[308] Tr. into English in 1659, under the title The Vanity of Judiciary Astrology. [↑]
Chapter XIV
BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
§ 1
The propagandist literature of deism begins with an English diplomatist, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, the friend of Bacon, who stood in the full stream of the current freethought of England and France[1] in the first quarter of the seventeenth century. English deism, as literature, is thus at its very outset affiliated with French; all of its elements, critical and ethical, are germinal in Bodin, Montaigne, and Charron, each and all of whom had a direct influence on English thought; and we shall find later French thought, as in the cases of Gassendi, Bayle, Simon, St. Evremond, and Voltaire, alternately influenced by and reacting on English. But, apart from the undeveloped rationalism of the Elizabethan period, which never found literary expression, the French ferment seems to have given the first effective impulse; though it is to be remembered that about the same time the wars of religion in Germany, following on an age of theological uproar, had developed a common temper of indifferentism which would react on the thinking of men of affairs in France.
We have seen the state of upper-class and middle-class opinion in France about 1624. It was in Paris in that year that Herbert published his De Veritate, after acting for five years as the English ambassador at the French court—an office from which he was recalled in the same year.[2] By his own account the book had been “begun by me in England, and formed there in all its principal parts,”[3] but finished at Paris. He had, however, gone to France in 1608, and had served in various continental wars in the years following; and it was presumably in these years, not in his youth in England, that he had formed the remarkable opinions set forth in his epoch-making book.
Hitherto deism had been represented by unpublished arguments disingenuously dealt with in published answers; henceforth there slowly grows up a deistic literature. Herbert was a powerful and audacious nobleman, with a weak king; and he could venture on a publication which would have cost an ordinary man dear. Yet even he saw fit to publish in Latin; and he avowed hesitations.[4] The most puzzling thing about it is his declaration that Grotius and the German theologian Tielenus, having read the book in MS., exhorted him “earnestly to print and publish it.” It is difficult to believe that they had gathered its substance. Herbert’s work has two aspects, a philosophical and a political, and in both it is remarkable.[5] Like the Discours de la Méthode of Descartes, which was to appear thirteen years later, it is inspired by an original determination to get at the rational grounds of conviction; and in Herbert’s case the overweening self-esteem which disfigures his Autobiography seems to have been motive force for the production of a book signally recalcitrant to authority. Where Bacon attacks Aristotelianism and the habits of mind it had engendered, Herbert counters the whole conception of revelation in religion. Rejecting tacitly the theological basis of current philosophy, he divides the human mind into four faculties—Natural Instinct, Internal Sense, External Sense, and the Discursive faculty—through one or other of which all our knowledge emerges. Of course, like Descartes, he makes the first the verification of his idea of God, pronouncing that to be primary, independent, and universally entertained, and therefore not lawfully to be disputed (already a contradiction in terms); but, inasmuch as scriptural revelation has no place in the process, the position is conspicuously more advanced than that of Bacon in the De Augmentis, published the year before, and even than that of Locke, sixty years later. On the question of concrete religion Herbert is still more aggressive. His argument[6] is, in brief, that no professed revelation can have a decisive claim to rational acceptance; that none escapes sectarian dispute in its own field; that, as each one misses most of the human race, none seems to be divine; and that human reason can do for morals all that any one of them does. The negative generalities of Montaigne here pass into a positive anti-Christian argument; for Herbert goes on to pronounce the doctrine of forgiveness for faith immoral.
Like all pioneers, Herbert falls into some inconsistencies on his own part; the most flagrant being his claim to have had a sign from heaven—that is, a private and special revelation—encouraging him to publish his book.[7] But his criticism is nonetheless telling and persuasive so far as it goes, and remains valid to this day. Nor do his later and posthumous works[8] add to it in essentials, though they do much to construct the deistic case on historical lines. The De religione gentilium in particular is a noteworthy study of pre-Christian religions, apparently motived by doubt or challenge as to his theorem of the universality of the God-idea. It proves only racial universality without agreement; but it is so far a scholarly beginning of rational hierology. The English Dialogue between a Teacher and his Pupil, which seems to have been the first form of the Religio Gentilium,[9] is a characteristic expression of his whole way of thought, and was doubtless left unpublished for the prudential reasons which led him to put all his published works in Latin. But the fact that the Latin quotations are translated shows that the book had been planned for publication—a risk which he did wisely to shun. The remarkable thing is that his Latin books were so little debated, the De Veritate being nowhere discussed before Culverwel.[10] Baxter in 1672 could say that Herbert, “never having been answered, might be thought unanswerable”;[11] and his own “answer” is merely theological.