THE RISE OF MODERN FREETHOUGHT--(Continued)
§ 4. England
While France was thus passing from general fanaticism to a large
measure of freethought, England was passing by a less tempestuous path
to a hardly less advanced stage of opinion. It was indeed a bloody
age; and in 1535 we have record of nineteen men and five women of
Holland, apparently Anabaptists, who denied the "humanity" of Christ
and rejected infant baptism and transubstantiation, being sentenced to
be burned alive--two suffering at Smithfield, and the rest at other
towns, by way of example. Others in Henry's reign suffered the same
penalty for the same offence; and in 1538 a priest named Nicholson
or Lambert, refusing on the King's personal pressure to recant,
was "brent in Smithfield" for denying the bodily presence in the
eucharist. [1] The first decades of "Reformation" in England truly
saw the opening of new vials of blood. More and Fisher and scores of
lesser men died as Catholics for denying the King's "supremacy" in
religion; as many more for denying the Catholic tenets which the King
held to the last; and not a few by the consent of More and Fisher for
translating or circulating the sacred books. Latimer, martyred under
Mary, had applauded the burning of the Anabaptists. One generation
slew for denial of the humanity of Christ; the next for denial of his
divinity. Under Edward VI there were burned no Catholics, but several
heretics, including Joan Bocher and a Dutch Unitarian, George Van Pare,
described as a man of saintly life. [2] Still the English evolution
was less destructive than the French or the German, and the comparative
bloodlessness of the strife between Protestant and Catholic under Mary
[3] and Elizabeth, the treatment of the Jesuit propaganda under the
latter queen as a political rather than a doctrinal question, [4]
prevented any such vehemence of recoil from religious ideals as took
place in France. When in 1575 the law De hæretico comburendo, which
had slept for seventeen years, was set to work anew under Elizabeth,
the first victims were Dutch Anabaptists. Of a congregation of them
at Aldgate, twenty-seven were imprisoned, of whom ten were burned,
and the rest deported. Two others, John Wielmacker and Hendrich Ter
Woort, were anti-Trinitarians, and were burned accordingly. Foxe
appealed to the Queen to appoint any punishment short of death,
or even that of hanging, rather than the horrible death by burning;
but in vain. "All parties at the time concurred" in approving the
course taken. [5] Orthodoxy was rampant.
Unbelief, as we have seen, however, there certainly was; and it is
recorded that Walter, Earl of Essex, on his deathbed at Dublin in 1576,
murmured that among his countrymen neither Popery nor Protestantism
prevailed: "there was nothing but infidelity, infidelity, infidelity;
atheism, atheism; no religion, no religion." [6] And when we turn aside
from the beaten paths of Elizabethan literature we see clearly what is
partly visible from those paths--a number of freethinking variations
from the norm of faith. Ascham, as we saw, found some semblance of
atheism shockingly common among the travelled upper class of his day;
and the testimonies continue. Edward Kirke, writing his "glosses"
to Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar in 1578, observes that "it was
an old opinion, and yet is continued in some men's conceit, that
men of years have no fear of God at all, or not so much as younger
folk," experience having made them skeptical. Erasmus, he notes,
in his Adages makes the proverb "Nemo senex metuit Jovem" signify
merely that "old men are far from superstition and belief in false
Gods." But Kirke insists that, "his great learning notwithstanding,
it is too plain to be gainsaid that old men are much more inclined
to such fond fooleries than younger men," [7] apparently meaning that
elderly men in his day were commonly skeptical about divine providence.
Other writers of the day do not limit unbelief to the aged. Lilly,
in his Euphues (1578), referring to England in general or Oxford
in particular as Athens, asks: "Be there not many in Athens which
think there is no God, no redemption, no resurrection?" Further, he
complains that "it was openly reported of an old man in Naples that
there was more lightness in Athens than in all Italy ... more Papists,
more Atheists, more sects, more schisms, than in all the monarchies
in the world"; [8] and he proceeds to frame an absurd dialogue of
"Euphues and Atheos," in which the latter, "monstrous, yet tractable
to be persuaded," [9] is converted with a burlesque facility. Lilly,
who writes as a man-of-the-world believer, is a poor witness as to the
atheistic arguments current; but those he cites are so much better than
his own, up to the point of terrified collapse on the atheist's part,
that he had doubtless heard them. The atheist speaks as a pantheist,
identifying deity with the universe; and readily meets a simple appeal
to Scripture with the reply that "whosoever denieth a godhead denieth
also the Scriptures which testifie of him." [10] But in one of his own
plays, played in 1584, Lilly puts on the stage a glimpse of current
controversy in a fashion which suggests that he had not remained so
contemptuously confident of the self-evident character of theism. In
Campaspe (i, 3) he introduces, undramatically enough, Plato, Aristotle,
Cleanthes, Crates, and other philosophers, who converse concerning
"natural causes" and "supernatural effects." Aristotle is made to
confess that he "cannot by natural reason give any reason of the
ebbing and flowing of the sea"; and Plato contends against Cleanthes,
"searching for things which are not to be found," that "there is no
man so savage in whom resteth not this divine particle, that there
is an omnipotent, eternal, and divine mover, which may be called
God." Cleanthes replies that "that first mover, which you term God,
is the instrument of all the movings which we attribute to Nature. The
earth ... seasons ... fruits ... the whole firmament ... and whatsoever
else appeareth miraculous, what man almost of mean capacity but
can prove it natural." Nothing is concluded, and the debate is
adjourned. Anaxarchus declares: "I will take part with Aristotle,
that there is Natura naturans, and yet not God"; while Crates rejoins:
"And I with Plato, that there is Deus optimus maximus, and not Nature."
It is a curious dialogue to put upon the stage, by the mouth of
children-actors, and the arbitrary ascription to Aristotle of high
theistic views, in a scene in which he is expressly described by a
fellow philosopher as a Naturalist, suggests that Lilly felt the
danger of giving offence by presenting the supreme philosopher
as an atheist. It is evident, however, both from Euphues and from
Campaspe, that naturalistic views were in some vogue, else they had
not been handled in the theatre and in a book essentially planned
for the general reader. But however firmly held, they could not be
directly published; and a dozen years later, over thirty years after
the outburst of Ascham, we still find only a sporadic and unwritten
freethought, however abundant, going at times in fear of its life.
Private discussion, indeed, there must have been, if there be any
truth in Bacon's phrase that "atheists will ever be talking of that
opinion, as if they ... would be glad to be strengthened by the
consent of others" [11]--an argument which would make short work
of the vast literature of apologetic theism--but even private talk
had need be cautious, and there could be no publication of atheistic
opinions. Printed rationalism could go no further than such a protest
against superstition as Reginald Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft
(1584), which, however, is a sufficiently remarkable expression of
reason in an age in which a Bodin held angrily by the delusion. [12]
Elizabeth was herself substantially irreligious, [13] and preferred
to keep the clergy few in number and subordinate in influence; [14]
but her Ministers regarded the Church as part of the State system,
and punished all open or at least aggressive heresy in the manner
of the Inquisition. Yet the imported doctrine of the subjective
character of hell and heaven, [15] taken up by Marlowe, held its
ground, and is denounced by Stubbes in his Anatomie of Abuses [16]
(1583); and other foreign philosophy of the same order found religious
acceptance. A sect called the "Family of Love," deriving from Holland
(already "a country fruitfull of heretics"), [17] went so far as
to hold that "Christ doth not signify any one person, but a quality
whereof many are partakers"--a doctrine which we have seen ascribed
by Calvin to the libertins of Geneva a generation before; [18] but
it does not appear that they were persecuted. [19] Some isolated
propagandists, however, paid the last penalty. One Matthew Hamont
or Hamond, a ploughwright, of Hetherset, was in 1579 tried by the
Bishop and Consistory of Norwich "for that he denyed Christe," and,
being found guilty, was burned, after having had his ears cut off,
"because he spake wordes of blasphemie against the Queen's Maiistie
and others of her Counsell." [20] The victim would thus seem to have
been given to violence of speech; but the record of his negations,
which suggest developments from the Anabaptist movement, is none the
less notable. In Stow's wording, [21] they run:--
"That the newe Testament and Gospell of Christe are but mere
foolishnesse, a storie of menne, or rather a mere fable.
"Item, that man is restored to grace by the meere mercy of God,
wythout the meane of Christ's bloud, death, and passion.
