Within a few years of the death of Locke in 1704, the appearance of an unassuming book on the mechanics of perception signalled a decisive departure from Locke’s philosophy. This was An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision (1709), by the young George Berkeley (1685–1753). The radical implications of Berkeley’s theory were spelled out in the following year in A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), in which he drew the startling conclusion that we can know nothing outside our minds. Berkeley’s theory marks a radical new departure in epistemology and metaphysics, but it does not signal the end of an era. For one thing the debates generated by Locke’s philosophy were set to continue well into the eighteenth century. And some of the most original new thinking of the early Enlightenment was a direct response to Locke: in very different ways, Shaftesbury and Berkeley, and many freethinkers all reacted to Locke. Furthermore, while it is certainly true that Locke dominated philosophical debates after publication of the Essay, his was not the only philosophical voice of his lifetime. Among the other strands in the philosophical debates which antedate Locke and shaped responses to his philosophy, one of the most significant was the philosophy of Malebranche (promoted by John Norris). Another was the eclectic philosophy of the libertines, men like Charles Blount, who came to be called deists or freethinkers. The perceived threat of freethinking to religious belief stimulated an apologetic mode of philosophical theology, by the likes of Samuel Clarke. A different group of independent-minded philosophers active in this period was the small band of women philosophers—Astell, Cockburn, and Masham—who entered the lists of philosophical debate. Yet another strand of philosophy, this time one to which Locke contributed, is the jurisprudential tradition, of which Richard Cumberland was the main English spokesman prior to Locke, and Gershom Carmichael one of the earliest exponents in Scotland. Discussion of Newtonian natural philosophy was also ongoing.1 Thus, if Locke was a key figure in raising the profile of British philosophy in eighteenth-century Britain and Europe, his philosophy must also be seen as one component of the rich tapestry of thought which was produced in these islands in the closing years of the seventeenth century. The continuities between seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy were many and multifaceted. But the death of Locke in 1704 is a convenient point at which to close this historical survey of seventeenth-century British philosophy. By way of conclusion, I shall offer a brief review of the state of philosophy in Britain on the threshold of the Enlightenment. I shall confine my survey principally to those philosophers whose intellectual formation belongs to the seventeenth century and who published in the last decade of the seventeenth century up to 1704. To pursue all the paths which run through this philosophical landscape would take us far into the eighteenth century, so here I shall do no more than signpost the subsequent fortunes of their contributions.
The so-called ‘freethinkers’ were a new kind of philosopher, beholden neither to the churches nor the universities—either men of independent means (aristocrats like Shaftesbury or gentry like Blount and Collins) or men who found employment as servants of the new political class (e.g. Toland). The ‘freethinkers’ were stridently anticlerical, and for the most part proponents of religious toleration. Most of them exemplify the corrosive and subversive potential of new ideas, especially, but not exclusively, of the philosophy of Locke. Although many of the freethinkers took inspiration from Locke (Samuel Bold and Anthony Collins counted him as a friend), philosophical libertinism, often characterized as deism, antedates Locke. For example Charles Blount’s Anima mundi, which launches a rational critique of religion which was to be the burden of all his writings, was published in 1679. Although he was no ‘deist’, arguably the first British ‘libertine’ philosopher was Hobbes, since his uncompromising materialism and anticlericalism anticipates the drift of later libertine philosophy. However, by no means all freethinkers were materialists. Most of them were eclectic thinkers, who exercised their freedom to philosophize by drawing on a variety of sources, guided by the authority of reason. According to one of the few self-declared freethinkers, Anthony Collins, freethinking is ‘the Use of the Understanding, in endeavouring to find out the Meaning of any Proposition whatsoever, in considering the nature and Evidence for or against it, and in judging of it according to the seeming Force or Weakness of the Evidence’.2 This echoes Walter Charleton’s account of ‘Assertors of Philosophical Liberty’, half a century earlier, as philosophers who respect no particular tradition, ‘ponder the Reasons of all, but the Reputation of none, and then conform their assent when the Arguments are nervous and convincing’.3 A significant difference between Collins and Charleton was that Collins proclaimed the freedom to philosophize as a right, the exercise of which constituted liberty.
The freethinkers were at best a loose collection of thinkers whose ranks included materialists (e.g. Tindal), a pantheist (Toland), and Epicurean moralists (e.g. Tyrell); some had a political agenda (Tyrell), others were anti-materialist (Tyrell and Shaftesbury). They were usually eclectic in their sources: Blount, for example, drew freely on Herbert of Cherbury and Spinoza, while Matthew Tindal’s later Christianity as Old as the Creation (1730) was a synthesis of arguments deployed by Herbert of Cherbury, Blount, Toland, Shaftesbury, and Collins. The freethinkers were not atheists, although they were seen as such by their detractors. They shocked because of their preparedness to treat Christianity as natural religion—Tindal went so far as to outline a religion of nature on the basis of ‘a Law of Nature, or Reason’.4 They were all preoccupied with religion to some extent, if in unorthodox ways. In his Preface to Brief Disquisition on the Law of Nature (1692) James Tyrell conceives of the universe as divinely ordered. Collins penned A Vindication of the Divine Attributes (1710). Tindal held that religious belief was innate and defends religious toleration using Lockean arguments in his anti-ecclesiastical The Rights of the Christian Church Asserted (1706).5 Even Toland’s Christianity not Mysterious (1697), in which he reduced all religious belief to rational explanation, did not attack religious belief per se. In the eyes of their detractors the materialist and sceptical tendencies of the freethinkers confirmed the dangers of the philosophical sources on which they drew—be these the religious rationalism of Herbert of Cherbury or the implicit scepticism of Locke. Collins, for example, went beyond Locke by advancing a materialist account of consciousness. Between 1706 and 1708, in an exchange of letters ostensibly in defence of Henry Dodwell, he debated Lockean themes with Samuel Clarke. These focused on the immateriality of the soul, and most contentiously, the questions raised in Essay Book 4, ‘whether “matter can think”’ and in Essay Book 2 about personal identity.6 By no means all of those freethinkers associated with Locke were materialists: Toland and Shaftesbury were anti-materialist.
