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The
readings for this lesson raise questions parallel to those we asked
earlier in connection with “The Royal
Society and the New Science” (Lesson 21).
The interest in observation and speculation begun at the Restoration led
to Newtonian physics and
Lockean
psychology, charting the outer world of nature and inner universe of human
experience. What spirituality and other
traditional ideology did the new
science and
rationalism of
the
Enlightenment displace?
The answer seems to be: as little displacement as possible occurred.
The church
had fractured into many parts; few people wanted to continue the
religious wars that had blemished the Tudor-Stuart period. Yet religious
beliefs and dogmas remained. Note how the writers in this section of our anthology establish positions resistant to
empirical approach. They are all,
in their various ways, doing the opposite of what Sprat declares the
Fellows of the Royal Society are up to. The Fellows’ “purpose
was to heap up a mixed mass of experiments, without digesting them into
any perfect model,” but these writers in the "Mind and God" perspectives
section assert order, completion and wholeness,
either in the mechanical workings of the universe, the epistemological
workings of the mind, or other asserted "divine works." The
argument
from design that we know as "Creationism"
and "Intelligent
Design" arose in this period.
Alexander Pope revisited
 A
Pope selection that fits this theme of
divine order is the
Essay on Man,
which is not a philosophical argument but a poetic distillation of one.
In his introduction Pope says, he “chose verse, and even
rhyme,” in order to “strike the reader more strongly at first” and to be
the more memorable afterward. Pope thinks he can be more persuasive in
poetry than in prose. The Essay is not only poetic but informal, taking the form
of an epistle (letter) to one of his friends,
Henry St. John. The title
also suggests informality, an "essay" (meaning "trial" as
Montaigne and
Bacon had used the
term). Does this choice of poetic and conversational form allow
Pope to dispense with science, logic and reasoning, even formal
learning?
It was
Milton's purpose in
Paradise Lost
to justify the ways of God to mankind, and Pope
chooses the same theme for his essay (ll 17). Notice that instead of
arguing from scripture as Milton had done in reworking the Genesis story
of Eden, and instead of beginning with concrete facts or specifics of
empirical observation, Pope begins his conversation with abstract
universals or generalities (e.g., we all know that God created the
universe, so the only question is whether God assigned man to the wrong
place). Pope's argument depends heavily on similes and metaphors (just
as the horse does not know why he is being ridden, so human beings don't
know God's purpose for them; the book of fate is hidden from all
creatures, so people must accept the limits of their knowledge, etc.).
Has Pope attempted to create a new poetic scripture? Is he a friend or
foe of the new learning and experimental method?
Why
has not Man a microscopic eye?
For this plain reason, Man is not
a fly. (ll193-194)
Is Pope
accusing Hooke of
looking too close at things?
Isaac Newton
 In
the "Mind and God" section of our anthology we find texts of various
genres or forms. What are the various rhetorical merits of the letter,
the essay, the dialogue, the hymn, the psalm, the poem? Why have these
genres been selected by the authors represented here?
Like Pope,
Newton (1643-1727) explains his beliefs in the form
of a letter.
Of course, his choice of genre is largely
predetermined: he’s responding by letter to Bentley’s letter asking for
help in understanding the relationships between Newtonian science and
religious faith. But what does the letter form permit Newton to say?
He can, and does of course, essentially write a small essay, but that
essay takes on the qualities of a private conversation in which doubts,
implicit or explicit, can be answered directly.
Only Bentley must be addressed by Newton in
the letter. Other "minds" can be dismissed. The narrow audience allows informality almost at the level
of a personal conversation. Therefore after the letter lays out its
shared agenda (“I had an eye upon such principles as might work
with considering men for the belief of a Deity”), it then supports that
agenda with personal statements: “I do not think”; “I know no reason but”; “I see
not why”; “I see nothing extraordinary.” Newton does not say: it is, only,
I
think it is. Opinion is acceptable on this occasion; it would not be
acceptable at a meeting of the Royal Society or in a
treatise on the laws of motion.
The letter creates a supernatural
universe beyond the natural one. The supernatural exists
by inference. Nature is not “explicable by mere natural causes,”
so its origin must be ascribed “to
the counsel and contrivance of a voluntary agent.” The Creator is
premised on the basis of physical laws which appear to
be universal throughout nature. Order is established.
However, Newton's sense of being “forced to ascribe” to
a Deist
conclusion will not be shared by
skeptics like
David Hume. The
Deist or Creationist conclusion may be plausible, but
it is not inevitable. As the introduction
to this "Mind and God" section points out, “for Newton, Locke, and countless other
inquirers, empiricism promised to explain the ways of God; but they had
begun a process which, in other hands, might threaten to explain God
away.”
