The Third Earl of Shaftesbury

A Study in Eighteenth-Century Literary Theory

R.L. Brett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000031270
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The third Earl of Shaftesbury had generally been known as the forerunner of the Moral Sense school of philosophers in the eighteenth century. Surprisingly little attention had been paid to his importance for literature and yet undoubtedly this had been very great. Originally published in 1951, this study gives an account of Shaftesbury's aesthetic and literary theory; his discussion of the imagination, ridicule, the aesthetic judgment and the sublime; and his anticipation of later writers such as Burke, Coleridge and Kant. It also considers Shaftesbury's thought as part of the background of ideas in the Augustan period and his influence in such fields as literature, architecture and landscape gardening. In addition, the author assesses in more general terms Shaftesbury's attempt to maintain a Platonic viewpoint that would be more congenial to poetry than Locke's "new way of ideas".

CHAPTER I

THE CAMBRIDGE PLATONISTS

“All things are artificial, for nature is the art of God.”

(Sir Thomas Browne: Religio Medici.)

I

BEFORE we approach Shaftesbury directly it is necessary in this first chapter to say something of the history of ideas in the seventeenth century and particularly of the disputes that centred in the figure of Hobbes. With few exceptions everything that has been written about Shaftesbury sees him as a thinker of the Enlightenment. He was this, of course, but his writings are an endeavour to answer questions which had been posed in the latter half of the seventeenth century. To fail to understand this is to fail to understand Shaftesbury. Nor is this a consideration that applies only to Shaftesbury. The habit of dividing literature into periods leads us to think of the Age of Anne as quite separate from the preceding century, and little attention has been paid to the transition between the two and the sources from which the Age of Anne drew its inspiration. This is particularly so with literary criticism, where the early part of the eighteenth century is seen as the beginning of a modern period and judged merely from that viewpoint. Though there is much to support this view, such a habit of mind leads us to overlook features that do not fit into this pattern. The general idea of the reign of Anne is that it was an age of reason, with critics such as Addison unaccountable exceptions to the general neo-classical rule, but to regard it in this way is to miss much of the complexity of the age. Its chief characteristic was an appeal, not to pure reason, but to common sense and experience. It was an age above all of empiricism, but an empiricism that was sometimes modified by an idealism deriving from quite a different philosophical tradition. This tradition was the Platonic one and its importance to literature and criticism at the end of the seventeenth century and during the reign of Anne has too frequently been overlooked. It was from this tradition that Shaftesbury sprang, and with it most of this chapter will be concerned.

A good deal of attention has been paid in recent years to the effect of philosophy on literature, and especially on poetry, in the seventeenth century. The whole movement of philosophy which started with Descartes and which was accompanied by the vast expansion of scientific inquiry and achievement, has been seen, and no doubt rightly, as producing an atmosphere inimical to poetry. The view of the universe its influence had made the generally accepted one, was that of a mechanism run on mathematical principles and devoid of colour, scent, taste and sound. Science had enlarged the size of the universe, but had turned it into a lifeless machine, which worked by forces that could be expressed in mathematical formulae, but not in poetry. What was real was what could be measured, weighed and expressed in numbers, not what could be made the subject of poetry. Such writers as A. N. Whitehead, Basil Willey and Douglas Bush have all made the point that the mechanical view of the world is one that does not commend itself to the poet. Its declaration that what is “really real,” is a world of atoms in motion, devoid of all secondary sense qualities, such as colour, scent, taste and sound, ordered by causal laws and explicable only in terms of mathematics, is one that gives little status to the poet. It is one, indeed, that gives little status to man himself, since, once the process of scientific explanation had started, it was soon seen that man himself, as part of the natural order; could be explained in similar terms. Poetry was not alone in suffering the effects of the new movement; religion itself was its companion.

The main stream of thought in the seventeenth century developed in such a way that poetry found it increasingly difficult to justify its own existence. The influence of Descartes had been harsh enough. As Jean-Baptiste Rousseau said in an often-quoted letter, “la philosophie de Descartes avait coupé la gorge à la poésie.” But the philosophy of Hobbes was even worse. For both men the task of philosophy was to bring as many phenomena as possible within a system of explanation based on the laws of motion. The Cartesian philosophy, however, did at least leave an independent place in the universe to both God and mind. For Hobbes, on the other hand, God was only the ‘prime-mover’, the first link in a causal chain which, once started, required no further help. Mind was explained in terms of motion. Once given the Cartesian dualism, it is easy to see that subsequent thinking would be tempted into trying to resolve one side of the dualism into the other; to explain everything either in terms of mind, or in terms of matter. It is equally obvious, so impressive were the results of the physical sciences, that the likelier choice in the seventeenth century should be matter and not mind.

