The Enlightenment: An Interpretation - Volume II: The Science of Freedom

On this point, as so often, Hume was both modest and right. What had passed for the science of man in earlier centuries was interesting and often penetrating speculation—philosophical reflection on the passions, orderly classification of temperaments, urbane aphoristic wisdom about human conduct, or candid autobiography: Rousseau and Lichtenberg were the eighteenth-century heirs of a long tradition. But the age of the Enlightenment made the study of man into a science. Before Locke, wrote Voltaire, “great philosophers had positively”—that is to say, boldly and wrongly—“determined the nature of the soul”; they had written its “romance”—le roman de l’âme. But then Locke, a true sage, “had modestly written its history.”² The philosophes intended to do no more than occupy the territory that Locke had discovered.

In repudiating Christianity, the philosophes gave the question of human nature new poignancy. Christians, to be sure, had not wholly agreed among themselves. There had been Christian optimists and pessimists, Christian rationalists and irrationalists, but the broad outlines of their view of man had been authoritatively laid down by the opening myth in Genesis: man’s place, lower than the angels, higher than the beasts, had been determined by the great hierarchy of being established, and governed, by God, but man’s godlike reason had been dimmed and his character degraded by his sin of disobedience. But if, as the philosophes asserted, the myths of God’s fatherhood and man’s fall from grace were so much nonsense, man’s true nature and place in nature became truly problematic; if the old answers would not do, the old questions must become more insistent than ever.

It was in this spirit that the philosophes inquired into human nature, and asked whether it was uniform through time and space, the same in ancient and modern man. For all their loose terminology, all their inclination for burdening their conjectures with fantastic travelers’ reports, the philosophes on the whole thought that there was such a nature, and that, although individual character and differences in environment produced wide, often astounding variations, nature had built a certain uniformity into man’s basic patterns of growth and behavior. Even extreme environmentalists like Helvétius, who thought that education could make man into almost anything, saw all men as endowed with the same bundle of potentialities. “It is universally acknowledged,” David Hume wrote in a famous passage, “that there is a great uniformity among the actions of men, in all nations and ages, and that human nature remains still the same, in its principles and operations. The same motives always produce the same actions.” The passions of “ambition, avarice, self-love, vanity, friendship, generosity, public spirit,” mixed “in various degrees, and distributed through society, have been, from the beginning of the world, and still are, the source of all the actions and enterprizes, which have ever been observed among mankind.” Indeed, “Mankind are so much the same, in all times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular.”⁵ At the same time, Hume wondered at the display of human variety: “Mighty revolutions have happened in human affairs,” he noted, and “those, who consider the periods and revolutions of human kind, as represented in history, are entertained with a spectacle full of pleasure and variety, and see, with surprize, the manners, customs, and opinions of the same species susceptible of such prodigious changes in different periods of time.”⁶ The other philosophes sounded much like Hume: the uniformity of human nature permitted some sound philosophizing about man, and even some well-founded predictions, but it was not so rigid as to induce boredom in the observer or the student.⁷

This conception of human nature was vague enough to leave adequate room for dispute. The Scottish school argued that man is equipped with an instinct of generosity or sociability, the Utilitarians rejoined that man is by nature self-regarding; similarly, the philosophes never reached full agreement on the power—even if there was near-unanimity on their high estimation—of the passions.⁸ And behind their debates there stood the fundamental question of the value the philosopher should place on man’s nature: Diderot epitomized the question in the title of his enigmatic play, Est-il bon? Est-il méchant? He was analyzing a single individual, the antihero of his play who is transparently Diderot himself, but this analysis barely conceals Diderot’s unsettled, and unsettling, question about the nature of man in general. “The heart of man,” Diderot said elsewhere, sententiously but seriously, “is by turns a sanctuary and a sewer.”⁹

This epigram was conventional eighteenth-century moralizing, striking only in its choice of metaphors, but it confirms the impression that the philosophes’ paganism in no way committed them to optimism about man’s nature. The very issues of the debate were far from clear; one man’s vice was another man’s virtue. The Utilitarians were in general men of hope, but Helvétius thought man often lower, more ferocious than beasts, while Bentham, a patient realist, conceded that man was more a pugnacious than a rational animal. Helvétius’s notorious faith in the omnipotence of education is a reflection not of optimism about human nature, but of stark pessimism about his starting point. The cool realism of the Federalist was a characteristic Enlightenment attitude; Holbach’s extravagant cynicism about human nature was far more prevalent than Diderot’s warmhearted, if intermittent, confidence.¹⁰ Doubtless, a number of philosophes were perfectly ready to accept, and even to celebrate, man’s inborn egotism, but they looked to some countervailing power, either restraining institutions or sociable feelings, to keep this egotism within the bounds of innocence and productivity. “It seems that nature has given us l’amour propre for our preservation,” Voltaire noted, “and la bienveillance for the preservation of others, and, perhaps, that without these two principles (of which the first should be the stronger) there could have been no society.”¹¹ The philosophes were certain that man is born innocent—“No, dear friend,” Diderot exclaimed to Sophie Volland, “nature has not made us evil; it is bad education, bad models, bad legislation that corrupt us”¹²—but they were inclined to dwell on his capacity for evil. Even Rousseau, who shocked and delighted thousands of readers with his reiterated claims for man’s essential goodness, regarded that goodness as a mere collection of possibilities, an absence of original corruption, and a mere hope—a rather slim hope—that in the right circumstances, with the right education and the right society, man might become a decent citizen.

This rebellious pagan spirit dominates the philosophes’ proud declarations of man’s dignity. Even Christian pessimists, of course, had asserted that dignity: if man was now corrupt, he was still the son of God, and it was a matter of great moment that Christ, God’s only begotten son, should have come to earth to rescue man from himself. If, to Pascal, man was mired in his sin, he was also a fallen king—fallen, but with the memory of his former high estate alive in him. But the philosophes, including those philosophes who punctuated their writings with despairing witticisms on man’s stupidity and cruelty, found Christian assertions of human dignity to be worthless cant—insignificant concessions that did nothing to correct the Christian hatred of this world and of nature and the Christian doctrine of man’s abjectness and servility. The language the philosophes used was often the language that pious men had used before them, but in their writings the words had new meaning. When Kant asserts that it is man’s chief task to discover his proper place, his “distinctive station,” in the universe, and resist all temptations to rise above or sink below his true level, he was expressing that mixture of secular confidence and philosophical modesty characteristic of the Enlightenment rather than arguing, in traditional Christian fashion, that man was lower than the angels and higher than the beasts.¹⁴ The evils man is inclined to commit only man is capable of preventing or curing. “One should say to every individual,” wrote Voltaire, denying that man is born evil, in a curt and radical injunction: “ ‘Remember your dignity as a man.’ ”¹⁵

Both Christians and philosophes recognized that the Enlightenment’s anthropology was revolutionary. When in his Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft, Kant asserted man’s “natural propensity” to wickedness, Goethe, fearful that his favorite philosopher had relapsed into the old faith, was deeply offended: Kant, he wrote, had “slobbered” on his “philosopher’s robe” and left on it “the shameful stain of radical evil,” seeking thus to lure Christians “to kiss its hem.”¹⁶ It was an interpretation as intemperate as it is doubtful, but it shows, with its very vehemence, how precious the Enlightenment’s denial of original sin was to a perceptive contemporary.

