SOURCE: Hoyles, John. “Introduction: Classicism and the Enlightenment” and “Free Philosophy.” In The Waning of the Renaissance, 1640-1740: Studies in the Thought and Poetry of Henry More, John Norris and Isaac Watts, pp. 143-48; 164-74. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971.

[In the following essays, Hoyles argues that Watts's works can be categorized as “the embodiment of both classical aesthetics and the English Enlightenment.” He then examines Watts's philosophical beliefs and argues that he “expresses the spirit of Enlightenment philosophy, and provides an interesting link between the seventeenth-century puritans and the nineteenth-century utilitarians.”]

INTRODUCTION: CLASSICISM AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT

The value of interpreting the work of More and Norris in relation to such problematic terms as Metaphysical, Classical and Romantic on the one hand, and Renaissance, Enlightenment and Modern on the other, depends largely on assigning some meaning to the middle term in each of these series of abstractions. Since the field of inquiry is principally that of religious lyricism, there can be little difficulty about choosing the work of Isaac Watts as the embodiment of both classical aesthetics and the English Enlightenment.

Traditionally Addison holds this position; but this is largely because Addison appealed to the Victorians, who restored so many 18th century reputations, while Watts was discredited as a precursor of the nonconformist conscience, and hence for the Victorians not entirely of another age. But as J. W. Draper points out:

Probably Steele and Watts could claim as many readers in the reign of Queen Anne as could Addison. Their public was of a lower social degree; but it was growing with the increase in wealth and education, and in a few years its opinions, by the sheer weight of its numbers, were to dominate English taste.¹

Unfortunately no attempt has been made to relate Watts's thought to his poetry, largely because his reputation as a philosopher did not outlive the Augustan period.

In 1753 Watts's editors made a claim that did not at that time appear in any way extravagant. They questioned “whether any author before him did ever appear with reputation on such a variety of subjects, as he has done, both as a prose writer, and a poet,” and they believed “that there is no man now living of whose works so many have been dispersed, both at home and abroad, that are in such constant use, and translated into such a variety of languages.”² Later in the century, Dr Johnson echoed these sentiments in his generous encomium:

He has provided instruction for all ages, for those who are lisping their first lessons to the enlightened readers of Malebranche and Locke; he has left neither corporeal nor spiritual nature unexamined; he has taught the art of reasoning, and the science of the stars.³

Dr Johnson also gave what amounted to high praise, when he exclaimed of Watts's efforts in sacred verse: “It is sufficient for Watts to have done better than others what no man has done well.”⁴

Since Dr Johnson's day however, no critics have treated Watts's work as a whole, and 20th century interest in Watts has been confined to his poetry, with the result that he has been taken out of context and attached either to the late Metaphysical tradition, or to the earliest stage of preromanticism.⁵ It is time that attention was paid to Watts's work as it reflects the associated aims of classicism and the Enlightenment. The classical moment in English culture may be difficult to define, but there is a watershed between late Metaphysical and early preromantic, and there is evidence in the literature of this period to substantiate Lovejoy's parallel between deism and classicism. Watts, like other members of his generation, whether formal deists or not, gives meaning to this parallel, and thus to the middle terms in our problematic series of abstractions.

One of the rambling essays that Bolingbroke composed in the first instance for his friend Pope, contains a staggeringly explicit demonstration of Lovejoy's parallel. Indeed Bolingbroke erects a sustained analogy between the philosophy and the aesthetics of the Enlightenment. He begins with the axiomatic proposition that “the simplicity of true theism could never subsist in the figures of poetry.”⁶ Before the age of classicism and Enlightenment, “affected inspiration passed for real, hyperboles were understood literally, and the machinery of an ode was taken for matter of fact.”⁷ “True theism” is equated with “naked truth,” and is at logger-heads with both metaphysical speculation and Renaissance rhetoric:

If naked truth, passing through many hands, came to be disguised, what must have happened to truth, wearing a mask at her first appearance? The hieroglyphic and the symbol remained, and the fable continued in tradition, when the signification of the one, and the moral of the other, were forgot.⁸

Pursuing the analogy with aesthetics, Bolingbroke sets out to demystify the uses and abuses of allegory:

An allegory may be contrived to puzzle and perplex the understanding, or to hold out nothing to us but itself. In the first case it is impertinent, in the second it is fraudulent, and in both it perverts the sole use it should be employed for, in the didactic, or even in the poetic style. … Allegory, in the true intention of it, is designed to make clearer as well as stronger impressions on the mind.⁹

The grounds of truth and beauty, once cleared of cant, are revealed as identical.

