The season of fiction is now over.
—JEREMY BENTHAM, 1776
Fact is superior to reasoning.
—TOM PAINE, 1791
Historians agree that the democratic revolution grew out of the Enlightenment, but if you ask what caused the Enlightenment, you are likely to be presented with a list of philosophers—Bacon, Locke, Hume, Berkeley, Descartes, Voltaire, and Diderot among them—who for some reason suddenly began singing in unison on behalf of reason and rights. Unless this was a coincidence, something must have happened—something of lasting consequence, capable of shifting the balance away from traditional beliefs and toward the enlightenment values of inquiry, invention, and improvement.
Science fits the bill. Science discovered new facts that were interesting in themselves but also rewarding—literally so, since they proved effective in curing disease, reducing toil, and making money. Science worked in new ways, rewarding merit rather than social station, challenging aristocratic traditions with a force mustered by no prior system of thought, and underscoring the liberal claim that humans have natural rights. Other influences were at work as well, but the Enlightenment without science would have been a steamship without steam.
The Enlightenment is customarily dated from England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688, but a more appropriate date would be one year earlier, with the publication in 1687 of Isaac Newton’s Principia, which was taken up by thinkers across Europe almost overnight. “Newton rose at once to the highest pinnacle of glory,” wrote Thomas Thomson in his history of the Royal Society, and “has stood ever since in the front of the philosophic world.” David Hume declared Newton to be “the greatest and rarest genius that ever rose for the ornament and instruction of the species.” Alexander Pope celebrated him in a poem: “God said ‘Let Newton be,’ and all was light.” The French philosopher Jean d’Alembert observed in the mid–1700s that Newton’s account of gravitation was “so generally accepted, that people were beginning to dispute their author the honor of having discovered it.” Newtonian precepts were soon being tried out, with mixed results, on everything from medicine and ethics to government. “We are all his disciples now,” said Voltaire in 1776.
Newton was obviously a great scientist, but he was not only a scientist. He was also a dedicated radical Whig—what today would be called a classical liberal—who stood up for liberty in the face of direct threats from the highest authorities. Reclusive, paranoid, and peculiar even by the standards of his fellow dons, Newton was nobody’s idea of a professional politician, yet he enjoyed enough political success to be described today as “one of the architects of our civil liberties.” His were politically tumultuous times; to appreciate just how tumultuous calls for a bit of background.
When the Principia was published, England had been suffering through a bloody half century that saw seven years of civil war; the beheading of a reigning monarch, Charles I, in 1649; a turbulent interregnum during which the monarchy was restored; and the Glorious Revolution itself, in which King James II was deposed. Pressing for further change were the gentry and other self-made traders, merchants, and artisans, who by 1628 comprised the majority of the House of Commons and controlled triple the wealth of their social superiors in the House of Lords. The ship of state seemed near to capsizing.
An adept monarch might have been able to keep it aright for a while, and the Tudor queen Elizabeth I was fondly remembered for having managed to do just that, from her coronation in 1558 until her peaceful death on March 24, 1603, shortly before her seventieth birthday. But the crown thereafter devolved to the Stuart regents James I (who ruled from 1603 until 1625) and his son Charles I (crowned in 1625 and beheaded in 1649). Both were the sort of leaders who, unable to master the intricacies of the job, take refuge in an unblinking adherence to unwavering precepts of religious and secular faith. (The historian G. M. Trevelyan says of James that “he was perpetually unbuttoning the stores of his royal wisdom for the benefit of his subjects, and as there was none who could venture to answer him to his face, he supposed them all out-argued.”) When such a ruler gets into trouble he is less apt to question his beliefs than to repeat them with heightened vehemence, as if bluster were a magical spell capable of revitalizing his ebbing power. The worse things get, the less he listens and the more he talks.
James and Charles shared an arrogant disdain for Parliament as well as a belief in the divine right of kings, James informing Parliament during a two-hour harangue in March 1610 that “kings exercise a manner of resemblance of divine power on earth.” These traits angered many British subjects, but when Charles finally heard the waterfall’s roar of imminent disaster he steered straight for it, assembling an army and declaring war on Parliament. Four years of conflict ended in his defeat, trial, and condemnation, but he remained resolute. Standing on the scaffold on January 30, 1649, Charles said of his subjects, “I must tell you that their liberty and freedom consist…not for having share in government, sirs; that is nothing pertaining to them; a subject and a sovereign are clear different things.”
Unpopular though Charles may have been, his execution aroused revulsion among those who associated monarchy with the rule of law (an Aristotelian precept still taught at all the universities), and a decade later his eldest son was invited back from exile in France to be crowned King Charles II, in 1661. But hopes for the Restoration were disappointed, Charles II signing a secret treaty with the king of France promising to publicly declare his Catholic faith in return for a bribe and such French troops as might be required to put down any resultant rebellion, then denying to Parliament that any such treaty existed. His brother James II, crowned in 1685, pursued a similar course, further alarming his Protestant subjects by ordering Catholics appointed to high posts at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. He seems to have underestimated the universities’ prestige; as Thomas Babington Macaulay writes in his History of England:
Literature and science were, in the academical system of England, surrounded with pomp, armed with magistracy, and closely allied with all the most august institutions of the state. To be the chancellor of an university was a distinction eagerly sought by the magnates of the realm. To represent an university in Parliament was a favorite object of the ambition of statesmen. Nobles and even princes were proud to receive from an university the privilege of wearing the doctoral scarlet…. Any attack on the honor or interests of either Cambridge or Oxford was certain to excite the resentment of a powerful, active, and intelligent class scattered over every county from Northumberland to Cornwall.
James II ordered Cambridge to name as Master of Arts a Benedictine monk who refused to take the oath of obedience required by parliamentary law. University officials, objecting that they could not legally obey the edict, dispatched eight distinguished professors to plead their case before an ecclesiastical commission at Westminster in April 1687. Newton was among them. “He was the steady friend of civil liberty and of the Protestant religion,” Macaulay writes of Newton, “although his habits by no means fitted him for the conflicts of active life. He therefore stood modestly silent among the delegates, and left to men more versed in practical business the task of pleading the cause of his beloved University.” It hardly mattered. The chief inquisitor was Sir George Jeffreys—a manically abusive judge notorious for unleashing torrents of invective on the trembling miscreants brought before his bench—and he dismissed the Cambridge delegation without a hearing. “Go your way and sin no more,” he thundered, “lest a worse thing happen to you.” Oxford fared little better. When Jeffreys was unable to expel the elected president of Magdalen College and replace him with a bishop of the king’s choosing, James himself turned up with a full glittering retinue (having paused along the way at Portsmouth to soothe scrofula victims with “the king’s touch”) to personally intimidate the dons. “Go home,” he roared, tossing aside a faculty petition without reading a word of it. “Get you gone. I am King. I will be obeyed…. Let those who refuse look to it. They shall feel the whole weight of my hand. They shall know what it is to incur the displeasure of their Sovereign.”
The king prevailed, dispatching troops with loaded carbines to install the bishop and begin the process of transforming Magdalen into a Catholic seminary, but his affronts became the fodder of revolutionary chatter in coffeehouses and newspapers across the land. The birth of a male heir to the previously childless monarch in 1688 aroused fears that yet another generation of Stuart rulers would continue turning back the clock. Within a year James had been deposed, driven into exile by an army that sailed over from Holland under the command of William of Orange at the invitation of seven English peers. (Related by marriage to the English royal family, William had made himself popular with the British by his skillful conduct of Dutch defenses against the French.) No sooner were William III and Queen Mary II enthroned than Parliament, with Newton its representative from Cambridge, enacted the Bill of Rights of 1689. It forbade British monarchs from independently raising money or creating armies in times of peace, infringing on freedom of speech, interfering with due process of law, or suspending acts of Parliament. England had become a constitutional republic, albeit one without a written constitution. Viewed in terms of a dialectic between Whigs (believers in science and material progress, apt to have supported Parliament in the civil war) and Tories (mostly monarchists and royalists, more concerned with stability than with social or scientific innovations), the Whigs had prevailed.