Thirty years before Goethe’s outburst, an equally perceptive observer had drawn just as drastic a conclusion, only from the other camp. When Christophe de Beaumont, archbishop of Paris, or—as is more likely—an intelligent cleric in his office, wrote a Pastoral Letter against Rousseau’s Émile for its impiety, he recognized the core of that impiety to be Rousseau’s denial of original sin, and Rousseau’s own sin to be the old pagan sin of pride. “No understanding or reconciliation,” Ernst Cassirer has written, was possible here: “In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the dogma of original sin stood in the center and focus of Catholic and Protestant theology. All great religious movements of the time were oriented toward and gathered up in this dogma. The struggles over Jansenism in France; the battles between Gomarists and Arminians in Holland; the development of Puritanism in England and of Pietism in Germany—they all stood under this sign. And now this fundamental conviction concerning the radical evil in human nature was to find in Rousseau a dangerous and uncompromising adversary. The Church fully understood this situation: it stressed, at once, the decisive issue with full clarity and firmness.”¹⁷ And it stressed the issue, one might add, with a wit that might have been learned from Voltaire; the author of the Mandement belabored Rousseau with a series of energetic antitheses—“From the heart of error there has arisen a man filled with the language of philosophy without being truly a philosopher; his mind endowed with a mass of knowledge which has not enlightened him, and which has spread darkness in the minds of others; his character given over to paradoxical opinions and conduct, joining simplicity of manners with ostentatious displays of ideas, zeal for ancient maxims with a rage for innovation, the obscurity of seclusion with the desire for notoriety: we have seen him thunder against the sciences he was cultivating, crying up the excellence of the Gospels whose dogmas he was destroying, paint the beauty of virtues he was obliterating in the souls of his readers. He has made himself the preceptor of the human race only to deceive it, the mentor of the public only to mislead everyone, the oracle of the century only to secure its ruination”—invective designed to discredit once and for all a pagan who dared to preach man’s original innocence. Significantly, the Mandement against Rousseau takes as its text a Pauline epistle warning against “perilous times” in which there would be men who loved themselves, who were haughty, boastful, blasphemous, impious, bloated with pride, lovers of pleasure rather than of God; men corrupt in spirit and perverted in faith—a catalogue of failings in which the sin of pride predominates. Indeed, Rousseau, the Mandement insists, speaks for a party of unbelief that thinks itself empowered to “throw off a yoke which, it argues, dishonors mankind and God himself,” the yoke—once again—of original sin; does not this party hold that “the first movements of nature are always good,” that “there is no original perversity in the human heart”? This view, and the plan of education built upon it, the Mandement reasons, and reasons justly, are “far from being in accord with Christianity.” They are, rather, evidence of the spirit of “rebellion” and, significantly, of “independence,” the spirit of “audacious men” who refuse to subject themselves to the authority of God and of men alike. Rousseau, the Mandement complains, appeals to the words that God has written in the hearts of men, but he misreads them: they are not incitements to rebellion and autonomy, but to submission. “Ah! My very dear brethren, be not thrown off the track on this matter. True faith—la bonne foi—is worthy only when it is enlightened and docile.” Christianity is indeed the religion of reason, but that reason leads man to the door of revelation, to humble acceptance of the mystery of his faith and acknowledgment of his evil heart, to an understanding of the “weakness and corruption of our nature,” and the history of the “lamentable fall of our first fathers.”¹⁸

These strictures, for all their hysterical tone and conventional rhetoric, are not empty formulas; they are a recognition of an unappeasable conflict, perhaps more palpable here, in the struggle over man’s nature, than anywhere else. Whatever the Christians thought of man—capable or incapable of participating in his salvation, likely to be doomed or likely to be saved—the point of Christian anthropology was that man is a son, dependent on God. Whatever the philosophes thought of man—innately decent or innately power-hungry, easy or hard to educate to virtue—the point of the Enlightenment’s anthropology was that man is an adult, dependent on himself.

2. NEWTONS OF THE MIND

The scientific value of these intellectual games was questioned even in the Enlightenment. While in nearly every instance, Adam Ferguson complained in 1767, “the natural historian thinks himself obliged to collect facts, not to offer conjectures,” in “what relates to himself, and in matters the most important, and the most easily known,” he “substitutes hypothesis instead of reality, and confounds the provinces of imagination and reason, of poetry and science.”²⁴ At the same time, the scientific intention behind these conjectures was unimpeachable, their share in the construction of a scientific psychology decisive. With such games eighteenth-century psychologists redefined and partially clarified their relations with epistemology, and, by moving into the orbit of organized observation, deliberate experiment, and controlled generalization, they distanced themselves from their old alliance with imaginative literature and casual worldly wisdom. Locke, at the very beginning of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, was the first to articulate the new direction the science of man was to take: while inquiries into the “essence” of mind, or the ultimate causes of sensation, were admittedly “speculations” at once “curious and entertaining,” he proposed to concentrate on the activity of the mind, on “the discerning faculties of a man, as they are employed about the objects which they have to do with.” And in considering these employments, Locke proposed to use the “historical, plain method,”²⁵ the scientific method of Bacon and Newton.

One motive for this ostentatious limitation of concern and insistence on the primacy of experience in mental life was, of course, that it permitted the philosophes to attack the Cartesian notion of innate knowledge. But it was also part of the philosophical modesty which, according to the philosophes, lay at the heart of all fruitful inquiry. In psychology, as everywhere else, to turn one’s back on the unknowable permitted—almost enforced—a salutary concentration on what could be known; it was compatible with enormous ambitions for the science of man.

This cannibalism says more about Condillac’s intellectual ancestry than about the evolution of psychology. Condillac was a professional Lockian, more Lockian in his final system even than Locke himself.³¹ The mind, Locke had argued, beginning as “white paper,” is furnished with its “vast store” of ideas from a single source, experience, but this source has two branches, “our observation employed either about external sensible objects, or about the internal operations of our minds, perceived and reflected on by ourselves”—sensation and reflection.³² But then, in the characteristic manner of the scientist, Locke’s successors sought to simplify and beautify the psychological theories they had learned from him: “The development of empirical psychology from Locke to Berkeley and from Berkeley to Hume,” Ernst Cassirer observes, “represents a series of attempts to minimize the difference between sensation and reflection, and finally to wipe it out altogether. French philosophical criticism of the eighteenth century hammered at this same point also in an attempt to eliminate the last vestige of independence which Locke had attributed to reflection.”³³ In the Essai sur l’origine des connoissances humaines, his first treatise on psychology, Condillac ambitiously announced that he planned to “reduce everything that concerns the understanding to a single principle.”³⁴ But the book kept the promise imperfectly. It retained Locke’s dual scheme: “At the first moment” of a man’s existence, “his mind first undergoes different sensations, like light, colors, pain, pleasure, movement, rest—these are his first thoughts”; then he “begins to reflect on what the sensations produce in him,” and “forms ideas about the different operations of his mind, like perceiving and imagining—these are his second thoughts.”³⁵ But in his Traité des sensations, published in 1754, Condillac offered a radical simplification, converting what he had treated as a temporal sequence into a causal one: reflection, which in the Essai had followed sensation, now became its effect. Rigorously carrying through the device of the inanimate, perfectly equipped statue, Condillac demonstrated that each single sense permits man to develop all his faculties. To “remember, compare, judge, discern, imagine, be astonished, have abstract ideas, ideas of number and duration, know general and particular truths,” are after all nothing but “different ways of being attentive”; and to “have passions, love, hate, hope, fear and wish,” are nothing but “different ways of desiring.” Now, to be attentive and to desire are “in their origins nothing but feeling,” and so it follows “that sensation comprehends all the faculties of the soul.”³⁶ Condillac did not despise or deny the enormous complexity of mental life or the intricate structure of the mind, but he insisted that it is possible to trace this complexity and this structure to essentially simple elements. All mental activity arises from attention: thought is the child of need, for—and here, too, Condillac takes a position of Locke’s to its conclusion—man’s first and decisive experience is uneasiness. For Locke uneasiness—the desire to gain absent good or flee present evil—“determines the will,”³⁷ for Condillac inquiétude, or tourment, determines everything: “Locke,” Condillac gratefully records, “was the first to note that the uneasiness caused by privation of an object is the principle of our determinations.” Yet as far as Locke had gone, he had stopped short. He “had uneasiness arise from desire, and precisely the opposite is true.” Condillac therefore thought that it remained to him to “demonstrate that this uneasiness is the first principle which gives us the habits of touching, seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, comparing, judging, reflecting, desiring, loving, hating, fearing, hoping, wishing; that, in a word, it is through uneasiness that all the habits of mind and body are born.”³⁸ And with this demonstration, Cartesian rationalist psychology had been refuted, and scientific empiricist psychology triumphantly held the field alone: “The will”—this was Condillac’s conclusion—“is not founded on the idea, but the idea on the will.”³⁹

Ambitious to secure the status of empirical scientists, the psychologists of the eighteenth century, though openly, even effusively, grateful to Locke, found it necessary to place him second to another, still more admirable model. They acknowledged Locke as the father of modern psychology, but they made Newton into its hero—a desertion that would hardly have wounded Locke, who was himself Newton’s enthusiastic admirer. Just as Buffon aspired to be called the Newton of nature, there were philosophers who aspired, more or less openly, to be called the Newton of the mind. They prided themselves on following his method, adapted some of his physical concepts to the mental world, and hoped to emulate his success in establishing a securely scientific system. In 1750 the Italian psychologist F. M. Zanotti published a fragment with the striking title, Della forza attrativa della idee. And David Hume, deliberately employing and emphasizing a term borrowed from the master himself, posited in the Treatise that man’s simple ideas are united in the memory by “a kind of ATTRACTION, which in the mental world will be found to have as extraordinary effects as in the natural, and to shew itself in as many and as various forms.”⁴⁰

