Hutchinson is one of the most repulsive writers that ever produced any effect upon his contemporaries. His language is such as almost justified Dr. Parr in calling it the Hutchinsonian jargon; and his system is so confusedly brought forward that one who wishes to obtain even a general knowledge of it, must collect it as he can from passages scattered through the whole of his treatises. Add to these disrecommendations that it is propounded in the coarsest terms of insolent assumption, and that he treats the offence of those who reject the authority of scripture,—that is of his interpretation of Hebrew, and his exposition of the Mosaic philosophy, as “an infectious scurvy or leprosy of the soul which can scarcely be cured by any thing but eternal brimstone.”
The Paradise Lost, he calls, “that cursed farce of Milton, where he makes the Devil his hero:” and of the ancient poets and historians he says that “the mischief which these vermin did by praising their heroes in their farces or princes for conquering countries, and thereby inciting other princes to imitate them were the causes of the greatest miseries that have befallen mankind.” But Sir Isaac Newton was the great object of his hatred. “Nothing but villainy,” he said, “was to be expected from men who had made a human scheme, and would construe every text concerning it, so as to serve their purpose; he could only treat them as the most treacherous men alive. I hope,” he says, “I have power to forgive any crimes which are committed only against myself; I am not required, nor have I any power to forgive treason against the king, much less to forgive any crimes whereby any attempt to dispossess Jehovah Aleim. Nay, if I know of them and do not reveal them, and do not my endeavour to disappoint them in either, I am accessary. I shall put these things where I can upon the most compassionate side; the most favourable wish I can make for them is, that they may prove their ignorance so fully, that it may abate their crimes; but if their followers will shew that he or his accomplices knew anything, I must be forced to make Devils of them. There are many other accidents besides design or malice, which make men atheists,—studying or arguing to maintain a system, forged by a man who does not understand it, and in which there must be some things false, makes a man a villain whether he will or no.
“He, (Newton) first framed a philosophy, which is two thirds of the business of the real scriptures, and struck off the rest. And when he found his philosophy was built upon, and to be supported by emptiness, he was forced to patch up a God to constitute space. His equipage appears to have been the translation of the apostate Jews, and some blind histories of the modern heathen Deus, and an empty head to make his Deus; Kepler's banter of his powers, and some tacit acknowledgements as he only supposed, of the ignorantest heathens; an air-pump to make, and a pendulum or swing to prove a vacuum; a loadstone, and a bit of amber, or jet, to prove his philosophy; a telescope, a quadrant, and a pair of compasses to make infinite worlds, circles, crooked lines, &c.; a glass bubble, prisms and lenses, and a board with a hole in it, to let light into a dark room to form his history of light and colours; and he seems to have spent his time, not only when young, as some boys do, but when he should have set things right, in blowing his phlegm through a straw, raising bubbles, and admiring how the light would glare on the sides of them.”
No mention of Hutchinson is made in Dr. Brewster's Life of Newton, his system was probably thought too visionary to deserve notice, and the author unworthy of it because he had been the most violent and foul-mouthed of all Sir Isaac's opponents. The Mathematical Principles of Natural philosophy, he called a cobweb of circles and lines to catch flies. “Mathematics,” he said, “are applicable to any data, real or imaginary, true or false, more pestilent and destructive positions had been fathered upon that science than upon all others put together, and mathematicians had been put to death, both by Heathens and Christians for attributing much less to the heavenly bodies than Newton had done.” He compared his own course of observations with Newton's. His had been in the dark bowels of the earth, with the inspired light of scripture in his hand,—there he had learnt his Hebrew, and there he had studied the causes and traced the effects of the Deluge. “The opportunities,” he said, “were infinitely beyond what any man can have by living in a box, peeping out at a window, or letting the light in at a hole: or in separating and extracting the spirit from light, which can scarce happen in nature, or from refracting the light, which only happens upon the rainbow, bubbles, &c., or by making experiments with the loadstone, talc or amber, which differ in texture from most other bodies, and are only found in masses of small size; or by arranging a pendulum, which perhaps has not a parallel case in nature: or by the effects produced by spirit or light upon mixing small parcels of extracted fluids or substances, scarce one of which ever happened, or will happen in nature: or by taking cases which others have put, or putting cases which never had, nor ever will have any place in nature: or by forming figures or lines of crooked directions of motions or things, which most of them have no place, so the lines no use in nature, other than to serve hypotheses of imaginary Powers, or courses, which always have been useless, when any other Powers, though false, have been assigned and received; and must all finally be useless, when the true Powers are shewn.”
