The seventeenth century was an age of transformation, in which the intellectual landscape of Britain was radically redrawn. As its traditional Aristotelian foundations crumbled, the rise of Cartesianism, the founding of the Royal Society, and triumph of Newtonian physics signal seismic shifts in the philosophical understanding of the world. Among the philosophers who emerged from this shakedown, Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke command the attention of philosophers to this day. The backdrop to these developments was one of the most politically turbulent periods in modern British history, a period of civil and religious conflict, the outcomes of which would determine the political and religious map of the United Kingdom for three centuries. The time-span covered in this volume is more or less coterminous with the period between union of the crowns of England and Scotland in 1603 and the accession of the Elector George of Hanover to the British crown in 1714. When James VI of Scotland acceded to the English throne, the concept of a single national church was unchallenged, the Pilgrim Fathers had not yet sailed for New England, and Britain was a minor player on the international scene. Any hopes that the peaceful accession of King James to the English throne would guarantee long-term political security did not survive his reign. Within less than a decade, the Thirty Years War engulfed Europe. During the 1640s, England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland were wracked by civil wars which brought down the monarchy and the established church (both the King and the Archbishop of Canterbury were executed) resulting in a period of de facto republican rule. By the time of Locke’s death in 1704, Britain had emerged from a century of political turmoil, which had altered the religious and political landscape in fundamental ways. Republicanism was now thinkable, religious dissent a fact of spiritual life and anticlericalism increasingly vocal. Memories of the Civil War and interregnum were now overlaid by memories of the more recent upheavals which dispossessed James II and VII and brought William III to power in 1688. Although the outward forms of monarchy remained in 1704, the balance of power had shifted towards Parliament. Theological debates of the kind occasioned by the predestinarian Calvinism of the Caroline era had long since given way to doctrinal quarrels of other kinds (most notably the Trinitarian debates of the 1690s). An accommodation of sorts between the established church and religious dissent was enshrined in the Toleration Act of 1689, while the Act of Settlement of 1701 had determined a Protestant succession for the future through the House of Hanover. In 1707 the Act of Union formalized the political union of England and Scotland which James I had failed to achieve in 1603. With the establishment of North American colonies, and the emergence of Britain as a sea power, the foundations of Britain’s colonial future had been laid, while the founding of the Bank of England marked the beginnings of the future capitalist economic order. The new-found economic prosperity of the late Stuart period, together with the rise of print culture, created the conditions of a new, more diverse cultural climate, which benefited from relaxation of censorship with the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695.
The chronologies of political and intellectual history rarely match, but by coincidence, the reigning dynasty of the seventeenth century could boast some of the most intellectual members of the ruling class of any European monarchy. Though no King Solomon, James VI and I was more intellectual than any reigning monarch before or since. His granddaughter, Electress Sophia of Brunswick Lüneberg, through whom the Hanoverians claimed their title to the British throne, might have been the most philosophical of British queens had she lived to succeed the last Stuart monarch, Queen Anne.1
The changes in British philosophy were no less profound than the political, social, economic, and religious changes witnessed in the seventeenth century. The rest of this chapter will attempt to characterize those changes by means of a brief survey of the different branches of philosophy, and of contemporary views on the nature of philosophy and philosophical innovation. I shall then discuss some of the other factors which affected the practice of philosophy, including style, social context, and religion.
We can gain a measure of quite how extensively philosophy changed in the course of the seventeenth century by comparing two philosophers from the opposite ends of the century: John Case (1539/46–1600) and Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), the last of the Elizabethans and one of the first philosophers of the Enlightenment. John Case was probably the most distinguished of English philosophers at the end of Elizabeth I’s reign.2 Case was an Aristotelian philosopher who had worked all his life at Oxford, where he had been linked to (though not always fully part of) the University. All his books (apart from his Praise of Musike) were discussions of Aristotelian philosophy, covering the branches of philosophy contained within the Aristotelian synthesis: logic, moral philosophy, physics, psychology, politics, economics. In the century following his death in 1600, the certainties of Case’s philosophical world dissolved. Already under pressure at the turn of the century, the Aristotelian world view and the philosophical synthesis which sustained it collapsed.
At the threshold of the next century, the Earl of Shaftesbury was one of the most promising of the up-coming new thinkers. Where Case’s philosophical formation was during what we might not unreasonably describe as the pax Elizabethiana of the late sixteenth century, Shaftesbury’s philosophical formation belongs to the late seventeenth century (he was tutored by John Locke). His first published philosophical work, An Inquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit (1699), anticipates the writings produced during the period of his most concentrated published output, the first decade of the eighteenth century. An Inquiry was, he claimed, a ‘more professed and formal’ exposition of what ‘lies concealed’ in his later work.3 Shaftesbury’s Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711) brings together both his Inquiry and works which he published between 1705 and 1710. Informally presented in a variety of genres and styles (epistles, soliloquys, essays), Shaftesbury’s Characteristics range freely over a range of topics: morality, politics, religion, politeness, art, and aesthetics. He thus anticipates so much of eighteenth-century philosophy in subject matter, tone, and style. In 1694 he described to Locke his idea of human-centred education, which drew eclectically from many sources.
What I count True Learning, and all that wee can profitt by, is to know our selves; what it is that makes us Low, and Base, Stubborn against Reason, to be Corrupted and Drawn away from Vertue, of Different Tempers, Inconstant, and Inconsistent with ourselves; to know how to bee always Friends with Providence…and to be Sociable and Good toward all men…Whilst I can get any thing that teaches this, whilst I can search any Age or Language that can assist me here, Whilst Such are Philosophers, and Such Philosophy whence I can learn ought from of this kind, there is no Labour, no Studdy, no Learning that I would not undertake.4
As philosophers, Shaftesbury and Case could not be more divergent—the one an academic, writing in Latin primarily for a university-student readership, the other a layman, writing in English for other gentlemen of his class. The first was bound by rules of formal academic disputation and exchange, where his subject matter was dictated by another text, or set of texts (Aristotle’s works). Reading was an important part of the culture of a gentleman like Shaftesbury, but not bookishness. Like other educated men of his class, he had respect for classical antiquity, but he was not bound to the authority of a single author. Case studiously covered all the branches of philosophy, Shaftesbury knew no such obligation. Physics (natural philosophy) does not figure prominently among his interests, but for Case it was an essential part of the philosophical corpus. Although Case ranged beyond the letter of Aristotle to incorporate topical themes in his discussion of politics, economics, and ethics, the content and scope of these discussions is set by Aristotle. Shaftesbury, by contrast, considered ‘the most ingenious way of becoming foolish is by a system’.5 Unfettered by the requirements of the teaching curriculum, he was exposed to a wide range of intellectual and cultural influences, which he was free to explore. His explorations took him to entirely new areas, such as aesthetics and art theory. His chosen preferred medium, the ‘miscellany’ of short essays, suited the polite conversation of an essentially social milieu.