Bolingbroke is chiefly concerned to pursue the Baconian critique of religious superstition, but he does so with the support of arguments and vocabulary that invite the reader to pursue the Baconian critique of Renaissance rhetoric. According to Bolingbroke, Bacon did not go far enough; in his view, Bacon

makes parables and allegories so essential to religion, that he affirms, that to take them away is to forbid almost all commerce of things divine and human. Whatever reasons this great author had to make such a declaration, it was rashly made. The expression is allegorical, but the meaning of it is obvious; and therefore I say, that as far as man is concerned in carrying this commerce on, we are justified in suspecting it of enthusiasm or fraud; since allegory has been always a principal instrument of theological deception. The chancellor admits, that it serves to involve and conceal, … which is in direct contradiction to its proper use, for that is to enlighten and illustrate. … He chose to say nothing of the former, rather than to be engaged in disputes, … and we may add, rather than offend the clergy. For me … who have no cavils nor invectives to fear, when I confine the communication of my thoughts to you and a very few friends, as I do in writing these essays; I shall repeat what I have said already, that the philosopher or divine, who pretends to instruct others by allegorical expressions without an immediate, direct and intelligible application of the allegory to some proposition or other, has nothing in his thoughts but the supposed allegory. … If he has anything there which he distrusts, and dares not venture to expose naked and stripped of allegory to the undazzled eye of reason, it is too much even to insinuate in such a case, and especially on subjects of the first philosophy. We may compare such theology to those artificial beauties, who hide their defects under dress and paint.¹⁰

The aesthetics of classicism are thus seen to be inextricably bound up with the philosophy of the Enlightenment. In the work of Watts, philosopher and poet, this parallel is eloquently embodied.

Bolingbroke's explicit insistence might suggest that Lovejoy's parallel can be easily substantiated in a variety of places over a period of years. Unfortunately the Enlightenment was not coextensive with deism, and its identity in England is especially blurred against the background of the decay of rationalism and the rise of sentiment. It is important to bear in mind at least one basic ambiguity in the nature of the philosophy of the Enlightenment. As Fairchild suggests,

the Enlightenment regarded reason as a universal faculty lodged within the human breast, a sort of Inner Light, which enabled all men easily to comprehend the few simple axiomatic truths which constituted the groundwork of nature. Hence the line between reason and feeling was extremely thin, and for men of emotional rather than cerebral temper there was nothing to prevent rationalism from collapsing into sentimentalism.¹¹

Such a view is both illuminating and confusing. It is difficult to maintain that the Enlightenment comprehends two opposites, and yet one of the functions of the Enlightenment was to prevent rationalism from collapsing into sentimentalism.

It is significant that Bolingbroke was aware of this ambiguity, and equally concerned to dispel it. He thus confirms Fairchild's definition of the Enlightenment, while vigorously opposing its implications. Bolingbroke traces the source of this ambiguity to the Cartesian Cogito and to the French word “sentiment”; in his view the Enlightenment must distinguish, as Descartes did not, between reason and inner light:

The French philosopher, … made clear and distinct ideas the necessary materials of knowledge. But then as he left this important article too general and too loose, so whilst he built up truth with one hand, he laid a foundation for infinite error on the other. He disarmed the scholastics; but he furnished arms to the mystics. Besides clear and distinct ideas, he admits a certain inward sentiment of clearness and evidence. The word sentiment is applied in the French language so variously and so confusedly, that it becomes often equivocal. But since it is distinguished, on this occasion, from idea, it must be meant either to signify that immediate perception which the mind has of some self-evident truth, in which case it is not a principle of knowledge, but knowledge itself, intuitive knowledge; or else it must be meant to signify that apparent evidence wherewith notions and opinions enter into the mind of one man, that are not accompanied with the same evidence, nor received in the same manner, in the mind of another. Now in this case the lively inward sentiment of Descartes is nothing better than that strong persuasion, wherewith every enthusiast imagines that he sees what he does not see. … If anything else be meant by sentiment, thus distinguished from idea, I confess myself unable so much as to guess what it is.¹²

Bolingbroke thus traces the thin line between reason and feeling. That other exponents of the Enlightenment were less scrupulous is evident if one refers to Fénelon and Rousseau at either end of the period under discussion.

