§ 4
Anti-scriptural writers could not hope for such toleration, being doubly odious to the Church. Berkeley, in 1721, had complained bitterly[80] of the general indifference to religion, which his writings had done nothing to alter; and in 1736 he angrily demanded that blasphemy should be punished like high treason.[81] His Minute Philosopher (1732) betrays throughout his angry consciousness of the vogue of freethinking after twenty years of resistance from his profession; and that performance is singularly ill fitted to alter the opinions of unbelievers. In his earlier papers attacking them he had put a stress of malice that, in a mind of his calibre, is startling even to the student of religious history.[82] It reveals him as no less possessed by the passion of creed than the most ignorant priest of his Church. For him all freethinkers were detested disturbers of his emotional life; and of the best of them, as Collins, Shaftesbury, and Spinoza, he speaks with positive fury. In the Minute Philosopher, half-conscious of the wrongness of his temper, he sets himself to make the unbelievers figure in dialogue as ignorant, pretentious, and coarse-natured; while his own mouthpieces are meant to be benign, urbane, wise, and persuasive. Yet in the very pages so planned he unwittingly reveals that the freethinkers whom he goes about to caricature were commonly good-natured in tone, while he becomes as virulent as ever in his eagerness to discredit them. Not a paragraph in the book attains to the spirit of judgment or fairness; all is special pleading, overstrained and embittered sarcasm, rankling animus. Gifted alike for literature and for philosophy, keen of vision in economic problems where the mass of men were short-sighted, he was flawed on the side of his faith by the hysteria to which it always stirred him. No man was less qualified to write a well-balanced dialogue as between his own side and its opponents. To candour he never attains, unless it be in the sense that his passion recoils on his own case. Even while setting up ninepins of ill-put “infidel” argument to knock down, he elaborates futilities of rebuttal, indicating to every attentive reader the slightness of his rational basis.
On the strength of this performance he might fitly be termed the most ill-conditioned sophist of his age, were it not for the perception that religious feeling in him has become a pathological phase, and that he suffers incomparably more from his own passions than he can inflict on his enemies by his eager thrusts at them. More than almost any gifted pietist of modern times he sets us wondering at the power of creed in certain cases to overgrow judgment and turn to naught the rarest faculties. No man in Berkeley’s day had a finer natural lucidity and suppleness of intelligence; yet perhaps no polemist on his side did less either to make converts or to establish a sound intellectual practice. Plain men on the freethinking side he must either have bewildered by his metaphysic or revolted by his spite; while to the more efficient minds he stood revealed as a kind of inspired child, rapt in the construction and manipulation of a set of brilliant sophisms which availed as much for any other creed as for his own. To the armoury of Christian apologetic now growing up in England he contributed a special form of the skeptical argument: freethinkers, he declared, made certain arbitrary or irrational assumptions in accepting Newton’s doctrine of fluxions, and it was only their prejudice that prevented them from being similarly accommodating to Christian mysteries.[83] It is a kind of argument dear to minds pre-convinced and incapable of a logical revision, but worse than inept as against opponents; and it availed no more in Berkeley’s hands than it had done in those of Huet.[84] To theosophy, indeed, Berkeley rendered a more successful service in presenting it with the no better formula of “existence [i.e., in consciousness] dependent upon consciousness”—a verbalism which has served the purposes of theology in the philosophic schools down till our own day. For his, however, the popular polemic value of such a theorem must have been sufficiently countervailed by his vehement championship of the doctrine of passive obedience in its most extreme form—“that loyalty is a virtue or moral duty; and disloyalty or rebellion, in the most strict and proper sense, a vice or crime against the law of nature.”[85]
It belonged to the overstrung temperament of Berkeley that, like a nervous artist, he should figure to himself all his freethinking antagonists as personally odious, himself growing odious under the obsession; and he solemnly asserts, in his Discourse to Magistrates, that there had been “lately set up within this city of Dublin” an “execrable fraternity of blasphemers,” calling themselves “blasters,” and forming “a distinct society, whereof the proper and avowed business shall be to shock all serious Christians by the most impious and horrid blasphemies, uttered in the most public manner.”[86] There appears to be not a grain of truth in this astonishing assertion, to which no subsequent historian has paid the slightest attention. In a period in which freethinking books had been again and again burned in Dublin by the public hangman, such a society could be projected only in a nightmare; and Berkeley’s hallucination may serve as a sign of the extent to which his judgment had been deranged by his passions.[87] His forensic temper is really on a level with that of the most incompetent swashbucklers on his side.
