Note 93 — Chapter XVI · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

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,93 there was little overt atheism,94 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.95 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.96 Even the revived discussion on the immateriality and immortality of the soul—which began with the Grand Essay of Dr. William Coward,97 in 1704, and was taken up, as we have seen, by the non-juror Dodwell98—was conducted on either orthodox or deistic lines. Coward wrote as a professed Christian,99 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.