Fénelon establishes a definition of Enlightenment which is coextensive with pietism, and yet his main ground is the same as Bolingbroke's. According to Fénelon,

c'est donc à la lumière de Dieu que je vois tout ce qui peut être vu. Il ne faut point la chercher cette lumière au dehors de soi: chacun la trouve en soimême; elle est la même pour tous.¹³

Similarly Rousseau defines the Enlightenment in terms of sentiment, without abandoning ground common to both Fénelon and Bolingbroke. According to Rousseau, “le culte que Dieu demande est celui du coeur; et celui-là, quand il est sincère, est toujours uniforme.”¹⁴ A concept of the Enlightenment, which excluded Fénelon and Rousseau on the grounds that they blurred Bolingbroke's thin line, would be an impoverished one; and yet between pietism and sentimentalism, both historically and philosophically, there is room for a central phase of Enlightenment, which is concerned to prevent the collapse of rationalism. And in England, Berkeley, Hume, Gibbon and Watts, at least, as well as Bolingbroke, belong to this phase. At the moment of Enlightenment they stand, sandwiched between the long and pervasive latitudinarian movement, and the equally long and pervasive development of a religion of sentiment.

Corresponding to this transitional moment of Enlightenment, one can identify a similarly transitional moment of classicism. As Draper suggests,

to call the age of Queen Anne a transition period is perhaps too bold a paradox; but in the broader sweep of culture-history, it seems scarcely more than a momentary rest in the rapid evolution from the intellectualistic and aristocratic world of the Renaissance to the modern world of emotionalism and democracy; it is a truce between contending forces, as was the Elizabethan age, and, like every truce, a period of deep-laid preparation for ensuing conflict.¹⁵

Watts's poetry makes good these sweeping statements. As a religious lyricist, he provides valuable evidence concerning the nature of this large-scale evolution from Renaissance to modern. Classicism, if it was anything homogeneous, was an attempt to prevent Renaissance literature from collapsing into modern and inferior ways. It attempted to bolster a collapsing aesthetic by purifying poetic diction and strengthening the sinews of syntax. Few English poets interpreted classicism in this way. For most, classicism meant slavish imitation of classical models; but not for Watts.

The following chapters are an attempt to give an account of Watts in terms of the above outline. His thought is related to what can be identified as the Enlightenment, and to trends in philosophy and religion that lie outside. His aesthetic theory and poetic practice are similarly related to classicism, and to the Metaphysical and preromantic trends which run into and out of the classical phase.

.....

“FREE PHILOSOPHY”

It would be misleading to suggest that the fulness of the English Enlightenment sprang fully armed from the mind of Watts. Behind Voltaire there lay Bayle and the Dutch Arminians. Behind Wolff there lay Francke and the German pietists.¹⁶ In like manner, behind Watts lay the philosophical and religious tradition of latitude. But for Watts this tradition was more than something in the air; it was embodied in the educational system of Dissent.

Watts drew his concept of Free Philosophy from the educational programme of the Dissenting Academies. The Renaissance had been first and foremost a revolution in education, and the universities had purveyed its spirit and methods. A similar educational revolution occurred in the latter half of the 17th century, as the Enlightenment replaced the Renaissance at the centre of European culture.¹⁷ Free philosophy meant of course freedom from the authority of Plato and Aristotle, and Watts suggests that this liberation is not difficult to achieve. One has but to think a little about the new mechanical philosophy and the scales will fall from one's eyes:

Let the one believe his universal soul and the other go on with his notion of substantial forms, and at the same time teach them how by certain original laws of motion … allowing a continued divine concourse in and with all, the several appearances in nature may be solved, and the variety of effects produced, according to the corpuscular philosophy, improved by Descartes, Mr Boyle, and Sir Isaac Newton. … Then … the peripatetic forms will vanish from the mind like a dream, and the Platonic soul of the world will expire.¹⁸

In England however, Free Philosophy had more formidable enemies than Plato or Aristotle.

There was on the one hand the traditional zeal of the Dissenters, who were suspicious that philosophical freedom would lead to libertinism; and on the other hand there was the conservative orthodoxy of those who feared a rapid descent into Arianism, deism, Socinianism and atheism. Watts therefore had to defend the principles of Free Philosophy against the charges of lukewarmness and apostacy:

For the most part people are born to their opinions, and never question the truth of what their family or their country or their party profess. They clothe their minds as they do their bodies, after the fashion in vogue, nor one of a hundred ever examine their principles. It is suspected of lukewarmness to suppose examination necessary, and it will be charged as a tendency to apostacy if we go about to examine them. Persons are applauded for presuming they are in the right, and (as Mr Locke saith) he that considers and inquires into the reasons of things is counted a foe to orthodoxy.¹⁹

Watts wrote a poem entitled “Free Philosophy,” in which he castigates

Custom, that tyranness of fools,
That leads the learned round the schools,
In magic chains of forms and rules.(20)

This poem, dedicated to his teacher, Thomas Rowe, expresses the energy and enthusiasm which raise Watts's thought above the level of mediocre plagiarism.

