Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World Read online

  Like natural science, philosophy had to be built anew on rock solid foundations. It would have to be transparent, stripped of verbiage, dead wood and ancestor-worship. It must be self-critical, grounded in Nature and squaring with common sense and experience. Only clear thinking, plain words, candour and modesty would end the reign of error. Hopelessly clipped, counterfeited and compromised, the debased intellectual coinage had to be replaced by a sound currency.30

  In the framing of such convictions, the printing press played a key, if double-edged, role. The printed word was praised as the guarantor of plain, stable fact – by contrast, for instance, to the imprecisions, instabilities and exaggerations inherent in handed-down word-of-mouth teachings. In that sense, it complemented the Baconian science of hard, solid facts. But the printed book was readily fetishized, and authors ossified into authorities. The ‘battle of the books’ largely hinged upon the ambiguities of books as the repositories of truth.31

  The emancipatory bid central to the identity of enlightening élites was symbolically presided over by three intrepid intellectuals of earlier generations.32 One was Descartes, who in his Discourse on Method (1637) coolly announced his Copernican revolution in thinking, notably the commitment to universal doubt and to clear and distinct reasoning derived from first principles: ‘I think, therefore I am.’ Though the senses were irreparably deceptive, reason was capable of establishing truth, and, almost to justify his confidence, his Geometry (1637) trail-blazed co-ordinate geometry and algebra, and his Principles of Philosophy (1644) set out a mechanical philosophy in which God directed a mechanical universe sustained by ‘cause and effect’ contact action and propelled through a swirl of vortices (tour-billons).

  With its promise of a renovation of thinking on a rationalist footing – cogito ergo sum – Descartes’ philosophy enjoyed a vogue in England around the Restoration, being taken up by, among others, Cambridge Platonists like Henry More. By validating the immaterial soul, Descartes particularly appealed to anti-Calvinists keen to reinstate the dignity of homo rationalis. But its a priorism never convinced.33 The Frenchman's clockwork universe could easily be dismissed as crypto-atheistic;34 moreover, his denial of consciousness to any creatures except humans struck many English writers as both implausible (did not animals have sense organs?) and heartless, flying in the face of Divine Benevolence. And the physiological basis of Cartesian dualism – body and soul fundamentally distinct and joined only via the obscure isthmus of the pineal gland deep in the brain – seemed makeshift. Gland jokes ran and ran.35

  Not least, advances in natural philosophy subverted Descartes’ physics, especially his vortices and plenum, and the mechanics of billiard-ball contact action. Since English scientists led the field in discrediting these views – notably via Newton's void space gravitational astrophysics and Boyle's airpump demonstrations of the vacuum – Descartes’ star waned rapidly in Britain: a Frenchman would leave the world full on quitting Paris, quipped Voltaire, but find it a vacuum on arriving in London.36

  Happily Descartes' reputation could be played off against that of native English thinkers, in particular Francis Bacon, apotheosized in the Enlightenment.37 The philosophical Lord Chancellor's programme for the reform and revitalization of natural philosophy was first outlined in his Advancement of Learning (1605), where, to hold at bay churchmen hostile to prying into God's secrets, science was diplomatically demarcated from theology, thereby validating unfettered investigation.

  Bacon opened his reformation of knowledge by rejecting blind worship of authorities like Aristotle: bad science buried itself in musty books instead of first-hand observation of the Book of Nature. Repudiating syllogisms, which toyed with terms while ignoring physical reality, he unfolded a new logic. Inquiry should start with faithful records of natural phenomena, proceeding to derive from them ‘aphorisms’ (system-free inferences); it would then gather these up into generalizations, and use ‘negative instances’ to falsify faulty ones.

  While science had to start with the senses, Bacon warned of the distortions, both individual and social, inherent in perception, defining the four ‘idols’ (or illusions) which warped sense experience: those of the cave, herd, theatre and market place. (Philosophical anti-idolatry of this kind clearly mirrored its Protestant twin.) These hazards could be overcome through a controlled ascent from fact to theory, then moving on to the acid test of practice, in the generation of discoveries and inventions beneficial to mankind. Science should be a collective enterprise, best organized in research groups (‘Solomon's Temple’), and its cumulative findings would pilot progress, mental and material alike.

