr. A. H. Bullen, in his introduction
to his ed. of Marlowe (1885, vol. i, p. lviii), remarks that Browne,
who "kept the road" in divinity, "exposed the vulnerable points in
the Scriptural narratives with more acumen and gusto than the whole
army of freethinkers, from Anthony Collins downwards." This is of
course an extravagance, but, as Mr. Bullen remarks in the Dict. of
Nat. Biog. vii, 66, Browne discusses "with evident relish" the
"seeming absurdities in the Scriptural narrative."
[440] Browne's Annotator points to the derivation of his skepticism
from "that excellent French writer Monsieur Mountaign, in whom I
often trace him" (Sayle's ed. 1904, i, p. xviii).
[441] Religio Medici, i, 6.
[442] Id. i, 9.
[443] Id. i, 18.
[444] Religio Medici, i, 20.
[445] Bk. I, ch. x.
[446] Here we have a theorem independently reached later (with the
substitution of Nature for God) by Mary Wollstonecraft and Tennyson
in turn. Browne cites yet another: "that he looks not below the moon,
but hath resigned the regiment of sublunary affairs unto inferior
deputations"--a thesis adopted in effect by Cudworth.
[447] By an error of the press, Browne is made in Mr. Sayle's excellent
reprint (i, 108) to begin a sentence in the middle of a clause, with an
odd result:--"I do confess I am an Atheist. I cannot persuade myself
to honour that the world adores." The passage should obviously read:
"to that subterraneous Idol (avarice) and God of the Earth I do
confess I am an Atheist," etc.
[448] Hutchinson, Histor. Essay Conc. Witchcraft, 1718, p. 118;
2nd ed. 1720, p. 151.
[449] Cp. Whewell, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy,
ed. 1862, p. 33.
[450] Robertson Smith, The Religion of the Semites, 1889, pref. p. vi;
Rev. Dr. Duff, Hist. of Old Test. Criticism, R. P. A. 1910, p. 113.
[451] This appears again, much curtailed and "so altered as to be in
a manner new," in its author's collected Essays on Several Important
Subjects in Religion and Philosophy (1676), under the title Against
Confidence in Philosophy.
[452] See the Humane Nature (1640), ch. iv, §§ 7-9.
[453] Scepsis Scientifica, ch. 23, § 1.
[454] See the passages compared by Lewes, History of Philosophy,
4th ed. ii, 338.
[455] In his Blow at Modern Sadducism (4th ed. 1668), Sadducismus
Triumphatus (1681; 3rd ed. 1689), and A Whip to the Droll, Fidler
to the Atheist (1688--a letter to Henry More, who was zealous on the
same lines). These works seem to have been much more widely circulated
than the Scepsis Scientifica.
[456] Scepsis, ch. 20, § 3.
[457] See Glanvill's reply in a letter to a friend (1665), re-written
as Essay II, Of Scepticism and Certainty: in A short Reply to the
learned Mr. Thomas White in his collected Essays on Several Important
Subjects, 1676.
[458] See the reply in Plus Ultra: or, the Progress and
Advancement of Knowledge since the days of Aristotle, 1668,
Epist. Ded. Pref. ch. xviii, and Conclusion. [The re-written treatise,
in the collected Essays, eliminates the controversial matter.]
[459] First printed with Glanvill's Philosophia Pia in 1671. Rep. as
an essay in the collected Essays.
[460] Owen, pref. to Scepsis, pp. xx-xxii.
[461] Owen, pref. to ed. of Scepsis Scientifica, p. ix.
[462] Of whom, however, a high medical authority declares that,
"as a physiologist, he was sunk in realism" (that is, metaphysical
apriorism). Prof. T. Clifford Allbutt, Harveian Oration on Science
and Medieval Thought, 1901, p. 44.
[463] Cp. Whewell, as last cited, pp. 75-83; Hallam, Literature of
Europe, iv, 159-71.
[464] Reid, Intellectual Powers, Essay I, ch. i; Hamilton's ed. of
Works, p. 226. Glanvill calls Gassendi "that noble wit." (Scepsis
Scientifica, Owen's ed. p. 151.)
[465] Poet. Works of Milton, 1874, Introd. i, 92 sq.
[466] Scepsis Scientifica, Owen's ed. p. 66. In the condensed version
of the treatise in Glanvill's collected Essays (1676, p. 20), the
language is to the same effect.
[467] J. J. Tayler, Retrospect of the Religious Life of England,
Martineau's ed. p. 204; Wallace, Antitrinitarian Biography, iii,
152-53.
[468] Cp. Buckle, 3-vol. ed. ii, 347-51; 1-vol. ed. pp. 196-99.
[469] Tayler, Retrospect, pp. 204-205; Wallace, iii, 154-56.
[470] Gangræna, pt. i, p. 38.
[471] Tayler, p. 221. As to Biddle, the chief propagandist of the sect,
see pp. 221-24, and Wallace, Art. 285.
[472] Macaulay, Essay on Milton. Cp. Brown's ed. (Clarendon Press)
of the poems of Milton, ii, 30.
[473] Cp. Dynamics of Religion, ch. v.
[474] Of Education, § 136.
[475] Essay, bk. iv, ch. xix. § 4.
[476] Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, c. 15.
[477] Third Letter to the Bishop of Worcester.
[478] Some Familiar Letters between Mr. Locke and Several of his
Friends, 1708, pp. 302-304.
[479] Fox Bourne, Life of Locke, 1876, ii, 34.
[480] The first Letter, written while he was hiding in Holland in 1685,
was in Latin, but was translated into French, Dutch, and English.
[481] Mr. Fox Bourne, in his biography (ii, 41), apologizes for the
lapse, so alien to his own ideals, by the remark that "the atheism
then in vogue was of a very violent and rampant sort." It is to be
feared that this palliation will not hold good--at least, the present
writer has been unable to trace the atheism in question. For "atheism"
we had better read "religion."
[482] Second Vindication of "The Reasonableness of Christianity,"
1697, pref.
[483] Fox Bourne, Life of Locke, ii, 181.
[484] Son of the Presbyterian author of the famous Gangræna.
[485] Said by Carrol, Dissertation on Mr. Lock's Essay, 1706, cited
by Anthony Collins, Essay Concerning the Use of Reason, 1709, p. 30.
[486] Cited by Fox Bourne, Life of Locke, ii, 438.
[487] Whose calibre may be gathered from his egregious doctoral thesis,
Concio ad clerum de dæmonum malorum existentia et natura (1700). After
a list of the deniers of evil spirits, from the Sadducees and
Sallustius to Bekker and Van Dale, he addresses to his "dilectissimi
in Christo fratres" the exordium: "En, Academici, veteres ac hodiernos
Sadducæos! quibuscum tota Atheorum cohors amicissimè congruit; nam
qui divinum numen, iidem ipsi infernales spiritus acriter negant."
[488] Confutation of Warburton (1757) in Extracts from Law's Works,
1768, i, 208-209.
[489] Cp. the Essay, bk. i, ch. iii, § 6, with Law's Case of Reason,
in Extracts, as cited, p. 36.
[490] Cp. Dynamics of Religion, p. 122.
[491] Fox Bourne, ii, 404-405.
[492] An ostensibly orthodox Professor of our own day has written
that Locke's doctrine as to religion and ethics "shows at once the
sincerity of his religious convictions and the inadequate conception
he had formed to himself of the grounds and nature of moral philosophy"
(Fowler, Locke, 1880, p. 76).
[493] Burnet, History of his Own Time, ed. 1838, p. 251. Burnet adds
that Temple "was a corrupter of all that came near him." The 1838
editor protests against the whole attack as the "most unfair and
exaggerated" of Burnet's portraits; and a writer in The Present State
of the Republick of Letters, Jan., 1736, p. 26, carries the defence
to claiming orthodoxy for Temple. But the whole cast of his thought
is deistic. Cp. the Essay upon the Origin and Nature of Government,
and ch. v of the Observations upon the United Provinces (Works,
ed. 1770, i, 29, 36, 170-74).
[494] Cp. Macaulay, History, ch. ii. Student's ed. i, 120.
[495] Compare his Advice to a Daughter, § 1 (in Miscellanies, 1700),
and his Political Thoughts and Reflections: Religion.
[496] See Macaulay, ch. xx. Student's ed. ii, 459.
[497] De Morgan, as cited, p. 107.
[498] See Brewster, ii, 318, 321-22, 323, 331 sq., 342 sq.
[499] Id. p. 327 sq.
[500] Id. p. 115.
[501] Cp. De Morgan, pp. 133-45.
[502] Four Letters from Sir Isaac Newton to Dr. Bentley, ed. 1756,
p. 25. Cp. Dynamics of Religion, pp. 97-102.
[503] Brewster, ii, 314.
[504] Id. pp. 315-16.
[505] Id. pp. 342-46.
[506] Brewster, p. 349. See the remaining articles, and App. XXX,
p. 532.
[507] Id. p. 388.
[508] Discourse on Tillotson and Burnet, pp. 38, 40, 74, cited by
Collins, Discourse of Freethinking, 1713, pp. 171-72.
[509] The Brief Notes on the Creed of St. Athanasius (author unknown),
printed by Thomas Firmin. Late in 1693 appeared another antitrinitarian
tract, by William Freke, who was prosecuted, fined £500, and ordered
to make a recantation in the Four Courts of Westminster Hall. The book
was burnt by the hangman. Wallace, Art. 354. There had also been "two
quarto volumes of tracts in support of Unitarianism," published in 1691
(Dr. W. H. Drummond, An Explanation and Defence of the Principles of
Protestant Dissent, 1842, p. 17).
[510] "Locke's ribald schoolfellow of nearly fifty years ago" (Fox
Bourne, ii, 405).
[511] Id. ib.
[512] Tayler, Retrospect, p. 226; Wallace, Antitrinitarian Biography,
i, 160-69.
[513] Fox Bourne, ii, 405; Wallace, art. 353.
[514] Above, pp. 35-36.
[515] Nelson's Life of Bishop Bull, 2nd ed. 1714, p. 398.
[516] "Perhaps at no period was the Unitarian controversy so actively
carried on in England as between 1690 and 1720." History, Opinions,
etc., of the English Presbyterians, 1834, p. 22.
[517] Cp. Dynamics of Religion, pp. 113-15--Tayler, Retrospect, p. 227.
[518] As to whom see Tayler, Retrospect, ch. v. § 4. They are spoken
of as "the new sect of Latitude-Men" in 1662; and in 1708 are said
to be "at this day Low Churchmen." See A Brief Account of the New
Sect of Latitude-Men, by "S. P." of Cambridge, 1662, reprinted in The
Phenix, vol. ii, 1708. and pref. to that vol. From "S. P.'s" account
it is clear that they connected with the new scientific movement, and
leant to Cartesianism. As above noted, they included such prelates as
Wilkins and Tillotson. The work of E. A. George, Seventeenth Century
Men of Latitude (1908), deals with Hales, Chillingworth, Whichcote,
H. More, Taylor, Browne, and Baxter.
[519] Toulmin, Histor. View of the Prot. Dissenters, 1814, p. 270. A
main ground of the offence taken was a somewhat trivial dialogue in
Burnet's book between Eve and the serpent, indicating the "popular"
character of the tale. This was omitted from a Dutch edition at the
author's request, and from the 3rd ed. 1733 (Toulmin, as cited). It
is given in the partial translation in Blount's Oracles of Reason.
[520] See Brewster's Memoirs of Newton, 1855, ii, 315-16, for a letter
indicating Craig's religious attitude. He contributed to Dr. George
Cheyne's Philosophical Principles of Religion, Natural and Revealed,
1705. (Pref. to pt. i, ed. 1725.)
[521] See the note of Pope and Warburton on the Dunciad, iv, 462.
[522] See arts. in Dict. of Nat. Biog.
[523] Reprinted at Amsterdam, 1712.
[524] Essays as cited, p. 84.
[525] Id. p. 30.
[526] See Christianity not Founded on Argument (by Henry Dodwell,
jr.), 1741, pp. 11, 34. Waterland, as cited by Bishop Hurst, treats
the terms Reasonist and Rationalist as labels or nicknames of those
who untruly profess to reason more scrupulously than other people. The
former term may, however, have been set up as a result of Le Clerc's
rendering of "the Logos," in John i, 1, by "Reason"--an argument to
which Waterland repeatedly refers.
[527] Prof. Strowski, who is concerned to prove that the freethinkers
of the period were mostly men-about-town, claims Patin as a Frondeur
(De Montaigne à Pascal, p. 215). But Patin's attitude in this matter
was determined by his detestation of Mazarin, whom he regarded as an
arch-scoundrel. Naudé's defence of the Massacre is forensic.
[528] Lettres de Gui Patin, No. 188, édit. Reveillé-Parise, 1846,
i, 364.
[529] Cp. Reveillé-Parise, as cited, Notice sur Gui Patin,
pp. xxiii-xxvii, and Bayle, art. Patin.
[530] See the notices of him in Owen's Skeptics of the French
Renaissance; and in Sainte-Beuve. Port Royal, iii, 180, etc.
[531] De la Vertu des Payens, in t. v. of the 12mo ed. of OEuvres,
1669.
[532] Hanotaux, Hist. du Cardinal de Richelieu, 1893, i, pref. p. 7.
[533] Cp. Buckle, ch. viii, 1-vol. ed. pp. 305-10, 325-28.
[534] See the good criticism of M. Hanotaux in Perrens, Les Libertins
en France au xvii. siècle, p. 95 sq.
[535] OEuvres, ed. 1669, v, 4 sq. Bellarmin, as Le Vayer shows, had
similarly explained away Augustine. But the doctrine that heathen
virtue was not true virtue had remained orthodox.
[536] Ed. cited, iv, 125.
[537] Id. pp. 123-24.
[538] Tom. iii, 251.
[539] He wrote very many, the final collection filling three
volumes folio, and fifteen in duodecimo. The Cincq Dialogues faits
à l'imitation des Anciens were pseudonymous, and are not included in
the collected works.
[540] "On le régarde comme le Plutarque de notre siècle" (Perrault,
Les Hommes Illustres du XVIIe Siècle, éd. 1701, ii. 131).
[541] Perrault, ii, 132.
[542] Bayle, Dict. art. La Mothe le Vayer. Cp. introd. to L'Esprit de
la Mothe le Vayer, par M. de M. C. D. S. P. D. L. (i.e. De Montlinot,
chanoine de Saint Pierre de Lille), 1763, pp. xviii, xxi, xxvi.
[543] M. Perrens, who endorses this criticism, does not note that
some passages he quotes from the Dialogues, as to atheism being less
disturbing to States than superstition, are borrowed from Bacon's
essay Of Atheism, of which Le Vayer would read the Latin version.
[544] Perrens, p. 132.
[545] In French, 1631; in Latin, 1656, amended.
[546] Translated into English in 1688, and into French, under the
title Traité du Pyrrhonisme de l'église romaine, by N. Chalaire,
Amsterdam, 1721.
[547] Bouillier, Hist. de la Philos. cartésienne, 1854, i, 410 sq., 420
sq.; Lanson, Hist. de la litt. française, 5e édit. p. 396; Brunetière,
Études Critiques, 3e série, p. 2; Buckle, 1-vol. ed. p. 338. Bouillier
notes (i, 426) that the femmes savantes ridiculed by Molière are
Cartesians.
[548] Bouillier, i, 456; Lanson, p. 397.
[549] Bouillier, i, 411 sq.
[550] Id. p. 431 sq.
[551] Id. p. 437 sq.
[552] Id. pp. 449-50.
[553] "Il disait très souvent," said Pascal's niece:--"Je ne puis
pardonner à Descartes: il aurait bien voulu, dans toute sa philosophie,
pouvoir se passer de Dieu; mais il n'a pu s'empêcher de lui accorder
une chiquenade, pour mettre le monde en mouvement; après cela il
n'a plus que faire de Dieu." Récit de Marguerite Perier ("De ce
que j'ai ouï dire par M. Pascal, mon oncle"), rep. with Pensées,
ed. 1853. pp. 38-39.
[554] Bouillier, p. 453.
[555] Id. p. 455 sq.
[556] See Bouillier, i, 460 sq.; ii, 373 sq.; and introd. to OEuvres
philos. du Père Buffier, 1846, p. 4; and cp. Rambaud, Hist. de la
civilisation française, 6e édit. ii, 336.
[557] Bouillier, i, 465.
[558] Perrens, pp. 84-85.
[559] Cp. Perrens, pp. 68-69, and refs.
[560] Cp. Strowski, De Montaigne à Pascal, p. 141.
[561] See Duvernet, Vie de Voltaire, ch. i, and note 1; and Perrens,
pp. 74-80.
[562] For all that is known of Petit see the Avertissement to
Bibliophile Jacob's edition of Paris ridicule et burlesque au
17ième siècle, and refs. in Perrens, p. 153. After Petit's death,
his friend Du Pelletier defended him as being a deist; but he seems
in his youthful writings to have blasphemed at large, and he had
been guilty of assassinating a young monk. He was burned, however,
for blaspheming the Virgin.
[563] Guizot, Corneille et son temps, ed. 1880, p. 200. The circle of
the Hôtel Rambouillet were especially hostile. Cp. Palissot's note to
Polyeucte, end. On the other hand, Corneille found it prudent to cancel
four skeptical lines which he had originally put in the mouth of the
pagan Severus, the sage of the piece. Perrens, Les Libertins, p. 140.
[564] Under whom he studied in his youth with a number of other notably
independent spirits, among them Cyrano de Bergerac. See Sainte-Beuve's
essay on Molière, prefixed to the Hachette edition. Molière held by
Gassendi as against Descartes. Bouillier, i, 542 sq.
[565] Constant Coquelin, art. "Don Juan" in the International Review,
September, 1903, p. 61--an acute and scholarly study.
[566] "Molière is a freethinker to the marrow of his bones" (Perrens,
p. 280). Cp. Lanson, p. 520; Fournier, Études sur Molière, 1885,
pp. 122-23; Soury, Brêv. de l'hist. du matér. p. 384. "Ginguené,"
writes Sainte-Beuve, "a publié une brochure pour montrer Rabelais
précurseur de la révolution française: c'étoit inutile à prouver sur
Molière" (essay cited).
[567] Act II, sc. iv. in OEuvres Comiques, etc., ed. Jacob, rep. by
Garnier, pp. 426-27.
[568] See Jacob's note in loc., ed. cited, p. 455.
[569] E.g. his Lettre contre un Pédant (No. 13 of the Lettres
Satiriques in ed. cited, p. 181), which, however, appears to have
been mutilated in some editions; as one of the deistic sentences
cited by M. Perrens, p. 247, does not appear in the reprint of
Bibliophile Jacob.
[570] E.g. the Histoire des Oiseaux in the Histoire Comique des états
et empires du Soleil, ed. Jacob (Garnier), p. 278; and the Fragment
de Physique (same vol.).
[571] See the careful criticism of Perrens, pp. 248-50.
[572] Bibliophile Jacob, pref. to ed. cited, pp. i-ii.
[573] Perrens, p. 302. Compare Bossuet's earlier sermon for the Second
Sunday of Advent, 1665, cited by Perrens, pp. 253-54, where he speaks
with something like fury of the free discussion around him.
[574] Cousin plausibly argues that Pascal began writing Pensées
under the influence of a practice set up in her circle by Madame de
Sablé. Mme. de Sablé, 5e édit. p. 124 sq.
[575] It is to be remembered that the work as published contained
matter not Pascal's. Cp. Brunetière, Études, iii, 46-47; and the
editions of the Pensées by Faugère and Havet.
[576] As to some of these see Perrens, pp. 158-69. They included the
great Condé and some of the women in his circle; all of them unserious
in their skepticism, and all "converted" when the physique gave the
required cue.
[577] Pensées, ed. Faugère, ii, 168-69. The "abêtira" comes from
Montaigne.
[578] Thus Mr. Owen treats Pascal as a skeptic, which philosophically
he was, insofar as he really philosophized and did not merely catch
at pleas for his emotional beliefs. "Les Pensées de Pascal," writes
Prof. Le Dantec, "sont à mon avis le livre le plus capable de renforcer
l'athéisme chez un athée" (L'Athéisme, 1906, pp. 24-25). They have
in fact always had that effect.
[579] De la Delicatesse, 1671, dial. v, p. 329, etc.
[580] Vinet, Études sur Blaise Pascal, 3e édit. p. 267 sq.
[581] Cp. the Éloge de Pascal by Bordas Demoulin in Didot ed. of
the Lettres, 1854, pp. xxii-xxiii, and cit. from Saint-Beuve. Mark
Pattison, it seems, held that the Jesuits had the best of the
argument. See the Letters of Lord Acton to Mary Gladstone, 1904,
p. 207. As regards the effect of Jansenism on belief, we find De
Tocqueville pronouncing that "Le Jansenisme ouvrit ... la brêche
par laquelle la philosophie du 18e siècle devait faire irruption"
(Hist. philos. du règne de Louis XV, 1849, i, 2). This could truly
be said of Pascal.
[582] Cp. Voltaire's letter of 1768, cited by Morley, Voltaire,
4th ed. p. 159.
[583] Cp. Owen, French Skeptics, pp. 762-63, 767.
[584] This was expressly urged against Huet by Arnauld. See the Notice
in Jourdain's ed. of the Logique de Port Royal, 1854, p. xi; Perrens,
Les Libertins, p. 301; and Bouillier Hist. de la philos. cartésienne,
1854, i, 595-96, where are cited the letters of Arnauld (Nos. 830,
834, and 837 in OEuvres Compl. iii, 396, 404, 424) denouncing Huet's
Pyrrhonism as "impious" and perfectly adapted to the purposes of
the freethinkers.
[585] Cp. Alexandre Westphal, Les Sources du Pentateuque, i (1888),
pp. 64-68.
[586] Huet himself incurred a charge of temerity in his handling of
textual questions. Id. p. 66.
[587] Pattison, Essays, 1889, i. 303-304.
[588] Pattison, as cited.
[589] "After all, a book [the Bible] cannot make a stand against the
wild, living intellect of man." Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua, 1st
ed. p. 382; ed. 1875, p. 245. The same is said by Newman of religion
in general (p. 243).
[590] Pattison disparages it as colourless, a fault he charges on
Jesuit Latin in general. But by most moderns the Latin style of Huet
will be found pure and pleasant.
[591] Pattison, Essays, i, 299. Cp. Bouillier, i, 595.
[592] Fontenelle, Éloge sur Régis; Bouillier, Philos. cartés., i, 507.
[593] Réponse to Huet's Censura philosophiæ cartes., 1691; Bouillier,
i, 515.
[594] Usage de la raison et de la foi, 1704, liv. i, ptie. i, ch. vii;
Bouillier, p. 511.
[595] Bouillier, i, 521-25.
[596] Lettre de 10 août, 1677, No. 591, éd. Nodier.
[597] Bouillier, ii, 10.
[598] Méditations chrétiennes, ix, § 13.
[599] Entretiens métaphysiques, viii.
[600] Id. viii, ix.
[601] Bouillier, ii, 33. So Kuno Fischer: "In brief, Malebranche's
doctrine, rightly understood, is Spinoza's" (Descartes and his School,
Eng. tr. 1890, p. 589. Cp. p. 542).
[602] The work of Arnauld was reprinted in 1724 with a remarkable
Approbation by Clavel, in which he eulogizes the style and the
dialectic of Arnauld, and expresses the hope that the book may "guérir,
s'il se peut, d'une étrange préoccupation et d'une excessive confiance,
ceux qui enseignent ou soutiennent comme evident ce qu'il y a de plus
dangereux dans la nouvelle philosophie non-obstant les défenses faites
par le feu Roi Louis XIV à l'Université d'Angers en l'année 1675 et à
l'Université de Paris aux années 1691 et 1704 de le laisser enseigner
ou soutenir."
[603] Des vrayes et des fausses idées, ch. xxviii.
[604] Recherche de la Vérité, liv. vi, ptie. ii, ch. iii.
[605] This was the main theme of the finished Éloge of Fontenelle, and
was acknowledged by Bayle, Daguesseau, Arnauld, Bossuet, Voltaire, and
Diderot, none of whom agreed with him. Bouillier, ii, 19. Fontenelle
opposed Malebranche's philosophy in his Doutes sur le système physique
des causes occasionelles. Id. p. 575.
[606] Cp. Bouillier, ii, 260-61.
[607] He is not mentioned by Ueberweg, Lange, or Lewes. His importance
in æsthetics, however, is recognized by some moderns, though he is
not named in Mr. Bosanquet's History of Æsthetic.
[608] Traité des premières vérités, 1724, §§ 521-31.
[609] Bouillier, introd. to Buffier's OEuvres philosophiques, 1846,
p. xiii.
[610] Remarques sur les principes de la metaphysique de Locke,
passages cited by Bouillier.
[611] OEuvres, éd. Bouillier, p. 329.
[612] Cp. Bouillier, Hist. de la philos. cartés., ii, 391.
[613] Malebranche, Traité de Morale, liv. ii, ch. 10. Cp. Bouillier,
i, 582, 588-90; ii, 23.
[614] Cp. Westphal, Les Sources du Pentateuque, 1888, i, 67 sq.
[615] Præadamitæ, sive Exercitatio super versibus 12, 13, 14 cap. 5,
Epist. D. Pauli ad Romanos, Quibus inducuntur Primi Homines ante
Adamum conditi. The notion of a pre-Adamite human race, as we saw,
had been held by Bruno. (Above, p. 46.)
[616] My copies of the Præadamitæ and Systema bear no place-imprint,
but simply "Anno Salutis MDCLV." Both books seem to have been at once
reprinted in 12mo.
[617] Bayle, Dictionnaire, art. Peyrere. A correspondent of Bayle's
concludes his account of "le Préadamite" thus: "Le Pereire étoit le
meilleur homme du monde, le plus doux, et qui tranquillement croyoit
fort peu de chose." There is a satirical account of him in the Lettres
de Gui Patin, April 5,1658 (No. 454, ed. Reveillé-Parise, 1846, iii,
83), cited by Bayle.
[618] See the account of his book by Mr. Lecky, Rationalism in
Europe, i, 295-97. Rejecting as he did the Mosaic authorship of the
Pentateuch, he ranks with Hobbes and Spinoza among the pioneers of
true criticism. Indeed, as his book seems to have been in MS. in 1645,
he may precede Hobbes. Patin had heard of Peyrère's Præadamitæ as
ready for printing in 1643. Let. 169, ed. cited, i, 297.
[619] Kuno Fischer, Descartes and his School, pp. 254-68.
[620] Colerus (i.e., Köhler), Vie de Spinoza, in Gfrörer's ed. of
the Opera, pp. xlv-xlvii.
[621] Cited by George Sinclar in pref. to Satan's Invisible World
Discovered, 1685,rep. 1871. I have been unable to meet with a copy
of Mastricht's book.
[622] "Novitates Cartesianæ multis parasangas superunt Arminianas."
[623] Nichols, Works of Arminius, 1824, i, 257 b (paging partly
duplicated).
[624] Cp. Bouillier, i, 293-94.
[625] Colerus, Vie de Spinoza, in Gfrörer's ed. of Opera, p. xxv;
Martineau, Study of Spinoza, 1882, pp. 20-22; Pollock, Spinoza,
2nd ed. 1899, pp. 10-14.
[626] As set forth by Joel, Beiträge zur Gesch. der Philos., Breslau,
1876. See citations in Land's note to his lecture in Spinoza: Four
Essays, 1882, pp. 51-53.
[627] Land, "In Memory of Spinoza," in Spinoza: Four Essays, pp. 57-58;
Sigwart, as there cited; Pollock, Spinoza, p. 12. Cp. however,
Martineau, p. 101, note.
[628] Renati Des Cartes Princip. Philos. more geometrico demonstratæ,
1663.
[629] Cp. Martineau, pp. 46, 57.
[630] Reprinted in 1674, without place-name, and with the imprint of
an imaginary Hamburg publisher.
[631] Tractatus, c. 15.
[632] Ep. xxiv, to Oldenburg.
[633] Epp. lviii, lx, to Boxel.
[634] Ep. xxiii, to Oldenburg.
[635] Ep. xxiv.
[636] Ep. xxxiv, to W. van Bleyenberg.
[637] Ep. xlvii, to Jellis, Feb. 1671.
[638] Ep. xix, 1675, to Oldenburg.
[639] "Spinozism is atheistic, and has no valid ground for retaining
the word 'God'" (Martineau, p. 349). This estimate is systematically
made good by Prof. E. E. Powell of Miami University in his Spinoza and
Religion (1906). See in particular ch. v. The summing-up is that "the
right name for Spinoza's philosophy is Atheistic Monism" (pp. 339-40).
[640] Ethica, pt. i, App.; pt. ii, end; pt. v, prop. 41, schol. Cp. the
Letters, passim.
[641] The solution is, of course, that the attitude of the will in
the forming of opinion may or may not be passionally perverse, in the
sense of being inconsistent. To show that it is inconsistent may be
a means of enlightening it; and an aspersion to that effect may be
medicinal. Spinoza might truly have said that passional perversity
was at least as common on the orthodox side as on the other. In any
case, he quashes his own criticism of Bacon. Cp. the author's essay
on Spinoza in Pioneer Humanists.
[642] Pt. iv, prop. 68, schol.
[643] Ep. 1; 2 June, 1674.
[644] Colerus, as cited, p. liv. Cuper appears to have been genuinely
anti-Spinozist, while his opponent, Breitburg, or Bredenburg, of
Rotterdam, was a Spinozist. Both were members of the society of
"Collegiants," a body of non-dogmatic Christians, which for a time
was broken up through their dissensions. Mosheim, 17 Cent. sec. ii,
pt. ii, ch. vii, § 2, and note.
[645] Theologisch, Philosophisch, en Historisch process voor God,
tegen allerley Atheisten. By Francis Ridder, Rotterdam, 1678.
[646] L'Impiétié Convaincu, "par Pierre Yvon," Amsterdam, 1681. Really
by the Sieur Noël Aubert de Versé. This appears to have been reprinted
in 1685 under the title L'Impie convaincu, ou Dissertation contre
Spinosa, ou l'on réfute les fondemens de son athéisme.
[647] See Fox Bourne's Life of Locke, ii, 282-83, as to Locke's
friendly relations with the Remonstrants in 1683-89.
[648] See the summary of his argument by Alexandre Westphal, Les
Sources du Pentateuque, 1888, i, 78 sq.
