Ideas

by Peter Watson

  20. Reinhard Bendix, Kings or People: Power and the Mandate to Rule, Op. cit., pages 307ff; see also: John Dunn (editor), Democracy: The Unfinished Journey: 508 BC to AD 1993, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, especially pages 71ff.

  21. Schulze, Op. cit., page 49.

  22. Moynahan, Op. cit., page 455, says the years 1562–1598 were the ones stained worst by massacres, murders and eight wars.

  23. Schulze, Op. cit., page 50.

  24. Bowle, Op. cit., page 290. Many (French) Huguenots emigrated to America after Louis XIV withdrew toleration in 1685. See: Moynahan, Op. cit., page 576.

  25. And in any case, Bodin was not himself a fanatic. Indeed, his thought anticipated the business-like outlook of Cardinal Richelieu, who was to put Bodin’s ideas into practice on an ambitious scale.

  26. Bowle, Op. cit., page 291.

  27. Schulze, Op. cit., page 53.

  28. Ibid., pages 56–57.

  29. Poland and the Netherlands were exceptions. Schulze, Op. cit., page 57.

  30. Bowle, Op. cit., page 293.

  31. Ibid., page 317.

  32. Bronowski and Mazlish, Op. cit., page 198.

  33. Bowle, Op. cit., page 318. See also: Moynahan, Op. cit., page 492.

  34. One of its distinguishing features is the most vivid title page of any book ever printed. The upper half shows a landscape which depicts a neatly planned town against a background of open country. Towering above this scene, however, there stands the crowned figure of a giant, a titan, shown from the waist up, his arms outstretched in a protective embrace, a great sword in one hand, a crozier in the other. Most poignant of all, the body of the figure is formed from a swarm of little people, their backs to the reader and their gaze fixed on the giant’s face. It is one of the most eerie, and most powerful images in all history.

  35. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1951, page 254.

  36. Roger Smith, The Fontana History of the Human Sciences, London: Fontana Press, 1997, pages 105ff.

  37. Bronowski and Mazlish, Op. cit., page 205.

  38. Bowle, Op. cit., page 321.

  39. Ibid., page 329.

  40. Ibid., page 328.

  41. Bronowski and Mazlish, Op. cit., page 206.

  42. Ibid., page 207.

  43. Bowle, Op. cit., page 331.

  44. Ibid., page 361.

  45. Boorstin, Op. cit., page 180.

  46. Bowle, Op. cit., page 363.

  47. Ibid., page 364.

  48. Schulze, Op. cit., pages 70–71.

  49. Bowle, Op. cit., page 365.

  50. Boorstin, Op. cit., page 186, who says the works are ‘labored’ and that it is surprising they have been so inspiring.

  51. Bronowski and Mazlish, Op. cit., page 210.

  52. Bowle, Op. cit., page 378.

  53. Ibid., pages 379–381.

  54. The Tractatus was originally published anonymously and, briefly, banned. The Jewish community of Amsterdam expelled him.

  55. Bowle, Op. cit., page 381. See: Richard H. Popkin, ‘Spinoza and Bible scholarship’, in: Don Garrett (editor), The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pages 383ff, which has many of Spinoza’s more pithy remarks on the scriptures.

  56. R. H. Delahunty, Spinoza, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984, pages 211–212.

  57. Bowle, Op. cit., page 383.

  58. Delahunty, Op. cit., page 7.

  59. Bowle, Op. cit., page 386.

  60. Ibid., page 387.

  61. Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, page 591.

  62. Giuseppe Mazzitta, The New Map of the World: The Poetic Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999, pages 100–101.

  63. Bowle, Op. cit., page 389.

  64. Joseph Mali, The Rehabilitation of Myth: Vico’s ‘New Science’, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1992, page 48.

  65. Ibid., pages 99ff, for the role of providence and curiosity.

  66. Bowle, Op. cit., page 393.

  67. Boorstin, Op. cit., page 233, for the way some of these ideas are echoed by Oswald Spengler.

  68. Bowle, Op. cit., page 395.

  69. T. C. W. Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe 1660–1789, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, page 2.

  70. Ibid., page 137.

  71. Ibid., page 208.

  72. Ibid., page 151.

  73. Ibid., pages 156–159.

  74. Israel, Op. cit., page 150.

  75. Ibid., page 151.

  76. Blanning, Op. cit., page 169.

  CHAPTER 25: THE ‘ATHEIST SCARE’ AND THE ADVENT OF DOUBT

  1. It was, as Thomas Kuhn puts it, in his monograph on the Copernican revolution, ‘the first European astronomical text that could rival the Almagest in depth and completeness’. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution, Op. cit., page 185.

  2. Ibid., page 186.

  3. Armstrong, A History of God, Op. cit., page 330.

  4. Popkin, The Third Force in Seventeenth-Century Thought, Op. cit., pages 102–103. See also: Moynahan, The Faith, Op. cit., page 354.

  5. Moynahan, Op. cit., page 357.

  6. Ibid., page 359.

  7. Ibid., page 360.

  8. Simon Fish, A Supplicacyion for the Beggars Rosa, quoted in Menno Simons, The Complete Writings, Scotsdale: University of Arizona Press, 1956, pages 140–141.

