Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

26

From Soul to Mind: the Search for the Laws of Human Nature

In 1726, the French writer Voltaire arrived in England. He was thirty-two and in exile. Not long before, at the Opera in Paris, he had been insulted by an aristocrat, the chevalier de Rohan. ‘M. de Voltaire, M. Arouet [Voltaire’s real name], what’s your name?’ The implication was that Voltaire, in using the ‘de’, was giving himself pretentious airs and graces. Voltaire, never one to duck a fight, shot back: ‘The name I bear is not a great one, but at least I know how to bring it honour.’ A fight nearly broke out there and then, and both men had to be restrained. A few nights later, however, the chevalier had Voltaire ambushed by six of his men and beaten up. Undaunted, Voltaire challenged the chevalier to a duel, a response so daring and presumptuous that the Rohan clan had him thrown into the Bastille. Voltaire could only regain his freedom by agreeing to leave France. He chose England.¹

This episode, though it didn’t feel like it at the time – to Voltaire at any rate – was fortuitous. The abuse of privilege exercised by the French aristocracy, epitomised by the duel that never was, incensed the writer and, in a sense, his career became a lifelong duel with the authorities. The three years Voltaire spent in England had a profound effect on him and helped shape the views that he would express so well on his return. Voltaire, more than anyone else, was the focus of the set of events which came to be known as the French Enlightenment and though he died a full decade before the French Revolution broke out, it was his ideas, exercising an influence on people like Denis Diderot and Pierre-Augustin de Beaumarchais, that provided one of the intellectual underpinnings for the events of 1789.

During the time that Voltaire spent in England, the most significant episode for him was almost certainly the death of Sir Isaac Newton. An old man of eighty-four, Newton was President of the Royal Society and held in the highest esteem. And it was this that impressed Voltaire, that a man from a modest background, but blessed with great intellectual gifts, could rise so high in society and be so respected by his fellow men, whatever their own background. It contrasted hugely with his own country, ‘just emerging from the shadow of Louis XIV’ and where, as Voltaire’s own predicament showed, the privileges of birth were still paramount. Voltaire’s letters reveal that he was very impressed by the intellectual and political organisation in England, by the status of the Royal Society, the freedom allowed to Englishmen to write whatever they liked, and what he saw as the ‘rational’ system of parliamentary government. In France, the Estates General had not met since 1614, more than a century before, and, though he would never know it, would not meet again until 1789. The death of Newton, while Voltaire was in England, helped to stimulate his interest in the physicist’s discoveries and theories and it was to be Voltaire’s crowning achievement to amalgamate those ideas with the theories of Descartes and John Locke to create his own blend of understanding. According to one anecdote, when he returned to France, and his mistress, his first act (or at least his second) was to teach her the principles of Newton’s theory of motion, involving gravity. His Philosophical Letters Concerning the English was widely praised, though the government, showing that very intolerance and high-handedness which he was criticising, had the book burned as a ‘scandalous work, contrary to religion and morals and to the respect due to the established powers’.²

What Voltaire did, in essence, was to adapt the Cartesian tradition to the new thinking in Britain, as epitomised by Newton and Locke. Descartes, as a rationalist, started with the more traditional a priori ‘essence of things’, as grasped by intuition, plus the all-important role of doubt. Voltaire adopted the Newtonian system, which gave priority to experience, derived from disinterested observation, and then the principles were deduced afterwards. Most important of all, perhaps, he applied this to human psychology, which is where Locke came in, for he too looked about him, and described what he saw. This is what Voltaire had to say about Locke: ‘After so many speculative gentlemen had formed this romance of the soul, one truly wise man appeared, who has, in the most modest manner imaginable, given us its real history. Mr Locke has laid open to man the anatomy of his own soul, just as some learned anatomists have done that of the body.’³ Voltaire thought that science had shown that the universe was governed by ‘natural laws’ which applied to all men, and that countries – kingdoms, states – should be governed in the same way. This, Voltaire believed, gave men certain ‘natural rights’ and it was this set of core beliefs that would, in the end, give rise to revolutionary doctrine. Impressed by the achievements of Newtonian science, Voltaire became convinced that, through work, religious ideas would eventually be replaced by scientific ones. He insisted that man need no longer lead his life on the basis of atoning for his original sin and that instead he should work to improve his existence here on earth, by reforming the institutions of government, church, education and so on. ‘Work and projects were to take the place of ascetic resignation.’⁴ A further factor in Voltaire’s importance, at least in France, is that the changes in thinking he recommended coincided with a desire on the part of many people to get rid of the ancien régime. The new thought therefore became a symbol of that desire. Many of the traditional concerns of French philosophy – freedom of the will and the nature of grace – were dismissed by Voltaire and his followers as meaningless; instead they argued that more practical matters were of greater importance.

In France, this all took place against a background in which protest and discontent were growing. As early as 1691, François de Salignac de la Mothe Fénelon had published his Examination of Conscience for a King and later his Letter to Louis XIV, where he drew a bleak portrait of the so-called Sun King’s realm: ‘Your peoples are dying of hunger. Agriculture is almost at a standstill, all the industries languish, all commerce is destroyed. France is a vast hospital.’⁵ In 1737 René Louis, marquis d’Argenson, had written Considerations on the Past and Present Government of France, which exposed the abuses and corruption at the heart of the French system. So corrupt that the book couldn’t be published until 1764.

It was against this background, largely created by Voltaire, that Denis Diderot launched the Encyclopédie. This too was originally an English idea, because at first all that Diderot intended was a translation of Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopaedia, originally released in Britain in 1728. The idea grew, however, beyond just technical subjects and statistics, to encompass the state of contemporary culture, a comprehensive description and a social and intellectual audit of all France. Diderot’s declared aim was not only to produce a body of knowledge but to deliberately manufacture a change in the way men thought: pour changer la façon commune de penser.⁶ The publication of the Encyclopédie is itself a chapter in the history of ideas. First appearing in 1751, it took twenty years to appear in full, and was alternately welcomed and suppressed by the censors.⁷ Financially, it was very profitable for the publishers but Diderot was sent to prison more than once and several plates and articles were confiscated.

The Encyclopédie first found its feet in the twice-weekly dinners in Baron d’Holbach’s hôtel in the rue Royale Saint-Roche (now 8 rue des Moulins), which became known as a ‘synagogue of atheists’.⁸ By the end of 1750, eight thousand copies of the prospectus for the Encyclopédie had been prepared: subscribers were to pay sixty livres on account and further sums amounting to 280 livres. Eight volumes, plus two of plates, were promised (though in all twenty-eight volumes were published, and more than 71,000 articles). The first volume, covering the letter A, appeared in June 1751 with its full title: Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, Arts et Métiers, with a ‘Preliminary Discourse’ by Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, in which he explained that the work would serve as both encyclopaedia and dictionary, giving an ‘eagle’s-eye’ view of knowledge that would show ‘the secret routes’ that connected different branches. The discourse described d’Alembert’s view of intellectual progress since the Renaissance, which he pictured as a ‘great chain’ of propositions.⁹ Of this great chain, he said, ‘humanity has discovered only a very few links’. Indeed, there are only two kinds of certain knowledge, he said, knowledge of our own existence and the truths of mathematics. P. N. Furbank, in his critical biography of Diderot, argues that the Encyclopédie can only be fully understood via its authors’ reactions to the attempts by the authorities to censor articles (for example, cross-referring was intended to direct readers to heretical or even seditious views in unlikely places).¹⁰

The first volume sold well, with the print run raised at the last moment from 1,625 to over 2,000. Later volumes had to contend with the censors but Diderot found a friend in Lamoignon de Malesherbes, the minister responsible for the book trade, who believed passionately in a free press and who hid manuscripts in his own home – presumably the safest place in all France. This proved Voltaire’s point, of course – in England, as Jacob Bronowski and Bruce Mazlish point out, the book could have been printed untouched, even with much more daring material. But by the early 1760s even the king and Madame de Pompadour came round to the idea of the Encyclopédie.¹¹

