The opening even of Jeremy Taylor’s Ductor Dubitantium, so far as it goes, falls little short of the deistic position.[141] A new vein of rationalism, too, is opened in the theological field by the great Cambridge scholar John Spencer, whose Discourse concerning Prodigies (1663; 2nd ed. 1665), though quite orthodox in its main positions, has in part the effect of a plea for naturalism as against supernaturalism. Spencer’s great work, De legibus Hebræorum (1685), is, apart from Spinoza, the most scientific view of Hebrew institutions produced before the rise of German theological rationalism in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Holding most of the Jewish rites to have been planned by the deity as substitutes for or safeguards against those of the Gentiles which they resembled, he unconsciously laid, with Herbert, the foundations of comparative hierology, bringing to the work a learning which is still serviceable to scholars.[142] And there were yet other new departures by clerical writers, who of course exhibit the difficulty of attaining a consistent rationalism.
One clergyman, Joseph Glanvill, is found publishing a treatise on The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661; amended in 1665 under the title Scepsis Scientifica),[143] wherein, with careful reservation of religion, the spirit of critical science is applied to the ordinary processes of opinion with much energy, and the “mechanical philosophy” of Descartes is embraced with zeal. Following Raleigh and Hobbes,[144] Glanvill also puts the positive view of causation[145] afterwards fully developed by Hume.[146] Yet he not only vetoed all innovation in “divinity,” but held stoutly by the crudest forms of the belief in witchcraft, and was with Henry More its chief English champion in his day against rational disbelief.[147] In religion he had so little of the skeptical faculty that he declared “Our religious foundations are fastened at the pillars of the intellectual world, and the grand articles of our belief as demonstrable as geometry. Nor will ever either the subtile attempts of the resolved Atheist, or the passionate hurricanes of the wild enthusiast, any more be able to prevail against the reason our faith is built on, than the blustering winds to blow out the Sun.”[148] He had his due reward in being philosophically assailed by the Catholic priest Thomas White as a promoter of skepticism,[149] and by an Anglican clergyman, wroth with the Royal Society and all its works, as an infidel and an atheist.[150]
This was as true as clerical charges of the kind usually were in the period. But without any animus or violence of interpretation, a reader of Glanvill’s visitation sermon on The Agreement of Reason and Religion[151] might have inferred that he was a deist. It sets forth that “religion primarily and mainly consists in worship and vertue,” and that it “in a secondary sense consists in some principles relating to the worship of God, and of his Son, in the ways of devout and vertuous living”; Christianity having “superadded” baptism and the Lord’s Supper to “the religion of mankind.” Apart from his obsession as to witchcraft—and perhaps even as to that—Glanvill seems to have grown more and more rationalistic in his later years. The Scepsis omits some of the credulous flights of the Vanity of Dogmatizing;[152] the re-written version in the collected Essays omits such dithyrambs as that above quoted; and the sermon in its revised form sets out with the emphatic declaration: “There is not anything that I know which hath done more mischief to religion than the disparaging of reason under pretence of respect and favour to it; for hereby the very foundations of Christian faith have been undermined, and the world prepared for atheism. And if reason must not be heard, the Being of a God and the authority of Scripture can neither be proved nor defended; and so our faith drops to the ground like an house that hath no foundation.” Such reasoning could not but be suspect to the orthodoxy of the age.