Such passages show that Hutchinson was either grossly incapable of appreciating Newton's discoveries, or that he wilfully and maliciously depreciated them. His own attainments might render the first of these conclusions improbable, and the second would seem still more so upon considering the upright tenour of his life. But the truth seems to be, that having constructed a system with great labour, and no little ability, upon the assumption that the principles of natural philosophy as well as of our faith, are contained in the scriptures, and that the true interpretation of scripture depended upon the right understanding of the Hebrew primitives, which knowledge the apostate Jews had lost, and he had recovered, his belief in this system had all the intolerance of fanaticism or supposed infallibility; and those who strongly contravened it, deserved in his opinion the punishments appointed in the Mosaic law for idolatry and blasphemy. Newton and Clarke were in this predicament. Both, in his judgement, attributed so much to secondary causes,—those Powers which had been the first objects of idolatry, that he considered their Deity to be nothing more than the Jupiter of the philosophizing heathens; and he suspects that their esoteric doctrine resolved itself into Pantheism. Toland indeed had told him that there was a scheme in progress for leading men through Pantheism and Atheism, and made him acquainted with all their designs, divine or diabolical, and political or anarchical! and all the villanies and forgeries they had committed to accomplish them. First they sought to make men believe in a God who could not punish, and then—that there was no God, and Toland was engaged, for pay, in this scheme of propagandism, “because he had some learning, and more loose humour than any of them.” The Pantheisticon was written with this view. Toland was only in part the author, other hands assisted, and Hutchinson says, he knew “there was a physician, and a patient of his a divine, who was very serviceable in their respective stations in prescribing proper doses, even to the very last.” But they “carried the matter too far,” “they discovered a secret which the world had not taken notice of, and which it was highly necessary the world should know.” For “though it be true to a proverb, that a man should not be hanged for being a fool, they shewed the principles of these men so plainly, which were to have no superior, to conform to any religion, laws, oaths, &c., but be bound by none, and the consequences of propagating them, that they thereby shewed the wisdom of the heathen people, who because they could not live safely, stoned such men; and the justice of the heathen Emperors and Kings, who put such to death, because they could have no security from them, and if their doubts, or notions had prevailed, all must have gone to anarchy or a commonwealth, as it always did, when and where they neglected to cut them off.”
That atheism had its propagandists then as it has now is certain, and no one who has watched the course of opinion among his contemporaries can doubt that Socinianism, or semi-belief, gravitates towards infidelity. But to believe that Newton and Clarke were engaged in the scheme which is here imputed to them, we must allow more weight to Toland's character than to theirs, and to Hutchinson's judgement.
What has here been said of Hutchinson exhibits him in his worst light,—and it must not hastily be concluded that because he breathed the fiercest spirit of intolerance, he is altogether to be disliked as a man, or despised as an author. Unless his theory, untenable as it is, had been constructed with considerable talent, and supported with no common learning,—he could never have had such men as Bishop Horne and Jones of Nayland among his disciples. Without assenting to his system, a biblical student may derive instruction from many parts of his works.
There is one remarkable circumstance in his history. When he was a mere boy a stranger came to board with his father, who resided at Spennythorn in the North-Riding of Yorkshire, upon an estate of forty pounds a year. The father's intention was to educate this son for the office of steward to some great landed proprietor, and this stranger agreed to instruct him in every branch of knowledge requisite for such an employment, upon condition of being boarded free of expence, engaging at the same time to remain till he had completed the boy's education. What he had thus undertaken he performed well; “he was, perhaps,” says Hutchinson, “as great a mathematician as either of those whose books he studied, and taught me as much as I could see any use for, either upon the earth or in the heavens, without poisoning me with any false notions fathered upon the mathematics.” The curious part of this story is that it was never known who this scientific stranger was, for he carefully and effectually concealed every thing that could lead to a discovery. Hutchinson was born in 1674, and his education under this tutor was completed at the age of nineteen.