In these instances, Newton’s influence on psychology was implicit, though obvious. In the work of David Hartley—perhaps the most inventive and certainly, despite intermittent periods of eclipse, the most influential psychologist of the eighteenth century—it became explicit. In his masterpiece, Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations, Hartley offered two connected psychological theories, of “vibration” and of “association,” the first developed “from the hints concerning the performance of sensation and motion, which Sir Isaac Newton has given at the end of his Principia, and in the Questions annexed to his Optics,” the second, “from what Mr. Locke, and other ingenious persons since his time, have delivered concerning the influence of association over our opinions and affections.”⁴¹ While the theory of associations turned out to have a longer life than the theory of vibrations, it was Newton, far more than Locke, who presided over Hartley’s system. Newton gave Hartley the impetus for his physiological psychology, supplied him with evidence on the persistence of sensations or the organization of the nervous system, and shaped his entire style of scientific thought. “The proper method of philosophizing,” Hartley pronounced, and his pronouncement did not offer, and was not meant to offer, any surprises to a reader familiar with the Principia or the Opticks, is “to discover and establish the general laws of action, affecting the subject under consideration, from certain select, well-defined, and well-attested phaenomena, and then to explain and predict the other phaenomena by these laws.” This, Hartley concluded, “is the method of analysis and synthesis recommended and followed by Sir Isaac Newton.”⁴² It is significant that when Thomas Reid criticized Hartley, he criticized him not simply for being wrong, but for being a bad Newtonian. It was, in an indisputably Newtonian universe, the most telling Schimpfwort Reid could find.⁴³

Hartley’s theory of vibrations is simple, and its simplicity is its virtue. Sensations and ideas, which are both “internal feelings,” are “presented to the Mind” by the “white Medullary Substance of the Brain,” which, with “the spinal Marrow, and the Nerves proceeding from them,” acts as the “immediate Instrument” of “Sensation and Motion.”⁴⁵ As a loyal Newtonian, Hartley conceived of the medullary substance as a collection of infinitesimally small particles, especially equipped to act as transmitters of stimuli. The nerves respond to sensations by vibrating, and produce vibrations among the medullary particles. “External objects, being corporeal, can act upon the nerves and brain, which are also corporeal, by nothing but compressing motion on them.”⁴⁶ The relation of sensation to response—that is, vibration—is constant and predictable; as sensations change, ideas change with them. Whatever the limitations of such a theory—and they gradually became obvious with the progress of psychology—the purpose and formulation of such a straightforward physiological psychology opened new prospects to the science of man.

For Hume, the theory of association offered a solution to a problem he himself had posed; association explained man’s sense of confidence in the world in which, strictly speaking, nothing outside of mathematics is certain. The materials of experience, Hume argued, are sensations, and no sensation can guarantee the appearance of another sensation. Yet man does see the world as an ordered pattern, and “the common subjects” of his “thoughts and reasoning” are “complex ideas.” Now this order and complexity, both indispensable, yet both in a sense artificial, are the products of the association of ideas. Sensations are repeated, sensations are like one another, sensations appear to have certain invariable effects, and it is from these three “principles of union”—contiguity, resemblance, and causation—that man constructs his mental world; association alone makes possible relations, modes, complex structures—in a word, organized thinking and rational discourse. With his customary caution, Hume conceded that his three principles were doubtless neither the “infallible” nor the “sole” principles of association, but he was certain that they were the “general principles” basic to mental life.⁴⁸

Hume’s psychology, with its atomism, its naturalism, its appeal to experience, its mixture of comprehensiveness and simplicity, and its modesty, was strikingly similar to Hartley’s, but Hartley, although his Observations appeared in 1749, a decade after Hume’s Treatise, had been at work on his own. Hartley was thoroughly familiar with the philosophical literature, and around 1730 he was told that “the Rev. Mr. Gay, then living, asserted the possibility of deducing all our intellectual pleasures and pains from association.” It was this hint that put Hartley “upon considering the power of association,”⁴⁹ and late in the 1730s his system, if not his book, was ready.

Like Condillac, Hartley was intent on simplifying Locke. “Excellent” as Locke’s Essay was, he noted, it had wrongly taken reflection as a “distinct source” of ideas;⁵⁰ in fact, all ideas come from sensations, and simple ideas are gathered into complex ideas by association alone. As Hartley puts it schematically: “Any sensations A, B, C, etc., by being associated with one another a sufficient number of times, get such a power over the corresponding ideas a, b, c, etc., that any one of the sensations A, when impressed alone, shall be able to excite in the mind, b, c, etc., the ideas of the rest.”⁵¹ Association is, for Hartley, the great, indeed the sole, principle of construction; it is built into the organism and indispensable to man’s physical and mental life. And its connection with vibrations is intimate and indissoluble: “One may expect, that vibrations should infer association as their effect, and association point to vibrations as its cause.”⁵² Indeed, Hartley restated the law of associations as the fundamental law of vibrations: “Any vibrations A, B, C, etc., by being associated together a sufficient number of times, get such a power over a, b, c, etc. the corresponding miniature vibrations, that any of the vibrations A, when impressed alone, shall be able to excite b, c, etc., the miniatures of the rest.”⁵³

Inevitably, Hartley’s enterprise, which sought to explain with two simple interlocking physical principles the infinite variety of man’s experience from his dimmest awareness of shapes and colors to his most exalted perception of God, from his most animal-like sensuality to his most abstruse cogitations, aroused a variety of responses. A little late, Dugald Stewart would censoriously dismiss Hartley’s work as unscientific, as a “metaphysical romance”⁵⁶—perhaps the most devastating pair of words a critic could utter in that age, while Joseph Priestley, Hartley’s most assiduous and most effective popularizer, thought that Hartley had done more for psychology than Locke, and “thrown more useful light upon the theory of the mind than Newton did upon the theory of the natural world.”⁵⁷ Clearly, both critic and disciple were wrong. To be a Newtonian did not make Hartley into a Newton, but to be a Newtonian in the study of man was, in itself, a good thing to be.

III

But, as Hartley was the first to recognize, his theories of vibrations and associations seemed to deny the free will that Christians of all persuasions except the Calvinist deem essential to salvation, and seemed instead to point toward a materialistic determinism that not even Calvinists could accept. “I think,” wrote Hartley in the Preface of his Observations, defiantly but a little pathetically, that “I cannot be called a system-maker, since I did not first form a system, and then suit the facts to it, but was carried on by a train of thoughts”—shall we say, persuasive associations?—“from one thing to another, frequently without any express design, or even any previous suspicion of the consequences that might arise.” Hartley knew that this was sound scientific procedure, but he found the results disturbing, especially “in respect of the doctrine of necessity; for I was not at all aware, that it followed from that of association, for several years after I had begun my inquiries; nor did I admit it at last, without the greatest reluctance.”⁵⁹ His friends were not convinced, but Hartley himself, once having developed his deterministic system, could not abandon it, and set himself instead to reconcile it with the immateriality of the soul, the truth of revelation, and man’s eventual happiness. Hartley himself seemed to be persuaded by his compromise between Anglicanism and materialism; it satisfied his scientific probity and Christian optimism. But most of his followers dropped the Anglicanism and retained the materialism. Joseph Priestley was, to be sure, an odd sort of materialist: he was the kind of pious scientist with which eighteenth-century England was so richly endowed—a Christian optimist much like Hartley; a materialist, a Unitarian, and a political radical; a Voltairian scourge of “superstition” and the “corruptions of Christianity” who believed in the miracles of Christ and in His resurrection. But other partisans of the new psychology were less complicated: Helvétius in France and Bentham in England incorporated its doctrines into a naturalistic materialism that made no compromises with theology. When some time around 1800 the German philosopher Friedrich August Carus wrote an essay on the history of psychology, he characterized Hartley’s Observations as offering the “principles of modern materialism” and said nothing about Hartley’s religion.⁶⁰ And so Hartley, like other enlightened Christians of the day, was victimized by the growing tensions between science and theology and lent involuntary aid to the radical Enlightenment, which was bent upon understanding man without recourse to God.