"Item, that Christe is not God, nor the Saviour of the world,
but a meere man, a sinfull man, and an abhominable Idoll.
"Item, that al they that worshippe him are abhominable Idolaters;
And that Christe did not rise agayne from death to life by the
power of his Godhead, neither, that hee did ascende into Heaven.
"Item, that the holy Ghoste is not God, neither that there is
any suche holy Ghoste.
"Item, that Baptisme is not necessarie in the Churche of God,
neither the use of the sacrament of the body and bloude of Christ."
There is record also of a freethinker named John Lewes burned at the
same place in 1583 for "denying the Godhead of Christ, and holding
other detestable heresies," in the manner of Hamond. [22] In the same
year Elias Thacker and John Coping were hanged at St. Edmonsbury "for
spreading certaine bookes, seditiously penned by one Robert Browne
against the Booke of Common Prayer"; and "their bookes so many as
could be found were burnt before them." [23] Further, one Peter Cole,
an Ipswich tanner, was burned in 1587 (also at Norwich) for similar
doctrine; and Francis Kett, a young clergyman, ex-fellow of Corpus
Christi College, Cambridge, was burned at the same place in 1589 for
heresy of the Unitarian order. [24] Hamond and Cole seem, however,
to have been in their own way religious men, [25] and Kett a devout
mystic, with ideas of a Second Advent. [26] All founded on the Bible.
Most surprising of all perhaps is the record of the trial of
one John Hilton, clerk in holy orders, before the Upper House
of Convocation on December 22, 1584, on the charge of having
"said in a sermon at St. Martin's-in-the-Fields that the Old and
New Testaments are but fables." (Lansdowne MSS. British Museum,
No. 982, fol. 46, cited by Prof. Storojenko, Life of Robert Greene,
Eng. tr. in Grosart's "Huth Library" ed. of Greene's Works, i,
39, note.) As Hilton confessed to the charge and made abjuration,
it may be surmised that he had spoken under the influence of
liquor. Even on that view, however, such an episode tells of a
considerable currency of unbelieving criticism.
Apart from constructive heresy, the perpetual religious dissensions
of the time were sure to stimulate doubt; and there appeared quite
a number of treatises directed wholly or partly against explicit
unbelief, as: The Faith of the Church Militant, translated from
the Latin of the Danish divine Hemming (1581), and addressed "to
the confutation of the Jewes, Turks, Atheists, Papists, Hereticks,
and all other adversaries of the truth whatsoever"; "The Touchstone
of True Religion ... against the impietie of Atheists, Epicures,
Libertines, Hippocrites, and Temporisours of these times" (1590);
An Enemie to Atheisme, translated by T. Rogers from the Latin of
Avenar (1591); the preacher Henry Smith's God's Arrow against Atheists
(1593, rep. 1611); an English translation of the second volume of La
Primaudaye's L'Académie Française, containing a refutation of atheistic
doctrine; and no fewer than three "Treatises of the Nature of God"--all
anonymous, the third known to be by Bishop Thomas Morton--all appearing
in the year 1599.
All this smoke--eight apologetic treatises in eighteen years--implies
some fire; and the translator of La Primaudaye, one "T. B.," declares
in his dedication that there has been a general growth of atheism
in England and on the continent, which he traces to "that Monster
Machiavell." Among English atheists of that school he ranks the
dramatist Robert Greene, who had died in 1592; and it has been argued,
not quite convincingly, that it was to Machiavelli that Greene had
pointed, in his death-bed recantation A Groatsworth of Wit (1592), as
the atheistic instructor of his friend Marlowe, [27] who introduces
"Machiavel" as cynical prologist to his Jew of Malta. Greene's own
"atheism" had been for the most part a matter of bluster and disorderly
living; and we find his zealously orthodox friend Thomas Nashe, in his
Strange News (1592), calling the Puritan zealot who used the pseudonym
of Martin Marprelate "a mighty platformer of atheism"; even as his
own and Greene's enemy, Gabriel Harvey, called Nashe an atheist. [28]
But Nashe in his Christ's Tears over Jerusalem (1592), though he speaks
characteristically of the "atheistical Julian," discusses contemporary
atheism in a fashion descriptive of an actual growth of the opinion,
concerning which he alleges that there is no "sect now in England so
scattered [i.e., so widely spread] as atheisme." The "outward atheist,"
he declares, "establishes reason as his God"; and he offers some
sufficiently primitive arguments by way of confutation. "They follow
the Pironicks [i.e., Pyrrhonists], whose position and opinion it is
that there is no hell or misery but opinion. Impudently they persist
in it, that the late discovered Indians show antiquities thousands
before Adam." For the rest, they not only reject the miracles of Moses
as mere natural expedients misrepresented, but treat the whole Bible
as "some late writers of our side" treat the Apocrypha. And Nashe
complains feelingly that while the atheists "are special men of wit,"
and that "the Romish seminaries have not allured unto them so many
good wits as atheism," the preachers who reply to them are men of
dull understanding, the product of a system under which preferment is
given to graduates on the score not of capacity but of mere gravity
and solemnity. "It is the superabundance of wit," declares Nashe,
"that makes atheists: will you then hope to beat them down with fusty
brown-bread dorbellism?" [29] There had arisen, in short, a ferment of
rationalism which was henceforth never to disappear from English life.
In 1593, indeed, we find atheism formally charged against two
famous men, Christopher Marlowe and Sir Walter Raleigh, of whom the
first is documentarily connected with Kett, and the second in turn
with Marlowe. An official document, [30] preserved by some chance,
reveals that Marlowe was given--whether or not over the wine-cup--to
singularly audacious derision of the received beliefs; and so explicit
is the evidence that it is nearly certain he would have been executed
for blasphemy had he not been privately killed (1593) while the
proceedings were pending. The "atheism" imputed to him is not made
out in any detail; but many of the other utterances are notably in
keeping with Marlowe's daring temper; and they amount to unbelief
of a stringent kind. In Doctor Faustus [31] he makes Mephistopheles
affirm that "Hell hath no limits ... but where we are is hell"--a
doctrine which we have seen to be current before his time; and in
his private talk he had gone much further. Nashe doubtless had him
in mind when he spoke of men of "superabundance of wit." Not only
did he question, with Raleigh, the Biblical chronology: he affirmed
"That Moyses was but a juggler, and that one Heriots" [i.e., Thomas
Harriott, or Harriots, the astronomer, one of Raleigh's circle] "can
do more than he"; and concerning Jesus he used language incomparably
more offensive to orthodox feeling than that of Hamond and Kett. There
is more in all this than a mere assimilation of Machiavelli; though
the further saying "that the first beginning of religion was only
to keep men in awe"--put also by Greene [if not by Marlowe], with
much force of versification, in the mouth of a villain-hero in the
anonymous play of Selimus [32]--tells of that influence. Marlowe was
indeed not the man to swear by any master without adding something of
his own. Atheism, however, is not inferrible from any of his works: on
the contrary, in the second part of his famous first play he makes his
hero, described by the repentant Greene as the "atheist Tamburlaine,"
declaim of deity with signal eloquence, though with a pantheistic cast
of phrase. In another passage, a Moslem personage claims to be on the
side of a Christ who would punish perjury; and in yet another the hero
is made to trample under foot the pretensions of Mohammed. [33] It was
probably his imputation of perjury to Christian rulers in particular
that earned for Marlowe the malignant resentment which inspired the
various edifying comments published after his unedifying death. Had
he not perished as he did in a tavern brawl, he might have had the
nobler fate of a martyr.
