Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson: Contesting Diversity in the Enlightenment and Beyond (Ideas in Context)

LOCKE, SHAFTESBURY, AND HUTCHESON

Daniel Carey examines the fundamental debate within the Enlightenment about human diversity. Three central figures – Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson – questioned whether human nature was fragmented by diverse and incommensurable customs and beliefs or unified by shared moral and religious principles. Locke’s critique of innate ideas initiated the argument, claiming that no consensus existed in the world about morality or God’s existence. Testimony of human difference established this point. His position was disputed by the third Earl of Shaftesbury who reinstated a Stoic account of mankind as inspired by common ethical convictions and an impulse toward the divine. Hutcheson attempted a difficult synthesis of these two opposing figures, respecting Locke’s critique while articulating a moral sense that structured human nature. Daniel Carey concludes with an investigation of the relationship between these arguments and contemporary theories, and shows that current conflicting positions reflect long-standing differences that first emerged during the Enlightenment. DANIEL CAREY

Galway.

is Lecturer at the National University of Ireland,

IDEAS IN CONTEXT

74

Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson

IDEAS IN CONTEXT

Edited by Quentin Skinner and James Tully

The books in this series will discuss the emergence of intellectual traditions and of related new disciplines. The procedures, aims and vocabularies that were generated will be set in the context of the alternatives available within the contemporary frameworks of ideas and institutions. Through detailed studies of the evolution of such traditions, and their modification by different audiences, it is hoped that a new picture will form of the development of ideas in their concrete contexts. By this means, artificial distinctions between the history of philosophy, of the various sciences, of society and politics, and of literature may be seen to dissolve. The series is published with the support of the Exxon Foundation. A list of books in the series will be found at the end of the volume.

LOCKE, SHAFTESBURY, AND HUTCHESON Contesting Diversity in the Enlightenment and Beyond

DANIEL CAREY National University of Ireland, Galway

cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 2ru, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521845021 © Daniel Carey 2005 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2005 isbn-13 isbn-10

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Contents

Acknowledgements Abbreviations

page viii x 1

Introduction 1 Locke, diversity, and the natural history of man

14

2 The uses of diversity: Locke’s sceptical critique of Stoicism

34

3 Locke’s anthropology: travel, innateness, and the exercise of reason

69

4 Contesting diversity: Shaftesbury’s reply to Locke

98

5 Method, moral sense, and the problem of diversity: Francis Hutcheson and the Scottish Enlightenment

150

6

200

Conclusion: the future of diversity

231 253

Bibliography Index

vii

Acknowledgements

I have many institutions, granting bodies, and individuals to thank for sustaining this investigation, which represents, as such projects usually do, the result of many years’ work. I am indebted to the University of Glasgow for electing me to a Newlands Visitorship at an early stage of research and revision; to the National University of Ireland, Galway, for sabbatical leave and grants from the Millennium Fund; to Columbia University for granting me visiting scholar status at a crucial time; and to the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences for a Government of Ireland fellowship which made it possible to conclude the writing and research. During long periods spent in Oxford, where most of the research was carried out, Hertford College and Worcester College provided sources of enduring support and stimulation. I am grateful to the Bodleian Library and Duke Humphrey’s, and to their staff, especially Vera Ryhajlo, Helen Rogers, and William Hodges. I am also indebted to the resources and staff of the libraries of the University of Glasgow, Columbia University, the British Library, and the James Hardiman Library in Galway. Earlier versions of some of the chapters and sections appeared in Journal of the History of Philosophy, The Seventeenth Century, Locke Studies, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, and the Archiv fu¨r Geschichte der Philosophie. I am grateful to the editors and publishers for allowing me to draw on this material. In developing this study I was fortunate to benefit from the instruction and advice of Anthony Pagden, Richard Tuck, and Charles Taylor, successive Carlyle lecturers in Oxford. Numerous friends and scholars supplied help and valuable information, among them Michael Ayers, Jane Conroy, Hannah Dawson, Nicholas Dew, John Dillon, Roger Fechner, Christoph Fehige, John Finamore, Doris Garraway, Mark Goldie, Loı¨c Guyon, James Harris, Peter Hulme, Michael Hunter, the late Oliver Impey, Doreen Innes, Margaret Jacob, Michael Khodarkovsky, Lawrence viii

Acknowledgements

ix

Klein, Helen Knight, Anthony Long, the late David Lovejoy, Gordon Marce, James McLellan, Michel Mervaud, Philip Milton, Philip Mitsis, Ken Parker, Jean-Paul Pittion, the late Richard Popkin, Graham Rees, Isabel Rivers, John Rogers, Helen Rountree, Joan-Pau Rubie´s, Henry Schankula, Dominic Scott, Kerry Sinanan, Nigel Smith, Mark Stansbury, M. A. Stewart, Margarita Stocker, Ronald Grigor Suny, Amy Talbot, Sven Trakulhun, Friedrich A. Uehlein, Claudia von Collani, Cyril White, David Womersley, and Richard Yeo. My colleagues in Galway have been a tremendous source of encouragement and camaraderie. My family has provided every kind of support – thank you to my parents, Jim and Bette, and to my brothers Bill, Tim, and Matt, and also to Dora. I owe a special debt to friends and colleagues who generously read drafts of chapters and saved me from many errors while sharpening my thinking – Peter Anstey, Clı´odhna Carney, Adrian Frazier, Roland Hall, Victor Nuovo, Laurent Jaffro, Susan Jones, John Milton, James Moore, Anne Mulhall, Richard Sher, Shirley Stacey, John Stephens, and James Tully. For crucial support at various stages I am immensely grateful to David Armitage, Anthony Pagden, and James Tully. At Cambridge University Press, I want to thank Jo Breeze, Mary Leighton, Joanne Hill, and my editor Richard Fisher for many efforts on my behalf and the courtesy and forbearance with which they have carried them out. The errors that remain I must acknowledge mine. I dedicate this work to Sue with love, affection, and gratitude.

Abbreviations

Ep. mor. Essay L LL Rand

Seneca, Ad Lucilium epistulae morales, trans. Richard M. Gummere, Loeb Classical Library, 3 vols. (London, 1917–25). An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch, corrected edn (Oxford, 1979). An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, ed. Wolfgang Leidhold (Indianapolis, 2004). John Harrison and Peter Laslett, The Library of John Locke, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1971). The Life, Unpublished Letters, and Philosophical Regimen of Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbary, ed. Benjamin Rand (London, 1900).

Note: original orthography has been preserved in all quotations, including the use of accents in French.

x

Introduction

The trajectory of John Locke’s impact in the eighteenth century has been traced in numerous ways by historians of philosophy. The most familiar approach has been to link him with Berkeley and Hume as part of a group which developed (and complicated) an empirical account of knowledge acquisition. This book describes an alternative triptych, connecting Locke with the third Earl of Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson. The argument between them focused on the problem of diversity and the question of whether any moral consistency could be located in mankind. Such a perspective explicitly joins their work with a number of current concerns in philosophy and politics, giving this study a dual purpose: to recover a neglected theme in intellectual history, in which a debate over the content of human nature and issues of cultural difference emerged during the English, Irish, and Scottish Enlightenments; and in conclusion, to explore the relationship between these arguments and some major dilemmas in contemporary thought. Locke’s decisive role was ensured by the publication of the Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690) and above all the opening book in which he supplied a critique of innate ideas and principles. In order to unseat the mistaken notion that human beings inherently recognise certain moral truths as well as the idea of the divine, Locke pointed out evidence of widespread cultural diversity: what one country embraced, another one abhorred. Some groups believed in God and others remained entirely atheist. No consensus existed in morals or religion, which Locke maintained was essential if the innateness argument had any merit. The purpose of Locke’s critique was not to introduce scepticism but rather to eradicate a false foundation for knowledge and to make way for something more reliable. But he undermined a widely held position, and his critics charged him with calling into question the difference between right and wrong, virtue and vice. By doing so, he set the problem of diversity in motion in a new way. 1

2

Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson

The challenge facing Shaftesbury and Hutcheson was to undo the damage of Locke’s argument. They attempted to rescue some sense of consistency in moral judgements and practices, and to restore unifying norms in the territory of ethics and religion. Locke’s contribution and the response it inspired from Shaftesbury and Hutcheson continued to preoccupy philosophers throughout the eighteenth century, most notably in the context of the Scottish Enlightenment. The scale of this discussion and the traditions that informed it have not been adequately appreciated or explored. At a local level, this may be due to the common assumption that Locke’s critique had swept all before it by the beginning of the eighteenth century, despite some initial skirmishing from backward-looking critics when the Essay first appeared. Such a view is quite mistaken. But, more generally, the Enlightenment has been understood as a period in which philosophers dedicated themselves solely to establishing uniformity in mankind, whether they located it in the capacity for reason or a conception of human nature as informed by common sentiments. Whatever truth we may assign this characterisation, we have neglected the extent of opposition to this view and the degree of struggle involved in maintaining the argument. In general, scholars of the French and German Enlightenments have been more alert to this question.1 Thus my purpose is to differentiate the Enlightenment rather than to totalise it, looking for oppositions and tensions instead of unanimity. In advance of a more detailed description of this book, a brief historical sketch of the place of diversity in the history of philosophy may be of benefit. For Plato and Aristotle, the existence of cultural variation did not pose particular difficulties. The strong cultural emphasis on a Greek/barbarian distinction had something to do with this, inhibiting the force of examples of cultural inconsistency assembled by figures like Herodotus from the practices of Scythians, Persians, and others. More importantly, the variant forms of teleological reasoning employed by Plato and Aristotle in the fourth century BC had a normative dimension which answered sophistic objections about the relativity of beliefs and practices. With the development of Pyrrhonian and Academic scepticism in the Hellenistic period, the problem of diversity emerged fully as a significant challenge, unsettling the confident 1

See Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass., 1993); Henry Vyverberg, Human Nature, Cultural Diversity, and the French Enlightenment (New York, 1998); C. P. Courtney, ‘Montesquieu and the Problem of ‘‘la Diversite´’’’, in Enlightenment Essays in Memory of Robert Shackleton, ed. Giles Barber and C. P. Courtney (Oxford, 1988), 61–81; Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton, 2003).

Introduction

3

assumptions of Stoics and other dogmatists committed to universal claims about morality. These arguments took place in the wake of Alexander the Great’s campaigns, and later in the context of an expanding Roman empire. The Christian response to diversity emerged in different ways. As a phenomenon of nature, diversity spoke to the wisdom and magnificence of divine creation. But as a human event, it had different consequences. Mankind shared the same nature by definition; diversity, in the form of barbarous or unaccountable customs, however regrettable, merely testified to the corruption of human nature after the Fall rather than raising a profound philosophical dilemma. Although everyone sprang, ultimately, from the same parentage, some account of difference was also possible in relation to the sons of Noah and the dispersal of mankind after the Flood.2 In a less theological vein, custom and education were also understood as powerful forces, shaping nature in new and surprising ways. This acknowledgement invited the worrying conclusion, however, that nature had no normative content and merely gave way to the fragmenting effect of cultural variation. In some sense diversity, then, has always been recognised. The question is whether it constitutes a ‘problem’. In a descriptive mode, historians, geographers, and philosophers, at least from the time of Ptolemy, addressed the issue of cultural difference, often assigning climate a leading role in producing variation in character and custom. Survivals of this pattern of thought appear throughout the medieval and early modern periods, most famously in the work of Jean Bodin (c. 1530–96), and long into the eighteenth century with Montesquieu (1689–1755) and Kant (1724–1804). But the perspective, in this case, is not principally moral. Diversity begins to represent a challenge when it is framed as qualifying moral certainties. The modern reinvention of this strategy occurred with the sceptics, particularly Montaigne (1533–92), who emphasised the lack of any common pattern in human beliefs, attitudes, or customs. Responses to this view came from many quarters, including some constructions of natural law theory. However, we find that the jurist Samuel Pufendorf (1632–94), for example, did not deny, in the words of his English translator, ‘This strange Diversity of Laws and Manners, by which most Nations in the World contradict each other’.3 2

3

See Benjamin Braude, ‘The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods’, The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 54:1 (1997): 1–42; See also Margaret T. Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1964; Philadelphia, 1971), ch. 6. Samuel Pufendorf, The Law of Nature and Nations [1672–3], trans. Basil Kennet, 5th edn (London, 1749), 125 (II.iii.10).

4

Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson

During the British Enlightenment, the terms of the argument started to change in important ways with Locke (1632–1704). In the Essay, Locke set out an empirical basis for knowledge. While he stressed our limited access to essences, including the essence of human nature itself, he advocated the use of reason to regulate the understanding. Appeals to innate ideas or principles had no merit. To make his point, Locke drew attention to anthropological evidence of human difference, and by doing so he brought the problem of diversity squarely back into play. He eradicated internal criteria and impulses separating good from evil or locating an idea of God which gave reassurance of the norm of religious belief. His discussion took place in an era of increasing exotic travel, principally for purposes of colonisation and trade, as it had earlier in the context of sceptical argument. With this information, Locke denied an alleged consensus gentium which ostensibly flowed from an identical moral inheritance. His approach, designed to clear a ground for the understanding to proceed on a more authentic basis, undermined some cherished certainties. Locke had various ways of avoiding the sceptical consequences of his argument, but they did not satisfy the third Earl of Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1671–1713). Although he was educated under Locke’s care (as grandson of Locke’s patron, the first earl), Shaftesbury resisted the implications of his mentor’s position in Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711). He returned to a form of reasoning favoured by the ancients. Stoic reflection on the beauty of the universe established a principle of order in creation which was matched by the unity of human nature, evident in shared convictions in matters of taste, morality, and a recognition of the divine. Shaftesbury reasserted the notion of innateness, attempting to shield it from Locke’s critique by insisting on the existence of natural dispositions toward virtue. He rejected Locke’s unsociable portrait of human beings as motivated by self-interest. The normative thrust of Shaftesbury’s philosophy led him to characterise diversity as the simple effect of custom and education, or more provocatively as the outcome of pernicious religion. Shaftesbury not only objected to Locke’s views on innateness, he also turned against Locke’s positive theory of morals. In particular, the assumption that mankind required rewards and punishments to maintain any degree of moral commitment offended him. Locke had situated human beings as appetitive agents who merely obeyed the law prudentially, but for Shaftesbury disinterestedness was consonant with our nature. Locke had come to rely increasingly on Scripture to remedy the deficiencies of human reason, that is, the failure to pursue notions of duty with adequate

Introduction

5

attention. Shaftesbury’s anti-clerical stance led him to make religion a moral affair, but it was not dependent on a revealed text. He defined a complex position in which consensus on matters of morality enabled him to open up a space for diversity and disagreement in the realm of religious doctrine. Francis Hutcheson’s (1694–1746) influential contribution was to attempt a synthesis of two deeply opposing figures – Locke and Shaftesbury. Like Shaftesbury he wanted to embed moral feelings or ‘affections’ in human nature, seeing morality as natural and instinctive rather than purely external, prudential, or socially constructed and artificial. As such he regarded diversity as a potential threat which undermined his position. However, Locke’s prestige was such that Hutcheson could not deny the critique of innateness. Indeed he admitted at one point that the existence of a ‘vast Diversity of moral Principles, in various Nations, and Ages’ was a good argument against such a view.4 The challenge was to devise an alternative structure for moral reactions. Hutcheson delegated them to the ‘moral sense’, understood as common equipment for mankind. This sense was somehow free from the accusation of innateness. What is more, he described its operation by using Lockean terminology for knowledge acquisition. The changes of position between Hutcheson and Shaftesbury, although subtle, meant that Hutcheson encountered the problem of diversity on new and potentially more difficult grounds. He looked for a democratic expansion of the moral sense and had more at stake in locating a wider empirical confirmation of human agreement in ethics. Shaftesbury had remained surprisingly untroubled by the possible absence of common consent, but his aristocratic account of the highest levels of moral and aesthetic appreciation was unavailable to Hutcheson. We can see that Hutcheson bequeathed a problem to his successors in the Scottish Enlightenment but not necessarily a solution. Although diversity remained a distinctively moral issue, the alternative favoured in the later eighteenth century was to interpret it as a consequence of history, indicating stages of social progression, not as testimony that threatened to falsify the moral sense empirically. If we consider the argument conducted by Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson in the light of present-day philosophical concerns, we may be struck initially by the discontinuities between their outlook and our own, rather than any affinities. For us, diversity is widely accepted as an irreducible feature of human life. In culture, politics, and morality, we no longer 4

Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (London, 1725), 182–3.

6

Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson

expect to locate agreement or consistency, but recognise the inevitability of disparities, both within the state and beyond national borders. The acknowledgement of diversity may require management by governments and institutions, it may complicate the task of international relations and raise constitutional issues that trouble the work of political theorists, but it is not something we can overlook or avoid. Indeed, diversity emerges in contemporary discourse as an achievement, in some sense, of human development, an outcome of our own distinctive version of enlightenment. If it casts a shadow of relativism and incommensurability, it brings with it other sources of liberation and light. We have abandoned, it seems, the notion of establishing regularities in the human community, seeing agreement as a lost hope, or more likely an ambition or imposition to be viewed with suspicion. An awareness exists that human behaviour cannot be collapsed into a compelling oneness, while the concept of human nature – as a normative, unifying essence – has largely receded from moral discussion. This paradoxical consensus regarding a non-consensual force suggests a strong disjunction, at least with Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, if not precisely Locke. But in reality, of course, the account of contemporary thought I have given is overstated, not least because we are committed, in various ways, to unifying notions connected with natural rights, democratic forms of political association, and even, more contentiously, a sense of human sociability or ‘sociality’. This book investigates an historical argument over the implications of cultural diversity. The issue of religious toleration forms part of the discussion but does not appear at the centre of it. There are several reasons why toleration is located in this way. While Locke’s political position in his Letter concerning Toleration (1689) assumes the existence of religious differences as a given, it does not trace these disparities to an epistemic source. The Essay provides such an analysis at a more general level, largely through the critique of innateness. In fact, Shaftesbury and Hutcheson agreed with Locke’s views on toleration and therefore accepted an area of intractable social difference (addressed politically by a policy of toleration). Nonetheless, in their moral theories they attempted to remedy or balance the situation by appealing to a deeper consensus in human nature associated with innateness, instinct, or a moral sense. In this way, Shaftesbury’s encouragement of a free space for religious dispute emerges as dependent on an account of human nature that retained basic norms of sociability and morality. Similarly, Hutcheson, who benefited personally from measures of extended toleration in eighteenth-century Ireland, was an advocate both of toleration and of an account of human beings that emphasised their

Introduction

7

shared nature and capacity for moral agreement. Locke’s critique made any strategy that depended on a normative account of human nature difficult to negotiate. In their estimation, he opened up the prospect of diversity without limits. Thus, if we focus solely on religious toleration we miss the tensions in their positions. To assess their dispute, then, we must move the ground to the characterisation of human nature as a whole. Here we see that the debate between Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson was often distinctively anthropological, and the paradigm cases of difference they discussed were typically extreme: parricide, infanticide, incest, cannibalism. These practices threw into relief problems of incommensurability and inconsistency in moral values and judgements. Could they be written off as mere depravity or did they tell against a normative conception of human nature? Religious diversity formed, in one respect, a subset of this phenomenon. Certainly Locke’s anthropological interests were often predicated on observation of extravagant religious opinion and practice, a point he held in common with Shaftesbury who was inclined to advertise difference in this sphere rather than eradicate it. Nonetheless, conflict remained over whether the idea of God was innate. Locke said it was not, but Shaftesbury and Hutcheson had something at stake in recovering a natural impulse to embrace the Deity. They found ways to stabilise the proliferation of difference and contain it, at the same time as they rejected Locke’s own solution of placing the burden on reason. The argument advanced in this book can now be broached in more detail. The first chapter considers Locke’s engagement with the phenomenon of cultural diversity as constituting a natural history of man. The project of natural history, advanced by Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, and others associated with the new science, accepted diversity as an inescapable fact of nature. Locke adhered to this method by refusing to draw conclusions in advance about the nature of mankind. Rather, he treated ‘customs and manners’ as effects of human nature, and he accumulated testimony drawn from the work of travellers in an inductive fashion, to establish whether any regularities of practice and belief existed. The rationale for this approach ultimately stemmed from his position on real and nominal essences. For Locke, access to the real essence of created things was unavailable. But it did not follow that we should abandon investigation. Instead, we could improve our grasp of ‘nominal’ essences by conducting empirical research. The predicament with respect to human nature was the same. We must examine it without supposing an a priori understanding of its essence.

8

Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson

When confronted by diversity Locke declined a number of familiar explanations: he refused to treat it as the outcome of the Fall and the effect of custom acting against a determinate norm supplied by nature (or for that matter as explainable in biblical terms by derivation from the sons of Noah). The preliminary task was to accumulate evidence without presuppositions or hypotheses. Eventually this approach furnished him with grounds for a negative conclusion regarding the existence of allegedly innate ideas or principles. But we can also see the basis for a descriptive, ‘sociological’, outlook on human practice which he developed elsewhere in the Essay. In Book II of that work he described a so-called ‘law of Opinion or Reputation’, intended to capture the way morality was regulated in practice on the basis of social sanction. This law spoke to the fact that human communities often failed to refer their actions to any higher code than purely social praise or blame. The relative ‘novelty’ of Locke’s method potentially obscures the fact that his strategy for unseating innateness – by citing the evidence of diversity – placed him in a long philosophical tradition associated with scepticism. In the second chapter, I investigate the debate in antiquity between sceptics and Stoics over the content of human nature, and the way their arguments were replicated in the early modern period. Sceptics routinely pointed to incommensurable attitudes on child murder, parricide, cannibalism, and incest, in order to question the universal validity of moral rules. Locke drew on the same group of well-established examples to combat a Stoic assumption, namely that innate ideas or ‘common notions’ (koinai ennoiai) structured human nature. Locke’s critics, including Bishop Stillingfleet (1635–99), rehearsed a Stoic reply, insisting that diversity was superficial and that a deeper unity in fact underlay human differences. Although Locke had ways of tempering the more radical consequences of his views, he was criticised for jeopardising moral distinctions and introducing scepticism. The ‘law of opinion’ merely confirmed what his opponents feared about the dangerous implications of Locke’s position. With no internal resources to lead us to the good and to God, morality regulated by social preference alone was the inevitable outcome. In the third chapter I explore the anthropological implications of Locke’s position more closely. Locke depended on a number of printed travel accounts to make the point that various nations did not possess an idea of God or form of worship. The question is whether he represented their testimony accurately. In the case of atheist tribes in Brazil and the Caribbean, Locke arguably manipulated the accounts he had read, eliding those occasions in which his authorities restored a Stoic reading of human uniformity in matters of religious sentiment. With polite nations like Siam

Introduction

9

and China, his use of sources was certainly debatable. Yet Locke needed support from civil peoples of this kind even more than he did from the primitive. A long-standing argument for common consent (in Grotius, Stillingfleet, and others) had recommended setting aside the impolite as outside the norm. This chapter also describes an important anthropological alternative in Locke’s Two Treatises of Government. Although continuities exist between the perspectives evident in the Essay and in his political writing, Locke’s ethnographic references in the ‘Second Treatise’ have very different implications. Specifically, they do not raise the problem of diversity. Instead, Locke treated differences in mode of government and social organisation as the effect of variation in historical development. In other words, his references to Amerindian practices in this context do not relativise European custom. On the contrary, they suggest that history will assist primitive peoples in progressing toward a condition mirroring the polite. Shaftesbury’s reply to Locke in the Characteristicks took many forms, including an attack on Locke’s use of travel literature, and rejection of his legalistic framework for morality and theory of motivation, as well as his understanding of the relationship between religion and morality. But at the heart of the dispute was innateness and with it the problem of diversity. Shaftesbury sought to reinstate some form of innateness in order to guarantee a distinction between virtue and vice which was rooted in nature. He returned to Stoic teaching on this matter in order to answer the sceptical advertisement of diversity. In particular, Shaftesbury reintroduced the Stoic notion of ‘prolepsis’. A prolepsis was a natural ‘anticipation’ or inclination which made it possible to recognise certain ideas or to hold certain beliefs. Effectively, it was an innate idea or common notion. But Shaftesbury emphasised some important differences which freed prolepses from Locke’s critique. Prolepses were natural and yet they did not guarantee moral knowledge per se. They supplied criteria, but they required some cultivation and development. Furthermore, prolepses could be misapplied. With this, Shaftesbury evaded a major requirement insisted upon by Locke – that innatists must show not merely verbal agreement to innate notions but also ‘Conformity of Action’ in the world.5 Prolepses were never expected to secure consistency at this level. Shaftesbury was more than happy to note failures to replicate true taste and departures from the moral norm, which may cause us some surprise. In 5

John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch, corrected edn (Oxford, 1979), I.iii.3.

10

Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson

fact, rather than threatening his system, such manifestations of diversity only exposed the effects of erroneous custom and education, false religion, or improper government. In a convergence with Locke’s anthropology in the ‘Second Treatise’, these departures indicated differences in historical situation and the consequences of incivility. Shaftesbury’s reduced circle of consensus allowed him to make his boldest claim with respect to diversity: in the context of religion, no agreement should be expected or enforced. Freethought was essential in this arena, in which he anticipated intractable differences of outlook and interpretation. The stability of Shaftesbury’s moral and aesthetic system made it possible to encourage dispute in the religious sphere. Toleration of diverse opinion became the answer to this predicament. Although Hutcheson owed much to Shaftesbury, his adherence to an ostensibly ‘observational’ methodology, combined with a denial of innate ideas, required him to provide a more strenuous response to the data of diversity. The fifth chapter describes the delicate balance he achieved between rival inheritances from Locke and Shaftesbury. While on the surface of things he accepted Locke’s critique of innateness, he needed to shield the moral sense from the accusation that it too succumbed to the refutation from diversity. Hutcheson did so by describing the moral sense as an inbuilt faculty which made moral experience possible. But the question remained whether this was merely a formal possession, necessary in logical terms but empty of real content. Clearly Hutcheson wanted to say something normative about the moral judgements people made, to identify their substance and the fact that mankind shared such beliefs and impulses. He was obliged to adopt a dispositional rendering of innateness, similar to Shaftesbury, to make his case. In a lengthy section of his Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), Hutcheson tackled the problem of diversity directly. On the one hand, he asserted that reports of moral difference had been exaggerated; on the other, he introduced a number of explanations for its existence. Rival notions of happiness had some effect here, as did the unfortunate limitation of people’s moral reference to their immediate circle of concern. Religion could not be discounted as a sometimes regrettable influence, although he did not pursue Shaftesbury’s adventurous, deistic, position in these matters. Finally, he made the novel suggestion that the association of ideas played some part. Hutcheson’s answers were not entirely persuasive, but they suggest forcefully that diversity could not be overlooked or ignored. Locke’s intervention had made this impossible. Hutcheson’s strongest point was to maintain that everyone agreed on

Introduction

11

matters of moral principle, but differed over interpretations of what remained consistent with the principle. Thus he rejected, as Shaftesbury had done, Locke’s insistence on establishing ‘Conformity of Action’ as proof of consensus in these matters. As the Scottish Enlightenment developed, two orientations on diversity can be discerned. Some followed through on Hutcheson’s general approach and attempted to limit the damage of acknowledging variation in moral practice while detecting an underlying unity within human nature and moral views in general. Yet Hutcheson made matters difficult by committing himself to an observational philosophy which suggested that everyone in the world agreed on fundamental moral tenets. Empirical testimony of difference remained a perpetual threat, in spite of his explanations. The alternative progressively favoured by Scottish commentators was one originally adumbrated, in different ways, by Locke and Shaftesbury in fact. Figures like David Hume (1711–76), Adam Smith (1723–90), Adam Ferguson (1723–1816), and Lord Kames (Henry Home, 1696–1782) adopted an historical perspective on moral difference. Diversity could be understood as the consequence of variation in levels of social, political, and economic development. Human nature possessed the same moral content, but historical situation affected its expression. With this approach, empirical evidence was welcome of whatever kind: testimony of ethical responses among the primitive confirmed the residence of natural moral ideas or impulses in the soul. Any departures from the expected moral standard by these people merely indicated a failure to progress to a higher level of politeness which would allow their true natures to flourish. If the polite occasionally failed in their duties, then they presumably had not transcended all their former attachments to improper customs accumulated along the way. In this manner, the Scottish philosophers provided a rejoinder to Locke’s natural history of man: where Locke’s empirical method began with diversity and in some sense ended there, the Scots had undertaken an observational approach which acknowledged variation, but only to argue that it gave way to a discovery of more unified patterns in practice and belief. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries new variants of great importance appeared in the understanding of diversity. Racial conceptions of difference took on a greater currency with the emergence of biological theories of variation in the species, bound up with spurious considerations of physical anthropology and climate. Figures like Samuel Stanhope Smith, indebted to traditions of argument identified in the book, struggled with this development. The supposition of a ‘radical diversity of kind ’

12

Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson

threatened the coherence of moral philosophy, as he remarked: ‘destroy this unity, and no certain and universal principles of human nature remain. We have no general and infallible standard by which to judge of the moral ideas and habits of different nations, or even of different men.’6 Darwin’s evolutionary natural history provided a different solution to the problem of diversity in the natural world. But its transposition onto debates about human nature had a pernicious effect, consolidating moral, social, intellectual, and political differences across mankind. Evolution offered a stadial theory of change, but as a history of man it lacked the ‘dispensation’ of the earlier Scottish narratives which allowed for an accelerated progress toward a goal, made possible by colonial contact. An examination of these later developments is beyond the scope of this study. But in some ways the discrediting of racial theories and abandonment of evolutionary theory as an explanatory model in the social sciences has brought contemporary discussion closer to traditions of argument I associate with Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson. This question is pursued in a conclusion to the book. However, I do not impose a genetic narrative on the subject. Indeed, the purpose of juxtaposition is to draw out contrasts as much as continuities. Nonetheless, we gain some added perspective on current disputes over diversity and multiculturalism if we situate them in a longer time frame and appreciate the ways in which related problems were addressed in the English, Irish, and Scottish Enlightenments. Consideration of diversity as moral issue, which characterised the debate outlined in the central chapters of the book, has largely given way to other contexts of discussion. We now tend to subsume these matters within a discourse of human rights and political theory. If an area of inquiry into human nature remains, the discipline of anthropology has inherited it. This field of study still tells us what is distinctive about being human, even though it rejects a moral context for its conclusions. Investigation of anthropology reveals an ongoing debate over diversity as a methodological principle and terminus of research. Clifford Geertz in particular has asserted that the vocation of anthropology is not to seek out a specious consensus omnium but rather to locate the truly salient differences marked by culture. In other words, he reinstates a sceptical approach to diversity against a Stoic insistence on regularities and uniformity. But others have been less content with this 6

Samuel Stanhope Smith, An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species [1787], ed. Winthrop D. Jordan (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), 9. Smith was educated at the College of New Jersey (Princeton), under the guidance of the e´migre´ Scottish philosopher and divine John Witherspoon (later marrying Witherspoon’s daughter).

Introduction

13

approach. An alternative anthropology that attempts to define some common resources in human nature, even if they are not fully moral, appears especially in the philosophical anthropology of Tzvetan Todorov. Todorov emphasises ‘sociality’ as a unifying force, although he defines it in ways that avoid the pitfall of normative or teleological reasoning. The continued difficulties posed by diversity appear in the challenge of reconciling cultural differences with a unifying theory of human rights. At what point does relativism end and some consensus begin about basic provisions of justice? Attempts to achieve an intersection between actual social practice and rights – that is, by locating a foundation for rights in some form of consent or consensus – have proved notoriously difficult. But the alternative, a purely formal account of rights, may simply defer the discussion: we all agree on a set of rights, but disagreement emerges over what laws or actions contradict or coincide with them (a point that Locke had made about the limits of consensual moral language7). In the context of political theory the resolution proposed by many comes down to an agreement on procedural provisions which create the space in which difference can exist while respecting the state as a guarantor of ‘regulatory’ notions of justice, fairness, and equality. Acknowledgement of diversity within the state creates problems of one kind, while diversity beyond it creates others. The conflict of religions and governmental systems seems to take us back to Locke’s picture of incommensurable values established in rival practices. At one extreme we appear drawn to a new sublime of difference. International relations remain an inevitable point of contact and contradiction, however. And here the irony is that an option has emerged which Shaftesbury and Hutcheson anticipated in their dispositional theory of innateness. Although the discussion no longer takes place in a moral sphere, in the realm of politics an implicit dispositionalist theory of democracy is at work. According to this view, variations in the form of government around the world do not undermine a norm of democracy: rather, they speak to differences of historical situation. Over time, recognition of a good embraced by all, a matter of ostensible consensus, will emerge. If war and economic influence bring about this change in a more accelerated fashion, then the West has merely played a facilitating role, not imposed its own vision on the rest of the world. Democracy itself, meanwhile, is not only consensual, but predicated, at least ostensibly, on creating the space for differences to exist. 7

John Locke, ‘Of Ethick in General’, in Writings on Religion, ed. Victor Nuovo (Oxford, 2002), 10.

CHAPTER

1

Locke, diversity, and the natural history of man

In April 1683, John Locke wrote to an agent of the East India Company who was shortly to depart for Cossimbazar,1 asking for information on India. Published accounts had whetted Locke’s appetite and he sought a more ‘exact’ description from an eyewitness whose observations he could direct and whose testimony would answer his curiosity. Locke noted: Some of those who have traveld and write of those parts, give us strange storys of the tricks donne by some of their Juglers there, which must needs be beyond leger de main and seeme not within the power of art or nature. I would very gladly know whether they are really donne as strange as they are reported . . . 2

Consistent with his long-standing interest in comparative religion and the problem of enthusiasm, Locke went on to express an interest in tales of apparitions and spirits, as well as the religious opinions and ceremonies of Hindus and other sects in the country. But he hoped, in fact, for a thorough ethnography, which would include detail on the languages, learning, government, and manners of the country, together with information on Aurengzib, the famed Mughal emperor.3 By framing these inquiries, Locke followed a well-established practice among devotees of the new science. The Royal Society often enlisted the 1 2

3

Charles Cudworth, son of the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth, and brother of Locke’s friend, Damaris Cudworth Masham. He died six months after arriving in India. Letter of 27 April 1683, The Correspondence of John Locke, ed. E. S. de Beer, 8 vols. (Oxford, 1976–89), II: 591. The questions raised by Locke relate closely to his journal entry of 8 October 1677 recording a conversation with Franc¸ois Bernier. See Locke’s Travels in France 1675–1679, ed. John Lough (Cambridge, 1953), 177. See also Locke’s later correspondence with John Lock, possibly a distant relative, who travelled to India in the service of the New East India Company; on 11 January 1703, Lock supplied him with information on local religions (Correspondence, VII: 736–7). Aurengzib reigned from 1658 to 1707. An account of him was given by Franc¸ois Bernier, Histoire de la dernie`re re´volution des E´tats du Grand Mogol, 2 vols. (Paris, 1670). John Dryden, Locke’s contemporary at Westminster School, based his tragedy Aureng-Zebe, first performed in November 1675 and published in 1676, on Bernier’s account. Henry Oldenburg translated Bernier’s text (and its continuation, Suite des memoires . . . sur l’empire du Grand Mogol, 2 vols. (Paris, 1671)) as The History of the Late Revolution of the Empire of the Great Mogol, 2 vols. (London, 1671), and A Continuation of the

14

The natural history of man

15

energies of voyagers in describing the physical world.4 Locke’s extension of methods associated with natural history to include the natural history of man provides the focus of this chapter. As I argue, there was an intrinsic connection between the attention to diversity among natural historians and Locke’s procedures in establishing the variety of human custom. Locke did not assume uniformity in advance and then treat difference as an indication of depravity or the distorting effect of education. Rather, his method was to accept the existence of diversity in the first instance and to establish patterns of human behaviour before drawing conclusions. I NATURAL HISTORY, HUMAN NATURE, AND DIVERSITY

In order to understand the origins and implications of Locke’s project and approach, the position of naturalists on the investigation of human nature and custom needs some exploration. The issue at stake was whether human nature in all its manifestations fell within the bounds of scientific investigation or belonged to a separate field or mode of inquiry. Should naturalists study habit as well as habitat, recording the practices, beliefs, customs, and intellectual capacities of human beings throughout the world, or should they restrict themselves to inquiries in medicine, physiology, and human anatomy? Did the method of natural history, which accepted the existence of diversity, suit the exploration of human nature? Existing disciplines of philosophy, theology, history, and law constituted more familiar locations in which to pursue such studies. By looking at proposals made by Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, and Henry Oldenburg (the first secretary of the Royal Society and an indefatigable correspondent and editor), we can gain a better sense of problems and possibilities involved in adapting the naturalists’ method (or methods) to the study of mankind. Locke formed part of a tradition of reflection on these matters, but he also took the debate in new directions and gave it a philosophical rigour it hitherto lacked. Examination of his approach, from journal entries through to the Essay concerning Human Understanding

4

Memoires of Monsieur Bernier Concerning the Empire of the Great Mogol, 2 vols. (London, 1672). In 1702, Locke received a letter from John Lock, reporting what he had learned of Aurengzib. Correspondence, VII: 613–14. See Daniel Carey, ‘Compiling Nature’s History: Travellers and Travel Narratives in the Early Royal Society’, Annals of Science 54 (1997): 269–92. Locke composed a set of inquiries for a contact travelling in the Bahamas to which he received a reply in 1675. On this basis, Locke wrote to Henry Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society, with a report on poisonous fish found there. Correspondence, I: 425–6, 423. The report was printed in the Philosophical Transactions 10 (no. 114) (1675): 312.

16

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(1690), enables us to grasp the implications of his distinctive natural history of man, one in which diversity played a central role. Although human nature was not subject to experiment as such, some proponents of natural philosophy maintained that it could nonetheless be studied as part of natural history. Bacon suggested as much in his Parasceve ad historiam naturalem, et experimentalem (1620), the work in which he outlined a group of ‘histories’ meriting the attention of naturalists. Among them, Bacon recommended a set of ‘histories of man’ containing an eclectic array of observations on hair, humours, external shape, the affections, intellectual faculties, and finally various trades, manufactures, and customs.5 Thus he embraced the study of mind and soul, traditionally addressed by theology and epistemology; he added psychology, in the form of the ‘affections’, as well as more recognisably physiological concerns, along with practical employments and customs that revealed human skill, technological achievement, knowledge, and – potentially at least – certain moral dimensions of human nature. Bacon’s provision for histories of this kind formed more of a list than an analytical statement, indicative of the open-ended nature of the investigation he proposed. Robert Boyle took up these suggestions in 1666 when he produced his ‘General Heads for a Natural History of a Countrey, Great or small’, published in the eleventh number of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.6 Boyle’s guidelines for the philosophical traveller incorporated the natural history of man within the domain of natural history, encouraging observation not only of the external appearance of human beings, but also their beliefs and customs: . . . there must be a careful account given of the Inhabitants themselves, both Natives and Strangers, that have been long settled there: And in particular, their Stature, Shape, Colour, Features, Strength, Agility, Beauty (or the want of it), Complexions, Hair, Dyet, Inclinations, and Customs that seem not due to Education.7 5

6

7

Parasceve ad historiam naturalem, et experimentalem, in The Oxford Francis Bacon, vol. XI: The Instauratio magna Part II: Novum organum and Associated Texts, ed. with facing page translations by Graham Rees with Maria Wakely (Oxford, 2004), 448–73. These directions appeared in book form after Boyle’s death, together with other lists of inquiries, as General Heads for the Natural History of a Country, Great or Small; Drawn out for the Use of Travellers and Navigators Imparted by the late Honourable Robert Boyle (London, 1692). Boyle was not responsible for the text as a whole, which may have been compiled by Denis Papin (although Boyle was identified on the title page and often treated as its sole author). See the editorial discussion in The Works of Robert Boyle, ed. Michael Hunter and Edward B. Davis, 14 vols. (London, 1999–2000), V: xli–xlv. Philosophical Transactions 1 (no. 11) (1666): 188. Works of Robert Boyle, V: 510.

The natural history of man

17

Boyle’s recommendations covered considerable ground, ranging from physiology and physiognomy to custom, inclination, technical knowledge, and tradition, but the condensed manner in which he expressed himself leaves us in some doubt regarding his rationale and expectations. The distinction between natives and strangers might yield insight into the effect of local environments, whether on the mind or body, while the attention to ‘inclinations’ perhaps coincides with Bacon’s psychological interest in the affections. Recording of customs that appear ‘natural’ rather than the result of socialisation suggests an intriguing concern to locate the contours of human nature, unadulterated by artifice. Boyle went on to recommend that travellers inquire after local opinion regarding anything peculiar or uncommon to the country. This wide-open proposal allowed for difference as well as continuity to emerge within the study of man and nature. Perhaps the most important consideration arising from Boyle’s advice is that the method of investigating nature and the method of investigating man were the same. Boyle advocates the accumulation of empirical information, independent of hypothesis and theorisation: careful observation and close description of customs and beliefs will lead to a catalogue of human creation. At the same time, the procedure by no means excluded attention to the anomalous and bizarre. Although the diversity evident in human practice might become subject to eventual classification and explanation, the preliminary task remained one of basic documentation. Boyle’s approach involves a methodological turn of great significance. In the natural law tradition, by contrast, human nature was described by means of a priori assumptions and hypothetical arguments regarding the state of nature and the transition to civil society. The structure of argument was largely deductive rather than inductive, proceeding logically from assumed premises and first principles.8 For Plato and Aristotle, a teleological understanding of nature was necessary, together with a distinction between ideal forms and particulars. According to critics allied with the new science, such a philosophy led too quickly from evidence to hypothesis and 8

For Hobbes, the state of nature seems to have represented an abstract notion answering to the needs of his philosophical system. On this subject see Franc¸ois Tricaud, ‘Hobbes’s Conception of the State of Nature from 1640 to 1651: Evolution and Ambiguities’, in Perspectives on Thomas Hobbes, ed. G. A. J. Rogers and Alan Ryan (Oxford, 1988), 107–23. In 1754, Rousseau acknowledged: ‘The Inquiries that may be pursued regarding [the state of nature] ought not to be taken for historical truths, but only for hypothetical and conditional reasonings; better suited to elucidate the Nature of things than to show their genuine origin . . .’ ‘Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality Among Men’, in The First and Second Discourses, ed. and trans. Victor Gourevitch (New York, 1986), 139. For his consideration of another way of ascertaining the state of nature, closer to Boyle’s proposal, see ibid., 130.

18

Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson

conviction. Boyle advocated inductive investigation of human nature through description of custom, without a priori assumptions. Customs, in this sense, are taken as effects or signs of human nature, and from an analysis of them an account of man’s nature would eventuate. The influence of Boyle’s proposals appears in the content and phrasing of inquiries compiled by the Royal Society and advertised by Henry Oldenburg. Picking up directly on Boyle’s outline of possible topics, inquiries for Barbary asked about the country’s inhabitants, ranging from the education of children to games, technology, architecture, and forms of learning. In addition, they sought further information on such things as ‘inclinations, diet, œconomy, conveniences of life, their strength, agility, and stature, shape’.9 Similarly, when Oldenburg provided questions for two voyagers who had returned from Hudson’s Bay, he mingled requests for information on the natives with inquiries regarding wildlife, climate, and navigation. The reply, communicated to a meeting of the Society,10 integrated the natural history of man with natural history as a whole, shifting back and forth between the Indians and their natural environment. In this scheme, the natives are in fact continuous with nature; their customs, beliefs, outward appearances, tastes, medical practices, and so forth, are documented in the same way as the environment and are subject to the same method of analysis. (Beyond the disinterested accumulation of detail on human custom, as this example indicates, the ‘natural history of man’ often proved useful in advancing the interests of trade and colonisation.) Nearer to home, the Anglican clergyman and author Joseph Glanvill wrote to the Royal Society from Bath proposing a philosophical correspondence in 1669. Oldenburg communicated the offer to the Society and in due course a pamphlet by Glanvill appeared (anonymously) which advocated pursuing various observations on nature already underway in Somerset. Included among them was a further possibility that ‘they make what Moral Observations they can, for the better assisting each other in the knowledge of Humane Nature’.11 Indeed Glanvill went further on this occasion by saying that hypotheses on this subject would also be welcome.

9 10 11

Thomas Birch, The History of the Royal Society, 4 vols. (London, 1756–7), III: 27. Ibid., III: 45. [Joseph Glanvill], Propositions for the carrying on a Philosophical Correspondence, already Begun in the County of Sommerset, upon encouragement given from the Royal Society (London, 1670), 2. See Birch, History, II: 394–5, 410–11.

The natural history of man

19

Lists of inquiries published by John Ogilby (1673), Robert Plot (1674), William Molyneux (1682), and Edward Lhwyd (1697),12 although they partake of different traditions (for example the antiquarian and chorographic), follow a similar pattern of including questions about human customs alongside issues of natural history, suggesting a continuity in the modes of investigation. This miscellaneous and inclusive approach complements the pattern of cabinets of curiosity assembled by travellers and virtuosi which show the same inclination to juxtapose natural productions and human artefacts, incorporating the study of man with that of nature.13 However constituted, the prospective natural history of man clearly allocated travel a central place as a vehicle of investigation. Natural history, characteristically conceived in an encyclopaedic fashion, relied on travel – and its narrative records – as a means of gaining access to necessary information.14 If the boundaries of the inquiry expanded to include mankind, then travel and travel literature would again represent an invaluable resource. The genre of travel writing was in fact an eclectic one, encompassing an array of documents, ranging from first-person accounts to histories and more specialised works based on eyewitness experience. Taken as a whole, such texts contained substantial empirical information on customs, inclinations, beliefs, habits, religions, laws, and a variety of other subjects that Boyle and Oldenburg envisaged as part of this larger investigation. Furthermore, travel literature itself elided the border between natural history and the natural history of man, providing a methodological precedent for the programme envisaged by Boyle and Oldenburg. An influential work in this regard was Jose´ de Acosta’s The 12

13

14

John Ogilby, Queries in Order to the Description of Britannia, 2nd edn (London, 1673); Robert Plot, Quaer’s to be propounded to the most ingenious of each County in my Travels through England (Oxford, 1674); William Molyneux, Whereas there is an accurate Account and Description of Ireland designed to be made Publick in the English Atlas undertaken by Moses Pitt of London . . . (Dublin, 1682); rpt in K. Theodore Hoppen, The Common Scientist in the Seventeenth Century: A Study of the Dublin Philosophical Society 1683–1708 (London, 1970), 200–1; Edward Lhwyd, Parochial Queries in Order to a Geographical Dictionary, a Natural History, &c. of Wales (n.p., 1697). See Arthur MacGregor and Anthony Turner, ‘The Ashmolean Museum’, in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. V: The Eighteenth Century, ed. L. S. Sutherland and L. G. Mitchell (Oxford, 1986), 643. See also Laura Laurencich-Minelli, ‘Museography and Ethnographical Collections in Bologna during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, in The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe, ed. Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor (Oxford, 1985), 17–23; Christian Feest, ‘Mexico and South America in the European Wunderkammer’, in Impey and MacGregor, Origins of Museums, 237–44; and J. C. H. King, ‘Ethnographic Collections’, in Sir Hans Sloane: Collector, Scientist, Antiquary, Founding Father of the British Museum, ed. Arthur MacGregor (London, 1994), 228–44. See Carey, ‘Compiling Nature’s History’. A revised version will appear in The Paradox of Travel, 1560–1700 (Columbia University Press, forthcoming).

20

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Naturall and Morall Historie of the East and West Indies (much admired by Boyle, and many other naturalists15), which appeared in 1590. As the title suggests, Acosta integrated an account of human customs with a description of the natural environment of the Indies. Barbara Shapiro notes that the work provided a ‘model for combining physical description – from the heavens down to plant and animal life – with the ‘‘deeds and customes’’ of men.’16 Endless examples could be cited of travel books that adopted the same pattern. Customs and manners appeared beside natural phenomena of fruits, vegetables, wildlife, and weather, in a commonplace of travel literature.17 Given Boyle’s recommendations and Oldenburg’s advertisement of inquiries on the subject of man, we might expect the Philosophical Transactions, which he edited on behalf of the Royal Society, to provide steady information on human custom and belief, at least in the context of the editor’s book reviews. However, the evidence of the journal suggests an interesting tension over the proper extent of natural inquiry. Oldenburg adopted a narrower editorial principle and attempted to exclude discussion of customs and manners as inappropriate to the Transactions if not in the context of science generally. In his notice of travel books, he included accounts of technology, arts, manufacture, and trade, but he wavered over the suitability of introducing religion, morals, politics, and other forms of 15

16

17

Boyle referred to Acosta approvingly in Some Considerations Touching the Usefulnesse of Experimental Naturall Philosophy (Oxford, 1663), second part, 25, a fact that Locke noted in his journal: Bodleian Library MS Locke f. 14, p. 68. Boyle also praised Acosta in The Sceptical Chymist (London, 1661), 371. Locke made reference to Acosta in the ‘Second Treatise’ of Government. For some discussion see William G. Batz, ‘The Historical Anthropology of John Locke’, Journal of the History of Ideas 35:4 (1974): 663–70; see also Barbara Arneil, John Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism (Oxford, 1996), 21–44. Barbara J. Shapiro, ‘History and Natural History in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century England: An Essay on the Relationship between Humanism and Science’, in English Scientific Virtuosi in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Los Angeles, 1979), 7. For discussion of the connection between travel and natural philosophy, see 7–21. See also Barbara J. Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England: A Study of the Relationships between Natural Science, Religion, History, Law, and Literature (Princeton, 1983), ch. 4; Barbara J. Shapiro, A Culture of Fact: England 1550–1720 (Ithaca, 2000), ch. 3. For an account emphasising Locke’s concerns with natural history see Neal Wood, ‘The Baconian Character of Locke’s ‘‘Essay’’ ’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 6 (1975): 43–84; and Neal Wood, The Politics of Locke’s Philosophy: A Social Study of ‘‘An Essay Concerning Human Understanding’’ (Berkeley, 1983). Evidence of Locke’s awareness of this potential appears in his journals and letters. He observed of Urbain Souchu de Rennefort’s Relation du premier Voyage de la Compagnie des Indes Orientales en l’Isle de Madagascar ou Dauphine (Paris, 1668); ‘the author gives a very slender account of the natural or moral history of Madagascar . . .’ (MS Locke d. 9, p. 36). In October 1701, Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun wrote to Locke and the letter was delivered by Martin Martin whom Fletcher described as ‘fraughted, with curiositys of the kind; to wit, materials for a natural and moral history of the rest of westerne isles of Scotland’ (Correspondence, VII: 471). Martin’s volume appeared as A Description of the Western Islands of Scotland (London, 1703). LL 1924.

The natural history of man

21

belief. Discussing a work on the Faroe Islands,18 he showed his reservations over an inclusive approach: ‘So much for the Natural Observations; the Moral and Political, as not belonging to the design of these Tracts, we leave here untouched.’19 However, Oldenburg was far from consistent in maintaining this restrictive editorial policy.20 Aside from occasional departures, neither Oldenburg’s Transactions nor the Royal Society itself dwelt on ‘ethnographic’ reports with the same degree of attention given to commercial practices, arts, trade, and manufacture.21 Oldenburg acknowledged the deficiency in the preface to the eleventh volume of the Transactions (1676), delivering a statement of great interest on the natural history of man. He asked what was deficient in ‘Physiological Knowledge’ and answered that the natural history of countries constituted the greatest lacuna. He included in the proposed remedy something, by his own admission, that aspired to a very high flight of human Reason, as merely human, and searches into one of the greatest depths of Nature, making the fullest discovery of Mankind, as Man is the Microcosme, and Divinae particula aurae; namely, to collect and digest in one series, and to bring as into Methodical Volumes, or under one view, the shapes, features, statures, and all outward appearances, and also the intrinsick mentals or intellectuals of Mankind.22

Unlike Bacon and Boyle, Oldenburg overtly recognised a theological moment in the inquiry, drawing on Stoic sources: human reason sought, in this instance, a sense of man as a microcosm of God’s creation, a particular invested with the divine, participating in an ordered universe.23 Nonetheless, the style of investigation remained appropriate to natural 18 19 20

21

22 23

Lucas Jacobson Debes, Faeroae, & Faeroa Reserata: That is a Description of the Islands & Inhabitants of Foeroe, trans. Jean Sterpin (London, 1676). LL 931. Philosophical Transactions 10 (no. 119) (1675): 461. See for example the discussion of Johann Michael Wansleben, Relazione dello Stato presente dell’Egitto (Paris, 1670), in Philosophical Transactions 6 (no. 71) (1671): 2160; and Oldenburg’s notice of his own translation of Franc¸ois Bernier’s Continuation of the Memoires of Monsieur Bernier, in Philosophical Transactions 6 (no. 75) (1671): 2263–4; elsewhere, he abandoned the editorial strictures altogether and included substantial information on Japan, Africa, and North America, prompted perhaps by the geographical obscurity of the examples. The same is true of the Royal Society’s lists of inquiries for distant countries, which are inconsistent and drawn from many sources and traditions. Human health and medicine are occasionally broached, but custom is rarely addressed other than as it impinges on manufactures and trades. For the inquiries for Turkey, Egypt, Guinea, Poland, Hungary, Greenland, Surat, Persia, Virginia, the Caribbean, Guiana, and Brazil, see General Heads (1692). Philosophical Transactions 11 (no. 123) (1676): 553–4. Italicised in the original. See Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, trans. R. D. Hicks, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), VII.87 and VII.143.

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philosophy. With the same encyclopaedic vision evident in his goals for natural history, Oldenburg anticipated a comprehensive review of the subject, a summary of the whole creation. He did not describe the method of organisation underlying the resulting ‘volumes’ in any analytical way, but merely recommended attention both to external appearance and what he called ‘intrinsic’ intellectual or mental capacities. To that extent, his project yielded information on cognitive ability, which might be innate and universal or different from place to place. His suggestion returned to Bacon’s Parasceve, then, with its mention of ‘intellectuals’, rather than to Boyle who omitted the subject in his ‘General Heads’, concentrating instead on custom. However, the topic remained in tune with Boyle’s broad concern for the study of untutored human nature. Under Oldenburg’s editorial policy, the scope of the Transactions excluded this project, but he anticipated that it could be undertaken separately in future, given sufficient diligence and supply of information, as knowledge advanced. External variations fell within the reach of ‘vulgar observation’, but the ‘intrinsicals’, on the contrary, he described as ‘intricate’. Notwithstanding the difficulties, he maintained that without great subtlety, we may discern a vast difference between the neighbour Nations of France, Spain, Italy, and Germany; yea, between the People of the East and West, North and South in England. Now I conceive, there is much difference between these characters, heaped up together promiscuously, and when they are sorted to their proper Climats, by longitudes and latitudes, for the detection of the nature of this Masterpiece, as the fairest, richest, and best order’d Gardens and Orchards are more beneficiall, more beautiful, and give a more solid delight, than a painted Landskip of Biscaye, or some wild Grotesco.24

Oldenburg’s conception of the project began by suggesting a link with long-standing theories of environment and national character, which originated in antiquity with Hippocrates and Ptolemy and went through various medieval modifications before re-emerging in the work of Jean Bodin, among others.25 Oldenburg pointed to some very different models 24

25

Philosophical Transactions 11 (no. 123) (1676): 554. The last sentence echoes a phrase of Richard Ligon’s in A True & Exact History of the Island of Barbados (London, 1657). Having been cast into prison, Ligon complained that his design for the history became ‘a wild Grotesco, or loose extravagant Drolerie, rather than a Regular piece of Story or Landscape’ (A2r). See Jean Bodin, Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (Paris, 1566), ch. 5; and Les Six livres de la Re´publique (Paris, 1576), bk 5; see also Nathanael Carpenter, Geography Delineated Forth in Two Bookes (Oxford, 1625), bk 2, 206–86. For further discussion, see Frank Lestringant, ‘Europe et the´orie des climats dans la seconde moitie´ du XVIe sie`cle’, in La Conscience Europe´enne au XVe et au XVIe sie`cle (Paris, 1982), 206–26; Marian J. Tooley, ‘Bodin and the Mediaeval Theory of Climate’, Speculum 28 (1953): 64–83.

The natural history of man

23

for executing the design. For ‘Humors and propensions of the mind’, he mentioned John Barclay’s Icon animorum (1614) and Johannes Boemus’s Omnium gentium mores, leges et ritus (1520). He commended Suetonius for his account of the Caesars and his display of their ‘Insides’. For ‘Externals’, he praised Richard Ligon’s True & Exact History of the Island of Barbados (1657), with its portrait of different shapes and features of the Indians and Negroes. Here he suggested a role for the artistic virtuoso.26 Despite the relatively unfocused nature of the scheme, the method implied here is vital. For Oldenburg, acknowledgement of diversity represented the first step in understanding the world. By adopting this strategy, he transferred an important methodological assumption from natural history to the study of man. Diversity constituted an obvious fact of nature, and classification the intellectual challenge posed by it. The endless variety of creation manifested the wisdom of God, leading to a sense of wonder not dismay. Just as with natural phenomena, Oldenburg proposed to gather empirical observations for classification, in the first instance, according to climate, longitude, and latitude. Such a procedure would reveal regularities indicating ‘the nature of this Masterpiece’. His approach differed therefore from the conventional technique of philosophy and theology which began with an assumption of a unified human nature in which diversity represented either a moral threat or simply the corruption of fallen man. II

THE NATURAL HISTORY OF MAN

Exploration of the natural history of man, mooted in different ways by Bacon, Boyle, and Oldenburg, came to fruition in the eighteenth century with the theories of Montesquieu and Buffon, as well as Scottish conjectural history.27 However, Locke can be seen as the principal exponent of the project to compile a natural history of man in the seventeenth century, both inheriting and reshaping the ambitions of older colleagues in the new science. Before addressing this issue we should establish how closely allied Locke was with the project of natural history, particularly through his ties with 26 27

For Locke’s medical notes on Ligon’s text, dating to 1667, see MS Locke f. 19, pp. 234, 256, 258. Montesquieu, De l’esprit des loix, 2 vols. (Geneva, 1748); Comte de Buffon, Histoire naturelle, 36 vols. (Paris, 1749–88). For the parts of the text dealing with man, see De l’homme, ed. Miche`le Duchet (Geneva, 1971). See also Miche`le Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire au sie`cle des lumie`res (Paris, 1971). On Scottish discussion, see P. B. Wood, ‘The Natural History of Man in the Scottish Enlightenment’, History of Science 28:1 (1990): 89–123; on German discussion in the period, see John H. Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago, 2002).

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Robert Boyle, the physician Thomas Sydenham, and the Royal Society.28 His scientific interests began with wide reading in medicine while at Christ Church in the late 1650s. By May of 1660 he had met Boyle who set up a laboratory in Oxford. Locke established links with members of Boyle’s group and eventually assisted him in a number of investigations, particularly concerning the air, weather, and mines.29 Over the ensuing decades, Locke’s notebooks indicate how carefully he read Boyle’s extensive publications. Boyle’s Memoirs for the Natural History of Humane Blood (1684) was dedicated warmly to Locke and seems to have been written on his solicitation.30 Their friendship and association lasted for over thirty years, ending with Boyle’s death in 1691. Locke served as one of his literary executors, and in this capacity he saw Boyle’s General History of Air (1692) through the press. Both of these works, as Peter Anstey points out, were expressly conceived as natural histories in the style of Francis Bacon.31 But Locke’s intellectual debts in this area of inquiry were not confined to Boyle. Shortly after his removal to London in 1667 where he joined the household of Lord Ashley (Anthony Ashley Cooper, later the first Earl of Shaftesbury), Locke made the acquaintance of Thomas Sydenham, the distinguished exponent of empirical medicine, and collaborated with him on a number of medical texts. In 1668 Locke was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and contributed several short pieces to the Philosophical Transactions.32 28

29

30 31 32

For valuable discussions of Locke’s interests and influences, see Peter R. Anstey, ‘Locke, Bacon and Natural History’, Early Science and Medicine 7 (2002): 65–92; Peter R. Anstey, ‘Locke on Method and Natural Philosophy’, in The Philosophy of John Locke: New Perspectives, ed. Peter R. Anstey (London, 2003), 26–42; Peter Walmsley, Locke’s Essay and the Rhetoric of Science (Lewisburg, 2003); Jonathan Walmsley, ‘Locke’s Natural Philosophy in Draft A of the Essay’, Journal of the History of Ideas 65:1 (2004): 15–37; Jonathan Walmsley, ‘John Locke’s Natural Philosophy (1632–1671)’ (Ph.D. diss., King’s College, University of London, 1998). Locke visited a mine in Pensford in April 1666 which Boyle asked him to assess with a barometer. When the attempt failed, Locke proceeded along guidelines Boyle had laid out in the Philosophical Transactions, asking the miners about their method for dealing with cold and other topics. ‘Articles of Inquiries touching Mines’, Philosophical Transactions 1 (no. 19) (1666): 330–43. Anstey, ‘Locke, Bacon and Natural History’, 81. Ibid., 81–2. On Locke’s connection with Sydenham, see Kenneth Dewhurst, John Locke (1632–1704) Physician and Philosopher: A Medical Biography. With an Edition of the Medical Notes in His Journals (London, 1963). Locke twice served on the Royal Society’s council, although the frequency of his attendance at meetings cannot be determined. For his contributions to the Philosophical Transactions, see Jean S. Yolton, John Locke: A Descriptive Bibliography (Bristol, 1998), 315–18. His four-page account of a ‘Child with very long nails’, with a drawing, dated 24 May 1678, was entered in the Royal Society’s Classified Papers (XIII.5). Locke owned a virtually complete run of the journal from its inception to the time of his death. In retirement Locke corresponded somewhat impatiently with his bookseller to secure the latest instalments, e.g., letters of 3 and 10 December 1701, Correspondence, VII: 512, 515.

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Locke’s connections also provide an important, although not exclusive, basis for understanding his enthusiasm for travel literature and his readiness to cite it.33 In addition to an extensive set of maps and geographical surveys, Locke owned 195 works of travel literature at the time of his death, several of which were multi-volume compendia such as those edited by Ramusio, Hakluyt, Purchas, The´venot, Hacke, and the Churchills. Students of Locke’s library have commented on his extensive collection,34 but what has not been recognised is the extent to which Locke’s holdings in travel literature formed part of a group of works referred to consistently by natural philosophers, evident in the writings of Boyle, the minutes of the Royal Society, and Oldenburg’s reviews in the Transactions.35 For example, of the twenty-four texts of travel writing identified by Michael Hunter as studied by the Royal Society’s committee of correspondence, beginning in 1664, Locke owned all but one.36 In Locke’s investigation of the natural history of man, he relied heavily on the findings of travellers, examining narratives for evidence of human custom, belief, and intellectual capacity, while maintaining the method employed by natural historians. He studied illustrations in travel books closely, directing his servant to copy them in order to record variation in costume and complexion.37 Having accepted moral and intellectual diversity, he committed himself to the gradual process of accumulating examples inductively before advancing hypotheses and explanations. In his journals he transcribed passages relating to religious customs, legal practices, and marriage rites, together with information on medical cures, 33 34

35

36 37

For further discussion, see Daniel Carey, ‘Travel, Geography, and the Problem of Belief: Locke as a Reader of Travel Literature’, forthcoming in History and Nation, ed. Julia Rudolph. John Harrison and Peter Laslett, The Library of John Locke, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1971), 23; Richard Ashcraft, ‘John Locke’s Library: Portrait of an Intellectual’, in John Locke: Critical Assessments, ed. Richard Ashcraft, 4 vols. (London, 1991), I: 17–31. For example, Locke noted Boyle’s opinion of travellers expressed in the Usefulnesse of Experimental Naturall Philosophy. MS Locke f. 14, pp. 68, 140, 164, 170. Boyle’s Memoirs for the Natural History of Humane Blood itself makes extensive use of travel accounts from printed and oral sources. On Boyle and travel writing, see Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in SeventeenthCentury England (Chicago, 1994), 243–66. Michael Hunter, Establishing the New Science (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1989), 118–19. During his exile in Holland Locke corresponded with William Courten (under his assumed name Charleton), keeper of an extensive cabinet of curiosities. He sent Courten a large collection of watercolours of native peoples from around the world, taken from various sources (including travel accounts) and redrawn by his servant Sylvanus Brownover. Courten’s curiosities passed to Sir Hans Sloane and from him to the British Museum. See British Library Add. MS 5253 ff. 26, 27, 31–56. For discussion see P. J. P. Whitehead and M. Boeseman, A Portrait of Dutch 17th Century Brazil: Animals, Plants, and People by the Artists of Johan Maurits of Nassau (Amsterdam, 1989), 85–8. They reproduce six drawings in the collection based on paintings by the Dutch artist Albert Eckhout (285–7). See also Maurice Cranston, John Locke: A Biography (1957; Oxford, 1985), 286–8.

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coinage, and trade. Nor did Locke impose strict boundaries between areas of interest. Effectively, he engaged in compiling a natural history, but, crucially, one which included the natural history of man. Locke’s method for conducting the investigation remained the same as that used to investigate nature generally, focusing on inductive accumulation in which theories and explanatory hypotheses emerged from, rather than preceding, the investigation – at least ostensibly – much as Oldenburg and Boyle had envisaged. Specific empirical examples supported the study of human nature and human intellect, drawn together by travellers in their journeys through distant countries, subject to verification. He did not presuppose order and regularity, which careful description and gradual classification alone would establish. Indeed he welcomed reports of anomalies and inconsistencies in moral behaviour, cognitive attainment, and physical appearance. Human diversity ran continuously with the variety evident in the animal, mineral, and vegetable worlds, stimulating the acquisition of further examples of human practice and belief. Locke by no means confined himself to recording customs resulting solely from nature; he also examined practices and opinions expressed in fashion, religion, education, and law, moving beyond Boyle’s more limited proposal. Furthermore he inquired into human ‘intellectuals’ on a scale far more cogent and extensive than Oldenburg anticipated. In his journals and notebooks, Locke recorded and indexed this information and conjecture, while in his published work, especially the Essay, he took occasion to offer conclusions derived from the survey of mankind. This approach led to important discussions of innateness, enthusiasm, and the so-called ‘law of opinion’. Locke’s procedure can be seen in a journal entry dated 19 February 1682,38 where he commented on the phenomenon of enthusiasm. Initially, Locke defined enthusiasm in the passage as a ‘strong and firm persuasion’, unsupported adequately by reason, which the believer understood to be ‘wrought in the mind extraordinarily by God him self ’. Locke rejected it as a ground of assent or form of knowledge, noting however that Christians, Muslims, and Hindus alike had pretences of this kind ‘and I am told the Chinese too’. For Locke, false and contradictory beliefs could not come from God, and any religion that required adherents to accept them declared its own erroneousness. Locke then remarked on instances of enthusiasm encountered in his reading of travel accounts. Drawing on Sir Paul Rycaut and Franc¸ois Bernier, he affirmed 38

MS Locke f. 6, pp. 20–5. Printed in Locke, Political Essays, ed. Mark Goldie (Cambridge, 1997), 289–91.

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that Turkish dervishes and Hindu Yogis ‘pretended’ to revelations, ecstasies, and raptures, considering themselves ‘swallowed up and transported with illuminations of God, discoursing with God, seeing the face of God’.39 He could not recall whether he had read of any enthusiasts among the American Indians.40 Locke pursued the matter by raising an interesting inquiry. He wondered whether it was not the case that religious believers whose faith was founded in revelation might be inclined to think that God would reveal himself again on matters relating to their conduct, state, or ‘comfort’, ‘if they take the right way to seek it’. But he proceeded cautiously, refusing to advance any conclusions until such time as he was ‘more fully assured in matter of fact’.41 Locke evidently anticipated that further reading of travel accounts (together with answers to questions he lodged with different travellers) would settle the issue in his own mind.42 Characteristically, Locke availed himself here of contemporary rather than classical examples, searching for up-to-date information, in a similar fashion to the critique of innateness in Book I of the Essay.43 Reliance on this form of testimony had several advantages in Locke’s view. In principle, these reports could be confirmed, cross-checked, and supplemented by new travellers provided with suitable inquiries.44 In his discussion of probability Locke emphasised the number, integrity, and skill of witnesses lending credence to the truth of a particular factual statement (Essay, IV.xvi.4). In his chapter ‘Of the Degrees of Assent’, he confirmed that ‘any Testimony, the farther off it is from the original Truth, the less force and proof it 39

40

41

42 43 44

He referenced the account of the Turks to Sir Paul Rycaut, The Present State of the Ottoman Empire (London, 1670), 216; and the account of the Hindus to A Continuation of the Memoires of Monsieur Bernier, 2 vols. (London, 1672), I: 173. In a journal entry of 15 April 1680, Locke did record an extensive passage from Edward Manning regarding the ‘Inhabitants of Hudson’s Bay’ which contained information on religious beliefs and the god ‘Manatan’ who appeared by conjuration. MS Locke f. 4, pp. 70–1. The information seems to have come from James Tyrrell. MS Locke f. 6, pp. 20–5. Printed in Locke, Political Essays, 289–91. In the same entry, he speculated that these beliefs constituted the ‘effect and operation of the fancy’. The discussion relates to correspondence between Locke and Damaris Masham. See especially Correspondence, II: 500–1, 503–5. Two months later he wrote to Charles Cudworth with his inquiries for India, in a letter quoted at the outset of this chapter. Locke favoured modern over ancient references in the Essay, with dates of publication ranging from 1530 to 1700. Locke’s method of citation coincides with Boyle’s recommendations in New Experiments and Observations Touching Cold, or an Experimental History of Cold, Begun (London, 1664), C8r. Locke compiled a generic list of inquiries on religion preserved in PRO 30/24/47/30, fol. 44. For evidence of his engagement with travellers and use of inquiries, see Correspondence, I: 353, 381, 384, 389–91, 397, 406–7, 421–2, 422–3, 424–6, 431–3; III: 23, 266–7; VI: 265; VII: 358.

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has’ (IV.xvi.10). In consequence he objected to the false confidence of those who looked upon opinions as gaining ‘force by growing older’. Although he declared ‘nothing more valuable than the Records of Antiquity’, Locke wished ‘we had more of them, and more uncorrupted’ (IV.xvi.10, 11). In the midst of these considerations we should not overlook the fact that Locke adopted an inductive approach to social custom. He largely avoided the introduction of immediate hypotheses or explanations at this point, to the extent that he refused to begin by positing an a priori conception of human nature. This approach meant that he did not recast diversity in the Essay as mere error and sin, the consequence of the Fall. Although his stories coincided, to some extent, with an Augustinian perspective on the condition of man in a fallen world, Locke did not have recourse to a Christian scheme of theological explanation. III

HUMAN KNOWLEDGE AND HUMAN NATURE

The rationale for Locke’s pursuit of a natural history of man ultimately derives from arguments set out in the Essay concerning Human Understanding. For a proper account of his position we need to consider the nature and extent of human knowledge. In this context Locke disputed the untenable assumptions of scholastic philosophy, bound up with Aristotelian conceptions of essences and substantial forms underlying particulars in the world.45 Locke clarified a series of logical and sceptical difficulties that beset the traditional framework of ‘scientific’ knowledge, but he did not abandon the project of inquiry altogether. Rather, he set out a different and more promising (even if epistemologically limited) terrain in which experiment and observation might occur, contributing to the formation of enhanced ‘nominal’ designations even if they did not capture unknowable ‘real essences’. It becomes clear that for Locke, knowledge of human nature extended no further than our knowledge of nature generally. He retained an important measure of scepticism regarding the degree of ultimate insight and certainty obtainable through investigation of ‘man’, but he also established the grounds and methods for proceeding with the study of human beings.

45

For some discussion of Locke and a defence of Aristotle, see David Charles, Aristotle on Meaning and Essence (Oxford, 2000), 356–7, 364–7. See also Scott Atran, Cognitive Foundations of Natural History: Towards an Anthropology of Science (Cambridge and Paris, 1990).

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The logic of Locke’s position depends on the distinction between real and nominal essences, and the proper understanding of what takes place when we attempt to classify substances and explain their properties and differences. When we identify a substance and sort it into a particular class, we do so not on the basis of ascertaining the immaterial form that organises the material ‘substrate’, but instead by merely applying a name to a collection of observed qualities. According to Locke it would be a mistake to believe that we can determine the discrete form that provides the structure of a given substance, governing its properties and enabling us to separate essence from accidents. Simply put, we have no access to such a level of reality. Indeed, Locke went further by regarding real essences as a supposition, introduced by us ‘without precisely knowing what they are’ (III.vi.6). Like Boyle, Locke replaced Aristotelian doctrines with the corpuscularian model which implied a view of nature as composed of relatively fluctuating particulars consisting of corpuscles, not fixed in terms of species and genera.46 On this model the real constitution of things remained unknown, even if we supposed that when two objects resembled one another the likelihood was that they shared a certain internal structure. The important provision was not to confuse the nominal with the real essence; the latter escaped us, while the former related to the way we employed general names for purposes of convenience in civil life. He noted that chemists often found to their chagrin that they could not locate the same qualities in one sample of sulphur, antimony, or vitriol that they had discovered in others (III.vi.8), a problem that would not have arisen had they grasped the real essence of these entities. He concluded in a memorable phrase: ‘There is not so contemptible a Plant or Animal, that does not confound the most inlarged Understanding’ (III.vi.9). Locke opposed the ontological rigidity of the earlier view, seeing nature as exceptionally mutable both spatially and across time.47 We tend to suppose that when we encounter a substance, it possesses all of its qualities and remains somehow independent and whole (IV.vi.11). Yet even inanimate objects lose their qualities over time; vegetables depend on environment, but we take little notice of it. We recognise that animals respire, but how many other factors escape our view? If the operation of the sun, millions of miles from us, has a great bearing on human health, then why

46 47

See Phillip R. Sloan, ‘John Locke, John Ray, and the Problem of the Natural System’, Journal of the History of Biology 5:1 (1972): 1–53. See Michael Ayers, Locke: Epistemology and Ontology, 2 vols. (London, 1991), II: 65–77.