Diderot’s many volumes were, in the end, more influential than, say, Chambers’ Cyclopaedia, which came first, partly because it was a more ambitious project but also because, in the eighteenth century, France was what Norman Hampson has called ‘the cultural dictator’ of Europe. People looked to France as the model and standard of taste in literature, art, architecture and the ancillary arts that had blossomed and even today occupy a special position: furniture, fashion and cuisine. More important still, by now the French language had replaced Latin as the common tongue of aristocratic Europe.¹² Even Frederick William I, the very embodiment of the Prussian spirit, spoke better French than German.¹³

French is one of the group of languages which, in all their essentials, are derived from Latin. They are known as the Romance languages and comprise Sardinian, Italian, Romanian, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Provençal and French. In each case they stem from the spoken (vulgar) Latin of soldiers, merchants, colonists, rather than from the literary language (classical Latin). The original language of Gaul is presumed to have been a form of Celtic (very few inscriptions survive) which was in any case affiliated with Latin. The Latin of Gaul, as France then was, became differentiated into two, the dialect of the north (langue d’oïl) and of the south (langue d’oc) along a line that extended, roughly, from what is now Bordeaux via Lussac to Isère (Grenoble). Old French was discernible from the ninth century in the Strasbourg Oaths (842), with Middle French making its first appearance in the fourteenth century (1328, the accession of the Valois).¹⁴

Modern French dates from the seventeenth century. The dialects of the north began to take precedence over the south as Paris gradually emerged as the capital, with Francien, the dialect of the Île de France, destined to become the national tongue.¹⁵ But not until the famous Ordonnances de Villers-Cotterêt (1539) was French officially recognised as the language of the law courts.¹⁶ Even then, French was still considered an inferior tongue to Latin, which was still used for the new learning – i.e., science. But French was employed for popular literature, and with the advent of printing, and of more widespread reading, its growth in popularity and usage was confirmed. In 1549 Joachim du Bellay wrote his Défense et Illustration de la langue Françoise, which called for French not just to be the medium for vulgar stories but to be ambitious, even ‘illustrious’. From then on, the French language was a self-conscious entity in France’s intellectual and national life, in a way that other languages have never been. Throughout the seventeenth century there was a concern with le bon usage and le bel usage, as the language was refined and developed and purified.¹⁷ This trend climaxed in the Grammaire générale et raisonnée de Port-Royal (1660), which put forward the idea of a philosophical grammar based on logic. By the eighteenth century, therefore, French was a much more self-conscious and, in a sense, artificial language than any other tongue. This rational tidiness helps account for the language’s great beauty but also for its comparative dryness and its relatively small vocabulary.¹⁸ Whereas other languages spread naturally, French was – to an extent – an official language, and for this reason even as late as the mid-twentieth century there were two million people in France whose mother tongue was not French (Alsatian, Breton, Provençal, etc.).¹⁹

At twenty-eight volumes, the Encyclopédie was, by any standards, a daunting read. That Diderot should consider the project even a remotely commercial proposition tells us a great deal about the changing reading habits of the eighteenth century. And indeed, in the latter half of the century reading habits did change in important ways. It was now that the traditional pattern of private patronage ebbed away. More and more writers began to live on their income from book sales, depending on the new generation of readers, whose relation to the author was completely impersonal. Samuel Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith were among the first tranche of authors who wrote exclusively for these new readers. In reality, the publisher took the place of the patron though there was a middle stage – public subscription, which, as we saw, was the way the Encyclopédie was launched.²⁰

Nor should we forget that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it had been music that provided the main leisure activity of both the rich and poor, rather than reading.²¹ ‘Tinkers sang, milkmaids sang ballads; carters whistled; each trade, and even the beggars, had their special songs; the base-viol hung in the drawing-room for the amusement of waiting visitors; and the lute, cittern, and virginals, for the amusement of waiting customers, were the necessary furniture of the barber’s shop.’²² In London they had the theatre, but that audience was really no more than a quarter million out of a population of five million. Defoe and Bunyan were the first, among English writers at least, to exist outside what Steele called ‘the circumference of wit’, to mean that predominantly aristocratic society of writers who obtained patronage. ‘If one inspects the memoirs . . . of the many self-educated men who achieved distinction in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, one finds almost invariably that their earliest contact with culture was through “Pilgrim’s Progress, the Bible, Paradise Lost, Robinson Crusoe.” ’²³

One important effect of this, says Arnold Hauser, was the emancipation of middle-class taste from the dictates of the aristocracy. ‘It forms the historical starting point of literary life in the modern sense, as typified not only by the regular appearance of books, newspapers and periodicals, but, above all, by the emergence of the literary expert, the critic, who represents the general standard of values and public opinion in the world of literature.’²⁴ The Renaissance humanists were unable to do this because they didn’t have a periodical/newspaper press at their disposal. The system of private patronage meant essentially that the income an author received bore no relation to the intrinsic value or general attraction of their writing. Now that changed: the book became part of commercial society, a commodity, ‘the value of which conforms to its saleableness on the free market’.²⁵ This public taste was especially strong for historical, biographical and statistical encyclopaedias.

Periodical publishing was also proving a growth business. In the tenth issue of the Spectator Joseph Addison wrote: ‘My Publisher tells me that there are already Three thousand of them distributed every Day: so that if I allow Twenty Readers to every Paper, which I look upon as a modest computation, I may reckon about Threescore thousands Disciples in London and Westminster.’ If this sounds high, we should remember that the coffee-houses of London were at that time the chief medium by which culture was channelled and by 1715 there were two thousand of them in London alone. It would be very easy for one copy of any newspaper to pass through a score of hands in this way.²⁶ The print-run of the Spectator later rose to between 20,000 and 30,000, on some accounts, giving a ‘circulation’, on Addison’s calculations, of roughly half a million (the population of England in 1700 was a little over six million). This was later reflected in a rise in newspaper readership: between 1753 and 1775 the average daily sale of newspapers practically doubled.²⁷ James Lackington, a bookseller, wrote in his memoirs: ‘The poorer sorts of farmers, and even the poor country people in general, who before that period [twenty years previously] spent their winter evenings in relating stories of witches, ghosts, hobgoblins &c., and on entering their houses, you may see Tom Jones, Roderick Random, and other entertaining books stuck up on their bacon racks, &c.’²⁸ In 1796 the Monthly Review noted that twice as many novels had been published that year as in the previous one.²⁹

One of the most influential books of the eighteenth century was Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1788) which, as we have seen, argued that Christianity, no less than the barbarians, had been responsible for replacing Roman civilisation, and helping to bring about the so-called dark ages. But there was another reason why Gibbon’s message was important. It showed, or purported to show, how religion could interfere with – hinder, delay – progress. For the most part ancient civilisations had believed in either a static universe or else a cyclical one. The ancient Israelites’ hope of a Messiah could be seen as a primitive notion related to progress, but such views were not widespread and in classical Greece the general approach – among Plato, Aristotle, Polybius – was either that civilisation was in decline, from a golden age, or that it was cyclical: monarchy led to tyranny which led to aristocracy to oligarchy to democracy to anarchy and back to monarchy.³⁰

For Voltaire and the other philosophes in France, however, the recent discoveries of science, and the prospect for advancement that they seemed to offer, and the fact that more and more people could read of these advances, meant that the optimistic idea of progress was suddenly on everyone’s mind, and this too was both a cause and symptom of changes in religious belief. Until the Italian humanists and Montaigne, the Christian life had been a sort of intellectual limbo: people on earth tried to lead a good life, as laid down by the Church, but, in effect, they accepted the notion of perfection at creation, the Fall, and decline ever since. They were waiting for fulfilment in another realm.³¹ Coincident with Newton’s discoveries, however, a new feeling began to spread throughout Europe. Its most important feature was an assumption of the principle of bienfaisance, or benevolence, which was now believed to animate both God and man. The view gained ground that the earth ‘was designed for man’s terrestrial happiness’. (Bienfaisance and optimiste are both eighteenth-century words.) At times, this led to some absurd notions: Fénelon, for example, said that Providence had determined the shape and consistency of water-melons in such a way that they were easy to slice; the abbé Pluche pointed out that the existence of tides was designed to make it easier for ships to enter ports.³²