  Synthesized in the Instauratio Magna (1620), Bacon's thinking was to prove immensely influential. His reformist blueprints were taken up first in the Civil War era and then by the Royal Society in the 1660s, which acknowledged the ‘father of experimental philosophy’ as its inspiration. Voltaire eulogized the man d'Alembert was to hail as ‘the greatest, the most universal, and the most eloquent of philosophers’, underwriting as he did so much of the enlightened agenda: the assault on bibliolatry; the iconoclastic rejection of tradition, speculation and a priori systems; the grounding of inquiry in observation; and experiment and the conviction that science must serve mankind. Indeed, the Baconian mapping of knowledge via the three fundamental faculties of the mind – memory, reason and imagination – was embraced in the ‘Preliminary Discourse’ to the Encyclopédie. With his adoption as the Royal Society's mascot, enlightened Britain gained a big-name philosopher of her own – and one who was Lord Chancellor to boot.

  The third modern philosopher definitive of enlightened self-understanding was the most problematic – yet also propitious. It is not surprising that Thomas Hobbes was bent on politico-philosophical cleansing, since he had been driven into exile in the Civil War, whose horrors pervaded his mature thinking.38 In Leviathan (1650) and other writings, root and branch reform of language and logic were deemed indispensable to future peace and order, and he himself proposed a severe philosophical purge through a radical nominalism and materialism targeted against spurious scholastic terms: ‘For True and False are attributes of Speech, not of Things.’39 Woolly thinking and false dogmatism spelt chaos: ‘For words are wise mens counters, they do but reckon by them; but they are the mony of fooles.’40 Words must never be allowed to take on a life of their own; entities must not unnecessarily be multiplied and all fictions must be banished – directives whose drastic implications included Hobbes's denial of the immaterial as utter nonsense: ‘The universe… is corporeall, that is to say, body… and that which is not Body, is no part of the Universe.’41 And that was that. The implications were momentous: no spirit, no lords spiritual.

  It was with this nominalist, materialist and monist pencil that Hobbes redrew human nature. Man was a machine, mere matter in motion; thoughts and feelings were stirrings in the sense organs induced by external pressures and producing in turn those brain waves called ideas; imagination was the consciousness of ideas which persisted in the mind after the original stimuli had died away, and memory was their recollection. All such activities went on independently of speech and hence (pace Descartes) were common to animals as well as humans.

  Men and beasts were also of a piece in possessing ‘passions’, disturbances in the internal organs matching images in the brain, incessantly reactivated by external stimuli. What counted emotionally was not only the satisfaction of present desires but the assurance that future needs would also be gratified. Hence felicity could have no finis ultimus, being rather ‘a continuall progresse of the desire, from one object to another’.42 It did, however, have an absolute negation, and that was death. Hedges against violent death, including ruthless self-defence, were therefore essential. No man being an island, a ‘perpetual contention for honour, riches, and authority’ resulted, entailing the notorious nightmare of a state of Nature in which the life of man was ‘solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short’.43 While the Hobbesian view of life as ‘a perpetuall an
d restlesse desire of power after power, that ceaseth onely in Death’ was thus dismal – a kind of secular Calvinism – his philosophical determinism was offered as providing the first principles for a salutary politics of absolutism and obedience, and hence a recipe for order.44

  For Restoration wits, Hobbism might also rationalize a black comedy of egoistic power play – the ‘Malmesbury monster’, or English Machiavelli, could serve as an alluring mentor for rakes like Rochester who endorsed his kneejerk anti-clericalism. Critics, however, were appalled by his corrosive denial of normative natural law and the Christian Deity as traditionally understood.45 Effectively dethroning, or at least defaming, God, Hobbes's mordant materialism seemed aimed not only at ‘vain philosophy, and fabulous traditions’ – like angels, demons and other ‘abstract essences’ bred by fevered imaginations – but against Christianity as such.46 Hobbists became targets: in 1668, one Daniel Scargill, a fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, was expelled from the university for having ‘asserted several Impious and Atheistical Tenets to the great dishonour of God’, while in 1683 Oxford consigned Leviathan to the flames, together with his De Cive (1642).47