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should stars yet further away not exert an unknown influence? Objects, in short, owe their ‘Being’ and ‘Excellencies’ to their neighbours (IV.vi.11). In the absence of access to real essences, we have no grounds for separating different species other than via nominal definitions.48 But the adequacy of employing them also comes under question. Locke complicates matters by mentioning a number of problematic cases, including seals, porpoises, and flying fish, along with ‘what is confidently reported of Mermaids, or Sea-men’ (III.vi.12). He records observing a cassowary in St James’s Park, a peculiar creature covered in something ‘between Feathers and Hair’ (III.vi.34), whose essence could only be specified by nominal terms.49 Locke concludes that nature does not set boundaries, only nominal essences do, and those imperfectly. We cannot be confident that we know when nature achieves its intention, nor can we be sure how to separate ‘irregular and monstrous Births’ (III.vi.16) from other species. Locke remarked that he had once seen a creature that was the ‘Issue of a Cat and a Rat, and had the plain Marks of both about it’ (III.vi.23).50 Creatures of this kind confirmed the intractable problem of species designation. Similar difficulties surround our knowledge of ‘man’, according to Locke. We may define the species by the shape of the body, sense, voluntary motion, and reason, yet we lack an understanding of the real constitution on which these features depend, and we cannot therefore say with certainty that all men sleep or will die if they consume hemlock. In fact these ideas have no connection or ‘repugnancy’ with the nominal essence of man we have formed (IV.vi.15). Furthermore, we cannot definitively state the bounds of the species itself, evident in deliberations over oddly shaped foetuses (III.vi.27) and the decision of whether to baptise or destroy them.51 Nor does propagation settle the matter, Locke maintains. History reported that women had given birth after coupling with baboons 48 49 50

51

Essay, III.iii.13. See A. J. Cain, ‘John Locke on Species’, Archives of Natural History 24:3 (1997): 337–60. See Peter Walmsley, ‘Locke’s Cassowary and the Ethos of the Essay’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 22 (1992): 253–67. In a Royal Society meeting of 9 March 1663/4, Sir Robert Moray reported that he had heard of a ‘copulation of a male rabbit and a female cat, which produced monsters, whose fore parts were like a cat, and the hinder parts like a rabbit; and that those monsters had reproduced more complicated monsters’. Birch, History, I: 393. At a meeting of June 1680, Sir Christopher Wren and John Aubrey affirmed that they had seen a ‘production’ from a male cat and female rabbit (ibid., IV: 41). Franc¸ois Bernier included similar examples in his Abrege´ de la Philosophie de Gassendi, 7 vols. (Lyon, 1678), V: 351–2. See also Essay, III.iii.14. In this context Locke includes ‘changelings’ in the list of problematic cases (III.iii.17).

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(III.vi.23), creating confusion about how to describe the ensuing species.52 These and other instances meant that it was necessary to confront the reality of ‘monstrous Productions’ that frequently occurred in nature: Who would undertake to resolve, what Species that Monster was of, which is mentioned by Licetus . . . with a Man’s Head and Hog’s Body?53 Or those other, which to the Bodies of Men, had the Heads of Beasts, as Dogs, Horses, etc. If any of these Creatures had lived, and could have spoke, it would have increased the difficulty. (III.vi.27)

However fanciful we may now find Locke’s references, they bring to our attention the scope of nature’s operation, and the limited extent of our knowledge of its fundamental capacities and intentions. The considerations raised by Locke underline the fact that man can know what he has created himself but cannot know what he has not created. In the case of moral terms, which function as archetypes, man has created the standard and can therefore fully grasp the meaning of the terms involved. As human beings make political societies and moral terms, they have some prospect of gaining demonstrative knowledge and instituting order within the system of ideas. On the other hand, ideas of natural objects must always fall short of the true essence of the thing in itself, since God made them, not man.54 This is precisely the situation regarding knowledge of human nature (especially given Locke’s tabula rasa theory which eliminated internal intellectual or moral principles and ideas). Only God, as the maker of man, can know the true essence of our being, the reason why we have been constituted in this way rather than another way. Though we can know our ideas and agree on moral conceptions under the aegis of the law of nature, we cannot describe the real essence of man.55 The purpose and potential for a natural history of man – a history continuous with the observation of animals, plants, and other objects in 52

53

54 55

Relying on a series of travel accounts and medical texts, John Bulwer affirmed that women in various places gave birth to monsters after sleeping with apes and baboons. He blamed the carnality on diabolic instigation and saw the offspring as divine retribution. Anthropometamorphosis: Man Transform’d: or, the Artificiall Changling Historically presented (London, 1653), 437–40. Not in LL. Locke refers to Fortunius Licetus, De Monstris (1616; Amsterdam, 1665), 13. LL 1741. The text features an illustration of a creature with a man’s head and pig’s body. The remainder of Locke’s references in this passage may also come from Licetus, 183, 191 (with illustrations). Locke mentioned the work in a book list sent to Robert Boyle in a letter of 12 December 1665 (Correspondence, I: 230). See James Tully, A Discourse of Property: John Locke and His Adversaries (Cambridge, 1980), 13–14. According to Locke: ‘had we such a Knowledge of that Constitution of Man, from which his Faculties of Moving, Sensation, and Reasoning, and other Powers flow; and on which his so regular shape depends, as ’tis possible Angels have, and ’tis certain his Maker has, we should have a quite other Idea of his Essence, than what now is contained in our Definition of that Species’ (Essay, III.vi.3).

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nature – becomes evident at this stage. There is no radical break, no separate account of man as such, since man’s nature is not his own creation. In spite of the apparent pessimism of the predicament in which the understanding finds itself, capable only of constructing nominal essences instead of penetrating to a further level of reality, we should not infer that Locke proposed to defeat the enterprise of investigating nature.56 Indeed, Locke remarked that it was crucial to abandon conventional ideas of species and essences in order to conduct a proper inquiry (IV.iv.16). Although nominal essences derive not from nature but from the mind, it does not follow, in Locke’s view, that they remain arbitrary. He recommended care and industry in the formation of our complex ideas of substances. Definitions would improve as we engaged in trials, made observation of further qualities, and revised our sense of the regularities and resemblances that occurred to the senses. The adequacy of nominal essences could be tested against the collection of simple ideas we acquired by examination, having found certain features united together. This fact made it possible for Locke to describe some ideas of substances as more accurate than others (III.vi.31). The inductive, observational, footing that Locke provided for natural philosophy stemmed from the limitation of human intellectual insight. Even in the case of ‘man’ the only appropriate course of action remained one of cautiously accumulating evidence, drawing on information supplied by the senses. Here too we needed to make trials although the effort could ‘reach but a little way’. For the rest, he argued that ‘We must content ourselves with Probability’ (IV.vi.15). This outlook occasioned Locke’s attention to the sources of testimony available in travel accounts. These documents suggested important differences in cognitive ability, moral standards, physical constitution, belief, fashion, law, and custom around the globe, once again pointing up the wisdom of refusing to assume the existence of fixed essences in advance. Locke in turn may have influenced an important set of guidelines for travellers issued in 1696, with the Royal Society’s imprimatur, John Woodward’s Brief Instructions for Making Observations in All Parts of the World. Woodward wrote to Locke including a copy of the pamphlet, which incorporated the natural history of man within the scope of the 56

On natural history as the outcome of our epistemological position relative to essences, see John Yolton, Locke and the Compass of Human Understanding: A Selective Commentary on the ‘‘Essay’’ (Cambridge, 1970), ch. 2; see also Tully, A Discourse, 22; more generally, see Anstey, ‘Locke on Method’.

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investigation. Calling for information on the natives of Africa, the East and West Indies, Tartary, Greenland, ‘or any other remote, and uncivilized, or Pagan Countries’, Woodward specifically encouraged attention to ‘their Tempers, Genius’s, Inclinations, Virtues, and Vices ’. He also welcomed discussion of ‘their Notions touching the Supreme God ’ and the devil, as well as a variety of customs, ranging from marriage, childbirth, funerals, and burials to law, government, trade, and education.57 For Locke, the acknowledgement of diversity was not only an outcome of the investigation, but a methodological principle of the investigation itself, set in place at the start. Thus we can see the logic behind scouring travel accounts, his efforts in the realm of natural philosophy, and his eventual production of Book I of the Essay. The outcome was a distinctive and influential, although hotly disputed, version of the natural history of man, one which confirmed the inescapable and apparently irreducible fact of diversity. 57

John Woodward, Brief Instructions for Making Observations in All Parts of the World (London, 1696), 8–10. See Correspondence, V: 506. For a discussion of the context of Woodward’s pamphlet, see V. A. Eyles’s introduction to a facsimile reprint (London, 1973), 1–8.

CHAPTER

2

The uses of diversity: Locke’s sceptical critique of Stoicism

To understand early modern conflict over the question of diversity we need a more nuanced history of philosophy, alert to the traditions of argument and counter-argument available to participants in the debate. With this we may begin to identify the contours and fault-lines that separated opponents addressing fundamental problems of human variation. The third Earl of Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson, as we will see in later chapters, disputed Locke’s conclusions even as he set the terms of the argument. The difficulty, as they saw it, was not Locke’s politics or his position on toleration, which they admired, but rather his willingness in the Essay to cite profound human differences in moral and religious matters without explaining them satisfactorily and restoring the normative force of nature. Where they sought uniformity, under the influence of Stoic teaching, he was only willing to acknowledge incommensurable customs, manners, and beliefs. Locke’s readiness to introduce this material owed something to the method of natural history, as I argued in the previous chapter. His accumulation of testimony on customs and manners treated human nature as something to be understood inductively, rather than through preassigned assumptions about essences. The modern, up-to-date, references to travel accounts he provided placed him in the company of naturalists who showed a similar enthusiasm for travel as a source of testimony and evidence. But Locke’s argumentative strategy, as it emerged in the Essay, had another pedigree which we need to appreciate: the sceptical tradition. Locke’s philosophical engagement with cultural diversity reached its most famous and controversial expression in the Essay’s first book. In order to unseat the mistaken view that certain innate ideas or principles informed human nature, he dwelt at length on the existence of vast disparities in religious belief and moral practice across the world. This testimony indicated the absence of universal agreement, a necessary condition for the claim of innateness to have any merit. Even if his overall 34

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intentions were not those of a sceptic, Locke was indebted in this respect to a sceptical mode of argument in his attack on innateness. The advertisement of diversity was an established technique among sceptical philosophers and Locke’s readiness to introduce anthropological testimony of human difference was a recognisable manoeuvre.1 Locke took part in a debate that separated sceptics and Stoics in antiquity as well as their modern heirs. The Stoics insisted on a shared moral outlook in mankind, based around innate ideas, common notions, or ‘prolepses’. Universal agreement confirmed the existence of these unifying principles in the soul. This conviction was embraced by a range of seventeenth-century philosophers and divines, for whom a normative account of human nature guaranteed the fundamental distinction between good and evil. Sceptics, by contrast, replied with references to inconsistent cultural habits around the world which confirmed the absence of agreement. Locke denied that nature endowed mankind with these ideas, principles, or inclinations, which led some of his critics to see his philosophy as advocating a pernicious form of scepticism. Characterisation of Locke in this way did not do justice to his position as a whole. Far from committing himself to a thorough-going scepticism, Locke merely intended to place epistemological and moral inquiry, in his estimation, on a sounder footing than specious innate concepts or principles. He rescued himself from the kind of relativism they alleged by stressing the power of reason to work out moral and religious duty. Christians enjoyed the benefit of the revealed text of Scripture, which provided an essential moral guide. Thus it is important to proceed carefully in reconstructing Locke’s strategy and intention in this difficult and contentious context. I LOCKE, INNATENESS, AND UNIVERSAL CONSENT

In the historiography of philosophy, Locke’s relationship to the sceptical tradition has been a matter of uncertainty. To the extent that an ‘active’ connection to scepticism has been admitted, critics have located it in Locke’s account of real and nominal essence, his wariness at admitting knowledge of things in themselves, and his resulting suspicion over natural kinds. But these arguments have been characterised as amounting 1

This chapter expands and revises Daniel Carey, ‘Locke as Moral Sceptic: Innateness, Diversity, and the Reply to Stoicism’, Archiv fu¨r Geschichte der Philosophie 79 (1997): 292–309, reprinted in Locke: Epistemology and Metaphysics, ed. Udo Thiel (Aldershot, 2002).

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to no more than mitigated scepticism, and scholars have preferred, on the whole, to assimilate him to Bacon in his impatience with sceptics who disrupted the effort of inquiry into nature, intent as they were on obstructing the growth of knowledge rather than facilitating it within appropriate parameters.2 In this sense Locke’s scepticism, to the extent that he shared in the habits of thought of that tradition, was restricted, much like Joseph Glanvill’s in The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661) and Scepsis Scientifica (1665). Glanvill’s texts were avowedly supportive of the new science and at the same time sceptical. Yet Glanvill reacted angrily, without contradiction in his own mind at least, to claims that he was a sceptic.3 In the context of moral philosophy, the drift of Lockean criticism has been more firmly against seeing him as inclined to scepticism. His insistence on reason’s grasp of the tenets of natural law, and the proposed, though never attempted, demonstrative ethics, have provided persuasive grounds for asserting his antagonism toward a sceptical attitude on moral matters, quite independent of his emphasis on rewards and punishments in the afterlife and espousal of Scripture as a source of moral guidance.4 But this perspective on Locke has left at least one cause for puzzlement, namely the reaction of some early readers of the Essay who made the accusation that 2

3

4

See the entry on ‘scepticism’ in John W. Yolton, A Locke Dictionary (Oxford, 1993), 246–8; Michael Ayers, Locke: Epistemology and Ontology, 2 vols. (London, 1991), especially I: 156–9, 302–3; II: 29–30, 43–7, 65–70; G. A. J. Rogers, Locke’s Enlightenment: Aspects of the Origin, Nature and Impact of His Philosophy (Hildesheim, 1998), ch. 3; G. A. J. Rogers, ‘Locke and the Sceptical Challenge’, in The Philosophical Canon in the 17th and 18th Centuries, ed. G. A. J. Rogers and Sylvana Tomaselli (Rochester, 1996), 49–66; G. A. J. Rogers, ‘John Locke and the Sceptics’, in The Return of Scepticism: From Hobbes and Descartes to Bayle, ed. Gianni Paganini (Dordrecht, 2003), 37–53; Charles Larmore, ‘Scepticism’, in The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1998), II: 1159–62. Bacon’s programme can be seen as one among many responses to sceptical epoche¯ or suspension of judgement. ‘My profession is freedom of enquiry, and I own no more Scepticism then what is concluded in the Motto which the Royal Society have now adopted for theirs, Nullius in Verba.’ Joseph Glanvill, Scire/i tuum nihil est: or, the Authors Defence of The Vanity of Dogmatizing; Against the Exceptions of the learned Tho. Albius in his Late Sciri (London, 1665), 3. Glanvill responded to Thomas White, Sciri, sive sceptices & scepticorum a jure disputationis exclusio (London, 1663), translated as An Exclusion of Scepticks from all Title to Dispute, Being an Answer to the Vanity of Dogmatizing (London, 1665). On Glanvill’s connection with scepticism, see also his Essays on Several Important Subjects in Philosophy and Religion (London, 1676), 43–7. For discussions which see Locke solely as anti-sceptical in morals see John Colman, John Locke’s Moral Philosophy (Edinburgh, 1983), 25, 135, 173; Rogers, Locke’s Enlightenment, 44–6; Rogers, ‘Locke and the Sceptical Challenge’, 61–3 (for a more hesitant reading, see Rogers, ‘John Locke and the Sceptics’); Larmore, ‘Scepticism’, 1162. For a valuable exception which stresses Locke’s engagement with Charron’s scepticism, especially in his early political writings, see David Wootton, ‘Introduction’ to John Locke, Political Writings, ed. David Wootton (Harmondsworth, 1993), 26–31; see also John Marshall, John Locke: Resistance, Religion and Responsibility (Cambridge, 1994), 31.

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Locke was indeed a moral sceptic.5 By looking again at Locke’s position on innateness, and setting it against a background of conflict between Stoics and sceptics over nature as a source of moral norms and consistent judgements, we can recover a better sense of the threat his position posed and the compatibility of his approach with sceptical argumentation over diversity. Locke’s case against innateness had its origins in a series of lectures delivered in Oxford in the early 1660s on the subject of natural law. In them, Locke entertained a number of possible bases on which to ground the law of nature. There is some evidence that Locke might have originally been drawn to a position which set store by the existence of unanimous agreement over moral matters, but significantly he deleted the passage outlining this case.6 In the end he devoted two lectures to specifically rejecting innateness and common consent as valid foundations.7 In his discussion of common consent, Locke began with a reference to the recent experience of religious conflict in the Civil War period as evidence enough that the voice of the people could not be equated with the voice of God. In the substance of the lecture, he treated the notion of consensus (communis consensus) as an empirical claim and he disproved it by pointing to the absence of such agreement: no consistent pattern across mankind could be found in moral views about theft, chastity, care for parents and the elderly, or the imperative of self-preservation. To make his case, Locke included a number of historical examples from the ancient world and contemporary travel.8 As far as the idea of God was concerned – a crucial one for morals – an array of atheist peoples and individuals demonstrated the lack of agreement on this matter. When he gave separate consideration to the question of whether the laws of nature were innate, Locke came to similar conclusions. The lack of an innate imprint was again demonstrated by the diversity of moral practices. Primitive peoples (barbarae nationes),9 who 5

6 7

8 9

See especially Thomas Becconsall, The Grounds and Foundation of Natural Religion Discover’d, in the Principal Branches of it, in Opposition to the Prevailing Notions of Modern Scepticks and Latitudinarians (London, 1698); and Henry Lee, Anti-Scepticism: or, Notes upon each Chapter of Mr. Lock’s Essay concerning Humane Understanding (London, 1702). John Locke, Essays on the Law of Nature, ed. and trans. W. von Leyden (1954; Oxford, 1988), 282–3. Essay III and Essay V in von Leyden’s edition, respectively. During the period, ‘common consent’ was often used as equivalent to universal consent. In the Essay and in answer to Bishop Stillingfleet, as we will see, Locke required universal confimation in a strict sense. In his Latin essay on this subject, Locke often uses consensus without a modifier (translated by von Leyden as ‘general consent’). On other occasions, Locke specifically denies a ‘universalem et communem consensum’ in matters of morals (166), or that a ‘unanimis et universalis . . . consensus’ regarding some opinion would prove it was a natural law (176). Locke, Essays, 161–79. Locke describes such people as ‘sine institutis, sine legibus, sine eruditione’ (without institutions, laws, or knowledge), 139.

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like young boys and illiterates were closest to nature, showed no sign of possessing consistently engraved beliefs, but gave themselves up to horrible crimes. Polite nations fared better in moral terms, but the agreement they displayed came from other sources. Locke refined and developed his case over the next twenty-five years. By the time the Essay appeared, he included so-called innate ‘speculative principles’ in his critique and he treated innate moral principles and innate ideas (such as the idea of God) in separate chapters. At the same time, his motivation for the critique took on a new focus. He made it clear that the attachment to innate ‘speculative’ maxims was a scholastic predilection that inhibited the discovery of truth and the advancement of learning (I.ii.27). In a similarly Baconian vein he regarded the claim of innate moral principles as setting up idols of the mind and stamping absurd errors with ‘the Characters of Divinity’ (I.iii.26). Just as darkly, such a move supported the claims of particular factions or sects who set up their views as unassailable norms, finding this a ‘short cut to Infallibility’ (I.iii.20). Thus, by devoting the first book of the Essay to a critique of innateness, Locke supported the epistemological enterprise of the Royal Society and placed himself in a publicly established (though not uncontested) tradition. Locke’s purpose in advancing the critique was also political, as James Tully has argued.10 The elimination of innate ideas had the effect (and intention) of upsetting hierarchies and establishing assent on the basis of evidence and probable reasoning. When Locke took up the argument against innateness in the second chapter of Book I of the Essay, his logic was straightforward. If a principle claims innate status, then it must be accompanied by universal agreement. Such agreement constituted the ‘mark’ or sign of innateness, a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for the assertion to have any merit. The 10

James Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge, 1993), 189–93. Locke is explicit about this in Essay, I.iv.24. Tully sees the negative reaction to Locke as motivated by a desire among Anglican churchmen to defend traditional hierarchies and knowledge claims. At the same time there are difficulties with Tully’s claim that need to be addressed, given that Glanvill was an Anglican clergyman, as was another critic of innateness, Samuel Parker, author of A Free and Impartial Censure of the Platonick Philosophie (London, 1666). Glanvill had latitudinarian sympathies while Parker was an energetic opponent of toleration and dissent. A year after Parker published his Free and Impartial Censure he became chaplain to the archbishop of Canterbury. Parker continued to hold an anti-innateness position, although with a certain modification on the matter of common consent in A Demonstration of the Divine Authority of the Law of Nature, and of the Christian Religion (London, 1681). On the range of views on innateness held by Dissenters see also Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics & Locke’s ‘‘Two Treatises of Government’’ (Princeton, 1986), 54–8. Tully’s observation is also problematic in relation to Shaftesbury who defended innateness but was deeply anti-clerical. Hutcheson, a Dissenter in an Irish context, nonetheless defended a dispositional theory.

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easiest way to confute innateness was to show that no intellectual or moral principle could demonstrate universal acceptance. By modus tollens, the case for innateness failed. Accordingly, Locke set about showing the lack of agreement over allegedly innate principles, beginning with speculative maxims before proceeding to moral tenets. Locke asserted that children, idiots, illiterates, savages – all those closest to nature and therefore to the source or fountain of innateness – did not indicate their consent. Of course he recognised the slipperiness of universal consent and the fact that his opponents had ways of modifying the requirement to make it less strict and therefore easier to meet. Accordingly he concentrated in equal measure on defeating these attempts; for example, some held that agreement occurred when ‘reason’ was acquired, while others suggested that consent happened at the very moment the principles were first presented for consideration. The logic of such manoeuvres was deficient, as Locke showed, but, whatever the merits of these approaches, they still needed to demonstrate universal consent (although even that was not sufficient to establish innateness on its own). Moral diversity came up for consideration in chapter III where Locke discussed the case for innate practical principles. He divided his attention between the effort to indicate once more the lack of universal consent and the equally pressing task of foiling any attempts to rescue innateness by somehow extenuating the necessary condition of consent. Nor was he satisfied with mere assent to a form of words. His opponents must show ‘Conformity of Action’ (I.iii.3) on the grounds that actions interpreted men’s thoughts while words might suggest a superficial agreement which concealed the fact that different societies reconciled very disparate actions with words like justice, reverence, etc. An appeal to conscience resolved nothing because conscience validated one set of actions embraced by a certain group of people while the conscience of others condemned them. There was no evidence of misgiving from those who adopted a host of cruel customs. Locke referred to entire countries where people readily exposed their children, knowing they would be devoured by wild beasts, and others where new-borns were buried with the mother if she died in childbirth, and others still where it was customary to exterminate aging parents without qualm (I.iii.9). Locke drew on a range of sources, including Jean de Le´ry, the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, and Arcangelo Lamberti, who reported on cannibalism, child murder, and revenge, providing lurid examples of disturbing practices. I will examine his citations more closely in the next chapter; for the moment I want to emphasise the argumentative strategy he employs.

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Locke did not confine himself to narratives of ‘primitive’ nations but also included some discussion of distasteful customs among the polite. If proof were needed of dissent from the basic moral principle that parents had a duty to preserve their children, we could find it among the ancient Greeks and Romans who practised exposure ‘without pity or remorse’ (I.iii.12). Thus, anyone who attempted to write off his instances as the customs of mere barbarians and savages had to contend with the testimony of civilised nations in the classical world. With this evidence in hand, Locke concluded by asking rhetorically, ‘Where then are those innate Principles, of Justice, Piety, Gratitude, Equity, Chastity? Or, where is that universal Consent, that assures us there are such inbred Rules?’ (I.iii.9). In the fourth chapter, Locke considered innate ideas specifically. Since propositions consist of ideas, in Locke’s account, then an advocate of innateness must establish the natural possession of certain ideas before proceeding any further. For example, the practical principle that God should be worshipped, which some philosophers claimed as innate,11 included the idea of worship and the idea of God; both had to be innate for the proposition to be innate. Proceeding on the same logic as before, Locke indicates the absence of an innate idea of God by calling attention to diversity: not only were there atheists among the ancients, but recent navigation had revealed ‘whole Nations’ at the Cape of Good Hope, in Russian territory, and the Caribbean ‘amongst whom there was to be found no Notion of a God, no Religion’ (I.iv.8).12 Jean de Le´ry concluded the same of the Tupinamba in his travels in Brazil.13 The phenomenon recurred not only in ‘uncultivated’ nations, closest to nature (and therefore to any alleged natural inscriptions), but even among educated and lettered societies such as Siam and China, which we might have expected to benefit from learning and inquiry (I.iv.8). We can call this the ‘whole nations’ argument because it is important for Locke that these are not isolated cases of immoralists and lawbreakers. Rather, entire peoples commit themselves to the ‘transgression’, which undermines the plausibility of the view that they flout it knowingly. The ‘generally allowed breach’ (I.iii.12), as he calls it, becomes a further proof 11

12 13

For example Lord Herbert in De veritate, as Locke points out (Essay, I.iii.15). See also Robert Sanderson, Several Cases of Conscience Discussed in Ten Lectures in the Divinity School at Oxford, trans. Robert Codrington (Oxford, 1660), 132. Locke’s references are discussed in the next chapter. Jean de Le´ry, Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre du Bresil (La Rochelle, 1578), ch. 16. This conclusion had been disputed by the Heidelberg theologian Johann Ludwig Fabricius in Apologia barbarorum praesertim Brasiliensium aliorumque Americanorum contra calumniam atheismi (Heidelberg, 1662).

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against innateness. True, breaking a rule did not mean it was unknown, but how could anyone imagine entire groups of people committed to violating something they all innately knew was good? (I.iii.11). Testimony of this kind was telling not just against the supposition of an innate idea of God. According to Locke, the absence of such an idea made the presumption of any other innate characters implausible (I.iv.17). Surely if God intended to provide us with such ideas he would have begun with a notion of himself. Of course, the lack of this idea also made sense of the fact that moral practices were so diverse and reprehensible, given the necessary relationship between belief in a divine lawgiver and the prospect of moral behaviour in Locke’s system.14 At this point, Locke changed tack and maintained that even if we could show universal consent, innateness would not be established on this basis. This turn in his argument, which proved useful in replying to Bishop Stillingfleet,15 highlights the fact that universal consent was a necessary but not a sufficient condition. While addressing this issue Locke also raised a series of other considerations: he sketched his alternative account of how we can acquire proper moral and religious conceptions, and explained why people mistakenly take their ideas for innate, and why they do not succeed in developing adequate ones in the first place. He lamented the failure to exercise the power of reason with sufficient diligence and force, which left people at the mercy of fashion and opinion. Although Locke’s approach was consistent with the method of natural history adopted by adherents of the new science, his compatibility with this ‘modern’ way of advancing knowledge should not obscure the fact that his critique also engaged with techniques of argument associated with ancient and early modern scepticism. The sceptics foregrounded testimony of human variation in several contexts; notably, for our purposes, they questioned human consensus and introduced a welter of inconsistent moral practices in reply to dogmatic ethical claims. Locke availed himself of their technique in order to pre-empt the assertion of innateness. But his intention was not to undermine confidence in moral distinctions or religious belief. On the contrary, he emphasised that his case did not tell against the law of nature, grasped by reason, nor was the absence of an 14

15

This is made clear in the Essay, I.iv.8, and especially Draft B of the Essay. See Drafts for the ‘‘Essay Concerning Human Understanding’’, and other Philosophical Writings, ed. Peter H. Nidditch and G. A. J. Rogers, 3 vols., vol. I: Drafts A and B (Oxford, 1990), 109. Mr. Locke’s Reply to the Right Reverend The Lord Bishop of Worcester’s Answer to His Second Letter, in The Works of John Locke, 9th edn, 9 vols. (1794; rpt London, 1997), III: 494. For further discussion, see chapter 4 below.

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innate idea of God proof against the existence of the Deity (I.iii.13, I.iv.9). He wanted a different basis for human understanding, but before he could establish it an old and erroneous outlook had to be dispatched. Here sceptical modes of argument became useful, particularly since (as we shall see) he was tackling a Stoic position which the sceptics had resisted in antiquity. II DIVERSITY AND THE SCEPTICAL TRADITION

Ancient scepticism combined the enunciation of a series of logical aporiai with empirical observations designed to instil doubt, prompted by the goal of chastening dogmatists and provoking a suspension of judgement, which would lead to ataraxia or calm detachment. In the Outlines of Scepticism, Sextus Empiricus described a number of modes of argument. The tenth mode concerned ethics, and involved setting one practice, law, or moral opinion against another: We oppose custom to other things – for example, to law, when we say that in Persia homosexual acts are customary, while in Rome they are forbidden by law; that among us adultery is forbidden, while among the Massagetae it is accepted by custom as indifferent (as Eudoxus of Cnidus narrates in the first book of his Journey round the World ); that among us it is forbidden to have sex with your mother, while in Persia it is the custom to favour such marriages; and in Egypt they marry their sisters, which among us is forbidden by law.16

As Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes observe, Sextus drew his examples from anthropological resources accumulated by Greek authorities in Herodotus’s time and before.17 Sextus used this information to create anomalies which made it impossible to establish consensus, the only recourse being a relativistic form of explanation. He maintained that nothing is by nature good, evil, or indifferent: rather, an array of irreconcilable customs and manners existed around the world, making it difficult to ascertain what was morally correct.18 16

17 18

Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Scepticism, trans. Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes (Cambridge, 1994), I.152. Translation modified. On this mode, see Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes, The Modes of Scepticism: Ancient Texts and Modern Interpretations (Cambridge, 1985), 151–71; R. J. Hankinson, The Sceptics (London, 1995), 262–72. The ‘we’ referred to in Sextus’s remarks is unclear. Little is known with certainty about his birthplace and residence when he was writing. His life is usually dated to the late second century AD. See D. K. House, ‘The Life of Sextus Empiricus’, Classical Quarterly 30:1 (1980): 227–38; Luciano Floridi, Sextus Empiricus: The Transmission and Recovery of Pyrrhonism (Oxford, 2002). Annas and Barnes, Modes of Scepticism, 157. Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Scepticism, III.197.

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Compared with Locke, Sextus pursued a more wide-ranging approach, casting doubt on dogmatic moral beliefs altogether. Nonetheless, at certain points Sextus introduced examples of relative custom and barbarity that coincide with those employed by Locke, who capitalised on extreme and imcommensurable practices when countering unanimous consent. Sextus pointed out: . . . tasting human flesh is among us unlawful; but it is indifferent among entire foreign nations . . . Further, some make human sacrifice to Cronus, just as the Scythians sacrifice strangers to Artemis; but we think that holy places are polluted by the killing of a human being . . . Among us the law orders that fathers should get proper care from their sons; but the Scythians cut the throats of everyone over sixty . . . and Solon laid down for the Athenians the law of immunity, according to which he permitted every man to kill his own child. But among us the laws forbid killing children.19

Sextus’s examples ranged from cannibalism to human sacrifice, abandonment of children, and extermination of the elderly. Fashions, funeral rites, and dietary habits exhibited the same variation, he added, and in matters of worship no pattern of consistency appeared, including the fact that ‘Most people say that there are gods, but some say there are not’.20 Within this broad approach, an emphasis on the force of custom can be discerned, coincident with Locke’s requirements for attacking innate ideas and principles. The connection with Locke also occurs in the rejection of ‘nature’ as a source of moral norms or principles. To establish Locke’s debt to this tradition, we need to look at how it was revived in modernity in order to combat Stoic convictions about innate moral principles or prolepses and common consent. Locke’s deployment of a sceptical form of argument has not been recognised – although it had direct bearing on his readiness to welcome testimony of diversity as well as the critical response to his position. Locke’s opposition to moral scepticism elsewhere in his moral theory means that this background must be set out with some care. The task is to show a connection with a sceptical mode of argument by identifying a pattern of resemblance between Locke’s approach and the method of others whose debt to scepticism is more recognised. This in turn explains why Locke was rebuked for scepticism and answered with Stoic replies by some of his contemporaries. We can also conclude with reasonable confidence that Locke was aware of what he was doing. Sceptical argument circulated as a series of 19

Ibid., III.207–10.

20

Ibid., III.218.

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commonplaces, in England as much as on the Continent, and he would have been sufficiently familiar with its traditions as an academic trained in philosophy and medicine. Although my emphasis in this discussion will be on reconstructing a sceptical mode of argument on its own terms, taken chronologically in the early modern period, I will strengthen the association with Locke by confining myself to describing figures whose work we know Locke read (as his notebooks show) during the time he was composing the early Essays on the Law of Nature when he first formulated his critique of innateness and universal consent. In the case of Montaigne, whom he was reading in the early 1660s, the manuscript evidence points to a general familiarity on Locke’s part rather than a specific concern with sceptical issues per se,21 but in relation to Pierre Gassendi and Joseph Glanvill there is a more decided awareness and interest in controversies aroused by sceptical polemic. The most famous and influential exponent of sceptical arguments in the early modern period was Montaigne, who used them in order to combat dogmatism of the kind that contributed to the French wars of religion. In his longest essay, the ‘Apology for Raymond Sebond’, Montaigne made use of Sextus’s tenth mode, citing the endless variability of law and custom. What one country abominated another one commended.22 Marriages between close relatives were prohibited at home, but permitted in other countries. Killing of infants or parents, wife-sharing, theft, licentiousness – no practice, however extreme, could be named that failed to find acceptance among one nation or another. Montaigne went on, for example in his essay ‘Of Custom’, to develop the exceptional diversity of customs and manners, establishing that whatever nature had supplied, man had twisted it into new and remarkable shapes. Sexual mores were inconsistent, nor could he locate any uniformity in opinions of beauty, one people preferring what another abhorred. He covered questions of law, customs of address and politeness, inheritance, emotional attachments, 21

22

Locke was reading some of Montaigne’s essays in Florio’s translation (1603) in the early 1660s and took note of his opinion on various classical authorities. See Bodleian Library MS Locke f. 14, pp. 53, 88, 180. On the dating of the notebook, the majority of whose entries were made by autumn 1664, see J. R. Milton, ‘The Date and Significance of Two of Locke’s Early Manuscripts’, The Locke Newsletter 19 (1988): 47–89. Later Locke purchased a French edition of the Essais (1669), LL 2029a. We do not know if Locke read the ‘Apology for Raymond Sebond’, Montaigne’s longest and most famous exploration of sceptical themes. The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, 1958), 437. The writings of Sextus Empiricus became available in Latin translation in the 1560s: Henri Estienne’s translation of the Outlines appeared as Sexti Empirici Pyrrhoniarum Hypotyposeon libri III (Geneva, 1562); this was incorporated into Gentian Hervet’s complete edition of Sextus, Adversus mathematicos (Antwerp, 1569). See Floridi, Sextus Empiricus, 72, 85.

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and childbirth, noting a standardised list of abuses such as cannibalism, infanticide, and parricide.23 But Montaigne did more than merely catalogue diversity and question universal consent. He also undermined innateness on this basis. In an important passage in the ‘Apology’, Montaigne expressed his doubts about the existence of natural laws, that is, ostensibly permanent injunctions ‘imprinted’ (empreintes) on the human race, which formed part of our essence. He described mockingly as a ‘misfortune’ the fact that out of the myriad legal dicta in the world, none could be located which enjoyed the universal acceptance of all peoples. The few candidates for common consent were contradicted not merely by one nation but by several. This presented a clear difficulty, according to Montaigne: Now the only likely sign by which they can argue certain laws to be natural is universality [universite´ ] of approval. For what nature had truly ordered for us we would without doubt follow by common consent [commun consentement]. And not only every nation, but every individual would resent the force and violence used on him by anyone who tried to impel him to oppose that law. Let them show me just one law of that sort – I’d like to see it.24

Several things are significant about this passage in relation to Locke: Montaigne not only disputes the innateness of moral laws but suggests, like Locke, that the only viable confirming sign of their naturalness is common consent. Testimony of human diversity eliminates that source of support. In stating his position, Montaigne emphasises that entire nations dissent from supposedly universal principles, a strategy that Locke also adopted. Furthermore, Montaigne argues that if nature is the source of moral laws, then everyone should be aware of and act on those principles, but this is not the case. Locke stressed the same two requirements: it was unintelligible to speak of innate principles that were unknown to us; what is more, if they existed, we should also expect ‘Conformity of Action’ (I.iii.3). The sceptical exploitation of diversity continued in the work of Gassendi. Although historians of philosophy have associated Gassendi closely with Locke on a variety of themes – ranging from his Epicurean 23

24

‘Here they live on human flesh; there it is an act of piety to kill one’s father at a certain age; elsewhere the fathers ordain, while the children are still in their mothers’ wombs, which ones they want to have brought up and kept, and which abandoned and killed.’ Montaigne, Complete Essays, 82. See also ‘Of Ancient Customs’ for further reflection by Montaigne ‘upon this continual variation of human things’ (216). In consequence, he advised that great caution be taken with the education of children (78–9), in a manner Locke was later to do in his educational writings. (Montaigne is referred to in Locke’s Some Thoughts concerning Education, ed. John W. Yolton and Jean S. Yolton (Oxford, 1989), 149.) Montaigne, Complete Essays, 437.

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epistemology and ontology, to the ‘mitigated’ scepticism that placed knowledge on a probabilistic basis, and an Epicurean account of motivation – they have not connected the two in deploying strategies of moral scepticism.25 In his Exercitationes paradoxicae adversus Aristoteleos, Gassendi included a discussion of rival opinion across mankind on identical subjects, together with a specific section on moral variation. Here Gassendi touched on marriage contracts, adultery, polygamy, sati, prostitution, whether in ancient Lydia or modern Calicut, incest, funeral rites, and cannibalism of parents by the Massagetae, all of which led him to surmise: ‘If you examine things with a degree of attention, you will not fail to discover that nothing is considered unjust or shameful in one country which is not deemed honest and just in another; nothing is rejected in one place that is not recommended in another.’26 In short, nothing that was regarded as shameful or unjust in one place lacked support in another.

25

26

The influence of Gassendi’s philosophy on Locke and Locke’s awareness of his work is a debated question. Locke quoted twelve times from Gassendi’s Syntagma philosophicum in notebook entries dating from the early 1660s, and made general references on several occasions to Gassendi’s Opera omnia. He also noted various authors who mentioned Gassendi. See J. R. Milton, ‘Locke and Gassendi: A Reappraisal’, in English Philosophy in the Age of Locke, ed. M. A. Stewart (Oxford, 2000), 87–109. Milton nonetheless concludes that Gassendi’s influence has been exaggerated. For some additional considerations, however, see the next three notes. For advocates of Gassendi’s influence on Locke in epistemology and ontology, see especially Thomas M. Lennon, The Battle of the Gods and Giants: The Legacies of Descartes and Gassendi, 1655–1715 (Princeton, 1993), ch. 3, and passim; Richard W. F. Kroll, ‘The Question of Locke’s Relation to Gassendi’, Journal of the History of Ideas 45:3 (1984): 339–59; Fred S. Michael and Emily Michael, ‘The Theory of Ideas in Gassendi and Locke’, Journal of the History of Ideas 51 (1990): 379–99. On the subject of ethics and hedonism, see Edward A. Driscoll, ‘The Influence of Gassendi on Locke’s Hedonism’, International Philosophical Quarterly 12 (1972): 87–110; Lisa T. Sarasohn, Gassendi’s Ethics: Freedom in a Mechanistic Universe (Ithaca, 1996), ch. 8. The records of Locke’s library indicate he owned three texts by Gassendi, a biography of the savant Pereisc (much referred to in MS Locke f. 14), Gassendi’s response to Descartes’s Meditations, and a short medical work (for references see Milton, ‘Locke and Gassendi’, 91). Locke also owned Franc¸ois Bernier’s Abrege´ de la Philosophie de Gassendi, 7 vols. (Lyon, 1678), LL 283, given to him by the author. For Gassendi in the context of ‘mitigated’ scepticism, see Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Savonarola to Bayle, revised and expanded edn (Oxford, 2003), 120–7. Pierre Gassendi, Dissertations en forme de paradoxes contre les aristote´liciens (Exercitationes paradoxicae adversus Aristoteleos), trans. Bernard Rochot (Paris, 1959), 459 (II.vi, art. 4). Rochot provides a facingpage French translation. Although composed c. 1624–6, the second part of the Exercitationes appeared in print for the first time in Gassendi’s Opera omnia, 6 vols. (Lyon, 1658). The reference to the Massagetae derives from Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Scepticism I.152 (quoted above). Locke took note of Gassendi’s Exercitationes when he read Thomas White’s Sciri (1663). White identified Gassendi as the reviver of pernicious ancient scepticism in his Exercitationes, whom Glanvill followed (13–14). Locke quoted this passage in MS Locke d. 10, p. 155. On this basis, Milton’s conclusion that ‘Gassendi the sceptical author of the Exercitationes paradoxicae adversus Aristoteleos . . . seem[s] never to have attracted his [Locke’s] interest’ (‘Locke and Gassendi’, 98) requires revision.

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This conviction was borne out in Gassendi’s response to Descartes on the subject of innate ideas, with which Locke was almost certainly familiar.27 In his published reply to the Meditations, Gassendi argued that our ideas come from external rather than internal sources, while Descartes’s ostensibly innate idea of God derived from figures such as his parents, teachers, professors, or the company he kept. Finally, Gassendi anticipated Locke in maintaining that if the idea of God resided innately in the soul, then ‘everyone would conceive of God in terms of a similar form and image, and would give him the same attributes and have exactly the same view of him, whereas, notoriously, the opposite is true’.28 (Gassendi’s view was complemented in the objections compiled by Marin Mersenne who pointed out that the Huron and other primitive Canadian tribes were lacking in this idea.29) In England, the conjunction between scepticism and natural philosophy appeared in Glanvill’s Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), which anticipated and may have informed Locke’s position on innateness. Certainly Locke took note of the controversy it aroused.30 Glanvill had described custom and education as powerful forces that shaped the soul. Although we entered the world with an uninscribed tablet,31 social influences ‘so blot and scrible on’t, 27

28

29 30

31

A notebook entry of Locke’s from the early 1660s refers to the opening of Descartes’s response to Gassendi’s objections, suggesting the probability that Locke had read Gassendi’s remarks (MS Locke f. 14, p. 64). Pierre Gassendi, ‘Fifth Set of Objections’ to the Meditations, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1984–91), II: 195, 205, 214. In this connection, a satirical account of Christ Church, Oxford – Locke’s college – published in 1659, is noteworthy. Probably the work of Henry Stubbe, the text picked up on new fashions in science and philosophy, advocating not only that the administration of the college be turned over to Westminster School (Locke’s alma mater) but also the establishment of ‘one Professor of Des Cartes’s Philosophy’ and ‘one Professor of Gassendus’s Philosophy’. Sundry Things from Several Hands Concerning the University of Oxford (London, 1659), 6. For discussion, see Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform 1626–1660 (London, 1975), 175–7. Milton suggests that there was ‘an interest in his [Gassendi’s] ideas among those involved with teaching logic in Oxford (‘Locke and Gassendi’, 109). In his Institutio logica (1658) Gassendi had emphasised the blank tablet of the soul. See Howard Jones’s edition (Assen, 1981), 4, 85. In the Nouveaux Essais, Leibniz saw Locke as following Gassendi in numerous respects, including the fact that ‘there are no innate ideas, [and] that our mind is a tabula rasa’. New Essays on Human Understanding, trans. Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett (Cambridge, 1996), 70. Quoted in Lennon, Battle of the Gods and Giants, 149. Marin Mersenne, ‘Second Set of Objections’ to the Meditations, in Philosophical Writings of Descartes, II: 89. Locke’s notebook dating from the period c. 1660–6 indicates that he was familiar with Glanvill’s argument and the debate it caused. MS Locke f. 14, p. 90. Locke also made references to Glanvill’s critic Thomas White whose Sciri appeared in 1663. ‘a“ grafon grammatei'on’. This phrase may have come from Nathanael Culverwell who uses it to describe Aristotle’s position. See An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature [1652], ed. Robert A. Greene and Hugh MacCallum (Toronto, 1971), 81.

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as almost to incapacitate it for after-impressions’.32 The diversity of human practices, which he remarked in some detail, nullified the supposition of a common source in nature, and indicated the basically arbitrary social inheritance each person acquired.33 He introduced this catalogue of custom to point out that ‘while we thus mistake the infusions of education, for the principles of universal nature; we must needs fail of a scientifical Theory’.34 By suspending this dogmatic attachment to inculcated beliefs, the new science gained space to operate. Like Glanvill, Locke appreciated that the easiest way to establish knowledge on a new basis was to question existing foundations. The removal of inherited beliefs, in the form of unexamined, allegedly innate, ‘maxims’, provided a new imperative to investigate the world.35 Thus, by devoting the first book of the Essay to a critique of innate ideas, Locke supported the epistemological enterprise of the Royal Society and placed himself in a publicly established (though not uncontested) tradition. Locke’s debt to a sceptical style of argument can be confirmed if we compare the testimony introduced to unseat innateness in the Essay with the rhetorical pattern of his earliest foray into this field in his Oxford lectures on the law of nature. In the dispute over the foundation of natural law in common consent, Locke presented evidence that looks familiar from the standpoint of his later work – he noted instances of atheism in Brazil and the Cape of Good Hope, as well as the practice of sati in India from a contemporary travel account, which contradicted the ostensibly innate natural law of self-preservation.36 Yet the preponderance of examples are classical in origin. Thus, it is less important for Locke to indicate the contemporary nature of his evidence than to accumulate testimony that would serve the purpose of instilling doubt and checking dogmatism. To this end, classical sources are as relevant as more recent ones. In this regard he 32

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Joseph Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatizing: or Confidence in Opinions (London, 1661), 126. Glanvill’s knowledge of scepticism was partly derived from Thomas Stanley’s History of Philosophy (1655–62). The third volume of the text (1660) provided a translation and summary of Sextus’s Outlines of Pyrrhonism. (Locke owned the 1687 complete edition of the work – LL 2755.) On Glanvill’s borrowings from Stanley, see Jackson I. Cope, Joseph Glanvill: Anglican Apologist (St. Louis, 1956). Glanvill altered his somewhat confused Stoic terminology in his revised version of the Vanity, published as Scepsis Scientifica: or, Confest Ignorance, the Way to Science (London, 1665), 93. ‘. . . antick deckings with feathers is as comely in the account of those barbarous Nations, which use them; as the Ornaments of Lace, and Ribband, are in ours. And the plucking off the shooe is to the Japanners as decent a salutation; as the uncovering of the head is to us, and their abhorred neighbours.’ Glanvill, Vanity, 130–1. Ibid., 132. Locke provides a very similar analysis of the way inculcated principles are mistakenly assumed to be innate and natural in the Essay, I.iii.22–3. See Locke, Essay, IV.vii (‘Of Maxims’), and IV.xx.8. Locke, Essays, 173–5.

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followed a precedent among early modern sceptics like Montaigne and Gassendi. For example, Locke cites Didymus, an ancient commentator on Homer, confirming the existence of sanctioned piracy in antiquity; similarly, the Egyptians or Spartans did not disapprove of theft, according to Aulus Gellius in the Attic Nights; both Solinus and Pomponius Mela, meanwhile, reported that the Garamantes in Ethiopia sanctioned open promiscuity; Locke also took note of Aelian who contributed the story of parricide by Sardinians, a custom they had in common with the Derbices in Asia.37 These references remind us that for early modern sceptical commentators, antique authorities and examples were equally pertinent and compelling as modern ones. But even more revealing of the origins of Locke’s argument is his inclusion of various unusual or inconsistent ‘opinions’ held by individual authorities in antiquity, the purpose of which is to indicate the absence of consensus.38 This kind of testimony is certainly common in Sextus who regarded it as equally useful in producing the suspension of judgement which he sought. While the focus in Locke’s Essay, on the other hand, is more firmly on the existence of entire peoples and nations dedicated to what others would call vice, in this early piece he takes occasion to remark that Cato and Socrates, both revered for their wisdom, not only ‘admitted others to their bridal bed, they lent their wives to friends and made themselves abettors of another man’s lust’.39 This is reminiscent of the anecdotal quality of many of Sextus’s citations which include the fact that Crates slept in public with Hipparchia, while Chrysippus believed that it was an indifferent matter whether men slept with their mothers or sisters.40 Locke goes on to note that Diagoras of Melos, Theodorus of Cyrene and Protagoras were all atheists.41 Here his source is almost certainly Cicero’s De natura deorum. When Cotta, the sceptical participant in the dialogue, disputes the cogency of universal consent in the belief in God, he not only mentions the existence of many nations ‘so uncivilized and barbarous as to have no notion of any gods at all’, but also the atheist views of individual 37 38

39 41

Ibid., 169–71. Locke’s sources are identified more fully in Questions Concerning the Law of Nature, ed. and trans. Robert Horwitz, Jenny Strauss Clay, and Diskin Clay (Ithaca, 1990), 185–91. Gassendi takes the same approach in his reply to Lord Herbert’s De veritate, commenting on the number of people who have dissented from the idea of God, providence, an immortal soul, natural right, and doing unto others as we would be done by – as confirmed not only by recent reports from the New World but also by ‘une foule de philosophes (comme il ressort de l’histoire ancienne)’. ‘Ad librum Domini Edoardi Herberti, Angli, De veritate, epistola’, trans. Bernard Rochot, in Actes du congre`s du tricentenaire de Pierre Gassendi (4–7 aouˆt 1955) (Paris, 1957), 278. Locke, Essays, 177. 40 Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Scepticism, I.153, 160. Locke, Essays, 175.

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thinkers, citing Diagoras, Theodorus and the sophist Protagoras of Abdera specifically.42 A trace of this style of argument remains in Locke’s Essay when he begins disputing the existence of an innate idea of God. Before delivering his catalogue of examples taken from modern travellers, Locke mentions ‘the Atheists, taken notice of amongst the Ancients, and left branded upon the Records of History’ (I.iv.8). Locke’s strategy in the early essays coincides with Pufendorf ’s later discussion in De jure naturae et gentium (1672–3). Pufendorf also disputes the existence of innate ideas, founding the law of nature, as Locke does, in reason. At the same time, Pufendorf devotes considerable attention to the difficulty of settling natural law on the basis of common consent, citing similar kinds of examples to Locke. It is important to note, however, that Pudendorf is much more explicit in acknowledging the sceptical sources on which he relies. He states that Sextus Empiricus ‘hath raked up a great Heap of these contradictory Customs and Institutions’, ‘to shew that there is no Certainty in the Notions of Honesty or Dishonesty’. The examples include cannibalism, incest, prostitution, and homosexuality, which various nations accepted and individual philosphers regarded as an indifferent matter. In addition, he cites parallel information from modern sceptics like Montaigne and Charron, as well as additional ancient sources such as the account of Pyrrho by Diogenes Laertius, and passages from Philo Judaeus, one of which confirms the force of habit (consuetudo) as equal to that of nature, before concluding against innateness. At the same time, Pufendorf holds that custom is not so forceful that it makes grasping natural law impossible, and further that ‘the Diversity which appears in the laws of several different Communities’ did not prevent the possibility of ‘some universal and uniform Definition of the Virtues’.43 I believe that Locke’s awareness of the tradition he engaged with can be shown, in any case, by the time of the Essay’s publication. In 1682, Locke recorded a number of notes in his journal while reading Meric Casaubon’s Treatise of Use and Custome (1638). Casaubon remarked that even laying aside the wild and barbarous, ‘there is scarce any vertue so much in request in one place, but will be found to bee a vice in another; scarce any vice so much abhorred at one time in one place; but at another time hath beene thought in the same place if not a vertue, yet no unlawfull thing’.44 Among 42 43 44

Cicero, De natura deorum, trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library (London, 1933), I.63. See also I.2. Samuel Pufendorf, The Law of Nature and Nations, trans. Basil Kennet, 5th edn (London, 1749), 123 (II.iii.8), 125 (II.iii.9), 37 (I.iv.6). Meric Casaubon, A Treatise of Use and Custome (London, 1638), 101.

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the authors who treated of these matters, Casaubon included Sextus Empiricus in the Pyrrhoniarum hypotyposeon. Locke noted this fact in his journal.45 What is more, an echo of Casuabon’s style and construction of his case appears in the formulation of Locke’s argument in the Essay. Casaubon went on to say that with respect to incommensurable customs ‘wee need not to goe so farre, to fetch our instances’, noting that the Romans conferred on fathers an absolute power over the lives of their children.46 Similarly, Locke stated, ‘Nor need we seek so far as Mingrelia or Peru, to find instances’ of parental neglect, as it was an uncondemned custom among the Greeks and Romans to expose their innocent offspring (I.iii.12). III INNATENESS AND THE STOIC TRADITION

Locke’s attack on innateness called into question an assumption that was basic to the thought of many seventeenth-century philosophers and theologians, namely that God had implanted ideas or predispositions in the soul which guided the moral actions and beliefs of mankind.47 The expression of the theory, as John Yolton has shown, took a naive as well as a more sophisticated form, either implying literal impressions of ‘characters’ or stamps, or inclinations and tendencies toward moral behaviour and religious belief, realised in practice under proper conditions. Locke’s critique told not only against the naive form but also the dispositionalist version.48 He began by addressing the crude version of the theory, arguing that if these ideas were imprinted on the soul, then children, idiots, and those closest to nature should display them forcefully. His opponents had another variation on the argument, however, suggesting that it was not so much a case of literal inscription as a matter of certain specific ideas and principles (of God and morals) gaining inevitable acceptance over time, 45

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MS Locke f. 6, p. 50. Locke also noted Casaubon’s references in this context to Plato, Eusebius of Caesarea, Stobaeus, and Damascenus Nicolaus’s addition to the work of Johannes Boemus. Locke began reading the text while visiting James Tyrrell at Oakley. Presumably he made use of Tyrrell’s copy as none survives in his own library. I am grateful to Henry Schankula for clarifying the circumstances of Locke’s reading. Casaubon, Treatise, 101–2. For example William Sherlock argued that it was atheistical to deny innate ideas in his response to Locke. See his ‘Digression concerning Connate Ideas, or Inbred Knowledge’, in A Discourse Concerning the Happiness of Good Men, and the Punishment of the Wicked, in the Next World (London, 1704), 162. Locke’s attention was drawn to this attack by Dr Robert South in a letter of 18 July 1704 (Correspondence, VIII: 356–8). John W. Yolton, John Locke and the Way of Ideas (Oxford, 1956), ch. 1. Yolton’s focus on Locke as questioning the naive theory has been challenged by a number of scholars. See Colman, Locke’s Moral Philosophy, ch. 3; Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy, 189–93; Ayers, Locke, I: 267–8.

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triggered by experience; we are predisposed to accept them, but they take time to manifest themselves. In response to this more sophisticated, dispositional, view, Locke merely observed that if we take this position, then every truth we come to learn should be understood as innate, an outcome he regarded as absurd. In fact, when Locke makes these objections he does not offer a refutation as such.49 He circles around the problem by stating first of all that it is ‘near a Contradiction’ (I.ii.5) to suggest that there are unperceived truths imprinted on the soul (unperceived, that is, because they remain predispositions at this stage rather than actual ideas). If we allow such a move, then every idea that we come to form can claim innate status.50 Locke seems to recognise that the logic is unassailable even if the conclusion is unappealing.51 Indeed, he closes the discussion not with a counterargument but by complaining that this amounts to ‘a very improper way of speaking’. The difficulty of dispatching such a position may account for Locke’s preference for focusing on the naive and less defensible variety of innatism. But he also concentrates on marshalling evidence that poses a problem for both versions of innatism – naive and dispositional – namely the lack of consensus across mankind, which we would expect to find if shared imprints or inclinations actually existed. Dispositionalists had a way out of this trap, as we will see in later chapters, but Locke set it all the same. In doing so, Locke emphasised diversity rather than uniformity, and in this respect he situated himself in a sceptical tradition. Locke’s incentive for engaging with sceptical argument becomes clearer if we consider the target of his critique more carefully. Various scholars have pointed out that the doctrine of innateness was common among the Cambridge Platonists, at least in its dispositional form.52 But the source of Cambridge innatism itself needs to be traced, specifically to the Stoic 49

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On this point see Dominic Scott, Recollection and Experience: Plato’s Theory of Learning and Its Successors (Cambridge, 1995), 99; Jonathan Barnes, ‘Mr. Locke’s Darling Notion’, The Philosophical Quarterly 22:88 (1972): 193–214. Gassendi makes a related point in his ‘Objections’ to Descartes’s Meditations: ‘For surely if the idea of a thing is innate, the idea of an animal, or a plant, or a stone, or of any universal will also be innate.’ Philosophical Writings of Descartes, II: 196. Leibniz was happy to accept such a conclusion in relation to truths of arithmetic and geometry. See New Essays, 77. On innateness among the Cambridge Platonists, see Yolton, Way of Ideas; G. A. J. Rogers, ‘Locke, Newton, and the Cambridge Platonists on Innate Ideas’, Journal of the History of Ideas 40 (1979): 191–205, rpt in Locke’s Enlightenment ; Dominic Scott, ‘Platonic Recollection and Cambridge Platonism’, Hermathena 149 (1990): 73–97. On their anti-scepticism see Alan Gabbey, ‘‘‘A Disease Incurable’’: Scepticism and the Cambridge Platonists’, in Scepticism and Irreligion in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Richard H. Popkin and Arjo Vanderjagt (Leiden, 1993), 71–91.

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tradition. By pursuing this lead, we can identify the fact that Locke’s intervention entailed a resumption of debates that took place in antiquity between Stoics and sceptics. The Stoics grounded their ethics in the concept of nature and a providentially ordered universe. Human nature, in their view, has a tendency to recognise and embrace the good and acknowledge the deity (or deities). Among the later Stoics the evidence for an innatist reading is well recognised. Epictetus, for example, asks: ‘who has come into being without an innate concept of what is good and evil, honourable and base, appropriate and inappropriate . . . and what we ought to do and what we ought not to do?’53 The term for innate concept used here is emphuton ennoian. In the sentence that follows, Epictetus links this to the word ‘preconception’ or prolepsis, saying that the challenge of morals is to relate our ‘preconceptions’ to actual circumstances in making ethical choices and evaluations. By employing both ennoian and prolepsis, he seems to gesture toward both the literal and dispositional versions of innateness – a naive notion of imprinting together with a concept of something not yet fully formed but nonetheless present in the soul as an anticipation.54 On the subject of belief in the divinity, a similar explanation was provided by the later Stoics. In one of his moral epistles, Seneca confirms that ‘there is implanted in everyone an idea concerning deity’ (omnibus insita de dis opinio est).55 Elsewhere, his language is more suggestive of a dispositionalist account, as he remarks on nature’s endowment of mankind with ‘seeds of knowledge, but not the knowledge itself ’.56 53

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Epictetus, The Discourses as Reported by Arrian, the Manual, and Fragments, trans. W. A. Oldfather, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1925–8), II.xi.3–4. On this issue, see A. A. Long, Epictetus: A Stoic and Socratic Guide to Life (Oxford, 2002), 80–3. Classical scholars are in agreement in assigning an innatist position to the later Stoic figures Epictetus and Seneca. A debate exists over the attribution of such a view to the early Stoa. Chrysippus describes prolepses as emphutoi in Plutarch, De Stoicorum repugnantiis, 1041e (I owe this reference to Anthony Long). For discussion, see F. H. Sandbach, ‘Ennoia and Prolepsis’, in Problems in Stoicism, ed. A. A. Long (London, 1971), 22–37; T. H. Irwin, ‘Stoic and Aristotelian Conceptions of Happiness’, in The Norms of Nature: Studies in Hellenistic Ethics, ed. Malcolm Schofield and Gisela Striker (Cambridge and Paris, 1986), 207–8, accepts prolepses as innate and describes Sandbach’s position as unduly sceptical. A convincing case for seeing the Stoic tradition as a whole as committed to dispositional innateness (taking account of Sandbach’s evidence) has been made by Dominic Scott, ‘Innatism and the Stoa’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 214 (n.s. no. 34) (1988): 123–53. Seneca, Ad Lucilium epistulae morales, trans. Richard M. Gummere, Loeb Classical Library, 3 vols. (London, 1917–25), 117.6. See also Plutarch, De communibus notitiis, 1075. Seneca, Ep. mor., 120.4. See also Cicero, De finibus, 5.43, where he refers to semina and sparks of virtue which require cultivation. On this subject, see Maryanne Cline Horowitz, Seeds of Virtue and Knowledge (Princeton, 1998).

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Seneca made a further connection of great importance between the implanted praesumptioni (i.e., preconceptions or prolepses) and the fact that a consensus could be observed across mankind on these issues. He stated that ‘in our eyes the fact that all men agree upon something is a proof of its truth’.57 In other words, universal agreement or consensus omnium formed an additional part of the argument, a fact to which a strong appeal might be made. Cicero also linked the two sides of the discussion in his account of the Stoic position on the deity: ‘Hence the main issue is agreed among all men of all nations, inasmuch as all have engraved in their minds an innate belief that the gods exist.’58 Properly speaking, the two issues, innateness and common consent, can and should be treated separately, as I will discuss in more detail in chapter four.59 For the Stoics, the concept of preconceptions or koinai ennoiai functioned as a criterion of truth, while the existence of consensus provided a kind of confirming sign or indication. Yet the two issues were often invoked at the same time, as we have seen, suggesting a stronger connection between them, which Locke was to capitalise on. The inference was straightforward – if common notions or preconceptions inhabited the soul, then a consensus was likely to emerge empirically. The Cambridge Platonists, among others, revived this set of assumptions in the mid-seventeenth century. In The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678), for example, Ralph Cudworth set out to confute atheism with a wide-ranging set of arguments. His epistemology rested on the conviction that common notions (koinai ennoiai) provided the basis for knowledge, rather than sense impressions.60 The existence of these internal principles supplied a criterion for determining the truth of what we perceived, forming a ground of recognition.61 Thus, on the subject of the Deity, Cudworth affirmed that ‘there is a Natural Prolepsis and Anticipation of a God’.62 He glossed the term ‘prolepsis’ at various points as something ‘implanted in us’, or as ‘Instincts of Nature ’, ‘deeply rooted in the Intellectual Nature of man’.63 In whatever form they took – idea, 57 59

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Seneca, Ep. mor., 117.6. 58 Cicero, De natura deorum, II.12. See Scott, Recollection and Experience, 180–1. See also Dirk Obbink, ‘‘‘What All Men Believe–Must Be True’’: Common Conceptions and Consensio Omnium in Aristotle and Hellenistic Philosophy’, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 10, ed. Julia Annas (Oxford, 1992), 193–231. Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe (London, 1678), 721. See Ralph Cudworth, A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality (London, 1731), 127–9. Dominic Scott observes that the Stoics confined prolepsis to moral notions, but Cudworth extends it, as does Descartes (Recollection and Experience, 228–30). Cudworth, True Intellectual System, 691. Ibid., 640, 691, 692. For Locke’s notes on his reading of Cudworth, dating from 1682, see MS Locke f. 6, pp. 19–20. See also MS Locke c. 33, fol. 27r; MS Locke d. 11, p. 23, 52.

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inclination, behaviour – the crucial understanding was that such prolepses derived from nature rather than the intervention of education, custom, tradition, or lawmakers and politicians.64 Henry More, Cudworth’s Cambridge colleague, drew similar conclusions, describing religion as a ‘deeply radicated property’ in man, with natural foundations and faculties to support it.65 Both More and Cudworth appealed in a Stoic manner to common consent as further proof of the indelible residence in the soul of an idea or inclination towards God.66 More acknowledged some deficiencies in the practice of certain peoples who ‘ineptly and foolishly’ embraced the divine, while others gave themselves over to ignorant worship of ‘stocks and stones’ or the heavens.67 But the basic impulse towards a governing spirit demonstrated the unanimity of consent. Cudworth introduced his supporting evidence without qualification, citing not only classical but contemporary testimony: ‘. . . the generality of the Pagans at this very day, as the Indians, Chineses, Siamenses and Guineans; the inhabitants of Peru, Mexico, Virginia, and New England (some of which are sufficiently Barbarous) acknowledge One Supreme or Greatest God.’68 Locke’s inclusion in the Essay of the Chinese and Siamese among his list of modern atheistic nations was therefore especially relevant. In his philosophical defence of immutable moral standards, Cudworth took a parallel approach. Ideas such as virtue, vice, honesty, and justice came from a ‘domestic’ source, the ‘Innate Fecundity’ of the mind: ‘For the Man hath certain Moral Anticipations and Signatures stamped inwardly upon his Soul, which makes him presently take Notice of whatsoever symbolizes with it in Corporeal Things.’69 These convictions led him to dispute the view that the soul was ‘Naked’, a mere ‘Rasa Tabula’, 64 65

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Cudworth, Treatise, 209. Henry More, An Antidote Against Atheisme, or, An Appeal to the Naturall Faculties of the Minde of Man, whether there be not a God, 2nd edn (London, 1653), 51. Damaris Masham alluded to More and summarised the position of the Cambridge Platonists on innateness, asking for clarification of the difference between Locke’s views and those of ‘some friends of Mine’. Letter of 7 April 1688, Correspondence, III: 433. She wrote in response to Locke’s Abre´ge´ of the Essay. For details of this publication, see James Hill and J. R. Milton, ‘The Epitome (Abre´ge´ ) of Locke’s Essay’, in The Philosophy of John Locke: New Perspectives, ed. Peter R. Anstey (London, 2003), 3–25. According to Scott, Recollection and Experience, ‘Whichcote appeals to universal consent both to confirm belief in the existence of God and justify practical principles’ (234n), and he quoted in support, on one occasion, Seneca’s Ep. mor., 117.6. The Works of the Learned Benjamin Whichcote, 4 vols. (Aberdeen, 1751), IV: 352–3. More, Antidote, 51. Cudworth, True Intellectual System, 458–9. Cudworth, Treatise, 149, 182.

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uninformed by pre-existing tendencies.70 Elsewhere, as we can see in the work of Nathanael Culverwell and others, prolepses and common notions became associated not only with ethical judgements but also with certain formulations of the basis of natural law.71 Here too a Stoic derivation can be found.72 The discussion lent itself to a Christian interpretation, based on a reading of St Paul’s letter to the Romans 2:14–15, and it was further integrated into a Christian perspective by equating these principles with the concept of conscience, the dictates of which had their source in the structure of the soul.73 Samuel Parker took a critical view of the Stoic position on innateness in a work published more than twenty years before Locke’s: . . . besides that ’tis a difficult and nice dispute to prove that the mind of man is furnished with any such innate Prolepses, and that we are destitute of any sure kritZv rion [criterion] to discerne Natural Anticipations from Preconceptions of Custome and Education (unlesse we bring them to the Touchstone of Experience) ’tis doubtlesse that Generalites [sic] are not capable of so palpable and convictive an Evidence, as single and particular Observations.74

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Ibid., 287. The full passage reads: ‘. . . the Soul is not a meer Rasa Tabula, A Naked and Passive Thing, which has no innate Furniture or Activity of its own, nor any thing at all in it, but what was impressed upon it [from] without; for if it were so, then there could not possibly be any such Thing as Moral Good and Evil, Just and Unjust’ (286–7). See also 131. Culverwell, Discourse, ch. 7. For further references in Grotius and Selden see Culverwell, 185n3. On the basis of travel accounts, Robert Ferguson concluded independently of Locke that universal consent was an unsound basis for securing the law in A Sober Inquiry into the Nature, Measure, and Principle of Moral Virtue (London, 1673), 79. While Cicero, following the Stoics, had grounded the law in universal consent and the harmony of mankind, Ferguson argued that the evidence of diverse customs observed in travel refuted such a notion. This development may constitute an elaboration of Stoic thought or, as some scholars have argued, derive more directly from Stoic teaching. For this view, see Maryanne Cline Horowitz, ‘The Stoic Synthesis of the Idea of Natural Law in Man: Four Themes’, Journal of the History of Ideas 35:1 (1974): 3–16; according to Horowitz, ‘While no passage directly states that the common notions are the foundation of man’s knowledge of natural law, this assumption is implicit’ (10). See also Gisela Striker, Essays on Hellenistic Epistemology and Ethics (Cambridge, 1996), ch. 11; Gerard Watson, ‘The Natural Law and Stoicism’, in Problems in Stoicism, ed. A. A. Long (London, 1971), 216–38. For a discussion of salient contrasts, see Paul A. Vander Waerdt, ‘The Stoic Theory of Natural Law’ (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1989). Scott, Recollection and Experience, 232–7. Parker, Free and Impartial Censure, 57. Parker also carefully distinguished himself from the sceptics in spite of his use of sceptical modes of argument (ibid.). Locke did not share the sceptics’ distrust of the senses; his ontology as well as his moral philosophy was influenced by Epicurean doctrines, a tradition to which Stoicism was also opposed. On the Epicurean context of Locke’s thought see John P. Wright, ‘Locke, Willis, and the Seventeenth-Century Epicurean Soul’, in Atoms, Pneuma, and Tranquillity: Epicurean and Stoic Themes in European Thought, ed. Margaret J. Osler (Cambridge, 1991), 239–58; and Thomas M. Lennon, ‘The Epicurean New Way of Ideas: Gassendi, Locke, and Berkeley’, in Atoms, Pneuma, and Tranquillity, 259–71.

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Parker opposed the Stoic claim that knowledge originates from within ourselves, in the form of certain ‘anticipations’ which he explicitly described as ‘innate’, arguing that we have no criterion for determining what arises from nature and what derives from custom and education. As an epistemological grounding, observation excelled such an uncertain source of knowledge. Like Parker, Locke resisted scepticism insofar as he accepted the information of the senses and used it to build a theory of knowledge, but he was sceptical in his critique of innate ideas. He employed the same argument as Parker by raising the criterion problem: ‘. . . it is reasonable to demand the marks and characters, whereby the genuine, innate Principles may be distinguished from others; that so, amidst the great variety of pretenders, I may be kept from mistakes, in so material a point as this’ (I.iii.27). Universal consent, the most conspicuous mark or character that might establish innateness, could not be shown, leaving the criterion problem in play. In other words, Locke placed himself on the side of the sceptics, replying to the Stoic account of moral knowledge. At the outset of his discussion in Book I, Locke specifically addressed the Stoic view: ‘It is an established Opinion amongst some Men, That there are in the Understanding certain innate Principles; some primary Notions, koinai` e“nnoiai, Characters, as it were stamped upon the Mind of Man . . .’ (I.ii.1).75 Although Locke only named one opponent explicitly, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, his choice is sufficiently revealing. Lord Herbert treated common notions as foundational, underwriting every area of epistemological endeavour, including ethics and theology. Indeed, part of his purpose was to attack established religion by identifying the existence of common notions that adequately addressed spiritual interests without requiring a clerical superstructure. He associated such notions with what he called ‘natural instinct’, arguing that they constituted a part of our providential endowment. They were known most readily by their universal acceptance. He not only states that ‘Whatever is believed by universal consent must be true’, but also that ‘universal consent is the teaching of Natural Instinct and is essentially due to Divine Providence’.76 Although Lord Herbert has come down to us as the father of English deism, his argument was not simply directed at 75

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Locke presumably regarded koinai ennoiai as identical to prolepses. Lord Herbert used the terms interchangeably, as did many others, including Culverwell (Discourse, 54–5) and Edward Stillingfleet, The Bishop of Worcester’s Answer to Mr. Locke’s Second Letter (London, 1698), 119. Sandbach’s reading of the Stoic tradition in ‘Ennoia and Prolepsis’ encourages a separation between the terms. Lord Herbert of Cherbury, De veritate, trans. Meyrick H. Carre´ (Bristol, 1937), 116, 117. He also rejected the tabula rasa argument, 132.

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revealed religion.77 He also answered the objections of sceptics by proclaiming a series of notions which could be shown to be universal, in spite of the claim by sceptics that diversity rather than uniformity characterised the human condition.78 Locke settled on Herbert’s account to illustrate the falsity of innateness theories, providing evidence of sceptical inclinations which his immediate audience recognised.79 Locke was not alone in replying to Lord Herbert in this way. In fact, he was preceded by Pierre Gassendi. Gassendi, who knew Herbert during the latter’s tenure as ambassador to France, was asked to comment on the second edition of De veritate (1633), and wrote a sharply critical and witty reply in the form of a letter; although it was never sent, the lengthy letter appeared after Gassendi’s death in his Opera omnia (1658).80 In it, Gassendi took issue with the attribution of common notions or natural instincts to mankind: if they are truly common then they must be admitted not merely by many people but by all, yet how many principles can support this claim? Relations of the New World contradicted the universality of beliefs such as the existence of God, providence, the immortality of the soul, and natural right. It was needless to give specific examples; suffice to say, ‘in morals there is no precept which is not rejected by numerous philosophers or nations’.81 Pierre Bayle confirmed Locke’s triumph in this argument. Writing in 1703 to Pierre Coste, Locke’s French translator, Bayle confirmed that he opposed the proof for the existence of God from common consent. In examining the question he was led to consider the relationship between universal agreement and innate ideas and whether the two issues were separable. This in turn obligated him to reread Locke’s discussion of innateness, of which he concluded: ‘il m’a semble´ victorieux, & qu’il faut donner a` son combat la gloire du debellatum est ’.82 IV UNIVERSAL CONSENT

As we have noted, the criterion problem formed an important part of sceptical polemic, suggesting the absence of grounds, in an ethical context, 77 78 79 80 81 82

For a more nuanced view, see R. W. Serjeantson, ‘Herbert of Cherbury before Deism: The Early Reception of the De veritate’, The Seventeenth Century 16:2 (2001): 217–38. On Herbert, see Popkin, History of Scepticism, 128–36. Culverwell had earlier identified the sceptics explicitly as opponents of common notions. See Discourse, 121–2. Gassendi, Opera, III: 411–19. Gassendi, ‘Ad librum Domini Edoardi Herberti’, 279. For a discussion of Herbert and Gassendi, see Howard Jones, Pierre Gassendi 1592–1655: An Intellectual Biography (Nieuwkoop, 1981), 116–34. Lettres de Mr. Bayle, ed. Pierre des Maizeaux, 3 vols. (Amsterdam, 1729), III: 945.