This idea, that nature’s harmony was a sign of God’s benevolence, was doubly important during the eighteenth century, because attention was now turned to man himself. If the rest of the universe was governed by (relatively) simple laws – accessible to figures like Descartes, Newton, Leibniz, Lavoisier and Linnaeus – then surely human nature itself should be governed by equally simple and equally accessible laws. Investigation of human nature, of man’s relationship to society, was perhaps a defining aspect of the Enlightenment. It was a time when many of the modern ‘disciplines’ that we recognise today – language studies (philology), law, history, moral and natural philosophy, psychology, sociology – either came into existence fully formed, or as proto-subjects, which would coalesce in the nineteenth century (for example, the word ‘psychology’ did not gain widespread currency in English until the 1830s, though it had been used, in Latin, in Germany).³³

The underlying motor for this change, as Roger Smith points out in his History of the Human Sciences, was the reconceptualisation of the soul as the mind, with the mind increasingly understood by reference to consciousness, language and its relationship with this world, in contrast to the soul, with its immortality and pre-eminent role in the next world.³⁴ The man mainly responsible for this approach, as was mentioned earlier, was John Locke (1632–1704), in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, published in 1690. In this book, prepared in draft as early as 1671, Locke himself used the word ‘mind’ not ‘soul’, and referred to experience and observation as the source of ideas, rather than some ‘innate’ or religious (revelatory) origin. He asked his readers to ‘follow a Child from its Birth and observe the alterations that time makes’, rejecting all innate ideas. Locke took it as read, however, that the mind did contain certain innate powers, such as a capacity for reflection, ‘the internal Operations of our Minds, perceived and reflected on by our selves’.³⁵ Experience of the physical world, he said, gives us sensations (his examples included ‘yellow’, ‘heat’, ‘soft’ and ‘bitter’). We reflect on these experiences and analyse them to form our ideas.

For the English at least, this was the modern world, formed by Newton and Locke. Newton had established the fundamental truths, while Locke, replacing metaphysics with the psychological, ‘had revealed the mental mechanism through which experience generates truth’.³⁶ His vision and analysis were so new that he even provided the vocabulary for this new way of looking at the world, a change which was reflected in the fact that talk about the soul became an embarrassment, to be replaced by the more secular notion of the mind. Also, the pre-eminence Locke allowed to experience (as opposed to innate knowledge) led him to the view, as critics quickly pointed out, that belief is relative to experience. He observed for example that some people(s) have no idea of God, and used this in his attack on innate ideas. This was a key ingredient in the birth of psychology, even if that term was not used much yet. Locke argued that motivation was based on experience – nature – which helped form the mind, rather than derived from some transcendent force operating on the soul. He saw action as a response to the pleasure or pain accompanying sensations and that opened up the possibility of a deterministic/mechanistic view of motivation. One unsettling effect of this was to further remove God from morality, a stance which, as we saw in the last chapter, came to form the dominant view as the eighteenth century passed. Morality has to be taught; it is not innate. In the same way Locke removed ‘the will’ as an ingredient of the soul and explained it as simple choice, arrived at after reflection on the sensations the mind had received. Arguably most important of all, he said that the self, the ‘I’, was not some mystical entity relating to the soul, but an ‘assemblage of sensations and passions that constitutes experience’.³⁷

Locke’s final contribution to the modern idea of psychology was his insight concerning language. Until the seventeenth century, language had a special status in the minds of many. It was felt that words were special things, in the sense that they resembled the objects which they described. The Bible was the word of God and some people believed that every object had originally possessed a name which identified it, and that the task of philology was to recover this original name. This was in particular the view of scholars such as Jakob Böhme, who argued for an ‘Adamic language’, the original form, believed by many to be closer to Hebrew than any other known language.³⁸ Locke, however, thought that language was no more than convention and convenience, that languages changed and developed and that there was no sense in which we could (or, indeed, should) ‘recover’ some earlier form of words, as if this would help us recover some earlier form of wisdom. All of this shocked and disoriented people.

Despite Locke, many were still reluctant to accept the demotion of the soul, and the idea went through some very ornate configurations. Georg Stahl, known for his phlogiston theory of combustion, thought that the soul was incarnate in the whole body. Nicholas Malebranche (1638–1715) thought that God acted through the soul to create innate ideas and motivation. Antoine Arnaud (1612–1694) and Pierre Nicole (1625–1695), in their book The Art of Thinking, likewise argued that the soul was responsible for reasoning, though they did concede the idea that the structure of language reflects the way the mind works.³⁹ Leibniz proposed that ‘what is exists as elementary units, called monads’.⁴⁰ It was these fundamental, indivisible, ‘primary elements’, he said, which underlie both body and soul. In Roger Smith’s words, ‘Leibniz became the figurehead for belief that stresses the soul’s innate and essential activity when it grasps knowledge and originates conduct.’⁴¹ This complicated reasoning regarding the soul shows the difficulties people got themselves into, in connection with an awkward concept. Locke’s system, though shocking, was much simpler to explain.

But work on the soul wasn’t dead, far from it. The Germans, like other Europeans of the day outside England, still believed that the soul was a unified entity which embodied divine design.⁴² For example, Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786), known as the ‘Jewish Socrates’, argued that there is a special faculty in the soul which functions only in regard to beauty, enabling man to respond to beauty, to ‘know’ it and recognise it, in a way that analysis can never achieve.⁴³ On this view, it was the soul that predisposed man to higher culture, and which separated him from the animals.

Just as psychology, in the modern sense, took time to disengage itself from the soul, so too was the distinction between psychology and philosophy slow in coming about. The man who did more than anyone else to distinguish the two was Immanuel Kant. His views were grounded in the essential difference between, on the one hand, scientific knowledge and philosophy (critical thinking) and, on the other, between science (rigorously understood) and pragmatic knowledge. Kant was fascinated with the self – the ego as we would say – and how it could know things. He concluded that not all knowledge is scientific, and that critical thinking shows we cannot know the world in itself.⁴⁴ Knowledge of the mind, for example, was not like mechanics, much as some eighteenth-century types wanted it to be. ‘There cannot be a “science” of psychology because what we observe in our minds does not exist as objects knowable in terms of . . . space and time.’⁴⁵ Partly as a result of this Kant became interested in anthropology and physiognomy, which he himself defined as ‘the art of judging what lies within a man, whether in terms of his way of sensing or of his way of thinking, from his visible form and so from his exterior’.⁴⁶

And this, says Roger Smith, is what defined the Enlightenment. ‘To quote references to human nature in the eighteenth century is a bit like quoting references to God in the Bible: it is the subject around which everything else revolves.’⁴⁷ Samuel Johnson claimed that the study of human nature first became fashionable at the end of the seventeenth century; in the 1720s Joseph Butler, bishop of Durham, gave sermons on human nature and in 1739 David Hume published his A Treatise of Human Nature. This did not immediately become a classic (Hume said it ‘fell still-born from the press’), but it did eventually help to bring about another defining aspect of the Enlightenment, namely the belief that knowledge would replace revelation as the way to achieve goodness.⁴⁸ These are the words of abbé de Mably: ‘Let us study man as he is, in order to teach him to become what he should be.’⁴⁹

The search for the laws of human nature took two main forms – the physical and the moral. The eighteenth century was fascinated by the body, by feelings, and by sensibility, the way the mind acted on the body through the nervous system. The Scottish physician Robert Whytt (1714–1766) experimented with decapitated frogs and found that they still moved their legs to brush off acid dabbed on their backs. He thus concluded they had a ‘diffuse soul’ in their spinal cord. A contemporary of Whytt, William Cullen (1710–1790), was the first to coin the term ‘neurosis’ but he applied it to all nervous disorders, which he thought more widespread than had hitherto been allowed. Neurosis acquired its modern meaning only in the late nineteenth century; nevertheless, in the eighteenth century, depression, anxiety and chronic anger were now described as ‘nerves’.⁵⁰ Medical language moved away from the terminology of the humours, and madness was explained as a ‘failure of the mind’, understood as housed in a bodily organ, the brain.

