or indiscriminate slaughter of his opponents. Shaftesbury, on the contrary, aims at slaying, or rather fettering, the Magi, whilst retaining the precious treasures of which they had become the depositories. He had been profoundly influenced by Hobbes's great opponents, the Cambridge Platonists, and had even written a preface to a volume of sermons published by Whichcote-one of their number. His sceptical tendencies, indeed, prevented him from being a disciple of the school, though their spirit permeates his pages. Metaphysical speculation, again, was not congenial to his temper, and his cosmopolitan training had impressed him with the belief that the day of the great system-mongers was past. The vast tower of Babel, by which the school of Descartes and Leibnitz had hoped to scale the heavens, was crumbling into ruin, leaving for its only legacy a jargon detestable to all intelligent men. Of metaphysics he always speaks with a bitter contempt. It was a pseudo-science, leading to barren formulæ fit only for scholastic pedants. Philosophers are 'a sort of moonblind wits who, though very acute and able in their kind, may be said to renounce daylight and extinguish, in a manner, the bright visible outside world, by allowing us to know nothing besides what we can prove by strict and formal demonstration.' He ridicules the philosophical speculations about 'formation of ideas; their compositions, comparisons, agreement and disagreement.' Philosophy, in his sense, is nothing but the study of happiness, and all these discussions as to substances, entities, and the eternal and immutable relations of things, and pre-established harmonies and occasional causes, and primary and secondary qualities, are so much empty sound. The most ingenious way of becoming foolish,' as he very truly says, 'is by a system,'4 and, in truth, the systems then existing were rapidly decaying. Should Shaftesbury, then, join the sceptical assault of his tutor, Locke, and endeavour to anticipate Berkeley and Hume? His dislike to purely sceptical speculation, and his want of metaphysical acuteness, precluded such a direction of his studies. The first is illustrated by his unequivocal condemnation of Locke; the second by the fact that, whilst 1 Misc. iv. ch. ii. 2 Soliloquy,' part iii. sec. I. 4 2 'Moralists,' iii. sec. 3. repudiating the metaphysical theories, he really borrows from them the central support of his own doctrine. 1 26. His theory is given in its most systematic shape in the Inquiry concerning Virtue,' but various corollaries and corroborative doctrines are scattered through his discursive disquisitions upon things in general. Shaftesbury is preeminently a moralist; for the main purpose of his writings is to show how, amidst the general wreck of metaphysical and theological systems, a sufficient base may still be discovered on which to construct a rational scheme of life. Moreover, his morality is still theological and metaphysical. A belief in God, though hardly in the Christian, any more than in the Jewish God, is an essential part of his system. The belief in justice must, as he urges, precede a belief in a just God.' A sound theism follows from morality, not morality from theism. And thus 'religion' (by which he means a belief in God) 'is capable of doing great good or great harm, and Atheism nothing positive in either way.' The worship of a bad deity will produce bad worshippers, as the worship of a good deity produces good worshippers. Atheism, indeed, implies an unhealthy frame of mind, for it means the belief that we are 'living in a distracted universe,' calculated to produce no emotions of love or reverence, and thus it tends to sour the temper and impair the 'very principle of virtue, viz. natural and kind affection.' 2 A belief in God means, on the other hand, a perception of harmonious order, and a mind in unison with the system of which it forms a part. Atheism is the discordant, and theism the harmonious, utterance drawn from our nature, according as it is, or is not, in tune with the general order of things. Though at times Shaftesbury uses language which would fit into an orthodox sermon about a 'personal God,'3 his teaching seems to adapt itself more naturally to the pantheism of Spinoza. 27. Intimately connected with this theology is the metaphysical doctrine which lies at the base of his system. With Leibnitz, he is a thoroughgoing optimist. He holds with Pope, who perhaps learnt the doctrine from him, that 'whatever is, is right;' or, in the phrase of Pangloss, 'everything is 1 'Virtue,' book i. part iii. sec. 2. 2 Ib. part. iii. sec. 3. See e.g. 'Moralists,' part ii. sec. 3. for the best in this best of all possible worlds.' The 'Enquiry into Virtue' opens with a demonstration that there can be no real ill in the universe. Apparent evil is merely the effect of our ignorance. The weakness of infants is the cause of parental affection; and all philanthropical impulses are founded on the wants of man. 