It was in these circumstances that Newton met John Locke, probably in the spring of 1689, the two forming a friendship that thrived until Locke’s death fifteen years later. Both were radical Whigs and devotees of science, but they were personally quite distinct. Locke had many friends, the prickly Newton few. Locke was voluble, Newton more apt to reserve his thoughts for the printed page. Newton was the most famous Englishman alive; Locke’s celebrity was limited to intellectual circles until publication of three long-suppressed works—his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Treatises of Government, and Letters on Toleration, arguing that governments are obliged by a “social contract” to protect “natural rights,” including right to “life, liberty, and the ownership of property”—made him a luminary. Locke was eager to know not only Newton the preeminent scientist, whose Principia had recently dawned like a second sun, but Newton the political activist, who in addition to joining the Cambridge delegation mustered against the intrusions of James II had recently denounced the king’s mandates as violations of common law. In that document Newton urged his academic colleagues to “be courageous therefore and steady to the laws,” adding that “an honest courage in these matters will secure all, having law on our sides” and reporting to his Cambridge colleagues that “fidelity & allegiance sworn to the King, is only such a fidelity & obedience as is due to him by the law of the land. For were that faith and allegiance more than what the law requires, we should swear ourselves slaves & the King absolute; whereas by the law we are free men.”
Locke, like Newton, was a man of modest origins whose early career had been deceptively quiet. Born in a Somerset village on August 29, 1632, to middle-class parents of evident moral standing (his father was sensitive enough to apologize to the adult Locke for once having struck him when he was a child, and Locke described his mother, reputedly a great beauty, as unfailingly loving), Locke was admitted to Christ Church, Oxford, as a scholarship student in 1652. He got off to an unpromising start, complaining that he was not cut out to be a scholar—due most likely to the fact that, as the encyclopedist Jean LeClerc noted, “the only philosophy then known at Oxford was the peripatetic [that is, Aristotelian], perplexed with obscure terms and useless questions.” Locke was rescued by his discovery of science, which arrived at Oxford in the person of John Wilkins, a burly, unbookish man who formed a club for the purpose of conducting experiments. Under Wilkins’ tutelage, Locke finally found his footing. He learned astronomy from a royalist, Seth Ward, and geometry from a Whig, John Wallis, who, moonlighting as a cryptographer, decoded intercepted Royalist messages for the Parliamentarians in the English Civil War. Eventually settling on medicine, Locke worked with Dr. Thomas Sydenham, called “the English Hippocrates,” a founder of epidemiology and enemy of dogma who taught that physicians should trust only “the faithful product of observation,” supported by “the only true teacher, experience.” Locke pursued science all the rest of his days. He kept meteorological records, studied the atmospheric effects of the great London fire of 1666 (popularly regarded as the satanic apocalypse predicted in the Book of Revelations), observed Jupiter and Saturn from the Paris Observatory, and counted among his friends the Danish astronomer Olaus Rømer, the Irish astronomer William Molyneux (whose pamphlet demanding equal rights for Irish citizens under English rule was burned on order of Parliament), and Robert Boyle, Britain's greatest chemist.
Locke’s scientific and medical studies pleased him sufficiently that he remained at Oxford for seventeen years. He never obtained a medical degree, but at one point supervised an operation to remove a suppurating liver cyst that was troubling Lord Ashley, later the first Earl of Shaftesbury, a radical Whig depicted by the royalist poet John Dryden as a Satan whose goal it was
That Kingly power, thus ebbing out, might be
Drawn to the dregs of a Democracy.
Against all odds the procedure actually cured Shaftesbury, who became Locke’s patron. Thus supported, Locke wrote a number of liberal political essays that he prudently kept to himself. One of them, the Essay Concerning Toleration, is a classic statement of the case for religious freedom, and a masterpiece of clearheaded reasoning and soaring rhetoric: “Now, I appeal to the consciences of those that persecute, torment, destroy, and kill other men upon pretence of religion, whether they do it out of friendship and kindness towards them or no?” When Shaftesbury was named lord protector of Carolina, Locke wrote and published the “Fundamental Constitution of Carolina” of 1670, providing that “no person whatsoever shall disturb, molest, or persecute another for his speculative opinions in religion or his way of worship.” Its liberalism made Carolina a magnet for refugees fleeing religious persecution.
As one of Shaftesbury’s pilot fish, Locke rose high when the great man became the most powerful figure in the court of Charles II, and descended to the depths when, by 1682, Shaftesbury’s growing opposition to the king’s high-handed fiats put his life in danger. Accused of plotting against the crown along with Lord William Russell, Algernon Sidney, and the Lords Essex and Salisbury—all of whom were soon imprisoned in the Tower of London, and soon thereafter dead—Shaftesbury fled to the Netherlands, where he too promptly died, just two years later. The relatively inconspicuous Locke might have survived in England, but he had by this time drafted his Two Treatises of Government, a seditious manuscript that endorsed human rights as natural. Fearing that he was being spied upon (rightly so, the Crown having dispatched lip-readers to transcribe his private conversations in the university dining hall), Locke in 1683 followed his patron’s example and decamped for Holland.
The Dutch were the architects and beneficiaries of what would be known as their Golden Age (1609–1713), an era during much of which Holland was pretty nearly the freest—and per capita the wealthiest and most creative—nation in the world. The Dutch dominated world maritime trade, owing in large measure to the fact that their ships, built to suit the practical needs of merchants rather than the vanity of regents, were broad-beamed, commodious, and easily maintained. (The other side of the coin was that Dutch warships tended to be converted merchant vessels, a liability that contributed to their defeat by British ships of the line in the three Anglo-Dutch wars of 1652–1674.) Their maritime empire stretched from Japan, where they enjoyed a trade monopoly that would last until 1853, to New Amsterdam, founded in America in 1625 as a private corporation and granted self-government in 1652, thereafter to become the West’s most commercial city. Their robust, republican, and relatively egalitarian society stood up to the mighty military forces of two retrograde regents, Philip II of Spain and Louis XIV of France. They counted among their philosophers immigrant freedom-seekers like Descartes; the liberal skeptic Pierre Bayle, whose Historical and Critical Dictionary of 1697 would find its way onto Thomas Jefferson’s list of the one hundred books vital to establishing the American Library of Congress; and now John Locke.
The greatest of Holland’s indigenous thinkers was Benedict de Spinoza, who like many philosophers professed the virtues of self-sufficiency and tranquil contemplation, but unlike most of them actually lived that way. A lens-grinder by trade, Spinoza contributed to the development of the microscope (and died of glass dust in his lungs), lived modestly (pipe-smoking was his only vice), worked assiduously (a friend said he once went three months without leaving the house), and shunned all honors, declining a professorship at the University of Heidelberg in 1673 “not in the hope of some better fortune, but from love of tranquility.” Recognizing science as “the only certain and reliable criterion of truth we possess,” Spinoza equated God with the universe and thus regarded scientific investigation of nature as doing God’s work—an outlook which at the time seemed so radical that Spinoza was excommunicated by his fellow Jews and narrowly survived an assassination attempt. (Seeing the gleam of the knife thrust at him by a stranger on a dark street, he turned aside and evaded it, keeping his slashed overcoat for the rest of his life as a kind of memento mori.) He was a liberal (“The purpose of the state is freedom”) and a democrat. “Democracy,” he wrote, “is of all forms of government the most natural and most consonant with individual liberty.” He regarded miracle-mongering theocrats as akin to illiberal politicians, since both enhanced their power by encouraging the irrational fears of the multitude:
The supreme mystery of despotism, its prop and stay, is to keep men in a state of deception, and with the specious title of religion to cloak the fear by which they must be held in check, so that they will fight for their servitude as if for salvation.