Apart from the influence of Hobbes, who, like Descartes, shaped his thinking from the starting-point of Galileo, the Cartesian philosophy played in England a great transitional part. At the university of Cambridge it was already naturalized;[153] and the influence of Glanvill, who was an active member of the Royal Society, must have carried it further. The remarkable treatise of the anatomist Glisson,[154] De natura substantiæ energetica (1672), suggests the influence of either Descartes or Gassendi; and it is remarkable that the clerical moralist Cumberland, writing his Disquisitio de legibus Naturæ (1672) in reply to Hobbes, not only takes up a utilitarian position akin to Hobbes’s own, and expressly avoids any appeal to the theological doctrine of future punishments, but introduces physiology into his ethic to the extent of partially figuring as an ethical materialist.[155] In regard to Gassendi’s direct influence it has to be noted that in 1659 there appeared The Vanity of Judiciary Astrology, translated by “A Person of Quality,” from P. Gassendus; and further that, as is remarked by Reid, Locke borrowed more from Gassendi than from any other writer.[156]
[It is stated by Sir Leslie Stephen (English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 2nd ed. i, 32) that in England the philosophy of Descartes made no distinguished disciples; and that John Norris “seems to be the only exception to the general indifference.” This overlooks (1) Glanvill, who constantly cites and applauds Descartes (Scepsis Scientifica, passim). (2) In Henry More’s Divine Dialogues, again (1668), one of the disputants is made to speak (Dial. i, ch. xxiv) of “that admired wit Descartes”; and he later praises him even when passing censure (above, p. 65). More had been one of the admirers in his youth, and changed his view (cp. Ward’s Life of Dr. Henry More, pp. 63–64). But his first letter to Descartes begins: “Quanta voluptate perfusus est animus meus, Vir clarissime, scriptis tuis legendis, nemo quisquam præter te unum potest conjectare.” (3) There was published in 1670 a translation of Des Fourneillis’s letter in defence of the Cartesian system, with François Bayle’s General System of the Cartesian Philosophy. (4) The continual objections to the atheistic tendency of Descartes throughout Cudworth’s True Intellectual System imply anything but “general indifference”; and (5) Barrow’s tone in venturing to oppose him (cit. in Whewell’s Philosophy of Discovery, 1860, p. 179) pays tribute to his great influence. (6) Molyneux, in the preface to his translation of the Six Metaphysical Meditations of Descartes in 1680, speaks of him as “this excellent philosopher” and “this prodigious man.” (7) Maxwell, in a note to his translation (1727) of Bishop Cumberland’s Disquisitio de legibus Naturæ, remarks that the doctrine of a universal plenum was accepted from the Cartesian philosophy by Cumberland, “in whose time that philosophy prevailed much” (p. 120). See again (8) Clarke’s Answer to Butler’s Fifth Letter (1718) as to the “universal prevalence” of Descartes’s notions in natural philosophy. (9) The Scottish Lord President Forbes (d. 1747) summed up that “Descartes’s romance kept entire possession of men’s belief for fully fifty years” (Works, ii, 132). (10) And his fellow-judge, Sir William Anstruther, in his “Discourse against Atheism” (Essays, Moral and Divine, 1701, pp. 6, 8, 9), cites with much approval the theistic argument of “the celebrated Descartes” as “the last evidences which appeared upon the stage of learning” in that connection.
Cp. Berkeley, Siris, § 331. Of Berkeley himself, Professor Adamson writes (Encyc. Brit. iii, 589) that “Descartes and Locke ... are his real masters in speculation.” The Cartesian view of the eternity and infinity of matter had further become an accepted ground for “philosophical atheists” in England before the end of the century (Molyneux, in Familiar Letters of Locke and his Friends, 1708, p. 46). As to the many writers who charged Descartes with promoting atheism, see Mosheim’s notes in Harrison’s ed. of Cudworth’s Intellectual System, i, 275–76; Clarke, as above cited; Leibnitz’s letter to Philip, cited by Latta, Leibnitz, 1898, p. 8, note; and Brewster’s Memoirs of Newton, ii, 315.
Sir Leslie Stephen seems to have followed, under a misapprehension, Whewell, who contends merely that the Cartesian doctrine of vortices was never widely accepted in England (Philos. of Discovery, pp. 177–78; cp. Hist. of the Induct. Sciences, ed. 1857, ii, 107, 147–48). Buckle was perhaps similarly misled when he wrote in his note-book: “Descartes was never popular in England” (Misc. Works, abridged ed. i, 269). Whewell himself mentions that Clarke, soon after taking his degree at Cambridge, “was actively engaged in introducing into the academic course of study, first, the philosophy of Descartes in its best form, and, next, the philosophy of Newton” (Lectures on Moral Philosophy, ed. 1862, pp. 97–98). And Professor Fowler, in correcting his first remarks on the point, decides that “many of the mathematical teachers at Cambridge continued to teach the Cartesian system for some time after the publication of Newton’s Principia” (ed. of Nov. Org., p. xi).