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for distinguishing between virtue and vice.83 Locke availed himself of this strategy in his denial of innate ideas, but the potential consequence, as many of his readers complained, was to deny the reality of moral distinctions entirely. Innate ideas made it possible to distinguish between good and evil, right and wrong. In their absence, nothing served adequately as a criterion of moral good, nothing supported the effort to establish moral norms, or so Locke’s critics thought.84 In his reply to the Essay, Bishop Stillingfleet commended the Stoics on this very point, endorsing their firm separation of truth and falsehood which provided ‘the Measure whereby we are to judge things’.85 Locke, by contrast, had introduced a welter of evidence designed to attack the reality of universal consent. When Stillingfleet answered Locke’s letter, he invited him to ponder a number of rhetorical questions highlighting Locke’s dubious character and strategy: Here you must give me leave to ask you, what you think of the universal Consent of Mankind, as to the Being of God? Hath not this been made use of, as an Argument not only by Christians, but by the wisest and greatest Men among the Heathens? And what then would you think of one who should go about to invalidate this Argument?86

Their initial tussles over the validity of Locke’s evidence masked a more fundamental opposition, again replicating the disputes between sceptics and Stoics in antiquity. The debate centred not so much on the verification of barbarism as on the question of whether any empirical instance of savagery would serve as a refutation of good nature or belief in God. Stillingfleet closed his objections by arguing that Locke’s account of the natives living near Saldanha Bay ‘makes them not fit to be a standard for the Sense of Mankind, being a People so strangely bereft of common Sense, that they can hardly be reckoned among Mankind’.87 Moral ideas and 83 84

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On the dispute between Stoics and sceptics over knowledge of the truth criterion see Striker, Essays, chs. 2 and 7; and Michael Frede, Essays in Ancient Philosophy (Minneapolis, 1987), ch. 9. Locke acknowledged that there was one innate practical principle in human nature, namely the tendency to avoid pain and pursue pleasure (Essay, I.iii.3). The same view was expressed by Cicero’s Epicurean spokesman, Torquatus, in De finibus, I.31. Locke’s opponents would have regarded this as unsatisfactory, given that such a principle did nothing to supply a proper criterion for separating moral good and evil. Locke makes this clear himself in I.iii.13. Stillingfleet, Answer to Mr. Locke’s Second Letter, 118. He explained that the Stoics ‘did allow of common Notions, which they called prolZv ceiB or Anticipations’, quoting Simplicius’s commentary on Epictetus which affirmed that ‘they are those wherein all are agreed, and are planted in us by right Reason, and confirmed by Time and Observation’ (119). Edward Stillingfleet, The Bishop of Worcester’s Answer to Mr. Locke’s Letter (London, 1697), 89. Ibid., 89–90.

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notions of God existed as standards established in nature, and any instance of perverse custom or atheism needed to be understood, by definition, as mere deformity, an outcome of adverse custom and education or a consequence of the Fall.88 From a discussion about contingent claims and empirical observations, the argument turned into one of predefined notions of human nature and common sense. Locke defended himself by saying of Stillingfleet’s objection: This, I think, may pass for nothing, till somebody be found, that makes them [the native inhabitants of the Cape] to be a standard for the sense of mankind: all the use I made of them was to show, that there were men in the world that had no innate idea of a God . . . you go near denying those Cafers to be men: what else do these words signify?89

The debate returns, Locke perceived, to the question of what we take as the standard, an ultimately arbitrary decision in his view, given our lack of access to the essence of human nature. Everything observed in nature forms part of nature, and could therefore serve as a rule for it. In short, he raised the criterion problem: his evidence could only be excluded if we allowed a standard in advance, but for every proposed moral standard, Locke supplied an alternative instance of diversity. Again Locke’s line of argument emerged from the sceptical tradition. Sextus Empiricus pointed out that in questions of moral preference, the decision of how to act must be based on the opinion of all or the opinion of some. No one could canvass the whole world, so our criterion for moral action could not claim universality. ‘But if by some,’ he asked, ‘then let them say to whom we should assent.’90 Sextus proceeded to supply his long list of moral variations, exposing the arbitrary nature of the standard. In a 88

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John Edwards’s reply to Locke asserted that Locke’s evidence proved nothing except that human nature was perpetually subject to decay and corruption. See A Free Discourse Concerning Truth and Error, Especially in Matters of Religion (London, 1701), 48–52. For a similar point see More, Antidote, 52. Cudworth described the ‘few’ atheists, past or present, as ‘no other than the Monsters and Anomalies of Humane kind’ (True Intellectual System, 634). Henry Lee likewise rejected ‘Monsters of Men out of the Indies and Africa’ as arguments against ‘universal Consent’ (Anti-Scepticism, 25). Lord Herbert claimed that common notions could not be denied ‘except by madmen, or persons bereft of their senses’ (De veritate, 116). For Locke’s response, see Essay, I.iii.20: ‘But concerning innate principles, I desire these men to say, whether they can, or cannot, by education and custom, be blurred and blotted out: if they cannot, we must find them in all mankind alike, and they must be clear in everybody: and if they may suffer variation from adventitious notions, we must find them clearest and most perspicuous, nearest the fountain, in children and illiterate people, who have received the least impression from foreign opinions.’ Locke replied directly to the argument from the Fall in his early Oxford lectures. See Locke, Essays, 139. Locke, Mr. Locke’s Reply to the . . . Answer to His Second Letter, in Works, III: 496–7. Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Scepticism, I.88. See also I.145–9.

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similar spirit, Gassendi questioned the basis on which we condemned those differing from us morally as deficient in judgement, given their soundness of body and evident intellectual gifts.91 Indeed they could return the accusation and inquire whether we had examined matters with adequate attention, questioning our facile endorsement of what we believed.92 Perhaps the most interesting contribution on this front came from Franc¸ois de La Mothe Le Vayer. In his Opuscule ou Petit Traite´ Sceptique, Sur cette commune Fac¸on de Parler. N’Avoir Pas le Sens-commun (1646), he answered those who attempted airily to dismiss certain peoples as lacking in common sense, arguing that it was impossible to establish what was common and therefore served as the norm; everyone adored their own perspective foolishly. Through a process of induction it was easy to show how mistaken this attitude was, and how many things ‘passent universellement pour bonnes & vertueuses dans un lieu, qui sont repute´es aussi generalement me´chantes & vicieuses dans un autre’.93 Locke accumulated just such an array of inductive evidence disproving the claim of innateness. In this respect, we can discern a closer connection between the scepticism evident in Locke’s method for conducting natural history and the scepticism associated with his perspective on innate ideas. Although he rejected the view that real essences were knowable, this position did not entail an abandonment of scientific inquiry. The natural world could still be studied and approximated, even if ultimate understanding remained the privilege of the Creator. Similarly, he opposed the assumption that the essence of human nature was knowable, but he continued to collect testimony in an empirical fashion, supplying a negative induction of innate

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Pufendorf makes a similar point when he disputes the validity of limiting the scope of agreement to the ‘more civilized peoples’, as Stillingfleet implicitly does in this passage: ‘For what Nation . . . will own the Title of Barbarous? Or what Nation can take so much on itself, as to desire its own Manners and Proceedings should be the Standard in trying all others, and that whatever People did not exactly conform to its Model, should be immediately pronounc’d barbarous and savage?’ (Law of Nature and Nations, 122 [II.iii.7]). In support he cites several passages from Charron. His target was Hugo Grotius, De jure belli ac pacis, new edn (Amsterdam, 1646), I.i.12. Locke makes a related point in his Letter concerning Toleration (1689). He repeatedly stresses the relativity of perspctive, noting at the outset that ‘every one is Orthodox to himself ’, and later that ‘every Church is Orthodox to it self ’, which leads him to conclude that differences over matters of doctrine and worship are ‘on both sides equal’, and any claims to represent the orthodox church are merely specious. A Letter concerning Toleration, trans. William Popple, ed. James Tully (Indianapolis, 1983), 23, 42, 32. ‘. . . encore est-il aise´ de monstrer par induction, & par quelques examples appropriez a` ce sujet, combien cette supposition est errone´e’. La Mothe Le Vayer, Opuscule ou Petit Traite´ Sceptique, Sur cette commune Fac¸on de Parler. N’Avoir Pas le Sens-commun (Paris, 1646), 41–2.

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ideas while remaining keenly interested in the investigation of moral and anthropological questions. V THE LAW OF OPINION

The complexities of Locke’s position emerge fully in Book II of the Essay where he provided a positive account of moral philosophy following the attack on existing theories supported by innate ideas. In this context he further distanced himself from the sceptical implications of his earlier discussion. His moral philosophy as a whole had several components: a hedonistic theory of motivation; the provision of rewards and punishments in the afterlife; a framework of morals based on law; Scripture as a source of moral instruction; and finally the possibility of a demonstration of morals (an unfinished project he appears to have abandoned).94 Without discussing his position in detail, which other scholars have undertaken,95 it is important to recognise the range of his moral thinking given the sharp and occasionally misleading response the Essay engendered. The concept of law was certainly fundamental to Locke’s account of morality. In his view, a moral system required specific rules or laws, as well as a lawgiver (whether God or civil society) capable of enforcing these laws with rewards and punishments. In chapter XXIII of Book II, Locke concentrated on describing three forms of law that oriented moral action, namely divine law, civil law, and the ‘law of opinion or reputation’.96 The latter form proved highly controversial and became subject to considerable misinterpretation. Locke introduced it to highlight the fact that most human beings refer their actions to moral rules established by opinion, reputation, and fashion, rather than anything higher or more rational. The law of opinion accounted for the fact that in different societies, the terms ‘virtue’ and ‘vice’ pick out contradictory actions and merely record local preferences: 94 95

96

See Locke, Essay, III.xi.16; IV.iii.18; IV.xii.8. See Yolton, Locke and the Compass of Human Understanding, ch. 7. See Colman, Locke’s Moral Philosophy; John Colman, ‘Locke’s Empiricist Theory of the Law of Nature’, in The Philosophy of John Locke: New Perspectives, ed. Peter R. Anstey (London, 2003), 106–26; Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy; Ayers, Locke, II: 184–202; Marshall, John Locke; W. M. Spellman, John Locke and the Problem of Depravity (Oxford, 1988); A. John Simmons, The Lockean Theory of Rights (Princeton, 1992), ch. 2; J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy (Cambridge, 1998), ch. 8; Stephen Darwall, The British Moralists and the Internal ‘Ought’: 1640–1740 (Cambridge, 1995), chs. 2 and 6; Nicholas Wolsterstorff, John Locke and the Ethics of Belief (Cambridge, 1996), 134–48. For Locke’s clarification of his intention in the chapter, see his letter to Tyrrell of 4 August 1690 (The Correspondence of John Locke, ed. E. S. de Beer, 8 vols. (Oxford, 1976–89), IV: 110–13).

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Thus the measure of what is every where called and esteemed Vertue and Vice is the approbation or dislike, praise or blame, which by a secret and tacit consent establishes it self in the several Societies, Tribes, and Clubs of Men in the World: whereby several actions come to find Credit or Disgrace amongst them, according to the Judgment, Maxims, or Fashions of that place. (II.xxviii.10)97

As Michael Ayers argues, Locke addressed here the ‘the force of nontheistic ethics’.98 Locke’s understanding of the legal status of opinion clearly owes something to his reading of classical moral philosophy based on honour, glory, praise, and reputation.99 But at the same time, Locke continued to provide a relativistic, sociological, perspective familiar from the sceptical tradition. As he put it in Draft B of the Essay: ‘Ideas of virtues taken up this way teach us noe more then to speak properly according to the fashion of the country we are in . . .’100 Locke’s analysis of the law of opinion corresponds to the discussion in Book I of the Essay where he argued that ideas of right and wrong arise from custom and education rather than nature, and vary substantially from society to society (I.iii.8). Evidence had to be confronted that what one community praised another blamed, yet both claimed absolute conformity with virtue and vice, right and wrong (II.xxviii.11). In its ‘sociological’ form, the law of opinion represents one outcome of Locke’s natural history of man. Locke acknowledged the diverse and rival claims to virtue among various tribes and societies, and concluded that opinion, fashion, and reputation provide the content and criteria for moral judgement and practice throughout the world. My interpretation derives from the relationship between his argument in Books I and II, but it can be seen clearly in a number of manuscript sources. For example in a journal entry of 12 December 1678, Locke made the following observation: The principal spring from which the actions of men take their rise, the rule they conduct them by, and the end to which they direct them, seems to be credit and reputation, and that which at any rate they avoid, is in the greatest part shame and disgrace. This makes the Hurons and other people of Canada with such constancy endure inexpressible torments. This makes merchants in one country, and soldiers in another . . . This cuts out the dresses for the women, and 97 98 99 100

Damaris Masham drew on Locke’s notion in Occasional Thoughts in reference to a Vertuous or Christian Life (London, 1705), 84–6. Ayers, Locke, II: 185. Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy, 211. Both Tully and Ayers remark on Locke’s reforming use of approval and reputation in his educational writings. Locke, Drafts, 268.

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makes the fashions for the men . . . Religions are upheld by this and factions maintained . . .101

The law of opinion serves to explain moral practices in the world, given that innate ideas have no ontological status and cannot be used to counteract the existence of diversity. As he put it in a journal entry composed while he was reading Le´ry’s account of the Tupinamba: ‘vertue is but the name of such actings as are most conduceing to the goods of the society & are therefore by that society recommended by all meanes to the practise of the people’.102 He noted that the Brazilians entirely lacked a notion of God and showed no evidence of worshipping a superior being. Nonetheless, for purposes of social control, they had introduced an account of the afterlife. In that state, the virtuous (i.e., those who exacted revenge and ate many of their enemies) would enjoy a life of ease in the high mountains, dancing in beautiful gardens with their grandparents, while those who failed to defend their country would suffer torments at the hands of the devil. Locke’s interpretation of this information was based on accepting Le´ry’s account of the Tupinamba as atheists. As a result he could not describe their beliefs and practices as authentic, if primitive, manifestations of religious sentiment. On the contrary, Locke treated them as further evidence of the law of opinion, a necessary outcome since the natives lacked any proper conception of divinity. The connection between Locke’s critique of innateness in Book I and his discussion of the law of opinion in Book II consolidated his reputation as a sceptic for readers like Shaftesbury. Locke appeared to eliminate a foundation for moral distinctions of any kind by denying innate ideas, and followed through on this sceptical strategy by settling moral action on the basis of opinion alone. Locke’s philosophy, on this account, had the pernicious effect of eradicating moral distinctions and upholding purely relative standards as acceptable moral rules. This reaction was registered early on. Locke’s friend James Tyrrell informed him in June 1690 that he had discussed the Essay with various ‘thinkeing men at Oxford’ who expressed dissatisfaction with Locke’s position on how we should distinguish good and evil. Locke had not only denied innate practical principles, but appeared in his discussion of the law of opinion to resolve virtue and 101

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John Locke, Political Essays, ed. Mark Goldie (Cambridge, 1997), 271–2. Locke refers to Gabriel Sagard, Le Grand Voyage du pays des Hurons (Paris, 1632), 214; and Pierre Boucher, Histoire veritable et naturelle des moeurs et productions de la Nouvelle France, vulgairement dite le Canada (Paris, 1664), ch. 12. See MS Locke f. 3, pp. 381–2. MS Locke f. 3, pp. 266–7. See Le´ry, Histoire (1578), 234.

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vice into social praise or dispraise. Tyrrell commented that this would entail regarding drunkenness, sodomy, and cruelty to enemies as acceptable, if countries could be found that upheld them. The latter condition was easily met by accounts of the New World by the Spanish and others. As long as these activities received the ‘tacite and general consent of that whole nation’, they not only could claim the status of virtue but would also ‘be so indeed’. Such a position, Tyrrell pointed out, was uncomfortably close to Hobbes’s famous conviction that moral good and evil had no meaning ‘in the state of nature and out of a commonwealth’.103 James Lowde made similar accusations in a work published in 1694,104 eliciting one of Locke’s few published responses incorporated in the Essay. In answer to him, Locke clarified that in discussing the law of opinion he had done nothing more than show the actual moral rules that people follow, whether or not their precepts were true or false. Although in practice men understood their actions by referring to the standards prevailing in their own society, Locke insisted this ‘alters not the nature of things’ (II.xxviii.11n). Thus he re-established a more orthodox ground for himself.105 Although Locke had confirmed the existence of diversity rather than arguing it away, he concluded his discussion on an optimistic note. The law of opinion generally coincides with the will of God, and those who failed to practise virtue usually approved of good and condemned evil, with the result that ‘even in the Corruption of Manners, the true Boundaries of the Law of Nature, which ought to be the Rule of Vertue and Vice, were pretty well preserved’ (II.xxviii.11). Hence Locke’s law of opinion did not 103

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Letter of 30 June 1690, Locke, Correspondence, IV: 101–2. In his letter to the reader of De Cive, Hobbes had indeed commended the efforts of philosophers who could show that ‘there are no authenticall doctrines concerning right and wrong, good and evill, besides the constituted Lawes in each Realme, and government; and that the question whether any future action will prove just or unjust, good or ill, is to be demanded of none, but those to whom the supreme hath committed the interpretation of his Lawes’. Thomas Hobbes, De Cive: The English Version [1651], ed. Howard Warrender (Oxford, 1983), 31–2. This statement had been condemned by Cudworth, who associated it with Epicurus and the sceptic Carneades in antiquity. Cudworth responded to the Latin text of 1641. For this passage see De Cive: The Latin Version, ed. Howard Warrender (Oxford, 1983), 79. See also Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Harmondsworth, 1968), 188 (I.xiii; misquoted by Cudworth, Treatise, 9). Locke took note of this view, Essay, I.iii.5. See also Cudworth, Treatise, 7–10. James Lowde, A Discourse Concerning the Nature of Man (London, 1694). This passage should be read in relation to Locke’s reply to Tyrrell of 4 August 1690 (Correspondence, IV: 110–13). Locke pointed out that he was only inquiring into the actual rules that men employ as ‘standards to which they compare their actions to frame moral Ideas’, which was purely a ‘matter of fact’; he was not uncovering the ‘grounds of true morality’. Had he considered divine law in the same way, he could just as easily have cited ‘the Alcoran of the Mahumetans and the Hanscrit [sic] of the Bramins’, but ‘then I had lain open to I know not what interpretations’ (112–13).

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necessarily confirm chaos and disorder in morals. He located a degree of consensus, however implausibly in the light of Book I’s catalogue of abuses, even though opinion alone provided the source rather than the strong guarantor of innate ideas. In spite of these clarifications, other features of Locke’s position caused disquiet. In particular, his account of motivation was recognisably Epicurean; essentially, pleasure and pain prompted human action. Like Hobbes, he recognised a category of natural good and evil which corresponded to experiences of attraction and aversion.106 Although Locke was quick to distinguish this from moral good and evil, his position was provocative in the context of the Essay’s first book because he stated there his readiness to accept only one innate practical principle, namely the avoidance of misery and desire for happiness (I.iii.3). This principle displayed itself ‘in all Persons and all Ages, steady and universal’, in contrast with other, ostensibly common, moral notions. The problem was that the avoidance of pain and embrace of pleasure did not serve as a criterion of moral goodness, unlike the innate ideas Locke discarded. As I noted, for Locke the intelligibility of virtue depended on understanding human action in relation to some form of law and a lawmaker (II.xxviii.5). Divine law was either promulgated by revelation or grasped by exercising reason. By the latter means, it represented the law of nature which Locke defended in his early lectures.107 Such a notion respected selfinterest as the prime motive and mover of human beings while also acknowledging the role of the Deity in meting out pleasure and pain in the afterlife.108 Locke rejected a ruthlessly deterministic version of agency, arguing that we have the power to suspend action on any particular desire, having reckoned its long-term implications for pleasure and pain. Most errors are made by engaging the will too quickly. Moral choices become clear when we look ahead to a future state to ‘see there God the righteous Judge’ (II.xxi.60).109 The ultimate source of stability in the moral sphere 106

107 108 109

Locke’s account of motivation coincides with Hobbes but his conception in general is less deterministic. He shares with Gassendi a belief in the power of the intellect to influence choice. For discussion, see Rogers, Locke’s Enlightenment, ch. 5. Of course Hobbes and Gassendi knew one another well and the question of who had priority in reviving Epicurus is an open one. See Sarasohn, Gassendi’s Ethics, ch. 6. See also Locke, Drafts, 269. ‘. . . were the satisfaction of a Lust, and the Joys of Heaven, offered at once to anyone’s present Possession, he would not balance, or err in the determination of his choice’ (Essay, II.xxi.58). For discussion, see Tito Magri, ‘Locke, Suspension of Desire, and the Remote Good’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 8 (2000): 55–70. For the development of his position, see also Gideon Yaffe, Liberty Worth the Name: Locke on Free Agency (Princeton, 2000); and James A. Harris, Of Liberty and Necessity: The Free Will Debate in Eighteenth-Century British Philosophy (Oxford, 2005).

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remains the threat of punishment and prospect of reward in the afterlife (one of the reasons for Locke’s unwillingness to extend toleration to atheists).110 Those who, like Thomas Becconsall and Henry Lee, accused Locke of scepticism had a point to the extent that they identified his debt to a sceptical strategy in relation to innateness. But they did not recognise or accept his positive theory. The most sensitive reading of Locke came from a French source, Jean Barbeyrac, who prefaced his translation of Pufendorf ’s De jure naturae et gentium in 1706 with a famous ‘Historical and Critical Account of the Science of Morality’.111 There he recognised the threat posed to moral theory by those who stressed the existence of diversity. Barbeyrac traced this argument to the sceptics and their detailing of moral contradictions between various nations and individual philosophers. He criticised Montaigne for taking the discussion to extremes, by questioning not only common consent and innateness but also natural law on the basis of such widespread disagreement. For our purposes it is significant that Barbeyrac recognised that Locke had ‘put in a new Light the ancient Opinion’ when he attacked innate ideas.112 But at the same time, Barbeyrac distinguished Locke from Montaigne despite their shared tradition. The reason for treating Locke differently was that he left an important way out of the predicament. God had given man not innate ideas but faculties sufficient to reach knowledge of the divine and the duties that followed from our situation as created beings. Locke had made this very clear in a passage quoted by Barbeyrac from the Essay: ‘God having endued Man with those Faculties of knowing which he hath, was no more obliged by his Goodness, to implant those innate Notions in his Mind, than that having given him Reason, Hands, and Materials, he should build him Bridges, or Houses’ (I.iv.12). The abuse of reason in matters of morality, together with 110 111

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For Locke’s most integrated though unfinished account of morals, see ‘Of Ethick in General’ in Writings on Religion, ed. Victor Nuovo (Oxford, 2002), 9–14. Barbeyrac provided advice to Pierre Coste on improving his translation of Locke’s Essay after it appeared in 1700. Barbeyrac and Locke exchanged a number of letters between 1702 and 1704, Correspondence, VII: 619–22; VII: 727–9; VIII: 355–6. Jean Barbeyrac, ‘An Historical and Critical Account of the Science of Morality’, trans. Carew, prefacing Samuel Pufendorf, The Law of Nature and Nations, trans. Basil Kennet, 5th edn (London, 1749), 9 (section iv). Barbeyrac himself accepted the nullity of innate ideas, pointing out Descartes’s error in advertising them and William Sherlock’s failure to revive them adequately in his reply to Locke (in A Discourse Concerning the Happiness of Good Men (1704)). At the same time, Barbeyrac referred favourably to Seneca’s Ep. mor., 120.4, a passage which suggests a dispositional account of innateness, but on his Lockean reading the ‘seeds’ implanted in the soul are equated with reason. For further discussion of Barbeyrac’s response to scepticism, see James Moore, ‘Natural Law and the Pyrrhonian Controversy’, in Philosophy and Science in the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Peter Jones (Edinburgh, 1988), 20–38.

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acquiescence in custom and tradition, accounted for the existence of cultural differences, but did nothing to diminish the certainty of moral principles. Few areas of Locke’s discussion attracted as much controversy as the critique of innateness in the first book of the Essay. Although he resolved the difficulties associated with citing diversity to his own satisfaction, his respondents in many cases remained attached to a Stoic theory of human nature in which internal predispositions led us to the good and to God. Before we examine Shaftesbury’s response, we need a fuller sense of the anthropological implications of Locke’s position and the way his sceptical reading of diversity contradicted Stoic conclusions.

CHAPTER

3

Locke’s anthropology: travel, innateness, and the exercise of reason

Locke’s strategy against innateness led him to point out the existence of widespread cultural diversity, which he refused to write off as degeneracy caused by education or the results of the Fall.1 We can trace Locke’s engagement with the phenomenon of difference to two principal sources. In the first instance, his way of approaching human nature through a study of customs and manners was indebted to the methodology of natural history. This approach emphasised the accumulation of evidence on a probabilistic basis without assuming a knowledge of essences in advance. From the perspective of such a natural history, Locke refuted the claim of innate ideas or principles by treating their existence as an empirical question, a matter of fact subject to determination through historical research. Locke’s second source of inspiration had a sceptical pedigree. The sceptics, both ancient and early modern, made use of diversity to attack Stoic assertions about human uniformity, common consent, and internal principles or prolepses concerning virtue and the divine. Locke made use of cultural variation not in order to create doubt about morals or the existence of God, but rather to undermine dogmatic attachment to the false belief in innate ideas or principles. In his formal treatment of the problem in the Essay, Locke argued that proponents of innate principles or ideas needed to establish universal agreement. Such consent was a necessary condition for their position to stand. Cultural diversity, of the kind introduced by sceptics, served the purpose of refuting it. The two sources of Locke’s encounter with diversity converged in his reading of travel literature. This ethnographical material not only confirmed the absence of unanimous consent, as Locke referenced it, but it also constituted up-to-date information, supplying empirical testimony on human

1

See An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch, corrected edn (Oxford, 1979), I.iii.20; Essays on the Law of Nature, ed. and trans. W. von Leyden (1954; Oxford, 1988), 139.

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practice which could be cross-checked and confirmed. Strictly speaking, Locke’s argument against innateness did not require the extended attention he gave to accounts of travel to distant parts of the world. Variation in opinion and belief of almost any kind (at home as much as abroad) would have been sufficient for his needs. But there is no doubt that he regarded himself as strengthening the case against unanimous consent or a consensus gentium by surveying the testimony of travellers so carefully. The fact that ‘whole Nations’ (I.iii.9) dissented from what allegedly unified mankind lent credence to the view that no internal rules or principles inhabited the soul. Those closest to nature – primitive peoples – evidently lacked the requisite knowledge or tendency to embrace appropriate moral practices and religious beliefs. Polite nations, whom we might have expected to benefit from learning and inquiry, showed the same lack of support for these basic notions. Thus, while he was laying the groundwork for a new theory of knowledge, one that abandoned innateness in favour of a new way of ideas, Locke was also advancing an anthropology with important consequences. In this chapter I examine the sources Locke used as evidence to support his case and consider the anthropological implications of his argument. Locke made explicit citations to back up his statements in the first book of the Essay, but the actual texts in question are sometimes more problematic than he made them appear, a point that has received very little scrutiny. The difficulties are especially notable in the case of supposedly ‘atheist nations’ which failed to give witness to an innate idea of God. In the second half of the chapter I look more closely at the predicament of the primitive in Locke’s philosophy. If neither innateness nor general agreement existed as a means of accessing moral truth, what prospect did such peoples have for gaining insight into ethical principles and the law of nature? Locke’s fundamental belief in the power of reason is crucial in many respects, but we still have to confront the consequences of his empiricism. The dependence of reason on ideas and ideas on environment potentially placed a crippling limitation on the scope of reflection possible in underdeveloped societies. Finally, I conclude with a comparative discussion of Locke’s anthropological perspective in the Two Treatises. On the whole, scholars interested in Locke’s anthropology have given his political writings more attention, yet the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century controversy that developed around Locke’s use of ethnographic references focused almost entirely on the Essay. The reason for the difference in reaction, I suggest, is that Locke’s discussion in the Two Treatises did not raise the problem of diversity. On the contrary, difference was treated there as a consequence

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of historical development, without relativising or destabilising implications. His politics and epistemology have shared moments, but there are grounds for seeing Locke as offering two different anthropologies in his work. The version which attracted a hostile response came in the Essay, and it is on this one that I shall concentrate my discussion. I ANTHROPOLOGY, DIVERSITY, AND THE CRITIQUE OF INNATENESS

Locke’s attack on innateness had several components, as I discussed in the previous chapter. He began with allegedly innate intellectual principles or maxims before moving on to moral matters and finally to innate ideas, the most important of which was the idea of God. The anthropological dimension of his critique focused largely on the latter two areas – ethics and religion. In both these domains Locke considered whether primitive as well as polite nations assented universally to the idea of the divine and to shared moral principles. On the question of moral practice, Locke could establish his point without much difficulty. Reports of barbarism and savagery were a stock in trade of travel writing and Locke cited them to show the lack of unanimity in what constituted acceptable moral action. He was essentially true to this literary form when he remarked on incidents of child murder, parricide, and other abominations as matters routinely described by travellers in various countries.2 In this context, Locke made reference to six different authorities. Two Catholic missionaries, Johann Grueber and Arcangelo Lamberti, told of the abandoning of the sick in Asia and burying children alive ‘without Scruple’ in Mingrelia, a Christian country, respectively.3 Locke added that the classical scholar Isaac Vossius avowed there were places where people ate their own children, although the value of the report was diminished by 2

3

Locke’s debt to the rhetoric of travel literature at this time is clearest in a passage from his early lectures on natural law, Essays, 141. For a discussion of Locke’s reading practices in this genre, see Daniel Carey, ‘Travel, Geography, and the Problem of Belief: Locke as a Reader of Travel Literature’, forthcoming in History and Nation, ed. Julia Rudolph. Essay, I.iii.9. Locke’s source in both cases was the redaction in Melchise´dec The´venot, Relations de divers voyages curieux, 4 vols. (Paris, 1663–72), IV: 23; I: 37–8 (The´venot’s volumes were printed in folio in separate fascicles, with separate signatures and pagination). Lamberti’s account appeared originally as Relatione della Colchide hoggi detta Mengrellia (Naples, 1654). For this passage, see 88–9. Mingrelia (Samegrelo) is an historic province of Georgia, though not all of its people regard themselves as ethnically Georgian. The country was converted to Christianity in the fourth century. On Grueber, who did not compose his own account of his travels through China, Tibet, and Nepal, see C. Wessels, Early Jesuit Travellers in Central Asia (1924; Delhi, 1998), ch. 6 (on the sources for The´venot’s text specifically, see 144–5). See also the entry in Neue deutsche Biographie, vol. VII (Berlin, 1966), 183–4.

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the fact that Vossius did not name any of the countries in question or witness these events first-hand.4 Nor did Peter Martyr (Pietro Martire d’Anghiera), the Italian humanist historian at the court of Ferdinand and Isabella, and subsequently Charles V, who chronicled activities of exploration and conquest in the New World. Martyr alleged that the Caribs gelded their children to fatten them up and eat them.5 Martyr’s report was complemented by information from the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, who claimed that in Peru children were begotten on female captives precisely to devour them, and when the women passed the age of childbearing they too were dispatched and eaten.6 Garcilaso wrote with authority as the son of an Incan princess and a Spanish conquistador. Finally, Locke cited the practices of the Tupinamba in Brazil who upheld cannibalism and vengeance as virtuous actions, according to the Calvinist settler Jean de Le´ry.7 Locke’s sources occasionally wrote at some remove from the original, but he did not misrepresent their testimony. He could also have backed them up with numerous other citations he recorded.8 In the first four editions of the Essay Locke only included one example from a ‘polite’ people. Tactfully retaining the Latin of the original, Locke quoted the German nobleman Martin von Baumgarten’s account of dubious sexual habits maintained by Muslim holy-men in Egypt.9 In the 4

5

6

7 8

9

Isaac Vossius, De Nili et aliorum fluminum origine (The Hague, 1666), chs. 18 and 19. Born in Leiden in 1618, Vossius moved to London in 1670. In a notebook entry dated to 1679, Locke recorded contact details for him in London. Bodleian Library MS Locke f. 28, p. 180. Peter Martyr, De orbe novo decades (Alcala´ de Henares, 1530). Locke took note of this passage in a journal entry of 7 August 1683 (MS Locke f. 7, p. 121). For a translation of the passage Locke cites, see Selections from Peter Martyr, ed. and trans. Geoffrey Eatough (Turnhout, Belgium, 1998), 46. Martyr refers to incursions by the Caribs against the innocent inhabitants of Hispaniola, whose children they took captive. He had access to manuscripts of Columbus but they are not likely to have been his source here. Locke referred to the French edition published as Le commentaire royal, ou l’Histoire des Yncas, roys du Peru, trans. Jean Baudoin (Paris, 1633), 58–9. For a translation of the relevant passage, see Royal Commentaries of the Incas, trans. Harold V. Livermore, 2 vols. (Austin, 1966), I: 36. Locke included his own translation in the ‘First Treatise’ x57, as I discuss below. Jean de Le´ry, Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre du Bresil (La Rochelle, 1578). Locke cites ch. 16 but he clearly has in mind the account in ch. 15. See for example a letter of 1679 received from Nicolas Toinard about an African people who were said to eat their enemies and who refused to nourish their children, burying them alive. The Correspondence of John Locke, 8 vols., ed. E. S. de Beer (Oxford, 1976–89), II: 85, recorded by Locke in MS Locke f. 28, p. 183; see also MS Locke c. 33, fols. 5r–v, 9v–10r, 21v, for notes on abortion, cannibalism, parricide, sexual mores, homicide, and child murder from Franc¸ois Pyrard, Gabriel Sagard, and Jean Chardin; and various notes in MS Locke f. 2, pp. 257, 258, 260. Martin von Baumgarten, Peregrinatio in Ægyptum, Arabiam, Palaestinam & Syriam (Nuremberg, 1594), 73. Although Locke refers to the holy-men as Turks, the passage he quotes makes clear that the location is ‘Belbes’ (Belbeis) in Egypt. A translation of Baumgarten’s account appeared in volume one of the Churchills’ Collection of Voyages and Travels, 4 vols. (London, 1704). For this passage, see I: 456.

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final edition he revised, Locke added that ‘More of the same Kind’ (I.iii.9) could be found in the travels of the Roman aristocrat Pietro della Valle in Turkey. Locke was able to advance the polemic against innateness by setting an important condition – he insisted that we must regard people’s actions as the best interpreters of their thoughts.10 In other words, he required the defenders of innateness to establish the existence of consistent moral behaviour around the globe, or ‘Conformity of Action’ as he called it (I.iii.3). He therefore eliminated a possible rescuing strategy which might have claimed that while principles are shared, interpretations of them differ across mankind. With this provision, Locke achieved his critique economically. No innate moral principles existed, as the testimony of diversity made clear. Yet diversity was by no means total. Some consistency was observable at a social and moral level across mankind, even if one denied that it came from innate sources. The question was how to account for this degree of unity without supporting a Stoic reading of it. Locke’s unwillingness to allow the Stoic account appears in his interpretation of an important passage from Scripture. In St Paul’s letter to the Romans, the apostle had described the morality of the gentiles to whom the Mosaic law had not been given. When these people nonetheless acted in a moral way, St Paul said this showed ‘the work of the Law written in their hearts, their Consciences also bearing witness, and amongst one another their thoughts accusing or excusing’ (2:14–15).11 Locke would have been well aware that many took this statement as affirming the innateness of moral principles and the law of nature.12 He was reminded of this point, in any case, by Gabriel Towerson in a letter of 1660.13 But when Locke quoted this remark in The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), he expressly interpreted it not

10 11 12

13

Essay, I.iii.3, 7. As translated by Locke in The Reasonableness of Christianity, ed. John C. Higgins-Biddle (Oxford, 1999), 18. See Robert Sanderson, Several Cases of Conscience Discussed in Ten Lectures in the Divinity School at Oxford, trans. Robert Codrington (Oxford, 1660). Sanderson argued that ‘These koinai` e“nnoiai, These common Notions, are that Law of God, which the Apostle Rom. 2. doth say is written in the Hearts of Men’, connecting them with the law of nature (132). For Locke’s familiarity with this text in its Latin edition, De obligatione conscientiae, see W. von Leyden’s introduction to Essays, 32–4. See also Henry Hammond, A Paraphrase and Annotations upon all the Books of the New Testament (London, 1653), who states that St Paul refers to ‘the practical koinai` e“nnoiai common notions of good and evil, which are among the generality of men’ (476). Letter of 3 November 1660?, Correspondence, I: 158–9. See also Gabriel Towerson, An Explication of the Decalogue (London, 1676), 2–3.

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as a reference to anything innate, but rather as alluding to moral principles known by reason, his rationally derived law of nature.14 We might have expected Locke to account for social regularities on the basis, then, of reason. However, he adopted a different approach which we can describe as sociological in orientation. His argument appears in a number of contexts, but we can see its shape in a chapter originally intended for the Essay but abandoned, ‘Of Ethick in General’ (c. 1689). There Locke observed that ‘Some kinde of morality is to be found every where received.’15 It was not perfect or exact, but what he called a ‘notion’ of it existed everywhere. He had never heard of a nation which did not distinguish between virtue and vice, right and wrong, adopting what he called rules, boundaries, and measures of some kind, although they were ‘very different’. What is more, he considered it significant that morality had emerged generally in the world as a distinct subject of study from the provinces of theology or law, and was given over to philosophers, which argued that some kind of ‘impression’ existed in the mind telling of a ‘discovery still amongst men of the law of nature, & a secret apprehension’ of rules of action that differed from those inculcated by priests or lawyers.16 If anything, Locke seems to set up a basis for an account of morality on innate grounds. In fact he provides a very different analysis. The philosophers who explored the subject failed to pursue their derivation of moral rules to the source, namely God, who meted out retribution, and as a result they enforced their rules with nothing more than the promise of reputation or shame. By definition, Locke confined such moral practice to the world of opinion, fashion, and local language.17 Thus, while offering a sociological and anthropological insight into how moral rules function in practice, Locke placed a strict limitation on this ethics. Aspects of his argument survive in chapter III of Book I and in Locke’s formulation of what he called the ‘Law of Opinion or Reputation’ in his 14

15 16 17

Locke does not address the issue of innateness when he comes to this passage in A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St Paul, ed. Arthur W. Wainwright, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1987), II: 499. Jean Le Clerc shared Locke’s view that St Paul referred to reason (not innate notions) in A Supplement to Dr. Hammond’s Paraphrase and Annotations on the New Testament, trans. W. P. (London, 1699), 255. John Locke, Writings on Religion, ed. Victor Nuovo (Oxford, 2002), 9. Ibid. The word ‘impression’ is crossed through in the manuscript. ‘But all the knowledg of virtue & vice which a man atteind to this way would amount to noe more then takeing the definitions or the significations of the words of any language either from the more skilled in that language or the common usage of the Country to know how to apply them & call particular actions in that country by their right names & soe in effect would be noe more but the skill how to speake properly or at most know which actions in the Country he lives in are thought laudible [sic] or disgracefull i.e. are calld virtues & vices’ (Ibid., 10).

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discussion of ‘Moral Relations’ in Book II.18 In that context, he reached an encouraging conclusion, explaining that the law of opinion tended to coincide with the will of God. Even those who neglected to practise virtue nonetheless approved of good and condemned evil for the most part, which meant that, despite corrupt manners, what he called the ‘true Boundaries of the Law of Nature’ (II.xxviii.11) were still preserved. By treating any convergence between social practice and the law of nature as a happy coincidence, Locke kept reason out of the equation and avoided an implausible analysis which would have overstated the extent of human rationality in his view. In an optimistic vein, Locke still had mankind replicating the law of nature; in his less sanguine moments, Locke remarked on how difficult it was to achieve a proper understanding of moral duty.19 The pivot in his position meant that he could account for confirmations of natural law without recourse to innateness and also provide an explanation for departures from it without the potential discomfort such derogations caused to innatists.20 The resourcefulness of Locke’s position appears once again in his account of social utility. In the Essay, for example, Locke observed that God had providentially made virtue necessary to social life. Yet these rules were not built into our natures innately. Instead, self-interest and utility, as much as actual conviction, encouraged us to adhere to them.21 Elsewhere, he could turn this view to advantage by detaching it from any contact with authentic morality, and maintaining that while societies might agree in employing the language of virtue, the actual demands placed on people were highly diverse. The only requirement was that such injunctions ensured the survival of the group and obedience to law and government.22 18

19 20

21

22

Essay, II.xxviii.7. See also Writings on Religion, 10–11. In the first edition of the Essay, Locke called the law of opinion the ‘philosophical law’ and there are traces of his rejection of scholastic verbal disputation over niceties of definition in this argument. See Reasonableness, 148–50; hence the need for moral rules revealed in Scripture. The innatist account of derogations from in-built moral principles focused on improper education and the potential within human nature for savage degeneracy. Cases of non-confirmation could be treated as aberrant. See replies to Locke by John Edwards, A Free Discourse Concerning Truth and Error, Especially in Matters of Religion (London, 1701), 48–52; and Henry Lee, Anti-Scepticism: or, Notes upon each Chapter of Mr. Lock’s Essay concerning Humane Understanding (London, 1702), 25. ‘. . . it is no wonder, that every one should, not only allow, but recommend, and magnifie those Rules to others, from whose observance of them he is sure to reap Advantage to himself. He may, out of Interest, as well as Conviction, cry up that for Sacred; which if once trampled on, and prophaned, he himself cannot be safe nor secure’ (I.iii.6). See Reasonableness, 147–8. ‘Of Ethick in General’: ‘. . . the generall rule . . . & the most constant that I can finde is that those actions are esteemed virtuous which are thought absolutely necessary to the preservation of society & those that disturbe or dissolve the bonds of community are every where esteemed ill & vitious’ (Writings on Religion, 10).

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We can see the emergence of the latter position in a journal entry of Locke’s from 1678, made when he was reading Jean de Le´ry. Locke began by remarking that it seemed plain to him that ‘vertue is but the name of such actions as are most conduceing to the good of the society & are therefore by that society recommended by all meanes to the practise of the people’.23 He then observed that although the Tupinamba of Brazil had no notion of God or signs of any worship or religion, they nonetheless held that the virtuous would be rewarded after death by going to a place in the mountains where they would dance in beautiful gardens. For this society, virtue consisted of exacting revenge on their enemies and eating them, as he would later point out in the Essay. The effeminate, meanwhile, were visited with torments by the devil. If the allegation of atheism was correct, then by definition their views on the afterlife served nothing more than a social function. II L O C K E ’ S C R I T I Q U E A N D T H E A T H E I S T N A T I O N S

Locke’s account of morality was bound up with the critique of an innate idea of God in several ways. His case against moral principles became even more convincing, he argued, if he could show that the supposition of an innate idea of God was false. After all, he reasoned, if any idea was likely to be innate, then surely it was the divine, and its absence would weigh heavily against the plausibility of moral principles having such a status. What is more, the lack of an innately held belief in God had further explanatory value in accounting for the confused and reprobate behaviour observed in the world. A proper concept of a creator and lawgiver who punished sins in the afterlife was necessary to achieve an adequate concept of duty. The Tupinamba travestied one part of this (the afterlife) in their belief system, contriving it only as a means of social control. The stakes were that much higher, then, when it came to disputing the innateness of the idea of God. Locke employed the same strategy to establish his point: if the idea was indeed innate, then unanimity of belief in God had to be shown. The existence of atheist peoples, as reported in travel accounts, was sufficient to disprove the claim. Since much depended on Locke’s sources of testimony, we would do well to examine them more closely. In fact, his reading of these texts was problematic in relation to a number of primitive as well as polite nations he described as atheist. 23

MS Locke f. 3, pp. 266–7.

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Locke portrayed the Tupinamba of Brazil on the basis of chapter 16 of Jean de Le´ry’s Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre du Bresil (1578). Le´ry began the discussion of local religion with an important adage of Cicero’s, namely, as Le´ry put it, ‘that there is no people so brutish, nor any nation so barbarous and savage, as to have no feeling that there is a divinity’.24 This pronouncement is important in relation to Locke not simply because it was widely quoted, not least by travellers,25 but because it expressed the Stoic belief in common consent. In Locke’s time, such consent was interpreted in relation to another Stoic concept, that human beings were endowed with natural prolepses leading them to the divine, which were identified with innate ideas. Locke was entitled, initially, to draw support from Le´ry. ‘When I consider closely our Tupinamba of America’, Le´ry said, ‘I find myself somewhat at a loss in applying [Cicero’s claim] to them.’26 He asserted that the natives were ‘utterly ignorant of the sole and true God’, and unlike other pagans did not subscribe to a plurality of deities. On the contrary ‘they neither confess nor worship any gods, either of heaven or of earth’.27 Le´ry had observed no sacred rites among them or religious assembly, nor any form of prayer conducted either in private or public. Thus far, Locke’s inclusion of the Tupinamba in his list of atheists seems entirely warranted. But Le´ry’s ethnography on this subject was complex and variable. He began to qualify his judgement by investigating the light they still possessed in the midst of shadows (encor de lumiere, au milieu des espesses tenebres). To start with they believed in the immortality of the soul and a place of future reward or punishment in the afterlife, as we have seen, according to the merits of the deceased. They also trembled when they heard thunder, to which Le´ry attached some significance. Consideration of this fact suggested that they were forced to acknowledge a higher and irresistible power, and on this basis Le´ry concluded that ‘Cicero’s adage is verified through them after all: indeed, there is no people that does not 24 25

26

27

See Cicero, De natura deorum, I.44; De legibus, I.24–5; Tusculan Disputations, I.30. For discussion of French travellers, both in favour of Cicero on this point and at odds with him, see Alan Charles Kors, Atheism in France, 1650–1729, vol. I: The Orthodox Sources of Disbelief (Princeton, 1990), ch. 5. More generally, see Sergio Landucci, I filosofi e i selvaggi 1580–1780 (Bari, 1972). Jean de Le´ry, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, Otherwise Called America, trans. Janet Whatley (Berkeley, 1990), p. 134. For Locke’s notes on his reading of Le´ry, based on the (false) third edition of 1594, see MS Locke c. 33, fol. 4r. They include a note on ‘religio nulla’ and ‘Deum habent nullum’ referenced to p. 231, where Le´ry remarks on his difficulty with Cicero. This is the same page which Locke cites on atheism in the Essay, I.iii.9. Le´ry, History, 134. ‘. . . ils n’ont nulle cognoissance du seul et vray Dieu . . . ils ne confessent, ny n’adorent aucuns dieux celestes ny terrestres’. Histoire d’un voyage faict en la terre du Bre´sil (1578), ed. Frank Lestringant (Paris, 1994), 379.

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have the feeling [sentiment] that there is a divinity’.28 The ‘Americans’ did not verbally assent to a deity, but Le´ry now maintained that they had an internal conviction which made them subject to judgement and unable to plead ignorance. They lived in darkness but ‘the seed [semence] of religion (if, after all, what they do deserves that name) germinates in them and cannot be extinguished’.29 A Stoic reader would have found this sufficient to claim that a divine spark or igniculus, common to all mankind, remained within them.30 In support of this assessment Le´ry mentioned once again their belief in the soul’s immortality and their fear of thunder, as well as the fact that devils and evil spirits afflicted them, and finally the existence of what he called ‘false prophets’ known as caraı¨bes (karai) who travelled from village to village and organised religious meetings.31 He contradicted his earlier assertion that they had no assemblies of this kind by describing at length a solemn gathering which he attended, something convened by the caraı¨bes every three or four years. There was much to object to in the practice of these prophets, but Le´ry was also ravished by the harmonious chanting of the congregation and clearly found it expressive of something that might bring them to the true faith. Moments of slim optimism competed with his Calvinist view of human degeneration, but Le´ry’s account of the Tupinamba was certainly not one in which simple ‘atheism’ told the whole of the story. Locke clearly knew the chapter well, but he elided Le´ry’s interpretation in favour of a strict insistence on their atheism. By doing so he negated the category of ‘feeling’ or ‘sentiment’ as a means of rescuing human uniformity. The same pattern appears in Locke’s inclusion in the Essay of the Carib Indians on his list of the atheist peoples. In this instance alone, Locke does not cite a source, but it is likely he was drawing on Charles de Rochefort. We know that Locke read Rochefort’s History of the Caribby-Islands in 28

29 30

31

Le´ry, History, 139. ‘. . . il n’y a peuple qui n’ait sentiment qu’il y a quelque divinite´’ (Histoire, ed. Lestringant, 395). On this subject, see also Landucci, Filosofi, 218–20; and He´le`ne Clastres, ‘Religion without Gods: The Sixteenth Century Chroniclers and the South American Savages’, History and Anthropology 3 (1987): 61–82. Le´ry, History, 140. ‘. . . ceste semence de religion (si toutefois ce qu’ils font merite ce titre) bourgeonne et ne peut estre esteinte en eux’ (Histoire, ed. Lestringant, 395). Seneca, Ep. mor., 120.4. See also Cicero, De finibus, 5.43, where he refers to ‘semina’ and sparks of virtue which require cultivation. On this subject, see Maryanne Cline Horowitz, Seeds of Virtue and Knowledge (Princeton, 1998). On thunder (tupa¨ ), the karai or prophets, and notions of the afterlife, see He´le`ne Clastres, The Land-Without-Evil: Tupı´-Guaranı´ Prophetism, trans. Jacqueline Grenez Brovender (Urbana, 1995). Clastres discusses sixteenth-century accounts and also provides a contemporary ethnographic reassessment of Tupı´ religion.

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English translation shortly after it was published in 1666.32 Even if he did not have Rochefort in mind when mentioning the Caribs, he was aware of his testimony and therefore responsible for considering it. Rochefort was a French Protestant minister sent to the Caribbean by the congregation of La Rochelle. He returned in 1650 and later established himself in Rotterdam where his Histoire naturelle et morale des Iles Antilles de l’Ame´rique appeared in 1658.33 When Rochefort addressed the question of religious belief among the Caribs in the text, he began by recalling Cicero’s conviction that no nation existed without some ‘opinion and perswasions of a Divinity’, citing the Tusculan Disputations.34 Rochefort concurred with this judgement, arguing that nature ‘seems to have been so indulgent to Mankind, as to make some impression of a Divinity in the minds of Men’, which he called a ‘natural sentiment’, appearing without instruction.35 But experience had put these views to the test, and it was now difficult to ‘make good’ on Cicero’s belief. In the Andes, Mexico, New France, New Holland, Brazil, Tierra del Fuego, and elsewhere, there existed people entirely lacking in religion, with no sign of revering a higher power, if historians of those regions could be credited. The same unfortunate conclusion seemed merited in the case of the Caribs. If Locke was drawing on Rochefort for support, he could have called on him here. However, Rochefort preserved his conviction in some form of innateness by saying that the inhabitants of these countries had merely ‘smother’d the apprehensions Nature had bestow’d on them’. As a result of the effort to extinguish what nature had provided, no evidence emerged among them of any invocations, ceremonies, or sacrifices demonstrating such a native belief, nor did they possess a word to express the concept of the deity. When Rochefort came to describe their actual beliefs and practices, he 32

33

34

Charles de Rochefort, The History of the Caribby-Islands, trans. John Davies (London, 1666). For Locke’s references to this edition, see MS Locke f. 14, p. 198; MS Locke d. 10, p. 20; MS Locke d. 11, p. 15; British Library Add. MS 32554, pp. 9, 236. On the date of Locke’s reading, see J. R. Milton, ‘The Date and Significance of Two of Locke’s Early Manuscripts’, The Locke Newsletter 19 (1988): 47–89. Locke first adds the Caribs to the group of atheist peoples in Draft B of 1671, that is, after composing the Essays on the Law of Nature (c. 1664), which refers only to atheism in Brazil and at Saldanha Bay, 173–4. This increases the plausibility that Rochefort was his source. Drafts for the ‘‘Essay Concerning Human Understanding’’, and other Philosophical Writings, ed. Peter H. Nidditch and G. A. J. Rogers, 3 vols., vol. I: Drafts A and B (Oxford, 1990), 106. Locke later purchased a copy of the first edition in French of 1658 (LL 100). There is a note in MS Locke f. 28, p. 36, pointing out that the best edition of the text is the ‘Holland’ quarto of 1665 (i.e., the second edition, published in French at Rotterdam). On Rochefort and the debated issue of authorship and his ethnographic sources, see Re´gis Antoine, Les ´ecrivains franc¸ais et les Antilles: des premiers Pe`res blancs aux surre´alistes noirs (Paris, 1978), 26–7, 34–7. See Tusculan Disputations, I.30. 35 Rochefort, History of the Caribby-Islands, 276.

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encountered an obvious problem – the Caribs were not as devoid of worship as he had suggested, although he found it, in general, abhorrent. To negotiate the inconsistency, he continued to maintain that they possessed a ‘natural sentiment’ of God, a conception of some ‘superior and obliging power’ residing in heaven. Despite their efforts to eradicate it from their consciences, there still ‘remain’d in them some spark of that Knowledge’.36 In effect, he proceeded with a Stoic account which regarded belief in God as a prolepsis, but one that required further development and intellectual nourishment. On this basis, Rochefort arrived at a conclusion which kept innate ideas intact. No matter how much the Caribs turned away from God, they could not help demonstrating some basis for belief, almost in spite of themselves. Their profound fear of thunder was evidence, for Rochefort as for Le´ry, that they recognised the divine, a notion ‘imprinted by Nature on the minds of all men’. Their assiduous attempts to remove this conception therefore ended in failure, allowing Rochefort to reinstate Cicero’s dictum, ‘That it is innate, and as it were graven in the minds of men, that there is a Divinity’.37 Locke’s examples in the Essay of atheism among the polite nations are subject to even greater dispute. In the first edition he referred only to the Siamese, but he later included the Chinese as well, based on recent information he had acquired. The Siamese instance was complicated from the start because Locke alluded to testimony which indicated that they were actually polytheists. For Locke this outlook was tantamount to atheism because it betrayed the fact that they possessed an inadequate conception of the divine: ‘What true or tolerable Notion of a Deity, could they have, who acknowledged, and worshipped hundreds?’ (I.iv.15).38 Here his source was the narrative of the travels of Pierre Lambert de La Motte, bishop of Beirut and apostolic vicar, who arrived in the country in 1662.39 Locke strengthened his atheist interpretation of Siamese religion by going on to remark that, in fact, the ‘Theology of the Siamites . . . consists properly in acknowledging no God at all’ (I.iv.15). He adopted this conclusion on the basis of the abbe´ de Choisy’s account of Siam.40 In his travel journal, Choisy explained the Siamese term niraphan (nirvana) and 36 38 39 40

Ibid., 278, 284. 37 Ibid., 290–1. Quoting Cicero, De natura deorum, II.12. Locke remarks on polytheists in the Essays on the Law of Nature, ‘Quid hi, quaeso, nisi alio nomine athei?’ (174). Jacques de Bourges, Relation du Voyage de Monseigneur l’Eveque de Beryte (Paris, 1666), ch. 13. Given the slightly awkward juxtaposition of sources, it is perhaps not surprising that Locke added the reference to Choisy after Draft C (1685), in which the case against innateness was substantially complete.

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described the story of the Siamese Buddhists’ ‘last god’: Somono-Ckodom (i.e., Buddha – Siddhartha Gautama), who was said to have died 2229 years before.41 Since Somono-Ckodom (Buddha) was annihilated, Choisy continues, they now have no God, although the Buddhist monks continue to uphold his law. It was on this basis that he remarked, in a phrase Locke translated directly, that ‘leur religion . . . consiste proprement a` ne reconnaıˆtre point de Dieu’.42 Locke’s account of Siamese religion was true to his source and to a certain perspective on Buddhist cosmology, but it depended on a strict interpretation which did not give religious weight to their practices of worship, prayer, or the existence of a priesthood. To strengthen his case, Locke added Simon de La Loube`re to his list of authorities on Siam in the fourth edition of the Essay (1700). La Loube`re also affirmed that the Siamese, according to Locke, wanted ‘the Idea, and Knowledge of God’ (I.iv.8), a fact which Locke said caused him surprise, evidently forgetting his existing conclusion in this and earlier editions of the Essay. La Loube`re had travelled to Siam in a diplomatic capacity, charged by Louis XIV with a complex set of military, commercial, and missionary objectives.43 The embassy failed rather spectacularly and La Loube`re returned after three months. On the basis of his short stay he produced a remarkably thorough and well-informed account, published in two volumes as Du Royaume de Siam (1691). In the key passage to which Locke directed the reader, La Loube`re offers his interpretation of Siamese Buddhism. After discussing the transmigration of souls, nirvana, and the honour given to Siddhartha (Buddha) as the summit of virtue, he described this as the whole of Siamese doctrine and stated that he could not locate a true conception of the divine in it. His conclusion was predicated on the lack among the Siamese of any understanding of God as a governing figure who punished sin and rewarded virtue or as a first mover who created nature and its principle of order. On these grounds, La Loube`re said, ‘I believe it may be asserted, that the Siameses have no Idea of any God, and that their Religion is 41

42

43

Sommono is a Siamese term designating a priest or talapoin. Codom is a corruption of Gautama or Gotama (Pali ). See abbe´ de Choisy, Journal du Voyage de Siam, ed. Dirk van der Cruysse (Paris, 1995), 308n. Abbe´ de Choisy, Journal ou Suite du Voyage de Siam (Amsterdam, 1687), 301. The page reference given by Locke in the Essay (I.iv.15) is incorrect. Choisy’s information was based on instruction he received from the bishop of Me´tellopolis, Louis Laneau, and the abbe´ Artus de Lionne. Laneau was apostolic vicar of Siam and created bishop of Ayutthaya in 1674. Lionne was a missionary. For the context, see Dirk van der Cruysse, Siam and the West 1500–1700, trans. Michael Smithies (Chiang Mai, 2002); and Michel Jacq-Hergoualc’h, E´tude historique et critique du livre de Simon de la Loube`re ‘Du Royaume de Siam’, Paris 1691 (Paris, 1987).

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reduced all intire to the worship of the dead.’44 Thus, for La Loube`re as much as for Locke, the deficiencies of their doctrine warranted their inclusion within the category of atheists, despite the fact that the Siamese had other appurtenances of religion. Not every reader would have found this harsh verdict necessary, especially those intent on rescuing some form of common consent. In the fifth edition of the Essay (1706), Locke went further by placing the Chinese in the atheist camp: ‘the Missionaries of China,’ he said, ‘even the Jesuits themselves, the great Encomiasts of the Chineses, do all to a Man agree and will convince us that the Sect of the Litterati, or Learned, keeping to the old Religion of China . . . are all of them Atheist ’ (I.iv.8). This assertion is certainly untenable in claiming unanimity of opinion amongst Western missionaries about Chinese atheism. The best way to establish the contentiousness of this statement is to examine Locke’s sources carefully. He cites two texts – the work of Domingo Ferna´ndez de Navarrete and the anonymous volume Historia cultus Sinensium (1700). Navarrete was a Dominican missionary in China. Once the preserve of the Jesuits, proselytisation in China had been opened up to other religious orders in 1633 and an inevitable rivalry resulted. The Dominicans actively sought to question and discredit the Jesuit accommodation of Chinese rites (that is, the Jesuit characterisation of ancestor worship and sacrifice to Confucius as purely ‘civil ceremonies’) and the Jesuits’ favourable interpretation of Confucian terms, which they squared with Catholic theology. Navarrete played a key part in this dispute. He returned to Spain where he published his Tratados historicos, politicos, ethicos y religiosos de la monarchia de China (1676). Like others in his order, Navarrete was convinced that the Chinese were atheists, but he went further by making use of testimony from a key Jesuit figure, Nicolo` Longobardi (or Longobardo), who had succeeded Matteo Ricci as superior of the Jesuit mission in China. Longobardi disagreed with many of Ricci’s conclusions about Confucianism and composed several treatises on this matter. Only one survived (dating from 1623–4), a unique if incomplete copy of which Navarrete obtained and published in his Tratados.45 Locke could of course take some encouragement from this 44

45

Simon de La Loube`re, A New Historical Relation of the Kingdom of Siam, trans. A. P. (London, 1693), 130. The translator was the Middlesex gentleman and fellow of the Royal Society, Alexander Pitfield. The identification is made by William Poole, ‘The Genesis Narrative in the Circle of Robert Hooke and Francis Lodwick’, in Scripture and Scholarship in Early Modern England, ed. A. Hessayon and N. Keene (Aldershot, forthcoming). For some discussion, see the introduction to The Travels and Controversies of Friar Domingo Navarrete, ed. J. S. Cummins, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1962); Paul A. Rule, K’ung Tzu or Confucius? The Jesuit Interpretation of Confucianism (Sydney, 1986), 74, 77–87. Locke corresponded with his

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judgement but it was certainly false to maintain that all missionaries, Jesuit and otherwise, attributed atheism to the Chinese.46 Locke’s second source, the Historia cultus Sinensium, was equally problematic. This lengthy volume, consisting of numerous documents, was also produced in the midst of controversy over the Jesuit accommodation of Chinese rites and theology. A number of the pieces in the volume came from Charles Maigrot, apostolic vicar of the Fujian province. The category of apostolic vicar was created by Pope Alexander VII, who appointed missionaries to defunct bishoprics in order to avoid openly abrogating the privileges that the Portuguese enjoyed under the Padroado Real. The Padroado had given control over missions in Asia to the Portuguese who in turn had entrusted them to the Jesuits. As we have seen, this exclusivity was already being eroded. Under the papacy of Innocent XI, the apostolic vicars in China were entitled to demand an oath of obedience from other missionaries, but this right was disputed by the Jesuits. Maigrot attempted to enforce it in Fujian which placed him in conflict with members of the Society of Jesus. He was also at odds with them, like the Dominicans, because he too rejected the Jesuit position on Chinese tradition and doctrine. In 1693 he issued a Mandatum seu Edictum with seven prohibitions bearing on this controversy. The Jesuits once again questioned his authority to enforce the Mandate. In response, Maigrot delegated Nicolas Charmot to represent him in Rome, and their joint literary and theological productions against the Chinese and the Jesuits appeared in the Historia cultus Sinensium.47 Maigrot alleged that

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friend Nicolas Toinard in 1698 and 1699 about the book, which Toinard described as ‘tres curieux et rare’. Locke asked if he would translate it into French (Correspondence, VI: 463, 569, 603, 615). Locke possessed a letter from Francis Atterbury to Col. Christopher Codrington of November 1699 discussing the existence of a manuscript translation into English. Atterbury described the book as reporting that ‘the Antient Chinese had no true Notion of a Deı¨ty, and that their Philosophy was a Scheme of Atheism’ (Correspondence, VI: 732). Locke obtained a copy of the Spanish edition which he loaned to Awnsham Churchill in November 1699, presumably to have it translated as part of his edition of travels. Churchill promised to return the book or to pay Locke the hefty sum of five pounds if he failed to do so (MS Locke b. 2, fol. 174). ‘An Account of the Empire of China, Historical, Political, Moral and Religious’ appeared in volume one of the Churchills’ Collection of Voyages and Travels, to which Locke referred in the Essay (I.iv.8). It is worth noting that Locke owned Nicolas Trigault’s Latin translation of Ricci’s account of the mission in China: De Christiana expeditione apud Sinas (Augsburg, 1615), LL 2983. The Italian original remained unpublished until the twentieth century. Locke also owned a French translation of Trigault (Lyon, 1616), LL 2984, which he loaned to Damaris Masham in 1683 (MS Locke f. 7, p. 13). Historia cultus Sinensium (Cologne, 1700). The Mandatum appears at 332–8. The Cologne imprint is false. The abbe´ du Bos wrote to Locke from Amsterdam in July 1699 saying that one of the city’s printers was engaged in preparing an edition of Latin documents relevant to the dispute between the Jesuits and the other missionaries in China. Correspondence, VI: 647. For the context, see Claudia von Collani, ‘Charles Maigrot’s Role in the Chinese Rites Controversy’, in The Chinese Rites Controversy: Its History and Meaning, ed. D. E. Mungello (Nettetal, 1994), 149–83.

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all Confucians were atheists, and he even found some support in references to Jesuit authorities like Matteo Ricci and Francesco Brancati, although he exaggerated what they had to say.48 Locke’s presentation of this argument, however, claims an unwarranted degree of consensus.49 The judgements advanced in the Historia were the subject of considerable dispute. In this sense Locke was giving us what can be called a sceptical anthropology, as opposed to a Stoic one predicated on human uniformity and natural internal principles or impulses.50 My point in discussing Locke’s sources is to establish that the Stoic version is more viable than Locke makes out – viable, that is, as a reading of these same sources. He clearly strained to make out his interpretation of the polite nations as atheists, but he evidently wanted them included in his critique. Why? Although Locke was drawn to the case of primitive peoples, on the grounds that they stood closest to nature and should therefore exhibit the stamped character of an innate idea of God most clearly,51 his examples could also be set aside as 48

49

50 51

Historia cultus Sinensium, 353–6. Locke marked an extensive number of pages for attention on the rear cover of his copy of the text (Bodleian Library shelfmark Locke 7.10), including this range. On the front flyleaf, he wrote: ‘Celsus says the Seres (which I tak to be the Chineses) had noe god.’ His source was Origen, Contra Celsum, 7.63. His identification of Seres with China is correct. Der Kleine Pauly: Lexikon der Antike, ed. Konrat Ziegler, Walther Sontheimer, and Hans Ga¨rtner, 5 vols. (Stuttgart and Munich, 1964–75), V: 133–5. Locke was aware of the larger context of the dispute. In February 1699 he wrote to Nicolas Toinard asking him to obtain a copy of the Paris edition of the Jesuit Louis Le Comte’s Nouveaux Memoires sur l’Etat Present de la Chine, 2 vols. (Paris, 1696), LL 827, because the Dutch edition was defective (Correspondence, VI: 568–9). See also his pencil list of pages marked for attention in his copy of Le Comte’s Lettre a Monseigneur le Duc du Mayne sur les Ceremonies de la Chine (Lie`ge, 1700), LL 828, which include two pages that affirm the Chinese belief in a sovereign God (20, 33). Bodleian Library Locke 7.161e. Locke also read the Jesuit Joachim Bouvet’s Portrait Historique de l’ Empereur de la Chine (Paris, 1697), sent to him by Toinard (Correspondence, VI: 535), LL 408. In July 1700, Du Bos kept him informed about escalating conflicts in Paris where the Theology Faculty of the Sorbonne had taken an interest in the Chinese rites (Correspondence, VII: 111). The faculty later condemned the position taken by Le Comte and by Charles Le Gobien in his Histoire de l’ Edit de l’Empereur de la China en Faveur de la Religion Chrestienne (Paris, 1698), LL 1274. For some discussion, see Jacques Davy, ‘La condemnation en Sorbonne des ‘‘Nouveaux Me´moires sur la Chine’’ du P. le Comte: les de´buts de l’affaire’, Recherches de science religieuse 37:3 (1950): 366–97. We should not of course conflate it with the anthropology of Montaigne and Bayle, although it shares certain elements with them. In addition to atheism in Brazil and the Caribbean, Locke referred to the testimony of Sir Thomas Roe about the Hottentots (i.e., Khoi Khoi) at Saldanha Bay (from The´venot, Relations, I: 2), and to the Jesuit missionary Nicolaus del Techo on the Indians of Paraguay (‘Caaiguarum gentis mores, coepta conuersio’, in Relatio triplex de rebus Indicis (Antwerp, 1654), 43), who had ‘no name signifying god or the human soul . . . no sacred rites and no idols’. This refers to the Caaigua´ or ‘people of the forest’, a Guaranı´ tribe. For Stillingfleet’s response, see The Bishop of Worcester’s Answer to Mr. Locke’s Letter (London, 1697), 89–90. Locke replied by shoring up the testimony on Hottentot atheism, quoting Edward Terry, A Voyage to East-India (London, 1655), 17; and John Ovington, A Voyage to Suratt (London, 1696), 489. Mr. Locke’s Reply to the Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of Worcester’s Answer to his Second Letter, in The Works of John Locke, 9th edn, 9 vols. (1794; rpt

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mere savage aberrations. Bishop Stillingfleet took this line in his response, adopting a familiar strategy.52 Grotius had earlier employed a similar argument in defending common consent to the existence of God, excluding the barbarous and wild who dissented, just as he proved the law of nature a posteriori in reference to the consent of the politer nations.53 The polite were therefore of some consequence in securing Locke’s critique. III R E A S O N A N D T H E P R I M I T I V E

We should remember that Locke regarded himself as requiring only a single example of atheism (individual or collective) to establish his case, as he understood it (and as he argued in reply to Stillingfleet).54 He demanded universal consent in a strict sense – any dissent would be enough to refute the innateness of the idea of God. If we grant Locke his critique, on his own terms, then we should consider its anthropological implications. On the whole, polite nations had an advantage in rectifying their inadequate conceptions because they cultivated learning and engaged in rational discussion of theological matters. The predicament of the underdeveloped was more precarious in this respect. How would they arrive at true notions of the divine and of moral duty, given the lack of innate ideas or principles to direct them? Robert Boyle had broached this issue in a work that Locke knew well. Boyle’s discussion occurred in the context of his defence of the orthodoxy of inquiry into nature. In Some Considerations Touching the Usefulnesse of Experimental Naturall Philosophy (1663), a text read very carefully by Locke,55 he made the point that ‘if there be, at this day, any Nations

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London, 1997), III: 496. He then incorporated these references into the next edition of the Essay (1700). For good measure he added a new example taken from Pierre Martin de La Martinie`re, Voyage des pays septentrionaux, 2nd edn (Paris, 1676), which reported laconically of the ‘Borandiens’: ‘N’ont point de Religion, vivans comme des bestes’ (201). The country and people in question have not been identified satisfactorily. They may have been one of the Samoyed groups (perhaps the Nenets (Yurak) living between the Pechora and the Urals). Boranday or Berendey is quite possibly a Turkic name. Although Samoyeds are not a Turkic people, they had assimilated with many of them. I am grateful to Michael Khodakovsky and Michel Mervaud for their advice on this question. See Answer to Mr. Locke’s Letter, 90. He had earlier done so in Origines Sacrae (London, 1662), 395. Hugo Grotius, De veritate religionis Christianae, new edn (Amsterdam, 1662), 4; De jure belli ac pacis, new edn (Amsterdam, 1646), 5–6 (I.i.12). Whatever ideas claimed the status of innateness, Locke said, ‘must be universal in the strictest sense; one exception is a sufficient proof against it’. Mr. Locke’s Reply to the . . . Answer to His Second Letter, in Works, III: 496–7. In Draft B of the Essay, he had regarded the absence of an innate idea of God as merely ‘probable’. Drafts, 109. Locke made numerous references to it in his notebooks, e.g., MS Locke d. 11, p. 10; MS Locke f. 14, pp. 28, 68, 93, 106, 140, 170.

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(as Navigators inform us there are in Brasil,56 and some parts of the Indies) that worship no God, they consist not of Naturalists, but Bruit, and Irrational Barbarians, who may be suppos’d rather to ignore the Being of God, than to deny it’. Boyle affirmed the consonance between natural philosophy and religious belief. The atheist Brazilians were not, in this sense, ‘naturalists’ but individuals who simply failed to employ their reason. Initially Boyle concerned himself with the matter of their irrationality, but he went on to question the problem of innateness: And if it be a Truth that there are really such Atheistical People, it may serve to recommend to us the Study of Physiology, by shewing us, That without the help of any such innate belief, or perswasion of a God, as is suppos’d connatural to Man, Reason exercis’d upon the Objects the Creation presents us with, is sufficient to convince Philosophers of a Deity.57

Boyle proceeded in a cautious manner, treating reports of unbelieving nations conditionally. Equally, he referred to innate principles as a supposition, and by calling them ‘connatural’ he used the term favoured by the Cambridge Platonists for describing such ideas.58 Boyle made it clear, however, that mankind needed to recognise God’s intention with the world, a task that could be accomplished without innate ideas: ‘Beasts inhabit and enjoy the World: Man, if he will do more, must study, and (if I may so speak) Spiritualize it.’59 Reason had sufficient power to grasp the existence of God and to work out the consequences of our situation as created beings, a view that Locke accepted entirely. Boyle’s remark alerts us to the fact that in the absence of innate ideas, reason provided the means of access to religious truth and moral duty. Locke concurred. Although Locke undermined internal principles by stressing human diversity, he preserved the capacity of reason to rescue the situation, transcending local custom in favour of natural law. In connection with Locke’s portrait of human nature, then, the final issue we must address is what level of rational ability he attributed to primitive 56

57

58 59

Boyle’s mention of Brazil here may be the source for Locke’s reference in the Essays on the Law of Nature to ‘some nations in Brazil . . . [who] acknowledge or worship no god at all, as is reported by those who have considered it worth while to go [there]’ (173–5). Like Boyle, Locke is unspecific in tying the reference to a particular traveller. Locke only refers explicitly to Le´ry, whom he began reading in France in the late 1670s, in the first edition of the Essay (1690). Robert Boyle, Some Considerations Touching the Usefulnesse of Experimental Naturall Philosophy (Oxford, 1663), 101–2; The Works of Robert Boyle, ed. Michael Hunter and Edward B. Davis, 14 vols. (London, 1999–2000), III: 269. Isabel Rivers, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660–1780, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1991–2000), I: 77. Boyle, Usefulnesse of Experimental Naturall Philosophy, 115. Works, III: 278.

