Enlightenment and Dissent

prelims:Layout 1 16/2/12 11:23 Page 1 EST A VE N R IT G A A S M E T T BI PRAEVALE Enlightenment and Dissent No. 27 2011 prelims:Layout 1 16/2/12 11:23 Page 2 prelims:Layout 1 16/2/12 11:23 Page 3 Contents Page v Editorial Articles 1 Clarke on Virtue and Reasonableness S H Smith 19 Thomas Paine and his British Critics H T Dickinson Documentary Articles 83 Thirteen uncollected letters of Richard Price Rémy Duthille 143 A further seven uncollected letters of Richard Price Paul Frame Review articles 161 Other voices of the Enlightenment: Religious Dissent, Romanticism and the Rights of Woman Mary Spongberg 168 On Being a Nonconformist Martin Fitzpatrick 174 Thomas Paine and his American Critics H T Dickinson Reviews 186 Pamela Clemit ed., The Letters of William Godwin: Volume I: 1778-1797 H T Dickinson 188 James Vigus ed., Henry Crabb Robinson: Essays on Kant, Schelling, and German Aesthetics Vilem Mudroch prelims:Layout 1 16/2/12 11:23 Page 4 192 Sarah Apetrei, Women, Feminism and Religion in Early Enlightenment England Lionel Laborie 195 Mark R M Towsey. Reading the Scottish Enlightenment. Books and their Readers in Provincial Scotland, 1750-1820 Mark G Spencer 198 Wayne Hudson, Enlightenment and Modernity: The English Deists and Reform James Dybikowski 204 John P Wright, Hume’s ‘A Treatise of Human Nature’: An Introduction Mark G Spencer 208 John Marshall, John Locke, toleration and early Enlightenment culture Alan P F Sell 213 Robert D Cornwall and William Gibson eds., Religion, Politics and Dissent, 1660-1832. Essays in Honour of James E. Bradley John Gascoigne prelims:Layout 1 16/2/12 11:23 Page 5 EDITORIAL When the three volumes of the correspondence of Richard Price edited by D O Thomas and Bernard Peach were published one did not have great expectations of further letters being discovered. In this issue we publish another twenty! Part of the explanation for this lies in the searchable facilities now available through new online data bases. Genealogical research has also been facilitated in the same way enabling the identification of members of the complex dynasty of the Price/Morgans. Fruitful contacts with the genealogists and descendants of Price – John Morgan, David Perry, and Nicola Bennetts – has yielded from the family archive a new letter from Price, which give us an insight into the family life of Price, and more accurate identification of the Prices and Morgans. Of course, one should not underestimate the amount of traditional archive work which has gone into the findings of Rémy Duthille and Paul Frame. We are grateful for their willingness to publish their findings in this journal. One special feature of this number is the twenty one illustrations for Professor Dickinson’s article. Authors will know how difficult it is to persuade presses to publish illustrations even when there is an obvious need for them. We are therefore especially grateful to the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland for supporting the publication of these illustrations especially those in full colour. Last November the Dr. Williams’s Centre for Dissenting Studies hosted a symposium in celebration of this journal, on the broad topic of ‘Enlightenment, Dissent and Toleration’. It proved to be a very successful occasion and the papers will be published in the next number. We extend our thanks to the Centre for its support. MHF JD prelims:Layout 1 16/2/12 11:23 Page 6 ED_book_6_2_12:Layout 1 16/2/12 11:24 Page 1 CLARKE ON VIRTUE AND REASONABLENESS S H Smith Historians of ideas have had a number of reasons to be interested in the work of Samuel Clarke. His correspondence with Leibniz in defence of Newton is important in the history of the philosophy of physics. He is important in the history of Dissent, due to his subtle view of the nature of Christ and the consequences of its publication1. His sermons on moral subjects have also been praised for their outstanding literary qualities.2 However, while Clarke’s ethical theory (as outlined in his second set of Boyle lectures3) was seriously debated at the time of its publication, he occupies a less exalted position in the history of British moral philosophy than might be expected from his intellectual stature in his lifetime4. There are two related reasons why this might be the case. First, later British writers such as Wollaston and Price expounded doctrines in meta-ethics that had a significant similarity to Clarke’s views; however, they placed moral philosophy at the centre of their concerns, whereas Clarke’s views, as we shall see, often served his natural theology. This theology was often the focus of contemporaries, sometimes to the exclusion of his ethical theory, and became unfashionable in the 1 See J P Ferguson, Dr Samuel Clarke: An eighteenth century heretic (Kineton, 1976) for a detailed account. 