Concerning Raleigh, again, there is no shadow of proof of atheism,
though his circle, which included the Earls of Northumberland and
Oxford, was called a "school of atheism" in a Latin pamphlet by the
Jesuit Parsons, [34] published at Rome in 1593; and this reputation
clung to him. It is matter of literary history, however, that he,
like Montaigne, had been influenced by the Hypotyposes of Sextus
Empiricus; [35] his short essay The Sceptick being a naïf exposition
of the thesis that "the sceptick doth neither affirm neither deny any
position; but doubteth of it, and applyeth his Reason against that
which is affirmed, or denied, to justifie his non-consenting." [36]
The essay itself, nevertheless, proceeds upon a set of wildly false
propositions in natural history, concerning which the adventurous
reasoner has no doubts whatever; and altogether we may be sure that
his artificial skepticism did not carry him far in philosophy. In
the Discovery of Guiana (1600) he declares that he is "resolved"
of the truth of the stories of men whose heads grow beneath their
shoulders; and in his History of the World (1603-16) he insists
that the stars and other celestial bodies "incline the will by
mediation of the sensitive appetite." [37] In other directions,
however, he was less credulous. In the same History he points out,
as Marlowe had done in talk, how incompatible was such a phenomenon
as the mature civilization of ancient Egypt in the days of Abraham
with the orthodox chronology. [38] This, indeed, was heresy enough,
then and later, seeing that not only did Bishop Pearson, in 1659, in
a work on The Creed which has been circulated down to the nineteenth
century, indignantly denounce all who departed from the figures in the
margin of the Bible; but Coleridge, a century and a half later, took
the very instance of Egyptian history as triumphantly establishing
the accuracy of the Bible record against the French atheists. [39]
As regards Raleigh's philosophy, the evidence goes to show only
that he was ready to read a Unitarian essay, presumably that already
mentioned, supposed to be Kett's; and that he had intercourse with
Marlowe and others (in particular his secretary, Harriott) known
to be freethinkers. A prosecution begun against him on this score,
at the time of the inquiry concerning Marlowe (when Raleigh was in
disgrace with the Queen), came to nothing. It had been led up to by
a translation of Parsons's pamphlet, which affirmed that his private
group was known as "Sir Walter Rawley's school of Atheisme," and that
therein "both Moyses and our Savior, the Old and the New Testaments,
are jested at, and the scholars taught among other things to spell God
backwards." [40] This seems to have been idle gossip, though it tells
of unbelief somewhere; and Raleigh's own writings always indicate
[41] belief in the Bible; though his dying speech and epitaph are
noticeably deistic. That he was a deist, given to free discussion,
seems the probable truth.
In passing sentence at the close of Raleigh's trial for treason in
1603, in which his guilt is at least no clearer than the inequity of
the proceedings, Lord Chief Justice Popham unscrupulously taunted him
with his reputation for heresy. "You have been taxed by the world with
the defence of the most heathenish and blasphemous opinions, which
I list not to repeat, because Christian ears cannot endure to hear
them, nor the authors and maintainers of them be suffered to live in
any Christian commonwealth. You know what men said of Harpool." [42]
If the preface to his History of the World, written in the Tower,
be authentic, Raleigh was at due pains to make clear his belief in
deity, and to repudiate alike atheism and pantheism. "I do also account
it," he declares, "an impiety monstrous, to confound God and Nature,
be it but in terms." [43] And he is no more tolerant than his judge
when he discusses the question of the eternity of the universe, then
the crucial issue as between orthodoxy and doubt. "Whosoever will
make choice rather to believe in eternal deformity [=want of form]
or in eternal dead matter, than in eternal light and eternal life,
let eternal death be his reward. For it is a madness of that kind, as
wanteth terms to express it." [44] Inasmuch as Aristotle was the great
authority for the denounced opinion, Raleigh is anti-Aristotelean. "I
shall never be persuaded that God hath shut up all light of learning
within the lantern of Aristotle's brains." [45] But in the whole
preface there is only one, and that a conventional, expression
of belief in the Christian dogma of salvation; and as to that we
may note his own words: "We are all in effect become comedians in
religion." [46] Still, untruthful as he certainly was, [47] we may
take him as a convinced theist of the experiential school, standing
at the ordinary position of the deists of the next century.
Notably enough, he anticipates the critical position of Hume as to
reason and experience: "That these and these be the causes of these
and these effects, time hath taught us and not reason; and so hath
experience without art." [48] Such utterance, if not connected with
professions of piety, might in those days give rise to such charges of
unbelief as were so freely cast at him. But the charges seem to have
been in large part mere expressions of the malignity which religion
so normally fosters, and which can seldom have been more bitter than
then. Raleigh is no admirable type of rectitude; but he can hardly
have been a worse man than his orthodox enemies. And we must estimate
such men in full view of the low standards of their age.
The belief about Raleigh's atheism was so strong that we have
Archbishop Abbot writing to Sir Thomas Roe on Feb. 19, 1618-1619,
that Raleigh's end was due to his "questioning" of "God's being
and omnipotence." It is asserted by Francis Osborn, who had known
Raleigh, that he got his title of Atheist from Queen Elizabeth. See
the preface (Author to Reader) to Osborn's Miscellany of Sundry
Essays, etc., in 7th ed. of his Works, 1673. As to atheism at
Elizabeth's court see J. J. Tayler, Retrospect of Relig. Life of
England, 2nd ed. p. 198, and ref. Lilly makes one of his characters
write of the ladies at court that "they never jar about matters
of religion, because they never mean to reason of them" (Euphues,
Arber's ed. p. 194).
A curious use was made of Raleigh's name and fame after his
death for various purposes. In 1620 or 1621 appeared "Vox
Spiritus, or Sir Walter Rawleigh's Ghost; a Conference between
Signr. Gondamier ... and Father Bauldwine"--a "seditious" tract by
one Captain Gainsford. It appears to have been reprinted in 1622 as
"Prosopoeia. Sir Walter Rawleigh's Ghost." Then in 1626 came a new
treatise, "Sir Walter Rawleigh's Ghost, or England's Forewarner,"
published in 1626 at Utrecht by Thomas Scott, an English minister
there, who was assassinated in the same year. The title having
thus had vogue, there was published in 1631 "Rawleigh's Ghost, or,
a Feigned Apparition of Syr Walter Rawleigh to a friend of his,
for the translating into English the Booke of Leonard Lessius
(that most learned man), entituled De Providentia Numinis et
animi immortalitate, written against the Atheists and Polititians
of these days." The translation of a Jesuit's treatise (1613)
thus accredited purports to be by "A. B." In a reprint of 1651
the "feigned" disappears from the title-page; but "Sir Walter
Rawleigh's Ghost" remains to attract readers; and the translation,
now purporting to be by John Holden, who claims to have been a
friend of Raleigh's, is dedicated to his son Carew. In the preface
the Ghost adjures the translator (who professes to have heard him
frequently praise the treatise of Lessius) to translate the work
with Raleigh's name on the title, so as to clear his memory of
"a foul and most unjust aspersion of me for my presumed denial
of a deity."
The latest documentary evidence as to the case of Marlowe is
produced by Mr. F. S. Boas in his article, "New Light on Marlowe
and Kyd," in the Fortnightly Review, February, 1899, reproduced
in his edition of the works of Thomas Kyd (Clarendon Press,
1901). In addition to the formerly known data as to Marlowe's
"atheism," it is now established that Thomas Kyd, his fellow
dramatist, was arrested on the same charge, and that there was
found among his papers one containing "vile hereticall conceiptes
denyinge the divinity of Jhesus Christe our Saviour." This Kyd
declared he had had from Marlowe, denying all sympathy with its
view. Nevertheless, he was put to the torture. The paper, however,
proves to be a vehement Unitarian argument on Scriptural grounds,
and is much more likely to have been written by Francis Kett than
by Marlowe. In the MSS. now brought to light, one Cholmeley, who
"confessed that he was persuaded by Marlowe's reasons to become an
Atheiste," is represented by a spy as speaking "all evil of the
Counsell, saying that they are all Atheistes and Machiavillians,
especially my Lord Admirall." The same "atheist," who imputes
atheism to others as a vice, is described as regretting he had
not killed the Lord Treasurer, "sayenge that he could never have
done God better service."
For the rest, the same spy tells that Cholmeley believed Marlowe
was "able to shewe more sound reasons for Atheisme than any
devine in Englande is able to geve to prove devinitie, and that
Marloe told him that he hath read the Atheist lecture to Sir
Walter Raleigh and others." On the last point there is no further
evidence, save that Sir Walter, his dependent Thomas Harriott,
and Mr. Carewe Rawley, were on March 21, 1593-1594, charged upon
sworn testimonies with holding "impious opinions concerning God
and Providence." There was, however, no prosecution. Harriott
had published in 1588 a work on his travels in Virginia, at the
close of which is a passage in the devoutest vein telling of his
missionary labours (quoted by Mr. Boas, art. cited, p. 225). Yet by
1592 he had, with his master, a reputation for atheism; and that it
was not wholly on the strength of his great scientific knowledge
is suggested by the statement of Anthony à Wood that he "made a
philosophical theology, wherein he cast off the Old Testament."