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peoples. If Locke denied them not only a set of predispositions toward the Deity and the good, but also adequate mental power to exercise their limited stock of ideas, then inevitably they would fail to regulate their conduct properly. In making the case against innate speculative principles – maxims such as ‘Whatsoever is, is ’ and ‘’Tis impossible for the same thing to be, and not to be ’ (I.ii.4) – Locke invoked not only children and idiots but also savages to establish his point. If such principles exist innately, then surely they should emerge with some force in the thoughts of individuals least corrupted by ‘Custom, or borrowed Opinions; Learning, and Education’. These ‘native Beams of Light’, as Locke described them, should appear with as much conviction as their obvious ‘love of Pleasure, and abhorrence of Pain’. But on examination we find: Their Notions are few and narrow, borrowed only from those Objects, they have had most to do with, and which have made upon their Senses the frequentest and strongest Impressions . . . And a young Savage has, perhaps, his Head fill’d with Love and Hunting, according to the fashion of his Tribe. But he that from a Child untaught, or a wild Inhabitant of the Woods, will expect these abstract Maxims, and reputed Principles of Sciences, will I fear, find himself mistaken. Such kind of general Propositions, are seldom mentioned in the Huts of Indians. (I.ii.27)

Locke sets himself up as something of an authority on Indian conversation and mental life, while satirising those who naively insist on the purchase of various maxims in the soul. But his point about the Indian mind is worth pursuing. It is not immediately clear why, even when rejecting innate maxims, Locke should describe the range of Indian ‘notions’ as ‘few and narrow’, arising only from immediate experience. Children and idiots have an obvious excuse, but why should one assume that Indian conceptions extend no further than bows and arrows, love, and hunting? In Locke’s draft of this passage, the formulation was even more troubling. In addition to universal principles of knowledge, he wondered what ‘rules of morality’ were to be found among the savages. Those who expected ‘notions of a god, doctrines of morality, or fundamental rules of right & wrong’ would find themselves mistaken.60 Locke of course emphasised the power of the environment to shape ideas, and thus a correlation would obtain between the rudimentary material conditions of Indian life and the relative paucity of their ideas. In his chapter in the Essay on ‘Number’, Locke stated that he had conversed 60

Draft B (Drafts, 122).

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with some American Indians who, though they possessed ‘quick and rational Parts enough’, were unable to count to a thousand.61 This occurred because their language was ‘scanty, and accommodated only to the few necessaries of a needy simple Life, unacquainted either with Trade or Mathematicks’. He also noted in this passage Le´ry’s report that the Tupinamba did not have any name for numbers beyond five (II.xvi.6).62 From one point of view, Locke is remarking on a predicament facing any group of people who lack certain experiences, regardless of whether they are primitive or polite. In his chapter on probability, for example, Locke related an anecdote from a Dutch ambassador resident at the court of the King of Siam. While regaling the sovereign with stories of Holland, the diplomat mentioned that in his country it was occasionally cold enough that water froze solid and became so hard it could bear the weight of an elephant. The king replied, ‘Hitherto I have believed the strange Things you have told me, because I look upon you as a sober fair man, but now I am sure you lye’ (IV.xv.5).63 Here Locke notes the difficulty of accepting testimony on matters of fact when they directly contradict one’s own experience.64 The king lacks a relevant physical impression (ice), rather than failing to exercise his mind with sufficient industry on an abstract topic. In one sense the narrow compass of Indian understanding results from isolation, which has a kind of parallel with the Siamese case, but the problem is really one of rational application in mathematics, theology, and ethical ‘mixed modes’.65 One might suggest that this condition is endemic for those who, like European labourers, lack sufficient leisure-time to devote to these matters, but it is not clear if this is the basis for Locke’s explanation. 61

62

63

64

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When and where these conversations took place remains a mystery. Locke first makes this reference in Draft B (Drafts, 157). The opportunity may have come about through his role as secretary to the Lords Proprietors of Carolina (1668–71). See Le´ry, History, 178–9. For Locke’s interest in counting, see MS Locke f. 2, p. 292, referenced to Franc¸ois Bernier; BL Add MS 15642, pp. 86–7 (entry for 25 April 1679). In a journal entry of August 1676, Locke reminded himself to add the ‘nodus of numbers’ to his list of inquiries (MS Locke f. 1, p. 388). See also later letters of Nicolas Toinard’s from 1697 and 1698, the latter referring again to Le´ry (Correspondence, VI: 265, 492). In his discussion of species in the Essay, III.vi.13, Locke ponders the predicament of ‘an English-man, bred in Jamaica’, unfamiliar with ice. If he came to England in winter, he would find ice in his basin in the morning when it was water the night before. Furnished with a new ‘idea’, he would then have to make a species designation of the entity. I think that Steven Shapin is mistaken in alleging that Locke criticises the king as ‘proceeding on defective grounds’. A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago, 1994), 229. See also 243–4, 248. The king’s obligation was to seek further testimony and confirming witnesses, not to accept what he was told outright, on the strength of one witness, however credible in himself. See the Essay, II.i.7 where Locke makes a general criticism of failure to apply the mind and extend the range of ideas.

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In any case, the difficulties for so-called primitives in Locke’s philosophy cannot be easily set aside. The very conditions of their existence mean that they run the risk of missing out on a range of ideas of great importance. We can glimpse the problem in a passage translated by Locke from the moral essays of Pierre Nicole. In 1676–7, Locke translated three essays by Nicole, a French Jansenist. In the essay on the ‘Weakness of Mankind’, Nicole speculated on the mental life of various primitives, despairing over the neglect of reason. In Locke’s version the passage reads: And in Truth, if one takes a general Survey of the World, one shall find the Bulk of Mankind buried in a Stupidity so gross, that if it does not wholly dispossess them of their Reason, yet it leaves them so little Use of it, that one cannot but wonder how the Soul can be depressed into so low a Degree of Brutality. What does a Canibal, Iroquoi, Brasilian, Negro, Cafer, Groenlander or Laplander think on during his whole Life? The ordinary wants of the Body, and some dull ways of supplying them, Fishing and Hunting, Dancing, and Revenge on his Enemies, is the whole Compass of his Contemplations.66

While offering an Augustinian outlook on human nature, Nicole drew attention to the sadly limited scope of ideas circulating in the savage mind.67 Locke, who often altered Nicole’s text when he translated it, kept close to the original in this case. Although we cannot infer from this fact alone that Locke accepted Nicole’s assessment, we can compare it with a very similar passage contained in Locke’s Conduct of the Understanding. In this lengthy piece, intended as a chapter of the Essay, Locke criticised the laziness of those who fail to use their minds and expand their horizons. He introduced an elaborate travel-metaphor of knowledge acquisition, common in his writing, and rebuked those who lived ‘mued up within their own contracted Territories’. Locke illustrated his point by referring to the inhabitants of the Marian Islands, separated by the sea from contact with the rest of the world. Even after the Spaniards introduced the islanders to fire, a technology previously unknown to them, together with 66

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Pierre Nicole, Discourses on the being of a God, and the immortality of the Soul; on the Weakness of Man; And concerning the way of Preserving Peace with Men. Render’d into English by the late John Locke, Gent. (London, 1712), 72–3. For a new edition, together with the French original, see John Locke as Translator: Three of the Essais of Pierre Nicole in French and English, ed. Jean Yolton (Oxford, 2000), this passage p. 87. For a discussion of Locke’s translation, see Ian Harris, The Mind of John Locke (Cambridge, 1994), 282–4, 287–8; John Marshall, John Locke: Resistance, Religion and Responsibility (Cambridge, 1994), 131–7, 178–86. On Nicole, see E. D. James, Pierre Nicole, Jansenist and Humanist: A Study of His Thought (The Hague, 1972). For Nicole’s equation of these primitives with ‘labouring men’, see Discourses, pp. 73–4; Yolton edn, pp. 87–9.

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information on a range of nations distinguished by their knowledge of arts, sciences, and ‘Conveniences of Life’, they continued to regard themselves, Locke reported, ‘as the happiest and wisest People of the Universe’.68 Nonetheless, Locke continued, no body, I think, will imagine them deep Naturalists, or solid Metaphysicians; no body will deem the quickest sighted amongst them to have very enlarg’d Views in Ethicks or Politicks, nor can any one allow the most capable amongst them to be advanced so far in his Understanding, as to have any other Knowledge but of the few things of his and the neighbouring Islands within his Commerce; but far enough from that comprehensive enlargement of Mind which adorns a Soul devoted to Truth, assisted with Letters, and a free consideration of the several Views and Sentiments of thinking Men of all sides.69

This statement offers a crucial insight into Locke’s view of primitive peoples. He assumes that even the most advanced mind among them would lack an array of thoughts extending beyond their circle. Their condition results from the fact they do not take part in conversation with ‘thinking Men’, balancing rival positions as they search for truth, aided by literacy.70 The consequences of linking the savages with illiterates in the Essay (I.ii.12) become clear in this passage. Ultimately their minds cannot 68

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Locke’s source was Charles Le Gobien, Histoire des Isles Marianes nouvellement converties a` la Religion Chrestienne (Paris, 1700). Le Gobien reported: ‘Jamais peuple n’a eu une pre´somption plus ridicule ni une plus sotte vanite´. Plongez dans la plus profonde ignorance, qui fut jamais, & denue´ de toutes les commoditez de la vie, il se regarde comme la nation la plus sage, la plus polie & la plus spirituelle que soit au monde. Tous les autres peuples luy sont pitie´, & il n’en parle qu’avec me´pris’ (49). Locke owned a copy of the second edition (1701), LL 1275. His attention was first drawn to the work by the abbe´ Du Bos (letter of 14/24 February 1700, Correspondence, VII: 11). Independently, Pierre Bayle discussed the religious beliefs and self-satisfaction of the Marian Islanders, with reference to Le Gobien, in his Continuation des Pense´es Diverses, Ecrites a` un Docteur de Sorbonne, a` l’occasion de la Comete qui parut au mois de Decembre 1680, 2 vols. (Rotterdam, 1705), I: 57–8. See also the later notice of the Marian Islanders in a similar vein to Locke in Helve´tius, De l’esprit, or, Essays on the Mind and Its Several Faculties (London, 1759), 106. John Locke, Of the Conduct of the Understanding (Bristol, 1993), 10–11. The work went through numerous editions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries after its posthumous publication in 1706. For details, see Jean S. Yolton, John Locke: A Descriptive Bibliography (Bristol, 1998), 347–58. For a critical edition, see Of the Conduct of the Understanding, ed. Paul Schuurman (Utrecht, 2000). This is privately printed, based on a Ph.D. thesis, Keele University, 2000. Schuurman prints this passage as part of paragraph 98 (247–8). For his editorial rationale see the ‘General Introduction’, 121–3. Literacy and the absence of ‘thinking men’ must be crucial since Locke was well aware that primitive Amerindians engaged in deliberative political and war councils (described in the ‘Second Treatise’ xx103, 105) and were commended by him, elsewhere, for their manner of conversation: ‘The Indians, whom we call Barbarous, observe much more Decency and Civility in their Discourses and Conversation, giving one another a fair silent hearing, till they have done; and then answering them calmly, and without Noise or Passion.’ Some Thoughts concerning Education, ed. John W. Yolton and Jean S. Yolton (Oxford, 1989), 206. This reference probably derives from his reading of Gabriel Sagard, Histoire du Canada (Paris, 1636), 398, as noted in MS Locke c. 33, fol. 10r.

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attain a ‘comprehensive enlargement’. From this mental impoverishment, we can infer, as Boyle did of the Brazilians, that the Marian Islanders achieve little or nothing in terms of reflection on natural philosophy or metaphysics. Perhaps more importantly, their ethical and political conceptions will prove equally stunted. Locke had argued in the Essay that moral matters ‘require Reasoning and Discourse, and some Exercise of the Mind, to discover the certainty of their Truth’ (I.iii.1). In the absence of discourse and reasoning, little in the way of moral insight could be expected from those engaged in such a limited form of life. Locke was certainly no primitivist. His epistemological theories supported the pessimistic conclusion that natives of these distant islands lacked a vital complement of ideas, and more damagingly that the range and capacity of their understandings were thereby reduced. There is something of a paradox in Locke’s position, however, given his commitment to the view, expressed elsewhere in the Conduct, that ‘The Americans are not all born with worse Understandings than the Europeans though we see none of them have such reaches in the Arts and Sciences.’71 For Locke the exercise of reason remained possible, but the evidence he gleaned from travel writers, together with his own experience of the uncultivated, made him doubt the height the mind could reach in unfavourable conditions. To achieve sufficient moral sophistication one needed to enter a polite and civil world. This in turn explains why Locke deployed evidence of diversity to undermine innate moral principles, but kept the potential force of reason in place. With that in mind we can return to the Essay and Locke’s final verdict on the subject, a mixture of Enlightenment liberality and disdain: ‘Had you or I’, Locke addressed the reader, ‘been born at the Bay of Soldania, possibly our Thoughts, and Notions, had not exceeded those brutish ones of the Hotentots that inhabit there: And had the Virginia King Apochancana,72 been educated in England, he had, perhaps, been as knowing a Divine, and 71 72

Locke, Conduct, 29; Schuurman edn, 166–7. Opechancanough, a Virginia Algonquian leader, headed insurrections against the English colonists in 1622 and 1644. See J. Frederick Fausz, ‘Opechancanough: Indian Resistance Leader’, in Struggle and Survival in Colonial America, ed. David G. Sweet and Gary B. Nash (Berkeley, 1981), 21–37. In Draft B, referring to a different Indian figure, Locke wrote: ‘had Tottepottemay been educated in England, he had perhaps been as zealous a Christian & as good an Architect as any in it’ (Drafts, 120). He cited Tottepottemay (the name was spelled variously), a Pamunkey chief who aided the English, dying in a battle of 1656. Locke’s source was a work dedicated to Lord Ashley, The Discoveries of John Lederer in three several Marches from Virginia, to the West of Carolina (London, 1672), 7 (LL 1706). The change in phrasing between Draft B and the Essay indicates a development in his argument, moving away from a similar formulation in Glanvill’s Vanity of Dogmatizing (London, 1661). According to Glanvill, ‘For our initial age is like the melted wax to the prepared Seal, capable of

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as good a Mathematician, as any in it’ (I.iv.12). The telling difference, finally, came down to facts of geography and the acquiescence of too many in received ‘Opinions, Fashions, and Things of their Country’. A ‘more improved English-man’, by contrast, had the benefit not only of living in a superior society, by implication, but crucially the diligence and industry to pursue higher conceptions of the divine.73 IV L O C K E ’ S P O L I T I C A L A N T H R O P O L O G Y

We have yet to address the issue of how this discussion relates to Locke’s perspective in the Two Treatises. Previous accounts of Locke’s ethnographic perspective on human custom have commonly focused on what might be called his political anthropology, above all in the ‘Second Treatise’ and Locke’s view of the state of nature. His discussion of the origins of government, the function of money in transforming political relations, and the role of property led him to comment suggestively on historical instances of Amerindian practice derived from his reading of travel literature.74 The question is whether he operated there with a different anthropology, especially of the primitive, or do shared assumptions and arguments underlie his politics and epistemology? Evidence exists to support both conclusions, but in general a different tendency is at work in the Treatises. One point of contact between the two works comes in his citation of the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. In the Essay, as I remarked above, Locke referred to Garcilaso in the context of the critique of innate practical principles, noting his testimony that the Peruvians kept female captives as concubines in order to beget children by them whom they would later eat (and the mothers too, when they were past childbearing).75 In the ‘First Treatise’,

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any impression from the documents of our Teachers . . . and we may with equal facility write on this rasa Tabula, Turk, or Christian’ (128). Locke changes his initial emphasis on the arbitrariness of religious attachment (Tottepottemay as Christian or pagan depending on where he is raised) and now stresses the second point, namely that an Indian would have the basis for becoming accomplished in divinity, architecture, or mathematics were he not disadvantaged by the situation of his birth. See also in this context his remarks on the consequences of the Indians’ failure to discover iron (Essay, IV.xii.11), which relates to a journal entry of 8 February 1677, MS Locke f. 2, pp. 44–5; printed in Political Essays, ed. Mark Goldie (Cambridge, 1997), 261. For previous work, if problematic in some cases, see William G. Batz, ‘The Historical Anthropology of John Locke’, Journal of the History of Ideas 35:4 (1974): 663–70; Herman Lebovics, ‘The Uses of America in Locke’s ‘Second Treatise’ of Government ’, Journal of the History of Ideas 47:4 (1986): 567–81; James Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge, 1993), ch. 5; Barbara Arneil, John Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism (Oxford, 1996); for a wide-ranging account see Francisco Castilla Urbano, ‘El Indio Americano en la Filosofia Politica de John Locke’, Revista de Indias 46 (1986): 421–51. Essay, I.iii.9. For the reference, see note 6 above.

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Locke quoted an extended version of the passage in his own translation as part of his reply to Sir Robert Filmer.76 If evidence was needed of patriarchal power, then Garcilaso supplied it, but Locke used this to polemical effect. Even if Sir Robert wished to claim it in support of his case, history did not supply a valid rule for human action. Locke took this opportunity to expatiate on a moral theme. He described the Peruvian custom as an example of what occurs when man ‘quits his reason’. The imagination and will take over, and under these circumstances the most extravagant and inventive individual assumes political command. Custom and practice then sanctify what began as folly or craft. Yet Locke did not confine himself in this instance to offering a lesson on the brutality of mankind which made people sink below ‘the level of Beasts’. He went further by noting that, in fact, an impartial survey of government and social practice around the world would teach us a paradoxical lesson that ‘irrational and untaught’ residents of the woods and forests provided a more suitable source of moral rules than what he called ‘Civil and Rational’ peoples, on the grounds that they ‘keep right by following nature’.77 Locke was making a polemical point and we should not perhaps subject his remarks to excessive scrutiny. But it is worth noting that although nature is a source of limited norms (a point he would not have made in Book I of the Essay),78 he nonetheless separated the primitive from the civil on the basis of possessing reason: the former were, by definition it seems, irrational, even if the rationality of the latter did not free them from the authority of inherited custom, however dubious. The issue of whether Locke placed a disability on reason in primitive circumstances, introduced casually here, takes on greater importance in the ‘Second Treatise’ when he builds his positive case for the foundation of civil government. His references to the American Indians, scattered 76

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Locke’s colourful translation reads: ‘In some Provinces, says he, they were so liquorish after Mans Flesh, that they wou’d not have the patience to stay till the Breath was out of the Body, but would suck the Blood as it ran from the Wounds of the dying Man; they had publick Shambles of Man’s Flesh, and their Madness herein was to that degree, that they spared not their own Children which they had Begot on Strangers taken in War: For they made their Captives their Mistresses and choisly nourished the Children they had by them, till about thirteen Years Old they Butcher’d and Eat them, and they served the Mothers after the same fashion, when they grew past Child bearing, and ceased to bring them any more Roasters.’ Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge, 1988), I.57. Locke’s truncated version elides Garcilaso’s reference to Pedro Cieza de Leo´n as the eyewitness to these ‘publick Shambles’. See The Travels of Pedro de Cieza de Leon, ed. and trans. Clements R. Markham (London, 1864), 97. Locke, ‘First Treatise’, x58. There Locke is concerned to stress that those closest to nature do not exhibit any moral consensus or indication of unanimously grasping true principles of morals.

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through this discussion, have been analysed by James Tully as part of a critique of Locke’s role in denying aboriginal rights. Tully’s argument is that Locke’s anthropology writes over the authentic practices of the Amerindian population with respect to property, ecology, and modes of government.79 Does reason play any part in this? Certainly reason is fundamental to grasping the law of nature, but I do not believe that Locke assumed that the groups described by Jose´ de Acosta and others laboured under some deficiency in this respect.80 Locke does not justify the occupation of Indian lands on the grounds that they require the paternal care accorded to infants and idiots.81 The justification is based on a right to settle on territory that has not been cultivated, deriving ultimately from the basic law of self-preservation. The inland parts of America certainly provide room enough in Locke’s estimation.82 If we want to read Locke suspiciously, we can point out an analogy between the failure to pursue ideas of the divine and moral duty with sufficient industry, which he attributed to the primitive, and the failure to cultivate the land and exploit its productivity and use-value. As Locke characterised the situation, the English were undoubtedly vastly ahead of the Americans in this respect.83 The capacity and potential are the same, but unequally exercised. Although this connection is worth entertaining, there are more explicit factors identified by Locke for the Indians’ lack of political development which stem from their confined desires and limited occasions for conflict, together with the absence of money (or at least the absence of money viable in international exchange). When occasion requires, they follow the law of nature in providing for a war captain to lead them in battle, but his authority is temporary and circumscribed.84 Locke’s purposes in the ‘Second Treatise’ are different to those that prompted his critique of innateness. In the ‘Second Treatise’ he made much of human equality, from a juridical perspective (rather than a descriptive one), and insisted on the capacity for reason. Reason is a political qualification and Locke has more at stake in showing that it is reached by mankind in its maturity.85 He builds in two degrees of the operation of reason. On the one hand, possession of reason is a bare condition for promulgating the law; the law must be understood for it to 79 80 81 82 84

Tully, Approach, ch. 5. The extent of Locke’s awareness of this remains a debated question. Locke, ‘Second Treatise’, x102. Ibid., xx58–60. The Indians are subject to punishment by West Indian planters but only in retribution for offences against the law of nature (‘First Treatise’, x130). Locke, ‘Second Treatise’, x36. 83 Ibid., xx37, 41, 43. Ibid., xx36, 45, 102, 108. 85 Ibid., xx59, 63, 170.

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apply. On the other, he has a more active sense associated with the effort to work out and understand the law’s principles for oneself.86 But the most crucial difference between the two works is that Locke’s anthropological references in the ‘Second Treatise’ are not designed to raise the issue of diversity. On the contrary, in Locke’s discussion ‘Of the Beginning of Political Societies’, for example, America exists as a kind of political embryo, offering us an insight into the development of civil societies in Asia and Europe, as Tully argues.87 The American mode of government, and social and economic organisation, do not trouble European practice, undermining common consent, but rather they show us our history. Thus the Indians are subject to a narrative in which, implicitly, their current practices will be transformed (not least, one may assume, with help from colonial settlers) into those of Europe. Clearly there are salient differences between Amerindians and Europeans, but they are not understood as fixed and incommensurable but rather as temporary and occasioned by historical situation. The Essay’s references to moral and religious variation leave us in a different predicament because the oppositions are not transitory or governed by history. Instead they are perpetual to the degree that they arise from the lack of any moral or religious direction given by nature.88 Reason may constitute a potential remedy, but Locke seems much less confident that it will be employed with sufficient diligence to achieve eventual consensus within societies or beyond them. His outlook on political progression towards a shared goal is much more optimistic. With these considerations in mind, we have the basis for understanding why Shaftesbury and Hutcheson’s quarrel with Locke focused on the implications of the Essay rather than on the political writings. Locke could be read as offering two different anthropologies – one which stabilised difference by offering an historical theory of progression, and another 86

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The latter form of reason is defined in dispositional terms. We come to acquire it through a process of maturation (ibid., x61). Elsewhere reason is identified not as a mere capacity or faculty, but rather as having a content or principles to which it must subscribe in order to qualify as reason. Thus Locke refers to the ‘Law of right Reason’ (x118) and, in an interestingly ambiguous phrase referring to Adam, to ‘the dictates of the Law of Reason which God had implanted in him’ (x56). In this case, it is presumably reason or the law of reason that has been implanted, not the dictates (which would suggest a stronger form of innateness he rejected in the Essay). Locke, ‘Second Treatise’, xx102, 105, 108, 49. See Tully, Approach, ch. 5, on this point. I believe that John Dunn is wrong to conflate Locke’s use of travel references in the Treatises and the Essay, and that this obscures the target of Shaftesbury’s critique of travel writing, which he directed against the Essay in my judgement. See John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke: An Historical Account of the Argument of the ‘Two Treatises of Government’ (Cambridge, 1969), 102 and note.

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which treated diversity as telling, at least against certain internal principles or inclinations provided by nature. Yet there were other ways in which comfort could be drawn from the Two Treatises by Shaftesbury and Hutcheson. Locke’s scepticism over species and the boundaries of the human in the Essay are no longer necessary or appropriate in this context, replaced by an unambiguous identification with others of the same kind.89 Although in the Essay our knowledge of human nature was limited in the same way as our knowledge of other essences, in the ‘Second Treatise’ human nature is said to have determinate ‘principles’ corresponding to the law of nature.90 In other words, it has a content which we can specify. What is more, on occasion Locke uses language in the ‘Second Treatise’ compatible with innatism, which we would not expect given his hostility to this notion in the Essay. The clearest case occurs in his discussion of the executive power to enforce the law of nature, possessed by everyone in the state of nature. In this context Locke acknowledges the entitlement to kill a murderer. Cain’s recognition of this right was sufficiently strong that he expected imminent destruction for his crime, in Locke’s words, ‘so plain was it writ in the Hearts of all Mankind’.91 In the light of Locke’s early essays on the law of nature, we have reason to believe that he did not intend to support the law of nature with an innatist argument, but of course these pieces remained unpublished. The significant point is that Locke had introduced testimony of murder in the Essay to confirm moral diversity and the absence of common consent. Infanticide, cannibalism, and extirpation of the elderly were practised without any evidence of remorse or reservation. Passages in the Essay on these forms of reprobate behaviour antagonised Shaftesbury and Hutcheson in part because they suggested a resolutely unsocial tendency of human nature. They confirmed and complemented Locke’s hedonist account of motivation in this respect. Rewards and punishments, however necessary, merely restrained powerful inclinations away from virtue or fellow-feeling. Locke’s perspective in this respect is continuous with certain passages in the Treatises, including the testimony from Garcilaso and the reference to human beings (including despotical monarchs) who quit the use of reason and merit the destruction afforded to ‘any savage ravenous Beast’.92 Yet elsewhere Locke provides a more sociable account of mankind in tune with the portrait that Shaftesbury and Hutcheson would later supply, expressed in terms they would have 89

Locke, ‘Second Treatise’, xx4, 8.

90

Ibid., x10.

91

Ibid., x11.

92

Ibid., x181.

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approved. In the ‘Second Treatise’, for example, he remarks that God designed human nature in such a way as to make society agreeable, convenient, and necessary, equipping us with intelligence and a capacity for language to enjoy it.93 Parental duty, which God likewise ‘placed’ in mankind, he joined with ‘suitable Inclinations of Tenderness and Concern to temper this power’,94 that is, to restrain the abuse of their authority. Locke’s acknowledgement would have gone some way toward satisfying Shaftesbury and Hutcheson’s demand for a recognition of social ‘instinct’. Both Shaftesbury and Hutcheson emphasised the importance of familial love and care for children (registered in the Greek notion of storge¯ ). Locke complemented his view, at one stage, with a benign and sociable account of the earliest stages of human association, seeing this condition, contra Hobbes, as an age of relative innocence and virtue.95 The Two Treatises served a different purpose to the Essay, which may sufficiently explain the different anthropological tendencies of these works. My point is not to expect a greater convergence between them, but rather to understand why Shaftesbury and Hutcheson devoted their energies to reversing the argument of the Essay and not the Two Treatises. There was enough to reassure them in the account of human nature emerging in the Treatises. The ethnographic content of the Essay, as I have argued, was another matter. There the issue remained diversity, which Locke did not resolve to their satisfaction. Indeed, he left it dangerously in place since they rejected his moral solutions and reassurances. 93 94 95

Ibid., x77. For a closely parallel passage on language in the Essay, see III.i.1. Locke, ‘Second Treatise’, x63. Locke, ‘Second Treatise’, x111. Elsewhere he stressed the inconveniences of the state of nature, e.g., xx124–8. The move to civil society was partly caused by ‘the corruption, and vitiousness of degenerate Men’ (x128). The two perspectives converge in a quotation from Hooker in x135n. Richard Tuck argues that Locke has a limited debt to the sociable perspective used to construct the law of nature. The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant (Oxford, 1999), 178–81.

CHAPTER

4

Contesting diversity: Shaftesbury’s reply to Locke

In a famous letter of 1709 to a young prote´ge´,1 the third Earl of Shaftesbury commented at length on his philosophical differences with his own mentor, John Locke. Not only had Locke mistakenly attacked innateness, but he had also asserted, according to Shaftesbury, that virtue was measured by nothing more than fashion or custom. Right and wrong had no permanence as distinctions, no residence in the mind. Thus Locke had landed the ‘home blow’ aimed by Hobbes: Locke ‘struck at all fundamentals, threw all order and virtue out of the world’.2 The accuracy of these accusations can be debated, but the strength of Shaftesbury’s reaction indicates the urgency and challenge of defining a philosophy of human nature in opposition to Locke, the man who had played a central role in Shaftesbury’s education and upbringing. The specific issues raised by Shaftesbury suggest that diversity played a key part in defining what he regarded as the pernicious effects of Locke’s philosophy. Locke began with a critique of innate moral principles and the elimination of an innate idea of God in the first book of the Essay. In Book II, Locke went further by introducing a sociological account of how moral rules functioned in practice – codified by Locke in the law of opinion or 1

2

Michael Ainsworth was the son of a family servant at Wimbourne St Giles, Shaftesbury’s family estate in Dorset, whom Shaftesbury maintained at University College, Oxford (and subsequently in his studies for ordination). Later Shaftesbury recommended him to Bishop Burnet, pointing out that he took him into his family and never employed him in anything ‘servile’. Public Record Office 30/24/22/7, fol. 496. Printed in The Life, Unpublished Letters, and Philosophical Regimen of Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, ed. Benjamin Rand (London, 1900), 419. Hereafter cited as Rand. Rand, 403. This letter, dated 3 June 1709, first appeared after Shaftesbury’s death in Several Letters Written by a Noble Lord to a Young Man at the University (London, 1716), this citation p. 39. In his first letter to Ainsworth, however, Shaftesbury said that he did not regret lending him Locke’s Essay, ‘which may as well qualify for Business and the World, as for the Sciences and a University. No one has done more towards the Recalling of Philosophy from Barbarity, into Use and Practice of the World, and into the Company of the better and politer Sort; who might well be ashamed of it in its other Dress. No one has opened a better or clearer Way to Reasoning’ (Several Letters, 4–5; not in Rand).

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fashion – which introduced a perpetual disorder in the moral world in Shaftesbury’s estimation. Such an evaluation depended on rejecting crucial provisions of Locke’s moral theory, like the law of nature, the role of rewards and punishments, and the value of Scripture. Locke appeared to him as a dangerous exponent of relativism, content to advertise human variation without identifying departures from the norm as instances of error, vice, or depravity. Shaftesbury had a very different perspective. In opposition to the sceptical tendencies of Locke’s critique, he maintained a Stoic confidence in human uniformity, expressed in shared ideas of virtue and the divine, consonant with the order of the universe itself. His aestheticised outlook equated the beautiful with the good,3 and he regarded taste as a consensual notion reached through cultivation. Examples of misjudgement, of moral error or barbarous custom had no real effect on his normatively structured system of values; they merely confirmed the necessity of referring back to the standard and reminding ourselves that politeness and virtue remained a telos of human nature which not everyone achieved. Cultural difference in matters of ethics and religion, cited by Locke in his critique, emerged as deformity or the negative consequences of custom, education, and – in his most provocative formulation – religion itself. Shaftesbury provided a powerful and influential, if often controversial, alternative to Locke. The subtlety of his negotiation of the problem of diversity was frequently predicated on attacking Locke, although he refused to name him in his printed writings. His private correspondence and unpublished drafts tell a different story. Yet there was another important territory of dispute between them: religion and its relationship to morality. Locke had effectively tied the two together, at least for Christians who relied on the only sure source of moral truth and guidance – the revealed word of Scripture. In a deist vein, Shaftesbury argued against this approach.4 Locke had also insisted on rewards and punishments as the only means of securing virtuous behaviour and this too Shaftesbury rejected. Virtue was not a matter of prudential calculation, in his view, but a case of 3

4

See for example Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge, 1999), 320, 327. There was a strong classical precedent for this of course. For further discussion, see John Andrew Bernstein, ‘Shaftesbury’s Identification of the Good with the Beautiful’, EighteenthCentury Studies 10:3 (1977): 304–25. For Shaftesbury’s deist affiliations, see Alfred Owen Aldridge, ‘Shaftesbury and the Deist Manifesto’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s. 41, pt 2 (Philadelphia, 1951): 297–385; for a contemporary assessment, see John Leland, who paid tribute to aspects of Shaftesbury’s moral system but objected to his deism, in the fifth letter of his View of the Principal Deistical Writers (London, 1754).

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following nature and the disinterested impulses of affection, love, and friendship that animated the soul. Despite these differences, we can see that Shaftesbury and Locke shared some important political values associated with the Whig tradition. Consent, the balance of power, the rejection of tyranny, and extension of toleration placed them in company with one another,5 appropriately enough given Locke’s political work for his patron, the first Earl of Shaftesbury. The political grounding of the third earl’s philosophical programme adds an important dimension to our understanding of his account of diversity. The paradox of his position is that while he articulated a consensus over morality, divine order, and taste, always referring to the existence of a rule or standard, he rejected this notion in the case of religion. Religion was a territory of free inquiry and dispute. Toleration was essential in this case, both for ‘enthusiastic’ extremists and for freethinkers. Thus his willingness to acknowledge and in some respects encourage diversity in the sphere of religion was predicated on claiming a territory of agreement rooted in human nature, virtue, and a providential conception of the divine. I SHAFTESBURY AND LOCKE

Before investigating Shaftesbury’s philosophical response to Locke, the biographical connection between the two should be established. Locke entered the service of the first earl (then Lord Ashley) in 1667, initially in a medical capacity (possibly advising him to undergo a life-saving operation in May 1668);6 later Locke assisted in the complex marriage negotiations for the future second earl. Locke also oversaw medical arrangements for the birth of the couple’s children and therefore had a role in Anthony’s life from the very beginning (he was born in 1671). Locke’s activity extended from this sphere to include work related to the first earl’s political concerns, notably on trade, religious toleration, and the drafting of a constitution for the Carolina colony (of which Ashley was proprietor and Locke a landgrave).7 His position of trust made him an obvious resource when the first 5

6 7

In his critical letter on Locke’s philosophy to Ainsworth, Shaftesbury began by saying that he honoured Locke for his other writings ‘on government, policy, trade, coin, education, toleration, & c’ (Rand, 404; Several Letters, 38–9). Their views on the problem of enthusiasm, which had interesting divergences and continuities, will be discussed below in the final section. J. R. Milton, ‘Locke, Medicine, and the Mechanical Philosophy’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 9:2 (2001): 230. See K. H. D. Haley, The First Earl of Shaftesbury (Oxford, 1968).

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earl sought advice on the education of his grandson (he took charge of this affair due to his son’s infirmity).8 Again, Locke played a leading role and selected a governess for Anthony, Elizabeth Birch. Periods of travel and exile for Locke in France and Holland prevented close contact in Anthony’s youth but Locke remained informed of his progress and sent him gifts. Later Locke arranged for him to meet his friends in Holland during his Grand Tour.9 Anthony himself formed important friendships with many of them. In a letter to Jean Le Clerc written not long after Locke’s death, Shaftesbury described Locke as having ‘the absolute direction of my education, and to whom next my immediate parents, as I must own the greatest obligation, so I have ever preserved the highest gratitude and duty’.10 The extant correspondence between Shaftesbury and Locke suggests an amicable relationship, animated by discussion of philosophical matters, and lacking excessive formality or reserve.11 Further evidence of this closeness appears in their frequent proposals to meet, whether in London or in Essex, where Locke lived in retirement at Oates, the home of Damaris Masham, the daughter of Ralph Cudworth, the leading Cambridge Platonist philosopher.12 They might have met more often if health problems had not intervened – both suffered from asthma. 8

Locke’s interest in educational matters appears not only in his letters to Edward Clarke but also in the publication based on these letters, Some Thoughts concerning Education (1693). In a biographical memoir of Locke written for Jean Le Clerc, Shaftesbury stated: ‘. . . I and six more of us (brothers and sisters) were born, in whose education from the earliest infancy Mr. Locke governed according to his own principles (since published by him) . . .’ (8 February 1705; Rand, 332). This refers as much to the physical regimen recommended by Locke, which succeeded with all but Anthony. 9 For example, the prominent Quaker Benjamin Furly and his son Arent, men of letters such as Pierre Coste and Jean Le Clerc, as well as the distinguished Remonstrant professor Philip van Limborch. See Original Letters of John Locke, Algernon Sidney and Lord Shaftesbury, ed. T. Forster (1847; Bristol, 1990); Anthony Ashley Cooper Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713) and ‘Le Refuge Franc¸ais’ – Correspondence, ed. Rex A. Barrell (Lewiston, N.Y., 1989). For a biography of Shaftesbury, see Robert Voitle, The Third Earl of Shaftesbury 1671–1713 (Baton Rouge, 1984). 10 Rand, 332. 11 See for example Anthony’s letter of 12/22 December 1687, The Correspondence of John Locke, ed. E. S. de Beer, 8 vols. (Oxford, 1976–89), III: 309–10. When Anthony became third earl in 1699, he assumed responsibility for an annuity of Locke’s and their later letters were often confined to financial matters. 12 Discussion of possible meetings occurs in many letters, including 3 November 1692; 26 January 1693; and 22? November 1694 (Correspondence, IV: 569–70, 632–3, V: 192–3). They met May 1693 (Correspondence, IV: 675–6) and two other encounters after this time are noted by Maurice Cranston ( John Locke: A Biography (1957; Oxford, 1985), 352, 452): Christmas 1691 and Easter 1701 (it is unlikely that they met in the summer of 1704, as Cranston alleges, 472). In his final letter to Locke, Shaftesbury wrote: ‘. . . were I now so well as to undertake a Journey, I shoud be thinking of seeing you in the first place before any other of my Friends; especially hearing (as I do with great Trouble), that you are of late wors than you us’d to be’ (letter of 7 September 1704, Correspondence, VIII: 388). Locke died 28 October 1704.

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At Christmas 1691, Shaftesbury did make the trip to Essex, and after he returned to London he wrote an intriguing letter to Locke which provides some insight into their relationship. In a bantering discussion in which each was accused of confederacy with Lady Masham against the other, Shaftesbury compared Locke’s power to those of princes, which he excelled because his began ‘where Reason does, and gains the Mind first’. He struggled to define Locke’s effect on him but acknowledged that whatever it was, he could not embrace his former diversions with the same satisfaction. Reverting to French (he had recently returned from his Continental tour), he called Locke a ‘Sorcier’, able to disguise himself. Shaftesbury played out a comic turn on this notion, imagining Locke as possessing poisons and other diabolic instruments. Even at a distance from Locke’s ‘castle’, he could take no more pleasure in his old pursuits, such was the force of one he addressed as ‘O sage et Puissant Enchanteur!’13 Locke was undoubtedly a daunting figure, but Shaftesbury did not avoid philosophical topics in his letters, even if he broached them with a certain wariness. In advance of the Essay’s appearance they discussed some of the book’s themes and Locke evidently encouraged Anthony to develop his thoughts further in written form. In a letter of 1689, written when he was eighteen, Shaftesbury excused himself for his reticence in replying to Locke’s position, blaming his own confusion. It is worth quoting some of his comments, as they suggest the distinctive character of their initial exchanges: I bethought myself of the Practice you have so often advised me to; and here being a very fair occasion offered, I resolved, to muster up my disorderly thoughts, and make all the Strength I Could for those Yesterday’s notions that had fainted but att the apprehension of your siding against ’em, and that onely your absence could come to something, where they might have liberty to gett to some head ’ere they were Crushed, and were not to be destroyed so still in their rise.14

These remarks highlight a complex relationship of some intimacy in which Locke provided intellectual guidance but remained a formidable, 13 14

Letter of 31 December 1691, Correspondence, IV: 348–51. No doubt he was playing on the fact that Oates was partly moated. I am grateful to Philip Milton for drawing my attention to this letter. Letter of August 1689 (Correspondence, III: 667). Locke’s contract for publication of the Essay was executed in May 1689 and he had received bound copies by December 1689. See Peter H. Nidditch, ‘Introduction’ to Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch, corrected edn (Oxford, 1979), xv. Locke arranged for Shaftesbury to receive presentation copies of the first two editions of the Essay as well as his replies to Edward Stillingfleet. See Jean S. Yolton, John Locke: A Descriptive Bibliography (Bristol, 1998), 71, 76, 297, 300.

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even a ‘crushing’, opponent. At the same time, Shaftesbury allowed himself room to respond by employing the familiar modesty topos, presenting himself as the pupil playing up to his learned teacher. Above all, the letter reveals that their philosophical engagement ended in something closer to rivalry than consensus, as Shaftesbury searched for an independent position that would challenge his tutor. The philosophical issue he went on to discuss in the letter is the possibility of ‘thinking matter’, a controversial suggestion raised in Locke’s Essay.15 He clearly intended to vie with Locke and goad him into a response. We also see evidence here of Anthony’s close familiarity with Locke’s position and the contribution made to his intellectual development by Locke. Over the next few years Shaftesbury began to mature philosophically and to formulate some of the ideas expressed in An Inquiry Concerning Virtue (first published in an edition of 1699).16 In a remarkable letter to Locke written in 1694, when he was twenty-three, Shaftesbury presaged many of the points he would later develop over the course of his career. He sided with the ancients, for example, and refused to accept the fashionable new philosophy espoused in England: ‘Descartes, or Mr Hobbs, or any of their Improvers have the same reason to . . . bee Jealouse about their Notions . . . as a practizing Apothecary or a mountebank has to bee Jealouse about the Compositions that are to goe by his name.’17 Locke could well have been included in this class of innovators, though Shaftesbury refrained from naming him. He made a related objection when he attacked virtuosi in natural philosophy, questioning whether their inquiries led to increased self-knowledge or made divine perfection 15 16

17

Locke, Essay, IV.iii.6. On the controversy, see John Yolton, Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford, 1983). Shaftesbury’s son (the fourth earl) claimed that his father had not authorised this publication and sought to withdraw all the copies he could obtain. The fourth earl blamed John Toland for surreptitious publication (Rand, xxiii–xxiv). M. L. de Miranda has argued that this is inaccurate, designed to discredit Toland. ‘The Moral, Social and Political Thought of the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, 1671–1713: Unbelief and Whig Republicanism in the Early Enlightenment’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Cambridge, 1994), 285–9. Shaftesbury continued to work with Toland and pay him an annuity until 1703; copies were still being advertised for sale by Shaftesbury’s publisher in 1706 (in Discourses Concerning Government by Algernon Sidney [1704] and volume III of State Tracts [1706]); and Shaftesbury encouraged a French translation by Pierre Desmaizeaux, beginning in 1700, and pursued the matter as late as 1705 (it was never completed). Shaftesbury’s stated dissatisfactions are expressed in the light of an opportunity to revise it for the Characteristicks. See Several Letters, 42 (Rand, 405); and Miscellaneous Reflections in Characteristics, 419. However, Laurent Jaffro suggests (personal communication) that while it is true that Shaftesbury’s son sought to distance his father from the odium of Toland’s political reputation, the fourth earl may nonetheless be correct in his account of the immediate circumstances of (unauthorised) publication of the Inquiry in 1699. Letter of 29 September 1694 (Correspondence, V: 151).

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any more perfect.18 Most significantly, Shaftesbury established in this letter what he understood as the proper goal of philosophy: to identify for oneself that man is a ‘Rationall and Sociable Creature by his Nature, and has an End to which he should refer his slightest actions’. The preeminent science studies ‘the well being of Man in Societys’. This is the basic tenet of Shaftesbury’s philosophy, examined in greatest detail in his Inquiry: human nature possesses a telos, one that can be known by studying the world in a neo-platonic and Stoic fashion; a proper perception of design will acquaint us with the transcendent form of nature. Unfortunately, we do not have Locke’s reply. He noted at the end of his copy of the letter ‘Answered 14 Nov’ but this letter has not survived. In any case, Locke clearly challenged and stimulated Shaftesbury’s thinking from the very start, and the development of Shaftesbury’s position resulted as much from a response to Locke as it did from his assimilation of ancient philosophy. When Shaftesbury embarked on his political career, first as an MP for Poole in 1695 and later in the Lords when he became the third earl (1699),19 Locke continued to monitor his progress and provide a source of guidance and connections.20 Locke himself remained politically active at this time as a member of the Board of Trade and a participant in the debates over recoinage.21 There is evidence that Shaftesbury was drawn into some of the 18

19

20

21

This position is reiterated in a letter to Michael Ainsworth of 24 February 1708/9, where he complained of philosophy built on ‘comparison and Compounding of Ideas, complex, implex, reflex, and all that Din and Noise of Metaphysicks; all that pretended Study and Science of Nature call’d Natural Philosophy, Aristotelian, Cartesian, or whatever else it be’ (Several Letters, 21–2; not printed in Rand). In his Soliloquy, published a year later, Shaftesbury continued to question philosophical priorities. Against a technical approach, he foregrounded human nature and selfknowledge as his ultimate concern. As opposing figures, he cited Descartes explicitly and Locke by implication by referring to philosophers preoccupied by the specious study of simple and complex ideas and the agreement and disagreement of ideas. Characteristics, 131, 134–5. He served in the Commons from 1695 to 1698, but declined to stand in 1698 in evident fatigue with ‘that Dinn of State Dogmatists, Prescribers, Moralizers, Exhorters, Praisers, Censurers, such as the D[avenant]t’s, the F[letche]r’s, M[oleswor]th’s, J. L[ocke]’s etc’. PRO 30/24/27/10, fol. 209r, quoted in Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1994), 138. Shaftesbury returned to parliament in the Lords from 1700 to 1702. After William’s reign he remained influential and ideologically active, although distanced as a result of the change of ministry, his travels, and health problems. See 27 January 1696, Correspondence, V: 524–6; 16 April 1696, Correspondence, V: 605. Shaftesbury (then Lord Ashley) sat on the Commons committee on coinage in late 1695. Although the committee backed aspects of Locke’s proposals on the subject, Locke’s April letter may refer to doubts over Shaftesbury’s degree of support. This suggestion is made by Christopher John Cunliffe, ‘The Third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713): His Politics and Ideas’ (D.Phil. diss., University of Oxford, 1981), 97–8, 69. Peter Laslett, ‘John Locke, the Great Recoinage, and the Origins of the Board of Trade: 1695–1698’, in John Locke: Problems and Perspectives, ed. John W. Yolton (Cambridge, 1969), 137–64.

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political concerns of Locke’s associates in the ‘College’.22 With Locke he shared a range of Whig commitments, and a concern to repair his grandfather’s reputation. Although he was aligned with the Country Whig faction, Shaftesbury’s independent turn of mind was also apparent.23 He combined this with values of classical republicanism, inspired by Harrington’s political thought, which led to close association with figures such as John Toland and Robert Molesworth.24 As a ‘commonwealthman’ he spoke for virtue, against corruption, and against the provision of a standing army (following the peace of the Treaty of Ryswick). His affiliations, in this regard, were further strengthened by his philosophical explorations of freethought. II SHAFTESBURY’S CHARACTERISTICKS

Shaftesbury’s major publication, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711; 2nd edn 1714), was a composite text. The first two volumes consisted of works he had published earlier and then revised: A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm (1708); Sensus Communis: an Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour (1709); and Soliloquy: or, Advice to an Author (1710), occupied volume one. He designated them as preparatory for the second volume consisting of An Inquiry Concerning Virtue, or Merit and The Moralists, a Philosophical Rhapsody (1709). The third volume provided 22

23

24

Cunliffe, ‘Third Earl of Shaftesbury’, 59–64; Miranda, ‘Moral, Social and Political Thought’, 276. The College included Edward Clarke, MP for Taunton, and Thomas Freke, with parliamentary support from Sir Walter Yonge and Sir Francis Masham (husband of Damaris Cudworth Masham). The Country Whig identification became less relevant in the changed political circumstances as Shaftesbury entered the Lords. In fact, Shaftesbury supported the Junto lords who faced impeachment in 1701, including Lord Somers. On Shaftesbury’s political career and philosophy, see A. B. Worden, ‘Introduction’ to Edmund Ludlow, A Voyce from the Watch Tower, Part Five: 1660–1662 (London, 1978); Cunliffe, ‘Third Earl of Shaftesbury’; Miranda, ‘Moral, Social and Political Thought’. This contains a valuable study of the corpus of Shaftesbury’s writings and associated works, expanding the canon of political texts and writings done under his patronage (however, I disagree with his de-attribution of the preface to Whichcote’s Sermons), 270–302; Klein, Shaftesbury, esp. ch. 7; Klein questions the extent of his political radicalism and emphasises, with Worden, Shaftesbury’s aristocratic, senatorial stance. Justin Champion stresses the Harringtonian impetus behind Shaftesbury’s conception of virtue and civil religion. The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and Its Enemies, 1660–1730 (Cambridge, 1992), 213–18. For his connections with Toland and the reconciliation of republican values with monarchy, see Champion, Republican Learning: John Toland and the Crisis of Christian Culture, 1696–1722 (Manchester, 2003), 32, 111, 116–17, 124–6, 151–5. On the connection with Molesworth, see Letters from the Right Honourable the Late Earl of Shaftesbury to Robert Molesworth, ed. John Toland (London, 1721), with a celebratory introduction by Toland. On the context of publication of this work, see Champion, Republican Learning, 152–4.

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a commentary on the preceding texts under the title Miscellaneous Reflections.25 It was a heterogeneous collection with numerous targets and preoccupations, but Shaftesbury described it as possessing a unified intention, as he remarked near the end of the work: It has been the main scope and principal end of these volumes to assert the reality of a beauty and charm in moral as well as natural subjects, and to demonstrate the reasonableness of a proportionate taste and determinate choice in life and manners. The standard of this kind and the noted character of moral truth appear so firmly established in nature itself, and so widely displayed through the intelligent world, that there is no genius, mind or thinking principle, which, if I may say so, is not really conscious in the case.26

Nature furnished a norm in matters of ethics and taste, and our responsibility was to proportion ourselves to it. No one of any sentience could deny the reality of these things – even the most refractory of individuals would find themselves, however reluctantly, acknowledging an unshakable distinction between right and wrong. He brought together in this statement some of his most basic assumptions and habits of thought, linking a moral and aesthetic perspective which he grounded in nature. A rule or standard was available to human intelligence and served to coordinate our taste in manners as much as our appreciation of beauty. What is more, he recognised that the philosophy he presented was geared towards assertion more than argument, articulating deeply held values in a non-technical style. Thus we cannot look to his work for an argument structured by premises and logical deductions. Instead he introduced a series of interrelated 25

26

For convenience I have continued to italicise these titles even though all references are to the versions printed in the Characteristicks. In particular, all references to Shaftesbury’s Inquiry are to the revised edition printed as An Inquiry Concerning Virtue, or Merit (the 1699 edition was entitled simply An Inquiry Concerning Virtue). There are a number of editions of the Characteristicks now available. I have quoted from Lawrence Klein’s edition which contains useful historical annotation. Shaftesbury’s orthography, punctuation, and emphasis are not retained by Klein, and the classical quotations are translated rather than given in the original. For a critical edition, see Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Philip Ayres, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1999), based on Shaftesbury’s revisions for the second edition (1714) as noted in his copy of the first edition retained in the British Library. The Standard Edition of Shaftesbury’s complete works, ed. Wolfram Benda, Wolfgang Lottes, Friedrich A. Uehlein and Erwin Wolff, 8 vols to date (Stuttgart, 1981– ) contains a number of valuable documents, including a facing-page edition of the 1699 Inquiry and the revised version, as well as the unpublished first version of The Moralists. But the series is problematic in adopting the 1711 edition of the Characteristicks as the copy text and disaggregating the work into constituent parts divided into separate volumes of aesthetics and his moral and political works (domains which Shaftesbury strove to unify). The most attractive edition and in many respects closest in appearance to the original is published by the Liberty Fund, ed. Douglas Den Uyl, 3 vols. (Indianapolis, 2001). Classical quotations are given in the original in notes with translation, and Shaftesbury’s commissioned illustrations are also reproduced. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 466.

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assumptions in a variety of rhetorical modes. Often he merely appealed to the truth of his position, which he understood as immediately recognisable, claiming that no one of good sense would contradict his view.27 Rhetorical questions, exclamations, and appeals to intuition consolidated a likeminded readership unwilling to engage with the misguided technicalities of Descartes, Hobbes, or Locke. Philosophy properly began with the self, in his estimation, and a narrative of internal impulses, often descriptive rather than argumentative, was therefore an appropriate method of proceeding. The closest Shaftesbury came to a philosophical treatise, his Inquiry, was built more on assumptions than strict argument or logical replies to objections. Even so, he remained somewhat apologetic for its ‘metaphysical’ density, as he commented in the Miscellaneous Reflections, which contrasted with the polite approach he took elsewhere.28 Part of this rhetorical strategy was governed by his conviction that philosophy had to be rescued from the world of scholastic disputation and the university or the dry milieu of the sermon. If it was to establish its rightful place in the polite world of gentlemanly conversation, philosophy required a very different manner of expression. For all these reasons, Shaftesbury was drawn to a variety of forms – the letter to a friend, composed to a sympathetic figure who shared his convictions; soliloquy, ‘self-dialogue’, and the genre of advice; dialogue between polite protagonists; and an ironic, self-distancing mode that appears throughout his work but most especially in the concluding contribution to the Characteristicks, his Miscellaneous Reflections, which commented on the preceding works and treated the author in the third person.29 One of the central organising concepts in Shaftesbury’s work is that of order. He repeatedly claimed that a principle of order existed in the universe, which he equated with divine providence and goodness. Notions of harmony and beauty complemented this perspective which 27 28 29

John Brown complained of this in Essays on the Characteristics (London, 1751), 116–18, although he noted that Shaftesbury was not alone in the failing. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 427. On Shaftesbury’s rhetoric and style, see Klein, Shaftesbury ; Laurent Jaffro, E´thique de la communication et art d’e´crire: Shaftesbury et les Lumie`res anglaises (Paris, 1998); Robert Markley, ‘Style as Philosophical Structure: The Contexts of Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks’, in The Philosopher as Writer: The Eighteenth Century, ed. Robert Ginsberg (London, 1987), 140–54; on his handling of different genres, Michael Prince, Philosophical Dialogue in the British Enlightenment: Theology, Aesthetics, and the Novel (Cambridge, 1996), ch. 1; on the dialogue form, ibid., ch. 2; and Timothy Dykstal, The Luxury of Skepticism: Politics, Philosophy, and Dialogue in the English Public Sphere 1660–1740 (Charlottesville, 2001), ch. 3; on Shaftesbury’s style and the complex organisation of the text, see Isabel Rivers, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660–1780, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1991–2000), II: 98–114.

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was as much moral and religious (on Shaftesbury’s terms) as it was aesthetic. In the moral world a similar sense of order was discernible, and it followed that whatever created disorder, whatever diminished our sense of the beauty of the world, constituted vice or bad taste. Nothing was more important to stimulating the natural affection of human beings than to call their attention to this governing order which merited their love, appealing to the best in them. As he put it in The Moralists, ‘We must contend for order.’30 The imperative suggested that however spontaneous and natural it was for mankind to have this appreciation, we still needed to defend and strive for it. The contrary – a disordered condition in which we abandoned virtue and gave in to vice – turned everything into chaos and reduced the world to the ‘atoms, chance and confusion of the atheists’.31 It will come as no surprise that Shaftesbury’s proof of divinity was based on the design argument, much favoured by the Stoics.32 The wisdom of the animal ‘economy’, the structure of plants, the evident purpose of all created beings for whom an end had been appointed, the organisation of life in terms of species entailing a ‘system’ – all of these considerations spoke to the existence of a benevolent creator. On this basis, Shaftesbury defined himself, rather provocatively, as a ‘theist’. Partly he achieved this by excluding the middle term of deism: on his definition the only alternatives to theism were either atheism or polytheism.33 In other words, he was unwilling to tar himself with the brush of deism although it is sometimes difficult to distinguish his position from others ranked in that category.34 Certainly he eschewed the notion of a God speaking in individual providential signs (and meting out particular punishments at the same time);35 questioned the revealed status of Scripture; undermined miracles; 30 32

33 34

35

Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 270. 31 Ibid., 271. Philocles, the ‘sceptical’ participant in the dialogue The Moralists, points out that this is the sole argument employed by Theocles, Shaftesbury’s spokesman, to the neglect of other arguments regarding a first cause and prime mover. Nor does Theocles ever transcend ‘probability’ in this argument (ibid., 278–9). On the Stoic attachment to the design argument, see L. P. Gerson, God and Greek Philosophy: Studies in the Early History of Natural Theology (London, 1990), 154–67. For a manuscript of Shaftesbury’s deliberating over the first cause, associated with a principle of goodness, see Hampshire Record Office, Malmesbury Papers, 9M73/G272 (this collection came through the philosopher and aesthete James Harris, Shaftesbury’s nephew). Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 165. A passage in his ‘Exercises’ indicates that Shaftesbury found ‘deism’ difficult to pin down. He distinguished a strain acceptable to him which maintained an ‘exalted’ idea of God as a mind ‘Universally governing presiding acting’, conscious of all human thought, and responsible for providence and design, from another form which reduced everything to atoms and matter in motion and was hardly distinct from atheism. Shaftesbury Papers, Public Record Office 30/24/27/10. In the Inquiry (Characteristics, 184), however, he remarked on divine ‘superintendancy’ and God as an interested spectator on virtuous actions.

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emphasised religion as a moral affair; and was silent on such doctrinal matters as the Trinity. For Shaftesbury, in the end, ‘To believe therefore that every thing is governed, ordered or regulated for the best by a designing principle or mind, necessarily good and permanent, is to be a perfect theist.’36 Mankind needed not only to embrace the divine but also to recognise that everyone existed as part of a system. Nothing was complete in itself but had a relation to something else, something larger outside of it. Ultimately this led to an acknowledgement of what he called a ‘universal system’,37 identified with nature, a coherent organisation, based on mutual interdependence. To think of human beings as isolated individuals made no sense and denied not only the reality of belonging to a species but also the constant patterns of interconnection and support that human life required. In characterising human nature, Shaftesbury turned decisively against an Epicurean tradition he associated with Hobbes and Locke. Rather than seeing people as motivated by self-interest (a potentially chaotic set of circumstances, controlled only by the power of the sovereign for Hobbes, or by divine authority meting out rewards and punishments for Locke), Shaftesbury attempted to define a series of values which he claimed were rooted in nature. The first of these was sociability. Instead of the relentlessly anti-social portrait of human action in Hobbes or the hedonist model of Locke, Shaftesbury stressed the importance of parental care, the fact that offspring required a far longer period of nurture than other species. To contemplate an entirely isolated individual was a terrible prospect; on the contrary, love and affection were constant features of social experience that defined human life. In this context he mentioned bonds of friendship and the special feeling of satisfaction in doing good to a friend, and he appealed to the notion of enlarging this affection to a ‘universal’ level.38 In fact, the social principle was so strong that it sometimes led to evils that required correction – the existence of political faction could be traced to an originally sociable impulse.39 Shaftesbury constructed the framework of a political theory based on this conception, challenging Hobbes’s view of the state of nature by regarding it as a sociable and virtuous condition.40 Even war provided an opportunity, in the midst of conflict, for the highest demonstration of fellowship, heroism, and philanthropy.41 In any case, attachments to 36 37

Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 165; see also 190. Ibid., 275. 38 Ibid., 256. 39 Ibid., 53.

40

Ibid., 51.

41

Ibid., 52.

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family, clan, and ultimately nation and the ‘public’ arose from this profound tendency. Throughout his discussion, Shaftesbury operated with a powerful conception of nature as a defining norm. He equated the natural with the good and saw departures from nature as intrinsically false, wicked, deformed, or unfortunate. The concept of nature as a norm, which Locke had done so much to dismantle, was intrinsically beyond challenge as Shaftesbury presented it. He merely offered a series of axioms or definitions which suffered from an inevitable circularity. Nature served as a transcendental source of validation, and to that extent Shaftesbury could do no more than appeal to it. (Later, we shall come to his hierarchical deployment of the notion.) Shaftesbury’s normative understanding of nature becomes conspicuous in his Inquiry, where he stated that ‘there is in reality a right and a wrong state of every creature’ and that nature ‘forwarded’ the right state.42 For human beings, this was complemented by recognising that a moral goal existed to which the human constitution naturally directed itself. Anything that assisted the attainment of this state was good and anything that prevented it was evil. Virtue, according to Shaftesbury, amounted to conformity with a ‘natural and just sense of right and wrong’.43 He described the sense of this difference as a fundamental principle of the human constitution, ‘as natural to us as natural affection itself ’.44 Nothing could diminish it other than improper custom or perverse education. Thus, no amount of diversity could ever shake the foundation of his system; he had already accounted for it as a mere departure from the norm. Locke of course contested the existence of a norm in nature, and the considerable effort he expended in developing the critique of innateness was necessitated by the resourcefulness of his opponents in redeploying the concept in the face of any amount of counter-evidence. III STOICISM AND PROLEPSIS

As this line of argument suggests, a major point of dispute between Locke and Shaftesbury focused on diversity and the issue of innateness. Locke had used testimony of cultural difference to unseat the notion of internal principles of right and wrong, inscribed on the soul or realised in the process of maturation. In a similar fashion he proved that the idea of God did not exist innately across mankind. For Shaftesbury, reinstatement 42

Ibid., 167.

43

Ibid., 177.

44

Ibid., 179.

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of some version of innateness was essential in retaining a moral norm; unless nature could be defended as the source of this tuition, a relentless diversity of moral opinion would result, allowing Locke’s ‘law of opinion’ to prevail. In the context of moral theory, Shaftesbury’s attachment to the concept of innateness appears in his frequent recourse to the language of ‘implanting’ throughout the Inquiry.45 He asserted that a ‘real sense of right and wrong’ was implanted in the heart, along with a ‘principle of virtue’ and what he called ‘natural affection’.46 In The Moralists he went further by saying that the ideas of order and proportion had been ‘strongly imprinted on our minds’,47 which accounted for our ability to distinguish between harmony and discord, orderly motion and what was arbitrary or ungoverned, the appreciation of regularity in an architectural piece in opposition to the randomness of a heap of stones. The use of the passive voice elides the source of these ideas: the divine. He made this explicit in A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm, remarking on the ‘original ideas of goodness, which the same Divine Being, or Nature under him, has implanted in us’.48 The question of innateness came up for more formal consideration in The Moralists, which was composed as a dialogue between Theocles – who spoke for Shaftesbury – and the sceptically inclined Philocles. Theocles maintains that our ideas of virtue and beauty come from nature; the mind’s ‘pregnancy’ in this respect derives from no other source than God. His interlocutor asks him whether, in that case, ‘these mental children, the notions and principles of fair, just and honest, with the rest of these ideas, are innate?’49 Theocles gives an indirect reply. He draws an analogy with the organs of sense and asks whether we should refer to them as formed before, after, or at the moment of birth itself. The answer remained a matter of speculation and he was less concerned with it than he was to make a crucial distinction between art and nature. The moral and aesthetic principles at stake had their origin in nature, not adventitious ‘art’ in the form of instruction or custom. If this were granted, it made little difference when exactly they manifested 45

46

On the Stoic notion of a belief in the gods implanted (insita) in all, see Seneca, Ep. mor., 117.6, and Cicero on ideas or tendencies implanted (ingenuit) at birth, De finibus, V.59–60. For a valuable discussion of innateness in the Inquiry, see Laurent Jaffro, ‘La Question du sens moral et le lexique stoı¨cien: sur la de´finition du ‘‘sense’’ comme ‘‘affection’’ dans l’Enqueˆte sur la vertu’, in Shaftesbury: philosophie et politesse, ed. Fabienne Bruge`re and Michel Malherbe (Paris, 2000), 61–78; for an important discussion more generally, see Rivers, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment, II: 126–9. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 185, 176, 192, 216. 47 Ibid., 273. 48 Ibid., 18. 49 Ibid., 325.

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themselves. Indeed, should his adversary wish to deny that life itself was innate, on the grounds that it came – strictly speaking – after the moment of birth, then it made no difference to him. What mattered was that nature remained the source ‘and nothing else’.50 If his antagonist disliked the word innate, he was happy to exchange it for the parallel one of instinct – so long as he accepted that it was nature’s instruction rather than what he called ‘art, culture, or discipline’.51 The Stoic pedigree of Shaftesbury’s view is clear if we return for a moment to the ancient sources. He was indebted to a Stoic adaptation of what was originally an Epicurean concept – that of prolepsis, which can be translated as ‘preconception’ or ‘anticipation’.52 Above all, prolepses were naturally formed concepts; they did not depend on or derive from instruction or from experience. Epictetus, whose philosophy was very important for Shaftesbury,53 had explained: ‘Prolepses are common to all men, and one prolepsis does not conflict with another. For who among us does not assume that the good is profitable and something to be chosen, and that in every circumstance we ought to seek and pursue it?’54 As Dominic Scott explains, the Stoics took on board two features of the concept of prolepsis derived from Epicurus. On the one hand, it constituted a truth criterion: a contested matter could be settled by appealing to an inborn and natural prolepsis. On the other, prolepsis was important epistemologically because it made knowledge possible.55 The possession of a prolepsis enabled us to make sense of experience in the world, to recognise things because we were predisposed toward them. For both reasons, prolepses had the capacity to settle dispute; an appeal to them concluded debate, assuring us of truth while providing the means to understand the issue in hand. 50 52 53

54 55

Ibid. 51 Ibid., 230. In Latin writings, Cicero refers to praenotiones in De natura deorum, I.44, as an equivalent (citing Epicurus and prolepsis explicitly); Seneca uses praesumptiones, Ep. mor. 117.6. For a notebook devoted to extensive notes on Epictetus, see PRO 30/24/27/16. They supplemented notes recorded in his copy of an ‘edition of Arrian’ prepared by Hieronymus Wolf (Cologne, 1595); for some discussion of the manuscript, see Laurent Jaffro, ‘Les Exercices de Shaftesbury: un stoı¨cisme cre´pusculaire’, in Le stoicisme aux XVIe et XVIIe sie`cles, ed. Jacqueline Lagre´e (Caen, 1994), 207–9. Jaffro dates the composition of the manuscript principally to 1705–7. Epictetus, The Discourses as Reported by Arrian, the Manual, and Fragments, trans. W. A. Oldfather, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1925–8), I.xxii.1–3. Translation modified. Dominic Scott, Recollection and Experience: Plato’s Theory of Learning and Its Successors (Cambridge, 1995), 165. For a valuable discussion of prolepsis more generally, see 159–68, 180–1. See also Malcolm Schofield, ‘Preconception, Argument and God’, in Doubt and Dogmatism: Studies in Hellenistic Epistemology, ed. Malcolm Schofield, Myles Burnyeat, and Jonathan Barnes (Oxford, 1980), 283–308.

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In his unpublished philosophical ‘Exercises’, the ’ASKHMATA (Askemata),56 Shaftesbury frequently employed the term ‘prolepsis’, using it on one occasion as the heading of a section in the notebook.57 In his published work, the importance of this concept appears in a number of contexts where he supplied English equivalents for ‘prolepsis’. In The Moralists he speaks of presensations and preconceptions, for example.58 When the antagonist, Philocles, questions whether we have a preconceived notion of what is fair and beautiful, Theocles responds by asking how he could perceive beauty in another person without such an original conception – or does he suppose that he would remain indifferent unless he received prior instruction in such matters? Here Shaftesbury employs the notion of prolepsis as the basis of (aesthetic) recognition, suggesting that it occurs precisely because nature has endowed us with something in advance of experience which directs the objects of our affection.59 As he extends the discussion to moral matters, Theocles affirms that the distinction between just and unjust is likewise founded in ‘a natural presumption or anticipation’.60 In the Inquiry Shaftesbury had offered a similar analysis. He regarded it as impossible to imagine someone indifferent to representations of justice and virtue, arguing that it would take considerable effort to overwhelm what he described, in a new coinage, as the ‘natural prevention or prepossession of the mind in favour of this moral distinction’.61 Shaftesbury’s debt becomes explicit in his Miscellaneous Reflections. Addressing those who have the affectation to deny the difference between natural and unnatural in things, he remarks that ‘we cannot resist our natural Anticipation’.62 This anticipation, in turn, supplies a standard 56

57 58 61

62

PRO 30/24/27/10. It consists of two notebooks, largely composed between 1698 and 1707, including the period of his two ‘retreats’ in Holland in 1698–9 and 1703–4. A version of the manuscript, not only reorganised but with many omissions and mis-transcriptions, was published under the title ‘Philosophical Regimen’ (Benjamin Rand’s translation of the word a' skZv mata) in The Life, Unpublished Letters, and Philosophical Regimen). I have worked from the manuscript in the Public Record Office. I am also very grateful to Professor Friedrich Uehlein for providing me with a copy of his transcription for the forthcoming volume in the Standard Edition. For a French translation, which preserves the order of the manuscript and contains valuable annotation, see Exercices ’ASKHMATA, ed. and trans. Laurent Jaffro (Paris, 1993). He also includes the phrase ‘
eri` to'n prolZv yeon’ (peri ton prolepseon) which is Epictetus’s title for Book I, chapter XXII of the Discourses (Shaftesbury includes this citation). Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 282, 326. 59 Ibid., 326. 60 Ibid., 329. Ibid., 178. In a note, Shaftesbury referred the reader ahead to his discussion in The Moralists of innateness, instinct, and the moral basis of pride and shame, which rested on a natural ‘impression’ incapable of being destroyed by ‘art or counter-nature’ (325–6, 329). ‘Prevention’ is a coinage from the Latin venire, to come. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 429.

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determining our assessment of moral actions in cases of dispute. To clarify his position, Shaftesbury includes a lengthy explanatory note. He glosses the phrase ‘natural anticipation’ in terms of what he had elsewhere called ‘preconceptions’ and ‘presensations’, equivalent to the term prolZv ceiB (prolepses). The connection between prolepses and innate ideas becomes apparent in this note as Shaftesbury goes on to invoke the views of Jean Le Clerc to support his position.63 In one of his recent writings, Le Clerc had referred explicitly to the controversy over ‘Ideis Innatis’ that had transpired among the learned, principally in Britain. For his part, Le Clerc accepted that it was improper to talk of ‘imprinted’ ideas (notiones a` Natura Animis nostris infixae); nonetheless he rescued a Stoic account by saying that the faculties of the mind had been shaped in such a way that they naturally distinguished good and evil, which he attributed to seeds implanted (semina indita) by nature.64 Le Clerc not only spoke of Ideis Innatis, but also used a Greek equivalent: e“mfuton e“nnoian (emphuton ennoian). This too was a phrase indicating a natural concept of virtue acquired without instruction. Importantly, it was used by Epictetus who had referred to the fact that there were inborn conceptions of good and evil and actions that ought and ought not to be done.65 Thus, in their plural forms, prolepses, ideae innatae

63

64

65

Shaftesbury met Le Clerc in Amsterdam in 1699 and they afterwards corresponded. Le Clerc was responsible for publicising Shaftesbury’s work on the Continent through his extended notices of his works in the Bibliothe`que Choisie. For some discussion, see Luisa Simonutti, ‘Shaftesbury e la ‘‘Bibliothe`que Choisie’’ ’, Giornale critico della filosofia italiana 68:2 (1987): 235–81. For their correspondence, see Anthony Ashley Cooper Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713) and ‘Le Refuge Franc¸ais’ – Correspondence. Le Clerc was also close to Locke, of course, whom he had earlier met in Holland. They maintained a correspondence and Le Clerc published various works of Locke’s, including a translation of the ‘Epitome’ of the Essay in 1688 (known as the Abre´ge´ ), as well as providing extended summaries of Locke’s writings in periodicals he edited. See Paul Schuurman, Ideas, Mental Faculties and Method: The Logic of Ideas of Descartes and Locke and Its Reception in the Dutch Republic, 1630–1750 (Leiden, 2004), 71–5. See Jean Le Clerc’s Silvae philologicae, included in his edition of Aeschines Socraticus, Dialogi tres (Amsterdam, 1711), 176, quoted by Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 429n. The original Latin is given in Den Uyl’s edition of the Characteristicks, III: 130–1n. On the Stoic notion of semina, see Maryanne Cline Horowitz, Seeds of Virtue and Knowledge (Princeton, 1998). Interestingly, Le Clerc had changed his position on this matter. In the chapter on innateness in his pneumatology, he produced a position dependent on Locke. All ideas had their origin in external impressions (sensations). There are no innate ideas of virtue or sin, and we work out our ideas of justice via reason. As a cure for the nonsense (inania) taught on the subject, he recommended Book I of Locke’s Essay and those wise men who traced our knowledge back to the senses. Ontologia (London, 1692), 102–3. This edition includes his ‘Pneumatologia’, and was prefaced by a dedicatory letter to Locke. Epictetus, Discourses, II.xi.3–4. Compare II.xvii.10 where he refers to prolepsis.

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and emphutoi ennoiai occupied the same semantic space, and Shaftesbury treated them as equivalent.66 The enormous advantage of the concept of prolepsis for Shaftesbury was that it implied the possibility of knowledge without guaranteeing it – it was an anticipation rather than a fully formed idea or principle. In the case of aesthetic judgement, some allowance had to be made for the fact that taste was not ‘ready formed’ when we entered the world. Certainly we acquired something from nature – call it faculties, senses, or ‘anticipating sensations’ – independent of any assistance. From them we built up particular notions of what was estimable aesthetically, but no one would regard these judgements as innate. In order to form taste, criticism was necessary together with practice and cultivation.67 In this fashion Shaftesbury sidestepped an obvious problem while retaining a version of naturally inspired tendencies. If we return to Epictetus, there was a further and even more crucial feature of the concept of prolepsis which he turned to advantage. In the same passage in which Epictetus affirmed that prolepses did not contradict one another, he observed that problems arose in ‘the application of our prolepses to particular cases’.68 In other words, he acknowledged the existence of error without allowing it to damage the integrity of the concept itself. Shaftesbury availed himself of the same flexible provision. Ethics still required reason which ensured the ‘right application of the affections’.69 In the case of mistaken ethical judgements, Shaftesbury could attribute them to a number of causes, including a ‘defect in the application of that unavoidable impression and first natural rule of honesty and worth’.70 Cases of this kind did not constitute telling examples of diversity that potentially refuted the concept, but mere errors of application. The seriousness of Shaftesbury’s deliberation over these issues appears in his ‘Exercises’ (’ASKHMATA). There he admonished himself on one occasion not to disturb the way the vulgar applied their prolepses. In general they had a right notion of the divine and he worried that disrupting these original conceptions would potentially do great damage. His personal adventurousness in matters of religion therefore carried with it a risk. 66

67 68 69

The equation is justified in relation to Greek terminology given that Plutarch refers to eÒmfutoi prolZv ceiB (emphutoi prolepseis) in his account of Chrysippus and early Stoic ethics, De Stoicorum repugnantiis, 1041e (I owe this reference to Anthony Long). Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 408. Epictetus, Discourses, I.xxii.2–3. See also ibid., II.xi.4–10. For some discussion, see A. A. Long, Epictetus: A Stoic and Socratic Guide to Life (Oxford, 2002), 80–2. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 175. 70 Ibid., 466.