[649] Mosheim, Reid's ed. p. 836; Martineau, pp. 327-28. The first
MS. of the treatise of Spinoza, De Deo et Homine, found and published
in the nineteenth century, bore a note which showed it to have
been used by a sect of Christian Spinozists. See Janet's ed. 1878,
p. 3. They altered the text, putting "faith" for "opinion." Id. p. 53,
notes.
[650] Edwards, Gangræna, as before cited.
[651] Discourse of Freethinking, p. 28.
[652] Colerus, as cited, p. lviii.
[653] First ed. Rotterdam, 2 vols. folio, 1696.
[654] Albert Cazes, Pierre Bayle, sa vie, ses idées, son influence,
son oeuvre, 1905, pp. 6, 7.
[655] A movement of skepticism had probably been first set up in
the young Bayle by Montaigne, who was one of his favourite authors
before his conversion (Cazes, p. 5). Montaigne, it will be remembered,
had been a fanatic in his youth. Thus three typical skeptics of the
sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries had known what it
was to be Catholic believers.
[656] Cp. the essay on The Skepticism of Bayle in Sir J. F. Stephen's
Horæ Sabbaticæ, vol. iii, and the remarks of Perrens, Les Libertins,
pp. 331-37.
[657] Éloge de M. le Cardinal Polignac prefixed to Bougainville's
translation, L'Anti-Lucrèce, 1767, i, 141. Bayle's quoted words are:
"Oui, monsieur, je suis bon Protestant, et dans toute la force du mot;
car au fond de mon âme je proteste contre tout ce qui se dit et tout
ce qui se fait."
[658] Cp. the testimony of Bonet-Maury, Histoire de la liberté
de conscience en France, 1900, p. 55. Besides the writings above
cited, note, in the Dictionnaire, art. Mahomet, § ix; art. Conecte;
art. Simonide, notes H and G; art. Sponde, note C.
[659] Commentaire philosophique sur la parabole: Contrains-les
d'entrer, 2e ptie, vi. Cp. the Critique générale de l'histoire du
Calvinisme du Père Maimbourg, passim.
[660] See pref. to Eng. tr. of Hotman's Franco-Gallia, 1711.
[661] Rep. at Amsterdam, 1788, under the title, Voeux d'un
Patriote. Jurieu's authorship is not certain. Cp. Ch. Nodier, Mélanges
tirés d'une petite bibliothèque, 1829, p. 357. But it is more likely
than the alternative ascription to Le Vassor. The book made such
a sensation that the police of Louis XIV destroyed every copy they
could find; and in 1772 the Chancelier Maupeou was said to have paid
500 livres for a copy at auction over the Duc d'Orléans.
[662] Ed. 1766, p. 7.
[663] The Tractatus Theologico-Politicus had been translated into
French in 1678 by Saint-Glain, a Protestant, who gave it no fewer
than three other titles in succession to evade prosecution. (Note
to Colerus in Gfrörer's ed. of Spinoza, p. xlix.) In addition to
the work of Aubert de Versé, above mentioned, replies were published
by Simon, De la Motte (minister of the Savoy Chapel, London), Lami,
a Benedictine, and others. Their spirit may be divined from Lami's
title, Nouvel athéisme renversé, 1706.
[664] Tom. I. § ii, ch. ix (ed. 1864, i, 134. 177).
[665] The destruction of Protestant liberties was not the work of
the single Act of Revocation. It had begun in detail as early as
1663. From the withholding of court favour it proceeded to subsidies
for conversions, and thence to a graduated series of invasions of
Protestant rights, so that the formal Revocation was only the violent
consummation of a process. See the recital in Bonet-Maury, Histoire
de la liberté de conscience en France, 1900, pp. 46-52.
[666] As to the loss to French industry see Bonet-Maury, as cited,
p. 59, and refs.
[667] See Duruy, Hist. de la France, ii, 253; Bonet-Maury, as cited,
pp. 53-66.
[668] As to whose attitude at this crisis see O. Douen, L'Intolérance
de Fénelon, 1880.
[669] Lanson, Hist. de la litt. française, p. 627.
[670] Id ib. Cp. Demogeot, p. 468.
[671] Not printed till 1743, in the Nouvelles libertés de penser; and
still read in MS. by Grimm in 1754. Fontenelle was also credited with
a heretical letter on the resurrection, and an essay on the Infinite,
pointing to disbelief. It should be noted, however, that he stands
for deism in his essay, De l'existence de Dieu, which is a guarded
application of the design argument against what was then assumed to
be the only alternative--the "fortuitous concourse of atoms."
[672] But Voltaire and he were not at one. He is the "nain de Saturne"
in Micromégas.
[673] B. 1613; d. 1703. A man who lived to ninety can have been no
great debauchee.
[674] Cp. Dynamics of Religion, p. 172.
[675] Cp. Gidel, Étude prefixed to OEuvres Choisies de Saint-Evremond,
ed. Garnier, pp. 64-69.
[676] Caractères (1687), ch. xvi: Les Esprits Forts.
[677] "Is embarrassed" in the first edition.
[678] Des ouvrages de l'esprit, near end. § 65 in ed. Walckenaer,
p. 176.
[679] M. Le Vassor, De la véritable religion, 1688, préf. Le Vassor
speaks in the same preface of "this multitude of libertins and of
unbelievers which now terrifies us." His book seeks to vindicate
the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, inspiration, prophecies,
and miracles, against Spinoza, Le Clerc, and others.
[680] Cp. Huet, Huetiana, § 1.
[681] The question is discussed in the author's Buckle and his Critics,
pp. 324-42, and ed. of Buckle's Introduction. Buckle's view, however,
was held by Huet, Huetiana, § 73.
[682] Cp. Perrens, pp. 310-14.
[683] Letter of the Duchesse d'Orléans, cited by Rocquain, L'Esprit
révolutionnaire avant la révolution, 1878, p. 3, note.
[684] As Voltaire noted, Toland was persecuted in Ireland for his
circumspect and cautious first book, and left unmolested in England
when he grew much more aggressive.
[685] First ed. anonymous. Second ed., of same year, gives author's
name. Another ed. in 1702.
[686] See Dynamics of Religion, p. 129.
[687] Pref. to 2nd ed. pp. vi, viii, xxiv, xxvi.
[688] As late as 1701 a vote for its prosecution was passed in the
Lower House of Convocation. Farrar, Crit. Hist. of Freethought, p. 180.
[689] Molyneux, in Familiar Letters of Locke, etc. p. 228.
[690] No credit for this is given in Sir Leslie Stephen's notice of
Toland in English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, i, 101-12. Compare
the estimate of Lange, Gesch. des Materialismus, i, 272-76 (Eng. tr. i,
324-30). Lange perhaps idealizes his subject somewhat.
[691] In two letters published along with the Letters to Serena, 1704.
[692] Letters to Serena, etc. 1704, pref.
[693] De Principiis atque Originibus (Routledge's 1-vol. ed. pp. 651,
667).
[694] Letters to Serena, pp. 19, 67.
[695] Sir Henry Craik (cited by Temple Scott, Bohn ed. of Swift's
Works, iii, 9) speaks of Toland as "a man of utterly worthless
character." This is mere malignant abuse. Toland is described by Pope
in a note to the Dunciad (ii, 399) as a spy to Lord Oxford. There
could hardly be a worse authority for such a charge.
[696] Gostwick, German Culture and Christianity, 1882, p. 26.
[697] Cp. Stephen, as cited, p. 115.
[698] "The Christianity of many writers consisted simply in expressing
deist opinions in the old-fashioned phraseology" (Stephen, i, 91).
[699] Cp. Pünjer, Christ. Philos. of Religion, i, 289-90; and
Dynamics of Religion, pp. 94-98. Lord Morley's reference to "the
godless deism of the English school" (Voltaire, 4th ed. p. 69) is
puzzling. Cp. Rosenkranz (Diderot's Leben und Werke, 1866, ii, 421) on
"den ungöttlichen Gott der Jesuiten and Jansenisten, dies monströse
Zerrbild des alten Jehovah, diesen apotheosirten Tyrannen, diesen
Moloch." The latter application of the term seems the more plausible.
[700] Macaulay's description of Blount as an atheist is therefore
doubly unwarranted.
[701] Cp. Dynamics of Religion, pp. 94-98.
[702] Continuation des Pensées Diverses ... à l'occasion de la Comète
... de 1680, Amsterdam, 1705, i, 91.
[703] Warburton, Divine Legation, vol. ii, preface.
[704] Stephen, English Thought, i, 114-18.
[705] This, according to John Craig, was Newton's opinion. "The
reason of his [Newton's] showing the errors of Cartes's philosophy
was because he thought it made on purpose to be the foundation of
infidelity." Letter to Conduitt, April 7, 1727, in Brewster's Memoirs
of Newton, ii, 315. Clarke, in his Answer to Butler's Fifth Letter,
expresses a similar view.
[706] "Three Discourses of Happiness, Virtue, and Liberty, Collected
from the Works of the Learn'd Gassendi by Monsieur Bernier. Translated
out of the French, 1699."
[707] Cp. W. Sichel, Bolingbroke and His Times, 1901, i, 175.
[708] Sir Leslie Stephen (i, 33) makes the surprising statement that a
"dogmatic assertion of free-will became a mark of the whole deist and
semi-deist school." On the contrary, Hobbes and Anthony Collins, not
to speak of Locke, wrote with uncommon power against the conception
of free-will, and had many disciples on that head.
[709] Letter to the Princess of Wales, November, 1715, in Brewster,
ii, 284-85.
[710] Second Letter to Clarke, par. 1.
[711] Abstract from the Works of John Hutchinson, 1755, pp. 149-63.
[712] Clarke's Answer to Leibnitz's First Letter, end.
[713] Berkeley, Defence of Freethinking in Mathematics, par. vii; and
Stock's Memoir of Berkeley. Cp. Brewster, Memoirs of Newton, ii, 408.
[714] In the Philosophical Transactions, 1718, No. 355, i, v, vi.
[715] Brewster, More Worlds than One, 1854, p. 110.
[716] Lecky, Hist. of England in the Eighteenth Cent. ed. 1892,
iii, 22-24.
[717] The tradition of Saunderson's unbelief is constant. In the
memoir prefixed to his Elements of Algebra (1740) no word is said of
his creed, though at death he received the sacrament.
[718] See The State of the Process depending against Mr. John Simson,
Edinburgh, 1728. Simson always expressed himself piously, but had
thrown out such expressions as Ratio est principium et fundamentum
theologiæ, which "contravened the Act of Assembly, 1717" (vol. cited,
p. 316). The "process" against him began in 1714, and dragged on for
nearly twenty years, with the result of his resigning his professorship
of theology at Glasgow in 1729, and seceding from the Associate
Presbytery in 1733. Burton, History of Scotland, viii, 399-400.
[719] Cp. the pamphlet by "A Presbyter of the Church of England,"
attributed to Bishop Hare, cited in Dynamics of Religion, pp. 177-78,
and by Lecky, iii, 25.
[720] Tatler, Nos. 12, 111, 135; Spectator, Nos. 231, 381, 389, 599;
Guardian, Nos. 3, 9, 27, 35, 39, 55, 62, 70, 77, 83, 88, 120, 130,
169. Most of the Guardian papers cited are by Berkeley. They are
extremely virulent; but Steele's run them hard.
[721] Analyst, Queries 60 and 62: Defence of Freethinking in
Mathematics, §§ 5, 6, 50. Cp. Dynamics of Religion, pp. 141-42.
[722] Letter in De Morgan's Newton: his Friend: and his Niece, 1885,
p. 69.
[723] The essays in the Characteristics (excepting the Inquiry
Concerning Virtue and Merit, which was published by Toland, without
permission, in 1699) appeared between 1708 and 1711, being collected
in the latter year. Shaftesbury died in 1713, in which year appeared
his paper on The Judgment of Hercules.
[724] A Project for the Advancement of Religion. Bohn ed. of Works,
iii, 44. In this paper Swift reveals his moral standards by the avowal
(p. 40) that "hypocrisy is much more eligible than open infidelity
and vice: it wears the livery of religion ... and is cautious of
giving scandal."
[725] Sir Leslie Stephen (English Thought, i, 283) speaks of Dodwell's
thesis as deserving only "pity or contempt." Cp. Macaulay, Student's
ed. ii, 107-108. But a doctrine of conditional immortality had been
explicitly put by Locke in his Reasonableness of Christianity, 1695,
p. 13. Cp. Prof. Fraser's Locke, 1890, pp. 259-60, and Fox Bourne's
Life of Locke, ii, 287. The difference was that Dodwell elaborately
gave his reasons, which, as Dr. Clarke put it, made "all good men
sorry, and all profane men rejoice."
[726] History of his Own Time, ed. 1838, p. 887.
[727] Compare his ironical Argument Against Abolishing Christianity,
1708.
[728] He had, however, hailed the anonymous Letter Concerning
Enthusiasm as "very well writ," believing it to be by a friend of his
own--(Robert Hunter, to whom, accordingly, it has since been mistakenly
attributed by various bibliographers, including Barbier). "Enthusiasm,"
as meaning "popular fanaticism," was of course as repellent to a
Churchman as to the deists.
[729] Printed in folio 1711. Rep. in vol. xi of the Harleian
Miscellany, p. 168 sq. (2nd ed. p. 163 sq.).
[730] Dr. E. Synge, of Dublin (afterwards Archbishop of Tuam), in his
Religion Tryed by the Test of Sober and Impartial Reason, published
in 1713, seems to be writing before the issue of Collins's book when
he says (Dedication, p. 11) that the spread of the "disease not only
of Heterodoxy but of Infidelity" is "too plain to be either denied
or dissembled."
[731] Leslie affirms in his Truth of Christianity Demonstrated (1711,
p. 14) that the satirical Detection of his Short Method with the
Deists, to which the Truth is a reply, was by the author of Priestcraft
in Perfection; but, while the Detection has some of Collins's humour,
it lacks his amenity, and is evidently not by him.
[732] An English translation of the Dictionary, in 5 vols. folio,
with "many passages restored," appeared in 1734.
[733] A Collection of Several Pieces of Mr. John Locke, 1720, p. 271.
[734] E.g. Mark Pattison, who calls Collins's book of 178 pages a
"small tract."
[735] "Ignorance," Collins writes, "is the foundation of Atheism, and
Freethinking the cure of it" (Discourse of Freethinking, p. 105). Like
Newton, he contemplated only an impossible atheism, never formulated
by any writer. The Philosophical Principles of Religion, Natural
and Reveal'd, of Dr. George Cheyne (1705, 2nd ed. 1715), similarly
declares (pref. end) that "if the modern [i.e. Newtonian] philosophy
demonstrates nothing else, yet it infallibly proves Atheism to be the
most gross ignorance." Thus the vindicator of "religion" was writing
in the key of the deist.
[736] Mr. Temple Scott, in his Bohn ed. of Swift's Works (iii, 166),
asserts that Swift's satire "frightened Collins into Holland." For
this statement there is no evidence whatever, and as it stands it is
unintelligible. The assertion that Collins had had to fly to Holland
in 1711 (Dr. Conybeare, Hist. of N. T. Crit. R. P. A. 1910, p. 38)
is also astray.
[737] Second ed. 1717. Another writer, William Lyons, was on the same
track, publishing The Infallibility of Human Judgment, its Dignity
and Excellence (2nd ed. 1720), and A Discourse of the Necessity of
Human Actions (1730).
[738] Work cited, p. 13.
[739] As to whose positions see a paper in the writer's Pioneer
Humanists, 1907.
[740] There were six separate Discourses. Voltaire speaks of "three
editions coup sur coup of ten thousand each" (Lettre sur les auteurs
Anglais--in OEuvres, ed. 1792. lxviii, 359). This seems extremely
unlikely as to any one Discourse; and even 5,000 copies of each
Discourse is a hardly credible sale, though the writer of the sketch
of his life (1733) says that "the sale of Mr. Woolston's works was
very great." In any case, Woolston's Discourses are now seldomer
met with than Collins's Discourse of Freethinking. Alberti (Briefe
betreffend den Zustand der Religion in Gross-Brittannien) wrote in 1752
that the Discourses were even in that day somewhat rare, and seldom
found together. Many copies were probably destroyed by the orthodox,
and many would doubtless be thrown away, as tracts so often are.
[741] Tyerman's Life of Wesley, ed. 1871, i, 65-66.
[742] The Infidel Convicted, 1731, pp. 33, 62.
[743] Tindal (1653-1733) was the son of a clergyman, and in 1678 was
elected a Fellow of All Souls, Oxford. From 1685 to 1688 he was a
Roman Catholic. Under William III he wrote three works on points of
political freedom--one, 1698, on The Liberty of the Press. His Rights
of the Christian Church, anonymously published in 1706, a defence
of Erastianism, made a great sensation, and was prosecuted--only
to be reprinted. His later Defence of the Rights of the Christian
Church was in 1710, by order of the House of Commons, burned by the
common hangman.
[744] Middleton's Works, 2nd ed. 1755, iii, 50-56.
[745] Tindal (Voltaire tells) regarded Pope as devoid of genius and
imagination, and so trebly earned his place in the Dunciad.
[746] A Layman's Faith.... "By a Freethinker and a Christian," 1732.
[747] Title-page of Rev. Elisha Smith's Cure of Deism, 1st ed. 1736;
3rd ed. 1740.
[748] Le Moine, Dissertation historique sur les écrits de Woolston,
sa condemnation, etc. pp. 29-31, cited by Salchi, Lettres sur le
Déisme, 1759, p. 67 sq.
[749] Lettre sur les auteurs Anglais, as cited. Voltaire tells that,
when a she-bigot one day spat in Woolston's face, he calmly remarked:
"It was so that the Jews treated your God." Another story reads like
a carefully-improved version of the foregoing. A woman is said to
have accosted him as a scoundrel, and asked him why he was not yet
hanged. On his asking her grounds for such an accost, she replied:
"You have writ against my Saviour. What would become of my poor sinful
soul if it was not for my dear Saviour--my Saviour who died for such
wicked sinners as I am." Life of Mr. Woolston, prefixed to a reprint
of his collected Discourses, 1733, p. 27. Cp. Salchi, p. 78.
[750] Life cited, pp. 22, 26, 29.
[751] An Historical Defence of the Trustees of Lady Hewley's
Foundations, by the Rev. Joseph Hunter, 1834, pp. 17, 35; The History,
Opinions, and present legal position of the English Presbyterians,
1834, pp. 18, 29; Skeats, History of the Free Churches of England,
ed. Miall, p. 240.
[752] Hunter, as cited, p. 17; History of the Presbyterians, as cited,
p. 19; Fletcher, History of Independency, 1862, iv, 266-67.
[753] Hunter, pp. 37, 39.
[754] Skeats, as cited, p. 226.
[755] Hunter, pp. 24-25.
[756] Skeats (pp.239-40) sums up that while the Baptists had
probably "never been entirely free from the taint" of Unitarianism,
the Particular Baptists and the Congregationalists were saved from
it by their lack of men of "eminently speculative mind"; while the
Presbyterians "were men, for the most part, of larger reading than
other Nonconformists, and the writings of Whiston and Clarke had
found their way among them." But the tendency existed before Whiston
and Clarke.
[757] History, cited, p. 22; Hunter, pp. 44-45; Skeats, pp. 243-44.
[758] Skeats, pp. 240-43, 245 sq.
[759] Skeats, p. 248.
[760] Hunter, p. 50.
[761] As Sir Leslie Stephen has observed (English Thought, i, 164),
Chubb "deserves the praise of Malthusians." Having a sufficiency of
means for himself, but not more, he "lived a single life, judging
it greatly improper to introduce a family into the world without a
prospect of maintaining them." The proverb as to mouths and meat, he
drily observes, had not been verified in his experience. (The Author's
Account of Himself, pref. to Posthumous Works, 1748, i, p. iv.)
[762] One of the then numerous tribe of eccentrics. He held by
Judaic Sabbatarianism, and affected a Rabinnical costume. He made a
competence, however, as an ironmonger.
[763] Essay Towards Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain.
[764] Discourse to Magistrates.
[765] Guardian, Nos. 3, 55, 88.
[766] The Analyst, Queries, 55-67.
[767] See above, pp. 126-28.
[768] Discourse of Passive Obedience, § 26.
[769] Works, ed. 1837, p. 352.
[770] See the whole context, which palpitates with excitement.
[771] Mr. Walter Sichel (Bolingbroke and his Times, 1901, i, 175)
thinks fit to dispose of her attitude as "her aversion to the Church
and to everything that transcended her own faculties." So far as the
evidence goes, her faculties were much superior to those of most of
her orthodox contemporaries. For her tone see her letters.
[772] E.g. Dunciad, ii, 399; iii, 212; iv, 492.
[773] Voltaire commented pointedly on Pope's omission to make any
reference to Shaftesbury, while vending his doctrine. (Lettres
Philosophiques, xxii.) As a matter of fact Pope does in the Dunciad
(iv, 488) refer maliciously to the Theocles of Shaftesbury's Moralists
as maintaining a Lucretian theism or virtual atheism. The explanation
is that Shaftesbury had sharply criticized the political course of
Bolingbroke, who in turn ignored him as a thinker. See the present
writer's introd. to Shaftesbury's Characteristics, ed. 1900 (rep. in
Pioneer Humanists); and cp. W. R. Scott, Francis Hutcheson, 1900,
p. 101.
[774] Texte, Rousseau and the Cosmopolitan Spirit in Literature,
Eng. tr. pp. 117-18.
[775] Chesterfield in his Characters (app. to the Letters)
testifies that Pope "was a deist believing in a future state;
this he has often owned himself to me." (Bradshaw's ed. of Letters,
iii, 1410.) Chesterfield makes a similar statement concerning Queen
Caroline:--"After puzzling herself in all the whimsies and fantastical
speculations of different sects, she fixed herself ultimately in Deism,
believing in a future state." (Id. p. 1406.)
[776] Dict. Philos. art. Athée, § 2.
[777] Wise, in his adaptation of Cudworth, A Confutation of the
Reason and Philosophy of Atheism (1706), writes (i, 5) that "the
philosophical atheists are but few in number," and their objections
so weak "as that they deserve not a hearing but rather neglect"; but
confusedly goes on to admit that "one or two broachers of 'em maybe
thought able to infect a whole nation, as ... sad experience tells us."
[778] Complaint to this effect was made by orthodox writers. The Scotch
Professor Halyburton, for instance, complains that in many sermons
in his day "Heathen Morality has been substituted in the room of
Gospel Holiness. And Ethicks by some have been preached instead of the
Gospels of Christ." Natural Religion Insufficient (Edinburgh), 1714,
p. 25. Cp. pp. 23, 26-27, 59, etc. Bishop Burnet, in the Conclusion to
his History of his Own Time, declares, "I must own that the main body
of our clergy has always seemed dead and lifeless to me," and ascribes
much more zeal to Catholics and dissenters. (Ed. 1838, pp. 907-910.)
[779] The Moralists deals rather with strict skepticism than with
substantive atheism.
[780] The Grand Essay: or, a Vindication of Reason and Religion
against Impostures of Philosophy. The book was, on March 18, 1704,
condemned by the House of Commons to be burned in Palace Yard,
along with its author's Second Thoughts Concerning the Human Soul
(1702). A second ed. of the latter appeared soon after.
[781] Above, p. 153.
[782] Mr. Herbert Paul, in his essay on Swift (Men and Letters,
1901, p. 267), lumps as deists the four writers named by Swift in his
Argument. Not having read them, he thinks fit to asperse all four as
bad writers. Asgill, as was noted by Coleridge (Table Talk, July 30,
1831; April 30, 1832), was one of the best writers of his time. He
was, in fact, a master of the staccato style, practised by Mr. Paul
with less success.
[783] Work cited, p. 324. The book is now rare.
[784] Cp. Cheyne, Founders of Old Testament Criticism, 1893, p. 2.
[785] Dr. Cheyne expresses surprise that a "theological writer" who
got no far should not have been "prompted by his good genius to follow
up his advantage." It is, however, rather remarkable that Parvish,
who was a bookseller at Guildford (Alberti, Briefe, p. 426), should
have achieved what he did. It was through not being a theological
writer that he went so far, no theologian of his day following him.
[786] See the author's introduction to ed. of the Characteristics,
1900, rep. in Pioneer Humanists.
[787] The question remains obscure. Cp. the Letter cited, reprinted at
end of Carver's 1830 ed. of Paine's Works (New York); F. Thackeray's
Life of Chatham, ii, 405; and Chatham's "scalping-knife" speech.
[788] A Vindication of the Moral Philosopher appeared in 1741.
[789] Cp. Lechler, pp. 371, 386.
[790] Cp. Cairns, Unbelief in the Eighteenth Century, 1881, p. 101.
[791] Ed. 1741, p. 30 sq.
[792] View of the Deistical Writers, Letter XI (X in 1st ed.).
[793] Sir Leslie Stephen, English Thought, i, 169.
[794] Act 9th, Geo. II (1736), ch. 5.
[795] A Tour in Ireland, ed. 1892, ii, 59-72.
[796] Young at this period was entirely secular in his
thinking. Telling of his recovery from a fever in 1790, he writes:
"I fear that not one thought of God ever occurred to me at that time"
(Autobiography, 1898, p. 188). Afterwards he fell into religious
melancholia (Introd. note of editor).
[797] Really an abler man than half the others in the list, but himself
a good deal of a heretic. So far from attempting to make "victims,"
he pleaded for a more candid treatment of deistic objections.
[798] Doddridge himself was not theologically orthodox, but was an
evangelical Christian. Dr. Stoughton, Religion in England under Queen
Anne and the Georges, 1878, i, 344-46.
[799] Whose doctrine Sir Leslie Stephen elsewhere (p. 258) calls a
"brutal theology which gloried in trampling on the best instincts of
its opponents," and a "most unlovely product of eighteenth-century
speculation."
[800] Of Warburton Sir Leslie writes elsewhere (p. 353) that "this
colossus was built up of rubbish." See p. 352 for samples. Again he
speaks (p. 368) of the bishop's pretensions as "colossal impudence." It
should be noted, further, that Warburton's teaching in the Divine
Legation was a gross heresy in the eyes of William Law, who in his
Short but Sufficient Confutation pronounced its main thesis a "most
horrible doctrine." Ed. 1768, as cited, i, 217.
[801] As to whose "senile incompetence" see same vol. p. 234.
[802] History of Protestant Theology, Eng. tr. ii, 77. For the
influence of deism on Germany, see Tholuck (Vermischte Schriften,
Bd. ii) and Lechler (Gesch. des englischen Deismus).--Note by
Dr. Cheyne.
[803] An Essay towards a Natural History of the Earth, 3rd ed. 1723,
pref. and pp. 16 sq., 77 sq. Cp. White, Warfare of Science with
Theology, i. 227.
[804] End of pref.
[805] Work cited, p. 85.
[806] Playfair, in the Edinburgh Review, January, 1808, cited by
Brewster, Memoirs of Newton, 1855. i, 347.
[807] Brewster, as last cited.
[808] Grant, History of Physical Astronomy, 1852, p. 108.
[809] Baden Powell, Hist. of Nat. Philos. 1834, p. 363.
[810] Brewster, More Worlds than One, 1854, p. 111.
[811] Sir James Stephen, Horæ Sabbaticæ, ii, 281; Lechler, p. 451.
[812] See details in Dynamics of Religion, ch. viii.
[813] Essay on "Tendencies of Religious Thought in England: 1688-1750,"
in Essays and Reviews, 9th ed. p. 304.
[814] In criticizing whom Sir Leslie Stephen barely notices his
scientific work, but dwells much on his religious fallacies--a course
which would make short work of the fame of Newton.
[815] In his Case of Reason; or, Natural Religion Fully and Fairly
Stated, in answer to Tindal (1732). See the argument set forth by
Sir Leslie Stephen, i, 158-63. It is noteworthy, however, that in his
Spirit of Prayer (1750), pt. ii, dial. i, Law expressly argues that
"No other religion can be right but that which has its foundation in
Nature. For the God of Nature can require nothing of his creatures but
what the state of their nature calls them to." Like Baxter, Berkeley,
Butler, and so many other orthodox polemists, Law uses the argument
from ignorance when it suits him, and ignores or rejects it when used
by others.
[816] The general reader should take note that in A. Murray's issue
of Hume's Essays (afterwards published by Ward, Lock, and Co.),
which omits altogether the essays on Miracles and a Future State,
the Natural History of Religion is much mutilated, though the book
professes to be a verbatim reprint.
[817] Even before his death he was suspected of that view. When
his coffin was being carried from his house for interment, one of
"the refuse of the rabble" is said to have remarked, "Ah, he was
an atheist." "No matter," replied another, "he was an honest man"
(Curious Particulars, etc., respecting Chesterfield and Hume, 1788,
p. 15).
[818] See Burton, Hist. of Scotland, viii, 549-50, as to the case
of Pitcairne.
[819] Howell's State Trials, xiii (1812), coll. 917-38.
[820] Macaulay, History, ch. xxii; student's ed. ii, 620-21; Burton,
History of Scotland, viii, 76-77. Aikenhead seems to have been a
boy of unusual if unbalanced capacity, even by the bullying account
of Macaulay, who missed no opportunity to cover himself by stoning
heretics. See the boy's arguments on the bases of ethics, set forth
in his "dying speech," as cited by Halyburton, Natural Religion
Insufficient, 1714, pp. 119-23, 131, and the version in the State
Trials, xiii, 930-34.
[821] Macaulay ascribes the savagery of the prosecution to the Lord
Advocate, Sir James Stewart, "as cruel as he was base"; but a letter
printed in the State Trials, from a member of the Privy Council,
says the sentence would have been commuted if "the ministers would
intercede." They, however, "spoke and preached for cutting him
off." Trials, xiii, 930; Burton, viii, 77.
[822] Letter to Sir Francis Masham, printed in the State Trials, xiii,
928-29--evidently written by Locke, who seems to have preserved all
the papers printed by Howell.
[823] Macaulay, as cited. In 1681 one Francis Borthwick, who had
gone abroad at the age of fourteen and turned Jew, was accused of
blaspheming Jesus, and had to fly for his life, being outlawed. State
Trials, as cited, col. 939.
[824] A Full Account of the Several Ends and Uses of Confessions
of Faith, first published in 1719 as a preface to a Collection of
Confessions of Faith, by Prof. W. Dunbar, of Edinburgh University,
3rd ed. 1775, p. 1.
[825] Work cited, p. 48.
[826] Id. p. 198.
[827] Scotland and Scotsmen in the Eighteenth Century. From the MSS. of
John Ramsay, of Ochtertyre, 1888, i, 277. Ramsay describes Johnston as
a "joyous, manly, honourable man," of whom Kames "was exceedingly fond"
(p. 278).
