Note 189 — Chapter XVI · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

To carry intellectual progress much further there was needed a general movement of scientific study and a reform in education. The translation of La Mettrie’s Man a Machine (1749)189 found a public no better prepared for the problems he raised than that addressed by Strutt eighteen years before; and the reply of Luzac, Man More than a Machine, in the preface to which the translator (1752) declared that “irreligion and infidelity overspread the land,” probably satisfied what appetite there was for such a discussion. There had begun a change in the prevailing mental life, a diversion of interest from ideas as such to political and mercantile interests. The middle and latter part of the eighteenth century is the period of the rise of (1) the new machine industries, and (2) the new imperialistic policy of Chatham.190 Both alike withdrew men from problems of mere belief, whether theological or scientific.191 That the reaction was not one of mere fatigue over deism we have already seen. It was a general diversion of energy, analogous to what had previously taken place in France in the reign of Louis XIV. As the poet Gray, himself orthodox, put the case in 1754, “the mode of freethinking has given place to the mode of not thinking at all.”192 In Hume’s opinion the general pitch of national intelligence south of the Tweed was lowered.193 This state of things of course was favourable to religious revival; but what took place was rather a new growth of emotional pietism in the new industrial masses (the population being now on a rapid increase), under the ministry of the Wesleys and Whitefield, and a further growth of similar religion in the new provincial middle-class that grew up on the industrial basis. The universities all the while were at the lowest ebb of culture, but officially rabid against philosophic freethinking.194