The contrast between Case and Shaftesbury far exceeds the shared ground of their interest in philosophy. But the contrast is instructive, because it provides an indicator (albeit a very general one) of the changes which transformed British philosophy in the seventeenth century—these include changes in both the content of philosophical enquiry, and the manner in which it was pursued. Of course the Shaftesbury–Case polarity does not reflect every new development in philosophy, but it does register the decline of the Aristotelian synthesis, the impact of other ancient philosophies such as Stoicism, Platonism, and Scepticism, the emergence of the vernacular as the language of philosophy, the relocation of philosophy outside the academies into more public social spaces, shifts of emphasis which raised the profile of moral philosophy, and the emergence of new areas of philosophical interest (aesthetics). The absence of natural philosophy from Shaftesbury’s philosophical horizons is itself an indicator of the greater degree of specialization which accompanied the development of seventeenth-century philosophy and this was most marked in natural philosophy where the ground was laid for the emergence of modern science as a separate discipline. Where John Case had been equipped, as an Aristotelian, to write on natural philosophy (his Lapis philosophicus is a commentary on Aristotle’s Physics), by the late seventeenth century the development of ‘experimental philosophy’ required a degree of technical support and mathematical specialization which the philosophical all-rounder would be unlikely to have. The narrower scope of Shaftesbury’s philosophical interests is also indicative of the demise of the unity of philosophy embodied in the Aristotelian synthesis.
Whatever their differences, one thing on which Case and Shaftesbury could have agreed was a broad definition of philosophy as the love of wisdom. This ancient definition was also the most widespread in the period.6 As Thomas Stanley avers on the title page of his History of Philosophy (1655), philosophers are ‘those on whom the Attribute Wise was conferred’. Another commonplace definition was Cicero’s claim that philosophy is the knowledge of the causes of things human and divine.7 Although everyone agreed on the centrality of reason to philosophy, Hobbes was unusual in conceiving of philosophy as coterminous with rationality. ‘Philosophy’, he writes in De corpore, ‘is natural reason, innate to every man’ (‘Ratio naturalis, in omne homine innata’). More particularly, ‘Philosophy is the knowledge, acquired through correct reasoning, of effects or phenomena from the conception of their causes or generations and also of generations which could exist from the knowledge of their effects’.8
Although, throughout our period, all branches of philosophy were affected by the same general trend, the displacement of Aristotelianism as the common core of philosophy, the subdivisions of philosophy established by Aristotle did not change. In logic, Aristotelianism maintained its hold, thanks to the university curriculum.9 The main challengers to traditional Aristotelian logic were Ramus, Bacon, and Descartes. The earliest attempts to change things were first by Pierre de la Ramée (Ramus) in the sixteenth century. Ramus considered dialectic applicable to all branches of knowledge and gave it a central place in the arts curriculum. But in reshaping of the arts curriculum he used a simplified logic, amalgamating dialectic and rhetoric, and instituting the use of method as an aid to study. One of the influential adjustments he made concerned dialectics, or the part of logic which was traditionally regarded as dealing with probable arguments used in rhetoric, as distinct from the type of arguments used in the demonstrative sciences.10 Francis Bacon’s Novum organum (or New Organon) (1620) was explicitly pitched against the bastion of Aristotelian logic, the Organon, with the intention of laying the basis of a logic of discovery. Although an English epitome was printed in 1676 Bacon’s Novum organum did not succeed in supplanting the logical instruments of university instruction, but its methodological principles would be taken up by experimental natural philosophers. The main instrument of Cartesian logic was the so-called Port Royal logic of the French Jansenists, Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, Logique ou l’art de penser, 1662. The Port Royal logic enjoyed huge success across Europe as well as Britain.11 As its title indicates, it presents logic as the art of thinking from basic principles, rather than the art of reasoning or disputing well. The authors explicitly distance their work from Aristotle and Ramus, presenting their work as ‘logic freed from the Pedantic dust of the schools’. Emphasizing the practical character of logic, and the importance of experiment in demonstration, and of a method which proceeds from simple things to more complex, they align themselves with Descartes, by quoting the four rules of method from his Discours. The decisive shift away from scholastic logic is evident in the sources which William Wotton recommends for logic at the end of the century: ‘Des Cartes’s Discourse of Method, Mr. Lock’s Essay of Humane Understanding, and Tschirnhaus’s Medicina Mentis’.12
In ethics the rejection of Aristotelianism was no less transformational even though Aristotelian assumptions persisted in much moral philosophy and Aristotle’s ethical writings continued to be used in the universities. Seventeenth-century ethical theory is characterized by a confidence in reason as a guide in ethical matters. In his Academia scientarium (1687) David Abercromby defines ‘Ethica’, as, ‘that Art which directs us how to act always conformably to right reason’.13 The view that moral principles are innate was widespread, and was developed in important ways by the more Platonist thinkers, notably Cudworth who argued for the existence of moral absolutes, existing independently of the mind and the physical world.
The ideal of a rational ethics finds its fullest expression in natural law theory, which is based on the idea that moral principles are discoverable naturally by human reason. For some, indeed, reason is natural law. The concept of natural law was not new in the period. An influential figure here is the Spanish Jesuit Francisco Suarez, whose major synthesis of scholastic moral and legal theory, Tractatus de legibus, ac Deo legislatore (1612) was foundational for discussions of natural law and a frequent point of reference in political debates (see Chapter 6).14 Natural law theory was revitalized and reconfigured by Hugo Grotius (see Chapter 3), for whom the fundamental principles of natural law were not of themselves moral, but the means by which moral norms might be deduced and moral obligation established. After Grotius, natural law was developed and applied in different ways by Hobbes, Locke, and Cumberland, through whom it became a central strand of political philosophy. Natural law theorists aspired to found a science of ethics, based on clear, universal principles, whence the norms of conduct can be deduced with mathematical certainty. This invocation of a mathematical model of deductive reasoning was influenced by the new mechanical philosophy of Descartes. However, the confidence in reason which it implies was tempered by increased realization of the limited power of reason to guide and motivate virtuous behaviour.