[828] W. R. Scott, Francis Hutcheson, 1900, pp. 15, 20-21.
[829] Id. p. 52.
[830] Cp. Alberti, Briefe betreffende den Zustand der Religion in
Gross-Brittannien, 1752, pp. 430-31.
[831] See Dr. McCosh's Scottish Philosophy, 1875,
pp. 111-13. Dr. McCosh notes that at some points Dudgeon anticipated
Hume.
[832] Dr. McCosh, however, admits that the absence of the printer's
name on the 1765 edition of Dudgeon's works shows that there was then
no thorough freedom of thought in Scotland.
[833] Rae, Life of Adam Smith, 1895, p. 13. Prof. Fowler shows
no knowledge of this prosecution in his monograph on Hutcheson
(Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, 1882); and Mr. W. R. Scott, in his,
seems to rely for the wording of the indictment solely on Mr. Rae,
who gives no references, drawing apparently on unpublished MSS.
[834] Rae, as cited, pp. 11-15.
[835] Scott, as cited, p. 87.
[836] Dr. James Orr, David Hume and his Influence, etc.,
1903. pp. 36-37.
[837] Also for a time a theological professor in Edinburgh University.
[838] The Thoughts Concerning Religion, Natural and Revealed,
appeared in 1735; the Letter to a Bishop in 1732; and the Reflections
on the Sources of Incredulity (left unfinished) posthumously about
1750. Forbes in his youth had been famed as one of the hardest drinkers
of his day.
[839] Reflections on Incredulity, in Works, undated, ii, 141-42. Yet
the works of Forbes were translated for orthodox purposes into German,
and later into French by Père Houbigant (1769), who preserves the
passage on freethinkers' morals, though curtailing the Reflections
as a whole.
[840] As to which see A Sober Enquiry into the Grounds of the Present
Differences in the Church of Scotland, 1723.
[841] Cockburn's Life of Jeffrey, ed. 1872, p. 10.
[842] See the Autobiography of the Rev. Dr. A. Carlyle, 1860,
pp. 492-93. Millar's Historical View of the English Government
(censured by Hallam) was once much esteemed; and his Origin of Ranks
is still worth the attention of sociologists.
[843] Ritchie's Life of Hume, 1807, pp. 52-81; Tytler's Life of Lord
Kames, 2nd ed. 1814, i, ch. v; Burton's Life of Hume, i, 425-30.
[844] Ritchie, as cited, p. 57.
[845] McCulloch, Life of Smith prefixed to ed. of Wealth of Nations,
ed. 1839, p. ii.
[846] Ramsay of Ochtertyre, Scotland and Scotsmen in the Eighteenth
Century, 1888, i, 462-63. Mr. Rae doubts the story, Life of Adam Smith,
1895, p. 60.
[847] Ramsay, as last cited.
[848] Ramsay, passage cited.
[849] Theory of Moral Sentiments, pt. iii, ch. ii, end.
[850] Cp. Rae, pp. 427-30. Mr. Rae thinks the deletion stood for
no change of opinion, and cites Smith's own private explanation
(Sinclair's Life of Sir John Sinclair, i, 40) that he thought the
passage "unnecessary and misplaced." But this expression must be read
in the light of Smith's general reticence concerning established
dogmas. Certainly he adhered to his argument--which does not claim
to be a demonstration--for the doctrine of a future state.
[851] Bk. v, ch. i, pt. iii, art. 3.
[852] Smith's admiration for Voltaire might alone indicate his mental
attitude. As to that see F. W. Hirst, Adam Smith (Eng. Men of Letters
ser.), pp. 127-28. But the assertion of Skarzinski, that Smith, after
being an Idealist under the influence of Hume, "returned a materialist"
from his intercourse with Voltaire and other French freethinkers,
is an exhibition of learned ignorance. See Hirst, p. 181.
[853] An Explanation and Defence of the Principles of Protestant
Dissent, by the Rev. Dr. W. Hamilton Drummond, 1842, pp. 5-6. 47;
Skeats, Hist. of the Free Churches of England, ed. Miall, pp. 238-39;
Wallace, Anti-Trinitarian Biography, iii, art. 360.
[854] Cp. Drummond, as cited, pp. 29-30; History, Opinions, etc.,
of the English Presbyterians, 1834, p. 29.
[855] W. R. Scott, Francis Hutcheson, p. 31.
[856] Above, p. 154, note.
[857] Scott, pp. 28-29, 35-36. The suggestion is not quite
convincing. Synge, after becoming Archbishop of Tuam, continued to
publish his propagandist tracts, among them An Essay towards making
the Knowledge of Religion Easy to the Meanest Capacity (6th ed. 1734),
which is quite orthodox, and which argues (p. 3) that the doctrine
of the Trinity is to be believed, and not pried into, "because it is
above our understanding to comprehend." All the while there was being
sold also his early treatise, "A Gentleman's Religion: in Three Parts
... with an Appendix, wherein it is proved that nothing contrary to
our Reason can possibly be the object of our belief, but that it is
no just exception against some of the doctrines of Christianity that
they are above our reason."
[858] Scott, p. 36.
[859] All that is told of this prelate by Lecky (Hist. of Ireland
in the 18th Cent. 1892. i, 207) is that at Killala he patronized
horse-races. He was industrious on more episcopal lines. He wrote an
Introduction to the History of the Jews; a Vindication of Biblical
Chronology; two treatises on prophecy; an anti-Athanasian Essay on
Spirit (1751), which aroused much controversy; A Vindication of the
Histories of the Old and New Testament, in answer to Bolingbroke (2
vols. 1752-1754; 2nd ed. 1757; rep. with the Essay on Spirit, Dublin,
1759), which led to his being prosecuted; and other works. The offence
given by the Vindication lay in his denunciation of the Athanasian
creed, and of the bigotry of those who supported it. See pt. iii,
letters i and ii. The Essay on Spirit is no less heterodox. In other
respects, however, Clayton is ultra-orthodox.
[860] Dr. G. W. Alberti, Briefe betreffende den Zustand der Religion
in Gross-Brittannien, Hannover, 1752, p. 440.
[861] Above, p. 180.
[862] Put by Huarte in 1575. Above, i, 472.
[863] Inquiry, p. 162.
[864] Inquiry, pref. pp. x, xxii.
[865] A Letter to the Rev. Dr. Conyers Middleton, occasioned by his
late "Free Inquiry," 1749, pp. 3-4.
[866] A Free Answer to Dr. Middleton's "Free Inquiry," by William
Dodwell [son of the elder and brother of the younger Henry], Rector
of Shottesbrook, 1749, pp. 14-15.
[867] Inquiry, p. 162.
[868] Works, 2nd ed. 1755, ii, 348.
[869] Cp. essay on Mandeville, in the author's Pioneer Humanists, 1907.
[870] As against the objections of Mr. Lang, see the author's paper
in Studies in Religious Fallacy.
[871] Cp. the summary of Farrar, Crit. Hist. of Freethought,
pp. 177-78, which is founded on that of Pusey's early Historical
Enquiry concerning German Rationalism, pp. 124-26.
[872] Rep. same year at Dublin: 2nd ed. 1750. The first ed. was
ascribed to D'Argens--an error caused though not justified by the
publisher's notice.
[873] The point is further discussed in Dynamics of Religion,
pp. 175-76.
[874] Cp. G. B. Hertz, The Old Colonial System, 1905, pp. 4, 22,
93, 157.
[875] Letter xxxi, in Mason's Memoir.
[876] Hill Burton's Life of Hume, ii, 433, 434, 484-85, 487.
[877] Compare the verdicts of Gibbon in his Autobiography, and of
Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, bk. v, ch. i, art. 2; and see the
memoir of Smith in 1831 ed. and McCulloch's ed., and Rae's Life of
Adam Smith, p. 24. It appears that about 1764 many English people
sent their sons to Edinburgh University on account of the better
education there. Letter of Blair, in Burton's Life of Hume, ii, 229.
[878] Essays, iv, end.
[879] Present State of Polite Learning, 1765, ch. vi. His story of how
the father of St. Foix cured the youth of the desire to rationalize
his creed is not suggestive of conviction. The father pointed to a
crucifix, saying, "Behold the fate of a reformer." The story has been
often plagiarized since--e.g., in Galt's Annals of the Parish.
[880] Abbey and Overton, The English Church in the Eighteenth Century,
1878, ii, 37.
[881] Dieu et les Hommes, ch. xxxix.
[882] Cp. Bishop Law, Considerations on the Theory of Religion, 6th
ed. 1774, p. 65, note, and the Analysis of Bolingbroke's writings
(1755) there cited. Mr. Sichel's reply to Sir L. Stephen's criticism
may or may not be successful; but he does not deal with Bishop Law's.
[883] Mémoires de Diderot, ed. 1841, ii, 25.
[884] These had begun as early as 1753 (Micromégas).
[885] Works, ed. 1842, i, pp. cix, 445; ii, 628, 728. Cp. the poem
Kew Gardens, left in MS.
[886] I here take a few sentences from my paper, The Church and
Education, 1903.
[887] Short History, p. 717. The Concise Description of the Endowed
Grammar Schools, by Nicholas Carlisle, 1818, shows that schools were
founded in all parts of the country by private bequest or public
action during the eighteenth century.
[888] Collis, in Transactions of the Social Science Association,
1857, p. 126. According to Collis, 48 had been founded by James I,
28 under Charles I, 16 under the Commonwealth, 36 under Charles II,
4 under James II, 7 under William and Mary, 11 under Anne, 17 under
George I, and 7 under George II. He does not indicate their size.
[889] Green, as last cited.
[890] Gibbins, Industrial History of England, 1894, p. 151.
[891] Hist. of England under George III, ed. 1865, ii, 83.
[892] The document is given in Ritchie's Life of Hume, 1807, pp. 53-55.
[893] A reply, The World proved to be not eternal nor mechanical,
appeared in 1790.
[894] The Doctrines of a Trinity and the Incarnation of God was
published anonymously.
[895] See the Biographical Introduction to the Unitarian reprint of
Watts's Solemn Address, 1840, which gives the letters of Lardner. And
cp. Skeats, Hist. of the English Free Churches, ed. Miall, p. 240.
[896] Life of Lardner, by Dr. Kippis, prefixed to Works, ed. 1835,
i, p. xxxii.
[897] Memoirs of Priestley, 1806, pp. 30-32, 35, 37. The Letter on
the Logos was addressed by Lardner to the first Lord Barrington,
and was first published anonymously, in 1759.
[898] Memoirs of Priestley, p. 19.
[899] Pamphlet of 1778, printing the sermon, with reply to a local
attack.
[900] MS. alteration in print. See also p. 1 of Epistle Dedicatory.
[901] In criticizing whom Sir Leslie Stephen barely notices his
scientific work, but dwells much on his religious fallacies--a course
which would make short work of the fame of Newton.
[902] A Church dignitary has described Evanson's Dissonance as "the
commencement of the destructive criticism of the Fourth Gospel"
(Archdeacon Watkins's Bampton Lectures, 1890, p. 174).
[903] Williams (d. 1816), who published 3 vols. of "Lectures on
Education" and other works, has a longer claim on remembrance as the
founder of the "Literary Fund."
[904] The subject is discussed at length in the essay on Gibbon in
the author's Pioneer Humanists.
[905] Cp. Bishop Watson's Apology for Christianity (1776) as to
the vogue of unbelief at that date. (Two Apologies, ed. 1806,
p. 121. Cp. pp. 179, 399.)
[906] The panegyric on Voltaire delivered at his death by Frederick
the Great (Nov. 26, 1778) was promptly translated into English (1779).
[907] Reflections on the French Revolution, 1790, p. 131.
[908] See Hannah More's letter of April, 1777, in her Life, abridged
16mo-ed. p. 36. An edition of Shaftesbury, apparently, appeared in
1773, and another in 1790.
[909] The essays of Hume, including the Dialogues concerning Natural
Religion (1779), were now circulated in repeated editions. Mr. Rae,
in his valuable Life of Adam Smith, p. 311, cites a German observer,
Wendeborn, as writing in 1785 that the Dialogues, though a good deal
discussed in Germany, had made no sensation in England, and were at
that date entirely forgotten. But a second edition had been called
for in 1779, and they were added to a fresh edition of the essays
in 1788. Any "forgetting" is to be set down to preoccupation with
other interests.
[910] Letter to the Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, 1777, p. 3.
[911] Dr. Parr, Characters of C. J. Fox, i, 220; cited in Charles
James Fox, a Commentary, by W. S. Landor, ed. by S. Wheeler, 1907,
p. 147. Fox's secretary and biographer, Trotter, while anxious
to discredit the statement of Parr, gives such a qualified account
(Memoirs of the Latter Years of C. J. Fox, 1811, pp. 470-71) of Fox's
views on immortality as to throw much doubt on the stronger testimony
of B. C. Walpole (Recollections of C. J. Fox, 1806, p. 242).
[912] See J. L. Le B. Hammond, Charles James Fox, 1903, ch. xiii.
[913] See a letter in Bishop Watson's Life, i, 402; and cp. Buckle,
ch. vii, note 218.
[914] See his Task, bk. iii, 150-90 (1783-1784), for the prevailing
religious tone.
[915] Princ. of Moral Philos. bk. v, ch. ix. The chapter tells of
widespread freethinking.
[916] Ernest Krause, Erasmus Darwin, Eng. tr. 1879,
p. 211. Cp. pp. 193, 194.
[917] Letters vii, viii, ix, xix, xxii.
[918] E.g., The Ordination, the Address to the Deil, A Dedication to
Gavin Hamilton, The Kirk's Alarm, etc.
[919] See also the pieces printed between these in the Globe edition,
pp. 66-68.
[920] The benevolent Supreme Being, he writes, "has put the immediate
administration of all this into the hands of Jesus Christ--a great
personage, whose relation to Him we cannot fathom, but whose relation
to us is [that of] a guide and Saviour." Letter 86 in Globe ed. Letters
189 and 197, to Mrs. Dunlop, similarly fail to meet the requirements
of the orthodox correspondent. The poem Look up and See, latterly
printed several times apart from Burns's works, and extremely likely
to be his, is a quite Voltairean criticism of David. If the poem be
ungenuine, it is certainly by far the ablest of the unacknowledged
pieces ascribed to him, alike in diction and in purport.
[921] Letter to Mrs. Dunlop, Jan. 1, 1789, in Robert Burns and
Mrs. Dunlop, ed. by W. Wallace, 1898, p. 129. The passage is omitted
from Letter 168 in the Globe ed., and presumably from other reprints.
[922] Letter to Mrs. Dunlop, July 9, 1790. Published for the first
time in vol. cited, p. 266.
[923] Epistle to a Young Friend.
[924] Lecky, writing in 1865, and advancing on Burke, has said of
the whole school, including Shaftesbury, that "the shadow of the tomb
rests on all: a deep, unbroken silence, the chill of death, surrounds
them. They have long ceased to wake any interest" (Rationalism in
Europe, i, 116). As a matter of fact, they had been discussed by Taylor
in 1853; by Pattison in 1860; and by Farrar in 1862; and they have
since been discussed at length by Dr. Hunt, by Dr. Cairns, by Lange,
by Gyzicki, by M. Sayous, by Sir Leslie Stephen, by Prof. Höffding,
and by many others.
[925] Conway, introd. to Age of Reason, in his ed. of Paine's Works,
iv, 3.
[926] Lemontey, Hist. de la régence et de la minorité de Louis XV,
1835, ii, 358, note. In 1731 there was published under the name of
Boulainvilliers (d. 1722) a so-called Réfutation de Spinoza, which was
"really a popular exposition." Pollock, Spinoza, 2nd ed. p. 363. Sir
F. Pollock assents to Voltaire's remark that Boulainvilliers "gave
the poison and forgot to give the antidote."
[927] For a brief view of the facts, usually misconceived, see Lanson,
pp. 610-11. Fénelon seems to have been uncandid, while Bossuet, by
common consent, was malevolent. There is probably truth, however,
in the view of Shaftesbury (Characteristics, ed. 1900, ii, 214),
that the real grievance of Fénelon's ecclesiastical opponents was the
tendency of his mysticism to withdraw devotees from ceremonial duties.
[928] Now remembered chiefly through the account of his intercourse
with Fénelon (repr. in Didot ed. of Fénelon's misc. works), and
Hume's long extract from his Philosophical Principles of Natural and
Revealed Religion in the concluding note to the Essays. Cp. M. Matter,
Le Mysticisme en France au temps de Fénelon, 1865, pp. 352-54.
[929] Tyssot de Patot was Professor of Mathematics at Deventer. In
his Lettres choisies, published in 1726, there is an avowal that
"he might be charged with having different notions from those of the
vulgar in point of religion" (New Memoirs of Literature, iv (1726),
267); and his accounts of pietists and unbelieving and other priests
sufficiently convey that impression (id. pp. 268-84).
[930] Towards the close of his "poem" Polignac speaks of a defence of
Christianity as a future task. He died without even completing the
Anti-Lucretius, begun half a century before. Of him are related two
classic anecdotes. Sent at the age of twenty-seven to discuss Church
questions with the Pope, he earned from His Holiness the compliment:
"You seem always to be of my opinion; and in the end it is yours that
prevails." Louis XIV gave him a long audience, after which the King
said: "I have had an interview with a young man who has constantly
contradicted me without my being able to be angry for a moment." (Éloge
prefixed to Bougainville's trans., L'Anti-Lucrèce, 1767, i. 131.)
[931] Cp. Duvernet, Vie de Voltaire, ch. i. Rivarol (Lettres à Necker,
in OEuvres, ed. 1852, p. 138) wrote that under Louis XV there began a
"general insurrection" of discussion, and that everybody then talked
"only of religion and philosophy during half a century." But this
exaggerates the beginnings, of which Rivarol could have no exact
knowledge.
[932] La verité de la religion chrétienne prouvée par les faits:
précédée d'un discours historique et critique sur la méthode des
principaux auteurs qui ont écrit pour et contre le christianisme
depuis son origine, 1722. Rep. 1741, 3 vols. 4to., 4 vols. 12mo.
[933] Nouveau Dictionnaire historique portatif, 1771, art. Houteville,
tom. ii.
[934] Whose Considérations sur les Moeurs (1751) does not seem to
contain a single religious sentiment. Historiographer of France,
he had not escaped the suppression of his Histoire de Louis XI, 1745.
[935] See above, p. 130. Buffier seems to have begun an attempt at
spelling reform (by dropping doubled letters), followed in 1725 by
Huard and later by Prémontval.
[936] 7 vols. 4to., 10 vols. 12mo. Rep. with corrections 1733. Seconde
partie, 1753, 8 vols. 12mo.
[937] A reprint in 1735 bears the imprint of London, with the note
"Aux dépens de la Compagnie."
[938] Lanson, p. 702. The Persian Letters, like the Provincial Letters
of Pascal, had to be printed at Rouen and published at Amsterdam. Their
freethinking expressions put considerable difficulties in the way
of his election (1727) to the Academy. See E. Edwards, Chapters
of the Biog. Hist. of the French Academy, 1864, pp. 34-35, and
D. M. Robertson, Hist. of the French Academy, 1910, p. 92, as to the
mystification about the alleged reprint without the obnoxious passages.
[939] Lettre 86.
[940] "Au point de vue religieux, Montesquieu tirait poliment son coup
de chapeau au christianisme" (Lanson, p. 714). E.g. in the Esprit
des Lois, liv. xxiv, chs. i, ii, iii, iv, vi, and the footnote to
ch. x of liv. xxv. Montesquieu's letter to Warburton (16 mai, 1754),
in acknowledgment of that prelate's attack on the posthumous works of
Bolingbroke, is a sample of his social make-believe. But no religious
reader could suppose it to come from a religious man.
[941] Also of E. Edwards, as cited above.
[942] See the notes cited on pp. 405, 407 of Garnier's variorum ed. of
the Esprit des Lois, 1871. La Harpe and Villemain seem blind to irony.
[943] The flings at Bayle (liv. xxiv, chs. ii, vi) are part of a subtly
ironical vindication of ideal as against ecclesiastical Christianity,
and they have no note of faith.
[944] Paul Mesnard, Hist. de l'académie française, 1857, pp. 61-63.
[945] Pensées Diverses: De la religion.
[946] Lanson, p. 714, note.
[947] Tr. in English, 1753. It is noteworthy that Cataneo formally
accepts Montesquieu's professions of orthodoxy.
[948] Correspondance littéraire de Grimm et Diderot, ed. 1829-31,
i, 273. See the footnote for an account of the indecent efforts of
the Jesuits to get at the dying philosopher. The curé of the parish
who was allowed entry began his exhortation with: "Vous savez,
M. le Président, combien Dieu est grand." "Oui, monsieur," returned
Montesquieu, "et combien les hommes sont petits."
[949] Mesnard, Hist. de l'académie française, p. 63.
[950] A full analysis is given by Strauss in the second Appendix to
his Voltaire: Sechs Vorträge, 2te Aufl. 1870.
[951] The details are dubious. See the memoir compiled by "Rudolf
Charles" (R. C. D'Ablaing van Giessenburg), the editor of the
Testament, Amsterdam, 3 tom. 1861-64. It draws chiefly on the Mémoires
secrets de Bachaumont, under date Sept. 30, 1764.
[952] Testament, as cited, i, 25.
[953] iii, 396.
[954] First published in 1762 [or 1764? See Bachaumont, Oct. 30],
with the date 1742; and reprinted in the Évangile de la Raison,
1764. It was no fewer than four times ordered to be destroyed in the
Restoration period.
[955] Probably Diderot did the most of the adaptation. "Il y a
plus que du bon sens dans ce livre," writes Voltaire to D'Alembert;
"il est terrible. S'il sort de la boutique du Système de la Nature,
l'auteur s'est bien perfectionné" (Lettre de 27 Juillet, 1775).
[956] "Il leur faut un Être à ces messieurs; pour moi, je m'en
passe." Grimm, Correspondance Littéraire, ed. 1829-31, iv, 186.
[957] Grimm, as cited, i, 235. Grimm tells a delightful story of his
reception of the confessor.
[958] "Cet ouvrage, dont les vers sont grands et bien tournés,
est une satire des plus licencieuses contre les moeurs de nos
évêques." Bachaumont, Mémoires Secrets, Juin 15, 1762.
[959] Bonet-Maury, Hist. de la lib. de conscience en France, 1900,
p. 68.
[960] Nouveau dictionnaire historique-portatif ... par une Société
de Gens de Lettres, ed. 1771, i, 314.
[961] Marmontel does not relate this in his Mémoires, where he insists
on the decorum of the talk, even at d'Holbach's table.
[962] Chamfort, Caractères et Anecdotes.
[963] Nouveau dictionnaire, above cited, i, 315.
[964] Name assumed for literary purposes, and probably composed by
anagram from the real name Arouet, with "le jeune" (junior) added,
thus: A. R. O. V. E. T. L(e). I(eune).
[965] Not to be confounded with the greater and later Jean Jacques
Rousseau. J. B. Rousseau became Voltaire's bitter enemy--on the score,
it is said, of the young man's epigram on the elder poet's "Ode to
Posterity," which, he said, would not reach its address. Himself a
rather ribald freethinker, Rousseau professed to be outraged by the
irreligion of Voltaire.
[966] See the poem in note 4 to ch. ii of Duvernet's Vie de
Voltaire. Duvernet calls it "one of the first attacks on which
philosophy in France had ventured against superstition" (Vie de
Voltaire, ed. 1797, p. 19).
[967] Duvernet, ch. ii. The free-hearted Ninon de l'Enclos,
brightest of old ladies, is to be numbered among the pre-Voltairean
freethinkers, and to be remembered as leaving young Voltaire a legacy
to buy books. She refused to "sell her soul" by turning dévote on the
invitation of her old friend Madame de Maintenon. Madame D'Épinay,
Voltaire's "belle philosophe et aimable Habacuc," Madame du Deffand,
and Madame Geoffrin were among the later freethinking grandes dames of
the Voltairean period; and so, presumably, was the Madame de Créquí,
quoted by Rivarol, who remarked that "Providence" is "the baptismal
name of Chance." As to Madame Geoffrin see the OEuvres Posthumes de
D'Alembert, 1799, i, 240, 271; and the Mémoires de Marmontel, 1804,
ii, 102 sq. If Marmontel is accurate, she went secretly at times to
mass (p. 104).
[968] Deslandes wrote some new chapters of his Réflexions in London,
for the English translation. Eng. tr. 1713, p. 99.
[969] Pour et Contre, ou Épitre à Uranie. It was of course not printed
till long afterwards. Diderot, writing his Promenade du Sceptique
in 1747, says: "C'est, je crois, dans l'allée des fleurs [of his
allegory] entre le champagne et le tokay, que l'épitre à Uranie prit
naissance." (L'Allée des Marronniers, ad init.) This seems unjust.
[970] He has been alternately represented as owing everything and
owing very little to England. Cp. Texte, Rousseau and the Cosmopolitan
Spirit, Eng. tr. p. 58. Neither view is just.
[971] In his Essay upon the Civil Wars of France, and ... upon
Epick Poetry (2nd ed. 1728, "corrected by himself"), written and
published in English, he begins his "Advertisement" with the remark:
"It has the appearance of too great a presumption in a traveller
who hath been but eighteen months in England, to attempt to write
in a language which he cannot pronounce at all, and which he hardly
understands in conversation." As the book is remarkably well written,
he must have read much English.
[972] Lord Morley (Voltaire, 4th ed. p. 40) speaks of the English
people as having then won "a full liberty of thought and speech and
person." This, as we have seen, somewhat overstates the case. But
discussion was much more nearly free than in France.
[973] Probably as much on political as on religious grounds. The 8th
letter, Sur le Parlement, must have been very offensive to the French
Government; and in 1739, moved by angry criticisms, Voltaire saw fit to
modify its language. See Lanson's ed. of the Lettres, 1909, i, 92, 110.
[974] Condorcet, Vie de Voltaire, ed. 1792, p. 92. In reprints the
poem was entitled Sur la religion naturelle, and was so commonly cited.
[975] Condorcet, p. 99.
[976] See above, pp. 213-14, as to the works of Boulainvilliers,
Tyssot de Patot, Deslandes, and others who wrote between 1700 and 1715.
[977] Cited by Schlosser, Hist. of the Eighteenth Century, Eng. tr. i,
146-7.
[978] Traité de la verité de la religion chrétienne, tiré en partie
du latin de M. J. Alphonse Turrettin, professeur ... en l'académie
de Génève, par M. J. Vernet, professeur de belles-lettres en la
même Académie. Revue et corrigé par un Théologien Catholique. 1e
éd. Génève, 1730. Rep. in 2 tom. 1753. Ecclesiastical approbation
given 15 janv. 1749; privilège, juillet, 1751.
[979] Dom Remi Desmonts, according to Barbier.
[980] "Par Panage" (=Toussaint?). Rep. 1755 and 1767 (Berlin).
[981] Work cited, ed. 1755, p. 252.
[982] A glimpse of old Paris before or about 1750 is afforded by
Fontenelle's remark that the prevailing diseases might be known from
the affiches. At every street corner were to be seen two, of which one
advertised a Traité sur l'incrédulité. (Grimm, Corr. litt. iii, 373.)
[983] Thus Duruy had said in his Histoire de France (1st ed. 1852)
that in the work of the Jansenists of Port Royal "l'esprit d'opposition
politique se cacha sous l'opposition religieuse" (ed. 1880, ii, 298).
[984] The case has been thus correctly put by M. Rocquain, who,
however, decides that "de religieuse qu'elle était, l'opposition
devient politique" as early as about 1724-1733. L'Esprit
révolutionnaire avant la révolution, 1878; table des matières,
liv. 2e. Duruy (last note) puts the tendency still earlier.
[985] "Cette hardiesse étonna Voltaire, et excita son émulation"
(ed. cited, p. 118).
[986] Avertissement des éditeurs, in Basle ed. of 1792, vol. xlv,
p. 92.
[987] It has been counted that he used no fewer than a hundred
and thirty different pseudonyms; and the perpetual prosecution and
confiscation of his books explains the procedure. As we have seen,
the Lettres philosophiques (otherwise the Lettres anglaises) were
burned on their appearance, in 1734, and the bookseller put in the
Bastille; the Recueil des pièces fugitives was suppressed in 1739;
the Voix du Sage et du Peuple was officially and clerically condemned
in 1751; the poem on Natural Law was burned at Paris in 1758; Candide
at Geneva in 1759; the Dictionnaire philosophique at Geneva in 1764,
and at Paris in 1765; and many of his minor pseudonymous performances
had the same advertisement. But even the Henriade, the Charles XII,
and the first chapters of the Siècle de Louis XIV were prohibited;
and in 1785 the thirty volumes published of the 1784 edition of his
works were condemned en masse.
[988] Diderot, critique of Le philosophe ignorant in Grimm's
Corr. Litt. 1 juin 1766; Lessing, Hamburgische Dramaturgie, Stück
10-12, 15; Gibbon, ch. i, note near end; ch. li, note on siege of
Damascus. Rousseau was as hostile as any (see Morley's Rousseau,
ch. ix, § 1). But Rousseau's verdict is the least important, and the
least judicial. He had himself earned the detestation of Voltaire, as
of many other men. In a moment of pique, Diderot wrote of Voltaire:
"Cet homme n'est que le second dans tous les genres" (Lettre 71 à
Mdlle. Voland, 12 août, 1762). He forgot wit and humour!
[989] Prof. Jowett, of Balliol College. See L. A. Tollemache, Benjamin
Jowett, Master of Balliol, 4th ed. pp. 27-28.
[990] See details in Lord Morley's Voltaire, 4th ed. pp. 165-70,
257-58. The erection by the French freethinkers of a monument to La
Barre in 1905, opposite the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, Montmartre,
Paris, is an expression at once of the old feud with the Church and
the French appreciation of high personal courage. La Barre was in
truth something of a scapegrace, but his execution was an infamy,
and he went to his death as to a bridal. The erection of the monument
has been the occasion of a futile pretence on the clerical side that
for La Barre's death the Church had no responsibility, the movers
in the case being laymen. Nothing, apparently, can teach Catholic
Churchmen that the Church's past sins ought to be confessed like
those of individuals. It is quite true that it was a Parlement that
condemned La Barre. But what a religious training was it that turned
laymen into murderous fanatics!
[991] M. Lanson seems to overlook it when he writes (p. 747) that
"the affirmation of God, the denial of Providence and miracles,
is the whole metaphysic of Voltaire."