Of this no trace remains; but it is established that he was
a highly accomplished mathematician, much admired by Kepler;
and that he "applied the telescope to celestial purposes almost
simultaneously with Galileo" (art. Harriott in Dict. of Nat. Biog.;
cp. art. in Encyc. Brit.). "Harriott ... was the first who dared
to say A=B in the form A - B = 0, one of the greatest sources of
progress ever opened in algebra" (Prof. A. De Morgan, Newton, his
Friend and his Niece, 1885, p. 91). Further, he improved algebraic
notation by the use of small italic letters in place of Roman
capitals, and threw out the hypothesis of secondary planets as
well as of stars invisible from their size and distance. "He was
the first to verify the results of Galileo." Rev. Baden Powell,
Hist. of Nat. Philos. 1834, pp. 126, 168. Cp. Rigaud, as cited by
Powell; Ellis's notes on Bacon, in Routledge's 1-vol. ed. 1905,
pp. 674-76; and Storojenko, as above cited, p. 38, note.
Against the aspersion of Harriott at Raleigh's trial may be cited the
high panegyric of Chapman, who terms him "my admired and soul-loved
friend, master of all essential and true knowledge," [49] and one
"whose judgment and knowledge, in all kinds, I know to be incomparable
and bottomless, yea, to be admired as much as his most blameless
life, and the right sacred expense of his time, is to be honoured and
reverenced"; with a further "affirmation of his clear unmatchedness
in all manner of learning." [50]
The frequency of such traces of rationalism at this period is to
be understood in the light of the financial and other scandals of
the Reformation; the bitter strifes of Church and dissent; and the
horrors of the wars of religion in France, concerning which Bacon
remarks in his essay Of Unity in Religion that the spectacle would
have made Lucretius "seven times more Epicure and atheist than he
was." The proceedings against Raleigh and Kyd, accordingly, did
not check the spread of the private avowal of unbelief. A few years
later we find Hooker, in the Fifth Book of his Ecclesiastical Polity
(1597), bitterly declaring that the unbelievers in the higher tenets
of religion are much strengthened by the strifes of believers; [51]
as a dozen years earlier Bishop Pilkington told of "young whelps"
who "in corners make themselves merry with railing and scoffing
at the holy scriptures." [52] And in the Treatise of the Nature of
God, by Bishop Thomas Morton (1599), a quasi-dialogue in which the
arguing is all on one side, the passive interlocutor indicates, in
the process of repudiating them, a full acquaintance with the pleas
of those who "would openly profess themselves to be of that [the
atheistic] judgment, and as far as they might without danger defend
it by argument against any whatever." The pleas include the lack of
moral control in the world, the evidences of natural causation, the
varieties of religious belief, and the contradictions of Scripture. And
such atheists, we are told, "make nature their God." [53]
From Hooker's account also it is clear that, at least with
comparatively patient clerics like himself, the freethinkers would
at times deliberately press the question of theism, and avow the
conviction that belief in God was "a kind of harmless error, bred
and confirmed by the sleights of wiser men." He further notes with
even greater bitterness that some--an "execrable crew"--who were
themselves unbelievers, would in the old pagan manner argue for the
fostering of religion as a matter of State policy, herein conning
the lesson of Machiavelli. For his own part Hooker was confessedly
ill-prepared to debate with the atheists, and his attitude was not
fitted to shake their opinions. His one resource is the inevitable
plea that atheists are such for the sake of throwing off all moral
restraint [54]--a theorem which could hardly be taken seriously by
those who knew the history of the English and French aristocracies,
Protestant and Catholic, for the past hundred years. Hooker's own
measure of rationalism, though remarkable as compared with previous
orthodoxy, went no further than the application of the argument of
Pecock that reason must guide and control all resort to Scripture
and authority; [55] and he came to it under stress of dispute, as a
principle of accommodation for warring believers, not as an expression
of any independent skepticism. When his pious antagonist Travers
cited him as saying that "his best author was his own reason" [56]
he was prompt to reply that he meant "true, sound, divine reason;
... reason proper to that science whereby the things of God are
known; theological reason, which out of principles in Scripture that
are plain, soundly deduceth more doubtful inferences." [57] Of the
application of rational criticism to Scriptural claims he had no
idea. The unbelievers of his day were for him a frightful portent,
menacing all his plans of orthodox toleration; and he would have had
them put down by force--a course which in some cases, as we have seen,
had in that age been actually taken, and was always apt to be resorted
to. But orthodoxy all the while had a sure support in the social
and political conditions which made impossible the publication of
rationalistic opinions. While the whole machinery of public doctrine
remained in religious hands or under ecclesiastical control, the mass
of men of all grades inevitably held by the traditional faith. What
is remarkable is the amount of unbelief, either privately explicit
or implicit in the higher literature, of which we have trace.
Above all there remains the great illustration of the rationalistic
spirit of the English literary renascence of the sixteenth century--the
drama of Shakespeare. Of that it may confidently be said that every
attempt to find for it a religious foundation has failed. [58]
Gervinus, while oddly suggesting that "in not only not seeking a
reference to religion in his works, but in systematically avoiding
it even when opportunity offered," Shakespeare was keeping clear of
an embroilment with the clergy, nevertheless pronounces the plays
to be wholly secular in spirit. While contending that "in action
the religious and divine in man is nothing else than the moral," the
German critic admits that Shakespeare "wholly discarded from his works
... that which religion enjoins as to faith and opinion." [59] And,
while refusing the inference of positive unbelief on the poet's part,
he pronounces that, "Just as Bacon banished religion from science, so
did Shakespeare from art.... From Bacon's example it seems clear that
Shakespeare left religious matters unnoticed on the same grounds." [60]
The latest and weightiest criticism comes to the same conclusion;
and it is only on presupposition that any other can be reached. One
of the ablest of Shakespearean critics sums up that "the Elizabethan
drama was almost wholly secular; and while Shakespeare was writing
he practically confined his view to the world of non-theological
observation and thought, so that he represents it in substantially
one and the same way whether the period of the story is pre-Christian
or Christian."
[Prof. A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, 2nd ed. p. 25. In
the concluding pages of his lecture on Hamlet, Professor Bradley
slightly modifies this statement, suggesting that the ghost is made
to appear as "the representative of the hidden ultimate power,
the messenger of divine justice" (p. 174). Here, it seems to the
present writer, Professor Bradley obtrudes the chief error of
his admirable book--the constant implication that Shakespeare
planned his plays as moral wholes. The fact is that he found
the ghost an integral part of the old play which he rewrote;
and in making it, in Professor Bradley's words, "so majestical
a phantom," he was simply heightening the character as he does
others in the play, and as was his habit in the presentment of a
king. In his volume of lectures entitled Oxford Lectures on Poetry
(1909), Professor Bradley goes more fully into the problem of
Shakespeare's religion. Here he somewhat needlessly obscures the
issue by contending (p. 349) that it is preposterous to suppose
that Shakespeare was "an ardent and devoted atheist or Brownist
or Roman Catholic," and makes the most of the poet's sympathetic
treatment of religious types and religious sentiments; but still
sums up that he "was not, in the distinctive sense of the word,
a religious man," and that "all was, for him, in the end, mystery"
(p. 353).]