Another characteristic feature of seventeenth-century moral philosophy is the prominence accorded to the emotions (or passions) in moral obligation and moral action.15 Traditionally, the passions came within the purview of physiology, and there is a long history, in both Stoic and Christian traditions, of regarding the passions negatively, as turbulent, disruptive forces in need of control by reason. The Aristotelian tradition, however, regarded them as integral to a life of virtue. The renewed attention to the passions may be linked to a revival of interest in Stoicism and also in Platonism (see Chapter 3). But more than anything, it was influenced by Descartes’s Passions de l’âme [Passions of the Soul] (1649). Descartes, too treats the passions as physical, and he claims that he discusses them as a natural philosopher (en physicien), not as a moral theorist. Nevertheless, his account of the passions focuses attention on their role in achieving the good life. Cartesian passions are corporeal motions which affect the soul, ‘those perceptions, sensations or emotions of the soul…which are caused, maintained and strengthened by some movement of the [animal] spirits’16 which intermediate between body and soul, enabling the soul to influence the body in order to maintain the well-being of both mind and body as a unity. The passions are therefore not negative impulses to be suppressed, but ‘they are all by nature good’.17 Henry More offers an essentially Cartesian account of the passions in his Enchiridion ethicum (1668), in which he develops the notion that moral awareness has a physical dimension, by positing what he calls a ‘boniform faculty’, which anticipates Shaftesbury’s notion of ‘moral sense’ (see Chapter 7).
The revival of interest in Epicureanism had an impact on the development of new ethical theories, such as those of Shaftesbury and Locke, which accord the senses an essential role. Of particular importance was the Epicurean notion that the pleasure is the highest good, which was adapted especially but not exclusively by natural law theorists to account for motivation and the discovery of ethical norms. Shaftesbury’s social conception of ethics as ‘the Philosophy of Manners’ is anticipated by Thomas Stanley, who expresses the view that ethics is concerned with conduct in general.18 Thomas Blount concurred that moral philosophy ‘consists in the knowledge and practise of civility and good behavior’.19
The branch of philosophy which underwent the most fundamental transformation in the seventeenth century was natural philosophy. At the beginning of the century the parameters of the discipline were set by Aristotle’s Physics and biological works, but also De anima, which was studied as part of natural philosophy. By 1700 Newton’s Principia had opened the way for the emergence of science as a separate discipline from philosophy, setting the seal on the abandonment of the Aristotelian philosophy of nature. Drawing on the 1700 Oxford lectures on natural philosophy by the Newtonian John Keill, John Harris declared that the only true natural philosophers were experimenters and ‘the mechanical philosophers who explicate all phenomena of nature by matter and motion’.20 The decline of Aristotelian natural philosophy is closely linked to new discoveries and developments in astronomy, medicine, and mechanics, which collectively undermined the authority of Aristotelian physics. But it was especially the advent of powerful alternative theories, in the form of Cartesian physics and the revival of Epicurean atomism, which prepared the way for Boyle and Newton.
Proponents of new natural philosophies such as Gilbert, Charleton, Cudworth, and Viscount Stair adopt the term ‘physiologia’ or physiology for natural philosophy. According to Stair, ‘physiology is the knowledge of phenomena of nature and the sufficient causes and effects for its perfection. It is also called physics or natural science.’21 (Stair himself was a convert from Aristotelianism to the new philosophy: having started his career teaching a ‘thoroughly scholastic’ curriculum in Glasgow, he ended up as a proponent of experimental philosophy). With the shift to empirical methods of enquiry, the scope of natural philosophy changed. As new philosophies of nature shifted attention away from the Aristotelianism onto the physical world (‘phenomena of nature’), study of the soul, which once came within the purview of natural philosophy, became the subject of ‘pneumatology’—a branch of metaphysics.
There was a discernible revival in scholastic metaphysics in the earlier part of the century. The Disputationes metaphysicae (1597) by the Spanish Jesuit Francisco Suarez was especially influential. Suarez’s metaphysics was taken up by Protestants and Catholics alike, and set the mould for instruction in metaphysics for centuries.22 However, overall the status of metaphysics was in decline. Increasingly, metaphysics came to be derided as ‘abstruse’ or ‘useless’ knowledge, and it was often associated with scholasticism. The Aristotelian origins of metaphysics explain why, for the most part, the principal authorities on metaphysics continue to be the Aristotelian and scholastic philosophers of the previous century: Abercromby cites Vasquez, Suarez, and Valentia. A late English champion of metaphysics was the neo-Aristotelian John Sergeant, who attributes the failings of contemporary philosophy to their ignorance of metaphysics. In his Solid Philosophy Asserted (1697), Sergeant defended metaphysics ‘that most Solid, most Clear and most Incomparable Science’, which supplies both ‘the Evidence and Certainty of the Principles’ on which other sciences depend, as well as dealing with spiritual beings and substantial forms.23
The seventeenth century saw the bifurcation of metaphysics into two distinct domains: into the science of being, on the one hand, which was concerned with general terminology and principles, and into ‘pneumatology’ on the other, which concerns itself with spiritual beings. This development, which has sixteenth-century origins,24 is implicit in Bacon’s differentiation between philosophia prima (axioms) and natural theology (which deals with angels and spirits). David Abercromby incorporates the dual definition of metaphysics in his Academia scientiarum (1687): one aspect of ‘Metaphysick’ deals with spiritual or immaterial beings and the supernatural, ‘Beings, as abstracted from all matter; and is so called, because it treats of things somewhat besides, above, or beyond Nature’. But metaphysics is also concerned with ontological questions, with Essence, Existence, and ‘three properties of every Being, its Unity, Goodness, and Truth’.25 William Wotton’s idea of metaphysics is of the former type: ‘Metaphysicks is properly that Science which teaches us those Things that are out of the Sphere of Matter and Motion, and is conversant about God, and Spirits, and Incorporeal Substances’.26
Despite the rhetoric of rejection of metaphysics (Shaftesbury doubted whether metaphysics was worthy of the name philosophy), new philosophy required new metaphysics, even if by another name. Both Bacon and Hobbes retain a place for philosophia prima in the architecture of philosophy, albeit in radically reconfigured form. In Locke, the place of metaphysics is taken by his epistemological classification of knowledge in terms of relations between word, idea, and thing. William Wotton treats Locke’s Essay as a substitute for metaphysics. Wotton also cites among other modern sources for metaphysics Descartes’s Meditations and Malebranche’s Recherche de la verité.27 Wotton nevertheless questioned whether modern writers had anything new to say on metaphysics, which the ancients had not already said.