Watts was a student at the Newington Green Academy from 1690 to 1694. He clearly profited from the liberal atmosphere which reigned there. It was from his education that he derived his treasured habit of giving his “thoughts a loose,” and letting “them rove without confinement.”²¹ Thomas Rowe took over the Academy in 1678. It appears that he was responsible for introducing the Free Philosophy as a basis for education around 1680.²² The central innovation was the teaching of Cartesian principles at a time when the Aristotelian philosophy was dominant in the universities; to this was later added the teaching of mental science according to the new ideas of Locke.²³ Cartesian physics was still being taught when Watts was at the Academy, so that his education, though far more modern than that obtainable in the universities, did lag behind the latest findings of Newton and the Royal Society. But the rivalry between Cartesian and Newtonian systems of natural science is of small account when one considers the ramifications of the Free Philosophy purveyed by the Academy.

Ramist logic, as we have seen, provided a modern method of tackling knowledge.²⁴ But logic had no priority over free enquiry as the way to truth; nor did ontology, by its own laws, dictate a synthesis to which all the parts of knowledge should be subject. In the first place, science was taught along experimental lines, as it was not in the universities.²⁵ Samuel Wesley the elder, who had himself attended Newington Green Academy before absconding with his grant and turning high-flyer, could not resist admiring the apparatus which was used for teaching experimental science. According to Wesley, the special features of Newington Green included “a fine garden, bowling green, fishpond, and within a laboratory, and some not inconsiderable rarities, with air pumps, thermometers, and all sorts of mathematical instruments.”²⁶ In the second place—and Wesley notes this with rather more scorn than admiration—, the Academy was organised and disciplined along democratic lines, “we having … for what order we had, a sort of democratical government among us, anyone having power to propose a law, and all laws carried by the ballot.”²⁷ In the third place, as Defoe, another distinguished ex-student of the Academy, notes, politics was taught as a science.²⁸ In the fourth place, there was a good deal of toleration between the dissenting sects, so much so that Wesley complained with high-church pique: “But do the Presbyterians and Independents hear none but such as have been ordained? I'm well assured of the contrary; for I remember several of us, if not all our pupils went to hear Friend Bunnian, when he preached at Newington Green.”²⁹ And lastly, and for our purposes most significantly of all, the Academy put into educational practice the principles of language reform which Wilkins and others had laid down as the declared policy of the Royal Society.³⁰ Watts spent a great deal of energy cultivating his diction. In this respect, as in others, he was drawing on ideas he had imbibed at the Academy.

Thus Watts's Academy education embraced within a common outlook attitudes in politics and religion, methods in logic and experimental science, and practice in language and morality. It is therefore not surprising to find Watts using the slogans of Baconian and Cartesian revolution, not only to hit out at Aristotle, but also to express his own comprehensive vision.

The first slogan is the attack on “words without ideas.” Watts held that “Descartes, Newton, Gassendi, Bacon, Boyle” all “carried on the noble design of freeing the world from the long slavery of Aristotle and substantial forms, of occult qualities, and words without ideas. They taught mankind to trace out truth by reasoning and experiment.”³¹ This is commonplace enough, though not everyone placed reasoning and experiment in the same bracket. The slogan takes on the colour of more energetic diatribe, when Watts uses it to expose the pretensions of ecclesiastical tyranny:

For many ages all truth and all heresy have been determined by … senseless tests, and by words without ideas; such Shibboleths as these have decided the secular fates of men; and bishoprics, or burning mitres or faggots have been the rewards of different persons, according as they pronounced them. … A thousand thank-offerings are due to that Providence which has delivered our age and our nation from these absurd iniquities.³²

In such a passage, the final panegyric sentence aside, Watts, by drawing on one of the driving-forces of Dissent, attains a tone which would not disgrace the pages of Gibbon.

The second slogan is the Baconian distinction between words and things. Here Watts is faithful to a long tradition, but he is particularly concerned to apply this slogan to the field of language reform:

The first direction for youth is this, “learn betimes to distinguish between words and things.” Get clear and plain ideas of the things you are set to study. Do not content yourselves with mere words and names, lest your laboured improvements only amass a heap of unintelligible phrases, and you feed upon husks instead of kernels.³³

Here Watts is drawing on the Baconian doctrine of things, the Cartesian doctrine of clear and plain ideas, and, as a link between the two, the Royal Society insistence on simplified and utilitarian language.

