method is hardly possible till some freedom of discussion is allowed, nor becoming when free discussion has brought all disputants to equal terms. Ridicule clears the air from the vapours of preconceived prejudice. Shaftesbury, though insisting even to tediousness upon its importance, is awkward in its application. Nor, indeed, is he to be reckoned amongst the unscrupulous employers of the weapon. It is 'good humour,' not a scoffing humour, which he professes to desire. 'Good humour,' he tells us, 'is not only the best security against enthusiasm, but the best foundation of piety and true religion.' Good humour, in fact, is the disposition natural to the philosopher when enthusiasm has been finally exorcised from religion. All turbulent passions and vehement excitements are alien to his nature. The sour fanatic and the bigoted priest are at opposite poles of disturbance, whilst he dwells in the temperate latitudes of serene contemplation. With the more rational forms of religion he would be the last man to quarrel. He sets himself at one place to prove that wit and humour are corroborative of religion and promotive of true faith;' that they have been used by 'the holy founders of religion;' and that ours is 'in the main a witty and good-humoured religion.' He passes with suspicious lightness over the proof of the last head; and the phrase 'in the main' is obviously intended to exclude a large, but undefined, element of base alloy. So long, however, as religion makes no unpleasant demands upon him he will not quarrel with its general claims. He speaks with contempt of the mockery of modern miracles and inspiration;' he is inclined to regard all pretences to such powers as 'mere imposture or delusion;' but on the miracles of past ages he resigns his judgment to his superiors, and on all occasions submits most willingly, and with full confidence and trust, to the opinions by law established.' A miracle which happened seventeen centuries before could hurt nobody; but the miracles of the French prophets, or at the tomb of the Abbé Paris, were noxious enough to require a drastic remedy in the shape of satire. One exception, indeed, must be admitted. Shaftesbury's philosophic calm is slightly disturbed by any mention of the Jews. The idol of the Puritans was naturally the 1 'Enthusiasm,' sec. 3. 3 2 2 Misc. ii. ch. iii. Ib. ii. ch. ii. bugbear of the deists. The Jew was the type of all that was fanatical, superstitious, narrow-minded, and offensive, and Shaftesbury hated him with the hatred of Voltaire. When writing as a literary critic, his examples of subjects upon which no poet could confer any interest are taken from Jewish history. Nothing, as the friend of Bayle naturally thinks, could be made of David. 'Such are some human hearts that they can hardly find the least sympathy with that only one which had the character of being after the pattern of the Almighty.' When writing as a moralist the same fertile source supplies him with abundant instances of the fearful consequences of superstition. Deism may be evil when it implies belief in a bad God. If religion gives a divine warrant for cruelty, persecution, barbarity to the conquered, human sacrifices, self-mutilation, treachery, or partiality to a chosen race, the practices which it sanctions are still 'horrid depravity.' 2 The reference to the Jews is more explicitly pointed in his later writings, where, for example, he explains the allusion to human sacrifice by the story of Abraham and Isaac,3 and discovers the origin of enthusiasm in priest-ridden Egypt, whence it was derived by the servile imitation of the Jews. Shaftesbury was a theist; but he was certainly not a worshipper of Jehovah. 25. The destructive element of Shaftesbury's writings is, however, strictly subordinate to his main purpose. He differs from Hobbes, the typical representative of the destructive impulses, as profoundly, though he does not hate him so heartily, as the soundest contemporary divines. Suppose, he says, that we had 'lived in Asia at the time when the Magi, by an egregious imposture, had got possession of the empire,'5 but had endeavoured to obviate hatred justly due to their cheats by recommending the best possible moral maxims, what would be our right course? Should we attack both the Magi and their doctrines; repudiate every moral and religious principle, and make men as much as possible wolves to each other? That, he says, was the course pursued by Hobbes, who, both in religion and politics, went on the principle of 'Magophony,' or indiscriminate slaughter of his opponents. Shaftesbury, on the contrary, aims at slaying, or rather fettering, the Magi, whilst retaining the precious treasures of which they had become the depositories. He had been profoundly influenced by Hobbes's great opponents, the Cambridge Platonists, and had even written a preface to a volume of sermons published by Whichcote-one of their number. His sceptical tendencies, indeed, prevented him from being a disciple of the school, though their spirit permeates his pages. Metaphysical speculation, again, was not congenial to his temper, and his cosmopolitan training had impressed him with the belief that the day of the great system-mongers was past. The