Ideas

by Peter Watson

  French is one of the group of languages which, in all their essentials, are derived from Latin. They are known as the Romance languages and comprise Sardinian, Italian, Romanian, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Provençal and French. In each case they stem from the spoken (vulgar) Latin of soldiers, merchants, colonists, rather than from the literary language (classical Latin). The original language of Gaul is presumed to have been a form of Celtic (very few inscriptions survive) which was in any case affiliated with Latin. The Latin of Gaul, as France then was, became differentiated into two, the dialect of the north (langue d’oïl) and of the south (langue d’oc) along a line that extended, roughly, from what is now Bordeaux via Lussac to Isère (Grenoble). Old French was discernible from the ninth century in the Strasbourg Oaths (842), with Middle French making its first appearance in the fourteenth century (1328, the accession of the Valois).14

  Modern French dates from the seventeenth century. The dialects of the north began to take precedence over the south as Paris gradually emerged as the capital, with Francien, the dialect of the Île de France, destined to become the national tongue.15 But not until the famous Ordonnances de Villers-Cotterêt (1539) was French officially recognised as the language of the law courts.16 Even then, French was still considered an inferior tongue to Latin, which was still used for the new learning–i.e., science. But French was employed for popular literature, and with the advent of printing, and of more widespread reading, its growth in popularity and usage was confirmed. In 1549 Joachim du Bellay wrote his Défense et Illustration de la langue Françoise, which called for French not just to be the medium for vulgar stories but to be ambitious, even ‘illustrious’. From then on, the French language was a self-conscious entity in France’s intellectual and national life, in a way that other languages have never been. Throughout the seventeenth century there was a concern with le bon usage and le bel usage, as the language was refined and developed and purified.17 This trend climaxed in the Grammaire générale et raisonnée de Port-Royal (1660), which put forward the idea of a philosophical grammar based on logic. By the eighteenth century, therefore, French was a much more self-conscious and, in a sense, artificial language than any other tongue. This rational tidiness helps account for the language’s great beauty but also for its comparative dryness and its relatively small vocabulary.18 Whereas other languages spread naturally, French was–to an extent–an official language, and for this reason even as late as the mid-twentieth century there were two million people in France whose mother tongue was not French (Alsatian, Breton, Provençal, etc.).19

  At twenty-eight volumes, the Encyclopédie was, by any standards, a daunting read. That Diderot should consider the project even a remotely commercial proposition tells us a great deal about the changing reading habits of the eighteenth century. And indeed, in the latter half of the century reading habits did change in important ways. It was now that the traditional pattern of private patronage ebbed away. More and more writers began to live on their income from book sales, depending on the new generation of readers, whose relation to the author was completely impersonal. Samuel Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith were among the first tranche of authors who wrote exclusively for these new readers. In reality, the publisher took the place of the patron though there was a middle stage–public subscription, which, as we saw, was the way the Encyclopédie was launched.20

  Nor should we forget that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it had been music that provided the main leisure activity of both the rich and poor, rather than reading.21 ‘Tinkers sang, milkmaids sang ballads; carters whistled; each trade, and even the beggars, had their special songs; the base-viol hung in the drawing-room for the amusement of waiting visitors; and the lute, cittern, and virginals, for the amusement of waiting customers, were the necessary furniture of the barber’s shop.’22 In London they had the theatre, but that audience was really no more than a quarter million out of a population of five million. Defoe and Bunyan were the first, among English writers at least, to exist outside what Steele called ‘the circumference of wit’, to mean that predominantly aristocratic society of writers who obtained patronage. ‘If one inspects the memoirs…of the many self-educated men who achieved distinction in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, one finds almost invariably that their earliest contact with culture was through “Pilgrim’s Progress, the Bible, Paradise Lost, Robinson Crusoe.”’23