John Locke
 Locke
(1632-1704) did for psychology what Newton did for
physics. His
epistemology
seems part and parcel of the
eighteenth-century fascination with things, with lists, with a
compartmentalizing of the universe, and with attempts to explain that
all of this superficially diverse phenomena is deeply
unified. For Locke big ideas arise from small ideas, and small ideas in
turn arise from sensations and perceptions of things.
The greatest idea would be the collection of ideas,
based on the most sensations and perceptions.
Locke argues that when
an English person sees or thinks of a swan, she sees or thinks of a
“white color, long neck, red beak, black legs, and web feet, and all
these of a certain size, with a power of swimming in the water, and
making a certain kind of noise.” The mind puts these things
together to construct a whole swan. The “whole” comes second to the parts.
In this same way Locke concludes we put together the idea of God, composed of
bits of what we know magnified to an imagined perfection. This is not to
say that Locke does not believe in God, or that he believes only in a
humanly constructed God. He says that the human organism is capable
of understanding God only in this limited human way. He is no less Deist
than Newton.
Isaac Watts
The selections from
Watts
(1674-1748) here show two very
different minds. One is rhythmical and orderly; the other is free-verse. “A Prospect of Heaven Makes Death Easy” offers
a simple metrical and rhyme scheme that opens with a promise (“There is”), and that opening offers us
everything we habitually dream about: no pain, no night, no faded
flowers. Its middle describes the timorous Us, fearful of the impeding
isthmus; its end describes the larger, telescopic perspective that would
and should nudge us into faith. The questions get resolved quickly and
and firmly through the poetic form using simple meter and rhymes. This
hymn offers a structure of reassurance fundamentally different from the
structure of argument, which argues with doubt in such a different way.
This hymn records the experience of doubt but displaces it swiftly with
the promise of a larger perspective.
 Watts’s
“The Hurry of Spirits” is a very different animal, a "spiritual song"
rather than a "hymn." Its free verse permits the doubt. Little is
“closed” between lines; much spills over into the next. Clauses or even
sentences often end in the middle of lines; form as well as content is
in a relative uproar, only relatively contained by a basic pentameter.
The choice of forms here reflects the subject matter and audience.
“Abrupt, ill-sorted” abruptly stops a line and asks for sorting (l. 20).
“Against Idleness and
Mischief” and "Man Frail, and God Eternal" return to smooth sorting. The
hymns are addressed to God; they call God to hear with the biggest most
pleasing sound that people can produce. The whole idea of form is
crucial in Watts: when to bolster with meter and rhyme and music and a
general sense of congregational chorus to support an idea, and when to
let the idea bleed itself out in more tense, private or disunified ways.
Joseph Addison ("Adam's son")
.jpg) Addison’s
Spectator
essay raises its own questions: what’s the relative
importance of solitude in negotiating the difficulties of faith? The
eighteenth century was an age of conversation, but as the introduction
points out, it was also an age of solitude. Addison observes that the
world is too much with us; as Hume says, “our eyes cannot turn in our
sockets without varying our perceptions.” Precisely because knowledge
was coming to be perceived as the product of sensory experience, we need
time to sort things out, to watch the operations of our own mind, to
“reflect” in Locke’s sense. The very obviousness of God, on Newton’s
argument from design, requires an observer who is not too caught up in
the empiricism of his or her own daily life.
Note Addison’s switch from prose to poetry: the
difference in typesetting on the page is something to consider. Does it
call the readers to a different mode of thinking? We are forcibly moved
from the engulfing prose of the page to the spatially isolated ode; the
large margins of page-space itself give room for reflective thought?
George Berkeley
 Bishop
Berkeley (1685-1753) chooses dialogue for his form. Why? How does it help to have
two persons on the stage? What is the difference between expounding and
discussing? The reader, in a dialogue, is given voice, so to speak, and
even a choice of voices with whom to identify. The choice is programmed,
of course, towards the mind-loving Philonous, but at least the reader is
offered an outlet, a way of asking those embarrassingly obvious
questions. How does Berkeley work to make Philonous’s position seem the
right, the sensible, the transparent choice? How does conversation
itself work to make abstract ideas concrete, to make philosophical
peculiarities seem common-sensical?
Even some great minds of the eighteenth century never
felt fully satisfied with Berkeley’s system.
Boswell recounts
Samuel
Johnson’s distinctive form of refutation: “After we came out of the
church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s
ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every
thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are
satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I
shall never forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking
his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from
it, ‘I refute it thus’” (Life of Johnson [Oxford UP, 1980] 333). How
would Philonous answer Johnson?