[992] Lord Morley writes (p. 209): "We do not know how far he ever
seriously approached the question ... whether a society can exist
without a religion." This overlooks both the Homélie sur l'Athéisme
and the article Athéisme in the Dictionnaire Philosophique, where
the question is discussed seriously and explicitly.
[993] Horace Walpole, Letter to Gray, Nov. 19, 1765. Compare the
mordant criticism of Grimm (Corr. litt. vii, 54 sq.) on his tract
Dieu in reply to d'Holbach. "Il raisonne là-dessus comme un enfant,"
writes Grimm, "mais comme un joli enfant qu'il est."
[994] Browning, The Two Poets of Croisic, st. cvii.
[995] Cp. Ständlin, Gesch. des Rationalismus und Supernaturalismus,
1826, pp. 287-90. Hagenbach, Kirchengeschichte des 18. und
19. Jahrhunderts, 2te Aufl. 1848, i, 218-20.
[996] Zimmerman, De causis magis magisque invalescentis incredulitatis,
et medela huic malo adhibenda, Tiguri, 1739, 4to. Prof. Breitinger
of Zurich wrote a criticism afterwards tr. (1741) as Examen des
Lettres sur la religion essentielle. De Roches, pastor at Geneva,
published in letter-form 2 vols. entitled Défense du Christianisme, as
"préservatif contre" the Lettres of Mdlle. Huber (1740); and Bouillier
of Amsterdam also 2 vols. of Lettres (1741).
[997] Cp. Bouillier, Hist. de la philos. cartés, ii, 624-25;
D'Argenson, Mémoires, ed. Jannet, iv. 63.
[998] See the thesis (Jerusalem Coelesti) as printed in the Apologie
de M. l'Abbé De Prades, "Amsterdam," 1752, pp. 4, 6.
[999] Id. p. 10.
[1000] Mémoires sur la vie et les ouvrages de Diderot, 1821, p. 160.
[1001] Cp. Bachaumont, Mémoires secrets, 4 fév. 1762; 22 avril,
1768. Tn the latter entry, Yvon is described as "poursuivi comme
infidèle, quoique le plus croyant de France." In 1768, after the
Bélisaire scandal, he was refused permission to proceed with the
publication of his Histoire ecclésiastique.
[1002] This was de Prades's own view of the matter (Apologie, as cited,
p. v); and D'Argenson repeatedly says as much. Mémoires, iv, 57, 65,
66, 74, 77.
[1003] Rocquain, L'esprit revolutionnaire avant la révolution, 1878,
pp. 149-51; Morley, Diderot, ch. v; D'Argenson, iv, 78. The decree
of suppression was dated 13 fév. 1752.
[1004] Mémoires, iv, 64, 74.
[1005] Id. iv, 129, 140.
[1006] Id. iv, 92-93.
[1007] Maury, Hist. de l'ancienne Académie des Inscriptions, 1864,
pp. 312-13.
[1008] Journal historique de Barbier, 1847-56, iv, 304.
[1009] Astruc, we learn from D'Alembert, connected their decline with
the influence of the new opinions. "Ce ne sont pas les jansenistes
qui tuent les jésuites, c'est l'Encyclopédie." "Le maroufle Astruc,"
adds D'Alembert, "est comme Pasquin, il parle quelquefois d'assez
bon sens." Lettre à Voltaire. 4 mai, 1762.
[1010] Cp. pref. (La Vie de Salvien) to French tr. of Salvian, 1734,
p. lxix. I have seen MS. translations of Toland and Woolston.
[1011] MS. statement, in eighteenth-century hand, on flyleaf of a
copy of 1755 ed. of the Grands hommes, in the writer's possession.
[1012] Lettre à D'Alembert, 16 Octobre, 1765.
[1013] Of the works noted below, the majority appear or profess to have
been printed at Amsterdam, though many bore the imprint Londres. All
the freethinking books and translations ascribed to d'Holbach bore
it. The Arétin of Abbé Dulaurens bore the imprint: "Rome, aux dépens
de la Congrégation de l'Index." Mystifications concerning authorship
have been as far as possible cleared up in the present edition.
[1014] Given by Brunet, who is followed by Wheeler, as appearing in
1732, and as translated into English, under the title Dying Merrily,
in 1745. But I possess an English translation of 1713 (pref. dated
March 25), entitled A Philological Essay: or, Reflections on the
Death of Freethinkers.... By Monsieur D----, of the Royal Academy of
Sciences in France, and author of the Poetae Rusticantis Literatum
Otium. Translated from the French by Mr. B----, with additions by the
author, now in London, and the translator. [A note in a contemporary
hand makes "B" Boyer.] Barbier gives 1712 for the first edition,
1732 for the second. Rep. 1755 and 1776.
[1015] There is no sign of any such excitement in France over the
translation as was aroused in England by the original; but an Examen
du traité de la liberté de penser, by De Crousaz, was published at
Amsterdam in 1718.
[1016] This was probably meant to point to the Abbé de Marsy, who
died in 1763.
[1017] The Abbé Sepher ascribed this book to one Dupuis, a Royal
Guardsman.
[1018] This "prose poem" was not an intentional burlesque, as
the ecclesiastical authorities alleged; but it did not stand for
orthodoxy. See Grimm's Correspondance, i, 113.
[1019] "A eu les honneurs de la brûlure, et toutes les censures
cumulées des Facultés de Théologie, de la Sorbonne et des
évêques." Bachaumont, déc. 23, 1763. Marsy, who was expelled from
the Order of Jesuits, was of bad character, and was hotly denounced
by Voltaire.
[1020] See Grimm, Corr. v. 15.
[1021] A second edition appeared within the year. "Quoique proscrit
presque partout, et même en Hollande, c'est de là qu'il nous
arrive." Bachaumont, déc. 27, 1764.
[1022] Bachaumont, mai 7, 1767.
[1023] "Se repand à Paris avec la permission de la police." Bachaumont,
13 fév. 1766.
[1024] "Il est facile de se convaincre que les parties les plus
importantes et les plus solides de cet ouvrage sont empruntées aux
travaux de Burigny." L.-F. Alfred Maury, L'ancienne Académie des
Incriptions et bellet-lettres, 1864, p. 316. Maury leaves it open
question whether the compilation was made by Burigny or by Naigeon. The
Abbé Bergier accepted it without hesitation as the work of Fréret,
who was known to hold some heretical views. (Maury, p. 317.) Barbier
confidently ascribes the work to Burigny.
[1025] The mystification in regard to this work is elaborate. It
purports to be translated from an English version, declared in turn
by its translator to be made "from the Greek." It is now commonly
ascribed to Naigeon. (Maury, as cited, p. 317.) Its machinery, and
its definite atheism, mark it as of the school of d'Holbach, though
it is alleged to have been written by Fréret as early as 1722. It
is however reprinted, with the Examen critique des Apologistes, in
the 1796 edition of Fréret's works without comment; and Barbier was
satisfied that it was the one genuine "philosophic" work ascribed to
Fréret, but that it was redacted by Naigeon from imperfect MSS.
[1026] Notice sur Henri Meister, pref. to Lettres inédites de Madame
de Staël à Henri Meister, 1903, p. 17.
[1027] "Deux nouveaux livres infernaux ... connus comme
manuscrits depuis longtemps et gardés dans l'obscurité des
portefeuilles...." Bachaumont, 22 mars, 1769.
[1028] Bachaumont, Mémoires Secrets, déc. 20, 1767.
[1029] Id. Jan. 18, 1768.
[1030] So Pidansat de Mairobert in his preface to the first ed. (1777)
of the Mémoires Secrets of Bachaumont, continued by him. See pref. to
the abridged ed. by Bibliophile Jacob.
[1031] As to the authorship see above, p. 241.
[1032] La Certitude des preuves du Christianisme (1767). 2e édit. 1768,
Avertissement.
[1033] In the short essay Le Philosophe, which appeared in the
Nouvelles Libertés de Penser, 1743 and 1750, and in the Recueil
Philosophique, 1770. In the 1793 rep. of the Essai sur les préjugés
(again rep. in 1822) it is unhesitatingly affirmed, on the strength
of its title-page and the prefixed letter of Dumarsais, dated 1750,
that that book is an expansion of the essay Le Philosophe, and that
this was published in 1760. But Le Philosophe is an entirely different
production, which to a certain extent criticizes les philosophes
so-called. The Essai sur les préjugés published in 1770 is not the
work of Dumarsais; it is a new work by d'Holbach. This was apparently
known to Frederick, who in his rather angry criticism of the book
writes that, whereas Dumarsais had always respected constituted
authorities, others had "put out in his name, two years after he was
dead and buried, a libel of which the veritable author could only be
a schoolboy as new to the world as he was puzzle-headed." (Mélanges
en vers et en prose de Frederic II, 1792, ii, 215). Dumarsais died in
1754, but I can find no good evidence that the Essai sur les préjugés
was ever printed before 1770. As to d'Holbach's authorship see the
OEuvres de Diderot, ed. 1821, xii, 115 sq.--passage copied in the
1829-31 ed. of the Correspondance littéraire of Grimm and Diderot, xiv,
293 sq. In a letter to D'Alembert dated Mars 27, 1773, Voltaire writes
that in a newly-printed collection of treatises containing his own
Lois de Minos is included "le philosophe de Dumarsais, qui n'a jamais
été imprimé jusqu'à present." This seems to be a complete mistake.
[1034] Grimm (iv, 86) has some good stories of him. He announced
one day that he had ound twenty-five fatal flaws in the story of
the resurrection of Lazarus, the first being that the dead do not
rise. His scholarly friend Nicolas Boindin (see above, p. 222) said:
"Dumarsais is a Jansenist atheist; as for me, I am a Molinist atheist."
[1035] On two successive pages the title Messiah is declared to mean
"simply one sent" and simply "anointed."
[1036] Like Buffier and Huard, however, he strives for a reform in
spelling, dropping many doubled letters, and writing home, bone,
acuse, fole, apelle, honête, afreux, etc.
[1037] Abriss einer Geschichte der Umwälzung welche seit 1750 auf dem
Gebiete der Theologie in Deutschland statt gefunden, in Tholuck's
Vermischte Schriften, 1839, ii, 5. The proposition is repeated
pp. 24, 33.
[1038] The exceptions were books published outside of France.
[1039] Madame de Sévigné, for instance, declared that she would not
let pass a year of her life without re-reading the second volume
of Abbadie.
[1040] Le Déisme refuté par lui-même (largely a reply to Rousseau),
1765; 1770, Apologie de la religion chrétienne; 1773, La certitude
des preuves du christianisme. In 1759 had appeared the Lettres sur le
Déisme of the younger Salchi, professor at Lausanne. It deals chiefly
with the English deists, and with D'Argens. As before noted, the Abbé
Gauchat began in 1751 his Lettres Critiques, which in time ran to 15
volumes (1751-61). There were also two journals, Jesuit and Jansenist,
which fought the philosophes (Lanson, p. 721); and sometimes even a
manuscript was answered--e.g. the Réfutation du Celse moderne of the
Abbé Gautier (1752), a reply to Mirabaud's unpublished Examen critique.
[1041] Alison, History of Europe, ed. 1849, i, 180-81.
[1042] The Jesuits were expelled from Portugal in 1759; from Bohemia
and Denmark in 1766; from the whole dominions of Spain in 1767; from
Genoa and Venice in the same year; and from Naples, Malta, and Parma
in 1768. Officially suppressed in France in 1764, they were expelled
thence in 1767. Pope Clement XIII strove to defend them; but in 1773
the Society was suppressed by papal bull by Clement XIV; whereafter
they took refuge in Prussia and Russia, ruled by the freethinking
Frederick and Catherine.
[1043] See the Correspondance de Grimm, ed. 1829-31, vii, 51 sq.
[1044] This apologetic work, after having been praised by the
censor and registered with privilège du roi in November, 1772,
was officially suppressed on Jan. 17, 1773, and, it would appear,
reissued in that year.
[1045] Liv. i. ch. viii.
[1046] Bachaumont, juin 22; juillet 9, 20, 27; novembre 14, 1762.
[1047] Grimm notices Astruc's Dissertations sur l'immortalité,
l'immaterialité, et la liberté de l'âme, published in 1755 (Corr. i,
438), but not his Conjectures. At his death (1766) he pronounces him
"un des hommes les plus decriés de Paris," "Il passait pour fripon,
fourbe, méchant, en un mot pour un très-malhonnête homme." "Il était
violent et emporté, et d'une avarice sordide." Finally, he died
"sans sacremens" after having "fait le dévot" and attached himself
to the Jesuits in their day of power. Corr. v, 98. But Grimm was a
man of many hates, and not the best of historians.
[1048] Cp. Maury, L'ancienne Académie des inscriptions et
belles-lettres, 1864, pp. 55-56.
[1049] Voltaire's various stratagems to secure election are not
to his credit. See Paul Mesnard, Histoire de l'académie française,
1857, pp. 68-74. But even Montesquieu is said to have resorted to
some questionable devices for the same end. Id. p. 62.
[1050] Maury, L'ancienne Académie des inscriptions, pp. 54-55, 94, 308.
[1051] Id. p. 93.
[1052] Id. pp. 116-20.
[1053] Where he was lieutenant-général, and died in 1750.
[1054] Maury, pp. 53, 86-87.
[1055] Mémoires, ed. Jannet, iv, 181.
[1056] Cp. Mesnard, as cited, pp. 79-80.
[1057] Maury, p. 315.
[1058] Id. pp. 82-84. It is noteworthy that the orthodox Thomas, and
not any of the philosophes, was the first to impeach the Government
in academic discourses. Mesnard, pp. 82-84, 100 sq.
[1059] "L'excellent Pompignan," M. Lanson calls him, p. 723.
[1060] "Les provisions de sa charge pendant six mois en
1736." Voltaire, Lettre à Mme. D'Épinay, 13 juin, 1760. "Je le servis
dans cette affaire," adds Voltaire.
[1061] Mesnard, pp. 67, 71, 73, 89.
[1062] Le Pauvre Diable, ouvrage en vers aisés de feu M. Vadé,
mis en lumière par Catherine Vadé, sa cousine (falsely dated 1758);
La Vanité; and Le Russe à Paris.
[1063] Mesnard, pp. 86-92.
[1064] Id. pp. 93-94.
[1065] Id. pp. 95-96.
[1066] Lanson, Hist. de la litt. française, p. 725.
[1067] The formal approval of a Sorbonnist was necessary. One refused
it; another gave it. Marmontel, Mémoires, 1804, iii, 35-36.
[1068] Marmontel mentions that while he was still discussing a
compromise with the syndic of the Sorbonne, 40,000 copies had been
sold throughout Europe. Mémoires, iii, 39.
[1069] This satire was taken by the German freethinker Eberhard,
in his New Apology for Socrates, as the actual publication of the
Sorbonne. Barbier, Dict. des Ouvr. anon et Pseud., 2e édit., i, 468.
[1070] Published pseudonymously as a translation from the English:
Histoire naturelle de l'âme, traduite de l'Anglais de M. Charp, par
feu M. H----, de l'Académie des Sciences. À La Haye, 1745. Republished
under the title Traité de l'Âme.
[1071] By Elie Luzac, to whom is ascribed the reply entitled
L'Homme plus que Machine (1748 also). This is printed in the OEuvres
philosophiques of La Mettrie as if it were his: and Lange (i, 420)
seems to think it was. But the bibliographers ascribe it to Luzac,
who was a man of culture and ability.
[1072] L'Homme Machine, ed. Assézat, 1865, p. 97;
OEuv. philos. ed. 1774, iii, 51.
[1073] Lange, Gesch. des Materialismus, i, 362 sq. (Eng. tr. ii,
78-80); Soury, Bréviare de l'hist. du matérialisme, pp. 663, 666-68;
Voltaire, Homélie sur l'athéisme, end. Frederick the Great, who gave
La Mettrie harbourage, support, and friendship, and who was not a
bad judge of men, wrote and read in the Berlin Academy the funeral
éloge of La Mettrie, and pronounced him "une âme pure et un coeur
serviable." By "pure" he meant sincere.
[1074] Salchi, Lettres sur le Déisme, 1759, pp. 177, 197, 239, 283 sq.
[1075] Huxley, essay on Darwin on the Origin of Species;
R. P. A. ed. of Twelve Lectures and Essays, p. 94.
[1076] See the parallel passages in the Lettres Critiques of the Abbé
Gauchat, vol. xv (1761), p. 192 sq.
[1077] See his essay Des Singularités de la Nature, ch. xii, and his
Dissertation sur les changements arrivés dans notre globe.
[1078] Eng. tr. 1750.
[1079] Essay cited, p. 96. The criticism ignores the greater
comprehensiveness of Robinet's survey of nature.
[1080] George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, 1707-1788.
[1081] Lyell, Principles of Geology, 12th ed. 1875, i, 57-58.
[1082] Suite de l'Apologie de M. l'Abbé De Prades, 1752, p. 37 sq.
[1083] Dissertatio inauguralis metaphysica de universali naturæ
systemate, published at Göttingen as the doctoral thesis of an
imaginary Dr. Baumann, 1751. In French, 1753.
[1084] Soury, p. 579. The later speculations of Maupertuis by their
extravagance discredited the earlier.
[1085] "Scheinbar bekämpft er Maupertuis desswegen, aber im geheimen
stimmt er ihm bei"(Rosenkranz, i, 144).
[1086] It should be noted that by Condillac's avowal he was much
aided by his friend Mdlle. Ferrand.
[1087] Cp. Réthoré, Condillac, ou l'empirisme et le rationalisme,
1864, ch. i.
[1088] Lange, ii, 27, 29; Soury, pp. 603-44.
[1089] Soury, pp. 596-600; Lange, ii, 27.
[1090] Oddly enough he became ultimately press censor! He lived till
1820, dying at Rennes at the age of 85.
[1091] This may best be translated Treatise on the Mind. The English
translation of 1759 (rep. 1807) is entitled De l'Esprit: or, Essays
on the Mind, etc.
[1092] Correspondance, ii, 262.
[1093] Id. p. 263.
[1094] Id. p. 293.
[1095] At the time the pietists declared that Diderot had collaborated
in De l'Esprit. This was denied by Grimm, who affirmed that Diderot and
Helvétius were little acquainted, and rarely met; but his Secretary,
Meister, wrote in 1786 that the finest pages in the book were
Diderot's. Id. p. 294, note. In his sketch À la mémoire de Diderot
(1786, app. to Naigeon's Mémoires, 1821, p. 425, note), Meister speaks
of a number of "belles pages," but does not particularize.
[1096] De l'Esprit, Disc, iii, ch. 30.
[1097] Cp. Morley's criticism. Diderot, ed. 1884, pp. 331-32.
[1098] Beccaria's Letter to Morellet, cited in ch. i of J. A. Farrer's
ed. of the Crimes and Punishments, p. 6. It is noteworthy that the
partial reform effected earlier in England by Oglethorpe, on behalf
of imprisoned debtors (1730-32), belongs to the time of propagandist
deism there.
[1099] Morley, Diderot, p. 329.
[1100] Lettre à d'Alembert, 9 janvier, 1773.
[1101] Cp. Rosenkranz, Vorbericht, p. vi.
[1102] Cp. Morley, Diderot, ed. 1834, p. 32.
[1103] E.g. § 21.
[1104] A police agent seized the MS. in Diderot's library, and Diderot
could not get it back. Malesherbes, the censor, kept it safe for him!
[1105] According to Naigeon (Mémoires, 1821, p. 131), three months
and ten days.
[1106] The Lettre purports, like so many other books of that and the
next generation, to be published "A Londres."
[1107] Diderot's daughter, in her memoir of him, speaks of his
imprisonment in the Bastille as brought about through the resentment
of a lady of whom he had spoken slightingly; and her husband left
a statement in MS. to the same effect (printed at the end of the
Mémoires by Naigeon). The lady is named as Madame Dupré de Saint-Maur,
a mistress of the King, and the offence is said to have been committed
in the story entitled Le Pigeon blanc. Howsoever this may have been,
the prosecution was quite in the spirit of the period, and the earlier
Pensées were made part of the case against him. See Delort, Hist. de
la détention des philosophes, 1829, ii, 208-16. M. de Vandeul-Diderot
testifies that the Marquis Du Chatelet, Governor of Vincennes, treated
his prisoner very kindly. Buckle (1-vol. ed. p. 425) does not seem to
have fully read the Lettre, which he describes as merely discussing
the differentiation of thought and sensation among the blind.
[1108] His friend Meister (À la mémoire de Diderot, 1786, app. to
Naigeon's Mémoires de Diderot, 1821, p. 424) writes as if Diderot had
written the whole Apologie "in a few days." The third part, a reply
to the pastoral of the Bishop of Auxerre, appeared separately as a
Suite to the others.
[1109] Apologie, as cited, 2e partie, p. 87 sq.
[1110] Observations sur l'instruction pastorale de Mons. l'Évêque
d'Auxerre, Berlin, 1752, p. 17.
[1111] Id. p. 102 sq.
[1112] Cp. Morley, Diderot, pp. 98-99.
[1113] Carlyle, Frederick, bk. xviii, ch. ix, end.
[1114] D'Argenson, Mémoires, iv, 188.
[1115] Carlyle, as cited.
[1116] "Quelle abominable homme!" he writes to Mdlle. Voland
(15 juillet, 1759); and Lord Morley pronounces de Prades a rascal
(Diderot, p. 98). Carlyle is inarticulate with disgust--but as much
against the original heresy as against the treason to Frederick. As
to that, Thiébault was convinced that de Prades was innocent and
calumniated. Everybody at court, he declares, held the same view. Mes
Souvenirs de vingt ans de séjour à Berlin, 2e édit. 1805, v, 402-404.
[1117] It is not clear how these are to be distinguished from the
mutilations of the later volumes by his treacherous publisher
Le Breton. Of this treachery the details are given by Grimm,
Corr. litt. ed. 1829. vii, 144 sq.
[1118] Buckle's account of him (1-vol. ed. p. 426) as "burning with
hatred against his persecutors" after his imprisonment is overdrawn. He
was a poor hater.
[1119] Madame Diderot, says her daughter, was very upright as well
as very religious, but her temper, "éternellement grondeur, faisait
de notre intérieur un enfer, dont mon père était l'ange consolateur"
(Letter to Meister, in Notice pref. to Lettres Inédites de Mme. de
Staël à Henri Meister, 1903, p. 62).
[1120] "Hélas! disait mon excellent grand-père, j'ai deux fils:
l'un sera sûrement un saint, et je crains bien que l'autre ne soit
damné; mais je ne puis vivre avec le saint, et je suis très heureux
du temps que je passe avec le damné" (Letter of Mme. de Vandeul,
last cited). Freethinker as he was, his fellow-townsmen officially
requested in 1780 to be allowed to pay for a portrait of him for
public exhibition, and the bronze bust he sent them was placed in
the hôtel de ville (MS. of M. de Vandeul-Diderot, as cited).
[1121] Madame de Vandeul states that this story was motived by the
case of Diderot's sister, who died mad at the age of 27 or 28 (Letter
above cited; Rosenkranz, i, 9).
[1122] Lettre de Voltaire à D'Alembert, 27 août, 1774.
[1123] Lettre de 2 décembre, 1757.
[1124] OEuvres posthumes de D'Alembert, 1799, i, 240.
[1125] D'Holbach was the original of the character of Wolmar in
Rousseau's Nouvelle Héloïse, of whom Julie says that he "does good
without recompense." "I never saw a man more simply simple" was the
verdict of Madame Geoffrin. Corr. litt. de Grimm (notice probably by
Meister), ed. 1829-31, xiv, 291.
[1126] Marmontel says of him that he "avoit tout lu et n'avoit jamais
rien oublié d'interessant." Mémoires, 1804, ii, 312.
[1127] See a full list of his works (compiled by Julian Hibbert
after the list given in the 1821 ed. of Diderot's Works, xii, 115,
and rep. in the 1829-31 ed. of Grimm and Diderot's Correspondance,
xiv, 293), prefixed to Watson's ed. (1834 and later) of the English
translation of the System of Nature.
[1128] Morley, Diderot, p. 341. The chapter gives a good account of
the book. Cp. Lange, i, 364 sq. (Eng. trans, ii, 26 sq.) as to its
materialism. The best pages were said to be by Diderot (Corr. de Grimm,
as cited, p. 289; the statement of Meister, who makes it also in his
Éloge). Naigeon denied that Diderot had any part in the Système, but
in 1820 there was published an edition with "notes and corrections"
by Diderot.
[1129] It is to be noted that the English translation (3 vols. 3rd
ed. 1817; 4th ed. 1820) deliberately tampers with the language of the
original to the extent of making it deistic. This perversion has been
by oversight preserved in all the reprints.
[1130] Mirabeau spoke of the Essai as "le livre le moins connu,
et celui qui mérite le plus l'être." Even the reprint of 1793 had
become "extremely rare" in 1822. The book seems to have been specially
disquieting to orthodoxy, and was hunted down accordingly.
[1131] So Morley, p. 347. It does not occur to Lord Morley, and to
the Comtists who take a similar tone, that in thus disparaging past
thinkers they are really doing the thing they blame.
[1132] Lettres de Memmius à Cicéron (1771); Histoire de Jenni
(1775). In the earlier article, Athée, in the Dictionnaire
Philosophique, he speaks of having met in France very good physicists
who were atheists. In his letter of September 26, 1770, to Madame
Necker, he writes concerning the Système de la Nature: "Il est un
peu honteux à notre nation que tant de gens aient embrassé si vite
une opinion si ridicule." And yet Prof. W. M. Sloane, of Columbia
University, still writes of Voltaire, in the manner of English bishops,
as "atheistical" (The French Revolution and Religious Reform, 1901,
p. 26).
[1133] Though in 1797 we have Maréchal's Code d'une Société d'hommes
sans Dieu, and in 1798 his Pensées libres sur les prêtres.
[1134] Thus Dr. Cairns (Unbelief in the Eighteenth Century, p. 165)
gravely argues that the French Revolution proves the inefficacy
of theism without a Trinity to control conduct. He has omitted to
compare the theistic bloodshed of the Revolution with the Trinitarian
bloodshed of the Crusades, the papal suppression of the Albigenses,
the Hussite wars, and other orthodox undertakings.
[1135] The book was accorded the Monthyon prize by the French
Academy. In translation (1788) it found a welcome in England among
Churchmen by reason of its pro-Christian tone and its general
vindication of religious institutions. The translation was the work
of Mary Wollstonecraft. See Kegan Paul's William Godwin, 1876, i,
193. Mrs. Dunlop, the friend of Burns, recommending its perusal to
the poet, paid it a curious compliment: "He does not write like a
sectary, hardly like a Christian, but yet while I read him, I like
better my God, my neighbour, Monsieur Necker, and myself." Robert
Burns and Mrs. Dunlop, ed. by W. Wallace, 1898, p. 258.
[1136] See Voltaire's letters to Madame Necker, Corr. de Grimm,
ed. 1829, vii, 23, 118. Of the lady, Grimm writes (p. 118): "Hypathie
Necker passe sa vie avec des systématiques, mais elle est devote à
sa manière. Elle voudrait être sincèrement hugenote, ou socinienne,
ou déistique, ou plutôt, pour être quelque chose, elle prend le
parti de ne se rendre compte sur rien." "Hypathie" was Voltaire's
complimentary name for her.
[1137] Cp. Aulard, Le Culte de la Raison et le Culte de l'Être Suprême,
1892, pp. 17-19. M. Gazier (Études sur l'histoire religieuse de la
révolution française, 1877, pp. 48, 173, 189 sq.) speaks somewhat
loosely of a prevailing anti-Christian feeling when actually citing
only isolated instances, and giving proofs of a general orthodoxy. Yet
he points out the complete misconception of Thiers on the subject
(p. 202).
[1138] Cp. Prof. W. M. Sloane, The French Revolution and Religious
Reform, p. 43.
[1139] Gazier, as cited, pp. 2, 4, 12, 19-21, 71, etc.
[1140] Les Assemblées Provinciales sous Louis XVI, 1864,
pref. pp. viii-ix.
[1141] Gazier, L. ii, ch. i.
[1142] Id. p. 67.
[1143] Id. p. 69.
[1144] Léonce de Lavergne, as cited.
[1145] The authority of Turgot himself could be cited for the
demand that the State clergy should accept the constitution of the
State. Cp. Aulard, Le Culte de la Raison, p. 12; Tissot, Étude sur
Turgot, 1878, p. 160.
[1146] Gazier, p. 113.
[1147] Aulard, Culte, pp. 19-20.
[1148] Michelet, Hist. de la révolution française, ed. 8vo 1868 and
later, i, 16. Cp. Proudhon's De la justice, 1858.
[1149] "Tout jugement religieux ou politique est une contradiction
flagrante dans une religion uniquement fondée sur un dogme étranger
à la justice." Ed. cited, introd. p. 60.
[1150] The grave misstatement of Michelet on this head is exposed by
Aulard, Culte, p. 60.
[1151] Yet it is customary among Christians to speak of this lady
in the most opprobrious terms. The royalist (but malcontent) Marquis
de Villeneuve, who had seen the Revolution in his youth, claimed in
his old age to have afterwards "conversed with the Goddess Reason
of Paris and with the Goddess Reason of Bourges" (where he became
governor); but, though he twice alludes to those women, he says
nothing whatever against their characters (De l'Agonie de la France,
1835, i, 3, 19). Prof. W. M. Sloane, with all his religious prejudice,
is satisfied that the women chosen as Goddesses of Reason outside of
Paris were "noted for their spotless character." Work cited, p. 198.
[1152] Mémoires, ed. 1841, ii, 166.
[1153] Père F.-J.-F. Fortin, Souvenirs, Auxerre, 1867, ii, 41.
[1154] See the speech in Aulard, Culte, p. 240; and cp. pp. 79-85.
[1155] "Le peuple aura des fêtes dans lesquelles il offrira de l'encens
à l'Être Suprême, au maître de la nature, car nous n'avons pas voulu
anéantir la superstition pour établir le règne de l'athéisme." Speech
of Nov. 26, 1793, in the Moniteur. (Discours de Danton, ed. André
Fribourg, 1910, p. 599.)
[1156] Aulard, Culte, pp. 81-82.
[1157] Concerning whom see Aulard, Culte, pp. 86-96.
[1158] The Source, the Strength, and the True Spirit of Laws,
Eng. tr. 1753, p. 6.
