LORD SHAFTESBURY

[Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, was born in 1671. His education was superintended by Locke, which probably accounts for his reaction from the Lockian philosophy. He was at Winchester from 1683 to 1686. He sat for a time in Parliament, but for the most part he lived the life of a student in ill-health. He was a traveller; he visited Holland, and made the acquaintance of Bayle, and in 1708 he began to publish pamphlets, mainly on ethical subjects. The most important of these is the Enquiry concerning Virtue or Merit. They are reprinted in a collection entitled Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, and Times (1711). In 1709 he married, and in 1712 he died. A fine edition of the Characteristics was printed by Baskerville in 1773, and the first volume has been more recently edited by Mr. Hatch. Two or three specimens of his correspondence have also been printed; the most interesting is the Letters written by a Noble Lord to a Young Man at the University (1716). The student may consult Professor Fowler's Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, Professor Sidgwick's History of Ethics, and Mr. Leslie Stephen's English Thought in the Eighteenth Century.]

IN the essentials of their philosophical position, Shaftesbury and Henry More are at one. Both represent the refusal, the characteristically English refusal, to accept the formulas of Hobbes and Locke as the last word on things human and divine. Both point to the unexplored fields, the unexplained residuum of the spiritual life, which those formulas fail to touch. Yet in all else they are each other's antipodes. More is eminently of the seventeenth century-poet, dreamer, Platonist, abhorrent of system, and ever hunting the shy, elusive fringes of truth, he presents a world full of mystery and colour, rich with gracious half-lights and reverent shadows. Not so Shaftesbury: sceptical where More is credulous, clear where More is vague, he wields for imagination the dry light of analysis, and champions the spiritual in a tone that robs it of its spirituality. He is one of the first embodiments of the eighteenth century spirit in speculation, and has all the merits and most of the defects which we habitually associate with that spirit.

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He writes in a style which is consummately easy and lucid. There are none of those obscurities and experimental reaches of thought which in other thinkers one sometimes finds so puzzling and so suggestive; his meaning may not be very profound, but it is at least expressed for the better understanding of the plain He brings into English prose an order and a clearness of which it was beginning to stand in some need. The worst that can be said of him is that he is terribly affected—“genteel" was Charles Lamb's epithet. He is not always in buckram; he will unbend to you; but all the same his treatises invariably smack of the superior person, the man of birth, debarred by circumstances from his natural pursuit of politics, and condescending to while away a part of his too abundant leisure in unravelling some niceties of the intellect. Unwilling to appear a pedant, he falls into the opposite vices of desultoriness and superficiality.

As a thinker Shaftesbury made definite and prominent an important principle of morals—that man is not a solitary unit, to be treated in vacuo as a self-contained whole; but rather a centre of forces in a complex society, dependent on others at every turn, with desires and modes of conduct inextricably entangled with theirs. Or, to use a phraseology nearer his own, Shaftesbury taught that man's benevolent impulses are as fundamental and natural, as much a part of man himself, as those which are selfregarding and that an ethical scheme which takes into account the one and neglects the other must needs be one-sided and incomplete. He struck a real blot in the reasoning of his decessors, and laid down the lines on which English psychological ethics were to proceed for some time to come.

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Shaftesbury's moral doctrine is positive enough, but he had his negative side also. The element of analysis, of criticism, in him led him into the camp of the unorthodox, and he ranks among the able, if transient, school of English Deists. Hence his influence over French thought, as French thought culminated in the worship of the Supreme Reason; while he is at one with Voltaire, as well as with certain brilliant writers, both French and English, of our own day, in finding the true solvent of superstition and fanaticism, not in persecution, but in humour.

E. K. CHAMBERS.

ON ENTHUSIASM

THUS, my Lord, there are many panics in mankind, besides merely that of fear. And thus is religion also panic, when enthusiasm of any kind gets up, as oft, on melancholy occasions it will; for vapours naturally rise, and in bad times especially, when the spirits of men are low, as either in public calamities, or during the unwholesomeness of air or diet, or when convulsions happen in nature, storms, earthquakes, or other amazing prodigies at this season the panic must needs run high, and the magistrate of necessity give way to it. For, to apply a serious remedy, and bring the sword, or fasces, as a cure, must make the case more melancholy, and increase the very cause of the distemper. To forbid men's natural fears, and to endeavour the overpowering them by other fears, must needs be a most unnatural method. The magistrate, if he be any artist, should have a gentler hand, and instead of caustics, incisions, and amputations, should be using the softest balms, and, with a kind sympathy, entering into the concern of the people, and taking, as it were, their passion upon him, should, when he has soothed and satisfied it, endeavour, by cheerful ways, to divert and heal it.