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In ethical subjects, the vulgar might not have learned how to apply their notions correctly, but if he was not prepared to teach them himself, then his religious views might lead them into impiety and atheism.71 Elsewhere in Shaftesbury’s notebook, to which he made additions over many years, he indicated at one point that he considered his project as one of inversion in which he recovered the prolepses ‘from their contradictory use, misapplication & inverted State, to their real & proper Subjects’.72 Shaftesbury’s attraction to prolepses was based, finally, on rejecting a key requirement that Locke set in place: conformity in action.73 Locke demanded agreement or consistency in how people actually behaved, on the grounds that this offered the best interpretation of their thoughts and beliefs. At this point citation of the customs of ‘whole nations’ became significant for him because while individuals might act against their consciences, no one could believe that entire countries would do so without qualm. The commonly received custom became an interpreter of national convictions about what was deemed right and proper moral conduct. Locke was disallowing, crucially, a manoeuvre that kept innateness in place, namely to argue that while everyone agreed on the moral principle, they differed over what actions remained in conformity with it. Shaftesbury objected to this line because in some sense Locke cut off precisely what the concept of prolepsis was designed to achieve. Prolepses were innate, but they did not guarantee uniformity because they could be applied incorrectly. In other words, the principle or prolepsis remained the same, but the interpretation of it differed. This was not a dispositional theory as such, although it could be linked to one (with applications of prolepses improving as the subject matured), but it really raised a larger epistemic issue and placed a limitation on what level of agreement we could reasonably expect. IV LOCKE, SHAFTESBURY, AND INNATENESS

In his private correspondence we can see how much Shaftesbury was antagonised by Locke’s critique of innateness, which threatened a fundamental assumption of his philosophy. In reply, Shaftesbury made a number of counter-arguments mixed with satire and dismay over 71 72

73

PRO 30/24/27/10, fol. 61v. Ibid., fol. 223r. He went on to quote from Epictetus, adapting the Greek of Discourses, I.xxii.2–3: e' farmoV zein ta;B prolZv ceiB tai'B e' pi; meVrouB ou' si vaiB (to apply prolepses to each particular thing). See also Discourses, II.xi.10 (as noted by Jaffro, Exercices, 357), and II.xvii.9. Locke, Essay, I.iii.13.

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Locke’s position on the subject. In a letter of November 1709 to James Stanhope,74 in which he confessed his own position in philosophy ‘even against my old tutor and governor, whose name is so established in the world, but with whom I ever concealed my differences as much as possible’,75 Shaftesbury described the issue of innateness raised by Locke as ‘one of the childishest disputes that ever was’.76 The real question was not whether ‘propositions’ about right and wrong were innate but whether the inclination toward society was natural or the product of art or accident. Clearly he believed that if this trait of human nature were conceded, then the rest of his conclusions about the permanency of moral distinctions would follow. He addressed himself to the naive version of innateness which he replaced with a dispositional alternative.77 In a letter to Michael Ainsworth (with which I began this chapter), Shaftesbury was even more outspoken: Innate is a word he poorly plays upon; the right word, though less used, is connatural. For what has birth or progress of the foetus out of the Womb to do in this Case? The question is not about the time the ideas entered, or the moment that one body came out of the other, but whether the constitution of man be such that, being adult and grown up, at such or such a time, sooner or later (no matter when), the idea and sense of order, administration, and a God, will not infallibly, inevitably, necessarily spring up in him.78

Shaftesbury attempted to evade Locke’s reply to the dispositional account of innateness. Although Locke often addressed himself to the naive form specifically, which implied literal inscription, Locke was equally dissatisfied with the dispositional alternative, which introduced a number of qualifications for the emergence of universally held principles and ideas, whether the possession of reason, the use of language, or the attainment of maturity (as here). Shaftesbury’s substitution of ‘connatural’ for innate gave him some distance, at least, from the odium that now attached to the term Locke had 74

75 77 78

James Stanhope (1673–1721) had a distinguished military career principally during the War of Spanish Succession, rising to the rank of general. His parliamentary career, in which he supported the Whigs, began in 1701, interrupted by various campaigns in Spain. In late 1709, he returned to England and served on a Commons’ committee which drew up articles of impeachment against Sacheverell and participated in his trial. After Shaftesbury’s death he became secretary of state, privy councillor and for a time first lord of the treasury and chancellor of the exchequer. Rand, 416. 76 Ibid., 414. Scott, Recollection and Experience, 204–10, argues that the Stoics adhered to a dispositional theory of innateness. Rand, 403; Several Letters, 39. This passage was noted specifically in the review of Several Letters in Nouvelles de la Re´publique des Lettres (November–December 1716): 765. Rivers notes other responses, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment, II: 128n.

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attacked. By recalling ‘connatural’ into usage, Shaftesbury invoked the favoured expression of the Cambridge Platonists for referring to innateness. Benjamin Whichcote was especially fond of this terminology for describing natural predispositions to virtue and he used it on several occasions in the sermons that Shaftesbury first edited for the press in 1698.79 In answer to Locke’s supposed emphasis on education or catechism, Shaftesbury referred to the untutored ability of birds to build their nests and fly.80 In a more sarcastic vein he supposed that a ‘Lockist’ would require instruction in sexual matters – and in the absence of ‘schools of Venus’, ‘horrid lewd books’ and companions, or parental instruction, the tradition might be lost, and mankind perish as a result. ‘This is very poor philosophy,’ he concluded, rather dismissively.81 There is evidence indicating that Shaftesbury intended to carry on the polemic against Locke over the issue of innateness in work he was engaged in at the time of his death. An essay on ‘Plasticks, or the Original, Progress, & Power of Designatory Art’, which remained in note form (it was intended to form part of a companion volume to the Characteristicks known as Second Characters or the Language of Forms), contains a number of attacks which perpetuate the dispute. Addressing those who denigrated instinct and innate ideas, he allowed that some of his contemporaries had abused the concept and carried it too far, as Plato had done in antiquity (presumably in the theory of recollection offered in the Meno). But what troubled Shaftesbury, on this occasion, was Locke’s excessive exploitation of the fact. Locke’s just reputation for the genius of his other writings meant that he was well received on the subject of innateness, so much so that it became impossible to use the word even in the most appropriate instances. Shaftesbury remarked satirically that it was safer for gentlemen who discussed the hunt to say their dogs reasoned or meditated rather than granting them ‘natural Sagacity or Instinct’. Shaftesbury went on to make an interesting if debatable connection between Locke’s views on innateness and his nominalist suspicion about species-designation. After Locke, it became a vulgar error to assume that ‘passions, Affections, Instincts, Inclinations, Impressions, Impulses, Ideas, Imaginations & previous Recognitions’ preceded or anticipated experience and were

79 80 81

See Select Sermons of Dr. Whichcot [ed. Anthony Ashley Cooper] (London, 1698), 6, 9, 93, 133. See also Shaftesbury’s unpublished essay on ‘Plasticks’ in the Standard Edition, vol. I, part 5: Aesthetics (Stuttgart, 2001), 189. Rand, 404–5; Several Letters, 41. This picks up on a discussion in The Moralists, 325.

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delivered down across the generations: ‘Nay even the Species themselves were calld in question & more than call’d in question, flatly denyd.’82 Shaftesbury was repeating old themes with some new variations but he needed innateness once more to play a role in the aesthetic system he was devising in the Second Characters. He wanted natural prolepses or anticipations to lay a groundwork for aesthetic recognition, explaining the permanence of forms associated with the perception of beauty. In an elaboration of his terminology, he referred to the response to beautiful faces as ‘imprinted by innate Characters, Moulds, preparatory Sockets for reception . . . & Recognition of such joyouse Forms, as in the Passion between the Sexes’.83 Plastic nature somehow set a boundary, connected with species and what he called ‘specifick Ideas’, limiting the elaborations of caprice and recalling things over time to their original forms.84 V COMMON CONSENT

The question we have not yet addressed is where Shaftesbury stood on the issue of common consent. Adherents to innateness often appealed to such agreement as a form of proof, on the assumption that consensus resulted from principles implanted by nature. And of course Locke had made evidence of unanimity a condition for demonstrating innateness, which he sought to dismantle. To what extent was Shaftesbury committed to answering Locke directly on this matter? Shaftesbury alluded to the issue in his letter to Ainsworth where he complained that Locke abandoned an argument for the Deity which Cicero, despite his sceptical outlook, would not ‘explode’, and which even Epicurus had acknowledged, ‘the chief of the atheistic philosophers’.85 Here Shaftesbury referred obliquely to a passage in De natura deorum, I.44, when the Epicurean participant in the dialogue, Velleius, claimed that belief in the gods rested (maneat) on the common consent of mankind. It was almost (fere) universal, not only among philosophers but also the unschooled (indocti). Velleius drew the conclusion that such a belief was necessarily true on the grounds that everyone shared it by nature (omnium 82

83 85

Shaftesbury, Standard Edition, vol. I, part 5, 188–9. This volume replaces the inadequate edition from the manuscript published as Second Characters or the Language of Forms, ed. Benjamin Rand (Cambridge, 1914). Standard Edition, vol. I, part 5, 189. 84 Ibid., vol. I, part 5, 188. Rand, 404; Several Letters, 40. For further discussion by Shaftesbury of the Epicurean position, and how it could be reconciled with an innatist and natural view of religion, see A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm (Characteristics, 25) and Miscellaneous Reflections (354).

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natura consentit). He traced its naturalness back to a pre-notion or prolepsis of the gods, which he elsewhere described as built-in or innate (insitus or innatus). In the Characteristicks, Shaftesbury did not address the matter of common consent formally,86 although the purpose of his extended attack on travel literature in the Soliloquy: or, Advice to an Author was to cast doubt over the reliability of Locke’s sources of testimony against it.87 Locke had made reference to a total of sixteen travel accounts in the Essay (by the time of his final revisions for the fifth edition of 1706) in order to display the absence of unanimity in points of morals or religious belief. Shaftesbury responded by converting the genre into romance, seeing it as a competition between authors to outdo one another in their exaggerated descriptions of enormities in nature: ‘From monstrous brutes he proceeds to yet more monstrous men. For in this race of authors, he is ever the completest and of the first rank who is able to speak of things the most unnatural and monstrous.’88 He compared the taste for extravagant stories with Desdemona’s imbibing of Othello’s tales of cannibals and men with heads beneath their shoulders.89 Not only were such accounts merely a substitute for chivalric narrative, they provided an indication of superstitious tendencies, a corrupting influence unworthy of a place in a gentleman’s library.90

86

87

88

89

90

In Shaftesbury’s essay Sensus Communis (1709), he appealed on occasion to a normative conception of common sense (Characteristics, 61, 67), implying common consent of a kind; but this did not make him beholden to all common judgements (for example attestations of miracles and prodigies, 68). Elsewhere in the piece he was concerned with a different definition of common sense which spoke to the capacity for observing or encouraging the common good. But it is not clear that everyone necessarily shared this sense. He may well have also had his friend Pierre Bayle in mind. Bayle devoted more than thirty chapters of his Continuation des Pense´es Diverses . . . a` l’occasion de la Comete qui parut au mois de Decembre 1680, 2 vols. (Rotterdam, 1705) to attacking the view that common consent was not only a marker of truth but had its origins in nature (in the form of instinct and innate ideas), and he relied on an array of sources from classical authors to modern travellers to underline human diversity. Locke was a source of acknowledged support (I: 18). Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 155. Henry Lee made a related objection in Anti-Scepticism: or, Notes upon each Chapter of Mr. Lock’s Essay concerning Humane Understanding (London, 1702), 20, questioning whether stories from the West Indies did not exaggerate the moral failings of the natives to justify European abuses. As for the loose morals of Egyptian clerics (cited by Locke from von Baumgarten’s travels, Essay, I.iii.9), he thought the story sounded like something picked up from the ‘Hackney Master’. Othello, I.iii.140–6, quoted by Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 155. Leibniz congratulated Shaftesbury for ‘condemning the love of vain and extravagant tales which prevails’. ‘Remarks on the Three Volumes Entitled Characteristics’ [1712], in Philosophical Papers and Letters, ed. and trans. Leroy E. Loemker, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1956), II: 1028. His comments were originally published in 1720. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 153.

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Shaftesbury’s sarcastic comments on the form may suggest a desire to recover common consent from the damage done to it by Locke. What is more, he pointed out a possible avenue for locating empirical confirmation by remarking that moral philosophers, when they considered distant countries, ought to seek out the ‘simplicity of manners and innocence of behaviour which has been often known among mere savages’.91 Whatever moral ills such people now exhibited had come from contact with Europeans who corrupted them with trade and taught them inhumanity and treachery. Yet in spite of this, I do not believe that Shaftesbury felt especially obligated to come up with empirical evidence of common consent. This is something of a conundrum since so much of his philosophy comes down to an appeal to consensus. The real question is whether he wanted it to be universal in scope or more deliberately proscribed. Did he look for genuine unanimity or a more limited locus of agreement? We have already seen that the concept of prolepsis allowed him considerable room to manoeuvre, complemented elsewhere by a dispositionalist theory of innateness. These provisions undoubtedly made the need for actual agreement less pressing. For Shaftesbury, however, there is an important sense in which he did not require common consent and would have treated it as a separate issue from innateness. In fact he was far closer to the original Stoic tradition on these matters than we have appreciated. To understand Shaftesbury’s outlook on common consent we need to revisit ancient philosophy and ask to what extent the Stoics were concerned to invoke a consensus omnium as a form of proof. Contrasting positions of the early and later Stoa may be relevant here. But before considering them we should make a logical clarification of the difference between prolepses (which are natural and innate) and any attempt to prove the truth of something by appealing to universal agreement. The fact that prolepses are natural means than everyone has them; but conversely the fact that everyone has a certain belief does not mean that the belief comes from nature. Dirk Obbink marshals considerable evidence to indicate that, in fact, for the early Stoics common consent was not a criterion of truth. At best it served to corroborate an argument, as a supporting rhetorical technique rather than an argument per se. But there was also plenty of reason, beyond that, to remain wary of common opinion and to feel that it required 91

Ibid., 157. This proposal was influential on Francis Hutcheson. See Daniel Carey, ‘Reconsidering Rousseau: Sociability, Moral Sense and the American Indian from Hutcheson to Bartram’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 21:1 (1998): 25–38.

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correction.92 Obbink concludes that matters changed in the Hellenistic era and that the later Stoa did make stronger claims about the probative value of the beliefs of all people, holding that common notions really were held in common (at which point the Stoics had to confront the reality of empirical counter-instances).93 Certainly there is an indication that Seneca attached importance to the fact that all people believed in the gods’ existence, mentioning it as a form of proof, and Cicero appears, as we have seen, to have done the same in De natura deorum.94 But Dominic Scott urges us not to exaggerate this point and to ensure that we separate the doctrine of common notions from appeals to universal or common consent.95 Prolepses are formed naturally; they do not require instruction. On this basis, they serve the role of criteria of truth. The fact that they are common is merely a result of their naturalness, which is Cicero’s point. In short, we should be careful to distinguish natural consensus from what Scott calls ‘cultural consensus’,96 that is, widely held opinions which do not have their origin in nature and about which we should remain cautious. Thus, the Stoics did not accept every instance of common consent, and additionally, where they gave it some credence, it still had to be modified and refined.97 Furthermore, prolepses could be overcome by the effects of custom and education, and these counteractions, if generalised, could receive widespread consent. Presumably this would be the Stoic explanation for the condition of Locke’s ‘whole nations’ who gave themselves over to a unanimous contradiction of natural moral tenets. We may have overlooked the nuances of the Stoic position because it was so often run together in the early modern period. Philosophers commonly combined innateness and common consent. The fact that a principle or idea was held unanimously became proof that it was part of the internal structure of the mind or soul, while from the assumption of innateness, 92

93 94

95

Dirk Obbink, ‘‘‘What All Men Believe–Must Be True’’: Common Conceptions and Consensio Omnium in Aristotle and Hellenistic Philosophy’, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 10, ed. Julia Annas (Oxford, 1992), 193–231. Obbink describes koinai ennoiai as deriving from prolepses (198); they reinforce one another. But the ‘commonness’ of the koinai ennoiai should not be confused with their epistemic value or logical function. In fact, the commonness may appear only in the light of a proper theoretical reflection, based on Stoic doctrine. Ibid., 229–30. Seneca, Ep. mor., 117.6. Scott argues that Seneca is making a weak claim here and elsewhere on common consent, similar to Aristotelian discussion of the subject. Where popular belief is in accord with prolepses, appeals to it are legitimate (184–5). Stoic providentialism ensured that cases of error were not excessive. For Obbink (‘ ‘‘What All Men Believe’’ ’, 200–2), Cicero mistook the Epicurean position by placing an emphasis on common consent, but Scott interprets his recourse to it as consistent with Epicurean reservations. Recollection and Experience, 174–6. Scott, Recollection and Experience, 180. 96 Ibid., 174, 176. 97 Ibid., 184.

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unanimous consent seemed naturally to follow as a confirmation (with evident circularity). Seneca and Cicero could legitimately have been read this way. Benjamin Whichcote referred to Seneca in these terms,98 for example, and in the Origines Sacrae (1662), Edward Stillingfleet dwelt at some length on showing the connection between common consent and the common notion of a belief in God (drawing in part on De natura deorum, I.44).99 The association may have been strengthened by the fact that so many in the period were drawn to the Greek phrase koinai ; e“nnoiai (koinai ennoiai), translated as ‘common notions’, when discussing innate ideas. They amounted to the same thing, and Locke of course treated them as equivalent.100 But the use of the word common inevitably suggested that they were widely or universally held. Finally, even if no formal relationship between innateness and common consent was claimed, in practice those who believed in common consent tended also to adhere to a doctrine of innateness. Just to make matters more complicated, certain philosophers accepted unanimous consent but rejected innateness. Samuel Parker, who anticipated Locke’s critique of innateness, took this line,101 and in some sense this is the position that Locke adopted when he was confronted by Stillingfleet’s criticism. When Stillingfleet asked why Locke, who had stated that he would support all arguments for the existence of God, set about dismantling the one from common consent, Locke replied that he had done nothing to tamper with it.102 His target was innateness alone. As far as he was concerned, the quantity of atheists was so inconsiderable that he acknowledged the majority’s view could be called ‘the universal consent of mankind’. But an innate idea required universal confirmation ‘in the strictest sense; one exception is a sufficient proof against it’.103 Nor was allowing common consent on these terms a particular problem for Locke, 98 99 100 101

102

103

As noted by Scott, ibid., 234, from The Works of the Learned Benjamin Whichcote, 4 vols. (Aberdeen, 1751), IV: 352–3 (where he quotes Seneca, Ep. mor., 117.6). Edward Stillingfleet, Origines Sacrae (London, 1662), 384–6. He glossed ‘common notion’ as an anticipation or prolepsis. Locke, Essay, I.ii.1. In A Demonstration of the Divine Authority of the Law of Nature, and of the Christian Religion (London, 1681), Parker rejected talk of imprinted moral principles but nonetheless insisted on common consent to the law of nature (5–14). For his earlier rejection of innateness and prolepsis, see A Free and Impartial Censure of the Platonick Philosophie (Oxford, 1666), 57. For Stillingfleet’s complaint, see The Bishop of Worcester’s Answer to Mr. Locke’s Letter (London, 1697), 89. Locke replied: ‘I have not said one word that does in the least invalidate this argument for a God.’ Mr. Locke’s Reply to the Right Reverend The Lord Bishop of Worcester’s Answer to His Second Letter, in The Works of John Locke, 9th edn, 9 vols. (1794; rpt London, 1997), III: 494. Locke, Works, III: 494–5.

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since there were other ways to account for it, including the due application of reason and appreciation of divine wisdom and power evident in the universe, if not simple tradition and word of mouth. If we turn to Shaftesbury, his relative indifference to full empirical confirmation of uniformity emerges in his restriction of common consent, on the whole, to the world of the civil. He provided a hierarchical account in which the lower social orders and, just as importantly, a vast array of non-British or non-European peoples existed outside the circle of consensus. He could reconcile this account with a normative understanding of nature not merely by acknowledging the realities of social difference but by regarding civility as a goal of human nature which competed with other tendencies. Some of the opposing forces came from nature itself, others were encouraged by negative factors associated with custom and education. His theory of historical and political progression towards a telos overcame any suggestion of contradiction. In this, Shaftesbury emerges as much closer to Locke than we might expect, especially the Locke of the ‘Second Treatise’. As we saw in the previous chapter, in the ‘Second Treatise’ Locke had focused on human potentialities while stressing an historical continuum which led the ‘savage’ from a primitive condition to one of eventual political and social sophistication. Elsewhere, for Locke, reason remained, in practice, the preserve of a limited group, however much it existed as a potential for all mankind. Discourse among the civil, the ‘thinking men’ of a polite, European, world, was necessary to acquire an adequate range of moral and political notions. Without this benefit, little could be expected from the confined circumstances of the savage. Shaftesbury’s thought was similarly informed by powerful hierarchies, although he drew the distinction along different lines. Initially, Shaftesbury divided the civil from the barbarous on the basis of how they managed a category of the passions he referred to as ‘unnatural affections’, which conflicted with more sociable and ‘natural’ inclinations. Distinguishing between natural and unnatural could only be done by introducing a normative account in advance, of course, but it allowed him to maintain a positive portrait of human nature at the same time as he recognised ‘an unnatural and inhuman delight in beholding torments and in viewing distress, calamity, blood, massacre, and destruction with a peculiar joy and pleasure’.104 Shaftesbury quickly identified it as the ‘reigning passion of many tyrants and barbarous nations’, a product of incivility. Thus it did 104

Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 226.

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not intrude on his otherwise moral notion of spectatorship. It belonged to those who had abandoned ‘courteousness of behaviour’. Good breeding, although it was not free from corruption, resisted these savage temptations. Shaftesbury also remarked on those who indulged in a hatred of mankind and society, in contradiction to his sociable understanding of human nature. This was a national failing in some cases, specifically of ‘the more savage nations and a plain characteristic of uncivilised manners and barbarity’.105 The same analysis of distinctions in taste according to the difference between the savage or barbarian and the polite appears in the Soliloquy: or, Advice to an Author when he considers the passions aroused by certain forms of art. ‘The best music of barbarians is hideous and astonishing sounds,’ he insisted. ‘And the fine sights of [East] Indians are enormous figures, various odd and glaring colours, and whatever of that sort is amazingly beheld with a kind of horror and consternation.’106 For Shaftesbury, virtuoso taste implied that aesthetic judgements reflected the nature of reality rather than mere subjective preference. But at the same time, he established a hierarchical understanding of access to this reality. His account was also historical, and we should bear in mind Shaftesbury’s awareness that Britain was the most recently civilised of the European countries. When the Romans arrived there, the condition of the inhabitants scarcely matched that of present-day Indian tribes, and a further conquest was necessary by the Normans to introduce an appreciation of arts and civility.107 His imperial perspective on cultural advancement was therefore grounded in national experience. The British had some achievements of note, but for most part the country existed in an ‘infant state’, though the ‘soil’ was good. In general, he pinned his hopes on the future, looking forward to the return of peace (he wrote during the War of 105 106

107

Ibid., 227. Ibid., 108–9. See also Soliloquy (Characteristics, 151), for his reservations about European artistic styles as well as taste in ‘Japan work’ and ‘Indian figures’. For a general study of responses to Indian art, see Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: History of European Reactions to Indian Art (Oxford, 1977). Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 403. See also Shaftesbury’s Letter Concerning Design (c. 1712), addressed to Lord Somers and intended to form part of the Second Characters. It was included in some copies of the second edition of the Characteristicks (1714) and accompanied the text from the fifth edition (1732), and is reprinted in Den Uyl’s edition (III: 243–51). Shaftesbury describes his hopes for peace in the midst of the War of Spanish Succession and his anticipation of Britain as a ‘principal Seat of Arts’ (244). The country’s real achievements lay ahead of it, but he congratulated it on having a correct ‘Taste or Relish . . . in Government’ (248). For discussion, see Klein, Shaftesbury, 210–12.

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Spanish Succession), but the most important reason for optimism was the country’s political system and commitment to liberty.108 The barriers identified by Shaftesbury were sometimes set up by nature but elsewhere they were distinctively cultural and political, associated with poor aesthetic taste and its consequences. Shaftesbury’s vehemence on this point, and the exclusiveness of his vision of taste, appear in the working notes for his uncompleted final project, the Second Characters. His essay on ‘Plasticks’ attempted to describe the nature of aesthetic representation, identifying the importance of ‘second characters’ or signs that expressed real essences (as opposed to Locke’s articulation of purely nominal essences).109 Yet Shaftesbury denied that large tracts of humanity (both ancient and modern) had approached the standard. On the contrary, they existed in a condition of savagery or gothic barbarity, as he repeatedly exclaimed in a passage in note form describing the ‘Rise & Progress of 2d Characters’: But this assert that neither Jew Egyptian nor Chinese polite. This a Judgment of Politeness – If polite; shew me a Picture, a Statue Coin, Proportion, Nature. – But Arabesque! Japan! Indian! – Savage Monstrouse. Even in their Portraiture, Pleasure-Pieces, wanton pieces – Also Gods, monstrouse, frightfull according to Aegyptian & Syrian Models or Turkish Mosques, no Architecture or Statuary or Figures: or as bad as none. . . . See Japan! Mogul ! China! Turk, & Tartar! – Shew me amidst their infinite delicacy or other Work a single 2d Character, a Form, even but a single Figure a Perspective, a Statue, Coin, Palace, Architecture that is not worse than Gothick. Shew but so much as a Vase! till in China taught by us & Dutch.110

Shaftesbury’s repressive classicism emerges in a panoramic dismissal of the cultural achievements of an array of Asian and Near Eastern countries. He abandons a more conventional categorisation which would have included these peoples within the realm of the civil, whatever their artistic taste, by relegating them to an undifferentiated status of savage, barbarous, impolite, uncivil. But their ‘distorted’ cultural productions do more than simply mar the visual culture of these communities. The equation between ‘Bad figures; bad minds’ could not be escaped, just as ‘Crooked Designs’ led 108

109

110

Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 97–8; 121–4. For further discussion, including contrasts and paradoxes with the important case of the arts in absolutist France, see Fabienne Bruge`re, The´orie de l’art et philosophie de la sociabilite´ selon Shaftesbury (Paris, 1999), 82–90. For Shaftesbury’s definitions, see Standard Edition, vol. I, part 5, 214–16. For discussion, see Prince, Philosophical Dialogue, 43–6; and Gordon Marce, ‘Shaftesbury’s Language of Forms’ (M.A. diss., Queen’s University, Ontario, 1990). Shaftesbury, Standard Edition, vol. I, part 5, 221.

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inexorably to ‘crooked Fancys’, as he says in the same passage. The deep analogy running through all these areas means that ‘letters’ and what he refers to as ‘thought’ suffer the same fate. Politeness in general held a constant proportion with art and design. If any hope remained, it came from the commercial and imperial activities of the English and Dutch who were responsible for instructing the Chinese in the proper taste.111 This statement confirms Shaftesbury’s strategy on the problem of diversity. He refused to synthesise such variations into a compelling, universal, expression of oneness; instead he argued that the lack of forms in the artistic and architectural pursuits of the Chinese, Japanese, Turks, and others constituted a sign of their moral and intellectual weakness while also, in a vicious circle, producing that weakness. Their predicament only improved, it seems, on making contact with Europeans. Ultimately, Shaftesbury advanced a political theory of representation in this context which tied together his concerns. The pattern repeated itself, in other words, in relation to ‘law and liberty’. Progress with respect to what he called first characters (alphabetical, verbal, or mathematical signs) would initiate developments in aesthetic grasp of the all-important second characters. Where tyranny began, the process would cease, as appeared in ‘Eastern monarchys antient & modern’. Shaftesbury took a conventional view of oriental despotism, then, but he integrated it with a novel art theory which was both diagnostic and explanatory of the condition of the oppressed. He coupled his Whig commitments to liberty and the rule of law with an analysis of the political condition of non-European nations.112 Shaftesbury rejected Locke’s remarks on innateness, his taste in travel writing, and his representation of humanity, which were at times illiberal. But Shaftesbury’s alternative is less liberating in its implications than it might have been. (Indeed the two of them seem in some respects to have converged in their anthropological perspectives.) Shaftesbury’s conception of civility and politeness supported a narrower interest in the end. To see why, we need to reconsider the notion of sociability that underpins his system. Ostensibly the concept opposes Hobbes’s unsocial view of mankind, and like Hobbes’s account it takes in the generality of human beings. However, the idea of sociability that Shaftesbury employs remains closer to 111 112

On the export of Dutch designs for Chinese manufacture see Hugh Honour, Chinoiserie: The Vision of Cathay (London, 1961). He reserved his strongest remarks for the ancient Egyptians. Under the heading of ‘third characters’ he condemned their hieroglyphics as barbarous, enigmatic forms, the creation of priests. See the essay on ‘Plasticks’, Standard Edition, vol. I, part 5, esp. 207, 216. This relates in turn to his critique of Egyptian priestcraft in the Miscellaneous Reflections (Characteristics, 356–64).

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the Latin notion of societas rather than to the wider, more embracing, one of communitas. In other words, there is something selective or restrictive about the definition.113 To be sociable is to be part of an elevated collective, a body of like-minded individuals who achieve a consensus on moral, social, and political questions.114 So long as Shaftesbury finds agreement or consensus among the members of a certain class, he can remain indifferent to Locke’s wider, encyclopaedic, survey of mankind. Sociability, like taste, results from the cultivation of innate capacities, and will not be achieved by all. His account of sociability, as Hans-Georg Gadamer pointed out, has more in common with the German concept of bildung, a process of raising up.115 To the extent that he wanted or required common consent, Shaftesbury clearly belongs in a tradition of argument that Grotius made familiar: if we seek confirmation of the law of nature, Grotius maintained, we should look to the example of the better nations and more refined peoples, although he acknowledged, as I have noted, that it was no more than an a posteriori argument.116 Both Locke and Pufendorf rejected this approach to natural law.117 In a parallel vein, Stillingfleet expressed disappointment that Locke disputed the commonness of belief in God by settling on inappropriate examples, bereft of common sense.118 Shaftesbury revived the argument not in a systematic or analytical fashion but in a conversational appeal to like-minded readers. He urged the adoption of higher models, from more esteemed nations and sources, insisting that ‘Beautiful Forms beautify; polite, polish . . . On the Contrary Gothick gothicize Barbarouse barbarize.’119 With this remark we can return to the objection 113 114

115 116

117

118 119

I owe this observation to Richard Tuck. The question of style becomes important at this point. For Shaftesbury’s method of addressing his audience and drawing it into his way of thinking in the essay on ‘Plasticks’, see Standard Edition, vol. I, part 5, 165–6. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York, 1975), 10–27. Hugo Grotius, De jure belli ac pacis, new edn (Amsterdam, 1646), 5–6 (I.i.12). In a similar vein, John Eachard, one of the most acerbic of Hobbes’s antagonists, noted that Hobbes’s account of the state of nature neglected the common consent of mankind or the ‘Agreement of the most wise men and learned Nations’. Mr Hobbs’s State of Nature considered, in a Dialogue between Philautus and Timothy (London, 1672), 91. John Locke, Essays on the Law of Nature, ed. and trans. W. von Leyden (1954; Oxford, 1988), 160–80. Samuel Pufendorf, The Law of Nature and Nations, trans. Basil Kennet, 5th edn (London, 1749), 121–2 (II.iii.7). Stillingfleet, Answer to Mr. Locke’s Letter, 90. Shaftesbury, Standard Edition, vol. I, part 5, 247. See also 220. In a similar vein, Shaftesbury concluded his Soliloquy by remarking that ‘honest home-philosophy must teach us the wholesome practice within ourselves. Polite reading, and converse with mankind of the better sort, will qualify us for what remains’ (Characteristics, 162).

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he lodged in his Soliloquy against readers of travel literature: ‘They have far more pleasure in hearing the monstrous accounts of monstrous men and manners’, as Shaftesbury put it, ‘than the politest and best narrations of the affairs, the governments and lives of the wisest and most polished people.’120 VI THE LAW OF OPINION OR FASHION

Shaftesbury’s long engagement with Locke’s thought, beginning in his youth, did not lead to agreement between the two over matters of morals and aesthetics. Whatever the shared ground in political questions, Shaftesbury was antagonised by Locke’s perspective on the moral law, motivation, and the relationship between religion and morality. While he fought out these issues over the course of the Characteristicks, and elsewhere, innateness was undoubtedly a source of particular sensitivity. But the question of why Locke’s critique appeared to open up a limitless diversity, in Shaftesbury’s view, cannot be answered without appreciating how he understood the relationship between different aspects of Locke’s position. In developing this account, we need to remember that Shaftesbury sometimes produced a debatable or incomplete rendition of Locke’s outlook. He may have done so partly because Locke was so difficult to defeat on his own terms, but also because he rejected many of the positive terms on which Locke constructed his moral philosophy. These provisions are what kept Locke from being unsettled by the diversity he remarked. By not accepting them, Shaftesbury regarded Locke’s philosophy as dangerous in tendency. We see this perspective on Locke particularly in his letters, not only because he could name him openly there, but because the relative brevity of these writings led him to run together aspects of Locke’s philosophy, revealing the pernicious logic that in his view held everything together. In this context, Shaftesbury made an important link between Locke’s critique of innateness and the law of opinion or fashion. This ‘law’, articulated by Locke in the second book of the Essay,121 was included in his account of the structure of moral systems. For Locke, morality depended on some form of law and method of enforcement. Divine law 120 121

Characteristics, 154. From the second edition (1694) onwards, he called it ‘the Law of Opinion or Reputation’, Essay, II.xxviii.7, 10. In the first edition he termed it the ‘philosophical’ law. In all editions, he further glossed it as the ‘law of fashion’ (xx13, 15).

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was the most important, of course, and it had the backing of rewards and punishments in the afterlife to make it effective. Civil law was equally intelligible and its punishments more immediate. The law of opinion or fashion was a rather different entity. Locke introduced it to try to explain how people regulated their actions in practice. They referred themselves, in Locke’s analysis, to opinion and fashion rather than to anything higher or more secure. He picked up on classical theories of virtue, with their emphasis on honour, disgrace, praise, and blame meted out socially. At the same time, as we have seen, he generalised this as a sociological or anthropological account applicable to the ethical practices of different societies.122 Shaftesbury was alarmed by this account. In his 1709 letter to Michael Ainsworth, he objected to Locke’s attack on innateness before making an explicit connection between the critique and Locke’s ‘sociological’ law: ‘Thus virtue, according to Mr. Locke, has no other measure, law or rule, than fashion and custom.’123 Shaftesbury cultivated an altogether different view of morality as a permanent ‘reality’ expressed in (human) nature. Locke’s view of morals as contingent on law suggested something imposed externally, with no corresponding internal impulse, and subject to diversity and change since it had no referent beyond local preference. Of course Shaftesbury was aware of the importance of God in Locke’s moral theory, but he found his account unsatisfactory. He saw Locke as a voluntarist for whom ‘morality, justice, equity, depend only on law and will, and God indeed is a perfect free agent in his sense; that is, free to anything, that is however ill, for if He wills it, it will be made good, virtue may be vice, and vice virtue in its turn, if he pleases’.124 The proper way to characterise Locke’s position – whether as a voluntarist or otherwise – has attracted considerable debate from Locke scholars.125 Locke’s insistence on the necessity of God’s enforcement of the law provides some justification 122

123 125

In this respect it was consistent with his account of the Tupinamba of Brazil who upheld revenge and cannibalism of enemies as ultimate values. Thus, they had a system of social values, together with a suppositious afterlife of rewards and punishments to make it work, even if the values themselves were reprobate. Rand, 404; Several Letters, 40. 124 Rand, 404; Several Letters, 40–1. For differing accounts, see Alex Tuckness, ‘The Coherence of a Mind: John Locke and the Law of Nature’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 37 (1999): 73–90; W. Randall Ward, ‘Divine Will, Natural Law and the Voluntarism/Intellectualism Debate in Locke’, History of Political Thought 16:2 (1995): 208–18; A. John Simmons, The Lockean Theory of Rights (Princeton, 1992), 26–36; John Colman, John Locke’s Moral Philosophy (Edinburgh, 1983), ch. 2. On voluntarism more generally in early modern moral thought, see J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy (Cambridge, 1998).

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for Shaftesbury’s assessment.126 This account positions morality as a system of positive law,127 but it conflicts with Locke’s statements elsewhere that reason can access the law of nature – meaning that its provisions must be fixed and independent of revelation, which complemented it.128 The answer may be, as Alex Tuckness proposes, to distinguish between two kinds of voluntarism: one version treats divine will as the source of the content of moral rules, which seems not to capture Locke’s position; another version sets up God’s will as a condition for our obligation to act morally, to which Locke subscribes.129 Certainly Locke remarked in the Reasonableness of Christianity that right and wrong were unchanging and obliged all people, Christian or otherwise.130 Shaftesbury’s understanding of Locke is made clear in a previously unnoticed manuscript preserved in the Hampshire Record Office. It consists of a single, undated, sheet of notes with the heading ‘Upon Mr. Locke’s Essay’ and a citation of Book II.xvii.14–15,131 where Locke discusses his concept of law and elaborates on the law of opinion or fashion. Shaftesbury objected in this manuscript note that Locke had made ‘rectitude’ relative to the will or commands of the divine, the civil authority, or social convention. The problem was that while these entities had the power to establish rules, they themselves had ‘no Rule or Measure, by which they Themselves are determin’d or by which they govern themselves in respect of what is worthy or unworthy, Equitable or Cruel, Honest or Vile’.132 126

127 128

129 130 131 132

The best example, although presumably unavailable to Shaftesbury, is Locke’s ‘Of Ethick in General’ (c. 1689), planned as a chapter for the Essay but never completed or incorporated. See Writings on Religion, ed. Victor Nuovo (Oxford, 2002), 9–14. See also The Reasonableness of Christianity, ed. John C. Higgins-Biddle (Oxford, 1999), 150–1; Essay, I.iii.6. As positive law it would also require Revelation, which would have contributed to Shaftesbury’s rejection of this line of argument. In Essay, I.iii.13, for example, Locke states that his denial of an innate law did not mean that there was nothing left but positive laws. On the contrary, natural law was obtainable through the exercise of reason. The Lockean position seems to be that the law corresponds to the nature of human beings, whom God created. In the light of that fact, the law is not subject to alteration. This did not obviate the need for rewards and punishments, however. Locke runs into other difficulties in attempting to explain why God created a law so difficult to live up to. His doing so was consonant with reason, and having created reason in man, he could not do otherwise, Locke explains. But God also created the other features of human nature which debilitated mankind morally. Reasonableness, 13–14. Tuckness, ‘Coherence’. He does not address the more fully fledged voluntarism evident in ‘Of Ethick in General’. Locke, Reasonableness, 20. See also 12, 140. After the first edition of the Essay, this chapter became number xxviii. Hampshire Record Office, Malmesbury Papers, 9M73/G272. This reference corresponds to a group of papers which have not been assigned separate folio numbers. In the chapter ‘Of Power’ Locke states a position Shaftesbury would have found more congenial: he commented that ‘God himself cannot choose what is not good; the Freedom of the Almighty hinders not his being determined by what is best’ (II.xxi.49).

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He sought something outside of this power which set a standard or rule, even for the divine, and refused to countenance the reduction of morality to will or assumed authority, as he saw it. He dismissed this with an exclamation: ‘Excellent Philosopher! Rare Exposition of Murther, Villany, Vice & Crime !’ Shaftesbury continued by disputing Locke’s version of the law of opinion, claiming that although swearing, drinking, and whoring might be considered fashionable by rakes and libertines, the same individuals never regarded these actions as virtuous, but rather derided morals, piety, and religion altogether.133 Locke’s analysis failed to recognise the independence of moral distinctions from social preference. Shaftesbury returned to his critique of Locke in his letter to Stanhope (written five months after he addressed Ainsworth on the subject). Once again he alluded to Locke’s pernicious law of opinion: ‘And this according to him was virtue and honesty,’ Shaftesbury remarked.134 He continued to position Locke as an advocate of this theory rather than as offering a purely descriptive account. In the absence of a moral philosophy grounded in innateness, Locke had nothing else to offer, as Shaftesbury represented him, other than a purely relative, highly diverse, set of rules conditioned by fashion and opinion. This notion offended against Shaftesbury’s deeply held conviction that things were not subject to opinion in this way but referred to a standard which existed in nature. To argue against the Lockean ‘thesis’, Shaftesbury played out its cumulative extremes hypothetically, in a passage worth quoting at length: As if writing to the Italian or other good masters, or understanders of music he said that the law of harmony was opinion; or writing to the maker of scholars in statuary or architecture, he had said in general that the law of design or the law of beauty in these designing arts had been opinion. Had Mr. Locke been a virtuoso, he would not have philosophised thus. For harmony is the beauty, the accord and proportion of sounds; and harmony is harmony by nature, let particular ears be ever so bad, or let men judge ever so ill of music. So is architecture and its beauty the same, and founded in nature, let men’s fancy be ever so Gothic; for there is a Gothic architecture which is false, and ever will be so, though we should all turn Goths, and lose our relish.135

Shaftesbury’s vehemence springs from the damage caused by Locke’s law of opinion as a scheme of ethics. By contrast, Shaftesbury refused to submit to the diversity of opinion in matters of taste, whether in music or architecture. There is a standard in nature that corrects human error and it resides 133 134

Hampshire Record Office, Malmesbury Papers, 9M73/G272. Rand, 416. 135 Ibid., 416–17.

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there permanently, even if we all become Goths. In just this way virtue and honesty constitute unaltered reference points. In a familiar manner, Shaftesbury begins with an argument about taste and aesthetics, the granting of which becomes a proof of his moral argument. Locke’s inability to emulate a virtuoso taste (as Shaftesbury understood it) accounted for his failings as a moral philosopher. Armed with this information, we can see more conspicuous traces of Locke’s presence as an opponent for Shaftesbury in his published work. In Sensus Communis, for example, Shaftesbury referred to modern philosophers who had informed us that virtue and vice had ‘no other law or measure than mere fashion and vogue’.136 William Warburton correctly identified Locke as the target and rebuked Shaftesbury for misrepresenting Locke.137 In Soliloquy: or, Advice to an Author, which originally appeared in 1710, not long after he had written to Ainsworth and Stanhope, Shaftesbury once again took note of ‘modern moralists’ who supposed that ‘all actions are naturally indifferent . . . they have no note or character of good or ill in themselves but are distinguished by mere fashion, law, or arbitrary decree’.138 The point is that, from Shaftesbury’s perspective, Locke’s alternative to fashion or opinion was no less arbitrary since God’s will could change, unsettling the foundation of moral truth. If we have any doubt that Locke is his target here, it disappears in the sequel, which compares closely with Shaftesbury’s explicit remarks in the letter to Stanhope. Shaftesbury continued in the Soliloquy by asking what response a writer on music would receive if he claimed that harmony was a matter of ‘caprice or will, humour or fashion’.139 A statement of this kind would be dismissed, he asserted, because harmony is harmony by nature, let men judge ever so ridiculously of music. So is symmetry and proportion founded still in nature, let men’s fancy prove ever so barbarous or their fashions ever so Gothic in their architecture, sculpture or 136 137

138

Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 38. William Warburton, The Divine Legation of Moses, 3 vols. (London, 1738), note to I: xxiv–xxv. He chastised Shaftesbury for disloyalty to Locke in making this remark and ignoring Locke’s clarification of his position. Warburton explained that Locke had rejected innate ideas because in many societies virtue and vice were not regulated by nature – as they must be if they were innate – but only by fashion and vogue. He thought that Shaftesbury would have justified his misrepresentation because Locke had overturned innate ideas, ‘the Foundation of his Moral Sense’. For Warburton, Locke had sufficiently repeated his view that divine law was the only ‘touchstone’ of morality. Elsewhere, however, Warburton concluded that Shaftesbury and Le Clerc had got it right on the innateness of morality, in opposition to Locke. A Selection from Unpublished Papers of the Right Reverend William Warburton, ed. Francis Kilvert (London, 1841), 324–5. These references are provided in Rivers, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment, II: 90n, 128n. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 157. 139 Ibid.

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whatever other designing art. It is the same case where life and manners are concerned. Virtue has the same fixed standard. The same numbers, harmony, and proportion will have place in morals and are discoverable in the characters and affections of mankind.140

Shaftesbury strengthened this point in an interesting fragment from the uncompleted essay on ‘Plasticks’, indicating his ongoing opposition to Locke. He again equated Hobbes and Locke, whom he described as ‘still the same Man, same Genius at the bottom’ because they both insisted, in his view, that beauty, virtue, music, and perspective amounted to ‘nothing’. For Shaftesbury, on the contrary, they represented ‘the greatest Realitys of things especially the Beauty & Order of Affections’. He deemed his adversaries ‘Anti-Virtuosi ’ and dismissed them finally as mere barbarians.141 The argument inspired by the law of opinion or fashion came back, then, to Shaftesbury’s ‘realism’. In sketching the different kinds of positions taken on ethics in The Moralists, Shaftesbury made a contrast between those he termed nominal moralists (like Hobbes and Locke) for whom virtue is ‘nothing in itself ’, and the view adopted by philosophers who were ‘realists in the point’.142 As he later explained, realists held that virtue was not ‘arbitrary or factitious’. It did not depend on ‘custom, fancy, or will, even on the supreme will itself ’. Significantly, Shaftesbury acknowledged at this point that virtue was independent of religion and that God did not ‘govern’ virtue but was governed by it, in accordance with his goodness.143 Near the end of The Moralists, we get more evidence of Shaftesbury’s rejection of the Lockean ‘law of opinion’. The passage is important because it marks the moment of the sceptic Philocles’s conversion to the moral perspective of Theocles, and the point he makes is ultimately resolved by returning once more to the notion of prolepsis. Theocles sets himself up as someone who distinguishes right from wrong, the honourable from the shameful. But he anticipates an objection from someone who claims, ‘All is opinion. It is opinion which makes beauty and unmakes it. The graceful or ungraceful in things, the decorum and its contrary, the amiable and unamiable, vice, virtue, honour, shame, all this is founded in opinion only. Opinion is the law and measure.’144 This leaves us with nothing fixed since opinion has no rule other than fashion or the vagaries of custom and education. Theocles asks, with a degree of exasperation, ‘What shall we 140 141 142

Ibid. Shaftesbury, Standard Edition, vol. I, part 5, 233–4. Contractions have been expanded. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 262. 143 Ibid., 267. 144 Ibid., 328.

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say to such a one? How represent to him his absurdity and extravagance?’145 In this predicament, a way forward was suggested by meditating on the notion of shame. Shame was a real emotion. Indeed Theocles was confident that his opponent would have to acknowledge that there were occasions in his life when he experienced not only shame but also pride, gratitude, and resentment. These feelings came back, in the end, to a foundation in nature which he called a ‘presumption or anticipation’.146 Prolepsis was ultimately the answer to the sceptical emphasis on the diversity and ostensible irreducibility of opinion. VII RELIGION, MORALITY, AND DIVERSITY

Thus far we have seen that Shaftesbury resisted Locke’s moral philosophy because it resolved everything into diversity. In the absence of innate ideas, Locke had nothing to offer aside from opinion or fashion to regulate morals. Although he recognised the possibility of divine will as a locus of higher authority for Locke, the ostensible freedom of God to change moral law according to whim meant that morality, on these terms, would remain perpetually unstable. The alternative, sketched out by Shaftesbury in dialogue form, essays, and other polite modes of address, gave nature a pre-eminent role in securing permanent moral distinctions. Where opinion, fashion, custom, or law diverged from these fixed standards, it could be legitimately corrected or condemned. But this account does not tell the whole story of Shaftesbury’s engagement with diversity. In fact there is an important respect in which he ended up as an advocate of diversity in a different context. His search for consensus in the domain of morals and aesthetics was conditioned by his readiness to open up religion as a space of conflicting judgements, inconsistent values, and diverse opinions. He relinquished the attachment to uniformity he elsewhere maintained and scorned the idea that any consistency could be recovered in religious matters. This turn in his philosophy seems paradoxical, but the two sides of his system of thought really cooperate with one another. He could allow for dispute and disunity in religion precisely because he had located an area of stability and consensus in morals and taste. 145 146

Ibid. Ibid., 329. This discussion clearly relates to entries in Shaftesbury’s ‘Exercises’ made in Holland in 1703. Under the heading of prolZv ceiB (prolepses) he considered the question of shame and the attempt to reduce virtue to custom and opinion. PRO30/24/27/10, fol. 221v.

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To appreciate Shaftesbury’s strategy we need to take a substantial detour through his account of the relationship between religion and morality. His position only makes sense if these two areas are separable from one another. Here again, he departed from Locke’s understanding that they were profoundly connected. In this section I consider the differences between Shaftesbury and Locke on religion, including revelation, rewards and punishments, and the status of Scripture. This will lay the groundwork for an appreciation of Shaftesbury’s way of negotiating religious conflict and diversity. Locke was only too well aware of differences in this sphere, of course, but he pursued a different solution to the problem. Locke had made religion and morality effectively inseparable. Morality required a lawgiver, in the figure of the divine, who induced adherence to his law by enforcing it with penalties and rewards in the afterlife. Even if the afterlife itself remained a possibility or probability rather than a certainty,147 it was still a necessary concept in order to keep the evil impulses of human beings in check. Locke had commented in the Essay that those who operated without the fear of retribution were capable of anything,148 and this view was consonant with his perspective on toleration, which he did not extend to atheists.149 The challenge – and it proved a considerable one for Locke – was to create a coherent psychology and theory of motivation which would somehow make the moral law an attractive as well as appropriate choice. He introduced extensive modifications and additions to his discussion in the Essay’s chapter ‘Of Power’ in Book II to improve this account. Shaftesbury noted the changes on the subject of ‘liberty and necessity’ in the letter to Stanhope, which he regarded as telling vacillations, unbecoming of a philosopher.150 For those beyond the scope of Christian revelation, Locke had set a number of provisions in place. The existence of God was obvious enough 147

148

149 150

Locke, Essay, II.xxi.70; see also a journal entry of 8 February 1677, Bodleian Library MS Locke f. 2, p. 49; printed in Political Essays, ed. Mark Goldie (Cambridge, 1997), 263. For discussion, see Tuckness, ‘Coherence’, 87–8. ‘Robberies, Murders, Rapes, are the Sports of Men set at Liberty from Punishment and Censure’ (Essay, I.iii.9). In The Reasonableness of Christianity, Locke stated: ‘there can be no bounds set to the Lawless Exorbitancy of unconfined men’ (14), referring to those who had thrown off divine authority. John Locke, A Letter concerning Toleration, trans. William Popple, ed. James Tully (Indianapolis, 1983), 51. Rand, 415. Locke had arranged for Shaftesbury to receive the 31 leaves of corrections and material added to the second edition of the Essay in 1694, as well as two copies of the new edition itself. Yolton, Bibliography, 75–6. Locke made further additions to the fourth and fifth editions. For discussion of Locke’s position on motivation and changes to the chapter ‘Of Power’, see Vere Chappell, ‘Locke on Freedom of the Will’, in Locke, ed. Vere Chappell (Oxford, 1998), 86–105; Gideon Yaffe, Liberty Worth the Name: Locke on Free Agency (Princeton, 2000).

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to anyone who contemplated the wisdom and power evident in the creation.151 To work out the dictates of natural law, a separate effort of reason was required. But the two areas remained indelibly linked by construing morality in terms of a law of nature once more enforced by God. In his later deliberations over morality in The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), Locke seems to have become more pessimistic that reason, unaided by divine revelation, would ever successfully devise an adequate system of morality. The revealed text of Scripture offered a crucial source of insight into divine will and the unchanging demands of true morality. Anyone outside the Christian tradition faced a troubling situation. Even if a complete body of ethics could somehow be assembled from disparate sources by drawing together the wisdom of the ancients – whether Greek, Roman, or Confucian – the result would still have no effect on mankind because, as I noted above, it would lack the essential ingredient of an enforcer.152 Shaftesbury came at these problems from an entirely different perspective. Although he treated the idea of God as well as morality as inbuilt prolepses, he nonetheless kept the two things distinct in many ways. In the Inquiry, for example, he was quite emphatic that the sense of right and wrong came before our knowledge of God.153 His position may have had something to do with his friend Pierre Bayle’s provocative suggestion in the 1680s that a society of atheists would not necessarily be given over to immorality.154 We can see a trace of this in the way Shaftesbury confirmed the distinctness of religion and morality. Inspection of countries or peoples with limited religious contemplations had yielded rather different results. Some proved ‘proud, harsh, cruel’, admiring violence and displays of power, as Locke’s anthropology suggested, but others behaved very differently, being ‘naturally modest, kind, friendly, and consequently lovers of kind and friendly actions’.155 However fruitful Bayle’s proposal may have been, his intentions were only partly convergent with Shaftesbury’s on this point. On the whole Shaftesbury was much more interested in defining the moral resources of human nature while Bayle’s view of mankind was generally pessimistic. 151 152 154

155

Locke, Essay, I.iv.9. See also Reasonableness, 143. Locke, Reasonableness, 150–1. 153 Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 182. Pierre Bayle, Various Thoughts on the Occasion of a Comet, trans. Robert C. Bartlett (Albany, 2000). Bayle considered various classical examples of individuals who, despite their atheism, lived moral lives (xx174, 178), and referred also to the class of Turkish Cadis (judges), whom he described as atheists, yet who nonetheless behaved morally. He drew on Sir Paul Rycaut’s Present State of the Ottoman Empire (London, 1667), 129–30. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 183.

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His hypothetical atheist society still required severe punishments and sanctions to maintain control, even if it could run itself on an ethic of honour and decency independent of belief in the divine.156 But Bayle’s larger purpose was undoubtedly polemical: he intended to show that religion, in practice, had little impact on morality, which made the fault of believers much greater than those who lacked all faith.157 In this respect, Bayle’s approach did have a further attraction for Shaftesbury who, with his deist inclinations, wanted to curb the influence and institutional authority of religion. Shaftesbury remarked that a true notion of religion was capable of giving great encouragement to morality, but conversely a wrong view of religion could do enormous damage.158 The contrast between Shaftesbury’s position and Locke’s appears in a discussion in The Moralists. Theocles comes to Shaftesbury’s defence, explaining that he focused on virtue in order to give it a proper grounding for those who had not yet accepted the existence of God and an afterlife. This method appeared perfectly sensible since no one could understand ‘supreme goodness’ without knowing what goodness was, nor make sense of the idea that virtue was rewarded without a grasp of ‘merit and excellence’. He concludes, therefore, that notwithstanding the fact that Shaftesbury had made virtue ‘in some measure independent on religion’, he still appeared in the end ‘as high a divine as he is a moralist’.159 Thus Shaftesbury approached a difficult theme with customary wit and ingenuity, shielding himself from direct criticism by claiming to protect what he appeared to undermine.160 Shaftesbury also took issue with Locke over the role of rewards and punishments, a building block of Locke’s ethics. The problem of basing morality on these terms was that it made observation of duty a matter of prudence, dependent on calculating the distant reward for acting virtuously against the pain suffered in the afterlife for following vice. By implication, nature led us in the direction of evil, and morality cut against the grain. Without the threat of punishment, we could not expect much from human beings. This perspective was consistent with Locke’s hedonist account of motivation and his remark in the Essay that he would admit only one innate principle, namely the desire for happiness and dislike of misery.161 This alone was constantly demonstrated in practice, unlike allegedly internal moral tendencies. The self-interested model constituted yet 156 158 160

Bayle, Various Thoughts, xx161, 172, 178, 179. 157 Ibid., xx134, 160. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 181–2. 159 Ibid., 267. Elsewhere he downplayed atheism as a problem. Ibid., 182, 189. 161 Locke, Essay, I.iii.3.

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another reason for associating Locke with Hobbes, however sincere Locke’s Christian beliefs. For Shaftesbury, by contrast, virtue was an end in itself, an expression of nature not a mastery over it. There were conflicting impulses, some of them selfish, but we fulfilled ourselves when acting in accordance with sociability, affection, love, and friendship. When he considered the issue of divine rewards and punishments formally in the Inquiry, he maintained that anyone who was incited to good or diverted from evil merely because of future expectations could claim ‘no virtue or goodness whatsoever’.162 They had the same merits as a restrained tiger or a whipped monkey. Conversely, a notion of God as a benevolent creator would have a positive effect on inspiring us to virtue, and the cause of goodness received support from believing that the universe was ordered and beautiful. At the same time, Shaftesbury did allow some role for rewards and punishments. They served a purpose when things went wrong and people needed to be recalled to virtue, while in civil societies their just application remained a resource and inhibited incursions of tyrannical rule. Where these things worked, it was really a true feeling for virtue that made the difference, not the effects of fear. In Sensus Communis, meanwhile, he allowed that the vulgar might benefit from the sight of the gallows, but a man of ‘liberal education’ hardly required this vision to dissuade himself from acts of knavery.163 In the light of this, Philip Skelton, the Irish satirist, wryly suggested that, for Shaftesbury, rewards and punishments were an appropriate incentive for morality among the lower orders, while the disinterested moral sense was sustained by his aristocratic associates.164 Shaftesbury’s motives for separating morality and religion come into greater focus if we consider his deist commitments on the subject of priestcraft, miracles, and the revealed text of Scripture. Behind all this lies a powerful antipathy to the political and social authority of established 162

163 164

Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 183; see also 46, 169. The basis of Locke’s likely reply appears in The Reasonableness of Christianity. He remarked on classical ethics, which showed the ‘beauty of Virtue’ and made ‘airy commendations’ of virtue as the perfection of human nature and its own reward. But only the thought of an afterlife in heaven or hell truly engaged people’s interests and made virtue ‘the best bargain’. ‘Upon this foundation, and upon this only’, he concluded, ‘Morality stands firm and may defy all competition’ (162–3). For Shaftesbury’s rejection of predicating morality on a ‘bargain’, see Characteristics, 46 (Sensus Communis, II.iii). See also an important letter from Shaftesbury to an unnamed friend (dated 2 December 1704) commenting on Locke’s dying message to Anthony Collins. In his ‘counter charge’ to Locke, Shaftesbury impugned those who do good only because they are ‘frighted or bribed into’ it. By contrast, he urged ‘doing good for good’s sake, without any farther regards’. Rand, 345. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 59. Philip Skelton, Ophiomaches: or, Deism Revealed, 2 vols. (London, 1749), II: 330.

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religion. The theme is most conspicuous, of course, in his remarks on the unwarranted and exalted status of priests. His account is mediated in the Miscellaneous Reflections through an historical anthropology of ancient Egypt, which he calls the ‘motherland of superstition’.165 Not only was the number of priests there limitless, but the office was hereditary. As a profession, its appeal was understandable, given not only that it conferred considerable ease, wealth, and sacred status but also because it made it possible ‘to subdue by wit instead of force, to practise on the passions and triumph over the judgment of mankind, to influence private families and public councils, conquer conquerors, control the magistrate himself, and govern without the envy which attends all other government or superiority’.166 The Egyptian case was important historically because of the country’s influence on Persia, Ethiopia,167 and, most significantly, the Hebrew nation. These inquiries led him to conclude more generally that, on the basis of political arithmetic, the level of superstition in a country corresponded to the number of priests, and by the same token that as priests grew in number, relative to the laity, their needs would also grow.168 Addressing Christianity directly on this subject was inevitably a sensitive matter. He approached the subject of miracles, for example, in the dialogue form adopted in The Moralists, allowing him some distance from speaking openly in his own person. The sceptic Philocles announces himself as incredulous when it comes to modern miracles, although he defers to ‘sacred writ’ in accepting those of the past.169 As for contemporary allegations of miraculous events, the safest way to avoid being imposed upon was not to believe them at all and to declare that such happenings had ‘ceased’ altogether. In any case, they were superfluous since true faith had no need of them, and thus his incredulity becomes, as he suggests with deliberate paradox, a mark of his orthodoxy.170 As he manages the discussion, however, Shaftesbury erodes our confidence in biblical miracles by initiating an argument between two 165

166 167 168 169 170

Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 357. His extensive documentation of the case in his notes is based on Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus. Champion points out the influence of Harrington on this argument, Pillars of Priestcraft, 216n. Shaftesbury comes closest here to Toland’s scholarly style where he documented the influence of Egyptian religion in Letters to Serena (London, 1704), 30–53. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 357. Egypt may have influenced Ethiopia or the other way around, he notes (ibid., 359). Ibid., 358, 364. Ibid., 291. See also 368, where he defends himself and explains that he believes in revelation as far as anyone can who has not had support from a personal divine communication or the witness of a miracle. Ibid., 292.

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unnamed figures in the dialogue (present for some of the exchanges between Philocles and Theocles). One maintains that miracles ended with the composition of Scripture. To allow them now would open the door to new claimants representing various sects and enthusiasms. Furthermore, miracles played a limited role in antiquity – serving to impress heathens and Jews rather than Christians who had the text of Scripture to rely upon, which carried its own evidence. His opponent objects that he does wrong to undermine miracles in this way, because Scripture is not so well attested as he claims. Those who testified to ancient miracles being dead and gone, modern miracles were required; furthermore, if modern cases were disallowed, it would suggest that none had ever occurred.171 In this way Shaftesbury introduces a spiral of doubt regarding the solidity of the foundation of the Christian religion. Shaftesbury’s critique of the revealed status of Scripture becomes more overt in the Miscellaneous Reflections, if conducted with a familiar dexterity. In contrast to Muslims, he argues, Christians invite scrutiny of their sacred text. Indeed they require it since there are no current miracles to confirm it, and what we agree among ourselves is no evidence of truth (quoting John 5:31). He makes the authority of the text dependent on what he calls ‘collateral testimony’ from ancient records, historians, and writers.172 But here he sets a trap. To the extent that these antique writings have been impaired or lost (which we know is considerable), the certainty of Scripture and its factual basis are ‘diminished and brought in question’.173 Only an enthusiast or fanatic would claim that we can have sufficient confidence in the integrity of a reiterated, translated text, handed down across generations and varied in ways of which we remain wholly ignorant. By this stage, he has already planted a corrosive suggestion: without these reassurances, a sceptic could legitimately claim that the sacred writings were merely the production of a party promoting its own interests and seeking a monopoly.174

171

172 173 174

Ibid., 292–3. In The Reasonableness of Christianity Locke emphasised the importance of miracles in confirming the divinity of Christ; his posthumously published ‘Discourse of Miracles’ (c. 1701–2), although concerned with biblical reports, left open the possibility of modern miracles supplementing revelation, subject to Locke’s criteria. Writings on Religion, 44–50 (first published in Posthumous Works (1706)). See also Characteristics, 369; on textual criticism, 471–2; and most boldly, 473–5. Ibid., 438–9. Elsewhere he asserts his obedience to the established Church and says that he has refused to name or discuss the ‘mysteries of revelation’ (ibid., 471), although he reserved the right of others to exercise freethought and inquire into the matter (as for example Toland had done).

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Having widened our account of the philosophical relationship between Shaftesbury and Locke, we are now in a position to appreciate the alternative theory of diversity put forward by Shaftesbury, one in which religion played a key part. When we examine Shaftesbury’s discussion of why departures occur from the true standard and norm of virtue in the Inquiry, for example, he appears to have had in mind Locke’s analysis of the Tupinamba of Brazil. In chapter III, section 9 of the Essay’s first book, Locke had introduced evidence of moral diversity to unseat the claim that innate moral principles existed which enjoyed universal consent. Among other instances, he noted the case of the Tupinamba who upheld revenge and ‘eating abundance of their Enemies’ as ultimate virtues, entitling them to a place in paradise. Perhaps because of the invocation of an afterlife here, Locke immediately added that according to Jean de Le´ry, his source, ‘They have not so much as a Name for God . . . No Acknowledgement of Any God, no Religion, no Worship’ (I.iii.9). As I discussed in the previous chapter, a link was therefore made between the absence of an idea of the divine and an evil outcome in terms of moral practice. Without a religion, the Tupinamba merely introduced an afterlife as a means of social control. Shaftesbury seems to have recalled this discussion when he addressed the phenomenon of incorrect assessments of right and wrong in the Inquiry. If all of us have the same natural inclinations to virtue, why do errors occur? Initially Shaftesbury laid the blame on custom and education – acting in opposition to nature. In other words, the moral input remains the same, but it might afterwards be warped and distorted by social intervention. This move allowed him in a conventional way to set diversity aside. He could account, then, for the fact that in a number of countries reprobate deeds, including cannibalism, nevertheless received commendation. Custom and education could make it possible for a man to force himself ‘not only against his stomach but against his nature’ to ‘eat the flesh of his enemies’.175 In this case, a person would act on the supposition that he rendered service to his community and advanced the name and terror of his nation. But Shaftesbury had more to say on this subject in opposition to Locke. As far as atheism was concerned, he did not see that it made any difference; it had no direct effect on creating false ideas of right and wrong. Atheism 175

Ibid., 179.

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had no power to make cannibalism or bestiality appear good in themselves, but religion was another matter, at least where it was corrupt and tied to superstition. In this set of circumstances, ‘many things the most horridly unnatural and inhuman come to be received as excellent, good and laudable in themselves’.176 Whether Shaftesbury set out deliberately to challenge Locke’s understanding of the Tupinamba, he certainly offered a rival anthropology, making his accusations against (false) religion rather than against atheism. Indeed, the fault of religion in the matter was hardly surprising in his view. Since religion was based on love for a deity, then the character traits attributed to the divine would enjoy similar reverence. Where these traits included wantonness, wrath, anger, fury, vengefulness, fraud, or deceit, these qualities would be received as virtues. Some, relying on their natural sense of right and wrong, would dissent but keep their reservations private. Others caught up in the exercise of the faith would gradually reconcile themselves to the capricious nature of the divine, regarding cruel and barbarous acts as lawful and worth imitating.177 Shaftesbury’s analysis of diversity did not end here. In fact he had a complex position on the question which requires a larger perspective on his account of religious difference, toleration, and the problem of enthusiasm. If we take into consideration the range of areas in which he engaged in polemical battles, of which there were many, we can see an important cultural strategy emerging in which Shaftesbury sought on the one hand to create order and consensus in the sphere of morals and aesthetics, while on the other he cleared a space for open discussion, freethought, and contested opinion in the realm of religion. His argument had a subtle balance in which he fought against the rigours of religious authority and the insistence on uniformity while also negotiating the opposing dilemma of fanaticism and excess of zeal. Shaftesbury devised a number of methods for dealing with these problems, recalling his opponents to a more sociable norm characterised by a certain levity in religious conflicts. At the same time, his allowance for ongoing dispute in religion was dependent on preserving a territory of genuine agreement which he located in human nature and its inbuilt tendency to recognise principles of virtue, design, order, and beauty. We cannot read aspects of his system in isolation, therefore, but must appreciate the interdependence of his many concerns. His achievement was not inconsiderable, argued as it was in a difficult cultural and political predicament. 176

Ibid., 180.

177

Ibid., 180–1.

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We can see most clearly the change in direction on Shaftesbury’s part – away from the emphasis on moral agreement, toward a more open-ended area of religious disagreement – in a discourse that concludes the Miscellaneous Reflections. Here he makes his boldest objections to established religion. Typically, he speaks not in his own voice, but by way of representing the thoughts of a ‘gentleman of some rank’, ordinarily disposed to a cautious approach in religious matters and an ‘apparent’ deference to the established church.178 Shaftesbury leaves us in little doubt that he has himself in mind, even if he retains an alibi. The supposed occasion is a conversation in a large group in which the unnamed nobleman is provoked into vindicating freethought in religion. Against him, a number of zealous figures urge the importance of maintaining one profession and belief, a statement with which even the moderate concur, arguing that a way must be found to reconcile religious differences. The answer he provides is sufficiently curt. He tells them that ‘the variety of opinions was not to be cured’, and that it is ‘impossible all should be of one mind’.179 In the domain of morals and aesthetics, Shaftesbury was keen to insist on the existence of a rule or standard in nature to which our judgements and actions should correspond, an infallible point of reference for settling disputes. But in religion he took a different course. When the suggestion was made in the midst of this dispute that a guiding principle or figure be found, he responded dismissively: such a proposal to unify men’s minds would merely create conflict over who should lead. ‘Others thought of a Rule. This was to be the effectual means of union! This was to do the work, or nothing could! But supposing all the world had been agreed on this rule, yet the interpretation of it was so full of variety that this also became part of the disease.’180 Having urged the conflict of interpretations on this point, Shaftesbury refuses to countenance Scripture as the rule or guide (as the normative equivalent of nature in his moral system). Scripture, he remarks, in his most provocative and sceptical statement on the subject, is highly problematic. How can we establish the text itself, distinguishing the apocryphal from the canonical corpus of writings, given the range of manuscripts, transcripts, copies, and textual traditions associated with different sects, each of which adopts an alternative version when it comes to power? Egged on by criticism, he compounds the difficulties for those who insist on uniformity and agreement. An endless conflict arises in how to read the text itself. The mysteries it describes are sufficiently difficult, underscored 178

Ibid., 472.

179

Ibid.

180

Ibid., 473.

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by obscurities of expression and allegorical rendering, that making them the subject of faith and the basis of creeds is questionable, to say the least.181 What mark enables us to tell where to differentiate between a literal and figurative reading? Since we have to rely on our own resources in this case, we inevitably encounter human difference, reflected in the variety of personal persuasion, individual ability, and inclination. He concludes: ‘If we allow any one translation or any one man’s commentary, what rule or direction shall we have by which to choose that one aright?’182 Shaftesbury adopts a change of method here. Essentially he employs a sceptical technique of argument which exposes the lack of a criterion of truth to separate the authentic from inauthentic text. He leaves in place a diversity of competing traditions, manuscripts, and commentaries, with no norm or test to distinguish them. By retailing the lack of unanimity he replicates Locke’s argumentative strategy on innateness. What is the answer to this predicament? For Shaftesbury, freethought and toleration, rather than a push for uniformity, were essential. In his Letter Concerning Enthusiasm, for example, he mockingly referred to attempts to overcome the problem by insisting on uniformity of religious opinion as ‘a hopeful project!’. Efforts to enforce an orthodoxy through intervention of the magistrate proved unsuccessful, demonstrating how hard it was for ‘government to settle wit’.183 The appropriate course was to liberate rather than restrain wit, and thus to give freedom to raillery, his preferred rhetorical mode in these matters. Shaftesbury returned to this theme in the Miscellaneous Reflections, remarking on the numerous religious faiths and opinions in existence, many of them grounded in miracles and ‘pretended commissions’ from heaven. Human understanding cooperated in this case, indicating a rooted desire to believe and embrace what he called ‘imposture and show’. Where belief was regulated by the magistrate, little scope existed for altering opinions, but the fact of the matter was that almost anything could become subject to the law, however ‘ridiculous or monstrous’. From this point of view, it mattered little if what was being defended was truth or error. The discipline of the law would be purely relative in producing orthodox Christians as opposed to Muslims, pagans, or Jews. For this reason, 181 182

183

Ibid., 474. Ibid., 475. Shaftesbury had a notable defence in case he was accused of unorthodoxy: he indicated, with supporting quotations, that he merely retailed the positions of learned divines of the Church of England such as Jeremy Taylor and Archbishop Tillotson (ibid., 475–9). Anthony Collins adopted a similar strategy in A Discourse of Free-Thinking (London, 1713). Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 11–12.

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Shaftesbury maintained the necessity of allowing comparison and examination in religion, predicating ‘rational belief ’ on the establishment of ‘sincere toleration’.184 There are some interesting continuities and differences between Shaftesbury and Locke here. In his Letter concerning Toleration, Locke shared the conviction that difference was unavoidable and that the appropriate response was one of toleration: ‘It is not the diversity of Opinions (which cannot be avoided), but the refusal of Toleration to those that are of different Opinions (which might have been granted), that has produced all the Bustles and Wars that have been in the Christian World, upon account of Religion.’185 In a move that had something in common with Shaftesbury, he also adopted a sceptical perspective on the limitations of human knowledge which meant that no one could claim privileged insight into divine will and therefore secure the ground of authority (and force) for themselves.186 Yet, unlike Shaftesbury, Locke’s case does not depend on calling the interpretation or integrity of the biblical text into question. On the contrary, he suggests that a strict interpretation is often possible, which supports his view that toleration is enjoined by Christianity and consistent with the teachings and example of Christ. Finally, Shaftesbury’s deployment of wit, although not without parallel in some of Locke’s more polemical writings, was underpinned by his aristocratic status and penchant for ironic self-distancing. The final area of Shaftesbury’s philosophy that remains to be addressed in this context is his attitude toward enthusiasm. His handling of this religious, social and political threat represents not only one of his most dextrous rhetorical performances but also a striking and innovative contribution to eighteenth-century thought. The position he took represents an interesting departure from Locke, but they shared a basic concern with the phenomenon of religious fanaticism.187 In his first letter to Michael Ainsworth (24 February 1706/7), Shaftesbury expressed surprise that Locke had been criticised by Anglican representatives for advocating the use of reason in religion since that was the only means for fighting enthusiasts, the Church’s great enemies ‘who in the last Age broke in so foully upon us, and are now (pretendedly at least) esteemed so terrible and 184 186 187

Ibid., 382. 185 Locke, Letter concerning Toleration, 55. Ibid., 23, 42, 32 (as noted in ch. 2 above). See Shaftesbury’s unpublished ‘The Adept Ladys or The Angelick Sect’, composed as a letter to his brother Maurice in 1702, which provides a satirical account of a visit made to him by various enthusiasts, including a severe Quaker woman. The work is printed in Standard Edition, vol. I, part 1: 376–430. He inveighs against the danger of enthusiasm, 378, 414–16.