This perhaps somewhat understates the case. The Elizabethan drama was
not wholly secular; [61] and certainly the dramatists individually
were not. Peele's David and Bethsabe is wholly Biblical in theme,
and, though sensual in sentiment, substantially orthodox in spirit;
and elsewhere he has many passages of Protestant and propagandist
fervour. [62] Greene and Lodge give a highly Scriptural ring to their
Looking-Glass for London; and Lodge, who uses religious expressions
freely in his early treatise, A Defence of Poetry, Music, and Stage
Plays, [63] later translated Josephus. Kyd in Arden of Feversham [64]
accepts the Christian view at the close, though The Spanish Tragedy
is pagan; and the pre-Shakespearean King Leir and his Three Daughters
(1594), probably the work of Kyd and Lodge, has long passages of
specifically Christian sentiment. Nashe, again, was a hot religious
controversialist despite his Bohemian habits and his indecorous
vein; Greene on his repentant deathbed was profusedly censorious
of atheism; [65] Lilly, as we have seen, is combatively theistic
in his Campaspe; while Jonson, as we shall see, girds at skeptics
in Volpone and The Magnetick Lady, and further wrote a quantity of
devotional verse. Even the "atheist" Marlowe, as we saw, puts theistic
sentiment into the mouth of his "atheist Tamburlaine"; and of Doctor
Faustus, despite incidental heresy, the dénouement is religiously
orthodox. Thomas Heywood may even be pronounced a religious man, [66]
as he was certainly a strong Protestant, [67] though an anti-Puritan;
and his prose treatise The Hierarchy of the Blessed Angels (1635)
exhibits a religious temperament. The same may be said of Dekker, who
is recorded to have written at least the prologue and the epilogue
for a play on Pontius Pilate, [68] and is believed to be the author
of the best scenes in The Virgin Martyr, in which he collaborated
with Massinger. He too uses supererogatory religious expressions,
[69] and shows his warm Protestantism in The Whore of Babylon, as
he does his general religious sentiment in his treatise The Seven
Deadly Sins. Chapman was certainly a devout theist, and probably
a Christian. In the "domestic" tragedy, A Warning for Fair Women
(1599), which is conjecturally ascribed to Lodge, the conclusion is
on Christian lines, as in Arden; and the same holds of The Witch of
Edmonton, by Dekker and others. Of none of these dramatists could it
be said, on the mere strength of his work, that he was "agnostic,"
though Marlowe was certainly a freethinker. The others were, first or
last, avowedly religious. Shakespeare, and Shakespeare alone, after
Marlowe, is persistently non-religious in his handling of life. Lear,
his darkest tragedy, is predominantly pagan; and The Tempest, in
its serener vein, is no less so. But indeed all the genuine plays
alike ignore or tacitly negate the idea of immortality; even the
conventional religious phrases of Macbeth being but incidental poetry.
In the words of a clerical historian, "the religious phrases which
are thinly scattered over his work are little more than expressions
of a distant and imaginative reverence. And on the deeper grounds
of religious faith his silence is significant.... The riddle of life
and death ... he leaves ... a riddle to the last, without heeding the
common theological solutions around him." [70] The practical wisdom
in which he rose above his rivals no less than in dramatic and poetic
genius, kept him prudently reticent on his opinions, as it set him
upon building his worldly fortunes while the others with hardly an
exception lived in shallows and miseries. As so often happens, it was
among the ill-balanced types that there was found the heedless courage
to cry aloud what others thought; but Shakespeare's significant silence
reminds us that the largest spirits of all could live in disregard
of contemporary creeds. For, while there is no record of his having
privately avowed unbelief, and certainly no explicit utterance of it
in his plays, [71] in no genuine work of his is there any more than
bare dramatic conformity to current habits of religious speech; and
there is often significantly less. In Measure for Measure the Duke,
counselling as a friar the condemned Claudio, discusses the ultimate
issues of life and death without a hint of Christian credence.
So silent is the dramatist on the ecclesiastical issues of his day
that Protestants and Catholics are enabled to go on indefinitely
claiming him as theirs; the latter dwelling on his generally kindly
treatment of friars; the former citing the fact that some Protestant
preacher--evidently a protégé of his daughter Susannah--was allowed
lodging at his house. But the preacher was not very hospitably
treated; [72] and other clues fail. There is good reason to think that
Shakespeare was much influenced by Montaigne's Essays, read by him in
Florio's translation, which was issued when he was recasting the old
Hamlet; and the whole treatment of life in the great tragedies and
serious comedies produced by him from that time forward is even more
definitely untheological than Montaigne's own doctrine. [73] Nor can he
be supposed to have disregarded the current disputes as to fundamental
beliefs, implicating as they did his fellow-dramatists Marlowe, Kyd,
and Greene. The treatise of De Mornay, of which Sir Philip Sidney began
and Arthur Golding finished the translation, [74] was in his time
widely circulated in England; and its very inadequate argumentation
might well strengthen in him the anti-theological leaning.
A serious misconception has been set up as to Shakespeare's cast
of mind by the persistence of editors in including among his works
without discrimination plays which are certainly not his, as the Henry
VI group, to which he contributed little, and in particular the First
Part, of which he wrote probably nothing. It is on the assumption that
that play is Shakespeare's work that Lecky (Rationalism in Europe,
ed. 1887, i, 105-106) speaks of "that melancholy picture of Joan
of Arc which is perhaps the darkest blot upon his genius." Now,
whatever passages Shakespeare may have contributed to the Second
and Third Parts, it is certain that he has barely a scene in
the First, and that there is not a line from his hand in the La
Pucelle scenes. Many students think that Dr. Furnivall has even
gone too far in saying that "the only part ... to be put down to
Shakespeare is the Temple Garden scene of the red and white roses"
(Introd. to Leopold Shakespeare, p. xxxviii); so little is there to
suggest even the juvenile Shakespeare there. (The high proportion
of double-endings is a ground for reckoning it a late sample of
Marlowe, who in his posthumously published translation of Lucan had
approached that proportion. Cp. the author's vol. on Titus Andronicus,
p. 190.) But that any critical and qualified reader can still hold
him to have written the worst of the play is unintelligible. The
whole work would be a "blot on his genius" in respect of its literary
weakness. The doubt was raised long before Lecky wrote, and was made
good a generation ago. When Lecky further proceeds, with reference to
the witches in Macbeth, to say (id. note) that it is "probable that
Shakespeare ... believed with an unfaltering faith in the reality
of witchcraft," he strangely misreads that play. Nothing is clearer
than that it grounds Macbeth's action from the first in Macbeth's own
character and his wife's, employing the witch machinery (already used
by Middleton) to meet the popular taste, but never once making the
witches really causal forces. An "unfaltering" believer in witchcraft
who wrote for the stage would surely have turned it to serious account
in other tragedies. This Shakespeare never does. On Lecky's view, he
is to be held as having believed in the fairy magic of the Midsummer
Night's Dream and the Tempest, and in the actuality of such episodes
as that of the ghost in Macbeth. But who for a moment supposes him to
have had any such belief? It is probable that the entire undertaking of
Macbeth (1605?) and later of the Tempest (1610?) was due to a wish on
the part of the theatre management to please King James, whose belief
in witchcraft and magic was notorious. Even the use of the Ghost in
Hamlet is an old stage expedient, common to the pre-Shakespearean
play and to others of Kyd's and Peele's. Shakespeare significantly
altered the dying words of Hamlet from the "heaven receive my soul"
of the old version to "the rest is silence." The bequest of his soul
to the Deity in his will is merely the regulation testamentary formula
of the time. In his sonnets, which hint his personal cast if anything
does, there is no real trace of religious creed or feeling. And it
is clearly the hand of Fletcher, a no less sensual writer than Peele,
that penned the part of Henry VIII in which occurs the Protestant tag:
"In her [Elizabeth's] days ... God shall be truly known." [75]
While, however, Shakespeare is notably naturalistic as compared with
the other Elizabethan dramatists, it remains true that their work in
the mass tells little of a habitually religious way of thinking. Apart
from the plays above named, and from polemic passages and devotional
utterances outside their plays, they hint as little of Christian
dogma as of Christian asceticism. Hence, in fact, the general and
bitter hostility of the Puritans to the stage. Even at and after
Shakespeare's death, the drama is substantially "graceless." Jonson,
who was for a time a Catholic, but reverted to the Church of England,
disliked the Puritans, and in Bartholomew Fair derides them. The age
did not admit of a pietistic drama; and when there was a powerful
pietistic public, it made an end of drama altogether. To Elizabeth's
reign probably belongs the Atheist's Tragedy of Cyril Tourneur, first
published in 1611, but evidently written in its author's early youth--a
coarse and worthless performance, full of extremely bad imitations of
Shakespeare. [76] But to the age of Elizabeth also belongs, perhaps,
the sententious tragedy of Mustapha by Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke,
first surreptitiously published in 1609. A century and a half later
the deists were fond of quoting [77] the concluding Chorus Sacerdotum,
beginning:
O wearisome condition of humanity,
Born under one law, to another bound;
Vainly begot, and yet forbidden vanity;
Created sick, commanded to be sound:
If nature did not take delight in blood,
She would have made more easy ways to good.