For such efforts—and for denying human immortality and the existence of a personal god who wields supernatural powers and takes an interest in human affairs—Spinoza was called an atheist, notwithstanding his having composed a fourteen-part proof of the existence of God.
The Dutch innovated oil painting, mixing earthen pigments with cold-pressed linseed oil in technologically advanced shops like the Old Holland Oil Color Factory, established in 1644 and still in business today. They created new styles of painting as well, influenced in part by the use of optical devices such as the pinhole camera, the refracting or “Gali-lean” telescope, and lenses which could project an inverted image onto a blank canvas. One such projector is thought to have been developed by the naturalist and microscopist Antoni van Leeuwenhoek and employed by Johannes Vermeer, both of whom worked in Delft. Art historians today debate whether Vermeer and other painters were in some sense cheating if indeed they used optical projection to sketch the outlines of their paintings, but it is perhaps more to the point to observe that the Dutch were quick to apply the results of scientific experimentation to the fine arts. Dutch paintings celebrated freedom, industriousness, and prosperity—as in Vermeer’s The Lacemaker, Jacob van Ruisdael’s View of Haarlem with Bleaching Grounds, and Rembrandt’s The Sampling Officials of the Clothmakers’ Guild, Amsterdam. In a break from the spiritual themes of the past, painters memorialized everyday scenes of housework, shopping, farming (the coming agricultural revolution in England would spring largely from experimental innovations developed by the Dutch), and technology (especially maritime technology; Dutch painters depicted sailing ships so reliably that maritime archeologists today use their paintings to re-create the lost rigging of recovered vessels). Science was celebrated in canvases such as Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lecture of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp and Vermeer’s Astronomer, who studies a celestial globe while bathed in light streaming through a window so radiantly as to suggest an intellectual awakening. The beauty of these canvases indicated that scientific inquiry, technological advancement, and free-market commerce could be carried out in harmony with nature, an outlook later jeered at by romantics who accused science of draining the mystery from existence (Wordsworth’s “We murder to dissect”) and technology of dehumanizing humankind (William Blake’s “dark satanic mills”). Such paintings became so popular that Dutch painters developed “wet-on-wet” overlaying techniques to complete their canvases faster and meet the rising demand, while their agents invented the practice of selling art at auction to maximize profits. As one modern historian puts it:
Here were products of a major European civilization—the very best products of that civilization—created by burghers for burghers. The existence of these works and their quality proved that no social elite was required for the creation of great art. The aristocracy was superfluous, the church irrelevant. Bourgeois artists attuned to the basic conditions of life around them, trusting their sensibilities and powers of observation alone, were capable of capturing the ultimate meaning of their culture.
Following the death of Rembrandt in 1669, the artistic inclinations of the Netherlands increasingly were expressed through natural history illustrations. Some of these works took the form of tropical landscape paintings, a genre invented by the Dutch that combined geographical and botanical depictions of Brazil, North Africa, and the East Indies. Many appeared in sumptuous books like Maria Sibylla Merian’s Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium of 1705, a study of the insects of the Dutch colony Surinam; Hendrik Adriaan van Reede tot Drakenstein’s Hortus Malabaricus, a twelve-volume botanical work containing over six hundred plates; George Rumpf’s monumental book on Moluccan shells, The Ambionese Curiosity Cabinet; Simon de Vries’s two-thousand-page Great Cabinet of Curiosities, which ranged from the wampum of American Indians to the marital customs of the Laplanders; and the Hortus Cliffortianus of Carl Linnaeus, the “father of taxonomy,” who was born in Sweden but developed the basis of his system for classifying plants while studying at the universities of Harderwijk and Leiden. Dutch collectors accumulated such vast inventories of the world’s biological and anthropological wonders that many of today’s methods of scientific classification had to be developed just to keep track of them.
Dutch society, like Dutch art, evoked a harmonious interplay between liberalism and science. As the historian Johathan I. Israel notes:
Visitors continually marveled at the prodigious extent of Dutch shipping and commerce, the technical sophistication of industry and finance, the beauty and orderliness, as well as the cleanliness, of the cities, the excellence of the orphanages and hospitals, the limited character of ecclesiastical power, the subordination of military to civilian authority, and the remarkable achievements of Dutch art, philosophy, and science…. Until the late seventeenth century many were appalled by the diversity of churches which the authorities permitted and the relative freedom with which religious and intellectual issues were discussed. Others disapproved of the excessive liberty, as it seemed to them, accorded to specific groups, especially women, servants, and Jews, who were invariably confined, in other European countries, to a lowlier, more restricted existence.
The Dutch were tolerant of such criticism; they were tolerant of just about everything.* They could afford to be. Having hit upon the magic triangle of science, technology, and liberal trade policies, they inhabited a seventeenth-century version of Tomorrowland, a state that demonstrated daily how a free, scientific world could work.
Locke thrived during his five years in the Netherlands, maturing into the accomplished, if still almost entirely unpublished, author who would become an architect of the Enlightenment and a preeminent exponent of science and liberalism. He quietly toured Dutch universities and studied local medical and technological improvements while conspiring with fellow Whig exiles to keep rebellion boiling back home in Britain. As a fugitive from justice—a warrant for his arrest and extradition having been issued in England—Locke was obliged to live in hiding, receiving his mail under assumed names and laboriously conducting his research from books hidden in secreted caches. Such a life is easy for no scholar, but Locke was accustomed to conflict—having grown up during the English Civil War, he recalled, “I no sooner perceived myself in the world but I found myself in a storm”—and the Dutch authorities were disinclined to betray him. William of Orange heeded the letter of the law in ordering enforcement of King James’ arrest orders—James was, after all, his father-in-law—but he did so with a wink and a nod, issuing fair warning before dispatching the police to search any of the private homes known to shelter Locke. In the preface to his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke coolly refers to its having been completed while he was “in a retirement where an attendance on my health gave me leisure,” without mentioning that the principal threat to his health was that of his being dragooned back to the Tower of London and the execution block.
Locke read Newton’s Principia soon after its publication. Its mathematics were beyond him so he asked the great Dutch mathematician Christiaan Huygens for help. He had picked the right man. Huygens was a diplomat, lute player, creator of a thirty-one-tone music temperament, inventor of a cycloidal pendulum employed in wristwatches and marine chronometers, a telescope builder who discovered a satellite of Saturn, and a talented physicist with ample experience in applying mathematics to the study of nature. It was Huygens who had first derived the law of centrifugal force for uniform circular motion, a step that incited Halley to hypothesize that gravitation obeys an inverse-square law of attraction and to ask Newton about it—which in turn led to Newton’s composing the Principia. Huygens took exception to some aspects of Newton’s theory, regarding it as “absurd” to imagine gravitational force somehow propagating itself across a vacuum of space, but he assured Locke that the work was mathematically trustworthy. Locke then devoted himself to absorbing Newton’s work, and emerged understanding better than most how and why it changed the world.