It is clear, however, that insofar as new science set up a direct conflict with Scriptural assumptions it gained ground but slowly and indirectly. It is difficult to-day to realize with what difficulty the Copernican and Galilean doctrine of the earth’s rotation and movement round the sun found acceptance even among studious men. We have seen that Bacon finally rejected it. And as Professor Masson points out,[157] not only does Milton seem uncertain to the last concerning the truth of the Copernican system, but his friends and literary associates, the “Smectymnuans,” in their answer to Bishop Hall’s Humble Remonstrance (1641), had pointed to the Copernican doctrine as an unquestioned instance of a supreme absurdity. Glanvill, remarking in 1665 that “it is generally opinion’d that the Earth rests as the world’s centre,” avows that “for a man to go about to counter-argue this belief is as fruitless as to whistle against the winds. I shall not undertake to maintain the paradox that confronts this almost Catholic opinion. Its assertion would be entertained with the hoot of the rabble; the very mention of it as possible, is among the most ridiculous.”[158] All he ventures to do is to show that the senses do not really vouch the ordinary view. Not till the eighteenth century, probably, did the common run of educated people anywhere accept the scientific teaching.
On the other hand, however, there was growing up not a little Socinian and other Unitarianism, for some variety of which we have seen two men burned in 1612. Church measures had been taken against the importation of Socinian books as early as 1640. The famous Lord Falkland, slain in the Civil War, is supposed to have leant to that opinion;[159] and Chillingworth, whose Religion of Protestants (1637) was already a remarkable application of rational tests to ecclesiastical questions in defiance of patristic authority,[160] seems in his old age to have turned Socinian.[161] Violent attacks on the Trinity are noted among the heresies of 1646.[162] Colonel John Fry, one of the regicides, who in Parliament was accused of rejecting the Trinity, cleared himself by explaining that he simply objected to the terms “persons” and “subsistence,” but was one of those who sought to help the persecuted Unitarian Biddle. In 1652 the Parliament ordered the destruction of a certain Socinian Catechism; and by 1655 the heresy seems to have become common.[163] It is now certain that Milton was substantially a Unitarian,[164] and that Locke and Newton were at heart no less so.[165]
The temper of the Unitarian school appears perhaps at its best in the anonymous Rational Catechism published in 1686. It purports to be “an instructive conference between a father and his son,” and is dedicated by the father to his two daughters. The “Catechism” rises above the common run of its species in that it is really a dialogue, in which the rôles are at times reversed, and the catechumen is permitted to think and speak for himself. The exposition is entirely unevangelical. Right religion is declared to consist in right conduct; and while the actuality of the Christian record is maintained on argued grounds, on the lines of Grotius and Parker, the doctrine of salvation by faith is strictly excluded, future happiness being posited as the reward of good life, not of faith. There is no negation, the author’s object being avowedly peace and conciliation; but the Epistle Dedicatory declares that religious reasoners have hitherto “failed in their foundation-work. They have too much slighted that philosophy which is the natural religion of all men; and which, being natural, must needs be universal and eternal: and upon which therefore, or at least in conformity with which, all instituted and revealed religion must be supposed to be built.” We have here in effect the position taken up by Toland ten years later; and, in germ, the principle which developed deism, albeit in connection with an affirmation of the truth of the Christian records. Of the central Christian doctrine there is no acceptance, though there is laudation of Jesus; and reprints after 1695 bore the motto, from Locke:[166] “As the foundation of virtue, there ought very earnestly to be imprinted on the mind of a young man a true notion of God, as of the independent supreme Being, Author, and Maker of all things: And, consequent to this, instil into him a love and reverence of this supreme Being.” We are already more than half-way from Unitarianism to deism.