An alternative to the Aristotelian tradition can also be found in Platonizing thinkers. An early example of Platonist metaphysics produced in England was Contemplationes metaphysicæ (1648) by the Bohemian immigrant, George Ritschel, a member of the Hartlib circle, who was for a short time at Oxford, where his book was published. According to Ritschel, metaphysics deals with the being of things (esse rerum) which derive from God. Metaphysics supplies the axioms and ideas which obtain in all arts and discipline. He compares it to a vital spirit which irrigates all sciences. His book, fundamentally Neoplatonic in its basic assumptions and terminology, consists largely of a discussion of abstract terms.28 The only major work of metaphysics produced in Britain in the period, Henry More’s Enchiridion metaphysicum (1671) is a pneumatology, or science of spirits. More explicitly excluded the traditional subject matter of metaphysics as the science of ‘being qua being’. For More, metaphysics is a kind of ‘natural theology’, and yields a proper understanding of natural philosophy. Shaftesbury may have had More in mind when he declared that he could not see the point of ‘defining of material and immaterial substances’, dismissing such philosophy as ‘delusive and infatuating on account of its magnificent pretensions’.29 As the study of soul, psychology belonged within the domain of pneumatology. Perhaps one of the most interesting developments here is discussion of ideas of consciousness and unconsciousness, which owe something to Cartesianism, and figure particularly in Locke’s conception of the person. Another important discussion comes in the philosophy of Ralph Cudworth which draws on Plotinus.30
The changes and modifications that we can track in the different branches of philosophy did not take place without comment. On the contrary, both traditionalists and innovators were very conscious that theirs was an age of philosophical innovation. Writing a generation later than Francis Bacon, the first English historian of philosophy, Thomas Stanley, had no doubt that philosophy had made great progress, and that this was measurable by the yardstick of history.
Nor is it unseasonable at this time to examine the Tenents of old Philosophers, when so great variety of Opinions daily spring up; some of which…being of late invention will receive addition, when advanced to such height wee look down to the bottom from which Philosophy took her first rise, and see how great a progress she hath made, whose beginnings are almost inscrutable.31
In his Baconiana, the future Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Tenison, celebrated Francis Bacon as the supreme example of the trend for philosophical innovation which he saw as characteristic of the period.
There lived in part of the last, and this, Century, many memorable Advancers of Philosophical Knowledg. I mean not here such as Patricius, or Telesius, Brunus, Severinus the Dane, or Campanella. These, indeed, departed from some Errors of the Ancients, but they did not frame any solid Hypothesis of their own. They only spun new Cobwebs, where they had brush’d down the old. Nay, I intend not, in this place, either de Chart [Descartes], or Gassendi. They were, certainly, great Men, but they appeared somewhat later, and descended into the depths of Philosophy, after the Ice had been broken by others. And those I take to have been chiefly Copernicus, Father Paul the Venetian, Galileo, Harvey, Gilbert, and the Philosopher before-remembred, Sir Francis Bacon, who, if all his Circumstances be duly weigh’d, may seem to excel them all.32
In this extract, Tenison situates Bacon as the first among equals in a constellation of innovators: Nicolaus Copernicus, Paolo Sarpi, Galileo Galilei, William Harvey, and William Gilbert. Tenison also acknowledges, in a back-handed sort of way, the Italians Francesco Patrizi, Giordano Bruno, Tommaso Campanella, the Dane Petrus Severinus (Peder Soerensen), and the French philosophers René Descartes and Pierre Gassendi. Tenison’s assessment of Bacon’s position among philosophical innovators of the seventeenth century represents a retrospective view from a particular point in the seventeenth century. (Well before Tenison made his pronouncement on Bacon’s pre-eminence, the Royal Society had established the credentials of its own methodology, claiming to be the scion of Sir Francis Bacon, whose experimental philosophy was set in opposition to Cartesianism). In acknowledging Bacon Tenison reminds us that Europe had its innovators just as much as Britain. Furthermore the culture of innovation to which Bacon contributed was not new with the seventeenth century, but can be traced back to the high Renaissance. Bacon himself contributed to the idea that progress had been made since ancient times—albeit that the advances in human knowledge were slow and limited.
Nowadays it is customary to regard Descartes as the watershed between ‘old’ and ‘new’ philosophy. Although seventeenth-century philosophers were conscious of the philosophical innovations of their age, by no means all of them would have agreed with this modern view of the origins of philosophical modernity. For one thing, there were different datings of the watershed between old and new. Descartes’s older contemporary, Rudolphus Goclenius, was no less certain that the watershed philosopher was Socrates, that all philosophy prior to Socrates was philosophia vetus and all post-Socratean philosophy counted as philosophia nova.33 Leibniz’s category of ‘recentiores’ extends back to the fifteenth century. In its turn, scholastic philosophy had its own clear division between the via moderna of Ockham, Buridan, and Marsilius of Inghen and the via antiqua of Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus, a division dating from 1425.34 It is certainly the case that philosophers of the seventeenth century had a strong sense of modernity but they were also conscious of tradition, and subscription to new ideas did not necessarily mean abandonment of the old.