 David
Hume
Hume
(1711-1776) poses a modern theory of identity—basically,
that we have none, it’s all convenient psychological construct. This
uncomfortable idea was not widely accepted in the 18th
century, but it offers perhaps the best theoretical
basis for understanding much of 18th century
literature. The general cultural preoccupation with masks, costume and
display all suggest a search for some sort of identity, some sort of
stability, after a loss of certainty about self. Hume himself connected personal identity and theater: “The
mind is a kind of theater, where several perceptions successively make
their appearance: pass, re-pass, glide away and mingle in an infinite
variety of postures and situations.”
The question "who am I?" had been easier
to answer in the Middle Ages and the early modern
period. It was a century of new genres based on
exploration of the self: biography, autobiography, familiar letters, travel
narratives, and the novel.
Hume is not happy with himself. Where Addison recommends retirement for self-study,
self-composure, and acquaintance with God, Hume finds himself “ready to
throw all [his] books and papers into the fire” and find a sociable game
of backgammon. He “is convinced that skepticism is logically irrefutable; nevertheless,
he is convinced also that scepticism is psychologically untenable”
(James Sambrook, The Eighteenth Century: The
Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature, 1700–1789
[Longman, 1990], 60). The path of philosophy, of
solitary contemplation, when truly steadily pursued, leads the pursuer
into skeptical darkness; careful questions and honest answers dissolve ideas of self, of cause and effect, of an external
world, of God. How can human beings live in this cold darkness?
Christopher Smart
Where does poetry find a place in an era
of science, reason and doubt? Is there a place for
unreason? In the age of books, poets assumed the place
which had been occupied in the Middle Ages by mystics.
Their inspired speech was taken to have prophetic
qualities or gifts of madness. It could penetrate divine
order or at least lay bare the hidden soul.
In
Oxford in the 1740s, Robert Lowth (1710–87) delivered lectures in which
he demonstrated the differences between Old Testament prose, marked by
regular word order (“correct, chaste, and temperate”), and poetry, in
which “the free spirit is hurried along, and has neither leisure nor
inclination to descend to those minute and rigid attentions. Frequently,
instead of disguising the secret feelings of the author, it lays them
quite open to public view; and the veil being as it were suddenly
removed, all the affections and emotions of the soul, its sudden
impulses, its hasty sallies and irregularities, are conspicuously
displayed” (Lowth,
The Sacred Poetry of the
Hebrews, trans. by G. Gregory [1787], lecture
14; quoted in Sambrook, 188).
 A
similar notion of poetry as "feelings" informs "Jubilate
Agno" by
Christopher Smart (1722-1771). Smart constructs a
God-warmed universe with strategies utterly unlike mathematical or philosophical
discourse—without argument, without formulas, without deduction, without
induction, but instead with bits of religious history, with linguistic puns,
with Hebraic parallelism, with public emotion, with sudden impulses,
with moving irregularities.
What are the
linguistic, historic, emotional, religious, and imaginative connections
that sustain this all-encompassing prayer?
William Cowper
 As
with Watts, it is revealing to watch the change in generic form as
Cowper
(1731-1800) changes his poetic perspective. The three selections in our
anthology offer different attitudes, different tones, different
structures, different visions. What is the difference between the kind
of vision or observation made possible by “philosophic tube” (the
telescope) and by poetry, by the word of God? What does it mean to
“baptize” philosophy? How does poetry itself work into that process?
It has been suggested that Cowper’s verse “rises in
technical control when he approaches matters of close personal concern,”
most poignantly in the Calvinistic allegory of “The Cast-away” (Pat
Rogers, “Literature,” in Eighteenth-Century
Britain: The Cambridge Cultural History,
ed. Boris Ford [Cambridge UP, 1991, 1992], 170). The
poet's choices of structure, rhyme scheme, meter, and stanza pattern, all
contribute to the power of the anguish and loss in religious despair. Like the other writers in this
lesson, Cowper moves from
experience to reflection, from empirical data to philosophical
implication, from a story current in the world around him to a darker
story within himself. Cowper’s poems reveal both the promise of hope and
the thread of doubt occasioned by very “advances” in science and
reason in the eighteenth century.
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Left: Alexander Pope.
Left: Isaac Newton.
Left: John Locke.
Image left:
modern statue of hymnist Isaac Watts in Southampton, UK.
Left: journalist, poet
and playwright Joseph Addison, but that's not his hair.
Left: Bishop Berkeley as seen in the National Portrait Gallery,
London. If you kicked this small painting, it might not hurt your foot
too much (although you would probably be arrested).
Left: Scottish
skeptical philosopher David Hume (shorter hair), a chief member of the
Scottish
Enlightenment.
Left: poet
Christopher Smart. Affecting madness was expected of poets in the age of
reason.
Left:
mad poet William
Cowper. |