The English mind in Watts's generation enjoyed this traditional interpenetration of Cartesian and Baconian attitudes. Descartes was used to give metaphysical or ideological justification to Baconian inspired experimental science, and Bacon was used to reinforce the solidity and unalterability of the Cartesian superstructure of ideas. This interpenetration lies behind the achievement and reputation of Samuel Clarke, hailed by most in Watts's generation after the death of Locke as England's greatest living philosopher. Both Clarke and Watts approach metaphysics or ontology as they approach physics. Ideas are as immutable and static as things. And, in Watts's words,

things are to be considered as they are in themselves; their nature is inflexible, and their natural relations unalterable; and therefore in order to conceive them aright, we must bring our understandings to things, and not pretend to bend and strain things to comport with our fancies and forms.³⁴

This Cartesian application of the Baconian slogan is a characteristic feature of Watts's Free Philosophy. Mere experiments are not enough; the mind must “conceive them aright.” Bacon's empirical and conservative critique of the Renaissance has been transformed into an enlightened modernism, through the addition to it of Descartes' rational and radical critique of the Renaissance.³⁵

The aspect of Watts's Free Philosophy which most closely reflects the ethos of Dissent is its marked individualism. Various critics have pointed out that, in the early 18th century, uniformity and individualism were no more mutually exclusive than were rationalism and sentimentalism.³⁶ Watts however emphasises the strand of individualism more strongly than others of his generation. In “The Indian Philosopher” (1701), which like “Free Philosophy” (1706) tries to provide a satisfactory basis for philosophical freedom, Watts not only specifically rejects “the schools,” but also the “wide fields of Nature's Laws.” He finds his ground of certainty “deep in thought, within my breast.”³⁷ The later poem arrives at a similar conclusion; the guarantee and justification of Free Philosophy is that “knowledge invites us each alone.”³⁸

Watts was by and large a man of his age, and yet he was sufficiently near to his 17th century puritan roots to be able to assert a rousing individualism: “When we are arrived at manly age, there is no person on earth, no set or society of men whatsoever, that have power and authority given them by God … absolutely to dictate to others their opinions and practices in the moral and religious life.”³⁹ The individualism of Watts's Free Philosophy meant that he did not have to choose between Ancients and Moderns, or a variety of theoretical systems. The Dissenting Academy had seen to it that “from the infancy of my studies I began to be of the Eclectic Sect.”⁴⁰ Consequently,

it is not often that I divert out of my way to tell the world particularly what the Moderns or the Ancients have said on these subjects, nor how far I agree with them or differ from them; but in the main I directly pursue my own track of thoughts, and range this infinite variety of ideas collected from the universe of beings in such a method as appears to me the most comprehensive and natural, plain and easy.⁴¹

Henry More and John Norris had defined their eclecticism in very similar terms. But Watts, as befits a Dissenter, puts the emphasis not so much on easy indifference as on jealous individualism. Thus when asked where he stands in relation to the Stoics, the Platonists, Gassendi, Descartes, Newton, Tycho, Copernicus, Arminius, Calvin, Episcopacy, Presbyterianism and Independency, Watts replies:

I think it may be very proper in such cases not to give an answer in the gross, but rather to enter into a detail of particulars, and explain one's own sentiments. Perhaps there is no man, nor set of men upon earth whose sentiments I entirely follow. God has given me reason to judge for myself.⁴²

In this declaration Watts appears as a mediator between the individualism which men in the 17th century strove to attain with strenuous rigour, and the individualism which the modern consciousness takes for granted as a received commonplace.

Perhaps the most striking contribution made by Watts's generation towards the evolution of the modern consciousness was Shaftesbury's idea of the moral sense. Like Watts's Free Philosophy, Shaftesbury's moral sense had its roots in the latitude of the Cambridge Platonists. Like Watts, Shaftesbury sought his ground of certainty inside man's consciousness. Both men were liberal-minded Whigs, disciples of Locke, and lovers of freedom political and philosophical. It is therefore interesting to find in Watts's fourth philosophical essay, “Of Innate Ideas,” a fifth section entitled “Of the Foundations of Moral Virtue, and of Moral Sense or Instinct,” which begins as follows: “There has a controversy risen long since these papers were written, … whether the soul of man judges of moral good and evil by an inward principle or instinct, which is called the moral sense, antecedent to all reasonings; or whether … it judges of them by reasoning.”⁴³ Watts is willing to admit that “there is such a thing which may be called a moral sense”;⁴⁴ “but this moral sense is still the same thing, is the very nature and make of the mind; it is intelligence or reason itself.”⁴⁵ This may be begging the question, but obviously Watts sees no need for there to be any other faculty than conscience, active at times as a moral sense, at times as a reasoning power.