When educated Christians could be so habitually envenomed as was Berkeley, there was doubtless a measure of contrary heat among English unbelievers; but, apart altogether from what could be described as blasphemy, unbelief abounded in the most cultured society of the day. Bolingbroke’s rationalism had been privately well known; and so distinguished a personage as the brilliant and scholarly Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, hated by Pope, is one of the reputed freethinkers of her time.[88] In the very year of the publication of Berkeley’s Minute Philosopher, the first two epistles of the Essay on Man of his own friend and admirer, Pope, gave a new currency to the form of optimistic deism created by Shaftesbury, and later elaborated by Bolingbroke. Pope was always anxiously hostile in his allusions to the professed freethinkers[89]—among whom Bolingbroke only posthumously enrolled himself—and in private he specially aspersed Shaftesbury, from whom he had taken so much;[90] but his prudential tactic gave all the more currency to the virtual deism he enunciated. Given out without any critical allusion to Christianity, and put forward as a vindication of the ways of God to men, it gave to heresy, albeit in a philosophically incoherent exposition, the status of a well-bred piety. A good authority pronounces that “the Essay on Man did more to spread English deism in France than all the works of Shaftesbury”;[91] and we have explicit testimony that the poet privately avowed the deistic view of things.[92]
The line of the Essay which now reads:
The soul, uneasy and confined from home,
originally ran “at home”; but, says Warton, “this expression seeming to exclude a future existence, as, to speak the plain truth, it was intended to do, it was altered”—presumably by Warburton. (Warton’s Essay on Pope, 4th ed. ii, 67.) The Spinozistic or pantheistic character of much of the Essay on Man was noted by various critics, in particular by the French Academician De Crousaz (Examen de l’Essay de M. Pope sur l’Homme, 1748, p. 90, etc.) After promising to justify the ways of God to man, writes Crousaz (p. 33), Pope turns round and justifies man, leaving God charged with all men’s sins. When the younger Racine, writing to the Chevalier Ramsay in 1742, charged the Essay with irreligion, Pope wrote him repudiating alike Spinoza and Leibnitz. (Warton, ii, 121.) In 1755, however, the Abbé Gauchat renewed the attack, declaring that the Essay was “neither Christian nor philosophic” (Lettres Critiques, i, 346). Warburton at first charged the poem with rank atheism, and afterwards vindicated it in his manner. (Warton, i, 125.) But in Germany, in the youth of Goethe, we find the Essay regarded by Christians as an unequivocally deistic poem. (Goethe’s Wahrheit und Dichtung, Th. II, B. vii: Werke, ed. 1866, xi, 263.) And by a modern Christian polemist the Essay is described as “the best positive result of English deism in the eighteenth century” (Gostwick, German Culture and Christianity, 1882, p. 31).
In point of fact, deism was the fashionable way of thinking among cultured people. Though Voltaire testifies from personal knowledge that there were in England in his day many principled atheists,[93] there was little overt atheism,[94] whether by reason of the special odium attaching to that way of thought, or of a real production of theistic belief by the concurrence of the deistic propaganda on this head with that of the clergy, themselves in so many cases deists.[95] Bishop Burnet, in the Conclusion to the History of his Own Time, pronounces that “there are few atheists, but many infidels, who are indeed very little better than the atheists.” Collins observed that nobody had doubted the existence of God until the Boyle lecturers began to prove it; and Clarke had more than justified the jest by arguing, in his Boyle Lectures for 1705, that all deism logically leads to atheism. But though the apologists roused much discussion on the theistic issue, the stress of the apologetic literature passed from the theme of atheism to that of deism. Shaftesbury’s early Inquiry Concerning Virtue had assumed the existence of a good deal of atheism; but his later writings, and those of his school, do not indicate much atheistic opposition.[96] Even the revived discussion on the immateriality and immortality of the soul—which began with the Grand Essay of Dr. William Coward,[97] in 1704, and was taken up, as we have seen, by the non-juror Dodwell[98]—was conducted on either orthodox or deistic lines. Coward wrote as a professed Christian,[99] to maintain, “against impostures of philosophy,” that “matter and motion must be the foundation of thought in men and brutes.” Collins maintained against Clarke the proposition that matter is capable of thought; and Samuel Strutt (“of the Temple”), whose Philosophical Inquiry into the Physical Spring of Human Actions, and the Immediate Cause of Thinking (1732), is a most tersely cogent sequence of materialistic argument, never raises any question of deity. The result was that the problem of “materialism” was virtually dropped, Strutt’s essay in particular passing into general oblivion.
It was replied to, however, with the Inquiry of Collins, as late as 1760, by a Christian controversialist who admits Strutt to have been “a gentleman of an excellent genius for philosophical inquiries, and a close reasoner from those principles he laid down” (An Essay towards demonstrating the Immateriality and Free Agency of the Soul, 1760, p. 94). The Rev. Mr. Monk, in his Life of Bentley (2nd ed. 1833, ii, 391), absurdly speaks of Strutt as having “dressed up the arguments of Lord Herbert of Cherbury and other enemies of religion in a new shape.” The reverend gentleman cannot have paid any attention to the arguments either of Herbert or of Strutt, which have no more in common than those of Toland and Hume. Strutt’s book was much too closely reasoned to be popular. His name was for the time, however, associated with a famous scandal at Cambridge University. When in 1739 proceedings were taken against what was described as an “atheistical society” there, Strutt was spoken of as its “oracle.” One of the members was Paul Whitehead, satirized by Pope. Another, Tinkler Ducket, a Fellow of Caius College, in holy orders, was prosecuted in the Vice-Chancellor’s Court on the twofold charge of proselytizing for atheism and of attempting to seduce a “female.” In his defence he explained that he had been for some time “once more a believer in God and Christianity”; but was nevertheless expelled. See Monk’s Life of Bentley, as cited, ii, 391 sq.