It was one thing to speculate, as many scientists had, that nature was built on a logical, mathematically intelligible basis, but Newton had shown nothing less than that the behavior of all objects influenced by gravity—from thrown stones on earth to the orbits of the moon and planets—could be predicted by means of mathematical formulas. Locke was so impressed that in the “Epistle to the Reader” prefacing his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, he referred to Newton’s “never enough to be admired book” as constituting “the greatest exercise and improvement of human understanding” yet accomplished. Locke added modestly of his own work:
In an age that produces such masters as the great Huygenius [i.e., Huygens] and the incomparable Mr. Newton, with some others of that strain, it is ambition enough to be employed as an under-laborer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge.
Voltaire said of Locke, “He everywhere takes the light of physics for his guide.”
With the advent of the Glorious Revolution, Locke returned to England as Princess Mary’s personal escort. They made landfall on February 13, 1689, and she was crowned queen the following day. Shortly thereafter her husband offered to name Locke the British ambassador to Frederick III, Elector of Brandenburg, an honor Locke refused on grounds of health—what he called “weak lungs,” probably asthma—and sobriety; Frederick was a drinker for whom Locke, “the soberest man” in England, might be poor company. Then Locke went off to find Newton.
Locke described Newton as a “nice” friend in the old sense of the word: “not able to endure much; tender, delicate.” When Newton in 1693 had a nervous breakdown—owing perhaps to overwork, lack of sleep, psychotropic poisoning by the toxic chemicals he handled in his alchemical experiments, or to the sexual repression of being a Puritan’s Puritan who evidently never had sex with anybody—and apologized to Locke for “being of opinion that you endeavored to embroil me with women,” Locke stuck by him, replying, with his customary steadfastness:
I have been, ever since I first knew you, so entirely and sincerely your friend, and thought you so much mine, that I could not have believed what you tell me of yourself, had I had it from anybody else. And though I cannot but be mightily troubled that you should have had so many wrong and unjust thoughts of me, yet…I receive your acknowledgement of the contrary as the kindest thing you could have done me, since it gives me hopes that I have not lost a friend I so much valued…. I shall always be ready to serve you to my utmost, in any way you shall like, and shall only need your commands or permission to do it.
By this time Locke had published, almost simultaneously, his Letter Concerning Toleration, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and Two Treatises of Civil Government. They were met with considerable enthusiasm, many agreeing with Lady Mary Calverley that Locke was now to be regarded as “the greatest man in the world.”
He had come to philosophy through science rather than the other way round, learning medicine, chemistry, and astronomy before encountering the likes of Descartes and Pierre Gassendi. (Of the two philosophers, Locke felt closer to Gassendi, who as an astronomer, chemist, and physiologist viewed the world empirically and was critical of Descartes.) While working on Human Understanding, probably in the winter of 1670–71, Locke attended meetings of the Royal Society and initiated small, informal gatherings to discuss science, philosophy, and religion. At one meeting, with about a half-dozen friends, something unusual happened. In the course of their discussion, as Locke recalled, they became “puzzled” and “perplexed” until “it came into my thoughts that we took a wrong course; and that before we set ourselves upon inquiries of that nature, it was necessary to examine our own abilities, and see what objects our understandings were, or were not, fitted to deal with.” This was not a traditional step—philosophers were more apt to use reason to explain everything under the sun than to consider its limits—but it answered to the spirit of science.
Scientists circa 1670 were mostly amateurs whose findings, although often of considerable interest, did not yet add up to anything like the imposing system that would come with Newton’s Principia. The odd nature of their inquiries—measuring quantities and counting things, mixing smelly chemicals in basement laboratories—was unprecedented and easily ridiculed. Samuel Butler’s “Satire upon the Royal Society” lampooned scientists’ desire
To explicate by subtle hints
The grain of diamonds and flints;
And in the braying of an ass
Find out the treble and the bass
Yet these early scientists had hit on something extremely important. The night sky viewed through a telescope revealed countless stars too dim to be seen with the naked eye, scattered endlessly into the depths of space. The microscope showed incredibly rich complexities in the details of every insect, leaf, and drop of pond water. (Even gold, Locke accurately speculated, might cease to look golden if inspected through a strong enough microscope.) Miners digging shafts and naturalists gathering seashells on mountaintops were finding clues that the earth had a longer and more varied history than anyone had imagined. The exotic botanical specimens being brought back from Africa and South America hinted at unanticipated biological extravagances. The effect of all this learning, preliminary and taxonomic as it may have been, was to make the vaunted presumptions of old look puny by comparison. As Richard Feynman would put it in the twentieth century, speaking of biblical accounts of the origin of the universe and the intervention of God in human affairs, “The stage is too big for the drama.”
The fact that logical inquiries by generations of capable thinkers had failed to anticipate the richness of the world now being unveiled by science raised the question, for Locke, of how those thinkers had gone wrong. Part of the problem clearly was that reasoning—thinking deductively to arrive at supposedly universal truths, as philosophers had done in the past—was of less use than had been assumed. The most sweeping logical claims, the ones that seemed the loftiest precisely because they lay the farthest from ordinary human experience, amounted to little more than shuffling empty abstractions, inviting the modern jape that “philosophy is the misuse of a terminology which was invented for just this purpose.” So Locke attempted a fresh start:
We should not then perhaps be so forward, out of an affectation of an universal knowledge, to raise questions, and perplex ourselves and others with disputes about things to which our understandings are not suited…. Our knowledge being so narrow…it will, perhaps, give us some light into the present state of our minds, if we look a little into the dark side, and take a view of our ignorance: which being infinitely larger than our knowledge, may serve much to the quieting of disputes, and improvement of useful knowledge; if discovering how far we have clear and distinct ideas, we confine our thoughts within the contemplation of those things, that are within the reach of our understandings, and launch not out into that abyss of darkness (where we have not eyes to see, nor faculties to perceive any thing,) out of a presumption, that nothing is beyond our comprehension.
His long inquiry into the nature of knowledge led Locke to formulate the philosophy known today as empiricism—the assertion that knowledge is based on experience alone, and that reason is but a secondary quality that arises, for instance, when we compare ideas that have arisen out of our experience.* (Thomas Henry Huxley: “All true science begins with empiricism.”) Locke went so far as to argue that the human mind at birth is a blank slate—a “white paper void of all characters, without any ideas”—on which sensations combine to form ideas in something like the way words combine to form sentences. Since human knowledge is limited to sensations and to the ideas formed by comparing and combining sensations, it is specious to claim that knowledge can be attained through reasoning alone, as Descartes did, or to reason from essences rather than appearances, as did Aristotle.
Intellectually, Locke’s Essay is remarkable for its modesty and its tolerance for ambiguity, two qualities that arose directly from science. Whereas most prescientific philosophers (and many modern and postmodern philosophers as well) sought to construct vast systems that pretended to explain just about everything, Locke was content, as scientists are, to establish facts about specific things. Ultimately the facts may be connected to form large patterns, but the big picture comes later. Thinkers impatient with the empirical approach, Locke noted, usually have failed to take the enormity of human ignorance into account. (The words “ignorant” and “ignorance” appear more than 140 times in Locke’s Essay.) If the range of empirical knowledge seems narrow by comparison with the grand claims of old, within that range much more may be learned: Locke writes that it would be childish to “undervalue the advantages of our knowledge, and neglect to improve it to the ends for which it was given us, because there are some things that are set out of the reach of it.” Aware that, as Feynman would put it, “What is not surrounded by uncertainty cannot be the truth,” Locke was good-humored about the limitations of his own philosophy:
The extent of knowledge, or thing knowable, is so vast, our duration here so short, and the entrance by which the knowledge of things gets into our understanding so narrow, that the whole time of our life is not enough to acquaint us with all those things, I will not say which we are capable of knowing, but which it would be not only convenient but very advantageous to know. It therefore behooves us to improve the best we can our time and talent in this respect, and, since we have a long journey to go, and the days are but short, to take the straightest and most direct road we can.