It is clear that Watts was less worried than either Berkeley or Bolingbroke about the possibility of Shaftesbury's moral sense accelerating the decay of rationalism. Berkeley hit out at Shaftesbury with considerable vigour. Through the mouthpiece of his devil's advocate, Alciphron, he condemns the whole idea of moral sense, on the grounds that it seeks by its very nature to escape the scrutiny of reason. When pressed to define moral sense, Alciphron “declared that such exactness was to no purpose; that pedants, indeed, may dispute and define, but could never reach that high sense of honour which distinguished the fine gentleman, and was a thing rather to be felt than explained.”⁴⁶ With heavy irony Berkeley embroiders on this theme:

Moral beauty is of so peculiar and abstracted a nature, something so subtle, fine and fugacious, that it will not bear being handled and inspected, like every gross and common subject. You will therefore pardon me if I stand upon my philosophic liberty, and choose rather to entrench myself within the general and indefinite sense, rather than, by entering into a precise and particular explication of this beauty, perchance lose sight of it, or give you some hold whereon to cavil, and infer, and raise doubts, queries and difficulties, about a point as clear as the sun, when nobody reasons upon it.⁴⁷

Euphranor states Berkeley's own position in terms that brand the idea of moral sense with the mark of enthusiasm:

Should it not seem a very uncertain guide in morals, for a man to follow his passion or inward feeling? And would not this rule infallibly lead different ways, according to the prevalency of this or that appetite or passion.⁴⁸

Bolingbroke offers an identical interpretation when he writes:

There are those who … affirm that they have … a moral sense, that is an instinct by which they distinguish what is morally good from what is morally evil, and perceive an agreeable or disagreeable intellectual sensation accordingly, without the trouble of observation and reflection. They bid fair to be enthusiasts in ethics, and to make natural religion as ridiculous, as some of their brothers have made revealed religion, by insisting on the doctrine of an inward light.⁴⁹

This critique of the idea of moral sense is partly applicable to Watts, who on this issue is nearer to Shaftesbury and Locke than he is to Berkeley and Bolingbroke. Watts, to a lesser extent than Shaftesbury, was prone to abuse his cherished philosophic liberty by shying away from rational scrutiny; and, as a Dissenter, he was not innocent of the charge of ethical enthusiasm. On other grounds however, Watts took exception to the implications of Shaftesbury's interpretation of the idea of moral sense, and could be as scathing as Berkeley in demanding an “explication of this beauty” which had become so fashionable among the polite part of mankind.

Watts has no real quarrel with Shaftesbury's moral sense as such; it is the use to which it is put which gripes him. In practice, Shaftesbury equated moral sense with aesthetic sense; and his own aesthetic sense was that of a dilettante who indulged his taste and paraded his politeness. Thus Watts, who was far from deficient in classical taste and polished diction, questioned

whether several of the rhapsodies called the Characteristics would ever have survived the first edition, if they had not discovered so strong a tincture of infidelity. … I have sometimes indeed been ready to wonder, how a book in the main so loosely written, should ever obtain so many readers amongst men of sense. … There are few books that ever I read, which made any pretence to a great genius, from which I derived so little valuable knowledge as from these treatises. There is indeed amongst them a lively pertness, a parade of literature, and much of what some folks nowadays call politeness; but it is hard that we should be bound to admire all the reveries of this author, under the penalty of being unfashionable.⁵⁰

It is significant that Watts does not attack Shaftesbury for being a free-thinker or deist. The brunt of his attack is fair criticism in the light of Shaftesbury's inflated reputation.

But Watts has not yet finished with Shaftesbury. Forty pages later he reveals that his basic quarrel with Shaftesbury is a moral one. For Watts, intellectual effort and aesthetic achievement meant nothing apart from the moral use to which they were put. “Let me ask our rhapsodist,” he writes:

How many have you actually reclaimed by this smooth soft method, and these fine words? … Perhaps now and then a man of better natural mould has been a little refined. … But have the passions of revenge and envy, of ambition and pride, and the inward secret vices of the mind been mortified merely by this philosophical language? Have any of these men been made new creatures, men of real piety and love to God? Go dress up all the virtues of human nature in all the beauties of your oratory, and declaim aloud in the praise of social virtue, and the amiable qualities of goodness, till your heart or your lungs ache, among the looser herds of mankind, and you will ever find, as your heathen fathers have done before, that the wild passions and appetites of men are too violent to be restrained by such mild and silken language.⁵¹

One feels that Watts appears in his true colours when he confronts Shaftesbury's enlightened optimism. Watts does not share Shaftesbury's conception of philosophical freedom. In Watts's view philosophy must not only be freed from its gothic chains; it must also be freed to be useful.

Watts's utilitarianism constitutes an important contribution to the modern consciousness. To those who looked on experimental science as a game or hobby, Watts pontificates:

Inquiries even in natural philosophy should not be mere amusements, and much less in the affairs of religion. Researches into the springs of natural bodies and their motions should lead men to invent happy methods for the ease and convenience of human life.⁵²

If Norris entitled himself to the epithet “ingenious,” then Watts equally well deserves that of “useful.” Indeed, in one of his essays, he extracts from “the ingenious Mr Norris's little discourse of religious conversation” certain “excellent and valuable hints for our use.”⁵³ Such an operation exemplifies Watts's approach.