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dangerous’.188 Nevertheless, while recognising enthusiasm as a problem, Shaftesbury found ways to humanise and contain it. Locke’s contribution to the debate came in a chapter on enthusiasm which he added to the fourth edition of the Essay (1700). He was interested in exposing enthusiasm as a false ground of assent, which set aside reason and put a form of personal revelation in its place. His attention was prompted by the political consequences of such claims, but he did not concentrate on providing a political answer in this chapter but instead on dismantling the epistemological grounds for asserting that one had experienced an illumination directly communicated by God. Locke was sufficiently orthodox that he would not deny this possibility in principle, but he set up strict criteria for certifying the transcendental source of these alleged new truths.189 The immediate occasion of Shaftesbury’s Letter Concerning Enthusiasm (1708), addressed to Lord Somers,190 had some continuity with the paradigm case Locke had in mind. In 1706 a Huguenot group, the Camisards, had arrived in London, distinguished by their prophetic pronouncements and millenarian convictions, which had attracted considerable attention.191 Shaftesbury did not make them the focal point of his essay, but when he considered their example he emphasised that, politically, the most sensible way to handle the problem was to ignore it. This meant refusing to persecute them because repressive action would merely give them what they wanted – an opportunity for martyrdom on which to build support.192 Thus toleration was the appropriate response.

188 189

190

191 192

Shaftesbury, Several Letters, 5 (not printed in Rand). For an account of Locke’s position, see Nicholas Jolley, ‘Reason’s Dim Candle: Locke’s Critique of Enthusiasm’, in The Philosophy of John Locke: New Perspectives, ed. Peter Anstey (London, 2003), 179–91. John Somers (1651–1716), a Court Whig, rose to the office of lord chancellor in the reign of William III, received a peerage, and became a leading figure in the Whig Junto. He was known for his philosophical and artistic interests and was a patron of various philosophers and writers. Shaftesbury made sure that Somers swiftly received his publications (including The Sociable Enthusiast, Shaftesbury’s first version (c. 1703–4) of The Moralists which he printed but did not publish) and he also addressed his Letter on Design to Somers. Shaftesbury entrusted his proxy vote in the Lords to Somers (Miranda, ‘Moral, Social and Political Thought’, 297–8). Somers was also associated with Locke, beginning in the 1680s. Later he secured Locke’s appointment to the Board of Trade and he was the dedicatee of Locke’s Further Considerations Concerning Raising the Value of Money (1695). On their connections see Patrick Hyde Kelly, ‘Introduction’, to Locke on Money, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1991), I: 14–31. See Hillel Schwartz, The French Prophets: The History of a Millenarian Group in Eighteenth-Century England (Berkeley, 1980); Jaffro, E´thique de la communication, 38–53. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 15.

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In some sense toleration was a containing gesture, but Shaftesbury had an active proposal for limiting the spread of enthusiasm – the deployment of wit, ridicule, and satire against it. In the case of the Camisards he thought that an apt response had been devised in Bartholomew Fair, where a puppet show had been dedicated to mocking them. The mechanical, jerky movements constituted a perfect analogue for their control by some external force associated with divine illumination.193 He went on to comment, adventurously, that had the Jews in the time of Jesus adopted this witty form of reply instead of calling for crucifixion, the history of religion might have been very different. English Protestants, meanwhile, had benefited from the enthusiasm of the Reformers, but their campaign against the Catholic Church would have had a less happy conclusion if priests had not answered them with a call for blood rather than making puppets to parody them.194 Although he made a bold suggestion, however polite its expression, for redefining the place of humour in religious discourse, Shaftesbury continued to operate with a normative conception of satire, which functioned to correct abuses and excess. As he remarked at one point, ‘nothing is ridiculous except what is deformed’.195 The exercise of raillery recalled adversaries to a more reasonable view. If they failed to relinquish their extreme attitudes, satire had the salutary effect of isolating enthusiasts as beyond the norm, who could be excluded from an emerging consensus. In tandem, toleration and ridicule would deprive enthusiasts of their platform and credibility.196 We can see especially clearly in this context that Shaftesbury’s allowance of diversity (of which enthusiasm represented a sub-set) was possible because of the strong sociable and normative thrust of his other philosophical commitments. Freethought and toleration of religious diversity were made possible by having an anchor elsewhere in normative views of nature, morality, and beauty. This becomes evident in his most distinctive move in addressing the question of enthusiasm.197 Rather than allowing it to remain the ‘privilege’ 193 194

195 196 197

Ibid., 15–16. In her reply, Mary Astell proposed that Shaftesbury, who appealed for good humour in religion, should have his own humour tested by consecrating a puppet show at Bartholomew Fair in his lordship’s honour. Bart’lemy Fair: or, An Enquiry after Wit (London, 1709), 46. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 59. He differed with Locke here in thinking that an argumentative response would be ineffective. Ibid., 12. On Shaftesbury’s transvaluation of enthusiasm (anticipated by John Dennis), see Lawrence E. Klein, ‘Sociability, Solitude, and Enthusiasm’, Huntington Library Quarterly 60:1–2 (1998): 167–76; Klein, Shaftesbury, 165–8; on his position generally, see Jaffro, E´thique de la communication, chs. 1 and 2.

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of the religious believer, intent on a programme disruptive of society, religion, and political life, he claimed enthusiasm for himself and turned it into a sociable passion.198 ‘Enthusiasm’ served as the term for a heightened sensitivity to the beauty and order of the universe, the wonder of divine providence, and a taste in moral excellence.199 He recalled notions of poetic inspiration and the concept of the sublime (not Burke’s later version, but a traditional account of it, closer to Longinus, as something heightened and transcendent).200 These exalted levels had some foundation in nature, but a full experience might remain the preserve of the few; nonetheless, they could be communicated to others (as in the dialogue The Moralists). Above all, enthusiasm now emerged as an expression of sociability, not a divisive force motivated by antagonism or melancholy.201 His response on this subject, which was both sophisticated and playful in some respects, enabled him to re-label ‘conventional’ enthusiasm as the ‘vulgar’ variety, in contrast with his own higher form of enlightened and rapturous appreciation.202 Once again, he deployed a hierarchical manoeuvre to effect his social reform. Shaftesbury’s perspective on diversity was predicated on a complex response to Locke. In his answer to the critique of innateness, he reinstated norms of sociability, moral affection, and the divine, inspired by a Stoic conception of human nature that identified internal resources in the form of prolepses. At the same time, his hierarchical conception of access to virtue allowed him to avoid the necessity of common consent or confirmation. Shaftesbury’s deft manoeuvring was designed to create an area of stability associated with nature, and this foundation left him free to open up an area of dispute in matters of religion. In this context he expected and even welcomed diversity. For Francis Hutcheson, the task was to preserve the positive features of Shaftesbury’s system without advancing his religious polemic. But he also sought a way to make use of Locke’s theory of knowledge to embed a moral consensus resistant to the challenge from diversity. 198 199 200 201 202

Shaftesbury’s first version of The Moralists was entitled The Sociable Enthusiast (printed but not published c. 1703–4). See Voitle, Shaftesbury, 313–14. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 320. See also 351–23 (Miscellany, II.i). For further discussion, see Jean-Paul Larthomas, De Shaftesbury a` Kant (Paris, 1985), ch. 4. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 9. Ibid., 467. He also distinguished enthusiasm inspired by love, of which he approved, from the enthusiasm engendered by fear, which led to superstition (355).

CHAPTER

5

Method, moral sense, and the problem of diversity: Francis Hutcheson and the Scottish Enlightenment Francis Hutcheson, whose work became a leading force in the philosophical and cultural movement known as the Scottish Enlightenment, devoted his first major publication, An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), to a defence of the third Earl of Shaftesbury.1 Like Shaftesbury, he believed that mankind shared a fundamental core of moral ‘affections’ and that our ethical responses and motivations exhibited an important consistency. As a result he worried over the implications of diversity which disrupted the picture of an orderly and unified moral world. Continual testimony of savagery, corruption, and incommensurable beliefs potentially undermined the plausibility of the view that a ‘moral sense’ resided in human nature. There are reasons for suggesting that Hutcheson felt this challenge more acutely than Shaftesbury. Hutcheson democratised the moral sense and made its reach encompass all mankind. At the same time, he positioned his philosophy on a more observational basis than Shaftesbury and therefore encountered an obvious objection from reports of diversity. Hutcheson not only adapted what he inherited from Shaftesbury, he was also well disposed towards a number of developments in natural philosophy and epistemology promoted by Locke. Finding a basis for rapprochement between these opposing figures posed a considerable problem. The intriguing tensions created by his synthesis of Locke and Shaftesbury provide the focus of my discussion. In this chapter I describe what Hutcheson gained from his reading of Shaftesbury and Locke, and explore 1

An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue; In Two Treatises. In which the Principles of the late Earl of Shaftesbury are Explain’d and Defended, against the Author of the Fable of the Bees: and the Ideas of Moral Good and Evil are establish’d, according to the Sentiments of Antient Moralists. With an Attempt to introduce a Mathematical Calculation in Subjects of Morality (London, 1725). The revised second, third, and fourth editions appeared in 1726, 1729, and 1738, respectively. In quoting Hutcheson, I provide references to the first and fourth editions to indicate the presence of points that he retained throughout the editions. I have also given citations to the Liberty Fund edition of the Inquiry, ed. Wolfgang Leidhold (Indianapolis, 2004), referred to as ‘L’.

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his attempt to integrate their positions in a way that would prove up to date while also respecting traditions of ancient philosophy. Hutcheson’s principal contribution to moral philosophy was to describe the workings of the moral sense. This faculty or capacity, which combined the moment of moral perception with that of moral judgement, established a natural foundation for ethical responses. These reactions took place prior to any social input, contribution from the will, rational reflection, or intervention of self-interested impulses. Hutcheson not only articulated an alternative to various existing moral theories, he also replied to the objection that cultural diversity called into question the uniformity of an alleged moral sense. He answered this claim in two ways – by suggesting that accounts of diversity had been exaggerated (in the case of travellers who overstated it), and secondly by arguing that the phenomenon of diversity resulted from a number of factors that did not tell against the moral sense: competing forces in human nature, for example, or a mistaken use of reason, or differing interpretations of what actions remained consistent with moral principles that everyone shared. Hutcheson’s extended attention to the problem of diversity indicates that cultural variation in opinion, belief, and practice was a genuine source of difficulty in the philosophical world after Locke. Hutcheson’s dilemma can be appreciated by examining his response to the issue of innateness. In the context of his critique, Locke had introduced ethnographic accounts indicating a lack of moral or religious unanimity across mankind, and on this basis he denied the existence of natural, internal principles of virtue or the idea of God. Locke’s argument had advanced so successfully that even in Shaftesbury’s time it was uncomfortable to speak of instincts, impulses, or ideas that came from nature. Hutcheson respected the critique and attempted to shield the moral sense from it. But his way of doing so is somewhat misleading. In fact he wanted to re-establish a form of innateness on new terms that would be acceptable as the eighteenth century progressed. Yet he did so without some of the philosophical resources available to Shaftesbury, notably a hierarchical conception that avoided the pitfalls of actual common consent and the need to assert universal acceptance of sociability and virtue. In the final two sections of the chapter, I examine the persistence of diversity as an issue addressed by philosophers in the Scottish Enlightenment. Hutcheson inaugurated an extended discussion on the part of figures such as Adam Smith, David Hume, and David Fordyce which we can trace all the way to Dugald Stewart writing in the first decades of the nineteenth century. While the empirical side of

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Hutcheson’s argument left him with the challenge of non-confirmation, the later Scottish contribution (for which a precedent, in fact, can be found in Shaftesbury and Locke) moved away from this quandary by explaining moral and cultural differences in terms of history and phases of social development. During the eighteenth century, the two strands of discussion existed alongside one another and formed complementary efforts to fill out an account of human nature which did justice to its moral resources while respecting the facts of difference.2 I HUTCHESON’S INTELLECTUAL CONTEXT

Before embarking on a discussion of Hutcheson’s philosophy we must briefly situate him socially, historically, and religiously. All of these considerations have a bearing, of course, on the interpretation of his work and the context in which he established his career and came to prominence. Hutcheson was born in 1694 in Drumalig, Co. Down, in Ulster. Both his father and grandfather were Presbyterian ministers, with his grandfather arriving in Ireland as part of the Scottish settlement in the time of Cromwell. After a local education in a dissenting academy, Hutcheson attended the University of Glasgow. He returned to Northern Ireland and was licensed to preach, but he soon departed for Dublin where he established a dissenting academy after 1719 and taught there for ten years. This period was decisive in many ways because it was in Dublin that he met Robert Molesworth, a leader of the Whig cause and commonwealthman who had close political and philosophical ties with Shaftesbury.3 The encounter was important in giving direction to Hutcheson’s philosophical development, as Molesworth and his circle stimulated his exploration of 2

3

We can also see the emergence, both in Scotland and among Continental thinkers, of a perspective on these questions that foregrounded natural history and contemplated the division of mankind into distinct species, an approach with implications for ranking of peoples and concepts of racial difference. This discussion, together with a new phase, which began in the age of evolutionary theory, are beyond the scope of this study. For Molesworth’s connection with Shaftesbury see Letters from the Right Honourable the Late Earl of Shaftesbury, to Robert Molesworth, Esq, ed. John Toland (London, 1721). On the Molesworth circle see M. A. Stewart, ‘John Smith and the Molesworth Circle’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland 2 (1987): 89–102. See also William Robert Scott, Francis Hutcheson: His Life, Teaching and Position in the History of Philosophy (1900; rpt Bristol, 1992). The views of the circle appeared in a series of Dublin Weekly Journal articles published in 1726, subsequently edited by James Arbuckle and dedicated to Molesworth’s son Richard (who succeeded his father as Viscount in 1725) under the title A Collection of Letters and Essays on Several Subjects, 2 vols. (London, 1729). In the first edition of the Inquiry, Hutcheson stated that diffidence of his own ‘Performance’ had made him circumspect in crediting ‘a certain Lord (whose Name would have had no small Authority with the Learned World)’ (ix–x). After Molesworth’s death, he named him openly in later editions.

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Shaftesburian themes. Having composed the works for which he is best known, the Inquiry (1725),4 and An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions. With Illustrations on the Moral Sense (1728), Hutcheson returned to Glasgow in 1730 after his election as professor of moral philosophy. There he authorised the publication of a number of pedagogical Latin texts (possibly based on his Dublin teaching curriculum) and continued to revise and defend his earlier publications. His influence was strongly felt as a charismatic teacher and participant in ongoing philosophical, theological, institutional, and cultural conflicts. His carefully negotiated position between radical and conservative forces was not uncontroversial in the Scotland of his day where principles of human nature and their religious and political implications were strongly contested. His success may have owed something to the skill he showed in navigating the difficult waters confronting a nonconformist trying to establish himself in Dublin while remaining on good terms with prominent authorities in the Church of Ireland.5 Hutcheson’s impact was carried to the New World both by his writings and by the large group of Scots who played such a remarkable role in the development of the American educational system. Hutcheson’s philosophy developed from a complex group of classical, scholastic, and modern influences in ethics, epistemology, logic, and jurisprudence. In opposition to those who, like Hobbes, Locke, and Mandeville, had argued – in different ways – that self-interest exerted a powerful influence over motivation and judgement, Hutcheson appealed to an equally forceful benevolent impulse in the soul. Without denying the conflicting claims of self-interest, he maintained that benevolence provided a strong motive for generous and disinterested action. He characterised human beings as sociable by nature on the evidence of these ‘kind affections’ and rejected the view that sociability merely stemmed from a 4

5

A second issue of the first edition in 1725, with a cancel title-page, elided the reference to Shaftesbury and Mandeville, reducing the title to An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue; In Two Treatises. I. Concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, Design. II. Concerning Moral Good and Evil. Whether Molesworth’s death on 22 May 1725 played a part in this – freeing Hutcheson, perhaps, from the need to advertise himself so prominently as Shaftesbury’s defender – is a matter of speculation. The explanation may simply lie with changes in printing house personnel (Thomas Longman having set up his own business in 1725). In any event, Hutcheson kept the revised title in the second and subsequent editions. Hutcheson established connections with a number of prominent members of the Church of Ireland, including Edward Synge, the younger (1691–1762); Hugh Boulter, archbishop of Armagh and primate of all Ireland; and leading political figures such as John Carteret, lord lieutenant of Ireland, and the lord chancellor, Richard West. Carteret and Synge pressed Hutcheson to consider taking up a Church of Ireland living. See James Moore’s Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry on Francis Hutcheson.

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prudential calculation of self-interest. Mankind possessed a moral sense which approved of benevolent actions instinctively. This capacity was linked with other ‘internal’ senses: the sense of beauty, honour, shame, and finally a public sense – all of which formed part of human nature. By identifying an impressive array of essentially sociable responses, Hutcheson felt he had rectified the narrowness of existing moral theories, their reductive analysis and tendency to understand law solely as an external force and not as part of the internal structure of human nature. In this way, Hutcheson reconciled the moral sense with the law of nature.6 This brief description indicates some of the reasons why Hutcheson was drawn to Shaftesbury’s philosophy. In the first instance, he shared an equal admiration for the Stoic tradition, revitalised by Shaftesbury as an alternative to Locke. Hutcheson’s regard for the Stoic moralists appears in his frequent references to Marcus Aurelius, his translation of the emperor’s Meditations, his enthusiasm for Epictetus, and his classes in Glasgow devoted to Arrian.7 This tradition influenced his conception of a providential order, evident in the design of the world, and of a similar order in human nature drawing mankind to the good. Hutcheson, like Shaftesbury, sought to identify some basis for agreement which he could set against the existence of diversity, preserving a sense of regularity in nature. Shaftesbury had used ancient philosophy to uphold the possibility of disinterested moral action, placing human beings in a larger system, the ‘goodness’ of 6

7

Hutcheson links his moral theory with natural rights in the Inquiry, esp. 1st edn, 256–65; 4th edn, 277–88; L 182–8. His formulation of natural law appears most fully in his Philosophiae moralis institutio compendiaria, ethices & jurisprudentiae naturalis (Glasgow, 1742), translated as A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy (Glasgow, 1747); and his posthumously published System of Moral Philosophy, 2 vols. (Glasgow, 1755). On this subject see especially Knud Haakonssen, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1996), ch. 2; Stephen Buckle, Natural Law and the Theory of Property: Grotius to Hume (Oxford, 1991), ch. 4; Daniela Gobetti, Private and Public: Individuals, Households, and Body Politic in Locke and Hutcheson (London, 1992), ch. 4. Hutcheson was credited with reviving classical studies at Glasgow (see William Leechman’s preface to Hutcheson’s System, xxxvi). In addition to his normal lecturing duties, Hutcheson taught classes ‘explaining and illustrating the works of Arrian, Antoninus and other Greek Philosophers’. David Murray, Memories of the Old College of Glasgow: Some Chapters in the History of the University (Glasgow, 1927), 516n. Hutcheson collaborated with James Moor, librarian and later professor of Greek at Glasgow, on an English translation which appeared as The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (Glasgow, 1742). On Stoicism in the Scottish Enlightenment generally see Richard B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1985), 175–86; M. A. Stewart, ‘The Stoic Legacy in the Early Scottish Enlightenment’, in Atoms, Pneuma, and Tranquillity: Stoic Themes in European Thought, ed. Margaret J. Osler (Cambridge, 1991), 273–96; Norbert Waszek, ‘Two Concepts of Morality: A Distinction of Adam Smith’s Ethics and Its Stoic Origin’, Journal of the History of Ideas 45 (1984): 591–606.

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which engendered feelings of love and admiration. Hutcheson argued in defence of these ideals by promoting the notion of benevolence, and he continued the attack on Hobbes’s version not only of human nature, but also of the state of nature. Hutcheson’s emphasis on human goodness, on benevolent affections and natural approval of disinterest, placed him at odds with a more traditional Calvinist account of human nature, in which the Fall had profound effects on mankind, necessitating rewards and punishments to control human impulses.8 Shaftesbury’s work again represented an asset, though a difficult one to acknowledge, in Hutcheson’s moderate position on Presbyterian ecclesiastical matters.9 Hutcheson’s position did not go unnoticed or unchallenged in the Irish Presbyterian community.10 In the second edition of the Inquiry, he publicly distanced himself from Shaftesbury’s deistic pronouncements.11 Finally, Shaftesbury and Hutcheson held similar views on basic political questions. They shared a high esteem for Locke’s political writing, and as a dissenter Hutcheson inevitably benefited from the spirit of toleration fostered in Whig politics. (His move to Dublin and establishment of a dissenting academy there was made possible by the Irish parliament’s Act of Toleration in 1719.) Hutcheson’s attachment to Shaftesbury’s writings, which he readily acknowledged, is therefore understandable. Yet the relative lack of analytical rigour in Shaftesbury’s work meant that it required a certain amount of adaptation in a more academic context. Shaftesbury favoured a 8

Hutcheson expressed himself cautiously on this point before his colleagues in his inaugural lecture as professor of moral philosophy in Glasgow. He acknowledged the weak and fallen nature of man, but maintained that the leading part of the soul (the Stoic concept of to hegemonikon) told us of our original, uncorrupted, nature. De naturali hominum socialitate (Glasgow, 1730), 8–9, 19. For a translation, see On Human Nature: Reflections on our Common Systems of Morality[;] On the Social Nature of Man, ed. and trans. Thomas Mautner (Cambridge, 1993), for these passages, 131–2, 142. Hereafter referred to as Mautner. For a contrast with Hutcheson’s view of human nature see the account by the Scottish Calvinist Thomas Boston, Human Nature in Its Four-fold State (Edinburgh, 1720): ‘There is in the Mind of Man a natural Bias to Evil, whereby it comes to pass, that whatever Difficulties it finds, while occupied about Things truly good, it acts with a great deal of Ease in Evil; as being in that Case in its own Element . . .’ (65). 9 On the moderates see Sher, Church and University ; Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘Philosophy in the Scottish Social Order’, in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (London, 1988), 241–59. 10 For a hostile nineteenth-century response, see James Seaton Reid, The History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, new edn, with additional notes by W. D. Killen, 3 vols. (Belfast, 1867), III: 296–8. 11 ‘It is indeed to be wished, that he [Shaftesbury] had abstained from mixing with such Noble Performances, some Prejudices he had receiv’d against Christianity; a Religion which gives us the truest Idea of Virtue, and recommends the Love of God, and of Mankind, as the sum of all true Religion’ (Inquiry, 2nd edn, xx; 4th edn, xix, italicised in the original; L 12). In his inaugural lecture Hutcheson praised the ‘clarissimus’ Shaftesbury but noted the just reservations of theologians about his work. De naturali hominum socialitate, 13. Mautner, 136.

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conversational style, addressed to a refined audience, often in dialogueform free from technical analysis.12 He presented his views as intuitively correct, rather than defending them meticulously. Although Hutcheson was drawn to this mode of expression, to some extent, he nonetheless wanted to provide a more technical account of the workings of the moral sense. In terms of the resources available to him, he had absorbed traditions of scholastic philosophy in his youth, but he pursued a revision of scholastic method by placing ‘observation’ at the forefront. At Glasgow the discourse of natural rights held a prominent place, the importance of which for Hutcheson should not be overlooked, but he rejected it as a starting point for moral inquiry. The work of Pufendorf, for example, which was significant in the Glasgow curriculum,13 had several limitations from Hutcheson’s perspective, including its emphasis on law as an external force, obeyed prudentially, which depended on a model of human nature as essentially self-interested.14 Derivations of natural law from reason or from divine will neglected the moral sense located internally in human nature. In many ways his most distinctive contribution was to link these notions. Shaftesbury had ignored the language and tradition of natural law and natural rights. Hutcheson did not begin with these but he ensured that his version of the moral sense generated the content of natural rights: the grounding of these principles in human nature itself made them genuinely inalienable. The notion of a moral sense had been raised by Shaftesbury (as Hutcheson acknowledged).15 In Shaftesbury’s Inquiry Concerning Virtue, or Merit, for example, he referred on one occasion to a ‘natural moral sense’ in man, and the phrase also twice appeared as a subject heading in the margins. Elsewhere, in The Moralists, Shaftesbury provided a somewhat fuller account of how such a sense would operate, remarking in the case of aesthetics on our perception of the difference between discord and harmony as deriving from a ‘plain internal sensation’. In the Inquiry, Shaftesbury commented on a ‘reflected sense’ in mankind, and implied that an analogy existed between the ordinary senses and the perception of 12

13

14 15

The Inquiry Concerning Virtue represents something of an exception, written in a more argumentative style from which he later distanced himself. This work is much closer in expression to Hutcheson’s later Inquiry than the other essays in Characteristicks. See James Moore and Michael Silverthorne, ‘Natural Sociability and Natural Rights in the Moral Philosophy of Gerschom Carmichael’, in Philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. V. Hope (Edinburgh, 1984), 1–12. Hutcheson, De naturali hominum socialitate, 11–13; Mautner, 134–6; and references elsewhere in Hutcheson’s work cited by Haakonssen, Natural Law, 69n. Hutcheson, Inquiry, 1st edn, vii; 4th edn, xiv–xv; L 9.

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beauty or moral action.16 Yet these remained incomplete or shadowy suggestions, not systematic statements, and in any event he was convinced that such a sense was not sufficient in itself: reason had an important role to play in ‘applying’ the affections correctly. Although the prospect of a moral sense represented a considerable advance, Hutcheson needed a more technical way of accounting for it than Shaftesbury had provided. To achieve this aim he turned to Locke, whose Essay offered a model for cogent analysis and argument.17 Locke had maintained that ideas arise from sensation and reflection. Consciousness of sensation or reflection produces further ideas which could then be combined in ever more complex forms, expanding the range of human understanding while maintaining an empirical basis. Hutcheson set out his conception of a moral sense along lines prepared by Locke, in terms of both its ontological status and its epistemological role. Specifically, Hutcheson argued that the number of senses had been unduly and artificially limited to five. We possess a number of other senses which operate internally, notifying us of ideas through a process he called sensation. These internal senses perceive pleasure when they receive ideas of beauty, order, harmony, virtue, and so forth. Having adopted this model, Hutcheson established a place within the structure of the mind and human nature for moral, aesthetic, and ultimately political principles. Just as importantly, he developed an argument 16 17

Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge, 1999), 180, 274, 175. The extent of Locke’s influence is a debated question. There is no doubt that Hutcheson adapted aspects of Lockean epistemology for his purposes, but he was also indebted to a range of Continental sources and traditions. For an argument stressing his debt to Locke, see Kenneth Winkler, ‘Hutcheson and Hume on the Color of Virtue’, Hume Studies 22:1 (1996): 3–22. For alternative analyses that see Lockean traces in combination with other traditions, see James Moore, ‘The Two Systems of Francis Hutcheson: On the Origins of the Scottish Enlightenment’, in Studies in the Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. M. A. Stewart (Oxford, 1990), 37–59; David Fate Norton, ‘Hutcheson and Moral Realism’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 23 (1985): 397–418; Moore does note that in his Logicae compendium (Glasgow, 1756), Hutcheson provided a review of the history of philosophy and endorsed a number of Lockean reforms in logic and metaphysics (56n). It is also worth observing the extensive referencing to Locke in Hutcheson’s Synopsis metaphysicae. Rather than polarising the issue – between an account that downplays Locke or one that attributes everything to his influence – I believe it is preferable to see Hutcheson as attempting a difficult task of reconciling rival sources. In the case of Locke and Shaftesbury, it is clear that Hutcheson rejected Locke’s account of morality’s dependence on law, together with rewards and punishments, just as Shaftesbury did. Nor did he find Locke’s account of motivation or desire adequate (see Luigi Turco, ‘Sympathy and the Moral Sense: 1725–1740’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 7:1 (1999): 79–101). Yet at the same time Locke’s epistemology provided a crucial account of the origin of ideas, the passivity of perception, and the concepts of simple and complex ideas. A model of synthesis or reconciliation allows us to see Hutcheson as contesting some of Locke’s conclusions while remaining dependent on a number of his philosophical distinctions. Innateness, which I will shortly consider in more detail, provides a particularly important case in point.

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against those who believed such principles merely gave expression to selfinterest and self-love, arising from calculation or the influence of social forces: . . . the Ideas of Beauty and Harmony, like other sensible Ideas, are necessarily pleasant to us, as well as immediately so; neither can any Resolution of our own, nor any Prospect of Advantage or Disadvantage, vary the Beauty or Deformity of an Object: For as in the external Sensations, no View of Interest will make an Object grateful, nor Detriment . . . make it disagreeable to the Sense.18

We cannot control having sensations; in the same way we cannot control having moral and aesthetic responses. They occur immediately, prior to reason or reckoning of self-interest, though considerations of this kind may subsequently affect them. Description of moral ideas as emerging from the senses provided them with a strong foundation in reality, not in the relative and fluctuating conditions of social life, education, or individual desire.19 Hutcheson grounded the notion of a moral sense in Lockean epistemology, and consequently he adopted a very different method from Shaftesbury, at least initially. Shaftesbury had objected that Locke’s philosophising began from a mistaken basis which led to sceptical conclusions about the knowability of human nature and the presence of moral norms in mankind. In contrast with Locke’s approach – which drew in part on influences from Bacon and the programme of natural history advocated by the Royal Society – Shaftesbury endorsed a Stoic understanding of man’s nature. But as the eighteenth century progressed, Shaftesbury’s resistance to reformed natural philosophy began to appear less like a legitimate complaint and more a symptom of his indolence and excessive refinement. Adam Smith’s comments in the Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres suggest the Scottish reaction to Shaftesbury on this point. As a student of Hutcheson’s who later followed him as professor of moral philosophy in Glasgow, Smith’s attitude merits attention. In his eleventh lecture, Smith argued that Shaftesbury’s feeble constitution prevented him from pursuing natural history with sufficient diligence: 18 19

Hutcheson, Inquiry, 1st edn, 10–11; 4th edn, 11; L 25. My description of Hutcheson as a realist is based on Hutcheson’s and Shaftesbury’s understanding of the term as implying a belief in a permanent distinction between good and evil, grounded in nature. For a debate over whether Hutcheson qualifies as a realist according to criteria of contemporary philosophy, see contributions by David Fate Norton and Kenneth Winkler – Norton, David Hume: Common-Sense Moralist, Sceptical Metaphysician (Princeton, 1982), ch. 2; Winkler, ‘Hutcheson’s Alleged Realism’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 23 (1985): 179–94; Norton, ‘Hutcheson and Moral Realism’; and Winkler, ‘Hutcheson and Hume’. After initially questioning whether Hutcheson qualifies as a realist in an ‘interesting’ sense, Winkler has suggested more recently that contemporary terminology is unhelpful in exploring such issues. ‘Hutcheson and Hume’, 3.

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Naturall philosophy he does not seem to have been at all acquainted with, but on the other hand he shews a great ignorance of the advances it had then made and a contempt for its followers. The reason plainly is that it did not afford the amusement his disposition required and the mathematicall part particularly required more attention and abstract thought than men of his weakly habit are generally capable of.20

Smith’s speculative explanation for Shaftesbury’s dislikes is questionable but the point he makes illustrates a significant shift of opinion on the merits of a more ‘scientific’, observational method endorsed by Hutcheson. His contemporaries saw the change of approach as one of Hutcheson’s most distinctive contributions to moral philosophy. In a preface to Hutcheson’s posthumous System of Moral Philosophy (1755), William Leechman stressed that Hutcheson had cast off the older method of forming ‘hypotheses and suppositions in natural philosophy’, replacing this approach with observation and experiment: [Hutcheson] thought there was ground to hope, that from a more strict philosophical enquiry into the various natural principles or natural dispositions of mankind, in the same way that we enquire into the structure of an animal body, of a plant, or of the solar system, a more exact theory of morals may be formed, than has yet appeared.21

Whether a single methodology encompasses these investigations is debatable,22 but Hutcheson nonetheless represents an important exponent of intellectual change.23 The broad consequence, then, as a number of critics have pointed out, is that Hutcheson’s style of argument is, at times, observational, involving an appeal to fact.24 20 21 22

23

24

Adam Smith, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. J. C. Bryce (Oxford, 1983), 57. Hutcheson, System, I: xiii–xv. Hutcheson drew on natural history in advancing the design argument (Inquiry, 1st edn, 24–5, 46–50; 4th edn, 26–7; 50–4; L 49–51; and also attempted a ‘mathematical’ calculation of virtue (1st edn, 168–73; modified in the fourth edition; L 128–9). Evidence of the change can be seen independently in the work of George Turnbull, who endorsed the experimental, inductive approach in his Treatise on Ancient Painting (London, 1740), x–xi; Observations upon Liberal Education (London, 1742); The Principles of Moral Philosophy, 2 vols. (London, 1740), I: 1–23. The impact also appears in the reform of the Scottish university system which reversed the traditional order of teaching from a scholastic foundation in logic and demonstration to a starting point in natural philosophy and natural history. See Paul B. Wood, The Aberdeen Enlightenment: The Arts Curriculum in the Eighteenth Century (Aberdeen, 1993); and Roger L. Emerson, ‘Science and Moral Philosophy in the Scottish Enlightenment’, in Studies in the Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. M. A. Stewart, 11–36. See for example Inquiry, 1st edn, 68, 275; 4th edn, 73, 303; L 63, 196–7. Among critics, Norton, David Hume, 65; Mautner, ‘Introduction’ to Hutcheson, On Human Nature, 46; see also Haakonssen, Natural Law, 71–2.

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But we should not overstate the case. In outlining his position, Hutcheson often appealed, for example, to the intuitive correctness of his views, asking his readers to examine their own hearts in the matter. Thus, if he appeared to move away from Shaftesbury by adopting the method of natural philosophy, it would be a mistake to suppose that this entailed a radical departure. His employment of an empirical technique certainly did not result in sceptical conclusions about human diversity. Ultimately, Hutcheson made use of an observational technique to establish a sense of design and order in the world, consistent with Shaftesbury’s vision. An inductive survey eventually revealed the intentions of the Creator, facilitating a series of important moral deductions. Locke, by contrast, remained unconvinced by teleological forms of argument, sceptical that we could gain access to the essence of our own nature, since we were created by God and not by ourselves. Hutcheson’s more confident approach elided Locke’s sophisticated deliberations over the probabilism inherent in a form of knowledge based on observation. On the contrary, Hutcheson shared Shaftesbury’s view that the moral sense provided definitive knowledge and certainty. Observation of nature eventually supported a teleological argument that gave insight into the ends for which man was created. This tendency emerges in Hutcheson’s remarks on the sense of humour in his early response to Hobbes.25 Similarly the moral sense, once identified empirically, must have a purpose assigned to it stemming from divine intention. Of course Hume, on the contrary, famously rejected the teleological component in Hutcheson’s argument as ‘unphilosophical’ in his estimation.26 Joseph Butler, whose philosophy coincided in many ways with Hutcheson’s, followed a similar pattern in his reflections on human nature. In the first of his Rolls Chapel sermons (1726) he touched on the question of method. If anyone doubted the existence of goodwill among fellow human beings, he argued that ‘whether man be thus or otherwise constituted, what is the inward frame in this particular, is a mere question of fact or natural history, not provable immediately by reason’. He made an important concession here since he allowed for a measure of doubt which 25

26

Francis Hutcheson, Thoughts on Laughter and Observations on ‘The Fable of the Bees’ in Six Letters (Bristol, 1989). His third letter proposed to inquire into the ‘effects of laughter, and the ends for which it was implanted in our nature’ (35). The letter originally appeared in The Dublin Weekly Journal in 1726. Letter to Hutcheson of 17 September 1739, The Letters of David Hume, ed. J. Y. T. Greig, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1932), I: 33. Hume described his own method as closer to the natural sciences, while Hutcheson, by implication, approximated the virtuoso concerns that preoccupied Shaftesbury.

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Hutcheson was wary of acknowledging. Butler recognised that matters of natural history relied on appeals to various forms of evidence – the external senses, ‘inward perceptions’, the ‘testimony of mankind’, and finally ‘acknowledged facts and actions’. Although this method allowed observers to establish with certainty what principles did not prompt given actions (such as self-interest), we could only ascertain the actual principles underlying an action (like benevolence) to a ‘great probability’: ‘Now that there is some degree of benevolence amongst men, may be as strongly and plainly proved in all these ways, as it could possibly be proved, supposing there was this affection in our nature.’27 The note of hesitancy in Butler’s prose, his reticence over insisting on conclusive proof, stems from an appreciation of the limited demonstrative capacity of observational evidence.28 But even allowing the presence of a ‘degree’ of human benevolence, Butler needed a transition from a contingent claim that benevolent actions actually occurred in society to a normative assertion that they represented an ideal and a goal for mankind. His model for thinking about human nature remained, like Shaftesbury’s and Hutcheson’s, essentially teleological. He regarded goodwill, in Stoic terms, as a seed implanted in our nature by God: ‘There is, it is owned, much left for us to do upon our own heart and temper; to cultivate, to improve, to call it forth, to exercise it in a steady, uniform manner.’29 II HUTCHESON AND THE PROBLEM OF INNATENESS

Nowhere was the combined influence of Locke and Shaftesbury more difficult to negotiate than over the issue of innateness. Locke’s critique was consistent with an observational method to the extent that it depended on historical reports of cultural difference. At the same time, the technique of argument drew on sceptical precedents in order to question Stoic assertions about human uniformity and internal principles. Having 27 28

29

Joseph Butler, Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel, ed. W. R. Matthews (London, 1958), 34–5n. Thomas Johnson explicitly criticised Hutcheson on this point. Hutcheson had alleged the existence, as a matter of fact, of disinterested affections, describing them as ‘natural instincts’, which he hypothesised had their origin in a moral sense. Johnson replied: ‘Now where a Phaenomenon is solv’d by an Hypothesis, the most that can be concluded, is, that the Solution is possible or probable, not that the true Cause is certainly assign’d.’ An Essay on Moral Obligation with a View Towards Settling the Controversy, Concerning Moral and Positive Duties (London, 1731), 37. Butler, Sermons, 35n. Hutcheson paid tribute to Butler on several occasions, for example in An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections. With Illustrations on the Moral Sense (London, 1728), xix; in the edition prepared by Aaron Garrett (Indianapolis, 2002), this passage appears p. 9; see also Hutcheson, System, I: 256n.

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adopted aspects of Locke’s method and epistemology, the question was whether Hutcheson would also accept his analysis of innateness. From Shaftesbury’s point of view, Locke’s critique led inevitably to the law of opinion which implied that moral standards had no purchase in reality but merely expressed the desires and prejudices of particular communities. Only innate principles, prolepses, or instincts could provide a moral standard and check against diversity. Although Hutcheson agreed with Shaftesbury that human beings were drawn by nature to approve of good actions and to disapprove of evil ones, he had too much respect for Locke’s philosophy to scorn it in Shaftesbury’s imperious fashion. In the Inquiry, for example, Hutcheson admitted that evidence of ‘the vast Diversity of moral Principles, in various Nations, and Ages ’, cited by Locke in Book I of the Essay, ‘is indeed a good Argument against innate Ideas, or Principles ’.30 But he refused to accept that this diversity undermined the moral sense itself. Later he prudently removed the statement from the third edition.31 Thus he attempted to shield the moral sense from complaints over innateness while getting it to perform a normative role previously delegated to innate practical principles. Of course there are different versions and definitions of innateness at stake here: in one account, it entails the possession of particular, specifiable, ideas or conceptions, somehow inscribed in the soul, which might or might not require the trigger of experience to emerge (for example, ideas of God, good and evil); in another, a predisposition to hold certain beliefs and make certain judgements, provided that ‘normal’ conditions of maturity or rationality have been met; finally, a faculty, that is, an inborn structure enabling the subject to experience the world in a moral way, and to register ethical responses to it, whatever they may be.32 All these orientations on innateness impinge on Hutcheson’s approach to the problem. On the one hand he conceded Locke’s critique as consistent with modern philosophising, but he restricted its force to innate ideas or propositions, leaving the moral sense conveniently exempt from the objection. On the other hand, Hutcheson was determined to reintroduce the content of innateness if not the name, assigning the moral sense a familiar, normative, role in underwriting perceptions and judgements. The intricacy of the issue has led critics to arrive at different assessments of Hutcheson’s outlook on innateness. Stephen Buckle and Knud Haakonssen conclude that Hutcheson abandoned innate ideas 30 32

Hutcheson, Inquiry, 1st edn, 182–3. 31 Compare the Inquiry, 3rd edn, 203. For definitions and discussion, see Innate Ideas, ed. Stephen P. Stich (Berkeley, 1975).

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altogether.33 David Fate Norton agrees that Hutcheson found Locke’s critique persuasive, at least against neo-platonic theories of ethics (such as Cudworth’s), but elsewhere Norton points out that Hutcheson sets up the moral sense as an ‘innate and independent’ moral faculty.34 Charles Taylor, meanwhile, remarks acutely on the dispositional inclination of Hutcheson’s argument: ‘Goodness and generosity are natural to us. He might have been tempted in an earlier generation to say ‘‘innate’’, but he has internalized enough of the Lockean psychology to shy away from this. So he claims that these sentiments are ones we naturally grow to have, just as we develop to our normal stature and shape.’35 In some sense all of these descriptions of Hutcheson are correct. The reason why he has attracted such varying characterisations of his position is due to the fact that he frequently changed his tack. His shifting strategy appears both in the changes he made to the four editions of the Inquiry, and in the development of his work over the course of his career. In the preface to the Inquiry, at least, Hutcheson appeared to settle the issue immediately. The moral sense, he claimed, ‘has no relation to innate Ideas . . .’36 He stated the matter negatively at this point, directing Locke’s critique away from the moral sense. In the body of the text he made his case more fully. In the opening treatise on beauty, he sided with those who followed ‘Mr. Locke’ in shaking off the ‘groundless Opinions about innate Ideas ’, but he warned against a conclusion that too many had adopted under Locke’s influence, namely that our likes and dislikes came from custom, education, or personal advantage. In answer to this false argument, Hutcheson observed that everyone understood the external senses to be natural and ‘antecedent’, even though they too were subject to alteration by habit, tuition, and self-interest. He stressed above all that the internal sense he described (in this case, of beauty) did not presuppose innate ideas or principles of knowledge, any more than the external senses did. Rather, it was a ‘passive power’, as he called it, to receive certain ideas.37 Thus he concentrated on maximising the advantage of describing our aesthetic reactions as the outcome of a ‘sense’. When he came to the moral sense in the second treatise of the Inquiry, he took the same approach. Emphasising once more that the internal sense did not entail the assumption of innate ideas or practical propositions, he also 33 34 35 36

Buckle, Natural Law, 198, and 198n20; Haakonssen, Natural Law, 66. Norton, David Hume, 83, 86. In ‘Hutcheson and Moral Realism’ (401), Norton interprets some of Hutcheson’s remarks on innateness as anti-Lockean. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, 1989), 260. Hutcheson, Inquiry, 1st edn, vii; 4th edn, xv; L 9. 37 Ibid., 1st edn, 73–5; 4th edn, 78–80; L 66–7.

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maintained that its reactions happened before personal loss or gain entered the equation.38 In this way he defended Shaftesbury against the cynical reply of Mandeville who had reduced everything to self-interest. At the same time, Hutcheson freed the moral sense from the charge of innateness since neither Locke nor his followers regarded the sense of smell, taste, and so forth in these terms.39 If any ambiguity remained, he tried to resolve it in the third edition of the Inquiry (1729) by stating that the moral sense shared with the other senses the capacity to receive simple ideas, as he now put it. There was no question of claiming that moral propositions, necessarily complex, inhabited human nature, a notion Locke had dispatched.40 In tracing the development of Hutcheson’s position we should bear in mind that Locke had effectively barred access to the two most familiar ways of establishing innateness, either in the form of inscribed ideas/principles or as dispositions developing over time. Hutcheson exploited the possibility of recapturing some form of innateness on a third basis, namely by understanding the moral sense as an inbuilt faculty of moral perception, part of our natural endowment. To do so, he made the clever move of drawing on Locke’s own account of knowledge acquisition in the Essay. According to Locke, ideas result from a process of both sensation and reflection. The physical environment stimulates the senses which then supply ideas passively in the mind. Operations of the mind itself, like perceiving, thinking, reasoning, and so forth, in turn produce ‘ideas of reflection’. Locke deemed these ideas ‘simple’. That is, they could not be analysed into anything else, they were ‘necessary’ in the sense of being unavoidable, and finally they were ‘natural’.41 Locke had also noted the existence of another group of ideas, such as pleasure and pain, which joined up with those of sensation and reflection, having been, as he put it, ‘suggested by them’ (Essay, II.vii.7). Hutcheson capitalised on this model by focusing on the latter responses. Just as the external senses make it possible to have ideas of sensation, so Hutcheson introduced an internal sense as a means of recognising the modification experienced in the mind when it sensed pleasure or pain on encountering moral 38 39 40 41

Ibid., 1st edn, 124; 4th edn, 129; L 100. ‘. . . an internal Sense no more presupposes an innate Idea, or Principle of Knowledge, than the external’ (ibid., 1st edn, 75; 4th edn, 80; L 67). Ibid., 3rd edn, 128. See also Hutcheson, System, I: 97. Locke remarks in the Essay: ‘simple Ideas, which since the Mind . . . can by no means make to it self, must necessarily be the product of Things operating on the Mind in a natural way, and producing therein those Perceptions which by the Wisdom and Will of our Maker they are ordained and adapted to’ (John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch, corrected edn (Oxford, 1979), IV.iv.4).

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events.42 Moral responses occur immediately and necessarily, but as the outcome of a sense, they transpire passively. His analysis on this point is difficult to interpret, but it would appear that moral qualities in actions and agents, like benevolence, are responsible for the reactions of the moral sense, parallel to the role of secondary qualities in sense perception.43 In any event, the moral sense became a faculty: an innate power or capacity to have certain kinds of experiences.44 Although this tactic is pursued in the Inquiry, it appears more conspicuously in Hutcheson’s posthumous System of Moral Philosophy (1755), where he refers to the ‘Moral Sense, or faculty of perceiving moral excellence’ and on the whole prefers to call it a faculty.45 The problem with this approach is that we tend to consider faculties as enabling rather than as normative. A faculty of volition does not imply the rightness or wrongness of things willed, merely that volition is possible, and that it depends on some internal structure (similarly with a faculty of language or imagination or memory).46 But Hutcheson wanted the moral sense to do more than simply facilitate the process of having moral ideas and making judgements; he wanted to prescribe the content of the ideas and judgements themselves. The content, in turn, became normative, guaranteeing distinctions between the natural and unnatural, providing a solid criterion for separating good from evil. Hutcheson’s way around this difficulty appears most clearly in his Synopsis metaphysicae, a work that apparently belongs to the early part of his career, although he published and revised it later in life. In the Synopsis, he refers to the moral sense explicitly as an innate power of the mind. 42 43

44

45 46

In response to criticism, Hutcheson added a long passage to the third edition (Inquiry, 128–30), clarifying his position on the nature of this pleasure and qualifying its importance. Ambiguity remains on this subject. Winkler has defended the view that Hutcheson follows Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities, although the evidence is somewhat limited and scattered. Hutcheson’s most direct comments appear in the introduction to the Inquiry’s second treatise, on virtue (1st edn, 101; 4th edn, 105; L 85). Norton, by contrast, has maintained that Hutcheson regarded moral ideas as concomitant and therefore non-Lockean. Winkler argues that concomitant ideas are only relevant in Hutcheson to duration, number, extension, figure, motion, and rest, not ideas of virtue and vice; in any event, the concept appeared in Locke who still deserves credit for influencing Hutcheson’s views on this subject. See the references in note 17 above. Adam Smith described Hutcheson’s moral sense as a faculty, and on that basis rejected it as superfluous. The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford, 1976), 322. For a discussion of Locke’s perspective on mental faculties, see Robert L. Armstrong, ‘Cambridge Platonists and Locke on Innate Ideas’, Journal of the History of Ideas 30 (1969), 200–1. Hutcheson, System, I: 53; for further references to the ‘moral faculty’ see especially ibid., Book I, chapter 4. For a related objection to Hutcheson, see Thomas Rutherforth, An Essay on the Nature and Obligations of Virtue (Cambridge, 1744), 21–2.

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Rather than leaving it as a bare capacity (or faculty) for having moral experiences, he brings together the moment of perception and judgement. The moral sense not only reports on moral reactions but judges at the same time. Hutcheson described the process in a distinctive metaphor: ‘As if from the judge’s bench, this reflective sense exercises judgement over all that human beings do, over all the pleasures of the mind and body, over thoughts, actions, volitions, promises, intentions, affections. It discerns what is good, what is proper, what is right, and what is the correct measure in each case.’47 The judging capacity of the moral sense allowed him to transcend the limitations of the moral sense as a merely passive receptor. While the passive model had the advantage of escaping from an innateness charge, it was open to the objection that it was either an insignificant piece of equipment or one that failed to guarantee substantive agreement. Locke had to some extent anticipated Hutcheson’s argument in his unpublished response to Thomas Burnet, author of three critical pamphlets on the Essay published between 1697 and 1699. In fact, in his Third Remarks, Burnet had come very close to Hutcheson’s later formulation of a moral sense when he redressed Locke on the subject of how we distinguish good from evil. Burnet presented a rather diffuse set of bases for this moral distinction. Some were very close to a naive form of innateness – he called them ‘monograms or sketches that want their full lines and colours to complete them’.48 At other times he proposed something that suggested an internal sense. In the latter case, he described the distinction between good and evil as deriving from a ‘different perception and sense of them, with a different affection of the mind arising from it’. Furthermore, Burnet described the capacity in question as an ‘internal sense’, whose response is immediate, pre-existing the force of law or exercise of reason.49 To confirm the analogy with the senses, Burnet cited the ability to distinguish different colours from one another, as well as tastes, smells, sounds, etc. We do so naturally and immediately, before supplying definitions or naming what we experience. Burnet called this capacity ‘natural conscience’, which he also deemed a ‘principle’ in its own right.50 47

48 49 50

‘quasi de tribunali, judicium in omnia quae agunt homines exercet; in omnes animi aut corporis voluptates, in sententias, actiones, voluntates, vota, consilia, affectus: decernens quid pulchrum, quid deceat, quod honestum, quis in quoque sit modus.’ Hutcheson, Synopsis metaphysicae, 4th edn (Glasgow, 1756), 120. I am grateful to John Finamore for his translation of this passage. Thomas Burnet, Remarks on John Locke . . . with Locke’s Replies, ed. George Watson (Doncaster, 1989), 63. Ibid., 63, 64. Burnet shows his Stoic sympathies in this argument. He anticipates an objection from Locke by saying we should not expect this ‘natural principle’, by which he means capacity, to manifest itself

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In his marginal note, Locke responded in a way that suggests what he would have said to Hutcheson on the issue of a moral faculty. He began by complaining that Burnet conflated the notion of a principle with that of a power. If Burnet had intended to claim only the existence of a faculty that enables us to ‘find out in time the moral difference of actions’, then Locke agreed that we possess such a capacity, which he identified with reason. ‘I never denied such a power to be innate’, he went on to say, but rather that ‘any ideas or connection of ideas was innate’.51 Instead of conceding the assertion of a so-called ‘inward distinguishing sensation’, operating prior to the imposition of an external moral rule, Locke commented that its existence must be proved. What form the proof would take remained unaddressed, but we can imagine that the familiar appeal to a consensus gentium would have left him unconvinced.52 In the absence of proof, Burnet’s supposition, according to Locke, was nothing more than ‘laying down a foundation for enthusiasm’.53 Locke continued to reject what both Burnet and Hutcheson wanted to do with the moral sense, namely to insist on human agreement over the morality of specific actions from internal principles.54 Hutcheson’s difficulties in accounting for the moral sense led him, in the first edition of the Inquiry, to remark that ‘This natural Determination to approve and admire, or hate and dislike Actions, is no doubt an occult Quality.’55 Occult qualities had a number of attributes, the most obvious of which was that of remaining hidden. They acted as causes of effects observed in nature without being readily intelligible within ordinary schemes of causation. Importantly they were also thought of as powers (like the loadstone, whose agency is evident but not understood).56 In this context, Hutcheson defended his position by arguing that the existence of a moral sense was no more mysterious than the capacity to move the body

51 52

53 54

55 56

immediately. It exists in the soul as a telos and potential. There is little doubt from the language used by Burnet that he has in mind the Stoic understanding of prolepsis, which functions as a criterion (separating good and evil) but which is nonetheless undeveloped, a preconception rather than fully formed knowledge: ‘But ’tis a principle of distinguishing one thing from another in moral cases without ratiocination, and is improvable into more distinct knowledge’ (ibid., 64). Marginal note in ibid., 64–5. In fact, Burnet did not base his claims for the naturalness of the internal sense on universal consent, but his position is unsatisfactory, as Locke pointed out in his marginal annotations. See Ernest Tuveson, ‘The Origins of the ‘‘Moral Sense’’’, Huntington Library Quarterly 11 (1947–8): 250–1. Marginal note in Burnet, Remarks, 65. For further discussion, see S. A. Grave, Locke and Burnet (Perth, 1981); Laurent Jaffro, ‘La formation de la doctrine du sens moral: Burnet, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson’, in Le sens moral: une histoire de la philosophie morale de Locke a` Kant, ed. Laurent Jaffro (Paris, 2000), 11–46. Hutcheson, Inquiry, 1st edn, 246. Peter R. Anstey, The Philosophy of Robert Boyle (London, 2000), 23.

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through an act of volition. An explanation of the latter phenomenon in terms of ‘the Brain, the elastic Fibres, and animal Spirits, and elastic Fluids’ hardly surpassed Indian cosmology which stationed the earth on the back of an elephant, and the elephant on top of a tortoise, without appreciating that the story progressed logically ad infinitum.57 Thus Hutcheson conceded, at some level, his failure to account for the operation of the moral sense, but he saw his lack of success as parallel to the inadequacies of others who attempted to describe human nature. However, it is significant that he removed the section on the occult quality of the moral sense from later editions of the Inquiry. Despite the editorial excision, some of Hutcheson’s critics detected the weakness in his position on this point.58 The philosopher John Gay took him to task over the moral sense: ‘if it is not a-kin to the Doctrine of Innate Ideas’, he argued, ‘yet I think it relishes too much of that of Ocult [sic] Qualities.’59 Thomas Johnson praised Gay’s dissertation and agreed with him in claiming that Locke’s critique took in the moral sense. Like Locke, Johnson argued that self-interest constituted the only innate principle in his view, largely because its universality could be shown. The moral sense, on the contrary, failed to appear as it ought to in uniform moral practice around the globe. Johnson concluded by saying that Hutcheson’s strategy 57

58

59

Hutcheson, Inquiry, 1st edn, 246. It seems likely that Hutcheson was taking advantage of a similar point made by Locke on the subject of substance: ‘Had the poor Indian Philosopher (who imagined that the Earth also wanted something to bear it up) but thought of this word Substance, he needed not to have been at the trouble to find an Elephant to support it, and a Tortoise to support his Elephant: The word Substance would have done it effectually . . . So that of Substance, we have no Idea of what it is, but only a confused obscure one of what it does’ (Essay, II.xiii.19). Just as Locke needed a concept of substance without being able to describe it properly, Hutcheson needed an originating moral sense to support the uniformity of perceptions (although he would not have accepted the notion that our ideas of what it does are obscure). See for example Archibald Campbell, Arete-logia; or an Enquiry into the Original of Moral Virtue (Westminster, 1728), 239, as noted by James Moore in his introduction to the forthcoming edition and translation by Michael Silverthorne of Hutcheson’s Logic, Metaphysics and the Natural Sociability of Mankind. John Gay, ‘Preliminary Dissertation. Concerning the Fundamental Principle of Virtue or Morality’, in William King, An Essay on the Origin of Evil, trans. Edmund Law (London, 1731), xiv. In Law’s notes to his translation of King, he gave a more sympathetic reading of Hutcheson. He acknowledged that discussion of the moral sense, instinct, and affection implied they were innate, and, as such, inconsistent with Gay’s conclusions in the ‘Preliminary Dissertation’. Indeed, Law regarded these things as remnants of the ‘Old Philosophy, which used to call every thing Innate that it could not account for’, and on that basis he ‘heartily’ wished they were ‘eradicated’, as Locke had intended. Yet in Law’s estimation, the position taken by defenders of implanted instincts and Lockeans who argued that God endowed man with certain powers to discover truth amounted to the same thing, so long as it could be shown that we ‘necessarily acquire’ certain views. On this basis he allowed Hutcheson’s talk of a moral sense and commended him for proving ‘that we are led insensibly, and by the constitution and circumstances of our very Being, to love and approve certain Actions, which we call Virtuous’ (67).

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on the moral sense ‘rather resolves the thing into an occult Quality, an ignotum Quid, than assigns any Cause why the fact is so’.60 Hutcheson followed the publication of the Inquiry with An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions (1728). There he adopted an alternative strategy on innateness. In order to specify the content of perceptions/ judgements made by the moral sense, he had recourse to a dispositional theory. Locke’s critique was conveniently taken as answering only the naive form of innateness, leaving a more sophisticated, developmental, version in place, much as Shaftesbury had argued.61 Thus the Lockean argument, which called into question innate ideas and principles, amounted to nothing more, in his view, than the assertion that when life begins we lack ideas or judgements. Locke could just as well have added that we arrive without sight, taste, smell, hearing, desire, or volition. To convey the emptiness of this observation, Hutcheson remarked that it was an equivalent insight to pointing out that trees start growing before they have such things as branches or leaves, flowers, fruit, or seeds, and on this basis to advance the dubious claim that everything that followed was ‘adventitious, or the effect of Art’.62 At this point Hutcheson’s natural history became prescriptive. In a long list of attributes, he defined as natural: ‘a State of Good-will, Humanity, Compassion, mutual Aid, propagating and supporting Offspring, Love of a Community or Country, Devotion, or Love and Gratitude to some governing Mind ’. Making use of an analogy with physical nature, he maintained that a moral condition with these constituents was one ‘to which we are naturally inclined, and do actually arrive, as universally, and with as much uniformity, as we do to a certain Stature and Shape ’.63 There are numerous problems with this account, in part because Hutcheson runs together too many assumptions. His analogy works only if we accept his conditions. First he sets a temporal limit, such that our 60

61 62 63

Johnson, Essay, 37. In his Questiones philosophicae, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1735), 180–1, Johnson included both Shaftesbury and Hutcheson in the class of those who affirmed the existence of an ‘innatus sensus moralis’, a subject which Hutcheson in particular had embellished (ornavit) in his Inquiry. See especially Shaftesbury, Several Letters Written by a Noble Lord to a Young Man at the University (London, 1716), 39. Hutcheson, Essay, 198; Garrett edn, 130. Hutcheson, Essay, 199; Garrett edn, 130. Compare Seneca, Ep. mor., 124.10–11. In one of his Dublin Weekly Journal articles, Hutcheson laid the blame on Pufendorf (who had also rejected innate ideas in De jure naturae et gentium, II.iii.13) for inhibiting discussion of traditional Stoic and Ciceronian virtues: ‘. . . the old Notions of natural Affections, and kind Instincts, the Sensus communis, the Decorum and Honestum, are almost banish’d out of our Books of Morals; we must never hear of them in any of our Lectures for fear of innate Ideas: All must be Interest, and some selfish View’. Arbuckle, ed., Letters and Essays, I: 79.

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moral impulses come before acts of will. But he also restricts the origin of agreement over these notions to purely natural sources – what he calls, in a rather shadowy way, ‘some Principles in our Nature’, ‘some part of our Constitution’. Locke, for example, could have accounted for Hutcheson’s list of moral and sociable attributes on the basis not of nature but social agreement or convention. Locke made it clear that a certain amount of convergence in moral values occurred in practice, but he traced it to the requirements for society to exist – on the grounds of utility – not innateness or nature.64 But the difficulties are more considerable than that. Hutcheson’s analogy with trees flowering and bearing fruit is effective from his point of view but misleading. In a given plant species, the presence and structure of the flower or fruit define the species itself. In their absence, another species designation would be called for. With mankind, Hutcheson’s options are decidedly more circumscribed. He cannot redefine the species if some segment of it refuses to exhibit the moral qualities or outlook he proclaims. Thus, to be compelling, he must assert that we have not only an inclination toward the moral terms he describes, but a universal acceptance of them – to the same extent that we realise a natural size and shape. Against this, cultural diversity of the kind introduced by Locke was all the more telling. Shaftesbury, in spite of his appeals to consensus, was not committed to anything like the same degree of unanimity in practice. As I showed in the previous chapter, he had a number of alibis, including the notion of prolepsis, which, although natural, did not guarantee correct application. But, more importantly, he could rely on several ways of circumscribing access to a full realisation of nature, whether on the basis of social difference, history, or cultural factors. These considerations explain why Hutcheson was eventually obliged to adopt a more dispositional and normative account of the moral sense rather than a version that attracted the counter-argument from diversity too readily. To assess his strategy, we need to draw back for a moment. By describing ethical responses as the outcome of a ‘moral sense’ Hutcheson gained several things: the moral sense, like the sense of taste and smell, resided inalienably in human nature. Equally, human beings had no control over its operation. We can no more resist making moral judgements than we can oppose seeing the colour green. Furthermore, if someone misidentifies a patch of green as a patch of red, we should not conclude 64

See especially ‘Of Ethick in General’, in John Locke, Writings on Religion, ed. Victor Nuovo (Oxford, 2002), 10; and Essay, I.iii.6.

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that all such perceptions are purely relative; rather, it follows that a mistake has been made, that the sense of sight has become damaged or distorted in some way. Similarly, erroneous moral judgements can be corrected, since the senses, if intact, provide consistent information. But there is a sleight of hand at work here which eventually forced Hutcheson into a different, normative account: it is one thing to say we have a capacity for taste, and that we automatically experience a sensation of taste if we put something in our mouths. But it is another to claim that the same uniformity of reaction appears in people’s designation of different tastes as good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant. In the case of ethics, even if we grant the existence of a power of moral perception, it does not follow that each of us judges moral matters in the same way; rather, it becomes a contingent question whether we do or not, and as a result Hutcheson encountered the forceful evidence of moral diversity with little means to avert it. The prospects for consensus over matters of sense perception always looked more promising than consensus over moral issues.65 The normative, dispositional theory offered an alternative. Accordingly, he insisted that the making of correct moral judgements occurs analogously with physical development, transpiring, as he remarked above, ‘as universally, and with as much uniformity’. The developmental model was valuable in allowing him room to account for disparities in outlook and practice. Hutcheson returned to the question of innateness in his inaugural lecture as professor of moral philosophy in Glasgow, delivered in 1730. The impact of the critique by the ‘celebrated’ Locke, he noted, was such that philosophers had ceased to investigate what he called ‘natural ideas, knowledge, and judgements’ (naturales ideae, notitiae, judicia). But in his view the ancients had correctly regarded as innate those ideas, judgements, and ‘apprehensions’ that nature led us to form, whenever they might occur to us. He committed himself once more to a dispositionalist view, observing that there was no point in focusing on human beings before they fully developed. The appetites, senses, and structures of nature showed themselves over time. But his position was still dependent on proclaiming that 65

In his System, Hutcheson attempted to turn this to his advantage: ‘Men’s palates differ as much [as their views on morality]; but who thence denies a sense of tasting to be natural?’ (I: 89). But the naturalness of the capacity for taste is not the same as convergence in judgements about what tastes good or bad. Hutcheson went on to argue that the ‘moral faculty’ observed greater uniformity than men’s ‘palates’ by maintaining, on this occasion, that if we examined the reasons offered for condemning or approving certain actions, we would find behind them ‘the same original species or notions of moral good and evil’ (I: 89–90).

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these ideas were universally received and necessary. Accordingly, in a manner familiar from figures like Shaftesbury, Stillingfleet, and Grotius, he attempted to exclude from consideration those ‘unfortunates’ (infelices, whom Locke had introduced) living in rude circumstances without the benefit of arts and proper human conditions.66 Hutcheson’s traditional affiliations, based on innateness and a restrictive consensus gentium, become clearer in this context.67 III THE DILEMMA OF DIVERSITY

Hutcheson’s observational method, his appeal to uniformity, and his acceptance, at least ostensibly, of the critique of innate ideas, meant that he faced a more difficult challenge from the evidence of diversity. While Shaftesbury protected himself against this sceptical difficulty by reinstating a normative conception of moral instinct, together with his hierarchical account of access to the sociable affections, Hutcheson did not avail himself of these defences explicitly. His extended discussion of diversity in the Inquiry suggests that it represented one of the most demanding issues facing his philosophy. The appearance of Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees provided the immediate impetus for Hutcheson’s analysis of the problem of diversity.68 More than one eighteenth-century commentator saw Mandeville as having revived Locke’s notion of the ‘law of opinion’, tracing moral ideas to custom and fashion rather than to ‘nature’.69 The link between Locke and Mandeville was based on their recourse to sceptical modes of argument in which moral diversity undermined confidence in ‘natural’ moral distinctions.70 In order to characterise Shaftesbury as singularly out of touch, Mandeville repeatedly pointed to the existence of cultural diversity, drawing once again on travel reports and histories. He came to the same 66 67

68

69 70

Hutcheson, De naturali hominum socialitate, 21; Mautner, 144. Elsewhere in the lecture he commended those who, like Shaftesbury, maintained that nature had implanted benevolent and sociable affections and passions. De naturali hominum socialitate, 13; Mautner, 137. Mandeville initially published the poem under the title The Grumbling Hive: or, Knaves Turn’d Honest in 1705. In 1714 he reprinted the work together with a commentary as The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits; he added further sections in editions of 1723 and 1724. See for example John Brown, Essays on the Characteristics (London, 1751), 139; Philip Skelton, Ophiomaches; or, Deism Revealed, 2 vols. (London, 1749), I: 125. George Blewitt correctly placed Mandeville in the sceptical tradition in his extensive reply to the Fable. See An Enquiry whether a General Practice of Virtue tends to the Wealth or Poverty, Benefit or Disadvantage of a People? In which the Pleas offered by the Author of the Fable of the Bees . . . are considered (London, 1725), 87–8.

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conclusion as Locke, namely that environment and education played a dominant role in forming moral judgements. In an essay added to the 1723 edition of The Fable of the Bees, Mandeville set out his challenge. While Shaftesbury described virtue and vice as ‘permanent Realities’, Mandeville contended that ‘there are few things if any, that have the same Esteem paid them, and which the same Judgment is pass’d upon in all Countries and all Ages’.71 He went on to list a myriad of contrasting and relative opinions: Plurality of Wives is odious among Christians . . . But Polygamy is not shocking to a Mahometan . . . In the East formerly Sisters married Brothers, and it was meritorious for a Man to marry his Mother . . . Ask [about religion] at Peking, at Constantinople and at Rome, and you’ll receive three distinct Answers extremely different from one another, yet all of them equally positive and peremptory.72

The mistake was to consider moral notions as coming from nature. In short, Mandeville’s introduction of an array of diverse practices undermined belief in the consistency of moral values, returning to the strong theory of custom prevalent in sceptical circles. In his defence of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson needed to show that diversity does not count against the moral sense, and that substantial agreement occurred in the world, rather than the perpetual contradiction described by Mandeville. His response took several forms. On the one hand, he disputed the existence of widespread diversity and claimed that disagreement had been overstated (as we will see in the next section). But it was important to do more than that. In the fourth chapter of his moral Inquiry,73 Hutcheson provided a lengthy answer, covering seventeen pages in the final edition. He gave the discussion a title that appears inconsistent: ‘All Mankind agree in this general Foundation of their Approbation of moral Actions. The Grounds of the different Opinions about Morals’. In removing the conflict between the two sentences Hutcheson was concerned to emphasise the stability of the foundation, identified with the moral sense, while treating diversity of opinion as containable in its implications. The struggle was considerable, with Hutcheson’s success dependent on frequent shifts of criteria and adaptations of his position according to the examples of 71 72 73

Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, ed. F. B. Kaye, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1924), I: 324–5. Ibid., I: 330–1. Much of Mandeville’s argument follows the form and content of Sextus Empiricus’s tenth mode in the Outlines of Scepticism. Hutcheson calls it a ‘section’ but I refer to it as a chapter to draw attention to the fact that it corresponds to a formal division of the text on a substantial scale.

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diversity he addressed. In the end he left us with some doubt about the status of the moral sense. Hutcheson framed his discussion by stating a number of principles. Initially he affirmed that the moral sense never ceases to operate even when powerful forces assail it, like self-interest.74 He allowed that violent passions may temporarily overcome us, but apart from being short-lived such occurrences really only show the blinding effect of passion or that we do not always act from motives of goodness. Furthermore, as observers, we always respond to an appearance of benevolence in commending actions, yet we may err in this assessment. Mistakes also occur in determining whether certain actions contribute to the common good. In this instance, however, it is reason, not the moral sense, that bears the blame. Thus Hutcheson had considerable room to manoeuvre in accounting for inconsistencies in actual moral practice or approbation across mankind. The moral sense would not easily succumb to falsification. We can see this in Hutcheson’s response to the kind of examples of moral diversity Locke had introduced, including parricide and the abandonment of children. Hutcheson was undeterred by travel stories retailing ‘strange Crueltys practis’d toward the Aged, or Children, in certain Countrys’.75 In reply, he observed that if these actions happened as a result of sudden passions, then we could only infer that benevolence was sometimes displaced by other forces. Elsewhere murder of the elderly or exposure of infants may have come about through a notion of benevolence in saving them from enemies or old age, or the motive may have been to unencumber citizens from a burden. On this basis Hutcheson accounted for the barbarous laws of Lycurgus and Solon, which permitted killing of the deformed and weak in the interests of public good. Finally, Hutcheson admitted that in some cases love of ease or pleasure might outweigh gratitude to parents or affection for children. Yet the fact that the societies in question perpetuated themselves still testified to natural affection. In defending the moral sense, then, Hutcheson clearly did not feel bound by Locke’s demand of producing ‘Conformity of Action’ (Essay, I.iii.3), which Locke had set as a condition for maintaining innateness. If practices were cited that contradicted common consent, the moral sense did not suffer since Hutcheson found ways to work around them. Nonetheless, Hutcheson did take occasion to say what kind of evidence would ‘void’ the moral sense, but he set the bar at a considerable height: we must produce evidence of cruel 74 75

Hutcheson refers to this as ‘external Advantage’ (Inquiry, 1st edn, 181; 4th edn, 202; L 136). Ibid., 1st edn, 185; 4th edn, 205; L 138.

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and malicious actions performed and approved without any accompanying interest except the desire to do mischief; we must locate countries where ‘Murder in cold blood, Tortures, and every thing malicious’ is either sanctioned or regarded with indifference.76 If tainted with thoughts of ‘advantage’, such actions merely indicated self-interest competing with the moral sense, not contradicting its existence. Hutcheson’s argument is not strictly circular but it has a similar self-protection against attack. While entertaining the possibility of counter-instances, nothing will satisfy his criteria. He continued in the same vein: We must find Men with whom the Treacherous, Ungrateful, Cruel, are in the same account with the Generous, Friendly, Faithful, and Humane; and who approve the latter, no more than the former, in all Cases where they are not affected by the Influence of these Dispositions, or when the natural Good or Evil befalls other Persons.77

The concluding sentence makes it a condition, once again, that the subject have no personal stake in the action while remaining indifferent when evil happens to others. Hutcheson rests his case on the difficulty of locating any people who hold treachery, ingratitude, and cruelty in the same ‘account’ as generosity, friendship, faith, and humanity. Locke had already addressed this matter, especially in ‘Of Ethick in General’ but also in the Essay itself. In the unpublished ‘Of Ethick’, Locke had acknowledged that he knew of no societies that did not make moral distinctions of some kind. Yet these distinctions were simply verbal markers. For Locke only the actions that were picked out by such terms mattered, and here he located profound disagreement. He remained a sceptical nominalist about the use of moral language, and required morality instead to have a proper foundation in notions of divine will and authority.78 In the Essay he made similar observations and, as I have said, demanded proof of conformity in action since moral vocabulary of praise and blame corresponded to utterly contrasting events in the world. Hutcheson’s remark, in contrast, speaks to the embedded realism in his account. The moral terms he employs, like treachery or friendship, are not simply verbal but correspond to actual realities. At the outset of his explicit discussion of diversity, Hutcheson admitted the existence of ‘vast’ differences in moral principles across time and from 76 78

Ibid., 1st edn, 182; 4th edn, 203; L 137. 77 Ibid., 1st edn, 182; 4th edn, 203; L 137. Locke, ‘Of Ethick in General’, in Writings on Religion, 9; Essay, I.iii.6.

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place to place. The acknowledgement of the extent of human variation is notable, but he maintained that such differences could be accounted for ‘easily’ in ways that did not tell against the moral sense, which approved of benevolence consistently throughout the world.79 Hutcheson devised four principal ways of understanding the origin of diversity: first, he traced it to rival views of happiness; second, to the effect of narrow systems of thought and belief on action; third, to differing conceptions of what the Deity required. And finally, Hutcheson drew on Locke’s account of the association of ideas in the Essay and made the novel suggestion that associated ideas produced diversity, while moral feeling remained somehow universal. Although seemingly straightforward, Hutcheson’s explanations depend on a number of assumptions and distinctions that appear problematic or ambiguous on closer inspection. In part this results from some obscurity of expression, and partly because Hutcheson remained intent on making different moral points of reference compatible with one another. For example, his conclusion that opposing views of happiness produce diversity has a certain simplicity and intuitive appeal, but it is doubtful whether he could separate the relativity of these preferences from the domain of morality.80 To do so, Hutcheson positioned notions of happiness under the rubric of natural good rather than moral good. Accordingly, in a society that esteemed liberty above all else, wars to defend privileges would be approved, while another, more timorous society would consider such conflicts ‘odious’, seeing civil war as the greatest evil. Although these were inconsistent evaluations of the same action, they called into question only the uniformity of the category ‘natural good’. In this way he made contested ideas of ‘happiness’ the locus of difference. In this context, he mentioned Sparta as a country that held wealth and possessions in contempt and even sanctioned theft by law, without being troubled by this as an instance of diversity. Yet Hutcheson complicated his own case when he remarked – with respect to the bold, liberty-loving country and the timid, peace-loving country – that the moral sense produced these contradictory assessments of the merit of war (one having perceived benevolence in the action, the other its opposite). Thus, he acknowledged that social preference determined the reactions of the moral sense. But of course the moral sense was designed to operate prior to such instruction. 79 80

Hutcheson, Inquiry, 1st edn, 182; 4th edn, 204; L 137. Locke had also traced ‘the great variety of Opinions, concerning Moral Rules’, evident in mankind, to the fact that people proposed ‘different sorts of Happiness’ to themselves, but he stressed that this diversity would be impossible if we possessed innate practical principles, ‘imprinted in our Minds immediately by the Hand of God’ (Essay, I.iii.6).