The brain, in fact, had been explored as early as the 1660s, by Thomas Willis, one of the generation of early scientists who, with Wren, Hooke and Boyle, was in at the birth of the Royal Society. Willis had carried out numerous dissections of brains – humans and dogs mainly – and had developed a new way of extracting the brain from the skull, from underneath, which helped preserve the shape intact. His careful observations and dissections, and some clever staining techniques, helped to show that the brain was covered in a fine network of blood vessels, that the ventricles (the central spaces where the cortex was folded in on itself) had no blood supply and were therefore unlikely to be the location of the soul, as some believed. He showed that the brain was much more complex than anyone had thought, identifying for example new areas, such as the corpus striatum (the striped body), and he traced the brain’s links – via the nerves – with the face, certain muscles, and the heart. His book The Anatomy of the Brain and Nerves (1664) did much to move the seat of the passions and the soul from the heart, making him famous in the process. He invented the term ‘neurologie’, which he called the doctrine of the nerves. He dedicated his book to Archbishop Sheldon, to highlight to everyone that he wasn’t an atheist.

These changing attitudes and beliefs were embodied, perhaps inevitably, in a work which was to take them to extremes. This was L’homme machine (Man a Machine) by the French surgeon Julien Offray de La Mettrie, published in 1747, though to escape censorship in France he was forced to release his book in Leiden. In arguing that thought is a property of matter ‘on a par with electricity’, he was coming down on the side of determinism, materialism and atheism, all of which were to land him in hot water. His view was that human nature and animal nature were part of the same continuum, that human nature equated with physical nature and he insisted that there were no ‘immaterial substances’, thus casting huge doubt on the existence of the soul. Matter, he said, was animated by natural forces and has its own organisational powers. There was, he said, no essential difference between any living organisms: ‘Man is not moulded from a costlier clay; nature has used but one dough, and has merely varied the leaven.’⁵¹

Étienne Bonnot, abbé de Condillac (1714–1780), argued that all mental activity is produced by the pleasurable or painful quality of sensations, but he also said that the soul preceded sensations. Charles Bonnet (1720–1793) thought that mental activity took place in the fibres of the brain but nevertheless this activity required a soul.

In line with these changes, from soul to mind, went an associated development, what Dror Wahrman calls the emergence of the modern idea of the self. In a survey of the way the different sexes were portrayed in the eighteenth-century theatre, in the way race was written about, the way animals were conceived (in particular the relationship of the great apes to man), in the study of portraits of the time, the changing character of the novel, the proliferating fashions in clothes, Wahrman shows that the understanding of the self was transformed, from something that was mutable, and due to climate, history or religion, to something that came from within. This was not yet a biological concept of the self, but showed instead a realisation that the self could be developed. The discovery of America, as was mentioned in Chapter 21 and will be returned to in Chapter 28, had a great influence on European thinking about race, biology, culture and history, but in this context it was the American War of Independence that was for many people a watershed. In that conflict, different nationalities – British, French, Germans, Italians – fought together against the British: this had a profound effect, forcing people more than in previous wars to consider exactly who they were. The animal–human boundary was also reconsidered in the context of identity, and compared with class and gender boundaries. Portraits, which earlier on in the century had distinguished sitters chiefly by their clothing, now began to stress distinguishing facial features. The rise of the novel, Wahrman says, was just the most vivid example of this ‘interiority complex’ of the late eighteenth century. In the early part of the century, characters in novels were usually regarded as examples of types; by the turn of the nineteenth century, character was esteemed for itself and for its singularity. Novels explored not the familiar ways in which traditional character types met typical problems, but introduced the reader to ‘strangers’, with inner lives that might be totally different from their own, and invited sympathy and understanding.⁵² It was in the late eighteenth century that the concept of development in character began to be stressed, the idea of Bildung in German, which reflected the view that in the course of a life the inner self may change in some areas while remaining consistent in others (Goethe’s thinking was especially powerful here). By the same token, there developed in art an interest in child portraits (in the work of Joshua Reynolds, for example) and associated with this was the new idea of children as ‘innocent blank slates’ rather than miniature adults.⁵³ It was this new interest in character, identity, and where they both came from, which provoked the fashion for physiognomy, predicting character from facial features. All of which reflected and reinforced the Enlightenment concept of natural rights. Anonymous members of large class-groupings were unlikely to be as assertive or self-conscious as individuals with a strong sense of self.

That Paris – the home of Voltaire and the Encyclopédie, of Montesquieu and Descartes, of La Mettrie and Condillac – should be a centre of enlightenment, and the search for the laws of human nature, was not so surprising. The city had been a capital of intellectual excellence and new ideas since its schools and university were founded in the eleventh century (see above, Chapter 17). What was far more surprising was that a small town in the very north of Europe should emerge as a rival.

‘For a period of nearly half a century, from about the time of the Highland rebellion of 1745 until the French Revolution of 1789, the small city of Edinburgh ruled the Western intellect.’ This is James Buchan in his recent book The Capital of the Mind. ‘For near fifty years, a city that had for centuries been a byword for poverty, religious bigotry, violence and squalor laid the mental foundations for the modern world . . . “Edinburgh, the Sink of Abomination” became “Edinburgh, the Athens of Great Britain”.’ At one stage in the seventeenth century, and despite the fact that there were three mail coaches between Edinburgh and London every week, on one occasion the return mail contained only one letter from London to the whole of Scotland.⁵⁴ Against this background, a raft of luminaries – David Hume, Adam Smith, James Hutton, William Robertson, Adam Ferguson and Hugh Blair – became the first intellectual celebrities of the modern world, ‘as famous for their mental boldness as for their bizarre habits and spotless moral characters. They taught Europe and America how to think and talk about the new mental areas opening to the eighteenth-century view: consciousness, the purposes of civil government, the forces that shape and distinguish society, the composition of physical matter, time and space, right actions, what binds and what divided the two sexes. They could view with a dry eye a world where God was dead . . . The American patriot Benjamin Franklin, who first visited Edinburgh with his son in 1759, remembered his stay as “the densest happiness” he had ever experienced. The famous Encyclopédie of the French philosophers had devoted a single contemptuous paragraph to Écosse in 1755, but by 1762 Voltaire was writing, with more than a touch of malice, “today it is from Scotland that we get rules of taste in all the arts, from epic poetry to gardening”.’⁵⁵

The immediate spur to this renaissance of the north was the rebellion of 1745. The Highland rebellion, led by Prince Charles Edward Stuart, to re-establish the (Catholic) Stuarts as the kings of Scotland (and Britain) briefly flourished in Edinburgh, before Charles, on his way to attack London, was defeated near Derby and forced to flee back to France. This concentrated minds in Edinburgh, forcing many to conclude that their future lay with England, that religious divisions, as reflected in the royal rivalries, did more harm than good, and that the future lay with the new learning rather than the old politics.

Almost as relevant to Edinburgh’s success was the project to build Edinburgh New Town. ‘Edinburgh New Town,’ writes James Buchan, ‘is intriguing not merely as a suite of handsome buildings, but as the material expression of ideas of civilian life . . . They embody a new social existence that is suave, class-conscious, sensitive, law-abiding, hygienic and uxorious: in short, modern.’ The extension of the city to the north of the old town was an expression not just of its expanding population but of its ambition. The new bourgeoisie wanted a more amenable city, one that was more rationally planned, with better commercial facilities, better meeting places, reflecting the way society was changing both economically and in the human relations that were now better understood via the new sciences. Churches and pubs were no longer enough: had not Montesquieu, no less, said that concentrating people in capital cities increased their commercial appetites?⁵⁶ The truth was that people came to realise what they had known in antiquity – that cities could be hugely pleasurable. (Until 1745, Edinburgh had been run in a very strict Puritan fashion – indeed, the phrase ‘Ten o’clock man’ reflected the fact that elders of the kirk would tour the city’s pubs at that hour, to ensure that no more alcohol was served.) Edinburgh New Town was built by public subscription, making it ‘the largest public work in Europe until the canal mania of the late 1760s’.⁵⁷ While several individual buildings were the work of Robert Adam, or his brother John (or both), the overall conception of the New Town, its visual and intellectual integrity, owed most to James Craig. It was his plan – broad main streets, narrow service streets, with squares at either end and neo-classical, neo-Palladian, façades, all in perfect proportion – which gave Edinburgh its name as the ‘heavenly city of the philosophers’.⁵⁸ ‘There is no city like Edinburgh in all the world,’ says James Buchan. ‘It is what Paris ought to be,’ wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. And, with the old castle high on its crag, like the Parthenon, looking down on the Palladian regularities of the New Town, the city’s physical splendour was certainly more impressive even than Paris (whose grand boulevards and vistas date from the nineteenth century), the perfect example of eighteenth-century civic ambitions. Against this splendid backdrop, we may consider the Edinburgh luminaries.