If human knowledge is based on our interactions with a material world that obeys natural laws, it follows that natural law is the proper basis for human governance. It was through this line of reasoning that Locke identified natural rights such as liberty, which he defined as “the power a man has to do or forbear doing any particular action according as…he himself wills it.” Liberty is rooted in human learning, since people can educate themselves, and act on what they have learned, only insofar as they are free.
Our understanding and reason were given us, if we will make a right use of them, to search and see, and then judge thereupon. Without liberty, the understanding would be to no purpose: and without understanding, liberty (if it could be) would signify nothing.
Impatient with philosophical arguments against free will, Locke argued that governance should be based on how people act and appear to be, rather than on theories about the inner workings of their minds: “As far as this power reaches, of acting or not acting, by the determination of his own thought preferring either, so far is a man free.”
Humans form social contracts with their governments to protect their natural rights. When a government fails to keep its part of the bargain, its citizens are justified in redressing their grievances, either through their elected officials or, if all else fails, through civil disobedience: “It is lawful for the people…to resist their king.” But if the people are to function capably as the ultimate source of political power they must be educated; hence Locke wrote at length about child rearing and public schooling. Although he never married, he evinced great sympathy and warmth toward children, advising parents to let their children get plenty of sleep, ample time to play in the open air, “plain and simple” diet and clothing (no straitlacing or otherwise overdressing of girls), and freedom from excessive discipline: “I have seen parents so heap rules on their children, that it was impossible for the poor little ones to remember a tenth part of them, much less to observe them…. Let therefore your rules to your son be as few as possible.”
Locke had his limitations, of course. He championed religious tolerance, but not for atheists and Catholics. He celebrated empiricism, but insisted that the existence of God could be established through reason alone. His “blank slate” theory of the human mind finds few adherents today. But he more than any other philosopher fashioned the kit of what was to become the democratic revolution—liberal governance based on natural rights and the consent of the governed; free intellectual, religious, and scientific inquiry; equal justice under law; and universal education designed to nourish individual capacity rather than mass servitude. Indeed the greatest difficulty for liberal-scientific readers reading Locke today is that his vast influence makes his philosophy seem as natural as fish find water.
As the founder of both empiricism and political liberalism, Locke produced a philosophy of science and of government that helped inspire the coming revolutions in America and France. Those epochal transformations were more immediately incited, however, by the journalist and amateur scientist Thomas Paine, who ranked high among the instigators of the American Revolution, the champions of the French Revolution, and the authors of the worldwide democratic revolution that followed—so much so that John Adams proposed that what is today called the Age of Reason, a borrowing from Paine’s book of the same title, should instead be called “the Age of Paine.” James Monroe spoke of him “as not only having rendered important service in our own Revolution, but as being, on a more extensive scale, the friend of human rights, and a distinguished and able advocate in favor of public liberty.” The Marquis de Lafayette, George Washington’s favorite officer, felt that “free America without her Thomas Paine is unthinkable.” The poet William Blake described Paine as a “worker of miracles,” comparing him favorably to Jesus: “Is it a greater miracle to feed five thousand men with five loaves than to overthrow all the armies of Europe with a small pamphlet?”
Paine’s first book, Common Sense, altered the political landscape almost overnight. Written in an accessible, unadorned style and bristling with insightful arguments for American independence, it was published on January 10, 1776, and sold over a hundred thousand copies before the year was out—this in a colonial America with a population of under three million. “Its effects were sudden and extensive upon the American mind,” wrote Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. “It was read by public men, repeated in clubs, spouted in Schools, and in one instance, delivered from the pulpit instead of a sermon by a clergyman in Connecticut.” “This book was the arsenal to which colonists went for their mental weapons,” wrote the nineteenth-century historian Theodore Parker. “Every living man in America in 1776, who could read, read Common Sense.…If he were a Tory, he read it, at least a little, just to find out for himself how atrocious it was; and if he was a Whig, he read it all to find the reasons why he was one.”
Paine followed Common Sense with a pamphlet titled The American Crisis, which he wrote in December 1776 while serving in the Continental army during its retreat from the British—“in a rage when our affairs were at their lowest ebb.” The British, aiming to crush the rebellion at its inception, had dispatched a fleet of warships to New York; their masts, said one observer, made the harbor look like a forest. The fleet disgorged twenty-three thousand British regulars and ten thousand German mercenaries, who on August 27, 1776, promptly decimated Washington’s ragtag army in the Battle of Brooklyn. Only through daring and luck was Washington able to convey the remainder of his Brooklyn forces across the East River by night, fleeing north through Manhattan before the British could catch up. Washington had been in retreat ever since, through New Jersey and on into Pennsylvania, and was close to despair. “I think the game is pretty near up,” he wrote to his brother John Augustine on December 18. The enlistments of three-quarters of his troops were due to expire at the end of the month; many, badly demoralized, had already declared their intention to quit fighting and go home and attend to their shops and farms. Dr. Rush found Washington on Christmas Eve “much depressed” and scribbling feverishly on scraps of paper that he then thrust aside. Retrieving a sheet that had fallen to the floor, Rush read the words “Victory or Death.”
Washington’s near-desperate plan was to stage a surprise attack against the 1,500-man Hessian garrison holding Trenton. If it worked, he might be able to keep his army together through the winter; if not, he felt, the American Revolution surely would be lost. Searching for sources of inspiration, Washington on Christmas Day had the opening paragraphs of Paine’s American Crisis, fresh off the press, read aloud to his troops. Wrapped in blankets that served as capes, slapping their arms across their chests to keep warm, many wearing shoes so ruined that their footprints in the snow were speckled with blood, they listened as Paine’s memorable injunction echoed in the frosty air:
These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.
Washington’s troops crossed the Delaware that night. Two of his men froze to death but Washington kept his forces together and attacked at dawn, taking Trenton and capturing nearly a thousand of the Hessians without incurring a single American fatality. Paine’s words were ever thereafter associated with the ultimate success of the American Revolution, and though he would be convicted of seditious libel in England, very nearly hanged and beheaded in France, and widely excoriated in America for his criticisms of organized religion, he remained the world’s most influential political writer. As Jefferson reflected in 1801, Paine had “as much effect as any man living.”
Yet there is more than a little mystery about Paine. Where did his insights come from? No mere rhetorician or rabble-rouser, he had a remarkably clear sense of what was wrong with Europe’s monarchies and a robust conception of how the Americans and the French might do better. His judgments were sound enough to keep us nodding in agreement with him today, his political philosophy sufficiently sophisticated for his biographer Eric Foner to declare that his ideas “have never been grasped in their full complexity.” But little in Paine’s personal history suggests fertile soil for such discernment.