  9. Armstrong, Op. cit., page 330.

  10. Interestingly, Anaxagoras, an Ionian, and a pupil of Anaximenes of Miletus, held a number of views that anticipated Copernicus. He taught that the sun was not ‘animated’ in the way that the Athenians believed, and neither was it a god, but ‘a red-hot mass many times larger than the Peloponnese’. He also insisted that the moon was a solid body with geographical features–plains and mountains and valleys–just like the earth. Anaxagoras also believed that the world was round. J. M. Robertson, A History of Freethought, volume 1, London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1969, page 166.

  11. In fact there appears to have been something of a fashion for freethinking in Periclean Athens, where the aristocrats foreshadowed the thought in Voltaire’s France, in believing that ‘the common people’ needed religion ‘to restrain them’, but that they themselves needed no such restriction.

  12. Thrower, The Alternative Tradition, Op. cit., pages 173 and 225–226.

  13. Robertson, Op. cit., page 181.

  14. Thrower, Op. cit., pages 204ff and 223.

  15. Ibid., pages 63–65.

  16. Ibid., page 84.

  17. Ibid., page 122.

  18. Robertson, Op. cit., pages 395–396.

  19. Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods, Op. cit., page 25.

  20. Ibid., page 32.

  21. Ibid., page 70.

  22. Ibid., page 161.

  23. Robertson, Op. cit., pages 319–323.

  24. Lucien Febvre, The Problems of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1982, page 457.

  25. Jim Herrick, Against the Faith, London: Glover Blair, 1985, page 29.

  26. Barnes, An Intellectual and Cultural History, Op. cit., page 712.

  27. Though terrible for many people, it was at the same time liberating because, as Harry Elmer Barnes says, it freed man from ‘the medieval hell-neurosis’.

  28. Barnes, Op. cit., page 714.

  29. John Redwood, Reason, Ridicule and Religion, 1660–1750, London: Thames & Hudson, 1976, page 150.

  30. Febvre, Op. cit., page 340.

  31. Ibid., page 349.

  32. Barnes, Op. cit., page 715. As Febvre showed, a vernacular language such as French lacked both the vocabulary and the syntax for scepticism. Such words as ‘absolute’, ‘relative’, ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’, ‘occult’ or ‘sensitive’, or ‘intuition’, were not yet in u
se. These were all words coined in the eighteenth century. As Lucien Febvre puts it, ‘the sixteenth century was a century that wanted to believe’. Febvre, Op. cit., page 355.

  33. Redwood, Op. cit., page 30.

  34. Febvre, Op. cit., page 332.

  35. Kuhn quotes from a long cosmological poem, published in 1578 and very popular, which depicted Copernicans as

  Those clerks who think (think how absurd a jest) That neither heav’ns nor stars do turn at all, Nor dance about this great round earthly ball; But th’earth itself, this massy globe of ours, Turns round-about once every twice-twelve hours: And we resemble land-bred novices New brought aboard to venture on the seas; Who, at first launching from the shore, suppose The ship stands still, and that the ground it goes…

  36. Kuhn, Op. cit., page 190. Despite its views, even this book by Bodin was placed on the Index.

  37. Ibid., page 191. Luther’s principal lieutenant, Philip Melanchthon, went further, quoting biblical passages that Copernican theory disagreed with, notably Ecclesiastes 1:4–5, which states that ‘the earth abideth forever’ and that ‘The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose.’

  38. Ibid., page 191; see Israel, Radical Enlightenment, Op. cit., pages 27ff, for a different detailed discussion of heliocentrism and its reception. Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

  39. Kuhn, Op. cit., page 193.

  40. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, London: Penguin, 1971, page 4.

  41. Kuhn, Op. cit., page 197.

  42. Ibid., page 244.

  43. Tycho Brahe did work out an alternative explanation to Copernicus, which kept the earth at the centre of the universe, and the moon and sun in their old Ptolemaic orbits. But even this, the so-called ‘Tychonic’ system, necessitated the sun’s orbit intersecting with that of Venus and Mars. This meant that the traditional idea of the planets and stars orbiting around giant crystal balls could no longer be sustained.

  44. Thomas, Op. cit., page 416.

  45. Next, the spots on the sun, also revealed by the telescope, conflicted with both the idea of the perfection of the upper realm, while the way the spots appeared and disappeared betrayed yet more the mutability in the heavens. Worse still, the movement of the sun-spots suggested that the sun rotated on its axis in just the same way that Copernicus claimed the earth did. Kuhn, Op. cit., page 222.

  46. People tried, of course. Some of Galileo’s opponents refused even to look through a telescope, arguing that if God had meant man to see the heavens in that way he would have endowed him with telescopic eyes.

  47. And in the universities, Ptolemaic, Copernican and Tychonic systems of astronomy (see note 43 above) were taught side-by-side, the Ptolemaic and the Tychonic not being dropped until the eighteenth century.