3. THE REVOLT AGAINST RATIONALISM

THE PHILOSOPHES WELCOMED and explored psychology as a rational discipline, but in their hands reason was not its central object of study. The metaphysicians of the seventeenth century had allowed their urgent desire for rationality to govern their conclusions: had not Descartes claimed, “There is no soul so weak that it cannot, if well directed, acquire absolute power over its passions”?⁶¹ The philosophes thought such a claim preposterous. As David Hume noted in one of his memoranda, tendentiously pitting antique pagan against modern Christian philosophers, “The Moderns have not treated Morals so well as the Antients merely from their Reasoning turn, which carry’d them away from Sentiment.”⁶² This was a dubious interpretation, characteristic of the philosophes’ manner of reading—or, rather, misreading—the history of psychology. But, however indefensible as history, Hume’s observation directs attention to a fallacy that the philosophes did not intend to perpetuate: reason, Hume insisted, neither influences the will nor gives rise to morality; nor does reason have any part in producing those associations of ideas by which men think and live. “Is it likely,” he asked rhetorically, “that reason will prevail against nature, habit, company, education, and prejudice?”⁶³ He put it more formally in the Treatise: “We speak not strictly and philosophically when we talk of the combat of passion and of reason. Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”

It is a harsh aphorism, rather more energetic than Hume’s own philosophy required it to be—Hume would have been the first to insist that there are some passions whose tyranny man should, and could, shake off—and he deprecated it as “somewhat extraordinary.”⁶⁴ But it was only extreme, not at all extraordinary: the limits of rational inquiry into ultimate mysteries, the impotence of reason before the passions, were after all themes that haunted the Enlightenment. “People ceaselessly proclaim against the passions,” wrote Diderot in the opening paragraph of his first philosophical work, “people impute to the passions all of men’s pains, and forget that they are also the source of all his pleasures. It is an element of man’s constitution of which we can say neither too many favorable, nor too many unfavorable things. But what makes me angry is that the passions are never regarded from any but the critical angle. People think they do reason an injury if they say a word in favor of its rivals. Yet it is only the passions, and the great passions, that can raise the soul to great things.”⁶⁵ It was a position that, once taken, he would surrender only with reluctance. In 1762 he told Sophie Volland: “I forgive everything that is inspired by passion.”⁶⁶ And seven years later he wrote to another correspondent: “The language of the heart is a thousand times more varied than that of the mind, and it is impossible to law down the rules of its dialectics.”⁶⁷ In its treatment of the passions, as in its treatment of metaphysics, the Enlightenment was not an age of reason but a revolt against rationalism.

This revolt was at once substantive and methodological. It opposed not merely excessive claims for man’s power to control his emotions, but also the arid, schematic, often unworldly constructions and classifications of earlier philosophers of the mind. But the philosophes’ revolt in psychology was also—and here its delicacy lies—a revolt against antirationalism, against that devout psychology which meekly served Christian theology by denying man’s capacity to find his own unaided way in life. It is no accident that the philosophes chose as their intellectual ancestors, in the study of man as elsewhere, those modern writers who had distrusted reason without exalting unreason: Montaigne, Hobbes, Spinoza—and Locke. The pious Christian, the Enlightenment conceded, had been right to explore the limits of reason and the range of passion, but he had misconceived them both. In response, the philosophes saw psychology as a dual escape—from unreasonable rationalism and superstitious antirationalism.

The issue between the Enlightenment and its adversaries, therefore, was less the power of the passions than their value, although the new psychology made that power appear greater than ever before. Tentatively, even playfully, often drawing no consequences from their own discoveries, the philosophes had intimations of the unconscious, the superego, of rationalization and sublimation. Swift had already called attention to the earthy, passionate sources of abstract thinking; Diderot, treating it as almost a commonplace, told Damilaville: “There is a bit of testicle at the bottom of our most sublime sentiments and most refined tenderness.”⁶⁸ Behind and beneath reason the philosophes glimpsed a large undiscovered country, strange and terrifying. “The sleep of reason begets monsters,” wrote Goya under one of his Caprichos, showing a man asleep, with his head on his arms, while batlike apparitions swirl about him. “Deserted by reason,” Goya commented, “imagination begets impossible monsters. United with reason she is the mother of all arts and the source of their wonders.”⁶⁹ Picture and commentary together embody the wisdom of a century.

It was in this climate that Diderot tersely formulated what Freud was to acknowledge as a remarkable anticipation of the Oedipus complex: “If your little savage were left to himself,” Diderot’s spokesman says to Rameau’s nephew, “keeping all his childish foolishness—imbécillité—and joining the bit of rationality of the infant in the cradle to the violent passions of the man of thirty, he would strangle his father and sleep with his mother.”⁷⁰ And it was in this climate that Lichtenberg commended the study of dreams to solve the secrets of the soul: “A philosophical dream book could be written.” Lichtenberg distinguished, and regretted that others had failed to differentiate, between the scientific “interpretation of dreams” and superstitious “dream books.” “That’s the way it usually is. I know from undeniable experience that dreams lead to self-knowledge”; after all, “we live and feel as much dreaming as waking.”⁷¹ If, in the philosophes’ hands, the universe of the mind became wholly natural, its nature gained in depth and mystery.

For most of the philosophes, the analysis of passion became a celebration. Diderot was convinced that without passion nothing could be done either in the arts or in civilization as a whole. Hume argued that all effort, all activity, all work spring from passion.⁷² Mendelssohn asserted that “reason acts as a kill-joy (Störerin) to sentiment and pleasure.”⁷³ Lessing, writing to Mendelssohn, offered the paradox that even the most disagreeable passion is agreeable to man, since each heightens his self-awareness.⁷⁴ Vauvenargues, Voltaire’s protégé, praised the instincts in a series of aphorisms that were much quoted and widely admired in his time: “The great thoughts come from the heart”—“Reason does not know the interests of the heart”—“Reason misleads us more often than nature.”⁷⁵ And Voltaire, though more moderate than Vauvenargues, anticipated him and the others when he called the passions “the principal cause of the order we see today in the world.”⁷⁶

Yet the philosophes’ celebration of passion inevitably had its wry aspect. Wieland and Voltaire, David Hume and John Adams joined in regretting man’s susceptibility to irrational impulse; they were complacently amused by his love of wonder, sardonic about the ease with which his noble philosophizing was subverted by appeals to baser passions, and horrified by his inclination to violence. Like progress, the passions seemed to the philosophes an uncertain blessing: Voltaire speaks of them as a divine but dangerous gift; Diderot, whose commitment to the emotions was wholehearted and almost hysterical, nevertheless thought them an untrustworthy ally and a capricious master: “The passionate man would like to control the universe,” he wrote, and evidently found this desire at once admirable and terrifying.⁷⁷ Love, he wrote, is a tyrant who dominates man’s moods and corrupts his judgment: “Where is the lover who allows himself to be told, patiently, that his mistress is ugly?”⁷⁸ Obviously reflecting on his own experience, he wrote to Vialet, engineer and Encyclopedist: “In men like you and me, my friend, passion often speaks the language of reason, but we all act like the other madmen.”⁷⁹ Even Rousseau—and this in his great homage to sentiment, the Nouvelle Héloïse—warned against the perils of the passions: “With the help of good sense,” so runs the device on the frontispiece for the novel, “we save ourselves in the arms of reason.”⁸⁰

Revolutionary for all its hesitancy and equivocations, the Enlightenment’s rehabilitation of the passions was essential to its rehabilitation of man as a natural creature. Two sentiments in particular—pride and lust—which Christians for centuries had condemned as mortal sins, acquired in the philosophy of the philosophes a new, high, and, to the devout, offensive status.

As the Pastoral Letter condemning Émile, and a thousand other texts, make plain, Christians found few mysteries in pride and few intellectual difficulties; some theologians proposed it as an ingenious divine device to spur men into activity, but in general, they treated it as simply and vastly sinful. For the philosophes, pride was much more problematical. In its passage through time, the term had gathered up a cluster of diverse and not wholly consistent meanings—self-love, boastfulness, sober confidence, desire for the approval of one’s soul or one’s fellow men—and the philosophes’ evaluation of it was as varied and unstable as its meanings. This much seemed evident: pride appeared in some egregious forms—conceit, vanity, lust for power—and in these forms it had done good only, if at all, unintentionally or by indirection. Rousseau, in his two Discours, was inclined to hold pride responsible for civilization with all its glaring flaws; Mandeville, more wryly, argued that “the Moral Virtues are the Political Offspring which Flattery begot upon Pride.”⁸¹ When Voltaire, méchant and sardonic, commended pride for being “the principal instrument with which men have built this fine edifice, society,”⁸² he was following Mandeville’s doctrine that private vices confer public benefits. But this seemed feeble consolation for the harm conceit and egotism had done: they had seduced philosophers to waste their lives constructing comprehensively foolish systems, statesmen to sacrifice ordinary men to their schemes, aristocrats to wound their fellow men with their arrogance, Stoics to attempt, nobly but in vain, to exercise control over their passions, and men of good hope to suffer grievous disappointments. Wieland’s and Voltaire’s fables are filled with cautionary figures who fell low because they reached too high. The philosophes’ inconclusive debates over the true character of amour propre show their suspicion of self-regarding sentiments; their repetitive injunctions against system-making and against intolerance were warnings against philosophical and theological pride.