The Glasgow-educated Irishman John Toland was the most colourful and controversial of the freethinkers. Sometime associate of Locke and Shaftesbury, Toland met Leibniz and his princely philosophical interlocutors, Electress Sophia of Hanover and Queen Sophie-Charlotte of Prussia (dedicatee of Toland’s Letters to Serena), during his visit to Germany in 1701. Toland first achieved notoriety when he published Christianity not Mysterious, a book which earned the dubious distinction of being burned in Dublin by order of the Irish Parliament in 1697. It was his use of the Lockean conception of reason in this book which instigated Stillingfleet’s controversy with Locke. The applications to which Toland put philosophical and historical ideas had the effect of highlighting their subversive potential, something which disconcerted his patrons, Locke and Shaftesbury. But Toland’s philosophical libertinism did not stop there. His wide-ranging philosophical curiosity extended to Giordano Bruno and Spinoza. He was not shy of proposing theologically and intellectually heterodox ideas, as evidenced by his positing active matter and his interest in pantheism.7 These topics are adumbrated in Letters to Serena (1704) and would be developed in future writings, especially in Pantheisticon (1720) where he rejects as unintelligible any distinction between the material and immaterial and argues that pantheists hold divine omnipresence. These ideas bear comparison with Anne Conway (whose Principia philosophiae was available in Leibniz’s circle) and Joseph Raphson, from whose De spatio reali, seu, ente infinito (1697) Toland apparently appropriated the term ‘pantheism’. Toland’s pantheistic reading of Spinoza, too, is not unlike Conway’s. Toland contributed to republican political thought through his editions of republican thinkers like Sidney, Ludlow, Milton, and Harrington, all opponents of arbitrary power.
One of the most intriguing of philosophical relationships was that between Locke and Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury. This originated as a pupil–teacher relationship when Locke was tutor to the young Lord Ashley. However, Shaftesbury came to repudiate Locke, regarding his own philosophy as diametrically opposed to Locke’s. His objections to Locke were both moral and metaphysical. He bracketed Locke with Hobbes as Epicurean materialists, and accused Locke of destroying the foundations of morality, by rejecting innate ideas. Locke, he declared, ‘threw all Order and Virtue out of the World, and made the very Ideas of these…unnatural, and without Foundation in our minds’.8 Hobbes and Locke were ‘the same Genius at the Bottom’, namely Epicurean advocates of the politics of self-interest, who made pleasure the criterion of morality. Hobbes and Locke were, to Shaftesbury, ‘Anti-Virtuosi’, even ‘Barbarians’, devoid of any sense of virtue, or beauty.9 He reasserted innate ideas and innate moral principles, and repudiated the machine model of the universe, finding more congenial philosophical models among the Cambridge Platonists, particularly Benjamin Whichcote (a collection of whose sermons he edited) and Ralph Cudworth (see Chapter 7).
Shaftesbury’s first philosophical work, his Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit (1699), was published by Toland—Shaftesbury claimed that Toland published it without his authority. This work contains the most systematic presentation of his moral theory, which would be elaborated further in Characteristicks (1711). In the Inquiry he argued for the naturality of goodness, and conceived of the universe as a harmonious whole every part of which is interconnected with the rest, such that the well-being of any part is conducive to the well-being of the whole. He also argued that knowledge of the good is acquired not merely by exercising reason, but affectively by reference to feeling. This ‘sentimentalist’ notion of ethics comports with his view that the practice of virtue is intrinsically pleasurable. Shaftesbury takes the affections (desires, motives, pleasures) to be inherently good. He identifies three kinds of affections: social, which result in public good; self-love, which concerns private good; and unnatural or vicious affections. Against Hobbes he held that self-love obliges us to virtue. The role of the affections in moral perception and moral conduct is further developed in Characteristicks where he proposed a specialist faculty—moral sense—which plays a central role in evaluating our moral reflections and directing our actions towards the good. Shaftesbury’s sentimentalism had a long after-life in the eighteenth century. It was taken up by stalwarts of the Scottish, French, and American Enlightenments. In Scotland Francis Hutcheson drew on Shaftesbury, as did, after him, William Wishart, George Turnbull, David Fordyce, and James Burnett, Lord Monboddo. North American enthusiasts for Shaftesbury included Jonathan Edwards, Samuel Johnson, Thomas Jefferson, and Ezra Stiles. In France, his admirers among the philosophes included Denis Diderot and Montesquieu.