In Britain, and particularly in Scotland, there was a special gloss on the way the relationship between the soul and psychology was conceived, which was known as moral philosophy. This was an ancient term, dating back to late medieval times, which reflected the view that the soul, human nature and the arrangement of social conditions were all linked, and that the study of human nature would reveal God’s purposes for morality. (Moral philosophy was also taught in the early American colleges.⁵⁹) There were those who argued that the moral sense was a faculty of the soul – this was how God showed man how to behave – but the man who grounded morality in the study of human nature was David Hume, the same Hume who we met in the last chapter attacking the rational defence of religion. Born in the Lawnmarket area of Edinburgh in 1711, the son of a Berwickshire laird, he developed a passion for literature and philosophy at college. His most important work was done while he was in his twenties but he was never made a professor, possibly because his scepticism bewildered and even frightened Edinburgh. On his deathbed, his friend Katharine Mure implored him to ‘burn a’your wee bookies’ before it was too late.⁶⁰

In January 1739, at the age of twenty-eight, Hume published the first of two volumes, A Treatise of Human Nature. This set out to provide the groundwork to establish a science of man that would provide a rational moral code (its subtitle was: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects). ‘There is no question of importance, whose decision is not compriz’d in the science of man; and there is none, which can be decided with any certainty, before we become acquainted with that science. In pretending therefore to explain the principles of human nature, we in effect propose a compleat system of the sciences, built on a foundation almost entirely new, and the only one upon which they can stand with any security.’⁶¹ He took out some of the strongest points, as likely to be very offensive to Christians, but even so, as one observer noted, he showed a level of scepticism ‘not seen since antiquity’.⁶² Like Locke, Hume based his approach on Newton but he cannily observed that the physicist, while he had described gravity, had not really explained it. For example, he argued that the basis of knowledge is causation. We know something is because we experience it becoming so. But Hume insisted that this is illusion: we can never demonstrate causality. Famously, he said that when one billiard ball ‘strikes’ another, knocking it across the table, this does not reveal causation, only conjunction.⁶³ Experience orders life, ‘knowledge becomes belief, “something felt by the mind”, not the result of a rational process.’ On this basis, all religion – with its ultimate causes and miracles – is complete nonsense.⁶⁴ Hume thought reason was completely in thrall to passion, and to that extent all science was suspect. There are no laws of nature, he said, there is no self, there is no purpose to existence, only chaos. Likewise he did not think it possible to explain ‘the ultimate principles of the soul’ but thought that there were four ‘sciences’ relevant to human nature. These were logic, morals, criticism and politics. ‘The sole end of logic is to explain the principles and operations of our reasoning faculty, and the nature of our ideas: morals and criticism regard our tastes and sentiment: and politics consider men as united in society, and dependent on each other.’⁶⁵ Although his book was in three parts, on understanding, the passions, and morality, he argued that at base human nature is composed of two principal parts, affections and understanding. It was, he insisted, passion rather than reason that drove actions, that passion is always divisible into pleasure and pain and that these feelings affect what we think of as good and bad.⁶⁶ Hume too replaced soul with mind, which, he believed, could eventually be ‘perfectly known’.⁶⁷ Though he placed the passions centre-stage, Hume was a moderate man in his own habits. He found many of his contemporaries ‘agreeable’ and, towards the end of his life, often cooked for his friends, who included several clergymen.⁶⁸

Adam Ferguson, the son of a clergyman, was born on Tayside, the main eastern road into the Highlands, in June 1723. He grew up with a‘peppery’ character and, according to Joseph Black, his physician, tended to wear ‘an uncommon amount of clothing’. After a series of adventures and appointments, including chaplain to the Black Watch regiment, and service in Ireland and America, he was eventually appointed to the chair of natural philosophy in Edinburgh. His best known and most influential work was An Essay on the History of Civil Society, which received much criticism in Edinburgh, not least from David Hume, but found many enthusiastic readers in London, where it went through seven editions in Ferguson’s lifetime. It also made a deep impression on the continent, giving to German philosophy the phrase ‘civil society’, bürgerliche Gesellschaft.⁶⁹ James Buchan says ‘the Essay forms the essential bridge between Machiavelli and Marx: between an aristocratic dream of civic participation and the Leftist nightmare of an atomised and “alienated” personality.’⁷⁰

Ferguson’s argument is that progress is neither linear nor inevitable. There was never any golden age, from which humanity has fallen; instead, human beings are defined by four qualities: men are ingenious, cautious, obstinate and restless.⁷¹ Humans are sociable and can only be understood ‘in groupes, as they have always subssisted’. The rational world is not quite as the French philosophes would have us believe, and history proceeds in a mist. ‘Every step and every movement of the multitude, even in what are termed enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action but not the execution of any human design . . . No constitution is formed by consent, no government is copied from a plan . . .’⁷² While part of him welcomed the development of industrial society (he had views about the ‘stages’ of history), Ferguson was one of the first to point out that manufacturing ‘reduces the human being to a simple moving hand or foot, men become narrow-minded and specialised, they lose their notion of public good . . . we make a nation of helots and have no free citizens’. ‘Wages and liberty,’ he said, ‘are not synonyms.’⁷³ For Ferguson, we can love progress too much.

Until the seventeenth century there was no conception of ‘the economy’ as an entity in its own right. In the university curriculum, centred on Aristotle, the management of affairs was regarded as a branch of ethics. Only in the eighteenth century was there a separation of economic from moral questions. Until then the ‘just price’ for goods was set by guild corporations and royal representatives, not (at least not directly) by the market. The emergence of modern states in the seventeenth century – France, Austria, Prussia, Sweden – was a significant step, as they sought to understand the links between population levels, manufacturing and agricultural productivity, and the variable effects of the balance of international trade. As a result the eighteenth century saw in several of these countries (but not yet Holland or Britain) the establishment of university chairs of economics and the management of the state – political economy.⁷⁴

A key figure here was Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s minister of finance between 1663 and 1683, who believed that the state needed accurate knowledge of social and economic conditions if it were to prosper. The French Académie des Sciences was instructed to study these issues when it was established in 1666.⁷⁵ In this way, details about credit arrangements, laws of contract, freedom of trade and the circulation of money became matters of interest in their own right. For the first time, it was realised that the quantity of money in circulation could be measured and related to economic performance.

The first British figure of consequence in the development of economics was William Petty (1623–1687), the Fellow of the Royal Society whom we met in Chapter 23 and who coined the phrase ‘Political Arithmetick’, the title of one of his books. He attempted a comprehensive quantification of Britain’s capital assets, public finances and population (harder than it sounds, because Parliament did not sanction a census until 1801, and it wasn’t comprehensive until 1851). It was Petty who, following Hobbes, envisaged economic activity as a system of discrete individuals, acting in their own rational self-interest. At the same time, he emptied the market – the system of exchange – of all moral considerations. A second figure was John Graunt (1620–1674), who pioneered the collection of social statistics (what he called ‘Shop-Arithmetique’). This was originally done to counteract public fears about crime, but Graunt extended his approach to assess population levels in different areas. In this way, statistics about variations in mortality began to appear, of great interest to the fledgling life insurance business.⁷⁶

In mainland Europe, where some of the states were quite small, there was in government little separation of economic, social, medical and legal matters, and these became known as ‘cameralistics’, after the camera, or chamber, of the ruler. In 1727 the first two chairs of ‘cameral’ sciences were established at the Prussian universities of Halle and Frankfurt-on-the-Oder. In fact the first chair at Halle was in Oeconomie, Polizei und Kammer-Sachen (economy, police and cameralistics). In Britain, however, men argued that human nature rather than the state should govern economics. At the time, there was a general acceptance that society had entered a new stage – it had become ‘commercial’. Commercial society, people felt, was the last (or at least the latest) stage in the progress of man. This approach or attitude was summed up by that other great Edinburgh man, Adam Smith. ‘Every man thus lives by exchanging, or becomes in some measure a merchant, and the society itself grows to be what is properly a commercial society.’⁷⁷ In other words, a person’s place in society is defined by what he or she (can) buy and sell.