  One important effect of this, says Arnold Hauser, was the emancipation of middle-class taste from the dictates of the aristocracy. ‘It forms the historical starting point of literary life in the modern sense, as typified not only by the regular appearance of books, newspapers and periodicals, but, above all, by the emergence of the literary expert, the critic, who represents the general standard of values and public opinion in the world of literature.’24 The Renaissance humanists were unable to do this because they didn’t have a periodical/newspaper press at their disposal. The system of private patronage meant essentially that the income an author received bore no relation to the intrinsic value or general attraction of their writing. Now that changed: the book became part of commercial society, a commodity, ‘the value of which conforms to its saleableness on the free market’.25 This public taste was especially strong for historical, biographical and statistical encyclopaedias.

  Periodical publishing was also proving a growth business. In the tenth issue of The Spectator Joseph Addison wrote: ‘My Publisher tells me that there are already Three thousand of them distributed every Day: so that if I allow Twenty Readers to every Paper, which I look upon as a modest computation, I may reckon about Threescore thousands Disciples in London and Westminster.’ If this sounds high, we should remember that the coffee-houses of London were at that time the chief medium by which culture was channelled and by 1715 there were two thousand of them in London alone. It would be very easy for one copy of any newspaper to pass through a score of hands in this way.26 The print-run of the Spectator later rose to between 20,000 and 30,000, on some accounts, giving a ‘circulation’, on Addison’s calculations, of roughly half a million (the population of England in 1700 was a little over six million). This was later reflected in a rise in newspaper readership: between 1753 and 1775 the average daily sale of newspapers practically doubled.27 James Lackington, a bookseller, wrote in his memoirs: ‘The poorer sorts of farmers, and even the poor country people in general, who before that period [twenty years previously] spent their winter evenings in relating stories of witches, ghosts, hobgoblins &c., and on entering their houses, you may see Tom Jones, Roderick Random, and other entertaining books stuck up on their bacon racks, &c.’28 In 1796 the Monthly Review noted that twice as many novels had been published that year as in the previous one.29

  One of the most influential books of the eighteenth century was Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1788) which, as we have seen, argued that Christianity, no less than the barbarians, had been responsible for replacing Roman civilisation, and helping to bring about the so-called dark ages. But there was another reason why Gibbon’s message was important. It showed, or purported to show, how religion could interfere with–hinder, delay–progress. For the most part ancient civilisations had believed in either a static universe or else a cyclical one. The ancient Israelites’ hope of a Messiah could be seen as a primitive notion related to progress, but such views were not widespread and in classical Greece the general approach–among Plato, Aristotle, Polybius–was either that civilisation was in decline, from a golden age, or that it was cyclical: monarchy led to tyranny which led to aristocracy to oligarchy to democracy to anarchy and back to monarchy.30

  For Voltaire and the other philosophes in France, however, the recent discoveries of science, and the prospect for advancement that they seemed to offer, and the fact that more and more people could read of these advances, meant that the optimistic idea of progress was suddenly on everyone’s mind, and this too was both a cause and symptom of changes in religious belief. Until the
Italian humanists and Montaigne, the Christian life had been a sort of intellectual limbo: people on earth tried to lead a good life, as laid down by the church, but, in effect, they accepted the notion of perfection at creation, the Fall, and decline ever since. They were waiting for fulfilment in another realm.31 Coincident with Newton’s discoveries, however, a new feeling began to spread throughout Europe. Its most important feature was an assumption of the principle of bienfaisance, or benevolence, which was now believed to animate both God and man. The view gained ground that the earth ‘was designed for man’s terrestrial happiness’. (Bienfaisance and optimiste are both eighteenth-century words.) At times, this led to some absurd notions: Fénelon, for example, said that Providence had determined the shape and consistency of water-melons in such a way that they were easy to slice; the abbé Pluche pointed out that the existence of tides was designed to make it easier for ships to enter ports.32

