[50] A Collection of Several Pieces of Mr. John Locke, 1720, p. 271. [↑]
[51] E.g. Mark Pattison, who calls Collins’s book of 178 pages a “small tract.” [↑]
[52] “Ignorance,” Collins writes, “is the foundation of Atheism, and Freethinking the cure of it” (Discourse of Freethinking, p. 105). Like Newton, he contemplated only an impossible atheism, never formulated by any writer. The Philosophical Principles of Religion, Natural and Reveal’d, of Dr. George Cheyne (1705, 2nd ed. 1715), similarly declares (pref. end) that “if the modern [i.e. Newtonian] philosophy demonstrates nothing else, yet it infallibly proves Atheism to be the most gross ignorance.” Thus the vindicator of “religion” was writing in the key of the deist. [↑]
[53] Mr. Temple Scott, in his Bohn ed. of Swift’s Works (iii, 166), asserts that Swift’s satire “frightened Collins into Holland.” For this statement there is no evidence whatever, and as it stands it is unintelligible. The assertion that Collins had had to fly to Holland in 1711 (Dr. Conybeare, Hist. of N. T. Crit. R. P. A. 1910, p. 38) is also astray. [↑]
[54] Second ed. 1717. Another writer, William Lyons, was on the same track, publishing The Infallibility of Human Judgment, its Dignity and Excellence (2nd ed. 1720), and A Discourse of the Necessity of Human Actions (1730). [↑]
[56] As to whose positions see a paper in the writer’s Pioneer Humanists, 1907. [↑]
[57] There were six separate Discourses. Voltaire speaks of “three editions coup sur coup of ten thousand each” (Lettre sur les auteurs Anglais—in Œuvres, ed. 1792. lxviii, 359). This seems extremely unlikely as to any one Discourse; and even 5,000 copies of each Discourse is a hardly credible sale, though the writer of the sketch of his life (1733) says that “the sale of Mr. Woolston’s works was very great.” In any case, Woolston’s Discourses are now seldomer met with than Collins’s Discourse of Freethinking. Alberti (Briefe betreffend den Zustand der Religion in Gross-Brittannien) wrote in 1752 that the Discourses were even in that day somewhat rare, and seldom found together. Many copies were probably destroyed by the orthodox, and many would doubtless be thrown away, as tracts so often are. [↑]