  For all his own disclaimers, Hobbes thus became execrated as tantamount to an atheist. That is what made him so useful to enlightened philosophers. So long as they piously disowned him, they could also quietly incorporate many aspects of his conceptual rubbish-cleansing: tactical Hobbes-bashing allowed them to pass as more correct than they actually were.

  This enlightened cleansing of ‘the Rubbish of the Schools’, was brought to a rousing climax by David Hume:

  When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance, let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matters of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames; for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.48

  The way forward lay not in ‘school metaphysics’ but intellectual humility: debunking infallible oracles, laying sound foundations in facts and figures and creating a culture of criticism. If there were strict limits to human knowledge, no matter, since God had surely given men powers sufficient to discharge their earthly offices. Herein lay the enormous appeal of Locke's image of the philosopher as ‘an Under-Labourer in clearing Ground a little, and removing some of the Rubbish, that lies in the way to Knowledge’, so as to beat a path for the true ‘master-builders’ – that is, such scientists as Robert Boyle, Thomas Sydenham and Isaac Newton, who were actually raising the temple of truth.49

  Far and away the key philosopher in this modern mould, however, was John Locke. From the 1670s, as we have seen, he became politically radicalized, thereafter playing a decisive part in political debate, economic policy, currency reform, and in promoting religious toleration. His Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690) was his masterwork, presenting a persuasive vision of the new man for the new times, grounded upon an analysis of the workings of the mind in the making of true knowledge.50

  In stark contrast to Descartes, Hobbes and the other rationalists, Locke's truth claims were models of modesty. To the Galileo-idolizing Hobbes, reason could range omnipotent; for Locke, any straying from the empirical straight and narrow led into mental minefields. While Hobbes proposed proofs modo geometrico, Locke saw no scope for Euclidian certainty. Man was a limited being, and reason just sufficient for human purposes.51 His anti-a priorism and his distrust of pure reason were backed by the relativistic anthropological evidence adduced in his Essay, which documented the stunning diversity of beliefs and customs worldwide, from the atheists of Soldania Bay in southern Africa to the Mingrelians, a people professing Christianity who nevertheless buried their children alive, and others who devoured their own infants.52 Such confirmation of the boundless variety of human beliefs and customs underpinned Locke's extreme mistrust of alleged innate cognitive and ethical truths, and the systems of certainty built on them. Yet full-blown scepticism was not in order: knowledge was achievable as a construct out of the interplay of mind and nature.

  Language itself was a mare's nest. ‘All the Art of Rhetorick,’ Locke growled, ‘is for nothing else but to insinuate wrong Ideas, move the Passions, and thereby mislead the Judgement.’53 Harping on man's capacity for deception and delusion, he highlighted ‘the several wilful faults and neglects which men are guilty of in this way of communication.’54 Linguistic abuse took many forms: new words were coined unanchored to clear ideas, old ones got garbled, Humpty-Dumpty fashion. Philosophers actually basked in obscurity, ‘by either applying old words to new and unusual significations, or introducing new and ambiguous terms without defining either; or else putting them so together as may confound their ordinary meaning’ – this last, Locke drily observed, passed under the ‘esteemed names of subtlety and acuteness’.55 ‘Names without ideas’ were but ‘empty sounds’, while ‘he that applies his names to ideas different from their common use… speaks gibberish’.56 Lockeans prided themselves on plain speaking.