At the same time, it was important for the philosophes’ reformist style of thought to assert that pride also took beneficent forms; in the guise of serene, realistic self-confidence, they argued, or the philosophical sentiment of inner worth, pride was a passion appropriate to enlightened men. This was the kind of pride Voltaire had in mind when he asked men to remember their human dignity, and Kant, when he suggested that man should put “a certain noble trust” in his powers.⁸³ It was David Hume who made the pagan implications of this view explicit. Those, he wrote pointedly, “accustom’d to the style of the schools and pulpit” treated pride simply as a vice; but Hume thought it “evident” that, just as humility is not always virtuous, pride “is not always vicious.”⁸⁴ Even more pointedly, Hume suggested that men who “judge of things by their natural, unprejudiced reason, without the delusive glosses of superstition and false religion,” will firmly reject “celibacy, fasting, penance, mortification, self-denial, humility, silence, solitude, and the whole train of monkish virtues.” These so-called virtues are really vices, making man neither rich, nor good company, nor a sound citizen, nor happy; they “stupify the understanding and harden the heart, obscure the fancy and sour the temper.”⁸⁵ Christian and Enlightenment anthropology could hardly be contrasted more sharply than this.

The philosophes’ “rescue” of sensuality was, if anything, more daring than their rescue of pride, though less conclusive. The strategies for their campaign are familiar enough; they defined the issue and their aims by writing tendentious history. In their polemics, the Christian view of the body appears as a debased Stoicism: like Stoicism it made inhuman demands on man’s nature; unlike Stoicism, its promised rewards for asceticism were fictitious, infantile, insulting to self-respecting men. La Mettrie saw the priesthood as the sworn enemy of man’s passionate nature; Diderot, for all his detestation of La Mettrie’s Anti-Sénèque, agreed with him on this point. Describing an abbé to Sophie Volland—in fact, his brother—Diderot regretted his flawed humanity: “He would have been a good friend, a good brother, if Christ had not ordered him to trample under foot all these trifles.” What these Christians “call evangelical perfection,” he added, “is nothing but the deadly art of stifling nature.”⁸⁶ This criticism became a commonplace in Holbach’s circle. “The proper object of Christianity,” wrote Damilaville in the Encyclopédie, “is not to populate the earth; its true aim is to populate heaven. Its dogmas are divine, and one must concede that this holy religion would achieve its goal if the belief were universal, and if the impulses of nature were not unfortunately stronger than all dogmatic opinions.”⁸⁷ And Holbach himself asserted, “If we examine matters without prejudice, we will find that most of the precepts which religion, or its fanatical and supernatural ethics, prescribe to man, are as ridiculous as they are impossible to practice. To prohibit men their passions is to forbid them to be men; to advise a man carried away by his imagination to moderate his desires is to advise him to change his physical constitution, to order his blood to run more slowly.” Holbach offers several instances of such insensate counsel: shun the pursuit of wealth, give up the desire for fame. But he reserves his climactic, most telling illustration for the erotic sphere: “To tell a lover of impetuous temperament that he must stifle his passion for the object that enchants him is to make him understand that he should renounce his happiness.”⁸⁸ This, to Holbach, was the utmost in folly; but he witnessed it with a mixture of the worldling’s resigned amusement and the reformer’s purposeful fury. After all, he was certain that religions—all religions, not Christianity alone—demand, practice, and impose some form of self-mutilation. And he was equally certain that the philosophes must rescue the body from the castrating zeal of pious men.

This clear-cut, unrelieved condemnation of the Christian attitude toward sensuality was a malicious caricature of a complex reality. It was plausible and popular: professing to worship Priapus, the earl of Pembroke said late in the eighteenth century: “So superb a deity ought always to have been treated with every possible mark of religion and respect but, from the natural perverseness and exclusive monopoly of the Christian faith, he has been neglected for too long a series of ages.”⁸⁹ And it contained a core of truth. Christian asceticism had arisen at least in part as a response to pagan indulgence. In Rome, as Stoic philosophers noted with disgust, pleasure, when it was available, was orgiastic: internal restraint was weak and life cheap. Pleasure meant gluttony, ruinous spending, blood sports, sexual experimentation, and murder. Christianity offered the ideal of restraint and the threat of an all-seeing God; it redirected pleasure on all levels, from eros to agape, from uninhibited lust to sexual abstention, from the self to the divine. And so, in Freud’s words, “Religious credulity stifled the neuroses” of antiquity.⁹⁰ Catholic Christianity, Heinrich Heine observed more than a century ago, “was necessary as a salutary reaction against the horrible colossal materialism that had developed in the Roman Empire and threatened to destroy all the spiritual splendor of man.” Flesh had become “so impudent in this Roman world that doubtless it needed Christian discipline to correct it.” After Trimalchio’s dinner what was needed was a “starvation diet like Christendom.”⁹¹

But, despite sermons against the flesh, philosophical deprecation of love, monasticism, the cult of virginity, Christian civilization was not solely a starvation diet. The sexual appetite did not vanish behind a wall of discreet silence after the triumph of Christianity; medieval literature was often coarsely direct. Not all praise of sensuality was the private property of heretical sects or exclusive privileged castes; others, too, sang the love of man for woman, or man for boy. Even the Puritans, whom the Enlightenment liked to malign as dour, fanatical enemies of life, were refreshingly unpuritanical in their sexual behavior. Yet, when all corrections have been made in the philosophes’ portrait, when all the liberality in practice, and all the erotic passages in medieval literature have been remembered, it remains true that Christianity officially condemned sexual desire, and sexual pleasure, as sinful—at least since the Fall.⁹² It was not the philosophes’ intention to deny that sexual intercourse, or sexual enjoyment, had been widespread before they came on the scene, or that erotic literature had been stifled by piety until their century: they had read Chaucer and Boccaccio, Aretino and Bembo, and, for all their tendentiousness, they were men of sense. Their intention was, rather, to reassert the innocence of sexuality, and to celebrate it as an integral and praiseworthy part of man’s nature.

It is this intention that controls one of the most striking polemics of the Enlightenment, Diderot’s Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville. Its procedure is perfectly simple: it is to contrast, invidiously, Christian sexual morality with Tahitian sexual morality by contrasting corrupt, superstitious, and above all hypocritical Christian civilization with pure, free, honest Tahitian civilization. Diderot’s Tahitians, though noble, are not savages, and the contrast Diderot wishes to draw is the more effective for it.

Christian morality, on the other hand, strikes the Tahitians as “useless knowledge,” as “fetters disguised in a hundred different shapes,” which “can only arouse the indignation and contempt” of men in whom “the love of liberty—le sentiment de la liberté” is the deepest of feelings.⁹⁴ Tahitian indignation is aroused by Western greed and bellicosity, but it is aroused most fiercely by the Christian sexual code. Diderot, composing an angry oration for his spokesman, an aged Tahitian, eloquently pleads for the pagan sensuality he thinks proper for the Enlightenment: “Only a little while ago, the young Tahitian girl blissfully abandoned herself to the embraces of a young Tahitian man; she impatiently awaited the day when her mother, authorized by the girl’s nubility, would lift her veil and show her naked breasts. She was proud to be able to excite the desires and attract the amorous looks of strangers, of her relatives, of her brother; she accepted the caresses of the one whom her young heart and the secret voice of her senses had pointed out to her—accepted them without fear and without shame, in our presence, in the midst of a crowd of innocent Tahitians, to the sound of flutes and amid dancing. The idea of crime and the fear of disease entered among us only with you. Our enjoyments, once so sweet, are attended with remorse and dread. That man in black standing near you, listening to me, has spoken to our boys; I don’t know what he said to our girls, but our boys hesitate, our girls blush. Go bury yourself in the dark woods, if you like, with the perverse companion of your pleasures, but let the good, simple Tahitians reproduce themselves without shame under the open sky, and in broad daylight.”⁹⁵

It is hardly necessary to emphasize that this improbable discourse contradicts the Christian condemnation of lust point for point. In the paradise of Tahiti’s innocence, Christian morality acts the part of the serpent. Diderot, one might say, wryly accepts the Fall by transferring the burden of responsibility: it is not man, but Christianity that is guilty of bringing sin—the sin against nature—into the world. Diderot relates that after Bougainville’s landing, the ship’s chaplain is invited to stay in one of the natives’ huts. The Tahitian and his family make their guest comfortable, and when he is about to go to sleep, his host appears by his bedside with his wife and three daughters, all naked, and makes him a little speech: “You have had dinner, you are young, you are in good health; if you sleep alone you will sleep badly; at night a man needs a companion by his side. Here is my wife; here are my daughters. Choose the one that pleases you, but if you would do me a favor, you would give preference to the youngest of my daughters: she has not yet had any children.” The chaplain declines, pleading “his religion, his holy orders—état—morals and decency,” a refusal that sends his host into a lyrical defense of nature: “I don’t know what this thing is that you call ‘religion,’ but I can only think ill of it, since it keeps you from enjoying an innocent pleasure to which nature, our sovereign mistress, invites us all.” The chaplain’s refusal, he suggests, is offensive alike to the demands of hospitality and the needs of nature in search of offspring. The only acceptable excuse is physiological: “I am not asking you to harm your health. If you are tired, you should rest.” With this he leaves the chaplain to fight out the conflict between unnatural self-denial and natural desire. It ends as it must end: the chaplain spends the night with the girl, objecting to the last: “But my religion! My holy orders!” And in succeeding nights, the chaplain performs the same service for the other girls and finally, “out of politeness,” sleeps with his host’s wife, punctuating the nocturnal silence with his repeated exclamations, “But my religion! But my holy orders!”⁹⁶

