with a friend than when I am alone: but my request is, that you would suffer me to impart my reflections to you. Phil. With all my heart, it is what I should have requested myself if you had not prevented me. Hyl. I was considering the odd fate of those men who have in all ages, through an affectation of being distinguished from the vulgar, or some unaccountable turn of thought, pretended either to believe nothing at all, or to believe the most extravagant things in the world. This however might be borne, if their paradoxes and scepticism did not draw after them some consequences of general disadvantage to mankind. But the mischief lieth here; that when men of less leisure see them who are supposed to have spent their whole time in the pursuits of knowledge professing an entire ignorance of all things, or advancing such notions as are repugnant to plain and commonly received principles, they will be tempted to entertain suspicions concerning the most important truths, which they had hitherto held sacred and unquestionable. Phil. I entirely agree with you, as to the ill tendency of the affected doubts of some philosophers, and fantastical conceits of others. I am even so far gone of late in this way of thinking, that I have quitted several of the sublime notions I had got in their schools for vulgar opinions. And I give it you on my word, since this revolt from metaphysical notions to the plain dictates of nature and common sense, I find my understanding strangely enlightened, so that I can now easily comprehend a great many things which before were all mystery and riddle. Hyl. I am glad to find there was nothing in the accounts I heard of you. Phil. Pray, what were those? Hyl. You were represented in last night's conversation as one who maintained the most extravagant opinion that ever entered into the mind of man, to wit that there is no such thing as material substance in the world. Phil. That there is no such thing as what philosophers call material substance, I am seriously persuaded: but if I were made to see anything absurd or sceptical in this, I should then have the same reason to renounce this that I imagine I have now to reject the contrary opinion. Hyl. What! can anything be more fantastical, more repugnant to common sense, or a more manifest piece of scepticism, than to believe there is no such thing as matter? Phil. Softly, good Hylas. What if it should prove that you, who hold there is, are, by virtue of that opinion, a greater sceptic, and maintain more paradoxes and repugnances to common sense, than I who believe no such thing? Hyl. You may as soon persuade me, the part is greater than the whole, as that in order to avoid absurdity and scepticism I should ever be obliged to give up my opinion in this point. Phil. Well then, are you content to admit that opinion for true, which upon examination shall appear inost agreeable to common sense, and remote from scepticism? Hyl. With all my heart. Since you are for raising disputes about the plainest things in nature, I am content for once to hear what you have to say. Berkeley's Theory summed up. Phil. With all my heart: retain the word matter, and apply it to the objects of sense, if you please, provided you do not attribute to them any subsistence distinct from their being perceived. I shall never quarrel with you for an expression. Matter, or material substance, are terms introduced by philosophers; and as used by them, imply a sort of independency, or a subsistence distinct from being perceived by a mind: but are never used by common people; or if ever, it is to signify the immediate objects of sense. One would think therefore, so long as the names of all particular things, with the terms sensible, substance, body, stuff, and the like, are retained, the word matter should be never missed in common talk. And in philosophical discourses it seems the best way to leave it quite out; since there is not perhaps any one thing that hath more favoured and strengthened the depraved bent of the mind toward atheism, than the use of that general confused term. Hyl. Well but, Philonous, since I am content to give up the notion of an unthinking substance exterior to the mind, I think you ought not to deny me the privilege of using the word matter as I please, and annexing it to a collection of sensible qualities subsisting only in the mind. I freely own there is no other substance, in a strict sense, than spirit. But I have been so long accustomed to the term matter, that I know not how to part with it. To say, there is no matter in the world, is still shocking to me. Whereas to say, there is no matter, if by that term be meant an unthinking substance existing without the mind; but if by matter is meant some sensible thing, whose existence consists in being perceived, then there is matter: this distinction gives it quite another turn: and men will come into your notions with small difficulty, when they are proposed in that manner. For after all, the controversy about matter, in the strict acceptation of it, lies altogether between you and the philosophers, whose