THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

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The ideal of universal law, order, and tidiness which could be extrapolated from Newtonian physics proved to have
widespread ramifications, especially when pursued in conjunction with arguments derived from the reasoning of
contemporary philosophers. John Locke (1632-1704) and his one-time pupil Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of
Shaftesbury (1671-1713), both provided an intellectual basis for easily digested theories of politics, religion, and
aesthetics and for precepts pertaining to social happiness. Locke’s epistemology and his crucial rejection of innate
ideas in favour of the notion of knowledge based on external sensation and internal ‘reflection’ helped, it has been
argued, to determine the tendency in many eighteenth-century writers to describe the observable world rather than
offer a subjective interpretation of the workings of the psyche. For Locke, the mind was a tabula rasa at birth, a
‘white Paper, void of all Characters, without any Ideas’. When he rhetorically demanded how the mind acquired ‘all
the materials of Reason and Knowledge’, he answered succinctly, ‘From Experience’. If at one point in his Essay
Concerning Human Understanding (1690) Locke famously compares the mind to a Newtonian camera obscura, at
another he employs a palatial metaphor to suggest that ideas are admitted to the brain through an ordered enfilade of
state rooms which lead steadily to the Royal Presence, the senses and the nerves acting as ‘Conduits, to convey them
from without to their Audience in the Brain, the mind’s Presence-room’. The discussion of language in Book III of
the Essay centres on the premiss that words are signs not of things, but of ideas, and on the related insistence that
language is the creation of a society the members of which consent to the fact that certain words stand for certain
ideas. Common usage and mutual consent provide an acceptable authority for regulating the use of words in ordinary
conversation (if not a precise enough one for philosophical discourse). Locke’s influential explorations of a theory of
government are related to this concept of social consent. His Two Treatises of Government (probably composed before
1682, but published to coincide with the success of the ‘Glorious Revolution’ in 1689/90) emphasize that civil
societies are bonded together by enlightened self interest and by the dual necessities of securing individual liberty and
the protection of individual property rights. Government existed as a trust conferred upon it by the consent of citizens;
if that trust were abused, or if power became arbitrary, then citizens, the true makers of laws, had a right to withdraw
confidence and authority from their rulers. Locke’s Two Treatises reveal him to be the direct heir to the political and
constitutional debates of the seventeenth century. As the reasoning advocate of a ‘mixed constitution’, which
interfused monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy, he was also, to some degree, the validating spirit of the British
political compromise of the eighteenth century.
Locke’s faith in the rights of the citizen enshrined in the rule of law, and in law as the product of consent, is in
part reflected in the easier philosophical arguments of Shaftesbury. Both philosophers were proponents of religious
toleration, and indeed of a rational Christianity based on common sense,
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virtuous action, and a perception of the nature of God through his creation rather than through revelation. To
Shaftesbury the contemplation of the universe was ‘the only means which cou’d establish the sound Belief of a Deity’,
and such `sound Belief’ in a blessed order could stand counter both to the Godless confusion of the atheists and the
sin-infused, fallen world of orthodox Christianity. ‘All Nature’s Wonders serve to excite and perfect this idea of their
Author’, Shaftesbury wrote in his dialogue The Moralists: A Philosophical Rhapsody (1709), ‘’Tis here he suffers us
to see, and even to converse with him, in a manner suitable to our Frailty; How glorious is it to contemplate him, in
this noblest of his Works apparent to us, The System of the bigger World.’ Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks of Men,
Manners, Opinions, and Times (1711, revised 1714), a collection which includes The Moralists, is insistent in its
expressions of the divine perfection of nature and of the interconnection of aspects of creation according to observable
laws; it is also explicit in its arguments proposing the essential goodness of the human element in creation.
Humankind, naturally virtuous and naturally sociable, finds its true destiny in acknowledging a correspondence
between the harmony and the proportion evident in the macrocosm and the individual spirit. A sociable morality,
which suppresses such unnatural passions as tyranny or misanthropy, itself derives from a reasoned observation of
‘the Order of the World it-self’. Shaftesbury’s optimistic view of innate human benevolence did not go unchallenged.
In his A Search into the Nature of Society, added in 1723 to the second edition of The Fable of the Bees: or Private
Vices, Public Benefits, the Dutch-born Bernard de Mandeville (1670-1733) bluntly complained that the ‘boasted
middle way, and the calm Virtues recommended in the Characteristicks, are good for nothing but to breed Drones’.
To Mandeville, Shaftesbury’s notions were ‘a high compliment to human-kind ... What a pity it is they are not true!’
His moral system was, moreover, ‘not much better than a Wild-Goose-Chase’. A far sounder picture of human society
should be based not on flights of wild geese but, as his larger, controversial, and widely read Fable suggests, on a hive
of bees, a mutual society which thrives because its individual members are acquisitive. This acquisitiveness, and a
concomitant love of luxury, could, he indicated, be properly interpreted as a public benefit rather than as a private