reality or a sham? an ultimate or a derivative faculty? The sceptics and the intuitionalists discussed the question from various points of view. The typical representatives of the two schools of thought in the early part of the century were Shaftesbury and Mandeville, both of them writers of remarkable ability and of great influence upon their contemporaries and successors. I will begin by considering their attitude and relation. 18. The school of Shaftesbury retained the general doctrine of a divine guidance, but generally denied or relegated to the background the doctrine of supernatural sanctions. Anxious to retain a theological conception of the universe, they made a God out of Nature-a God immanent in the world, not acting upon it from without. Good impulses were at once divine and natural. The old God dwelt in a supersensual heaven, and our corrupt world could only reflect scattered lights from its benign Creator. Nature was revealed in the visible universe, and, therefore, the universe was everywhere pervaded by profound harmonies fitted to excite our enthusiastic veneration. It was the new temple, sanctified everywhere by the omnipresent Deity. Our aspirations were gratified within the visible order, instead of seeking for gratification elsewhere. Heaven and hell were no longer required to balance the corrupt desires of man, for man's loftiest impulses were natural. It was unnecessary as in orthodox divinity to call a new world into existence to redress the balance of the old. 19. The school, of which I have called Mandeville the representative, generally retained, by an equally natural process, the doctrine of supernatural sanctions, but rejected the doctrine of the divine guidance. They cared comparatively little for a comprehensive theory of the universe, and fixed their eyes upon the facts immediately around them. A strong grasp of realities distinguished them, as a love of wider generalisations distinguished their adversaries. They recognised the important truth involved in the theological doctrine of human corruption. Man was, in fact, an animal moved by base and ferocious passions. As a matter of observation, religion was the best restraint upon his impulses, and the most tangible part of religion was the belief in future rewards and punishments. They had no desire, therefore, to abolish damnation, unless, with Mandeville, they accepted the doctrine that all virtue was an empty sham. But they refused to see any signs of supernatural agency in the world around them. In specting every theory, to use an illustration of Tucker's, with the microscope of science, they thought that human passions, bad as they might generally be, quite accounted for all the phenomena around them. Theology might still be true as regarded the dim distance beyond their ken, but theology was not applicable to ordinary life. Just as in the deist controversy, it was assumed that God might have revealed himself to the ancient Jews, but never appeared to modern Englishmen, so in ethical controversy, it was thought that God was not a present guide, but it might very well be proved that he would reward or punish us elsewhere. Thus, with thinkers of this class, the divine glory retired from the present and the tangible world, to concentrate itself in a distant past and future; whilst, with their opponents, that glory grew dim and indefinite indeed, but still continued to irradiate the present world. These two currents of speculation run side by side throughout the century; the utilitarian gradually becoming the most conspicuous, as being most in harmony with the tendencies of the age and of English thought. I shall trace them separately, after describing Shaftesbury and Mandeville as their typical representatives. 20. The third Lord Shaftesbury is one of the writers whose reputation is scarcely commensurate with the influence which he once exerted. His teaching is to be traced through much of our literature, though often curiously modified by the medium through which it has passed. He speaks to us in Pope's poetry, and in Butler's theology. All the ethical writers are related to him, more or less directly, by sympathy or opposition. During his life, he and his friend Lord Molesworth were the chief protectors of Toland; and Tindal and Bolingbroke took many hints from his pages. The power is perhaps due less to his literary faculty-for, in spite of his merits, he is a wearisome and perplexed writer-than to the peculiar position which he occupied in speculation, and which at once separates him from his contemporaries, and enabled him to be a valuable critic and stimulator of thought. 21. A grandson of Dryden's Achitophel, and brought up 1 under the influence of Locke, he had imbibed from his cradle the political principles of the great Whig families. He professed, indeed, to adhere to the genuine party creed, with an independence not shown by its official representatives. Above all, he shared the Whig hatred to High-Church principles; and contempt for the slavish political doctrines of nonjurors and highflyers was naturally allied in his mind, as in the minds of many other members of his party, with an equally hearty contempt for their theology. The Church, according to his view, was useful in so far as it tied the hands of priests and fanatics, or acted as a gag instead of a trumpet; it would be pernicious if it could be made an engine of priestly power. He contemptuously professes his 'steady orthodoxy, resignation and entire submission to the truly Christian and catholic doctrines of our Holy Church, as by law established'—a profession in which the stress is, of course, to be laid upon the last three words. His Utopia implied an era of general indifference, in which the ignorant might be provided with dogmas for their amusement; and wise men smile at them in secret. The Church, in short, was excellent as a national refrigerating machine; but no cultivated person could believe in its doctrines. 