[1159] E.g., in the Arrêt du Parlement of 9 juin, 1762, denouncing
Rousseau's Émile as tending to make the royal authority odious and to
destroy the principle of obedience; and in the Examen du Béllisaire de
M. Marmontel, by Coger (Nouv. éd. augm. 1767, p. 45 sq. Cp. Marmontel's
Mémoires, 1804, iii, 46, as to his being called ennemi du trône et de
l'autel). This kind of invective was kept up against the philosophes
to the moment of the Revolution. See for instance Le vrai religieux,
Discours dédié à Madame Louise de France, par le R. P. C. A. 1787,
p. 4: "Une philosophie orgueilleuse a renversé les limites sacrées que
la main du Très-Haut avoit elle-même élevées. La raison de l'homme
a osé sonder les décrets de Dieu.... Dans les accès de son ivresse,
n'a-t-elle pas sapé les fondemens du trône et des lois," etc.
[1160] Cp. the admissions of Curnier (Rivarol, sa vie et ses oeuvres,
1858, p. 149) in deprecation of Burke's wild likening of Rivarol's
journalism to the Annals of Tacitus.
[1161] OEuvres, ed. cited, pp. 136-40, 147-55.
[1162] Cp. the critique of Sainte-Beuve, prefixed to ed. cited,
pp. 14-17, and that of Arsène Houssaye, id. pp. 31-33. Mr. Saintsbury,
though biassed to the side of the royalist, admits that "Rivarol
hardly knows what sincerity is" (Miscellaneous Essays, 1892, p. 67).
[1163] Charles Comte is thus partly inaccurate in saying (Traité de
Législation, 1835, i, 72) that the charge against the philosophers
began "on the day on which there was set up a government in France
that sought to re-establish the abuses of which they had sought the
destruction." What is true is that the charge, framed at once by the
backers of the Old Régime, has always since done duty for reaction.
[1164] Mémoires, ed. Jannet, iii, 313; iv, 70; v, 346, 348.
[1165] Id. iii, 346-47.
[1166] D'Argenson, noting in his old age how "on n'a jamais autant
parlé de nation et d'État qu'aujourd'hui," how no such talk had been
heard under Louis XIV, and how he himself had developed on the subject,
adds, "cela vient du parlement et des Anglois." He goes on to speak of
a reissue of the translation of Locke on Civil Government, originally
made by the Jansenists (Mémoires, iv, 189-90).
[1167] Hallam, Lit. of Europe, ed. 1872, iii, 160-63.
[1168] OEuvres diverses de Pierre Bayle, La Haye, 4 vols. fol. 1737,
ii, 564 sq.
[1169] This Critique appears in the very volume to which Coger refers
for the Avis aux Réfugiéz. See Lett. viii, xiii, xvii, etc., vol. and
ed. cited, pp. 36, 54, 71, etc.
[1170] Cp. the survey of Aulard, Hist. polit. de la rév. française,
2e édit. 1903, pp. 2-23.
[1171] Probably the work of a Jansenist.
[1172] On the whole question of the growth of abstract revolutionary
doctrine in politics cp. W. S. McKechnie on the De Jure Regni apud
Scotos in the "George Buchanan" vol. of Glasgow Quatercentenary
Studies, 1906, pp. 256-76; Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle
Ages, Maitland's tr. 1900, p. 37 sq.
[1173] Mallet actually reproaches the philosophes in the mass--while
admitting the hostility of many of them to the Revolution--with "having
accelerated French degeneration and depravation ... by rendering
the conscience argumentative (raisonneuse), by substituting for
duties inculcated by sentiment, tradition, and habit, the uncertain
rules of the human reason and sophisms adapted to passions," etc.,
etc. (B. Mallet, as cited, p. 360). With all his natural vigour of
mind, Mallet du Pan thus came to talk the language of the ordinary
irrationalist of the Reaction. Certainly, if the stimulation of the
habit of reasoning be a destructive course, the philosophes stand
condemned. But as Christians had been reasoning as best they could, in
an eternal series of vain disputes, for a millennium and a-half before
the Revolution, with habitual appeal to the passions, the argument
only proves how vacuous a Christian champion's reasoning can be.
[1174] Art. in Mercure Britannique, No. 13, Feb. 21, 1799; cited
by B. Mallet in Mallet du Pan and the French Revolution, 1902,
App. p. 357.
[1175] Id. p. 359.
[1176] Tableau littéraire du dix-huitième siècle, 8e édit. pp. 112,
113.
[1177] Id. p. 72.
[1178] Work cited, p. 358.
[1179] Id. p. 359.
[1180] Cp. Morley, Diderot, p. 407. Lord Morley points to the phrase in
another form in a letter of Voltaire's in 1761. It really derives from
Jean Meslier, who quotes it from an unlettered man (Testament, i. 19).
[1181] Rosenkranz, Diderot's Leben und Werke, 1866, ii, 380-81.
[1182] As Lord Morley points out, Henri Martin absolutely reverses
the purport of a passage in order to convict Diderot of justifying
regicide.
[1183] Mémoires, ed. Jannet, iv, 44, 51, 68, 69, 74, 91, 93, 101, 103.
[1184] Mallet du Pan says he saw the MS., and knew Diderot to have
received 10,000 livres tournois for his additions. This statement
is incredible. But Meister is explicit, in his éloge, as to Diderot
having written for the book much that he thought nobody would sign,
whereas Raynal was ready to sign anything.
[1185] Memoirs of Sir Samuel Romilly, 3rd ed. 1841, i, 46.
[1186] When D'Argenson writes in 1752 (Mémoires, éd. Jannet, iv,
103) that he hears "only philosophes say, as if convinced, that even
anarchy would be better" than the existing misgovernment, he makes
no suggestion that they teach this. And he declares for his own part
that everything is drifting to ruin: "nulle réformation ... nulle
amélioration.... Tout tombe, par lambeaux."
[1187] Aulard, Hist. polit. de la révol. p. 24.
[1188] This is the sufficient comment on a perplexing page of Lord
Morley's second monograph on Burke (pp. 110-11), which I have never
been able to reconcile with the rest of his writing.
[1189] Lecky, Hist. of England in the Eighteenth Century, small
ed. vi, 263.
[1190] D'Argenson notes this repeatedly, though in one passage he
praises the Parlement as having alone made head against absolutism
(déc. 1752; ed. cited, iv, 116).
[1191] Maximes et Pensées, ed. 1856, p. 72.
[1192] Id. pp. 73-74.
[1193] Chamfort in another passage maintains against Soulavie that
the Academy did much to develop the spirit of freedom in thought and
politics. Id. p. 107. And this too is arguable, as we have seen.
[1194] On this complicated issue, which cannot be here handled at
any further length, see Prof. P. A. Wadia's essay The Philosophers
and the French Revolution (Social Science Series, 1904), which,
however, needs revision; and compare the argument of Nourrisson,
J.-J. Rousseau et le Rousseauisme, 1903, ch. xx.
[1195] Correspondance de Grimm, ed. cited, xiv, 5-6. Lettre de
janv. 1788.
[1196] Lettre de Voltaire à D'Alembert, 27 août, 1774.
[1197] Histoire du mariage des prêtres en France, par M. Grégoire,
ancien évêque de Blois, 1826, p. v. Compare the details in the
Appendice to the Etudes of M. Gazier, before cited. That writer's
account is the more decisive seeing that his bias is clerical,
and that, writing before M. Aulard, he had to a considerable extent
retained the old illusion as to the "decreeing of atheism" by the
Convention (p. 313). See pp. 230-260 as to the readjustment effected
by Grégoire, while the conservative clergy were still striving to
undo the Revolution.
[1198] Heroes and Hero-Worship: Napoleon.
[1199] See the Sentiments de Napoléon sur le Christianisme:
conversations recueillies à Sainte-Hélène par le Comte de Montholon,
1841. Many of the utterances here set forth are irreconcilable with
Napoleon's general tone.
[1200] O'Meara, Napoléon en Exil, ed. Lacroix, 1897, ii, 39.
[1201] Ph. Gonnard, Les origines de la légende Napoléonienne, 1906,
p. 258.
[1202] Id. p. 260.
[1203] Pasquier, cited by Rose, Life of Napoleon, ed. 1913, i,
282. The Concordat was bitterly resented by the freethinkers in the
army. Id. p. 281.
[1204] See Jules Barni's Napoléon Ier. ed. 1870, p. 83, as to the
amazing Catechism imposed by Napoleon on France in 1811. For the
history of its preparation and imposition see De Labone, Paris sous
Napoléon: La Religion, 1907, p. 100 sq.
[1205] As to the Napoleonic censorship of literature, cp. Madame de
Staël, Considérations sur la révolution française, ptie. iv, ch. 16;
Dix Années d'Exil, préf.; Welschinger, La Censure sous le premier
Empire, 1882.
[1206] Las Cases, Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène, 19 août, 1816.
[1207] Mignet, Hist. de la révolution française, 4e édit. ii, 340.
[1208] Cp. Pusey, Histor. Enquiry into the Probable Causes of the
Rationalist Character ... of the Theology of Germany, 1828, p. 79.
[1209] Bishop Hurst, History of Rationalism, ed. 1867, p. 56.
[1210] Id. pp. 57-58 (last ed. pp. 74-76), citing Tholuck, Deutsche
Universitäten, i, 145-48, and Dowding, Life of Calixtus, pp. 132-33.
[1211] Pusey, p. 113.
[1212] Hurst, p. 59.
[1213] Cp. Buckle, 1-vol. ed. pp. 303-309. "The result of the
Thirty Years' War was indifference, not only to the Confession, but
to religion in general. Ever since that period, secular interests
decidedly occupy the foreground" (Kahnis, Internal History of German
Protestantism, Eng. tr. 1856, p. 21).
[1214] Quoted by Bishop Hurst, ed. cited, p. 60 (78).
[1215] Preservatio wider die Pest der heutigen Atheisten.
[1216] Dated from Rome; but this was a mystification.
[1217] Kahnis, p. 125; La Croze, Entretiens, 1711, p. 401.
[1218] Even Knutzen seems to have been influenced by Spinoza. Pünjer,
Hist. of the Christ. Philos. of Religion, Eng. tr. i, 437. Pünjer,
however, seems to have exaggerated the connection.
[1219] Cp. Lange, Gesch. des Materialismus, 3te Aufl. i, 318
(Eng. tr. ii, 35).
[1220] Epistolæ ad Spinozam et Responsiones, in Gfrörer, liii.
[1221] Colerus, Vie de Spinoza, in Gfrörer's ed. of the Opera, 1830,
pp. lv, lvi.
[1222] Pünjer, as cited, i, 434-30: Lange, last cit. Lange notes
that Genthe's Compendium de impostura religionum, which has been
erroneously assigned to the sixteenth century, must belong to the
period of Kortholt's work.
[1223] Pünjer, p. 439; Lange, last cit.; Tholuck, Kirch. Leben,
2 Abth. pp. 57-58.
[1224] It was nominally issued at Amsterdam, really at Berlin.
[1225] This writer gives (p. 12) a notable list of the forms of
atheism: Atheismus directus, indirectus, formalis, virtualis,
theoreticus, practicus, inchoatus, consummatus, subtilis, crassus,
privativus, negativus, and so on, ad lib.
[1226] Cp. Buckle and his Critics, pp. 171-72; Pünjer, i, 515.
[1227] Letter cited by Dr. Latta. Leibniz, 1898, p. 2, note.
[1228] Philos. Schriften, ed. Gerhardt, i, 26; Martineau, Study of
Spinoza, p. 77.
[1229] Letter to Thomas, December 23, 1670.
[1230] Quoted by Tholuck, as last cited, p. 61. Spener took the
same tone.
[1231] Philos. Schriften, ed. Gerhardt, i, 34; ii, 563; Latta,
p. 24; Martineau, p. 75. Cp. Refutation of Spinoza by Leibnitz,
ed. by Foucher de Careil. Eng. tr. 1855.
[1232] His notable surmise as to gradation of species (see Latta,
pp. 38-39) was taken up among the French materialists, but did not
then modify current science.
[1233] The only lengthy treatise published by him in his lifetime.
[1234] M. A. Jacques, intr. to OEuvres de Leibniz, 1846, i, 54-57.
[1235] Cp. Tholuck, Das kirchliche Leben, as cited, 2
Abth. pp. 52-55. Kahnis, coinciding with Erdmann, pronounces that,
although Leibnitz "acknowledges the God of the Christian faith,
yet his system assigned to Him a very uncertain position only"
(Int. Hist. of Ger. Protestantism, p. 26).
[1236] Cp. Pünjer, i, 509, as to his attitude on ritual.
[1237] Latta, as cited, p. 16; Vie de Leibnitz, par De Jaucourt,
in ed. 1747 of the Essais de Théodicée, i, 235-39.
[1238] As to his virtual deism see Pünjer, i, 513-15. But he proposed
to send Christian missionaries to the heathen. Tholuck, as last cited,
p. 55.
[1239] Lettres entre Leibnitz et Clarke.
[1240] Discours de la conformité de la foi avec la raison, §§ 68-70;
Essais sur la bonté de Dieu, etc., §§ 50, 61, 164, 180, 292-93.
[1241] The Nouveaux Essais sur l'Entendement humain, refuting Locke,
appeared posthumously in 1765. Locke had treated his theistic critic
with contempt. (Latta, p. 13.)
[1242] Amand Saintes, Hist. crit. du Rationalisme en Allemagne, 1841,
ch. vi; Heinrich Schmid, Die Geschichte des Pietismus, 1863, ch. ii.
[1243] Saintes, p. 51; cp. Pusey, p. 105, as to "the want of resistance
from the school of Pietists to the subsequent invasion of unbelief."
[1244] Hagenbach, German Rationalism, Eng. tr. 1865, p. 9.
[1245] Id. p. 39; Pusey, Histor. Enquiry into the Causes of German
Rationalism, 1828, pp. 88, 97; Tholuck, Abriss einer Geschichte des
Umwälzung ... seit 1750 auf dem Gebiete der Theologie in Deutschland,
in Vermischte Schriften, 1839, ii, 5.
[1246] Pusey, pp. 86, 87, 98.
[1247] Cp. Pusey, pp. 37-38, 45, 48, 49, 53-54, 79, 101-109; Saintes,
pp. 28, 79-80; Hagenbach, pp. 41, 72, 105.
[1248] Pusey, p. 110. Cp. Saintes, ch. vi.
[1249] Das kirchliche Leben, as cited, 2 Abth. p. 58.
[1250] Id. pp. 56-57.
[1251] Vol. i, p. 6.
[1252] H. Luden, Christian Thomasius nach seinen Schicksalen und
Schriften dargestellt, 1805, p. 7.
[1253] Cp. Schmid, Geschichte des Pietismus, pp. 486-88.
[1254] Pufendorf's bulky treatise De Jure Naturæ et Gentium was
published at Lund, where he was professor, in 1672. The shorter De
Officio hominis et civis (also Lund, 1673) is a condensation and
partly a vindication of the other, and this it was that convinced
Thomasius. As to Pufendorf's part in the transition from theological to
rational moral philosophy, see Hallam, Lit. of Europe, iv, 171-78. He
is fairly to be bracketed with Cumberland; but Hallam hardly recognizes
that it was the challenge of Hobbes that forced the change.
[1255] Freimüthige, lustige und ernsthafte, jedoch vernunft- und
gesetzmässige Gedanken, oder Monatgespräche über allerhand, vornehmlich
über neue Bücher. There had been an earlier Acta Eruditorum, in Latin,
published at Leipzig, and a French Ephemerides savantes, Hamburg,
1686. Other German and French periodicals soon followed that of
Thomasius. Luden, p. 162.
[1256] Schmid, pp. 488-92, gives a sketch of some of the contents.
[1257] Pusey, p. 86, note. It is surprising that Pusey does not make
more account of Thomasius's naturalistic treatment of polygamy and
suicide, which he showed to be not criminal in terms of natural law.
[1258] Compare Weber, Gesch. der deutschen Lit. § 81 (ed. 1880,
pp. 90-91); Pusey, as cited, p. 114. note; Enfield's Hist. of
Philos. (abst. of Brucker's Hist. crit. philos.), 1840. pp. 610-612;
Ueberweg, ii, 115; and Schlegel's note in Reid's Mosheim, p. 790,
with Karl Hillebrand, Six Lect. on the Hist. of German Thought, 1880,
pp. 64-65. There is a modern monograph by A. Nicoladoni, Christian
Thomasius; ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Aufklärung, 1888.
[1259] Baron de Bielfeld, Progrès des Allemands, 3e éd. 1767, i,
24. "Before Thomasius," writes Bielfeld, "an old woman could not have
red eyes without running the risk of being accused of witchcraft and
burned at the stake."
[1260] Schmid, pp. 493-97. Thomasius's principal writings on this
theme were: Vom Recht evangelischen Fürsten in Mitteldingen (1692);
Vom Recht evangelischen Fürsten in theologischen Streitigkeiten
(1696); Vom Recht evangelischen Fürsten gegen Ketzer (1697).
[1261] Ec. Hist. 17 Cent. sect. ii, pt. ii, ch. i, §§ 11, 14. It
is noteworthy that the Pietists at Halle did not scruple to ally
themselves for a time with Thomasius, he being opposed to the orthodox
party. Kahnis, Internal Hist. of Ger. Protestantism, p. 114.
[1262] Pusey, as cited, p. 121. Cp. p. 113.
[1263] Hagenbach, Kirchengeschichte des 18. und 19. Jahrh., 2te
Aufl. i, 164. (This matter is not in the abridged translation.)
[1264] See the furious account of him by Mosheim, 17 C. sec. ii,
pt. ii, ch. i, § 33.
[1265] Hagenbach, last cit. p. 169.
[1266] Noack, Die Freidenker in der Religion, Th. iii, Kap. 1; Bruno
Bauer, Einfluss des englischen Quäkerthums auf die deutsche Cultur und
auf das englisch-russische Projekt einer Weltkirche, 1878, pp. 41-44.
[1267] Pref. to French tr. of the Meditationes, 1770, pp. xii-xvii. Lau
died in 1740.
[1268] Tholuck, Abriss, as cited, p. 10.
[1269] Trans. in English, 1750.
[1270] Hagenbach, tr. pp. 35-36; Saintes, p. 61; Kahnis, as cited,
p. 114.
[1271] Hagenbach, pp. 37-39. It is to be observed (Tholuck, Abriss,
p. 23) that the Wolffian philosophy was reinstated in Prussia by
royal mandate in 1739, a year before the accession of Frederick the
Great. But we know that Frederick championed him.
[1272] Tholuck, Abriss, as cited, p. 5.
[1273] Tholuck, Abriss, as cited, p. 6.
[1274] Kahnis, p. 55.
[1275] Pünjer, i, 544. Cp. Tholuck, Abriss, pp. 19-22.
[1276] Tholuck, Abriss, p. 22. Schmid was for a time supposed to be
the author of the Wolfenbüttel Fragments of Reimarus (below, p. 327).
[1277] Unpartheyische Kirchen- und Ketzerhistorie, 1699-1700, 2
tom. fol.--fuller ed. 3 tom. fol. 1740. Compare Mosheim's angry account
of it with Murdock's note in defence: Reid's ed. p. 804. Bruno Bauer
describes it as epoch-making (Einfluss des englischen Quäkerthums,
p. 42). This history had a great influence on Goethe in his teens,
leading him, he says, to the conviction that he, like so many
other men, should have a religion of his own, which he goes on to
describe. It was a re-hash of Gnosticism. (Wahrheit und Dichtung,
B. viii; Werke, ed. 1866, xi, 344 sq.)
[1278] Cp. Hagenbach, Kirchengeschichte, i, 171: Pünjer, i, 279.
[1279] Die Göttlichkeit der Vernunft.
[1280] Noack, Th. iii, Kap. 2: Saintes, pp. 85-86; Pünjer, p. 442. It
is interesting to find Edelmann supplying a formula latterly utilized
by the so-called "New Theology" in England--the thesis that "the
reality of everything which exists is God," and that there can
therefore be no atheists, since he who recognizes the universe
recognizes God.
[1281] Naigeon, by altering the words of Diderot, caused him to appear
one of the exceptions; but he was not. See Rosenkranz, Diderot's
Leben und Werke. Vorb. p. vii.
[1282] Kahnis, pp. 128-29. Edelmann's Life was written by
Pratje. Historische Nachrichten von Edelmann's Leben, 1755. It gives
a list of replies to his writings (p. 205 sq.). Apropos of the first
issue of Strauss's Leben Jesu, a volume of Erinnerungen of Edelmann
was published at Clausthal in 1839 by W. Elster; and Strauss in his
Dogmatik avowed the pleasure with which he had made the acquaintance
of so interesting a writer. A collection of extracts from Edelmann's
works, entitled Der neu eröffnete Edelmann, was published at Bern
in 1847; and the Unschuldige Wahrheiten was reprinted in 1846. His
Autobiography, written in 1752, was published in 1849.
[1283] Betrachtungen über die vornehmsten Wahrheiten der
Religion. Another apologetic work of the period marked by rational
moderation and tolerance was the Vertheidigten Glauben der Christen
of the Berlin court-preacher A. W. F. Sack (1754).
[1284] Art. by Wagenmann in Allgemeine deutsche Biographie.
[1285] Hagenbach, Kirchengeschichte, i, 355.
[1286] Pünjer, i, 542.
[1287] Kurz, Hist. of the Christian Church from the Reformation,
Eng. tr. ii, 274. A Jesuit, A. Merz, wrote four replies to
Jerusalem. One was entitled Frag ob durch die biblische Simplicität
allein ein Freydenker oder Deist bekehret ... werden könne ("Can a
Freethinker or Deist be converted by Biblical Simplicity alone?"),
1775.
[1288] Cp. Hagenbach, i, 353; tr. p. 120. Jerusalem was the father
of the gifted youth whose suicide (1775) moved Goethe to write The
Sorrows of Werther, a false presentment of the real personality,
which stirred Lessing (his affectionate friend) to publish a volume of
the dead youth's essays, in vindication of his character. The father
had considerable influence in purifying German style. Cp. Goethe,
Wahrheit und Dichtung, Th. ii, B. vii; Werke, ed. 1866. xi, 272;
and Hagenbach, i, 354.
[1289] Goethe, as last cited, pp. 268-69.
[1290] Lechler, Gesch. des englischen Deismus, pp. 447-52. The
translations began with that of Tindal (1741), which made a great
sensation.
[1291] Pusey, pp. 125, 127, citing Twesten; Gostwick, German Culture
and Christianity, p. 36, citing Ernesti. Thorschmid's Freidenker
Bibliothek, issued in 1765-67, collected both translations and
refutations. Lechler, p. 451.
[1292] Lange, Gesch. des Materialismus, i. 405 (Eng. tr. ii, 146-47).
[1293] Lange, i, 347, 399 (Eng. tr. ii, 76, 137).
[1294] Lange, i, 396-97 (ii, 134-35).
[1295] Goethe tells of having seen in his boyhood, at Frankfort, an
irreligious French romance publicly burned, and of having his interest
in the book thereby awakened. But this seems to have been during the
French occupation. (Wahrheit und Dichtung, B. iv; Werke, xi, 146.)
[1296] Id. B. iv, end.
[1297] Translated into English 1780; 2nd ed. 1793. The translator
claims for Haller great learning (2nd ed. p. xix). He seems in reality
to have had very little, as he represents that Jesus in his day
"was the only teacher who recommended chastity to men" (p. 82).
[1298] Rettung der Offenbarung gegen die Einwürfe der
Freigeister. Haller wrote under a similar title, 1775-76.
[1299] Baur, Gesch. der christl. Kirche, iv, 599.
[1300] Gostwick, p. 15.
[1301] Wahrheit und Dichtung, B. viii; Werke, xi, 329.
[1302] Schlosser, Hist. of Eighteenth Cent., Eng. tr. 1843. i, 150;
Hagenbach, tr. p. 66.
[1303] Hagenbach, tr. p. 63.
[1304] Id., Kirchengeschichte, i, 232.
[1305] Kahnis, p. 43; Tholuck, Abriss, p. 34.
[1306] See the extracts of Büchner, Zwei gekrönte Freidenker, 1890,
pp. 45-47.
[1307] Thiébault, Mes Souvenirs de Vingt Ans de Séjour à Berlin, 2e
édit. 1805, i, 126-28. See i, 355-56, ii, 78-82, as to the baselessness
of the stories (e.g., Pusey, Histor. Inq. into Ger. Rationalism,
p. 123) that Frederick changed his views in old age. Thiébault, a
strict Catholic, is emphatic in his negation: "The persons who assert
that [his principles] became more religious ... have either lied or
been themselves mistaken." Carlyle naturally detests Thiébault. The
rumour may have arisen out of the fact that in his Examen critique du
Système de la Nature Frederick counter-argues d'Holbach's impeachment
of Christianity. The attack on kings gave him a fellow-feeling with
the Church.
[1308] Cp. the argument of Faure, Hist. de Saint Louis, 1866, i,
242-43; ii, 597.
[1309] Examen de l'Essai sur les préjugés, 1769. See the passage in
Lévy-Bruhl, L'Allemagne depuis Leibniz, p. 89).
[1310] G. Weber, Gesch. der deutschen Literatur, 11te Aufl. p. 99.
[1311] Zur Gesch. der Relig. und Philos. in Deutschland--Werke,
ed. 1876, iii, 63-64. Goethe's blame (W. und D., B. vii) is passed
on purely literary grounds.
[1312] Hagenbach, tr. pp. 103-104; Cairns, p. 177.
[1313] This post he left to become secretary of the Academy of
Painting.
[1314] Cited by Pünjer, i, 545-46.
[1315] Id. p. 546.
[1316] Hagenbach, tr. pp. 100-103; Saintes, pp. 91-92; Pünjer, p. 536;
Noack, Th. iii, Kap. 7.
[1317] Hagenbach, Kirchengeschichte, i, 298, 351.
[1318] Id. i, 294 sq.
[1319] The book is remembered in France by reason of Eberhard's
amusing mistake of treating as a serious production of the Sorbonne
the skit in which Turgot derided the Sorbonne's findings against
Marmontel's Bélisaire.
[1320] Hagenbach, tr. p. 109.
[1321] Eberhard, however, is respectfully treated by Lessing in his
discussion on Leibnitz's view as to eternal punishment.
[1322] Noack, Th. iii, Kap. 8.
[1323] Saintes, pp. 92-93.
[1324] Cp. Hagenbach, Kirchengeschichte, i, 348, 363.
[1325] Id. i, 367; tr. pp. 124-25; Saintes, p. 94; Kahnis, p. 45. Pusey
(150-51, note) speaks of Teller and Spalding as belonging, with
Nicolai, Mendelssohn, and others, to a "secret institute, whose object
was to remodel religion and alter the form of government." This seems
to be a fantasy.
[1326] So Steffens, cited by Hagenbach, tr. p. 124.
[1327] P. Gastrow, Joh. Salomo Semler, 1905, p. 45. See Pusey,
140-41, note, for Semler's account of the rigid and unreasoning
orthodoxy against which he reacted. (Citing Semler's Lebenschreibung,
ii, 121-61.) Semler, however, records that Baumgarten, one of the
theological professors at Halle, would in expansive moods defend theism
and make light of theology (Lebenschreibung, i, 103 ). Cp. Tholuck,
Abriss, as cited, pp. 12, 18. Pusey notes that "many of the principal
innovators had been pupils of Baumgarten" (p. 132, citing Niemeyer).
[1328] Cp. Dr. G. Karo, Johann Salomo Semler, 1905, p. 25; Saintes,
pp. 129-31.
[1329] Cp. Gostwick, p. 51; Pünjer, i, 561.
[1330] Karo, p. 44.
[1331] Cp. Saintes, p. 132 sq.
[1332] Cp. Karo, pp. 3, 8, 16, 28.
[1333] Over a hundred and seventy in all. Pünjer, i, 560; Gastrow,
p. 637.
[1334] Karo, pp. 5-6.
[1335] Gastrow, p. 223.
[1336] Pusey, p. 142; A. S. Farrar, Crit. Hist. of Freethought, p. 313.
[1337] Cp. Karo, p. 5 sq.; Stäudlin, cited by Tholuck, Abriss, p. 39.
[1338] Kahnis. p. 116.
[1339] Wahre Gründe wanum Gott die Offenbarung nicht mit
augenscheinlichen Beweisen versehen hat.
[1340] Die Göttliche Eingebung, 1771.
[1341] Beweis das Gott die Menschen bereits durch seine Offenbarung
in der Natur zur Seligkeit fuhre.
[1342] Gostwick, p. 53; Pünjer, i, 546, note.
[1343] Cp. Kahnis, pp. 132-36, as to Bahrdt's early morals.
[1344] Geschichte seines Lebens, etc. 1700-91, iv, 119.
[1345] See below, p. 331.
[1346] Geschichte seines Lebens, Kap. 22; ii, 223 sq.
[1347] Baur, Gesch. der chr. Kirche, iv. 597.
[1348] Translated into English in 1789.
[1349] Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, Abschn. I--Werke, 1838 p. 239
(Eng. tr. 1838, pp. 50-51); Rousseau, Contrat Social, liv, iv,
ch. viii, near end; Locke, as cited above, p. 117. Cp. Bartholmèss,
Hist. crit. des doctr. relig. de la philos. moderne, 1855, i, 145;
Baur, as last cited.
[1350] See his Werke, ed. 1866, v, 317--Aus dem Briefe, die neueste
Literatur betreffend, 49ter Brief.
[1351] If Lessing's life were sketched in the spirit in which orthodoxy
has handled that of Bahrdt, it could be made unedifying enough. Even
Goethe remarks that Lessing "enjoyed himself in a disorderly tavern
life" (Wahrheit und Dichtung, B. vii); and all that Hagenbach
maliciously charges against Basedow in the way of irregularity of
study is true of him. On that and other points, usually glossed over,
see the sketch in Taylor's Historic Survey of German Poetry, 1830,
i, 332-37. All the while, Lessing is an essentially sound-hearted
and estimable personality; and he would probably have been the last
man to echo the tone of the orthodox towards the personal life of
the freethinkers who went further in unbelief than he.
[1352] E.g. his fable The Bull and the Calf (Fabeln, ii, 5), à propos
of the clergy and Bayle.
[1353] Sime, Life of Lessing, 1877, i, 102.
[1354] E.g. his early notice of Diderot's Lettre sur les
Aveugles. Sime, i, 94.
[1355] Dramaturgie, Stück 7.
[1356] Sime, i, 103-109.
[1357] Sime, i, 73, 107; ii, 253.