  This idea, that nature’s harmony was a sign of God’s benevolence, was doubly important during the eighteenth century, because attention was now turned to man himself. If the rest of the universe was governed by (relatively) simple laws–accessible to figures like Descartes, Newton, Leibniz, Lavoisier and Linnaeus–then surely human nature itself should be governed by equally simple and equally accessible laws. Investigation of human nature, of man’s relationship to society, was perhaps a defining aspect of the Enlightenment. It was a time when many of the modern ‘disciplines’ that we recognise today–language studies (philology), law, history, moral and natural philosophy, psychology, sociology–either came into existence fully formed, or as proto-subjects, which would coalesce in the nineteenth century (for example, the word ‘psychology’ did not gain widespread currency in English until the 1830s, though it had been used, in Latin, in Germany).33

  The underlying motor for this change, as Roger Smith points out in his History of the Human Sciences, was the reconceptualisation of the soul as the mind, with the mind increasingly understood by reference to consciousness, language and its relationship with this world, in contrast to the soul, with its immortality and pre-eminent role in the next world.34 The man mainly responsible for this approach, as was mentioned earlier, was John Locke (1632–1704), in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, published in1690. In this book, prepared in draft as early as 1671, Locke himself used the word ‘mind’ not ‘soul’, and referred to experience and observation as the source of ideas, rather than some ‘innate’ or religious (revelatory) origin. He asked his readers to ‘follow a Child from its Birth and observe the alterations that time makes’, rejecting all innate ideas. Locke took it as read, however, that the mind did contain certain innate powers, such as a capacity for reflection, ‘the internal Operations of our Minds, perceived and reflected on by our selves’.35 Experience of the physical world, he said, gives us sensations (his examples included ‘yellow’, ‘heat’, ‘soft’ and ‘bitter’). We reflect on these experiences and analyse them to form our ideas.

  For the English at least, this was the modern world, formed by Newton and Locke. Newton had established the fundamental truths, while Locke, replacing metaphysics with the psychological, ‘had revealed the mental mechanism through which experience generates truth’.36 His vision and analysis were so new that he even provided the vocabulary for this new way of looking at the world, a change which was reflected in the fact that talk about the soul became an embarrassment, to be replaced by the more secular notion of the mind. Also, the pre-eminence Locke allowed to experience (as opposed to innate knowledge) led him to the view, as critics quickly pointed out, that belief is relative to experience. He observed for example that some people(s) have no idea of God, and used this in his attack on innate ideas. This was a key ingredient in the birth of psychology, even if that term was not used much yet. Locke argued that motivation was based on experience–nature–which helped form the mind, rather than derived from some transcendent force operating on the soul. He saw action as a response to the pleasure or pain accompanying sensations and that opened up the possibility of a deterministic/mechanistic view of motivation. One unsettling effect of this was to further remove God from morality, a stance which, as we saw in the last chapter, came to form the dominant view as the eighteenth century passed. Morality has to be taught; it is not innate. In the same way Locke removed ‘the will’ as an ingredient of the soul and explained it as simple choice, arrived at after reflection on the sensations the mind had received. Arguably most important of all, he said that the self, the ‘I’, was not some mystical entity relating to the soul, but an ‘assemblage of sensations and passions that constitutes experience’.37

  Locke’s final contribution to the modern idea of psychology was his insight concerning language. Until the seventeenth century, language had a special status in the minds of many. It was felt that words were special things, in the sense that they resembled the objects which they described. The Bible was the word of God and some people believed that every object had originally possessed a name which identified it, and that the task of philology was to recover this original name. This was in particular the view of scholars such as Jakob Böhme, who argued for an ‘Adamic language’, the original form, believed by many to be closer to Hebrew than any other known language.38 Locke, however, thought that language was no more than convention and convenience, that languages changed and developed and that there was no sense in which we could (or, indeed, should) ‘recover’ some earlier form of words, as if this would help us recover some earlier form of wisdom. All of this shocked and disoriented people.