Born in Kirkcaldy in 1723, Smith was a sickly child and on one occasion, according to some accounts, he was abducted by gypsies.⁷⁸ But he grew up to be something of a Renaissance man, familiar with Latin, Greek, French and Italian. He translated works from the French, so as to improve his English. He wrote on astronomy, philology, ‘poetry and eloquence’, and was professor of logic and rhetoric at Glasgow before he was appointed to the more prestigious chair of moral philosophy, in 1752. Though he lived and worked in Glasgow, he participated fully in Edinburgh life: the Glasgow–Edinburgh stage coach arrived each day in time for early-afternoon dinner.⁷⁹ He published The Theory of the Moral Sentiments in 1759, a work which Alexander Wedderburn, founder of the Edinburgh Review, described as disclosing ‘the deepest principles of philosophy’. But it is for The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, that Smith is remembered and revered around the world.

When he died, ‘after a life of intellectual adventure and social prudence’, a local newspaper complained in its obituary (4 August 1790) that he had ‘converted his chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow University into one of trade and finance’.⁸⁰ There is more than an iota of truth in this but, because of the way Smith has been understood, and misunderstood, in the years since he lived, it is important to reiterate that he was an academic, a moral philosopher, who took a very moral view of his own work. ‘Capitalism’ is a term invented only at the turn of the twentieth century (as Kapitalismus, by Werner Sombart, the German economist and sociologist), and Smith would not have recognised either the word or the sentiment. His grasp of finance and banking was never especially strong and towards the end of his life he expressed profound misgivings ‘about the moral complexion of commercial society’.⁸¹ There is an irony here because Smith created an approach and a language that, ultimately, divorced economics from what most people mean by morals. But he himself felt that allowing absolute freedom of economic activity was itself a form of morality. Among other things, his book was a morally outraged attack on the monopolistic practices of the grain trade.⁸² He championed the interests of the consumer against the monopolists, identifying consumer demand as the engine for the creation of wealth.⁸³ We should not forget that state intervention in the eighteenth century was very important to economic development and Smith never disagreed with this.⁸⁴

The formation of commercial society is, as both Roger Smith and Paul Langford highlight, a new stage in the evolution of a modern view of human nature. ‘The term “economic man” is a code-word for the opinion that what is called society is only an association of individuals who act in the light of rational self-interest to maximise their material profit and well-being.’⁸⁵ As well as everything else, this clearly has implications for man’s psychology, and it is important to be aware of the new world of the consumer into which Smith introduced his book. ‘The architect John Wood, writing in 1749, listed the novelties introduced since the accession of George II. Cheap and dirty floorboards gave way to superior deal covered with carpets. Primitive plaster was concealed with smart wainscoting. Stone hearths and chimney-pieces, customarily cleaned with a whitewash which left a chalk debris on the floor, were replaced with marble. Flimsy doors with iron fittings were abandoned for hardwood embellished with brass locks. Mirrors had become both numerous and elegant. Walnut and mahogany, in fashionable designs, superseded primitive oak furniture. Leather, damask, and embroidery gave seating a comfort unobtainable with cane or rush . . . The carpets, wall-hangings, furnishings, kitchen and parlour ware in the homes of many shopkeepers and tradesmen in the 1760s and 1770s, would have surprised their parents and astonished their grandparents.’⁸⁶

Smith’s theories were especially poignant because at the time, in France, the only country where there was what we might call rival thinking, the theories of the so-called physiocrats were very different and, as it soon turned out, nowhere near as fruitful or accurate. The physiocrats were significant because they too encouraged the idea that, in the eighteenth century, there was a shift to commercial society and with this went an acceptance of commerce and exchange as important to the understanding of the laws of human nature. However, France, much more than England, was overwhelmingly rural and agricultural and this determined the theories of the physiocrats, the main figures here being François Quesnay (1694–1774) and the marquis de Mirabeau (1719–1789). Their view, argued in a series of books, was that all wealth derived from land, from agricultural productivity. Civilisation was essentially driven by the surplus of agricultural goods over the consumption of food required to produce it.⁸⁷ Expansion of this surplus, and the consumption it fuelled, produced the growth in population that worked yet more land, in a virtuous cycle. Quesnay’s approach led him to view society in a particular way. There was a ‘productive class’, engaged in agriculture, there was a class of proprietors, landowners who included both the king and the church, who received the yield of agriculture in the form of tithes, taxes and rents, and there was what he called in a revealing phrase a ‘sterile class’, which included manufacturers, dependent on agriculture and, according to him, incapable of producing a surplus.⁸⁸

Adam Smith in effect took the opposite view, that man had advanced beyond agricultural society, to a new stage in civilisation, commercial society. The basis of economic value, the origin of wealth, Smith said, lay in labour, work done. This was a marked change in that Smith did not identify any one occupational sector as the fundamental basis of wealth – what mattered instead, he said, was exchange and productivity, the value added in any transaction. This approach later became what was called ‘classical economics’, so it is important to reiterate here that Smith had no conception of a discipline of economics isolated from the study of moral relations, from the history of civilisation or from political questions about how Britain should be governed. ‘He defined political economy “as a branch of the science of a statesman”.’⁸⁹ Smith’s view was essentially the modern one that we have today: a man was to be judged by his rational and moral qualities, and the extent to which they helped the welfare of his fellow men. This led Smith to change attitudes – towards entrepreneurs, for example: they were not shady moral types, he said, but important figures who accumulated capital and in that way facilitated productive work by others. Although he came to be regarded as the father of free-market economics, in fact Smith believed that legislation was essential in certain areas of life, to maintain fairness and openness, and he himself lectured on jurisprudence.⁹⁰ J. A. Schumpeter, the great Austro-American economist of the twentieth century, said that Smith’s seminal work, The Wealth of Nations (1776), was the most influential of all books on economics but that it was also, after Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, the best of all scientific books. In the nineteenth century, H. T. Buckle thought The Wealth ‘perhaps the most important book that has ever been written’.⁹¹ Smith’s approach, his rationalism, allowed mathematics to be applied to trade and exchange. This was not always successful but it did show that economic activity obeys certain laws or order and we have Smith to thank for this. He is often identified with the phrase ‘laissez-faire economics’, but this is a French term, and reflects an eighteenth-century French view that did not become popular in Britain until the nineteenth century. In fact, Smith himself was always equally concerned with justice in civil society and with wealth creation. He justified this view by a comparison between Britain and elsewhere. By attaching value to labour, gross inequalities were not ironed out but, he argued, abject poverty was reduced, as he had predicted, much more so in Britain than elsewhere in Europe or, for example, India. People, he felt, would always naturally pursue their own self-interest and, other things permitting, this would lead to a high-wage economy which encouraged consumption, productivity and a general and continual upward cycle. Notably, Smith believed that God has so designed human nature that the average person, besides looking out for him- or herself, also shares sympathy for others. He believed that a civic humanism could go hand-in-hand with a commercial society.

The discipline of political economy was well launched by Adam Smith. One of Smith’s most influential followers was the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834), who became known as ‘Population Malthus’ on account of his theory of population and its effect on economics. The advent of the French Revolution and its bitter after-taste had concentrated minds on the political instability that seemed to be just below the surface everywhere and Malthus thought that, at the least, he had one answer if not the answer. Like so many others of his time he thought that there were discoverable laws of human nature but in his case he believed that there were limits to progress and he argued that he had hit upon one of the most intractable. He first published An Essay on the Principle of Population, As It Affects the Future Improvement of Society in 1798 but there was a second edition, almost a new version, in 1803, in which he expanded his argument. In these works Malthus produced a very pessimistic view of the future. His view was that there are laws of human nature and that one basic law is that the rate of population growth increases geometrically whereas the production of food increases only arithmetically. It follows from this that conditions of scarcity are a permanent feature of the human condition.⁹² However, we should not overlook the fact that Malthus was a reverend and he viewed his discovery in a moral way, concluding not that starvation is an inevitability but that people should show restraint – prudence – and avoid contributing to a population that outstrips its ability to feed itself. The law he had uncovered, he said, was God’s way of showing man that he had to show restraint on the procreation front, and work hard at wealth creation to ensure there was always enough food to go round.⁹³