It is natural to suspect that the author of such lines was less
orthodox than his own day had reputed him; and yet the whole of
his work shows him much pre-occupied with religion, though perhaps
in a deistic spirit. But Brooke's introspective and undramatic
poetry is an exception: the prevailing colour of the whole drama
of the Shakespearean period is pre-Puritan and semi-pagan; and
the theological spirit of the next generation, intensified by King
James, was recognized by cultured foreigners as a change for the
worse. [78] The spirit of free learning for the time was gone,
expelled by theological rancours; and when Selden ventured in
his History of Tythes (1618) to apply the method of dispassionate
historical criticism to ecclesiastical matters he was compelled to
make a formal retractation. [79] Early Protestants had attacked, as a
papal superstition, the doctrine that tithes were levied jure divino:
Protestants had now come to regard as atheistic the hint that tithes
were levied otherwise. [80]
Not that rationalism became extinct. The "Italianate" incredulity
as to a future state, which Sir John Davies had sought to repel
by his poem, Nosce Teipsum (1599), can hardly have been overthrown
even by that remarkable production, which in the usual orthodox way
pronounces all doubters to be "light and vicious persons," who,
"though they would, cannot quite be beasts." [81] And there were
other forms of doubt. In 1602 appeared The Unmasking of the Politique
Atheist, by J. H. [John Hull], Batchelor of Divinitie, which, however,
is in the main a mere attempt to retort upon Catholics the charge of
atheism laid by them against Protestants. Soon after, in 1605, we find
Dr. John Dove producing a Confutation of Atheisme in the manner of
previous continental treatises, making the word "atheism" cover many
shades of theism; and an essayist writing in 1608 asserts that, on
account of the self-seeking and corruption so common among churchmen,
"prophane Atheisme hath taken footing in the hearts of ignorant and
simple men." [82] The orthodox Ben Jonson, in his Volpone (1607),
puts in the mouth of a fool [83] the lines:--
And then, for your religion, profess none,
But wonder at the diversity of all;
And, for your part, protest, were there no other
But simply the laws o' th' land, you would content you.
Nic Machiavel and Monsieur Bodin both
Were of this mind.
But the testimony is not the less significant; as is the account in
The Magnetick Lady (1632) of
A young physician to the family
That, letting God alone, ascribes to Nature
More than her share; licentious in discourse,
And in his life a profest voluptuary. [84]
Such statements of course prove merely a frequent coolness towards
religion, not a vogue of reasoned unbelief. But the existence
of rationalizing heresy is attested by the burning of two men,
Bartholomew Legate and Edward Wightman, for avowing Unitarian views,
in 1612. These, the last executions for heresy in England, were results
of the theological zeal of King James, stimulated by the Calvinistic
fanaticism of Archbishop Abbot, the predecessor of Laud.
James's career as a persecutor began characteristically in a meddlesome
attack upon a professor in Holland. A German theologian of Socinian
leanings, named Conrad Vorstius, professor at Steinfurth, had produced
in 1606 a somewhat heretical treatise, De Deo, but had nevertheless
been appointed in 1610 professor of theology at Leyden, in succession
to Arminius. It was his acceptance of Arminian views, joined with
his repute as a scholar, [85] that secured him the invitation, which
was given without the knowledge that at a previous period he had been
offered a similar appointment by the Socinians. In his Anti-Bellarminus
contractus, "a brief refutation of the four tomes of Bellarmin,"
he had taken the Arminian line, repudiating the Calvinist positions
which, in the opinion of Arminius, could not be defended against
the Catholic attack. But he was too speculative and ratiocinative
to be safe in an age in which the fear of spreading Socinianism
and the hate of Calvinists towards Arminianism had set up a reign of
terror. Vorstius was both "unsettling" and heterodox. His opinions were
"such as in our own day would certainly disqualify him from holding
such an office in any Christian University"; [86] and James, worked
upon by Abbot, went so far as to make the appointment of Vorstius a
diplomatic question. The stadhouder Maurice and the bulk of the Dutch
clergy being of his view, the more tolerant statesmen of Holland,
and the mercantile aristocracy, yielded from motives of prudence, and
Vorstius was dismissed in order to save the English alliance. Remaining
thenceforth without employment, he was further denounced in 1619 by
the Synod of Dort, and banished by the States General. Thereafter
he lived for two years in hiding; and soon after obtaining a refuge
in Holstein, died, worn out by his troubles. In England, meantime,
James drew up with his own hands a catalogue of the heresies found
by him in Vorstius's treatise, and caused the book to be burned in
London and at the two Universities. [87]
On the heels of this amazing episode came the cases of Wightman
and Legate. Finding, in a personal conversation, that Legate had
"ceased to pray to Christ," the King had him brought before the
Bishop of London's Consistory Court, which sentenced the heretic to
Newgate. Being shortly released, he had the imprudence to threaten an
action for false imprisonment, whereupon he was re-arrested. Chief
Justice Coke held that, technically, the Consistory Court could
not sentence to burning; but Hobart and Bacon, the law officers of
the Crown, and other judges, were of opinion that it could. Legate,
accordingly, was duly tried, sentenced, and burned at Smithfield; and
Wightman a few days later was similarly disposed of at Lichfield. [88]
Bacon's share in this matter is obscure, and has not been discussed by
either his assailants or his vindicators. As for the general public,
the historian records that "not a word was uttered against this
horrible cruelty. As we read over the brief contemporary notices
which have reached us, we look in vain for the slightest intimation
that the death of these two men was regarded with any other feelings
than those with which the writers were accustomed to hear of the
execution of an ordinary murderer. If any remark was made, it was
in praise of James for the devotion which he showed to the cause of
God." [89] That might have been reckoned on. It was not twenty years
since Hamond, Lewis, Cole, and Kett had been burned on similar grounds;
and there had been no outcry then. For generations "direness" had been
too familiar to men's thoughts to admit of their being shocked by a
judicial murder or two the more. Catholic priests had been executed
by the score: why not a pair of Unitarians? [90] Little had gone
on in the average intellectual life in the interim save religious
discussion and Bibliolatry, and not from such culture could there
come any growth of human kindness or any clearer conception of the
law of reciprocity. But, whether by force of recoil from a revival of
the fires of Smithfield or from a perception that mere cruelty did
not avail to destroy heresy, the theological ultima ratio was never
again resorted to on English ground.
Though no public protest was made, the retrospective Fuller testifies
that "such burning of heretics much startled common people, pitying
all in pain, and prone to asperse justice itself with cruelty,
because of the novelty (!) and hideousness of the punishment." [91]
It is noteworthy that within a few years of the burning of Legate
and Wightman there appeared quite a cluster of treatises explicitly
contending for toleration. In 1614 came Religion's Peace: or, a Plea
for Liberty of Conscience, by Leonard Busher, the first English book of
the kind. In 1615 came Persecution for Religion Judged and Condemned;
and in 1620 An Humble Supplication to the King's Majesty, pressing
the same doctrine. [92] There is no record of any outcry over these
works, though they are tolerably freespoken in their indictment of the
coercive school; and they had all to be reprinted a generation later,
their point having never been carried; but it may be surmised that
their appeal, which is substantially well reasoned from a secular
as well as from a theological point of view, had something to do
with the abandonment of persecution unto death. Even King James,
in opening the Parliament of 1614, professed to recognize that no
religion or heresy was ever extirpated by violence.
That an age of cruel repression of heresy had promoted unbelief
is clear from the Atheomastix of Bishop Fotherby (1622), which
notes among other things that as a result of constant disputing
"the Scriptures (with many) have lost their authority, and are
thought onely fit for the ignorant and idiote." [93] On this head
the bishop attempts no answer; and on his chosen theme he is perhaps
the worst of all apologists. His admission that there can be no à
priori proof of deity [94] may be counted to him for candour; but the
childishness of his reasoning à posteriori excludes the ascription
of philosophic insight. He does but use the old pseudo-arguments of
universal consent and design, with the simple device of translating
polytheistic terms into monotheistic. All the while he makes the usual
suggestions that there are few or no atheists to convert, and these
not worth converting--this at a folio's length. The book tells only
of difficulties evaded by vociferation. And while the growing stress
of the strife between the ecclesiasticism of the Crown and the forces
of nonconformity more and more thrust to the front religio-political
issues, there began alongside of those strifes the new and powerful
propaganda of deism, which, beginning with the Latin treatise, De
Veritate, of Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1624), was gradually to leaven
English thought for over a century.