The term ‘deism’ as a classificatory term for the freethinkers was given currency by their clerical opponents. Their critics were, in the main, theologians who conceded to reason a role in religious matters and were in consequence more concerned than most by the libertines’ rationalization of religious belief. Their most coherent response to libertinism was in terms of philosophical theology. The Boyle lectures provided them with a platform for their apologetics in which lecturers like Bentley, Derham, and Clarke brought philosophy and science to the defence of religion. Philosophically, the most important of these was Samuel Clarke (1675–1729), who had studied at Cambridge, where his interest in natural philosophy brought him to the attention of the Newtonian William Whiston. Clarke was to become, in effect, Newton’s philosophical and theological spokesman, by defending him against Leibniz, in a series of letters written 1715–16.10 Their controversy covered a wide range of topics, from the existence of God to gravitation and space, as well as key topics of Leibniz’s metaphysics, including his hypothesis of pre-established harmony, and the principles of sufficient reason and of the identity of indiscernibles. Clarke was consulted by Roger Cotes when he was drafting the Preface to the second edition of Principia mathematica (1713) and may have influenced the drafting of the scholium generale of the 1706 edition. Clarke also translated Newton’s Opticks into Latin in the same year. He employed a Newtonian version of the argument from design in his first Boyle lecture (delivered in 1704, and published in 1705 as Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God). This lecture provides a detailed taxonomy of deism, and deploys his superior understanding of Newton against Toland’s critique of Newton. Clarke’s most enduring legacy was not, however, his philosophical theology, but his ethics. His second Boyle lecture, Discourse Concerning the Unchangeable Obligations of Natural Religion (1706), which targets Hobbes, sets out a strongly rationalist, anti-voluntarist ethics, in which, like Cudworth, he defended freedom of the will and argued that immutability of moral distinctions as absolute relations is enshrined in the nature of things. Like Cudworth, he conceived of a moral universe, analogous to the physical universe, and consisting of moral relations. He developed the idea that moral actions are actions ‘fit to be done’, since they are grounded in the rationally discernible relations between things in nature. Clarke’s theory was taken up by, among others, William Wollaston in his Religion of Nature Delineated (1722) and John Balguy in The Foundation of Moral Goodness (1727–8). Along with Cudworth, Clarke came to be regarded (e.g. by Hume and Dugald Stewart) as the chief proponent of ethical rationalism in the eighteenth century.
As the examples of Shaftesbury and Clarke show, a major strand of thought in the early eighteenth century owes something to the Platonist tradition as developed by the Cambridge Platonists. Another influential branch of the Platonist philosophical heritage was the work of Nicolas Malebranche, whose philosophy seems to have enjoyed something of a vogue in England in the 1690s (see Chapter 3). Malebranche also provided the touchstone for the most original and radical of new directions in philosophy—immaterialism—which denies knowledge of the world outside the mind, and which was proposed by Arthur Collier and George Berkeley. However, this development was not altogether unconnected with Locke. On the one hand Locke’s idealist critics were receptive to Malebranche—this is true of both Berkeley and, John Norris. On the other hand Locke was himself a critic of Malebranche. For his part, Malebranche knew Locke’s Essay, which he read in Coste’s translation, and which he regarded as sceptical.
Locke was in fact well acquainted with Malebranche’s philosophy, having become aware of it at a relatively early date. He owned several copies of the Recherche (including the first edition, Paris, 1674), as well as Traité de la nature et de la grace (Amsterdam, 1680). He also knew Arnauld’s attack on Malebranche’s theory of ideas, Des vraies et fausses idées (Cologne, 1683), which sparked a lively debate in France. Locke regarded Malebranche’s epistemological principle that we see all things in God as ‘perfectly unintelligible’,11 and discussed with Molyneux the possibility of adding some critical comments on Malebranche to the second or third edition of The Essay. He did in fact draft a critique of Malebranche’s vision of all things in God, but decided against publication (it appeared posthumously as Examination of Père Malebranche’s Opinion of Seeing all Things in God in 1706).
Locke’s objections to Malebranche may also have had the leading English Malebranchian, John Norris, in his sights. Norris’s receptiveness to Malebranche may owe something to his admiration of Henry More (see Chapter 7). The Augustinian strands in Norris’s theology are another factor which helped to predispose him towards the philosophy of Malebranche. Norris evidently thought that Malebranche’s occasionalist thesis, which made God the true cause of all change in the world, provided a satisfactory answer to the problem of how such distinct substances as mind and body can interact—a problem which had contributed to the Cambridge Platonists’ reservations about Cartesianism.
Before encountering Malebranche, Norris had already, in his Metaphysical Essay towards the Demonstration of God, from the Steady and Immutable Nature of Truth (1687), advanced the Augustinian thesis that God is the source of all truth because ideas and eternal truths are present in the divine nature, and not because eternal truths are dependent on divine will. Since God is identified with truth, necessary truths are known directly in God and, conversely, to know eternal and necessary truth is to know God. In The Theory and Regulation of Love (1688), Norris proposes an occasionalist account of the relationship between divine and earthly love, between the love of God (which is irresistible) and the love of created things (which can be directed by the will). He identifies the good with God, and defines love as ‘a motion of the soul towards the good’,12 arguing that it is through our love of God that we come to love created things. God being the only causally efficacious being, God and not material things or creatures is the proper and immediate object of both human knowledge and human love. This thesis connects with occasionalist themes in other writings, such as his Practical Discourses (1698), in which Norris explained mind–body interaction in occasionalist terms. Bodies are no more than the ‘occasions’ of sensations which arise in us. Sense impressions, he argued, are not experienced directly, but are caused by God. Likewise, feelings of pleasure arising from love, are caused by God.