principles, I acknowledge, are not near so natural or so agreeable to the common sense of mankind and holy scripture as yours. There is nothing we either desire or shun, but as it makes or is apprehended to make some part of our happiness or misery. But what hath happiness or misery, joy or grief, pleasure or pain, to do with absolute existence, or with unknown entities, abstracted from all relation to us? It is evident, things regard us only as they are pleasing or displeasing: and they can please or displease only so far forth as they are perceived. Further therefore we are not concerned; and thus far you leave things as you found them. Yet still there is something new in this doctrine. It is plain, I do not now think with the philosophers, nor yet altogether with the vulgar. I would know how the case stands in that respect: precisely what you have added to or altered in my former notions. Phil. I do not pretend to be a setter-up of new notions. My endeavours tend only to unite and place in a clearer light that truth which was before shared between the vulgar and the philosophers: the former being of opinion, that those things they immediately perceive are the real things: and the latter, that the things immediately perceived are ideas which exist only in the mind. Which two notions put together do in effect constitute the substance of what I advance. Hyl. I have been a long time distrusting my senses; methought I saw things by a dim light, and through : false glasses. Now the glasses are removed, and a new light breaks in upon my understanding. I am clearly convinced that I see things in their native forms; and am no longer in pain about their unknown natures or absolute existence. This is the state I find myself in at present though indeed the course that brought me to it I do not yet thoroughly comprehend. You set out upon the same principles that Academics, Cartesians, and the like sects usually do: and for a long time it looked as if you were advancing their philosophical scepticism; but in the end your conclusions are directly opposite to theirs. Phil. You see, Hylas, the water of yonder fountain, how it is forced upwards in a round column to a certain height; at which it breaks and falls back into the bason from whence it rose: its ascent, as well as descent, proceeding from the same uniform law or principle of gravitation. Just so, the same principles which at first view lead to scepticism, pursued to a certain point, bring men back to common sense. The standard edition of Berkeley is that of Professor Campbell Fraser, with a Life and dissertations (4 vols. 1871; new ed. 1902). Professor Fraser also published a small monograph on Berkeley (1881) and Selections from Berkeley (5th ed. 1900). Mr A. J. Balfour wrote a biographical introduction to the edition of the works by G. Sampson (3 vols. 1897-99). Joseph Butler (1692-1752), one of the greatest of English divines and moralists, was born at Wantage in Berkshire, the youngest of the eight children of a retired draper. With a view to the Presbyterian ministry, he attended a Dissenting academy at Gloucester, afterwards at Tewkesbury, where the future Archbishop Secker was his schoolfellow. About the age of twenty-two he joined the Church of England, and entered Oriel College, Oxford. Having taken orders in 1718, he was appointed preacher at the Rolls Chapel, where he preached those remarkable sermons which he published in 1726. The first three, On Human Nature, constitute one of the most important contributions ever made to moral science. He became prebendary of Salisbury (1721), and rector of Haughton-le-Skerne near Darlington (1722); in 1725 he was presented to the 'golden rectory' of Stanhope, also in Durham. Here he resided in great retirement till 1733, busy on his Analogy. Secker wished to see him promoted to some more important position, and mentioned his name to Queen Caroline. The queen thought he had been dead. 'No, madam,' said Archbishop Blackburne (the jolly old Archbishop of York' who, according to Horace Walpole, 'had all the manners of a man of quality though he had been a buccaneer and was a clergyman'), 'he is not dead, but he is buried.' In 1733 Butler became chaplain to his friend Lord Chancellor Talbot, and in 1736 a prebendary of Rochester and clerk of the closet to Queen Caroline. In 1736 he published the Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, which, in the words of Chalmers, made him the 'Bacon of theology.' In 1738 he was made Bishop of Bristol, in 1740 Dean of St Paul's; in 1747 he declined the primacy; and in 1750 he was translated to the see of Durham. Butler takes high rank amongst English moralists, and has had the very greatest influence on English ethical thinking. It is sometimes said that the sum total of his teaching is the insisting on the authority and supremacy of conscience. He developed Shaftesbury's moral sense into a higher and more authoritative conscience, he learnt from Aristotle and the Stoics, and he wrote against Mandeville and Hobbes, contending that the social impulses in