The idea of setting the ancients against the moderns to weigh their relative merits is a trope which only comes into vogue at the end of the period, the classic discussion being William Wotton’s Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning (1694). It was more common in the seventeenth century to de-emphasize the differences: a more cogent way of understanding the relationship between philosophers past and present seemed to be to underline the similarities between the present and the past. Many, like Thomas Stanley, believed much contemporary philosophy was a rehash of ancient philosophy, ‘raked out of the ruines of antiquity, which ought to be restored to their first owner’.35 Nicholas Hill describes his Philosophia epicurea (1601), which revives ancient atomism, as ‘Novantique philosophy’, that is ‘neither new nor old’ (nec nova nec vetus). The term ‘novantique’ was more commonly used to signify a conjunction of ancients and moderns, where contemporary philosophers, as novantiqui, were presented as revivers of ancient philosophies: thus Descartes was the new Democritus, Hobbes a modern Strato. A supreme exponent of the novantique approach was Ralph Cudworth, whose True Intellectual System of the Universe is a vast store house of ancient philosophical doctrines with which he correlates contemporary philosophy. As late as 1702, in his immensely popular Lexicon Technicum John Harris who praises Newton for opening ‘a New World in Natural Philosophy’, still finds room for Hermetic Philosophy, and lists the Grecians and Phoenecians among the originators of ‘Mechanical philosophy’.36
For Richard Burthogge the conjunction of ancient and modern betokens universality, as he indicates in the title of his Organum vetus & novum, or, A Discourse of Reason and Truth (1678). Burthogge’s title finds an echo in Jean Baptiste Du Hamel’s Philosophia vetus et nova (1678). First published in Paris, this was printed in London in 1685 and was specifically designed for teaching (‘ad usum scholae accommodata’). Du Hamel’s earlier De consensu veteris et novæ philosophiæ (1663) was also published in England for university use, since it was printed in Oxford in 1669. This sets Plato, Aristotle, and Epicurus alongside Descartes, and includes discussion of chemical philosophy.
Rather than opposing modern to ancient philosophy, it was more common to register differences in terms of schools of philosophy. Most commonly that difference was expressed in terms of difference from Aristotelianism and the philosophy of the schools. An example is Philosophia naturalis by the Dutchman Adrian Heereboord, whose textbooks were widely used in the mid-seventeenth century. Heereboord identifies three schools of philosophy: Aristotelianism, Ramism (or anti-Aristotelians), and new philosophy (‘recentiores’). Each one is characterized by a progressively reductive account of the scope and subdivisions of philosophy: Aristotelians deal with the full range of Aristotelian philosophy from physics through to politics, ethics, logic. The Ramists cover logic, physics, and ethics. The ‘recentiores’ (Descartes, Regius, and Berigardus) focus on physics—though Descartes also treats metaphysics and method.37 Heereboord’s classificatory scheme testifies to the pervasive hold of Aristotle’s philosophy well into the seventeenth century. But the two alternatives which he lists reflect the changes taking place. A late example of differentiation between schools of philosophy in terms of adherence to Aristotle comes in Academia scientiarum (1687) of Boyle’s admirer David Abercromby, who defines natural philosophy as ‘the knowledge of Natural Bodies, or of the Natural Causes of Things’. He then distinguishes between two schools of philosophy according to their principles: Aristotelian Philosophy, which ‘acknowledgeth three Principles of every thing, Matter, Form, and Privation’, and ‘the New Philosophy’, which holds ‘but two simple Principles of all things, Matter, and Motion; that, as the Material Cause; this, as the Efficient’.38
In his Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltoniana (1654), Walter Charleton follows Gassendi in subdividing philosophy into four ‘General Orders’, three of which integrate the old and new in some way. The ‘Renovators’ (such as Ficino, and Copernicus) revive ancient philosophy; the ‘Electors’ or eclectics ‘cull and select out of others’ (Fernel and Sennert); while the ‘Assertors of Philosophical Liberty’ respect no particular tradition but subject all philosophies to the same rational examination: they ‘ponder the Reasons of all, but the Reputation of none, and then conform their assent when the Arguments are nervous and convincing’.39 The only ‘order’ of philosophers to be bound to tradition are the Pedants (Aristotelians and Scotists). Charleton expresses the anti-dogmatic spirit of contemporary philosophy by invoking the idea of libertas philosophandi or ‘philosophical liberty’ to express the freedom to choose between different schools of philosophy.40 On the whole, when asserting their freedom to philosophize seventeenth-century philosophers exhibit a strong sense of intellectual pluralism, rather than outright rejection of particular philosophies. But the claim to philosophical freedom is to be encountered in specifically anti-Aristotelian contexts, for example in Nathaniel Carpenter’s Philosophia libera (1621) or in Bacon’s assertion of the right to question the authority of Aristotle in Advancement of Learning.41 Libertas philosophandi was also construed to mean freedom from theology, as for example by James Dalrymple, in his Physiologia nova experimentalis. Thus interpreted, the freedom to philosophize, gave rise to the idea of the philosophical ‘libertine’ or freethinker.
Changes in the scope and content of philosophy were accompanied by changes of a different order which were not of themselves philosophical, but had a profound effect on the practice and content of philosophy. Firstly there were social changes which affected participation in philosophy. The seventeenth-century relocation of philosophy outside the academies goes hand in hand with the emergence of a new type of philosopher who was neither a cleric nor a university teacher.42 Following Herbert of Cherbury, we might call him the philosophical layman (laicus). Although some of these laici were philosophical aristocrats (Bacon, Herbert, Boyle, and Shaftesbury), laicization increasingly meant democratization. The most distinguished thinkers of the period were drawn from among the ranks of professional men, who were advisers and tutors to magnates and their families. Hobbes was an employee of the Earls of Devonshire and Locke was, for a time, a member of the household of the first Earl of Shaftesbury. Several philosophers had a medical background: Locke studied medicine with Thomas Sydenham, and Walter Charleton was a qualified physician, as were Richard Burthogge and Francis Glisson. There were at least four philosophers were who were professional lawyers (Sir Francis Bacon, James Dalrymple, Viscount Stair, Sir Matthew Hale, and Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh). It is quite likely that many clergymen were frustrated philosophers, there being no employment for philosophers: for example John Norris and Arthur Collier. The social relocation of philosophy outside the universities helps explain the appearance of women among the ranks of philosophers.43 As with their male counterparts, the first women philosophers emerge from the ranks of the nobility: Anne Conway was a Viscountess, Margaret Cavendish a Duchess. Subsequently, British women philosophers are drawn from the educated middle classes: Damaris Masham, Mary Astell, and Catharine Trotter Cockburn.