[1358] In his Gedanke über die Herrnhuter, written in 1750. See Adolf
Stahr's Lessing, sein Leben und seine Werke, 7te Aufl. ii, 183 sq.
[1359] Julian Schmidt puts the case sympathetically: "He had learned
in his father's house what value the pastoral function may have for
the culture of the people. He was bibelfest, instructed in the history
of his church, Protestant in spirit, full of genuine reverence for
Luther, full of high respect for historical Christianity, though on
reading the Fathers he could say hard things of the Church." Gesch. der
deutschen Litteratur von Leibniz bis auf unsere Zeit, ii (1886), 326.
[1360] Taylor, as cited, p. 361.
[1361] Sime, i, 73.
[1362] See Lessing's rather crude comedy, Der Freigeist, and Sime's
Life, i, 41-42, 72, 77.
[1363] Cp. his letters to his brother of which extracts are given by
Sime, ii, 191-92.
[1364] Sime, ii, 188.
[1365] As to the authorship see Saintes, pp. 101-102; and Sime's Life
of Lessing, i, 261-62, where the counter-claim is rejected.
[1366] Zur Geschichte und Literatur, aus dem 4ten Beitr.--Werke,
vi. 142 sq. See also in his Theologische Streitschriften the Axiomata
written against Pastor Goeze. Cp. Schwarz, Lessing als Theologe,
1854, pp. 146, 151; and Pusey, as cited, p. 51. note.
[1367] Compare the regrets of Pusey (pp. 51, 153), Cairns (p. 195),
Hagenbach (pp. 89-97), and Saintes (p. 100).
[1368] Sämmtliche Schriften, ed. Lachmann, 1857, xi (2), 248. Sime (ii,
190) mistranslates this passage; and Schmidt (ii, 326) mutilates it
by omissions. Fontanes (Le Christianisme moderne: Étude sur Lessing,
1867, p. 171) paraphrases it very loosely.
[1369] Sime, ii, 190.
[1370] Stahr, ii, 239; Sime, ii. 189.
[1371] See Sime, ii, 222, 233: Stahr, ii, 254. Hettner, an admirer,
calls the early Christianity of Reason a piece of sophistical
dialectic. Litteraturgeschichte des 18ten Jahrhunderts, ed. 1872,
iii. 588-89.
[1372] Stahr, ii, 243. Lessing said the report to this effect was
a lie; but this and other mystifications appear to have been by way
of fulfilling his promise of secrecy to the Reimarus family. Cairns,
pp. 203, 209. Cp. Farrar, Crit. Hist. of Freethought, note 29.
[1373] See it analysed by Bartholmèss, Hist. crit. des doctr. relig. de
la philos. moderne, i, 147-67; and by Schweitzer, The Quest of the
Historic Jesus (trans. of Von Reimarus zu Wrede), 1910.
[1374] Gostwick, p. 47; Bartholmèss, i, 166. His book was translated
into English (The Principal Truths of Natural Religion Defended and
Illustrated) in 1766; into Dutch in 1758; in part into French in 1768;
and seven editions of the original had appeared by 1798.
[1375] Stahr, ii, 241-44.
[1376] Id. ii, 245.
[1377] The statement that, in Lessing's age, "in north Germany men
were able to think and write freely" (Conybeare, Hist. of N. T. Crit.,
p. 80) is thus seen to be highly misleading.
[1378] Von dem Zwecke, Jesus und seiner Jünger, Braunschweig, 1778.
[1379] Taylor, Histor. Survey of German Poetry, i, 365.
[1380] Stahr, ii, 253-54.
[1381] Cp. Introd. to Willis's trans. of Nathan. The play is sometimes
attacked as being grossly unfair to Christianity. (E.g. Crouslé,
Lessing, 1863, p. 206.) The answer to this complaint is given by Sime,
ii, 252 sq.
[1382] See Cairns, Appendix, Note I; Willis, Spinoza, pp. 149-62;
Sime, ii, 299-303; and Stahr, ii, 219-30, giving the testimony of
Jacobi. Cp. Pünjer, i, 564-85. But Heine laughingly adjures Moses
Mendelssohn, who grieved so intensely over Lessing's Spinozism, to
rest quiet in his grave: "Thy Lessing was indeed on the way to that
terrible error ... but the Highest, the Father in Heaven, saved him
in time by death. He died a good deist, like thee and Nicolai and
Teller and the Universal German Library" (Zur Gesch. der Rel. und
Philos. in Deutschland, B. ii, near end.--Werke, ed. 1876, iii. 69).
[1383] See in Stahr, ii, 184-85. the various characterizations of his
indefinite philosophy. Stahr's own account of him as anticipating the
moral philosophy of Kant is as overstrained as the others. Gastrow,
an admirer, expresses wonder (Johann Salomo Semler, p. 188) at the
indifference of Lessing to the critical philosophy in general.
[1384] Sime, ii, ch. xxix, gives a good survey.
[1385] Letter to his brother, Feb., 1778.
[1386] Strauss, Das Leben Jesu (the second) Einleitung, § 14.
[1387] Hurst, History of Rationalism, 3rd ed. p. 130. "It was a
popular belief, as an organ of pious opinion announced to its readers,
that at his death the devil came and carried him away like a second
Faust." Sime, ii, 330.
[1388] Cited by Hurst, Hist. of Rationalism, 3rd ed. p. 125. Outside
Berlin, however, matters went otherwise till late in the century. Kurz
tells (Gesch. der deutschen Literatur, ii, 461 b) that "the
indifference of the learned towards native literature was so great
that even in the year 1761 Abbt could write that in Rinteln there
was nobody who knew the names of Moses Mendelssohn and Lessing."
[1389] Karl Hillebrand, Lectures on the Hist. of German Thought,
1880, p. 109.
[1390] Deutsche Merkur, Jan. and March, 1788 (Werke, ed. 1797,
xxix, 1-144; cited by Stäudlin, Gesch. der Rationalismus und
Supernaturalismus, 1826, p. 233).
[1391] Kurtz, Hist. of the Chr. Church, Eng. tr. 1864, ii, 224.
[1392] T. C. Perthes, Das Deutsche Staatsleben vor der Revolution,
262 sq., cited by Kahnis pp. 58-59.
[1393] See above, pp. 321, 328.
[1394] Kant distinguishes explicitly between "rationalists," as
thinkers who would not deny the possibility of a revelation, and
"naturalists," who did. See the Religion innerhalb der grenzen der
blossen Vernunft, Stück iv, Th. i. This was in fact the standing
significance of the term in Germany for a generation.
[1395] Letter to his brother, February 2, 1774.
[1396] Known as Zopf-Schulz from his wearing a pigtail in the fashion
then common among the laity. "An old insolent rationalist," Kurtz
calls him (ii, 270).
[1397] Hagenbach, Kirchengeschichte, i, 372; Gostwick, pp. 52, 54.
[1398] Philosophische Betrachtung über Theologie und Religion
überhaupt, und über die Jüdische insonderheit, 1784.
[1399] Pünjer, i, 544-45.
[1400] Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ch. ix, Bohn ed. p. 71.
[1401] See the details in Hagenbach, Kirchengeschichte, i, 368-72;
Kahnis, p. 60.
[1402] Marokkanische Briefe. Aus dem Arabischen. Frankfurt and Leipzig,
1785. The Letters purport to be written by one of the Moroccan embassy
at Vienna in 1783.
[1403] Briefe, xxi.
[1404] P. 49.
[1405] P. 232.
[1406] Das zum Theil einzige wahre System der christlichen Religion. It
had been composed in its author's youth under the title False
Reasonings of the Christian Religion; and the MS. was lost through
the bankruptcy of a Dutch publisher.
[1407] Noack, Th. III, Kap. 9, p. 194.
[1408] Mauvillon further collaborated with Mirabeau, and became a
great admirer of the French Revolution. He left freethinking writings
among his remains. They are not described by Noack, and I have been
unable to meet with them.
[1409] It was a test of the depth of the freethinking spirit in
the men of the day. Semler justified the edict; Bahrdt vehemently
denounced it. Hagenbach, i, 372.
[1410] Cp. Crabb Robinson's Diary, iii, 48; Martineau, Study of
Spinoza, p. 328; Willis, Spinoza, pp. 162-68. Bishop Hurst laments
(Hist. of Rationalism, 3rd ed. p. 145) that Herder's early views as
to the mission of Christ "were, in common with many other evangelical
views, doomed to an unhappy obscuration upon the advance of his later
years by frequent intercourse with more skeptical minds."
[1411] On the clerical opposition to him at Weimar on this score see
Düntzer, Life of Goethe, Eng. tr. 1883, i, 317.
[1412] Cp. Kronenberg, Herder's Philosophie nach ihrem
Entwickelungsgang, 1889.
[1413] Kronenberg, p. 90.
[1414] Stuckenberg, Life of Immanuel Kant, 1882, pp. 381-87;
Kronenberg, Herder's Philosophie, pp. 91, 103.
[1415] Kahnis, p. 78, and Erdmann, as there cited. Erdmann finds the
pantheism of Herder to be, not Spinozistic as he supposed, but akin
to that of Bruno and his Italian successors.
[1416] The chief sample passages in his works are the poem Das
Göttliche and the speech of Faust in reply to Gretchen in the garden
scene. It was the surmised pantheism of Goethe's poem Prometheus that,
according to Jacobi, drew from Lessing his avowal of a pantheistic
leaning. The poem has even an atheistic ring; but we have Goethe's
own account of the influence of Spinoza on him from his youth onwards
(Wahrheit und Dichtung, Th. III, B. xiv; Th. IV, B. xvi). See also
his remarks on the "natural" religion of "conviction" or rational
inference, and that of "faith" (Glaube) or revelationism, in B. iv
(Werke, ed. 1866, xi, 134); also Kestner's account of his opinions
at twenty-three, in Düntzer's Life, Eng. tr. i, 185; and again his
letter to Jacobi, January 6, 1813, quoted by Düntzer, ii, 290.
[1417] See the Alt-Testamentliches Appendix to the West-Oestlicher
Divan.
[1418] Heine, Zur Gesch. der Rel. u. Phil. in Deutschland (Werke,
ed. 1876, iii, 92).
[1419] Wahrheit und Dichtung, Th. I, B. iv (Werke, ed. 1886, xi, 123).
[1420] Id. Th. III, B. xiv, par. 20 (Werke, xii, 159).
[1421] Id. pp. 165, 186.
[1422] Id. p. 184.
[1423] Cited by Baur, Gesch. der christl. Kirche, v, 50.
[1424] Compare, as to the hostility he aroused, Düntzer, i, 152, 317,
329-30, 451; ii, 291 note, 455, 461; Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe,
März 6, 1830; and Heine, last cit. p. 93.
[1425] Eckermann, März 11, 1832.
[1426] Id. Feb. 4, 1829.
[1427] Hurst, Hist. of Rationalism, 3rd ed. p. 150.
[1428] Wahrheit und Dichtung, Th. III, B. viii; Werke, xi, 334.
[1429] Cp., however, the estimate of Krause, above, p. 207. Virchow,
Göthe als Naturforscher, 1861, goes into detail on the biological
points, without reaching any general estimate.
[1430] Remarked by Hagenbach, tr. p. 238.
[1431] Letter to Goethe, August 17, 1795 (Briefwechsel, No. 87). The
passage is given in Carlyle's essay on Schiller.
[1432] In Die Sendung Moses.
[1433] See the Philosophische Briefe.
[1434] Carlyle translates, "No Rights of Man," which was probably
the idea.
[1435] Letter to Goethe, July 9, 1796 (Briefwechsel, No. 188). "It is
evident that he was estranged not only from the church but from the
fundamental truths of Christianity" (Rev. W. Baur, Religious Life of
Germany, Eng. tr. 1872, p. 22). F. C. Baur has a curious page in which
he seeks to show that, though Schiller and Goethe cannot be called
Christian in a natural sense, the age was not made un-Christian by them
to such an extent as is commonly supposed (Gesch. der christl. Kirche,
v, 46).
[1436] Cp. Tieftrunk, as cited by Stuckenberg, Life of Immanuel Kant,
p. 225.
[1437] Id. p. 376. In his early essay Träume eines Geistersehers,
erläutert durch Träume der Metaphysik (1766) this attitude is clear. It
ends with an admiring quotation from Voltaire's Candide.
[1438] Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung? in the Berliner
Monatschrift, Dec. 1784, rep. in Kant's Vorzügliche kleine Schriften,
1833, Bd. i.
[1439] For an able argument vindicating the unity of Kant's system,
however, see Prof. Adamson, The Philosophy of Kant, 1879, p. 21 sq.,
as against Lange. With the verdict in the text compare that of Heine,
Zur Gesch. der Relig. u. Philos. in Deutschland, B. iii (Werke, as
cited, iii, 81-82); that of Prof. G. Santayana, The Life of Reason,
vol. i, 1905, p. 94 sq.; and that of Prof. A. Seth Pringle-Pattison,
The Philosophy of Religion in Kant and Hegel, rep. in vol. entitled
The Philosophical Radicals and Other Essays, 1907, pp. 264, 266.
[1440] Stuckenberg, pp. 225, 332.
[1441] Cp. Haym, Herder nach seinem Leben ... dargestellt, 1877, i,
33, 48; Kronenberg, Herder's Philosophie, p. 10.
[1442] Cp. Hagenbach, Eng. tr. p. 223.
[1443] Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft, Stück iii,
Abth. i, § 5; Abth. ii (ed. 1793, pp. 145-46, 188-89).
[1444] Work cited, Stück ii, Abschn. ii, Allg. Anm. p. 108 sq.
[1445] E.g. Stück iv, Th. i, preamble (p. 221, ed. cited).
[1446] Id. Stück iii, Abth. ii, Allg. Anm.: "This belief," he avows
frankly enough, "involves no mystery" (p. 199). In a note to the
second edition he suggests that there must be a basis in reason for the
idea of a Trinity, found as it is among so many ancient and primitive
peoples. The speculation is in itself evasive, for he does not give
the slightest reason for thinking the Goths capable of such metaphysic.
[1447] Stück iii, Abth. i, § 5; pp. 137, 139.
[1448] Stück iii, Abth. ii, p. 178.
[1449] Kant explicitly concurs in Warburton's thesis that the Jewish
lawgiver purposely omitted all mention of a future state from the
Pentateuch; since such belief must be supposed to have been current
in Jewry. But he goes further, and pronounces that simple Judaism
contains "absolutely no religious belief." To this complexion can
philosophic compromise come.
[1450] Stuckenberg, Life of Immanuel Kant, p. 329.
[1451] Borowski, Darstellung des Lebens und Charakters Immanuel Kant's,
1804, cited by Stuckenberg, p. 357.
[1452] Stuckenberg, pp. 359-60.
[1453] Stuckenberg, p. 361.
[1454] Cp. F. C. Baur, Gesch. der christl. Kirche, v, 63-66.
[1455] The first, on "Radical Evils," appeared in a Berlin monthly
in April, 1792, and was then reprinted separately.
[1456] Stuckenberg, p. 361.
[1457] Ueberweg, ii, 141; Stuckenberg, p. 363.
[1458] Stuckenberg, pp. 304-309.
[1459] Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft, Stück iv,
Th. 2.
[1460] Cp. Stuckenberg, p. 332; Seth Pringle-Pattison, as cited.
[1461] Stuckenberg, pp. 340, 346, 354, 468.
[1462] Letter of May 22, 1799, reproduced by Heine.
[1463] Zur Gesch. der Rel. u. Philos. in Deutschland. Werke, as cited,
iii, 96, 98.
[1464] Stuckenberg, p. 311.
[1465] Id. p. 357.
[1466] Stuckenberg, p. 351. "It is only necessary," adds Stuckenberg
(p. 468, note 142), "to develop Kant's hints in order to get the
views of Strauss in his Leben Jesu."
[1467] Id. p. 375. Erhard stated that Pestalozzi shared his views on
Christian ethics.
[1468] Stuckenberg, p. 358.
[1469] Cp. Weber, Gesch. der deutschen Literatur, 11te Aufl. p. 119;
R. Unger, Hamann und die Aufklärung, 1911.
[1470] Bartholmèss, Hist. crit. des doctr. relig. de la
philos. moderne, 1855, i, 136-40.
[1471] In demanding a "history of the human conscience" (Neue
Anthropologie, 1790) Platner seems to have anticipated the modern
scientific approach to religion.
[1472] Gespräche über den Atheismus, 1781.
[1473] Lehrbuch der Logik und Metaphysik, 1795.
[1474] W. Smith, Memoir of Fichte, 2nd ed. p. 10.
[1475] Id. pp. 12, 13, 20, 23, 25, etc.
[1476] Id. pp. 34-35.
[1477] Smith, p. 94.
[1478] Id. p. 34.
[1479] Adamson, Fichte, 1881, p. 32; Smith, as cited, pp. 64-65.
[1480] Letter to Kant, cited by Smith, p. 63.
[1481] Asserted by Stuckenberg, Life of Kant, p. 386.
[1482] Cp. Robins, A Defence of the Faith, 1862, pt. i, pp. 132-33;
Adamson, Fichte, pp. 50-67; W. Smith, Memoir of Fichte, pp. 106-107.
[1483] Adamson, pp. 71, 73.
[1484] Grundzüge des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters, 16te Vorles. ed. 1806,
pp. 509-510.
[1485] Compare the complaints of Hurst, Hist. of Rationalism,
3rd ed. pp. 136-37, and of Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Bohn
ed. p. 72. Fichte's theory, says Coleridge (after praising him as
the destroyer of Spinozism), "degenerated into a crude egoismus,
a boastful and hyperstoic hostility to Nature, as lifeless, godless,
and altogether unholy, while his religion consisted in the assumption
of a mere ordo ordinans, which we were permitted exotericé to call
God." Heine (as last cited, p. 75) insists that Fichte's Idealism is
"more Godless than the crassest Materialism."
[1486] Grundzüge, as cited, p. 502.
[1487] Cp. Seth Pringle-Pattison, as cited, p. 280, note.
[1488] Kurtz, Hist. of the Chr. Church, Eng. tr. 1864, ii, 225. Jahn
was well in advance of his age in his explanation of Joshua's
cosmic miracle as the mistaken literalizing of a flight of poetic
phrase. See the passage in his Introduction to the Book of Joshua,
cited by Rowland Williams, The Hebrew Prophets, ii (1871), 31, note 33.
[1489] R. N. Bain, Gustavus Vasa and his Contemporaries, 1894,
i. 265-68.
[1490] A. Sorel, L'Europe et la révolution française, i (1885), p. 458.
[1491] See articles on Beethoven by Macfarren in Dictionary of
Universal Biography, and by Grove in the Dictionary of Music and
Musicians.
[1492] Grove, art. cited, ed. 1904, i, 224.
[1493] Jonckbloet, Beknopte Geschiedenis der nederl. Letterkunde,
ed. 1880, p. 282.
[1494] Id. pp. 315-16.
[1495] Cp. Trinius, Freydenker-Lexicon, pp. 336-37; Colerus, Vie de
Spinoza, as cited, p. lviii.
[1496] See Texte, Rousseau and the Cosmopolitan Spirit, Eng. tr. p. 29.
[1497] Briefe, 1752, p. 451.
[1498] This is the basis of Pope's reference to "illustrious Passeran"
in his Epilogue to the Satires, 1738, ii, 124. The Rev. J. Bramstone's
satire, The Man of Taste (1733), spells the name "Pasaran," whence
may be inferred the extent of the satirist's knowledge of his topic.
[1499] Reprinted, in French, at London in 1749, in a more complete
and correct edition, published by J. Brindley.
[1500] The copy in the British Museum is dated 1737, and the title-page
describes Passerano as "a Piemontæse exile now in Holland, a Christian
Freethinker." It is presumably a re-issue.
[1501] Warburton in a note on Pope (Epilogue, as cited)
characteristically alleges that Passerano had been banished from
Piedmont "for his impieties, and lived in the utmost misery, yet
feared to practise his own precepts; and at last died a penitent." The
source of these allegations may serve as warrant for disbelieving
them. Warburton, it will be observed, says nothing of an imprisonment
in England.
[1502] London ed. 1749, pp. 24-25.
[1503] Koch, Histor. View of the European Nations, Eng. tr. 3rd
ed. p. 103. Cp. Crichton and Wheaton, Scandinavia, 1837, i, 383-96;
Otté, Scandinavian History, 1874, pp. 222-24; Villiers, Essay on
the Reformation, Eng. tr. 1836, p. 105. But cp. Allen, Histoire de
Danemark, Fr. tr. i, 298-300.
[1504] Otté, pp. 232-36; Crichton-Wheaton, i, 398-400; Geijer,
Hist. of the Swedes, Eng. tr. i, 125.
[1505] Koch, p. 104; Geijer, i, 129.
[1506] Crichton-Wheaton, ii, 322.
[1507] Ludwig Holberg, Baron Holberg, born at Bergen, Norway,
1684. After a youth of poverty and struggle he settled at Copenhagen in
1718, as professor of metaphysics, and attained the chair of eloquence
in 1720. Made Baron by King Frederick V of Denmark at his accession
in 1747. D. 1754.
[1508] Nicolai Klimii Iter Subterraneum novam telluris theoriam
ac historiam quintæ monarchiæ ... exhibens, etc. Dr. Gosse, in
art. Holberg, Encyc. Brit., makes the mistake of calling the book a
poem. It is in Latin prose, with verse passages.
[1509] It was published thrice in Danish, ten times in German, thrice
in Swedish, thrice in Dutch, thrice in English, twice in French,
twice in Russian, and once in Hungarian.
[1510] Cap. vi, De religione gentis Potuanæ.
[1511] Cp. pp. 75-78, ed. 1754.
[1512] Cap. vi, p. 69; cp. cap. viii, De Academia, p. 101.
[1513] Id. p. 77.
[1514] He had visited England in his youth.
[1515] Crichton-Wheaton, ii, 322. On p. 159 a somewhat contrary
statement is made, which obscures the facts. Cp. Schlosser, iv, 13,
as to Christian's martinet methods.
[1516] Geijer, i, 324.
[1517] Id. p. 343; Otté, p. 292.
[1518] Geijer, i, 342. Cp. Ranke, Hist. of the Popes,
Eng. tr. ed. 1908, ii, 399; iii, 345-46.
[1519] Crichton-Wheaton, ii, 88-89, and refs.
[1520] Cp. Ranke, as cited, ii, 407.
[1521] Work cited, pp. 288-89. This writer gives the only intelligible
account of the private execution of Christina's secretary, Monaldeschi,
by her orders. Monaldeschi had either passed over to other hands some
of her letters to him, or kept them so carelessly as to let them be
stolen. Id. p. 11. For her cruel act she shows no trace of religious
or any other remorse. She was, in fact, a neurotic egoist. Cp. Ranke,
ii, 394, 405.
[1522] Bouillier, Hist. de la philos. cartés., i, 449-50.
[1523] Geijer, i, 342.
[1524] See his treatise, Of the Nature and Qualification of Religion
in Reference to Civil Society, Eng. tr. by Crull, 1698.
[1525] Heaven and Hell, 1758, §§ 353, 354, 464.
[1526] Translated as The Divine Providence.
[1527] §§ 235-264.
[1528] Work cited, § 241.
[1529] De cultu et amore Dei, 1745. tr. as The Worship and Love of God,
ed. 1885, p. 18.
[1530] "When he was contradicted he kept silence." Documents concerning
Swedenborg, ed. by Dr. Tafel, 1875-1877, ii, 564.
[1531] Cp. Swedenborg's letter to Beyer, in Documents, as cited,
ii, 279.
[1532] For many years he seldom went to church, being unable to listen
peacefully to the trinitarian doctrine he heard there. Documents,
as cited, ii, 560.
[1533] W. White, Swedenborg: his Life and Writings, ed. 1867, i, 188.
[1534] Schweitzer, Geschichte der skandinavischen Literatur, ii,
175, 225; C.-F. Allen, Histoire de Danemark, Fr. tr. ii, 1900-1901;
R. N. Bain, Gustavus Vasa and his Contemporaries, 1894, i, 226.
[1535] Correspondance de Grimm, ed. 1829-1831, vii, 229.
[1536] Crichton-Wheaton, ii, 206.
[1537] Writing to his mother on his first visit to Paris, he takes
her, ostensibly as a libre esprit, into his confidence, disparaging
Marmontel and Grimm as vain. Joseph II in turn pronounced Gustavus "a
conceited fop, an impudent braggart" (Bain, as cited, i, 266). Both
monarchs set up an impression of want of balance, and the mother of
Gustavus, who forced him to break with her, does the same.
[1538] Bain, as cited, i, 224-31.
[1539] Id. ii, 208-12.
[1540] Id. i, 267-68.
[1541] Cp. Bain, ii, 272, 287, 293-96.
[1542] Crichton-Wheaton, ii, 335.
[1543] Crichton-Wheaton, ii, 322. Cp. pp. 161-63. Schlosser, iv, 15.
[1544] Crichton-Wheaton, ii, 190; Otté, p. 322; C.-F. Allen, as cited,
ii, 194-201; Schlosser, iv, 319 sq.
[1545] Cp. Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters from Sweden, Norway, and
Denmark, 1796, Let. xviii. One of the grounds on which the queen
was charged with unchastity was, that she had established a hospital
for foundlings.
[1546] Trans. from the German, 1774; 2nd ed. 1825. See it also in the
work, Converts from Infidelity, by Andrew Crichton; vols. vi and vii
of Constable's Miscellany, 1827. This singular compilation includes
lives of Boyle, Bunyan, Haller, and others, who were never "infidels."
[1547] Crichton-Wheaton, ii, 190-91.
[1548] Work cited, Letter vii.
[1549] Id. Letter viii, near end.
[1550] Crichton-Wheaton, ii, 324.
[1551] He claimed that the remarks penned by him in an anti-atheistic
work, challenging its argument, represented not unbelief but the demand
for a better proof, which he undertook to produce. See Krasinski,
Sketch of the Religious History of the Slavonic Nations, 1851,
pp. 224-25. It is remarkable that the Pope, Innocent XI, bitterly
censured the execution.
[1552] Fletcher, History of Poland, 1831, p. 141.
[1553] Fletcher, pp. 145-46.
[1554] Hardwick, Church History: Middle Age, 1853, pp. 386-87.
[1555] L. Sichler, Hist. de la litt. Russe, 1887, pp. 88-89,
139. Cp. Rambaud, Hist. de Russie, 2e édit. pp. 249, 259,
etc. (Eng. tr. i, 309, 321, 328).
[1556] R. N. Bain, The First Romanovs, 1905, pp. 136-51; Rambaud,
p. 333 (tr. i, 414-17). The struggle (1654) elicited old forms of
heresy, going back to Manicheism and Gnosticism. In this furious
schism Nikon destroyed irregular ikons or sacred images; and savage
persecutions resulted from his insistence that the faithful should
use three fingers instead of two in crossing themselves. Many resisted
to the death.
[1557] Prince Serge Wolkonsky, Russian History and Literature, 1897,
pp. 98-101.
[1558] Morfill, History of Russia, 1902, p. 14; Bain, p. 201.
[1559] Cp. Wolkonsky, p. 101.
[1560] C. E. Turner, Studies in Russian Literature, 1882, p. 2.
[1561] Id. pp. 16, 17, 25, 26, 40; Sichler, p. 148.
[1562] Sichler, p. 139. Peter's dislike of monks won him the repute of
a freethinker. Morfill, p. 97. He was actually attacked as "Antichrist"
in a printed pamphlet on the score of his innovations. Personally, he
detested religious persecution, and was willing to tolerate anybody but
Jews; but he had to let persecution take place; and even to consent to
removing statues of pagan deities from his palace. Bain, pp. 304-309.
[1563] Cp. Bain, p. 392.
[1564] Turner, p. 22. Kantemir was the friend of Bolingbroke and
Montesquieu in Paris.
[1565] Sichler, p. 147.
[1566] Turner, pp. 40-41.
[1567] See the passages cited by Rambaud, p. 482, from her letter
to Voltaire.
[1568] Seume, Ueber das Leben ... der Kaiserin Catharina II: Werke,
ed. 1839, v, 239-40; Rambaud, pp. 482-84.
[1569] See Bishop Burnet's Letters, iv, ed. Rotterdam, 1686,
pp. 187-91.
[1570] Zeller, Histoire d'Italie, pp. 426-32, 450; Procter, Hist. of
Italy, 2nd ed. pp. 240, 268.
[1571] Burnet, as cited, pp. 195-97.
[1572] Prof. Flint, who insists on the deep piety of Vico, notes
that he "appears to have had strangely little interest in Christian
systematic theology" (Vico, 1884, p. 70).
[1573] Siciliani, Sul Rinnovamento della filosofia positiva in Italia,
1871, pp. 37-41.
[1574] Siciliani, p. 36.
[1575] Introduction (by Mignet?) to the Princess Belgiojoso's tr. La
Science Nouvelle, 1844, p. cxiii. Cp. Flint, Vico, 231.
[1576] Ganganelli, Papst Clemens XIV, seine Briefe und seine Zeit,
vom Verfasser der Römischen Briefe (Von Reumont), 1847, pp. 35-36,
and p. 155, note.
[1577] See the Storia della economia pubblica in Italia of G. Pecchio,
1829, p. 61 sq., as to the claim of Antonio Serra (Breve trattato,
etc. 1613) to be the pioneer of modern political economy. Cp. Hallam,
Lit. of Europe, iii, 164-66. Buckle (1-vol. ed. p. 122, note) has
claimed the title for William Stafford, whose Compendious or briefe
Examination of certain ordinary Complaints (otherwise called A Briefe
Conceipt of English Policy) appeared in 1581. But cp. Ingram (Hist. of
Pol. Econ. 1888, pp. 43-45) as to the prior claims of Bodin.
[1578] Briefe, as before cited, p. 408.
[1579] Correspondence littéraire, ed. 1829-31, vii, 331. Cp. Von
Reumont, Ganganelli, p. 33.
[1580] The Dei delitti e delle pene was translated into 22
languages. Pecchio, p. 144.
[1581] See in the 6th ed. of the Dei delitti (Harlem, 1766) the
appended Risposta ad uno scritto, etc., Parte prima, Accuse d'empietà.
[1582] See his letter to the Abbé Morellet, cited by Mr. Farrer in
ch. i of his ed. of Crimes and Punishments, 1880, p. 5. It describes
the Milanese as deeply sunk in prejudices.
[1583] Pecchio, p. 123.
[1584] Cp. McCulloch, Literature of Political Economy, 1845, p. 64;
Blanqui, Hist. de l'economie politique, 2e édit. ii, 432.