Norris first propounds a version of Malebranche’s epistemological theory of seeing all things in God in Reason and Religion (1689), developing this most fully in his most systematic work, An Essay towards the Theory of the Ideal or Intelligible World (1701–4), a work which is suffused with a metaphysical Platonism. The ‘ideal world’ of the title is ‘a system of Ideas’, an archetypal realm of immutable and intelligible truth contained in God, through which the material world is rendered intelligible to us by ‘Intellectual or Ideal Perception’.13 Thus it is that, as with Malebranche, we ‘see all things in God’. It is this idealism which is at the root of Norris’s objections to Locke in his Cursory Reflections, appended to his Christian Blessedness (1690) (see Chapter 9). Norris also took issue with Henry Dodwell and those materialists and atheists who cast doubt on the soul’s immortality.14
Norris is usually dismissed as a minor figure, and he is not regarded as influential. However, by writing accessibly on philosophical themes in his books and through his association with the journal The Athenian Mercury, Norris played an important role as a mediator of philosophy to a growing lay readership. Thus, although its diffuse nature makes it difficult to document, Norris’s impact as a disseminator of philosophy was considerable. Norris’s ‘lay’ readers included non-philosophers like John Wesley and Samuel Richardson, the heroine of whose novel Clarissa is a reader of Norris. He also gave encouragement to Malebranche’s translator, Thomas Taylor (1669–1735), whose Two Covenants of God with Mankind (1704) draws on Malebranche’s Treatise of Nature and of Grace. Malebranche’s other English translator Richard Sault (1660?–1702) models his Conference betwixt a Modern Atheist and his Friend (1693) on Malebranche. Importantly, as the example of Clarissa indicates, Norris’s readership included women, and he had an honourable role in encouraging women thinkers like Mary Astell and Mary Chudleigh to participate in intellectual life.
Discussion of Malebranche’s philosophy was one of the topics which drew women into philosophical debate: Mary Astell discussed Malebranchian views in an exchange of letters with Norris, while the first critique of Malebranche to emanate from Locke’s circle was Damaris Masham’s Discourse Concerning the Love of God (1696) written in response to the Astell–Norris letters. Astell and Masham were two of the small but nonetheless significant group of philosophical women who make up the complexion of late Stuart philosophy. These were the first women to acquire a discernible measure of philosophical visibility in public philosophical debate. Most of them came to notice in the 1690s, beginning with the posthumous publication of Anne Conway’s only work of philosophy: Principia philosophiae antiquissima et recentissima was printed in 1690 in Holland, followed by an English translation in 1692. Although both versions were published anonymously, the preface makes clear that the author was a woman. There is some question as to whether Anne Conway intended that her treatise be published. But its appearance, in the same decade as the first publications of Mary Astell and Damaris Masham, suggests that even if they did publish anonymously, the conditions for publishing philosophical works by women were more favourable than previously.
There was certainly no such thing as a school of ‘women’s philosophy’ in a systematic sense, but several female philosophers (Cavendish, Astell, and Masham), addressed issues of particular relevance to women, such as sexual inequality and the position of women within marriage. But they were also fully engaged with current philosophical debates, and they were all abreast with the new philosophy of their day. They can also be said to be beneficiaries of the seventeenth-century philosophy ‘Cartesian turn’, which generated confidence in human reason, philosophical self-reliance, and made the vernacular the language of philosophy. No British woman philosopher was a Cartesian in the strict sense, but Cartesianism had a propaedeutic role for several of them. So too did the writings of the Cambridge Platonists.15 Another feature of their philosophy is its strong emphasis on moral issues—though this is not true of Cavendish who was, for a woman, unusually broad in her scope. All of them, bar Conway, engaged publicly in philosophical debate. However, all except for Cavendish published very little. Despite the political setbacks for her own and her husband’s family during the Civil War, Margaret Cavendish was in a position to publish her writings in several folio volumes. As we have seen, she was associated with Hobbes’s circle in exile. Although she imputed powers to matter (she conceived some matter to be animate, and therefore endowed with the power of thinking), Cavendish never attracted the kind of criticism which both Locke and his more radical admirers did. The reason for this may be that as the work of a ‘man in petticoats’ her writings were disregarded or ridiculed as absurd. However, of all British women philosophers she is closer to the freethinkers or libertines of the last part of the period. By contrast with Margaret Cavendish, the published work of the other women philosophers has explicitly religious overtones—a precondition, perhaps, of women’s philosophizing.
Mary Astell (1666–1731) has been hailed as the first English feminist for her passionate advocacy of women’s education and defence of the intellectual equality of women with men. Astell lived an independent, politically engaged life as a single woman. As a ‘high Tory’ and ‘high’ Anglican, she contributed to the religio-political debates of Queen Anne’s reign. Her thought displays a strong religious moralism and political conservatism, but also a perceptive knowledge of philosophy which underpins her championship of women. She was most likely self-taught as a philosopher, through reading Cartesian works available in English, and also the writings of Henry More.16
Astell’s first entry into philosophical debate was in 1693, when she started a correspondence with Norris which was published as Letters Concerning the Love of God in 1695. Against Norris’s claim that we love God as the cause of the pleasure we feel, she objects that Norris’s argument leads to the absurdity that, as the cause of pain as well as pleasure, God is also deserving of love as the cause of our pain. She argues, furthermore, that to reduce creatures to mere ‘occasional causes’ is to render most of God’s creation ‘Vain and Useless’. She draws explicitly on the Cambridge Platonist accounts of the interrelation of body and soul, notably Henry More’s idea of a congruity of immaterial and material substances which he calls ‘vital congruity’. Contra Norris, she proposes, that we love God for the good which he intends to promote by endowing us with the capacity to feel pain and pleasure, which he designed ‘in order to our Happiness’.17 Thus, while generally in sympathy with Norris’s Malebranchian disposition, Astell’s metaphysics in fact owes more to the Cambridge Platonists than Malebranche.
Astell takes up feminist themes in two other works: A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694–7) and Reflections upon Marriage (1700). In the first of these she put forward proposals for the education of women as rational human beings, including an academy or college for women, and ideas for the cultivation of female reason based on Descartes’s Discours de la méthode and the Port Royal logic.18 A possible inspiration for this work was Poulain de la Barre’s De l’égalité des deux sexes [The Equality of the Two Sexes] (1673) which uses the Cartesian egalitarian conception of mind and reason as the basis of arguments in favour of the equality and education of women. (An English translation of Poulain’s book, The Woman as Good as the Man, was published in 1677.)