But for Diderot, even in this Tahitian fantasy, sexual liberty is not sexual license: Diderot scoffs at celibacy, monogamy, and the fear of incest, and insists that the sexual impulse, being natural, is as innocent as it is essential for the survival of society. But Diderot defines “natural” not as primitive- or animal-like, or as everything that is possible; the natural, for him, is the appropriate. He places distinct limits on permissible sexual activity: Diderot’s Tahitians impose strict taboos on intercourse before maturity has been reached, and the enforcement of these taboos “is the principal object of domestic education, and the most important point in public morality.”⁹⁸ Bigamy, fornication, adultery, incest are imaginary crimes foisted on a supine humanity by religion, but nature itself sets boundaries which, since they emerge from nature rather than violate it, are truly sacred.

III

The philosophes’ drastic revaluation of the passions was a hope, a forecast, a critique of prevailing pieties and, to some extent at least, a report on subtle developments in their own time. That the Enlightenment’s defense of pride reflects the widespread and growing confidence in man’s capacity to master his world is plain enough; it was the psychological and anthropological counterpart of the recovery of nerve. Its defense of lust reflects some changes as well, but these changes are by no means plain. In the eighteenth century, sexuality was still surrounded by coy circumlocutions or embarrassed secrecy, and by striking diversities between professions and performance; most men, even the most philosophical, were still reluctant to engage in a philosophical discussion of sexual behavior.

Once again, this double process is realized most completely in Diderot. “Head and heart are such different organs,” he wrote, but not without hope: “Should there not be some circumstances that would allow us to reconcile them?”¹¹² Diderot himself reconciled them playfully: in his Paradoxe sur le comédien, Diderot proposes that the most profound actor is the actor who knows precisely what he is doing at all moments; he must have all rational art and no spontaneous emotion. “I claim,” he wrote to Grimm, “that sensibility makes mediocre actors; extreme sensibility, limited actors; cold sense and head, sublime actors.”¹¹³ Another way to reconciliation for Diderot was to employ sexual metaphors and imagery for intellectual or moral activity; thus Diderot lent passions to ideas and status to lust. In the opening of Le neveu de Rameau, “Moi” describes his customary afternoon walks around the Palais Royal, his ruminative strolls during which he permits his mind to wander, abandoning it to free libertinage, granting it leave to follow any idea, wise or foolish, just as “our young libertines follow the steps of a courtesan,” picking up one and leaving the other: “My thoughts are my strumpets.”¹¹⁴ Similarly, Diderot could experience a moral act as though it were a satisfying sexual experience: “The spectacle of equity,” he told Sophie Volland, inflamed his ardor: “Then it seems to me that my heart expands beyond me, that it swims; an indescribably delicious and subtle sensation runs through me; I have difficulty breathing; the whole surface of my body is animated by something like a shudder; it is marked above all on my forehead, at the hairline; and then the symptoms of admiration and pleasure come to mingle on my face with those of joy, and my eyes fill with tears.”¹¹⁵ There was a rank order for this sensual Stoic—“The man who despises the pleasures of the senses,” he wrote, “is either a lying hypocrite or a crippled creature; but the man who prefers a voluptuous sensation to consciousness of a good action is a debased creature”¹¹⁶—but in general Diderot had the best of both by joining lust and ethics.

Diderot’s confidential correspondence is a record of this experimental morality. To his mistress he can describe the joys of sexual excitement in the most graphic terms—the burning lips, the delicious shudders, the torrents of tears that come with satiety¹¹⁷—but he also treats love as an exalted human experience: “It is four years ago now,” he ardently tells Sophie Volland, “that you seemed beautiful to me; today I find you more beautiful still. That is the magic of constancy, the most difficult and the rarest of our virtues.”¹¹⁸ Love is extreme or it is nothing: “Love, friendship, religion” are among “the most violent enthusiasms of life,”¹¹⁹ and this startling juxtaposition, which groups love with religion and burdens it with the epithet enthusiasm, which was, for the philosophes, a term of disapproval, is a sign of Diderot’s uneasiness. Obviously even for Diderot, sexual gratification was not the highest of all goods, though all of it that was within the bounds set by nature was good. For Diderot, and with him for the Enlightenment in general, the passions were coming into their own, but they remained a touchy problem.

4. THE CAREER OF IMAGINATION

The complexity that marks the cultural situation of the time also marks the Enlightenment’s philosophical analysis of the imagination. The philosophes freely repeated hoary Platonic platitudes about the frenzied poet and uncritically accepted the old saying that every genius has his touch of madness. And the philosophes never disputed—it was one tradition they did not care to overturn—that the imagination is the most precious instrument the creative artist can possess. Shaftesbury, whose writings reverberate throughout the eighteenth century, proposed that the artist creates beauty through his aesthetic intuition, and Addison laid it down, perhaps a little mechanically, that a poet “should take as much Pains in forming his Imagination, as a Philosopher in cultivating his understanding.”¹²³ La Mettrie commended this passion less coolly. The “soul” and all its functions, he writes in a characteristic passage in which analysis and eroticism become one, can be reduced to the faculty of imagination: “Through it, through its flattering brush, the cold skeleton of reason takes on lively, carmine colors; through it, the sciences flourish, arts beautify themselves, the woods speak, echoes sigh, rocks weep, marble breathes, all takes on life among inanimate bodies”; in fact, “the more one exercises the imagination, or the meagrest talent, the more it takes on plumpness, so to speak; the more it grows, becomes vigorous, robust, enormous and capable of thought. The best physical constitution needs this exercise.”¹²⁴

While La Mettrie’s metaphor is unusually lush, especially for a philosophe, most of the phrases about mad geniuses and the uses of the imagination were little more than clichés; they could be found in the most academic of academic treatises. But for the philosophes they were, so to speak, the right kind of cliché. They did not impede, in fact they were gestures toward, a favorable estimate of the role that inner freedom plays in life and art.

In France, largely—probably wholly—independent of Leibniz, Diderot analyzed the imagination in similar fashion, concluding it to be a special kind of active, shaping memory. “The imagination,” he argued, as a good Lockian, “creates nothing,” but he argued at the same time that while ordinary memory is “a faithful copyist,” the imagination is “a colorist”; it “imitates, it composes, combines, exaggerates, it makes things larger or smaller.” For the painter or poet the imagination organizes an “internal model” which he realizes in his production, which, in turn, stirs the imagination of his audience.¹²⁶ This doctrine adroitly combined the notions of genius and imagination: the genius was simply the artist in whom the creative imagination acted most vigorously and flowed most freely.

David Hume took substantially the same position, but, since he was more interested than Addison in technical philosophical questions, he was more moderate in his tone. Addison had praised fancy, Hume felt compelled to distinguish in the imagination “betwixt the principles which are permanent, irresistible, and universal,” and “the principles, which are changeable, weak, and irregular.” The former are “the foundation of our thoughts and actions”; they are the basis of memory, the senses, causal inference, and the understanding, and without them “human nature must immediately perish and go to ruin.” The latter principles, in contrast, “are neither unavoidable to mankind, nor necessary, or so much as useful in the conduct of life; but on the contrary are observ’d only to take place in weak minds”¹³¹; these are “the frivolous properties of our thought,” the “bright fancies” and “trivial suggestions of the fancy,” which “very often” degenerate “into madness or folly.” Imagination sober is not only essential to life but to philosophy, imagination drunk is pernicious to both one and the other. “Nothing is more dangerous to reason than the flights of the imagination, and nothing has been the occasion of more mistakes among philosophers.” But whichever activity the imagination may be pursuing, Hume, unlike Addison, did not waver in his allegiance to Locke’s sensationalism: the imagination converts ideas into impressions, it “transposes and changes” ideas “as it pleases,” and can “join, and mix, and vary” them, but it never can go beyond “original perceptions.”¹³² The French philosophes—most prominently Condillac and Voltaire and even, as we have seen, Diderot—adopted the same line of reasoning: The imagination is valuable and troublesome, infinitely varied and therefore in appearance a creator. But only in appearance: the imagination—this was the firm majority view of the Enlightenment—was a builder, not a god.

¹ Treatise of Human Nature, xx, 273.