Malthus was, with Bentham, encountered earlier, a utilitarian. We may conclude this section by considering the ideas of a colleague of Malthus, when he went to work as a curate at the new East India College, a teaching outfit where future employees of the East India Company were trained (the East India Company was the chief organ of British power in India during the high days of empire). At the college Malthus came across James Mill, father of John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), who was one of the most uncompromising – and scientifically-minded – utilitarians. In his Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1829), James Mill said that his aim was to make ‘the human mind as plain as the road from Charing Cross to St Paul’s in London’. (In other words, for those who knew London, it was not a long journey and was, essentially, a straight line.) Mill tells us that he used the word ‘analysis’ in the title of his book to show that his methods at least aimed to be like those in chemistry. As one reviewer put it, ‘sensation, association, and naming, are the three elements which are to the constitution of the human mind what the four elements, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and azote [nitrogen] are to the composition of the human body’.⁹⁴ Association was an important concept in early psychology and referred to the way in which sensations – pains and pleasures, and ideas and actions – come together to form regular patterns. This is another of those ideas which may seem self-evident to us but it was new at the time because it linked what goes on inside the head with behaviour and experience, and gave rise to much of modern psychology, such as learning theory, perception and motivation.⁹⁵

Just as psychology had an uncertain and drawn-out birth during the eighteenth century, not really coalescing until the nineteenth, so too with what we now call sociology. During the Enlightenment there were conflicting views about man and his relation to his fellows. Some shared Hobbes’ view that man was not naturally social whereas others considered sociability perfectly normal. It did not take a genius to see that man everywhere lived in civilisation, in cities, had formulated politics, so it seemed to many that the laws of ‘society’ (a late eighteenth-century term in this context) should be identifiable.⁹⁶

One concern was the difference(s) between savage and civilised, which recalled the ancient barbarian/Greek and Roman divide. Carolus Linnaeus (1707–1778), for example, listed several categories of Homo under his famous classificatory system. These included Homo ferus (feral or wild man), Homo sylvestris (tree man, including the chimpanzee) and Homo caudatus (tailed man, partly mythical, partly designed to include imperfectly understood birth disorders). The first primates were imported into Europe at this time – orang-utans and chimpanzees – giving rise to the creation of comparative anatomy. People like Linnaeus and Edward Tyson could see the close relation in form to humans but at that stage lacked the conceptual framework to make more of the similarities. Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), Charles Darwin’s grandfather, wrote Zoonomia: Or the Laws of Organic Life, in the 1790s, in which he showed animals as changing over time in a progression. This was an early theory of evolution, but showed no understanding of natural selection. When people travelled in the eighteenth century, and met ‘savage’ or ‘primitive’ peoples, they had no idea whether such peoples were at an earlier stage of development, or a later one, and were in a state of decay from a higher civilisation. What distinguished man from the animals was his possession of a soul, and language. Skulls began to be collected, as evidence of different ‘racial’ types.

Roger Smith also says that the idea of Europe, as an entity by itself, as somewhere different from Christendom, as a civilisation of its own – the West, different from the East – also emerged in the eighteenth century. This is discussed in more detail in Chapter 29 (on the Oriental renaissance) but this idea, that Europe was artificial in comparison with more ‘primitive’ and ‘natural’ peoples, received a boost from Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) in his idea of the ‘noble savage’. Rousseau was, psychologically speaking, far from straightforward (his mother died in childbirth, his father disappeared when he was ten), and several modern historians have argued that he was psychologically disturbed.⁹⁷ He came to public attention in 1755 when he submitted an essay for his local Dijon Academy, addressing the question ‘What is the origin of inequality among men, and is it authorised by natural law?’ He began his answer by trying to describe and understand man’s original, natural state, though he conceded that this was a difficult, even impossible task, as there were by then so many layers of artificiality. Nevertheless, he concluded that the moral life is a consequence of civilisation, not the natural state and that in achieving morality and civilisation men and woman have lost their innocence. In gaining something, something has also been lost. He advanced this view because he felt that man possesses a spirit, a consciousness of freedom, and that the soul revealed itself through the passions. ‘Nature commands every animal, and the beast obeys. Man feels the same impetus, but he realises he is free to acquiesce or resist; and it is above all in the consciousness of this freedom that the spirituality of his soul is shown.’⁹⁸ Rousseau’s natural man is ‘individual, innocently at one with his feelings, feelings that are firmly feelings of self but include a desire for self-improvement and sentiment about others.’⁹⁹ This is one of the origins of the romantic movement, considered in Chapter 30. And it was this which separated man from the animals. ‘Some actual savage societies, like the Carib, preserve a happy balance between “the indolence of the primitive state and the petulant activity of our vanity”. Other societies developed iron and corn, “which have civilised men, and ruined the human race”. Manufacturing and agriculture created a division of labour and, through labour, property and inequality . . . men became what they once were not – deceivers, exploiters, legislators of inequality, defenders of oppression, tyrants.’¹⁰⁰ His Social Contract, which introduced the idea of the ‘general will’, became for some people a sacred text of the French Revolution.

C.-L. de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755), was the author of De l’esprit des lois (The Spirit of the Laws), published in 1748, which offered a contrary view to Rousseau. To Montesquieu (who was an amateur experimental scientist) it was self-evident that the social world, no less than the physical world, shows regularities and rhythms. From this he concluded, contrary to Adam Ferguson, that the world is not governed by blind chance and that the laws of human social conduct are discoverable. ‘Laws, taken in the broadest meaning, are the necessary relations deriving from the nature of things; and in this sense, all beings have their laws . . .’¹⁰¹ Despite a number of frankly questionable statements, such as his view that warm climates ‘expand the nerve fibres’, making people indolent, his more substantial argument involved an examination of different types of government – monarchies, republics, despotisms – and their consequences for freedom, education, and other aspects of social life. His most important point was his conclusion that it was not so much the system of government that determined how rule was exercised but how individuals administered the government. In the context of the times this was taken to be a criticism of the monarch’s claim of divine authority, and The Spirit of the Laws was placed on the Index.

The final way in which the eighteenth century examined the laws of human nature was through the emergence of academic history. History itself was of course not new. What was new was, first, innovative techniques of study, which laid the groundwork for what would become an academic subject in its own right and second, an expansion of the historical imagination to include the history of civilisation. This helped produce the modern idea of progress.

Both Voltaire’s The Century of Louis XIV (1751) and David Hume’s History of England (1754–1762) questioned dogmatic Christianity as the central theme of historical change, while Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1788) ‘ended on a tone of irreparable loss rather than excitement over the foundation of Christian Europe’.¹⁰² In the 1750s a non-dogmatic view of history emerged. For example, the so-called ‘four-stages theory’ attributed social change to transformations in the mode of subsistence, from hunting, to pasture, to agriculture, to commerce. Though many people picked holes in this theory, nonetheless the idea of historical stages unrelated to Christianity proved popular because it accounted for the great diversity around the world that had been discovered in the age of exploration. It was in this way that the idea of progress became popular. If progress were to be possible, it had to be defined and measured, and that could only be done by the proper study of the past.¹⁰³

As early as the fourteenth century the Muslim philosopher Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) had argued that history was a science and should seek to explain the origin and development of civilisation, which he likened to the life of an individual organism.¹⁰⁴ Francis Bacon also had an idea of advancement. ‘These be ancient times,’ he wrote, ‘when the world is growing old; our own age is more truly antiquity than is the time which is computed backwards, beginning with our age.’ For him, just as a mature person is considered wiser than a child, so people in later times may be expected to have a great accumulation of knowledge.¹⁰⁵ Descartes also talked specifically of the ‘improvement’ of human health that would result from the discoveries of science. But it was in late seventeenth-century England, in a series of tracts, that there had been a celebrated exchange as to whether ancient or contemporary thought was better. In 1690 Sir William Temple, in his Essay upon Ancient and Modern Learning, went so far as to deny the importance of Copernican theory and the circulation of the blood, and argued that Pythagoras and Plato surpassed Galileo and Newton. Even Jonathan Swift, a protégé of Temple’s, upheld (just) the superiority of the ancients in his satire The Battle of the Books (1697). Temple’s errors were exposed, partly by William Wotton in his Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning (1694), but the very existence of the battle itself shows how much ideas about progress were in the air.