22. Shaftesbury, however, by native intellectual power, and by force of cultivation, was raised far above the ordinary politicians of his day. On the rude stock of commonplace Whiggism were grafted accomplishments strange to most of his countrymen. Driven from a public school by the unpopularity of his grandfather, he had acquired the rare power of enjoying classical literature, without being drilled by grammatical pedants. He had travelled abroad, and there learnt to value, even to excess, the advantages of cosmopolitan culture in art and philosophy. In Italy he had become a connoisseur, and could frame high-sounding æsthetic canons of taste. In Holland, he had made the acquaintance of Bayle and Le Clerc, the leaders of European criticism. He is never tired of preaching the advantages obtainable by the refining process of which he was thus a brilliant example. He complains of the narrow prejudices of his countrymen. Those only will relish his writings 'who delight in the open and free commerce of 1 Misc. v. ch. iii. the world, and are rejoiced to gather views and receive light from every quarter.' A highly cultivated taste is the sole guide both in art and philosophy. To philosophise in a just signification is but to carry good breeding a step higher.'' 'The taste of beauty and the relish of what is decent, just, and amiable, perfects the character of the gentleman and the philosopher.' The person who is thus thoroughly trained is called, in his old-fashioned dialect, the 'virtuoso;' and if Shaftesbury has a full measure of the pedantry and conceit belonging to the character, he has also some of the intellectual sensibility which the virtuoso arrogates as his peculiar merit. 2 23. Shaftesbury's writings appeared between 1708 and 1711.3 His first two treatises explain his view of contemporary theologians. I have not discussed them in speaking of the deist controversy, although their influence was considerable. Shaftesbury, however, confines himself chiefly to indicating his general attitude of mind, and deals but little in those specific attacks upon the letter of the Bible which formed the staple of contemporary controversy. He looks upon the whole struggle with the supercilious contempt of an indifferent spectator. His 'Letter on Enthusiasm,' provoked by the strange performances of the French prophets, and its sequel, called 'Sensus Communis,' or an Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour,' explains his theory. His strongest antipathies are excited by that ugly phenomenon which our ancestors condemned under the name of criticism—a word, the change in whose signification is characteristic of many other changes. Inspiration,' he says, 'is a real feeling of the Divine presence, and enthusiasm a false one;'4 to which he adds, significantly, that the passions aroused in the two cases are much alike. This false belief in a supernatural influence is at the bottom of the disgusting manifestations of popular superstition, in which men mistake mental diseases for divine inspirations; and equally at the bottom of the superstitions which the Church of Rome has succeeded, with marvellous skill, in fettering and turning to account for the support of its Misc. iii. ch. i. 2 Ib. iii. ch. i. The essay on 'Virtue' had been published in an imperfect state by Toland in 1698. The Characteristics,' containing his collected treatises, first appeared in 1711, the year of his death. 'Enthusiasm,' sec. 7. majestic hierarchy. To provide for the enthusiasm of the loftier kind, the rulers of that Church allowed 'their mystics to write and preach in the most rapturous and seraphic strains.' To the vulgar they appealed by temples, statues, paintings, vestments, and all the gorgeous pomp of ritual. No wonder, he exclaims, if Rome, the seat of a monarchy resting on foundations laid so deep in human nature, still appeals to the imagination of all spectators, though some are charmed into a desire for reunion, whilst others conceive a deadly hatred for all priestly rule. 24. Shaftesbury, of course, belongs to the latter category, and for both evils he prescribes the same remedy. \ Ridicule is the proper antidote to every development of enthusiasm. Instead of breaking the bones of the French charlatans, we had the good sense to make them the subject of a puppetshow at Bartle'my fair;' and if a similar prescription had been applied by the Jews seventeen centuries before, he thinks that they would have done far more harm to our religion. For enthusiasm in priestly robes, and armed with the implements of persecution, there is the same remedy as for the enthusiasm serving the passions of a mob by counterfeit miracles. He maintained as a general principle that ridicule was the test of truth; a theory which produced a very pretty quarrel between Warburton and Akenside. Truth, he argues, may bear all lights,' and one of the principal lights is cast by ridicule. This is an anticipatory justification of the practice of the deists and their pupil Voltaire. Ridicule is the natural retort to tyranny. "Tis the persecuting spirit that has raised the bantering one.' 4 The doctrine, questionable enough in this dogmatic form, may perhaps be admitted with some limitation. Ridicule, out of place, when men are still in earnest enough to fight for their creeds, may be useful or venial for destroying the phantoms of dead creeds. When the prestige has survived the power, when heterodoxy is unfashionable, but not criminal, when priests bluster but cannot burn, satire may fairly come into play. Dogmas whose foundations have been sapped by reason may be toppled over by the lighter bolts of ridicule. The 'Wit and Humour,' part i. sec. I. 1 Ib. sec. 4. 1 Misc. ii. ch. ii. |