Another aspect of the extra-mural move of philosophy was, literally, the new spaces which served as fora for philosophical discussion. There had always been circles where philosophical ideas were discussed in a non-academic context, and the seventeenth century is no exception. Although Britain lacked the lay academies which were such a strong feature of sixteenth-century Italy, new ideas flourished in a number of notable intellectual groupings such as the circle of the ‘Wizard Earl’ of Northumberland and the Welbeck circle to which Hobbes belonged. In the second half of the seventeenth century the development of a ‘lay’ philosophical culture was boosted by the rise of the coffee-house and the development of print culture, and with it the increasing availability of books, and the rise of journals. Two examples of philosophical clubs which started to appear in the second half of the century are James Harrington’s ‘Rota Club’ which was set up in 1659 for discussing political ideas, and the ‘Dry Club’ formed by Locke and his associates after he returned from exile.
The philosophical controversies of the latter part of the century, especially those provoked by Hobbes, Locke, and the freethinkers, reflect this widening social participation in philosophy. Although the philosophical calibre of these debates was highly variable, they nevertheless bear testimony to a strong culture of intellectual engagement with philosophy among the general public. These debates drew interventions from a whole variety of people, from clergymen to merchants. Increasingly the contributors were non-clerical and non-academic. By the end of the century women began to contribute as well as men. It was in these circumstances that Mary Astell, Damaris Masham, and Catharine Cockburn’s philosophical views appeared in print. However, broadening social participation in philosophy did not mean that there were no constraints on women. Social convention required anonymity in publication. Astell, Masham, and Cockburn all published anonymously. Anne Conway eschewed print publication altogether, but the convention of anonymity was observed when her book was published posthumously. Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, is the great exception, since she not only dispensed with anonymity, but published many works in her own right. However, the price of this was public ridicule.
Further evidence of philosophical interest among the general public may be gathered from library lists. Gentlemen’s libraries of the period show a broad range of philosophical texts from Aristotle’s works to the latest European philosophy. One example is the library available to Hobbes at Hardwick Hall; another is the library of Lord Conway. The chronological listing of acquisitions in the Conway library catalogue enables us to see just how up to the minute the philosophy accessions were. To judge by the books in his library, Sir Kenelm Digby kept abreast of new developments in philosophy. As one might expect from an eclectic thinker like Digby, his books included Aristotle (Erasmus’ Greek edition) and modern scholastics (Gilbert Jack and Thomas Barlow) as well as the works of his Paris contemporaries, Descartes and Hobbes. He also owned Spinoza’s introduction to Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy and a lot of Platonist texts (editions of Plotinus and Plato), as well as Sextus Empiricus. Among the moderns we find Bacon, Boyle, Gassendi, Charleton, More’s apology for Descartes, and six volumes of Margaret Cavendish’s works. Libraries were not the prerogative of gentlemen: one of the largest in the late seventeenth century was the library of the Rotterdam merchant Benjamin Furly, which was frequented by Locke during his exile. Clerics too had philosophical books, and they too read philosophy. Archbishop Tillotson’s library included works by Gassendi, Descartes, Herbert of Cherbury, Bacon, Cudworth, Culverwell, Boyle, Charleton, Henry More, and Hobbes, as well as Aristotle, Plato, Plotinus, Glisson, Campanella. The largest clerical library, Bishop Stillingfleet’s library of 10,000 books, is rich in philosophical resources. This was acquired by Narcissus Marsh for the library which he founded in Dublin in 1701. Book ownership patterns also reveal that partisanship is a poor guide to private collections. As one would expect, owners of Hobbes’s writings included his admirers, for example Thomas Lockey whose manuscript copy of Human Nature was used for the unauthorized edition of 1650. But copies of his works are found in the libraries of those hostile to him, like Ralph Cudworth, James Nairn, and Francis Atterbury.44 Part of the reason for this is that in order to refute your foe, you have to read him. Although the contents of libraries provide some indication of the availability of philosophical books, the picture is incomplete, since records are incomplete and they were vulnerable to depredation in times of civil unrest. In his An Humble Apologie for Learning and Learned Men (1653) Edward Waterhouse laments the depredations suffered by ‘famous Libraries of Our own Nation,’ in ‘Our late unhappy Wars’. One major collection lost in this way was the Conway library of some 11,000 books, which was a casualty of the Irish rebellion in 1641.45
Wider social participation which contributed to the development of lively general philosophical culture brought with it other non-philosophical developments which affected the character of seventeenth-century philosophy. The most important were changes in style, the adoption of the vernacular as the language of philosophy and development of modes of philosophizing which did not require the highly specialist technical training necessary in the traditional philosophy of the schools. Here, Descartes led the way, with his direct appeal to the philosophical amateur, that is the reader without a formal academic training, who would require only common sense in order to follow his arguments. His choice of his native French for both his more popular as well as for his more technical philosophical writings widened the social spectrum of his audience. The success of Cartesianism, despite hostility within the universities, may be attributed, at least in part, to its take-up by the non-traditional philosophical readership which it was able to reach by this means. It is no coincidence that most of the first female philosophers found their way to philosophy via Descartes. Latin was still in use as the international language of philosophy, but it was becoming the second language: Henry More wrote in English, but translated his Opera omnia into Latin for international consumption. Robert Boyle, too had his writings translated for the same purpose. Thomas Hobbes broke his general rule of writing in Latin when he wanted to address a more general audience, as he did when he wrote Leviathan in English. The Cambridge Platonists were among the first philosophers to publish primarily in English. In so doing, they coined many English philosophical terms, some of which form part of our modern philosophical vocabulary. Philosophers also begin to adopt new forms (sometimes experimentally) for communicating with a wider philosophical public—the essay, the dialogue, and even the philosophical romance. Locke addressed his Essay not to the learned, but to ‘polite company’, and appealed to individual experience. Henry More’s Divine Dialogues was designed for a non-specialist readership. The use of fiction pioneered by Bacon’s New Atlantis was continued by Nathaniel Ingelo and Joseph Glanvill.46
Finally, something should be said about religion, which was an important part of the context in which people philosophized in early modern times. Religion was central to daily lives and at the heart of contemporary politics. Across Europe, the seventeenth century was a period of religious strife and fragmentation. In the view of Locke, religion was ‘a perpetual foundation of war and contention’ which he held responsible for the devastating wars in which ‘coals from the alter’ have kindled ‘all those flames that have made such havoc and desolation in Europe, and have not been quenched but with the blood of so many millions’.47 In the British Isles as in Europe major tensions divided Protestants from Catholics and anti-Catholicism is a persistent theme in both politics and religion throughout the seventeenth century. But tensions also divided Protestantism itself. In the earlier part of our period, the established churches of England and Scotland were at best uncomfortable coalitions of the Protestant groups, significant numbers of whom (though to varying degrees), did not think that the Reformation had been fully accomplished either in terms of creed and doctrine, or in terms of ecclesiastical polity. The struggles between these groups, between Episcopalians and Presbyterians on both sides of the border, as well as among different shades of Calvinists, and between the new sects which appeared mid-century, impacted on philosophy. The collapse of central ecclesiastical authority during the Civil Wars was followed by a proliferation of competing sects, resulting in major debates about the foundations of religious authority. Similarly, freethinkers flourished more easily after the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695.