man are no less natural than the appetites and self-regarding desires-that virtue is more consonant with human nature than vice. He not merely emphasises, as vigorously as Kant does, the indefeasibleness of the moral law, but shows ingenuity in constructing an argumentum ad hominem specially applicable to those who deny his main thesis. This method of the argumentum ad hominem is especially characteristic of his great treatise, the Analogy. The keynote of the Analogy is to show that all the objections to revealed religion are equally applicable to the whole constitution of nature, and that the general analogy between the principles of divine government, as revealed in the Scriptures, and those manifested in the course of nature, warrants the conclusion that they have one Author. The argument is valid against the deists, but it lacks completeness as a defence of Christianity. Even then it seemed hardly enough to pose the deists; unfriendly critics thought the true method of defending Christianity was so to exhibit its excellences as to make objectors eager to embrace it. Pitt is reported to have said that it raised more doubts than it solved. Bagehot not unfairly said that we might expect revelation to explain the difficulties to be found in the religious interpretation of nature, and not to add others of its own. Matthew Arnold and Mr Leslie Stephen are amongst those who find Butler's argument unsatisfying. Mr Gladstone was one of Butler's most enthusiastic defenders, and seemed even to argue that the Analogy is of as great apologetic value now as it was in Butler's own time. But for materialists, positivists, thorough-going agnostics, Butler's arguments are irrelevant : unless you posit the existence of God, and the truth and binding force of 'natural religion,' the Analogy has no fulcrum to work from. In Butler's time the deists were the most conspicuous, the only considerable opponents of revealed religion; and most of them accepted the truths of natural religion as heartily as Butler did. Kant and Darwin had not as yet overthrown teleology, and the kind of evidences of religion then demanded were very different from what would now be required. The moral arguments in the Sermons of Butler are less antiquated than those of the Analogy. It was with deists more or less pronounced, and people liable to be influenced by their arguments, that Butler had to do; and it is by the cogency of his argument as addressed to them that he must be judged. Butler's great influence, and the place his Sermons and the Analogy secured in the Church and at the universities, owe little to the superficial graces of style. He was a severely logical writer, often dry, sometimes cumbrous, generally vigorous, clear, and effective, at times attaining the force of aphorism; but even in the Sermons there is no declamation and little direct appeal to the feelings. Probability in Religion. It has been thought by some persons that if the evidence of revelation appears doubtful, this itself turns into a positive argument against it; because it cannot be supposed that if it were true, it would be left to subsist upon doubtful evidence. And the objection against revelation from its not being universal, is often insisted upon as of great weight. Now the weakness of these opinions may be shown by observing the suppositions on which they are founded, which are really such as these—that it cannot be thought God would have bestowed any favour at all upon us, unless in the degree which we think he might, and which we imagine would be most to our particular advantage; and also that it cannot be thought he would bestow a favour upon any, unless he bestowed the same upon all -suppositions which we find contradicted not by a few instances in God's natural government of the world, but by the general analogy of nature together. Persons who speak of the evidence of religion as doubtful, and of this supposed doubtfulness as a positive argument against it, should be put upon considering what that evidence indeed is which they act upon with regard to their temporal interests; for it is not only extremely difficult, but in many cases absolutely impossible, to balance pleasure and pain, satisfaction and uneasiness, so as to be able to say on which side the overplus is. There are the like difficulties and impossibilities in making the due allowances for a change of temper and taste, for satiety, disgusts, ill health—any of which render men incapable of enjoying, after they have obtained, what they most eagerly desired. Numberless, too, are the accidents, besides that one of untimely death, which may even probably disappoint the bestconcerted schemes, and strong objections are often seen to lie against them, not to be removed or answered, but which seem overbalanced by reasons on the other side, so as that the certain difficulties and dangers of the pursuit are by every one thought justly disregarded, upon account of the appearing greater advantages in case of success, though there be but little probability of it. Lastly, every one observes our liableness, if