Note 123 — Chapter XVI · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

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.”123 “Scotland contributed her Maclaurin, but England no European name.”124 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.”125 “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”;126 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.127 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.