  Despite Locke, many were still reluctant to accept the demotion of the soul, and the idea went through some very ornate configurations. Georg Stahl, known for his phlogiston theory of combustion, thought that the soul was incarnate in the whole body. Nicholas Malebranche (1638–1715) thought that God acted through the soul to create innate ideas and motivation. Antoine Arnaud (1612–1694) and Pierre Nicole (1625–1695), in their book The Art of Thinking, likewise argued that the soul was responsible for reasoning, though they did concede the idea that the structure of language reflects the way the mind works.39 Leibniz proposed that ‘what is exists as elementary units, called monads’.40 It was these fundamental, indivisible, ‘primary elements’, he said, which underlie both body and soul. In Roger Smith’s words, ‘Leibniz became the figurehead for belief that stresses the soul’s innate and essential activity when it grasps knowledge and originates conduct.’41 This complicated reasoning regarding the soul shows the difficulties people got themselves into, in connection with an awkward concept. Locke’s system, though shocking, was much simpler to explain.

  But work on the soul wasn’t dead, far from it. The Germans, like other Europeans of the day outside England, still believed that the soul was a unified entity which embodied divine design.42 For example, Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786), known as the ‘Jewish Socrates’, argued that there is a special faculty in the soul which functions only in regard to beauty, enabling man to respond to beauty, to ‘know’ it and recognise it, in a way that analysis can never achieve.43 On this view, it was the soul that predisposed man to higher culture, and which separated him from the animals.

  Just as psychology, in the modern sense, took time to disengage itself from the soul, so too was the distinction between psychology and philosophy slow in coming about. The man who did more than anyone else to distinguish the two was Immanuel Kant. His views were grounded in the essential difference between, on the one hand, scientific knowledge and philosophy (critical thinking) and, on the other, between science (rigorously understood) and pragmatic knowledge. Kant was fascinated with the self–the ego as we would say–and how it could know things. He concluded that not all knowledge is scientific, and that critical thinking shows we cannot know the world in itself.44 Knowledge of the mind, for example, was not like mechanics, much as some eighteenth-century types wanted it to be. ‘There cannot be a “science” of psychology because what we observe in our minds does not exist as objects
knowable in terms of…space and time.’45 Partly as a result of this Kant became interested in anthropology and physiognomy, which he himself defined as ‘the art of judging what lies within a man, whether in terms of his way of sensing or of his way of thinking, from his visible form and so from his exterior’.46

  And this, says Roger Smith, is what defined the Enlightenment. ‘To quote references to human nature in the eighteenth century is a bit like quoting references to God in the Bible: it is the subject around which everything else revolves.’47 Samuel Johnson claimed that the study of human nature first became fashionable at the end of the seventeenth century; in the 1720s Joseph Butler, bishop of Durham, gave sermons on human nature and in 1739 David Hume published his A Treatise of Human Nature. This did not immediately become a classic (Hume said it ‘fell still-born from the press’), but it did eventually help to bring about another defining aspect of the Enlightenment, namely the belief that knowledge would replace revelation as the way to achieve goodness.48 These are the words of abbé de Mably: ‘Let us study man as he is, in order to teach him to become what he should be.’49

  The search for the laws of human nature took two main forms–the physical and the moral. The eighteenth century was fascinated by the body, by feelings, and by sensibility, the way the mind acted on the body through the nervous system. The Scottish physician Robert Whytt (1714–1766) experimented with decapitated frogs and found that they still moved their legs to brush off acid dabbed on their backs. He thus concluded they had a ‘diffuse soul’ in their spinal cord. A contemporary of Whytt, William Cullen (1710–1790), was the first to coin the term ‘neurosis’ but he applied it to all nervous disorders, which he thought more widespread than had hitherto been allowed. Neurosis acquired its modern meaning only in the late nineteenth century; nevertheless, in the eighteenth century, depression, anxiety and chronic anger were now described as ‘nerves’.50 Medical language moved away from the terminology of the humours, and madness was explained as a ‘failure of the mind’, understood as housed in a bodily organ, the brain.