Locke’s gloomy assessment of the deleterious impact of religion, however, is only one part of the picture. The religious history of the period is by no means entirely negative. Religion and philosophy were not opposed to one another, and religious authority was neither a unified monolith or uniformly antithetical towards philosophy. Seventeenth-century Britain produced fine examples of religious philosophy—in fact it was in this period that the term ‘philosophy of religion’ was introduced (by Cudworth). Much seventeenth-century philosophy was concerned with religious questions. In time-honoured tradition enshrined in the university curriculum, philosophy was allied to religion in subordinate relation as the ‘handmaid of theology’. In the university context, its main application was in ‘natural theology’ which aimed to provide rational arguments for theological tenets, without encroaching on the mysteries of faith (what Thomas Barlow called ‘the abstruse mysteryes…beyond the reach of Mans understanding’).48 The close proximity of philosophy and theology within the university curriculum goes some way towards explaining the intellectual ties between them. These will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter.
But to take a philosophical interest in religion was not the preserve of theologians. Almost every natural philosopher of the period—e.g. Charleton, Boyle, Wilkins—wrote on religion. Beyond the universities, philosophers continued to discuss a raft of traditional topics which originated in the domain of natural theology and ethics, ranging from the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, to free will and necessity. These topics were as important in the new philosophies, as the traditional philosophy of the schools. Francis Bacon’s separation of philosophy and theology did not diminish his respect for the former. Hobbes, too, presumed to philosophize about God. Natural philosophers like Boyle regarded their enterprise as thoroughly godly. The lecture series which Boyle endowed by his will (the so-called Boyle lectures) was devoted to the apologetic end of demonstrating the compatibility of philosophy and religion and refuting atheism. The main changes to the way philosophers discussed religion were in the philosophical terms of the discussion, rather than the topics discussed. But new themes do emerge in the later half of the century: one was religious toleration, another was the relationship of natural reason to religious belief. For their part, theologians made it their business to assess philosophical arguments in terms of their implications for theology and religious belief. The most famous examples, to be discussed later, were Bramhall’s controversy with Hobbes about liberty and necessity, and Stillingfleet’s controversy with Locke in which he expressed concern about the sceptical consequences of Locke’s position, especially for the doctrine of the Trinity. The pervasiveness of religion in all areas of seventeenth-century thought makes it impossible to extract it as a separate theme.
In seventeenth-century Britain, philosophy underwent transformational change which affected all thinkers of the period. The decline of Aristotelianism, the changes in style and medium, and the shift to wider participation in philosophy took place over the course of time. These changes were not confined to the British context. And, as we shall see, in this period, British philosophers begin to make formative contributions to the development of European philosophy. In order to understand and assess their contribution, it is important not to overlook the continuities between old and new. One area where the interplay of tradition and innovation is most apparent is in the philosophy taught at the universities, which is the subject of Chapter 2.
1 Sophie was the interlocutor of Leibniz at the Hanoverian court, as was her daughter, Sophie Charlotte, Queen of Prussia. The Electress’s sister, Elisabeth von der Pfalz, correspondent of Descartes, was one of the foremost women philosophers of the age.
2 On Case see C. B. Schmitt, John Case and Aristotelianism in Renaissance England (Kingston: McGill Queens, 1983).
3 Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 399.
4 Lord Ashley to Locke, in The Correspondence of John Locke, ed. E. S. de Beer, 8 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976–89), vol. 5, p. 153.
5 Shaftesbury, Characteristics, ed. Klein, p. 130.
6 See, for example, Johnnes Micraelius, Lexicon philosophicum (Stetin, 1662; first published Jena, 1653), p. 1003; cf. Antoine Le Roy, Floretum philosophicum (Paris, 1649), p. 174 (both produced in Lessico intelletuale). David Abercromby, Academia scientiarum (London, 1687), p. 152.
7 J. A. Scherzer, Vademecum sive manuale philosophicum, ristampa (Lipsia, 1675), p. 155. (Source: Lessico Intelletuale.)
8 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), ch. 16. Cf. De corpore, 1.2, p. 2 (‘Philosophia est effectuum sive phaenomenon ex conceptis eorum causis seu generationibus, et rursus generationum quae esse possunt, ex cognitis effectibus per rectam rationcinationem acquisita cognitio’) and 1.8, p. 7 (‘Subjectae Philosophiae, sive materia circa quam versatur, est corpus omne cuius generatio aliqua concipi …’).
9 On seventeenth-century logic, see Gabriel Nuchelmans, ‘Logic in the Seventeenth Century’, in CHSP; E. Jennifer Ashworth, Language and Logic in the Post-Medieval Period (Dordrecht: Reidel Publishing Company, 1974); W. S. Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500–1700 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956); Lisa Jardine, ‘Humanistic logic’, in CHRP; Marco Sgarbi, The Aristotelian Tradition and the Rise of British Empiricism: Logic and Epistemology in the British Isles (1570–1689) (Dordrecht: Springer, 2013).
10 Ashworth, Language and Logic, ch. 6; Sachiko Kusukawa, ‘The Reception of Melanchthon in Sixteenth-Century Cambridge and Oxford’, in Günter Frank and Kees Meerhoff (eds), Melanchthon und Europa (Stuttgart: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 2002), pp. 233–54.