we be not upon our guard, to be deceived by the falsehood of men, and the false appearances of things; and this danger must be greatly increased if there be a strong bias within, supposed from indulged passion, to favour the deceit. Hence arises that great uncertainty and doubtfulness of proof, wherein our temporal interest really consistswhat are the most probable means of attaining it, and whether those means will eventually be successful. And numberless instances there are in the daily course of life, in which all men think it reasonable to engage in pursuits, though the probability is greatly against succeeding, and to make such provision for themselves as it is supposable they may have occasion for, though the plain acknowledged probability is, that they never shall. Then those who think the objection against revelation, from its light not being universal, to be of weight, should observe that the Author of Nature, in numberless instances, bestows that upon some which he does not upon others, who seem equally to stand in need of it. Indeed he appears to bestow all his gifts with the most promiscuous variety among creatures of the same species-health and strength, capacities of prudence and of knowledge, means of improvement, riches, and all external advantages. And as there are not any two men found of exactly like shape and features, so it is probable there are not any two of an exactly like constitution, temper, and situation, with regard to the goods and evils of life. Yet notwithstanding these uncertainties and varieties, God does exercise a natural government over the world, and there is such a thing as a prudent and imprudent institution of life, with regard to our health and our affairs, under that his natural government. (From the Analogy, Part ii. Chap. vi.) See the splendid edition of Butler's Works by Mr Gladstone (2 vols. 1896), his Subsidiary Studies on him (1896), Lives by Bartlett (1839), Collins (1881), and Spooner (1902), and Lightfoot's Leaders in the Northern Church (1890) and Mr Leslie Stephen's History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876). The editions of the Sermons and of the Analogy are innumerable. John Leland (1691-1766), born at Wigan and educated at Dublin, became a Presbyterian minister in Ireland. He wrote industriously against Tindal, Morgan, and other deists, but is remembered specially from the often-quoted View of the Principal Deistical Writers (1754–56). William Warburton (1698-1779), Bishop of Gloucester, had a bold and original way of thinking, indomitable self-will and arrogance, ponderous learning, and a gift of copious utterance; he was eager to astonish and arrest the attention of mankind; but his writings, after passing like a splendid meteor across the horizon of his own age, have all but sunk into oblivion. He was the son of an attorney at Newark, and there he began by following the same profession. A passion for study having led him to qualify meanwhile for the Church, in 1723 he took deacon's orders, and by the dedication of a volume of translations, obtained a presentation to a small vicarage. He now threw himself amidst the literary society of the metropolis, and sought for subsistence and advancement by his pen. On obtaining from a patron the rectory of Brant Broughton in Lincolnshire, he retired thither, and devoted himself for eighteen years to unremitting study. His first work of any note was The Alliance between Church and State (1736), which, though scarcely calculated to please either party in the Church, brought the author into notice. But it was in The Divine Legation of Moses, demonstrated on the Principles of a Religious Deist from the Omission of the Doctrine of a Future State of Rewards and Punishments in the Jewish Dispensation (1738-41), that the scholarship of Warburton was first fairly displayed. It was objected to the Jewish religion that it nowhere acknowledges a future state of rewards and punishments. Warburton, who delighted in paradox, instead of attempting to deny this or explain it away, asserted that therein lay the strongest argument for the divine mission of Moses-because no mere human legislator would have dispensed with the supernatural sanction of morals and religion. Ransacking the domains of pagan antiquity, he reared such a mass of curious and confounding argument that mankind was awed into partial agreement with his views. In support of his startling thesis, he wanders discursively into endless subsidiary inquiries, and supplies lack of evidence by abusing all kinds of opponents in his footnotes-'the place of execution.' There is a constant polemic, either by violent assault or casual innuendo, on temporary deists and freethinkers. He never completed the work; he became, indeed, weary of it; and perhaps the fallacy of the hypothesis was first secretly acknowledged by himself. Gibbon, in his autobiography, called the work 'a monument already crumbling in the dust of the vigour and weakness of the human mind.' Bentley said, 'The man has monstrous appetite and bad digestion.' He showed no real