In A Serious Proposal to the Ladies Astell sought to secure female autonomy by means of an independent female community where women might retain their single status, without any obligation to marry. Nevertheless, in Reflections upon Marriage, she defended the institution of marriage and supported sexual inequality within marriage, notwithstanding her view that women and men were equal. She was, however, scathing about the double standard implicit in contractarianism. In the Preface to the 1703 edition of Some Reflections she skilfully invokes the political rhetoric of her Whig enemies, to underscore the deleterious consequences of basing power relations in natural rights. The best remedy for this state of affairs is the education of women. Not only will an educated woman be better able to make an informed decision about whether to marry, but an educated woman is better able to fulfil her duty to direct the moral education of her children.19 For the woman unfortunate enough to marry a tyrannical husband, education has consolatory value. At the same time Astell upholds a woman’s right to refuse marriage. The significance of Astell’s proposal for a separate female community is, first that it was a means to realize her desire for improved women’s education. Secondly the community would be a place where a single woman might retain her autonomy. In this sense it is the means to enhance the personal freedom of individual women, free from the pressures of social expectation, from disturbances caused by unruly passions, and from subordination within marriage.
The Astell–Norris correspondence occasioned the entry of another woman philosopher into public philosophical debate. This was Ralph Cudworth’s daughter, Lady Damaris Masham, a close friend of John Locke. As we have seen she published (anonymously) two works with Locke’s encouragement, A Discourse Concerning the Love of God (1696) and Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian Life (1705). In the first of these she takes issue with the occasionalism of the Norris–Astell Letters Concerning the Love of God. Against the occasionalist position articulated by Norris, Masham argues that, ‘if we lov’d not the Creatures, it is not conceivable how we should love God’.20 Masham objects that, by denigrating God’s works, Norris’s occasionalism undermines the basis of morality and hence the bonds of human society and the foundation of religion itself. Subsequently, in her brief correspondence with Leibniz (between 1704 and 1708) Masham raises the objection to occasionalism that it renders bodies redundant and their structure and organization of bodies otiose. This was the basis of her objection to Leibniz’s theory of pre-established harmony. A Discourse attracted interest as a contribution to the debates about divine love sparked by Malebranche. It was translated into French by Pierre Coste (French translator of Locke’s Essay) and published in Amsterdam in 1705. It was reviewed in Jean Le Clerc’s journal, Bibliothèque choisie.21 Both Norris and Astell took the author to be Locke, Norris in his Practical Discourses (1698) and Astell in her The Christian Religion as Professed by a Daughter of the Church (1705), which takes aim at the materialist drift of Locke’s thinking, implicit in his sense-based theory of knowledge and especially the idea that matter might think.
Masham’s second book, Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian Life (1705) discusses the role of reason in religion and in ethics, as well as practical morality, and the education of women. She argues that the exercise of virtue is grounded in civil and religious liberty, that human beings are rational and social beings for whom the love of happiness is ‘the earliest, and strongest principle’.22 She defines happiness in Lockean terms as the enjoyment of pleasure, and the pursuit of pleasure regulated by exercise of reason which directs us to the greatest happiness. Her argument for women’s education arises logically from the emphasis which she places on the key role of mothers in the early education of their children, especially in laying the foundations of morality through what they teach them. The strong echoes of Locke in Occasional Thoughts explain why it too was attributed to Locke when it was republished in 1647 with the title Thoughts on a Christian Life.
Catharine Trotter Cockburn23 was the first Scottish woman philosopher—Leibniz’s patron Sophia of Hanover called her ‘Sappho Ecossoise’. Like most philosophical women of her time, Catharine Trotter Cockburn’s published output was restricted. Most of it consists of anonymous interventions in the philosophical and theological debates of her day. These included the controversies surrounding the reception of Locke (see Chapter 9) and the debates on rational ethics sparked by Samuel Clarke’s Boyle lectures (1704–5). Her first foray into philosophy was her A Defence of Mr Locke’s Essay of Human Understanding (1702), which earned her the respect and gratitude of Locke, commendation from Leibniz, and surprisingly, perhaps, the approval of John Norris.24 A pattern of philosophizing through engagement on particular points would continue throughout her life. Later, in Remarks upon some Writers (1749), she would return to themes of her Defence, defend Samuel Clarke on moral obligation, and take issue with Edmund Law, Bishop of Carlisle, and Isaac Watts, on the nature of space. Others whom she critiqued would include, besides Rutherforth, George Berkeley, William Warburton, Francis Hutcheson, and Lord Shaftesbury. An edition of her writings, both published and unpublished, was subsequently produced by Thomas Birch in 1751, from which it is clear that she wrote from a consistent and non-dogmatic philosophical position. In ‘Cursory Thoughts’, prefixed to Remarks, she discusses topics such as necessary existence, infinite space, the idea of substance, and the nature of spirit, but the main focus of her interest is ethical, in particular the nature of virtue and of moral obligation. She held that since human beings are rational and social beings, it is natural for them to act both rationally and for the good of all and that it is most fit for a reasonable being to act in conformity with God’s moral perfections. Like the Cambridge Platonists Trotter-Cockburn held that the principles of morality are fixed and immutable, although she did not regard them as innate. And she echoes Samuel Clarke when she argues that the principles of morality may be deduced from the ‘reason, nature and fitness of things’.25 Against the ethical relativism of Hobbes she argued that morality is neither arbitrary nor conventional in foundation. She also raised objections to Shaftesbury’s sentimentalism, denying that the obligation to virtue is founded in moral sense.