'What,' he asks, 'can be happier, than such a deficiency as is the occasion of so much good?' If there be a supremely good and all-ruling mind, so runs his argument, there can be nothing intrinsically bad. Or, rather, the absence of evil proves the existence of the all-wise and all-good ruler. Theism is another name for universal optimism. The universe is a veil which but half disguises the presence of an all-prevading essence of absolutely pure benevolence. And, therefore, Shaftesbury exhausts all the resources of eloquence, pedantic and stilted enough, yet at times touched by some genuine emotion, in exalting the wondrous harmonies of nature. Much of his writings is simply an exposition of Dryden's verses : From harmony, from heavenly harmony, This universal flame began. From harmony to harmony Through all the compass of the notes it ran, Harmony is Shaftesbury's catchword. On that text he is never tired of dilating. What discords may exist in the general current of harmony are to be resolved into a fuller harmony as our intelligence widens. If we complain of anything useless in nature, we are like men on board a ship in a calm complaining of the masts and sails as useless encumbrances. He dwells, however, less upon metaphors of this kind, which suggest Paley's Almighty watchmaker, than upon the universal harmony which speaks of, or which, we might almost say, is God., Theocles, the expounder of his views in the Moralists,' bursts into a prose hymn to nature, conceived in this spirit-'O mighty nature!' he exclaims; ' arise, substitute of Providence, empowered creatress! Or, thou empowering Deity, supreme Creator! Thee I evoke, and Thee alone adore! To Thee this solitude, this place, and these rural meditations are sacred; whilst thus inspired with harmony of thought, ''Moralists,' part ii. sec. 4. though uninspired by words and in loose numbers, I sing of nature's order in created beings, and celebrate the beauties which resolve in Thee, the source and principle of all beauty and perfection.' There is beauty, as he goes on to show, in this queer compromise between blank verse and prose, which naturally embodies a strange mixture of bombast and eloquence, in the laws of matter, in sense and thought, in the whole universe, in earth, air, water, light, in the animal creation, and in natural scenery. Stilted, frigid, and most awkward when he attempts to enliven his style by playful humour and sarcastic insinuation, there is yet a true vigour and originality in Shaftesbury, which redeems him from contempt. 28. Shaftesbury's theology is thus an attempt to reconcile the old and new by banishing the supernatural, whilst retaining the divine, element of religion. God is to be no longer a ruler, external to the world, but an immanent and all-pervading force. He wishes to retain so much of the old conceptions as may enable him to regard the universe as a coherent whole, and to look upon it with reverence and affection; but he would reject under the name of enthusiasm all the degrading beliefs which imply the occasional interference, under whatever forms, of a supernatural agent. The evil which he wishes to extirpate is the obstinate anthropomorphism of divines. The advantage which he desires to retain is the power of regarding nature with the sentiments expressed in the higher forms of theology, and not to allow it to fall to pieces in a blind chaos of mutilated fragments. The light is to be diffused throughout the universe, not concentrated into a single external focus. 29. Hence arises his fundamental quarrel with the divines. He charges them with blaspheming God, the universe, and man. They blaspheme God when they represent him as angry with his creatures, as punishing the innocent for the guilty, and pacified by the sufferings of the virtuous. They blaspheme the universe, because in their zeal to 'miraculise everything,' they rest the proof of theology on the interruptions to order rather than upon order itself. They paint the world in the darkest colours in order to throw the future world into brighter relief, and thus, as Bolingbroke afterwards put it, the divines are in tacit alliance with the atheists. Make the universe 2 Ib. part ii. ser. ''Moralists,' part iii. sec. I. a scene of wrong and suffering, and is not the inference that there is no God more legitimate than the inference that a God exists, to provide compensation elsewhere? We cannot, indeed, understand the whole. The spider is meant for the fly, and the fly for the spider; the web and the wing are related to each other; to understand the leaf we must go to the root.' Every naturalist must understand the organisation in order to explain the organs. All are but parts of one stupendous whole,' as Pope puts it, whose Essay on Man' is a continuous comment upon Shaftesbury. His incessant reference to the 'mighty union,' to a uniform consistent fabric,' and to 'a universal mind,' by which the whole is animated is the keynote of Shaftesbury's writings. The theory is in part identical with Butler's, but with this vital difference that whereas, with Butler, nature testifies to an external Creator, nature is with Shaftesbury itself divine. The supernatural element is thus excluded; for if nature be God or the veil of God, how should God interfere with his work? 2 30. But Shaftesbury's conception of man is that which places him in most radical opposition to the divines, for they had blasphemed man even more than they blasphemed God and the universe. Man, as the chief work of nature, must show the plainest marks of the divine power. The theological dogma of corruption, and Hobbes's doctrine of the state of nature as a perpetual warfare, are equally alien to him. The state of nature-to quote Pope once more— The state of Nature was the reign of God; And, there as how should it be otherwise if God be nature? fore, Shaftesbury repudiates with special indignation the doctrine of supernatural rewards and punishments. They have no proper place in a system which restores the divinity of man and represents the universe as self-balanced without the aid of external considerations. He believes, indeed, in an inmaterial soul, and he does not deny that a belief in hell has its advantages for the vulgar. But his whole energy is bent to show that hopes and fears of a future state are so far from being the proper reward of virtue that they are rather destructive of its essence. The man who obeys the law under threats is no 1 'Virtue,' book i. part ii. sec. I. 2 Moralists,' part ii. sec. 4. |