Born in 1737 in Thetford, a village seventy miles northeast of London, Paine had only a rudimentary education before being apprenticed to his father as a staymaker at age thirteen. He disliked the job and tried various others, all without success. He twice worked as an excise officer but was fired both times, taught school for a few months but never returned to teaching, applied to become a clergyman but was turned down, and ran a tobacco shop that promptly failed. Nor did he cut the figure of a bookish autodidact. Although friends spoke of his large, clear eyes and alert demeanor, it was Paine’s habit to stay in bed reading newspapers till the sun was high in the sky, take a long walk, eat a substantial meal, nap for a few hours, and then start writing and drinking. Accounts differ, but he seems to have been a world-class brandy drinker who kept a snifter by his inkwell. Domestic bliss eluded him. His first wife, an orphan who worked as a maid, died delivering a stillborn child soon after their wedding. His second, the daughter of the widow who ran the tobacco shop, left him when he mismanaged the shop, presenting him with a £35 settlement in return for his renouncing all future claims to her property. (Paine would later reflect wistfully that many marriages “end in mutual hatred and contempt. Love abhors clamor and soon flies away, and happiness finds no entrance when love is gone.”) He used the money to book passage to Philadelphia, bearing a letter of introduction from Ben Franklin. In it Franklin states rather guardedly that Paine, whom he had met in London, had been “very well recommended to me as an ingenious worthy young man,” who might find employment in America “as a clerk, or assistant tutor in a school, or assistant surveyor.”
Paine landed in Philadelphia on November 30, 1774, so ill (from typhus, evidently) that he had to be carried off the ship on a stretcher. He was thirty-seven years old and had written little for public consumption other than a petition urging Parliament to raise the salaries of excise officers—a plea that the legislators effortlessly ignored. Nevertheless, Paine in America soon began writing oddly prescient and optimistic essays, mostly for The Pennsylvania Magazine. One of them begins by ruminating about geology, then characterizes America as the political equivalent of a scientific experiment. Protesting “against the unkind, ungrateful, and impolitic custom of ridiculing unsuccessful experiments,” Paine notes that scientific progress often arises from such failures, and predicts that Americans will thrive in the long term even if they falter at present:
I am led to this reflection by the present domestic state of America, because it will unavoidably happen, that before we can arrive at that perfection of things which other nations have acquired, many hopes will fail, many whimsical attempts will become fortunate, and many reasonable ones end in air and expense. The degree of improvement which America has already arrived at is unparalleled and astonishing, but ’tis miniature to what she will one day boast of, if heaven continue her happiness.
The following year he published Common Sense.
Scholars searching for the key to Paine’s metamorphosis have come up with many possible influences—from Quakerism (his father was a Quaker), to his unhappy experiences as an excise officer, his failures as a small-business man, or even his having grown up in Thetford, which saw more than its share of poverty. But many had been Quakers, seen poverty, failed in business, or suffered dismissal from government jobs, yet there was only one Tom Paine. It is more likely that Paine’s political ideas arose from his exposure to science.
No firsthand account of Paine’s intellectual development survives. He appears to have written at least part of such a work—he showed two volumes of memoirs to his friend Redman Yorke in Paris in 1802, and when writing to Jefferson in 1805 mentioned that he was composing a five-volume collected works with historical prefaces—but those manuscripts never saw the light of day. When Paine died, on June 8, 1809, in a house on Grove Street in New York City being rented by his friend Margaret Brazier Bonneville, he left his papers to her. She attempted to edit some of them, avidly erasing passages that offended her Catholic sensitivities, but produced nothing for publication. Following her death the papers passed into the possession of her son, General Benjamin Bonneville, who stored them in a St. Louis warehouse that later burned down. Bonneville’s widow confirmed that Paine’s papers were “all destroyed—at least all which the General had in his possession.”
Notwithstanding this scholarly tragedy it is possible to construct a coherent, if fragmentary, narrative of Paine’s scientific awakenings and their influence on his political thought. The story begins in 1756, when a teenaged Paine enlisted to serve on the privateer Terrible but was dissuaded from doing so by his father. The following year he tried again and this time succeeded, shipping out aboard the King of Prussia on January 17, 1757, and returning some six months later with over £30 in his pocket—his share of the booty earned by the privateer for having rescued a friendly ship, the Pennsylvania, from attack by the French. Paine headed for London, where he educated himself by reading library books and attending public lectures, discovering that “the natural bent of my mind was to science.”
There he befriended two leading science popularizers, James Ferguson and Benjamin Martin, men of common origins who supplemented their incomes by lecturing and writing about the wonders of chemistry, optics, and the stars. Ferguson came from a large, poor family in the north of Scotland and had only three months of schooling, but had taught himself to read, charted the stars as a shepherd at age fourteen, and embarked on a career in which he had, as his epitaph put it, “by unwearied application (without a master), attained the sciences.” He had just published a bestselling book, Astronomy Explained Upon Sir Isaac Newton’s Principles, that was to inspire a generation of budding amateur scientists—among them the musician William Herschel, who upon reading it built himself an oboe-wood telescope and went on to discover the planet Uranus. Martin was a farmer’s son and onetime schoolmaster who made telescopes and celestial globes. Like Ferguson he gave public “demonstrations” in which experiments were staged to show how scientific findings are established. (Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755, defined science as knowledge “grounded on demonstration.”) Both men sold globes, orreries, magnifying glasses, microscopes, and telescopes—including the popular “jealousy glasses,” small periscope-like pocket instruments employed to discreetly spy on one’s fellow audience members at the opera. “As soon as I was able,” Paine recalled, “I purchased a pair of globes, and attended the philosophical lectures of Martin and Ferguson.” The globes most likely were sold him by Martin, whose Fleet Street shop, called The Globe and Visual Glasses, advertised that “the use of the Globes…is the first consideration among those Qualities requisite for forming the Scholar and the Gentleman.” Displaying a pair of globes—one celestial, the other terrestrial—in your home signified that you were up on the latest scientific developments and knew about “the plurality of worlds,” the theory that the earth was just one among many inhabited planets.
Paine’s enthusiasm for science shows up so often in his works that were it not for his political influence, he might today be remembered as a gifted science writer. Long passages in The Age of Reason investigate the implications of there being many worlds. The earth, Paine writes,
may, at first thought, appear to us to be great; but if we compare it with the immensity of space in which it is suspended, like a bubble or a balloon in the air, it is infinitely less in proportion than the smallest grain of sand is to the size of the world, or the finest particle of dew to the whole ocean; and…is only one of a system of worlds, of which the universal creation is composed.
Every star is a sun, and each star may well be orbited by planets of its own, “as our system of worlds does round our central Sun.” Life abounds on the earth (Paine noting that when viewed through a microscope “every tree, every plant, every leaf, serves not only as a habitation but as a world to some numerous race”), so it stands to reason that other planets may harbor life, too:
Since then no part of our earth is left unoccupied, why is it to be supposed, that the immensity of space is a naked void, lying in eternal waste. There is room for millions of worlds as large or larger than ours, and each of them millions of miles apart from each other.
Paine saw the prospect of extraterrestrial life as underlining the importance of democracy and education. “It is not to us, the inhabitants of this globe, only, that the benefits arising from a plurality of worlds are limited,” he wrote. “The inhabitants of each of the worlds…enjoy the same opportunities of knowledge as we do…. The same universal school of science presents itself to all.”
Paine tells us that when he was learning science from Ferguson and Martin—and later from the astronomer John Bevis—he “had no disposition for what is called politics. It presented to my mind no other idea than is contained in the word Jockeyship”—that is, a game, a jostling for position in order to win. Although he later changed his mind on this point, Paine never stopped working on scientific and technological projects. He investigated the causes of yellow fever and the development of steamboats, invented a smokeless candle, corresponded with Thomas Jefferson about the capillary action that draws water up into the branches of trees, and designed an innovative iron bridge. “I took the idea of constructing it from a spider’s web, of which it resembles a section,” he recalled, “and I naturally suppose that when nature enabled that insect to make a web she taught it the best method of putting it together.”