Further, there now came into play the manifold influence of
Francis Bacon, whose case illustrates perhaps more fully than any
other the difficulties, alike external and internal, in the way of
right thinking. Taken as a whole, his work is on account of those
difficulties divided against itself, insisting as he does alternately
on a strict critical method and on the subjection of reason to
the authority of revelation. He sounds a trumpet-call to a new and
universal effort of free and circumspect intelligence; and on the
instant he stipulates for the prerogative of Scripture. Though only
one of many who assailed alike the methodic tyranny of Aristotelianism
[95] and the methodless empiricism of the ordinary "scientific" thought
of the past, he made his attack with a sustained and manifold force
of insight and utterance which still entitles him to pre-eminence
as the great critic of wrong methods and the herald of better. Yet
he not only transgresses often his own principal precepts in his
scientific reasoning; he falls below several of his contemporaries and
predecessors in respect of his formal insistence on the final supremacy
of theology over reason, alike in physics and in ethics. Where Hooker
is ostensibly seeking to widen the field of rational judgment on the
side of creed, Bacon, the very champion of mental emancipation in
the abstract, declares the boundary to be fixed.
Of those lapses from critical good faith, part of the explanation
is to be found in the innate difficulty of vital innovation for
all intelligences; part in the special pressures of the religious
environment. On the latter head Bacon makes such frequent and emphatic
protest that we are bound to infer on his part a personal experience
in his own day of the religious hostility which long followed his
memory. "Generally," he wrote of himself in one fragment, "he perceived
in men of devout simplicity this opinion, that the secrets of nature
were the secrets of God, and part of that glory whereinto the mind of
man if it seek to press shall be oppressed;... and on the other side,
in men of a devout policy he noted an inclination to have the people
depend upon God the more when they are less acquainted with second
causes, and to have no stirring in philosophy, lest it may lead to
innovation in divinity or else should discover matter of further
contradiction to divinity" [96]--a summary of the whole early history
of the resistance to science. [97] In the works which he wrote at the
height of his powers, especially in his masterpiece, the Novum Organum
(1620), where he comes closest to the problems of exact inquiry,
he specifies again and again both popular superstition and orthodox
theology as hindrances to scientific research, commenting on "those
who out of faith and veneration mix their philosophy with theology
and traditions," [98] and declaring that of the drawbacks science
had to contend with "the corruption of philosophy by superstition and
an admixture of theology is far the more widely spread, and does the
greatest harm, whether to entire systems or to their parts. For the
human understanding is obnoxious to the influence of the imagination
no less than to the influence of common notions." [99] In the same
passage he exclaims at the "extreme levity" of those of the moderns who
have attempted to "found a system of natural philosophy on the first
chapter of Genesis, on the book of Job, and other parts of the sacred
writings"; [100] and yet again, coupling as obstinate adversaries
of Natural Philosophy "superstition, and the blind and immoderate
zeal of religion," he roundly affirms that "by the simpleness of
certain divines access to any philosophy, however pure, is well nigh
closed." [101] These charges are repeatedly salved by such claims
as that "true religion" puts no obstacles in the way of science;
[102] that the book of Job runs much to natural philosophy; [103]
and, in particular, in the last book of the De Augmentis Scientiarum,
redacted after his disgrace, by the declaration--more emphatic than
those of the earlier Advancement of Learning--that "Sacred Theology
ought to be derived from the word and oracles of God, and not from
the light of nature or the dictates of reason." [104] In this mood
he goes so far as to declare, with the thorough-going obscurantists,
that "the more discordant and incredible the divine mystery is, the
more honour is shown to God in believing it, and the nobler is the
victory of faith."
[It was probably such deliverances as these that led to the
ascription to Bacon of The Christian Paradoxes, first published
(surreptitiously), without author's name, in 1645. As has been
shown by Dr. Grosart (Lord Bacon NOT the Author of "The Christian
Paradoxes," 1865) that treatise was really by Herbert Palmer,
B.D., who published it in full in part ii of his Memorials
of Godliness and Christianity, 5th ed. 1655. The argument
drawn from this treatise as to Bacon's skepticism is a twofold
mystification. The Paradoxes are the deliberate declaration of a
pietist that he believes the dogmas of revelation without rational
comprehension. The style is plainly not Bacon's; but Bacon had
said the same thing in the sentence quoted above. Dr. Grosart's
explosive defence against the criticism of Ritter (work cited,
p. 14) is an illustration of the intellectual temper involved.]
Yet even in the calculated extravagance of this last pronouncement
there is a ground for question whether the fallen Chancellor, hoping
to retrieve himself, and trying every device of his ripe sagacity to
avert opposition, was not straining his formal orthodoxy beyond his
real intellectual habit. As against such wholesale affirmation we have
his declarations that "certain it is that God worketh nothing in nature
but by second causes," and that any pretence to the contrary "is mere
imposture as it were in favour towards God, and nothing else but to
offer to the author of truth the unclean sacrifice of a lie"; [105]
his repeated objection to the discussion of Final Causes; [106] his
attack on Plato and Aristotle for rejecting the atheistic scientific
method of Democritus; [107] his peremptory assertion that motion is a
property of matter; [108] and his almost Democritean handling of the
final problem, in which he insists that primal matter is, "next to
God, the cause of causes, itself only without a cause." [109] Further,
though he speaks of Scriptural miracles in a conventional way, [110]
he drily pronounces in one passage that, "as for narrations touching
the prodigies and miracles of religions, they are either not true or
not natural, and therefore impertinent for the story of nature." [111]
Finally, as against the formal capitulation to theology at the close of
the De Augmentis, he has left standing in the first book of the Latin
version the ringing doctrine of the original Advancement of Learning
(1605), that "there is no power on earth which setteth up a throne
or chair in the spirits and souls of men, and in their cogitations,
imaginations, opinions, and beliefs, but knowledge and learning";
[112] and in his Wisdom of the Ancients [113] he has contrived to
turn a crude myth into a subtle allegory in behalf of toleration.
Thus, despite his many resorts to and prostrations before the
Scriptures, the general effect of his writings in this regard is
to set up in the minds of his readers the old semi-rationalistic
equivoque of a "two-fold truth"; reminding us as they do that he "did
in the beginning separate the divine testimony from the human." When,
therefore, he announces that "we know by faith" that "matter was
created from nothing," [114] he has the air of juggling with his
problem; and his further suggestion as to the possibility of matter
being endowed with a force of evolution, however cautiously put, is far
removed from orthodoxy. Accordingly, the charge of atheism--which he
notes as commonly brought against all who dwell solely on second causes
[115]--was actually cast at his memory in the next generation. [116]
It was of course false: on the issue of theism he is continually
descanting with quite conventional unction; as in the familiar essay
on atheism. [117] His dismissal of final causes as "barren" meant
merely that the notion was barren of scientific result; [118] and he
refers the question to metaphysic. [119] But if his theism was of a
kind disturbing to believers in a controlling Providence, as little
was it satisfactory to Christian fervour: and it can hardly be doubted
that the main stream of his argument made for a non-Biblical deism,
if not for atheism; his dogmatic orthodoxies being undermined by his
own scientific teaching.
Lechler (Gesch. des englischen Deismus, pp. 23-25) notes that
Bacon involuntarily made for deism. Cp. Amand Saintes, Hist. de
la philos. de Kant, 1844, p. 69; and Kuno Fischer, Francis
Bacon, Eng. tr. 1857, ch. xi, pp. 341-43. Dean Church (Bacon,
in "Men of Letters" series, pp. 174, 205) insists that Bacon
held by revelation and immortality; and can of course cite his
profession of such belief, which is not to be disputed. (Cp. the
careful judgment of Prof. Fowler in his Bacon, pp. 180-91, and
his ed. of the Novum Organum, 1878, pp. 43-53.) But the tendency
of the specific Baconian teaching is none the less to put these
beliefs aside, and to overlay them with a naturalistic habit of
mind. At the first remove from Bacon we have Hobbes.