Neither the theories of Descartes nor of Hobbes could justify the claim of poetry to be dealing with the truth. Poetry is concerned with the sort of experience that their philosophies could not account for. In particular, religious poetry, which attempts to reach out from the finite to the infinite, was robbed of its meaning. Poetry could take over the truths worked out by rational processes in philosophy and science, but it could not adumbrate its own truths. The relationship between the finite and infinite, in any case, was merely a simple one of causation; the relation between the clockmaker and the clock which he winds. Poetry, in attempting to find another or more profound relationship, was doing something that could not be justified on rational grounds and the attempt was either stupid or presumptuous.

This summarizes what is by now a well-known account of the relationship between philosophy and poetry in the seventeenth century. Less has been written about what might be called the counter-movement to what has been described; yet if we are to understand Shaftesbury properly we must consider this opposition in some detail. The impact of the mechanical philosophy on poetry was so great that perhaps attention has been paid to this at the expense of recognizing how strong was the fight put up against a mechanical view of the universe. Some, at least, both philosophers and poets, in the seventeenth century, realized the implications of the scientific movement and saw that it led to a view of reality which cut across the truths of both religion and poetry. For, as Ralph Cudworth said, the writings of Hobbes and Descartes

“make God to be nothing else in the world, but an idle spectator of the various results of the fortuitous and necessary motions of bodies; … They made a kind of dead and wooden world, as it were a carved statue, that hath nothing neither vital nor magical at all in it.” (True Intellectual System, ed. Harrison, I, 220–221.)

The opponents of Hobbes were, in the main, theologians and philosophers, who saw the problem intellectually, though there were poets, too, who felt the new philosophy to be uncongenial to their work and welcomed an alternative more sympathetic to a poetic view of things. The answer in general terms that they made to mechanism was based upon a spiritual interpretation of reality derived from Christianity and Platonism, though their Platonism was often combined with neo-Platonic elements that were a later gloss on the philosopher’s work.

At Cambridge, especially, there had been a revival of Platonic studies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. From the time when Roger Ascham became the first Regius Professor of Greek in 1540, there had been a steady increase in Greek studies, accompanied by a new interest in Platonism. In particular, in the latter half of the seventeenth century, there was a group of theologians in the University, who have come to be known as the Cambridge Platonists. These.men were distinguished both for their intellectual ability and the spiritual quality of their lives. Bishop Burnet, describing the Church in the reign of Charles II, pays great tribute to them. The good divines, he tells us, were

“so few, that, if a new sect of men had not appeared of another stamp, the Church had quite lost her esteem over the Nation. These were generally of Cambridge, formed under some divines, the chief of whom were Drs. Whitchcot, Cudworth, Wilkins, More and Worthington.” (Burnet’s History of His Own Time, pubd. posthumously, 1724–1734, Vol: I, 186.)

Burnet describes each of the men in turn and refers to their fight against Hobbes. He sees very clearly that Hobbes for them was the most formidable opponent and that their chief work, spread over nearly half a century, was in combating his influence. His account of Hobbes, though too long to quote in full, is shrewd as well as quaint.

“Hobbes, who had long followed the Court, and passed there for a mathematical man, tho’ he really knew little that way, being disgusted by the Court, came into England in Cromwell’s time, and published a very wicked work, with a very strange title, The Leviathan. His main principles were, that all men acted under an absolute necessity, in which he seemed protected by the then received doctrine of absolute decrees. He seemed to think that the universe was God, and that souls were material, Thought being only subtil and unperceptible motion. He thought interest and. fear were the chief principles of society; And he put all morality in the following that which was our own private will or advantage. He thought religion had no other foundation than the laws of the land…. So this set of men at Cambridge studied to assert, and examine the principles of religion and morality on clear grounds, and in a philosophical method.” (ibid, pp. 187–8.)

The Cambridge Platonists, or ‘Latitude-men’ as they were sometimes called, were liberal theologians who wished to reconcile the claims of Christianity with the findings of science. While remaining orthodox in religion, they wished to give due place to scientific discovery and some of them, indeed, were well abreast of the scientific developments of their day. At first some had been attracted by the Cartesian philosophy and it was only later, when they realized its implications, that they disowned it. What they disliked was the view of the universe that was being built up on the foundation of scientific achievement. They felt that the philosophy of thinkers like Hobbes denied the possibility of certain sorts of experience which to them were real and important. They were sufficiently impressed by the methods and achievements of science, however, to feel that the old Christian cosmology could not be accepted literally, and yet they were passionately intent on retaining the truths of the Christian faith, which they felt gave the only satisfactory explanation of the whole of man’s moral, spiritual and intellectual experience.

