Lecture V.
Note 23. p. [178]. The Literary Coteries Of Paris In The Eighteenth Century.
An account of these coteries may be seen in Schlosser's Hist. of Eighteenth Century, (E. T.) vol. i. ch. ii. § 4; the particulars of which chapter he has gathered largely from the Autobiography of Marmontel, and from Grimm's Correspondence. See also Sainte-Beuve's Papers (Portraits, vol. ii.) on Espinasse and Geoffrin. These coteries were specially four: viz. (1) that of Madame De Tencin, mother of D'Alembert, which included Fontenelle, Montesquieu, Mairan, Helvetius, Marivaux, and Astruc; (2) of Madame Geoffrin, who took the place of De Tencin. It included, besides some of the above, Poniatowsky, Frederick the Great when in France, the Swedish Creutz, and Kaunitz, the whole of the Voltaire school, and at first Rousseau; (3) of Madame Du Deffant, contemporary with Geoffrin. This was less a coterie of fashion, and more entirely of intellect; and included Voltaire, D'Alembert, Hénault, and Horace Walpole when in Paris. Later Mlle. Espinasse took the place of Deffant, and this became the union-point for all the philosophical reformers, D'Alembert, Diderot, Turgot, and the Encyclopædists; (4) of D'Holbach, consisting of the most advanced infidels.
Note 24. p. [198]. The Term Ideology.
As the term Ideology has lately been employed in a novel theological sense, (e.g. Essays and Reviews, Ess. iv.), and as it is employed in these lectures in its ordinary sense, as known in metaphysical science, it may prevent ambiguity to state briefly the history of the term.
The word Ideology, as denoting the term to express metaphysical science, seems to have arisen in the French school of De Tracy at the close of the last century. Cfr. Krug's Philos. Lexicon, sub voc.
As early as Plato's time metaphysics was the science of ἰδέαι, i.e. of forms; but the word ἰδέα implied the objective form in the thing, not the subjective conception in the mind. It was Descartes who first appropriated the word Idea in the subjective sense of notion. This arose from the circumstance that in his philosophy he sought for the idea in the mind, instead of the essence in the thing contemplated, as had been the case in mediæval philosophy. In the following century Locke's inquiries, together with Berkeley's speculations, caused metaphysics to become the science of ideas. The representative theory of perception which was held, increased, if it did not cause, the confusion: all knowledge was restricted to ideas. The subsequent attempts of Condillac and others to carry forward the analysis of the formation of our ideas still farther, caused metaphysics to be restricted to them alone. This apparently was the reason why De Tracy gave the name of Ideology to the science of metaphysics in the Elémens d'Idéologie.[1066]
It was the sceptical notion of the unreality of the objects as distinct from the ideas, partly the offshoot of a sensational philosophy, like that of De Tracy, partly of the spiritual philosophy of Germany, which farther caused the term Ideological to slide into the sense of ideal; a meaning of the term which the employment of it in English in recent theological controversy seems likely to make common.
Note 25. p. [195]. The Works Of Dr. Geddes.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century, free thought began to manifest itself in England under a rationalistic form, in a Roman catholic, Dr. Geddes, who lived 1737-1802. (See Life by Mason Good, 1804.) Vol. i. of his Translation of the Bible appeared in 1792; vol. ii. in 1797; and his Critical Remarks (vol. i.) in 1800. His free criticism is seen in discussing the character of Moses (pref. to vol. i. of Transl.); the slaughter of the Canaanites (pref. to vol. ii.); Paradise (Crit. Rem. p. 35); the remarks on Genesis xlix. (Id. p. 142); on the Egyptian plagues (p. 182); on the passage of the Red sea (p. 200). As soon as the first volume was published the Catholic bishops silenced him. Geddes was a believer in Christianity; but felt so strongly the deist difficulties, that he sought to defend revelation by explaining away the supernatural from the Jewish history, and inspiration from the Jewish literature. His views, so far as they were not original, were probably derived from the incipient rationalistic [pg 423] speculations of Germany, though he quoted almost none of the German except Michaelis and Herder. His position in the history of doubt is with the early rationalists, not with the deists. A writer of somewhat similar character, Mr. Evanson, a unitarian, wrote a critical attack on the Gospels, The Dissonance of the Four generally received Evangelists, in 1805.
Note 26. p. [196]. The Works Of Conyers Middleton.
Dr. Conyers Middleton lived from 1683 to 1750. In 1749 he published A Free Inquiry into the Miraculous Powers of the Early Church; “by which it is shown that we have no sufficient reason to believe, upon the authority of the primitive fathers, that any such powers were continued to the church after the days of the apostles.” He was attacked by Dodwell, Church, and Chapman, who described the work as discrediting miracles. The object of it was to place the church in the predicament of denying altogether the authority of the fathers, or else of admitting the truth of the Romish doctrine of miracles. Gibbon, when young, chose the latter horn of the dilemma. A list of Middleton's works in chronological order will be found in vol. i. of his Miscellaneous Works (1752). The one which created disputes in theology besides the above was, An Anonymous Letter to Waterland, 1731, in reference to his reply to Tindal's work; which was answered by Bishop Pearce. His posthumous work on The Variations or Inconsistencies which are found among the Four Evangelists, (Works, vol. ii. p. 22); his essay on The Allegorical Interpretation of the Creation and Fall (ii. 122); and his criticism in 1750 on bishop Sherlock's Discourses on Prophecy, may cause Middleton to be regarded as a rationalist. See his Works, ii. 24, 131, and iii. 183.