Note 47 — Chapter XVI · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Deism had been thus made in a manner fashionable47 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)48 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.49 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.”50 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.51 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.