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Hutcheson has it both ways: the moral sense comes before socialisation, yet it can be influenced later by social custom. But such an argument invited the reply that every moral tenet came from custom and education, and that a norm could only be selected arbitrarily. Hutcheson’s difficulties on this front become clearer when we consider his discussion of the problem case of incest. He acknowledged that one of the strongest objections against his view that the moral sense was natural and independent of tuition came from the citation of incommensurable customs. We would think, he accepted, that ‘what is from Nature in one Nation, would be so in all’, and yet some actions were ‘immediately’ detested by one group while another embraced them as innocent or honourable.81 Incest (which, as noted above, Mandeville had recently included in his sceptical list of variable customs) exemplified such an area of disagreement. Hutcheson noted that Christians abhorred the practice as much as they did murder, irrespective of whether or not they knew it negatively affected mankind. Yet in Greece, it was honourable to marry a half-sister and the Persian Magi commended marriage to mothers. In the light of these incommensurable assessments we could easily conclude that all moral beliefs derived from custom and education. Hutcheson answered the charge by reminding us that the reaction of abhorrence presupposes a moral sense. But this is a logical requirement only, not a guarantee of agreement over the specific qualities it responds to. We need this particular piece of equipment to have moral experiences, but what they may be becomes a contingent question. In order to avoid formalising his account to the point of irrelevance, Hutcheson stated that the hatred of incest would occur, in some countries, because the act was deemed reprehensible by the Deity. The morally evil quality perceived on this occasion is ingratitude in abrogating the will of God, which constitutes a lack of benevolence. Leaving aside the complexity of this principle (it surely fails to qualify as a simple idea perceived by an internal sense), the content of the moral sense now comes from the divine. However, the moral sense should generate a judgement independent of, although in harmony with, God’s will, otherwise it requires a revelation to determine its specific reactions. Elsewhere in the Inquiry, Hutcheson was explicit in stating that the moral sense produced ideas of virtue and vice ‘abstractly’ from divine law and he rejected the Lockean position on the necessity of such law for morality.82 Hutcheson’s dilemma becomes conspicuous here because he could not readily explain the alternative, namely a society that approved of incest, 81 82

Hutcheson, Inquiry, 1st edn, 191; 4th edn, 215; L 144. Ibid., 1st edn, 249, 253–4; 4th edn, 267, 274–5 (with some changes of expression); L 176, 180–1.

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without admitting that the moral sense receives its content from purely relative assessments of what divine will requires. The society that commends incest may equally claim that it responds to a morally good quality perceived in the action, i.e., the conformity with divine preference. Hutcheson admitted as much when he said that ‘in those Countrys where no such Opinion prevails of the Deity’s abhorring Incest, or prohibiting it . . . it may be look’d upon as innocent ’.83 The challenge of diversity led Hutcheson, eventually, to produce an analysis which represents a variation on Shaftesbury’s solution to the problem. Shaftesbury had relied to a large extent on the Stoic notion of prolepsis. Prolepses were natural moral tendencies or inclinations, shared by all. They required cultivation and to that extent implied a dispositional understanding of innateness, but prolepses had another argumentative advantage described by Epictetus and redeployed by Shaftesbury. They had to be applied to particular instances in the world. Epictetus was able to account for error by simply claiming that while the prolepses were universal and given by nature, the application of them was sometimes mistaken.84 Hutcheson developed a related strategy, although he did not use prolepsis to word his argument. When he clarified the function of the moral sense, he pointed out that it could not provide us with a knowledge of the consequences of actions.85 Instead, the moral sense had the more limited assignment of informing us of perceived benevolence in actions or affections. These were simple ideas (in Lockean terms), not complex ones. Reason was charged with the complex task of computing ‘tendencies’. The distinction between reason and the moral sense proved useful for Hutcheson. Thus he could acknowledge the barbarous laws of Sparta and Athens with respect to killing of parents and children but preserve a foundation in benevolence: the mistake was made by reason, not nature which supplied the basic moral response. Reason, in this respect, was delegated with applying the benevolent prolepsis and thus reason attracted the criticism when the application failed.86 83

84 85 86

Ibid., 1st edn, 193; 4th edn, 216; L 145. Perhaps in recognition of this, Hutcheson later modified his position on incest. For these changes, see Alfred Owen Aldridge, ‘The Meaning of Incest from Hutcheson to Gibbon’, Ethics 6:4 (1951): 309–13. See section III of the previous chapter for discussion and references. That is, their ‘Tendency to the publick Good ’ (Inquiry, 1st edn, 184; 4th edn, 205; L 138). He complemented this with a conventional discussion of men’s capacity to deceive themselves. On the whole people convince themselves they act from virtuous motives, even when they do not. Malice and revenge come under the cover of honour, while rampant destruction of enemies passes as a noble defence of one’s country. This is not the same as a false application of a prolepsis but a case of simple self-delusion. Ibid., 1st edn, 189; 4th edn, 213; L 143.

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This deft manoeuvre, facilitated I would suggest by his encounter with the Stoic tradition and Shaftesbury, enabled him to challenge conventional wisdom on the subject of reason. He complained, in fact, of a double standard by his opponents. Reason was upheld as universal in mankind, even though numerous ‘stupid, ridiculous Opinions’ held sway in the world. Yet the moral sense, whose universality he personally insisted on, was supposedly refuted by these very notions. Bad conduct, in his view, came about not from ‘irregularity’ in the moral sense but because of wrong judgements or opinions. As Hutcheson concluded: ‘the absurd Practices which prevail in the World, are much better Arguments that Men have no Reason, than that they have no moral Sense of Beauty in Actions’.87 Hutcheson’s second explanation for diversity can be considered more briefly. He maintained that diversity arose in some instances because people confined their benevolence to unduly narrow frames of reference or ‘systems’. He drew explicit support from Shaftesbury, noting with approval his point that such things as parties, sects, cabals, or factions came about because of a sociable, public spirit carried to a certain extreme.88 Since this tendency could clearly get out of hand, Hutcheson objected forcefully to trivial disputes between rival groups. Associations for commerce or manufacture he approved of, together with organisations to defend liberty against tyranny – even social clubs for pleasure or to improve conversation – but he drew the line at wrangling and mutual contempt, especially where no public good was at stake. This inclination inspired rage and zealotry, much impairing the moral sense and damaging our ‘natural Notions of Good and Evil ’.89 As for the ‘horrid Crimes’ recorded in history, they testified not to the nullity of the moral sense but to excessive enthusiasm for particular causes.90 Hutcheson left to the end his analysis of the role of religion in creating diversity, an issue that Shaftesbury had preferred to foreground in a parallel discussion in his Inquiry Concerning Virtue, or Merit.91 Shaftesbury was keen to emphasise, in his discussion of the ‘wrong sense or false imagination of right and wrong’, that religion bore considerable blame, or at least that variant which could be called corrupt and superstitious. In order to clarify that religion tout court was not at fault, he explained that a proper view of the divine would inspire us and solidify our natural notions of the good. But a perverse religion, by contrast, had the power to make horrible and inhuman 87 88 89 91

Ibid., 1st edn, 187, 4th edn, 209; L 140. Shaftesbury had stated that it was natural to ‘cantonise’ in larger countries. Characteristics, 52–3. Hutcheson, Inquiry, 2nd edn, 208; 4th edn, 211; L 142. 90 Ibid., 1st edn, 189; 4th edn, 213; L 143. Shaftesbury, An Inquiry Concerning Virtue, or Merit, III.ii, in Characteristics, 179–82.

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things appear ‘excellent, good, and laudable in themselves’.92 Even those with private reservations would find that by degrees they accepted the abominable characteristics of their deity, such that cruel, barbarous, or unjust actions would appear not only valid but worthy of imitation. Hutcheson’s discussion followed suit. False notions of divine will and law had a pernicious effect because God would be imagined as meriting obedience based on his righteousness. The obviousness of this truth meant that he had no need to detail the ‘Follys, Superstitions, Murders, Devastations of Kingdoms’ that resulted from a sense of virtue and duty under these circumstances.93 But he did introduce one twist. Shaftesbury had positioned religion as a potential opponent of morality; Hutcheson, by contrast, wanted to enlist evidence of religious belief as proof of the moral sense, even in the midst of barbarities, although it has to be said that the point was weakly made. Obedience to the divine was based on conceiving God to be good, and arose from gratitude. This codicil did not advance matters very far but it testifies to Hutcheson’s reluctance to engage with the bolder hostility to religion that Shaftesbury was comfortable adumbrating. In order to reclaim some confidence in the moral sense’s universality – as well as its operation prior to instruction – Hutcheson closed with one of his ‘observational’ sallies. He claimed that his convictions received confirmation by attending to the sentiments of children. As soon as they had a grasp of language and listened to stories, they always showed a passionate interest in protagonists who exhibited kindness and humanity, and conversely loathed the ‘Cruel, the Covetous, the Selfish, or the Treacherous’.94 We need hardly point out that his case is far from plausible in claiming either universality or freedom from tuition in the matter. Locke would have had little trouble dispatching this argument on the basis of points he had raised in the critique of innateness. The difference of perspective between them is all the more conspicuous in Locke’s educational writings, which give a sense of the effort required to shape the moral nature of children. Hutcheson’s statement stands, however, as an expression of his basic confidence in human nature and his warmth of feeling: How strongly do we see [children’s] Passions of Joy, Sorrow, Love, and Indignation, mov’d by these moral Representations, even tho there has been no pains taken to give them Ideas of a Deity, of Laws, of a future State, or of the more intricate Tendency of the universal Good to that of each Individual.95

92 94

Ibid., 180. 93 Hutcheson, Inquiry, 1st edn, 190; 4th edn, 214; L 144. Ibid., 1st edn, 193; 4th edn, 217; L 146. 95 Ibid., 1st edn, 193–4; 4th edn, 217; L 146.

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Like Shaftesbury, Hutcheson denied Locke’s appeal to rewards and punishments and a concept of law as the only basis for morality, locating natural resources that Locke was convinced we did not possess. Hutcheson’s most novel contribution on the subject of diversity came near the end of the chapter, although his discussion was highly attenuated. In accounting for diverse moral preferences he noted that the association of ideas produced arbitrary reactions of abhorrence. He left it at that, content to observe that no reaction of any kind would be possible without the moral sense. But in his theory of aesthetic taste, Hutcheson had more to say on the subject. The doctrine of association which he found useful was introduced by Locke in a chapter added to the fourth edition of the Essay (1700). There, Locke described the association of ideas as a natural activity, but he also identified what he termed the ‘false association of ideas’ in order to explain certain anomalies in human belief. For him, the concept of association accounted not only for irrational fears and bizarre preferences but also for the powerful influence of custom and education.96 We can see Hutcheson’s continuity with this perspective in his comment that association could cause us to form an opinion of disgust in response to aesthetic forms that had nothing disagreeable about them. Serpents and insects possessed their own beauty but through the association of ‘accidental’ ideas such creatures became loathsome. This notion provided a resource in Hutcheson’s subsequent discussion of the causes of ‘apparent Diversity of Fancys in the Sense of Beauty ’.97 Reading ahead to his moral theory, we can see that in a very compressed manner Hutcheson alluded, in his reference to association, to certain unaccountable customs and preferences which emerged as by-products of the epistemological condition of mankind, separable from the workings of the moral sense.98 Hutcheson’s discussion of diversity attracted some attention from his contemporaries, including John Maxwell, a Trinity-educated Anglican who was chaplain to Lord Carteret, the lord lieutenant of Ireland.99 Maxwell provided a note of interest to his translation of Richard Cumberland’s De legibus naturae (1727), where Cumberland addressed the objection that differences of manners between nations destroyed the 96 97 98

99

See Locke, Essay, II.xxxiii, especially sections 17–18. Hutcheson, Inquiry, 1st edn, 76; 4th edn, 80; L 67. Hutcheson developed this account of association considerably in his Essay. For discussion, see Michael B. Gill, ‘Nature and Association in the Moral Theory of Francis Hutcheson’, History of Philosophy Quarterly 12:3 (1995): 281–301. Hutcheson wrote a letter of dedication to Carteret in the second edition of the Inquiry (1726), following Carteret’s favourable reception of the first edition. This is the edition to which Maxwell refers.

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‘general Nature of Good ’. Maxwell’s note provided an extensive, near verbatim summary of Hutcheson’s position on diversity in the Inquiry, including inconsistent opinions of happiness as a source of variety; the confinement of benevolence to a narrow scope or ‘system’; and the influence of diverse opinions about divine will on conceptions of virtue and duty. He did not pursue Hutcheson’s novel suggestion on the subject of association.100 Thomas Johnson, for one, remained unconvinced. He gave a lengthy reply to Hutcheson’s position on diversity in his Essay on Moral Obligation (1731), which he reconnected with the critique of innateness. In his estimation, Locke’s objection to innate practical principles took in the moral sense: if such a sense existed, then it should be universal. But the moral preferences of mankind were as various as custom itself. Theft, exposure of children, killing of people in public for mere diversion, and revenge had all been practised and commended in certain countries. Johnson remarked: ‘How this Difference of Approbations and Aversions can be accounted for, consistently with the Hypothesis of a Moral Sense, or innate Principle of Benevolence, I cannot in the least apprehend.’101 The attempt to save the moral sense from the testimony of diversity by arguing that those who departed from it had corrupted their taste merely took for granted something he considered it impossible to prove. In any case, we had no answer if they responded in kind and argued that we distorted our original nature in the same way as we accused them. The only innate principle, as Locke had affirmed, was self-regard. Benevolence was a social good, Johnson did not deny, but recognition of it as a value came about from rational reflection or instruction, not nature. Some people clearly ignored these dictates and felt no such affections.102 Taking his lead from John Gay, he turned the notion of association of ideas to advantage. Benevolence and public affection, which Hutcheson had traced to the moral sense, in fact had their origin in an association of ideas acquired through habit and instruction.103 Later in the century, William Paley replied to the moral sense tradition by invoking the issue of diversity in The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785). Against the view that moral terms like generosity, 100

101 102

103

John Maxwell, ‘A Dissertation on the Law of Nature: Its Obligation, Promulgation, and Observance’, appendix to Richard Cumberland, A Treatise of the Laws of Nature, trans. John Maxwell (London, 1727), 169–70n. Johnson, Essay, 32. Johnson departed fundamentally from Hutcheson’s formulation. Rather than taking reactions to amiable or disagreeable qualities as primary, he argued that we only experienced these ‘affections’ after we had determined whether an action was either good or evil (Ibid., 43). Ibid., 40. For Hutcheson’s reply, see System, I: 57.

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gratitude, and fidelity received immediate and universal approval, he noted the objection that unanimity on these matters was disproved by the accounts of ‘historians and travellers’, who pointed to countries sanctioning murder of parents, suicide, theft, and the sexual morality of ‘tropical regions’ where ‘promiscuous commerce’ between the sexes was allowed.104 A system predicated on innate moral instincts merely invented an excuse for treating received opinions as founded in nature. In any event the moral sense had no special authority.105 What had existed as a ‘celebrated question’ about human nature and morality now became a matter of mere curiosity in establishing the natural history of the human species. We can see that Locke’s position remained a powerful one in the eighteenth century. Hutcheson was not alone in trying to work around it in Dublin in the 1720s. John Maxwell shared his concerns, as I remarked. Maxwell also developed an alternative reply, which owed more to an engagement with Shaftesbury’s arguments than it did to a mediation via the moral sense. Maxwell’s ‘Dissertation on the Law of Nature’, appended to his translation of Cumberland, tackled both innateness and the issue of diversity. In order to rehabilitate the concept of innateness as a basis for natural law, he gave a dispositional account, claiming that the physical maturation of mankind was matched by developments in the mind, which made it possible to grasp ‘common notions’. He was confident that an ‘innate power’ or ‘propension’ (both rational and religious) noticed and dictated these conceptions. They were distinguished by being ‘self-taught by an untaught Gift of Nature’ and they received their proof from common consent. To maintain this view, Maxwell gave a direct response to Locke’s reading of ethnography, following the arguments in the first Book of the Essay closely. In contrast to the claim that exposure of children passed uncondemned, he asserted that it was rejected by the Egyptians, Germans, and Greeks in antiquity. The Greeks and Romans showed a natural kindness to their children and love for them (registered in the term storgZv (storge) – which Shaftesbury had emphasised).106 Indeed, these motives played a role in their ‘pawning’, selling, or exposure of infants – based on the hope that someone would take pity and care for them. The devouring of elderly parents actually stemmed from a profound respect. Diversity was not 104 105 106

William Paley, The Priniciples of Moral and Political Philosophy, ed. D. L. Le Mahieu (Indianapolis, 2002), 7–8. For a similar objection see James Balfour, A Delineation of the Nature and Obligation of Marality, 2nd edn (Edinburgh, 1763), 222–3. See Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 432n.

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occasioned by a lack of innate principles but by the failure to apply prolepses accurately, as Epictetus (and Shaftesbury) had taught.107 IV REFORMING TRAVEL

Hutcheson’s extended attention to the problem of diversity was largely predicated on finding explanations for the phenomenon that left the moral sense intact. In other words, he accepted the reality of diversity but tried to limit its consequences. But an alternative was also possible – to allege that diversity had been exaggerated, notably by travellers who reported on human custom and moral practice. In the second edition of the Inquiry, Hutcheson strengthened his position with an observation on this theme drawn from Shaftesbury. Taking his lead from remarks in Shaftesbury’s Soliloquy: or, Advice to an Author, directed against the deplorable taste in travel writings, Hutcheson affirmed that human difference had been vastly overstated by contemporary travellers. He went further than Shaftesbury, however, by insisting that sociable and benevolent traits of human character had been neglected – once more indicating his search for empirical confirmation. On this basis he initiated a prospective reform of eighteenth-century ethnography which had considerable influence. If empirical support were required, the response was to inspire those who travelled with proper notions of human nature which they would then locate in exotic destinations. In approaching this issue we should bear in mind, once more, Hutcheson’s conditions for refuting the moral sense. His opponents needed to produce evidence of entire nations that made no moral distinction between treachery, cruelty, torture, and ‘unprovoked murders’ on the one hand, and compassion, humanity, and liberality on the other. As Hutcheson put it in a passage in his System of Moral Philosophy, paralleling the Inquiry : ‘But such nations have not yet been discovered to us, not even by the invention of the boldest traveller.’108 His sensitivity to this possible source of counter-evidence, retailed to such effect by Locke, was therefore understandable. Accordingly, in the second edition of his Inquiry Hutcheson congratulated Shaftesbury on the justice of his observations against this literary form which testified to the ‘monstrous Taste’ of readers as well as writers of travel accounts. He reproduced Shaftesbury’s list of dubious authorities who penned such narratives (including monks, friars, sea-captains, and pirates) and censured the credulity of those taken in by their deceit. Shaftesbury had also commented, if briefly, on the failure of philosophers to 107

Maxwell, ‘Dissertation’, 148, 151–2.

108

Hutcheson, System, I: 92.

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search out ‘simplicity of manners, and innocence of behaviour’ which often appeared among savages before Europeans corrupted them.109 Hutcheson developed this theme more extensively. He complained of moral traits missing from narratives of American Indians in particular. We learned nothing from travellers of the ‘natural Affections, the Familys, Associations, Friendships, Clans’ of these people, nor their dislike of treachery, care for one another, or stout defence of their nations and contempt for death. He concluded: ‘The ordinary Employment of the Bulk of the Indians in support of their Wives and Offspring, or Relations, has nothing of the Prodigious.’110 The explanation lay in the fact that these social features were, in some sense, ordinary and unremarkable. Although these attributes made the Indians part of the same moral community as the rest of the world, travel writers were bent on the extraordinary, and therefore focused on human sacrifices and cannibalism of enemies. Hutcheson did not describe the report of these particular activities as fabricated, however. Instead, he juxtaposed the horror and wonder at barbarities of this kind with atrocities nearer to home: the Massacre at Paris, the Irish Rebellion, and the Inquisition. He dwelt on examples of specifically Catholic outrages, emphasising the similar ‘Perversion of Humanity by Superstition’ evident in Indian ritual killings, making his levelling point more limited in its reach.111 His larger commitment, as we see throughout his writings, was to the view that we overlook benevolence and the moral sense precisely because of the familiarity and constancy of sociable and moral feeling. Instead we call attention to shocking events, but by doing so we foster a misleading account of humanity.112 Hutcheson takes his examples from the routine features of social life, the stable experiences of friendship and family, which provide the basis of sociable interaction. The institution of marriage, parental affection, and family life play a prominent role in his account of benevolent affections throughout his work.113 In his Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, Hutcheson pointed out that we must regulate the way we think about others to avoid concluding that mankind is worse than it really is. In examining human action it was rare to uncover a motive worse than self-love: the majority of people’s lives was spent in 109 111 112 113

Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 157. 110 Hutcheson, Inquiry, 2nd edn, 203–4; 4th edn, 206–7; L 139. Ibid., 2nd edn, 204; 4th edn, 207; L 139. This argument is implicit in Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks. He described the human fascination with horror and wonder in Soliloquy: or, Advice to an Author and in The Moralists, in Characteristics, 288–9. See A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy, II: 273–85; System, II: 149–87. On the humanising effect of family life see John Dwyer, Virtuous Discourse: Sensibility and Community in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh, 1987), ch. 7. See also Susan M. Purviance, ‘Intersubjectivity and Sociable Relations in the Philosophy of Francis Hutcheson’, Eighteenth-Century Life 15 (1991): 230–8.

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‘Offices of natural Affection, Friendship, innocent Self-Love, or Love of a Country’.114 Later in the same work he argued that we let our imaginations loose on events like robbery, piracy, murder, perjury, fraud, massacre, and assassination. The normative thrust of his thinking emerges once again in this context, in common with Shaftesbury. We focus our attentions on these crimes because of their rarity when compared with more innocent moral actions. The annals of history became disproportionately crowded with extreme incidents at the expense of what he called ‘honest, generous, domestick Actions’, which were overlooked because of their commonness.115 The same problem occurred in travel literature. As with other forms of historical writing, travellers recorded vicious and exceptional occurrences rather than virtuous deeds, or common scenes of domestic life.116 Hutcheson sought to reclaim travel writing for the developing moral sense school of thought. In his inaugural lecture of 1730, he included it along with history and drama as a source which could inspire positive ethical reactions by representing moral characters.117 Thus, unlike Shaftesbury, he did not imply that perusal of such material compromised his dignity; in fact in the Inquiry he presented himself as something of an authority on the virtues of Indian society. Where the moral sense school might have isolated itself from empirical evidence for fear of potential refutation, Hutcheson decided to seek empirical confirmation and to argue that travellers could supply it. This strategy offered a way around reports of diversity, suggesting a degree of overlooked uniformity in social practice, not the set of profoundly contradictory customs ostensibly observed in exotic locations. He refused to surrender ground either to Locke or to Mandeville, but rescued a potential means of support for his case. As a result, the natural history of man, as he contrived it, no longer confirmed Locke’s findings, and would now lend credence to a belief in common consent.118 At the same time, Hutcheson rejected Shaftesbury’s practice of 114 116

117 118

Hutcheson, Essay, 108; Garrett edn, 77. 115 Hutcheson, Essay, 184–5; Garrett edn, 121. The rhetorical dilemma faced by travel writers can be appreciated in Henry Fielding’s comment in his preface to The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon : ‘If the customs and manners of men were every where the same, there would be no office so dull as that of a traveller . . .’ The Criticism of Henry Fielding, ed. Ioan Williams (London, 1970), 139. The reform of travel literature in such a way as to establish what is shared between different groups runs counter to the demand for novelty, for the strange and marvellous in the moral as well as the natural world. Hutcheson, De naturali hominum socialitate, 14; Mautner, 137. In his treatise on beauty in the Inquiry, Hutcheson attempted to institute this more embracing position in his response to exotic aesthetic objects which Shaftesbury had typically excoriated (particularly in his unpublished writings). According to Hutcheson, Chinese and Persian buildings, although very different to those of Greece and Rome, still had their uniformity. East Indian decorative

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accepting tales of barbarity in order to establish a hierarchical notion of full access to the sociable and disinterested affections.119 The impact of Hutcheson’s position in the eighteenth century contributed to a re-evaluation of the potentialities of human nature. His work was complemented in this respect by other sources, including Shaftesbury, Butler, Pope, and a broader sentimental turn in ethics, poetry, and fiction, although all of these contributions competed with less-uplifting perspectives associated with Mandeville, Swift, and others. We can see specific evidence of Hutcheson’s influence on the understanding of American Indian virtue and sociability in such figures as William Smith, provost of the College of Philadelphia, William Bartram, the famed naturalist and travel writer (who was also indebted to Rousseau), and Thomas Jefferson, who sought to rehabilitate the reputation of the indigenous population in Virginia from the sweeping aspersions of Buffon.120 V DIVERSITY AND THE SCOTTISH ENLIGHTENMENT

Hutcheson’s legacy can also be discerned in continued discussions of the problem of diversity in the work of some of his contemporaries and successors in the collective known as the Scottish Enlightenment. One strand of Scottish thought on this subject addressed the moral question of what traits unified mankind and how evidence of diversity could be negotiated in such a way as to preserve a moral sense or moral sentiments common to everyone. Of course during the century various kinds of discussion of diversity took place, including renewed investigations of national character, the effect of climate, differences of external appearance, and the disparity between individual characters (complemented by contributions from Continental thinkers).121 But the response to Locke’s critique and the philosophical alternative set out by Shaftesbury and taken forward in Hutcheson’s work

119

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screens seemed rather deformed to him, but they too retained a degree of beauty and uniformity while contorting the human body. In his moral treatise, he conjectured that the preference for facial features that Europeans generally disparaged – such as large lips or narrow eyes – arose either from a sense of beauty and proportion perceived in them or because they were associated with moral qualities. Inquiry, 1st edn, 33, 71–2, 230; 4th edn, 37–8, 76–7, 252–3; L 41, 65, 167. There were limits to Hutcheson’s levelling of human difference. In his Thoughts on Laughter he asked who ‘would not prefer a life of sixty or seventy years with a good accommodation, and a numerous offspring, to eighty or ninety years as a Hottentot or worse?’ (74). For references and discussion, see Daniel Carey, ‘Reconsidering Rousseau: Sociability, Moral Sense and the American Indian from Hutcheson to Bartram’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 21:1 (1998): 25–38. In the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume suggests: ‘We must not . . . expect that this uniformity of human actions should be carried to such a length as that all men, in the same circumstances, will always act precisely in the same manner, without making any allowance for the

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treated difference as above all a moral question. In Hutcheson’s case he eventually reconnected his account with natural law, finding a harmony between internal sensations of benevolence and the domain of natural rights, which made his work powerfully political in the end. Hutcheson’s framing of the problem created difficulties, however, because it was vulnerable to empirical counter-evidence, in spite of his many efforts to provide arguments against it and alternative testimony. The strategy that eventually gained favour among Scottish writers was to recast difference as a product of history, conditioned by varying economic and social situations. This solution, which was not always liberal in its implications, had a precedent in Locke and Shaftesbury. Whatever its limitations as conjecture, it had the great advantage of turning empirical data of human variation not into a challenge against the integrity of man’s moral nature, but into supporting evidence, once the testimony was understood as pointing to different levels of human development spread over time. We can begin with discussion more immediately tied to Hutcheson’s position. The continuing importance of diversity appears in the work of David Fordyce, who began teaching at Marischal College, Aberdeen, in 1742. Fordyce contributed the section on moral philosophy to Robert Dodsley’s The Preceptor (1748), and this text, based on his lectures, appeared separately as The Elements of Moral Philosophy (published posthumously in 1754).122 Fordyce subscribed to Hutcheson’s view that a moral power of perception existed in the ‘the very Frame, and Constitution of our Nature’ which was ‘uniform and steddy’ in the way it operated.123 He addressed the array of objections lodged against such a position, the most familiar of which was empirical: if a uniform moral sense inhabits the human frame, why do human beings disagree over moral matters, including the merits of treachery, revenge, and cruelty: ‘nay whole Nations [approve of ] Theft, the Exposition of Infants, and many other Crimes of as black a Dye’. In reply, Fordyce maintained that diversity of opinion and practice did not alter the nature of things, any more than disputes over matters of taste meant that

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123

diversity of characters, prejudices, and opinions.’ Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 3rd edn rev. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford, 1975), 83, 85. See also Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Mary J. Gregor (The Hague, 1974). In The Aberdeen Enlightenment, Paul B. Wood argues against overemphasising the importance of Hutcheson for Fordyce. He stresses the impact of George Turnbull and Bishop Butler on the formation of Fordyce’s position, but this risks underplaying the close connection between Fordyce’s text and Hutcheson’s work generally, especially Hutcheson’s Philosophiae moralis institutio compendiaria (1742) which Fordyce not only mentioned expressly but which provided much of the form and content of his argument. David Fordyce, The Elements of Moral Philosophy (London, 1754), 48–9.

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painting had no fixed standard. He began as Hutcheson did by confirming the analogy between judgements of taste and morals. Nature served as the ultimate point of reference in both cases, although differences in education, ‘capacity’, the organs of sense, and prejudice made people apply this universal rule in contrary ways. Accordingly, Fordyce distinguished the contribution of nature from the influence of customs, manners, and education, expressing confidence that appeals to a common nature and common sense virtually eliminated errors of judgement.124 Even if we acknowledged diversity in the human community, on this model of human nature only the moral sense, technically, could produce ethical ideas: custom and education, however influential, had no power to originate moral conceptions. As a result, Fordyce insisted, in tandem with Hutcheson, that when various societies abandoned sickly children, public good motivated the act. Murder of the elderly did not indicate cruelty but confirmed a desire to free them from the ‘Miseries of old Age’.125 As Hutcheson had argued, in these cases we ought to fault reason rather than the moral sense. However, not everyone accepted Hutcheson’s proposed solutions. Philip Skelton (1707–87), a near contemporary of Hutcheson, also born in Northern Ireland, renewed the attack on the moral sense on the basis of diversity in Ophiomaches: or, Deism Revealed (1749), reminding his readers that while one nation might think it obligatory to ‘suckle and cherish their children with great tenderness’, others disapproved of burdening themselves with unhealthy infants, and therefore discarded them to wild beasts after they were born. Certain countries preserved and prolonged the lives of parents with exceptional care, but still more put them to death when they became decrepit and feasted on their flesh. Innumerable examples existed of this diversity, he claimed, enough to convince sober thinkers that neither nature nor reason instructed mankind how to act. He took the view that continual tuition was essential. Without that, he remarked, ‘I cannot tell what would become of the moral sense; but I am afraid it would dwindle away almost to nothing.’126 David Hume developed his position on the problem of diversity at some length in a work entitled ‘A Dialogue’, appended to the Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751). The dialogue form enabled him to test out a number of paradoxical theses before attempting to reconcile the debate with firmer conclusions about the constancy of moral sentiments and principles. He began with a travel account by Palamedes, an experienced figure who, as a character, owed something to literary precedents in 124

Ibid., 68–9.

125

Ibid., 69–70.

126

Skelton, Ophiomaches, I: 123–4.

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Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes and More’s Utopia. Palamedes had spent considerable time living among the Fourlians, a highly civilised people whose precise geographical location he refrained from giving. There he was fortunate to take up residence with a local figure universally esteemed for his great merits, but Palamedes was confounded to discover that his host had committed murder and parricide, and had assassinated a revered individual to whom he was ostensibly loyal. This individual’s personal circumstances were no less erratic, as he had made repeated attempts to seduce a male lover, despite being married (to his own sister, no less), although his wife had no objection to his affairs. After departing from the country, Palamedes learned that the gentleman had suffered a reverse of fortune and committed suicide. Yet none of these actions earned him censure; on the contrary, they merely added to his high reputation. Hume’s unnamed interlocutor, who speaks for him, assumes that Palamedes is jesting. The savage and barbarous practices he names are inconsistent with civilisation and virtually contradict human nature, in his view. Indeed, he remarks, ‘They exceed all we ever read of, among the Mingrelians, and Topinamboues.’127 These two references pick up directly on examples that Locke had brought to the attention of the learned world as models of cultural difference (Essay, I.iii.9). But there is a twist in the tale. Palamedes admits that he has been referring, all the while, not to an imaginary country, but to the ancient Greeks, especially the Athenians – their ‘amours’, marriages, as well as their sanction of exposing children; his host, meanwhile, was an impersonation of the Roman patriot Brutus. In reply, Hume’s spokesman initially complicates the picture by imagining how the ancients would respond to a similarly truncated (and misleading) portrait of contemporary France, also acknowledged as the height of modern civility, and yet its people engaged in adultery and sanctioned duelling while they lived in conditions of political slavery that the Greeks would have abhorred. For Palamedes, however, this answer merely confirmed his case. Like Mandeville and the Locke who articulated the law of opinion or fashion, he advanced the conclusion that ‘fashion, vogue, custom, and law, were the chief foundation of all moral determinations’.128 127 128

David Hume, An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp (Oxford, 1998), 188. Ibid., 191. In a reply to Hume’s ‘Dialogue’, James Balfour maintained that his scheme was not only ‘violent and affected’, but ultimately failed to establish a more secure grounding for morality than fashion, law, and opinion. A Delineation of the Nature and Obligation of Morality (Edinburgh, 1753), 133; see also 127–33. A year later, Balfour was appointed professor of moral philosophy in Edinburgh.

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The question for Hume’s speaker was how to fix a standard that would apply to everyone, in spite of all these differences of moral sentiment, thereby recovering ‘the most universal, established principles of morals’. He began by observing that although homosexuality was blameworthy, in the Greek case it was based on moral qualities such as friendship, sympathy, and fidelity, however absurdly. As far as incest was concerned, rules about consanguinity required some balance: the Greeks erred on one side of the proposition and canon law on the other. Parents who exposed their children, meanwhile, were prompted by love and a desire to save them from poverty. He found parallel means for extenuating the suspect customs of the French, arguing that ‘the principles upon which men reason in morals are always the same; though the conclusions which they draw are often very different’. The Rhone flowed north and south, but its source was the same.129 As Hume continued his analysis, he admitted additional factors into the equation. Specific preferences in different countries varied according to a number of conditions. A state of war or peace had an important impact on moral values, suggesting that some account of historical (and economic) circumstances was required to place human difference in perspective. More generally, he divided the assessment of moral qualities according to criteria of usefulness or ‘agreeableness’, and the varying pull of these claims allowed him room to account for inconsistencies between the priorities of social groups. But he also allowed national character to play its part and to influence morals independently of principles shared across mankind.130 In this context, he recognised that chance had an effect on ‘national manners’. Similarly, local customs and the biases received from them had the effect of producing variation. These remarks suggested an alternative basis for understanding the sources of human difference, which, if taken further, would have replicated the sociological law of opinion. So long as philosophers committed themselves to an account of human nature implying some uniformity of moral sense or moral sentiments, they confronted the objection that insufficient consistency existed across mankind to support their view. The argument against universal consent, raised by Locke as well as Bayle, was difficult to dispatch, even if one rejected Locke’s insistence on conformity in action. Adam Smith reflected on this 129 130

Hume, Enquiry, 192–3. See also Hume’s essay ‘Of National Characters’, in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, rev. edn, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, 1987).

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dilemma in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) in a chapter addressing the influence of custom and fashion on ideas of beauty and ugliness. Unlike Hutcheson and Fordyce, he did not attempt to confirm the uniformity of moral beliefs from an analogous consistency in aesthetic judgements. No privileged access to truth and reason existed on this point. In fact, Smith catalogued a Mandevillian array of contrasting preferences in body shapes and facial features.131 But Smith warned his readers not to express astonishment at the barbarity of Indian customs by attributing them to their alleged stupidity. He recalled that European women, until recently, had endeavoured to squeeze their ‘beautiful roundness’ into awkward, square shapes. Despite the many physical discomforts and ailments occasioned by it, the custom held sway in some of the most civilised nations the world had ever seen.132 Although Smith characterised judgements of beauty as changeable and uncertain, he insisted that moral views, by contrast, stemmed from ‘the strongest and most vigorous passions of human nature’. Morality could be warped, as he put it, but not entirely perverted.133 Even though custom and fashion enjoyed a certain influence, moral sentiments maintained their resilience. He agreed with Hume that contrasting historical and social conditions led to different standards, particularly of what constitutes polite behaviour.134 The need for self-command, necessitated by the harsh conditions of Indian life, induced a habit of falsehood and dissimulation, while the safer circumstances of polished society resulted in greater openness and sincerity. Having cited these differences, Smith described the effects of custom and fashion on morality as inconsiderable. Generally speaking, the manners adopted by any nation matched its situation: ‘Hardiness is the character most suitable to the circumstances of a savage; sensibility to those of one who lives in a very civilized society . . . we cannot complain that the moral sentiments of men are very grossly perverted.’135

131

132 133 134

‘A fair complexion is a shocking deformity upon the coast of Guinea. Thick lips and a flat nose are a beauty. In some nations long ears that hang down upon the shoulders are the objects of universal admiration. In China if a lady’s foot is so large as to be fit to walk upon, she is regarded as a monster of ugliness. Some of the savage nations in North-America tie four boards around the heads of their children, and thus squeeze them, while the bones are tender and gristly, into a form that is almost perfectly square’. Theory of Moral Sentiments, 199. Ibid. Ibid., 200. For Smith’s distinction of his views on moral sentiment from Hutcheson’s account of benevolence and the moral sense, see 304–5, 321–7. See Ibid., 205. 135 Ibid., 209.

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VI AN HISTORICAL SOLUTION

As we can see from hints in Hume and Smith, the Scottish account of diversity eventually took an historical form. In order to account for variations in custom, manners, and civility, a number of philosophers adopted a model of social progress that obviated the need to confirm the moral sense empirically. The four-stage scheme of conjectural history, then, had an advantage over Hutcheson’s theory (at least in its empirical incarnation, as opposed to its Stoic and normative formulation). Difference emerged as a feature of historical predicament, a conclusion that did not militate against the notion of a unified human nature but rather placed societies on a continuum from savagery to civilisation.136 Hutcheson’s difficult requirement of harnessing history and travel to the purposes of a moral sense theory was therefore circumvented. One of the first extended discussions of this kind appeared in Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767). Ferguson’s understanding of history emerges from natural history, and he committed himself to collecting facts on which to base his conjectures. Diversity constituted an obvious feature of human society, and he described the task of accounting for it in moral or physical terms as one of great curiosity and utility. Yet the first challenge was to establish the universal features of human nature before assessing differences that resulted from what he called ‘unequal possession or application of dispositions and powers that are in some measure common to all mankind’.137 Ferguson maintained that not only do individual members of a species develop from infancy to maturity and decline, but also the species itself; thus mankind proceeded, in his scheme, through three stages, from savagery to rudeness and eventually civilisation. He confirmed the sociable nature of mankind and stressed the advantage of gleaning proofs drawn from those living in a primitive condition, who had not yet learned ‘to affect what they do not actually feel’.138 When contemplating the state of nature he 136

137 138

On the four-stage theory see R. L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge, 1976). See also Roy Harvey Pearce, ‘The Eighteenth-Century Scottish Primitivists: Some Reconsiderations’, ELH 12 (1945): 203–20; and Robert Wokler, ‘Apes and Races in the Scottish Enlightenment: Monboddo and Kames on the Nature of Man’, in Philosophy and Science in the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Peter Jones (Edinburgh, 1988), 145–68. This is not to imply that the problem of diversity disappeared for historians. William Robertson, for one, struggled with causal explanation of moral difference in The History of America (1777). On this subject see David Womersley, ‘The Historical Writings of William Robertson’, Journal of the History of Ideas 47 (1986): 497–506. Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Fania Oz-Salzberger (Cambridge, 1995), 16. Ibid., 9, 23.

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made an increasingly positive rather than negative or defensive use of travel accounts to establish his case. From a collection of Dutch voyages he noted the joy with which sailors, long removed from contact with others, greeted the sight of a Laplander’s track ‘on the snowy shore’, demonstrating their social nature. William Dampier’s travels and Charlevoix’s Histoire et Description Generale de la Nouvelle France (1744) supplied him with instances of the powerful bond of friendship which transcended mere interest or the considerations of safety. But Ferguson’s rendition of the state of nature was not uniformly celebratory. (For Hutcheson it was a condition of ‘peace and good-will, of innocence and beneficence, and not one of violence, war and rapine’.139) Ferguson regarded war and dissension not as unnatural events but as the outcome of attachment to the tribe. Recent discoveries had made known a vast array of human circumstances. Travellers had encountered peoples inhabiting vast open spaces who could have formed confederacies, as well as residents of small chains of islands who might have benefited from assembling together, but in every case ‘they were broke into cantons, and affected a distinction of name and community’.140 His evidence appeared to impugn human nature, but he remarked that this powerful identification with the group remained consistent with the portrait of sociability, affection, and friendship he had already sketched. Thus he was ultimately consistent both with Hutcheson’s analysis and Shaftesbury’s claim that it was natural to ‘cantonise’.141 Ferguson’s refusal to suppose a uniform moral sense, together with his historical perspective, removed the requirement for empirical confirmation of the kind sought by Hutcheson. When he inquired into moral sentiment in the state of nature Ferguson used the conditional throughout, and posed questions rather than making assertions. In any case he refrained from sentimentalising the primitive condition of man prior to the adoption of private property, even as he described the sociability, affection, and familial concern of North American tribes. Human differences, which Ferguson had no reluctance to acknowledge, resulted finally from variations in economic and political circumstances, with manners changing from republics to monarchies and despotic regimes, from an era of property to one of commerce.142

139 142

Hutcheson, Short Introduction, I: 148. 140 Ferguson, Essay, 22, 25. 141 See note 88 above. See Ferguson, Essay, 80–94. Ferguson did not simply respond to Scottish discussion; he also addressed Rousseau and Montesquieu. He focused on the consequences of commercial society, inquiring into the potential loss of civic virtue in a context of luxury and increasingly individual pursuits. Implicitly he explored the relationship of the Highlands and Lowlands of Scotland, and the nation’s transition from a rude but moral state to one of increasing cultivation.

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Ferguson’s inquiries were quickly followed by an investigation on an even more substantial scale in the work of Henry Home, Lord Kames. His Sketches of the History of Man (1774) originally appeared in two volumes and was later expanded in subsequent editions to four. Kames, a lawyer by training who rose to be a judge on the highest Scottish civil and criminal courts, had wide philosophical and historical interests; he also contributed his political influence to assist the academic careers of Adam Smith and others. In the Sketches, Kames provided a graphic illustration of the advantages of combining an historical form of argument with a moral sense theory when it came to confronting the problem of diversity. The position he set out blended different philosophical assumptions and commitments, largely conditioned by an acceptance of universal moral principles in human nature, which he managed to reconcile with empirical testimony of human difference. In the fourth volume, Kames provided an account of moral philosophy in order to establish the rule or principles that govern morality irrespective of historical deviations. In this context, immediate indications appear of his debt to Hutcheson, although it soon becomes clear that he considerably modified and augmented what he acquired.143 He argued that right and wrong are qualities perceived by a moral sense; the moral sense informs us of what is agreeable and disagreeable in actions.144 Nor should we doubt the existence of this sense any more than we would question our sense of sight or hearing or beauty. By analogy with the other senses, he expected perceptions of moral qualities to prove equally uniform and consistent. God had ordained this in order to preserve society.145 Having laid a Hutchesonian foundation, Kames proceeded to adapt it extensively. We need, in addition to this sense, an idea of duty, of what we ought to do. Kames simply added this complex notion to the list of information provided by the moral sense. Furthermore, we require ‘some principle or propensity, some impulsive power, to enforce obedience to the laws dictated by the moral sense’.146 Accordingly he affirmed that the Deity had endowed us not only with an understanding of benevolence and duty, but also with ‘principles’ of reward and punishment as well as reparation.147 In an even 143

144 145

Kames’s original formulation appeared in Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion (Edinburgh, 1751). There he confirmed the existence of a moral sense, identified as ‘the voice of God within us’ (63), and equated it with Butler’s concept of conscience. At the same time he introduced an explicit revision of Hutcheson’s moral theory by insisting on the importance of justice and duty or obligation. Benevolence, in his view, was secondary to these notions and not strictly obligatory (49–75). Whether it constitutes a branch of the sense of sight or a distinct sense he remains unsure. Sketches of the History of Man, 3rd edn, 4 vols. (Edinburgh, 1788), IV: 12n. Ibid., IV: 20, 24. 146 Ibid., IV: 48. 147 Ibid., IV: 48–9.

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more substantial departure from Hutcheson, he maintained that universal benevolence would in fact be harmful and that a balance of self-love was in fact advantageous (indicating the influence of Adam Smith on his position). Yet Kames’s blending of positions was not so great that he could ignore the objection from diversity. Rather than concede that the lack of universal agreement called the moral sense into question, he asserted that the sense has been distributed unequally.148 In some it is weaker, in others more vigorous. In a discussion of the ‘Progress of Morality’, Kames treated the problem more fully and combined it with an extensive historical catalogue. Some of the senses, he remarked, arrive at their perfection more quickly than others. Those on which our existence depends come into usage rapidly, but a feeling for propriety, dignity, order, or grace develops over time. Although the moral sense often manifests itself in children, he regarded it in general as ‘slow of growth’, requiring what he called ‘culture and experience’.149 On these grounds he could take into evidence any amount of barbarity among savage peoples by situating them in a historical continuum which would lead them from incivility to politeness.150 Thus, a savage could kill someone in cold blood without feeling any remorse, while a more cultured person would respond entirely differently, and yet both possessed a moral sense: in the former it was latent, in the latter, active. In this way the moral sense had more ‘authority’ over someone with a polite education than over an untutored savage. For Kames, this construction did not diminish the naturalness of moral principles. He regarded the savage state as constituting a nation’s infancy, and the moral sense, in these conditions, as accordingly ‘feeble, yielding to custom, to imitation, to passion’. Gradually, however, it grows in strength and the ‘benevolent affections’ prevail over ‘dissocial passions’.151 The position that Kames developed is in fact far closer to Shaftesbury than to Hutcheson. Shaftesbury regarded the moral affections as largely 148 150

151

Ibid., IV: 17. 149 Ibid., IV: 128. David Doig challenged Kames on this point in Two Letters on the Savage State (London, 1792). Composed between 1774 and 1776, the letters were addressed to Kames but not published until after his death. Doig questioned whether mankind began in a universally savage state from which it then progressed. Broaching an ‘unpopular thesis’ (40) he held that savages remained savages; in fact they were more likely to sink than advance. Many examples could be cited of peoples who failed to show any signs of social development. Africa, for example, continued in ‘abject’ savagism (45), with few exceptions. He believed that a number of civilised societies had existed from the beginning; others were raised up suddenly by a single heroic figure. Colonisation seemed the only implicit hope for those beyond immediate contact with more civil societies, unless of course the colonists were outcasts and dregs, who would have a negative impact. On the whole he drew the unhappy conclusion that human nature had an innate tendency to degenerate, not to advance (154). Kames, Sketches, IV: 130, 131.

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unavailable to the uncivil and uncultivated, and he introduced an historical scheme to explain the progress of nations toward a goal that nature forwarded for mankind. Kames was similarly untroubled by failures to live up to the high ideal of the moral sense or implanted moral principles. Furthermore, Kames sought to prove not only the universality of the moral sense but also a belief in God by restricting the testimony on these matters to ‘enlightened nations’.152 Thus, in relation to common consent, Shaftesbury’s solution was more attractive than Hutcheson’s. Considered as natural history, Kames’s theory was shielded by sidelining moral anomalies to the status of monsters.153 They occur in nature but they do not tell against the norm. In fact he had little need to worry. The testimony he gleaned could remain contradictory without causing him any difficulties. Signs of benevolence or good nature among the primitive proved his point, just as readily as moral failures did. When he embarked on ‘induction of particulars’,154 the variability of his ethnographic evidence came to light. Among primitive peoples, he concluded, moral qualities could be discerned in their relations among themselves, as various travellers affirmed; but cruelty reigned in human nature once they made contact with others and began competing, for example, over hunting grounds.155 Indeed Kames gathered together a very long list of abuses, irregularities, and injustices drawn from classical and modern sources, but they told against history not human nature. At one point he remarked, with unintentional comic effect, ‘In the thirteenth century, so obscured was the moral sense by rapacity and avarice, that robbery on the highway, and the coining of false money, were in Germany held to be privileges of great lords.’156 Hutcheson’s predication of his argument on actual empirical confirmation meant that he could not countenance the same kind of examples without trying to diminish them in some way. As we have seen, he specifically questioned the representativeness of historical narratives that seized on the extraordinary and extreme, in his opinion, and overlooked the ordinary because of its familiarity. Benevolence, as a common trait, was elided from the record. Kames had no such case to answer. 152

153

Ibid., IV: 20, 192. Accordingly, he set aside certain kinds of travel literature as unreliable (IV: 192) in an even more peremptory fashion than Bishop Stillingfleet (The Bishop of Worcester’s Answer to Mr. Locke’s Letter (London, 1697), 89–90). Where reports confirmed his case, he was happy to admit them (e.g., IV: 231–3). Kames maintained that the idea of God must be innate because neither reason nor reflection on design could attain it universally. Since it was universal it must have an innate source. He added that the idea of worship is also included in the sense of a Deity (IV: 201). Locke had specifically objected to this position in the Essay, I.iv.5. Kames, Sketches, IV: 19–23. 154 Ibid., IV: 132. 155 Ibid., IV: 138. 156 Ibid., IV: 165.

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The value of taking an historical perspective on human nature and diversity did not mean that Scottish philosophers gave up on the dispute with Locke over innateness. This is clear enough in Kames. We find the same conviction in his contemporary James Beattie, who held the chair of moral philosophy and logic at Marishal College, Aberdeen. Beattie, who was elsewhere a great admirer of Locke, objected strongly to the argument of the Essay ’s first book which he considered dangerous in its implications because it invited the conclusion that truth and virtue were no more than ‘human contrivances’. He regarded a variety of moral sentiments as instinctive, a conclusion warranted by their universality.157 In a later work, Beattie pursued empirical confirmation of moral and sociable inclinations among those ‘closest to nature’ (to use Locke’s phrase for an important test case), i.e., savage or primitive peoples. He accused Locke, in his Dissertations Moral and Critical (1783), of making a shallow inquiry into the customs he relied on to impugn mankind. In answer to Locke’s allegation that nations existed in which the natives remorselessly killed their parents when they grew old and burdensome (Essay, I.iii.9), Beattie introduced the testimony of William Ellis who had travelled with Captain Cook to the New World. Ellis confirmed the fact that, indeed, Indians inhabiting the Hudson’s Bay area strangled their parents, but they did so only at the request of the loved one in question. Children performed the act with reluctance, conceiving it as a duty they owed to the parent, not because they regarded the elderly as an unwanted encumbrance. For Beattie, this encouraging report answered the accusation that ‘these poor barbarians are destitute of filial affection’. In fact, the contrary was true. Beattie concluded his digression on the subject by commending Ellis’s salutary tributes to human nature. He only regretted that this travel book had become a scarce item, ‘I know not for what reason’.158 Dugald Stewart’s Philosophy of the Active and Moral Powers of Man, published in the year of his death (1828), confirmed yet again that the original argument between Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson had not been transcended. In a manner akin to Beattie, Stewart gave an extended reply to Locke’s argument that whole nations existed without moral principles, arguing that more recent travellers had contradicted Locke’s view (he cited Captain Cook, Ellis’s Voyage, and Roger Curtis’s account of 157 158

James Beattie, An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth (Edinburgh, 1770), 245–7. James Beattie, Dissertations Moral and Critical (London, 1783), 524–6n. He cites William Ellis, An Authentic Narrative of a Voyage performed by Captain Cook . . . in search of a North-West Passage, 2 vols. (London, 1782).

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Labrador printed in the Philosophical Transactions for 1774).159 Stewart added that moral differences resulted from diverse speculative opinions and ideas of happiness; finally, differing social states had the effect of ‘modifying the moral judgments of mankind’.160 In this respect Stewart combined Hutcheson’s solution to the problem of diversity, which stressed rival views of happiness and differences of reasoning (separable from the uniform operation of the moral sense), with the historical answer available from other Scottish commentators who linked inconsistent assessments of virtues and vices to varying social circumstances. Nonetheless, Stewart’s sensitivity to the empirical objection led him to quote approvingly from Shaftesbury’s attack on Locke, and in particular Shaftesbury’s rejection of travel literature as evidence of human nature. Hutcheson’s attempt to integrate the conclusions available in Shaftesbury’s philosophy with the technical resources provided by Locke did not occur without difficulty. His moral and aesthetic intuitions convinced him of the beauty of human nature; he traced the benevolent affections to a moral sense located in mankind, understood in Lockean terms as the capacity to appreciate simple ideas of moral events, prior to calculation of interest. With these convictions he turned against the testimony of human diversity supplied by travellers and recirculated in a sceptical vein by Locke and Mandeville. He bequeathed a problem to his successors in the Scottish Enlightenment, but not necessarily a solution. 159

160

Roger Curtis, ‘Particulars of the Country of Labradore, extracted from the Papers of Lieutenant Roger Curtis’, Philosophical Transactions 64 (1774): 372–88. In fact Curtis’s account is more compatible with Locke’s travel references, as he reports that the Eskimos destroy the elderly and decrepit, lack any form of government or religion, and engage in hostile battles with other groups. Following his scheme, Hutcheson could have reconciled these traits with the moral sense, but they did not provide an immediate confirmation of his outlook. Dugald Stewart, The Philosophy of the Active and Moral Powers of Man, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1828), I: 186.

CHAPTER

6

Conclusion: the future of diversity

The phenomenon of diversity – whether in morality, social custom, or religious belief – played an important but in many ways neglected part in the debate between leading philosophers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Locke’s attack on innateness in the first book of the Essay established as a key point of contention the issue of whether any unities existed in moral outlook or conceptions of the divine. His denial of universal consent, together with his sceptical view of essences, expressed elsewhere in the Essay, left open the possibility that, in practice, human beings regulated themselves only according to socially received notions (fashion, opinion, reputation, etc.) rather than anything higher. Reason was the ultimate resource for mankind, in Locke’s view, but human nature alone did not supply us with inclinations toward virtue and away from vice, nor did it provide conceptions of the Deity. Shaftesbury and Hutcheson attempted to repair the damage and to recall a Stoic conception which saw nature as a fund of normative ideas, predispositions, or prolepses that embraced benevolence, sociability, disinterested affection, and the divine, explaining our attachments to friend, family, and nation. Their assumption of a profound unanimity in the world required them to address the testimony of human difference cited by Locke and the unsociable portrait of human motivation. On this subject they developed alternative strategies, with differing strengths and weaknesses, which brought innateness back into play in a new form. By responding to the implications of diversity they placed this problem at the centre of a certain set of discussions about human nature, travel, ethnography, and moral theory that spread during the Enlightenment throughout England, Ireland, Scotland, and beyond. Nor have these disputes lost their potency. Indeed, the challenge of working through the consequences of human difference and cultural variation, while preserving some prospect of a larger unity at a moral, legal, and constitutional level, has become a hallmark of contemporary 200

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intellectual discussion. This tendency appears in contexts ranging from anthropology to political theory, ethics, and the debate over the consequences of multiculturalism. Not every strand of these engagements can be traced to the traditions outlined in this book, but a substantial core of current concerns had its first modern exploration in the work of Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson. The following account suggests the ongoing relevance of the polarities established by these three central figures. By seeing contemporary engagements in the light of their arguments, we not only historicise the present, but we also gain some added perspective on the powers and limits of current configurations, as well as an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century legacies to the present. Before embarking on this discussion we need a review of the book’s central arguments. Locke’s engagement with diversity was influenced by two traditions. The method of natural history pursued by Robert Boyle, and others connected with the new science, regarded diversity as a fact of nature. Inductive accumulation of observations began with an acceptance of diversity as a point of departure and deferred hypothesis or theory to a later stage of argument. Locke adopted a number of key assumptions characteristic of this approach, and he extended the method to include human nature and social practice. His version of the natural history of man was predicated on eschewing a number of obvious explanations for cultural difference, familiar in the work of others: diversity could be understood, in a conventional way, as a corrupt departure from the norm, an outcome of the Fall, or simply as the effect of perverse custom and education. Instead Locke documented the myriad ways in which human beings organised themselves socially, morally, and religiously, without accepting the validity of traditional explanations for these variations. In the Essay, Locke used this information to refute the suggestion that innate ideas or practical principles inhabited the mind. Testimony from travellers in exotic locations – effectively an early form of anthropology – ruled out the possibility of meaningful consistencies across the globe. Once again Locke did not write this off as mere depravity, but used it as telling information against the view that nature endowed the soul with specific moral principles and tendencies or ideas of the divine. A hedonist psychology of avoiding pain and pursuing pleasure was the only constant principle, but such self-interested impulses did not guarantee authentic morality.1 1

To secure a basis for morality, Locke combined this with the notion of a divine lawgiver who supplied rewards and punishments in the afterlife.

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Locke’s readiness to use the data of diversity placed him, at the same time, in a recognisably sceptical tradition. The sceptics had made a broader use of cultural diversity in order to confute moral dogmatism altogether and to instil doubt over the validity of moral principles or judgements. Yet their readiness to report on practices such as incest, child murder, parricide, cannibalism, and other customs coincided with Locke’s requirements for undermining the Stoic insistence on nature’s inclination to direct us to the good. Locke’s own anthropology, designed to eradicate innateness, had its gaps and suppressions, but it undoubtedly placed a huge burden on reason to rescue the situation. His confidence in this capacity varied from context to context in his writings and he eventually reposed more faith in Scripture as a source of guidance than he did in unaided rationality. The question is whether he left ‘primitive’ peoples behind, unaided by revelation and potentially crippled by the limitations of their environment in securing more sophisticated ideas of government, morality, and religious duty. In the Two Treatises, meanwhile, Locke developed an alternative anthropology which was significant in a number of respects, most notably because he did not treat diversity as indelible. Salient differences did exist, of course, but he supposed that history would transform primitive forms of social organisation and government into an eventual consensus. While he did not adopt a specifically moral frame of reference, the argument was significant because the citations of cultural variation did not invoke the prospect of relativism as they did in the Essay. Shaftesbury had more in common with Locke than has perhaps been appreciated, but the core of his philosophy was dedicated to undoing the damage caused by his tutor and mentor. He recalled the Stoic notion of prolepsis in order to describe the natural inclinations present in human nature that resulted in social, moral, and aesthetic consensus. Diversity of the kind advertised by Locke potentially disrupted the order and beauty evident in the universe and mirrored in human relations. Shaftesbury devised a number of ways to evade the impact of this testimony. First, prolepses did not guarantee agreement. They provided a natural foundation, but it was necessary to apply them in the world, at which point error might occur. Thus he rejected Locke’s insistence on ‘Conformity of Action’ (Essay, I.iii.3) as something that innatists must demonstrate. Secondly, he offered a circumscribed notion of common consent, limiting the realm of consensus to a social elite or to the world of polite nations. Counter-evidence from the impolite did nothing to damage his notion of ultimate agreement. His argument positioned some nations as beyond the circle of civility, morality, and taste. Other countries, including England,

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had benefited from historical progress, moving from a condition of barbarism towards a more promising future (made possible by a proper political system in the English case). His argument, in this respect, coincided with the drift of Locke’s position in the ‘Second Treatise’. We must not overlook an important feature of Shaftesbury’s system, however. His insistence on consensus in matters of taste and morality enabled him, in fact, to clear a space for diversity: with respect to religion, he argued against the imposition of ecclesiastical authority to enforce uniformity and dismissed the search for agreement in this arena. On the contrary, he encouraged freethought, which spread in various directions.2 Francis Hutcheson did not share Shaftesbury’s views on religion, but he was deeply persuaded by his perspective on human nature. He shared an equal conviction in disinterested moral affections and sociability, commended by the moral sense. Repudiating his predecessor’s aristocratic refuge in elite notions of taste and morality, Hutcheson democratised the moral sense. This faculty or power built into human nature also generated political principles consistent with natural law and thus guaranteed a foundation for rights in nature, not self-interested calculation (as Hobbes, Pufendorf, and Locke had taught in different ways). Yet the contrasts in approach between Hutcheson and Shaftesbury meant that he faced a far stronger challenge from diversity. He was unwilling to contradict Locke’s critique of innateness, unlike Shaftesbury, and he attempted to shield the moral sense from this criticism. Although his way of doing so (by borrowing from Lockean epistemology) was clever, he risked turning the moral sense into a purely formal capacity to have moral experiences, without a content in itself. In order to prevent this outcome, Hutcheson stated a normative set of terms approved by the moral sense. Having done so, he had to confront the counter-evidence of diversity more directly. He introduced a number of arguments explicitly designed to limit the impact of diversity and to prevent the refutation of the moral sense on these grounds. At the same time, he picked up on Shaftesbury’s suggestion that diversity had been exaggerated in the narratives of travellers endorsed by Locke. To reform and reclaim this source of testimony, it was necessary to supply travellers with a proper conception of human nature which they could then locate empirically in the world. Hutcheson stimulated sustained attention to the problem of diversity in the Scottish Enlightenment. But his own solution was awkward to the 2

Shaftesbury anticipated an eventual agreement, however, militating against superstition, enthusiasm, and the power arrogated by clerics.

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extent that it was potentially embarrassed by evidence of incommensurable customs or savage practices that contradicted the allegedly uniform moral sense. The advantage of an historical perspective, suggested in Locke’s ‘Second Treatise’ and pursued in a different way by Shaftesbury, became evident at this point. Moral consensus could be recovered by treating deviations as a feature of history, remedied by social progress. The sophistication and extent of these discussions in the English, Irish, and Scottish Enlightenments have not been fully appreciated by modern commentators. The scope and power of these original debates invite us to consider how they relate to current articulations of related problems. The political theory of multiculturalism and diversity represents an obvious point of contact with this tradition of argument, but a wider survey is required to appreciate the contexts which have inherited and developed these original disputes. Anthropology, in particular, is an important point of departure because it has engaged more actively than most disciplines, and for a longer period, with debates over human uniformity and difference. Moral judgement may no longer constitute the terminus of the argument, but the theoretical reflections of anthropologists still confront us with basic questions about human nature, its content, and the implications of diversity. I

AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF DIVERSITY

Much of the conflict discussed in this book was bound up with rival anthropologies. From one point of view, modern anthropology has sided with the notion that cultural differences remain basic, and that diversity is therefore a fact which ethnographic research should not overwrite. Indeed, diversity represents something of a methodological principle, akin to the working practices of a Lockean natural history of man. Yet a wider examination of the field indicates a continuing disagreement, similar to the disputes between Stoics and sceptics, over the content of human nature, in which some attempt has been made to recover a fundamental area of agreement connected with sociability or sociality. In many quarters of the profession, anthropology’s objective has been understood above all as engaging with and confirming the existence of diversity. Karen Brodkin, for example, remarks: ‘If anthropology is about anything, it is about cultural diversity.’3 Michael Carrithers calls this ‘the 3

Karen Brodkin, ‘Diversity in Anthropological Theory’, in Cultural Diversity in the United States: A Critical Reader, ed. Ida Susser and Thomas C. Peterson (Oxford, 2001), 365.

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central problem’ of the profession,4 while Richard Rorty, writing as an outsider, characterises anthropologists, somewhat mischievously, as ‘connoisseurs of diversity’.5 The professional focus on diversity arises from the fact that anthropology stands as the principal inheritor of the task undertaken by travellers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, namely to describe the ‘customs and manners’ maintained by different peoples, to form some understanding of their belief systems, legal traditions, and rituals. This was the vocation of authors enlisted by Locke in his critique of innateness. If anthropologists have largely discarded the business of framing their discussions of other communities in moral terms, they have continued the work of their antecedents by professionalising the investigation of society, myth, kinship, and law. In a number of respects, diversity commonly appears both as a conclusion of empirical inquiry – a fact disclosed by research – and as a methodological principle behind the investigation. In this respect, the discipline (at least in some of its manifestations) has a point in common, as I have suggested, with the working practices of Lockean natural history which eschewed uniformity in favour of a documentation of difference and variation within the natural world. Before classification begins, before order and uniformity are established, the sheer range and variety of forms must be acknowledged. Although equally strong attempts have been made to assert anthropological regularities in human society (whether or not they derive from a strong concept of human nature), the dominant strain in current work is emphatic in taking diversity as a point of departure and arrival. An explicit recognition of this disciplinary priority appears in twentiethcentury accounts at least as early as Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture (1934). In a chapter on ‘The Diversity of Cultures’, Benedict argued against the view that any intrinsic features of human nature produced necessary cultural effects. Practices of warfare, sexuality, initiation, and so on constituted cultural ‘traits’ that could be combined, recombined, and elaborated in myriad ways, all of them arbitrary, although ‘historical’ in the sense of diversified over time. This analysis turned culture into a relatively autonomous entity, with an agency of sorts to work out its own distinctive manifestations; nonetheless, the inquiry did not lead to the articulation of cultural constants, related to evolution or other permanent forces grounded in human nature. Even murder could not be cited as an event attracting universal condemnation. ‘On the contrary,’ she 4 5

Michael Carrithers, Why Humans Have Cultures: Explaining Anthropology and Social Diversity (Oxford, 1992), 2. Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism and Truth (Cambridge, 1991), 206.

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remarked, ‘in a matter of homicide, it may be held that one is blameless if diplomatic relations have been severed between neighbouring countries, or that one kills by custom his first two children, or that a husband has right of life or death over his wife, or that it is the duty of the child to kill his parents before they are old.’6 Thus she raised a central problem which organised the conflict between Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson – how to understand such phenomena as infanticide and parricide. Locke had included these practices in his list of incommensurable customs in the first book of the Essay, and Hutcheson had answered with an elaborate set of explanations that protected the moral sense. His strategy on diversity was intended to trace acts of murder, and other moral outrages, to mistaken ideas of the common good, the pernicious effects of religion, to reason, and other sources that might be unfortunate but which nonetheless allowed him to preserve the uniform workings of the moral sense. Diversity was in some sense accidental rather than essential to human nature. For Benedict the challenge was to organise units of cultural behaviour into meaningful ‘patterns’, but in the process diversity was not to be explained away or overcome, but rather preserved and ‘documented’. The investigation was conducted with a methodological commitment to relativism instead of a frame of moral judgement. Anthropological discussion of diversity was raised to a higher theoretical level by Clifford Geertz in his influential collection of essays The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), where he addresses the problem in a formal way that clearly re-engages with the traditions outlined in this book. In his essay ‘The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man’, Geertz objects to an Enlightenment preoccupation with locating ‘human nature’, an entity equivalent to ‘Man’ stripped of the appurtenances of custom, religion, and belief expressed in ritual. For Geertz, this image of human beings, devoid of local particularity, lacks any appreciable content or interest. In the search for ‘universals’, for a consensus gentium, as he puts it, anthropologists implemented an eighteenth-century concern for the transcendent form of man, establishing regularities in behaviour, the essential features of human existence. By contrast, Geertz replaces this view with his concept of culture, which, among other attributes, asserts the force of custom: ‘To entertain the idea that the diversity of custom across time and over space is not a mere matter of garb and appearance . . . is to entertain also the idea that humanity is as various in its essence as it is in its expression.’7 6 7

Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (1934; rpt New York, 1989), 45. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), 36–7.

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To situate Geertz in terms proposed in this study, he reinitiates the sceptical reply to Stoicism. He abandons innate ideas, instincts, or common consent in favour of diversity, renewing the sceptical observation that custom constitutes a ‘second nature’ whose force is such that we can never uncover the original nature of things. The anti-essentialism of this position militates against a strong concept of species, the normative strategy that submerges real ‘differences among individuals and among groups of individuals’.8 Geertz sustains his position by refusing to collapse the rituals of Indian religion, the trances of the Balinese, Aztec sacrifices, or Zun˜i rain-dances into a compelling oneness. The fruits of fieldwork – a professional elaboration of the practice of travel – persuade him to adopt a view that differs little, in fact, from Locke’s refusal to countenance innateness, to assume an essence in advance, or to delimit difference by assigning a determinate content to human nature.9 In more recent work, Geertz cites contemporary political, social, and cultural developments as the basis for renewing the commitment to ‘deep diversity’ as a research programme in anthropology.10 The conditions of change, largely created by the collapse of the Berlin wall, have shifted attention away from ‘blocs’ of power, which entailed clientship and a certain level of stability amid other kinds of threat, towards a more fragmented array of identifications, movements, and political and cultural possibilities. As Geertz puts it, ‘In a splintered world, we must address the splinters.’ In place of the old certainties, we confront a new ‘heterogeneity’.11 What underpins this conviction is a growing awareness of the implications of diversity. Totalities that once exhibited (or were thought to exhibit) a degree of cohesiveness – Europe or Russia, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, etc. – appear as ‘conglomerate[s] of differences, deep, radical and resistant to summary’.12 Even the subdivisions or markers within these groupings, whether religious, ethnic, or social, appear divided, mixed, textured rather than even-surfaced. In the face of this intellectual challenge, Geertz proposes: ‘What we need are ways of thinking that are responsive to particularities, to individualities, oddities, discontinuities, contrasts, and singularities,’ to diverse ways of ‘belonging and being’.13 The complex 8 9 10 11

Ibid., 51. For a restatement of his position, see Clifford Geertz, Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics (Princeton, 2000), ch. 3, esp. 58–9. The phrase ‘deep diversity’ is taken from Charles Taylor, Reconciling the Solitudes: Essays on Canadian Federalism and Nationalism, ed. Guy Laforest (Montreal, 1993), 182–3. Geertz, Available Light, 221. 12 Ibid., 224. 13 Ibid.

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forms of identity may not become pellucid but at least we avoid the danger of perpetuating a false or unrepresentative account of human communities. In the light of this, he articulates two related desiderata for investigating the contemporary scene. In the first instance, he suggests that ‘difference must be recognized, explicitly and candidly’.14 Paradoxically, difference must also – and this is his second point – be seen as comprising similarity, not as a negation of it. We face ‘an era of dispersed entanglements, each distinctive’.15 Any unity we try to locate will have to emerge out of difference. Thus he has not abandoned the ideal or prospect of a more general level of explanation, but it is not to be reached through universal concepts like human nature. Indeed Geertz closes with a question that strikes at the heart of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson’s project: ‘What is a culture if not a consensus?’16 Both eighteenth-century figures depended on an appeal to consensus to settle philosophical disputes, whether in aesthetics or morals. As they both recognised, testimony of diversity potentially disrupted the prospect of achieving consensus and therefore undermined moral certainties. The positing of difference as the first term, central to Geertz’s methodology, would have struck them as a dangerous and misguided route to unification. Nor would the prospect of unity solely at a level of theory or explanation have held much attraction. The key was to identify meaningful consistencies in practice, associated with both morality and taste. We cannot conclude the discussion of the role of diversity in Geertz’s thought and contemporary anthropology more generally without addressing the problem of relativism. The same issue arose in the replies of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson to Locke. The question is what conceptual relationship exists between an acknowledgement of diversity and an attachment to some form of relativism. Does diversity entail a radical scepticism about the commensurability of cultures, or should some common ground be recoverable? As the title of his lecture on ‘Anti Anti-Relativism’ suggests, Geertz’s account of the issue concentrates not so much on the issue itself as the negative effects of overreacting to relativism. In particular he warns against the tendency to smuggle in a concept of human nature: The fear of relativism, raised at every turn like some mesmeric obsession, has led to a position in which cultural diversity, across space and over time, amounts to a series of expressions, some salubrious, some not, of a settled, underlying reality, the essential nature of man, and anthropology amounts to an attempt to see through the haze of those expressions to the substance of the reality.17 14

Ibid., 226.

15

Ibid., 227.

16

Ibid., 246–60.

17

Ibid., 58–9.

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Geertz restates his objection to the introduction of human nature as a category of analysis or telos of the investigation designed to contend with diversity. The facts of difference should not be overwritten by consensus. Whether this leads, logically, to relativism, he declines to say, preferring to characterise the excessive concern with relativism as a form of superstition or hysteria. As some of his critics have noted,18 this response is unhelpful, not least because relativism has many different meanings and outcomes, some of which should be taken seriously while others are no doubt misplaced. Among anthropologists, the question is whether an approach that begins, inductively, with diversity will also end there, with a portrait of complex cultures defined by their differences to such a degree that making them commensurable is a futile exercise. There are two issues at stake: can universal principles (moral or otherwise) be retrieved from diversity, and, secondly, must anthropologists abandon moral judgement and commit themselves to a principle of equal worth regarding cultural difference? We can clarify the problem by taking a few issues into consideration. An acceptance of diversity amounts to the view that there are meaningful human differences. Relativism suggests that no common standard can be invoked for evaluating these differences. The first claim is descriptive or interpretive, while the second makes a point about analysis or perspective. Both of these positions can be adopted methodologically. Thus we can assume difference from the start, rather than unity (as God’s creation, etc.); similarly we can methodologically adopt a working practice of not making judgements about the cultures in question.19 But it does not follow either that (1) no regularities can or will be found in principle or (2) no judgements can be made about observed variations. In a sense, both these matters are contingent questions, although the first will be worked out at the level of observation while the second will be subject to rational argumentation. Neither of them need intrude on anthropological research, although conversely they may be taken legitimately as the goal of the exercise. The crucial link between these two points is this: if we can locate human regularities, do they then become enforceable norms?20 18 19 20

See, for example, Charles Nissim-Sabat, ‘On Clifford Geertz and His ‘‘Anti Anti-Relativism’’’, American Anthropologist 89 (1987): 935–9. Or alternatively, we can show how judgements are relative to particular cultures (without claiming that they can only ever be relative). Hutcheson seems to regard this as obvious, although his view developed before Hume’s introduction of the is/ought problem in ethics.