This utilitarian approach is present in the midst of his intricate speculations on the doctrine of the Trinity. In his first treatise on the subject, he prefaces his inquiries as follows:

I imagined … that it would be an acceptable service to the Church of Christ, if this sublime and important doctrine were brought down to a practical use, and our particular duties to the sacred three, were distinctly declared and vindicated out of the holy scriptures; which is of far greater moment to our piety and salvation than any nice adjustment of all the mysterious circumstances that relate to this article in the theory of it.⁵⁴

If the Trinity can be shown to be of practical use, then the more so religion in general. Watts was not above describing the usefulness of religion as a means to prevent suicide, alcoholism and duelling, and in his Defence against Temptation to Self-Murther (1726), he even gathers together some statistics from the weekly newspapers: “59 are known to have destroyed themselves the year past; besides 74 who were drowned, and 43 who were said to be found dead.”⁵⁵

The usefulness of religion was a theme that Berkeley treated with considerable eloquence along similar lines. Thus he declared that, “for my own part I had rather my wife and children all believed what they had no notion of, and daily pronounced words without a meaning, than that any of them should cut his throat, or leap out of a window.”⁵⁶ Berkeley points the same moral as Watts when he opines, with all the good-humoured weight of Augustan common sense:

Errors and nonsense, as such, are of small concern in the eye of the public, which considereth not the metaphysical truth of notions, so much as the tendency they have to produce good or evil. Truth itself is valued by the public, as it hath an influence, and is felt in the course of life. You may confute a whole shelf of Schoolmen, and discover many speculative truths, without any great merit towards your country.⁵⁷

As a corollary to Berkeley's distinction, it may be granted that Watts's own brand of utilitarianism had at least as much influence on succeeding generations as did Shaftesbury's doctrine of moral sense.

Watts gives the impression of being somewhat obsessed with the utility of things, from the art of shorthand,⁵⁸ to card-games,⁵⁹ and the association of ideas.⁶⁰ But in all this, he expresses the spirit of Enlightenment philosophy, and provides an interesting link between the 17th century puritans and the 19th century utilitarians. His position in the tradition of Dissent qualifies the nature of his thought. His Free Philosophy is not merely derivative from Descartes and Locke, but arises out of the special nature of his education, has its roots in the past, and has its consequences for the future.

Notes

1. Draper, p. 241.

2. Watts, ed. Jennings and Doddridge, Preface, p. vii.

3. Samuel Johnson, “Life of Watts,” Lives of the Poets (2 vols.; London: Oxford University Press, 1906), II, 384.

4. Ibid., II, 385.

5. See notably, T. A. Birrell, “Sarbiewski, Watts and the Later Metaphysical Tradition,” English Studies, XXXVII (1956), 125-132; and Vivian de Sola Pinto, “Isaac Watts and the Adventurous Muse,” Essays and Studies, XX (1935), 86-107, and “Isaac Watts and William Blake,” Review of English Studies, XX (1944), 214-223.

6. Bolingbroke, IV, 17.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid., IV, 19.

9. Ibid., IV, 52.

10. Ibid., IV, 54-55.

11. Fairchild, II, 9.

12. Bolingbroke, IV, 162.

13. Fénelon, pp. 152-153.

14. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Profession de foi du vicaire savoyard (Paris: J. J. Pauvert, 1964), p. 130.

15. Draper, p. 249.

16. German Pietism was a more specific and homogeneous movement than either Dutch Arminianism or English Latitudinarianism. The founder of the school of German Pietism was P. J. Spener (1633-1705). His Pia Desideria (1675) inaugurated the attack on Lutheran scholastic theology. By 1727, when Francke died, Pietism was the dominant force in German religious life. See Arthur Cushman McGiffert, Protestant Thought Before Kant (London: Duckworth, 1911), Chapter 9.

17. Karl Barth notes that in Germany in the early 18th century “there was a divergence of opinion between the educators of the pietistic and those of the enlightened school.” The two schools were agreed however that education “was a matter over which they were quite capable of taking control.” Barth, p. 38.

18. The Improvement of the Mind, Watts, V, 340-341.

19. Ibid., V, 288.

20. Horae Lyricae, II. Watts, IV, 393.

21. Watts, IV, 532. Quoted in Harry Escott, Isaac Watts Hymnographer (London: Independent Press, 1962), p. 19.

22. DNB (Thomas Rowe).

23. Locke's Essay was on the index at Oxford at the end of the century, and in 1703 the heads of Oxford colleges met to arrange a ban on the reading of his works. See H. McLachlan, English Education under the Test Acts, p. 28.