This was ancient policy and hence, as a notable author of our nation expresses it, it is necessary a people should have a public leading in Religion. For to deny the magistrate a worship, or take away a National Church, is as mere enthusiasm as the notion which sets up persecution. For why should there not be public walks as well as private gardens? Why not public libraries as well as private education and home-tutors ? But to prescribe bounds to fancy and speculation, to regulate men's apprehensions, and religious beliefs or fears, to suppress by violence the natural passion of enthusiasm, or to endeavour to ascertain it, or reduce it to one species, or bring it under VOL. III

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any one modification, is in truth no better sense, nor derives a better character, than what the comedian declares of the like project in the affair of love.

Not only the visionaries and enthusiasts of all kinds were tolerated, your lordship knows, by the ancients, but, on the other side, philosophy had as free a course, and was permitted as a balance against superstition; and whilst some sects, such as the Pythagorean and latter Platonic, joined in with the superstition and enthusiasm of the times, the Epicurean, the Academic, and others, were allowed to use all the force of wit and raillery against it. And thus matters were happily balanced. Reason had fair play; learning and science flourished. Wonderful was the harmony and temper which arose from all these contrarieties. Thus superstition and enthusiasm were mildly treated, and being left alone, they never rose to that degree as to occasion bloodshed, wars, persecutions, and devastations in the world. But a new sort of policy, which extends itself to another world, and considers the future lives and happiness of men rather than the present, has made us leap the bounds of natural humanity, and out of a supernatural charity, has taught us the way of plaguing one another most devoutly. It has raised an antipathy which no temporal interest could ever do, and entailed upon us a mutual hatred to all eternity; and now uniformity in opinion (a hopeful project!) is looked upon as the only expedient against this evil. The saving of souls is now the heroic passion of exalted spirits, and is become in a manner the chief care of the magistrate, and the very end of government itself.

If magistracy should vouchsafe to interpose thus much in other sciences I am afraid we should have as bad logic, as bad mathematics, and in every kind as bad philosophy, as we often have divinity in countries where a precise orthodoxy is settled by law. It is a hard matter for a government to settle wit. If it does but keep us sober and honest, it is likely we shall have as much ability in our spiritual as in our temporal affairs; and if we can but be trusted, we shall have wit enough to save ourselves, when no prejudice lies in the way. But if honesty and wit be insufficient for this saving work, it is in vain for

the magistrate to meddle with it, since, if he be ever so virtuous or wise, he may be as soon mistaken as another man. I am sure the only way to save men's sense or preserve wit at all in the world, is to give liberty to wit. Now wit can never have its liberty, where the freedom of raillery is taken away; for against serious extravagancies and splenetic humours, there is no other remedy than this.

We have indeed full power over all other modifications of spleen. We may treat other enthusiasms as we please. We may ridicule love or gallantry, or knight-errantry, to the utmost : and we find that, in the latter days of wit, the humour of this kind, which was once so prevalent, is pretty well declined. The Crusades, the rescuing of Holy Lands, and such devout gallantries, are in less request than formerly. But if something of this militant religion, something of this soul-rescuing spirit and sainterrantry prevails still, we need not wonder, when we consider in how solemn a manner we treat this distemper, and how preposterously we go about to cure enthusiasm.

I can hardly forbear fancying, that if we had a sort of inquisition, or formal court of judicature, with grave officers and judges, erected to restrain poetical license, and in general to suppress that fancy and humour of versification, but in particular that most extravagant passion of love, as it is set out by poets, in its heathenish dress of Venuses and Cupids; if the poets, as ringleaders and teachers of this heresy, were, under grievous penalties, forbid to enchant the people by the vein of rhyming; and if the people, on the other side, were, under proportionable penalties, forbid to hearken to any such charm, or lend their attention to any love tale, so much as in a play, a novel, or a ballad, we might perhaps see a new Arcadia rising out of this heavy persecution: old people and young would be seized with a versifying spirit: we should have field-conventicles of lovers and poets forests would be filled with romantic shepherds and shepherdesses, and rocks resound with echoes of hymns and praises offered to the powers of love. We might indeed have a fair chance, by this managment, to bring back the whole train of heathen gods, and set our cold northern island burning with as many altars to Venus and Apollo as were formerly in Cyprus, Delos, or any of those warmer Grecian climates.

(From A Letter concerning Enthusiasm.)