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The important thing to bear in mind is that one can be a methodological relativist without being a philosophical one.21 The philosophical relativist holds a position akin to scepticism, claiming that no moral or cultural consensus can or will be located.22 Dogmatic attempts to establish universals will be met by further evidence of diversity (as Sextus Empiricus instructed), leading to the conclusion that we are bounded by our own cultural beliefs and that no agreed standard or criterion can be introduced to adjudicate disputes. The methodological version of relativism merely turns this point into a working practice without committing itself to scepticism regarding the outcome of an empirical search for ethical or cultural constants or unifying philosophical principles. Two issues related to relativism have caused some confusion in anthropological discourse on these matters. The first is the worry that methodological relativism somehow prevents comparison between cultures, but this simply does not follow logically. Comparisons remain possible, although the methodological relativist may not wish to pursue them. The philosophical relativist, on the other hand, may also engage in comparison for purposes of establishing contrast. The difficulty with the comparativist mentality, as it is conventionally presented, remains the presupposition that comparison entails convergence. The second, related, issue concerns tolerance. Once again, tolerance may be a working practice, a stance of ethical neutrality adopted in the face of difference. At another level, however, tolerance may be an ethic worked out philosophically and enjoined on everyone, or it may be an outcome of scepticism – a matter of advice on how to approach life that encourages a refusal to engage in conflict over differences (since none of them will find a foundation), and which at the same time avoids the self-contradiction of making tolerance a binding principle.23 If we revisit eighteenth-century debates with these considerations in mind several things become clear. What concerned Shaftesbury and 21

22

23

Gananath Obeyesekere’s short article ‘Methodological and Philosophical Relativism’, Man n.s. 1:2 (1966): 368–74, remains very useful on these questions, despite changes in the terms of debate. However, his clearing of a space for ‘personal value judgments’ (373) may not satisfy anti-relativists, since the goal for many of them is a universally applicable set of moral criteria. See also Elvin Hatch, Culture and Morality: The Relativity of Values in Anthropology (New York, 1983), 11. The most famous exponents in anthropology were Ruth Benedict and Melville Herskovits; in their cases, methodological relativism follows from philosophical relativism, but philosophical does not necessarily follow from methodological. For discussion, see James W. Fernandez, ‘Tolerance in a Repugnant World and Other Dilemmas in the Cultural Relativism of Melville J. Herskovits’, Ethos 18:2 (1990): 140–64. For further discussion, see Elvin Hatch, ‘The Good Side of Relativism’, Journal of Anthropological Research 53 (1997): 371–81.

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Hutcheson, above all, was the loss of a criterion for separating right from wrong, good from evil, that seemed to result from Locke’s advertisement of endless diversity. But they recognised that the negative consequences of his position derived from a more elaborate outlook, in which the critique of innateness (and with it diversity) became linked with the sociological ‘law of opinion’, and a hedonist account of motivation, all of which, they believed, eradicated any sound basis for establishing moral truth. Diversity in itself was not the sole culprit (as we see in the case of Shaftesbury who sometimes used it to his advantage). But joined with other assumptions it contributed to a pernicious spiral of doubt and indeterminacy. To put it in other terms, they regarded the connection between Locke’s methodological relativism (an outcome of his natural philosophy) and his other philosophical views as tantamount to philosophical relativism. His innocent stance of mitigated scepticism gave way to a full-blown form, intentionally or otherwise.24 II

AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF SOCIABILITY

In certain strands of contemporary theory and research, we can identify an anthropology consistent with various Lockean assumptions – the focus on diversity, anti-essentialism, and scepticism about common consent and human nature. The question is whether an anthropology consistent with Shaftesbury and Hutcheson is also possible. Such an anthropology would attempt to discover continuity rather than difference. Indeed Geertz has complained that in certain parts of his profession, ‘There is the same tendency to see diversity as surface and universality as depth’,25 describing an outlook that has something in common with Shaftesbury’s and Hutcheson’s impatience with endless accumulation of inductive data at the expense of a larger sense of order, a common strand that organises the disparate facts of human life. Most of the candidates for consensus would not satisfy their moral outlooks, ranging as they do from psychoanalysis to genetics and evolutionary theory.26 However, the commitment 24

25 26

Despite their other differences, Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson all supported the principle of religious toleration on Whig grounds; toleration of moral differences was an entirely different question. Geertz, Available Light, 59. For some discussion, see Adam Kuper, The Chosen Primate: Human Nature and Cultural Diversity (Cambridge, Mass., 1994). Geertz is especially suspicious of attempts to introduce social norms via this exercise, and he attacks anti-relativism of the kind that proclaims a distinction between the ‘natural natural’ and the ‘unnatural natural’ (Available Light, 57), in a phrase that indicates some of the slipperiness of this undertaking.

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of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson to human sociability has received renewed attention in current research. Hutcheson went further than Shaftesbury by accepting the critique of innateness, at least ostensibly, and therefore committing himself to an empirical search for moral consensus. As such, he anticipated an ongoing anthropological effort to uncover agreement out of apparent difference. Although Michael Carrithers has confirmed the importance of diversity to the problematic of anthropology, his position suggests a movement in a direction more sympathetic, prospectively, to the tradition associated with Shaftesbury and Hutcheson. Diversity remains, in his rendition, an inescapable feature of human life, indeed the most distinctive aspect of human social organisation. However, this fact is not the end of the discussion but an occasion for asking a further series of questions. The most fundamental, from our point of view, is this: ‘What unity underlies the cultural diversity of humanity?’27 Posing the issue in this way reinvokes an issue that inspired the work of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson. In contrast with them, Carrithers begins his answer by accepting, without objection, that substantial diversity exists. Nonetheless, Carrithers moves forward by suggesting that we must also find some way of explaining how it is that human nature makes possible ‘socio-cultural variability’.28 Here the concept of human nature, hobbled to some extent by Locke’s critique of innateness, makes a return as a meaningful category but not without diversity as an essential constitutive component of it. The search for universals is not abandoned in the face of diversity but becomes a project motivated by the very existence of diversity, which must itself be explained. For Hutcheson, the explicit need to define the causes of diversity was undertaken to protect the moral sense – a strategy which in some ways separated human nature from diversity. Carrithers, by contrast, effectively reconnects human nature and diversity, making them integral to one another. Significantly, Carrithers’s argument coalesces around the concept of ‘sociality’, what an earlier century might have called, more contentiously, ‘sociability’. In other words, what unites human beings, while also explaining their differences from one another, is their resolutely social nature. This feature of mankind is tied, in his account, to human biology and the definition of the species. By taking this approach, he reintroduces a significant concept of species, which Locke – in Shaftesbury’s estimation – had drained of meaning. Carrithers also defines sociality, significantly, in dispositional terms, not so much as an inscribed innate idea in human 27

Carrithers, Why Humans Have Cultures, 4.

28

Ibid.

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nature, but rather as a tendency, ‘a capacity, a potential. It can only be realized by conception, birth, maturation, and growth in a suitable environment.’29 This language suggests some continuity with a tradition strengthened in the eighteenth century by Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, but there are important differences that have to be noted. Shaftesbury and Hutcheson understood human nature as intrinsically sociable, using a dispositional account of this ‘characteristic’ to diminish the force of counter-examples (in the form of ruthless self-interest or savagery and barbarism). In other words, they deployed the concept of sociability normatively. They stressed a basic impulse to live in society, in contrast to the anti-social tendencies elaborated by Hobbes and confirmed, in some measure, by Locke (with subsequent, paradoxical, variations by Mandeville). For Carrithers, by contrast, there is no antonym for sociality: if a social capacity constitutes an evolutionary attainment, his account does not provide ‘grounds for congratulating ourselves as a species’ for possessing it.30 In a more general reflection on anthropology, Tzvetan Todorov has come to similar conclusions about the neglected unifying force of human sociability. His perspective again places him in some continuity with Shaftesbury and Hutcheson while displaying marked differences that highlight the inevitable constraints imposed on modern philosophy when entering this domain. Todorov’s stated purpose is to challenge the overriding portrait of human nature that emerges in a variety of fields, whether political theory, psychology, or philosophy generally, in which mankind appears as isolated, individualistic, bent on self-gratification and therefore engaged in permanent rivalry and competition. In opposition, he specifically seeks to define what is common among human beings rather than what divides them, observing that ‘the very idea of differences among societies or individuals implies qualities in common’.31 The ‘common life’ is one grounded in sociability, in the need for recognition, in the family, and forms of mutual support that are often overlooked or elided in pessimistic accounts of human practice, in contrast with exercises of independence, rivalry, competition, war, or ruthless self-advancement. He affirms the ‘constitutive sociality of man’: the interhuman is the basis of the human . . . I contest the dominant role habitually attributed to the relations of resemblance, which also means of rivalry and combat, 29 31

Ibid., 40. 30 Ibid. Tzvetan Todorov, Life in Common: An Essay in General Anthropology, trans. Katherine Golsan and Lucy Golsan (Lincoln, Nebr., 2001), ix.

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and I recall that a role comparable in importance, indeed more important, is played by the relations of contiguity and complementarity, an exemplary incarnation of which is the gaze we turn toward one another and hence, at the origin, the gaze exchanged by the infant and his mother (or whoever is serving in that capacity).32

Thus, he expressly rejoins a debate over the proper way of characterising human desires and appetites. Although he cites Rousseau and Adam Smith as sources of inspiration, the position he advocates in fact has its origins in a tradition inaugurated by Shaftesbury and Hutcheson.33 The dominant, antisocial, outlook, to which they were opposed, begins, in any case, with seventeenth-century philosophers like Hobbes and La Rochefoucauld, who were later joined by Mandeville, Helve´tius, Diderot, d’Holbach, and others who maintained the unshakeable power of self-interest, describing human beings as essentially isolated, competitive agents. Based on a hypothetical state of nature, this account falsifies human experience in an important way because we live, unavoidably, in a social world from the very beginning. Furthermore, the prevailing narrative does not capture the condition of humanity at birth which is one of dependency and love, or searching for recognition and contact rather than an individualistic struggle and combat.34 Todorov traces the modern survivals of this mistaken outlook to several important sources, notably psychoanalysis, especially as outlined by Freud, and to Nietzsche’s will to power. In his reply to the tradition of anti-social psychology, Todorov resists the view that man is essentially solitary by nature, that groupings occur only out of weakness, that society imposes restraints on a human nature otherwise prompted by violence.35 Todorov reinvigorates the moral position taken by Shaftesbury and Hutcheson in their respective responses to Locke and Mandeville. Of course there are significant differences of emphasis, idiom, and argument, most notably that Todorov refuses to equate a social instinct wholly and entirely with morality.36 Yet the subtle psychological discrimination, the appeal to the reader’s experience, the invitation to contemplate human development in the milieu of the family, bear striking reminders of the approaches taken by Shaftesbury and Hutcheson. 32 33

34 35 36

Tzvetan Todorov, ‘The Gaze and the Fray’, New Literary History 27:1 (1996): 95. Smith was taught by Hutcheson in Glasgow and his system addressed some of the difficulties of the moral sense, which he replaced with moral sentiments. The conviction of sociability is a shared constant of their work. For a critique of the ‘heuristic’ history of philosophy employed by Todorov, see Robert Wokler, ‘Todorov’s Otherness’, New Literary History 27 (1996): 43–55. Todorov, Life in Common, 23–4. Ibid., 37. For further discussion, see Tzvetan Todorov, Le jardin imparfait (Paris, 1998). Todorov, Life in Common, 43.

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What makes Todorov’s position distinctive is the fact that he offers a descriptive account which rehumanises mankind but which avoids, at the same time, the risk of introducing a restrictive, falsifying norm. Sociality is a given in human life; it has no opposite (as Carrithers also affirms), such that unsociability could be readily condemned in moral terms. No one is born outside society, and therefore it is not a choice, and as such it is not subject to moral evaluation. He refuses a more familiar frame for his discussion in this way: ‘We must not see in sociality either a good quality to develop or a flaw to eradicate, and we must not reduce it to generosity or vanity.’37 The implications and indeed the forms of human sociality are simply too diverse to confine them to this moral space. Morality remains social, but sociality is not entirely moral. Thus he takes a conviction from Shaftesbury and Hutcheson in a new direction. The rehumanisation is attenuated in some sense, characteristically for a modern philosopher who must contend with too many obvious counter-examples of tyranny, injustice, genocide, etc., to remain complacent. But from an ethical point of view, perpetuating a wholly negative account and naturalising it has dangerous consequences. If the argument of Life in Common remains at a pre-moral level, Todorov takes the problem of diversity in a more expressly ethical direction in Nous et les autres: la re´flection franc¸aise sur la diversite´ humaine, where problems of justice appear in the excessive emphasis on human difference. Thus he continues a philosophical reworking of problems that appear in the debate between Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson, although he does so by concentrating largely on parallel French sources in the early modern period and eighteenth century. On this occasion, Todorov organises the discussion by investigating the history of articulations of universalism and relativism beginning with Montaigne and ending with Le´vi-Strauss. According to Todorov, the inadequacies of Montaigne’s method arise from his relentless accumulation of ‘particular bits of knowledge’. The inductive method, here associated with Montaigne’s scepticism, never attains insight into human nature, yielding only a tolerant form of relativism whose consequences, perhaps paradoxically, lead to conservatism and the establishment of unassailable values. Montesquieu, by contrast, came to a more satisfactory compromise by considering actions and customs in context without, at the same time, ‘relinquishing absolute judgments’.38 37 38

Ibid., 146. Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 44, 50.

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Todorov’s reading of Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes (1721) suggests not only that everyone adores their own perspective and that religions for that reason have purely relative admirers, but that we must suppose a core of values defining all religions. The central tenet is one of equity, and thus Montesquieu moves from a bland tolerance to something resembling justice, understood as universal. For Todorov, again inspired by Montesquieu, the security of moral judgements arises from the recognition that freedom and moderation represent ultimate ideals. He condemns tyranny and despotism, particularly in the state, but also in personal relations and the space of the home because they unify power and abridge diversity. If, on the other hand, we acknowledge the disparate nature of individuals and groups that make up the nation, then power must accept the limitations imposed by law: ‘the only moderate laws are laws that limit the other powers – that is, those that translate the heterogeneity of society within institutions.’39 This delicately balanced, not to say precarious, position allows for the continued existence of diversity both within societies and between them, expressed in the spirit of the laws, without sacrificing a criterion of judgement. Significantly, the criterion is formal rather than substantive, and therefore obviates the difficulty of assigning a determinate content to the norms supplied by human nature. At this stage, the rationale for Todorov’s view of the vocation of the ‘philosophical’ traveller comes into focus. Such a traveller begins by observing differences, and ‘in this movement toward others a forgetting of self ’ occurs, but only temporarily. The philosopher discovers ‘universal horizons (even if they are never definitively universal) that allow him not only to learn but also to judge’. Ultimately Todorov has recourse to reason and some notion of a unified human nature, not as something ‘given objectively’ but rather ‘deduced by reason’, both accommodating diversity and overcoming it at the same time.40 On this foundation he builds an ethics of relating to others, if for no other reason than that we exist as members of the same species. III

HUMAN RIGHTS AND DIVERSITY

Todorov’s network of concerns with sociability, human nature, and the ethics of relating to the other places diversity at the centre of anthropological reflection. By raising the issue of justice alongside them, he introduces a new dimension into the debate. We can see the challenge this poses in 39

Ibid., 374.

40

Ibid., 376, 351.

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current anthropology with important attempts to reconcile cultural difference with the concept of human rights. Such concerns intersect with the principal difficulties described in this book, notably Hutcheson’s attempt to locate an empirical basis for natural rights in the shared moral sense. Here the emphasis on diversity meets its ultimate challenge: is a methodology which articulates difference compatible with justice, in the form of human rights? Or is the relativist method bound to come in conflict with a universalising tendency of rights discourse? Does anthropology excuse itself from the discussion or become central to it, providing an empirical confirmation of the locus for agreement across cultures? Can cultural relativism and human rights coincide?41 From a Lockean perspective, it should be said, the issue of combining human rights and anthropology is by no means problematic. Locke demonstrated an anthropological awareness of diversity while remaining committed to natural law (the combination of the two views occurring most clearly in his early Essays on the Law of Nature). For Locke the wrong way to establish natural law was the Stoic route of innateness, vested in common notions, prolepses, and universal consent. The right way was reason. Shaftesbury and Hutcheson both endorsed the Stoic approach, but Hutcheson faced the greater difficulty because he sought a genuine empirical confirmation of the moral sense, equating it with instinctive responses that occur prior to the exercise of reason. The moral sense, in turn, was the ultimate source for tenets of natural law. Some of the difficulties of reconciling human rights and diversity emerge in A. J. M. Milne’s philosophical account of the subject. Milne acknowledges that any rights theory must take account of diversity, but he attempts to define a set of social conditions that are necessary for human interaction and therefore underlie any amount of cultural variation. He calls this a ‘minimum standard’ for social life, deliberately limiting the ambition of his project. These requirements translate into rights, to which individuals have entitlement. Among the set of ‘principles’, Milne includes beneficence (the obligation to do good rather than evil), respect for human life, civility, child welfare, and fellowship. Since these are ‘necessary’ for social engagement, they enable us to make judgements about the failure and success of social arrangements around the globe. Yet they are not 41

For previous discussion, see ‘Universal Human Rights versus Cultural Relativity’, ed. Terence Turner and Carole Nagengast, special issue of Journal of Anthropological Research 53:3 (1997); ‘Moral Relativism’, ed. Alan Page Fiske, special issue of Ethos 18:2 (1990); Human Rights and Anthropology, ed. Theodore E. Downing and Gilbert Kushner (Cambridge, Mass., 1988).

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derived empirically, from observation of how the world is run, but rather from philosophical reflection on what is required for things to run. Milne proposes a kind of formal test: if a society can claim to have acted in accordance with fairness (for example), then it has met the minimum standard. This formulation appears to answer the demand for universalism in the acceptance of moral terms. But once again, things break down at the empirical level. The actual content of moral terms (that is, the actions they pick out) is relative to particular groups and their social configurations. To determine the outcome of the formal test we must engage in ‘contextual interpretation’ – the point at which the investigation becomes decidedly empirical – but here we make the discovery that ‘what counts as a violation of a human right in one context may not in another’.42 Milne’s predicament takes us to the heart of a number of oppositions that developed in the argument between Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson. To begin with, Locke had remarked in the unpublished ‘Of Ethick in General’ on the existence of a certain amount of convergence in the customs of different societies. But he was keen to trace this to social utility and not to admit it as proof of innateness or a strong normative contribution from nature. He coupled this point with a sceptical perspective on moral vocabulary of the kind introduced by Milne.43 Terms such as child welfare, civility, or fellowship might receive verbal assent if proposed as ideals, but this ‘unanimity’ meant nothing if in practice different communities reconciled extremely disparate and incommensurable customs with these notions. Thus the Tupinamba in Brazil had conceptions of virtue and vice, but they amounted to a readiness to take revenge and devour their enemies. This scheme served a social function, but it did not constitute an authentic grasp of virtue, according to Locke. Shaftesbury and Hutcheson had different ways of addressing this dilemma. They focused, in a way analogous to Milne, on what makes society hold together, but they concluded more optimistically than Locke about the depth and significance of this convergence across groups. When confronted by diversity that could not be dismissed, they had two ways around it: it was possible to reject Locke’s insistence on ‘Conformity of Action’ and to maintain that everyone agreed on key moral principles. Diversity occurred when groups began to decide and interpret which actions corresponded to the ideal. The second solution was really a 42 43

A. J. M. Milne, Human Rights and Human Diversity: An Essay in the Philosophy of Human Rights (Basingstoke, 1986), 133. John Locke, ‘Of Ethick in General’, in Writings on Religion, ed. Victor Nuovo (Oxford, 2002), 9–10.

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variation on this. Shaftesbury in particular relied on the Stoic concept of prolepsis: prolepses established a foundation in human nature for shared ethical and religious convictions. But prolepses needed to be applied in the world, and at this point error could occur. In Milne’s formulation there are two things worth noting. The variability of content he allows indicates that he does not anticipate or achieve consensus over the morality of actions. This gives considerable ground to diversity, more than most rights theorists would be inclined to welcome. Secondly, his terms are tests in the sense that they enable us to judge errors of belief and practice, and to identify societies that are ‘morally defective’.44 Again he does not claim actual convergence in practice but instead provides a criterion for judgement. Whether the criterion has any real force remains the pressing problem. In this respect, an analogy exists between Milne’s position and Hutcheson’s strategy on the moral sense. Hutcheson fluctuated in his characterisation of it. On the one hand he deemed it a faculty, that is, a human capacity for making moral judgements and having moral reactions. But this way of describing it left open the question of what judgements or reactions, in practice, would take place. Hutcheson had something at stake in prescribing what those reactions and judgements would be, and he therefore claimed it was possible to find an empirical consensus. Milne backs away from this attempt, convinced that the facts of diversity would never permit it.45 But the cost is an account of moral terms which is purely formal and which cannot ultimately adjudicate between rival definitions of which practices fall within the ambit of the moral term (e.g., the morality of infanticide or abortion): ‘. . . what counts as ‘‘wrong’’ depends upon a community’s particular morality.’46 His method of contextual interpretation therefore has much in common with Hutcheson. Both of them want to look at particular circumstances and see how a moral rule is operative, around which there is ‘universal’ agreement, despite the appearance of radical differences. Milne’s restricted attempt to reconcile human rights and diversity steers clear of empirical questions at the risk of losing content. One of the few theorists to take the discussion in a resolutely empirical direction is Alison Renteln. She argues that for human rights charters to overcome the 44 45

46

Milne, Human Rights, 127. Milne’s hesitation at the outset is instructive. He notes that the minimum standard is compatible with ‘considerable’ or ‘much’ cultural and moral diversity (ibid., 9), suggesting that extreme variation jeopardises his system. Ibid., 136.

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complaint that they merely impose one society’s vision on the rest of the world, they must receive some form of consent. Ratification is the literal expression of that consent. But a deeper form would be consent as it was understood by the Stoics, and in later variations by Grotius, Stillingfleet, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson, namely common consent, based on shared moral attitudes and practices.47 The challenge for Renteln is to find an empirical location for consensus. She rejects a foundation for philosophical rights in divine authority, natural law, intuition, or ratification, and regards appeals to human nature and rationality as unsuccessful means of securing universality. The method that remains is empirical: ‘Only through crosscultural research can one discover values shared by all cultures.’48 However, the outcome of Renteln’s investigation shows how difficult this strategy is to pursue. In the first place, the inquiry is limited to establishing a single principle, namely that retribution should be proportionate. This belief, ostensibly shared across a wide spectrum of populations, has the potential to provide a basis for cross-cultural condemnation of genocide and indiscriminate killing, neither of which can claim ‘proportionality’. Yet even if we accept that this principle has an empirical grounding, on the basis of the testimony of ethnographers and travellers, we are left with only a single anthropological constant rather than a range of terms around which consensus might emerge. Shaftesbury and Hutcheson looked for a much wider set of moral issues on which agreement would occur. Even accepting this limited objective, Renteln’s evidence for widespread acceptance of the principle is not persuasive or compelling. There are two sides to her anthropological argument: first, societies exact revenge; for example, they engage in retribution for crimes like murder. The second point is that they believe the response to the crime should be ‘proportionate’ rather than excessive or unmotivated and unjustified.49 The evidence introduced to prove the first proposition carries more conviction than the second, but still remains problematic. She makes an assumption that vengeance is part of human nature, witnessed in ‘primitive’ tribes, above all, and states that this impulse also survives the transition into ‘civilisation’. The outdated nature of the binaries indicates that the argument coincides with an earlier form of anthropology, broadly consistent with the testimony that Locke 47 48 49

With the possible exception of Hutcheson, they limited this consent to the circle of the polite, excluding the savage and barbarous from consideration. Alison Dundes Renteln, International Human Rights: Universalism versus Relativism (Newbury Park, Calif., 1990), 11. The cases in question circulate around the phenomenon of the ‘feud’ rather than warfare where commitment to proportionality disappears altogether.

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introduced to dispute innate ideas (indeed she includes as supporting evidence citations from two eighteenth-century texts – a Jesuit account of India in the early years of the century and James Adair’s History of the American Indians of 1775).50 Leaving aside the validity of this testimony, the evidence introduced to support the universality of ‘proportionateness’ as a principle encounters a real difficulty because ideas of ‘proportion’ differ from culture to culture, as she acknowledges: ‘The determination of what constitutes equivalence between crimes and punishments varies cross-culturally.’51 On what basis can cruelty and excess be rejected if the scale is purely relative? The prospect of condemning such acts as judicial dismemberment, the death penalty, or flogging, never mind genocide, seems to disappear. Thus, diversity has not been overcome as a source of objection or difficulty. The argument suffers from a lack of empirical support, its basic aim, but the logic is also weak. Richard Wilson has made a number of valuable observations in this context while defining his own perspective on anthropology and human rights. In his view, no amount of empirical evidence of consensus will support the transition between facts and norms. Consensus is not in itself a justification.52 This reformulation of Hume’s observation on the relationship between is and ought statements returns us to Hutcheson’s awkward method of defending the moral sense by defining it as a faculty which nonetheless produced normative judgements. Yet when we look at Wilson’s alternative, an intriguing pattern emerges. He seems to abandon the search for a foundation altogether, while regarding human nature as a metaphysical notion which we should bracket in favour of ‘contingent and historical investigations’. Nonetheless, he declares that his investigation rests on an ‘analytical premise’: ‘that human rights are not a product of social relations, nor even indicative of them, but immanent in them, internal to their very expression. They are a particular form of power and governance interior to the social body and are embedded in matrices of value distinctions.’53 The Kantian idiom should not obscure the fact that this proposal represents a variation on Hutcheson’s approach. Although Wilson avoids building rights into the structure of human nature, as Hutcheson desired,

50 52 53

See Renteln, International Human Rights, 104. 51 Ibid., 98. For Renteln’s unpersuasive attempts to deal with this issue, see ibid., 89–91, 135–7. Richard A. Wilson, ‘Human Rights, Culture and Context: An Introduction’, in Human Rights, Culture and Context: Anthropological Perspectives, ed. Richard A. Wilson (London, 1997), 14.

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he inserts them into the structure of society, the ‘social body’ from which they cannot be alienated. IV THE POLITICAL THEORY OF DIVERSITY AND MULTICULTURALISM

The Enlightenment debate over diversity concentrated on principles and ideas supposedly shared by mankind as a whole and therefore extended the discussion beyond national borders. Locke’s evidence came largely from exotic travel accounts, proving inconsistency of belief and practice around the globe. In our own time, disparities at this level are now understood as a given, even while the prospect of ongoing international conflict raises the stakes for finding some core of agreement, whether grounded in human nature, principles of law, or forms of government that remind us of what we share in common. Yet today, the problem of diversity increasingly arises not just at this cosmopolitan level, but within the state, inside national borders, as differences of outlook and value, grounded in ‘culture’, take shape. The two contexts are not of course separable; indeed, their integral relationship occurs as a result of colonialism, decolonisation, immigration, and the movement of populations for economic and other reasons. But it is more than that. ‘Internal’ cultural differences associated with issues of gender, race, class, and sexuality also reconfigure our social geography and reduce the likelihood, it seems, of locating consensus. Liberal conceptions of the state have, to some extent, contained the implications of moral variation, although not without risking a degree of relativism. On this model, the state does not depend on agreement over what constitutes the good life, held in common, but regulates itself according to values of freedom, equality, non-discrimination, and access to the law. Even with these provisions, however, which acknowledge difference as an inescapable feature of political life, the challenge of diversity has remained forceful and undiminished. In fact it has grown, especially under the banner of multiculturalism, an umbrella-term that encompasses some of the divergent tendencies which resist containment within a liberal consensus. It must be said that claims to particularity and essential difference, whether backed by ethnic, cultural, or linguistic factors, might form the basis for ‘recognition’ of minority groups, yet they come with the risk of marginalisation and disenfranchisement.54 At the same time, they promise a future of instability by 54

Ernesto Laclau calls this ‘the route to self-apartheid’ which he warns against in Emancipation(s) (London, 1996), 32.

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calling attention to unresolved discrepancies of outlook. Thus, when the self and ‘other’ occupy the same state, additional complications arise beyond the moral questions that prevail in depictions of difference across national boundaries. Can we contain this diversity or does it have the kind of limitless sceptical consequences that Shaftesbury and Hutcheson feared? In Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity, James Tully provides a valuable account of the challenge posed by differences in culture, outlook, and forms of association that undermine the claim of the state to rest on legitimate consent. He argues that constitutional thought from the seventeenth century onwards depends on either excluding or assimilating cultural diversity, imposing unity through a ‘centralised and uniform system of legal and political authority’.55 An influential strategy for doing so appeared in Locke’s ‘Second Treatise’ which recognised diversity, in a sense, but established an historical reading in which difference, over time, would resolve itself into the same, taking inhabitants of a state of nature into one of property and civil society where the constitution would merit their consent. We are not so far from Shaftesbury’s model of cultivation as the means of access to sovereign concepts of beauty and virtue that remain true for all people at all times. On these terms, assimilation becomes a gift, and exclusion a legitimate course of action against those who refuse to recognise the route their interests take. The end result is a form of constitutionalism which, under the banner of a rational universalism, endorses imperial ambitions to occupy colonial territory, joined with ‘cultural imperialism over the diverse citizens of contemporary societies’.56 Tully wants to refashion constitutional association in a way that accommodates differences, and recognises, importantly, that ‘culture is an irreducible and constitutive aspect of politics’.57 So we are no longer dealing with the implications of moral variation but rather with political claims based on cultural disparities. If there is more than a hint of relativism in this perspective, the risks are minimalised by pointing out, as Tully does, that these differences cannot sustain a claim to nationhood in every case, and thus the prospect of unparalleled political fragmentation diminishes if it does not altogether disappear.58 The reason for this can be traced to the revised 55 56 58

James Tully, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity (Cambridge, 1995), 83. Ibid., 96. 57 Ibid., 5. Will Kymlicka distinguishes between two different kinds of diversity within the state: a source associated with conquered peoples, annexed states, or territories incorporated in a larger whole (which result in ‘multination states’), and another source arising from immigration, refugees, asylum seekers, or economic migrants (which result in ‘polyethnic states’). On his analysis, the claims of the former for greater sovereignty typically outstrip the latter. See Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford, 1995).

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conception of culture employed in the discussion: Tully resists the image of cultures as separate and distinct entities, co-extensive with the ‘nation’ in certain forms of nineteenth-century thinking; rather, he sees cultures as diverse entities in themselves, composed of patterns of interlinking experience, values, and commitments. The hybrid model undercuts the possibility of radical disaggregation. Whether or not federation becomes the appropriate political solution, the test, for him, is if the constitution adheres to conventions of mutual recognition, consent, and continuity.59 One major difference, then, between the era of Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson and our own is the introduction of a concept of culture into reflection on diversity. The travellers quoted by Locke and questioned by Shaftesbury and Hutcheson spoke in the language of ‘customs and manners’; they understood social practice as composed of these units which suggested an element of detachability about them. From one perspective, customs and manners had some analogy with clothing which covered the body, sometimes in surprising ways, but which was separable from it and could not transform the human (that is, human nature). In a stronger view of custom, on the other hand, associated with the sceptical tradition and with Locke, custom was a ‘second nature’ and therefore possessed a peculiar capacity to transform the given and to make it unrecognisable. Yet even within this account, the potential for reforming custom was implicit – as we see in the educational theories of Montaigne and Locke – suggesting that the mark of ‘culture’ was not indelible. In the context of travel, this was indeed the point of encouraging cross-cultural contact between ‘superior’ European societies and other groups fortunate enough to encounter them. In the work of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, the emerging notion of culture (or taste – a term that applied both to aesthetics and morals) was consensual, and also applied transnationally, in part because it derived from classical canons of beauty and design, and also because of its grounding in human nature itself. They understood cultivation as a process of raising up which was teleological for Shaftesbury and Hutcheson. As such, they could use it normatively. The development of a stronger concept of culture, derived from Herder and other nineteenth-century sources, suggested a much deeper and more particular relationship between human beings and their social 59

The question here is what paradigm case is employed. The Canadian solution of federalism addresses the problem of Quebec and the rights of aboriginal peoples. American discussion focuses more on immigration and race as central issues. For a discussion of federalism in relation to Russia and the former Soviet republics, see Graham Smith, ‘Sustainable Federalism, Democratization, and Distributive Justice’, in Citizenship in Diverse Societies, ed. Will Kymlicka and Wayne Norman (Oxford, 2000), 345–65.

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environment. By definition different, these cultural groupings embedded diversity within the world more resolutely than the earlier account of ‘customs and manners’. Anthropologists and other theorists have revised this view of culture, but it does not appear that ‘human nature’ will be the beneficiary of such rethinking. Indeed, we now understand culture as closer to identity, and identities change and transform themselves in hybrid ways rather than remaining stable and unitary. Human beings are still composed of differences, understood as cultural; in fact culture is the marker of those differences as much as a content in itself. As Arjun Appadurai comments, ‘The most valuable feature of the concept of culture is the concept of difference, a contrastive rather than a substantive property of certain things.’60 Behind this lies a more fragmented conception of identities, rather than a view that makes these differences incidental to a unifying human nature. Equally, the prospect of using the term for normative purposes disappears. In short, culture is equivalent to difference. We live in a sceptical age, to the extent that we accept the existence of diversity, but we mitigate that scepticism by adhering to a notion of human rights and a regulative commitment to fairness, equity, and respect.61 As John Rawls remarked, ‘the diversity of reasonable comprehensive religious, philosophical and moral doctrines found in modern democratic societies is not a mere historical condition that may soon pass away; it is a permanent feature of the public culture of democracy’.62 Although he traced these differences not to diverse cultural identifications but to the exercise of practical reason, the outcome is the same. Under these conditions, the goal is not to force through some kind of agreement but to clarify the territory of ‘overlapping consensus’, which provides the basis for political stability. Ju¨rgen Habermas describes the outcome in terms consistent with Rawls: . . . in complex societies the citizenry as a whole can no longer be held together by substantive consensus on values but only by a consensus on the procedures for 60 61

62

Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, 1996), 12. The use of the term ‘sceptical’ in this context, even if mitigated, is not uncontroversial, but it is based on a reading of the position taken by Locke, who abandoned innateness by citing diversity, while nevertheless respecting natural law. This is consistent with Richard Tuck’s characterisation of seventeenth-century natural rights theorists as the ‘intellectual heirs of the sceptics’. ‘Rights and Pluralism’, in Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism: The Philosophy of Charles Taylor in Question, ed. James Tully (Cambridge, 1994), 166. Of course, many contemporary theorists have distanced themselves from any connection with scepticism. See John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York, 1993), 150–4; Susan Mendus, ‘Pluralism and Scepticism in a Disenchanted World’, in Pluralism: The Philosophy and Politics of Diversity, ed. Maria Baghramian and Attracta Ingram (London, 2000), 103–19. Brian Barry argues in favour of a sceptical perspective on agreement over the good in A Treatise on Social Justice, vol II: Justice as Impartiality (Oxford, 1995), 168–73. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 36.

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the legitimate enactment of laws and the legitimate exercise of power . . . The universalism of legal principles manifests itself in a procedural consensus, which must be embedded through a kind of constitutional patriotism in the context of a historically specific political culture.63

This amounts to a careful negotiation of particularity and difference amid a more ‘universal’ containing or organising principle. But the result is a kind of ‘thin culture’, as Will Kymlicka puts it,64 rather than a deeper form of moral consensus of the sort cultivated by Shaftesbury and Hutcheson. Indeed, what’s involved is more than an extension of the principle of religious toleration to the cultural sphere, in which the state demurs from taking an interest in particular beliefs (so long as they do not impinge on others), while protecting the right of worship in disparate ways. The move is closer to an affirmation of difference or an according of recognition where recognition is understood as basic to identity and dignity.65 The question raised by this demand is whether a just society can be achieved solely by according rights to individuals who differ in various ways, or whether an added responsibility exists to protect the interests of groups within the state who want to sustain their collective cultural identity and integrity. We are dealing with different forms of diversity, as Charles Taylor makes clear.66 Firstorder diversity concerns the variable interests of individuals, which a ‘procedural’ form of liberalism accommodates, but a second order, identified as what he calls ‘deep diversity’, concerns the claims of whole societies within the state who have a particular view of the good, the survival of which they want to ensure in the future, even at the expense, potentially, of some individual rights. 63

64 65

66

Ju¨rgen Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory, ed. Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De Grieff (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 225–6. Rawls put it this way: ‘Social unity is based on a consensus on the political conception; and stability is possible when the doctrines making up the consensus are affirmed by society’s politically active citizens and the requirements of justice are not too much in conflict with citizens’ essential interests as formed and encouraged by their social arrangements’ (Political Liberalism, 134). Will Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction, 2nd edn (Oxford, 2002), 374. As Gordon J. Schochet observes, in the early modern period, toleration was understood as a ‘grant’, based on the concept of a legitimate authority deciding to extend the grant or privilege. ‘John Locke and Religious Toleration’, in The Revolution of 1688–1689: Changing Perspectives, ed. Lois G. Schwoerer (Cambridge, 1992), 150. The alternative is to conceive of toleration as a right. In contemporary discussion, something of the suspicion that toleration remains merely a grant, not a right, appears in the emphasis on recognition as an alternative model for multiculturalism, not the model of religious toleration. On the differences between models of religious toleration and multicultural affirmation, see Joseph Raz, Ethics in the Public Domain, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1995), 172–3. See also Will Kymlicka, Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and Citizenship (Oxford, 2001), 50; and Bhikhu Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory (Basingstoke, 2000), 1. On recognition, see Charles Taylor, ‘The Politics of Recognition’, in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, 1994), 25–73. Taylor, Reconciling the Solitudes, 182–3.

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Kymlicka has argued that recognition of the demands and priorities of ethnocultural minorities does not contradict liberal principles, but rather that a multicultural ‘supplement’ is needed to correct the tendency of the state to encourage the existence of a single ‘societal culture’ that dominates all others. He bases this argument on several considerations: the tradition of natural rights implicitly protected the interests of groups all along and is therefore less individualistic than supposed; the fact that the ostensible neutrality of the state on the question of the good is a misleading fiction;67 and finally the need to rectify a history of unjust methods of nation-building in the past. He remains confident that an eventual liberal consensus will emerge.68 Yet we are still left with further, unresolved, difficulties associated with diversity: the problem of illiberal minorities who attempt to protect their distinctive practices, and the wider issue raised by those who insist that the discourse of rights or liberalism itself is really the language of one society, however extensive, imposing its vision on another. This is a sceptical problem of a different order, but its potency continues to derive from the existence of diversity. Both issues have been addressed by theorists in some measure, but another sceptical difficulty has received less attention: how do we avoid the political problem of an infinite regress of differences? If differences residing in groups enjoy political recognition, how do we arbitrate between them so that not every difference/group is accorded additional rights? Kymlicka attempts to introduce limits by maintaining that only ‘societal cultures’ should receive this grant, while Taylor considers the duration of cultures as a salient criterion.69 But the distinctions are fragile and subject to dispute, indicating the disruptiveness of diversity even as it is acknowledged.70 We can appreciate some of the awkwardness of the contemporary predicament by recognising that recent political theory has attempted to 67 68 69 70

For critical discussion of this theme, see Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, 1990), 165, 173; Taylor, ‘Politics of Recognition’, 43. Kymlicka points out the contemporary paradox that ‘it is the absence of multiculturalism which erodes the bonds of civic solidarity’. Contemporary Political Philosophy, 367. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, ch. 5; Taylor, ‘Politics of Recognition’, 66–7. The problem is stated succinctly in Alison M. Jagger, ‘Multicultural Democracy’, The Journal of Political Philosophy 6:2 (1999): 312–14, in a critique of Young’s position in Justice and the Politics of Difference. Young has since revised her view in Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford, 2000). For critiques of Kymlicka’s notion of ‘societal culture’, see Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (Princeton, 2002), ch. 2; Joseph H. Carens, Culture, Citizenship, and Community: A Contextual Exploration of Justice as Evenhandedness (Oxford, 2000), ch. 3. Homi Bhabha raises objections to Taylor’s criterion in ‘Culture’s in Between’, in Multicultural States: Rethinking Difference and Identity, ed. David Bennett (London, 1998), 32–3. We might add the criterion problem of separating reasonable from ‘unreasonable’ comprehensive views in Rawls’s system. His emphasis on accepting the ‘essentials of a democratic regime’ makes the argument merely circular (Political Liberalism, xvi).

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inculcate a normative respect for diversity, despite the fact that diversity was understood, historically, as an anti-normative phenomenon.71 To put it differently, we must organise consensus around a non-consensual force or phenomenon. We are left with an imperative of ‘combining difference and identity’, as Stuart Hall remarks, ‘drawing together on the same terrain those formal incommensurables of political vocabularies – liberty and equality with difference, ‘‘the good’’ and ‘‘the right’’’. As Hall sees it, multiculturalism suggests that we must accept difference as crucial to conceiving of democracy ‘as a genuinely heterogenous space’, not submitting to a ‘drive to be integrated by a process of formal equivalence’.72 At the same time, we cannot remain content with radical particularity. The creation of a ‘diversity of new public spheres’ should happen in such a way as to obligate them to ‘negotiate within a broader horizon’. The leftperspective provided by Hall receives some clarification from Chantal Mouffe who similarly maintains that respect for ‘pluralism and differences must be at the core of a radical democratic conception of citizenship’.73 She dissents from both the liberal and communitarian perspectives, as does Hall, by proposing a more conflictual, agonistic model of democracy. Yet she too stops short of treating pluralism as somehow an end in itself. The limiting term is democracy which must receive some mutual validation even if we redevise protocols of political engagement. It is not a case, therefore, of opting either for universalism or for diversity, but of finding ways to combine the two. The terms in which the debate over human diversity took place in the Enlightenment have inevitably been developed and modified in successive eras of philosophical, social, and historical change. The positions established by Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson constitute a point of origin and as such they offer an historical criterion for evaluating contemporary discussion. At the same time, their disputes continue to define important parameters of current thought. During the inaugural period of these disputes, several distinctive orientations emerged: Locke treated diversity as a fact of human societies but he did not ‘welcome’ it as such. Although he began with a critique of innateness, his moral theory did not end in ethical relativism; he withdrew from sceptical conclusions and preserved a 71 72 73

For an overtly normative political theory of multiculturalism, see Jacob T. Levy, The Multiculturalism of Fear (Oxford, 2000). Stuart Hall, ‘Conclusion: The Multi-Cultural Question’, in Un/Settled Multiculturalisms: Diasporas, Entanglements, ‘Transruptions’, ed. Barnor Hesse (London, 2000), 235–6. Chantal Mouffe, ‘Democratic Politics and the Question of Identity’, in The Identity in Question, ed. John Rajchman (London, 1995), 39.

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basis for moral judgement in natural law, generated and assented to by reason (complemented, for Christians, by Scripture and revelation). Politically, differences of custom and social development did not lead him to abandon a colonial project. For their part, Shaftesbury and Hutcheson made compatible arguments denying that human diversity had serious or insuperable implications. Sociability, moral affections, benevolence, and the moral sense served to unify rather than divide humanity. The pattern of current argument suggests, to some extent, that we are still finding our way within these polarities. The difference now is that we no longer see ourselves as sharing a unified, undifferentiated, nature, but rather as occupying what amounts, in the end, to no more than a common space. The negotiated arrangements within states have not of course eradicated the problem of diversity beyond the borders of individual countries or the West itself. In a number of respects the strategies evident in seventeenthand eighteenth-century discussion have been replicated in current understanding of international relations. Here we should identify two sorts of diversity. One is perpetual, the kind within states. In this arena, we no longer expect consensus or impose a telos guaranteeing convergence. The second kind is historical: in other words, diversity emerges as a fact of history but one which historical progress will remedy. The real issue is whether diversity in form 2 is really a case of diversity in form 1, i.e., a fixed condition of incommensurability and difference. To clarify this point some review of previous discussion may be helpful. The weakness, in some sense, of Hutcheson’s solution to the problem of diversity was its lack of historical analysis. By committing himself to actual, empirical consensus, he had more to do in order to combat counter-evidence and make it compatible with a shared core defined by the moral sense. His successors in the Scottish Enlightenment increasingly emphasised an historical perspective on these questions which made it possible to marry difference with uniformity: those who departed from the norm or the consensus merely existed at a different point on a continuum. Their social and political predicament prevented them from appreciating the moral possibilities located in their nature, but a remedy was to hand in historical progress. The West, it seems, has a similar perspective on democracy as a moral and political good. Democracy represents a telos, a goal of human nature. The fact that different communities reject this ideal is no proof against it as a shared ideal, but it speaks, rather, to historical differences: history will answer the objection and humankind will discover a value it cannot appreciate in all circumstances at present.

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The obvious attraction of this argument is not without irony given the otherwise insistent claims of local difference. What may be less conspicuous is another turn in the argument that recalls certain strands of Enlightenment discussion. In closely related ways, Grotius, Stillingfleet, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson all argued for common consent, drawing on a Stoic tradition. A consensus gentium provided proof of the innateness and naturalness of those ideas or principles around which agreement formed. Yet these figures, including even Hutcheson, at times, attempted to limit the circle of consensus to the polite, the ‘better’ nations, the more civilised peoples. The advantages of such a perspective were evident in their period, but they have not disappeared in our own. The search for consensus at an international level has not gone away, but it too is predicated on leaving out the ‘barbarous’, the ‘uncivilised’, the impolite who dissent from this consensus. A minimum of diversity can be admitted, but it does not tell against the majority. Consensus is, in that respect, predicated on exclusion. Thus Enlightenment deliberations over diversity have a sequel in our time. Nor have we resolved the conflicts and inconsistencies this phenomenon has introduced. I will reserve a final word for a recent contribution. From the point of view of the themes discussed in this book, Chandran Kukathas’s theory of diversity offers a striking set of commitments. He emphasises that the human world is ‘marked by diversities’, including those of language, custom, religion, and culture. Yet he attempts, nonetheless, to recover a unifying concept of human nature. To do so he returns initially to Hume’s conception in ‘A Dialogue’ (discussed in the previous chapter) in which Hume noted that the Rhine flows north and south but has the same source, acted on by the same gravitational force. Kukathas makes an appeal to the notion of a shared nature, characterised by self-interest, but, importantly, underpinned by conscience or what he calls a moral sense: ‘all humans have a sense of propriety, or more broadly, a moral sense which governs their conduct’.74 Thus he refuses to relinquish a commitment central to Hutcheson’s programme, although he wisely avoids determining, prescriptively, the ‘content’ of conscience or the moral sense.75 We might find this move surprising in contemporary political theory, although it clearly has affinities with the stance adopted by Todorov, as we have seen. An impulse remains, then, toward recovery of points of contact that bring human beings into relation with one another in some profound way, even as they are understood as existing amid constitutive differences. 74 75

Chandran Kukathas, The Liberal Archipelago: A Theory of Diversity and Freedom (Oxford, 2003), 48. Ibid., 65.

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4

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Index

Aubrey, John 30n Aulus Gellius 49 Aurengzib 14 Ayers, Michael 63

abortion 72n, 219 Acosta, Jose´ de 19, 94 Adair, James 221 ‘Adept Ladys or The Angelick Sect, The’ (Shaftesbury) 146n Aelian 49 aesthetics 119, 126, 156 Africa, Africans 89, 196n Ainsworth, Michael 98n, 104n, 117, 119, 130, 132, 133, 146 Alexander VII, Pope 83 Alexander the Great 3 Annas, Julia 42 Anstey, Peter 24 anthropology 201 of ancient Egypt 140 and diversity 12 and human rights 217–21 Lockean 8, 10, 71–97, 183, 202 modern and contemporary 204–16 of polite nations 72, 80–5 political 92–7 of primitive societies 71–2, 76–80, 85–92, 193, 196n, 197, 198 sceptical 84 and Shaftesbury’s account of religion 143 of sociability 212–15 Stoic 84 Appadurai, Arjun 225 Arabesque style 100 architecture 104n, 126, 127, 132, 133 Aristotle 2, 17, 28, 29 Arrian 154 association of ideas 10, 176, 181 Astell, Mary 148n atheism 8, 37, 43, 60, 64, 70, 76–86, 123, 142 and Bayle 137 and Shaftesbury 116 and toleration 136 Athens 178, 190 Atterbury, Francis 83n

Bacon, Francis 7, 15, 16, 17, 20, 21, 23, 24, 158 Barbary 18 Barbeyrac, Jean 67 Barclay, John 23 Barnes, Jonathan 42 Bartholomew Fair 148 Bartram, William 187 Baumgarten, Martin von 72, 120n Bayle, Pierre 58, 120n, 137–8, 191 Beattie, James 198 beauty 119, 128, 132, 156, 158, 163, 181, 191, 192 Becconsall, Thomas 67 Benedict, Ruth 205–6 benevolence 153, 155, 161, 165, 174, 176, 177, 178, 179, 182, 185, 188, 195, 197, 200, 229 Berkeley, George 1 Bernier, Franc¸ois 26, 30n bestiality 143 Bible (see also Scripture) interpretation of 144 textual criticism of 144 Birch, Elizabeth 101 Blewitt, George 172n Bodin, Jean 3, 22 Boemus, Johannes 23 Boranday 85n Boston, Thomas 155n Boulter, Hugh 153n Bouvet, Joachim 84n Boyle, Robert 7, 15, 16–18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 25, 26, 29, 85–6, 91, 201 Brancati, Francesco 84 Brazil 8, 40, 48, 64, 72, 76, 77, 79, 79n, 84n, 86, 89, 91, 142, 218 Britain 125, 125n Brodkin, Karen 204

253

254

Index

Brown, John 107n Brutus 190 Buckle, Stephen 162 Buddhism 81–2 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de 23, 187 Burke, Edmund 149 Burnet, Gilbert, Bishop of Salisbury 98n Burnet, Thomas 166–7 Butler, Joseph 160–1, 187, 188n Calicut 46 Cambridge Platonism 52, 54, 86, 101, 118 Camisards 147, 148 cannibalism 8, 39, 43, 45, 46, 50n, 72n, 89, 92, 96, 120, 142, 143, 183, 185, 189, 202 Cape of Good Hope (see also Hottentots; Saldanha Bay) 40, 48, 60 Caribbean (see also Indians, Carib) 40, 79, 84n Carolina colony 100 Carrithers, Michael 204, 212–13, 215 Carteret, John, Lord 153n, 181 Casaubon, Meric 50–1 cassowary 30 Cato 49 Celsus 84n Champion, Justin 105n Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (Shaftesbury) 4, 105, 120 Chardin, Jean 72n Charlevoix, Pierre-Franc¸ois-Xavier de 194 Charmot, Nicolas 83 Charron, Pierre 36n, 50, 61n China, the Chinese 9, 26, 40, 55, 80, 82–3, 126, 127, 173, 186n, 192n Chinese rites controversy 82–4 Choisy, Franc¸ois Timoleon, abbe´ de 80 Chrysippus 49, 53n Churchill, Awnsham 25, 83n Churchill, John 25 Cicero 77–80, 119, 122–3 Cieza de Leo´n, Pedro 93n Clarke, Edward 101n, 105n Codrington, Christopher 83n Collins, Anthony 139n, 145n colonialism 12, 18, 94, 95, 196n, 223, 229 Columbus 72n common consent (also universal consent, consensus gentium, consensus omnium) 4, 5, 9, 12, 37, 43, 44, 45, 48, 52, 54, 57, 58–61, 67, 69–70, 82, 85, 95, 167, 172, 186, 197, 200, 202, 206, 207, 211, 217, 220, 230 and Cambridge Platonism 55 and Cicero 77 and Grotius 85, 128, 172, 220, 230 and Hutcheson 172

Locke’s attack on 37–41, 59–61 and Shaftesbury 119–29 and Stillingfleet 172, 220, 230 common notions (koinai ennoiai) 8, 9, 56, 175, 183 and Lord Herbert of Cherbury 57 and Stoicism 35, 54 Conduct of the Understanding, Of the (Locke) 89–91 ‘conformity of action’ 9, 11, 73, 116, 174, 191, 192, 202, 218 Confucius, Confucianism 82, 84, 137 connatural ideas (see also innateness; prolepsis) 86, 117 Cook, James, Captain 198 Cooper, Anthony Ashley see Shaftesbury Cossimbazar 14 Coste, Pierre 58, 67n, 101n Courten, William 25n criterion problem 35, 56, 57, 58, 60–1, 145 Cudworth, Charles 14n, 27n Cudworth, Ralph 14n, 54–6, 60n, 65n, 101, 163 culture, concept of 205–8, 223–5 Culverwell, Nathanael 47n, 56 Cumberland, Richard 181, 183 Curtis, Roger 198 Dampier, William 194 Darwin, Charles 12 deism (see also freethought) 10, 57, 99, 108, 138, 139, 155 democracy 13, 225, 228, 229 Dennis, John 148n Derbices 49 Descartes, Rene´ 47, 52n, 67n, 103, 104n, 107 design argument 108 Desmaizeaux, Pierre 103n D’Holbach, Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron 214 Diagoras of Melos 49 Diderot, Denis 214 Didymus 63 Diodorus Siculus 140n Diogenes Laertius 50, 51n diversity 2–3, 5, 10–12, 71, 110, 127, 129, 150–2, 160, 162, 200–30 Christian response 3 and contemporary thought 12–13, 222–30 cultural and moral 34, 37, 170, 171 ‘deep’ form of 207, 226 and Geertz 206–9 historical solution 193–9 and Hutcheson 172–84 and Locke (see also innateness, critique of ) 69–70, 71–85, 204–16 methodological principle 15, 23, 26, 33, 205 and the moral sense 173–82

Index and the natural history of man 15–28 and religion 99, 135–49, 179–80, 203 and the sceptical tradition 41 and the Scottish Enlightenment 187 and Shaftesbury 98, 135–49 and travel literature 184–7 and the Two Treatises 95 Dodsley, Robert 188 Doig, David 196n Dominican Order 81, 82, 83 Dryden, John 14n Du Bos, Jean-Baptiste, abbe´ 83n, 84n, 90n Dunn, John 95n Dutch, the 126 Eachard, John 128n East India Company 14 Edwards, John 60n, 75n Egypt 42, 49, 72, 120n, 126, 127n, 140, 183 Ellis, William 198 emphutoi ennoiai 114, 115 English Civil War 37 Enlightenment 1, 2, 4, 204, 206, 222 Enlightenment, Scottish 2, 5, 11, 150, 151, 204, 229 and diversity 187, 203 enthusiasm 14, 26–7, 141, 143, 146–9, 167 Epictetus 50, 53, 53n, 112, 114, 115, 154, 178, 184 Epicureanism 45, 56n, 66, 109, 112 Epicurus 108n, 112n, 119 Essay concerning Human Understanding, An (Locke) 1, 4, 8, 27, 28, 34, 50, 70, 82, 93, 97, 98n, 102, 129, 131, 147, 157, 175, 176, 181, 183, 198, 200, 201, 202, 206 Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions. With Illustrations on the Moral Sense (Hutcheson) 153, 169, 185 Essays on the Law of Nature (Locke) 44, 48, 50, 60n, 71n, 72n, 79n, 80n, 86n, 96, 217 essences, real and nominal 7, 28–31, 35, 57–8, 61, 126 ‘Ethick in General, Of’ (Locke) 74, 75n, 131n, 175, 218 Ethiopia 49, 140 Eudoxus of Cnidus 42 evolutionary theory 12 Exercises (’AKHMATA) (Shaftesbury) 108n, 112n, 113, 115, 135n Fabricius, Johann Ludwig 40n faction 109, 179, 194 Faroe Islands 21 Ferguson, Adam 11, 193–5 Ferguson, Robert 56n

255

Ferna´ndez de Navarrete, Domingo 82 Fielding, Henry 186n Filmer, Sir Robert 93 Fletcher, Andrew, of Saltoun 20n Fordyce, David 151, 188–9, 192 freethought (see also Deism) 10, 100, 105, 126, 143, 144, 145, 203 Freke, Thomas 105n French wars of religion 44 Freud, Sigmund 214 Furly, Arent 101n Furly, Benjamin 101n Gadamer, Hans-Georg 128 Garamantes 49 Garcilaso de la Vega, the Inca 39, 72, 92, 96 Gassendi, Pierre 44, 45, 49, 52n, 58, 61, 66n Gay, John 168, 182 Geertz, Clifford 12, 206–9, 211 genocide 220, 221 Germans 183 Glanvill, Joseph 18, 36, 38n, 44, 47 God, proofs for existence of 108, 123 gothic taste 126, 128, 132, 133 Greece 137, 177, 183, 186n, 190 Greenland 89 Grotius, Hugo 9, 61n, 85, 128, 172, 220, 230 Grueber, Johann 71 Guinea 55, 192n Haakonssen, Knud 162 Habermas, Ju¨rgen 225 Hacke, William 25 Hakluyt, Richard 25 Hall, Stuart 228 Hammond, Henry 73n harmony 107, 132, 133, 158 Harrington, James 105, 140n hedonism (see also self-interest) 96, 138 Helve´tius, Claude Adrien 90n, 214 Herbert of Cherbury, Lord 60n Herder, Johann Gottfried 224 Herodotus 2, 140n Hinduism, Hindus 14, 26, 65n Hippocrates 22 Hispaniola 72n Historia cultus Sinensium 82, 83–4 Hobbes, Thomas 17n, 65, 66, 66n, 97, 98, 103, 107, 109, 127, 128n, 134, 139, 153, 155, 203, 213, 214 Homer 49 homosexuality 42, 50, 191 Hottentots (Khoi Khoi) 84n, 91, 187n Hudson’s Bay 18, 27n

256

Index

human nature 1, 6, 11, 97, 109, 124, 130, 143, 149, 152, 158, 184, 193, 197, 203, 204, 206, 208, 211, 212, 216, 220 and Bayle 137 and Butler 160 Calvinist view of 78, 155 knowledge of 28, 34 and natural history 15–18 human rights 12, 217–22, 225 human sacrifice 43, 185 Hume, David 1, 11, 151, 160, 189–91, 192, 221 Hunter, Michael 25, 26 Huron, The 46, 47, 63 Hutcheson, Francis 1, 5, 6, 10, 95, 96, 149, 150–99, 200, 203–4, 206, 208, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 223, 224, 226, 228, 229, 230 and diversity 172–84 inaugural lecture 155n, 171, 186 and incest 177–8 intellectual context of 152–61 and Locke 166–7 and moral sense and moral sense of children 180–1 on religion and diversity 179–80 and Shaftesbury 154–6 igniculus (spark) 78 incest 8, 42, 44, 46, 50, 191, 202 and Hutcheson 177–8 incommensurability 6, 8, 13, 34, 43, 150, 177, 206, 208, 229 India, East Indians 14, 48, 55, 125, 126, 167n, 168, 168n, 186n, 221 Indians, American (see also Tupinamba) 9, 18, 27, 36, 46, 87–8, 91, 92–5, 120n, 125, 185, 186, 192, 192n, 194, 198, 207 Indians, Carib 8, 71n, 72, 72n, 78–80 infanticide 8, 39, 43, 44, 72n, 174, 182, 183, 188, 189, 191, 202, 206, 219 innateness (see also prolepsis) 4, 9, 58, 75, 79–80, 151, 207 and Cicero 120, 122 dispositional form of 10, 13, 53, 116, 117, 121, 169–71, 178, 183 and Hutcheson 161–72, 198–9, 200 naive form of 53, 117, 166 and Shaftesbury 110–19, 200 and Stoicism 35, 110–19, 217 innateness, critique of 1, 5, 8, 10, 25, 26, 27, 34, 37–41, 51–2, 56–8, 59, 64, 67, 69, 71–84, 96, 123, 129, 142, 143, 161, 187, 200, 205, 211, 212 and Gassendi 47 idea of God 40–1, 50, 76–85

and Locke 25, 27, 34, 37–41, 51–2, 56–8, 59, 64, 67, 71–85, 123, 127, 142, 161, 162, 163, 168, 180, 187, 201, 205, 212 moral principles 91 and Montaigne 45 speculative principles 50, 71, 87 Innocent XI, Pope 83 Inquiry Concerning Virtue, or Merit, An (Shaftesbury) 103, 104, 105, 107, 110, 111, 113, 137, 139, 142, 156 Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (Hutcheson) 10, 150, 153, 155, 162, 172, 173, 184, 186 Iroquois 89 Jaffro, Laurent 103n Japan 47n, 125n, 126, 127 Jefferson, Thomas 187, 189 Jesuit Order 82–4 Johnson, Thomas 161n, 168, 182 Judaism, Jews 126, 140, 141, 145, 148 Kames, Lord (Henry Home) 195–8 Kant, Immanuel 3, 221 Kukathas, Chandran 230 Kymlicka, Will 226–7 Laclau, Ernesto 222n La Loube`re, Simon de 81–2 La Martinie`re, Pierre Martin de 85 Lambert de La Motte, Pierre 80 Lamberti, Arcangelo 39, 71 La Mothe Le Vayer, Franc¸ois de 61 Laneau, Louis 81n Lapland 89, 194 La Rochefoucauld, Franc¸ois de 214 Law, Edmund 168n law of opinion or fashion 8, 26, 62–6, 74, 98, 111, 162, 172, 190, 191, 200, 211 and Shaftesbury 129–35 Le Clerc, Jean 74n, 101, 101n, 114, 133n Le Comte, Louis 84n Lee, Henry 60n, 67, 75n, 120n Leechman, William 159 Le Gobien, Charles 84n, 90n Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 47n, 120n Le´ry, Jean de 39, 40, 64, 76, 80, 85–92, 86n, 142 Letter Concerning Design, A (Shaftesbury) 125n Letter Concerning Enthusiasm, A (Shaftesbury) 105, 111, 145, 147 Le´vi-Strauss, Claude 215 Lhwyd, Edward 19 liberalism 222, 225–7

Index Licetus, Fortunius (Fortunio Liceti) 31 Ligon, Richard 23 Limborch, Philip van 101n Lionne, Artus de, abbe´ 81n Locke, John 1, 4, 6, 7–9, 10, 13, 34–68, 98–105, 107, 109, 116, 118, 119, 120, 124, 128, 146, 151, 152, 153, 154, 160, 161, 164, 171, 172, 175, 176, 177, 180, 181, 184, 186, 190, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201–2, 203, 206, 208, 211, 213, 214, 215, 217, 218, 220, 222, 223, 224, 228 biographical connection with Shaftesbury 100–5 and Burnet 166–7 and critique of innateness 25, 26, 27, 34, 37–41, 51–2, 56–8, 59, 64, 67, 71–84, 73, 76–85, 123, 127, 142, 161, 162, 163, 168, 180, 187, 201, 205, 212 and enthusiasm 147 and Hutcheson 166–7 moral philosophy of 62–8 and natural history of man 23–33 and natural law 41, 65, 66, 74, 75, 86, 96, 99, 131, 137 and scepticism 34–7, 57, 58, 64 and Shaftesbury 98–105, 116–19, 129–35, 136–9 and thinking matter 103 and voluntarism 130–1 Logicae compendium (Hutcheson) 157n Longinus 149 Longobardi (or Longobardo), Nicolo` 82 Louis XIV 81, 82 Lowde, James 65 Lycurgus 174 Lydia 46 Madagascar 20n Maigrot, Charles 83–4 Mandeville, Bernard 153, 164, 172–3, 177, 186, 187, 190, 192, 199, 213, 214 Marcus Aurelius 154 Marian Islands 89–91 Martin, Martin 20n Martyr, Peter (Pietro Martire d’Anghiera) 72 Masham, Damaris Cudworth 14n, 27n, 63n, 83n, 101, 105n Masham, Sir Francis 105n Massagetae 42, 46 Maxwell, John 181–2, 183–4 Mersenne, Marin 47 Milne, A. J. M. 217–19 Milton, J. R. 46n Mingrelia (Samegrelo) 71, 190 miracles 108, 139, 140, 145 Miscellaneous Reflections (Shaftesbury) 106, 107, 113, 140, 141, 144, 145

257

Molesworth, Robert, Viscount 105, 152 Molyneux, William 19 money 92, 94 monsters 30 Montaigne, Michel de 3, 44–5, 49, 50, 67, 84n, 215, 224 Montesquieu, Charles Louis de 3, 23, 189, 194n Moor, James 154n Moore, James 157n Moralists, a Philosophical Rhapsody, The (Shaftesbury) 105, 108, 111–12, 113, 134, 138, 140, 149, 156 moral sense 5, 10, 150–1, 154, 156–8, 160, 162–71, 185, 186, 188, 189, 191, 193–7, 203, 212, 217, 219, 229 and diversity 173–82 as faculty 164–7 as occult quality 167–9 Moray, Sir Robert 30n More, Henry 55, 60n More, Thomas 190 motivation, theory of 136 Mouffe, Chantal 228 multiculturalism 204, 222 murder 43, 72n, 96, 175, 183, 186, 190, 205, 220 music (see also harmony) 125, 132, 133 Muslims 26, 65n, 72, 141, 145 natural history 34, 45, 169, 205 method of 69, 193 natural history of man 7, 11, 12, 63, 204, 217–19 and Butler 160 and Hutcheson 186 and Kames 197 and Locke 15–33 natural law 3, 17, 45, 56, 67, 70, 128, 203, 220 and common consent 128 and Hutcheson 188 and innateness 36 and Locke 41, 65, 66, 74, 75, 86, 96, 99, 131, 137 and reason 94 and Stoicism 56, 217 natural rights (see also human rights) 156, 217 nature as norm 110, 200 Nicole, Pierre 89 Nietzsche, Friedrich 214 nirvana 80, 81 Noah 3, 8 Norman conquest 125 Norton, David Fate 158n, 163, 165n numeration 87 Obbink, Dirk 121–2 Obeyesekere, Gananath 210n

258

Index

observational method 10, 159 occult qualities 167–9 Ogilby, John 19 Oldenburg, Henry 15, 18, 19, 20–3, 25, 26 Opechancanough 91 order, concept of 98, 107, 111, 117 Origen 84n Othello 120 Ovington, John 84n Padroado Real 83 Paley, William 182–3 Paraguay 84n Parker, Samuel 38n, 56–7, 123 parricide 8, 44, 49, 71, 72n, 96, 174, 183, 189, 190, 198, 202, 206 Persia 2, 42, 140, 177, 186n Peru 55, 92 Philo Judaeus 50 Philosophiae moralis institutio compendiaria (Hutcheson) 154n, 188n Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 20–2, 24, 25, 26, 199 Pitfield, Alexander 82n Plato 2, 17, 118 Plot, Robert 19 Plutarch 115n polygamy 46, 173 polytheism 80, 108 Pomponius Mela 49 Pope, Alexander 187 positive law 131, 131n preconception see prolepsis priestcraft 127n, 139 probability 27, 32, 88 prolepsis (see also innateness) 9, 35, 43, 53, 54, 56, 69, 77, 80, 110–16, 119, 120, 121, 122, 134, 137, 162, 167n, 168n, 170, 178, 200, 202, 217, 219 and Shaftesbury 113 and the Stoics 112, 115 promiscuity 44, 72n Protagoras of Abdera 49 Ptolemy 3, 22 Pufendorf, Samuel 3, 50, 61n, 67, 128, 156, 169n, 203 Purchas, Samuel 25 Pyrard, Franc¸ois 72n Pyrrho of Elis 50 racism 12 raillery 145, 148 Ramusio, Giovanni Battista 25 Rawls, John 225 realism 134, 175

reason and primitive peoples 86 Reasonableness of Christianity, The (Locke) 73, 131, 139n, 141n relativism 6, 13, 35, 99, 202, 208–11, 215, 217, 222, 223, 228 methodological 206, 209–10 Renteln, Alison 219–21 revelation 66, 131, 131n, 136, 137, 140n, 141, 141n, 177, 229 revenge 39, 76 rewards and punishments 4, 36, 62, 96, 99, 109, 130, 155, 181, 195 Ricci, Mateo 82, 84 Robertson, William 193n Rochefort, Charles de 78–80 Roe, Sir Thomas 84n Rome 3, 137, 173, 183, 186n Rorty, Richard 205 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 17n, 187, 194n, 214 Royal Society of London, The 14, 18, 20, 24, 25, 26, 30n, 38, 48, 158 Russia 40 Rycaut, Sir Paul 26, 137n Sacheverell, Henry 117n Sagard, Gabriel 72n, 90n St Paul 56, 73 Saldanha Bay (see also Cape of Good Hope; Hottentots) 59, 79n, 84n, 91 Sanderson, Robert 73n sati 46, 48 satire 148 sceptical tradition, scepticism 1, 2, 8, 9, 12, 28, 59, 60, 69, 173, 202, 204, 207, 215 Scott, Dominic 112, 122 Scripture 36, 62, 75n, 99, 108, 136, 137, 141, 144, 202, 229 Scythians 2, 43 Second Characters or the Language of Forms (Shaftesbury) 118, 126, 134 self-interest (see also hedonism) 4, 62, 66, 109, 151, 153, 158, 161, 163, 168, 174, 175, 182, 185, 196, 201 self-preservation 37 Seneca 53, 53n, 122, 123 Sensus Communis, an Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour (Shaftesbury) 105, 120n, 133, 139 Sextus Empiricus 42–3, 44, 49, 50, 60, 173n, 210 sexual mores 72, 183 Shaftesbury, first Earl of (Anthony Ashley Cooper) 4, 24, 100, 105 Shaftesbury, third Earl of (Anthony Ashley Cooper) 1, 4–5, 6, 9–10, 13, 34, 38n,

Index 64, 95, 96, 98–149, 150, 151, 152, 160, 161, 164, 170, 172, 178, 179, 183, 184, 186, 187, 196, 199, 200, 202–3, 204, 206, 208, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 217, 218, 220, 223, 224, 226, 228 biographical connection with Locke 100–5 and Hutcheson 154–6 and innateness 110–19 and the moral sense 156–7 philosophical style 106 political career 104–5 and prolepsis 113 on religion and diversity 179–80 on religion and morality 135–48 and reply to Locke on innateness 116–19 Shapin, Steven 88n Shapiro, Barbara 20 Sherlock, William 50, 51n, 67n Siam, the Siamese 8, 40, 55, 80–2, 88 Skelton, Philip 139, 189 Smith, Adam 11, 151, 158–9, 191–2, 196, 214 Smith, Samuel Stanhope 11 Smith, William 187, 195 sociability 6, 109, 127, 139, 149, 153, 185, 193, 229 sociality (see also sociability) 6, 13, 204 and contemporary anthropology 212–15 Socrates 49 Soliloquy: or, Advice to an Author (Shaftesbury) 105, 120, 125, 129, 133, 184 Solinus 49 Solon 43, 174 Somers, John, Lord 105n, 125n, 147 Sparta 49, 176, 178 species, concept of 30–1, 96, 108, 118 stadial theory 23, 95, 193 Stanhope, James 117, 132, 133 state of nature 17n, 65, 92, 97n, 109, 155, 193, 214, 223 Stewart, Dugald 151, 198–9 Stillingfleet, Edward (Bishop) 8, 9, 41, 59–60, 85, 123, 128, 172, 197n, 220, 230 Stoicism, Stoics 4, 8, 9, 12, 21, 35, 42, 43, 73, 77, 78, 80, 99, 149, 154, 161, 179, 200, 202, 204, 207, 219, 230 and Bishop Stillingfleet 59, 68 and common consent 121–3 and design argument 108 and innateness 52–9 and natural law 56, 217 and prolepsis 110–16, 178 storge97, 109, 183 Stubbe, Henry 47n Suetonius 23 superstition 140, 143

259

Swift, Jonathan 187 Sydenham, Thomas 24 Synge, Edward 153n Synopsis metaphysicae (Hutcheson) 157n, 165–6 System of Moral Philosophy, A (Hutcheson) 159, 165, 184 tabula rasa 47, 47n, 55, 92n Tartars 126 taste (see also virtuoso taste) 115, 125, 125n, 126–7, 181, 192, 224 Taylor, Charles 163, 226 Taylor, Jeremy 145n Techo, Nicolaus del 84n teleological reason 160, 161 Terry, Edward 84n testimony 27, 88 theft 37, 44, 49, 183, 186, 188 Theism 108 Theodorus of Cyrene 49 The´venot, Melchise´dec 25, 71n thinking matter 103 Tillotson, John, Archbishop 145n Todorov, Tzvetan 13, 213–16 Toinard (or Thoynard), Nicolas 72n, 83n, 84n Toland, John 103n, 105, 140n, 141n toleration 10, 100, 136, 143, 145, 146, 155, 211n, 215, 226 and Shaftesbury 147–8 Tottepottemay 91n Towerson, Gabriel 73 travel 14, 19, 121, 205, 216 and fieldwork 207 and Hutcheson 184–7 travel literature 8, 9, 19–21, 25, 26, 31n, 32, 34, 69, 76–82, 129, 174, 184, 199, 201, 203, 222 and Locke 71–3, 76–82 and Shaftesbury 120–1 Treaty of Ryswick 105 Trigault, Nicolas 83n Tuck, Richard 97n Tuckness, Alex 131 Tully, James 38, 94, 95, 223–4 Tupinamba 40, 64, 72, 76–8, 88, 142, 143, 190, 218 Turkey, Turks 73, 126, 127, 137n, 173 Turnbull, George 159n, 188n Two Treatises of Government (Locke) 9, 70, 92–7, 124, 202, 223 Tyrrell, James 27n, 64 utility, social 75–6, 170

260 Valle, Pietro della 73 virtuoso taste 132, 134 voluntarism 130–1 Vossius, Isaac 71 vulgar, the 124, 139, 149 Warburton, William 133 War of Spanish Succession 117n, 125n, 125–6 West, Richard 153n

Index Whichcote, Benjamin 55n, 118, 123 Whig tradition 100, 105, 127, 155, 211n White, Thomas 36n, 46n, 47n, 48n Wilson, Richard 221 Winkler, Kenneth 158n, 165n Woodward, John 32 Wren, Christopher 30n Yolton, John 51 Yonge, Sir Walter 105n