² Lettre XIII, Lettres philosophiques, I, 168–9.

³ Quoted in Bryson: Man and Society, 21.

⁴ For the use of psychology in the philosophes’ attack on Christianity, see The Rise of Modern Paganism, chap. vii, especially 407–12; for its relation to aesthetics, see below, 290–318; to education, 510–15; and political thought, 522–8.

⁵ An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, in Works, IV, 68.

⁶ “Of Civil Liberty,” ibid., III, 157; “Of Eloquence,” ibid., 163, although Hume here goes on to say that in the course of “civil” history the variety of human experience is rather less marked than in what we would today call cultural history.

⁷ I shall return to this question in the section on history; see below, 380–5.

⁸ See below, section 3.

⁹ Diderot to Falconet (May 15, 1767). Correspondance, VII, 59.

¹⁰ For the confrontation between Diderot and Holbach, see Diderot: ibid., III, 195–6, 320; for Helvétius’s pessimism, see ibid., 281.

¹¹ Notebooks, 219.

¹² Diderot to Sophie Volland (November 2 to 6 or 8, 1760). Correspondance, III, 226.

¹³ For Voltaire’s one-sided “debate” with Pascal, see The Rise of Modern Paganism, 388–90.

¹⁴ See Kant: Sämmtliche Werke, ed. G. Hartenstein, 8 vols. (1867–8), VIII, 624 ff., as quoted in John E. Smith: “The Question of Man,” in Charles W. Hendel, ed.: The Philosophy of Kant and Our Modern World (1957), 24.

¹⁵ “Evil,” Philosophical Dictionary, II, 378.

¹⁶ Goethe to Johann Gottfried and Karoline Herder, June 7, 1793. Gedenkausgabe, XIX, 213.

¹⁷ Ernst Cassirer: The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1932; tr. Peter Gay, 1954), 74.

¹⁸ See Mandement de Monseigneur l’Archevêque de Paris portant condamnation d’un livre qui a pour titre, Émile, ou de l’éducation, par J. J. Rousseau, citoyen de Genève, in Rousseau: Œuvres complètes, 4 vols. (1835), II, 747–54 passim. The author of the Mandement, whoever he is, draws on II Timothy 3, verses 1, 2, 4.

¹⁹ “Diderot was experimenting with … the method of trying to find out about the nature of the normal by studying the abnormal, of learning about the nature of the well through studying the diseased.” Wilson: Diderot, 98.

²⁰ See Jonathan Swift to Thomas Tickell, April 16, 1726. Correspondence, ed. Harold Williams, 5 vols. (1963–5), III, 128, 128 n.; and the sensible observation by Adam Ferguson: “A wild man … caught in the woods, where he had always lived apart from his species, is a singular instance, not a specimen of any general character.” An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767; ed. Duncan Forbes, 1966), 3.

²¹ Diderot’s scientific interest here has a malicious edge: if all of men’s ideas come through the senses, the moral experience of a blind man might well exclude God.

²² Once again, Adam Ferguson is worth quoting. “In opposition to what has dropped from the pens of eminent writers, we are obliged to observe, that men have always appeared among animals a distinct and superior race; that neither the possession of similar organs, nor the approximation of shape, nor the use of the hand, nor the continued intercourse with this sovereign artist, has enabled any other species to blend their nature or their inventions with his; that in his rudest state, he is found to be above them; and in his greatest degeneracy, never descends to their level. He is, in short, a man in every condition; and we can learn nothing of his nature from the analogy of other animals.” History of Civil Society, 5–6. In other (familiar) words, the proper study of mankind is not the apes, but man. It was from such discussions that the modern social sciences were to develop.

²³ Traité des sensations, in Œuvres philosophiques, I, 222. On the controversy over this device see ibid., 222 n. Condillac did give credit to an obscure friend, a Mademoiselle Ferrand, for giving him some ideas, but this acknowledgment seemed to his exasperated colleagues inadequate.

²⁴ History of Civil Society, 2.

²⁵ Essay Concerning Human Understanding, I, i, 2.

²⁶ In Œuvres philosophiques, I, 4. For the impact of this view on d’Alembert, see his Discours préliminaire, in Mélanges, I, 12.

²⁷ Treatise of Human Nature, 13.

²⁸ History of Civil Society, 25–6.

²⁹ Discours préliminaire, in Mélanges, I, 13–14.

³⁰ Extrait raisonné du Traité des sensations, in Œuvres philosophiques, I, 324; the same passage struck Ernst Cassirer: see Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 99 n.

³¹ See The Rise of Modern Paganism, 321.

³² Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II, i, 2 and subsequent sections.

³³ Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 100.

³⁴ This is the subtitle of the first edition of the Essai; in Œuvres philosophiques, I, 1.

³⁵ Ibid., I, 6.

³⁶ Traité des sensations, ibid., I, 239.

³⁷ Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II, xxi (this is the famous chapter on “Power”), especially sections 31 ff.

³⁸ Extrait raisonné du Traité des sensations, in Œuvres philosophiques, I, 325; see Cassirer: Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 103 n.

³⁹ As Cassirer notes, this was also the general conclusion of the Enlightenment. Ibid., 103.

⁴⁰ Treatise of Human Nature, 12–13.

⁴¹ Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations (1749; 6th edn., 1834), 4.

⁴² Ibid., 4–5; see also 8, 11–12.

⁴³ Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785; ed. A. D. Woozley, 1941), 60–9.

⁴⁴ Several historians of psychology, including George Sidney Brett, have rightly criticized Priestley’s abridgment of Hartley’s Observations, published in 1775, for omitting the theory of vibrations.

⁴⁵ Observations on Man, 6.

⁴⁶ Ibid., 8.

⁴⁷ This chapter was only added to Locke’s Essay in its fourth edition, in 1700: II, xxxiii.

⁴⁸ Treatise of Human Nature, 10–13, 92–3.

⁴⁹ Observations on Man, “Preface,” a2.

⁵⁰ Ibid., 226–7.

⁵¹ Ibid., 41.

⁵² Ibid., 4.

⁵³ Ibid., 43.

⁵⁴ Ibid., 46.

⁵⁵ Ibid., 151.

⁵⁶ Quoted in Maria Heider: Studien über David Hartley (1705–1757), (1913), 67.

⁵⁷ Quoted in Élie Halévy: The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism (tr. Mary Morris, 2d edn., 1934), 9.

⁵⁸ Hartley to Rev. John Lister, December 2, 1736. Quoted in Heider: Studien über Hartley, 44.

⁵⁹ Observations on Man, iv.

⁶⁰ Geschichte der Psychologie (posthumously edited and published by Ferdinand Hand, 1808), 746. That Hartley’s ideas were thought to lead to infidelity is shown by Coleridge who, as a young man, much admired Hartley, but then records in a letter to Poole, March 16, 1801: “I … have completely overthrown the doctrine of association as taught by Hartley, and with it all the irreligious metaphysics of modern infidels—especially the doctrine of necessity.” Quoted in I. A. Richards: Coleridge on Imagination (2d edn., 1950), 15.

⁶¹ Les passions de l’âme, article 50; Œuvres, XI, 368.

⁶² Quoted in Mossner: Life of David Hume, 76.

⁶³ Hume to John Clephane, February 18, 1751. Letters, I, 149.

⁶⁴ Treatise of Human Nature, 415.

⁶⁵ Pensées philosophiques, in Œuvres, I, 127.

⁶⁶ (July 31, 1762). Correspondance, IV, 81. In the same paragraph Diderot insists—it is an important point—that the passions make man human and that lack of passion is, really, beastly: “The mediocre man [which must here be taken to mean the man without passion] lives and dies like an animal.”

⁶⁷ To Madame de Maux (?), (November 1769). Correspondance, IX, 204. See also below, 194–200.

⁶⁸ (November 3, 1760). Ibid., III, 216. A little later Diderot attributes this idea—“it is impossible to analyze the most delicate of feelings without discovering a bit of filth in them”—to Madame d’Aine, Holbach’s mother-in-law. It seems, then, to have been well known in advanced circles (see ibid., 236).

⁶⁹ The etching has often been reproduced and commented upon; conveniently in Michael Levey: Rococo to Revolution: Major Trends in Eighteenth-Century Painting (1966), 8, 10–12, 210–14.

⁷⁰ Le neveu de Rameau, 95.

⁷¹ The Lichtenberg Reader, tr. and ed. Franz Mautner and Henry Hatfield (1959), 70.

⁷² “Our passions are the only causes of our labour.” “Of Commerce,” Works, III, 293.

⁷³ Briefe über die Empfindungen, quoted in Robert Sommer: Grundzüge einer Geschichte der deutschen Psychologie und Aesthetik (1892), 116.