11 It was revised several times, the most important being the 1683 edition: Introduction, to Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, Logic, or, The Art of Thinking, ed. Jill Vance Buroker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. ix. It grafts Cartesian theory of knowledge onto the older Aristotelian structure of the categories. Antoine Le Grand’s Institutio philosophiæ (London, 1672) is another source for Cartesian logic. It was reprinted twice and translated as An Entire Body of Philosophy (London, 1694).
12 William Wotton, Reflections on Ancient and Modern Learning (London, 1694), p. 156.
13 Abercromby, Academia, p. 68. On seventeenth-century moral philosophy see especially Stephen Darwall, The British Moralists and the Internal ‘ought’, 1640–1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Terence Irwin, The Development of Ethics: A Historical and Critical Study, vol. 2: From Suarez to Rousseau (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
14 An edition was printed in London in 1679. On scholastic natural law theory, see Annabel S. Brett, Liberty, Right and Nature: Individual Rights in Later Scholastic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). On natural law in the seventeenth century, see Knud Haakonssen, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy from Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Knud Haakonssen (ed.), Grotius, Pufendorf and Modern Natural Law (Dartmouth & Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999).
15 See especially Susan James, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Susan James, ‘Reason, the Passions, and the Good Life’, in CHSP.
16 Descartes, Passions, CSMK, vol. 1, p. 338.
17 Descartes, Passions, CSMK, vol. 1, p. 403–4.
18 Thomas Stanley, The History of Philosophy: containing those on whom the attribute of wise was conferred (London, 1655), vol. 3, p. 226.
19 Thomas Blount, Glossographia (1656), s.v. ‘Philosophy’.
20 John Harris, Lexicon technicum (London, 1708), s.v. ‘Physiology’.
21 ‘Physiologia est cognitio phaenomenon naturae & causarum sufficientium & efficacium ad ea perficienda, dicitur etiam physica aut naturalis scientia’, James Dalrymple, Viscount Stair, Physiologia nova (Leiden, 1686), p. 10.
22 Richard Serjeantson, ‘Becoming a Philosopher in Seventeenth-Century Britain’, in Peter Anstey (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 25.
23 John Sergeant, Solid Philosophy Asserted (London, 1697), pp. 114 ff.
24 Charles Lohr, ‘Metaphysics’, in CHRP, p. 629. This more restricted view of the scope of metaphysics is associated with Lutherans like Scheibler.
25 Abercromby, Academia, p. 104.
26 Wotton, Reflections, p. 157.
27 He also cites Poyret’s Cogitationes de Deo and Van Velthuysen’s De initiis primae philosophiae. Plato is the ancient philosopher he cites for metaphysics.
28 Contemplationes metaphysicæ ex naturâ rerum & rectæ rationis lumine deductæ (Oxford, 1648). Ritschel cites Francis Bacon and Herbert of Cherbury. His ‘metaphysics was known to Cambridge Platonists’ More, Cudworth, and Smith, and was known in Europe by, among others, Jungius (Hamburg), Mersenne and Gassendi. See Martin Mulsow, ‘“Sociabilitas”: Zu einem Kontext der Campanella-Rezeption im 17. Jahrhundert’, Ricerche filosofiche e materiali storico-testuali’, Bruniana & Campanelliana, 1 (1995): 205–32, p. 214.
29 Shaftesbury, Soliloquy, in Characteristics, ed. Klein, p. 129.
30 See Udo Thiel, The Early Modern Subject: Self-Consciousness and Personal Identity from Descartes to Hume (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
31 Stanley, History, Preface.
32 Thomas Tenison, Baconiana (London, 1679), pp. 6–7.
33 Rudolph Goclenius, Lexicon philosophicum, quo tantam clave philosophiae fores aperiuntur (Frankfurt, 1613; repr. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1980), p. 819.
34 Pasnau, Metaphysical Themes, pp. 84–5. See also Pasnau’s discussion of the problem of historical categories, pp. 1–5. Also Roger Ariew, ‘Modernity’, in Robert Pasnau (ed.), The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), vol. 1, pp. 114–26.
35 Stanley, History, Preface.
36 John Harris, Lexicon technicum (London, 1708), s.v. ‘Hermetical’.
37 Adrian Heereboord, Philosophia naturalis (London, 1684).
38 Abercromby, Academia, pp. 152–5.
39 Charleton, Physiologia, 3.
40 ‘Libertas philosophandi’ is an idea associated with scepticism, and goes back to the Middle Ages, and ancient scepticism. See Ian Maclean, ‘The “Sceptical Crisis” Reconsidered: Galen, Rational Medicine and the Libertas Philosophandi’, Early Science and Medicine, 11 (2006), pp. 247–74; and M. A. Stewart, ‘“Libertas philosophandi”: From Natural to Speculative Philosophy’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 40 (1994): 29–46.
41 Nathaniel Carpenter, Philosophia libera (Frankfurt, 1621; Oxford, 1622); Francis Bacon, Advancement of Learning, ed. Michael Kiernan (Oxford, 2002), p. 28. Also Pierre Charron who makes ‘liberté d’esprit’ one of the four pillars of wisdom, except in matters of religion: Charron, De la sagesse (Paris, 1630).
42 See Richard Tuck, ‘The Institutional Setting’, in CHSP, and Richard Serjeantson, ‘Becoming a Philosopher in Seventeenth Century Britain’, in Anstey (ed.), Oxford Handbook, pp. 9–32.
43 Jacqueline Broad, Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
44 See, for example, M. C. T. Simpson, ‘The Library of the Reverend James Nairn (1629–1678): Scholarly Book Collecting in Restoration Scotland’, Ph.D. diss. (University of Edinburgh, 1987); Feingold, ‘Mathematical Sciences’, HUO, vol. 4, p. 419.
45 Sarah Hutton, Anne Conway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 21.
46 Nathaniel Ingelo, Bentivolio and Urania (London, 1660); Joseph Glanvill, ‘Anti-Fanatical Religion and Free Philosophy: In a Continuation of the New Atlantis’, in Essays on Several Important Subjects in Philosophy and Religion (London, 1676).
47 John Locke, Two Tracts on Government, ed. Philip Abrams (London: Cambridge University Press, 1967), pp. 160–1.
48 Thomas Barlow, A Library for Younger Schollers, ed. Alma De Jordy and Harris Francis Fletcher (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961), p. 44.