[In the excerpt below, Richardson briefly summarizes Shaftesbury's major ideas and his influence on writers and philosophers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.]

It has often been noted that the Cambridge Platonists had a direct impact on American Transcendentalism; what is less often remarked is the even more massive indirect influence exerted by the Cambridge Platonists through Shaftesbury. Indeed, Shaftesbury, whom Herder called ‘the beloved Plato of Europe’ is probably the main person through whose work Liberal Platonism gets into the mainstream of eighteenth-century thought.¹ Shaftesbury was John Locke's student. He edited a volume of Whichcote's writings, and was, according to his modern editor the ‘greatest Stoic of modern times’, and together with Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, one of the three major exponents of Stoic thought. The Stoic element in Shaftesbury was not as evident to his contemporaries as his Platonism, and indeed his real importance is in how he took the Platonic insistence on the adequacy and universality of reason and transformed it into the ‘moral sense’ of the main line of eighteenth-century thought.²

Shaftesbury combined the Stoic focus on nature with the Platonic insistence on the plenitude to be found in nature. He believed that ‘the end or design of nature is man in society’, and that our end is ‘to live according to nature’. In nature, Shaftesbury thought, ‘the elements are combined, united, and have a mutual dependence one upon another … All things in the world are united, for as the branch is united and is at one with the tree, so is the tree with the earth, air, and water which feed it, and with the flies, worms, and insects which it feeds’ (Rand, 49,52,13).

Turning to the individual self, Shaftesbury asks, ‘Consider then who am I? What is this self? a part of the general mind, governing a part of this general body, itself and body both governed by the universal governing mind. … It is at one with it, partakes of it, and is in the highest sense related to it’ (Rand, 39). Shaftesbury's concept of reason is not a narrow, technical, Cartesian ratiocination. It is rather a broad power, which he often calls ‘good nature’, a quality we all have which is capable of finding truth, which, he good-naturedly observes, ‘is the most powerful thing in the world, since even Fiction itself must be govern'd by it and can only please by its resemblance.’³

Shaftesbury is at pains to warn against what he calls ‘false enthusiasm’, which he says is marked by melancholy and by ‘pannick’ emotionalism, but he comes out carefully in favour of the real thing. ‘Inspiration’, he writes, ‘may be justly call'd Divine Enthusiasm: for the word itself signifies Divine Presence, and was made use of by the philosopher [Plato] whom the earliest Christian fathers call'd Divine, to express whatever was sublime in human passions.’ This inspiration, Shaftesbury goes on, ‘he allotted to heroes, statesmen, poets, orators, musicians, and even philosophers themselves. Nor can we, of our own accord, forbear ascribing to a noble enthusiasm whatever is greatly performed by any of these. So that almost all of us know something of this principle.⁴

Shaftesbury's influence has been enormous. In England he is the founder of the ‘moral sense school’ which includes Francis Hutcheson, Bishop Butler and Adam Smith. He was a friend of the Deists John Toland and Anthony Collins, and he also influenced Addison, Thomson, Akenside, and Fielding. It has been remarked that Shaftesbury's Characteristics only ceased to be regularly reprinted when nobody any longer questioned the … moral ideas which Englishmen derived from it.’⁵ Leibniz said he found in Shaftesbury's The Moralists ‘almost all of my theodicy before it saw the light of day.’⁶ Shaftesbury is represented in more colonial American libraries than Hobbes or Rousseau.⁷ Diderot translated Shaftesbury's Inquiry Concerning Virtue into French in 1745; a complete translation into French appeared in Geneva in 1769. Rousseau had a copy.⁸ The first translation into German appeared in 1738; a complete translation of Shaftesbury appeared in German in 1776-79. His ideas were enthusiastically received by Lessing, Mendelssohn, Kant, Wieland, Goethe, Herder, Schiller, and, most importantly, by Schleiermacher.⁹ When the English and American Romantics took up these German writers, they were also taking up the Shaftesbury who lies behind them. Shaftesbury affected the Transcendentalists directly through his own work, semi-directly through Scottish common sense and the moral sense philosophers, and indirectly through the Shaftesburian Germans. These three streams coalesce, with the important addition of Schleiermacher, to create the Liberal Platonism of the Transcendentalists. …

Notes

1. For Shaftesbury, see Ernst Cassirer, The Platonic Renaissance in England (London: Nelson, 1953) and C. A. Moore ‘Shaftesbury and the Ethical Poets in England, 1700-1760,’ PMLA June 1916.

2. Benjamin Rand, The Life, Unpublished Letters and Philosophical Regimen of Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury (London: Swan Sonnenschein 1900), xii.

3. Shaftesbury, ‘Letter Concerning Enthusiasm’ in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 4th edn (np 1727) 1:4.

4. ‘Letter Concerning Enthusiasm’, 53, 54. Shaftesbury here footnotes the Phaedo, the Meno, and the Apology.

5. R. Voitle, The Third Earl of Shaftesbury (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ Press), 414.

6. S. Grean, Shaftesbury's Philosophy of Religion and Ethics (Athens: Ohio Univ Press 1967).

7. David Lundberg and Henry F. May, ‘The Enlightened Reader in America’, American Quarterly, 28 (Summer 1976). Shaftesbury is represented in twenty percent of American libraries of the period 1700-1813, and in thirty three percent of the 92 libraries surveyed for the period 1700-1776.

8. See Dorothy B. Schlegel's Shaftesbury and the French Deists (University of North Carolina Studies in Comparative Literature, no 15, Chapel Hill, NC, 1956, Johnson Reprint 1969).

9. For Shaftesbury and the Germans see Grean above.