speculative power or profundity of thought. con The merits of the author, or his worldly wisdom, brought him preferment in the Church: he rose through the grades of prebendary of Gloucester, prebendary of Durham, and Dean of Bristol to be (1759) Bishop of Gloucester. He had early forced himself into notice by his writings, but one material cause of his advancement was his friendship with Pope. He had secured the poet's favour by defending the ethical and theological orthodoxy of the Essay on Man, and by writing commentaries on that and other poems; and Pope in return left him the property or copyright of his works, the value of which Johnson estimated at £4000. Pope had also introduced him to Ralph Allen, one of the wealthiest and most benevolent men of his day, the Squire Allworthy of Fielding's Tom Jones; and Warburton took advantage of this introduction to secure the hand of Allen's niece and obtain a large fortune. To Pope he was also indebted for an acquaintance with Lord Mansfield, through whose influence he was made preacher of Lincoln's Inn (1746). He was remiss in episcopal duties, but was constantly at feud with Bolingbroke and Hume, Voltaire and the deists, as well as with Jortin, Lowth, and Wesley; and his great learning was thrown away on paradoxical speculations. His notes and commentaries on Shakespeare and Pope are lacking in taste and real insight-Douce said that of all Shakespeare's commentators he was 'surely the worst' but they often display curious erudition and ingenuity. His arrogance and dogmatism became proverbial. His force of character and various learning, always ostentatiously displayed, gave him a high name and authority in his own day; but posterity refused to ratify the judgment. The Rationalizing of the Greek Mythology. Here matters rested; and the vulgar faith seems to have remained a long time undisturbed. But as the age grew refined, and the Greeks became inquisitive and learned, the common mythology began to give offence. The speculative and more delicate were shocked at the absurd and immoral stories of their gods, and scandalised to find such things make an authentic part of their story. It may, indeed, be thought matter of wonder how such tales, taken up in a barbarous age, came not to sink into oblivion as the age grew more knowing, from mere abhorrence of their indecencies and shame of their absurdities. Without doubt, this had been their fortune but for an unlucky circumstance. The great poets of Greece, who had most contributed to refine the public taste and manners, and were now grown into a kind of sacred authority, had sanctified these silly legends by their writings, which time had now consigned to immortality. Vulgar paganism, therefore, in such an age as this, lying open to the attacks of curious and inquisitive men, would not, we may well think, be long at rest. It is true, freethinking then lay under great difficulties and discouragements. To insult the religion of one's country, which is now the mark of learned distinction, was branded in the ancient world with public infamy. Yet freethinkers there were, who, as is their wont, together with the public worship of their country, threw off all reverence for religion in general. Amongst these was Euhemerus, the Messenian, and, by what we can learn, the most distinguished of this tribe. This man, in mere wantonness of heart, began his attacks on religion by divulging the secret of the mysteries. But as it was capital to do this directly and professedly, he contrived to cover his perfidy and malice by the intervention of a kind of Utopian romance. He pretended that in a certain city, which he came to in his travels, he found this grand secret, that the gods were dead men deified, preserved in their sacred writings, and confirmed by monumental records inscribed to the gods themselves, who were there said to be interred.' So far was not amiss; but then, in the genuine spirit of his class, who never cultivate a truth but in order to graft a lie upon it, he pretended 'that dead mortals were the first gods, and that an imaginary divinity in these early heroes and conquerors created the idea of a superior power, and introduced the practice of religious worship amongst men.' The learned reader sees below, that our freethinker is true to his cause, and endeavours to verify the fundamental principle of his sect, that fear first made gods, even in that very instance where the contrary passion seems to have been at its height, the time when men made gods of their deceased benefactors. A little matter of address hides the shame of so perverse a piece of malice. He represents those founders of society and fathers of their country under the idea of destructive conquerors, who, by mere force and fear, had brought men into subjection and slavery. On this account it was that indignant antiquity concurred in giving Euhemerus the proper name of atheist, which however he would hardly have escaped though he had done no more than divulge the secret of the mysteries, and had not poisoned his discovery with this impious and foreign