Natural Philosophy and Theology in Seventeenth Century England Harry John Pearse King’s College, Cambridge September 2016 This dissertation is submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Preface This dissertation is the result of my own work and includes nothing that is the outcome of work done in collaboration except as declared in the Preface and specified in the text. It is not substantially the same as any that I have submitted, or, is being concurrently submitted for a degree or diploma or other qualification at the University of Cambridge or any other University or similar institution except as declared in the Preface and specified in the text. I further state that no substantial part of my dissertation has already been submitted, or, is being concurrently submitted for any such degree, diploma or other qualification at the University of Cambridge or any other University of similar institution except as declared in the Preface and specified in the text It does not exceed the prescribed word limit for the relevant Degree Committee. Table of Contents Acknowledgements Introduction 1 I. Disciplines 1 II. Knowledge and disciplinary boundaries 7 III. Universities and curricula 19 IV. Summary of the chapters 25 Chapter One: Francis Bacon 33 I. Religious themes 33 II. Philosophy and theology 43 III. Inductive method 55 IV. Forms 62 V. Fables 71 VI. Conclusion 79 Chapter two: Thomas White 83 I. Anti-scepticism and Aristotelianism 85 II. Logic 92 III. Hobbes and Aristotle 96 IV. Rules of faith 101 V. The psychological foundations of faith 112 VI. Theology 116 VII. Conclusion 126 Chapter three: Henry More 129 I. Theology’s philosophical fence 132 II. Biblical grounds for faith 142 III. Providence and theories of the soul 148 IV. Knowledge, reason and disciplines 158 V. Conclusion 175 Chapter four: John Locke 177 I. Disciplines and genre 177 II. Natural philosophy and tripartite theology 182 III. Knowledge and natural theology 190 IV. Biblical theology 199 V. Reason and faith 206 VI. Theology governing natural philosophy 212 VII. Conclusion 218 Conclusion 220 Bibliography 224 Acknowledgements I am very grateful to the Cambridge Home Scholarship Scheme for funding my research for three years. Thanks also to King’s College for picking up the burden in my fourth. Obviously, and unfortunately, I am not allowed judge the merits or failings of this thesis myself. However, I can say with certainty that without the help of several people it would have been very, very defective. Predictably, I am most indebted to my supervisor, Dr Michael Edwards. For many years now, Michael has improved my philosophical astuteness, and helped me to think with greater historical sensitivity – something that, at times, seemed almost impossible. He has saved this PhD from innumerable blunders, and acted as a constant guide and inspiration. Most importantly, he has been willing to chat and laugh about the trials of graduate life/work: putting my efforts, ambitions and bewilderment into useful context. I also owe much to Dr Richard Serjeantson, whose formidable scholarship and infectious enthusiasm were great sources of purpose and energy. I particularly appreciated Richard’s mode of supervision: either peripatetic (around Trinity gardens), or hungry (treating me to breakfast). For their illuminating advice and guidance on different chapters of this thesis, I would like to thank Dr Hannah Dawson and Dr Anthony Ossa-Richardson. Doctoral work is regrettably solitary. It therefore fell to my friends to keep me sane. Ali Digby, Rachel Stratton, Julia Nicholls, Pete Levi, Jo King, and Callum Barrell – doyens of the British Library ‘Rare Books’ room – made my life more fun, diverted or engaged me where necessary, and provided moral and emotional support. I am glad to have shared this experience with all of you. My parents, finally, have been brilliant. Helping me with work, and with everything else, I could not have managed without them. Dad read, and possibly hated, the whole thing. But the grammar is now much tighter. My Mum, Jane, who was the best and craziest person I ever knew, died late last year. I devote this thesis to her memory. 1 Introduction I. Disciplines In 1666, the Oxford cleric, Samuel Parker (1640-1688), said: ‘’Tis an unpardonable Luxury and Wantonness for Wise and considering Philosophers, to spend their time and study to disclose distant and inscrutable Mysteries’, for they are ‘beyond the reach of human Cognisance, and such things as cannot be known but by Revelation’.1 According to Parker, philosophy dealt with subjects that the human faculties could access and comprehend. This ruled out divine mysteries, which derived from scripture, and thus belonged to theology. Further, each discipline had professional practitioners whose job it was to inquire into their respective subject matters. Parker thus set a disciplinary boundary between natural philosophy and theology, determining what could and could not be said (by particular people) about particular subjects. His remarks therefore indicate the way disciplines shape knowledge and define what is knowable. He also alludes to the