This rigid and self-satisfied provincialism of outlook, as applied to philosophers in the Encyclopædia Britannica, is not, I am inclined to believe, the result of a deliberate attempt to exaggerate the importance of British thinkers and to underrate the importance of non-British thinkers. To the contrary, it is, I believe, the result of an unconscious ethical prejudice coupled with a blind and self-contented patriotism. But whatever the cause, the result is the same. Consequently, any one who wishes an unbiased exposition of philosophical history must go to a source less insular, and less distorted than the Britannica. Only a British moralist, or one encrusted with British morality, will be wholly satisfied with the manner in which philosophy is here treated; and since there are a great many Americans who have not, as yet, succumbed to English bourgeois theology and who do not believe, for instance, that Isaac Newton is of greater philosophic importance than Kant, this Encyclopædia will be of far more value to an Englishman than to an American.
The first distortion which will impress one who seeks information in the Britannica is to be found in the treatment of English empirical philosophers—that is, of John Locke, Isaac Newton, George Berkeley, Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, Joseph Butler, Mandeville, Hume, Adam Smith and David Hartley. Locke receives fifteen columns of detailed exposition, with inset headings. “He was,” we are told, “typically English in his reverence for facts” and “a signal example in the Anglo-Saxon world of the love of attainable truth for the sake of truth and goodness.” Then we are given the quotation: “If Locke made few discoveries, Socrates made none.” Furthermore, he was “memorable in the record of human progress.”
Isaac Newton receives no less than nineteen columns filled with specific and unstinted praise; and in the three-and-a-half column biography of George Berkeley we learn that Berkeley’s “new conception marks a distinct stage of progress in human thought”; that “he once for all lifted the problem of metaphysics to a higher level,” and, with Hume, “determined the form into which later metaphysical questions have been thrown.” Shaftesbury, whose main philosophical importance was due to his ethical and moral speculations in refutation of Hobbes’ egoism, is represented by a biography of four and a half columns!
Hume receives over fourteen columns, with inset headings; Adam Smith, nearly nine columns, five and a half of which are devoted to a detailed consideration of his Wealth of Nations. Hutcheson, the ethical moralist who drew the analogy between beauty and virtue—the doctrinaire of the moral sense and the benevolent feelings—is given no less than five columns; while Joseph Butler, the philosophic divine who, we are told, is a “typical instance of the English philosophical mind” and whose two basic premises were the existence of a theological god and the limitation of human knowledge, is given six and a half columns!
On the other hand, Mandeville receives only a column and two-thirds. To begin with, he was of French parentage, and his philosophy (according to the Britannica) “has always been stigmatized as false, cynical and degrading.” He did not believe in the higher Presbyterian virtues, and read hypocrisy into the vaunted goodness of the English. Although in a history of modern philosophy he is deserving of nearly equal space with Butler, in the Britannica he is given only a little over one-fifth of the space! Even David Hartley, the English physician who supplemented Hume’s theory of knowledge, is given nearly as much consideration as the “degrading” Mandeville. And Joseph Priestley, who merely popularized these theories, is given no less than two columns.
Let us turn now to what has been called the “philosophy of the enlightenment” in France and Germany, and we shall see the exquisite workings of British moral prejudice in all its purity. Voltaire, we learn, “was one of the most astonishing, if not exactly one of the more admirable, figures of letters.” He had “cleverness,” but not “genius”; and his great fault was an “inveterate superficiality.” Again: “Not the most elaborate work of Voltaire is of much value for matter.” (The biography, a derogatory and condescending one, is written by the eminent moralist, George Saintsbury.)
Condillac, who is given far less space than either Berkeley or Shaftesbury, only half of the space given Hutcheson, and only a little over one-third of the space given Joseph Butler, is set down as important for “having established systematically in France the principles of Locke.” But his “genius was not of the highest order”; and in his analysis of the mind “he missed out the active and spiritual side of human experience.” James Mill did not like him, and his method of imaginative reconstruction “was by no means suited to English ways of thinking.” This latter shortcoming no doubt accounts for the meagre and uncomplimentary treatment Condillac receives in the great British reference work which is devoted so earnestly to “English ways of thinking.”
Helvétius, whose theory of equality is closely related to Condillac’s doctrine of psychic passivity, is given even shorter shrift, receiving only a column and a third; and it is noted that “there is no doubt that his thinking was unsystematic.” Diderot, however, fares much better, receiving five columns of biography. But then, more and more “did Diderot turn for the hope of the race to virtue; in other words, to such a regulation of conduct and motive as shall make us tender, pitiful, simple, contented,”—an attitude eminently fitted to “English ways of thinking”! And Diderot’s one great literary passion, we learn, was Richardson, the English novelist.
La Mettrie, the atheist, who held no brief for the pious virtues or for the theological soul so beloved by the British, receives just half a column of biography in which the facts of his doctrine are set down more in sorrow than in anger. Von Holbach, the German-Parisian prophet of earthly happiness, who denied the existence of a deity and believed that the soul became extinct at physical death, receives only a little more space than La Mettrie—less than a column. But then, the uprightness of Von Holbach’s character “won the friendship of many to whom his philosophy was repugnant.”
Montesquieu, however, is given five columns with liberal praise—both space and eulogy being beyond his deserts. Perhaps an explanation of such generosity lies in this sentence which we quote from his biography: “It is not only that he is an Anglo-maniac, but that he is rather English than French in style and thought.”