Berkeley was not the first to propose an immaterialist account of the mind-dependence of all things. By coincidence, a similar theory was advanced by Arthur Collier, who encountered the philosophy of Malebranche when he was studying at Oxford. By the age of 23, independently of Berkeley, Collier arrived at the conclusion that there is no such thing as an external world existing independently of the mind. Collier also shared with Berkeley concerns about materialism and scepticism which were sharpened, in both cases, by their encounter with Malebranche. Unlike Berkeley, however, it seems to have been Aristotle rather than Locke who prompted Collier’s concerns about materialism, particularly the Aristotelian view that matter subsists eternally. Collier set out his views in Clavis universalis, drafted in 1708 and published in 1713.26 Not only was Collier influenced by his reading of Malebranche, but his book also reflects the influence of John Norris, to whom he sent a copy. Despite commendation from Norris, and Collier’s correspondence about it with Samuel Clarke, and a summary in Acta eruditorum (1717), the book was ignored, and soon overshadowed by Berkeley. But it attracted attention after Collier’s death, when it was translated into German in 1756, by J. C. Eschenbach who made the connection with Berkeley by publishing it with his translation of Berkeley’s Three Dialogues (Rostock 1756). It was also held in esteem by Sir James Mackintosh and Dugald Stewart.
Collier was not in fact the first to propose that we have no direct experience of the physical world. Richard Burthogge, for example, had argued in his Organum vetus et novum that both our ‘sentiments’ and ‘notions’ are mental entities, and that the objects of cognition—whether derived from the senses, imagination, or reason—are ‘Phaenomena’ or ‘Appearances’ with no existence beyond our faculties.27 Anthony Collins, too, argued that we never get beyond our perceptions and that perceptions are the only criterion of truth (Essay Concerning Reason, 1707). However, both Burthogge and Collins stopped short of denying all knowledge, or the existence, of things outside the mind.
Although Berkeley, like Collier, read Malebranche at a formative age, Berkeley was in fact unpersuaded by Malebranche’s arguments. Like several of Locke’s critics, Berkeley had high regard for Locke, whom he studied closely as a young man. Locke is the philosopher most frequently cited in his early notebooks, his Philosophical Commentaries. Although he repudiated Locke’s philosophy, he held him in high esteem and acknowledged his debt to him. ‘Wonderful in Locke’, he wrote, ‘that he could…see at all thro a mist that had been so long a gathering & was consequently thick. This more to be admir’d than that he didn’t see farther.’28 Berkeley’s New Theory of Vision took up the question posed by William Molyneux to Locke, of whether a blind man restored to sight could recognize the difference between a cube and a sphere. Although Berkeley came to the same conclusion as Locke, he did so on very different grounds. This led him to repudiate Locke’s epistemology and to formulate the immaterialist hypothesis set out in The Principles of Human Knowledge. With its sustained critique of Locke’s empiricism, and its concern with scepticism, Berkeley’s response to Locke can be situated alongside the clerical reaction to Locke (see Chapter 9). Berkeley evidently had concerns similar to those of many of Locke’s clerical critics—particularly scepticism arising from his perceived failure to ground knowledge in things. Berkeley’s critique of Locke’s epistemology went far further, and transformed the terms of the debate, which had been focused largely on anxieties about the theological implications of Lockean empiricism. In its place Berkeley proposed an epistemological and metaphysical philosophy of his own. Where most of Locke’s critics worried over his agnosticism about essences, Berkeley targeted the primary–secondary quality distinction, and denied that we can know even the secondary properties of things. The qualities which we attribute to things outside the mind only exist in the mind. The target of Berkeley’s critique was not just Locke, but all forms of what he called ‘abstractionism’, that is theories which claim to identify the essential properties of matter, whether these be materialist theories, like Hobbes’s, or philosophies, like Cartesianism, which admit the existence of immaterial things. His concerns regarding empiricism and materialism and his theory of the mind-dependence of all things echo Malebranche. There are aspects of Berkeley’s epistemology which have suggestive parallels with Cudworth, for example in his view that corporeal qualities do not exist outside the mind, and that the world is intelligible by virtue of the God-given order of relations within it and within our own minds. However, since Cudworth’s Treatise was as yet unpublished, Cudworth is unlikely to have been an influence.
Berkeley was far and away the most original philosopher post Locke, but he also illustrates the historical truth that originality and influence do not go hand in hand. He was almost universally treated as a sceptic who denied the existence of material reality, as more sceptical than the empirical philosophies which he critiqued.29
The nature and extent of the intellectual and cultural movement known as the European Enlightenment, and indeed the very question of what constitutes ‘Enlightenment’ is currently the subject of heated historical debate.30 No longer viewed as ‘the age of reason’, the Enlightenment is discussed as ‘radical’, ‘high’, ‘low’, and its religious dimension is recognized.31 No longer regarded as Franco-centric, or as a single pan-European movement, the Enlightenment is now usually discussed as a multiplicity of regional enlightenments each with its own characteristic preoccupations—German, Dutch, Neapolitan, Scottish, as well as French.32 Notwithstanding this diversity of locations, these different enlightenments are generally taken to exhibit a common set of characteristics, among which a ferment of new ideas is considered a defining feature. The idea that ‘enlightenment’ has something to do with reason and philosophy persists, even in the eyes of its detractors, and proponents of its ‘dark side’. Equally important is the communication of those ideas, thanks to the new media of the century. This was the age of the encyclopedia and philosophical journal, a period when the preferred language of intellectual exchange was French, which had taken the place of Latin. On the pages of these publications, British philosophy was cited as never before, setting the agenda for discussion across Europe. England was celebrated by Voltaire as a ‘nation of philosophers’ and esteemed by Diderot for the honour (as he saw it) accorded to philosophers by comparison with France.
