Chapter XIV · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

§ 1

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.

§ 2

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.

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.

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” (Œuvres mélées: t. viii of Œuvres, 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.

Dr Sherlock was not going to do good if the devil bade him.

“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.

§ 3

[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).

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).

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).

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.

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.