2 Samuel Johnson considered Clarke as having written the best sermons in the English language ‘bating a little heresy’; clearly referring to Clarke’s supposed Arianism. See G B Hill ed., Johnsonian miscellanies (2 vols., Oxford, 1897) II, 305. 3 A discourse concerning the being and attributes of God, the obligations of natural religion, and the truth and certainty of the Christian Revelation, in Samuel Clarke, Works (4 vols., 1738, reprinted New York, 1978), II, 595-733. In what follows, I quote these lectures as passages from Works. 4 An anecdote concerning Clarke’s doctoral examination demonstrates how far Clarke’s abilities exceeded the majority of his contemporaries, and even his superiors. This can be found in Ferguson, Dr Samuel Clarke, 40-1. For a brief snapshot of Clarke’s polymathism, see W Sorley, A history of British philosophy to 1900 (Cambridge, 1965), 155. 1 ED_book_6_2_12:Layout 1 16/2/12 11:24 Page 2 Clarke on Virtue and Reasonableness generation after Clarke.5 Second, later commentators on Clarke have generally interpreted him as leaving unresolved a major tension between virtue and self-interest – a tension that finally suggests incoherence. I contend that the reason for such interpretations is that later commentators have, paradoxically, not taken account of the theological context of his arguments, and that plausible interpretations are available which eliminate the supposed incoherence. I Clarke is generally considered to be one of the ‘ethical rationalists’ of British moral philosophy in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.6 His predecessors were Cambridge Platonists such as More and Cudworth;7 his successors, to greater or lesser degrees, were Balguy, Wollaston, and Price. Broadly, the doctrine of ethical rationalism was that reason by itself determines the fundamental principles of morality – morality that is itself ‘eternal and immutable’.8 Clarke was also influenced very greatly by Cicero.9 Through Cicero, Clarke was influenced by middle Stoics such as Panaetius (of whom Cicero takes himself to be an expositor10). The relation of Cicero’s views to Clarke’s will be mentioned in section V of this essay; all of these influences will be relevant to the interpretation of Clarke. The particulars of Clarke’s moral theory, as he presents it in the greater part of the second Boyle lecture, are as follows. Clarke has a Platonic view of the grounds of moral truth and virtuous action that is derived in 5 Joseph Butler corresponded with Clarke (as ‘a Gentleman in Gloucestershire’) concerning Clarke’s arguments for the existence of God: but not about his ethical theory. This correspondence was later published: see Clarke, Works, II, 735-58. For some of the history of the tendency towards natural theology in British philosophy, see J J MacIntosh, ‘The argument for the need for similar or ‘higher’ qualities: Cudworth, Locke and Clarke on God’s existence’, Enlightenment and Dissent, 16 (1997), 29-59. 6 See Stephen Darwall, The British moralists and the internal ‘ought’ (Cambridge, 1991), 111. 7 See Darwall, The British moralists, 112, footnote 9. 8 See Frederick Beiser, The sovereignty of reason (Princeton, 1996), 267. 9 For a summary, see Martha K Zebrowski, ‘The Christian Platonism and natural law of Samuel Clarke’, in Enlightenment and Dissent 16 (1997), 3-28, at 25-8. 10 Cicero, De officiis (New York, 1912), 9. 2 ED_book_6_2_12:Layout 1 16/2/12 11:24 Page 3 S H Smith its outline from Cambridge Platonists such as Cudworth.11 He believes that moral truths are eternal, immutable, a priori, and necessary,12 and that they are acquired through the operation of a faculty that he variously calls Reason, or the Understanding.13 Sometimes he uses metaphors of perception to describe the operation of this faculty.14 At other times he uses such metaphors of intuition as the detection of mathematical inconsistency or contradiction.15 Moral truths are not created through the power of some agent, state, or even by being willed by God.16 However, there is reason to hold that he believed these truths ultimately to originate with the Reason of God.17 The existence of certain entities in the world (including people) entails certain abstract relations between those entities and others; and certain actions on the part of agents are fit or unfit in light of these relations, thus generating unchanging obligations, the acknowledgement and carrying out of which constitutes virtue.18 What sort of relations could generate such fitnesses? Clarke outlines the following: That there is a Fitness or Suitableness of certain Circumstances to certain Persons, and an Unsuitableness of others; found in the 11 In the following, where I quote from Clarke, Works, I also reproduce page numbers in parentheses for the appropriate sections in D D Raphael ed.

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