The French writer Bernard de Fontenelle (1657–1757) went further than any of the English authors. In A Digression on the Ancients and Moderns, he came to five surprisingly modern conclusions. These were that, from a biological point of view, there was no difference between the ancients and moderns; that in science and industry one achievement depends on another and that, therefore, ‘progress is cumulative’, meaning that the moderns have indeed surpassed the ancients; this does not make the moderns cleverer than the ancients, they simply take advantage of what has gone before – they have more accumulated knowledge; in poetry and rhetoric, the arts, there is really no difference between the two periods; we should remember that ‘unreasoning admiration’ for the ancients is a bar to progress.¹⁰⁶ De Fontenelle was supported by Charles Perrault (1628–1703). Despite the accumulation of knowledge since classical times, Perrault thought the recent scientific discoveries had brought the modern world to perfection and that later ages would have little to add. ‘We need only read the French and English journals and glance over the noble achievements of the Academies of these two great kingdoms to be convinced that during the last twenty or thirty years more discoveries have been made in the science of nature than during the whole extent of learned antiquity.’¹⁰⁷ Anne Robert Jacques Turgot (1727–1781) was only twenty-four when he delivered a lecture at the Sorbonne in December 1750, later published as On the Successive Advances of the Human Mind. Despite his youth, his theory became very influential – he argued that civilisation is the product of geographical, biological and psychological elements and that, basically, man’s biology doesn’t change. Mankind has a common treasury of knowledge, preserved in writing, and builds on what has gone before. He distinguished three stages of intellectual progress – theological, metaphysical and scientific. He accepted that perfection was possible and would be achieved one day.

Voltaire wrote three works of history. The first concerned a single individual, Charles XII (1728), the second an entire century, The Century of Louis XIV (1751), and the third – his most important work – was the 1756 Essay on Customs (Essai sur le moeurs et l’esprit des nations), much more ambitious than the other books, aiming, as he put it, to explain the causes for ‘the extinction, revival, and progress of the human mind’.¹⁰⁸ Voltaire’s approach was new too in concentrating not on political history but on cultural achievements. His self-imposed task was to show ‘by what stages mankind, from the barbaric rusticity of former days, attained the politeness of our own’. He called this process the ‘enlightenment’ of the human mind, ‘which alone made this chaos of events, factions, revolutions, and crimes worth the attention of men’.¹⁰⁹ He was not concerned with divine or ‘first’ causes, but showed how things worked and went on from there. In the same book he also introduced the phrase ‘philosophy of history’, meaning that history was to be looked at as a science, critically, with an empirical weighing of evidence and with no place for intuition.

Probably the most complete – certainly the most elaborate – idea about progress was that devised by the marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794) in his Outline of an Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, released in 1795. He took the view that ‘nature has assigned no limit to the perfecting of the human faculties, that the perfectibility of man . . . has no other limit than the duration of the globe on which nature has placed us’.¹¹⁰ He divided history into ten stages: hunters and fishermen; shepherds; tillers of the soil; the time of commerce, science and philosophy in Greece; science and philosophy from Alexander to the fall of the Roman empire; decadence to the crusades; the crusades to the invention of printing; printing to the attacks on authority by Luther, Descartes and Bacon; Descartes to the Revolution, ‘when reason, tolerance and humanity were becoming the watchwords of all’. He regarded the French Revolution as the dividing line between the past and a ‘glorious future’, in which nature would be mastered ever more completely, progress would be without limit, industry would make the soil yield enough food for everyone, there would be equality between the sexes and ‘death will be the exception rather than the rule.’¹¹¹

The Englishman William Godwin (1756–1836) saw progress in frankly political terms – that is to say, he saw politics as a way to achieve overall justice for mankind, without which man’s fulfilment was impossible, and this fulfilment, he said, was the object of progress. The publication of his book Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), with the French Revolution at its height, caused a sensation. ‘Burn your books on chemistry,’ Wordsworth is said to have told a student. ‘Read Godwin on necessity.’¹¹² Godwin’s theory was that mankind is perfectible but has not made much progress in the past and that this was due to the coercive power of oppressive human institutions, in particular government and the Church. He therefore proposed that central government be abolished and that no coercive political organisation be allowed above the parish level. He proposed to abolish marriage and to equalise property holding. Progress, achieved when man is free to exercise his reason as he wishes (save for the moral censure of his peers), can be achieved only through political justice, which he felt depended on literature and proper education.¹¹³

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), like his contemporary Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), accepted that there was a great cosmic purpose in history, toward which men are unwittingly guided by their observance of natural laws. (Kant’s own laws were invariable; neighbours could set their watches by his daily walks.) For him one of the tasks of the philosopher is to uncover this universal plan for mankind. He thought that, in principle, these natural laws of history and progress would be discoverable, as Newton’s laws of the planets had been discovered. He concluded his philosophy of history by putting forth nine propositions that outline mankind’s progress. His main argument was that there is always a conflict within man, between the sociable being, who cares for the good of his neighbours, and the selfish being, who cares only for himself, for achievement and independence. This constant struggle, he thought, goes back and forth as times change, producing progress in both spheres, the social and the individual. This creative conflict, he argued, is at its best where there is a strong state, to regulate social life, and the most individual freedom, to let individuality thrive. He was clear in arguing that this was a moral concept of progress: the freedom of the greatest number – to realise their individuality and to look after their neighbours – was the aim.¹¹⁴ Like Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) felt that progress was essentially about freedom. Throughout history Hegel distinguished four main phases of historical progress, during which freedom expanded. There was, first, the Oriental system, in which only one person is free – the despot. Next came the Greek and then the Roman systems, in which some people were free. Finally, there is the Prussian system, in which all people are free. This brief summary bends Hegel’s views somewhat but he himself was required to bend quite a bit of evidence to show that his own world – nineteenth-century Prussia – was the best of all possible worlds.

Finally, so far as progress is concerned, let us return to France and the theories of Count Claude Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825) and Auguste Comte (1798–1857). Both men may be regarded as early sociologists, a concern with the concept of progress being a major focus of this fledgling social science. These two men were also more interested in realising progress than in merely theorising about it. (In this sense, the invention of sociology was itself part of progress.) In a well-known paragraph Saint-Simon said: ‘The imagination of poets has placed the golden age in the cradle of the human race. It was the age of iron they should have placed there. The golden age is not behind us, but in front of us. It is the perfection of social order. Our fathers have not seen it; our children will arrive there one day, and it is for us to clear the way for them.’¹¹⁵ Saint-Simon accepted the three stages of progress that had been put forward by Turgot, adding that the advances of the scientific and industrial revolutions had really started progress in a big way. Disappointed by the violence and irrationalism of the French Revolution, he thought that industrialisation was man’s only way forward and he became an eloquent propagandist for the machine. In particular, and most originally, Saint-Simon advocated certain new houses of Parliament, one which he called the House of Invention, to include engineers, poets, painters, architects, another the House of Examination, to include doctors and mathematicians, and a third, the House of Execution, consisting of captains of industry. His idea was that the first house would draw up laws, the second would examine them and pass them, and the third would decide how to put them into effect.

In his book Positive Philosophy, Comte argued that history divided into three great stages, the theological, metaphysical and scientific. He adapted Saint-Simon’s ideas in the sense that he thought that the people who should guide industrial and technical progress were the sociologists (‘sociologist-priests’ as someone called them), that women should be the guardians of moral direction, and that the captains of industry, again, should actually administer the society. In politics he thought that ‘imagination’ should be subordinate to observation. Comte died in 1857, two years before Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, when the theory of evolution transformed and simplified ideas of progress for all time.

The eighteenth century, the Enlightenment, was characterised by the first attempts to apply the methods and approach of the natural sciences to man himself. They were not wholly successful but they were not a total failure either. It is a problem still very much with us. What we might call the ‘hard’ sciences – physics, chemistry and biology – have gone on making great progress. On the other hand, the ‘soft’ sciences – psychology, sociology and economics – have never acquired the same measure of agreement, or predictive power, and have never generated the same highly effective technology in the realm of human affairs as, say, nuclear physics, solid-state physics, organic chemistry and genetic engineering. Today, two centuries after the end of the Enlightenment, we still can’t say for sure what laws human nature obeys or even if these laws are the same as those that obtain in the ‘hard’ sciences. This disjunction is, essentially, the main topic of the last section of the book.