vast tower of Babel, by which the school of Descartes and Leibnitz had hoped to scale the heavens, was crumbling into ruin, leaving for its only legacy a jargon detestable to all intelligent men. Of metaphysics he always speaks with a→ bitter contempt. It was a pseudo-science, leading to barren formulæ fit only for scholastic pedants. Philosophers are 'asort of moonblind wits who, though very acute and able in their kind, may be said to renounce daylight and extinguish, in a manner, the bright visible outside world, by allowing us to know nothing besides what we can prove by strict and formal demonstration.' He ridicules the philosophical speculations about 'formation of ideas; their compositions, comparisons, agreement and disagreement.'2 Philosophy, in his sense, is nothing but the study of happiness,3 and all these discussions as to substances, entities, and the eternal and immutable relations of things, and pre-established harmonies and occasional causes, and primary and secondary qualities, are so much empty sound. The most ingenious way of becoming foolish,' as he very truly says, 'is by a system,' and, in truth, the systems then existing were rapidly decaying. Should Shaftesbury, then, join the sceptical assault of his tutor, Locke, and endeavour to anticipate Berkeley and Hume? His dislike to purely sceptical speculation, and his want of metaphysical acuteness, precluded such a direction of his studies. The first is illustrated by his unequivocal condemnation of Locke; the second by the fact that, whilst 3 Moralists,' iii. sec. 3. 'Soliloquy,' part iii. sec. 1. 1 Misc. iv. ch. ii. 2 'Soliloquy,' part iii. sec. I. 4 repudiating the metaphysical theories, he really borrows from them the central support of his own doctrine. 1 26. His theory is given in its most systematic shape in the 'Inquiry concerning Virtue,' but various corollaries and corroborative doctrines are scattered through his discursive disquisitions upon things in general. Shaftesbury is preeminently a moralist; for the main purpose of his writings is to show how, amidst the general wreck of metaphysical and theological systems, a sufficient base may still be discovered on which to construct a rational scheme of life. Moreover, his morality is still theological and metaphysical. A belief in God, though hardly in the Christian, any more than in the Jewish God, is an essential part of his system. The belief in justice must, as he urges, precede a belief in a just God.' A sound theism follows from morality, not morality from theism. And thus 'religion' (by which he means a belief in God) is capable of doing great good or great harm, and Atheism nothing positive in either way.' The worship of a bad deity will produce bad worshippers, as the worship of a good deity produces good worshippers. Atheism, indeed, implies an unhealthy frame of mind, for it means the belief that we are living in a distracted universe,' calculated to produce no emotions of love or reverence, and thus it tends to sour the temper and impair the 'very principle of virtue, viz. natural and kind affection.' 2 A belief in God means, on the other hand, a perception of harmonious order, and a mind in unison with the system of which it forms a part. Atheism is the discordant, and theism the harmonious, utterance drawn from our nature, according as it is, or is not, in tune with the general order of things. Though at times Shaftesbury uses language which would fit into an orthodox sermon about a 'personal God,' 3 his teaching seems to adapt itself more naturally to the pantheism of Spinoza. 27. Intimately connected with this theology is the metaphysical doctrine which lies at the base of his system. WithLeibnitz, he is a thoroughgoing optimist. He holds with Pope, who perhaps learnt the doctrine from him, that 'whatever is, is right;' or, in the phrase of Pangloss, 'everything is 1 'Virtue,' book i. part iii. sec. 2. 2 Ib. part. iii. sec. 3. See e.g. 'Moralists,' part ii. sec. 3. for the best in this best of all possible worlds.' The 'Enquiry into Virtue' opens with a demonstration that there can be no real ill in the universe. Apparent evil is merely the effect of our ignorance. The weakness of infants is the cause of parental affection; and all philanthropical impulses are founded on the wants of man. What,' he asks, 'can be happier, than such a deficiency as is the occasion of so much good?' If there be a supremely good and all-ruling mind, so runs his argument, there can be nothing intrinsically bad. Or, rather, the absence of evil proves the existence of the all-wise and all-good ruler. Theism is another name for universal optimism. The universe is a veil which but half disguises the presence of an all-prevading essence of absolutely pure benevolence. And, therefore, Shaftesbury exhausts all the re- sources of eloquence, pedantic and stilted enough, yet at times touched by some genuine emotion, in exalting the wondrous harmonies of nature. Much of his writings is simply an exposition of Dryden's verses : From harmony, from heavenly harmony, This universal flame began. From harmony to harmony Through all the compass of the notes it ran, Harmony is Shaftesbury's catchword. On that text he is 1 'Moralists,' part ii. sec. 4. |