The work of the Cambridge Platonists consisted, therefore, in building up a new world-picture which would reconcile religion and science. There were those who claimed that not only the mythology,¹ but the truths behind the mythology of the Christian faith, had been invalidated by the new science. It was here that the Cambridge Platonists joined issue with the mechanistic philosophers and defended their religious beliefs against the writings of men like Hobbes and other “professed theists of later times, who might notwithstanding have an undiscerned tang of the mechanic atheism, hanging about them” and who admitted

“no other causes of things as philosophical, save the material and mechanical only; this being really to banish all mental, and consequently divine causality, quite out of the world; and to make the whole world to be nothing else but a mere heap of dust, fortuitously agitated.” (True Intellectual System, I, p. 217.)

As might be expected, any conflict between Christianity and science came to a head on the question of how far the Scriptures could be accepted as true. Can we believe both the Bible and the findings of modern science? The answer in the seventeenth century, as in the nineteenth century, was that we cannot, if the Old Testament is accepted as a literal and historical account. On the other hand, if such narratives as Genesis are regarded as allegory or myth, the conflict can be resolved. The Cambridge Platonists, by giving the Scriptures an allegorical interpretation, were able to avoid difficulties at certain points where modern science appeared to conflict with the literal narrative. Thus Henry More, in his Conjectura Cabbalistica (1653), argued that the Bible is not always to be regarded as a literal and historical record, but can be viewed on different levels of explanation of a symbolic and mythical kind.

¹By mythology I do not, of course, mean something that is untrue. I mean the presentation of facts in allegorical or symbolic forms.

This sort of explanation is very old in the history of scriptural exegesis. It seems to have become prominent in the Alexandria of the first century B.C., where Greek culture met the Hebrew religion. Philo and other Alexandrian Hellenists were faced, as were the Cambridge Platonists later, with the problem how to reconcile a religious mythology with a philosophical tradition that worked in logical and conceptual language. It was not that the philosophical tradition invalidated or superseded the religious mythology, but that the religious mythology had to be translated into terms acceptable to the philosophical understanding.

Such a method of interpreting sacred writings so that the products of the religious imagination could be seen as myths embodying general truths, was not new even to Philo and his school. It had been used by the Greeks in interpreting the Homeric writings and it is something, although not without its dangers, which must commend itself to the poetic imagination, which expresses its meaning in symbols and myth. It is something, in fact, which commends itself to everyone, for everyone is to some extent an artist. When we read how Christ talked with Moses and Elias, in a cloud on the Mount of Transfiguration, and again, at His Ascension, was taken up into a cloud, we easily comprehend that the cloud represents the presence of God, and scarcely need to be told that the New Testament writers were using an example of imaginative expression well known in the Old Testament. This kind of interpretation is not limited to sacred writings; all poetry uses the language of imagery rather than that of systematic thought. This was one of the reasons, as we shall see, why the philosophy of the Cambridge Platonists was welcomed by many contemporary poets. The scientific way of thinking regarded language as meaningful only in so far as it dealt in straightforward statements of fact. The philosophy of the Cambridge men, on the other hand, took seriously the work of the artistic imagination.

Like the Alexandrian Hellenists, the Cambridge Platonists were faced with the task of relating an old religion to a new sort of knowledge. There have been those in the Christian tradition who have felt that such an effort is misplaced and that the attempt to work out a natural theology is not only doomed to failure, but is a sinful presumption on the part of human reason. The Cambridge Platonists were convinced that the attempt should be made and that the natural world could be related to the supernatural by reason as well as by special revelation. They felt that the natural world was God’s world and that He could be discerned therein, not in a manner that rendered the Incarnation superfluous, but in a way that was congruous with it. Their favourite image for describing God was that of Light. God ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Frontispiece
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Note
• Preface
• Chapter I. The Cambridge Platonists
• Chapter II. The Life and Writings of Shaftesbury
• Chapter III. Shaftesbury’s Philosophy
• Chapter IV. The Ancients and Moderns
• Chapter V. The Creative Imagination
• Chapter VI. The Aesthetic Judgment
• Chapter VII.The Sublime
• Chapter VIII.The Doctrine of Ridicule
• Chapter IX. The Influence of Shaftesbury’s Thought
• Chapter X. The Crisis of Reason
• Appendix
• Index