[1585] As to the genuineness of the Ganganelli letters, originally
much disputed, see Von Reumont's Ganganelli, Papst Clemens XIV;
seine Briefe und seine Zeit, 1847, pp. 40-44.
[1586] Lett. lvi, Eng. tr. 1777, i, 141-42. No. lxxii in Von Reumont's
Ganganelli, 1847.
[1587] Lett. xiii, 1749. Eng. tr. i, 44-46; No. cxiv in Von Reumont's
translation.
[1588] Lett. vi and xiv; Nos. ix and xxii in Von Reumont.
[1589] Lett. xxx, p. 83; No. xxxiv in Von Reumont.
[1590] Lett. xci; No. xcii in Von Reumont.
[1591] Lett. cxlvi; No. xiii in Von Reumont.
[1592] Lett. lxxxii, 1753 or 1754; No. lxi in Von Reumont.
[1593] Lett. cxxiv, 1769. This letter is not in Von Reumont's
collection, and appears to be regarded by him as spurious--or unduly
indiscreet.
[1594] Lett. lxxxiii, 1754; No. lxxiii in Von Reumont.
[1595] Corr. Litt. as cited, vii, 104.
[1596] Zeller, p. 473.
[1597] Zeller, pp. 478-79.
[1598] Julien Luchaire, Essai sur l'evolution intellectuelle de
l'Italie de 1815 à 1830, 1906, p. 3.
[1599] Parini wrote a reproving Ode on the subject. (Henri Hauvette,
Littérature Italienne, 1906, p. 371.) He was one of those disillusioned
by the course of the Revolution. (Id. p. 375.)
[1600] Hauvette, pp. 391-93.
[1601] Coxe, Memoirs of the Bourbon Kings of Spain, ed. 1815, iv, 408.
[1602] Villanueva, Vida Literaria, London, 1825.
[1603] Buckle, iii, 547-48 (1-vol. ed. 599-600). The last victim
seems to have been a woman accused of witchcraft. Her nose was cut
off before her execution. See the Marokkanische Briefe, 1785, p. 36;
and Buckle's note 272.
[1604] Letter of D'Alembert to Voltaire, 13 mai, 1773.
[1605] Grimm, Corr. Litt. x, 393.
[1606] Llorente, ii, 534.
[1607] As to which see Buckle, p. 607.
[1608] Llorente, ii, 544.
[1609] Id. ii, 544-47.
[1610] Grimm is evidently in error in his statement (Correspondance,
ed. 1829-31, x, 394) that one of the main grievances against Olavidès
was his having caused to be made a Spanish translation of Raynal's
book, which was never published. No such offence is mentioned by
Llorente. The case of Almodobar had been connected in French rumour
with that of Olavidès.
[1611] Llorente, ii, 532.
[1612] Id. ii, 534-35.
[1613] Id. pp. 547-48.
[1614] Llorente, ii. 549-50.
[1615] Id. ii, 472-73.
[1616] Id. pp. 436-40.
[1617] Id. ii, 440-42. Llorente mentions that Clavijo edited a
journal named The Thinker, "at a time when hardly anyone was to be
found who thought." A Frenchman, Langle having asserted, in his Voyage
d'Espagne, that the Thinker was without merit, the historian comments
that if Langle is right in the assertion, it will be the sole verity
in his book, but that, in view of his errors on all other matters,
it is probable that he is wrong there also.
[1618] Llorente, p. 449.
[1619] Id. ii, 450-51. The book was prohibited, but a printer at
Bayonne reissued it with an additional volume of the tracts written
for and against it.
[1620] Id. ii, 469-72.
[1621] Buckle, p. 618.
[1622] Id. p. 612.
[1623] Id. p. 613.
[1624] Carnota, The Marquis of Pombal, 2nd ed. 1871, p. 242.
[1625] Id. p. 240.
[1626] Id. pp. 261-62.
[1627] Id. p. 262.
[1628] Id. p. 375.
[1629] Cp. P. Godet, Hist. litt. de la suisse française, 1900.
[1630] E. de Budé, Vie de François Turrettini, 1871,
pp. 12-18. B. Turrettini was commissioned to write a history of the
Reformation at Geneva, which however remains in MS. He was further
commissioned in 1621 to go to Holland to obtain financial help for the
city, then seriously menaced by Savoy; and obtained 30,000 florins,
besides smaller sums from Hamburg and Bremen.
[1631] Cp. Budé, as cited, pp. 24 (birth-date wrong), 294; and the
Avis de l'Éditeur to the Traité de la Verité de la Religion Chrétienne
of J. A. Turretin, Paris, 1753.
[1632] Work cited, i, 8, note.
[1633] Lettre à Damilaville, 6 décembre, 1763. The reserved youth may
have been either Jean-Alphonse, grandson of the Socinian professor,
who was born in 1735 and died childless, or some other member of the
numerous Turrettini clan.
[1634] Voltaire to Damilaville, 12 juillet, 1763. "Il faut que vous
sachiez," explains Voltaire "que Jean Jacques n'a été condamné que
parce qu'on n'aime pas sa personne."
[1635] Voltaire to Damilaville, 21 auguste, 1763.
[1636] Cp. i, 2, 16, 56, 58, 65, 68, 70, 71, 73, 94; ii, 290, etc.
[1637] For instance: "Je me recommande contr'eux [les prêtres] à Dieu
le père, car pour le fils, vous savez qu'il a aussi peu de crédit
que sa mère à Genève" (Lettre à D'Alembert, 25 mars, 1758).... "Une
république où tout le monde est ouvertement socinien, exceptés ceux
qui font anabaptistes ou moraves. Figurez-vous, mon cher ami, qu'il
n'y a pas actuellement un chrétien de Genève à Berne; cela fait
frémir!" (To the same, 8 fév. 1776.)
[1638] On this see the correspondence of Voltaire and D'Alembert,
under dates 8, 28, and 29 janvier, 1757.
[1639] Lettre à D'Alembert, 27 août, 1757.
[1640] Lettres sur le Déisme, 1759, p. 6. Cp. pp. 84, 94, 103,
105, 412.
[1641] John Wesley in his Journal, dating May, 1737, speaks of having
everywhere met many more "converts to infidelity" than "converts to
Popery," with apparent reference to Carolina.
[1642] Such is the wording of the passage in the Autobiography in the
Edinburgh edition of 1803, p. 25, which follows the French translation
of the original MS. In the edition of the Autobiography and Letters
in the Minerva Library, edited by Mr. Bettany (1891, p. 11), which
follows Mr. Bigelow's edition of 1879, it runs: "Being then, from
reading Shaftesbury and Collins, become a real doubter in many points
of our religious doctrine...."
[1643] Only in 1784, however, appeared the first anti-Christian work
published in America, Ethan Allen's Reason the only Oracle of Man. As
to its positions see Conway, Life of Paine, ii, 192-93.
[1644] Autobiography, Bettany's ed. pp. 56, 65, 74, 77, etc.
[1645] Letter of March 9, 1790. Id. p. 636.
[1646] Cp. J. T. Morse's Thomas Jefferson, pp. 339-40.
[1647] MS. cited by Dr. Conway, Life of Paine, ii, 310-11.
[1648] Memoirs of Jefferson, 1829, iv, 300-301. The date is 1817. These
and other passages exhibiting Jefferson's deism are cited in Rayner's
Sketches of the Life, etc., of Jefferson, 1832, pp. 513-17.
[1649] Memoirs of Jefferson, iv, 331.
[1650] Dr. Conway, Life of Paine, ii, 310.
[1651] Extract from Jefferson's Journal under date February 1, 1800,
in the Memoirs, iv, 512. Gouverneur Morris, whom Jefferson further
cites as to Washington's unbelief, is not a very good witness; but
the main fact cited is significant.
[1652] Compare the testimony given by the Rev. Dr. Wilson, of Albany,
in 1831, as cited by R. D. Owen in his Discussion on the Authenticity
of the Bible with O. Bacheler (London, ed. 1840, p. 231), with
the replies on the other side (pp. 233-34). Washington's death-bed
attitude was that of a deist. See all the available data for his
supposed orthodoxy in Sparks's Life of Washington, 1852, app. iv.
[1653] So far as is known, Paine was the first writer to use the
expression "the religion of Humanity." See Conway's Life of Paine,
ii, 206. To Paine's influence, too, appears to be due the founding
of the first American Anti-Slavery Society. Id. i, 51-52, 60, 80, etc.
[1654] Cp. Conway's Life of Paine, ii, 205-207.
[1655] A letter of Franklin to someone who had shown him a freethinking
manuscript, advising against its publication (Bettany's ed. p. 620),
has been conjecturally connected with Paine, but was clearly not
addressed to him. Franklin died in 1790, and Paine was out of America
from 1787 onwards. But the letter is in every way inapplicable to
the Age of Reason. The remark: "If men are so wicked with religion,
what would they be without it?" could not be made to a devout deist
like Paine.
[1656] Conway, Life of Paine, ii, 254-55.
[1657] See Dr. Conway's chapter, "The American Inquisition," vol. ii,
ch. xvi; also pp. 361-62, 374, 379. The falsity of the ordinary charges
against Paine's character is finally made clear by Dr. Conway, ch. xix,
and pp. 371, 383, 419, 423. Cp. the author's pamphlet, Thomas Paine: An
Investigation (Bonner). The chronically revived story of his death-bed
remorse for his writings--long ago exposed (Conway, ii, 420)--is
definitively discredited in the latest reiteration. That occurs in
the Life and Letters of Dr. R. H. Thomas (1905), the mother of whose
stepmother was the Mrs. Mary Hinsdale, née Roscoe, on whose testimony
the legend rests. Dr. Thomas, a Quaker of the highest character,
accepted the story without question, but incidentally tells of the
old lady (p. 13) that "her wandering fancies had all the charm of
a present fairy-tale to us." No further proof is needed, after the
previous exposure, of the worthlessness of the testimony in question.
[1658] Conway, ii, 371.
[1659] See the details in Conway's Life, ii, 280-81, and note. He
had also a scheme for a gunpowder motor (id. and i, 240), and various
other remarkable plans.
[1660] Conway, ii, 362-71.
[1661] Testimonies quoted by R. D. Owen, as cited, pp. 231-32.
[1662] Conway, ii, 422.
[1663] Memoir of Sydney Smith, by his daughter, Lady Holland, ed. 1869,
p. 49. Lady Holland remarks on the same page that her father's religion
had in it "nothing intolerant."
[1664] Memoir of Sydney Smith, p. 142.
[1665] Julien Luchaire, Essai sur l'évolution intellectuelle de
l'Italie, 1906, pp. 5-7.
[1666] Dr. Ramage, Nooks and Byeways of Italy, 1868, pp. 76,
105-13. Ramage describes the helplessness of the better minds before
1830.
[1667] Luchaire, pp. 35, 36.
[1668] Id. p. 30.
[1669] Doblado (Blanco White), Letters from Spain, 1822. p. 358.
[1670] Thus the traveller and belletrist J. G. Seume, a zealous
deist and opponent of atheism, and a no less zealous patriot,
penned many fiercely freethinking maxims, as: "Where were the most
so-called positive religions, there was always the least morality";
"Grotius and the Bible are the best supports of despotism"; "Heaven
has lost us the earth"; "The best apostles of despotism and slavery
are the mystics." Apokryphen, 1806-1807, in Sämmtliche Werke, 1839,
iv, 157, 173, 177, 219.
[1671] C. H. Cottrell, Religious Movements of Germany, 1849, p. 12 sq.
[1672] Cp. the author's Evolution of States, pp. 138-39.
[1673] When I thus planned the treatment of the nineteenth century in
the first edition of this book, it was known to me that Mr. Alfred
W. Benn had in hand a work on The History of English Rationalism in
the Nineteenth Century; and the knowledge made me the more resolved
to keep my own record condensed. Duly published in 1906 (Longmans,
2 vols.), Mr. Benn's book amply fulfilled expectations; and to
it I would refer every reader who seeks a fuller survey than the
present. Its freshness of thought and vigour of execution will more
than repay him. Even Mr. Benn's copious work, however--devoting as it
does a large amount of space to a preliminary survey of the eighteenth
century--leaves room for various English monographs on the nineteenth,
to say nothing of the culture history of a dozen other countries.
[1674] Lecky, Hist. of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, ed. 1892,
iii, 382.
[1675] Cp. Conway's Life of Paine, ii, 252-53.
[1676] This translation, issued by "Sherwood, Neely, and Jones,
Paternoster Row, and all booksellers," purports to be "with
additions." The translation, however, has altered d'Holbach's atheism
to deism.
[1677] By W. Huttman. The book is "embellished with a head of Jesus"--a
conventional religious picture. Huttman's opinions may be divined from
the last sentence of his preface, alluding to "the high pretentions
and inflated stile of the lives of Christ which issue periodically
from the English press."
[1678] Cp. Dynamics of Religion, pp. 208-209.
[1679] See Harriet Martineau's History of the Peace, ed. 1877, ii,
87, and Mrs. Carlile Campbell's The Battle of the Press (Bonner,
1899), passim, as to the treatment of those who acted as Carlile's
shopmen. Women were imprisoned as well as men--e.g. Susanna Wright,
as to whom see Wheeler's Dictionary, and last ref. Carlile's wife and
sister were likewise imprisoned with him; and over twenty volunteer
shopmen in all went to jail.
[1680] Hone's most important service to popular culture was his issue
of the Apocryphal New Testament, which, by co-ordinating work of the
same kind, gave a fresh scientific basis to the popular criticism of
the gospel history. As to his famous trial for blasphemy on the score
of his having published certain parodies, political in intention, see
bk. i, ch. x (by Knight) of Harriet Martineau's History of the Peace.
[1681] Holyoake, Sixty Years of an Agitator's Life, i, 109-10. See
p. 111 as to other cases.
[1682] Art. by Holyoake in Dict. of Nat. Biog. Cp. Sixty Years,
per index.
[1683] Articles in Dict. of Nat. Biog.
[1684] Holyoake, Sixty Years, i, 47.
[1685] Kirkup, History of Socialism, 1892, p. 64.
[1686] "From an early age he had lost all belief in the prevailing
forms of religion" (Kirkup, p. 59).
[1687] Reformers of almost all schools, indeed, from the first
regarded Owen with more or less genial incredulity, some criticizing
him acutely without any ill-will. See Podmore's Robert Owen, 1906, i,
238-42. Southey was one of the first to detect his lack of religious
belief. Id. p. 222, n.
[1688] Podmore, i, 246.
[1689] Kirkup, as cited, p. 64.
[1690] Podmore, ii, 640.
[1691] "Extraordinary self-complacency," "autocratic action,"
"arrogance," are among the expressions used of him by his ablest
biographer. (Podmore, ii, 641.) Of him might be said, as of Emerson
by himself, "the children of the Gods do not argue"--the faculty
being absent.
[1692] Pamphlet sold at 1 1/2d., and "to be had of all the
Booksellers."
[1693] Of George Combe's Constitution of Man (1828), a deistic work,
over 50,000 copies were sold in Britain within twelve years, and 10,000
in America. Advt. to 4th ed. 1839. Combe avows that his impulse came
from the phrenologist Spurzheim.
[1694] See the details in his Last Trial by Jury for Atheism in
England.
[1695] The Gospel its Own Witness, 1799. rep. in Bohn's ed. of
The Principal Works and Remains of the Rev. Andrew Fuller, 1852,
pp. 136-37.
[1696] See Prof. Flint's tribute to the reasoning power of Bradlaugh
and Holyoake in his Anti-Theistic Theories, 4th ed. pp. 518-19.
[1697] See Mrs. Bradlaugh Bonner's Charles Bradlaugh, i, 149, 288-89.
[1698] For a full record see Part II of Mrs. Bradlaugh Bonner's
Charles Bradlaugh.
[1699] After Bradlaugh had secured his seat, the noble lord even
sought his acquaintance.
[1700] Though young Conservative members, after 1886, privately
professed sympathy.
[1701] Work cited, p. 524.
[1702] Coquerel, Essai sur l'histoire générale du christianisme,
1828, préf.
[1703] Dr. Christopher Wordsworth, Diary in France, 1845, pp. 75-77.
[1704] "The miserable and deistical principle of the equality of all
religions" (id. p. 188). Cp. pp. 151, 153.
[1705] Id. pp. 15, 37, 45, 181, 185, 190.
[1706] Id. pp. 157-61. As to the general vogue of rationalism in France
at that period, see pp. 35, 204: and compare Saisset, Essais sur la
philosophie et la religion, 1845; The Progress of Religious Thought as
illustrated in the Protestant Church of France, by Dr. J. R. Beard,
1861; and Wilson's article in Essays and Reviews. As to Switzerland
and Holland, see Pearson, Infidelity, its Aspects, etc., 1853,
pp. 560-64, 575-84.
[1707] Louis Philippe sought to suppress this book, of which many
editions had appeared before 1830. See Blanco White's Life, 1845,
ii. 168.
[1708] Prof. E. Lavisse, Un Ministre: Victor Duruy, 1895 (rep. of
art. in Revue de Paris, Janv. 15 and Mars 1, 1895), p. 117.
[1709] Id. pp. 99-105.
[1710] Id. pp. 107-118.
[1711] Id. pp. 118-27.
[1712] Llorente, Hist. crit. de l'Inquisition de l'Espagne, 2e édit,
iv, 153.
[1713] Rapport of Ch. Fulpius in the Almanach de Libre Pensée, 1906.
[1714] Squier, Notes on Central America, 1856, p. 227.
[1715] Before 1840 the popular freethought propaganda had been partly
carried on under cover of Radicalism, as in Carlile's Republican, and
Lion, and in various publications of William Hone. Cp. H. B. Wilson's
article "The National Church," in Essays and Reviews, 9th ed. p. 152.
[1716] Described as "our chief atheistic organ" by the late
F. W. Newman "because Dr. James Martineau declined to continue
writing for it, because it interpolated atheistical articles between
his theistic articles" (Contributions ... to the early history of the
late Cardinal Newman, 1891, p. 103). The review was for a time edited
by J. S. Mill, and for long after him by Dr. John Chapman. It lasted
into the twentieth century, under the editorship of Dr. Chapman's
widow, and kept a free platform to the end.
[1717] Pastor W. Baur, Hamburg, Religious Life in Germany during the
Wars of Independence, Eng. tr. 1872, p. 41. H. J. Rose and Pusey,
in their controversy as to the causes of German rationalism, were
substantially at one on this point of fact. Rose, Letter to the Bishop
of London, 1829, pp. 19, 150, 161.
[1718] Id. p. 481.
[1719] Ueber die Religion: Reden an die gebildeten unter ihren
Verächtern. These are discussed hereinafter.
[1720] Lichtenberger, Hist. of Ger. Theol. in the Nineteenth
Cent. Eng. tr. 1889, pp. 122-23.
[1721] See the same volume, passim.
[1722] Karl von Raumer, Contrib. to the Hist. of the German
Universities, Eng. tr. 1859, p. 79. The intellectual tone of
W. Baur and K. von Raumer certainly protects them from any charge of
"enlightenment."
[1723] Laing, Notes of a Traveller, 1842, p. 181.
[1724] C. H. Cotterill, Relig. Movements of Germany in the Nineteenth
Century, 1849, pp. 39-40.
[1725] Id. pp. 27-28, 41-42.
[1726] Cp. Laing, as cited, pp. 206-207, 211.
[1727] Cotterill, as cited, p. 84.
[1728] Cotterill. as cited, pp. 43-47.
[1729] Rapport de Ida Altmann, in Almanach de Libre Pensée, 1906,
p. 20.
[1730] The principal have been: Das freie Wort and Frankfurter Zeitung,
Frankfort-on-Main; Der Freidenker, Friedrichshagen, near Berlin; Das
freireligiöse Sonntagsblatt, Breslau; Die freie Gemeinde, Magdeburg;
Der Atheist, Nuremberg; Menschentum, Gotha; Vossische Zeitung, Berlin;
Berliner Volkszeitung, Berlin; Vorwärts (Socialist), Berlin; Weser
Zeitung, Bremen; Hartungsche Zeitung, Königsberg; Kölnische Zeitung,
Cologne.
[1731] Studemund, Der moderne Unglaube in den unteren Ständen, 1901,
p. 14.
[1732] Id. p. 22.
[1733] A. D. McLaren, An Australian in Germany, 1911, pp. 181, 184.
[1734] Studemund, Der moderne Unglaube in den unteren Ständen, 1901,
pp. 17, 21.
[1735] Glossen zu Yves Guyot's und Sigismund Lacroix's "Die wahre
Gestalt des Christentums."
[1736] Studemund, p. 22.
[1737] Id. p. 23.
[1738] Id. p. 27.
[1739] Id. pp. 37-38.
[1740] Id. pp. 40-42. Cp. p. 43. Pastor Studemund cites other
inquirers, notably Rade, Gebhardt, Lorenz, and Dietzgen, all to the
same effect.
[1741] E.g. Pastor A. Kalthoff's Was wissen wir von Jesus? 1901. Since
that date the opinion has found new and powerful supporters in Germany.
[1742] "The people in the country do not read; in the towns they read
little. The journals are little circulated. In Russia one never sees
a cabman, an artisan, a labourer reading a newspaper" (Ivan Strannik,
La pensée russe contemporaine, 1903, p. 5).
[1743] Cp. E. Lavigne, Introduction à l'histoire du nihilisme russe,
1880, pp. 149, 161, 224; Arnaudo, Le Nihilisme, French trans. pp. 37,
58, 61, 63, 77, 86, etc.; Tikhomirov, La Russie, p. 290.
[1744] Tikhomirov, La Russie, pp. 325-26, 338-39.
[1745] Cp. Priestley, Essay on the First Principles of Government,
2nd ed. 1771, pp. 257-61, and Conway's Centenary History of South
Place, pp. 63, 77, 80.
[1746] See Rev. Joseph Hunter, An Historical Defence of the Trustees of
Lady Henley's Foundations, 1834; The History, Opinions, and Present
Legal Position of the English Presbyterians (official), 1834; An
Examination and Defence of the Principles of Protestant Dissent,
by the Rev. W. Hamilton Drummond, of Dublin, 1842.
[1747] Conway, Autobiography, 1905, i, 123.
[1748] So Prof. William James, The Will to Believe, etc., 1897, p. 133.
[1749] Conway, Emerson at Home and Abroad, 1883, ch. vii.
[1750] Hagenbach, Kirchengeschichte des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts,
1848, ii, 422. Rationalism seems to have spread soonest in the canton
of Zürich. Id. ii, 427.
[1751] Grote, Seven Letters concerning the Politics of Switzerland,
pp. 34-35. Hagenbach (Kirchengeschichte, ii, 427-28) shows no shame
over the insurrection at Zürich. But cp. Beard, in Voices of the
Church in Reply to Dr. Strauss, 1845, pp. 17-18.
[1752] Cp. the rapport of Ch. Fulpius in the Almanach de Libre
Pensée, 1906.
[1753] G. M. Theal, South Africa ("Story of the Nations" series),
pp. 340, 345. Mr. Theal's view of the mental processes of the Boers
is somewhat à priori, and his explanation seems in part inconsistent
with his own narrative.
[1754] An English acquaintance of my own at Cape Town, who before
the war not only was an orthodox believer, but found his chief weekly
pleasure in attending church, was so astounded by the general attitude
of the clergy on the war that he severed his connection, once for
all. Thousands did the same in England.
[1755] I write on the strength of personal testimonies spontaneously
given to me in South Africa, some of them by clergymen of the Dutch
Reformed Church.
[1756] See the evidence collected in the pamphlet The Churches and
the War, by Alfred Marks. New Age Office, 1905.
[1757] For the survey here reduced to outline I am indebted to two
Swedish friends.
[1758] Cp. Lamon's Life of Lincoln, and J. B. Remsburg's Abraham
Lincoln: Was he a Christian? (New York, 1893.)
[1759] Remsburg, pp. 318-19.
[1760] Personal information.
[1761] Remsburg, p. 324.
[1762] Of these the New York Truthseeker has been the most energetic
and successful.
[1763] White, Warfare, i, 81.
[1764] White, Warfare, i, 84, 86, 314, 317, 318.
[1765] This view is not inconsistent with the fact that popular
forms of credulity are also found specially flourishing in the
West. Cp. Bryce, The American Commonwealth, 3rd ed. ii, 832-33.
[1766] As to the absolute predominance of rationalistic unbelief
(in the orthodox sense of the word) in educated Germany in the first
third of the century, see the Memoirs of F. Perthes, Eng. tr. 2nd
ed. ii, 240-45, 255, 266-75. Despite the various reactions claimed by
Perthes and others, it is clear that the tables have never since been
turned. Cp. Pearson, Infidelity, pp. 554-59, 569-74. Schleiermacher was
charged on his own side with making fatal concessions. Kahnis, Internal
Hist. of German Protestantism, Eng. tr. 1856, pp. 210-11; Robins,
A Defence of the Faith, 1862, i, 181; and Quinet as there cited.
[1767] Aus Schleiermachers Leben: In Briefen, 1860, i, 42, 84. The
father's letters, with their unctuous rhetoric, are a revelation of
the power of declamatory habit to eliminate sincere thought.
[1768] Werke, 1843, i, 140.
[1769] See Kabnis, p. 214, and refs. as to his relations with
Frau Grunow. "He belonged to the circle of Prince Louis, in which
intellect and art, but not morality," reigned. Ib. Compare the
sympathetic Lichtenberger, Hist. of Ger. Theol. in the Nineteenth
Cent. Eng. tr. 1889, pp. 103-104. It was of course his clerical
character that disadvantaged Schleiermacher in such matters.
[1770] Lichtenberger, as cited, p. 87.
[1771] Lichtenberger, as cited, p. 89.
[1772] Id. p. 109.
[1773] Id. pp. 123-24.
[1774] Id. p. 119.
[1775] Id. p. 129.
[1776] Strauss, Die Halben und die Ganzen, 1865, p. 18.
[1777] For estimates of his work cp. Baur, Kirchengeschichte des
19ten Jahrh., p. 45; Kahnis, as last cited; Pfleiderer, Development
of Theology in Germany, 1893, bk. i, ch. iii; bk. ii, ch. ii;
Lichtenberger, as cited; and art. by Rev. F. J. Smith in Theol. Review,
July, 1869.
[1778] Reuss, History of the Canon, Eng. tr. 1890, p. 387. Cp. Strauss,
Einleitung in Das Leben Jesu, § 10.
[1779] See a good account of the development in Strauss's Introductions
to his two Lives of Jesus.
[1780] In a volume entitled Offenbarung und Mythologie.
[1781] Hebräische Mythologie des alten und neuen Testaments.
[1782] Evangeliencommentar, 1800-1804; Leben Jesu, 1828.
[1783] Probabilia de Evangelii et Epistolarum Joannis Apostoli indole
et origine.
[1784] It is thus inaccurate--Strauss himself being the witness--to
say, as does Dr. Conybeare (Hist. of N. T. Crit. p. 107), that
Strauss was the first German writer to discern the unhistoricity of
the Fourth Gospel.
[1785] Das Leben Jesu, pref. to first ed. end.
[1786] Hausrath, David Friedrich Strauss und die Theologie seiner Zeit,
1878, ii, 233-34.
[1787] Pref. to work cited. Eng. tr. 1875, i, 86, 89.
[1788] Lichtenberger, as cited, p. 391.
[1789] Kritik der evang. Gesch. der Synoptiker, ed. 1846, Vorrede,
pp. v-xiii.
[1790] Baur, Kirchengesch. des 19ten Jahrh., pp. 388-89.
[1791] Gesch. der Politik, Kultur, und Aufklärung des 18ten Jahrh. 4
Bde. 1843-45; Gesch. der französ. Revolution, 3 Bde. 1847.
[1792] Russland und das Germanenthum, 1847.
[1793] Lichtenberger, p. 378.
[1794] Philo, Strauss, Renan, und das Urchristenthum, 1874; Christus
und die Cäsaren, 1877.
[1795] Das Christenthum und die chr. Kirche, 1854, p. 34.
[1796] Das Leben Jesu für das deutsche Volk bearbeitet, § 41, 3te
Aufl. p. 254, 1st par.
[1797] Id. ib.
[1798] Cp. Christianity and Mythology, pt. iii, div. ii, § 6.
[1799] Pref. to second Leben Jesu, ed. cited, p. xv.
[1800] Zeller, David Friedrich Strauss, 2te Aufl. p. 113.
[1801] Cheyne, Founders of Old Testament Criticism, 1893,
p. 16. Eichhorn seems to have known Astruc's work only at second-hand,
yet, without him, it might be contended, Astruc's work would have
been completely lost to science. (Id. p. 23.)
[1802] See Dr. Cheyne's surveys, which are those of a liberal
ecclesiastic--a point of view on which he has since notably advanced.
[1803] Cheyne, pp. 187-88.
[1804] Kuenen, The Hexateuch, Eng. tr. introd. pp. xiv-xvii.
[1805] Dr. Beard, in Voices of the Church in Reply to Strauss, 1845,
pp. 16-17.
[1806] Zeller, D. F. Strauss, Eng. tr. 1879, p. 56.
[1807] See Gunkel, Zum religionsgeschichtlichen Verständnis des Neuen
Testaments, 1903, pp. 1-2, note.
[1808] Mythen der alten Perser als Quellen christlicher Glaubenslehren,
1835; Der Mystagog, oder Deutung der Geheimenlehren, Symbole und Feste
der christlichen Kirche, 1838; Rabbinische Quellen und Parallelen
zu neutestamentlichen Schriftstellen, 1839; Biblische Mythologie des
alten und neuen Testaments, 1842; Der Festkalender, 1847, etc.
[1809] Der Mystagog, 1838, p. vii, note, and p. 241.
[1810] See Nork's preamble on Hr. Fr. Daumer, ein kurzweiliger
Molochsfänger, in his Biblische Mythologie, Bd. i.
[1811] After being acquitted in 1880. The first charge was founded
on his Britannica article "Bible"; the second on the article "Hebrew
Language and Literature," which appeared after the acquittal.
[1812] These utterances were noted for their "vigour and independence"
by Kuenen, and also by Dr. Cheyne, who remarks that the earlier
work of Kalisch on Exodus (1855) was somewhat behind the critical
standpoint of contemporary investigators on the Continent. (Founders
of Old Testament Criticism, p. 207.)
[1813] See his Introduction to the Study of the Old Testament,
pref. "It is the spirit of compromise that I chiefly dread for our
younger students," wrote Dr. Cheyne in 1893 (Founders, p. 247). His
courteous criticism of Dr. Driver does not fail to point the moral
in that writer's direction.