By 1700 British philosophy exhibits many of the features classically associated with eighteenth-century philosophy: increasing secularism, a widespread emphasis on rational religion (deism to its enemies), the rejection of metaphysics, confidence in Newtonian natural philosophy, and the methodology of Newtonian science. In these respects British philosophy at the turn of the eighteenth century typifies Enlightenment thought, in most of the forms that we might choose to understand that contested term. Furthermore, the intellectual life of the period was supported by a strong philosophical laity and new media (such as philosophical journals and the recent advent of the philosophical dictionary). British philosophers themselves express the idea that the time in which they lived was an enlightened age. One of the most remarkable developments of the eighteenth century is the resurgence of Scottish philosophy, at the heart of what has come to be called the ‘Scottish Enlightenment’. However much the intellectual and cultural vibrancy of the Enlightenment is associated with ‘new ideas’, it is important not to overlook the continuities with the past, and the shaping influence of the seventeenth century. The contribution of seventeenth-century British philosophy to eighteenth-century philosophy is widely acknowledged by Enlightenment thinkers. Indeed, the Enlightenment view of what mattered in British philosophy has done much to shape the canon we have inherited today, and historically it is a useful measure of the prestige which British philosophy had obtained by this time.
Taking their cue from the philosophes, historians of the Enlightenment have tended to emphasize one strand or another of the legacy of seventeenth-century philosophy. On one view Locke is the seventeenth-century philosopher for the Enlightenment, the philosophical spokesman of empiricism and representative of the natural law tradition, bringing in his train the natural philosophers Boyle and Newton as well as Bacon and Cumberland. In terms of the esteem expressed by the philosophes and the quantity of Locke editions in the period, this view has much to support it. Voltaire promoted the association of Locke with Newton and Bacon in his Letters Concerning the English Nation (1733, published in French as Lettres philosophiques ou lettres sur les Anglais). Voltaire’s championship of Newtonianism played an important role in securing the acceptance of Newton’s natural philosophy in Europe. His account of Bacon contributed greatly to the esteem in which Bacon was held by the French philosophes in the eighteenth century, by whom he was celebrated as the harbinger of Enlightenment science. On another view it is Shaftesbury who forms the bridge between seventeenth-century British philosophy and the Enlightenment—Shaftesbury as anticlerical heir of Herbert of Cherbury, and father of eighteenth-century sentimentalism. The response of the philosophes Diderot and Montesquieu would seem to support this view. Diderot translated Shaftesbury’s Inquiry Concerning Virtue in 1745, and drew heavily on Characteristicks for his Pensées philosophiques (1746). He celebrated Shaftesbury and Locke in counterpoint in the Encyclopédie. Montesquieu ranked Shaftesbury with Plato, Montaigne, and Malebranche, as one of the four great poetic philosophers. Shaftesbury was also taken up by the German romantics Johann Gottfried von Herder and Gotthold Lessing, while Moses Mendelssohn modelled his own philosophical dialogue on The Moralists.
While there is a plausible case to be made that Enlightenment thinkers drew inspiration from one or other of these two strands (if not both), neither view captures the complexities and scope of the eighteenth-century philosophy or does justice to the traditions which the Lockean or Shaftesburian legacies putatively represent. In point of fact the coverage of British philosophy by the encyclopédistes was wider than received narratives suggest. Cudworth’s philosophical theories, for example, circulated in Enlightenment Europe. Diderot included an account of Cudworth’s hypothesis of Plastic Nature in the Encyclopédie along with Bayle’s critique.33 The Latin translation of Cudworth’s works by the German scholar Johan Lorenz Mosheim (1733, reprinted 1773) includes a translation of the 1731 first printing of A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality.
Received accounts of the Enlightenment tend to overlook the fact that British seventeenth-century philosophy had a reception at home, as well as in Europe. One of the most important outcomes for seventeenth-century British philosophy was its impact on philosophy in eighteenth-century Britain, most especially the Scottish Enlightenment, where the philosophy of Locke, Newton, and Shaftesbury, but also of Clarke and Cudworth, contributed to the emergence of the powerful new schools of Scottish philosophy. However, the full extent of continuities between the philosophies of seventeenth-century Britain and eighteenth-century Scotland still remains to be explored.34
Eighteenth-century philosophy was no less of a continuous conversation than the philosophy of the preceding century. The fortunes of British philosophy in the eighteenth century show that thinkers of that period were in dialogue with their seventeenth-century predecessors, every bit as much as the latter had, in their turn, been with sixteenth-century thought. As the preoccupations of the eighteenth-century interlocutors changed, so did what they found interesting and important among their predecessors. Of course, many of the latter dropped out of the conversation. So, for example, and for different reasons, the voices of Henry More, Walter Charleton, and the women philosophers are no longer heard. This reflects the fact that, as in previous centuries, eighteenth-century philosophical readers reinterpreted the philosophy of the past in the light of their own priorities. And like their predecessors, philosophers conversed not just with their contemporaries but also across chronological and geographical boundaries. A major difference between the eighteenth-century philosophical conversations as compared with the time when Herbert, Bacon, and Hobbes philosophized, is that British philosophy was recognized as central to those conversations. It was the achievement of seventeenth-century British philosophy to put it there. This is one important sense in which the seventeenth century is the defining period in the history of British philosophy.