  Just as ideas were not innate, words themselves were not God-given: no more than absolute political power had indefeasible verbal authority been bestowed upon Adam, wrote the refuter of Sir Robert Filmer's patriarchalist political theorizings (see chapter 8). Speech, rather, was consensual, and the relations between signified and signifier were essentially conventional. Language was at bottom pragmatic and functional, best when tailored for ‘ease and dispatch’.57 It needed to be properly policed.

  The intellectual garden was thus choked with weeds. To root them out, Locke laid down certain fundamental ground rules for tackling such basic questions as: what do I know? – and how do I know it? To begin with, it was essential to distinguish ‘assent’ from ‘knowledge’. Assent (or ‘faith’) was owed to the testimony of whoever revealed God's word. Before assent could be given, however, there must be certainty that it really was revelation; this required not blind trust but judgement.58 ‘How a rational Man,’ Locke assured a supporter, ‘that should enquire and know for himself, can content himself with a Faith or Religion taken upon trust… is to me astonishing.’59

  Locke had no truck with the fideist line that reason and faith were at odds, for the latter was properly ‘nothing but a firm assent of the mind: which… cannot be accorded to anything but upon good reason’. Gullibility was not piety. To accept a book, for instance, as revelation without checking out the author was gross superstition – how could it honour God to suppose that faith overrode reason, for was not reason no less God-given?60

  In a typically enlightened move, Locke restricted the kinds of truths which God might reveal: revelation could not be admitted contrary to reason, and ‘faith can never convince us of anything that contradicts our knowledge’. Yet there remained matters on which hard facts were unobtainable, as, for instance, Heaven or the resurrection of the dead: ‘being beyond the discovery of reason’, such issues were ‘purely matters for faith’.61

  In short, Locke raised no objections to revealed truth as such, but whether something ‘be a divine revelation or no, reason must judge’ – it was the constant court of appeal. The credo, quia impossibile est of the early Church fathers might seem the acme of devotion, but it ‘would prove a very ill rule for men to choose their opinions or religion by’. Unless false prophets were strenuously avoided, the mind would fall prey to ‘enthusiasm’, that eruption of the ‘ungrounded fancies of a man's own brain’. Doubtless, God might speak directly to holy men, but Locke feared the exploitation of popular credulity, and urged extreme caution.62

  These directives of Locke on faith and reason, set out in his Essay (1690) and then in The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), proved enormously influential in staking out an enlightened epistemology which made reason a citadel against superstition and enthusiasm. His distinctive Christian beliefs will be examined further in chapter 5.

  By contrast to the ‘assen
t’ of faith, natural ‘knowledge’ was derived from the senses – though these, Locke always warned, ‘reach but a very little way’.63 Whereas revelation gave grounds for certainty, ‘knowledge’ garnered from sense experience stopped at probability. Here Locke shared Bacon's impatience with scholastic syllogisms, which chopped logic ‘without making any addition to it’.64 Empirical knowledge, by contrast, traded in honest matters of fact and, though limited, could be cumulative and progressive.

  Knowledge – as distinct from faith and sham syllogizing – was of two kinds. One was intuitive. This, the more certain but restricted in scope, consisted of truths requiring no proof: for instance, a semicircle is less than a whole circle.65 The other type (‘demonstration’) arose from the acquisition and assimilation of sense data, and would generate ‘probable’ knowledge. While inevitably lacking the certitude of revelation or intuition, this formed the main stock of truth available to mortals. Locke agreed with Sydenham, Boyle, Newton and their peers in stressing the limits of man's powers, but that was no insuperable problem: ‘our business here is not to know all things, but those which concern our conduct’.66

  Turning to the actual operations of the understanding, Locke denied Descartes’ innate ideas.67 The mind of a newborn infant was like an ‘empty cabinet’, a tabula rasa, or a piece of ‘white Paper’,68 and knowledge was acquired only by experience, that is to say, through the five senses:

  Methinks the Understanding is not much unlike a Closet wholly shut from light, with only some little openings left, to let in external visible Resemblances, or Ideas of things without: would the pictures coming into a dark room but stay there, and lie so orderly as to be found upon occasion, it would very much resemble the understanding of a man.69