addition, so contrary to the true spirit of that secret. This detection had been long dreaded by the orthodox protectors of pagan worship; and they were provided of a temporary defence in their intricate and properly perplexed system of symbolic adoration. But this would do only to stop a breach for the present, till a better could be provided, and was too weak to stand alone against so violent an attack. The philosophers, therefore, now took up the defence of paganism where the priests had left it, and to the others' symbols added their own allegories, for a second cover to the absurdities of the ancient mythology. [Here ancient authorities are quoted.] For all the genuine sects of philosophy, as we have observed, were steady patriots, legislation making one essential part of their philosophy; and to legislate without the foundation of a national religion was, in their opinion, building castles in the air. So that we are not to wonder they took the alarm, and opposed these insulters of the public worship with all their vigour. But as they never lost sight of their proper character, they so contrived that the defence of the national religion should terminate in a recommendation of their philosophic speculations. Hence their support of the public worship and their evasion of Euhemerus's charge turned upon this proposition, 'That the whole ancient mythology was no other than the vehicle of physical, moral, and divine knowledge.' And to this it is that the learned Eusebius refers, where he says 'that a new race of men refined their old gross theology, and gave it an honester look, and brought it nearer to the truth of things.' However, this proved a troublesome work, and after all ineffectual for the security of men's private morals, which the example of the licentious story according to the letter would not fail to influence, how well soever the allegoric interpretation was calculated to cover the public honour of religion; so that the more ethical of the philosophers grew peevish with what gave them so much trouble, and answered so little to the interior of religious practice. This made them break out from time to time into hasty resentments against their capital poets; unsuitable, one would think, to the dignity of the authors of such noble recondite truths as they would persuade us to believe were treasured up in their writings. Hence it was that Plato banished Homer from his republic, and that Pythagoras, in one of his extra-mundane adventures, saw both Homer and Hesiod doing penance in hell, and hung up there for examples, to be bleached and purified from the grossness and pollution of their ideas. The first of these allegorisers, as we learn from Laertius, was Anaxagoras, who, with his friend Metrodorus, turned Homer's mythology into a system of ethics. Next came Hereclides Ponticus, and of the same fables made as good a system of physics. . . . And last of all, when the necessity became more pressing, Proclus undertook to shew that all Homer's fables were no other than physical, ethical, and moral allegories. ... (From The Divine Legation, Book iii. Section 6.) Bishop Hurd published a sumptuous edition of Warburton's works in seven quartos (1788); a later edition (1811) was in twelve volumes. In The Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion we have sermons. Colley Cibber (1671-1757), actor, manager, and dramatist, was born in London, the son of the Holstein sculptor, Caius Gabriel Cibber or Cibert, who settled in England during the Commonwealth, and executed sculptures for the London Monument, the old Royal Exchange, Bethlehem Hospital, St Paul's, and Chatsworth. Young Colley, named after his mother's family, was educated at Grantham, and in 1690 joined the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, where he remained, with short intervals, during his whole theatrical career of forty-three years. In 1696 he produced his first comedy, Love's Last Shift, himself playing Sir Novelty Fashion, and so established his fame both as dramatist and actor. About thirty pieces are ascribed to him, some of them tragedies and some 'musical entertainments and farces.' Not a few are réchauffés from Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Dryden, and others, two or more plays being sometimes inSeveral are geniously welded into a new one. from the French. Among the best known are Woman's Wit, She Would and She Would Not, and The Provoked Husband (the latter completed from Vanbrugh's manuscript). Cibber contributed largely to the improvement in decency which followed Jeremy Collier's famous philippic in 1698; his comedies do not rely for ludicrous effects on the outraged husband. He was a strong Hanoverian, and as poet-laureate from 1730 onwards wrote some sufficiently tiresome and absurd odes. But even they could not justify Pope in making Cibber the hero (in place of Theobald) in the 1743 issue of the Dunciad, where these lines occur: How with less reading than makes felons 'scape, Cibber was no poet; he was vain and a loose liver, but he was assuredly not a dullard. Pope's |