1 A work which illustrates the currency of most of these strands of this philosophical tapestry is Reason an Essay (1690) by Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh, who defends innate ideas, is positive about the new science, and critiques Hobbes, Locke, and Cumberland.
2 Anthony Collins, A Discourse of Freethinking (London, 1713), p. 5.
3 Walter Charleton, Physiologia (1654), p. 3. Charleton’s definition derives from Gassendi.
4 Matthew Tindal, Christianity as Old as the Creation, 2 vols (London, 1730), vol. 1, p. 8.
5 Tindal’s book, together with his Defence of it, was burned by the Common Hangman order of the House of Commons in 1710.
6 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 4.3.6 and 2.27.3.
7 Stuart Brown, ‘The Sovereignty of the People’, in Sarah Hutton and Paul Schuurman (eds), Studies on Locke: Sources, Contemporaries, and Legacy (Dordrecht: Springer, 2008), 45–57; Stephen Daniel, John Toland: His Methods, Manners, and Mind (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 1984).
8 Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, Complete Works, Selected Letters and Posthumous Writings, ed., trans., and commented by Gerd Hemmerich and Wolfram Benda, 6 vols (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1981–), part 2, vol. 4, p. 402.
9 Shaftesbury, ‘Second Characters’, in Complete Works, ed. Hemmerich and Benda, part 1, vol. 5, pp. 233–4.
10 These letters were published as A Collection of Papers which passed between the late learned Mr Leibnitz and Dr Clarke in the years 1715 and 1716 (London, 1717).
11 John Locke, The Correspondence of John Locke, ed. E. S. de Beer, 8 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976–89), vol. 4, p. 668.
12 John Norris, The Theory and Regulation of Love (Oxford, 1688), p. 30.
13 John Norris, An Essay towards the Theory of the Ideal or Intelligible World (1701–4), vol. 2, p. 194.
14 John Norris, A Letter to Mr Dodwell Concerning the Immortality of the Soul of Man (London, 1709).
15 Jacqueline Broad, Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 11.
16 Broad, Women Philosophers, ch. 4.
17 Mary Astell, Letters Concerning the Love of God (London, 1695), pp. 33, 34.
18 Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest (London, 1694) and A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Part II: wherein a method is offer’d for the improvement of their minds (London, 1697). Evidently popular, both part 1 and part 2 were republished several times.
19 Astell, A Serious Proposal (1694), pp. 155–6.
20 Damaris Masham, A Discourse Concerning the Love of God (London, 1696), p. 62. See Broad, Women Philosophers, ch. 5.
21 Damaris Masham, Discours sur l’amour divin, où l’on explique ce que c’est, & où l’on fait voir les mauvaises conséquences des explications trop subtiles que l’on en donne (Amsterdam, 1705). See Bibliothèque choisie (1705), vol. 4, item 10, pp. 383–90.
22 Damaris Masham, Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian Life (London, 1705), p. 71.
23 Cockburn is her married name, and the name by which she first became known as a philosopher. However, she is known to literary scholars by her maiden name. It therefore makes sense to use both the names by which she was known. For her philosophy, see Martha Bolton, ‘Some Aspects of the Philosophy of Catharine Trotter’, JHP, 31 (1993): 565–8; Broad, Women Philosophers, ch. 6. Patricia Sheridan, Introduction to Catharine Trotter Cockburn, Philosophical Writings (1702–1747) (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2006).
24 Broad, Women Philosophers, p. 157.
25 Trotter-Cockburn, Philosophical Writings, p. 111.
26 Arthur Collier, Clavis universalis: or, a New Inquiry after Truth. Being a Demonstration of the Non-existence, or Impossibility, of an External World (London, 1713). See Charles J. McCracken, ‘Stages on a Cartesian Road to Immaterialism’, JHP, 24 (1986): 19–40; Charles J. McCracken, Malebranche and British Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983).
27 Michael Ayers, ‘Richard Burthogge and the Origins of Modern Conceptualisation’, in Tom Sorell and G. A. J. Rogers (eds), Analytic Philosophy and the History of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 179–200.
28 Berkeley, Notebook A, Philosophical Commentaries, item 567, in The Works of George Berkeley Bishop of Cloyne, ed. A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop, 9 vols (London: T. Nelson, 1948–51), vol. 1, p. 71.
29 ‘I am the furthest from Scepticism of any Man’, Philosophical Commentaries, vol. 1, p. 70.
30 For a brief survey, see Ann Thomson, Bodies of Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). The classic view of the Enlightenment is Peter Gay, The Enlightenment, an Interpretation (London: Allen & Unwin, 1970).
31 Margaret Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans (London: Allen & Unwin, 1981); Jonathan Israel, The Radical Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). For religion in the Enlightenment, see J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Knud Haakonssen, Enlightenment and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Brian W. Young, Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason (London: Allen Lane, 2003); Roy Porter and M. Teich, The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Thomson, Bodies of Thought.
32 See, for example, John Robertson, The Case for Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Porter and Teich, The Enlightenment in National Context.
33 The poets, Alexander Pope (in ‘An Essay on Man’) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (in his early poems) make creative use of Cudworth’s conception of ‘plastic nature’.
34 Existing histories of Scottish philosophy (e.g. Broadie) either overlook or minimize the continuities. So too does the older historiography. But it is interesting that the figures whom Dugald Stewart acknowledges include figures who don’t feature in the modern canon, namely Clarke and Cudworth. See also Michael B. Gill, ‘From Cambridge Platonism to Scottish Sentimentalism’, Journal of Scottish Philosophy, 8(2010): 13–31, and Sarah Hutton, ‘From Cudworth to Hume: Cambridge Platonism and the Scottish Enlightenment’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 42 (2014): 1–19.