Paine once conducted a scientific experiment with George Washington, who shared the passion for empirical inquiry that animated Franklin, Jefferson, and the other scientific Whigs who helped win American independence. In November 1783, he was Washington’s guest at Rocky Hill, a country estate in New Jersey. The locals maintained that a creek running through the property sometimes caught fire at night. Washington theorized that the fires occurred when “bituminous matter,” similar to oil slicks or coal dust, rose to the creek’s surface. Paine argued that the fires instead occurred when “inflammable air”—swamp gas or foxfire, known today to be methane—bubbled up from decaying organic matter on the river bottom. The two set out one night aboard a flat-bottomed scow to decide the question. “General Washington placed himself at one end of the scow, and I at the other,” Paine recalled. “Each of us had a roll of cartridge paper, which we lighted and held over the water, about two or three inches from the surface.” Washington’s soldiers prodded the river mud with their poles, and
when the mud at the bottom was disturbed by the poles, the air bubbles rose fast, and I saw the fire take from General Washington’s light and descend from thence to the surface of the water, in a similar manner as when a lighted candle is held so as to touch the smoke of a candle just blown out, the smoke will take fire, and the fire will descend and light up the candle. This was demonstrative evidence that what was called setting the river on fire was…the inflammable air that arose out of the mud.
Paine saw that science undermines authority, erodes superstition, and requires for its own advancement that people be free to meet and speak as they please. He was not the first to have made such connections. As his biographer John Keane notes, “The circles of Newtonians” that Paine encountered in London were “breeding grounds for a new radical politics. To many in those circles, Paine included, it seemed obvious that the sciences were friends of liberty.” What Paine brought to the mix was an unprecedented combination of coolheaded empirical judgment and blast-furnace rhetoric. In 1776, many Americans were still loyal British subjects who took a sympathetic view of monarchs generally and of King George III in particular. Paine would have none of that. Monarchy, he wrote, is “a silly, contemptible thing. I compare it to something kept behind a curtain, about which there is a great deal of bustle and fuss, and a wonderful air of seeming solemnity; but when, by any accident, the curtain happens to be open—and the company see what it is—they burst into laughter.” The job is empirically untenable: “The state of a king shuts him from the world, yet the business of a king requires him to know it thoroughly; wherefore the different parts, unnaturally opposing and destroying each other, prove the whole character to be absurd and useless.” Paine was particularly acute about the historical foundations of the monarchies: Each had originated, he noted, in the violent coercion of “a banditti of ruffians” who, “their power being thus established…contrived to lose the name of Robber in that of Monarch; and hence the origin of Monarchy and Kings.” This royal genesis in thievery, brutality, and usurpation is so embarrassing that a monarchist
never traces government to its source, or from its source. It is one of the shibboleths by which he may be known. A thousand years hence, those who shall live in America or France, will look back with contemplative pride on the origin of their government, and say, This was the work of our glorious ancestors! But what can a monarchical talker say? What has he to exult in? Alas he has nothing. A certain something forbids him to look back to a beginning, lest some robber, or some Robin Hood, should rise from the long obscurity of time and say, I am the origin.
To conceal the illegitimate source of their power, monarchists are obliged “to trump up some superstitious tale, conveniently timed…to cram hereditary right down the throats of the vulgar.”
The despotic power of monarchs becomes ludicrous when perpetuated through heredity—“All hereditary government is in its nature tyranny”—and Paine ridiculed hereditary rule by imagining what would happen if it were applied to art and science:
As the republic of letters brings forward the best literary productions, by giving to genius a fair and universal chance; so the representative system of government is calculated to produce the wisest laws, by collecting wisdom from where it can be found. I smile to myself when I contemplate the ridiculous insignificance into which literature and all the sciences would sink, were they made hereditary; and I carry the same idea into governments. An hereditary governor is as inconsistent as an hereditary author. I know not whether Homer or Euclid had sons: but I will venture an opinion, that if they had, and had left their works unfinished, those sons could not have completed them.
While Paine’s scientific skepticism ate away at the pomp and pretense of European nobility, the findings of eighteenth-century science afforded him an impression of the universe as based on harmonious laws, which in turn implied that human society too should be lawful and harmonious. This was very different from the widely held opinion, still voiced today, that an inherently lawless and violent humanity will descend into chaos unless held in check by authoritarian rule. “Such governments,” Paine argued, “consider man merely as an animal; that the exercise of intellectual faculty is not his privilege; that he has nothing to do with the laws but to obey them; and they politically depend more upon breaking the spirit of the people by poverty, than they fear enraging it by desperation.” Free governments work the other way round, building on foundations of liberty and justice. No king is required for them to function, any more than a master cat is needed to tell all the world’s cats how to catch mice, or angels to usher the planets in their orbits. (Paine, a Newtonian deist, believed that God had fashioned the universe well enough to never thereafter require any fine-tuning via divine intervention.) “No one man is capable, without the aid of society, of supplying his own wants; and those wants, acting upon every individual, impel the whole of them into society, as naturally as gravitation acts to a center,” he wrote. Systems of government are to be judged by the extent to which they embody natural law: “All the great laws of society are laws of nature.”
Paine foresaw that an international community of scientists would become a model of liberalism. Science, he wrote,
has liberally opened a temple where all may meet. Her influence on the mind, like the sun on the chilled earth, has long been preparing it for higher civilization and further improvement…. The philosopher [i.e., natural philosopher, or scientist] of one country sees not an enemy in the philosophy of another; he takes his seat in the temple of science, and asks not who sits beside him.
As “science and commerce” made the world wealthier and more peaceful, free peoples would find that almost their only remaining opponent was “prejudice; for it is evidently the interest of mankind to agree and make the best of life.”
When Paine returned to Europe from America in the spring of 1787, he thought that he was leaving politics behind to pursue a career as an inventor and engineer. He described his political career as “closed” and told friends that he now intended to devote himself to “the quiet field of science.” He arrived in Paris bearing another letter from Franklin, describing him as “an ingenious, honest man [who] carries with him the model of a bridge of a new construction, his own invention.” A soaring arch, the bridge was meant to demonstrate the beauty and efficiency of science while symbolizing the lofty spirit of liberty. Crossing it would be like ascending in a balloon—an experience that, Paine later wrote, “would have every thing in it that constitutes the idea of a miracle.” He saw the bridge as exemplifying his view that science reveals wonder in even the most ordinary things. “Every thing is a miracle,” he wrote, “and…no one thing is a greater miracle than another.”
But the bridge was never built, and politics returned to the center of Paine’s life in about as vivid and immediate a fashion as can be imagined. The storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789—which found Paine in England, supervising construction of yet another bridge—soon impelled him to resume writing about political affairs. His Rights of Man, published in two parts in 1791 and 1792, brought a conviction for seditious libel in a British court, but by that time Paine had fled to France. There he was welcomed as a hero, granted citizenship, and elected to the National Convention. Initially optimistic, he soon became rudely acquainted with the revolution’s dark side.