  48. Kuhn, Op. cit., page 198.

  49. Popkin, Op. cit. Barnes, Op. cit., page 784. People did not, at first, see any conflict between religion and reason. Redwood, Op. cit., pages 214–215.

  50. See: Israel, Op. cit., chapter 12, ‘Miracles denied’, pages 218–229, for a fuller discussion of this subject; and Thomas, Op. cit., pages 59–60.

  51. Barnes, Op. cit., page 785.

  52. Herrick, Op. cit., page 38.

  53. The more you think about it, the harder it is to make this distinction.

  54. Redwood, Op. cit., page 140. The very concept of revelation took a knock at the end of the seventeenth century as the world of witches, apparitions, magical cures and charms suffered a near-fatal setback in the wake of the discoveries of science, which appeared to suggest an atomistic, determinist universe.

  55. Barnes, Op. cit., page 788.

  56. Redwood, Op. cit., page 179.

  57. Israel, Op. cit., page 519. Israel has a whole section on Collins, pages 614–619.

  58. Barnes, Op. cit., page 791.

  59. Herrick, Op. cit., page 58.

  60. A. C. Giffert, Protestant Thought Before Kant, New York: Scribners, 1915, pages 208ff.

  61. Roger Smith, Op. cit., page 282.

  62. Israel, Op. cit., page 266.

  63. Not that the deists were wholly negative in their views. A variant form of deism accepted the true Christianity of Jesus, but rejected the Christianity as it had grown up in the church.

  64. Barnes, Op. cit., page 794.

  65. Preserved Smith, History of Modern Culture, Op. cit., volume 2, page 522.

  66. See in particular the sections on scepticism in Stephen Buckle, Hume’s Enlightenment Tract, Oxford: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press, 2001, for example, pages 111–118, 167–168, 270–280.

  67. Ibid., pages 289–294.

  68. Herrick, Op. cit., page 105.

  69. Barnes, Op. cit., page 805.

  70. Herrick, Op. cit., page 33. There are those who doubt that Bayle was a true sceptic, but see him instead as a ‘fideist’, a believer who thought it his Christian duty to air his doubts, as a way to encourage others to be stronger in their faith. Roy Porter, The Enlightenment, London: Palgrave, 2001, page 15. There were also many French sceptics grouped around Denis Diderot (1713–1784), and his Encyclopédie. Figures such as d’Alembert and Helvétius argued, as Hume did, that what people learn as infants tends to stay with them all their lives, for good or ill.

  71. Herrick, Op. cit., page 29; Barnes, Op. cit., page 813; and Redwood, Op. cit., page 32.

  72. Armstrong, A History of God, Op. cit., page 350.

  73. Redwood, Op. cit., page 35.

  74. Israel, Op. cit., pages 41 and 60.

  75. Redwood, Op. cit., page 35.

  76. Ibid., page 181.

  77. Ibid., page 187.

  78. Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza, Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1979, pages 215–216. See also the same author’s The History of Scepticism from Savonarola to Bayle (revised and expanded edition), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Redwood, Op. cit., page 34.

  79. Barnes, Op. cit., page 816.

  80. Redwood, Op. cit., page 120.

  81. Israel, Op. cit., page 605.

  82. In some geology departments in modern universities, 23 October is still ‘celebrated’, ironically, as the anniversary of the earth’s birthday.

  83. Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought, Op. cit., page 315.

  84. Rosenberg and Bloom, The Book of J, Op. cit.

  85. Israel, Op. cit., page 142.

  86. Redwood, Op. cit., page 131.

  87. Mayr, Op. cit., page 316.

  88. Boyle actually said that he believed in ‘natural morality’. Herrick, Op. cit., page 39.

  89. Barnes, Op. cit., page 821.

  CHAPTER 26: FROM SOUL TO MIND: THE SEARCH FOR THE LAWS OF HUMAN NATURE

  1. Bronowski and Mazlish, Op. cit., pages 247ff.

  2. Boorstin, The Seekers, Op. cit., page 193 for Voltaire’s flight to London, and its effects. Geoffrey Hawthorn, Enlightenment and Despair: A History of Social Theory, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1976, page 11, for Voltaire’s education and how it bred intellectual independence; and pages 10–11 for the English influence on the French Enlightenment (Locke and Newton).

  3. Bronowski and Mazlish, Op. cit., page 249.

  4. Ibid.

  5. Quoted Ibid., page 250.

  6. Ibid., page 251.

  7. Raymond Naves, Voltaire et l’Encyclopédie, Paris, 1938.

  8. P. N. Furbank, Diderot, London: Secker & Warburg, 1992, page 73.

  9. Ibid., page 84. See also: Boorstin, Op. cit., page 196.

  10. Furbank, Op. cit., page 87.

  11. After many problems. See Ibid., page 92.

  12. Norman Hampson, The Enlightenment, page 53.

  13. Ibid., pages 53–54.

  14. Alfred Ewert, The French Language, London: Faber & Faber, 1964, pages 1–2.

  15. Ibid., pages 8–9.

  16. M. K. Pope
, From Latin to Modern French, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1952, page 49.