As regards his intellectual inconsistencies, we can but say that they
are such as meet us in men's thinking at every new turn. Though we
can see that Bacon's orthodoxy "doth protest too much," with an eye
on king and commons and public opinion, we are not led to suppose
that he had ever in his heart cast off his inherited creed. He shows
frequent Christian prejudice in his references to pagans; and can
write that "To seek to extinguish anger utterly is but the bravery
of the Stoics," [120] pretending that the Christian books are more
accommodating, and ignoring the Sermon on the Mount. In arguing that
the "religion of the heathen" set men upon ending "all inquisition
of nature in metaphysical or theological discourse," and in charging
the Turks with a special tendency to "ascribe ordinary effects to the
immediate workings of God," [121] he is playing not very scrupulously
on the vanity of his co-religionists. As he was only too well aware,
both tendencies ruled the Christian thought of his own day, and derive
direct from the sacred books--not from "abuse," as he pretends. And
on the metaphysical as on the common-sense side of his thought he
is self-contradictory, even as most men have been before and since,
because judgment cannot easily fulfil the precepts it frames for
itself in illuminated hours. Latter-day students have been impressed,
as was Leibnitz, by the original insight with which Bacon negated the
possibility of our forming any concrete conception of a primary form
of matter, and insisted on its necessary transcendence of our powers
of knowledge. [122] On the same principle he should have negated
every modal conception of the still more recondite Something which he
put as antecedent to matter, and called God. [123] Yet in his normal
thinking he seems to have been content with the commonplace formula
given in his essay on Atheism--that we cannot suppose the totality of
things to be "without a mind." He has here endorsed in its essentials
what he elsewhere calls "the heresy of the Anthropomorphites," [124]
failing to apply his own law in his philosophy, as elsewhere in his
physics. When, however, we realize that similar inconsistency is fallen
into after him by Spinoza, and wholly escaped perhaps by no thinker,
we are in a way to understand that with all his deflections from his
own higher law Bacon may have profoundly and fruitfully influenced
the thought of the next generation, if not that of his own.
The fact of this influence has been somewhat obscured by the modern
dispute as to whether he had any important influence on scientific
progress. [125] At first sight the old claim for him in that regard
seems to be heavily discounted by the simple fact that he definitely
rejected the Copernican system of astronomy. [126] Though, however,
this gravely emphasizes his fallibility, it does not cancel his
services as a stimulator of scientific thought. At that time only a few
were yet intelligently convinced Copernicans; and we have the record of
how, in Bacon's day, Harvey lost heavily in credit and in his medical
practice by propounding his discovery of the circulation of the blood,
[127] which, it is said, no physician over forty years old at that
time believed in. For the scientific men of that century--and only
among them did Copernicanism find the slightest acceptance--it was
thus no fatal shortcoming in Bacon to have failed to grasp the true
scheme of sidereal motion, any more than it was in Galileo to be wrong
about the tides and comets. They could realize that it was precisely
in astronomy, for lack of special study and expert knowledge, that
Bacon was least qualified to judge. Intellectual influence on science
is not necessarily dependent on actual scientific achievement, though
that of course furthers and establishes it; and the fact of Bacon's
impact on the mind of the next age is abundantly proved by testimonies.
For a time the explicit tributes came chiefly from abroad;
though at all times, even in the first shock of his disgrace,
there were Englishmen perfectly convinced of his greatness. To
the winning of foreign favour he had specially addressed himself
in his adversity. Grown wary in act as well as wise in theory, he
deleted from the Latin De Augmentis a whole series of passages of the
Advancement of Learning which disparaged Catholics and Catholicism;
[128] and he had his reward in being appreciated by many Jesuit and
other Catholic scholars. [129] But Protestants such as Comenius and
Leibnitz were ere long more emphatic than any Catholics; [130] and at
the time of the Restoration we find Bacon enthusiastically praised
among the more open-minded and scientifically biassed thinkers of
England, who included some zealous Christians. [131] It was not that
his special "method" enabled them to reach important results with
any new facility; its impracticability is now insisted on by friends
as well as foes. [132] It was that he arraigned with extraordinary
psychological insight and brilliance of phrase the mental vices which
had made discoveries so rare; the alternate self-complacency and
despair of the average indolent mind; the "opinion of store" which was
"cause of want"; the timid or superstitious evasion of research. In
all this he was using his own highest powers, his comprehension
of human character and his genius for speech. And though his own
scientific results were not to be compared with those of Galileo and
Descartes, the wonderful range of his observation and his curiosity,
the unwearying zest of his scrutiny of well-nigh all the known fields
of Nature, must have been an inspiration to multitudes of students
besides those who have recorded their debt to him. It is probable
that but for his literary genius, which though little discussed is
of a very rare order, his influence would have been both narrower and
less durable; but, being one of the great writers of the modern world,
he has swayed men down till our own day.
Certain it is that alongside of his doctrine there persisted in
England, apart from all printed utterance, a movement of deistic
rationalism, of which the eighteenth century saw only the fuller
development. Sir John Suckling (1609-1641), rewriting about 1637
his letter to the Earl of Dorset, An Account of Religion by Reason,
tells how in a first sketch it "had like to have made me an Atheist at
Court," and how "the fear of Socinianism at this time renders every man
that offers to give an account of religion by reason, suspected to have
none at all"; [133] but he also mentions that he knows it "still to
be the opinion of good wits that the particular religion of Christians
has added little to the general religion of the world." [134] Himself a
young man of talent, he offers quasi-rational reconciliations of faith
with reason which can have satisfied no real doubter, and can hardly
have failed to introduce doubt into the minds of some of his readers.
§ 5. Popular Thought in Europe
Of popular freethought in the rest of Europe there is little to
chronicle for a hundred and fifty years after the Reformation. The
epoch-making work of Copernicus, published in 1543, had little or
no immediate effect in Germany, where, as we have seen, physical
and verbal strifes had begun with the ecclesiastical revolution,
and were to continue to waste the nation's energy for a century. In
1546, all attempts at ecclesiastical reconciliation having failed,
the emperor Charles V, in whom Melanchthon had seen a model monarch,
[135] decided to put down the Protestant heresy by war. Luther had
just died, apprehensive for his cause. Civil war now raged till the
peace of Augsburg in 1555; whereafter Charles abdicated in favour
of his son Philip. Here were in part the conditions which in France
and elsewhere were later followed by a growth of rational unbelief;
and there are some traces even at this time of partial skepticism in
high places in the German world, notably in the case of the Emperor
Maximilian II, who, "grown up in the spirit of doubt," [136] would
never identify himself with either Protestants or Catholics. [137]
But in Germany there was still too little intellectual light, too
little brooding over experience, to permit of the spread of such a
temper; and the balance of forces amounted only to a deadlock between
the ecclesiastical parties. Protestantism on the intellectual side,
as already noted, had sunk into a bitter and barren polemic [138]
among the reformers themselves; and many who had joined the movement
reverted to Catholicism. [139] Meanwhile the teaching and preaching
Jesuits were zealously at work, turning the dissensions of the enemy
to account, and contrasting its schism upon schism with the unity
of the Church. But Protestantism was well welded to the financial
interest of the many princes and others who had acquired the Church
lands confiscated at the Reformation; since a return to Catholicism
would mean the surrender of these. [140] Thus there wrought on the one
side the organized spirit of anti-heresy [141] and on the other the
organized spirit of Bibliolatry, neither gaining ground; and between
the two, intellectual life was paralysed. Protestantism saw no way
of advance; and the prevailing temper began to be that of the Dark
Ages, expectant of the end of the world. [142] Superstition abounded,
especially the belief in witchcraft, now acted on with frightful
cruelty throughout the whole Christian world; [143] and in the nature
of the case Catholicism counted for nothing on the opposite side.
The only element of rationalism that one historian of culture can
detect is the tendency of the German moralists of the time to turn
the devil into an abstraction by identifying him with the different
aspects of human folly and vice. [144] There was, as a matter of fact,
a somewhat higher manifestation of the spirit of reason in the shape
of some new protests against the superstition of sorcery. About 1560
a Catholic priest named Cornelius Loos Callidius was imprisoned by
a papal nuncio for declaring that witches' confessions were merely
the results of torture. Forced to retract, he was released; but again
offended, and was again imprisoned, dying in time to escape the fate
of a councillor of Trèves, named Flade, who was burned alive for
arguing, on the basis of an old canon (mistakenly named from the
Council of Ancyra), that sorcery is an imaginary crime. [145] Such
an infamy explains a great deal of the stagnation of many Christian
generations. But courage was not extinct; and in 1563 there appeared
the famous John Wier's treatise on witchcraft, [146] a work which,
though fully adhering to the belief in the devil and things demoniac,
argued against the notion that witches were conscious workers of
evil. Wier [147] was a physician, and saw the problem partly as one
in pathology. Other laymen, and even priests, as we have seen, had
reacted still more strongly against the prevailing insanity; but it
had the authority of Luther on its side, and with the common people
the earlier protests counted for little.