An early warning came on June 21, 1791, when Lafayette burst into Paine’s room in Versailles to awaken him with the news that King Louis XVI and his family had gone into hiding. Paine dressed hastily and strolled the streets of Paris with his friend Thomas Christie. The two regaled in the excitement of the mingling mobs, although Paine remarked coolly, “You see the absurdity of monarchical governments. Here will be a whole nation disturbed by the folly of one man.” They joined a crowd that listened respectfully, hats in hand, as a declaration was read aloud on behalf of the National Assembly to the effect that the escape of the monarchs would not impede progress toward a new constitution. The reading ended and the crowd donned their hats, adorned with tricolor ribbons denoting their revolutionary sympathies, but Paine had left his own cap back in his room. The mob turned on him, crying “Aristocrat! A la lanterne!” Three men seized Paine and dragged him toward a lamppost. Everyone understood what would follow: Royalists customarily were hanged by a rope around the neck from a street post and then decapitated, after which their organs were removed and displayed on pikes while their mutilated corpses were dragged through the streets. Paine narrowly escaped this fate thanks to the fact that Christie, who spoke good French, reasoned with the mob, and that an anonymous individual intervened and assured them that Paine was “un Américain.” Exhibiting remarkable coolness if also a dangerous inattentiveness to the potentials of revolutionary violence, Paine wrote languidly of this episode in a letter to the Marquis de Condorcet, observing that “during the early period of a revolution mistakes are likely enough to be committed.”
Beneath the studied nonchalance, however, Paine knew that his personal prospects were bleak. “I saw my life in continual danger,” he wrote Samuel Adams in 1803. “My friends were falling as fast as the guillotine could cut their heads off, and as I every day expected the same fate, I resolved to begin my Work.” That work was The Age of Reason, a book prompted on one hand by Paine’s lifelong distrust of organized religion and on the other by his concern, as a deist, that the French “were running headlong into atheism.” In 1776 Paine had told John Adams that he planned to write a book about religion but, anticipating that it would arouse public hostility, intended to “postpone it to the latter part of my life.” Having good reason to expect that his life would indeed soon end, he now composed the book feverishly and with his customary verve. “To believe that God created a plurality of worlds, at least as numerous as what we call stars, renders the Christian system of faith at once little and ridiculous; and scatters it in the mind like feathers in the air,” he wrote. “The two beliefs cannot be held together in the same mind; and he who thinks that he believes both, has thought but little of either.” Were Jesus of Nazareth the son of God, then a Jesus operating in the universe revealed by science “would have nothing else to do than to travel from world to world, in an endless succession of death.” And if, as the Bible recounts, Satan carried Jesus to a high peak and showed him all the kingdoms of the world, “how happened it that he did not discover America?”
In an episode that put the “dead” in deadline, Paine completed The Age of Reason by Christmas Eve of 1793 and was arrested shortly thereafter. Locked up in the Luxembourg prison, he passed the time debating religion with his friend Anacharsis Cloots, a militant atheist, until Cloots was guillotined on March 24. A few days later Georges-Jacques Danton, who had sought to calm Paine’s concerns during the onset of the Terror by reassuring him that “revolutions cannot be made with rosewater,” joined him in prison. “That which you did for the happiness and liberty of your country, I tried in vain to do for mine,” Danton told Paine, as their fellow prisoners looked on. “I have been less fortunate, but not less innocent.” Danton was guillotined on April 5. “Many a man whom I have passed an hour with in conversation I have seen marching to his destruction the next hour, or heard of it the next morning,” Paine wrote. “For what rendered the scene more horrible was that they were generally taken away at midnight, so that every man went to bed with the apprehension of never seeing his friends or the world again.”
Paine’s death sentence, signed by Maximilien Robespierre, was conveyed to the prison on July 24. By that time Paine had fallen seriously ill with a fever and been moved to a larger cell where three Belgian inmates could care for him. Concerned that the emaciated and semiconscious Paine was having trouble breathing, the Belgians got permission from a guard to leave the door open so that air could circulate through the cell. At dawn a turn-key made his way down the hall, chalking numbers on the doors of those to be executed that night. Since Paine’s door was open, the guard chalked his number, Quatre, on the inside of the door. When night fell the Belgians quietly closed the door, then listened in horror as a death squad proceeded down the corridor, dragging screaming inmates away. One of the Belgians clasped his hand over the delirious Paine’s mouth to ensure that he would not moan, cry out, or otherwise draw attention to himself, and the squad passed them by. Robespierre himself was guillotined just four days later.
Paine lived for fifteen more years, mostly in America, where he worked on various inventions—bridges, cranes, gunboats, and steamboats—and wrote tracts opposing slavery, championing women’s rights, and, in a letter to President Jefferson, proposing the Louisiana Purchase. He made many friends, among them Robert Fulton, inventor of the submarine and builder of the first economically viable steamboat, and the journalist Louis-Sébastien Mercier, whom he described as “a very funny, witty, old man, who had just as sound notions of liberty as he had of astronomy.”
In his will Paine declared, with his customary unadorned candor, “I have lived an honest and useful life to mankind; my time has been spent in doing good, and I die in perfect composure and resignation to the will of my Creator, God.” His physician, Dr. James R. Manley, asked, “Do you wish to believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God?” “I have no wish to believe on that subject,” Paine replied, then slept, then died. His body, buried in New Rochelle, New York, was exhumed in 1819 by William Cobbett, an English journalist, for reburial beneath a proper monument in England. But funds for the monument were never raised, and the disposition of Paine’s remains is unknown.
Paine was widely reviled, first for his revolutionary political views and later for his caustic critiques of organized religion in The Age of Reason. That book, too, was largely scientific in its orientation, Paine taking the deistic view that God may be known by studying his handiwork in the natural world. “The principles of science lead to this knowledge,” he wrote, “for the Creator of man is the Creator of science; and it is through that medium that man can see God, as it were, face to face.” This naturalistic view of God had the virtue, in Paine’s opinion, of being far more steadfast and reliable than are the Scriptures:
The Bible represents God to be a changeable, passionate, vindictive Being; making a world and then drowning it, afterwards repenting of what he had done, and promising not to do so again. Setting one nation to cut the throats of another, and stopping the course of the sun till the butchery should be done. But the works of God in the Creation preach to us another doctrine. In that vast volume we see nothing to give us the idea of a changeable, passionate, vindictive God; everything we there behold impresses us with a contrary idea—that of unchangeableness and of eternal order, harmony, and goodness.
Paine even urged that science itself be taught as a form of theology: “That which is now called natural philosophy, embracing the whole circle of science, of which astronomy occupies the chief place, is the study of the works of God and of the power and wisdom of God in his works, and is the true theology.” In doing so he drew unflattering comparisons between theology as it was and as it could be:
The study of theology, as it stands in Christian churches, is the study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on no principles; it proceeds by no authorities; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing; and it admits of no conclusion. Not any thing can be studied as a science, without our being in possession of the principles upon which it is founded; and as this is not the case with Christian theology, it is therefore the study of nothing.
William Blake, a religious rather than theological believer, perceived Paine to be a “better Christian” than were his critics, but the theologians were enraged. Their slanders had such lasting effect that Theodore Roosevelt in 1888 could dismiss Paine as a “filthy little atheist,” thus making three factual errors in three words: Paine stood five foot ten inches tall, had the presentable appearance of an internationally celebrated man of letters, and was a deist who opposed atheism.
Napoleon Bonaparte, seeking to curry Paine’s favor, visited him in Paris one day and proposed that every city should erect a gold statue in his honor. And so, perhaps, they should, but none has yet done so in the nation he named (Paine invented the term “The United States of America”) and helped establish. Visitors to Washington, D.C., today may view the statues of such foreign-born contributors to the American Revolution as Lafayette, Thaddeus Kosciusko, Baron Steuben, Jean de Rochambeau, and Michael Kovats de Fabricy—but none of Tom Paine.