[1814] Conrad, The German Universities for the Last Fifty Years,
Eng. tr. 1885, p. 74. See p. 100 as to the financial measures taken;
and p. 105 as to the essentially financial nature of the "reaction."
[1815] Id. p. 103.
[1816] Id. p. 104.
[1817] Id. p. 112. See pp. 118-19 as to Austria.
[1818] Id. pp. 97-98.
[1819] White, Warfare, i, 239. In February, 1914, on a given Sunday,
out of a Protestant population of over two millions, only 35,000
persons attended church in Berlin. Art. on "Creeds, Heresy-Hunting,
and Secession in German Protestantism To-day," in Hibbert Journal
for July, 1914, p. 722.
[1820] See Haeckel's Freedom in Science and Teaching, Eng. tr. with
pref. by Huxley, 1879, pp. xix, xxv, xxvii, 89-90; and Clifford.
[1821] Büchner, for straightforwardly renouncing his connection with
the State Church a generation ago, was blamed by many who held his
philosophic opinions. In our own day, there has arisen a considerable
Austrittsbewegung, or "Withdrawal Movement"; while creedless clerics
strive to remain inside a Church bent on ejecting them. A. D. McLaren,
in Hibbert Journal for July, 1914, art. cited.
[1822] Tracts for the Times, vol. ii, ed. 1839; Records of the Church,
No. xxiv.
[1823] Tracts for the Times, No. 3.
[1824] Id. No. 32.
[1825] Cross's Life, 1-vol. ed. p. 79.
[1826] Account of the Printed Text of the Greek N. T., 1854, pref. and
pp. 47, 112-13, 266.
[1827] A third brother, Charles Robert, became an atheist. This,
as well as his psychic infirmity, insures him sufficiently severe
treatment at the hands of his theistic brother in the introduction
to the latter's Contributions Chiefly to the Early History of the
late Cardinal Newman, 1891.
[1828] Latterly abandoned by the learned author, who before his death
disclosed his name--W. R. Cassels.
[1829] See the testimonies of Pfleiderer, The Development of Theology
since Kant, Eng. tr. 1890, p. 397, and Dr. Samuel Davidson, Introd. to
the Study of the New Testament, pref. to 2nd ed.
[1830] Ptie. i, liv. i, ch. v.
[1831] Id. i, liv. iii, ch. ii.
[1832] It is further to be remembered, however, that Mr. Matthew
Arnold saw fit to defend Chateaubriand, calling him "great," when
his fame was being undone by common sense.
[1833] C. Wordsworth, Diary in France, 1845, pp. 55-56, 124, 204.
[1834] Essais sur la philosophie et la religion, 1845, p. 193.
[1835] Histoire, tom. vii, Renaissance, introd. § 6.
[1836] M. Faguet writes (Études sur le XIXe Siècle, p. 352) that
"Michelet croit à l'âme plus qu'à Dieu, encore que profondément
déiste. Les théories philosophiques modernes lui étaient
pénibles." This may be true, though, hardly any evidence is offered
on the latter head; but when M. Faguet writes, "Est-il chrétien? Je
n'en sais rien ... mais il sympathise avec la pensée chrétienne,"
he seems to ignore the preface to the later editions of the Histoire
de la révolution française. To pronounce Christianity, as Michelet
there does, essentially anti-democratic, and therefore hostile to
the Revolution, was, for him, to condemn it.
[1837] Letter to Sainte-Beuve, cited by Levallois, Sainte-Beuve,
1872, p. 14.
[1838] Lanson, Hist. de la litt. française, p. 951.
[1839] "L'incrédulité de Sainte-Beuve était sincère, radicale,
et absolue. Elle a été invariable et invincible pendant trente
ans. Voilà la vérité" (Jules Levallois, Sainte-Beuve, 1872,
préf. p. xxxiii). M. Levallois, who writes as a theist, was one of
Sainte-Beuve's secretaries. M. Zola, who spoke of the famous critic's
rationalism as "une négation n'osant conclure," admitted later that
it was hardly possible for him to speak more boldly than he did
(Documents Littéraires, 1881, pp. 314, 325-28). And M. Lavisse has
shown (as cited above, p. 406) with what courage he supported Duruy in
the Senate against the attacks of the exasperated clerical party. See
also his letter of 1867 to Louis Viardot in the avant-propos to that
writer's Libre Examen: Apologie d'un Incrédule, 6e édit. 1881, p. 3.
[1840] That Wordsworth was not an orthodox Christian is fairly
certain. Both in talk and in poetry he put forth a pantheistic
doctrine. Cp. Benn, Hist. of Eng. Rationalism, i, 227-29; and
Coleridge's letter of Aug. 8, 1820, in Allsopp's Letters, etc.,
of S. T. Coleridge, 3rd ed. 1864, pp. 56-57.
[1841] Leslie Stephen, George Eliot, p. 27.
[1842] Mr. Benn (Hist. of Eng. Rationalism, i, 226, 309 sq.) has some
interesting discussions on Scott's relation to religion, but does
not take full account of biographical data and of Scott's utterances
outside of his novels. The truth probably is that Scott's brain was
one with "watertight compartments."
[1843] At the age of twenty-five we find him writing to Gifford: "I
am no bigot to infidelity, and did not expect that because I doubted
the immortality of man I should be charged with denying the existence
of God" (letter of June 18, 1813).
[1844] By the Court of Chancery, in 1822, the year in which copyright
was refused to the Lectures of Dr. Lawrence. Harriet Martineau,
History of the Peace, ii, 87.
[1845] W. Sharp, Life of Severn, 1892, pp. 86-87, 90, 117-18.
[1846] On reading Lamb's severe rejoinder, Southey, in distress,
apologized, and Lamb at once relented (Life and Letters of John
Rickman, by Orlo Williams, 1912, p. 225). Hence the curtailment of
Lamb's letter in the ordinary editions of his works.
[1847] William Allingham: A Diary, 1907, p. 253. Cp. p. 268.
[1848] Id. p. 232.
[1849] Allingham, as cited, p. 254.
[1850] Id. p. 211. Carlyle said the same thing to Moncure Conway.
[1851] Cp. Prof. Bain's J. S. Mill, pp. 157, 191; Froude's London
Life of Carlyle, i, 458.
[1852] Bain, p. 128.
[1853] See Brougham's letters in the Correspondence of Macvey Napier,
1879, pp. 333-37. Brougham is deeply indignant, not at the fact, but
at the indiscreet revelation of it--as also at the similar revelation
concerning Pitt (p. 334).
[1854] My Relations with Carlyle, 1903, p. 2.
[1855] Morning Post, March 9, 1849.
[1856] Germany, by Bisset Hawkins, M.D., F.R.S., F.R.C.P., Inspector
of Prisons, late Professor at King's College, etc., 1838, p. 171.
[1857] History, ch. xix. Student's ed. ii, 411.
[1858] Sometimes he gives a clue; and we find Brougham privately
denouncing him for his remark (Essay on Ranke's History of the Popes,
6th par.) that to try "without the help of revelation to prove the
immortality of man" is vain. "It is next thing to preaching atheism,"
shouts Brougham (Letter of October 20, 1840, in Correspondence of
Macvey Napier, p. 333), who at the same time hotly insisted that
Cuvier had made an advance in Natural Theology by proving that there
must have been one divine interposition after the creation of the
world--to create species. (Id. p. 337.)
[1859] In 1830, for instance, we find a Scottish episcopal D.D. writing
that "Infidelity has had its day; it, depend upon it, will never
be revived--NO MAN OF GENIUS WILL EVER WRITE ANOTHER WORD IN ITS
SUPPORT." Morehead, Dialogues on Natural and Revealed Religion, p. 266.
[1860] Cp. the author's Modern Humanists, pp. 189-94.
[1861] Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System (1797),
8th ed. p. 368. Wilberforce points with chagrin to the superiority
of Mohammedan writers in these matters.
[1862] "In point of tendency I should class her books among the most
irreligious I ever read," delineating good characters in every aspect,
"and all this without the remotest allusion to Christianity, the only
true religion." Cited in O. Gregory's Brief Memoir of Robert Hall,
1833, p. 242. The context tells how Miss Edgeworth avowed that she had
not thought religion necessary in books meant for the upper classes.
[1863] Art. "The Faith of Richard Jefferies," by H. S. Salt, in
Westminster Review, August, 1905, rep. as pamphlet by the R. P. A.,
1906.
[1864] The writer of these scurrilities is Mr. Bramwell Booth, War Cry,
May 27, 1905.
[1865] Cp. Mrs. Sutherland Orr's article on "The Religious Opinions of
Robert Browning" in the Contemporary Review, December, 1891, p. 878;
and the present writer's Tennyson and Browning as Teachers, 1903.
[1866] Apropos of his Theatrocrat, which he pronounced "the
most profound and original of English books." Mr. Davidson in a
newspaper article proclaimed himself on socio-political grounds an
anti-Christian. "I take the first resolute step out of Christendom,"
was his claim (Daily Chronicle, December 20, 1905).
[1867] See Talks with Emerson, by C. J. Woodbury, 1890, pp. 93-94.
[1868] It was in his old age that Whitman tended most to "theize"
Nature. In conversation with Dr. Moncure Conway, he once used the
expression that "the spectacle of a mouse is enough to stagger a
sextillion of infidels." Dr. Conway replied: "And the sight of the
cat playing with the mouse is enough to set them on their feet again";
whereat Whitman tolerantly smiled.
[1869] Kahnis, Internal Hist. of Ger. Protestantism, Eng. tr. 1856,
p. 78.
[1870] Geständnisse, end (Werke, ed. 1876, iv, 59).
[1871] Zur Gesch. der Relig. und Philos. in Werke, ed. cited, iii, 80.
[1872] See Ernest Newman's Study of Wagner, 1899, p. 390, note,
as to the vagueness of Wagnerians on the subject.
[1873] Tikhomirov, La Russie, 2e édit. p. 343.
[1874] See Comte de Voguë's Le roman russe, p. 218, as to his
propaganda of atheism.
[1875] Arnaudo, Le Nihilisme et les Nihilistes, French tr. 50.
[1876] Tikhomirov, p. 344.
[1877] "Il [Tourguénief] était libre-penseur, et détestât l'apparat
religieux d'une manière toute particulière." I. Pavlovsky, Souvenirs
sur Tourguénief, 1887, p. 242.
[1878] See the article "Un Précurseur d'Henrik Ibsen, Soeren
Kierkegaard," in the Revue de Paris, July 1, 1901.
[1879] Prof. A. D. White, Hist. of the Warfare of Science with
Theology, 1896, i, 17, 22.
[1880] The phrase is used by a French Protestant pastor. La vérité
chrétienne et la doute moderne (Conférences), 1879, pp. 24-25.
[1881] Antiquities of the Jews, by William Brown, D.D., Edinburgh,
1826, i, 121-22. Brown quotes "from a friend" a demonstration of the
monstrous consequences of a stoppage of the earth's rotation.
[1882] Theopneustia: The Plenary Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures,
Eng. trans. Edinburgh, 1850, pp. 246-49. Gaussen elaborately argues
that if eighteen minutes were allowed for the stoppage of the earth's
rotation, no shock would occur. Finally, however, he argues that there
may have been a mere refraction of the sun's rays--an old theory,
already set forth by Brown.
[1883] Dr. C. R. Edmonds, Introd. to rep. of Leland's View of the
Deistical Writers, Tegg's ed. 1837, p. xxiii.
[1884] The work consists of twelve "Mémoires" or treatises, six of
which were read in 1796-1797 at the Institute. They appeared in book
form in 1802.
[1885] Rapports, Ier Mémoire, § ii, near end. (Éd. 1843,
p. 73.) Cp. Préf. (pp. 46-47).
[1886] Ed. cited, p. 54. Cp. p. 207, note.
[1887] Not published till 1824.
[1888] Ueberweg, ii, 339.
[1889] Cp. Luchaire, as cited, p. 36.
[1890] Lange, Gesch. des Materialismus, ii, 134.
[1891] "Since Cabanis, the referring back of mental functions to
the nervous system has remained dominant in physiology, whatever
individual physiologists may have thought about final causes" (Lange,
ii, 70). Compare the tribute of Cabanis's orthodox editor Cerise
(ed. 1843, Introd. pp. xlii-iii).
[1892] Rapports, IIe Mémoire, near end. (Ed. cited, p. 122.)
[1893] See the already cited introduction of Cerise, who solved the
problem religiously by positing "a force which executes the plans
of God without our knowledge or intervention" (p. xix). He goes on
to lament the pantheism of Dr. Dubois (whose Examen des doctrines de
Cabanis, Gall, et Broussais (1842) was put forward as a vindication
of the "spiritual" principle), and of the German school of physiology
represented by Oken and Burdach.
[1894] Lawrence's Lectures on Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural
History of Man, 8th ed. 1840, pp. 1-3. The aspersion of Abernethy is
typical of the orthodox malignity of the time. Cabanis in his preface
had expressly contended for the all-importance of morals. The orthodox
Dr. Cerise, who edited his book in 1843, while acknowledging the high
character of Cabanis, thought fit to speak of "the materialists" as
"interested in abasing man" (introd. p. xxi). On the score of fear
of demoralization, the champions of "spirit" themselves exhibited
the maximum of baseness.
[1895] Lawrence's Lectures, p. 9, note.
[1896] Id. pp. 168-69.
[1897] Yet Lawrence was created a baronet two months before his
death. So much progress had been made in half a century.
[1898] Work cited, pp. 355 sq., 375 sq. The tone is at times expressive
of a similar attitude towards historical religion--e.g.: "Human
testimony is of so little value ... that it cannot be received with
sufficient caution. To doubt is the beginning of wisdom." Id. p. 269.
[1899] Cp. Whewell, Hist. of the Inductive Sciences, 3rd ed. iii, 505.
[1900] White, as cited, i, 222-23, gives a selection of the language
in general use among theologians on the subject.
[1901] The early policy of the Geological Society of London (1807),
which professed to seek for facts and to disclaim theories as premature
(cp. Whewell, iii, 428; Buckle, iii, 392), was at least as much
socially as scientifically prudential.
[1902] See the excellent monograph of W. M. Mackenzie, Hugh Miller:
A Critical Study, 1905, ch. vi; and cp. Spencer's essay on Illogical
Geology--Essays, vol. i; and Baden Powell's Christianity without
Judaism, 1857, p. 254 sq. Miller's friend Dick, the Thurso naturalist,
being a freethinker, escaped such error. (Mackenzie, pp. 161-64.)
[1903] Cp. the details given by Whewell, iii, 406-408, 411-13,
506-507, as to early theories of a sound order, all of which came to
nothing. Steno, a Dane resident in Italy in the seventeenth century,
had reached non-Scriptural and just views on several points. Cp. White,
Hist. of the Warfare of Science with Theology, i, 215. Leonardo da
Vinci and Frascatorio had reached them still earlier. Above, vol. i,
p. 371.
[1904] Metamorphoses, lib. xv.
[1905] He had just completed a work on the subject at his
death. Cp. Mackenzie, Hugh Miller, as cited, pp. 134-35, 146-47.
[1906] Christianity and Judaism, pp. 256-57.
[1907] See Charles Darwin's Historical Sketch prefixed to the Origin
of Species.
[1908] Meding, as cited by Darwin, 6th ed. i, p. xv. Goethe seems
to have had his general impulse from Kielmeyer, who also taught
Cuvier. Virchow, Göthe als Naturforscher, 1861, Beilage x.
[1909] Memoirs of Newton, i, 131. Cp. More Worlds than One, 1854,
pp. vi, 226.
[1910] See Darwin's Sketch, as cited.
[1911] Letter of March 16, 1845, in Life of Whewell, by Mrs. Stair
Douglas, 2nd ed. 1882, pp. 318-19. If this statement be true as to
Owen, he shuffled badly in his correspondence with the author of the
Vestiges. See the Life of Sir Richard Owen, 1894, i, 251.
[1912] Mackenzie, Hugh Miller, p. 185.
[1913] Foot-Prints of the Creator, end.
[1914] Oxford Essays, 1856, p. 5.
[1915] Hist. of the Inductive Sciences, 3rd ed. iii, 479-83; Life,
as above cited. Whewell is said to have refused to allow a copy of the
Origin of Species to be placed in the Trinity College Library. White,
i, 84.
[1916] White, i, 70 sq.
[1917] Edward Clodd, Thomas Henry Huxley, 1902, pp. 19-20.
[1918] Luthardt, Fundamental Truths of Christianity, Eng. tr. 1865,
p. 74.
[1919] See the many examples cited by White. As late as 1885 the
Scottish clergyman Dr. Lee is quoted as calling the Darwinians
"gospellers of the gutter," and charging on their doctrine "utter
blasphemy against the divine and human character of our incarnate Lord"
(White, i, 83). Carlyle is quoted as calling Darwin "an apostle of
dirt-worship." His admirers appear to regard him as having made amends
by admitting that Darwin was personally charming.
[1920] E.g. the Education, small ed. pp. 41, 155.
[1921] I am informed on good authority that in later life Huxley
changed his views on the subject. He had abundant cause. As early as
1879 he is found complaining (pref. to Eng. tr. of Haeckel's Freedom
in Science and Teaching, p. xvii) of the mass of "falsities at present
foisted upon the young in the name of the Church."
[1922] See a choice collection in the pamphlet What Men of Science
say about God and Religion, by A. E. Proctor; Catholic Truth Society.
[1923] Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, ed. 1888, iii, 179.
[1924] It is doubtful whether C. A. Walckenaer should be so
described. His Essai sur l'histoire de l'espèce humaine (1798) has
real scientific value.
[1925] See the author's Buckle and his Critics, 1895.
[1926] Europe during the Middle Ages, 11th ed. i, 377.
[1927] Cp. his Decline of the Roman Republic, 1864, i, 345-47; and
note on p. 447 of his translation of Plutarch's Brutus, Bohn ed. of
Lives, vol. iv.
[1928] See The Dynamics of Religion, pp. 227-33.
[1929] It is difficult to understand the claim made for Hegel by his
translator, the Rev. E. B. Speirs, that any student of his lectures
on the Philosophy of Religion "will be constrained to admit that in
them we have the true 'sources' of the evolution principle as applied
to the study of religion" (edit. pref. to trans. of work cited, i,
p. viii). To say nothing of Fontenelle and De Brosses, Constant had
laid out the whole subject before Hegel.
[1930] Primitive Culture, i. 2.
[1931] Life and Letters, i, 151.
[1932] Principles of Sociology, 3 vols. 1876-96.
[1933] Cp. Saintes, Hist. crit. du rationalisme en Allemagne, p. 323.
[1934] Id. pp. 322-24.
[1935] As to Hegel's mental development cp. Dr. Beard on "Strauss,
Hegel, and their Opinions," in Voices of the Church in Reply to
Strauss, 1845, pp. 3-4.
[1936] E. Caird, Hegel, 1883, p. 94.
[1937] E.g. Philos. of Religion, introd. Eng. tr. i, 38-40.
[1938] Id. p. 41. Cp. pp. 216-17.
[1939] Id. p. 219.
[1940] Cp. Morell, as cited, and pp. 195-96; and Feuerbach, as
summarized by Baur, Kirchengeschichte des 19ten Jahrh. p. 390.
[1941] Cp. Michelet as cited by Morell, ii, 192-93.
[1942] As to Strauss cp. Beard, as above cited, pp. 21-22, 30; and
Zeller, David Friedrich Strauss, Eng. tr. pp. 35, 47-48, 71-72, etc.
[1943] As to Vatke see Pfleiderer, as cited, p. 252 sq.; Cheyne,
Founders of O. T. Criticism, 1893, p. 135.
[1944] E.g. Dr. Hutchison Stirling. See his trans. of Schwegler's
Handbook of the History of Philosophy, 6th ed. p. 438 sq.
[1945] Baur, last cit. p. 389.
[1946] Geständnisse, Werke, iv, 33. Cp. iii, 110.
[1947] Cp. Hagenbach, pp. 369-72; Farrar, Crit. Hist. of Freethought,
pp. 387-88. On Bauer's critical development and academic career see
Baur, Kirchengesch. des 19ten Jahrh. pp. 386-89.
[1948] Die Selbstzersetzung des Christenthums und die Religion der
Zukunft, 2te Aufl. 1874 trans. in Eng. as The Religion of the Future,
1886.
[1949] See Schopenhauer's dialogues on Religion and Immortality,
and his essay on The Christian System (Eng. tr. by T. B. Samplers),
and Nietzsche's Antichrist. The latter work is discussed by the writer
in Essays in Sociology, vol. ii.
[1950] Prof. Seth Pringle-Pattison, who passes many just criticisms
on their work (Philos. of Relig. in Kant and Hegel, rep. with The
Philosophical Radicals), does not seem to suspect this determination.
[1951] Baur gives a good summary, Kirchengeschichte, pp. 390-94.
[1952] "M. Feuerbach et la nouvelle école hégélienne," in Études
d'histoire religieuse.
[1953] A. Kohut, Ludwig Feuerbach, sein Leben und seine Werke, 1909,
p. 48.
[1954] Die Halben und die Ganzen, p. 50. "Feuerbach a ruiné le système
de Hegel et fondé la positivisme." A. Lévy, La philosophie de Feuerbach
et son influence sur la litt. allemande, 1904, introd. p. xxii.
[1955] E.g. "All knowledge, all conviction, all piety ... is based
on the principle that in the spirit, as such, the consciousness of
God exists immediately with the consciousness of itself." Philos. of
Relig. Eng. tr. introd. i. 42-43.
[1956] Essence of Christianity, Eng. tr. 1854, p. 12.
[1957] Kirchengeschichte des 19ten Jahrhunderts, pp. 393-94.
[1958] Cp. A. Lévy, as cited, ch. iv.
[1959] Id. ch. ii.
[1960] Reden über Religion, ihr Entstehen und Vergehen, an die
Gebildeten unter ihren Verehrern--a parody of the title of the famous
work of Schleiermacher.
[1961] Work cited, p. 119.
[1962] Büchner expressly rejected the term "materialism" because of its
misleading implications or connotations. Cp. in Mrs. Bradlaugh Bonner's
Charles Bradlaugh the discussion in Pt. ii, ch. i, § 3 (by J. M. R.).
[1963] While the cognate works of Carl Vogt and Moleschott have
gone out of print, Büchner's, recast again and again, continues to
be republished.
[1964] Cp. Paul Deschanel, Figures Littéraires, 1889, pp. 130-32,
171-73; Lévy-Bruhl, The Philosophy of Auguste Comte, Eng. tr. 1903,
p. 190; and Ch. Adam, La Philosophie en France, 1894. p. 228.
[1965] Adam, as cited, pp. 227-30.
[1966] In his Mélanges philosophiques (1833), Eng. trans. (incomplete)
by George Ripley, Philos. Essays of Th. Jouffroy, Edinburgh, 1839, ii,
32. Ripley, who was one of the American transcendentalist group and
a member of the Brook Farm Colony, indicates his own semi-rationalism
in his Introductory Note, p. xxv.
[1967] Mélanges philosophiques, trans. as cited, ii, 95.
[1968] Essai, cited, i, 232, 237.
[1969] Id. pp. 241-43.
[1970] Id. p. 221.
[1971] Correspondance, 1858-86, letter of May 26, 1833.
[1972] Letters of August 1 and November 25.
[1973] Cp. Ch. Adam, La Philosophie en France, 1894, p. 105.
[1974] Id. p. 84.
[1975] Littré, Auguste Comte et la philosophie positive, pp. 123,
125-26.
[1976] Article in 1844, rep. in Essais sur la philosophie et la
religion, 1845, p. 1.
[1977] See M. Lévy-Bruhl's Philosophy of Auguste Comte,
Eng. tr. pp. 10-15. M. Lévy-Bruhl really does not attempt to meet
Littre's argument, which he puts aside.
[1978] Cp. Prof. Botta's chapter in Ueberweg's Hist. of Philos. ii,
513-16.
[1979] Veitch's Memoir of Sir William Hamilton, 1869,
p. 54. Cp. Hamilton's own Discussions, 1852, p. 187 (rep. of article
of 1839).
[1980] Veitch, p. 214.
[1981] In his Church of Englandism and its Catechism Examined (1818),
and Not Paul but Jesus (1823), by "Gamaliel Smith."
[1982] Under the pseudonym of Philip Beauchamp. See The Minor Works of
George Grote, edited by Professor Bain, 1873, p. 18; Athenæum, May 31,
1873; J. S. Mill's Autobiography, p. 69; and Three Essays on Religion,
p. 76.
[1983] Cp. Morell, Spec. Philos. of Europe in the Nineteenth Century,
ii, 620; and Life and Corr. of Whately, by E. Jane Whately, abridged
ed. p. 159.
[1984] Articles in the Edinburgh Review (1829-30); and professorial
lectures at Edinburgh (1839-56).
[1985] Cp. Veitch's Memoir, pp. 195-97.
[1986] Bampton Lectures on The Limits of Religious Thought, 4th
ed. pref. p. xxxvi, note. After thus declaring all metaphysics to be
profoundly delusive, Mansel shows at his worst (Philosophy of the
Conditioned, 1866, p. 188) by disparaging Mill as an incompetent
metaphysician.
[1987] Id. p. xxxviii.
[1988] Spencer has avowed in his Autobiography (ii, 75) what might be
surmized by critical readers, that he wrote the First Part of First
Principles in order to guard against the charge of "materialism." This
motive led him to misrepresent "atheism," and there was a touch of
retribution in the general disregard of his disavowal of materialism,
at which he expresses surprise. The broad fact remains that for
prudential reasons he set forth at the very outset of his system a
set of conclusions which could properly be reached only at the end,
if at all.
[1989] As to his fluctuations, which lasted till his death, cp. the
author's New Essays towards a Critical Method, 1897, pp. 144-47,
149-54, 168-69.
[1990] Baur, Die christliche Lehre der Versöhnung, 1838, pp. 54-63,
124-31.
[1991] Benrath, Bernardino Ochino, Eng. tr. pp. 248-87.
[1992] Field's Memoirs of Parr, 1828, ii, 363, 374-79.
[1993] See Pearson's Infidelity, its Aspects, Causes, and Agencies,
1853, p. 215 sq. The position of Maurice and Parr (associated with
other and later names) is there treated as one of the prevailing forms
of "infidelity," and called spiritualism. In Germany the orthodox
made the same dangerous answer to the theistic criticism. See the
Memoirs of F. Perthes, Eng. tr. 2nd. ed. ii, 242-43.
[1994] Ed. cited, pp. 158-59.
[1995] Pearson, as cited, pp. 560-62, 568-79, 584-84.
[1996] Letter in W. L. Courtney's J. S. Mill, 1889, p. 142.
[1997] Cp. Schechter, Studies in Judaism, 1896, pp. 59, 71. Schechter
writes with a marked Judaic prejudice.
[1998] Id. pp. 117-18.
[1999] This title imitates that of the famous More Nebuchim of
Maimonides.
[2000] Zunz, cited by Schechter, p. 79.
[2001] Whence Krochmal is termed the Father of Jewish
Science. Id. p. 81.
[2002] A Life of Mr. Yukichi Fukuzawa, by Asatarô Miyamori, revised
by Prof. E. H. Vickers, Tokyo, 1902, pp. 9-10.
[2003] Pamphlet cited, p. 16.
[2004] A curious example of sporadic freethought occurs in a pamphlet
published towards the end of the eighteenth century. In 1771 a writer
named Motoori began a propaganda in favour of Shintôism with the
publication of a tract entitled Spirit of Straightening. This tract
emphatically asserted the divinity of the Mikado, and elicited a
reply from another writer named Ichikawa, who wrote: "The Japanese
word kami (God) was simply a title of honour; but in consequence of
its having been used to translate the Chinese character shin (shên)
a meaning has come to be attached to it which it did not originally
possess. The ancestors of the Mikados were not Gods, but men, and were
no doubt worthy to be reverenced for their virtues; but their acts were
not miraculous nor supernatural. If the ancestors of living men were
not human beings, they are more likely to have been birds or beasts
than Gods." Art.: "The Revival of Pure Shinto," by Sir E. N. Satow,
in Trans. Asiatic Society of Japan.
[2005] Lafcadio Hearn, Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation, 1904,
p. 313; cp. p. 46.
[2006] Thus the third emperor of the Ming dynasty in China (1425-1435),
referring to the belief in a future life, makes the avowal: "I am fain
to sigh with despair when I see that in our own day men are just as
superstitious as ever" (Prof. E. H. Parker, China and Religion, 1905,
p. 99).
[2007] See Hearn, as cited, passim.
[2008] Cp. Sir F. S. P. Lely, Suggestions for the Better Governing
of India, 1906, p. 59.
[2009] See article on "The Future of Turkey" in the Contemporary
Review, April, 1899, by "A Turkish Official."
[2010] Yet, as early as the date of the Crimean War, it was noted by
an observer that "young Turkey makes profession of atheism." Ubicini,
La Turquie actuelle, 1855, p. 361. Cp. Sir G. Campbell, A Very Recent
View of Turkey, 2nd ed. 1878, p. 65. Vambéry makes somewhat light of
such tendencies (Der Islam im 19ten Jahrhundert, 1875, pp. 185,187);
but admits cases of atheism even among mollahs, as a result of European
culture (p. 101).
[2011] Ubicini (p. 344), with Vambéry and most other observers,
pronounces the Turks the most religious people in Europe.
[2012] H. M. Baird, Modern Greece, New York, 1856, pp. 123-24.
[2013] Id., p. 320.
[2014] Id., p. 339.
[2015] Id., p. 86.
[2016] Id., p. 340.
[2017] Prof. Neocles Karasis, Greeks and Bulgarians in the Nineteenth
and Twentieth Centuries, London, 1907, pp. 15-17, citing a Bulgarian
journal.
[2018] In the Edinburgh Mirror of 1779 (No. 30) Henry Mackenzie speaks
of women freethinkers as a new phenomenon.
[2019] "She bought 2,000 acres in Tennessee, and peopled them with
slave families she purchased and redeemed" (Wheeler, Biog. Dict.).
[2020] See Lord Morley's Life of Gladstone, 1903, ii, 110-11, as to
the embarrassment felt in English official circles at the time of
Garibaldi's visit.
[2021] On the whole case see The Life, Trial, and Death of Francisco
Ferrer, by William Archer: Chapman & Hall, 1911; and The Martyrdom
of Ferrer, by Joseph McCabe: R. P. A., 1910.
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