24. Ramus was apparently unknown in Oxford in 1678. He was almost invariably studied in the Dissenting Academies, many of whose teachers in the early days were ex-Cambridge men. See ibid., p. 20, and Irene Parker, Dissenting Academies in England (Cambridge: University Press, 1914), pp. 74-75.

25. Cf. John Ray in 1691: “I am sorry to see so little account made of real experimental philosophy in this University, and that those ingenious Sciences of the Mathematics are so much neglected by us.” Ray, p. 126.

26. Samuel Wesley, A Letter from a Country Divine to his Friend in London Concerning the Education of the Dissenters in their Private Academies (London, 1703), p. 7.

27. Ibid., p. 8.

28. Defoe was also taught 5 languages, mathematics, natural philosophy, logic, geography and history—all in English. See Escott, p. 27. Cf. Swift's ironic reference to the “ignorance” of the Brobdingnagians in “not having hitherto reduced politics into a science, as the more acute wits of Europe have done.” Swift, XI, 119.

29. Samuel Wesley, A Defence of a Letter, p. 48.

30. One of Wilkins's companions at Oxford was Charles Morton who held a fellowship there in the days before the Act of Uniformity and who founded Newington Green Academy in 1667. He used Wilkins's books for tutorial work. See Escott, p. 27.

31. Philosophical Essays, Watts, V, 502.

32. The Improvement of the Mind, Watts, V, 255.

33. Ibid.

34. Ibid., V, 258-259.

35. This distinction between the work of Bacon and the work of Descartes is made by Michel Foucault in Les Mots et les Choses, pp. 65-66.

36. Arthur Oncken Lovejoy, “The Parallel of Deism and Classicism,” Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1948), pp. 78-99. Lovejoy's first two paragraphs are on what he calls Uniformitarianism and Rationalistic Individualism. Cf. Thomas A. Hanzo, Latitude and Restoration Criticism (“Anglistica” 12; Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1961), p. 48. Hanzo points out that “the individual could follow his heart or mind, assured that the rest of mankind would do the same with the same result.” Cf. also Fairchild, II, 9.

37. “The Indian Philosopher,” Horae Lyricae, II. Watts, IV, 407.

38. “Free Philosophy,” ibid., IV, 393.

39. The Improvement of the Mind, Watts, V, 336.

40. Philosophical Essays, Watts, V, 501.

41. “A Brief Scheme of Ontology,” ibid., V, 638.

42. The Improvement of the Mind, Watts, V, 293.

43. Philosophical Essays, Watts, V, 550.

44. Ibid., V, 551.

45. Ibid.

46. Berkeley, p. 114.

47. Ibid., pp. 119-120.

48. Ibid., p. 120.

49. Bolingbroke, V, 86.

50. The Improvement of the Mind, Watts, V, 214.

51. Ibid., V, 243.

52. Ibid., V, 260.

53. An Humble Attempt Towards the Revival of Practical Religion Among Christians (1729), Watts, III, 31.

54. The Christian Doctrine of the Trinity (1722), Preface Watts, VI, 416.

55. Watts, II, 355.

56. Berkeley, p. 105.

57. Ibid., p. 106.

58. The Improvement of the Mind, Watts, V, 281.

59. Ibid., V, 386-387.

60. Ibid., V, 284.

Bibliography

Texts of Principal Authors Studied

Watts, Isaac. Works. Edited by D. Jennings and P. Doddridge. 6 vols. London, 1753.

Other Primary Texts

Berkeley, George. Alciphron. Edited by T. E. Jessop. London: Thomas Nelson, 1950.

Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, Viscount. Works. Edited by David Mallet. 5 vols. London, 1754.

Fénelon (Francois de Salignac de la Mothe). De l'existence et des attributs de Dieu. Paris: Didot, 1853.

Locke, John. Works. 9 vols. 12th ed. London: Rivington, 1824.

Swift, Jonathan. Works. Edited by Herbert Davis. 14 vols. Oxford: Blackwell, 1939-1962.

Other Secondary Texts

Barth, Karl. From Rousseau to Ritschl. London: Student Christian Movement Press, 1959.

Draper, John William. The Funeral Elegy and the Rise of English Romanticism. New York: University Press, 1929.

Fairchild, Hoxie Neale. Religious Trends in English Poetry. 5 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1939-1962.

Foucault, Michel. Les mots et les choses. Paris: Gallimard, 1966.

McLachlan, Herbert. English Education under the Test Acts: Being the History of the Nonconformist Academies 1660-1820. Manchester: University Press, 1931.