social dimension to disciplines – that they managed and differentiated groups of people. Taking Parker at this word, this thesis contends that disciplines bring out the cognitive and social aspects of knowledge making, and consequently, that they are necessary tools for analysing the establishment and defence of knowledge.2 In what follows I will use these tools to unpack and understand knowledge in the seventeenth century. In early modern England, disciplines were used for two purposes: one epistemic, the other, broadly, social and organisational. First, they set the rules and boundaries of argument, which meant knowledge was legitimised and made intelligible within disciplinary contexts. And second, disciplines structured pedagogy, dividing knowledge so it could be studied and taught. This pedagogical role explains why Joseph Mede (1586- 1639), tutor at Christ’s College, Cambridge, was praised for writing ‘Instructions and Advices about the study of Theology, the Arts and History’, which, had they been 1 Samuel Parker, A Free and Impartial Censure of the Platonick Philosophie Being a Letter Written to his much Honoured Friend Mr N.B., (Oxford, 1666), pp. 79, 82. 2 This is true of seventeenth-century disciplines as well as their (otherwise very different) modern counterparts. See Simon Schaffer, ‘How Disciplines Look’, in Andrew Barry and Georgina Born (eds.), Interdisciplinarity: Reconfigurations of the Social and Natural Sciences, (London, 2013), 57-81, p. 58. 2 recovered, would have been ‘advantageously instructive unto all…and copied out for the publick use’.3 This thesis asks questions about disciplines in general. However, my attention is largely focused on the nature and uses of natural philosophy and theology. Mediating these particular disciplines was important, as together they produced epistemic and ontological judgements about man, nature and the divine. Natural philosophy was the study of body or nature.4 According to the Catholic philosopher, Sir Kenelm Digby (1603-1665), it was concerned with (but not limited to), ‘those bodies we conuerse withall’, and it aimed to discover ‘by what course and engines nature gouerneth their common motions’.5 Throughout medieval Europe, and into the seventeenth century, it was taught and studied using Aristotle’s (384-322 BC) libri naturales.6 Though valued in its own right, it was also regarded as preparation for higher disciplines, pre-eminently theology. Theology was the study of the divine. For Aristotle, it was neither a science (which was subject to reason), nor an art (which was subject to procedure), but was rather based on belief.7 However, in school theology, taught in medieval and early modern universities, articles of Christian faith were usually explained and expanded using demonstrative Aristotelian metaphysics, (as well as scripture and the Church Fathers).8 Both disciplines underwent considerable change in the seventeenth century, and their relationship was changeable and multifaceted. By mid-century, scholasticism’s textual Aristotelianism was giving way to more experimental, mathematical and mechanistic accounts of nature.9 Natural philosophy was consequently vulnerable to accusations of materialism, even atheism.10 Theology remained interested in what Thomas Barlow (1608/9-1691) called ‘Knowledge of God, and our Duty, and that Divine Worship which is 3 Joseph Mead, The Works of the Pious and Profoundly-Learned Joseph Mede, B.D. sometime Fellow of Christ’s Colledge in Cambridge. Corrected and Enlarged according to the Author’s own Manuscripts, (London, 1677), ‘The General Preface’, unpaginated. 4 See Ann Blair, ‘Natural Philosophy’, in Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston (eds.), The Cambridge History of Science, Early Modern Science, (7 vols., Cambridge, 2003), III, 365-406. 5 Sir Kenelm Digby, Two Treatises. In the one of which, The Natvre of Bodies; in the other, The Natvre of Mans Sovle; is looked into: in a way of discovery of the Immortality of Reasonable Sovles, (Paris, 1644), p. 144. 6 William A. Wallace, ‘Natural Philosophy: Traditional Natural Philosophy’, in Charles B. Schmitt, Quentin Skinner, Eckhard Kessler, with Jill Kraye (eds.), The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, (Cambridge, 1988), 199-235, pp. 202-3. 7 Harris Francis Fletcher, The Intellectual Development of John Milton, vol. II, (Urbana, 1961), p. 197. 8 Ibid. 9 Christoph Lüthy, ‘What to do with Seventeenth-Century Natural Philosophy? A Taxonomic Problem’, Perspectives on Science, 8 (2000), 164-95, p. 165. 10 Michael Hunter, ‘Science and Heterodoxy: an Early Modern Problem Reconsidered’, in Science and the Shape of Orthodoxy: Intellectual Change in late seventeenth-century Britain, (Woodbridge, 1995), 225-44. 3 due to Him’.11 But the relationship between different types of religious writing – patristic doctrine, ecclesiastical and civil history, school-divinity, casuistry, popery, Socinianism, and church doctrine – was constantly shifting. The fluctuations in both disciplines prompted many seventeenth-century thinkers to establish (or re-establish) an appropriate relationship between the two.