⁷⁴ See Lessing to Mendelssohn, November 13, 1756. Schriften, XVII, 69–70; and Lessing to the same, February 2, 1757, ibid., 90.

⁷⁵ “Réflexions et maximes,” in Maximes et réflexions, ed. Lucien Meunier (1945), 43, 44.

⁷⁶ Traité de métaphysique (1734), ed. H. Temple Patterson (1937), 53.

⁷⁷ Diderot to Sophie Volland (July 14, 1762). Correspondance, IV, 39.

⁷⁸ Diderot to Falconet (June 15, 1766). Ibid., VI, 220.

⁷⁹ (End of April or early May, 1766). Ibid., 179.

⁸⁰ See F. C. Green: Jean-Jacques Rousseau: A Critical Study of His Life and Writings (1955), 182.

⁸¹ “An Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue,” The Fable of the Bees, or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits (1714; ed. F. B. Kaye, 2 vols., 2d edn., 1957), I, 51.

⁸² Traité de métaphysique, 53.

⁸³ Both, see above, 172, 177.

⁸⁴ Treatise of Human Nature, 297–8.

⁸⁵ Enquiry into the Principles of Morals, in Works, IV, 246–7.

⁸⁶ (August 16, 1759). Correspondance, II, 218.

⁸⁷ “Population,” in D’Holbach et ses amis, ed. René Hubert (1928), 192.

⁸⁸ Système de la nature, I, 357.

⁸⁹ Quoted in Nina Epton: Love and the English (edn. 1963), 276.

⁹⁰ Sigmund Freud to Oskar Pfister, February 9, 1909. Sigmund Freud, Oskar Pfister, Briefe 1909–1939, ed. Ernst L. Freud and Heinrich Meng (1963), 12.

⁹¹ Die Romantische Schule, in Heinrich Heines sämtliche Werke, ed. Oskar Walzel et al., 10 vols. (1910–15), VII, 8–9.

⁹² For St. Augustine, “lust” came into being after Eve’s disobedience; without that, he believed, Adam and Eve should have copulated without sin, commanding their sexual organs by their wills rather than being driven on by concupiscence. The City of God, book XIV, chaps. xviii–xxiv.

⁹³ Supplément au voyage de Bougainville, ed. Herbert Dieckmann (1955), 14. While at least one speaker in this essay-review-dialogue refers to the Tahitians as “savages,” the overwhelming and intended impression is that they are a civilized people.

⁹⁴ Ibid., 10.

⁹⁵ Ibid., 16–17.

⁹⁶ Ibid., 22–4, 49.

⁹⁷ Ibid., 26, 28, 28–9. As Diderot wrote to Falconet: “The first step toward becoming wicked” is “to see wickedness where it is not” (August 21, 1771). Correspondance, XI, 128.

⁹⁸ Supplément au voyage de Bougainville, 33.

⁹⁹ January 10, 1743. Letters, I, 48.

¹⁰⁰ Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, in Works, IV, 198. How difficult it was even for Hume to maintain this posture is illustrated by his observation—on the following page—in which he describes incest as “pernicious”; not as seeming, or being widely thought, but as actually, pernicious. Cultural relativism, which flourished in the Enlightenment, was still too new to be complete. (See also below, chap. vii, passim.)

¹⁰¹ Ibid., 199.

¹⁰² See above, 31–3.

¹⁰³ October 20 (1755). Complete Letters, ed. Robert Halsband, 3 vols. (1965–7), III, 97.

¹⁰⁴ To Sophie Volland (August 29, 1762). Correspondance, IV, 120. While Diderot here is speaking of sexual intercourse rather than love, this callous, medical tone is doubtless Chamfort’s ancestor. See also Diderot to Sophie Volland (July 31, 1762), where he speaks of “the voluptuous loss of a few drops of fluid.” (Ibid., 84.) Both of these remarks are combined in his Supplément au voyage de Bougainville: “Write as much as you like, on tablets of brass, to borrow Marcus Aurelius’ expression, that this voluptuous rubbing of two intestines is a crime; man’s heart will be bruised between the threat of your inscription and the violence of his inclinations” (59).

¹⁰⁵ See below, 275–6.

¹⁰⁶ Salon of 1761; Salons, I, 142. It is instructive to consider the probable response of a twentieth-century reader to Diderot’s report on L’Accordée de village and compare it with the nineteenth-century view of John Morley. In his biography of Diderot, which was authoritative, at least in the English-speaking world, for generations, Morley quotes from Diderot’s description of the painting at great length but stops precisely when he reaches the phrase I have quoted. See Diderot and the Encyclopaedists, 2 vols. (1878), II, 74–6.

¹⁰⁷ See La Mettrie’s satirical dedication of L’Homme machine to Albrecht von Haller, in the critical edition by Aram Vartanian (1960), 143–8.

¹⁰⁸ Quoted in Arnaldo Momigliano: “Gibbon’s Contribution to Historical Method,” Historia, II (1954), 463, now in Studies in Historiography (1966), 55.

¹⁰⁹ Sengle: Wieland, 372.

¹¹⁰ Life of Johnson (I cannot now trace this reference).

¹¹¹ An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 2 vols. (3rd edn., 1798), I, 81, quoted in Burton Ralph Pollin: Education and Enlightenment in the Works of William Godwin (1962), 38.

¹¹² To Falconet (February 15, 1766). Correspondance, VI, 98–9.

¹¹³ Diderot to Grimm (November 14, 1769). Correspondance, IX, 213. The editor, Georges Roth, suggests (ibid., 213 n.) that this is the passage from which the Paradoxe sur le comédien took its rise. See below, 283–6.

¹¹⁴ Le neveu de Rameau, 3.

¹¹⁵ (October 18, 1760). Correspondance, III, 156. I have quoted this instructive passage at somewhat greater length in The Rise of Modern Paganism, 187–8.

¹¹⁶ Diderot to the Princess of Nassau-Saarbruck (May or June 1758). Correspondance, II, 56.

¹¹⁷ See for an example Diderot to Sophie Volland (May 15, 1765). Ibid., V, 35.

¹¹⁸ (October 14, 1759?). Ibid., II, 277.

¹¹⁹ To Sophie Volland (July 14, 1762). Ibid., IV, 42. It should be obvious, but remains worth remarking, that there was no agreement among the philosophes on the proper manner of expressing the passions, even if they on the whole agreed that they were valuable. Voltaire particularly objected to Diderot’s effusions; what he called “exclamations à la Jean-Jacques” struck him as “supremely ridiculous.” Voltaire to Charles Joseph Panckoucke (October–November 1768). Correspondence, LXX, 129.

¹²⁰ “Annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds’ Discourses,” in The Complete Works of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (2d edn., 1966), 476–7, 456, 470. To be sure (as one of my students rightly objected) Blake’s view is a very particular one and cannot be treated as a typically Romantic response to eighteenth-century views of reason. Blake was certainly not a typical Romantic; in most respects he was not a Romantic at all. But his vehement assault on Newton and Reynolds remains instructive.

¹²¹ Quoted in René Wellek: A History of Modern Criticism, 1750–1950, I, The Later Eighteenth Century (1955), 97. Chapter xliv of Johnson’s Rasselas is a sermon against the disorders of the intellect and the evils of imagination.

¹²² Voltaire to Cideville (April 16, 1735). Correspondence, IV, 48–9. I have quoted from this letter before; see above, 158.

¹²³ Spectator, No. 417, in The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (1965), III, 563.

¹²⁴ L’Homme machine, 165–6.

¹²⁵ Cassirer: Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 128–9.

¹²⁶ See below, 279–80.

¹²⁷ The Spectator, No. 411; III, 537.

¹²⁸ Ibid., No. 421; III, 578–9.

¹²⁹ Ibid., No. 419; III, 573.

¹³⁰ Ibid., No. 416; III, 559.

¹³¹ Treatise of Human Nature, 225.

¹³² Ibid., 504 n., 267, 123, 267, 427, 629, 85. That Hume fully recognized the difficulties in the way of using the term precisely is evident from his analysis on 117–18 n.

¹³³ Quoted in Richards: Coleridge on Imagination, 51 n.

¹³⁴ Quoted in Margaret Gilman: The Idea of Poetry in France from Houdar de la Motte to Baudelaire (1958), 1. In 1820, in one of his witty essays, “Four Ages of Poetry,” Thomas Love Peacock took precisely the same line.

¹³⁵ Treatise of Human Nature, 121.

¹³⁶ For Diderot’s comment, see The Rise of Modern Paganism, 197, and below, 510.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Science of Man

1. ENLIGHTENMENT MAN

2. NEWTONS OF THE MIND

I

II

III

3. THE REVOLT AGAINST RATIONALISM

I

II

III

4. THE CAREER OF IMAGINATION

I

II